The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- New Business Version Of PogoPlug Coming Soon
- ToneCheck Checks Your Tone Like A Spell Checker Checks Your Spelling
- Intel Capital Invests In Cloud-Based Game Streaming Service Gaikai
- MovieTickets.com to Sell Movie Tickets On the Xbox 360
- Raptr Leaves Beta, Makes It Easier To See Which Games Your Friends Are Playing
- Honda Announces Plug-In Hybrid & Electric Car Plans For The 2012 Model Year
- Social Travel Planning Service Kukunu Launches, Raises Funding
- Quick Look At the Dell Streak
- Hyperlocal News Site Fwix Debuts Local Trend Search
- Offerpal Moves On, Gives Game Developers New Ways To Distribute Notifications
- Teams Released Ahead Of Mini Seedcamp London
- A Facebook Game With a Mission: Waste Management to Launch Oceanopolis
- Brightkite Gets Down To Badges
- Cloud Wars: HP Poaches Salesforce Executive Mark Angelino
- MOG Launches All-You-Can-Eat Music Service For iPhone And Android
- SCVNGR Looks To Make ‘Checking In’ Less Antisocial, More Physical
- Report: Mobile App Store Downloads To Hit 25 Billion By 2015
- PopScreen Aims To Surface Viral Videos Before They Go Viral
- Karsa Flash Payer Offers Bait And Switch Model For Video Monetization
- PopSugar Launches Retail Therapy, A FarmVille For Shopaholics [Video]
- BranchOut Unlocks The LinkedIn In Facebook
- With DECE’s UltraViolet, We’re About To See Just How Powerful Apple Really Is
- This Week’s Groupon Clone Action
- New Market Research: Social Media Sites as Annoying to U.S. Customers as Cable Providers, Airlines
- It’s Hard To Feel Sorry For AT&T
| New Business Version Of PogoPlug Coming Soon Posted: 20 Jul 2010 08:53 AM PDT
     
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| ToneCheck Checks Your Tone Like A Spell Checker Checks Your Spelling Posted: 20 Jul 2010 08:38 AM PDT
Ever sent or received an email that was just screaming to be misunderstood? There’s a good chance you have, and if not it will happen some day – just trust me on that one. Unless … Canadian startup Lymbix thinks it can help you avoid situations that come out of misinterpreted textual communication with the launch of a new service called ToneCheck. Think of it as an emotional spell-check application. Available today for Microsoft Outlook, with support for more desktop and Web-based email clients slated for the future, ToneCheck is supposedly capable of identifying the emotional definition of words and phrases in order to help end users improve the clarity of their communication. The application gauges words and phrases against 8 levels of connotative feeling, enabling end users to make real-time corrections and adjust the overall tone of messages using a simple menu system. Text interpretation problems: solved. Provided you use Outlook, of course. Any readers who still do, please be so kind to give ToneCheck a whirl and tell us if it
     
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| Intel Capital Invests In Cloud-Based Game Streaming Service Gaikai Posted: 20 Jul 2010 08:25 AM PDT
Gaikai offers a server-based, cloud-gaming technology that streams games, allowing users to play any game inside the web browser. Gaikai’s game streaming service hosts the games, runs them and then streams them to users, allowing them to interact with games wherever they are browsing. Gaikai will launch this summer, with unsurprisingly, servers powered by Intel’s Six-Core processors and Intel Solid State Drives. The games will also be running throught the key nodes of the Limelight network. Gaikai recently announced a deal with Electronic Arts to stream EA’s games, including The Sims, Mass Effect and Medal of Honor, over Gaikai. Gaikai faces competition from OnLive.      
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| MovieTickets.com to Sell Movie Tickets On the Xbox 360 Posted: 20 Jul 2010 08:05 AM PDT
As you see from the description, you don’t actually buy the movie tickets via the interface but instead are connected to a “Microsoft tag” that brings you to a payment system for tickets using a mobile phone.      
