What you need to know - Monday 10/25/2010
Groupon and eBay ink deal; Q2 venture capital funding down; Skype and Nimbuzz part ways
Skype and Nimbuzz end their partnership. Nimbuzz allowed users to share instant messages and Skye-to-Skype on mobile devices. The change will take effect on October 30th.
The Wi-Fi Alliance announced a new set of specs, called Wi-fi direct. The service is a peer-to-peer sharing standard for Wi-fi enabled devices. The alliance expects it to be in effect within the next year.
Amazon announced book lending on the Kindle. The new feature will allow users to lend a book to a friend, for a period of 14 days. During that time the book is unreadable by the lender.
Groupon and eBay announced a deal. This will allow, not only for updated daily deals, but also earning five percent eBay Bucks when a a user buys Groupon deals from the eBay site.
Dow Jones released its third quarter venture capital numbers. It showed that 662 companies raised $5.4 billion. This is down significantly from last quarter where, 740 companies raised $7.7 billion.
Google is requesting that YouTubeSocial hand over their domain, as part of a trademark protection push. Google is also demanding that the company re-brand. YouTubeSocial was already in acquisition talks with an, as yet unnamed, major media company.
Captchas are now to get video ads. The common security feature on many sites, will now integrate advertising, via a program called NuCaptcha Engage.
Blizzard announced new games at Blizzcon, over the weekend. Blizzard is best know as the makers of World of Warcraft, a fantasy based MMORPG.
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Nimbuzz
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Nimbuzz is the free call and messaging app for the connected generation.
Nimbuzz combines the powers of the Internet and mobile communications into one, and lets you meet, share and connect with family and friends on any mobile device.
At the heart of Nimbuzz is the live Contact list – an always-on, hyper-connected, dynamic address book, enhanced with “real-time-presence” showing at a glance who’s online, offline, busy or away, their status messages, avatar pictures and social community activity. From here, users launch free and cheap calls between each other, IM chat sessions, picture sending, chat-room sessions, location based services and various other communication & interactive features.
Nimbuzz users enjoy the freedom of communicating with friends between any internet enabled device, from mobile to mobile, mobile to PC/Mac and vice versa, harnessing the power of the Internet (Wi-Fi, 3G, 2G, GPRS)
With its mobile, Web, Wap and desktop clients, Nimbuzz is available on thousands of the worlds’ most popular devices across all major platforms – Symbian, iPhone, iPod touch, Windows Mobile, Android, BlackBerry, J2ME, as well as Windows and Mac desktop computers.
Social networks & communities supported by Nimbuzz include Skype®, Facebook®, Windows Live Messenger (MSN®), GoogleTalkTM, Twitter, Yahoo!TM, AIM®, MySpace, ICQ®, GaduGadu, Hyves, StudiVZ, Giovani and others.