Ressacca

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

Link to TechCrunch

Obama Campaign Releases Mobile Voter Engagement App

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 09:13 AM PDT

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Obama For America released the iPhone version of a voter engagement app today with the Android version set to be released soon. The app is meant to bolster the campaign’s grassroots efforts, 100 days out from November's presidential election.

The app synchronizes with Facebook, Twitter, email and SMS, as well as a web app, Dashboard, on the OFA website. The campaign is billing the smartphone app as a tactic that will allow organizers, volunteers and voters to better engage with the campaign.

The app also streams campaign news, provides volunteer opportunities, allows for easy social media sharing, provides information on voting locations and registration information. There's a function for users to see the latest voter ID laws in their state and a place to report voting problems or abuse. Users can also donate to the campaign using the app.

It shares nuggets of campaign PR for users to utilize in campaigning on behalf of OFA stream via the app, such as how middle class tax relief affected Florida voters, for example.

This allows users of the app to essentially become their own campaign headquarters. They can download the names of voters in their neighborhood from campaign HQ via the app, then share this information using the app back to the campaign.

The Dashboard, a web app users can synch to their smartphone apps, allows users to Connect via Facebook and then engage in campaign actions, such as volunteering or hosting an event.

"We designed our new app to help break down the distinction between online and offline organizing, giving every supporter the same opportunities to get involved that they would find in a field office," said Deputy Campaign Manager for Obama for America Stephanie Cutter in a statement.

Decide.com’s Shopping Engine Now Tells You What To Buy, Not Just When To Buy It

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 09:02 AM PDT

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Decide.com, the shopping engine that tells you when to buy, is expanding into a new frontier: it’s now going to tell you what to buy, too. The service, launched last summer by former Farecast engineers following that company’s acquisition, has come a long way since its original debut where it was positioned as an electronics-only shopping service. Today, Decide offers “buy or wait” recommendations across 150 product categories, and will now start the rollout of its new product recommendations across 16 categories within the electronics and appliance verticals, with more to come.

Says Decide CEO Mike Fridgen, the company is on its way to becoming the “big data technology version of Consumer Reports.”

Decide, for those unfamiliar, has been working to become a consumer-facing solution for product research, aggregating data across hundreds of sources to tell consumers if they should buy now or wait for a new product release or for the price to drop, for example. It’s similar to the Farecast model  - which watched airline ticket prices for fluctuations – but is applied to new categories of purchases, ranging from consumer electronics to home appliances and more.

Today, however, the company’s focus is expanding. “This is more about when you’re earlier in the process, when you want to decide what to buy,” says Fridgen. “This has been a problem for people – they’re inundated and don’t even know where to start,” he explains. Starting now, Decide will also offer a “score” (1-100) alongside its buy/wait predictions telling you whether “we love it” (scored 90 or above), “we like it,” “you can do better,” or “don’t buy it.”

Like the shopping engines from Google and Bing, Decide aggregates data from millions of user reviews and expert sources around the web, including sites like Amazon, Best Buy, Consumer Reports, Cnet and more. But the aggregation itself is not what makes Decide.com special – it’s the algorithms it applies afterwards. Using its own proprietary recommendation technology, the service can normalize the user reviews, discounting things like astroturfing, and older, out-of-date reviews.  This is Decide’s key advantage. “We apply hardcore tech here,” Fridgen says. “We have a team that’s uniquely positioned to extract the insight from the data.”

Product recommendations will first appear in categories like TVs, phones, tablets, cameras, grills, espresso machines, refrigerators and more, but will eventually roll out site-wide.

While Fridgen declined to talk user numbers or monthly growth, saying only that it’s “positive,” he did mention that the iPad application has been downloaded over 100,000 times and Decide has served up 7 million recommendations to customers to date. That translates to $75 million in potential savings, he notes.

The company is also soon expanding its partner lineup, which currently includes Consumer Reports and Bizrate. Two more partner deals are in the works, one being a “major shopping engine,” says Fridgen. But going the brand partnership route is not Decide’s key interest, he adds: “we’re focused on building a brand that consumers rely on for credible recommendations,” Fridgen says. “Big data has created all kinds of opportunities to do this at scale for more products, to become more precise about these recommendations. That’s really what we’re aiming to build – a next-generation consumer advocacy service.”

Microsoft Reboots Mail Service, Calls It Outlook; Attacks Clutter, Adds Social

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 09:00 AM PDT

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Continuing its rollout of updated and revamped services, Microsoft today is releasing a preview of its upcoming mail client reboot. Outlook, as it will be called going forward, is a fresh take on a dated service (cough: Hotmail) that some people still use.

So what’s new in Outlook? A cleaner design for more content, social network (Facebook, Twitter and soon Skype) integration, and 7GB of free cloud storage are just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft has stripped out ads from personal email accounts and even figured out a way to manage those dreaded newsletters we all sign up for but can’t figure out how to unsubscribe from. (Yes, there are others who do this but Microsoft isn’t really going after email power users.)

