Audience is backed by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, whose Vulcan Capital is the third largest shareholder in the company (25%). Tallwood Venture Capital holds 32% share and New Enterprise Associates holds 30% share.

You might know Audience as the makers of earSmart, “the world’s most intelligent voice processor.” earSmart technology works to replicate how humans hear, by differentiating different sounds and enhancing voice sounds while keeping background noise in the background.

Basically, earSmart aims to improve mobile conversations in loud places.

earSmart is currently available in over 60 mobile devices, including the HTC Titan, Samsung Galaxy S II, Google Nexus One, and HTC Vivid.

From the S-1 filing:

We were founded in 2000 and initially targeted the rapidly growing mobile device market, including mobile phones, media tablets and mobile PCs. We began production shipments in 2008 and, as of December 31, 2011, had sold over 135 million processors to our OEM customers. In addition to the mobile device market, we believe that our voice and audio technology is applicable to a broad range of other market segments, including automobile infotainment systems, digital cameras, digital televisions, headsets and set top boxes. We outsource the manufacture of our voice and audio processors to independent foundries and use third parties for assembly, packaging, test and logistics. We had total revenue of $2.5 million, $5.7 million, $47.9 million and $79.7 million for 2008, 2009, 2010 and the nine

[Hat Tip to GeekWire]

What have you found to be the most challenging part of creating mobile apps? Please share.

Aaron Forth, the VP of Product at Mint/Intuit, admits that building mobile apps is no “light endeavor” and pointed out that the mobile platform is completely different from desktop computers.

“It’s building a whole new set of functionality for a whole other platform, and in many cases, for entirely different use cases,” he said.

He went on to say that businesses that try to use their current website on mobile devices are really just setting themselves up to fail. Businesses need to understand that the interaction, the form factor, the use cases, and the screen are all very different on the mobile platform.

As he explained, businesses can take some of what they already have, but they need to re-create a lot of aspects to make it compatible with mobile. Designers often enjoy creating the new features because it means that are able to get rid of a lot of old processes that aren’t necessary.

Mint, in particular, has been very successful with its own mobile app. The app allows users to be in touch with their financing while they are on the go, which is an element that Forth believes “makes more sense” on mobile than it does on the desktop.

Although the mobile app would continue to be an extension of the desktop version of Mint, he said that it would also have its own individual features.

“We don’t really think of mobile as a different thing, it’s just, it is Mint. It’s an appendage of our service,” he added.

Mint is also working on an iPad app, which Forth said further visualizes Mint’s goal of visualizing finances.

News of the deal was confirmed by BeatThat.Quote.com managing director John Paleomylites on the company’s website.

“Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products. We think we can offer more transparency and better pricing information than existing online offerings,” said Paleomylites.

“We are confident that by combining BeatThatQuote.com’s expertise in UK financial products with Google’s technology, we’ll accelerate innovation in this field, benefiting consumers and the companies offering these products. We plan to keep working with our current partners and look forward to working with new ones, too.”

 MarketDash allows iPad users to manage views of stock charts, scroll across hours, days or months of market activity; plot points in time; and compare multiple stock tickers in one chart.

The Yodel Anecdotal Blog offers more details. “Want to take a look at how your portfolio is doing today without booting up the computer? MarketDash makes it fast and easy. Every tailored detail fits perfectly to the iPad screen – breaking news, real-time stock updates, and your own personalized portfolio information.”

“Add a stock to a watch list from your iPad and it will show up instantly in the Yahoo Finance app for iPhone or Android phones or when you view your portfolio on Yahoo Finance.”

When users enter tickers or company names in the search box on Yahoo Finance they will see a new “Related Tickers” module to the left of their search results for select queries. The Related Tickers feature displays up to 10 related tickers. In addition, the Yahoo Finance Search homepage now offers access to finance-specific Trending Now Terms.

On Yahoo Sports Search, the company has improved its “Related Athletes” module on the left side of search results pages with suggestions for members of a sports team.