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| Raptr Leaves Beta, Makes It Easier To See Which Games Your Friends Are Playing Posted: 20 Jul 2010 08:00 AM PDT
A year ago, Raptr rolled out a multi-protocol chat client that allowed gamers to see what games their friends were playing (this included support for both PC games and console games).That worked fairly well, but CEO Dennis Fong says that it came with one big caveat: it only worked if you got your friends to sign up for a Raptr account, which was obviously a significant hurdle. Raptr’s latest release fixes this, allowing you to see if your friends are playing games on their PS3, Xbox 360, and PC (including casual Flash games, Steam and Xfire) — even if they don’t have Raptr accounts. In other words, the service is now far more useful than it used to be. When you see that one of your buddies is online and in a game, you can send messages to them from the Raptr client regardless of which platform they’re on. For some games, you can see even more supplementary information — for example, if someone is playing Madden 2010, you can see which teams your friends are playing as. Another recently added feature is a chat overlay, which PC gamers can pull up on top of the game they’re playing without having to switch — or “alt-tab” — out of their gaming session. Raptr does all of this with its own technology, not through APIs sanctioned by Sony, Microsoft, and the other gaming platforms. This obviously isn’t the ideal solution, but these gaming networks tend to be walled gardens and give third parties minimal access to their communication channels. Still, the fact that Raptr had to build the technology itself makes the barrier to entry that much higher for competitors (assuming the gaming companies don’t try to block Raptr). Fong, whose past companies include Xfire and Gamers.com, says that Raptr has quietly rolled out some of the service’s biggest improvements in the last few months, and that user growth has reflected this. Overall, he says the service has “north of 1 million users” and is growing by half a million users a month. Given the second statistic it sounds like the service probably has significantly more than 1 million users, but Fong wouldn’t get any more specific. He did give some predictions for the future, though: he hinted that a year down the line, we may see a ‘Raptr Connect’, which would allow games to tie directly into the service.
     
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| Honda Announces Plug-In Hybrid & Electric Car Plans For The 2012 Model Year Posted: 20 Jul 2010 06:46 AM PDT
These new lines should start hitting streets in both Japan and the US sometime next year for the 2012 model year. This comes on top of the current plans to introduce a hybrid version of the B-segment Honda Fit later this year. Details about the up-coming electric car wasn’t announced, but a few tantalizing specs concerning the next-gen Honda Civic Hybrid leaked a few weeks back and seem to confirm today’s report. Can we say Prius-killer? Yup.      
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| Social Travel Planning Service Kukunu Launches, Raises Funding Posted: 20 Jul 2010 06:21 AM PDT  Kukunu is a social travel planning service that puts you, your fellow travelers and your friends in the driver's seat when it comes to planning your vacation(s). The company, which was one of the winners of Seedcamp Week 2009, has been operating quietly so far, having launched a private beta version at Le Web 2009. Kukunu is now available in public beta, and the fledgling company has also announced that they've raised $400,000 from Seedcamp, Jaina Capital (the fund of Meetic founder and angel investor Marc Simoncini) and Kima Ventures (Xavier Niel).
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| Posted: 20 Jul 2010 06:16 AM PDT
The device has a 5-megapixel camera, touchscreen, and built-in GPS. You can use it to watch movies and listen to music and it has a fully-featured webkit browser running on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, making it quite speedy. The device features a built-in GSM modem so you can connect to 3G networks and make calls, making the Streak look like a comically big EVO 4G, except without the 4G.      
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| Hyperlocal News Site Fwix Debuts Local Trend Search Posted: 20 Jul 2010 06:11 AM PDT
Fwix, a news site that offers a stream of hyperlocal, realtime news by location, is launching a new portal today that aims to give anyone a real time view of what’s happening in a location. You can access the new search portal here. Fwix Local Trend Search allows users to search for anything that is happening at any geo-point. The search feature rounds up news, events, government data, business reviews, check-ins from Foursquare or Gowalla and more on a map of a given area. You can expand the sphere of location to show coverage from a greater area or a more localized location. For example, you could see all of the hyperlocal news from the city of San Francisco, but can then pinpoint the Mission neighborhood and see all of the most recent news relating to that given area. One question I had for Fwix’s CEO and founder Darian Shirazi was how the site determine an article’s “location.” Dhirazi tells me that Fwix’s proprietary technology analyzes and indexes nearly 40 million pieces of content to determine and scan for any reference to location within the text of a document. So if a restaurant review refers to an establishment in the Financial District of San Francisco, the content will be geolocated to that area. The site will also serve hyperlocal, targeted ads on top of search results. Of course, with the introduction of a news search portal, Fwix now competes with Google News. But Shirazi thinks there can be mutiple players in this space, especially considering Fwix’s emphasis on hyperlocal news. And Fwiz already has a number of well-known media partners on board to integrate the technology, says Shirazi (the partners will be announced in a few months). Fwix just inked a deal with The New York Times Company to deliver local and hyperlocal content across the publisher's properties. Fwix, which also recently launched an iPad app, is getting into the geolocation game, adding geo-tagged status updates (from Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite), geo-photos (from Flickr, yfrog, Smugmug, and Twitpic), local events (from Eventbrite, Eventful, Upcoming, and Zvents), nearby reviews and restaurants (from Yelp and Citysearch), concerts (Songkick), local crime and government data, weather, listings (Oodle, Trulia), and deals from local merchants (Groupon, Town Hog, and Living Social) to its feeds. Clearly, Fwix wants to be a destination that you go to not only for news, but for all contextual information around a given locality. The new search portal makes it much easier for consumers to sort through this flux of information.      
