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Salesforce Chatter To Add Instant Messaging and Screensharing

A D M I N — Tue, 22 May 2012 09:00:09 +0000

The team behind Salesforce.com’s enterprise social networking app Chatter is making a big push for real-time communication with two new features — Chatter Messenger and Chatter Screensharing. Chatter Product Marketing Director Dave King demonstrated Messenger and Screensharing for me earlier today and, well, they look like instant messaging and screensharing, just, y’know, in Chatter. King admits that there are other enterprise IM tools out there (there’s part the TechCrunch team uses HipChat, for example), but he says it’s the “in Chatter” part that’s really important. After all, he says that most collaboration tools are “separate and siloed from each other.” When Salesforce acquired web conferencing company Dimdim in January 2011, it could’ve just launched these capabilities as a separate tool, but it would have “proliferated these islands of collaboration.” Instead, King says the features are built into Chatter’s “core architecture.” So if you’re discussing a potential sale with someone in Chatter, you’ll be able to know whether they’re online, and if they are, you could start talking in real-time. You could also start a group chat. That gives the conversation more context than if you’d just reached out to them on an unconnected IM client. It also means you can tap into the connections and recommended connections that you receive in Chatter. One downside of Chatter Messenger compared to, say, Gchat: It’s limited to people within your company. However, King points out that Chatter now includes spaces to interact with external customers, so it’s conceivable Salesforce would expand Messenger similarly. Messenger has been in pilot mode since late 2011 (the company was talking about both Messenger and Screensharing in August.) It’s planned to become generally available for free as part of Chatter in June, with a pilot of Screensharing coming in the third quarter of this year. King says there are now 150,000 active Chatter networks.

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Salesforce Chatter To Add Instant Messaging and Screensharing

Wishpond Launches Mall360 To Bring Your Local Shopping Mall Online

ACMAir — Tue, 22 May 2012 06:34:22 +0000

Like Milo before it , Wishpond launched in late 2010 to build a local search engine that aggregates realtime inventory and product listings from brick and mortar retail stores — from big chains to mom and pop shops. The startup has since focused its efforts on developing social commerce solutions for retailers, launching tools like Social Store , which allows any business to quickly create and deploy a storefront for their businesses on Facebook. While Wishpond, like so many others, is looking to capitalize on the growing interest in social commerce, its solutions have really been developed as means by which to expand on its core competency: Consumer-facing product aggregation and search for retailers. And today, Wishpond is leveraging its technology for the sake of a segment underserved by eCommerce solutions: Shopping malls, launching Mall360 , a service that enables malls and shopping centers to offer their shoppers a browsable, searchable product discovery app that works across their Web, social, and mobile properties As eCommerce solutions mature, more and more consumers are doing their shopping online, from start to finish. However, while 90 percent of shopping begins online today, the majority of people still prefer to buy products live, in local stores, rather than online. For the most part, shopping malls are still in a past decade when it comes to their approach to eCommerce, even though customers continue to visit their stores when they’re ready to buy. Mall360 gives shopping malls a way to increase their visibility online in a way that lets them better understand and influence potential customers while they’re in the process of making their purchasing decisions, while they’re searching, talking about products with friends, and planning their next excursion to the mall. For outlets that may house dozens of brick and mortar retail stores, Mall360 lets visitors search and browse through all the products found at the shopping center through visiting the mall’s Facebook page and clicking on a “Shop Our Stores” button, for example. To enable this cross-platform service, Wishpond is leveraging RetailConnect, its scalable platform that imports, aggregates and processes large volumes of product data from websites, point of sales systems, and eCommerce platforms. It then uses this data, along with its search and publishing capabilities to enable malls to instantly deploy its product discovery app on their mobile and desktop websites, mobile apps, and Facebook pages. The goal is to be able to give consumers an easier way to search for and discover products at their favorite local retailers, while in turn, giving retailers the ability to boost social interaction, traffic and both website and social engagement. According to the Wishpond team, malls can choose to deploy some or all of the components of its solution, and over the next few weeks, participating outlets will begin to deploy the solution across their digital properties. For more, check out Wishpond at home here , Mall360 here , or see the video below:

