The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Use Setlist.fm To Collect And Share Track Lists From Any Live Performance
- Indie Author Lands Book Deal After Self-Publishing On Kindle Store
- Confirmed: Pandora Raises A Huge Round, Post Streaming Rate Agreement
- CrunchUp Live The Main Event: Real Time Round Table
- CrunchUp Live: Real Time Business
- MySpace Hires Former AOL And Tsavo Exec Mike Macadaan As VP Product
- FriendFeed Promises Penicillin For The “Syphilis” — We Sign Up Again
- Mag.ma Bubbles Up 300 Invites For TechCrunch Readers
- TuneIn: A Media Dashboard For Your Twitter Stream
- 12seconds Lays An iPhone Video Messenger On Top Of Twitter’s Social Graph
- JS-Kit’s Real-Time Commenting Widget Echo Captures The Pulse Of Comments On The Web
- Qik Launches Push API, Mobile-To-Mobile Video Streaming
- Camtweet Does Justin.tv Live On Twitter
- Can You Digg It? Maybe Not, If You’re Stuck On IE6
- Bantam Live: The Ultimate Social, Real-Time CRM
- CrunchUp Live: Real Time Search Panel
- Interview: Greg Grunberg and August Trometer, Founders of Yowza, Action Heroes
- Seesmic’s Browser Client Is Like Gmail For Twitter
- Causes: $10,000,000 Raised In Just Two Years
- Brizzly: A Twitter Reader From The People Who Brought You Google Reader
- Enterprise Friendly Social Network Dashboard PeopleBrowsr Launches Real-Time Search
- CrunchUp Live: The Real-Time Moment
- Everything You Need To Know About Microsoft’s Silverlight 3
- Twitter Client Tweetdeck Raises Around $2 Million In Funding
- Ron Conway’s 10 Ways To Monetize Real-Time Data
| Use Setlist.fm To Collect And Share Track Lists From Any Live Performance Posted: 11 Jul 2009 08:26 AM PDT
The good thing about Setlist.fm is that the goal is to collect the real setlists, meaning which tracks artists and bands actually play at live gigs rather than what the setlist says they will. If you have any basic knowledge about the live music industry, you know that those are two completely separate things. To submit and edit setlists, you don’t necessarily need to register, although the startup behind the site recommends that you do. Once you add tracks for a certain gig, say Metallica’s performance at the Sonisphere Festival in Hockenheim, Germany from last week, the back-end of the system will automatically check the web for a playable stream of the tune, YouTube videos and the lyrics. The site will also auto-generate statistics for artists and bands (example for Metallica) which gives you a good overview of their performance history and what their most played songs at live gigs are. Setlist.fm comes with a decent internal search engine and enables visitors to easily share the setlist in their Last.fm event review or embed it on their own website or blog. For example, here is the setlist of U2’s concert at Camp Nou in Barcelona, Spain from the beginning of this month: As an aside, this is most probably the first project that we cover that hails all the way from the tiny nation of Liechtenstein. Which goes to show good ideas can come out of countries with less than 40,000 inhabitants too. Nice one!
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Indie Author Lands Book Deal After Self-Publishing On Kindle Store Posted: 11 Jul 2009 07:09 AM PDT  And you though self-pubished books were all rubbish. Author Boyd Morrison sold two books, the first one called The Ark, to Simon & Schuster. Boyd uploaded and sold the books himself and raised awareness for his novels by being a member of Kindle Boards and generally self-promoting. He will be published in hardcover in 2010 and is working on his next book featuring swashbuckling adventurer Tyler Locke.
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| Confirmed: Pandora Raises A Huge Round, Post Streaming Rate Agreement Posted: 10 Jul 2009 06:18 PM PDT
Pandora is being mum on the huge number, but is saying that Greylock Partners led the round and that Greylock partner David Sze will be joining Pandora’s board. Greylock joins existing investors Crosslink Capital, Walden Venture Capital, Labrador Ventures, King Street Capital, Hearst Corporation, DBL Investors, and Selby Ventures in the funding. Assuming the $35 million is correct, that’s a huge numer and actually more than all of Pandora’s previous rounds combined. Pandora had previously raised slightly over $20 million, but the last round was in 2005. But this new funding comes when Pandora expects to be profitable by next year, and is coming off its best quarter in terms of ad sales yet. “New funds will be used toward the continued growth and development of Pandora” is all the company will say on how they plan to use this large chunk of change. This is no doubt a case of investors hopping on board now that the skies seem clear for Pandora. It’s one of the most popular streaming radio services, and the fact that it looks on the verge of making money is a good sign. [photo: flickr/dan4th] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| CrunchUp Live The Main Event: Real Time Round Table Posted: 10 Jul 2009 04:33 PM PDT
Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck Find my live notes below (paraphrased): Or you can follow the live stream. SG: Where is this going, what is this all about, this real-time? ID: I started TweetDeck just me, cause I couldn’t deal with the data coming at me on Twitter. This is a massively big deal, I’m not going to webpages anymore. I’m consuming real-time data DL: Real-time in life. And all of this will wrap around our lives. GV: This is namespace for people versus namespace for websites. It’s very exciting and fundamental as anything we’ve been doing in 15 years. DH: I think this is a part of the evolution. It’s the same thing that happened with RSS, we had the data, then we couldn’t sort it. Now it’s with this real-time data. SG: Has Google fallen behind in speed? CW: I don’t think so. Google Wave was as impressive as it gets in real time. ES: So how does this tie into Google Chrome OS? CW: Chrome OS is about web apps are the future. A lot of info isn’t out there, so I’m not going to say much. DL: I’m looking forward to learning about it. And I’ll be waiting a long time (laughs). BT: Real-time is an important feature of every site. But this is all changing user expectations. Email, social network, real-time. Now you seem to need all of them. We’re still struggling with some user interface elements. It’s simplicity of chronological information versus the need for filtering. You need to come up with an interface that mixes those. We’re thinking a lot about that. You want to load up FriendFeed and it’s all good stuff, but you don’t lose anything. I think it will be a mix. KM: The real-time stuff distracts us