Tuesday, April 21, 2009

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Ages After Yahoo And Google, Microsoft Finally Enables Web-Based IM In Hotmail Top
We’ll say it right off the bat: what the hell took Microsoft so long? Years after Yahoo and Google integrated web IM features into their free webmail services (Yahoo Messenger in Yahoo Mail and Gtalk in Gmail, respectively), Redmond is finally enabling users to log into their Hotmail accounts and converse with their contacts over instant messaging directly without the need to log on to Windows Live Messenger separately, or to even have the program installed altogether. The new feature will be gradually rolled out, starting from today enabling subsets of users in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and USA to send instant messages from the Windows Live Hotmail and People pages. The feature earlier rolled out to some users users in France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the UK. I’ve said this before: easily dismissed by geeks and savvy web users, Hotmail has a gigantic mainstream userbase who are not likely going to switch to an alternative webmail service en masse provided Microsoft keeps up with the times and lets Hotmail evolve the way its users are increasingly demanding it to. But make no mistake about it: Microsoft is ridicously late with adding this functionality to Hotmail. Your thoughts? Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Micro-Consolidation: PlaySpan Buys Spare Change Top
The micro-industry forming around micro-transactions is now going through some micro-consolidation. PlaySpan , which is quickly racking up micro-payments across hundreds of video games and virtual worlds, is acquiring Spare Change Payments , a startup which focuses on micro-transactions for social networking apps. The value of the cash-and-stock deal was not disclosed. PlaySpan raised $16.8 million in a series B funding just last February from Easton Capital Group, Menlo Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, and STIC. The startup was famously founded by a 12-year-old , Arjun Mehta, but it is really run by his father, CEO and co-founder Karl Mehta. The company has processed more than $50 million worth of micro-transactions through its PayByCash and Ultimate Game Card products. While its focus so far has been games and virtual worlds, it recently began making its own forays into social networks with a deal to p ower some micropayments on hi5. But Spare Change already has more momentum on social networks. It powers micropayments across 700 social networking apps on Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo, and is on its way to processing $30 million worth of transactions this year. As the social networks and online games collide, and developers seek new ways to make money other than advertising, micropayments will continue to grow. Like any payments business, even micro-transactions are all about scale. The bigger PlaySpan can get before the giants finally wake up and enter the market seriously, the better chance it has to becoming the PayPal of micropayments. Of course, PayPal, Facebook and MySpace all have their own plans to become the PayPal of micropayments. And plenty of other startups, from Zuora to Zong , are vying for the title as well. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Mobile Site Developer MoFuse Rolls Out Premium Service (Discount Code) Top
MoFuse, a service that will take your website and instantly create a mobile version of it, is launching a premium version of its mobile website development service for the enterprise space. MoFuse’s existing platform, which spares websites the development costs of formatting the site by hand, creates customized iPhone versions of sites in addition to the standard versions for basic mobile browsers. MoFuse is offering TechCrunch readers 50% off any premium plan for Website owners who use the promotional code “TechCrunch” when signing up before May 1. MoFuse Premium for Business is a completely separate platform from the site’s original service, which will remain intact and will be known as MoFuse for Blogs. The premium service creates higher quality mobile sites for businesses with more features, including the ability to nest topics in the site with drag and drop technology, search functionality, Google Maps integration, color customization, a local weather app, and more. The pricing for the premium site development starts with the “Basic” plan, which is $39 per month with a 50,000 page view limit for one site; “Small Business,” which is $89 per month, creates 3 sites with a limit of 125,000 page views per site; and “Ultimate,” which is $199 per month, creates up to 10 sites with a limit of 1 million page views per site. Founded in 2007, MoFuse has become popular with publishers—the service has helped nearly 25,000 organizations create mobile websites. Several of our colleague publications in tech news use MoFuse for their mobile sites including GigaOm and ReadWriteWeb. In addition to converting a web site for mobile consumption, Mofuse also allows publishers to monetize their mobile websites via revenue shares with Google AdSense and AdMob. Jag.ag also provides a simple service to help less tech-savvy consumers create their own mobile presence in a few minutes but doesn’t offer some of the same premium features yet. Zinadoo and Wirenode also provide similar services. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Lure In Users With Your Trackle Box Top
