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- Bit.ly’s Borthwick: Twitter, Thanks For The Ride
- Grou.ps And Grouply Welcome Ning Refugees
- It’s 4SQ Day, But Foursquare Has (Almost) Nothing To Do With It
- Millennial Media: Android Ad Impressions Rise 72 Percent From February To March
- A Volcano Plays Merry Hell With European Startups
- Oracle Buys Healthcare Software Firm Phase Forward For $685 Million
- Prosper Raises $14.7 Million For Peer To Peer Lending Market; Eric Schmidt Invests
- Grooveshark Revamps TinySong: Easy Music Sharing Made Even Easier
- Israeli Startups, Let’s Meet Up At Techonomy 2010
- Glympse Brings Real-Time Location Sharing To Facebook
- Google’s Plan To Give Chrome OS (And All Web-Enabled Devices) Universal Printer Support
- Google Brings The Damn Goats Back
- Google Announces Q1 Earnings, Beats Analyst Estimates But Shares Drop
- Won’t Somebody Please Think Of The Trackpads?
- CrunchGear Interviews UFC’s Chuck Liddell about Reebok, MMA, and the iPad
- Google: Android Market Now Serving 38,000 Apps, Nexus One Is A Profitable Business
- The Rest Of The Details On That Monster Groupon Financing
- Microsoft Arc Keyboard vs the Apple Wireless Keyboard
- Scamville? No. But You Can Now Get Facebook Credits Via Offers
- Khosla And RRE Lead $16.2 Million Series C In Xobni
- Rally Up Brings “Real Friend-Focused” Location Based Social Network To The iPad
- PeerIndex Plots A DNA Profile Of Your Expertise
- Snacksquare: A Foursquare Directory Of Deals And Venues
- Ning’s Bubble Bursts: No More Free Networks, Cuts 40% Of Staff
- Gleeks Rejoice! Smule Packs Fox’s Glee Into A Fantastic iPhone App
| Bit.ly’s Borthwick: Twitter, Thanks For The Ride Posted: 16 Apr 2010 08:10 AM PDT On Wednesday at Twitter’s Chirp conference, CEO Evan Williams released another bomb during the wrap-up Q&A session: Twitter is working on creating it’s own link shortener for Twitter.com. Once again, in the space of a week, Twitter declared it was moving into an area previously occupied by another company in the Twitter eco-system, in this case bit.ly, which grew on the back of Twitter when it became the default link shortener on the service in May, 2009. I was able to speak with bit.ly and betaworks CEO John Borthwick yesterday about Twitter's unwinding of their relationship. The impact on bit.ly may be negligible, at least in the short run. It turns out that Twitter stopped using bit.ly as it's default shortener on Twitter.com back in early December, except for one specific use-case. And even before then, Twitter.com accounted for only about 5 percent of link encodes. Now it is less than 1 percent. Yet bit.ly encoded 3.4 billion links last month and continues to have record days. That is because it is used by many Twitter clients, including Tweetdeck (a betaworks portfolio company). Borthwick says bit.ly went into the relationship knowing it could be temporary and is happy bit.ly was able to help Twitter during the crucial period last year when it was working through its scaling issues. He reiterates that point in a blog post today:
It is odd, however, that Twitter stripped out bit.ly before it's own link shortener is ready. It is even odder that hardly anybody noticed since December. Maybe that is because the power users who would notice don't use Twitter.com that often. Nevertheless, Borthwick thanks Twitter for the ride and “for the kick start it gave bit.ly.” He also assures users and observers that “bit.ly is short, sweet and out of control.” No business should be dependent on any one platform, he maintain, and bit.ly isn’t. But he also offers some advice for “platforms” (like Twitter), with a hint of a reprimand:
Borthwick voices the concern of all Twitter developers. They want to know they can build real businesses on top of Twitter without Twitter arbitrarily tuning off the spigot. But he suspects these boundaries will now become much clearer. Once a platform company decides on its business model, it is easier to define those boundaries, he writes. With Twitter finally deciding how it will make money with Promoted Tweets and commercial accounts, those boundaries are being set.      
