Kevin Rose: Pioneering the Downturn As Well?

Kevin Rose: Pioneering the Downturn As Well?It’s interesting how a couple of months can change the view you hold of a collection of companies.

These in particular center around Kevin Rose and the companies that he has an involvement in – Digg, Revision3 and Pownce.

It’s not long ago – back in March 08 – that there were rumours that Digg was subject to a bidding war between Microsoft and Google. The tech giants were – rumours told us – battling to outbid each other for the blessed Digg. Figures of $200 million were floated, although the accuracy of the rumours was questioned by Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson.

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Sun Startup Essentials: An Interesting Deal For Start-Ups

Sun Startup Essentials: An Interesting Deal For Start-UpsIt’s possible that some people reading this won’t have heard of Sun. They’re a big computer company that has gone through many iterations (during the dotcom boon their moto was “The computer is the network”).

We’ve covered a background below to get you up to speed on Sun, but before that, we’ve got an overview on the Sun Startup Essentials, which is aimed at start-ups.

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Pownce: Shutting Shop On 15 December

Pownce: Shutting Shop On 15 DecemberPownce, a competitor to Twitter, has announced that it is shutting the service on 15 December – Just two weeks notice.

The two main people behind the service, Leah Culver and Mike Malone, will be going to work with blog company, Six Apart.

Two more of the Pownce team, Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka will be all ‘la de da’ and become advisers to Six Apart.

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Virgin Mobile: 30p/Day For Internet Access

Virgin Mobile: 30p/day For InternetEvery day more people are accessing data services from their mobile phones, like Internet browsing, Twittering, checking Facebook.

Virgin Mobile are to be offering a 30p per day Internet tariff from 8 December to tempt people to their network, or indeed keep them.

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Getting Started With Arduino: Book Review (70%)

Getting Started With Arduino: Book ReviewIf you’re like me, you won’t have heard of Arduino. Outside this sphere of ignorance there’s a whole lot of artists who not only love Arduino, but are passionate about it too.

If you’re in the “What the hell is Arduino?”, this book gives you a good guide to what it it and what can be done with it.

Arduino comes from an educational background and is a combination of open source hardware running open source software, enabling the control of ‘things.’ These ”things’ can be assembled allowing quite complex circuits to be constructed.

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Met Office To Offer Free VOD Weather To Your Mobile

Met Office To Offer Free VOD Weather To Your MobileThe Met Office, well-know weather forecasters, are to offer a world’s first – a free-of-charge (beyond any of your own mobile data charges), video on-demand weather service to your mobile phone.

Access will be via a branded portal (lovely to hear that phrase again :) ), giving access to weather forecasts that will be updated several times a day – currently the mobile site is saying it’s three times a
day.

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Amplified 08

Amplified 08I’m on my way to Amplified 08, a new UK event that brings together people who want to actively contribute to the conference/event that they’re going to – Think BarCamp/ unconferenced events.

Essential to the event is the lack of hierarchy to the organisation of the event – you don’t have a self-appointed panel of ‘experts’ that decide what is going to be the important things to tell the great unwashed about when they come along – as many ‘official’ conferences are structured.

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