Sequoia Capital

Outright

Outright (formerly called GoBootstrap) launched its online bookkeeping app in public beta earlier this year after raising $2 million in seed funding from undisclosed angel investors and the VC firms that have now joined this second financing round alongside Sequoia.

Outright wants to make it easier for small businesses and self-employed individuals to keep track all of their income and expenses in order to get their taxes done accurately (it was designed for the United States tax system).

The service is currently free to all customers and will remain so, although the company aims to introduce a number of paid options and fee-based services at some point in the future.

(Via peHUB)

As first spotted by DownloadSquad earlier today, Google appears to have tipped its hand a little early. In the newest builds of Chromium across all the platforms (yes, even Mac and Linux), you can clearly see the jigsaw puzzle area in the lower right hand corner. This is in the same place that the colorful stripes usually appear to take you to the Theme Gallery. But clicking on this area currently redirects you back to google.com — but as you can see when you hover over it, clearly there will be something at https://chrome.google.com/extensions, presumably an Extensions Gallery.

Next to this new jigsaw picture is a note at the bottom of the page reading: “New! Chromium now has extensions and bookmark sync.” “Extensions” links to the URL above, while “bookmark sync” links to a Google help page to show you how to use bookmark sync. Sadly, while this does appear to be working on the Windows and Linux versions of Chromium right now, it’s not yet working for the Mac.

Also note that when you go to the current extension page in Chrome (which you can find by typing chrome://extensions/ into the URL field), you will see a message that reads, “Want to browse the gallery instead?” The phrase “browse the gallery” is again linked to the still non-existant extensions page.

As you may recall, Google also tipped off its Theme Gallery a bit early on this tab page just before it launched. Chatter here by Google employees seems to suggest this Extension launch is indeed imminent. The image on the right would look to be some sort of new Chrome menu placeholder icon related to extensions.

And there’s more. Below, find some other pictures and information I was able to find in the Chromium Code Reviews area (placed by Google employees) that seem to make it very clear that Google is about to unleash extension support to rival that of Firefox. Based on what I’m reading, developers will be able to add icons to the Chrome toolbar (likely what the image above represents), add temporary icons inside the Chrome address bar (think: RSS icon), allow users to customize the extensions, and developers will apparently even be able to implement their own versions of “standard browser pages such as the New Tab page.”

From the backchannel talk, it sounds like Google will have a few of its own extensions ready to go at launch. One will have something to do with Google Maps, another will have to do with Google News, a third will allow you to automatically update builds of Chromium (much like the tool we built several months ago). But by far the most interesting is the Gmail Checker. As you can see in the image up top, it will use badging, tagging a number to the icon to let you know how many unread items you have.

The key for all of this though appears to be to show developers just how easy it is to make your own extension for Chrome. That’s what many of the images below represent, an easy “hello world” extension that can apparently be built in just a few steps. With speed no longer its strong suit, extensions are perhaps the last great feature Firefox has a stranglehold over. If Google gets it way, that could soon change.

T-Pain,

Snoop Dogg,

Lil’ Jon,

P. Diddy.

here.

The app is powered by mobile digital entertainment studio Moderati’s Romplr remix platform. Romplr allows fans to interact with music by creating their own versions of tracks by artists. Users can record and share their personal mixes via Facebook, email, or on Romplr’s site.

Romplr was first implemented on Soulja Boy’s pp, which was actually $4.99 in the app store, instead of free. But 50 Cent’s app only offers one song to remix, while Soulja Boy let users remix several of his tracks.

In addition to being able to remix the single, 50 Cent is giving the user that creates the best remix with the app (and shares it on the app’s branded site), the opportunity to meet him. Compared to the other rap-focused iPhone apps out there, this one falls a little short in my opinion. It only lets you remix one song, and it seems for like more of an opportunity for 50 Cent to create buzz around his new single and promote Vitamin Water than to actually create a broadly entertaining app.

That being said, its free and could provide for some interesting and funny songs. Plus, songs can easily be shared to social networks. If the app could include some of 50 Cent’s more popular songs, such as “In Da Club,” perhaps it could give T-Pain’s popular app a run for it’s money.

It’s been about a year since Brightcove released the last upgrade to its professional online video platform with Brightcove 3. On Monday, it’s going to release Brightcove 4, and it’s a massive upgrade.

