The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘api’

A few days ago, we noted that Facebook was testing putting links to QR codes on their main profile pages. Now we know why. Apparently, Facebook is doing some testing ahead of their location feature roll-out, which will use these codes.

A source with knowledge of Facebook’s plans tells us that the QR codes will be used with an upcoming version of Facebook’s mobile app. More specifically, businesses could potentially print out a QR code and put it on a wall or a counter in their venue to allow users to scan it to check-in at that store, we’re told. Facebook is expected to unveil its location plans at its f8 conference in late April.

For those unfamiliar, a QR code (short for “quick response”) is a sort of barcode that stores information which can be captured and interpreted by a mobile device by way of the camera on the device. Google, Microsoft, and others have been experimenting with their usage recently, and now Facebook is hoping on board.

But Facebook’s idea is particularly interesting because it’s based around the hot check-in space right now. While services such as Foursquare and Gowalla are quickly gaining popularity, both still have under 1 million users, while Facebook has over 400 million users. Recently, the social network has been testing out pulling in data from both of those networks, rather than trying to build its own location network from scratch.

That said, with a feature like this, it appears that you could use Facebook to check-in, then perhaps send it back out to someplace like Foursquare. The problem with Gowalla is that their API is currently read-only, so checking-in would have to be done through their own app, and not Facbeook.

While the QR code links spotted the other day didn’t work yet, it was clear that one would link to the actual profile page, while the other would link to a particular status update. It seems that Page owners will get the option to view them soon as well.

Facebook’s location plans continue to unfold.

I’m hopelessly addicted to Push Notifications on the iPhone. Unfortunately, the system is flawed, in that the more notifications you get, the worse the experience is because it can be hard to manage them all. And one reason I always have the iPhone on me, even when taking around an Android phone, is that there’s no good way to get my notifications on another device. A new startup may offer a solution for both of those problems.

Notifo is a Y Combinator-backed company launching today. While it’s currently only available as an iPhone app, the plan is to eventually roll out to all the major mobile platforms, starting with Android and BlackBerry soon. And while the current app may seem pretty barebones, the power resides underneath; it’s a platform.

Notifo’s API makes it very, very simple for any site to insert a few lines of code in their site and offer Push Notifications very quickly. There is no approval process, you simply insert the code and you’re good to go; your site is now notification-ready.

What’s great about this solution is that it’s creating a way to get all the notifications in one place, rather than having to manage a dozen (or in my case, more) apps all with their own notifications. This way, when you load up the Notifo app, you get a stream of all the notifications you’ve chosen to subscribe to. You could get notifications about new TechCrunch posts, or even when someone responds to a comment you made on TechCrunch, for example.

The idea is similar to one of my favorite iPhone apps, Boxcar, but again, this is more about the underlying idea of notification syndication. Boxcar is more about setting up and managing notifications across a range of services they choose — and it’s iPhone-only. Notifo should let you fairly easily set up notifications for just about anything, on any device.

While they wait for others to adopt the idea (so far, Listia has), Notifo set up a few services so people can use it with the iPhone right now. For example, Push.ly allows you to get notifications for all Twitter mentions of your name. And there is a simple March Madness final score notifier that has been giving me updates all day as tournament games end, with their final scores. You can also set alerts for when individual stocks hit certain prices.

And the service also allows you to send yourself timed alerts, which are easily set up from the Notifo website.

Notifo is the work of Chad Etzel, a developer who was formerly doing some work for Twitter.

You can find the free app in the App Store here.

Plastic Jungle, a marketplace for gift cards, has secured $7.4 million in Series B funding, led by Redpoint Ventures with Shasta Ventures Bay Partners, First Round Capital and other investors participating. This brings the company’s total funding to $13.4 million.

Plastic Jungle lets you buy, sell and exchange gift cards online. Instead of receiving cash for your gift card, Plastic Jungle also lets you trade the value in for an Amazon gift card or give your money to charity. Users can receive cash for unwanted gift cards for up to 92% of the unused balance and buy gift cards at up to a 30% discount. The company says that it will use the funds to accelerate product development and work on other ways to create supply and demand for gift cards on the site.

