Granting Credit On The Fly. Is Bill Me Later Part Of the Problem Or Part Of The Solution? (2)
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Erick Schonfeld (966)
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TechCrunch (5368)
8 hours, 48 minutes
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On the same day the public markets are tanking because of the spreading credit crisis, we see one of the biggest M&A exits of the year with eBay acquiring Bill Me Later for $945 million ($820 million in cash, plus an extra $125 million in options). The only other tech exits of this size in 2008 were Sun buying MYSQL for $1 billion (which involved less cash and more options), AOL buying Bebo for $850 ...
Freddy Mini shared as favorite Apple Met Goal of 10 million iPhones Sold in 2008 (5)
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John Biggs (353)
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TechCrunch (5368)
9 hours, 2 minutes
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By using some fairly interesting IMEI collection, the folks at Mac Observer have found that Apple sold 10 million iPhones in 2008, reaching and potentially surpassing Steve's original stated goal. By looking at phones sold over the last few months, Mac Observer's "Apple Finance Board" found that the phone has gone through nine 1 million unit runs. Adding this to the known sales they found the total number was far above analyst expectations.
Angel Investor Roger Ehrenberg: Want My Money? Here's My Criteria (10)
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Roger Ehrenberg (41)
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Silicon Alley Insider (481)
18 hours, 18 minutes
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Much has been written recently about VC and start-up angst in the wake to today's - and likely tomorrow's - poor market conditions. Some analysts, myself included, see this malaise possibly lasting well into the next decade. Albert Wenger wrote a worthwhile summary of where the overall early-stage investment mind-set is right now. In short, it's not pretty. I have taken a somewhat less draconian view of things, but that is not to say that ...
Free Vs Paid (13)
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Fred (458)
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A VC (287)
19 hours, 12 minutes
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My friend Howard was visiting me a few weeks ago and he said to me "free is over, I am only investing in services that customers pay for". He said "freemium is dead". I reminded him that freemium is a paid model, but he wasn't buying it. There's a movement afoot by investors to back web services with a real business model instead of the pervasive "give it away for free and hope for the ...
Alert Thingy Looks To Be All-In-One Social Desktop Tool (21)
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Michael Arrington (1770)
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TechCrunch (5368)
19 hours, 30 minutes
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For those nuts out there like us that use just about every social website there is, the upcoming version 2 of Alert Thingy’s AIR desktop application may be just what you need. The current version of the service supports Twitter, Flickr and Friendfeed. But version 2, which will be released this month, adds support for Digg, YouTube, Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce and Tumblr as well. Creator Jeremy Baines hasn’t let us test the new version yet, ...
CauseWired Quote Of The Day (1)
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Fred (458)
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A VC (287)
21 hours, 3 minutes
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My friend Tom Watson has written a book on "peer to peer philanthropy" called CauseWired. It's not yet out but you can pre-order it at that link. Tom gave me a preview of it and I am going to blog some quotes from it that relate to Donors Choose throughout the month of October as a cool way to remind readers of the Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge. Here's the first one:"I thought there must be ...
Bad Karma At contentSutra. Site Sputters After Being Bought By The Guardian. (2)
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Erick Schonfeld (966)
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TechCrunch (5368)
1 day, 4 hours
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Only three months after the British newspaper publisher The Guardian Group bought Rafat Ali’s ContentNext Media and his collection of blogs for a reported $30 million, one of those blogs is sputtering badly. The blog in question is contentSutra, the Indian counterpart to its bigger and better known brother, paidContent (both cover the business of digital media). Until recently, contentSutra was ContentNext’s second biggest blog, even beating out mocoNews. But if you look at it ...
MySpace Music Streamed Its Billionth Song “A Few Days” After Launch (5)
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Michael Arrington (1770)
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TechCrunch (5368)
1 day, 4 hours
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It took iTunes nearly three years to get to 1 billion song downloads. MySpace Music streamed a billion songs in just a few days after it launched on September 25. And while this isn’t a fair comparison (songs on MySpace are free to stream; on iTunes users were paying $0.99 each), it’s an incredible milestone. What MySpace won’t say for some reason is what the billionth song was, or when exactly it was streamed (which ...
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Devlin D said:
Holy freaking crap that is a lot of ads displayed!
The Power of Profiles (9)
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Fred (458)
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A VC (287)
1 day, 17 hours
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I visited the New York Times today and saw this at the top of the front page: For those of you with good eyes, that's my avatar on the upper left and that top banner is something that is called TimesPeople. It's a profile based service for sharing stories with friends and colleagues on the New York Times website. TimesPeople also has a facebook app which I installed today. This is an important step for ...
