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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

Federal Judge Rules You May Be Forced To Provide Decryption Password

Budowniczy425 — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:42:35 +0000

In July, we wrote about an ongoing case wherein a woman accused of fraud was being asked by the prosecution to provide the password to access her computer’s data, which otherwise would remain encrypted and unreadable, weakening their case. They got permission to compel her to reveal the password, but the defense said that it was unconstitutional to do so, as providing that information was essentially self-incriminating testimony. The defense and the prosecution disagree, there is no single compelling precedent, and even the Supreme Court, which has weighed in on a similar topic, isn’t quite sure what to make of the situation. So, doing what Judges are made to do, Judge Robert Blackburn made a decision: “the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer.” His opinion, which is embedded at the end of the post, is not a poorly informed or foolish one (like some inevitably are in tech), though it isn’t very transparent. One earlier decision in a child pornography case, though the situations are not particularly analogous, is more lucid and describes its reasoning in more detail, something that may be important in a potentially major precedent-setting case. The interpretation he gives, notably, eschews analogies (the battle has been over whether providing the password is an expressive act or more akin to simply handing over a key) and sticks to what he feels are the more relevant legal realities: the location and nature of the data is known by the prosecution, the owner of the data and the laptop have also been established, and whatever documents are discovered will be authenticated not by the defendant’s production of the password but by other means. To him, it seems, everyone is arguing over the wrong aspects of the case. It’s a practical decision, but because it is so practical (and specific to this case), it probably won’t live long as a serious precedent. The question everybody is asking is not whether Ramona Fricosu will be convicted of fraud, but how access to data should be considered in a courtroom. It’s long, long past time when this should have been settled definitively. But the debate over whether access is “more like” one thing or another, over which there are precedents already, doesn’t seem very forward-thinking. This doesn’t seem like an issue that’s going to be settled by this kind of decision, unfortunately, because as the debate shows, nothing is really an adequate comparator for something like a password to an encrypted drive. The parallels are only superficial, and building legal precedent on superficial similarities just because it’s easier for some people to grasp is no way to build the future. Unsurprisingly, Fricosu’s lawyers are fighting the decision, asking for a stay of execution on the order so they can take it to the next level, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. No doubt the debate will go on for some time, but this case will certainly be considered one of the key documents. View this document on Scribd

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Federal Judge Rules You May Be Forced To Provide Decryption Password