Content on the web is constantly changing and while you can track changes in information manually, it’s often a time-consuming process to monitor the things you care about. Trackle, a personalized web and RSS feed tracker we wrote about earlier this year, is launching a “Trackle It” button that can be added to any site to help users track information instantly while surfing the web. Trackle.com’s free web service provides real-time personalized RSS feeds for data such as the latest crime in a user's neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket prices, how much a user's house value is down this week, updated job listings, sports scores and more. Now with the introduction of the Trackle button, the tracking service wants to let sites provide instant tracking options directly to consumers and hopes to allow users to “Trackle” an item or feed from anywhere on the web. The button allows users to automatically sign up to receive notifications about personalized information, such as price drops, new content, messages about products, etc. via email or SMS directly from the site (instead of tracking the item from Trackle’s website, with the Trackle button, the consumer doesn’t have to be signed up to be a user on Trackle’s site). Trackle’s co-founder Pavan Nigam says that the Trackle button, which is sold to sites on a pay-per-action basis, can be incorporated into a site within an hour, using Trackle’s self serve API. He says that the button helps online marketers reach their audience with customized alerts that give users of a site a reason to return. The Trackle feature can be used to generate statistics about what’s most interesting to users. Currently, Trackle has several sites which are testing the beta version of this feature, including EveryTrail.com, Eurekaspot.com and KLDSoccer.com. Trackle is also offering sites the option of using a Trackle widget, instead of the integration of a Trackle button. The Trackle widget is similar to the button feature and allows users to track any updated information, changes or fluctuations of any item on a site in a widget form. Site owners can choose from over 100 of Trackle's tracking widgets, ranging from "Local Crime" and "Health" to “Weather.” For example, a ski-website might offer the "Trackle weather" widget to allow its readers to track local snow conditions. Widgets are continually updated and are ad-free. Trackle is also trying to integrate social media into its tracking service by launching a Trackle Facebook app. The app, which currently can only track sports scores and events, allows you to create a “tracklet” for a team or type of event to be tracked, and then sends you feeds alerts to you within the application. The alerts also go into your News Feed and your friends can see and comment on your Trackle updates. Trackle says it also plans to develop a MySpace app. As we noted in our original review of Trackle, the breadth and specificity of Trackle's information is what differentiates the site from other RSS and product tracking applications like Google Alerts, Yotify and Notify.me (which also allows sites to embed a “notify” widget to track items). The introduction of the “Trackle” button is a useful idea, but in order for it to be widely adopted by a variety of users, it needs to be more viral. The “Trackle” button needs to be an option on eBay, or Kayak or Craigslist for it to become truly useful, which is an ambitious task. The integration with Facebook is definitely key and Trackle says that the site will also integrate with Twitter and other social media sites in the future. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
IRLConnect puts Twitter and Facebook on a map with live video Top
IRLConnect (as in, ‘in real life connect’) is one of those new social-networks-meets-maps startups, but what sets them apart is some pretty cool integration, a focus on live video and a tantalizing business model based on owning the virtual equivalent of real estate. Today they launch into a public beta after being invite-only since September last year. The site is bringing together mobile devices and multiple social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, into a very visual platform. As well as integrating YouTube video onto their Google map, they’re pulling in partners including pictures from Mobypicture and live video from Bambuser . It will also pull in geotagged content from YouTube and news alerts from media such as CNN and Reuters. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Amazon Wants To Bully Amazee Into Changing Its Name Top
Online retail juggernaut Amazon isn’t too pleased with the name Swiss startup Amazee picked for its social collaboration service, and is now trying to persuade the young company to change it to something else. This has apparently been going on for a couple of months, but now Amazee is stepping up and throwing some good old fighting words out there, claiming ‘peaceful and cooperative efforts to reach an amicable solution’ have led to nothing. Amazon claims consumers could be confused by the similarity of the two names and wrongfully assume there’s some sort of affiliation. Amazee, on the other hand, claims the name is derived from the word ‘amazing’ (sounds plausible) and alleges that there’s no chance for confusion. The startup launched a new project on its own service, and this is an excerpt of the description: Their IP department says: “… the mark AMAZEE is not a natural derivative of "amazing". Amazee is a coined term where the dominant portion of the mark brings to mind Amazon, not "amazing".” Hm. The brand name Amazon is better known than the english word amazing? Well, at least they show great enthusiasm for their company. At this point, it looks like Amazon attorneys representing their Luxembourg subsidiary are demanding the deletion of Amazee in the Swiss trademark register ( after waiting for the opposition period to expire) while their US attorneys have filed an appeal against the registration of Amazee in the US. Amazee, which we likened to a ‘Facebook meets Basecamp for activists’ when it launched, is now calling its users and fans to speak up in favor of the service on the project, and they’re trying to get some publicity out of it in a humorous way: if you join to support the submitted project, you have a shot at winning a 100$ Amazon gift certificate. Personally, I’m pleased to see the young company takes a stance against Amazon, even if they’re clearly now trying to turn the situation into a promotional vehicle. Having taken a good look at Amazee’s size and scope, its logo, the believable explanation of how they came up with the name and particularly its current activities and future plans, I think Amazon is looking ridiculous going after them. (Via BloggingTom - in German) Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Live Video From London - TechCrunch Geek'n Rolla Top
Here you’ll find the live video stream from Geek'n Rolla, a day-long conference created by TechCrunch Europe for European early stage tech startups old and new to share real, hard-core knowledge about their experiences. Here is our agenda and speaker line-up . Geek'n Rolla is sponsored by Viadeo one of the largest professional social networks in the world, and supported by UK Trade and Investment , as well as NESTA , the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. Not only will we be having a great day of content for startups, we are planning the mother of all evening networking parties at one of London’s premier venues, Cafe de Paris , kindly sponsored by Winston & Strawn’s Bootlaw . Doug Richard’s School for Startups is our Strategic Event Partner. Speaker gifts and competition prizes are donated by Park Lane Champagne . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
