The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Finally, Professional Social Network LinkedIn Gives Users An Android App
- OpenFeint’s Game Channel Uses The Groupon-Model To Sell Its Mobile Games
- First Round’s Epic Holiday Video Makes Your Startup Portfolio Look… Inadequate
- Nexus S Availability And Pricing Announced: Get Thee To Best Buy
- Myspace And Google Renew Search And Advertising Agreement For Multiple Years
- Social Gaming And Career Opportunity Platform Gild Hits 100K Users
- Chrome Browser Sandboxes Flash To Protect Against Malware
- ‘Tis The Season Of Desktop PC App Stores: Allmyapps Launches One For Windows
- Bonobos Raises $18.5 Million. Metrosexuals Unite!
- Wikileaks: Assange To Be Freed On Bail (Plus Bonus Downfall Parody)
- HeyWire And Twitter Partner To Allow Users To Send Tweets Via SMS For Free
- AdKeeper Now Reveals Metrics Behind How Often Its Ads Are ‘Kept’
- Fanhattan Promises Better Internet TV Through The Power Of Data (TCTV)
- Apple: Mac App Store Will Be Open For Business In 90 Countries On January 6
- MapQuest Launches OpenStreetMap-Powered Mapping Service In The US
- Lazyscope Turns Twitter Favorites Into Read-It-Later Bookmarks
- InMobi: iPhone OS Dominates European Mobile Ad Market With 31.9% Share
- AOL Acquires Content Marketing Platform Startup Pictela
- Rackspace Buys Server Management Platform Cloudkick
- Posterbee Pivots To Help Teams Share Ambient Info
- Lessons from London – and a few UK Start-ups that aren’t Rubbish
- 2010′s iPad App Of The Year, Flipboard, Solidifies Its Crown With Massive Update
- AndFriends Lets You Discover And Share Android Apps With Your Friends
- Facebook Uses Face Recognition To Help Tag Photos
- Blekko Goes Social, Now Lets You Search Sites Your Friends Have ‘Liked’ On Facebook
| Finally, Professional Social Network LinkedIn Gives Users An Android App Posted: 16 Dec 2010 09:00 AM PST
The new app, which LinkedIn warns is “rough around the edges’ and is in beta, can be accessed by joining the LinkedIn for Android group in the social network. The app itself includes much of same basic functionality as its iPhone and Blackberry cousins. You can view updates from your professional network, including updates from newly established connections, changes to people's profiles, and articles and information being shared by your contacts. The app also leverages Android’s search capabilities, offering the ability to search for contacts and people from the app. LinkedIn says that it is the fastest search experience it offers across all mobile platforms.
While LinkedIn, which now has 85 million users and is adding a member every second, has certainly taken its sweet time to unveil an Android app, the app itself has the potential to be one of the platform’s most powerful mobile offerings considering the search capabilities Android’s OS has to offer.        
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| OpenFeint’s Game Channel Uses The Groupon-Model To Sell Its Mobile Games Posted: 16 Dec 2010 08:58 AM PST
Game Channel lets developers that build games off of the OpenFeint platform to promote their games with daily and weekly deals on games. Specifically, Game Channel’s Fire Sale feature uses a group-buying model to drive downloads for game developers. Each week, Fire Sale will promote a deal for a premium game, normally priced at $1.99 to $9.99, featured to OpenFeint's 50 million users. When enough Game Channel users vote to say they want the game, the price of the game drops. OpenFeint says it will send push notifications to voters notifying them that the game is on sale for a limited time. First up in Fire Sale is Jaws, the official game based on the original summer blockbuster movie, from Bytemark Games. Game Channel will also include Free Game of the Day, which makes one game free for a day. It was only a matter of time before the group-buying craze extended to the apps and games. But I’m curious if the model will be able to jump start sales on paid games when there so many free games in the mobile app ecosystem. I guess we’ll find out.        
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| First Round’s Epic Holiday Video Makes Your Startup Portfolio Look… Inadequate Posted: 16 Dec 2010 08:34 AM PST The wait is finally over: it’s holiday season, which means it’s time for First Round Capital’s annual video greeting card. From the intro by First Round Managing Partner Josh Kopelman to Path’s flamingos (you’ll see), this video reaches new heights of awesome (and goofiness). I’ve never wanted a muscle suit more. If you have’t seen them yet, make sure to check out First Round’s previous holiday greetings, which included a sing-along inspired by Les Misérables in 2009 and a dancing-themed video that helped brighten up the gloomy days of 2008.        
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| Nexus S Availability And Pricing Announced: Get Thee To Best Buy Posted: 16 Dec 2010 08:21 AM PST
Note that some commenters are saying that the phone is not available unlocked right now:
       
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| Myspace And Google Renew Search And Advertising Agreement For Multiple Years Posted: 16 Dec 2010 08:08 AM PST Myspace and Google this morning announced that they have reached a multi-year agreement to renew and expand their search and advertising relationship. It’s unclear how long the deal will stand this time, but three years like the former agreement sounds plausible. Whether Myspace will still be around when the new deal expires remains to be seen. Under the terms of the new agreement, Google will continue to power Myspace search functionalities and advertising, and will also provide additional display advertising services. We’re still digging for further details on the deal, but we should note that the former $900 million deal between Google and the News Corp.-owned company, first announced in August 2006, expired on June 30, 2010. And that there is absolutely no way the agreement was renegotiated on similar terms. Myspace is on a steady decline in terms of revenues and, more importantly, mindshare and traffic, as it’s clinging on to rapidly growing rival Facebook in an effort to stay relevant despite a recent, deep redesign and a new mobile site and apps. News Corp COO Chase Carey recently started that the company is open to a sale of the beleaguered social network.        
