Monday, November 28, 2011

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Flavors.me Heads Into Tumblr Territory With "Follow" Buttons & Plans To Support Content Creation Top
flavors-me-screenshot_2Flavors.me, the dead-simple service for building your own personal profile page, is launching a major redesign on Tuesday, with features that position it to take on the blogging juggernaut that is the Tumblr pageview machine. Among a number of improvements to the service's tools, user interface and design, the most notable new addition is that of a "follow" button which will now appear on every Flavors.me profile page. This button lets you follow the posts from other Flavors.me users, which includes their aggregated updates from around the social Web, such Twitter posts, Facebook status updates, blog posts, Instagram photos and Foursquare check-ins. But more importantly, the "follow" button is laying the groundwork for Flavors.me's next move: support for content creation.
 
WeedMaps Acquires Marijuana.com For A Kushy $4.20 Million Top
weedmapslogo-1Yes, really. General Cannabis Inc. has just announced that it's acquired Marijuana.com. The company didn't disclose the details of the deal, but we've confirmed that the acquisition price was $4.20 million. Naturally. The executives involved obviously have a sense of humor, but General Cannabis is a serious business: it's traded on the OTCQX market, and a year ago it acquired WeedMaps, a popular 'Yelp for Cannabis Dispensaries' site with a large following.  WeedMaps was topping $400,000 a month in revenues at the time of the acquisition and it's growing nicely — the site did over $1 million in gross revenues in July, and now sees 10 million page views a month.
 
The Promise Of The 15-Inch MacBook Air Top
Screen Shot 2011-11-28 at 6.27.37 PMIn my home office sits a 27-inch iMac with a secondary 24-inch LED Cinema Display attached to it. It's a glorious vision of screen real estate. And yet, I dread using it. First world problem? It's perhaps the definition of the term. But it's true. I'm sitting here on a couch adjacent to my desk because I'd rather type this post on my MacBook Air. To be completely honest, I'd rather be using my iPad right now. But I must admit, it doesn't come anywhere close to cutting it when it comes to typing more than a few dozen words. So for now, the MacBook Air exists as the pinnacle of personal computing in my eyes.
 
Why Greedy Stockholders and A $100 Billion IPO Could Hurt Facebook Top
378702_152923341474702_152922924808077_173818_363709751_nFacebook will IPO in April or June 2012, right on time with our prediction and when it would need to start filing public financial reports, according the the Wall Street Journal. The outlet's sources say Facebook could raise $10 billion at a $100 billon valuation, and hasn't chosen which banks to go with yet. But is this the right move? To date, Facebook has been conservative with monetization and progressive with product development. It minimizes ad real-estate in favor of maintaining a healthy user experience for the long term, and pushes products people might not warm up to for years. But outside stockholders could detract from Facebook's vision and momentum. They could push for faster returns, and pressure the company to display more ads, turn mobile into a direct revenue stream, and play it safe with product. This might produce short-term gains, but could hamper what CEO Mark Zuckerberg has built into a core communications utility for the world.
 
Fashioning Change Launches Netflix-Style Recommendation Engine For Green Shopping Top
FashioningChangeHere's one for all you do-gooder Cyber Monday shoppers out there. "Doing good" and online shopping have traditionally been at odds. You know what your favorite brands are, where to find them online, and maybe you occasionally find yourself wanting to patronize the green, "ethical" equivalent of your favorite brands. Problem is, you have no idea where to find them, and you probably don't care that much. Plus, search results don't give you the price points or styles you want. Well, Fashioning Change is developing a solution to this very problem. The San Diego-based startup is building a recommendation engine that takes information based on the big, well-known brands you love and introduces you to the "do-gooder" or "green" alternative. Today, that recommendation takes the form of a public marketplace (in beta) and a private beta browser add-on, which will be launching in early 2012. (But we have 100 free invites to test the add-on below.)
 
True Or False? Automatic Fact-Checking Coming To The Web – Complications Follow Top
polygraph_history_5The social layer has settled on the web like a dusting of multicolored snowflakes, gracing every story with a little menagerie of sharing counts and buttons. Once basic standards of content publishing were established, basic standards of sharing had to be as well, the internet being as it is a medium of information transmission. First you get the content, then you move it around. We're still working on the moving around part. Another layering we've seen is the layering of the internet onto the real world. Location-based networking, maps, deals, all that. As soon as we had the ability to tell the world where we were, that information was naturally integrated into our services. Yet another combination is emerging: the layering of reference and context onto the information you read. What this even comprises is difficult to say exactly, but MIT Media Lab grad student Daniel Schultz (@slifty) has one idea: a browser script that automatically checks what you're reading against reliable, substantiated facts. It's a simple idea with innumerable approaches, problems, and implications — which means we'll probably be dealing with it for a long time.
 
