Tech News: December 2007 Archives

I liked it when I heard it - it makes sense coming from Google.  Marissa Mayer, whose talks I have always enjoyed in conferences, tells us that GOOG-411 is not about profitability but about getting more samples to improve ASR for voice search.  

Jaxtr has had an amazing growth:  5M new users in less than 5 months.  I happen to know one of the co-founders, Phillip Mobin, and I think I'll see him the day after tomorrow.  I will ask him how they did this.  Amazing, and congratulations!

LinkedIn released its API, See coverage on TechCrunch.

Also, Imeem is doing a fantastic job of landing deals with the big names of the music industry - getting close to serving about 5,000,000 songs for free (ad supported).  Latest deal is with Universal Music.

Last but not least, TechCrunch has published an interesting chart of the traffic trends of some major media sites, in which NY Times seems to be the winner.  Personally I was not expecting such level of increase in their web site...

The (pleasant) shock of Verizon deciding to open up is still here...

Enjoy:

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2007/tc2007123_429930.htm

I have to give it to them:  Divorce 360 is a brilliant idea.  Maybe you and I do not like the concept of divorce, but it's out there and it happens to people.  Personally I do not have any moral issues with helping people through the process and make some money along the way.  Whether they execute well and become successful or not is to be seen, but as far as finding an unserved market niche is concerned, they have hit the nail on its head.  To see why it makes sense in terms of dollars and cents, see the TechCrunch coverage of Divorce 360.