Recent Event Highlights: Sonos To Take Investment From Index Ventures, Add Mike Volpi To Board Of Directors, KODA Secures Another $1.5 Million For Its Social Jobs Site, Citrix Online Acquires Paglo, Enters IT Management With Launch Of GoToManage, Flavors.me: A Dead Simple Way To Pull Your Online Presences Into One Place, Changing Of The Guard: Jive Software Brings On New CEO, Win A Free Ticket To Google I/O 2010, and 485 more...
Created by secretsushi on Sep 5, 2008
Last updated: 03/11/10 at 12:43 AM
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KODA.us, a social recruitment service for employers to recruit young professionals, has received an additional $1.5 million injection of private angel funding.
Back in August last year it raised $1 million in angel funding on top of an existing $2 million, so it now has, you guessed it, $4.5m in capital.
KODA wants to bring social networking and job recruiting together into one unified service, claiming that it is "more professional than Facebook but more personal than LinkedIn". The jury is out on whether this market space actually exists.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/RwPc1HZZwzo/
There's a changing of the guard taking place at social software company Jive. Co-founder and CEO Dave Hersh will be stepping down from the role to allow board member Tony Zingale to take over as interim CEO. Hersh will continue at Jive as chairman of the company's board of directors.
Zingale was most recently the president and CEO of enterprise company Mercury Interactive, which was acquired by HP. Prior to Mercury, he was President and CEO of CRM provider Clarify. Jive’s board of directors has begun a search for a permanent CEO, and is currently evaluating candidates for the position.
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Nooka is one of our favorite brands and these guys created a new way to try on a Nooka watch at home. By using augmented reality technologies - albeit technology that may not work quite yet - you can try on any watch just by putting on a specially coded bracelet. The system senses the position of your hand and lets the Nooka watch appear in 3D right on your wrist. It's honestly an amazing idea and someone better patent it before Trojan and Victoria's Secret get their hands on it.
Click through for video.
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Back in December, we ran a post about the "most stalker friendly people on the web." The main point of reference for it was a leaderboard made by Osnapz, which showed the Foursquare users with the most followers. Now, with Gowalla's API officially launched, they've done the same for that service.
These numbers are interesting because unlike a service like Twitter, both Foursquare and Gowalla make you explicitly accept new followers that you will broadcast your location to. While back in December, it was Robert Scoble who was the most stalker-friendly person on Foursquare, he's only the 210th most stalker-friendly on Gowalla, with only 54 friends. The most stalker-friendly person on Gowalla is entrepreneur and blogger Wayne Sutton, with 724 friends, according to Osnapz data.
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As we noted earlier, Google announced an update today to its Android OS for Nexus One phones that would enable the pinch-to-zoom multi-touch feature for the first time in a few Google apps: Maps, Gallery, and the Web Browser. We’ve just received the update, which is technically firmware 2.1-update1, and have taken a video of the new functionality in action.
While some third-party apps have taken advantage of mutli-touch for some time on Android, Google has resisted the feature for its own apps — likely due to an agreement with Apple. But now, all bets appear to be off.
Google notes that most users shouldn’t receive the update until the end of the week as they gradually roll it out, so we were apparently lucky. Watch it in action below, and note how it compares to the iPhone’s multi-touch.
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While Twitter is an incredible platform for tapping into the conversations that are taking place on the web, the real-time stream can be crowded. It’s hard to keep track of back-and-forth communication between users or to keep track of subject-related Tweets based on hashtags. Recently launched TweeterClubs aims to create a real-time conversation around the Tweets that are broadcast to the web.
Once you log into the site with your Twitter account, you can enter the tweet on the TweetUp tab. Your tweet will appear in both the club and on Twitter automatically. TweeterClubs will only show the tweets that come from the club members and when you log in, you are automatically a member. At the moment, the site only shows one club, the “Tweetheart Club,” which includes the Tweets of the six women profiled in the controversial Vanity Fair article. But TweeterClubs’ founder Jeff Whitehead says the site is planning to open up so allow anyone to create their own clubs.
Those who are participating in clubs who Tweet with a club-specific hashtag can Tweet from any third party Twitter client, and their Tweets will be aggregated into their Tweeter Club. Users will be able to manage specific clubs by banning members, deleting messages and also seeing statistics on clubs, including the number of members and number tweets per day. Whitehead says that TweeterClubs will also offer an Android app and will open up its API for Twitter clients to incorporate its functionality into their own platforms.
Of course, users can also participate in conversations on Twitter by just adding a specific hashtag to Tweets and then searching for that hashtag. Other startups that help make sense of specific conversations on the web are TweetGrid, and TweetConvo and Bettween.
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Appolicious, a comprehensive iPhone and Android app directory with a social twist, has launched a compelling new feature today: the ability for users to create curated lists of iPhone apps and Android apps. The new feature, which is similar in some ways to Twitter’s list functionality, allows anyone to create lists of their favorite apps by category and lists are limited to five apps. Appolicious has also launched an iPhone App Developer Directory that aims to connect businesses with app developers.
Appolicious, which just raised $1.5 million in funding and debuted an iPhone app, tries to make sense of the 100,000 apps on Apple’s App Store and the 16,000 apps on the Android Market, but with a social twist. So not only can you find apps based on category or topic, but you can share those apps with your social graph on Twitter and Facebook, review apps, and more. Via its technology, the application will scan your iTunes directory for your downloaded app and will integrate them into your Appolicious library. It’s similar in some ways to oneforty, an app directory for Twitter. The ability to create lists is a sure to be popular amongst users of the platform and could be a useful resource for consumers looking to get both user and expert opinions on apps in certain categories. Curators of lists can list apps, the reason and rationale behind their choice, any related links or tweets, and why they’re qualified to make that selection.
Founded in May of this year by former Yahoo VP, Alan Warms, Appolicious is hoping to expand its platform to include Android, Blackberry and other smartphone apps. Warms is a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Buzztracker to Yahoo in 2007. Warms is enthusiastic about the new iPhone app business directory, which he hopes will become a defacto resource for businesses, brands, retailers and developers. The directory will launch with several thousand profiles of various app developers.
The startup faces competition from Appsfire, 16 Apps, mPlayit, and others.
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Precision Polling has launched to provide an easy way to create and launch phone surveys, taking a page from the model that simple online survey sites, like SurveyMonkey, have pioneered. Precision Polling is self-service website that lets you design and run phone surveys start to finish.
You simply create a questionnaire through a web interface, call the site’s hotline to record your voice, and then give the site a list of phone numbers to call. Once those steps have been completed, Precision Polling will start making calls You can also choose between dialing out to a list of people, or letting people call in. It costs the surveyor just 10 cents per call. Users can see data and results in real time via a customized Web-based dashboard. On the backend, the site is using services like Twilio to power its service.
Seattle-based Precision Polling was founded by Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom, who formerly started and sold social money management tool BillMonk.com to mobile payments startup Obopay. The pair also recently worked at Xmarks and Amazon.
The startup should be able to gain traction in the space, especially for government and non-profit initiatives. Phone polling is an expensive endeavor and Precision Polling sees to simplify this process.
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According to just released Dow Jones LP Source figures, U.S. private equity fund-raising closed out its worst year for fundraising since 2003, with 331 funds raising a mere $95.8 billion in 2009. That’s down 68% from the $299.9 billion raised by 508 funds in 2008.
Zooming in on the past quarter (Q4 2009), Dow Jones LP Source figures show PE firms raised $20.5 billion in 75 funds, down 80% from the $102.7 billion raised by 188 funds in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Jennifer Rossa, managing editor of Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst, isn’t overly optimistic for 2010 either, and says we’ll not be seeing a return to levels seen before the economic downturn even though limited partners are likely to become more active this year.
Leveraged buyout and corporate finance funds raised just $53.7 billion across 133 funds last year, a 73% drop from the $195.5 billion raised by 204 funds in 2008. Despite that drop, it remains the biggest slice of the capital pie. Mega funds (funds of $6 billion or more) had most difficulty raising capital in 2009. Six mega funds raised $14 billion, but more than half of the year’s total for mega funds was raised by a single firm, Hellman & Friedman, which raised $8.8 billion for its seventh fund last year.
One silver lining in the report: the secondary market was the only subsector of private equity to turn in a strong performance, collecting $17.5 billion in 2009, up 83% from 2008 and a new record.
It wasn’t a stellar year for venture capital either, as you may have heard. Still, Dow Jones LP Source says, VC firms did not have as difficult a year as buyout firms. Venture fund-raising fell 55% to $13 billion across 120 funds from the $28.7 billion collected by 204 funds in 2008. In the fourth quarter, 21 funds raised $4.4 billion, a 56% drop from the same period last year. We’ve spotted an increase in VC funding deals in Q4 2009 based on CrunchBase data as well.
A few of the big winners in 2009 were New Enterprise Associates, which raised $1.2 billion, taking the total amount raised to date for the firm’s 13th fund to $2.5 billion, and Norwest Venture Partners which closed its 11th fund in the fourth quarter after raising $1.2 billion. Outside of Hellman & Friedman’s mega fund and Goldman Sachs Private Equity Group’s secondary fund ($5.5 billion), the fund that closed on the most capital last year was TA Associates’ eleventh fund, collecting $3.5 billion for its $4 billion fund in 2009.
