Facebook could be set to retain a significant amount of its initial public offering, after a source close to the deal claimed that the firm will pay its underwriters a fee of just 1.1 percent of the deal, according to a Bloomberg report. Wall Street firms usually expect payment of 3-7 percent, according to...
Daily Archives: March 19, 2012
Zynga’s bid for Draw Something may top $200 million
What a strange story – a New York-based startup that began its life as a dating-gaming company, went through many incarnations has finally hit the jackpot. OMGPOP, the company behind Draw Something, a mobile and Internet game inspired by Pictionary, is being actively pursued by Zynga, which is considering offering $200 million for the fast growing...
Glancee’s SXSW Adventure: Battling Bad WiFi, Battery Drain & The Silicon Valley Mafia
Andrea Vaccari is a tall, cherub-faced 28 year old with dark hair. He’s talkative and his eagerness to tell you about the product he created makes him a natural Silicon Valley entrepreneur. But like many in the Valley, he’s an import. In 2006 Vaccari moved from his native Italy to live in the USA....
Netflix on how it predicts what users really want, not what they think they want
Trying to find your way across any Web service is never easy, particular there is so much content waiting to be found, and Web video service Netflix is one such example. The company has growing catalog of films and TV series, and it helps discovery by serving up relevant, personalized content for each of...
6waves Lolapps Sheds Most Of Its Development Team To Focus on Publishing Games
6waves Lolapps, the social gaming company that was formed out of a merger just half a year ago, shed most of its employees on the development side today to focus on publishing other studios’ titles. The decision today seems to undo some of what that merger agreement created last July and we hear it...
Brother Can You Spare Some Code?
“Last year’s 12 percent drop in Veterans homelessness shows the results of President Obama’s and the whole administration’s commitment to ending Veterans homelessness,” said Secretary of House and Urban Development Shaun Donovan, in a prepared statement. “I want to thank Jon Bon Jovi for being a part of that effort and for using competition...
When It Comes To Phones, Men Are More Price-Sensitive (According to Vuclip)
For its latest user survey, mobile video service Vuclip decided to look at why people buy the phones they do — specifically, at the differences between men and women. And indeed, there was a real contrast between male and female respondents. When men were asked about the most important factor when choosing a phone,...
How Engine Yard Keeps Customers Up when AWS is Down
This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the case study about how Intel Xeon processors and VMware helped virtualize 12 business critical database applications. Last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a brief network outage...
Amazon’s cloud rockstar not a fan of solar-powered data centers
James Hamilton of Amazon Amazon’s web infrastructure rockstar James Hamilton writes on his blog that he’s not convinced that solar power is a good fit for powering data centers. He points to the two most high profile examples of Internet companies embracing solar for data centers — Facebook’s tiny solar project in Prineville, Ore....
BBC iPlayer launches on Xbox, integrating voice and gesture control features for the first time
You may remember that the BBC launched a new TV-friendly version of iPlayer last August, as it seeks to go beyond the tech-savvy and embed itself firmly in livingrooms across the UK. Today, it takes another big step towards reaching this goal, as it rolls out on Microsoft Xbox Live and finally becomes available...