The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Too Lazy To Count Calories? Now You Can Just Take A Picture Of Your Meal
- Shpigler The Shark’s Advice To Zuckerberg – Walk Like A Man, Get A Nice Shirt
- Finally, Google Adds Free Phone Support For U.S. And Canada AdWords Customers
- Fitbit Partners With RunKeeper, Microsoft, About.Me And Others With New API
- The ShowMe Teaching Technology Behind The New Princeton Review SAT iPad App (TCTV)
- Xigo Wants To Shrink Your Company’s Phone Bill (For Free)
- Play, AOL’s Android Music Sharing App, Hits 250,000 Downloads In Three Weeks
- Potentially Leaked iPod Touch Has Capacitive Home Button
- Barnes & Noble Nook Subscribers Will Be Able To Access The NYTimes.com For Free
- FounderLY Wants To Be A Library For Entrepreneurs’ Stories
- Kana Software Buys Social Media Monitoring Platform Overtone
- Free Electronic Medical Records Service Practice Fusion Raises $23 Million
- TechCrunch Europe and The Telegraph release the Startup100
- StockTwits Gets Even More Social, Rolls Out Discovery Tools
- Six Launches At #Techonomy3 – The Latest From The Nation Of Startups
- From Search Engines To Lunar Landers: Barney Pell’s Next Startup Is Moon Express
- AOL Fires A Ton Of Freelancers, HuffPost Doesn’t Pay Most Of Its Writers. I Approve.
- LivingSocial Files To Authorize Up To $565M In Series E [Update: And Raises $400M]
- The Product Shakeup At Google Begins
- RockHealth Opens Incubator to Get the Web 2.0 Generation into Healthcare
- Miso Media’s Snazzy Guitar-Teaching iPad App Is Now Live
- Bought By AOL Alongside Patch, Going Will Soon Be Gone
- American Airlines’ Fares Return To Expedia And Hotwire
- Think AT&T’s Bandwidth Cap Is Bad? Try Living Down Under.
- Twitter And Mediasift Partner To Resell Firehose Data
| Too Lazy To Count Calories? Now You Can Just Take A Picture Of Your Meal Posted: 05 Apr 2011 09:04 AM PDT
Wow. If this app had been pitched to us on the 1st, I would have been sure it was an April Fool’s joke. Coming in a few days later, however, it seems almost genius. Given that my job of sitting in front of a computer and blasting out gadget news isn’t exactly an active one, I’ve gotta be fairly careful to avoid packin’ on the pounds. At one point this entailed keeping a fairly detailed journal of meal calorie counts tediously pulled ingredient by ingredient from a time-wrecking databases. As you can probably tell from my unenthusiastic tone and use of words like “tedious” and “time-wrecking”, that didn’t last too long. If this Meal Snap iPhone app works as promised, however, I might just go back to keeping track. The idea: Take a picture of your food, send it in to Meal Snap, and after some techno-sorcery and number crunching, it’ll spit out a rough estimate of the calorie count and track it for you.        
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| Shpigler The Shark’s Advice To Zuckerberg – Walk Like A Man, Get A Nice Shirt Posted: 05 Apr 2011 08:37 AM PDT
What is the future of Facebook? Ask Shpigler! “From here you can only go down. Don’t be Myspace,” he starts, gently.        
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| Finally, Google Adds Free Phone Support For U.S. And Canada AdWords Customers Posted: 05 Apr 2011 08:30 AM PDT
Because of the overwhelming demand from users, Google is keeping AdWords specialists on call between Monday-Friday, 9am-8pm Eastern Time for AdWords advertisers who need help with a question or problem. The search giant plans to add phone support out to advertisers in other countries in the coming months. Frankly, I’m surprised that Google is only rolling out phone support now. AdWords is one of Google’s most popular advertising products and one of its major businesses. I guess better late than never.        
