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March 16 2010
Team Europe Makes Early Investment
Team Europe Ventures, the Berlin-based VC firm focused on early stage Internet companies, has made a minority investment in Infakt. The Polish startup provides web-based accounting and invoicing solutions for small companies locally.
Alongside Team Ventures, angel Christoph Janz also brings new investment, with the combined funding amounting to a 30% stake in Infakt. Polish business angel Krzysztof Nowinski (formerly with the VC firm BMP) is an existing investor.
Hey Twitter, are you going to deal with these Nazis or not?
There is a tweet being retweeted heavily within the German Twitter community right now which roughly translates as
“BEWARE Nazi-pigs on Twitter! @Heil_Hitler_88 Please block so that the account gets deleted. #nazi #block #rt Please!” (original).
Now, if Twitter had servers in Germany an account like @Heil_Hitler_88 (we’re not linking BTW) would be illegal and would be deleted right away.
TC50 Movie Search Startup AnyClip Launches, Without Many Clips
When movie clip search startup AnyClip demoed at last year’s TechCrunch50, it was one of the crowd pleasers. The concept was to be able to search for any line or scene in a movie, and the site would take you to that exact moment and play the clip. The demo looked great, but could the startup actually get the movie studios to license their films? Sean Parker, one of the judges on the panel noted: “This is the kind of thing that absolutely should happen. But it will take you twice as long to make those deals.”
Parker turned out to be right. AnyClip continues to negotiate with the studios, but decided not to wait for those deals to open up its service. Yesterday, it launched in a public beta, without many actual video clips. There are some older and public domain movies, licensed from the Film Chest catalog, such as the classic Reefer Madness. Search for “faster, faster” and up comes the piano scene from Reefer Madness.
But AnyClip works even for movies where it cannot show the clips. Search for “I drink your milkshake” and the dialogue from the scene in There Will Be Blood comes up as a result. Or you can search for “ferris wheel” scenes, where a ferris wheel appears in the scene but is not necessarily mentioned in the dialogue.
AnyClip has indexed 2,000 movies so far. CEO Aaron Cohen estimates that “two percent of all searches appear to be for 8,000 Hollywood films and 1,000 actors.” Creating really deep meta data around movie clips and exposing those to search engines should be enough to get traffic growing simply as movie quotes database. But the ultimate appeal of AnyClip is the ability to start playing the movie clip at the exact moment you are looking for and share those clips. It’s going to happen. Rival MovieClips.com, which launched in December, has already struck licensing deals for 12,000 clips. Those are predetermined clips, however. AnyClip still wants to provide data on, literally, any clip.
At the same time, the movie studios are paying companies to index their digital archives for their own internal purposes. Cohen is hoping to do a trade: give them the metadata on their catalogs for free in return for the ability to promote their films. Maybe if AnyClip gets big enough, they will start paying attention.
Fake Steve Jobs, Larry Charles Working On EPIX Silicon Valley Comedy Series
Dan Lyons, the Newsweek writer, book author and creator of the Fake Steve Jobs persona, is currently writing a pilot script for a comedy series on Silicon Valley for entertainment channel and movie streaming network EPIX.
Larry Charles of Seinfeld, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Borat and Brüno fame will be directing the pilot and overseeing the script development. The show is going to be called “iCON” and will be a half-hour, single-camera style satire.
EPIX, a service from Viacom, its Paramount Pictures unit Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and Lionsgate, is working with Media Rights Capital to develop the series, which it promises it will “pull out all stops” for and aims it to be a “riotous satire of Silicon Valley and its most powerful figures”. Notably, EPIX recently landed its fourth major cable deal by signing up Charter Communications, after sealing deals with Cox, Mediacon and Verizon FIOS.
Deadline has more on what the series will be about:
The show’s lead charcter (SIC), Tom Rhodes, is a composite of that Silicon Valley titan, and the comedy is described as a savage satire, a study of ego, power and greed.
And:
MRC will serve as the studio and financier. The company said it had several bidders for the property, but chose EPIX because Charles could be as edgy as he wanted to be. The feeling is that the show could put EPIX on the map the way series like Mad Men did for AMC, Weeds for Showtime, and Burn Notice for USA. Charles, who worked with MRC on the Baron Cohen films, will be swinging for the fences.
We. Cannot. Wait.
ZumoDrive Brings Cloud Storage And Syncing Application To Android And Palm Devices
File syncing and storage startup Zumodrive is expanding its mobile offerings today with free applications for Android and Palm phones. While there are a plethora of syncing and storage services available to users, ZumoDrive, which spawned from Y Combinator startup Zecter, has a different take on file syncing. Similar to other services, Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But service includes a slightly different twist-ZumoDrive tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.
The startup launched an iPhone app last year, which let users sync their content to their phone without having to deal with local storage capacity issues. The Android and Palm apps include much of the same functionality. The apps allows users to sync their entire iTunes library on their phones even though the songs are not locally saved. Plus, ZumoDrive allows you to import your files. photos albums and videos onto your Android and Palm phones.
Additional features include video streaming from ZumoDrive directly to devices in MP4, H.264 format, music organized by artist, albums, and even playlists created on other devices, the ability to stream music in the background and listen to music over both 3G or EDGE networks.
Additionally you can access and view Microsoft Office documents and PDF files.
ZumoDrive has been gaining traction over the past year. Fresh off of a $1.5 million funding round, the startup scored a deal with HP in January to to power the backend of the technology giant’s CloudDrive on all HP Mini netbooks.
Last year, ZumoDrive released a new version of its system that wirelessly syncs playlists between devices, auto-detects content, and lets users link file folders on their devices to ZumoDrive only once so that changes in that folder will always be linked to ZumoDrive. The service was also upgraded to integrate well with media applications, like iTunes, so users can play entire music libraries saved in ZumoDrive on multiple devices without manually syncing content. We initially reviewed Zumodrive here.
