Thursday, May 31, 2012

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Timing Is Everything: Indie Movie Discovery Platform Prescreen To Close Its Doors Top
Screen shot 2012-05-31 at 1.14.39 PMIt was just last September that we covered the launch of Prescreen, the startup founded by former Groupon and Zoosk execs that aimed to help independent films find the publicity they nearly always lack. To do so, they built a curated, on-demand video platform that would give filmmakers and distributors an alternative to traditional ad and distribution channels, while giving users an easy way to discover low-budget films they wouldn't otherwise. But, as it goes in Startup Land, sometimes even veteran advisors, seed capital, and a good idea aren't enough to keep a business afloat. Yesterday, Prescreen notified its users that it will be suspending its beta until further notice. While this doesn't exactly mean that the startup has hit the deadpool, for all intents and purposes for its users, Prescreen is no longer operational.
 
Fly Or Die: HTC Evo 4G LTE [TCTV] Top
Screen shot 2012-05-31 at 4.25.25 PMI'm smack dab in the middle of my HTC Evo 4G LTE review (the full review will be up tomorrow), but as I judge, I felt the need to bring John Biggs into the mix for a little Fly or Die. Now, John is notoriously hard on Android phones, namely because they're all incredibly similar. The Evo 4G LTE is no different. I, on the other hand, think it brings some pretty strong design language to the table, which could be great for someone looking to stand out.
 
First Impressions On Fluent, The Startup Promising "The Future Of Email" Top
Fluent-logoY Combinator's Paul Graham recently begged entrepreneurs to consider "frightening ambitious startup ideas," like building a better search engine or replacing universities. "Any one of them could make you a billionaire," said Graham. "That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away from them," he said. "Don't worry, it's not a sign of weakness. Arguably it's a sign of sanity. The biggest startup ideas are terrifying." Among those terrifying ideas was rethinking the inbox, and in particular, the Gmail inbox. Although there has been much complaining about the sorry state of email, very few companies are addressing the situation. It's just too hard. But there is an interesting startup to watch in this space, which happens to be thinking about the bigger picture. The somewhat stealthy Fluent is not shy about its vision either, offering a tagline that boldly proclaims it's offering "the future of email." But can it deliver?
 
Google Calls Its Smart Ad Relevance System "Smart Ass" (Yes, Seriously) Top
Screen Shot 2012-05-31 at 12.44.28 PMWhat's the best thing that I (and others) learned at D10 this year? (Other than the fact that Steve Jobs used to own a peacock, of course.) Onstage at D10, Google SVP of Advertising  Susan Wojicicki revealed, in answering Walt Mossberg's question about the sad state of ad relevancy, that Google calls its machine learning smart ad targeting technology "Smart Ass" internally. Aside from those self-driving cars, this is probably the coolest thing happening at Google at the moment. Wojicicki then told Mossberg that a "huge amount" of Google engineers were working on improving "Smart Ass," "There are all kinds of amazing things on the Web. Advertising is not one of them," she said. "Display ads are very crude, there is a really high CPM price for the value being extracted.
 
Chrome SVP Sundar Pichai Confirms Chrome Is (Mostly) Beating IE Top
Chrome-logo-2011-03-16Remember this report about Google Chrome passing Microsoft's Internet Explorer in browser market share? Well, at today's D10 conference, Chrome SVP Sundar Pichai basically confirmed this is true, saying that Chrome is "#1 in most countries" and even noting that Chrome's market share is over 50% in some regions. One-third of people are using Chrome, said Pichai.
 
Microsoft Launches Windows 8 Release Preview Top
Windows 8 Consumer PreviewMicrosoft just announced that the Windows 8 Release Preview, the company's final pre-release version of Windows 8, is now available for download. With this release, Microsoft is also making new versions of its Windows 8 apps for Hotmail, SkyDrive an Messenger available, as well as hundreds of new and updated apps from third-party developers in the Windows Store.
 
SEO Was Yesterday. 500 Startups' PostRocket Fires Up $610K For Facebook News Feed Optimization Top
PostRocket LogoBusinesses struggle to come up with what to post to their Facebook Page each day, and making those posts actually get seen is a difficult as the dark arts. That's why PostRocket has raised $610,000 to help businesses blow up on Facebook thanks to news feed optimization. PostRocket analyzes your Facebook Page, and provides recommendations for when and what to post. The 500 Startups Fall 2011/Winter 2012 company pulled in the syndicate seed round from Polaris Ventures, 500 Startups, and several angels. PostRocket's CEO Tim Chae is actually the youngest founder ever funded by Dave McClure's accelerator.
 