Brightcove 4 now supports a native video player on the iPhone, in Facebook, and live video streaming on the Web. It’s got Twitter integration for sharing videos, faster-loading video players, the ability to switch between Flash streaming and HTTP, adaptive streaming based on a user’s device and bandwidth, behind-the-firewall video delivery, support for most major ad servers, better analytics, and a new, cheaper, entry-level subscription service called Brightcove Express.

The biggest new feature is the iPhone player. Instead of clicking off into the Quicktime player, Brightcove uses the Quicktime APIs to render the player within an app. Developers are going to love this because they can skin the player any way they want, tie it into the same ads served through a publisher’s Brightcove player on the Web, add email and Twitter sharing, and Coverflow-style browsing.

The Facebook integration will also be popular. Brightcove 4 offers a template which allows for Facebook Connect logins with realtime comments which appear in each commenter’s Facebook stream. Brightcove videos shared on Facebook will also be playable within the stream, just like YouTube videos.

Brightcove 4 will also support live video streams for the first time. Live videos of events can be scheduled, archived, mixed with on-demand videos, and tied into the same advertising backend. If a publisher has a huge event and would rather use their own CDN, they can do that as well. Why now? “We waited until there was sufficient market demand,” says CEO Jeremy Allaire. Yet more evidence that live video on the Web may be finding its legs.

So far Brightcove is mostly used by media companies and professional video publishers who can afford to pay at least $500 a month for the service. But with this release, Brightcove is also trying to broaden its appeal with service plans which now begin at $99 a month. It’s still not a consumer platform, and probably never will be. But for professional Web video publishers and companies with video marketing budgets, the new entry point should help to expand Brightcove’s market.

I am not sure why Brightcove holds all of this good stuff back until they can package it in a new, numbered release, since it is a Web-based service, which could just as easily upgrade on a rolling basis. But doing it all at once like this does highlight all the changes to the code-base, and shows why Brightcove is considered the leading Web video platform for professional use. Brightcove boast 800 customers which use its players across 2,500 different Web sites. Collectively, they reach 135 million unique viewers per month, according to Allaire.

He won’t disclose exact revenues other than to say that it is in the “tens of millions” of dollars a year, and growing at a 50 percent annual rate. But he does say that the company, which has raised a total of $91 million in venture capital, isn’t burning any more cash. “During the first half of this year we were profitable and cash flow positive,” he says. Like everyone else, Brightcove cut back on expenses last year, and even went through layoffs of 13 percent of its workforce. The fourth quarter was the low point, but demand started picking up again at the beginning of the year, especially from branded goods companies, marketing departments, and even manufacturers looking to add video to their sites. Last quarter, Allaire hired 30 people, and currently employs 180. Next quarter he is looking to hire 30 more.

accounts

That revelation was made tonight during a Q&A session at a town hall event with Chinese youth that was held in Shanghai this evening (which was streamed live on the web). The President fielded a question about the restricted use of Twitter in China and he had this to say, “I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.”

This is interesting considering the Internet, and social media in particular, was considered a large part of his ascension to the Presidency. Obviously, he had a killer team around him that was able to embrace the web without the then-Senator getting too much involved. Still, it’s somewhat surprising that he never sent any of his own tweets during the primaries. And undoubtedly part of us wants to believe that when you see tweets like “This is history,” which was sent on November 7 — or “Humbled” after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in October, that’s it could the President really sending it. Nope.

Of course, the more important story here is his stance on Chinese Internet censorship. It’s ridiculous that people in China are restricted from accessing certain parts of the Internet. But we’ve all known that for a long time, and we’ve known the President’s position on it.

The debate here, if it can be called that, seems to rotate around the correlation between video game violence and real violence. The old man in this debate mentioned an American Association of Pediatrics statement. Here it is:

VIOLENT VIDEO GAME CONTENT MORE ATTRACTIVE TO YOUTH

Restrictive age and violent-content labels increased the attractiveness of video games for boys and girls of all age groups, according to a new study. In “Age and Violent-Content Labels Make Video Games Forbidden Fruits for Youth,” researchers tested 310 Dutch children in three groups: 7 to 8, 12 to 13 and 16 to 17 years of age. Participants read fictitious video game descriptions and rated how much or how little they wanted to play each game. An important finding for parents, pediatricians and policy-makers is that age and violent-content labels do not prevent young children from playing games with objectionable content. In fact, they have the opposite effect. Study authors suggest that video games should not be forbidden in Europe or the United States because that will only make the games more attractive, and parents should help in selecting appropriate games for their children to play.

