On December 2, 1983 Michael Jackson released a 14 minute long music video for the song “Thriller.” The Thriller music video was directed by John Landis (Blues Brothers 2000, Beverly Hills Cop III, Coming to America, ¡Three Amigos!, National Lampoon’s Animal House, and An American Werewolf in London).
On June 25th Michael Jackson passed away and the world was shocked. In order to recapture their memories of the King of Pop, they watched the Thriller video on the Internet. The Thriller music video was watched over 8.5 million times since June 25th. Old Michael Jackson songs are almost among the most downloaded songs on iTunes as of right now.
On June 27th, about 1,500 inmates at CPDRC performed a tribute. The tribute was completed in 10 hours and features the songs “Ben,” “I’ll Be There,” and “We Are The World.” This video was watched almost 3 million times since being created 3 days ago.
Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder estimated that about 300,000 Palm Pre devices have been sold so far. Apparently these numbers are higher than Palm expected to sell because the company is still playing catch up. When the Palm Pre was released, there were about 120,000 units available for in their inventory. The whole inventory was sold within days of the phone’s launch.
Snyder estimates that the company is producing about 15,000 units per day as of right now. This means that the Pre will ship about one million units to Sprint within the first quarter of their launch. This is well “well above consensus.” In conjunction to the unit sales, there were about 666,000 applications downloaded in the first 12 days.
Dean Cain is an actor that is best known for playing Clark Kent/Superman in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. The show ran from 1993 to 1997. After that Cain produced the TV show Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Cain’s career in this decade has not been the same as it was in the 1990’s. This is further evident in his latest gig.
Cain has been hired by Microsoft Corporation to pitch Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). The ads for IE8 is only available online so far. If I were to choose two words to describe the three ads, it would be “very bizarre.” Even more bizarre than the Microsoft/Seinfeld ads. Embedded below are the four ads. Spoiler: if you don’t want to see a woman puking on a man, then don’t watch the last video. (more…)
Joost was started by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis back in October 2006. The company raised about $45 million in funding shortly after starting up. Investors included Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Viacom, CBS and Li Ka-shing. Joost killed off their desktop application and became purely a web service in September 2008.
Joost announced that they have replaced former CEO Mike Volpi. Joost SVP of Engineering Matt Zelesko will be replacing Volpi. However Volpi will remain as Chairman of the board.
As a result of Joost’s lack of growth compared to YouTube, Hulu, and other video services Joost has decided to focus on providing video platforms for bigger companies. There will also be major layoffs. Joost employs about 100 people in New York and London.
Google product management director Prashant Fuloria has left the search engine company to join Facebook. At Facebook, Fuloria will have the same job title. Fuloria will be working on monetization products and strategies.
When Fuloria was working on Google, he was in charge of Google Checkout and other payment systems. Facebook appears to be targeting Google for employees lately. At one point, 10% of Facebook’s employees were former Google employees.
Before Google Fuloria was Senior Product Manager at Closedloop Solutions. Fuloria has degrees from Stanford and the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi.
Comcast Corporation is working on a new initiative while partnering with Clearwire Corp. and several other companies that utilize WiMax technologies. The initiative is the implementation of fourth-generation (4G) broadband services. People on 3G networks are already able to update their blogs and websites.
But the Comcast High-Speed 2go service will allow those using laptops and netbooks use a wireless connection anywhere in the U.S. The connection will be available at speeds faster than before. The download speeds will be about 4 megabits per second compared to the 1-1.5 megabit speeds available on 3G networks.
High-Speed 2go is now available in Portland, Oregon. The service will be available in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Chicago by the end of the year. The service will cost $49.99 per month. A nationwide version will be available for $69.99 per month.
Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) has bought out The Pirate Bay, a torrent search engine website that was recently taken to court for copyright infringement. Global Gaming Factory also bought out another company called Peerialism, a file sharing service. GGF will be taking over both services in August 2009.
The founders of The Pirate Bay was fined $3.6 million and one year in jail, but tried to appeal the decision because they believed the judge may have been biased. Check out our extensive coverage here: http://pulse2.com/category/the-pirate-bay/. The Pirate Bay was bought for $7.7 million.
As part of the acquisition, The Pirate Bay will stop hosting and tracking torrents. Instead they will use a third party tracking and torrent hosting service.