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| Social Gaming And Career Opportunity Platform Gild Hits 100K Users Posted: 16 Dec 2010 08:00 AM PST
Gild allows job hunters to submit their resume to professional opportunities like any other job posting site but adds a different twist. The companies posting jobs set up competitions, like ‘Brain Buster’ programming puzzles and job-seekers complete these challenges on the site, receive their scores, and are ranked accordingly. You can engage in multiple competitions to help boost your chances and Gild will let you improve your profile by completing certification tests and other challenges. As you perform on Gild and win competitions, you can also earn badges to show your skills and proficiency. The site also tells you how many other people have applied for the same job, and even takes a step at telling you how you compare, based on your stats. Employers including Oracle, Sapient, Harrah's, Salesforce.com, eBay, VistaPrint and others are all participating in Gild’s model. Competition winners receive the opportunity to interview for jobs as well as certifications to validate specific skill sets. Previous winners have received prizes such as iPads and trips to Las Vegas, says the startup.        
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| Chrome Browser Sandboxes Flash To Protect Against Malware Posted: 16 Dec 2010 07:58 AM PST One of the big issues with Flash is that it introduces all sorts of security vulnerabilities, especially if you don’t have the latest security patches and updates. Google has chosen to embrace Flash both in its Chrome browser and Android OS (as opposed to that other company which won’t let Flash anywhere near its iPhones and iPads). But it wants to minimize the security risks posed by Flash. Today, it is releasing a new version of the Chrome browser for Windows in its beta channel which sandboxes Flash and other extensions. (New versions of chrome are released simultaneously in three channels: developer, beta, and stable). Sandboxing will come to the Mac and Linux versions soon. Google previewed these changes during its big Chrome event about a week ago, and it’s been talking about sandboxing Flash at least since March. Sandboxing isolates websites and applications so that malware doesn’t spread beyond that tab to other parts of your computer. Plug-ins are a huge security hole, which Chrome is attempting to contain. Chrome will also now automatically update Flash for all security patches. With 120 million Chrome users worldwide, this will go far towards making Flash safer. Now if only they could keep Flash from crashing Chrome altogether, that would be something. In addition to the sandboxing feature, the beta version for Windows will also start loading frequently visited websites when you start tying the URL into the address bar. The page will load before you even finish typing the URL or hit enter. It is like Google Instant for browsing.        
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| ‘Tis The Season Of Desktop PC App Stores: Allmyapps Launches One For Windows Posted: 16 Dec 2010 07:49 AM PST Allmyapps has picked a weird – or genius – time to announce the launch of its independent application store for Windows PCs – Apple has just announced that it will be opening up its Mac App Store for business on January 6. The French startup, which recently raised €1 million in venture funding, was also just blasted by Robert Scoble, after an apparently gruesome pitch at last week’s Le Web conference. They responded to his blog post with one of their own, saying Scoble was right about Windows but wrong about them. But why not decide for yourself? Allmyapps, now in public beta, bills its desktop app as the “easy, fun and fast way to discover and manage Windows applications”. Through the Allmyapps market, users can browse for specific software categories, read reviews, launch web apps and download free and paid applications via a mobile friendly interface designed for use on tablets, laptops and netbooks. Once purchased through Allmyapps, verified paid apps are automatically updated, and can be re-downloaded and removed with a single click. Windows is still, of course, used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, so the potential is there, but so is the competition. There’s no shortage of software suggestion and download sites for Windows-native applications, so it will be difficult for Allmyapps to make enough waves to establish themselves as the “iTunes for Windows apps”. Besides, the chances of Microsoft starting up a similar endeavor in the near future, especially with rivals Apple and Google swiftly moving to the app store distribution model for desktop client software, are rather big. That said, Allmyapps is part of Microsoft IDEEs program in France, which aims to foster a select number of innovative French software startups, so perhaps there’s some exit potential in that regard.        