Facebook Acquires The Tech Behind WhoGlue, A Company That Sued It In 2009 Top
Screen Shot 2011-11-28 at 3.01.18 PMFacebook has confirmed to us this morning that it did indeed acquire the Baltmore-based software firm WhoGlue earlier this month. WhoGlue builds social networking software for membership organizations (like college alumni networks, for example) and apparently had the fortuity to file a patent on something called "Distributed personal relationship information management system and methods" in 2001, three years before Facebook existed.
 
SlideShare Details Its Own Exponential Growth In … An Infographic Top
16198v1-max-250x250SlideShare, the content sharing platform for business documents, videos, and presentations, has grown into a sizable platform. In 2008, SlideShare was but a simple app launched on LinkedIn to allow professionals to share slides and documents with their network. As SlideShare is designed as a sharing platform for the professional community, its collaboration with LinkedIn has made perfect sense from a strategy standpoint -- and has helped it grow into the juggernaut it is today. The startup has continued to work with LinkedIn to add deeper integration into its platform, which Leena covered in depth back in June.
 
Show Off Your iPhone's Guts With iFixit's Cyber Monday Deal Top
ifixitdealWhen Cyber Monday rolls around, everyone's eyes dart to the big boys like Amazon and Newegg for cheap goods, but niche retailers have their own deals too. Case in point: the DIY repair nuts at iFixit have whipped together a nifty bundle for aspiring iPhone modders who would like to see the fruits of Apple's design savvy instead of an opaque black panel.
 
New Google+ Ad Shows Off The Social Network's Biggest Problem Top
Google has released yet another TV commercial to help demonstrate the features of its new social network, Google+. Like the other marketing efforts, the ad is slick, polished and even sort of funny. Unfortunately, it also demonstrates everything that's wrong with Google+ in a just minute's time. In fact, if the video hadn't been posted to Google's own YouTube channel, you may have almost wondered if it was a parody put out by Facebook PR. The ad, published the day prior to Thanksgiving in the U.S., tells the tale of two Google+ users, Kyle and Lisa. In it, Kyle places Lisa into his "Love of My Life" Circle while Lisa puts Kyle in her own unfortunately named "Creepers" Circle. Oh, poor Kyle! Over time, though, it becomes clear that Lisa and Kyle's relationship changes, as the ad shows Lisa moving Kyle into a variety of other Circles, including "Book Club," "Guys With Cars" (shallow much, Lisa?), "Ski House," "Maybes" and finally, "Keepers." Cue the awwwwww's, right? Wrong.
 
Ad Targeting — Both Facebook And The European Commission Have Explaining Left To Do Top
ausefultargetdfbadThe European Commission is going after web companies over their failures to explain how their ad targeting systems work. But it's not hitting the bulls-eye, because it's confusing targeting with data protection, which are not quite the same issue. The commission, for all of its good goals, has some explaining left to do. So does its big target, Facebook. In a sensationalistic article today that claims "Facebook faces a crackdown on selling users' secrets to advertisers," The Telegraph reveals that it and the European Commission only sort of understand how Facebook works. Commission vice president Viviane Reding proclaims that "I call on service providers – especially social media sites – to be more transparent about how they operate," in a quote provided to the paper. "Users must know what data is collected and further processed (and) for what purposes." That's a real issue, and something that Facebook could solve on its own.
 
Flockified's Group Invite / Planning App Helps Ticket Sites Boost Sales Top
Flockafied LogoWhen 90% of people discover an event they might want to buy tickets for, they leave the purchase funnel as they try to convince friends to join them. This group decision process is clumsy, and poor retention reduces sales for promoters. Helsinki startup GigsWiz addresses these problems today with the beta launch of Flockafied, a Facebook app that makes it easy to poll friends about buying event tickets. Promoters add a Flockified button to their ticket page which potential customers click to invite friends and track confirmations that they want tickets. Flockified could help sites like Eventbrite, Ticketfly, or even Ticketmaster sell more tickets in exchange for fees. The first 100 TechCrunch readers to sign up for Flockified with the code TechCrunchFlockified will get early access.
 