(Image via Flickr / Oxfam International)
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If you’ve looked at buying a television the past several years, chances are you’re well aware of the terms: Plasma, DLP, LCD, and more recently, OLED. Well, there’s a new acronym in town: LPD.
Developed by the Silicon Valley-based Prysm, LPD is being formally unveiled today as the latest type of screen technology. LPD stands for Laser Phosphor Display, which likely means nothing to you, but the company is promising that it’s a tech that will allow them to create massive, crisp digital displays that consume some 75% less power than the other display technologies. The company claims these displays are also much cheaper to build, and will last longer.
So can they deliver on such promises? It will likely be a while before we as consumers can see, because at first, Prysm is targeting commercial vendors with the tech. They hope that arenas/stadiums, concerts, and big department stores will take advantage of their displays initially. But after that, assuming all goes well, this tech would ideally be available to consumers looking for large screens that consume little power. And following the hoopla of Avatar and some of the tech at CES, these screens are 3D compatible, we’re told.
Of course, the key to that is also pricing, but again, they’re still a ways away from figuring that out for consumers. In fact, all they’ll say on their site is vaguely worded statements such as, “Finally, LPD technology breaks free of the performance limitations of conventional displays by offering high resolution, superb image quality, high brightness and the widest viewing angle at the lowest cost of ownership while consuming the least resources.” That sounds like the best of all worlds. But seeing is believing, and we haven’t seen yet.
Prysm is a company that has actually been flying under the radar for about four years now in Silicon Valley. The privately held company has over 100 employees.
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As the way consumers read books evolves, there is an opportunity for mobile technologies to connect consumers with their favorite reads. Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps develops iPhone apps, is collaborating with one of the most foremost publishers, Random House, to launch iPhone apps for authors.
The Random House group will launch free individual iPhone applications, powered by Mobile Roadie, for three of its bestselling authors—Steve Berry, Sophie Kinsella, and Karen Marie Moning. With this new application, fans will be able to preview books, access bonus content, interact with other fans, check upcoming author appearances, listen to audiobook clips, watch author videos and book trailers, and more.
Mobile Roadie also developed the official iPhone app for LeWeb, the foremost European technology conference organized by French entrepreneur and Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur and his wife, Geraldine. The app was a huge hit at the conference.
Mobile Roadie only offers iPhone apps but will soon offer the ability to develop apps for the Andoid in January. The beauty of Mobile Roadie’s platform is that it offers a dead simple mostly-automated system to build apps and have them posted to Apple’s App Store in as little as a week. Launched earlier this year, the startup develops mobile apps for other conferences, events, and venues, as well as musicians, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities.
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Italian writer, blogger and photographer Vincenzo Cosenza has for the second time put together a visualization that shows the most popular social networks around the world on a map, based on the most recent traffic data (December 2009) as measured by Alexa & Google Trends for Websites.
The first one, which we featured in June 2009, already painted a picture of Facebook taking over the world from the West, but the second one shows its relentless colonization even more clearly.
Facebook, with over 350 million users, is the undisputed leader of social networking in the English speaking parts of the world, and has been making strides in Latin-America, Europe and Africa as well. Based on Alexa data only, Facebook has even taken over Orkut in India, historically a high-flyer in those parts. Google’s social network remains the most trafficked in Brazil, however.
Facebook clone Vkontakte.ru has been able to resist and stop Facebook from becoming the leader in Russia. It’s worth noting that Vkontakte is largely owned by Digital Sky Technologies, which also owns a significant stake in Facebook, so you can see how they could potentially melt together in the future.
Hi5 has also seen Facebook take over most of the territories where it was leading, and has only been able to stop the social network from dominance in Peru, Portugal, Romania, Thailand and Mongolia. Meanwhile, QQ is still ahead of everyone else in China, where the number of Internet users is expected to double and reach a staggering 840 million by 2013.
Nowhere to be seen on the map: MySpace (which only leads on the Island of Guam).
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Startup RepairPal, an auto repair and maintenance information site, has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by Tugboat Ventures, with Rick Keister, David Strohm, Mark Goines, and Michael Torres participating. The startup previously raised $3 million in seed and angel funding.
The site, which we reviewed last year, is similar to a Google Health for cars. You get price estimates for different parts and repair jobs for your car. You enter your car year, model, and mileage, and it spits out price ranges for your zip code. There is also a directory of hundreds of thousands of local mechanics, with each shop placed onto a Google Map. Members can rate each mechanic and once a repair is completed, you can keep an online service record at RepairPal. It’s like a one-stop shop to maintain and record the health of your car.
RepairPal also launched a free, handy iPhone app which will help users find reasonable prices for car repairs and provided them with locations of reputable repair shops in their areas on the go. The app also includes Google Maps integration, user reviews for each shop and a list of towing and roadside assistance services based on your location.
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When you’re running on a hot streak of smash hits, it’s not too tough to find investors. Such is the case for Smule, the developers behind I Am T-Pain, Ocarina, Leaf Trombone, and a handful of other App Store success stories.
Today, Smule is announcing that they’ve secured an $8 million dollar round of Series C funding. That’s an absolutely massive pot for a development house focused solely on the iPhone, and it more than doubles Smule’s total funding thus far.
Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>
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Ever since last summer, Twitter’s growth in the U.S. has been stalling. But in October, the number of people who visited Twitter.com from the U.S. actually declined for the first time by 8 percent month-over-month. Estimates released today by comScore put Twitter’s domestic unique visitors at 19.2 million, down from 20.9 million in September.
On an annual basis, Twitter is still going gangbusters with 1,271 percent growth from 1.4 million visitors in October, 2008. And on a global basis, it still seems to be chugging away with 58.4 million visitors in September. But a hypergrowth company like Twitter cannot afford to slow down in its home market.
CEO Evan Williams recently acknowledged the slowdown in the U.S., and hopes that a slew of new features will help revive growth to the site. Many of these features are already rolling out, including the new Retweet button, Lists, and Geolocation features.
Twitter is obviously committed to making its service better on its own Website (these numbers do not measure usage on mobile or desktop clients, which is easily half of all Twitter usage). But while it fiddles, rival Facebook keeps moving further and further ahead.
Will the new features be enough to bring back growth in the U.S.? If they don’t, Twitter’s troubles will really begin.
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Plenty of people use Twitter to syndicate out their content — like TechCrunch, for example. And often those tweets also are syndicated out to other places — like MySpace, for example. But now you can remove one step in that process if you choose with MyFeedSync for MySpace.
This tool, developed by Egghead Ventures, with the help of developer Sean Percival, who has been advising MySpace recently, uses MySpace ID to sync any RSS feed with your MySpace status. This is similar to the tool that MySpace’s recently announced that syncs your Twitter with your status. But instead of showing a tweet with a Twitter logo, it shows a blog post title with a link, and a RSS logo. This should make it clear to people looking at your profile that you’re highlighting a post of yours rather than just linking to some piece of content you think is cool. The blog URLs are shortened with MySpace’s lnk.ms shortener.
There are also options for this tool such as setting the time interval that dictates how often it will pull in new content. And you can set an into text to put in such as “New blog post:”
More here on Percival’s blog.
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As we were all painfully aware, it took AT&T forever to bring MMS to the iPhone. A new app has just been released that hopes to one-up it.
Knocking, made by Pointy Heads Software, is basically a photo-sharing app on steroids. With it, you can pretty much instantaneously share up to 100 photos at once between two iPhones. This works by establishing a connection between the two phones, during which one user selects another user with the app and “knocks” the pictures over to them. The video below shows just how simple and fast this process is.
Naturally, for this to work, both people must have the Knocking application. But the app, which is free for the first 50,000 downloads, has other advantages, such as being able to control the photo viewing experience on another phone. So, for example, if I want to send some pictures to my mom and show her specific ones, I would simply create a Knocking connection and send them over where I could then control which ones she is seeing. She would also be able to save any of those pictures to her phone with the click of a button.
MMS allows you to send multiple images but the sending process is slow, and the selection process is cumbersome. With Knocking, you can easily share entire albums, not just individual pictures. And MMS limits you to sending 5 pictures. Again, Knocking’s limit is 100. And even with that many photos, it takes only a couple of minutes to sync them all between the two phones.
There is also Facebook Connect integration to allow users to share their “knocks.” And Knocking works over both 3G and WiFi.
You can find the Knocking app here. Again, it’s free for the first 50,000 downloads.
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Well that didn’t take long. We outlined the not-so-ethical ways that the big social gaming startups are generating revenue through lead gen scams and subscriptions through a series of posts over the last week. Starting with Social Games: How The Big Three Make Millions and Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell. We also threw in some comments by other companies and a former scammer, and a quote from Zynga that 1/3 of their revenues come from offers, much of which are scams.
We thought this would be a fight that would take months to end successfully, and we thought that only Facebook or MySpace would make the move to clean up their own platforms.
But boy am I surprised today to see Zynga, the worst of the offenders, admit publicly to the problem and take quick steps to change. CEO Mark Pincus says:
Michael Arrington posted over the weekend about CPA offers within social games and questioned why facebook, myspace, zynga and others would expose these to our users. He raises good points about ‘scammy’ advertisers and the bad user experience they create. I agree with him and others that some of these offers misrepresent and hurt our industry.
