The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Rent The Runway Raises $15 Million For The Netflix For Couture
- gWallet Launches New Format For Virtual Currency Offers; Eyes International Expansion
- Some Gmail Features Matriculate, Others Flunk Out
- TradeShift Launches To Disrupt The Financial System – And Morten Lund Is Advising It
- Watch Obama Debate Healthcare Today On C-Span CitizenTube
- AllRecipes Launches New iPhone App; Planning Cooking App For iPad
- Placecast Debuts Location-Based Mobile Marketing Technology ShopAlerts
- Palm Says Revenue Will Be Lower Than Expected, Cites Slow Sales
- World of Good Sells Brand And Assets To eBay, Wholesale Division To GreaterGood
- 91% Of iPhone Users Would Recommend Device Vs. 69% Of webOS Users: AdMob
- LBi And Bigmouthmedia In $150 Million Merger Deal
- Video: The Early Days Of Pyra Labs / Blogger (Featuring @Ev Williams)
- Google Search Accounts For 9% Of All Pageviews On The Mobile Web: Opera
- Does Citibank Suffer From Homophobia Or Just A General Dislike For Startups?
- Vogue’s New iPhone App Will Style Your Wardrobe And Please Advertisers
- Do You Follow Too Many People On Twitter? Use ManageTwitter.
- The Facebook Imperative
- Infectious Rolls Out Skins For Current BlackBerry Models
- OMGPOP Remakes Atari’s Missile Command For The Multiplayer Web (Exclusive Video)
- Facebook Checks-In On Loopt
- Yammer May Be About To Open The Floodgates To Its Microblogging Platform
- Foursquare’s First Television Commercial Airs Tonight On Bravo [Video]
- Google Real-Time Search Now Includes A Fraction Of Facebook Status Updates
- Twitter Connects With Two From LinkedIn
- hi5 Acquires Social Gaming Company Big Six
| Rent The Runway Raises $15 Million For The Netflix For Couture Posted: 25 Feb 2010 09:01 AM PST
Once you pick a design on the site that you’d like to wear, you can schedule a delivery date. Rent The Runway will send two sizes, to ensure that you receive a dress that fits. Rentals on the site run from $50 to $200 for a four night loan. According to the New York Times report, Bain Capital Ventures provided seed financing for the startup. It appears that Rent The Runway raised $1.5 million according to a previous filing.      
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| gWallet Launches New Format For Virtual Currency Offers; Eyes International Expansion Posted: 25 Feb 2010 08:59 AM PST
gWallet, a recently launched company that partners with both brands and game developers to bring users virtual currency offers, is launching a new format for offers. Called the Brand Bar, the offers to earn virtual currency appears in a bar across the top of a social game. gWallet says that the conversion rate of users who choose to pause and leave a game to earn virtual currency is so low, that offers and advertisements need to be engaging. According to the startup, only two to four percent of users choose to pause and leave the game in order to access offers and branded engagements. With the Brand Bar, gWallet says that its offers are places in a way that allows the advertisements to become part of the in-game experience. The "Brand Bar" is already live on more than a dozen online games, including those developed by Clipwire Games, Zen Gaming Inc., Poolhouse, FooMojo, Bubblefish, Mobscience, and Chat Republic Games. gWallet, which recently raised $10 million in funding, was founded by serial entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal. gWallet works directly with brands directly as opposed to adopting an affiliate leads model and uses branded video campaigns to engage with consumers. Disney, Best Buy, K-Mart, Nestle, Coke, and The History Channel are all using gWallet's video campaigns on social networks, which are powered by Tube Mogul. gWallet also announced an early-stage venture fund to invest in social gaming companies and promote innovation within the social gaming ecosystem. gWallet faces competition from Offerpal and SuperRewards. Chahal told me that gWallet is seeing steady growth in the U.S. and is now looking to international gaming markets to expand its offers globally. The startup will be opening up offices in Europe later this year and will also announce a partnership with a Chinese gaming company in the near future.      
