4 Jun

Justin.tv Broadcast Network Adds New Channels

Welcome to the Justin.tv broadcast network.

Justin.tv is having a very bub.blicio.us with the addition of two new channels on his very popular livecasting network. This news comes in just one week after launching iJustine’s dedicated channel.

The team hopes to introduce new channels every week building a full blown livecast network from the ground up.

Who are the two latest stars? Today marked the official launch of Parris Harris aka P.H.ashion and also Bay Area Hip Hop station Wild 94.9.

Wild 94.9 debuted today with a live interview of pop singer Rhianna, and well. Parris Harris, just launched with pure off the wall, non stop offbeat humor. Parris is going to be very entertaining.

The entire lifecasting movement is gaining unbelievable momentum. I call it this phenomenon You.tv and it’s only a matter of time until everyone has some sort of video presence on the Web. Basically it’s all about “enter your name here” dot tv forcing reality television through an online renaissance.

We’ll see who’s set for next week. Rumor has it that Hooman.tv is one of the contendenders.

Follow us on our own lifecast, text style.

More on the subject:

Wired

Mashable

Mashable

4 Jun

Redpoint Invests $3.5 Million in Document Network Scribd

Things are looking very bub.blicio.us for Scribd, the so-called “YouTube of documents.” The company closed a round of funding led by Redpoint Ventures to the tune of $3.5 million.

Scribd is one of the several interesting startups to spin out of Y Combinator – along with Weebly and Justin.tv.

The company plans to expand its product development team.

For more on the subject, visit:

TechCrunch

Ryan Stewart

4 Jun

Palm Sells 25 Percent Stake to Bono’s Elevation Partners

It’s a beautiful day, don’t let it slip away!

Palm Inc. is hoping for a bub.blicio.us future with today’s official announcement that it is selling a 25% to Elevation Partners. Elevation Partners is a private equity firm, best known for being co-founded by U2′s Bono.

That’s right…it seems that lately Palm still hasn’t found what its looking for, so in the name of love (and money) they’re looking to succeed with or without you (hopefully with) globally where the streets have no name. As we all know the market moves in mysterious ways, however, the stock has been on a bit of a roller coaster over the yeat\r with a 52 week low of $13.41 and a high of $19.40. The last trade was at $17.50 at the time of this post.

Palm is facing some evolution challenges in the face of powerful competitors in the smartphone market, most notably Apple’s iPhone which is due in stores on June 29th.


Photo Credit: AP

And even though Palm’s chief geek, Jeff Hawkins, introduced the new foleo mobile smartphone companion at Walt Mossberg’s All things D conference last week, it was met with more confusion than fanfare. Om Malik dubbed it fold-up-and-go.


Photo Credit: PC World

According to VentureBeat, Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s former head of hardware who helped oversee the creation of the iPod , will join Palm as executive chairman and head up product development. Fred Anderson, a partner at Elevation, and a former Apple chief financial officer, will join Palm’s board. We all know Bono helped introduce the U2 iPod. And, Elevation partner, Roger McNamee, will also join the board.

In a statement, Palm President and CEO, Ed Colligan said, “As a result of this transaction, we will strengthen the Palm leadership team and create a more effective capital structure, which puts us in a great position to attract new talent, significantly strengthen our execution capabilities, and deliver long-term shareholder value.”

Roger McNamee, managing director and co-founder of Elevation, also commented in a statement, “This is by far the largest investment that Elevation has ever made, which reflects our enthusiasm for Palm and its opportunity. This investment fits perfectly with Elevation’s investment strategy of partnering with great management teams to transform businesses in industries with dynamic technology change. We see Palm as uniquely positioned to deliver the integrated software and hardware solutions that will drive the next generation of mobile computing.”

According to the press release, Elevation will purchase $325 million of a new series of convertible preferred stock. The conversion price will be $8.50 per share, which represents a premium of approximately 16 percent to the implied post-distribution price over the 10 trading days ended June 1, 2007, excluding the $9 per share cash distribution. Upon completion of the transaction, Elevation will own approximately 25 percent of Palm’s outstanding common stock on an as-converted and diluted basis, based on the number of shares of common stock outstanding as of March 30, 2007.

More on the subject:

Wall Street Journal

TreoCentral

Engadget

3 Jun

Yelp Elite Unite in San Francisco

The latest hot spot in the SF tech circuit is Harlot and since I haven’t been there in, oh, three days…I was getting anxious to go back.

Well it was another busy night and the bub.blicio.us crew was out and about trying to keep up with the tech set. We started at SF Beta at 111 Minna, migrated over to AdBrite’s party at Varnish, and then headed over to Yelp’s party at Harlot.

The most convenient thing about the hottest tech party spots is that they formed a perfect triangle, with each requiring less than a two minute walk. Nice.

The Rat Pack 2.0 posse was in full effect as we headed over to Yelp. Justin Kan of Justin.tv, Scott Beale of Laughing Squid, Brett Butterfield of Shozu, and a few other folks whose names escape me at the moment.

You know it’s interesting when you walk up to the door and the doorman simply says, “Hey guys, good to see you again. Come on in!” It couldn’t have been me though, it had to be the guy with the camera clipped to his head.

The place was expectedly packed with a fair ratio of 80-20 women to men. Most however, weren’t in the tech or 2.0 space, so there isn’t much to report on that front. Although, we did bump into Hazel Grace Dircksen co-founder of fashionIV.

For the most part, it was an interesting time, mostly for Justin. In our ongoing, unofficial series to set him up on dates, we introduced him to several attractive single women. We considered it casting for future episodes.

While they were starstruck for all of two minutes, their attention span would quickly dissolve forcing us to move on. In Justin’s defense, most were not interesting enough to hold the attention of Justin’s audience if they were to go out. So, needless to say, we still need to cast future starlets.

As the alcohol permeated the confidence layer of party goers, the dance floor slowly filled up. It was on the sidelines where I remained for the rest of the event. Justin had to get his groove on, and in doing so, required me to wear the hat for an impromptu cameo appearance of Solis.tv.

Oh yeah. Someone had to break out the caterpillar – an oldie but goodie.

All in all, it was a refreshing departure and we’ll probably go to the next event – that is if Yelp reminds us.

For more pictures, visit Brian Solis‘ flickr set.

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