OnSwipe Heads To The iPhone, Launches Layout Personalization With OnSwipe Draft Top
onswipe_phone_swipeOnSwipe's been around for a little over a year, and since raised a total of $6 million in funding and launched content recommendations within its HTML5 tablet publishing network. But just as tablets are entering into mainstream territory, people are now entirely comfortable consuming long-form content on their even-smaller iPhone. That said, publishers who don't want to build out an app will now have a new tool to display iPhone-optimized content to folks on-the-go.
 
"In the Studio," PublikDemand's Courtney Powell is Building a Better Business Bureau for the Social Age Top
Screen shot 2012-05-31 at 2.07.27 AM"In the Studio" begins the summer by welcoming an entrepreneur from Austin who worked in various roles at different startups before she tried to return a cable box to TimeWarner, an experience which motivated her to assemble a new squad, form a new company, and move west to Silicon Valley where she now leads a small team based out of 500 Startups that may be sitting on the next big idea. Courtney Powell is the CEO and co-founder of PublikDemand, a social crowd-based platform where individuals can initiate and/or join campaigns (or "demands") against Fortune 1000 companies. (Currently, they support demands against nine larger companies and plan to expand as demands increase.) Their platform is different from other "social good" or corporate social responsibility programs -- on PublikDemand, customers of companies can use the power of the crowd to lodge complaints against those large entities and pressure them into changing policy. Within the last six months, PublikDemand has served as the catalyst for a California man who became so fed up with his service from AT&T that he initiated his campaign against the company on the site itself, has created targeted leads for AT&T competitors, and has even caught the eye of Netflix's Reed Hastings in his fight to preserve Net Neutrality.
 
FTC Chairman Leibowitz: More Privacy Could Actually Bring Bigger Revenues For Web Giants Top
Screen Shot 2012-05-31 at 9.38.32 AMPrivacy guidelines such as the "Do Not Track" option proposed by the Federal Trade Commission does not necessarily mean the end of the kind of targeted online ads that have brought such riches to web companies over the past decade. In fact, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz says, more privacy on the Internet could actually bring the industry much more money that it attracts now.
 
TC/Gadgets Webcast: WWDC Expectations, E3 Excitement, And The Death Of The Spec Top
Screen shot 2012-05-31 at 2.52.27 PMQuite a bit hangs on the horizon in the world of gadgets. E3 is right around the corner, as is WWDC (Apple's Developer conference), and while hardware gets cooler and cooler, the spec does not. John, Matt and I discuss this and more in this week's TC/Gadgets webcast.
 
Google Applies for .Google, .Docs, .YouTube and .LOL Top-Level Domains Top
dot-google-logoToday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) closed its window for new generic top-level domain name applications. ICANN will publish a list of all the applied-for strings in two weeks, but Google today already announced some of the names it applied for. Among these are, as expected, .google and .youtube. According to Google's chief Internet evangelist and "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf, however, the company also applied for domains it thinks " have interesting and creative potential," including .lol.
 
Flikdate Announces The World's First Mobile Live Video Dating Service Top
youve_been-flikedUntil now, online and mobile video dating has mostly been about looking at video clips. Flikdate for iOS, however, is all about live video calls, making it feels more like a mix of Chatroulette and Match.com than the current crop of video dating services. The Flikdate team gave me a demo of the service earlier this week and it turns out the app is about as easy to use as it gets. You simply sign up with your Facebook login (no worries, the app doesn't post to your wall or access any of your data), tell the service if you want to chat with men or women, and after that, it just takes one click to get started. The service works over 3G and WiFi (though the video quality tends to be more consistent over WiFi).
 
Banjo For iOS Becomes More Photo-Friendly Thanks To Update Top
banjoBanjo, the slightly creepy social discovery app that shows you who's doing what nearby, has been updated today with a handful of new tweaks for its iOS version. Sorry Android folks -- you'll have to sit this one out for the time being. Here's a quick recap if you've never messed with Banjo before. Banjo pulls in geo-tagged pictures and updates from all of the major social platforms (think Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and the like), and splays them all onto a map (or into a list) so users can see what's going on around them.
 