Over the next few months (possibly year(s)), Hotmail users will be prompted to upgrade to the new Outlook. Watch the video for a high-level rundown of the new service. We weren’t given access to the new service ahead of time, so there may be loads of new features other than the ones listed above.

Sign up for the preview at Outlook.com and grab your preferred handle now!

Gay Mobile Social Network Hornet Is Fabulous: Rakes In 150K Users With 150% MOM Growth

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 08:40 AM PDT

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While location-based social dating apps haven’t gotten the best rap of late — Skout being a particularly egregious example — a certain segment of the population seems to just love them: the gay folks. Grindr has seen incredible success since its launch, and now a new gay dating app is set to make things a little more interesting.

Hornet, which has raised $500K in funding since its January launch, has seen 150,000 users in the past six months. And that’s only expected to keep growing, as PandoDaily reports 150 percent month-over-month growth and 100,000 sessions per day.

The reason for this may be Hornet’s new approach on gay social networks. Unlike Grindr, Hornet allows you to save and store certain users to continue chatting later, rather than a one-off connection. You can also search in different areas, rather than a default search of your current location, and users have the option to load multiple profile pictures.

But the real claim to fame for Hornet is the company’s focus on security. They’ve made it the highest priority, making sure that closeted users never have to worry about a hack or some other security breech. And the app takes it a step further, reminding users to get tested for HIV and other STDs every six months.

While Hornet is definitely different than Grindr, I can’t help but be bothered at just how similar the interfaces are. And beyond that, Hornet seems to be in attack-mode when it comes to Grindr, mentioning their greatest competitor over and over again, noting the faults and flaws of the first gay mobile social network. This isn’t all that attractive to me, but perhaps the gay men on Hornet are attractive to you.

So if this sounds like it may float your boat, check out the app in the App Store.

Click to view slideshow.


Apple TV Finally Adds Hulu Plus — Why It Took So Long, And Why It Makes Sense Now

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 08:16 AM PDT

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Good news for Hulu Plus fans who also happen to have an Apple TV in their homes: The subscription VOD service is now available as an app on the streaming device. But wait — why is Hulu Plus coming to Apple TV now, years after it first began rolling out on other connected devices? Well, there are a few likely reasons.

For one, the new Hulu Plus app lets users sign up for the service using Apple’s own in-app purchasing and subscription renewal. Hulu follows Netflix, which also recently added subscription directly through the streaming box. Previously, both had eschewed such purchasing options, in part because, as payment processor Apple TV took a cut of the $7.99 subscription. But also because, with users signing up directly through Apple TV (or any Apple device, really), Apple owns the customer and billing information, something that those companies don’t want to lose control over.

But as Apple TV’s device footprint grows, and as rumors around the launch of an actual TV continue to persist, it’s become increasingly important for content owners to target the device. And so, as one of the few major paid services to not yet be on Apple TV, Hulu saw an important new distribution outlet that it had to reach.

One other big attraction to the platform is the availability of a viable ad platform. In case you didn’t notice, very few Apple TV apps have ads — for the most part, they’re either subscription-based services (Netflix, MLB.tv) or free to watch (YouTube, Vimeo). One of the big sticking points I’ve heard about Hulu and Apple TV over the years is that Hulu needed the ability to serve ads into the platform before it joined — after all, ads are its bread and butter. Hulu Plus isn’t the first app to have ads — WSJ Live, which was added to the device late last year, also has ads — but ensuring that the ad-serving platform was mature enough was likely a big part of why Hulu Plus was held back for so long.

As Peter Kafka points out, the latest version of Apple’s operating system, Mac OSX Mountain Lion, includes a neat little feature called AirPlay Mirroring. That basically lets anyone with a new-ish Mac and an Apple TV to use their TV as a display, without needing to hook up HDMI cables or any other cords from their laptop to the TV. Being able to wirelessly stream any video on the Internet directly to the TV posed a threat to the whole Hulu Plus subscription model, which is based on people paying for access on various devices. With a choice between making revenue from Apple TV users or not making revenue from Apple TV users, guess which Hulu chose?

But what about Apple? Doesn’t Hulu Plus compete directly with its own video-on-demand platform? Well, yes and no. Apple TV users are unlikely to purchase a TV show from iTunes when they can pay $7.99 a month for all-you-can-eat shows from Hulu Plus. Even so, media purchases still make up a very small portion of Apple’s business. Apple makes all its actual money from sales of hardware, so having more content on that hardware could help ship more units which means more money for Apple. More importantly, though — take a look at the top shows being sold through Apple TV. They’re all from cable networks like AMC, FX, and the like — basically shows that users can’t get from Hulu, which is mostly about broadcast TV.

