Monday, March 28, 2011

Y! Alert: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from TechCrunch

Google's Android Bear-Hug Comes To LG: New LG/Nexus Tablets Coming Soon? Top
Every few months Google embraces another CE company. It began with HTC and G1, giving that manufacturer resources and manpower enough to produce a powerful entrant in the smartphone race. It continued with Motorola for the Droid and has cycled through to Samsung for a brief period. This bear hug essentially gives the manufacturer access to Google’s engineers and pre-release code and leaves everyone else out in the street, waiting for a software update. Now Google has set its sights on LG and, if rumor is correct, it means a Nexus S tablet is on its way from LG running a pitch perfect version of Honeycomb. It also means that anyone with a 2.x Android Tablet, the Gal Tabs included, will be severely disappointed. Think of this action by Google as akin to training one athlete in a race to an Olympic level and then pitting her against amateurs. The amateurs could still win, but it’s going to be tough. Read more…
 
Apple Sets Dates For WWDC: June 6 Through June 10 At Moscone, SF Top
Apple this morning announced that it will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) June 6 through June 10 at San Francisco's Moscone West. The company promises to “unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS”, demo a bunch of apps and host more than 100 technical sessions presented by Apple engineers. (More coming) CrunchBase Information Apple Information provided by CrunchBase
 
After Visa, American Express Takes On PayPal With Digital Payments Platform Top
Following in the footsteps of rival Visa , American Express this morning announced a digital payment and commerce platform dubbed Serve , enabling U.S. consumers to make purchases and person-to-person payments online, via mobile phones and at AmEx’s network of millions of merchants. Serve integrates a variety of payment options into a single account that can be funded from a bank account, debit, credit or charge card, or by receiving money from another Serve account. The platform is available immediately to anyone in the U.S. and is expected to launch into other international markets over the coming year. American Express has released mobile applications for iOS and Android. Serve accounts can also be accessed through Facebook . It won’t stop there, says Dan Schulman, Group President at American Express: "We intend to quickly evolve the Serve platform by adding new features and functionality as we learn from consumer and merchant experiences. To encourage a broad cross-section of people to experience the benefits and convenience of Serve, we are working with a range of partners to integrate Serve as a payment method and deliver customized offers, and we will waive most consumer fees for the next six months.” Indeed, in the first six months Serve will charge no fees to open an account, for P2P transactions, use social network widgets or anything else. After that period, it will cost 2.9% + 30c/per load to put money into Serve accounts (discounted to 0% for cash, debit and ACH) and $2.00 for ATM cash withdrawals. Interestingly, Serve also offers users the ability to create, manage, and specify sub-accounts for friends, family members or colleagues. Linked to the master account, they allow users to set spending profiles for “everything from children's allowances to dog walker fees”. Serve is the result of technology obtained by American Express through the $300 million acquisition of PayPal competitor Revolution Money in early 2010. CrunchBase Information American Express PayPal Visa Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Heartsy Is Groupon For Etsy Top
From the why-didn’t-anyone-think-of-this-before department: meet Heartsy , which is basically a Groupon for Etsy , i.e. a daily deals site for handmade items sold on Etsy stores. The concept should be overly familiar to you: registered users get sent exclusive deals on handmade items sold on Etsy by email. Acquired coupons, or vouchers as Heartsy refers to them, can be redeemed at the Etsy store that sponsored the deal ( example ). If you’re an Etsy seller, no need to do the math on it to see if it’s worth you while or not – someone already did that for you. (Spoiler alert: it depends). Like many other daily deal sites, you get cash every time you refer a new user. Heartsy also cleverly lets you vote on what type of deals you think they should be running in the future. Currently, Heartsy's services are free, but don’t expect that to last long: a transaction fee will be added to the program in the near future. CrunchBase Information Etsy Information provided by CrunchBase
 
