Friday, March 9, 2012

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Cater2.me May Be Feeding Your Favorite Startup Top
cater2me logoStartup Cater2.me is trying to answer one of the rarely-discussed challenges facing any company that wants to keep a large workforce happy — feeding them meals that aren't boring. Cater2.me was founded in late 2010 and has already attracted some positive press attention. Now, its client list includes some startups worth bragging about, such as Yelp, Eventbrite, Tagged, Square, Dropbox, Twilio, Causes, Posterous, and Heyzap. The company is serving 40,000 lunches a month (including many to non-startups, of course.)
 
Mobcaster Crowdfunds Its First TV Season Top
mobcasterIt's famously difficult to get a TV show on the air — much less one that still matches your initial vision. That's why startup Mobcaster has launched a new platform where creators can ask fans directly for the financial support needed to produce their shows. The startup just had its first funding success story — The Weatherman, an Australian-produced comedy about, yes, a weatherman, which just raised the funding for its first season. The production company set a goal of $72,500, and it raised $73,975. (As the team notes at the beginning of the pilot episode, traditional television episodes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, so that's a tiny budget for a full season.)
 
PayPal's New Digital Wallet Will Offer Personalized Deals, Flexible Payments, And More Top
PayPal-1We've been hearing recently about PayPal's in-store payments platform for large retailers (which will soon be rolled out to small businesses as well). But we haven't seen PayPal do much in the past few months with its plans for its digital wallet on the consumer side. We know PayPal has a major vision for how payments will be made in the future, but today, the company is giving us a glimpse of exactly what new features will be added to the platform in the coming year. As PayPal's director of communications Anuj Nayar tells us in an interview, "PayPal is changing, and this is the first major revamp of the core PayPal product. We're known as an online payments brand but this is all part of PayPal becoming an actual wallet."
 
Gundotra: Google+ Won't Let 3rd-Party Apps Post Because "Your Stream Could Easily Be Overwhelmed" Top
vic_gundotra_250pxToday at his SXSW fireside chat, head of Google+ Vic Gundotra said "I am 100% to blame" for the social network lacking an API seven months after launch. The reason? "Your stream could easily be overwhelmed" if Google allowed third-party apps to post content on users' behalf. "I'm going to release that API when I'm confident we're not going to screw over developers." Additionally, Gundotra criticized Facebook's inclusion of ads on photo albums and said that only a "very small number of people have turned off social search".
 
A Better Live Wiki: HackPad Could Be Your SXSW Backchannel Top
Screen Shot 2012-03-09 at 1.45.37 PMThere are lots of apps for finding the right people and parties at South By Southwest this year, but what about, you know, actually going to panels and sharing your thoughts about them? Well, there's Twitter for short-form public sharing, and messaging apps like GroupMe for group chats. But HackPad has a more serious idea: actually taking notes about the panels and keynotes you go to, with other people who care. It sounds dangerously productive for the fun-oriented event. And it is -- this is one of the better live group word-processing products I've seen in a while.
 
Nokia Lumia 900 Won't Hit AT&T Shelves Until April 22 Top
lumia-900We'd heard a while back that the long-awaited Windows Phone-powered Lumia 900 would show up on AT&T's shelves on March 18. However, around the time that this rumored launch date leaked, the Lumia 900 had yet to go through its testing in the technical acceptance process. Turns out, that may be the reason BGR is now reporting that the Lumia 900 launch has been delayed to April 22.
 
Marvel Touts New Deal: Buy A Comic Book, Get The Digital Version Free Top
mobilecomicsPop quiz, hotshot: it's Wednesday, and that means a new shipment of comic books is sitting pretty at your local dead tree retailer. Do you schlep down to the store to buy a physical copy, or will you reach for your smartphone/tablet and buy it from the comfort of your own home? Well, if you want the best bang for your buck, you should probably get dressed and prepare to brave the outside world. Starting in June, any Marvel comic that costs $3.99 or higher (when did comic books get so pricey?) will come with a code that lets the purchaser download a digital copy of that same comic via the Marvel Comics app for iOS or Android.
 
