Thursday, March 8, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

Link to TechCrunch

NewsiT Raises $500K To Gamify Crowd Journalism

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 09:24 AM PST

NewsiT.net_App Images

Crowdsourced news platform NewsiT.net just announced that it has raised $500,000 in seed funding. And, timed to match the beginning of South by Southwest, it’s also launching its iPhone app.

The company was founded by longtime journalist Melinda Wittstock, who has worked for the Times of London, BBC Television, the Guardian, the Observer, ABC News, National Public Radio, and MSNBC/CNBC. Wittstock says she wanted to reinvent the newsgathering and publishing model after attending “too many conferences with a lot of moaning and not a lot of solutions.”

This is hardly the first experiment with crowdsourced journalism. (Here’s a story that combines two examples — last fall, Spot.us, which uses crowdfunding to support investigative journalism, was acquired by American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, which helps newsrooms collect crowdsourced data.) But Wittstock says NewsiT was built around an important insight: “Every other user-generated content type play that we’ve seen over time expects regular folks to be journalists — and we don’t.”

So the startup doesn’t expect any of its members to create a complete news report on their own. Instead, it breaks a story up into manageable tasks, then assigns multiple members to each task. Members are rewarded with points and badges for both contributing and reading.

For example, the site is currently working on a story about the effect of digital media on politics. To participate, members can answer some basic questions, like whether they trust mainstream media or friends and social networks more as a source of political information. Or they can get more involved, by actually interviewing a panelist at SXSW about their opinions.

Eventually, someone from the NewsiT editorial team will take on those contributions and combine them into a polished article. Wittstock says NewsiT is also developing algorithms to help it find the patterns in user submissions, identifying answers that might be inaccurate — or perhaps a big scoop.

Naturally, the iPhone app creates new opportunities for gathering news while users are away from their desks. As the example above suggests, NewsiT will be taking advantage of its new mobility by creating a number SXSW-specific tasks.

And while Wittstock is looking into licensing the company’s technology to others, she doesn’t just want to be a technology provider to other organizations. NewsiT is a site for news gathering and news consumption, and it offers rewards for both. (That applies to the app, too.)

Investors include Sandra D. Kresch, president of PSD International and managing director of Golden Seeds, and P. Chrisman Iribe, CFO of Scaleform Corporation and former president and COO of PG&E.

Collusion! Apple, Publisher Partners Accused Of Raising E-Book Prices

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 09:13 AM PST

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Apple was surely riding high after the announcement of their new iPad yesterday, but that doesn’t mean that everything is OK in CA if a Wall Street Journal report holds true.

According to "people familiar with the matter," Apple along with HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Group, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan are on the verge of being slapped with a Department of Justice lawsuit that alleges them of colluding to raise e-book prices.

At the heart of the DoJ's beef with these publishers is their adoption of Apple's agency book-selling model, under which publishers can set e-book prices on their own, but surrender a 30% cut from each sale to Apple. It's no wonder then that these publishers would jump onboard — a presence in the iBookstore means they've got access to a ridiculous number of iOS devices, and can charge as much as they like in an effort to offset their payouts to Apple.

The industry’s talking heads have been more than a little outspoken about the pricing model shift. According to American Bookseller Association CEO Oren Teicher "the agency model is in the best interest of not only the book industry, but the consuming public as well.” I beg to differ Mr. Teicher — I can see how the book industry would love being able to charge whatever they want for their books, but I don’t see how you can frame higher costs for e-books as a boon for customers.

Anyway.

Rivals like Amazon have been feeling the heat for over a year because of the agency model adoption. Given their long life as a book retailer, Amazon sticks to a wholesale pricing model, under which they can purchase the rights to sell an e-book and determine their own selling price. While this choice (and the ensuing slate of $9.99 bestsellers) generated love among consumers, it has caused them to scuffle with publishers who think their digital editions are undervalued.

The five publishers reportedly involved in the suit are big players in the book industry, but at least one major publisher seems to have dodged the bullet here. Random House announced their intentions to switch to the agency model for their e-books at the end of February, but I wonder if that decision will stick now that the model faces legal scrutiny.

So what's the end-game scenario here? If the Department of Justice gets their way, then cheaper e-books for you and me are on the horizon, though how exactly that sort of pricing shift could happen is still up in the air. The publishers in question are scrambling to come up with a solution that allows them to dodge legal heat while still raking in revenue. Among the ideas currently being floated is the possibility of sticking to the agency model but allowing certain retailers to offer discounts. Negotiations have apparently been going on for a while, and we’ll keep you posted if anything actually comes of them.

Stamped Updated For SXSW: Better Maps, Search & Austin-Area Recommendations

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PST

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Stamped, the NYC-based startup founded by ex-Googlers, is rolling out an update to its social recommendations app today with a focus on improving local discovery. Specifically, Stamped has overhauled the app’s map interface with the addition of a search box and slider for switching between views.

The company has also teamed up with The Austin Chronicle for SXSW, whose branded account will “stamp” their favorite restaurants around Austin.

The mobile app, for those unfamiliar, launched back in November, to help simplify the ratings and reviews process by making it super simple to recommend anything – a restaurant, bar, nightclub, etc., or even real-life items like a book, album, movie or app. Instead of using 5-star ratings, you just “stamp” something if you like it. Adding notes and photos are completely optional.

With today’s update (ver. 1.1), the app’s map feature has been refreshed, and now includes a slider at the bottom. Here, you can slide between views that show just your stamps, stamps from you and your friends, stamps from friends of friends, and the most popular stamps for the area.

