The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- AT&T To Finally Bring MMS Functionality To The iPhone Next Week?
- Microsoft Mulls Making Search Results Shareable With “Bing & Ping”
- As Twitter Continues To Grow, Popular Users Widen The Gap
- CrowdEye Introduces CrowdRank To Real-Time Search
- T-Mobile Has A Pulse: First Pay-As-You-Go Android Smartphone
- VCs Exit As Music Retailer Buys Half Of 7Digital For $12.6 Million
- Tweetvite: An Events Site Dedicated To Planning And Finding Tweetups
- Endless Summer: AT&T Has Three Weeks To Fulfill Its MMS Promise
- Perk Up: Facebook Launches Shuttle Service Between SF And Palo Alto
- Digg Starts Nofollow-ing Links That It Doesn’t Trust
- NetBase Thinks You Can Get Rid Of Jews With Alcohol And Salt
- Google Voice Alternative Line2 Is Now Live On The App Store
- Event Ticketing Startup Amiando Shows Impressive Early Growth
- Mint is Worth A Mint: $140 Million Valuation
- Producteev Now Lets You Crowdsource Your Tasks On Twitter
- Yelp Is Growing 80 Percent A Year, While Citysearch Remains Flat
- Android Now Plays Foursquare Too
- Oh, RSS Is Definitely Dead Now: Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo To Become Twitter COO
| AT&T To Finally Bring MMS Functionality To The iPhone Next Week? Posted: 03 Sep 2009 08:43 AM PDT  The iPhone 3G S launched a few months ago, but AT&T users haven't been able to take advantage of a few much vaunted (and much needed) features as yet: MMS, Bluetooth file-sharing, and tethering are the Big Three. This, of course, despite the fact that AT&T is the "flagship" carrier! But never mind all that, because today we have some good news in the way of this latest bit of gossip: starting with iPhone OS 3.1, AT&T users will, in fact, be able to use MMS and Bluetooth file-sharing. Welcome to 2006, iPhone owners!TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco           |
| Microsoft Mulls Making Search Results Shareable With “Bing & Ping” Posted: 03 Sep 2009 08:21 AM PDT Websites large and small are quickly learning that a sure way to make something go viral is to make it easy to share on Facebook and Twitter. Why should search results be any different? In fact, the ability to share a result via Twitter or social networks is quickly becoming a standard feature of many real-time search engines. Microsoft’s Bing might soon add its own way to share search results called “Bing and Ping.” The feature is about to enter limited beta testing and will show up under certain result types such as sports scores or flight information. There will be small links at the bottom allowing you to share that result via Twitter, Facebook, or email. Most of the time, searching is a solitary activity. But there are times when you come across something worth sharing, especially if it is presented as more than just a link. Bing tries to compile information for different search categories in their own self-contained boxes. These are certainlyshareable, especially when you are trying to prove a point, win an argument, or just rub your friends’ noses in it when their favorite team loses. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| As Twitter Continues To Grow, Popular Users Widen The Gap Posted: 03 Sep 2009 06:44 AM PDT
Note that this traffic only accounts for members who are content with using the Twitter website, and doesn’t take into account the multitude of users who log on to third-party web services or desktop clients to access their Twitter streams. Either way you look at it, Twitter’s ongoing growth is staggering. People information search specialist Rapleaf thought it’d be interesting to run some analysis on Twitter follower trends based on data it was monitoring closely for one of its clients, and the study gives us an interesting insight into how Twitter’s huge growth between March and June have affected following patterns of some of its most active users. We already learned most people on Twitter are sheep, but does that change over time? Rapleaf recently helped one of the world's largest consumer packaged goods companies identify the most influential and connected Twitter users within their customer list for a word-of-mouth marketing campaign. Part of the analysis that Rapleaf was commissioned to do involved researching how profiles of their client’s customers on Twitter changed between given periods of time, by closely analyzing the users’ following and follower count. The company ran some numbers on their clients’ top 0.1%, top 1% and top 10% most-followed Twitter users within the company’s customer list and compared how these figures changed in nine weeks, from the beginning of March until mid-June. Rapleaf will be releasing the numbers later today but was kind enough to give us a sneak peek. Clearly, the catchphrase ‘the rich get rich and the poor get poorer’ is at least half true when it comes to Twitter users’ following trends. While the service’s