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| Bonobos Raises $18.5 Million. Metrosexuals Unite! Posted: 16 Dec 2010 06:59 AM PST
So while at Stanford Business School he and Brian Spaly started Bonobos- a company that makes pants that fit. The theory was that there’d been huge strides with fit in premium denim but not regular pants. There were three big issues: The lack of a contoured waistline, a rise that is too big or too small and the tailoring in the thigh. Most off-the-rack pants are designed to fit the broadest number of men, and so they wind up fitting few men well– especially the hip, semi-athletic, 25-to-40 year old guy. Spaly was the main designer, adding to the fit some crazy colors, high end fabrics, and hip details in the buttons and zippers. He started getting them made in San Francisco’s small garment district near the ballpark, while a lot of his peers were starting Facebook and iPhone apps. In his first year they sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in pants, mostly to classmates out of the trunk of his car. There was another sign of success: Girls in bars starting grabbing his butt for the first time. As a single guy in his early 20s, that was an important data point. (Spaly is no longer at the company.) Dunn decided to up his game and build a direct-to-consumer Web brand called Bonobos– a hybrid of the Gap and Zappos. Only problem: No one would fund him. This was before the new ecommerce boom and Bonobos was really more of a fashion company than a tech company. VCs were confused. So he raised three rounds of angel money from some rich customers who didn’t want to live life without his pants– a whopping $7.7 million in all. With no marketing team, he sold about $1.3 million in pants in November– more than 3,300 pairs on Cyber Monday alone. Now, he’s raised $18.5 million from Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners to up his game again. A big part of that will go into customer acquisition. The way to build a Web brand no one has heard of isn’t SEM and SEO, Dunn argues. That’s about fulfilling a demand that’s already there. He needs to generate demand, to make people want his pants. And he’s doing that through good, old-fashioned offline media, brand advertising and PR. Bonobos is also creating a mid-market line with the tentative brand name “Iowa’s Revenge,” because it’s headed up by a team of Iowans and it’s aimed to be a solid, not-terminally-hipster brand with Middle America appeal. Like discount retailers H&M or the early days of Old Navy, the cuts and design will be as innovative, but the fabrics won’t be quite as high end. A pair of Bonobos pants will cost $100; these will cost more like $60-$80. He’s also expanding into dress shirts and suits. Suddenly in a once-again-sexy ecommerce world– particularly one where men’s fashion is exploding– Bonobos is a hot commodity. His investors are a good fit (GET IT! I’m sorry.) Accel has been all over this wave of companies funding Etsy, Groupon and ModCloth. Lightspeed’s Jeremy Liew has similarly been hot on modern ecommerce, funding LivingSocial and ShoeDazzle. A lot of VCs Dunn met with showed up wearing his pants, but typically the khaki chinos. Liew showed up wearing the turquoise corduroys, and Dunn was impressed. “This guy knows the space and obviously cares deeply about this product,” he thought. (We’ve noted Liew’s fashion sense here. Go here to steal his Holiday 20% off code.) Interestingly, when we had Liew on Ask a VC a few weeks ago, we talked about whether you always had to have a technical co-founder, and he said sometimes it made sense to outsource the early technical development of a company. He didn’t cite Bonobos then, but he must have been thinking about it. With this funding, the company will bring its technology in house, actually hiring a team of engineers for the first time. Bonobos expects the company to become more tech-centric over time– hopefully getting into the business of taking measurements, doing 3-d mapping and making custom clothes. That’s a more crowded space, but few of the entrants are getting big traction. Meanwhile, his manufacturing is getting farther away from the headquarters, with about 80% of his pants now being made in Asia. He hired a VP of sourcing from the Gap who has tiered production out to the regions with the best fabric and manufacturing for that fabric. China does the washed chinos, India does the corduroys, Malaysia does the dress shirts, South America does the polo shirts. If he ever jumped into the crowded denim market that inspired the company, he’d make them in LA, where there’s some of the worlds best washed denim. “Denim and dyed knits. Those are the only two things America can do anymore,” he says. The catch with Bonobos is a higher-than-average cost of customer acquisition, because it’s not leveraging an existing brand. But at $100 a pair and no middleman retailer, Dunn is hopeful that the cost will turn out to be a bargain over the lifetime of a young hipster suddenly getting his butt grabbed by girls in bars for the first time.        
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| Wikileaks: Assange To Be Freed On Bail (Plus Bonus Downfall Parody) Posted: 16 Dec 2010 06:58 AM PST
Interesting aside: His lawyer Mark Stephens said Assange has been staying in the same cell in Wandsworth prison as Oscar Wilde once did.        
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| HeyWire And Twitter Partner To Allow Users To Send Tweets Via SMS For Free Posted: 16 Dec 2010 05:50 AM PST
HeyTweets, which is part of the free application HeyWire, allows users to access Twitter via SMS from anywhere in the world. Users can text from their own real dedicated phone number, essentially doing the same for Tweets using the shortcode 40404. HeyTweets will support tweeting in all major languages and offers iPhone and iPad apps,with with support for Android Smartphones and Tablets coming soon. HeyWire itself offers free local and international text messaging from a phone number and is steadily gaining traction. The reason why HeyTweets is compelling is that normally user sending Tweets via SMS would incur charges from their carriers. Twitter has negotiated lower carrier fees internationally, but users still incur a charge (Twitter actually bought startup Cloudhopper to hep mitigate this issues). While HeyTweet certainly democratizes Tweeting via SMS for users worldwide, it is still only available through apps for iOS devices, leaving out Android and feature phone users. Particularly when addressing a global community, the ability to use feature phones would boost HeyTweet’s service.        
