The news never sleeps, which is why news sites like TechCrunch are addicted to realtime information. That addiction extends to the analytical tools news sites use to determine which articles are resonating with people and which ones aren’t. Today, news sites are getting a special flavor of a tool many already use. It’s called Newsbeat. It’s Chartbeat on steroids for news publishers, and it launches in public beta.
Chartbeat is like a realtime Google Analytics for sites that shows you exactly what is happening on your site at any given second. (We swear by it here at TechCrunch, and it even powers the popular posts widget in the sidebar at right). Newsbeat will be familiar to any Chartbeat user, but it is redesigned to break out social traffic from other types and provides an early warning system for stories that are gaining traction or losing steam. → Read More
As we reported in February, betaworks and the New York Times are collaborating to launch a socialnews reader for the iPad called News.me. And we heard more details on the app as it readied for launch this week. Today, Betaworks founder and CEO John Borthwick announced that the iPad app is finally live on the App Store for your viewing and browsing pleasure (link).
News.me, which has been in development since last August, is a social news reading iPad app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall. → Read More
Tomorrow, all eyes will be on the launch of News Corp’s iPad newspaper The Daily, but huddled away in a downtown loft in New York City’s meatpacking district a team from betaworks and the New York Times are busy putting together their answer to what an iPad news app should be. The collaboration will be called News.me, and it won’t look anything like The Daily. I know because I’ve been playing with an early version of the app, which I will describe in detail below along with the first-ever published screenshots of the app.
News.me is a social news reading app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall. It pulls in data from not only Twitter but also bit.ly, the betaworks company that shortens billions of shared links every month. In contrast, The Daily will produce its own articles and videos with a staff of 100 journalists. It is not clear how many social features will be included in The Daily, but the emphasis seems to be more on the original content. We’ll find out more tomorrow (I’ll be covering the launch). → Read More
As the CEO of betaworks, John Borthwick is one of the most influential architects of the social web. Borthwick, who used to run technology strategy at Time Warner, co-founded betaworks as a new medium company for the social economy. Today, betaworks is a network of around 30 companies – including Bitly, Tweetdeck, Chartbeat and SocialFlow – all, in Borthwick’s words, “loosely connected at the data level.”
Just as betaworks is a new medium company, so Borthwick is a new medium mogul. Richly networked (note the unscripted appearance of AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong – a betaworks investor – at the end of the second video), the understated Borthwick is a master not only of social media technology, but also of knowing the right people in today’s social economy. This may explain why betaworks is based in networking capital of the world, New York City, and why Borthwick’s chairman is Ken Lerer, the co-founder and chairman of the Huffington Post.
Video ahead. → Read More
Looks like Jaiku founder and former Googler Jyri Engeström is up to something new. According to an SEC filing, a startup listing Engeström as chief executive officer called Pingpin has just raised $775,000 in financing.
Backers are BetaWorks (the startup’s address matches that of the early-stage investment firm) and True Ventures, as founder and managing partner Jon Callaghan is listed as a director as well. → Read More
Mobile social payments startup Venmo has some interesting backers and a new iPhone app. The Philadelphia-based company closed $1.2 million in seed funding last May led by RRE Ventures. Other investors include betaworks, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, as well as angel investors Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook co-founder), Dave Morin (founder of Path, senior platform manager at Facebook) and Sam Lessin (Drop.io CEO).
Co-founder Andrew Kortina used to work at betaworks, where he was one of the original engineers on URL shortener bit.ly. Earlier today, I met up with Kortina and Venmo’s other co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail at a coffee shop in New York City, where they showed me their newest iPhone app (see video, taken on my iPhone). → Read More
In a short amount of time since its launch in April, 2009 and its redesign a year later, realtime analytics startup Chartbeat has gained an impressive following of more than 2,500 paying corporate customers. All of this was done so far with 5 employees, led by general manager Tony Haile.
Now, the betaworks-incubated company has gained an impressive roster of investors in a $3 million Series A financing. The round was led by Index Ventures, and includes some serious superangels such as Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Chris Dixon’s Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Freestyle Capital, betaworks, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and Jason Calacanis. With the funding, Chartbeat will be spun off as its own separate company, just as betawork’s bit.ly was before it. → Read More
Highflying stream reader TweetDeck just raised a $3 million Series B round led by its biggest investor, betaworks. That brings the total capital raised by the company to $5.3 million. Ron Conway and Danny Rimer also invested in this round, as did all existing seed investors, including the Accelerator Group, Roger Ehrenberg, and Howard Lindzon.
