The latest from TechCrunch
- Google Voice CEO Craig Walker Launches Firespotter, A Google Ventures Funded Incubator
- IAC's CityGrid Media Buys Social Media Monitoring And Analysis Platform BuzzLabs
- Talkatone Lets You Make Calls And SMS Over Wifi For Free, No Strings Attached
| Google Voice CEO Craig Walker Launches Firespotter, A Google Ventures Funded Incubator | Top |
| When Google Voice (previously GrandCentral) cofounder and CEO Craig Walker left Google last year, he didn’t go far. In fact, he just went across the street to set up a desk at Google Ventures as an entrepreneur in residence. At the time he told me his goal was to start a new company. Now, he tells me, he wants to start lots of them. He and his team (former Google Voice engineers Brian Peterson and John Rector, and Alex Cornell) are launching Firespotter Labs today, an incubator for new startups. The company has also taken an initial $3 million round of funding from Google Ventures (keepin it in the family!). Wesley Chan joins Firespotter’s board of directors. Just another incubator? Maybe. But Walker has direct experience with the idea. Grand Central came out of a successful incubator, Minor Ventures . He says he wants to take the parts of Minor Ventures that worked, and then tweak a few things. For example, he says, Minor Ventures tended to come up with ideas and then hire a team to build those ideas and carry the companies forward. Walker says that Firespotter Labs will build the initial products using its own permanent in house team. When and if an idea has legs, then they’ll hire a team and spin off the company to get outside funding. Boutique incubators are somewhat in vogue right now. Betaworks continues to do well, and Churn Labs , founded by Admob founder Omar Hamoui , is off to a great start with backing from Sequoia. So when will we see some actual operating startups coming out of Firespotter? Sometime soon, says Walker. That $3 million, he says, is enough to get 4-6 companies off the ground. CrunchBase Information Firespotter Labs Google Ventures Google GrandCentral Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| IAC's CityGrid Media Buys Social Media Monitoring And Analysis Platform BuzzLabs | Top |
| Social media monitoring platforms are undoubtedly one of the more desirable acquisition targets for both technology, e-commerce and media companies. Salesforce picked up Radian6 a few weeks ago for $326 million and Walmart bought Kosmix as well. And today IAC-owned local media and advertising property CityGrid Media is acquiring its own social media monitoring and sentiment analysis platform, BuzzLabs. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Seattle-based BuzzLabs, which was co-founded in 2009 by former Microsoft employees Philip Lee and Dou Shen, allows publishers to leverage social content, keeps consumers better informed, and helps local businesses monitor their presence across the web. BuzzLabs’ dashboard for businesses dashboard aggregates social media activity into one location, allowing companies to track mentions, Tweets, reviews and more across the web. For content providers, BuzzLabs will help socialize data. For example, BuzzFeed’s opinion mining technology extracts and identifies key phrases from content to determine if it’s positive, neutral, or negative. The startup also creates tag clouds from content. The company has actually been a partner of CityGrid and has been using the local media platform’s API for the past year. So how does BuzzLabs’ technology help CityGrid? For background, IAC launched CityGrid last year as a set of APIs which makes all of Citysearch's local listings content and advertising available to other Websites and mobile apps. The company then rebranded its Yelp-like local business content platform CitySearch as part of CityGrid Media. All of the local listings in Citysearch are available through CityGrid's APIs so that anyone creating a mobile app or local Website can grab business listings, addresses, phone numbers, photos, reviews, and more and build their own apps around them. CityGrid also matches local advertisers with these local publishers. With the acquisition, CityGrid says it will have the ability to aggregate and analyze millions of pieces of content across its content and ad network, including reviews, articles, blog posts, check-ins, Likes and other real time streams of user generated content, producing additional data relating to business sentiment, consumer insight and trending data for its publishers and million-plus merchants. The acquisition will also offer a reputation management and social media monitoring platform to local merchant advertisers. And the BuzzLabs business dashboard will be integrated into the CityGrid Media Ad Center, allowing local merchants to access BuzzLabs' social monitoring and analysis tools to better manage online reputations. Jay Herratti, CEO of CityGrid Media said this a statement:"With the explosion of local, user-generated content on the Web, it is imperative our network of publishers has real-time tools to acquire new content and make sense of it for users in a way that's immediately valuable to them…By adding BuzzLabs to the CityGrid offering, we are able to provide our publishers with relevant, real-time content and new local data that consumers now rely on to make their decisions." Herratti tells us that BuzzLabs technology will be integrated into the CityGrid platform over the next three to six months. CrunchBase Information CityGrid Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Talkatone Lets You Make Calls And SMS Over Wifi For Free, No Strings Attached | Top |
| Like Pinger , Talkatone allows you to make phone calls using Wifi. Unlike Pinger, Talkatone uses Google Voice as a channel to let you make and receive phone calls to and from your phone contacts, for free. While Pinger, using Textfree with voice , gives you a certain amount of minutes free and then charges your iTunes account or asks you to complete tasks, Talkatone, after some jiggering of your Google Voice account, allows you to make unlimited calls without having to jump through any additional hoops. To set Talktone up log into your Gmail account and select the “Call Phone” option under Chat. Use the “Call Phone” option to make one call to a regular phone number. Then sign out from Google Chat and return to Talkatone. Make a phone call from its phone widget and you should be good to go there. In order to receive incoming calls, you have to upgrade your Google Voice account to get a phone number and select “Forward to Google Chat” on the Voice Settings page. You can then receive calls to your Google Voice number in Talkatone. (For more detailed instructions click here. ) This latest Talkatone release also lets users in the US and Canada send and receive unlimited SMS messages via Wifi, using just their data plans. It includes an audio compression upgrade to improve voice quality over weaker networks. Talkatone is particularly useful for phone deadzones like TechCrunch offices, but might be a godsend for people who turn off their cell service on trips abroad and just use their data plans. Imagine being able to make calls from French hotel Wifi or even on a plane? You can try Talkatone for free here. CrunchBase Information Talkatone Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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