The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel Back Next-Generation Digital Book Publisher Hyperink
- Khosla Ventures-Backed Snip.it Lets You Clip, Save And Share Collections Of Content On The Web
- Google Offers Partners With 14 Deal Providers, Becoming A One-Stop Shop For Hometown Deals
- TechCrunch to Beijing: The Eagle Has Landed
- Gunnar Optiks Intros Glasses For The Call Of Duty Obsessed
- Video: This Bendable Remote Control Has No Buttons, Doesn’t Require Batteries
- Mobile Advertising Company 4INFO Raises $14M From Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital And Others
- Redfin Raises Another $14.8 Million To Reinvent The Real Estate Market
- MoPub Launches New Marketplace For Real-Time Mobile Ad Bidding
- Creepy/Awesome Banjo App Now Pings You When Your Friends Are Nearby
- Microsoft’s Vision Of The Future Includes Touch-Sensitive Everything (And Beautiful People Only)
- Keen On … The Greatest Entrepreneurs Are Born To Deal With Failure (TCTV)
- Video: This Electric Vehicle “Wears” Airbags For Ultimate Protection
- Gnip Adds Google+ To Social Media Monitoring Data Stream
- Majority Of Top 100 Brands Now Have Mobile Apps, Up From Just Half 18 Months Ago
- Jobs Biography Sells Out In China As Fans Clamor For Copies
- Nintendo Reports US$923 Million Loss In The First Half Of This Fiscal Year
- BlackBerry Porsche P’9981 Unveiled In Dubai
- Schmap’s In-Depth Analytics Platform Lets You Take A Deep Data Dive On Your Twitter Followers
- The 1% Will Love This Ostentatious Double iPad Case
| Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel Back Next-Generation Digital Book Publisher Hyperink Posted: 27 Oct 2011 09:00 AM PDT  Hyperink, a next-generation digital book publishing platform, has raised $1.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Launch Capital, Cyriac Roeding, Jack Abraham, and others. Simply put, Hyperink, which was a graduate of Y Combinator’s Winter 2011 class, wants to disrupt the book publishing world. The startup is a digital book publishing platform and full-service agency that will help any aspiring author write, design, publish, market, and sell a book without any up-front fees. Hyperink wants to represent the long-tail of book demand. As co-founder Kevin Gao explains, traditionally, the publishing industry is very hits-driven and slow. With Hyperink, he explains, people can create books that are far more niche and targeted, and do it ten times faster than traditional publishers so that the information is the most current and relevant. For example, instead of publishing a book on “how to get into college”, Hyperink aims to publish specific titles on “how to get into Stanford”, “how to get into Harvard”, “how to get into MIT.” Another way that Hyperink is looking to disrupt the industry is sheer cost. With big publishing houses, books cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce and market, and take 16-18 months to publish. Hyperink’s books cost under $1,000 on average, and are published in under a month. Hyperink also offers higher royalty rates, and give authors up to 50 percent of their earnings (many publishers give authors around 25 percent) For example, one Hyperlink’s top selling books is “Marketing Your Android App”. The expert and author is Eddie Kim, who has successfully built and sold 6-figure Android apps. He spent under 10 hours working with Hyperink’s journalist team to produce a book, and it’s already profitable. Authors can write their own books, in which case Hyperink uses its publishing platform to go from manuscript to “for sale”, providing editorial support, cover design, layout, content advice, etc. Hyperink also provides it own marketing channel and will publish to platforms like Kindle, iBooks and Nook and provide marketing support through search optimization, social media, and email. If you don’t have the time or interest in writing your own book, Hyperink pairs you with a ghostwriter who will interview you and then write the whole book, with your input and editing. Of course, Hyperink is taking on Amazon, who is already launching its own army of publishing imprints as well as self-publishing options. But there is a wave a disruption that is already taking place in book publishing world and if Hyperink can attract high-quality, niche content, it could be a compelling player in this space.