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| Some Gmail Features Matriculate, Others Flunk Out Posted: 25 Feb 2010 08:22 AM PST
Gmail is known for launching a plethora of nifty little features through Labs that make the email platform more attractive and easy to use. In total, Gmail Labs has 60 features that can be turned on and off and is steadily adding more enhancements. Yesterday, Google announced that six features will be graduating from Labs and will become regular features of Gmail. And Google will also be retiring five features. The decisions were made based on usage and user feedback. Here are the graduating and retiring features: Graduating: 1. Search Autocomplete: Auto suggests terms, keywords, contact names and labels within the Gmail search box. Retiring: 1. Muzzle: Hides friends shat status messages. Photo credit/Flickr/Beverly and Pack      
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| TradeShift Launches To Disrupt The Financial System – And Morten Lund Is Advising It Posted: 25 Feb 2010 07:48 AM PST
Christian Lanng, a former builder of deep e-commerce and security services for the Danish government is co-founder of TradeShift along with a very hard-core team which includes John Bosack who created XML, who is on the board. But what is perhaps most startling is the re-emergence of early Skype investor Morten Lund on the project. Lund was made famous in tech circles both for his early Skype investment but also for going personally bankrupt two years ago. TradeShift, which has been operating under the stealth name of Porta till now, is aiming at a very, very big target. It wants to disrupt how banks and credit card companies process payments between any kind of business, and use the Internet to do it.      
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| Watch Obama Debate Healthcare Today On C-Span CitizenTube Posted: 25 Feb 2010 06:46 AM PST
President Obama is going to debate the Republican detractors of his healthcare reform proposals at the big healthcare summit in Washington today. (Democratic Congressional leaders will be in attendance as well). This is not a closed-door meeting. Far from it, Obama wants to put the opponents of his healthcare plans on display in front of the American people? But who is going to be watching C-Span or CNN or Fox at 10 AM (Eastern Standard Time) in the morning. We’re all supposed to be working. And frankly, healthcare debates put most people to sleep. But if you want to secretly slack off and even throw some questions to the politicians at the healthcare summit, you can watch it live from your computer on YouTube’s CitiizenTube Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader John Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will answer select questions submitted via Google Moderator at the end of the summit. No, Obama won’t be answering questions from CitizenTubers. He already did that after his State of the Union. This time, he’s got to get back to work.
     
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| AllRecipes Launches New iPhone App; Planning Cooking App For iPad Posted: 25 Feb 2010 06:40 AM PST
Allrecipes launched a free iPhone app last year which has seen 2.8 million downloads. Based on the popularity of this app and requests by users to be able to save recipes, Allrecipes decided to launch a paid version with additional features. Cooks on the go can locate recipes, save recipes to personal Recipe Boxes, rate recipes, share recipes and upload mobile images to Allrecipes. The app also includes a shopping list feature which aggregates ingredients across recipes and allows users to virtually check off items while shopping. Interestingly, the iPad may breathe new life into cooking and recipe apps. While reading recipes on the iPhone and other mobile devices while cooking can be tough; the iPad’s large screen almost simulates a digital cook book. And we all know that the iPad will be used as an e-book, allowing users to download and access cookbooks directly from their device. AllRecipes’ president, Lisa Sharples, agrees that the iPad will be a “killer” device in the kitchen. Accroding to survey’s conducted by AllRecipes, one out of five people bring their laptops into the kitchen to access recipes. But the kitchen is a dangerous place for a laptops, with significant threats of spills onto keyboards. But the iPad could come with protective screens and stands, making it safe to use in the chaos of the kitchen.      
