Redbeacon from Former Googlers Takes Top Prize at Tech Conference
The 2009 TechCrunch 50 conference was held this week, and 50 start-ups each had a chance to make a presentation, and then the judges picked one grand-prize winner at the end of the whole thing to win $50,000.
The winner this year, was a company called Redbeacon, which just happens to have been founded by three ex-Googlers – Ethan Anderson, Yaron Binur, and Aaron Lee, who were product managers and engineers with the Internet giant.
Android 1.6 SDK Arrives, Should Reach Consumers Soon
Android 1.6 SDK – which is perhaps better known by the codename "Donut" – has at last been made available for developers to download. Upgrades and new features are evident left and right, and if Google’s estimates are correct, not much more time will pass before Android 1.6 reaches consumers.
Opera Releases Latest Version of Popular Mobile Browser
Opera has announced the release of the beta version of its latest mobile browser – Opera Mini 5. Opera Mini is the most popular mobile web browser in the world, the company claims.
More Marketers Focused On Digital Spending
More marketers are planning on shifting their media spending budgets to digital during the economic downturn, according to a second quarter survey by Round2 Communications.
Email marketing is one area where spending is set to increase with 40 percent of respondents planning to do so, while half expect their amount of spending to remain the same and just 10 percent plan a decrease.
Nearly a third (31.3%) of marketers plan to increase spending on interactive advertising while 52.1 percent say their investment will remain the same and 16.7 percent plan a decrease.
Adobe Seeks to Expand its Analytics Horizons
Omniture, one of the biggest names in web analytics, is being acquired by Adobe, in a transaction valued at $1.8 billion. Adobe will commence a tender offer to acquire all Ominture outstanding stock for $21.50 per share in cash.
Google Huge in Brazil and India
Numbers from comScore this week, revealed that Google sites account for nearly 30% of all time spent online in India and Brazil. That is three times higher than the average.
MySpace Opens Up Recommendation Engine
MySpace has announced an open source framework for "distributed computation," which is ultimately a recommendation engine. It’s called Qizmt, and it’s the feature the social network currently uses for its "People you may Know" feature.
"Qizmt can be used for many operations that require processing large amounts of data such as collaborative filtering for recommendations and analytics," explains MySpace COO Mike Jones.
Facebook Has Nearly Same Amount of People as US
Update: Ok, they’ve officially announced the testing of the prototypes directory now. From the company blog:
Metacafe Rolls Out Video Game Hub
Video site Metacafe has launched a new video games hub featuring trailers, reviews, news, interviews and walkthroughs for popular video game releases.
"Online video is increasingly a primary source of entertainment for today’s consumers, so it’s important we showcase content in key entertainment categories – such as video games – about which people are passionate," said Erick Hachenburg, CEO of Metacafe.
3 Reasons Why Your AdCenter Campaign Could Be Paused
Microsoft shared some info, aiming to "demystify" downtime in adCenter campaigns. adCenter advertisers may sometimes find that their campaigns are paused, when they check their accounts. Microsoft names three reasons you might see this.