TweetDeck is the most popular Twitter client by one estimate, with more than 15 million downloads so far. Over the past year, it has been moving beyond Twitter, adding streams from Facebook and MySpace. And just a few minutes ago, it released its latest update, which incorporates streams from Google Buzz, Foursqaure, and more. It is now truly a general stream reader. → Read More
Venture capital is flowing once again to startups at a steady pace. During the first quarter of 2010, the total value of venture funding doubled to $12.8 billion from $6 billion a year before, when it was scraping the bottom of the barrel. However, the funding amount is down 16 percent from the $15.3 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, based on an analysis of CrunchBase data.
Some of the venture rounds during the first quarter include Sonos (http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/12/sonos-confirms-25-million-investment-from-index-ventures/), betaworks ($20 million), Hunch ($12 million), and Posterous ($4.4 million). → Read More
Betaworks, the New York City-based holding company investing in the realtime Web, just raised a $20 million Series B. The round was led by RRE Ventures and Intel Capital, DFJ Growth, AOL Ventures, The New York Times, Softbank Japan and Softbank NY, Lerer Investments and Founders Collective, also participated, along with investors from the last round, which was $7.5 million
The company both invests and incubates realtime media startups, including Summize (acquired by Twitter for realtime search), bit.ly, TweetDeck, StockTwits, SuperFeedr, Outside.in, OMGPOP, and gdgt. → Read More
If Google Analytics just isn’t fast enough for you, there’s Chartbeat, a betaworks company which provides realtime analytics to Website owners. It gives Website publishers a second-by-second view of the number of visitors on their site, which pages are spiking in popularity, referring sites, as well as alerts on slow load times and server crashes. It is particularly useful for blogs.
Today, Six Apart’s blog hosting service, TypePad, is starting to promote chartbeat by making it available from its stats page. Website hosting service DreamHost is offering a deeper integration, showing a hover-over summary of current visitors and top referring sites on its dashboard page. Chartbeat also has an iPhone app which sends you push notifications every time your traffic spikes or your site is down. → Read More
When we first covered real-time photo-blogging service DailyBooth last August, we had noticed how remarkably vibrant the community already was, and how quickly the site was amassing tons of traffic.
The startup was launched in February 2009, received some initial seed funding from Y Combinator over the summer and has now raised an additional $1 million from an all-star team of institutional and individual investors. → Read More
Perhaps you’ve been following the Tr.im fiasco. If not, basically the URL shortening service shut down and said all its links would cease to work by the end of the year, dealing a severe blow to users of any URL shortening service. Tr.im has since recanted its decision (if only to make it easier to sell), but the problem is still a very real one: What happens if your favorite URL-shortener just shuts down? 301works hopes to solve that.
Perhaps you heard about 301works in one of our recent pieces about how Bit.ly was attempting to salvage the Tr.im wreckage. The idea was the 301works would be a centralized hub for all shortened URLs, not run by any one URL-shortener. Tr.im balked at the idea of joining, but plenty of others are, including Bit.ly, Awe.sm, Adjix, betaworks, Cligs, and URLizer. All of them are teaming up with Gnip to launch this project. → Read More
If your Twitter feed is beginning to replace your RSS feed, you can probably thank Mario Menti. Back in March, 2007, he created the initial prototype of Twitterfeed in London as part of a BBC developer program. Twitterfeed is a simple publishing tool which turns any RSS feed into a Twitter stream. Each feed item becomes a new Tweet consisting of the headline and a shortened link to the story or blog post. Today, 170,000 publishers are using Twitterfeed to convert 300,000 feeds into Twitter streams.