The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast

user — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 02:17:18 +0000

Editor’s note : Mark Hendrickson is the founder and CEO of Plancast , a social site for planning events, which he has decided to stop working on full-time. In this guest post, Hendrickson takes us through a detailed analysis of why it never took off and what he learned. He is also a former TechCrunch writer. Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that’d help people get together in real-life rather than simply helping them connect online as most social networking applications had done. Plancast was the service conceived a few months later from that basic inclination. Its approach was to provide a really easy way for people to take whatever interesting plans they had in their calendars and share them openly with friends, with the rationale that greater social transparency for this particular type of personal information would facilitate serendipitous get-togethers and enable a greater awareness of relevant events. Personally, I figured that knowing more about the events my friends and peers were attending would lead to a more fulfilling social and professional life because I could join them or at least learn about how they spent their time around town. Along the way my team built a minimum viable product , launched from obscurity here on TechCrunch, raised a seed round of funding from local venture capitalists and angel investors, and worked like mad to translate our initial success into long-term growth, engagement and monetization. Alas, our efforts began to stall after several months post-launch, and we were never able to scale beyond a small early adopter community and into critical, mainstream usage. While the initial launch and traction proved extremely exciting, it misled us into believing there was a larger market ready to adopt our product. Over the subsequent year and a half, we struggled to refine the product’s purpose and bolster its central value proposition with better functionality and design, but we were ultimately unable to make it work (with user registration growth and engagement being our two main high-level metrics). This post-mortem is an attempt to describe the fundamental flaws in our product model and, in particular, the difficulties presented by events as a content type. It’s my hope that other product designers can learn a thing or two from our experience, especially if they are designing services that rely on user-generated content. The challenges I describe here apply directly to events, but they can be used collectively as a case study to advance one’s thinking about other content types as well, since all types demand serious analysis along these lines should one seek to design a network that facilitates their exchange. Questions are welcome by others who wish to learn more about the product and how we developed it, either by email ( drop me a line ) or in the comments below. There’s also a possibility that someone who reads this will be inspired to continue the work we’ve begun. And if you’re a user, I’d love to hear about what you do or don’t like about the service (and whether the following points resonate with you). Sharing Frequency Social networks (by my general definition and among which I count Plancast) are essentially systems for distributing content among people who care about each other, and the frequency at which its users can share that content on a particular network is critical to how much value it’ll provide them on an ongoing basis. Unlike other, more frequent content types such as status updates and photos (which can be shared numerous times per day), plans are suitable for only occasional sharing. Most people simply don’t go to that many events, and of those they do attend, many are not anticipated with a high degree of certainty. As a result, users don’t tend to develop a strong daily or weekly habit of contributing content. And the content that does accrue through spontaneous submissions and aggregation from other services is too small to provide most users with a repeatedly compelling experience discovering events. I run the service, and even I currently have only five upcoming plans listed on my profile , with a total of 500 plans shared over the last couple of years, in contrast to almost 2,800 tweets on Twitter over the same period of time. People often tell me “I like Plancast, but I never have any plans to share”. With social networks, this is sometimes a case of self-awareness (such as when people say they don’t know what to tweet), but often they’re simply telling the truth; many Plancast users don’t have any interesting plans on their calendars. Consumption Frequency People also don’t proactively seek out events to attend as you might suppose. I’ve gotten into the habit of thinking about people as divided into two camps: those who have lots of free time and those who don’t. Those who do are often proactive about filling it, in part by seeking out interesting events to attend in advance. They are generally more inquisitive about social opportunities, and they will take concrete steps to discover new opportunities and evaluate them. Those who don’t have much free time often desire to conserve it, so rather than seeking out or welcoming additional opportunities, they view them as mentally taxing impositions on a limited resource. For them, planning is a higher-risk endeavor, and usually they’d rather not plan anything at all, since if they’re busy, they likely have a preference to keep their free time just that – free. It’s hard to generalize by saying most people are in one camp or the other, but suffice to say, there are many people in the latter. And for them, it’s hard to get them excited about a service that will give them more options on how to use their time. Tendency to Procrastinate Even putting this bifurcation aside, most people resist making advanced commitments before they absolutely need to make them. People fear missing out on worthwhile events but don’t actually like to take the deliberate initiative to avoid such missed chances, which requires planning. This can be attributed primarily to people’s desire to keep their options open in case other conflicting opportunities emerge as the date and time of an event approaches. If they can afford to wait and see, they will. Therefore, their commitment will be secured and shared in advance only when they’re particularly confident they’ll attend an event, if they need to reserve a spot before it fills up, or if there’s some other similar prerogative. Incentives to Share Returning to the topic of sharing plans, it’s not only a matter of having interesting plans to share but being compelled to actually share them. And unfortunately, people don’t submit information to social networks because they love data set integrity or altruistically believe in giving as much as possible. They do it because the act of contribution selfishly results in something for them in return. Most social networks feed primarily on vanity, in that they allow people to share and tailor online content that makes them look good. They can help people communicate to others that they’ve attended impressive schools, built amazing careers, attended cool parties, dated attractive people, thought deep thoughts, or reared cute kids. The top-level goal for most people is to convince others they are the individuals they want to be, whether that includes being happy, attractive, smart, fun or anything else. This vanity compels folks to share content about themselves (or things they’ve encountered) most strongly when there’s an audience ready and able to generate validating feedback. When you post a clever photo on Instagram, you’re telling the world “I’m creative!” and sharing evidence to boot. Those who follow you validate that expression