So there you have it: Apple TV gets more content to sell more devices, and a little bit of incremental revenue from subscription sales which happen through Apple TV. Meanwhile Hulu gets wider distribution and the ability to serve ads, but gives up the customer relationship. Seems like a fair deal to me.

Could A New Coupon App Bring Facebook One Step Closer To Retail Commerce?

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 08:12 AM PDT

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There have been some signals coming from Facebook that point to how it could one day become a platform for e-commerce beyond apps and virtual goods on Facebook itself. There are its patent holdings, and there is the code for a (not live) “Want” button to use on posts for particular products that could trigger a purchase. Today comes one more opening on this front, but from a third party rather than Facebook itself: couponing giant Valassis, which already works with some 15,000 advertisers to create electronic coupons, has launched a new Facebook app that lets brands offer coupons that can be printed or downloaded directly within Facebook itself, without taking users off the site — a first for Facebook, according to Valassis’ chief digital officer Jim Parkinson.

RedPlum Social Savings, as the app is called, is part of Valassis existing RedPlum service, which includes iOS and mobile web apps for redplum.com and save.com (and, soon, an iPad app) and already covers some 100 million users. What the new Facebook app is doing is making that couponing offer significantly more social: with the app integrated with Open Graph, users will be able to share their coupons with other users, and advertisers can create their own coupons via a white-label service which they can subsequently target to specific users — so, like a Sponsored Story, the coupons can run in a user’s Timeline and act as another form of marketing for a brand. The coupons will appear on Facebook’s mobile as well as desktop versions.

And while users are not able to redeem the coupons, you can see how this could be the logical next step — not just adding the coupon directly to a user’s loyalty card as you can already do, but pre-paying for them in the process. This is something that Parkinson says is being seriously considered by his company already.

The reason why Valassis said it wanted to keep users on Facebook for couponing is because the “basic philosophy” that Valassis has learned is that “once a person goes to a site or social network, transporting them away from it is considered rude.” So if they do create an e-commerce element to the couponing offer, it will be within Facebook itself. “Letting users do what they want, which is to stay on the social network, is pretty critical,” he notes.

Valassis has been running its social coupon app in beta up to now — one customer it notes is the U.S. grocery chain Food Lion, although there have been a number of other retailers and FMCG brands involved to date — and so far the indications are that users are responding positively, rather than viewing this like a piece of marketing spam. Valassis says that some 25,000 users have installed it, equating to a 72% adoption rate among those users it targeted. The app has subsequently led to some 450,000 impressions among those users and their networks.

Although this is a service developed by Valassis itself, Parkinson notes that his company has worked closely with Facebook in creating it. “They gave us lots of advice but fundamentally we did the development work on our own,” he says.

Does he worry that Facebook might look to move into this space itself, in its ongoing search for new revenue streams for its nearly one-billion user base? (A similar question exists for Apple with its new Passbook.)

“It's hard to say what Facebook will or won't do,” he says. “We haven't really had that discussion with them.” Ultimately, for Valassis it comes to the table with a compelling offer: not only is it already available on different platforms but it already has 15,000 customers turning to it for coupon creation and distribution. “We have the content and the relationships already,” he notes. “As big as Facebook is, it might be hard for them to develop all those relationships itself.”

Next up is an iPad HD app that could likely spur the company to move faster on being able to prepay for the coupons directly on the app (the iPad has been well documented for being e-commerce friendly). On Android, Parkinson notes that his company will likely continue to develop on the web. “With the fragmentation on Android, it’s just too hard to get the full functionality working there,” he says.

NBCFail: Would Twitter Delete Gaga’s Account If She Linked To An Email?

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 08:06 AM PDT

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We’re not going to apologise for returning to the storm surrounding the suspension of a journalist’s Twitter account because in a free-speech democracy, this stuff matters.

To re-cap: The Twitter account of Guy Adams, a U.S.-based journalist for the UK-based Independent newspaper has been suspended by Twitter. In common with many, many media outlets, Adams has been highly critical of NBC’s Olympics coverage, and he’s by no means alone. But when he tweeted a top NBC executive’s email address, NBC complained, and his account was suspended, as we’ve reported, for allegedly posting someone else’s private information. Something against the company’s rules. (Twitter and NBC are partners for the Olympic Games, although there’s no suggestion that there is any conspiracy here).

In an update to the story Search Engine Land notes that “celebrities, have done similar things without Twitter taking action.”

We reached out to Twitter for a response. They are standing by their earlier statement. A spokesperson told us: “We don’t comment on individual accounts so [we have] nothing further to add.” They also did not respond to the question of whether Adams’ account would be re-instated.

We also reached out to Twitter to clarify if it would suspend the account of Lady Gaga if she tweeted a work email address (or a private one). This has happened in the past with other celebrities. At the time of publication there was no response from Twitter on this issue.

