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MessageMe, the US-based chat app looking to rival Line, WhatsApp, Viber and co, has confirmed that it has closed a $10 million round of seed funding and, furthermore, that it has passed 5 million registered users, just 75 days after launch. That follows an impressive start which saw it hit 1 million users within its first week. The mobile messaging newcomer sprung a surprise last week when we dug up a filing that showed it had closed the new investment just months after it announced a $1.9 million round, which was assembled in late 2012. The startup has revealed that the new round was led by existing investor Greylock Partners and included participation from a number of other existing backers. The service adopts a multimedia-rich approach to communications to its iOS and Android apps. Chats can be one-on-one or in groups and, beyond basic text-based messages, users can share images, drawings, videos, voice recordings, music and their location. In addition, there are two blank spaces that are reserved for stickers and money; two features that the company will switch on when it turns its focus to making money, CEO (and one of four co-founders) Arjun Sethi told TNW recently. Speaking prior to the latest round of funding, Sethi said that the primary focus is on growing the service’s user base for now. Indeed, with fresh cash in the coffers, there is less pressure on making money and the company has the resources to grow its team, develop the product and increase its user base. “We’ve got some ground breaking additions in the pipeline, aiming to change the way we look at communication happening in our world. We’re excited to help lead a team that pushes the envelope on what’s possible, while focusing on a first-class product,” said the founders in a blog post. Passing 5 million registered users in a short space of time is impressive, but it still leaves MessageMe a long way behind WhatsApp (200 million monthly active users), WeChat (195 million monthly active users), Viber (200 million registered users), Line (150 million registered users), Kakao Talk (90 million active users), Kik (50 million registered users) and, well, others…you get the picture. But, the service is certainly growing at a fast clip, and the founders shared a range of other statistics to illustrate that. As of today, MessageMe sees 8 images uploaded per second on average, that’s up from two 65 days ago after it first launched, while the number of notifications sent per second on average has tripled from 500 to 1,500 over that same period. A recent Informa report found that the number of messages sent by chat apps overtook the volume of SMS worldwide for the first time last year. And, while Message is very much standing in the shadow of giants on that front, one particular thing that is notable about its plans: the founders’ background in gaming. Sethi and fellow co-founder Justin Rosenthal were part of game maker Lolapps, which merged with game publisher 6wave in 2011. Sethi was centrally involved with a number of top Facebook games, so has experience in scaling social games and making money from them. That’s crucial because a number of messaging services are moving towards becoming content and games platforms, with promising signs of success. Line made $58 million during Q1 2013, up from $30 the previous quarter, and Kakao Talk’s games ecosystem is grossing $40 million each month. Equally tellingly is that two billion dollar mobile games firms, GREE and DeNA, are moving into the space with their own messaging apps, Tellit and Comm, respectively. Yet, in the US — MessageMe’s primary market thus far — no company has stepped up to dominate the mobile messaging with games and content. WhatsApp service remains focused on providing communications services, but there are also that are moving. Canada-based Kik is gradually developing its content play — with its HTML5-based Cards platform —

The Kickstarter campaign of Jagged Alliance Flashback is in danger: 60 hours to go and there are still missing 90.000 USD. But developer Full Control wont give up until the very last second. In an interview with PC Games Hardware, CEO Thomas Lund talks…

Yahoo confirmed on Monday that it was acquiring Tumblr for US$1.1 billion -- perhaps further propelling the flight of Tumblr bloggers that began when rumors of the sale intensified last week. While the deal has implications on many levels and for many players -- starting with Yahoo and its shareholders and including the youth segment Yahoo intends to target -- at least one group appears to have weighed the transaction and come to a conclusion about its merits. Tumblr bloggers reportedly have been leaving in droves to join Wordpress.

Globalfoundries has signed up to an IMEC R&D program on STT-MRAM which is seen as a promising high-density, non-volatile alternative to SRAM and DRAM and for embedded use.View the full article HERE.

