Skype to Acquire GroupMe
Skype will reportedly be acquiring a group messaging service called GroupMe, a service which was born at a TechCrunch Disrupt at hackathon in New York in 2010. GroupMe was founded by Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci.
The terms of the deal, including price, are not being disclosed.
Only a couple of months after TechCrunch Disrupt the company closed a $850,000 round of financing from SV Angel, Betaworks, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and a number of major investor angels. Earlier in the year the company raised $10.6 million more from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and previous investors.
GroupMe facilitates the creation of on the fly private phone groups along with others, and send text messages afterwards throughout the group and set up free conference calls.
Skype CEO Tony Bates says he is in talks with the company for a few months, at around the same time Skype was in negotiations to be acquired by Microsoft.
The Microsoft transaction currently is still pending.
They will keep GroupMe as a standalone brand and look for integration points eventually over time:
“The group messaging space in general is one of the most important markets for Skype…GroupMe creates a very sticky instant feeling. Like Skype, it is an everyday interactive form of communication. Skype’s goal is to get to 1 billion users. Mobile is the place to do that.”
GroupMe, which has twenty employees, will remain in New York.
Google Again now Catalogs
Let’s face it, Google has always been in the search business; this is obvious. With its new Catalogs app, Google clearly would like to break into the browsing business.
Google Catalogs remakes the catalog experience on the iPad, featuring digital versions of catalogs from retailers like Pottery Barn, Bergdorf Goodman, Sephora and Urban Outfitters across six main categories such as beauty, fashion, gifts, jewelry and home. The first version of the app is primarily targeted at female shoppers, however Google has plans to expand its partnerships and include a wider range of catalogs.
Google already has launched several shopping and style-oriented services like Google Product Search, a search engine focused on goods, from backpacks to baby carriages, and Boutiques.com.
The app is quite simplistic considering that it is the brainchild of the company building self-driving cars and striving to make credit cards obsolete. There are a some bells and whistles: Users may create bulletin-board-esque “collages” of their favorite items and share these with the other users; buy items right from the app; search catalogs for specific items; and sometimes even watch YouTube videos embedded in the catalogs. However, while it is possible to email collages and products to contacts, sharing these items through
Facebook and Twitter, a usual feature on apps, is not included.
However, Google Catalogs is to catalogs what iBooks is to ebooks: it digitizes catalogs, however does not attempt to reinvent them. It also follows in the footsteps of similar, existing iPad apps like CatalogSpree, a “mobile catalog shopping app.”
Eventually the app will be integrated with Google’s Google+ social network, though she declined to offer more specifics on how the company could integrate the product with its existing offerings.
Google Catalogs at launch won’t be available on Google’s Android operating system, only as an iPad app.
Google’s New Buy
Last Monday morning a little company called Google announced it will acquire smartphone maker Motorola Mobility for just $12.5 billion in cash.
Google put out a press release published in full at TechCrunch that read:
“The acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a dedicated Android partner, will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition in mobile computing…This acquisition will not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform…Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. We will run Motorola as a separate business. Many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them to deliver outstanding user experiences…Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft.”
Larry Page, CEO of Google, said, “Motorola Mobility’s total commitment to Android has created a natural fit for our two companies. Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers. I look forward to welcoming Motorolans to our family of Googlers.”
Business Insider sees Google’s mega-deal putting pressure on Microsoft’s smartphone business: “Other handset makers, like RIMM and Nokia are both up pre-market on the news as the focus obviously turns to Microsoft: Is it now forced to buy one of them? Or does Microsoft benefit because the remaining handset makers (Samsung, etc.) now turn more towards Windows?”
In January 2011, Motorola announced that it would split into two companies: Motorola Solutions, which would manufacture tech products aimed at businesses; and Motorola Mobility, which would focus solely on consumer technology.
The new acquisition has been approved by both companies’ boards and is expected to close by the end of this year or early next year.
The Motorola deal dwarfs Google’s erstwhile biggest deal, the 2008 purchase of DoubleClick for $3.2 billion.
What Google is likely after with the acquisition is Motorola’s trove of more than 17,000 patents on phone technology. Google recently lost out to a conglomerate consisting of Microsoft Corp., Apple and Research In Motion Ltd. in bidding for thousands of patents from Novell Inc., the maker of computer-networking software, and Nortel Networks, a Canadian telecom equipment manufacturer which went bankrupt and is now selling itself off in pieces.