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| AdKeeper Now Reveals Metrics Behind How Often Its Ads Are ‘Kept’ Posted: 16 Dec 2010 05:48 AM PST
Kurnit says the thought behind AdKeeper is that current forms of online advertising don’t work because it disrupts the user experience of reading or interacting with a website. Why not allow consumers to save these ads for later, when they can actually interact with them without distraction? Today, AdKeeper is announcing that it will give advertisers more data on how their AdKeeper ads are performing, in addition to metrics on impressions and clisks. AdKeeper will inform advertisers of the number of times an individual ad was Kept, the number of online users who Kept them and what websites those consumers were visiting when they Kept the ad. AdKeeper, which has since been operating in private beta since October, is planning to roll out its service more broadly in early 2011. It’s unclear how well the fledgling ad startup is performing with its adds but AdKeeper, which has raised $8 million in funding, is definitely catching the interest of high-profile brands and advertisers, including AT&T, Best Buy, CBS, Ford, Gap, General Mills, InterContinental Hotels Group, JetBlue, Kia Motors, Kmart, Kraft Foods, Macy's, McDonald's, Nextag, Pepsi, Sara Lee, Sears, Showtime, The Home Depot, Unilever, and Warner Bros.        
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| Fanhattan Promises Better Internet TV Through The Power Of Data (TCTV) Posted: 16 Dec 2010 05:45 AM PST The TV is the last screen in most people’s homes to be conquered by the Internet. Although with so many companies both big and small going after that screen—Google, Apple, Boxee, Roku—it seems like someone will eventually figure it out. Now you can add to that list Fanhattan, a new company spun off from Vuze, the maker of the popular Bittorrent client which has been downloaded 150 million times. Despite its origins, Fanhattan is built to please media companies and Hollywood studios as much as consumers. Fanhattan combines a consistent, easy-to-navigate user interface with a deep database of movies and TV shows to make discovering videos from the Internet even simpler than finding them on cable TV. (Watch the demo below and my interview with CEO Gilles BianRosa). Fanhattan acquired TMDb, the Open Movie Database, which powers the search and browsing features of the service. TMDb will relaunch as Fanhattan on the Web in January, followed by Mac and PC clients. The company is in discussions with various device manufacturers and cable companies to integrate its video browsing interface in their products and services. One of the big reasons Internet TV has been a bust so far is because it doesn’t fit squarely into any of the licensing windows the entertainment industry thrives on. Fanhattan is built around these licensing windows. When you search for a movie or TV show, it will list various places on the Internet where it can be found,ranging from free advertising-supported Websites to streaming rentals and paid downloads. Then you can choose where you want to get the video from, and watch it within Fanhattan’s consistent user interface. The problem with Internet video, argues BianRosa, is that there are almost too many choices. You have all of these apps, but they all have their own UI, and their own search engine. If you know which movie you want to watch, you have to check half a dozen different providers.” What TMDb provides is metadata to organize videos from across the Web. And it brings you information and trailers even if the movie just came out in theaters. For instance, let’s say you want to search for TRON Legacy. A summary of the movie would appear, along with a list of the actors and director. If you click on Jeff Bridges, then you can see his entire movie career and browse to other movies he’ starred in. Some of them might be available from Amazon or Netflix, and you can watch them if you pay. Fanhattan turns video on the Interent into a giant video-on-demand system. You can also browse by genre, ratings, era, director or any of many other variables. TMDb is a structured database so it knows how movies are related to one another through actors, directors, and so forth. Fanhattan lets you browse along those axes with ease. Studios should love that feature because it exposes old movies from their libraries to new viewers. Fanhattan will also manage music, photos, and other personal media, but its real sweet spot is videos. It is designed as a technology platform, however, so that other companies can build apps on top of it. A music service like Spotify, for instance, could have an app which pulled a soundtrack from a movie. For every movie, you can also imagine FanGear (T-shirts, coffee mugs, accessories) which could be purchased with one affiliate click. While the app will initially be free, Fanhattan may charge for premium versions in the future. Earlier this month, I met with BianRosa in a New York City hotel, where he showed me a demo of the product. I shot some video with my iPhone, which I’ve embedded below. The lighting isn’t that great, but it gives you an idea of what the UI will look and feel like. In the second video, BianRosa discusses what he is trying to accomplish with Fanhattan:        
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| Apple: Mac App Store Will Be Open For Business In 90 Countries On January 6 Posted: 16 Dec 2010 05:38 AM PST Apple this morning announced that the Mac App Store will open on Thursday, January 6. At launch, it will be available in 90 countries and feature both paid and free apps in categories like Education, Games, Graphics & Design, Lifestyle, Productivity and Utilities. In a short statement, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said:
Our previous coverage: Tread Lightly When Embracing The Mac App Store Might The Mac App Store Lead To A New Class Of Micro-Apps?        
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| MapQuest Launches OpenStreetMap-Powered Mapping Service In The US Posted: 16 Dec 2010 05:21 AM PST MapQuest this morning announced the launch of its first U.S. site built on OpenStreetMap data, an information source encouraging consumer contributions. This was to be expected, after online mapping service provider MapQuest (owned by AOL, also the owner of TechCrunch) recently recruited Hurricane Coast to manage its $1 million open-source mapping investment fund in the United States. Do you consider MapQuest to be an also-ran? You might want to check its visitor numbers again – the service reached more than 44 million users in November 2010, according to comScore Media Metrix. MapQuest Open was already live in the UK, and since September also in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, and has recently also expanded to Asia. The new U.S. site, which lives on Open.MapQuest.com, hosts OSM data along with the freshly revamped MapQuest brand and interface. This partnership makes it a "living map", MapQuest says, constantly improved by contributors who can add content and details that make the map more specific and useful. Today, there are more than 320,000 registered OpenStreetMap users worldwide. Examples of map enhancements include detailed tourist attractions, biking and hiking trails, or footpaths through neighborhood parks.        
