Morning Tech Wrap: Skype, HP, Facebook
August 22, 2011 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
Skype is buying the group-messaging service GroupMe, just a year after it was founded by Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci. The terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. The service allows conference and private group phone calls and group texting from mobile devices
A couple of months after its creation, GroupMe closed an $850,000 round of financing from a number of angels. Earlier this year, the company raised a further $10.6 million. Skype CEO Tony Bates says he’s been in talks with the company for months.
“GroupMe creates a very sticky, instant feeling. Like Skype, it is an everyday interactive form of communication,” Bates told TechCrunch. “Skype’s goal is to get to 1 billion users. Mobile is the place to do that.”
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Retailers like Best Buy were selling the Hewlett-Packard TouchPads at a firesale price of $99 each on Saturday, with many selling out. It comes two days after HP announced it would be selling or spinning-off its Personal Systems Group and immediately stopping production on TouchPads and smartphones.
The HP tablet, which saw slow sales in recent months, were already sold out by Saturday morning from Best Buy and Staples outlets in New York City’s Union Square. Heavily reduced prices for the soon-to-be axed line of tablets encouraged shoppers, PC World reports. The 16-GB TouchPad was just $99, with the 32-GB model at $150.