MySpace Finally Opens The Door To Application Notifications Top
Tonight MySpace is preparing to launch a new addition to its application platform that allows developers to distribute notifications from their apps to their users. It may not sound particularly exciting at first, but the feature is one that developers have been clamoring for, as the notifications are essential to drive asyncronous applications (like a long-term chess games), and can be used to keep users engaged with a variety of other apps. The program is only in Beta for now (developers can only send notifications to other developers or themselves) with plans to release it more widely in the near future. Given how basic the feature is, it’s surprising that we haven’t seen it sooner. So what took so long? MySpace says that it’s doing its best to prevent abuse from spammy applications - a problem that Facebook suffered from for a few months when it first got started (it has since employed a variety of measures to curb spam, but it isn’t perfect). Notices will be shown in their own channel on MySpace, similar to the way invites are in the site’s message center, so even if some spam does get through it shouldn’t be too annoying. For more details, check out the MySpace blog post here . Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Katalyst Media Taking Punk'd Live With Ustream Top
“Punked” is one of those words that started out as a slang term, but was taken to a whole new level by a pop culture moment — in this case, the MTV show Punk’d. But as quickly as it heated up in 2003, it quickly burned out, lasting just 4 years. But the company behind it, Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst Media , may have found a way to revive the formula — take it live and online. Katalyst is teaming up with Ustream , the online streaming video service, to bring “Punk'd-style experiences” to the platform. It would seem to have all the makings of a new web hit: People getting tricked and embarrassed on video, the whole thing happening live, interactivity and, perhaps most importantly to get it off the ground, star power. As we saw this past week with Kutcher’s race to a million Twitter followers, the guy knows how to leverage himself on the web. Of course, content is still king. Kutcher and partner Jason Goldberg’s web cartoon show Blah Girls , hasn’t exactly exploded onto the scene after being unveiled at last year’s TC50. Traffic to the Blah Girl’s site does seem to be increasing nicely now, but it was in a rut for a while — and pales in comparison to say, the amount of pageviews Kutcher’s Twitter profile did just last week. And to be fair, Blah Girls is syndicated a bunch of different places, so website traffic doesn’t mean all that much for the show. But Ustream knows a bit about huge viral shows itself. It hosts the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam , which is literally just a live stream of a puffy puppies sitting there being cute. That video has attracted some 10 million viewers, according to Ustream. And Ustream also did some major streaming during President Obama’s inauguration in January. On top of their web partnership, the two sides plan to bring their videos to the iPhone in May, with a new live streaming aggregator app, taking all of these Punk’d-style live videos mobile. As I said, it sounds like a winning combo, but I would caution Kutcher and company of one thing: There is still backlash on the web. If you overexpose yourself too much, users can get turned off, just as viewers do in Hollywood. Stay focused on what works, but don’t try to do too much. And please follow up on your promise to punk Ted Turner . Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Skout Fully Embraces Location-Based Dating With Homepage Relaunch Top
Earlier this year Skout shifted gears, shedding its role as a traditional location-based social network in the same vein as Brightkite to become a network exclusively focused on location-based dating. It’s now primarily centered around its iPhone application, which launched in January and was one of the iPhone’s first dating apps. But until now its web presence has failed to properly reflect its shift to dating, presenting users with a clunky social network that the Skout team didn’t pay much attention to. Today, Skout is looking to fix that with a revamped and simplified homepage that makes flirting its top priority. The site now primarily revolves around a location-based feed, which anyone in your region can post status updates and photos to. There’s also a ‘hotlist’, which allows users to ‘follow’ the actions of the users they find interesting (the site has swapped its Facebook-like friending system to a Twitteresque following model, so you can follow people you don’t know). The site now also more prominently features a chat area, and allows you to ‘wink’ at people. And that’s about it. The simplicity makes the site easy to navigate, but I can’t help but feel that Skout might have become a little too basic - there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot going on. That may not prove to be too much of a problem though, as the site is really only meant to serve as an extension to the iPhone app. The company is reporting around 2000-3000 new users sign up per day, with 15,000 unique logins on a daily basis. I’ve previously expressed my reservations about Skout - namely, I question if there’s really room for yet another dating site (I suspect some of the more established players will release location-based apps of their own). But it’s also doing some smart things, like bringing a new product called Skout OUT to bars and clubs, which users can interact with on digital screens (the company currently has some major deals in the works on this front). And it’s also beginning to white label its network, allowing sites to offer their own branded dating apps that are pre-populated with Skout users. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Dora Merges Three Hot Web Services: Pandora, Twitter and Bit.ly Top
