Wednesday, November 2, 2011

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Amazon's Flow iPhone App Brings Augmented Reality To Barcode Scanning Top
A9.comAmazon subsidiary A9.com has just launched a new augmented reality iPhone app—Flow Powered by Amazon. Flow uses augmented reality to help users explore and discover tens of millions of products in a real world setting, including books, DVDs, packaged electronics and toys, to give shoppers interactive product information about the items around them. Here's how it works. Once downloaded, you can point the app toward a book, video game, CD, DVD or other product with a UPC barcode. When the app recognized the product, it displays the Amazon.com product information, including the option to play multimedia content and read customer reviews.
 
Infographic: The Mobile World In 60 Seconds Top
mobile60smallTo say that things move quickly in the mobile space is putting it rather mildly, but an infographic from mobile ad exchange Mobclix aims to highlight what goes down every 60 seconds. In case you were curious, in the time it took me to write out that first sentence, over 23,000 iOS apps were downloaded from Apple's App Store.
 
Twitter Tests "Top News" And "Top People" At Top Of Search Results Top
Twitter _ Search - twitterIn what appears to be a test among some users, Twitter is adding "Top News" and "Top People" results at the top of its realtime search results. When you search for a hot story like "gmail" (which came out with a buggy iPhone app today) or even "Humanoid" (a new startup I just wrote about), you will see a highlighted boxed result with a link to a top news story along with a thumbnail image from that article or blog post. Similarly, a search for anyone who is Twitter-famous will turn up a "Top People" result with their Twitter profile picture and a link to their stream. I first noticed this earlier today, and I thought it was a paid search ad. But it is actually a way to help users discover the most popular content and people. Presumably, the Top News items are based on retweets and some sort of whitelist Twitter keeps for news sources. Although it seems like the Top News story sometimes rotates to another source if you repeat your search.
 
Siri, Why Are You So Underwhelming? Top
underwhelmingWhen Apple first unveiled the iPhone 4S, there was one feature that left every jaw in the room on the floor. Her name is Siri. Scott Forstall demoed the personal assistant at Apple's media event, and the entire presentation went off without a hitch. Then, as expected, Apple released their commercials, which were equally impressive. In short, everyone and their brother was amped for Siri. Then the iPhone 4S was released. Save for some battery life issues and my own mini-rant on Siri's gender and humility, there really weren't many complaints. Now, however, I find myself more bothered by my own expectations than anything else. Why? Because Siri isn't perfect, and perfect is what I expected.
 
Venuelabs Is Launching VenueRank, A "Klout For Storefronts" Top
venuerank-by-venuelabsVenuelabs, a company which got its start as Valuevine before a pivot in early 2011, is launching a new service called VenueRank this week at the Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco. VenueRank, simply put, operates somewhat like a "Klout for storefronts," as it allows brands with multiple stores to compare those against each other or against their competitors using a single, at-a-glance score.
 
Flurry: China's App Usage Has Gone Through The Roof Top
AppSessionGrowth_Top10Countries-resized-600China has the most cell phone users in the world, and according to mobile app analytics firm Flurry, they're using apps more than they ever have before. For their latest report, Flurry tracked mobile app sessions (essentially, instances of use) across 120,000 apps from January to October 2011. Among other things, they were able to single out the ten countries where apps sessions have increased the most.
 
With Backing From Google Ventures, Humanoid Brings Robot Supervision To Crowdsourced Tasks Top
HumanoidWorkers of the world, get ready to meet your robot supervisors. A new service called Humanoid wants to turn you into a "robot-supervised army" that it will rent out for $5 an hour. It already has 20,000 workers lined up for today's launch. Humanoid comes out of a startup called Speakertext, which uses a mixture of automated techniques and crowdsourced labor to transcribe online videos (we use Speakertext for TCTV). Speakertext will continue as a product of Humanoid, which is shifting focus to helping companies with their software development. Google Ventures is putting in a few hundred thousand dollars in another seed round (the company raised $600,000 in February from Mitch Kapor and others).
 
Yahoo Brings Intelligent Social TV App IntoNow To The iPad; Adds Content Feeds And More Top
intoSocial TV app IntoNow, which Yahoo acquired earlier this year for $20 to $30 million, is heading to the iPad today with the launch of a native app. In case you aren't familiar with IntoNow, the service IntoNow, a new service that allows you to tell your friends what television shows and movies you're watching in realtime. But unlike other media "check-in" services, you do this simply by hitting a button and letting your phone listen to what you're watching. It's that audio tracing technology that made it an appealing purchase for Yahoo, compared to the plethora of other social check-in apps.
 
New Gmail App For iPhone Is Unusable, Shows Errors Upon Launch Top
gmail-iconWell, that was a big disappointment. Google just unveiled its first native application for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch this morning, and the app is a mess. It's unusable. It doesn't even launch properly, displaying an error message upon startup.
 
Angie's List Sets Price Range For IPO At $11 To $13 Per Share; Valued At Over $600M Top
angies-listAngie's List, which offers consumers a way to review and rate doctors, contractors and service companies on the Web, has just set the terms for its IPO. In a new filing, the company revealed that it aims to raise as much as $131.4 million in the offering and has priced its IPO in the range of $11 to $13 per share. The company will list on the Nasdaq under the symbol "ANGI." At the high end of the range, Angie's List would be valued at nearly $700 million. Angie's List launched in 1995 with a focus on local home, yard and car services, sits at the intersection of local search, user-generated content and subscription-based services. To date, Angie's List has raised nearly $100 million from Battery Ventures, T. Rowe Price, City Investment Group, Cardinal Ventures and others.
 
