Ram Shriram weighs in on FCC vote on wireless rule changes — See the Google investor’s VentureBeat column, where he advocates the FCC should take the first step toward opening wireless standards and access when it meets later today (Wed). He says the innovation gap will grow, if it doesn’t. Separate but related: India added 67 million mobile phone users (WSJ sub required) last year alone, more than the 41 million land lines in the entire country.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":7393,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,","session":"C"}']Google Maps have limited reach — Indian streets, along with the village masses of the Indian countryside, defy Google’s search for order, and so Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins, and its investing scout in India, Ram Shriram, have invested in Mapmyindia, according to Content Sutra. Although even Mapmyindia has trouble in India’s own capital.
Blackberry users get VoIP — Iotum‘s Talk-Now feature lets Blackberry users see who in their contact list are available to chat with. Now, Iotum has incorporated Jajah’s VoIP service, letting users make low-cost global phone calls with an Internet call.
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…while other phone users can get Blackberry features — Users of Windows Mobile 6 phones, including Palm Treos, will this fall be able to use software from BlackBerry that makes these phones work like a BlackBerry. It will load applications like its push email, phone, address book, calendar, browser and so on. We remember Silicon Valley’s investors dismissing Blackberry a few years ago, saying it didn’t understand software. Despite its recent outage, this company isn’t going away.
Chinese video clones keep coming — Ku6.com has received $5 million from DFJ ePlanet Ventures and some others, according to Bill Bishop. Meanwhile, Tudou.com has raised a very large (for China, and for video) $18 million from JAFCO in its third round of financing, and is reportedly valued at about $70 million. This comes after it got more than $9 million from IDG, Granite Global and others.
Peace between MySpace and Photobucket — The announcement is here, but we don’t know how they resolved it.
The proliferation of Twitter continues — When a company spreads virally, it’s a good sign. Twitter, the service that lets people update their friends with their latest goings-on, is finding itself being pulled into various plug-ins for your browser — from 30boxes’ feature, which lets you share Flickr photos, Youtube video and URLs via Twitter, to TwittyTunes, which lets you send a message to Twitter telling friends what music you’re listening to, with a link back to the song and artist.
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Controversial company, PayPerPost, now seeking readers — PayPerPost, the company which pays bloggers to post articles about advertisers, just acquired Zookoda, which gives those bloggers another way to distribute their paid posts to readers. Announcement here. Zookoda, of Australia, lets a bloggers update their readers via email whenever they blog a new post. (Presumably, paid articles won’t draw hordes of readers — so now the strategy is to push the posts on people). Zookoda is the second company that listed on our VentureBoard to be sold.
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