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Wishpond Launches Mall360 To Bring Your Local Shopping Mall Online

Machinima Gets $35M In Funding, Led By Google

Administrator — Tue, 22 May 2012 04:16:30 +0000

After weeks of speculation , online video creator Machinima announced Monday that it has closed a $35 million funding round led by Google, which also included existing investors Redpoint Ventures and MK Capital. The new financing comes as Google’s YouTube has been investing heavily in bringing in all sorts of new original programming. The Machinima network is the largest single page view generator for YouTube, with more than 1.6 billion video views in the month of April. And YouTube is an invaluable partner for Machinima, as it is the company’s primary distribution and monetization platform. With the funding, Machinima says it will invest in content and global sales, as well as international expansion and distribution. For Google, though, it signals another move toward betting on teams that have proven their ability to grow and scale in what used to be the Wild West of online video. Last year, Google acquired Next New Networks and leveraged it to create YouTube Next, a program for helping independent content creators to improve their video production skills, as well as better leveraging social and other channels for grabbing viewers attention. It’s also betting more than $100 million in an effort to fund a whole new group of independent video channels on its platform. As I wrote this morning , the race to add interesting independent content is on for a number of streaming providers, including Netflix, Hulu, AOL, and Yahoo, all of which see an opportunity to grow an audience of young new video viewers without having to go through traditional broadcast or cable TV distribution channels.

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Machinima Gets $35M In Funding, Led By Google

Disrupt NYC Day 1: Your Startup Battlefield Companies

bestcbstore — Tue, 22 May 2012 04:12:19 +0000

Our very first day of Disrupt NYC is over and the conference started off with a bang. We had memorable chats, dove into fashion for a bit, hung out with the Startup Alley companies and witnessed 15 startups launch their products in our first day of the Startup Battlefield. Even though we will have brand new companies launching tomorrow while fighting for the ultimate prize of $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup, we wanted to take a moment to highlight all that we saw today. There were some brilliant companies, so be sure to check all of them out below. The Internet was buzzing with positive words about each. This is going to be a tough battle. Which company was your favorite? Session 1: Disrupting Learning and Decision Making SpokenLayer Read the web with your ears. SpokenLayer delivers the written web as audio. Instantly. Read by authors, real people and really smart robots. In your pocket, on your time. Answer Factory Cyfeon invented Answer Factory to improve how businesses made decisions and understand their data. Answer Factory immediately operationalizes any data source, regardless of its format, size or location, resulting in improved answer quality. Ark Ark is a search engine for people. With Ark, you can search for new people, old classmates, new business contacts, and even search your friends across multiple social networks. Koemei Koemei is a self-service cloud-platform and API for automated transcription and captioning of video content at large scale. Incident (gTar) Incodent is a consumer electronics company aiming to make creating and interacting with music as enjoyable and casual as listening to it. Session 2: Disrupting Processes UberConference UberConference is a simple, free and visual conferencing tool. BroadPeak Partners Broadpeak Partners brings you K3, an interface harness that standardizes interfaces without the complexity of EAI/ESB. CallApp CallApp was founded in 2011 by a group of passionate industry experts, well funded VCs and angels. CallApp makes each call more fun and productive. Powered by a Universal Crowdsourced Contact-Genome, CallApp provides the Ultimate Calling Experience via its Social Phone CRM & Interaction Platform. Open Garden Open Garden lets you share your mobile Internet among all your devices. KurbKarma KurbKarma delivers a social network for parking that connects people with killer parking to people seeking parking. This mobile app facilitates a peer-to-peer exchange and rewards both parties – parking karma at your fingertips. Session 3: Disrupting Media Punch! Punch’s interactive publishing platform radically reduces the cost, time and risk of creating apps for tablets by removing the need to code. It also enables Punch’s orginal entertainment iPad app, the “Punch! Culture Shelf”. StyleSaint Designer goods for under $100. An online eTailer where the community sets the trends. Stevie Stevie turns online video and social graphs into a broadcast-like TV experience, creating entertainment that is personal and social across platforms. TagBrand TagBrand is the service for people who love brands. Babelverse (Startup Alley Audience Choice Winner) Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt from the Startup Alley and with little notice ended up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters: it means anyone can be an interpreter.