Actually, Motorola has three times more patents than Nortel.
In premarket trading, shares of Motorola Mobility rose 60 percent, or $14.72, to $39.19, while shares of Google fell $14.68, or 2.6 percent, to $549.95.
New Search Features from Google
On Friday, Google announced that Google+ users soon will begin to see Google+ posts in their Google Search results.
The feature is activated only when users are signed in to their Google Account, according.
When users search Google for, let’s say, a restaurant, they might see that some results include content shared publicly by members of Google+ Circles.
Product Manager Sagar Kamdar detailed the new tool thus:
Let’s say I’m logged into my Google Account, and I search on Google for [uncle zhou queens]. I’ve heard a lot of great things about this restaurant, and we’re visiting NYC soon, so we want to figure out all the best eats in town. I also happen to have Andrew Hyatt in one of my Google+ circles. Oh, and it turns out he just made a public post on his Google+ account about Uncle Zhou in Queens [...] Now not only do I get some great reviews on the web, I get a review from a friend about a restaurant with recommendations about what dishes to order.
The new feature will roll out to Google+ users over the next coming days.
The company plans to integrate its social network into search results by reintroducing Realtime Search.
Last February, Google updated its Social Search feature to enrich Search results with content from Google Account users’ friends on YouTube, Blogger, Flickr, Google Reader, Quora, Twitter and others social sites. This was prior to the launch of Google+, and some wondered at the time about the usefulness of placing content from social networks into search results.
The recent addition of Google+ content will not present any fundamental changes in Social Search. Search Engine Land explained:
Google Social Search continues to operate as before. Things shared socially at places like Twitter and Facebook by those you’re connected with may appear with annotations and rank better in results. [...] The main difference is, as Google’s post says, is that things you share on Google+ itself are now part of the mix.
Google+ has grown at an astonishing rate since its launch in late June. An August study released by comScore found Google+ to be the fastest-growing social network ever. Indeed, at the time of the study, Google+ had amassed 25 million members.
And Google isn’t resting on its laurels when it comes to growing the site. Thursday saw the launch of Google+ Games, a social gaming network that includes titles like ‘Angry Birds‘ and ‘Bejeweled‘. Among the list of developers jumping on board with Google+Games was Zynga, Facebook’s gaming cash cow.
Messenger App on Facebook
Recently, Facebook unveiled a new, standalone app called “Messenger.” It is made for sending SMS-like messages to your Facebook friends.
But before texting that first “hello,” users should be aware of a multitude of settings which might make them y share more than they wanted; and some fun features which set Messenger apart from other messaging tools such as BlackBerry Messenger and texting.
As Facebook explained in its intro to Messenger, the app “is an extension of Facebook messages, so all your conversations are in one place, including your texts, chats, emails and messages.” It also blurs the line between text messaging, Facebook’s “messages” tool and chat feature as well.
Somewhat akin to cc’ing someone on an email thread who is already in progress, anyone you chat with might instantly add other people to the conversation without having to request permission first to do so. All of the previous messages exchanged in the conversational exchange will be readily seen to the new participant. Furthermore, make an effort to note that the people added to your conversation might not be your Facebook friends. Someone you’re chatting with may add her Facebook friend, who might not be yours necessarily, and this person will be able to see your prior messages.
Lucy Zhang, the Beluga Co-founder and Facebook Engineer wrote recently in a Facebook note:
More and more of us rely on our phones to send and receive messages. But it isn’t always easy to know the best way to reach someone on their phone. Should you send an email or text? Which will they check first? Did they even get your last message?
We think messaging should be easier than that. You should be able to write a message, click “Send” and know that you will reach the person right away.
So today, we’re introducing Messenger, a new mobile app that simplifies how messaging works, and gives you a faster way to message friends and small groups.
A whole new app
Messenger is a separate app, so it only takes one click to get to your messages or send a new one. Messages are delivered through notifications and texts, so your friends are more likely to get them right away.
You can use Messenger to reach all of your friends — whether they’re on Facebook or in your phone contacts. All you have to do is type the person’s name.
Vudu ditty do!
Coming soon to the iPad, the Vudu (owned by Walmart) video-streaming service, though not as an app.
