Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Business Insider: 10 Things You Need To Know This Morning

Good morning! Here's what you need to know:

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We love this: Christopher Poole, aka moot, i.e. the founder and leader of the infamous image board 4chan, has raised money for a startup called Canvas Networks, which aims to be the next generation of image and message boards. The investors list isn't too shabby either: Ron Conway and Chris Dixon are in it among others.
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Alex Payne, a top Twitter exec, is leaving to start a new startup -- an online bank! That doesn't suck.
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Google acquisition of the week! (Or so it seems) $68 million for online video communications company Global IP Solutions.
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Microsoft just gave Hotmail a big, much-needed upgrade. We hear it's pretty sweet.
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Hulu will probably introduce payments at some point, but not right now.
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Speaking of paying for online media, Spotify, the awesome European streaming music app (it's really awesome, we're using it as we type this) just halved its price, or more accurately, introduced a new pricing plan that lets you stream their full library without ads for about 5 euros a month. For offline and mobile playback you still need to pony up 10 euros a month (which we're happy to).
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Lookout, a smartphone security
startup, just raised $11 million, bringing the total to $16 million.
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Poken is a nice startup: they hand out tiny keychain dongles that you can hit with somebody else's dongle, and that gives you all their social networking info. They've just raised money. Can they compete with apps like Bump, which do the same thing for your phone? Let's see!
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You can't be a big online company and not have privacy hassles, it seems these days. Google is in hot water with the German government for its accidental snooping on people's wifis.
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Funny video of the day! It's a great one, courtesy of The Onion: Google will whisper ads into your Google phone. Watch it to the end for a priceless dig at Yahoo.
Read more: Business Insider

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