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Blog 3529
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DFJ raising $400 Million for Startups in India
Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the venture capital firm which backed Skype, Feedburner, Overture, Baidu, and many such other startups which were later acquired by big Internet fishes is planning to raise $400 Million for start ups in India, US and China.
The economic growth rate indicates that India and China would surpass the total economy of rest of the world. So venture capitals are ready to re-invest after a long break due to the global economic crisis.
The firm may invest 15 percent of the funds in India said Mohanjit Jilly, executive director of DFJ’s India unit. DFJ expects to invest as much as $20 million a year in India, which has a history of investments in India and had already invested $75 million in 18 Indian companies since 2005.
The California based firm has invested in India-focused companies including travel Web site Cleartrip.com , the Indian travel site with tremendous market reach and Reva Electric Car Co., which has a tie-up with General Motors Corp. to sell electric cars.
Norwest Venture Partners, based in Palo Alto, California, raised a $1.2 billion venture-capital fund, the biggest to be completed this year, to expand in Israel and India. While DFJ is investing almost half the funds compared to previous year, on this Jolly says ‘Smaller pools of capital are easier to manage and can help investors recover their money faster’
Talking about investing particularly in Indian startups, Jolly says “India has been and will be a story of growth for decades to come, Just hold on and ride it.” -
iPhone Worm Hacker Lands a Developer Job
The 21 year old iPhone worm creator from Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia, has previously spoken of the many job offers he’d received after the stunt left many iPhone users literally bricking it.
Today it’s been confirmed that he’s accepted one of those many job offers and will now begin work as an iPhone application developer for Australian firm mogeneration.
The malicious code created by Towns changed the wallpaper of jailbroken iPhone devices it infected to a picture of cheesy ’80s pop star Rick Astley. Although not malicious, a variant of it has circulated and targeted people in the Netherlands who used their iPhones for internet banking with Dutch online bank ING.
Towns describes this as an “experiment” that got out of hand: “I didn’t really think about legal consequences at the time. I honestly never expected it to go this far.”
Graham Cluley, a senior security consultant at Sophos, was the first to point towards Towns as the likely creator of the worm, based on comment lines in the viral code and an internet search, and he described the mobile worm written by Towns as riddled with bugs. Even leaving aside the ethical problems of creating and distributing malware, Towns was a poor mobile application developer.
“The worm was a buggy piece of code that leaked data by copying across the wallpaper from other peoples’ phones during its infection routine,” Cluley continued.
“We interviewed Ashley, assessed him with our iPhone developer test – which he passed with flying colours – and we employed him today,” said a spokesperson for mogeneration.
“It leaves a nasty taste that he has been rewarded like this, yet has not even expressed regret for his actions,” Cluley said in an interview with the BBC.
With many, including Towns, expecting jail time – a job at one of Australia’s leading iPhone developers is clearly a surprise but will likely lead many to think the quickest way up the ladder to create a media storm. -
Pip.io Is Going To Rock Your Social – Invites
Sometimes you begin to play with a new application, and you are immediately hooked. Before you are even sure exactly what the service is, or what it does, or what it will do, you know: this is something exciting.
Pip.io is such a startup and product. It bills itself as a social OS, taglined as “What Wave Should Have Been.” Quite large claims for itself, if I may.
But it delivers. If you follow me on Twitter you will know that I have been giving out some invites trying to get some friends into the service to play with. I did, and have been having a bang up time.
Pip.io is part chat application, part location service, part Twitter and Facebook app, and part platform. It is hard to encapsulate. Here, this screenshot will help:
As you can see, the application is run from the menu on the right, with endless AJAX love oozed onto windows that you can move about, to social away with your friends.
The home area, which is pictured above, is the aggregate of your experience, bringing in all streams that you have, where they be commented on in a simple fashion. This feels something like Cliqset, although it feels quite different.
The application is a very powerful social experience, but it is very, very new. Sadly, it means that (a bit like Wave) not everyone has gotten in yet.
But, we have invites for everyone! Go register and use the code thenextweb. If you need someone to talk to, feel free to add me.
Pip.io is launching a number of new things with the forthcoming 1.0 launch, but for now the beta is as betas are: not finished, but you can see the potential. -
Task.fm – The best, simple, reminder tool out there?
Australians must have a lot of things to do.
How else can you explain that two kick-ass sites in the reminder/to-do space, Remember The Milk (RTM) and now Task.fm, are both Aussie-made?
When Task.fm first launched earlier this year many people loved the simplicity of the service but baulked at the price point – $10/month. Especially when leading services like RTM cost as little as $25/year.
Well with Task.fm v2 you can now get a free ad-supported account or the pro account for only $3.99/month.
If you go pro, what do you get for your $4/month?
You get everything from groups and contacts to to-do lists to the ability set up reminders almost anyway you could think of, including by SMS, voice, email or twitter.
Best of all though, you can set all of those reminders by using plain English. Task.fm’s natural language recognition tool means using the system is as simple as using words the way you want to, not the way the program says they have to be input.
