Tuesday, November 2, 2010

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Google Offers Money Rewards For Finding Vulnerabilities In Its Web Stuff Top
Google will now pay you to find and report vulnerabilities in its various Web properties. The company made the announcement yesterday, and it applies to sites like google.com, youtube.com, and orkut.com. Should you report a qualifying bug, you can expect to walk away with at least $500. Read more…
 
This Is Not My Beautiful Picture Of A Fish: PicScout Makes Sure Photographers Get Theirs Top
As a professional blogger (TM) I find myself dealing with lots of photographs. While the majority of them are press shots of devices, many times we need the odd photograph of a local Best Buy or a hairless mole rat. In very rare cases, the owners of said photos ask us to remove the photos, which we do. Now, however, there’s a better way to tell if a photo is part of a stock photo collection or has been uploaded by a professional photographer and/or costs something to use. It’s called PicScout ImageExchange and, at its heart, basically adds a little icon to photos that belong to others in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Clicking the icon brings up a purchase page and you’re all done, happily motoring through the countryside with your fresh, new image. The service lets you can buy the photo from the stock agency or the actual photographer and then use the photo in your own projects. The system also includes a service called ImageTracker that allows photographers to tag their photos and then scan the Internet for unauthorized usage. The website itself is arguably bad simply because it’s quite barren with little real explanation and is thus discouraging to the average photographer on the go. Simply put, the service is essentially a tagging system for photos that does not depend on anything embedded in the photo. You could feasibly Photoshop a photo to within an inch of its life and PicScout would still find it. Non-intrusive, highly scalable technology identifies unique patterns within an image PicScout digitally fingerprints your images with proprietary technology and includes them in the ImageIRC Without dependence on embedded code, correct matching survives many forms or generations of alterations, even matching highly manipulated images to original sources. PicScout crawls the web and identifies matches, even when images have been cropped, colorized or altered significantly, including watermark removal PicScout documents each commercial use with a screen capture and full company details and generates regularly scheduled client reports On the user’s end all you really see is, thanks to PicScout’s plugin, is the little icon. In many cases, that’s all that’s needed to turn a photography thief into a customer. The service has been around for a few years now but they’ve recently released an API for programmers as well as features to help track your images in the wild. The service can also help content creators track the popularity of their images on the Internet. While the service has yet to help me in finding a picture of a naked mole rat, its nice to know photographers – and the people who love them – have some recourse when it comes to figuring out whom to pay.
 
LiveU Raises $11 Million For Wireless Video Transmission Technology Top
LiveU , which markets solutions for live video transmissions over wireless networks, this morning announced that it has raised $11 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Pitango Venture Capital and joined by existing investors Carmel Ventures and Canaan Partners . LiveU has raised a total of $23 million in venture capital to date.
 
4INFO Makes A Real Play For Display: AdHaven Platform Reaches 63 Million Top
In its ongoing quest to be more than the “ King of SMS ,” 4INFO has reached a major milestone. In a recent Nielsen report for US mobile display advertising, 4INFO tallied more than 63 million uniques for the month of September, or roughly 75% of the market. That put them in second place, ahead of Microsoft’s Extended Ad Network, Quattro , AdMob and Jumptap . Millennial was number one with 72 million uniques. With a reach of 63 million per month, 4INFO’s mobile display business has now eclipsed the company’s original bread and butter: SMS advertising. Its SMS ad network touches roughly 45 million per month. Founded in 2005, the mobile advertising company has dominated the SMS ad space, with roughly 3,000 publishers on its msgHaven platform. This publishing platform, which allows clients to manage the content and delivery of their SMS campaign, delivers roughly 400 million text messages per month. And yet for all the success with SMS, 4INFO’s CEO, Zaw Thet has been trying to reshape the company as a one-stop shop for all of mobile advertising. Now, no one would call 4INFO the king of mobile just yet, but Thet has made significant strides in 2010, picking up Butter in June (a startup that creates customized mobile solutions), fleshing out AdHaven, its mobile ad management platform, and leveraging its SMS relationships.  Explaining the recent jump in display advertising uniques, Thet says the company has made progress by “moving up the stack from the existing SMS relationships we have with the top publishers and media companies in the US and signing new platform deals.” This Tuesday, the company is also rolling out a new version of AdHaven, which will provide a more comprehensive suite of mobile advertising tools. Beyond display and SMS ad management, the platform will feature full support for in-app rich media, video and a software development kit. CrunchBase Information 4INFO Zaw Thet Information provided by CrunchBase
 