A SWOT Analysis On America (12)
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Fred (458)
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A VC (287)
1 day, 18 hours
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I spent 15 years in the States and left in 2006, precisely because I saw the horrifying decline of this great nation. Don't you think, though, that before a turnaround plan you need to do a SWOT analysis? Here's a quick stab at it: Strengths:Bar none, the most diligent, hard-working, dedicated, disciplined and focused people in the world. I've lived on three continents and know what I am talking about. Weaknesses:1. Decay of rationalism. Right ...
Goldman Sachs Forecasts "Deeper" Recession (3)
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CalculatedRisk (42)
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Calculated Risk (44)
2 days, 20 hours
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From Rex Nutting at MarketWatch: More severe recession now forecast by Goldman Sachs The U.S. recession will be "significantly deeper" than they previously thought, Goldman Sachs economists predicted Friday in a research note. ... The unemployment rate will likely rise to 8% by the end of next year from 6.1% currently. Goldman is now forecasting Q3 2008 real GDP growth at 0.0%, with PCE at minus
US kills 'senior Baghdad bomber' (2)
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Run web apps in full-screen native app mode on the iPhone » VentureBeat (7)
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MG Siegler (188)
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VentureBeat (517)
3 days, 13 hours
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With the launch of the Apple’s App Store, the once all-powerful web app has lost a lot of its value on the iPhone and iPod touch. There are still plenty of good apps out there — such as the Twitter client Hahlo, FriendFeed and several of the Google web apps — but they’re confined to running within the Safari web browser. That makes them a lot less sexy than native apps. But thanks to a ...
Royalty rate frozen, iTunes is saved! (It was never going to die anyway.) (3)
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MG Siegler (188)
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VentureBeat (517)
4 days, 9 hours
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The Copyright Royalty Board handed down its ruling today on a proposed increase in the rate that digital music download stores much pay publishers. The result? No change. It will remain at 9.1 cents a song, according to CNET. Yes, it looks like many popular online music stores, and Apple’s iTunes store in particular, dodged a bullet. But despite what some sites may have written over the past few days, this was never a fatal ...
Untitled (2)
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Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins (255)
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Mashable! (2545)
4 days, 9 hours
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Today the Startonomics workshop is underway, and Mashable friend and occasional contributor Muhammad Saleem is presenting a session on social media and word of mouth marketing for startups: Digg, Delicious, Twitter. Word of mouth has never been sexier. Learn how to use social media & social bookmarking to spread the word to your mother. This is something he’s imminently qualified to speak on as a social media consultant and one of the most visible individual ...
Facebook appoints Christopher Cox as Director of Product, promotes Mike Schroepfer to VP of Engineering » VentureBeat (5)
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Matt Marshall (45)
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VentureBeat (517)
4 days, 9 hours
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Facebook has just orchestrated another shuffle in its management team, in the latest sign that founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is turning to the company’s engineering roots by promoting top lieutenants. Facebook has appointed Christopher Cox as director of product, a significant position because he will control the direction of future product releases. Cox (pictured left; his Facebook thumbnail is all we have right now) was formerly director of human resources. Before that, he ...
Pitfalls of a Non-Traditional Ad Network (3)
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Mark Davis (15)
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Mashable! (2545)
4 days, 13 hours
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Mark Davis is an NYC-based tech VC that blogs on technology and the venture world at Get Venture. I recently wrote a post about the ways in which ad networks can differentiate themselves. One of the three key considerations is type of inventory. With a belief that ads will continue to penetrate more facets of our lives, I think that ad networks targeting non-traditional inventory are quite interesting. By non-traditional ad inventory, I’m referring to ...
Quick link: List of $350MM of VC investments in social gaming, virtual worlds, casual MMOs, etc (2)
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Andrew Chen (64)
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Futuristic Play by @Andrew_Chen (64)
5 days, 11 hours
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Wow, there has been a ton of investment into games-related startups. I hadn’t seen this table until today - I thought I’d share it. It shows the tremendous amount of investment that’s been thrown into the “new” games space, although I’ll note that some of the companies on this list are relatively mature. But lots of them were funded in the last year or so. Given that there are still tons of stealth companies out ...
BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition (243) permalink
An al-Qaeda commander described as one of Baghdad's bombing masterminds is killed by US troops, military officials say.Shared by Aaron R (118) Andrei (29)Contribute comment
