Wednesday, September 2, 2009

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Producteev Now Lets Your Crowdsource Your Tasks On Twitter Top
There are plenty of Web-based task management tools that let you track the progress of your work projects and collaborate with co-workers. Producteev founder Ilan Abehassera wants to go one better and help you “complete your task” by making it easy to ask your contacts and followers on Twitter for assistance. Producteev shows you a dashboard of different tasks you’ve set up, each in its own widget box which you can drag around and rearrange. For its commercial launch today, Producteev is introducing some new features. One is the ability to syndicate any task to Twitter or Facebook. So if you need a Web designer or sales person for a project, for example, you can create a task on Producteev and share that not only with your co-workers, but also publish it on Twitter. A link brings your Twitter followers back to a public page on Producteev for that specific task/message, where they can reply. All outside replies are brought into the Producteev activity stream for everyone in your work group to see. This is good, but it doesn’t go far enough, as you can’t reply via Producteev and have that reply appear on Twitter. Another new feature makes Producteev like a Friendfeed of productivity apps. It lets you bring in other streams of data from outside Producteev, including Slideshare, Scribd, Zoho, Twitter, and soon Google Docs, Google Reader, and Yammer (yes, it competes with Yammer on the communication stream, but Producteev is more about task management). So you can automatically see when someone on your team adds a new presentation to Slideshare, edits a doc, or shares an article. There is also now a timeline/calendar view, which comes in handy since every task can be assigned a due date. (The other views are a dashboard grid that is similar to Netvibes or iGoogle, and a straight, chronological activity stream). Workers can now generate reports based on their tasks in progress and completed, which they can show to employers to prove they’ve been working ( oDesk anyone? ). Soon Producteev will add graphs as well for productivity tracking at a glance. Other upcoming features on the product roadmap include integration with Meebo Community IM for chat functionality, the ability to export deadlines and reminders to iCal, Google Calendar, and Outllook, an OpenSocial application on Xing, and a JoliCloud app. Producteev is gradually becoming a fully-featured online productivity and collaboration tool. I would compare it to WizeHive , another great online task management tool with a slightly different set of features. Producteev is seed funded, and recently raised $180,000 in angel money from a group including Fotolia president Oleg Tscheltzoff. The service is free for up to 3 users, and then starts at $19/ month up to 10 users. The top Gold membership is $99/month for 100 users. Different pricing applies to university students, another target market. We’re giving away 10 Gold subscriptions for one year to whoever adds the best comments below about their greatest productivity challenge or suggestions for new features. Abehassera will pick the best 10 and respond in comments. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Yelp Is Growing 80 Percent A Year, While Citysearch Remains Flat Top
Say what you will about the quality of the reviews on Yelp or the lengths it will go to get verboten features into its iPhone app, it has made the jump from Web 2.0 darling to a mainstream service. Over the past year, Yelp has nearly doubled its U.S. audience, while incumbent CitySearch has remained flat. In July, Yelp had 8.6 million unique U.S. visitors, up 80 percent from a year ago. Citysearch, on the other hand, literally had zero growth, staying at 15.4 million uniques, although it bottomed at 13 million in April and has come back up since then (comScore). Yelp also has the No. 1 travel app on the iPhone (it is No. 26 overall). Whereas Citysearch’s similar iPhone app is not even in the top 20 travel apps. Yelp’s pageviews and average time spent per user on the site are also up 150 percent and 22 percent, respectively. In fact, the 3.3 average minutes per visitor on Yelp is above Citysearch’s 2.3 minute average. But comScore shows a steep drop in both pageviews and average time spent starting in May, with a leveling off in July. Citysearch experienced similar drops. (See charts below). It’s hard to say what is causing these drops. It could be that people are not finding what they are looking for, or the opposite, that they are finding what they need faster due to better site design. I suspect it has something to do with the latter. For instance, a much-improved Citysearch redesign went site-wide in March and Yelp is constantly tweaking its site. I asked Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman about the pageview situation, and he sent me an internal Google Analytics chart pasted at bottom of this post). “As you can see we’ve continued to grow pageviews smoothly throughout the summer,” he says, “so it looks like the effect Comscore is reporting is spurious.” There is definitely a discrepancy there. Stoppleman also says that worldwide Yelp did 157 million pageviews in August (although he thinks that is becoming a less a meaningful metric as Ajax redesigns reduce the need for page refreshes) and more than 25 million unique visitors. (The comScore numbers cited above are only for the U.S.) Yelp came out with a major update for its iPhone app in April, right about the time the pageviews started to allegedly decline. But Stoppelman doesn’t think that is it either. There might be some shift over to mobile, but he’s seeing the following trends: Mobile usage for us is lowest early in the week and climbs throughout, peaking on Saturday. Desktop web usage (especially contributions) tends to be highest on Monday or Tuesday (though Yelp.com reader traffic sometimes peaks on Fridays as people plan their weekend in the office ;). No matter which way you cut the numbers, though, Yelp is gaining fast on Citysearch. Average Minutes Per Visitor Total Pageviews Yelp’s Daily Pageviews (Google Analytics) Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Android Now Plays Foursquare Too Top
