Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Posted on November 20, 2008 - by admin
Tweetag: Tag-Based Search For Twitter
Tweetag is a brand new way to search Twitter, or ‘browse the Twittosphere’ as they put it. The app, like most Twitter-related applications, is fairly simple: you enter a tag, and Tweetag will show any public Twitter messages that contain that particular keyword, but more interestingly also a list of other tags that are related to it.
This allows you to filter down Twitter’s constant stream of 140-or-less-character messages intuitively. Take for instance a query for ‘obama‘: you’ll see all tweets contain the President-elect’s first name, and you can simply filter it down by adding other keywords to the URL or clicking an associated tag, e.g. ‘obama/youtube‘.
Posted on November 20, 2008 - by admin
Poll: More Than Half Of Twitter Users Would Pay
Guy Kawasaki posted a poll on via his SocialToo service that asks “How much would you pay to use Twitter?”
More than half (around 53%) of respondents, presumably all Twitter users who follow Guy, said they’d pay at least $5/month. The last thing I want is for Twitter to start charging, so I want each of you to take that poll and say “$0, I’d rather see it go away.”
Posted on November 20, 2008 - by admin
It’s Time For The Crunchies!
It’s hard to believe that nearly a year has gone by since we gave out those crazy gorilla awards to the best startup and product successes in Silicon Valley and around the world. Some of the photos from last year are here.
The Crunchies are back. We are once again partnering with some of our favorite blogs - thank you to co-hosts GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider and VentureBeat (click the links for their announcements). Thanks as well to 1938 Media, our video production partner (see their first video below in the comments).
Posted on November 18, 2008 - by admin
Metacafe Bets Its Future On The Power Of Wikis
Remember Metacafe? That’s right, the video entertainment site which got overshadowed by YouTube’s phenomenal rise? Well, it’s now making a huge gamble on a new product direction and doing so with zero guarantees. The gamble is WikiCafe, a collaborative editing approach for video metadata. To appreciate how important WikiCafe is to Metacafe just take a look at the company’s official R&D resource usage: 60% WikiCafe, 30% revenue generating opportunities, 10% everything else. That says it all.
I spent a few hours with Eyal Hertzog, the company’s co-founder and Chief Creative Officer who walked me through the company’s new product vision and the rationale for its big bet on the wiki approach to organizing videos. Hertzog was frustrated that users (he being among them) couldn’t just locate “THE” result when searching for a video. His definition of “THE” being a single video result that encompasses all the relevant (and preferably accurate) info, along with multiple language versions, captioning, and so on. The current reality, of course, is that when we perform a search for a video we get back multiple results—sometimes even in the hundreds—from multiple sources, in various languages, with different view counts, fake versions . . .. You all know the drill.
Posted on November 13, 2008 - by admin
Tapulous Releases One of iPhone’s Best Twitter Clients; Online Tap Tap Revenge Goes Live
Prolific iPhone development studio Tapulous has launched a trio of new applications, including an impressive Twitter client that could well become the most-used app on my phone. They’re also releasing a new online multiplayer version of mega-hit Tap Tap Revenge that will likely see the game surge in popularity (again), and have announced that they have hit a total of 3 million users across all of their applications.
The company’s new Twitter client is called Tweetsville (grab it here for $3.99), and was developed by veteran engineer Ed Voas. CEO Bart Decrem says that Voas initially started building the app for himself after becoming dissatisfied with existing Twitter clients, and incorporated a number of key features that make Tweetsville an ideal app for Twitter power-users. The application includes an integrated listing of top trends, advanced search functions, and a streamlined interface that feels much speedier than its competitors. In short, it’s great, and I won’t be surprised if it displaces favorites like Twitterific and Tapulous’s own Twinkle as the premier Twitter client on the iPhone. Decrem says that Twinkle will now focus on connecting people who are close to each other while still functioning as a Twitter client, while Tweetsville will be for hardcore users.
Posted on November 13, 2008 - by admin
A Brief Intermission To Remember Why The Internet Is So Wonderful
A camera + the Internet + puppies. Ten thousand people are watching right now.
My goal is to get people to stop emailing me this. Ok? It’s awesome. I posted. Time has all the details, if you want to know their names, etc.
Posted on November 13, 2008 - by admin
GestureTek To Rival Microsoft Surface?
I guess you don’t know you’re leading the pack unless you hear the other dogs barking at your heels.
GestureTek is a company that puts out touch- and gesture-based interactive screens in more various forms than the Microsoft Surface project. From what I can tell, it doesn’t track as exactly or as reliably as the seriously stress-tested Surface, but it also has a more attractive form factor in this thing (autoplaying video warning). I can’t tell what it’s using to track movement, but it looks to be sufficient for the basic applications that would be running in, say, a mall kiosk: a map, sales, basic product browsing and so on.
Posted on November 13, 2008 - by admin
Soocial’s Web-to-Phone Contact Syncing In Public Beta, Works With Outlook And Blackberry
When we came across contact management and synchronization service Soocial earlier this year, we said it made Plaxo look lame. The Holland-based startup is now waving the private beta phase goodbye and switching to public beta mode, which means you don’t have to wait any longer to try out the service.
In essence, Soocial enables you to sync contacts (and contacts only) between your computers, over 400 types of mobile phones and web applications like Gmail and Highrise. Later today, at the Under the Radar conference in San Francisco, Soocial will announce support for Outlook and Blackberry, which will evidently make the service far more appealing to business users.
Posted on November 13, 2008 - by admin
This Christmas, OfficeMax’s ElfYourself.com Will Get a JibJab Twist
A year ago, one of the surprise holiday breakout hits on the Web was ElfYourself.com. It was a promotional viral video site created by OfficeMax that let people upload their pictures and create dancing elves that they could then send as e-cards to family and friends. ElfYourself turned out to be the fastest growing site last December, peaking at 39 million unique visitors in the U.S. (and attracting a total of 100 million unique visitors worldwide throughout the campaign).
When Greg Spiridellis, CEO of JibJab Media, saw ElfYourself, it resonated with him because JbJab is organized around a similar series of “Starring You” videos that allow people to upload their photos so that they can star in the videos, and send them as digital cards. The JibJab videos also often involve dancing characters.
Posted on November 13, 2008 - by admin
Workstir Opens Its Trustworthy Classifieds To The Public
Craigslist is great (I use it all the time), but there are few things more unnerving than inviting a total stranger billing himself as a “HANDY MAN, AT YOUR SERVICE!” to your house to make a few repairs. The vast majority of transactions on the site go smoothly and without incident, but there’s a reason Cragislist advises you to meet up in a public place and let a friend know what you’re doing, just in case. And even if the guy you hired isn’t a creep, there’s still a chance he won’t be any good at his job.
Workstir is looking to take some of the guesswork out of hiring for services like home repair, cleaning, and child care. The site, which we’ve described as a Craigslist/Yelp hybrid, allows you to post service requests to a forum frequented by these service providers, much as you would in the Craigslist ‘Looking for’ section. These service providers then contact you through Email. But instead of making you verify their credentials independently, each service provider will have a Workstir profile that features photos, their interests, and reviews from other Workstir users who have dealt with them in the past.
