Friday, December 18, 2009

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Twitter Hack: Part Of Broader Iranian Strategy

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 09:04 AM PST

Screen shot 2009-12-18 at 8.54.36 AMLate last night the popular micro-messaging service Twitter was attacked and had its website defaced by a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army. The Twitter homepage and the main application service page were replaced with a bold pro-Iranian and anti-American message. The message was loud, and very clear – the attack was in response to what Iran saw as internal meddling by the west during the recent presidential elections and associated demonstrations in Tehran.

Twitter played a large role during those demonstrations as a communications tool used by demonstrators to co-ordinate protests and movements. The Iranian government tried in vain to crack down on the communications networks with Internet filtering and cell jamming, but these efforts were mostly in vain. As a service from the USA, Twitter also had a greater symbolic impact on the Iranian government, who viewed it as a tool being provided by one enemy to assist an internal enemy. The US State Department went on to intervene to assure that Twitter was available and accessible to protesting Iranians, which likely further infuriated the government in Tehran.

The attack last night on Twitter was clear retribution for the role that the service played during the demonstrations, and the role that it continues to play today. We have spoken to a number of sources overnight who have told us that the Iranian Cyber Army, unlike other groups with similar national monikers, is a group name that is to be taken literally – ie. it is an Iranian government group. Little is known about how the group operates, but previous attempts to shut off Iranian citizens from Twitter and other web services demonstrate that Iran has the capability and will to use almost any means to control the flow of information on the web both within and outside of its own borders.

The defacement page included an email address – an unusual move, which suggests that there is a media element to the attack and the hackers, the Iranian government, wish to send their message out far and wide.

Other sources told us that the timing of the attack on Twitter is part of a concerted effort across the Iranian government and military to take a stronger diplomatic stance against the United States and European Union in the lead up to negotiations on Irans nuclear plans. Since receiving the initial tip that there might be a larger and broader story in development, Iran has gone on to announce this morning that it will have a new generation of Uranium enrichment centrifuges online and operational by 2011. Further, there are reports from Iraq ia Reuters that Iranian troops crossed the border into southern Iraq last night and raised an Iranian flag over an oil well that is part of a disputed oil field. The websites of anti-government Iranian organizations were also hacked, with the website of Mowjcamp having three of its primary domain names stolen and pointed to the same defacement message that appeared on Twitter (we will not link to it since it is still compromised).

These incidents, along with the attack on Twitter, all occurred in the space of 12 hours and point towards a more aggressive stance from Iran in the lead-up to deadline on negotiations around their nuclear program. With a large-scale attack on a popular global web service, it is the first time that cyber attacks have been used to propel the global political agenda of a foreign government. Twitter is a big scalp for the Iranian government, and it allowed them to flex their muscles and inflict damage outside of its own borders and onto those who it blames for much of the country’s internal strife. By selecting Twitter as a target and taking out high-profile anti-government sites at the same time, the Iranian government is being as clear as it possibly can that this war will also be fought on the web. In a web war, Iran has demonstrated that almost nobody is immune, the battlefield is level and it is not afraid to fire the first big shots in full view of the entire world.

Tune into Techcrunch today as we will continue our coverage with a complete description of the web defacements and attacks that have occurred with complete details on how they were carried out.

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Etsy Buys Retail Product Ad Platform Adtuitive, Gains Five New Programmers

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 08:03 AM PST

Handmade item marketplace and community website operator Etsy, which is backed by $31.6 million in venture capital funding, has acquired New York-based advertising startup Adtuitive for an undisclosed sum.

The small acquisition was mentioned on a company blog post published yesterday, although the announcement was pretty scarce on details.

The blog post only reveals that Etsy gained five coders with “deep technical expertise in algorithmic search, machine learning and data interpretation, and advertising infrastructure” thanks to the acquisition.

It also mentioned that the five programmers would be working on improving Etsy's search algorithms and expanding the company’s Showcase advertising system.

It’s been relatively quiet about Etsy the past few months. Our latest coverage of the four-year old company dates back to February 2009, when Michael Arrington interviewed Etsy co-founder Robert Kalin at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Back then, Kalin disclosed that $100 million worth of goods were sold on Etsy in 2008, and that the company was generating over $1 million/month in revenue.

Here’s the video:

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Very Cool: World’s Largest Spherical Photo (18-Gigapixel Awesomeness)

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 07:14 AM PST

Jeffrey Martin from 360Cities (our earlier coverage) has spent over a month stitching together what he believes is now the world’s largest 360-degree panorama shot.

