Tuesday, May 4, 2010

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Tungle Adds Search, A User Directory, And Group Meetings To Scheduling Application Top
Tungle, a scheduling and calendar sharing tool we wrote about during its launch in 2008, is rolling out a new version of its meeting scheduling platform, Tungle.me, that taps into your social graph and simplifies the process of finding and connecting with friends and colleagues. Tungle.me now includes a public directory, search functionality, and group meeting capabilities. Tungle offers users a free web-based application that lets you share calendars across companies and platforms, schedule meetings with individuals or groups inside or outside their company and propose multiple meeting times in invitations. The service currently syncs with Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage for Mac, and Lotus Notes. Tungle.me users can now opt-in to be included in a public directory on the site, allowing users to see colleagues’ schedules. On a users’ personal scheduling page, you can view their availability and schedule meetings with them without signing up for Tungle.me. Visitors can search for users by name or company name without needing to upload contacts or create new friend lists. The new Group functionality for Tungle.me allows users to create and name private or public groups, browse public groups in the directory, and save group aliases to contact lists. Non-users can also schedule meetings with public groups without having to register for accounts. Groups can be created for associations, organizations, committees, departments, conferences, and more; making it easier to view others' availability and schedule meetings between members. Tungle also recently partnered with social planning application Plancast to integrate the Tungle.me widget into Plancast profiles. The startup has enhanced personalization with LinkedIn integration as well. While Tungle’s vice president of marketing Jonathan Levitt declined to reveal the number of users Tungle currently has, he did say that Tungle.me is being used to schedule meetings in over 30 percent of Fortune 100 companies, over 700 Universities, and in more than 100 countries. Tungle’s main competitors are TimeBridge, and Jiffle. CrunchBase Information Tungle.me Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Evernote Zooms Past 3 Million Users Top
If there is something everyone needs help with now and then, it is remembering stuff. Evernote does that very well via the iPhone, the iPad, Android phones, Blackberries, Windows PCs, and the Web. It just crossed the three million user mark in about 60 percent of the time it took to get to two million . Evernote took 447 days to get its first million users , 222 days to get to its second million users, and 134 days to get to its third. Evernote lets you take pictures of things with your phone camera or clip pages on the Web and stores them in a searchable, chronological tape of geo-tagged notes. A full 79 percent of its daily mobile usage is on the iPhone OS, including the iPhone itself (63 percent), the iPod Touch (7 percent), and the iPad (9 percent). Android makes up 12 percent of daily mobile usage, and Blackberry is only 2 percent. On the desktop, Windows rules with 49 percent of daily desktop usage, followed by the Mac client (38 percent), and the Web (13 percent). The key stat for Evernote’s business is how many people it can convert to its premium service, which costs $45 a year for more storage and features. There are now 59,000 paying Evernote subscribers, up from 35,000 when there were two million total users. It is still a modest number, but it is steadily growing and the conversion rate keeps getting better. But in order to justify the $25.5 million investors have put into the company, it is going to have to figure out ways to get more than 2 percent of its users to pay. CrunchBase Information Evernote Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Fiddme Lets Foodies Share Their Favorite Dishes With The World Top
(This is a review of one of the 7 startups presenting today at Techonomy 2010 in Tel Aviv. To read about the others, browse all posts tagged ‘techonomy’ .) Fiddme , publicly launching in beta today, is a social network for foodies that love to share their ‘food experiences’ with the world, which I think is code for notably good or bad dishes. The service, which comes in the form of both a Web and an iPhone application, lets people share their favorite dishes in restaurants or other places by taking a picture of said food and adding a short caption, where it is being consumed and even recipes. This can prove to be a fun and valuable service for documenting and sharing specific food recommendations rather than suggestions or reviews of local eateries as a whole. If that sounds a lot like what Foodspotting is all about, that’s because it’s largely the same offering. That’s not to say there’s no room for both – quite the contrary. Things Fiddme has going for it is the great user experience and design, the location-based approach – it’s like checking in, but based on what you’re eating where – and the viral nature of the whole thing. Fiddme is very visual and enjoyable to use (there’s no learning curve), both on the Web and on the iPhone. Fiddme hopes to turn the data it collects from its users into something they can sell ads against, or something they can sell directly to restaurants or food brands. Time will tell if they’ll be able to turn the service into a business, but as far as I’m concerned I think a lot of people are going to like using it.
