Friday, September 11, 2009

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Glam Media Goes Mobile Top
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
 
Oyster Scores $4 Million For In-Depth Hotel Reviews Site Top
Oyster Hotel Reviews, a site that launched a few months ago, has raised $4 million in an extended Series A round of funding from Bain Capital Ventures and Accelerator Ventures . To date, the startup has raised $10.4 million in funding. The site provides consumers with qualified professional reviews of hotels around the world, hoping to compete with the likes of Frommers, Fodors, Conde Nast Traveler and others. Oyster aims to differentiate itself from the plethora of other travel review sites by offering longer, more magazine-like reviews that are written by a staff of full-time journalists who actually travel to each hotel reviewed. The online travel industry is a competitive landscape, with TripAdvisor, Fodors, Frommers and TripKick all vying for traffic. But Oyster has received a good amount of positive press since its launch and has raised a fair amount of funding in a tumultuous economic environment, so it may be able to survive in the space. The advantage that Oyster has in terms of content is a team of experienced travel journalists who write detailed and informative reviews that seem to be unbiased. And as the site adds more locations and perhaps more verticals, it should gain a loyal following. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Wrong Way, Skype Top
Skype is terminating its Extras developer program, they announced earlier today, because “not enough people were using [the tools] to justify” it. No new projects will be certified, and existing ones will expire over time. This is exactly the wrong thing for Skype to be doing. Om Malik goes on a justifiable rant , arguing that Skype doesn’t understand developers, never understood developers, and shouldn’t be trusted by developers. For the record, I agree. Skype has not been much of a team player when it comes to community over the years. And they’re right, the Extras program was a dud. But only because developers didn’t have any real ability to do deep integrations. For all the pomp, third party developers have never been able to do much more than skim the surface of Skype functionality. No wonder the program never took off. What developers need to really integrate with Skype is the ability to treat the call function as a service, and build it directly into other applications. Today, almost without exception, to make a Skype call requires the Skype client to be opened. Skype has made a very few exceptions to this rule. iSkoot for example, runs the heavy part of Skype on a server so that mobile users could get the functionality on their devices. But these were one-off deals, not via an API or developer program. What developers need is the ability to build the core Skype functionality directly into applications. Like Outlook. Or Facebook. And give those developers a revenue share from paid Skype-out calls, supposedly Skype’s biggest and fast growing revenue source. It’s not clear Skype is going to go in that direction, although the new buyers have said quietly that they’re going to look hard at skype-as-a-service. and some Skype employees I’ve spoken with have said much the same – at some point, expect developers to be able to do deep integrations with the Skype service, not just launch the Skype client. We’re all waiting for that day. And when it comes Skype will win, too. Skype-out calls will absolutely skyrocket, and the revenue will pour in. But for now, Skype, you’re going in the wrong direction. Instead of killing your limited APIs and tools, you should be expanding them dramatically. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
A Nice Big FriendFeed Bug: Impersonate Anyone! Top
There’s quite a big vulnerability with FriendFeed right now. Using the FriendFeed By Email function, apparently anyone can post a message as anyone else on FriendFeed. For example, someone posted this pretending to be FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor . Obviously, this is a huge security problem. When it was spotted just about an hour ago, FriendFeed jumped on it quickly, and has shut down email posting while they look into the issue. (Good to know they can still hop on these problems with FriendFeed even though they are now technically Facebook employees .) Still, you have to wonder if this bug has existed for months, or however long this feature has existed? We’ve reached out to FriendFeed to see if there have been any serious compromises because of this bug. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Preview: Foursquare's New iPhone App Ups The Social Ante Top