There are a lot of excellent reminder/to-do tools out at the moment, RTM, Things and Nirvana to name a few. If founder Anthony Feint can keep developing innovative tools, however, there’s no reason why Task.fm won’t be able to win its fair-share of the market. -
5 Must Have Google Chrome Extensions
While Google hasn’t officially released their own repository to download extensions yet (although you can officially submit them here), third-party sites such as Chrome Extensions have a large repository of extensions ready for you to download.
While many of these extensions are next to pointless, there are a few gems that can make your Chrome browsing experience a bit more useful.
Aviary Screen Capture
Aviary, a powerful online image based editor, has released a quick and easy way to capture screenshots within Chrome instantly and edit them within a streamlined version of the Aviary image editor. You also get quick links to other Aviary products, such as Aviary Audio Editor, which we covered here. (Download extension)
Chrowety
You just can’t have a list without a Twitter app of some sort included. Chrowety is a streamlined, convenient and surprisingly intuitive Twitter client. While it doesn’t have all the features more advanced Twitter clients such as Seesmic Web, if you’re looking for quick and dirty tweeting without all the wait, you got it with Chrowety. (Download Extension)
Feedly
One of the most popular Firefox extensions, and beloved by many RSS consumers is Feedly.
Feedly turns your Google Reader into a magazine like start page. While I am not an avid user of Feedly, I know of many who swear by it. Some of them are so rabid about Feedly that they refuse to move from Firefox until a Chrome extension is available. Talk about a dedicated user.
Well now they can see the light. Feedly has now officially released a Chrome extension that will give you all the greatness of the magazine style reader you have come to expect. Time to move to the faster side of browsing my Feedly friends. (Download Extension)
Chrome Reader
It has always puzzled me why Google does not integrate their own superior RSS reader, Google Reader, into Chrome. Until that day comes though, Chrome Reader will have to suffice.
When Chromes discovers an RSS feed, simply click on the RSS icon in the URL bar and that feed will automatically be subscribed to in Google Reader instead of opening a web page full of XML. Chrome Reader also allows you to add your new subscriptions into folders within the extension. (Download Extension).
Dotspots
Dotspots is an annotation service that we recently wrote about here. Using the Chrome extension, you can add annotations to any content based web page by simply highlighting a paragraph. You can also see and edit other users annotations (also known as Dots). While the extension requires you have an account through DotSpots, it is a powerful extension that can potentially add a lot of value. To download sign-up for an account.
While I am sure there are plenty of other extensions just as useful, if not more useful than the ones listed above, you can be sure that Chrome extensions will start seeing some serious advances in the near future. Keep in mind, these Chrome Extensions are not officially backed by Google and can break. While I have not personally ran into problems with any of the extensions listed above, I am sure some people have.
Make sure if you think there are any Chrome extensions worthy of a future “must have” list you leave them in the comments. -
The Power of Physical News. What the Internet doesn’t prov
I am in an airport at the moment, something that I am beginning to think that we all do too much, and I have no internet connection. I refuse to pay $14 for an hour of connectivity.
It is probably worth the money, but the principle of paying for a service that (all the good) airports generally provide, like water fountains, miffs me. I digress.
I picked up a copy of the Wall Street Journal ($2), and deposited myself into one of the lovely Southwest comfort chairs, and read the paper.
I mean, I hit every page of all the sections. Even the one pager on sports, trying as it was. This is what happened: I learned more in the last thirty minutes reading the Journal than I have in the past week reading hard news (not tech related) online.
I am a bit surprised by this revelation. I had never tried to compare the utility of reading offline and on directly, but it makes sense. Allow me to explain.
You read more, and more diversely when reading a newspaper. One story leads you to the next. And, when you are in the middle of section A, you see much more than a series of headline links. It drives you to keep reminding.
Once you complete the story on the health care reform bill, you note the article on the deficit, and then current Afghanistan policy, and so forth.
Online, I am always in a bit of a rush, moving towards the two sentences of the article that comprise the news bit of the point, before bouncing to a picture of a rabbit with a pancake on its head. You think that I am kidding.
To put it plainly, when physical newspapers are gone (talk to me in a few years, maybe three), I am going to miss them. Not too much, this only happens at backwards, anti-blogger, airports, but the point is made.
One other note, the quality of writing tends to be better offline than on. Given the news cycle in the blogosphere, say 37 seconds from wire story to post, versus a daily cycle, people have more time offline. You can really get into the wordsmithery , something that is so often lost online.
I know I must sound a like a dinosaur, but think about it. Actually, go pick up a copy of the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal. Get some coffee, and read the damn thing. Then tell me there is no value to print. -
Ok…I want this. A WiFi Scale.
Holidays are here which means most of us will pack on some pounds from extra helpings of ham and plenty of toast.
For those looking for that extra motivation will like the WiFi enabled scale: withings. It is as simple as a scale and as complex as a multi user weight and body mass index (BMI) tracker with web access.
They also have an iPhone app. I thought I had seen it all, really. A scale with an iPhone app. Bravo.
Perhaps this is a little over the top, but having a no effort way to track your weight might be that last ingreedient to keeping to your diet.
The cost is € 129.00.