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| Khosla Ventures-Backed Snip.it Lets You Clip, Save And Share Collections Of Content On The Web Posted: 27 Oct 2011 08:59 AM PDT  Snip.it, a startup that lets you create and share collections of content on the web, has raised a round of funding from Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and SV Angel. While the service is still in private beta, TechCrunch readers can use the invite code ‘techcrunch_500′ here to use Snip.it. Snip.it lets you create collections of content and opinions (called “snips”) and share them with anyone or everyone. Snip.it allows you to pull the content that matters to you in one place, add your voice to it, and discover interesting content from like-minded people. It’s sort of like bookmarking meets content collection meets self-expression meets discovery. The startup allows you to collect content from around the web, personalizing it with one’s voice, and also discovering content. Via a Bookmarklet, you can snip content easily from any site, and it will be imported into your Snip.it collections. You can then organize your snips and publish them or share them privately. And you can editorialize your collections with descriptions and commentary. In terms of sharing and discovery, you can share your collections to Facebook via a link. On Snip.it, youc an subscribe to certain topics (i.e. U.S. Politics, technology), to discover additional collections. SnipIt is the brainchild of former TellMe engineer Ramy Adeeb, who also was a principal at Khosla Ventures. Adeeb tells me that he founded the startup shortly following the Egyptian protests (Adeeb is from Egypt) that took place earlier this year. He was seeing reports on Twitter and Facebook but there wasn’t the ability to curate and share all this content in one place and add opinion as well. He set out to create what he calls a “scrap book of all things important to me,” and SnipIt was born. So far in private beta, he says results have been positive. Amongst a group of a few hundred users, 10,000 clips have been shared. Similar to Pinterest, Snip.it is providing a way to curate content in a social and discoverable way. And Snip.it makes it relatively easy to clip the content on the web while you are browsing and import it to your content.
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| Google Offers Partners With 14 Deal Providers, Becoming A One-Stop Shop For Hometown Deals Posted: 27 Oct 2011 08:58 AM PDT  Google has just announced a set of new partnerships with over a dozen niche daily deal providers, which will now be integrated into the Google Offers service, both on the Web and in the Google Shopper mobile applications for iOS and Android. The new Google Offers partners include Dealfind, DoodleDeals, Gilt City, GolfNow, HomeRun, JuiceInTheCity, kgbdeals, Mamapedia, PlumDistrict, PopSugar Shop, ReachDeals, Active.com Schwaggle, TIPPR, and zozi. Initially, these deals will be only available to those in the San Francisco Bay area, but this feature will soon arrive to other areas, says Google. These deal providers aren’t all household names, the way Groupon and LivingSocial are today. However, they do target specific audiences, either by geographic region, type of deal or both. For example, Mamapedia targets Bay Area moms, Schwaggle offers fitness-related deals, zozi goes after adventure seekers, and so on. Not only will Google Offers users be able to discover, be alerted about and pay for deals (via Google Checkout, of course) via Google Offers/Google Shopper, Google will handle the customer service issues for these deal providers, too. Although Google isn’t saying how many customer support reps it has on hand to do this, Eric Rosenblum, Director of Product Management for Google Offers, says Google’s response time is fast: calls are answered in 5 seconds. In addition, Google Offers will provide an optional “personalization” quiz that will help Google better customize the types of deals it will sent to you though email and push notifications on Android (and iPhone soon). Says Rosenblum, the quiz is meant to address the “information overload” problem created by signing up for all these deal providers. The deals will still be listed in the Google Offers hub if you want to browse them, but they won’t be in your inbox or pushed to your phone. For now, this level of deal personalization involves more of a manual effort, but Google has plans to further integrate Offers with other Google services, including Google+ and Gmail. For example, in the future, you may be able to check a box indicating that Google can use your Google Profile information from Google+ to personalize your Offers. It may also start to push those Offers into Gmail by way of the “Gmail message ads” (the ads below your email messages). The idea is that Google will be able to tie together your activity and your usage of all its services to boost your participation with and enjoyment of its daily deals product. When it comes to the details of these personalization efforts, Google firmly believes that one size doesn’t fit all, Rosenblum explained. Some people will want offers pushed to their mobile phone, some will be actively looking for deals, some people will just want to be surprised. But using its knowledge of your particular demographic infromation will be key to improving the service. ”I think down the road it’s quite important,” he says, “and Google’s approach is to get smarter.” But what about personalizing the overwhelming influx from LivingSocial and Groupon? Google has nothing to say on that matter for now, only that it’s open to partnerships both “big and small.” Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....