A Great Firewall? Google Now Warns Chinese Users When Search Terms Could Cause "Connection Issues" Top
Screen shot 2012-05-31 at 10.05.39 AMThose who don't live or haven't recently traveled to China may not have experienced this first hand, but Google Search has been known to be "inconsistent and unreliable" in mainland China -- to use Google's words. Error messages like "This webpage is not available" or "The connection was reset" are common and those errant queries then prevent users from searching again for a period of time. In a blog post today, Google's search team said that, after "taking a hard look" at its own systems, the problem isn't emanating from Google's end, and is instead "closely correlated with searches for a particular subset of queries." As a result, Google search will now be notifying Chinese users when their search terms are likely to cause these interruptions.
 
Facebook Chips Away At Marketing Providers By Adding Native Page Admin Roles and Scheduled Posts Top
Facebook Page ManagementWhat once you had to use or pay for outside software to do, Facebook now offers for free. Facebook today rolled out Page administrator permissions and post scheduling. The two critical marketing features were previously only available in third-party Page management products like Buddy Media and Vitrue, which are fetching big acquisition prices in part because of these service. Roles let a Page owner assign publishing, advertising, or analytics privileges to team members and service providers without giving them total control. Scheduled posts lets marketers push out a steady stream of messages to the news feed, day and night.
 
Kleiner Perkins Adds Megan Quinn, Former Products Director At Square, As Newest Investment Partner Top
new-avatarMegan Quinn, the web exec who most recently served as the Director of Products at credit card processing tech firm Square, has joined Sand Hill Road venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as an investment partner. The hire was announced by KPCB in a press release today.
 
Business-Focused Ad Startup Bizo Launches Self-Serve Retargeting Top
bizo logoStartup Bizo tries to help advertisers reach a business audience using methods like retargeting. Now it's making those retargeting capabilities available in a self-serve product. For anyone who needs a refresher on the nomenclature, if you visit a website but failed to sign up or buy anything, then see ads for that company following you around the Web — well, you can thank retargeting. (As someone who has to visit startup websites as part of his job, this has become a constant annoyance.) However, Bizo says it uses retargeting in virtually all of its display advertising campaigns, because it works — it's going after people who have already expressed interest in a product or service, and it helps businesses stay at the top-of-mind for those consumers.
 
No More Mobile Overage Charges: Netflix iOS App Now Lets You Limit Streaming To WiFi Only Top
NetflixBuilding4Mobile video is taking off, especially due to high-quality video streams available over increasingly fast LTE mobile networks. The only problem is that most users have wireless plans that include a limited amount of data usage -- usually just 2GB or 5GB per month. Since movies can quickly run up data usage, mobile viewers are in a bit of a catch-22: They can now watch mobile video at almost the same speed and quality on wireless networks as is available over WiFi, but doing so could potentially mean lots of icky overage charges, generally at the rate of about $10 per extra GB used. Netflix is one of those services which is forced to navigate that mobile video paradox. Up until recently, its iPad app would stream video to users regardless of their connection, which could drive up data costs for consumers if they weren't watching their data usage closely. With that in mind, the latest update to the Netflix iOS app now lets 4G and LTE iPad owners limit streaming so that they can only access the service when connected to a WiFi network.
 
Hipstamatic Branches Out With A New iPad Magazine, Snap, And #MakeBeautiful Social Campaign Top
Screen shot 2012-05-31 at 16.23.02Hipstamatic has made a successful business out of its popular (and paid) iPhone camera appand the many features it has incorporated to enhance that photo experience: four million active monthly users and 50 million photos snapped through it each month. Now the company behind it, Synthetic, is looking to build on that foundation and create more engagement among the existing Hipstamatic community, and perhaps find new users in the process. Today, it becomes an iPad magazine publisher, with a monthly culture and lifestyle title for the iPad called Snap, consisting of original content and images created by Hipstamatic users. Unlike Synthetic's paid Hipstamatic app, Snap will be free. Alongside that, the company is ramping up its social media profile, with the launch of #makebeautiful. This project will encourage Hipstamatic users to mark pictures using the hashtag to put them into a special stream on Twitter and Instagram and on its own site -- the first time they're aggregating their users' photos in this way.
 

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