Friday, October 2, 2009

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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NPR Gets $3 Million Grant For Hyper-Local News Initiative

Posted: 02 Oct 2009 08:30 AM PDT

NPR has received $3 million in funding to launch a new journalism project that will focus on providing in-depth, hyper-local coverage on community-specific issues on an online platform. NPR received $2 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and $1 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The new funding will allow a pilot group of a dozen NPR stations with the resources to provide in-depth, hyper-local news on a topic that is most relevant to the community where the station is located. The grants also allow the stations to hire new “journalist bloggers,” who will focus exclusively on reporting and aggregating news about a topic relevant to that city. The pilot radio and TV stations have not been chosen yet.

In addition, PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer will share its embeddable video player with the pilot participants. The player makes it possible to access and present video content from NewsHour, Frontline, NOW, Washington Week, Bill Moyers Journal, Tavis Smiley and about a dozen local PBS stations. The NewsHour will also feature selected reporting from the participating stations on its Web site.

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Venture Exits Might Be Down, But Total M&A Activity Is Definitely Picking Up

Posted: 02 Oct 2009 07:30 AM PDT

The value of venture-backed exits (which is almost entirely M&A these days) might be down about 50 percent in the third quarter, but total M&A activity (including public companies) is seeing a noticeable uptick.

We ran some numbers on Crunchbase, which keeps track of all announced acquisitions, and in the third quarter $31.8 billion worth of acquisitions were announced, double the amount from the second quarter and up fourfold from the $7.6 billion low in the fourth quarter. That number was even up 23 percent from the year before.

Many of the bigger deals involved publicly traded companies, such as Xerox buying Affiliated Computer services for $5.75 billion, Dell purchasing Perot Systems for $3.9 billion, and Adobe picking up Omniture for $1.8 billion.  There were also a lot of biotech and pharmaceuticals deals such as Abbott Labs swallowing Solvay Pharmaceuticals ($6.6 billion) and Dainippon Sumitomo eating Sepracor ($2.6 billion).

The actual number of M&A deals is pretty flat at 213, which is about where it’s been for the past four quarters. But the average value of each deal in the quarter was $349 million, up 85 percent from last year. So buyers might be more picky, but when they do pull the trigger they are willing to spend more money. And they are more willing to spend money for companies with established businesses, which often means they are publicly traded or have been around a while.

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Mighty Mouse 2: Apple Planning To Upgrade Its Ill-Fated Mouse?

Posted: 02 Oct 2009 07:15 AM PDT

I wanted to like the Mighty Mouse, Apple's no-button mouse with tiny little ball on top. I was totally ready to make it my mouse of choice for years to come. We'd grow old together. We'd have children. Sadly, the Mighty Mouse was a mess. The ball got crudded up fairly easily and it stopped tracking and ended up in the big pile of junk in my office. But that's about to change.

Sidebar Will Deliver Personalized Mobile Apps And Content To Your Phone

Posted: 02 Oct 2009 06:00 AM PDT

With over 85,000 apps on Apple’s App Store alone, the task to find apps tailored to your needs and likes is daunting. Who wants to sift through that? Sidebar is hoping to help smartphone users with the process of finding the perfect apps for their phones. An app in itself, Sidebar will ask you a series of demographic questions (gender, age, location) and a series of questions to determine your interests and content preferences (i.e. what type of news do you prefer, do you play online games, what types of outdoor activities are you interested in). Once Sidebar figures out a rough sketch of who you are, the app will begin to recommend mobile content to you.

Sidebar will recommend daily content to you within the app, including videos, games, music, apps, ringtones, podcasts, promotions, news articles. The app will load no more than 12 content recommendations per day, which will last for 24 hours until the next batch of recs are sent to you. Recommendations include a short synopsis of the app or content and a screenshot or image. If you like the rec, you can save it and and download or access it later.

The startup has also recruited two seasoned professional to help run operations. Patrick Kennedy, a former Sony Pictures Digital exec, joins the company as president and CEO. At Sony, Kennedy oversaw Sony's entry into mobile entertainment and the creation of Sony Pictures Mobile. Sidebar’s new COO is Kieran Hannon, former CMO of online retailer Cooking.com and former marketing EVP at Helio.

Kennedy tells us that the app, which is free, will be available on Apple’s App Store and for other smartphones, such as the Blackberry and Android within the next three months. The service around Sidebar is compelling. While there are other ways to find recommended apps, such as the App Store itself, and websites like 16 Apps, it’s great to receive the personalized recommendations on your mobile device.