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| TechCrunch to Beijing: The Eagle Has Landed Posted: 27 Oct 2011 08:52 AM PDT It has begun. Some eight hours ago, eight more members of the TechCrunch team landed in Beijing. Giddy and jetlagged, we are spending every minute between wheels down today and curtain up Monday morning working on the hackathon, shooting videos, meeting with Chinese speakers and showing Western speakers a bit of this amazing country. Most important, we’re working with the startups competing in the Battlefield to hone their pitches for their six minutes of International glory early next week. It’s fitting that the conference is being held spitting distance from Olympic village. Like the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Disrupt Beijing is a story of China’s coming of age as a unique and complex global force of the startup world and of the simultaneous opportunity and threat that poses for the West. TechNode editor Gang Lu stopped by the TechCrunch war room tonight, and on a stroll to the Watercube, I asked him what he was most looking forward to next week. Video above. Lucky you, you don’t even need to leave the couch to get a piece of the action! Thanks to uStream, the conference will be live streamed for your convenience. So don’t forget to tune into the hackathon at 8 PM PST Saturday and the conference on 6 PM PST Monday and Tuesday. And wish us luck! TechCrunch, founded on June 11, 2005 by Michael Arrington, is a network of technology-oriented blogs and other web properties.
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| Gunnar Optiks Intros Glasses For The Call Of Duty Obsessed Posted: 27 Oct 2011 08:44 AM PDT  With the new Call of Duty game hitting shelves soon, Gunnar Optiks has released a limited edition pair of Modern Warfare 3 gaming glasses that promise to please the eyes of even the most obsessed gamers. Well, that’s the claim, anyway. You see, Gunnar Optiks peddles special glasses meant for people who find themselves in front of screens all day. They’re said to reduce eye strain by filtering out artificial light, and their gaming-specific models are designed to keep players in the game for even longer than usual. Sounds perfect for those all-night frag sessions, right? Skeptics may balk (I know I did), but TechCrunch has looked into Gunnar Optiks in the past and came away rather impressed. For their MW3 edition specs, Gunnar Optiks went with what they call a “fighter”-inspired design, complete with a Call of Duty logo embossed in the frames. The glasses also come with a Call of Duty-branded pouch and carrying case, just to prove how hardcore you are. The entire package will set you back $99, but the bigger is question is whether or not the game-related swag is worth a $20 premium over the more traditional models. I’ll leave that up to you to decide, but I’m fairly certain some players are already chomping at the bit for these things.
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| Video: This Bendable Remote Control Has No Buttons, Doesn’t Require Batteries Posted: 27 Oct 2011 08:41 AM PDT  We’ve shown you the "Leaf Grip Remote Controller" a few weeks ago, but its maker, Japanese tech company Murata, decided to wait until the CEATEC 2011 exhibition to present it to the public. The device can theoretically be used for a number of applications, but Murata is pitching it first and foremost as a remote control for TV sets. The Leaf Grip Remote Controller lets users change channels with a twisting motion while the volume can be adjusted by bending it. Shake the device, which doesn’t require batteries to work, to turn the TV on or off. Murata explains:
This video – in English – shows how the remote control works (video provided by Diginfo TV, Tokyo):