 
SircleIt Makes It Easier For You To Get Help From Friends And Family Top
(This is a review of one of the 7 startups presenting today at Techonomy 2010 in Tel Aviv. To read about the others, browse all posts tagged ‘techonomy’ .) Questions about the meaning of life? Stuck with an overweight dilemma? Sure, you could reach out to the masses who are following you on Twitter or Facebook, but what are the chances of getting answers only from the few people whose opinions you actually care about? And what if it concerns a private matter? Emailing a specific group of people could do the trick … but then again, it could make the problem-solving process even more complex and long-winded. Enter SircleIt , which lets you group your Facebook contacts into lists of people based on pre- or self-defined categories (e.g. ‘beer buddies’, ‘Giants fans’, ‘male chauvinist pigs’, etc.) and enables you to address your questions or share your problems with those people and those people only, which is especially useful if you wanna get few but relevant answers from your subsets of your social graph, or if it concerns a delicate matter that can’t be thrown out into the open just like that. When you sign up for SircleIt, using Facebook Connect, the service checks which friends are already a member, or you can invite them to join. You’re also supposed to let the company know what your specific skills are, so people can determine easier what it is you can help them with. The UI is clunky, but on the flip side makes it extremely easy to both algorithmically and manually create clusters of friends, family members, classmates, and so on. Once you’ve grouped people in ‘sircles’ (social circles), and you can ask them questions or even poll them on a given subject. Users you direct your question to get a notification by email that you’re looking for their help, and they can log on to the platform and lend you a virtual hand. Watch the demo video below for more info. In a way, SircleIt sounded to me a lot like Aardvark (recently purchased by Google) and Quora, although SircleIt’s founders insist that there’s much more to their service and that it does not revolve around social search but rather social yet targeted Q&A and problem-solving. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.
 
HelloCotton Launches A Social Platform For Women's Blogs Top
Paris-based HelloCotton (HelloCoton en Français ), a French social platform for discovering and sharing women's blog content, is launching in the US today. Initially launch in France in April 2008, the platform counts roughly 3 million monthly unique visitors who use HelloCotton to discover and share lady-oriented blog content - about fashion, health, beauty, you-name-it. And oddly enough, despite being oriented towards women, this start-up was founded by two men - Hubert Michaux and Victor Cerutti - who were formerly part of the Netvibes team; the founding duo decided to launch the platform hoping to capitalize on the hyperactivity of the female blogosphere that seemed to be contrained by traditional and fragmented online distribution channel. Thus, with a bit of Netvibes sauce, the team developed a platform ressembling a mashup of women's magazine content with web 2.0 social features: think Elle Magazine à la Twitter and Facebook.
 
Disposable Content On The Non-Disposable iPad Top
The iPad has now been out in the U.S. for exactly one month. So where does it stand? Well, it’s an initial hit out of the gate with a million units sold in less than half the amount of time it took Apple to sell a million iPhones. It’s still too early to tell the long-term impact it will have on the various industries it touches, but having used it for the past couple of weeks outside of the initial launch hype, I keep coming back to the same few thoughts. One of them is the way it alters media consumption. Yes, this was talked about ad-naseum before the device even launched. Depending on what you read, the iPad would either be the savior of print media, or the final straw that destroyed these companies. But now, having actually used the device to consume media these past few weeks, I’m more intrigued by this idea than I ever have been. And particularly disposable media. That is, newspapers and magazines. When I was younger I used to love reading magazines. I would come home from school, open one up, and not put it down until I was finished. I loved the mixture of (relatively) current news, professional prose, and engaging visuals. But the Internet changed everything. I can’t even remember when the last time was that I picked up a magazine. It’s too bad because while the web is better in some regard (timeliness of the news), it’s much worse in others (the presentation). The same is true with newspapers. They up the current news and downplay the visuals, but it’s the same idea. I rarely read those anymore either — maybe if I’m on a plane. Both have been getting murdered by the Internet. And yet, I actually do read a lot of content from magazines and the web, I just read it online — for free. But I’m not necessarily opposed to paying for content, as I used to do with magazines or newspapers, I’m just opposed to paying for content as it currently stands on the web. If some time and effort was put into the presentation, I would pay again. And that’s where the iPad comes in. A few of my favorite early apps on the iPad have been the magazine and newspaper apps. While New York Times and USA Today keep things relatively simple with stripped-down versions of their actual papers that they give away for free as apps, The Wall Street Journal will gladly give you the whole thing — provided you pay for it. WSJ wants you to pay $3.99 a week (just over $200 a year). With it, you get access to not only that day’s paper (in iPad-form, of course), but also a 7-day archive of content, and special content. The app has been in the top 20 apps on in the App Store for the past