Final Nail In The Joost...

Looks like the final frame has been reached for Joost , the online video service originally started by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis and then eventually sold to the Adconion Media Group : Adconion today announced that it would fold in and rebrand Joost Media into smartclip , a video advertising company that it bought in November 2011 . The company says it is making the move in order to better serve the U.S. market, where it is now launching services, and presumably believes that using one brand is stronger than using two. Smartclip is a multi-screen video and brand advertising platform that offers ad formats for PCs, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, set-top boxes and connected TVs. Adconion claims that smartclip is already the leading European digital video advertising company, and it has more recently made inroads into Latin America and Australia. Adconion does not give details on how wide the reach is for smartclip, or how wide it was for Joost but does note that overall its wider video advertising distribution platform has a potential reach of 687 million unique users. As part of the deal, Adconion says that Joost’s existing clients and partners will all be rolled into the smartclip platform. Adconion, which first started in video advertising in 2008, bought Joost in 2009 to enhance that platform. The service was originally formed by Zennstrom and Friis in 2006 with the intention of becoming a peer-to-peer-based premium video distribution platform. On the strength of the founders’ popularity and that of its other P2P products, Skype and KaZaa, the pair got funding of around $45 million from investors including Sequoia, Index Ventures and CBS; lots of premium content deals; and some one million sign-ups to its beta. But with sustained traffic and business models failing to materialize, the service began to fizzle and was eventually sold to Adconion for an undisclosed amount. Adconion had actually, quietly suspended the Joost service at the end of April.

MobileBackstage Secures...

Lady Gaga has captured the imagination of the entertainment world with her team’s successful social media engagement with the fans she calls her “Little Monsters”, and many other artists and agents are scrambling to capitalise in similar ways. At the same time startups are appearing to meet this need. To that end MobileBackstage , an interactive fan club service that develops these online relationships between artists and fans, has just today announced it closed a bridge funding round of $1.3 million (€1 million) back in April. The investment was led by Finnvera, the financing vehicle of the Finnish state, which was joined by Miston, a privately owned investment company, management team members, as well as a group of angel investors. The cash will be used for growth, developing the platform and new offices in San Francisco, going existing offices in New York, London and Helsinki. This follows a round of funding in the region of €2 million in 2010. More than just another a mobile app, the service creates a fan club environment across multiple platforms connecting fans globally. The app can be fully branded for each artist/band and runs on iPhone and Java-enabled handsets. The company has so far created fan clubs for artists such as Jessie J., Tinie Tempah, The Kooks, Devlin, Lykke Li, and works with Universal, EMI, Warner, Sony among others. Mobile Backstage claims that in the past year, end users have generated over 4 million interactions and 100 million page views as a result of its platform. The startup is a sort of spin out from an agency called Steam Republic, however they are not pushing the Steam Republic name in order to differentiate the platform. A competitor to MobileBackstage is Moontoast . Both similarly small sized, early stage start-ups offering promising solutions to rebuild try and build deep connections between fans and artists. Paavo Bäckman, founder and CEO of Mobile Backstage says he has also appointed Johannes Milén as the startup’s new Chief Operating Officer (COO) based in its Helsinki office. Milén is a former CIO of Rautakesko of Kesko, one of the largest corporations in Finland.

Apple’s Q2 2012: $11.6B...