The photo was taken from a TV tower in Czech’s capital, Prague, and gives you a great digital glimpse of what the beautiful city looks like.

For maximum effect, head on over here and hit the fullscreen button.

Pan around the (18-gigapixel) image, and then zoom in on any part of the picture to be amazed how deep you can dive in. Heck, you can read the license plates off cars situated miles and miles away from the TV tower. The startup set up a treasure hunt that will kick off next week: find 30 things in the shot based on clues given on Twitter and Facebook and you get a chance to win $1000.

When you’re watching panorama shot, make sure to also right-click and check out the different views (I like the Little Planet view, which you can see in the video below as well).

From the press release (PDF):

The record-setting photograph was created from 600 individual exposures stitched together into a single image measuring 192,000 pixels in width by 96,000 pixels in height, or 18.4 billion pixels altogether.

When printed, it will be sixteen meters (54 ft.) long at standard photographic quality. Not only is the subject matter of this new panorama arguably more picturesque than the previous record-holder, the road to its creation is one that has spanned continents.

More technical details are available here.

The previous record holder is supposedly a 13-gigapixel photo of Harlem, NY, that became the world's largest known panoramic image when it was shot back in 2007.

This blows it right out of the water.

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Trackle Launches Real-Time Social Directory Of Tracking Alerts

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 06:56 AM PST

Trackle, a personalized web and RSS feed tracker we wrote about earlier this year, is making itself a whole lot more social today with the launch of a real-time search engine on the site that lets you follow other people’s Trackles. Trackle.com's free web service provides personalized RSS feeds for data such as the latest crime in a user's neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket prices, how much a user's house value is down this week, updated job listings, sports scores and more.

The new search platform within Trackle lets you search for other user’s trackings by keyword. Here’s how it works: people within the Trackle community contribute by setting up alerts for very specific and changing information (they will show up in search when users set up their profiles as public). These alerts are then shared by the community, specific, time-sensitive information, such as information is then posted on Trackle as it happens, in real time. Duplicate requests are removed, so there are no repeated alerts.

So you can do a search for TechCrunch on Trackle and see all of the profiles that have set up Trackles for the keyword. You can follow that particular Trackle on your own feed or modify the Trackle as well. The new search platform also lets users filter the sources by credibility, social network and more. Trackle will also show users who have similar interests, so you can

Trackle has close to 100,000 users and is generating 2 million alerts of information each day. The startup is also trying its hand at setting up Trackle button on sites to provide instant tracking options directly to consumers to allow users "Trackle" an item or feed from anywhere on the web.

As we’ve said in the past, the major obstacle Trackle will face is gaining more users and becoming viral. At the moment, it has gained a loyal following but it is by no means a widely used service. But by adding compelling features like real-time search of others Trackles, the platform may be able to move itself in that direction.

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The UltraMega Weekend Giveaway: $500 Gift Card From Lottay.com

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 02:27 AM PST

Good morning. We have a week until Christmas and we've been pounding out giveaways left and right. We've had Smart Pens, Olive Hi-Fis, and your own personal Ninja for a year (didn't see that one? There's a reason.) But today we're here to announce the final big giveaway: a $500 gift card towards anything you want from the kind folks at Lottay.com.


Seedcamp Releases Its Dates And Cities For 2010

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 01:48 AM PST

Seedcamp, the pan-European early stage startup programme that tours Europe to find companies for a week-long annual seed-funding event, has has given TechCrunch Europe exclusive access to its dates for 2010.

The original plan to hold a Seedcamp Week every year in London for a 3 year run, investing in a total of 15 companies in that period, has now changed. The emphasis is now on a regular touring programme of ‘mini-seedcamps’, a move pioneered this year with seven events.
In 2010 there will be 8 Mini Seedcamps (Spain is the new addition) and majoring on the Balkans and Eastern Europe which has produced previous Seedcamp finalists like Erply, Codility, Zemanta, Ubervu and Brainient. These dates will be:

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Rdio Launches iPhone App That You Can’t Use Yet (Updated)

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 12:37 AM PST

Rdio, the upcoming music streaming and download service backed by the founders of Skype, Kazaa and Joost, may not be taking public beta registrations just yet, but it already has a free iPhone application live on the App Store that you can download right now (iTunes link).

The app, which apparently went live yesterday, was first spotted by the folks over at Music Ally.

Since it requires a login, only private beta testers are able to give the app a whirl for the time being, but Music Ally took some screenshots from the iTunes detail page which we embedded below.

The description reads:

Rdio is like carrying a giant MP3 player in your pocket – you have unlimited and unrestricted access to all the music, and you get to select exactly the song, album or artist you want to hear. And you can skip, pause fast forward as much as you want.