PayPal Cyber Monday Mobile Payment Volume Up Over 500 Percent Top
paypalBlack Friday and Thanksgiving Day brought record mobile engagement for PayPal, with 511 percent and a 538 percent increase in global mobile payment volume when compared to Thanksgiving and Black Friday 2010, respectively. It looks like Cyber Monday is also bringing record sales for the payments giant. The company is reporting that as of 11 a.m. PST, PayPal is already seeing a six-fold increase (514 percent) more mobile payment volume on Cyber Monday 2011 compared to the same time period on Cyber Monday 2010.
 
eBay Sold Four iPad 2s Per Minute This Cyber Monday Morning Top
ebayshopOnline commerce giant eBay this morning ran a Cyber Monday deal for a white Apple iPad 2 WiFi 16GB, selling the popular tablet for $449 or exactly $50 off the MSRP (+ free shipping). Turns out a lot of people figured that was a great deal. And they were right, too. After all, Apple only discounted the iPad 2 16GB with $41 on Black Friday, so you would indeed have been better off waiting until today and buying it on eBay ... if you could get your hands on it quickly enough.
 
LocalVox Launches Full-Service Marketing Solution To Help Local Merchants Target Their Customers Top
139187v2-max-250x250Hyperlocal is all the rage these days, and content companies, deal sites, and everyone in between are trying to find better ways to access (and advertise to) local markets. Over the last decade, the majority of media companies have attempted to launch internal or on-site outlets that cover local news, but most have met with middling success. NearSay, a New York City-based startup that launched six months ago, began by asking a simple question: "Where do we get our neighborhood news?" NearSay's founders, Trevor Sumner and David Pachter, were startled by the lackluster and confusing responses to that question and, in turn, the dearth of valuable neighborhood outlets for local news. So, for their answer, they started a platform that began as a realtime business newswire to allow local businesses in New York City to publish announcements (on events, deals, etc.) to the NearSay platform.
 
Time To Tweet The Art: Museum-Analytics.org Keeps Tabs On Curatorial Social Media Top
Screen Shot 2011-11-28 at 2.19.15 PMTo paraphrase Cracker, I suspect what the world needs now is another method to assess the social metrics of various museums around the world like I need a hole in the head, but presumably this information is important to someone out there, so here goes. Museum-Analytics.org is a site with a simple mission: to calculate the social reach of various museums. The service uses various and sundry sources as well as Twitter and Facebook to find news and information about almost 3000 museums around the world. For example, you can see trends at the Van Gogh Museum (Motto: "It doesn't cost an ear and a leg to get in!") including new Facebook likes, Tweets, comments mentioning the museum, and engaging content created for and about the museum. I could see this as a boon to curators and directors alike and valuable to museum fans who are trying to push these staid organizations into, at the very least, the 20th century.
 
(Founder Stories) How Michael Bloomberg Got His Start: "I Brought You A Cup Of Coffee" Top
Bloomberg Show 1.movBefore he became the three-time Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg made billions running the financial information company bearing his name. But it might never have happened if he hadn't been fired from Wall Street during the early days of his career. The Mayor and Bloomberg LP founder dropped by our TechCrunch studio to discuss all this and how he is working to turn New York City into a high tech hub with Founder Stories host, Chris Dixon. After leaving Salomon Brothers, Mayor Bloomberg started his own business because "nobody offered me a job, I was probably too proud to go look for one, and I said well why not start your own company."
 
Twitter Nabs The Two Guys Behind Mobile Security Startup Whisper Systems Top
Screen Shot 2011-11-28 at 11.09.37 AMThe team behind security startup Whisper Systems has been acq-hired by Twitter, they have announced on their company blog this gorgeous Cyber Monday morning.
"We started Whisper Systems with the goal of improving security and privacy for mobile devices. We were attracted to this not only because we saw it as an opportunity to reinvent the security solutions that never really worked in the PC environment to begin with, but also because the stakes are much higher — due to the nature of mobile devices themselves — and we didn't like the way that things were looking."
As Whisper Systems consists of just two employees, Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson, this has talent acquisition written all over it. In their year of being in the business, the startup has built a variety of encryption products for Android phones and the web including WhisperCore, a product that encrypts all data on your phone and TextSecure, a product that encrypts text messages.
 
Rovio Said To Have Turned Down $2.25 Billion Acquisition By Zynga Top
angry birdsReady for this week's tale of someone turning down an absurd mountain of money in exchange for their company? According to a report by the New York Times, Rovio — makers of the Angry Birds series (and the accompanying heap of Angry Birds merchandise so plentiful that they've started opening up retail stores) — turned down $2.25 billion this past summer. The would-be buyer? Zynga.
 
The 4Moms Origami: Look At This Robotic Stroller! Look At It! Top
There are things you need to be afraid of when you're a new parent. There's gluten, pull cords, Disney products, and BPA, to be sure, but what about wild robotic strollers that look as if they'll eat your wee ones in one snap of their plastic jaws? Luckily, the 4moms Origami stroller won't close on the little ones and is in fact a automatic stroller with a bit of a twist. Instead of pressing down on some hydraulics, this thing opens and closes with the tap of a button. It is, in short, pretty darn amazing.
 

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