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| Offerpal Moves On, Gives Game Developers New Ways To Distribute Notifications Posted: 20 Jul 2010 05:56 AM PDT
Last week, Offerpal Media announced that, as a direct result of Facebook transitioning games and applications from their proprietary currencies to the newly-launched Facebook Credits and partnering with rival Trialpay, the company saw itself forced to lay off people who worked on its Facebook monetization initiatives. Today, the company is launching a new product that should make it clear it would be unwise to consider that event a lead-up to its eventual demise. With SocialKast, which the company will be presenting later today at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, Offerpal aims to relieve many a game developer that was hurt by Facebook’s recent decision to seriously cut down on the many ways they could distribute notifications via the social networking site in order to get new users to sign up. Dubbed a ‘user acquisition and re-engagement solution’, SocialKast aims to enable game developers to connect with audiences across social networks and media platforms such as Yahoo and Google, opening the doors to massive distribution of game-related notifications to roughly 1 billion users in over 150 countries. George Garrick, Chairman and CEO of Offerpal, says it has proven costly and difficult for game developers to find new means of distribution in the current environment, and that the new product aims to solve that problem and allow them to accelerate viral growth and at the same time lower the cost of acquiring new users. SocialKast allows game developers and social platforms to ‘write once’ in order to interact with multiple platforms using a set of lightweight REST messaging APIs and Javascript calls, allowing them to distribute both user-to-user and app-to-user invites, gifts, notifications and other types of text-based or graphical messages directly into the activity streams and email inboxes of Offerpal's partner sites. Messages from a game on any platform or Website using SocialKast will be distributed through Yahoo's Updates API, for example, which will make it possible for those actions to be shared by users in a variety of formats across Yahoo properties. A new generation of spam, or a legitimate way to reel in new users across multiple platforms? Time will tell how users feel about it, but for sure game developers will be drooling over this. Access to SocialKast is available for free – for now – as a value-added service to select game developers and social platforms using Offerpal's monetization platform, which allows gamers to earn virtual currency by taking part in alternative payment options such as advertising offers, surveys, shopping rewards and other brand engagements.      
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| Teams Released Ahead Of Mini Seedcamp London Posted: 20 Jul 2010 05:37 AM PDT  Pan-european startup programme Seedcamp has released the names of the teams appearing at the Mini Seedcamp London next week. Seedcamp says they "saw many teams applying with innovative ideas in the mobile space and we are seeing more and more dedicated, smaller applications adressing very specific markets." Teams applied from all over Europe and beyond, and there is a trend towards self-financing and bootstrapping but the "quality [of teams] is growing from strength to strength each year". Personally I am not surprised they are doing that given the dearth of early stage funding right now, but, perversely this lack of funding, especially in Europe, does rather concentrate the mind on what startups should be doing. There's nothing like a downturn for sorting out the wheat from the chaff. The below is a run-down on what the teams are doing, supplied by Seedcamp: 
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| A Facebook Game With a Mission: Waste Management to Launch Oceanopolis Posted: 20 Jul 2010 05:30 AM PDT
In the game, players maintain their own island by recycling trash to build a sustainable community and interacting with friends. Points earned virtually turn into printable coupons that can be used at movie theaters, restaurants and stores. Alternatively, they can be turned into cash donations. Points can also be earned in real life through recycling or through blogging on Greenopolis‘ site.
When Greenopolis, a environmentally themed social networking site and blogging community launched two years ago, Michael Arrington wrote that it would be better suited as a Facebook application. Oceanopolis seems to fit that bill. According to the site, Greenopolis members have earned 6.7 million rewards and the physical recycling kiosks have recovered 3.5 million bottles, cans and other items thus far. Greenopolis and Oceanopolis Creative Director Anthony Zolezzi said the reason for creating Oceanopolis was to virtually engage consumers. “It’s critically important that large companies get involved in the solution,” he added. “One thing Waste Management does is lets Greenopolis operate independently as part of a solution.” Waste Management is the largest recycler in North America. Oceanopolis is kicking off its beta launch with a fundraiser for Ocean Aid, which will hold an annual concert to fund research on pollution-filled ocean gyres. Greenopolis will donate a dollar on behalf of anyone who tweets: "Make waves. Fight ocean pollution with http://apps.Facebook.com/Oceanopolis #Oceanopolis." It remains to be seen whether recycling on a virtual island can inspire real-life recycling, and whether Oceanopolis will be able to gain a significant user base. At the very least, Oceanopolis could be an addictive game to feel good instead of guilty about playing.      