Zecter previously launched a product called Versionate, an office-wiki product, that we first covered in July 2007. We wrote about them again a year ago. ZumoDrive faces competition from Dropbox, SugarSync, and Box.net.
superbomba
“ 褒められて嬉しくない人は、少ないでしょう。日本の両親に育てられた、アメリカ在住の子ども達からよく聞くのは、学校や、周りの友達に比べて、日本人の親は、あまり褒めてくれない、という不満です ”— ちゃんとほめましょう (1月2010年) - Mio’s Column (via milkcocoa)
(via insect)
“ 現在の能力で— 生き方―人間として一番大切なこと
できる、できないを
判断してしまっては、
新しいことや困難なことは
いつまでたっても
やりとげられません。 ”
- 稲盛和夫
(via meigenbako) (via zenrahanra) (via xtc) (via ak47) (via kml) (via tnoma) (via yaruo) (via theemitter) (via soulboy) (via toukubo)
“ 男物の服が高いのは「マーケットが小さい為、数を作る事でコストダウンが出来ない」「競争原理がレディースほどは働いていない」というのもあるけど、男の方が（女性より）体力もある上、体も大きいので「レディースのように華奢な作りには出来ない」「より多くの生地が必要（体積は三乗だから）」という、もうどうにもならない理由もあるのだ。 ”— 安くて良い服なんて無い。 - SUKEBENINGEN-DEUX (via goodmorning) (via sagaraya) (via jinon) (via draftcode) (via plasticdreams)
2008-02-24 (via gkojay) (via xxx-irielife-xxx) (via toukubo)
“— 進化した「フリー」戦略は、凄い勢いでチラシである件について: 切込隊長BLOG（ブログ） Lead‐off man’s Blog (via pedalfar) (via toukubo)フリーの伝道者となった業界最薄毛の小林弘人氏のtwitterで面白いRTが。
http://twitter.com/kobahen/status/10556580355
[引用]RT @matchan_jp “今アメリカ版Kindleのベストセラーリストは１〜５位まですべて$0です” #freemiumjp RT @kobahen “無料配信で電子書籍の売り上げが増加” http://oneclip.jp/p7EVF4こ、これは…。
こりゃただのチラシじゃねえかああぁぁぁーーーーッ！！！最先端のビジネスモデル、話題のハードウェアで行われている最前線で繰り広げられているのは、フリーとラベルを書き換えた原始的な「無料お試しセット」戦術ッ…！！
死屍累々のビットバレーを生き抜き… 二度のネットバブル崩壊をかいくぐって、ようやく、ようやく見えてきた新しい時代が… 街頭で配られるチラシ同然の…！ 最新技術を使った… 原始資本主義ッ！！
”
My dialogue with those at the forefront of mobile, location based social networking continues here at SXSW Interactive 2010. Brightkite founders Brady Becker and Martin May were kind enough to take a moment and talk with me about some current and unreleased features of their service/software called Brightkite. They also showed me an unreleased demo of their new multi check-in web app. Stay tuned for some follow-up conversations soon.
At the most recent Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that the company's partners are now selling over 60,000 Android handsets on a daily basis. With that kind of growth rate, it's no wonder that the size of the Android Market is increasing in its slipstream. While Google doesn't publicly show how many apps there are in Android Market, a Google rep this morning informed me that the store now serves approx. 30,000 apps in total.
Shorthand Mobile Launches TextApps To Bring Web Content To Basic Mobile Phones
TechCrunch50 2008 DemoPit company Shorthand Mobile (formerly Smart Touch) aims to help consumers who don’t use mobile data plans to access SMS and web content. Upon launch in 2008, the startup had developed a suite of basic widgets for mobile phones that visualize SMS services, allowing users to navigate through an intuitive menu. Today, Shorthand Mobile is launching TextApps, a new category of apps that deliver content from websites via SMS in a rich, interactive interface, aiming to expand the capabilities of non-smartphones and provide access to web content for mobile users without data plans.
Launching in beta today on select Motorola and Nokia handsets on AT&T and on Windows Mobile phones, Shorthand TextApps use SMS to expand access to top brands and mobile content including social networks, local search, sports scores, weather forecasts, movie times, news and entertainment. TextApps is an app you download which then creates a more intuitive UI for text-based apps.
Once you download Shorthand, it uses your SMS text messaging plan to connect you to the web content you want. Apps in the TextApps library include CitySearch, Netflix, Facebook Mobile, Twitter, The New York Times and Yelp. Of course, Facebook, Twitter and others have independently integrate with SMS for their sites but Shorthand claims to add more functionality by almost recreating a basic smartphone app. Shorthand is also now available in India on all major carriers and will launch in Brazil this spring. The starup will offer localized TextApps for these countries. Shorthand is free to download, but you will be charged for SMS messages via your SMS plan with your carrier.
As we wrote in our initial review, year, the technology behind is very basic so users shouldn’t expect to see a iPhone like Facebook-app on their phone with TextApps. That being said, the fact that Shorthand has struck deals with Nokia and Motorola to include its offering on their phones and could become a useful way to incorporate extra functionality into basic mobile phones.
Day 74 Sales: Apple iPhone vs. Google Nexus One vs. Motorola Droid (Peter Farago/blog.flurry.com)
Peter Farago / blog.flurry.com:
Day 74 Sales: Apple iPhone vs. Google Nexus One vs. Motorola Droid — Through applications using Flurry for analytics reporting, Flurry can detect and count unique devices in the market such as Google Nexus One and Motorola Droids. Because applications embedded with Flurry have been downloaded …
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