Friday, May 11, 2007
Ringtone/Mobile Game Retailer Playphone Does Big Round
PlayPhone strikes us as another startup whose core strength is not technology but deal making. The company has done deals on the content side to bring in famous name brands and then gone out to do the distribution deals.
PlayPhone.com drives traffic to its own destination site and powers mobile destinations for SEGA, ABC, Bandai, Lycos and RealNetworks. Regarding a recent Bandai deal, PlayPhone and Bandai expect to sell 100K units of their pre-paid Tamagotchi phone within 12 months of its July launch in the US.
PlayPhone has secured $18.75M in Series C funding led by Scale Venture Partners and joined by existing investors, Cardinal Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures. The startups says the funding will allow PlayPhone to expand into additional international markets this year.
B and C List VCs Sucking Wind
“It’s been almost a decade,” said Eric Doppstadt, director of private equity for the Ford Foundation, which invests in venture capital firms. “I find it shocking that an asset class that has provided so little payback continues to attract so much capital.”
Read - Some Unrest Is Bubbling Beneath the Top Tier (NY Times)
Odd iPod Patent Shows Dual Screens, Rear Touchscreen
The Interweb is all a'flutter about an odd iPod patent filed by Apple that describes a device with screens on both the front and the back of the player. An amalgam of Sprint's UpStage and the iPhone, this patent describes an interface in which a rear touchscreen accepts input and reflects that input on the front screen. Confused yet?
It works like this. Because a Nano-sized device would be too small to allow for a real front touch interface, the rear touchscreen would sense your finger position and show a cursor where your finger or thumb would be on the front screen. This frees up front real estate and could potentially allow for an onscreen keyboard and other goodies. Possible? Yes. Will it happen soon? Probably not.
This is all pie-in-the-sky conjecture, but it does show a potential design for a future Nano-sized iPhone and makes for great Apple rumor-mongering.
Bypass Flickr Ban in Iran, UAE and Saudi Arabia
"We apologize the site [Flickr.com] you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates."
That's the message you're likely to see when trying to access Flickr pictures from certain gulf countries like UAE and Iran because the administration has blocked the photo sharing site from citizens for various cultural and religious reasons.
To unblock Flickr in UAE, Iran, China or any other country, you may try the standard proxy route but there's a much better option developed by an Iranian photographer who's an ardent Flickr fan himself.
Hamed Saber has released an Access Flickr extension for Firefox that will let you circumvent the internet filters of any country where the site is banned.
The Access Flickr extension for Firefox substitutes the HTTP header parameters before sending a request to Flickr and therefore fools the government filters. This extension is only for accessing Flickr.com, it won't work for other sites like YouTube or Orkut.
Download Access Flickr | Hamed Saber on Flickr
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