WD TV Live Media Streamer Skips Internal Storage For Spotify

Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... ? Learn More

Western Digital is getting a lot of mileage out of their WD TV media players, and that trend continues today with the announcement of their new WD TV Live box. Unlike its big brother, the WD TV Live is strictly a streamer, but it has a reason to boast: it’s the first WD product to ship with Spotify support

The WD TV Live doesn’t have any internal storage to speak of, but it does sport 2 USB ports for all of you who carry thumb drives full of illicit TV shows.

Once it’s set up on a wireless network or an ethernet connection, the WD TV Live can access media from computers on your home network, or from content partners like Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Pandora. It’s got enough horsepower to playback video content at 1080p, and supports a boatload of media formats from the mundane (like AVIs) to the more obscure (hello MKV!).

Ardent Spotify fans need not worry about missing out here. The WD TV Live supports a majority of Spotify features, like managing playlists, sharing songs, and subscribing to friends and fellow music lovers with good taste.

With companies like Microsoft looking to own the living room with their new media initiatives, it makes it harder and harder for boxes like the WD TV Live to pick up any steam. Still, its price point is sure to help: at $99, the WD TV Live is an inexpensive way to start streaming with minimal headaches. It’s set to appear in Western Digital’s online store shortly, and it shouldn’t be long before it hits your electronics retailer of choice.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

ZiiLabs Demonstrates Their Jaguar3 Android Tablet Media Platform On Video

Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. ? Learn More

We’ve seen a few peeks of Creative’s Zii-powered Android tablets over the last couple months, but being rather spec-oriented, this reference platform didn’t get much attention. This video does a better job of showing off the advantages of having a general-purpose parallel CPU array like StemCell. It’s a special 48-core chip they’ve married to a 1.5GHz Cortex A9, and it’s dedicated to media processing.

It may not be that we ever see this guy in action: the Zii series of media players just couldn’t stand up to the iPod touch, and it could be that this augmented Android platform isn’t cost-effective or flashy enough to bring in sales. A hell of a lot of people are going to opt for something like the Fire, since they have no idea what WebM is, and don’t see why they would want to have 1080p playback on a small tablet that can’t even display that resolution. That’s why they have a Blu-ray player attached to a 55? LCD. Who can blame them?

It does look like a nice little tablet, though, and having that big parallel array would probably be attractive to a lot of developers. But I don’t think the market is big enough right now for this to sell more than a few thousand units.

[via Fine Oils]

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Myspace Owner-Specific Media Hit With Layoffs

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Myspace owner-Specific Media has laid of a percentage of its staff today, we’ve confirmed with the company. Specific Media said these layoffs took place in sales and operating areas, and was part of a consolidation effort to eliminate redundancies between the two businesses. As Specific Media says in a statement: The company is consolidating forces to ensure greater alignment between its workforce and the direction in which it’s headed. Specific Media says that “less than 8%” of the company’s employees were laid off. Specific Media has about 750 employees, so around 50-60 employees may have been let go.

Apart from Myspace, Specific Media is an ad technology company that aims to help drive viewership for content owners, engagement for brands and relevance for consumers. The company allows marketers to buy digital ads across the Web, TV, online video, mobile platforms. Of course, you may know that Specific Media (along with Justin Timberlake) bought Myspace earlier this year from News Corp for around $35 million.

Part of that deal included letting go half of Myspace’s then staff of 400 employees. These layoffs are in addition to those cuts made in June.

Chris Vanderhook, Chief Operating Officer at Specific Media and Myspace issued this statement about the news today: “We’ve made great progress in integrating the companies post acquisition, and have identified new ways to streamline the businesses. In addition to the synergies realized, there have been some real innovation and big progress made toward achieving our goals…We are well on our way to executing our plan and will invest in our strategy as we continue to grow.”

Unfortunately, Specific Media recently decided to scale-back the elaborate plans to debut the new Myspace. Traffic has also been declining for the beleaguered social network.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Technology Media Publisher TechMediaNetwork Raises $33 Million

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

TechMediaNetwork (TMN), a publisher of technology and science media, this morning announced that it has raised $33 million in funding in a Series B round led by ABS Capital Partners, with earlier backers Village Ventures and Highway 12 Ventures also participating.

