Glam Media is flexing its M&A muscle overseas. Today, it is acquiring German men’s Web property Fantastic Zero from the digital division of German media giant Holtzbrinck and European marketing agency Publigroupe.

Fantastic Zero is a collection of 50 male oriented sites with a reach of 5.5 million unique visitor a month in Germany, and 10 million overall. The acquisition price is not being disclosed, but it is a decent sized acquisition for Glam, which started in the U.S. as a collection of female-oriented sites and a larger ad network. Glam is already the the sixth largest Web property in the U.S. with a reach of 98 million uniques in August, coming up fast on No. 5 AOL’s 107 million (comScore). Fantastic Zero won’t help in the U.S., but it will worldwide, where Glam has a reach of 170 million uniques.

The acquisition helps Glam not so much on the numbers, but in its attempt to broaden out to men. A year ago it launched Brash, and more recently, BrashSports.

Glam raised $50 million last February, and hired a big-gun CFO in former Microsoft executive Bruce Jaffe last May. Glam’s M&A machine is just getting rolling. Expect it to pick up more properties to expand its reach both in the U.S. and abroad as it tries to unseat AOL.

Mobile social network Flirtomatic (“the world’s number one flirting company”) today announced somewhat of a milestone: It’s passed the 3 million global user mark and, perhaps more noteworthy, recently surpassed 1 million users in the U.S.

Furthermore, citing a study by the mobile media measurement firm Ground Truth, the London-based company says that over the summer, Flirtomatic accounted for 65% of the season’s audience for mobile dating in the US (I didn’t know dating sites had seasons), out flirting traditional players such as eHarmony and match.com.

That’s impressive although it also speaks volumes to the vulnerability of said players, many of whom charge for access as well as an additional premium for mobile.

Announcing another in our series of subscriber-only features: a live, moderated webchat with Kyle Wiens. Kyle is the cofounder of the extremely popular gadget repair site iFixit. iFixit started out providing tear-down guides, tools, and replacement parts for Apple products, but has since branched out to all manner of gadgets, from phones to video game consoles (read our profile of the company). iFixit’s primary mission is to make the world a cleaner and better place by reducing gadget waste through educational tools like free and open repair guides in addition to providing access to hard-to-find tools and parts.

This live chat is only available to Ars Premier subscribers and begins at 1pm CDT on Wednesday, September 8 (see it in your own timezone). The discussion will center on iFixit’s mission of educating individuals on repairing their gadgets (rather than tossing them) and their adventures in dissecting the latest gadgetry.

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With Kinect set to launch in North America on November 4, Microsoft has announced a bundle that will see the controller-free device bundled with an Xbox 360 and a game. The bundle will be available at launch and will cost $399.

In addition to the Kinect hardware, you’ll get a shiny new 250GB 360 slim and a copy of Kinect Adventures. With the 250GB 360 model retailing at $300 and Kinect soon to be available for $150, the bundle offers up modest savings for those buying their first 360. It might also be a good option for those who have an older 360 model and are looking to upgrade. Of course, it’s not the only option available, as Microsoft has already previously announced a 4GB 360/Kinect bundle that will cost $299.

When Kinect launches later this year, a total of 15 games will be available, including Kinect Sports, Kinectimals, and Harmonix’s Dance Central. If you don’t feel like waiting for your motion controls, the PlayStation Move will be available later this month.

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No matter what size iPad or other portable device you get, many times it seems that you’re going to hit that storage limit and find yourself aching for more space. The HyperDrive may not fix that problem for you, but it may be handy in certain circumstances.

Using the portable HyperDrive and the iPad Camera Connection Kit, one can transfer movies and photos onto the iPad from either the HyperDrive’s internal storage or via memory cards attached to it. Since the iPad only allows attached storage of 32GB or less, the HyperDrive sections off its on-board storage into 32GB “folders,” each of which is viewable using the iPad Photos application.

It’s definitely a hacky way to go about transferring data to your iPad while on the go, but at least it doesn’t require jailbreaking to use (if that’s a concern of yours). The usefulness of the HyperDrive seems rather limited, though, as it’s not able to transfer data off of your iPad, only onto it.