AMD plummets in microprocessor market ranking

Above the Law is a tabloid blog where the legal community comes to get news and gossip — and to say terrible things about one another. Many of the reader comments on the site are so mean or hurtful that they make notorious troll forums like Gawker feel like a petting zoo. And the Above the Law staff wouldn’t have it any other way. At a time when many publishers are trying to improve comments or else refuse to permit reader participation in the first place, Above the Law continues to let readers be as abrasive as they like. For example, here’s a screenshot of responses to a story by editor Elie Mystal about a scholarship for white people at Columbia: I spoke this month with Mystal and John Lerner, CEO of Breaking Media (the company that owns Above the Law), to learn more about the site’s comment philosophy and its effect on business strategy. “If you write on the internet, people will say horrible things about you. We allow them to say it to our faces — if we didn’t, they’d say it on Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr,” said Mystal. “Anyone who wants to write professionally better be prepared for ad hominem, unfair personal criticism. That’s not just part of media in 2013.” Above the Law’s writers, most of whom are Ivy League law school graduates, are frequent targets of personal vitriol by readers, but Mystal says he still appreciates them. “Commenters got me my job. Online people voted me in. I remember that when they’re screaming about how I look like a walrus.” The commenters also serve as a vital part of the site’s overall content and business strategy. Lerner explained that the story comments appear as separate web pages, which allows Above the Law to sell additional ads, and that the site also works with comment platform Disqus to sell sponsored comments on its app. And, contrary to popular wisdom, advertisers aren’t skittish about their brands appearing next to off-color stories (like this one about a lawyer who invoked the First Amendment to excuse “slut-shaming” someone who turned him down) – a quick look shows that most of ATL’s sponsors are big and boring professional firms. “It’s not like five years ago when a lot of advertisers didin’t know how the internet works,” said Mystal. “They realize there’s horrible comments on the Washington Post too.” Above the Law readers can flag comments as offensive but that doesn’t mean the editors will respond. The only thing likely to be pulled down is something that offends absolutely everybody — “no one one cares if you’re offended”, says Mystal, adding that moderating each comment would be a full time job. Ultimately, the no-holds-barred policy is not just simpler for the editors to oversee, but may also offer a more authentic view of humanity than the curated comments of other forums: “I used to work in a big firm in downtown Manhattan, and there were some racists there. We’re the legal community, and there’s people who hold racist, homophobic views — you’re going to meet people like that. Those people may be your boss.” (Image by ArTono via Shutterstock) Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

As a co-founder of Basho Technologies, the company behind the Riak database, Antony Falco observed that companies already had lots of databases. It makes sense, given that not every database was created equal. But Falco noticed an inherent structural problems with using multiple databases. Keeping data isolated inside any one database prevents companies from making discoveries across multiple data sets. Plus, he said, at least one database tends to have trouble at any given time. Earlier this year, Falco started Orchestrate.io to respond to these issues. The company provides a single API through which customers can send data from multiple databases. This way, customers can join, say, geolocation data, time-series data and tweets, drawing graph relationships and doing full-text searches on top of it all. To build out the infrastructure to do this with multiple cloud providers and bring on customers, Portland, Ore.-based Orchestrate.io is taking on $3 million in seed funding. True Ventures is leading the round (see disclosure) alongside contributions from Frontline Ventures and Resonant Venture Partners. Some companies were already testing out the Orchestrate.io service, although Falco declined to identify them. He said the price of using the service is tied to the number of queries per second customer make. When it comes to competition, Falco said, “Certainly there’s Amazon.” On Amazon Web Services, customers can get a slew of tools, from RDS for relational databases to DynamoDB for nonrelational work to Elastic MapReduce for Hadoop. And, of course, if companies don’t buy into the Orchestrate.io logic, existing databases constitute challengers. But Falso has an answer for that. “Databases can do most of these queries,” he said. “The problem is, they can’t do them efficiently and at scale at the same time.” After the company comes out of private beta, Falco thinks Orchestrate.io has the potential to be a go-to provider for lots of different kinds of data-analysis services, Falco said, just as companies look to Twilio for voice services and SendGrid for email. “(There’s a) shift of operational burden from a corporation or the end user to a service provider,” he said. “I think we’re just part of the trend. You’re going to continue to see that over the next several years.” Disclosure: Orchestrate.io is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystemWhat’s driving the next phase of the e-commerce evolutionThe Red-Hot Data Warehouse Market: Who’s Buying Next?

Researchers at Northwestern University have devised a new method of creating large volumes of high-quality graphene, and then printing flexible graphene patterns with an inkjet printer that are 250 times more conductive than previous attempts.

