We haven’t heard all that much from Siri, the venture-backed startup that is working on virtual assistant applications for smartphones.

Still well below most people’s radar, the company raised $24 million in venture capital and recently released its first app for the iPhone after nearly a year of development.

But that doesn’t mean the startup has a lack of ambition: they’ve just hired Gummi Hafsteinsson, who has led several of Google’s most successful mobile product initiatives as Senior Product Manager for the past 5 years, as their new VP of Product. Hafsteinsson originally joined Google’s mobile group in July 2005 and first managed the Google Maps for Mobile product.

More recently, he led development of Google’s voice-powered search app for all the major mobile platforms – iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Symbian. He reported directly to Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of Engineering.

Prior to joining Google, Gummi founded and ran a company called Dimon Software that produced mobile enterprise connectivity software designed to enable enterprises to access corporate IT systems from any mobile device.

His experience in developing scalable applications for multiple platforms tells us Siri is working on making its virtual personal assistant product cross-platform. Its proposition was compelling enough to bring home the award for most innovative Web service at the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, by the way.

In other news, Siri is now available for iPod touch devices, integrated Twitter into the service last week and is closing in on a quarter million early users.

(Photo by Peter DaSilva for the New York Times)

CrunchBase InformationSiriInformation provided by CrunchBase

Le géant minier anglo-australien Rio Tinto a signé vendredi un accord avec le géant public chinois de l'aluminium Aluminum Corporation of China (Chinalco) pour développer le gisement de fer du Simandou, en Guinée. Cet accord de joint-venture couvre...

Geoffrey A. Fowler / Digits:
Facebook Co-Founder Hughes Launches Philanthropic Venture Jumo  —  Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook and director of online organizing for Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, unveiled his new project on Thursday: a Web site for charitable organizations.

More often than not, an entrepreneur with a great idea looking for funding will pitch his or her startup dozens, if not hundreds of times to potential investors. There is an endless amount of resources out there for entrepreneurs looking to learn the best practices for their pitch, including what to include in their decks, how long to speak, and what pitfalls to avoid. By the time an entrepreneur actually gets funding, they've probably mastered their pitch to a point where they could recite it in their sleep and provide advice of their own to newcomers. The problem with this is they can get stuck in their pitch mentality and it can creep into areas of their business that need the ole straight talk express.

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Michael Hirshland of Polaris Venture Partners, who blogs under the name VCMike, wrote today about a problem he often sees when in board meetings with startups. The issue is that entrepreneurs are so used to speaking a certain way to VCs that they sometimes have a pitch-like tone that gets in the way of board room progress. As Hirshland points out, don't try to beat around the bush when it comes to bad news.

"VCs hear bad news all the time -- it is part of the startup process and part of the VC job description," says Hirshland. "Any VC worth his or her salt should respond to bad news, provided it is shared in a timely fashion, by helping the entrepreneur figure out the best way to respond rather than dwelling on what went wrong."

He advises CEOs to stear clear of attempts to placate their board members by spouting off excuses for whatever their bad news is, or by claiming that they are already fixing the problem in hopes of avoiding any impending wrath. From what Hirshland says, board members are not schoolmasters there to punish you and whip you into shape; they are there to help, so don't isolate yourself, he says. If you speak openly and honestly about your issues with your board, chances are you will preserve your most valued asset as an entrepreneur and as a startup: credibility.

"Early stage ventures are filled with ambiguity. Entrepreneurs and their investors need to make quick decisions based on information that is far from complete," says Hirshland. "This necessitates relying to a very substantial degree on the entrepreneurs' interpretation of the situation and prospects."

In other words, you are the eyes and ears for your board, and if you aren't being open and honest with them, bad things will happen. Worst of all, speaking with fluff and rounding out the rough edges of your company will destroy your credibility, which Hirshland calls "toxic" to your partnership and "not a happy place for either the entrepreneur or the investor."

As we mentioned earlier this week, credibility is your best friend when trying to get funded, so make sure you carry it with you and preserve it in your board meetings and into your company's future. Save the pitching for future rounds of fundraising, and when it comes to your board members, don't try to win them over, simply treat them like equal members of your team.

