Thursday, October 1, 2009

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TaxiMagic Launches Web Portal For Online Taxi Booking Top
Nine months ago we wrote about Taxi Magic , a nifty service that hooks directly into local dispatch systems to let you book cabs from your smart phone. Since then the startup has been doing quite well — it now supports the iPhone, Blackberry, and SMS booking. It’s also grown from supporting 25 fully supported cities to 40. And tonight it’s launching a new feature that exposes it to an even broader audience: a web portal at TaxiMagic.com The site features a directory for each of the service’s supported taxi providers, with some cities (like San Francisco and Washington, DC) offering multiple options. Once you’ve picked a taxi service, you enter an address and pickup time. At this point you can’t pay for the taxi online, but you can pay from your smartphone or via SMS using through TaxiMagic if you’d rather not deal with cash or hand over your credit card (the service charges a $1.50 fee for this). Aside from the new website, TaxiMagic has made quite a few changes since we last covered them. As mentioned above, you can now pay for taxis using your TaxiMagic account that’s been linked to a credit card (before you could only book cabs and would have to pay the old fashioned way). And the service now offers support for SMS, which means you can shoot a text from bascially any phone to TaxiMagic with your current address to request a pickup. TaxiMagic will respond with a text message indicating the cab drive’s name and distance. Finally, the service’s iPhone application has seen quite a few upgrades, including the ability to actually see where your cab currently is as it drives to pick you up. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
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.
 
Twingly Channels: A Personalized, Social, Real-Time Memetracker Top
A few weeks ago, we wrote about Swedish startup Twingly and its stealth memetracker Twingly Channels. Tonight, Twingly is launching in closed beta. In the past, Twingly has brought us a microblogging search tool, a search engine for blogs, and a global ranking system for blogs. Twingly Channels essentially lets users to create their own personalized real-time memetracker. To sign up for an invite, click here with the code “TechCrunch.” As we wrote previously, Twingly is a mix between Digg and FriendFeed. Twingly Channels lets users to create their own personalized social memetracker by collecting feeds and search terms covering any topic or event into a channel they share with others. And the site has real-time functionality. Users can post links posted by users, content from RSS feeds, and real-time search results for terms from blogs and microblogs (i.e. Twitter). The resulting stream is filtered into a Friendfeed-like channel where people can comment on, like, or dislike incoming items. Channels will be public by default, but to comment or subscribe you will need to sign up. Twingly will also employ a ranking system to filter content using a proprietary alogorithm. Every item coming into the channel is continuously ranked using links from blogs, Tweets, user comments and likes. The highest ranked items are shown in the Popular view. Twingly Channels can also be used by companies for brand tracking and social media monitoring and can be kept private for these purposes. The site could be useful for aggregating RSS feeds, tracking specific content on blogs and microblogs and then sharing that content with others, all on one site. The blog/microblog search is powered by Twingly’s search engine which tracks close to 26 million blogs around the world. It’s similar in some ways to Streamy. CrunchBase Information Twingly Information provided by Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 

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