Common Paradox Tech Blog

Rdio, the upcoming music streaming and download service backed by the founders of Skype, Kazaa and Joost, may not be taking public beta registrations just yet, but it already has a free iPhone application live on the App Store that you can download right now (iTunes link).

The app, which apparently went live yesterday, was first spotted by the folks over at Music Ally.

Since it requires a login, only private beta testers are able to give the app a whirl for the time being, but Music Ally took some screenshots from the iTunes detail page which we embedded below.

OK, so we knew that the social gaming space was big — just look at the blockbuster $300-$400 million acquisition of Playfish. We also knew that FarmVille creator Zynga was huge — they are likely bigger than Twitter and were valued at $1 billion last month.

Well, it’s time to throw all of those numbers and assumptions out of the window. Digital Sky Technologies (D.S.T.), the same Russian venture capital firm that paid $200 million to buy a chunk of Facebook, has dropped a ton of money on one of Facebook’s biggest beneficiaries. The total amount of the round is $180 million, which included participation from several other venture capital firms. The FarmVille and Mafia Wars maker may now be worth between $1.5 billion and $3 billion.

According to The New York Times, D.S.T. will not only buy directly into Zynga, but will be purchasing shares from current shareholders, a.k.a. the Zynga founders and its employees. This is exactly the same thing it did with Facebook.

The numbers are simply huge, and we’re going to do more research to find out the terms of the deal and how this came about. In the meantime, though, we’re just sitting here in shock at just how fast the social gaming market has grown. We couldn’t have imagined a company that primarily makes Facebook games raising $180 million even six months ago, but here we are.

What’s your opinion? We want to hear about it in the comments.

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: facebook, farmville, Mafia Wars, Zynga

Want to find a good place to eat or shop while you’re visiting a new city? The mobile web has made that super easy, thanks to services like Yelp and Loopt and even social networking games like Foursquare. However, most of those services take an approach that is more akin to a directory of every possible option, rather than a curated list of recommendations from locals or people you trust.

Nextstop is a website that lets people find, discover and share cool places to eat, visit or hang out in cities all over the world, and today the company is launching a fully-optimized iPhone website that will make it easy for you to do just that directly from your phone, using geolocation.

HTML5 In Action

I talked to the founders of Nextstop yesterday, and they said that when developing a mobile version of the site, the biggest goal was to make the experience fast. Although they considered building a separate app specifically for Nextstop, they decided to take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 features to make the site look and feel more like a native iPhone app, while having the ability to cache more data and keep the experience more consistent.

Watch this video to get a sense of how the site works:

Worldwide Focus

One of the downsides of the bigger location recommendation services is that they have a very U.S.-centric focus. If you’re in Italy or China or Australia, options and recommendations are more limited. To that end, Nextstop has embraced and cultivated a very world-centric approach. Its community has created nearly 1,000 tours of different places around the world — think of it like a travel guide — and the places that are shared and recommended are often local-approved.

Even in my own city — Atlanta — I was impressed that, aside from a few mainstays, most of the recommendations were for excellent restaurants and places often missing from the more tourist-centric lists.

Nextstop is small now, but it’s growing. Meanwhile, its technically impressive web app (it just works with the iPhone right now, but there have been reports that it works on the Droid as well), as well as its commitment to the worldwide community, make this one impressive tool.

Next time you’re looking for something cool to do in a new place — try out Nextstop on your phone.

Reviews: Australia, iPhone

Tags: geolocation, HTML5, iphone, nextstop

Two weeks ago, SimpleGeo raised a $1.5 million seed round from just about every big angel investor in Silicon Valley. Not surprisingly, they’re already putting that money to good use.

Before the funding, SimpleGeo was a team of four including co-founders Matt Galligan and Joe Stump. As of today, they’re now 7, with the arrival of two new hires: Zooko (yes, that’s what he’s known as), a peer-to-peer hacker best known for his work on Mojo Nation, a precursor to BitTorrent. And Mike Malone, an engineer at Six Apart who was also instrumental in the building of Pownce, the since-deadpooled social messaging service.

Back in November of 2008, we covered a project called StoryTlr, which put an interesting spin on the traditional lifestreaming concept. Instead of simply listing all of your updates from various networks and sources, StoryTlr lets you repackage that content so that it tells a story.

The platform and project had some really interesting ideas, but in October the founders of the project — Laurent and Alard — announced that StoryTlr would be shutting down on December 31. There just wasn’t enough time or commercial interest to sustain the service. However, in a pretty classy move, the guys have open sourced the platform, meaning that existing users can download all of their data and migrate to a self-hosted solution. It also means that people who might have never even used StoryTlr can play around with some of its features.