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| Lazyscope Turns Twitter Favorites Into Read-It-Later Bookmarks Posted: 16 Dec 2010 05:00 AM PST Already realtime streams such as Twitter and Facebook have replaced RSS readers for many people, but the problem with a realtime feed is that it passes by too quickly. And sometimes you see a link to a story you want to read, but don’t have time to get to right that second. Enter Lazyscope, a new desktop client from developer Ethan Gahng that is a Twitter reader and RSS reader combined into one. It looks like a regular Twitter client, with links that open in a second pane to reveal the full article, photo, or videos being linked to. But anytime a blog or news source with an RSS feed is linked to, you can also start to subscribe to that RSS feed and it will mix the posts in with your Twitter feed. Today, Lazyscope is adding a couple new features. One turns the favorite star on Twitter into a read-it-later bookmark along the lines of what Instapaper does. Anytime you favorite a Tweet, it will be available in Lazyscope under a prominent new star icon, along with the ability to read the post in-line without leaving the app. The nice part about this read-it-later feature is that you can favoriet a Tweet on Twitter itself or any Twitter app, and it saves it in Lazyscope. After all, it is just a column showing your favorites, but combined with the inline reading experience it turns favorites into a way to bookmark links. The second new feature is that Lazyscope will now let you import your RSS feeds from Google Reader or other RSS readers. Before, you could only subscribe from within Lazyscope. The app also lets you subscribe to YouTube users and Twitpic or yFrog photos. Anytime an article is displayed, it shows other recent posts from the same source underneath. Competing with established stream readers like Tweetdeck is going to be tough, but there are some novel features in Lazyscope worth exploring. You can see a video demo of Lazyscope below (which does not include the latest favorite bookmarking feature), or a longer video interview Robert Scoble did with with Gahng. Lazyscope comes out of Gahng’s other product, Lazyfeed, which he launched last year at one of our Realtime Crunchups.        
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| InMobi: iPhone OS Dominates European Mobile Ad Market With 31.9% Share Posted: 16 Dec 2010 04:59 AM PST  Research from mobile ad network provider InMobi has found that iPhone OS currently dominates the European mobile ad market with a 31.9% share, while Nokia's share has slide to 19.7%, putting it in second place. Android OS, meanwhile, is making its way after a slow start in these parts: the platform has gained +9.5 share points between July 2010 and October 2010, growing to a 12.9% share. The rapid decline of Nokia (-6.0 share points in the past 90 days alone) is a major inflection point for the European mobile advertising community, remarks James Lamberti of InMobi.
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| AOL Acquires Content Marketing Platform Startup Pictela Posted: 16 Dec 2010 04:05 AM PST AOL has picked up Pictela, an NYC-based startup that offers a platform capable of injecting branded rich media such as video, photos and apps directly into various online advertising and social media. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed (update: WSJ says about $20 million). AOL hopes the purchase will bring scale to its suite of advertising tools for advertisers, agencies and publishers, including the company's new Project Devil display advertising format – which it intends to roll out across all AOL Media sites by March 31, 2011. Pictela will remain a separate group within AOL Advertising, based in New York, and will continue to provide its products and services to its many partners. Jeff Levick, AOL's President of Global Advertising and Strategy, commented thusly:
The purchase of Pictela, founded in 2009, marks the first acquisition for AOL’s Advertising unit since the company regained its independence in December 2009. For AOL as a whole, it’s the fifth acquisition this year, after StudioNow, 5min Media, Thing Labs and, well, us. Coincidentally, one of the co-founders and CEO of Pictela is Greg Rogers, previously VP of Sales Strategy for TACODA, a behavioral targeting online ad network that was acquired by AOL back in 2007. AOL was already a Pictela partner, as are Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Inc, Conde Nast, Glam Media, Demand Media and plenty of other publishers. (Disclosure: AOL is also the owner of TechCrunch)        
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| Rackspace Buys Server Management Platform Cloudkick Posted: 16 Dec 2010 03:58 AM PST
Cloudkick, which launched in early 2009, provides detailed graphs on the health of your servers, and tools to categorize and keep information about what each server is doing. Cloudkick serves more than 1,500 businesses from Fortune 500 Cloudkick's dashboard allows you to easily add or remove servers from Rackspace Cloud, Amazon EC2, Linode, GoGrid, Slicehost, RimuHosting, and VPS.NET and then monitor an unlimited amount of instances. You can see all the servers in one place, and color-code and label each server. One of the more compelling aspects of Cloudkick’s platform is that it will consistently check whether servers are alive and functioning and then alert you, via email, if servers go down. Cloudkick also provides data on bandwith and other metrics on servers in easy to use graphs and tables, allowing you a visual snapshot of server activity. You can also access servers straight from web and can run commands through your web browser remotely, which is handy when you are trying to manage servers from another computer. Additionally, earlier this year Cloudkick <a href=" Clearly, Cloudkick’s platform is comprehensive, which makes its an attractive buy for a company like Rackspace. The hosting company plans to offer Cloudkick to its client base, but will also keep Cloudkick alive for its existing and future customers who are not Rackspace customers. Rackspace, which is based in Texas, is also using the Cloudkick acquisition as a way to establish more of a presence in the Silicon Valley area. Powered by a staff of 12 employees, Cloudkick has raised $2.75 million in funding.        