Build your collection and compose your playlists on rdio.com and listen to them all on the go. Or search for just the right song when you're out and it will start playing instantly.

- Carry your collection in your pocket
- Build unlimited playlists
- Search the entire Rdio catalog
- Notification when your collaborative playlists are updated

We still haven’t been able to persuade any of the members of the killer team behind the soon-to-launch music subscription service to grant us access to the private beta, so we couldn’t tell you if it’s any good.

If any readers are in the private beta elite club, do let us know how it stacks up against the likes of Spotify, MOG and Pandora. And get some screenshots of the web/desktop version over to TechCrunch HQ please. Pronto.

Update: someone who would know informs us that the application is not in the App Store because the startup wanted private beta testers to try it out, and that it’s in fact pretty crippled at the moment. The real reason why it’s available for download: the company wanted to test the waters of the App Store approval process sooner rather than later.

Such teases.

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MySpace And Wall Street Journal To Send A Citizen Journalist To Davos

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 11:59 PM PST

Once again, MySpace is partnering with The Wall Street Journal, which are both owned by News Corp, to send one MySpace user to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January. Dubbed the "MySpace Citizen Journalist,” the contest will let one lucky winner, who is chosen by a panel of correspondents, join the Davos press corps.

The winner will have to use the MySpace platform to report on conference news. And MySpace will expand the contestant pool and accept entries from users in the United States and the United Kingdom this year. Details are here. You choose one question to answer and record a video with your response to one of the questions below:

1. Name two issues – one global and one local – in which you've been actively engaged over the past year. What have they taught you about your impact in the world?

2. Which country caught your attention most this year? What are the primary issues facing its citizens and how would you resolve them?

3. What pressing global issue has been underreported? Why is the international community neglecting the topic? How would you draw attention to mobilize support?

The citizen journalist will receive an expense paid trip to/from Davos, Switzerland, the ability sit in on private meetings with editors from the Wall Street Journal and News Corp executives and the opportunity to document the experience in written and video blogs on MySpace and the Wall Street Journal online.

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Twitter Hacked, Defaced By “Iranian Cyber Army”

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 10:12 PM PST

We’ve received multiple tips right around 10 pm that Twitter was hacked and defaced with the message below. The site was offline for a while.

We’re looking into this and awaiting on a response from Twitter.

The message read:

Iranian Cyber Army

THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY

iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM

U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….

NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?
WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST ;)
Take Care.

Update: – We have just found out that the same defacement is appearing at at least one other site, mawjcamp.org. We are not able to see what was at this domain before, but it is now displaying the same defacement that Twitter was only a few minutes ago.

Twitter does not have the best record with security issues. We have previously covered a number of incidents, and as recently as two months ago their web servers were misconfigured to reveal detailed internal network information. We also previously wrote about their admin interface having a password of ‘password’ on one account, and the well-known Twitter doc incident. It was hoped that with the hiring of a new COO, Dick Costolo, as well as a number of other high-level engineers, including security experts, that Twitter had grown out of the phase of being vulnerable to security incidents on such a large scale.

We do not know a lot about the group claiming responsibility for the attack as we haven’t heard their name before and they do not show up in any defacement mirrors or security sites. Similar Iranian groups were active during the election campaign in that country. We have emailed the group (they were kind enough to leave an address on the defacement) for a comment (also added them on Gchat – worth a shot).

Update 2.: Twitter.com is down, status.twitter.com is down. Some tweets are getting through at the moment because parts of the API are up. Search also seems to be working. The Firehose is up – Tweets are coming in from FriendFeed (all those tweets about ‘is twitter down’ are from third-party sites)

Update 3.: It is suggested that if you use the same password on your Twitter account with other accounts, now would be a good time to change your password on those other accounts.

Update 4.: There is a history between Iran and Twitter. It was well noted and covered in the media that Twitter was used as a tool during the Iranian election protests. The US government actually intervened to assure that Twitter was available to the protestors in Tehran and around the country. This attack may be an act of reprisal from groups who were not happy with the role that Twitter played during the protests.

Update 5.: There is speculation at the moment that this may be a DNS redirect, which means that the Twitter.com domain has been redirected to the defacement page. This doesn’t explain why some sub-domains are down, while others are currently still alive (such as search)

Update 6.: Twitter.com is back. The company updated its status blog saying: “Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon.”