The day Sven Olaf Kamphuis parked his huge orange Mercedes van with its German numberplates outside Bar Javis, in the Catalan town of Granollers, the owner's son snapped a picture with his mobile phone. "Not a lot happens in this street," Maria Cruz, the bar's owner, explained. "And it was so huge, with all those funny antennas and solar panels poking out of the roof, that it blocked the light to the bar." Even stranger was the 35-year-old Dutch man who parked it in this narrow street after renting a small attic flat with windows made of glass blocks in the poorer end of this nondescript town 15 miles from Barcelona. Even on hot early summer days, Kamphuis wore a woollen hat. And he spoke no Spanish, answering "yes, yes" in English to everything people from this friendly neighbourhood said to him. Kamphuis, 35, is one of the most controversial characters in the murky world of spam and hacking – deemed the internet's public enemy number one by some, though others believe his reputation has been blown out of proportion by the grandstanding of his foes. Capable of rigging up sophisticated computer systems anywhere, including the back of a van, he allegedly masterminded a flurry of March internet attacks that the security company CloudFlare claimed "almost broke the internet", plunging the world into digital darkness. When Spanish and Dutch police arrested him they found the flat occupied by a tangle of cables and computer gear. A copy of the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver lay on the unmade bed. Kamphuis displayed a Napoleonic sense of grandeur. "He claimed he had diplomatic status," said the Spanish police officer who led the operation, but asked not to be named. "He said he was the telecommunications minister and foreign minister of a place called the Cyberbunker Republic. He didn't seem to be joking." "The request to arrest him came from the Netherlands," said the police officer, who heads the cybercrime unit in Barcelona. "But Britain, the United States and Germany were all affected by the massive denial of service attacks that he launched. "The van was fitted out as a mobile office from which he could launch his attacks. Amongst other things we found the IP addresses of his targets and that is part of the evidence we are sending to the Netherlands." Kamphuis has yet to be tried, but Spanish police believe they know his modus operandi. "He brought together hackers from around the world to launch the attacks. It is obviously not all over yet, because the Dutch have been under attack again in recent days – presumably as revenge by his friends. "Some of them have networks of zombie computers, having spread viruses that let them control others people's computers. They all agree to launch the attack and they do millions of requests to the server at the same time." The result was what the New York Times called an attack of previously "unknown magnitudes", producing a 300bn-bits-per-second data stream that targeted the British and Swiss-based anti-spam operator Spamhaus and its allies. This had reportedly blacklisted his CB3ROB/Cyberbunker company, which claims its servers are housed in an old Nato nuclear bunker near Rotterdam, for hosting hundreds of spam and malware websites. Kamphuis happily claimed to be punishing Spamhaus for "abusing their influence". "Nobody ever deputised Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the internet," he told the New York Times in an angry message. He later denied involvement. "We want to be absolutely clear that the DDoS [distributed denial of service] attacks are not and have not ever been orchestrated within CB3ROB/CyberBunker, nor are they conducted under the supervision of Sven," he wrote on his Facebook page. But the huge number of spammers he hosts has led even hacktivists sympathetic to his pro-Pirate party, Anonymous and Julian Assange's stance to question his real activities. Several other mysteries remain. If this was one of the most successful

ConsultingMD, a startup that connects patients with leading medical specialists, has raised a $10 million round of funding from Venrock Capital. The company, which launched earlier this year and previously raised $1 million from Harrison Metal, enables patients to seek second opinions from a network of top doctors, and to get referrals to  specialists in their own area. With the funding, the startup said it plans to further develop its technology and build out its network of elite doctors. In contrast to startups like ZocDoc or HealthTap, which help patients find any doctor available in their area or online, ConsultingMD bills itself as service that offers access to only the doctors in the top echelon of the medical world. These physicians – who encompass the one percent of their profession – tend to be the chiefs or chairmen of the department, with publications in the top medical journals, the company says. “The core problem is that in the highly elite world of academic specialists… access to these people is difficult [and] patients don’t know how to find them in the first place,” said CEO and co-founder Owen Tripp, who was previously COO and co-founder of Reputation.com. The company’s other co-founder is Dr. Lawrence Hofman, chief of interventional radiology at Stanford Hospital. Through the site, patients in need of second opinion spend a few minutes describing their case, disclosing where they’ve already received care and authorizing ConsultingMD to access their medical history. Then the startup digitizes and indexes the relevant medical records (an often frustrating and dragged-out process for patients) and delivers it to the appropriate specialist on ConsultingMD. While it can take the company an average of seven or eight days to aggregate all the records, once the doctor receives the information, Tripp said, they the doctor  can turn around a second opinion in an average of 48 hours. For individuals coming to the site, the pricing is steep, emphasizing ConsultingMD’s positioning as an elite service – the company’s website says a second opinion costs $3,750. But the company believes its bigger opportunity is by offering the service to employers looking for a way to help their employees get better outcomes (and therefore boost productivity and lower costs). For an additional $200, the company will also locate and schedule a priority appointment with a top specialist in a patient’s area, as well as deliver all of the necessary medical records. For doctors, the site offers a chance to interact with other top-tier medical professionals (doctors are only admitted to the site by peer recommendation), see more cases that match their research interests and, of course, earn a little more cash. For patients, the opportunity to reach the one or two leading experts in a given field may be attractive — especially in very specific or rare medical situations. But even though the company says that outcomes for elite doctors differ substantially from outcomes for less pedigreed professionals, it’s unclear that the research backs that up. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunityWeb startups: How to guard against security breaches