Thursday, October 1, 2009

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BNO News Updates Its Great iPhone App, Lets You Harness Stream Of Push Notifications Top
One of my favorite iPhone applications is BNO News — a lightweight app that lets you receive messages from the BNO newswire . The service, which is best known for its extremely popular Twitter account , offers very timely, short snippets of news throughout the day, often before mainstream media catches wind of it. The iPhone app lets you receieve these messages as soon as they happen using push notifications. It’s great (I always feel like I know what’s going on before everyone else), but the app had one major flaw: BNO News pushed an alert for every story it deemed important. That means that I’ve gotten urgent updates on stories that I really don’t care about, like the French lottery having a large jackpot. This isn’t to say that the stories weren’t newsworthy — I just didn’t need my iPhone ringing every time one of them popped up. Fortunately that ends today: BitMethod , the development house that built the BNO News app, has released a new version that brings with it some key new features, including the ability to filter the stories you receive. You can download the updated version here . The new application is still quite straightforward. Upon opening it you’ll see a list of the most recent BNO News stories. Click the ‘Options’ button and you’ll be able to subscribe to updates from over a dozen categories, including Politics, Tech/Science, Disasters, Health, and more. If there are only a few specific topics that you’re interested in, you can specify a list of keywords, and get alerted any time one of those appears in an update. From then on you’ll only receive updates from those categories, along with the news that BNO News considers very important. Another addition to the BNO application is a subscription pricing plan (the old application’s page informed users that this change was coming). If you want access to the full filtering options BNO News will cost 99 cents per month, with one month included as part of the application’s initial $1.99 purchase price. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Google Has A Plan To Stop The Mass Exodus From Orkut: No Friend Exports For You! Top
Just yesterday, we wrote about how Facebook was quickly gaining on Google’s social network, Orkut , in places like India where Orkut is still the big dog. One reason for Facebook’s gains is that they’ve been heavily promoting the fact that you can import your Orkut contacts via a special tool. Well guess what? As of today, that tool no longer works. And that’s not all. Previously, even without the tool, it was pretty easy to export you contacts from Orkut into a CSV (comma separated value) file. But that’s no longer working either. The option still exists on the Friends page in Orkut, but when you click on it, and fill in the CAPTCHA, it simply redirects you to Orkut’s main page. Coincidence? Maybe. But we’ve already gotten emails from users in India who saw our post and rushed to try and export their friend data to escape Orkut, only to be shot down. And let’s not forget that Google and Facebook have been down a similar road before. Last year, Facebook blocked Google’s Friend Connect from accessing the data on its network. This led to a silly he said/she said spat in which the users were the losers. Could this be payback? Facebook is undoubtedly increasingly interested in India not only because it is the largest social network in the world, but thanks to Facebook Lite , it’s much more accessible to a wide range of people. Orkut, meanwhile, is, well, a social network that Google seems to talk about as little as possible. To test the friend export functionality tonight, I logged into my Orkut account for the first time in what must be years. I was shocked to find that there were other people I knew actually on it, that Google was recommending that I friend. So I sent a few requests out, and within minutes, this is the reply I got back (over email): “what the f**k?” The message behind that being, “why are you using Orkut?” For some people in India right now, sadly, it appears that they have no choice. I wonder what Google’s Data Liberation team thinks about this? I have a feeling the official word we’ll get back from Google is “bug.” But given the timing and the fact that two different ways to export your friends broke at once, I’m not so sure that the word they’re really looking for isn’t “hypocrisy.” Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Photobucket Founders On To Their Next Startup: SlimeSandwich Top
In early August we broke the news that Photobucket founders Alex Welch and Darren Crystal would be leaving parent company News Corp. to try something new. Now we know what that new thing is – an ambitious new online MMO and first person shooter game company called SlimeSandwich . So far the company has been operating in stealth mode. But sometime in the next couple of months they’ll launch their first game title, SCAPS Agent . Click the link to see a trailer of the upcoming game. So far the company has raised around $1 million from the founders, and they may not be raising more. The game will make money via subscriptions and virtual goods. If it’s a hit, it could turn into a cash cow. If not, they’ll move on to the next game. The team isn’t saying much more about SlimeSandwich or SCAPS Agent for now. Stay tuned for their launch. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
TrialPay Bundles A Bunch Of Deals To Raise Money For Cancer Top
If I told you that you can get over $700 worth of stuff for $29.99, you’d probably be interested. But you’d also likely think there was a catch. And there is — but in this case it’s a good one: The net proceeds of that $29.99 are being donated to the American Cancer Society. TheBigBundle is a site put together by TrialPay . Basically, they rounded up a bunch of tech companies (and some non-tech ones) and got them to offer some good deals to people who made the donation. So you’ll get things like, a free month subscription to Skype Unlimited, 6 months free of TripIt Pro, $25 off Everynote Premium, a $5 coupon to Threadless, 3 months free of Dropbox Pro, $50 off 23andMe, and a bunch of other stuff. The goal is to raise $3 million to give to the American Cancer Society (which would be 100,000 bundles). They’ve given themselves until October 14 to reach the goal, so two weeks from today. So far today. in just a few hours, they’ve raised about $3,000. As with all of these types of things, people often want to know exactly how much of their money is going towards the cause. TrialPay is very transparent about it, listing it on the site : How much really goes to the American Cancer Society? Virtually everything. The company putting on this promotion, TrialPay, is making no profit from sales of the bundle, and will be publishing a report at the end to detail the full accounting of the amounts it has collected from sales of the bundle and the amount contributed to the American Cancer Society. We expect that the American Cancer Society will receive a minimum of 70% and a maximum of 98% of your purchase price of the Bundle. And you can also choose to donate an extra $20, and nearly 100 percent (minus a couple percent for the credit card fee) will go towards the American Cancer Society. The basic idea behind TrialPay is to give customers something for free on top of an item they are already paying for. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
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 : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 

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