Friday, March 11, 2011

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Zynga’s FarmVille Now Allows You To Sow Seeds At A Farm In The English Countryside

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 08:59 AM PST

With the success of Zynga’s newest game CityVille, the gaming giant’s first game, FarmVille, has taken a backseat in terms of buzz. But despite the competition from its sister games, FarmVille is still posting impressive usage numbers on Facebook; with 14 million daily active users and 44 million monthly active users (this data doesn’t include usage on Zynga’s mobile apps). FarmVille is still the second most popular game on Facebook, behind CityVille of course. And today, Zynga is launching its biggest product enhancement to FarmVille since the game’s launch a few years ago—a second farm experience in the English Countryside.

So now users will be able to create a second farm (players previously could only create one farm), in a new venue and geographic area—the English Countryside. Zynga has worked to make the new area and farming experience unique and separate from the regular FarmVille experience.

When you choose to start a farm in the English Countryside, you’ll be greeting by a Duke with an airship who will take you to the new region for your farm, where you can get started on building your farm. The game itself is similar to the sowing experience on FarmVille but with a number of new features. The English Countryside includes a exclusive crops and buildings, a new visual layout, new characters and more.

One of the new features that Zynga’s GM of FarmVille Todd Arnold highlighted is the ability to breed animals. For example, users can choose to breed sheep, pick the sheep they want to breed, create babies and earn points for breeding. While you could create baby animals in FarmVille, this new breeding feature is a more interactive and in-depth feature.

The new farm will also how you a map of how you are progressing through the game compared to your friends. And you can easily travel back from the English Countryside to your home farm on FarmVille and work on both farms at the same time.

Arnold says that Zynga evaluated a number of different climates and locales for the second farm experience, including a tropical island farm, but eventually decided to go with the English Countryside. Zynga conducted a number of surveys within its games, and players overwhelmingly responded positively to the UK-based farming experience.

For now, English Countryside farms can only be developed on Facebook but depending on the traction the new experience receives from players, this could be expanded to FarmVille’s mobile apps. And Arnold says that the hope is that English Countryside will resonate with FarmVille users, and the gaming company will add additional farming experiences.

As we indicated above, although FarmVille has taken a backseat to CityVille, the game is still seeing viral use. FarmVille has received 30+ million likes on Facebook (FarmVille English Countryside's Facebook page has 1.5+ million likes even before launching), and there are now more tractors in FarmVille than there are in the world.

Judging by the success of pretty much any social game that Zynga develops, I’m going to bet that FarmVille English Countryside will be a hit.

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Zynga
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With Tilt-Shift And A News Feed, Instagram Is Ready To Rock SXSW

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 08:30 AM PST

For all the talk of group messaging apps being the breakout hits at SXSW this year, most people are overlooking another genre: mobile photo-sharing apps. But that’s probably because a few of those apps already are pretty big hits. Take Instagram, for example. The app already has well over 2 million users, even though it’s not even six months old yet. For some context, when Foursquare successfully launched at SXSW two years ago, they left town with just 5,000 users.

But just because Instagram has had some early success, that doesn’t mean they don’t recognize the value of putting out a new app in time for SXSW. And this morning we get just that. And it’s brings two pretty significant upgrades.

The first big addition is a new camera feature called tilt-shift. If you’re a camera app fanatic, you’ll undoubtedly already know what this is. For everyone else, it’s a new effect that allows you to focus on a certain part of an image and blur the rest. “It’s one of the most popular filters people have used outside of Instagram,” co-founder Kevin Systrom says, noting that they decided to build their own from scratch.

This marks the first time that Instagram had ventured into effects that weren’t straight-up photo filters. And it’s going to lead to a lot more interesting combinations of photos as it can be combined with any of the existing filters.

But the bigger addition is the new News Feed. Previously, the News tab in the app consisted of new follower, likes, and comment notifications. It was useful to new users, but pretty bland overall. So Instagram redid the entire thing.

Now the News area is more akin to a robust News Feed like what Facebook and other bigger networks offer. You can see who your friends started following, what pictures your friends like, and which ones they comment on. What’s great is that these can be photos from people you don’t already follow, so it’s a powerful new discovery tool.

“I’m excited that the new version gives people a whole new way to browse Instagram. Through your friends’ activity you have rich way for discovering beautiful photos you may never have seen otherwise. The new features open up new doors for exploration and discovery which make Instagram that much more fun to use,” Systrom says of the new feature.

Fans of the way the News tab previously worked can still find that functionality in the new “You” area of the tab. But this has also been given an entirely new look, to be more clickable.

And the Instagram update comes with two other smaller updates as well. You can now finally share Instagram images over email. You can enter one or multiple email addresses in the settings and use the toggle switch to determine if you should send them out with each picture or not. This is useful for services that accept pictures via email (and undoubtedly for parents/grandparents who have no idea what Instagram is as well).

There’s also a new geolocation layer baked into Instagram. While location has been a part of the service since day one, this was previously relying solely on Foursquare’s place database. That’s still there, but just in case you don’t want to tag a picture to a specific place, Instagram will simply record the coordinates that you took the picture at. Why? “This means that within the API, you can find your photos more granularly based on locations,” Systrom notes. He also says that when the website they’re working on rolls out, it will make it so that every picture shows up on a map.

Oh, and one more thing. Regular users of Instagram will know what a pain it is to reply to someone — you have to manually type in their username each time or they may not see it. Well now you don’t have to type it in anymore. Simply hold down on a username you wish to reply to and you’ll get the option to do just that.

