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Buzz lawsuit costs Google $8.5m

admin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:26:05 +0000

Google Buzz, the social media service that has not been as popular as expected, attracted a lot of unfavourable attention in February due to privacy concerns. At that stage Buzz, which aggregates social media content, automatically included Gmail users’ frequent contacts on their public Buzz profiles.

However even though Google quickly changed their policy to give its users a better understanding of the privacy features of the service, they still got stuck when Gmail user Eva Hibnick filed a lawsuit against the company in February.

Apparently the proceedings of the settlement of $8.5m will be ...

SeeqPod bought by Intertrust

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 13:32:25 +0000

Intertrust has bought the assets of Seeqpod – the online search and recommendation engine. Since April 2009, SeeqPod ceased its service and has filed for bankruptcy but may now be resurrected by Intertrust. SeeqPod developed a web crawler that indexed playable search results across a wide variety of media including audio, video, podcasts and so on. SeeqPod was powered by an algorithm developed to aid biologists understand complex genetic connections called GenoPharm. This was adapted to enhance search by linking complex information in the same way the human brain might.

Now, Intertrust has announced ...

ShowUHow Wins US $3 Million Funding

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 13:28:03 +0000

The days of obscure paper manuals could be numbered as ShowUHow gets enough money to start work on its online instruction manual service. The San Diego based business has received a $3 million investment from Syncom Venture Partners to continue developing the service.

ShowUHow has created online video guides for products sold at BestBuy, CocstCo and others – akin to an official video e-how or videojug presentation. However, unlike the crowd sourced competitors, ShowUhow’s platform can also help consumers order spare parts, register for warranties and submit support requests. The website can also generate ...

Placecast and Location Labs Join Forces

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:14:39 +0000

Placecast, the SMS-based advertising company was founded in 2005. Since then it’s been developing its text based advertisement model. With its newly announced partnership with Location Labs, Placecast has extended its reach to over 180 million US consumers.

This means that up to 60% of US consumers could soon be receiving texts from the ShopAlerts service. This service uses the Location Labs API to allow customers of Placecast to send texts, IM’s and tweets to consumers who have opted in to receiving offers based on location and shipping preferences.

This ...

Formspring.me

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:28:57 +0000

Formspring.me, the question and answer service, has seen their user base pushing the 16 million users mark, and that’s only since they’ve launched. This equates to about one billion questions answered between now and last November.

In common with other early start-ups, the feature list has been a bit light allowing developers time to concentrate on core business but this is set to change. Notably, Formspring is launching connections, allowing users to form connections by answering questions.

This is in contrast to the Twitter / Facebook follow functionality. The system will use weightings to sort ...

Spotify goes social

admin — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:28:03 +0000

Spotify Music Pro@ile is the new feature set from popular music service Spotify. Integrating with Facebook, Spotify believes it has created a true social music network. Spotify’s goal is to be ‘your only music source’ in what Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder and chief executive, says is the ‘the biggest change to Spotify since our launch’.

The star feature is the new Facebook integration option, which allows a user to view the tracks that their friends are listening to, as well as a feature allowing them to recommend songs. When signed ...

A Last Word

admin — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:09:22 +0000

As you might have noticed, VOIS.com recently acquired Rev2.org, and Craig Agranoff, who has been filling in for me for the last year or so, has now taken on the blog full-time as Editor.

The decision to sell Rev2 came as a difficult one seeing it has been a part of my life for the last five or so years, but given my lack of time and neglect for it, it was either a case of watching it die a slow death with the lack of content and missed hosting bills, ...

Memiary + Lessons of a Weekend Entrepreneur

admin — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 08:06:38 +0000

So here’s my problem: I have a bad memory. A really bad one. If you asked me what happened five hours ago, I couldn’t tell you to save my wallet, let alone day, week, month, year. I forget fast, and the pictures I take on occasional trips and my daily tweets are not enough for me to catalog my life. I can feel the ten-year-later Sid hating himself for not preserving the events, moments, and actions which surrounded his life in 2008. The Story Last weekend on a really really rainy Saturday night, I was sipping a cup of hot chocolate and staring at the latest copy of Fast Company magazine. And then I had this idea. But it didn’t just come to me in an instant — it was the result of constant subconcious pondering of the problem I stated in the above paragraph. I really had been thinking about this for months. I just didn’t know it. ...

TapSmack: The Power of Co-Creation

admin — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:03:23 +0000

Full disclosure: TapSmack is joining Rev2 as a new sponsor, but since we haven’t covered them before, we figured even our sponsors needed to hear what we think. My attempt is to be as un-biased as possible, so take it for what it is.

Artist-centric communities have been around for quite some time in Internet space. Years before things like Flickr existed, I remember mindlessly browsing around deviantART and sharing a couple creations of my own. But while these communities encourage creators creating and sharing, something they don’t encourage is collaborating. And as ...

The Entrepreneur and the Time: Great Artists Ship

admin — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:47:54 +0000

Following up to the inaugral post of my new focus for Rev2 — the entrepreneur — I received a great suggestion from Gonzalo Arzuago of KillerStartups: the entrepreneur and the deadline/time/launch date. Yes, any entrepreneur who is reading this knows what I am talking about, and if you haven’t worked on your own company yet, chances are that you’ve experienced this problem in at least some form of your life.

The Deal
So, here’s the deal: you have a huge idea — the company, the product, the business. There are some key components ...