Common Paradox Tech Blog

One producer’s YouTube video, featuring giant robots invading the city of Montevideo, has landed him a $30 million Hollywood movie deal.

Fede Alvarez’s “Ataque de Panico” (Panic Attack) shows the gigantic CGI humanoids capturing the capital of Uruguay as citizens flee; the 5 minute clip has been viewed 1.5 million times on YouTube. It was created on a budget of $300. Alvarez says that after uploading the video on a Thursday, he was receiving offers from Hollywood on the Monday.

He eventually accepted a $30 million dollar deal from Ghost House Pictures for a full-length sci-fi thriller set in Uruguay and Argentina. The movie won’t be based on the YouTube video itself, Alvarez told the BBC.

While it makes for a remarkable story, you might be less surprised after watching the clip: it has a Hollywood polish that implies Alvarez’s work is ready for its big screen debut.

Reviews: YouTube

Tags: youtube

Palm has just announced their quarterly results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2010.

Revenues for the quarter were a lowly $78.1 million with a gross profit of $5.5 million. These numbers, Palm is quick to point out, are GAAP-adjusted, which is to say the "revenues and direct cost of revenues for Palm webOS products [...] are deferred and recognized over the products’ estimated economic lives."

Non-GAAP accounting paints a slightly prettier picture: $302.0 million revenue and gross profit of $77.3 million. Net loss (non-GAAP) for the quarter: $85.4 million.

Total smartphone shipments was also disappointingly low: 783,000 units shipped, 573,000 sell-through.

The numbers are are generally lower compared to last quarter, which saw GAAP adjusted revenues of $100.6 million and a net loss of $164.5 million. Last quarter Palm shipped 823,000 units. Palm does not break out specifics on which phones make up their shipment numbers.

Rubinstein’s quote indicates they’re still looking at the long term and feeling good about the work they’re doing now, however:

"We are continuing to execute strongly against our long-term strategy with the delivery of Palm Pixi, the new carrier launches completed this quarter, and the upcoming opening of Palm’s full developer program,” said Jon Rubinstein, Palm’s chairman and chief executive officer. “We’re still in the early stages of a long race, and we’re energized by the opportunity to compete in this exciting market. We remain confident that Palm’s innovative product design capabilities, integrated cloud services and the differentiated and delightful Palm webOS experience will provide the foundation for our sustained success.”

Full release after the break. We’ll listen in on the call and let you know if any news sneaks in there.

Update: Quick update on numbers: I’m neither an accountant nor an analyst, but it does sound to me like Palm is looking at slimmer margins on the Pix (no surprise) and increased expenses from both Marketing and R&D. In that context, not so bad.

Update 2: We got confirmation of webOS 1.3.5 and a hint that we won’t see new products beyond Pre and Pixi for awhile. Check out the details here.

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Skimlinks, the platform for content owners to control how their affiliate ads work, has secured a Series A round of funding, which we’ve now confirmed as $1.5 million.

The round, effectively a follow-on internal round, was led by Sussex Place Ventures and includes the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and The Accelerator Group, along with a number of the original angel investors involved in Skimlinks’ seed round earlier in the year.

The funding will be used by the company to expand its US operations, along with investing in sales and marketing initiatives, and product development.

Adobe this week reported financial results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended November 27, 2009. According to the report, the company recorded fourth quarter revenue of $757.3 million, down from $915.3 million for the fourth quarter in 2008, but up from $697.5 million in the third quarter of this year.

"We experienced an improvement in customer demand for our products in Q4," said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe. "We believe the investments we have made in the past year, and the new products we will deliver in the coming year, will drive top line growth as the economy improves."

Adobe also pointed out that the results take into account the company’s acquisition of Omniture, a deal that was valued at approximately $1.8 billion back in September. As a result of the close of that acquisition, Adobe was able to add $26.3 million to its Q4 revenue, with another $8.3 million deferred in accordance with business combination accounting guidelines.

Image Credit: Adobe

Appolicious, an online iPhone app directory, has raised $1.5 million in funding from Apex Venture Partners and James Crouthamel, the founder of Performics. The startup had previously raised $500,000 in seed funding from Apex.

Basically, Appolicious tries to make sense of the 100,000 apps on Apple’s App Store, but with a social twist. So not only can you find apps based on category or topic, but you can share those apps with your social graph on Twitter and Facebook, review apps, and more. Via its technology, the application will scan your iTunes directory for your downloaded app and will integrate them into your Appolicious library. It’s similar in some ways to oneforty, an app directory for Twitter.

Andover, MA-based SeeWhy has raised a second round of funding from most of its current shareholders, adding $2 million to the $4.5 million it secured earlier this year. The company plans to add additional investors alongside those investing in this round through 2010.

The startup markets tools that help ecommerce sites and online retailers up their conversion rates by giving them the opportunity to automatically or manually try to make people who were close to purchasing goods or services on their website but left the process before completion, for whatever reason, come back and finish the cycle.

Digital memory aid and note taking service Evernote already has mobile applications for the iPhone and BlackBerry, among others, but so far it wasn’t part of the now more than 20,000 applications for the Android platform.

Expect that to change real soon, because we hear the startup is making the app available in the Android Market in the next few hours.

(Update: it should be available now)

We’ve got more details on the Friendster acquisition announced last week. Rumors were floating that the buyer, MOL Global, paid as much as $100 million for Friendster. The real price, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources, was under $30 million. Just a few months ago, based on comparable valuations from Bebo, LinkedIn and Facebook (and taking into account Friendster’s largely Asian audience), Friendster was worth between $98 million and $273 million.

The total purchase price paid was $39.5 million. But lots of stuff was deducted, totalling $13 million and change:

Twitter’s U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors from 19.24 million unique visitors in October. It’s no surprise that Twitter’s U.S. growth is stalling as the numbers have indicated this pattern for some time. At least the microblogging network didn’t drop in visitors, as it did in October, declining by 8 percent in U.S. traffic.

While Twitter’s international growth also flattened in October, the microblogging network is still seeing considerable growth when it comes to year over year numbers. Twitter has grown over 1200% since November of 2008, when the microblogging network had only 1.5 million unique visitors.

Just last week, Aol celebrated its re-emergence as an independently-traded company. But its one main advantage is that it still commands a large audience, and in fact was the fourth largest Website in the U.S.—until last month. ComScore data for November, 2009 shows that Facebook surpassed Aol with 102.9 million unique visitors in the U.S., versus 99.7 million for Aol.

Although Aol’s unique visitors grew by nearly a million since October 2009, Facebook grew by more than 5 million. On an annual basis, Facebook’s U.S. audience grew 104 percent since November 2008 (from 50.5 million visitors). During the same period, Aol’s audience declined by 8 percent. That decline is worrisome to Wall Street.