The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- How Can Technology Impact Social Change?
- Google’s Gundotra On Apple, The Fight For Developers’ Hearts [Video]
- Meetup Everywhere: Turn Your Followers Into A Real Movement. And Celebrate Our Bday!
- Google’s Arora: We May Be A One-Trick Pony, But It’s A Pretty Good Trick
- Ogmento First AR Gaming Startup To Win VC Funding
- Clickable Introduces The Master Campaign At #TCDisrupt
- Zynga Continues To Expand Beyond Facebook, Forges Major Partnership With Yahoo
- Video: Jack Dorsey Shakes Down Arrington, Calacanis, And Google In Seconds
- Bieber On Twitter: He’s Talking To The 2 Million Girls At His Disposal
- Intel Leads $18.2M Round For Media And Marketing Research Company TRA
- Jack Dorsey’s Advice On Raising Funding
- Lady Gaga’s Manager: We Make Music Videos For YouTube
- BillShrink Tackles TV, Makes Ordering Cable & Satellite Services Less Of A Headache
- PayPal Goes On The Defensive After MasterCard Opens Platform To Developers
- Mobile App Recommender Appsaurus Raises $850K From Mitch Kapor, Chris Sacca And Others
- GeeksOnAPlane Get First Crash Course On Asia’s Internet Market In Shanghai
- Live From Copenhagen – TechCrunch Europe Nordic Meetup #TCNordic
- BBC Adds Twitter And Facebook To Socialise Its On Demand Service
- A Taste of Startup Alley
- Survival Of The Fittest: The Startups That Made The Second Round At #TCDisrupt
- LinkedIn Deepens Integration With Twitter; Becomes A Full-Fledged Client
- Facebook Like Buttons Pop Up On Yahoo Sports
- Steve Case: AOL/Time Warner Merger May Have Worked Had I Played A More Active Role
- “Plantly Is An Investment Tool That Aims Not To Suck”
- Keenkong Manages The Social Media Overload For Marketers
| How Can Technology Impact Social Change? Posted: 26 May 2010 09:19 AM PDT As digital tools create communities, how will they meet society and the larger world? That’s the question that an interesting trio tried to answer at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. This is what Scott Heiferman (CEO of Meetup), Chris Hughes (co-founder of Facebook and now Executive Director at Jumo) and Reshma Saujani, Congressional Candidate for the 14th district in New York, had to say on the topic. Erick Schonfeld: Chris, you were the developer of President Obama's campaign website and social media campaign for the 2008 Presidential election. Can you talk a little bit about that? Chris: It was all about creating a culture of sharing, of which social networks like Facebook were really only one piece of the puzzle. We tried to empower people to speak up using their favorite online services and build relationships on the Web and beyond. It’s also what we’re trying to do with Jumo, for non-profits specifically. Erick: How do you use the Web to engage citizens beyond giving money? Chris: Giving money is really what happens last – the first two pieces are helping people understand why an entity is important, and keeping up with it through email, Facebook, MySpace. You have to get in front of people as often as possible, foster relationships, build understanding. It’s not just about donation. Erick: Reshma, what did you learn from the Obama campaign, and how are you using the Web for yours? Reshma: First of all, Scott and Chris have really been trailblazers, they changed the process. As for me: I knew I was running against incumbents, and I realize that technology has the ability to disrupt establishment. It’s harder for an outsider like me to run against these embedded heavyweights, and digital tools helps me out a lot. We knew we needed 30k votes to win, so we had to build our own machine for that. We asked ourselves how we could get people engaged, not just through Facebook and Twitter. So we use a platform called pro.act.ly to keep track of supporters, to find out where they are, what they’re doing for us, you know, basically measure the intensity of commitment. Erick: So it’s like a dashboard for your campaign managers? Reshma: And other people, but yes. Chris: In my opinion, this is what campaigning is all about. Erick: Pro-act-ly looks a lot like marketing campaign tools used by advertisers online. Reshma: Yes, we’re constantly engaging with and monitoring the movement. Erick: Scott, can you talk about how you think the online and offline world are converging? How do you see that accelerating? Scott: In my view, social change goes way beyond politics. Using the Internet to get off the Internet is a larger notion. You know, how is it that people are more powerful, beyond being consumers or a passive audience, getting involved in something? Scott on stage also introduced Meetup Everywhere. Scott: we have nearly 50k meetups a week, only 1% of which i tech related. Everywhere is a brand new platform, an easy way for any organization to spark meetups everywhere, about them. It’s about turning followers into a movement. Seth Godin is an early adopter. Scott: Meetup Everywhere lets you sort meetups by number of people attending, location and date. It’s basically an easy way to connect people (and more powerful than the iPad, too). Early users are Foursquare, Groupon, fred Wilson, The Huffington Post and … TechCrunch (more about that here). Erick: Chris, what could you have done with this? Chris: I think it’s great. It’s the type of thing that holds more potential for smaller, more agile campaigns. Reshma: We’re absolutely going to use this. Chris: If I may … the big question of this panel is: how can technology accelerate and impact social change? With existing networks and startups, it’s easier to build movement, but I’m focused on how do you make sure that energy turns into practice and action. At Jumo, we’re thinking about how individuals can more easily connect to their supporters, and building the infrastructure for all types of organizations to benefit from this. Erick: What do you think the next presidential election campaign’s going to be like? Chris: I think we’re going to see what we saw with the Obama campaign, but amplified. You’ll see a lot more people putting budget into these tools, more data mining efforts, more attention paid to relationship-building. I’m sure Facebook Connect will play a big role there. Erick: Reshma, what’s the most effective way to engage people online in your view? Reshma: I talk to a lot of people who tell me: “Washington is not listening to me” – they have a sense of not being part of the government. So we’re going to change that by having things like online office hours, reach out to people proactively, crowd-source ideas, making accountability a key part of the whole thing. Erick: Do you see online tools also being used to govern rather than get someone in office? Chris: Well, what’s happened at the federal level recently is pretty impressive, opening the data sets, provide more oversight, etcetera. I think this would not have happened under another administration, they’re moving really fast. But I acknowledge that some people are a bit disappointed in technology’s ability to sustain movements. Technology can’t do it on its own, it’s all about creating this culture of sharing. Scott: I think the 2012 election campaigns will look a lot more like the tea party movement (which uses Meetup). You’ll see a lot more depth at the local organization levels.      