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| Brightkite Gets Down To Badges Posted: 20 Jul 2010 05:28 AM PDT
Location-based social networking service Brightkite has experimented with the concept of badges in the past, threading in the footsteps of Foursquare and Gowalla, who have popularized if not pioneered the now-familiar virtual loyalty and rewards system. Last May, the startup partnered with coffee chain Starbucks to create a set of branded badges, self-reportedly the biggest brand integration they had done until then. Today, they’re ramping up their badging efforts. Brightkite badges now have levels. For example, if you use their mobile website or one of their many mobile apps to post 10 photos, you’ll earn a ‘Slick pic’ badge at level 1. You can monitor your progress in a status bar on the badge, which will be visible on the web or your iPhone. Once you get to level 1, Brightkite will tell you what to do to get to level 2, and so on. According to Brightkite, the biggest reason to introduce levels to its badges was so stores, bars, restaurants and brands gain ways to reward users / customers. The company is setting out with a number of partnerships: check in to stores that sell Sharpie products, and you’ll earn their custom badge and automatically enter into a sweeps to win $1,000. Get down to some serious social networking via the Brightkite service, and Dentyne will be sponsoring your ‘social swagger’ badge. Read the August edition of Redbook magazine, and there’ll be a surprise there for you, as well. Brightkite says it is currently working out the details for more branded badge programs with the likes of McDonald’s, Visa and the CW. The company says they also have a “bunch of home-grown badges live and plenty more to follow” and invites users to discover them and “level up”.
     
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| Cloud Wars: HP Poaches Salesforce Executive Mark Angelino Posted: 20 Jul 2010 05:01 AM PDT
Mark Angelino, formerly vice president at IBM and President at Sprint, was responsible for the adoption of Salesforce's sales, call center and platform services in North America from May 2009 until last month. As you can tell from the screenshot above, he left Salesforce.com in June to become Senior Vice President at another company, but he played coy and marked his new employer’s name ‘Guess Who!’. No need to guess any longer, in case you were interested: turns out Angelino has joined HP as SVP of Global Distribution for its roughly $54 billion Enterprise Business. Angelino will be responsible for managing HP's relationships with ISVs, system integrators, managed services providers and channel partners for the business unit, which includes the technology giant’s portfolio of servers, storage, networking, software and services.      
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| MOG Launches All-You-Can-Eat Music Service For iPhone And Android Posted: 20 Jul 2010 05:00 AM PDT
When MOG launched its All Access music service back in December, we gave it a rave review, but it was missing one key feature: mobile. These applications bring all of the functionality of the desktop service and they do it one better, by allowing you to store as many songs and albums as you’d like to your phone’s storage for offline access. Navigating the application should come naturally to anyone who has used the iPhone’s music player (and it’s actually a big step up over the music player that comes stock on Android). After first firing up the app, the first feature you’ll want to try is search. You’ll find the regular options here, like searching by artist and song, but there’s also an option for Playlists, which allow you to search through user-curated playlists created by MOG’s large community of music fans. This is part of a recurring theme in the application: discovery, which is important if you’re keen on tapping into the service’s broad music library. The main navigation screen also includes a list of New Releases, top songs and albums across the service, and a collection of songs handpicked by MOG’s editors on a daily basis. MOG really shines when it comes to actually getting the music you want to hear onto your phone. When you find a song or album you like, you have two options: you can stream it (just tap the song or album title), or you can download it and store it locally. Next to each song and album is an arrow pointing downward; hit that, and MOG will start downloading the files the background (it’s really nice to be able to download an entire album or playlist in one tap).
There isn’t any restriction on how much music you can download, other than the amount of storage you have available on your phone. By default downloads clock in at 64 kbps AAC+, but you can elect to download files at a much higher quality 320 kbps MP3 bitrate if you’d like (this obviously takes up more space). You can also use MOG mobile to create custom digital radio stations, sort of like Pandora, but without the learning algorithms. Input a seed artist or song titles, and MOG will start playing similar music. Using a sliding scale, you can tell MOG to play only music by that artist, or you can increase the amount of variety you want to introduce into the station.
The applications have been a long time coming. MOG showed them off at SXSW in March, only to have its iPhone application sit in App Store limbo waiting for Apple’s approval for a month. Now that they’re out, you can expect MOG to push them hard, with help from the new $9.5 million funding round it raised earlier this year. Note that this release doesn’t include support for iOS 4′s multitasking; MOG says that it will be coming in the next two weeks in an update. Of course, MOG isn’t alone in this space. The service will be competing against the likes of Rhapsody, and more competitors like Rdio and Spotify are on the horizon (the latter two have received plenty of press, but are not yet available in the US). Also note that MOG offers a version of its service that omits mobile access for $5 a month. Update: As the commenters point out, US users can request an invite code to Rdio from its site, but it’s still in private beta.      
