Technology News

Technology

The Kind of Music Startups One Venture Capitalist Would Like to Fund

Source: HypeBot
June 26, 2009

And His Unusual Way Of Turning Them Into Businesses

Y Combinator a revolutionary venture firm that speciializes in funding early stage startups. 40 or so young entrepreneurs spend months together boot camp style developing their ideas into businesses. In addition to support from each other, they are surrounded by advisers and visited by experts who help focus their efforts.

Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, sold his company Viaweb to Yahoo in 1998 and has since developed a large ...

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Technology

Study: Twitter Users Want to Discover and Will (Gasp!) Actually Pay for Music

Source: HypeBot
June 26, 2009

According to a new NPD Group study, Twitter users are much more likely to be interested in discovering and engaging with music than the average internet user. And in some good news for the music industry, they are also far more willing to pay for it.

According to NPD's consumer tracking, 33% of Twitter users reported buying a CD in the prior 3 months, and 34% said they had purchased a digital download. That compares positively to overall web users ...

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Youtube Uploads Soar After iPhone 3g S Ships

Source: PC Magazine
June 26, 2009

uploads to YouTube jumped 400 percent last Friday, the day that Apple released its iPhone 3GS, which contains a video recorder function and easy sharing features. In the last six months, meanwhile, the Google-owned video site has seen mobile uploads increase by 1,700 percent, the company said in a blog post. “This growth represents three things coming together: new video-enabled phones on the market, improvements to the upload flow when you post a video to YouTube from your phone, and ...

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Technology

Myspace Cuts 66% of International Staff

Source: HypeBot
June 26, 2009

In a second wave of major restructuring, MySpace announced this morning that it will cut 300 of its 450 international staffers and close at least four overseas offices.. The moves on the heels of Facebook passing MySpacein both visitors and page views in the US and worldwide and just a week after the social networker reduced it's domestic head count by 30% cutting 420 staffers.

Upon completion of the proposed plan, London, Berlin, and Sydney would become regional hubs for ...

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Youtube Rolls out 6 Incremental Improvments

Source: HypeBot
June 23, 2009

Rather then a big splashy make-over, YouTube has been rolling out an ongoing series of changes and improvements that marketers and uses should pay attention to.

Download MP4 Files of Your Own Videos: You no longer have to panic when your computer crashes and you lose the original files of videos. Find the video you want in YouTube's “My Videos" and hit the “Download MP4" button to save the MP4 file of the video back to your new computer. ...

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Twitter Growth Slowing Despite Huge Yearly Gains

Source: PC Magazine
June 23, 2009

Twitter grew 1,448 percent from this time last year, but its growth is slowing as the year goes on, according to Monday data from Nielsen. The micro-blogging site logged 18.2 million unique visitors in May 2009, up from 1.2 million in May 2008, and up 7 percent from April 2009. Those stats make Twitter the fastest growing brand year-over-year, but that growth is starting to slow, Nielsen said. Time spent on Twitter also increased 175 percent from last year, up ...

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Google Ordered to Block Porn into China

Source: PC Magazine
June 20, 2009

China's Internet watchdog on Friday ordered Google to stop overseas websites with “pornographic and vulgar" content from being accessed through its Chinese-language search engine. The China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center had told Google to “make immediate changes" and clean up the content available through its search engine (www.google.cn), the official Xinhua news agency reported. The targeting of Google illustrates the difficulties faced by foreign Internet firms doing business in the world's largest online market while avoiding charges of censorship. ...

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Tech Giants Again Defend Data Collection Policies

Source: PC Magazine
June 20, 2009

Can you anonymously surf the Web and peruse social networks without consequence, or are today's top tech companies compiling a FBI-like file on your behavior? More than likely, it's somewhere in the middle, according to Thursday testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Representatives from Facebook, Yahoo, and Google appeared on Capitol Hill to once again discuss how much information they are collecting and maintaining about their customers in order to serve up more targeted advertisements. All three companies ...

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