Among the many comments from the tech world mourning the death of Apple’s Steve Jobs, one of the more unusual comes from Vivek Wadhwa, the former Research Triangle entrepreneur and executive who is now a university academic who examines work force issues for Duke University and writes for the Washington Post Innovations section and other media.
Wadhwa issued this statement on Jobs’ death:
teve left a deeper mark on an entire generation than anyone in recent memory. He has changed the way we work and, in the tech world, the way we think. He taught us the importance of design, elegance, and quality. He defied the conventional wisdom about price being the key motivator for technology. He proved that people will pay premium prices for easy to use, elegant products.
With Spotify now in the U.S. and a host of other competing free music streaming services online, Pandora has eliminated its limit on free listening. Previously, free users who listened for 40 hours would have to either sign up for the firm’s premium, ad-free, service with better sound. I once paid .99 cents to finish out a month of the service after hitting its 40 hour limit.
I have to say, this is one move I applaud. I still like Pandora as much if not more than any of the other music streaming services, perhaps because I’ve used it longest. But it has an easy-to-use interface that has never given me the first bit of trouble, not something I can say for Spotify. I’m a fairly sophisticated user of digital media, but the first time I used Spotify, it felt like the first time I picked up a smartphone and pecked away at the buttons learning to navigate it.
We’re still not sure how Pandora’s business model is working out, but if they’re relying on add revenue and a piece of music sales via the site, making listening free without limits should increase its traffic. I know I would use it relatively sparingly to avoid going over that 40 hour limit, even though I can also access it on my Squeezebox Internet radio.
iPhone 4S sales begin
Will Apple fans line-up for the iPhone 4S the way they have for previous versions of the coveted smartphone?
The Internet has been critical of the iPhone 4S. It was expecting seas to part and other miracles from Apple, while the new iPhone 4S is not a completely new phone. It does boast the fast dual-core A5 processor and an 8-megapixil camera and run the iOS5 software that has 200 new features.
The new iPhone 4S is available for pre-order from Apple.com (it will run on AT&T, Sprint and Verizon).
So what do you think, Apple fanactics? Are you headed off to buy the new iPhone? If so you might want to review these tips first. Ten Tips for buying the Apple iPhone4S.
Xfire lights up with $4M round led by Intel Capital for gaming social service
Xfire , a social service for gamers with more than 19 million users, has received $4 million in funding led by Intel Capital and several prominent angel investors. The company is based in Los Angeles.
Xfire has also strengthened the executive team by adding Mark Donovan as president, Juston Brommel as chief marketing officer and Autumn Radtke as director of Business Development.
The new additions to the team and funding are the first of several major announcements expected this fall from the company. As part of this investment, Xfire has been split from Titan Gaming so both businesses can operate independently.
“Xfire is already the most advanced social service for gamers with group chat, group voice, and user generated content sharing tools like live game broadcasting. Think of Xfire as Facebook meets Skype for gamers,” says Mark Donovan, president of Xfire. “This round of capital is allowing us to make many enhancements starting with an entirely new look for the Xfire website and chat application.
He adds, ”Our users have already created tens of millions of game videos, screenshots and live broadcasts which they’re sharing every minute on Xfire. Soon they will be able to useXfire to share them to other social networks and numerous top-tier websites.
Tower Cloud Inc., a wireless backhaul services provider, has secured $49 million in additional equity to fund its expansion into new markets throughout Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama.
The latest round of funding was led by two of Tower Cloud’s existing investors, The Burton Partnership and Knology Inc. Tower Cloud’s other existing institutional investors include: Sutter Hill Ventures, El Dorado Ventures, Ballast Point Ventures, Kinetic Ventures, ITC Partners Fund and Noro-Moseley Partners.
For this round, two new investors joined the consortium, The Florida Growth Fund and CLR Investors. The funding was done in two phases with $13 million completed in January and $36 million completed in July. This funding follows a $20 million equity commitment by the same investor group in October 2009.
