Google announced some fresh updates for Google Now today, consisting of six new types of cards that will show up in the automated, intelligent digital assistant feature for Android and iOS. The new cards include a location-based Reminder feature, public transit travel times, and information about books, music, TV shows and video games that might be of timely interest to users. → Read More
Today at Disrupt NY 2013, Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti took the stage to talk to the audience about how content works on the Internet: What sells, what gets shared and why. Peretti, a journalist, programmer, marketer and founding member of The Huffington Post (now owned by TechCrunch parent company AOL), has long been a student of viral media. Not surprisingly, Peretti’s latest brainchild… → Read More
Music streaming service Spotify has finally come to Asia. Today, it announced that it would be launching in the cities of Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Its premium service, priced at $9.99 per month in the US, will also be a little cheaper in the region, with Malaysians getting the lowest price. Update: after turning on Asia, Spotify posted on its blog that it now has also turned on services… → Read More
AdzCentral, an ad-matching platform from Singapore, has received $3.2 million (S$4 million) in funding from Electric Sheep Capital and Digital Media Partners . The company provides an engine to advertisers that serves up ads based on targeted audience demographics. Companies spell out the parameters of their intended audience and AdzCentral’s ads are displayed to people based on what sites… → Read More
Singaporean media outfit, e27, has raised about US$615,000 (S$760,000) through a funding round with investors in the region, and plans to expand into Southeast Asia. The round was raised with B Dash Ventures from Japan, Pinehurst Advisors in Taiwan, Ardent Capital in Thailand and Dan Neary in Singapore. e27 has been around since 2006 and runs a news site on tech startups in Asia, and organizes… → Read More
Few people are better equipped to imagine the future of online journalism than Emily Bell. As Bell told me when we talked in her New York office, she believes that online journalism has a future – both in terms of content sitting behind paywalls, ad-supported news, and content subsidized by organizations or wealthy individuals. → Read More
Olive, a well established San Francisco-based audio company that makes high-end digital home audio systems, today took the somewhat unusual route of launching its latest product on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. The new Olive ONE, as it’s called, is a departure for the company in more ways than that however: it’s also a much more affordable option with a pre-order entry-level price of $399, and… → Read More
There are only a few founders that I really like and Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian are two of them. These lads, with their bright-eyed charm and genuinely nice personalities, created Reddit in 2005 with the help of Paul Graham and Y Combinator. This video by ATotalDisruption tells that story quite well and is a must-see for all young entrepreneurs and media types. → Read More
Parse.ly, the content optimization platform for publishers which emerged from stealth in January has been flying under the radar when it comes to press, but has growing the size of its customer base over the past year. The company recently signed one of its largest deals to date, having now added Thomson Reuters to its list of publishing customers, and says that it’s now on track to profitability… → Read More
Poznan, Poland-based startup Zapstreak has just brought its AirPlay-style media streaming solution for Android out of beta, making the SDK it provides available to developers worldwide after a six-month extended testing period. The company’s tech allows Android developers to build music, video or picture-streaming right into their app. But will new options change Zapstreak’s chances at success? → Read More
As Twitter tries to surface more content from its network, it continues to beef up tweets and its Discover section of the site. Today, the company announced a few new features to make sure that you know the context behind a story so that you can figure out why it’s being shown to you within another big feature, Search.
Context has been the missing piece to Twitter all along and the company is… → Read More
Cloud gaming may have taken a hit with the floundering of OnLive, but Agawi is still going strong and today, the Menlo Park company is officially launching its GameZen app for Windows 8. We previewed that partnership back in September, before Windows 8 had even launched, when executive chairman Peter Relan talked about how his service differs from the competition. Now, the app is live, and Relan… → Read More
A new report from Flurry Analytics released today details some of the key differences between smartphone and tablet usage. The study finds that tablets are used overwhelmingly during the evening, prime-time hours, and that users spend more time per-session on tablet devices compared to smartphones. Also, users tend to game and consume media more heavily on tablets vs. smartphones. → Read More
How’s Your News began 15 years ago when a set of developmentally disabled adults hopped on a bus and travelled around the country interviewing folks on the street. The mixture of charm, astuteness, and fascination with the little things that these reporters exhibited has always been great fun and their work is a real tonic in this age of blowhards blowing hard at each other. → Read More
The New York Times this morning announced a new HTML5 web app for iPad, rounding out their lineup of web and tablet products for digital subscribers. The Times is soliciting feedback from its users about the app and its features, which suggests that it’s looking at this as a way to experiment with a non-native delivery method, but isn’t quite sure about how consumers will respond. → Read More
ReelSurfer, which graduated from Y Combinator’s most recent batch of startups, is a “tl;dr” for video. In other words, ReelSurfer was borne out of the frustration of trying to find quotes and scenes from their favorite movies on YouTube. Usually, these searches are fruitless. If you’re lucky enough to find a video that contains the quote or clip you’re looking for, you then have to download the… → Read More
More brands are gravitating towards Google’s social offering, Google+ as of late, and it looks like the latest comes from the high-end fashion realm.