a bit. Real-time is only a part of what we’re going to want. What used to real-time television and radio are now stored, but there are new real-time elements. ES: And do you have an announcement to make? KM: Yes, I’m joining British Telecom to work in this area. AW: The amount of data generated by people is so huge now. Data is grow so fast, and real-time incentivizes people for it to grow faster. NH: Real-time to me is about collecting news in real-time. Google FeedBurner is too slow, so we went with Tweetmeme on Twitter cause it’s instant. And then you press a button and then it goes back to Twitter. FriendFeed impresses me too, you retweet something and seconds later its on FriendFeed. This is real-time. To me it’s all about real-time filtering, getting data in front of the people who want it. SG: PubSubHub is fixing the FeedBurner speed right? NH: Yeah. SG: So where are we going to draw value from this stream? NH: It’s a lot of thing, the story their talking about, who mentions it, and who else is talking about it. Dynamic filtering doesn’t work for us cause the data is too live. ES: There seem to be two main platforms: Twitter and Facebook coming on strong. How many stream platforms can there be? LL: You have a great tie (laughs). We are pushing about 4,000,000 API calls to Facebook a day, but we don’t have it to Twitter. ID: (laughs) We don’t have that information. KM: You’ve got the Highlander disease again, where there can be only one. We don’t all see the same web, we see a different subset on the web. ES: Okay if MySpace or Yahoo tried to recreate Twitter would anyone care. KM: Yes they will, they have millions of users. LL: I bet MySpace and Yahoo will come up with something very soon. Twitter and Facebook is just the first. BT: I think it’s wrong to think that real-time systems will always be like AOL and Compuserve, that you can only talk to others on that network. I think it will be more like Yahoo Mail or Gmail, where you can talk to other networks. There is a lot of work on that. Federation will be big, users will demand it. Users demands for openness will win out, and the system with operate openly. So with that Yahoo could make what they wanted, and it would just work. ES: That sounds great but Twitter can’t afford to give its firehose to Google. That’s its power. CW: I have no idea if Twitter is not giving us accees. But IM open operation has never happened. There’s a incentive for the leader not to give away the goods. KM: We’re talking about different things. GZ: I think it’s going to be a return of the IM horse. We’ve reinvented IMs with this, I don’t think the name spaces will cooperate with each other. SG: But it happens in the business world, why not the consumer world? BT: There is no RSS of every IM you send, so it’s a bit different. We didn’t sign deals with a bunch of companies, we used feeds and APIs. That means a lot. ES: But developers are building on top of Twitter and Facebook. How do Microsoft and Google get those guys on board? DL: There’s infrastructure. It’s kind of like the cloud conversation, all this data is somewhere. You have to adhere to the core standards. There’s a lot of cost when you get up to hundred of millions of users. This is a similar movie to the movie has played before, but now it’s based on standards. SG: How will this play in Twitter exits? DH: Venture exits? Is that a joke? (Laughs) This is like anything else, the amount of data being spread is meaningful, and platforms will exists. Platforms are the big winners. The most interesting, the most useful for porn, etc. (laughs) Can we really be done 7 months into the excitement on the web? I don’t think so. We will fund the new things that come out. SG: So what are you interested in? DH: I honestly think this question of managing this information is what is really interesting. That’s why I invested in Aardvark. Everyone sitting here is trying to build the next interesting things. Maybe FriendFeed wins. Maybe TweetDeck wins. We’ll see. AW: Sometimes it’s worth thinking about what’s constant. People have to be clear about the tradeoff what they’re willing to give up, things like privacy. —-Okay, well a WiFi failure ate the final two minutes but here’s a summary: There is huge opportunity here, and it’s only going to get bigger. The number of requests to get into this conference alone says this is far from over. Interoperability of all this data remains a big question marks. Some are sure it will come, others are sure it won’t. Some think it has to for this idea of real-time to really thrive. Some think if this happens, it will dampen the big platforms. Obviously, there is a lot of debate. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| CrunchUp Live: Real Time Business Posted: 10 Jul 2009 03:58 PM PDT
We're here at the Real-Time CrunchUp, listening to the Real Time Business Panel featuring: Porter Gale, Virgin America Follow my live notes below (paraphrased). You can also watch the live video stream here. Gale: We have a staff person who just looks at Tweets. We are full fleet wifi, so people are Tweeting from the sky. We have on occasion set messages up to the plane. Virgin’s perspective about social media isn’t a marketing channel but an engagement channel. We ask out community to answer questions. We love social media. ES: SocialText is a dashboard for enterprises. Tell us about to what extend are your customers keeping track of external social data? Mayfield: You have pr, marketing support and sales trying to find out what the right engagement model is for monitoring social media. ES: People on organizations are used to using Twitter but the enterprise’s software needs to be impacted. Why do enterprise guys have to follow the consumer? Webb: Consumer experience has lapped the enterprise experience on the web. Eneterprise has to catch up quickly. ES: It seems that the enterprise is pulling in social data more so now. Webb: Enetrprises have to catch up in a big way, Pisani: Things are changing in how enterprises are purchasing software. Now employees go out and choose software. Webb: It’s not enterprise vs. consumer world. The decision making process is different. ES: How do businesses manage what communications go out to consumers? Young: Organizations have to have employees respond in real time if the consumer is using real-time technology. You’re going to start to see enterprise platforms like SocialCast be deployed to enable real-time communications in the enterprise. Marcouillier: Enterprise applications have always been lacking. Previously, the things you did at home have nothing to do with work. Now you can compare the things you do at home to things you do at work. ES: To what