The HyperDrive comes in 120GB up to 750GB models, starting at US$299.

[via Macworld UK]

TUAWCarry more iPad data with you, using HyperDrive originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s a surprise we didn’t expect this morning — or ever, for that matter — Apple has changed its stance on iOS app development, now allowing all tools “…as long as the resulting apps do not download any code.” Theoretically, this would include Adobe Flash CS5 but certainly includes tools like Unity. [Note that while the Flash CS5 authoring environment may be kosher, this rule still excludes the Flash browser plugin due to the no-downloaded-code clause. -Ed.]

In addition, Apple has published the App Store Review Guidelines for the very first time. We’ll be anxious to hear what developers have to say after giving those guidelines a good read.

You’ll remember a recent change in Apple’s SDK language that prohibited iOS apps to be written with anything other than Apple-approved tools, including Flash. This led to a viciously bitter spat between Adobe and Apple (though it really seemed to be between Jobs and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen) with both sides setting up their tents and firing barbs. To say that this morning’s change is dramatic is an understatement.

Great, now I have to be on the lookout for 3 other horsemen for the rest of the day.

[Via Engadget]

TUAWApple loosens reins, allows 3rd party iOS dev tools with caveat originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 09:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon has bought AmieStreet.com, the indie music site that became known for starting its song prices at zero and increasing them with each download. Amie Street, Inc. (which remains independent) said that it plans to shift its focus onto its own social music streaming service, Songza.com.

Amie Street launched in July 2006 as a bit player in the online music scene. At that time, it was one of the only services that offered DRM-free MP3s, and the pricing structure was very attractive to those looking to explore new music. Songs started out free, but as more and more people bought a particular song, the price would go up a few cents, with a cap of 99¢ per download.

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We are fascinated here at ReadWriteWeb about Hadoop. It can be used in so many ways. It gives you that sense of excitement that shows how big data can open up all kinds of possibilities.

So we got a tad excited tonight when we ran across a post by Mike Pearce about “10 Hadoopable Problems: or in other words, 10 things you can do with Hadoop. But excitement turned to disappointment when it reminded us of how limiting we can be when thinking about big data in standard terms.

We won’t go into detail about each of the 10 ways Hadoop can be used. You can go check out the post yourself. Instead, we’ll highlight a few and provide our own little view about big data, the failings of geek culture and the role information plays in our interface culture.

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Hadoop is a transforming technology that through its analytic capabilities, can change the way we interface with the world. We use the term interface in deference to Interface Culture, the book by Steven Johnson that explored the Web’s interactive elements and technology interfaces. He looked at buttons, links and metaphors such as the desktop and traced them back to medieval planning, Victorian novels, early cinema and the rise of our modern culture.

The interface culture we develop out of big data will spawn new works that help guide us into unfamiliar spaces as much as novels helped the Victorian era make sense of the new, industrial world.

Hadoop is a tool increasingly used to make sense of a new world that automatically creates data in overwhelming amounts. We manually create our own data through gestures on Facebook, from the images we post to Flickr and the tweets we post religiously. But data is also created automatically by intelligent agents who do the work on our behalf, sending information from machine-to-machine, analyzing itself along the way, increasing in intelligence through APIs or forking into new realms as its manipulated and turned into apps, recommendation engines and the rest.

Transforming data helps us make sense of an information universe, By analyzing it we create our own interface culture and in the process, better understand our world. New art, new intellectual movements and new societies will emerge from the data we are just starting to learn how to chisel into new shapes, new scuptures if you will that tells stories about who we are.

Unfortunately, the 10 examples (from a Cloudera presentation) don’t draw us into a new world of possibilities. Sure, fraud detection (number seven) is important. Goodness knows how often we hear about it. I am sure there are lots of surveillance geeks out there who love the idea of monitoring trade with Hadoop as pointed out in number 8. Ad targeting comes in the four spot. That’s a familiar topic. Search quality is ninth. More yawns. You get the picture.

All of these examples explore what we have become accustomed to in geek culture. Possibilities for how big data can be used in a strictly commercial sense or as a way to optimize processes or the technologies we have already developed.

