Wednesday, August 1, 2012

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Google Wallet's Huge Upgrade Adds Support For All Credit/Debit Cards, Remote Disable Feature Top
Google WalletOf all the limitations that Google's NFC-based Wallet payment system had, perhaps the biggest was that of card compatibility -- once you blew through that free $10 credit, it only ever worked well if you owned a CitiBank MasterCard. Note the use of the past tense in that sentence. Google recently revealed a substantial update to the Wallet service that allows it to (finally) play nice with Visa, Discover, and American Express credit or debit cards.
 
AppAide Helps You Find The Apps That People Are Actually Using Top
AppAideHere's an interesting approach to the seemingly eternal problem of mobile app discovery: A new app called AppAide recommends apps based on actual usage. The App comes from BetaBait, a company that connects startups with early users. Back in May, BetaBait acquired BetaNoodle, a company doing something similar for Android apps, and BetaBait co-founder Cody Barbierri (a former co-worker from my VentureBeat days) says AppAide takes advantage of BetaNoodle technology.
 
Study: Texting Iz Destroying Student Grammar Top
no-cell-phone-sign1Texting-addled young minds are losing their grip on the English language, according to a new study from Wake Forest. The research, which reveals a correlation between the use of SMS-abbreviations and poor grammar proficiency, comes as bitter sweet vindication for modern teachers who have to waste time decrypting the odd new language of teenagers.
 
VEVO Inks Deal To Bring Music Videos To Upcoming OUYA Android Game Console Top
ouyaThe folks behind the stylish, Android-based OUYA game console have been on a hot streak lately. Not only has the project raked in over $6 million in Kickstarter pledges, but cloud gaming service OnLive and legendary game developer Square-Enix have thrown their collective weight behind the $99 gadget. Now there's another hefty name to add to that list. Music video provider VEVO has announced that it has entered into a partnership with OUYA that will allow gamers access to its sizable catalog of music videos between long stretches of random encounters in Final Fantasy III.
 
Quora Launches 'Views' To Show You Exactly Who Is Reading Your Posts Top
quoraYou may have noticed recently that Quora has increasingly required you to log in to see the full breadth of the site's question-and-answer content. Today, it's rolling out a new feature that shares some of the data it collects from those signed-in users: Quora 'Views,' site analytics that show you just how many people have read your Quora questions, answers, or posts.
 
Getting Married? Wedding Party Collects Photos From Guests' Phones To Create Beautiful Online Albums Top
cover photoMany of the startups targeting the weddings space today are focused on offering better services for the bride and/or the couple, but with a new mobile application called Wedding Party, that model has been flipped on its head. Wedding Party wants to offer a better wedding experience for the guests first, which then, in turn, will benefit the couple being married. The app offers a simple way to allow wedding guests participate in the creation of a digital wedding album by sharing photos, notes, and later on, videos. It's the modern-day equivalent of the guy running around with the video camera, bugging you to "say something nice about the couple."
 
Yammer Is Launching A Chat Feature Called Online Now 'In A Couple Of Weeks' Top
online nowYammer, the enterprise social networking company that was recently bought by Microsoft for $1.2 billion, is getting ready to add a new instant messaging feature called Online Now to its main service, enabling users to chat to each other in real time. Online Now will sit alongside existing services that let users post status updates and media as well as send private messages. The feature was spotted earlier today by TNW, and we have now confirmed exactly what is happening with Yammer itself, including the name: "We will be announcing the chat feature through a press release in a couple of weeks as part of our summer release," a spokesperson told TechCrunch.
 
Twitter Launches Its Own Political Barometer To Track U.S. Presidential Elections Top
The Twitter Political IndexTwitter just announced the launch of its Twitter Political Index. This index, says Twitter, is "a daily measurement of Twitter users' feelings towards the candidates as expressed in nearly two million Tweets each week." Every day, twitter will evaluate and weigh the sentiment of tweets mentioning both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney relative to every other message that passes through Twitter's systems. The system then calculates a score for both candidates. Currently Obama's score is 34 (and trending down) and Romney is at 25 (and trending up a bit). The Twitter Political Index will be updated every day at 8pm ET.
 
Content Recommendation Startup Thirst Brings Its Twitter App To The iPhone Top
5. Main Navigation - iPhoneThirst, an app that helps users get caught up with important news as it's shared on Twitter, is expanding beyond the iPad today with the launch of a "universal" app that works on the iPhone and iPod Touch, too. Thirst launched in May, and as co-founder and CEO Anuj Verma tells me, its goal for the current app is to bring people up-to-speed on the most important Twitter updates. So when you open Thirst, you get a personalized "newspaper" with the hottest news stories since the last time you opened the app — which could be an hour or a week ago.
 
Microsoft Officially Signs Off On Windows 8, Releases It To Manufacturers Top
win8Right on schedule, Microsoft has just announced on its Windows Team blog that Windows 8 has emerged from its long development and testing phase, and will soon be in the hands of manufacturers and OEMs for installation on new PCs and devices. Among those on the list to receive the final build (build 9200, if you were curious) are Lenovo, Acer, ASUS and Toshiba, though that's clearly just the tip of a very large iceberg.
 
YC-Backed Zapier, The IFTTT For Business Users, Launches Developer Platform Top
zapier-logo-whiteZapier, the Y Combinator-backed service that allows you to automate common tasks on the web and sync data between web apps, just announced the launch of its developer platform. With Zapier, even non-technical users can easily create connections between the more than 60 apps the service currently supports. This means, for example, that you can push a notice to your Basecamp account whenever you sell a ticket on Eventbrite or get an SMS alert every time somebody signs up for your Campaign Monitor or AWeber email marketing campaigns. With its new development platform, Zapier says, developers will be able to easily add their own apps to the service instead of having to wait for the Zapier team itself to support them.
 
CardSpring Gains New Investors, First Data Partnership, As Its App Platform For Payment Cards Nears Launch Top
CardSpringCardSpring, an ambitious payments startup founded by former Netscape engineers, is building a platform that connects web and mobile applications to payment cards. It's a card-linked payment infrastructure that can work across any bank or card type (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, AmEx, etc.), because it sits in the cloud, and is attached to the payments network directly. This enables developers to build card-linked applications that trigger when a consumer pays by credit or debit card, whether it's an app delivering coupons, offers, loyalty points, frequent flier miles, recommendations, or more. Now, the startup is taking a big step in terms of making this all happen, as it has partnered with the First Data payments network, the largest payment processor in the U.S., reaching over 4 million merchant locations, and accounting for over half of the U.S.'s payment infrastructure. Also new, CardSpring has added a handful of big-name strategic investors who cover every aspect of its business: API franchises, online advertising, big data, and finance.
 
AppFog And Rackspace Want To Break Your App Out Of Amazon's Walled Garden Top
appfogDuring the great Amazon Web Services outages of April 2011 and June 2012 many users were stuck. They could, in theory, move their apps to another AWS region, or to another cloud provider altogether. But in practice the architecture of AWS regions are unique - each one supports slightly different features and APIs. The thing is, every cloud provider will eventually have some downtime. Quite possibly less downtime than your on-premise apps. But if you can't wait it out the downtime you're going to need to architect your applications so that they can live in different environments. And today AppFog and Rackspace announced a partnership that promises to make it easier to do that. But there's no word on when, so for now this is still vaporware.
 
Curiosity Piqued By The Mars-Bound Rover? Watch The Mission Unfold In Times Square Top
559441main_curiosity_946-710In case you hadn't already heard, NASA's Curiosity rover -- which is the largest rover NASA has ever launched -- should touch down on the Martian surface in just over four days. That fateful night comes after nearly eight months of interplanetary travel, and thankfully for New York-based space nuts, the sizable Toshiba Vision screens perched above Times Square will be broadcasting all the action as it happens. All the rest of you will have to make do with the two live video feeds that NASA will be streaming come August 6.
 