Later in the post he also says:
We have worked hard to police and remove bad offers. In fact, the worst offender, tatto media, referenced in the techcrunch article, had already been taken down and permanently banned prior to the post. Nevertheless, we need to be more aggressive and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring them to filter and police offers prior to posting on their networks. We have also removed all mobile ads until we see any that offer clear user value.
At zynga, we have faced a similar challenge in providing customer support to millions of users of our free games. Six months ago we were overwhelmed with our ticket volumes and faced an F rating with the better business bureau. We made massive efforts to address this, getting our maximum response times for live email and phone support down to 72 hours and raised our rating to a B+. Even today we realize our customer support isn’t at the level our users expect and we continue to work on it.
Hats off to Zynga. Flat out admitting that the problem exists and taking early steps to fix it is just something you don’t see from most companies. While Offerpal’s CEO (why coincidentally and humorously has 666 Facebook friends) takes an offensive “shit, doubleshit and bullshit” denial strategy, Zynga’s CEO just stepped up to the plate and hit the ball out of the park. He also just self regulated before Facebook or MySpace could even respond.
There may be hope yet for the Internet.
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Rearden Commerce, the under-the-radar automated online assistant that helps people organize travel needs and other services, has raised another $40 million in a Series F funding from JPMorgan Chase. This latest round brings Rearden’s total funding up to $240 million since the company’s launch in 2000. JPMorgan Chase is a marketing partner and a pre-existing investor. Greg O’Hara and Rick Smith, both general partners from One Equity Partners, JPMorgan Chase’s private equity fund, will be joining Rearden’s board, although the funding comes from Chase Capital Partners.
Unfortunately, the funding is bittersweet for the company because it coincides with a round of layoffs. Rearden let go roughly 60 employees from a staff of 335 employees (or 18 percent), following a round of layoffs last November of around 10 percent (or 40 employees) of the company’s staff.
At this point, with so much capital invested in the company, the best hope for Rearden investors to see a returns is if it goes public. Rearden is hoping for an IPO, but before it files it wants to hit profitability, and therefore it is cutting its way there. Public investors are going to want to see evidence of sustainable profits and clear revenue growth. Investors generally prefer companies that are hiring to keep up with growth than cutting back to hit their numbers.
Rearden is better known in the corporate world, offering its services to more than 5,000 corporations, up from 1,700 in May, 2008, with over 2 million individual employees using the service. American Express resells the service to its business customers. Last year, Chase also signed on as a reseller and marketing partner, offering the Rearden’s personal web concierge service to its bank cardholders.
Rearden offers enterprises an automated personal assistant that helps their employees organize any sort of travel-related task. They can set their profile up with the types of restaurants they like, whether they like aisle or window seats, and their preferred car provider, and Rearden will book all aspects of their trip for them. Rearden also launched a mobile version of its service that will sync up with their calendar, message them with alerts and allows them to make changes to their itineraries and bookings. The service also keeps track of reward miles and points from airlines, hotels, and rental cars, and lets employees use those points to book additional travel and other services. The service will even keep track of travel credits and apply them to future trips.
The company had a banner year in 2008, raising $100 million in funding, growing the company’s client and user base and expanding into the mobile space. The site also acquired Global Ground Automation to assist with limousine and other ground transportation reservations, and ExpenseWire to simplify expense reporting for users. Rearden is still planning to target consumers directly, after promising to roll out a consumer-facing service for the past few years.
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Conference organizer, publisher and investor Tim O’Reilly doesn’t mince words. In this video he talks candidly about what he hated at TechCrunch50 today, what he loved and what excites him about the Web right now.
O’Reilly is a consummate thought leader in the Valley so the interview is interesting for anyone. But if you’re planning on actually pitching O’Reilly on anything this is required viewing.
Oh, he also explains what he and the Cookie Monster have in common. Video is on the jump. (Sorry for the abrupt edits. Trying to keep these interviews on the short-side.)
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Tim O’Reilly
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What do you do when you're sitting on a nearly endless torrent of finely-focused content and a few million bucks in venture capital? You go mobile.
That's exactly what Glam Media, the distributed media network behind the womens lifestyle site Glam.com and its male-oriented counterpart Brash.com, is about to do. As one of the fastest growing sites on the web, its taken a bit longer for them to take on the mobile front than we would have guessed - but their quest to conquer portables begins tomorrow.TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5bAdxhLVxmM/
Wow, talk about a big day for Facebook. Hours after launching Facebook Lite, open-sourcing part of FriendFeed’s code, and launching @ tagging, the site has one more release in store for today: Fax This Photo, powered by efax.com. Now when you’re looking through photo albums, you’ll have the opportunity to send a photo you like to a friend’s fax machine. For price of $1.50 per photo. That’s one pricey fax.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but I’m not sure why Facebook would do this. For one, faxes aren’t known for offering great quality — if you want to print a photo, you probably aren’t going to rely on your Fax machine. Second, if you have someone’s fax number, there’s a good chance you have their Email address too — why not just send it over Email?
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Big surprise. There’s another URL shortening service that wants to throw its hat in the ring and into a field that’s pretty much saturated. Do we really need another URL shortener? Brinkster, the web-hosting startup behind Br.st seems to think so.
Similar to many of its competitors, Br.st offers statistics (in your own time zone) about your links, including number of clicks, referrers, and origin (by country or region) of all of the clicks. Bit.ly, which is one of the current leaders in the URL shortening space, offers all of these analytics as well. Additionally, Br.st filters submitted links through malware filters.
Br.st’s service lets you post to over 10 social networks and sites including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Digg, and will soon offer Google analytics. The site also offers bookmarklets to add to your toolbar. And Br.st has opened up its API. Br.st says that it will also offer image and filer sharing (similar to yFrog or TwiPic) and will let you see detailed stats on these links.
Though full of useful features, Br.st is entering a space that’s inundated competitors and it’s a dog eat dog world out there in the URL shortening field. It seems that every week, there’s a new URL shortener out on the market. TweetMeme just debuted its own URL shortening service, ReTwet.me. Of course, one URL shortener Tr.im, has dropped out of the race. And recently, Royal Pingdom conducted a study on which URL shortener was the fastest and Ow.ly and Bit.ly came out on top.
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As facial recognition and virtual try-on technologies continue to improve, there is an opportunity to use this innovation for the cosmetics industry. Last year, we reviewed Tazz, a virtual makeover site that lets you alter the makeup and hair of a photo of yourself (or a celeb like Angelina Jolie). This week, startup Daily Makeover is launching a new version of its similar product, Makeover Studio, which could make the online makeover process even more detailed and easy to use.
Makeover Studio, which can be used on Daily Makeover’s standalone site and is licensed to more than 60 beauty brands, including Avon and Mary Kay, and web media publishers, lets women upload a picture of themselves (or use a model’s picture) and then try on makeup and hair styles virtually. Women can try on specific brands of makeup in all different shades and styles. When a woman uploads the photo onto the platform, her face is instantly traced using facial recognition technology so that all the different application techniques such as a smoky eye shadow effect or a blush technique can be superimposed on her face in the correct area. Plus, women are able to try on different brands of products in each genre of makeup. So you could try a Dior blush and a Lancome blush and compare the looks on your face.
The new version of Makeover Studio (which will be released later this week) includes new rendering functionality, visualization technology and face-tracing capabilities. The latest version has also added a more expansive list of makeup finishes, including satin, matte, metallic, shimmer, stained, dewy, sheer, and glossy in an attempt to show the reality of the finish of the makeup on a woman’s skin. Makeover Studio has added an option for women to adjust the placement and coverage levels of foundations, concealers, lip colors, eye shadows, mascara, and blush. The detail that Makeover Studio offers to women is compelling. You can differentiate between a lengthening mascara and a thickening mascara or determine how glossy a lipgloss is compared to a lipstick.
Of course, makeup is a set of products that is difficult to buy (especially if the product is pricey) without seeing what it looks like on your face. Daily Makeover says that Makeover Studio’s technology can help bridge this gap in the online space for cosmetics, perhaps now allowing women to get the same trying-on opportunities they would find in a department or retail store for a cosmetics company. Currently on Tazz, you can purchase the cosmetics your “virtually” try on, which is unavailable on Daily Makeover’s site. But companies can brand the makeover application and let users email and publish their “makeovers” to social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace.
There’s no doubt that buying and trying on makeup online is certainly disruptive to the cosmetics industry. But I’m still a little skeptical as to whether the online experience is the same as trying on a product at the beauty counter. When you try on the product at a beauty counter, you see the technique of putting a particular eyeliner or blush on, which isn’t shown on the Makeover Studio. It’s unclear if masses of women will trust that the makeover technology using virtual tools, such as Makeover Studio, is as accurate as actually trying on makeup. That being said, if you can combine the experiences of trying on and learning how to use a cosmetic product into an e-commerce platform, this could closely resemble the experience at the beauty counter.
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Online marketing and search engine optimization firm SEO.com is expanding its services to include web design / development with the acquisition of Graphics.net, as announced yesterday for an undisclosed amount. Michael Benson from Graphics.net will join SEO.com as the vice president of Web development.
The acquisition of Maryland-based Graphics.net by SEO.com makes sense, because the latter can now combine website optimization with design services and social media applications. It’s also funny to note Graphics.net actually did some design and other work for SEO.com in the past, so there were already some ties.