The Yahoo Search Blog offer more details. “For example, when you search for ‘LA Lakers’, the ‘Related Athletes’ module provides a list of athletes who play for the Los Angeles Lakers. Like the ‘Related Tickers’ module on Finance Search, this new feature on Sports Search helps you quickly navigate to a player overview in your search results without entering another query in the search box."

Google Finance for smartphones users can now view mutual funds’ prices, and stats by entering the ticker into the search box.

Smartphone users can can also view wider stock charts by turning their phone on its side for a landscape view.

Besides being able to view last price and market caps for stocks in their portfolio, users can see how their portfolio is doing in real-time by clicking on the Performance tab from the Portfolio page.

Finance for smartphones is also faster. The Google Blog offers more details. “Well, we can’t help when the mobile networks get overloaded or you’re out of the 3G zone, but we are doing everything we can to help you get the information you need as fast as possible.”

“We now cache the CSS and Javascript from pages on the mobile site so that reloads are faster than ever.”

SEC filings reveal that Icahn owned a whopping 60,452,099 shares of Yahoo’s stock as of August 14th, 2009.  By the time December 31st rolled around, the number of shares he owned had decreased to 11,991,000.

Obviously, then, Icahn doesn’t intend to go on the attack against Carol Bartz and the current board, which might be good news for Yahoo.  Optimists could interpret Icahn’s move as a sign of contentment.  (Or perhaps he managed to reap some profits at one point.)

Icahn’s move might be a sign of surrender, however.  As the graph below shows, Yahoo’s stock was at nearly the same level on Friday as it was six months ago.

Anyway, perhaps as a result of this development, Yahoo’s stock is down a bit this morning.  Neither Icahn nor Yahoo has issued a statement on the matter.

RampRate lowered the estimated bandwidth costs, stating that by locating its data centers in “out of the way” locations like Iowa and Finland, the company saves significantly on the cost of transmitting data. RampRate also took into account peering costs for what they say is a more accurate estimate.

While a $174M loss is still a significant loss, it’s not the sob story we’re used to seeing with YouTube and its tireless search for profitability. RampRate takes a cynical line on Google’s motivations for not correcting reports like Credit Suisse’s:

Google is no doubt thrilled to let YouTube be known as a financial folly. In the dangerous waters of online content, a whiff of potential profit is an irresistible lure for predators such as copyright lawyers circling user generated content monetization and content partners that are all too ready to turn on their distributors in a feeding frenzy.

They also take Google to task for shielding their relative profitability from their contributors, who might (well, probably not, but you know) be able to claim a share of that money:

The key is its lack of leverage with premium content partners, and the thousands of copyright holders whose content is posted by users onto YouTube without the owner’s permission. Any appearance of profits leads to more draconian revenue share demands from partners and additional lawsuits from owners of unlicensed content. An apparent loss deters this behavior, making it eminently advisable for Google to let the rumors of YouTube’s losses grow and compound. This perception of a loss-making business is one of the factors that contributed to ASCAP collecting only $1.6M instead of $12M from YouTube in a recent court judgment.

Ouch. What do you think: is Google hiding YouTube profits (or at least its less-impressive losses) or is YouTube a serious drain on Google’s resources?

Comments

Users in the U.S. may have noticed new text and image ads Google is experimenting with on the results page of its Image Search.

Google has also introduced "Sponsored Videos" on YouTube that the company says is "a great example of matching ads to content."

Google has now launched text ads on Google Finance in the U.S. The ads appear in the upper right hand corner of the Google Finance homepage in a square box and are fairly unobtrusive.

Later in the year Google says it will start trialing text ads on a small number of news refinements within Google Search. As an example, if a user types in "iPod" into Google.com and then clicks on the news link on the upper-left hand side, they might see text ads displayed with those results.

On the official company blog Google says," Whenever we make changes like these, we carefully evaluate users’ reactions to ensure we’re holding true to our basic principles: that ads by Google should always be relevant and useful."