The latest from TechCrunch
- Preview: Foursquare's New iPhone App Ups The Social Ante
- Welcome To Silicon Valley, FairCompanies. Thanks For Not Breaking Into My House
- Kijubi Launches Booking Engine For Local Outdoor Activities
- TechCrunch50 Sells Out: See You All On Monday
- VodSpot Gives Publishers Easy Custom Video Portals; Now Powering TechCrunch Video
- Job Boards Are So Over. TalentSeekr Targets And Recruits Through Ads Instead.
| 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 developer 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 | |
| Welcome To Silicon Valley, FairCompanies. Thanks For Not Breaking Into My House | Top |
| How polite! A husband and wife team, the founders of Barcelona-based FairCompanies , visits Silicon Valley. And unlike a certain group of Dutch entrepreneurs, they don’t decide to break into my house as a publicity stunt. Instead they visit our office in the wee hours of the morning and leave a very nice note on our window: TechCrunch – We are visiting from Barcelona and are readers of your blog. We don’t want to go into Michael’s house like the random Dutch guys, but we wanted to let you know about our site. We are a husband and wife team (he: ex-tech writer for Spanish Playboy & she: shooter/producer for MTV) with a site with tools on sustainability. Well, check it out @ faircompainies.com Best, Kirsten & Nico They add “Please don’t print this unless necessary” (it was, plus they didn’t write “off record” on the note) and apparently taped a Spanish Focaccia to the note that never actually made it to my desk. Good luck with your startup, Kirsten and Nico . And next time, email ahead and we’ll meet you in person! Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Kijubi Launches Booking Engine For Local Outdoor Activities | Top |
| The online travel booking market is saturated with both large companies and startups which want a share of an $847 billion dollar industry. But in this type of competitive environment, niche sites that offer personalized services that the big guys like Kayak and Expedia can’t do because of scale, can be successful. One such service is Kijubi, a booking engine for local outdoor activities and travel and a TechCrunch50 DemoPit startup. The startup aims to help people book surfing trips, indoor skydiving and other niche outdoor activities on its centralized platform. You can see a live demo of Kijubi and meet the startup’s founders at the DemoPit at next week’s conference. Please note that Kijubi’s site will not be launching until Monday, September 14, but you can email beta@kijubi.com to test out the site beforehand. Kijubi allows you to research, plan and book a myriad of outdoor activities in a variety of locations around the United States, including California, Nevada, Maryland, and Florida. Kijubi’s co-founder and CEO Billy Fried started the company after finding that it was tough for consumers to book niche outdoor activities, like indoor skydiving or surfing lessons, on the internet because many of these independent operations are mom and pop type of businesses that don’t have an online presence. That’s where Kijubi comes in. The startup aggregates all of these activity operators and will facilitate the booking of these activities for you. Plus, you can book all of your other travel, including flights, cars, and lodging on the site. From sea kayaking to skydiving to discount theme park passes, Kijubi offers over 70 categories of outdoor activities that you can easily find by theme (i.e. kids, romance, luxury), location, and type (i.e. air, water, land). The beauty of Kijubi is that it’s comprehensive; you can book everything, including air, car, hotels, and activities, on one site. Another notable feature of the site is the ability to gift activities to friends or family. Similar to other travel sites, Kijubi monetizes through commissions. Each time a user books a flight, activity, hotel etc., Kijubi takes a cut. Kijubi is also providing many activity vendors with the technology for e-commerce platforms, in which the startup is able to take a percentage of credit card processing fees. And of course, Kijubi will be advertising on its site. As of now, Kijubi only covers four states in the U.S., but plans to expand within the U.S. as well as internationally. Even from personal experience, Kijubi seems like it adds value to the online travel industry. I know that when I’ve traveled, I often leave the planning of the activity portion of the trip until I get to the hotel, which leads to late-bookings and not always being able to participate in a desired activity. Next time, I’ll look too Kijubi to book my hot air balloon ride over Napa Valley or flying lesson in San Diego. At TechCrunch50’s DemoPit next Monday and Tuesday, Kijubi will be giving away a bunch of cool outdoor activities from indoor skydiving to biking tours through Napa Valley via a Twitter contest. Follow Kijubi and Tweet following message “RT #Kijubi #TechCrunch50 and tell Kijubi why you should win an free pass to try out an outdoor activity like sailing lessons or a bike tour in Napa Valley. The most creative tweets will win activities. You can also enter by dropping a business card at Kijubi’s booth at the DemoPit. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| TechCrunch50 Sells Out: See You All On Monday | Top |
| The TechCrunch Office is buzzing! TechCrunch50 , which starts Monday in San Francisco, will sell out sometime later today. There are approximately 50 tickets left, so we should be sold out and into a waiting list situation some time this afternoon. 1,750 people should be rolling through the event next week, matching last year’s sell-out crowd. All the press you could ever want will be there, too. The 50 launching startups are in round three rehearsals at Sequoia Capital’s offices. The panel of experts are preparing their quippy remarks for launching companies, and a swarm of hungry demopit companies are preparing their presentations. As always there will be surprises, and not just Penn & Teller showing up to launch a new product. Lots more info will be coming over the next three days on the TechCrunch50 blog . See you all on Monday! Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| VodSpot Gives Publishers Easy Custom Video Portals; Now Powering TechCrunch Video | Top |