Update: as a commenter points out, there are more connections than this: apparently both SEO.com and Graphics.net are portfolio companies of private equity firm WashingtonVC.
SEO.com further added that there’s seeing decent growth after a decade in business: in the last year alone, the SEO firm says it has quintupled its size, growing from 12 employees to more than 50, and moved to a larger office in Salt Lake County. It’s not clear how many people Graphics.net employs and if all will be transitioning to SEO.com.
(Hat tip to James Green for the heads up)
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Another month, another report that Bing is chiming slightly louder. Analytics firm comScore has just released its latest figures on search market share, and once again Microsoft’s search engine has managed to grow while its competitors have seen modest losses.
Bing launched to the public on May 31, when Microsoft held 8.0% search marketshare. Over the course of June and July, the site has gained nearly a full percentage point — it’s up to 8.9%, and growth was actually higher for July than for June, when the site was getting all of its launch attention. Of course, Bing’s marketshare still pales in comparison to Google’s dominant 64.7%, but at least Microsoft is heading in the right direction.
Once again, it looks like Bing’s gain comes at Yahoo’s expense, at least to some extent. Since May, Yahoo has dropped from 20.1% to 19.3%. Google has dropped a more modest .3%, from 65% to 64.7%. We saw a similar pattern last month, when we pointed out that Yahoo was losing marketshare both from below (Bing) and above (Google).
Since then though, the landscape has changed dramatically: Yahoo search will soon be powered by Bing. When the Yahoo/Microsoft search deal was announced Yahoo EVP Hillary Schneider discounted the impact of this market share erosion, stating, “seeing Bing as a live experience was a nice assurance but did not change our rationale or timing.” But it’s hard to believe that Bing’s strong start didn’t have an impact on the deal.
Once that deal comes to fruition Bing will have to face the real test: can it continue to take market share away from Google, or will it simply continue to eat away at itself as users move from Yahoo’s portal to the Bing homepage?
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This guest post was written by Alex Ahlund, founder of AppVee.
We are just past of a year since the App Store launched and there are more than 60,000 applications released for the iPhone and iPod Touch. When we wrote our 2008 year-end app wrap-up, we had just surpassed the 10,000 app milestone. In early June 2009, the store reached 50,000 apps. At present, we are looking at a staggering 300 new applications being released every single day. How does the average iPhone user find the gems in this deluge?
Unfortunately, the process is entirely overwhelming for the average iPhone user. The bulk of consumers use iTunes’ Top and front page listings. Since placement on the top lists is derived entirely from unit sales, there is a disturbing skew towards the $.99 applications. This not only discourages big developers from putting high budgets and serious resources towards development of really useful applications and games, but also does a disservice to us, as iPhone users. If all we see are ninety-nine cent gimmicks and toys, how will we realize the true potential of our device? Apple attempts to offset this with editor’s picks, but this simply isn’t enough to make sense of the App Store.
There are new third party services and tools coming onto the scene to help show how to best navigate the App Store. AppVee has been doing in-depth reviews of applications since the launch of the App Store and will soon celebrate our one-year anniversary with nearly 1,000 video reviews of the top applications. We’re often asked if we are overwhelmed with the number of applications currently released and the number we are capable of covering. The answer is no. 90% of apps currently out there are of no use to anyone. There are a massive number of clones, one-off gimmicks, volumes of books and reference material, and a never-ending supply of uninteresting games. So, we try to act as a filter for consumers, directing them to what is worth their time and money.
The following is a round-up of our top picks so far this year:
Most practical
1. Slacker Radio
A fantastic alternative to Pandora, which carries a larger catalog and offers Premium accounts that offers something we’ve always loathed about Pandora – unlimited song skips. (Similar: Pandora, WunderRadio, Last.fm)
2. Hey Where Are You
A beautifully simple application that takes advantage of Push Notification, by letting users ask and answer the question “Hey, Where Are You?” (Similar: Loopt)
3. Textfree Unlimited
Currently the best alternative to high SMS plan costs, offering free text messaging using Push Notification.
4. Bento
Create simple databases to store information about every aspect of your life.
5. TweetDeck
Our new, favorite Twitter client that takes advantage of the same layout as its desktop counterpart – multiple columns, separation of user groups, and more. (Similar: Tweetie, Twinkle, TwitterFON)
6. Print and Share
Print files, emails, web pages, contacts, images and even snapshots direct from your camera, straight to your home printer. Simple setup and works perfectly.
7. Flight Tracker
Watch flights in real-time and get up-to-the-minute arrival and departure times. This has saved me countless delayed pick-ups from the airport.
8. Read It Later
Store any web page for offline reading or to mark as a reminder to read. A bit tricky to setup at first, but it will quickly replace bookmarking for articles.
9. iEmoji
Activate emoticons in your keyboard to include in emails and text messages. Works only for iPhones, but the end reader does not need the app to see emoticons in your texts.
10. Birthday Reminder
Rarely check Facebook to see upcoming birthdays? This app downloads all of that information so you can access and easily see upcoming bdays offline.
11. Mover
Swap contacts and photos with other iPhones in an easy way. Requires both users to have the application, but it is free and quick to download. (Similar: Bump)
12. Simplify Music 2
Listen to your entire music library from your home computer, streamed quickly and without any lag. (Similar: Simply Music, imeem)
13. Cell Minute Tracker
We prefer Cell Minute Tracker to AT&T’s minute tracker any day. Much simpler, easy to navigate and much faster.
14. QuickOffice
Edit Word and Excel documents on the go.
15. Photogene
There are a multitude of photo editing apps out there, but you really only need one. Crop, rotate, adjust colors, and add filters with Photogene. (Similar: Camera Bag)
16. Skype
Superb quality Skype-to-Skype over WiFi using the Skype application. Finally be free of your computer and microphone to make those long distance calls. (Similar: Truphone)
17. Kindle
Skeptical at first, but found eBook reader surprisingly easy on the eyes and good for taking in a quick chapter. Offers plenty of free content, but won’t be replacing your physical Kindle.
18. Beejive IM 3.0
We mentioned this on last year’s roundup, but it deems reiteration. So far, the best multi-IM service client on the iPhone, now with Push Notification. AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, and more.
19. Redlaser
Extremely reluctant to include this on the list, but it does deserve a bottom slot. Scan UPC codes for price comparisons on the go, but wait for an update for improved scanning and database.
Best Games
20. Real Racing
Standard track based racing game, but has the best graphics on an iPhone game to-date. Worth it alone to see what the iPhone is capable of.
21. Sims 3
Slightly watered down Sims 3, but still an excellent version on the go. Fantastic graphics and runs well.
22. My Brute
Create a fighter and compete in daily arena matches. Very simplistic, but highly addicting and will bring you back daily.
23. Mecho Wars
Advanced Wars for your iPhone and iPod Touch, enough said. Interesting art style and background story.
24. Zenonia
The first fully featured traditional 2D action RPG for your iPhone and iPod Touch.
25. Peggle
The time sucking, simple Pachinko style casual PC game from PopCap ported to your device.
26. Marble Blast Mobile
Another PC game port where you roll your marble through various levels, filled with obstacles and hazards.
http://www.appvee.com/t/iphone-app-review-marble-blast-mobile
27. Myst
Do we even need to explain this one?
28. Merlin’s Legacy
An original IP based around two dueling wizards, battling for control across a 2D side-scrolling field. Interesting game mechanic based on spells and timing.
29. Assassin’s Creed
A smaller version of Assassin’s Creed on your iPhone and iPod Touch. Plays rather smoothly and provides solid entertainment.
30. Oregon Trail
The classic Oregon Trail, updated with fantastic graphics and animation. Will keep you entertained just like when you were in school. Try not to die of dysentery.
31. Rolando 2
The sequel to the popular game of rolling little Rolandos around to save the kingdom. Your hands may cramp from hours of play.
Fun Timewasters
32. Doodle Jump
Dominated the Top 25 list for quite a while. Accelerometer based movement—you guide your Doodle to bounce off platforms, jumping to the highest point possible as you avoid getting hit.
33. Mouth Off
Cover your mouth with your device and show off an assortment of crazy mouths that animate to the input sound of your voice. I’ve annoyed dining mates with this one more than once.
34. Pocket God
Well done, episodic content based on a simple toy of dealing with your islanders. Fun to show off to friends and receive new updates.
35. Flight Control
Elegantly simple and highly addictive game. You direct various planes to different landing strips, all the while trying to avoid collisions. Updated with Bluetooth device co-op.
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One of the big problems with starting a new service that relies on user submitted data is getting people to actually use it — nobody is going to routinely boot up your app if they don’t have an incentive to do so. One way to tackle this problem is by working the service into a game, which is a technique that seems to be working quite well for Foursquare, a service that makes it easy to find your friends. GraffitiGeo is a new Y Combinator funded startup launching tonight that’s looking to combine similar gameplay elements to take on a different space: restaurant reviews.
At its core GraffitiGeo allows users to leave brief reviews of restaurants, or for those too lazy to do that, to simply leave a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ — it’s like a highly condensed version of Yelp, or a “Digg for the world”. These reviews and votes can be cast from the site’s iPhone app or from the service’s homepage. The homepage also features a stream of the latest comments to come in from other users, as well as a profile for each restaurant in the system that includes all of its votes and comments. There’s also a nifty feature that lets you view a heatmap of your current region, so you can quickly figure out the hot spots in town.
