Following its November launch, OnSwipe competitor (and TechCrunch Disrupt finalist) Pressly is bringing another major media outlet’s content to the tablet interface. The company is today announcing the launch of a new publication called Electionism. The app was built for the Media Lab, an internal product innovation team inside The Economist Group, which includes The Economist, CQ Roll Call and other businesses.
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Does the world need another social news site? That’s the big question about today’s launch of Comunitee, a new beta destination for tracking the news you want to follow, commenting and sharing stories with your friends. I mean, it’s not like we already have Facebook, Twitter and Google+ for this, right?
Well, not exactly. For those who want the full, real-time firehose of feeds for a set of specific topics, there are fewer options on the desktop that don’t involve geeky RSS readers. And given what Google did to Google Reader, a lot of people are still looking for online alternatives. → Read More
You may be familiar with Flud as the news reader app that’s trying to build an appealing alternative to Flipboard and Pulse. Flud launched iOS platform back at the end of 2010 with a heavy focus on design — and a simple user interface. Fast Company even gave Flud the 2010 Design Award of The Year. The startup has since launched its social news sharing app on Android, raised $1 million in seed from Ludlow Ventures, Scott Belsky, and Detroit Venture Partners, and is re-tooling its app for Mango, as Jordan reported last month, for release in January.
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News360, the cross-platform news reader, is arriving on the iPhone today in version 2.0, after having been previously available on virtually all other platforms, including Android, the iPad, Windows Phone, the Web and even the BlackBerry PlayBook.
With today’s launch, News360 is also adding support for logins, allowing you to sync your reading trends and behavior, (aka your “interest graph”) across devices. Support for Google+ has been added as well. → Read More
Realtime semantic startup Evri is debuting its brand-new iPad application today, where it joins the crowded “iPad news magazine” space filled with the likes of Flipboard, The Daily, Zite, Pulse, NewsMix, AOL Editions, News360 and others. To differentiate itself from the pack, Evri’s app employs a combination of social news and topical streams, allowing readers to follow their interests as opposed to just following sources. → Read More
Wibbitz, a new service that functions as sort of a “play button” for the Web, has just raised a seed round of approximately half a million. The service is similar to former TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki, in that it, too, automatically generates videos on the fly using the content found on a given website.
But unlike Qwiki, Wibbitz is positioned as a tool designed specifically for publishers who want to provide an easy-to-digest video summary of an article or articles’ content. → Read More
Cross-platform newsreader application News360 launched into version 2.0 today, a significant update that introduces its new personalization features. The news reader now learns from your activity on social Web services, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader and Evernote, in order to present you with stories that fit your interests.
But unlike some of its competitors, which there are now many of, News360 uses semantic analysis to deliver the most relevant news of the day, including stories about your favorite topics from your favorite sources. → Read More
Gas prices are going up again, not one single Gordon Gekko-lyte has been held accountable for the financial meltdown of recent years, and most of us are just now sobering up from a tax filing hangover. So if you’re looking for another reason to complain about the government, here it is: Reports are that 13 out of 36 surveyed FBI agents lack the skills to deal with cyber crime. Sounds like a job opportunity! → Read More
Online retail giant Amazon has tussled with state tax agencies before so this ain’t a new fight. But it might very well be an escalation of the beef… Reports are circulating that Amazon has decided against opening a new distribution center in South Carolina because lawmakers won’t go along with the retailers attempt to gain an exemption for collecting sales tax. → Read More
When Apple announced back in February that The Daily would be the first subscription news app on iTunes, it was seen by other publishers as the model going forward. Some like it, some don’t, but at least Apple knows how it wants to treat subscriptions going forward. Or does it?
Some subscription news apps seem to be in limbo right now while Apple figures out how to handle special situations. If you are a single-title publication like the New York Times, The Daily, or Businessweek, then it is pretty straightforward and the current rules apply. But what if you are a news reading app that brings together articles from many sources, some paid and some free? In other words, what if you are an aggregator app like Flipboard or Zite, but you want to charge a subscription for the app? How should that subscription be split up between the app and the publishers, and should Apple even be involved with policing those types of licensing and copyright issues? It’s all getting sorted out right now. → Read More
I’m beginning to think that the old phrase “think globally, act locally” has become an appropriate slogan for Web 2.0. (Or perhaps an alternative might be “think global, try to monetize the sh*t out of local”.) With the rise of location-based services like Gowalla, Foursquare, and Facebook Places, local-friendly deal sites like Groupon, LivingSocial and Yipit, and local-happy news services Patch.com, Everyblock, and Baristanet, the message is clear: It’s cool to be local. All the kids are doing it.
A new eMagazine called Street Fight has grouped these businesses under one umbrella, dubbed it the “hyperlocal industry”, and aims to be the industry’s main source of news and analysis. I’ll let you decide whether an industry getting its very own trade publication is an augur of exploding growth and collective interest, or is actually no signifier at all (besides, even kite flying enthusiasts have their own resource). → Read More
In the old days, big data used to be called data warehousing. But that was when corporations stored all their own data on their own servers. Today, it’s just called big data and it generally refers to the vast reaches of data in the cloud. Old big data is buying new big data today, as data warehousing powerhouse Teradata just announced it will be acquiring Aster Data Systems for $263 million.
Teradat already owns an 11 percent stake in Aster Data, which it bought last September. The $263 million, which is “net of debt and other expenses,” will purchase the remaining 89 percent, giving Aster Data a final valuation of $295 million. ASter Data has raised $53 million from Sequoia, First Round Capital, and IVP. Ron Conway, David Cheriton, and Anand Rajaraman were angel investors. → Read More
When it comes to realtime news, the prevailing wisdom these days is to let your friends tell you what to read through Twitter or Facebook. Instead of editors, people are using these social stream sto filter their news, and a whole bunch of apps (like Flipboard) are tapping into that to present your social news feed in more appealing ways. But a Toronto startup called Eqentia is approaching the problem from a different angle. It indexes 100,000 articles a day across blogs and news sites, puts them through a semantic engine to categorize them into every topic imaginable, and only then does it look at how much social attention each article is getting. Social comes last, not first.