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Yes, Muslims Go Online Too – A Talk With Muxlim CEO Mohamed El-Fatatry

Posted: 02 Oct 2009 05:02 AM PDT

Having spent the past couple of days in Finland visiting some of the country's most interesting startups, the omnipresent Nokia and attending the great MindTrek conference, I'm starting to get some insight into the Finnish tech scene. In short: it's relatively tiny but surprisingly fascinating. Apart from Dopplr, Jaiku, Floobs and some others, I wasn't really all that familiar with the web startup scene in Finland, but I've met a couple of companies I'm going to feature on TechCrunch Europe over the next couple of days. First up: Muxlim, a media company that is all about 'enhancing the Muslim lifestyle'.

Cash4Gold Absolutely Raking In The Money

Posted: 02 Oct 2009 04:02 AM PDT

You’ve probably seen ads on TV and the Internet for Florida-based Cash4Gold, a service that buys gold from people (watches, rings, other jewelry, etc.) via the mail. You send in your stuff, the company sends you money. You have twelve days to say you don’t accept their offer and you get your gold back. The company pays shipping (both ways if necessary) plus insurance.

The service launched in early 2008 to a perfect storm of soaring gold prices and a down economy. But still, it’s more than surprising that the company raked in $90 million in revenue in the first year of operations according to a source close to the company. Profit, even after paying out cash to sellers and a huge marketing spend, was in the $30 million range.

Revenues in 2009 are on track to hit $160 million, says our source, with a similar profit margin. That implies $50 million or so in 2009 profits.

The company decided to buy a Super Bowl commercial in 2009, featuring MC Hammer (pictured in image above, sans dignity) and Ed McMahon. You can watch it here (embedding is disabled for some reason). Television, not Internet advertising, continues to be their most profitable marketing, says our source.

The business velocity attracted the venture capitalists, of course. Sometime this year the company took a sizable investment from Mangrove Capital Partners and possibly other investors as well. Mangrove is notable because they’re a European firm (and also one of the first investors in Skype).

So what’s next for Cash4Gold? Competition. A number of clones have launched in the U.S., which is driving marketing costs up. The company recently launched operations in the UK and will continue international expansion. They’re going to have to do some serious brand building and lock up key strategic partnerships if they intend to create a long term business. But in the meantime they’ve made a ton of money off a very simple but very good idea.

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LevelUp Scores: Now Powering Yahoo Mexico’s Video Game Channel

Posted: 02 Oct 2009 12:49 AM PDT

LevelUp.com, a Spanish-language video gaming portal that caters to Mexican, Latin American, and US Hispanic markets, has landed a deal with Yahoo! Mexico to power its video game content channel.

Our English speaking readers may not be familiar with LevelUp, but the site’s parent company Busca Corp is quite well established: it powers Playboy’s Mexican portal, the Spanish-language version of MSN’s Video Game section, and has a deal with Terra Networks. BuscaCorp’s top property is LevelUp, which the company says is Mexico’s top video game website. LevelUp recently broke into the Alexa 2000.

The deal is obviously a big win for LevelUp, which will now be offered as a feed that users can include in their homepage. Links shown in this feed will be directed back to LevelUp, so the site will likely see a big boost in traffic. However, it appears that you’ll have to manually add the feed from Yahoo’s gallery — it isn’t one of the defaults.



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Hadoop Clusters Get A Monitoring Client With Cloudera Desktop

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 09:33 PM PDT

Cloudera has seen some pretty amazing growth for a year-old startup. Backed by an impressive list of investors and advisors and run by a team of experienced technology veterans, Cloudera commercially distributes and services Hadoop. It’s similar in theory to Red Hat’s distribution of Linux. At tomorrow’s Hadoop World: NYC, Cloudera is announcing “Cloudera Desktop” a uniļ¬ed graphical user interface for Hadoop applications that includes tools for job and cluster management. This is significant because Cloudera is transitioning from providing a service to distributing an actual software.

Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides services around the technology. Cloudera’s newest Desktop software lets developers, analysts and administrators submit jobs, to monitor cluster health and to browse the data stored on a Hadoop cluster. Basically, helps business teams manage and monitor applications that store data using Hadoop.

Cloudera Desktop runs inside a Web browser, and works on Windows, Macintosh and Linux systems. Applications within Desktop include a file browser, for copying and browsing the data files stored on a cluster; a job designer, for creating, running and saving jobs for later reuse or customization; the job browser, for keeping track of job status and progress; and a cluster health dashboard, for monitoring the health of a Hadoop cluster and alerting operators in case of problems.

Via Cloudera, Hadoop is currently used by most of the giants in the space including Google, Yahoo, Facebook (we wrote about Facebook’s use of Cloudera here), Amazon, AOL, Baidu and more. To date, Cloudera has raised $11 million in funding from Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.