Hat tip to DailyBurn who has a free shipping offer and partnership with the service (you can pair the weigh ins with their fitness tracking app). -
Please help me survive: The Android Experiment!
Yes, I admit: Like many friends here at The Next Web, I’m an Apple fanboy.
I’ve been using the iPhone since it saw the light of day. I’ve since migrated from the first generation iPhone to the 3G and from my 3G to the super-speedy 3GS.
Looking back I’ve spent way too much money on the App Store and I cannot resist to regularly check out new apps.
Applicious is my first thing in the morning!
My iPhone serves to keep me connected via Twitter, email, Socialcast, Facebook, FriendFeed, you name it. Of course it also lets me tune into my huge iTunes managed library of mp3 music, whenever I take a break.
On Thursday evening I’ll switch it off. For an entire week.
I’ll hand it over to a friend whom I truly trust and he’ll keep it safe in a secret place. No matter how much I might beg for it, I’ll not get it back. The Android 2.0 powered Motorola Milestone, the EU version of the DROID, will be my cellphone for the next seven days.
Android powered phones have been called “iPhone killers” more than once. And the debate gets emotional far too often. I want clarity.
But I do need your support:- Being absolutely new to the world of Linux powered cellphones, what do I need to know?
- Which must-have-apps do I have to install and which services do I need to subscribe?
- How do I handle multiple Twitter accounts?
- Special tips and tricks for iPhone to Android movers?
- Anything you want me to cover or test for you?
Please help me survive the now official “Android Experiment” and submit anything you think might help in the comments.
I’ll make sure to come back here with an in-depth report of my first week without the iPhone and a summary of everything I’ve learned. -
3D virtual gifts come to the iPhone
The virtual gifts market is reportedly worth $1bn and with the holiday season approaching one UK start-up is bringing the idea to the iPhone.
Little World Gifts is an iPhone/iPod Touch app that allows users to send each other virtual gifts.
There’s a twist though; unlike traditional virtual gifts that are little more than a picture of an item, Little World’s gifts are 3D rendered items. What’s more, thanks to multitouch you can scale and rotate the gifts as you wish, making them seem a little more like something of value.
The ‘3D gifts’ idea really does have the effect of making the gifts appear more ‘valuable’. While Facebook’s virtual gifts may have got boring, these 3D gifts feel a bit more valuable. A nice touch is that if scale the image too large it bumps against the glass of your screen (complete with a sound effect), increasing the idea of the gift being real.
Little World Gifts uses iPhone OS 3.0’s in-app purchase capability to allow gifts to be bought using your iTunes account from within the app. Facebook Connect is used to allow you to select a recipient for a gift from your Facebook friends list. Push notifications are used to notify you when a new gift arrives.
Little World Gifts is the brainchild of a six-strong Liverpool-based team including Katie Lips and Jonathan Deamer, two people well-known in the UK for their tech-industry smarts. It shows – although initially aimed at the Christmas 2009 market, the idea of 3D gifts sitting on a shelf within the app could really take off.
Seasonal special items, limited edition items, marketing tie-ins the with big brands… it’s all possible with this app if the public take to it.
Little World Gifts launches worldwide in the iTunes App Store in December.
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Android To Be Sony Ericssons Saviour?
Not only had Sony Ericsson recorded a 42% sales plunge back in
October, but yesterday their latest smart phone, the Satio, was taken off the shelves of Carphone Warehouse and Phones4u stores across the UK.
Citing software issues, the street retailers suspended sales of the devices until further notice adding to Sony Ericsson woes.
This is major setback for them from a reputation point of view. Not only are the world’s consumers as fickle and cautious as they’ve ever been whilst being in the current climate, but Sony Ericsson have just given them another reason to avoid their products.
They also sold 45% less phones from July to September than the previous quarter.
According to the BBC, a Sony Ericsson spokesman said it was “giving this matter its utmost priority and working toward solving it”. There really shouldn’t have been an issue in the first place, if there’s ever been a clearer time to adopt a different operating system, it’s when your evidently struggling to produce one good enough and reliable yourself.
With Sony’s hardware expertise, the handsets themselves have never been a problem and have produced some great phones since they joined forces with Ericsson in 2001.
Their first Android phone, the Xperia X10 (above) is due in early 2010 and could potentially be the turning of fortunes for the company.
Phone manufacturers are growing in confidence in the platform, with Google behind it and a solid and increasingly functional interface and features.
It’s a great long term bet too with customers becoming more and more familiar with the system in a similar way to those that have adopted to Apple’s iPhone over the last 2.5 years.
The iPhone has subsequently taken a 50% market share of all smart phone data traffic with Android growing swiftly behind by growing to 11% in the two months prior to October. The graph (left) from AdMob, the mobile advertising platform recently purchased by Google, portrays the aforementioned confidence manufacturers are placing in Android.
Sony Ericsson’s adoption of the OS could prove crucial in turning around their flailing handset sales, as their clearly not faring too well at current. The PR bombshell that hit yesterday will not help them one bit especially with the lucrative festive trading period approaching fast.
A bad year all in all for them in 2009, though 2010 with a well spec’d and nice looking new smart phone running an increasingly popular operating system could well change their fortunes.
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