While Foursquare’s apps on other platforms ( Android , BlackBerry, and WinMo) have been garnering most of the buzz recently, the company remains firmly committed to the only app it developed entirely in-house: It’s iPhone app. In fact, it recently submitted a new version, 1.4, to the App Store for approval. I’ve had a chance to play with an ad-hoc build for the past couple of weeks, and it’s great. It significantly improves two key areas: Usability and its social layer. See Who Else Is Here The most important new feature of Foursquare 1.4 is that it now allows you to see who is checked into any venue at any given time. While previously, you had to rely on your main “Friends” tab to see a stream of where people were checked in, now you can click on any venue, click on the new “People” tab, and see who is there. If you see someone you are not currently friends with, you can click on their name, and you will load up their profile where you can add them as a friend. On that profile page, you can also see their Twitter stream (if they have hooked up their Foursquare account to their Twitter account) and their Facebook profile (if they’ve hooked that up). What’s great is that the tweet stream loads up right in the app, while clicking on the Facebook profile loads the Facebook iPhone app (assuming you have it). Both of these features should allow you to determine if you want to friend that person or not. O bviously, not everyone is going to love this ability to see everyone who is checked in at a place. Some will think this is an invasion of privacy, of sorts. But really, it’s a very nice extension of the social capabilities of the Foursquare app. For any social application to work, there needs to be a way to navigate its social graph. Previously, you could only add new friends by either entering their phone number, or looking up account by way of your Twitter friends. Neither of these methods are really ideal, and the idea of friending people that you actually see at places you frequent seems like a good one. Respect The Mayor Alongside being able to see who else is at a particular venue, you can also now see who the mayor is at any given time. A “mayor” of a venue is the person who has checked in there the most amount of times in the past 60 days. Battling for mayorships is a particularly fun element of Foursquare. On your main friend stream you can also now see when your friends are checked in places that they’re the mayor of. With the new app, you’ll see a crown next to a person’s name if they’re currently the mayor of the place they are at. Better Maps One of the nice features of both the Android and the upcoming WinMo versions of Foursquare is that they have much nicer map integration than the current version for the iPhone. Version 1.4 changes that, as you can now click on the map in a venue’s “Details” section, and it will load a larger Google Map which you can manipulate just as you would the regular iPhone Maps application. However, you still cannot get directions to a venue from your current location within the app (but you can do this by clicking through and going to the Maps application on the iPhone). More importantly, you still cannot see where your other friends are on the map. Such a Latitude and Loopt-like feature would be a very nice addition to Foursquare. The Windows Mobile version of the app should have this, I’m told. Mayor Deals Mayor deals, which we’ve previously covered , are also now much more visible in this new version. When you’re at a place that has a deal nearby, you’ll see a green ribbon alerting you about it. Clicking on that will tell you what the deal is, and where it is. They continue to extend these deals in new venues in various cities. Location, Location, Location A subtle, but potentially huge addition to the Foursquare app is the ability to see tweets nearby. Right now, this feature is a bit crippled, as it pulls them in based on location set in Twitter users’ profiles (what you say you location is in your profile, some people use exact coordinates provided by some Twitter apps). But when the Twitter Geolocation API goes live, this could be an awesome feature. And that’s why Foursquare included it, I’m told. Basically, on a venue’s Details page, underneath the map there is a button to “View tweets nearby.” Clicking on this will show you a stream of tweets around that venue. When the Geolocation API is working, it should show what people are saying that are currently in and around that venue, which is another potentially powerful layer of social discovery. Foursquare.com Finally Foursquare formally announced its $1.35 million seed round earlier this week. Right now, the company only has 3 employees, but they hope to add a fourth soon. They also used some of their money to buy the important foursquare.com domain. Previously, they only owned playfoursquare.com, which obviously would confuse new users. Interestingly enough, Foursquare is the name co-founder Dennis Crowley originally had wanted to use for his previous startup, Dodgeball (which was acquired by Google). Since he wasn’t able to obtain the foursquare.com domain at the time, he went with Dodgeball instead. He’s been trying for over 11 years to get the domain, so now that he has it, he’s obviously quite pleased. Soon Foursquare is still limited to a select group of cities that they’ve rolled the product out in (most recently, Vancouver), but soon they hope to start crowdsourcing cities, meaning opening them up for users to start populating venues. Right now, Foursquare mainly uses third party data for city population before they roll a new city out. Foursquare submitted version 1.4 of the app for approval several days ago, so assuming there are no problems, it should be available soon. As usual, it will be free. Watch for it to appear here . CrunchBase Information Foursquare iPhone Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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