Tuesday, September 1, 2009

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Yahoo Launches Microblogging Platform Yahoo Meme In English Top
A few weeks ago , we reported that Yahoo quietly launched its microblogging product Yahoo Meme, in Spanish. Yahoo had previously launched a Portuguese language micro-blogging product, Yahoo Meme, that drew similarities to Twitter and Tumblr. And on second glance, it seemed to be a mediocre competitor to Twitter, Tumblr and other micro-sharing services in terms of its offerings and features. It looks like Yahoo definitely has lofty ambitions for Yahoo Meme, as it has stealthily rolled the micro-blogging service out in Spanish and now in English to appeal to the masses. Here's how Yahoo Meme works: you create an account and it starts you off with an empty blog that you can fill with text, images, videos, music or a mixture of those things. All you can add to your blog - apart from the content - is a title, a 100-character description and an avatar. You can also create a comment thread underneath the content you post, which was a feature that was missing when we reviewed Yahoo Meme previously. Like Twitter and Tumblr, you can search other people's public accounts and follow them, with updates from these users appearing in your stream. You can also 'Repost' anyone’s entry, similar to the 'Reblog' feature that's integrated into Tumblr. But the micro-blogging service seems lacking in its features and its potential to surpass its competitors. Yahoo also recently launched Yahoo Know Your Mojo, a site that claims to tell you what kind of "social mojo" you possess by analyzing your Tweets, but actually appears to do basically nothing . Yahoo hasn’t had the greatest luck with social networks recently, with its Indian social network, SpotM, shutting its doors less than a year after its launch. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Brizzly Adds Photo Uploads. 500 Invites For TC Readers. Top
Brizzly , the new web-based Twitter client that was first unveiled at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp in July, has today added a new feature: photo uploads. Users can now upload images to Brizzly’s servers and they will tweet out along with any message you enter. This is a nice addition for Brizzly because one of its key features is the inline display of images. Alongside the new feature, Brizzly is also announcing a wider roll-out of its beta today. As such, they’re giving us 500 invites to hand out to TechCrunch readers. Simply go to brizzly.com and use the code: ‘ multiplylibrary ‘ to sign up. Aside from in-stream images, Brizzly also shows videos right from users’ tweet streams. While co-founder Jason Shellen tells us that they have nothing to announce for video today, it is in the works. Right now, the images will be hosted on the Amazon servers Brizzly users, we’re told. When they are sent out to other Twitter services, the photos use brizzly.com URLs, and direct users to a special Brizzly photo page. On this page you can see how many time the photo has been viewed, when it was upload, and who uploaded it, pretty standard stuff, but it has a nicer interface than some of the other Twitter photo-sharing services. There is also a new area in the left-side menu of Brizzly just to view photos that have been uploaded through the service. We’ve been trying out Brizzly for a few weeks now, it’s a really nice interface to interact with Twitter from. On top of inline images and videos, it also offers a nice way to see and reply to Direct Messages as they come in, and explains to you why certain items on Twitter are trending topics. Most importantly, you can group the people you follow together to cut through a lot of Twitter clutter if you follow a lot of people. There is also support for multiple Twitter accounts. Brizzly has put together a reviewer’s guide for how to use it here . You can also learn more in the video below (note that the interface has been updated slightly since this video). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
TheFind Acquires iStorez.com To Help Consumers Find Deals While Shopping Top
TheFind , a technology-heavy shopping search engine, has acquired the deal-driven shopping site iStorez.com. iStorez aggregates the latest coupons, sales and deals from retailers across a variety of categories. Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed, but we are hearing it was less than $500,000. TheFind, which is a search engine geared more towards finding new products than locating a price for a particular item, will use its latest acquisition to attract consumers who are looking for promotions, deals and sales from online retailers. This is probably a wise move given the current economic climate. Everyone is looking for a deal and its helpful to have information about sales and promotions side by side in your shopping portal. TheFind is hoping to be a one-stop shopping destination for consumers where they can search for a varied list of items from multiple sources. The site currently indexes 350 million products from over 500,000 stores. Last year, TheFind launched an iPhone app that allows users to search for stores in a region that are selling a particular product. The app will also compare prices of products from stores in your location and even calculates the cost to drive from your location to a particular store. In 2007, TheFind acquired Glimpse, a womens' shopping destination. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Live From fbFund REV's Demo Day Top