Google Launches Native Gmail App For iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, Faces Instant Backlash Top
ios2Google is launching a new native Gmail application for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch today, which is now available in the iTunes App Store. As recently revealed by TechCrunch writer MG Siegler on his personal blog, one of the app's most important features is its ability to do push notifications. The app will also include search, autocomplete, support for attachments, priority inbox access, labels and other standard email features like archiving, deleting and reporting spam.
 
Maybe BBM Music Isn't So Silly After All Top
BBM-Music-1With BBM Music, RIM has thrown their hat into the already crowded mobile music ring. The new service's focus on leveraging your social connections to score some new tunes is a novel twist, but it begs a significant question. Why would RIM release an ostensibly limited music service when you can shell out a few extra dollars a month for unlimited access?
 
Ex-Google Reader Product Manager Posts Scathing Review Of Reader Redesign Top
screen_500 (1)Former Google Reader Product Manager Brian Shih has posted a scathing, but fairly accurate, review of the update to Google Reader. The update, which removed Reader's own social sharing features in favor of Google+, was unpopular among Google Reader's most active users because it destroyed their niche community built up over the years. But in Shih's opinion, that's only one of its problems. Just as bad is the new visual style, he says, referring to the stark, black-and-white user interface Google has been rolling out to all its products in recent weeks. Says Shih: "it's as if whoever made the update did so without ever actually using the product to, you know, read something,"
 
Here's The First GTA:V Trailer And It's Spectacular Top
gta-v-logo1Rockstar Games just released the first trailer for the upcoming GTA V game and it's good to be home. Grand Theft Auto V is living large back in the beautiful state of San Andreas. The big city of Los Santos, the lovely ladies, and the fast cars -- it's all there. The game still doesn't have a release date but don't expect it this year. However, there will likely be a steady stream of trailers, teasers and random marketing until it's hyped to unreasonable levels.
 
Take A Peek At China's Version Of The Motorola Droid RAZR Top
Chinese RAZRThe Droid RAZR has certainly been the talk of the the town lately, with its 7.1mm waist line, 1.2GHz dual-core processor and uniquely beautiful design. According to the leaks, the RAZR should be gracing shelves by November 10 both here in the States and in the UK. But what about China?
 
Gigya Launches Platform To Give Businesses Access To Users' Complete Social Identities Top
368422_gigya_logo_medium1Many companies have begun to realize that social is not just a new channel or a new fad, it's a new way of doing business. But learning the ropes, how to use social networks and social channels, and optimize and tailor social features for one's business, is easier said than done. This is where Gigya enters the equation. The startup offers a SaaS technology (or a social CRM platform, if you will) to help businesses make their websites social, integrating their online appendages with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and consolidating the best social features and widgets into one solution. While the startup has made a play into social commerce with widgets to integrate e-Commerce platforms with social networks, etc., Gigya is today announcing the launch of an important (and perhaps somewhat intimidating) new technology that has big data implications. Social data implications, of course. The tech has been dubbed the "Identity Management Platform", and essentially, it enables businesses to better manage user data by providing them with complete, permission-based access to a user's social, profile, and behavior data culled from activity on their websites.
 
Womply's New Deals Startup Loads Local Offers Onto Your Credit Cards Top
womply-logoWomply's "Efortless Offers" is a new offers platform that links local merchants' discounts to all major credit and debit cards, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover. Live now in the D.C. area, with plans to roll out to five additional markets by early January, the service feels like a daily deal site for consumers, but works like targeted advertising for local merchants. The key differences between Womply and something like Groupon are that the offers are personalized for the consumers and are directed towards specific audiences. They don't require a certain number of buyers in order to "tip," and there are no coupons to print.
 
Cloudera Founder Debuts Big Data Management And Analysis Platform WibiData With Backing From Eric Schmidt Top
wibiExclusive: Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia is debuting his new startup today, called Odiago. Odiago develops a product called WibiData, which leverages Apache Hadoop to manage and analyze large amounts of data. And the company is launching with a number of major backers including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, and SV Angel. For background, Bisciglia founded Cloudera, a developer and commercial distributor of Hadoop, the open source software that powers the data processing engines of the worldʼs largest and most popular web sites. Prior to Cloudera, Bisciglia was a senior engineer at Google where he founded and led Google's Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, which provides Google hosted computational resources to facilitate education and research to universities around the world.
 
Email Security Startup Agari Raises $2.5M From Alloy, Battery, Greylock And First Round Top
AgariStealthy email security startup Agari has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding led by Alloy Ventures with participation from Battery Ventures, First Round Capital and Greylock Partners. Agari's technology, which was developed by former IronPort/Cisco employees, assesses, visualizes, and protects against email threats to brands, such as phishing and other fraud. The startup collects terabytes of data to figure out what are the legitimate online identities in email and which ones consumers shouldn't see in first place. The startup partners with email companies and senders to make sense out of what the company calls the 'wild west of email.'
 
Loiloscope 2 Lets You Edit HD Videos In Real Time, Now Offers More Features Top
LoiLo_CompanylogoOver a year passed since we covered powerful video editor LoiLoScope, but instead of resting on its laurels, maker LoiLo has kept innovating on the product. Aptly named LoiLoScope 2, the updated software for Windows PCs (system requirements) still has the same key value proposition: combining an easy-to-use UI (geared towards pros and amateurs alike) and a ton of editing functions with a technical "killer feature" (instead of letting the CPU do the heavy lifting, the editor uses the GPU for video processing). Thanks to the "GPGPU editing engine", LoiLoScope makes it possible to edit and preview videos in HD in real-time. In other words, users don't need to wait for the software to process and then reflect the changes they make to the videos but can track them without delay (LoiLoScope supports a long list of input and output video formats).
 

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