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| Mobile Advertising Company 4INFO Raises $14M From Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital And Others Posted: 27 Oct 2011 08:00 AM PDT  Exclusive: Mobile advertising company 4INFO has raised an additional $14 million in funding led by Paul G. Allen's Vulcan Capital, with Mitsui Global Investment and existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Gannett, Mezzanine Capital and U.S. Venture Partners participating. This brings 4INFO’s total funding to $52 million. Founded in 2005, 4INFO has dominated the SMS ad space, with roughly 3,000 publishers on its msgHaven platform. For those unfamiliar with their B2B product, 4INFO’s publishing platform helps publishers manage their SMS content and delivery. MsgHaven delivers around 400 million text messages each month (which has doubled in the past year). But last year, the network expanded to mobile advertising via display/apps through its AdHaven platform and audience network. The AdHaven Mobile Audience Platform includes a next-generation mobile ad server with advanced targeting and data management capabilities. AdHaven can serve 360-degree mobile advertising campaigns across the mobile Web, rich media, mobile video, applications, tablets, and SMS. Advertisers can integrate AdHaven’s targeting technology into their existing exchanges and networks. And today, the company is announcing that it is spinning out AdHaven from 4INFO as a separate company due to the success of the product. 4INFO’s CEO Zaw Thet says that AdHaven is now reaching 90 million uniques per month. As Thet explains, “it’s time for the mobile advertising industry to catch up with the targeting and data capabilities that media buyers demand from online advertising.” AdHaven provides that audience targeting option for advertisers. The new funding will be used towards expanding the AdHaven platform. The company will also be looking at making strategic acquisitions in the near future. Last year, 4INFO bought Butter, a company that specializes in creating customized mobile solutions and ad campaigns for the iPhone and Android platform. 4INFO will also be looking to expand internationally. And the company is profitable. 4INFO is a mobile advertising company that delivers the highest mobile ROI per interaction for the world's top publishers, application developers, agencies, and brands. AdHaven™ is the company's flagship mobile advertising platform that serves a wide range of ad units across all mobile channels, including mobile web¸ apps, video, and SMS. Publishers and app developers use AdHaven to sell and manage ads or optimize revenue using 3rd party ad networks, including 4INFO's Audience Network. AdHaven brings the first...
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| Redfin Raises Another $14.8 Million To Reinvent The Real Estate Market Posted: 27 Oct 2011 08:00 AM PDT  Real estate is a market that’s full of inefficiencies, headaches, and price gouging. Thankfully, there are a handful of startups looking to fix it, one of which is Seattle-based Redfin. Today the company — which has proven to be so disruptive that angry real estate professionals were harassing the startup in its earlier days — has just raised another $14.8 million for its quest to turn the industry on its head, saving both buyers and sellers money in the process. The round was led by Globespan Capital Partners, with participation from previous investors Madrona Venture Group, Vulcan Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Greylock Partners. This round brings Refin’s total funding to nearly $46 million (its last round was a $10 million Series D in November 2009). As part of the deal, Globespan’s Managing Director Venky Ganesan will join Redfin's Board. Redfin says that since the company launched back in 2006, its users have purchased or sold more than $6 billion in homes, with an average savings of more than $7,000 per transaction. In aggregate, Redfin has saved users $85 million. Some other promising stats: the company says that 97% of past users would recommend the site to friends. Most users are buying and selling houses for the first time (i.e. they’re fairly young), but the company is also seeing more traction with customers over 45, who represent the company’s fastest-growing customer segment (the company didn’t say this, but I’d guess that the average transaction price increases with age). Redfin is an online real estate company that provides real estate search and brokerage services. Redfin uses an interesting combination of online real estate search and access to live agents. They employ their agents so they can better control customer satisfaction; traditional brokerage firms license their name to independent agents. Redfin claims to save homebuyers on average $7,500 by reimbursing roughly 1/2 of the buy-side real estate fee directly on closing. Redfin also pays bonuses to agents when they...