Digital Video Consolidation: Avail-TVN Picks Up $100M From Carlyle, Buys UK’s On Demand Group For $27M

jos — Tue, 22 May 2012 02:14:35 +0000

A double-whammy in the digital video space today: Avail-TVN , a video services provider that works with companies like NBC, Univision, and brands like Mattel, has announced that it has picked up $100 million in financing led by the Carlyle Group , and it is using those funds to make an acquisition outside of the U.S., buying rival video service provider On Demand Group in the UK from its existing owner, SeaChange International, for $27 million. Avail-TVN says that the deal will make it the largest provider of digital video services in the world. The move is a sign of how the digital TV industry is already fairly large in its geographical reach, but in many cases is still only providing incremental revenue on top of more traditional TV revenue streams — and so companies that work in this space, which can be capital intensive, are best suited to bulk up their scale to survive. Carlyle is leading the round that also includes existing investors Columbia Capital, Valhalla Partners, Novak Biddle and Pioneer Ventures. With the round of financing Carlyle, which already has an extensive amount of holdings in the media industry , becomes Avail-TVN’s largest investor. Avail-TVN will also use the funds for product development and for wider international expansion targeting content providers and multichannel video service providers. Avail-TVN already had a customer base extending outside of its U.S. headquarters, but this deal will extend that even further: it will now have customers in 25 countries covering 70 million households. Regions covered will be North America, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. “Our strategy has been to invest in leading players across the digital media ecosystem and incorporate them into one company to build Avail-TVN into the largest provider of advanced digital video services worldwide,” said Ramu Potarazu, Avail-TVN’s chief executive officer, said in a statement. “The Carlyle Group’s investment supports that vision, and provides the capital and global network to build upon this foundation both domestically and internationally.” Avail-TVN already works with provides to provide enhanced interactive digital TV services: for example, it is powering the multi-platform video coverage that NBC will run during the London 2012 Olympics this summer. Adding ODG to the mix will bump up the kinds of services it can offer to customers: ODG helps broadcasters with a range of things from content acquisition and strategic consulting services, through to powering video-on-demand services for mobile, online and digital TV services. Its customers include Virgin Media in the UK, Disney, Cablevision and others. Its existing CEO, Tony Kelly, will stay on and become a part of the bigger executive management team, and will now report to Avail-TVN’s CEO, Ramu Potarazu. There is also some debt funding involved in this deal from Silicon Valley Bank, RBS Citizens, N.A. and Bank of America, N.A.

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Digital Video Consolidation: Avail-TVN Picks Up $100M From Carlyle, Buys UK’s On Demand Group For $27M

Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, And Others Will Share Wi-Fi Hot Spots

kram412 — Tue, 22 May 2012 01:19:51 +0000

Imagine for a moment that you are sitting in your front yard in a lawn chair, sipping lemonade while attempting to read the latest news on your WiFi-only iPad. You’re just out of range of your WiFi signal. Your neighbor’s signal is super strong, but that selfish hooligan didn’t leave it wide open for you to leach onto. Relax. Depending on where you live and who your service provider is, you may be able to use your neighbor’s hotspot regardless of his futile attempts to lock it down someday soon. A consortium of cable companies (Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp., Bright House Networks LLC and Cox Communications Inc) have agreed to enable the sharing of WiFi hotspots at a grand scale, creating a large region of available signal, in select markets in the U.S. According to the Wall Street Journal, a single hotspot name and sign on scenario will be used to make it easier for consumers to log in and use available spectrum to surf. It will be a perk for paying broadband account holders in the consortium, but certain providers like Time Warner will let you pay as you go if you like. I assume there will be measures in place to prevent people from consuming all of the available bandwidth of someone else’s node, but they haven’t explicitly laid out how or when throttling will occur. [via WSJ ]

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Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, And Others Will Share Wi-Fi Hot Spots