Discuss

Blippy is always fun to write about because so many people are enraged by its very existence. But all that rage apparently hasn’t stopped the company from getting lots of investor attention. In addition to landing a bevy of top tier angels and venture capitalists in their first round of financing, we’ve now heard that Blippy is preparing to close on a new round.

August Capital partner David Hornik is leading the round. And the valuation is “totally absurd” says one source. Another puts it at $50 million, although that may be a little on the high side. Regardless, that’s not bad for a site which only launched publicly two months ago. Update: Yet another source says “high 30s” on valuation, and we think that’s about right.

Blippy wouldn’t comment on this story. I reached David Hornik (he seemed to regret having answered the phone). All that he’d say is that he loves Blippy, but he would neither confirm nor deny an investment.

If you’re not already familiar with it, Blippy is a Twitter-like service where users post everything they purchase. You can hook up your credit cards and various online services (Amazon, iTunes, Zappos, etc.), and details about everything you buy are posted. You can see my account here – I’ve linked it to my iTunes. See our Blippy launch post for more details.

Lots of people love posting and discussing their purchases on Blippy. But lots of other people just hate the idea of the service as an insane invasion of privacy (albeit one that people voluntarily enter into). Read the comments on any of our Blippy posts to see examples of that indignation.

Putting all that aside, though, if enough people start using Blippy they are going to be able to monetize the heck out of it. Advertisers will see exactly what users are buying and be able to target them with ridiculous precision. In fact, the data is so deep and rich that Amazon is already threatened by the young startup.

CrunchBase InformationBlippyAugust CapitalDavid HornikInformation provided by CrunchBase

Google is looking to leverage its foothold in the online video realm by partnering with Sony on a new television service to be called Google TV. The new service will be an Android-based solution that will hook into online video repositories like YouTube and Hulu and serve up online content either through a set-top box or directly by embedding the software into your flashy new Sony HDTV. With Android at its core and Chrome as the browser, the service will provide access to online websites such as Twitter and Picasa and will open up a new arena for television-based application development. Google and Sony have also reached out to Logitech who will be developing a line of peripherals to control your new Google TV. Last but not least, a fourth heavy hitter known as Intel may also be joining this venture as the new TV media platform will reportedly run on the Intel Atom chipset. More than just a concept, the set-top box is reportedly at an advanced stage of development and is being tested by Dish Network. With four major players involved with this new Google TV service, should Roku, Boxee, and everyone else be a bit nervous?

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Miami, Florida-based Labotec has landed a round of funding from Kima Ventures, a European early-stage investment fund founded by entrepreneurs and angel investors Jeremie Berrebi (Zlio, Net2One) and Square backer Xavier Niel (Free, Iliad).

The VC firm thus joins Kipost and FS Ventures as investors of the crowd-sourced mobile app development venture. The size of the round remains undisclosed, but we hear the amount of financing totaled just south of a seven-figure sum, so we’ll peg it at in between $800,000 and $999,999.

Labotec offers a relatively unique way of mobile app publishing, based on crowd-sourcing ideas from third parties. Basically, people who have ideas for mobile applications on any of the major platforms but lack the time, development skills or resources to actually build them can submit their ideas through the Labotec website.

The ideas are subsequently evaluated by Labotec, and if one gets thumbs up from a committee of unnamed field experts associated with the company, Labotec funds the entire development, distribution and marketing of the app. The IP is co-owned by whoever submitted the idea – targeted are carriers and handset manufacturers – and Labotec.

The ‘Inspirer’ (the person or organization that brought forward the idea for the app) doesn’t pay a cent, but if the app ends up generating revenue, the first $25,000 that it makes goes to Labotec – no matter how long it took to get to that point. After that, the Inspirer gets 50% of any revenue that may follow. Labotec notes that they’re still testing this model and that it is subject to change in the future.