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| Placecast Debuts Location-Based Mobile Marketing Technology ShopAlerts Posted: 25 Feb 2010 05:58 AM PST
Here’s how ShopAlerts works. Consumers can opt-in to receiving text messages in a variety of ways—at the store, online, via text-message, mobile websites or on Facebook. Once the technology has been activated, consumers will be alerted when they are near a location that they are interested in or when the brand is offering sales and specials. ShopAlerts’ technology uses “geo-fences,” which are virtual boundaries that can be targeted via location-based marketing. Retailers can customize alerts to fit their brand and strategy. On the consumer side, ShopAlerts will only send maximum number of 3 messages within a given week from a retailer. And users can opt out of the program by texting “stop” back to a text message. One of the benefits of ShopAlerts is that it works on both smartphones and non-smartphones, making it a compelling source of marketing and advertising for the 196 million Americans who do not own smartphones but may be interested in shopping alerts. Since September 2009, the ShopAlerts service has run pilot programs across the U.S. with several major retailers including North Face, American Eagle Outfitters, and REI. Based on a survey of consumer participants in the program, 60% of participants found the location-triggered messages to be innovative, 79% said it increased their likelihood to visit a store, 65% made a purchase as a result of a ShopAlerts message and 73% of participants would definitely or probably use the service in the future. Of course the biggest barrier to ShopAlerts gaining serious traction is if consumers choose not to opt-in to receive alerts via SMS. Launched in 2005, Placecast has raised $5 million in funding. The startup also offers a location-based advertising platform that weaves together location information and other data from audiences across the web, mobile, and email. Placecast will analyze inventory, segments audiences and targets ads for maximum relevance for advertisers and publishers.      
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| Palm Says Revenue Will Be Lower Than Expected, Cites Slow Sales Posted: 25 Feb 2010 05:51 AM PST
In a statement, Palm says disappointing sales are due to “slower than expected consumer adoption” of its products, resulting in lower than expected order volumes from carriers and the deferral of orders to future periods. The company intends to provide more detail on its financial results during its third-quarter financial results conference call scheduled for March 18. Since peaking in September 2009, at $17.75, Palm's stock has fallen to less than half that, closing at $8.09 on Wednesday. Expect it to drop more today. Palm chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein is quoted as follows:
Good luck with that. How long until a bigger rival snaps up the company? (Image via HandCellPhone)      
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| World of Good Sells Brand And Assets To eBay, Wholesale Division To GreaterGood Posted: 25 Feb 2010 05:40 AM PST
This morning, World of Good announced that it is selling its wholesale division to GreaterGood/Charity USA, while eBay has moved to fully acquire its main brand and related assets. The terms of neither transaction were disclosed. eBay’s acquisition of the World of Good brand results from a two-year long collaboration between the two companies. The online marketplace is said to host hundreds of sellers, with tens of thousands of products from 85 countries at present day. GreaterGood/Charity USA has basically purchased World of Good’s entire wholesale division, including its Global Girlfriend apparel line, and will re-brand the company’s line of designer, Fair Trade products. Both companies say they are committed to maintaining existing relationships with retailers like Whole Foods, Hallmark and Disney, as well as those that have been established with its artisan partners. World of Good was founded in 2004 by Priya Haji and Siddharth Sanghvi, with the mission to help small artisan producers improve their lives by providing them with access to mainstream retail markets. According to the press release, the company has impacted more than 40,000 individual artisans across 70 countries by connecting them with millions of U.S. consumers.      
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| 91% Of iPhone Users Would Recommend Device Vs. 69% Of webOS Users: AdMob Posted: 25 Feb 2010 05:19 AM PST
Among the most interesting things the survey found is the conclusion that 91 percent of iPhone users would recommend their device, compared to 84 percent of Android users and only 69 percent of webOS users. That 22% difference has got to hurt for Palm.
Other than that, not much noteworthy in this month’s survey results, which states that consumers who use iPhone and Android devices showed “remarkably similar” activity levels, downloading approximately the same total number of applications and spending approximately the same amount of time using them. What I would deem logical and not remarkable at all. AdMob further says iPhone users continue to download more paid applications, with 50 percent of users purchasing at least one paid application a month compared to 21 percent of Android users. The survey also included consumers on webOS devices and found that they downloaded fewer paid and free applications, although they remain active. AdMob says it stores and analyzes handset and operator data from every ad request in a network of more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and iPhone, Android, and webOS applications. The AdMob share is calculated by the percentage of requests received from a particular handset; it is a measure of relative mobile Web and application usage and does not represent handset sales. Additionally, AdMob claims that the number of ad requests to their network went up 32 percent between December and January, to a total of 15.2 billion ads. (Image via TiPb)      
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| LBi And Bigmouthmedia In $150 Million Merger Deal Posted: 25 Feb 2010 04:58 AM PST  LBi International, the global marketing and technology agency, is to merge with SEO and Internet marketing specialist bigmouthmedia, creating "Europe's largest digital agency". The deal is deal worth around £100m (roughly $150 million), reports Econsultancy, with the two companies combining "to offer clients digital marketing, consulting and technology services wherever they operate, all under one roof."
