Eyes On: The Nokia Lumi...

Ah, so close yet so far. Nokia’s new flagship Lumia 900 handset was on display here at CES 2012, and though we couldn’t quite get our hands on it, we did the next best thing — we shot some video. While the Nokia Lumia 710 technically led Nokia’s U.S. Windows Phone charge, the newly-announced Lumia 900 for AT&T is likely to be the one that gets phone fans’ hearts fluttering. With its 4.3-inch AMOLED display, 1-megapixel front-facing camera, stylish polycarbonate design and support for AT&T’s fledging 4G LTE network, it could soon be the Windows Phone to beat in the United States. For a while, anyway. That being said, Nokia could face some stiff competition from devices like the HTC Titan 2 , a whopper of a new Windows phone from HTC that sports (among other things) a 1.5GHz processor and a 16-megapixel camera. Even so, while some customers will end up choosing one over the other if they decide to buy a Windows Phone, either purchase would help grow the Windows Phone platform as a whole. Personally, I’d be inclined to go for a 900 thanks to the fact that it will be available in the same cyan hue as its little brother that Lumia 800 does. There’s no official release date or price as of yet, but Nokia’s representatives assure us that it will hit store shelves within a few months.

Nokia Acquires Norwegia...

Nokia has acquired Oslo, Norway-based Smarterphone , a company that builds a mobile operating system for so-called feature phones. The news of the purchase, which was actually completed last November, comes straight from investment firm Ferd Capital , which pumped 6.5 million euros into Smarterphone since 2007. Other backers of Smarterphone – which was formerly known as Kvaleberg AG, after founder Egil Kvaleberg – include Innovation Norway, Trolltech founder Haavard Nord and management consultant Lars Øberg. Smarterphone specializes in software that allows handset makers to equip basic models of phones (aka feature phones) with smartphone-like looks and certain capabilities . Whether Nokia will keep Smarterphone’s platform as a third option for its devices, aside from S40 and Windows Phone, or if this was more about buying talent and know-how, remains unclear. Financial terms of the deal were also not disclosed.

No Cable Killer After A...

So much for Sezmi ‘s ambitious plans to kill cable TV : the assets of the cloud-based TV delivery platform company were recently acquired by KIT digital for approximately $27 million in a mixture of stock and cash. Sezmi, founded in 2007 under the name Building B by the former CTO of Sony Music (and later CTO of Sony’s US subsidiary) Phil Wiser and serial entrepreneur Buno Pati, reportedly raised over $70 million . The Belmont, California-based company shut down its consumer-facing business back in September 2011, and tried to turn the ship around by focusing on selling hardware to service operators , such as telcos and ISPs. Clearly, that didn’t work out so well either. KIT digital, which provides video management software and related digital services worldwide, says it acquired ‘certain assets and liabilities’ of Sezmi on December 30, 2011. KIT digital paid approximately $16 million in cash upfront, and approximately $11 million in KIT digital common stock (or approximately 1.2 million shares), plus earn-outs. Notably, future earn-out payments may amount up to $20 million – $25 million over a period of three years, in total, payable either in stock or in cash at KIT digital’s discretion. As part of the deal, KIT digital has obtained 18 patents from Sezmi, related to “over-the-top (OTT) platform provision in the mobile, online and digital terrestrial television (DTT) environments”. According to the press release announcing the purchase, Sezmi has approximately 80 full-time employees and contractors in the United States, with another 55 in India. Other recent acquisitions by KIT digital include Ioko , Polymedia , KickApps, Kewego and Kyte . The company today also raised its financial guidance for 2012; KIT digital management says it now expects annual revenues of at least $320 million, as compared to $300 million previously. KIT digital plans to report preliminary Q4 2011 financial results in February.

And The First $1 Millio...

Domain name marketplace operator Sedo this morning announced that it has brokered a big domain name sale before the first week of the new year is over. The company has negotiated a sale of the domain dudu.com to a Dubai-based social networking service provider called – you guessed it – DUDU Communications . Amazingly, the domain name went for as much as $1 million, which is right up there with the sales of furniture.com, sky.com and domainname.com – heck, it even fetched double the purchase price of premium domains like 3D.com, logo.com and puzzle.com. Sedo says negotiations with the former owner of dudu.com, from China, took three months. Said Alibek Issaev, chairman of DUDU: “With the purchase of dudu.com, we will be able to match our platform’s brand with the exact domain name we need, and migrate from using godudu.com to this shorter version. This purchase means we don’t lose important traffic, and at the same time we ensure that visitors from around the globe will remember our brand’s name.” DUDU, started in 2007, is a multi-lingual social network that lets people communicate with each other online even if they don’t speak the same language. Also read: Canadian Rock Band Wants To Cash In On TeaParty.com Sale

Y Combinator Startup Pr...

You want the best price on things you buy second hand, but finding out how much you should pay is a hassle. Removing this friction from a lucrative part of the purchase funnel is the goal of Priceonomics . The first startup out of the winter 2012 Y Combinator batch, Priceonomics has crawled the web to compile its next-generation price guide. It launches today featuring 10 million prices on 50,000 products, and plans to expand across verticals soon. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you want to buy a TV on craigslist, a bike on eBay, or something from the TechCrunch holiday gift guide . Visit the site and search for the product. Priceonomics returns an estimate for how much you should pay for it along with a range of prices it’s crawled. It then displays listings of people selling it. Filter by keyword, proximity, and price to narrow the results. There’s also value to sellers, as they can check how they should be pricing their own products. Most listings I clicked had already been sold, but the site is designed for you to discover what you should pay, not necessarily where to buy. If you can wait a little while, enter your email address and Priceonomics notifies you when the product is posted at a great price. There’s also browsable price guides for specific product types. You could click Computers-> Apple-> MacBook to discover you should pay about $1000 for this used laptop, or at least somewhere between $682 and $1,318. Currently the site features 71 product types across categories like transportation, cameras, computers, phones, and TVs, but more are on the way. Used product price guides aren’t new, especially for cars, but Priceonomics does it right. I love how quick and clean the site is. It’s so refreshing compared to slogging through Google product search results. My only gripe is that I have to click a listing to find out if it’s already been sold. Because it fits into the purchase funnel at the stage where people are clearly trying to buy something, the site has big monetization potential. Featured product guides for brands, sponsored search results, traditional display, lead generation, and affiliate links would all work. While the rest of the Winter YC class will launch soon, Priceonomics made a smart push to get out the door today. It may have missed the pre-holiday shopping blitz, but there’ll be plenty of people looking to spend cash gifts or find out whether they should return a new product and buy used instead.