The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Shoparatti: Another Daily Deal Aggregator (But Curated By Melissa Rivers!)
- McAfee: Change In Corporate Culture Leaves Businesses Vulnerable To Hackers
- eBay Acquires GSI Commerce For $2.4 Billion In Cash And Debt
- Lady Gaga Donates $750K To Zynga’s Japan Earthquake Relief Campaign
- Excelsior! Students Build Fruit Ninja Simulator
- Upstream Commerce Helps E-Retailers Price Their Products, Raises $1.25 Million
- Cloud-Based Networking Company Aerohive Networks Raises $25 Million
- Apple Announces WWDC 2011 And It’s All About The Software
- GroupMe Brings Brands Into The Conversation
- Nokia Ditches Old Familiar Font For Shiny New One
- CertiVox Raises $1.5 Million For Cloud-Based Content Security Technology
- Google’s Android Bear-Hug Comes To LG: New LG/Nexus Tablets Coming Soon?
- Apple Sets Dates For WWDC: June 6 Through June 10 At Moscone, SF
- After Visa, American Express Takes On PayPal With Digital Payments Platform
- Heartsy Is Groupon For Etsy
- JavaScript Creator And Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich To Advise Ajax.org
- UK Entrepreneurs Launch StartupBritain With Government Backing, But Not Money
- An App By Any Other Name …
- OMG/JK: The Color Of Controversy
- Glam Media Furthers International Presence With South Korean Vertical
- A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Points: Topguest Hooks Up With Instagram
- Strangers in Paradise
- (Founder Stories) Lauren Leto: Texts From Last Night Was A Million Dollar Idea, Bnter Is Next
| Shoparatti: Another Daily Deal Aggregator (But Curated By Melissa Rivers!) Posted: 28 Mar 2011 08:59 AM PDT
Exclusive - There’s a ton of daily deal sites out there, and we’ve seen a bunch of daily deal aggregators pop up in the past few months, too. Today sees the launch of yet another one of those, dubbed Shoparatti. A ‘one-stop destination for busy online shoppers’, Shoparatti’s claim to fame is its semi-famous editor-in-chief Melissa Rivers, daughter of comedian and actress Joan Rivers. Rivers and her team of editors will scour more than 100 daily deal web sites and showcase the best offers they can find through Shoparatti.com, Facebook and an iPhone app. According to the press release, Rivers will be drawing upon her “expertise in spotting trends in lifestyle, entertainment and fashion” to make her Shoparatti selections. Yipit and 8coupons needn’t worry too much at this point, though. "As a mom and passionate shopper I know what it's like to spend hours hunting down the best deals on the web; it's frustrating and time consuming," said Rivers. "Everyone knows I love shopping, not to mention getting a deal and telling my friends about the great deal I just got." Barf. We’d be somewhat excited about the news if endorsements of involvement from celebrities ever helped a startup succeed in the cutthroat e-commerce industry, but alas. Also, why would anyone boast about the fact that ‘everyone’ knows how much he or she loves shopping?
       
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| McAfee: Change In Corporate Culture Leaves Businesses Vulnerable To Hackers Posted: 28 Mar 2011 07:51 AM PDT
       
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| eBay Acquires GSI Commerce For $2.4 Billion In Cash And Debt Posted: 28 Mar 2011 07:12 AM PDT
eBay has just announced that it has agreed to buy GSI Commerce, a provider of ecommerce and interactive marketing services, for $29.25 a share, or total consideration of approximately $2.4 billion. The acquisition, which will be financed with cash and debt, is expected to close in Q3 2011. With more than 180 customers across 14 merchandise categories, GSI has long-term commerce services relationships with a wealth of retailers and brands. eBay says it expects GSI clients to benefit from eBay's Marketplaces and PayPal services, particularly. The merger consideration represents a 51 percent premium over GSI's closing price on March 25, 2011. As usual, the transaction is subject to regulatory approval as well as other customary closing conditions. Under the terms of the merger agreement, GSI Commerce may solicit acquisition proposals from third parties for a 40-day "go-shop" period continuing through May 6, 2011. The agreement, however, also provides eBay with a customary right to match a superior proposal. As part of the transaction, eBay will divest businesses that it says are not core to its long-term growth strategy. The divestiture includes 100 percent of GSI's licensed sports merchandise business and 70 percent of ShopRunner and Rue La La. These assets will be sold to a newly formed holding company, which will be led by GSI founder and CEO Michael Rubin. eBay will loan said company $467 million in total, while Rubin will invest an additional $31 million in cash. eBay will host a conference call at 8 am PST/11 am EST today to discuss this announcement.        
