Wednesday, July 4, 2012

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Late, Expensive And Probably Redundant: YouView Finally Launches UK Digital TV Service Top
Screen shot 2012-07-04 at 11.37.44Two years after it was meant to go live, and with a list of backers that include the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Arqiva, BT and TalkTalk,  YouView today finally crashed the UK TV party. Available by the end of July with a selection of major retailers, the service is based around an all-in-one set-top box that you can use without a subscription, which includes 100 digital TV and radio channels, catch-up and on-demand services, as well as the ability to record programs. But with a pricetag that will begin at £299 ($469) without the required broadband thrown in, and competing against a host of existing services, is this a case of too-little, too-late?
 
TextMaster Rolls Out API For Its Copywriting, Translation And Proofreading Platform Top
124828v2-max-250x250It's not a spelling mistake, it's a typo. That's my line and I'm sticking to it. But what if proof reading, along with copywriting and translation, could be offered akin to a Software-as-a-Service, API included? That's the ambitious aim of TextMaster which this week uncloaked its technology stack to enable third-parties to start building apps that integrate the full functionality of its service. TextMaster offers a platform for content creators to crowdsource their copywriting, translation and proofreading needs via its community of 'professionals' who have each gone through a quality vetting process and are paid per-word. One way to think of the service is a Mechanical Turk for a very specific niche, while the bigger vision is to disrupt the respective copywriting, translation and proofreading industries. As an example, the translation industry is thought to be a $20B market. To that end, some of TextMaster's competitors include Greatcontent, and Textbroker (copywriting), Wordy (proofreading), and Mygengo (translation), which already offers an API.
 
MOVE Guides Secures Seed Funding To Revolutionise International Relocations Top
Screen Shot 2012-07-04 at 09.44.26MOVE Guides, which competes with Moveline (a TechStars company), is about moving people and families for work internationally - business relocation in other words. The market is - according to MOVE Guides - worth more than £40bn annually. That means that if expats were a country, that country would be one of the most wealthy and mobile in the world - international business moves are rarely done on the cheap. So today MOVE Guides announces it's raised £400,000 seed funding - all while founder Brynne Herbert successfully completed her MBA at London Business School. Not bad.
 
Sorry IBM – A Big Box Is Not A Platform As A Service Top
ibmIn April, IBM rolled out a big new machine called IBM PureApplication Systems, a member of the PureSystems technology family. At the time, I  called IBM out for calling it a "PaaS in a Box." It reminded me of Larry Ellison calling Oracle's hardware a "cloud-in-a-box" back in 2010. Well, IBM is continuing its PaaS washing. Krishnan Subramanian just tweeted about a new IBM post that went up today that's titled:"Open 24x7x365: The IBM open PaaS and private cloud platform."
 
Song Pop Hits 2 Million Daily Active Users, Many Of Them Probably Flirting Top
Screen shot 2012-07-02 at 9.43.19 PMCall it the way we flirt now. Facebook games like Song Pop and Draw Something and apps like Pair are discovering novel ways to get you to hook up connect online. The space is ballooning to the point where there's even a couples app for co-founders. A little over a month since its late May launch, breakout app Song Pop has hit 2 million daily active users, CEO Mathieu Nouzareth tells me. Though the game shows around 1.9 million daily active users on AppData, Nouzareth reveals that the real number is over 2 million because many people actually log in via their independent Song Pop accounts on iOS and Android. For context, hit Angry Birds Friends is presently at 3.3 million daily active users.
 
FunnyJunk Attorney Charles Carreon Drops Lawsuit Against Oatmeal Creator Top
theoatmeal logoCharles Carreon, the attorney with the the infamous lawsuit against The Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman, has withdrawn the suit. The news was announced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which also posted Inman's "notice of voluntary dismissal". (I would embed the document below, but there's basically no text, aside from "plaintiff dismisses the action.") The EFF was representing Inman in the lawsuit, and the announcement included this statement from Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl:
"Matthew Inman spoke out against Carreon's threat of a frivolous lawsuit, in a very popular and very public way. This was nothing more than a meritless attempt to punish Inman for calling attention to his legal bullying. We called him out on this in our briefs, so it's no surprise that Carreon was left with no choice but to dismiss."
 