ComScore: US Smartphone Penetration 47% In Q2; Android Remains Most Popular, But Apple's Growing Faster Top
comscore-flagComScore today released its latest quarterly figures on the state of the mobile market in the U.S. based on active users, and while the exact numbers are different, the basic picture is the same as the one that Strategy Analytics painted earlier in the week around smartphone sales: Apple's iOS continues to see the strongest gains and Android has remained in the lead but with its lead reduced somewhat. There are now 234 million U.S. residents using mobile devices, with smartphone usage up 4% to 110 million -- giving the country a smartphone penetration of 47%. ComScore's survey, based 30,000 U.S. consumers, also found that the number of subscribers using Samsung and LG devices, both smart and feature phone devices, declined, as did the number on Motorola handsets. Apple and HTC, meanwhile, both went up.
 
Standing On Its Own: Wix Spin-Off daPulse Scores 1.5m Series A For Its Internal Communications Tool Top
Screen Shot 2012-08-01 at 11.36.08It's always interesting to see when a company builds a product on the side purely to scratch its own itch, and then decides that said product has the making of a startup in itself. That appears to be the case with daPulse which, broadly speaking, plays in the enterprise social network space, and spun out of web publishing platform Wix as a venture in its own right in February of this year. Today, daPulse is announcing its first funding round: a Series A to the tune of $1.5 million from GenesisPartners. The investment will be used to further develop the startup's topic-based internal communication tool -- a sort of Yammer, Saleforce's Chatter, or Socialcast competitor -- and to enter new markets, specifically giving its marketing efforts a shot in the arm in the US and Europe.
 
What Startups Should Do Before They Get Into The VC's Office Top
fundraisingThis is a guest post by Eze Vidra, Head of Campus London, Google's dedicated startup space in East London housing accelerators and cowering spaces. He tweets at @ediggs and blogs at VCCafe.com. An experienced VC would have heard thousands of pitches in his day. The good ones would tell you that they have developed a "pattern recognition". After a while, they are able to determine (at least in their own minds) what startups would succeed or fail in a matter of minutes. There's obviously lots going on in a pitch - verbal and non-verbal communication, chemistry etc. In this post, I will outline both platforms and tools startups should consider to improve their pitching success, before they get into the VC's office.
 
Eat The Rich: The App Economy's Middle Class Is Booming…And So Is The Poor Top
app_moneyIn the mobile application ecosystems offered by the iOS and Android platforms, there's now a booming "middle class" of mobile application developers, according to new data from analytics firm Flurry. Even the long tail is benefiting - something that goes counter to traditional industry trends, which tend to see wealth established at the top as an industry matures. Typically, established players and brands invade from other platforms, then start to depress the opportunities for many of the platform's earlier players, Flurry's report explains. But the opposite appears to be true for the app economy.  Here, there's a rapidly growing middle class of app developers, and even the long tail is generating a larger portion of the revenue than ever before.
 
BigArtMob Plans To Turn Urban Street Art Into Cash Via Tourist Maps And API Top
bamBack in the day BigArtMob was originally a cultural project backed by UK broadcaster Channel 4, but now it's being re-animated as a full-blown startup. It's starting from an interesting - shall we say - position. It allows people to upload and tag 'public art' to a map, which, in simple terms, can be everything from street graffiti to an outdoor sculpture by an established artist. They make no differentiation between 'Institutional art', Street Art, temporary art or graffiti (that's the interesting bit, given that not all graffiti is very artistic). But if you think it's art and it's on the street or out there in the wild backwoods, they plan to map it and create a community around it. This is definitely not Art.com, RiseArt, Artfinder or Artspace. Now, while Artspotter aims to do everything - street art as well as galleries and exhibition - BigArtMob will just focus on street/public art. The first 500 users can sign up for the closed beta here. Admittedly almost every major city in the world has grass roots orgs dedicated to public art documentation and probably a thriving art scene and audience. The question is, is that enough of a draw to create some kind of traction and a business?
 
Content Crunching App Silk Raises $1.6 Million Seed Round Top
silk-apSilk, makers of a free web-based personal database app, today announced a $1.6 million seed funding round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Atomico, Anil Hansjee, Jens Christensen and Philippe Cases.
 

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