Letting people know what music you are listening to has long been a staple of the web. The blogging platform LiveJournal has long had the “listening to” field, instant messaging clients like iChat and Google Talk added the ability to update your status based on the song you were listening to a few years ago, and now people are using Twitter to send our their music selections. Blip.fm is the best for this so far, but a new challenger rises in Dora . Dora is actually an API mashup of three popular web services: the music streaming service Pandora , the micro-messaging service Twitter and the URL-shortening service Bit.ly . When you load Dora, you may think it’s just Pandora, but at the bottom of the page is the Dora overlay which provides you with an easy way to tweet out what you’re listening to. Before you do this, you must authenticate yourself on Twitter, but that gives you the ability to send a tweet out with the title of the song you are listening to (and a message in the remaining characters) with one click. There is also an option to append a link to the song shortened using Bit.ly. Unfortunately, there are a couple weaknesses with Dora. First, before you can tweet, it authenticates your Twitter information over the OAuth protocol. This is nice as it’s a secure way to send information, but it adds a step to the tweeting out process. A lot of users are likely already signed into Twitter in their web browser, and could pass the song information that way. But the OAuth authentication wouldn’t be a bad way to go if Dora didn’t make you authenticate each time you revisit the site. That’s just annoying. Another problem is that links Dora sends out to Twitter, link back to Pandora. The problem with that is that Pandora doesn’t allow you to access full versions of individual songs anytime you want to. Instead, it takes you to a page on Pandora for the song and gives you the option to preview it. Sure, you could create a new Pandora stations around this song, and it may pop up first, but that’s more complicated than it should be. Pandora has to do this because the rules of Internet radio streaming prohibit users from picking the individual songs they want to hear. But Blip.fm, isn’t technically a Internet radio service, so it doesn’t have to adhere to such rules. And, as such, when you tweet out a song from Blip.fm, anyone can click on the link and immediately start listening to the song as well. Blip.fm also offers its own way to sign-in to Twitter without using OAuth. You have to give Blip.fm you Twitter name and password, but it’s more seamless. Another service in this space is Twt.fm . It’s similar to Blip.fm, but uses imeem’s catalog of music to find and tweet songs out. If you’re addicted to Pandora, or really just want to share the titles of songs you are listening to, Dora is a nice solution. But if you want others to subject others to your musical tastes, Blip.fm is still the way to go. At least until it gets big enough to raise the ire of the record industry. CrunchBase Information Dora Pandora Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Qik Launches Facebook Connect Support Top
With too many companies to list battling it out for users in the live mobile video broadcasting space, spreading the word is key. Most people just don’t realize such a thing is possible; outside of geekier circles, the entire concept is still fairly new. Stream a live video from your handset and send the link off to some friends that don’t lurk blogs and social sites all day - chances are they’ll be more amazed by the fact that you’re streaming live video from a phone than they are by the content. Many of these services have turned to outside networks to get the word out, enabling users to automatically share their content out to their already established circle of friends. Just recently, for example, both Qik and FlixWagon added support for Nokia’s Share on Ovi service. That’s all well and good for reaching the geek crowds - but what about everyone else? This evening, Qik is announcing that they are the first to roll out Facebook Connect support, which could potentially introduce the concept to a massive new group of people. As they’re leveraging Facebook Connect, they’re able to post videos directly to your video collection or wall without requiring the user to install additional Facebook apps. It’s as simple as could be for the user looking to share, but not without its faults: due to a limitation of the Facebook Connect API, videos can’t be streamed live directly onto Facebook, only posted after the fact. As an alternative, however, users can opt to publish a status update which links directly to their live video whenever they’re streaming. The update is being rolled out immediately. As it’s a user profile setting, no updates are needed to the handset software. To get things going, users just log into Qik, pop into the “Edit Networks” screen, and authorize Qik as you would any Facebook Connect service. Over time, however, all handsets will see updates which improve upon the new functionality. Available immediately is an update for non-touch Windows Mobile smartphones which allows users to pick-and-choose which videos they want pushed to Facebook. On other handsets, for the time being, Facebook will be updated with all Qik videos set as “public”. This is a huge move for Qik and, as I’d imagine that all of the competition is already hard at work at rolling in Facebook Connect support as well, a huge move for the concept as a whole. Facebook is amongst a small handful of social networks that have really breached the main stream. Integrate a product properly, and you’ll be pitching your wares to one of the few online audiences that isn’t almost entirely geeks. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Apple Rejects App For Using An Icon That Somewhat Resembles An iPhone Top
