Bing today begins the rollout of a major redesign that separates search results into three panes: pure, algorithmic, text-focused results in the center; context like maps, reviews, and actionable input fields to the right; and social assistance like friends and experts who can help on the far right. The redesign is Bing’s answer to “Search Overload” — the exhausted feeling people get from today’s search results pages that have become a cluttered mess of links, tools, social, maps, and actions.
Microsoft is looking to take advantage of public discontent with Google recent missteps in design and social. Bing aims to frame Google as impure, with its desire to highlight Google+ distorting the quality of search result ranking. If it works it could claw market share away from Google and make search a real two-horse race. The rollout will reach the U.S. over the next few weeks, then the world, but you can sign up here for early access to the new Bing (and unfortunately its newsletter too). → Read More
Shame on you, WriteThat.Name. After more than one personal recommendation, not to mention glowing reviews around the web, I finally got around to signing up for WriteThat.Name, a service which automatically updates your Gmail address book with your contacts’ current information, which it pulls from their email signature lines. To be clear, the service is not new – we covered its $1.55 million seed round in January. But you know how it goes, things launch, you forget about them for a while, then you find them again thinking, “wow, how did I miss that?!” The service sounded amazing, and in the brief period of time I used it, it worked beautifully. It seemed like one of those under-the-radar must-haves that just make life easier.
But something I came across in the settings concerned me. WriteThat.Name wanted me to pay in order to keep it from spamming my friends? What? → Read More
When two of the biggest names in venture capital (arguably still the biggest) both invest in a startup, you know it’s probably time to take notice. So yes, take notice: A cross-device ad targeting startup called Drawbridge has raised a $6.5 million Series A from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.
The company was founded in November 2010 by Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, a scientist at AdMob and then, after the acquisition, at Google. Sivaramakrishnan says she started the company because she saw the proliferation of ad targeting technology on the desktop web, while there was “no significant technology innovation” on the mobile side. So she decided to tackle the problem herself, “outside of the big G.” → Read More
Minted, the company that is best known for its online marketplace for stationery with prints by individual graphic designers, has launched a new vertical: Art prints.
The art business on Minted is curated in the same way as stationery. Minted holds design competitions to which any graphic designer or artist can submit work, and the submissions are voted on by their peers — the community of artists and designers on the site call themselves “Minties.” Only the top designs as voted on by the community are presented for sale. → Read More
Assured Labor, a mobile-centric job networking startup that was founded at MIT four years ago, is breaking into another Latin American market. The company is launching in Brazil with a localized service called TrabalhoJá. This adds to its reach in Mexico and Nicaragua.
“Most of the job sites in Brazil charge job seekers, sometimes up to $50,” said Assured Labor’s CEO David Reich. “We’re totally free and job hunters don’t have to be extorted.”
Assured Labor is a feature phone-based service that helps job seekers land work. The company targets workers that might only have cell phones and lack personal computers or a broadband connection. You can kind of think of it like a LinkedIn for the developing world. → Read More
Squrl has released a new app that has optimized many of the features of its video discovery application for the iPad and made them available on the iPhone. It also hopes to increase engagement by allowing users to seamlessly share the videos they’re watching with friends on Facebook.
When Squrl released its first app about a year ago, most of its focus was on bookmarking videos and saving them for later. But since then, the company has moved more toward helping viewers find new videos that they might want to watch. → Read More
Isis, the carrier-led joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, is gaining steam and has today announced a new addition to its mobile wallet: American Express. The Isis Mobile Wallet will now support American Express’ Consumer, Open Small Business and Serve cards, joining Chase, Capital One and Barclaycard, which have previously committed to the program.
A mobile wallet leader has not yet emerged – Square is growing, and Google Wallet has been floundering – but the space is still really new. Although half of the U.S.’s mobile population use smartphones, making transactions via the phone has yet to establish itself as a real, or more importantly, as a better alternative to the swipe. But if there’s a piece of the mobile payments pie to be had, you can be sure the carriers want in. Hence, Isis. → Read More
You’ve seen the ads. What once was Carly in a pink dress, talking about her myTouch 4G that let her Facebook her face off while making little “digs” at AT&T, has now become a biker chic badass whizzing by an iPhone biker with a wink and a hat tip. She’s now edgy, and has the leather to prove it.
But T-Mobile is getting punchier on its own. Even in its earnings call today, T-Mo’s CEO Phillip Hume said it himself, “the iPhone is slow, even on AT&T’s network.”
If you can’t join ‘em, might as well start punching, right? → Read More
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. *Deep breath* No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.No. No. No. No. No. No.
Update: They pulled the video, which is probably for the best for humanity and Nokia alike. → Read More
Y Combinator-backed analytics startup Mixpanel can now add Andreessen Horowitz to an already-impressive list of investors.
Mixpanel had already raised $1.75 million from Sequoia Capital, Square COO Keith Rabois, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, and Bebo co-founder Michael Birch. Now Andreessen Horowitz has led a $10.25 million Series A, with participation from Levchin, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and Yammer CEO David Sacks. (It looks like Sequoia sat out the current round, though I’ve emailed Mixpanel to confirm.) Andreessen Horowitz’s Peter Levine is joining the company’s board. → Read More
Mobile ad and monetization platform Tapjoy is announcing a new $5 million fund – the “Tapjoy Asia Fund” – which aims to support development and marketing of free-to-play mobile games on both iOS and Android. The new fund is an extension of the company’s earlier $5 million push from June of last year, which encouraged developers to port their iOS games to Android.