That alone may be worth the upgrade.

Instagram’s rivals aren’t sitting still either in the quest to dominate SXSW. PicPlz just released an update that added photo borders and collections yesterday.

You can find Instagram in the App Store here. It’s a free download.

Social Music Startup Rdio Pushes Play Button For API, Affiliate Program

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 08:30 AM PST


Rdio, the social music startup founded by Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, is expanding its platform today with the launch of its API and an affiliate program.

Rdio launched last year as an unlimited, on-demand social music service that allows users to build and share online music collections from a catalogue of over 8 million songs. Rdio offers a Web-only music streaming music service for $4.99, and a premium version that adds mobile access for $9.99 per month.

Now, Rdio’s API gives developers the ability to create web apps that can search, access and play all of the artists, songs, albums, playlists, and charts in Rdio's catalog of over 8 million songs. The open platform includes an oEmbed API, REST API, and Web Playback API and allows developers to access community-only features such as the ability to see what's in heavy rotation in your network, follow people whose music tastes you like, check out other people's music collections and modify a personal collection or playlist. Rdio also plans on releasing a playback API for iOS and Android in the future.

Unlike other APIs, this one is tied to a subscription service and users who do not sign up to use Rdio (either as a subscriber or a trial user) won’t get the full benefits of the API. Whether that is enough to cripple the API remains to be seen. So visitors on third party sites using Rdio’s API will be able to stream full length songs, whether they are a subscriber or a trial user. Users who are not subscribers or trial users that encounter the Rdio API on third-party sites will be able to hear 30-second song excerpts. These users will also be given the option of enlisting in a free 7-day trial (no credit card required) to hear the full song.

Additionally, developers will be able to monetize their applications through a new affiliate program which will pay commissions for referring new subscribers and song downloads. Affiliates can earn two to three percent gross revenue per month for the lifetime of a new subscriber and seven percent gross revenue per song download referred.

Todd Berman, VP of Engineering at Rdio says that an API has been the startup’s most requested feature. Rdio’s API is already being uses by a number of web companies, including AOL’s new Play app, Tweetlouder, and The GRAMMY Awards' MusicIsLifeIsMusic microsite.

Rdio, which just raised $17.5 million, in new funding, has made it to the U.S. (albeit with a different model) before much hyped competitor Spotify. And Google Music, the search giant’s music service has yet to make its public debut. Rdio is probably smart to start wooing developers and expanding its ecosystem and reach before these competitors launch.

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Rdio
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Fly Or Die: Can Ditto Get You Laid? Plus, TurboTax for the iPad

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 07:44 AM PST

Sex and taxes—usually you don’t see those two words in the same sentence, but on today’s episode of Fly or Die we cover apps that will help you with both. Well, sort of. This week, we take a look at Ditto, TurboTax for the iPad and the new Olympus E-PL1 micro 4/3 camera.

Ditto is a brand new mobile app (iTunes) that helps you plan what you want to do and find people to do it with. “Ultimately, we are all looking to get laid. It is what all social apps are about in the end,” jokes Ditto founder Jyri Engestrom (previously of Jaiku), who joins us as our surprise guest.

Ditto isn’t really about sex so much as it is about broadcasting what you are doing and what you want to do to your friends and associates. To the extent that what you are doing makes you seem interesting to others, maybe that will help in the love department, but it is not a dating app. I am intrigued by it because it is very different than most other geo mobile apps. It’s about creating serendipity by throwing out a desire to eat out, watch a movie, get a drink, or exercise, and then making it easy to create conversations around those desires. Of course, sometimes it’s just about telling the world that you are eating nuts on a train. But that can be rewarding too.

What about taxes? Nobody likes to do taxes, but TurboTax for the iPad at least lets you do them on your couch. The app just came out this week. And finally, we have the Olympus E-PL1, which is a shrunk-down digital SLR. Swap lenses with less bulk.

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Jyri Engestrom
Intuit
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RoundPegg, The eHarmony For Jobs, Not So Harmonious With eHarmony (Humor)

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 06:46 AM PST

When we recently wrote about a round of funding raised by RoundPegg, we dubbed it the ‘eHarmony for jobs’ in the article headline. eHarmony was none too pleased and actually wrote an email to us saying that the use of the name ‘eHarmony’ in such a manner could lead to genericization of the brand. Which tempts us to do it more often, of course.

Anyway, we were almost done laughing about the whole ordeal, but now RoundPegg has apparently come back for round two, requesting that we correct our article because eHarmony’s letter could lead to ‘denerdification of the RoundPegg Trademark’.

The Denerdification of the RoundPegg Trademark

Hello,

On March 9, 2011 you ran a letter from the eHarmony(TM) legal department improperly insinuating that RoundPegg has a mere one algorithm. I’m sure you can appreciate that the allegation of being mono-algorithmic leads to the denerdification of what we’re doing and therefore must be addressed.

As RoundPegg matches people to company culture, team dynamics and manager communication style, the use of a single algorithm would presume that we view ‘matching’ as one dimensional. Neither people nor companies are that simplistic.

We request that you correct the letter you received and pluralize the word in all future writings when referring to RoundPegg.

Respectfully yours.