The Next Microsoft — Updating Its Branding And Messaging In Three Days Top
m21A very smart project is underway by a 21-year-old design student in Los Angeles. The goal: update Microsoft's branding and messaging in three days. Judging by the reaction, Andrew Kim has hit a tap root of pent upfrustrated creative juice out there. So far, there are more than 188 comments on Hacker News about his speculative design project.
 
Cofounderly Is A Couples App For Founders. Yes, Really. Top
cofounderlyYou've probably heard plenty of comparisons between founding a startup with someone and being in a relationship (heck, there's even a service called FounderDating). Well, TheIceBreak has taken those comparisons to heart with a new iPhone app called Cofounderly. When I describe this as a couples app for co-founders, I mean that pretty literally. TheIceBreak previously launched an app where couples can answer icebreaker questions (the responses are shared with the general community), post private messages to each other, and get scored on the quality of their relationship. When TheIceBreak co-founder Christina Brodbeck was looking at the app's user data, she saw that there were co-founders actually using the app to communicate. And hey, it kind of makes sense — Broderick says she sees her co-founder more often than she sees her boyfriend.
 
Lynx2Games Lets You Pass Along Used Games For Fun And Profit. Mostly Profit. Top
LynxSquare-Transparent-sm-darkA website called Lynx2Games.com has a new approach to buying and sharing that could help consumers avoid paying full price for video games. When people buy a games on the site, they're buying them in pairs — there's a "borrower" and a "buyer" (friends can make a purchase together, or Lynx2Games can match up consumers interested in the same product). The borrower pays 25 percent and gets the game for the first three weeks, then they ship it to the buyer, who pays 75 percent and then gets to keep the game indefinitely. The average new console game costs $60, so that breaks down to $15/$45.
 
Facebook News Feed Is Getting Faster, So I Made It This Tramp Stamp Top
Facebook Fast - Tramp StampFacebook's news feed is so slow to give you the goods, you could almost call it prude. But you're about to get lucky. Now the feed will load faster, as it will be pulling in fewer stories to start so you can get browsing immediately, Facebook just told us. Plus, if you don't want to see every little move your friends make, there's a new "Hide Ticker" button in the top right of the web home page. But the real hotness is still bottled up. My sources say Facebook is about to release a much faster version of its mobile apps that will load the urgent elements first so it's more snappy. That'll be nice considering that whenever I launch my Facebook app currently, it's like I've drunk a bottle of cough syrup and gone into some sort of slow-motion trance.
 
Triposo: Ex-Googlers Raise $3.5M From InterWest To Put Social (& Traditional) Travel Guides To Shame Top
Screen shot 2012-07-03 at 1.53.10 PMLast fall, ex-Googlers Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga launched a new mobile travel platform called Triposo, which aimed to bring a little PageRank order to an unruly ocean of travel content in service of a greater good: Giving we, the end user, more relevant, personalized travel recommendations. Because there's already a mess of public destination and travel information in databases like Wikitravel and Open Street Maps, rather than become another player in the brimming social travel space, Triposo took an algorithmic approach to travel recs. Even though models, users and money have favored the social approach, Triposo has seen high ratings and has attracted nearly two million downloads of its travel guides on iOS and Android since launch. This early traction has also been appealing to investors, with the latest interest coming in the form of a $3.5 million series A round led by Keval Desai of InterWest Partners.
 
Single Dad Building Sequel To "Jetpack" Video Game He Built As A Teenager Top
level-jetpack"Look for Jetpack 2 in 1995." The message carried on the 1993 2D video game "Jetpack," created by 16-year old Adam Pedersen and distributed by Software Creations on floppy disk, pledged an updated sequel to fans in a couple of years. 19 years later, Pedersen, now a single dad, is working to deliver on that promise. He has taken to Kickstarter in an attempt to raise $40,000 by the end of July for "Jetpack 2." As a 16 year old, Pedersen tells me he was a big fan of "Lode Runner," "Jumpman," and "Boulder Dash" and wanted to make a game like those. "A game that I would enjoy playing," he describes, his voice filled with excitement.
 
Rumor: Twitter To Acquire Sense Networks To Better Target Local Ads Top
sense-networks-2008-logoA good source tells me that Twitter is set to make its sixth acquisition of 2012 with NY-based Sense Networks. Terms of the deal are still under wraps but it is expected to go through this month. Twitter declined to comment. Sense Networks was founded in 2003 and in 2006 launched MacroSense, which the company says "turns massive amounts of mobile location data into actionable, predictive behavioral data." What that means is Sense not only collects location data from mobile devices when shared but also takes that data and creates a unique behavioral user profile to serve ads that users would find useful.
 