extent are other data streams impacting businesses? Ham: It’s definitely more prevalent and people understand the value proposition. I see it as a trend. I see some creative use cases for enterprises, mashups for conferences. Marcoullier: In the enterprise, real-time data isn’t a new concept-look at real-time financial data. There a lot of real-time data that companies can take advantage of to sell to our customers. ES: Aardvark is a q and a service where your friends on social networks answer your questions. There’s actionable, lead-gen opportunities in this data. Ventilla: The main feature of real-time is that its conversational. Anyone can send out a question then Aardvark tries to match you with the person in your social graph who could best answer this. From a business perspective, you could have auto dealers, travel agents who can use this. From a broader perspective its about allowing this individual info taking place, everyone needs a human being on the other end. ES: Porter, do you now if someone is Tweeting from a plane? Gale: No we don’t know the plane. Question: How do you see the role of computation in the self organization of structures? Mayfield: Real-time sounds great but in an organization, this can be overwhelming. The businesses who do this faster will do better. Pisoni: Real-time is a disrupter, completely changes the way businesses operate. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| MySpace Hires Former AOL And Tsavo Exec Mike Macadaan As VP Product Posted: 10 Jul 2009 03:28 PM PDT
Macadaan spent ten months at Tsavo Media before announcing his departure from the company in June. Now it looks like he’s following former Tsavo CEO Mike Jones, who was recently appointed as MySpace’s COO, to the social network (the two also worked together at AOL prior to Tsavo). Macadaan will likely play a key role in the site’s reworking going forward, first with incremental changes (hopefully a bit more substantial than the logo change we saw last week) and later on with a major reworking of the site, which MySpace seems to have been hinting at since CEO Owen Van Natta took the helm last April. Given MySpace’s lagging growth and dropping traffic as users migrate over to Facebook, it’s clear that the site badly needs to make some changes. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| FriendFeed Promises Penicillin For The “Syphilis” — We Sign Up Again Posted: 10 Jul 2009 03:20 PM PDT
Today at our Real-Time CrunchUp, Michael sat down with FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor and Robert Scoble, one of the service’s leading cheerleaders. Scoble has disagreed with Michael in the past that FriendFeed commenting could lead to a problem. But today, he agreed with him when put on the spot. But the more interesting part of the discussion was Taylor also admitting that the mob-mentality (though he wouldn’t use those words) was more or less a problem. And they’re working on a solution. One solution Taylor laid out is that users should be able to shut down comments for specific threads on FriendFeed. This way, if a conversation is getting out of control, you can just shut it down. Currently, you can moderate comments on a thread, but only on a one by one basis, this would shut things down in one fell swoop. But another more interesting thing Taylor said they were talking about is only allowing comments from users in your social graph. Sounds good to us. We’re reopening our FriendFeed account. It’s not ready yet, but stay tuned. And watch the video below for some of the hilarity. And the one below that for what this really is all about. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Mag.ma Bubbles Up 300 Invites For TechCrunch Readers Posted: 10 Jul 2009 03:12 PM PDT
Most people will use Mag.ma primarily for its ‘wall’ of videos, which presents a list of the most recent and hottest clips on the web. As I wrote back when I first covered the site, Mag.ma is a great place to go if you’re looking to kill some time, as it features a constantly changing flow of interesting and/or funny videos that are updated in real-time. These videos are broken into channels by source (Mag.ma pulls from sites including YouTube, CollegeHumor, and Digg), but you can also choose to ‘follow’ the streams created by other users. Mag.ma also features a heavy emphasis on stat tracking, allowing you to watch as a video receives more comments and video hits, increasing the video’s overall “buzz”. Because this data comes from multiple sources, you can get a better feel for a how a video is doing than if you watched its hit count on a single site, like YouTube.
Here’s the video of the demo from the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp: Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| TuneIn: A Media Dashboard For Your Twitter Stream Posted: 10 Jul 2009 03:09 PM PDT
TuneIn, a new startup presenting today at today’s RealTime CrunchUp, is looking to harness this media and present it in an easily searchable, consumable format. Using the site should be pretty straightforward for anyone who has used the main Twitter web interface. You’ll see your normal Twitter feed in the center of the page, but on the right side you’ll also see a list of the latest article links, videos, and photos that your Twitter friends have shared. You can choose to sort these shared links by popularity (the more Tweets a link gets, the more popular it becomes) or simply by time. And if you’d prefer to see media shared by only a select group of the people you follow, you can break Twitter users into groups (called Channels). If you’d like to browse only media and ignore other tweets entirely, you can do that too by hitting the ‘media’ tab on the left hand side of the page. Content is filtered into three columns: ‘articles’, ‘video’, and ‘images’, or you can arrange everything into a handy grid with thumbnails of each item. TuneIn isn’t the first startup to do this kind of media aggregation: Tweetmeme has been using Twitter to surface hot articles, images, and video for quite a while. Here’s the video from the demo of TuneIn at the event: Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| 12seconds Lays An iPhone Video Messenger On Top Of Twitter’s Social Graph Posted: 10 Jul 2009 02:58 PM PDT