+brent
co-ceo | founder
RoundPegg

In case you were wondering, RoundPegg is poking fun at the letter eHarmony sent us. For your background, this is it with emphasis ours (and we swear this one wasn’t written as a joke):

Genericization of “eHarmony” trademark

Hello,

On February 18, 2011, TechCrunch correspondent Leena Rao published an article entitled "RoundPegg Raises $1.27 Million To Be The eHarmony For Jobs."  While we appreciate the reference to our business and matching technology that were intended to be communicated via the title, I'm sure you can appreciate that such use of our eHarmony brand can lead to genericization of the brand, thereby affecting the goodwill and other intangible trademark rights we have so heavily invested in.

From that perspective, we ask that TechCrunch refrain from using the eHarmony brand in any way that would compare other companies' products to that of ours, especially when it comes to their matching technology or algorithm (e.g. "eHarmony of ___________").

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

Best Regards,

Steve

————————————————————————————————————

Steve S. Nikkhou || Sr. Director, Legal Affairs || eHarmony, Inc.

Hopefully RoundPegg’s letter will lead to defuzzification of the whole situation.

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RoundPegg
eHarmony
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They Grow Up So Fast – Foursquare Hit With Its First Patent Infringement Suit

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 05:57 AM PST

It’s part of the ritual for tech companies who achieve a certain status in the world this day and age, whether riding solely on the waves of hype or by making a ton of money, to get targeted by trigger-happy patent owners at one point or another.

Well, Foursquare, today’s the day.

Foursquare Labs, Inc., the company behind the popular check-in service, has been slapped with its first patent infringement lawsuit by a company called Mobile Commerce Framework.

I’d link to the latter’s website, but patent trolls usually don’t even bother to have those – they’d rather spend their time suing companies who actually make and/or sell something – and this one is no exception. Funnily enough, it looks like the company was simply named after the title of the patent-in-suit – how’s that for creativity?

On April 6, 2010, Mobile Commerce Framework (MCF) was issued US Patent No. 7,693,752 by the USPTO. In summary, this patent describes:

a subscription-based system for providing commerce information for one or more mobile devices for one or more merchants. Some techniques employed feature a subscription-based method for presenting commercial resources to a mobile device.

The method involves receiving mobile device user information relating to a geographic location to locate one or more merchants within a subscription-based shopping network, and receiving mobile device user information relating to a merchant type within the subscription-based shopping network.

According to MCF, Foursquare infringes its patent by creating and distributing mobile apps that can be used by people to obtain information and offers from merchants by searching, based on their physical location and merchant type.

If this sounds like what a ton of mobile application developers are making and distributing these days, then you’re not the only one – I hope MCF isn’t just looking to score a precedent so they can start targeting more companies.

Mobile Commerce Framework is asking for monetary damages and that “Foursquare be directed to withdraw from distribution all infringing products, and that all infringing products or materials be impounded or destroyed”. The complaint is embedded below.

MCF is represented by Jonathan Hangartner, owner of X-Patents. We’ve contacted Foursquare for comment and will update when we hear back.

Hat tip goes to patent news site PriorSmart.


Complaint _23_
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Foursquare
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SoundTracking Sets Out To Share Your Music Moments In A Postcard-Like Manner

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 05:30 AM PST

Twitter allows you to share a short message at any given time. Foursquare allows you to share your location at any given time. Instagram allows you to share your photos at any given time. IntoNow allows you to share what you’re watching on television at any given time. The list goes on. But oddly, that list doesn’t yet include anyone who has nailed sharing the music you’re listening to at any given time. There’s a ton of potential in that space. And that’s exactly what Schematic Labs is aiming at with their first product, SoundTracking.

The idea for SoundTracking came about when founder Steve Jang realized that you could easily share all of these other bits of information easily via your phone, but not the music you were listening to at the moment you were listening to it. Sure, there are some great music identifying apps like Shazam and SoundHound. And there are plenty of music playback and recommendation apps like Rdio and Pandora. But they aren’t inherently social. That’s the key in Jang’s mind to nailing what he calls “your music moment.”

And this music moment is about more than just the music. The music is the key, but it’s also about sharing where you are (location), letting your friends see what you see as you share a song (picture), and explaining your situation a bit (comment). All of those are baked-in functionality for SoundTracking a song. “You don’t just want to share the Bon Iver song. You want to share it with the image of raindrops on your window,” Jang says, only half joking.

But he’s right. Musical experiences are often about more than the music. They’re about what you’re doing when you’re listening to the music. And that’s exactly what SoundTracking facilitates the sharing of.

To share a song, you simply fire up the app and do one of three things. If you’re listening to the song already on your iPhone or iPod touch, you can click a button and have the app identify it (band and song title). If there’s a song playing through some external source, like the radio, you can fire up the Gracenote-powered listening engine which will ID the song. Or you can manually enter in what you’re listening to via a search.

If you share a picture with the music, that will be the background of your share. Otherwise, SoundTracking will find the album art for the song you’re sharing. It all works very smoothly.

But none of that means much unless the people on the other end of your share can hear what you hear. So SoundTracking has woven in full iTunes Store support into the app. This means that each share (assuming the song is available on iTunes) will come with a 90-second preview to hear the song. And if you like it, it’s just one click to head over to iTunes to buy it.

No, you don’t get the full song experience. But Apple’s recent move to up the preview time to 90 seconds does definitely help SoundTracking. And they’re looking into possible partnerships down the road for full song playback.

Obviously, all of the other standard social keys are in play here. You’ll follow friends in the app, and their shares will populate your main feed. You can both “like” and “love” songs, as well as comment. And you can also see what songs and locations are trending based on network-wide activity.