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| SCVNGR Looks To Make ‘Checking In’ Less Antisocial, More Physical Posted: 20 Jul 2010 05:00 AM PDT
So why would anyone actually want to do this? First, it’s more fun than your standard check-in — I could see this working as a decent, albeit nerdy, icebreaker at bars. And it’s probable that the Patriots will be trying it out during a game as part of a stadium-wide social checkin. SCVNGR is also incenting users to do this by offering in-game bonuses that make social check-ins worth significantly more than most other actions. SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch says that he initially hoped to implement the feature using Bump’s API, but found that that service couldn’t properly handle multiple phone taps at once — he says it’s designed for 1-to-1 transfers of contacts and other media. So SCVNGR designed a system that would allow many (even thousands) of people to tap their phones together in order to achieve a group checkin. Of course, physically hitting devices that cost upwards of $500 isn’t always the best idea, especially when you’re trying to get a bunch of people to do it at once (some of whom may not be especially sober). Fortunately there’s an alternative: Priebatsch says that some well-timed phone shaking when you’re in the vicinity of your friends will work just fine.      
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| Report: Mobile App Store Downloads To Hit 25 Billion By 2015 Posted: 20 Jul 2010 04:42 AM PDT  The app store train seems unstoppable. According to a Juniper Research report out today, the number of "consumer-oriented handset downloads" is expected to rise from less than 2.6 billion per-year in 2009 to more than 25 billion in 2015. The trend, notes the report, is being driven by industry players who are seeking to emulate Apple's success with the App Store by launching their own branded storefronts, such as 'Mobile Market' from China Unicom, 'Airtel App Central' from Bharti and the 'Apps & Games Shop' on Vodafone 360. And let's not forget Google's Android, Nokia Ovi, Palm, Windows Phone etc. or the independent giant GetJar, which passed 1 billion downloads earlier this month. In other words, app stores are here to stay. Juniper has a warning, however: Copying the Apple model isn't as straight forward as it would seem.
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| PopScreen Aims To Surface Viral Videos Before They Go Viral Posted: 20 Jul 2010 04:40 AM PDT
Viral video monitoring startup PopScreen aims to save you from the disgrace you deserve when you email all your friends and relatives a link to that super funny video on YouTube only to find out they’ve all seen it a couple of times yesterday. The company is today launching what they dub a ‘video prediction engine’, which they claim is capable of detecting which videos will spread across the Web before they actually do. PopScreen measures online videos from over 10,000 sources, including YouTube (duh), Vimeo and DailyMotion but also content networks like Revision3 and FunnyOrDie. Its video prediction engine indexes around 15,000 videos per day based on those sources, and analyzes them in order to collect a number of unique data points – it’s unclear which ones exactly but the number runs in the ‘hundreds of thousands’ according to PopScreen – and processes them through a proprietary algorithm in an effort to accurately predict the viral potential of videos and to identify newsworthy content before your sister finds out about it. Its main strength lies in filtering out duplicates, repeats and similar videos that are far less likely to scale up, tapping a network of influencers to determine which videos are most likely to go mainstream in the near future. Not interested in content related to movies or music? Simply un-check the relevant boxes in the sidebar and have PopScreen cater potential hit videos according to your interests. Find anything you like in particular? Share away via the Twitter and Facebook buttons. PopScreen says its engine will be rolled out on a larger scale over the coming months to allow partners across all industries including news, publishing, and search, to syndicate predictive data and provide their users with access to the most timely video content on the Web, tailored specifically to their personal interests. Founded in 2008, PopScreen is privately-held and based in Houston, Texas. The startup was founded by Kevin Nguyen and Glenn Gutierrez, who in 2003 launched Zapmeta, a meta search engine which processed 25-35 million searches a month and self-reportedly generated over $15 million in revenue.
     
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| Karsa Flash Payer Offers Bait And Switch Model For Video Monetization Posted: 20 Jul 2010 03:20 AM PDT  Karsa Flash Payer offers a way for content creators to monetize their online video using a bait and switch model in which payment is only requested mid-viewing, once the user is already hooked. The service was developed by UK-based Steven Carroll, the guy behind Documentary-film.net, which came very close to entering the Deadpool after he found it difficult to generate enough revenue to cover the hosting and bandwidth costs of the site. Instead of forcing the viewer to commit to paying up front for content that they may not yet consider worth their cash, Karsa allows for it to be viewable for free for a set amount of time, after which the video pauses and the user is prompted for payment. Once paid-for, playback of the video can be resumed.
