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Surprise! Location App Highlight Actually Creates Serendipity

jos — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:02:40 +0000

The big promise of location-based mobile apps is that they can help you find something great in real life without you meaning to look for it. But that hasn’t usually been my experience. Instead, whether because of the friction of having to check in, the lack of adoption by friends outside of tech, or whatever else, I simply forget to use them. That has changed with Highlight , a new passive location app for iOS that shows you when Facebook users with friends and interests in common are nearby. Since it launched last week, I’ve gotten in touch with an old friend/source who’s now at a big new company, discovered a couple previous acquaintances who happen to live or work near me, and got the heads up about a fellow blogger creeping behind me at work. My experience is more or less on track with what founder Paul Davison is hearing from other users so far. But before I get into that, what’s different about Highlight from the million other location apps out there? At first, it doesn’t seem like much: you install it on your phone, sign in with Facebook, and continue your life as normal. But there is no check-in. Instead, you get notifications showing up whenever Facebook friends, friends-of-friends or just people with shared interests (that is, Liked Facebook pages) are close. If you click through any of the notifications, you can see their Facebook profile photos, the specific shared friends and interests you have, and the option to message with them or leave a comment. The combination of the Facebook social graph and the frictionless sharing experience makes discovery uniquely automatic. The closest app I’ve seen to it is Sonar , which lets you find Foursquare users with things in common, but still requires a check-in. Maybe everyone else doing location will evolve their products along Highlight’s lines, as Josh noted when he covered the launch , but for now the startup is off to a great start. Here’s what its users are doing so far, as related to me by Davison: Remembering names: Remembering names has been a pretty powerful use case. One of our users saw someone he knew at a coffee shop and initially avoided eye contact because he couldn’t remember the man’s name. Then Highlight popped up and told him who the man was and how he knew him, so he was able to go over and say hi. Remembering other details about friends: People have been using it at dinner parties to remember where their friends work. Discovering that friends are nearby: One user and her husband were eating dinner and Highlight notified them that their close friends were also at the restaurant, on the other side of the bar, so they joined up and ate together. People are getting notified that friends are nearby all the time – when they are shopping, out at bars, or getting coffee in the afternoon. Sometimes they’ll meet up with the friend, or other times they’ll just say a quick hi. They say it makes it more fun to go out in the city. Impromptu meetings (a quote from a user): ”I have been emailing with someone about meeting up for weeks and today he pinged me on Highlight when the app said we were nearby, and we just grabbed coffee then. It was so awesome.” Another example, from Davison: ”I was in a coffee shop this weekend and one of our users appeared in my Highlight feed right as I was working on a feature she had requested. I pinged her in the app and it turns out she was sitting at front of the coffee shop, so we met in person and I showed her the designs we were working on. It even turns out she works with a friend of mine from college. It was really nice to randomly meet her in person like that.” Getting to know coworkers: “We’ve had a lot of people use it in their offices to help people remember their coworkers’ names and learn more about them. It makes people friendlier and reduces the awkwardness. It’s tough to ask someone their name when you’ve been nodding hello to them in the hallways for three months.” Connections from the past: One user crossed paths with a woman who knew a boy he used to mentor in Texas 10 years ago, who had recently passed away. They did not meet up in person, but they talked in the app about how they missed him and how nice it was to connect with someone who was feeling the same thing. Seeing when visitors are nearby: When people are expecting a friend, they like getting notified when their friend is nearby. Conferences: A lot of people are saying they’d like to use it for conferences, so they know where people work and what friends they have in common with them. Asking questions: People have started using their Highlight status to ask questions to the people around them and get pinged throughout the day with replies.