Jang likes to think of SoundTracking as a sort of “musical postcard”. Again, the thinks the combination of elements in the app help users tell a story through music. And they couldn’t have picked a better time to launch as SXSW starts today, with the music portion taking place next week. Of course, they’ll have some competition from day one: AOL is launching a competing app called Play — though it will be Android-only at first, while SoundTracking will be iPhone-only at first.

But it’s important to note that SoundTracking is just the first app in a grander vision that Jang and co-founder Matt Paul have for Schematic Labs. They aim to build mobile-first entertainment apps across a bunch of different verticals. And they’re already working on their next project. But first, they’re going to obviously do an Android version of SoundTracking as well.

To make this all happen, Schematic Labs raised a seed round late last year. Investors include True Ventures, Google Ventures, AOL Ventures, Keith Rabois, Bill Tai, Alread Lin, Garrett Camp, and Hunter Walk.

Find SoundTracking in the App Store here. It is a free download.

‘SUPER 8′ Movie Trailer Launches Exclusively On Twitter, TwitVid

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 05:24 AM PST

A couple of hours ago, Paramount Pictures launched the trailer for SUPER 8, the new film from director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg, only on and in partnership with Twitter.

Notably, the movie trailer is being seeded on TwitVid, a video upload site created by a small startup that was launched back in August 2009. Should be a boon for them.

According to the press statement, this exclusive trailer premiere marks a first for both the studio and Twitter. People can follow the account @Super8Movie to stay abreast of news updates and a first look at the trailer, and also use the hashtag #Super8Movie to share information about the movie with their friends.

Facebook isn’t completely out of the picture, though – Paramount Pictures is syncing its Twitter account with Facebook to connect the conversation between the two platforms.

Said Amy Powell, Paramount’s EVP of Interactive Marketing Strategies & Film Production:

“With Twitter, fans are able to foster a real time conversation in a communal viewing environment and we wanted people everywhere to have the chance to discover the SUPER 8 trailer here first.”

SUPER 8 will be released by Paramount Pictures nationwide on June 10th.

You can watch the trailer here.

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TwitVid
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AOL’s Mobile-First Group Steps To The Stage With Play, An Instagram For Music

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 05:00 AM PST

As you know, we’re now owned by AOL. And while it’s a big company, you’d think we’d be able to find out some tidbits of information about secret projects they’re working on. Nope. Sometimes it seems as if they’re fine with anyone else finding out what they’re working on as long as it’s not us. Take the “mobile-first” group for example. We heard about their tablet reader thing when everyone else did. And now we’re hearing about their secret music-sharing app, Play, when everyone else is.

Well, at least it’s a good idea. It’s essentially Instagram for music. At least that’s how Senior Director of Mobile Projects Sol Lipman pitches it to me.

“Music is the fabric of our lives,” Lipman says in a sincere way that almost makes it sound as if it’s not a level-5 cliche alert. “We wanted to build an app that allowed you to share it in a really interesting way,” he continues. So they teamed up with the AOL Music team to build Play, an app debuting today for Android devices.

And it’s good timing. SXSW kicks off today. And the festival is heavily integrated into the app. For example, AOL has secured some exclusive streaming rights from shows at SXSW that you can watch from within the app. They also have Spinner’s MP3 of the day, and full-length previews from AOL’s CD Listening Party.

But the key to the app is the sharing of the music that you already know you like. Thanks to all of the content available to you in the app — including Rdio content — you can easily share any song with your Play friends, Facebook or Twitter. These songs can be shared with the album cover art, or a picture of your choosing.

And if the other Play users subscribe to Rdio, they’ll also be able to listen to the full songs. Otherwise, non-Rdio users will be able to hear previews of the songs. There’s also a light geolocation layer (where you shared the song from). And you’ll be able to comment and like others’ shared songs.

Again, the app will be Android-first for now. But Lipman says an iPhone version will be out in a “few weeks”.

But the app is not without competition. Rival app SoundTracking is also making its first appearance in time for SXSW, though it will be iPhone-only at first.

Need Some Cash? Buy Apple Stock Instead Of Apple Gear

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 04:46 AM PST

If you had bought Apple stock instead of an iPod back in 2001, you’d be about $10,000 richer. According to an assessment by Kyle Conroy, you’d be a few times richer if you bought Apple stock instead of Apple gear on day of launch. What does this say about us, as consumers? That we’re ravenous fools intent on spending ourselves into oblivion? Pretty much.

The highest bit of profit comes from the Apple PowerBook G3 250 released in 1997 on the cusp of Apple’s turnaround. If you invested the $5,700 you paid for that laptop into Apple stock, you’d have made $330,000. However, to be fair, the productivity gains you probably experienced thanks to a laptop in those days may have made up for the initial purchase price.

Read more…



Radian6 Acquires Social Media Firm 6Consulting

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 02:20 AM PST

Radian6, which has been making waves in social media monitoring space for the past few years, has extended its global reach with the acquisition of UK-based social media firm 6Consulting. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 6Consulting's clients include Kellogg's, EDF, Dyson, Fujitsu, Sony Ericsson, the Metropolitan Police as well as many of the region's PR and ad agencies. The firm has been an official reseller for Radian6 since 2009.


You Can Order An iPad 2 Right Now. Are You Buying?

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 01:50 AM PST

Slightly ahead of the announced 1 AM PST launch time, Apple's iPad 2, which was introduced earlier this month, is now up for sale at the company's US online store.

Estimated shipping date for iPads are from March 18 to March 25th. That day, the iPad 2 will also be made available in 26 additional countries – Apple says further international availability and pricing will be announced at a later date.