The number of times I get pinged about an iPhone app getting rejected is almost catching up to the number of times I get pinged for ones accepted. Obviously, it’s a very small percentage that get rejected, but developers are getting increasingly annoyed — and for good reason in some cases. Take one of my favorite apps, Instapaper , for example. Developer Marco Arment submitted version 1.4 of Instapaper several days ago for approval into the App Store. He’s had several other versions approved in the past, but this one was rejected. Why? Well, he decided to use an small icon within the app that looks like it could be an iPhone. Considering this app has been made for the iPhone, it seems a bit silly that you can’t use its likeness in any way. First of all, icons like this can certainly help user experience. Secondly, the icon in question could almost just as easily be a G1, or any number of other smartphones for that matter. But this is the same problem that derailed the popular game Pocket God, last week, as Arment writes on his blog. And, apparently, it’s not always enforced. It would seem to be a problem that’s only brought up if the person looking over the app happens to notice it. The bigger issue is the aspect of timing. When an app is rejected, it basically means it must go back to the back of the line for approval, and this may mean another two weeks of waiting around. For certain time-sensitive apps, this can be a crushing blow. For others, it’s just an extreme annoyance, especially if the change needed is very minor. And, in the case of Instapaper, it means lost sales. As the App Store continues to grow in popularity, you’d think at some point Apple is going to need to devote a larger team to the approval process, particularly when it comes to relations with developers. While certain big name developers have been known to get special treatment when it comes to approvals (though it’s not exactly like Arment is a no-name developer — he’s also the lead developer for Tumblr ), there are many more who feel that Apple could care less when it comes to their apps — which in some cases are now their livlihood. But it’s baby steps for Apple. Shortly after the App Store first launched last summer, Apple would reject apps and not even tell developers why. Now at least it gives a reason — even if some are kind of silly — and forces developers to get back in line. Arment is now completely redesigning the offending icon before he resubmits, so that Apple doesn’t have an excuse to reject it again. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Mobile Roadie Builds Bands Custom iPhone Apps On The Cheap Top
The record industry has approached Apple’s App store with a somewhat amusing amount of hesitation. When the App Store first launched last summer, a few major artists tested the waters with some obnoxiously basic apps, sometimes consisting of little more than a splash screen and a handful of their songs. But things are beginning to change. Leading the charge has been Nine Inch Nails, which partnered with Tapulous last fall to release a special NIN version of Tap Tap Revenge and more recently launched a robust ‘NIN Access’ app that offers fans a library of rich media, news, and social features. The app’s reception has been overwhelmingly positive, with over 75% of reviewers giving it five stars. Now the major record labels (and countless indie bands) are looking to get in on the action. Enter Mobile Roadie , a new application platform that allows bands to quickly deploy their own custom applications to the App Store. For a relatively small fee, bands can use Mobile Roadie’s mostly-automated system to build their apps and have them posted to Apple’s App Store in as little as a week (and the majority of the wait is from Apple’s still-mysterious approval process). The application supports a wide range of content, including photo galleries, streaming music (which can be linked to songs for purchase on iTunes), YouTube videos, a list of upcoming shows, and interactive features, like a ‘fan wall’ where users can post comments and photos in real time for all to see. On the backend, bands will have access to an intuitive CMS, where they’ll be able to update photos and video, manage comments, and post news stories. They can also choose what price they’d like their app to sell for on the App Store. CEO Michael Schneider acknowledges that there are other media platforms available, like Kyte , but says that these can run thousands of dollars apiece. Mobile Roadie is substantially cheaper, running $399 for intitial setup and then $29 a month after that. For larger bands that receive over 1000 installs, there’s an additional 1 cent per month, per install charge. The company is currently in talks with every major record label (some of which are already testing the app), and has forged an exclusive partnership with The Orchard, a leading indie distributor. I’ve tried out a few of Mobile Roadie’s apps, and for the most part they seem to work quite well (though if a band doesn’t upload many media assets the app feels a bit barren). The company has positioned itself well in a space that is about to really take off, especially once the iPhone 3.0 software hits and users will be able to see updates in realtime from their favorite bands without having to open the application manually. If you’d like to check out a band’s app built on the Mobile Roadie platform, you can see a directory of their apps here . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
SkyGrid Launches Free Real Time Financial News Aggregator Top
Dump those expensive Bloomberg terminals in the trash, because there’s a brand new financial news product in town. And it’s free. SkyGrid will aggregate all the news about publicly traded companies in a single user interface, and give users a feel for the importance of each news story as well as the overall sentiment of the author. In January we wrote about SkyGrid , the $6,000 per seat/year financial news product that gives users real time updates via a flash interface on the stocks and sectors they are interested in. Today the service completes its transition to a free service that anyone can use and launches into private beta. You can sign up for it here . Existing users are also given invitations to the service as well, so once you are in you can get your friends on the service, too. Like TechMeme and Google News , SkyGrid clusters related news stories based on keyword analysis, what they’re linking to, etc. That lets users see a variety of coverage from major news sources and blogs. And SkyGrid also makes a serious attempt to determine the sentiment of each article - red for negative, green for positive. The main page, shown above, shows major financial news affecting public companies. Users can create separate pages for stocks, a portfolio or sectors that they follow as well. You can also filter by news type (major news sites, blogs, edgar filings, press releases, etc.). Finally, users can look at real time news or filter historical news back up to two weeks prior (the company says they