Also added is a much needed search box that lets you filter the types of stamps you’re seeing. So, for example, you could type in “pizza” to narrow down the selections.

While the map update is the big news, Stamped co-founder Robby Stein tells us that there are a few other minor enhancements being shipped today, too, including an improvement to the suggested users’ feature. Now, Stamped will be able to recommend people you should follow based on your stamps. The app will tell you why it’s making these recommendations, too.

The suggestions will indicate which friends you have in common and which tastes you share, for example.

In addition, SXSW goers will now see recommended restaurants around Austin, courtesy of The Austin Chronicle. This isn’t the only brand partnership for Stamped, we should note. The company previously established partnerships with New York Magazine as well as with notable individuals like Mario Batali, Michael Kors, Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, and others. And they’re close to adding more partnerships with other brands and public figures, Stein says.

Although the company is too young to feel comfortable talking metrics, they are announcing they’ve reached 100,000 stamps across their worldwide audience, with the majority of ratings, surprisingly, found outside of location-based venues (restaurants, bars, etc.). A lot of the activity in the app has been on rating movies and TV shows, apparently.

The updated iPhone app should be out in the iTunes App Store today. (If not now, then very shortly after this post.) You can grab a copy of Stamped from here.

Social Passport Marries NFC With Social Media For A New Spin On Mobile Deals

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 08:30 AM PST

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When it comes to daily deals and loyalty programs, local merchants are constantly bombarded with new options. Groupon has leapt ahead in daily deals, and there quite a few players in the loyalty program space, all trying various approaches to mobile, to rewarding influencers, to encouraging social engagement, gamification, and more.

Generally speaking, local merchants, whether they be restaurants or retailers, want to keep it simple: If they choose to offer discounts or deals, they want to be able to set the terms, upsell, encourage repeat visitors, and track the ROI of their campaigns — doing so in a way that results in as little friction as possible for customers.

New York-based Social Passport is taking a different approach to the problem by creating a social loyalty tool that leverages both NFC and QR codes to allow customers to interact with their favorite businesses in realtime and receive discounts, and, in turn, gives businesses access to a wider audience of potential customers through their users’ social media channels.

Launching in October of last year — and shortly thereafter winning the “best startup” award at Web 2.0 in New York City — Social Passport allows businesses to easily post NFC tags or QR codes in their store, which users can then interact with to unlock rewards, deals, and discounts. For example, a customer might enter a store in which a merchant has posted a QR code; the user scans the code with Social Passport, which then displays a range of prompts being offered by the merchant. Those might ask the user to check in to the app on Foursquare, post their location to Facebook, or follow or tweet their reaction on Twitter.

After doing so, the user would unlock a reward pre-established by the business under their own terms, whether that be a 30 percent discount on burritos or a buy one, get one free deal for socks. On the other side, business owners get their own dashboard through Social Passport, through which they can set their deals, and view analytics, like how many scans they performed, how many people they reached on social media spaces, or how many people clicked on a respective message, for example.

And today, Social Passport is launching a feature called “More Friends, More Savings,” which enables businesses to reward their customers proportionally, meaning that they can offer greater savings to those users who have substantially larger social media footprints. For example, a user who has 50 followers on Twitter or 75 friends on Facebook could would receive a 20 percent discount, while someone with 700 on each might receive a 35 percent discount.

The big attraction here for merchants is that they’re able to add that extra layer of security, giving themselves an added layer of protection against customers who might, say, create social media accounts just to check-in (in other words, people who are trying to game the system).

Social Passport has already been deployed by 115 businesses in New York City (the service will be expanding to other cities later this year), with in additional 50 businesses having signed up. With the startup’s new feature in place, users can now simply download the startup’s iPhone or Android app and instantly begin “liking,” following, and checking-in at their favorite businesses, receiving deals tailored to them based on their interaction with the business on social media in accordance with their social footprint. Meanwhile, businesses are able to take advantage of the viral potential of a few positive words from influential users and reward them accordingly.

Even if a user doesn’t have a NFC-enabled device, they can use both QR codes and Reverse QR, the latter of which allows users to display their own and have merchants scan them, with both enabling customers to perform the same social media functions — while scoring a few deals.

Social Passport founder and CEO David Merel says that he thinks merchants are tired of the solutions that simply reward people who are already in the store, and instead want more efficient ways of driving new customers into their stores, while taking advantage of social media influence. Thus, the team has designed a platform that is flexible and provides a big value-add for these businesses, offering businesses their own QR and NFC stickers, complimentary signs to advertise to users in store windows, and its own punchcard feature, which Merel says is similar to that of PunchTab.

The startup has raised $400K in seed financing from private and angel investors, and Merel says that the team plans to begin rolling out its API in the near future.

For more on Social Passport, check them out at home here and in the video below:

Rovio Goes Gravity-Free With Angry Birds Space (Video)

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 08:08 AM PST

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Curious how Rovio planned on dealing with physics in the forthcoming Angry Birds Space? I have been, too. If we presume that Rovio is playing by the physical laws of space, a lack of gravity fundamentally changes the game. But apparently, that’s the point.

Rovio took us to the international space station, courtesy of the video below of course, to show us a little bit about how the new version of the game will work. An astronaut, Don Pettit, did a little demo flinging a plush red bird in a zero gravity environment. It should go without saying, but that little red bird flew straighter than an arrow through the space station.

“We’re seeing all of this in a weightless environment, which is what Angry Birds Space will look like, with gravitational fields from planetary bodies,” said Pettit.

