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Cyanogen Mod Raises $23 Million Funding All Set To Become Major Android Player
sfcrazy writes "The newly formed company has opened the next chapter of its history by bagging $23 million financing from A16Z (Andreessen Horowitz). CyanogenMod was recently incorporated as a company after getting Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures as partners and raising $7 million in funding."
CyanogenMod, now with advertising.
Not every giant, successful tech company that displaces competition will immediately start advertising.
... uh ...
Take
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
What do people that have contributed to the code base get? Who is getting money for this? I don't understand how you can go from an opensource project to a for-profit project.
"Chance favors the prepared mind." ~Me
So either CM goes to shit, full of advertising and scumware, like pretty much every other commercial OS, or they don't, founder, and fade away.
Either way, it was nice while it lasted, I suppose.
It's in all facets of life now. You can't even find a guy with good karma on an online forum who won't leverage it for some cash on the side.
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They don't necessarily have to make their revenue all from ads.
They can provide a polished, stable version of Android that is in many ways better than the original and provide support to the phone manufacturers (perhaps more cheaply than Google?), directly getting a cut from handset sales.
They could start and manage their own app store and take a cut if app purchases.
By working directly with manufacturers, they can spend less time hacking/reverse engineering stuff in order to get it to work with the hardware and instead focus on making their flavor of Android better and therefore desirable on handsets. Cyanogenmod has always been about being cutting-edge - pioneering many features long before AOSP. And not just 'fun' features but really important stuff like fine-detailed app permissions management (which has been WAY overdue). If they can now have a say in hardware design, I say, hell yes, bring it on. I hope to see cutting-edge badass smartphones with easy root access, high customize-ability/theming, and bleeding edge features.
Lately I've been keeping an eye on the Sailfish project, but this news has refreshed my interest in the future of Android in general. Let's not be too cynical and assume it's all going to be about advertising. And even if there are ads, does anyone really think the ads could be any worse or more intrusive than the current state of Android in general?
Maybe Canonical has spoiled everyone's attitudes toward the idea of monetizing open source. There's certainly a comparison to be made here. I'm not well-versed enough in the behind-the-scenes stuff to compare, but I wonder what the degree of impact Cyanogen has had on the Android world is, compared to Ubuntu's contribution to Linux, and what lessons we can take from the latter and apply to the former?
If I'm reading this correctly - you stopped trusting Cyanogenmod because you apparently accidentally tried to use your Gmail credentials to log at the Cyanogenmod account login prompt? That's like accidentally putting in your Gmail login info at the Facebook login screen. Why would that make you trust CM less?
For anyone who's interested, here's a rundown on the Cyanogenmod account stuff:
http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/cyanogenmod-account
Sure. You've just gotta come out of the shadows, get a UID, and join the club. You'll have all the details once you reach Level Five Laser Lotus. You didn't think the karma system was just a mutual admiration club, did you?
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They don't necessarily have to make their revenue all from ads.
They can provide a polished, stable version of Android that is in many ways better than the original and provide support to the phone manufacturers (perhaps more cheaply than Google?), directly getting a cut from handset sales.
They could start and manage their own app store and take a cut if app purchases.
By working directly with manufacturers, they can spend less time hacking/reverse engineering stuff in order to get it to work with the hardware and instead focus on making their flavor of Android better and therefore desirable on handsets. Cyanogenmod has always been about being cutting-edge - pioneering many features long before AOSP. And not just 'fun' features but really important stuff like fine-detailed app permissions management (which has been WAY overdue). If they can now have a say in hardware design, I say, hell yes, bring it on. I hope to see cutting-edge badass smartphones with easy root access, high customize-ability/theming, and bleeding edge features.
Lately I've been keeping an eye on the Sailfish project, but this news has refreshed my interest in the future of Android in general. Let's not be too cynical and assume it's all going to be about advertising. And even if there are ads, does anyone really think the ads could be any worse or more intrusive than the current state of Android in general?
Maybe Canonical has spoiled everyone's attitudes toward the idea of monetizing open source. There's certainly a comparison to be made here. I'm not well-versed enough in the behind-the-scenes stuff to compare, but I wonder what the degree of impact Cyanogen has had on the Android world is, compared to Ubuntu's contribution to Linux, and what lessons we can take from the latter and apply to the former?
BLAH blah blah.
They're just hoping to be bought by google, later, for much MORE money.
how exactly do you buy a community developed distro?
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
They don't necessarily have to make their revenue all from ads.
They can provide a polished, stable version of Android that is in many ways better than the original and provide support to the phone manufacturers (perhaps more cheaply than Google?), directly getting a cut from handset sales.
That seems to be the obvious value in this company. Phone makers have demonstrated time and again how badly they manage their own Android distros, and how much they see them as a cost-centre rather than an opportunity to better position themselves in the market.
Given the state of current MBAThink, why wouldn't they want to outsource the heavy lifting of distro management to a company that not only does it well, but does it better than their competitors? If CM play their cards right, they could start a bidding war, or at very least, make sure that their's is a seller's market.
I especially like this idea because it upsets the playing field a little. Cyanogenmod can be ported at low cost to a number of generic platforms, allowing cheap(er) phone makers to gussy up their product without much effort. So to the consumer, there won't be much to choose between an SGS4 and a KungPaoDuk Delightra XXS Happy Screen. (Visually, at least.)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.