Ebyline Launches As A Market For Freelance Journalists And News Syndication @ 08-09-2010 16:00
Can a ragtag group of former newspapermen from the
L.A. Times help newspapers fight off the content farms of the Web? The founders and backers of
Ebyline, which has been in private beta for a few months and launches today more broadly, think they can streamline the way news organizations manage freelancers and syndicate their own articles. Some publishers testing out the system include
Variety,
ProPublica, and
The Texas Observer. Ebyline is a marketplace for freelance journalists and syndicated news. Freelancers must be invited by an editor at a participating publication, or be vetted through an application. They can pitch story ideas into the open marketplace, or take assignments directly from editors they work with. The freelance writer and editor agree on a price, the freelancer submits drafts through the system, and once the editor accepts it after any necessary revisions, payment is authorized. The story can then be dumped into whatever ancient content management system the newspaper uses.
gWallet Brings Offers To Mobile Apps; Partners With Ad Exchange Mobclix @ 08-09-2010 15:59
Online monetization platform
gWallet, which offers social gaming developers a variety of ways to monetize their apps and boost engagement, is debuting a new mobile ad offering today. Mobile app developers can now integrate virtual currency offers within their apps. However, instead of signing up for Netflix or other offers that gWallet uses on its web platform; the mobile offers ask for users to download an app in exchange for earning virtual currency. For example, within an iPhone app, a user will be given the opportunity to earn virtual currency if they download the Netflix iPhone app. To expand reach of the new format, gWallet is partnering with mobile ad exchange
Mobclix to allow developers integrate the branded offers within their apps. Developers purchase installs via a bidding system, with gWallet bringing in the brands to the platform. gWallet Mobile will be available on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and other smartphone platforms.
Benchmark And Accel Partners Reach Across The Atlantic To Fund ResearchGATE @ 08-09-2010 15:55
"So ResearchGATE is Facebook for Scientists?" I asked ex-Facebook exec, current
Benchmark Capital general partner and new ResearchGATE investor
Matt Cohler. "I bristle at that characterization," he responded telling me that doesn't adequately describe the company. Either way he's invested in the Berlin based startup, along with
Accel Partners, Simon Levene, Michael Birch, Joachim Schoss, Martin Sinner, Ulrich Essmann, Christian Vollmann and Rolf Christof Dienst. Cohler, Levene and Schoss also join the company's board of directors. Oddly the company won't disclose the size of the round, other than to say it's a typical series A round, which implies $5 million or so. We first
wrote about ResearchGate in May, when Leena Rao called it, ahem, LinkedIn for scientists (I know, but context is always nice):
Google Doodle Results In Retailer Selling Many Buckyballs, Making A Lot Of Bucks @ 08-09-2010 15:39
It seems that one of Google's
latest doodles, a homage to the 25th anniversary of the discovery of Buckyballs was, as we suspected, too clever by half. Two, presumably, unintentional consequences have emerged: costing Google's users money, while making a heck of a lot of cash for the maker of the Buckyballs desktoy overnight. The way the doodle itself had been designed put a very heavy load on users' computers, increasing power consumption at
a cost to those users, as well as causing many a browser crash. That's kind of clumsy and, arguably, irresponsible when you consider how many people have Google as their browser's default start page. But more bizarrely was another side effect, which surely Google must have anticipated:
Amazon Acquires Amie Street, But Not In A Good Way @ 08-09-2010 15:01
Amie Street is one of those startups that just got me - love at first site if you will. I
first discovered them in 2006, calling it an awesome new music model. Artists upload songs and those songs are free to download to start. As more downloads occur the price goes up. A cent, fifty cents, etc., up to $1. The price of the song is an indication of how good it is, as friends share the good stuff with others. Over time a lot of artists tried out the service, songs were downloaded over 10 million times, and the company
raised venture capital from Amazon and others. And today, the company will announce that Amazon has acquired the Amie Street business. Going forward the team will focus on
Songza, which
they acquired in 2009. Amazon will redirect Amie Street to a new cobranded Amie Street/Amazon Music Service site and give users a $5 coupon to purchase songs on Amazon. But while the users and the brand are being acquired, Amazon will most likely ditch the business model, say the founders (stressing that they don't know for sure).
ZumoCast Debuts Cross-Platform Streaming iPhone And iPad App For Videos, Music And More @ 08-09-2010 14:58
We originally
wrote about
ZumoCast, a new cloud storage service, brought to us from the folks who brought us Zumodrive. ZumoCast's application streams music, videos and files directly from your home desktop computer to another Internet connected device. Today, the startup's free iPhone and iPad app is
available in the App Store. ZumoCast is the brainchild of Y Combinator startup
Zecter, which also launched a cloud storage service
Zumodrive. Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But instead of syncing those files with all of your other devices, Zumodrive tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.
