As Berlin’s overhyped Amen fails, time to take stock
The death of Amen is no great surprise, but it does represent the end of a certain era — one of hype — for Berlin. So what’s left? A ton of serious businesses that bode well for the future.
The death of Amen is no great surprise, but it does represent the end of a certain era — one of hype — for Berlin. So what’s left? A ton of serious businesses that bode well for the future.
Following the rise of good design for consumer web, mobile apps and gadgets, next up is the enterprise. Company services, apps and hardware are finally starting to get the Apple-style design treatment.
Serial entrepreneur Marco Boerries wants to provide well-designed apps for the small businesses of the world, and has raised a $38 million round from well-known investors to do it.
Update: Yahoo’s official statement on the matter after the jump…
This had been expected: Marco Boerries, the EVP for Connected Devices di…
Following Vodafone’s (NYSE: VOD) Arun Sarin, Yahoo’s EVP of Connected Life Marco Boerries came on stage to tell the audience about its vario…
Speech recognition company Vligno has scored a $20 million second round of funding led by Yahoo, and through a relationship with the search company, access to 600 million cell phone subscribers worldwide. As I noted earlier, Yahoo said today it will use Vlingo to power the voice recognition for its oneSearch mobile search product.
“We like the technology so much we made sure our competitors can’t use it,” explained Marco Boerries, president of Yahoo Mobile. Boerries declined to say how much Yahoo put into Vlingo, but said the company had exclusive use of the technology for mobile search.
Hooking its star to Yahoo puts Vlingo in the same league as Microsoft — which offers mobile carriers speech recognition technology derived from its TellMe acquisition — and singlespeech-focused search company Nuance Communications, which is cultivating carrier relationships as well.
Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) mobile Chief Marco Boerries has confirmed that it will make versions of its mobile services to run on phone platforms inc…