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BNO News Updates Its Great iPhone App, Lets You Harness Stream Of Push Notifications

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 08:17 PM PDT

One of my favorite iPhone applications is BNO News — a lightweight app that lets you receive messages from the BNO newswire. The service, which is best known for its extremely popular Twitter account, offers very timely, short snippets of news throughout the day, often before mainstream media catches wind of it. The iPhone app lets you receieve these messages as soon as they happen using push notifications. It’s great (I always feel like I know what’s going on before everyone else), but the app had one major flaw: BNO News pushed an alert for every story it deemed important.

That means that I’ve gotten urgent updates on stories that I really don’t care about, like the French lottery having a large jackpot. This isn’t to say that the stories weren’t newsworthy — I just didn’t need my iPhone ringing every time one of them popped up. Fortunately that ends today: BitMethod, the development house that built the BNO News app, has released a new version that brings with it some key new features, including the ability to filter the stories you receive. You can download the updated version here.

The new application is still quite straightforward. Upon opening it you’ll see a list of the most recent BNO News stories. Click the ‘Options’ button and you’ll be able to subscribe to updates from over a dozen categories, including Politics, Tech/Science, Disasters, Health, and more. If there are only a few specific topics that you’re interested in, you can specify a list of keywords, and get alerted any time one of those appears in an update. From then on you’ll only receive updates from those categories, along with the news that BNO News considers very important.

Another addition to the BNO application is a subscription pricing plan (the old application’s page informed users that this change was coming). If you want access to the full filtering options BNO News will cost 99 cents per month, with one month included as part of the application’s initial $1.99 purchase price.



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Google Has A Plan To Stop The Mass Exodus From Orkut: No Friend Exports For You!

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 07:49 PM PDT

soupnaziJust yesterday, we wrote about how Facebook was quickly gaining on Google’s social network, Orkut, in places like India where Orkut is still the big dog. One reason for Facebook’s gains is that they’ve been heavily promoting the fact that you can import your Orkut contacts via a special tool. Well guess what? As of today, that tool no longer works.

And that’s not all. Previously, even without the tool, it was pretty easy to export you contacts from Orkut into a CSV (comma separated value) file. But that’s no longer working either. The option still exists on the Friends page in Orkut, but when you click on it, and fill in the CAPTCHA, it simply redirects you to Orkut’s main page.

Coincidence? Maybe. But we’ve already gotten emails from users in India who saw our post and rushed to try and export their friend data to escape Orkut, only to be shot down. And let’s not forget that Google and Facebook have been down a similar road before. Last year, Facebook blocked Google’s Friend Connect from accessing the data on its network. This led to a silly he said/she said spat in which the users were the losers. Could this be payback?

Facebook is undoubtedly increasingly interested in India not only because it is the largest social network in the world, but thanks to Facebook Lite, it’s much more accessible to a wide range of people. Orkut, meanwhile, is, well, a social network that Google seems to talk about as little as possible.

To test the friend export functionality tonight, I logged into my Orkut account for the first time in what must be years. I was shocked to find that there were other people I knew actually on it, that Google was recommending that I friend. So I sent a few requests out, and within minutes, this is the reply I got back (over email):

“what the f**k?”

The message behind that being, “why are you using Orkut?” For some people in India right now, sadly, it appears that they have no choice.

I wonder what Google’s Data Liberation team thinks about this? I have a feeling the official word we’ll get back from Google is “bug.” But given the timing and the fact that two different ways to export your friends broke at once, I’m not so sure that the word they’re really looking for isn’t “hypocrisy.”

orkut

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Photobucket Founders On To Their Next Startup: SlimeSandwich

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 07:21 PM PDT

In early August we broke the news that Photobucket founders Alex Welch and Darren Crystal would be leaving parent company News Corp. to try something new.

Now we know what that new thing is – an ambitious new online MMO and first person shooter game company called SlimeSandwich. So far the company has been operating in stealth mode. But sometime in the next couple of months they’ll launch their first game title, SCAPS Agent. Click the link to see a trailer of the upcoming game.

So far the company has raised around $1 million from the founders, and they may not be raising more. The game will make money via subscriptions and virtual goods. If it’s a hit, it could turn into a cash cow. If not, they’ll move on to the next game.

The team isn’t saying much more about SlimeSandwich or SCAPS Agent for now. Stay tuned for their launch.