Update 7.: Twitter’s Platform Lead engineer Alex Payne has a funnier update on the current status

Update 8.: Google was showing the below briefly when doing a search for Twitter (thanks Chris). The translation from Farsi/Persian reads:

“In the name of God, As an Iranian this is a reaction to Twitter's interference sly which was U.S. authorities ordered in the internal affairs of my country…”

Update 9.: Biz Stone blogged:

As we tweeted a bit ago, Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed. As some noticed, Twitter.com was redirected for a while but API and platform applications were working. We will update with more information and details once we’ve investigated more fully.

As will we.

Update 10.: Video (thanks @orli):

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Loopt Ventures Into Yelp’s Territory With New Local Reviews Site

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:17 PM PST

Before there was Gowalla or Foursquare, there was location-based social network Loopt. Launched in 2006, Loopt was one of the pioneers of the location-based mobile social network. And Loopt has gained a huge number of users of its mobile apps; the social network currently has 3 million mobile users, 1 million of which are on the iPhone. Compared to Foursquare and Gowalla, which have 150,000 and 50,000 users respectively, Loopt has a pretty significant user base. More recently, Loopt upgraded its mobile offerings to offer a check-in where you can also review a place and help recommend things for your friends to do, called Pulse. The mobile feature aggregates data on all of these “check-in spots,” which include, bars, restaurants, and more. It’s kind of like a local search engine. And it appears that this data is expanding Loopt’s business.

Now Loopt is venturing into Yelp’s territory (even as rumors swirl about Yelp) by making these local reviews available on the web. Similar to Yelp, each business has a separate page, where you can see hours, location (via a Google Map), ratings, pictures and more. Loopt will aggregate all the ratings and reviews made by mobile users on the business’ page, and web users can also comment on the page, but have to limit their comments to 140 characters or less. And Loopt aggregates reviews from professional sources like Zagat, and more user-review focused sites like Citysearch to further its recommendations on the page (this is also available on its mobile app). All of this data has allowed Loopt to create what founder Sam Altman refers to as a "local search engine." Two examples of pages can be found here and here. As of now, the pages have limited functionality but Loopt will be adding user generated content and other data shortly.

The key part of this venture is that Loopt’s web-based reviews are valuable because users can see which of their friends have visited a certain place or establishment. Loopt has all of this mobile data which shows what people like, and who they are connected to and this social data adds an extra compelling component to its local reviews site.

While Loopt is not yet advertising on the site (it does advertise on its mobile apps), I’d expect this to come soon. And the startup collects money from some advertisers who pay them on a per action basis, so Loopt currently will see some revenue from click throughs. Unfortunately, Loopt doesn’t allow business owners to create a page themselves, but this might be a feature added in the near future.

Loopt’s founder and CEO Sam Altman says that it is hoping to grab a part of the competitive landscape that houses Yelp, Citysearch and others. The whole idea of combining data on where and what users like to do with local listings for businesses is huge for local merchants and businesses, as not only can they get detailed information on their demographic, but they can also use the listings as a way to offer coupons and other incentives to visitors. Google even seems to be sniffing around this opportunity, too.

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Google In Discussions To Acquire Yelp For A Half Billion Dollars Or More

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 06:52 PM PST

Google and Yelp are in advanced acquisition negotiations, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. And while the deal isn’t done, we’ve heard that it’s very likely to close. The price is supposedly at least $500 million.

Yelp was founded in 2004 as a way to let users leave reviews on local businesses. Comscore puts worldwide traffic at nearly 9 million monthly unique visitors, and it has been growing fast – the company says it’s real numbers are more like 25 million monthly uniques.

Yelp has whispered that 2009 revenues will be around $30 million and are expecting $50 million or so in 2010.

Yelp last raised venture capital in early 2008 from DAG at a $200 million pre-money valuation, we’ve heard. They’ve raised a total of $31 million over four venture rounds.

On the odds of the deal happening – one source says its 80% likely. Not signed, sealed and delivered, but past the term sheet stage.

Google is building out their own directory of local businesses with its Place Pages, which can be accessed via Google Maps and local search. They are encouraging local businesses to put Google-branded stickers in store windows and recently added their own ratings summaries to business profiles. Yelp, of course, already has all of this data, along with a growing and active audience of consumers who are used to finding (and rating) businesses on Yelp.

For their part, Google is clearly on a shopping spree. They recently acquired AdMob for $750 million, and were in the running on the LaLa acquisition. Expect lots of deals to be announced by them over the next three months.