by liking the photo and commenting positively about it. The psychological rush of first posting the photo and then receiving positive feedback drives you to post more photos in the hope of subsequent highs. Sharing plans, unfortunately, doesn’t present the same opportunity to show off and incur the same subsequent happy feelings. Some plans are suitable for widespread consumption and can make a person look good, such as attending an awesome concert or savvy conference. But, frustratingly, the vainest events are exclusive and not appropriate for sharing with others, especially in detail. The feedback mechanisms aren’t nearly as potent either, since coming up with a worthy comment for an event is harder than commenting on a photo, and “liking” a plan is confusing when there’s also an option to join. The positive feedback of having friends join is itself unlikely since those friends have considerations to make before they can commit, and they’ll tend to defer that commitment for practical purposes, per above. Additionally, if a user wants to show off the fact they’re at a cool event, there is little additional benefit to doing so before the event rather than simply tweeting or posting photos about it while at the event. An important exception is to be made for professionals who style themselves as influencers and want to be instrumental parts of how their peers discover events. This exception has indeed been responsible for much of our attendee-contributed event data among an early-adopter community of technology professionals. Selectivity & Privacy Concerns Vanity, of course, is not the only possible incentive for users to share their plans. There’s also utility to getting others to join you for an event you’ll be attending, but this turns out to be a weak incentive for broadcasting since most people prefer to be rather picky about who they solicit to join them for real-life encounters. While event promoters have a financial interest in attracting attendees far and wide, the attendees themselves mainly turn to their closer circle of friends and reach out to them individually. You don’t see a lot of longer-tail plans in particular (such as nights out on the town and trips) because people are both wary of party crashers and usually uninterested in sourcing participants from a wide network. The Importance of an Invitation On the flip-side of this reluctance to share plans far and wide is the psychological need for people to get personally invited to events. Plancast and other social event sharing applications are rooted in an idealistic notion that people would feel confident inviting themselves to their friends’ events if only they knew about them. But the informational need here is not only one of event details (such as what’s going to happen, when, where and with whom). People often also need to know through a personal invitation that at least one friend wants them to join. When you have a service that helps spread personal event information but doesn’t concurrently satisfy that need, you have a situation where many people feel awkwardly aware of events to which they don’t feel welcome. As a result, the most engaging events on Plancast are those that are open in principle and don’t solicit attendees primarily through invitations, such as conferences and concerts, where the attendance of one’s friends and peers is a much less important consideration for their own. Content Lifespan Getting content into a social network is not enough to ensure its adequate value; there’s also an importance of preserving that content’s value over time, especially if it just trickles in. Unfortunately, plans don’t have a long shelf life. Before an event transpires, a user’s plan for it provides social value by notifying others of the opportunity. But afterwards, its value to the network drops precipitously to virtually nothing. And since most users don’t have enough confidence to share most plans more than one or two weeks in advance, plans are typically rendered useless after that length of time. Contrast this expiration tendency with more “evergreen” content types, such as profiles and photos. Other people can get value out of your Facebook profile for years after you set it up, and the photos you posted in college appear to have even increased in value. Nostalgia doesn’t even have to play a part; people’s hearts will melt upon viewing this puppy on Pinterest, Tumblr, and other visually-heavy content networks for a long time to come. But how much do you care that I attended a tech meetup in New York last October, even if you’re my friend? Geographic Limitations Geographic specificity is another inherent limitation to a plan’s value. Unlike virtually all other content types (with the exception of check-ins), plans provide most of their value to others when those users live or can travel near enough to join. I may share plans for a ton of great events in San Francisco, but few to none of my friends who live outside of the Bay Area are going to care. In fact, they’ll find it annoying to witness something they’ll miss out on. Sure, they might appreciate simply knowing what I’m up to, but the value to that kind of surveillance is rather modest all by itself. This is especially problematic when trying to expand the service into new locations. New users will have a hard time finding enough local friends who are either on the service and sharing their plans already, or those who are willing to join them on a new service upon invitation. People who encounter the service from non-urban locations have the hardest time, since there aren’t many events going on in their area in general, let alone posted to Plancast. Trying to view all events simply listed within their location or categories of interest yields little for them to enjoy. Looking Forward Despite all of these challenges, I still believe someone will eventually figure out how to make and market a viable service that fulfills our aims, namely to help people share and discover events more socially. There’s simply too much unearthed value to knowing about much of what our friends plan to do to leave information about it so restricted to personal calendars and individuals’ heads. Another startup may come along that develops insight into an angle of attack we missed. Or, perhaps more likely, an established company with an existing event or calendaring product will progressively provide users with a greater ability to share their personal information contained within. On the calendaring side, Google is possibly the best-situated with Google Calendar and Google+, which together could make for a very seamless event sharing experience (one of the things we considered seriously for Plancast was deep personal calendar integration, but a sufficient platform for it simply wasn’t available). On the events side, companies like Eventbrite, Meetup and Facebook have services that are primarily compelling for event organizers but already contain useful data sets that could be leveraged to create their own social event discovery and sharing experiences for attendees. Plancast managed to attract a niche audience of early adopters who found it to be among the most efficient ways to share and hear about events (thanks, users! you know who you are). Over 100,000 have registered and over 230,000 people visit each month, not to mention enjoy the event digests we send out by email each day. For that reason alone, and despite its growth challenges, we’re going to keep it up and running for as long as possible and are hopeful we’ll find it a home that can turn it into something bigger. It’s my expectation that one day mainstream society will take for granted the type of interpersonal sharing it currently enables for just this small community, and I look forward to seeing how technological advancements overcome the aforementioned challenges to get us there.