This amazing bit of news – kids like stuff they can’t have – is an obvious by-product of our neophilic instincts and does very little to correlate events like the shooting at Fort Hood and 9/11 to violent video games.

Violence stems from a lack of human interaction in a nurturing and mental health context. To ascribe any sort of behavior to media is a cop out for the pundits and for the aggressor. That said, I would recommend children not watch Fox News because it encourages damn fools to come to presidential speeches wearing guns, but that’s neither here nor there.

Sadly, Jon Cristensen at SlashGamer was too tongue-tied to respond to this criticism and it’s rarely the gamer that comes out ahead in these sorts of ambushes. The bottom line: violent games are not for young kids just as pornography, beer, cigarettes, handguns, lighters, spray paint, and knives are not for kids. There is a time and a context for each of those things and to rail against them shows a lack of judgment and clarity.

UPDATE – A cool response:

These days, when people aren’t talking about the Apple Tablet, they’re talking about how Apple’s next target is the Big Three gaming companies. The iPhone will topple them! iPhone is a revolutionary gaming device! Well, certainly a little optimism is warranted; the iPhone has inarguably changed the landscape of mobile phones, personal media players, and to a lesser extent personal computers. Why shouldn’t Apple extend its holy sovereignty to gaming?

It already has, in fact. But Apple has come kicking and screaming the whole way. The iPhone, you understand, was not meant to be a gaming device, and in Cupertino, Apple’s intentions are paramount. Apple could never accidentally create a platform for gaming; if it wasn’t meant for gaming (or enterprise, or medical use, or reading e-books, etc.) from the beginning, Apple doesn’t want it happening at all. Because if Apple didn’t intend it, it’s outside of the bounds they set into the platform (regardless of how well it works, much like tethering) — it breaks the mold and, ironically, that’s the last thing Apple wants.

It’s no secret that the Apple ecosystem is a gilded cage. It’s a nice cage, and large, and yes indeed that gilding is very attractive by Jove, but all the doors are shut until Apple opens them. If you think otherwise, you’re probably already scrawling some crude flame in the comment section below. Thank you for your insight. Really, though: Macs are a carefully-tended walled garden of semi-delights (to mix several metaphors), and that’s part of why they’re so good at what they do. Attempts at expanding the garden have been made in fits by Apple, with varying success. Serious music production has never really caught on, nor scientific or medical applications, and any real expansions (personal media, mobile, and video primarily) have been engineered by Apple and not third parties. Why should it be any different for gaming? If Apple doesn’t do it, no one will. And Apple’s not going to do it.

But this is all getting rather vague. There are more substantial objections to an Apple expansion into gaming than my half-baked theories on their corporate philosophy. I’ll just enumerate them here in list form. I’m using the iPhone as the basis for these, but the points apply to the tablet without serious modification.

Battery
Part of the hardware objection, but worth noting on its own, is the fact that battery life would be off-the-charts bad. How long can you really play a high-quality title on the iPhone? An hour maybe, before you’re down to 25% battery? Remember this is also your lifeline to email, the web, and so on. Unlike a DS, you can’t afford to let it run down. A portable game system needs to be as efficient as it can, and the iPhone is already an energy hog. No one wants to be tethered to an outlet to play their favorite handheld. And the thing already explodes when you use it too hard.

Developers
A few developers are putting out real iPhone games, but where is your Valve, your CryTek, your Rockstar? These are the people who make AAA titles that sell millions and make billions. Ubisoft may outsource some company to make a little Assassin’s Creed 2 clone to cash in a bit on the mobile contingent, but it’ll just be a way to sell the real game. They’re not going to spend $50m to develop a truly amazing game for the iPhone. No one will. Hardly anyone does as it is for existing handhelds (Dragon Quest IX notwithstanding). Apple could align itself with developers, but my feeling is they wouldn’t mix well. Apple is pretty much oil to their partners’ water to begin with due to their iWay-or-the-highway (clever, no?) approach to “collaboration,” and I don’t think that the major game studios would take a shine to it either.

Pricing
Do you see people hitting that “purchase” button when a game costs more than $10? Neither do I. Real games cost upwards of $40-50 when they come out. That won’t fly in an App Store or iTunes environment, where the emphasis is on multiple small, easy-to-swallow buys.