The gameplay in GraffitiGeo is a bit more complex than that found in Foursquare, which gives you points for checking in but doesn’t really let you do anything with them. With GraffitiGeo, you earn points for every action you take, be it voting on a restaurant or leaving a brief comment. Once you’ve reached a certain point threshold, you can use those points to start a ‘mob’, which you can invite your friends to join. Mobs allow friends to pool their points, which can then be used to acquire territory, which corresponds to actual city blocks. Whenever someone votes on one of the restaurants on the block, the mob gets some street cred too. It’s definitely going to be confusing at first, but it also brings a team element to gameplay — something that Foursquare lacks. You can read more about the mob game here.
GraffitiGeo is also working on a second related iPhone app that combines the site’s data with augmented reality — in effect, it turns your iPhone into a viewfinder for looking up restarurant info (see the video below for a demo). Just hold the iPhone as you would a camera and point it in the direction of the restaurant in question, and an overlay featuring GraffitiGeo comments will hover over it. It’s very cool (we’ve seen a number of other AR apps that are on the way), though we’ll have to wait a while longer to try it out.
GraffitiGeo has some good ideas (especially with the AR app), but it still has its work cut out for it. For one, Yelp is going to prove a very tough competitor — it already has a vast amount of data, and while it may be annoying having to sift through long reviews at times, I don’t think people find it annoying enough to stop using that site. The startup also has some work to do on the iPhone app and the service’s homepage, both of which are functional but could still use some polish.
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Apple’s App Store policies have been under fire for months now. It looks like tensions are starting to thaw following a couple of emails from Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller to some vocal bloggers. But it seemed a bit odd that it was Schiller doing this after months of basically nothing on the issues from Apple’s PR team. But today brings a good sign: There is an App Store PR team, and they’re starting to communicate.
Now, to be clear, the email we’ve received has nothing to do with any App Store issues, and is instead just a pretty standard PR email promoting some iPhone/iPod touch apps for the upcoming NFL season. But the key here is that it came from someone in “App Store Public Relations”.
From what I’ve heard, the company fairly recently broke the iPhone PR team in two, with one side focusing on the hardware, and the other on the App Store, and this would seem to be proof of that. In the past, I’ve received similar emails, but they were always from the more general iPhone PR or Apple PR teams.
Of course, this doesn’t ensure that the App Store PR team will be any more responsive to inquiries about problems with the store, but it looks like it could be another positive step in the direction of more communication, which is good.
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WPP subsidiary Millward Brown Optimor released its highly regarded annual brand ranking BrandZ Top 100 (PDF) back in April. It identifies the world’s most valuable global brands as measured by their dollar value.
Topping the list were Internet giant Google, whose brand was valued at a whopping $100 billion, and rival Microsoft which came in second with a $76.2 billion valuation. The report showed Google’s brand value was up from $86 billion last year (an increase of 16% in value), while Microsoft’s rose only 8% in value over the past year.
Note that this is the value of the brand and not the company, and we mustn’t forget Google tends to put its name in all its products so would conceivably get more exposure as Microsoft, which markets far more brands than just one (Windows, Bing, etc.). Then again, Microsoft has been around a heck of a lot longer than Google, as has Coca-Cola which came in third with a brand valuation of $67.6 billion.
Just for reference, I took a look at both tech companies’ current stock listings to see how they relate to the brand value pegged by Millward Brown’s ranking. Google today has a market cap of $142.82 billion, while Microsoft’s amounts to $212.16 billion, or an approximate 1.5 ratio in Redmond’s favor.
Does Google’s brand really account for 70 percent of its total market value, or has its brand taken a hit since the initial report? After all, Google is now Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the antitrust division of the U.S. Justice Department, competitors, and others.
Other valuable top brands in technology, according to Millward Brown’s ranking, included IBM ($66.6 B), Apple ($66.1 B), Vodafone ($53.7 B), Nokia ($35.1 B), Blackberry ($27.4 B), HP ($26.7 B), SAP ($23.6 B), Intel ($22.8 B) and Oracle ($21.4 B). Just outside the top 25, we found Amazon at the number 26 spot, but the company can pride itself in having the most ‘brand momentum’ - a measurement predicting short-term growth prospects - this year.
For the full lists and report, click here (again, it’s a PDF file).
The report also broke down brand valuations in categories, so allow me to publish the top 3 for those categories you’re likely most interested in:
GAMING CONSOLES
1 Nintendo DS - $9.65 billion
2 Nintendo Wii - $8.25 billion
3 Microsoft Xbox 360 - $4.68 billion
MOBILE OPERATORS
1 China Mobile - $61.28 billion
2 Vodafone - $53.72 billion
3 AT&T - $20.05 billion
BEER
1 Bud Light - $6.65 billion
2 Budweiser - $6.63 billion
3 Heineken - $5.06 billion
CARS
1 Toyota - $29.9 billion
2 BMW - $23.94 billion
3 Porsche - $17.46 billion
(Image via Renato Mitra’s blog)
CrunchBase Information
Google
Microsoft
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A short post on the Google News blog today revealed a big number: Google recently quadrupled the number of newspaper articles in its News Archive Search. You may recall that at TechCrunch50 last year, Google’s Marissa Mayer demoed this powerful news tool that can search the text of publications far back in time — some over 200 years old.
The recent update saw Google add a bunch of new publications, including some from different parts of the world. And it even has a newspaper in the archives from 1753 now. The fact that it’s searchable is fairly insane.
Google launched with “millions” of searchable articles, so now we have to assume it has millions times four (Google didn’t give an exact number). But this along with its book scanning efforts are getting impressive in their size and scope (but the book scanning is not without controversy).
Of course, why Google primarily cares about archiving these old publications is not just for information, but also for the fact that it can sell contextual AdSense ads against them. Look at this article from the Manila Standard about a volcano eruption, it features an ad to get an emergency management degree.
[photo: flickr/DRB62]
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Microsoft has announced that in late August it will be discontinuing availability and support for its once popular mashup creation application Popfly. In a blog post, team leader John Montgomery confirms the internal deadpooling, although he doesn’t call it the way we do. He writes that on August 24, 2009 the Popfly service will be discontinued and all sites, references, and resources will be taken down.
Montgomery points developers to Microsoft’s Web Platform and Xbox development program as all projects that were created using Popfly will effectively be discontinued completely.
TechCrunch got an early look at the Silverlight-powered application when it debuted in private beta mode over 2 years ago. At the time, mash-up and widget creation tools were all the rage, with Yahoo introducing its Pipes web app just a few months prior. Google got in the game with its Mashup Editor a bit later, but that service never left private beta and the company ultimately announced it would be axing the product last January. Two days ago, the team even reminded developers that it would soon be shutting down.
ProgrammableWeb in its coverage of the discontinuation of Microsoft Popfly points back to a February 2008 article in the NY Times, in which the newspaper talks about Montgomery and Popfly in a positive light, with the product manager being lauded as “an example of how it just might be possible for someone to teach dinosaurs to dance”.
Last fall, his team introduced an intriguing software Web service called Popfly that is intended to make it possible for nonprogrammers to plug together Web components and data sources quickly to create useful new Web services. For example, news feeds could be added to digital images, or data lists to maps.
Introduced at the Web 2.0 conference last year by Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, Popfly was picked by PC World magazine as one of the most innovative computing and consumer electronics products of 2007. It has garnered more than 100,000 users — the company says the exact number is confidential — and now has a library of more than 50,000 “mashups”: new components or Web pages that have been created in a visual snap-together fashion, like Lego blocks.
Web 2.0 Conference organizer Tim O’Reilly also gets quoted in the article, and he apparently expressed skepticism early on:
“Popfly shows me that Microsoft still thinks this is all about software, rather than about accumulating data via network effects, which to me is the core of Web 2.0,” said Tim O’Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media, a print and online publisher. “They are using Popfly to push Silverlight, rather than really trying to get into the mashup game.”
Seattle-based tech blog TechFlash got a bit more information out of Microsoft regarding Popfly’s sudden death. In an e-mail to editor Todd Bishop, Redmond says Popfly was simply no longer part of its refocused strategy, which was outlined in light of the dismal economic situation.
(Thanks to everyone who sent this in as a tip)
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It’s not easy to launch a successful WebEx competitor. Most businesses have long since established their “system” for dealing with web meetings, using old standbys like WebEx or GoToMeeting. And those businesses that are willing to venture into the unknown have had plenty of cheaper alternatives to choose from, like DimDim, for quite a while. But that isn’t keeping CallWave from launching one of its own, dubbed Fuze Meeting. And while it’s not going to be an easy space to compete in, Fuze Meeting doesn’t disappoint.
As far as startups go, the history of the company is pretty unique. CallWave was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CALL. After reaching a peak soon thereafter of over $15 per share, the stock dropped steadily, dipping as low as 50 cents early this year. Deciding to cut its losses, the company delisted itself from NASDAQ on Monday after buying back shares from public shareholders at a 44% premium over the current market value and paying out a total of $10 million. CMO Patrick Moran says that the company did this on its own accord, and that its hand wasn’t pushed by any banks or VCs. CallWave will soon change its name to Fuze Box to reflect its new position as a startup.