growth understandably lifts the follower numbers of the average Twitter user along the way, there’s also an apparent popularity gap that continues to widen. Based on the sample of 40,000 users that Raplead has analyzed - deemed active members because they have at least five followers, five friends or five updates - it seems that having lots of followers on Twitter means that you’re going to grow more popular more rapidly as the microblogging service continues to boom. The top 0.1% of observed Twitter users climbed 275% in Twitter followers between March and June, while the top 1% increased only 146% in comparison, and the top 10% gained only 126%. Even when analyzing the median followers, the stats paint a clear picture: the top 0.1%, 1% and 10% of researched Twitter users saw their follower base grow by 78%, 65% and 59% respectively. Could this be the Twitter Golden Ratio at work? Looking at the difference between the popularity of the top 0.1%, the top 1%, and the top 10% during the month of June, Rapleaf’s study shows users in the top 0.1% have approximately 5 times as many followers as users in the top 1% and about 40 times as many followers as users in the top 10%. It’s unclear how many of them are spam, of course. Also noteworthy: a user who barely makes the top 10% needs 11.4 times more followers to break into the top 1%, and nearly 55 times as many followers to enter the top 0.1%. Wanna see how your popularity on Twitter is evolving? Check out TwitterCounter to get an idea. Not happy with what you’re seeing? Try tweeting more often. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| CrowdEye Introduces CrowdRank To Real-Time Search Posted: 03 Sep 2009 05:54 AM PDT One of the richest areas of experimentation in search right now is how to rank real-time results. For the most part, that means finding relevance in Twitter and bringing up the most important Tweets for any given keyword (see OneRiot, Collecta,Scoopler). Today, real-time search engine CrowdEye is introducing its own real-time ranking algorithm called CrowdRank. It’s supposed to be like Google’s PageRank, but for the crowd. Right now,real-time search is Twitter search because that is the richest source of real-time data. And Twitter search is essentially a form of people search. Twitter’s own search engine simply brings back a reverse-chronological list of the most recent Tweets that match the keyword you enter. CrowdEye does that as well because often in real-time search you just want to see what is happening at this second. But now CrowdEye will let you sort by relevance as well, rearranging results by the most influential people on Twitter. (See screenshots below) What exactly goes into CrowdRank? CrowdEye founder Ken Moss, who previously was a search guru at Microsoft, won’t reveal all the factors. But the number of followers someone has seems to be the main one. He says: CrowdEye Rank has many inputs, and the list will be changing over time as we work to refine the algorithm. Obviously it includes things like how many followers you have and whether you are a “verified” twitter account. Less obviously are some factors we use to penalize spammers. Fortunately, he includes other measures of influence too, like how many times any particular message has been retweeted. Otherwise @aplusk is going to show up at the top of every search. But now that every person on Twitter has a CrowdRank, when CrowdEye returns results, it shows an actual CrowdRank number between 1 and 100 at the bottom right of each avatar for the top Tweets in results. There is also a directory of the top CrowdRanked Twitter users, but these seem to match up closely to the list of people with the most followers (which again brings us back to to @aplusk problem). For any given search, CrowdEye returns the top Tweets as well as the top links. Another change today is that if you sign into CrowdEye with your Twitter account, you can follow anybody who comes up in search results or retweet a message without leaving CrowdEye. CrowdEye will also now give you a personalized list of people to follow based partly on who you are already following. This list is much better. For me it suggested my former Fortune colleague David Kirkpatrick and New York Times reporter Brad Stone (I swear, I thought I was already following you guys—no wait, that’s on Facebook). It also suggests Stocktwits (I’m not really a trader), author Tim Ferris (yes), and MC Hammer (why not?). And most ambitious of all, CrowdEye will create a personalized homepage showing you links and Tweets tailored for you (see bottom screenshot). It shows you the most Tweeted articles from your favorite pre-selected blogs and news sites or ones which match saved queries. So instead of an empty search box, you are greeted with a bunch of recent content to explore as filtered by both your personal preferences and the collective wisdom (or idiocy) of Twitter. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| T-Mobile Has A Pulse: First Pay-As-You-Go Android Smartphone Posted: 03 Sep 2009 03:18 AM PDT  T-Mobile UK this morning announced the Pulse, the first pay-as-you-go Android 1.5 smartphone and the third coming from the network operator. Available for £180 starting October exclusively on T-Mobile, it boasts a 3.5" HVGA touchscreen display, the biggest yet on an Android handset, a 3.2-megapixel camera and a TeleNav-powered GPS (more specs below). The new device comes courtesy of Huawei, which had been rumored to be working with T-Mobile since displaying a device at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year. More details about the device: The phone runs on a Qualcomm's MSM7200A chipset and weighs 130g. It features a trackball and a 3.5" HVGA touchscreen display with auto-rotation. The T-Mobile Pulse also features a 3.2 mega pixel, auto-focus camera (no flash) that allows photos to be uploaded straight to the Internet, a 2GB internal memory and a micro SD card slot for storing media. The handset also offers access to corporate e-mail through the Road sync client, and boasts enhanced social networking and community features.TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| VCs Exit As Music Retailer Buys Half Of 7Digital For $12.6 Million Posted: 03 Sep 2009 03:15 AM PDT
The purchase creates a neat exit for 7Digital’s VC backers Balderton Capital and Sutton Place Managers. CEO Ben Drury told me that the VCs got a “positive return on investment” - though terms have not been disclosed. In January last year it took £4.25 million in a round led by Sutton Place Managers that included original investor Balderton Capital. HMV Group will now use the five year-old 7Digital as its sole supplier for "all of its existing digital operations" in the UK and Canada. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Tweetvite: An Events Site Dedicated To Planning And Finding Tweetups Posted: 02 Sep 2009 09:13 PM PDT
For those that haven’t encountered the term before, a Tweetup is a real-life get together between people who use Twitter. Beyond that, the rules are flexible: Tweetups can be large events or small gatherings, can involve grabbing a few drinks or just socializing for a bit, and can be planned for in advance or spontaneous. Founder Jeff Morin says that while there are plenty of sites that cater to traditional events, like birthday and BBQs, the Tweetup niche is underserved. Setting up an event with Tweetvite will be familiar to anyone who has used an event site like Anyvite or Evite. To get started, you enter the name of your event, the location, who is hosting it, and other essential information. But the site includes a few attributes that you won’t find anywhere else: it asks you to designate a hashtag for the event, as well as a custom shortened URL. The site also makes it easy to Tweet out your event, or share it with other services like Facebook and MySpace. Another big difference from traditional events sites is the fact that Tweetvite offers a directory of upcoming Tweetups (given the nature in which they’re announced, they’re generally open to the public). Once you’ve created your event, you can use the site’s control panel to monitor for any tweets containing your hashtag and see how many people have viewed your page and RSVP’d. The site also offers a widget that you can embed on your blog to inform visitors of your upcoming tweetup.  Tweetvite looks great, with a very polished interface and a streamlined event creation process that only takes a minute or two. At this point the biggest question in my mind is how many people actually throw Tweetups — they may be becoming increasingly popular but are nowhere near as common as traditional events are, so it may be tough to build a business around this niche. That said, Twitter is obviously still in its infancy, so the number of Tweetups may grow rapidly over the next few years.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Endless Summer: AT&T Has Three Weeks To Fulfill Its MMS Promise Posted: 02 Sep 2009 09:06 PM PDT
I shouldn’t have to remind everyone how utterly ridiculous it is that about three months now after much of the rest of the world got it, the U.S. still has no MMS capabilities for the iPhone. Reasons seem to vary for why exactly it is taking AT&T so long, but my favorite is the one where they have to manually remove MMS opt-out codes from each iPhone contract. Genius planning right there, if that’s true. And still, why exactly does that take three months? The lawsuits are already starting to come out of the woodwork over the lack of MMS (and tethering) on AT&T. And if AT&T is not able to hit that September 22 date, expect a hell of a lot more. And, of course, more calls for Apple to break up with AT&T. The company bought itself a little bit of time by actually, for once, not having anything to do with a