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| Posterbee Pivots To Help Teams Share Ambient Info Posted: 16 Dec 2010 03:48 AM PST  Posterbee is relaunching today - yes, they're pivoting! - as a more efficient way for teams to share what the Estonian startup refers to as "ambient information", such as news, slides, reports and videos. It combines elements of Facebook's news feed (these are called 'streams'), including the ability to comment on any shared item, with the 'bookmarklet' functionality of, say, Delicious. Another comparison might be the sharing aspect of Yammer or its many competitors. And in fact Posterbee originally launched in September as a more generic group communications app not dissimilar in concept to the new Facebook groups, but is now targeting knowledge workers and other small teams through what's being pitched as a better alternative to email or IM for sharing information, which no doubt it is.
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| Lessons from London – and a few UK Start-ups that aren’t Rubbish Posted: 16 Dec 2010 02:34 AM PST
Interested readers might recall (almost) a couple of weeks ago as I was leaving San Francisco, I reiterated my already year-old proposition that there are no interesting start-ups (which is to say companies less than 5+ years old) in the British capital. By "interesting", I dunno, I think I meant companies that are making a splash on the world stage, or might one day bring in – say – ten million pounds plus in annual revenues (hell, even ten million dollars would be nice). My reason for being so mean-spirited in my review of the UK start-up scene was two fold. First off, I was concerned that my reception in London would otherwise be too warm: punching every British entrepreneur on the nose before I'd even landed seemed like a good way to head off that possibility. But secondly, and more importantly, I wanted to be proved wrong. Brits love proving people wrong, and so I figured that by saying there were absolutely no good start-ups in London, scores of brilliant entrepreneurs would contact me to refute my claim. Guess what? Didn't happen. I mean, yes, scores of people came out of the woodwork – via email, or at the half-dozen parties and gatherings I attended in town – to tell me they passionately disagreed with my post (or my follow-up video chat with Sarah). But here's how the conversation generally went… Entrepreneur: "So, I read your post (/saw your video) where you said there were no good London start-ups. You're an idiot." Me: "Oh?" Entrepreneur: "Yeah, just because the Silicon Valley echo chamber hasn't heard of a company, doesn't mean it doesn't exist" Me: "Fair point. So what are the good start-ups that I haven't heard of?" Entrepreneur: "Moshi Monsters is doing brilliantly." Me: "I know, I wrote about their success on TechCrunch and – uh – I profiled (founder) Michael Smith in my book. Trouble is, Mind Candy (the company behind Moshi) was founded seven years ago." Entrepreneur: "Ok! Moo.com" Me: "Yeah, same." Entrepreneur: "Last.fm!" Me: "You're kidding, right?" Another popular line of conversation was the "British start-ups don't have a chance because there's no investment here" argument. Or, worse, the "people in Silicon Valley only care about companies founded by their friends" complaint. I heard that latter whine wheeled out not once but twice about Path – Dave Morin's new social start-up. I had to gently explain to the poor critically-ignored London entrepreneurs that the attention given to Path was probably less down to the fact that Morin has friends in the tech media (which he certainly does), and more because he was previously senior Platform Manager at Facebook. At that they skulked away. So, all depressing news then? Not quite. While few people here were able to readily identify London's new crop of potentially world-beating start-ups, a small amount of independent investigation reassured me that those start-ups do exist. (I should probably insert a quick disclosure here and point out that due to the Petri-dish-like size of the London tech scene, a lot of the following companies employ – or were founded by – friends of mine. You simply can't be a Brit writing about London technology without that being thus conflicted.) Take, Huddle. The collaborative working start-up founded by Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin in 2006 continues to expand in both London and San Francisco (perhaps a little too hastily: rumour has it they’ve just laid off about a dozen people from their SF office – although the company says the number isn’t that large). The company raised $10.2m in Series B funding this year and according to their website, clients include HTC, Fujitsu and UNICEF. They also recently moved from Huddle.net to Huddle.com, so you know they mean business. Or Skimlinks, which hopes to provide a viable revenue stream for online publishers by inserting affiliate ads in editorial content. Founder Alicia Navarro have disagreed in the past about whether automatically mixing editorial and advertising is a good thing or the work of the devil, but numerous publishers including the UK's Daily Mirror newspaper are using the technology. Also, judging by the number of revellers at the Skimlinks Christmas party on Tuesday night, the company growing fast. Like Huddle, they've also just opened up shop in San Francisco. Or Struq – one of several companies responsible for those creepy banners and buttons that stalk you around the web, from retailer to blog and back again. Unlike Skimlinks, Struq respects the moat between editorial and advertising, but again they're growing fast as advertisers and media owners desperately leap on the new advertising format. And not least – but, as far as I can tell, last – there's Mendeley, a start-up which aims to ‘disrupt’ the cozy, costly, world of academic journals by offering a "research management tool for desktop & web" and also a way to "explore research trends and connect to other academics in your discipline." I met the company's Research Director, Jason Hoyt, in Palo Alto last year after he responded to one of my previous claims that the London start-up scene was dead – and he did a pretty decent job of convincing me that Mendeley might be an exception to that truth. Certainly judging by their advisory board – including former Last.fm chairman, Stefan Glänzer and