Monday, July 30, 2012

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Sparklabs Aims To Bring Silicon Valley Innovators, Like Advisors Mark Cuban And Vint Cerf, To South Korea Top
facebook1SparkLabs, a new startup accelerator, launched today in hopes of developing South Korea's next wave of entrepreneurs. Serial entrepreneurs Hanjoo Lee, James Kim and Bernard Moon, who have all known each other since college, co-founded the accelerator. Moon said they are all Korean or Korean American and want to be a part of the changing entrepreneurial landscape in the country.
 
Twitter Launches Clickable Stock Symbols, StockTwits' Howard Lindzon Says "Hey, We Already Do That!" Top
Screen shot 2012-07-30 at 8.45.28 PMTonight, Twitter quietly rolled out another feature -- one that may seem simple and straightforward at first glance but could actually have big implications. The company said via its very own Twitter account that users can now click on stock (or "ticker") symbols in any tweet to view search results for those stocks and companies. To make this possible, Twitter is essentially introducing a new hashtag -- or what is being called a "cashtag." Instead of the ubiquitous "#", the addition of the symbol "$" added in front of any ticker will instantly provide context for that stock, aggregating all tweets that use the ticker under one label. Twitter gives the example of "$GE" -- General Electric's ticker symbol -- although this will obviously work for any company, like Apple ($AAPL) or Google ($GOOG), allowing users to peruse conversations happening around those stocks in realtime.
 
Yahoo's IntoNow Updates Its iPad App With Music Syncing, TV Screen Captures, And Group Chat Top
intonowWhen Yahoo acquired IntoNow last spring, the "technology powered media company" sought ways to connect users playing around with their iPhones and iPads with content that they were watching on TV. Today, about 80 percent of users watch television with some sort of mobile device in their hands. But mostly what they're doing is checking email and playing Angry Birds. Now if only there were some app that could get them to pay attention to TV-type stuff while commercials are on. That's what IntoNow and other second screen apps are all about. Anyway, the newest IntoNow release -- the company's third major update -- takes a step back from earlier versions, which were focused on TV discovery and sharing metadata with users. It found that users were getting little actual utility out of those features, and they weren't coming back for more, according IntoNow GM Adam Cahan. So the team set about re-imagining ways it could promote more interaction with the app.
 
Irreducible Top
Irreducible Featured ImageThe future is in apps you don't open. "We're going to move away from the era of 'I have hundreds of apps but never think of using them' towards 'I have these cool apps and they take care of me'". This is David Lieb, co-founder and CEO of Bump, on the sea change in design philosophy that underpins Pay With Square and his company's new photos apps Flock. It centers around the idea that apps shouldn't force us to add new behaviors. Instead, they should strip away needless, interruptive steps from themselves and the way we live our lives until the solutions to our problems become irreducible.
 
Amazon Lockers Available For Delivery In Silicon Valley, Too Top
amazon lockerIt looks like Amazon.com is expanding its Lockers program, which allows customers to have their deliveries sent to, yes, nearby lockers. The idea was first reported last fall. It may seem like an inconvenient alternative to home delivery at first — until you think about some of the headaches that can come up, like worrying one of your neighbors will swipe the package as it's sitting on your doorstep, or making sure you're at home to sign for it. With Amazon Lockers, the package sits securely at a nearby pick-up station, until you come by at your convenience (well, as long as it's within three days of delivery) and open the locker up with a special code.
 
Dalton Caldwell On App.net's Plan To Build A Dependable, Ad-Free Version Of Twitter [TCTV] Top
Screen shot 2012-07-30 at 6.53.16 PMDalton Caldwell made some serious waves earlier this month when he announced "an audacious proposal" to refocus his company App.net to build a real-time feed API and service that would essentially be a new, more open version of Twitter. It's always fun to hear about big ideas like this, so it was great to have Caldwell stop by TechCrunch TV last week to tell us in person about App.net's new mission and clear up some common misconceptions about what they're up to. You can watch our whole conversation in the video embedded above, and below I've excerpted some of his points.
 