So it would appear emails are fair game when they are tweeted by celebrities who have a huge following. Remember, Twitter was the first place we ordinary mortals could really interact with celebrities in any vaguely meaningful way. To suspend a celebrity account would be to not only disappoint users, but to possibly even remove much of the reason a lot of people are on Twitter in the first place.

SEL claims the NBC exec’s email address was not “widely available” because it was only on the Internet for more or less one page before all the hoo haa. But this is an obfuscation.

Given that anyone on the (uncensored) Internet can access Google, a result only needs to be on Google or Bing or any search engine ONCE for it to be ‘widely available’ to millions of people in the Internet. As the phrase goes, on the Internet once, on the Internet forever.

The exec’s email address was clearly online and searchable, as well as easily worked out by seeing how NBC structures its generic corporate email addresses.

Certainly the old Biz Stone phrase, “The Tweets must flow” looks quite different in light of this event.

We think that morally, Twitter has a duty to clarify its policy, but while it does, it should also re-instate the Twitter account of a legitimate member of the media.

Adams has now posted a story about the incident.

Sprout Social Releases Queue and ViralPost To Help Clients Better Reach Their Audience

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 08:00 AM PDT

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Sprout Social, a social management and publishing tool suite, released Sprout Queue and ViralPost today, estimating that the new features will help brands increase engagement with social content by 30-40%.

Sprout, founded in 2010, offers users tools for social media monitoring and engagement, a "smart inbox" that combines social feeds, collaborative tools and analytics, among other features. CEO Justyn Howard tells me the company, which counts Nike, McDonald's and Yahoo among its more high-profile clients, is known for its simple user interface and collaborative style.

Sprout Queue allows users to add content to a queue for automated future publication. Howard says the company original worked on Queue with ViralPost as an embedded feature, before realizing ViralPost would be better on its own.

ViralPost analyzes the users' audience and gives the user the optimal times to deliver content based on "usage and engagement patterns, content velocity and other factors." Similar to Queue, ViralPost automatically delivers content at the optimal time. Sprout Social says the models have improved engagement by 30% for the average user and up to 300% in some cases.

"We're trying to solve the problem of when's the right time to reach your audience," Howard explains, saying Sprout Social is taking the guesswork out of reaching your target audience.

While many similar services offer free and premium versions, Sprout Social only offers a monthly subscription (although they do have a 30-day free trial).

Howard tells me they are working on an iPad app, which will be released in the coming months, and are building more tools to allow teams to collaborate on publishing.

Evernote Hires CNET’s Rafe Needleman As Its New Platform Advocate For Third-Party Apps

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 08:00 AM PDT

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Evernote, the Silicon Valley company that makes note-taking and personal archiving software, is announcing today that it’s hired longtime tech journalist Rafe Needleman as its new Platform Advocate and the leader of its newly-formed “Developer Voice Platform.”

Needleman is joining Evernote from CNET, where he’s worked as an editor and writer covering startups and Silicon Valley since 2004.

At Evernote, Needleman’s job will be two-fold: To help mentor the third-party developers who build on top of Evernote’s platform to help them focus their ideas and messages, and to write about the strongest and most interesting of those apps while leading the editorial side of the Developer Voice Program.

In a joint interview, Evernote CEO Phil Libin and Needleman told me they actually first met when Needleman interviewed Libin in Evernote’s early days as a startup. “Remembering back to the fist time we pitched Evernote to Rafe, I remember how nervous I was, because I had no idea what it takes to actually have a good story, a good presentation, and a good pitch to a journalist,” Libin said.

Libin says that talking to people like Needleman throughout the years as Evernote has grown bigger and bigger has helped him and the rest of his team to hone their ideas — and the way they convey them to others. “I had this idea [for the position] a few months ago, and I thought, who better than Rafe to do it?”

For his part, Needleman says that while he’ll miss the team at CNET and CBS, he’s looking forward to having a hand in the development of a whole new class of startups. “I’ve been covering startups for 15 years and I love them,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to give back more than I’ve been able to. [As a journalist] you dive into a company, meet with them for an hour or a couple hours and then you leave them. I had a need to want to do more, to get in deeper with companies.”

Here are a couple relevant bits from the press release regarding the departments on which Needleman will focus at Evernote:

“The Developer Voice Program is designed to engage with Evernote partners and developers to build the next generation of useful, innovative and successful Evernote integrations. The program will work to connect the needs of its user base with the capabilities of the developer community through mentorship, events, online content, podcasts, and webcasts. It will also provide developers with advice on user experience design, marketing, development, fundraising, and internationalization.

As Platform Advocate, Rafe Needleman will establish new content channels to provide the growing Evernote community with the guidance and resources they need to build products with lasting value. Rafe will also continue to deliver commentary on industry trends and broad business and technology themes with complete editorial independence.”