It will be falling in line with other companies in order to avoid the fees that Apple applies to any content that is sold through dedicated apps.
Apple takes a 30 percent cut for content such as movies sold through apps. Earlier in the summer, The Financial Times made an app-like website for its publication on how to steer clear of Apple’s fees.
Vudu.com’s business model is not unlike Apple’s iTunes. It rents out movies one buck to six dollars for a 24-hour or 48-hour viewing period. It also sells them for five dollars and up, allowing viewing any time. What makes it famous is that it has to its name many movies on the very same day that they are released to DVD.
By opting for the browser instead of an app, Vudu bypasses Apple’s iTunes checkout process, however the movies can only be viewed with a live Internet connection. They cannot be downloaded and played back later like iTunes movies does so gracefully.
Vudu’s site works with PC browsers, however, the Flash technology used does not work so well on the iPad. Actually, Vudu is using “Live Streaming” tools from Apple for reaching the tablet.
General manager for Vudu Edward Lichty said the site also works with iPod Touches and iPhones, however the interface could be quite hard to navigate, because it is designed for tablets. The movies will even stream over “3G” cellular broadband, however the image quality will suffer, and a full movie would eat a lot of the monthly data allowance which iPad plans come with most of the time.
Research in Motion & London Riots
Research in Motion, the company that makes the BlackBerry said it would co-operate with a police investigation into suspicion its popular BlackBerry Messenger service played a major role in organizing the London riots.
Scotland Yard said that it would track down and arrest the protesters who posted “really inflammatory, inaccurate” messages on their service, and Facebook and Twitter.
The managing director regional marketing at Research In Motion, Patrick Spence, insisted that the BlackBerry manufacturer had contacted police in order to help with the investigation.
However, the statement prompted fears from some BlackBerry users that their private messages could be handed over to the police.
BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) appears to be the favorite method of planning which has swept across north London since Saturday evening.
RIM may be legally ordered to hand over details to police of users who are suspected of unlawful activity. But the Canadian company will be more than likely to resist such demands and the content of users’ inflammatory messages would be encrypted.
The “broadcasts” that get sent instantly from one to a plethora of BBM users have been amplified and reposted on Facebook and Twitter. Evidence of rioters planning where they will attack next spread quickly on the networks as the police struggled to keep up. One BBM broadcast posted on Monday evening seemed to urge protesters to go looting in east London.
Before manufacturing the BlackBerry, RIM worked with Ericsson and RAM Mobile Data turning the Ericsson-developed Mobitex wireless data network into a bi-way paging and wireless e-mail network. The crux of this development was the onslaught of Inter@ctive pager 950, that started shipping in August 1998. Roughly the size of a bar of soap, this device competed against the SkyTel two-way paging network that was developed by Motorola. RIM’s early development was financed by the Canadian venture capital investors via private placement in the private firm.
Worm? Defcon? Facebook? Koobface?
At the last DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas, a Facebook representative team has been making the rounds and delivering a strange message: Hack us Motherfucker. We will even pay you for it.
The team, led by Joe Sullivan he is Facebook’s Chief Security Officer, is currenly promoting the firm’s brand new “bug bounty program,” paying researchers to report security flaws in the social-networking site consisting of upwards than 750 million active users.
Facebook will shell out at least $500 for valuable info as long as the hacker agrees to not disclose the flaw until the company has it fixed. Since the program was announced the week before last, Facebook already has paid out one bounty of more than $3,000.
To get their mojo kicking, hackers should be the very first to report the security flaw and should reside in a country not under U.S. sanctions. They also will be adhereing to the company’s disclosure policy, stating that researchers must make “a good faith effort” to not make privacy violations, destroying data and interrupting the site’s service when in research hours, and therefore avoid being sued or investigated by law enforcement.
Facebook is not the only company looking to pay hackers for security help. Earlier this week, Microsoft said it would be offering up to $200,000 to researchers who design different security technologies. Google also offers upwards from $500 to researchers who find security flaws.
Facebook has been put on high alert to possible malware since the time
Introducing Interview Street
Hiring experienced and talented programmers is not an easy job to do. Small firms have a difficult time getting the best candidates where as the larger firms are inundated with disposable applications. Interview Street is a new Y Combinator-funded startup attempting to fix both of these problems with the same solution. The service, coming out of beta this week allows tech companies to test the skills of applicants using puzzles.
