Thursday, March 31, 2011

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Boxcar Pushes Its Way Onto The Mac Top
My love of Boxcar should be pretty clear at this point. Because I’m an information junkie, it’s probably the app I use the most on my iPhone/iPad besides Safari. And earlier this year, they brought the notification goodness to the web as well . Now they’re taking the next step: native Mac support. Yes, Boxcar is here for the Mac. The app resides in your toolbar and when clicked shows a drop-down with all of your notifications as they come in in realtime. You can set it so a sound goes off with every new message and if you have Growl installed you can get a visual notification as well. “ This is another step in offering Boxcar wherever you’re at. We believe in delivering messages to people – not devices. We want to deliver messages to you, wherever you’re at. That will be on your phone, tablet, desktop, TV or car. It doesn’t matter to us, as long as it gets to you ,” creator Jonathan George tells us. He also notes that even though notifications are not as vital on a traditional computer with more robust multi-tasking capabilities, people have been using the Mac version to get away from things like a full-fledged Twitter client which can distract you. Instead, Boxcar only notifies you when they must: when you have an @reply or DM, for example. One interesting thing about Boxcar for Mac is that they’re not releasing it via the Mac App Store. George says they want to use this initial release as a large-scale beta of sorts, and Apple’s requirements for their store make some of what they want to do difficult. Instead, a release through that store will likely come down the road. So for now, you can find Boxcar for Mac on their website here . CrunchBase Information Boxcar Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Why Salesforce Overpaid For Radian6 Top
As you may have heard, yesterday Salesforce announced the $326 million purchase of social media monitoring company Radian6, the CRM company’s largest acquisition to date. While we know that Salesforce has been actively pushing its social strategy with the debut of a Twitter and Facebook-like Chatter and the Service Cloud 3 , $300-million plus is a lot of money for the CRM giant to shell out for a single company. In a press call with Salesforce executives and analysts yesterday, the company’s CEO and founder Marc Benioff said that Radian6 currently has a revenue run rate of $35 million and is expected to add $40 to $50 million in revenue to Salesforce’s top line this year. At $326 million, Salesforce paid nearly ten times Radian6′s revenues, which is rare. So why did Salesforce want Radian6 so badly? First, Salesforce is aggressively pushing a social strategy and it’s a dog eat dog world in the social enterprise space with a massive number of companies trying to capture marketshare for social applications. Salesforce is actively marketing Chatter but the Yammer and Jive competitor isn’t a clear cut leader in the space. Radian6 boosts the company’s footprint in social, and provides an established set of well-known clients, such as Dell, GE, Kodak and UPS. Salesforce has already stated its intention to integrate the two applications to ‘create the bridge between public social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and online communities, and Salesforce Chatter, the private, secure social network for the enterprise.’ According the company, ‘Chatter feeds will no longer just contain the activity happening within the walls of a company, but will be filled with real time insights from fans on Facebook pages, followers on Twitter, comments on blog posts and more.’ Another reason why Salesforce bought Radian6 (and paid through the nose) was that it was in a rush to add social media monitoring to its family of products. When an analyst asked Benioff why Salesforce didn’t just develop the technology in house, he said that he needed to move quickly as more competitors move into the world of social enterprise. Salesforce CMO Kendall Collins said it would have takes at least three years for Salesforce to build the technology in-house. Collins tells us that the company looked at entire space of social media monitoring companies, but narrowed it down to a few select companies. In the end, he says, Radian6 was the leader in terms of technology, clients and talent. Clearly, Salesforce is making it known that it is willing to pay the big bucks for social. Even the company’s latest investments, including Seesmic and HubSpot, have been made in social applications for businesses. And for social media monitoring, this exit is probably the largest acquisition to date. Lithium bought ScoutLabs for $20 million to $25 million last year and Jive bought Filtrbox for an undisclosed (and probably small) amount. It’s unclear if Salesforce’s massive bet will pay off in the end. Yes, it will have a social media monitoring application within its comprehensive portfolio of products. But what’s to stop a competitor (i.e. Microsoft or IBM) from buying a smaller (and less expensive) but equally as feature rich app like HootSuite or ViralHeat? Photo credit/ Flickr/blatantnews CrunchBase Information Salesforce Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Twitter Kills The #Dickbar Top
Yes, it’s happened. Three days after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey comes back in to head product, the dreaded #Dickbar , or the Quickbar that inserted trending topics and promoted ads into your tweet-stream on the iPhone, is dead. Business Insider  reported that the Dickbar was a mistake in the first place, having been developed by a junior product manager with no senior oversight. And this would make sense, considering Twitter backtracked after its launch, taking the step to pin it to the top of the app weeks ago and today deciding to do away with it altogether. From the Twitter blog: “Rather than continue to make changes to the QuickBar as it exists, we removed the bar from the update appearing in the App Store today. We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what's happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this. For now, we're going back to the drawing board to explore the best possible experience for in-app notification and discovery.” While this move calls into question Twitter’s grasp on it overall monetization strategy (is it ads over user experience or user experience over ads?), for now users interested in shaking off their #Dickbars can download the new ad-free app from the App Store. And in case anyone misses it, you can replicate the experience here .
 
