The latest from TechCrunch
- Google Toolbar Now Translates Pages In Firefox
- Confirmed: Twitter Has Begun Geolocation Rollout
- The $25 Million Demo. Yext Scores A Big Round From IVP After TechCrunch50 Debut.
- Twitter Lists Competitors Respond: We Can All Get Along
- Smule Sells 300k Copies Of I Am T-Pain, Celebrates With A New Song And A Huge Contest
- An App Contest For San Francisco
- Confirmed: Delivery Agent Raises $25 Million For Entertainment Commerce Platform
| Google Toolbar Now Translates Pages In Firefox | Top |
| Google has launched a new version of its Toolbar for Firefox that lets you translate any webpage with the click of a button without leaving the page. Google will also add web-site suggestions and sponsored links to the toolbar as you type in any query. The new toolbar is synced with Firefox version 3.5’s Private Browsing mode so that the tool bar will not record your searchbox history while you are in this mode. It will also turn off PageRank, Web History and Sidewiki. Last week, Google announced their new web annotation system, Sidewiki, that will be included in the new version of Toolbar for Firefox. Sidewiki allows users to leave a comment on an entire page or a selected piece of text, and share the URL via email, Twitter or Facebook. Users can read and vote comments up or down, which creates a user ranking for each individual that will determine where their comments fall on the Sidewiki. The higher the ranking, the higher comments appear. So now you can make comments on pages that aren’t published in your own language. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Confirmed: Twitter Has Begun Geolocation Rollout | Top |
| As we first reported last night , Twitter appeared to have turned on at least part of its new Geolocation API . Today, the company has confirmed the roll out on its API Announcement Google Group page. As Twitter API team member Raffi Krikorian writes today, “ as some of you may have already noticed, we’ve started going through the first steps to get the geolocation API out our door. ” Last night, a portion of the Geoloction API got turned on and it slightly borked the new, still unreleased version of Tweetie . Basically, it looks like it turned on geolocation coordinates for all tweets, even if they weren’t meant to be enabled. This gave every tweet a coordinate of 0,0, which put them in middle of the ocean off the coast of Africa. Tweetie developer Loren Brichter quickly realized what the issue was and corrected it. Other third-party developers we talked to noticed similar things. As such, Krikorian explains a bit more about how the Geolocation API will work today. As he writes: if you start to pull status objects through the API, you’ll notice that, for the majority of them, there is an empty | |
| The $25 Million Demo. Yext Scores A Big Round From IVP After TechCrunch50 Debut. | Top |
| Howard Lerman can be a little intense. After the CEO of Yext finished his demo at this year’s Techcrunch50 (embedded below) he left one judge “speechless,” and during rehearsals Michael took him aside and asked him, “Are you on drugs?” He wasn’t. Lerman just has the heightened dopamine levels of an entrepreneur. And he hadn’t slept for 45 days because he was pushing his New York City startup to relaunch on an entirely new technology platform for TechCrunch50 Over the past three years, Lerman and his co-founders (who all went to the same high school together in Virginia), have built a local advertising business under everyone’s nose that is on track to generate $20 million in revenues this year.Yext is going after the huge, entrenched Yellow Pages business with online ads for local businesses that result in phone calls instead of clicks. At TechCrunch50, which was the company’s public debut, Yext relaunched with a whole new product, going from plain vanilla pay-per-call ads to pay-per-action ads where the action is a relevant call that actually drives new business. Each ad has a unique trackable number that goes through Yext’s system, where it is recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Yext customers get their own inbox for calls which is like a Google Voice for businesses. There is a transcript for each call, the phone number of the person who called, and a full audio file that can be played back. When a business signs up, Yext places ads for them across the Web in local directories such as Yellowpages.com, SuperPages.com, Local.com, 1-800-Free-411, 4Info, Topix, RepairPal, and more. It turns those ads into phone calls. Yext uses speech-to-text recognition licensed from IBM and fine-tuned with its own algorithms for each business category it targets. Co-founder Brent Metz used to be an engineer in IBM’s speech science labs, and his name appears on many IBM patents. Only when certain key words related to the actual services offered by the business are mentioned in a call (”spinal decompression,” “oil change,” “install countertops”) does Yext charge for it. Wrong numbers, marketing calls, or calls from beyond a pre-determined geographic area are put in a junk folder and Yext doesn’t charge for those. This means Yext needs to be really good at both driving relevant calls to local businesses and identifying them. “You've got to be transparent,” says Lerman. “We take all the risk, then we pull our pants down and show them what they get.” Lerman is so confident of his technology that at TechCrunch50, he switched all 20,000 local businesses already using Yext over to the pay-per-action system. It is a big, gutsy bet. The minute he stepped off the stage, Lerman was inundated with emails and business cards from seemingly every venture capitalist and M&A officer in the room. He tried to ignore them and soak in the rest of the conference, but some of them were from people any startup CEO would be foolish to ignore. He took a few meetings with the most serious VCs, and ended up closing a $25 million B round, led by Institutional Venture Partners (which is also an