Public event listings on Facebook have been used to influence politics and organize protests. But now events organized through Facebook–and their chaotic aftermath–may just lead to…a modeling contract?
When the chief executives of the Big Three automakers went to Washington, D.C. with tin cups in hand asking for a $25 billion government bailout, they triggered public outrage when it was revealed they’d flown in on luxury private jets.
No game captured my imagination when I was growing up like SimCity. Certainly, a part of it was my God complex, but more it was the open-ended nature of a game with few rules that let you build a city. I spent countless hours on my computer playing it; I even spent countless hours on the Super Nintendo playing it when it was ported to that console. Now it’s coming to the iPhone–countless hours will be lost again.
These days, the more you talk to folks about Silicon Valley’s venture capital industry, the more negative the message is becoming. And for good reason. There’s no more patience. Last time, circa 2001, the entire VC industry got a “get-out-jail-free card” after the Internet bubble burst.
Has news site Digg really made no progress in two years? That’s what you’d have to conclude from the value investors are placing on Digg after its most recent investment: $164 million.
Watch out, distributors of premium content online, a 900-pound gorilla named YouTube just crept into the room. For the past few years, the service has become far and away the world’s most popular online video platform on the backs of its user-generated content and often legally questionable copyrighted material.
It hasn’t even been a month since Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a German blog that growth, not monetization, was the priority for the social-networking site. In fact, he even went so far as to say that he didn’t see a revenue plan coming into play for three more years.
Games are starting to catch up with movies in this respect: Low-budget titles from indie studios have the same chance to succeed as blockbusters. And the indie game makers are about to make their biggest strides yet as Microsoft prepares to sell user-generated games on the Xbox 360 game console.
The social content conversation site FriendFeed is a huge time suck for a lot of people. This includes me. I sit on the site throughout the day and constantly hit the refresh button to send me new information from my contacts. Now I no longer have to hit that button, as FriendFeed has launched an area known as “Real-time.”
A shakeout in the venture capital industry appeared to take hold in the third quarter of the year, even before the latest decline in the stock market began. And we’ve also learned one more reason why Sequoia Capital may have reacted as quickly as it did with its terrifying R.I.P. message to companies.
by Peter Kafka, Managing Editor, Silicon Alley Insider
Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes says he’ll have a decision on the future of AOL “soon”. That can’t come fast enough for AOL boss Randy Falco, who we’re told is now fuming about the limbo state his company has entered: “When is New York going to sell us?” we’re told he muttered in earshot of his lieutenants recently.
The web is abuzz with how vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email got hacked. Hackers who obtained Alaska Gov. Palin’s email password apparently used the “forgot my password” feature of Yahoo’s email service.
by N. Evan Van Zelfden, Contributing Writer, VentureBeat
The Austin Game Developers Conference featured one of the first official public dissections of the Lively by Google virtual world (or virtual room), and I got a chance to sit down with the project’s creative director, Kevin Hanna, in advance of that talk.
by Matthaus Krzykowski, Contributing Writer, VentureBeat
Carriers have long worried that they’ll be relegated to being “dumb pipes” as more developers churn out applications for mobile phones. But some new figures are now making those carriers change their stance.
Mobile software operating system Android is coming soon, at least on one device–and that device will have a way for third-party applications to get access to users. The Google-led software initiative will offer a service called Android Market, a way to find, maybe purchase and download third-party applications (and maybe other content?). This is like [...]
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