Off & Away, an innovative travel startup that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, is launching a few new features today. Off & Away applies a Swoopo-like auction model to buying hotel rooms online.
The site features upscale hotel rooms at rock-bottom prices; Off & Away auctions off each reservation, and other people bid for the same room. To participate you need to buy bids (they’re a dollar apiece); then you can bid as many times as you’d like until time runs out. Once that happens one user will walk away with the cheap hotel price. Everyone else can use the money they’ve put towards bids toward reserving the room at its normal price. → Read More
The Foursquare model of checking into a location, earning badges and tapping into your social network to share that location has become one that has been able to be applied to other platforms. For example, GetGlue allows users to check-in to shows, books, movies and more, earn badges and share this with friends on Twitter and Facebook. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, OneTrueFan is launching a service for web publishers that allows visitors to earn badges for interacting and sharing content on the site.
OneTrueFan, which will be available as a browser add-on or as a javascript code that publishers embed on their site, aims to help engage visitors while they are on a website interacting with content. The startup revolves around a game-format that allows you to see who is reading content in the site, compete for the most engagement and encourages you to share content within the service and on social networks. → Read More
Hope you don’t have an Apple TV shipment notification in your inbox. You’re about to get a little media streamer jealousy because it seems a Hulu channel is launching on the Roku platform shortly.
BusinessOfVideo.com apparently confirmed with a couple Hulu content partners that the service will soon be available on the streamer. Of course you should probably file this in your Unfounded Internet Rumors folder, bow it raises a couple of questions if it’s true. And boy do I hope it’s true. → Read More
There’s clearly something to this idea of mobile/social shopping. Or at least, a huge group of startups all seem to think there is. Already this year we have apps like Shopkick and Barcode Hero attempting to build upon what apps ShopSavvy and others have been working on for some time. That is, enriching the shopping experience by using a device most of us now have on us at all times: our phones. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, a new entry attempting to be the broadest of these yet, CheckPoints, is launching.
Co-founder Mark DiPaola calls CheckPoints “the first mobile shopping rewards app that lets consumers own rewards regardless of what store they’re in.” While the aforementioned apps may have been out first, a number are limited in either the number of stores they work in, or the number of products they work with. CheckPoints has products from partners such as Belkin and Tyson at launch, as well as brands like Amazon, CVS, and American Airlines. At launch, CheckPoints will work in over a million stores around the U.S., DiPaola says. → Read More
Increasingly, there are apps that let you leave messages, photos, and videos for friends in real places. Now you can leave money as well. Many startups are already adding rewards to check-ins, but social payments startup Venmo is tying check-ins to real money with a new iPhone app called Gifi that is launching today at TC Disrupt.
Venmo is a way to text real money to your friends and broadcast those payments on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Gifi is a mashup of Foursquare and Venmo. It lets you leave money for people in specific locations, which they can unlock with a Foursquare check-in. → Read More
When Foursquare first launched, there were no deals. There was no way to get free pizza or cheap beer. The only incentive to play their game was to earn badges and bragging rights among friends. Badgeville, a new startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, wants to apply that gaming mechanic to all sites across the web.
So how does this work? Well, a publisher sets up a Badgeville account and chooses what type of badges they want to give to readers for various types of actions on the site. For example, if you comment, you may get a badge. Or if you click the Like button on comments, you may earn points for that. If you become a Facebook Fan of a page, you may earn a different badge for that, etc. All of this is defined by the publisher. → Read More
Maybe it was just a slip. Or maybe it was something much more. But here’s what HP’s Todd Bradley said at TCDisrupt today when Mike Arrington asked a question especially interesting to anyone who’s taken a Business 101 course, “Do you think it’s ethically wrong to charge as much for ink as you do?”
“Ask me next year, if I take the [CEO] postion,” Bradley responded to Arrington, language that would imply that he had been offered the CEO position, notable because HP is still searching for a CEO to replace Mark Hurd and Bradley began the talk emphasizing the fact that he was still just an EVP. → Read More
In his explorations with the Twitter button, Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead discovered that there are millions of tweets a day producing a stunning amount of valuable information, the only problem is that’s pretty hard to separate the wheat from the chafe, the signal from the noise or a bunch of other sifting cliches.
Datasift, in the same space as HootSuite and Tweetronics, is attempting to make this process of sifting through realtime data easier for companies. No longer unique to Twitter, the Datasift platform, accessible through a drag and drop graphical interface, is a curation engine which relies upon realtime filtering, providing developers with alerts, analytics and a realtime API. → Read More
Similar to Cooliris, Japanese startup Gunzoo aims to change the way people search for videos through their Fabric Video product, which launches today at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Founded by Toshikazu Shinohara, Gunzoo and Fabric Video want to disrupt the video search space, by allowing users to browse efficiently and seamlessly through thousands of options, instead of having to try to find what they’re looking for through specific keyword search, which is what is happening on YouTube video search, for example. → Read More
The main reason I love services like Tumblr and Posterous is that they make personal blogging simple. While you certainly still can write long-winded pieces about whatever you want, you can also just use a bookmarklet or email to send in individual pieces of content quickly. Storify seems like it could be the next step in that evolution.