About.me Releases Public API, SDK At Disrupt, Now Integrates With Reputation, Smarterer, Forkly, Kred And Showyou

Budowniczy425 — Mon, 21 May 2012 20:00:44 +0000

About.Me is set to get a bit more social. The AOL-owned property just released a public API and SDK into the wild in partnership with Reputation.com, Smarterer, Forkly, Kred and Showyou. While the online profile site already worked with most popular social platforms, today’s announcement is huge for both about.me and their legions of users. Plus, for attendees of Disrupt NYC this week, the company is celebrating the news by having a professional photographer on hand to help create free killer profile pics. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. About.me collects a user’s various online identifies and puts them in a single (and beautiful) location. Think of it a splash page for your identity online. Instead of directing people to various locations like LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram, the idea is to just send them to your about.me page, which neatly collates the rest of your accounts. Here’s mine . I think it’s lovely and only took about five minutes to make. Today’s news makes the first time that about.me has opened up for outside development. Tony Conrad, Ryan Freitas and Tim Young launched the company in 2010, which was then acquired by AOL, TechCrunch’s parent company, a mere four days later . Since then, the company had reserved its API for internal use only. The company foresees its API to be used as an alternative to the traditionally painful task of creating user profiles. For example, if a particular service implements this system, with just one click, the profile will be created automatically from pulling the info from about.me. With the SDK, platforms can add their badge to about.me’s profile pages. As about.me’s Ryan Fuiji explained to me at Disrupt, Smarterer, a launch partner, will integrate test scores on the about.me badge and Kred will display their influence data as well. But there’s still a fundamental problem with the gorgeous about.me layouts: A lot of potential users might not have access to a high-quality user profile images. I only have the one. Thankfully it shows my good side. However, for attendees of Disrupt NYC 2012, about.me is here to help. The company hired a professional photographer that will be around the show Monday through Wednesday. Stop by and get a great looking pic for your about.me profile page.

Disruptive Retail Trend Continues As Urbanara Secures €3.5m From TA Venture

A D M I N — Mon, 21 May 2012 19:03:17 +0000

Lately we’ve seen the rise of e-commerce and online retailer stertups disrupting the relationship between distributors and the consumer. Etsy comes to mind of course. Meanwhile, Made.com in the UK is leading the charge, and lately Llustre (also UK) has hit on a model of re-connecting designers with consumers. That trend continues today as Urbanara , an online retailer for “high quality home textiles and home wares” supplied direct from the people who make them, secures a significant funding round. TA Venture, together with a group of international investors, including Blumberg Capital and Brain-to-Ventures, has participated in a €3.5 million series A investment round in the startup. Urbanara cuts out the usual costs such as wholesaler margins and warehousing that traditional retailers add on. Originally launched in Germany and Austria last year, Urbanara has broken out to offices in Shanghai and Berlin and now services the UK. TA Venture has a $50 million venture capital fund focusing on seed-stage and early-stage Web companies in Ukraine, Russia and other CIS countries (former Soviet states).

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Disruptive Retail Trend Continues As Urbanara Secures €3.5m From TA Venture

