I’m so confused right now.
There’s this thing spreading around Twitter right now. It looks like it may be a virus — but it’s not. It’s just thousands of people all tweeting the same thing: “Sometimes I just want to copy someone else’s status, word for word, and see if they notice.” Some are retweets, but most are just people manually entering those words and sending them out to all their followers. I get it, it’s funny. But it’s not that funny. And yet, everyone seems to be doing it. → Read More
Videoplaza, the video ad server startup, has announced its working with the UK digital advertising network Unanimis.
The “strategic partnership” will see the two companies offer “seamless integration of advertisements” into online videos for Unanimis’ clients, which include Orange.co.uk, Sony’s Crackle.com and WWE.
Videoplaza, headquartered in Stockholm, targets broadcasters, newspaper publishers and other premium media owners and has to-date partnered with several leading European media companies including Sweden’s TV4 Group, Denmark’s Ekstrabladet, La Vanguardia in Spain, and Myvideorights.com and Incisive Media in the UK (see TCE coverage). → Read More
They’ve going to try this DJ Hero business one more try, eh? Good on them. If you’re so inclined, here’s the entire track list for the next game, DJ Hero 2, which is due to be released later this year . Look at that: my favorite Deadmau5 song, “I Remember,” is in there. Nice. → Read More
Bored? Don’t have anything to play when you hit the old WC at work? Why not win a free copy of Blaze: Fire Puzzle from Handmark. I have 15 copies to give away, 8 to folks who tweet me with the hashtag #blazeon (don’t forget to follow me so I can DM you if you win) and 7 to commenters who comment below. You can enter both ways but you’ll only win once. I’ll send the codes out randomly over the next few hours and will close the contest tomorrow morning. → Read More
In a move that emphasizes the increasing importance of realtime search, Google has just given their realtime search function a kick in the pants, moving it from the lowly “Updates” sidebar on regular Google search to it’s own URL http://google.com/realtime, which was broken this morning but now seems to be redirecting to http://www.google.com/realtime?esrch=RealtimeLaunch::Experiment.
In addition, Google has added some supplementary tools to help you sift through news stories, blog posts, Twitter, Facebook, and Buzz updates including … → Read More
3D printing has been gaining a lot of popularity in the last couple of years. There’s even a DIY 3D printer community at RepRap. Since most of the parts used in these 3D printers are fairly simple, it’s possible for a 3D printer to print the parts necessary to make new 3D printers — it’s even possible to print a new 3D printer more advanced than the one doing the printing! Skynet, take note: I, for one, welcome our new self-replicating printer overlords. → Read More
In the endless game of cat-and-mouse that is iPhone jailbreaking, sometimes the mouse needs to take a break. Not because it’s tired, mind you — but because it doesn’t want to show the cat where it’s hiding its cheese before it gets a chance to eat it. Early this morning, the iPhone Dev Team (the guys behind the discovery of the vast majority of iPhone jailbreak methods) announced that they won’t be working on a jailbreak for iOS 4.0.2. → Read More
When RC Nerf Tanks are outlawed, only outlaws will have RC Nerf Tanks. This DIY project uses an automatic Nerf gun (the Stampede would probably work) and an RC tank to unleash the hurt on unsuspecting cubicle-mates. → Read More
“Augmented reality”? That’s Samsung’s gimmick, BattleTac. Be that as it may, this is Layar, what the Hungarian company calls an “augmented reality app that shows you the things you can’t see.” On the battlefield, that is. Mmm. → Read More
MouseTrace has launched as a way for website owners to optimize their sites “to better suit their customers and visitors.” It does this via a single line of javascript which gives the owner the ability to spy on their visitors, literally, through a visual replay of how they’ve interacted with the site, including mouse movement, clicks and page scrolling. Additionally, MouseTrace works for pages viewed on an iPhone, recording touch, pinch to zoom, and rotation. → Read More
Yesterday we wrote about the launch and funding of GroupMe, a new startup that was conceived and built at the TechCrunch Hackday in New York in May. We asked cofounder Jared Hecht to tell us about the experience. His response is below.
Several days before the TC Disrupt Hackathon in May, my fiancé started complaining about an email chain she was on. Her friends were coordinating a trip, and when it came time to mobilize, the chain broke down in real-time. Not everyone had a smartphone, some people experienced lag times between emails, etc. I thought there needed to be an easier way to communicate within groups in real-time. SMS seemed like the most intuitive option. I called up Steve Martocci (who I’ve used as a sounding board for years) who grew very excited by the idea. He slept on it and called me back the next day with what was potentially an 18 month product roadmap for what would eventually become GroupMe. → Read More
Europeans, take note: Tivo could soon be coming to your neighborhood in a big, big way. The company’s president and CEO, Tom Rogers, said that it’s looking to gain more of a foothold in the larger European markets, including the UK and Spain, in order to broaden its horizons a little bit. Dulling some of the pain from that recent $15.3m loss wouldn’t hurt, either. → Read More
I’ve been reading up on Facebook‘s most recently filed lawsuit, and the more I learn, the more the whole ordeal aggravates me.