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| Grou.ps And Grouply Welcome Ning Refugees Posted: 16 Apr 2010 08:05 AM PDT
Grouply will shortly announce a more comprehensive 'Ning to Grouply' migration tool that will enable a Ning network owner to easily import other important content from their network, says Mark Robins, CEO and co-founder of Grouply. Of course, there are slight differences between the functionality on the two sites but groups on Grouply provide many of the same core social features as Ning does, including a customizable community website, event management, discussion forums, an activity feed, and an app store with add-on applications. Grou.ps also provides a similar platform to Ning. The startup's networks are attractive to users because it lets you run all of your group's collaboration tools from one GROU.PS domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups – each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, etc). But its important to note that Ning’s traffic and userbase is still much greater than both of these competitors. For example, Grou.ps has 2.8 million users, whereas Ning has at least 37 million users as of last November. And the number of Ning networks that migrate may not be too significant; 75% of Ning’s traffic already comes from premium accounts.      
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| It’s 4SQ Day, But Foursquare Has (Almost) Nothing To Do With It Posted: 16 Apr 2010 07:01 AM PDT It’s the day after tax filings are due, and that means one thing: 4SQ Day! Actually, the timing of 4SQ Day has nothing to do with a post-tax-filing celebration. The date (4/16) is four squared. Swarms of Foursquare users are planning to meet in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Miami, and even London. About 150 businesses and counting across the country and a few in Europe are celebrating by giving Foursquare users special one-day deals and there is even a new badge. Even McDonald’s is getting involved. Sounds like another quirky marketing stunt by Foursquare, the geo-social startup that gives you points and prestige (okay, badges) to check in everywhere. But Foursquare has almost nothing to do with 4SQ Day other than making the badge. CEO Dennis Crowley tells me that it wasn’t organized by Foursquare at all. An independent group of users led by Tampa Bay optometrist Nata Bonilla-Warford organized the event and it sort of grew on its own. Local businesses are getting in on the self-described “social media holiday” by adding special promotions to be part of the one-day event. Crowley compares it to some of the early Tweetups or other self-organizing activities of Twitter users when it was at a similar size. When the users take over, that is a good thing.      
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| Millennial Media: Android Ad Impressions Rise 72 Percent From February To March Posted: 16 Apr 2010 07:00 AM PDT
Millennial, which claims that its mobile advertising network reaches 83 percent of 72 million mobile web users in the U.S., reports that Android's OS was in the top three in the ranking of smartphone impressions in March. Android OS impressions share in the U.S. increased 3 percent in March alone to bring the Google-developed mobile platform to a total of 6 percent of U.S. smartphone impressions for the month. Mobile connected devices like the iPad and Sony PSP displayed more than 20 percent of the ad networks' total ad impressions in March. In terms of type of device, the majority of ad impressions took place on smart phones (45%), with Feature Phones seeing 34% of ad impressions, and Connected Devices, like the iPad, seeing 21% of impressions. Unsurprisingly, Apple's OS remains the leading OS on Millennial’s network with 70 percent share of Smartphone impressions. While Apple represented 40% of overall network impressions in March (top slot for the 6th consecutive month); manufacturers supporting Android enabled devices represented over 50% of the Top 15 Manufacturers. Samsung was firmly embedded as the second largest manufacturer on Millennial’s network, with four devices in the Top 20. Millennial has been seeing strong growth and is now one of the largest mobile ad networks in the space. The Baltimore-based startup is growing; in February Millennial Media acquired mobile metrics and analytics firm TapMetrics. Additionally, the ad network raised $16 million in Series C funding last November. But like many of its fellow mobile ad networks, Millennial finds itself in a perplexing situation in the space. It’s unclear how Google’s acquisition of AdMob (although this may be derailed). Most importantly, Apple’s newly launched iAd platform may throw a wrench in mobile ad networks’ growth as a competing platform.      
