While there has been a lot of doom and gloom around venture capital funding during the current economic crisis in the U.S., some of the more established later-stage companies are still finding it relatively easy to get funding. AdMob, a leading mobile advertising platform, just announced that it has raised $15.7 million in a Series C round led by Sequoia Capital's Growth Fund, with participation from Accel Partners. AdMob, which is already seeing positive cash flow, is planning to use this money to expand its international operations, especially in India, South Africa, and Europe.
We interviewed Google's Derek Slater at the SanFran MusicTech Summit yesterday. Slater is a Policy Analyst at Google and in our interview he discusses net neutrality, copyright and other public policy issues Google deals with on a daily basis.
Derek Slater now runs public policy for Google, but before that he worked with the Berkman Center and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
If you have been on the Internet for long enough, you will surely remember the old MP3.com, which was first geared towards independent musicians, but later also allowed you to listen to your own music collection online. Lala, which launched yesterday, features a similar concept. It is first and foremost a music store with a unique sales pitch: pay 10 cents for the right to listen to a song online and between 79 and 89 cents on top of that for the DRM-free MP3 file. For a lot of users, however, the fact that Lala also clones MP3.com's online music locker will be the real attraction of this service.
Last week, the internet video service Joost relaunched as a Flash-based online portal, having finally ditched their downloadable player for good. The service, once hyped as the next big thing, has long been overshadowed by the much sleeker Hulu, a joint effort between NBC Universal and News Corp. Joost hoped that with their relaunch they would finally be able to compete again.
Having played with the new version of Joost for awhile, it's obvious Hulu has nothing to fear. Joost currently has several issues that need improvement if they ever hope to succeed.
Today at 11am PT/2pm ET, ReadWriteWeb is presenting an online product strategy roundtable featuring Sramana Mitra and using Dimdim's open source web conferencing platform. During the 60-minute session, entrepreneurs will pitch Sramana their product ideas in a 3-minute presentation. She will review the material in real-time and provide 3-minutes of feedback on each plan.
The session is open to 500 people and 10 have the opportunity to pitch Sramana. You can follow the session live by clicking here.
Grab your OPML reading list and get out now. That was the message in an email sent today to users of the innovative start-page service YourMinis, a years-old startup that was acquired by AOL in February.
YourMinis was a start-page service like no other, but its feature richness and happy users fall victim to the cold business logic that so many cool startups face after being acquired. YourMinis is now primarily used to power advertising widgets for AOL, a practice that will continue but pales in comparison to the beautiful topical pages its users built with the full service over the last several years.
When Google announced Android, its software platform for mobile devices, it released an SDK for developers to work with, but it also promised to eventually release the code under an open-source license. Today, Google and its partners in the Open Handset Alliance did exactly that. You can now download the code and help Google and its partners to develop it further. The source code has been released under the Apache 2.0 license and consists of the complete codebase of Android, including all the libraries, media codecs, and applications.
One of the biggest topics in the tech blogosphere at the beginning of this year was 'comment fragmentation.' With services like FriendFeed, SocialMedian, Digg, Reddit, and others often creating unconnected conversations around a single blog post, many bloggers felt that they had lost control of their content and the conversation around it. Artiklz, which launched its private alpha test today, wants to put an end to this discussion. The company aggregates comments from a wide range of external sources, including FriendFeed, Digg, Mixx, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz, and Delicious, with more to follow very soon.
Cooliris (formerly PicLens) makers of a browser plugin which transforms the web into an immersive 3D experience, has just released their first application for the iPhone. The new Cooliris App brings 3D web surfing to the iPhone. Like their plugin, the iPhone app lets you browse using their unique "wall of content," a 3D wall that you can flick through using finger swipes and can touch to zoom in and out. This app lets you search Google, Flickr, Yahoo, SmugMug, and DeviantArt. Also like their browser plugin, the Cooliris iPhone App delivers relevant news and articles from across the web via a "Discover" feature which presents iPhone-optimized content organized in categories like News, Sports, Tech, and more.
When Twine announced itself to the world exactly one year ago, it claimed to be "the first mainstream Semantic Web application". However despite raising millions of dollars in its quest to bring the Semantic Web to the mainstream, Twine has been beset by usability and performance issues in its beta period. Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote probably the most brutal review. The post title said it all: Twine Disappoints After Semantic Web Hype.
However Twine has just launched publicly, confident that it is ready for prime time. I spoke with Twine founder and Semantic Web proponent Nova Spivack today to find out what's changed, who's been using Twine up till now, and where the service is headed in the future.