Just take a look at the site and you will see that it is divided into two separate sections: one for ‘Challenges’, and another for ‘Recruit’. The first is catering to engineers looking for gigs at the top firms. Sign in and you may take one of three coding challenges which you can complete using a web-based IDE (copy and paste your code into the app if you want to). The web-based code checker supports C, C++, C#, Python, Java, PHP, MySQL, Ruby, Haskell, and Bash, and generates results immediately. Click tab number two and you will be in the half of the site which is geared toward recruiters. Here, companies may create their own tests and they can manage the dashboard of applicants.
Right now the coding puzzles on Interview Street are pretty much standard, however, cofounder Vivek Ravisankar says that from now on the company wants to offer more ‘real-world’ tests like deploying an application to AWS, or integrating functions from Twitter’s API into a brand new iPhone app. Ravisankar told TechCrunch in a recent interview the programming puzzles prospects take as part of their application process often do not have anything to do with the roles which they would be filling, and Interview Street wants to change that.
At launch Interview Street is offering three puzzles to solve, and it will surely be adding more in the coming weeks. The site will soon also be allowing companies to upload their own puzzles.
Now, keep in mind, many tech companies already offer puzzles to potential applicants. However, Ravisankar says that the typical submission process for these is quite clunky, with applicants sending attachments which have to be manually tested by an engineer.
Content Writing Scams: Mike Cris AKA. Michael Sadish AKA. sadishwebhost@gmail.com or Contentodor.com
So this is the story of a content writing scam. We have significant content requirements and in an effort to get well written, original content we sometime test new writers, this is the story of one of them. One who turned out to be a Scammer and a Fraud content writer by the alias name of Mike Cris or Michael Sadish.
Normally, there are safety measures when you test new vendors online but there are always ways for frauds and scammers to scam you. This is such a case.
It started with a friendly email
“My name is Mike Cris, and I am a professional copywriter, marketing specialist and business author”
and some cute banter,
“I write in a professional, conversational writing style which will grab your audience’s attention and hold it. And since my writing is so accessible and readable, I can clearly and persuasively make your case, without resorting to overbearing hype.”
Sounds good right? So we go ahead and do a test. Five blog posts, unique content, open format on current topics – $20 each (BECAUSE they are VERY HIGH Quality!!!)..
He writes two posts and they are a disaster. They are unique alright, uniquely horrible. Not sure they are even in English. The man can’t put five words together, and two of the words could be his name. I have no idea who wrote the intro emails but not this guy. Here is just a little taste, see if you can (A) understand what he writes, and (B) find more then five words that are actually legible:
Anders Behring Breivik is the conservative extremist who exploded the strong bomb outside the PM’s central office in Norway, then 2 hours after he shot down teenagers on Utoya Island who gathered for a Labor camp party. A thousand five hundred page manifestos placed on the internet briefly earlier the blasts which he desired to begin, the revolution against the policies of liberal in-migration which have raised Islamic populations over Europe.
A bit about him personally
Anders Behring Breivik was with his parents until age thirty, has no kids and was never got married. People close to him have reported him as the person without real girlfriends and a loner; he keys out in his manifesto that girls approaching to him however as well tells it is good to shoot down cute girls in the run of his operation. He describes himself as the Freemason. Other than traffic offences, he had no past wrangles with police.
A bit about him professionally
Anders Behring Breivik managed a lot of little job enterprises ranging from internet stock dealing to possession of the software sales service which got drained. His only focus is to earn bucks to fund his projected blasts, starting some years earlier the mass murder and bombing. Hardly days before the blasts, traveled to the rural region to run the agricultural company. This brought him the masking to both get and examine fertilizer-based bombs.
Anders Behring Breivik surrendered at Utoya shooting place to the police. He shot down seventy-six innocent people between the 2 blasts (ONLY ONE BLAST!!). If condemned and charged with law-breakings against humans, Anders Behring Breivik may get up to thirty years in jail. But, Norway has no life condemns or death punishment. Anders Behring Breivik was abnegated the first hearing he needed, where Breivik may have been able to adopt his opinions before the media. The member of the Labor Party and the lawyer of Breivik who has described the neo-Nazi previously, has said the press that Breivik is mad and got on drug doses. Anders Behring Breivik has accepted carrying the blasts however refuses guilt of crime, stating that his activities were portion of his campaign.