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TrialPay Bundles A Bunch Of Deals To Raise Money For Cancer

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 07:04 PM PDT

Screen shot 2009-10-01 at 7.02.24 PMIf I told you that you can get over $700 worth of stuff for $29.99, you’d probably be interested. But you’d also likely think there was a catch. And there is — but in this case it’s a good one: The net proceeds of that $29.99 are being donated to the American Cancer Society.

TheBigBundle is a site put together by TrialPay. Basically, they rounded up a bunch of tech companies (and some non-tech ones) and got them to offer some good deals to people who made the donation. So you’ll get things like, a free month subscription to Skype Unlimited, 6 months free of TripIt Pro, $25 off Everynote Premium, a $5 coupon to Threadless, 3 months free of Dropbox Pro, $50 off 23andMe, and a bunch of other stuff.

The goal is to raise $3 million to give to the American Cancer Society (which would be 100,000 bundles). They’ve given themselves until October 14 to reach the goal, so two weeks from today. So far today. in just a few hours, they’ve raised about $3,000.

As with all of these types of things, people often want to know exactly how much of their money is going towards the cause. TrialPay is very transparent about it, listing it on the site:

How much really goes to the American Cancer Society?

Virtually everything. The company putting on this promotion, TrialPay, is making no profit from sales of the bundle, and will be publishing a report at the end to detail the full accounting of the amounts it has collected from sales of the bundle and the amount contributed to the American Cancer Society. We expect that the American Cancer Society will receive a minimum of 70% and a maximum of 98% of your purchase price of the Bundle.

And you can also choose to donate an extra $20, and nearly 100 percent (minus a couple percent for the credit card fee) will go towards the American Cancer Society.

The basic idea behind TrialPay is to give customers something for free on top of an item they are already paying for.

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Wiggio Adds Facebook Integration, Video Conferencing And More

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 06:15 PM PDT

Wiggio, the a communication application for college students, has added a slew of new features to its collaborative product. Similar to Yammer, Wiggio provides a Twitter-like message stream from all the group members, lets users share calendars, use text and voice messaging, share files and more.

Wiggio, which is free, now lets users host free, Web-Ex like "virtual meetings" for a group, which includes live video conferencing, screen sharing and whiteboard collaboration. The application has also added integration with Facebook, letting users create a group and then import group members directly from their list of Facebook friends. Wiggio users can also use the "Wiggio Boards" Facebook application which lets you communicate in real- time with group members through text message, email and Facebook messaging in one centralized stream. The app will also sync group calendars with calendars in Outlook, Google, Yahoo! and iCal.

Launched in January 2009, Wiggio was founded by Dana Lampert and Rob and Derek Doyle, sons of Bob Doyle, the creator of MacPublisher (the first desktop publishing program) and the 1970s electronic game Merlin. The elder Doyle is an adviser and investor in Wiggio, and houses the four-person startup in his lab a block away from Harvard. Wiggio raised $450,000 in an angel round last August.

Lampert says that Wiggio is is currently growing by over 1,500 new members per day and recently passed 200,000 total users. Although the product faces competition from bigger players like WizeHive, Yammer and Basecamp, Wiggio it is steadily gaining traction among college students and is even expanding its reach to small businesses and non-profits.

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Amazon Clarifies What Can Go Down The Memory Hole

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 05:59 PM PDT

Bezos may have apologized, but the stink of Amazon's unprecedented act of cyberburglary is still strong enough that people aren't likely to forget any time soon. It's a good thing, then, that Amazon has struck while the iron is still slightly hot by announcing the terms under which they will consider themselves justified in making your book an unbook. Nobody likes the idea of having a corporation forcefully take back something they legitimately purchased (whether it was legitimately offered is not their concern), but the truth is that e-books and other "virtual property" will have to be subject to some of the same laws and restrictions as real property. I can't think of many situations where the police would be justified in entering my house and removing an item I had purchased, without my consent, but that's what judges and warrants are for. Amazon is, for the most part, its own judge (and extraction team), but they haven't left too many doors open for more Orwellian tomfoolery.

TaxiMagic Launches Web Portal For Online Taxi Booking

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 04:30 PM PDT

Nine months ago we wrote about Taxi Magic, a nifty service that hooks directly into local dispatch systems to let you book cabs from your smart phone. Since then the startup has been doing quite well — it now supports the iPhone, Blackberry, and SMS booking. It’s also grown from supporting 25 fully supported cities to 40. And tonight it’s launching a new feature that exposes it to an even broader audience: a web portal at TaxiMagic.com

The site features a directory for each of the service’s supported taxi providers, with some cities (like San Francisco and Washington, DC) offering multiple options. Once you’ve picked a taxi service, you enter an address and pickup time. At this point you can’t pay for the taxi online, but you can pay from your smartphone or via SMS using through TaxiMagic if you’d rather not deal with cash or hand over your credit card (the service charges a $1.50 fee for this).