While all of this has been going on, CallWave has been building the “fuze platform” that powers Fuze Meeting, which it’s pitting as a sleeker, lighter, and cheaper alternative to services like WebEx. Last fall, the company decided to show off an early version of the product to some press, perhaps prematurely (it was labeled as “incomplete” by CNET). Finally in May, a full eight months after making its public debut, Fuze Meeting finally became commercially available. And only now that the company’s financial wranglings are complete is it ready to really announce it to the public.
I played around with the complete version yesterday, and for the most part I was impressed. The application is slick and intuitive, and unlike some other screen sharing apps, Fuze Meeting requires no plugins — it should work on just about any browser, and also offers support for both the iPhone and BlackBerry. Screen sharing supports high resolution video sharing, allowing presenters to jump to any point in the video as each participant’s screen is updated in real time. Presenters can also annotate video frames, which will likely appeal to marketing organizations.
While the service is currently working on acquiring free users, it is going to operate under a subscription model of $29 a month, or 12 cents per minute for users who would prefer to pay as they go. This is substantially cheaper than WebEx, but other less well known alternatives sport similar price points, so cost won’t be the only thing Fuze can rely on to differentiate itself.
If you’d like to see a video of the service in action, check out the clip below. Warning: it features Moran’s kids, and may be too cute to handle.
Fuze Meeting from Patrick Moran on Vimeo.
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Sense of Fashion is an Israeli startup that aims to be a marketplace for both Indie fashion designers to sell their designs and for consumers to be able to access clothes made by aspiring designers. The site also serves a social purpose—it lets any user create a fashion homepage of sorts where you can add photos of what you wear your favorite clothes and designs. Designers can create storefronts on this platform as well.
The site has ambitions to be more than just a marketplace for new and interesting fashion. The site hopes to connect shoppers, designers and trendsetters. Designers can tap into a potential customer base of users who have created their own fashion pages and users can influence designers by commenting on designs and fashions posted on the site. Users can also interact with other shoppers on the site. For example, Sense of Fashion has a “Fashion Emergency” feature that allows you ask friends to vote and choose which item of clothing looks best on you.
Sellers can operate e-commerce on Sense of Fashion via Paypal. The site takes a 3% sales commission on all sales and charges designers an undisclosed listing fee as well. Launched in 2009, Sense of Fashion has received seed funding by VOIP pioneer Jeff Pulver, Ori Levy and other investors. Sense of Fashion is an interesting way to combine social networking, fashion, and retail for the Indie design space. I can imagine aspiring fashion students and design connoisseurs will find the site particularly appealing. FashionSpace has a similar concept.
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Yesterday we posted about Glam Media contacting Twitter app developers concerning an upcoming ‘Twitter-powered ad network’, and requested more information from CEO Samir Arora as the e-mail we were forwarded by one of the developers was rather scarce on details.
He came through earlier this morning to confirm the accuracy of the scoop, and also provided a statement from his team in order to shed more light on the imminent initiative. As we suggested, the new solution is tied to GlamApps, the company’s application platform.
Arora tells us:
With the launch of Tinker.com to help monetize “real-time” trends and events, Advertisers have been asking Glam to reach real-time stream users across multiple applications.
Unlike Social Network apps that live “inside” MySpace and Facebook, Twitter is revolutionizing the apps business by pioneering an open model- Glam sees this as the first mid and long tail of Social Apps, much like iPhone has done for mobile apps with a pay for apps model. Given internet apps are free, except for a small “pro” apps upgrades, it is vital that we can figure out a monetization quickly. Given the audience and vertical targeting Glam has developed for content publishers and the trust with brand advertisers, Glam can bring the learning to the Twitterverse. Like Portals like Yahoo and AOL offered advertisers content along with social apps like AIM, Twitter Apps Network helps Glam Media offer distributed social apps to brands- taking the next step in building a true distributed media company.
Yep, that’s still vague. Hopefully we’ll have a better understanding of what Glam Media is trying to accomplish when they share more details about the project next month.
We didn’t really ask, but Arora also shared some statistics about the current reach of the Glam network. He claims Glam Media currently boasts over 1,000 publishers with 6,000 editors/journalists/bloggers reaching 56 million unique users a month in the United States. That’s one big vertical.
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“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” Elevation Partners (which owns a huge portion of Palm) co-founder Roger McNamee told Bloomberg in March. “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”
We’re 5 days away from that milestone. Anyone want to take that bet still?
It’s been 18 days since the launch of the Palm Pre, and the device has already passed an important milestone: 1 million app downloads, according to mobile analytics firm Medialets. That’s impressive for a store with only 30 or so applications. While Apple surpassed 10 million downloads in its first weekend following the App Store launch in 2007, it had over 500 applications at launch, and already had a few million devices (the original iPhone) with which people could download from.
The big problem for Palm is that is set itself up to be compared to the iPhone with comments like the one above and its feature set. And now it has a huge mountain to climb to get anywhere near it. While the Pre may have seen a million app downloads after 18 days, Apple’s newest device, the iPhone 3GS, sold a million hardware units in just three days after its launch last week. Analysts estimate Pre sales to be about 150,000 so far. All told, there are well over 20 million iPhones now out there (probably closer to 25 million), and when you throw in iPod touches (which also access the App Store), there are over 40 million units.
And Palm isn’t making things any easier on itself. During this critical time after launch where new apps are vital, there are only 30 because the webOS SDK still isn’t open to all developers. Palm recently gave an update saying that developers should by the “end of this summer”, but even when they get it, it will likely be another few months before a wide range of apps start coming out. That means it will be the Fall or Winter before there are a ton of apps for the Pre — and that’s assuming developers jump on board.
Meanwhile, all indications are that Apple’s new iPhone 3.0 SDK is kicking app development into an even higher level on that platform. The App Store is currently backlogged with app approvals, and just about every developer I’ve talked to, has something in the pipeline very shortly.
Oh yeah, and Apple just launched a version of the iPhone that is $99, which everyone seems to be forgetting. The sales numbers on that should be interesting.
That’s not to say Palm cannot be successful with the Pre and more specifically, its webOS, it can. It’s a great device, and a great platform. And the mobile arena, and specifically smartphones, are exploding in popularity right now. There is certainly more than enough room for a number of devices and a range of platforms. But Palm still has some very serious question marks on the business side of things, and they’re basically betting the farm on the Pre. It has another webOS device that may or may not come in the next few months, but even if it does, if the apps aren’t there, it could be facing a less than stellar entrance. And that’s the kind of performance Palm needs right now, stellar.
On the other hand, McNamee’s comment might technically be true. All those people who bought the original iPhone may not be using one a month from now — they might be using the iPhone 3GS, instead. Let’s revisit this on July 29, shall we?
[photo: flickr/kowitz]
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Last week we posted a pair of videos showing off OTOY, the upcoming server-side rendering service that can stream complex 3D games to your computer through any web browser. It’s a very impressive technology, requiring no plugins or lengthy installs — just open your browser and you can instantly jump into a game of Crysis or GTA4, streamed in HD quality.
Today we’ve gotten our hands on a clip proving that when OTOY says its technology will work on nearly any browser-enabled device, it means it. As the video below shows, OTOY is going to bring modern games like Crysis and GTA 4 to your mobile phone.
The phone in the video is a Samsung Omnia, which was released to the public last summer (in other words, you don’t need a cutting edge phone for the technology to work). The game is running through the phone’s built-in browser, with no installs required, and is being controlled via a Xbox gamepad connected wirelessly. OTOY Chief Strategy Officer Mark Tseng says that the company is working on a variety of control schemes, allowing users to control games using a phone’s accelerometer, onscreen gamepad, or external peripherals like the Xbox controller.
OTOY will work over Wi-Fi or a 3G connection (the company has it working speeds as low as 1.5 Megabits per second), though Tseng says Wi-Fi works best. He also notes that the technology will work on the iPhone, going on to emphasize that it should work on nearly any device — we can likely expect it to work on the Palm Pre, Android, and most other smartphones as well. At this point the company isn’t willing to divulge how pricing will work, though Tseng says more details will be coming soon.
This is very powerful stuff. Imagine being able to whip out your cell phone and join a quick raid in World of Warcraft, or play through a mission in Grand Theft Auto. I see this as being particularly appealing for MMO’s, which tend to attract especially devout players who would love to be able to access their accounts away from home.
Of course, mobile phones are becoming powerful enough to render 3D graphics on their own — the iPhone offers a slew of games with complex graphics, and the iPhone 3GS is able to support even more detailed games. But these graphics won’t rival modern console or PC games for many years, and you’re going to always have to continuously upgrade your hardware if you want to stay current. Once you have a phone that supports OTOY you shouldn’t have to worry about upgrading your hardware, as all game processing is being done remotely.
But streaming games on mobile phones come with its own set of issues. Unlike your home PC, where you can normally count on a stable connection, many of us play games on our phones while we’re in transit, when you can hardly rely on your cell phone’s reception to hold up. But even if they have to stay stationary or jump on a Wi-Fi connection, this is a service that I’m sure many gamers will be salivating over.
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Google has launched a bunch of new features to Google Books in an effort to promote interactivity between readers and the online books.