Unveiled today at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event, the “12seconds Video Messenger for Twitter”, is an app that’s all about sending short video messages to your friends. And while 12seconds already has a social graph of its own from its website, it understands that Twitter’s social graph is much larger — and so it’s laying this new app on top of that. Basically, how it works is that you record a video and then select the friend (or friends) you wish to send it to. This friend is then sent a direct message through Twitter with a link to the video. Or if they have the app also, it comes in through there. This is different than a lot of the current Twitter video offerings out there in that it has a main focus on messaging between smaller groups of people rather than the public, though you can do that too. And this app utilizes the iPhone 3.0 software’s new Push Notifications to let you know when you have a new video to view. 12seconds undoubtedly hopes to make use of the new iPhone 3.1 SDK that was just released to developers. It is rumored to have some subtle changes to the way it allows apps to handle video. And while Twitter is the key social graph that 12seconds is targeting with this app, it will eventually roll integration with other social networks as well, including the big one, Facebook. The app should be available soon in the App Store.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| JS-Kit’s Real-Time Commenting Widget Echo Captures The Pulse Of Comments On The Web Posted: 10 Jul 2009 02:51 PM PDT
Comments are taking on a life of their own now as Facebook Connect and other modes of commenting communication become increasingly popular. Comments are evolving into what some say are “social gestures,” instead of conventional comments and these gestures are taking place all over the web, not just on a publisher’s site. Just look at the amount of reTweets a popular TechCrunch article gets on Twitter-it can reach into the thousands. JS-Kit, a company that offers an array of Javascript-based commenting, polling, and ratings widgets, is launching a new commenting product at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp that is designed to change the way users comment and the way publishers interact with comments. Echo, JS-Kit’s real-time streaming commenting widget, aggregates any Tweets, Diggs, or FriendFeed updates that a commenter is making about a webpage and pulls it into the stream. Here’s the live stream feed of the event. I had the opportunity to demo the widget and it’s pretty cool. Echo’s technology will crawls social networks and sites including Twitter, for the url links to an article or post on a site (it even is able to discover shortened urls) and then reassembles the comments from the web into the widget’s real-time stream.  On the flip side, Echo allows hyper distribution from the actual widget itself. The commenting functionality looks exactly like an email. You first identify yourself either as a guest, your Twitter handle, your Facebook profile, your blog, and more. You the are given the option to hyper-distribute your comment to a variety of social net works and sites including Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg and Delicious. JS-Kit hasn’t added Facebook to the distribution channel yet. JS-Kit’s co-founder and CEO Khris Loux told us that the startup has been using the commenting widget internally for some time now and it has changed the way people interact with comments. He says that the ability to use the widget to make a comment on another social network spreads the conversation and makes it viral. Loux adds that although commenting is updating in real-time in a stream, Echo has intense spam protection, community moderation, and filtering abilities to prevent spam or inappropriate comments from getting through. This product is sure to bolster JS-Kit’s presence in the commenting widget arena. The startup has been steadily growing, acquiring fellow competitors SezWho and Haloscan over the past year. The company has also developed partnerships with a number of major companies, including Sun and World Now. But JS-Kit faces strong competition from Automattic, which acquired commenting system IntenseDebate, which is being incorporated into incorporated Automattic’s popular blogging platform WordPress. Here’s the video of the demo of Echo at the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp: Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Qik Launches Push API, Mobile-To-Mobile Video Streaming Posted: 10 Jul 2009 02:47 PM PDT
Alongside the new API, Qik is also allowing select mobile phones to stream live video directly from the web (previously you’ve been restricted to watching archived clips from mobile devices). Unfortunately the iPhone doesn’t support live mobile viewing at this point (you can still only watch archived clips), but Qik will be supporting Nokia and Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphones. This is especially cool because you’ll be able to receive immediate push notifications on supported phones, and immediately jump into the phone’s mobile browser to start watching the video. You can see an example of what the API can do here, which shows a list of the latest Qik videos being posted on Qik, updated in real-time. Qik is also releasing an open-source Adobe AIR app that will offer similar functionality. Developers that are interested in joining the private beta can request access by contacting api@qik.com. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Camtweet Does Justin.tv Live On Twitter Posted: 10 Jul 2009 02:39 PM PDT
Camtweet looks kind of like what the various photo and video sharing sites that are tied to Twitter currently look like, except it has a big live video box in the center. Below that is the place where you chat to others who are watching in your Camtweet (or Justin.tv — the videos will reside on both) room. And these messages are tweeted out with a link to bring people back to the room. Then when they login with their Twitter credentials and chat with you on the page, their messages are tweeted out too. The interface is dead simple, and it seems like a good idea if Justin.tv can get some big name Twitter users to use it. We’ll start seeing tweets flying around with links back to hot Camtweet live video chats, which some users may not like, but should mean huge traffic for Camtweet. The closest thing to this so far has been Qik which does live video from mobile devices and can easily be set up to auto-tweet out when recordings start. The difference is that first of all this is meant for live video from the desktop, not a mobile device, and second, is the aforementioned huge potential for streams to go viral since chat is run through Twitter (with links back to Camtweet) as well. And Qik is being slightly held back by the fact that Apple and/or AT&T will not allow its app (or any other app the sends out live video from the iPhone) into the App Store. As I mentioned, all of this video will also reside back on Justin.tv’s main site, where it will be archived as well.
