The company will raise around $50 million, we’ve heard, although the final amount of the raise is apparently not yet locked down.
Twitter raised $35+ million earlier this year in a round led by Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners. That round valued the company at $250 million.
The company has raised a total of around $55 million
Update: A source tells us that New York based Insight Venture Partners is the primary investor in this round.
A “Power Hour” is a game in which you must drink one shot of beer every minute for an hour (there are variations). Yes, that’s 60 shots of beer. Yes, that will get you very, very drunk. But again, this app never once mentions drinking in its description, and instead implies that it may just be fun to listen to music for a minute at a time. I love it.
Then I dove into the App Store and looked at some other “Power Hour” apps — there are a ton of them. And hilariously, none seem to mention drinking at all. One, Hour of Power, has a description that even reads as follows:
Ever needed a one minute timer to pace yourself while listening to music? With Hour of Power, you can play one minute of any artists, albums, songs, or playlists from your iPod.
When exercising, you can use your music to tell you when to switch weights or activities. When jogging, you can use it to tell you when to change speeds.
Exercising? Jogging? Ha!
We all know what these apps are for, even if they found a rather brilliant loophole in Apple’s App approval system: Simply create a drinking game app, don’t mention the drinking part, and you’ll get a nice 4+ rating, rather than a much more restrictive one (or possibly even rejection).
But we’re going to focus on Power Music Hour because at least they were honest in their email to us about the app:
Howdy TechCrunchers,
Hope you’re all having a lovely week, but in case you’re not we’d like to give you the opportunity to forget all those blog posts you were meaning to post and take a sec to check out our new app, the perfect companion to a 30-rack and an office full of writers.
Let us kindly introduce Power Music Hour, the best (if not first) power hour application for the iPhone & iPod Touch.
So take a load off, grab your favorite drink(s), and enjoy yourself. Hey, your lunch break is an hour long, right?
The app itself is great as a Power Hour app. It takes the music that on your iPhone or iPod touch and cycles through it in 60-second intervals (you can also make it longer or shorter). There is then an audible “ding” when that minute is up, and the song changes.
Back in the day, we used to have to use a stop watch to do Power Hours, this is much, much better!
Find Power Music Hour in the App Store here
Planning a wedding can be an incredibly stressful process (I know from experience-I just got married a few weeks ago). WeddingWire,
The previous version of WeddingWire’s app just let you see lists of vendors in your area. The new app is a lightweight version of WeddingWire’s site that will sync with your account on the planning platform’s site. Once you log-in to the app with your WeddingWire account, you can keep track of to-do items in your planning list, access your customized budget tool, and find local wedding vendors and reviews.
The review feature is key, sort of serving like a Yelp for weddings vendors. You can see reviews of a vendor then create a to-do item in your planning checklist to follow up with that vendor at a later date. Surprisingly, there aren’t as many wedding planning apps in the app store as I though there would be. Other wedding planning apps include Bride Guide, and iWedding but both are paid apps. WeddingWire’s app is free. The Knot,
There’s no longer any question – either Google or Apple is flat out lying to the FCC:
Apple: “Contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it.”
Google: “Apple representatives informed Google that the Google Voice application was rejected because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone”
Our position is that Apple is the one full of it, which we stated way before this new information from Google. And it isn’t just he said/she said – Apple’s story doesn’t add up.
But Apple is standing firm, and even today told press
This doesn’t end here. As we’ve speculated, Apple will capitulate and accept the application with a few minor tweaks to save face. Because if they don’t we’ve heard Google has yet another nuke waiting on the sidelines – a screen shot of the actual rejection notice via the iPhone developers admin with the formal rejection. At that point, Apple will no longer be able to rely on nuances and misdirection. The FCC and everyone else will know that they lied in a government investigation.
We’re offering a free TechCrunch tshirt to any Google employee that forwards that screenshot to us. No questions asked.
300 million is the obvious big news. But really, it was always just a matter of time before Facebook was going to hit the milestone. They hit 250 million back in July. Really, the much bigger news is the second item.
Back in April, we noted that while the company has been EBITDA profitable for several quarters in a row, they weren’t expecting to go cash flow positive on an operating basis until 2010. Back in 2008, there was roughly a $200 million gap between Facebook being cash flow positive and their EBITDA numbers. So why was it going to take another 2 years to close that gap? It’s likely because Facebook has been spending a lot of money over the past couple years on things like servers, but accounting rules allowed them to spread those costs over time. But the amount of money they’re pulling in has either eclipsed those costs earlier than expected or it isn’t spending as much. (Equipment spending for big storage servers tend to be lumpy).
Undoubtedly, projects like Haystack, which aim to cut the costs of sharing photo storage on Facebook have helped quite a bit. Aside from being the biggest social network, Facebook is also the largest photo-sharing site as well.
Twitter is currently rolling out a couple of design tweaks for its web version.
The most apparent change is noticeable when you go to a user’s profile page. Instead of just a ‘Follow’ button under the person’s username, you’ll now get a newly designed follow button next to another button that allows you to follow, public message (or privately when he or she follows you back) or block the person in one click. Also, when you do a search for a popular trending topic, there’s a chance you’ll see a short explanation above the results about why it is trending (coming from WhatTheTrend.com). See an example for a search on ‘Jay-Z’ below. Finally, the default avatar that new users are assigned when they sign up without uploading a proper profile pic has been changed to something, well, better.
Slowly but surely, we’re seeing Twitter’s design when logged in change to one that inches closer to its recently launched new homepage, which was largely centered around search and trending topics.
has been in the news a lot lately. Over the past six months, rumors swirled that the peer-to-peer telephony service provider was going to be bought back from eBay by its original founders, to be spun off as a separate company and then IPO, and ultimately to be sold to an investor group (which was confirmed at the beginning of this month). Now Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis through their Joltid holding are suing eBay and the new buyers over copyright issues centered around core p2p technology used in Skype product which they have developed and own. The rumors just won’t stop.
This time, however, it’s about the company’s product strategy rather than its general fate. A well-placed source tells me Skype management is actively shopping around for companies that provide web-based communication services such as browser-based calling and video chats.
To date, Skype has focused on desktop and mobile software to handle peer-to-peer based calling over the Internet. This is not surprising, because when Skype first started back in 2003 bandwidth costs were a an order of magnitude higher
Here’s another reason Skype might be looking at web-based communication service providers. What if eBay/Skype cannot develop a workaround that would allow them to continue the service without using the Joltid-owned source code powering its core peer-to-peer engine? It’s conceivable that might drive the company to consider purchasing companies with similar or related Web-based technology to speed up its move away from the litigation threat hanging over them.
Of course, companies talk to one another all the time and as far as we know there haven’t been any official acquisition offers from Skype at this point. But they’re definitely looking.
