• YouTube Founders Acquire Yahoo Delicious

    // Gradly // blog, News, Rants & Raves, Social Networks No Responses

    Yahoo has sold its Delicious bookmarking site to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen in a move that likely signals a coming renaissance for the service, which Yahoo had decided no longer fit with its focus on media and communications properties. In a statement, Yahoo says that Hurley and Chen plan to “make the site even easier and more fun to save, share and discover the web’s ‘tastiest’ content.” Hurley, who stepped down as YouTube CEO in October, and Chen, who left YouTube in 2008, say they will run Delicious out of offices a few blocks from where they started YouTube in San Mateo and are “aggressively hiring.” The news come from the guys at moconews and here what they had to say about the acquisition:

    Yahoo, which purchased Delicious five years ago, gave the site a major refresh in spring 2009, but traffic has fallen off over the last year as people have turned to social networks like Twitter and Facebook to share sites they find. In December, Yahoo said that it was looking for a “home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users.”

    Several parties had been said to be interested in Delicious, but there were no hints that Hurley and Chen were among them, and in fact a report in March said that Yahoo had sold Delicious to a rival bookmarking service for $5 million. Yahoo is not disclosing how much Hurley and Chen are paying for it. Yahoo purchased the company for a reported $15 million.

    Here’s the full announcement:

    San Francisco, CA., – April 27, 2011 – Delicious.com, the leading social bookmarking service, has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.  As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. Their vision for Delicious is to continue to provide the same great service users love and to make the site even easier and more fun to save, share, and discover the web’s “tastiest” content. Delicious will become part of AVOS, a new Internet company.

    “We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” said Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.”

    “We spoke with numerous parties interested in acquiring the site, and chose Chad and Steve based on their passion and unique vision for Delicious,” said John Matheny, SVP of Communications and Communities at Yahoo!.

    The YouTube founders plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload. “We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” said Chen.

    Going back to their roots, Hurley and Chen located Delicious in downtown San Mateo, California, blocks away from where they started YouTube. They’re aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web.

  • White iPhone 4 Officially to Launch Tomorrow

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, Gadgets, iPhone, News No Responses

    Apple has just released a press release confirming the April 28 launch for its highly anticipated white iPhone 4. The device will be available from Apple’s online and retail stores, AT&T and Verizon Wireless stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers.

    “The white iPhone 4 has finally arrived and it’s beautiful,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “We appreciate everyone who has waited patiently while we’ve worked to get every detail right.”

    iPhone 4 is the most innovative phone in the world, featuring Apple’s stunning Retina™ display, the highest resolution display ever built into a phone resulting in super crisp text, images and video, and FaceTime®, which makes video calling a reality.

  • Apple Officially Addresses Location Data Controversy

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, Conspiracies, iPhone, News, Rants & Raves, Scandal 1 Response

    Apple officially acknowledged the growing controversy over the logging of location data on the iPhone and iPad. The document comes in a Q&A format. In it, Apple addresses some common concerns and explicitly states that they are not tracking the location of your iPhone/iPad, has never done so, and has no plans to do so.

    Why is my iPhone logging my location?

    The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.

    Apple states that all data that is transmitted to Apple is anonymous and encrypted and can not be tied to the identity of the user. They also note that findings that the database continues to grow despite Location services being off as a bug that will soon be addressed.

    Apple is planning on releasing a free iOS update in the next few weeks that performs the following:

    • Reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
    • Ceases backing up this cache, and
    • Deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

    [via: macrumors]

  • Google Knows Where You’ve been Using Your Smartphone

    // Gradly // blog, google, Humor, Infographic, News No Responses

    Here are some of the key findings from “The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users,” a study from Google and conducted by Ipsos OTX, an independent market research firm, among 5,013 US adult smartphone Internet users at the end of 2010:

    71% of smartphone users search because of an ad they’ve seen either online or offline; 82% of smartphone users notice mobile ads, 74% of smartphone shoppers make a purchase as a result of using their smartphones to help with shopping, and 88% of those who look for local information on their smartphones take action within a day.

    Google commissioned this research with the objectives to better understand how smartphones are used in consumers’ daily lives and how smartphones have influenced the ways consumers search, shop and respond to mobile advertising. Check out the video below: