The latest from TechCrunch
- Contest: Away Put Your Weapon, I Mean You To Win A Star Wars Prize
- MerchantCircle Debuts iPhone App For Small Businesses To Manage Marketing
- Facebook Like Aggregator Likester Tracks What's Hot On Facebook
- Howard Lindzon, Yossi Vardi, Greg Tseng, and Bradley Horowitz All Ready To Disrupt In NYC
| Contest: Away Put Your Weapon, I Mean You To Win A Star Wars Prize | Top |
| It is May 4th aka Force Day. On this day we must celebrate the cultural phenomenon that is Star Wars. How better to do that than by picking one item from a huge list of Star Wars stuff and having it sent to your home. Your mission, then, is to choose one item and I will pick one winner at random and that winner will receive the item he or she chose. The result? He or she will, as Han Solo once said, “live long and prosper.” Read more… | |
| MerchantCircle Debuts iPhone App For Small Businesses To Manage Marketing | Top |
| Online marketing network for small business owners MerchantCircle is launching an iPhone app today that allows small businesses to manage and update their listings on the site and other social media pages, upload photos, answer new customer inquiries and stay on top of their reviews on the go. Merchant Circle provides a business directory for merchants in smaller towns and currently lists over a million small businesses. MerchantCircle has long targeted merchants in small locales versus catering towards the consumers, as sites like Yelp and CitySearch do. MerchantCircle has local business members in 95% of the 24,600 U.S. cities and towns with populations over 200. The free iPhone app allows users to create and publish daily deals, photos, status updates and more across multiple social networks, including MerchantCircle, Facebook and Twitter. Users can also use the app to respond to customer inquiries, manage their business listing, reply to messages, and monitor reviews. For example, a hairstylist on MerchantCircle could snap before-and-after photos of clients and immediately post them to her page. Or an IT specialist could respond to inbound customer inquiries as they come in. A mobile app seems like a natural extension of the network for small businesses (similar to the usefulness of mobile apps for networks like Facebook or LinkedIn). I’m actually surprised that MerchantCircle didn’t already offer small businesses a mobile app. CrunchBase Information MerchantCircle Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Facebook Like Aggregator Likester Tracks What's Hot On Facebook | Top |
| With hundreds of thousands of websites integrating with Facebook Likes and 250 million people engaging with Likes just a little after a year after the Like button made its first appearance at F8, the space of Facebook Likes aggregation is about to get competitive. Facebook search engine Booshaka just released their own Facebook Likes categorization yesterday, for example. Likester just overhauled its platform, wanting to become the go-to Facebook Likes aggregator What Likester does differently from Booshaka is that it shows users realtime and popular Like trends, including what your friends are Liking, what everyone is Liking, what’s trending and a chronological log of all your friends Likes. A maps feature adds locality to what Likes are popular where. As an example of the potential of this service, Likester is currently trying to predict the winner of American Idol by tracking how many people Like certain contestants during the show. The best part about Likester is the drill down effects of item affinity when you hit the Details button on a specific Like. You can look into “Likesters who liked this also like” recommendations as well as suggest the content to friends and post it on your Facebook wall. Founder Kevin McCarthy says he is also experimenting with anti affinity, or figuring out what people who Like something dislike. The site offers the ability to search all Facebook Likes by keyword (to search for all the Seattle-related Likes for example) and by popularity and relevance. You can also search for Like related content on platforms like Amazon, YouTube, Google, Twitter and more. McCarthy explains the utility of the service, “I came up with the idea for Likester about a year ago, because Facebook doesn't show you the whole picture. That is, if just view your news feed every day, you'll never see the totality of all of your friends likes (some are never shown to you). And you'll never see likes that occurred more than a day or so apart combined and reported, even when your friends have each individually liked the same thing. Basically, we wanted to provide a structured format for a user to manage all this data. An average user of ours, in their friend network, has 15,000 likes. How can you possibly make sense of all of that data, without a service like this?” Likester is currently bootstrapped and run by a small team of five out of Seattle, Washington. McCarthy is currently talking to customers like ChannelAdvisor to up the ante on retail adoption of Like data as a marketing tool. CrunchBase Information Likester.com Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Howard Lindzon, Yossi Vardi, Greg Tseng, and Bradley Horowitz All Ready To Disrupt In NYC | Top |
| TechCrunch Disrupt NYC starts May 23rd—less than a month away. And we are very excited to announce four more guests to our growing list of speakers who will be joining us at this year’s Disrupt in NYC: Howard Lindzon, Yossi Vardi, Greg Tseng, and Bradley Horowitz. Howard Lindzon, co-founder and CEO of StockTwits, is a force to be reckoned with. With over twenty years experience in the financial community acting as both an entrepreneur and investor (his sold his last startup, Wallstrip, to CBS) , has incredible insight into new media and is also a very active angel investor in the financial and internet business sectors. Yossi Vardi is an award winning Israeli investor, most famous for being the original investor in ICQ . Currently co-founder and board observer of WeFi, Vardi has invested in over 50 tech companies and has acted as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program on issues of energy in the developing world. Greg Tseng is the co-founder of Tagged and has served as Chief Executive Officer since its inception. He has been a driving force in creating Tagged.com with his partner, co-founder and long-time friend, Johann Schleier-Smith. As VP of product for Google apps, Bradley Horowitz oversees Google's communications products and social applications including Google Talk , GrandCentral , Blogger , and Picasa . Before joining Google, Horowitz was the former vice president of Yahoo's product strategy group and led Yahoo's efforts in building innovative products and technologies across the company. We are incredibly excited to have all four guest speakers with us for this year’s Disrupt in NYC. We will keep announcing new guest speakers week after week as we get closer to the event. You can read the full list of announced speakers here . Early bird ticket prices end tonight at midnight PDT, so make sure to purchase your tickets soon. Tickets are available here . If you'd like to become a part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde for more information. Howard Lindzon Co-founder and CEO, StockTwits Howard Lindzon is co-founder and CEO of StockTwits® – a social network for traders and investors to share real-time ideas and information. StockTwits was recently named "one of the top 10 most innovative companies in web" by FastCompany and one of the "50 best websites" by Time magazine. Mr. Lindzon has more than twenty years experience in the financial community acting in both an entrepreneurial and investing capacity. With a unique vision for starting and successfully managing innovative companies, he is the Managing Partner of Social Leverage, a holding company that invests in early stage web businesses. Howard continues to manage a hedge fund he started in 1998. He created Wallstrip, and more than 400 original web video shows, which was purchased by CBS Corp. in 2007. He is an active angel with many success angel investments including: Rent.com, (purchased by Ebay in 2005 for $415 million), Golfnow.com (purchased by Comcast in June 2008), and Lifelock (lead investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers). Mr. Lindzon’s new media and internet business investments also include: Limos.com, Blogtalkradio.com, Buddy Media, Ticketfly, Assistly, Bit.ly and Tweetdeck. Mr. Lindzon received an MBA at Arizona State University and an MIM from The American Graduate School of International Management. Yossi Vardi Co-founder & Board Observer, WeFi Inc. Yossi Vardi is an Israeli investor most famous for being the original investor in ICQ – the first Internet-wide instant messaging system. Vardi has invested in over 50 tech companies in diverse areas of software, energy, Internet, mobile, cleantech, and others. Vardi has been an active civil servant in Israel through projects involving energy and infrastructure. He also co-founded Alon, an Israeli oil company. Vardi acted as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program on issues of energy in the developing world. Vardi has received many awards including The Prime Minister Award, The Industry Award, Entrepreneur of the Year (Tel Aviv University), and the CEO!'s Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame from the Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization. Greg Tseng Co-founder and CEO, Tagged Greg Tseng co-founded Tagged in October 2004 and has served as Chief Executive Officer since its inception. He has been a driving force in creating Tagged.com with his partner, co-founder and long-time friend, Johann Schleier-Smith. Greg holds an A.B. in Chemistry & Physics & Mathematics from Harvard University, where he served as a Director of the Harvard Entrepreneurs Club (HEC) from 1998-2000 and co-authored The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide to Starting Your Own Business (Wiley, 1999). Greg is presently on leave from Stanford University, where he is pursuing the Ph.D. in Physics on a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. His academic research lies in the field of nanotechnology and he has published his results in top journals such as Science. Bradley Horowitz VP Product, Google Apps, Google Bradley oversees Google's communications products and social applications including Google Talk, GrandCentral, Blogger and Picasa. Before joining Google, Bradley led Yahoo's advanced development division, which developed new products such as Yahoo! Pipes, and drove the acquisition of products such as Flickr and MyBlogLog. Bradley Horowitz is the former vice president of Yahoo's product strategy group. He led Yahoo's efforts in building innovative products and technologies across the company. Horowitz drove innovation and leveraged Yahoo's platform to deliver compelling Yahoo products and services to a community of 500 million users. In addition, he was responsible for the company's initiative to open up its platform which included overseeing the Yahoo Developer Network (YDN). Prior to that, he managed a portfolio of products for Yahoo including media search, desktop search and the Yahoo Toolbar. Prior to joining Yahoo, Horowitz served as both the chief technical officer and the vice president of engineering for the Virage division of Autonomy, where he was responsible for the technical delivery of five major product lines. Prior to Autonomy, he founded Virage, the company widely recognized as the market creator and leader for advanced media indexing and analysis. Horowitz helped grow the company from "a garage startup" through its NASDAQ IPO. Horowitz was a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. While at the Media Lab, he worked on a number of topics related to computer vision, graphics and image processing, which resulted in a patented new technique for the recovery of structure, motion and camera parameters from video sequences. Horowitz holds an MS in Media Science from MIT and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. | |
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