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When I think of product sampling, I remember the glorious days of wheeling around the grocery store with my mom and picking up every cheese and meat-laden toothpick in the building. My mom hated it. She was quite organized, and knew exactly what she wanted from the trip, while I was busy begging for the salami I just discovered or the special water crackers I sampled with a cube of Colby Jack.
She didn’t run off and buy the stuff I had sampled (probably because she never actually tried it), and I obviously wasn’t old enough to throw down cash for a box of crackers.
But clearly, product sampling can be big for a brand if it hits the right demographic in the right setting, which is exactly the business proposition of a new startup called LetsWombat. → Read More
When Google Drive launched at the end of April, a wave of partner apps launched too. Now Y Combinator-backed HelloFax, the startup behind one of those apps, says its Google Drive app has seen rapid uptake, with 51,000 installs in about two weeks.
In fact, the company says that number makes it the most-installed of the Google Drive apps. The claim seems a little odd at first, since there are other apps in the Google Drive section of the Chrome Web Store that show a much higher user count — LucidChart, for example, for example, has 332,930. However, HelloFax says those user counts don’t show an app’s strength on Google Drive specifically, because some were previously available as Chrome extensions. → Read More
It’s easy to miss the launch of the latest movies. You get a week of marketing and by the time you’ve figured out if you want to see it or not, it’s moved off the theatre and you’re waiting for the DVD release. Most movie marketing dollars are spent in these first few days. So MoviePilot, launched out of Berlin, brings upcoming films to fans based on their taste, turning the marketing model on its head and making better use of budgets. It focuses solely on upcoming movie projects and TV shows so that fans are less likely to miss new releases. This gives them a place to gather often long before official homepages are created, finding the right film for its natural audience and the right audience for a film.
Today it’s sealed a $7 million Series B financing, led by leading venture capital firm DFJ Esprit, and continued participation from existing VC funds T-Venture, Grazia Equity and VC Fund Creative Industries Berlin. This will be used to expand in the US and develop the platform.
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Mobile and online payments and ID verification startup Jumio has received an additional Series B investment led by Citi Ventures, a unit of global financial services company Citi. The funding follows Jumio’s $25.5 million Series B from March, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Although Citi’s investment amount is not being disclosed, to date, Jumio has raised $35.4 million in funding.
Other investors in the company include Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Peng T. Ong, partner at GSR Ventures and founder of Match.com, and Vivek Ranadivé, founder of TIBCO.
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KLIK, the real-time, facial recognition iPhone camera app from Face.com, has released its official 1.0 version today. (The previous version, which debuted in January, was a beta). The production version of the app includes significantly enhanced recognition capabilities as well as – you guessed it! – photo filters. (Sigh, thanks Instagram.)
Despite hopping on the photo-filtering bandwagon, KLIK, if you haven’t yet tried it, is kind of cool. The app lets you take a picture of your friends, which it automatically recognizes, using Facebook as its photo-sourcing database. Of course, that means if your friends aren’t active Facebook users, it will have more trouble ID’ing them – but you’ve got to start somewhere. And Facebook’s 900+ million users is probably the best place (outside of Google images, perhaps) to train your face-detecting algorithms. → Read More
Let’s say you’re a video publisher who wants all the world to have access to your content… But translating videos into multiple languages is time-consuming and expensive — that is, unless you’ve got a team of volunteers to do it for you. One of the most efficient way to tackle the problem is by crowdsourcing subtitles, which is why translation startup Amara has raised $1 million from Mozilla and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Amara, previously known as Universal Subtitles, was created as an open-source platform to allow anyone to crowdsource transcriptions and translations of video content. Its technology has been used by volunteers to translate and create subtitles for more than 170,000 videos, including President Barack Obama’s message to Sudan and the KONY 2012 video, which was available in more than 35 languages in four days. → Read More
In the riveting story of consumer electronics, the lowly point-and-shoot camera is about to be cut. Its days are numbered and cheap cameras are becoming increasingly less relevant as smartphones steal the limelight. The point-and-shoot camera will soon be just a supporting character.
Samsung sees the writing on the wall, too. Speaking with the Wall Street Journal, Han Myoung-sup, head of the company’s digital imaging division, indicated that the massive Korean empire will shift away from “low-end compact cameras” in an effort to concentrate on mirrorless cameras. This bet, which is the correct move by the way, shows the company’s foresight as it’s very similar to the one Samsung made several years ago when it decided to shift away from its own smartphone platforms and instead concentrate on Android. This will pay off big for Sammy. → Read More
Yesterday Rovio announced that it had reached 1 billion downloads of games from its hugely popular Angry Birds franchise — and with it, a little teaser of what might come next from the Finnish developers.
Today the company has confirmed to us some more detail about that, and the clearest sign yet of what it plans for its big follow up. It says that it has bought the IP for the game Casey’s Contraptions — Casey is the guy in the little video clip yesterday, pictured here — from Snappy Touch and Mystery Coconut.
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Potter fans will now be able to download all seven Harry Potter books from Amazon’s Kindle Lending Library, a service offered free for Amazon Prime users.
From the PR:
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