By one count, Twitterfeed is the third largest Twitter client, being used by 6.5 percent of all Twitter accounts and at one point was generating 9.2 percent of all Tweets.But it is not really a Twitter client, as investor John Borthwick of betaworks pointed out to me last night while we were riding in one of those bicycle rickshaws across Manhattan (I do not recommend this mode of transportation, we were in a hurry and there were no regular cabs available). Nobody uses Twitterfeed to consume their Twitter stream, so it is not really a client like TweetDeck or Seesmic Deesktop. However, a lot of people use it to populate their own Twitter account with messages. → Read More
Famous angel investor Ron Conway’s investment focus on real time startups earned him the moniker “Real Time Ron” by his close friends. But he’s certainly not the only venture capitalist out there focusing on this space.
New York based betaworks, an incubator/VC, is also right in the thick of things. They invested early in Summize and gained a sizable chunk of Twitter stock when that company was acquired in 2008 to become Twitter Search.
betaworks’ list of investments is a who’s who of the real time world. Twitter, StockTwits, TweetDeck, Twitterfeed, Tumblr and bit.ly are examples. And they also own a piece of what may be my favorite content site on the Internet – someecards. → Read More
Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages. Web companies large and small are embracing this stream. It is not just Twitter. It is Facebook and Friendfeed and AOL and Digg and Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop and Techmeme and Tweetmeme and Ustream and Qik and Kyte and blogs and Google Reader. The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.
This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos, and videos.
What does this mean for how we will come to consume information? → Read More
The default mode for Google Analytics and other Website tracking software often makes you wait an entire day to find out what is happening on your site. There is a 24-hour delay (although this can often be changed in settings). Speed up the feedback loop, and Websites in theory could become even more responsive to traffic and attention peaks or to unexpected sluggishness. Betaworks, John Borthwick’s startup holding company which has stakes in Twitter and Tweetdeck, and spun off bit.ly, has just launched Chartbeat.
Keeping with Betaworks’ focus on real-time data services, Chartbeat offers a dashboard for Website owners that monitors how many people are on their site at any given second, where they are coming from, which pages visitors are looking at the most, as well as conversations and links from Twitter. It also shows average load times, what percentage of current visitors are returning, how many are reading, how many are actively writing in comments or engaging with the site in some other way, and how many are simply idle. All it requires is one line of Javascript to be inserted on a site and then it pings Chartbeat every 10 seconds. → Read More
In a world where everything is being jammed into 140 characters or less, shorter is better. That goes double (or is it half?) for lengthy URLs. So-called URL shortening services are increasingly becoming indispensable to anyone who uses Twitter. It is the only practical way to share links on the service.
Today, one of these URL shortening services, bit.ly, raised $2 million, sparking the question: How much are these things actually worth? Nobody really knows.
But here is some fun math. Assuming bit.ly sold 20 percent of its shares to its new investors (the O’Reilly Alpha Tech Fund, Mitch Kapor, and Howard Lindzon), that would imply an $8 million pre-money valuation ($10 million post-money). Its market share of shortened links, as calculated by Tweetmeme, is only 13 percent. The biggest URL shortner out there is actually TinyURL, which commands a 75 percent share. So by that metric, if bit.ly is worth $8 million, TinyURL should be worth at least $46 million (8/13 X 75 = 46.15). Yes, I am making up these numbers, just like the investors do.
But wait. Bit.ly seems to be shooting up like a rocket, while TinyURL may have plateaued. Why is bit.ly growing so much faster? One big reason is because it creates even shorter URLs than TinyURL does by about five characters (http://bit.ly/ versus http://tinyurl.com/). Don’t laugh. Every character counts. Bit.ly also offers better analytics and tracking tools on the backend. → Read More
TweetDeck, an increasingly popular tool for accessing the Twitter service from your desktop, is close to securing a round of angel funding to the tune of nearly $500,000 from seed funding house Betaworks, reports MediaMemo.
Update: funding is confirmed; amount is just south of $500,000, and comes not only from Betaworks but also from The Accelerator Group, Skype veteran Taavet Hinrikus, Gerry Campbell, Howard Lindzon and Roger Ehrenberg.
Update 2: peHUB confirms today (3/28) that the exact amount was $300,000.
TweetDeck is the work of one man, British programmer Iain Dodsworth, who says the TweetDeck Adobe AIR-powered and hence cross-platform desktop application has been downloaded 250,000 times since he launched it over last Summer, and that users are pushing 120,000 messages a day to their Twitter followers using the software. → Read More
