Google VP of product Bradley Horowitz was recently interviewed at the Business Insider Ignition conference. Horowitz said that ads on Facebook were like someone with a sandwich board interrupting two people having a conversation by trying to sell them food.
Acquia is a company that is known for providing products, services, and technical support to enterprise users of Drupal. Acquia has raised $30 million in funding led by Investor Growth Capital. Goldman Sachs and Accolade Partners also participated in this round. Previous investors that joined include North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and Tenaya Capital. Acquia has raised a total of $68.5 million in funding. Jose Suarez of Investor Growth Capital has joined Acquia’s board of directors after the funding.
Tony Fadell is the former Apple hardware designer credited for designing the iPod. Currently Tony Fadell is known for designing the popular Nest learning thermostat. Tony Fadell recently revealed that he is not surprised that Scott Forstall was fired from the company. Tony Fadell even went as far as saying that he “got what he deserved” in an interview with the BBC.
CapLinked is a startup company that helps manage business deals. CapLinked has raised $1.6 million in Series A funding. The company raised funding from companies like FF Angel, Siemer Ventures, 500 Startups, Peter Thiel, Andrej Henkler, and Alexsis de Raadt-St. James.
A judge has ordered Twitter to keep providing data to PeopleBrowsr. PeopleBrowsr used Twitter data over the last 4 years to create products like the social media scoring platform called Kred and a cloud-based social analytics platform called Playground. PeopleBrowsr argued that when they were cut off from Twitter’s Firehose Analytics, it would drastically harm their business.
If you have an iPhone and was disappointed when Google Maps was no longer available as an application on iOS 6, then you will be happy to hear that Google is in the final testing phase of a new Google Maps app according to The Wall Street Journal. Once completed, Apple will have to review the app. I believe that this should not be a problem since Apple CEO Tim Cook already apologized for the Apple Maps debacle and suggested people to use other mapping apps back in September. Apple recently fired the Apple Maps head Richard Williamson too.
Ford Motor Company is upgrading and extending the MyFord Touch system warranty by two years after they received a series of consumer complaints and poor reviews. Consumer Reports. Ford improved the voice recognition capability and navigation in version 3.5 of the software. Ford head of Americas Mark Field said that the first wave of updates will arrive for some users on December 10th.
Barnes & Noble has announced their fiscal second quarter financial results. In the results B&N revealed that they have sold double the amount of Nook Android tablets over the four day Black Friday/Thanksgiving weekend across all channels when compared to the similar period last year. This does not include the new Nook HD and HD+ tablets since these tablets shipped outside of the second fiscal quarter.
