What you need to know - Monday 8/30/10

Katie Gatto · August 30, 2010 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/1173

Foursquare hits 3 million, Paul Allen sues, Facebook's new offices and Google Pay Per View

It's Monday, and you know what that means: a chance to get your day, and your week started with all of the information you need to make good decisions. Let's look at what happened over the weekend.

Foursquare hits three million users, if the data from the site’s public user registration numbers can be trusted. The three millionth account belongs to a man name Brian S, who hails from St. Louis, Missouri. This represents a serious uptick in users since August 2, when the site had just over two and a half million visitors, and 725,000 in March of this year.



Google is reportedly planning to offer pay-per-view movie rentals. Google is said to be in negotiations with Hollywood productions companies to talk about the possibility of providing pay per view movies with a renewed enthusiasm, to end users in the future. If the rumors prove to be true the the service could go live by the end of the year.

iContact raises 40 million for their email marketing software. iContact, which currently has over 65,000 customers, has raised 40 million dollars in series B funding. The capital was provided by JMI Equity, and raises the companies total funding to 53.3 million dollars.


Paul Allen sues almost everyone. On Friday evening Paul Allen, former founder of both Microsoft and the now shut down Interval Research, is suing a bevy of companies including Google, Apple, Facebook, AOL, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, eBay, and Netflix for alleged patent infringements. Patents listed include: United States Patent No. 6,263,507 issued for an invention entitled "Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data.", United States Patent No. 6,034,652 issued for an invention entitled "Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.",  and United States Patent No. 6,757,682 issued for an invention entitled "Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.". Microsoft is not named in the suit.

Yottaa raises four million. Yottaa, a web analytics and website performance company has raised four million dollas in series A capital. The money was provided by General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and CambridgeWest Ventures.

Cisco is trying to buy Skype. Ideally Cisco would like the deal to occur before Skype enters into its initial public offering, as this would potentially complicate the deal. Right now this is largely an unconfirmed rumor, which was first announced last last night.

Facebook to open two new offices. The Facebook blog announced that they will be opening two new offices, one in Austin, Texas and the other in Hyderabad, India. This move will allow for round the clock support. Facebook is currently hiring online sales and operations teams for both locations. Job listings can be found at www.facebook.com/careers.

Intel to buy Infineon Technologies AG's wireless-chip unit, made for mobile phones, according to The Wall Street Journal. While the division is only one fourth of the company, it would still represent a significant departure from Intel's own mobile chip, Atom as Infineon's chips are used in a variety of smart phones, such as iPhone 4.

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