Rackspace Hosting Inc. (NYSE:RAX) is expecting to return customer credit from the major outage that they had this past Monday. The dollar amount that the company is expecting to return will be between $2.5 and $3.5 million according to an SEC filing. The cause of the outage was a series of equipment failures at a Rackspace data center in Dallas, Texas.
Several generators malfunctioned which put several servers out of power without backup. “We sincerely apologize for this disruption and know that it impacted our customers’ businesses as well as the experience of many who use the web,” stated Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier in a blog post. “Although we have had some issues with this data center before, please know that we will do what it takes to improve its reliability and performance. We owe you an action plan to prevent this type of thing in the future, and we’ll get that to you as soon as it is ready.” The data center in Dallas, Texas is 144,000 in square feet and is Rackspace’s largest facility.
Personal note: Pulse2.com uses Mosso, a Rackspace subsidiary and we have been 100% satisfied with their services. Pulse2.com barely had any downtime and if there was, we were refunded immediately.
StyleCaster is a website that offers style tips, shopping tips, and has a social network. StyleCaster raised $4 million in Series A from Quicken Loans owner Dan Gilbert. Gilbert is a businessman born in Detroit and also founded Rock Financial Corporation. StyleCast said that they plan to use the funding to expand internationally and grow their ad network.
StyleCaster started in February and receives about 200,000 unique visitors per month. StyleCaster will soon be launching a fashion website for men. “StyleCaster has the potential to truly revolutionize the fashion and lifestyle space,” stated StyleCaster CEO and Co-Founder Ari Goldberg. “We are excited to continue our partnership with Dan Gilbert as we build the next generation of intelligent and engaging experiences.”
E*TRADE Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:ETFC) has successfully completed a debt exchange offer. E*TRADE received a commitment from creditors to swap $1.8 billion in debt for convertible bonds.
The conversion was accepted for the following reasons:
- The new bonds do not bear interest as zero coupons. Class A debentures can be converted into E*Trade’s stock at a rate of $1.034 per share.
- E*Trade’s largest shareholder Citadel had already commited to the deal which encouraged other investors.
- Creditors realized that because there are greater capital requirements on the horizon, this would be a good way to keep E*TRADE from buckling down their services.
E*TRADE is struggling to keep up the competition with Ameritrade and Charles Schwab. E*TRADE will be posting another loss this year. E*TRADE has applications built on the iTunes App Store and BlackBerry App World.
IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) has laid off about 25% of their work force at Evite.com. Evite had about 38 employees and now they are down to about 29. Two of the executives that were laid off includes General Manager Rosanna McCollough and VP of Marketing Lariayn Payne. John Foley will be at the top Evite. Hans Woolley will be reporting to John Foley.
Evite has taken a hit on revenue which was generated mainly from advertising. Evite is also finding themselves heavily competing with social networking websites that have built in event invitations.
Evite currently has 22 million registered users and there are about 25,000 invitations sent each hour. Evite was launched in 1998 and has headquarters in LA, CA.
Facebook is actively working on a new advanced application for iPhone OS 3.0. Facebook software engineer Joe Hewitt wrote a post stating that he is about 98% done with it and even listed the features that will be included:
1. The “new” News Feed
2. Like
3. Events (including the ability to RSVP)
4. Notes
5. Pages
6. Create new photo albums
7. Upload photos to any album
8. Zoom into photos
9. Easier photo tagging
10. Profile Pictures albums
11. A new home screen for easy access to all your stuff, search, and notifications
12. Add your favorite profiles and pages to the home screen
13. Better Notifications (they link to the comments so you can reply)
14. Quickly call or text people right from the Friends page
15. Messages you are typing will be restored if you quit or are interrupted by a phone call
Push is not ready as of yet, but Facebook is working on it. The 3.0 version may not have it, but the 3.1 version will most likely have it.
It is not everyday that you see an Asian cruising around in a shopping cart. MIT student Charles Guan made it happen though. The shopping cart is powered by a lithium nanophosphate cell from an A123, a 33 Ah battery pack, and a Briggs and Stratton ETEK DC pancake electric motor. All of this put together is called the LOLrioKart.
Last month AT&T had the best month ever with the release of the Apple iPhone 3G S. Below is a list of some of the milestones achieved by the phone’s launch:
- Best ever sales day in retail stores
- Second largest traffic day in retail stores
- Most transactions processed through IT systems in a single day
- Largest order day in history on att.com
- Most upgrade eligibility checks in one day
- Largest features sales day on att.com
On June 25, when Michael Jackson died — AT&T processed 65,000 text messages per second — the largest ever recorded.
When the Palm Pre launched in June, Sprint also broke sales records. Given that Sprint and AT&T had the best month ever last month, I’m wondering what Verizon has up their sleeve.
I’ve heard of events such as start-up pitching at a bar and even TweetUps, but I think CuddleParty.com comes off as the most bizarre type of event I’ve heard of so far. Cuddle Parties started about 5 years ago for people that want to literally cuddle with each other. A bunch of people in pajamas show up and cuddle with each other as long as there is consent.
