Love it or hate it, but Klout is one of the key players in today’s influence/reputation market. Even if the whole concept of ranking people based on popularity feels a little icky to you (I feel you), the startup has the potential to form the basis of something bigger, something less spammy, and something less easily gamed by “social media marketers.” Or so we hope.
In the meantime, for those of you who care about this sort of thing: hooray, your score just went up today thanks to Google+!
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New startup accelerator Advise.me, home to the global startup initiative which encourages entrepreneurs from around the world to apply for seed funding, is today announcing new partnerships with LinkedIn, GoSquared and SnapEngage. All three companies will provide direct support and/or free subscriptions to their services to the program’s participants.
In addition, the team at Advise.me has grown again, and now includes folks from Spotify, Evernote, GetSatisfaction, MTV and more. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — talked SOPA, Amazon Fire, FaceBook Borging our data and not letting it out, the end of books, the beginning of Pad magazines, and why Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Starz, Arrested Development, House of Cards, and Comcast cares.
Another Gillmor Gang recorded Monday morning at 9, the show asks the musical question: should we start the week off with a bang or end it with a whimper? In the new world of streaming, nothing is more fitting than messing with the broadcast window from the start. If Congress can only pass bad laws to prop up the content cartel, maybe it’s up to the tech community to turn reality TV into our fantasy of what should happen next. → Read More
Last May at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, Gauri Manglik and her two cofounders launched SpotOn, a mobile recommendation app for bars and restaurants based on where your friends have checked in on Foursquare. The people who ended up using the app used it more as a social network than as a recommendation tool. So Manglik and her team took what they learned and built an entirely new product called Fondu, which they are launching today as an iPhone app.
“We are building a social network for writing bite-sized reviews,” says Manglik. You can search for places nearby or pull up a list of your recent Foursquare check-ins, and review each place with a short comment and give it a one-to-four petal rating with a swipe of your thumb. The app gives you a feed to follow your friends’ ratings and mini-reviews, or you can see what is popular on a map near you. → Read More
I’ve always been something of a fan (a proponent, even) of white phones. Back in another life when I was consulting mobile manufacturers on their phone designs, it was always one of the first questions I’d ask: “This is great! Can you make it in white?”
Back then, everybody acted like I was crazy. “White is too hard to keep clean!” they’d assure me. “The white bezel makes the black screen look smaller!” they’d say. These days, of course, white phones are all the rage.
Sometime before the holidays, another flagship phone is now set to hop on the big list of handsets with snowy variants: the Samsung Galaxy S II. → Read More
Intel Capital, the chip maker’s investment arm, this morning provided some details about a recently made investment in Insyde Software, a publicly listed Taiwan company that specializes in system firmware based on Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) as well as customized Android distributions for OEM and ODM customers.
Intel Capital injected NT$300 million, or roughly $10 million, into the company out of its recently announced $100 million AppUp fund. → Read More
Over 10 million people have created artful iPhonography with Instagram, but they’ve never seen their masterpieces any bigger than a Postagram postcard. But now, thanks to a peculiar synergy between the mediums and a secret algorithm, CanvasPop has found a way to blow up Instagrams and print them as beautiful canvas paintings. See, Instagram’s filters reduce grainyness and so does the texture of canvas. This means that even at 20″ by 20″, almost 10x their size on the iPhone, $60 CanvasPop prints look wall-worthy. → Read More
Driving from the Foxconn Factory, down the road from the main gate, we spotted a truck full of pigs in an open-sided container. They were huge, porcine pink, and surprisingly clean. They were still alive – but wouldn’t be for long – and they were, we could only presume, destined for the bellies of some of the company’s 400,000 workers.
As the truck trundled along the well-paved road, I flicked through the pictures I took of the Foxconn kitchen. It was something out of a delicious version of Hieronymus Bosch: huge cauldrons manned by men and women in white smocks, smoke and steam coming out of huge soup pots, the food flipped and tossed using shovels.
There, in the course of the day, nearly 400,000 meals pour out into the campus. There a cooker the size of two truck trailers cleans, cooks, and cools hundreds of pounds of rice, and some of those pigs (slaughtered off campus because that’s one thing the kitchen at Foxconn isn’t allowed to do) are stir-fried or stewed and sent out to one of the many campus cafeterias.
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Socialize, makers of a “Social SDK” for mobile developers, is today launching version 1.0 of its “Social Action Bar.” This action bar is an easy-to-install mobile toolbar of sorts, which allows an app’s users to view the popularity of the app’s content, “like” and comment on items, and share content via SMS, email, Facebook or Twitter.
In addition to the Social Action Bar SDK v. 1.0, the company is also offering an API for HTML5 developers with similar functionality. → Read More
You know, I’m beginning to think that Samsung’s factory lines are rigged up like the bus in Speed. If at any time they drop below 50 newly created Android phones per month, bam! Factory falls down and Keanu Reeves never hooks up with Sandra Bullock.