former head of digital at Warner Music Group, Alejandro Zubillaga – and the rave reviews from Wired, the New York Times and even the US government - the company probably deserves a place near the top of any list of promising UK startups. So what can we learn from the success of Huddle, Skimlinks and Mendeley (and Moo, Moshi et al before them)? Firstly, we can learn that there are certain types of companies that do very well in London. Media companies, for one. The UK is very good at media – be that music, book publishing, magazines, TV formats and even film (writing them, if not actually making them). If your company is a media play, rather than a pure technology one, then London could be a really good place to start - not least because it's a city where the leading media, technology, advertising and investment companies sit side by side. In the US there's an entire containment between the technology and the creatives, a gap that forces entrepreneurs to pick New York (creative, but lacking in tech) or Silicon Valley (tech, but lacking in advertising and media expertise) as a base of operations – which, either way, represents a compromise. Other companies that do well out of London are those, like Betfair, which involving gambling (the laws here are reasonably pro- online gambling, the laws in the US – not so much) and those involving academia (see Medeley) where, again, the UK is a recognised centre of excellence. The second thing we can learn is that, if you're a London-based entrepreneur who hopes to compete with Silicon Valley companies – say in areas like collaborative working or social networking – then you'd better book a flight to SFO, fast. You can whine all you like about Silicon Valley cliques and the bubble-mindedness of the US investment community – but that's the reality. You can either get on a plane or – to quote Curated.by's Bastian Lehmann – "stay at home and play with the losers". Frankly, if your entrepreneurial skills don't stretch to getting an O Visa then you're probably not going to ever be the next Mark Zuckerberg. Or even Jonathan Abrams. So there we are – a few learnings from London, for what they're worth. Now, just time for some festive cheer before I hop back on a plane to the Valley bubble, where the cliquey US tech press give regular handjobs to their best friends' startups and money is plucked off trees by colluding investors, and handed to anyone with an American accent and a Stanford hoodie. I can't wait. See you at the Crunchies.        
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| 2010′s iPad App Of The Year, Flipboard, Solidifies Its Crown With Massive Update Posted: 15 Dec 2010 09:01 PM PST
First of all, Flipboard has added both Flickr and Google Reader integration to bring more content into the system. Users of those services can easily link up their accounts to create new areas to browse on their Flipboard. But the bigger news is what they’ve added to the content options that have existed on Flipboard since the beginning: Twitter and Facebook. Both of these areas on Flipboard now feature support for various sections of the services. So on Facebook, you can browse items shared in the News Feed, on your Wall, on the various Pages you follow, or filter items by the Friend Lists you have. You can also filter the stream to show just pictures or just links. With Twitter, you can now choose between your standard Timeline, just your Tweets, your Favorites, your @Replies, or any of your Lists. And all of these new sections can be added as main Flipboard items with one click. To bring them up, you simply click on the section header (so in Twitter’s case “Twitter”, for example) and a pop-over menu appears. Flipboard has also added the ability to send Tweets and/or Facebook status updates from within the app. When you’re in the Twitter and Facebook areas, you’ll see a new compose button along the top. Clicking on this brings up a composition area, similar to the one that Twitter for iPad uses (so you can still see the content you’re writing about). You can attach images or an article here as well. Clicking on your profile image allows you to toggle between Twitter and Facebook to share — and Flipboard threw in the ability to send a note to Google Reader this way as well. But you can also update your status from anywhere in Flipboard. If you’re on any of the home screens, simply place two fingers on the screen and drag them upwards. The composition area will appear. If you’re on an actual article page, simply hit the share button and click “Post to…” and the same area will appear.
But there’s more. Flipboard has also altered the way content appears within the app. It used to be that they’d give you a preview of text and make you click a “Read on Web” button to load the full story. Now, depending on the content, they can load that page below the excerpt as you read it. If you click on this area, it will load the full content page for you to read. Or, if the site you’re reading has a full RSS feed, Flipboard will load the content that way. Yes, they’re finally using RSS. On top of all this, it’s now more seamless to reply to Facebook messages and Tweets as well within Flipboard. And articles can easily be sent to Instapaper to read later. And you can set the Google Reader integration to remember what you have and haven’t read already, making Flipboard a killer RSS reader itself. Again, Flipboard was the 2010 app of the year before all of these features. Apple must really be loving their pick right now, because the app just got much better today. But the truth is that they had to. With the success of the iPad, the social browsing space is heating up. Rival Pulse recently released some really deep Facebook integration, making it one of the best ways to view Facebook on the device. Meanwhile, news broke earlier today that Flipboard CEO Mike McCue has just accepted a seat on Twitter’s Board of Directors. So you can probably expect the integration to get even deeper. “I’m a big believer in the Twitter phenomenon both from a user and ecosystem point of view. So excited to join Twitter’s board and help any way I can,” McCue said when we asked about his new position. Both Flipboard and Twitter now share big time backing from VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers as well. All of this adds up to Flipboard starting 2011 where 2010 left off: with a bang.