Labotec says that it has received hundreds of new project ideas from 27 countries since its inception in May 2009. A total of 3 applications out of those ideas have launched (iSOS for Android, iMove2Music and FakeSMS for iPhone) and 20 are slated for release by the end of this year – which basically means a lot of the submitted ideas are junk.

The company says it plans to use part of the just-raised capital to hire 10 more developers of mobile apps for platforms such as iPhone, Android, iPad and BlackBerry.

CrunchBase InformationLabotecInformation provided by CrunchBase

You can learn all sorts of interesting tidbits from legal documents. For instance, in one of the legal briefs unsealed today in the YouTube-Viacom dispute, such as the amount of money YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley made from the $1.65 billion sale of the company to Google in 2006. His take: $334 million (based on the November, 13, 2006 closing price of Google’s stock). In other words, the young CEO owned about 20 percent of YouTube at the time of the sale.

YouTube’s other co-founder Steve Chen’s stake was worth $301 million at the time of the sale, and the third co-founder Jawed Karim walked away with $66 million. Even YouTube interface designer Christina Brodbeck “received Google shares worth $9.09 million.”

The VCs did even better. Sequoia Capital, YouTube’s venture backer, turned a $9 million investment into $516 million (or about 31 percent of the total). And Artis Capital turned a $3 million investment into $85 million.

Another notable stat from the legal docs: in the past five years, more than 500 million videos have been uploaded to YouTube overall.

CrunchBase InformationChad HurleySteve ChenJawed KarimSequoia CapitalInformation provided by CrunchBase

Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia recently visited EA to check in on the progress of the company's upcoming, cutscene-driven MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic. He reported that "earnings are somewhat depressed" due to the development costs for the game, but EA management is hopeful that they'll recoup this cash when the title brings in over two million subscribers. He added that, at the very least, the game needs over one million players in order for EA to break even.

We think they might be setting the bar a little too high for themselves. Why not make the monthly subscription fee cost $20,000, and then just hope that 500 outrageously wealthy, rabid Star Wars fans hop on board? There have got to be at least 500 successful venture capitalists out there who own a baker's dozen of collectible Millennium Falcon models.

EA expecting two million subscribers for Star Wars: The Old Republic originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia recently visited EA to check in on the progress of the company's upcoming, cutscene-driven MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic. He reported that "earnings are somewhat depressed" due to the development costs for the game, but EA management is hopeful that they'll recoup this cash when the title brings in over two million subscribers. He added that, at the very least, the game needs over one million players in order for EA to break even.

We think they might be setting the bar a little too high for themselves. Why not make the monthly subscription fee cost $20,000, and then just hope that 500 outrageously wealthy, rabid Star Wars fans hop on board? There have got to be at least 500 successful venture capitalists out there who own a baker's dozen of collectible Millennium Falcon models.

EA expecting two million subscribers for Star Wars: The Old Republic originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chris Hughes, who co-founded what became one of the world’s largest social networks and then just a few years later orchestrated a social-media campaign that helped put Barack Obama to the White House, has launched a new, non-profit startup that he says will create an “online platform to connect individuals and organizations working to change the world.” He launched the new entity, called Jumo, not on Facebook but through a post on his Tumblr blog and on Twitter. He didn’t provide many details about the venture or what it intends to build, but said:

To do this well, I’m firmly of the mind that we have to foster relationships between everyday people and issues and organizations that are personally relevant to them. It’s now possible to provide each person with information and opportunities for meaningful action tailored specifically to who they are. If Jumo can make sure that happens and offer opportunities for meaningful engagement alongside it, I think we can speed the pace of global change.

Hughes told The Huffington Post in a phone interview that he was looking for something to do after the Obama campaign ended, and knew that “I wanted to do something at the nexus of what I call global development and technology.” By global development, he said he meant a “broad umbrella including everything from health care and education to agriculture. He said he spent the past year “traveling and talking to people — researching, studying, learning everything I could in the space.” Jumo is opening an office in Soho next week, Hughes said on his blog, and is also looking to hire a developer, a design director and an “outreach director” who it says will require a “wide-ranging, nearly unparalleled command of the global development field and the ability to see through ideological constraints fairly and analytically.”

