dailylicious!
Breaking: The Yahoo board has approved a deal to pay $1.1 billion in cash for the blogging site Tumblr. wsj.com
— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 19, 2013
So @ariefr said if he was running Tumblr he’d sell for a billion to Microsoft and let them deal with the porn.
If you were running Tumblr and Yahoo dangles a billion USD in cash in front of you, would you sell?
Consider Instagram selling to Facebook for $300 million in cash and $700 million in…
Bitcoin
By Adam L. Penenberg May 15, 2013, pandodaily.comYesterday the Department of Homeland Security served the Dwolla mobile payment service with a court order requiring it to immediately cease all account activities with the Mt. Gox bitc …
PandoDaily has a whole list of articles talking about Bitcoin, the virtual currency created back in 2009 out of frustration with physical currency which lose value each time more is produced. There’s even a Super Mario video to explain what it is.
For Chris Dixon the next big thing might be bitcoin
Cale Guthrie Weissman, pandodaily.comAt this month’s PandoMonthly in New York, Dixon, a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, talked about the need for a diverse investment portfolio, and part of the thrill of working for such an influential venture capital firm is keeping tabs on what cou…
Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon talks about Bitcoin in the latest edition of Pando Monthly. He likens the virtual distributed currency to a Starbucks card with increasingly wider acceptance. Bitcoin is fascinating to observe, it has its share of supporters and detractors, not to mention drama. It is unstable, relatively new, mostly unknown. Dixon thinks it will be the solution for e-commerce.
Pick your poison: messaging will be fragmented, expensive, or locked-in
By Dieter Bohn, theverge.comMoves from Google this week don’t bode well for chat apps
The hottest space in mobile tech right now is messaging, with all the apps that let you skip past high-priced SMS and send texts for free (or very cheap). Just this week, we’ve heard th…
Everyone is trying to deliver a messaging app and as a result, consumers are forced to decide which app to use when communicating with certain people due to preferences and tendencies to use certain apps over another. Relying on email isn’t a solution since most people don’t use email and there is also a growing group of people who avoid email for various reasons. So here we are texting each other in silos, having to use different apps. There is no unified messaging network like there is with email and that creates a problem. While the GSMA is trying to deliver a unified solution with Joyn, it’s not exactly taking off, requires cooperation between every single mobile carrier in the world as well as mobile device manufacturers, and it’s certainly dwarfed by the popular apps even after a few years of rollout.
Google Says SMS Integration is ‘Coming Soon’ to Hangouts
Jon Russell, thenextweb.comUPDATE 2: It seems we were on the right track with this. Google employee Dori Storbeck has confirmed SMS integration is coming soon, as well as outbound calls. She revealed the nuggets when responding to questions from users on…
As Google confirms that Hangouts will support SMS eventually, this puts the new app in a much better position against all other messaging apps and may even undermine Facebook Messenger and iMessage simply because it is a much more integrated messaging app with more communications solutions. Google Hangouts is available as a replacement app for GoogleTalk but for some reason Android users will have to install the app from the Google Play website instead of the app within their devices. Google Play app currently does not allow users to update GoogleTalk to Hangouts, the Install button is missing.
Billions: How exactly do Apple and Google count app downloads?
Matthew Panzarino, thenextweb.comYesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google announced that it had hit 48B downloads of apps on the Google Play Store. During the same keynote, the counter on Apple’s site ticked over to 50B App Store downloads.
But there has been some…
Apple on Wednesday announced that it has recorded 50 billion app downloads from the App Store but hours prior to Apple’s announcement, Google said that it had seen 48 billion downloads from Google Play. So what is considered a unique download and which apps count towards those numbers? In short, built in apps don’t count, updates don’t count, and one app downloaded to several devices using a single account counts only once.
Something about green and white with communication apps.
Screenshot by Yoga Nandiwardhana
For anyone who might need some stats about mobile messaging, here’s a few put together by mobithinking. It’s quite insightful for references on any discussion on this subject. This was primarily based on Portio’s research released in early 2012 but the 2013 research was just released in late April, so if you have access to that, you can compare it and update certain figures and add to them. Here’s the last year’s accompanying blog post from Portio.
Mobile Messaging Apps: A Primer
Natasha Lomas, techcrunch.comThe global mobile messaging app space is the new social battleground. Startups that would have had little chance of unseating Facebook’s dominance on the web are attacking Zuckerberg’s empire by refocusing social networking around…
We’ve been publishing stories on mobile messaging over the past week and we still have a handful scheduled for this week, so this guide to the world’s largest mobile messaging apps from TechCrunch is a nice complement to our coverage.
