News Byte
Ina Fried in Mobile on July 7 at 4:30 am PT
YouMail, maker of the mobile Visual Voicemail Plus app, said Thursday its program has now been used to answer more than a billion calls on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and other devices. The Irvine, Calif.-based company also noted it has now raised a total of $12.5 million since 2007, including a new funding round made up of VantagePoint Capital Partners, Siemer Ventures and the Tech Coast Angels.
John Paczkowski in News on July 7 at 3:41 am PT
Apple best get used to the idea of seeing the term “app store” alongside Amazon’s brand, because it’s looking more and more like the battle it’s fighting to trademark the term is a losing one.
Kara Swisher in Commerce on July 7 at 3:05 am PT
Groupon’s S-1 filing for an IPO last month certainly got a lot of ink.
Unfortunately, much of it was negative, focused on several controversial parts of the document.
So the social buying service conducted a poll to find out the impact.
Anton Troianovski, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on July 7 at 12:00 am PT
For years, as Internet use boomed, builders of the giant, air-conditioned computer warehouses known as data centers couldn’t keep up with demand.
Now, though many investors continue to pile into the data-center business, one of the few hot spots in real estate, others fear the peak may be past.
First, the minority were focused on mobile; they were all building their website, then an iPhone app…Now, they are starting with both iPhone and android apps, saying they need to nail mobile distribution, and saying that maybe will never build a website at all, because it’s unnecessary.
Harjeet Taggar, a partner at Y Combinator, in conversation with San Francisco magazine 7×7, about mobile development among startup teams he’s worked with.
Jessica E. Vascellaro, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in Media on July 6 at 7:31 pm PT
Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger said the owners of online video site Hulu LLC are “committed to selling” it.
Weeks after Hulu’s board began exploring a sale, Mr. Iger, who is attending the Allen & Co. media conference here, predicted that a sale of the television-and-movie site would happen but said he couldn’t say when.
Walt Mossberg in Personal Technology on July 6 at 6:04 pm PT
Seagate Technology’s GoFlex Satellite is a portable hard disk that carries big storage capacity for your tablet by creating a local Wi-Fi network.
Walt Mossberg in Mossberg’s Mailbox on July 6 at 6:00 pm PT
Walt answers a student’s question on finding a laptop or tablet for school that runs Adobe Flash Player.
News Byte
Tricia Duryee in Commerce on July 6 at 5:00 pm PT
PetFlow.com, a New York-based online retailer, has secured $10 million in a second round of funding. The investment was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Founded in early 2010, PetFlow.com encourages consumers to sign up to get pet food delivered automatically every few weeks. The funding will be used for hiring and marketing, and building out its infrastructure. Earlier today,
Amazon-owned Quidsi unveiled a vertical focused on pets called
Wag.com.
Liz Gannes in Social on July 6 at 4:37 pm PT
Though these presidential town hall meetings are never terrifically interactive or spontaneous, Jack Dorsey and the Twitter team did an admirable job of making today’s conversation with Barack Obama feel like it was coming together in real-time.
Peter Kafka in Media on July 6 at 4:02 pm PT
No surprise at all: Storage is cheap, and this stuff will only get cheaper. Meanwhile, Amazon’s cloud music service now works on the iPad, but still won’t do anything for iPhone and iPod owners.
News Byte
Ina Fried in Mobile on July 6 at 3:34 pm PT
Motorola has dropped the price on its
Xoom tablet, the first device to ship with the Honeycomb version of Android. The
Wi-Fi-only model, with its 32GB of memory, now sells for $499. The $100 price drop comes as the device struggles to compete against Apple’s iPad 2 and faces increasing competition from lower-priced Honeycomb tablets, including
Acer’s Iconia Tab.
John Paczkowski in News on July 6 at 2:51 pm PT
Looks like nothing came of those “high-level” patent litigation discussions between Apple and Samsung last month. Because legal hostilities between the two are escalating once again.
Liz Gannes in Social on July 6 at 2:18 pm PT
Considering that Google last week revealed the scale of its social ambitions by starting to roll out Google+, the question at today’s Facebook product launch was: What’s the Facebook reaction to this fierce new competition?
