The latest from TechCrunch
- yaM Labs Secures $500K To Take Meeting Management To The Cloud
- SohoOS Begins Rolling Out An About.me For Small Businesses
- The Pros And Cons Of Facebook Comments
- Charlie Sheen, Now On Twitter At @CharlieSheen
| yaM Labs Secures $500K To Take Meeting Management To The Cloud | Top |
| yaM Labs , a Russian startup not to be confused with Yammer, has secured $500k from Foresight Venture s. The company has developed Cloud-based software to make meetings - both face-to-face and virtual - more efficient by enabling participants to collaborate on the planning, running, and execution of a meeting. The premise being that traditional offline tools make for a lot of wasted time because meetings lack focus and 'memory' - you have to be there to know what went down and even if you were, often the answer is not a lot or there at least exists no actual record. Shifting these tools to the Cloud - the yaM app runs completely in a web browser - and improving them along the way is supposed to help with this. The startup broke cover at our recent TechCrunch Moscow event . | |
| SohoOS Begins Rolling Out An About.me For Small Businesses | Top |
| On the heels of its recently announced $1.75M round led by Mangrove , SohoOS is today announcing the roll-out of SohoOS.me , a new product that allows SMBs to create simple business profile pages for themselves—very similar to how About.me allows individuals to do so. Creating a profile is painless. Businesses can include their logo and contact information, as well as links to their Twitter profiles, Facebook Pages and collateral, for example, PDF’s and videos. Businesses can also customize the look & feel (see screenshots). On the face of it, it’s a simple product, however, it could have significant impact on the company and its customers. Here’s how… From the customer perspective, beyond the fact that these profile pages serve as ‘business cards’, every page has a built-in contact form. Instead of treating it as a simple contact form though, SohoOS built the functionality to serve as lead-generation for its customers. This means that when information is plugged-in, it’s pushed into the CRM portion of SohoOs, as a lead to be followed-up on. Very convenient and effective for small businesses. It’s also the only way the product can be truly differentiated from the plethora of quick-and-dirty yet useful website building services out there ( Wix , Yola , Jimdo , Weebly , Webs and Moonfruit leap to mind, but there are of course loads more). For SohoOS itself, the new product offers a couple of upsides. First, if there is customer uptake for the product, the company will find itself sitting on a directory of small businesses that could be monetized in a number of ways (advertising, lead-gen, etc.). Second, considering that SohoOS is based on a freemium model, the product which is today offered free of charge, could be offered at a premium for the option of allowing small business to host their profile pages on custom URLs. A win-win for both SohoOS and its customers that could become a nice little money maker. Additional functionality will continue to be rolled-out, the first being more themes and the ability to embed the contact (lead) form externally. CrunchBase Information SohoOS Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| The Pros And Cons Of Facebook Comments | Top |
| Today, Facebook rolled out a new commenting system for blogs and third-party sites. We’ve implemented it here on TechCrunch, and after a few hours of the system being live it is obvious that it has its share of pros and cons. Readers have certainly noticed, and there is already a ton debate about whether this is good or bad for the Internet. It is certainly not perfect. Facebook comments don’t support Twitter or Google logins. It doesn’t yet allow sites to archive their comments to make backups (although an API for that is forthcoming I am told), and switching away from Facebook comments after a few months on the system looks like it will be a hassle (data portability anyone?). Some corporations block Facebook, which kills it as a commenting system for that subset of users. In one fell swoop it could hurt Disqus , which is a great startup that’s been perfecting its commenting system for years. And there are lots of little bugs we’ve noticed that hopefully will be fixed soon (we were manually moderating every comment on TechCrunch until a few minutes ago, and you still can’t see a comment count at the top of each post like you could before). On the other hand, it also has some real advantages. Primary among these is that it requires commenters to use their real identities. In the past few hours, most of the anonymous trolls who have come to call TechCrunch comments a second home are gone. Of course, some people don’t want to comment with their real names for good reason (they want to speak freely without fear of reprisals), but for the most part in practice anonymity was abused. It was used mostly as a shield to hide behind and throw out invective. Have the trolls really vanished or will they return? I certainly hope they are gone. We have fewer comments in general on most posts today, but the conversations are much more civil and interesting. The other main benefit is social virality. When you comment on TechCrunch, your comment also appears in your Facebook stream with a link back to the post (unless you opt out of that option in the comment box). It would be better if the link went right to your comment instead of to the post in general, but that is a feature that can be added. It brings in more readers from Facebook who are pulled in to see what their friends said. So what are the results? So far today, Facebook is our No. 2 referring site, after AOL (thank you, Justin Bieber ). It is beating out Twitter, which is usually our top source of referring traffic. This viral effect would be twice as powerful, of course, if people could use their Twitter IDs as well. Pros Real names and identities greatly reduces the number of trolls and anonymous cowards in comments. Social virality boosts traffic by creating a feedback loop between Facebook and participating sites. Friends pull in their friends, creating a social entry point to your site. Automatic sign-in if you already signed into Facebook elsewhere, lowers the barriers to commenting. Most “liked” comments get voted to the top. It also knows who your friends are, so you will see those comments first. Cons No support for Twitter or Google IDs, which leaves out the other half of the social Web. No backups and other lock-ins will make it hard for sites to leave. If you work somewhere that blocks Facebook, you are out of luck. Your friends might be surprised to find their replies in your Facebook News stream reproduced on another site’s comments. Expect a backlash . Moderation bugs, no view counts at the top of posts or ways to highlight site owners/writers in comments. What do you think are the biggest pros and cons? @ScepticGeek Mahendra Palsule I don't think FB offers any backup for comments, unlike Disqus does with WordPress. Also, issue of single-point-of-failure. about 19 hours ago via TweetDeck Retweet Reply @alexia Alexia Tsotsis The worst thing about Facebook Comments is that now all our comments are people bitching about Facebook Comments. about 16 hours ago via Seesmic Desktop Retweet Reply CrunchBase Information Facebook DISQUS Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Charlie Sheen, Now On Twitter At @CharlieSheen | Top |
| Because if I don’t write this somebody else will: After blazing a colorful trail through some obscure radio show, The Today Show, Good Morning America, TMZ, CNN and so on, media obsession of the moment Charlie Sheen has brought his antics to Twitter. It looks like Sheen was just set up with a “Verified” account at @CharlieSheen. @everydaydude Aaron Durand Somebody just helped set up @ CharlieSheen . The things I do for you guys. about 15 hours ago via web Retweet Reply While the account does seem pretty boring and lacks an image currently, I’m guessing that it was set up as more of a counter measure to prevent parody accounts like the one below (which sneakily uses a capital “I” instead of an “L” in Charlie) from continuing to, um, parody unchallenged. It’s testament to the times we live in that Sheen or someone on behalf of Sheen would consider Twitter an important enough arena to pin down. I mean, it’s not like he’s worried about his Myspace profile. In any case, “Followed” — By me and everybody else in the world. Update: It took the account less than an hour to amass 100K followers, all awaiting what promises to be a very heavily covered first tweet. Update 2: And he’s tweeted! And I called it. Also: His bio? “Unemployed Winner….,” referring to his now signature catchphrase. Update 3: Curiouser and curiouser. @TechmemeFH Techmeme Firehose The @ AdlyAds and @ Twitter team signed up Charlie Sheen to Twitter today. 250,000 followers in… http://j.mp/gxKuP0 http://techme.me/BF1G about 9 hours ago via Techmeme Retweet Reply Thanks: Samir CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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