Stride, A CRM System Salespeople Will Hate (But Freelancers Will Love), Launches Into Beta Top
stide-logoStride, a new CRM system designed to meet the needs of freelancers and small business owners, is launching into private beta today. The product, which was born out of an actual need for a more simplified CRM system, is focused on efficiency, not a complex feature set. It's not for adding contracts, managing cases, or allocating tasks to a team of salespeople. Instead, Stride is about deal-tracking and high-level metrics only. "For salespeople, this app is going to make them cringe," says Stride co-founder Andrew Dumont.
 
Apple Goes Big In Texas With $304 Million Austin Campus Top
AnjiiX3CQAAGhRmMost of the news around Austin this week is centered around SXSW, naturally, but Texas Governor (and erstwhile presidential candidate) Rick Perry broke some news today that's unrelated, but still Austin-relevant. Apple, it seems, which has been slowly growing its presence in the state's tech oasis, chose SXSW weekend as an auspicious time to announce a major new campus in Austin.
 
Clouds & APIs: Mayor Lee Unveils The San Francisco Open Data Cloud Top
Screen shot 2012-03-09 at 11.12.23 AMWith 30,000 tech jobs already in town and more (hopefully) on the way, San Francisco has been making a big push to make its city as friendly as possible to entrepreneurs. In January, we saw Mayor Ed Lee, Ron Conway, and former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde launched sfCITI, a committee which focuses on hiring -- both placing and training competent programmers and just generally bringing smart people into San Francisco's workforce. Last month, the city complemented its hiring committee by announcing a new initiative again aimed at making the city more relevant to its chief industry, called the 2012 Innovation Portfolio, which helps founders, as Eric wrote at the time, do everything from "completing the paperwork for creating a company, to giving developers new access to city data, to actually testing out tech products at City Hall itself."
 
How Green Dot Will Use Loopt To Go After Mobile Payments Top
3938248052_5b5823e58f_mImagine you're walking by your local cafe, and you get a notification on your phone that you'll get a free bagel if you buy a cup of coffee. You walk inside, and make the purchase with your credit card — no need to take out your phone again. The bagel rings up as "free," and you get a notification from your bank confirming you've received the discount. All of this payments and loyalty interchange can happen over the cloud. A lot of companies are trying to get their arms around mobile payments. Many of them, trying to make your phone itself act as the credit card. Google with Wallet, Square, PayPal, American Express, everybody who's experimenting with NFC.
 
How To Win At SXSW: Give Away Experiences, Not Grub and Booze Top
Salesman ShoutingThe fundamental mistake companies make when marketing at SXSW is giving away things I can easily buy on my own. Open bars and taco giveaways only attract freeloaders. If brands want influencers to take notice, they have to provide unique experiences. From my last three SXSWs, I couldn't tell you who provided the ice cream sandwiches or Lone Star beers. But Zynga's warehouse concert with TV On The Radio, Tagged's limo rides, and Diggnation's fire-eating magician -- those I remember.
 
StartupBus To SXSW Day Three: Las Cruces To San Antonio [TCTV] Top
startupbus 2012StartupBus, the hackathon-on-wheels in which busloads of entrepreneurs make the journey down to the South By Southwest conference with the goal of teaming up to create viable web apps by the time they arrive in Austin, rolled into its third day yesterday. in this video you can see how the buspreneurs' apps have gone from concept to code with demos from customizable breakfast cereal app Cerealize and motion detection video technology startup Kinect.ly.
 
Resumes Are Bullshit. HireArt Is Better. Top
HireArt_logoHireArt, a newly launched Y Combinator-backed company, is working to solve a major problem that all employers face today: resumes are bullshit. Job candidates often like to fluff up their experience, and sometimes they even outright lie about their abilities. Other times, potentially great employees are overlooked because they have unorthodox backgrounds that don't match up with what an employer thinks they need in terms of experience. Sometimes these kinds of things are realized during the in-person interview. Unfortunately for many employers, they often don't discover how much a particular candidate may have oversold themselves until they've been hired and can't perform to expectations. With its new applicant screening system, HireArt thinks it may have a solution: have the employees actually do the work first.
 