TechMediaNetwork publishes news and reviews across a website network that it says reaches more than 24 million visitors on a monthly basis. Its network includes websites like Space.com, LAPTOP, Newsarama, TechNewsDaily, TopTenREVIEWS, iPadNewsDaily, SecurityNewsDaily and many more.

The company distributes content through its owned and operated websites and syndication partners, which include Yahoo, MSNBC.com and the websites of Fox News and CBS News.

TMN says it will use the additional capital to complete more acquisitions (they purchased the LAPTOP mobile technology magazine and website last June), expand its news operations and increase the distribution and monetization of its content.

ABS Capital general partner Ralph Terkowitz and principal Paul Mariani will join TMN’s board of directors as a result of the funding agreement.

TechMediaNetwork is a publisher of high-quality original content with owned and operated brands and an advertising partner network that combined reach 56 million unique readers monthly, plus millions more through syndication to major media partners.

Learn more

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

ThingLink Adds Rich Media Tags To Online Images

TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley participant ThingLink is a Helsinki, Finland and U.S.-based startup that lets you add rich media tags to online images. These tags appear as small dots when you hover your cursor over the image, and can link out to a number of services, including Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, EventBrite, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr, SoundCloud, Spotify, Wikipedia and many others. You can also choose to tag the images with just text or standard URLs, too.

These enhanced, interactive images can then be hosted online, on a website or blog, for example. Already, the format is proving popular with music labels, several of which are using ThingLink images on artists’ sites.

(Note: above image is for illustrative purposes only, not a  live ThingLink image.)

The startup was launched back in June of this year, but was showing off its concept in TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley this week. When I dropped by the booth, folks from a major movie studio were giving the startup a serious look. It’s not surprising. ThingLink’s sign promotes its high CTR’s (click-through rates) as a key selling point. CMO Neil Vineberg tells me that averages can be anywhere from 1.5% to 20%. In some campaigns, CTR’s were even as high as 50+%. Given that banner ads hover around 0.05% these days, says Vineberg, (or sometimes even worse, we should note), even the low-end of ThingLink’s scale would catch marketers’ eyes.

As noted above, ThingLink has already proved popular with content promoters, including several indie record labels, and most recently, music artist promoter TopSpin.  Explained TopSpin CEO Ian Rogers, “photos are a big source of traffic for artists, so it makes sense to attach links to artist offers and let those images travel the web.” (ThingLink has a deal in the works with another big company in music industry, but we can’t get into specifics at this time.)

Some the artists on ThingLink also use the image hotspots to allow users play music directly from the photo itself. To play a track, it’s as simple as clicking the dot then clicking the play button that shows up in the small pop-up overlay.

The hotspots on ThingLink images can be associated with affiliate accounts, when viable, such as Amazon’s affiliate program, for example. And on the back-end, a real-time analytics engine tracks image and tag-specific views, hovers and clicks, helping promoters evaluate the successfulness of their campaigns. Images are embeddable and shareable (via Facebook, Twitter, email, direct link), and the tag editor is simple to use, too.

Music labels aren’t the only companies interested in the technology. ThingLink has a showcase of examples for commerce, fashion, design, education and social connection. And the U.K.-based news outlet The Guardian uses ThingLink, as you can see here.

Thinglink has received around 2 million Euros in early-stage funding from European investors Inventure and Lifeline Ventures, as well as TEKES, the Finland Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. Several former Nokia engineers have also found a new home at the startup, we hear.

Thinglink is a product identification tool that makes it easy to add clickable tags to any image on the web and share the tagged images on social networks. Any publisher or brand can distribute tagged images to bloggers and other publishers and still receive traffic back to the original image source.

Learn more

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Stand Well Back – Media Giant Pearson Releases Developer API

TechCrunch Europe is edited by Mike Butcher (FRSA, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts). As well as editing TechCrunch Europe, Mike is involved in a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment called TechHub (@TechHub), in London initially. A long time journalist, Mike has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including... ? Learn More

Let’s all agree that traditional media companies have, for the most part, struggled with the Internet. It turned up on their doorstep a few years ago and, like a startled bull in a china shop, startled smashing up their business models.

Eventually various media outlets started releasing APIs so that third party developers could innovate on their platforms – although it’s been a double-edged sword. The Guardian newspaper released a full content API, advertising based, only for it for be used in an iPhone app called Today’s News which carried ads for the developer. That eventually got nixed.