Photo of Rafe Needleman courtesy of Flickr user Thomas Hawk, via Creative Commons license



Pinterest-Like Social Travel Planner Trippy Inks Deals With 6 Major Brands, 20 More To Come

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 07:15 AM PDT

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Trippy, the social travel planner which debuted last fall at TechCrunch Disrupt, is going to begin pulling in some additional revenue starting today, thanks to a newly launched feature: brand profile pages. The initial lineup includes roughly half a dozen brands such as Chase Sapphire Preferred, Thompson Hotels, Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Brides, Air New Zealand, and Forkly. However, Trippy founder J.R. Johnson says they’ve got about 20 more brands waiting in the wings, which will roll out over the next few weeks.

“A lot of companies want to engage around the idea of travel,” explains Johnson, and, he adds, “each one of their motivations for wanting to get involved is a little bit different. But it’s all designed around this idea of having their brand in the social conversation when people are thinking about and talking about travel.”

For some of the brands, it’s about content distribution, for others, brand distribution, or it’s about attracting new users. Or, more likely, it’s a good mix of all that and more. Some brand relationships here are more obvious than others, too. For example, hotels and tourists bureaus are obvious fits, while with Brides magazine, it can be about associating its brand with those who are researching destination weddings or honeymoons, perhaps, and with Chase it’s about highlighting their travel rewards. By including themselves in Trippy’s social travel planning platform, the brands are tapping into a tool for social distribution – that is, it’s a tool for getting their brand shared on Facebook, without the need for a “Like” or cut-and-pasted URL.

Instead, says Johnson, “anytime someone is using Trippy, and they say they want to go to any of these places, or they’ve been to any one of these places, with [Facebook's] Open Graph, that becomes a timeline story.” The post then goes to that user’s Facebook profile and gets seen by their friends. But Johnson insists it’s not just the Facebook effect at play here. “At this stage in the game, 90% of it is being on the site itself, and 10% is the Facebook effect,” he says. “And the reason I say that is because it’s a little unproven.”

If Trippy as a destination is the current draw, then we wanted to know what that platform looked like, in terms of users, visitors, and engagement metrics. However, Johnson declined to share these numbers for now, saying it’s still early for that. But other competitors have not been as shy. For example, Jetpac, which just closed a $2.4 million Series A, was seeing 18 actions per session at the time of its financing. Trippy is probably waiting to match or beat that.

Trippy, which offers Pinterest-like boards for travel inspiration, will begin seeding the brand’s content into both its web app and iPad starting today, but iPhone app users will only see the brands’ imagery and shared items if they first save it to one of their travel boards for now. This will change with a forthcoming update to the iPhone version. In the meantime, you can see some example pages here: Thompson Hotels, Chase and Brides.

Nestio Updates Mobile App To Make Apartment Hunting A Little Less Awful

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 07:06 AM PDT

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After launching at TechStars NY in April, the Tripit of apartment listings, Nestio, raised 750K in funding. And it would appear that the cash is going to good use, as the company has just released version 2.0 of the Nestio iOS app.

“We realized that people were behaving very differently on the website then they were on their phones, so we spent the last year taking into account the differences and building out the perfect mobile companion,” said Caren Maio, Nestio’s founder.

They saw that, on the website, people were more focused on hunting and gathering listings, whereas on mobile they need an app that helps them find, evaluate, and keep track of those listings. The app was originally just a mobile version of the site, but version 2.0 brings a new design and some pretty attractive new features.

Of course, the app will still plot your listings on a map and you still have the ability to search for listings on mobile, but that’s not the focus anymore. Instead, the app has added better functionality for checking out listings, like an improved camera that lets you snap multiple pictures in a row.

There’s also a notes tab, that lets you jot down thoughts on a listing, and an activity screen, which lets users collaborate with roommates or a significant other when all parties can’t be present at showings. Notes can also be collaborative with that special living buddy.

The update brings with it an apartment checklist for every listing, letting you “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” certain feature like transit options, natural light, water pressure, outlets, closet space, etc.

But perhaps my favorite feature is a new progress bar at the bottom of every listing. I’m currently on the hunt for an apartment, and one of the most difficult parts of the process is knowing which listings you’ve contacted, remembering what you’ve seen and what you haven’t, and generally keeping track of your progress for each listing.

The Nestio app gives you a little bar where you can note if you’ve contacted the agent, scheduled an appointment and seen the apartment.

In the schedule section, the app automatically brings up a calendar style interface to let you set a date and time, at which point the app will notify you. And since it’s as easy as clicking to call or email the agent within the app, there’s no excuse to not get started with the process of taking appointments.

The update is available now from the Apple App Store.

Click to view slideshow.


Thumb Brings New Opinion-Sharing App To Android, Says Average Engagement Now 5 Hours Per Month

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 07:02 AM PDT

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Thumb, the mobile startup that makes it easy for users to ask for and share opinions, is bringing a big update to its Android app today.