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| Lady Gaga Donates $750K To Zynga’s Japan Earthquake Relief Campaign Posted: 28 Mar 2011 07:07 AM PDT
And in the past two weeks, Zynga players alone have raised more than $2.5 million for Save the Children's Japan Earthquake Tsunami Children in Emergency Fund and other causes. In a release issued by the pop singer and Zynga, Gaga said "I'm inspired that my little monsters banded together to help those affected by the terrible tragedy…What Zynga's players have done for the cause is equally inspiring, and I'm thrilled to partner with them to raise money that will go to Save the Children and the American Red Cross." Through Zynga games including Café World, CityVille, FrontierVille, FarmVille, Words With Friends, Vampire Wars, YoVille and Zynga Poker, more than 250 million players had the opportunity to donate 100 percent of the purchase price of newly created virtual items to the fundraising efforts. Via Credits, Facebook donated money generated through the purchases to support the initiative. The Japan fundraising initiative isn’t the first charitable campaign for Zynga. Since October 2009, hundreds of thousands of players have raised more than $10 million dollars for international nonprofits through Zynga.org. And Zynga was able to raise millions for the relief efforts in Haiti last year. Lady Gaga recently sat down with Google’s Marissa Mayer for a candid talk about tech, music and YouTube.        
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| Excelsior! Students Build Fruit Ninja Simulator Posted: 28 Mar 2011 07:02 AM PDT
       
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| Upstream Commerce Helps E-Retailers Price Their Products, Raises $1.25 Million Posted: 28 Mar 2011 06:58 AM PDT
Exclusive - Upstream Commerce, a provider of a cloud-based, automated competitive pricing and product analytics solution for online retailers not to be confused with mobile marketing solutions company Upstream Systems, has raised $1.25 million in funding from YL Ventures, TechCrunch has learned. The company basically helps online retailers proactively adjust product pricing to the most appropriate levels based on market conditions. To help them do that, Upstream Commerce searches through competitors' sites 24/7 and analyzes relevant data such as their latest promotions, product assortment and recent pricing changes, all in order to provide their customers with actionable insights. Upstream Commerce was founded by Amos Peleg and Shai Geva. Both previously held executives roles at Mercado Software (acquired by Omniture, now Adobe). YL Ventures managing partner Yoav Leitersdorf has joined the startup’s board of directors as part of the investment deal.
       
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| Cloud-Based Networking Company Aerohive Networks Raises $25 Million Posted: 28 Mar 2011 06:53 AM PDT
Founded in 2006, Aerohive Networks offers cloud-enabled, distributed Wi-Fi and routing products for enterprises and medium sized companies. Aerohive says that its controller-less Wi-Fi and cloud-based networking saves money for companies and provides better application performance. The new funding will be used to expand the company’s sales and marketing capabilities and for future acquisitions. Aerohive recently acquired fellow competitor, cloud-based networking company Pareto Networks.        
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| Apple Announces WWDC 2011 And It’s All About The Software Posted: 28 Mar 2011 06:33 AM PDT
As Brave Sir Robin noted before, Apple just announced the availability of tickets to WWDC 2011 on June 6-10 at San Francisco’s Moscone West. Nothing new here – this has been happening this way since time immemorial. However, what’s interesting is the focus on software in the announcement text.        
