In This Update:
• Nokia Says Symbian Deal on Track
• Silicon Valley’s Airline: XOJET Takes off as Corporate Jets Lose Favor
• Kyte Announces Branded Mobile Sites
• Cisco To Shut Down For 4 Days At Year End
• Lenovo Lets You Disable Your Laptop with a Text Message
• Cable Markets in New York City Declared Competitive
• Magnify.net Raises $750K For Web Video Service
• Microsoft Expected to Rebrand Live.com to Kumo.com
• PlaySpan Raises $16.8 Million For Virtual-Goods Marketplace
• CafePress Raises $8.3 Million for User Powered E-Commerce Community

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Nokia Says Symbian Deal on Track
REUTERS
The world’s largest cell phone maker, Nokia, said on Tuesday its 264 million euro ($339.9 million) acquisition of British software firm Symbian was on track to be closed this year. Nokia said in June it would buy out other shareholders of UK-based smartphone software maker Symbian and make its software royalty-free to other phone makers in response to new rivals such as Google. It has said it expects the deal to be approved by the end of this year. “The Symbian deal is on track,” Mary McDowell, Nokia’s chief development officer, told Reuters on the sidelines to Business Week’s European Leadership Forum in London.
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Silicon Valley’s Airline: XOJET Takes off as Corporate Jets Lose Favor
VENTUREBEAT
When the chief executives of the Big Three automakers went to Washington, D.C. with tin cups in hand asking for a $25 billion government bailout, they triggered public outrage when it was revealed they’d flown in on luxury private jets. With shareholder and taxpayer frustration growing, companies are starting to see corporate jets as a liability. That’s where Silicon Valley’s XOJET airline comes in. The San Carlos, Calif.-based airline provides a kind of private jet time sharing service for corporations. Sure, it’s not your typical Silicon Valley startup. But it’s an example of how innovative thinking can reengineer an entire industry.
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Kyte Announces Branded Mobile Sites
READ WRITE WEB
Kyte, the popular video streaming platform, announced a new product tonight: branded mobile web destinations. These new sites will allow brands to easily create and monetize their own video-enabled sites for mobile devices. As we reported earlier this year, Kyte is slowly moving away from user-generated content and is focusing on large brands and content producers instead. Among the launch partners for the new branded mobile sites are two Interscope recording artists: Lady Gaga and the All-American Rejects. These new brand-specific mobile sites are now also available for all of Kyte’s partners.
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Cisco To Shut Down For 4 Days At Year End
GIGAOM
If you want to know how bad it is going to get for all of us in Silicon Valley, just look at Cisco Systems. For first time in its history the company is going to shut down for four days at the end of the year, according to a report by UBS Research. Remember when such shutdowns were associated with industrial era companies? Well, this is the new past as they say. I heard that a major internal annual event has been put on hold as well. Cisco’s four-day shutdown is part of an effort by the company to save $1 billion. It might be more than just cost savings because Cisco (and many of us) doesn’t have visibility into 2009. Cisco, as a company has just seen Wall Street, a major customer shrink in size. At the same time it is facing low-cost competition from Dell, HP and Huawei. The New York Times is correct in identifying HP’s ProCurve businesses as slowly becoming a major competitor to Cisco.
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Lenovo Lets You Disable Your Laptop with a Text Message
NEOWIN.NET
In the next couple months Lenovo will be rolling out a BIOS update for its Montevina laptop users which enables remote shutdown and subsequent encryption via text message. The tech relies on the laptop having a WWAN connection and activates when a custom string, defined by the user and sent from a single, paired phone, is received. In other words, you can choose whatever you want as the shutdown signal, from a cool “Kill” or “Self-Destruct” to a long, patronizing multi-part message about the thieving youth of today. Constant Secure Remote Disable, as it’s called, isn’t being touted as a first line of defense. In fact, quite the opposite: “This is kind of like a morning-after pill, I guess” said Stacy Cannady, Lenovo’s product manager for security and apparently the only person at Lenovo to miss the company-wide memo about not using awkward reproductive metaphors in PR. The update will be available as a free download for compatible laptops in the next few months.