may increase the timeline further back if users want it). My overall impression: slick and very useful. It’s trivial to find relevant news on just about any public company, grouped by whatever story is being discussed. The engine does an excellent job of picking and ranking stories. But by far the most useful tool is the sentiment engine, which can give stock buyers a very good indication of which way the news is trending without a careful read of the entire article. The sentiment engine isn’t 100% accurate, but it’s good. And users can change the sentiment if they think it’s incorrect. What I want: more. SkyGrid currently only covers public companies. Large private companies like Facebook, or public company subsidiaries like MySpace, can’t currently be tracked even though there’s plenty of press on them. If they offered private company information as well this would be a serious competitor to services like TechMeme. For now, it’s only another tool in the arsenal for news junkies like me. Of course, serious stock traders will find this extremely valuable, and don’t care about private company news. SkyGrid is targeting those types of users first. SkyGrid, located in Sunnyvale, California, has raised $13.3 million over two rounds of financing. They were founded in 2005. Update: Here’s a demo video. Also see Robert Scoble’s interview from today. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Can Silicon Valley Help Save Iraq? Top
Nine execs from tech companies including Twitter, Google, and YouTube are in Iraq to meet with the local government and private groups to see how technology can help rebuild the country. The State Department has not released the names of the execs on the mission but Scott Heiferman, co-founder and CEO of Meetup; Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter; Jason Liebman, co-founder and CEO of Howcast; Hunter Walk, product manager at YouTube, and Richard Robbins, director of social innovation at AT&T, seem to be on board according to Twitter chatter. Here’s an except from the statement the State Department released today: The delegation includes a mix of CEOs, Vice-Presidents and senior representatives from AT&T, Google, Twitter, Howcast, Meetup, You Tube, Automattic/Wordpress, and Blue State Digital. During their visit to Iraq, they will provide conceptual input as well as ideas on how new technologies can be used to build local capacity, foster greater transparency and accountability, build upon anti-corruption efforts, promote critical thinking in the classroom, scale-up civil society, and further empower local entities and individuals by providing the tools for network building. As Iraqis think about how to integrate new technology as a tool for smart power, we view this as an opportunity to invite the American technology industry to be part of this creative genesis. That’s right. After six years of war, Silicon Valley is coming to save Iraq. Or not. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Google News Timeline Offers A New Way To Search The Past Top
Timelines are becoming an increasingly popular user interface. Today, Google Labs launched a new product called Google News Timeline , which lays out the top stories from Google News in columns for each day. You can scroll down to see more stories or, of course, can search for specific topics or keywords. (It also launched similar image search ) The timeline view gives you a snapshot of the major stories for each day, and you can drag the dates across to go back in time. It seems to favor Time Magazineand Wikipedia Events, although you can get rid of those results with a click. If you want to zero in on a particular topic, you can search for that term to see how a story has evolved over time. The timeline remembers your searches and saves them if you are logged in. You can also switch the calendar to view stories by day, week, month, year, or decade. But why not by the hour or the minute? That is where Google news is weakest and losing out to Twitter search, in my opinion. Finally, to put a finer filter on it, you can search only news quotes, news videos, blogs, magazines, newspapers, Wikipedia, or various other sources. Maybe it could add a bias filter . The idea is a good one, but this is very obviously a Google Labs project. Switching from year to decade, back to day is not seamless.Going from decade to day, for instance, doesn’t bring me back to the present, but to 2003. Similarly, it seems like it has trouble switching from search term to search term. This might be simply because it just launched, but I am hoping Google resolves these issues quickly so I can test it as a research tool. I often find myself looking for articles from the past, and seeing stories laid out on an actual timeline is visually helpful. It would also be nice if you could merge different sources, so that you could search across blogs and news at the same time, for instance. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Google Similar Images First Look Top
A new 20% time Google project has just launched called Google Similar Images . It’s pretty self-explanatory — when you search for an image and find one close to what you’re looking for, Google can now find ones that it believes to be the same, or similar. This type of visual search is similar to what like.com has been doing for a while, but is potentially much more powerful with Google, as the search giant currently looks at hundreds of millions of pictures of just about anything you can imagine, across the web. But it’s interesting that this is not done by way of optical recognition. That technology is what Apple, for example, is using in the newest version of iPhoto to look at faces in images and determine if other images contain the same people. Because Google already has its vast database of web images and a lot of metadata thanks to projects like the game in which you tag photos, and more recently, sorting images by color, it has a bunch of different data points it can work with to make Similar Images work. Let’s take this new toy for a spin. “ Apple ” is a good query to test this because there is the aforementioned company Apple, as well as the fruit. When you find an image you are looking for after the initial query, it’s easy to click on “Similar images” and get more of the same. This is where Google really takes over and uses its technology to search for images it believes to be similar. For example, if I decide I want the silver version of the Apple logo, I’ll see this: But maybe I want another version of the Apple logo shown on the initial page. In that case, I may see this: Or maybe I decide that I don’t want an Apple logo at all. Maybe I just want a picture of an apple, the fruit. Then I may see this: As you can see, the filtering works very well. Here’s an interview with Radhika Malpani , the director of engineering working on this project. Watch more in the video from Google below: Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Fairspin Teases Out The Bias In Political News Top