eBay Bets On Online To Offline Shopping, Adds Milo's Local Product Availability To Search Top
eBay has been quick to start integrating Milo’s local product inventory technology into its products after picking up the startup for $75 million in December. eBay added Milo’s local results in its barcode scanning apps, RedLaser for iPhone and Android, and GiftsNearby, as a shopping tool for consumers to find gift options available for pick up at local retailers in their neighborhood. Today, eBay is launching its deepest integration with Milo—on it’s search platform. Milo’s local availability results will show eBay shoppers which local stores in their neighborhood currently have a desired item in-stock and how much it costs at each location. Milo currently provides access to millions of products from approximately 50,000 stores across all 50 states. eBay shoppers will now have the choice to opt-in to a feature that will include local shopping tab in search results to check a product’s local, or in-store, availability directly from the eBay search results page. In addition, product pages for MP3 players and GPS devices now also include a local shopping tab, which will displays in-stock results from nearby stores. For now, the local search feature has been integrated with eBay Garden , but we’re expecting it to be extended to other search portals in the near future. In addition, eBay is providing retailers who use QuickBooks a way to easily upload their inventory onto Milo and eBay through a new inventory management plug-in. Essentially, this makes it a whole lot more easier for retailers to integrate their offline merchandise onto Milo and eBay. For eBay, local appears to be one of the key strategies that will drive the e-commerce company in the future. Forrester estimates that online research to offline buying is a $917 billion market that will eventually reach $1.3 trillion and account for nearly 50% of total retail sales by 2013. This is a way for eBay to get in on this revenue source. This deepest integration also means that eBay will go head to head with Google on product search, as the search giant’s newest version of its Product search portal was updated with local inventory listings from 70 popular retail brands, many of whom also list with Milo. Between eBay’s local strategy, and its ambitions in fulfillment with its recent $2.4 billion acquisition of GSI Commerce, the company has definitely upped its game in the battle against Amazon and others. CrunchBase Information eBay Information provided by CrunchBase
 
GameSalad Raises $6.1 Million For iPhone And iPad Game Creation Tool Top
GameSalad, formerly Gendai Games , has raised $6.1 million in funding, led by Steamboat Ventures, with participation from Greycroft Partners, DFJ Mercury, DFJ Frontier and ff Asset Management. GameSalad’s game creation tool allows non-programmers to build, develop and publish 2D casual games games for the iPhone and iPad. The benefit of using the platform is that developers can design, publish and distribute original games for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Web without needing to write a line of code. To date, GameSalad has been used to create powered over 8,500 titles in the iTunes App Store including more than 30 top 100 U.S. Games in Apple's App Store. The new financing will be used to grow GameSalad's technical and product teams and further develop its game creation technology. We hear the company, which is currently based in Austin, is also planning a move to San Francisco in the next few months. CrunchBase Information GameSalad Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Opera Mini Returns To GetJar's Mobile App Marketplace Top
A few weeks ago, after the debut of the Opera App Store , app marketplace GetJar banned Opera’s mobile browsing app Opera Mini from its own mobile app marketplace. The reasoning: Opera’s App Store was available in the app and competes directly with GetJar’s marketplace. Today, it appears a truce has been made, as Opera Mini 6 is now back in the GetJar store. GetJar remains committed to offering consumers the best possible content regardless of category, phone or platform , said Patrick Mork, CMO of GetJar. Opera Mini has been a great partner and one of our top apps for many years and our users will be happy to have a bigger and better version of Opera Mini back in our store. It’s unclear how Opera and GetJar resolved their differences. When GetJar first banned Opera Mini from its app marketplace, Mork wrote that the company “spent many months negotiating with Opera to avoid this scenario and are disappointed that GetJar consumers will no longer have access to Opera Mini.” It appears that GetJar was blindsided by the fact that Opera opened up its own app store. A reader had suggested previously the possibility that GetJar bid for Opera's inclusion of its app store in its mobile browser products but lost out to Appia, who is powering Opera’s app store. The whole brouhaha does bring up an interesting point when it comes to competition and the flux of app marketplaces. At what point do competing app marketplaces and developers draw the line? Well, all’s well that ends well. Photo Credit/ Flickr/Mel B.
 
Skype Challenger Releases Viber 2.0: Free Text Messages And More Top
Exclusive - Viber Media , the Israeli startup behind the Viber service, which lets iPhone users make free calls to each other , has released version 2.0 of its application in the App Store. The company’s still gearing up for the launch of their Android application , but in the meantime the update to the iPhone app brings a couple of goodies, in particular the ability to text message other Viber users free of charge. Sure, there isn’t exactly a shortage of free messaging apps for the iPhone these days, but it’s always nice to have a free app that supports both voice calls and text messages. Viber 2.0 comes with a new tab dedicated to ‘Messages’, where users can see all of their messages and from which they can send new ones to their contacts. Viber sends push notifications to users when they receive a text, so it’s potentially a replacement for SMS. In addition, the ‘Contacts’ interface has been redesigned to let users filter their contacts and easily see which ones are already on on Viber, or just their favorites if they prefer. Viber’s calling mechanism has also been improved. When users place a call, the app will first enter a ‘Calling’ state. Once the other party’s Viber app has been contacted and it begins ringing, Viber will enter a ‘Ringing’ state, letting the user know that there’s a connection. Viber has already been downloaded by over 10 million users to date. CrunchBase Information Viber Media Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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