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| Fitbit Partners With RunKeeper, Microsoft, About.Me And Others With New API Posted: 05 Apr 2011 08:01 AM PDT
The Fitbit Tracker is an compact wearable device that clips onto clothing or slips into a pocket and captures, through accelerometer technology, information about daily health activities, such as steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned, exercise intensity levels and sleep quality. The activity data collected by the Fitbit Tracker can then be wirelessly uploaded to the Fitbit website where users access all of the data and track progress toward personal and group goals. Users can also log nutrition, weight and other health information on the site in order to gain a complete picture of their health. The Fitbit API allows third-party developers to integrate Fitbit data in their own applications, products and services and also to read and write data for users' Fitbit activities, food logs and other data in real time. For example, fitness and weight loss apps RunKeeper and Lose It allow users to import and publish data into into their apps. About.me users will be able to display real Fitbit stats on their profile through use of the API and Microsoft HealthVault allows users to upload daily activities and sleep sessions into HealthVault. And Last Fall, FitBit announced an integration with Google Health. The use cases of data from API itself is flexible, says Tim Roberts, VP of Interactive of Fitbit. Roberts says other uses of Fitbit data include data mash-ups with other personal health monitoring tools, and deep integration with Twitter, Facebook, tablets, smart phones and more. Fitbit is also announcing that it recently raised $9 million in new funding led by The Foundry Group with existing investors True Ventures and SoftTech VC participating in the round. This brings Fitbit’s total funding to $11 million. This funding, says CEO James park, will be used for new product development and for future expansion of sales channels. Already, Fitbit has expanded its footprint in retail channels and is currently available for sale at BestBuy, REI and 24HourFitness retail operations. The startup is also rolling out an affiliate program for partners, allowing app promoters to earn revenue from sales of Fitbit Trackers. Also, Fitbit would love to hear from TechCrunch readers on innovative things to do with the startup’s API. Leave your ideas in comments and Fitbit will pick the 10 best ideas, and will give those readers free Fitbit Trackers.        
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| The ShowMe Teaching Technology Behind The New Princeton Review SAT iPad App (TCTV) Posted: 05 Apr 2011 07:31 AM PDT The Princeton Review launched a slick new iPad app today called SAT Score Quest. Each question comes with a whiteboard video tutorial with a voiceover from an instructor explaining the solution. The ShowMe whiteboard technology is licensed from Easel Learning, a bootstrapped NYC startup, which is also developing its own app and a corresponding ShowMe website where tutors and teachers of all stripes can show off their teaching skills, share lessons with students, and get rated by the community. Easel CEO San Kim recently showed me both the Princeton Review app and the ShowMe app which is still in development (watch the video above). The demo was at General Assembly, the co-working space in Manhattan where Easel set up shop a couple months ago. He hopes that ShowMe can become a “Flickr for teachers,” which isn’t exactly the way I’d describe it—more like a YouTube for lessons. But what is exciting here is Easel is showing a glimpse of how the iPad can completely change the way people learn. Any teacher can simply record their lessons and their students would need nothing more than an iPad to learn. Add some realtime chat and maybe some video, and it is not too difficult to see how this kind of technology can turn the iPad into a classroom.        
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| Xigo Wants To Shrink Your Company’s Phone Bill (For Free) Posted: 05 Apr 2011 06:44 AM PDT
If you’re a family of 3 or 4 people, it’s pretty easy to figure out if you’re spending too much on your phone bill. Pop into something like Billshrink, plug in your credentials, and away you go. If you’re a company with 20,000 employee phones to your name, it’s a different story. Running BillShrink 20,000 times probably isn’t going to cut it, so shaving costs usually requires dumping anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand bucks into a specialized “Telecom Expense Management” (or, as the cool kids call it, TEM) service. This morning, a company called Xigo is looking to turn that TEM market up on its head. Beginning today, they’re offering a free, automated service built to analyze the wireless bills of companies with as many as 50,000 phones under their belt. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>        
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| Play, AOL’s Android Music Sharing App, Hits 250,000 Downloads In Three Weeks Posted: 05 Apr 2011 06:37 AM PDT
When a mobile app gets more than a hundred thousand downloads in its first few weeks, that is usually a good thing. Instagram hit 100,000 in a week, and music-sharing app Soundtracking got there in two weeks. But another music-sharing app, Play by AOL, is right up there with 250,000 downloads in three weeks. Play is very similar to Soundtracking. It lets you share snippets of songs, along with album art or photos, with your friends via Twitter, Facebook, or the in-app network. Play might even have more downloads than Soundtracking, which is getting far more buzz. But what’s interesting about Play is that it launched first on Android, and is not yet available on the iPhone. Still, it’s getting a decent amount of traction. Winamp for Android, another AOL mobile music app, saw 500,000 downloads its first month in private beta, and is now well over 3 million. (TechCrunch is also owned by AOL). And games like Angry Birds have seen millions of Android downloads as well. This kind of traction is yet more evidence that Android has arrived as a viable alternative to the iPhone for app developers.        
