Apple's MobileMe Could Have Had a Dropbox-Style Feature. 23 January '12, 04:51pm Follow Apple’s MobileMe could have had a Dropbox-style feature built into the OS X Finder, but it was nixed by internal Apple politics, according to Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston.
Houston was talking to Wired UK editor David Rowan at the DLD conference in Munich today, and he discussed some of his past dealings with Apple, the company that previously made a bid to buy the cloud storage startup. Houston said that apparently the team behind the failed cloud service MobileMe wanted to add a Dropbox-style feature directly into OS X (for use with MobileMe) but that the team responsible for the OS X Finder app “wouldn’t prioritize it, or wouldn’t build it” for them. MobileMe’s replacement, iCloud, also lacks any kind of direct OS X Finder interaction as yet. Danprimack : RT @hblodget: The VC busin... SoundCloud Hits 10 Million Users. 23 January '12, 02:59pm Follow Audio sharing platform SoundCloud has announced that it has signed up a total of 10 million users, rapid acceleration in takeup for the startup which launched in 2008 and had just 3 million users in February 2011.
The Berlin-based startup announced 5 million users in June 2011, meaning that the total number of registered users has doubled in the space of seven months. We caught up with CEO and co-founder Alexander Ljung at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, today, to find out what was driving this growth. He explained that its mobile apps (with a total of 5 million downloads) and developer ecosystem (over 10,000 apps either available or in development) are helping to push the growth. Ljung admits that the company has been “lucky” to tap into the growth of audio on the Web, and the SoundCloud now hosts an “Incredibly broad” variety of recordings with over 3.3 million unique tags in use to describe the types of audio available.
Tumblr to Improve Content Discovery This Year. 23 January '12, 05:41pm Follow Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp admits that one area the blogging network hasn’t performed well enough at thus far is content discovery – and you can expect to see a lot of development in that area at Tumblr.com this year.
Karp is at the DLD conference today as part of a bid to expand the international impact of the blogging service. As we reported earlier today, the startup now serves 120 million people and 15 billion pageviews every month. DLD 2012 – @Jack Dorsey: “Twitter Has A Business Model That Works” Earlier this fine Sunday afternoon, Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey took the stage at the DLD Conference, the annual pre-Davos meeting of minds held in Munich, Germany.
In an interview with not one but two journalists (Holger Schmidt from FOCUS Magazine and Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick), Dorsey talked a great deal about Twitter and a little bit about Square. Dorsey didn’t reveal anything spectacular about either company, emphasizing once more how Twitter is not your traditional social network (here’s my counterpoint) and that its business model works, thanks very much for asking. He also talked about how Square is looking to expand outside of the United States and why 2012 will be a pivotal year for Twitter in Germany. DLD 2012 – Andrew Mason: Groupon Now Boasts 10,000 Employees, 70% Outside Of The US.
Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason was interviewed by Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick on stage at the annual DLD confab in Munich, Germany.
Below are my notes – Mason’s responses are slightly paraphrased. Also read: DLD 2012 – @Jack Dorsey: “Twitter Has A Business Model That Works” As you can tell from how filled the room is: there’s a lot of interest in Groupon. Can you start by telling us how you would describe the company today? Groupon has evolved quite bit since we launched three years ago. And as we go wider and expand into new categories, where are passion lies remains in local commerce. We now have 150 million subscribers, and we’re good at getting customers in the door of the merchants we work with.
Do you consider Groupon to be a technology company? Groupon is a cyborg. There’s been a lot of skepticism about Groupon, from myself included I must admit. DLD 2012 – Brian Chesky: “Average Airbnb Host In NYC Pockets $21,000 A Year” Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, took the stage this afternoon at the DLD Conference in Germany for a keynote covering his views about the ‘sharing economy’.
In terms of news, there isn’t much to report based on his talk, but Chesky talked about the fact that sharing used to be an integral part of human life and ‘hardwired’ into our DNA, that it disappeared after the second World War because of increased consumer spending and individualism, and that we’re now at the beginning of the return to sharing. Access, Chesky purports, will eventually become more powerful than ownership again. Later, he referred to Airbnb riding a ‘third wave of the Internet’. Chesky asserts that the first wave of the Internet was about bringing commerce online, the second wave was about connecting with others online, and that the new wave is enabling shared offline experiences through online platforms. Hosts are making money from renting out space to travelers, too.