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Surprise! Location App Highlight Actually Creates Serendipity

Showyou Rolls Out All-New iPad App With Improved Video Discovery, Better Social Tools

ACMAir — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:00:40 +0000

Social video browsing app Showyou just launched version 3.0 of its iPad application, a major update with a ton of new features. Competing in a hot space with competitors like Fanhattan , Shelby.tv , Squrl , Vodio and others, Showyou offers a grid-like view for browsing the videos your friends are sharing on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Vimeo. Once connected, you can watch any of the over 30 million videos indexed by the Showyou search engine. With version 3.0, four months in the making, the focus is offering users a better way to find content and new ways to drill down deeper into their favorite videos and topics. The Showyou application now pulls in over 5,000,000 videos retrieved from users’ Facebook and Twitter feeds per day, and includes nearly 700,000,000 “social signals” (data from tweets, other metadata) in its search index. According to founder Mark Hall, Showyou is now handling a video volume of 150 videos per second and 5 million videos per day – numbers which represent the incredible amount of videos being socially shared across various networks. With the new version of the iPad app, the aim was to use this massive archive of data to improve Showyou’s social discovery mechanisms. In Showyou 3.0, users can tap on friends’ user icons within the app which will then launch a grid of the videos they’ve shared. Another update involves a new category grid feature that lets you see the top videos within a given topical area. You can also now browse the videos by social network (e.g. those shared on Facebook, Twitter, etc.), toggle between popular and recent videos, and browse through videos associated with Twitter hashtags, among other things. There are actually dozens of features in this new update, some of which involve user interface improvements which, like the above, are easier to see and use than they are to explain. Hall tries to simplify things, saying “we’ve gone from this 2D grid to being able to drill down into more specific grids for users… and that interaction is going to really fun.” (Well, yes it is.) But given the increasingly crowded social video discovery space, the question is not necessarily why is Showyou fun, but why is it the one to beat? Hall says that one of the app’s distinguishing features is its “immersive, engaging UI – it’s really unique.” The other thing is that the app is “really data-driven,” he says. “Doing that at scale, I don’t think anyone’s close to us,” he says, “And using that data in really intelligent ways to make the grid more responsive and intelligent is another area where we are excelling and will continue to excel. It’s not just a pretty interface, it’s a pretty interface powered by incredibly sophisticated data.” The updated version of Showyou is live now in the iTunes App Store here .

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Showyou Rolls Out All-New iPad App With Improved Video Discovery, Better Social Tools

Daily Crunch: Swarm

admin2 — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:00:42 +0000

Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: Swarming Robots Will Fly Menacingly Towards Your Loved Ones In Perfect Formation Mint.com Launches Android Tablet App The New Android Watch In The Google Store Isn’t What You Think Review: Panasonic Lumix GX1 Back To Basics: Sony Appoints Kazuo Hirai, Ousts Stringer

