Hulu To Users: Connect Your Facebook Account Or No Social For You
Last month, video provider Hulu made changes to its social sharing features. For Facebook users, it was great — Hulu made it easy to turn sharing on and off so that you don’t accidentally tell all of your Facebook friends that you just watched a video about ‘sex dice.‘
But for non-Facebookers, it was awful. The latter lost all their social features (including their friend lists) and were told they have to connect their accounts to Facebook if they want them back.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/05/07/hulu-to-users-connect-your-facebook-account-or-no-social-for-you/
Brazil’s Startup Industry: Impressions, Insights & Lessons from Israel (Part I)
Initial Capital was launched in 2011 as an investment firm targeting early stage startups in Israel and Brazil. The unlikely investment focus is the result of three friends — two Israeli and one Brazilian — turned professional investors.
Our Israeli investment network was rather mature when we launched, so we were able to hit the ground running and in the eleven months since our launch, Initial has invested in six Israeli-based startups. In Brazil, however, we spent our first months developing a similar network from scratch. Slowly but surely learning and embracing the state of, and the challenges facing, the Brazilian startup industry.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/08/brazil-israel-part1/
Robert Herjavec: Top 10 tips for budding entrepreneurs
Robert Herjavec, one of the hosts of CBC’sDragons’ Den, has lived the classic rags-to-riches story. He currently heads The Herjavec Group, listed as one of Canada’s fastest growing IT security and infrastructure integration firms. He has a 50,000-square-foot mansion valued at $15 million in Toronto’s Bridle Path. For thrills, Robert jets to a private island near Miami or cruises Toronto’s Yorkville area in one of his many luxury cars.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2009/10/05/f-small-business-robert-herjavec-dragons-den.html
Yahoo Employees Are Angry At Thompson: ‘How angry? LIVID!’
Yahoo employees are angry, disappointed, and feeling pushed to the limit because of CEO Scott Thompson’s resume scandal.
For at least eight years, Thompson allowed people – employers, employees, and shareholders of eBay and Yahoo – to believe that he had a computer science degree from Stonehill College when he did not actually have one.
http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-employees-are-livid-over-thompsons-resume-scandal-2012-5?op=1#ixzz1uIDlyiQO
Viddy hits 26M users, consistently registering over 500K a day
On April 16th, I wrote an article about how popular video sharing app Viddy had hit 6.5M users. Less than a month later, the company tells me that it’s starting to consistently sign up over 500K new users a day, and currently boasts a userbase of 26M.
That’s pretty impressive growth in less than a month, isn’t it? Mark Zuckerberg joined Viddy to see what all of the hype was about, and investors are quite happy with its growth.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/05/08/viddy-hits-26m-users-consistently-registering-over-500k-a-day/
Facebook Social Readers Are All Collapsing
The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a “frictionless” social reader app, whichlaunched last year. If you use Facebook you’ve probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication.
If you decide to click on a link it doesn’t take you to the story. Instead, it shunts you over to a signup screen for Social Reader, which you have to accept if you want to make it through to the site. This forceful behavior is how the Post’s reader app gained tens of millions of users in a few short months; it’s also how, as Jeff Bercovici at Forbes pointed out this morning, the Washington Post seems to have worn its readers — or Facebook — out. They’re annoyed, and they’re quitting in droves:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/facebook-social-readers-are-all-collapsing
The Race: Build the Instagram of Video
Facebook Inc.’s $1 billion acquisition of photo-sharing start-up Instagram has shifted the spotlight to the newest phenomena in mobile apps: uploading personal videos from smartphones.
A growing number of start-ups are providing easy ways to share videos taken from a smartphone, enabling people to add music and text and to share the results on Facebook or another social network.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702304451104577390333679922236-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwNzEwNDcyWj.html
ON THNEEDS AND THE “DEATH OF DISPLAY”
It’s all over the news these days: Display advertising is dead. Or put more accurately, the world of “boxes and rectangles” is dead. No one pays attention to banner ads, the reasoning goes, and the model never really worked in the first place (except for direct response). Brand marketers are demanding more for their money, and “standard display” is simply not delivering. After nearly 20 years*, it’s time to bury the banner, and move on to….
http://battellemedia.com/archives/2012/05/on-thneeds-and-the-death-of-display.php
Google infringed Oracle copyrights, jury finds, but deals a blow to Oracle’s quest for $1 billion
A federal jury Monday delivered a messy split verdict in the trial over Google’s (GOOG) popular Android mobile software, by finding that Google infringed copyrights held by tech rival Oracle (ORCL) but failing to answer a key question that Oracle needed to press its case for nearly $1 billion in damages.
The result was a blow to Oracle’s quest for a share of profits in the world’s leading smartphone operating system. And it put some of the most important issues of the case back in the hands of a judge to decide.
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_20566834/google-infringed-oracle-copyrights-jury-finds
A Detailed Look At Tizen on Samsung’s First Prototype Device
Tizen just hit the 1.0 release last week (codenamed Larkspur), and at the Tizen Conference I’ve had the chance to play with the prototype device that Samsung has been handing out to developers to test their applications. Its basically a super large screen device, (my guess is about 4.3-4.7″ inches, 720p HD) that’s running on an ARM chip. In some cases it contains a cellular radio, while some device are WIFI only. There’s no word on what clock speed are they running at, or the the size of battery that’s inside.
http://thehandheldblog.com/2012/05/08/tizen-phone-demo/
Google: AT&T’s CEO doesn’t understand how Android phones get updated
Like us, Google appears to be confused by last night’s report—where AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson told a questioner that the fault of Android smartphones not receiving updates is Google’s.
Stephenson blamed Google, claiming, “Google determines what platform gets the newest releases and when. A lot of times, that’s a negotiated arrangement and that’s something we work at hard. We know that’s important to our customers. That’s kind of an ambiguous answer because I can’t give you a direct answer in this setting.”
http://9to5google.com/2012/05/07/google-atts-ceo-doesnt-understand-how-android-phones-get-updated/