investor in Twitter). The money just hit Yext’s bank account a few hours ago. “Anyone who doesn’t launch at TechCrunch50 is crazy,” says Lerman. IVP partner Dennis Phelps will be joining Yext’s board. Sutter Hill Ventures, which had put in $3.5 million in an A round in June, 2008, also participated in this latest funding. Yext is currently only in 12 local categories, including auto repair, chiropractors, gyms, vets, and yoga. There are 2,300 Yellow Pages categories. Lerman is going to take the $25 million and aggressively expand into those categories, hiring sales people to go after each one. He already has 75 employees. Lerman is also extremely excited about getting Yext numbers into mobile apps. He thinks he can build an AdSense for mobile phones. “What do you think is the perfect action for mobile?”he asks. “It is a phone call, not a click.” App developers who sign up here can freely import Yext numbers into their apps by business type and category. So a travel app could bring up nearby auto garages or window repair shops for stranded travelers and get a cut of any call revenue they generate. Lerman has a lot of ideas like that. Here is the demo from TC50 that got him $25 million: Photo credit: TechCrunch/ Chanaye Thomas . Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Twitter Lists Competitors Respond: We Can All Get Along | Top |
| It looked as if Twitter may have dropped a bomb on a number of Twitter-centric third-party apps yesterday by announcing its new Lists feature . It’s a feature that Twitter really should have implemented a while ago for better filtering if nothing else, but they didn’t, and that gave rise to services like TweepML and Wefollow . So are those guys now mad about Twitter’s latest move? No. Instead, they see it as an opportunity to make their services even more popular by hooking up with the feature through its API. Brizzly , a web-based Twitter client from Thing Labs , was the first to come out and share its enthusiasm for Twitter’s new feature. One of Brizzly’s key selling points is that you can filter the people you follow on Twitter into groups. As the Brizzly official account tweeted out yesterday , the plan is to now support Twitter Lists. They’ll apparently offer the ability to convert your Brizzly groups into these lists, which is nice. Meanwhile, Digg founder Kevin Rose’s latest project had been Wefollow , a Twitter directory for popular people to follow in various fields. So is he annoyed by Twitter lists, which will allow users to group people in a similar way? Nope. He tweeted out a link to Twitter’s blog post about Lists a few hours ago with the note, “ playing w/twitter lists feature, this is going to be cool ” The most interesting would-be competitor for Lists however is TweepML . The service, which we covered here , allows you to create your own lists of Twitter users to follow to send and share with others. On the surface, that sounds very similar to what Twitter Lists is, but founder Marcelo Calbucci has already gotten a chance to play with Lists and says that he too looks forward to integrating TweepML with Twitter Lists. He also notes what he sees as 10 key differences , which we’re reposting here with permission: #1 You can't create a list with yourself : A Twitter list is a subset of your followers. You cannot follow yourself, and you cannot add yourself to a list you create. If I create "Entrepreneurs in Seattle" list, I cannot be on it. #2 You can only add people you follow : That's the same issue as above, but what if I want to create a list that doesn't have everyone that I follow. For example, I might not want to follow all the 300+ Entrepreneurs in Seattle. #3 It's hard to add people to your list : To add someone to your Twitter list you go to your Friends page and select one-by-one who you want on your list. #4 No way to go from list subscriber to tweep subscriber : Imagine you are following a list of 25 photographers. You get upset because the list owner keeps adding irrelevant people, or removing cool people. You decide you just want to follow them directly. There is no UI to do that now. #5 No way for people to know you are following them : If you follow a list, the people on that list won't be notified you are following them. You lose the opportunity of them following you back. #6 No way to "follow-the-list-except-that-guy-who-tweets-too-much" : If you follow a list is all or nothing. You can't exclude that guy that can't stop tweeting. #7 You can't import/export lists : They don't support the TweepML format, but they've promised a server-to-server API, which doesn't matter for end users. If you have a list with 25 accounts, there is no way to easily import a list. There is no way to export that list either, like into a spreadsheet or a text document. #8 What if you block someone : Blocking on Twitter is somewhat weak already, because the person can continue to follow your tweets by just going to your page (if your account is public like most people). Now, if someone creates a list that you are part of it, anyone that you blocked can follow your tweets again by following the list. #9 No stats or analytics : Right now Twitter does not tell you anything about your list. I believe in the future they will tell you how many people are following that list, but that's it. No way to know how people found the list, how many people came and went, etc. This is probably not important to your average user, but for power users and business, this is critical. #10 No dynamic lists : Finally, Twitter doesn't allow you to have dynamic lists. For example, if you go to TweepSearch and you want to follow everyone who's a Security Consultant in Seattle you have to be manually updating that list. Some very interesting points from someone who has used the feature already. Overall, it looks like Twitter did a smart thing by allowing these competitors to check out Lists from the get-go. Rather than seeing this as a hugely threatening gesture by the service, these competitors all are welcoming it to varying degrees. Twitter also did a smart thing by making sure Lists launched with an API , so third-parties can build things that will do many of the 10 things listed above. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| Smule Sells 300k Copies Of I Am T-Pain, Celebrates With A New Song And A Huge Contest | Top |