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| A Volcano Plays Merry Hell With European Startups Posted: 16 Apr 2010 06:13 AM PDT  So like everyone else in Europe right now, I am fascinated by the impact of the volcano in Iceland, which is spreading ash all over northern Europe and shutting down the airlines. Eyjafjallajokull is now the new in vogue swear word in Europe, if you can say it. Yesterday my Twitter stream was full of entrepreneurs suddenly saying their travel plans were being thrown into chaos. It seems that Europe's startup economy has been running partly on the spread low-cost airlines for the past 5 years, and without airlines the startups, along with the whole of the general business sector, are going to be badly affected. As I have long said, the quintessential startup in Europe is: CEO from anywhere, money from a pan European investor (often based in London, the biggest financial centre) and developers/engineers often in Central Europe. That implies plenty of travel. After all, by plane we are all, at the most, two or three hours away from eachother. With planes grounded, that is going to have a huge effect. 
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| Oracle Buys Healthcare Software Firm Phase Forward For $685 Million Posted: 16 Apr 2010 05:39 AM PDT
Phase Forward’s software is used by drug companies for clinical trials. The company’s software automates the entire clinical development process — from Phase I through regulatory submission, post-approval trials and and more. The company will be folded into Oracle’s Health Sciences Global Business Unit. IBM also recently made a healthcare software acquisition, buying up Initiate Systems to boost its own healthcare offerings.      
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| Prosper Raises $14.7 Million For Peer To Peer Lending Market; Eric Schmidt Invests Posted: 16 Apr 2010 05:13 AM PDT Prosper.com, a popular peer-to-peer lending marketplace in the U.S., has raised $14.7 million in Series D funding round from new investors TomorrowVentures and CompuCredit Holdings with existing investors Accel Partners; Benchmark Capital; DAG Ventures; Meritech Capital Partners; Omidyar Network; QED Investors; and Volition Capital participating in the round. This round of funding brings Prosper’s total funding to $57.7 million. TomorrowVentures happens to be the investment vehicle for Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Prosper pioneered the idea of concept of people-to-people lending in the U.S with its launch in 2006. Unfortunately, the startup hit a rough patch last year when the SEC stopped all lending on the platform because the company didn’t register as a seller of securities. With the new climate of heightened regulatory oversight in light of the financial meltdown, the SEC is being more judicious about overseeing financial institutions. The startup was able to re-launch its site over the summer after the SEC gave Prosper the OK to facilitate peer-to-peer lending. Prosper became the first and thus only Internet auction-based P2P loans platform to have its registration statement declared effective by the SEC. Prosper is currently available for lenders in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. The company has nearly one million members and has coordinated over 32,000 funded loans totaling over $194 million. Prosper’s main competitor, Lending Club, also just raised a massive round totaling $$24.5 million.      
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| Grooveshark Revamps TinySong: Easy Music Sharing Made Even Easier Posted: 16 Apr 2010 02:50 AM PDT If the old TinySong was already drop dead easy to discover and share music on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks, the new TinySong is even more so. Operated by Grooveshark, TinySong lets you search for songs in the startup’s extensive music catalog, and lets you instantly stream previews on the same page. Click the ‘Share’ button next to songs and you’ll get a dedicated URL you can spread (it plays the entire song on the Grooveshark website). Example: http://tinysong.com/two5 You can also opt to send the link straight to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, StumbleUpon or an email contact with one click, or use the appropriate link to copy it to your clipboard. Simple, useful, and nicely designed. What’s not to love?      
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| Israeli Startups, Let’s Meet Up At Techonomy 2010 Posted: 16 Apr 2010 02:27 AM PDT
I’m traveling to Israel for Techonomy 2010, a must-attend event for anyone professionally involved with the Web and technology in general. This is the second time the event is being held, and it’s being pitched as follows:
You can find more information about the event here if you’re not convinced. As for me, I love innovation, and I love practicality, so count me in! There will be a launchpad for 7 hot new yet-to-be-announced startups, who will present their business to the entire audience and a panel of expert judges such as Robert Scoble, Jeff Pulver, Yaron Samid and Eyal Shahar (full list can be found on the main website). You can register here – the venue is YES Planet (Kanyon Ayalon, Ramat Gan). Kudos to Orli Yakuel and Eddy Resnick for setting up the event and inviting TechCrunch (read: me) over – we’re proud to be a media partner. Really looking forward to it! See you there?      