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| Potentially Leaked iPod Touch Has Capacitive Home Button Posted: 05 Apr 2011 06:12 AM PDT
       
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| Barnes & Noble Nook Subscribers Will Be Able To Access The NYTimes.com For Free Posted: 05 Apr 2011 06:08 AM PDT
The New York Times announced its paywall a few weeks ago , which allows for free access to a set amount of content across digital platforms. The Nook subscription for the New York Times costs $19.99 per month, and these users will not have to pay for any content when accessing the NYTimes.com. For non-home delivery subscribers, access to the NYTimes.com plus its Smartphone Apps starts at $15 every four weeks. For tablet access, the subscription will cost $20. Obviously, if Kindle or Nook user are already paying for a subscription to the New York Times via their e-reading device, it wouldn’t make sense to charge them twice. Barnes and Noble says that The New York Times continues to be one of the bestselling NOOK Newspapers. Barnes & Noble customers with current subscriptions to The New York Times through NOOK Newsstand will be notified via email in the coming weeks with more information on how they will gain free access to NYTimes.com.        
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| FounderLY Wants To Be A Library For Entrepreneurs’ Stories Posted: 05 Apr 2011 06:00 AM PDT
While many of the infamous stories of tech entrepreneurs (Bill Gates and Microsoft, Larry and Sergey and Googe, Steve Jobs and Apple) are documented in print forms, FounderLY’s co-creator Matthew Wise felt that there was a need for more candid video interviews from a variety of founders, and he felt the best way to do this was to have fellow entrepreneurs interview each other to capture the best stories. Wise and his fellow co-founder Andy Saebjoernsen developed an open platform which allows anyone to submit a video of a founder to be posted on Founderly. FounderLY will then package it with an intro, bumper, and a closing, and publish it to their website. Neither Wise or his co-founder want to profit from FounderLY—the project is simply a way to capture and preserve these stories, says Wise. Currently, FounderLY features videos from Vivek Wadhwa, Naval Ravikant, Michael Seibel, Rick Marini, and a number of other founders. We’ve embedded Wadwa’s videos below. FounderLy’s ambitions are noble but the challenge the platform will face is actually getting founders and entrepreneurs to take the time to interview each other.        
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| Kana Software Buys Social Media Monitoring Platform Overtone Posted: 05 Apr 2011 05:56 AM PDT
Overtone, which has raised $20.5 million in funding, develops a SaaS applications that allows companies to monitor social media platforms and analyze customer sentiment, emerging issues, and topic trends. Overtone’s platform will be added to Kana’s customer service management platform to give service agents the ability to listen to conversations about a brand or company on social media channels. Service agents will be able to track customer conversations across social networks, email, web feedback forms, chat, surveys, and online communities. Social media monitoring platforms are being scooped up left and right. Last week Salesforce spent $326 million on Radian6.        
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| Free Electronic Medical Records Service Practice Fusion Raises $23 Million Posted: 05 Apr 2011 05:00 AM PDT
Launched in 2007, Practice Fusion allows doctors across the country to chart patient visits, review records, schedule appointments, prescribe medications electronically, order and receive lab tests, and connect patients to their health data — all in realtime. Unlike legacy electronic medical records systems that charged doctors exorbitant fees, Practice Fusion’s web-based system is free to health care providers and lives in the cloud. Offering a free digital system is fairly unprecedented and, at first blush, would seem financially unsound, but Practice Fusion was initially able to stay in the black through rapid product development, word-of-mouth buzz among doctors, and the $44,000 economic stimulus incentive program rolled out by the Obama Administration in 2009. Since then, it has been able to rely on venture capital and has brought more than 70,000 health care providers into its community, allowing for triple-digit annual growth among its users, according to communications director Helen Phung. As many are aware, the state of American healthcare systems remains atrocious, and the medical industry has struggled to incorporate technology into the management of the healthcare process. Sure, we may have cutting-edge devices in our ERs, but when it comes to IT and medical records, the U.S. healthcare industry might as well be in the Stone Age. Currently, only 1.5 percent of hospitals have integrated IT systems and only 6.3 percent of physicians have fully-functional electronic medical record systems in use, said Practice Fusion board member Rebecca Lynn. As this is the case, Practice Fusion provides hosted electronic medical records that are always online and works to improve the overall efficiency of a healthcare provider’s practice by matching the workflow of primary care and specialty physicians through the entire lifecycle of a patient’s healthcare — while giving them access to their personal records. And, through its API platform, Practice Fusion is currently attempting to situate itself as a testing ground for health data visualization and app development. Both of which need to become areas of increased focus for the healthcare industry. The company has also announced the addition of Jason Portnoy as CFO. Portnoy was previously the CFO at roles at Palantir Technologies and Clarium Capital. For more on Practice Fusion, check out the video below:         