Here’s a video of the demo of Camtweet from the Real-Time Stream Event: Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Can You Digg It? Maybe Not, If You’re Stuck On IE6 Posted: 10 Jul 2009 01:22 PM PDT
In a new blog post User Experience Architect Mark Trammell writes that the site is strongly considering removing some of the site’s core features, like digging and commenting, for IE6 users. This isn’t necessarily to punish those users, but rather to cut back on largely wasted development time. Trammell explains that while IE6 users make up around 5% of site traffic, it only accounts for 1% of diggs, buries, and comments. Digg developers are being forced to spend a very disproportionate amount of time to keep those features working in the ancient browser, and they’re thinking of simply abandoning those efforts. The site would still work for pure browsing, but IE6 users wouldn’t be able to interact with the site.  Trammell’s blog post also includes some good insight as to why Digg users are still browsing with IE6. Digg is no longer as tech-heavy as it was in its early days, but it’s safe to say that most of the site’s viewers are at least aware of IE7 and IE8 (not to mention alternatives like Firefox and Chrome). So rather than simply put out banners prompting users to upgrade to a new browser (something that Twitter just started doing), it decided to run a poll.  The results? 77% of the Digg users on IE6 simply don’t have a choice, citing reasons like “I can’t upgrade because I don’t have admin access” or “I can’t upgrade because someone at work says I can’t”. In other words, they’re probably just as unhappy about it as Digg is. Granted, this poll is probably prone to substantial bias (people who are frustrated about their browsers probably feel more compelled to take a survey and tell people about it), but it’s still worth noting. Given the results, Digg isn’t going to be running a “Upgrade Now!” banner any time soon, but it’s still considering the feature cuts described above.  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Bantam Live: The Ultimate Social, Real-Time CRM Posted: 10 Jul 2009 01:00 PM PDT
Bringing social media features to enterprise-focused applications is all the rage these days. There’s Jive, Socialcast, and Cubetree, which all provide social media and networking applications for businesses. Bantam Live, an online workspace for business teams that has “social CRM” features, joins the trend. Launched today at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream Crunchup, the software-as-a-service product provides an online workspaces for business teams that includes a real-time dashboard stream of messaging and workflow activity along with a native social CRM application. Here’s the live stream feed of the event. Members can share information, track activity, and manage contact and company relationships inside and outside the organization via the real-time activity stream. With Bantam, a user can search Twitter, import a new contact with one click, initiate task workflows with team members to engage this new contact, and then converse with the new contact for various CRM purposes. And this is all within the same application. Integrated to Twitter and soon other social networks like Facebook, Bantam Live also allows users to search, monitor, and connect with people across the web for sales leads, business development, and marketing purposes. There are services that provide enterprise friendly social networks like Socialcast, but what makes Bantam Live unique is that it leverages social media tools helping users create and track leads for sales, marketing, and business development purposes. And the beauty of Bantam’s application is that it is published in a real-time stream, aiding collaboration between employees. Here’s the video of the demo of Bantam Live from the event: Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| CrunchUp Live: Real Time Search Panel Posted: 10 Jul 2009 12:58 PM PDT
Edo Segal, Relegence Follow my live notes below (paraphrased). You can also watch the live video stream here. ES: The NSA has been doing real-time search for decades. I want to take the last 5 minutes of everything published on the planet and collect it, that’s feasible. It’s like a consciousness, not memory. Erick: What is real-time search right now? Is it just Twitter, or is it everything on the Internet that is just recent. KM: Traditional search is like going to a library. And Google are the best librarians. But real-time is the right search, right now. DS: I don’t think it is all Twitter, it’s just that Twitter is the leader. What’s interesting is that real-time search engines are all different — unlike say a Google image search, and Bing image search. We still really need to define real-time search. Twitter is basically real-time search right now because that’s where all our content is right now. Erick: The second you put a filter on it becomes less real time, right? GC: Sometimes you just want highlights from the game, sometimes you want the whole game. Filtering doesn’t really slow things down. At Collecta we’re still holding back about 90% of the content because we’re trying to figure out what is useful to people. KM: Drinking from the firehose is a ticking timebomb. Even filtering 90% of the Iran election is a tiny slice that’s useful. And in the future, it will be even more spam. That’s why you need to filter, too much spam. MC: As you saw at Searchology a few weeks ago, Google is interested in real-time. Back when I joined Google in 2000, we were only updating our index every few months. By 2003 it was every few days. By 2007, it was 10-15 minutes. We’re still working in that direction, but it’s about getting the right mix. Erick: What about Marissa Mayer and Larry Page talking so much about real-time? MC: We’re doing a lot of exciting things in that area. Erick: What about Microsoft? SS: We’re definitely interested in real-time. You saw what we are doing already with pulling in tweets. ES: Right now Twitter is the only game in town. VVP: Twitter feed is one of the largest and interesting sources of information, but a large part of the web is moving into this real-time world. Erick: How much data are you seeing from Twitter alone? KM: 20% of our data. We have a panel we use to monitor some users. Our own data is 50%. And other comes in from Digg and some other sources. If you just stick with Twitter it’s biased data, and spam. GC: Twitter is all about the head too, it’s hard to use it to get the tail. Erick: More about spam on Twitter? MC: On the web, spam is anonymous, but Twitter tries to put an identity. It’s interesting to have been doing this for 8 years to see the same things happening now, but it’s going faster now. Q&A Q: How are we going to get the search data out of Facebook? ES: It’s happening already, just slowly. Twitter is forcing their hand a bit. SS: There’s a big promise in what Facebook is trying to do with making status updates public. ES: It’s a matter of months away. And it’s a big threat to Twitter. Q: What about making the real-time results more relevant? MC: I agree. The debate on date vs. authority will be solved soon. Date only is a recipe for disaster. GC: Rank and filter are not exclusive. It’s all about deciding which content to show, no matter what the filter is. KM: At OneRiot we do Pulse Rank, with a ranking done at search time. ES: We are struggling to figure out where we are. But where we’re going is important. One has to assume that the ways people use real-time search will be different from using a search box. Most of the game is on our phones, because we’re connected all the time. The next buzz is augmented reality. We’ll be doing it in two years from now in a conference like this. End of the panel. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Interview: Greg Grunberg and August Trometer, Founders of Yowza, Action Heroes Posted: 10 Jul 2009 12:26 PM PDT  Greg Grunberg and his partners August Trometer and Rick Yaeger have a successful iPhone App called Yowza - it's basically a location-aware coupon app that gives you great deals at major merchants - and Greg plays Matt Parkman on NBC's Heroes, a program I'm told is quite popular with a certain demographic. They are two very cool guys. I got a chance to talk to Greg and August about building iPhone apps, acting while topless, and was quite close to getting Hayden Panettiere's phone number for you all. CrunchGear: So… Yowza, is this your fallback move? Is this what happens when the bottom falls out of this whole acting fad? Greg Grunberg: Exactly. This is for when they're thinking about firing me and I'm like "I don't understand, why is make-up putting some sort of an STD sore on my face? What's going on? You know, is my character going to be killed off?" I have always been business minded, always been sorta an entrepreneurial guy, I played a character on Felicity that was modeled after me actually. JJ Abrams is one of my closest friends so when he was creating that show, he was like, I've got the perfect character Sean Lumberg, He's always looking for the next idea. I mean I've been friends with JJ since preschool, believe it or not. All through college I was selling this and selling that, different businesses and stuff.