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| Glympse Brings Real-Time Location Sharing To Facebook Posted: 15 Apr 2010 09:41 PM PDT
Glympse, which we first checked out last May, is a bit like Google Latitude in that it allows you to passively share your location with friends (as opposed to the check-in model popularized by Foursquare). But unlike Latitude, Glympse is for granting people temporary access to your location. Say you’re going to be late for a meeting because you hit traffic — instead of giving your coworkers a ballpark estimate of when you might possible get to the office, you can send them a Glympse, which lets them track your position and ETA for a limited amount of time (you might set the expiration to, say, an hour). Once that Glympse expires, your coworkers can’t see your location any more. This way, Glympse avoids many of the issues with always-on location services (namely, the fear that you might accidentally share your location when you didn’t want to). Glympse has offered this functionality for a while, but the integration with Facebook looks quite well done. Previously when you shared a Glympse link with someone it would just redirect to the Glympse site (this is what happens when you share to Twitter). On Facebook, the service will now embed an interactive map that continuously updates. And you can use Facebook’s Friend List feature to specify who can see the map. Glympse got some other good news recently, when Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone will get multitasking with its next OS upgrade. That’s a big deal, because up until now the iPhone version of Glympse has been crippled — if you closed the app, you’d no longer be able to update your location. The upgrade should remedy this issue for Glympse and many other location-based services.      
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| Google’s Plan To Give Chrome OS (And All Web-Enabled Devices) Universal Printer Support Posted: 15 Apr 2010 06:15 PM PDT
Google has announced a new project called Google Cloud Print which is setting out to “build a printing experience that enables any app (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer anywhere in the world.” In short, your computer or device will tell Cloud Print what it wants printed, and Cloud Print will then send the appropriate instructions to your printer. No printer drivers necessary. Google is providing some initial documentation on the project here. The site says that any application, be it native or web based, will be able to use Cloud Print through APIs (which will allow you to submit print jobs and also check job status). There’s going to be a standard ‘web UI’ print dialog for interacting with the service from an application. Of course, there’s still one big problem: getting Google Cloud Print to actually talk to your printer. Google has two solutions to this. In the long term, it is proposing that the industry adopt new open standards around cloud printing, and that manufacturers build new printer models to be ‘cloud aware’. In other words, the printer is connected to the web and includes software that knows how to communicate with Google’s servers. The second solution is for ‘legacy printers’ (which include all printers at this point—even printers with an ethernet or Wifi connection). For these, Google plans to offer software that you install on the PC that the printer is connected to. Google is currently building this proxy software for Windows and intends to support Mac and Linux down the line. You won’t actually install the software on your own, either — it will come with Google Chrome (though it will be off by default). Google also hopes that some router manufacturers will start including the proxy software in their devices, so that users don’t have to leave their computers on. A few key things to note: Google is going to offer its own Cloud Print service, but it wants the standard to be open and expects other alternative services to spring up as well. And this isn’t just for computers — it could potentially be used for phones, tablets, and any other web-enabled device. Wouldn’t that be nice.      