M5 Networks Acquires Hosted VoIP Provider Geckotech For $8 Million Top
Business VoIP phone system provider M5 Networks is announcing the acquisition a competitor, Geckotech . The acquisition price is $8 million. Chicago-based Geckotech provides a Cisco-powered Hosted VoIP platform to businesses. The company’s services include phone service installation and training, system management and free maintenance, system and feature upgrades, and in-house customer support. M5 Networks also offers VoIP phone systems to companies, including Amnesty International and Etsy. M5 will take over all of Geckotech's staff, customers, and datacenters. CrunchBase Information M5 Networks Information provided by CrunchBase
 
For Leetchi, Good Accounts Make Good Friends. And Investors. Top
The first time we talked about Leetchi on TechCrunch was back in February - only 3 months after its official launch in November 2009. At the time, the young company created by 27-year-old Céline Lazorthes had just raised funding with Kima Ventures and 360 Capital Partners . Some of France's hottest business angels, like Oleg Tscheltzoff and Xavier Niel , are also investors. And now the company is about to celebrate its first birthday on November 19th with 1.2 million euros in the bank. Along the same lines as YCombinator 's  WePay , Leetchi's platform facilitates group payments and purchases. And coincidentally, WePay - who raised $7.5 million back in August - is also backed by some rather well-known angel investors, including Max Levchin , Ron Conway and Dave McClure .
 
Verify: Get Feedback On Your Site When It's Still Just A Mockup Top
It isn’t uncommon for websites to ask users for feedback, but most of the time this involves them responding to sites and services that are already in the wild (see services like GetSatisfaction and UserVoice). What if you could poll users about a new design, before you’d done the legwork required to put together the images, HTML, CSS and underlying code of a new site? Meet Verify , a user feedback platform that’s based on screenshots. The new service, which was created by Zurb , offers a suite of screenshot-based tests that you can put in front of users to see what they think. There’s the Click Test , which shows users a screenshot and asks them to click the spot that looks most interesting. It takes users all of five seconds to complete this visual survey (you can try a sample Click Test here ), but it can result in some invaluable data. Other tests are similarly straightforward: there’s a Memory Test to see how much users remember after five seconds of looking at your webpage (is your slogan working?), a preference test that lets users pick between two versions of a site, and more — a total of eight test types available now, with more on the way. Once users have completed these tests, Verify sends the site creators the relevant data, often with heatmaps and other visualizations that demonstrate which designs and features are most effective. For now Verify requires you to bring your own crowd of testers — you can tweet, write Facebook updates, and publish blog posts inviting your users to share their thoughts. In the future the company intends to offer a pool of testers that you’ll be able to tap into. The service costs $9 a month for access to a basic set of feedback, or for $29 a month you get access to demographic information as well. CrunchBase Information ZURB Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Answers.com Hits 10 Millionth Answer, Launches Its First iPhone App (blufr) Top
Answers Corporation , which owns and operates a community-generated Q&A site at Answers.com , this morning announced that its database of answers now tops 10 million . In conjuction with the announcement, Answers Corporation is today debuting its first iPhone app, a free fast-paced trivia game dubbed blufr . The 10 millionth answer registered by the Israeli/US company came in response to the question: “Who was the first Native American to play pro-football?” ( direct link ). The company points out that the answer to this question can improve over time as people contribute their knowledge by using the site's "Improve" feature. Questions can also be discussed in Answers.com's community forum and can easily be shared on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Bob Rosenschein , CEO of Answers.com, also reveals in the press release that its community is now 5.5 million registered members strong. CrunchBase Information Answers Corporation Information provided by CrunchBase
 
DocuSign Expands E-Signatures With New Marketplace Top
DocuSign, an e-signature service, is launching a marketplace that will include applications that complement the use of the platform. DocuSign, which was founded in 2003, allows companies to get legally binding signatures quickly over the internet instead of over the fax or mail. DocuSign certifies digital signatures over the web, acting as a intermediary who holds the documents and verifies the identity of the signature. Currently, DocuSign has 40,000 paying customers, and more than eight million unique users. The functionality of applications from various partners in the marketplace range from CRM, mobile integration, document storage and real estate. Applications in the DocuSign Marketplace ranked by customer feedback and input. The marketplace includes paid and free applications from Ariba, Box.net, Drawloop Technologies and other technology partners. Competitors to DocuSign, which has raised $30 million in funding to date, include EchoSign, and VeriSign. CrunchBase Information DocuSign Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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