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| GroupMe Brings Brands Into The Conversation Posted: 28 Mar 2011 05:59 AM PDT
As group texting apps like GroupMe gain popularity, people are using them to create ad hoc, private social networks among a handful of friends. But wherever people congregate online or through their mobile phones, brands will want to talk to them. Today, GroupMe is opening up its mobile group chat to brands in what is the first hint at it business model: Featured Groups. Brands can create their own featured groups, which will show up as suggested conversation topics. When you and your friends create a group around those topics, they work like regular GroupMe chats, except you’ve also opted in to receive messages from the brand. These may include news, offers, marketing messages, or even VIP appearances by celebrities in your GroupMe chat. The first partners to take advantage of the new feature are Oxygen Media, MTV, Bon Jovi, Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival and Coachella. Oxygen will be creating suggested topics around its TV shows “Bad Girls Club” and the upcoming Paris Hilton show “The World According To Paris.” MTV is using it for “America's Best Dance Crew.” “Basically, we’re working with brands where there are intuitive use cases,” says GroupMe CEO Jared Hecht. “Live events (people going to a music festival together), television shows (people who watch a series with a group of friends), and artists/musicians (me and my friends love a band).” GroupMe first experimented with suggested group topics at SXSW, where people who created a SXSW group got a map and special info about goings on about Austin during the conference. Just before SXSW, GroupMe pushed out a major new version of its app for users. Now we are seeing the business side of that. If you and your friends go to a concert or really like “America’s Best Dance Crew” (you know who you are) and you are creating groups around these topics anyway, now you might get rewarded with “insider” info, contests, signed merchandise giveaways, or maybe even a pop-in from a band or cast member. The only way these branded topics will work, however, is if they don’t feel like marketing. And that’s always been the case with social media. Brands need to try to have real conversations with their consumers. But as we’ve seen with Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media, that is easier said than done.        
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| Nokia Ditches Old Familiar Font For Shiny New One Posted: 28 Mar 2011 05:53 AM PDT
       
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| CertiVox Raises $1.5 Million For Cloud-Based Content Security Technology Posted: 28 Mar 2011 05:44 AM PDT
CertiVox is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company that provides on-demand encryption key generation, management and content distribution for the cloud. Companies can use CertiVox to secure email and transferred files, prevent data leaks, implement digital rights management, and launch comprehensive audit controls over secure information exchanges. Users can control the use of their content with a number of post-delivery control features, even allowing users to restrict access to content. Customers can also track who accessed which content, when, and for how long, as well as track by groups, individuals, or channels. CertiVox faces competition from Adobe, Oracle and others.        
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| Google’s Android Bear-Hug Comes To LG: New LG/Nexus Tablets Coming Soon? Posted: 28 Mar 2011 05:34 AM PDT
Think of this action by Google as akin to training one athlete in a race to an Olympic level and then pitting her against amateurs. The amateurs could still win, but it’s going to be tough.        
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| Apple Sets Dates For WWDC: June 6 Through June 10 At Moscone, SF Posted: 28 Mar 2011 05:33 AM PDT
Apple this morning announced that it will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) June 6 through June 10 at San Francisco's Moscone West. The company promises to “unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS”, demo a bunch of applications and host more than 100 technical sessions (presented by Apple engineers). The site for the event is not up yet – the link is “apple.com/xx” which we suspect is an error on the company’s part. (Update: fixed – tickets here for $1,599 each). Interesting, the supporting quote in the press release announcing the dates for the event was not provided by CEO Steve Jobs but by Philip Schiller, SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing:
Further reading: iOS 5 Likely Pushed To The Fall After A Cloud Unveiling At WWDC        
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| After Visa, American Express Takes On PayPal With Digital Payments Platform Posted: 28 Mar 2011 05:21 AM PDT
Following in the footsteps of rival Visa, American Express this morning announced a digital payment and commerce platform dubbed Serve, enabling U.S. consumers to make purchases and person-to-person payments online, via mobile phones and at AmEx’s network of millions of merchants. Serve integrates a variety of payment options into a single account that can be funded from a bank account, debit, credit or charge card, or by receiving money from another Serve account. The platform is available immediately to anyone in the U.S. and is expected to launch into other international markets over the coming year. American Express has released mobile applications for iOS and Android. Serve accounts can also be accessed through Facebook. It won’t stop there, says Dan Schulman, Group President at American Express:
Indeed, in the first six months Serve will charge no fees to open an account, for P2P transactions, use social network widgets or anything else. After that period, it will cost 2.9% + 30c/per load to put money into Serve accounts (discounted to 0% for cash, debit and ACH) and $2.00 for ATM cash withdrawals. Interestingly, Serve also offers users the ability to create, manage, and specify sub-accounts for friends, family members or colleagues. Linked to the master account, they allow users to set spending profiles for “everything from children's allowances to dog walker fees”. Serve is the result of technology obtained by American Express through the $300 million acquisition of PayPal competitor Revolution Money in early 2010.        
