If you thought the “ambient location” craze has passed, prepare to be surprised. A company called SocialRadar is announcing today that it has raised $12.75 million in Series A funding from NEA, Grotech Ventures, and others including Steve Case, Ted Leonsis, Dave Morin and Kevin Colleran for a mobile, location-based people discovery app arriving first on the iPhone. → Read More
Facebook and Twitter have become stellar venues for brands and small businesses alike to advertise their wares. However, while social-style gift-giving has seen some traction thanks to Facebook, social commerce has been slow to take flight. Chirpify launched in early 2012 to do something about this, offering an easy way for people to make purchases in-stream on Twitter. Late last year, the young… → Read More
Is there room for another social network for book lovers, now that the biggest, Goodreads, has been snatched up by the largest online retailer (and Kindle maker) Amazon? Slice thinks so. Today, the mobile receipt tracking service backed by Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Lightspeed, Floodgate and others is expanding into a new vertical, with the debut of its second application, Slice… → Read More
Toronto-based social video network Keek has seen some tremendous growth recently, adding on 24 million users in just four months to bring its network to a total reach of 45 million registered members. The platform’s growth is perhaps most interesting in that nearly half of it has taken place since the launch of Twitter’s Vine video-focused mobile social networking app. → Read More
Tango, a mobile messaging and video calling app with now over 120 million members worldwide, is expanding its service by opening its platform to third-party developers. By integrating the newly launched Tango software development kit (SDK) into their own applications, mobile publishers will be able to add a social layer into their apps meant to better reflect users’ real-world connections… → Read More
Microsoft’s SharePoint always featured a core set of social tools, but with the acquisition of Yammer, as well as the ongoing integration of Lync and Skype, the folks over in Redmond are clearly ready to push social as the next major cornerstone of their enterprise offerings. Today, Microsoft is launching a new campaign to help companies understand how social can help them become more productive. → Read More
It’s fair to say that the “ambient location” craze has passed. Several of the mobile apps intent on connecting people with friends and other recommended users nearby are still struggling to find mainstream adoption. Some, like Glancee and Glassmap have sold. Others, like Kismet, have moved into new product categories. And today, the business-focused networking app Intro, is… → Read More
During their work with patients, doctors will frequently contact colleagues with questions, to trade horror stories, or converse about treatment methods. There isn’t really a technological solution to streamline this daily back and forth, but that’s what SharePractice aims to bring.
Founders Dr. Andrew Brandeis and Benoit Carrier built an easy to use the mobile app to serve as a sort of… → Read More
Once you’ve had a few drinks at a bar it’s easy to let loose and blow off steam. Unfortunately, while you’re having fun, you could end up annoying others around you, namely the staff at the venue you’re at. By acting like a fool, you’re jeopardizing your future visits, since bartenders tend to remember who was a jerk and who was a great customer. A project at our… → Read More
Blink, a new mobile application for ephemeral messaging, is debuting today on the Apple App Store allowing users to text, plus share photos, and soon videos, with other friends as well as with groups. The app represents a spin-off from the same technology which also powers social friend finder, Kismet. Though the company says it has no plans to shut down Kismet at this time, its current focus… → Read More
Despite the ubiquity of smartphones and the insane number of photos we now save and share, surprisingly, no one has yet to figure out how to shift more personal and private photo-sharing away from old school methods like SMS and email, and into a dedicated mobile application. A number of startups, however, are trying to do just that. Cluster is one of those companies, and with today’s… → Read More
Swipp, which earlier this year launched its social interest platform for consumers to share what they think of products, topics, pretty much anything, has taken the natural next step by introducing Swipp Plus: a tool for businesses to mine the consumer data that its opinion graph generates. To fund the new product, Swipp has secured an additional $2m institutional investment. → Read More
Save for later service Pocket debuted a new feature today, which allows users to quickly send content saved to their Pocket accounts to contacts from within the app. The feature uses that most old-school of social sharing means, email, but updates it with more modern social features, adds in-app and push notifications, and saves frequently used connections for easy future access. The Send to… → Read More
Services like HealthTap have proliferated over the last year as a way to let anyone with questions about their health connect with real, licensed physicians online and avoid the pain of waiting in line at the doctor’s office. While HealthTap and others are building up their health information databases to let people quickly find answers to a variety of health questions, the demand for personalized… → Read More
When Google wanted to get into the game of selling social ads across all platforms, it decided to acquire Wildfire, a company that had the market on lockdown. Since the acquisition last July, little has changed as far as what Wildfire offered, how it offered it and there was little to no impact for current customers. Today, the Wildfire team has announced that its first major shift is upon us… → Read More