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| Google Brings The Damn Goats Back Posted: 15 Apr 2010 05:19 PM PDT
     
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| Google Announces Q1 Earnings, Beats Analyst Estimates But Shares Drop Posted: 15 Apr 2010 03:21 PM PDT
The company beat analyst expectations, though the stock has fallen nearly 5% in after-hours trading as some investors were hoping for more. Revenue was up 23% for $6.77 billion, with net revenue at $5.06 billion (estimate was $4.93 billion). Net income rose 37% to $1.96 billion, or $6.06 EPS; non-GAAP EPS was $6.76, beating estimates of $6.60. 66% of total revenue, or $4.44 billion, came from Google-owned properties, with 30% ($2.04 billion) from partner sites through AdSense. Paid clicks were up 15% Y/Y and cost-per-click was up 7% Y/Y. Google has $26.5 billion in cash, and has grown to 20,621 employees up from 19,835 at the close of 2009 — in other words, they’re hiring. Below are my notes from Google’s conference call, which included responses from: Note that CEO Eric Schmidt was not on the call, and likely won’t be in the future (though the company says this was merely a matter of streamlining and that there’s nothing to read into it). High level thoughts – As we enter 2010, it’s clear that the digital economy is continuing to grow rapidly. We are continuing to invest heavily in people, product, and acquisitions. We’ve already stepped up hiring. We have a strong pipeline of candidate, primarily in Engineer and sales. On Product we continue to push the envelope on two fronts: User experience and Ad Business. Acquisitions: we’ve been very active this year and have a strong M&A pipeline in place. Wojcicki: Starting about a year about we asked ourselves why search ads had to be text links. In many cases it may be more interesting if we show a video/product in the ad. Search the movie Losers and you may see a video ad. Search Toys R Us and you get promoted site links. CTR on site links up 30-40%. Launched search funnel earlier this year. In display business, on platform side we launched new version of DoubleClick. Our new ad exchange has real-time bidding. As users transition to smartphones with mobile browsers, want to make it easier to extend campaign to those devices. Huber: We believe in open platforms.. Our efforts in mobile are a great example of this at work. Schmidt said Goog is taking mobile first approach. Your smartphone knows where you are, so this location launched near-me-now. Turns your location into the search query. New stars in search feature, you click star next to result to save it. Makes it easier to find later (from mobile device). Android and Chrome gaining lots of momentum. Android powering 34 devices from 12 OEMs. Over 60,000 Android devices sold/activated a day. Our mantra w/ Android is “open”. The platform and Market. 38,000 Apps, up 70% quarter over quarter. I/O coming up. Q&A: Q: What percentage of rev comes from mobile display and enterprise combined? Is Nexus One profitable? Why isn’t Eric on the call? He’s everywhere. The fact that he isn’t on earnings doesn’t mean he isn’t available. It’s an issue of streamlining, shouldn’t read into it. We hiring back in sales and engineering. The bar at Google has not changed. It is incredibly high. We can’t speculate on relationship around search w/ Apple. We have historically had a strong relationship with them and look forward to continuing it in the future. We’ve been very happy with growth in paid clicks. It’s a result of advertisers coming back, new ad formats. Marketing spend. It’s clear that we have opportunities. Lots of opportunities to on-board customers. Most of marketing is ROI spend to get advertisers and customers on product. On Nexus one being online only and how many sold. And comments on China. Update on dist deal with News Corp. Is there a plan B if AdMob doesn’t go through? Paid Click is up, combination of lots of factors. Advertisers come back, start spending. Google and ads team bringing new products to market. Investing a lot in Android and Chrome. Thoughts on shipping the tablet:      
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| Won’t Somebody Please Think Of The Trackpads? Posted: 15 Apr 2010 03:00 PM PDT
Now, this isn’t the venue for discussing the other relative merits of Macs and PCs — cost, OS, Apple Tax, and so on. This is strictly about the trackpad. I rose a similar question when I asked how Apple has had the best touchscreen on the market for three years running, despite years of R&D by their competitors. It’s the same with trackpads. Why don’t laptop makers seem to get it?      
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| CrunchGear Interviews UFC’s Chuck Liddell about Reebok, MMA, and the iPad Posted: 15 Apr 2010 03:00 PM PDT  I had myself a bit of a field trip yesterday, going over to Reebok's fancy gym on Columbus Avenue in New York to try out their new ZigTech shoes. The name alone implies, well, tech, which would explain my presence there. Bonus: I got to interview former UFC light heavyweight Chuck Liddell. Truly an awesome day.
