By Kelly Faircloth 3/26 8:56am

Linkages

$30 million buys a lot of shirts with whimsical patterns. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Booting Up: This Teen Just Made Millions Off Yahoo

As if recently released prisoners didn’t have enough trouble readjusting to life on the outside, now they have to learn all sorts of new digital skills, too. [WNYC]

Spotify is reportedly launching its own video streaming service, with plans for original content. [Business Insider]

Yahoo just bought the news app Summly for a reported $30 million, making its 17-year-old creator a very, very wealthy young man. Try not to spend it all in one place, kid! [AllThingsD]

China’s getting its very own Snapchat clone. [Tech in Asia]

Speaking of China: Tencent’s QQ (the largest IM service in China, with 780 million MAU) has just released a version designed for Facebook. It comes with built-in chat translation features. [QQ]

 

By Nitasha Tiku 2/14 6:00pm

Early Adopters

Screen Shot 2013-02-14 at 2.48.08 PM

Supermodel Coco Rocha’s Social Media Game Is On Some Other Level

As a supermodel–and here Betabeat can only conjecture–the product you’re selling, essentially, is you. Your matchstick stems, all the places you go, your cool attitude = you. Therefore, as with most celebrities (and increasingly regular humans) run-of-the-mill personal brand building on social media is directly tied to revenue.

But even if Coco Rocha‘s entire extended Canadian family depended on the number of her Instagram followers, you still have to respect the 24-year-old’s commitment. We discovered as much this afternoon at panel run by Decoded Fashion hosted on the mouth of a runway at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 9/15/11 12:39pm

Groupon Fatigue

(Max Whittaker, fotopedia.com)

Groupon’s Chinese Joint Venture Is Falling Apart as American Groupon Renews Its March Toward IPO

“It’s an open secret that Groupon’s China JV, Gaopeng (高朋), is on its way to becoming the next failure of foreign internet companies entering China,” the Chinese tech blog TechRice wrote earlier this month. In the U.S., Groupon, which is being sued by its employees for ludicrously-uncomfortable working conditions, and has been the subject of a string of bad press for everything from its shaky financials to the peppy memo that was accidentally-on-purpose leaked to AllThingsD, prompting an SEC investigation that was resolved without penalty. But after canceling its IPO roadshow, Dealbook is reporting that the startup is back on track for a public offering even as the markets continues to suck. Read More