Today at the RealTime CrunchUp, representatives from some of the top companies involved in location based services came together to talk about the current state and future of geo-based services.
Participating in the panel were:
Matt Galligan, co-Founder of SimpleGeo
Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter
Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare
Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
Justin Shaffer, Founder of Hot Potato
Elad Gil, CEO of Mixer Labs
Moderators were our own Erick Schonfeld and MG Siegler. → Read More
I’ve never heard of Waterfall Audio before. I think they qualify for one of my rules in the audio world though: if you’ve never heard of an audio company and they cost more than products from a familiar brand, it’s probably good stuff. Apparently the company made a name for itself a few years ago with a glass-enclosed speaker line. Who knew.
The latest speaker line, Serio, keeps the glass theme alive, but manages to shrink the package down to a satellite-style size. Too bad all that glass and square lines scream the ’90s. → Read More
Target will be running a special Sunday-to-Wednesday circular this weekend full of pre-Black Friday deals. Most of the deals are okay, if unspectacular – 32-inch LCD TV for $398, $20 giftcard with Wii system purchase, etc. – while the 10.1-inch Acer Aspire One netbook ought to sell out pretty quickly at just $199. → Read More
[UK] London-based Fingertips.net lets users create their own personalised online newspaper “from the publications they want”. Or at least that’s the claim.
The reality is that the RSS-driven service isn’t nearly as customisable as its many competitors, such as start page Netvibes or more similar aggregators like Meehive. Instead, Fingertips only enables users to pick from around 300 sources (50,000 articles) from publications such as The Times or Heat magazine, divided into traditional sections based on subject – news, sport, travel etc. → Read More
This is our third guest post written by a London-based VC. To allow them to speak plainly without jeopardising their fund or their career in the small village that is the London VC scene, I’m allowing them to post anonymously. FYI, LondonVC is a genuine VC and TechCrunch Europe has met them face to face.
One of the biggest challenges for any investor (regardless of the stage/type of investment they target) and founders alike is hiring great talent. In early stage investing the team may be the single criteria upon which an investment decision is based (considering how many times when that’s all there is to go by) and even in later/growth stages, while the founding team has been historically crucial, bringing someone new in to help “get the company to the next level” can be the difference between investing or not. → Read More
Well this is no fun. If you’ve been patiently waiting for the Vizio HDTVs that bring Twiiter, Facebook, Netflix, and Yahoo into you living room, you’re going to have to wait a bit longer. Santa isn’t going to bring one this year. → Read More
Rippol, the video discovery site that combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting content, has launched to the public at today’s RealTime CrunchUp.
We recently took an in-depth look at the service, but for those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a recap: Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It then looks at meta data from video content ingested from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and uses machine learning to identify videos it thinks you’ll like. From there you can browse through various genres to look at recommended videos → Read More
At our Real-Time CrunchUp today in San Francisco, we are hosting a panel titles “Media Streams: Are These The Utlimate Marketing Vehicle?”
Panelists include Sean Rad, CEO of Ad.ly; Ryan Amos, co-founder of DailyBooth; Jesse Engle, CEO of CoTweet; Robin Bechtel, a celebrity agent and Philip Nelson, SVP of strategic development for NewTek.
Below find my live notes (paraphrased): → Read More
Today at the RealTime CrunchUp we saw the launch of VideoLobby, a new service founded by Peter Urban that’s looking to make it easier to create professional-looking webcasts, complete with custom branding. The service is an extension of Urban’s “sales software for real people” service Smibs.
Urban says that while some other services offer embeds, you’re generally responsible for building your own branded site to insert those in. That’s where VideoLobby comes in: the site helps you build your own custom video portal, and then allows you to include streams from services like Qik, Ustream and Justin.tv. The company calls itself the “Blogger for real-time video”.