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| MoPub Launches New Marketplace For Real-Time Mobile Ad Bidding Posted: 27 Oct 2011 07:58 AM PDT  MoPub, the mobile advertising startup founded by former AdMob and Google employees, has been known as kind of a ”Doubleclick for mobile” until now. Today, the company is expanding its offerings with the launch of the MoPub Marketplace, which will serve as a virtual trading floor for mobile ads, allowing app publishers to connect with ad buyers in real-time. The Marketplace will operate as a self-serve platform, allowing publishers to access new sources of revenue, while still remaining in control of their mobile ad inventory. Explains Co-founder and CEO Jim Payne, the new real-time marketplace can do what ad networks cannot, equating those to a sort of “black box” where publishers can’t control what they’re buying or target their ads with any real sophistication. To use the new service, iOS and Android developers can download the updated SDK, already in use by over 650 publishers on the MoPub platform. Once installed, publishers get detailed insights right down to which individual ad creatives are working and how well they’re working, for example. In the future, MoPub will begin offering even more fine-grained details, including hourly analysis of ad inventory. Publishers in the Marketplace can also choose to expose or hide their app’s name to bidders and can preemptively block ads from a particular advertiser or brand, like ads by a competitor. They can even block a specific ad itself. Although there are other real-time marketplaces out there – Nexage’s solution is fairly complete, says Payne - MoPub hopes to differentiate itself by becoming the one-stop shop for publishers. Its full lineup now includes direct-sold ads, cross-promotional campaigns, ad networks, and, thanks to the Marketplace launch, real-time bidding, all in one place. The pilot program for the Marketplace was previously in testing with around 10% of its user base (65 publishers) on an invite-only basis. Now, any interested publisher can sign up here for free. MoPub has raised over $6.5 million in venture capital from Accel Partners and Harrison Metal Capital. The funding was used towards the Marketplace development and to increase its staff, which is now 30 people, mostly engineers, in San Francisco and New York (and still growing). MoPub is rethinking mobile app monetization, enabling publishers to understand ad performance and user engagement. MoPub was founded in 2010 by ex-Google and ex-AdMob engineers and product managers that understand the pain points faced by mobile app developers.
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| Creepy/Awesome Banjo App Now Pings You When Your Friends Are Nearby Posted: 27 Oct 2011 07:47 AM PDT  Social discovery service Banjo, which launched its cross-platform mobile application for iPhone and Android earlier this summer, has just introduced a new way to keep track of where your friends are and what they’re doing: automatic friend alerts. Unlike the alerts you see on Foursquare, which ping you every time a friend checks in somewhere, this friend alerting feature works across social networks. And more importantly, it only bothers you when your friends are actually nearby. You know what’s annoying? Foursquare telling me that my friend downtown just checked into Starbucks while I’m sitting here at my desk trying to get some work done. I just don’t care. But I do care to know where my friends are when I’m out and about, too. Maybe I’m the one checking into a Starbucks when my friend is doing a little back-to-school shopping just a few shops down. (OK, yes, I’m boring. Feel free to insert “bar,” “nightclub” or “restaurant” here if you have a more exciting life.) But how would I know that my friends are nearby? Until now, I probably wouldn’t have. Keeping track of your friends’ activity has typically been more of a manual effort – a somewhat stalker-like activity. You have to launch Google Latitude or Apple’s new “Find My Friends” app. You have to constantly keep an eye on your Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare streams for updates. What’s more useful is a service that simply tells you when your friend is just a block away (or 5 miles away – in Banjo, the choice is up to you). That’s what Banjo is doing now, and it’s awesome. The service, which connects to your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla accounts, simply sends you a push notification (on either iOS and Android) when a friend is within the radius you specified. And when you don’t want to be bothered, you can turn off the alerts entirely or put them on pause with just a tap. You can even turn off alerts for individual friends. Simple, but incredibly useful. (Note that the ability to specify the radius for alerts is rolling out in a few days. The friend alerts themselves are live now, however). Banjo, which just announced it has now reached 300,000 users, also finds nearby people through geo-tagged updates posted to TwitPic and Instagram. As of yet, those networks are only used for discovery purposes, not to provide alerts. The app is available for download here on iTunes or here on the Android Market. Banjo is a social discovery service that helps people explore social updates across multiple social networks. Connecting real people in real time, Banjo harnesses publicly-available information and delivers it to mobile phones in one integrated view.