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| Google’s Gundotra On Apple, The Fight For Developers’ Hearts [Video] Posted: 26 May 2010 09:17 AM PDT After wrapping up Tuesday’s panel on the future of mobile with Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley and Facebook’s Chris Cox, Google’s Vice-President of Engineering Vic Gundotra joined us backstage for a brief video interview. We discussed the development of location based services, the challenge of penetrating developing markets, Google TV and of course, Google’s little tiff with Apple. I pressed him on his Apple “jabs” at this month’s Google I/O, which was well documented by this site and several others. Amusingly, he said his jokes and comments were not “necessarily jabs at Apple,” but rather a way to outline the companies’ distinctions and “done in a spirit of good fun.” It was certainly a lot of fun but come on Vic— you can call it a “jab,” a “swipe,” a “dig,” a “poke” (a delicious dessert treat?) and no matter how you dress it, Google was making clear, well articulated criticisms against Apple. So what does he think Apple will do? I asked him whether he thinks Apple will eventually try to become more open after receiving a fair share of criticism from developers. After acknowledging that he could not predict Apple’s next move, he did say that he expects Apple to “adjust to market dynamics.” You’ll have to watch his body language n the video below to read more into his words. Beyond the Apple fun, Gundotra made several interesting comments that could point to Google future direction: -location will be integrated in virtually everything that we do -LBS market will naturally segment -potential of a super hyper local and event driven LBS (i.e. if you’re at an airport, your phone could tell you what gate you’re at, or if you’re at a venue, your phone will tell you about the event, nearby events) -The challenge of serving emerging markets where the dominant computing device is the mobile phone and it is not a smartphone but a more limited device. He predicts smartphone prices could drop dramatically in the next few years. -Google is looking closely at the tablet market, they are doing some interesting work in this space. More announcements to come.      
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| Meetup Everywhere: Turn Your Followers Into A Real Movement. And Celebrate Our Bday! Posted: 26 May 2010 08:54 AM PDT
Meetup, an online way to establish real world meetups, has seen success with its core product. There are now some 50,000 meetups a week going on almost everywhere in the world thanks to the service, Heiferman says. But Meetup Everywhere is a brand new platform — it creates an easy way for an organization, company, or movement to spark a meetup simultaneously anywhere, not just in one location. As you might expect, TechCrunch is a launch partner for the product. And we’re using it for a good reason. On June 11, TechCrunch is celebrating its 5th birthday. We have a birthday party every year, but it’s always limited to some place in the Bay Area. Now, those people who wish to celebrate as well but can’t make it to the Bay Area, can host their own gatherings around the world. And we can track them all through Meetup Everywhere. There are already TechCrunch birthday meetups set up in 52 cities around the world. Hopefully we can send out some stuff to help celebrate. And there are 14 other launch partners for this platform. They include VC Fred Wilson, author Seth Godin, Foursquare, and the Huffington Post. “This is more important than the iPad — it’s more powerful than the iPad,” Heiferman says. It’s a way to “turn your followers into a real movement.”      
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| Google’s Arora: We May Be A One-Trick Pony, But It’s A Pretty Good Trick Posted: 26 May 2010 08:40 AM PDT
Michael called upon Yahoo CEO’s famous quote indicating that Google is a one-trick pony of sorts. She stated earlier this year search is 99 percent of Google’s business, saying that the search giant has to grow “Yahoo” per year. Arora was quick to respond that ‘if we are a one trick pony, we have a pretty good trick.’ But it’s no secret that Google is looking at other revenue streams besides search, including Android, Video (YouTube) and Google Apps. While Arora declined to state YouTube’s revenue, he did say that there is going to be a tremendous amount of innovation around video and video advertising, stating that “online video will be a big part of our lives.” When asked if cloud based productivity suite Google Apps is the company’s “second trick,” Arora said that Google hopes for Apps to be a billion dollar revenue stream in three to four years. Google’s forecasts come as no surprise, as the company has been aggressively lobbying enterprises and small businesses to move to the cloud.      
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| Ogmento First AR Gaming Startup To Win VC Funding Posted: 26 May 2010 08:37 AM PDT
So far Ogmento has developed AR experiences for Penguin Publishing, SAP, Orange Telecom, Smith and Nephew, and PBS, and is doing games with CPG, and other sports enterprises. Chart has already made investments in hardware and software areas related to AR so this closes the loop quite nicely. Matthew McCooe of Chart Venture Partners and Joe Del Guercio of CNF join Ogmento's board, along with founders Brad Foxhoven, Brian Selzer, and Inbar. Cole Van Nice, a partner with Chart, will also join Ogmento's management team.      
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| Clickable Introduces The Master Campaign At #TCDisrupt Posted: 26 May 2010 08:19 AM PDT It’s the last day of the first edition of the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, and our awesome program continues to be, well, awesome. Earlier this morning, we had Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey do a demo of Square, and we also had David S. Kidder, CEO of search advertising startup Clickable, show off a brand new product the company is cooking up. Kidder kicked off by saying that there is tremendous potential in social advertising, which commands about 50% of ad spend in the United States today (the other half goes to search). Clickable sees friction in the marketplace, which makes things complicated for many advertisers, particularly first-timers, who don’t always know where to start spending their first dollars and what works best. Kidder demoed an alpha version of the new product, dubbed The Master Campaign, which will basically allow advertisers to launch campaigns across a variety of search engines and social networks in one go. Customers will be able to use the Web-based dashboard of The Master Campaign to indicate what they’re trying to achieve (branding or customer acquisition), set a monthly budget, define their target audience based on age, gender and location and enter keywords. Clickable will then mine all that data and pre-build campaigns across Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing and Facebook. Advertisers can tweak the settings, edit the ad copy if warranted, launch campaigns across all those platforms with a single click and get custom performance reports. The Master Campaign will be launched in public beta in Q3 of this year. NY-based Clickable launched at TechCrunch40 back in 2007, has since raised over $20 million in venture funding and has former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller on its board. The startup said on stage that it now employs over 140 people full-time (and aims to grow by another 100 in the next 12 months) and has over 1,000 paying customers.      
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| Zynga Continues To Expand Beyond Facebook, Forges Major Partnership With Yahoo Posted: 26 May 2010 08:15 AM PDT
At this point details on the deal are a bit vague — the games aren’t rolling out onto Yahoo for a couple of months, and neither company has announced which games will be integrated. That said, we can likely expect Zynga megahits like Farmville to be featured prominently, perhaps even on the Yahoo Homepage (which would be a huge win for Zynga). Yahoo also says that games and/or updates will be available through many of its properties, including the Yahoo Games portal, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Messenger. Games will be deployed in the US first, followed by a global rollout. All of this comes just a week after Zynga agreed to enter into a five-year partnership with Facebook to continue its presence on the social network, after tensions between the companies almost led to war. Details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but we’ve heard rumors that Facebook was pushing to keep exclusivity over Zynga’s games, which obviously hasn’t happened. This isn’t the first time Zynga has expanded beyond Facebook. Last fall it launched a Facebook Connect-enabled version of Farmville at Farmville.com, and it integrated its games into MSN Games back in February. And there’s also Zynga’s rumored independent game portal Zynga Live looming in the future. It’s also worth pointing out that today’s announcement is coinciding with Yahoo’s Investor Day, and will probably be pitched as part of its recent drive to increase its social functionality. Update: I spoke with Cody Simms, Yahoo’s Senior Director of Product/UED for Yahoo! Social Platforms, about the news. When I asked if Zynga games would be featured prominently on the Yahoo Homepage, Simms said that details are still being worked out, but that it would be to the benefit of both companies to have users playing Zynga games on Yahoo. In other words, don’t expect these games to be buried under a hard-to-find menu. Simms also explained how notifications from the Zynga games will be integrated deeply into Yahoo’s suite of services, allowing users to receive updates directly from Yahoo’s web apps and Messenger client. As detailed in the Yahoo Developer Blog:
     
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| Video: Jack Dorsey Shakes Down Arrington, Calacanis, And Google In Seconds Posted: 26 May 2010 08:09 AM PDT Today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, Square co-founder Jack Dorsey took the stage to show a demo of Square running on the iPhone. To do the demo, Dorsey had a good idea: take money from Michael Arrington. Dorsey took $100 from Mike with the swipe of a credit card. Mike was concerned about Dorsey’s intentions for the money, but it will actually go towards Charity Water as a donation, Dorsey assured. He then sat down to talk a bit with Mike and Erick Schonfeld about Square, and his experience raising funding. At the end of the interview, Mike asked the audience if anyone would be willing to use Square to donate $1,000 to Charity Water. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis graciously volunteered. Then, after being humorously called out, so did Google (thanks to developer evangelist Don Dodge). Funny stuff for a good cause. Watch it all in the video below. Watch live streaming video from disrupt at livestream.com      
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| Bieber On Twitter: He’s Talking To The 2 Million Girls At His Disposal Posted: 26 May 2010 07:46 AM PDT
Bieber currently has around 2.7 million followers on Twitter, making him one of the most-followed people on the service. But more impressively, Bieber has seemed to dominate Twitter’s Trending Topics area lately. Or rather, he did. Then something happened. “Twitter, if you’re here. You changed your algorithm,” Braun half-joked. Braun noted that for most of the tweets it is actually Bieber tweeting. In fact, Braun is the only other one with the password to the account — and those tweets are clearly not from Bieber. And of course Bieber is going to tweet for himself: “He’s talking to the 2 million girls has at his disposal,” Braun said. More seriously, Braun said that the usage of Twitter is actually pretty important. It shows that he’s ”the same person who was talking to them before he got huge, is still talking to them now,” Braun noted. He noted that there may be a random girl in Iowa who never thought she’d ever talk to Justin Bieber, then he responds to her on Twitter. “That’s something she’ll remember for the rest of her life.” Bieber spends a least two hours a day on Twitter, Braun noted. “He likes doing it. That’s what kids do.”      
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| Intel Leads $18.2M Round For Media And Marketing Research Company TRA Posted: 26 May 2010 07:27 AM PDT Intel Capital is investing $10 million in TRA (which stands for ‘True ROI Accountability for Media’), a media planning, measurement and analytics software company. Funding for the investment comes from the $200 million Intel Capital Invest in America Technology Fund. Intel’s capital injection is part of an $18.2 million Series C round, which includes participation from existing investors Arbitron and WPP. TRA will use the funding for market expansion, data acquisition and to ramp up recruitment. TRA provides a Web-based business intelligence platform called Media TRAnalytics, which enables advertisers, agencies and media organizations to enhance marketing accountability and measurement by matching 1.5 million households of TV data with 54 million households of purchase data for what it touts as the largest single-source database — 370,000 households. In TV, TRA uses tuning data from set-top boxes, household purchase data from scanner cards and advertisers, and household demographic data. TRA's ASP platform collects, measures, integrates, analyzes, and creates customized reports for each advertiser. TRA’s database currently contains consumer packaged goods data, but the company says it will be loading additional purchase data in the future (such as pharmaceutical, automotive, consumer electronics and financial services purchase data). The company was launched 2 years ago.      
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| Jack Dorsey’s Advice On Raising Funding Posted: 26 May 2010 07:22 AM PDT Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, Square co-founder (and Twitter creator) Jack Dorsey took the stage to demonstrate Square working on the iPhone. He also sat down with our own Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld to talk a bit about his success. And Dorsey had some advice for new entrepreneurs looking to raise money. Mike noted that Dorsey is sort of a celebrity in the tech community now so raising money for Square was pretty easy. That’s true. Dorsey said that he took two weeks and scheduled 25 meetings in Silicon Valley and New York to talk to venture capitalists about Square. This resulted in Square being valued at $40 million before it even launched. But Dorsey said his past success (with Twitter) was also a bit of a detriment. He wasn’t sure if people were actually interested in Square, or if they were just thinking about Twitter and his past success. It was important to him and his new co-founder that Square was the focal point. Dorsey then went into a bit of history with the Twitter funding, and had some advice for new entrepreneurs: “You wanna see that engagement.” What he means by that is that some of the early Twitter funding meetings were “terrible” because they weren’t questioned hard. The VCs didn’t really seem interested in the product or didn’t get it — so Twitter knew they weren’t the right fit. The one who was? Fred Wilson, Dorsey took no time saying. “Fred was one of the only people we saw that was a user of Twitter on a daily basis. 20 times a day in some cases,” Dorsey said. Mor e importantly, Wilson asked the tough questions about the long-term goals for the company. He wanted to know the product plan, he was agressive in his questioning, but he got it. “I want someone on the board that will push the company in ways that I’m not thinking about. They need to guide us,” Dorsey said. Another bit of advice: “Get something you can demo.” Dorsey said that while most people go into VC meetings with a PowerPoint presentation, that should only be a back-up to what you’re presenting. Instead, you should show the site or the product. And it has to be something you’re proud of, he noted. He said that they had been using Square for seven months on a day-to-day basis before they hit the road for the funding. They were ready. “We could go into a meeting and take money from someone,” Dorsey half-joked.      
