Posted on October 15th, 2008 by admin
Three years ago today, Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and its parent company Intermix for $580 million. That turned out to be money well spent. The last time we ran the numbers, we figured that MySpace alone is worth between $3 billion and $20 billion , depending on how much you value each user. Fox Interactive Media (which is mostly MySpace) accounted for about $850 million in revenues last fiscal year (which ended in June), and is projected to hit $1 billion next year.
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Posted on October 9th, 2008 by admin
Here is a one-month stock chart comparing Apple (down 40 percent), Google (down 20 percent), Yahoo (ditto), and Microsoft (down about 10 percent). Microsoft is holding up best. If Yahoo keeps diving, what next? Discuss among yourselves. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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Posted on October 6th, 2008 by admin
It’s a blood bath out there this morning. The S&P 500 is at a four-year low as the credit crisis keeps getting worse, despite the passage of the government’s $700 billion bailout plan. The market is taking tech stocks down with it. Google is down 4 percent to $368, its lowest point since 2006. Apple is down 6 percent to $91. Microsoft is down nearly 5 percent to $25. Amazon, Yahoo, eBay—all down
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Posted on October 4th, 2008 by admin
September 4th 2008 marked Google’s tenth birthday. That means that during 2000 and 2001, when all the air was being let out of the dot-com bubble, Google was in its infancy. That was a good idea that survived the bleakest time for high tech companies. On the flip side, Facebook has not even reached its fifth birthday, but as a company it is worth well more than four billion dollars . Great ideas can scale and become big businesses very quickly. And incredible organizations like Six Apart , Plaxo , and Ning were all started before the Web 2.0 boom.
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Posted on September 30th, 2008 by admin
As part of its 10th birthday celebration , Google has opened the doors to an antiquated version of its search engine that dates back to 2001. The portal has all the trimmings from the old site, including the goofy logo (complete with exclamation point), a missing “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, and the not-so-modest claim of having indexed 1,326,920,000 web pages. It’s cool to see things the way they were (though they haven’t changed all that much), but the real fun lies in running a few searches. Google’s blog post offers a few examples: The iPod referred to a Document Processing System, and YouTube gets zero hits
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Posted on September 30th, 2008 by admin
With the $700 billion bail out on hold and banks dropping like flies, it seems this economic apocalypse will come in – and out – with a bang and not a depression. To that end we’ve decided to scour our mind-holes for gear that will help you survive the coming economic catastrophe. While we can’t promise that there will be zombies during this international economic breakdown, we wanted to be completely prepared for all potential threats, especially when Pfizer goes belly-up and their laboratories are overrun by environmental activists who release a deadly “rage” virus into the wild. So, in a very real way, this is both to help you survive the Great Dustbowl of 2008 and the great Zombie uprising of suburban New Jersey. Let’s begin. Read more… Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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Posted on September 29th, 2008 by admin
This week two giants spoke to the technology wave known as cloud computing. Larry Ellison called it a new label on what everyone is doing already. He acknowledged he was going along with it to keep his marketing and sales guys happy, but basically he called bullshit on it. Steve Ballmer talked at a deep level about intelligent caching between the cloud and the client
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Posted on September 27th, 2008 by admin
Jason Calacanis’ latest post to his email mailing list takes a look at the dark times many involved in the startup world have to struggle through at one point or another. Startup news is often dominated by success stories – multimillion dollar acquisitions and overnight successes are more glamorous than the countless entrepreneurs trudging in the trenches as they try to build userbases and raise funding. Calacanis’s post offers some valuable insight into the realities of building a startup, and making it out in one piece. The full text of Jason’s email is below. You can request to join the mailing list here . (The) Startup Depression ———————————— Since stock market gyrations and the elections seem to be making everyone rightfully nauseous and depressed, I thought I would take this email to discuss the biggest ramifications of these challenging times: depression
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Posted on September 26th, 2008 by admin
One interesting thing about the software world, I find, is that there is a trickle- up system for innovation. Things like live searches, better task bars, and the much-debated widget/gadget/dashboard idea often have had their seeds in smaller OSes or pieces of software. Designers will find a way to work something in their program that others may be able to adapt to something bigger, and thus the snowball begins to grow. Some of the OSes (perhaps more accurately called Desktop Environments, says a commenter) on this interesting list may be familiar to you, some not, but doubtless all are interesting and relatively unique in their strengths. I’m far from an expert in this field (in fact, it would be a stretch to call me a dabbler), but I think I have the appreciation for usability and good design that comes from a lifetime of using computers and technology of all kinds. Read more… Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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Posted on September 26th, 2008 by admin
Digg’s latest funding round valued the company at “around $175 million” we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. The company raised nearly $29 million in the round, which was announced earlier this month. The valuation seems about right for the company, which attracted 15.7 million worldwide visitors in August, up from 10.1 million a year ago (Comscore) (click here for Quantcast data, which shows much higher traffic). The financing was a second choice for Digg, which thought it was getting bought by Google for $200 million until a last minute glitch killed the deal . After it was clear the deal wasn’t going to happen, the company pursued a financing instead
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