Every news source has its bias, and that is especially true for political news. The same story on the Huffington Post is more likely to have a liberal slant than something on Fox News . Most people figure out which news sources share political views and settle on a few which make them feel comfortable. For those who have trouble identifying left from right, there is now FairSpin , a site that looks like it just launched today. FairSpin takes the most buzzed about news stories from memeorandum (the sister site to Techmeme, but for politics), and lays them out on a page literally from left to right. The Huffington Post, Talking Points memo, and Washington Monthly stories are on the left. The Washington post and New York Times stories are in the middle. And the Wall Street Journal Op-ed and Fox News stories are on the right. If you don’t agree with this pacement, then you can vote on any story, indicating whether you think it’s bias is left-leaning, right-leaning, or “fair.” (I am not sure whether a neutral leaning is more fair than any other, or simply wishy-washy). When you click through to a story, it presents it under a toolbar (yes, yet another frame ) with its own shortened URL, which lets you cast your vote and return easily to FairSpin. For instance, this link http://fairspin.org/read/5093 takes you to a Michelle Malkin post. (This doesn’t work for New York Times articles, however, because it has disabled such toolbars and non-redirecting URL shorteners after the whole Diggbar controversy ). FairSpin shows you your voting history, as well as the community’s, and allows you to hide “highly-biased” stories. It neatly lays out visually what many readers already know, but is a helpful filter nonetheless. Just ignore the side which offends you the most. The site was developed by Stephen Hood, who until recently ran Delicious for Yahoo, and Dave Baggeroer, a designer. You can read more about it on their blog . Stephen Hood most recently ran the social bookmarking service Delicious at Yahoo. Based on this experience Stephen is a big believer in the power of the community to organize information and accomplish goals, and sees an opportunity to mobilize readers to identify bias in the news. Dave Baggeroer Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Live At The Google Labs Press Event: Real Image Analysis, News Timeline, Labs Reloaded Top
I’m among a mass of press at Google’s San Francisco headquarters for a special Google Labs press event. R.J. Pittman , Director of Product Management, Radhika Malpani , Director of Engineering and software engineer Andy Hertzfeld are presenting. My real time notes are below. Look for a new advanced image search product, Google News and other news. My Notes: “Scarcity breeds clarity” says Pittman, talking about Google’s culture of experimentation that persists even in these troubled times. And the real time internet, blogs, tweets, etc., are accelerating innovation. Pittman’s talking about previous Google Labs products, Streetview, Picasa facial recognition, audio indexing (search for spoken words in video) and Google translate. Google Labs is focused on creating early prototypes and getting them into consumer’s hands as quickly as possible. With feedback products are quickly iterated or put out to pasture. New Google Image Search Radhika Malpani is now talking about image search. A week ago Google expanded search to allow users to search by color. Now, Google will allow users to refine content of a specific image. See chart below. In the demo, Malpani searched for beaches and rocks and clicked on the similar images link to find lots of new images. There’s some metadata analysis, she says, but its mostly based on image analysis. Google is releasing this early, Pittman says, to get feedback from users right away. The new service is available here . Google’s blog post is here . Google News Timeline Next up is Andy Hertzfeld, who’s been at Google for 3.5 years, to launch a new product, Google News Timeline . News is often grouped by time. Through the new interface organizes information chronologically by presenting results from Google News and other data sources on a zoomable, graphical timeline. You can navigate over time by dragging the timeline, setting the time scale or just adding a time period. Google is partnering with Freebase to obtain structured data. The product is an amazing way to look at lots of news data and images over time, to determine trends, do research, etc. The filters for movies, sports scores, music, magazines, etc. make it very easy to slice the data. New Google Labs Google is moving its Google Labs to googlelabs.com . The new site is built on Google App Engine (of course). “We also redesigned the website to make it easy and fun to discover new experiments as they arrive and to follow them as they evolve. We even added an RSS feed and an iGoogle gadget to make it easier to stay up to date.” labs was first introduced in 2002. The new site has an interactive design with comments and ratings and engineer profiles. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Pushed By Celebrities, Twitter Is Poised To Double Its Monthly Traffic Once Again Top