Buckle Up was founded by Kory Sherman and Chris Snyder while studying in the game program at Wake Technical Community College. As part of Joystick Labs, they will develop “Flipped”, a puzzle game for mobile devices that takes advantage of the accelerometer and physics to create a unique gameplay mechanic. The game was originally conceived and prototyped as a class project at Wake Tech.
Joystick Labs, founded in 2010, provides startup video game entrepreneurs a unique mix of early-stage seed funding, mentorship, services, and networking. Seven teams have been funded and the first games developed by Joystick teams will ship in Q4 2011.
“We had a great idea for our game, but did not have the resources to focus on full-time development or the business expertise to form a studio,” said Kory Sherman, Buckle Up Game Studios co- founder. “The Joystick Labs program provides opportunities and resources that will accelerate the development of our studio and our first title.”
Joystick Labs next session will begin in Q1 2012 with an application deadline in December, 2011. Joystick Labs looks for teams who possess an entrepreneurial spirit and an innovative game concept.
DC-based LivingSocial, Groupon’s largest competitor, may delay plans to file for an initial public offering of stock and take a new $200 million financing round instead, according to Bloomburg, which sites anonymous sources.
The round would value LivingSocial at $6 million and might include equity and debt the report says. It has raised $632 million in backing so far.
The company was discussing a potential IPO of more than 10 billion, but a delay may be prudent in the current volatile market for both it and Groupon.
Jon Carpenter, Director of Marketing, LivingSocial, will be at TechMedia’s upcoming Digital East conference in Tysons Corner, VA, Sept. 28-29.
GrubHub grabs whopping $50 million for mobile restaurant ordering service
CHICAGO -GrubHub, a web and mobile service that connects diners to restaurants and simplifies online ordering for delivery and pick up, has raised $50 million in Series E funding to aggressively focus on its mobile development and acquire New York-based Dotmenu, the parent company of Campusfood and Allmenus.
This Series E funding is led by Lightspeed Ventures with Mesirow Financial, Benchmark Capital, Greenspring Associates and DAG Ventures participating. Terms of the acquisition will not be disclosed.
“Since starting GrubHub with my partner Mike Evans in his apartment in 2004, we’ve sent over $200 million in delivery and pick up orders to independent restaurants across the country,” said Matt Maloney, GrubHub co-founder and CEO. “With our unwavering focus on providing the best service to diners and the most efficient technology to restaurant owners, we have grown to become the leader in the online ordering space.
“It is precisely for this reason that we are acquiring Dotmenu. Dotmenu has shown great expertise in servicing the college market, and by combining our extensive networks, we will become the foremost resource for diners and restaurants for their online ordering needs.”
The Series E and Dotmenu acquisition comes just six months after GrubHub raised $20 million in funding led by DAG Ventures. The funding rounds, coupled with the acquisition, strengthen GrubHub’s position as the category-defining leader in the industry.
Largest restaurant listing in the country
Through the acquisition, GrubHub will have the largest restaurant listing in the country with 250,000 restaurant menus in over 50 major cities and countless college towns across the US. The two companies are projected to send over $225 million in combined order revenues to independent restaurants in 2011, and will continue together to achieve more aggressive growth in the years to come.
“GrubHub has a strong presence in the top US markets,” said Michael Saunders, Founder and President of Dotmenu. “This, combined with our network across more than 300 college campuses, allows us to build upon the strong relationship we have with our diners long after they graduate. The acquisition will enable us to make an immediate impact on our restaurants by sending more orders their way.”
GrubHub is free for diners who order and pay for their meals with cash, credit or PayPal. Restaurants pay commissions for each online order they receive from GrubHub, and every order is supported by GrubHub’s 24/7 customer service. Restaurants that do not currently partner with GrubHub can still list their telephone numbers and menus for free.
