Social.FM is dead — 30+ music startups to go
Much more silently than it came into the world, music search and sharing site Social.FM has gone back out — leaving what users it had to retreat to Pandora, iLike or one of the other, more successful music sites on the Internet.
The news was discovered by GigaOm based on a tip, who went on to find that the company’s site and widgets have all gone down. Formerly known as Mercora, the company had taken about… Continue Reading
Roundup: Eons cuts, Mercora, Facebook break-even, Mojiti and advertising decline?
Summary:
*Eons, social network for 50-plus, cuts a third of staff
*Mercora, music sharing service, changes name
*New technology to allow searching images with different languages
*Lendingclub, the people-to-people lending service, launches Web site
*Facebook is roughly breaking even
*Microsoft announces student promotion for Microsoft Office 2007
*Advertising spending is down for second quarter in a row
*Video giant Hulu purchases Chinese company Mojiti to power its video platform?
Eons, social network for 50-plus, cuts a third of staff — This is a surprising move,… Continue Reading
CBS buys music recommendation service Last.fm for $280M
Updated
CBS has bought music recommendation website Last.fm for $280 million, the extremely popular London-based company that lets users search for and listen to music based on their past preferences and recommendations of other users.
Last.fm says it has around 20 million active users each month, four million of which are in the US. The purchase comes at a time when services such as Last.fm are growing extremely quickly. Other private competitors showing growth are Pandora and… Continue Reading
Roundup: PixSense, Piczo, Imeem’s new model & more
PixSense, latest start-up to offer video compression, is hiring! — This Santa Clara start-up claims no one has been able to compress a video by 85 percent to share it via mobile phone.
It is offering such a feature to consumers and carriers. Some 90 percent of cell-phone users don’t have a set data plan, meaning they pay for bandwidth they use while sending pictures. PixSense will lower costs. It will also sell its technology to… Continue Reading
VC firm, ITU, asked portfolio companies for political donations
This story about ITU is a tragic one, and a lesson for us taxpayers in California to be vigilant about how the state deals with venture capital firms.
A few weeks back, we reported on the failure by the Southern California-based venture firm ITU to raise a new fund. The failure, we reported, was sparked in part by Harvard’s decision to pull its money from the firm.
Now a story in the LA Times tells us why… Continue Reading