It’s implausible to believe that we will see any kind of diversity in geek culture if we continue grinding down this technically oriented view of the data around us. Focusing on incremental improvements in processes has been done for generations. It will make people a lot of money but its impact is minimal in the world we live. It will create jobs. We will without a doubt see a new generation of data analysts but there is more to this big data, right?

Perhaps it is too early to expect a renaissance. It’s like we are medieval artists who are struggling to move beyond the concept of flat images. We are too consumed in the technological marvels of what we have created to fully understand the implications of what we have discovered and with it what we can create.

We will admit it is getting simpler to develop technologies and easier for people to use. More people are making apps. We have a new generation of developers who have taught themselves by following the principles of the view-source culture. More women are making inroads. We can thank open standards for that.

It’s the software that mixes and cooks up that data which will truly transform our world. When that data is as accessible as flour is for baking or clay for sculpting then Hadoop and other analytics technologies like it will have real meaning.

And perhaps it is the ability to discover data and perform tricks with it that opens up this marvelous world. A world made from the big data we shape into images that help us realize an interface culture of a new modern era.

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If you have ever pulled your hair out over maintaining SQL statements intermingled with your PHP project code you might not be alone. Perhaps you considered abstraction or wished your database had an API. You might have even heard of an Object Relational Mapper (ORM).

Let’s take a quick look at ORM for your next PHP project.

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The Perfect (st)ORM

The ORM offerings for PHP projects have come a long way. A query on stackoverflow returns over 100 hits on php+orm. With that in mind, focusing on one PHP ORM might be helpful as you to consider your next PHP project.

As with any solution in the PHP community you can expect to see several contenders for the best mousetrap prize. While no ORM is perfect, each will cater to specific needs and have varied levels of integration or consideration for PHP frameworks. Features can range from simplified abstraction to code generation to support for various underlying databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Firebird to IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle.

Doctrine was mentioned recently in the RWH review of zfKit as part of its easy out-of-the-box Zend Framework experience. You may also find features in the Doctrine 2.0 release to be of interest if you need caching or support for writing your own interfaces and abstract classes for when your database of choice is not supported at the time of a stable release.

A recent presentation highlighted Doctrine 2.0 as being a fresh take on the expansion of the PHP ORM options showing up in sourceforge, github, and related project hosting services.

(Slide 14 is an instant favorite)

I want a $drug->new()

Of course, even if you focus on Doctrine you find references to alternative ORM options such as Propel. This is because an ORM can often be found intermingled in wider discussion of PHP MVC frameworks.

For example, Propel is often mentioned in relation to Symfony and CodeIgniter or as another alternative to using Doctrine with other PHP MVC frameworks. In addition, the Propel blog is a good resource for extracting the value when using Propel or any ORM in general.

Again, there is more than just one ORM option in the PHP community. You may have even ended up writing your own at one point or found your MVC framework came with a library that supplied ORM functionality.

When selecting an ORM, what are your considerations? What did you expect to gain from the ORM? Have you had success or strugles with use of an ORM in your projects?

Let us know in the comments below!

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Wow, a mutant virus? This analogy may sound like a ringing bell for another cat fight on the playground, but Acer founder and retired chairman Stan Shih is actually semi-praising Apple here. Speaking at the launch of an Acer touch-themed design competition, Shih said that while Apple’s taking the “revolution” highway to tackle the PC market, Acer’s success has always depended on its time-consuming but more pragmatic “evolution” strategy, and it’ll keep doing so to lay the ground for the next 30 years or so. Here’s how China Times paraphrased Shih:

“Apple is like a mutant virus, escaping from the traditional structure of the PC industry, but the industry will still eventually build up immunity, thus further blocking this trend, and we believe the size of the non-Apple camp will exceed Apple’s, because this is how the industry normally evolves.”

Assuming the second half of Shih’s quote refers to the tablet market share, this certainly echoes the words of his good friend JT Wang. That said, this is also the man who’s boldly predicted that all American PC brands will be gone within 20 years, but there’s no promise that Apple won’t be kicking out a few more revolutions in the coming years. Anyway, doesn’t Acer have more to worry about for the mean time?

CE-Oh no he didn’t!: Acer founder characterizes Apple as a mutant virus originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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