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| PopSugar Launches Retail Therapy, A FarmVille For Shopaholics [Video] Posted: 20 Jul 2010 02:23 AM PDT Sugar Inc., the media company behind the popular collection of sugar-centric blogs (PopSugar, FabSugar, BellaSugar), is now dipping its well manicured toe into virtual gaming with the launch of PopSugar’s Retail Therapy. As the name suggests, this Facebook app aims to be the FarmVille of shopping. After a quiet, soft launch last week, the site has grown from 50 users to nearly 4,000, says Sugar’s founder and CEO, Brian Sugar. That’s a far cry from the tens of millions of users who diligently fertilize crops on Farmville’s acres, but PopSugar’s Retail Therapy has potential. The game has the power and eyeballs of Sugar’s network at its disposal (the consortium averages 16 million uniques per month) and Retail Therapy has already forged partnerships with several high-profile fashion labels, including Diane Von Furstenberg, Gap, Barneys New York, Juicy Couture, Tory Burch and TopShop. The basic format of the game is simple. Each user owns and manages a boutique and builds the store from the bottom up. When a user signs up, she receives $2,500 in coins (and yes, it is always a she— in the world of Retail Therapy there are no male avatars available). She can then use that money for virtual clothing, to design the boutique with furnishings and to purchase inventory for the store. The user selects inventory from a catalog of virtual goods which are actually replicas of real life, in-season products from the retail partners (the ultimate product placement). That inventory, Sugar says, will be refreshed frequently to reflect any real world changes. Once a user has retrieved and unpacked inventory, computer generated avatars intermittently shuffle into the store to peruse and purchase goods. Facebook friends on Retail Therapy can also visit and make purchases or sign up to be your store’s sales representatives (anyone can simultaneously manage a boutique and work for a friend’s store). With every purchase you earn new coins and for various actions (like ordering inventory, unpacking it, etc. ), you also earn experience points which will help you access new levels. With each new level— there are currently more than 40— you unlock new products for purchase. Furthermore, if you want to get additional coins for Retail Therapy, you also have the option to purchase them through Facebook Credits.
Fundamentally, Retail Therapy is not radically different from rival Facebook games like Fashion World and Mall World, but PopSugar’s version is the best at bridging virtual and real world shopping. In the game, avatars can explore virtual TopShop and Diane Von Furstenberg stores, get additional information on those real world products and find links to make actual purchases. Although Facebook Credits is an obvious revenue stream, the game’s real worth could ultimately lie in these retail partnerships. Depending on the evolution of these partnerships and the site’s success, major vendors may be willing to sign lucrative contracts in exchange for creative marketing opportunities. Sugar says he’s concentrating on building out the user base for now but he would like to explore new retail opportunities, like offering loyal customers discounts at their favorite retailers or special in-house sample sales. As the business strategy develops organically, Sugar says he will also definitely create a high level of integration with Sugar’s various websites, through cross-promotion and the creation of special events built around editorial content. For example, during Oscars coverage, PopSugar might promote a limited supply of Red Carpet items on Retail Therapy. For all its potential, Retail Therapy has significant challenges. From a current base of 4,000, the site will need to number in the millions in order to matter in this market. Mall World has more than 4 million active users, Fashion World has more than 2 million. Unlike other virtual world gaming services, like Zynga or IMVU, Sugar is also walking in foreign territory. The network has built a business on creating influential blogs, not viral Facebook games. Sugar acknowledges that they will have to build out their current team, with additional game managers, to establish a sufficient support network for Retail Therapy.
Update: TechCrunch readers who sign up, can get an extra $2,500 coins through this link.      
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| BranchOut Unlocks The LinkedIn In Facebook Posted: 20 Jul 2010 01:06 AM PDT
Everyone you know is on Facebook, and most people have added their resume information. But you can’t search by companies and even searching within your friends for company names is virtually impossible. So if you want to research which of your friends work at a specific company, or which friends of friends do, you head on over to LinkedIn. Well, not anymore. BranchOut launched this evening, a new Facebook application that makes career networking a snap. The application unlocks massive amounts of career data about my friends and friends of friends that was just impossible to get to before. Search on a company name and see which of your Facebook friends work there (or used to). If those friends have installed the app, you can also see how many of their friends have worked at that company. You can then reach out to them for an introduction if you like. My network of 5,000 friends have worked at 4,664 unique companies. My 20,607 friends of friends have worked at 17,901 unique companies. Basically, someone I know or someone that they know works at any place I want access to. BranchOut tells me that 5 of my friends worked at Sun. 68 worked at Microsoft, and 53 worked at Google. I also have three friends who were in the Navy, apparently. The application also has job listings, currently free for thirty days to your direct network. Soon, says founder and CEO Rick Marini, they’ll let people put up job postings that reach all users, for $30/month. Given who’ll be using this, that should be a no brainer. We’ll certainly list TechCrunch jobs there. Test it out and let us know what you think. It’s just out of beta and there are a few bugs, so go easy. Or not.      