Online orders will ship within 3 to 5 days, and buyers are limited to two units per order.

Later today, at 5 PM local time to be exact, the iPad 2 will go on sale at all 236 Apple retail stores as well as at AT&T, Best Buy, Target, Verizon Wireless, Walmart and select Apple Authorized Resellers.

Other than that, not much to report.

Question is: are you buying? And if so, which model, and which color?

(I did not purchase an iPad 1, but I will be buying a black 64GB iPad 2)

Further reading: TechCrunch Review — The iPad 2: Yeah, You're Gonna Want One.

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After Amazon, Masterobjects Takes Google To Court Over Instant Search Patent

Posted: 11 Mar 2011 12:59 AM PST

Yesterday, I broke the story of a small search software outlet named Masterobjects taking on Amazon.com in a notable patent infringement lawsuit.

The patent-in-suit, US patent no. 7,752,326, describes a method to immediately start showing search results even while a user is still typing his query into the search box – instant search if you will.

I and others wondered why Amazon.com was singled out specifically, and not for example Google or Microsoft, which both offer custom search engines that start showing results while a user is entering his query, or Apple (App Store search) or eBay (another ecommerce giant that employs such search technology on its website).

Well, turns out Google is indeed the next target on the list.

I asked Masterobjects why they waited until now to sue Amazon.com, which started offering ‘search suggestions’ (using technology which Masterobjects alleges infringes it patent) back in 2008. I also asked why they singled out Amazon specifically.

In a brief response, the company tells me that they will not comment on either this case or the complaint they’ve just filed against Google, revealing that the search giant is effectively already under legal attack by the software maker.

Google premiered its instant search feature at a special event in San Francisco back in September 2010 (see introduction video below). Furthermore, back in December 2004 the company debuted Google Suggest, providing users with search suggestions, in realtime, while they type.

For your background, here is the summary of the patent, originally filed in August 2001 and entitled “System and method for utilizing asynchronous client server communication objects”:

A session-based client-server asynchronous information search and retrieval system for sending character-by-character or multi-character strings of data to an intelligent server, that can be configured to immediately analyze the lengthening string and return to the client increasingly appropriate search information.

Embodiments include integration within an Internet, web or other online environment, including applications for use in interactive database searching, data entry, online searching, online purchasing, music purchasing, people-searching, and other applications. In some implementations the system may be used to provide dynamically focused suggestions, auto-completed text, or other input-related assistance, to the user.

The obvious next question: is this just the beginning and are others giants such as Microsoft, eBay and Apple next on the hit list?

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Google
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Posterous Joins The SXSW Pile On With Posterous Events For iPhone

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 07:47 PM PST


Because you ain’t nobody unless you have a special version of your app for SXSW, Posterous has today released its own effort with Posterous Events, a which allows people at a massive event like SXSW or even something as humble as a family picnic to create a simple site around that event using their iPhone apps.

All users who want to create a Posterous site around an event have to do is open up their iPhones and create a .posterous address for a specific location and post (the site you most recently posted to will stay on top of your events).

Posterous is incorporating SimpleGeo location data into the app, so that anyone with the Posterous iPhone app also in the vicinity of a given event will be able to see that event and post photos and media which are then presented on the site in slideshow format (above).

Says head of marketing Rich Pearson, “Our aim is to make Posterous Events the default place to share at concerts, weddings, parties and conferences – that said, it’s an early version.” Posterous is also planning event notification, private event capability in a later build, but for now, enjoy SXSW Posterousers.

You can find the app in the app store here.

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Loosecubes Wants To Change The Way You Co-Work, Launches SXSW Micro App

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 06:50 PM PST

Seed funded by Accel and Battery Ventures, Loosecubes is a workplace sharing community with a focus on co-working. Unlike Liquidspaces, which primarily matches people with work spaces, Loosecubes founder Campbell McKellar tells me she wants to move beyond providing an area with wifi and match people with people.

Loosecubes will be launching a redesigned site and product next week and but wants to help people come together in advance, and thus is holding a Co-Working Un-Conference in Austin tonight until 11pm at 301 Colorado (Colorado and 4th). To further drive this “bringing people together” thing home, LooseCubes built the HTML 5 app Instant Jelly especially for the SXSW occasion.

Taking off of Amit Gupta’s idea of a “Jelly” (a formalized work-together) Instant Jelly in an HTML5 mobile web app which allows you to create spontaneous co-working events by opening ij.lcub.es in your smart phone browser, plugging in your Twitter handle and the When, Where and Theme of your event.

Aside from the events being tweeted out from the @instantjelly account, you can also tweet them out yourself using a unique RSVP link. The app then allows other people to request invites to your Jelly, which you can then deny or approve.

Continuing on the Jelly theme, Campbell eventually wants to make LooseCubes more like a social network for co-working than a real estate listing service like eVenues.com, and hopes to keeping adding social features after her services relaunch next week, so people can check out the social aspects of a space before you sign up.

For example, people with industry designations could fan a page and people could evaluate the site based on the profiles of the people who friended it like, “Oh these people are like me they’re all writers.” “Finding a place to work in a hotel lobby is a lot different than having someone work with you for the day,” says McKeller.

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Loosecubes
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Aol To Journalists: You Be The Rock Star, We’ll Be Mark Chapman

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 06:25 PM PST

“You be the rock star, we’ll be your stage.” – Aol billboard outside TCHQ

“Hey, what’s going on? – Russell just got electrocuted.” – Almost Famous

The re-invigoration of Aol continues apace today with the announcement by Tim Armstrong that 900 employees will be laid off before the afternoon is out. According to Wired, those canned include "veteran journalists from AOL's top news sites, including PoliticsDaily, DailyFinance and Walletpop". Or as AOL's SVP of news put it: "I have just laid off dozens of the most talented journalists & product folks I know."