Daily Crunch: Another Castle

Budowniczy425 — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:00:07 +0000

Here are some recent TechCrunch Gadgets posts: What Is A 3D Printer Good For? Stop-Motion Cartoons Featuring Princesses, Of Course! BMW DesignworksUSA, Thermaltake Team Up For The Level 10 M Mouse Kno Adds New Features To Smart Textbooks In Attempt To Head Off Apple Try-Before-You-Buy Gadget Site YBUY Launches With $750K In Funding Location, Location, Location: MIT Builds A Bracelet That Controls The Office Thermostat

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Daily Crunch: Another Castle

Urban Airship To Shutter SimpleGeo Services In March, With Factual Picking Up The Slack

Achilles — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 06:09:49 +0000

Yesterday, we wrote about Urban Airship , the startup that gives developers a simple way to build in-app purchases and push notifications into their mobile apps, and how the company has been on a tear of late. They recently hired Skype’s former strategy czar and yesterday hit 10 billion notifications pushed. Not bad for a two-year-old. On top of that, Urban Airship acquired SimpleGeo at the end of October for approximately $3.5 million. Considering that the two startups had some months before struck a strategic partnership, and both provide location-based services for mobile developers, the acquisition made sense, even if the price was lower than many had hoped. (And SimpleGeo Co-founder Joe Stump left the company post-acquisition, following Co-founder Matt Galligan.) At the time, it was unclear what Urban Airship would be doing with the terabyte-plus of SimpleGeo location data. Today, that became clear. Simply put, it looks like it’s curtains for SimpleGeo’s services. Urban Airship said this afternoon , after the requisite internal discussions, talks with customers, and hand-wringing, that it will “wind down the availability of the current versions of [SimpleGeo's] Places, Context, and Storage over the next few months”. The target date for pulling the plug officially will be March 31st. Obviously, this is not good news for SimpleGeo’s customers, so in order to make sure its customers aren’t left out in the cold, the company said that Factual will be picking up the slack. The LA-based startup will be migrating developers over to its service, as the company offers its own API with location information, similar to that which was provided by SimpleGeo. A loss for SimpleGeo means a win for Factual. Factual has been providing SimpleGeo with their Places data since June 2011, so Urban Airship hopes that it will be able to facilitate a smooth transition to Factual’s API to continue with access to that data. Urban Airship is also offering customers an additional list of replacement services here . Furthermore, the startup will not be charging for use of Places, Context, or Storage services through March 31st, and will be offering existing SimpleGeo customers up to six months of its Pro Plan for no monthly charge. ( More here. ) Smacks of a bit of guilt, doesn’t it? Urban Airship said that it is basically determined to focus on its product development efforts, which means that it will be taking the best parts of SimpleGeo to beef up the location and context capabilities of its push notifications, while the rest is for all intents and purposes kaput. This wasn’t unforeseen considering the departures from the company post-acquisition, but it’s probably not what the SimpleGeo founders had in mind a year ago. For more, here’s Urban Airship’s blog post .