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| With DECE’s UltraViolet, We’re About To See Just How Powerful Apple Really Is Posted: 20 Jul 2010 01:03 AM PDT
Of course one very important member of the ecosystem is absent from this coalition: Apple. While DECE may have nearly 60 entertainment and consumer companies on board, they don’t have Apple. And that means this upcoming UltraViolet content won’t work on iPods, iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs — and maybe not even Macs. In other words, this is going to be the biggest test yet to see just how much power Apple has over the entertainment content business. UltraViolet is the technology DECE came up with in order to make content both interoperable and secure as it travels between devices made by supporting manufacturers. It’s DRM, but it’s a form of DRM that DECE hopes consumers will go along with because of all the consumer electronics and content it should work with. Companies like Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Sony, Comcast, Netflix, and Microsoft are all on board. The basic idea is that rights to content are all stored online and transfered to various UltraViolet-compatible equipment. This could allow you to stream movies or TV shows encoded with UltraViolet, but it may also allow you to do something like burn DVDs with the encoding. Eventually, the members hope to extend this to music as well. The problem with all of this (beyond that it’s DRM) is that it sounds like it’s going to get fairly complicated awfully quick. With this many partners trying to work together (again, around 60), who knows if it’s something consumers will ever actually adopt — especially with this many big companies (all with different agendas) involved. Of course, the same thing was thought about Hulu before it launched. And that has proven to be a success. But again, UltraViolet won’t have Apple support — the company which is arguably the most important single player in content-consuming devices these days. Apple, it seems, will continue to go its own way with its own formats (DRM for movies and TV — DRM-free for music). Disney is also not on board with DECE. This may not be all that surprising when you consider that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney’s largest shareholder. So without Disney’s content and Apple’s devices, is UltraViolet DOA? That may ultimately depend on if the other studios are willing to pull their content out of Apple’s ecosystem in order to support their format. If that happens, Apple may be forced to go with UltraViolet. Otherwise, it will be a kingdom divided. And we’ll see just how much pull Apple has. Memo to DECE: if you have any interest is enticing Apple to join, perhaps make a site that isn’t entirely done in Flash.
     
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| This Week’s Groupon Clone Action Posted: 19 Jul 2010 11:58 PM PDT A week rarely goes by that we don’t see someone clone all or part of hot group buying site Groupon. See, for example, Copy/Paste Innovation: Groupon Gets Cloned In Russia And China and this post discussing the hundred or so Groupon clones in China alone. ScoutMob isn’t one of the guys copying the Groupon website wholesale. But our guess is they certainly took a look at the video Groupon plays when a user unsubscribes from the daily email. ScoutLabs does their own video whenever someone subscribes. If something works, other people will grab it and evolve it. And that seems to be ok with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason. In a video interview earlier this year, he said he’s more focused on growing his company than tracking down people who copy part or all of the service. So the good news is this – if you like what you see in the video above, feel free to copy it. Groupon certainly won’t be coming after you.      
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| New Market Research: Social Media Sites as Annoying to U.S. Customers as Cable Providers, Airlines Posted: 19 Jul 2010 09:00 PM PDT A new study by ForeSee Results and the American Customer Satisfaction Index finds that U.S. consumers regard social media sites Facebook and Myspace as lowly as they regard cable providers, airlines and the I.R.S. The Annual E-Business Report for the A.C.S.I. study encompassed thirty online media brands in the categories of: portals and search engines, news and information sites and for the first time in July 2010, social media sites. Social media companies Facebook, Myspace, Wikipedia and YouTube were included for the first time this year, but achieved the worst "satisfaction" scores within the “e-business” group. On a 0-100 point scale, Facebook scored just 64 points but Wikipedia scored 77. YouTube scored 73, and MySpace scored 63. By way of comparison, Netflix ranks at 87. ForeSee Results expects to add Twitter next year but did not include Twitter in 2010 because so many people access the site through third-party applications (like TweetDeck) creating a varied user-experience said ForeSee Results chief executive Larry Freed. Regarding Facebook’s low score, but dominance in the social media U.S. market, Freed notes: “Customer satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect [from a website]. The business model of starting out free and ad-free, then turning your site into something else over time works somewhere in tech, but from the average consumer standpoint it doesn't work.” Privacy issues and promotional content — including everything from display ads to information posted by a user’s “friends” about Mafia Wars or Farmville — all frustrated Facebook customers. Wikipedia, in contrast, has adhered to a non-profit business model where “it's about the content more than anything else,” Freed says, and Wikipedia hasn’t added revenue generating features that make it “troubling for people to access and utilize an ever-changing site.” The ForeSee Results study found that Wikipedia users are less frequent visitors compared to users of other social media sites. About one in five Wikipedia users visits daily compared to more than half of Facebook users. According to July 2010 Hitwise data, Facebook is the top website in the U.S. with 9% of all website visits — Google has 7.4% — and 55% of all social media site visits. Despite lower customer satisfaction numbers than researchers expected, people aren’t leaving Facebook and going to newer social media networks, Freed notes. Some are using it less frequently, he says, but they’re not jumping ship. He compares Facebook’s position to eBay’s: “[EBay] has all these buyers and sellers, a large dominant group. If you want to sell, where are you going? Until consumers get a seriously viable alternative, they’re going nowhere.” In total, the A.C.S.I. measures 223 companies online and off, with only ten of these scoring below a 65, including Facebook, Myspace, and airlines and cable providers. Among goverment agencies and websites ranked, only 10% score lower than 65 including the I.R.S. The full report is available for free from ForeSee Results with registration. UPDATE: In response to this study, a Facebook representative writes: "We haven’t reviewed the survey methodology in detail, but clearly we have room to improve. Building a simple, useful service is the best way to earn and sustain the trust people put in us. That's why we spend so much of our time and energy focused on improving the products we offer and introducing new ones."      