Facebook Shares Slide Nearly 12% To $33.76 On Second Trading Day After IPO

Administrator — Mon, 21 May 2012 18:18:03 +0000

Facebook shares dropped nearly 12 percent to $33.76 — below the company’s final $38 price in the company’s highly anticipated initial public offering last week. Today is an interesting test for Facebook’s worth because the company’s shares will no longer be supported by the IPO’s lead underwriter Morgan Stanley. Facebook’s performance today may further stoke the debate over whether its IPO was priced well. To save face on Friday, Morgan Stanley had to step in to make sure that Facebook shares didn’t close below their opening price. There were also irregularities in trading on NASDAQ as some buyers had to wait hours to know whether their orders had been filled . The company’s market cap is now around $92.7 billion, down from the $104 billion valuation the company opened with last week. That said, the real test will be over the long haul. Can Facebook prove its worth over the many years to come with more display ad and payments revenue? At Friday’s closing market cap of $104.8 billion, Facebook is worth more than one hundred times last year’s net income. Plus its revenue dipped quarter-over-quarter for the first time in the beginning of this year. Over the weekend, there was a raging debate about whether the banks underwriting Facebook’s IPO pushed the offer price too high to $38. The financial press including The Wall Street Journal , Bloomberg (and yes, even some earlier reporting from me on TechCrunch ) focused on the fact that Morgan Stanley had to support Facebook’s shares above the $38 line. Fortune’s Dan Primack and others VC’s like Benchmark’s Bill Gurley and the guest post on TechCrunch this morning from Trinity’s Dan Scholnick argue that the IPO went off fantastically well for Facebook. Because shares didn’t pop dramatically higher than the $38 offer price, it’s a sign that the company got the most capital it could out of the IPO and didn’t leave any money on the table. They also savvily negotiated the underwriters’ fees down to about 1 percent. These are all essentially shades of gray. Facebook’s performance today will be fascinating to watch. But again, it’s just one day in the long life of a company. It’s up to Facebook to show that it is worth a lot more. That’s a sentiment that was echoed by Union Square Ventures’ managing partner Fred Wilson this morning at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. He said, “The price of Facebook isn’t that important. Mark built an incredible organization. I don’t care whether it’s trading at $25 or 35.” Facebook’s performance is probably affecting tech stocks across the board. This morning, Zynga’s shares are off 7 percent to $6.65 and LinkedIn is down 6.4 percent to $92.65.

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Facebook Shares Slide Nearly 12% To $33.76 On Second Trading Day After IPO

B-Ball, Travel, And Spoilers, Oh My! Hulu’s New Slate Of Exclusives and Originals

bestcbstore — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:44:07 +0000

Hulu announced a new slate of original and exclusive programming Monday morning, as the video site ventures further into creating its own content. For Hulu, it’s a way to begin controlling its own destiny and distinguishing itself from all the content produced by parents and part-owners Fox, NBC and Disney. For its originals, Hulu is teaming up with Hollywood big shots like Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater. Smith will work on a show called Spoilers , which will invite movie fans to discuss all the biggest movies being released. Linklater’s Up To Speed is a travel show built around Speed Levitch (you might remember him from Linklater’s Waking Life , if you’re into that sort of thing) and his travels around the world. And We Got Next , a bro-mantic comedy set in a basketball gym? Ok, maybe I’m kind of interested. That’s it for the originals… Hulu is also getting an exclusive set of series that were produced by others. Its summer exclusives include: Rev. – Follows the Rev. Adam Smallbone, who moved from a sleepy, rural parish to the busy, inner-city world of St. Saviour’s in East London. The Yard – A mockumentary miniseries that juxtaposes two rival cliques of elementary school children. Originally appeared on HBO Canada. Derren Brown: Inside Your Mind – Follows Derren Brown, a performer who uses psychology, magic, showmanship and suggestion to mess with people. The Booth at the End – All about an enigmatic character played by Xander Berkeley, who occupies the corner booth of a diner. Riveting. Pramface – Follows the lives of Jamie and Laura, two young, free and single teenagers who hook up at a party and end up getting Laura pregnant. Like Knocked Up for teenagers. The Promise – A four-part political thriller and love story that examines the origins of the Middle East conflict in events that took place under British rule sixty years ago. Little Mosque – A light-hearted, comedic fish-out-of-water tale about a small Muslim community that rents the parish hall of a small town church to use as a mosque. The new original and exclusive programming will debut during the summer, a time when TV programming from the broadcast networks begins to slow down. That might be able to help Hulu, which tends to see a seasonal dip in viewership. Of course, Hulu isn’t the only one signing up new original content and exclusive access to series online. Netflix also is making a big push for original content with series from the likes of David Fincher, horror master Eli Roth, Weeds creator Jenji Kohan, and the triumphant return of Arrested Development . YouTube is also spending more than $100 million on about 100 channels of new, original programming. Yahoo and AOL have also announced their own slates of original programming, hoping to cash in on growing interest for streaming video.

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B-Ball, Travel, And Spoilers, Oh My! Hulu’s New Slate Of Exclusives and Originals