Wanna see a Microsoft Surface unboxing? Click through to watch one lucky guy unwrap the $13,500 gadget. These touchscreen tables still fascinate us. Could the Surface be the ultimate gadget? Yeah, probably. → Read More
MSN had a bit of a problem. It had the popular entertainment area of its service, where movies, musical acts, and other things in pop culture have pages filled with content for fans. But the problem was that paying people to populate these sites with content was expensive. And since it’s the fans that want to see it, why not let them help out to build the site? That’s why MSN is now partnering with WetPaint, the simple website building platform, to power new entertainment sites.
Two dozen such sites are set to be launched over the next few months. These sites will specifically be powered by WetPaint Injected, its service which allows any site owner to place user generated content onto their sites. That’s exactly what MSN plans to do, as it will still house the sites, but will simply populate pages based on the content that fans create. → Read More
Conductor, a New York-based provider of SEO measurement and optimization solutions, has raised a Series B round of funding to the tune of $10 million, led by Matrix Partners and joined by FirstMark Capital, who led the startup’s Series A financing.
Conductor markets technology which aims to empower online marketers and interactive agencies to gather reliable data on their SEO efforts, make better decisions on capturing natural search market share and accurately measure ROI for their employers or clients. → Read More
Prosper, the people-to-people lending service that launched way back in May 2006, has found itself on a rocky road so far. Last October, Prosper suspended new lending in order to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission to create a secondary marketplace for the loans on its site (the SEC wanted to evaluate whether the company should register as a securities broker, as evidenced later when it formally issued its cease-and-desist letter).
But now Prosper is back despite the fact that the SEC hasn’t yet approved its operations, and while they have respected the requested silence up during the six-month hiatus, they haven’t exactly stalled development of the service.
SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source CRM software, has launched Sugar Express, a low-cost, on-demand CRM that runs on SugarCRM’s global on-demand computing platform – the Sugar Open Cloud.
Like Sugar CRM’s other products, Sugar Express delivers sales, marketing and support features, complete with Sugar Plug-Ins for Microsoft Office and access to SugarCRM Customer Support. Sugar Express is offered as an annual subscription at $499 for up to five users or $799 for up to ten users per year. → Read More
IMshopping has launched a human-powered shopping search site and Twitter shopping service designed to help consumers find niche products on the web. It’s sort of like a shopping 411 service, which human guides on call respond to product questions and provide personalized recommendations for users about what product best suits their needs. IMShopping tries to simulate the experience of going into a store, speaking with a sales person and being guided to the item that works best for you. IMShopping also closed a $4.7 million Series A round of funding from SK Telecom Ventures.
IMSHopping hopes to fill the gap pf personalized, detail-oriented service that e-commerce sites don’t have, since these sites are focused less on answering technical questions about a product and more on price and reviews. Twitter users can directly ask questions by messaging @imshopping. The shopping guides in the community and trained experts offer detailed responses within minutes. Shoppers can use these responses to instantly make purchases or save to their own folders before making a product decision. → Read More
UrbanSpoon, a restaurant recommendation service, started out with a simple plan. It was three former Jobster employees, Ethan Lowry, Adam Doppelt and Patrick O’Donnel who set out to see if they could build a company in today’s world without needing any traditional outside investments. Today, they can safely say they succeeded — big time. IAC, the Internet giant, has just bought the completely self-funded company.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but I hear that it’s definitely worth something in the millions of dollars range. And it had to be, because UrbanSpoon was perfectly happy continuing to grow its business on its own, as it was already fairly profitable, Lowry tells me. But IAC, came in with “an offer we couldn’t refuse,” according to Lowry. He would only elaborate that, “we’re very happy with the deal.”
UrbanSpoon first popped up on IAC’s map when it began pulling in Citysearch reviews to serve up to customers. IAC was impressed with the local audiences UrbanSpoon was able to attract, Lowry says. The two sides had been talking informally on and off starting in the second half of last year. Coincidentally, this was right around the time when the iPhone 3G and Apple’s App Store launched. I mention those because they were really the catalysts that catapulted UrbanSpoon into the spotlight. → Read More
Andy Baio, blogger on Waxy.org and co-founder of Upcoming (acquired by Yahoo back in October 2005), yesterday evening announced the release of Kickstarter.
