London startup SpinVox raised $100 million today in a round of financing that values the company at $500 million. That’s big money for a company that translates voicemails into text, but SpinVox appears to have achieved some valuable intellectual property associated with its speech-to-text software. Currently […] Read more »
Startup JumpBox has managed to stuff an entire software program — and a virtual computer to run that program — into a single file for easy downloading and installation. And today the company has launched a subscription program called JumpBox Open, which gives access to a […] Read more »
Earlier this month, when Demand Media purchased Pluck, the price wasn’t disclosed. But judging from a comment made last night at a post-merger shindig held in Austin, Texas, the social news software startup was worth $70 million. “I should have gotten a t-shirt for $70 million, […] Read more »
{"source":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/author\/shigginbotham\/page\/79\/wijax\/b959f4af7e82222223ac4cb50ea2d81d","varname":"wijax_0009d8f075dc59a1461d5777604f18bc","title_element":"h2","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Ch2%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fh2%3E"}
Just when you think you know all the flavors of home networking standards, along comes One-Net. Joining ZigBee, Z-Wave and Insteon, One-Net is another home automation standard for connecting your lights, security cameras and other home functions to one another. It, much like the existing standards, […] Read more »
Every two years the Semiconductor Research Corp., an industry consortium of chip firms, holds a chip design challenge. The challenge generally reflects a concern in the industry, but is really a chance for SRC members to evaluate the latest crop of chip designers coming out of […] Read more »
I spent my morning in a lecture hall here in Austin, Texas, listening to the heads of manufacturing at three different semiconductor fabrication plants talk about the future of their aging facilities. (Solar isn’t the only thing an older fab can be used for, but I’ll […] Read more »
The FCC has scheduled a second set of network management hearings to be held on the Stanford campus on April 17. A do-over of the hearings that were held last month at Harvard, perhaps? That gathering was driven, at least in part, by Comcast throttling BitTorrent […] Read more »
The 700 MHz auction ended yesterday, and the $19.59 billion going to the Treasury looks like a lot until you realize the government’s total budget is $2.9 trillion. But now the waiting (and speculating) can begin. What will happen with the failed auction for the D […] Read more »
The launch of KidZui could be viewed as just another social network for kids hitting the market, or it could be seen as a victory of real-live people over the mighty algorithm. Time and the company’s success will eventually tell. Over the last two and a […] Read more »
The University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be the recipients of $20 million in research grants from Microsoft and Intel over the next five years to further the use of multicore chips, the four said today. On the conference call […] Read more »
{"source":"http:\/\/pro.gigaom.com\/wijax\/a206c64880c8215b985ab24ebe90eafd","varname":"wijax_d269eebc26af5b39ec3c65bb7948e7ce","title_element":"h2","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Ch2%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fh2%3E"}
The sun is shining on India’s Tata BP Solar, which recently signed an agreement to raise $78 million in financing to expand its photovoltaic manufacturing plant to 128MW. Currently, the pilot line produces 50MW of solar panels, with 60 percent of those sent outside of India […] Read more »
Right now Microsoft’s Windows Live efforts are the software giant’s answer to web applications and cloud computing. In fact, however, they’re less a cloud strategy than a layer of fog over the multibillion-dollar packaged software franchises that keeps Microsoft going. But the Redmond-based behemoth isn’t dumb, […] Read more »
New data from M:Metrics for the month of January confirms that folks who own an iPhone tend to do more entertaining things on their devices — such as watch video and visit social networks — than those who own smartphones. However February data from mobile ad […] Read more »
Earlier this week Om wrote about Dropbox, which he liked so much that we at GigaOM are trying it out for our file-sharing and backup needs. Also this week, FolderShare, another remote file access program, launched its first version since being acquired by Microsoft two-and-half years […] Read more »
The EU today chose DVB-H as the region’s official unofficial mobile television standard, leaving Qualcomm’s MediaFLO technology stuck in the States and DMB alone in Asia. The EU however, can only ask its member nations’ governments to endorse the standard — they have no power to […] Read more »
A former executive at French semiconductor firm ST Microelectronics is proposing a three-way merger of Europe’s three largest semiconductor companies: ST Micro of France, NXP of the Netherlands and Germany’s Infineon. But while it underscores many of the problems facing the chip industry — and makes […] Read more »
OK, so it’s no secret that a desire for free services on the part of consumers coupled with the desire of service providers to make a buck has spawned ever more intrusive ad models (Hello, Beacon!) But while hyper-targeted ads and behavioral advertising raise eyebrows, so […] Read more »
Having been excoriated for its poor customer service and monumental financial losses, Sprint is reaching out and trying to make amends. It’s offering up an online chat with its chief marketing officer, John Garcia, who will field questions about Sprint’s Simply Everything unlimited plan, the Xohm […] Read more »
Business software may be profitable, but the growth and sex appeal is in advertising. At least, Microsoft seems to thinks so. Amidst efforts to make headway with its takeover offer for Yahoo, the Redmond giant today said it’s agreed to buy online ad analytics firm Rapt. […] Read more »