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| Lady Gaga’s Manager: We Make Music Videos For YouTube Posted: 26 May 2010 06:47 AM PDT
The hot topic of the conversation was YouTube and Twitter. Carter said openly that he and Lady Gaga “create music videos for YouTube.” Braun agreed with Carter, saying that Bieber represented a new strategy of creating a breakout teenage star. Braun said that previously teenage music stars has to have a show on Nickelodeon or Disney. But Bieber changed this; he was found on YouTube and his first videos singing Aretha Franklin’s Respect saw 55 million views by the time the artist signed a record deal with Universal Music. He ended up going Platinum shortly after. Gaga originally broke out on YouTube and MySpace Music (which Braun was quick to say is dead), and Carter has now discovered a new star on YouTube, Grayson Chance. When asked about advertising, carter says that Lady Gaga’s videos include pre-roll and post-roll advertising (thanks to Vevo) but said that advertising isn’t a large revenue source. Record companies keep the bulk of the money made from ads and the remaining trickles down to the artists. Carter and Braun both agreed that concert tours are the main revenue stream for artists. And what about Twitter? Both managers said that Twitter is a great way to connect with fans, especially for artists who were discovered by fans on YouTube. Twitter breaks down the layers between the artists and the fan, says Carter. Braun says that Bieber loves talking to his fans over Twitter (perhaps that’s why he’s always a trending topic!). E: That last video was Grayson Chance,      
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| BillShrink Tackles TV, Makes Ordering Cable & Satellite Services Less Of A Headache Posted: 26 May 2010 06:00 AM PDT
Using the new feature is simple: enter your address and how much you currently pay for your television service. Next, tell BillShrink what categories of channels you’re interested in; options include entertainment, lifestyle, movies, and sports. If there are some channels you absolutely have to have, you can list those too (you can even enter the name of your favorite TV shows, and BillShrink will figure out what channel they air on). Finally, you tell BillShrink how many TVs you will be hooking up (you can designate options like HDTV and whether or not you want that TV to have a DVR). The whole process takes around two minutes. Once you’re done inputting your information, BillShrink will look through the TV services available in your area (including both cable and satellite) and tell you what the optimum plan is for you. BillShrink has data on 9 providers covering around 80% of the market, and plans to add more. The site makes it easily to quickly look up which channels are included in each suggested package, and BillShrink shows you how much each option in the plan costs, both during your initial signup period (when the cable companies give you a steep discount) and once your rates jump up to the “normal” (read: gouging) prices. Once you find a plan you like, BillShink gives you a phone number to call and tells you what plan to ask for.
This is BillShrink’s sixth vertical, and Pham says more are on the way — its other cost-cutting tools include support for savings accounts, gas stations, credit cards, and phone bills. The site also recently scored a deal with Walmart, which features Billshrink on its in-store cell phone kiosks.
     
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| PayPal Goes On The Defensive After MasterCard Opens Platform To Developers Posted: 26 May 2010 05:51 AM PDT
While this is at the forefront of innovation for MasterCard, PayPal says that the developers who are building off of its platform are ahead of the curve. The company cites Bump, a technology to swap information between smartphones by tapping them together, which is used in PayPal’s iPhone app, allowing people to "bump" iPhones to transfer money (the app was downloaded more than one million times in the first three weeks it was out). PayPal, which cites Facebook, Salesforce and IBM as users of its API and technology, says that next month it will offer developers the ability to collect credit card payments from within their PayPal X based application. So is MasterCard a real threat to PayPal? Of course, MasterCard has not been known as the most developer friendly in the past, whereas PayPal has spent the past year reaching out to the developer community, even holding a conference completely for developers. But it also may come down to the revenue share numbers. PayPal said last year that it charges developers a $0.50 cents flat free per transaction or 0.75 percent of transaction depending on user cases. MasterCard hasn’t yet released numbers on revenue share (the platform won’t be released until later this year).      
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| Mobile App Recommender Appsaurus Raises $850K From Mitch Kapor, Chris Sacca And Others Posted: 26 May 2010 05:50 AM PDT
Hello, Chair’s Appsaurus competes with the Apple Genius feature, serving as recommendation service for mobile apps on the iPhone. Here’s how it works. After launching the application, you'll be presented with a handful of semi-popular apps from the App Store and asked to pick the one you like best. Once you pick your favorite, it shows you another round of apps. After four rounds or so, the app begins to learn your preferences, and you keep ranking more apps to help fine-tune its recommendations. In essence, it's trying to build a profile based on your entire library of apps, not just one. If you're presented with an application that you've never heard of, you can hit an arrow to read its summary and see screenshots. The startup is also releasing a new version of the app that now recommends iPad apps, helping users discover which apps they want. The App Store has not yet switched on the Genius feature for iPad apps, so this functionality is definitely compelling. The new version also includes Lists, a comprehensive library feature for organizing your apps. Appsaurus will also serve you recommendations based on any of your lists. One of our pain points with the App was that it didn’t have a syncing functionality to import your current apps, making you manually have to input your apps. The new version of the app includes Cloud Sync, which allows users to sync their phone’s apps from the Appsaurus Sync desktop app directly to their “Installed” list in Appsaurus for instantly relevant recommendations. Hello Chair has considerable experience in developing mobile app recommendations. In 2008, they launched Appalanche, which shared some similarities with Appsaurus in that it was meant to help surface interesting apps, but was a web app rather than a native download. The precursor to Appalanche is an ad voting engine called Adpinion.      