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| It’s Hard To Feel Sorry For AT&T Posted: 19 Jul 2010 08:55 PM PDT
In this scenario as laid out by Vogelstein, Apple seems a bit like the uncaring and demanding husband. While AT&T is the timid and overwhelmed wife. The way Vogelstein ends up painting it, it’s hard not to feel a bit bad for AT&T. Their situation has always been sort of a lose-lose. And it could be a very big loss when the iPhone exclusivity ends. But let’s not feel too bad for AT&T. As noted in Vogelstein’s post, since early 2007 when the iPhone was first announced, AT&T's wireless revenue is up 43 percent. Meanwhile, the number of subscribers are up about 40 percent. But much crazier is that profit has risen roughly 200 percent. Profit. Up. 200%. Yes, AT&T is spending a lot on network upgrades. But every carrier does this (Verizon has spent about $20 billion in the past three years, for example). And AT&T would be even if they didn’t have the iPhone. Are they spending more because of the data demands of the iPhone? No doubt. But as one chart in the story shows, AT&T is actually spending far less than they did in 2008 on network upgrades. This is despite income rising each year — and data usage rising each year. It may be hard to fault AT&T for wanting to squeeze out more profit. But by not pouring every dime that they can into upgrading their network, they’re sealing their own fate when it comes time for the iPhone to move on. And you can argue that no matter what AT&T does, it won’t be enough (that’s at least part of what Vogelstein is saying). But if that’s the case, AT&T should have been smart enough to know that for the long-term betterment of the company, it may have been wise to get out of the iPhone exclusivity agreement earlier. Instead, all indications have been that they’ve lobbied hard to keep that agreement in place. And despite Apple thinking about walking away at least “a half dozen times” that hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, AT&T has shown their overall customer service to be far less than adequate. I keep going back to this example — but it’s a good one. When Netflix has a hiccup in movie streaming, even just for a few minutes, I automatically get an email alerting me that I can have a partial refund if I want it. When I drop a call on AT&T what do I get? Another dropped call if I try to call customer support. I’ve never once gotten any money taken off of my bill from AT&T despite every single one of those months being filled with dropped calls and overall shit service. If I called to complain I might be able to get something back — but I’d have to do that each month. And even if I didn’t drop the call when calling them up, have you ever tried calling one of those customer support numbers? Kill me. And I loved when AT&T tried to spin their recent termination of unlimited data plans as a good thing for customers. Almost all customers will be paying less under the new plans, is how the company line read. Sure, right now. But in a couple years (when you’re still under contract, by the way), these plans are going to screw you. This is all about AT&T taking precautionary measures so they can make more money down the road. It’s not about saving their customers any money. It’s a lucky side-effect of their larger agenda to get data consumption under control. It’s total bullshit. Vogelstein’s takeaway seems to be that all customers should get used to high prices and declining service as wireless demands continue to increase. Sadly, that’s probably true. As he notes, AT&T has been relegated to a “parsimonious gatekeeper.” And the other U.S. carriers are likely to join them there. Apple (and Google) have effectively body-slammed them and changed the entire wireless industry by deflating their positions of power. But the carriers still control the pipes and unless the wireless industry truly changes with the upcoming opening of the Spectrum (which is mainly thanks to companies like Google — and against the wishes of the carriers), we’re all going to be paying the price — literally. But at least it seems more likely than ever that sometime soon — either the end of this year or the beginning of next year — iPhone users in the United States are going to have a choice of which carrier to sell their soul to. If nothing else, the Wired story shows that the dysfunctional relationship between Apple and AT&T can’t continue forever. Or probably even much longer. The two would kill one another. Instead, they’ll date other people. And they’ll share custody of their little girl, the iPhone. Though I still suspect she may get along better with her new mother, Verizon. [image: AppAdvice]      
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Perhaps now you’ve read Fred Vogelstein’s feature about the relationship between AT&T and Apple in this month’s Wired magazine. If not, you definitely should, it’s | You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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