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| TechCrunch Europe and The Telegraph release the Startup100 Posted: 05 Apr 2011 03:51 AM PDT TechCrunch Europe occasionally partners with other media outlets in Europe in order to support the European ecosystem. Last December we agreed to link up with the London Telegraph newspaper, which planned to put some time and resources into a ranking of promising technology companies in Europe. The Telegraph Tech Start-Up 100 lists 100 top European tech companies. This year, TechCrunch Europe chaired the Telegraph’s judging panel, put together by Milo Yiannopoulos, Technology columnist, which included many familiar faces from the European emerging technology industry. The list includes trailblazers like Wonga, SoundCloud and Songkick, as well as start-ups who are aggressively expanding into the US market like Huddle and Skimlinks. I think the way to think about this list is that it’s a wrap-up of some still early companies, while including a number of tech companies who are really motoring now after their initial startup phase. It’s a great list, you should check it out.        
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| StockTwits Gets Even More Social, Rolls Out Discovery Tools Posted: 05 Apr 2011 03:15 AM PDT
It’s been a good start to the year for StockTwits. For starters, as we reported last week, the realtime info-sharing hub for investors and traders, has doubled its monthly visitors since December. It also recently stole Yahoo Finance products exec David Putnam and added Chris Bullock, who was formerly the senior managing director for global investor relations services at NASDAQ, as its new VP of Corporate Services. Today, the information service announced further developments, saying that it will be rolling out a series of discovery tools to allow its users to more easily find people to follow within its growing community. To begin with, StockTwits is launching a full page (vertical) dedicated to this social discovery (which you can see above) that members can use to search for traders, investors, and more. You can then filter the results, defining specific attributes you want to search for, like “Suggested List” status, approach to market, holding period, asset class, and investor relations. This means that members can more easily locate, say, a long-term equities analyst to advise them on whether or not they should buy a certain ETF. StockTwits has also added a widget to each of its stream pages, which serves users with suggestions on who to follow. It bases these suggestions on the attributes you define in your profile and who you’re already following. The more people you follow, the better suggestions it serves.
If you’ve never used StockTwits, but are familiar with those ubiquitous stock tickers, then you can think of StockTwits as a ticker for the social aspect of stock tracking. Instead of tracking an individual stock’s rise and fall, the service tracks the social data around each stock — who’s discussing the stock and what they’re saying. This allows you to locate the traders, analysts, etc. whom you trust, add them to the list of people you follow, and track them as they make predictions or chat about investments, trades, deals, and so on. But maybe you have a stock in mind, but aren’t sure whether you should invest. StockTwits’ new discovery tools make it easy to select the type of traders or analysts that would be discussing your prospective stock, follow them, and join the conversation. Pretty cool. And as I wrote last week, quite a few companies have started using the service to disseminate information among investors and to answer their questions, so, again, social discovery tools that can help you more easily find your colleagues or your company’s financial advisors adds to the service’s overall appeal. Especially in the investor relations sector, which will be a big area for StockTwits going forward.        
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| Six Launches At #Techonomy3 – The Latest From The Nation Of Startups Posted: 05 Apr 2011 01:17 AM PDT
Today, six new startups launch at Techonomy3 in Tel Aviv, joining the mass of startups here, and I would say all of them are pretty interesting one way or another. Here are the individual write-ups on each of the startups which launched (the names of the companies links will go live as they launch): HitPad, Dapsem, Magisto, Tingiz, TVTak and Jumboard.        