Aside from the new website, TaxiMagic has made quite a few changes since we last covered them. As mentioned above, you can now pay for taxis using your TaxiMagic account that’s been linked to a credit card (before you could only book cabs and would have to pay the old fashioned way). And the service now offers support for SMS, which means you can shoot a text from bascially any phone to TaxiMagic with your current address to request a pickup. TaxiMagic will respond with a text message indicating the cab drive’s name and distance.

Finally, the service’s iPhone application has seen quite a few upgrades, including the ability to actually see where your cab currently is as it drives to pick you up.

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Google Toolbar Now Translates Pages In Firefox

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 03:01 PM PDT

Google has launched a new version of its Toolbar for Firefox that lets you translate any webpage with the click of a button without leaving the page. Google will also add web-site suggestions and sponsored links to the toolbar as you type in any query.

The new toolbar is synced with Firefox version 3.5’s Private Browsing mode so that the tool bar will not record your searchbox history while you are in this mode. It will also turn off PageRank, Web History and Sidewiki.

Last week, Google announced their new web annotation system, Sidewiki, that will be included in the new version of Toolbar for Firefox. Sidewiki allows users to leave a comment on an entire page or a selected piece of text, and share the URL via email, Twitter or Facebook. Users can read and vote comments up or down, which creates a user ranking for each individual that will determine where their comments fall on the Sidewiki. The higher the ranking, the higher comments appear. So now you can make comments on pages that aren’t published in your own language.

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Confirmed: Twitter Has Begun Geolocation Rollout

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 02:11 PM PDT

IMG_0563As we first reported last night, Twitter appeared to have turned on at least part of its new Geolocation API. Today, the company has confirmed the roll out on its API Announcement Google Group page.

As Twitter API team member Raffi Krikorian writes today, “as some of you may have already noticed, we’ve started going through the first steps to get the geolocation API out our door.” Last night, a portion of the Geoloction API got turned on and it slightly borked the new, still unreleased version of Tweetie. Basically, it looks like it turned on geolocation coordinates for all tweets, even if they weren’t meant to be enabled. This gave every tweet a coordinate of 0,0, which put them in middle of the ocean off the coast of Africa.

Tweetie developer Loren Brichter quickly realized what the issue was and corrected it. Other third-party developers we talked to noticed similar things. As such, Krikorian explains a bit more about how the Geolocation API will work today. As he writes:

if you start to pull status objects through the API, you’ll notice that, for the majority of them, there is an empty <geo/> tag and for the user objects there is a <geo_enabled> tag that is set to false.

And he continues:

for clarification: the <geo_enabled> will always be in a user object reflecting whether the user has opted-into the geolocation API.  there will also always be a <geo> tag in the status object regardless of whether there is a location attached to the tweet or not.  if there is no location, then the tag will be empty.  if there is a location (as above [here]), then the tag will be populated.

So it would appear that some of these apps weren’t taking the <geo_enabled> tag into account, and it may have been automatically setting it to ‘true’ which would then populate the <geo> tag with the 0,0 coordinates, since there was no actual geolocation data to share.

But, to be clear, the <geo> tag will always be there whether <geo_enabled> is set to ‘true’ or ‘false’, but if it’s ‘false’, it won’t be store any data and will self-close, I’m told.

Krikorian suggests that there have been some slight last-minute tweaks to the Geolocation API and that these are still in internal testing, but that they will be turning it on for a general audience “soon.”

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The $25 Million Demo. Yext Scores A Big Round From IVP After TechCrunch50 Debut.

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 02:02 PM PDT

Howard Lerman can be a little intense. After the CEO of Yext finished his demo at this year’s Techcrunch50 (embedded below) he left one judge “speechless,” and during rehearsals Michael took him aside and asked him, “Are you on drugs?” He wasn’t. Lerman just has the heightened dopamine levels of an entrepreneur. And he hadn’t slept for 45 days because he was pushing his New York City startup to relaunch on an entirely new technology platform for TechCrunch50

Over the past three years, Lerman and his co-founders (who all went to the same high school together in Virginia), have built a local advertising business under everyone’s nose that is on track to generate $20 million in revenues this year.Yext is going after the huge, entrenched Yellow Pages business with online ads for local businesses that result in phone calls instead of clicks.

