Facebook has announced that it is now cash-flow positive, and than it recently reached the 300 million member threshold. That’s a pretty stunning number.
Again, the free service model is a winner on the web.
Author: Staff (Page 28 of 29)
Here’s a strange story.
The founders of Skype are escalating their legal battle with eBay.
Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who became billionaires after selling Skype to eBay in 2005, filed a copyright lawsuit on Wednesday against Skype in the United States District Court of Northern California. The suit comes a little more than two weeks after eBay announced it would sell most of Skype for $1.9 billion to a consortium of investors led by the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners.
In the court filing, Joltid, a company owned by the Skype founders, claims that eBay violated copyright law by altering and sharing the peer-to-peer source code behind the free Internet calling service. The Skype founders maintained ownership of that source code after selling Skype to eBay in 2005, and licensed it to eBay.
Joltid seeks an injunction and statutory damages, which it says could total more than $75 million a day. The lawsuit also names as defendants Silver Lake Partners and its partners in the buyout, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but eBay spent $1.9 billion $2.6 billion to acquire Skype, yet somehow structured a deal that permitted the founders to retain the copyright to the source code?!?! This sounds absurd.
UPDATE: BusinessWeek is reporting that the lawsuit might complicate eBay’s proposed sale of Skype. Dumbasses!
Little Steven gets in the social media act.
Steven Van Zandt, an actor and musician known for his turns on “The Sopranos” and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, is launching a music-themed social-networking site that he said will serve as a hub for insider information and advice directly from bands.
The site, Fuzztopia (currently in beta), is expected to launch in three to six months, Mr. Van Zandt said, and he is looking for funding in the low eight figures to get “from the present tense to the future.”
Given his passion for rock music and all of his connections, this idea seems plausible. MySpace currently dominates the playing field in music, but there should be room for another player.
Mint.com offers free online tools to manage your money, and it’s been a huge success. Intuit decided to pull the trigger and buy it.
Intuit is buying Mint.com for $170 million in cash, in a deal that gives it control of a startup that had disrupted its dominance in personal money management software with a free online alternative. Intuit, which sells Quicken, and Mint had been in a tight race in the online personal finance market, with both companies claiming more than one million active users of their online products. Last fall, Intuit dropped the $2.99 a month subscription fee that it was charging for Quicken Online, partly in order to better compete with Mint. Intuit says it will now offer both services separately, although it says Mint will be the “primary online personal finance management service” it will offer to consumers.
Both sites make money by referring users to financial services like credit cards and credit counseling services. I guess the free service model still works!
ReadWriteWeb has an interesting featuring covering the top 5 web trends of 2009. Their latest entry covers the Internet of Things.
The Internet of Things is a network of Internet-enabled objects, together with web services that interact with these objects. Underlying the Internet of Things are technologies such as RFID (radio frequency identification), sensors, and smartphones.
The Internet fridge is probably the most oft-quoted example of what the Internet of Things will enable. Imagine a refrigerator that monitors the food inside it and notifies you when you’re low on milk. It also perhaps monitors all of the best food websites, gathering recipes for your dinners and adding the ingredients automatically to your shopping list. This fridge knows what kinds of foods you like to eat, based on the ratings you have given to your dinners. Indeed the fridge helps you take care of your health, because it knows which foods are good for you.
The potential impact on a new, all-digital lifestyle is quite staggering. The fridge example is a good one, but it opens up so many possibilities.
Imagine how we can monitor aging people in the future. Many seniors currently have little choice but to live in a nursing home. Assisted living is becoming much more common, but with tools like this family members, and health care providers, could more easily monitor loved ones. Home security and personal security is another huge opportunity.
On the other hand, this will raise serious privacy issues as well. In the future, will everything, and everyone, be monitored all the time?
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