SEO Werkt!

The social network for reading, sharing, and recommending books now boasts 10 million members, who have collectively shelved more than 360 million books since the site launched in January 2007. Goodreads announced the milestone on August 13, 2012 in a post on the company blog.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Some consolidation up in the clouds: Colt Technology Services has bought ThinkGrid, an enterprise cloud startup that has created a platform for channel partners and small and medium businesses for them in turn to become cloud service providers.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it looks like it was a decent one for ThinkGrid’s investors: a spokesperson for Runa Capital, a VC backer of ThinkGrid, tells TechCrunch that it has made back 4.5 times what it invested in the company in October 2011 (that investment itself was for an undisclosed amount). The RNS statement for the deal notes that Fidelity Telecom (the non-trading name for ThinkGrid) had unaudited gross assets of £600,000, although this “does not reflect the transactional value of the acquisition,” a Colt spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The deal underscores the potential strength of the cloud and managed services business specifically in the area of SMBs, but also how Colt needs to focus more on that area to try to capitalize on it. Colt says this market is set to grow “15% annually during the coming years.” But in its last earnings statement, Colt also noted that “economic headwinds” were leading to lots of churn in data and voice services among its small business customers.

For the last six months ended June 30, Colt noted that its enterprise services revenues declined by €3.2m (1.1%) to €298.8m, “with declines in legacy Data and Voice services, particularly more commoditised offerings to smaller enterprise customers.” That was in turn offset by strong growth in Managed Service revenue, it said.

Services covered by the ThinkGrid platform include hosted virtual desktops, email, file sharing, cloud backup and voice services. ThinkGrid’s partner ecosystem already has 300 partners delivering public, private and hybrid cloud services and solutions for over 35,000 users. The deal will help ThinkGrid grow its business further. Publicly-traded Colt operates some 20 data centers and a business network across 22 countries in Europe, and has been around since 1992.

UK-based Colt has bought ThinkGrid to strengthen not only its cloud-services portfolio but the professional services it offers around it, specifically in the area of small and medium businesses.

Colt says ThinkGrid’s training programme, which helps develop resellers’ cloud capabilities, will be rolled out to Colt’s indirect sales team and channel partners. Colt says the deal will add 200 resellers and software vendors to its network in the UK.

“The acquisition of ThinkGrid further strengthens our position with the addition of a complementary range of cloud-based services,” noted François Eloy, EVP at Colt, in a statement announcing the deal. “We also gain a reseller-oriented management platform and portal which will reduce our time to market across our European markets. This acquisition allows us to extend our channel community to include skilled managed services resellers who will help us to accelerate our growth.”

Since The Oatmeal draws comics like 5 Ways To Fight A Crack Whore, the kids down in Mountain View figured they could play a joke on him.

This summer the artist wrote that Google+comment threads sound like *crickets*, poking fun at the social network’s lack of engagement. He also criticized not being able to “set up a fancy profile URL so I don’t have to link people to http://plus.google.com/blergasdf1234 thimbleturdorgasm99meatpoopypoop xv9donkeypie ” – a made-up, ridiculously long string of random characters.

Yep, you saw a “turd orgasm 99 meat poopy poop” in there. But hell hath no fury like an engineer scorned.

In retaliation, the Google+ team didn’t cite its user growth stats or give an excuse for why there are no custom profile URLs. Oh, no, that wouldn’t be nearly witty enough for the search giant’s brainiacs.

Instead, they just redirected http://plus.google.com/blergasdf1234thimbleturdorgasm99meatpoopypoopxv9donkeypie back to The Oatmeal author Matthew Inman’s Google+ profile “https://plus.google.com/100193529331792590881/posts“ . Congrats, Matt, you’ve now got “donkey pie” at the end of your own special Google+ vanity URL.

Maybe his comment threads won’t be such a ghost town now that anyone who types in the joke URL will be able to put the comedian in their Circles.

The best part might be that somewhere in the Google+ code is a little comment to future engineers about the redirect, noting “Don’t take this out, we’re fucking with The Oatmeal.”

Check out TechCrunch’s coverage of how The Oatmeal earned a bunch of money for charity by telling a trademark troll’s mom to go have sex with bears.

There’s never a dull day in the world of iPhone component rumors.

The latest leak comes from 9to5Mac, which has published what it says is the battery for Apple’s next iPhone. While it’s physically identical to the current iPhone battery, it does feature a 1440 mAh battery, a slight bump up from the 1430 mAh batteries currently in use.

But there’s one problem if this battery turns out being legit: It’s not nearly big enough.

Right now, an LTE-ready iPhone 5 is basically a sure thing, which means that this battery can’t possibly belong to it. LTE, the next-generation of high-speed network connectivity, is a notorious battery hog, which is why manufacturers have been forced to give LTE phones hefty batteries to compensate.

For example, consider recent LTE phones like the HTC EVO 4G LTE and Droid Razr Maxx, which feature 2,000 mAh and 3,300 mAh batteries, respectively. In order for the next iPhone to offer any semblance of respectable battery life, it’s going to have to feature a battery with a similar capacity.

While there is a slight chance that the iPhone 5 will be optimized for better power consumption, it’s going to be tough for even Apple to tame the battery-draining beast that is LTE.

So, there are two possibilities: Either we will see a much more sizable battery in the next iPhone, or Apple is going to have to bundle Mophie battery cases with every device. Guess which one is more likely.

