According to PaidContent, Imeem, one of our favorite streaming music services, is starting to feel the pressure of the economic downturn and is planning to lay off a quarter of its workforce. According to this report, Imeem is also looking for a potential candidate to buy the company.
Imeem is one of Sequoia's portfolio companies, so it doesn't come as a surprise that it is looking to keep its budget under control, but we do think that Imeem is going to have a hard time finding a buyer in these tough economic times.
In the US, sending SMS messages can get spendy. In the rest of the world, however, texting costs can be downright oppressive. As such, finding cheaper ways to send SMS messages has a broad appeal - especially with the younger, and often cash-strapped, set.
With the release of Utterli Free Group Texting, Utterli - formerly known as Utterz - is hoping to tap into that market, offering the ability to send SMS messages to friends - and groups of friends - for free from within Facebook or Bebo. And, free is a very good price.
Bill Gates has started a mysterious new company, called bgC3, possibly to be focused on creating catalyst business ideas to spin off to Microsoft, the Gates Foundation or elsewhere. Little is known about the company, which doesn't appear to have a public web page, but a fair number of details have been ferreted out by the Seattle area tech reporters Todd Bishop, Eric Engleman and John Cook.
As part of our Gritty Entrepreneurs series, we interviewed Frank Zamani, Founder/CEO of Caspio. Their pitch is "no more programming for custom web applications". That is a tough market, which we will explore in this post. But Caspio is bootstrapped, profitable and can point to some real case studies. So they must be doing something right. Let's tell you this entrepreneur's tale and assess their future prospects.
Rackspace, one of the world's largest hosting providers, announced two major acquisitions today: SliceHost and JungleDisk. Slicehost is a popular cloud computing and hosting provider with about 15,000 users, while JungleDisk is one of our favorite online backup services. JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it will now also support Rackspace's new cloud storage solution.
While online video is a great tool, automatically indexing these videos and making them searchable is still a very hard task. EveryZing, a Massachusetts-based company that focuses on media indexing through speech-to-text and natural language processing, released a new version of its media player today that allows users to search online videos on third-party sites for keywords and tags. Currently, however, this technology is only available to EveryZing's corporate partners, with the Dallas Cowboys being the first to make use of these new capabilities.
With the upcoming U.S. elections only 12 days away, Google has released a new web site to help simply and centralize information about voting locations and voter registration. According to a blog post about the new U.S. Voter Info site, Google found it hard to believe that in 2008, this type of important information isn't better organized on the web. Because organizing info is what Google is all about, they took it on themselves to step in where government has not and have created an incredibly useful site for all U.S. citizens.
While Adobe Flash has remained popular with Web developers who want to deliver fluid user interfaces, database-driven content, and nonstandard typography on the Web, it has suffered from one glaring shortcoming: search engines have been unable to effectively index the content held within the Flash file.
With Ichabod, Adobe is hoping to fix that problem for Flash. Update: According to a comment from Adobe's John Dowdell, Ichabod only works on Flash, not AJAX as previously reported. Nonetheless, it's still a very important step forward.
You got that email again. You know the one. The one you've answered a million times. And even though you don't have anything more you can add to your response - time after time after time - you dutifully craft the same exact email, each and every time. If only Gmail had some way to save a standard response to that question.
Now, it does. Enter Gmail Canned Responses, a new release from Google Labs that lets you save that response as a template. With Canned Responses, you can answer that annoying question with a few clicks of your mouse. And you can do some other interesting things, too.
AOL announced the new developer site for MyAOL today to almost no fanfare, but at a time when some are declaring the Facebook platform "dead" - AOL's new platform warrants some serious attention.
The new MyAOL platform is an OpenSocial container based on the gadgets.*API, meaning developers shouldn't have to do much to get their widgets up and running on it. A fair number of MyAOL gadgets already have millions of users, so the new developer site seems like a real opportunity.