Visitors to the site or mobile users enter their address to see every local restaurant that delivers to them. Diners can view menus and coupons, read reviews and order for free online, by phone or through the GrubHub iPhone and Android apps.
There are more than 300,000 delivery and takeout restaurants in the country. On average, GrubHub users order out more than 10 times a month and over 22 percent of GrubHub’s revenues come through mobile orders. Pickup and delivery are the fastest growing segments in the restaurant industry, which is one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy. With more people searching for restaurants and ordering food on-line and through smartphones, the opportunity for continued growth is substantial.
Facebook changes
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergy disclosed huge changes to the social network, which he says now has a record billion visitors a day.
They include a new feature called Timeline, which curates news, apps and visuals. The feature, which sorts content with an algorithm.
While Zuckerberg and Facebook made a lot of hoopla over the Timeline changes to users’ profiles, it is sure to stir up more controversy among users, who have been notoriously unfriendly toward the continual alterations Facebook makes to the site.
The company also added a lightweight status steam called “Ticker.”
One user told us recently, “They just don’t know how to let it alone.”
On the other hand, perhaps it will quell the Facebook fatigue that more than a few of our friends show signs of experiencing.
Here’s a video showing an overview of what Timeline looks like:
Windows 8 is grabbing good press across the net for the features disclosed at the Windows Build Conference earlier this week. With the exception that it still doesn’t work right with the drivers for some of our equipment, Windows 7 was certainly an advance over Vista and XP. We particularly appreciate its fast loading time compared to Vista, which, it sometimes seemed, would grind on and on for interminable lengths.
Windows 8 will boot in about 8 seconds, due to a new method that puts the kernal session to sleep rather than shutting it down completely so that it needs to completely reboot. Eight seconds! Now that’s an improvement we like.
Here’s a video demo of the quick startup:
Other features in Windows 8: it provides an Android like touch and swipe method with a picture password for unlocking your PC, as opposed to the text password used now.
The lock screen will display your battery information, time, instant messages and email you missed while away, and upcoming calendar events. Here’s a slideshow Windowof all the changes.
UNC Chapel Hill launching Virtual Digital Humanities Lab
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will launch a new virtual Digital Innovations lab that will encourage collaborative, interdisciplinary and innovative digital humanities projects.
Brett Bobley, director of the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities, will give a free public talk Oct. 10 to celebrate the kickoff of the Digital Innovation Lab, which will be affiliated with the American studies department in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. Bobley will speak at 2 p.m. in the University Room of Hyde Hall, home of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, located off East Franklin Street.
The Digital Innovation Lab will encourage the production of digital “public goods”: projects and tools that are of social and cultural value; can be made publicly available; are scalable and reusable; and/or serve multiple audiences. One immediate focus will be the use of large-scale data sources – maps, newspapers, city directories, public records – by scholars and the public in understanding the history of communities. The lab, accessed at http://digitalinnovation.unc.edu,
was created with a startup grant from the college.
“Digital technologies have the potential to transform how our faculty in the humanities ask questions about the world, engage with local communities, create learning environments for our students and collaborate with partners within and beyond the University,” said William L. Andrews, Ph.D., senior associate dean for the fine arts and humanities in the College.
The lab will build on the nationally funded digital humanities work of its UNC co-directors and co-founders – Robert Allen, Ph.D, and Richard Marciano, Ph.D. Allen is the James Logan Godfrey Distinguished Professor of American studies, history and communication studies. Marciano is a professor in the School of Information and Library Science and affiliated professor in American studies and director of Sustainable Archives and Leveraging Technologies (SALT).
Cloud storage firm Zetta lands $9M round
Sunnyvale, CA-based Enterprise cloud storage provider Zetta today announced that it has raised $9 million in its third round of funding, bringing the total funding to $31.5 million. Both existing investors Foundation Capital and Sigma Partners participated. Funds from this new investment will be used for sales, marketing and product development that will help the company increase market share of its award-winning cloud backup services in the small-to-medium business (SMB) market.
