Pinterest joins the billion dollar club with $100m funding from Rakuten
A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars.
The words made famous by the movie that dramatized Facebook's beginnings may soon be passé in Silicon Valley, as investors clamouring to get in on funding rounds for the hottest tech startups seem increasingly willing to put their cash in at billion-dollar valuations.
Crazy? Perhaps, but Facebook's $1bn Instagram acquisition shows that big valuations don't exclude companies from the startup lottery, at least for the time being.
The latest entrant to the billion dollar club will be Pinterest, thanks to a $100m funding round led by Rakuten. The funding round puts a $1.5bn valuation on Pinterest.
Harry Potter is coming to Amazon, the Kindle
The Harry Potter series is one of the most popular series of books ever written, but if you're looking for your fix of wizardry, you'll have to put your Kindle down.
That's because Harry Potter's author, J.K. Rowling, has refused to sell her books in digital format directly through companies like Amazon.
Facebook launches its own app store
Facebook has built a multi-billion dollar ecosystem with its application platform, but much of the growth of that platform has been driven by social games created by companies like Zynga.
In an effort to help the 900m-plus Facebook users discover apps of all shapes and sizes, and create new monetization opportunities for app developers, Facebook yesterday announced the launch of its own app store, the App Center.
Managing the flood of big data: infographic
As large web companies are selling us on the value of big data, they are also peddling their own cloud services to help you make sense of all the information you feel compelled to process.
Just as Amazon Web Services is showing how it's changing businesses with its scalable and affordable data and analytic services, IBM has been developing its own solution with Netezza, an acquisition they made in 2010.
Microsoft forms partnership with B&N, invests $300m in NOOK business
Thanks to Amazon's dominance, it's easy to forget that traditional bookseller Barnes & Noble (B&N) has managed to build a decent digital portfolio of its own.
In the past, that has sparked speculation that B&N would eventually spin off its NOOK division, freeing its digital business from the baggage of its brick-and-mortar business.
Kindle Fire now represents over half of Android tablets: report
Thanks to testimony in the Oracle-Google lawsuit over the use of Java in Android, we now know just how high Google's hopes for Android were in 2011.
According to Google VP Andy Rubin, the search giant was looking for Android tablets to account for 33% of the tablet market last year. The good news for Google was that the launch of Amazon's Kindle Fire may have brought Google within striking distance of that figure.
Amazon's CTO highlights seven transformations cloud services will enable
Yesterday, we attended the Amazon Web Services Summit in New York where Dr Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon, gave the keynote speech highlighting how cloud services will transform how we do business.
Though some critics think cloud services may have unforeseen challenges, Vogals somewhat salesy keynote also had representatives of companies using Amazon cloud services come to the stage to say why the cloud is enabling their businesses to do things they could never do before.
As these (and most) businesses are discovering, a data revolution is taking place. The amount of information we need to process, map and store is growing at exponential rates. So in comes cloud services.
One cloud to rule them all? Amazon launches AWS Marketplace
According to a report from research firm DeepField Networks, Amazon's AWS cloud now powers 1% of the internet. If this number is anywhere close to accurate, it's a stunning figure, particularly when one considers that Amazon started as an online retailer of books.
But Amazon's cloud ambitions are huge, and in an effort to grow its cloud even more, Amazon today launched the AWS Marketplace, a one-stop shop for AWS customers to, with a single click, purchase and deploy cloud servers running the software they need.
Amazon ups in-app purchase limit
Amazon recently rolled out in-app purchases for apps in the Amazon Appstore, which, thanks to the rise of the Kindle Fire, is reportedly more lucrative for some developers than the Google Android app store that's part of Google Play.
Now there's good news for developers and heavy-spending app users alike: Amazon is upping the maximum price that can be charged for an in-app purchase.
Amazon launches AWS cloud search service
Amazon's AWS cloud already has one of the broadest sets of offerings and the ecommerce giant continues to expand the services it offers with today's launch of a new AWS service, CloudSearch.
Based on the search technology that powers search on Amazon.com, CloudSearch, as the name implies, is a cloud-based, fully managed search facility.