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| Seesmic’s Browser Client Is Like Gmail For Twitter Posted: 10 Jul 2009 12:16 PM PDT  Seesmic, the Twitter and Facebook desktop client developed by Loic Le Meur, is launching its much talked about browser-based Twitter client today at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp. We first heard about the plans for the browser client at the TechFellow awards in June, but its been in stealth mode for the past few months. We got a chance to test it out and it’s pretty cool. It reminds me of a Gmail interface for Twitter. Currently, the browser client only includes support for Twitter but Le Meur says that Facebook integration will be coming soon. The client is pretty basic, simple to use and similar in some ways to the desktop client. You can open up your timeline in a column, your mentions in another column and your direct messages in another column. You can also use the mouse to roll over a Twitter handle and will be given the option to see the user’s profile, message the user or unfollow the user. My favorite part of this interface is using the timeline in the single column mode, which makes it seem like a simple, easy to use email application. The other compelling part of the browser client is the layout of the direct messages, which makes it simple to have and see a conversation with someone.  As we reported in June, Seesmic is also launching the fourth version of its desktop client today, which will include the ability to view Seesmic in single column mode or multi-column mode, with ability to change detach and change the size of columns. You will also be able to save space on the client by collapsing and expanding the sidebar with the click of a button and will still be shown minimized buttons with shortcuts to toggle between accounts, userlists and searches. Seesmic has also updated its internal code to improve performance and now allows you to modify the timeline limits in set in Seesmic Desktop to help control performance. These limits define the maximum number of messages kept in each of your timelines from your friends; replies, private and sent; and searches. One of the differentiating factors between Seesmic and main rivals Tweetdeck and Tweetie is that Seemsic pulls in status updates from Facebook and allows users to update their Facebook status from the desktop client itself. Le Meur tells is that Facebook status updates are becoming as common as Twitter updates from Seesmic, especially since the client enables two-way communication. What’s missing from today’s rollout is the Seesmic iPhone app, which Le Meur says is still in the works and will be released in the near future. Seesmic Desktop, which faces competition from popular client and rival Tweetdeck and a plethora of others, officially launched in April. Le Meur tells us that Seesmic is getting about 10,000 downloads a day. PeopleBrowsr, another social network aggregator (and presenter at the Real-Time CrunchUp), recently made the opposite switch, adding a desktop Adobe Air client to its browser product. As TechCrunch's Robin Wauters recently wrote, the social network aggregator market is almost fully saturated and new players are throwing their hats in the ring every day. So it makes sense that Seesmic would want to not only build up its offering with useful features, but also try to conquer all the mediums—web, desktop and mobile. Check desktop and web, now onto mobile! Disclosure: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic. I am not. Here’s the video of Le Meur’s demo of the new version of Seesmic Desktop and the browser-based client: Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Causes: $10,000,000 Raised In Just Two Years Posted: 10 Jul 2009 11:18 AM PDT
Causes co-founder Joe Green writes on the site’s blog that the community currently stands at 70 million users, who are supporting 270,000 different causes and 53,000 nonprofits. Monetary donations have come from a total of 192,000 different users, with an impressive average donation size of $25. Causes also highlights a few of the site’s best performers: Birthday Wish, which allows users to ask their friends to donate to a Cause of their choice in honor of their birthday, has raised a total of $1.4 million. Causes also details a few examples showing just how far $10 million can go:
For more, be sure to check out the Causes blog. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Brizzly: A Twitter Reader From The People Who Brought You Google Reader Posted: 10 Jul 2009 11:00 AM PDT
Brizzly is the second project under Thing Labs, a development house started by former Googler Jason Shellen. Their first project was Plinky, a more proactive take on blogging. But Shellen decided the time was right to launch something that tackled the whole Twitter craze, and improved upon the experience of it. So he brought one of the creators of Google Reader, Chris Wetherell, on board along with a few others from that team and they built Brizzly.
Some of the more robust Twitter apps have variations on some of these features, but Brizzly is doing this while being entirely web-based. And it’s really the UI that will make or break something like this, and Brizzly looks like it has a nice one (see screenshot). Plus they have a killer logo of what looks to be a bear wearing a dead Twitter bird’s skin. And this is just the first step for Brizzly. They are considering future support for Facebook and some of the other social services, Shellen says. And they plan to do some mobile-specific interfaces, maybe even an iPhone app. Following today’s preview, Brizzly will enter closed beta testing next week. You can sign up to receive an invite when they’re ready, here. Note: The UI and design of Brizzly hasn’t been finalize yet, the image below is what the working model looks like.