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Bambuser’s Video Streaming iPhone App Hits The App Store, Qik Still MIA

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 06:48 PM PST

Bambuser, a mobile streaming startup in the same space as Qik and Ustream, has announced that their live streaming iPhone application has been approved by Apple. The news comes only a few days after Ustream’s live video streaming app was approved, ending a 18 month long drought of broadcasting apps on the App Store. The Bambuser application lets anyone use their iPhone to broadcast live video directly to the web. You can get it on the App Store here. [iTunes link]

The release of these apps is a big deal — for a year and a half since the App Store’s launch, Apple consistently rejected any application that allowed users to broadcast video from their iPhones. The exact reason for this ban is uncertain, but has been attributed to (very valid) concerns over AT&T’s ability to handle their heavy bandwidth consumption.

Bambuser is directly competitive with Qik and Ustream (through Ustream also offers more robust streaming for events, too). We last covered Bambuser last December, when the site got a major overhaul. The service now supports live broadcasting from the iPhone, Symbian, Android, and Windows Mobile, spanning 200 devices. It also offers support for video streaming through desktop web browsers.

Now that Bambuser and Ustream have their live streaming apps available, it’s strange that Qik is still MIA. Qik was really the pioneer in mobile broadcasting, and they’ve definitely got a functional iPhone app (I’ve been using it on my iPhone for well over a year using an ad-hoc build). Presumably they’ve hit a snag in the Apple approval process.

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Google Starts Pushing Chrome To All Mac Users On Its Homepage

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 06:46 PM PST

Screen shot 2009-12-17 at 6.00.42 PMAs we all know by now, Google Chrome for Mac and Linux are now here, and despite the Mac version missing a few features at the moment, both are earning rave reviews around the web. Meanwhile, a report a couple days ago from Net Applications suggested that the Mac and Linux builds helped push Chrome into the number three browser spot in terms of usage, past Apple’s own Safari. And it could be on the verge of jumping even higher thanks to Google now promoting it on its homepage to all Mac users.

Across all the major web browsers that work on the Mac (Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino), Google is now placing an overlay on google.com which reads “A faster way to browse the web” and includes a Chrome logo and a button that you can click to be taken to the Chrome for Mac download page. This shows up regardless of if you’re signed into your Google account or not. The only requirement is that you not being using Chrome. Clicking on the “X” will make the overlay disappear.

Google has been doing this same promotion for the PC version of Chrome for a while, and while the browser hasn’t exploded in usage to even Firefox level, it has been steadily rising since its launch last year. Its overall market share is now around 4.4% according to the Net Applications data, but on the Mac alone, just since the beta launch, Chrome has already risen one full percentage point. And you can likely expect that to jump quite a bit higher next month once the browser has been out for a while and people feel more comfortable switching to it.

Google continues to heavily promote Chrome in the real world too. Just yesterday, a bunch of ads for it were spotted in newspapers in the Netherlands. They’re doing the same thing in the UK as well. Google famously doesn’t advertise on its homepage, but it does promotions like this more and more frequently to push its own products. And this will undoubtedly help them hit the stated goal of 10% market share for Chrome in two years. I’m sure Mozilla and Apple are thrilled about it.

[thanks Dejan]

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CrunchBase Funding Digest: JAGTAG, OneWire, SimpleGeo, Millennial Media

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 06:46 PM PST

Every day I troll SEC Form D Filings to discover new startups, fundings and investments. I put everything I find into CrunchBase. For everyone else I give you the daily digest, a quick hit of the latest and greatest SEC Form D filings in the TechCrunch sphere:


Ad.ly Launches Analytics For Sponsored Tweets

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 04:59 PM PST

There’s been a bit of controversy around Ad.ly, which aims to link up high-profile advertisers with celebrities on Twitter and then distribute links to marketing campaigns through the user's tweet stream with full disclosure. Launched this fall, the startup has created an interesting way to use the viral nature of Twitter and celebrity reach to develop an advertising model.

Today, Ad.ly has launched analytics for its platform, letting marketers and Twitterati measure the impact of their advertisements and Tweets. Some of the analytics that Ad.ly can now provide to advertisers include user engagement, male and female segmentation, location, and sentiment analysis. Ad.ly has partnered with PeopleBrowsr, a startup that data mines Twitter, to provide the data to users. Ad.ly’s founder Sean Rad says the reasoning behind the new feature “provide Twitter users the data they need to become more prolific content creators.”

Here’s how Ad.ly works: Ad.ly's platform is self-serve for both the Twitter users and the advertisers. So for example, an advertiser for Dell could choose which Twitter power-user to pitch their ad too and then submit a bid to a particular user. The celeb (or publisher) then approves or denies the request. Once the publisher approves the Tweet, the message is sent out via their account by Ad.ly. Each campaign requires the celeb to send out four Tweets over the course of a week. It's important to note that each Tweet identifies Ad.ly and links to an online interactive campaign for a brand. Celebs are paid handsomely and advertisers get their reach.

