February 2008 Archives

Tiny Pictures Pulls in $7.2 Million Financing for Radar Photo/Video Sharing Service

February 26, 2008 3:34 PM | 0 Comments
Yesterday I blogged about a company called Radar Networks that just completed Round B of its financing series. Well, it turns out that Radar must be a winning name. Another company, Tiny Pictures—which offers a mobile photo and video sharing service called Radar—also just completed Round B of its financing series, pulling in $7.2 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mohr Davidow Ventures.
 
Previously, Tiny Pictures raised $4 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures and “angel invetors” Reid Hoffman and Joichi Ito. Funds raised during Round B, the company said, will be used for international growth and development of its recently launched ad platform.
 
Radar from Tiny Pictures enables real-time sharing of photos and videos between cameraphone users. It can be accessed on wireless devices, on PC browsers and through a series of mobile applications.
 
Tiny Pictures was founded in 2005 by John Poisson, who formerly headed up the mobile media research and design groups at Sony in Tokyo, Japan. The startup company is based out of San Francisco, California.
 
For more about Tiny Pictures and its Radar service, see:
 

Radar Networks Pulls in $13 Million Venture Capital During Round B of Financing Series

February 25, 2008 9:45 AM | 0 Comments
Radar Networks is on a role. The company announced Monday completion of Round B financing series, during which it brought in $13 million from several venture capital firms. This brings total venture capital funding for the company to $18 million, including Round B and Round A (which closed in April, 2006).
 
What’s drawing venture capital firms to invest in Radar? The company offers an online service called Twine, which the company describes as a “Web 3.0” application, part of the “Semantic Web.”
 
Twine lets users organize, share and discover information that correlates to their interests, and connect with networks of like-minded people. In this sense, it is similar to a lot other “social network” services on the Web. But Radar is taking this idea to a new level what the company calls “semantic understanding,” a method of automatically organizing information using algorithms that learns from users’ interests and uses its conclusions to make connection and recommendations.
 
Given the trend toward social networking services being used not only on desktop computers but on mobile devices as well, it seems likely that Twine will prove useful to computer-based surfers and on-the-go social networkers alike.
 
Round B of Radar’s financing series was led by Velocity Interactive Group. Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Vulcan Capital also participated.

Architecture Redundancy Would Help RIM Avoid Future BlackBerry Outages

February 14, 2008 3:54 PM | 0 Comments
The power of Google’s ability to perform fast and accurate Web searches comes in large part from the its distributed nature—using a geographically dispersed network of computing power to deliver results to users quickly. Distributed systems like Google’s have another advantage, too: they inherently protect against any single point of failure since if equipment in one location goes down the slack can be picked up somewhere else.
 
In a Thursday post, ZDNet MobileTech blogger Eric Everson suggested that, in light of two major outages within a year, RIM might want to consider a more distributed type of architecture to provide service for its BlackBerry devices, rather than feeding everything through a centralized system.
 
Everson quoted a Canadian Press report as pointing out that, “The concentration of RIM's BlackBerry service at a single network operation centre in the Ontario city of Waterloo, through which traffic such as e-mails are routed, exacerbates such problems and leaves it open to more crashes.”
 
Everson added in his post, “If at a network level everything is routed through a bottleneck configuration it likely doesn’t take the Founder of MyMobiSafe.com to point out that there may be some mobile security issues users should consider.”
 
In other words, there is power in numbers and RIM might do well to consider adopting a distributed network architecture to avoid such a major outage again in the future.

Rumor Mill: AT&T to Launch Centro Smartphone on Feb. 19

February 14, 2008 3:26 PM | 0 Comments
The rumor mill is in full gear this week suggesting that AT&T will be introducing its own “branded” model of Palm’s Centro smartphone, till now available exclusively through Sprint.
 
The PalmAddicts blog said Sprint’s exclusive hold on the Centro, which began shipping in early October, was rumored to be a three-month deal, so now’s about the time you’d expect to see it start being offered by other carriers.
 
Engadget seemed very confident in a Thursday post that AT&T’s Centro is set being shipping on February 19. The price likely will be $99, and the color probably white.

A Closer Look at Apple's MacBook Air Laptop

February 4, 2008 11:29 AM | 0 Comments
If you’re among those considering whether or not to buy Apple’s new MacBook Air laptop, there are now some pretty thorough reviews available to help with the decision. One of those is from Engadget.
 
Engadget’s review examines all aspects of the new laptop, including hardware (processor, battery life, display, keyboard, audio, wireless connectivity, ports, etc.) and software (OS, multi-touch gestures, Remote Disc, etc.).
 
The review is quite thorough, and concludes that although MacBook Air is supposed to appeal to road warriors, it compromises on some of the things such users most need (like ability to swap out a second battery). Given the laptop’s limitations, Engadget thinks it’s unlikely road warriors will pick the Air to replace their primary computer (which may very well be a laptop with more connectivity options), and as such Apple might be more successful if it lowered the price to roughly $1500 and included an Ethernet dongle and SuperDrive into the package.
 
“The Air isn't supposed to be everything for everyone,” Engadget said in its review. “For those in need of a machine that masters basics in a super thin, light form-factor, and who have the coin to pay for that ultraportability, the Air absolutely nails it like few others.”
 
What do you think—would you consider or are you planning to buy a MacBook Air?

FCC 700MHz Auction Update

February 1, 2008 5:15 PM | 0 Comments
Update as of 5:10 p.m. on Friday, February 1, 2008: after 25 rounds of bidding, the FCC’s 700MHz auction has pulled in just over $18 billion.
 
Earlier in the day, after 24 rounds of bidding, RCR Wireless News noted that the bidding had slowed, with only 1.8 billion coming in during the first three rounds Friday morning (compared with $4 billion for all round on Thursday).
 
The eight C Block licenses did not receive any new bids, RCR Wireless noted, which means bidding on this block may be done. (If so, will Google emerge as not only the white night that rescued open access but also as the owner of the spectrum?)
 
How do you see the rest of the auction playing out?

How Many iPhones Has Apple Really Sold?

February 1, 2008 9:03 AM | 0 Comments
It just doesn’t add up. During Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote, he reported that Apple shipped four million iPhones so far. But AT&T says it had only about two million iPhone customers at the end of 2007. Even taking into account the fact that Apple now has service agreements with carriers in countries other than the U.S., it appears there is a discrepancy. 
 
InformationWeek offers information from analysts at Sanford Bernstein that attempts to explain the mismatch between Apple’s and AT&T’s numbers. The analyst firm estimated that Apple’s total iPhone shipments are actually 3.75 million, not 4 million. The firm also estimated that carriers have activated 2.35 million iPhones.
 
“Assuming that 20% of the unactivated phones may have been unlocked to work on other networks, that still leaves 670,000 iPhones unaccounted for,” InformationWeek noted in its report.
 
That means that there is a pile of not-yet-activated iPhones in the hands of carriers. The question remains: can Apple still hit its target of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008? What do you think?
 
On a somewhat related note, Rich Tehrani blogged yesterday that Motorola may be considering spinning off its handset business. He asked whether this is really a smart move, given how big mobility is these days. The company has operations in 44 countries/regions and describes itself as “a global communications leader” that’s all about seamless mobility, broadband embedded systems and wireless networks.
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