Here’s the video demo of Brizzly from the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp: Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Enterprise Friendly Social Network Dashboard PeopleBrowsr Launches Real-Time Search Posted: 10 Jul 2009 11:00 AM PDT  PeopleBrowsr, a desktop and web browser-based dashboard for social networks, is adding a real-time search functionality that would let users make filtered searches into conversations on Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. Launched at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp, the search engine is particularly useful to brands and companies looking to have insight into the conversations about their businesses taking place on the social graph. Designed to unearth conversations around particular keywords, the search engine also offers further filtering options. Search results can be filtered by topic, geography and authority. PeopleBrowsr’s technology crawls a plethora of data from social networks, including links in messages, Twitter bios, authority (determined by number of followers), real-time trending topics, and sentiment. PeopleBrowsr then lets users directly engage with the people who appear in the search results across multiple social networks via public response, personal direct messages, retweets, and reposts. As I wrote in my earlier review of the desktop client, PeopleBrowsr’s client is targeted towards use in the enterprise space, which is smart considering the current rat race in the Twitter client arena. I’m sure the real-time capabilities only make PeopleBrowsr’s offering more appealing to brand managers or clients. PeopleBrowsr’s "Smart Cache" real-time indexes high volumes of conversations (1,000 new posts per second) and trends them into 1 minute, 10 min or 1 hr increments. Results are also embeddable, allowing users to integrate results in a widget to be placed in reports or posts. There’s no doubt that with the companies, restaurants, brands and celebrities all using Twitter and Facebook as business platforms that real-time, powerful search across these networks will be a boon to brand managers and communications teams. Startup ViralHeat also crawls the web, Twitter and video sites for real-time mentions of keywords but doesn’t yet have capabilities for Facebook and FriendFeed.  Here’s the demo video of PeopleBrowsr from the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp: Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| CrunchUp Live: The Real-Time Moment Posted: 10 Jul 2009 10:24 AM PDT
Today, at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp conference Erick Schonfeld is sitting down with Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter; Chris Cox, vice president of products at Facebook; and Bret Taylor, co-founder of FriendFeed. ES: Jack, tell us why you decided to present the info that’s coming through Twitter as a stream of information and why is it resonating? JD: It’s the way I’ve always been visualizing information. A stream, imagine a 911 calls a typical center gets, and those calls flowing into a stream that bubbles up makes sense. We developed it over many iterations. ES: Facebook always had a stream element, but with the latest re-design this has been emphasized in a big way. How’s that going? CC: Originally the site was just a bunch of profiles, wasn’t real-time. The inspiration for news feed was how you can see this curated, dynamic info around you on Facebook. The newsfeed we had before the redesign didn’t support the real-time use case. ES: Twitter for me is like a public IM system; earlier Ron Conway was talking about the value of social relationships. To what extent are you trying to create a stream of public information and encourage users to making the stream public to everyone? Are you trying to create a public IM System? CS: It’s all about offering the user the choice. We’re trying to give people a more granular control over the audience- ES: FriendFeed is embracing information overload, can you talk about this? Is that the optimal UI?
BT: Once something is shared, having those discussions in real-time does make it seem like an IM conversation. We want our comments to be quick so people feel like they are discussing around a table. All of these systems represent the modern water cooler. You can share reading/watching experience with friends and discuss it. Everyone wants to have a social aspect to all communication. ES: What type of content/messages do people have the most likes and comments? BT: Ones that contains media, photos, music. CC: It’s hard to generalize. Of course when there are major events or shared real world moments like Michael Jackson’s memorial, there is a peak. JD: It’s really unexpected. More and more people are focused on these technologies and more and more people are interested. I don’t know what event will capture it, but the exciting thing is that it’s hard to predict. BT: The majority is public. ES: What’s been the reaction for the redesign of Facebook? CC: It’s important to get correct the balance between the aggregated view of whats been going on over the past day and what’s going on now. We are testing a bunch of versions of the home page. We are working on balancing the aggregated view with the real-time view. This creates a natural model for what we want to know about our friends. We want to reflect that in the product.
ES: The more public that data is the more valuable it is. Can you talk about that? BT: For us that’s not the case. Some of our most devoted users use our groups functionality within their companies or project groups. A lot of our development efforts are spent to enhance that use case. At the end of the day, the public content is more accessible, but sometimes interactions can be more comfortable and open in a private setting. ES: FriendFeed just started real-time search so public data is important. The private part of stream isn’t as valuable as public part of stream. BT: I don’t completely agree with that but at the end of the day the primary use case for realtime search isn’t about what everyone is saying about Michael Jackson, it’s about what my networks says. JD: As a business, we want to foster the choice of public and private. ES: Can you talk a little bit about the social etiquette of social networks? Especially with the monetization discussion, it’s easier to monetize the public part. Are you happy with the way you define friends vs. fans, followers vs. followees?
JD: Concept of what Twitter is doing really resonated with me. I like the lightness of the concept of following someone. It allows me to decide if I find value in someone’s Tweets, and if not, simply unfollow them. I don’t see myself as following people as more their updates and stream. It’s an important insight we had early one, keeping it lightweight and fresh. It comes down to minimizing interactions. CC: Friendship original experience for Facebook, we try to set controls over interactions. The way we are trying to navigate this is to allow every user to have the choice of both. ES: What is the platform? The firehose of the stream? How many Stream platforms can there be? BT: Our long-term vision is that communications products should be interoperable. At end of the day, when you post that link, you want to follow wherever your friends are. Maybe move towards a model like Federation. Question from audience: How committed are you to letting me have access to your Streams? JD: Generally, the more access we have to real-time public info, the more that we will make available. JD: You are seeing this concept everywhere, on the clients, mobile phones. It’s important to move past the web but retain an immediacy to the interaction. The nobel prize situation shows what value Twitter brings to people. That’s where the focus is. How do we support real-time media accessibility and transparency. [photos: CC Brian Solis] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Everything You Need To Know About Microsoft’s Silverlight 3 Posted: 10 Jul 2009 10:00 AM PDT