At TechCrunch50, which was the company’s public debut, Yext relaunched with a whole new product, going from plain vanilla pay-per-call ads to pay-per-action ads where the action is a relevant call that actually drives new business. Each ad has a unique trackable number that goes through Yext’s system, where it is recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Yext customers get their own inbox for calls which is like a Google Voice for businesses. There is a transcript for each call, the phone number of the person who called, and a full audio file that can be played back. When a business signs up, Yext places ads for them across the Web in local directories such as Yellowpages.com, SuperPages.com, Local.com, 1-800-Free-411, 4Info, Topix, and more. It turns those ads into phone calls.

Yext uses speech-to-text recognition licensed from IBM and fine-tuned with its own algorithms for each business category it targets. Co-founder Brent Metz used to be an engineer in IBM’s speech science labs, and his name appears on many IBM patents. Only when certain key words related to the actual services offered by the business are mentioned in a call (”spinal decompression,” “oil change,” “install countertops”) does Yext charge for it. Wrong numbers, marketing calls, or calls from beyond a pre-determined geographic area are put in a junk folder and Yext doesn’t charge for those.

This means Yext needs to be really good at both driving relevant calls to local businesses and identifying them. “You've got to be transparent,” says Lerman. “We take all the risk, then we pull our pants down and show them what they get.” Lerman is so confident of his technology that at TechCrunch50, he switched all 20,000 local businesses already using Yext over to the pay-per-action system. It is a big, gutsy bet.

The minute he stepped off the stage, Lerman was inundated with emails and business cards from seemingly every venture capitalist and M&A officer in the room. He tried to ignore them and soak in the rest of the conference, but some of them were from people any startup CEO would be foolish to ignore. He took a few meetings with the most serious VCs, and ended up closing a $25 million B round, led by Institutional Venture Partners (which is also an investor in Twitter). The money just hit Yext’s bank account a few hours ago. “Anyone who doesn’t launch at TechCrunch50 is crazy,” says Lerman.

IVP partner Dennis Phelps will be joining Yext’s board. Sutter Hill Ventures, which had put in $3.5 million in an A round in June, 2008, also participated in this latest funding.

Yext is currently only in 12 local categories, including auto repair, chiropractors, gyms, vets, and yoga. There are 2,300 Yellow Pages categories. Lerman is going to take the $25 million and aggressively expand into those categories, hiring sales people to go after each one. He already has 75 employees.

Lerman is also extremely excited about getting Yext numbers into mobile apps. He thinks he can build an AdSense for mobile phones. “What do you think is the perfect action for mobile?”he asks. “It is a phone call, not a click.” App developers who sign up here can freely import Yext numbers into their apps by business type and category. So a travel app could bring up nearby auto garages or window repair shops for stranded travelers and get a cut of any call revenue they generate. Lerman has a lot of ideas like that.

Here is the demo from TC50 that got him $25 million:

Photo credit: TechCrunch/Chanaye Thomas.

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Twitter Lists Competitors Respond: We Can All Get Along

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 01:44 PM PDT

Screen shot 2009-10-01 at 1.42.23 PMIt looked as if Twitter may have dropped a bomb on a number of Twitter-centric third-party apps yesterday by announcing its new Lists feature. It’s a feature that Twitter really should have implemented a while ago for better filtering if nothing else, but they didn’t, and that gave rise to services like TweepML and Wefollow. So are those guys now mad about Twitter’s latest move? No. Instead, they see it as an opportunity to make their services even more popular by hooking up with the feature through its API.

Brizzly, a web-based Twitter client from Thing Labs, was the first to come out and share its enthusiasm for Twitter’s new feature. One of Brizzly’s key selling points is that you can filter the people you follow on Twitter into groups. As the Brizzly official account tweeted out yesterday, the plan is to now support Twitter Lists. They’ll apparently offer the ability to convert your Brizzly groups into these lists, which is nice.

Meanwhile, Digg founder Kevin Rose’s latest project had been Wefollow, a Twitter directory for popular people to follow in various fields. So is he annoyed by Twitter lists, which will allow users to group people in a similar way? Nope. He tweeted out a link to Twitter’s blog post about Lists a few hours ago with the note, “playing w/twitter lists feature, this is going to be cool :) ”

The most interesting would-be competitor for Lists however is TweepML. The service, which we covered here, allows you to create your own lists of Twitter users to follow to send and share with others. On the surface, that sounds very similar to what Twitter Lists is, but founder Marcelo Calbucci has already gotten a chance to play with Lists and says that he too looks forward to integrating TweepML with Twitter Lists.