What you get is a personal news page organized by topics and sub-topics that you want to follow (business, technology, iPad news, mobile web, cloud computing). Headlines can be sorted by time, social attention, or preferred sources. Eqentia is designed to create a competitive intelligence dashboard were you can create essentially an alerts page for specialized news about any micro-topic, but these also roll up into broader topics. Each topic page shows recent tweets about that topic in a sidebar widget. The news search is also pretty powerful because of all the implicit categorization and content mining that Eqentia does. → Read More
The Pew Internet organization put out results of a survey on how many people pay for digital content online. The study found that 65 percent of people online have paid to download some form of digital content or for a subscription to a digital media service. The survey excluded physical goods bought online and was focussed only on digital content such as music, software, news, and other online or electronic publications.
For those who do spend money online on digital media, most spend between $1 and $10 a month, with 68 percent spending less than $30 a month. (You can see the distribution of amount spend in the chart above). The two kinds of digital goods people are most willing to pay for by far are music and software. One third of respondents (33 percent) say they have paid for either digital music or software online. And 21 percent have paid for mobile apps. So if you combine mobile apps and other forms of software, that is the largest single category even accounting for overlap in the numbers. Paying for digital games comes in fourth at 19 percent.
What about digital newspapers or magazines behind paywalls or for sale for tablets like the iPad? → Read More
In its attempt to bring social streams into the enterprise, Salesforce is taking its Chatter messaging service and making it freemium. Unlike most freemium services which start out free, and then add on premium features for a price, Salesforce is going in the opposite direction. Chatter started out as an additional $15/user/month service, but perhaps the uptake wasn’t what CEO Marc Benioff had hoped it would be. Now most of the basic features will be free (as, arguably, they should have been from the beginning), and premium features will be available for power users at the $15 price as Chatter Plus.
Chatter first launched in private beta last February, and then opened up in June. Chatter gives employees a realtime feed of what is going on in their company. You can follow other co-workers, but also documents, data, and accounts. It is tied into Salesforce.com, and all the apps built on top of the Salesforce platform (although that is now extra, see below). So for anyone who uses Salesforce, Chatter provides a realtime intelligence feed. → Read More
Here come the robo sports journalists. While people in the media biz worry about content mills like Demand Media and Associated Content spitting out endless SEO-targeted articles written by low-paid Internet writers, at least those articles are still written by humans. We may no longer need the humans, at least for data-driven stories.
A startup in North Carolina, StatSheet, today is launching a remarkable network of 345 sports sites, one dedicated to each Division 1 college basketball tam in the U.S. For instance, there is a site for the Michigan State Spartans, North Carolina Tar Heels, and Ohio Buckeyes. Every story on each site was written by a robot, or to put it more precisely, by StatSheet’s content algorithms. “The posts are completely auto-generated,” says founder Robbie Allen. “The only human involvement is with creating the algorithms that generate the posts.” → Read More
The Pew Research Center, which regularly surveys U.S. consumers about their media consumption habits, put out a report which shows that more people are getting their news online than from print newspapers. In response to a survey question asking people where they got their news yesterday, 34 percent answered online versus only 31 percent from a daily newspaper.
If this doesn’t sound like news, that is because nearly two years ago the exact same research organization declared that the Internet had taken over from newspapers by an even greater margin—40 percent to 35 percent. That question was worded slightly differently (Where do you get most of your news?), which might account for the disparity. But now the Internet is beating newspapers in yesterday’s news as well, which I’m not sure is something to crow about. (How about asking people where they got their news today?) → Read More
IBM put out a new report (embedded below) on security threats to enterprise computer networks today from its X-Force security research group. It found a 36 percent increase in security vulnerabilities, with Web applications being the main culprit. Web apps with security exploits accounted for 55 percent of all disclosed vulnerabilities.
One of the biggest threats are hidden attacks using Javascript. There was a 52 percent rise in such “obfuscated attacks” in the first half of 2010. The increased adoption of cloud computing and virtualization brings with it its own security threats. For instance, 35 percent of virtualization vulnerabilities affect the hypervisor, meaning that gaining control of one virtual machine can give attackers controls of other machines on the same system. → Read More
It’s no secret that Microsoft and Salesforce just plain don’t like each other (remember when Microsoft communications head Frank Shaw basically said that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is obsessed with them?). In fact, the two companies have spent the last year suing one another over patents. But today they’re announcing that they’ve settled the suit. But Microsoft couldn’t help but get one final jab in.
At first, the press release sent out today by Microsoft announcing the settlement seems even-steven. The patent agreement will allow Salesforce to receive coverage under Microsoft patents, and Microsoft to receive coverage under Salesforce’s patents. Nice. Everyone is happy. But then comes a paragraph indicating that Salesforce is actually paying Microsoft for the patent coverage “based on the strength of Microsoft’s leading patent portfolio.” → Read More
Adobe is strengthening its product portfolio with its intention to acquire Swiss firm Day Software, which makes Web content management systems aimed at marketers. Adobe announced an all-cash tender offer for Day’s shares. The purchase price is approximately $240 million.
Many of Adobe’s products, such as Illustrator and Photoshop, are used already to create marketing materials for companies. Moving into Web content management is a natural step since as many of these marketing materials are consumed and distributed online. Day allows marketers to manage digital assets for online marketing campaigns and set up marketing blogs and other social media outreach. → Read More