nightmare situation (the Google Voice fiasco). But at the end of the day, AT&T still badly needs to improve its execution. While the service has been doing some upgrades to its services in particularly bad cities (San Francisco and New York), I think it’s all too easy to forget that we really shouldn’t be lauding them for that — it’s their job to provide us with service, and we’re paying them very well for that. They can complain all they want about being overwhelmed, but we all have contracts that state we pay them and they provide us with service. As I see it, only one side is living up to those contracts: Us. While Netflix is dishing out unprompted refunds for little hiccups in their service, many of us have probably accumulated days of basically no service with AT&T. How many of those refund emails have you gotten from AT&T? Because I’ve seen none. Apple is holding an event in one week to show off its new iPods. The event is said to be music-centric, but if we don’t hear a peep from Apple about MMS, I’m going to be pretty worried about the whole “end of Summer” promise. Actually, I’m already worried, it’s freaking September. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Perk Up: Facebook Launches Shuttle Service Between SF And Palo Alto Posted: 02 Sep 2009 08:08 PM PDT
The news comes only a week after Facebook announced plans to drastically increase the size of its workforce by as much as 50% by the end of the year, during a time when most of Silicon Valley is not hiring and is cutting back on perks. Clearly, the social network is doing everything it can to make the decision to join as easy as possible. Facebook has spelled out all of its other perks on its homepage, which include a robust benefits package, free food (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), free Caltrain passes, and laundry services. The company also used to offer housing vouchers to employees that lived in Palo Alto, but discontinued that program some time ago. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Digg Starts Nofollow-ing Links That It Doesn’t Trust Posted: 02 Sep 2009 04:50 PM PDT
Sure, all spammer who submit something to Digg hope that it hits the frontpage and brings a rush of traffic. But more important to them are the links associated with Digg. If a story is popular on Digg, it will also likely garner quite a few links back to it. But even if it doesn’t become popular, the link coming from Digg itself gives some weight to the spammy URL in a search engine crawler’s eyes. Digg using nofollow has been a subject of debate since at least 2007, when the service was exploding with popularity. Around that time, Wikipedia decided to use nofollow for all of its outbound links. But what’s interesting here is that Digg isn’t adding nofollow to all of its links, and instead is only doing it for the untrusted ones. “This work was done in consultation with leading experts from the SEO/SEM and link spam fields, in an effort to lookout for the interests of content providers and the Digg community,” Digg’s John Quinn writes today. This would seem to suggest that company realizes it’s still in the interest of most content providers to get the link juice that comes from Digg. It would also seem to suggest that it doesn’t want firestorm of controversy similar to the one it created with the DiggBar. This move comes at an interesting time for Digg, as sites like Bit.ly look to be setting up to battle for who has the most interesting link data on the Internet. Twitter itself has been testing out the tracking of links from its site, though it claims to be just doing so for internal product purposes. How Digg judges which sites they trust, they don’t say. But one would have to assume that these sites are different from the ones that are straight-up blocked from the service for being spammy. Untrusted links in comments, profiles and story pages will also get the nofollow tag as well. [photo: flickr/brianware3000] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| NetBase Thinks You Can Get Rid Of Jews With Alcohol And Salt Posted: 02 Sep 2009 04:08 PM PDT  This morning I wrote about NetBase Solutions’ healthBase, a semantic search engine that aggregates medical content from millions of authoritative health sites including WebMD, Wikipedia, and PubMed. But is it a semantic engine or an anti-semitic search engine? Several of our readers tested out the site and found that healthBase’s semantic search engine has some major glitches (see the comments). One of the most unfortunate examples is when you type in a search for “AIDS,” one of the listed causes of the disease is “Jew.” Really. The ridiculousness continues. When you click on Jew, you can see proper “Treatments” for Jews, “Drugs And Medications” for Jews and “Complications” for Jews. Apparently, “alcohol” and “coarse salt” are treatments to get rid of Jews, as is Dr. Pepper! Who knew? I’ve included the screenshots of the results below if you don’t believe me. Now, I don’t think that healthBase is being intentionally anti-semitic, but for a technology which is supposed to understand the nuances of human language, this is about a big a fail as you can get. It is plainly obvious that its technology needs to be fixed before it is parsed out to other companies and media corporations. I emailed NetBase to figure out exactly how this could appear and this is the response I received:
Personally, I think such basic distinctions should have been ironed out before launching the site. This is just the most flagrant example of site giving non-health answers to health-related questions. If you look at the pros of AIDS (yes, it thinks here are pros to having AIDS), it comically lists the “Spanish Civil War.” One of the causes of hemorrhoids is “Bronco” (I don’t even want to know). HealthBase is touted to be a showcase for NetBase’s semantic technology, which can supposedly understand language. Clearly, it doesn’t understand language well enough. And if the technology is going to be peddled to other companies to be used to power additional search engines, it needs to be improved immediately.  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Google Voice Alternative Line2 Is Now Live On The App Store Posted: 02 Sep 2009 03:22 PM PDT
The story so far: late last July, Apple abruptly pulled all third party Google Voice applications from the App Store, explaining that they somehow were duplicating the iPhone’s native functionality. Later that day, we broke the news that Google’s official Google Voice client had been barred from the App Store, sparking a media storm and a FCC inquiry into Apple’s rationale for the ban. Line2, an iPhone client that lets you easily tap into the Toktumi service, got caught in the crossfire. From a technical standpoint the application is quite similar to Google Voice: both services allow you to hand out a ‘virtual number’ to contacts. When they call, the service can either relay the call to your ‘real’ number (the AT&T number assigned to your iPhone), or it can send it to voicemail, depending on the way you’ve set up your call filters. You can also use both services to make cheap long distance calls. In fact, the Line2 app was built by developer Sean Kovacs — the same developer who built GV Mobile, one of the handful of third party Google Voice apps that Apple pulled. But there are some key differences. For one, Toktumi doesn’t include support for SMS at all; Google Voice does. And Toktumi costs $14.95 a month, while Google Voice is free. Toktumi is also marketing its service to a very different audience: while Google Voice is trying to let you use a single phone number for everything, Toktumi wants to give small business employees who lack a dedicated work line the flexibility to use two phone numbers from the same mobile phone, and includes some features that Google Voice doesn’t. Here’s how we previously described it:
Even with those differences, Toktumi CEO Peter Sisson says that many consumers do actually use the service as an alternative to Google Voice — if you just hand out your Toktumi number to everyone, you can use the service’s filtering options to manage your calls much as you would with Google’s service (he does note that Toktumi’s filtering is less flexible than Google’s, but it should be sufficient for most people). Soon after the Google Voice story broke, Sisson grew concerned that his application’s similarities might keep it from being accepted to the App Store, so he attempted to reach out to Apple executive Phil Schiller. Schiller got back to him, saying that he would have an answer soon. Then the FCC launched its inquiry, and Apple went silent. Sisson says he’s been pestering Apple over the last month, and it looks like his persistence worked. It’s great news to hear that Line2 has been accepted, and it may indicate that Apple is coming closer to accepting Google Voice — given Apple’s approval of Vonage this morning, it the App Store may even have some new policies in place regarding this kind of app (though details on the Vonage app are still sparse). Also worth noting: Line2 clearly “replaces” the phone’s Voicemail and keyboard in the same way Apple complained about in its FCC response about Google Voice (this claim has always been laughable). If Apple still won’t approve Google Voice after this, it will be clear, as if it wasn’t already, that it’s not worried about the user experience — it’s worried about Google. If you’d like to try Toktumi out for yourself, visit Line2.com, and the first 200 US-based users to sign up using the promo code 743623718 will be able to access 3 months of unlimited US/Canada calling and cheap international calls, as well as Toktumi’s other features like a professional-grade voicemail system. You can download the iPhone app here. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Event Ticketing Startup Amiando Shows Impressive Early Growth Posted: 02 Sep 2009 02:46 PM PDT Event ticketing and management site amiando is reporting some impressive growth in revenues. In a company update the private German startup is circulating, it is reporting 200 percent annual revenue growth in the second quarter, and 65 percent growth over the first quarter of 2009. The report doesn’t give absolute numbers, but I’ve learned that it is in the range of a few million Euros a year, split evenly between its two main businesses, amiandoTICKETS (ticket sales) and amiandoEVENTS (event registration and management). The company says it is on track to become profitable by early next year. On the ticketing side, amiando is selling about 30 million Euros worth of tickets a year, of which it gets a cut of 7.5 percent or less. It offers tickets in 15 currencies and has been used for more than 70,000 events since it launched three years ago. About 45 percent of its revenues still come from its home country of Germany, but more than half come from outside. And since it opened up its ticketing API last December, about a dozen social networks now offer amiando as a ticketing app. Facebook Connect alone accounts for 5 percent of its event traffic and 2 percent of revenues. And Twitter recommendations are growing fast. Although email recommendations drives more referrals than anything else. While Amiando is coming up the ranks, it still trails Eventbrite in traffic. Other competitors include Eventbee and TicketLeap. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Mint is Worth A Mint: $140 Million Valuation Posted: 02 Sep 2009 02:23 PM PDT
That’s not bad for a company that launched just two years ago - Mint won the top prize at TechCrunch50 2007. In a “normal” round of financing a company would dilute by 25-35%, meaning the expected valuation on a $14 million round would be, roughly, $45 million - $60 million. The $140 million valuation shows two things - Mint is on a roll, and they don’t seem to need much capital. Mint has grown to 1.4 million registered users, tracking $175 billion in transactions and $47 billion in assets. The site also reports that it has identified $300 million in potential savings offers for its users. It primarily makes its money by generating leads for financial institutions, but it's also sitting on a goldmine of user data that it hasn't even begun to tap into yet. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Producteev Now Lets You Crowdsource Your Tasks On Twitter Posted: 02 Sep 2009 12:00 PM PDT There are plenty of Web-based task management tools that let you track the progress of your work projects and collaborate with co-workers. Producteev founder Ilan Abehassera wants to go one better and help you “complete your task” by making it easy to ask your contacts and followers on Twitter for assistance. Producteev shows you a dashboard of different tasks you’ve set up, each in its own widget box which you can drag around and rearrange. For its commercial launch today, Producteev is introducing some new features. One is the ability to syndicate any task to Twitter or Facebook. So if you need a Web designer or sales person for a project, for example, you can create a task on Producteev and share that not only with your co-workers, but also publish it on Twitter. A link brings your Twitter followers back to a public page on Producteev for that specific task/message, where they can reply. All outside replies are brought into the Producteev activity stream for everyone in your work group to see. This is good, but it doesn’t go far enough, as you can’t reply via Producteev and have that reply appear on Twitter. Another new feature makes Producteev like a Friendfeed of productivity apps. It lets you bring in other streams of data from outside Producteev, including Slideshare, Scribd, Zoho, Twitter, and soon Google Docs, Google Reader, and Yammer (yes, it competes with Yammer on the communication stream, but Producteev is more about task management). So you can automatically see when someone on your team adds a new presentation to Slideshare, edits a doc, or shares an article. There is also now a timeline/calendar view, which comes in handy since every task can be assigned a due date. (The other views are a dashboard grid that is similar to Netvibes or iGoogle, and a straight, chronological activity stream). Workers can now generate reports based on their tasks in progress and completed, which they can show to employers to prove they’ve been working (oDesk anyone?). Soon Producteev will add graphs as well for productivity tracking at a glance. Other upcoming features on the product roadmap include integration with Meebo Community IM for chat functionality, the ability to export deadlines and reminders to iCal, Google Calendar, and Outllook, an OpenSocial application on Xing, and a JoliCloud app. Producteev is