Some people believe that Google’s practices when it comes to search are mystical and unfair — or sometimes evil – but what the company wants to do is surface the most important information for you when you perform a task on its most important product. With the introduction of Knowledge Graph last year, Google started showing information on the right-hand side of search results… → Read More
Today, Ev Williams’ latest startup, Medium, added some tools to bring people together while they’re writing. The collaboration tools are similar to what you’d find in Google Docs, but the key is to work on something to share publicly, together. The service isn’t open to the public yet, but it’s a beautiful set of tools to help you write about the things that interest… → Read More
Microsoft is maybe a little jealous of the spotlight shone on Facebook yesterday for its Facebook Home announcement. In a new blog post today, Frank X. Shaw, Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications at Microsoft used some mild snark and mostly gentle prodding to complain about how his company had already done what Facebook was trying to do on smartphones, which sadly only reinforces… → Read More
Today, Amazon has announced the acquisition of social reading service, Goodreads. Specific terms of the deal weren’t disclosed and it should close by the end of Q2. Goodreads had raised $2.75 million in funding from the likes of True Ventures since launching in January 2007. When we talked to them last August, the site had over 10 million members and had catalogued more than 360 million… → Read More
Palo Alto-based publisher platform ShareThis, the maker of those “social sharing” buttons scattered across the web, is today announcing having closed on $23 million in Series C financing, in a round led by T-Venture, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom. Additionally, in another move signaling its intention to unify its platform across web and mobile, ShareThis has also acquired Socialize… → Read More
A new gifting startup called Aggregift is launching an entirely new way to purchase goods on Amazon. The company, which has been quietly running its beta tests with a few thousand users over the past several months, allows users to initiate crowdfunding campaigns for gifts, which involve posting the call for contributions to the recipient’s Facebook Timeline. → Read More
Great news. You’ll now know the viewing preferences of your friends’ kids on Netflix, thanks to the service’s foray into social sharing via opt-in Facebook integration, announced earlier this morning. Because the company rushed to launch the feature ahead of a product release which would allow family members and other shared account holders to set up their own profiles, that means parents will… → Read More
At The Pool, the Los Angeles-based social discovery platform, is today rolling out a big re-design that sees the startup becoming laser-focused on creating the “anti-Facebook” social network for young people. In its February 10-K report, Facebook said that it is at risk of losing young users to other services that are similar to or act “as a substitute for Facebook.” → Read More
Google just launched an update for Google+ that brings a number of significant visual updates to the company’s social backbone. The first things Google+ users will notice when they visit their profile pages is a prompt to change the cover images for their profiles. The new profile pages allow for cover photos that are much larger than before (2120px by 1192px). This, Google says, provides… → Read More
Cheers, the app and social network built around giving users the chance to celebrate the good things in their lives, has raised a $2.5 million Series A funding round led by MindFund and including Charles River Ventures, Trinity Ventures, AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and others. The startup launched just over a year ago in February, and is still very much experimenting with its positivity-based… → Read More
Hubble, a new mobile application for private social networking created by the team that developed Flip Video, is launching today to serve as the secure hub (get it? Hubble?) for family communication. The app currently supports text messaging, voice messages, photo and location sharing and alerts, and may extend into other real-time communication methods like voice and video in the future, too. → Read More
Scringo, which just launched version 2.0 of its SDK and announced that is has raised a $700,000 seed round led by Israeli venture fund Inimiti and other angel investors, offers an SDK for mobile app developers who want to add community building features, activity feeds and in-app messaging to their apps with just a few lines of code. As Scringo co-founder Ran Avrahamy told me, the record for… → Read More
Founded in 2011, Detroit-based startup UpTo set out on an important mission: Turn your daily calendar into a social network. Sure, social calendaring may not reach out and grab you, but, when the startup launched its iPhone app last March, it seemed worthy of another chance. Event-sharing apps are hardly new (see Facebook, Eventbrite, etc. etc.), but UpTo is taking an approach that many can… → Read More
Senzari, the Miami-based Pandora competitor backed by $3 million in funding from 500 Startups and other angels, is making good on its recent acquisition of the Berlin-based streaming music app Wahwah.fm. The company is now spinning off its music efforts as a mobile-first streaming radio application, rebranded as just Wahwah. In the meantime, the Senzari web-based streaming service is being… → Read More
Wedding Party, the mobile app that allows wedding guests, friends and family to contribute to a shared, digital album of photos and notes which can later be posted directly to the couple’s Facebook timeline, has raised $1 million in seed funding in a round jointly led by NEA and Felicis Ventures. Also participating were a number of angel investors, including early Dropbox investor Pejman… → Read More
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