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| Video: The Early Days Of Pyra Labs / Blogger (Featuring @Ev Williams) Posted: 25 Feb 2010 04:04 AM PST We got a tip about a video from the same people who made us – and subsequently, you – aware of Biz Stone’s 2006 video-recorded attempt to explain ‘Twttr’ when the service that became Twitter was still in diapers. This time, it’s Twitter’s other co-founder, Evan Williams, who appears in a video with developer Paul Bausch, Meg Hourihan, Alberto González and some birds, recorded way back when. More specifically, the recording dates back to 1999, the same year Williams co-founded Pyra Labs – the company behind Blogger, acquired by Google in 2003 – together with Hourihan. If you’re low on time, skip to the 3:17 mark, when we catch a glimpse of the Pyra Labs office in its early days, and witness the glorious arrival of a brand new server for the Blogger service. (Thanks, Grigoris!)
     
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| Google Search Accounts For 9% Of All Pageviews On The Mobile Web: Opera Posted: 25 Feb 2010 02:45 AM PST
In their January 2010 State of the Mobile Web report, Opera Software looked at social networking on the mobile Web and concluded that Facebook dominated that aspect by a margin throughout 2009, while Twitter was the fastest-growing. This month, the company looked at Mobile Web search in the United States, and claims Google is – perhaps unsurprisingly – leading the pack. According to Opera's report, Google Search accounts for more than 9% of all page views on the mobile Web in the United States, outpacing rivals Yahoo! and Bing, who respectively command 4.3% and 0.03% of all page views. Opera, as usual, also provided some numbers about the growth of its own mobile browser Opera Mini, and general page view stats. The company says that in January 2010, 50 million people used Opera Mini, a 7.4% increase from December 2009 and up 149% compared to January 2009. Collectively, Opera Mini users viewed more than 23.3 billion pages last month, up 12.7% since December 2009 and an increase of 208% since the same period last year. Opera’s servers processed more than 3 petabytes of data, Opera Software co-founder Jon von Tetzchner writes. That’s a gigantic amount of data, and he puts that in perspective as follows:
Do you use Opera Mini on your phone? What do you use for searching the Web from your mobile?      
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| Does Citibank Suffer From Homophobia Or Just A General Dislike For Startups? Posted: 25 Feb 2010 02:00 AM PST
Fabulis is described on the blog as “the social network that helps gay men connect with amazing experiences nearby and around the world”. Could that be what Citibank is objecting against rather than the content on the blog, which is perfectly innocent any way you look at it indeed? Now, in case you don’t know Goldberg: he’s an accomplished Internet entrepreneur, who had stints at the White House, AOL and T-Mobile under his belt before founding Jobster (and raising more than $50 million for the startup) and after that socialmedian (which he sold to Xing in December 2008). For his latest startup fabulis, Goldberg has raised $625k in seed funding from the likes of Washington Post and Venture Partner at Mayfield Fund Allen Morgan, and essentially aims to become the leading social network and lifestyle website for homosexual men. Which is challenging if your financial institution freezes your bank account and marks it for immediate termination after reading a couple of your – again, perfectly harmless – company blog posts. This is Goldberg’s take on the blocking of the account:
WTF indeed. Whatever update comes, this is a PR nightmare for Citibank, and I’ll be curious to see what the company has to say about this atrocity. In a comment on Hacker News, Goldberg says he doesn’t think Citibank is being homophobic, and calls out moronic behavior instead:
Very uncomfortable for sure, but mostly for Citibank, who for the record, apparently does not want to be reached by e-mail even by press. So even if there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation to this – that the bank’s allowed to share publicly – I can only hope to reach someone by phone when it’s morning in the U.S. who can look into it and tell us what’s up.      