Apple has just posted their Q2 2012 financials, and revealed that over the last 14 weeks the company has pulled in $11.6 billion in profit on $39.2 billion in revenue, which breaks down to $12.30 per share. Analysts expected earnings of $10.02 per share on $36.81 billion in revenue. Apple soundly exceeded the Q2 guidance they offered last quarter, as they forecasted earnings per share of $8.50 on $32.5 billion in revenues. For a bit of comparison, those figures are up substantially year over year — in Q2 2011, Apple pulled in $6 billion in profit on $24.7 billion in revenues. The company also reports that they have sold 35.1 million iPhones this past quarter, up 88% year-over-year and beating most analysts expectations of devices sold. However, iPhone sales dipped 5.5% from last quarter. A total of 11.8 million iPads, 4 million Macs and 7.7 million iPods were also sold last quarter. According to a poll of analysts conducted by CNNMoney, professional analysts expected the company to report just shy of 31 million iPhones sold, compared to the relatively high 37.25 million units sold as foretold by independent analysts. There’s plenty more Apple coverage where this came from — for more, take a look at our liveblog of Apple’s earnings call. The full release has been reproduced below: CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2012 second quarter ended March 31, 2012. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $39.2 billion and quarterly net profit of $11.6 billion, or $12.30 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $24.7 billion and net profit of $6.0 billion, or $6.40 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 47.4 percent compared to 41.4 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 64 percent of the quarter’s revenue. The Company sold 35.1 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 88 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 11.8 million iPads during the quarter, a 151 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4 million Macs during the quarter, a 7 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 7.7 million iPods, a 15 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. “We’re thrilled with sales of over 35 million iPhones and almost 12 million iPads in the March quarter,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The new iPad is off to a great start, and across the year you’re going to see a lot more of the kind of innovation that only Apple can deliver.” “Our record March quarter results drove $14 billion in cash flow from operations,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Looking ahead to the third fiscal quarter, we expect revenue of about $34 billion and diluted earnings per share of about $8.68.” Apple will provide live streaming of its Q2 2012 financial results conference call beginning at 2:00 p.m. PDT on April 24, 2012 at www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsq212. This webcast will also be available for replay for approximately two weeks thereafter.

Facebook One-Ups Google...

Facebook today announced a new change for how people can find you on its network — a move for more consistency, but also  another route to getting people to use more email in Facebook, and secure its place as the center of your web life. Facebook is now rolling out a service where the name you use in your Facebook timeline will be the same as the name on your Facebook email account. Updated addresses, Facebook wrote in its announcement , will be taking place over the next few weeks. “Anyone who already selected an email address will not be affected,” Facebook noted. It’s not clear how many of us have already linked up a Facebook email address with our timeline page — I’ve asked Facebook if it could provide that stat to me — but this move will mean that now all of us will (whether we wanted to or not). You can check your status here . It means that it will become a lot easier for people to use your Facebook email to contact you, and seems to go directly in the face of other web mail services, specifically Google’s Gmail. What Facebook is making a lot easier is the link up between these two. Finding a person’s timeline on Facebook, if you know that email address, will now be super easy, and vise versa. It’s notable that Google has yet to make its own email and social networking product, Google+, as linked up and user-friendly. TechCrunch’s Google+ site is https://plus.google.com/103037366582313115962/ On Facebook it’s http://www.facebook.com/techcrunch Which do you think is more catchy?

Cloud Infrastructure Au...

Opscode , a company that provides cloud infrastructure automation for the enterprise, has raised $19.5 Million in Series C funding led by Ignition Partners, with Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson participating in the round. The company also today announced that Ignition Partners’ John Connors has joined Opscode’s Board of Directors. This latest investment brings Opscode’s total funding to $33 million. Opscode provides companies the ability to develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale in the cloud or behind the firewall. Basically, the company’s offering allows developers and engineers to define what infrastructure they want to build and then manage these complex systems in a number of environments. Opscode’s software, Chef, is an open-source systems integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud. Mitch Hill, CEO of Opscode, says Chef makes it easy to deploy servers and scale applications within infrastructure. The company also offers a version of Chef for private clouds, which Hill says has been receiving a lot of attention from the enterprise. For example, music service Rhapsody uses Opscode in the cloud. And Ancestry.com uses the offering to develop behind the firewall. Hill says that the company mainly faces competition from old school system managements services offered by IBM, HP, and BMC, which were developed a number of years ago. Hill maintains that Opscode’s Chef works with the cloud, and is able to rapidly deploy changes, while also promising scalability. Currently, Opscode has hundreds of paying customers, and thousands of user (some are using the service for free). The financing round, which was oversubscribed, will be used to towards building the company’s software engineering, sales, marketing and business development teams.