The service doesn’t just make your page look nicer, though — it can automatically pull in comments from Twitter and Facebook, and also allows users to submit questions directly from the show’s page. Stream administrators can use a management system to heck off their questions as they answer them. And the service is completely free. → Read More
There really is something to be said about being the first to the dance. I’m pretty sure we can all agree that Steam was the first big digital distribution service for video games, and I also think we can all agree that it was something of a success. But how big a success? Stardock, which owns the Impulse distribution service (and published Sins of a Solar Empire), believes that Steam enjoys 70 percent market share of the digital distribution business. → Read More
[Holland] This week we’ve got Rutger van Waveren, Founder of Spectives.com, doing an elevator pitch. Spectives.com allows people to use images to keep track of the latest news from their favorite sites. Think of Spectives as a visual RSS, Alltop, or as a kind of Netvibes for visual news.
Unlike RSS where you have to scan text headlines for information, you can scan images. Great for a lot of visual news like cars, fashion, design, photography, sports, funny pictures and gossip.
Thanks to Techfluff.tv’s Amsterdam correspondent Isabelle O’Kane for filming this. → Read More
Rotten Tomatoes is a great site because it takes all the movie reviews from around the web and condenses them into an easy-to-understand aggregate score. But let’s be honest: Most movie reviewers suck. Why not instead rely on people in your social circle to recommend movies to you? That’s the idea behind FlixUp.
This new iPhone app unveiled at our Realtime CrunchUp event in San Francisco today essentially scans Twitter for what people are saying about a movie and shows you a rating based on that. It can return a general score from across Twitter, or the tweets about the movie from people you follow on Twitter. → Read More
You know the retweet button you see on content spread throughout the web? You can thank TweetMeme for that. Long before Twitter’s new Retweet functionality existed, this button was the way to share on Twitter. And it still is for content not on twitter.com. But now it’s time for TweetMeme to think about making money. And they’ve come up with a way that people are either going to love or hate.
At our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco today, TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead has unveiled AdTweets. As you might expect, this involves ads that appear on your site — but with the addition of a retweet button. Yes, you can also retweet these ads just as you would any piece of content. → Read More
You may recall that back in early September, we brought you news of this steering wheel table. Well, the customer reviews on Amazon’s product page are pouring in and it looks like this may be the sleeper hit of the season! → Read More
The first randomly selected audience winner today at the RealTime CrunchUp is SuperFeedr. They are an API service that works with both XMPP and PubSubHubbub (which launched at the first CrunchUp) to create realtime content feeds.
As they noted on stage, it’s hard to demo something that is API only, but one implementation that we’ve written about before is Excla.im, which we wrote about recently. This allows for the realtime tracking of keywords on Twitter via IM. But this idea works for all content. → Read More
With services like Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Kyte, and Qik bringing live video streaming to the masses, the web is turning into a viable competitor to television for real-time content. But while all of these services are great for bloggers remotely broadcasting footage,or streaming live events, but they come with a few problems: video content isn’t optimized for search engines, and unlike TV, there’s no closed captioning. PlyMedia is looking to change that.
The company is launching a service that will offer real-time captions and super-fast transcriptions to suit the needs of live streamers. → Read More
The sudden surge in interest in Android (largely due to all of the hype surrounding the Droid) has caused a lot of developers to reconsider the platform. Atleast one major development house, however, isn’t impressed. Earlier today, Alexandre de Rochefort, Finance Director of Gameloft, told an investor conference that the company had “significantly cut [their] investment in Android platform, just like … many others”. Gameloft is one of the largest mobile games companies around, having pulled in roughly $132 million in the last three quarters alone. While there are plenty of fish in the developer sea, this can’t be one that Google is happy to see swim away. → Read More
At today’s Real-Time CrunchUp, Mozzler launched its real-time search engine based on Twitter. Mozzler, which has real-time functionality, searches Twitter for the most popular content in the last six hours based on retweets.
You can search Mozzler by keyword, similar to searches you can do on OneRiot and other search engines that include Twitter results. Results can include videos and images as well. Mozzler has also created numerous categories of searches under technology, entertainment, sports, business and more. → Read More
It’s safe to say that we hear at CrunchGear think you should be able to do whatever you want with hardware that you buy. Let’s take console modding. You wanna flash the drive on your 360 for whatever reason? Fine, go ahead. But don’t think that you can log onto Xbox Live with said modded console, and play your misbegotten wares (or is that warez?), on Microsoft’s network. It’s against the TOS, it makes a mockery of the entertainment medium that you purport to support, and, well, is unfair to the other players. → Read More
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