Unsurprisingly, Salesforce is seeing rapid adoption of its social collaboration platform Chatter among its existing customers after launching to the public last week. In its first week of general availability, Chatter has been integrated by 10,000 of Salesforce’s 77,300 existing customers, or 13 percent of Salesforce’s customer base.
Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff said in a statement: “We’ve never seen this kind of excitement around a product release before.” Chatter was made available to the public last week after four months in private beta. Announced last November, Chatter leverages what Benioff calls the Cloud 2, delivering realtime access to data and information, using social sources, such as YouTube and Twitter. → Read More
Google Social Search is a good idea. You take regular Google search results and intertwine them with related elements that your contacts have shared on various social networks. But there’s one big barrier to entry. In order for your contacts to automatically share elements, they have to link up their various social profiles to their Google Profile page. A lot of people are simply not going to do that. So Google is changing things up a bit and making it easier to get at social data.
Starting today and rolling out over the cource of this week, Google will begin looking at items you share on Buzz and crawling elements from those social networks to use in Social Search as well. For example, if you link up your Twitter feed to your Buzz page, even if you haven’t linked it to your Google Profile, you’ll now start seeing results from your Twitter social graph in the results. → Read More
The rumors were true. Today, Hulu is announcing a limited launch of Hulu Plus, an ad-supported, premium subscription service that will run $9.99 per month and includes HD access to full season runs of shows from Fox, ABC, and NBC. Better yet, Hulu Plus will work across a multitude of platforms, including PCs, the iPad, iPhone, some Samsung Blu-ray players, and soon, the PlayStation 3. The service is currently only available to select Hulu members who have been invited — you can request an invite here.
Even if you don’t have an invite, you’ll still be able to download a Hulu Plus application on the iPad, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 (it isn’t up on the App Store yet — we’ll update when it is). The application will feature a limited number of episodes, but you’ll be able to get a feel what the service will be like. Hulu says that the service wil launch broadly in the coming months. → Read More
Credit to Pocket-lint, a fine site, for comparing the Adidas Jabulani, the ball that’s used in the World Cup, and the Nike T90 Ascente, the ball that’s used in the English, Spanish, and Italian leagues. The ides was to see if you could find out, once and for all, if there’s something inherent in the design of the Jabulani that makes it fly all over the place. Conclusion? Maybe, but the balls are so damn near identical that in no way can you say, “Well, Adidas screwed the pooch here.” Remember: Fifa is ultimately in charge of the ball, so if there’s anyone to blame (or praise) it’s those bozos. → Read More
It’s 2010, and we’re still exchanging printed business cards. There are quite a few solutions to digitize the cards, but most existing scanners, for example, aren’t practical enough. This is where Pitrec [JP], a new handheld for digitizing business cards made by Japanese stationery maker King Jim, comes in. → Read More
Only a few months after the company raised $1 million in funding, Kontagent, an fbFund winner and social analytics platform, has raised $4.5 million in new funding. We’ve confirmed the funding with Kontagent’s co-founder, Albert Lai. The round was led by Altos Ventures and Maverick Capital, with participation from Larry Braitman, cofounder of FlyCast and Adify. This brings the total amount raised by Kontagent to nearly $6 million dollars to date.
Kontagent’s platform gives Facebook app developers and publishers detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times, social interaction and other variables. The platform provides powerful A/B testing across any viral channel (a button, an invite or a notification) that sits inside Facebook. → Read More
Cisco is in the business of sending bits from one place to the next. Therefore, anything that will allow them to play to their strengths, namely data access, is important. That’s why they bought Flip and that’s why they just announced this odd business tablet.
It’s basically an HD tablet running Android with full video conferencing and email and media access. Obviously there’s no price and they’ll be shipping in 2011, if they ever ship.
This is definitely not a consumer-facing product. It will be part of their Communications package that they sell to business users. My thinking is this won’t ship at all, but that’s just a hunch. Perhaps they’ll farm out the manufacture to an OEM for mass production, but don’t expect it in your local Best Buy. → Read More
Ok, so this is legitimately great. Ninety percent of the stuff I write about… meh. It’s called the Pivot Power, and it’s a electrical outlet that changes shape, allowing you to snake it around corner, shoes, the giant Xbox 360 power supply, and other obstructions. Pretty amazing, this. → Read More
Got a SIM you need shaved down and you don’t trust your shaky hands to cut it? Brando has you covered. For only $25, you can now buy a sort of cutter that does the dirty deed for you. Brando
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The long dalliance between investors and Foursquare appears to almost be consummated. According to a Tweet by Foursquare board member Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, about an hour ago he was “approving the wire transfer heard ’round the world.”