W3i: App Marketing Costs On The Rise, Jump 56% On iOS, 70% On Android Since January Top
how-to-ask-for-a-raise1-money-handout_s600x600It's no secret that the mobile app landscape has become extremely competitive. Over the last few years, this has led to an incredible amount of innovation and progress, but the cost of visibility -- of acquiring new users -- is also on the rise. In fact, Fiksu found that the cost of acquiring users hit a record high in December. While December is a critical month for app discovery, it remained to be seen whether or not this trend would continue. Today, W3i, the monetization and distribution network for app developers, released new user acquisition figures for the first half of 2012, and the results tell the same story. Assessing hundreds of millions of mobile users from January to June 2012, W3i found that the average cost-per-install (of CPI) of mobile apps increased by 70 percent on Android and by 56 percent on iOS.
 
Why The Open Cloud Wins And Oracle Loses When IT Gets Virtualized Top
oraclelogoOracle said today they have bought a company called Xsigo that leverages the growing popularity of a new form of technology that virtualizes the network. It's called software defined networking (SDN) and it is shaking up the way we view IT and the cloud. The acquisition points to a shift in the market that will eventually make Oracle the loser. The cloud is opening up while Oracle is folding inward. Network virtualization is serving as a catalyst for a federated infrastructure that will make the open cloud more viable for an organization than a vertically integrated stack that needs to be managed by teams of IT engineers.  Oracle is rejecting that premise and will use Xsigo to strengthen its own proprietary environment.
 
GoDaddy CEO Steps Down, Scott Wagner Named Interim CEO Top
GoDaddy-Will-No-Longer-Sell-cn-Chinese-Domain-Names-2GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman has stepped down after less than eight months on the job. Adelman replaced the beleaguered elephant-killing former CEO, Bob Parsons, and will be succeeded by Scott Wagner of KKR Capstone, a major GoDaddy investor.
 
Microsoft Open Sources Entity Framework Top
Microsoft_Logo_PageMicrosoft continues to make in-roads into open source development. Early last year it open sourced several development related tools, including NuGet and several libraries for its ASP.Net language. And by the end of the year the company announced sponsorship of projects to port both the Node.js development platform and the big data analytics tool Apache Hadoop to Windows. It's even making Linux available on Azure, the company's cloud computing platform. And now it has open sourced Entity Framework, a framework that helps developers simplify data manipulation.
 
What Those Mysterious Cell Phone Fees Fund: $115 Million For Rural Broadband Top
Photo: TelegraphEver wonder what those mysterious government service fees on your cell phone bill go to fund? Part of it goes toward a newly launched $415 million plan to provide 400,000 rural netizens with some broadband goodness. The Connect America Fund, a Obama-administration supported plan for universal access to broadband, is part of a larger $4.5 billion mission to connect 19 million homes to bit-torrent streaming speeds by 2020. As with any major government rollout, the project is dogged by bureaucracy and industry backlash, but is nonetheless moving forward.
 
Still Protesting? Facebook Will Soon Force You To Switch To Timeline Top
No Old Facebook Profile DesignOver the next few months, anyone still refusing to voluntarily switch to the Timeline profile redesign will be automatically migrated, Facebook tells me. Users could choose to adopt the redesign starting in January, but there have been some hold-outs who didn't want their whole life becoming easier to access, or just hated change. Soon they won't have a choice, though. Facebook revealed to me it plans to complete the Timeline rollout by this fall as part of its photo revamp this morning. By waiting to minimizing the number of users it's forcing to switch, and doing it all gradually, Facebook will have successfully avoided the wildfire protests that characterized its early years.
 
With Marissa Mayer In Place, Yahoo's Interim CEO Ross Levinsohn Officially Leaves The Company Top
Image1 for post TC50 Backstage: Ross Levinsohn on MySpace, Ad IndustryAfter Scott Thompson's unceremonious departure from Yahoo's CEO spot earlier this year, Ross Levinsohn took over as the company's interim chief executive -- and for a while there, he was widely expected to eventually be named Yahoo's permanent CEO. But, of course, that's not how things worked out: This month Yahoo announced that longtime Google executive Marissa Mayer would take the CEO spot. And now it's official that Levinsohn will not be sticking around to see how it plays out. His last day is tomorrow.
 
