Archive for July 17th, 2009
Ron Paul Questions Fed Governor Elizabeth Duke at Financial Services Hearing 7/16/09
July 17th, 2009Stealth Mobile Startup MOBshop Has Serious Backers, Big (Secret) Plans
July 17th, 2009
I’m not sure exactly what MOBshop (the company name is Cross-Platform Corp. but will likely change) co-founder Cyriac Roeding is up to, but he’s convinced some very serious people to invest time and money into his idea. And he has put together a killer core founding team.
The company has raised $2.5 million in an initial round of financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and entrepreneur/angel investor Reid Hoffman. Hoffman also joined the board of directors of the company, and Kleiner actually added two board members: Matt Murphy and Aileen Lee. It’s rare for a fund to spend two partners’ time on a single investment. And Hoffman has said he rarely invests in startups any longer, let alone taking the time to sit on the board. Clearly, they think there is something under the hood at the secretive MOBshop.
Full story at http://www.techcrunch.com
MySpace CEO: “Our users don’t know if we’re a social portal, a music site, or an entertainment hub”
July 17th, 2009
One thing that’s great about MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta — his emails to employees always have at least one good sound bite. In June the zinger was his reference to laid off employees as “bloat.” This time, he’s saying it like it is, again: “Our users don’t know if we’re a social portal, a music site, or an entertainment hub.”
Neither do we. MySpace always described itself as a social network until they weren’t the biggest social network any more. At various times since then they’ve called themselves a “premier lifestyle portal,” an “online community that lets you meet your friends’ friends” or just the largest “social portal” in the world that doesn’t begin with “F” and end in “book.”
Anyway, I assume Van Natta will have an answer to what exactly MySpace is at some point in the near future. He also says “In the last week, we’ve made some small but meaningful site changes that will lay the groundwork to provide more clarity on our brand and business” (all we’ve seen is a logo change, but there are likely other small changes).
Full story at http://www.techcrunch.com
Twitter Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet”
July 17th, 2009
“On Tuesday evening more than 300 confidential Twitter documents and screenshots landed in our inbox. We said we were going to post a handful of them only, and we’ve spent much of the last 36 hours talking directly to Twitter about the right way to go about doing that. We’ll have more to say on that process in a couple of days”. - http://www.techcrunch.com
The documents include employment agreements, calendars of the founders, new employee interview schedules, phone logs and bills, alarm settings, a financial forecast, a pitch for a Twitter TV show, confidentiality agreements with companies such as AOL, Dell, Ericsson, and Nokia, a list of employee dietary restrictions, credit card numbers, Paypal and Gmail screen shots, and much more.
Full story at http://www.techcrunch.com