But then we got to the really cool part: the first time any of us have seen Angry Birds Space in action. And boy, does it look awesome. Those planetary bodies he mentioned pull the bird in, and change the course of the trajectory. And if you’re paying close enough attention you’ll notice that some of our favorite birds, Big Red and Yellow, have changed outfits. Big Red is now Big Green, and Yellow is now swathed in a lovely shade of purple.

It’s worth considering the meaning behind Angry Birds switching things up so drastically. All three versions of the game — Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio, and Angry Birds Seasons — have gone on to be monstrously successful. But are people getting bored?

Angry Birds Space will be significantly more challenging than previous versions of the game, and after years of success not fixing what isn’t broken, I think we can all agree a refresh is in order.

Update: I reached out to the Mighty Eagle himself, Peter Vesterbacka, to see if Rovio chose space (and thus, a zero-gravity environment) to make the game more challenging? Here’s what he had to say:

Eric Schmidt-Backed Slice Brings Receipt Aggregator And Tracking Service To Android Devices

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 08:01 AM PST

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Eric Schmidt-backed receipt tracking service Slice is bringing its handy, organizational platform to Android devices.

Slice offers Yahoo Mail, Gmail and iPhone apps that help you organize your online shopping by analyzing your inbox. It's sort of like what TripIt does for your itineraries, except Slice tracks receipts, notices and purchases.

Once you sign up, the app automatically aggregates and pulls information from the electronic receipts in your email and organizes it in one place. The startup says that receipts and purchases often gets lost in your inbox and the app consolidates your shopping history in one place so you don't have to log into multiple websites, dig through receipts or manually file emails. Slice for the iPhone gives you access to all this information on the go.

With the launch of the Android app, users will also be able to view and organize purchases made using Google Wallet. The app will track all your in-progress shipments on a single map as they make their way to your front door, with detailed information about the contents of the package and where it is coming from. Push notifications let you know when a purchase has shipped and when it gets delivered.

Slice will also give you historical purchase details beyond what's provided in your credit card statement, showing you exactly what you bought down to the individual item, not just where you bought it.

Since launching in May of 2010, Slice has processed more than 10 million purchases. Slice faces competition from Lemon.

Location App Highlight Gets Clever Update That Features… Highlights

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 08:00 AM PST

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There are a few use cases for hot background location app Highlight, cofounder Paul Davison explains to me when showing off the latest update. You just met someone and you want them to find out more about you. You want to note that someone is particularly interesting for future reference. And, you want to see which friends are nearby, or have recently left.

The app is getting upgrades today that should make it more useful in all of these situations.

The first is a particularly smart new addition, also called, er, Highlight. Click on any user profile, and you simply click the button and you’ll add the person to a saved list of contacts. It’s asymmetrical. They don’t have to Highlight you back. But, while any user can see who you’ve Highlighted, this isn’t a numbers game like Twitter follower counts. It’s more like a public poke, or a bookmark — a way for your friends to see that you’ve noted that someone is interesting.

Saved Highlights appear in a new left-hand navigation menu, so you can check their profiles (but not their locations) later on. Davison also says that the system will look at who you Highlight to find other similar people who are nearby.

The second addition builds on the first, by using existing social relationships to turn Highlighted people into long-term connections. You can now follow a link from users’ Highlight profiles to see the original version back on Facebook. There, you can friend or subscribe to them. If the user is on Twitter, they can also now update their Highlight profile to include their handle, and you can take a link to follow them on the microblogging service, too.

I recently speculated about the ability for Highlight to help users share contact info via an address book sync of some sort, but this is a more elegant solution.

For the third use case, the app has subtly changed how it displays location times. If someone is currently nearby, the time-stamp will just say “now.” Otherwise, it will say how many minutes ago they left the vicinity, and they’ll drop down into the history list of formerly nearby folks. This should further help connections between proximate users.

Users will also notice lots more spit and polish. The left-hand navigation bar also includes a button to pause Highlight in case you’re getting too many notifications or want to conserve battery life. The main interface includes a search feature where you can comb through your entire location history to find people who have at some point been nearby.

The overall sense you get is of an app that’s incrementally moving towards a big strategic goal. A lot of the other background location apps feel like they’re still trying to find a market fit, and adding and subtracting features in the hope that they’ll somehow get it right. Instead, Highlight is on the second iteration of becoming the way you discover friends and new people around you, layered on top of the real world connections you already have.

Like some of us have already been declaring, this one is going to be a hit at South By Southwest this weekend. The app, however, is still only available for iOS, and the company’s logo still hurts my eyes.

HomeSnap Is Not A Boring Real Estate App

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 07:40 AM PST

HomeSnap-iphone

Sawbuck Realty, an online real estate broker, has just launched a new app called HomeSnap which lets you discover information about any home nationwide just by taking a photo of it. Using a combination of mobile phone sensors to determine location and orientation as well as MLS and public records data, HomeSnap can tell you everything about a home, including how many square feet it has, number of bedrooms/bathrooms, estimated price and more. And it can do so even if the house is not on the market. More importantly, the app is actually fun to use.

The company is also announcing the close of an additional $2 million angel round today, which adds to its previous $2 million round from 2009.

Sawbuck CEO Guy Wolcott tells us that the company currently has MLS data for 13 of the largest metro areas across the U.S. (think NY, DC, LA, Chicago, Boston, etc.) but plans to aggressively add more markets throughout the year. By year-end, it expects to be in 30 top markets across the U.S.