This is an online platform that enables just about anyone to raise funding from interested individuals. Basically, Kickstarter took what Sellaband is all about and applied it to a wider variety of projects, i.e. not only to discover and fund upcoming bands but anyone who does something creative (think designers, musicians, filmmakers, writers, etc.).
At launch, the service is restricted to people who are invited to the service, but you can sign up here to be notified when that changes. → Read More
Over the years, we’ve covered a number of startups, or rather projects, that were born out of the so-called Startup Weekends. Basically, these are regional community events where developers, designers and business people come together on a given weekend, decide to pursue the creation of one or more fresh web application(s) or service(s) and subsequently cook them up in a very brief period of time (usually 54 hours).
Founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde from TechStars, the concept quickly caught on and has since been held in many U.S. cities as well as many other countries across the globe.
But what happens to all these projects after they’ve launched? Do any of them actually take off or do most die a silent death? Are they usually left for what they were after the weekend or does development on the services and applications continue? → Read More
PSP 2 rumors have been coming and going for quite a while now, but now it’s being claimed that internal sources are confirming a lot of the features we’ve all been hoping for. The PSP Go! name, in addition to breaking up sentences worldwide, reflects Sony’s recent Go! effort to provide video on demand and other mobile services. So what’s the new PSP got and what didn’t make the cut? → Read More
Last week we heard that silver-age internet legend GeoCities would be closing down forever. Although that’s no great loss in itself, it’s a bit like finding out the really crappy pizza place you used to go to when you were a kid is being demolished. If you could just have one more greasy, poorly seasoned slice to remember what it was like… Well, in GeoCities’ case, you can. TechCrunch readers submitted what they felt were the most (or their most) shamefully designed GeoCities pages on the whole site. I’ve collected the links here so you don’t have to troll through the comments. → Read More
While AOL was officially launching its Socialthing for Websites initiative this morning, it was also quietly making some changes to the design of its homepage. There are some new themes, Twitter integration, a prominent RSS tab up top, and all the information and news modules are now collapsible. There are also a few new AOL content featured along teh left-hand column, such as Paw Nation and PoliticsDaily (see our review).
But if you haven’t been to AOL.com lately (you are not alone), you may not completely recognize it. For one thing, there is a lifestreaming box on the right that lets you log into various social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and MySpcace. You can see all of the status updates from your friends on other social networks and respond to them from within AOL. AIM and Bebo are also options in that box, but for Bebo you have to click an arrow to even see it (and AOL owns Bebo). → Read More
As more and more people are getting their hands on the Pre, it looks like a few more developers have been given access to the SDK emulator. Well, either that or someone who has had access for a while got a little antsy and finally caved to leaking a ton of emulator screenshots. → Read More
TellMe, which Microsoft bought two years ago, is rolling out an upgrade to its call center automation software which should improve its speech recognition rates. It is also adding Global Crossing as partner for reselling its VoiP carrier service, along with AT&T and Verizon. TellMe handles 2.5 billion calls a year for customers such as American Airlines and ETrade, all on-demand. Even a one percent improvement in automated call completion rates translates into millions of dollars a year for large call centers.
TellMe will be deploying a new text-to-speech engine with an almost-sexy female voice called Zira. She only sounds slightly robotic. Another set of technologies can break up sentences into their constituent parts so that if the software doesn’t understand something it can ask for only the piece of missing information instead of repeating the entire question. or instance, if you say you want to fly from New york to San Francisco on Wednesday, and it got everything but the day, it would only ask you what day you want to fly instead of making you repeat your entire itinerary. → Read More
This hip-hop (or shall I say hip-chop) remix of the Slap Chop infomercial is outstanding. The autotune makes it sound like a legitimate piece of pop music. Of course, they did it to MLK too, but this is far less offensive (and more delicious). → Read More
Conceptual artist and sculptor Kim Graham has created one of the creepiest prosthetics ever. Inspired by horses and other digitigrades, Ms. Graham built what is essentially a pair of stilts fashioned to resemble legs. The video shows two different views of the legs, one as plain metal, and one with fur covering, obviously intended to make your satyr fantasies come true. → Read More
