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Okay, so we knew that the social gaming space was big – just look at the blockbuster $300-$400 million acquisition of Playfish for the proof. We also knew that FarmVille creator Zynga was huge – they are likely bigger than Twitter and were valued at $1 billion last month. Well, it’s time to throw all of those numbers and assumptions out of the window. Digital Sky Technologies (D.S.T.), the same Russian venture capital firm that paid $200 million to buy a chunk of Facebook, have just dropped $180 million on one of its biggest beneficiaries.
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Earlier today, we pondered what Google and Facebook’s move into the realm of URL shortening might mean for the leader in the space – Bit.ly. While it’s too soon to tell what the long term ambitions of Goo.gl and Fb.me might be, Bit.ly’s not taking the potential threat lying down. Tonight, the company revealed plans for Bit.ly Pro, a service that lets publishers create their own custom short URLs that use the Bit.ly platform. The company’s also introducing a new real-time dashboard to give publishers a better idea of how and where they’re content is being shared.
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A number of companies are pursuing AOL’s ICQ instant messaging product, we’re hearing. Russian press is saying DST (a recent Facebook investor) is talking about buying the service. Our sources say they’re a relatively new bidder to the process, and others continue to show interest. One of those interested parties is Google. Another, at least at one point, was Skype. ICQ, which AOL acquired in 1998 for $400 million, has 33 million worldwide monthly users, according to Comscore. But 8.3 million of those are in Russia, where it hold the no.
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When a man in the UK was asked to be the best man at his friend’s wedding, he was touched. So touched, that he promised not to pull any pranks before or during the wedding. After the wedding though, that’s another story. This man, who is choosing to stay anonymous, has set up this Twitter account for the sole purpose of automatically tweeting when the newlyweds are having sex. I’m not kidding. Read the entire tweet stream from the bottom up if you want the full story.
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Back in August, I wrote about an interesting new company called SCVNGR. Their goal? To turn scavenger hunts into a business by offering companies, universities, and other organizations a platform on which they can build city (or campus) spanning activities. Since then, things have really started to take off for SCVNGR: the startup has crossed “well over” $1 million in revenue in its first full year in business, with monthly revenue up 40% month over month for the last six months. And it’s now cash-flow positive.
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We’ve known for a while that Facebook users are getting a lot older, but now new data released by Nielsen reveals that the number of seniors (65 and older) using the web has increased by 6 million in the last five years. Not only that, but nearly half of online seniors visited Facebook or YouTube last month, making them their 3rd and 4th most visited online destinations. The research confirmed a trend that we’ve seen in recent years: that more seniors are becoming active on the web. In November of 2004, there were 11.3 million active seniors online.
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We heard reports that Friendster was going to shopping itself to an Asian technology company but tonight, the news was released that MOL Global, a Malaysian payments company, has purchased social network Friendster. The full press release is below. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but we’ve heard that the purchase price is around $100 million. Friendster, which was founded in 2001, has raised over $45 million in venture capital to date, and is sitting on some potentially lucrative IP.
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For fans of imeem and other third party music services that made use of its API, the future isn’t looking too bright. Since announcing the acquisition of the struggling music startup in mid-November, MySpace has apparently seen fit to effectively shut it down completely, according to CNet. The once standalone imeem.com site and personal profiles now all point to MySpace Music, which seems like quick work considering the deal was only finalized earlier today.
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If you grew up watching cartoons like I did, then it’s impossible not to have known Popeye the Sailor, the Olive-loving, spinach-eating hero who used his unusually large arms and magical spinach powers to thwart the evil schemes of Brutus and other cartoon adversaries. But even before Popeye was a beloved cartoon, he was a storied comic book character created by cartoonist E. C. Segar. E. C. Segar, born on December 8th, 1894, created his iconic balding hero in January of 1929, when he appeared in Segar’s Thimble Theatre comic strip.
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The evolution of music is in essence a study of how human culture, tastes, and technology have evolved over the course of thousands of years. From ancient Indian music to Beethoven to Lady GaGa, music has embraced new instruments and scientific advances in the search for the perfect harmony and melody. While most of society thinks of music in terms of voices, pianos, and woodwinds, perhaps the world should get ready for the rise of a new instrument: the iPhone.
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