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HashBang.TV Episode 9 “Get the knowledge on Hailo Cab”
Russ and Gary join the boys to tell the Hailo Hollywood script style story – learn how three cabbies came up with the idea in a Covent Garden coffee shop, launched and spread the word amongst the London Black Cab community, and went on to raise one of the largest A rounds in recent European startup history.
Listen to the Podcast from my Podcast page or iTunes to get the extended interview, including talk of a “Hailo Fest” meetup, and the Dragon’s Den application.
Mobile TV And Video Platform MobiTV Files For $75 Million IPO | TechCrunch #mobile
Mobile TV and video platform MobiTV has filed its S-1 with the SEC this afternoon. In the public offering, MobiTV plans to raise as much as $75 million.
For background, MobiTV was founded in 1999 and was one of the pioneers in bringing live and on-demand TV to mobile devices. The company boasts partnerships with a number of carriers and content providers such as NBC, ESPN, Disney, CBS, Warner Music and more. And MobiTV has raised approximately $115 million from a wide range of investors, including Menlo Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Adobe Ventures and Hearst Ventures.
According to the filing, the company is the national provider of mobile television services for AT&T U-verse Live TV, NFL Mobile on Verizon, Sprint TV and T-Mobile TV, among others. The company’s technology works on 375 different types of mobile devices, across wireless and broadband networks and all major operating systems, including Android, Apple iOS, BlackBerry OS and Windows.
Learn moreMobiTV powers white-labeled mobile media services such as AT&T U-Verse Live TV, T-Mobile TV, Sprint TV, NFL Mobile on Verizon and more. In addition to user benefits, its new...
Wow, I did some work with Mobi TV back in about 2002. Hope things go well for them.
Empire Avenue adds support for FourSquare and Instagram #ea #eav #social #yam cc @empireave
Finally social media stock exchange / game, Empire Avenue, has added support for additional services that count towards your share price in the game. This morning EA announced on its blog it has added support for Foursquare and Instagram. If you have no clue about what Empire Avenue is, read this GigaOm article explaining the basics.
I've quickly connected my new accounts up, and I'm intrigued to see how EA rates my performance on FourSquare in particular.
There have been some early complaints from the community that adding Instagram gives an unfair advantage to iPhone owners (Instagram currently only supports iPhone), however EA confirmed that only your top 5 most active connections drive your share price. Whilst reassuring for non iPhone users, it does beg the question that if EA is aiming to rate and reward you (virtually at least) for your social prowess, why limit scoring networks to 5? I'll also be interested to see how FourSquare activity is rewarded and ranked in the game. Normally EA claims it rewards engagement, rather than quantity, but I think its fair to say FourSquare is more about checking in and leaving tips than driving conversation.
The update comes at a good time, as I was starting to get a little pissed off with the game. I've been playing for three months, and progress has been steady if a little unspectacular. My first month was a little random trying to get my head around the game. Month two was spent buying up all the highest dividend shares in the game. Month three I have switched tactics to buying new accounts showing promise of growth and ROI.
It takes days and weeks to move the needle on your scores. Twitter in particular is a mystery. I have been stuck on a score of 42 for nearly two months, despite adding followers and generating conversation, whilst in parallel I have moved from zero to 18 on Facebook with less conversation and growth vs Twitter.
Particularly annoying is how aggressively you lose connection scores and drop your share price if you take even a few days off from social activity. Weekends dent a lot of people's performance, and being the holiday season I lost over 2 points off my share price for taking a few days vacation. Seems a little harsh.
Anyhow, below are my two key graphs showing share price and wealth performance over the last 30 days. If you would like to try Empire Avenue follow this link (we will both receive bonus cash!) and if you have any questions about the game or strategy, ask away below.
Also, today's annoucement includes news that EA has raised $1.2m in additional funding from San Francisco-Based Crosslink Capital, iNovia Capital and BioWare Co-Founders Drs. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk.
Dropbox valued at $5 billion
I'm a huge fan of Dropbox. Why? It's simple and it works.
Like cloud based note taking and clipping service Evernote, Dropbox has really cracked the convergence / multi screen experience. You have a beautiful experience across PC, Mac, Web and mobile. The business model is also well designed. Upgrading to a premium account is positioned at just the right point to offer enough utility to free members (2Gb space), plus there is a nice member get member feature to encourage service expansion where you get rewarded with additional space for signing up friends.
However, the most powerful part of the product is how super simple sharing your documents is with other people. Ironically whilst the mechanics of sharing are straight forward, the proposition part didn't quite make sense to me.
Considering this is a cloud based storage product, by brain was automatically wired to expect a hub & spoke model. e.g. I could upgrade my account to host as much stuff as I liked, then simply give access to that store to who ever I liked. I use Dropbox to share documents across my team. I paid to upgrade my account to the Pro 50 plan ($99 per year for 50Gb). Logically I expected all my team to now be able to access my 50Gb file store and pull out anything they needed.
Interestingly though, this is not how it works. All my team members also had to upgrade to Pro accounts, because as soon as my file store exceed the 2Gb included in the free accounts they were all running, they all started getting error messages saying they were out of space when trying to access my account. Weird customer experience when you are thinking cloud / server /client (at least in my eyes, you may disagree) but a great business model, as rather than 1 x $99 plan, they now have 8 x $99 plans...
This TechCrunch article reports are they are raising an additional $200 - $300 million, giving them a valuation of $5 billion +. Nice!. I've used numerous cloud based sync and storage solutions in the past, Dropbox wins hands down.