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Urban Airship To Shutter SimpleGeo Services In March, With Factual Picking Up The Slack

Engineering Serendipity

admin2 — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:04:13 +0000

Editor’s note : Guest contributor Catherine Cook is the co-founder of MyYearbook , a social network for meeting new people. When John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale reach for the same pair of black gloves in the movie Serendipity , they meet and fall in love. The goal of social discovery applications is to engineer this kind of serendipity. By leveraging demographic and interest data, and by providing good reasons to interact with strangers, this emerging category seeks to make meeting people feel fun and natural. And it’s not just about dating. Most people I know I met through serendipitous encounters. Whether it’s the friend I bumped into at the college bookstore as a confused freshman or the boyfriend I met at the coffee shop, most human relationships start the same way – in a serendipitous moment. But not a random moment. I wasn’t waiting in a random line in a random store in a random city; I was waiting in my college bookstore, surrounded by people in close proximity with shared ambitions and life stages. Even at the coffee shop, it’s not a random cross-section of society that caffeinates there each day, but a group of people particular to the location and environment of Georgetown. Social discovery apps spend much of their time focused on this problem: how to infuse apparently “random” online interactions with the sort of affinity that leads to connection—not unlike a good mutual friend who enjoys playing matchmaker. Yet there has traditionally been a distinction between meeting people online and doing so offline: intention. We tend not to wake up one morning and say, “I’m going to meet a friend today.” Sure, you need to be open to friendship to find it, and it helps to be in places where you might meet someone (malls, bars, casual sports, and so on), but you don’t start every conversation with “Do you want to be my friend?” The key for social discovery apps is to mirror those offline meeting places by providing an experience that’s still fun on the days when the serendipity part just isn’t happening. Let’s face it: picking someone out of a list feels less than magical, yet that’s where online social discovery has traditionally been stuck. Whoever can make it feel as natural as grabbing a coffee, hanging out at the bar, or wasting time in the mall is going to win the race for leadership of what I believe will be a very big category. And there’s no shortage of contenders, from more established players like Badoo and Tagged to extremely interesting venture-backed services like Banjo and Shaker . My own company, MyYearbook, is also competing for the same prize (so I am completely biased, but I am also a complete believer in these trends). How big could this prize be? Everyone in the world has a desire for friendship, especially as teens and young adults when so many long-lasting relationships begin. It is inconceivable to me that there will not be the mobile equivalent of the mall or the coffeehouse, that there won’t be a dominant meeting place that will intelligently take into account location, interests, and every other available cue to make serendipity happen. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of meeting new people—of how people discover one another and make relationships in a world where mobile devices behave like extensions of the human body. How do you create a social graph not of the people you know, but of the people you want to know? How do you make meeting people fun, at scale, for everyone? How do you make all that serendipity stuff just happen? These are the challenges we face, because as friendships themselves increasingly migrate online, we think it’s only natural that friendship-making will too.

