Finance Matters

Archive for September 3rd, 2010

Google settles Google Buzz privacy lawsuit for $8.5 million. 7 plaintiffs get $2,500 each. Lawyers $2.5 million — Danny Sullivan

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NASA has posted beautiful photos of Hurricane Earl over the North Atlantic. This pretty storm monster is about to ruin your Labor Day weekend.  See more amazing photos of the storm >

See more amazing photos of the storm >

30 Aug. 2010 –– Photographed by an Expedition 24 crew member on the International Space Station, this is an oblique view of the eye (center) of Hurricane Earl (at this time a category 4 but later downgraded to a category 3), centered just north of the Virgin Islands near 19.3 north latitude and 64.7 west longitude packing 115-kilometer winds. The photo was taken with a digital still camera using a 50mm lens.

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Hope everybody knows we’re keeping score. Here’s how start-ups are looking heading into the September stretch run:

Booyah, the mobile gaming company behind the extremely successful location-aware MyTown, launched a new iPhone app called InCrowd leveraging Facebook Places. NEW RANK: #88

Things just keep getting worse for Digg. Its users are still in revolt over its new design, its site has been unreliable, it is getting called out by a former employee, and it just plain isn’t as big a deal as it used to be. NEW RANK: #89

Fusion Garage, maker of the Joojoo, suffered a major set back in its lawsuit with Michael Arrington and TechCrunch. And, to top it all of, it is still Fusion Garage, maker of the Joojoo. NEW RANK: #1,732

New York City education technology startup Knewton won the prestigious Technology Pioneers award from the World Economic Forum. So did Foursquare, SecondMarket, Scribd, OpenDNS, and a handful of other startups, but we can’t dedicate this whole list to Davos, so Knewton it is. NEW RANK: #55

Startup-that-isn’t-a-bank-but-provides-banking-services BankSimple raised a series A from a top notch set of investors, and strikes us as a neat idea. NEW RANK: #208

 

Foursquare competitor Loopt landed the best check-in offer we’ve ever heard of: 2-for-1 plane tickets to Mexico. The deal helped Virgin America to its fifth-biggest day in sales ever. NEW RANK: #62

 

Twitter’s authentication update broke a number of third-party apps. It sent out its announcement two days too late, without realizing what day it was. It also announced that it has registered 145 million accounts, so poor communication skills don’t seem to be a dealbreaker. NEW RANK: #8

WiThings, the French startup behind the scale that lets you periodically tweet out your weight, raised $3.8 million, which makes that success of Blippy sound expected and completely undepressing. NEW RANK: #308

 

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The world of web video is quickly evolving, and live video sites are benefiting. New data from comScore shows minutes spent on live streaming sites like UStream, Justin.tv, and Livestream are up 600% on a year over year basis.

In July users spent 1.5 billion minutes watching videos on those sites. It’s still much smaller than recorded web video. YouTube alone served up well over 40 billion minutes worth of video in July. But, time spent watching YouTube only grew 68%.

This is potentially bad news for the cable companies. The more people get comfortable watching streams on the web, the less they need cable. Obviously, the fare offered up on these sites isn’t on par with what you get on premium stations, but if they can ever hit on a winning formula for a show or channel, people will be ready to tune in.

Follow the Chart Of The Day on Twitter: @chartoftheday

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See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: 1 In 5 YouTube Users Uploads A Video Each Month
• CHART OF THE DAY: The Rise And Fall Of Apple’s iPod
• CHART OF THE DAY: The Death Of AOL Instant Messenger

The US economy shed another 54,000 jobs in August, the third month in a row that jobs have been lost, Labor Department figures have shown.