Alex Tew, the guy behind the Million Dollar Homepage, has launched a new useless website called Do Nothing For 2 Minutes. Do Nothing For 2 Minutes tells the user not to move the mouse or touch the keyboard for two minutes. If you do, then you fail the test. In the background, there is some soothing ocean wave sounds and some seagulls. Tew said that Do Nothing For 2 Minutes hit 20,000 uniques within 8 hours of launching.
Orange, the largest telecommunications company in France, has acquired 49% of Dailymotion. This deal values Dailymotion at $160 million. This deal also allows Orange to gradually increase their equity in Dailymotion to 100% by 2013. The deal is not fully confirmed yet. Another source with BusinessInsider.com is reporting that Dailymotion raised funding from the French government’s sovereign wealth fund Fonds Stratégique d’Investissement (FSI). FSI is major shareholder in Orange.
CloudTalk is a social messaging service that has raised $5.2 million in Series A funding. The company is expecting to close the funding by the end of this month. CloudTalk is being led by CEO David Hayden. Hayden co-founded the Magellan Search Engine in 1993 and sold it to Excite.com in 1996.
Only Won has done a parody of the Travie McCoy song “I Wanna Be A Billionaire.” Only Won’s parody is called “I Wanna Be An Engineer,” where he dreams of being placed on the cover of PC Magazine and getting a patent. Check out the video above.
At a Ukranian aquarium, a tourist was taking photos of a 14 year old crocodile, but she accidentally dropped it into the water. The crocodile quickly ate the Nokia phone so the man alerted the workers. The workers did not believe him so they called the phone. And what do you know? The phone rang inside the crocodiles’s stomach. Unfortunately for the crocodile, it has been acting strangely since the incident. The crocodile refuses food and is appearing to be sluggish. The crocodile will be taken in for an X-ray and the phone may be refused surgically.
Sonian is a cloud computing archiving solutions company that has raised $9 million in Series B recently. The investors in this round include Amazon.com, Webroot, Summerhill Venture Partners, and Prism VentureWorks. Sonian will use the funding for research and development. Sonian currently has about 5,000 customers.
NileGuide is a travel planning website that has acquired travel ranking company 10Best.com from Enveritas Group. 10Best.com ranks attractions, events, and hotels across the world. NileGuide also recently acquired Localyte to expand their travel website portfolio. Founded in 2006, NileGuide raised $13 million in funding from Draper Richards, Austin Ventures, Tenaya Capital, and KPG Ventures.
NMA.tv is a Taiwanese animation company that does parodies of world events and news. In this case they decided to target the Cheezburger network. This video portrays Cheezburger founder Ben Huh as a meme stealer and a cat torturer. As a result Huh receives a lot of Internet flames. Check out the video above.