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Engineering Serendipity

TechCrunch Giveaway: 2 Tickets To The Crunchies #Crunchies

vertical8 — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:19:03 +0000

Who’s excited for the Crunchies Awards? All of the finalists have been announced and the voting has begun. There are some interesting match-ups this year. We have Google+ going up against Facebook Timeline, Instagram, Path 2.0 and New New Twitter for Best Social Application of 2011. Foursquare is going up against Airbnb, RunKeeper, Grindr and Uber for Best Location Application. And which startup do you think will take the award for Best Overall Startup of 2011? Heavy hitters like Dropbox, Instagram, Square, Gilt Groupe, Spotify and Tumblr are all finalists. The Crunchies Awards are going to be really big this year, and we will have nothing short of the best in the technology industry joining us. We have started to release tickets in batches and will continue to do so as we get closer to the event. They sell out really fast, so we will continue to give our readers chances to win tickets for free to the Crunchies as well. As always, an after party will follow the ceremony with all of the distinguished guests and speakers. We will have a fully stocked bar, plenty of food, a casino game room, and other fun entertainment and surprises. So who wants to come with us? We are giving away two free tickets to one lucky person. To enter, all you have to do is follow the steps below. 1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page: 2) Then do one of the following: – Retweet this post (including the #Crunchies hashtag) – Or leave us a comment below telling us why you want to come The contest starts now and ends January 8th at 7:30pm PT. Make sure you only tweet the message once, or you will be disqualified. We’ll choose the winner at random and contact them this weekend. Anyone in the world is eligible. Please note this giveaway only includes two tickets to the ceremony and after party, and does not include airfare or hotel.

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TechCrunch Giveaway: 2 Tickets To The Crunchies #Crunchies

PhotoPin: Creative Commons Photos For All Your Stock Photo Needs

vertical8 — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:14:17 +0000

I’ve been looking for something like this for years: a central, easy-to-use site for stock photos. Called PhotoPin , the site features a search engine that trolls Flickr for pictures. Some of them are also available to buy, but the vast majority are CC licensed. Obviously the site (it’s more a widget, really) reminds you to link back to the original image, but if you’ve ever tried to find an acceptable image for “ ninja stormtrooper ” then you’ll understand the value of the site. Just search for any topic using the search box (ex: passion, puppies, etc.), preview the photo, and click “get photo” to download the photo as well as the proper attribution link. If you prefer to pay for the photo rather than linking to it, the results at the top will take you to a partner stock photo site where you can buy the photo (currently fotolia). The site is surprisingly barren but quite handsome and much better than the jumble that is Flickr’s own CC site . It’s a clever site and an interesting diversion on this fine Friday afternoon. There is actually no contact information on the site itself, so there’s no telling how long it will stay up or if they’re looking for funding.

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PhotoPin: Creative Commons Photos For All Your Stock Photo Needs