HP has tapped Zecter to provide a cloud storage app on netbook devices and Zumodrive offers a number of
mobile products.
The Perfect Rosh Hashana Gift: An iPhone App That Measures Breast Size @ 08-09-2010 14:04
Did you know eight out of ten women wear the wrong bra size? Of course you didn't. Now, thanks to Israeli iPhone app dev house,
Digital Relations, you can celebrate the Jewish New Year with the correct support your loved ones' bosoms need. Say hello to
FITS, the iPhone app that helps you measure breast size. Happy new year indeed! The story behind the app is that one of the developers at Digital Relations had an "embarrassing session with the saleswoman at the bra-shop". As he made his cowardly escape, and evidently being a full-fledged dork, he thought to himself "hey, there should be an app for exactly these situations."
Norton Debuts New Security Software, Reveals Cybercrime Pisses Off Victims @ 08-09-2010 13:46
Symantec this morning
released two new security software products,
Norton AntiVirus 2011 and
Norton Internet Security 2011. Coinciding with the release, the company has also
published its latest cybercrime report, dubbed The Norton Cybercrime Report: The Human Impact. The company claims two-thirds (65 percent) of global Internet users have already fallen victim to cybercrimes, which includes computer viruses, online credit card fraud and identity theft.
Just-Eat Founder Launches Platform For Virtual Therapists And Life Coaches @ 08-09-2010 13:39
Jesper Buch who co-founded
Just-Eat, the European company that took fast food online, has launched his latest venture:
Mentaline, a platform for therapists, life coaches and psychologists to deliver services to clients. Ambitiously, it's not a marketplace in which sessions eventually take place offline but instead the whole thing operates on the Web. Users browse the site by specialism to identify the right therapist and then book and pay for an online consultation which is delivered via webcam. In addition, the system scales so that sessions can be delivered to groups of people or couples, and a separate section of the site is tailored to 'Masterclasses' or life coaching-style lectures.
Soon, We’ll Have Downloaded More Apps From iTunes Than Songs (Chart) @ 08-09-2010 12:57
Asymco, a Helsinki-based app developer / industry analysis advisory firm, ironically founded and led by a longtime Nokia manager, just
posted this telling chart on its blog: According to the firm's research, iTunes download rates for music and iOS apps are both still growing, but accelerating much faster for the latter. In fact, Asymco posits, based on data from the recently updated Music and App Store, that the total number of app downloads has already reached the same level as that of songs in less than half the time.
Kno Raises $46 Million More To Build “Most Powerful Tablet Anyone Has Ever Made” @ 08-09-2010 10:14
Marc Andreessen is normally enthusiastic about the startups he's invested in. Still, when I spoke to him last week about
Kno, he surprised me by saying it will be "the most powerful tablet anyone has ever made." And he's backing up that claim with a new investment -
Andreessen Horowitz has put even more capital into the company as part of a new
$46 million debt and equity round.
Silicon Valley Bank and
TriplePoint Capital also invested in the round. Kno has now raised over $55 million. The company is still planning on getting its first dual-screen tablet computer to market by the end of the year, says CEO
Osman Rashid, although he won't get specific on the price. It will be less than $1,000, but that's as close as they'll get.
Alert The Enterprise: Seesmic Integrates With Salesforce Chatter @ 08-09-2010 10:07
How businesses and brands deal with social media has become one of the defining issues of the recent web era. Today a pretty big leap is taking place which may define the next phase. Two of the biggest players have come together to create certainly one of the slickest and most seamless integrations I've yet seen of the realtime social web and enterprise worlds. Seesmic is to integrate Salesforce's internal Twitter-like app, Chatter, into their platform. That makes Seesmic the first realtime social consumer app to go directly into the enterprise space. Seesmic will also suddenly have the potential to access to over 20,000 Salesforce customers who have used Chatter so far. The news was unveiled at a 3,000-strong Salesforce conference in London today. Below we have an exclusive interview with Loic Le Meur of Seesmic and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. Once you see Seesmic working with Salesforce's Chatter it make perfect sense. Suddenly you can be having internal and external conversations at once.
Salesforce Takes Chatter Mobile With iPhone, iPad, Android And BlackBerry Apps @ 08-09-2010 09:58
As Salesforce's foray into social collaboration,
Salesforce Chatter,
gains traction amongst enterprise users, it makes sense for the company to launch complimentary mobile apps to the platform. And as the enterprise increasingly relies upon mobile devices for connectivity; there is a strong demand for native mobile use of Chatter. Today, Salesforce is taking Chatter to mobile phones; unveiling Chatter Mobile apps for the iPad, iPhone, Google Android and BlackBerry devices. Salesforce Chatter, which was
originally announced last November, was
launched into public beta in June after four months in
private beta. In the realtime collaboration platform's firts three months open to the public, Chatter has been
adopted by 25,000 companies; with 25 percent of Salesforce's client base using the platform. .