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Daily Crunch: Swarm

Congratulations Crunchies Winners! Dropbox Is The Best Overall Startup

A D M I N — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:32:29 +0000

This year’s fifth annual Crunchies Awards has just finished up at the classy Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and it was a smashing success. We poked fun #humblebraggers, got cussed at by Siri, honored former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, and gave wild monkey trophies to tech’s greatest innovators. If you missed the event or our livestream , check out the full list of nominees and winners below. The world owes a thank you to Jack Dorsey, the “Founder Of The Year” and leader of Twitter, winner of “Biggest Social Impact”. His poise and dedication helped keep the microblogging service online so it could aid revolutions. And a big congrats to Dropbox on its win for “Best Overall Startup”. The company’s young founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi (seen below) demonstrated the power of the freemium model, and had the guts to turn down a 9 figure acquisition bid. Here are the nominees and winners: Best Technology Achievement Lytro (Runner Up) NFC OnLive Siri (Winner) Tesla Flat Pack Battery Best Social Application Facebook Timeline Instagram (Runner Up) Google+ (Winner) The New New Twitter Path 2.0 Best Shopping Application Birchbox Fab (Winner) Gilt Groupe Lot18 Warby Parker (Runner Up) Best Mobile Application Evernote (Winner) Flipboard (Runner Up) Pandora Spotify Square TaskRabbit Best Location Application Airbnb Foursquare Grindr (Winner) RunKeeper (Runner Up) Uber Best Tablet Application djay Eventbrite At the Door Fotopedia (Winner) GarageBand Netflix (Runner Up) StumbleUpon Best Design Gojee Orchestra Path 2.0 (Winner) Pinterest (Runner Up) Quora Best Bootstrapped Startup (2010 winner: addmired) Github (Runner Up) Imgur (Winner) Instapaper Onesheet Tap Tap Tap (Camera+) Best Cloud Service Asana Box (Runner Up) CloudFlare Dropbox (Winner) Okta Twilio Best International Startup Badoo Klarna (Runner Up) Peixe Urbano (Winner) Rovio SoundCloud Wonga Best Clean Tech Startup Alta Energy Array Power (Runner Up) EcoATM (Winner) EcoMotors Hara Best New Device Galaxy Nexus iPad 2 iPhone 4S Kindle Fire (Runner Up) Nest (Winner) Best Time Sink Modern Warfare 3 Quora Skyrim (Runner Up) Turntable.fm Words With Friends (Winner) Biggest Social Impact Charity: Water (Runner Up) Khan Academy Kickstarter Practice Fusion Twitter (Winner) Angel of the Year Ron Conway Paul Graham Reid Hoffman (Winner) Keith Rabois Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi (Runner Up) Kevin Rose VC of the Year Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz (Winner) Matt Cohler (Runner Up) Vinod Khosla Aileen Lee Yuri Milner David Sze Founder of the Year Leah Busque (Task Rabbit) Brian Chesky (Airbnb) Jack Dorsey (Square, Twitter) (Winner) Susan Feldman & Ali Pincus (One Kings Lane) Drew Houston (Dropbox) (Runner Up) CEO of the Year Dick Costolo (Twitter) Daniel Ek (Spotify) (Runner Up) Phil Libin (Evernote) Mark Pincus (Zynga) Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn) (Winner) Best New Startup of 2011 Codecademy (Runner Up) Fab Nest Pinterest (Winner) Turntable.fm Best Overall Startup of 2011 Dropbox (Winner) Instagram Gilt Groupe Spotify Square (Runner Up) Tumblr Thanks to everyone who watched, voted, or attended the Crunchies. This award show is about the tech community, and we’re honored to have you as our readers.

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Congratulations Crunchies Winners! Dropbox Is The Best Overall Startup