To some extent Jumo — whose name means “together in concert” in a West African language called Yoruba — may wind up competing with Hughes’ former company once it launches. Not only do many charitable groups use Facebook pages to gather support for causes, but former Facebook president Sean Parker has a Facebook application called Causes that has attracted millions of users. There are also several other Web-based platforms that are trying to connect people interested in global development, including Ushahidi, which pulls together information to help in crisis situations such as the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti.

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Hughes left Facebook, which he co-founded with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and fellow classmates Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin, in 2007 to lead the social-media efforts for the Obama campaign, including helping to develop My.BarackObama.com, and was the subject of a number of flattering profiles in mainstream media outlets such as Fast Company magazine — which called him a “boy wonder” — and the Wall Street Journal. After the campaign ended he became entrepreneur in residence at General Capital Partners in Cambridge. It’s not clear whether General Capital has funded Jumo or not — a spokesperson said it is “a non-profit venture and we’re raising funds from both foundations and individuals.” Hughes told Fast Company he is looking to raise about $2.5 million.

Hughes said in an email sent to friends that he believes Jumo can “leverage the participatory web to foster long-term engagement with the issues and organizations that are relevant to each individual. Jumo has the potential to unlock a great deal of time, skills, and financial resources previously unavailable to organizations around the world.” After the “soft launch” of the startup, Hughes got a number of congratulations on Twitter, including one from Charlie O’Donnell of First Round Capital in New York, who said that he was “excited @chrishughes is back in the making the world a better place business.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Steve Rhodes

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/online_education_and_blogging

Joshua Kim writes:

The best preparation I received for blogging was teaching online. One of the most important elements for running a successful online course involves presence. The instructor must be “present” in the course discussion boards and blogs. Teaching online gave me tons of practice in writing rapid, hopefully thought provoking, discussion and blog posts around the curriculum and the student’s work. Much has been written about how teaching online can improve on-ground teaching. I’d add comfort with blogging to the benefits online learning.

Is the ability to quickly produce prose that (at least sometimes) may interest a reader the sort of skill that we want to cultivate in our students? The importance of rapid, persuasive writing is growing as blogs and other social media displace other forms of communication. We all need to learn to make our case, to persuade, to make arguments based on evidence – and to do so in a limited attention economy. For all of us, both writes and readers, time is our scarcest commodity.

Perhaps participating in online courses provides students the same practice with rapid and persuasive writing as teaching an online course. The same behaviors that make for a good online instructor, namely the willingness to be active and engaged with the asynchronous communication tools, are also those behaviors of a successful online student. An online course is all about collaboration and interaction. The best students post persuasively, briefly, and often.

I would venture to say the best preparation I received for online teaching is blogging! Quick posts sharing links and commentary – something bibliobloggers have long been doing – translate perfectly to the way I interact with my online and hybrid classes. I also think the blogging activities have helped my students with their writing – just afeeling, no evidence yet, but it might be a good thing to study.

Ad serving technology firm Videoplaza announced today that it has raised a €3.5 million ($5 million) financing round led by Nordic venture capital firms Creandum and Northzone. The company, which focuses on helping major media companies in Europe to monetize content on their web sites with video ads, has developed a platform called Monetizer, enabling publishers to manage, track, and set rules around how ads are served across different media properties.

Videoplaza already claims customers in eight European countries, having just brought on a publisher in Russia to expand into that market. Its business is particularly strong in the Nordic states, where the company serves ads for five of the top eight broadcasters, CEO Sorosh Tavakoli said in a phone interview. It also has a presence in the U.K. and France, and is looking to expand further into Western Europe, including Germany, Spain and Italy.

Videoplaza is allowing its customers to set rules for different video properties so that they can serve the maximum number of ads without turning users off. “We help their in-house sales staff sell more effectively,” Tavakoli said. “We do that by helping publishers to achieve a balance between the user experience and the value that their advertisers get, so that they can show as many ads as possible and charge as much as possible for every ad.”

