It looks like Digg is getting serious about beating back some of the competition that has begun to crop up in the social news space. Yesterday, the company that pioneered the user-driven approach to news announced its third funding round, a $28.7bn $28.7m haul led by Highland Capital Partners of nearby Silicon Valley.
The move will double Digg’s coffers, allowing it to double its staff, move to a new headquarters, and expand overseas. Four years after its launch, Digg remains one of the most popular news sites on the web. But its vote-based method for deciding which stories to display on its pages has spread far and wide, with some large media names - most notably Yahoo, with its Yahoo Buzz site - getting in on the act.
The site claims 30m one-of-a-kind users per month, double that of one year ago. It said its advertising revenues had tripled over the same period, according to the news release that accompanied today’s fundraising news.
With well-funded competitors nipping at Digg’s heels, and with interest in the news spiking as the US presidential elections enter full swing, the extra infusion of cash looks well-timed.
I’ve been a big fan of Billeo for a long time and more recently Vidoop (with their cross-browser, on the web storage, secure password management system) for password management. I’ve over 150 different logins to sites and it’s easy to forget which one I used where. The “Forgot Your Password” link is a pain to use — type your info, answer challenge questions, check your email, and finally choose a new password that has never been used before. That’s too much work for me. These great password management tools help alleviate this problem.
Billeo was developed to be a bill management application. It can track when bills are due, how much has been paid and can take snapshots of pages you’re viewing. In addition, on Windows, it can keep track of your web passwords. This includes banking, credit card, email and some of those more risqué sites that you might or might not (but probably do) visit. The downside is the passwords are only stored on your personal and it’s Windows only.
Vidoop has come aboard and has not only created a great cross-browser application but they have a great security mechanism for keeping people out of your account. In order to log in (and install the toolbar/plugin), a user must first type their username, answer a security question and then verify by either telephone or email that they’re in fact the user logging in. Finally, each time you want to log in during future sessions from that machine, a user has to pick out the three “types” of pictures that they chose during setup. This could be a computer, a fruit, an animal or almost anything else you can think of.
Finally, Passpack has made great advances in the security area. In addition to being able to access your information from nearly anywhere on the internet, user’s information is never stored unencrypted on Passpack’s servers (it’s browser-side encrypted always) and can contain more than easy username and password combinations. This is great for storing other useful info like a bank account number or your hit list (if you’re in to that kind of thing). Tara, one of the founders of Passpack writes a great post of how to replace some of the tools that you may already be using with theirs (such as Google’s Browser Sync).
All-in-all there are some great tools for managing your passwords in your browser. Using these and other tools, you can keep both your information safe and your memory in tact.
Sony seems to be preparing the next generation of its reader — the announcement is on October 2 — and it will likely copy everything that’s good about the Kindle will improving on its shortcomings.
PlasticLogic will enter the market early next year, with a device that weighs less than a pound and has an 8.5-by-11-inch screen (pictured above).
By then, Amazon will almost certainly have a new Kindle ready for use.
Why is all this exciting? Because each new product makes important advances.
The original Sony Reader was the first device I ever saw with a screen that was almost as easy on the eyes as ink on paper.
The Kindle was the first I ever tested that made getting electronic books easier than getting paper ones.
But problems still remain.
The screens on both devices are too small for certain types of books. It takes to long for them to change pages. The resolution could be superior. They’re not flexible like paper. You can’t underline passages or write notes in the margins. They can’t show things in color.
The next few devices will fix some — but not all — of these problems.
Eventually, someone will develop a device that beats paper in each way. It will look better, do more and save the enormous cost of creating, distributing and storing physical material.
Dell has always subscribe to the more-is-more theory of press releases, but the company has gone into overdrive this week.
In what may be a record for a company with no vital breakthroughs or huge changes to announce, Dell has issued seven press releases in a 48-hour period.
Why would Dell makes a many announcements one on top of the other?
No one is going to write seven stories about the same company in two days, so all these announcements sort of canceled one another out.
