GigaOM

Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire joined me (subbing for Om) and co-host Joyce Kim on the GigaOM Show this week. Hear him talk about Brightcove’s traffic spikes from TMZ, politics, and National Geographic; Yahoo’s Maven Networks acquisition; his company’s decision to drop its own ad sales team; and learning from experience to grow through partners. [...]

Bill Gates spoke at Stanford today, gathering a crowd because a) he’s Bill Gates, and b) he’s about to retire. Microsoft had just announced it would be giving students developer and designer software for free. Gates said that besides his philanthropic commitments, he’ll continue to stay involved in Microsoft’s work on natural user interface (e.g. [...]

doubleTwist, the startup founded by hacker Jon “DVD Jon” Lech Johansen to combat restrictive DRM (and which we were first to write about in detail back in October 2006), launches Tuesday. The company has raised a Series A round of an unnamed amount from the top European VCs at Index Ventures.
Sharing with doubleTwist from [...]

Updated: TechCrunch is reporting that HotorNot, the little meme that’s lasted two web bubbles, has been sold to “investors connected with Avid Life Media.”
HotorNot has been a cash cow for the last seven years for founders James Hong and Jim Young. The site, which started out as a simple photo rating service, had brought [...]

Get to know the new CEO of Mozilla, John Lilly, on this week’s GigaOM Show, where I subbed in for Om again. Joyce Kim and I had a nice chat with Lilly — he shares details on the recent executive changeover, the impending release of Firefox 3 (which Lilly claims never crashes on his machine), [...]

Parsing through Current Media’s filing for a $100 million public offering, I kept stumbling over the financials section. The youth-oriented news company had a net loss of $9.8 million in 2007, based on revenue of $63.8 million. It lost $7.6 million in 2006 and $14.3 million in 2005. Altogether, Current had $36.5 million in debts [...]