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| Vogue’s New iPhone App Will Style Your Wardrobe And Please Advertisers Posted: 24 Feb 2010 11:48 PM PST
The free app, called the Vogue Stylist, is meant to be used by women to do exactly what its name indicates: help style women’s wardrobes. Users can choose one of the trends highlighted by Vogue within the app and upload clothing they already own. Vogue Stylist will then produce stylish outfits from the pieces that reflect the current trend. The catch: Vogue will style outfits only with products from their advertisers. March trends include The Trench, Floaty Dress, Tribal, Natural Shades, and Bright Lip. User can also their looks via a click to buy feature,and can locate the item in a nearby store. The app has a social element to allow users to save styled looks and publish to Facebook. The App will launch with 91 brands and over 600 articles of clothing and beauty products. Pilot brands include Gucci, Hudson Jeans, Kate Spade, Longchamp Paris, Nine West, Valentino, and Via Spiga. Within the app, Vogue will also offer special event invitations, and shopping discounts. Conde Nast also has fashion-focused iPhone apps for Style.com, Lucky Magazine and Teen Vogue.      
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| Do You Follow Too Many People On Twitter? Use ManageTwitter. Posted: 24 Feb 2010 11:44 PM PST
While Seesmic Web is great for a number of things (it’s arguably the best Twitter web client out there), ManageTwitter is great at one thing: managing your Twitter followers. To use it, you simply link up your Twitter account (via OAuth) and it lets you know which of the Twitter users you follow aren’t following you back, who is inactive, who is talkative, and who is quiet. Each of these are great gauges for whether you should still be following them or not. Personally, I was able to eliminate over 200 people I was following that I determined I shouldn’t be. Most of these were users I followed a couple years ago that either were simply not using the service any more, or were no longer that interesting to me. Unfollowing users is as simple as selecting their name and clicking the “unfollow” button. You can also do this in bulk. And hovering over any users gives you more information about them including their average tweets per day. You can also sort the various ManageTwitter fields by ‘date followed,’ ‘username,’ ‘followers,’ or ‘timezone.’ While there are no shortage of services that recommend people you should follow, I’ve long needed one to suggest who I maybe shouldn’t be following. Of those, ManageTwitter is easily the best. Created by the Australian company Melon Media, the site notes that it has unfollowed 17092 people for 381 users in the past 3 days.
     
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| Posted: 24 Feb 2010 10:14 PM PST
I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple question: "Why isn't all enterprise software like Amazon.com?" Why couldn't applications be run from a simple website, without software or hardware to install, and pricy consultants to hire? Why couldn't we just compute in the Internet, or the cloud, and get away from the data center and all its complexity. Simply put, I wanted to simplify the enterprise. It was a pretty straight-forward idea, but from the confines in which I sat, there wasn't anything close to a straight-forward solution. That vision led to the founding of salesforce.com. But the enterprise world wasn't ready for Amazon.com, or eBay, or Yahoo, or any of the innovative services that were changing the way consumers bought, sold, or communicated. I tell this story in my book Behind the Cloud and can't help but note that the factors at play 10 years ago—an inspiring service, wide skepticism, and phenomenal potential—mirror where we are today. But it's no longer Amazon that frames the questions or gives us the answers. In this decade, I've become obsessed with a new simple question: "Why isn't all enterprise software like Facebook?" As we were focused on bringing enterprise computing into the modern age, Facebook redefined the values of consumer computing and helped ignite the social phenomenon. The compelling aspect of feeds, profiles, and groups, amplify the service's stickiness. So does its functionality on a mobile device like an iphone—necessary to secure a service's status as a "killer app." Facebook is where I start my day to find out what my friends and family are doing. It's where I go to see the important events in my social life. Everything I care about and need to know is pushed to me—and it requires no work on my part. What does the social revolution mean for business, though? So far it hasn't meant much. Currently, our methods of collaboration are defined by Lotus Notes or Microsoft SharePoint, but these tools haven't kept up with the changing times. They were conceived before anyone knew what a "newsfeed" was. (In