Announcing The 2011 Crunchies Finalists And Tickets On Sale Now

blogger — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:04 +0000

The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat , we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now . For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App, the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway. There are some pretty good match-ups this year. Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline for Best Social App, along with the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0). The Kindle Fire is competing with the iPad 2 for Best New Device. And Pinterest, Turntable.fm, Nest, Fab, and Codecademy are all vying for Best New Startup (even though two of those were complete pivots). LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman is up for Angel of the Year. His seed investment in Zynga is worth 160 times what he paid for it. But AngelList founders Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi are also finalists in the category for helping to democratize angel investing, along with Conway, Rabois, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, and Kevin Rose (who has a killer portfolio that includes Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga, and Square). Who will win? Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote . The rules state that you may vote once per day, per award category, until voting closes on Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 11:59pm PST. There are 20 award categories open for voting, recognizing the top accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles. If you are one of the finalists, create a badge and get your community excited about this honor and get them to vote for you. Winners will be announced on January 31, live at the Crunchies. In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite . The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can . Here are your Finalists: Best Technology Achievement (2010 winner: Google Self Driving Cars) Lytro NFC OnLive Siri Tesla Flat Pack Battery Best Social Application (2010 winner: DailyBooth) Facebook Timeline Instagram Google+ The New New Twitter Path 2.0 Best Shopping Application (2010 winner: Groupon) Birchbox Fab Gilt Groupe Lot18 Warby Parker Best Mobile Application (2010 winner: Google Mobile Maps for Android) Evernote Flipboard Pandora Spotify Square Task Rabbit Best Location Application (New category for 2011) Airbnb Foursquare Grindr RunKeeper Uber Best Tablet Application (2010 winner: Flipboard) djay Eventbrite At the Door Fotopedia GarageBand Netflix StumbleUpon Best Design (2010 winner: gogobot) Gojee Orchestra Path 2.0 Pinterest Quora Best Bootstrapped Startup (2010 winner: addmired) Github Imgur Instapaper Onesheet Tap Tap Tap (Camera+) Best Cloud Service (New category for 2011) Asana Box CloudFlare Dropbox Okta Twilio Best International Startup (2010 winner: Viki) Badoo Klarna Peixe Urbano Rovio SoundCloud Wonga Best Clean Tech Startup (2010 winner: SolarCity) Alta Energy Array Power EcoATM Eco Motors Hara Best New Device (2010 winner: iPad) Galaxy Nexus iPad 2 iPhone 4S Kindle Fire Nest Best Time Sink (2010 winner: Cityville) Modern Warfare 3 Quora Skyrim Turntable.fm Words With Friends Biggest Social Impact (New category for 2011) Charity: Water Khan Academy Kickstarter Practice Fusion Twitter Angel of the Year (2010 winner: Paul Graham) Ron Conway Paul Graham Reid Hoffman Keith Rabois Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi (AngelList) Kevin Rose VC of the Year (2010 winner: Yuri Milner) Marc Andreesen & Ben Horowitz Matt Cohler Vinod Khosla Aileen Lee Yuri Milner David Sze Founder of the Year (2010 winner: Mark Pincus) Leah Busque (Task Rabbit) Brian Chesky (Airbnb) Jack Dorsey (Square, Twitter) Susan Feldman & Ali Pincus (One Kings Lane) Drew Houston (Dropbox) CEO of the Year (2010 winner: Andrew Mason) Dick Costolo (Twitter) Daniel Ek (Spotify) Phil Libin (Evernote) Mark Pincus (Zynga) Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn) Best New Startup of 2011 (2010 winner: Quora) Codecademy Fab Nest Pinterest Turntable.fm Best Overall Startup of 2011 (2010 winner: Twitter) Dropbox Instagram Gilt Groupe Spotify Square Tumblr 5th Annual Crunchies Awards Tuesday, January 31, 2012 Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall 201 Van Ness Ave. San Francisco, CA 7:30pm – midnight – Awards Ceremony and After Party A night of celebration with festive attire. Our sponsors help make the Crunchies happen, if you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities during the ceremony or after-party, please contact Jeanne Logozzo at jeanne@techcrunch.com . For press credentials, please fill out this request form and confirmations will be sent separately via email.

Originally posted here:
Announcing The 2011 Crunchies Finalists And Tickets On Sale Now