In another post he wrote:
“Dotomi has the heavy direction upon retail advertisers” (Remember this one…)
Now after I received the first two “pieces”, I was told to
“I expect feedback from you, and to possibly make a revision if needed (and many times, I do nail it on the first shot.) And I’ll send you the remaining copies tomorrow….”
Cute, right? So, since the review…to put it mildly … wasn’t great, I asked him to refund the balance and hold on the other three posts. Two days later I got an email with the remaining pieces – telling me they were already written (and if you can believe it, the quality of these was even worse)!
This was his final email after I emailed him my comments on the above content:
Thanks for reviewing my work. You get glanced at and quickly tossed away my writing (because of the reason you can’t afford me).
A quick teaching for you to learn my language – “heavy direction” in that sentence means “strong focus”
So, the highlighted errors looks like a horror!! – I don’t know what you means either. Please, get a professional editor to review my writing.
I have a long name, it goes as Mike Cris somewhere and Michael Sadish someplace. (you can’t ask me why you have such names)
And you have to know, right now, I don’t refund the money for your juke reasons.
So for you out there looking for good content writers, this is scammer you need to avoid.
What do we know about Mike Cris or Michael Sadish?
Name: Mike Cris (Or Michael Sadish)
Aliases: Mike Cris, Michael Sadish
Tricks of Beauty Blogger AccountEmails: sadishwebhost@gmail.com & writermikecris@gmail.com
Writes on:
eZineArticles: http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Mike_Cris
Articles Boulevard: http://www.articlesboulevard.com/author/mike-cris
Website: www.contentodor.com
PayPal Account: Sathish S. – sadishwebhost@gmail.com
Priceless.
LOL
Shopping Discount Market Booming
With the economy what it is and the thrifty mood that surrounds everything we do, the Shopping Discount Market is booming. Google Offers was launched late May in Portland and now the acquisition of discount aggregator Dealmap.
Dealmap aggregates local deals, discounts, and coupons from a variety of online sources and then allows the user to connect to these results on a US map. The map is assigned “cool to hot” zones where a user can find deals at varying levels of “discount”. The site is of course mobile fluent (with apps for Android, iPhone and iPad). At this stage the people at Dealmap say they have 2 M users. The purchase was for an undisclosed amount.
Google said
“We’ve been thrilled with the early success of our commerce offerings, and we think they can help us build even better products and services for consumers and merchants”
Dealmap said
“As we’re ready to share more about integration and transition plans, we’ll update our partners and consumers on progress and any news”
Dealmap said it would continue to support its core products and partner services. It does not however accept new deals from users and businesses on its website or mobile apps, and redirects interested business owners to submit deals to Google Offers.
Google turned its attention to discount shopping as an answer to the meteor, Groupon. Google Offers now covers Portland, San Francisco, and New York and plans to extend to Austin, Boston, Denver, Seattle and Washington D.C.
No Hangups about Hangout
When Vic Gundotra of Google talks about the “Hangout” feature on Google+, he likes drawing the parallel between it and…your front stoop.
“It allows you – in a very nice way, it’s not socially awkward – to say, hey I’m hanging out on my porch…I’m available, if you’re available too, you can join.”
Enthusiasts of Google+ have pushed the platform’s servers to the max with a continuous group video chat which does not seem to want to end…ever.
The topic of discussion there has been rotating along with the participants. An estimated 1,000 are said to have stopped by the party so far.
Michael Nast, the founder of Dot TV Social Media Services is an ardent fan of Hangouts. Last Thursday afternoon, engineer after engineer started popping in on Thursday from all around the globe. The word of mouth effect was strong.
Mikael Nilsson, the Google software engineer said, “Wow! I’m proud our servers can manage that.”
Nast also said, “I’ve been using social media for years, but Google’s totally flipped everything around [with Hangouts and their interaction].”
Many heard about the Hangout on Twitter, via Huddles, or had friends in the Hangout in their Stream.
Perhaps the most interesting thing of all about the Hangout is that it is being livestreamed. 67 people at one point were watching at once, even though only 10 can be in a Google+ Hangout at once. Go figure!
