Friday, November 2, 2007MetroPCS Bid For Leap Wireless WithdrawnDallas-based MetroPCS said late Thursday that it has withdrawn its offer to acquire San Diego-based Leap Wireless. MetroPCS, which has proposed a $5.5B acquisition of Leap Wireless in September, said that it dropped the bid because it "has not been able to engage Leap in meaningful negotiations" with Leap Wireless on its offer.
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Interview with Reza Pourzia, Cyber RainFor our Friday interview, we thought it would be interesting to profile Cyber Rain (www.cyber-rain.com), a Los Angeles company in the clean technology space which recently raised a small round of funding. Reza Pourzia is founder and CTO of the company, and he told us a little bit more about its "smart" irrigation controllers designed to better control sprinkler systems to conserve water. Reza spoke with Ben Kuo.
What's your background, and what's the idea behind Cyber Rain?
Reza Pourzia: I (More info...)
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MySpace Joins Google's OpenSocial PlatformLos Angeles-based MySpace said Thursday afternoon that it has joined Google's newly launched open social networking API effort, OpenSocial. MySpace and Google said that the two are partnering on the effort, which is a joint effort by Google and a number of social networking web sites to create a standardize set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for developing social networking applications. The effort, which appears to be a response to the immense popularity of Facebook's open API eff (More info...)
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Revver Upgrades Video Sharing ServiceLos Angeles-based Revver said yesterday that it has released the latest version of the firm's web site, calling its upgrade Revver 2.0. According to the company, the new site includes a more intuitive user interface, new community tools, and additional opportunities for advertisers. Among the enhancement to the site are widgets, ability to post videos in response to other videos, contact lists and a dashboard, along with ability of advertisers to sponsor specific video collections. Revver is bac (More info...)
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Move.com Expands Team, Hires MacWrite CreatorWestlake Village-based Move.com said Thursday afternoon that it has expanded its team with two new key hires, including one of the original employees of Apple Computer who created MacWrite. Move.com said it has appointed Justin Miller Senior Vice President of Product Management, and Randy Wigginton as site architect. Miller was most recently an executive at eBay; Wigginton joins from Quigo. Move.com said that Miller was most recently senior director of product at eBay Europe, and also served at (More info...)
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CinemaNow Partners With SamsungMarina Del Rey-based video on demand firm CinemaNow has inked a deal with Samsung Electronics, the companies said yesterday. CinemaNow said that it will offer its video download service for use with Samsung's new P2 Portable Media Player. The deal includes a Samsung branded, video on demand service which will allow Samsung P2 users to purchase and download films, TV shows, and music videos from CinemaNow. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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iRise Appoints ExecsEl Segundo-based iRise said this week that it has appointed two new executives. The firm said that it has appointed Steven Yamanaka as CTO of the firm, and Lionel Etrillard as VP of Finance. Yamanaka joins the firm from Aceva Technologies; Etrillard joins the company from DLC. iRise said that Yamanaka will be responsible for technology strategy behind its product, and that he has also served at Mineshare, Kofax, Starbase, Ashton-Tate, and TRW. Etrillard has also served at Conexant, Kittrich, and (More info...)
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Solarflare Taps Accton For ManufacturingIrvine-based Solarflare Communications said earlier this week that it is collaborating with Accton Technology Corporation, on manufacturing of its 10 Gigabit Ethernet products. Solarflare said that Accton will manufacture products based on Solarflare's 10GbE and 10GBASE-T technology for OEMs. Solarflare's chips are used for connecting systems via Gigabit Ethernet over standard copper UTP cabling. Solarflare said that network interface cards (NICs) for OEMs will start shipping in Q4 of this year (More info...)
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WD Ups Drive Capacity, Ships 320 GB DriveLake Forest-based Western Digital has upped its notebook and portable drive capacity, saying earlier this week that it is now shipping its new WD Scorpio 320GB, 2.5-inch SATA drives for notebooks. The drives are among the highest capacity disk drives available for notebooks and other portable devices. According to WD, the new drive will be shipping in systems from Acer Inc. The new 5400 RPM drive doubles the speed of the SATA interface to 3Gbit/sec, and also includes a number of firmware and har (More info...)
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j2 Links Into StarOfficej2 Global Communications has linked into Sun Microsystems' office productivity software, StarOffice, saying earlier this week that users of the StarOffice and OpenOffice.org suite of tools can now easily FAX documents directly from the software. j2 said that its eFax service is now available from the menu bar of StarOffice and the open source OpenOffice software. The new software is an extension which is available for the open source office productivity suite. StarOffice is Sun's answer to Micro (More info...)
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