During New York Fashion Week (NYFW), brands and fans will be able to participate in some pretty exclusive Hangouts and On Air Events being broadcast on YouTube. While I’m not a fashion fan, obvs, I can appreciate the ability to use technology to… → Read More
News publishers are becoming tech companies, right down to the Google Labs style experimental sites: The New York Times Company Research & Development Lab, The Globe Lab, WapPo Labs…
And now there’s HuffPost Labs, which will unveil its first project today: Highlights, a collection of the most popular sentences from articles and blog posts across the Huffington Post empire. → Read More
Last week The New York Times ran a story by John Markoff about robots replacing human workers. Andrew McAfee, co-author of the excellent Race Against The Machine followed up with a post of his own. The gist: technology and automation lead to more job creation than job displacement in the past, but that may be changing.
Writing is one of the few areas that McAfee and his co-author Erik… → Read More
If you had to recruit the ideal team to help you navigate the intersection of technology, media, and celebrity, it probably wouldn’t look much different from the partnership behind theAudience. The stealthy social media company, which has flown under the radar until recently, counts Sean Parker, Ari Emanuel, and Oliver Luckett as its co-founders — just your average startup’s triumvirate of tech… → Read More
Chute knows you’re tired of hearing about yet another photo-sharing or photo-syncing app. So, although it dwells in the photo sphere, thankfully Chute is taking a different approach. The recent Y Combinator grad set out to become the go-to service that app developers and content producers turn to for managing and enhancing photos in their app or on their website. You can think of Chute as a Twilio… → Read More
Former TC’er Paul Carr’s latest venture, called NSFWCorp, has launched into private beta. It’s a weekly news magazine dubbed as the “the Economist as written by ‘The Daily Show’” and will be available for $26 a year or “two bucks a month.” What’s particularly interesting, however, is how the company is offering initial subscriptions using a clever sponsor model.
If you join the waiting list… → Read More
In what I suspect will be an increasing trend, cartoonist Bill Amend has released three “packs” of his popular FoxTrot comics for the iPad. He built the books by himself using iBooks Author and proceeds go to the Help Bill Amend Eat Food Fund (I suspect).
He’s selling three titles including a special issue — number 3.14 — featuring geek strips. Each book contains 100 strips and is optimized… → Read More
America’s favorite funnyboy [citation needed], Jim Gaffigan, has just released his new special, Mr. Universe, in download and streaming formats. For $5 you get three SD or HD downloads or three streaming sessions for your content consumption comfort. You can pay with PayPal or Amazon check-out. → Read More
Another milestone for old-school print magazines moving into a digital future: Cosmopolitan says that it now has 100,000 people paying to read the digital edition of its monthly fashion/beauty/lifestyle magazine. That puts publisher, Hearst, one step closer to a target set by president David Carey last November to rack up one million paying subscribers across all of its non-print editions this… → Read More
If you’ve been Tweeting or Facebooking or G+ing at all this week, you’ll notice that there is something called “CES” happening in Las Vegas. CES is clearly overwhelming the tech news cycle – it can’t be helped – but this seems to be the first time it’s started overflowing in social media causing one TC writer to quip: “Wish what happened in Vegas actually would stay in Vegas. #CES”.
Topsy is… → Read More
Apps have taken over the world. If you doubt that just take a look at this app map by Horace Dediu at Asymco which shows the 123 countries in the world where iPhones are available. Of course, anywhere you can get an iPhone, you can get an iPhone app. Like the Web, apps are distributed globally.
But when it comes to “media” like books, music, and movies, the distribution is much more limited on… → Read More
Netflix and Hulu are the two leading video streaming services on the Web when it comes to mainstream TV shows and movies. More people watch Netflix online than Hulu, and have since about 18 months ago. In November, 2011, comScore estimates that Netflix.com attracted 26.6 million unique visitors, versus 20.2 million for Hulu
But a better metric to compare the two is how much time people actually… → Read More
This story dropped a few days ago but it seemed like a good choice to share on a lazy Sunday and the topic is something that’s been kicking around in the old sub-conscious for a while. Jim Romenseko has long been the go-to media critic at Poynter.org where he spent twelve years poking at – and changing – the online/print media landscape. On November 10 Poynter essentially forced him out by … → Read More
Why is content such a dirty word in venture capital? We have seen a few generations of technology entrepreneurs and investors, but there have been far fewer successful outcomes for media startups. In fact, most of the value has remained in the hands of the Traditional Media Companies (TMCs), and as such, executives in those fields have not really had the vast war chests to fund new startups in… → Read More
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