Videoplaza, which was founded about two and a half years ago in Sweden, now has about 20 employees, with its headquarters and R&D center in Stockholm and additional sales offices in London and Paris. The latest funding comes on top of a €420,000 ($667,802) round of financing from Creandum and angel investors that Videoplaza raised in mid-2008. With the latest round, Tavakoli says the company expects to double its headcount by the end of the year, adding more sales people throughout Europe and continuing to invest in its ad serving technology.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: (subscription required)

Are Sponsored Apps the Key for Traditional Media in Mobile?

Google looks set to venture into the living room with Google TV, an Android-based set-top box capable of delivering the best of the Web (and online video) to your television set. And it’s partnered with Sony and Intel to make Google TV happen.

Google

Google is, without a shadow of a doubt, the biggest name on the Internet right now. The search giant controls the search sector, is making gains with its Chrome Web browser, has Maps, Street View, and all those other cool apps, and, of course, owns YouTube.

Google has also made the move to smartphones with its Android operating system. But it’s yet to venture into the living room, at least until now.

Google Living Room

There have been rumors of Google attempting to enter the living room by way of a set-top box for a while now, but nothing was really known about the efforts, and whether they would actually amount to anything.

But the New York Times is now reporting that Google TV is its name, it’s very real, and Google already has partners lined up.

Google TV

Google, Intel, and Sony are alleged to be jointly developing the Google TV platform. Google TV would take the form of both hardware (set-top boxes) and software (built into TVs) and bring Google right into the living room.

Google TV would be based on the Android operating system and be open to software developers. The intention being to create a similar buzz and number of applications as experienced by the Apple App Store and other smartphone app platforms.

Google TV would allow users to browse and search the Web, watch online video via Web-based apps including YouTube and Hulu (although Boxee’s efforts to do the same thing have been shuttered), and play downloadable games.

Google isn’t doing this for nothing: it would allow the tech giant to place ads on the system and put it at the forefront of the move to connected TV platforms, of which there are an increasing number.

Conclusions

Google has enough clout to not only make this happen but to sweep away all the other connected TV platforms already out there or emerging from development. But it cannot afford any mistakes on this score, and there’s still no real evidence that people want these platforms in any great number.

More details, and an official announcement from Google and/or its partners are definitely needed before I’ll be getting too excited.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Sprint is making the bold first move into 4G smartphone market next week, a Wall Street Journal report said today, when the company is expected to show off the WiMAX-enabled HTC Supersonic.

The Supersonic has been a pretty big blip on the Android community's radar for several months, after a whole list of HTC device names was uncovered in a leaked Sense UI ROM last December. Since that time, a few more details have been discovered, and a few blurry spy camera shots and renders have surfaced; but as far as official specs go, there are none. It looks to have the same massive 4.3" screen that the HD2 has, run on the Android platform, and possibly contain a Snapdragon processor.

Sprint is the only major mobile network operator with a higher-speed "4G" network immediately available to consumers, but it is currently only accessible through USB dongles and portable hotspots like the Sierra Wireless Overdrive, and these are still only available in about 10 markets nationwide.

There are nearly 30 WiMAX networks active in the U.S. now under the Clear brand (a joint venture of Sprint and Clearwire,) and this year Clearwire expects to complete 80 more cities including major markets Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Seattle and Washington D.C.

Since Betanews is headquartered in Baltimore, we've been using Sprint's WiMAX network since it first launched in 2008. I ran a quick test this morning to see how well the WiMAX connection holds up against my smartphones' 3G connections, and the performance was actually only marginally better.

Using the FCC's Ookla network tester three times for each network, Sprint 4G averaged 5.35Mbps/.30Mbps with 130ms latency, Verizon 3G averaged 1.61Mbps/.65Mbps with 122ms latency, and T-Mobile 3G averaged .5Mbps/.45Mbps with 215ms latency. Unfortunately, I didn't have a device handy to test AT&T's speeds in the area this morning.

We will be meeting with both Sprint and HTC at CTIA next week and will be able to give you a crystal clear look at the device if it does, in fact, show up.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010