1. Embeddable previews of books: This new feature allows you to embed a preview of a full view or partner book in your websites or blogs, just like you would with a YouTube video. You can also copy and paste a url link in an email to share the book with your friends.
2. Ramped up in-book search: For public domain and partner books, Google has made the ability to search for a term within a book a little bit more user friendly. When you search for a term on a book, you can now see an image from the part of the page on which it appears. You can also click on those images to navigate directly to the pages inside the book. And you can filter search results by relevance in addition to page order in the book or magazine.
3. Thumbnail view options: You now have the option to click on the thumbnail view button to see an overview of all the pages in a public domain book or in a magazine.
4. Contents drop-down menu: Via a contents drop-down menu, Google Books will now allow you to jump to chapters within the book–or articles within a magazine (the same technology supports the mobile version of Google Books).
5. Plain Text Mode: Google’s made it easier to see the plain text versions of Google Books. The tool bar now includes a ‘Plain text’ button to see the HTML version of the text, which Google says is especially useful for visually impaired users, who can use this format for text-to-speech and other types of software.
6. Page Turn Button and Animation: In addition to scrolling through the book, you can now also click the page turn button at the bottom of the screen. Google also has implemented an an animated line to move with the page turn to make it easier to keep track of your location in the text.
7. Overview Page Overhaul: Google has added an assortment of data about the book on its overview page, including reviews, ratings, summaries, related books, key words and phrases, references from the web, places mentioned in the book, and publisher information.
Last October, Google signed a $125 million settlement with the Author’s Guild to pay authors for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web through its Google Book Search project. More than 7 million books have been scanned by Google so far, a large portion of them out of print. The Settlement, though the site is up and running, is still up in the air, facing an antitrust investigation by the Department of Justice. And the settlement has draw its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos.
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Lets nip this one in the bud right away. SFAppeal is reporting that MySpace terminated every employee in its San Francisco office as part of the wider layoffs today.
The report is based on an anonymous MySpace employee who told the site “San Francisco MySpace offices have just been obliterated. (Staff is) all just getting phone calls in silence and staring at each other, one by one. All fired. Even higher ups. One by one.” That statement was interpreted as “we’re told that every San Francisco-based MySpace employee has been laid off this afternoon.”
MySpace won’t comment on whether their San Francisco office remains open (you read that right, they will not answer the question “Do you still have a San Francisco office?”) but other sources close to the company say the office remains open and that layoff rates weren’t materially different than at MySpace headquarters in Los Angeles.
We’ve heard that MySpace will likely close the San Francisco office eventually, but as of now everyone who’s willing to talk says it either isn’t closing or isn’t imminent.
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The founders of Inkling Markets, a prediction market platform and a Y Combinator alum, found that their staff needed a secure chat room every day to work together on private issues within their business but most of the collaboration apps send an email when they’re updated with a message, which while is convenient, is not necessarily secure. They also wanted an uber-simple email collaboration tool that was secure across all email clients and could be accessed from a laptop or an iPhone. The looked into Basecamp and Google Groups, but found the interface too clunky for simple email correspondence.
So they created Tgethr, a simple, easy-to-use secure, free email collaboration platform that can be used between family members or within an enterprise. All you have to do is set up a group name, i.e. “techcrunch@tgethr.com” with a distribution list of whomever you want to participate, and write to it. You can write from your own email client or from Tgethr’s interface. Tgethr will keep a private archive of everything you write on the web. You can cc: or bcc: to it, tag your correspondence, search for emails and keywords, and it’s secure with both ssl and email encryption. And the interface is sort of like a chat room.
Nathan Kontny, co-founder of Inkling Markets, says that the tool is aimed to be the anti-fancy email collaboration app. Most importantly, Kontny, says was to build in security capabilities so both email and web traffic would be encrypted and users could feel better about sharing sensitive information - something that is missing in other collaboration solutions. Ideal users could be project teams, families, friends, and clubs, or enterprises whose staff work remotely. Startups which have launched similar applications include Cc:Betty (which we wrote about here) and FamSpam.
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It seems like I’ve heard that title somewhere before. Oh yeah, almost exactly. So this time a guest at our party last week decided to corner Chandra Rathakrishnan, the CEO of our CrunchPad partner Fusion Garage, and talk him into doing this ridiculous “unboxing” of the CrunchPad. The video went up and the blogosphere went wild, just like last time.
The video has now been removed from YouTube.
This was not a sanctioned or official video, nor is it even very interesting. It’s just the last prototype being taken out of its box (which should be sort of obvious, pictures of the prototype in the video have been circulating since April). It’s certainly not the launch prototype, pictured here, which doesn’t actually exist yet.
The only official information on the CrunchPad at this point is in the blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, and you can send an email to crunchpad@techcrunch.com for various updates. We’re planning an event in July to give more information. Until then, I hope we’ve seen the last of these ridiculous fingerprint smudged “unboxing” videos.
And that guest who took the video without talking to me first won’t be back at any TechCrunch events anytime soon.
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Scripps Networks Interactive is actively shopping around uSwitch, a UK-focused online price comparison and switching service for home services and personal finance products, which it acquired back in 2006 for a lofty $366 million in net cash.
Scripps Networks Interactive, itself spun out off E.W. Scripps back in October 2007, has engaged investment banking firm Allen & Company to assist in its search for a "qualified buyer" for uSwitch without establishing a timetable for completion of a transaction.
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After attending a great Tokyo 2.0 event last night (more to come about that later), the GeeksOnAPlane group is now at Startonomics Tokyo, where we’ll be hearing about a broad range of topics pertaining to Japanese tech throughout the day.
Join us below as we watch the presentations.
Slides from today’s presentations:
Shuji Utsumi, CEO Q Entertainment; Gaming in Japan
Japanese Game Business Overview (Shuji Utsumi, Startonomics Tokyo, June 2009)
View more OpenOffice presentations from GeeksOnaPlane.
Gen Miyazawa, CEO Cirius Technologies; Mobile in Japan
Japanese Mobile Market Overview
View more Microsoft Word documents from Geeks on a Plane.
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Users beware - if you try out a brand new service in private beta, don’t get too upset when everything goes wrong.
On Monday we wrote about iMindi, a new startup that first showed its stuff at TechCrunch50 in 2008. In the post on Monday we gave out 1,000 private beta invites, which were apparently snatched up quickly.
Then, disaster. The email iMindi sent out, which contains the dreaded phrase “we accidentally deleted all the user accounts” sort of says it all. Brave souls can start all over again here. I know there are at least a few of you out there that are quite willing to forgive and forget.
Here’s the email. Credit to iMindi CEO Adam Lindemann for standing up and taking a beating.
Dear Friends of Imindi,
Yesterday, we were featured on Techcrunch and many of you were kind enough to sign up to the service. Unfortunately, we had not prepared sufficiently for the demand on our servers and then with some human error we accidently deleted all the user accounts. Darn.
We would ask that you forgive us and sign up one more time as members of Imindi. We will set you up with a clean account which we hope you will enjoy using to collect your thoughts and share them with like-minded people.
We are extremely embarrassed by this mistake and we have purchased more capacity and instituted safer backup processes to handle the increased demand to prevent a recurrence of this incident. It’s a private beta, and it will be a while before this service is ready to be launched in public but we hope that you will be kind to Imindi as she grows.
Below is the new invitation URL:
http://imindi.com/invitations/03711dda503b02868903efbed6649d59046952d9
Thank you again,
Adam Lindemann
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Yesterday developer Rick Strom wrote a blog posted titled “The Incredible App Store Hype“, in which he detailed some of the revenue stats he was seeing from the iPhone applications that he had released (some of which rank on the App Store’s top apps lists), and what other developers could expect to make accordingly. His conclusion? That most of the 36,000 applications on the App Store aren’t selling at all - for many apps, most days go by without a single sale.
Surprised? You shouldn’t be.
As marketplaces go, the App Store has a very low barrier to entry that makes it easy for anyone to sell their wares, which means that it’s flooded with apps. There’s no way Apple could prominently present these 36,000 applications to users without overwhelming them, which means most apps fall into obscurity as soon as they’re submitted. If you can’t find a way to get the word out, nobody is going to find your app on their own.
Now, as someone who regularly likes to cover the success stories of the App Store, I thought this would have been fairly obvious to other developers and have thus failed to insert disclaimers that these cases were not typical results. But the fact that Strom’s post was written seems to indicate that perhaps we need to make this a bit clearer.
So here goes: The App Store probably will not make you rich.
To underscore the point, let’s go over some of the stats presented by Strom. His application Zen Jar ranks #34 on the Social Networking top apps list. And while most of us would probably assume it would take at least a hundred daily downloads to place there, the reality is quite surprising: Zen Jar reached the 34th position with only 30-35 downloads a day (or around $20 a day for a 99 cent app). Similarly, Sprint Board Pro, which ranked 95th in the Board Games section of the store with 6-8 daily downloads. Granted, these aren’t exactly the most popular categories, but If it takes fewer than 10 downloads a day to make the top 100 bestsellers of any category, that’s saying something.
Strom likens the App Store to a lottery, with the time and cost spent developing your application as the price of admission. And I think he’s right in this respect. The thing is, I don’t really see how this differs from many professions where the rich and elite are given heavy media coverage while everyone else toils away in obscurity. This is true for the entire entertainment business, where actors train for years just so they can vie for a limited number of spots. Most writers struggle to have their books published, let alone see them become popular. Basically any job that has the potential to make you rich is going to require a combination of hard work, talent, and luck. Those with lower barriers to entry will see huge amounts of competition. There’s a reason everyone isn’t wealthy.
