Friday, March 25, 2011

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NYT Updates Its iPhone App With Push Alerts For Breaking News, New Subscription Plan Top
The New York Times , struggling to find its place digitally, has just released an iPhone update today, three days before its paywall plan is put into action. Well what’s new? In addition to an interface touch up and the option to swipe between stories, the app now has Recently Viewed items at the top of it’s Sections section, followed in order by Photos and Video, which were not at the top before. The update purportedly will add more videos and slideshows to the app, so the re-prioritization of these options makes sense (and also cents, as these two content types have proven to be the most addicting for readers). The NYT Blogs like Dealbook and Media Decoder have (finally) been relegated to their own section, at the bottom of the app. Most importantly, in this age of Twitter, the app now has push notifications for breaking news (which users can enable in Settings) which means that you’ll actually be reminded to use the NYT app. Twitter share and Facebook share options are also available. These notifications and reminders could be crucial to user engagement once the NYT paywall goes up on March 28, as only the Top News section of the app will remain free and users who want to enter other sections like Blogs or Video will have to become digital subscribers starting at $15 for every four weeks (print subscribers will have unlimited digital access). You can find the update in the App Store here. CrunchBase Information New York Times Information provided by CrunchBase
 
A Look At The Uptime Of 50 Popular APIs Top
APIs are like websites: they are available most of the time, but unfortunately not all the time. Website and application performance monitoring startup WatchMouse monitored the uptime of 50 of the most popular APIs (as ranked by ProgrammableWeb ) for a month to see which are the most reliable – and which ones are rather flaky. WatchMouse, which also publishes API statuses in real time at API-Status.com , found that ten of them performed without a single hitch between February 16th to March 17th, including goo.gl, Quora, eBay, Google Maps and Basecamp. A number of APIs, namely those from Digg, GeoNames, Gowalla, Posterous and Eventful performed rather poorly, but ailing Myspace takes the cake in terms of unreliability. Needless to say, a lot of websites and applications rely on APIs for their own businesses, so uptime is important to avoid that nasty domino effect to kick in. The methodology for testing the sites for this particular report includes one simple API call plus check for a valid result, which means that it’s not exactly an in-depth functional test of the full APIs, but could still be used to evaluate whether one should rely on certain APIs for business purposes. The full report is available here . The API checks were performed every 5 minutes from the 56 WatchMouse monitoring stations worldwide. Errors are used to count towards the percentage of availability or uptime for each of the sites. CrunchBase Information WatchMouse Information provided by CrunchBase
 
LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman Personally Thanks First Million Members For Being Early Adopters Top
As you may have heard, professional social network LinkedIn passed 100 million members this past week. Amid an upcoming IPO, this was a pretty significant milestone for the social network. And today, LinkedIn co-founder and chairman Reid Hoffman has sent the first million members an email, personally thanking them for joining the network in its early days. TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld received a note (he is member #261,186), which we’ve embedded in the post. The note reads: I want to personally thank you because you were one of LinkedIn’s first million members (member number [ ] in fact!*). In any technology adoption lifecycle, there are the early adopters, those who help lead the way. That was you. For the few users who were one of the first 100,000 members, LinkedIn sent a similar note thanking them for being “innovators” (Federated Media founder John Battelle was member #74,282). LinkedIn, which launched in 2003, says that it is now being used in over 200 countries, with more than half of its users originating from outside the U.S. To be exact, the U.S. has 44 million LinkedIn members, and there are 56 million members outside of the U.S. While the note itself isn’t monumental news, a somewhat personalized congratulatory note from the founder and chairman of LinkedIn is a nice touch for the network’s users. CrunchBase Information LinkedIn Information provided by CrunchBase
 
TechCrunch Giveaway: Xbox Kinect Package #TechCrunch Top
For today’s giveaway, we are giving a Xbox Kinect package away to one lucky reader. This package comes with the Xbox 360, a Kinect, and a game. Microsoft broke records by selling 8 million Kinects in 60 days and the Kinect has become the world's fastest growing game console. Want it? Just follow these steps to enter. 1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page: 2) Then do one of the following: - Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TechCrunch hashtag) - Or leave us a comment below The contest starts now and ends tomorrow, March 26th at 7:30pm PST. Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will choose at random and contact the winner this weekend with more details. Anyone in the world is eligible, as long as you can receive delivered packages. Good luck!
 
Facebook Gives Seedcamp Startups Similar VIP Access As Y Combinator's Top
Last year Facebook announced that it will be working to help Y Combinator companies create "transformative social experiences", giving them preferential treatment and access to company resources. By no means a guarantee for success, but still a big deal. Today Facebook is announcing a partnership with European startup accelerator and fund Seedcamp . Seedcamp startups will receive product, technical, and design support as well as early access to beta products and programs on the Facebook Platform.
 

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