fact, Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg was!) Today, realtime information is possible, which has changed everything: How people consume information has changed, how people learn things about each other has changed, and how people stay current has changed. Most of all, our expectations around immediacy have changed. Now, we need to take this idea to our businesses. We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet the software we use to run our enterprises is in anything but real time. We need tools that work smarter, make better use of new technology (like the mobile devices in everyone's hands), and fully leverage the opportunities of the Internet. New realtime cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure offer the path to redefine the future of collaboration. Now in beta, Salesforce Chatter takes the best of Facebook, Twitter, and other social leaders, for instance, and applies it to enterprise collaboration—making people more productive and businesses more competitive. I already see it working: I have an enterprise desktop where without any effort I can learn about what my team is focusing on, how my projects are progressing, and what deals are closing. It is fundamentally changing the way our organization collaborates on product development, customer acquisition, and content creation—making it all easier than ever before. We are on the precipice of a major shift in our industry. It stems from a change we badly needed and the once-in-a-decade question we had to ask. And this time, we are all ready for the answers. Luckily, this time, I don't have to leave my job to find out what they are.      
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| Infectious Rolls Out Skins For Current BlackBerry Models Posted: 24 Feb 2010 10:05 PM PST
We’re big fans of Infectious, a startup that makes high quality decals and skins that let you customize the look of your iPhone, car, laptop, skateboards, and more. Today, the startup has launched Infectious skins for all current Blackberry models. Infectious now has designs for the Bold, Bold 9700, Storm2, Curve 8520, Curve 8530, Curve 8900 and Tour. Infectious launched nearly two years ago with large, vinyl decorative stickers for your car, and they released decorative iPhone covers just in time for the 2008 holiday season. The company has since expanded to include laptop skins, custom skateboard decks, and wall prints. Users can also craft their own designs or branded skins to make the service appealing to a much broader customer base. It’s kind of like a Threadless for skins. Other players in this space include Gelaskins and SkinIt.      
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| OMGPOP Remakes Atari’s Missile Command For The Multiplayer Web (Exclusive Video) Posted: 24 Feb 2010 08:42 PM PST
Flash games on the Web are getting to be so quick and responsive . . . that they can recreate 30-year-old arcade games no problem. And that’s just fine with me because those are about the only video games where I can hold my own. Online video arcade OMGPOP’s latest game is a remake of Atari’s Missile Command on its 30th anniversary. The OMGPOP version is true to the original except it adds a multiplayer twist. It’s pretty addictive and the social aspect makes it more fun. Just like at the old coin arcades, it was always better when you went with a couple of friends. Like most OMGPOP games you can enter a live match with other players or invite your friends to meet you in a game room. You can sign in with Facebook Connect or AIM. OMGPOP matches you with players at about the same level as you. You can get more missiles, enlarge their impact radius, or increase your reload rate buy using your health points to buy better capabilities. If things are going really badly you can buy a nuke for 500 “coins.” You earn coins the more you play, but you can also pay for them straight out through PayPal or a credit card. Selling virtual goods is OMGPOP’s main source of revenues. The site has about a dozen games. CEO Dan Porter (who used to be the president of Teach For America, TicketWeb before it sold to TicketMaster, and worked as a corporate VC for Virgin) says that about 2 to 5 percent of players end up actually paying for something. About 30 percent of its virtual goods revenues come from third-party offers from TrialPay, but they try to keep the scammier offers out. Porter says the site has 2.5 million members, and about 1 million monthly unique visitors. Most of those are high school and college students. The site is still small but has a loyal following. About 40 pecent of users visit the site more than 50 times a month. I recently visited OMGPOP’s New York City offices, where Porter, founder Charles Forman, and game developer Will Chen gave me a preview of Missile Command in the video below. I also get Forman to weigh in on the HTML5 Vs. Flash debate. He says there is no way he could create the games on OMGPOP without Flash.
