Monthly Archives: April 2010
Ask Jeeves Founder David Warthen Joins Allvoices As CTO
David Warthen, the founder of Ask Jeeves has joined AllVoices.com as the CTO. Back in the mid 1990′s, Warthen sold Ask.com to IAC for $1.85 billion. IAC ended up renaming Ask Jeeves to Ask.com Warthen also worked at Demand Media’s Answerbag.com for a short amount of time. AllVoices is a news website that depends on citizen journalism. [VentureBeat]
Categories Allvoices, Ask Jeeves, Ask.com, David Warthen
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Oh Snap! These Cows Are Tweeting!
At the University of Waterloo, there is a herd of dairy cows that are on Twitter. The cows tweet about their milk production through RFID devices attached to them. The RDIF devices also report the cows’ eating habits. The project is part of a U-Waterloo Critical Media Lab experiment. Some of the people behind the project include lab members Ron Broglio, Marcel O’Gorman and Pouya Emami. They are working with dairy farmer Chris Vandenberg at the Buttermine Farms in Brant, Ontario. [Teat Tweet via Mashable]
WePay Hires PHP Founder Rasmus Lerdorf
Rasmus Lerdorf, founder of the PHP programming language has joined WePay. Lerdorf quit Yahoo! last November and now he will be leading the development of the WePay API. The API will be available to a limited number of developers this summer. WePay is a company that helps you collect money from a group of people that owe you. Competitor PayPal is more known for one-to-one payments. WePay has become especially useful for fraternities that and college roommates. [TechCrunch]
Categories Rasmus Lerdorf, WePay
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Ford Hits $2.1 Billion In Profit Q1 2010
Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) has hit $2.1 billion in profit in Q1 of 2010, which is a $3.5 billion improvement from last year. Not too shabby Ford…
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Categories Alan Mulally, Ford, Ford Motor Company
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Doodle Jump Passes 4 Million Downloads
Doodle Jump, a game on the Apple App Store that was #1 for a very long time has hit over 4 million downloads at a $0.99 price. They did not have a lite free version of a “free for a day” promotion at all according to game co-creator Igor Pusenjak of Lima Sky. The game passed the 3 million mark in March and was released in fall 2009. Lima Sky is also preparing to develop the game on the iPad. [Kotaku]
Categories Apple App Store, Apple Inc., Doodle Jump, Lima Sky
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Mobile Payment Company Zong Raises $15 Million
Zong.com is a mobile payments company that has raised $15 million in a round of funding led by Matrix Partners. Zong is essentially a company that allows you to make purchases through mobile devices and cell phone bills. Zong is often times used to pay for goods on Facebook. Dana Stadler, a General Partner at Matrix will be joining the Board of Directors at Zong as a result of the funding.
Categories Dana Stadler, Matrix Partners, Zong.com
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Kim Kardashian’s ShoeDazzle.com Raises $13M
ShoeDazzle.com, a women’s fashion website co-founded by Kim Kardashian has raised $13 million as part of a growth financing round. The lead investor was Lightspeed Venture Partners and previous investor Polaris Venture Partners also participated. ShoeDazzle’s previous round of funding was $7 million. The other co-founder of ShoeDazzle is Brian Lee, who also co-founded LegalZoom.com. ShoeDazzle.com asks users to fill out a survey and based on the answers, the website will recommend you certain shoes to buy from them based on your fashion preferences. [soCalTech]
Craigslist Makes About $36 Million Annually From Prostitution Ads [ESTIMATE]
Classifieds website Craigslist will be seeing their revenue increase 22%. One of the reasons for the substantial revenue increase is because of ads used for illegal ends according to The New York Times. These ads are expected to bring in about $36 million this year according to a projection. The projections were provided by The Advanced Interactive Media Group (AIM). The estimate was based on the number of sex ads counter on Craigslist over the month of February and the fees associated with them. Each sex ad costs $10 initially and $5 for re-posts.
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Categories craigslist, Jim Buckmaster, The AIM Group
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BlackBerry App World Hits Over 6,500 Apps
At the Wireless Enterprise Symposium, Research In Motion announced some significant numbers today. RIM has sold a total 90 million of BlackBerry devices in total thus far. In the last quarter, RIM sold about 10.5 million BlackBerry devices. Currently BlackBerry devices are available across 550 wireless network operator partners. There are over 250,000 registered developers on the BlackBerry platform and over 250,000 registered active developers on the BlackBerry Enterprise Servers. The company said that they have seen a 200,000% growth since their IPO in 1998. RIM has about 14,000 employees.
In terms of the App World, there are over 6,500 applications available for download and 41 million active users of BlackBerry smartphone devices. Around 1 million applications are being downloaded per day on App World. About 20% of the total BlackBerry community is running OS 5.0. BlackBerry currently owns 44% of the U.S. smartphone market. [InformationWeek]
Categories BlackBerry, BlackBerry App World, Research In Motion, RIM
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Watch This Southwest Plane Get Built In 2 Minutes, 30 Seconds [TIME-LAPSE VIDEO]
How do planes get made? Southwest Airlines made a time-lapse video showing exactly how they do it. In 2 minutes and 30 seconds you can see exactly how they built this Boeing Specialty Plane.
Categories Boeing, Southwest Airlines
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