Magnet Systems snags $12.6M from Andreessen Horowitz as social enterprise booms

Social enterprise network startup Magnet Systems announced today that it has pulled in $12.6 million in a first round of institutional funding. The round was led by well-know tech venture capital outfit Andreessen Horowitz.

The company said it will use the money to “fight for the best people possible” to help it develop a platform for creating business applications with attributes like those of social networks like Facebook.

Palo Alto, Calf.-based Magnet was founded by … Continue Reading

Live internet video will get its big test with the royal wedding

The royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton Friday is going to be broadcast with a live feed on Google’s YouTube video service. Hopefully, it won’t bring down the internet.

The chances of that happening are pretty small, as the total amount of video traffic is likely to be a very small percentage of overall internet traffic on an ordinary day, said Chris Sharp, general manager of content and digital media at Equinix,which carries … Continue Reading

RIM acquires calendar scheduling app Tungle.me

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) announced this morning that it has acquired Tungle.me, a calendar scheduling application, for an undisclosed sum of money.

Tungle.me, which launched at DEMO in 2007, offers a service to synchronize and schedule meetings across various calendaring applications — including Microsoft’s Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal. Additionally, it helps prevent timezone and double-booking conflicts, and integrates with devices such as Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s own BlackBerry.

The service has … Continue Reading

Apple explains why the white iPhone 4 was delayed

Apple’s white iPhone will finally be available tomorrow, after a long delay.

But what was the hold up? Steve Jobs and Apple vice president Phil Schiller gave an interview to AllThingsDigital, explaining the issues that kept the white iPhone from making it to store shelves.

Overall, it seems it’s harder to make white mobile devices than it is to make white computers. Apple’s MacBook is available in white and previously its iMac range was also … Continue Reading

Verizon says its working to fix massive 4G LTE outage

Verizon Wireless subscribers on the carrier’s super fast LTE 4G network are now paying the price for being early adopters, as many users have been reporting sporadic 4G outages across the country.

In a statement released a few hours ago, Verizon said it has discovered the cause of the issue — which began last night and has persisted throughout Wednesday — and is working to resolve the outage.

As All Things Digital’s Ina Fried points … Continue Reading

Amazon says some data unrecoverable after restoring cloud service

Amazon said that about 0.07 percent of the data storage in its restored eastern cloud service isn’t fully recoverable. The company’s cloud-based web services suffered an outage that lasted for three-and-a-half days last week and service was restored for the most part on Monday.

But some of the data — 0.07 percent of the eastern region — hasn’t been recovered, and the company is contacting the limited number of customers who have lost data. One … Continue Reading

Nokia cuts 4,000 jobs worldwide, reorganizes R&D sites

Nokia announced today that it will cut its workforce by 4,000 employees by the end of year 2012. The majority of the reductions will be made in Nokia’s home country Finland, Denmark and in the UK. Nokia will also refocus its research and development operations.

The cuts are a part of Nokia’s restructuring as the company decided to switch from Symbian to Windows Phone as its primary smartphone operating system, a deal led by new … Continue Reading

Hulu Plus coming to Xbox 360 Friday, PlayStation Network users get one week credit

Even though Sony’s PlayStation Network outage is completely outside of Hulu’s control, the streaming video company is doing right by its PlayStation 3 customers by offering one week worth of free credit to Hulu Plus (which requires PSN to sign in).

It’s a classy move by Hulu and also a reminder that the PSN outage affects more than just Sony services. Some PS3 Netflix users, for example, also reported intermittent issues because of the outage.… Continue Reading

Surprise: Sony faces class action lawsuit on PlayStation Network breach

Sony hasn’t yet recovered from the PlayStation Network outage, but it has already been hit with a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of an angry user. The suit comes a day after Sony admitted that personal information, including credit card data, had been compromised when hackers broke into its online entertainment service.

The PlayStation Network has more than 77 million registered users, and the data breach is one of the worst in hacking history. Sony … Continue Reading

Search, shop, love: Secrets of smartphone users

As part of Google’s ongoing battle to conquer the mobile advertising market, the company commissioned research from Ipsos OTX to understand how smartphones are used in people’s daily lives. Mobile ad network InMobi also just released some data on consumer’s attitudes to mobile shopping. Let’s see what they found.