However, if you’re not in one of the regions where Sawbuck has MLS information on homes, the app can pull in data from public records. Currently, it has over 90 million homes in its database.

But what makes the app notable is the user interface. This is not another boring real estate app. It’s actually kind of fun.

“So many of the real estate apps are boring and utilitarian, explains Wolcott. “We looked at things like Shazam – things where you want to show your friends, and they say ‘how does that work?’ – and we tried to make something like that for homes.”

Under the hood, the app uses the iPhone’s sensors, like the accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS, to determine where you are and what you’re looking at. Then the company’s patent-pending algorithms interpret that data to make a best guess as to which exact home you’re probably seeing. If the app can’t figure it out for some reason, it has a backup system that lets you pick the house in question with a tap.

“The real idea,” says Wolcott, “is to be kind of magical. You just take a picture, and it knows what you’re looking at.”

The app also keeps track of the history of your snaps, to help you remember the houses you’ve seen. This feature serves a two-fold purpose: one, to help consumers recollect their searches, and two, to help build up a crowd-sourced database containing pictures of homes.

In the future, the app could begin using image recognition, too, thanks to these crowd-sourced photos to better recognize the homes in question.

The app is clearly a competitor to industry leaders like Zillow (and its mobile app), but Wolcott says the HomeSnap app is meant to be used differently. Zillow is primarily about researching a specific home or neighborhood’s prices. HomeSnap, meanwhile, is meant more for serendipitous discovery and satisfying your immediate curiosity about a house you see. He also notes that HomeSnap’s access to real-time MLS data in particular markets is a key advantage.

The new app is available for download here from the iTunes App Store.

New iPad May Sport 1GB Of RAM, But Apple Will Never Say So

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 07:33 AM PST

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If you were hoping that the blitz of iPad news would end with the device's long-awaited announcement yesterday, well, sorry. Even with Cupertino's latest tablet waiting in the wings for a March 16 release, we're all still speculating when it comes to some of the device's particulars, and now the new iPad's allotment of RAM is getting its share of the spotlight.

According to The Verge, the new iPad will indeed feature double the RAM of its immediate predecessor, with a full gigabyte of memory ensconced within its aluminum frame. But why doesn’t Apple ever talk about it?

That Apple would make the jump to 1GB for their newest post-PC poster child shouldn't come as a surprise. The original model launched with 256MB of RAM onboard, which made for some iffy use experiences after a few software updates. The iPad 2 debuted with 512MB under the hood, a substantial improvement to be sure, but it’s only a matter of time between new features and apps have iPad 2 users feeling the same sort of squeeze.

Now I can’t speak for everyone, but my childhood in computing was spent scrounging together allowances for new RAM so my off-brand PC wouldn’t chug quite so hard. As The Verge rightly points out, Apple’s iPad line to date has never blown the tech community away with the amount of RAM they’ve included. Apple's silence on that front is to be expected — while they're always eager to talk up their processors and their cameras, Apple has historically been content to leave the some of the technical specifics shrouded in mystery.

And why shouldn't they? By throwing around adjectives like "magical," "incredible," and "amazing" at every possible opportunity, consumers are left to focus more on what they can do with an iPad rather than the little bits of silicon that make those experience happen. Sex sells, and RAM is anything but sexy.

Still, the fact of the matter is that RAM matters, even if Apple would prefer you didn't know about it. As apps get more complex and more impressive (as they should, considering how picky we are about them), the demands they exact on a device's hardware grow ever greater. More robust system resources means more opportunities for developers to flex their respective muscles, and the last thing Apple needs to do is displease the people who generate revenue for them. More RAM is a win for nearly everyone involved, and while some of us may never see as much as we like in our iDevices, that shouldn’t stop Apple from at least talking about it.

Now With 1.5M Lessons, ShowMe Launches v2.0 To Bring Khan Academy To The Masses

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 07:30 AM PST

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Over the last year or so, we’ve seen an auspicious rise in the number of startups looking to tackle those seemingly intractable problems in both K-12 and higher education. One of these startups, the New York City-based ShowMe, found some early financial validation from an impressive set of investors, raising $800K last August from the likes of Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, betaworks, Learn Capital, and angel investor Naval Ravikant.

Those familiar with Khan Academy — the startup that offers an impressive web library of videos on everything from arithmetic and physics to finance and history to let students learn at their own pace — will likely find it easy to understand ShowMe’s appeal. The startup is taking a bottom-up approach to the Khan Academy model.

While Sal Khan (the founder and head teacher of Khan Academy) has proven to be an incredibly skilled instructor, procuring the equipment, software, and resources that have allowed Khan Academy to thrive is difficult to say the least. Creating that depth of quality content and building a sizable user base requires a lot of time and significant financial backing.

Thus, ShowMe wants to bring the classroom-flipping power of Khan Academy’s platform to the millions of teachers out there looking to share their knowledge and experience with students of every age. “We want to create thousands of Sal Khans,” ShowMe CEO San Kim tells us, taking Khan’s approach and turning into a community and P2P-based model.

To do so, the startup built an iPad app (with a corresponding web platform) that transforms the device into an interactive video whiteboard, allowing teachers of all stripes to record lessons while speaking into the iPad’s microphone and drawing on the accompanying touchscreen whiteboard. Once those instructors have created a video, they can then be shared on the app or on the Web, where other users can peruse through videos, voting them up, and sharing their own favorites.

Since the app debuted on the App Store last summer, it has racked up over 400K downloads (which is impressive for an educational app), and Kim tells us that ShowMe teachers have now created over 1.5 million lessons. ShowMe’s technology is also now powering Princeton Review's SAT prep app.