The first one — which stated that all Dell monitors will use energy-efficient LED lighting in the next couple years — got some play in the mainstream media.
The new desktop and notebook computers — announcements three and four — got blurbs on the gadget blogs.
But the others have gone largely unnoticed.
True, some reporters seem to have covered the EU speech, but they ignore the praise-the-EU angle and wrote up Dell’s promise to keep his company growing faster than the overall personal industry.
Any theory on the timing of all this? Pure coincidence or deliberate strategy?
NewEgg.com is currently offering a Kingston 4GB SD for around $8! The lowest price I’ve seen so far, and shipping’s free if you choose the 3-7 day option. Just click on the picture above or the link below to get that much-needed item for your digital camera or handheld personal!
No, the cellphone software, developed by a London start-up, doesn’t work with specialized sensors. Rather, the app tracks the user’s movement patterns via GPS, and computes whether he’s walking, driving, or flying.
Carbon Diem’s inventors claim that, by using GPS to measure the speed and pattern of movement, their algorithm can identify the mode of transport being used. It can therefore calculate the amount of carbon dioxide that a journey has emitted into the atmosphere – without any need for input from the traveller.
Given all the effort GM has made to build its Volt from the ground up — an effort designed to minimize both weight and wind resistance — I’m surprised that Chrysler thinks it can just drop new components in old bodies.
For one thing, I’m under the impression that engineers are having trouble building a battery that’ll be powerful enough for the Volt, so it seems odd that Chrysler thinks it can develop one that puts out twice the power.
For another, batteries are very high-priced. Indeed, they’re the big reason that the Volt will nearly twice as much as a mid-range, mid-sized vehicle. Thus, it would seem, that a battery that was twice as massive would make these Chrysler cars very high-priced.
“I started dreaming about this day 18 months ago, when I laid out my vision for our board of directors on how Yahoo! could play a very special role in changing the face of on the web advertising. In fact, Sue and I called it Nirvana at the time – a platform that would be to 2009 what radio was to 1924, TV to 1947, color TV to 1965, and the Internet to 1993.”
The tone is a little different from an email to all staff on Tuesday announcing the appointment of Bain & Co to review Yahoo’s expenses and suggest ways of improving efficiency.
Mr Yang says the company is actively looking for efficiencies through “process and structural changes”. He types:
“i know that yahoo! can benefit greatly from more discipline among all departments and functions, across the company. longer term, getting fit now will enable us to be more successful moving forward.”
While there’s no mention of downsizing or job cuts, the implications seem clear. Mr Yang, who actually increased staff numbers by 1,200 in his first quarter as chief executive last year, is now under pressure from his new board and shareholders to increase margins and profitability instead.
Streamlining lies ahead and reductions in its 14,000-strong workforce appear inevitable.
With the new section of the blog being formed, the “IT Confessional” and the contest where you’re going to win a free, awesome keyboard, I figured I’d open it up to you guys and gals as to what to call the confessional. Please select an answer from the poll below, add your own or comment and let me know what you’d like to see it called. We’ll be calling on graphic designers next to help us brand this section of the blog.
Look, I comprehend why good customer service engenders warm, fuzzy feelings. You love me! You really love me!
But honestly, if you’re spending a lot of time dealing with customer service people, then you’ve purchased a crummy product.
I’d rather have a solid, inexpensive gadget that requires me to go Google-ing for help on message boards on the rare times that I need it, than a more high-priced clunky device that’s backed up by sensitive, caring call center staffers who feel my pain.
Ideally, of course, we’d get excellent products and top-notch support, but the reality is that consumer electronics is a price-driven market (like nearly any other), and if you want prices on HD televisions or laptops or MP3 players to keep falling, you’ve either got to cut quality or customer service.
Yes, Amazon disappointed me 
No, the cellphone software, developed by a London start-up, doesn’t work with specialized sensors. Rather, the app tracks the user’s movement patterns via GPS, and computes whether he’s walking, driving, or flying.
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