       
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| AndFriends Lets You Discover And Share Android Apps With Your Friends Posted: 15 Dec 2010 05:01 PM PST
But how can you separate signal from noise? Wading through countless apps to discover useful ones is (still) a nightmare in the Android market – as is search. A new (and free) Android application called AndFriends wants to solve this problem by making discovery and search social – through leveraging your network of Android-using friends. The main idea here is that new Android users usually ask these friends what kind of apps they are using right after getting the handset- and that a list of apps your friends think are useful is more relevant than what you can find in the Android market. Here is how it works: once you register with your Google account, AndFriends pulls in friends from your address book and also lets you add your Twitter and Facebook friends. You can then discover what Android apps these friends are using and start downloading apps that are of interest to you right away (from the Android market, Andronavi or the au one market from Japanese mobile carrier KDDI).
All apps can be
Each time a friend installs a new app, AndFriends instantly notifies you so you can keep track on what apps are gaining popularity “in real-time”. AndFriends also features a badge system to boost engagement: users can earn various badges, for example the “Googler” badge after collecting five Google-related apps or “Wallstreeter” after collecting five finance-related apps. AndFriends is offered by Tokyo-based startup milog. The app is available in English, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese – plus it’s free, so you should give it a spin.        
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| Facebook Uses Face Recognition To Help Tag Photos Posted: 15 Dec 2010 03:46 PM PST
Back in October Facebook launched a feature that had some face detection built in — if someone appeared in multiple photos in the same album, Facebook would group them together and ask you who that person was, allowing you to tag them in one fell swoop. Now it’s improving on that by using face recognition technology to guess who the person is, using your network of friends as a reference. Of course, any time the words “Face recognition” and Facebook are put together, there are going to be questions about privacy. Facebook VP Product Chris Cox says that the new feature complies with all relevant laws, and that users are given a choice of opting out of it entirely (i.e. your name won’t be suggested in the ‘tag your friends’ dialog, though your friends can still add it manually). He also says that the technology couldn’t currently be used for any kind of site-wide face search, because it’s reliant on your social graph. Because you’ve got a fairly small number of friends, and typically appear in photos alongside an even smaller number of those, Facebook doesn’t need to be super accurate when it’s matching faces. Cox guesses that most people won’t even notice that the feature is active, though there will be an announcement at the top of the tagging screen. The new face recognition technology will be rolling out to 5% of users next week, and will ramp up gradually after that. It’s also worth noting that Facebook licensed some of the technology it used to build this (it wouldn’t say from whom), and built some of it in-house.        
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| Blekko Goes Social, Now Lets You Search Sites Your Friends Have ‘Liked’ On Facebook Posted: 15 Dec 2010 02:56 PM PST
Unlike Bing’s Facebook ‘Like’ integration, Blekko’s new feature doesn’t just surface ‘Likes’ next to already existant result URLs. You can actually change the results you see based on what your friends have ‘Liked’ by searching and adding the /Likes slashtag to any search, for example TechCrunch /Likes. And while ‘Like’ data now also shows up in normal Blekko search, you can also sort by ‘Like’ number by clicking on the thumbs up icon in the top corner of your results page. Click on ‘View’ to see which friends liked what.“We want to give you different views of the web based on how you want to see it,” said Blekko co-founder Mike Markson explaining the recent product development. The feature also allows for some nifty tricks: You can search for everything movie related in your social graph by searching for /Movies /Likes. You can also click on a users’s name to see their ‘Likes’ and actually ‘Like’ individual results which will add the ‘Likes’ to your /Likes slashtag (Warning, this feature was a little buggy at the time of our demo). “We think this gives users a reason to use the ‘Like’ button, as a way of bookmarking something so you can search for it again in the future,” says CEO Rich Skrenta. Blekko will now surface ‘Like’ information in three scenarios, a particular page, the site in general and a different page, taking one small step towards a feature of social search. While in actuality Google was the first social search (because links were actually made by humans) today most of the new links to things are not created by individuals, but spammers. Blekko’s use of the social graph is a noble attempt at remedying this. I for one welcome this new era of personalized search.“We think having the insight of your friends directly into your search results does make search better,” Markson emphasizes. “There’s a real person behind the Facebook accounts, when they ‘Like’ something it’s not just a machine ‘Liking’ it but a human,” adds Skrenta. Maybe they’re right? Perhaps friendship is greatest spam filter there is.        
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Professional social network 
You can send and respond to invitations, as well as message your contacts within invitations. In the future, LinkedIn says that it will give users full access to their Inbox, will add sharing and commenting on updates, and will integrate its "People You May Know" feature.
The group-buying model that was pioneered by Groupon has entered the world of mobile gaming and apps. A few months ago Y Combinator-backed 
Google just announced that the Nexus S is now available at Best Buy and Best Boy mobile stores for $529.99 unlocked (which means it will work on AT&T’s network) or $199.99 with a T-Mobile 2 year plan. 
Hosting company 
“>launched premium features, which include load, CPU, bandwidth, and memory monitoring; advanced performance graphs and diagnostic performance. Prices range from $99 to $599 per month depending on the number of servers being tracked.
So that was London for another year – my annual trip back to the old town to see what's what, en route North to spend Christmas with the family.
Given the success Apple has seen this year with the launch of the iPad, they decided to single out the device to give it its own “
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