Thumb 3.0 launched on iOS at the beginning of June. CEO Dan Kurani says the new app has already contributed to a big increase in user engagement over the past five-ish months, going from an average of 3 hours and 50 minutes per month to an average of 5 hours. (As a point of comparison, Thumb points out that Pinterest’s average user engagement has been reported at 98 minutes per month.)

As for the new Android app, Kurani says it will include all of the features included in the iOS version, as well as a few additions that make this “one of the rare cases where Android is going to move out ahead a little bit” — though the plan is to add bring these features to the iOS app in turn. The big Android-only feature (for now) is the ability to save “Thumbs up” and “Thumbs up” responses (which can be used to rate food, locations, puppies, or pretty much anything else that people post photos of) directly to your profile, making it easier to search for other users who gave the same answer.

Kurani notes that by collecting so many opinions, Thumb has, in essence, been building “an interest-based graph”, and the new version starts to take advantage of that data. (At the same time, he’s quick to add that the company never uses that phrase in the app itself, because its overuse has made it “almost a dirty word.”)

The version 3.0 improvements that previously launched on iOS include a revamped interface that’s supposed to simplify friend discovery, a chat feature, and a leaderboard. Kurani says the app also highlights the company’s new branding and message, which is all about “getting and giving opinions.” (Thumb’s branding has been evolving for a while now, most notably when it changed its name from Opinionaided last year.)

You can download the Android version of Thumb here, and the iOS version here.

Instacanvas Raises $1.7M Round For Its Instagram Prints, Expands Its Product Offerings

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 07:00 AM PDT

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One of the cool things about Instagram is that it has spawned a whole ecosystem of companies that use the popular photography app’s APIs to develop their own services. One of these is Instacanvas, a recent graduate of the L.A.-based MuckerLab accelerator. The company, which allows Instagram users to sell their photos as physical prints, just announced that it has raised $1.7 million in an oversubscribed round. Investors include FF Angel (Founders Fund’s seed investment vehicle), First Round Capital, and Bullpen, as well as a number of angel investors, including Scott Banister.

More Than Just Canvases

Instacanvas, as the service’s CEO and co-founder Matt Munson told me last week, plans to use this new round of funding to introduce new products besides canvasses and hire additional employees to scale the company (Instacanvas is especially looking to hire more backend and mobile engineers). Among these new products are framed artwork and desktop art pieces crafted from 1-inch thick acrylic photo glass which are launching today (all of Instacanvas’ products start at $39.95). Besides these new products, Instacanvas also just introduced $9 worldwide flat-rate shipping.

Munson also noted that the company piqued investors’ interest because it stands at the intersection of social and e-commerce. The site’s current growth curve also looks more like a pure social media play than an e-commerce site, with the advantage that Instacanvas has a an easily identifiable business model.

The service, as Munson told me, currently hosts about 100,000 Instagram galleries that its users can use to sell their photos on canvas and as framed artwork. The company’s users come from about 35-40 different countries.

Fanhattan Adds A Watchlist And Shows From NBC, HBO, And Cinemax To Its Video Discovery App

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 07:00 AM PDT

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When Fanhattan launched its iPad app last year, it had just four content sources to choose from. With the latest release of its app, being launched today, Fanhattan’s now got content from 14 different providers, including some new cable TV offerings from networks like NBC, HBO, The CW, and Cinemax.

The whole point of the Fanhattan app is to provide a way for users to search for and browse content across a wide range of content providers without jumping back and forth through their apps. Fanhattan seeks to defeat fragmentation by aggregating content from multiple sources and displaying it side-by-side.

To do that, it hooks into different content providers’ iPad apps — like apps from Netflix, Hulu Plus, and now cable networks like HBO GO — and lets viewers find the shows or movies they want to watch, without worrying which apps that content is available through. So if you search for Modern Family, for instance, Fanhattan will show you available episodes from Hulu Plus, ABC, and iTunes.

With new content, Fanhattan is also adding new ways to discover and access the movies and shows you want to see. Altogether, there’s more than 175,000 movies and TV shows available through Fanhattan, so managing what you want to watch becomes a new challenge. For the first time, the Fanhattan app lets users add content to a watchlist, which they can use to save content for later.

Interestingly enough, it doesn’t even have to be content that is available on the iPad for viewers to add it to a watchlist. You can add future movies, for instance, like movies that are coming out next year. When they become available, either in theaters or through various online services, you’ll receive a notification telling you where you can watch those titles.

The Fanhattan app also lets you browse through content that your friends have liked or added to their own watchlists, thanks to integration with Facebook’s Open Graph. And when you add a movie or TV show to your watchlist, it will be shared with Facebook friends, so long as you’ve tagged social sharing on.

I got a demo of the new app from Fanhattan CEO Gilles BianRosa in the video above. If you want to see how the app actually works, check it out!

Lemon Wallet Releases Android App, Lemon Business

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 07:00 AM PDT

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Mobile wallet platform Lemon released an Android application and a Smarter Wallet Business Plan today.

