I had a lot of theories back in 2008 when I started researching entrepreneurship in emerging markets, and I had one big, glaring question: For all the noted VCs urging me to go check out their companies in Israel, Eastern Europe, China, India, parts of Africa and even Iceland?almost no one mentioned one of the hottest emerging countries: Brazil. In fact, only one person in the Valley urged me to visit any country in Latin America, and that wasn?t a VC. It was Shervin Pishevar, CEO of SGN which has a core part of its R&D down in Buenos Aires.
How could that be? We?re geographically closer, have a shorter difference in time-zones and while few countries in Latin America are growing as fast as China or even Rwanda, Brazil?s economy just graced the cover of the Economist and anchored a special report in the Financial Times. Hell, the biggest IPO of the year was a Brazilian company. So what gives? It can?t just be the fact that it’s harder to get into Brazil than Harvard.
Google, which is currently on one heck of a spending spree, is closing an acquisition of San Francisco based DocVerse, a service that lets users collaborate around Microsoft Office documents, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. The purchase price is supposed to be around $25 million.
Docverse lets users collaborate directly on Microsoft Office documents. Appjet, another recent Google Acquisition, has a related product called EtherPad, although that team is reported to be working with Google Wave and the EtherPad source code has been released to the community.
?I just emailed you a video. You have to watch it now,? I said to Paul Carr, my resident TechCrunch partner-in-crime.
?Why are you sending me a video about?.farm equipment??
More than three months after we reported that Darren Feher left NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) to head Conviva, the content delivery company is making it official. The former NBCU CTO is president and CEO, while co-founder Dr. Hui Zhang has moved to chief scientist. Zhang will focus on product development and technology while Feher, a former West Point grad (and one-time GE Six Sigma quality leader), tries to better package and sell it. Conviva’s clients include NBC Sports for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games; it will provide real-time streaming usage data and streaming management for NBCU’s online production using Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Silverlight.
Founded in 2006, Conviva has raised $29 million in two rounds from Foundation Capital, NEA and UV Ventures. Feher told paidContent that while Conviva has had some conversations about equity partnerships with “strategic ” partners and is still evaluating the idea, the company is not trying to raise more money: “We’re not in a position where we have to.”
Microsoft promised us it would remove the silly content censorship from the Zune HD Twitter app ASAP, and here we are a day later with version 1.1, which lets you see all the schoolyard swears you could ever want. High five, assholes. Unfortunately, we’re not seeing a huge performance improvement: it’s a tiny bit snappier, but we’re still seeing unresponsive buttons, laggy scrolling, and random WiFi disconnects. On to version 1.2!
P.S.- Screenshot of the new non-censoring app in action after the break. Be careful, it could damage more delicate constitutions.
Sony’s Sir Howard Stringer played the tease at today’s Reader content partnership presser, stating that while Sony could make the device into a multimedia tablet, it would rather wait and see if consumers warm up to current devices. Stringer’s watching if people find the form factor “comfortable and helpful” before Sony starts “plowing on a thousand apps” or building a “Vaio Reader.” We don’t really know how much e-reader acceptance points to the demand for color multimedia tablets, but in regards to the (non-existant, ever-present) Apple Tablet, Stringer says “we’re all working on variations of the same thing.” Hopefully we’ll figure out what exactly he means by that before we grow old and start reading books or something horrible like that.
Microsoft definitely copped some of Apple’s lame App Store antics with its tweet-censoring Zune HD Twitter app, so now it’s time for the infuriatingly vague PR-speak backtracking — Redmond just pinged us to say it’s “identified the issue” with the Twitter app and that a naughty words-enabling update is coming “as soon as possible.” That’s a pretty lame response, considering the “issue” is that the app is coded to actively censor tweets — not exactly an “oops” moment, you know?
Here’s the entire statement:
ComScore has released a list of the top smartphone operating systems by market share in the United States in October. Who’s on top? Research in Motion (but for how much longer?), followed by Apple, then Microsoft, Palm, Symbian, and finally Google.
The guys at FierceDeveloper have put together this nifty chart showing the top smartphone operating systems by number of active users in the United States in October, based on comScore’s data.
Microblogging startup Plurk took note of Microsoft’s apology, in which the software company took responsibility over the blatant rip-off of the startup’s design and code for a competing service in China.
Microsoft was quick to blame a third-party vendor for cutting a few corners here and there when developing the beta service (MSN Juku), and promptly yanked it off the Web.