Can Someone Send TechCrunch's Fax Number To Vanity Fair? Top
faxmachine Vanity Fair is one of my all-time favorite magazines -- it publishes loads of incredibly well-written stories about fascinating topics and people. Its regular features, like My Stuff and the Proust Questionnaire, are always entertaining. So, I was pretty excited to get an email from one of Vanity Fair's publicists this morning, offering an advance copy of a story that will run in the August issue.
 
Little "Want" Button Code Foreshadows Big Things For Facebook Ecommerce Top
facebook-money-360Last week, developer Tom Waddington uncovered Facebook code that points to the creation of a "Want" button -- a plugin that potentially points to a new kind of commercial innovation being developed by Facebook itself, different from "want" buttons already being developed by third parties (one example here), and partially working but only within Facebook's Graph API tester. He's continued to dig around and today has presented us with some of his latest finds: looking deeper into Facebook's code, he found more references that point to how Facebook might be thinking about how users can share purchasing information with each other.
 
Please Welcome Alex Williams, Greg Ferenstein, Christine Ying And TechCrunch Interns Billy Gallagher And Natalie Swope Top
863163You may have noticed some new bylines popping up these past couple of days. You're not hallucinating! We've quietly made several new additions to the TechCrunch roster this summer and hiring continues to be our first priority across all departments. In addition to specialist writers like Alex Williams and Greg Ferenstein, we've added a couple of interns and a rockstar product manager to our team. We're also busy with other parts of the company, adding more people to our events team, and working on important but unglamorous projects like getting the site to load faster (hallelujah). Here's the latest on the newest folks we've got working here, and why you might want to talk to each of them.
 
Verizon Wireless Stops Subsidizing Tablets, Now Selling Them At Full Retail Sans Wireless Contract Top
verizonWatch out for exploding prices! Verizon Wireless just stopped subsidizing tablets, which naturally results in a lot higher advertised prices. Want a 16GB Motorola XYZBoard? That will be $629. A Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7? Hand over $549. Verizon Wireless quietly made the switch late last month when launching the "Share Everything" family plans. With this new service contract, subscribers have the option of allowing a tablet access to the bucket of data shared among devices. In the past tablets required a separate data plan, and therefore a separate contract, which locked owners into a tablet that will likely be quickly outdated.
 
With Added Backing From Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan & SV Angel, Quarterly Reopens Its Doors Top
screen-shot-2012-03-28-at-6-11-54-pmAs we spend more and more time online, as our virtual interactions increase, so too does our appreciation for tangible, real-world experiences -- especially those that arrive via the mailbox. Remember how good it feels to receive a letter from a friend in the mail? Now imagine that friend is someone you admire and that letter is an awesome gift, and you have the basis for Quarterly, a subscription-based service that launched last December. Promising curated gifts from notable designers and tech industry celebs for $25/month, Quarterly quickly found an eager audience. In fact, founder Zach Frechette tells us that due to high demand (i.e. $100K in gross sales in 12 weeks), Quarterly had to shut its doors on new users so it could catch up on fulfilling original prescriptions and re-architect for scale. And today, those doors are being re-opened, with new contributors waiting in the wings.
 
Redux Partners With YouTube Stars To Sell Their Movie "Smiley" Directly To Fans Top
Redux_Logo_White-300x231Redux has been through a couple of iterations over the years: Originally launched as a platform for social discovery of video, the startup bet big on building an app for Google TV to create a "lean back" experience for navigating channels of online video. Now it's adding a distribution platform for independent content creators to the mix. When Humble Bundle released its first movie, Kooky, it was Redux that powered distribution for the film. The next project to leverage Redux for Artists will be Smiley, a feature-length film that was a collaboration of YouTube stars like Shane Dawson and Michael Gallagher. Those folks will be distributing the film directly to fans online, selling it for $8 and making it available as a stream or download.
 
Google Shutdowns Continue: iGoogle, Google Video, Google Mini & Others Are Killed Top
GoogleAxeGoogle is continuing to shut down services which aren't core to its business - something it has been actively doing ever since Google co-founder Larry Page took over as CEO. Today, the tradition continues as Google is announcing the shuttering of five more services, the most notable of which are Google Video and iGoogle, its personalized homepage offering.
 

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