PaidContent Founder Rafat Ali Launches Travel News Site Skift Top
Screen Shot 2012-07-30 at 1.46.13 PMRafat Ali, founder of paidContent, sold his company to The Guardian for roughly $12.5 millionin 2008. Then he spent two years traveling the world, in a "quest for isolation after eight clamorous years." Now, he has built "the homepage for the travel industry" to inform your travels. Ali and co-founder Jason Clampet, who ran Frommers.com's original content efforts, aim to disrupt the enormous travel industry with a site that offers a combination of original media content and data tools to users, especially business travelers.
 
This Friday's Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp: Come Learn What's Working For Airbnb And SongPop Top
crunchup2012-wide-for-wp-1Facebook is still huge and growing -- it added another 50 million users this past quarter, and it's about to break the one-billion-humans mark. But it still has to figure out how to survive on mobile. So we're focusing on Facebook and its developer ecosystem at our annual CrunchUp event this Friday in Redwood City, Calif. Our aim is to detail what's working and what's not, so entrepreneurs can better strategize how to think about Facebook when building their companies. Get your Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp tickets now! They can be found here. Some mobile-savvy startups are getting big growth from Facebook's platform. One of them is the music game SongPop. It now has more than 2.7 million daily active users and 11.4 million monthly active users via Facebook, and it's also a top free app in the Apple App Store. I'll be trying to get all the secrets to its success out of its creator, Mathieu Nouzareth, this Friday as part of our panel on Facebook's platform.
 
The API Hub: Jeff Bezos-Backed Mashape Launches To The Public With 430 APIs In Tow Top
Screen shot 2012-07-30 at 12.52.33 PMAugusto Marietti, Marco Palladino and Mike Zonca founded Mashape in November 2010 to create a unified, all-in-one marketplace where one could go to find, sell, distribute, and hack on APIs, believing that APIs would become an essential part of the conversation for developers. Though it wasn't an easy road, last September Mashape raised $1.6 million from NEA, Charles River Ventures, Jeff Bezos, and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors -- to name a few. Mashape has been in private beta since, testing its model and "building out the supply-side," says Marietti. Today, the startup is finally throwing back the curtains, officially opening to the public, with new features and inventory in stock.
 
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before: Olympic Athlete Kicked Out Of Games For Tweet Top
Switzerland's Michel Morganella runs onMichael Morganella, a defender on the Swiss Olympic soccer squad, has been kicked off the team for an offensive tweet about South Koreans, hours after losing to the country's team. Five days ago, Voula Papachristou, Greece's triple-jump champion, was kicked off her team for an offensive tweet about West Nile virus. Morganella's Twitter account, @morgastoss, has been deleted, but Swiss newspaper Le Matin grabbed a shot of the tweet.
 
Codecademy Adds Python Lessons, Promises More Server-Side Languages Top
codecademylogoCodecademy, the startup offering online lessons and tools to help people learn how to code, is adding Python to its lesson line-up starting today. Until now, co-founder Zach Sims says Codecademy has "been focused on client-side languages and markup - javascript, HTML, and CSS." Starting today, you'll be able to find user-generated Python lessons on the site, and Sims adds, "This is the beginning of new language support on Codecademy - Python is only the first server side language you'll see."
 
Bing Improves Its Facebook Integration With Friend Tagging Top
bing_logoMicrosoft's Bing search engine launched its social sidebar last month and the company has been adding features and support for additional social networks ever since. The core of Bing's social efforts, however, is its Facebook integration and the company today announced a nice new feature for Facebook users on Bing. The social sidebar already allowed users to ask their Facebook friends questions right from Bing, but with today's update, Bing is also allowing users to tag up to five of their friends whenever they ask a question. This, says Microsoft, will allow you "to effortlessly tap into the collective wisdom of your social network, and get input from your friends who are in the know."
 
Distracted Walking Injuries Quadruple — Mobile Devices to Blame? Top
images (5)The number of citizens wandering into ditches, on-coming cars, and each other while staring at electronics has "quadrupled", according to the Associated Press. "Look up. Drivers aren't always looking out for you," reads a Delaware traffic safety sign, one of many states that are turning to the magic of PSA billboards as a substitute for state legislatures that have almost universally opposed laws criminalizing "distracted walking." While the Internet is overflowing with hilarious bloopers, such as one man walking into a real-life black bear (video below), distracted walking is a serious problem, and is implicated in the 4.2% rise in pedestrian fatalities in 2010.
 

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