Many have doubted Ad.ly’s model because advertisements within a stream could distort a celeb’s authority. The idea that celebs (and advertisers) would be monetizing their followers is questionable and has raised some interesting discussions.

Of course, Ad.ly is just one of several ways that Twitter can be used for advertising. Robert Scoble presented us with a compelling model for advertising on Twitter, called a Super Tweet. We know Twitter is going to be incorporating advertising of its own soon, but we don’t know what this will look like yet.

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Trefis Widgetizes Its Customizable Stock Price Charts

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 04:05 PM PST

Last month we wrote about Trefis, a new financial site that lets you tweak your stock predictions by adjusting variables in a company’s business model, depending on how you think different segments of the company will perform. These predictions are plotted out on attractive interactive charts, but until now those charts were all housed on the site’s homepage. Today, Trefis is launching support for widgets, giving bloggers and financial experts the chance to share their adjusted stock predictions with the world.

CEO Manish Jhunjhunwala says that the early adopters for the widget will likely be bloggers, freelance writers, and columnists who regularly write about business and financial content. He also notes that the site has gotten requests from a broader audiecne of writers who often write about a particular company (e.g. an Apple fan site).

Trefis breaks out a company’s businesses and products into different categories, then lets you manually tweak the contributions of those segments to the overall stock price. For example, Trefis currently says that the Apple TV represents 2.11% of the company’s stock price. If I think that’s about to change — say, because of the release of a new, superior model — I can manually adjust that value and see its impact on the overall stock price. You can get an idea for how the site works using the widget embedded below.

Jhunjhunwala says that the site has seen around 25K unique visitors in the last month.



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Groupon Valued At $250 million

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 03:24 PM PST

Multiple sources tell us that Groupon, the surging Chicago-based startup, was valued at $250 million when they closed their recent $30 million venture round with Accel Partners and previous investors. In that post we wrote that “the company is going gangbusters,” but apparently that’s a bit of an understatement. Post round, the value of the company is at least $280 million.

Groupon offers users deep discounts on products and services from local businesses. A minimum number of users must sign up for a deal before it activates, giving users an incentive to spread links to friends on Facebook, Twitter and via email. The company says they are on track to generate $100 million in gross merchandise sales in 2010. They take a big cut of that for themselves, generally 30% – 50%. A number of my friends tell me they’re addicted to Groupon’s deals (all of them are women who love to shop).

The round was very competitive, which explains the high valuation. Groupon appears to have created a compelling local advertising platform that generates a ton of cash.

Disclosure – one of our writers, Leena Rao, is married to a new Groupon employee. Despite my bullying, Leena refused to give up any information on the company.

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Autodesk Acquires Sequoia-Backed Software Design Startup PlanPlatform

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 03:09 PM PST

Autodesk, the developer of software design applications, has acquired PlanPlatform, a competing company. According to reports, Autodesk shelled out between $20-$30 million for the Israeli startup. Autodesk, a publicly traded company, provides software design applications for a variety of industries, including Architecture, Engineering, Media and Entertainment.

PlanPlatform, formerly known as Visual Tao, develops SaaS that provides engineers with two-dimensional and three-dimensional software drafting tools. The startup recently $4.3 million, with Sequoia Capital leading the round. Autodesk has acquired a number of companies, including Algor, SoftImage and 3D Geo.

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Nuance Dragon Search Lets You Search With Your Voice, Because Typing Is For Chumps

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 03:02 PM PST

nuance1

Hot on the heels of the launch of their Dragon Dictation app (and a short-lived and mostly overblown privacy scandal), Nuance has just launched a second iPhone application: Dragon Search.

Heralded by Nuance as the “fast, accurate, and smart way to search online content on your iPhone”, Dragon Search allows iPhone users to search across Google, Yahoo!, Bing, iTunes, Twitter, Wiki, or YouTube by speaking their search terms.

Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>

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EchoSign Integrates With Twitter To Tweet Out “Signed Deals”

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 01:15 PM PST

EchoSign, the web-based electronic signatures and signature automation service, has launched a nifty Twitter integration to let users "ring the bell" on Twitter the moment a deal is signed and closed. EchoSign will auto-tweet the moment a deal is signed, and will Tweet how quickly a deal was closed.