Entrepreneur To Entrepreneur: The New Kitchen Of The Middle East (TCTV) @ 08-09-2010 09:38
It has been roughly one year since
Yahoo! made waves in the Middle East, by
buying Maktoob, the region's largest web portal for $164 million. From Silicon Valley's observation deck that may seem like small peanuts--- these days we barely bat an eye when HP and Dell get into a multi-billion dollar tug-of-war game. However, for the Middle East and in particular Jordan, the Maktoob takeover was a flash point for the fledgling tech scene. That's not to say that Jordan has become a premiere tech hub overnight. Indeed, the region still suffers from a dearth of angel investors. But there is a palpable rise in confidence among the region's entrepreneurs, like
Ammar Ibrahim founder of
Asuaq.com. The young site, which touts itself as the Craigslist of the Middle East (minus the "censored" controversy), has only garnered about 300,000 unique visitors since its launch earlier this year, but it's growing at a healthy clip. Traffic has doubled in the last five months. On this week's episode of
Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur, SGN Founder
Shervin Pishevar talks to Ibrahim about his new startup, Jordan's startup community, the Maktoob deal's effect and the challenges of funding. Video ahead.
Campus Dibs Is A GroupOn For Colleges: Smart Move @ 08-09-2010 09:11
The most interesting thing about
Campus Dibs, a recently launched GroupOn clone, is its choice of vertical i.e. college campuses. If you don't think this is notable enough to merit another (albeit brief)
GroupOn clone post then just remember how Facebook got a heads start towards world domination, by strategically targeting social networks in the Ivy League and slowly expanding outward. Facebook has proven that colleges are hotbeds of virality in more ways than one, and are extremely interesting when thought of in terms of a market for GroupOn clones. If you doubt Campus Dibs' chances for setting itself apart from the 800 or so daily deals sites out there, just imagine the power of the 50k plus populations of college campuses and alumni coupled with the mob mentality of group buying sites.
Is Google’s Mobile Loss in China Kai-fu Lee’s Gain? @ 08-09-2010 08:41
Former head of Google China, Kai-fu Lee, insists—
insists—that he is not happy that Google imploded its business in China. “Seeing the work that I put in, how could I be happy to see that?” he says. In fact, in a press release all about his incubator's companies being built on top of Android he doesn’t use the G-word once. “Given the pull out, we’ll accept the situation and do our best,” he says humbly.
Yeah, accept the situation like a fox. As Lee begins
to open up more about the types of companies being created at his incubator,
Innovation Works, there’s a consistent theme—Android. Whether it’s address books, music programs, video games, maps, eCommerce marketplaces or e-readers, many of Lee’s companies are hoping to take advantage of the good things about Android—namely that it’s a free, robust operating system—but customize the core smartphone applications in a way that Google won’t or can’t. It’s interesting that I had a conversation with Lee about this topic right about the time Google CEO Eric Schmidt was delivering a keynote touting that more than 200,000 Android-powered smartphones are activated daily, going beyond just the smartphone wielding “elite.” Lee would agree with everything his former boss said. It’s just that Google isn’t well positioned to make money off the apps and services in the world’s largest market. Oops.
Google Updates The Doodle Again; Points To Live-Updating Results @ 08-09-2010 07:43
The ongoing saga of Google's logo continues. The search giant has just changed the doodle on
google.com once again this evening,
leading up to their search event tomorrow. And once again, it looks as if the logo points to what they'll be announcing tomorrow. Whereas yesterday, the doodle was more
kinetic, which Google called "
fast, fun and interactive," today's logo updates as you type in the search box. This points to Google rolling out the live-updating results-as-you-type feature they've
been testing.
50 Days Of Logos? All We Can Take Is 1 Day Of Logos. @ 08-09-2010 05:38
Well, power to the people, I guess. Yesterday we
announced quite innocently that we'd be changing our logo every day for 50 days to salute a different startup. We thought it would be fun based on doing it last week with an old Twitter logo. Fun it was not. Reddit, it seems, has been doing exactly the same thing for the last eight days. Within moments of our post going up we were slammed for copying them. And then demands were made that we stop, and/or give them credit for inventing the silly idea. I scoffed, and then things went crazy. We get more than our fair share of crazies in our comments, but this was over the top even in our experience. We banned dozens of hateful comments, but they're coming faster than we can stop them. And I certainly have no intention of doing this day after day as each new logo goes up.