The 5 Reasons Why Facebook Is Worth So Much Money

admin2 — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:25:12 +0000

How did Facebook become worth so much money that it could file for the biggest IPO in tech history ? By building a highly defensible product, platform, and advertising business on top of brilliant talent and valuable data. It now has several competitive advantages that protect it from disruption and could give it a long life as the primary online identity provider. Here are the 5 components that make Facebook a smart long-term bet for investors, regardless of its exact IPO pricing. Network Effect Displacing Facebook as the mainstream online social network would be next to impossible. It brought authenticated identity to the internet –a crucial utility that compelled users to join. No other service may be able to add on top of Facebook something as valuable as what Facebook added to Myspace, friendster, and other services where you didn’t have to be yourself. Facebook’s ingenius distribution strategy, detailed in The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick , allowed the service to capitalize on this value-add and spread to the farthest reaches of the globe . Eventually the network effect took hold, with Facebook’s ever-growing user base making it ever-more valuable and attractive to new users. And now inertia has set in. Users have invested considerable time into Facebook building their profiles, walls, interest graphs, and most importantly, their social graphs. As Facebook handles a wide range of use cases and a critical mass of any person’s friends already using it, a competing social network can’t just be as good or better, it would need to be massive improvement to lead users astray. The insulation to competition provided by the network effect makes it a safe long-term bet for investors. The News Feed’s EdgeRank Algorithm For five years, Facebook has been collecting data and refining its EdgeRank algorithm , which determines what of all the content your friends share ends up in your news feed, and how prominently. By using Likes, comments, and shares to determine what’s most relevant, Facebook had developed arguably the best automated content curation engine in the world. The news feed also gets to draw on the web’s largest database of photos , and the friend tags they feature which helped Facebook go viral. For new users without tons of data points, Facebook can still predict what they might be interested in seeing. For existing users, especially veterans of the site that actively use its feedback mechanisms, the news feed consistently surfaces relevant content. EdgeRank creates that the highly addicting experience that drives Facebook’s enormous time on site, return visit rate, and engagement. Even if Twitter or Google+ had all the content of Facebook, it could take them years to develop an algorithm that produces such a relevant feed. Talent Mark Zuckerberg sees the future. His product vision allows Facebook to release features that users grow into rather than out of. Zuckerberg has integrated progressive home brewed ideas as well as those that couldn’t reach their full potential when launched elsewhere. He has pushed the service to constantly reinvent itself, allowing it to stay cool and relevant 8 years after launch. Zuck’s dedication to making the world a better place through interconnection and openness has also attracted other visionaries. COO Sheryl Sandberg ‘s efficiency has made the company very profitable, and her willingness to experiment means Facebook will continue to revolutionize advertising through behavioral targeting and social content-infused ads. VP of Product Chris Cox has led Facebook’s social design movement, where 1st and 3rd party products are made to leverage Facebook’s data and community from the start, rather than bolting them on. With the promise of changing the world and a lean, fun-loving company culture, Facebook has been pulling top engineering, product, and business talent away from larger companies like Google that are saddled with product bloat and bureaucracy. It’s also been aggressively acquiring disruptive startups such as Paul Bucheit and Brett Taylor’s FriendFeed , Blake Ross’ Parakey , Sam Lessin’s Drop.io , and Josh Williams’ Gowalla . The rockstar product designers and executives ensures innovation will continue to flow from within Facebook. The IPO will provide Facebook more cash for acquisitions and give its talent the liquidity they deserve . Though there’s always the chance they could cash out and leave, the ability to sell a little stock and upgrade their lifestyle might keep employees happy enough to stick around. The Apps and Games Platform Facebook has created a gaming platform proven to offer viral growth. While the service has curtailed some of loudest viral channels, organic growth opportunities remain and on-site advertising for games has produced high returns on investment for companies like Zynga. Facebook has fostered an enormous community of developers that pay while populating the site with engaging apps and content, and that won’t ever disappear overnight. Facebook games are often infinite building simulations or twitch puzzlers, have long session lengths, and let users make vanity purchases so they can show off while simultaneously hooking them deeper into a game. They readily produce “whales”, or people who spend orders of magnitude more than the average player. Mobile is emerging as a lucrative platform for Apple and Google, and Facebook is just getting started there, but it does have an enormous install base to work from . By attracting developers early with free growth , clamping down once they had invested, and then taxing them 30% through its virtual currency Credits, Facebook has turned its games platform into a consistent money maker . Now some developers are experimenting with digital media sales and rentals , pay-per-view , as well as offering virtual currency microincentives , showing potential for platform monetization beyond games. Ad Targeting Age, gender, current city, hometown, employers, education, friends, interests, and now in-app activity and ecommerce habits. When users share this data with friends, they’re also sharing with Facebook. This gives Facebook possibly the most accurate and robust set of ad targeting data in the world. With both an self-serve tool and ad reps handling premium accounts, Facebook can provide effective advertising solutions to both local business and international brands. Facebook has developed eye-catching ads by combining this targeting with social-content infused ad creative . Viewers see the names and faces of friends who Like an advertised brand. Interactions between their friends and brands, such as Likes, app usage, and checkins, can become the ads themselves through Sponsored Stories. These trump, and are increasingly pulling spend away from more cookie-cutter display and search ads targeted through cookies and keywords. Facebook has only begun to monetize through ads. The sidebars where ads primarily appear have been kept small and unobtrusive. Facebook is now mixing ads back into the web version of the news feed , where they’re sure to be seen between organic social content. Facebook has yet to show ads to its hundreds of millions of daily mobile users, but Sponsored Stories could show up there soon too. Finally, it could one day create an ad network that allows other sites to pay to show logged-in Facebook users the same highly targeted social ads they see on Facebook.com.