SAI: BitTorrent CEO: Rethinking Media Store, No Business Impact from Comcast CNet: Verizon Touts Smart P2P Technology ArsTechnica: $5 a Month for Legal P2P Could Happen Sooner Than you Think Broadband Reports: Comcast Sues FCC Over 30% Cap Reuters: U.S. Video Games Sales Jump 34% in […] Read more »
New England-based demand-response company EnerNOC is heading into the Wild West of Texas! It has inked a deal with the state’s Electric Reliability Council to participate in a blackout prevention program that goes beyond large industrial users. As a Texas resident, I’m all for blackout reductions […] Read more »
This morning, Google said it was launching a hosted ad server program for small- to medium-sized web publishers called Ad Manager. As it happens, I was on the phone with James Bilefield, CEO of open-source ad-serving company OpenX (formerly Openads). Bilefield gave the usual this-validates-our-market spiel […] Read more »
Almost a year after Facebook opened up its social network to developers, MySpace is launching its own developer platform in public beta with an application Gallery Page available to users. It’s based on Google’s OpenSocial platform, which MySpace helped develop. MySpace announced the platform in late […] Read more »
Some quick math makes Facebook’s $15 billion valuation look even crazier. Apparently the guys over at Silicon Valley Insider also bothered to crunch the numbers. Bebo sold to AOL this morning for $850 million and have about 40 million users, costing $21.25 per user. In July […] Read more »
The Register: Qualcomm buys Phorm-alike Firm BroadbandReports: Time Warner Cable Will be Spun Off ArsTechnica: Congress Prepares Probe of FCC Chairman ArsTechnica: How NBC Wants to Both Filter and Use P2P Light Reading: AT&T Prepping for GPON Reuters: Google to Unveil New Ad Service for Publishers: […] Read more »
In a few weeks, online bookmaking site Blurb will launch a new community called BlurbNation, a section of the Blurb site where people can connect with a professional designer that will take their photos, stories, recipes or any other images and pull them together into a […] Read more »
A couple of startups are trying to become the PayPals of the business world, offering their enterprise clients a way to measure and invoice without resorting to expensive custom-built billings software that they have to host themselves. The latest of these, Zuora of Redwood City, Calif., […] Read more »
Corporate Wi-Fi usage in the U.S. hasn’t grown much but has seen a sharp spike in Europe and Latin America, according to new data released by iPass. While Latin America represents a fairly small number of users, Rick Bilodeau, VP of corporate and channel marketing at […] Read more »
Plenty of people get politically active during election years, but the issues don’t go away once the hanging chads have been punched and the Diebold source code is no longer being hacked. Aside from voting (or donating thousands to a campaign) the most powerful way to […] Read more »
SAI: Hulu Household: Why I Got Rid of Cable The Inquirer: 5 New Fabs for $14.7B EETimes: Nokia, Techs Drop as TI Points to 3G Weakness ArsTechnica: Norton Places Big Bet on Mac Virtualization Vulnerabilities Light Reading: Charter Gets Nibbles EWeek: Nortel Rolls out 40 Gigabit […] Read more »
After losing an infringement case brought against it by fellow content delivery network Akamai, Limelight Networks is going all out to reassure its customers that the $45.5 million judgment against it was merely a flesh wound. In a letter posted to the company’s web site (and […] Read more »
Entrepreneurs see their venture backers as the ones with control in the relationship, according to a recent online survey conducted by Research Data Technology for a member of the National Venture Capital Association who wishes to stay anonymous. And just as many of them may have […] Read more »
That was the question asked of the four panelists on Monday’s Scalability Boot Camp Panel at South by Southwest. The panelists, who represented various consumer sites, all said that at some point in their online ventures the answer to that question was no. As a result […] Read more »
Overheard at The Google Open Social Happy Hour on Monday night: “Looking at the people here, it’s like I came all the way to Austin only to see the same people I see in San Francisco.” Read more »
Wandering around the South by Southwest Conference in Austin this weekend and yesterday, I was struck by how few people were sporting MacBook Airs. iPhones, on the other hand, were everywhere. I watched four impromptu demos of new sites on the iPhones of four different entrepreneurs. […] Read more »
After the debacle of yesterday’s on-stage interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at South By Southwest, I decided to take myself out of the process as much as possible by offering up a Q&A. And I’ll tell you right now: When I asked about money, my questions were quickly shot down. Read more »
When it comes to semiconductor news, it can be hard to judge how much of it is hype and how much will actually come to pass. But Altair Semiconductor, which is now sampling chips, has some cool attributes worth noting, especially for those interested in 4G […] Read more »
The web of alliances among semiconductor manufacturers is getting tangled, and as we continue to move down the process node, add one more to the equation. IBM and Hitachi are expected to announce a partnership today to collaborate on getting down to the 32 nanometer and […] Read more »
BroadbandReports: Israel Latest to Force ISPs to Block Piracy Reuters: Logitech Says Any Microsoft Bid “Without Sense” Virtualization for Everyone: Interview with Rackspace CTO InfoWorld: Former Head of Motorola Handset Business Leaves ArsTechnica: Bad Phorm? UK ISPs sell Clickstream Data to Advertisers SAI: Storage/Sharing Site Drop.io […] Read more »
Mark Zuckerberg isn’t focused on the company’s $15 billion valuation. He just “doesn’t think about it,” the Facebook CEO said in an interview with Sarah Lacy today at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Instead, he’s focused on building a platform on which people can communicate […] Read more »
Follow @gigastacey or @gigaom for more stories like this.
You're subscribed to our newsletter. If you'd like, you can update your settings