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| Google: Android Market Now Serving 38,000 Apps, Nexus One Is A Profitable Business Posted: 15 Apr 2010 02:12 PM PDT
The Android Market now includes 38,000 apps, up 8,000 apps from a month ago. The application store for Android devices supposedly hit the 10,000 apps milestone in September 2009 and grew to some 16,000 apps in Android Market in December 2009. Additionally, Google revealed that Nexus One, Google’s recently launched Android phone, is a profitable business for the search giant. The fact that’s its already profitable is surprising, if you take into account this report from Flurry, which reported low Nexus One sales. In fact, there’s been a lot of talk today about how the Nexus One’s initial roll-out has been a flop. But Google maintained today that they are “driving the business to be a profitable business from the get go.” When asked if the phone will be offered in retail stores, Google couldn’t comment, but “is happy with device uptake and impact it has had raising the bar showing what a smartphone can do.”      
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| The Rest Of The Details On That Monster Groupon Financing Posted: 15 Apr 2010 02:09 PM PDT
Groupon raised (or is raising) around $130 million, says a new source, and the valuation is $1.35 billion. Russian holding company and investment firm Digital Sky Technologies is leading the round, and there’s participation from Battery Ventures as well. All or nearly all of the round is being used to purchase stock from insiders to give them an early cash out in advance of an IPO. We’ve also heard that the Accel round last December, $30 million, was also used to cash out insiders. Meaning the founders, employees and other insiders will be taking a whopping $160 million in secondary stock sales. Why isn’t Groupon raising the money for operations? Because it’s making money hand over fist, say our sources. The company is generating $1 million or more per week in pure profit from the resale of steeply discounted local business products and services. Estimated 2010 revenue is $350 million.      
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| Microsoft Arc Keyboard vs the Apple Wireless Keyboard Posted: 15 Apr 2010 12:59 PM PDT  I am losing the war on clutter. Apparently my desk can spew gadgets, cables and crap out hidden orifices. So instead of fighting the power by actually cleaning, I picked up both the Microsoft Arc Keyboard and Apple Wireless Keyboard in a desperate attempt to regain my sanity. My thought was that maybe, with their smaller frames and wireless capability, I could peacefully co-exist with the crap on my desk. After all, they forgo the number pad for a more compact laptop-ish layout. But alas, I also found both have different fatal flaws and aren't able to handle my daily workload — so I'm back typing on my old full-size Apple keyboard. Still, they are both great keyboards in their own right and might be a legitimate alternative for you. Click through for my findings.
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| Scamville? No. But You Can Now Get Facebook Credits Via Offers Posted: 15 Apr 2010 12:52 PM PDT
They’re starting things off very carefully with offers only from TrialPay and Peanut Labs, who are known for being the cleanest of the clean when it comes to offers (read this guest post by TrialPay CEO Alex Rampell). More details at InsideFacebook. I don’t expect we’ll see the really scammy stuff like mobile subscriptions and Video Professor pop up on Facebook directly. But I would expect them to broaden the offer providers over time to guys like Offerpal and SuperRewards, who have been much more aggressive about monetization in the past. Either way though, we suspect that Facebook is taking the lion’s share of revenue from the offer providers, which means that even when they work with the providers there isn’t much revenue in it for them. Over time It may just make more sense for Facebook to go direct, maybe by buying one of the offer providers, and then cut everyone else out.      
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| Khosla And RRE Lead $16.2 Million Series C In Xobni Posted: 15 Apr 2010 12:36 PM PDT
Xobni’s social email plugins essentially makes your e-mail smarter (Xobni is inbox spelled backwards). The plugin integrates LinkedIn, Twitter Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, Hoovers and more into your Outlook inbox. CEO Jeff Bonforte tells us the plugin has seen 5 million downloads to date. The round was an insider round and Bonforte seemed pleased that inside investors were fighting over who would lead the round. He says he’s happy with the valuation but declined to give us a number. The funding will be used for further product development, more mobile apps, and expansion of the plugin into other email platforms besides Outlook. Xobni, which took an investment from the Blackberry Partners Fund last year, recently launched a Blackberry app that ranks your contacts by importance and pulls in social data from Facebook, LinkedIn and other places. Along with the Blackberry app, Xobni also launched another product, Xobni One, that syncs your Xobni contacts in Outlook with your contacts on your Blackberry, all in the cloud. Xobni One is a way to sync your desktop and mobile contacts. If you use Outlook on your desktop at work, but Gmail on your Blackberry, Xobni One reconciles the two. Xobni is charging users for this service, which is just one of many revenue streams for the company.      