The startup is also launching a contest to incentivize the use of Twitter when signing deals via EchoSign and will reward the top closer and quickest closer each month with gift cards and prizes. Echosign is used for a variety of transactions, including those in real estate deals, sales contracts and in human resources activities. Of course, its important to note that users may not want to Tweet out their deals to the public for privacy reasons.

EchoSign, launched back in 2006, has reached 1.2 million users and has also helped sign and close more than $200,000,000 worth of contracts in one month.

EchoSign's electronic signature service lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. The startup has a freemium model, where the you can use a basic service for free but pay anywhere from $14.95 to $300 per month for a subscription service that includes extra features such as PDF encryption and password protections. EchoSign has gained traction as more businesses adopted SaaS and cloud computing applications. For example, EchoSign has gained significant popularity on Salesforce’s App Exchange. EchoSign is also integrated with web-based productivity suite Zoho.

To date, EchoSign has raised $8.5 million in funding. The startup faces competition from DocuSign and VeriSign.

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TC Avatar Screening Is Tomorrow. We’ll Have Square There. 10 Best Comments Win A Ticket

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 12:00 PM PST

The wait is finally over for James Cameron’s Avatar, and we’re holding a private screening tomorrow afternoon to celebrate. The screening is at the AMC Metreon 16 (at 4th and Market) in downtown San Francisco on Friday the 18. Seating starts at 3:15, and you’ll need to be there by 3:45 or we’ll have to give up your seat (once the tickets sell out Eventbrite will open up a Waitlist). The screening starts at 4 PM sharp. Our last batch of tickets have just gone live here at Eventbrite.

In light of the holidays, we’re asking for a $5 donation per ticket, all of which will go toward either the UCSF Foundation or Malaria No More(your choice). We’re very excited to announce that we’ll have Square — the new mobile payment system from Twitter creator Jack Dorsey — at the screening. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, we’ll be accepting further donations toward UCSF Foundation and Malaria No More. These will be totally optional, but you’ll be able to count yourself among the first people try out the exciting new system.

If the tickets sell out by the time you read this, don’t fret too much — you still have a chance to get one. We’re holding a contest in the comment thread below. To win, tell us why you absolutely must get into the screening. Creativity is encouraged. We’ll pick the ten best responses and Email you at 6 PM this evening (make sure to use your real Email address).



Finally, we’re pleased to announce that all attendees will get a medium popcorn and medium soda free of charge, thanks to our four sponsors:

Building43 – A great resource for learning about how to leverage the web’s newest tools.

Mashery – A powerful API management service.

Kontera – Provider of in-text advertising generated based on the content around it.

SingleFeed – Helps retailers manage product listings on multiple shopping sites through one feed.


UPDATE: Ticket capacity has been reached. We look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Update 2: The winners have been chosen, check your Email boxes shortly if I left a comment below yours.

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Watch The Buzz On Bitly.TV

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 11:55 AM PST

bitlytv

With more than two billion links a month passed through its link shortening service, bit.ly can see what is some of the most buzzed about and shared content on the Web. Today, it is exposing the most popular videos people share through bit.ly on Bitly.TV, which is the second project under bit.ly Labs (the super-short j.mp URL shortener was the first).

With bit.ly being the main way people share links on Twitter, Bitly.TV might as well be called Twitter TV. The videos featured are based on bit.ly’s bitrank algorithm. “The algorithm looks at velocity, popularity and persistence,” says general manager Andrew Cohen. “We’re examining the social distribution history of each video to determine what is trending, and to predict what will go viral.”

When you click on a video it opens up in a lightbox player along with a live stream of Tweets about that video and the ability to share it again on Twitter, Facebook, or via email. As you are watching, you get the realtime commentary in a box on the right and a retweet number so you can get a sense of how viral it is and why.

Just last Monday, the startup released Bit.ly Pro, which allows Web publishers to send out short links with their own branded (short) domain names such as nyti.ms, 4sq.com, mee.bo, or tcrn.ch. Publishers also get an analytics dashboard which shows realtime stats like the total number of clicks, and their distribution by geography and referring sites. The data around URL shorteners is incredibly valuable, and even Facebook and Google are jumping into the game with goo.gl and fb.me. With Bitly.TV, bit.ly seems to be upping the ante by providing a way to see the most popular videos on the web.

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Issuu Mobile Makes Reading Books And Magazines Easier On Android

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 11:03 AM PST

What is the best reading experience on a touchscreen device? As magazines and tablet-makers grapple with this question for larger form factors, Issuu has an answer for touchscreen phones. The Web-based document-viewer just released Issue Mobile for Android phones, and is working on an iPhone app.

