SlideRocket has raised $5 million in Series B funding. The funding round was led by Azure Capital Partners. The company has raised $7 million to date.
SlideRocket is a web-based software-as-a-service presentation platform. It aims to help consumers “create stunning presentations, manage them intelligently, share them securely and then measure the results.”
With SlideRocket, you can build impressive presentations effortlessly. The platform even includes an integrated media store where you can buy objects to jazz up your presentation.
Once a presentation is created, it can be published online or exported to PowerPoint.
Researchers at Nielsen Norman Group concluded that the average success rate in completing tasks on a mobile browser is 59%. The rate jumps to 80% on a PC and a whopping 75% on the iPhone.
The researchers had a number of individuals perform tasks such as look up movie listings and shop for earrings using their own mobile device. They also gave the participants open ended research questions. Success was measured by the amount of time it look to perform a task.
The study found that people still get things done much faster on a PC. When a test subject used a website designed for mobile phones, their success rate and time jumped.
Tonight, Barnes & Noble launched its e-book store. The store carries over 700,000 titles. eBooks can be purchased and read through the iPhone, BlackBerry, or a desktop PC. According to Barnes & Noble, their e-book store is the world’s largest. The store offers premium titles as well as free public domain titles.
Barnes & Noble also announced a partnership with Plastic Logic, a company developing a Kindle competitor.
The books it sells will not be compatible with the Kindle.
The company ditched its previous digital book efforts nearly six years ago because of lackluster sales. Now it’s trying to play catch-up with Amazon.
Tim Armstrong, AOL’s new CEO, wants AOL to feel like a startup again. He was hired to help spin off the struggling Internet giant as an independent company. AOL has over 7,000 employees. So how does he plan to make it feel like a startup?
Well, for starters, he wants to cut down on advertising – at a company that runs on advertising. He says that cutting down on advertising will help the company regain “flavor.”
“I think AOL’s return to higher prominence in terms of being an Internet leader is purely dependent on the work that we do here,” Armstrong said to the AP.
He wants pages to load faster. He wants AOL properties to seem less cluttered. He also wants to transform AOL into a technology innovator. He turned Tuesdays into “Product Meeting Days.” On Tuesdays, teams behind AOL properties discuss and share ideas with executives. That way, rank-and-file employees can share their ideas.
The executive team at AOL want employees to feel like they have some control over the company’s destiny.
AOL properties saw a combined average of 107 million unique U.S visitors each month this quarter. So AOL does have the traffic to innovate. Now they just need the mindset.
Chipmakers AMD and Texas Instruments announce their earnings this week. Positive numbers from them mean that demand for devices that use their chips is increasing. Their chips are used in everything from cell phones to televisions and calculators. Strong demand means that market conditions are easing.
Amazon will also announce their earnings this week. The company beat all expectations for earnings and revenue last quarter. Good Amazon numbers can mean that consumers are spending more money online.
Yahoo will also post earnings this week. Good numbers from Yahoo mean that the online advertising market is improving.
The big one this week is Apple. Everyone will be looking at iPhone sales here.
Ebay is another tech giant to announce their earnings this week. eBay’s owns PayPal, the largest online payment processor. Strong eBay and PayPal numbers are also a good indicator of current economic conditions.
Microsoft will also be announcing its earnings this week.
Mozilla released a minor update to FireFox 3.5. The update addresses a security vulnerability in TraceMonkey. TraceMonkey adds native compilation support to FireFox’s JavaScript engine. The vulnerability could possibly be exploited by an attacker to run code. Here is the text from the bug report.
Firefox user zbyte reported a crash that we determined could result in an exploitable memory corruption problem. In certain cases after a return from a native function, such as escape(), the Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler could get into a corrupt state. This could be exploited by an attacker to run arbitrary code such as installing malware.
FireFox 3.5.1 also addresses several stability and load issues.
Verizon Wireless said Friday that it would shorten the length of exclusivity deals on cellphones. The company will allow a phone under exclusive contract to be sold by any small carrier with under 500,000 customers after six months.
Cell phone companies are facing pressure from the government because of their exclusive handset deals. Exclusivity deals restrict competition. Exclusive handsets are usually the hottest phones around. Therefore, smaller carriers lose customers to larger carriers such as Verizon.
Everyone knows about Apple’s iPhone exclusivity deal with AT&T. No other carrier in United States country can carry an iPhone. If a smaller carrier were allowed to carry the iPhone, their business would boom.
In a letter to lawmakers, Varizon said “Effective immediately for small wireless carriers (those with 500,000 customers or less), any new exclusivity arrangement we enter with handset makers will last no longer than six months — for all manufacturers and all devices.”
Matt has connected several items to an IoBridge module that he controls via sending Tweets to his Twitter account. An ioBridge module makes it easy to interface real world devices with the web. The ioBridge IO-204 Monitor & Control Module connects to your home network and lets you monitor and control electrical signals. The module can do things as simple as monitor temperature or as advanced as control R/C servos.
Commands to the module are sent by placing a keyword in a @reply message to the account. Keywords include light, bright, temp, etc. The module can also respond back to simple questions such as “What is the temperature?”
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