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| Rally Up Brings “Real Friend-Focused” Location Based Social Network To The iPad Posted: 15 Apr 2010 11:40 AM PDT
Location based services like Foursquare, Gowalla and others are increasing in usage but there are definite privacy concerns with sharing your exact location with the world. Rally Up recently launched its location based social network via an iPhone app that only includes your “real friends” and emphasizes privacy as a main feature of the application. Today, Rally Up is bringing its application to the iPad with a free app. First, Rally Up allows you to only friend other people who are on using the app. And Rally Up purposely does not integrate with Twitter, with the ambition of keeping your friends more “pure.” Plus the app wants to encourage its users to use Rally Up as a microblogging application as well as a location based social network. The app does, however, allow you to push your updates to your Facebook friends, under the assumption that your social graph on Facebook will include more of your “real friends.” Another cool feature of Rally Up is the ability to adjust the “flow” of information to and from specific people. The friend slider includes 4 different modes (real, feed, lurk, mute) to choose from and each one controls the content you send out and the content you receive. You can mute people temporarily, so if don’t want someone to know where you are tonight, you mute them. If your friend is set to Real, he or she will be able to see where you check in and you’ll also see all of their check ins. Additionally, you’ll get a push notification (like a text message, but free) on your iPhone alerting you the instant your friend checks in anywhere. Feed’s status is similar to real, except you won’t get a push notification every time your friend checks in. Lurk status allows you to see a person’s check ins in your feed, but they won’t see your activity. Rally Up includes a number of other privacy-focused features. For example, home is always set as private in the app. You can also declare certain locations as temporary so it is not added permanently to the database. Lipman says that LBS apps on the iPad have huge potential because of the content on these apps, particularly news feeds and maps. Of course, rally Up is also a microblogging network, so it includes additional content besides just check-ins. Maps are definitely more enhanced on the device’s screen, says Lipman, making the experience more interactive. It should be interesting to see how popular LBS social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, and others tackle the iPad. Loopt already launched its iPad app a few weeks ago.      
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| PeerIndex Plots A DNA Profile Of Your Expertise Posted: 15 Apr 2010 11:01 AM PDT  Viewsflow appeared in the last few months as a sort of high-brow filtering mechanism for Twitter users. It's majored on finding the best people who tweet about Peak Oil, or China's economy, for instance. It's been producing quite a nice little daily newsletter full of the kinds of links you'd expect more from an editor on The Economist or The Atlantic Monthly. And that's precisely the point. If you can work out who really knows their stuff on Twitter, you can get some great knowledge and insight, right? The realtime nature of the stream lends itself well to the coming world (which may already have arrived?) where we start to make trading decisions based on the data we can pull from social networks. This is well known as a discussion. Now, like many startups, now Viewsflow has stumbled on its real business. In around June/July it'll be launching PeerIndex, a data play based on the algorithms it developed building Viewsflow. 