Behind this early traction, the startup is today officially launching version 2.0 of its iPad app and Web platform, which turns ShowMe into a central hub where all lessons can be posted and searched for, bringing lessons posted from a teacher’s iPad directly into the web platform for easy searching and sharing.

ShowMe initially started off as a standalone iPad app, which Kim says was a big hit among K-12 teachers. What surprised the team was how eagerly this growing community of teachers began sharing the lessons they created on Twitter, blogs, and beyond. And, again, while grade school teachers were the primary target for ShowMe’s whiteboard, with its new online content hub, the startup wants to make it clear that the technology is meant to be used by anyone who has knowledge or lessons to share — whether they be writers, musicians, artists, chefs, etc.

ShowMe’s lessons are now aggregated on the Web in one place, as users can browse through featured videos, or jump to “All Topics,” to peruse by category. As to who is in charge of these 1.5 million lessons, Kim says that the community itself is the gatekeeper of the content, which crowdsources and filters the best content and groups it into categories.

As to what’s up next? The CEO says that the next step for the company involves enhancing these filtering mechanisms so that it can curate and organize its content in a way that’s personalized to individual learners. Everyone has a different learning style, and with thousands of teachers producing content on ShowMe, the key going forward will be finding the best way to match those various styles with right teachers.

The beauty of ShowMe is that it takes the whiteboard out of the classroom and puts it in students laps, so that they can continue to learn and practice lessons when they’re not in school, in a much more engaging and multidimensional world, thanks to the iPad. Opening up its library of lessons to the general public, and enabling easy search and discovery, is an important step for ShowMe in its progress toward bringing high quality education to the masses.

For more, check out the startup at home here, or watch the video below:

Trippy Launches New Visual Browsing Experience; Adds Kevin Rose, Celebs As Advisors

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 07:19 AM PST

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For those unfamiliar, Trippy is a social travel web and mobile app that operates on the assumption that travel recommendations are best served on a silver, friendsourced platter. That is to say, Trippy’s platform, which ties your favorite social networks into its platform to allow friends to comment on your itinerary, feedback, and so on, advances the notion that travel recommendations and destination discovery is most effective when emanating from people who you implicitly trust.

Trippy debuted in private beta at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC in September, launched open beta in October, and raised $1.75 million in November from VCs like Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, True Ventures, and angel investors including Rob Solomon, Tim Ferriss, Brian Lee, Gil Ebaz, Randi Zuckerberg, Jasom Mraz, and Rachel Zoe.

Building on its first round of funding from celebrity and well-known angel investors, Trippy is today officially announcing its advisory board members, which include some familiar names (investors), with a few more travel and tech experts to boot. The slate of advisors includes investors Jason Mraz, Rachel Zoe, Tim Ferriss, Randi Zuckerberg, as well as names like Anthony Bourdain, Kevin Rose, Andrew Zimmern, Gary Vaynerchuk, Chase Jarvis, Soleil Moon Frye, Soraya Darabi, Johnny Jet, Veronica Belmont, Kim Mance, Brett Snyder and more.

Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose, for example will be advising the company in day to day operations, but the real goal of bringing this cast of characters and influencers on board is that they are all globetrotters, so, in their role as advisors, they will use Trippy to share their travel experiences to inspire and offer recommendations to other travelers.

Trippy is also announcing the initial roll out of what it’s calling “Project Delightful,” the next big iteration of the app, which offers a new visual-browsing experience that aims to bring serendipitous discovery of travel ideas through photos. This new phase will clearly bring the startup into even more direct competition with fellow social, photo-focused travel site, Gogobot.

The new project is live today with its first phase, and will continue to develop over the next few weeks, but as it stands, Trippy users can now view pages of travel photos, click on the places they want to go and have been to, and add travel ideas to visual “inspiration boards.”

Custom boards can be created for any category, says Trippy Founder and CEO J.R. Johnson (who previously launched VirtualTourist, which was acquired by Expedia in 2008), from “Weekend Getaways” to “Top Places To Eat In San Francisco,” “Where To Travel To Get Cultured,” and so on. Each travel photo is geo-tagged to help users remember the locations of the places they’ve visited, and the collection of photos is plotted on an interactive map for easy viewing.

Then, when users are ready to move from planning into action, Trippy taps into their social networks to show them which of their friends have already visited the locations they’ve chosen. Johnson says that the idea is to take travelers “from dreaming to doing” and create a personally-relevant, full-circle planning experience.

For more, check out Trippy at home here.

Kismet Combines Check-Ins, Background Location And More — A SXSW Dark Horse?

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 07:17 AM PST

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Out of the slew of new location apps vying for users at SXSW this weekend, Highlight and Glancee are looking like the standouts. They both have subtle ways of connecting you to friends and new people via your phone, without invading your privacy too much. But there’s a royal rumble of competitors.

And another one of them, Kismet, has just entered the ring with a particularly forward approach to privacy that could help it win the attention melee.

It includes the background location stuff like the others, but lets you check in if you really want to declare the place you’re at. ”Walking around San Francisco, I’m unlikely to check in,” chief executive Kevin Stephens explains. “But at SXSW where so many events are right on top of each other, it’s more valuable to show which event or location I actually am in order to meet new people. It’s impractical to leave a bar to go to one next door if the line is 30 minutes long.”

It also lets you do things like set up-one on-one “meetings” and ad hoc group “events” that you create and invite people to within the app. Both could be good for the conference.

