The latest from TechCrunch
- Fluther Raises $600k From Top Valley Investors For Crowd-Sourced Answers
- Video: Symantec Shows The Danger Of Shortened Twitter Links
- CrunchBoard: Wikimedia, Yammer, Electronic Arts and More!
- NetSuite Launches iPhone App To Access Business Software On The Go
| Fluther Raises $600k From Top Valley Investors For Crowd-Sourced Answers | Top |
| Fluther , a slick service that lets you outsource your questions to other members on the web, has closed a $600k round of seed funding from some of Silicon Valley’s most notable investors. Included in the round were Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, the recently launched Andreesen-Horowitz, and Dave McClure, via FF Angel. Rounding out the roster are Twitter’s Biz Stone and Leonard Speiser (Bix, Twables founder), who are advisors. Using Fluther is pretty straightforward: you visit the site and ask a question, then wait for other members to answer you in real-time (the site offers a reply system similar to FriendFeed’s that lets you view these responses immediately). Whenever you ask a question Fluther reaches out to other members on the site through Email and (optionally) IM alerts, channeling the questions to members it thinks knows the most about the topic. Fluther faces a few major competitors, including Aardvark , which also lets you outsource your questions to other users on the web. The biggest difference is who each service turns to for answers — Aardvark tries to pair you with knowledgeable people using your social graph (typically you’ll be referred to friends or friends of friends). Conversely, Fluther sends its questions to members that it deems to be the most knowledgeable, independent of your social graph. You can syndicate your Fluther questions out to Facebook, but co-founder Ben Finkel says that there isn’t a strong emphasis on this. Another player in this space is Mahalo , which launched its Mahalo Answers product last December. Finkel says that Mahalo’s approach, which incentivizes users to answer questions by offering them monetary rewards, inevitably leads to having people trying to game the system with low quality answers. Instead, Fluther is relying on users to submit answers as a show of good will, though it does offer a points reward system for the best answers. It can be hard to attract users with that model, but we’ve seen it work before on sites like Wikipedia and Finkel says that Fluther has developed some very dedicated users. Fluther soft-launched back in summer 2007, and is seeing around 600,000 monthly unique visitors. Tonight’s news confirms reports of a funding round based on SEC filings. value="true" /> /> type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="480" height="480"> Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Video: Symantec Shows The Danger Of Shortened Twitter Links | Top |
| While there is often a lot of talk about the downside of URL shorteners being that if they go down, they take your links with them , the much more obvious and real problem is that they very easily mask potentially bad sites. We’ve been seeing this more and more in both public tweets and DMs, but luckily so far most of those have just been worms meant to replicate themselves, rather than really bad viruses. But security software company Symantec released a video today to show some very bad links in action. As you can see in the video below, clicking on just one link infected a computer a dozen or so times in seconds. Obviously, Symantec’s intention is showing this is to sell their software that helps to protect against these attacks, but the point is still a good one to make. While URL shorteners like Bit.ly have begun warning users about potentially harmful links, others don’t bother. And let’s be honest, most of us click on links from friends regardless of what URL shortener they are using. Yesterday, Twitter was bombarded by tweets using the hashtags “beforesex,” “aftersex,” and “duringsex.” It wasn’t long before people were using those tags to send out malicious links. It’s a problem because virus makers know that any trending topic is likely to be searched for a lot, so they can just ride that wave and catch unsuspecting users who are curious to click on links. Google’s Joshua Schachter , who started Delicious , wrote about this and the other problems with URL shorteners earlier this year. CrunchBase Information Twitter Symantec bit.ly Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| CrunchBoard: Wikimedia, Yammer, Electronic Arts and More! | Top |
| If you're on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard . We've added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks. Here's a quick sample: CTO Wikimedia Foundation – San Francisco, CA Software Engineer – Messaging Architect Yammer – San Francisco, CA EDP Programming Mgr. (Entertainment Development & Programming) Electronic Arts – Redwood City, CA Software Engineer Yext – New York, NY HR Director StumbleUpon, Inc. – San Francisco, CA For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard. Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| NetSuite Launches iPhone App To Access Business Software On The Go | Top |
| NetSuite, a company that provides cloud-based business management software suites, is furthering its mobile strategy by launching a free iPhone app to compliment its web-based products. The iPhone app gives NetSuite users on-the-go access to the company’s on-demand SaaS offerings, which include real-time dashboards with financial and customer data from CRMs and other applications. A competitor to Salesforce.com, NetSuite offers four main types of cloud computing software: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), CRM, accounting, and ecommerce software. In any business, mobile access makes business processes speedier, so NetSuite has tried to make the crossover between the web and the iPhone (or iPod touch) seamless. With the new app, users get real-time access to their NetSuite calendar and task lists, including the ability to accept or decline events and mark tasks complete. With respect to the CRM, sales reps can see leads, view client purchase history and contacts, and review past orders. Users can also access accounting information, browse financial trends and graphs, read performance indicator reports and receive and generate detailed financial scorecards. NetSuite faces competition primarily from tech giants Salesforce.com and Microsoft, which both offer business application suites such as CRMs and ERPs. Salesforce has had an iPhone app (as well as apps for Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices) to compliment its products since early this year and has similar functionality to NetSuite’s app. Of course the larger picture for most companies is whether they trust all of their business data going in the cloud and then within an app, but as more and more companies become increasingly comfortable with the idea of the cloud, this concern is minimized. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
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