In late March, Facebook’s former CFO Gideon Yu had quit. The rumor about why Yu left was that he was not getting along with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. An internal memo went around that Facebook was looking for a CFO that has more experience with a public company.
This is where former Genentech CFO David Ebersman comes in. Genetech is a biotech company that was bought out by Swiss company Hoffman-La Roche for $46.8 billion on March 26, 2009. Genentech is also an investor in 23andMe, a genetics company that was started by Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife. Ebersman worked at Genentech for 15 years, but Hoffman already had a CFO making his job much less important.
Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) is a space transportation companies that was started by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. SpaceX is building reusable space launch vehicles called the Falcon 1 and the Falcon 9 along with a Dragon series of vehicles.
The company started in 2002 and employs about 800 people. Musk himself put $100 million in seed funding for the company. After that the company raised $20 million in Series A from The Founders Fund. The company is now pursuing an additional $60 million additional round. DFJ put in about $15 million of the new round.
Last year SpaceX launched a rocket into space after failing three times. Now SpaceX is being hired by aerospace companies and the government to launch satellites.
Dyson is best known for building vacuum cleaners and the DC 31 is no exception. What distinguishes the DC31 from all the other vacuums out there is that it spots the world’s fastest motor with a speed that is ten times greater than a Boeing 747 aircraft engine. The DC 31 is the latest vacuum cleaner from Sir James Dyson, a British inventor.
This machine may be the first of many products to feature the built-in motor. The motor speed is 104,000 revolutions per minute and turns 10 times faster than a commercial aircraft and five times faster than a Formula 1 engine.
The vacuum weighs 2.2 lbs. and uses a rechargeable battery. It is designed for cleaning cars and certain areas around a household. Dyson employed about 50 motor engineers to work on this product at the headquarters in Wiltshire, England. Many of these motor engineers have automotive experience. The Dyson DC 31 will be on sale for £129 ($212) next month.
It is incredible what computer-generated imagery can do for commercials. In this case Big Lazy Robot created an advertisement for Nike called “Exploit Yourself” and it features a robot wearing a hoodie and Nike sneakers while doing some parkour tricks.
Parkour is a technique in which you are able to get through obstacles in your path as one would do in an emergency. This involves jumping from steps on a building and climbing walls.
Big Lazy Robot has also done some work on the Transformers movie.
CloudSwitch is a cloud computing company based in Burlington, MA. CloudSwitch recently announced that they have raised $8 million in their second round of funding and have hired John McEleney as President and CEO.
The $8 million in funding was led by Commonwealth Capital Ventures and includes Matrix Partners and Atlas Ventures. Thus far, CloudSwitch has raised $15 million in funding. Before joining CloudSwitch, McEleney was the chief executive at SolidWorks Corporation.
Apple Senior Director of Worldwide Product Marketing Bob Borchers has left the company to join Opus Capital as a general partner. Borchers worked at Apple since 2004. Borchers was in charge of marketing for the iPod and iPhone. He appeared in several videos discussing the products.
Borchers said that working at Apple was amazing, but Opus offered him the chance to make investments in mobile technologies. Opus has $1 billion in capital. Borchers will be part of the latest fund that Opus raised which was around $280 million.
Next month T-Mobile will be hosting several events across the U.S. in celebration of the launch of the HTC Touch Pro2 and the HTC Dash 3G. The Touch Pro2 was announced back in February and the Dash 3G details leaked earlier this month. The Dash 3G is also known as the HTC Snap.
BGR has a list of cities and links to the registration. Below are the cities and the dates of the event:
- July 14 – San Francisco, CA
- July 15 – Chicago, IL
- July 16 – Los Angeles, CA
- July 21 – Arlington, VA
- July 22 – Houston, TX
- July 23 – Atlanta, GA
- July 28 – Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Microsoft Corporation’s newest operating system is selling on Amazon.com at a discounted price. Because of this discounted price, the operating system is selling like crazy. As a matter of fact, the Microsoft operating systems are the top selling items on Amazon right now.
The pre-orders of the Windows 7 Home Premium edition is selling for $49.99 and the Windows 7 Professional edition is selling for $99.99. The discounted prices are available until July 11, 2009 in U.S. and Canada. In Japan, the operating systems will be available for those prices on July 5, 2009. The Home edition was number one on electronic product sales and the Professional version was ranked number two.