Firefox 4 Beta, Now With Faster Graphics And Visual Sound @ 08-09-2010 05:18
Firefox just
launched its fifth Firefox 4 beta, which includes a more streamlined interface, faster graphics and a new audio API that exposes raw audio data. What's new in this latest iteration of Firefox? * The introduction of an audio API which uses HTML5, allowing developers to visualize sound data in a browser, creating novel ways to experience sound while web surfing. * Emphasis on speed of graphics load with default graphics support from Direct2D, a 2-D graphics API for Windows 7, on machines that support Windows 7. * Implementation of the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), a security protocol that increases the chances for a secure connections. A stable alpha version is set to be released by Mozilla in November. You can try out
the latest beta here.
Yahoo!’s User Interface Library Learns To Love Being Touched, Gestured At @ 08-09-2010 04:49
Gather up a group of people who make their living through web design, and they'll probably all agree on at least two things: A) touchscreens aren't going anywhere, and B) designing web stuff for touchscreens sort of sucks. Native apps have, in a sense, spoiled users; with things like drag-and-drop and basic touch gesture recognition almost laughably simple to implement in native apps, web app developers are left to hack in such features themselves or risk having their app seem dated from the get-go. Today Yahoo! is looking to make things a
bit less painful with the latest release of their open-source User Interface library, YUI.
Still Think The iTunes 10 Icon Sucks? Our Ten Reader Alternatives @ 08-09-2010 04:15
Is it just me or has there been
a lot of logo hate going around lately? Apparently hell hath no fury like an armchair graphic designer scorned, if you go by some of the comments on our
"Hate The iTunes 10 Logo? Think You Can Do Better?" post. Along with haters doing what they do best (hint: it's hating) we also got a ton of alternative submissions. Here are ten of the most noteworthy above. And in case you want to switch the current iTunes 10 logo out, here's how to do it on
a Mac and on
a PC. 
The New iPod Order: Click Wheel Dethroned, Touch Screen Crowned @ 08-09-2010 04:09
I remember my first iPod very well. Shockingly, I was a little late to the party, waiting until the fourth generation iPod (now called the “iPod classic”) in 2004 to join the revolution. And I only bought one because I was planning to drive out to California (from Ohio) and I wanted enough music storage to last me the entire trip. I remember unboxing it and thinking: “wow, I can store all my music on this tiny device?” Today, six years later, I still have that old iPod. But I no longer consider it “tiny.” In fact, it’s more of a “brick” both in size and weight. It held 40 gigabytes of my music on its miniature hard drive platters. Today, the latest high-end iPod touch holds 24 more gigabytes and is a sliver of the size and a fraction of the weight. And it plays music for 28 more consecutive hours. Oh, and it has a color screen. One you can touch. One you can multi-touch.
Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital Adds $20 Million To Its Coffers @ 08-09-2010 03:39
According to recent SEC filings, it appears that
Chris Sacca's newly launched fund,
Lowercase Capital, has raised over $20 million in funding. Under the name
Lowercase Industry Fund, Sacca has quietly raised over
$11 million in a filing from early August and
$10 million in a filing from June. It's unclear who the investors are from the SEC filings. This funding adds to Lowercase Capital's $8.5 million raised earlier this year at the launch of the angel fund. Some of the fund's previous
investments include SimpleGeo, Fanbridge, DailyBooth, Posterous and Stickybits. And Lowercase has been on an investment roll lately, participating in a number of recent rounds in hot startups, including
Embed.ly, Chartbeat, and
Backupify. 
Exclusive: Digg’s Lunch Menu And A Terrible Hot Dog Scaling Solution @ 08-09-2010 03:26
Apparently some of Digg's employees aren't super happy that their main source of news about Digg is TechCrunch - probably referring to the news that
VP of Engineering John Quinn is out. Digg Designer Danny Trinh Twitters "I love finding out about @digg company news via @techcrunch. Wonder if they'll post our lunch menu too.." Yes, we will.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Rips “Vindictive” HP Lawsuit @ 08-09-2010 03:16
The dramatic battle between Mark Hurd, HP, and Oracle continues. Yesterday Oracle
announced that it was hiring
recently-ousted HP CEO
Mark Hurd as Co-President and a member of its Board. HP responded this morning by
suing Hurd, alleging that he would potentially leak trade secrets to Oracle. Oracle has just responded to the suit, and it isn't pulling any punches:
“Oracle has long viewed HP as an important partner,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “By filing this vindictive lawsuit against Oracle and Mark Hurd, the HP board is acting with utter disregard for that partnership, our joint customers, and their own shareholders and employees. The HP Board is making it virtually impossible for Oracle and HP to continue to cooperate and work together in the IT marketplace."