Today international media giant Pearson is throwing its hat into the ring with its Plug & Play platform. This allows developers and startups to access three main datasets: the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, the Dorling Kindersley (DK) Eyewitness Guide to London and the FT Press business book publisher (that’s different form the Financial Times itself which has famously tangled with Apple recently).

Luckily that’s not all you’ll get. More datasets are planned for release, based on feedback.

A showcase shows how the data is being used so far. This includes an Android App with the Eyewitness Guide to London API.

Of course, the issue is always whether developers can monetise apps based on this kind of content and whether the media provider doesn’t one day turn around and stamp on something. But for now it’s looking good.

Pearson is an international media and education company with businesses in education, business information and consumer publishing.

Learn more

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

YC-backed Crowdbooster Launches Social Media Monitoring Dashboard That Does The Thinking For You

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Crowdbooster, a Y Combinator-backed startup, is debuting its intelligent social media optimization, monitoring and analytics platform for companies and brands. What differentiates Crowdbooster from other monitoring platforms is that the startup’s technology works behind the scenes to understand a user’s social activity, and then makes recommendations about what to share, when, and with whom.

The company’s platform will automatically surface the most popular links to share; features cross-posting to Twitter and Facebook, based on popularity and content fit; allows you to teceive alerts when influential people follow (measured by Klout); schedule Tweets and posts based on best time; respond to missed Tweets; and thank the most engaged followers. And the company’s customized recommendations surface the best content to share and suggests when
to publish for maximum exposure.

The startup’s application also offers detailed analytics across Facebook and Twitter, including data around the popularity of content shared based on Retweets, Mentions, Replies,
Likes, Impressions, and Comments; follower or fan growth over time; the most influential and engaged follower and more.

Crowdbooster is already being used by a number of agencies and brands including rapper Lil
Wayne, The Los Angeles Times, Wieden+Kennedy, JetBlue, Education Week, Ben & Jerry’s, The Roxy Theatre, Crowd Surf, and Stussy. Crowdbooster is a freemium offering; the application is free for up to 3 profiles and access to enhanced recommendations and more profiles cost $20 per month.

The company has also raised a round of seed funding from Steven Chen, Esther Dyson, Nils Johnson, Charles River Ventures, Quest Venture Partners, StartupAngel, Royce Disini, Tony Pham, Brian Shire, Adora Cheung, Jonathan Pines, and Y Combinator.

Crowdbooster was founded in the Spring of 2010 by three Stanford graduates who are passionate about connecting people through social media. We measure and optimize your social media marketing....

Learn more

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Vitrue Updates Social Media Management Platform For Brands With Deeper Analytics And More

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Vitrue, a social media marketing company, is rolling out version 3.0 of its social media management platform for brands. New features include localization and enhanced analytics and metrics within one dashboard interface.

As we’ve written in the past, Vitrue’s SaaS platform allows brands and marketing agencies to
communicate with fans and consumers across Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts, location based services, and via mobile applications. The company’s SRM (social relationship management) platform is being used by a number of high profile brands including Harley Davidson, Mentos, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Crocs, Eddie Bauer, Maybelline, Purina, McDonald’s, YouTube, Ford, AT&T, Disney and Best Buy.

The newest version of Vitrue’s software comes with a new dashboard and user interface, allowing marketers to see, access and manage all of the available functionalities, tools and modules within one interface. The company has also added enhanced analytics and metrics to give marketers specific metrics on demographics and engagement of their social pages and users including insight into traffic sources, overall user demographics, top fan profiles, fan growth breakdowns, top location snapshots, per-post publishing metrics, and user engagement statistics by action (i.e., like, comment, share, play, etc.) and by day of week and time of day.

Other features include the ability to publish targeted content to specific users, the ability to add coupons, quizzes, and more to campaigns, and 24-7 customer support.

Vitrue, which has raised $32 million,
faces competition from Buddy Media.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Mobile Ad Network Millennial Media Saw Nearly $50 Million In Revenue In 2010

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

We’ve known that mobile ad network Millennial Media more than tripled revenue in 2010 from 2009 and achieved profitability. But we didn’t know how much the mobile ad network brought in, until now. In the recent 2011 Inc 500 list, Millennial revealed that it saw $47.8 million in 2010 revenue, up over 3,000 percent from 2007 revenue of $1.5 million. And while we don’t know what Millennial’s net income is, we know the company is profitable.