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| GeeksOnAPlane Get First Crash Course On Asia’s Internet Market In Shanghai Posted: 26 May 2010 05:43 AM PDT Traveling around the world, learning, networking, sharing – that's what GeeksOnAPlane (GOAP), a field trip of sorts (which takes place a couple of times a year), is mainly about. This time, the tour is leading a group of 30+ geeks (mainly from the US) to no less than five tech hot spots in Asia: Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo. I am joining the trip as an embedded blogger, exploring the current trends in Asia's web and mobile world, and the implications of the Asian tech revolution for the industry in the US and elsewhere. The GOAP already got a first crash course on China’s Internet landscape from a number of local VCs, entrepreneurs and tech journalists we met in Shanghai, the first leg of the tour (which ended yesterday). This part of the tour included Silicon Valley-based investor Dave McClure (who brought GOAP to life) pitching the StartupVisa movement to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the Shanghai Expo 2010 (see picture above), an “East meets West” blogger meetup, witnessing the first ever “Ignite” show in Shanghai, taking part in a Mobile Monday event, and networking at a Startup2Startup Dinner/Fast Pitch event in downtown Shanghai. One of the main takeaways is that the web and mobile market in Asia is not only huge already, but that it’s poised to become even bigger in the future. The spectacular growth is fueled by a large reservoir of entrepreneurs, a huge potential customer base and both local and international investors looking for the next big thing to come out of Asia. Everybody the GOAP met in Shanghai was bullish about Asia’s online future – for a good reason. Take some recent web usage statistics, for example. Asia already boasts the most Internet users in the world (764 million out of a global web population of 1.8 billion people at the end of last year). And while North America has an Internet penetration of around 76%, many Asian countries are still largely offline: according to some sources, the Internet penetration for Asia as a whole stands at a mere 20%. There is little doubt that China in particular will continue to play the biggest role in the region. The country has 400 million (and counting) Internet users and a whopping 770 million cell phone subscribers. In other words, China not only boasts the world's largest Internet population (the US is second with 248 million web users), but it's the world's biggest mobile nation, too – by far (there are 585 million handsets used in India, and 285 million in the US). And even in China, there’s still a lot of room for growth. Take the mobile market as one example. According to some pundits the GOAP met in Shanghai, many Chinese people with low income (especially those living in rural areas) skipped buying laptops in recent years but access the web through their cell phones instead. Yet, “just” 200 million people access the web through their cell phones, and just 20 million Chinese users are on 3G currently (that number is said to balloon to 150 million next year). But enough with crunching numbers. Check out this (excellent yet slightly dated) presentation from Shanghai-based consultancy and incubator Web2Asia for an overview on China’s Internet and how it differs from the rest of the world: Make sure to check out the rethink: Shanghai homepage for substantial information about what’s currently happening in China’s tech scene. I'll be summarizing what the GOAP learn in Beijing (the next stop of the tour) and the other cities over the next few days here on TechCrunch. For information in real-time, follow the adventures of the GOAP via the #goap hash tag (the official Twitter account is here). GOAP pictures are being uploaded regularly over on Flickr. Photo credit: Kris Krüg, Static Photography      
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| Live From Copenhagen – TechCrunch Europe Nordic Meetup #TCNordic Posted: 26 May 2010 05:24 AM PDT  TechCrunch Nordic – Copenhagen – 26th May 2010 TechCrunch Europe is hosting its 3rd TechCrunch Nordic event - joining the Seedcamp startup programme on their European tour in Copenhagen. Below you'll find our live stream from the event which kicks off at 2.30pm Copenhagen time. 
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| BBC Adds Twitter And Facebook To Socialise Its On Demand Service Posted: 26 May 2010 03:13 AM PDT  The BBC's video on demand service, iPlayer is introducing social networking features which should further boost the uptale of Twitter and Facebook in the UK - as if they needed any boosting. The new iPlayer Beta is set to go live officially at the end of June. Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live Messenger will be linked to a user's "BBC ID" which they get when they register on BBC.co.uk. Users will be able to share what they're watching over social networks (queue lots of "Watching Britains Got Talent" updates) while Windows Messenger will show in real-time how many minutes a user is in to a program on iPlayer and allow them to sync viewing with friends and chat about the show in realtime. The features will also work for BBC radio stations.
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| Posted: 25 May 2010 10:08 PM PDT A hundred startups lined-up the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt. Here’s just a small taste of some of the interesting companies that over 1,700 attendees were able to see: 6rounds6rounds, which we wrote about in a previous post can be best described as a snazzy one-on-one video chat product. At TechCrunch Disrupt, 6rounds announced a new API for developers of game, entertainment and collaboration-based apps. With the API, developers can easily integrate all the rich and interactive functionality of 6rounds, including gifting, video effects, and the ability to add multi-user functionality to single player games and videos. AppFirst
With this type of visibility organizations can flag changes before they become problems and have a negative impact on internal users, or external customers. AppFirst is NYC-based with backing by FirstMark Capital and First Round Capital. RankAboveSeven months after we wrote about its closed beta, RankAbove is pushing its automated SEO analysis product, Drive, into open beta. Drive is intended for sites with a minimum of 1000 pages, up to several million. It performs everything from keyword research and on-page analysis, to link building and acquisition. For the open beta, RankAbove made some product improvements such as new backlink analysis tool, daily updated competitive analysis, opportunities to find organic relevant backlinks and a new UI. If you’re at Disrupt, stop by their booth for a free site analysis. sProphetsProphet (Sports Prophet) lets fans share sports knowledge by predicting outcomes of real sporting events. For example, they can predict which baseball batter will have the longest batting streak in the MLB this week. Users play with virtual money to challenge their friends and arrange group prediction tournaments. sProphet is offered through a destination site, via a Facebook application and soon through a widget which will be offered to partners such as sports sites and portals.      