| The second we laid eyes on Smule's autotuning, pitch-changing iPhone app, I Am T-Pain , we knew it was going to be a huge hit - and it has been. We just got some details from Smule's CEO, Jeff Smith, on how things are going so far. In the first 3 weeks alone, the application has seen 300,000 downloads. The average user spends around 66 minutes within the application -- an absolutely ludicrous number for any app, much less one out of the entertainment category. To date, 4.1 million performances have been recorded within the application. So, what's the best way to celebrate making lots and lots of money? By adding new content - oh, and giving away lots and lots of money. | |
| An App Contest For San Francisco | Top |
| This guest post was written by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom , who was elected to the position in 2003 and reelected in 2007. Newsom is also running for governor of California in the upcoming 2010 election. In this guest post, Mayor Newsom announces a contest to create apps using city data from DataSF.org ,. Last week, we announced a City App Store to highlight and centralize software applications developed from government data available on DataSF.org . The response from the community has been overwhelming. We have received a number of new civic apps that are now featured in the DataSF App Showcase. We've added Mom Maps , a new iPhone app that helps you find kid friendly locations in San Francisco, Dadnab a text messaging service that gives you transit directions, and then there's EveryBlock, which has just added a new feature . The site breaks down what types of services people are requesting from the city by neighborhood, zip code and day. This type of innovation is exactly what we were hoping for when we launched DataSF.org less than six weeks ago. We were not sure what people would create with the data, but we knew that many of our talented developers wanted to help improve San Francisco. Now, our community is coming together to help fill our app store with even more civic apps. The Center for Investigative Reporting's California Watch reporting team, Spot.Us, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, MAPLight.org, the Gov 2.0 Summit, Sun Light Foundation and others are announcing today that they are joining forces to sponsor the first DataSF App Contest on Nov. 7. The day-long app-building contest is open to developers, journalists, community organizers, policy wonks, students and others interested in building a better San Francisco from more than 100 datasets available on DataSF.org. Register here for the DataSF App Contest. If you are interesting in sponsoring the App Contest, visit the Spot.Us pag e A team of judges will pick the winning app at the end of the day and award a cash prize or Apple gift certificate to the winning team. More than $1600 has already been raised from community sponsors. If you would like to donate to the contest please click here . We are excited to see what apps will be created from this contest. The only limit is participants' imagination and the amount of data we are able to make available by Nov. 7. In San Francisco we are moving away from a one size fits all government to making government a platform for innovation. If you are using or have created an application based on City data that is not in our DataSF App Showcase, we would like to hear from you. Join Mayor Newsom on Facebook or follow him on Twitter . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| Confirmed: Delivery Agent Raises $25 Million For Entertainment Commerce Platform | Top |
| What recession? We’ve confirmed that startup Delivery Agent has just raised $25 million in Series D funding led by new investor Focus Ventures with T-Venture, Coral Group, Ironwood Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Worldview Technology Partners and Cardinal Venture Capital participating. This brings Delivery Agent’s total funding up to $60 million. In a nutshell, Delivery Agent helps TV networks monetize content through two distinct channels. First, the company creates online marketplaces for products and merchandise that are seen on television shows. Delivery Agent has signed on all the major networks, including ABC, CBS, NBC Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, and MTV Networks. Similar to GumGum's ShopThisLook feature, Delivery Agent catalogues products appearing in movies and shows and then creates an e-commerce site where products can be purchases. By outsourcing all e-commerce for products seen on their networks to Delivery Agent, networks are able to monetize their content while keeping their overhead costs low. Delivery Agent’s second service is coordinating advertising from the brands that manufacture the products that are shown on a networks' TV shows. Delivery Agent will go through the index of products that will be airing on a show prior to when the episode airs, and then reach out to the brand and offer them the ability to buy an ad package for the show. Mike Fitzsimmons, Delivery Agent’s founder and CEO, tells me that the new funds will be used to develop “click-to-buy” applications for online video and mobile content. In fact, Delivery Agent will soon launch a partnership with a major cable operator that will allow consumers to click and buy a product they see on TV with their remote control. Fitzsimmons also add that Delivery Agent will be using the funds to pursue international growth, and launch their content-monetization services in markets in Europe and Asia. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
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