Here’s the privacy twist.

The core social graph is built around Facebook like Highlight, Glancee and many of the others. You have to enable Facebook permissions when you first log in, and the app is built around the idea that you’re trying to connect with people you have things in common with.

But unlike most of the competitors, you’ll see the exact places where people are, even if you have no friends in common with them. And by exact I mean sometimes right down to the street addresses.

But!

You’ll only get exact addresses for those other users who actively check in themselves, not people who are just using the background location feature. And, the app has a unique tactic for privacy protection: it watches residential places you go to often and automatically obscures them after a few visits.

The app builds location frequency into the app in other ways. “You’ll actually see a counter of how many times you’ve both been there for places both of you have visited frequently (e.g., we both went to AT&T Park 5 times lately),” Stephens tells me. “This is to show what you have in common with someone. Where you spend your time says more about you than your Facebook likes.”

You can also see other detailed stats about other users, including the number of meeting invitations they’ve sent and the number of chats they’ve had. Stephens intends for this feature to promote good behavior.

“If someone chatted up 80 people and proposed to meet 50 of them in the past day or two,” he says, “that would send off a ‘creeper’ vibe to most women. That’s basically being the guy in the room that walks around and hits on every woman in sight. This feature is specifically to create some social pressure so people avoid anti-social behavior.”

For people who have friends in common, the interface lets you scroll through to see the degrees of separation on Facebook, up to three and four degrees of separation away.

One of my favorite features, and one that’s not available on most competitors’ apps, is a way to see a map of everyone else who has actively checked in. It gives you a new sense for all the activity happening right around you.

Kismet is launching a little late for the buzz building around SXSW this year, but it has a strong team, an interesting product, and some room to experiment. After an incubation period in AngelPad, the company (incorporated as Meh Labs) has raised $1 million in a seed round led by Triple Point Ventures, with participation from New Enterprise Associates and angel investors including Shiva Rajaraman, Steph Hannon and Roham Gharegozlou.

The app is currently only for iPhone, but look for it to expand to the other platform at some point.

Nokia’s 20-F: A Stark Picture Of Declines In Almost Every Key Area

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 07:16 AM PST

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Last week at Mobile World Congress, Nokia unveiled wave of new handsets from its fightback strategy that cuts through both the lower end of the market as well as the high. Some of it — like the new 41-megapixel camera on the Symbian PureView — is inspiring for what else might lie ahead.

But as for today, a more sombre picture, as the Finnish handset maker’s decline was laid bare in its 20-F annual report filing with the SEC. Between the many risks detailed at the beginning of the document and the declines in almost every key metric, Nokia has a tall task ahead to turn things around.

In 2011, Nokia had an operating loss of $1.4 billion, compared to an operating profit of $2 billion in 2010. Sales were down to $50 million from $56 million. And earnings per share also went into negative territory.

In devices specifically, net sales declined in almost every region except for the Middle East and Latin America, where they only grew one percent and nine percent, respectively. Important markets like Europe, Nokia’s largest, declined by 27 percent to a $7 billion business. And while China and Asia-Pacific once looked like they might become Nokia’s biggest markets, they too declined by 18 percent and 19 percent; these were both each worth about $5 billion in handset sales to the company.

In smartphones specifically — a key area where Nokia has now pinned its star to Microsoft — the company reported 77.3 million units sold for the year, down 25 percent from 2010. The average selling price for those devices was down, too, to $185 (less than the starting price for an iPhone out of contract).

The risks, meanwhile, read like a catalog of the many articles written here and elsewhere about the challenges that Nokia faces. They cover pretty huge issues like consumer interest in the Windows Phone platform — a platform that has actually declined in market share in the last year.

Another area that I think is worth pointing out are the concerns Nokia spells out about its own services, such as whether its investments in location and mapping will ever kick off as a profitable and big business. The mapping division that contains Navteq has seen some layoffs in the last year and despite being one of the smallest divisions in the company in terms of revenues ($405 million in the last quarter) reported an operating loss of $1.6 billion. On the plus side, this is a very high margin business for Nokia at the moment, with a 393.8 percent operating margin (compare that to the 12 percent in devices), so if Nokia can grow this, that can only be a good thing.

When I met with Stephen Elop, Nokia’s CEO, last week at Mobile World Congress, he highlighted how important location would be both for Nokia and for mobile services in the future. I don’t doubt that it will have a massive role in mobile going forward, but I can’t help but feel that the jury is very much still out on whether Nokia will be playing, too.

Kayak Expands Direct Booking Into Flights; Adds Jetsetter And Travel + Leisure Hotel Reviews

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 07:01 AM PST

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After debuting direct booking for hotel reservations, travel search engine Kayak is expanding this option to airline flights. This feature is initially only available for Air Canada but Kayak will be adding more airlines in the future.

Previously if you wanted to book a flight using Kayak's search engine, you would click-through to the airline or partner site to book the reservation. Kayak would receive an affiliate fee from the transaction but the actual booking would be made outside of the search engine.

Now, you can purchase the flight within the Kayak platform, exclusively for Air Canada routes. As we reported last March, Kayak added this capabilities for hotels, thanks to Travelocity.

The option will be available on Kayak’s mobile applications in the coming weeks, and will also integrate with Kayak’s itinerary management service, My Trips. Robert Birge, Kayak’s CMO, tells us developing additional direct booking partnerships will depend on each airline. In some cases, airlines offer an API, which makes it easy for Kayak to add the direct booking option. In other cases, he explains, Kayak will have to work directly with the airline to provide a direct booking experience. “We’re trying to focus on the customer experience and provide better choices and a simpler booking experience,” he says.

