it looks like that $10 million offer from Martin Shkreli to exclusively acquire Kanye West’s new album wasn’t even in the ballpark. Today Kanye has taken to Twitter to publicly plead with tech execs for investments as the artist delays the release of his much anticipated album “The Life of Pablo” and cites $53 million in personal debt.
Samsung announced today that ChatON, the company’s chat service that comes preinstalled on many of its mobile devices, has now passed the 100 million subscriber mark. That’s up around 50 million users in fourth months since first hitting 50 million subscribers in May, according to Samsung. The press release notes that ChatON has been experiencing growth in markets such as India and China, but doesn’t say how many active users the service has:
ChatON was designed in-line with Samsung’s drive to deliver products that meet specific local needs in different markets. In India for example, ChatON has seen exponential growth as the service supports 10 regional dialects, with plans to support 13 dialects by the end of 2013. Additional features such as the Ramadan Anicon have helped boost its popularity in the Middle East.
It’s important to note that this certainly doesn’t mean active users, and with ChatON currently preinstalled on Samsung’s most popular devices– the Note II & III, Galaxy S4, etc– there’s no telling how many users signed up and only tried the service once.
ChatON is also available on other Android devices, iOS, Windows Phone, and PCs, as well as in 63 different languages, but Samsung didn’t share details on how many subscribers it has on each platform.
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After announcing it would invest around $100 million in original TV quality content for YouTube last year, Google added almost a 100 new channels offering high-quality content. Today, we get some updates on the progress of the project from a report in The Wall Street Journal. According to WSJ’s sources, advertisers already committed over $150 million in ads on the channels for this year alone. Google also plans to throw another $200 million at the effort going forward. Google will also apparently fund content for international viewers:
YouTube plans to expand its channels initiative to Europe by funding a couple dozen video channels for British and French viewers by next year, according to people familiar with its initiative.
Reports circulated last month that Google wanted to buy social messaging service Meebo for roughly $100 million, and now those stories have finally received official confirmation.
Meebo verified the news today in a post on the company blog (above):
We are happy to announce that Meebo has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Google!
For more than seven years we’ve been helping publishers find deeper relationships with their users and to make their sites more social and engaging. Together with Google, we’re super jazzed to roll up our sleeves and get cracking on even bigger and better ways to help users and website owners alike.
We’ve had a blast building Meebo so far and we’re really excited to start the next leg of our journey.
Thank you all for coming along for the ride!
Meebo Team
Meebo began in 2005 as a browser-based instant messaging program with support for Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AIM, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, and others. The service now boasts mobile apps, and it features multi-user chat rooms, a content aggregator, and the ability for users to check-in and share media across popular social networks. It even offers APIs for developers.