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| Survival Of The Fittest: The Startups That Made The Second Round At #TCDisrupt Posted: 25 May 2010 06:03 PM PDT We were fortunate enough to witness a lot of fascinating startups strut their stuff here at TechCrunch Disrupt, not just on the main stage but also in the Startup Alley and beyond. But of course the event is and remains a competition, so the experts have been working hard to select those startups with the most potential to be genuinely disruptive, and vote them into the second round of the pitching contest. Just ten of the original twenty startups have been invited back to round two. The final few startups will be announced tomorrow, and they’ll be back on stage for the final round of demo and rapid-fire Q&A with our experts. Appbistro
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video. Betterment
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video. Compass Labs
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video. LiveIntent
For advertisers, it’s an enabling technology that builds stronger and longer lasting relationships between brands and consumers in social media. Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video. MOVIECLIPS
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video. Plantly
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video. Publish2
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video. Soluto
Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video. UJAM
Here’s our review (there are links to other coverage from around the Web in there). WeReward
Here’s our review + video.      
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| LinkedIn Deepens Integration With Twitter; Becomes A Full-Fledged Client Posted: 25 May 2010 03:57 PM PDT
Once you’ve installed the Tweets application, the “Overview” tab on your homepage will allows you to see everyone you currently follow on Twitter, view their Twitter feed, and Tweet from your own account. A new feature, Connections to Follow, has been added to recommend new people for you to follow, based on your LinkedIn connections. You can easily see all of your LinkedIn connections who have added Twitter accounts to their LinkedIn profiles and allows you to see who you are and aren’t following on Twitter. You can also see the Twitter information for any of your connections, follow or unfollow them, and even see a sample of their last tweet by hovering over their Twitter ID. And now you can save your LinkedIn connections as a dynamic Twitter list. When you choose to save your connections as a Twitter list, LinkedIn will create a private Twitter list for all of your LinkedIn connections that have added Twitter accounts. LinkedIn will keep this list up-to-date, adding and removing Twitter accounts to the list daily based on your LinkedIn connections. Clearly LinkedIn has added much more functionality to its Twitter platform, which seems to be popular. Of course while one million out of nearly 70 million users is still only a portion of its userbase, it still represents a large portion of members who have downloaded the app. LinkedIn is making a strong push to encourage users to share content on the site, and becoming a full-fledged Twitter client will only increase sharing on the platform. The obvious next step would be to integrate with Facebook in some way, but we probably shouldn’t hold our breath.      
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| Facebook Like Buttons Pop Up On Yahoo Sports Posted: 25 May 2010 03:35 PM PDT
Latest to apparently add Facebook “like” buttons is Yahoo, which as we’ve written before seems to be happily outsourcing all that social nonsense to Zuckerberg & co lately. To see the integration in action, go to any MLB team on the Yahoo Sports website (e.g. the Cleveland Indians). On the right, right below the Teamtracker frame, you can “like” the team, after which your status will be updated with a link back to the page you’re on. Also shown is the number of people who have clicked the button before you. As far as we can tell, the deep integration of Facebook Connect buttons was publicly announced but the addition of like buttons to Yahoo Sports was not, or at least not yet.      
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| Steve Case: AOL/Time Warner Merger May Have Worked Had I Played A More Active Role Posted: 25 May 2010 03:27 PM PDT
One of the more interesting topics to come up during the conversation was whether or not Case thought the Time Warner merger was a good idea. Case hasn’t been directly involved with AOL for years — he left his role as CEO when AOL merged with Time Warner in 2000, and left the board of directors in 2005 — but he didn’t shy away from speaking about the company. Case said it was obviously clear in hindsight that the deal has been a disappointment. But he said that it’s hard to say whether he would have done anything differently with the merger, as AOL was at its peak at the time (Case and AOL shareholders did quite well). He also said that he thought the merger might have gone better had he been more involved with the transition.
Watch live streaming video from disrupt at livestream.com Here are my notes from the talk: Arrington: What keeps you going? Case: I love building stuff. For 25 years I was focused on AOL. Now instead of playing a direct operating role working with entrepreneurs, I’m funding around a dozen companies, and they’re all interesting to me. Arrington: You’re not doing it for the money, so it’s almost a hobby for you? Arrington: Last night we were talking about early days of AOL. You were talking about the number of users AOL had.. Case: We started in 85, went public in 1992, when we had 184k users. 7-8 years later it was like 25 million customers. And the nice thing was that each of those customers were paying 25 dollars a months. We like to say, those were the good old days. Arrington: Let’s talk about Revolution. What exactly is it? Case: Zipcar has 7000 cars. About 200 cities. It’s crazy to own a car in cities. Relying exclusively on taxis doesn’t work either. Instead of going to Hertz you can just walk a block away. Arrington: Of all the companies you’re invested in, which do you think about most? Case: LivingSocial is really on a tear. There were companies doing this 10 years ago, and it was mostly right but they didn’t have the right context. I think social media is changing that. Case: About three years ago a company wanted to do Facebook apps… LivingSocial. They tried figuring out how to monetize that, and about a year ago they pivoted. Went from being a thin to a fat ‘speedup’. 30 employees to 130 in the last six months. I think ‘grouponing’ will be an important segment. Probably a few big companies built. Arrington: Is the idea at all relevent to Amazon? Case: I don’t think it’s irrelevant. I think they probably look at it as more an opportunity than a threat. These companies are really picking a deal or a market. Interesting business or interesting business model. Merchants like that it generates new customers and zero risk. Arrington: What do you think about Tim Armstrong as CEO for AOL? Arrington: Yesterday on stage John Doerr talked about the ‘third wave’. What do you think, does that ring true? Case: I think what we’ve shifted to is that having spent a lot of timing building core infrastructure and platforms, now you can shift to different things. Embedding these things in other areas. ZipCar for example, it’s enabled by the internet and couldn’t make it without the internet. These companies don’t have to be on the Internet itself, but how you build on it in other industries. Healthcare will probably be a big thing here. Q&A: Q: Looking back on merger what would you have done differently? Arrington: If you hadn’t merged where would the company be today?      