Microsoft Envisions A Future With Super-Fast Touchscreens Top
msfastAs solid as modern touchscreens are, there's very often an subtly apparent sense of disconnect when you try to use one. According to Paul Dietz of Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group, it all comes down to latency — he notes average touchscreens have a latency of a 100ms, which yields a noticeable bit of lag between a user touching a screen and the screen displaying a reaction to it. Sure, it's totally usable, but it never really feels like you're fully in control. If you drag an app across the iPad's screen, for example, the icon will dance around your finger a bit as the display tries its best to keep up. That's not good enough for Dietz and his team, as they have whipped up a demo of how things ought to be — unlike the 100ms delay of a regular touchscreen, the demo knocks that delay between touch and tracking down to 1ms flat.
 
Fred Wilson, Ron Conway, Dennis Crowley, Keith Rabois And Roelof Botha Are All Ready To Disrupt Top
PreviewWho's coming to Disrupt NYC this year, you may ask? Well, we aren't going to reveal all of the fun surprises we have in store quite yet, but we are excited to announce a couple key speakers who will be joining us this year. This year's lineup kicks off with a strong set of Silicon Valley greats and New York tech titans. Roelof Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital and is in the business of finding the most disruptive startups out there. As many know, Ron Conway puts the "super" in super angel. Dennis Crowley, the co-founder of Foursquare will also be joining us, along with Square's Keith Rabois and top investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. These five compelling speakers are just a quick preview of all of the guests who will be there. As they stroll through Startup Alley, which companies will catch their eye this year? Stay tuned for more announcements of our guest speakers, ticket giveaways and a few surprises each week as we get closer to the event.
 
TechCrunch Cribs Visits Llustre — A Better Gilt For Home Decor? Top
Screen Shot 2012-03-09 at 17.10.14I must admit I didn't immediately get Llustre. It looked like another ecommerce play, super-focused on curation and editorial - where was the potential for scale? I looked again. They'd raised £750,000 (just over $1 million) from a host of experienced angel investors, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. There must be more to it than meets the eye? Perhaps it was the latest in a new trend of culture-led startups coming out of London right now in the fields of art, design and music? Clutching a camera, I went along to their new offices in Clerkenwell to find out. The location is significant. London's Clerkenwell has long been home to a cluster of designers, artist and artisan communities and is well located between the creative/design companies of the West End and the tech startups of the East.
 
Why Google's Plan To Make Maps Pay For Itself Could Backfire Top
Google Maps Goes The Wrong WayGoogle was once satisfied to have its satellite products, like Maps, drive goodwill among startups and create new exposure to their users. But now we've heard Google's new plan is to make these products self-sufficient. It's begun charging high-volume users of its Maps APIs. Companies like Foursquare and Apple are balking at the price hike and looking to strategically reduce reliance on Google, so they're switching to OpenStreetMap. This short-term revenue play could turn into a long-term disaster because OpenStreetMap users have to contribute the improvements they make to its data, so one day it could become better than Google Maps. And who'll be next to bail on Google's API? Yelp comes to mind.
 
After Legal Scare, PinClout Becomes PinReach Top
pinreachPinClout, the analytics service for Pinterest whose name prompted a cease-and-desist letter from Klout, has renamed itself as PinReach. Shortly after the service launched about two weeks ago, it received a letter from Klout's attorney demanding that PinClout change its name because it was "confusingly similar." When I spoke to co-founder Chris Fay last week, he said he would indeed be changing the name, mostly just to avoid a costly legal fight — but he and his co-founder were still settling on their actual choice.
 
Sincerely Rolls Out Postagram In Europe In Time For Spring Break Top
130325v1-max-450x450The craze of printing Instagram and Facebook photos is slowly but surely hitting Europe. Roughly a month ago, Nantes-based DarQRoom became one of the first European companies to offer high-quality Instagram printing. Prior to that, local Instagram printing services were somewhat limited to London's StickyGram, which transforms photos into magnets. Today, it's Sincerely's Postagram that is launching its service on this side of the Atlantic, allowing users to send physical postcards made on iPhone and Android devices to addresses in Europe. And just in time for Spring Break.
 

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