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| Posted: 28 Mar 2011 03:34 AM PDT
From the why-didn’t-anyone-think-of-this-before department: meet Heartsy, which is basically a Groupon for Etsy, i.e. a daily deals site for handmade items sold on Etsy stores. The concept should be overly familiar to you: registered users get sent exclusive deals on handmade items sold on Etsy by email. Acquired coupons, or vouchers as Heartsy refers to them, can be redeemed at the Etsy store that sponsored the deal (example). If you’re an Etsy seller, no need to do the math on it to see if it’s worth you while or not – someone already did that for you. (Spoiler alert: it depends). Like many other daily deal sites, you get cash every time you refer a new user. Heartsy also cleverly lets you vote on what type of deals you think they should be running in the future. Currently, Heartsy's services are free, but don’t expect that to last long: a transaction fee will be added to the program in the near future.
       
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| JavaScript Creator And Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich To Advise Ajax.org Posted: 28 Mar 2011 02:50 AM PDT
Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript scripting language and chief technology officer at Mozilla, has joined the advisory board of Amsterdam, The Netherlands-based Ajax.org. We recently wrote about Ajax.org’s introduction of Cloud9 IDE, a commercial, cloud-based development platform for JavaScript that incorporates HTML5, and supporting Python, Ruby and PHP. Eich is known for his work on Netscape, where he started work in April 1995 and invented JavaScript. He then helped found Mozilla.org in early 1998, serving as chief architect, and later helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation. In August 2005, after serving as a member of the foundation’s Board of Directors, Brendan became CTO of the newly founded Mozilla Corporation. His primary focus is improving the company's star product, web browser Firefox. His appointment to the advisory board is of course a boon for Ajax.org, which intends to use his insights to move forward with the advancement and promotion of Cloud9. The company is looking to expand into North America in 2011. (Photo via Wikipedia)
       
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| UK Entrepreneurs Launch StartupBritain With Government Backing, But Not Money Posted: 28 Mar 2011 01:47 AM PDT
The campaign is being launched by Prime Minister David Cameron, who is known to be very pro-enterprise. The UK has 270,000 businesses that start up every year but many fail due to a lack of support. So in effect the Startup Britain initiative is doing a few things much more differently. It’s offering a package of discounts and free trial on business services like insurance, broadband, advertising, office space and more. The claim is that this amounts to over £1,500 in value for every startup company in Britain. Startup Britain is a portal site to a package of these services.        
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| Posted: 27 Mar 2011 07:27 PM PDT
– Apple exec Jean Louis Gassée on the naming of Apple
– Bill Nguyen, Color founder on why he chose the name Color Reading Semil Shah’s post on group messaging this morning, I was struck by the sheer numbers and diversity of the startup names scattered throughout: Yobongo, Disco, SocialCam, SoundCloud, Beluga, GroupMe, Fast Society, Rabbly, Whatsapp, Kik, textPlus, Convore, SMSGupShup, MessageParty, TextSlide, Bump Technologies, Color Labs and so on, all contenders in the saturated mobile social space. Some like MessageParty or textPlus had names that were actually related to their product, but many like Yobongo, Beluga and Disco had only a tenuous connection. It’s now pretty clear the app ecosystem has gone mainstream: People talk about apps the way they used to talk about music or drugs (“Omg have you guys tried COLOR. Omg you have to try it. Omg we’re on it right now”). And naming your startup has become like naming your band — An intricate dance between a multitude of contributing metaphoric and literal factors. So which approach, picking something random or actually related to what you do, makes more sense?  @chrysbChrys Bader You can tell it's a bubble because startups are raising so much money they can actually afford vowels in their domain names. Two notable app launches this week highlighted how exactly an app’s name plays into public perception. The most visible instance of this was the launch of Color, an ubiquitous noun/verb name picked by Bill Nguyen and Peter Pham for their photosharing app with a hefty $41 million in funding. While initial complaints held that the app was unsearchable in both the Android and iPhone App Store and on Google because of its common name, that problem now seems to have been solved on Google. Perhaps all the inbound links from news and other sites are responsible for the fact that the service is now the eighth result for the word “color”? Color also somehow went from being invisible to being the first app to appear in the Apple App Store under the “color” search term (I’m hearing Android is still having issues). Color’s name, while initially striking some people as slightly off if only for all its other connotations, is valid in that it accurately describes a core function of the Color Labs product, namely the fact that people are sharing images (a collection of colored pixels) through the app. The Color guys tell me (and Quora above) that they first came up with the name Color in a tribute to Apple’s original reverse-color logo and then bought the domain name for $350K. In order to appeal to English speakers in other regions, they also bought the domain name Colour.com and redirected it to Color.com. And yes, this did not stave off complaints.  @alisontanAlison Tan The 'Color' app isn't spelt the way I like it… #COLOUR Contrast Color’s name with that of the other hot five-letter app of the moment, Disco. Currently it’s unclear whether Google made the $255K purchase of the domain Disco.com for a Slide-related purpose, or just to have on hand (Google has not given me a straight answer in any of my emails). If the latter is the case then it wouldn’t be the first time Google stockpiled domains (bayareaburritos.com anyone?) for future use. Whether purposefully acquired or not, the name Disco seems to have a less of a direct relation to its core product than Color. While a disco (nightclub) does bring people together in a sense, the noun has absolutely nothing to do with group messaging, and I think users have already picked up on this distinction. All in all the choice to use Disco as a name for a group messaging app is incongruous, especially when you consider that Google also owns Hello.com. “This one fits to the product #color, This one doesn’t fit at all #disco,” tweeted Berrehili Réda. “I don’t know, when I first heard about google’s product #disco, I thought they had finally released their music streaming service…”  @mmMorgan Missen Google has owned Hello.com forever. I'm surprised they didn't use that name for Disco and wonder why they're saving it. http://t.co/lYApre9 about 12 hours ago via webRetweetReply While it’s possible that the name Disco was already on the drawing board at Slide pre-Google acquisition, if Disco’s makers first chose a vague name and then built out a product for release, then they wouldn’t be alone. Private photo-sharing service Path still called itself Path (at Path.io) back when it was a list-making tool. Guess they thought the Path designation still held after the photo-sharing pivot. In a seminal post on the subject, VC Rich Barton holds in that making up a new word (like Kleenex or Yobongo) is much more powerful than trying to appropriate a already existing literal word like Color or Disco. But if you’d have to go with an existing word, I’d go with the one that has a strong tie-in to the actual product. Then again there’s always exceptions. No matter which apocryphal origin story you believe, the word Apple has nothing to do with computers. “If somebody had told me in 1970 that Apple would be the name of the top tech company, I would have laughed to death,” said VC Dani Nofal. Yes, and if someone had told me in 1990 that someone would name their company Color in homage to that top computer company Apple, I too would have chuckled. Color probably hopes it’ll be laughing all the way to an extended featured position in the App Store.  @alexiaAlexia Tsotsis Are you there Steve? It's me, Color.         
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| OMG/JK: The Color Of Controversy Posted: 27 Mar 2011 06:51 PM PDT We’re back with a new episode of OMG/JK, and it’s a good one. This last week has been full of controversy — from the launch of Color, the photo-swapping app that raised $41 million pre-launch, to reports that Google is not planning to open-source the tablet version of Android any time soon. And, as you’d expect, MG and I have some differing opinions about what that means for Android’s status as “Open”. This week also brings the launch Amazon’s Appstore, which will face off with Google’s official Android Market. Here are some posts relevant to this episode’s discussion:
       
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| Glam Media Furthers International Presence With South Korean Vertical Posted: 27 Mar 2011 06:00 PM PDT
Glam Media, one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is continuing to expand its international presence with the launch of Glam Media South Korea. The women-focused vertical will represent the sixth international country subsidiary for Glam, adding to platforms in Canada, Germany, Japan, France and the UK. Similar to Glam’s womens entertainment, style and fashion channel Glam.com, Glam.kr will feature original stories, photos and videos, as well as curated content across a range of lifestyle categories including beauty, entertainment, fashion, health and wellness, and more. Ellie Park, formerly the editor-in-chief of Elle Magazine's online site in South Korea, will serve as editor in chief of Glam.kr. Glam Media South Korea is launching with 15 leading content providers such as Marie Claire, Luxury, WomanSense, iBestBaby, and more. Heesun Chin will serve as country manager for South Korea, and will lead advertising and sales operations for the platform. Glam is also incorporating its brand-targeted ad serving platform, Glam Adapt in South Korea. Glam’s CEO Samir Arora tells us that the combination of the high number of internet users in South Korea as well as the opportunity for women’s focused content was the deciding factor in opeining up a designated South Korea site. According to comScore, South Koreans ranked number one for most page views per person and number four for number of hours spent online per person. As we’ve heard, Glam is gearing up for an IPO in the next year. Successful properties outside the U.S. should help solidify Glam’s presence as a global content provider. The company just bought Canadian advertising media firm BBS Media this past week and will launch a Canadian site. Arora says that Glam is seriously considering China, Russia, India, Brazil, Italy and Spain as the next possible points of entries outside of the U.S. Currently, Glam’s networks currently have a total reach of 90 million people a month in the U.S and just under 200 million monthly visitors globally. And further expansion should help the media company increase this traffic significantly.        