gradually becoming a fully-featured online productivity and collaboration tool. I would compare it to WizeHive, another great online task management tool with a slightly different set of features. Producteev is seed funded, and recently raised $180,000 in angel money from a group including Fotolia president Oleg Tscheltzoff. The service is free for up to 3 users, and then starts at $19/ month up to 10 users. The top Gold membership is $99/month for 100 users. Different pricing applies to university students, another target market. We’re giving away 10 Gold subscriptions for one year to whoever adds the best comments below about their greatest productivity challenge or suggestions for new features. Abehassera will pick the best 10 and respond in comments. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Yelp Is Growing 80 Percent A Year, While Citysearch Remains Flat Posted: 02 Sep 2009 11:51 AM PDT Say what you will about the quality of the reviews on Yelp or the lengths it will go to get verboten features into its iPhone app, it has made the jump from Web 2.0 darling to a mainstream service. Over the past year, Yelp has nearly doubled its U.S. audience, while incumbent CitySearch has remained flat. In July, Yelp had 8.6 million unique U.S. visitors, up 80 percent from a year ago. Citysearch, on the other hand, literally had zero growth, staying at 15.4 million uniques, although it bottomed at 13 million in April and has come back up since then (comScore). Yelp also has the No. 1 travel app on the iPhone (it is No. 26 overall). Whereas Citysearch’s similar iPhone app is not even in the top 20 travel apps. Yelp’s pageviews and average time spent per user on the site are also up 150 percent and 22 percent, respectively. In fact, the 3.3 average minutes per visitor on Yelp is above Citysearch’s 2.3 minute average. But comScore shows a steep drop in both pageviews and average time spent starting in May, with a leveling off in July. Citysearch experienced similar drops. (See charts below). It’s hard to say what is causing these drops. It could be that people are not finding what they are looking for, or the opposite, that they are finding what they need faster due to better site design. I suspect it has something to do with the latter. For instance, a much-improved Citysearch redesign went site-wide in March and Yelp is constantly tweaking its site. Update: Kara Nortman, the executive who runs Citysearch, says that the pageview numbers are down slightly, but not as much as comScore suggests. Part of this has to do with Citysearch actually going through the site and “pulling out pages that are not great consumer experiences,” which hurts SEO, but improves the site overall. Citysearch is also trying to reduce the number of searches it takes ti get to what you want, which also causes pageviews to drop. I asked Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman about the pageview situation, and he sent me an internal Google Analytics chart pasted at bottom of this post). “As you can see we’ve continued to grow pageviews smoothly throughout the summer,” he says, “so it looks like the effect Comscore is reporting is spurious.” There is definitely a discrepancy there. Stoppleman also says that worldwide Yelp did 157 million pageviews in August (although he thinks that is becoming a less a meaningful metric as Ajax redesigns reduce the need for page refreshes) and more than 25 million unique visitors. (The comScore numbers cited above are only for the U.S.) Yelp came out with a major update for its iPhone app in April, right about the time the pageviews started to allegedly decline. But Stoppelman doesn’t think that is it either. There might be some shift over to mobile, but he’s seeing the following trends:
No matter which way you cut the numbers, though, Yelp is gaining fast on Citysearch. Update “I worry about everyone,” says Citysearch’s Nortman. “I think you'll start to see some pretty strategic initiatives roll out across the web and mobile. We have this new neighborhood platform in place. We have to fill it up with trusted content.” That is how Citysearch will try to stand apart, by having reviews and other content that is more trustworthy than Yelp’s. Which site do you trust more? Average Minutes Per Visitor Total Pageviews Yelp’s Daily Pageviews (Google Analytics) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Android Now Plays Foursquare Too Posted: 02 Sep 2009 11:44 AM PDT
Work on the project started back in April and was mainly coded by Joe LaPenna and Chris Brummel in their spare time. It started as a project to first reverse engineer the iPhone API, and then migrate to Android using Foursquare’s beta API, LaPenna tells us. After a few months of work, the duo and Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai (who has been managing it from the service’s side) feels its now feature-complete and ready for distribution.