I know, you’re sick of Twitter data. But more keeps rolling in showcasing just how massive last week was for Twitter. The Kutcher/CNN race to a million on top of Oprah showcasing the service on Friday, likely was the biggest week ever for the service. And here’s some data to back that up. The week before the Kutcher/CNN race, Kutcher’s Twitter page got about 176,000 pageviews, according to numbers provided to us by Compete . Last week, his pageviews rose to an incredible 3.2 million — yes, that is just for his Twitter profile page . In the same time span, CNNbrk (the account racing Kutcher) went from 61,000 pageviews to over 900,000. And Oprah, the latecomer, went from 5,000 pageviews (before she ran the account), to over 980,000 — which is perhaps even more incredible considering she made her debut on Friday of last week. Now, Compete’s numbers are sometimes quite a bit off, but the trends are the key here. Overall Twitter.com traffic went from 367 million to over 420 million for the week in terms of pageviews. Meanwhile, unique views went from just over 8 million, to over 10 million. The pageviews on Twitter’s signup page alone went up over by over a million for the week. These celebrities are having an amazing effect on Twitter’s growth. We crunched some numbers earlier today suggesting that perhaps over a million users signed up for Twitter following Oprah’s show. “Twitter is poised to explode once again this month and will likely finish up over 30 million UVs for this month. If that happens they will double their March numbers and jump from #72 in our ranking into the Top 20,” according to a Compete analyst. That comes just a month after it already more than doubled its unique views (at least in the US) last month. Wow. And remember, this data is only for Twitter’s website, it doesn’t include any of the usage from third-party sites/services (thanks, Max). Find the full web traffic chart below. Update : The original signup pageview numbers Compete sent over were off, the updated chart is below. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
TopFans.com Adds Another Way To Worship Celebrities Online Top
Pop culture’s obsession with celebrities is evolving along with technology. Ashton Kutcher reached 1 million Twitter followers and Oprah is now part of the Twitterati. And there is never enough news or information about celebrities to satiate the thirst of fans; they want more and more insight into celebrities’ lives, especially online. The startup that created Zivity, the adult social network and media site which debuted at TechCrunch40, is hoping to create the next-generation of digital fan clubs with its new site, TopFans.com. The site lets fans create celebrity “fan pages,” and then add content, such as images, video, and news, to the fan page. And the celebrities can also interact with their pages by adding their own content, commenting on content and interacting with fans. The pages themselves are similar in theory to a MySpace page or Facebook pages for celebrities, but Top Fans hopes to differentiate itself in several ways. First, celebrities can directly import their Twitter feeds into their Top Fans pages. Like on a Facebook fan page, there is the ability to import RSS feeds into an activity stream. But Top Fans’ technology also crawls the web for news and images of the celebrity that will be imported into the main news feed on the page. Fans can also contribute comments and content to the site feed. The pages include a Digg-like button next to each piece of content that allows fans to vote whether they like the content or don’t like it. The highest rated content goes to the top of the feed. And unlike Facebook, where celebrities often have an “official” page and unofficial pages that have been created by fans, Top Fans ensures celebrities that they only have one centralized page with no duplicates. Pages can be created by fans or the celebrities themselves. Fans are also rewarded when they contribute content to a Top Fans site, thus having the ability to differentiate themselves from other less-passionate fans. Fans are ranked, according to how much content they have contributed, which also gives celebrities a way to see who their biggest fans are. This feature can be especially attractive to a fan of a celebrity with hundreds of thousands of followers, who wants to stand out as one of the most loyal of all the fans. Currently, Top Fans is launching with just “teen idols” and “professional baseball celebrities” (which amounts to 5,000 fan pages) but the end-game is to include Hollywood, internet celebrities, politicians, musicians, bands, etc. TopFans also also created profiles for the Top 1000 Twitterers, ranked by number of followers. This list includes Shaquille ONeal, John Mayer, Chris Sacca, , Ashton Kutcher and TechCrunch’s own Michael Arrington. One potentially problematic issue for Top Fans is how to control the enormous amount of questionable content that’s on the web about celebrities, such as content that is taken by the paparazzi or speculative gossip about celebrities. Celebrities would most certainly not want this sort of content on a fan page. Top Fans CEO Jon Elvekrog says that all questionable news is flagged but said that many celebrities have the feeling that “any press is good press.” I’m not so sure that’s the case, considering the growing amount of lawsuits that celebrities are filing against publications that print misinformation. Top Fans is run by Top Fans Inc., which also owns Zivity. Zivity’s adult site has been able to raise $8 million in funding from top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors and received widespread press since its launch at TechCrunch40, especially after its co-founder, Cyan Banister, bared all on the site. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Stoke Nabs $15 Million For Mobile Broadband Network Technology Top
Mobile broadband network developer Stoke has received $15 million in Series D funding from Reliance Technology Ventures Limited, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Japanese networking company Net One Systems, bringing the telecom network startup’s total funding to $65 million. Stoke raised $20 million in Series C funding in 2007 (led by DAG Ventures ), $19.8 million in Series B funding in 2005, and $10 million in Series A funding. As people are using their mobile phones to download applications, view movies, and listen to music, mobile data carriers need to provide greater bandwidth to support mobile phone usage. Stoke’s hardware provides mobile carriers the technology to let phones access different wireless networks including 3G, GSM, CDMA, Wi-Fi and WiMax and converges wireless coverage to help carriers cope with massive increments in web traffic. For example, Stoke’s technology lets phones seamlessly detect different networks and will automatically enable phones to switch to available networks based on location and availability. Stoke says the new funds will be used to support continuing partnerships with with mobile carriers. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 

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