Alternative Intro: Samsung and Verizon are incredibly excited about their latest handset, the Samsung Illusion. You can always tell a company is excited about a product when much of the press release is dedicated to the riveting details, like its Underwriters Laboratory score. → Read More
Facebook users are getting more connected to each other as the service grows older, according to a new study by the company’s data team and the University of Milan. Instead of the traditional “six degrees of separation” that researchers have historically observed between all people in the world (and Kevin Bacon), the number of degrees has been dropping since 2008 on the site, from 5.28 then to 4.74 now.
This isn’t just an interesting factoid about the modern world, it highlights Facebook’s long-term strategy, and its dominant market position in social networking. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has proclaimed for years that his goal is to make the world more “open and connected.” In practice, that’s meant features across the site that do things like reveal what friends you have in common with any other user, and suggest that you become friends with people you’ve never met in person. → Read More
It’s a good day for all you Android lovers out there, because today you’re getting a killer app from iOS land: 360 Panorama. The app is from Occipital, the 2008 TechStars grad, also makers of the (now eBay-owned) barcode scanner Red Laser.
This is the first real-time panoramic photo capture app for Android, as the others on the Android Market require manual capture of separate photos followed by stitching. With 360 Panorama, you just move the device around to capture the image. → Read More
Boxee Box owners, get ready for even more content. The SlingPlayer app is available for your downloading (auto-playing video warning) and ready to catch content slung from a SlingBox Solo or Pro-HD.
This simple app allows big things. When paired with the appropriate SlingBox, Boxee Box users will be able to remotely control and access a cable box, DVR or satellite receiver. This turns the Boxee Box into a content consuming monster. → Read More
Rocket Ninja, a developer of social 3D entertainment, has raised $7.5 million in Series B funding led by European private investor Marcel Boekhoorn. This brings the company’s total funding to $11 million.
Founded two years ago, Rocket Ninja company enhances third-party games and applications with 3D technology. The company offers a proprietary 3D browser-based, content pipeline engine, Shr3d, is accessible across devices and applications. Shr3d can render complex scenes, features a robust content pipeline and provides a platform for publishing for games in a wide variety of styles and genres.
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It’s the age old tale. Company makes phone. Company codenames phone (sometimes multiple times). Company dabbles back and forth between a couple names before ultimately choosing the wrong one (*cough* HTC ChaCha *cough*). Retailer changes the name of the phone anyway, usually back to the better name (but sometimes to a ridiculously long and uselessly vague name). Happily ever after.
Today the cycle repeats with none other than the holy grail of Android handsets, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus? Or is it Prime? → Read More
There may be no greater gift than a quality piece of home entertainment equipment. I mean that, too. Forget train sets, diamonds and puppies. Everyone wants entertainment this holiday season and we’ve rounded up six solid bets ranging in price from $40 to $600. There’s something here for everyone including your great aunt or boyfriend that already has everything. → Read More
Back in January, Yuri Milner and SV Angel partnered to offer every startup that was part of Y Combinator’s winter batch (some 40 startups) $150K each in convertible debt. In September, national startup accelerator, TechStars, followed suit, upping its investment in each startup to $100K in convertible notes.
Providence, Rhode Island may not be the first city that pops into your head when you think of burgeoning startup ecosystems, but it looks like the city and one of its prominent young incubators is looking to change that. This week, Betaspring, the Providence-headquartered startup accelerator, announced that all startups that complete its 12-week accelerator program will be automatically eligible for a $50K equity investment from Rhode Island’s capital city. → Read More
We’ve all built up a ton of connections through networks like Facebook and Twitter. Now there’s a way to greedily exchange that social capital for real-world dollars. Shopcade is a new affiliate ecommerce platform where users create a personal store and feature products from a catalog of 40 million item. They can then blast store links to their social networks and earn affiliate kick-backs when their products sell. When used for good, Shopcade helps people structure the shopping recommendations they give friends to aid product discovery, and give to charity. But when used for evil, Shopcade incentivizes social network users to spam their friends.
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Startups thrive on discontinuities and disruption. NPR and Kaiser Health News broke a major story that Walmart intends to become the largest provider of primary care in the country. While Walmart backed away from some of what was reported in their Request for Information, there’s enough wiggle room in their statement to drive a truck through. In my view, this is the biggest news in healthcare since health reform. Regardless of how one feels about Walmart, it’s indisputable that they have a massive footprint and ripple effect that is good news for healthtech companies.
With 1.4 million employees and hundreds of millions of customer visits every month, Wal-Mart’s impact is without parallel. It’s one reason that the Sierra Club partnered with Walmart on its Sustainability Program. At one time, Walmart would have been a target of scorn by the Sierra Club but they saw the impact they could have. The effect of Sierra Club’s partnership with Walmart may have had a more positive outcome on the environment than just about any other Sierra Club initiative. → Read More
According to Israeli businesspaper Calcalist (in Hebrew), Microsoft has acquired San Mateo, California-based video search technology company VideoSurf for about $70 million.
We’ve confirmed the acquisition with multiple sources, although we haven’t been able to nail down the exact price (yet). One source who requested anonymity pegged it at $70 million too, though.
VideoSurf raised $28 million from a couple of tech heavyweights, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg, along with Al Gore and Current Media CEO Joel Hyatt and other investors, including Pitango VC and Verizon Ventures.
Read more at TechCrunch Europe. → Read More