Google’s research was conducted at the end of 2010 among 5,000 US adults. The first surprise is that the most common location to use a smartphone … Continue Reading

OpenFeint debuts mobile social game platform in China

OpenFeint‘s mobile social gaming platform is now available to Chinese gamers thanks to a partnership with Chinese online game maker The9.

Branded as The9 Game Zone, the platform lets Android mobile gamers socialize with each other, player multiplayer games, and share games. The move is an important one for OpenFeint as it tries to establish its platform on a global basis. This kind of international move is one reason Japan’s Gree agreed to buy OpenFeint … Continue Reading

YouTube founders acquire Delicious, announce (and crash) new startup

Updated

It looks like social bookmarking site Delicious will have a healthy afterlife. Yahoo, which acquired the site in 2005, just announced that Delicious has been sold to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

Hurley and Chen are apparently incorporating Delicious into a new startup called Avos. They aren’t revealing much about what Avos will be, but a press release says that they’re trying to “develop innovative features to help solve the problem of … Continue Reading

The cost of Sony's PlayStation Network outage: $24 billion or $20 million?

Now that Sony has figured out that hackers stole personal records for more than 77 million PlayStation Network users, everyone wants to figure out how much the incident has cost the Japanese company.

The estimates today range from $20 million in lost revenues for a couple of weeks to $24 billion for the full costs of dealing with the consequences of losing control of customer data.

Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan, estimates that … Continue Reading

Matchbook launches an easy way to bookmark cool locations

If you’re the kind of person who’s constantly writing down recommendations for restaurants, bars, and so on, a just-launched iPhone application called Matchbook can help you keep track.

I played with the app earlier today, and the interface is pretty straightforward. Whenever someone tells you about a location that you’d like to remember, you can search for it in Matchbook’s location database (which uses Foursquare’s application programming interface), bookmark it, and add tags like “Mexican” … Continue Reading

Apple blames bugs for iPhone tracking scandal, software fix coming soon

Apple finally has officially responded to reports that iPhones store user location data in the form of an unusually revealing Q&A.

The company says it’s not actually tracking iPhone locations, instead it’s been compiling a crowdsourced database of cell tower and WiFi hotspot locations — “some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone,” Apple stresses — to speed up GPS services on the iPhones. Apple says it’s simply … Continue Reading

Angry Birds hits 140M downloads, poised for growth in China

Rovio‘s Angry Birds mobile game has been downloaded more than 140 million times since its release 16 months ago.

The game maker said it has seen a major surge from the 100 million units it reported in March, which means that the title is climbing higher in the ranks of the best-selling games of all time.

In March, Rovio released the Angry Birds Rio version of the game, with new levels and characters related to … Continue Reading

JD Power: Battery, hybrid-electric cars are overhyped

Plug-in electric and hybrid electric vehicles are over-hyped and won’t meet many car companies’ 2020 sales targets, according to global marketing information firm JD Power & Associates.

Battery-powered and hybrid-electric cars will only capture around  7.3 percent of all car sales by 2020, according to the firm. That means that electric car sales will only account for 5.2 million sales out of 70.9 million cars sold that year. Concerns about electric car looks, design, power … Continue Reading

Sibblingz's Spaceport may be Holy Grail for publishing cross-platform games

Game startup Sibblingz is announcing today that its cloud-based Spaceport technology will allow a developer to write a social game that can be played on just about any smartphone, on Facebook, or a web site.

The new automated social game platform overcomes major problems that have plagued past attempts to tailor universal game development platforms, said Peter Relan, chairman of YouWeb, the parent company of Sibblingz. If it works, it could save developers a lot … Continue Reading

Zynga acquires Wonderland Software in UK mobile game expansion

Game maker Zynga has expanded its game development reach into the United Kingdom with the acquisition today of Wonderland Software.

The deal adds more mobile game development talent to Zynga’s fold as it tries to rapidly expand into the smartphone and tablet game markets. While Zynga dominates social games on Facebook with 259 million monthly active users, it doesn’t have nearly the same presence in mobile, which could turn out to be a larger and … Continue Reading

Minecraft creator opens the doors to custom mods

Indie darling Minecraft creator Marcus Persson will reveal the game’s guts to game developers looking to create custom modifications for the build-your-own-adventure sandbox game.

Minecraft is an important independent game because it is so wildly successful and it was released without a publisher. The game has sold more than 1 million copies and raked in some serious cash for Persson, who goes by his online handle “notch,” and the rest of his team. It’s always … Continue Reading