Google acquires social currency company Jambool
Google has acquired Jambool, the company behind a virtual currency called Social Gold. Jambool made the announcement in an open letter from founders Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein.
“Our vision is to build world-class products that help developers manage and monetize their virtual economies across the globe,” the letter read. “When the opportunity arose to join forces with Google to execute against this vision, we couldn’t pass it up. We are thrilled to bring the Social Gold platform to Google’s global users.”
An FAQ explains what’s happening next to its users. In a nutshell, Social Gold will continue to operate as it always has and will continue to process payments. In other words, Google will not be shutting down the product anytime soon.
Rumours suggest Google paid out $70 million in the deal. The company has raised approximately $6 million in two funding rounds.
Facebook removes application boxes
In a blog post this weekend, Facebook announced it will remove application boxes from its service, effective August 23. Boxes currently enable Facebook users to display third party content on their profile pages.
The replacement will be something called application tabs, similar to browser tabs. They're specifically devoted to third-party content.
Facebook's move from boxes to tabs mimics the functionality of a web browser. Facebook may see itself as a platform for the rest of the web's content—partly Google's motivation for creating Chrome. Other speculation suggests that Facebook wants to avoid what happened to MySpace, which became overrun with tacky third-party widgets. Another belief is that Facebook wishes to reduce third-party content exposure so that its built-in tools receive maximum utilization.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. As a first step to fulfilling that mission,... [more]
Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to... [more]
Knowlton Thomas
Knowlton is the Associate Editor of Techvibes.
A Vancouver-based writer and author, Knowlton has been published in national and has also appeared on television and radio. He has written two ebooks are more are in the works.
Previously, he was an editor for New Westminster weekly The Other Press and served on its board of directors.
When not...[more]
