Mike Dirolf, the young founder of an idiot-proof way to send group emails, is shutting down his startup Fiesta.cc.

Fiesta.cc allowed users to create group email lists from the carbon copy field without ever having to visit another web page.

Dirolf says he lost interest in what he was building. Though everything was going well from a numbers perspective, he decided “life is too short to spend time on something that I’m not 100% passionate about.”

Dirolf was bootstrapping the startup and says it’s too expensive to keep the service running. Dirolf will move out of Dogpatch Labs NY and become a consultant while he figures out where his real startup passion lies.

Dirolf formerly worked at 10gen (the maker of MongoDB) and attended Princeton.

Here’s the farewell email and blog post Fiesta sent to users this morning:

We’ve got some sad news for you: we have decided to stop working on Fiesta and to shut the service down. If you’re interested in why, there are more details at the end of this post. If not, here’s the quick overview of how this affects you: we’ve made an export tool available on the list management page to export your lists. We’ve turned off the ability to create new lists, but your current lists will continue to function until March 1st. Hopefully that gives you time to find an alternate solution and coordinate with the other members of your lists. After March 1st, we’ll be turning off the servers that handle incoming email (so lists will no longer function). At that point all personal data will be permanently deleted.

We owe all of you a huge debt of gratitude for using Fiesta and making it so fun for us to work on over the past 13 months. We sincerely hope that it’s been a useful tool for you. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to get in touch with me directly: mike@corp.fiesta.cc

We wish you way more than luck,

Mike and Dan

Source: SAI

A Nashville couple were shot dead in their home allegedly because they “unfriended” someone on Facebook, police say, according to Reuters.

The victims, Billy Clay Payne Jr. and Billie Jean Hayworth, had recently unfriended Jenelle Potter on Facebook.

Potter’s father and cousin shot both victims in the head and slit Payne Jr.’s throat.

It gets worse. Hayworth was apparently holding her baby when the men murdered her. They left the couple’s eight month old baby alive in Hayworth’s arms, according to Reuters’ report.

Potter lives at home with her parents and is “constantly on Facebook,” local Sheriff Mike Reese told Reuters. ”We’ve had murders, but nothing like this. This is just senseless,” Reese said.

The killing took place a month ago, but local police arrested the two men responsible on Tuesday and charged them with two counts of first degree murder on Wednesday.

Read the rest of the report over at Reuters >

Craig Silverstein, the first Google employee after Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is leaving to join Khan Academy, reports All Things D.

Silverstein has had a variety of responsibilities at the company since it was founded in 1998, but his first was to actually help create the Google search engine itself.

Silverstein has literally been with Google since it was operating out of a dorm room at Stanford.

His new position will see him working as a developer for high-profile education startup Khan Academy. Today is his final day at Google.

From his goodbye email:

When I write my massive 4-volume autobiography, “Craig Silverstein: the Man Behind the Legend,” I will devote an entire volume to my years at Google. I can’t emphasize enough how meaningful my time at Google has been, and how meaningful all of you have been to it.

Source: SAI

Oracle is acquiring Taleo, a cloud based human resource recruiting and management company for $1.9 billion.

The acquisition comes on the heels of SAP’s purchase of SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion in December. Taleo’s technology is used by 5,000 organizations for human resource management.

Both companies are rushing to catch up in the fast-growing cloud-computing market.

Oracle is using acquisitions to build its cloud business as part of efforts to help blunt the impact of a possible slowdown in software sales growth. Cloud services are meant to appeal to customers seeking to save money by letting them access computing power over the Web. Taleo is another fit-in with that strategy, following the $1.5 billion purchase of RightNow Technologies Inc. last year, said Mark Moerdler, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York.

“Taleo is the next-largest player in the talent-management space,” said Moerdler.

Taleo’s shares are up $46 a share or 18% on the acquisition.

You hear it on TV everyday India and China, India and China and how they are going to kick everyone’s behind. China, yes. But India is a joke. Everyone knows it but nobody says. Except for Hillary Clinton, as it was revealed in the Wikileaks documents. She said, paraphrasing here, [They are so delusional only they believe it]. Think about it, India does less trade with the U.S. than tiny Switzerland. Its embarrassing, yet India is of the opinion that they are the same as China, which is the U.S. largest trading partner and pretty much every other country’s.

Today, India passed a new internet law that requires 21 internet companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and others to removed content from some Indian domain websites to protect religious sensibilities. It is a “China” like crackdown. More on Reuters.

The companies have been ordered to develop a mechanism to block material considered religiously offensive after citizens took them to court over images deemed offensive to Hindus, Muslims and Christians. Its complete garbage in my opinion.

Why copy China, on backward matters. Copy China on things that will move India forward not backward. It’s already 5,000 years backward.

Mark Zuckerberg is the next Rupert Murdoch, and given internet time he might get there in a couple of years not decades, says Rob Cox of Reuters.

He says that users and investors are ceding so much control over to Zuckerberg that it is bound to stop being in their best interest.