Strom writes that software entrepreneurs frequently use the “huge successes” of a market to gauge its potential, rather than looking at the average outcome. I think this may be true for some of them, just as some would-be actors venture to Hollywood with the expectation of simply jumping into the spotlight only to find themselves waiting tables at a diner. But I think that most developers understand the risks involved, and how unlikely it is that their app will hit the big time. The same can be said for most of the web entrepreneurs I meet. They may invest many months or years into their work, but they know that the vast majority of new online ventures are bound to fail.
So for all of you iPhone developers who are new to these somewhat discouraging facts of life, I’m sorry if I (and the media as a whole) have failed to underscore the low probability of striking it rich on the App Store. To those of you who keep building things anyway: rock on.
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The last $75 million payment on the $900 million Google/News Corp. search advertising deal will be paid to News Corp. a year from now. That deal has accounted for about a third of News Corp.’s online revenue from MySpace and some of its smaller Internet sites, and the looming end of that particular gravy train is causing more than a little consternation for new Digital Media chief Jonathan Miller and his new MySpace exec team.
Google revenue is the difference between profitability and the opposite of profitability at MySpace and its sister sites. And unless a new deal is negotiated that can bring in similar revenue after next year, MySpace is facing massive layoffs and a general downsizing of its business, we’ve heard from multiple sources close to MySpace.
Here’s the good news: Google is at the table negotiating a new deal to take over in July 2010.
Here’s the bad news: Sources say Google thinks the deal is worth, tops, $50 million - $75 million per year, significantly less than the $300 million/year they’re paying now.
Why? Sources say that while Google has gotten plenty of advertising impressions (MySpace uses any excuse to put Google search results and Google ads in front of users), those ads don’t convert well. Add to that the dramatic shrinking of MySpace page views and the predictive modeling gets ugly.
Google knows MySpace is shrinking by about 20% a year. And unlike the last time they negotiated with News Corp., they now have nearly three years of actual operating history with the company. They’ve got real data to value the deal.
Unless Microsoft or perhaps Yahoo comes in and bids very aggressively, MySpace is going to get slaughtered in the negotiations.
If rumors are correct News Corp. has brought in EVP Mike Lang to run the Google negotiations. This is the guy who led the creation and funding of Fox’s Hulu joint venture, and is considered a top notch negotiator. But News Corp. needs more than a top negotiator to save MySpace’s revenue stream. They need a miracle worker.
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As a Kindle owner, I love the fact that Amazon released an iPhone app to allow me to continue reading my content even when I don’t have the actual Kindle with me. Of course, the experience of reading on the iPhone’s much smaller and back-lit screen is worse than on the Kindle, but Amazon has made it a bit better with the new update it just rolled out.
The new 1.1 version of the Kindle app [iTunes link] allows users to read in either portrait or landscape mode. You can also now switch between different background color/text color combinations to make reading easier on the eyes. And turning pages is now easier with tap support and you can now use the multi-touch pinch to zoom in on images. Basically, Amazon has iPhone-ified the Kindle experience.
My favorite thing about the landscape/portrait mode is that while you rotate your iPhone to switch between the two, there’s a lock icon in the lower right hand corner to easily disable this rotation. I wish every app on the iPhone had that, as I cannot stand when things rotate even though I didn’t want them to. The background options of black or sepia along with the standard white is also a nice touch, as it can be hard to read on the white when the screen is fully illuminated.
A couple of weeks ago, Amazon revamped its Kindle book site to be better suited to browse and shop from the iPhone. Now, it seems that the app is already benefiting from Amazon’s recent purchase of the company behind the popular Stanza book-reader app. With this latest update, the Kindle app now shares many of the same features.
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Spam filtering tool Mollom, a competitor to Automattic’s Akismet, has struck a deal to filter messages and comments for Netlog, one of Europe’s fastest growing social networks. Mollom will be filtering more than 4 million messages in over 25 languages for Netlog, which has 40 million worldwide users.
Mollom says that it has set up dedicated servers within Netlog’s data center to enable real-time, 24/7 monitoring of messages and comments. Mollom’s technology automatically blocks comment spam, contact form spam and fake user accounts using a filtering technique based on the combination of content analysis and CAPTCHA challenges. When new content is analyzed by Mollom’s text-analysis filter, and Mollom is unsure whether it is spam, Mollom asks the user to answer a CAPTCHA challenge.
This challenge-response procedure doesn’t block human users. If an unwanted message still makes it onto a website, users can report this spam to Mollom. According to Mollom, the startup’s servers analyze more than 50 messages every second, reaching up to 200 messages per second during peak times and maintaining 99.95 percent efficiency in detecting and blocking all spam content.
Mollom is positioning its deal with Netlog as a sign that the spam filtering tool is gaining the trust of big-time clients and perhaps coming closer to being a serious competitor to Akismet, the current market leader in the space. It still has a ways to go before it can challenge Akismet. Six Apart also offers a competitive anti-spamming feature, TypePad AntiSpam.
Netlog is growing fast, especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle-East, where it serves as the community portal of choice thanks to its viral nature and extensive language translation program. Belgium-based Mollom was founded on 2008 by Dries Buytaert, the founder and project lead of the Drupal project and Benjamin Schrauwen, a Post-Doc researcher at Ghent University and Machine Learning expert. Other well-known Mollom users include Sony BMG, Adobe and FastCompany.
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Easily my favorite app on the Android platform is Imeem. It’s simple, fast and powerful, allowing you to listen to a huge range of music for free. And now it’s coming to the iPhone, we’ve learned.
The Imeem app has already been submitted for App Store approval and could be released any day, we’re hearing from a reliable source. In terms of what it will offer, you can probably expect it to be about the same as the Android version. That means access to Imeem’s library of music and perhaps more importantly, access to your own collection of songs from the cloud, if you use Imeem’s upload service to put your music on their servers.
Of course, you have to pay for that. But if you’re willing to shell out $99 a year for their most premium plan, it means you can access 20,000 of your songs from your iPhone from anywhere (there are lower-cost version with less storage as well).That’s around 80GB of music, obviously a lot more than an iPhone or iPod touch can hold. But one tricky thing about this on the iPhone is its close ties with iTunes, which means that many of its users probably have some DRM-protected music, which won’t work over Imeem’s streaming service. But I assume the new iTunes Plus, DRM-free variety (which the entire iTunes store was recently converted to) will.
And I’m sure you’ll be able to buy new music you hear on the Imeem app with one click that takes you to the iTunes store on the iPhone. This has been working out pretty well for Pandora.
Cloud-based streaming of music makes a lot of sense. It gives you a single place to access your music from anywhere, without taking up valuable space on your devices. Lala is another service doing this with a still unreleased iPhone app that we got an early look at. It makes so much sense, in fact, that I suspect Apple will eventually get into this game as well. It almost has to with HD movies and television shows at some point because most people simply do not have enough storage space even on home systems to buy that content to their heart’s content — which of course, Apple would love. Naturally, Apple would want to have an option to pull your music off of the cloud to take on trips where you don’t have web access as well — that’s something that won’t work so easily with Imeem’s solution.
Imeem’s iPhone application will undoubtedly have another major downside that the Android version does not: The inability to run in the background. That’s one of the killer features of the Android version — I can turn it on and leave it on while I do something else. Compare this to Pandora on the iPhone which shuts off as soon as you exit it. Seeing as Apple doesn’t allow third-party apps to run in the background, that will be the case with Imeem too.
Still, given the range of music Imeem offers and this cloud-based option, I’m definitely looking forward to this iPhone app. The Android version actually won the Crunchie this year for Best Mobile Application — even beating out Pandora for the iPhone. Look for the iPhone version soon in the App Store.
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Now businesses that are being built on top of Twitter are starting to consume others that were in fact features of those very businesses to begin with. Case in point: StockTwits has just acquired Chart.ly, which is a tremendously logical deal. Chart.ly is a stock-chart service designed specifically for StockTwits (which is dedicated to talking about stocks on Twitter). Think of it as a Twitpic for stock charts (you can Twitter about a stock with a link to a chart on Chart.ly).
Howard Lindzon, the founder of StockTwits (and before that, WallStrip), confirms to me that StockTwits now owns the code behind Chart.ly and that its creator, Adarsh Pallian, will continue to oversee the development site. Lindzon will help with ad deals. He paid less than $10,000 for the development work and will now split ad-revenues on Chart.ly 50/50 with Pallian.
In a world of open APIs, this is how small M&A deals are done. Pallian came to StockTwits with his idea for Chart.ly and just went out and built it. “He just came to us,” says Lindzon. “He is a young guy who wanted to design something for us, and we didn’t have the time.” Lindzon and his team were more focused on the stream of data coming into StockTwits, which currently has 70,000 followers on Twitter. Since Chart.ly launched a few weeks ago, about 3,000 stock charts have been created and shared. It was an obvious feature for StockTwits. Pallian proved that it was a good idea by building it and gaining traction for the feature quickly. Right now it is connected to StockTwits loosely, but will become more integarted now that StockTwits owns it.
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