Category Archives: General

Hot or Not sold for $20 Millions

hotornot.gif

HotOrNot.com was just sold for a reported $20 Millions to Avid Life Media. Well, big congratulations to the founders Jim and James.

As you might know now, I have been a member for a couple of years  now and I loved how was the site so open since the start and the freedom we had as members.

In the beginning the site was all about rating people based on their looks. Then they have implemented a dating method that was different than any other dating service site.

And I have to say that they kept it clean of any pornographic images, by manually moderating the site (Funny it was James parents who took out the bad pictures).

Now with the explosion of the site’s application on FaceBook and so many highly trafficked social networking sites, and after reporting about $5 Million a year revenue from their site, I think that another $20 Million to top that is a great deal.

I know and hope that Jim and James will have another great idea to come up with. But for now, I wish them great luck and hope they don’t spend it all in one place 😉

A new gadget from Sony!

Xperia
A new toy just came out from Sony Ericsson. I won’t call it an iPhone equal, but it’s a great competition to O2’s Ocean or the T-mobile sidekick.
The new product line is called: XPERIA. To start, Sony just launched the XPERIA X1 with a full QWERTY keyboard, 3 inch touchscreen, Wi-Fi and a full 400 MB of storage memory. Also the new phone have a microSD support and was built with a modified windows mobile version (which I like a lot) and so far I heard that it will be available locally sometime this summer and should be able to work on every network in the U.S. and Europe.
Here is a first hand video review from gizmodo.com: Video

Yahoo! Live goes “Live”: A video service

Yahoo uncovers an experimental live video product last night.

A live streaming video service and was testing it with Yahoo! employees. The service (Yahoo! Live) enables anyone with a Web camera to create their own live video stream (similar to the competing sites: BlogTV, Mogulus, UStream.tv and Justin.tv) and broadcast, lifecast or webcast till their hearts are content.

The new service will allow anyone to text message in a chat box anybody who is streaming live, and of course you can embed videos from around the web.

It gets even better, Yahoo has also created an API for developers and has made a preview of the API and its embeddable components, and made a sample app and tutorial available as well.

Visit: http://live.yahoo.com or get the updates from:  Yliveblog

Only problem so far is there is no way to see your past recordings, which would make the service useless for creating an online show, like so many have done on uStream.

I am sure that Yahoo will develop such thing in the near future. I also got some errors when using the site however, over all it looks great and it’s optimized for fast loading.