Due to proxies, Zuckerberg’s shares have 10 times the votes of ordinary shares. That wields him 57 percent of the votes despite controlling 28 percent of the shares. That lets him overrule the majority.

He says investors have allowed Zuckerberg to maintain an iron grip on Facebook (FB) because his dorm-room project is about to fetch them $75 billion, more than the combined market capitalizations of Viacom, News Corp and The New York Times.

Cox says that Murdoch’s News Corp, Sumner Redstone’s Viacom and the Sulzberger family’s NY Times are among the myriad companies controlled by individuals or families whose ambitions no longer fully align with those of a majority of their shareholders and users if I might add.

This absolute power was on display when Murdoch nominated his two sons to the News Corp board. The other 88 percent of News Corp shareholders that did not share his name opposed the move but Murdoch was able ignore their votes due to the voting structure that gives him absolute power.

Facebook is not the only company with such a structure, the founders of Zynga, Google have wield similar power.

Halliburton (HAL), the oilfield services company, once a bastion for the Blackberry (RIMM), is dumping RIM’s platform and switching Apple’s (AAPL) iOS.

“Over the next year, we will begin expanding the use of our mobile technology by transitioning from the BlackBerry (RIMM) platform that we currently use to smartphone technology via the iPhone,” the firm told employees in an internal newsletter.

Halliburton is taking the same path for it 70,000 employees as Clorox (CLX) did last year, when it ditched the BlackBerry for the iPhone.

The company once relied heavily on RIM’s platform, but after evaluating RIM, Windows Phone, Android, and iOS, Halliburton has settled on switching to Apple’s platform.

RIM’s platform was once synonymous with business communications, but that status has slowly eroded since the iPhone’s introduction. While corporate IT spent the first few years after the iPhone’s introduction scoffing at the device, quarterly reports from analysis firms like Good Technology show that iOS has penetrated enterprise markets in a way that even the stodgiest of companies can no longer afford to ignore.

As such, Halliburton is looking to iOS devices to provide employees with secure access to many of its internal applications from outside the company’s network, exclusively through their iPhones. The demand for such flexibility was driven in part Halliburton’s customers, who desire mobile data-access apps for their own iPhone platforms, according to people familiar with the matter.

Halliburton, said it is actively working with Apple on the transition to iOS.

Groupon (GRPN) has purchased Mertado, a member access shopping site, that offers its members exclusive deals.

Mertado is similar to Groupon Goods, which offers discounted items and the supplier ships the goods directly to you. You can also deal directly with the supplier to purchase directly with your Groupon discount code.

From what I can gather, the thinking behind the purchase is to create communities around Groupon Goods.

Eileen Brown from ZDNet summed it up best:

Lots of us are loyal to Groupon itself — but we are not loyal to the brand making the offer. We go from Groupon deal to Groupon deal. We rarely go back to the brand again — unless there’s another offer from the brand itself.

To get brand loyalty, brands will need to work with Groupon Goods / Mertado to encourage loyalty amongst their social shoppers. Encouraging deals to be shared widely brings in more revenue for the brand offering the loss leader.

Groupon has redefined how local advertising works. The grouping of like-minded people drives pricing down. The brand benefits, we all benefit.

Groupon has been increasing its social commerce offerings. It acquired social messaging and engagement platform Campfire Labs whilst it was still in stealth startup mode last month. Groupon want to capitalize on the shift in how consumers will shop in the future.

Used to be, that the Super Bowl ads were something special. Something people would talk about the next day. I am pretty sure nobody will be talking about them this year. They were a bore. This year, the ads were full of dogs, which is good, washed out old 80′s stars like John Stamos, Ferris Bulher, Bruce Willis, Betty White, Jerry Seinfeld and 80′s music like Lionel Ritchie’s “All Nite Long”. The ads sucked to put it diplomatically. There were no ads featuring bikini clad women, I mean this is Super Bowl after all. The Kia ad came close but it too sucked. I would think the audience is predominately male, it would only make sense to target the ads to the audience. With advertisers paying $3.5 million for 30 seconds, I would have thought they would have targeted their ads better. You can watch all the Super Bowl ads in Hulu’s Super Bowl Adzone.

Used to be, that the Super Bowl ads were something special. Something people would talk about the next day. I am pretty sure nobody will be talking about them this year. They were a bore. This year, the ads were full of dogs, which is good, washed out old 80′s stars like John Stamos, Ferris Bulher, Bruce Willis, Betty White, Jerry Seinfeld and 80′s music like Lionel Ritchie’s “All Nite Long”. The ads sucked to put it diplomatically. There were no ads featuring bikini clad women, I mean this is Super Bowl after all. The Kia ad came close but it too sucked. I would think the audience is predominately male, it would only make sense to target the ads to the audience. With advertisers paying $3.5 million for 30 seconds, I would have thought they would have targeted their ads better. You can watch all the Super Bowl ads in Hulu’s Super Bowl Adzone.