The company, which launched in late 2011 and recently raised $8 million in Series A, claims that over two million customers have used Lemon's mobile wallet platform. The wallet only launched last month, yet they claim over half a million credit cards have been scanned.

Lemon says they are targeting a portion of the market ignored by Google Wallet, Square and others, helping users organize and use their money better.

Android users will be able to download the app from Google Play for any Android 4.0 or higher smartphone, with similar experiences to the iOS app.

Founder and CEO Wences Casares tells me the company developed Lemon Business after many consumer-side customers, many of whom are lawyers and consultants, asked Lemon for tools to process business expenses. Users can submit receipts directly to their employer for reimbursement through the app (say goodbye to those expense reports!), which Lemon says is secure, trackable and IRS compliant.

"Our new Lemon for Business offering is designed to eliminate tiresome tracking and endless expense report paperwork that is burdensome for all sides of the reporting process," Casares said in a press release. "There are no hardware costs, no IT upkeep, and the app is highly secure, while also meeting IRS expense tracking requirements."

Lemon Business is available from $6.99 to $9.99 per employee per month, depending on the number of employees you have. For consumers, there is a basic, free Lemon and Lemon Pro ($9.99 per month), with extra features (duh).

While I personally haven’t started using the app, I would love to get rid of paper receipts, both for personal spending and reimbursements. Of course, as my boss’ parody Twitter account (how many people can say that?) points out, the simplification isn’t always as good as it seems.

Verizon To Launch The Strangely-Named Pantech Marauder On August 2

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 06:54 AM PDT

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It's a sad truth of the mobile industry: sometimes perfectly good smartphones are saddled with silly, effete, or otherwise ridiculous names.

Take the new Pantech Marauder, which Verizon just revealed a few moments ago. The name conjures up images of bandits roaming the plains in search of lily-livered prey to accost, but what you actually get is a ho-hum Ice Cream Sandwich-powered smartphone.

The Marauder's spec sheet doesn't provide much to write home about, but those aching for a physical QWERTY keyboard could do worse — it packs (among other things) 1.2GHz dual-core processor of unspecified make, plus 1GB of RAM, an LTE radio, and a 5-megapixel rear camera. Meanwhile, 3.8-inch 800 x 480 display is nestled front-and-center over a quarter of Android navigation soft keys. Perhaps the most interesting part of the device (aside from its completely incongruous name) is the fact that it allows users to switch between what Verizon calls Starter and Standard modes.

While Standard mode is the lightly-skinned default version of Ice Cream Sandwich that most people will stick with, Starter mode provides first time users and all-around luddites a simplified interface. Specifically, that entails four homescreens (as opposed to seven) loaded up with preset widgets, and a quick dialer icon that's apparently very hard to miss.

Pantech’s previous U.S. handsets haven’t exactly been hits, but they’re generally solid enough devices (my personal favorite was this little guy). The combination that the Marauder brings to the table isn’t awful by any stretch, but it’s purely an entry-level device and it has the $49 price tag to match.

TechCrunch Makers: Georgia Tech’s Musical Robots

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 06:43 AM PDT

Three Shimis Final

Gil Weinberg is a Ph.D with a background in jazz. More importantly, however, he’s an expert in the field of artificial intelligence, especially in how it intersects with concepts of creativity and musicianship. His projects, Shimi and Shimon, two music-playing robots that regularly amaze audiences around the world, explore what it means to “play” music. He asks whether music is an innate human talent or a lucky confluence of math and harmonics.

I think he’s proven it’s the latter.

We talked with Weinberg in Georgia at his lab on Georgia Tech’s verdant campus. His work in artificial intelligence has allowed him to build “musical simulators,” which allow him to recreate the styles of various jazz and pop greats using his odd little robot, Shimon. To see these robots play – to see them work together at first and then roll off into wild solos and pleasing musical interludes – is strangely alien. You know that music is for humans, but these guys make machine music look easy.

You can learn more about Weinberg’s company, TovBot here and look for a commercial version of his Shimi phone dock/musical robot soon. Maybe one day his wild creations can take to the street corners around the world, playing for tips and reminding us that we don’t have a monopoly on music.

Video Ad Company Affine Systems Rebrands As SET, Lets Users Buy Online Ads Like TV Ads

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 06:30 AM PDT

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Affine Systems first came to market several years ago with a product that helped advertisers deliver video ads with some pretty impressive brand safety features. Using a semantic video technology, Affine could scan videos frame-by-frame and group them together by relevance, enabling advertisers and agencies to build their own channels or content to run campaigns against. The only problem? No one could pronounce “Affine.”

So the company is rebranding to the more easily pronounceable and memorable name “SET.” It’s also rolled out a whole new dashboard that will let advertisers to create custom video ad campaigns, and receive very granular reports around where those ads ran.