And, lest overpaid freelancers like me get too cocky, Tim had a nice fuck-you-very-much for us too. “Going forward, AOL will invest more heavily in our in-house editorial team and transition away from a reliance on freelance journalists,” he wrote in an email leaked to Business Insider. Thank God I write books for a living, eh?

To be fair, though, Armstrong’s grand plan for making Aol the world’s greatest content company isn’t limited to laying off "dozens of the most talented journalists and product folks". According to a second leaked memo that’s just landed in my inbox, other proposed measures to improve the bottom line include…

  • Only completely restructuring the entire company three times a week, instead of five.
  • Ending the company’s popular "let’s burn all our money" Fridays.
  • Increasing the cost of AOL dial-up and broadband to $10,000 a month "because those fucking idiots will buy anything."
  • Switching to premium rate "900" numbers for the company’s 40,000 mandatory weekly conference calls.
  • Resisting the temptation to give buying Bebo "just one more shot."
  • Rebranding PoliticsDaily as BieberKittensandDirtyPornDaily.
  • Encouraging local Patch journalists to increase revenue by sending 419 scam mail to their readers.
  • Making all potential editorial hires take a Turing test and rejecting any who pass.

Instapaper Goes Social With Sharing, Likes, And Friends

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 05:51 PM PST

I remember when I first fell in love with Instapaper. It was a few years ago, and most people were still using Delicious or worse, their browsers, to bookmark things on the web. Delicious was still solid at the time, but it was also pretty slow. Instapaper was wonderful because it was fast. You hit one button (a bookmarklet) and it saved an article to read later.

The reality is that the service hasn’t changed all that much over the years. But the iPhone and now iPad have transformed it from being a useful service into an essential one. And it has grown into a big enough business where creator Marco Arment was able to leave his job as CTO of Tumblr to focus on it full time. And now we’re seeing the fruits of that.

Instapaper 3.0 is a massive update. The iPhone, iPad, and web interfaces have all been updated to include the big new aspect of the service: social.

You can now easily share things you Instapaper to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinboard, and Evernote. Once you link up your Instapaper account to each, you’ll see an option to automatically share stories you “like”.

And that another big new feature: Likes. It used to be that you could “star” stories you have saved to further mark them as important. But it was never really clear how useful that feature actually was. But now “likes” are directly tied to the sharing aspect — not only sharing to other networks, but also within Instapaper itself.

The service now has a social layer that allows you to subscribe to Likes shared by other users you know (you find them via your contact list or the other social networks). Previously, there was a way to subscribe to other users’ Instapaper feeds if they were public, but it wasn’t very obvious how you did that. Now there’s a nice big “Friends” button at the top of the app.

There’s also a new “Editors” button which allows you to find new curated content from the likes of Longreads, Longform.org, and Instapaper’s own “Editor’s Picks”.

And finally, there’s also a new “Web” button along the top of the app to allow you to browse websites you like and mark things to read later.

In his post on the new release, Arment also notes a half dozen other upgrades in Instapaper 3.0. Image quality is better, downloads happen faster, and other settings have been tweaked. The biggest of these other changes is the ability to search the content of downloaded articles. Arment notes that this isn’t website-enabled yet for the entire archive of content you’ve saved, but he hints that that may well be coming.

You can find Instapaper in the App Store here. 3.0 is a free upgrade for existing users of the Pro version, otherwise it’s $4.99 — well worth it.

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Social Retargeting Ad Network RadiumOne Raises $21M At A $200M Valuation

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 03:58 PM PST

RadiumOne, an online ad network that aims to combine social and intent data to serve ads, has raised $21 million in Series B funding led by Crosslink Capital, with DFJ Esprit, Adams Street Partners and Trinity Ventures participating in the round. This latest round brings RadiumOne’s total funding to $33.5 million. Although the company declined to name the valuation in the round, we heard from industry sources that the network’s valuation was roughly $200 million (we heard one online company tried to buy RadiumOne for $250 million).

RadiumOne was founded by serial entrepreneur and gWallet founder Gurbaksh Chahal. Chahal sold his ad network BlueLithium to Yahoo for $300 million in 2007 and at the time, Chahal’s company was the fifth largest ad network in the United States and the second largest in the United Kingdom. Chahal’s non-compete contract with Yahoo ended in October 2010, and he got back into the online ad business with RadiumOne.

RadiumOne mines social data and use this information to identify relevant consumers for brands. Through what Chahal calls "social retargeting,” RadiumOne analyzes how users interact with one another on social networks to find the consumers that identify with a brand's current customer base, and then serves advertisements to this audience across the company’s network of publishers.

RadiumOne gets this data directly from social networks (which sell anonymous user behavior data to advertisers), its own gWallet offer platform, blogging platforms, microblogging platforms (i.e. Twitter), URL shorteners, photosharing websites and other applications. As social media users share information like links, blog posts, videos and more, RadiumOne will analyze this data to place the consumers on a social graph that will accurately describe their “behavior.”

RadiumOne will also take the social data and form "social clusters" of people who know each other and share common interests. RadiumOne will target these new groups based on their interactions.The startup recently rolled out a new social ad format with likes and shares, that promise to increase engagement.