I’m here at the demo day for fbFund REV, Facebook’s new incubator program that’s jointly put on by Accel Partners and Founders Fund. We’ve embedded a live stream of the event below, and I’ll be updating with notes on each company that presents. Also be sure to check out our post from last night, when we took a look at fbFund’s first session as an incubator (versus just a distributor of cash grants), as well as some of the talks given by fbFund’s mentors. Thread.com — Thread.com helps users on Facebook meet possible matches for dating using Facebook. Rather than revolving around meeting strangers, the site allows you to browse through singles who are friends with your friends. You can see our full introduction to the site here . Funji —  A community for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The company is targeting “Generation ME” age 13-21 with a virtual world that allows users to customize their own virtual room and avatars. Users can interact in a forum and check out their friends’ rooms. Everything looks very colorful and playful, which could help it catch on with the youth audience. Sociable says that retailers are not driving significant sales from social media (e.g. from Facebook and Twitter). The company says brands need to evolve from B2C communication, to word of mouth, C2C conversations. Sociable tries to optimze the retailer’s “viral loop” through a variety of ways, including syndicating events published to Facebook to other Facebook Connect-enabeld sites. The service is currently live on every concert page on LiveNation. The company plans to expand to other verticals. Projects to break even by the end of the year. Geckogo brings user generated content from social travel sites and brings them to more traditional travel portals. The service can take content from services like Facebook and Twitter, and then bring them to sites like Travelocity or Expedia in embeddable widgets. FriendRadio brings an integrated music player to Facebook in a interesting way. Rather than just embed music players into the site, users can use FriendRadio to create a nifty music player that resides tucked on the side of the screen. The company is building a browser plugin to bring music to Facebook profile pages as well (you’ll see your friends’ music when you visit their profile). photosilove is a media sharing app that users use to send bite-sized media to show their friends that they care about each other — things like small images of teddy bears, or a frog holding a sign that says “I care”. The app didn’t originally plan to focus on this kind of friendly sharing, but it’s what their users tended to use it for. At this point the app hasn’t done much monetization, but the company points out how many large companies are successfully tapping into this market. Vittana.org is “Kiva for student loans”. One of two non-profits in this round of fbFund. Loans are 6-24 months in length, $500-1500 in total amounts. Bank teller is currently the top profession. The company says that until the student loan model is proven, other organizations are hesitant to do it. Says that for every $800 loan, the student will earn $20k more in incremental income over their lifetime. Workstir is “yellow pages, plus your social graph”. It helps connect you with service professionals (say, a painter) and see what your friends, or friends of friends think of them by tapping into your social graph. It uses a similar connection to model to what you’ll see on LinkedIn. To generate revenue, the company will allow service professionals to advertise on their key pages. It will also allow service professionals to join the site and answer questions posted by other users — the more questions the professionals answer, the higher their rank on Workstir. Backlight — Everything has a backstory, but where can you share that online? The company says that there’s an opportunity for “Inspirational content”. Points out success of brands like Chicken Soup for the Soul and Causes. Says Twitter is great for sharing, identity creation, but they don’t offer a platform for inspiration/meaning. Backlight allows you to upload any piece of media and provide a backstory, including ability to take photos on Facebook and add another layer of meaning to it. Working with Stanford, Cal, Santa Clara University to help showcase student work. NetworkedBlogs — Connect bloggers with readers who are on social networks. “On average, your blog sucks” — the bottom 98% of blogs have average of 3 page views a day. But when you build a blog, it’s what people find when they Google your name, so you need to make it look like someone is reading it. The service lets you syndicate your blog to Facebook, to embed social widgets into your blog, and more. The service already has 1.5 million installs, 650k monthly actives, and is the largest news community on Facebook. The site aggregates 100,000 blog posts a day. On Facebook, you can see which of your friends are following certain blogs, which of your friends are writing blogs, and so on. The company is profitable, grew revenue by 50% in the last two months. Today the company is announcing a partnership with Webs.com Wildfire is a powerful self-service platform that allows companies to create social marketing campaigns for Facebook, Twitter, and their company websites. The company left private beta last month, and is profitable. Clients have included 3M, Facebook, and Pepsi. The platform helps companies who are looking to engage social network users using proven campaign formats (the service offers wizards that companies can use to create their campaigns). Companies can get the campaign started though advertising, and they generally continue to grow through viral channels. NutshellMail is a service that compiles your social networking activity into a single digest it and sends it to your Email inbox. The service also allows you to interact with Facebook and Twitter through your Email. NutshellMail lets you monitor what people are saying about you on Twitter and see your new friend requests, messages, and birthdays from Facebook, among other things. To respond to one of these messages or tweets, you just reply to the message and Nutshellmail will put an update on your behalf. Most people get 3 digests per day, and it has 60% engagement. 