Filed under: mobile

Renren’s stock has slipped after a mixed Q2 earnings report earlier this week, where net revenues were $44.8 million, up 47.5% year over year, but advertising revenues decreased and analysts are worried that the social network may be losing its potential as the “Facebook of China”. The stock has dropped around 25% over the last few months and the big question is whether nor not now is the time to buy cheap. I look at what some analysts are saying below.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It’s only August, but I’m ready to give out my award for the best infographic graphic of the year. It’s the header from the Umpf’s examination of one of life’s great mysteries: Is Google+ really popular or is it a ghost town?

Google is cagey about releasing stats on Google+ and when they do, it’s often hard to distinguish general Google users from those actually on the social network. The current estimate is 170 million Google+ accounts, which would make it the second most popular social network after Facebook. But, as we all know, having a lot of signups does not an active community make. For marketers, it’s interaction that counts, so Umpf counted it.

They did this by cataloging 100 articles from well-known websites covering news, entertainment, tech, and business. Then they used those handy-dandy share counters to add up the number of shares per social media network. Now, before you say hey, it’s only 100 data points and that’s not enough – it is enough. It’s a random sampling that is as likely to give you the full picture as well as 10 times that amount of data.

Here’s what they found:

For every 100 million users, the following number were likely to share an online story:

Twitter, 197.3 people were likely to share an online story
Facebook, 41.8 people were likely to share an online story
LinkedIn, 15.2 people were likely to share an online story
Google+, 6.0 people were likely to share an online story

Ouch! Not only is Google+ on the bottom, it’s been stomped on by Twitter! It’s Godzilla vs Tokyo all over again. Is anyone actually surprised? The sad thing is, I keep throwing Google+ a bone when I share tech or nerdy articles. They seem so at home there, but it’s probably a wasted click. Business and Technology are the two areas with the highest share proportion (see bottom of infographic) and still they don’t even crack the 2% mark.

So there you have it. Google+ is officially a ghost town. The structures are there, the tumbleweeds roll through now and then, but the human beings have done got gone.

Maybe Google can turn it into a tourist trap. And on the left you see the last posts of Kermit the Frog. Oh, those were the days.

There’s no end in sight for T-Mobile’s subscriber drain. After losing 510,000 contracted subscribers in the first quarter of 2012, T-Mobile announced this morning that it has lost 557,000 in its second quarter.

The carrier reported profits of $207 million (down from $212 million last year) on $4.9 billion in revenue (down 3.3 percent from last year). Still, T-Mobile reports that its profitability has improved, with EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) up 18.6 percent from last year.

T-Mobile added 227,000 prepaid subscribers — likely due to its low-cost phones and prepaid plans . But it’s worth noting that prepaid customers are far less valuable to carriers, since they’re not tied to contracts. Average revenue per user fell 4.3 percent across prepaid and contract customers (mostly due to the rise of prepaid users).

The carrier is pushing forward with its $4 billion plan to build out a LTE 4G network next year, but it’s going to have to work doubletime to attract subscribers after losing them in droves. T-Mobile is currently the only major U.S. carrier not offering the iPhone, but that could change next year once it rolls out LTE. I find it hard to imagine that T-Mobile customers will be patient enough to wait for that though.

Even T-Mobile’s former CEO Philipp Hum didn’t have enough faith in the carrier to stick around (he’s now heading up Vodafone’s European operations). T-Mobile COO Jim Allings is currently serving as interim CEO, but the company will need to find some strong leadership soon if it’s to survive the next few years.

Since this time last year, T-Mobile’s contracted subscriber numbers fell 9 percent from 23.4 million to 21.3 million, while prepaid customers jumped 22 percent to 5.3 million. Overall, T-Mobile had 33.2 million customers at the end of the quarter, down slightly from the 33.4 million customers last year.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

No matter how many product updates, Hangout innovations or sharing tweaks that Google lays on to its new Google+ social network, detractors still push ahead claiming you can’t put lipstick on a pig, or in this case, you can’t hide a ghost town with a population sign. But is Google+ really a ghost town? A new infographic from umpf.co.uk attempts to figure out the truth.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I come across these companies that you might not think are super fascinating. But it is often through these technical providers that you get a sense for the bigger market, how business models are changing and the new role of data as an indicator of a cloud’s overall health.

A case in point is SevOne. The company uses P2P networking and big data clusters to help companies do real-time management of their massive infrastructures. Today they announced an update to their appliance.

Legacy providers are often ill fitted to monitoring big data, thousands of mobile and the new massive loads on networks. In legacy environments, it may require a network administrator to look at several servers to get data for monitoring.

The new SevOne service can monitor millions of objects in real-time across all networking technologies through a web interface.

The P2P environment means the appliances are aware of each other when they go online. A company may have 15 appliances spread across its network in different geographic regions.  This means it can show data and its behavior in different scenarios.

This is the new face of the cloud. It’s about predicting if there will be problems on the network by monitoring the data from thousands of points on the network.. The companies that need this kind of monitoring are the likes of Thomson Reuters. It counts on SevOne to manage the health of its network so it can deliver financial information in seconds to financial services firms.

But it’s the business model that is most intriguing. SevOne charges $5 per element. Essentially it analyzes the machine generated data from the network environment. You only get charged for the elements you use. Monitored elements can include but are not limited to: network interfaces, response-time measurements, CPUs and disk drives.

SevOne is in a market of IT giants. Cisco, Dell and HP all have performance management services. Vmware could prove to be a formidable competitor as its cloud strategy matures. But SevOne has something different in its distributed infrastructure and the business model it uses.

There are many factors that can lead to a divorce or breakup (sorry to be a Debbie Downer), and it looks like social media is on the rise as one of these factors.  A surprising (and maybe a little depressing) new infographic from Total Divorce takes a look at social media’s influence on infidelity and provides tips on how to avoid a social network divorce of your own.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.