While Plastic Jungle didn’t reveal revenue numbers, the company’s CEO Garry Briggs says that its revenue is eight times more that what it was a year ago. Briggs also said that “millions” of dollars have flown through the marketplace since the company’s launch two years ago. Plastic Jungle faces competition from CardPool and others.

I’m at the NewsMorphosis Conference in Hawaii today locked in a day of debates about the state of news quality and how the hell we find a business model to keep paying for it. It’s a big issue locally– earlier this year three of Hawaii’s five largest TV news stations merged operations and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin is  merging with the other daily paper the Honolulu Advertiser, resulting in plenty of layoffs and general civic concern.

So it’s fitting that the conference ended with a talk by John Temple, the editor of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s new Peer News site, a test case in how the future of local news could work. And thankfully, we finally got a few more details on the site and the approach.

Temple was clear to say “there is no silver bullet” when it comes to fixing the media business, but also sees a great deal of hope in the volatility– this from the guy who was head of the now shuttered Rocky Mountain News, a paper that’s already gone through what so many dailies are dreading.

“We’re not trying to reinvent a local newspaper and put it on the Web,” he said. Indeed, the mission of Peer News doesn’t even contain the words “news” or “media” or “paper.” It’s simply “to create a new civic square.” Core to the development of Peer were three questions:

-What is the role of a free press in a democracy?

-How would you best fulfill that on a local level using all the tools available today?

-How do you do that in a sustainable way?

On content, the most interesting thing Temple talked about was doing away with “articles” as we know them. He criticized the static, episodic nature by which journalists have traditional covered news, challenging readers to hunt through archives for the information they want. Instead, Peer’s “building block” will be a page that’s always updated almost like Wikipedia, or as he put it, “something closer to a living history on a topic that changes as it develops.” There will no longer be a sense of “missing” an article, because the “articles” will be living things. That also addresses the critique that local news swarms around one issue, then moves on. “We’re not going to be hot topic driven,” Temple says. Going back to those questions, Temple says the role of a free press is to inform citizens so they can make intelligent decisions. “Let’s stop making it so difficult,” he said.

The other hallmark of Peer’s approach is what has made blogs popular– a sense of community. But it’s certainly a different approach. For one thing, Peer won’t have “reporters” in the classical sense, it will have “hosts” who help facilitate this civic square answering questions for the community.  “In this era, the fact that newspapers still rewrite press releases is an embarrassment,” Temple said. “We’re not going to be stenographers. I think that’s a downfall of journalism.”

But for a site that intends to be very community oriented, there was one big shocker: Peer will not have comments. “(Comments) descend into racism, hate, ugliness and reflect badly on news organizations that have them,” said Temple. Why? Because people do not have to show their faces when they comment so there’s no sense of responsibility, he argued. “We think anonymity is a huge problem when it comes to comments,” he said.

Temple also emphasized that the coverage would not pull punches: “We’re going to call things like we see them. We think there’s real value in taking a stand.”

So what about that business model? As Temple noted, there aren’t that many business models out there to chose from. Unlike most media sites, this will be a member site that people “value and will pay for.” He added “advertising would not be a key focus for us.”

Peer should be launching early next quarter, so we’ll be able to see more of these ideas in action soon. But it’s clear that the site– or “news service” as it prefers to call itself– is taking a markedly different approach from old and what we consider “new” media right now.

And with the benefit of some of these details, it seems less out of step for Omidyar to be starting this company. EBay, after all, was one of the first sites to powerfully leverage community on the Web, pioneering a lot of the systems of trust and reputation we still use today.

(More on Temple’s blog here.)

Jack Dorsey’s Square was unveiled last December as an innovative way to let people quickly and easily accept physical credit card payments from their mobile phone.

Since then, Square, which has been in limited beta, has been used in a variety of use cases. E.g. philanthopic organization charity:water recently used Square at the SXSW festival to collect donations.

A local flower cart in San Francisco is using Square to take payments from customers. Denim, a jeans store in New York is using Square to take payments from shoppers. We even used Square at this year’s Crunchies to raise money for the UCSF Foundation.

Here’s how Square works: A small device attaches to the phone via the headset/microphone jack. The device gets the power it needs to send data to the phone from the swipe of the card, and sends the information over the microphone connection. The device is compatible with both the iPhone and Android. It’s similar in some ways to PayPal, but anyone can now accept physical credit card payments, too. With no contracts or monthly fees. People are sent receipts by text and email. If you haven’t seen Square in action, check out this video.