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| Microsoft’s Vision Of The Future Includes Touch-Sensitive Everything (And Beautiful People Only) Posted: 27 Oct 2011 07:43 AM PDT  No one knows what the future will look like, but it’s always fun to guess, right? Microsoft has an entire position dedicated to the task, titled “Director of Envisioning,” which is held by David Jones. In an interview with GeekWire, he claimed that the future holds “an expanded definition of productivity where it's not just about getting things done. It's also about doing the right things, and doing them well and enjoying the process with other people in a very natural way." And that’s just what the sequel to Microsoft’s “Office 2019” video shows. In the video (below), Microsoft paints a world inhabited only by beautiful people, in which smartphones are about the size of a business card, and just about any surface you come into contact with has a touch-sensitive interface. Everyone is also wearing the same clothes as we do today, which is curious but comforting all the same. The video shows cloud connections as the primary form of content transference, whether that be from a phone to a book-like tablet, or from a tablet to the kitchen table. Interestingly, the “phone” type device (which no one actually speaks on throughout the whole video) sports a “live tile” interface very similar to the current Windows Phone Mango platform. There’s not a shred of paper in the video, which is bad news for the print industry should Redmond’s vision come to fruition. But on the whole, I wouldn’t mind living in Microsoft’s world in the next five to ten years. Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...
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| Keen On … The Greatest Entrepreneurs Are Born To Deal With Failure (TCTV) Posted: 27 Oct 2011 07:30 AM PDT  Few people know failure better than venture capitalists. Even the most successful fail much more than they succeed and the best are those, like Vinod Khosla, who acknowledge that their successes are much rarer than their failures. Another venture capitalist well acquainted with failure is Peter Gardner, Managing Director of Wavepoint Ventures, a Menlo Park shop that primarily invests in software, medical technology and clean tech start-ups. I caught up with Peter earlier this week at the engaging FailCon conference where he spoke on the Failure of Business Models panel. "We've had our fair share of failures," Gardner confessed to me, stressing that one of the greatest assets of Silicon Valley was its tolerance of failure. Sharing Ron Conway's view on failure, Gardner explained that rather than being born to succeed, great entrepreneurs are born to be able to deal with failure. This interview is the third in a weeklong series from FailCon about failure. Yesterday, Chris DeWolfe talked about MySpace – one the most spectacular failures of the entire Internet age.
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| Video: This Electric Vehicle “Wears” Airbags For Ultimate Protection Posted: 27 Oct 2011 07:20 AM PDT  A Japanese company called Humanix [JP], in cooperation with Hiroshima University, has developed a small electric car that “wears” airbags on the body. I am not really sure if the result can be called pretty, but Humanix is claiming that (perhaps rightfully) their ”iSAVE-SC1” is the “safest electric vehicle in the world”. The three-wheeled car offers enough room for three people and comes with inflated airbags on the front and rear, while the body is covered with tent cloth. Upon collision, the idea is that the air released from the bags will soften the impact. The iSAVE-SC1 reaches a top speed of about 50km/h and can be charged using conventional 100V power plugs. Humanix is planning to sell the first cars in November (in Japan only) for US$10,400 before starting “mass-production” sometime next year. The company also set up a US unit in April this year in San Francisco. This video is from last year, but you’ll get the idea:
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| Gnip Adds Google+ To Social Media Monitoring Data Stream Posted: 27 Oct 2011 07:00 AM PDT  Exclusive: Gnip, a provider of social media data to enterprise applications, is announcing today that it will be incorporating data from Google+ into its streams. Gnip will offer a keyword search stream for Google+ that is built on the social platform’s new API. For background, Gnip serves as an API hub for social streams, collecting data from services like Twitter, Facebook and other social sources, and pushing it out to other data-consuming applications and Websites. Applications using Gnip's platform can get public data streams for over 100 feeds and sites, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, and others without ever visiting those sites or accessing their individual APIs. And Gnip also has premium access to the Twitter firehose of data. Adding Google+ data to the stream was 100 percent based on demand from clients, says Chris Moody, COO and President of Gnip. “Large companies making business decisions based on social conversations as well as social media monitoring companies have been asking for this as a compliment to other feeds from Facebook and Twitter. Using the keyword search stream for Google+, customers select relevant terms and phrases that Gnip uses to deliver matching public activity, comments, photos, URL and video data from Google+. Gnip’s Google+ keyword search stream comes with the startup’s standard metadata enrichments including format normalization, deduplication and URL unwinding. The key takeaway, explains Moody, is that businesses actually want to monitor the Google+ stream. With 40 million users, he says, “it’s a worthwhile source.”