70% of the people who sign up are using it 30 days later. In the future, the company plans to offer social groups so you can specify certain groups of friends and keep track of them using your Email. GroupCard and Cash.io . GroupCard is the largest platform for collaborative gifts and cards, and is profitable and used in thousands of offices. Today they’re launching Cash.io. The company says it costs money for businesses to send consumers rebates. Cash.io is a platform that lets businesses issue codes that consumers redeem however they want. It uses PayPal, Amazon, and Facebook Payments in the future (maybe). Customers can fulfill rebates on services like Facebook. Businesses will be able to issue payment codes over Twitter. Gameyola is looking to help monetize and distribute Flash games over social networks. It’s looking to help social distribution on Facebook, and monetization through virtual goods. The company offers a unified ayment currency called Gameyola coins. Has 180,000 players, and has started selling virtual goods on its site. RunMyErrand is a service that lets you outsource everyday tasks that you don’t have time for (shop at target, return Cable box, and more). The company is working with Coldstone creamery in Boston, giving them a way to outsource delivery in Boston. Once you post an errand, a trusted runner network is alerted. Have retirees, stay-at-home-moms, dog walkers, young professionals running these errands to supplement income. So how does RunMyErrand establish trust? They have user ratings, and 100% background checked. Everything is social-graph aware. Trust is obviously going to be hard to establish with users, but if they can get over that hurdle I could see this becoming quite useful. Revenue model is to take cut of reimbursements and fees charged by runners. samasource is a non-profit service that allows you to outsource microwork tasks like data, testing, transcription and research to poor, but educated, workers abroad — it’s a Kiva for small work tasks. Clients so far include Google, YPO, Benetech, and Dolores Labs. For example, a young man (one of the Lost Boys of Sudan) was denied formal employment in Kenya, but was able to earn money by working for US company Dolores Labs through samasource. There is a screening process to ensure that workers will be able to handle the work you have to offer. Because you’re doing this through Facebook, you can more personally connect with them. MyChurch is a service that helps churches build their own social networks, and lets them connect via Facebook. The site has 30,000 churches signed up (out of around 300,000) in the US. If they can map out everyone’s church social network, they become the de facto church social network. Previously monetized through ads, now they’re trying to sell subscriptions to churches with higher quotas, no ads, and new features (custom URL for MyChurch page). Lots of churches are using myChurch page for official website. Close to break even under freemium model. But the site also hopes to make money though online donations to church. RunThere is a social community for runners and bikers. You can map out your run, look at routes that other users have created, and embed maps of these on your blog. You can also track your route using Google Earth. The site can also help build a blog with meta data about your runs. The site plans to make money by offering a tool for personal trainers. Trainers can use the app to help keep clients motivated, keep track of their progress. Zimride is a service that helps companies and universities create communities for carpooling. Users log in (you can use Facebook Connect to verify that you belong to a certain company or University), then indicate where they’re loking to go and the date. The service then matches users so that they can share the cost of the drive. The company has a partnership with Zipcar, has $180k in recurring revenue and will be break-even by the end of the quarter. For more, check out our post on the startup here , when it described it as a “carpooling startup that actually makes money”. Sortuv helps you find things that are “sort of” like something else. Enter a restaurant and the site will present other restaurants that are similar. The company isn’t just about local search — if you like a kind of char, you can search for places with a similar kind of design. The startup has an iPhone app that lets you rate what you like, and it will suggest similar matches. Can analyze your status updates, use the things you talk about (like bands, video games, and movies) to help build your Sortuv profile. Broadcasting Live with Ustream.TV Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
See Which Conferences Your Friends Are Attending With EventVue's 'Discover' Widget Top