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| From Search Engines To Lunar Landers: Barney Pell’s Next Startup Is Moon Express Posted: 04 Apr 2011 07:49 PM PDT
Joining him are Robert Richards (CEO) and, inexplicably, Naveen Jain. How Jain plans to rip people off from space eludes me, but I’m sure he’ll figure out a way. Putting Jain aside for a moment (Pell and I have argued for hours about his ethics), Moon Express is an audacious company. They were one of six companies chosen by Nasa to receive funding from it’s $30 million Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) project. And they are one of only three companies to actually receive part of that funding. Their aim is to create “reliable precision transports” that will allow people to develop, explore and research the moon. Over time, these landers will be able to return to earth safely with samples, etc. Commercial exploit of the moon may feasible in the near future, says Pell, particularly mining of certain materials like Platinum, which is scarce on earth and useful as a catalyst in fuel cells. “We’re effectively selling shovels to miners,” he says, and funding from NASA as well as Google’s Lunar X Prize can help fill in the funding gaps until that market develops. Science fiction? Perhaps. But so is Space X, founded by another Silicon Valley dreamer, Elon Musk. And in fact, it’s very likely that the Space X Falcon 9 will be the rocket that delivers the Moon Express lander into space. The company hopes to be conducting trials by 2013. They’ve raised funding, they say, but won’t disclose the amount or who it’s from. I’m guessing we’ll be hearing a lot more from them in the near future.        
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| AOL Fires A Ton Of Freelancers, HuffPost Doesn’t Pay Most Of Its Writers. I Approve. Posted: 04 Apr 2011 07:01 PM PDT
Mzzzzz…. The Huffington Post should pay its writers tttzzzzzzzz… it's modern-day slave labor bbzzzzzz…. AOL payout should be shared equally…. pzzzzzz…. calls herself a liberal…. ZZZZZZ…. EXPLOITATION… And now she’s fired all those freelancers…. OUTRAGEOUS! Jesus Christ, can someone please shut that freaking thing OFF? After careful investigation, the main source of the whining seems to be the Newspaper Guild, a 26,000-member -strong group representing the rights of media workers. The union is angry that my paymasters at Huffington Post Media Group are refusing to share their Aol-provided wealth with the thousands of unpaid writers who produce the bulk of the content on HuffPost.com. In order to force a change in policy, they're calling for those writers – and anyone else who supports the idea of fair compensation for editorial contributors – to go on strike. Yeah, and then they should take a razor sharp hunting knife and slice of their nose. That'll show their face! Today, though, those calls got a little more urgent as Business Insider revealed that Aol has laid off the bulk of its stay-at-home freelance contributors in favour of New York, DC and LA-based full-timers. Those dumped from a paying gig have been told that they are still welcome to contribute their content for free to the Huffington Post. Ooof. Low blow. And yet, two facts remain. First – and this is absolutely, verifiably true – a huge number of Aol editorial freelancers let go today were churning out utter garbage and deserved to be (at worst) fired or (at best) downgraded to volunteer status. A mass cull of non-talent is exactly what Arianna Huffington needed to do to assert her editorial authority over Aol’s content. Second — the people calling for Arianna Huffington to pay every one of her 3,000+ contributors are either a) stupid b) disingenuous or c) both. Despite what you might have read, Huffington doesn't send leather-clad storm troopers door-to-door to demand that writers contribute their content to the Huffington Post. Quite the opposite: every day dozens (hundreds?) of would-be contributors line at Huffington's virtual door, begging to be allowed inside. They do this because the benefits of being published on the HuffPost far outweight the opportunity costs of not contributing. At last count, the site reached 40 million readers every month. If you have something to promote — as every single one of HuffPost's unpaid contributors does — then that's a hell of a big audience to reach for free. The simple fact is that, even with Aol's money in the bank, HuffPost afford to pay even fifty dollars per post to each of the thousands of people who currently contribute for free. With that option off the table, the choice for the majority of contributors is to either write for free, and enjoy the self-promotional benefits that brings, or don't write at all. And it's not just authors, speakers, consultants and other self-promotional hacks who see the value in writing for the HuffPost. Even for superstar contributors like Alec Baldwin or Ben Affleck, the