     
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| Posted: 24 Feb 2010 08:23 PM PST
Loopt won’t comment on this story, and a Facebook spokesperson says “As a practical matter, we don’t comment on rumor and speculation.” There is no indication that Facebook has made an actual offer to buy Loopt at this time, and in fact we don’t even have direct information that negotiations are taking place. But it’s clear that Facebook is at least considering acquiring Loopt, and/or others in this space. It’s also not clear that Facebook is the only company taking a look at Loopt. Google is also highly interested in the mobile social and location space. Their recent launch of Buzz, which allows check-ins of locations via a mobile device, is just one indication of that. But Facebook is clearly furthest behind. They have one of the most popular mobile applications but have to date ignored location features and the increasingly popular checking-in at locations via mobile devices. Part of their hesitation is likely due to privacy concerns around disclosing location information, even at the user’s request. But they’ve also clearly just sat on the sidelines as well as the space developed, and recently surged in activity. It’s time for Facebook to make their move. Jupiter Research recently stated that location based services could generate nearly $13 billion in revenue by 2014. Facebook wants their share of that. Loopt competitors like Foursquare and Gowalla have the biggest press footprint with mobile location applications, getting lots of attention from the early adopters in Silicon Valley. But Loopt has the most users by far. And they also have longstanding carrier relationships that bring in real revenue. Loopt was one of the hot location-based networks early on, with founder Sam Altman even getting stage time during the initial App Store unveiling event. But Loopt, like Google’s Latitude, was intially built around the “always-on” idea of location. This is something that hurt it because the iPhone did not allow third-party applications to run in the background. Meanwhile, “check-in” based services like Foursquare and Gowalla grew in popularity. Loopt has since repositioned itself as more of a check-in based service, but despite its large user base, it’s not clear if its users will adapt to this change. In January, we published a deck Loopt was sending out to potential advertisers pitching them about a new app completely built around the idea of check-in specials. Notably, this app was to be entirely built on top of Facebook’s social graph, utilizing Facebook Connect. This app is an offshoot of GeoGraffiti, a Y Combinator startup that Loopt itself acquired last year.      
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| Yammer May Be About To Open The Floodgates To Its Microblogging Platform Posted: 24 Feb 2010 07:17 PM PST
So what exactly is Yammer about to introduce? We’re hearing from one source that the company is planning to start allowing people to create networks that aren’t built around web domains. That may not sound like a big deal, but it would be a major change for Yammer, and one that could open it up to a huge number of new users. Until now, in order to create a Yammer network you’ve needed to have email addresses associated with your own business domain name (say, jason@company.com) . This works great for sizable companies (everyone who has an email account on that domain is automatically placed into the correct network), but it’s a big limitation on who can actually use the service — plenty of businesses and organizations don’t have their own domain names. Depending on how Yammer rolls this out, there could be countless uses for this. Last summer, I wrote about how useful it would be to have a Yammer for families that would allow family members to easily share information in a centralized place (and get SMS alerts if something important came up). Local groups could set up Yammer accounts to share information instead of relying on long Email chains, and so on. But Yammer wouldn’t be alone here — a recently launched startup called HipChat is already going after this broad market. We’ll have more details tomorrow at 11 AM. And if you’re interested, the WebEx meeting is apparently open to the public.
     
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| Foursquare’s First Television Commercial Airs Tonight On Bravo [Video] Posted: 24 Feb 2010 07:01 PM PST
In a tweet sent from their main Twitter account, the Foursquare team notes a “rumor” that an ad for their service will be running on Bravo tonight alongside the show Sheer Genius from 9 to 10 PM. But it’s not a rumor, we’ve seen the ad (and have embedded it below for your own viewing pleasure). It’s a 20-second spot made by Bravo for Foursquare to highlight their recently announced a partnership that allows the network to point out locations from its shows that let fans who use Foursquare (or their own Guides By Bravo app) go to them in the real world. This is believed to be one of the deals currently earning Foursquare some revenue. While the company is making some revenue, it’s not yet profitable, and the focus remains on building the product and gaining users. Currently, Foursquare is closing in on 500,000 users, but with a cable television commercial, those numbers could soar. The service is in the process of revamping its website and several of its mobile applications. A new version of the iPhone app, which launched one year ago at the SXSW conference will hopefully be ready in time for this year’s SXSW, we’re told.
