The latest from TechCrunch
- Check-In For Charity: Loopt Giving To Haiti If You Visit Chipotle, Panera, Or Whole Foods
- The Other Winner In Macmillan v. Amazon: Barnes & Noble
- Bantam Live Takes The Beta Covers Off Its Social CRM
- Stephen Colbert: Blippy Is More Exciting Than Going Through Old Receipts
| Check-In For Charity: Loopt Giving To Haiti If You Visit Chipotle, Panera, Or Whole Foods | Top |
| We recently wrote about location-based mobile social network Loopt’s push to launch deals for check-ins, and today, the startup is putting use check-ins to philanthropic use. For every check-in at Chipotle, Panera Bread, or Whole Foods around the country, Loopt will donate $1 towards the Haiti earthquake relief. Half of the proceeds from the check-ins will be given to the American Red Cross and the other half will be donated to Doctors Without Borders. Loopt founder and CEO Sam Altman said the spots were chosen primarily because they are seeing many check-ins at these vendors. It’s truly a generous and worthy initiative and it also provides a noble inventive for users to enable Loopt’s check-in technology, which the startup recently launched. Text messaging has also played a significant part in fundraising for Haiti earthquake relief; with mobile donations reaching $35 million. | |
| The Other Winner In Macmillan v. Amazon: Barnes & Noble | Top |
| There’s been a lot of hoopla the past week over Amazon’s fight with book publisher Macmillan. The main issue is that Macmillan wants higher prices for its e-books, while Amazon wants to keep prices down for its Kindle device. Amazon went as far as to pull all of Macmillan’s books from its store, but quickly admitted that they’d eventually have to give in to Macmillan’s demands . Why? Well the obvious answer is Apple, whose new iPad device with its iBooks Store is allowing publishers to set higher prices. But don’t forget Amazon’s other rivals too. One reader wrote in to tell us how he was looking for The Politician , a new book by Andrew Young about John Edwards. The book, which is published by Macmillan, is not available on Amazon.com right now due to the dispute. When the man noticed that he turned to Amazon rival Barnes & Noble for the book — and from the looks of it, he’s not alone. The book is actually the number one best seller on Barnes & Noble’s entire site. On another rival’s site, Borders , it’s the number five best seller. Pressure from Apple aside, Amazon can’t afford to blackball these publishers because people can so easily turn elsewhere to get the book. Even though it’s not available on Amazon, The Politician is still the number 49 best seller on the site through partner sellers — even though they’re selling the book for significantly more than Barnes & Noble or Borders (or than Amazon would if it were available through them). [thanks Shmuel] | |
| Bantam Live Takes The Beta Covers Off Its Social CRM | Top |
| Today, Bantam Live, is launching the commercial version of its social CRM workspace and is rolling out premium features of its product. Bantam Live provides an online workspace for business teams that has "social CRM" features, which include a real-time dashboard stream of messaging and workflow activity along with a native CRM application. Members can share information, track activity, and manage contact and company relationships both inside and outside the organization via a real-time activity stream. We last wrote about Bantam when the startup debuted its product at TechCrunch’s RealTime Stream CrunchUp last July. Bantam extends a company’s sales outreach and customer relationships out to the social Web. For instance, with Bantam, a user can search Twitter, import a new contact with one click, initiate task workflows with team members to engage this new contact, and then converse with the new contact for lead generation. All of this happens within the same application, integrated with Twitter and soon other social networks like Facebook. Bantam Live also allows users to search, monitor, and connect with people across the web for sales leads, business development, and marketing purposes. Members also can manage their calendars, file sharing and task management within the platform. Similar to the activity stream on Facebook, Bantam Live will now include co-worker notifications, workflow information, customer communications and other messages within a realtime stream in a dashboard. Bantam Live also recently raised a second round of funding from angel investors, bringing the startup’s funding to $1.7 million. Of course, Bantam will face competition from Salesforce’s upcoming product in the social CRM space, Chatter . But Bantam’s CEO John Rourke maintains that his offering is not only comprehensive, but also more reasonably priced than Chatter. Plus, Bantam is entering the marketplace now, ahead of Chatter. That being said, Bantam is still entering a crowded space that includes many worthy competitors besides Chatter, including Jive, Cubetree and Socialtext. Bantam Live charges a monthly subscription fee for a range of plans that range from $19 (for a Personal plan) up to $140 per month large groups/heavy use. We have a special offer for TechCrunch readers in the month of February; enter the promocode “TECHCRUNCH” when signing up for Bantam, and you will save 50% on your first two paid-months, after a free 30-day trial. | |
| Stephen Colbert: Blippy Is More Exciting Than Going Through Old Receipts | Top |
| Normally, it takes quite a bit of time before a startup gets any sort of mainstream spotlight. That’s not the case with Blippy . Tonight, the controversial social credit card data aggregator was featured on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report . As you might imagine, host Stephen Colbert ripped into the service’s ability to show everyday purchases at places such as Wendy’s. Humor aside, this appearance is a huge win for Blippy, which recently raised its first round of funding , and is now signing deals with retailers . Will Colbert Nation embrace Blippy? Sadly, YouTube is apparently smart enough to know that the Colbert Report is something they shouldn’t allow you to embed, so I’ll have to link to it — here . Update : And YouTube has now completely removed the video. Wow, they’re good. Update 2: The video’s now up on Colbert Nation. Or watch it below. The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c The Word – Cognoscor Ergo Sum www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy CrunchBase Information Blippy Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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