same economics are at play: writing an op-ed for HuffPost is a great way to promote yourself, your movie, your TV show or just your personal agenda. There's no doubt that some celebrities contribute to the site just because they're friends of Arianna – but that's just another kind of economics; the give-and-take barter economy of friendship. Still, it's easy for well-paid Aol-contributors like me to tell our unpaid brethren to put up or shut up. After all, you don't see me writing for free, do you? Well, actually, yes. You do. An hour or so ago, I joined the great unpaid ranks of Arianna's content army (I’m keeping my paid gig here at TechCrunch too, obviously). As regular readers might recall, I'm heading to Las Vegas for the month of April (and some of May), where I'll be staying a single night in each of the hotels on the Vegas Strip. While there, I’ll write a daily diary of the trip for the HuffPost. For free. I'm not even claiming expenses from Aol. Why? Economics, stupid. In a month's time, my new book – about my adventures living in hotels – will be published in the UK. As part of the marketing efforts for the book, Jess, my publisher’s Publicity Manager, is doing everything she can to whore me out to the media: arranging radio interviews, convincing editors of newspapers to run extracts, setting up readings — that kind of thing. When I mentioned that I was going to be writing about my adventures in Vegas hotels for the Huffington Post, Jess did the email equivalent of giving me a high-five. When I followed up a few days later saying it was going to be a daily feature, promoted on the front page, I thought she was going to explode with joy. She, or I, literally couldn't buy that kind of positioning. The truth is, for as long as there has been media, there have been unpaid contributors who provide huge value for no direct financial reward. Talk radio has been "exploiting" free contributors for decades: otherwise it would have to be renamed "listen radio". Newspapers and magazines have letters pages, which are frequently the first pages that readers head for. News channels have vox pops, TV shows have audience voting — and yet noone demanded a piece of the commercial pie. And then came social media. Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, YouPorn — none of those sites would be worth a brass dime without uncompensated user generated content. Weirdly though, it's only the online entrepreneurs who are criticised for relying on unpaid content to make money. As Facebook's valuation has grown, so has the chorus of users who feel they are entitled to their fair share of Zuckerberg's wealth. Flickr and YouTube users have demanded similar. The Newspaper Guild's animosity towards Aol/HuffPost is just the latest example. So what is it about new media that makes everyone so entitled; so greedy even? If I were a cynical man I'd suggest that it's the a symptom of a more self-entitled age, where everyone and their dog believes they have the right to be a billionaire, or at least share in a billionaire’s wealth. I'd suggest that for all the shouting and screaming about "doing what's right" and "fairness", the truth is we don't like to see someone else getting rich, even if they're doing so by providing us with something valuable, and free. Moreover, I'd suggest that if the Aol contributors who were let go today were good enough at their jobs, then they’d still be doing them. And if the unpaid writers on the Huffington Post are good enough at what they do, then they'll make plenty enough money elsewhere not to have to beg for financial scraps from Arianna. But I'm not a cynical man; I'm just a lowly blogger with a book to promote. Hey! You should pre-order a copy. Jess will love that.        
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| LivingSocial Files To Authorize Up To $565M In Series E [Update: And Raises $400M] Posted: 04 Apr 2011 04:30 PM PDT
The amended Certificate of Incorporation form confirms that the company is allowed to raise the funds, but doesn’t necessarily mean that it already has the money in its coffers. I wouldn’t be surprised if we come across the round’s SEC Form D sometime soon. As LivingSocial has 630 million authorized common shares, this could value the company at over $3.5 billion, a stark jump from its one billion valuation back when it received the Amazon and Lightspeed Ventures $183 million investment in January. LivingSocial has also raised $49 million from Revolution Fund, Grotech Ventures and U.S. Venture Partners in addition to $2.9m two weeks ago, which makes its total (confirmed) funding to date $232 million. Representatives from LivingSocial would not provide official comment on the news. Update: The New York Times is reporting that the total amount of the funding was $400 million from existing investors Amazon, Lightspeed Ventures, T. Rowe Price as well as Institutional Venture Partners.        