Millennial is one of the largest remaining independent ad networks after AdMob was bought by Google and Apple acquired Quattro. There’s no doubt that many technology companies have eyed Millennial as an acquisition target, but the company has managed to remain independent despite the increased consolidation taking place in the mobile ad space.

In addition to Millennial’s independent ad network, the company also operates and manages private mobile ad networks for large media companies and conglomerates that have multiple apps and sites, essentially powering a self-service ad network for these companies. And Millennial has a deal with a “prominent internet media company” (but declines to name the company) that has completely outsourced its mobile advertising to Millennial.

For basis of comparison, AdMob reportedly had a $100 million revenue run rate when it was acquired in 2009, which could have put its actual revenue at $40 million (AdMob split its revenues 60/40 with publishers). It’s unclear if Millennial’s $47.8 million in 2010 revenue is post-split.

Hopefully we’ll see more details of Millennial’s financials when the company files its S-1 for a public offering in the coming months. CEO and founder Paul Palmieri has had ambitions of taking the company public, and the timing may be right considering this seems to be the year of the tech company IPO. In May, Bloomberg reported that Millennial was talking to bankers about an IPO, which could come in the Fall or in early 2012 and would value the company at a whopping $700 million to $1 billion (AdMob was sold to Google for $750 million).

Considering how most companies refuse to reveal exact financials when they are private, it’s always interesting to see revenue numbers pre-IPO.

Millennial Media is the leading independent mobile advertising and data company. Millennial Media commands an impressive share of the mobile display advertising market. The company’s technology, tools and services...

Learn more

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary Now Includes ‘Tweet’, ‘Social Media’, ‘Crowdsourcing’ And More

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary has been updated to include 150 new words and definitions this year, its publisher announced this morning.

Four technology-related additions are ‘tweet’, ‘social media’, ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘m-commerce’, words that should have been familiar to readers of this blog for years now.

In fact, according to Merriam-Webster, the first known use for the word ‘tweet’ dates back to the year 1768. Clearly, Jack Dorsey’s forefathers were true visionaries.

In all seriousness, I can’t help but wonder what took the publisher so long to add the above words to the dictionary. Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s Editor at Large, explains in a statement:

“We’ve been tracking words like social media and tweet for years, of course, and now we feel their meanings have stabilized enough to include them in the dictionary.”

Other new words that have had their meaning stabilized sufficiently according to the company include bromance (“a close nonsexual friendship between men”), fist bump (with thanks to Barack Obama), cougar (“a middle-aged woman seeking a romantic relationship with a younger man”) and helicopter parent (“a parent who is overly involved in the life of his or her child”).

Retweet, lulz, trollface, pedobear and philosoraptor haven’t made the cut yet.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

ePals Acquires Media Personalization Platform Newstogram, News Site DailyMe

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

ePals, developer of a social learning network, this morning announced that it has acquired Newstogram, maker of a media personalization and content recommendation platform. Also included in the deal was news site DailyMe – both are businesses owned by a company called Nexify.

The transaction was in ePals stock and amounted to about $3 million.

ePals says the acquisition provides it with a robust platform for personalization of media and learning applications, and enhances its capability to match learners with each other based on interests, across its network of approximately 700,000 classrooms and ‘millions of users’ in 200 countries.

The platform will allow media publishers – including more than 20 media companies that currently use the Newstogram platform – to create ‘educational’ pages that highlight their content.

Newstogram / DailyMe founder and CEO Eduardo Hauser will become president of ePals’s Media division, while chief product officer Neil Budde joins at EVP.

Before starting Nexify, Hauser was EVP of Latin America for AOL and VP News and Information at Venevision. Neil Budde previously was the founding editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal Online, and VP and Editor in Chief of Yahoo! News, Finance and Sports.

ePals CEO Miles Gilburne also used to be an executive at AOL, by the way. A venture capitalist, he served for five years as SVP of Corporate Development for AOL before stepping down from those duties in December 1999. He was elected to the board of directors of AOL in 1999 and continued to serve on the board of directors of Time Warner, until stepping down in May 2006.

ePals issued to Nexify 4,449,686 restricted common voting shares at a price of US$0.67 per share. In addition, ePals issued to Nexify warrants to acquire an additional 307,000 restricted voting common shares, at the same price. The warrants are exercisable up to 4 years from the date of closing.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.