Rev2.org » News & Acquisitions

Tim Bray Takes Job in Google’s “No Evil Zone”

Craig Agranoff — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:44:46 +0000

Tim Bray is best known as the co-inventor of XML and for his blogging on his website at TBray.org. Google has hired him as a “Developer Advocate” to promote and maintain the developers who interact with Google on the Android platform. Blogging about it on his site, Bray rants against Apple and the iPhone platform:

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded ...

HP Slate Shows Off Flash in New Video

Craig Agranoff — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:40:18 +0000

With all of the buzz about the new Apple iPad, the new HP Slate has been a little overlooked. This new device from Hewlett Packard will run Windows 7 and, of course, Adobe’s Flash. The video also captures the on-screen keyboard, showcases how the hardware-accelerated Flash speeds up performance, and also shows that AIR applications will also run on the Slate.

Little is offered from HP on the technology underneath the hood of this device, but it’s obvious ...

Microsoft Buyout Rumors: Twitter – Yahoo

Craig Agranoff — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:02:48 +0000

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, did a live interview at Search Marketing Expo West in California (transcript here). He said several things that have a lot of people asking a lot of questions and making more than a few conjectures too. The recent deal with Yahoo! that has received the OK from the European Union and will begin rolling out over the next year plus the question of who’s talking to who at Twitter are hot topics right now.

Ballmer’s remarks on the deal with Yahoo! made it clear that ...

Sun CEO Resigns via Haiku on Twitter

Aaron Turpen — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:54:29 +0000

We must live in the 21st Century. Johnathan Schwartz, now the former CEO of Sun Microsystems, resigned from his post last night by tweeting a Haiku. His resignation is the final step in the total absorption of Sun into Oracle, which purchased Sun last week.

This is Schwartz’s tweet, the first-ever resignation by Twitter from a Fortune 200 company CEO:

An interesting way to resign, for sure, but some of Sun’s former employees and critics have rebuttals. Eric Savitz at Barrons found this one from a Yahoo! forum, ...

Twitter’s New Suggested User List – Better Than Before, At Least

Craig Agranoff — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:04:37 +0000

Twitter has changed how new users just signing up find others on the app. Rather than the old, random, Suggested User list of (mostly) celebrities, Twitter has installed a new Suggestions list based on topics. The change was officially announced on the Twitter blog today.

Each of about twenty categories (including Books, Fashion, Tech, and the like) has a floating list of users that Twitter keeps track of. Active users are Twitter are categorized by the subject matter of their posts and their activity level. Those who are most ...

Quiet Moves Signal Apple Tablet Coming Soon

Craig Agranoff — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:17:30 +0000

An industry rumor and a change in an Apple subsidiary are more signs that the buzz about Apple working on a new tablet computer is true. In fact, one of them is a good sign that the tablet will be here sooner rather than later.

Sylvie Barak at TD Daily says that the rumor on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show was that Apple has been quietly sucking up the available supply of 10-inch touch screens in both LCD and OLED. An anonymous source at the CES event ...

ReachLocal Goes IPO

Craig Agranoff — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:58:16 +0000

Online marketing company ReachLocal just filed a $100 million initial public offering (IPO). For the first three quarters of 2009, ReachLocal made a reported $143 million in revenue compared to $100 million in 2008 for that period. Profits were $11.66 million of that.

ReachLocal’s venture funding sources, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Rho Ventures, and Galleon Group, have put in about $68 million into the company, so cashing out at $100 million is actually a small return by comparison.

ReachLocal is one of the most well-known Internet marketing firms in the business. They work ...

Pepsi Dumps the Super Bowl for Social Media

Craig Agranoff — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:11:01 +0000

In a stunning move, Pepsi has announced that they will not be running ads in the Super Bowl this year. Instead, they will be focusing on social media.

Yes, you heard right. They’re dumping the Super Bowl, televisions largest event of the year, for social media. This marks a serious turning point for not just social media, but media in general. In fact, another ABC article, this one written by Larry D. Woodard, CEO of Vigilante (a Manhattan ad agency), points this out:

As television viewership has gone ...

Microsoft Loses Patent Appeal, Office and Word on the Ropes

Craig Agranoff — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:43:28 +0000

Of all the big tech companies out there, it seems that Microsoft finds itself in court more often than any of the others. They’ve been in patent battles with a company called i4i for several years, ever since Word and other Office apps started supporting XML.

The patent suit is over the algorithms that Microsoft uses to convert and save .xml, .docx, and .docm files. i4i is a database design company that holds a patent on a specific set of algorithms they created in 2000 to convert USPTO database (Office) files ...

Yelp Decides Not to Sell – No Google Deal

Craig Agranoff — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:43:00 +0000

The big news on Friday was that Google and Yelp had nearly cinched negotiations for a buyout with Google acquiring the social consumer site, for a sum rumored to be over $500 million. Well, that deal is off according to breaking news today at TechCrunch.

The deal looked like a win-win for everyone. Except maybe the loyal fan base at Yelp. Yelp’s investors and shareholders would have stood to gain a huge return on their investment while Google would have gained a vital niche for their local ...