EventVue , a company that builds online communities for conferences in order to improve conference networking amongst individuals, has launched a new product called Discover designed to help conference attendees find friends who are attending the same event. The goal of Discover is to work with different companies’ APIs, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Contacts, and Yahoo! Contacts, to help identify matches. Discover is a simple widget that conference organizers can install on their sites to showcase an event’s speakers, sponsors, and attendees. It’s currently in private beta testing, and only selected conferences are using the widget on their sites, according to a company blog post . It’s interesting to note that LinkedIn’s API is a private API that only a handful of companies get access to, and EventVue was one of the companies given access to the API. EventVue Co-Founder Josh Fraser says that the product can actually help get more attendees to visit conferences, explaining: “Over the past 2 years, we’ve heard from conference organizers that their biggest challenge is getting people to register for their conference. These conversations have had increased urgency in the past year as the economy has brought a lot of cuts to conference travel. We heard this enough times that we finally decided to do something about it. EventVue Discover helps conference organizers market their events and get more butts in seats. We learned from talking with organizers that the most effective way to market an event is to get attendees to encourage their friends to attend. Discover lets attendees see who they know is attending a conference from their social networks and makes it easy to invite their friends.” EventVue was part of the inaugural batch of startups under the TechStars incubator program, and offers direct integration with some of the largest online ticketing services Eventbrite , RegOnline and Acteva . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
The Mobile Payments Rivalry Heats Up Top
Mobile payments for micro-transactions on the web are catching wind and there are several players in the space vying for the top spot in the field. Today, Boku, a recently launched mobile payments conglomorate of sorts, is announcing a slew of new customer acquisitions as well as details of its international expansion. Boku, which acquired competitors Paymo and Mobillcash and raised $13 million in Series A funding back in June, doesn't require users to have a credit card or bank account to make a micropayment. Users enter their cell phone number on the site, reply to a text message and then all virtual charges are automatically charged to the user's monthly cell phone bill. As we’ve said in the past, it’s ridiculously easy. Because of its acquisition of Paymo and Mobillcash, systems that had significant international reach, BOKU gained a strong base of users around the world. Today’s announcement adds availability of the payment service in Finland, Indonesia, Slovenia and Taiwan, bringing the company's global reach to 56 countries. Boku’s marketing chief Ron Hirson tell us that they are seeing a strong foothold in Southeast Asia and will be expanding to the Phillipines within a few weeks. Boku has also added a number of online gaming sites, social network applications and the social networks themselves over the past few months, including Playfish, HitGrab and Gambit. Boku says that currently they have over 1000 customers that use its mobile payments platform. So far, Boku has powered 6.5 million online mobile transactions. But competition is stiff in this field and one competitor in particular, Zong, has also witnessed strong growth over the past few months. Most recently, Zong was chosen to test a pilot program for mobile payments for Facebook’s virtual currency, Credits. While Zong may not have had the organic international base that Boku has (Zong is available in 19 countries), this partnership is sure to help Zong’s global reach thanks to Facebook’s ever growing presence and popularity around the world. Zong also reached a big milestone a few weeks after processing mobile payments for 10 million unique users in 2009. However, the potential obstacle to Boku, Zong and other mobile payments platforms are the high fees that mobile carriers charge to the payment systems (which are then passed on to the consumer). Boku told us on June that different cell phone carriers charge varying fees that range between 10% to 50% of the purchase price, which is a hefty amount in transaction fees. But if mobile carriers lower their fees, mobile payments have the potential to be the go-to way to pay for microtransactions. David Marcus, CEO of Zong, says that many U.S. and European carriers that Zong works with are contemplating reducing these fees by building large-scale models to process payments that would in turn lessen the pressure on startups like Zong and Boku as well as the applications and social networks using the systems. Marcus feels confident that if this does happen, the sky is the limit with mobile payments. Regardless, as shown by growth witnessed by both Boku and Zong, mobile payments are catching on and attracting the attention of some of technology’s giants, like Facebook. And of course the rivalry and ensuing competition between the two companies could continue to spur further innovation and growth. It will certainly be fascinating to see which startup comes out ahead. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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