Foursquare has been all the rage in the early adopter mobile space the past several months . And it has been peeking outside of the early adopter crowd with things such as local bars offering promotions for Foursquare usage. But it has still been held back a bit by the fact that it has only had an iPhone app and a somewhat clunky mobile web interface. And Foursquare understood that, so it called for developers to help build its app for the other mobile platforms. Today, the first of those is ready to go: Foursquare for Android . Work on the project started back in April and was mainly coded by Joe LaPenna and Chris Bummel in their spare time. It started as a project to first reverse engineer the iPhone API, and then migrate to Android using Foursquare’s beta API, LaPenna tells us. After a few months of work, the duo and Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai (who has been managing it from the service’s side) feels its now feature-complete and ready for distribution. Users who have played with the iPhone version should feel at home with this app. But it has a few features that the iPhone version doesn’t, such as integrated maps and a one-click check-in process. Other areas like the friends check-in list and the page to display your badges are largely the same as the iPhone version, but the app has the distinctive Android look and feel. One advantage the Android platform has over the iPhone is that applications can run in the background. But Foursquare for Android chooses not to take advantage of that, and instead opts for speed and better battery life. “ No “location aware” always-on background services or application bloat to drain your battery over the course of the night, ” is how they phrase it. Since Foursquare is all about manually checking-in places, that makes sense. With the app now complete, the next revisions will focus on performance and UI, LaPenna says. But there are also some new features that both they and Foursquare have planned. “ We of course plan on adding features to the app but we’re not sure what order we’re going to tackle them in, ” LaPenna says. Having another mobile application for Foursquare should certainly help with its adoption. And Android is especially key since a lot of geeky early adopters have Android phones. There is also work being done on a BlackBerry app and a Windows Mobile app. The latter I’ve seen in action, as my friend Anand Iyer has been working on it. It has a few great features also not found on the iPhone app including the ability to ping you if three of your friends check-in somewhere that you are not. And placing your friends on an actual map to show where they are (think Latitude). One really nice thing about the new Android app is that it’s open-source. LaPenna and Bummel have already had plenty of others help in building it. You can find out more about it on the Google Code page for the project. They’ve also written up some documentation for first-time Foursquare Android users. The Android Foursquare app is available in the Android Market right now for free, or you can grab the app from the Google Code page and install it yourself. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Oh, RSS Is Definitely Dead Now: Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo To Become Twitter COO Top
Former Google exec and the cofounder/CEO of RSS service Feedburner Dick Costolo is Twitter’s new chief operating officer, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Costolo, who sold Feedburner to Google for $100 million in 2007, left Google in July . We’d heard he was looking to start a new company, but obviously Twitter swooped in and grabbed him. Steve Gillmor is going to love this, of course, since he proclaimed that RSS was dead and Twitter was the new messaging protocol bus, or something to that effect. “Rest In Peace, RSS,” he wrote , saying “It's time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter…All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don't go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don't go there, I don't use RSS anymore.” Santosh Jayaram , Twitter’s existing head of operations (and also from Google), will presumably remain with the company and report to Costolo. Costolo, who is also an early Twitter investor , is someone who has actual experience building scalable infrastructures, which Twitter sorely needs. The company hasn’t launched any new features in recent memory, and continues to have regular downtime . In fact, Twitter’s inability to build features and keep the service live is a serious competitive disadvantage. Costolo can presumably fix all that. Twitter is actively hiring more senior people, we’ve heard. In July they hired Alexander Macgillivray , Google's associate general counsel for Product and IP, as their new General Counsel. 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 : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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