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| Majority Of Top 100 Brands Now Have Mobile Apps, Up From Just Half 18 Months Ago Posted: 27 Oct 2011 06:51 AM PDT  A report being released today from mobile analytics firm Distimo finds that the majority of the top 100 brands (91%) now have a presence in at least one of the major mobile application stores, usually Apple’s iTunes. This finding is notable because just 18 months ago, only half (51%) of the top brands even had any mobile applications published. The “top brands” in Distimo’s new report are those defined by the Interbrand 2011 Best Brands report, and include household names like Coca-Cola, BMW, Disney, GE, IBM, etc. These brands, especially those operating in the media, business services and the automotive industries, have realized that having an app store presence helps them to promote their brand to consumers, and, for some, even to sell content. Most brands, though, are not looking to making money with their apps, but give them away for free. What’s even more interesting is that the brands that ranked higher on Interbrand’s report actually have more presence in the various app stores in terms of the volume of applications. The more apps, the higher the ranking. That’s not to say that the apps caused the brands to rank higher, to be clear. It’s more likely a reflection of the increasing importance for the world’s largest brands to maintain an App Store presence. Many of these brands are heavy app publishers, too – the average number of apps per brand is 24. That average, it should be noted, is due to outliers like Disney (636 apps!) and Sony (285 apps), which are very large publishers. However, even if you remove those two from the average, it’s still high at 15 applications per brand. In terms of where to publish, Apple’s App Store is, not surprisingly, the number one pick. 86% of the top brands have a presence in Apple’s iPhone App Store, 66% are in the Apple iPad App Store, 59% have a presence in the Android Market and 26% are in BlackBerry’s App World. Of those, Google’s Android Market is gaining the most ground as a preferred place to publish. Meanwhile, Nokia’s Ovi Store is becoming less import. More details on the report, including this month’s app rankings, are available from Distimo’s website here. We know app stores. Distimo was founded to solve the challenges created by a widely fragmented app store marketplace filled with equally fragmented information and statistics. Distimo was launched shortly after the introduction of the first app store. App stores have clearly shown since that time that they are the way forward for content distribution. The app store model offers an enormous opportunity for developers to get their content out and dramatically improves content discovery by consumers. However, the mobile market...
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| Jobs Biography Sells Out In China As Fans Clamor For Copies Posted: 27 Oct 2011 06:37 AM PDT China is serious about Jobs-mania. All 250,000 copies of the book are sold out in the country and folks lined up before bookstores opened just to get copy. Considering publishers already faked the bio, it’s clear that their love of Steve is still strong. MICGadget has a full photo gallery of the launch including a number of delightful sculptures made entirely of copies of the bio. How hardcore are these folks? Some choice quotes:
Heady stuff, to be sure. I’ll try to grab some shots of the scrum when I land in Beijing tonight.
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| Nintendo Reports US$923 Million Loss In The First Half Of This Fiscal Year Posted: 27 Oct 2011 06:22 AM PDT  Not too long ago, Nintendo was printing money every month after landing two hardware smash hits in a row, the Wii and the DS. But these times are now over, it seems. The company posted their financial report [PDF] for the first six months of their fiscal year (which ends in March 2012) today, and it has registered a loss of US$923 million. To put things into perspective, the minus for the same time frame in last fiscal was just US$26 million, but the number is at least better than the US$1.3 billion The Nikkei yesterday predicted for Nintendo’s earnings call. Revenue dropped by 41% to US$2.83 billion. The company is blaming the strong yen and rapidly shrinking 3DS sales (both hardware and games) for the bad numbers. What’s even worse is that Nintendo is now projecting a loss of US$264 million for the fiscal through March 2012, which would be the first annual minus since big N started reporting its numbers in 1981.