He also notes what he sees as 10 key differences, which we’re reposting here with permission:

  • #1 You can't create a list with yourself: A Twitter list is a subset of your followers. You cannot follow yourself, and you cannot add yourself to a list you create. If I create "Entrepreneurs in Seattle" list, I cannot be on it.
  • #2 You can only add people you follow: That's the same issue as above, but what if I want to create a list that doesn't have everyone that I follow. For example, I might not want to follow all the 300+ Entrepreneurs in Seattle.
  • #3 It's hard to add people to your list: To add someone to your Twitter list you go to your Friends page and select one-by-one who you want on your list.
  • #4 No way to go from list subscriber to tweep subscriber: Imagine you are following a list of 25 photographers. You get upset because the list owner keeps adding irrelevant people, or removing cool people. You decide you just want to follow them directly. There is no UI to do that now.
  • #5 No way for people to know you are following them: If you follow a list, the people on that list won't be notified you are following them. You lose the opportunity of them following you back.
  • #6 No way to "follow-the-list-except-that-guy-who-tweets-too-much": If you follow a list is all or nothing. You can't exclude that guy that can't stop tweeting.
  • #7 You can't import/export lists: They don't support the TweepML format, but they've promised a server-to-server API, which doesn't matter for end users. If you have a list with 25 accounts, there is no way to easily import a list. There is no way to export that list either, like into a spreadsheet or a text document.
  • #8 What if you block someone: Blocking on Twitter is somewhat weak already, because the person can continue to follow your tweets by just going to your page (if your account is public like most people). Now, if someone creates a list that you are part of it, anyone that you blocked can follow your tweets again by following the list.
  • #9 No stats or analytics: Right now Twitter does not tell you anything about your list. I believe in the future they will tell you how many people are following that list, but that's it. No way to know how people found the list, how many people came and went, etc. This is probably not important to your average user, but for power users and business, this is critical.
  • #10 No dynamic lists: Finally, Twitter doesn't allow you to have dynamic lists. For example, if you go to TweepSearch and you want to follow everyone who's a Security Consultant in Seattle you have to be manually updating that list.

Some very interesting points from someone who has used the feature already.

Overall, it looks like Twitter did a smart thing by allowing these competitors to check out Lists from the get-go. Rather than seeing this as a hugely threatening gesture by the service, these competitors all are welcoming it to varying degrees. Twitter also did a smart thing by making sure Lists launched with an API, so third-parties can build things that will do many of the 10 things listed above.

Screen shot 2009-10-01 at 1.43.16 PM

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Smule Sells 300k Copies Of I Am T-Pain, Celebrates With A New Song And A Huge Contest

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 01:02 PM PDT

The second we laid eyes on Smule's autotuning, pitch-changing iPhone app, I Am T-Pain, we knew it was going to be a huge hit - and it has been. We just got some details from Smule's CEO, Jeff Smith, on how things are going so far. In the first 3 weeks alone, the application has seen 300,000 downloads. The average user spends around 66 minutes within the application -- an absolutely ludicrous number for any app, much less one out of the entertainment category. To date, 4.1 million performances have been recorded within the application. So, what's the best way to celebrate making lots and lots of money? By adding new content - oh, and giving away lots and lots of money.

An App Contest For San Francisco

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 12:50 PM PDT

This guest post was written by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was elected to the position in 2003 and reelected in 2007. Newsom is also running for governor of California in the upcoming 2010 election. In this guest post, Mayor Newsom announces a contest to create apps using city data from DataSF.org,.

Last week, we announced a City App Store to highlight and centralize software applications developed from government data available on DataSF.org. The response from the community has been overwhelming.

We have received a number of new civic apps that are now featured in the DataSF App Showcase. We've added Mom Maps, a new iPhone app that helps you find kid friendly locations in San Francisco, Dadnab a text messaging service that gives you transit directions, and then there's EveryBlock, which has just added a new feature. The site breaks down what types of services people are requesting from the city by neighborhood, zip code and day.

This type of innovation is exactly what we were hoping for when we launched DataSF.org less than six weeks ago.

We were not sure what people would create with the data, but we knew that many of our talented developers wanted to help improve San Francisco. Now, our community is coming together to help fill our app store with even more civic apps.

The Center for Investigative Reporting's California Watch reporting team, Spot.Us, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, MAPLight.org, the Gov 2.0 Summit, Sun Light Foundation and others are announcing today that they are joining forces to sponsor the first DataSF App Contest on Nov. 7.

The day-long app-building contest is open to developers, journalists, community organizers, policy wonks, students and others interested in building a better San Francisco from more than 100 datasets available on DataSF.org.

Register here for the DataSF App Contest. If you are interesting in sponsoring the App Contest, visit the Spot.Us page

A team of judges will pick the winning app at the end of the day and award a cash prize or Apple gift certificate to the winning team. More than $1600 has already been raised from community sponsors. If you would like to donate to the contest please click here.