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The 5 Reasons Why Facebook Is Worth So Much Money

FounderSoup: Stanford and Andreessen’s New Startup Generator

vertical8 — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 03:25:27 +0000

A single entrepreneur alone is vulnerable to shortsightedness, to fatigue. But with a team comes diverse perspective, encouragement, and the wherewithal to push through problems. That’s why a group of Stanford computer science and business students started the Andreessen Horowitz-backed FounderSoup program. It’s designed to give entrepreneurs with an idea or a fledgling company a chance to pitch — not to raise funding, but to recruit co-founders. At its first full-scale event on Thursday night , I watched as 20 ideas were pitched, and 170 PhD, MBA, and undergraduate students mingled. What I saw was an effective model for fostering startups, and several brilliant ideas in healthtech and energy (reviewed below) that could turn into successful companies. FounderSoup’s President Mike Dorsey tells me “As a CS student and an MBA, I would constantly get questions from entrepreneurs to connect them to people with coding skills. I’d also get all these coders with great products who needed business co-founders.” Dorsey and some friends started the program to help founders meet, thanks to financial backing from Andreessen Horowitz via partner Ronny Conway (son of Ron). At the Founder Soup pilot event, 4 teams discovered co-founders and 2 went on to receive funding. Clearly there was potential. For Thursday, 50 founders submitted ideas and 20 were given the chance to pitch for 90 seconds each. Afterwards, each team was stationed around the Stanford d.school and approached by those interested in joining their team. To ease networking, FounderSoup made temporary business cards for all attendees with their contact info and specialties. Some startup-spawning universities are beginning to set up their own VC funds, accelerators, and incubators, like Harvard’s new Experiment Fund and Stanford’s StartX . Before young companies can take funding or stipends, they need a great team, though. More universities and cities should look to copy the FounderSoup model. It’s simple, cheap, and in a school’s interest. After all, nothing brings in top applicants and alumni donations like producing the next Larry Page, Vinod Khosla, or Jerry Yang . Here’s a quick look at the most exciting companies from FounderSoup, you can also watch their pitches here Wello – An online marketplace where fitness professionals can deliver training sessions via live streaming video. Trainers pay to set up a profile, sell one-on-one or group training sessions, and Wello processes the transactions and takes a cut. There’s big potential because many who want to get fit don’t have time to go to a gym, but can easily slot in video sessions while at the home or office. Customers say the webcam-based workouts are effective. Wello could grab a share of the $21 billion a year onsite fitness services market, in which millions of people already pay for gym memberships and expensive in-person physical trainers. Oxford, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins-educated Co-founder Leslie Silverglide previously co-founded and sold Mixt Greens, a quick-service restaurant group, to Nestle’s investment arm. D.C. Revolutions - Helix-shaped, 3 foot tall plastic wind turbines that fit on light poles and can produce half the energy the lights need. D.C. Revolutions could sell the turbines to cities or property owners. Eye-catching when they spin, the turbines could change the face of the urban landscape and as founder Durrell Coleman says, “make sustainability sexy”. CS LabTech’s MuSE - A healthtech company that has developed MuSE, a cell-stretching petri dish medical research device for labs. Currently when labs test cells they’re taken out of the body and are therefore in a static state, different from their dynamic state inside a live body where they stretch while in use. CS LabTech’s vacuum-powered Multi-dimensional Strain Experiment petri dish allows biologists to mimic the dynamic state of heart, lung, muscle, and other cells within the lab. Founded by dynamic cell structure PhD Chelsey Simmons, CS LabTech’s device will be ready for commercial sale next month, and could power advancements in the lucrative fields of drug screening and pharmaceutical development. Crowd Jewel – A crowdsourced jewelry design and sales company. Designers submit their work through a Facebook app where potential customers then vote and pre-order, and the winners’ designs are commissioned and delivered with CrowdJewel taking 30% cut. Since designers want the exposure and sales that come with winning a contest, they source sales leads for CrowdJewel by encouraging their friends to vote. With a big market and lots of struggling designers, CrowdJewel could attain some of the success of similar businesses like Threadless and BeachMint. Veebot – A vein puncture medical robot that automatically finds a patient’s vein, inserts the needle, and performs a procedure. Co-founder Richard Harris tells me there are 1.4 billion venipuncture procedures per year in the US alone, and 33% fail to find a vein on their first attempt. This forces doctors to make multiple manual needle pricks that can up the risk of infection and complication, as well is increase costs and delay medical treatment. Veebot solves the problem using infrared to initially locate a vein, then ultrasound to pinpoint it. Veebot can then draw blood, insert an IV, or administer medicine. Venipuncture is a $30 billion per year global market, and this is a massively disruptive device every hospital in the world could use. While some might be scared of a needle-wielding robot, I’d be happy to submit if it saved me from multiple pricks.