month. While the app itself is free, the amount of free content you have access to is limited, so it seems hard to believe that people would download it without wanting to pay for the full version. That suggests that the paper might be doing fairly well so far with the app. But then there are the nearly 2,000 reviews of the app, which give it an average of two stars (out of five). Nearly 1,200 of those are one-star reviews, the majority of which seem to be pissed off about the subscription pricing. Others complained about the clunky subscription system. I have to agree there. Unlike the elegant in-app purchasing systems set up by many other apps, WSJ’s feels foreign and arduous. Naturally, WSJ uses this because it ties into the same system that they use to charge for regular web access to their site as well. Then there are the magazines. My two favorite apps of this nature are Time and Popular Science. Whereas the newspapers tend to be more straight-up versions of the paper ported to the iPad, both of these magazines clearly had a lot of effort put into them to make them look and perform great on the device. Both, for example, provide a slightly different, but still tailored experience depending on if you are using the iPad in landscape or portrait mode. Both also contain rich media that looks great. Time, in particular, makes great use of videos that add to the content. This is obviously something that would be impossible in the print version. It should go without saying that the presentation is much better than it is on the web. Something else these digital magazines do well: advertisements. I never thought I’d see myself write this, but I actually do not mind the ads in these apps. In fact, most of them are interactive in some way, and I can guarantee you that I’ve interacted with them more than I have with a web ad in years. Whereas almost all web ads look like absolute garbage, these look like fairly nicely done print ads that have this extra element to them. I still can’t believe I’m writing this — especially since the norm nowadays is that if there are ads, the content is likely to be free. But that’s not the case at all with these magazines on the iPad. And yet, I’m still paying, and still happy with the result. It’s funny, at first, when I looked at this price of these magazines (both Time and Popular Science are $4.99 an issue) I thought there was no way I would pay for either. Then I thought about it for a second. Actually, that’s about the exact same price I would pay on a newsstand. So why was I so hesitant? Because I’m not used to paying for content on a computer device. And not only that — while I’m used to paying for apps on my iPhone and iPad, I’m not used to paying for apps that I’m just going to delete when I’m done with them. The idea of disposable apps hasn’t really come up yet in the App Store. But because Time was creating a new, stand-alone apps for each new issue, that’s exactly what it was creating. That is, until this week when they wisely launched a singular Time app that allows you to download new issues as in-app purchases. This is what Popular Science uses as well. This method is much better. This way I don’t have to delete an app each time after I use it. Or worse, keep them and have them clutter up my screen. Still, I’m hardly the only one who has suffered from initial sticker shock. Whereas the WSJ had two stars, the Time app has 1.5 stars. Why? Hundreds of people giving the app one star because they say the price is outrageous. The same is true for Popular Science. The same is true for Men’s Health. The problem is that fans of these magazines often subscribe to them, and end up paying something like a dollar or less an issue when all is said and done. But there isn’t yet a subscription system in place for these magazines. So a year of Popular Science will cost you $60 on the iPad, rather than $12 if you subscribed to it regularly. But help is coming. As Apple 2.0 detailed over the weekend , in the next month or so, Apple will allow these magazines to start offering subscriptions. The plan then, is to sell a year’s worth of Popular Science on the iPad for $30 — half off. The other problem, of course, is that most of these magazines have their content (at least some of it) available online, for free. Hell, you can just point the Safari web browser on your iPad there and take it all in for free. But again, I think there is something to be said for the presentation these apps offer. And remember, this is just the very first generation of them — they will get even better. And none seem certain about the right pricing model either. Plenty of the commenters in the App Store are suggesting digital issues of magazines should be only a dollar or less considering there is no print, and there is no postage. Of course, there is still extensive graphical work, and writing, that has to be paid for. And the ads, while cool, are undoubtedly nowhere near paying for all of that. But maybe it’s not a bad idea to cut prices and try to get circulation way up. If Apple’s App Store has taught us anything, it’s that micro-transactions are an after-thought. A $4.99 app I may worry about a little, but a $0.99 in-app issue, I wouldn’t think twice about. The problem with that is that if one publisher does it, all of them will likely have to do it. And if it doesn’t work for one of them, the great iPad experiment could end quickly. Again, this is still the early days for all of this. And I do believe these publishers (moreso in the magazine industry, but we’ll give the newspaper industry some time to catch up) are onto something. All I know is that I haven’t read this much print media in years. Or, let me rephrase that: I haven’t paid to read this much print media in years. And yet I’m happy to do it. It’s a weird feeling. CrunchBase Information iPad Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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