One advantage the Android platform has over the iPhone is that applications can run in the background. But Foursquare for Android chooses not to take advantage of that, and instead opts for speed and better battery life. “No “location aware” always-on background services or application bloat to drain your battery over the course of the night,” is how they phrase it. Since Foursquare is all about manually checking-in places, that makes sense. With the app now complete, the next revisions will focus on performance and UI, LaPenna says. But there are also some new features that both they and Foursquare have planned. “We of course plan on adding features to the app but we’re not sure what order we’re going to tackle them in,” LaPenna says. Having another mobile application for Foursquare should certainly help with its adoption. And Android is especially key since a lot of geeky early adopters have Android phones. There is also work being done on a BlackBerry app and a Windows Mobile app. The latter I’ve seen in action, as my friend Anand Iyer has been working on it. It has a few great features also not found on the iPhone app including the ability to ping you if three of your friends check-in somewhere that you are not. And placing your friends on an actual map to show where they are (think Latitude). One really nice thing about the new Android app is that it’s open-source. LaPenna and Brummel have already had plenty of others help in building it. You can find out more about it on the Google Code page for the project. They’ve also written up some documentation for first-time Foursquare Android users. The Android Foursquare app is available in the Android Market right now for free, or you can grab the app from the Google Code page and install it yourself. Update: DailyFinance published some other interesting information today in a profile of Foursquare. The most interesting part is that Foursquare is preparing to announce a round of seed funding. We’ve heard that as well from a couple sources. From what we hear, the company is actually looking for less money than some investors are offering. Look for a low seven figure seed round to be announced in the coming weeks. And one name that is continually thrown around as being involved is Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson. And where he is putting money, you can often find Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet close by as well. Nothing confirmed yet, that’s just what we’re hearing. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Oh, RSS Is Definitely Dead Now: Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo To Become Twitter COO Posted: 02 Sep 2009 10:56 AM PDT
Steve Gillmor is going to love this, of course, since he proclaimed that RSS was dead and Twitter was the new messaging protocol bus, or something to that effect. “Rest In Peace, RSS,” he wrote, saying “It's time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter…All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don't go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don't go there, I don't use RSS anymore.” Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s existing head of operations (and also from Google), will presumably remain with the company and report to Costolo. Costolo, who is also an early Twitter investor, is someone who has actual experience building scalable infrastructures, which Twitter sorely needs. The company hasn’t launched any new features in recent memory, and continues to have regular downtime. In fact, Twitter’s inability to build features and keep the service live is a serious competitive disadvantage. Costolo can presumably fix all that. Twitter is actively hiring more senior people, we’ve heard. In July they hired Alexander Macgillivray, Google's associate general counsel for Product and IP, as their new General Counsel. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
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Foursquare
Users who have played with the iPhone version should feel at home with this app. But it has a few features that the iPhone version doesn’t, such as integrated maps and a one-click check-in process.
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