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FounderSoup: Stanford and Andreessen’s New Startup Generator

Zynga Brings Social Gaming To The Bingo Hall With Newest Facebook Title

admin2 — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:00:15 +0000

There’s been one trend we’ve been noticing over the past few years when it comes to Zynga’s game development strategy. The social gaming giant likes to re-create classic games like Hangman or hidden puzzles and add social elements for gameplay. We saw this with the release of Hanging With Friends, Scramble With Friends , Hidden Chronicles. And As Zynga revealed in October , next up is Bingo . Today, the company is revealing its social take on Bingo via a Facebook game, which will be joining Zynga Poker in Zynga’s newest franchise, Zynga Casino. Currently, the game is in private beta but will be launching to the public soon. In terms of actual gameplay, Zynga Bingo works similarly to the way an ordinary bingo game works. And if you’ve played Zynga Poker before, the game mechanics and nuances will feel familiar to you as well. As numbers are called out in the game, you cross off those that match on your card, with the winner being the first person who reaches a consecutive pattern on the card from the drawn numbers. The main difference is the social aspect of Zynga Bingo. When you start the game, you’ll be promoted to enter themed bingo rooms and compete against friends or other random players on Facebook simultaneously, challenging buddies in a race to get B-I-N-G-O faster. Similar to Zynga Poker, players can chat and see which rooms their friends are in. Each room has a theme. There’s Vegas Lights, which has a Las Vegas Casino theme; Pirate’s Paradise; and a FarmVille-themed Bounty room. And as you collect more tickets from wins, you’ll be able to unlock secret rooms as well. As you are considering which room to enter, you can also choose how many Bingo cards you’d like to play. Players can compete with up to six cards at once, and you use your tickets to purchase more cards. Within the game, you can also use what Zynga calls “power-ups” to progress faster, get coins and win collectibles to level-up. One type of power-up relates to friend help, which enabled a friend to automatically daubs a free square on each of your cards and complete your cards faster. Nicole Opas, Senior Producer for Zynga Bingo, says the gaming company will be considering extending Zynga Bingo to mobile platforms in the future. Zynga Bingo was created by Zynga’s Austin, Texas gaming studio in collaboration with the Zynga Casino team in San Francisco. It should be interesting to see how the slew of games released in the fourth quarter helped boost both Zynga’s revenue and usership numbers. The company is expected to deliver Q4 earnings on February 14, and Zynga’s stock rating just got a boost, and could see a traffic boost from some of the newly launches game titles.