There are several rules for the cuddle parties: No alcohol, no promiscuous pajamas, consent required, and cuddle participants must be hygienically-savvy. Each cuddle party is hosted by a trained guide and participants are sometimes charged as high as $40 per party. But there are some free parties.
Cuddle Party is a non-profit institution that makes money by training the facilitators. It costs $495 to learn the skills and $995 for a 10 session teleconference. There is an additional $195 per year to stay affiliated with the website CuddleParty.com.
Over 50 facilitators have been trained around the world over the last 5 years. The number of Cuddle Parties are increasing and so is the number of facilitators.
Microsoft Research has developed a platform called Kodu Game Lab. The Kodu Game Lab allows users to create XBox 360 LIVE games for download. Kodu is supposed to be easy to use that even a 12 year old girl was able to create a game in a demo. As of right now there is a free trial version of a Kodu Game Lab available for download. The full version costs 400 Microsoft Points ($5).
Below are some of the details about the new video game creation software:
- Developer: MSR Kodu
- Game Rating: Unrated
- Genre: Family
- Players: 1-4
- Co-Op: 2-4
- HDTV 1080p
- Custom Soundtrack
- Only Multiplayer: 2-8
Apple Inc. is currently working on making a deal with China Unicom for bringing the iPhone to China, the most populated country in the world. The only problem is that Hanwang Technology Co. owns the trademark for the term “i-phone” for mobile phones.
This makes it illegal for Apple to sell the iPhone in China. Apple registered the “iPhone” trademark in China back in 2002, but that only covered computer software and hardware. In 2004, Hanwang won the trademark for the term “i-phone” covering mobile phones and phone equipment.
In order for Apple to sell the iPhone in China, Apple would have to make an agreement with Hanwang or find a way to have the i-phone trademark revoked. Having a trademark revoked could take upwards to 3-4 years. In China, there are currently about 1 million unlocked iPhones floating around.
Amit Chowdhry |
Thursday July 2, 2009 |
1 Comment Categorized under
Playfish
Playfish is a company that designs game applications for social networks and mobile devices. Playfish games are available across platforms such as MySpace, Facebook, the iPhone, Google Android, and Bebo.
The company has just announced that they have received about 100 million downloads of their games over the last 18 months. According to the company’s statement regarding the 100 million download, it took the board game Monopoly about 45 years before they reached this milestone.
However installing games through Playfish is free of charge, giving users more accessibility to them. Playfish has about 30 million monthly active players and 7 published games. And each of the games were a top 10 on Facebook.
Those of you that are on Tweetdeck will notice that you can make more use out of the service by requesting to use more API calls. API calls include sending out tweets, following, and unfollowing people. Users can also request more tweets at a given time. The original API limit was 100 per hour and now it is 150 per hour.
Other applications that have seen the API limit being increased includes Twhirl, Tweetie, Tweepular.com, DestroyTwitter, etc. What this probably means is that Twitter is scaling up their server architecture to handle tons of additional bandwidth.
BeautyMeter was an application that allowed users to upload a photo of themselves and users had the ability to rank them based on Face, Body, and Clothes. Recently a photo appeared of a nude 15 year old girl and there was a media frenzy about it. Apple was bashed in the media for not being able to prohibit inappropriate content.
Today Apple pulled the application from the iTunes store. By the time it was removed, about 5,000 people rated the photo and Apple App review site Krapps discovered and pointed out the picture first.
Another application that contained pornography that slipped through the cracks is Hottest Girls. The Hottest Girls application had topless photos of women that was added through a server to the application. This application was promptly removed as well.
The BeautyMeter application developer FunnyMals said that the application users were required to provide their iPhone device ID so that illegal content can be traced back to the user. “We don’t review each uploaded photo exclusively but from time to time we will clean up,” wrote Funnymals in the Ts and Cs of BeautyMeter.
Considering all the negative press Apple received as a result of this application, it may be a while that a new version of BeautyMeter will be added in iTunes. There will probably need to be more strict security for the application.
At the end of May, Psystar filed for bankruptcy. The company was facing a legal battle against Apple Inc. which put them in bankruptcy in the first place. Now the company is out of bankruptcy and is ready to take on Apple once again. Below is a statement from Psystar:
As you all may already be aware in late May, Psystar filed for Chapter 11 protection. Although this was critical to our continued daily operations, we now are ready to emerge and again battle Goliath.
More information will be available in the coming days when we will be formally discharged by the Bankruptcy court.
When life gives you apples, make applesauce.
Psystar is best known for building computers that use the Mac operating system, but at cheaper prices than what Apple sells computers for. Psystar has even introduced a couple of new products. One is called Open(7) which is a system that uses the Intel Nehalem Xeon platform. The new system is available in desktop and server form. The price of the Open(7) starts at $1,4999 with OS X Leopard installed.
Its not every day that you see a traditional media company poach from a new media company, but this is exactly what happened when CBS hired Richard Lawson from Gawker Media.
Lawson will be writing for TV.com in a role that is similar to what he already has been doing for Gawker: writing what is happening on famous TV shows.
Lawson will be writing fewer posts per day and do actual reviews. Lawson has supposedly been generating 2.4 million pageviews per month for Gawker, more than any of Gawkers’ others writers.