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| The Product Shakeup At Google Begins Posted: 04 Apr 2011 04:27 PM PDT
Larry Page’s first day as CEO of Google again after ten years began with a shakeup at the very top of the company. Google’s longtime senior VP of product management, Jonathan Rosenberg, announced that he will resign. Rosenberg is an extremely well-respected executive who was often on quarterly conference calls with Eric Schmidt and helped guide the company for the past decade. If Schmidt was the adult supervision for Page and co-founder Sergey Brin, Rosenberg was the adult supervision and management mentor to the other young executives who filled Google’s management ranks, including Marissa Mayer, Susan Wojcicki, and Salar Kamangar. Rosenberg was brought on by Schmidt years ago, and the two worked closely together. Rosenberg’s stated reason for leaving is that Page asked his senior team to recommit to Google for the long haul and he wasn’t planning on staying past 2013. That’s fair enough, but his departure also signals the possible start of a shakeup in Google’s product management ranks. Page famously has a low opinion of managers, especially product managers who try to tell engineers what to do. “People don’t want to be managed,” he is quoted in Steven Levy’s new book, In the Plex. Page is a big believer in self-management. At one point early on in the company’s history, he and Brin tried to get rid of all managers. Google is too large to be self-managed at this point, but many of its products are perhaps not as engineer-driven as Page would like. In certain areas, like social, Google’s products lack a certain oomph. So far, it’s been playing catch up in that area. Maybe Page wants his engineers to swing for the fences more even in areas outside their comfort zones. No replacement for Rosenberg was named today.        
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| RockHealth Opens Incubator to Get the Web 2.0 Generation into Healthcare Posted: 04 Apr 2011 03:48 PM PDT
RockHealth, a new incubator for healthcare IT startups, opened its doors for applications on Friday and has already received more than forty submissions. RockHealth’s founder Halle Tecco didn’t want to spill the beans on specific ideas, but examples include home health monitoring apps via the iPhone that can update physicians on chronic conditions or iPad games that can be used as hospital therapy for sick kids. This isn’t your parent’s healthcare IT movement. The intersection between technology and hugely inefficient health care was talked up in the mid-1990s and again in the early 2000s but hasn’t yet yielded many huge companies. Innovation in the healthcare industry usually comes from inside hospitals and heathcare organizations– not always the best technologists. Meanwhile technologists don’t usually get real problems patients, doctors and hospitals face. “It’s a culture of ‘no’ and a culture of red tape,” says Tecco. “You can’t iterate, and you can’t move fast.” So why bother? Tecco has had an obsession with applying consumer Web technology to solve healthcare’s problems since she entered Harvard Business School. Her application said she wanted to help bridge the two worlds, and unlike most HBS students, she graduated with the same idea. Her summer internship was even approving healthcare apps for Apple’s app store. She sat next to the woman approving gaming apps, and they had utterly different jobs. “She’d have all these cool things coming in, and I’d be begging for a hospital to just update its logo,” Tecco says. Sexy or not, Tecco was determined to create a bridge between hot shot Web entrepreneurs who want to build something useful and places like the Mayo Clinic who don’t have a clue how to recruit them but desperately need their skills. She’s raised $500,000 for RockHealth and will be giving up to a dozen selected companies $20,000 grants to build their products, along with contacts at hospitals, healthcare organizations and even the FDA to help remove barriers. The plan is to have all the company selected by RockHealth’s June 16 launch party, and open the doors to the incubator June 20. The main parameter is that teams can’t have raised venture capital yet, but angel funding or friends and family money is fine. As far as her own funding, Tecco decided to build RockHealth as a nonprofit, so that it could be more mission-than-sheer-returns-oriented. That said, many of her backers are venture capitalists, hoping she’ll spur more innovation for a huge, inefficient and lucrative market that Web 2.0 has mostly ignored. Supporters include Accel Partners, Aberdare Ventures, the California HealthCare Foundation, Microsoft HealthVault, Mohr Davidow Ventures, NEA and Nike; partners include the Mayo Clinic and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.        