| For many content publishers, managing video can be a tricky business, particularly when you’ve got clips spread across multiple services like YouTube and Blip.tv. Today video bookmarking startup VodPod is launching a new product called VodSpot that’s looking to help, by allowing publishers to create dynamically updated video portals that can aggregate your site’s video content, as well as pull in new content that you’ve bookmarked around the web. We’ll be using the service to power our new TechCrunch Video site, which you can find at http://video.techcrunch.com or in the masthead above. The new site will feature a collection of recent video content from throughout the TechCrunch network, and we’re also opening it up to user submitted videos — if you have an interesting interview, demo, or other tech related video that you’d like to share with the TechCrunch community, here’s your chance. We last covered VodPod back in 2006, when the site launched as a YouTube competitor with some social bookmarking features. Since then the site has seen some major changes: CEO Mark Hall says that within a month or two after launching, VodPod decided to disable user-uploaded videos and to concentrate on its bookmarking functionality, which was quickly becoming the site’s most popular feature. The startup launched a widget that allows bloggers to include their most recently bookmarked videos into their sites, which Hall says is currently being used by over 40,000 bloggers. In 2007, VodPod launched an API that allowed sites to manage their video content, drawing from videos that they’d either bookmarked on VodPod or uploaded themselves. The API has been used by Second Life, NewTeeVee and a number of other well known sites. But up until earlier this year, using the API required developer resources, which prevented many sites that would have otherwise benefited from having their own video portals from using it. Around nine months ago VodPod launched an experimental version of VodSpot as a hosted solution that allowed publishers to build video portals with a minimal amount of work required (Hall compares this to WordPress.com’s hosted blogs versus WordPress.org). But at the time the customization options were limited, with only a handful of designs available. Today’s launch includes support for VodPod’s new template engine Laminate, which will allow publishers to fully customize the appearance of their sites. Hall says that the company will monetize VodSpot by offering some premium features like custom domain mapping and control over advertising, which will cost $10 a month. He says that sites that draw lots of traffic will likely fall under a different pricing structure, given that VodSpot will be hosting the content. He also notes that VodPod is driving some impressive traffic now — it has quintupled since a year ago and now sees over 10 million monthly uniques — so the revenue coming in from advertising is significant. In conjunction with today’s launch, VodSpot is also open-sourcing the Laminate template engine, and is launching a new version of its API that adds support for finding the most popular videos in a given subject (say, politics) across the thousands of video sites that VodSpot indexes. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Job Boards Are So Over. TalentSeekr Targets And Recruits Through Ads Instead. | Top |
| Even though unemployment is at the highest levels in a decade, companies are still finding it difficult to find the best qualified candidates to fill the positions that are available. The reason for that is because more often than not, the best qualified candidates are already employed and not necessarily looking for new jobs. Certainly not on job boards like Monster.com or HotJobs. So if the best candidates won’t seek out job openings on employment sites, the jobs need to seek them out. That is the idea behind TalentSeekr , which is essentially an ad network for jobs. Companies fill out what jobs they are trying to fill in what locations, then TalentSeekr creates and tests multiple ads across the Web—social networks, blogs, forums, search engines, you name it. Based on the response rate and quality of the applicants that come through the ads, TalentSeekr optimizes the mix of ad types (banner, text, video, creative elements) and placement. (Watch the video below to see how it works). If more qualified applicants are coming in through LinkedIn than Facebook, it readjusts the mix. (In fact, LinkedIn makes a lot of money through recruitment ads on its own site in much the same manner. TalentSeeker is attempting to apply the same principles in a more distributed manner across the Web). “What we are doing is what job boards did to newspapers. Everybody knows the space is about to shift big,” says Ryan Caldwell, the CEO of EnticeLabs , the company behind TalentSeekr. EnticeLabs was founded in August 2007, and funded with $1.3 million in angel money so far. It’s been operating in a private beta until recently, and already counts among its customers Dell, GE, IBM, Adidas, Rebock, Google, and Microsoft. In addition to TalentSeekr, which is aimed at companies looking to recruit, EnticeLabs’ other product is CareerAds, which is aimed at blogs and Websites looking to display job-focused ads. TalentSeekr’s approach takes longer than filling a job on Monster, but if you are looking for 3,000 SAP consultants, it could be a better approach. If you are looking to just fill a single position quickly, you are probably still better off with Monster or some other job board. Hiring managers get a dashboard (see screenshot below) which shows the number of ad impressions, clicks, and ultimate applications resulting from the ads, as well as the geographic distribution. The average clickthrough rates for TalentSeekre ads can range from 0.15 percent to 0.37 percent (see table below). Then among those who click, the application rate can be anywhere from 0.22 percent for medical jobs to 2.68 percent for tech jobs. But with an average cost-per-click of around $1, and an average cost per qualified applicant of anywhere from $200 to $2,600, it still beats hiring a headhunter. Job ad networks have been tried before by both large companies (Monster has its Career Ad Network ) and small. A Y Combinator company called SnapTalent tried this before shifting over to career fairs, and ultimately deadpooling (their site is no longer online). Caldwell isn’t worried about the same fate happening to EnticeLabs because he’s gone after big enterprise with thousands of employees first, rather than the other way around. “This is not something where you can do a cute little startup,” he says, “you need scale.” The other thing that gives him confidence is that big employers like IBM and GE are talking about shifting large online recruiting budgets away from poorly-performing job boards. Since TalentSeekr already tracks the performance of its ads, it can also plug into applicant tracking systems used by HR departments to get feedback into how the people hired end up doing in terms of job evaluations, longevity and other factors. CrunchBase Information TalentSeekr EnticeLabs Information provided by CrunchBase 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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