     
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| Google Real-Time Search Now Includes A Fraction Of Facebook Status Updates Posted: 24 Feb 2010 05:38 PM PST
The only problem with the new addition is that Facebook is only granting Google access to updates from its 3 million Pages, which are generally for celebrities, politicians, brands, and local businesses — not your average Facebook user. That information could occasionally be useful, but the power of real-time search comes from having a large number of contributors. Facebook has a huge amount of data from its 400 million active users, but it isn’t sharing most of that with Google. Instead, it’s only granting full acess to user updates to Bing (though that isn’t live yet). Bing will still only be getting status updates that are shared with “Everyone“, but with its recent privacy overhaul in December, Facebook ensured that it would have far more of those than it used to. Unlike Twitter, which is reportedly making money off of its search deals with Bing and Google, Facebook isn’t charging the search engines for its data. According to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, Facebook is giving away the status updates because they may drive more people back to the social network. Here’s a sample of some of the updates you can get from Facebook Page updates:      
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| Twitter Connects With Two From LinkedIn Posted: 24 Feb 2010 05:23 PM PST
As he both tweets and blogs about, Haggerty will be joining Twitter’s fast-growing mobile team. At LinkedIn, Haggerty did a lot more than the iPhone app, he also built the apps for the Pre and the BlackBerry. He also helped build the Buzz application that let companies scan information about them on yes, Twitter. So what will a mobile UI guy be doing at Twitter? Well considering they just updated their previously awful mobile UI to something much nicer (on phones like the iPhone, at least), who knows. Maybe they’ll update it again. Or maybe they’ll even start dabbling in their own native mobile applications. But would they dare do that and risk alienating the many third party developers working on platforms like the iPhone? We’ll see. Twitter has been hiring other UI people recently as well. And they continue to pull new employees left and right from some of the most well-known companies in Silicon Valley. Update: We also hear that another LinkedIn employee is joining Twitter: Taylor Singletary, a LinkedIn evangelist and product manager will apparently be doing API evangelism at Twitter, we hear. While Singletary has confirmed that today was his last day at LinkedIn, he has yet to officially state where he’s going next — though he does tweet about birdies… [thanks Brad]      
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| hi5 Acquires Social Gaming Company Big Six Posted: 24 Feb 2010 02:58 PM PST
Big Six’s founders, Kevin Gliner, Monty Kerr and Chad Hansing, will join the hi5 management team. Hi5 says the deal will boost the social networks efforts in developing in commerce platforms and payment processing offerings. Right now, gaming is a central part of hi5’s strategy for growth so it makes sens for the social network to acquire innovative technologies and talent. The games section of hi5’s site accounts for around 1/3 of the site's traffic, and direct user payments through the game already account for 15% of hi5's revenue. Apart from the currency and payments technology, Big Six’s social gaming platform will also become part of hi5. With the massive success of Zynga and Playfish, it makes sense that hi5 would try to create a social network that centers around gaming itself. hi5 has over 60 million members, which is a far cry from Facebook’s 400 million users. In December, hi5 brought on a new president, gaming industry veteran, Alex St. John, to help lead the social network’s efforts. Earlier in the year, the company suffered from layoffs and also hired a new CEO, Bill Gossman.
     
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One of the most potentially disruptive startups of the last ten years is emerging into the light this week. And I honestly don’t say that lightly. 
Handset manufacturer 
I just finished reading a very unsettling blog post by serial entrepreneur 
A few days ago, I noted that 
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by 
Facebook has been doing background checks, known as due diligence, on the location-based social network 
Last week, 
First 
Google has just announced via 
Back in December, 
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