Posts Tagged ‘software’

Using more aggressive estimates, the Facebook App Economy created a total of 235,644 jobs, adding a value of $15.71 billion to the economy.

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Google is set to pay $40 per share, a 63 percent premium to Motorola Mobility’s Friday closing price on the New York Stock Exchange. The deal will close at the end of this year or early 2012.

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A software service tool for employees and business managers called Teamly made its commercial launch today after 9 months of beta trials. The software helps to manage and track tasks for individuals or organizations, because it breaks down your projects into day/week/month tasks. As well as mobile apps, Teamly will be integrating with other popular platforms and products such as Microsoft Outlook, Google Apps and Salesforce.com.

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At long last, there is a program out there for the many that worry about their image on the Web. Researchers in Germany have developed X-Pire, a program that will delete at a future time any pictures you are wary about.

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Startups have seen a double digit increase in VC investments in 2010, which marks the first ever such increase since 2007 – according to MoneyTree Report by Pricewaterhouse Coopers, and National Venture Capital Association. VC’s invested $21.8 billion in 3,227 deals in 2010, which represents an increase of 19% in dollars and 12% in terms of deals done compared to the previous year.

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Software developers got a new way to reach customers with the launch of Apple’s new app store for the Mac Thursday as part of a software update.

Based on the success of the computing giant’s app store for iOS, the Mac app store gives customers an easy way to discover and spend money on new Mac software. On the day of launch, one of the top sellers was the game Angry Birds from Rovio, a European mobile game developer that launched in 2003.

Like the iOS app store, a user’s iTunes account stores their credit card information so they can purchase items with a single click. Also like the iOS app store, the Mac app store comes with tight controls over what is and isn’t allowed. Apple also takes a 30% cut of all sales.

Apple isn’t the first to dive into the “app” store model. Steam from Valve, and Direct2Drive, which is under the News Corp. umbrella have been distributing games over the Internet for years.

Cross-platform mobile web browser SkyFire has earned nearly $1 million over a single weekend after it’s appearance on Apple’s iOS app store.

SkyFire launched for iOS devices last Wednesday at $2.99 a pop. However demand for the program was so great that the company SkyFire Labs temporarily pulled the app down after just five hours to keep their servers from being overloaded. The company then allowed users to download the app in more controlled batches.

SkyFire’s claim to fame is its ability to run Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Quicktime web content without additional plugins. Flash video is pre-processed on the SkyFire servers so it can be played in the mobile browser; a feature that iOS devices such as the iPhone and the iPad lack.

Over the first weekend on the iOS store, SkyFire was downloaded more than 300,000 times, according to MobileCrunch. After Apple’s 30% cut, the SkyFire team will still get between $600,000 and $700,000. Had the company been prepared for the barrage of initial downloads, they might have made even more during that time period.

While SkyFire charges money for the iOS version, the browser is available for free on other mobile platforms such as Google’s Android OS.

For the popular bookmark syncing service Xmarks, 2 million users was apparently not popular enough. Co-founder and CTO Todd Agulnick announced on the company blog Tuesday that, despite growing by 3,000 users each day, the startup was floundering and would shut down its service in 90 days.

“For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service,” wrote Agulnick. Unfortunately for Agulnick and his co-founder Mitch Kapor, that hypothesis proved wrong.

Since it launched as Foxmarks back in 2006, the startup has synchronized more than 1 billion bookmarks between users machines at last count, and the idea was to create a crowd-sourced search engine based on sites that people have saved.

It almost worked, according to Agulnick, and produced “shockingly” detailed lists of popular web sites organized by category. Unfortunately, users who tried the system were looking for answers to questions rather than topical lists of sites. In the years that followed, the company scrambled to find a revenue model that worked.

In 2008, the company hit the 1 million users mark, and recruited James Joaquin, an Apple, Inc. alum and former president of Kodak’s Ofoto online image sharing service to serve as CEO. “‘There’s a scalable business in here somewhere,’ we told ourselves, and we were determined to find it,” wrote Agulnick.

The company tested a variety of services and monetization schemes, including adding a bookmark ranking to Google search results, and SearchBoost for advertisers, which added a bookmark ranking next to paid links. The service even rebranded itself as Xmarks to emphasize that it worked across multiple browsers, not just Firefox. The SearchBoost actually worked, and boosted click-through rates by 10%; however the userbase was too small to make SearchBoost that valuable to advertisers, according to Agulnick.

With money running tight and no buyers, Xmarks has decided to pull the plug on January 10, 2011. Email support has already been shut down, and the company is directing users towards bookmark syncing alternatives from Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

In a busy startup environment, computer security can sometimes become an afterthought, but now there’s no excuse for not protecting your machines and your network. Starting in October, Microsoft’s widely lauded Security Essentials software will be available for free to small businesses.

Under the current license, Microsoft’s streamlined no-nonsense anti-virus and anti-spyware suite for Windows is available free to home users only. Next month small business owners will be able to install Security Essentials on up to 10 PCs.

There are plenty of other computer security suites out there, some more powerful, and some with more features, but when you’re on a startup’s budget, it’s hard to argue with free.

It may only be a licensing change, and I suppose the software suite could theoretically be used on business machines right now, but we know our readers would never violate a software licensing agreement.

Once again I want to give you some tips how to access blocked websites or services online, this time using VPN services available for free. I see that many of you have trouble accessing sites like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn at school or workplace and that’s why we covered previously some proxy services to help you deal with these problems. VPN Services also helps to deal with country restrictions by service providers – Hulu for example – using VPN you can access to this service from anywhere.

If proxy don’t work for you or you feel it’s not the solution you like to use – try Virtual private network services (VPN). Other great advantage of using VPN is hiding your personal information online. VPN services hide your real IP address and encrypts transferred data so you can be sure nobody tracks your activities online.

So here are some of the best and free VPN services available today:

AlonWeb – Free VPN service

Choosing AlonWeb you get almost premium service absolutely for free. All your traffic is encrypted and compressed using this service so there is no need to worry about privacy. Check out also premium version with VoIP support and no traffic limits.

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