As you may have heard, the social networking juggernaut has decided to sue a fledgling startup called Teachbook, which is preparing to launch an online community for teachers, over the word ‘book’ in their name.
Greg Shrader, managing partner of Teachbook, told Wired that it doesn’t plan to be bullied into changing its name without a fight.
In his words: ”They’re throwing bombs at a mosquito. They believe we’re going to roll over and in some respect they get to own the term ‘book.’” → Read More
As a bona fide lover of Red Vines*, I found the Red Vines World of Sharing social media promotion quite intruiging. Essentially you go to the site, gain access by logging in or connecting with Facebook, and you then leave a note about Red Vines or sharing or kittens or whatever. After every few notes they run a contest to give away licorice or a similar prize and the stated goal is to cover the world in Red Vines, at least symbolically. Aside from the “shilling for licorice” angle, it seems they did a good job of mixing a few important aspects of social media marketing including, but not limited to, offering prizes and accepting the risk of a flood of penis jokes if 4chan gets ahold of their site.
Candy manufacturers have it hard. You really can’t say much more about Red Vines than has been already passed down through generations by word of mouth. They also know that this cohort of parents is pretty down on candy and that these same parents also flails around on Facebook a lot. Putting two and two together, you see, makes a social media marketing plan and that’s what Red Vines did. By attempting this goofy, odd stunt, they reminded me, at least, to go buy some Red Vines. → Read More
Calling itself an ‘unhotel’, Onefinestay, which launches first in London, lets travelers stay in someone’s real home while the owner is out of town. For guests, it’s being pitched as a better value alternative to a premium or boutique hotel with the attraction being that they can “live like a local” (or so the marketing goes), while for house owners the service is a way to generate “hassle-free income” since it’s fully managed with Onefinestay doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes, such as inventory, insurance, and even providing towels and toiletries. The contract, however, is between the guest and home owner not Onefinestay, so in that sense they are simply an intermediary. → Read More
Oh, man. It’s here. We’ve been hoping for Netflix instant streaming support to hit the iPhone and iPod Touch ever since it landed on the iPad, and we’ve been waiting on the edge of our collective seat since the company demonstrated it at WWDC. The wait.. its over! → Read More
Although Xing founder Lars Hinrichs recently launched his much talked about seed fund HackFwd, he’s just announced a non-institutional investment by himself and fellow German entrepreneur and angel investor Christoph Janz.
Both have invested an undisclosed amount in Samedi, a German SaaS startup that’s been around for two years and is offering a web-based solution for practicing physicians. → Read More
Sony sure knows how to name their products, don’t they? “RDP-X50iPBLK” easily rolls off the tongue and instantly transmits the notion of “iPhone speaker dock!” This speaker dock does all you’d expect from an iPhone or iPod speaker dock: it plays your music, charges your device, and sports a remote control. There’s also a line-in jack in case you want to connect your roommate’s goofy Android device to listen to his collection of nerdcore rap. → Read More
When it comes to measuring how content is shared across the Web, the approaches we use today are still pretty primitive. People count how many times a link is shared on Facebook or retweeted on Twitter, but nobody really knows what percentage of those links are clicked on to drive traffic back to the original sites. ShareThis, which offers an all-in-one share button across tens of thousands of sites, is trying to address this issue with new metrics across its network that measure not only how many times a link is shared, but also how many times people act on that and click back to the article or Webpage. It calls this new metric Social Reach.
The company shared some data with me about the biggest sharing services across its network, which reaches 400 million people a month. Facebook is No. 1, accounting for 45 percent of all shared content. Email is No. 2 with 34 percent, and Twitter is No. 3 with 12 percent. Combined, Twitter and Facebook now account for 57 percent of all shared links, which is up 6 percentage points since last February. Email, meanwhile, has dropped by 7 percentage points in teh same time period. So a share shift in social sharing is definitely occurring. → Read More
Want to stream Netflix shows and TV on a tiny screen? Well now you can. The Netflix iPhone app is now available on iTunes and it offers the same functionality you know and love on the iPad but on the smaller devices. No huge changes here: you sign-in, pick a video, and start watching over wi-fi or 3G, with obvious quality reduction with bad reception. Click through for the press release. → Read More