And now, a new use case has popped up for Square: political fundraising.

Square is currently being used in two campaigns. Silicon Valley VC Josh Becker, who is running for state assembly in California’s 21st district, has been using Square at fundraising events. And lawyer Reshma Saujani, who is running for Congress in New York’s 14th district, is using Square at campaign fundraising events, including at an event in San Francisco on Friday.

Square is ideal for taking money at political fundraisers for several reasons.

Currently, if you want to donate money at a fundraising event, you often have to fill out a form and hand over a check or cash at the event. If you don’t have your checkbook or cash handy (which, many of us don’t), credit cards are the only option. You can write down your credit card number and info for fundraisers to charge at a later date, but you have to trust that the fundraiser keeps track of that information and paper.

With Square, there is both a convenience added for both the payee and fundraiser. The donation is instantly processed, and Square will send the receipt via SMS or email to the payee. Of course, political contributions and donations are a little more complicated because of the reporting requirements associated with donations.

For many types of donations, you need to take the donator’s name, occupation, address, and other information. Currently Square doesn’t allow users to input all of this information but Dorsey says that they are releasing Square’s API to allow fundraisers to build additional applications on top of Square, where they could input all of the necessary data. Once this is enabled, Square will allows fundraisers to eliminate paper collection and payments all together.

Dorsey says he’s already getting significant interest from politicians and political candidates across the country, but because Square is in limited beta, is being selective about how the service is distributed. Dorsey expects Square to be open to the public sometime in the next few months.

Valued at $40 million even before launch, Square is off to an impressive start. And technology’s most notable investors and leaders seem to think so as well.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, investor Ron Conway, Google’s Marissa Mayer, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, Digg creator Kevin Rose, investor Esther Dyson and a host of others have invested in Square. The company also raised funding from Khosla Ventures.

I’ll let the video after the jump do most of the talking on this one but RunKeeper has improved its sharing service by building out a cool run sharing service that works like a social network for the preternaturally skinny yet surprisingly hungry.

The system allows you to share runs with friends and/or strangers. You can turn off maps for privacy and selectively share runs with the world. For example, I have one visible activity while RunKeeper founder Jason has like 5,000 (actually 130). This means he is better than me and, in fact, better than most of us.

Mobile analytics startup Motally is bringing in a seasoned analytics executive, John Forese, as the startup’s new CEO. Forese was previously Nielsen Mobile’s Senior Vice President of Product Management. Additionally former Google Vice President of Product Development, Doug Garland, has joined Motally’s board of directors.

Prior to his tenure at Nielsen Mobile, Forese was a senior vice president at mobile metrics and research company Telephia where he led overall product strategy and had P&L responsibility across the company’s product lines. Telephia was eventually acquired by Nielsen in 2007. Forese also worked at several telecom and technology based start-ups, including Flashpoint Technologies, Netro and Pacific Bell Mobile Systems.

In addition to their new CEO, Motally has also elected Doug Garland to its board. Prior to joining Google, Doug was an executive in residence at the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Earlier, he was a senior vice president at Yahoo!, where he led the launch of the broadband access business and the company’s mobile efforts.

Motally has been expanding and innovating at a rapid pace over the past several months. The startup just launched an analytics platform for mobile game developers, rolled out an extension of their mobile analytics to include content developed on Apple’s iPad and released a flexible API.

Currently, Motally supports analytics for applications on the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry platforms as well as the mobile web. For a young startup, Motally has seen significant traction as a mobile analytics provider. Backed by renown investor Ron Conway, Motally’s clients include Twitter, Yelp, Fandango and Verizon.

Fwix, a startup that offers a stream of local news that’s updated in real-time, has landed a deal with The New York Times Company to use Fwix’s hyper-local news wire across The New York Times Company’s Regional Media Group’s 15 newspapers, as well as other business units such as Boston.com and NYTimes.com.