DURHAM, NC -The company that may put at least some journalists out of work, StatSheet, which sells real-time content automation, has raised a $4 million round of funding led by Court Square Ventures and OCA Ventures, with participation from IDEA Fund Partners and other existing investors.
In conjunction, the company changed its name to Automated Insights to reflect the broad applicability of its innovative technology to data-intensive verticals beyond sports where high content generation costs can make comprehensive coverage prohibitively expensive. The company’s sports offerings will continue to grow under the StatSheet brand.
“We believe this new corporate branding better reflects the long-term potential of our company, and underscores the value of our technology to any vertical with large amounts of structured data,” said Robbie Allen, the company’s CEO and founder.
Automated Insights’ technology transforms vast amounts of raw data into compelling narrative content and powerful visualizations. The content is written entirely by software and can be formatted as headlines, summaries, and long-form articles. In addition, the content can be published cost-effectively at just about any scale via the web, mobile applications, and all types of social media.
“Our technology has worked extremely well with sports, but it is also well suited to verticals such as finance, real estate and weather, or even sales productivity and business intelligence applications. In essence, our technology humanizes big data by automating knowledge and insight so the new name is a perfect fit” added Allen.
Automated Insights’ technology can be seen in action in its StatSheet sports content network. StatSheet currently powers fully-automated, real-time coverage of all 375 Major League Baseball (MLB) and NCAA Division I College Basketball teams via dynamically updated team-centric websites, iPhone and Android applications, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and e-mail newsletters. In September, the company will also launch team-centric sites and mobile apps for all 32 NFL and 244 NCAA Division I College Football teams.
“Automated Insights is revolutionizing the creation of compelling high-quality content and they have proven they can do it at scale through their StatSheet sports content network,” commented Randy Castleman, General Partner with Court Square Ventures. “We are excited to help them continue to grow their sports coverage and apply the technology to new verticals.
“We are thrilled to team up with such a strong management team and experienced investors,” noted Jim Dugan, CEO and Managing Partner of OCA Ventures. “We believe the timing is ideal for Automated Insights’ highly scalable content development solutions.”
Investors are giving Twitter something to tweet about: the microblogging service is in the process of raising an additional $400 million in backing – the second raise of that amount this year at a valuation of about $8 billion, according to reports. CNN Money first reported the story about the new raise.
The company, which claims more than 300 million users, more than 100 million of them active, raised $400 million earlier in the summer in a round led by Yuri Milkner and Russia-based DST, the same firm that has backed Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon.
SAN FRANCISCO – Swrve, which is launching a realtime feedback platform for game developers, has nabbed $2.7 million in seed money.
Investors include: Intel Capital, SV Angel, Mochi Media founders, Playfish founders, the AIB Seed Capital Fund Limited Partnership, the Bank of Ireland Start-up Accelerator Fund, the AIB Seed Capital Fund, Enterprise Ireland and angel investors.
Swrve says its platform helps developers test, target and tune a game. The Swrve cloud-based platform works as a feedback loop providing content owners an opportunity to understand user behavior and then tune content. Swrve automatically pushes concepts the developer wants to test to targeted segments of players, so the effect on users can be analyzed in realtime and changes can immediately be made.ent to provide a better user experience.
Finding the right mobile app for your needs can be more of a pain in the nether regions than necessary. A West Coast startup just landed funding to help mobile device users find the apps that do what they want without jumping through a lot of search hoops. Palo Alto, CA-based Quixey — a search engine for apps – has raised $3.8 million in Series A funding. The $3.8 million investment will help fuel growth and partnership development.
Quixey invented a new type of search — functional search — specifically for apps. Quixey’s functional search scans blogs, review sites, forums and social media sites to learn exactly what each app can do. Quixey has hundreds of pieces of data about each app. Quixey searches apps across all platforms — including mobile, web, desktop and browser apps.