The new services, launching today in beta at TechCrunch Disrupt, is all about content curation from other social networking sites. Say there’s a tweet you see and want to build a story around (we do it quite a bit), with the click of a button, you can drag it into your Storify story. Maybe there’s a Flickr picture about the same topic — same idea, just drag it is. Maybe there’s a YouTube video, or a Facebook status update — all of this stuff can be easily pulled in. This creates one story of all this curated content. → Read More
First came the specs. Then came the pre-production render. And now, the hat trick is complete: say hello to the Android-powered, Verizon-bound HTC Lexicon in all of its plasticky flesh. → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt today, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington sat down with HP’s Executive Vice President for the Personal Systems Group, Todd Bradley to discuss HP’s recent acquisition spree, future strategy and more. HP just bought data storage company 3PAR for $2.4 billion after a heated bidding war with Dell. And earlier this summer, HP bought smartphone manufacturer Palm for $1.2 billion. And let’s not forget the whole Mark Hurd fiasco. Bradley of course could be a contender for Hurd’s position as CEO.
Bradley says his group, which is in charge of a $40-plus billion revenue stream including PCs, printers and more, was in charge of buying Palm. Bradley’s main goal now, is how to broadly deploy the WebOS, the mobile operating system for Palm phones. Next year, for example, Palm will sell 15 million printers that use WebOS/ He says that while the smartphone category is growing, tablets are going to be a huge market. He estimates that in the next few years tablets will be a $40 billion market. HP of course, is looking to be a part of this market with its own iPad competitors. → Read More
In the late 1980s, Apple created a few concept videos about a device they called the Computer Knowledge Navigator. These videos came up recently when Apple unveiled the iPad, because the machine in the videos is a tablet computer. But that’s about all the iPad has in common with this conceptual device. Instead, a new startup launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, Qwiki, is much more like the futuristic computer in the videos.
To be clear, Qwiki isn’t a piece of hardware. Instead, it’s a piece of software meant to run on the web and as an app on mobile devices. What it does is present to you data about millions of topics in an extremely interesting and visual way. Imagine if someone created a movie highlight reel of Wikipedia pages — that’s sort of what Qwiki is like. You search for something — a topic, a person, etc — and Qwiki talks to you, telling you all you need to know about what you searched for, while also showing you key things about the subject or person. → Read More
Germany’s Bild newspaper says that the Nintendo 3DS will be released in Japan on November 11. And who are we to question almighty Bild, the paper that recently asked how it’s supposed to be able to tell the difference between two different Japanese footballers? For real. → Read More
Details are still vague, so consider this speculative for now, but Amazon is poised to do something that involves Android — and it looks like it may be a competitor to Android’s official Android Market, which is analogous to the iPhone’s App Store. Beginning late last week, Amazon began reaching out to developers about an opportunity; interested developers are being asked to sign an NDA before they’re sent more details. We’ve confirmed with multiple developers that Amazon has been sending out feelers, and while we’re still working on confirming the details of Amazon’s project, there are a few clues scattered around the web.
In a thread on Listware, multiple developers are apparently talking about Amazon’s proposal. One notes that the opportunity looks “more restrictive than Android Market”. Another talks about Amazon’s global payments system, which has much broader reach than Google’s payments. → Read More
Kno Inc, the company that recently received $ 46 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Silicon Valley Bank and TriplePoint Capital to build “the most powerful tablet anyone has ever made” announces at TC Disrupt that it will also be building a single screen tablet to supplement the dual screen tablet it announced in June. → Read More
“The Yelp for cellphones will be Yelp. The Google for cellphones will be Google.”
That was Clarium Capital President Peter Thiel talking to our own Sarah Lacy on stage during TechCrunch Disrupt today. His point was that Internet innovation today is much like innovation in the automobile industry in the 1950s and 1960s. That is, there isn’t much — it’s all about the big boys, in Thiel’s mind.
Thiel kept coming back to this point during his talk. Given this, Sarah was especially curious about his early Facebook investment. While Thiel said that he believes that Facebook is currently undervalued at $30 billion, he would think twice about funding a startup like Facebook today. Again, he just doesn’t believe there’s going to be a lot that’s happening that isn’t dominated by the big boys. → Read More
Parents everywhere are constantly uploading videos of their little geniuses effecently using iDevices. Just last week we featured a video of a four-year-old boy playing around on an iPad. It’s certainly a testament to Apple’s user interface. But the iPad just isn’t for pre-schoolers. Oh no, the kid in the video after the jump undercuts the other boy by three years. He probably can’t even say iPad yet. Sorry about the aspect ratio. Whoever uploaded it failed at Video 101.
[Thanks for the video, Rob!] → Read More
Facebook’s first investor Peter Thiel told Fox Business today that Facebook will not IPO until 2012. Earlier this summer, Bloomberg reported that Facebook was holding off on its IPO for another two years and Thiel seems to confirm this line of thinking.
Thiel says that Facebook wants to follow the example of Google, and doesn’t want to IPO until late in the process (which he claims is a byproduct of Sarbanes Oxley and other regulation). → Read More
Forget Mad Men and Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead will be the new king of AMC when it premieres on October 31st. A dedicated fan made the video above simply out of his love for the comic and upcoming show. The art came right from the comic. This show is going to be awesome. In case you missed it during Comic-Con, the 4:35 sneak peak at The Walking Dead is after the jump. [via LikeCool] → Read More