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| BlackBerry Porsche P’9981 Unveiled In Dubai Posted: 27 Oct 2011 06:21 AM PDT  Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to the BlackBerry Porsche P’9981 — the ugliest BlackBerry I’ve seen in years. Unveiled at RIM and Porsche Design’s Dubai event, the new BlackBerry Porsche is clad in equal parts stainless steel and leather. While the device’s shell has gotten quite the facelift, the internals aren’t a far cry from the standard: it sports a 1GHz processor, a 5-megapixel camera with 720p HD video, and an NFC chip. Even the BlackBerry 7 OS has undergone a bit of a makeover, as it’s been tricked out with a custom Porsche Design font and icons. Yesterday I pegged my hopes on a slightly more traditional design getting the Dubai limelight, but I should’ve realized that Porsche would never put their name on something so pedestrian. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh on the Porsche P’9981. RIM has contented itself with recycling their design language, so a huge shift from the norm like this is sort of reaffirming. Still, I can’t help get the feeling that it’s been over-designed, leading to a device that’s meant to be less of a business tool and more of a gaudy status symbol. Then again, it’s very clearly not meant for run-of-the-mill users like me. The Porsche P’9981 manages to transcend the concept of limited edition, as it’s availability has been referred to as downright “restrictive.” If you’re a sucker for all things Porsche Design, then you’ll be pleased to know that the P’9981 will be making its way to Porsche Design stores and selected retailers for a scant $2,000 (!) before the year is out. Developing…
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| Schmap’s In-Depth Analytics Platform Lets You Take A Deep Data Dive On Your Twitter Followers Posted: 27 Oct 2011 06:00 AM PDT  Whether it be for advertising, targeting messages, or just for general knowledge, knowing who your Twitter followers are is information that is useful to any company, or brand. Today, Schmap is launching its automated freemium service that gives any individual, company or brand immediate access to aggregate in-depth demographic analysis of their Twitter followers. Schmap will breakdown Twitter followers at a basic level, segmenting followers by gender, marital status, profession, likes and interests, plus location by country and US state. The paid version of the service breaks down followers by same categories, plus location by city, breakdowns of technology usage, Twitter influence/activity and more. The paid service ranges from $39.95 to $149.95 for most corporations/brands; and $4.95 to $24.95 for individuals, charities and local merchants. Paul Hallett, CEO for Schmap, believes the service will be particularly useful to brands and corporations, ad buyers, the media, political campaigners, event promoters and local merchants to understand who their audiences are. For example, Schmap compared the follower profiles of a number of celebrities including Charlie Sheen, Sarah Palin, Tiger Woods, Bill gates, Wolf Blitzer, and Donald Trump. Schmap’s analysis showed that Charlie Sheen followers are iPhone users, tweet a lot and like to party. Sarah Palin followers are religious married parents who like reading books. Twitter users who keep pets most like Wolf Blitzer and least like Tiger Woods. Firefox users follow Bill Gates; Donald Trump is popular with fitness fanatics. On the backend, Schmap’s evaluated data that followers have chosen to make public on Twitter (their names, locations, bios etc.), and semantically processes and parses this data using a series of proprietary algorithms Of course, it’s hard to imagine that Twitter wouldn’t offer some of these analytics, especially when it comes to providing more targeted advertising. Hallet admits that this is something that Twitter could release (the company is already moving forward on a number of analytics offerings) but he does believe that developers have a future in this area. While he says that some third-party developers have been burned before when Twitter has started to offer competing products, the advanced signaling with third-party developers is better now that a year ago. Checkout a sample summary of Starbucks’s Twitter followers below:
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| The 1% Will Love This Ostentatious Double iPad Case Posted: 27 Oct 2011 05:51 AM PDT Can’t get your Angry Birds done on just one iPad? Are you what would be commonly termed “a Bluetooth-toting dbag?” Do you think you’re more important than most people? Do your co-workers (or employees) hate you? Here’s the double iPad case of your dreams. Made by a small case manufacturer, ZooGue, the double iPad case is launching tomorrow and should be the toast of the country club come Monday. After all, you can’t GTL if you’re not connected to your homies back at the home office on your two red-hot iPads! No price yet, but if I were ZooGue I’d add a certain premium for the man – or woman – who has it all and wants just a titch more. Slap some Ed Hardy art on there and you’ve got a trifecta.
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