An App By Any Other Name … Top
“One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn’t dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy.” – Apple exec Jean Louis Gassée on the naming of Apple Why is Color named “Color”? “A tribute to Apple’s color logo from the Apple II. This computer changed my life when I was seven (also a reference to another company name I’ve used.) My dad bought one from ComputerCraft run by Billy Ladin in Houston. He was one of the first computer resellers back in 1977. In an odd twist, I meet him in an elevator 15 years later and worked for him. He introduced me to the Web. Working at Apple was a dream. Color’s name is a tribute to Apple.” – Bill Nguyen, Color founder on why he chose the name Color Reading Semil Shah’s post on group messaging this morning, I was struck by the sheer numbers and diversity of the startup names scattered throughout: Yobongo, Disco, SocialCam, SoundCloud, Beluga, GroupMe, Fast Society, Rabbly, Whatsapp, Kik, textPlus, Convore, SMSGupShup, MessageParty, TextSlide, Bump Technologies, Color Labs and so on, all contenders in the saturated mobile social space. Some like MessageParty or textPlus had names that were actually related to their product, but many like Yobongo, Beluga and Disco had only a tenuous connection. It’s now pretty clear the app ecosystem has gone mainstream: People talk about apps the way they used to talk about music or drugs ( “Omg have you guys tried COLOR. Omg you have to try it. Omg we’re on it right now” ). And naming your startup has become like naming your band — An intricate dance between a multitude of contributing metaphoric and literal factors. So which approach, picking something random or actually related to what you do, makes more sense? @chrysb Chrys Bader You can tell it's a bubble because startups are raising so much money they can actually afford vowels in their domain names. about 12 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone Retweet Reply Two notable app launches this week highlighted how exactly an app’s name plays into public perception. The most visible instance of this was the launch of Color , an ubiquitous noun/verb name picked by Bill Nguyen and Peter Pham for their photosharing app with a hefty $41 million in funding. While initial complaints held that the app was unsearchable in both the Android and iPhone App Store and on Google because of its common name, that problem now seems to have been solved on Google. Perhaps all the inbound links from news and other sites are responsible for the fact that the service is now the eighth result for the word “color”? Color also somehow went from being invisible to being the first app to appear in the Apple App Store under the “color” search term (I’m hearing Android is still having issues ). Color’s name, while initially striking some people as slightly off if only for all its other connotations, is valid in that it accurately describes a core function of the Color Labs product, namely the fact that people are sharing images (a collection of colored pixels) through the app. The Color guys tell me (and Quora above) that they first came up with the name Color in a tribute to Apple’s original reverse-color logo and then bought the domain name for $350K .  In order to appeal to English speakers in other regions, they also bought the domain name Colour.com and redirected it to Color.com. And yes, this did not stave off complaints. @alisontan Alison Tan The 'Color' app isn't spelt the way I like it… #COLOUR about 13 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone Retweet Reply Contrast Color’s name with that of the other hot five-letter app of the moment, Disco . Currently it’s unclear whether Google made the $255K purchase of the domain Disco.com for a Slide-related purpose, or just to have on hand (Google has not given me a straight answer in any of my emails). If the latter is the case then it wouldn’t be the first time Google stockpiled domains ( bayareaburritos.com anyone?) for future use. Whether purposefully acquired or not, the name Disco seems to have a less of a direct relation to its core product than Color. While a disco (nightclub) does bring people together in a sense, the noun has absolutely nothing to do with group messaging, and I think users have already picked up on this distinction. All in all the choice to use Disco as a name for a group messaging app is incongruous, especially when you consider that Google also owns Hello.com. “This one fits to the product  #color , This one doesn’t fit at all  #disco ,” tweeted Berrehili Réda. “I don’t know, when I first heard about google’s product #disco, I thought they had finally released their music streaming service…” @mm Morgan Missen Google has owned Hello.com forever. I'm surprised they didn't use that name for Disco and wonder why they're saving it. http://t.co/lYApre9 about 8 hours ago via web Retweet Reply While it’s possible that the name Disco was already on the drawing board at Slide pre-Google acquisition, if Disco’s makers first chose a vague name and then built out a product for release, then they wouldn’t be alone. Private photo-sharing service Path still called itself Path (at Path.io) back when it was a list-making tool. Guess they thought the Path designation still held after the photo-sharing pivot. In a seminal post on the subject, VC Rich Barton holds in that making up a new word (like Kleenex or Yobongo) is much more powerful than trying to appropriate a already existing literal word like Color or Disco. But if you’d have to go with an existing word, I’d go with the one that has a strong tie-in to the actual product. Then again there’s always exceptions. No matter which apocryphal  origin story you believe, the word Apple has nothing to do with computers.  “If somebody had told me in 1970 that Apple would be the name of the top tech company, I would have laughed to death,” said VC Dani Nofal. Yes, and if someone had told me in 1990 that someone would name their company Color in homage to that top computer company Apple, I too would have chuckled. Color probably hopes it’ll be laughing all the way to an extended featured position in the App Store. @alexia Alexia Tsotsis Are you there Steve? It's me, Color. about 10 hours ago via Seesmic Desktop Retweet Reply CrunchBase Information Color Apple
 

CREATE MORE ALERTS:

Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted

Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope

Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more

News - Only the news you want, delivered!

Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more

Weather - Get today's weather conditions




You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)