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| “Plantly Is An Investment Tool That Aims Not To Suck” Posted: 25 May 2010 03:04 PM PDT
Title aside, Planty is a risk-aware investment tool. They use a lot of advanced tools to show users exactly what will happen to their investments based on various scenarios. “We want you to touch this to get a feel for what will happen to your money,” is the way they put it. They are not a broker, this is just a tool. If you have a broker, you can put their fees in the tool to add those into the system as well. The whole idea is to put a plan in place — it’s not about rushing to invest. The business model mainly resides in the follow-up services. For example, you can use other tools to see how your investment is actually doing versus how you thought it would do. They also charge $10 for access to the system — but that’s just a one-time fee. But again, the key to all of this is the design and simplicity of the service. Plantly wants to make what’s going to happen to your money obvious. They don’t care if you invest or not — they just hope that by showing you this info, that if you do choose to invest, you’ll use some of their more advanced (paid) tools. ———-Q&A With The Judges—————- Jason Calacanis, CEO & Founder, Mahalo Q: This is great. It’s like the good things about Mint. You expressed it well. Q: It was a very nice product. Very easy to use. Who is your competition in this market. A: We’re learning about more and more of them — like Betterment, which launched here yesterday. But we’re not brokers, they are. We’re about our interface design. Q: Is this only ETFs? A: Yes, only ETF. Q: How it’s different from something like MorningStar. A: The information is different and we’re heavily involved in the plan for the future. The information in advance is important. MorningStar has too much information. This is about just the right amount of information. Smart decisions are the key. Q: I think these are the two best product guys we’ve seen all day. At the end of the day it’s clear what your proposition is. I love the product. Q: You guys didn’t earn your way onto stage — but you were the best presentation of the whole group. You guys were elegant with how you think about the space. Where are you guys from? A: Originally from Israel. Now in Brooklyn. Q: What’s your qualification in the financial space. A: No, it’s all from my MBA and working at Proctor & Gamble. Q: This is about protecting people and protecting their money. ——– The Monetization Plan —————– They’re still in beta so they’re figuring out the monetization strategy. They’re thinking about some 40% of investors in the longtail. $10 is cheap enough for people to get into this, they think. Again, the idea isn’t to push people to invest, but if they do, give them more tools. “Affiliating through need is the wrong thing for our customers,” —————– Second Q & A ————— Q: How will you acquire customers? A: Again, around 40% of people first go to friends and family. And being here is a good start. Q: What wealth level are you talking about? A: $5,000 for a single investment. For the middle class small investors. Q: So you should go to Walmart or get people through 401k. Q: Protecting wealth is a great message, you could do all sorts of things — make videos. Q: Plantly in some ways reminds me of a social game. Maybe as you’re managing it, a plant grows. The leaves represent your financial life. A: Thank you, we are having discussions about game mechanics. Q: You guys are brand-able too. Make videos! Watch live streaming video from disrupt at livestream.com      
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| Keenkong Manages The Social Media Overload For Marketers Posted: 25 May 2010 02:38 PM PDT
So when you click on a segment in Keenkong, you can see the related conversations according to a particular topic. Keenkong’s linguistic processing engine extracts live why people are talking, what are they talking about, who they are and it segments messages accordingly. Keenkong automatically captures, parses and groups incoming messages from Twitter (including lists and searches) and Facebook. For example, Keenkong will segment Tweets about users choosing between your brand and another into one category. Or Keenkong will create a segment of Tweets and updates where a brand should thank the consumer for highlighting a positive aspect of a brand. It essentially allows marketers to break down conversations by actionable insights vs. sentiment or even topic. And the categorization of these actions makes it fairly simple to marketers to prioritize actions. Plus, Keenkong provides users with analytics around engagement and interaction with a brand on Twitter and Facebook. The social media monitoring space is crowded-with a number of worthy competitors in the space, including Scout Labs, PeopleBrowsr, ViralHeat and more. But, Keenkong’s application seems to provide a unique approach to the monitoring space, so many brand marketers are sure to find the application useful. TG: What’s different about what you are doing? Watch live streaming video from disrupt at livestream.com      
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Today at 
Today, at 
Some pretty big news on the Augmented Reality gaming space today. 
If you thought Zynga’s recent 
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Yesterday MasterCard 
Interesting. Despite all the brouhaha about 
This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt, AOL cofounder 
Now more than ever, marketers are using tools to monitor and keep track of the conversation about brands taking place on sites like Facebook and Twitter. While many of these tools monitor sentiment around Tweets and updates including a brand’s name, | You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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