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| Snacksquare: A Foursquare Directory Of Deals And Venues Posted: 15 Apr 2010 10:55 AM PDT The budding business model for Foursquare is local ads through geo-targeted offers. When you check into a bar or restaurant, you might get 10 percent off your meal, or maybe a free drink if you are the mayor (it’s good to be the mayor). But how do you find all of these venues on a map. On the the Foursquare iPhone app you get a list of nearby venues, but that is it. Not even a map. Fortunately, Foursqaure makes all of its venue data available through its liberal APIs. Developers like James Gillmore can take that data and create their own products around Foursquare like he did with Snacksquare. The Website is a business directory for Foursquare. Select a city and it shows you all the venues currently offering deals on a Google map, as well as by badge. Try New York City, Chicago, or San Francisco. If you like a deal, you can send it to your phone to redeem later. Snacksquare launched just in time for Foursquare Day tomorrow, which will be a massive festival of Foursquare offers across the country. When you go beyond the big cities, there aren’t that many deals. In fact, according to Gillmore, there are only a total of 1,500 business venues (stores, restaurants, bars) running specials right now in all of Foursquare. (Tristan Walker from Foursquare says it is closer to 2,000). But that number will surely grow. Gillmore wants to turn Snacksquare into a way for local merchants to manage their Foursquare venues and contact loyal customers. Businesses can add their Foursquare venues to Snacksquare and create SMS advertising campaigns that target the people who come to their venues. Now here is where Snacksquare’s business model enters questionable territory. Snacksquare basically harvests all the checkins for all the business venues on Foursquare. Then it helps businesses who sign up to scrape those lists of customers from Foursquare and try to add them as friends in order to get their phone numbers. (It makes them change their Foursquare names to the names of their business). Once they have their phone numbers they can send them marketing messages and offers via SMS (trust me, this can get annoying very quickly). But for local businesses, it’s another way to capture existing customers who walk in the store. The big question is, would you become a friend of a business you frequent on Foursquare? If the answer is yes, Snacksquare might be onto something. It is certainly an aggressive approach, but it is also a taste of what’s to come with geo-advertising in general. Either way, get ready for more Foursquare spam.      
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| Ning’s Bubble Bursts: No More Free Networks, Cuts 40% Of Staff Posted: 15 Apr 2010 10:46 AM PDT
Ning’s announcement also says that it will be giving network creators more details in the next two weeks. While the email talks about Free versus Premium paid networks, Ning actually has a variety of different premium upgrades. Currently, Ning’s premium options include support (which has a $10/month and $100/month options for different service levels); Custom domains ($5 a month); Extra storage and bandwidth ($10 a month); Ad removal ($25 a month) and the ability to hide any trace that you’re running on Ning ($25 a month). As a result of today’s news I suspect we’ll see quite a few active networks jump to whatever the cheapest premium option is; I don’t expect Ning to make it especially easy to port their data to a different service. There will also certainly be a backlash from Ning’s vocal community of Network Creators, many of whom have invested quite of bit of time building out their niche networks. While the massive layoffs are obviously a big hit to the company, it isn’t all bad news for Ning: the service is still seeing its traffic grow according to comScore (see graph below). But traffic growth is no longer good enough for the company — it needs to start generating some serious revenue, and advertising clearly isn’t cutting it. Ning has raised around $120 million, getting valuations of a half-billion dollars in April 2008 and a reported $750 million last summer.
     
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| Gleeks Rejoice! Smule Packs Fox’s Glee Into A Fantastic iPhone App Posted: 15 Apr 2010 10:03 AM PDT If you own a TV, you’ve probably heard of Glee. It’s Fox’s new big thing, starring a surprisingly pretty lot of “geeks” who not only happen to be able to belt out just about any pop tune you throw at them, but can find ways to squeeze those songs into situations where no one would generally be singing (like a guy telling a girl’s parents that he got their daughter pregnant), without anyone raising an eyebrow. If you own an iPhone, you’ve probably heard of Smule. They’ve had more top iPhone apps (most of which have been music-oriented) than just about anyone else, with apps like Ocarina, Leaf Trombone, and I Am T-Pain in their roster. Now, bring these things together – what do you get? You get beautiful, beautiful music — and one of the best uses of a content license I’ve ever seen. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>      
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With yesterday’s news of Ning’s 
Mobile ad network 
Enterprise giant Oracle 
Israeli entrepreneurs and VCs, I’ll be happy to meet as many of you as humanly possible in the span of 3-4 days while I’m spending some time in Tel Aviv in a few weeks. I’ll be heading down there – first time ever – on the 3rd of May and stick around until the 6th of May around noon.
Over the last few months there have been non-stop 
Google’s 
Google is 
This afternoon Google released its 
Google reported 
On Tuesday we reported on a 
It was probably too lucrative to ignore – Facebook is now directly in the offers business (yes, all that 
One month after long-time Ning CEO 
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