Fwix, which launched its realtime API a few weeks ago, aggregates news articles and blog posts that are relevant to a certain region (the site now features support for over 80 cities in the United States and Canada). To do this, the Fwix team selects news sources and blogs that it thinks are related to each city, and also uses automated algorithms to determine when other content might also be relevant. Fwix has also recently tweaked its algorithm and offerings to include “nearby” local content features. So content on Fwix displays relationships between both topics and nearby location. For example, after reading a story about a robbery that took place in the Mission district of San Francisco, you’ll be able to find any other crime and or stories about the Mission neighborhood.

While its still unknown how Fwix will be implemented across all of the New York Times’ properties, the startup’s local news content is already being used in the publishing company’s Northern California newspaper, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. In the “YourTown” section, the Fwix feed is set to a current location and feeds realtime news about the San Francisco Bay area. However in some instances, the Fwix news feed might show the reader his or her own local news by autodetect location via an IP address (say, at a global-reaching site like www.nytimes.com).

There is a revenue agreement with The New York Times Company, says Fwix founder and CEO Darian Shirazi, but he declined to reveal the exact amount involved in the deal. And the deal is not exclusive, so Fwix can be incorporated on other news sites as well. Fwix’s local news stream has also been integrated on integrated on WeatherUnderground.com and UPI.com. And the startup also launched the Fwix News Publisher app on Facebook, which lets any Facebook Page add local news of any variety of subjects (business, sports, politics, living, entertainment, etc.) to their page’s feed. The deal with the New York Times is a huge coup for a startup that launched less than two years ago.

Which employee does what, when, how and with which tools? That’s a critical question for many companies, which usually rely on business process management (BPM) solutions to visualize, streamline, and implement predefined workflows. Just last month, enterprise SaaS behemoth Salesforce.com rolled out a new BPM tool, Visual Process Manager – only to be now challenged by a small startup called Questetra, which thinks its eponymous solution can stack up.

The way Questetra’s BPM suite (and similar products) work is that users chart business workflows to identify redundancies, “bottle necks” or conflicts in future company processes. Once the design is ready, the designer can authorize other users to revise the system themselves, meaning these designs are then put to actual use in a work environment.

The applicant in the reimbursement process visualized below, for instance, submits a request through the Flash application, which then notifies his supervisor who can then approve and send the request to the accounting division for a final check (there’s actually a whole bunch of different task execution functions built into the application). All actions can be managed via a user-specific dashboard, and just like with Salesforce.com’s solution, for example, Questetra users don’t need to deal with any code.

Apart from relatively low pricing and ease of use, Questetra says the “killer feature” of their suite is that it’s 100% web-based, meaning separate software isn’t required to design a process or perform a task. Another key selling point is the seamless integration with Google Apps (in the SaaS version, users can log in with their existing Google accounts and easily export data to Google Docs).

Questetra, which says their suite is especially interesting for companies with 20 to 200 employees, offers a self-hosted (downloadable) edition and an SaaS solution for $10 per user per month (there’s also a trial version and a number of free sample workflows). It’s also one of the first applications distributed through the Google Apps Marketplace that launched just last week.

Questetra, which is based in Kyoto/Japan, is currently working on mobile-friendly features and an API to be rolled out in the near future. Apart from Salesforce.com’s Visual Process Manager, the Questetra BPM suite competes with SAP’s Visual Composer, Appian, and Intalio, amongst others.

Under the radar startup NorthScale is publicly launching today with a new data management technology to help web-based companies, particularly startups that deal with large amounts of transactional data. For example, social gaming giant Zynga has been using NorthScale since December.

Founded by leaders of the memcached open source project, NorthScale is like Cloudera for Hadoop or Red Hat for Linux; the startup is commercializing the open source technology. As web applications generate vast volumes of data, there is a need for a data management technology that caters towards transactional software systems. NorthScale’s elastic data infrastructure software promises to cache frequently used data while also offering performance and scalability.

The NorthScale Memcached Server is the also includes the ability to securely support multiple applications on a shared cluster, and allows a memcached cluster to dynamically change with automatic client updates. The NorthScale Membase Server is a high‐performance, distributed key‐value database which builds on the NorthScale Memcached Server foundation and is directly compatible with memcached APIs and client libraries.

Currently Zynga and NHN are using NorthScale as a foundations for shared data management infrastructure. Founded in 2009, the startup has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.