Laurent Kretz

March 1st to March 17th, what I missed on Mashable:

Compete acquired for $75M by TNS. It makes sense for a market research super-giant to get into the game with a promising startup. (via)

Nine Inch Nails proposed its new album online, on various torrents sites. The band said: “we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.” Wow. (via)

AOL wants to launch 12 new niche sites in 6 months. And ? Give me some money and I’ll launch 12 a month, what’s the big deal ? And actually even without money, just give me some additional hours per day and I’ll do it: open-source tools are so spread out that with limited development knowledge, my sister could do it. (via)

Google gears mobile and offline. Meaning on your smartphone or PDA and when not connected. Beware Microsoft, you’re not far anymore from the big expected battle … (via)

Driftr is a new travel blogging platform. Cool design, many trips already. (via)

Google Contacts API is the best news in a while ! It’s a big step into data portability, as well as a move forward transforming your email account into a database of contacts for all networking sites. Bravo. (via)

Goolge selling TV ads?! Online, radio, print, TV … When does it stop ? I guess product placement is next, then packaging, then flyer distribution, … ?? ;)) (via)

Google maps will no more map military bases. I’ve been wondering for years how long it would take them to react !! For me that’s just normal, as it’s critical and sensitive information. (via)

As you may have understood from previous posts, I love raw data. I love to look for it, find it, fetch it, crush it. It’s always a good feeling when huge data sources make their data available, and the last one is the UN with UNdata.org. (via)

Spitzer.com: I’ve always wondered if you could make easy + quick money online using real news scandals. When something breaks in the news big time - a scandal, catastrophe, political coup, anything that will have a short attention span of a week to a month, you buy a dns according to that (like client9.com), put up some display and cpc ads, some content (a blog or CMS you setup in 5mn), and see where it gets. (via)

ShareThis took $15M. Yes, $15M in funding. Maybe I am missing the big (business plan ?) picture there … (via)

Bebo is worth $850M in AOL’s eyes. With 80M unique users, that’s the same price per user (+/-) as MySpace few years back. However, how much would a transformation of AIM into a real social network have cost ? Certainly less than $850M. Also, the recent layoffs must be happy to see how the money saved on their salaries is used …. (via)

China has become the first internet country - in terms of number of surfers, according to a Beijing research firm. 220M surfers against 217M in the U.S. That was of course expected, but here we are. And that’s only a start: India ? Pakistan ? Indonesia ? Russia ? On their way ! (via)

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