The latest funding round will be used for international expansion and acquisitions, which Chahal says will center around talent and technology. Specfically he says that there are a number of interesting companies who are mined social data that are currently targets for RadiumOne. In terms of revenue, Chahal says that RadiumOne saw revenue in the double digit millions in 2010 and reached profitability in Q4 of the year. He says RadiumOne is on track to post four to five times 2010 revenue in 2011.

We sat down with Chahal for a video interview about the funding, RadiumOne’s future and more.

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VigLink Raises Another $5.4 Million To Help Publishers Monetize Outbound Clicks

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 03:57 PM PST

VigLink, a startup that helps publishers and bloggers monetize their outbound traffic, has closed a $5.4 million Series B funding round led by Emergence Capital, with participation from existing investors Google Ventures and First Round Capital. The company raised $800,000 in January 2010 and has now raised a total of $7.3 million. The company is also revealing that SoftTech VC took part in an earlier round (their participation was not previously disclosed).

VigLink’s goal is to help publishers monetize their content more effectively and without much effort. After installing a small snippet of code on your site, VigLink will detect whenever you create an outbound link to any of 12,500 merchant sites. It will then automatically convert this link to an affiliate link, which means that you get a kickback whenever someone clicks it and eventually completes a purchase on the linked merchant site. VigLink generally takes 25% of this cut, but given that many publishers don’t monetize their outbound traffic at all, it’s a lot better than nothing. Of course, you could always sign up for an affiliate program yourself, but VigLink is more convenient.

In addition to converting these links, VigLink is also gradually rolling out a new product that automatically inserts affiliate links whenever a relevant keyword is mentioned (for example, if you mentioned Nike shoes in a blog post, the site might automatically add a link to that text). This is a more aggressive feature, but CEO Oliver Roup says that the company’s goal is to make their links unobtrusive. They’re totally optional for publishers, and the service will also cap the number of links in any given article at four.

Since launching in February 2010 the service has been embedded on 15,000 sites, which serve some 2 billion pageviews per month. The company isn’t talking about how much revenue it’s generated for publishers, other than to say it’s been “meaningful” to their bottom lines. VigLink acquired one of its competitors, DrivingRevenue, in August. Other competitors include UK-based startup Skimlinks.

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UberGenius: Uber Is Taking Control of SXSW Pedicabs

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 03:42 PM PST

San Francisco is a ghost town right now. It seems as if the entire city has packed up and headed to Austin, Texas for SXSW. The conference was too big two years ago. Then it got bigger last year. And this year it’s expected to be significantly bigger once again. I’m leaving tomorrow, and I’m scared.

But the good news is that an old trusty friend will be on hand to help us navigate the insane crowds: Uber. Yes, mobile app-controlled car service is heading to Austin as well for SXSW. But they’re doing it with a true Austin twist: pedicabs.

Anyone who has been to SXSW before will know how handy the pedicabs can be when you find yourself at one party either too tired or too inebriated to get across the city to another party. Now, if you have the Uber app on your iPhone or Android phone (you can use text messages also), you can simply request a pick up that way — it’s the same general process as hailing a regular Uber.

But there is one big difference: you negotiate the price you want to pay with the pedicab driver (well, technically, “biker”, I suppose). Obviously, it will depend on distance, etc.

This is an absolutely brilliant move by Uber. There will be 100 or so pedicabs flying around Austin with their branding on the side, we’re told. (There will also be a few regular Uber cars as well, we hear.) And Uber is taking it one step further by donating 20 percent of each fare taken in during SXSW to LIVESTRONG.

This move into Austin follows the news we reported just a few days ago that Uber was also coming to New York City.

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Google May Face Antitrust Hearings In Senate

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 02:52 PM PST

Google is constantly under antitrust scrutiny these days, whether it’s for large acquisitions into new markets such as its proposed ITA deal or for its general dominance in search. The company has faced antitrust investigations in Europe. But now Google faces possible antitrust hearings in the U.S. Senate .

Senator Herb Kohl (Democrat from Wisconsin), who is the Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, announced his subcommittee’s agenda today for the 112th Congress. One of the planned agenda items is a probe into Google’s “dominance over Internet search” and “allegations raised by e-commerce websites that compete with Google that they are being treated unfairly in search ranking, and in their ability to purchase search advertising.”

That would primarily be the online travel industry and its “FairSearch” consortium which is trying to block the ITA deal. In general, Google doesn’t buy too many e-commerce businesses—the failed attempt to buy Groupon notwithstanding. And ITA itself is more of an information services company than a pure e-commerce company, but the deal could certainly impact online travel purchases.

Here is the language from the Senator’s release, pertaining to the issue it wants to address:

Competition in Online Markets/Internet Search Issues
Access to the wealth of information and e-commerce on the Internet is essential for consumers and business alike. As the Internet continues to grow in importance to the national economy, businesses and consumers, the Subcommittee will strive to ensure that this sector remains competitive, that Internet search is fair to its users and customers, advertisers have sufficient choices, and that consumers' privacy is guarded. In recent years, the dominance over Internet search of the world's largest search engine, Google, has increased and Google has increasingly sought to acquire e-commerce sites in myriad businesses. In this regard, we will closely examine allegations raised by e-commerce websites that compete with Google that they are being treated unfairly in search ranking, and in their ability to purchase search advertising. We also will continue to closely examine the impact of further acquisitions in this sector.

