This article was published on August 29, 2008

Friday Flashbacks: where does last year’s buzz stand now?


Friday Flashbacks: where does last year’s buzz stand now?

Friday Flashbacks is a new article series we’re going to try and establish here on The Next Web blog, in which we look back at what happened in this week one year ago. The aim is to get some insight in what had us – “us” being tech bloggers in general – buzzing last year, and if all that noise was worth it or not. (Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts on this in the comments.)

So where does last year’s buzz stand now?

August 26, 2007AllOfMp3, the infamous Russian MP3 retail site was rumored to make a comeback after being shut down by the Russian government after inmense international pressure. That didn’t happen, at least not under that name. The RIAA dropped its lawsuit against the website, but didn’t pay any attention to the fact that the site simply relaunched under a different name, MP3Sparks. That clone remained online for a little while, but now has been closed as well. Its predecessor seems to be GoldenMP3.

August 27, 2007 – Free Voip enabler Jaxtr raised $10 million in a Series A round, and reached 1 million users. The company is still going strong with over 10 million users, and raised the same amount in a Series B round announced just last month. Jaxtr is now operational in most of the world.

August 28, 2007 – Rumors about a ‘Gphone’ or ‘Google Phone’ were swirling, and some even ushered talk about a Google-powered OS. Back then, it was referred to as ‘Gphone OS’, even if Google had already acquired Android in 2005 (without making a big fuzz about it). Meanwhile, the first Android-powered mobile phone, the HTC Dream or T-Mobile G1 is well on its way, and just yesterday Google announced Android Market, an upcoming app store for developers, similar to the iTunes App Store (but not entirely the same).

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