Om says Technorati just got some cash (and by some I mean a ton). Technorati closed its first round of VC to the tune of $6.5 million. The valuation of the company is $12 million which is pretty impressive considering that’s nearly revenue x infitity. Don’t get me wrong–I love the site–I just think hype might be getting crazy again in dotcom 2.0. With Google worth more than GM or the mighty evil Halliburton it’s hard to say the boom isn’t back. If that doesn’t convince you… Try Six Apart EMEA.
Let it be known that MobileTracker is currently vastly more profitable than Technorati and could be bought for a lot cheaper. Heh.
I am busy adding my recent Flickr photos to the side of this space. This post serves as a test for the new code (Update: hey it works!). Here is the RSS feed. Since I don’t technically have a camera phone, I am not sure how it will be updated. But at least for the near future it looks like I have enough review units to keep Flickr full.
If this phone had Bluetooth, I’d probably add it to the collection. Oh well–can’t win them all.
Got my K700i today… It does photo stitching to make panoramas. The far edge of each frame is shown on the phone’s screen in about 50% opacity so you can line up the next frame. Three frames are taken.
To become a true hipster I signed up for flickr to handle my pics.
I realized yesterday just how scared some people are of the unknown. USA Today picked Yahoo! Mail over Gmail… Even though Y! Mail was “packed full of ads”. The reason? At least the ads aren’t targeted. I wonder if they know Yahoo has software that scans every message–it’s called an anti-virus.
Who wants to bet lawyers had something to do with this. Hopefully it’s just a server change gone bad, but no one seems to know what’s up. If you didn’t use it, BugMeNot was a large database of log-ins for sites with free registration (like a ton of news papers). Some people really hated it, but I even had the FireFox extension.
My view is that if I am reading a story on some local paper that I don’t care to visit again, I will not register. I’ll just find the story somewhere else. At least with BMN they get an extra page view.
Update: Their host took ’em offline. But BMN will be back soon.
Update 2: They’re back!
Case in point. It seems the best PR is no PR. The Google IPO became a meme because no one really knew what was going on. Sound familiar?
Congratulations Google. I’ve used you since the main search engine was marked beta (when was that, 98 or 99?). Now I make most of my income from you. Hopefully something wise is done with $1.2 billion…
About every day I walk past a local deli that has a sign out about their gyros. About every day I throw a curious glance at said sign. Today was the day–my first gyro. Maybe it’s my way of celebrating the olympics. The result: I have been missing out. I’ll be downing more of these in the future.
For those not in the know, which is about where I was until lunchtime today:
The gyros sandwich is a very versatile food. Depending on the restaurant it usually has a few standard ingredients: meat, tomatoes, onions, pita, tzatziki, and a great deal of spices (salt, black and red pepper).
And because I had to look it up as well, tzatziki (have no idea how to pronounce it) is:
A flavorful and versatile cucumber sauce that often accompanies gyro; made with yogurt, grated cucumber, olive oil, minced garlic, and fresh mint or dill.
This discovery comes as news to me. I’ve been doing daily mobile phone news for a year and a half, but did not know that most of Nextel’s phones offer up a meager 2-3 day standby time. And this is the advertised standby… AKA exaggerated.
I got my hands on a couple of Motorola i830s today, but they only last 2 hours of talking or 2 days of not talking. For not having a huge screen or anything to really suck the juice, this is pretty lame. If you can live with the battery it’s a solid phone–very small and well built. Having a GPS in a phone is cool, but I couldn’t get it to see the satellites (to be fair I only tried about 3 minutes). I don’t know enough people with Nextel to make DirectConnect much fun but a lot of people seem to get use out of it.
I can’t rag on bad battery life too much though because FedEx is bringing me a Sony Ericsson K700 this week. It has better battery life than the i830, but it’s no champ. At least there is a large screen and camera to suck away the juice. I’ll be posting a full review of the K700 on MobileTracker, so if you have any questions about it please send them my way via the comments. The K700 is the successor to the T630 which is the successor to the T610 (still being sold in the US)… It will be awhile before a US carrier picks it up.
Head Automatica’s debut CD Decadence came out today, move over Franz Ferdinad–new dance rock is in the house. Decadence has a real up beat feel, much more so than the leaked copy that hit P2P nets early this year. Daryl Palumbo of Glassjaw fame is the vocals, which gives it instant cred to indie kids. WB is the record label so you should be able to find it anywhere for a decent price. WB also spent a lot on the recording/production (Dan the Automator is the producer) which my ears appreciate.
Here’s one of my favorite songs.
I want to say that these guys will blow up in the next few months, but that’s up to WB. If you like the MP3 above, go buy the CD.