Kayak is also adding reviews for over 1,400 hotels from Travel + Leisure and Jetsetter. A few weeks ago, Kayak added 60 million TripAdvisor reviews into search results.

With the IPO on hold, Kayak has been heads down on product development and improving customer experience over the past few months, as the company battles with Google in the travel search space.

In December, Kayak redesigned its iPad app and consolidated the app with its iPhone cousin. The company’s website most recently got a big UI upgrade, creating a more universal and comprehensive consumer experience across all Kayak platforms: web, mobile web and apps.

Petridish Aims To Crowdfund Science And Research Projects

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 07:00 AM PST

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Funding for science and research is hard to come by, yet these discoveries made through research projects and lab experiments can revolutionize industries and make the world a better place. Enter Petridish, which is a crowdfunding platform for science that plans to transform the way research is funded. On Petridish, science-lovers can connect directly with researchers to help them launch new projects.

On Petridish, researchers can post materials about themselves and their research, and the public can discover projects that are exciting to them. In exchange for contributing to the project, backers receive insider updates on the research, naming rights to new discoveries, and other souvenirs from the work.

For example, one of the scientists on the site is offering naming rights to new species of animals. Disciplines of projects include those centered around biology, ecology, geology, astronomy and more. Scientists can apply to be listed on the site, but co-founder Matt Salzberg tells us that Petridish really wants to put the decision-making process in the greater community.

Similar to other crowdfunding sites, backers don’t get equity but will receive other benefits in exchange for participating in the project. For example, one project on the site will acknowledge backers in journal articles, arrange visits to field sites, or naming rights. For each transaction, Petridish will take 5 percent of the donation. Projects will only be funded if they reach their goal before the deadline set by the researcher.

Petridish is the brainchild of Ilia Papas and Salzberg. Prior to founding Petridish, Salzberg was a senior associate at Bessemer Venture Partners.

Current projects range from Unraveling the mystery of gelada monkey melodies to Capturing the first sounds of deep sea creatures to New species of ants in Madagascar.

Mobile Ad Network Millennial Media Will List On The New York Stock Exchange

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 06:53 AM PST

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Mobile ad network Millennial Media will be listing its offering on the New York Stock Exchange, according to a new S-1 filing. The network, which filed its original S-1 in early January, aims to raise as much as $75 million in the offering. The company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “MM.”

According to more recent stats from the filing, Millennial serves ads to 200 million unique users worldwide, including approximately 100 million unique users in the United States alone. More than 30,000 apps are enabled by developers to receive ads delivered by Millennial.

From 2009 to 2010, Millennial’s revenue increased 195% from $16.2 million to $47.8 million, and the company took a net loss of $7.6 million, and $7.1 million, in those years, respectively. From 2010 to 2011, revenue increased 117% from $47.8 million to $103.7 million. In 2011, the company saw a net loss of just $287,000.

While Millennial’s IPO is certainly not at the scale of Facebook, it’s definitely a win for the NYSE in its war with NASDAQ over tech company listings. Last year, NASDAQ got big listings for Zynga and Groupon, whereas NYSE got LinkedIn, and Pandora. In this year’s round of IPOs, Yelp chose the NYSE, and Brightcove went with NASDAQ. We’ll see which exchange Facebook chooses soon.

Ask.com Does Q&A Again, This Time With Mobile, Social Polls

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 06:52 AM PST

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Ask.com, which refocused its efforts on Q&A back in 2010, is rolling out another mobile application in the Q&A genre today. And no, it’s not that Ask.com Q&A app. It’s another one. The new app is called PollRoll, and, as the name implies, it allows you to quickly create polls on your iPhone, then post them to Facebook and Twitter.

PollRoll is being pitched (of course) as a utility to help SXSW conference goers find the best food truck/panel/party/etc., but that may be selling it a little short. Unlike some of the applications that get hot at South By, you might actually use PollRoll after the conference ends…well, that is, if you’re into taking or posting polls online. Or if you have a few minutes to kill.

The app competes with other mobile polling tools like iPoll, Pollbob, or Wayin, to name just a few of the dozens in the iTunes App Store, but it offers a user interface that’s a bit more appealing thanks its use of images to accompany the text.

Upon first launch, PollRoll shows you a large photo and a randomly displayed poll which you can answer, comment on and then view the results of. There’s also a dashboard of image thumbnails which are used to illustrate the available polls. It makes for a more engaging experience than simply viewing a list of questions.

To get PollRoll going, the database is seeded with around 1,000 polls, many of the “would you rather” variety, which ended up being strangely addictive. (Like that board game, I guess).

Polls within the app are sorted into “New,” “Trending” and “Around Me,” the latter which shows you local polls – that’s the feature that could come in handy during SXSW, if enough people jump on board.

But what makes PollRoll stand out are the social features. You sign into the app using Facebook or Twitter, which allows PollRoll access to your social graph. Then, as you answer polls, you can switch the results view around to see how everyone answered, how just your friends answered, or what those nearby said.

Poll creation is easy, too, if maybe a little basic. The app lets you enter a title, up four responses and a photo you either snap, pull from the camera roll, or grab from the web.

Pretty simple stuff.

Look, I’ll be honest. I probably wouldn’t normally write about a little app that does polling, but after I found myself, five minutes later, emerging from a poll daze and dozens of questions answered, I figured this one might have some appeal. The UI makes it pretty addictive. (Also, you guys: teleportation would be the best super power, not time travel. D’uh.)