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| A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Points: Topguest Hooks Up With Instagram Posted: 27 Mar 2011 01:36 PM PDT
Yes, beginning today when the integration goes fully live, you’ll be able to earn reward points at venues around the world simply by taking a picture and sharing it on Instagram. This may mean hotel points, air miles, or other benefits at the over 10,000 places Topguest currently works with. All you have to do is link up Topguest to your Instagram account (via their new API) and make sure your picture is geotagged at the venue. To celebrate the launch, Virgin America is launching a special competition. The most-liked Instagram photos taken at various Virgin America-related venues (like airport terminals) will win 1,000 bonus Elevate points (their frequent flyer program). They’ll be giving this reward away on a weekly basis. For context, regular Instagrams at Virgin America spots will earn 25 points. From Topguest’s perspective, the Instagram partnership is an expansion of a good idea and interesting model. “This isn’t about deals or specials. What we’re doing on the enterprise side for our customers is actually pretty unique — in a way that’s explicitly opt-in for the user —we’re merging the user tables from all these disparate social networks with the member tables for a valuable but old-fashioned/outdated industry: traditional loyalty programs, starting with the travel space. Social activity mapped to loyalty program numbers unlocks a lot of new value for our market,” co-founder Geoff Lewis says. For Instagram, this is an interesting step for the photo service. They’ve often said that they aim to connect users to the real world through their pictures, and this is certainly a unique way to do that. Some may worry that this will lead to pictures that get taken simply to earn points, but the fact of the matter is that people are taking pictures at these venues anyway. What’s the last thing I do before I’m about to take off on a flight? Send an Instagram out. Now I’ll just earn points for it.
       
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| Posted: 27 Mar 2011 11:49 AM PDT
The new reality is the small stream of bits pushed through the push notification gateway, @mentions, direct messages, and clues to the time it takes to absorb attendant text, video, and live streaming services. As Robert Scoble understood, you can publish your phone number in the clear if you’re willing to project a certain transparency which encourages a broad audience to function more like friends than consumers. That is, project a persona that establishes an emotional connection based on rules of respect. In Robert’s case, he is deluged by marketers in this app-streamed crazy universe we’re tethered to. It would seem counter-intuitive to be so wide open, and in fact I’ve been surprised how few times I can’t get through in the course of an average week. I’ve been switching phones around recently and sometimes call with a different number, but Robert still answers more often than not. Something else must be going on here. That something is actually more about me, or us, than it is about @scobleizer. We forget sometimes that how we initiate the connection is derived from a complex and extremely social way we move through our day. For me, push notification creates a dynamic context, a social map, of clues to what and where things are forming, ebbing, and flowing. So, with Robert, where and what is going on with him is in an easily accessible stream emitting from Twitter mostly, decorated by Foursquare and whatever app du jour that feeds back into Twitter. This uber stream trains me to intuit what are the good times to connect, where are the higher value opportunities to learn something in sync with my own travels and time constraints, and so on. It’s the map of our joint interests, of a special cloud of interactive influence we all garden in. Our phones manage this garden, vibrating and notifying as we go, breaking down only when the drumbeat of meetings chirps proves too irritating to others in the room. Then we turn off the noise more globally, creating pockets of silence that register as fingerprints, a form of social DNA that over time registers as part of our intuitive profile. Oh, it’s going to voicemail on 2 rings. Intuitive message: he’s pushing the call to voicemail after 2 rings because he hasn’t yet turned the sound off (but will now.) Now the shoe is on the caller’s foot: do I call again and annoy him, or wait an appropriate interval. What is that interval? I’ll look at his Twitter stream and see what’s going on, or remember that I saw a Foursquare checkin a few hours ago, or …. We’re carrying around a sense of how our friends, partners, collaborators, competitors, etc. are doing, how they and we navigate. We’re already doing what Colors is going to do with its 41 million, collating, comparing, and matching our intersecting clouds based on social signals in realtime. The best information we have is the stuff we’ve accumulated without having to download it, bring it up, overtly view it. It’s