The thing is that I don’t think anyone has alleged that Google’s travel search results is treating competitors unfairly. The argument is that it could end up treating them unfairly. It’s all hypothetical at this point. Of course, if the Senate does decide to hold antitrust hearings (at this point no specific hearings are scheduled, it’s just an agenda item for the subcommittee), the discussion will no doubt range far beyond e-commerce into all sorts of other antitrust arguments.

Now, if Eric Schmidt becomes Commerce Secretary, for which side will he have to testify?

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Picplz Adds Photo Collections And Borders

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 02:04 PM PST

Social photo sharing app picplz is preparing to roll out an update to both its Android and iPhone apps that will add the ability to create collections of photos. The feature is already live on its Website. Under every photo, next to the like button there is now an “add to collection” button. You can photos to existing collections or create new collections. For example, here is a collection of photos of Sunsets.

The idea is that much like people like to create playlists of songs they can create collections of photos from their own, the people they follow, or just the most interesting ones. The feature will appear in both the Android and iPhone mobile apps as soon as the updates go through. Android should be today, and iPhone (iTunes link) whenever Apple gets through the backlog of SXSW apps awaiting approval.

Another requested feature that will make it into the update is the option to put borders around your photos. Each filter will have a border option. The photos do tend to look much better with borders, although this is more of a catch-up feature to competitor Instagram, which has had borders from the start.

Instagram is still growing at a faster rate than picplz, but original futures like collections should help picplz differentiate itself. Instagram doesn’t even yet offer a website experience beyond individual page links for each photo. Whereas on picplz it is easy to explore interesting photos both on the site and in the mobile app. If collections are the new playlists, they need to be shared with people in both places.

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Analyst: Non-iPad Tablets Will Be Collecting Dust On Store Shelves

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 01:16 PM PST

The immense popularity of the iPad, and now the iPad 2 (recently reviewed by The Daily’s Peter Ha), has Apple’s competitors, in the words of Steve Jobs, flummoxed. What to do? According to a J.P. Morgan Research analyst, it may well be that all of these competitor tablets will be sitting on the store shelves as folks decide en masse that the iPad is the way to go. In other words, competitors try to convince people that their tablet is "better" than the iPad could well be wasting their time. And money, of course.

The report, which was obtained by Cnet, was presented by one Mark Moskowitz, and says that competitors trying to play catch-up are going to have a "tough" time, and that, the effort to flood the market with tablets could result in a severe over-saturation. Nothing’s quite worse thank sinking a bunch of money into a product’s R&D, manufacturing too many of them, then having them sit on store shelves—next to signs that say, "Sorry, we’re out of iPads. Check back later!"

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Social Analytics Platform BackType Raises a Cool Million in Funding

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 12:44 PM PST

Today, San Francisco-based marketing intelligence company, BackType, announced that it has closed a seed funding round of just over $1 million, led by a group of Silicon Valley investors, including lead investor True Ventures as well as Manu Kumar’s K9 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Founder Collective, Raymond Tonsing, and more.

BackType adds to the previous cumulative $315,000 of seed funding it raised in July 2008 and January 2009, from Y Combinator and True Ventures, respectively. It also recently added one of the co-founders of Palantir Technologies as an advisor.

BackType’s free analytics dashboard, which is currently in private beta, aims to help brands and agencies understand the business impact of social media in order to make more intelligent marketing decisions. The company has already amassed 30 terabytes (one terabyte is roughly equivalent to the entire contents of a large library) of social data (Tweets, Facebook comments and likes, blog comments, etc.) and assists more than 100 companies with their social media analytics, from The New York Times and Edelman to startups like Bitly, HubSpot, Hunch and SlideShare.

Making sense of terabytes of social data in realtime is no easy feat. BackType uses a high tech stream processing system, akin to Hadoop but for real-time processing, which they claim goes beyond what Facebook and Twitter have developed for their analytics. You can read more about the big data processor here. BackType CEO Christopher Golda told me that, thanks to this backend tech, the company was able to build and release influence profiles for every active Twitter user in under 24 hours.

The company provided TechCrunch with statistics for the viral hashtag #LessAmbitiousMovies as well as a snapshot of the number of mentions “Tunisia” received on Twitter after the fall of Tunisian president Ben Ali.

Golda said that BackType will be using this new round of seed funding to grow the team and launch its new paid analytics product, which he said will debut later this year. In the meantime, you can find its paid Twitter-only product here or use its free product here.

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Wanna Be A Movie Producer? Just Give $250 To Jon Heder & Nick Peterson On Kickstarter

Posted: 10 Mar 2011 11:29 AM PST

A couple weeks ago, we noted an interesting new project that had popped up on Kickstarter: an animated short film by Nick Peterson and Jon Heder. Heder, of course, is an actor known for his roles in Blades of Glory, Mama’s Boy, and yes, Napoleon Dynamite. He clearly could have funded this project himself, but he and Peterson decided to give Kickstarter a try to raise the $27,000 required to make the film.

I got the chance to talk with both Heder and Peterson the other day to ask them about the experience so far. The project still has 16 days of fundraising to go, and so far they’ve gotten about $4,000 in pledges, so they have a ways to go yet. But the two have good insight as to how exactly the process works for this type of project — and it’s clearly very much an experiment for them. If it works, they envision doing other movie projects this way — Heder even has some thoughts on if it could work for larger-scale projects.

So far, the $25 donation options for the film is the most popular one. But the $250 gets you an associate producer credit, and $1,000 gets you a co-producer credit. So if you ever wanted to be on IMDb, here’s your shot. Watch the full interview above — you can donate to the film on Kickstarter here.

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