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| Miso Media’s Snazzy Guitar-Teaching iPad App Is Now Live Posted: 04 Apr 2011 03:30 PM PDT
But while it’s gotten plenty of buzz, the application itself hasn’t been available to users. Until now. Today, the company is announcing that Plectrum is live on the App Store. You can download it right here for $2.99. Fire up the application and you’ll see a handful of lessons and classical songs, like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and some scales. Tap a lesson and it will present music as TAB (a basic music notation system familiar to guitar players). And unlike other tab viewers, Plectrum will listen and scroll along as you play each note (it’s pretty cool). It also has fingering suggestions for each note and chord, which is a nice touch. In addition to guitar, the app supports music for bass guitar, ukulele, banjo, and more. I fired up my acoustic guitar to put the application to the test, and came back with some mixed results (though there’s plenty of promise). The audio detection works pretty well, with notes scrolling across the screen as I played, but every so often a note I played on my guitar would register more than once in the app, causing it to ‘skip’ to the next note. Or sometimes I’d have to adjust the threshold setting because the app wasn’t ‘hearing’ everything I played. And there’s definitely a learning curve to using this on songs that move at anything faster than a leisurely pace — though I’m sure I would have gotten used to it after a couple of hours. There are a few more superficial quirks as well. When I downloaded Yesterday, by The Beatles, I found that the audio detection wasn’t working at all. Turns out the song is actually supposed to be played a step down, but the app didn’t go out of its way to point that out. I’m also not a big fan of the integrated Strobe tuner, which looks snazzy and is accurate, but will leave guitar novices scratching their heads. But, again, this is still early days for the app, and it’s off to a solid start. Miso Media generates extra revenue by offering plenty of in-app purchases. First, you can buy licensed virtual guitars in the app, with instruments from the likes of Fender and Martin & Co. More important is the application’s lessons store, which lets you purchase tabs for premium songs, like Blackbird by The Beatles. These songs range from around 99 cents to $2.99 depending on the publisher and take a few seconds to download. CEO Aviv Grill says that the app will be adding dozens — and later, hundreds — of premium songs to the lesson catalogue every week. To do this, they’ve adopted a user-submitted content model. Using Miso Media’s tab editor, you’ll be able to construct your own tab for popular songs, which you can then submit to the company. If your tab is deemed to be the ‘best’ of the submissions, they’ll start selling it through the app, and you’ll receive 5 cents per download (if the song has multiple instrument tracks, then each person who tabbed a track gets 5 cents). Each app will be screened for quality, and if someone submits a more accurate version than yours, Miso will swap in the better one (there will only be one version of each song available at a time).        
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| Bought By AOL Alongside Patch, Going Will Soon Be Gone Posted: 04 Apr 2011 02:34 PM PDT
Going will be “going away” (they made the joke, not me) on May 1, 2011. The reason? “AOL’s refocusing”, the team explains in an email sent to users today. We’ve previously covered Going a number of times over the years. More recently, AOL had turned it into a new-style check-in service that focused on events (odd given that earlier today, Facebook unveiled an app update that does the same basic thing). At the time, Foursquare was starting to get some buzz, but it was far from clear who the winner in the space would be. We can definitely say now that it will not be Going. You’ll be able to grab you information off of Going before the May deadline. After that, going.com will apparently be part of both Moviefone and Patch somehow. Below, find the email sent out:
       
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| American Airlines’ Fares Return To Expedia And Hotwire Posted: 04 Apr 2011 02:30 PM PDT
Financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, but clearly, the airline and travel site were able to come to a mutual agreement that suited their interests financially. American had a similar issue with travel search site Orbitz, and also removed its listings in late December 2010. American itself has been trying to build up its own bookings site, and industry insiders thought that the airline was planning to adopt Southwest’s model of offering fares and booking solely through its site. As Airfare Watchdog reported earlier this year, the benefit of having consumers buy their flights on AA.com is that the airline makes money from the extra upgrades, including seat upgrades, insurance products, vacation packages, and hotel and car reservations. While American didn’t expect a significant drop in sales from removing fares from Expedia, the fact that the two companies eventually reached an agreement makes me wonder if there was a financial impact for the airline after all. American also recently signed a distribution deal with Priceline.        
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| Think AT&T’s Bandwidth Cap Is Bad? Try Living Down Under. Posted: 04 Apr 2011 02:19 PM PDT
       
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| Twitter And Mediasift Partner To Resell Firehose Data Posted: 04 Apr 2011 01:32 PM PDT
This move is similar to when Twitter partnered with Gnip to make parts of Twitter’s firehose commercially available five months ago, except Gnip focuses on bulk instead of vertical searches. According to Sarver, Mediasift will “serve the analytics market we can’t serve ourselves.” “We’re trying to commoditize data processing,” said founder Nick Halstead about offering developers the ability to use Mediasift’s DataSift in order to analyze the Twitter firehose. Halstead used to focus on Tweetmeme, but expanded the platform to all realtime data at TechCrunch Disrupt in September. DataSift’s platform provides developers with alerts, analytics and a realtime API through a drag and drop graphical interface. DataSift’s bread and butter is being able to drill down on data, for example mentions on Starbucks on Twitter with a positive sentiment or Foursquare checkins from people with a certain Klout score. Sarver told developers to stop focusing on building Twitter clients in March and to focus on data and different niche verticals. Looks like Datasift has complied.
       
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