the intuitions, the oh yeah she’s got something at 4 she mentioned, the GTalk icon going green as someone signs on to the net once the plane reaches 10 thousand feet, the lack of signal which suggests either AT&T trouble or running silent off the grid. Here Scoble provides yet another service, as an abstraction of how far we can take this public persona before it breaks down. The surprising answer is that it really doesn’t break down because the responsibility for maintaining a respectful relationship becomes shared across the networks we live in. You could violate the premise a few times, but eventually not only will you become persona non grata with the target, but you’ll damage your relationships with others who notice the bad example as it’s broadcast more visibly with celebrity-ish nodes. It’s schoolyard politics, and nothing is more Darwinian. The phone number is certainly a prime node, tethered via a service contract to your identity in a way that prevents most spoofing. FaceTIme, with its carrier-spanning WiFi identity space, is more Wild West in appearance, yet much more closely tied to push notifications, the @mention cloud, and the stream map. FaceTime on the iPad 2 may seem like a small tweak alongside thinner and faster, but the resultant connection is so high value that it is establishing a level of investment in software and hardware that will change business as we know it. Much has been made of the iPad’s role as a laptop replacement, but for me that war is over. The phone is increasingly a remote controller for the larger screen — I use its Personal Hotspot tethering to broker FaceTime calls on the move, and push notification as pointers into Twitter and the Web document store. Chatter provides a corporate firewalled collaboration space, and I spend the rest of my time discovering workarounds for current limitations that require my Mac Book Pro. They are as vanishingly few as times I can’t get through to Scoble or weekends where I can get my column in on time. I’m writing this on said Mac, mostly just to send a signal to my family that I’m “working.” They’re too busy themselves fleshing out the social cloud with metadata, letting their world know when the most opportune time is to connect. It takes some getting used to, but as long as Robert keeps answering his phone, we’ll know the circuit will be unbroken.        
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| (Founder Stories) Lauren Leto: Texts From Last Night Was A Million Dollar Idea, Bnter Is Next Posted: 27 Mar 2011 11:30 AM PDT As a law student, Lauren Leto and her friends started Texts From Last Night, a site where they could anonymously posts real text messages about their exploits going out at night. It turns out a lot of people could relate, and when they opened up the site to anyone to contribute, it became a Web sensation. Today, the site attracts 4 million people a month, 5,000 to 15,000 submissions a day, and the 99-cent iPhone app has been downloaded a million times. It also spurred a book deal for Leto. Not bad for a bootstrapped startup site that only took $20,000 in capital to get off the ground. In the Founder Stories video above, Leto tells host Chris Dixon how Texts From Last Night got started and how she quit law school to move to New York City from Detroit. She ended up in Brooklyn at the Makery, a co-working space with other startups, which she talks about as well. In the second video below, Leto gets into her latest startup, Bnter, which is a way to capture text messages and publish them publicly. In that sense, it is the opposite of Texts From Last Night. Or, as Leto puts it, Bnter is “Texts From Last Night pulled inside out. Texts From Last Night by its very nature needs to be anonymous, otherwise it will ruin your career.” Bnter, which has its own iPhone app and which raised money from Dixon’s Founder Collective among others (disclosure: he is an investor), is more about capturing interesting moments. Leto compares it to a social photo app, except its textual. It will also work with Twitter conversations. “Anywhere you are having a conversation we want to capture it,” she says.        
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As we wrote a few weeks ago, Zynga 
Since our rise from the primordial ooze, mankind has wanted one thing and one thing only: the ability to play Fruit Ninja inside of a little white room while using our hands as swords. That goal, friends, has been met and surpassed. I present to you 
Wireless LAN company 
Before reading the following post, I suggest you make peace with your Maker because it's so intense you may just explode in ecstasy. Are you ready? I mean, really, ask yourself: are you ready? I don't think you're ready because you couldn't possibly be ready. Well, OK, maybe you are ready. Let's hope so. Ready? Here we go: Nokia is using a new font.
Every few months 
This morning in London, the UK’s answer to 
Everyone loves loyalty points. But it’s often a pain to get them because different companies all have their own programs that require you to remember numbers. 
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