The first version of StoryTlr is now available from a Google Code repository, with installation instructions and answers to frequently asked questions.

StoryTlr is being released under the Apache 2 license, which means users can even use it for commercial projects. Laurent and Alard plan to keep updating and monitoring the codebase over the next few weeks until a stable 1.0 is available.

If you’ve always wanted to have a way to aggregate and lifestream your different online activities — but you actually want to own the data and control where and how it appears — you might want to give StoryTlr a look. The shuttering of hosted services is just one of those things that happens on the Internet. We like that StoryTlr gave its users advanced notice, made it easy to export their existing data and have now open sourced the platform so that individuals can build their own copies or even extend the idea.

Reviews: storytlr

Tags: lifestream, lifestreaming, StoryTlr

Service-now.com has raised $41M of a $66M funding round, the company disclosed in an SEC filing today. The company was founded by Fred Luddy in 2004 to provide on-demand Enterprise IT services and 2009 has been a boom year for the company. Service-now.com specializes in cloud-based Software as a Service (Saas) IT service management solutions. They cover everything from licensing compliance to the service desk all with a built in analytics system.

On July 21 of this year a company press release detailed some of the company’s accomplishments including: recurring revenue of more than $28 million, 105 percent growth in recurring revenue and a variety of accolades. We’re awaiting word from Service-now.com about the funding. In the meantime we can deduce that some of the funding is probably from Sequoia Capital.

Startup SendGrid has raised $750,000 in Series A funding led by Highway 12 Ventures, with SoftTech VC, FF Angel LLC, TechStars-founders David Cohen and other angel investors participating. Incubated by TechStars, SendGrid attempts to solve the problems faced by companies when sending transactional outbound email (emails delivered by software applications such as sign up confirmations, shipping alerts, friend requests, and notifications). SendGrid’s outbound email servers promise to improve the delivery rates and solve scalability problems.

SendGrid also delivers CAN-SPAM compliance, link tracking, open rate reporting, and more. Besides deliverability and scalability, SendGrid offers companies analytics, so they can track email clicks, opens, unsubscribes, spam reports, and bounces without writing a single line of code. The company already has100 paying customers and has delivered over 100 million emails on their behalf. SendGrid will use the funds to to expand its development, marketing and sales efforts.

Social search service Aardvark is considering accepting a $30+ million offer by Google, say multiple sources close to the companies (one source says it’s $40 million). The company, which was founded by ex-Googlers, has raised around $6 million in venture capital to date.

The company is also talking with other potential buyers, say our sources. And even if no one else comes to the table, they have a difficult decision to make. At least one venture capitalist has offered to put new money into the company at a similar valuation, and the founders may be in a position to sell some of their personal stock in that round as well.

So the decision comes down to sell now and take the guaranteed money, or roll the dice and go for the big win.

Envision a web service that lets you record and share your entire life online: That’s the lofty goal LIFEmee wants to achieve. The eponymous Tokyo-based startup behind the service (which is available in both English and Japanese) relaunched its site today with a redesigned interface and a set of new features. (LIFEmee launched back in September this year as a TechCrunch50 DemoPit company.)

To recap, LIFEmee allows you to store, manage and share all significant aspects and events of your life: Your daily health condition, relationships, jobs, schools, possessions, hobbies, family members, pictures, notes etc. etc. The main idea is to give users a platform for organizing their lives online by collecting and structuring this kind of information for lifetime use. Users can not only review all data they fed into their “lifestream” (all data aligned along a time line) in retrospect but also lay out their plans for the future. The information can be shared or kept strictly private.

LIFEmee is still loaded with too many buttons and icons, but the new site is much simpler to use than the TechCrunch50 version. The site’s co-founders say after having collected feedback from early users all around the world, they tried to make it more accessible, integrate it with existing social networks and redesign the entire layout. A Japanese version was added a few weeks after TechCrunch50, too (at the event, LIFEmee launched in English only).

SETIGuy writes “SETI@home Project Scientist Eric Korpela has responded to many of the allegations made by Higley Unified School District administrator Denise Birdwell regarding the difficulties caused by the installation of SETI@home, which led to the recent firing of the school’s technology supervisor. One of the project’s founders, David Gedye, takes issue with Dr. Birdwell’s claim that ‘an educational institution … cannot support the search for E.T.’ Meanwhile, the fired supervisor denies misusing school computers.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.