Brand
Apple doesn’t do games. They don’t put out games, they don’t make it easy to play games, they don’t encourage developers to make games for their platform. This is the last time Apple and Mac users were excited about games:

Seriously. Ever since the Great Halo Disappointment, nobody has considered Apple’s gaming enthusiasm as being anything other than a lark. Meanwhile, Nintendo is so completely identified with games that one implies the other in almost any context, Microsoft is hard at work building a gaming platform that dovetails with their entire ecosystem, and Sony is actually gathering steam with the PS3, as its lower price leads more people to find that it actually might be the most powerful and versatile system on the market. Apple struck at mobile phone makers when they were at their most complacent and vulnerable; gaming consoles and companies are stronger and more successful than they’ve ever been. It would be an insanely bad time to take a swat at them.

Content
Pop quiz: what game had the most lucrative launch of all time? If you answered Modern Warfare 2, an extremelyviolent and graphic game being accused of turning kids into terrorists, then you are correct! Apple is already choosy when it comes to what appears on its devices, and the kind of ultraviolence that sells games probably isn’t going to fly. Apple isn’t as positively warm and fuzzy as Nintendo usually is, but it would be a pretty major shift to start pushing games like MW2.

They don’t want to
Don’t you think that if Apple had any inclination to make the iPhone or Mac into a gaming platform, they’d have at least shown a little of that by now? Where’s the gamepad accessory for the iPhone? Why isn’t Apple courting the big developers to get some titles on Macs? There’s no indication that Apple is interested in games except as a class of apps to take a cut on. Almost all game development so far has been driven by the “there’s gold in them thar iPhones” mentality.

They don’t need to
This readership more than any other should be aware of Apple’s solvency in this worldwide financial crisis; indeed they have thrived mightily. The iPhone shows continual growth, they gain a tenth of a point of OS market share every month or two, and they’re making money hand over fist via iTunes and the App Store. Why the devil would they want to get into gaming, a market that would expose all the company’s weaknesses, bring their best hardware to its knees, and complicate their entire strategy — one which is working perfectly? I’m not saying that Apple doesn’t like to rock the boat, but they don’t do it when they stand a good chance of being thrown in the drink.

$200 million

100 let go

Despite new leadership under CEO Tim Armstrong, AOL has yet to turn around financially.  Last quarter, revenues sank 23 percent to $777 million.  The biggest drop came from subscription revenues to its legacy Internet access business, down 29 percent, but advertising revenues also took a hit, down 18 percent.  AOL depends on display advertising, which has not yet rebounded like search advertising appears to be doing.

By cleaning up house and removing as many costs as possible before the IPO, Armstrong is trying to make AOL as lean as possible. But eliminating salaries and benefits can only go so far. He has to show that his new content strategy can create actual growth as well.

Wooga (world of gaming) launched in January this year and has, to-date, focused solely on the Facebook platform with the release of Brain Buddies in July. The game is currently listed as one of the top twenty titles on Facebook, for which the company claims 6 million monthly users. Two further games are in the last stages of development wooga tells us and should be released in the next few weeks. No confirmation, however, on which social network these will be for but our guess is Facebook again (a current job advert certainly points in that direction).

Talking of staff, the company employs 25 people from 9 different countries and says it will use the additional funding to hire new talent – the list of current vacancies is quite extensive – and to grow the company further. That said, with only one Facebook game released so far and two in the pipeline, €5 million is quite the endorsement. Did we mention that social gaming is hot right now?

The auto-tagging app was only available in private beta so far, but today the company is debuting the public version of Photo Tagger. It’s free of charge, and it’s awesome.

Here’s how it works: after you install the app on Facebook, you can select any public album (either their own or from friends). Photo Tagger then scans the photos, batches subjects into groups using its facial recognition technology and suggests tags for faces it has identified as such. Confirmed tags are then pushed directly onto Facebook, mirroring the social network’s privacy settings, and the result is a custom album made up of tagged photos.

You have to try it out to see how it works for you, but Face.com claims faces can be recognized regardless of facial expressions or the lighting, quality, backgrounds, angle and focus of the pictures.

This turns Photo Tagger into quite an impressive social search engine for faces on Facebook, where millions of images are uploaded to albums every week. It also doubles as a handy notification tool, because it has a system in place dubbed Face Alerts that lets users know when pictures of them appear on Facebook, with or without tags.

Face.com says the private alpha edition of Photo Tagger attracted over 30,000 users and identified 5 million faces on Facebook within three months.

For an alternative, take a look at what Polar Rose is doing.