Issuu Mobile is a mobile document reader which gives you access all the magazines, books, and documents uploaded to Issuu. Millions of public documents have been uploaded, just like on Scribd or DocStoc, and you can view your own private documents in your own account as well. The Android app shows featured content and addresses the small screen size with a new EasyRead feature. You just scratch a portion of the text and it pops up in a magnified view. You can also subscribe to publishers and news feeds.

Everything on Issuu is free or promotional right now, but you can find previews and free editions of books from Penguin, Random House and indie magazines. Issuu really needs a store like Scribd’s. But it is creating new mobile reading experiences which everyone can learn from.

I just wonder of down the road you need a separate app, or whether you can get the same reading experience from the Web. For now, Issuu is offering both and, at least for smaller screens, optimizing the experience with an app.

Here is an AppsFire video of the upcoming iPhone version of Issuu Mobile reader:

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Rally Wants To Bring Location Back To Its Core, With Only Your Real Friends.

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:15 AM PST

main_feedApparently, I’m not the only one who thinks there is a social paradox in the location space. A new service, Rally, believes the power of location lies in less rather than more. That is to say, fewer social connections rather than more of them.

It’s an idea that you don’t hear a lot of social networks talking about these days as each tries to build a social graph that’s as sprawling as possible. But the team behind Rally is taking this different approach largely due to their past experience. Much of the team is the same one that built 12seconds, one of the video platforms that rose as Twitter began to become popular. And eventually, 12seconds started relying heavily on Twitter’s large social graph for its own service. But co-founder Sol Lipman isn’t convinced that’s the right way for services going forward.

So he pulled together a team with the idea of building a dead-simple location service from scratch. There is no option to pull in your friends from Twitter. No option to pull in your friends from Facebook. That’s ballsy, and risky, but it could pay off in the form of a location service that people use just with their actual friends. To put it another way, “friending becomes a virus that ruins your application,” Lipman says.

If you’ve used a location service such as Foursquare or Gowalla, Rally will feel familiar to you. Like those services, the core concept is to “check-in” at various venues around a city. But Rally does things a little differently. One thing is that they place an emphasis on tagging a check-in with a picture. You don’t have to do this, but Rally has a very nice stream UI that will highlight check-ins with pictures from those people you follow.

Another unique concept is the idea of checking in at “Home.” While plenty of users create venues on Foursquare and Gowalla for their homes, Lipman realizes that many people aren’t comfortable putting their addresses on these services. So the “home” location in Rally is a non-geotagged place that still allows you to check-in so that your real friends know that you are home. And since they are your actual friends, they will likely already know what that location is.

Rally also has a feature that allows you to make temporary locations. This is the perfect solution for creating a spot that is only going to last for a set amount of time, such as a conference or a party. These temporary spots automatically expire 12 hours after the last person checks-in there.

Leaving behind comments at venues, and the aforementioned picture functionality also gives the app an almost Yelp-like quality.

As with Foursquare, badges are also an important part of Rally. However, whereas Foursquare’s collection is pretty limited, Rally plans to gives users a ton of them for various activities (including a number of potentially racy ones).

feed_detailsLike Gowalla, much of the location data in Rally (such as venue names) will be crowd-sourced. They’re also working on some deals to get some pre-populated location information around the world. Until they do that, they are restricting the service to the Santa Cruz, CA area, where Lipman and his team mainly reside. Once they’re ready, likely in a few weeks, they plan to open it up to everyone.

So how does Rally make money? “With location-based services, you don’t have to rely on anyone else to make your money. Location is the Holy Grail of advertising,” Lipman notes. And he plans to use what they’ve learned from partnering with brands on 12seconds to inject a model into Rally.

An early build of Rally is actually available in the App Store right now as a free download. Eventually, the plan is to make a web version, and extend it to other mobile platforms. But for now the focus remains the iPhone, Lipman says.

A final differentiating factor to note between Rally and the other location services is that they’re decidedly not focusing on gaming elements. Lipman says they’ve talked to various groups of people who feel that these types of gaming elements are simply a gimmick. “Games have winners and loser, we just want to build a very clean service,” Lipman notes.

While Rally may not rely on Facebook or Twitter for its social graph, Lipman says that they may use Facebook Connect to help spread its data to your real friends on that network. He does not foresee them using Twitter, at all. In terms of how else they’ll spread the word about the service, Lipman says that have some other interesting ideas in the works, but declined to say what. The key will remain making sure that these are people you actually know and want to share your location information with, he says.

with location based services you don’t have to worry on anyone else to make your money
location is the holy grail of advertising.
leveraging experience as to what big brands are looking for.

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