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Zynga Brings Social Gaming To The Bingo Hall With Newest Facebook Title

SittingAround Launches Service To Help Parents Find & Schedule Trusted Sitters

Achilles — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:15:07 +0000

SittingAround , a new service that allows parents to quickly and more easily find and schedule a babysitter, is launching today. The business is the creation of CEO Erica Zidel, a former management consultant in the Boston area (and mom) and CTO Ted Tieken, who, like Zidel, is a Harvard grad. What’s unique about SittingAround is how it leverages users’ social networking connections – like those on Facebook – in order to build trusted relationships between parents and sitters. If you’ve ever used a traditional childcare-finding service, like Care.com , for example, or even Craigslist, you know the feeling of having to wade through dozens of listings, without really knowing which caregivers are better than others. Who have your friends used? Did they like them? Traditional sites can’t tell you. However, on SittingAround , the site pulls in data from popular social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, to help you immediately see who your friends would use and recommend. “Babysitting is a complex and unique problem. You have a need that is irregular, generally, but you also want a high level of trust,” explains Zidel. “What we do is we allow people to see how they’re connected to each other, including the people in their community, the sitters that they use, and how the sitters are connected to each other, to really pass trust along the social graph. You’re able to form your own network of sitters.” SittingAround, which grew out of an earlier site that helped parents find local babysitting co-ops (parents who trade sitting duties with each other), doesn’t just help you find a sitter – it also helps you schedule them. Using the site’s free tools, parents can send out a single message to their network of sitters when they’re in need. To reach sitters not on SittingAround, the site supports entering email addresses, to save you time. The sitters themselves can also maintain their own schedules on the site with calendars showing their availability, allowing parents to quickly see whether their favorite sitters are free that day or not. While those are the main points, SittingAround has many other notable features that give it a unique edge. For example, it has partnered with a service to provide free background checks to sitters and parents alike, which will help immediately weed out less desirable quotient. (After all, if it’s free, why wouldn’t someone do the background check?) They’re also working on curating daily deals for select areas, to provide a source for “date night deals,” which could help SittingAround expand from just a care-finding resource to an entire “night out” planning tool. For now, SittingAround is a freemium service. For $15/year, you can eliminate ads and have access to priority support. But the business model is still in the experimental phase. SittingAround’s initial product, a babysitting coop, now has 3,000 families in 6 countries trading care with each other. The sitter-finding aspect to the service, meanwhile, is launching now in New York, Boston, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago and Seattle, where it has a waitlist in over 1,000 sitters. While not officially live in other locations yet, the Sitter Marketplace is open and available for anyone interested to sign up. The service will launch both a mobile web version and mobile apps (Android first) in early 2012. The company is currently in due diligence with angels in the Boston area, while raising a $600,000 round of funding with a targeted close in February.

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SittingAround Launches Service To Help Parents Find & Schedule Trusted Sitters

Sprint’s Epic 4G Touch Gets Stripped Of Carrier IQ

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:43:47 +0000

Sprint has been spending the past few weeks quietly pumping out software updates that remove Carrier IQ from affected devices, and now it looks like Sprint’s flagship Android device (for now) will be able to run wild and free. Thanks to an update that started making the rounds yesterday, Samsung’s Galaxy S II variant the Epic 4G Touch joins a handful of Sprint devices to get the Carrier IQ cleanup treatment . Aside from giving Carrier IQ the boot (which Sprint refers to as a “security update”), the new build also includes updated modems and a fix for an issue involving multiple calendar alerts. The only other notable addition in the new update is support for the Commercial Mobile Alert System, which allows Sprint to push out critical public safety updates to customers in the event of an emergency. While this release is the first official one that removes Carrier IQ from Sprint’s Galaxy S II, Samsung has been working on a clean build for some time now. To wit, a Carrier IQ-free software build for the Epic 4G Touch was leaked one day prior to Sprint’s announcement that they would discontinue use of the oft-maligned diagnostics tool. If your Epic 4G Touch hasn’t yet been graced with the update, it’s only a matter of time — according to Sprint, the OTA rollout will should be complete within 10 days. Of course, if you’re really impatient, you could always load up a flashy new custom ROM and be done with Carrier IQ for good.