Backed By Angels, Antengo Takes On Craigslist With Realtime Mobile Classifieds

Budowniczy425 — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:40:00 +0000

You may not have heard of it, but San Diego has its very own tech incubator, called EvoNexus , a product of the non-profit industry association, CommNexus which provides startups with access to capital, talent and business development. One of the companies we wrote about recently, Fashioning Change , has just been accepted into the incubator. And, today, another one of EvoNexus’ startups is officially announcing itself to the world with a platform relaunch, new iOS apps, and a bit of funding to boot. Joining Taap.it (formerly Social Listing) and a host of others, Antengo is launching a redesigned mobile marketplace for posting and discovering realtime, local classifieds. ( Check out the free iPhone app here .) While this may not initially set your hair on fire, classified listings a la Craigslist are resources we turn to virtually every day, to find tickets to local events, sell an unused gadget, or find freelance work. So, simply put, Antengo wants to make it really easy for you to do just that on your mobile device, allowing you and your local communities to post, browse, and answer listings in realtime. How does it work? It’s pretty simple. Once you’ve downloaded the free app, new users will hit the splash page, where they can browse listings immediately without logging in, using simple keyword searches. Atengo then populates the splash page with realtime results. For users who want to post a listing, Atengo requires you to sign up (Facebook and Twitter authentication are available), at which point you can browse through categories, find the appropriate one, take a picture of your item, enter cost, your address (or use “send my location” functionality), and post — listings take only a few short minutes to create and are immediately posted to the marketplace. Both buyers and sellers can apply filters, search by categories, and message each other directly or make calls in-app, the former of which results in simple push notifications. Listings are searchable based on the time published, proximity to you (location), descriptions, or by photo — because, let’s be honest, you never buy something from a local listing without browsing through a few photos first. Antengo is going after a pared-down design that makes buying, selling, and browsing classified listings simple and easy-to-use while you’re on the go. The design is focused around providing users with specific and immediate needs — selling last-minute concert tickets, a place to live, or someone to carpool with — an easy way to connect with local users looking for the same items or services. According to comScore’s 2010 Mobile Year in Review report , classifieds are one of the fastest growing mobile categories, second only to social media. So, it’s clear that there is plenty of demand for a well-designed secondary market for mobile shopping. Obviously, Craigslist has a well-reviewed app for iOS as well, and with a well-established name, it’s an uphill battle for startups looking to compete toe-to-toe with the larger players, eBay included. However, while Craigslist has a few not-so-shabby third-party apps, its apps still mostly rely on web data, and they haven’t yet killed the mobile user experience. So, where Antengo hopes to offer differentiation with the bigs is through offering a platform model that can incorporate mobile classifieds into other offerings, including events. Antengo has been working with events producers to power ad hoc “live event marketplaces”, which provide attendees with a channel to find vendors selling food and merchandise at specific GPS locations, as well as public restrooms, parking, and special offers from the producers (like ticket give-aways, for example). Antengo can also create realtime mobile marketplace functionality at events in the P2P sense as well, providing attendees with the ability to broadcast requests and offers to others in the crowd, creating a level of interactivity and serving as a utility to help event-goers save money through carpooling, etc. Tech events are another likely candidate for this kind of mobile marketplace, as Antengo Co-founder and CEO Marcus Wandell tells us that they have a commitment from Seattle’s largest tech conference as well as conferences in San Diego. This is where Antengo eventually hopes to make its money — by capturing mobile payments at large events or grocery stores, where users might be able to pay using the app once it’s linked to their mobile bank accounts. For now, Antengo is monetizing by enabling users to purchase ads directly that give their listings higher visibility (like purchasing SEO, basically) for under $3 a pop. Beyond Craigslist, Antengo also has to deal with at least nominal competition from apps like Zaarly , an awesome service that lets users hire people to do just about anything, whether it be to bring them a cup of coffee, or track down some quality Giants tickets, or find a private dancer for hire. Zaarly is a bit like the mobile Task Rabbit. Atengo has a bit of a different use case, and now it also has $415K in funding from institutional and angel investors, including a “former SVP at MSNBC Interactive, a former exec at Microsoft, and the CEO of ViaSat”, to name a few. With a location-aware, GPS and realtime messaging with push-enabled app, Antengo is hoping to take on Craigslist and others in the mobile classifieds space. The app still has a ways to go, but the design looks great, and I have to say that posting an add is frictionless, nearly instantaneous, and thus pretty easy to do. At the very least, that right there puts Atengo off to a good start. What do you think?

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Backed By Angels, Antengo Takes On Craigslist With Realtime Mobile Classifieds