UK Tech News

Archive for June, 2009

New release brings the second-most popular browser up to speed with current browsing technology and trends, and perhaps nudges it ahead of the competition.

Startups which concentrate on the development of iPhone apps have attracted about $100 million in venture capital in the mere two years that this business has existed, according to data compiled by the Chubbybrain blog.

The leading VC firm in this space is Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, which has put $50 million in six startups. This is about half of the $100 million iPhone development fund they launched in March 2008.

The average placement has been about $4.6 million. The largest deal was $15 million and the smallest $15,000.

The $102.49 million overall figure may be conservative since it leaves out a developers who create apps across smartphone platforms and companies for whom iPhone app development is small and/or incidental — like media companies who create an app to extend their reach.

Admittedly, this delineation was a bit of art and science but our aim was to remove those startups who might be building mobile apps or tools across platforms, e.g., iPhone, Android, Symbian, etc or where the iPhone element was complementary but adjacent to their core business. And so our $100 million number focuses on those startups who are tethering themselves in a large way to the iPhone platform.

Not since the heyday of the Palm in the late 1990s has their been such vibrancy in mobile computing software development, and the intense interest in the iPhone software ecosystem isn’t hard to understand. The selling platform —The App Store — is on every iPhone/iPod and in iTune. Most apps are a dollar or a small few, a risk that is easy to take after having spent hundreds of dollars on a handset and perhaps $100 a month for service. Apple sold its one billionth app on April 24. One lone coder, Ethan Nicholas, earned himself $600,000 in one month for iShoot.

Is this only the beginning? There are 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch models in circulation, Apple told the WWDC earlier this month. And last weekend, Apple sold one million third generation, 3 GS models.

The iPhone Inspired 2nd Economy: Over $100 Million Goes from VCs to iPhone Startups [ChubbyBrain Blog]

See Also:

• Billionth iPhone App Downloader Scores Freebies; Developer Wins Freebies; Developer Wins Too
• Apple, Stanford Teaching iPhone Development for Free
• First iPhone Web Apps Available
• Make Your Site An iPhone App - Webmonkey
• $23.3 Million To Twitter-Based Startups
• Coder’s Half-Million-Dollar Baby Proves iPhone Gold Rush Is Still On

These albums ought never to have sullied an unsuspecting public’s ears. We’d need a time machine to keep them from being released; until we get Terminator technology, the sonic black hole will have to do. Rate these audio atrocities and submit your own.
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Social site now better at collecting Diggs under canonical URLs, and tracking them too.

A flaw that prevented Windows Desktop Search from working properly with Googles App Sync for Outlook tool has been fixed.

Oracle wants Linux to be free, but has gone about this goal in the wrong way. Rather than cloning Red Hat, Oracle simply needs to bless Ubuntu.

Ordinary people can be trained to locate objects using tongue clicks instead of sight in just a matter of weeks.
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For those who want another way to keep their Twitter feed fed, Yahoos photo-sharing site now has a direct conduit to the microblogging service.

The $7.7 million sale of The Pirate Bay spells its end as a file sharing maverick.
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America’s first chief information officer Vivek Kundra launched the new spending dashboard on his website Data.gov Tuesday, which should bring transparency to government-funded information technology projects. Kundra, who previously demo’d the platform at Wired’s first-ever business conference on June 15th, announced it again Tuesday at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in Manhattan.

The purpose of the spending dashboard is accountability. Viewers will be able to track the progress of government-funded IT progress.  More than that, they’ll be able to point fingers. There’s a little thumbnail picture of the CIO and contact information next to each project’s page. People who are unsatisfied with the way things are moving can write in.

At this stage, Kundra and his team have thrown the data up, and hoped that America will work out the kinks. “This is version 1.0, we’ve launched it in beta and we’re going to continue to innovate and ad more and more features.” One feature that he emphasized was a feedback loop, so that the site won’t just be about exposure, but also creating a dialogue.

It’s going to need to create one quickly. The first “Uncle Sam Wants You to wiki” task is to do some serious editing.

“You could go through the site and find where it’s broken and find data that isn’t exactly right,” White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips said.

“Far too often people wait two to three years and they try to perfect rather than starting and launching these platforms,” Kundra added.

More than 1,000 journalists, technologists and political practitioners interested in politics and technology attended the two-day conference.

Pictured: Vivek Kundra, June 15, at the Wired Disruptive by Design Conference. Photo by Joseph Moran.

See Also:

• Vivek Kundra, America’s CIO, Details Plan to Let Us Mash Government Data
• And Data for All: Why Obama’s Geeky New CIO Wants to Put All Government Data Online