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Cable Markets in New York City Declared Competitive
GIGAOM
In an order released yesterday, the Federal Communications Commission declared certain parts of the New York City cable market competitive, thanks to Verizon offering its FiOS TV in the area. This means the FCC also revokes the ability of the municipal authorities of New York to regulate how Time Warner Cable sets its basic cable rates. So far, it looks like parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan are competitive, if one can envision a duopoly (in areas where Cablevision doesn’t provide service) as real competition. Although I may be too cynical, as I bet that TWC will find it hard to implement tiered bandwidth when going head-to-head for broadband and cable subscribers with Verizon, which has shown no inclination to cap or meter customers. Maybe I should hightail it back to Brooklyn.
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Magnify.net Raises $750K For Web Video Service
SILICON ALLEY INSIDER
NYC-based Web video startup Magnify.net has raised about $750,000 in Series A1 financing. This is in addition to the $1 million it raised in February. Innovation Ventures led the round, and all major investors returned, including RoseTech Ventures, NextStage Capital, Ogden Capital, and individual angel investors. Magnify also took on some debt issued by Vencore. One way to think about Magnify is as a simpler version of Brightcove, which has abandoned its free products to focus on high-end media clients. Magnify uses Amazon Web services to deliver its videos.
Magnify’s clients include Taste of Home Magazine , which uses Magnify to power its Web video site. All told, almost 47,000 sites use Magnify, which is on track for 30 million video impressions this month.
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Microsoft Expected to Rebrand Live.com to Kumo.com
NEOWIN
Microsoft intends to rebrand its Live Search service as Kumo next year, according to a TechCrunch report that cited a source within the company. Apparently, the software giant acquired the kumo.com domain name last week and since then has been busy snapping up all the other variants such as .net, .jp, .fr, .ru and so on. Also being reported as a sign that Microsoft is taking measures to boost its search engine is the fact that it has recently hired Sean Suchter, currently Yahoo’s vice president of search technology. Despite Microsoft’s recent efforts to encourage Live.com usage, which include actually paying users, their service seems to have reached a dead end and hasn’t grown in the past few months. Whether or not these latest moves will improve the company’s competitiveness with the other leading search engines remains to be seen.
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PlaySpan Raises $16.8 Million For Virtual-Goods Marketplace
TECHCRUNCH
Who says raising money is hard these days? PlaySpan makes it look like child’s play. The startup, which was literally founded by a 5th grader, just raised $16.8 million in a series B round from existing investors Easton Capital Group, Menlo Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, and STIC.
PlaySpan was founded two years ago by Arjun Mehta, then in the 5th grade, and his father Karl Mehta, who is the CEO. It is a marketplace and micro-transaction payment system for virtual goods in more than 200 different video games. So far this year, more than $50 million worth of transactions have gone through PlaySpan, and the company has reaped revenues in the millions of dollars.
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CafePress Raises $8.3 Million for User Powered E-Commerce Community
STARTUP MEME
CafePress, a San Mateo, California based user powered e-commerce site has raised $8.3 million in venture funding according a regulatory filing. Return backer Sequoia Capital also participated in the round. CafePress allows users to create, sell and buy T-Shirts and other such print items such as greeting cards, holiday gifts etc. The site has more than 6.5 million members and has 150 million products listed on its pages.
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Tags: AlleyInsider, Amazon, API, Boston, Brand, Brightcove, Broadband, Cablevision, CafePress, Cisco, Dell, Europe, FCC, Financing, FIOS, GigaOM, Google, IAB, IGA, Ike, ISP, Kyte, Lenovo, Microsoft, Mobile, Mobile Web, New York, New York Times, Nokia, NYC, Ovi, PRI, Reuters, SEC, Sequoia Capital, Series A, Smartphone, Symbian, Time Warner, Turn, TV, UK, Venture, Venture Capital, Verizon, Video, Web Video, XOJET, Yahoo