I got to sit down with SET VP of Product Marketing Matt Tillman, who told us a little about what SET does and what new features are available through the platform. He also gave us a demo of how advertisers can create campaigns based on a number of different categories and subcategories, with ads delivered in real-time. Check out the video above for more on SET’s new brand and direction.

Russian Carrier On Apple’s High iPhone Pricing: “They’re In Dictatorship Mode”

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 06:27 AM PDT

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The iPhone, while highly subsidized here in the U.S., can still feel pricey. Most Apple products are. But in Russia, where there isn’t the same long-term commitment/subsidy pricing, the iPhone costs upwards of $1,000.

And the country’s largest mobile service provider, OAOMobile TeleSystems (MTS), isn’t happy about it.

“They’re more in a dictatorship mode where they say, ‘This is what you have to do or you don’t get the iPhone,’” said MTS’ VP of marketing Vasyl Latsanych. “Being arrogant with your partners in big markets doesn’t pay off.”

According to MTS’ VP for strategy and corporate development Michael Hecker, Russia’s smartphone penetration is expected to grow from 15.4 percent in Q1 2012 to 60 percent by the end of 2014. Hecker also mentioned that a price reduction would help Apple take advantage of the growing hunger for smartphones in the region, reports Bloomberg.

After a disappointing Q3 earnings report just last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook faced questions of whether or not the iPhone’s strict and high price was affecting the device’s success in emerging markets.

But in proper Apple fashion, Cook linked it back to the company’s utmost concern: quality of product.

I firmly believe that people in the emerging markets want great products like they do in developed markets. The goal is to make the very best product, and that’s more important and overshadows all other things.

HootSuite Extends Its Social Media Wings With Evernote, Storify, Zendesk Integrations

Posted: 31 Jul 2012 06:08 AM PDT

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HootSuite, the Vancouver-based developers of a social media management dashboard for enterprises and other power users, is adding three new outlets to the list of social networks that are supported on its platform: from today there will be plugins available for Evernote, Storify and Zendesk that will let users send content created natively for Twitter and Facebook to these three, on top of support already offered to manage interactions on Twitter, Facebook and other sites like LinkedIn for some five million users worldwide.

HootSuite notes that this is a development on how the App Directory has been used since its creation in 2011: originally it was intended as a dashboard “focused primarily on populating streams within HootSuite.” It says it will be adding more plugins to extend the new functionality even further, covering areas like customer support, CRM and publishing — putting HootSuite in much closer competition with the likes of Oracle and Salesforce, which are also converging on this area.

The move enhances HootSuite’s position as a social data management platform in its own right, and makes it a more relevant one-stop shop for companies looking to consolidate and monitor how it engages and gets mentioned across the whole of the social media galaxy.

The plugins are part of HootSuite’s free offerings.

HootSuite notes that the Evernote app plugin will give users the ability to save these conversations directly into Evernote notebooks. These notes, which can be viewed in a stream, can then be shared out to other social networks.

The Zendesk integration will mean that a particular Twitter or Facebook post can be instantly “actioned” with a ticket for work within the HootSuite dashboard, adding in elements like priority level or assign to specific users.

The Storify integration will mean that users can create Storify narratives directly from content being monitored via HootSuite, rather than resorting to a copy/paste process as in the past.

"We've decided to take its functionality to the next level, and have introduced plugin capabilities to increase the interaction possible between the HootSuite dashboard, and other external applications", says Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, said in a statement. "With the addition of app plugins, we're making it possible for our users to monitor their social media properties from the dashboard, then delegate messages for additional handling in external, third party applications. This tighter coupling between HootSuite and its integrated apps extends the power of both."

HootSuite tells me that the App Directory has been “extremely successful” to date, with around 15% of new users adding at least one app in the first week of signing up for HootSuite. YouTube and Instagram are the most popular apps to date, it says.

It chose Evernote, Storify and Zendesk as its first three integrations because of a number of requests for current customers across its Free, Pro and Enterprise segments. “We also have great relationships with Evernote, Zendesk and Storify and they provide strong use cases for the plugin framework,” a spokesperson tells me.

There is some further integration work that may need to be done on HootSuite’s dashboard, which currently divides up content between “App Plugins” and “App Streams”.

App Plugins let developers and partners a way to tap into the social media content surfaced in HootSuite, by providing the ability to send individual pieces of social content (from native Twitter and Facebook streams) to 3rd party applications. Users can send specific tweets and posts from their HootSuite streams to 3rd party applications. (For example, Storify is an app plugin only)

App Streams, meanwhile, brings social content from outside apps into streams on the HootSuite dashboard can also be shared through the dashboard as well. (Youtube has app streams only.)

“Apps Streams and Plugins are not mutually exclusive and some HootSuite apps may have both an app stream and plugin,” a spokesperson tells me. (Evernote has both incidentally.)
Posted by Ateev at 9:54 PM

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