Quixey is fundamentally different from other search engines. Other search engines require users to know an app’s name or official description to find the right app. Since Quixey knows exactly what each app can do, users can search by answering the question, “What do you want to do?”
The investment was co-led by U.S. Venture Partners and WI Harper Group with participation by Webb Investment Network in addition to a follow-up investment by Innovation Endeavors.
The popular blogging service Tumblr, which hosts more than 27 million blogs, many of them photo or graphically oriented, is about to close on a funding round of from $75 million ot $100 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The WSJ pegs the company’s valuation at $800 million, which may not rock the Facebooks and Groupons if the world, but does show that companies can attract significant funding without making money if they have large enough audiences.
Tumblr raised $30 million in 2010 from Sequoia Capital, Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital and a total of about $40.2 million. Teh WSJ says Graylock Partners, an investor in Facebook and Groupon, as an investor in the new funding round.
The service has exploded in popularity this year. Tumblr, which employs 50, had 13.4 million unique visitors in July, up from 6.7 million in December, according to digital measurement service comScore.
We just started using Tumblr recently. About 20 percent of Tumblr blogs are fashion oriented and it include numerous other visually focused blogs, including those of porn starts and amateur nude models.
It has features that can make it addicting: you scroll easily through the blogs you follow with a mouse wheel and it’s very easy to reblog posts. You can “track” subjects such as film, technology, or Game of Thrones, say, and scroll through all the posts on that topic. It only takes a click on a blog’s “follow” button to start receiving its posts. Posting is also a quite painless endeavor.
All in all, we find it pretty easy to kill a couple hours scrolling through Tumblr blog posts.
Text posts do not seem to draw the attention or “notes” that visual blogs do, but we’ve found specific blogs and posts exposed us to stories, ideas and images we would have otherwise missed. We particularly like the “Future of Journalism Project” blog, which touches on many topics we cover here, such as social and digital media.
We’ve noticed people complain regularly about changes to the Tumblr service, to bloggers reposting items without attribution, and the other social media carping that we hear also about Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (although less so about LinkedIn).
We suspect Tumblr is about to become the social network everyone talks about for a while. It’s not a Facebook/Twitter killer or a Google+ competitor so much as it may be competition for Blogger and to some lesser extent to WordPress. — Allan Maurer
With Spotify now in the U.S. and a host of other competing free music streaming services online, Pandora has eliminated its limit on free listening. Previously, free users who listened for 40 hours would have to either sign up for the firm’s premium, ad-free, service with better sound. I once paid .99 cents to finish out a month of the service after hitting its 40 hour limit.
Will Apple fans line-up for the iPhone 4S the way they have for previous versions of the coveted smartphone?
Xfire , a social service for gamers with more than 19 million users, has received $4 million in funding led by Intel Capital and several prominent angel investors. The company is based in Los Angeles.
Tower Cloud Inc., a wireless backhaul services provider, has secured $49 million in additional equity to fund its expansion into new markets throughout Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama.
Windows 8 is grabbing good press across the net for the features disclosed at the Windows Build Conference earlier this week. With the exception that it still doesn’t work right with the drivers for some of our equipment, Windows 7 was certainly an advance over Vista and XP. We particularly appreciate its fast loading time compared to Vista, which, it sometimes seemed, would grind on and on for interminable lengths.
DURHAM, NC -The company that may put at least some journalists out of work, 
Investors are giving Twitter something to tweet about: the microblogging service is in the process of raising an additional $400 million in backing – the second raise of that amount this year at a valuation of about $8 billion, according to reports. 
SAN FRANCISCO – 
Finding the right mobile app for your needs can be more of a pain in the nether regions than necessary. A West Coast startup just landed funding to help mobile device users find the apps that do what they want without jumping through a lot of search hoops. Palo Alto, CA-based 
The popular blogging service 