Microsoft’s “Flash-killer,” Silverlight released the third version of its rich media application platform, Silverlight 3, on the web yesterday. This morning, Microsoft is holding the official launch of Silverlight 3, which is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering media experiences and interactive applications for the Web. The first version was launched in 2007 and the second version was launched in September of 2008. In April, Microsoft reported 300 million downloads of Silverlight between September 2007 and April 2009, with an estimated 300,000 developers and engineers working off the Silverlight platform. The beta of Silverlight 3 was launched earlier this year. Now Microsoft is taking the beta off, and rolling out the full-fledged version of Silverlight 3 to the public. We had the opportunity to speak to Director of Microsoft's Development Platform Group, Brian Goldfarb, about the new features of Silverlight 3 and the strategies behind the development of the new product. We also were able to talk to Scott Guthrie, vice president in the Microsoft’s Developer Division, on camera about his perspective on the significance of Silverlight 3 and its potential to takeover main competitor Adobe’s Flash (see video below). We’ve been able to compile a complete guide to SIlverlight 3 with all of its new features and the customers and developers who are using these features to launch innovative products. And Microsoft will also be demoing some of the real-time capabilities of Silverlight 3 at TechCrunch's Real-Time Stream CrunchUp today. Microsoft says that one of the main strategies that drove the development of Silverlight 3 was the focus on creating a technology and a set of efficient tools that bring design and development together in a rich media experience for the consumer that could be used across different platforms (browser and desktop) and across different browsers. Here are all of the new features of Silverlight 3, Expression Suite (a suite of tools for designers and developers), and the customers which are using the new product to enhance their media experiences. 1. Smooth Streaming: Microsoft says its new streaming feature improves the quality of streaming video on the browser so that it compares to watching video on television. Smooth Streaming on the backend is basically an encoding that lets you break the file up into smaller chunks that are easier to move and stream to an application. As a user, you'll experience HD video playback of content if your bandwith is high. If a user’s bandwidth is below 3 Mbps, Smooth Streaming’s dynamic capabilities will kick in. Basically Silverlight is evaluating how much CPU and bandwith your computer and network has and makes dynamic calculations on the optimal place where the video should stream and acts accordingly, allowing for limited buffering. This streaming feature was used to stream Michael Jackson’s memorial service on MSN and to stream Wimbledon live on the web.  2. Digital Rights Management: Silverlight 3 comes with increased protection of content for businesses using the platform to stream or publish content. Studio and content owners have greater abilities to monitor and protect content from being distributed. 3. Immersive Experiences: Silverlight 3 comes with a few innovative capabilities for developers to harness, including th ability to have a deep zoom into images and an experience, almost making users feel like they are on a virtual ride. I demoed the deep zoom capability that’s currently being used on the Hard Rock Cafe’s site to portray music memorabilia in it’s different restaurants. Silverlight 3 also has a more powerful 3-D technology. 4. Out Of The Browser: Silverlight has been a browser based technology since its launch in 2007, but this ends with the new release. Microsoft has now given developers the ability to build applications on Silverlight that can be viewed in the browser and on the desktop. One of the potential apps that can be built off of Facebook was debuted by Microsoft at the social network’s technology tasting a few months ago, and we thought it was impressive. 5. Expression Studio 3 and Sketchflow: Expression Studio is Microsoft’s set of tools that lets designers and developers build high quality applications off of Silverlight. Expression Studio 3 is launching with a new tool, called Sketchflow, which will basically enable the creation and implementation of fully functional prototypes. So a napkin sketch can become a reality, and can be animated and used by designers and developers. 6. The Push Towards Enterprise: Goldfarb says that Microsoft is making a a significant effort to show businesses that Silverlight can also be used internally to host and support rich media applications. For example, Continental Airlines is using Silverlight as the foundation for their call center application for employees who are taking reservations and supplying information. Besides the examples mentioned above, Silverlight has been able to make some big deals in the live streaming space, including the Bejing Olympics, the Presidential Inauguration and for Netflix.Is Silverlight 3 a Flash-killer? Probably not, but Silverlight’s new features, especially its dynamic streaming capabilities (which Adobe has its own version of) and the innovative technologies that are being offered to developers and designers certainly may keep the product neck in neck with Flash. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Twitter Client Tweetdeck Raises Around $2 Million In Funding Posted: 10 Jul 2009 09:55 AM PDT
Tweetdeck, one of the most popular Twitter clients, has raised $2 million in a previously undisclosed round of funding, according to angel investor John Borthwick. He revealed the funding at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp, during a panel discussion bewteen Michael Arrington, and investor Ron Conway. Tweetdeck, which recently launched a TechCrunch-branded version, raised a small round of angel funding in January, estimated at $300,000. TweetDeck is available for Mac, Windows and Linux, it just requires Adobe AIR. The company has been working on getting more services integrated into its client. Last week, it launched an iPhone app that has been gaining popularity quickly. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Ron Conway’s 10 Ways To Monetize Real-Time Data Posted: 10 Jul 2009 09:48 AM PDT
Counting down:
There’s at least $5 billion of monetization right there — at least, Conway says.
[photo: CC Brian Solis] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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It’s festival season, so this may be a welcome addition to the gigantic directory of music-related information websites and applications already out there on the Web, particularly for live gig buffs. 
With its potential troubles behind it, having 
Here it is. The final panel discussion of our Real-Time CrunchUp conference. Judging from the participants, it should be a good one. Here’s the roster:
MySpace continues to 
So. Maybe you read Michael’s rant 
Twitter has quickly turned into one of the best places to discover new media — be it video, images, or links — as soon as it comes out. Videos that may take hours or even days to surface on sites like Digg can virally spread across Twitter in a fraction of the time. As Fred Wilson put it, the value of Twitter lies in 
Mobile video streaming service 
There are a few ways you can send out live video feeds over Twitter right now. The most obvious is just take a service like Justin.tv, shorten your live stream URL, and tweet it out. But there’s no real easy-to-use seamless way of doing it. That’s what 
IE6 has long been a thorn in the sides of many web developers, offering limited support for many established web standards that often force devs to implement ugly, ugly hacks. It might not be so bad if there weren’t so many people still using the damn thing over eight years after its release (and two full browser upgrades from Microsoft), but it still has an alarmingly large following. Its poor performance, combined with its persistance, has made it one of the worst tech products of 
Twitter’s front-end look and feel on the web has been slowly 
It’s “fast, simple, and enhances reading and creation,” Shellen tells us. Some of the big features are that it allows you to create groups out of the users you follow, gives you insights into why certain topics are trending, and threads direct message conversations. It also gives you multiple account access, allows you to save multiple drafts of tweets, and keeps track of where you left off reading in your stream. And it should handle media (pictures and video) in a more seamless way that Twitter itself currently does.
Angel investor 
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