You can grab the new app for iPhone (sorry Android people) here.

Apple Extends Shipping Date To March 19 For AT&T’s 4G LTE iPad

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 06:23 AM PST

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Despite the fact that Apple’s store was an absolute mess yesterday when it relaunched with the new iPad, it would seem people are still finding a way to get their pre-order on. So much so, in fact, that white versions of the 16GB and 64GB AT&T 4G iPads have been given a new, later shipping date of March 19.

This is not even close to a surprise. In fact, we kind of expected the ship dates to get pushed back even sooner. Black models in each storage flavor seem to still be ready to ship on March 16, and Verizon’s 4G LTE iPads are also still on track. Still, we don’t expect this to last much longer so if you’re absolutely set on having the new new iPad before everyone else, you seriously need to place your pre-order like right this second.

Click here if that sounds like you.

It’s also worth wondering where AT&T and Verizon stand with regards to sales of Apple devices. After hearing that Apple has sold more iPads than the combination of any given PC maker’s full line of products, it’s worth thinking about the carrier partnerships in place.

AT&T has always had a leg up when it comes to Apple thanks to that exclusivity contract that was in place until Verizon got the iPhone 4. This meant that early Apple adopters, ones more likely to buy an iPad, iPad 2, or new iPad, already have a subscription set up with AT&T. With each launch that included both AT&T and Verizon, both carriers have been on a relatively even playing field.

Verizon perhaps had the advantage when it comes to an unclogged network, but AT&T had the advantage of already having more iDevice owners on its network. But this time, and for the first time, the upper hand finally lands on Big Red’s side of the battlefield. Verizon’s 4G LTE network is far more built out than AT&T’s. For those who consider LTE the stand-out feature of the new iPad, this should surely play a role in the decision.

Again, we really don’t expect either carrier to keep up the pace with that March 16 ship date for much longer, but people leaning towards an AT&T model should move exceptionally fast.

[via BGR]

Planvine Reserves You Those Tickets You Wanted — Invites For TC Readers

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 06:11 AM PST

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In recent times we’ve seen the rise of many businesses predicated on the idea that a user subscribes to an ecommerce service instead of buying a la carte. Thus, BirchBox delivers beauty product samples every month. Stylistpick sends fashion, Shoedazzle sends shoes. The list goes on. But what if you had a similar service but there was no need for shipping items in the post, plus it had wider appeal outside of, for instance, fashion?

Launching in London first, Planvine is a new service which, for a monthly subscription, reserves two tickets to events based on your pre-selected interests. This solves a big problem a lot of people have – including myself. You’d like to go to something but never remember to get tickets or just can’t get organised.

Planvine researched its market and found many twenty-to-thirty-somethings don’t end up actually doing things that interest them. Planvine CEO Barnaby Clark says London has a lot to offer but what’s stopping people is the time it takes “to find the cool stuff and the hassle of booking tickets.”

Founders Clark, Chris Crossley and James Stillwell reckon they will end up as an aggregator for ticketing agencies who have problems reaching this audience. The startup has closed a pre-seed investment round so far from Sardis Capital, with Osman Mardin joining the board.

It’s clearly an interesting market. HowAboutWe in the US takes a dating approach to events just aiming at couples, but has raised a $15 million Series B from Khosla Ventures on top of a prior $3.1 million from RRE Ventures.

TechCrunch readers can get in on the best site with this link which avoids the invite process.

Juniper: NFC Payments To Reach $74 Billion Worldwide By 2015

Posted: 08 Mar 2012 05:05 AM PST

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As we heard last week, Isis, the carrier-led joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, is picking up steam in the NFC world to make these payments a reality. And we know Google has made a big bet on NFC as a payments technology. But it’s still unclear whether NFC (near field communication), which allows devices to exchange data over short distances with a wave or a tap, will become a major force. But Juniper seems optimistic that NFC payments will become a huge market in the payments world forecasting that global NFC mobile contactless payment transactions will reach nearly $74 billion worldwide by 2015.

Juniper contends that NFC is increasingly being used for the payment of goods in-store and as transport tickets; and is already over triple the expectation for 2011. Additionally, the firm says that the use of mobile devices as an alternative to credit cards and paper tickets is one of the fastest growing segments of the mobile commerce market.

Juniper’s David Snow explained in the report “Our report demonstrates the spectacular growth we see across all segments of the mobile commerce market. Four of these segments (money transfer, physical goods, NFC and coupons) will more than triple in transaction value over the next three years, whilst digital goods, banking and tickets will still on average, double over the same period.”

The barrier to mobile payments and NFC, says Juniper, are both real and perceived security risks. Even if one application is found to be insecure, this could throw off the whole market.

Other findings include that SMS is the key to widespread mobile banking service adoption and without interoperability mobile money transfer services will have difficulty gaining a critical mass of users. And while mobile coupons still represent the smallest mobile commerce segment, it is demonstrating the highest growth rate.

Last year, Juniper forecasted that North America and Western Europe together will exceed the Far East region in under three years based on transaction value. And North America and Western Europe will account for 50% of NFC payments market by value in 2014.

Slowly but surely, more companies are incorporating NFC into payments solutions, but there are still questions as to whether NFC will become a dominant technology in the mobile payments landscape of the future, especially when other companies including PayPal, Square and others seem to be shying away from making a big bet on the technology. The other missing component is Apple’s participation in the space, and it’s still unclear if the iPhone maker will be adopting the technology.
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