That would be the wire transfer from the new group of investors led by Andreessen Horowiitz, as we reported a few weeks ago. Despite being one of the hottest startups around, or perhaps because of it, Foursquare took along time to close this round. Mostly that was because the company got distracted by acquisition talks with Yahoo and Facebook. When I asked Foursquare CEo Dennis Crowley about this drawn out process ten days ago, he responded, “You don’t have to rush through it.” → Read More
This is it, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Well, maybe.
A report today in Bloomberg citing two unnamed sources claims that Verizon Wireless will be getting the iPhone in January. Yes, Verizon, iPhone, January. Naturally, all the companies involved are declining to comment on the record, but Bloomberg sounds pretty confident in the report thanks to their two sources “familiar with the plans.”
This information is close to what the Wall Street Journal was reporting back in March which stated that a CDMA (the type of network Verizon uses) iPhone would be entering production later this year to be released at some point after that. There have been many earlier reports as well. Some dating back years — and some of those may have very well been negotiating tactics by Apple to score a better deal when re-upping with AT&T. → Read More
Yup, humanity has peaked. This is the Sound Blaster World of Warcraft Tap Chat, um, thing. You use it to tap to chat while playing the game. → Read More
As you may have noticed, Twitter has been having a rough month. Due in part to traffic from the World Cup, Twitter has had its worst month in terms of uptime in a year. The Fail Whale has been out in full force, and it’s partially Twitter’s own fault as they’re trying to overhaul their internal network during this time of high traffic. And today they’ve announced another move to help deal with network strain: an API rate limit cut.
And this isn’t a minor rate limit cut either. Twitter is taking the default limit from 350 and cutting it to 175. And they’re slashing the rates in half across the board. This means that everyone from the smallest Twitter sites to those whitelisted will be affected. Even Twitter’s own mobile properties (which use the same API) are being forced to deal with this cut. → Read More
Now this is a CPU cooler! It’s the Cooler Master V6GT, and for whatever reason it has a LED strip up top for… no reason? Whatever~! → Read More
Do you remember the cool “self-destructing” USB drive Fujitsu teased back in April last year? The device, which offers timed data deletion to prevent unauthorized access, was shown on both Fujitsu Japan’s and Fujitsu America’s website, and today the company in Tokyo finally [JP, PDF] named, spec’d and dated it for end consumers. → Read More
Last year we wrote an in-depth feature on Pivot, a Microsoft Live Labs technology that helps make sense of interconnectedness between objects on the web. The underlying premise of Pivot is to view relationships between “collections” of individual information on the the web. Many of the connections between items on the web aren’t necessarily tangible, but Pivot helps crawl massive amount of objects on the web and produces sleek visualizations of all that is connected. Today, Microsoft is using the technology to power Silverlight PivotViewer, which is now available for download. PivotViewer lets the user visualize thousands of items at once and then organize and navigate them within a rich media application.
Pivot and Silverlight technologies are the core of the PivotViewer. Developers and designers can now use Silverlight PivotViewer to build collections and embed them on their websites. Using the Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight 4, you can zoom into high resolution content and pan around to find what you’re looking for. → Read More
First, TorrentFreak rules. Second, TorrentFreak rules. Third… Well, you know what third is! The guys over there point out that the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sorta like the ACLU for tech, will appear in federal court this week, trying to stop all those Hurt Locker BitTorrent lawsuits. The main reason is that the U.S. Copyright Group, which is just a fancy-sounding name for an otherwise unremarkable law firm, is denying justice to the thousands of individuals wrapped up in this mess. If the USCG is truly interested in justice, it would file suit against each person individually and let them have their day in court one-on-one. → Read More
Foursquare has gotten some pretty big publicity before — like in Vegas. But a new Verizon commercial appears to be completely predicated around the service. Well, provided you know what Foursquare is.
As you can see in the 30-second spot embedded below, a girl is walking around a city on her Verizon Droid phone. She pulls it out of her pocket, starts walking, and immediately begins using the device. So what’s she using on it? About 6 seconds in, you’ll see she’s checking-in to a venue on the Android version of Foursquare. She keeps using her phone as she’s walking, but we don’t see the screen until 11 seconds later. What’s she doing then? Again, she’s checking Foursquare. → Read More
Germany’s Dextrose, the browser-based game engine startup, has acquired California-based Effect Games, which provides developer tools for creating and publishing web-based games. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed.
Dextrose is building what the startup claims will be the first commercial game engine for pluginless browser-based games. Dubbed ‘Aves Engine‘, it enables developers to create games built on the ‘open web stack’ in 2D and 2.5D (pseudo-3D), utilizing modern web standards – HTML, CSS and JavaScript – and negating the need for users to install a separate browser plug-in such as Flash or any other bespoke technology. → Read More
You want these packs. Seriously. Gamer Grub is good. Like OMG-I-might-start-living-off-this-stuff good. So yeah, we’re giving away three packs to one hungry gamer. How do you win? → Read More
