Facebook pokes devs’ wallets: Mobile app ad beta launches
Desperate to squeeze money from its mobile users, Facebook is trialling mobile-app advertising, auctioning news-feed slots to the mobile developer who bids highest.
The adverts for the devs' creations will appear in news feeds of mobile users and link directly to the relative app stores, iTunes or Google Play. Facebook reckons that it already sends 146 million people in that direction every month – via the news feeds of users 'Friends' as well as by way of the social network's App Center, so Zuck's firm might as well try to make some money from the process.
Mobile developers are being invited to register for the beta, which will allow them to bid something in the region of half a dollar per click. It will also let them specify their daily budget – along with the gender and even the region (creepily sourced from those who have location services switched on in their mobes) of those to whom they wish to advertise. Read more...
Money can’t buy open-source love… only code can
Money can't buy you happiness, but Meteor, a web-apps startup focused on enterprise app development, seems to think it can buy it an open-source community.
Instead of the standard startup funding announcement, proclaiming that the company will use its funding for product development, marketing and so on, Meteor says it "will use the money to build the open source community around its offerings."
Is that so? Who knew all you needed for an open-source community was $11.2m in venture funding?
This may be a bit harsh. After all, Meteor's board is filled with people who understand that money can't buy a community. David Skok invested in and helped to build JBoss's commercial business. Rod Johnson built up a massive, two-million strong Spring community. Peter Levine also has an open-source pedigree, having run XenSource until its acquisition by Citrix.
But guess what? In exactly zero of those cases did venture money buy a community. The opposite, in fact, happened. Read more...
Megaupload founder offers deal to the US
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has offered to do a deal with U.S. prosecutors, who are seeking his extradition from New Zealand to the U.S.
"Hey DOJ, we will go to the US. No need for extradition. We want bail, funds unfrozen for lawyers & living expenses," Dotcom said in a message on Twitter on Tuesday.
A District Court at North Shore in Auckland, New Zealand has rescheduled tentatively to March 25 next year the hearing on the extradition. It was earlier scheduled to commence on Aug. 6.
Dotcom has used his Twitter account frequently to mock the U.S. Read more...
Three incredible new smartphone accessories that are under $30
There is so much that can be done with our smartphones now that we basically never put them down. If we’re not checking in to something or watching a video, we’re surfing the web and/or making phone calls. So in between all that hard work we do with them, why not have a little fun as well? Welcome to the wonderful world of smartphone toys.
We’ve already spent hundreds of dollars on these devices after all, so I went in search of some things under $30 that are cool for just about any phone. Read more...
How to launch your career 2.0
Comedian Louis CK recently produced an "HBO special"-style show, but with a difference: HBO wasn't involved -- and neither was any other network.
CK did all the work and took all the risks. But he also kept all the money.
The project was made possible by technology unavailable 10 years ago. The cost of the cameras, website, editing equipment and other necessary elements would have been far too high in the past.
The special, called "Live at the Beacon Theater," cost CK $170,000 to make. It was edited by CK himself on a regular MacBook Pro. Distribution, which happened entirely on the Internet with a digital rights management-free download costing $5 for each user via PayPal, took place on a site built for $32,000.
That's a lot of money. But the whole project paid for itself in a few hours after the special went on sale. Within four days, CK had made $500,000. And the money is still rolling in. Read more...
Lady Gaga, Eric Schmidt and others will invest ~$1M in Backplane internet starup.
What do Lady Gaga and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt have in common?
Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures and Gaga have partnered up to finance Cartier’s still in stealth startup, with Gaga being a 20% shareholder. Tomorrow Ventures is leading the angel round, which is currently at over $1 million. It is not clear yet as to whether the round has closed. Read more...
Converting currency on Google can lead to malware
The way for you to pick up malware. Today's scary corner of the Internet? Currency conversion searches on Google.
Malicious links appeared within the top five results in several currency conversion attempts on Google.
The folks from Sophos Labs report that there appear to be a great deal of malicious links among the results for currency conversion-themed searches on Google. Read more...