PowerVoice Launches New Social Media Marketing Platform, Pays Users To Post Ads On Twitter, Facebook

Budowniczy425 — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:00:48 +0000

PowerVoice , a new social media marketing company founded by former federal consultant at IBM Ryan Landau and ex-Googler (and brother) Andrew Landau, is launching today. The service compensates users for sharing brands’ messages on social networks in a somewhat similar fashion to Adly . However, unlike Adly, it’s not focused solely on enabling celebrities and other public figures to earn additional income through recommendations. Instead, on PowerVoice, anyone can sign up and get paid to promote brands’ ads. Of course, since PowerVoice users aren’t celebrities, they’re not going to receive hundreds or thousands of dollars for each brand message they choose to share – the payouts are much smaller. But, says COO Andrew Landau, “we’re democratizing the social media space, so people who don’t have the time or the resources to connect with these brands, and may not have an agent….can come to PowerVoice and get paid.” The company has been operating a private beta since Thanksgiving, and now has a network of a couple thousand users who are sharing these advertisements on Facebook and Twitter. The types of ads PowerVoice has seen to be most effective involve “like” campaigns (i.e., to “like” a brand on Facebook) and video views, but a brand can determine the message they want to promote, be it a discount, contest, coupon or some other promotion. Brands can also control the commission rates by offer, but PowerVoice says it prefers to give a 60% to 80% cut to its publishers. PowerVoice has around 30 companies in its system, but most have come through affiliate networks to start. These include Starbucks, Sheraton, American Greetings and W Hotels, for example. Andrew Landau was previously account executive at Google’s Affiliate Network, so this is an area he’s familiar with. Users have to earn at least $50 before receiving a payout, and so far “dozens” have been paid, with some earning “hundreds of dollars,” says Andrew. The average active user earns around $55 per month. In other words, a bit of extra income, but don’t quit your day job. Also important to the company are disclosures – that is, users must say that what they’re posting is an ad. On Twitter, this is done via the hashtag “#ad,” while on Facebook the text includes “sponsored promotion.” Messages can also be shared through email, blogs and forums. To combat the obvious challenge of dealing with fraud and spam, as is case on any platform where money is being handed out in exchange for clicks, the company is using technology from Cactus Media, a product that two of PowerVoice’s investors, David Weinberg and Aaron Weitzman, happen to own. PowerVoice also sees the majority of its signups via Facebook Connect, which helps to verify a user’s identity. (Plus, spamming your friends is not only bad business, it’s bad for your reputation.) Speaking of reputation, UserVoice will very soon begin tiering the system based on user’s Klout scores where higher payouts would be given to those with higher scores. Thankfully, this may be implemented alongside other metrics, so even those with low scores but high engagement levels will have similar opportunities as the highly ranked. This is interesting, though, because it’s one of the first companies to really use Klout’s scores in something that leads to tangible rewards outside of Klout itself: i.e., cold, hard cash. It should be noted that this whole thing has been tried before, not only with Adly, but also Twittad and Magpie (acquired by another – IZEA’s Sponsored Tweets ), for example. In addition, Adly once operated very much like PowerVoice is proposing to do now, before switching to the far more lucrative celebrity endorsement market. Of course, this was in the pre-Klout era. With “real” metrics (err, Klout scores) in tow, plus support for additional social networks (yes, Google+ is coming soon), PowerVoice hopes to raise itself above its competitors. PowerVoice currently has seven angel investors , mostly from Detroit, and has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding. It’s now looking to raise additional funding.

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PowerVoice Launches New Social Media Marketing Platform, Pays Users To Post Ads On Twitter, Facebook