We are excited to see what apps will be created from this contest. The only limit is participants' imagination and the amount of data we are able to make available by Nov. 7. In San Francisco we are moving away from a one size fits all government to making government a platform for innovation.

If you are using or have created an application based on City data that is not in our DataSF App Showcase, we would like to hear from you.

Join Mayor Newsom on Facebook or follow him on Twitter.

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CrunchGear Video Review: $100 Headset Shoot-out

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 12:36 PM PDT

For those of you about to rock, I encourage you to pick out a nice pair of headphones. I tested four models at around $100. They are:
  • Ultrasone Zino - $99
  • Philips Tapster - Price TBA
  • Shure SE102MPA - $119
  • Klipsh S4i - $99 Which one did I love the most? While they were all special in their own way, there were two that really stood out in the round-up… but I won't ruin the surprise! Watch the video to find out.
    		•

    Brightkite About To Go 2.0…And Asynchronous (Screenshots)

    Posted: 01 Oct 2009 12:18 PM PDT

    Screen shot 2009-10-01 at 12.00.40 PMBrightkite has been one of the major players in the location-based social networking game for a while now. Originally a TechStars startup, the company was bought in April by Limbo, with the goal of merging the two location services. Since that time however, Brightkite has been flying a bit under the radar as a fresh crop of location-based services have popped up including the new early-adopter favorite, Foursquare. But now Brightkite looks ready to strike back at the competition with Brightkite 2.0.

    It’s not entirely clear when Brightkite 2.0 will launch, but indications are that it will be soon. Users have been receiving notices about it. We’ve obtained a whole bunch of screenshots purported to be of the new version. We’ve reached out to the company to verify these, but they definitely look legitimate.

    So what’s new? The first thing you’ll notice is that the whole look and feel of the site has been revamped. Gone is a lot of the clutter that distracts from the main location feed. This has been replaced by a revamped top toolbar, and a new bottom toolbar (think: Facebook).

    Screen shot 2009-10-01 at 11.51.37 AM

    Filters are a key part of Brightkite now. Rather than having three different main streams (Me & My Friends, Around Me, Universe), there is now one with a few different filters. There are also new filters to sort through people using the service by factors like location, sex, and age.

    Checking-in has been simplified, as has adding a new place. And Brightkite 2.0 promises simplified privacy settings so you can more easily set where to send you updates (to the public, or just your friends — to Twitter and/or Facebook).

    Also new is the ability to “like” other people’s updates. Obviously, this is similar to the functionality found on FriendFeed and Facebook.

    But the biggest change to Brightkite is that it is going asynchronous. That is to say, rather than forcing you to accept a friend request to enable other people to see you updates, those people can now simply follow you without any confirmation needed, like on Twitter. They will become your “Fans” while people you also follow back are your “Friends”.

    This is an interesting move since Brightkite is a location-based service, and privacy remains the main issue for why all services, like Facebook, don’t switch to this model.

    Below, find more screenshots.

    Screen shot 2009-10-01 at 11.54.39 AM

    Screen shot 2009-10-01 at 11.52.04 AM

    Screen shot 2009-10-01 at 11.54.23 AM

    Screen shot 2009-10-01 at 11.55.02 AM

    CrunchBase Information
    Brightkite
    Information provided by CrunchBase

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    MG Goes Gaga Over Google Wave On TV

    Posted: 01 Oct 2009 12:08 PM PDT

    The much awaited release of Google Wave is now taking place; with 100,000 lucky users getting invites to use the ambitious online communication and collaboration platform. Wave was first unveiled at Google I/O back in May, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin telling us that the product “will set a new benchmark for interactivity.” Our very own MG Siegler appeared yesterday on G4’s Attack of the Show to explain what’s so special about Wave and how it could change the web.

    MG says that Wave can best be characterized as email, plus instant messaging, plus real-time collaboration wrapped up in one package. One of the key components of Wave is its open-source platform, which encourages developers to build games, messaging, and other types of applications on top of Google Wave. But it’s still yet to be determined whether Wave will take off; it could face backlash. Watch the video above for more.

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    T-Mobile Confirms That Android v1.6 (Donut) Rollout Is Underway

    Posted: 01 Oct 2009 11:01 AM PDT

    Rumors were abound last night that T-Mobile would begin sending out the Android v1.6 update (known amongst the geekdom as “Donut”) today, and sure enough: they’ve just confirmed it.

    The big changes here include a fix for a bug that would reset your phone after dialing 911 (Oops!), the new (and much prettier) market, improved voice search, a new camera interface, and homescreen search. Here’s the official word from ol’ Magenta themselves:

    Read the rest of this post >>

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