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Posts Tagged ‘crunch-network’

Do you find yourself constantly emailing stuff to your iPhone just so you can have it when you leave your desk? I do: emails, links, addresses, phone numbers, photos. Well, now there is an app for that. It’s called Pastefire, and it comes naturally enough from the app-sharing service Appsfire (which was co-founded by former TechCrunch writer Ouriel Ohayon). You can get the free app on iTunes here http://getap.ps/pastefire (if you click that link on your iPhone it will open up the App Store for you, and is another service AppsFire will launch soon which will combine short links for iPhone apps with analytics on conversions).

Pastefire lets you send links, phone numbers, email addresses, videos, and photos to your iPhone, and then it figures out what to do with them automatically. For example, after you sign up, you just add a bookmarket to your browser or go to the Pastfire “Copy Zone” and paste a link. Then if you fire up the app on your iPhone, it will open up that link in Safari. A phone number initiates a call. An email address opens up the Mail app addressed to that person. A photo URL lets you save the image to your phone’s image gallery. A video link opens up the YouTube app and plays the video. You can also post to Twitter, search in Google or Wikipedia, or save to a local clipboard.

If you turn on the automated mode, the app performs these actions automatically depending on what you send to your iPhone from your desktop. Or you can do it yourself in manual mode. More options are on the way, such as opening up a map for an address. And there are a few bugs which will be fixed soon as well. For instance, when you copy a photo to your gallery, it doesn’t open up the gallery. My other main complaint about the app is that you can only send one thing at a time. So if you want to send a bunch of links, emails, and photos all at once, you have to open up the app for each one and perform an action before you can move on to the next one. It should just store everything in the clipboard if things pile up. The other drawback is that you actually have to open the app. Here notifications would work really well, letting you send things directly to the top of your iPhone screen without having to hunt for the Pastefire app icon.

But these are minor quibbles. All-in-all, Pastefire is a solid productivity app and I’m going to be using it a lot.

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Twitter is preparing to launch a new set of tools that will let third party websites easily integrate Twitter features directly into their web sites and services, multiple sources have confirmed. In a nutshell, this is their response to the massively popular Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect was first announced in May 2008 (Google and MySpace announced similar projects at the same time).

Facebook Connect became generally available later in 2008, and it hasn’t looked back since. Today, Facebook says 80,000 websites have added Facebook Connect, and 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook connect on these third party websites each month. For many sites, like our own CrunchBase, it’s the only way to create an account and log in.

Facebook Connect is attractive to a lot of smaller sites simply because it’s so easy to implement. They’ve created a number of widgets that bring Facebook features directly to third party sites, and integration is easy. You can find some of these here on TechCrunch.

Last year Twitter released simply buttons to let users on third party sites sign in to Twitter and identify themselves (we use it in our commenting system).

The new Twitter product will allow sites to authenticate users, pull data and then publish back to Twitter, we’ve heard. All of these features exist today via the Twitter API, but the slick Facebook Connect-like packaging and easy-to-use widgets don’t exist yet.

Twitter is also taking an open, standards based approach. They use OAuth, for example, for authentication and data sharing. Facebook uses proprietary protocols for Facebook Connect.

We’ll update as we hear more. But our understanding is that Twitter has been working with a handful of publishers and will likely announce the new product shortly.

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MySpace Records, the indie record label that’s a joint venture between the social network and Interscope Records, is going through some changes. Not to be confused with MySpace’s popular MySpace Music free streaming portal, MySpace Records is a small record label designed to help promising new artists get early exposure. Earlier this evening, LA-based radio station KROQ reported that MySpace Records may have been disbanded. We’re hearing from multiple sources that that isn’t entirely accurate: A handful of people were let go from the label’s small team, and the label’s GM Jay Scavo has returned to Hollywood Records. But all artists currently signed to MySpace Records will remain on the label, and the partnership with Interscope remains.

That’s sure to be good news for the label’s artists, which include Pennywise and Nico Vega. The label has also previously featured a handful of artists who were eventually promoted to the main Interscope label, including Kate Voegele and Mickey Avalon. However, while the current artists are safe, we’re hearing that the direction of the label and its future structure are still up in the air.

When MySpace Records launched, MySpace planned to leverage its then-recent acquisition by News Corp to turn the label into a jumping off point for hot new bands (former CEO Chris DeWolfe was quoted as saying they’d get the bands into Fox movies and TV shows). Obviously it hasn’t performed as well as everyone hoped, but MySpace has still managed to help kickstart the careers of quite a few well known bands. Likewise, its MySpace Music site continues to perform well despite MySpace’s slowdown in other areas.

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Back in 2008, we wrote about a startup called NewsCred, which looked to help identify the most trustworthy news sources using a combination of community voting and algorithms. That didn’t really take off, so the company is now heading in a new direction: it wants to help users build their own custom online newspapers in a matter of minutes, offering a professional-looking site tailored to include the content you’re interested in. And using NewsCred premium features, you could potentially create a combination news aggregator/opinion site in the same vein as The Huffington Post.

Using the site is simple: you choose the title of your new virtual paper, then specify which topics you’re interested in following. The site includes a number of categories to choose from, including tech and politics, but you can also generate one based on a keyword if you’d like. Once you’ve chosen your topics, NewsCred will generate a virtual newspaper containing the latest stories from each area. Stories are drawn from popular relevant news sites and blogs, and you can specify a RSS feed if it isn’t in the NewsCred directory. Along the left side of the screen is a list of sections that you can jump through, much as you would in a physical paper. There are a handful of sample sites you can test for yourself, like this one on Mobile News, Celebrity Gossip, and Manchester United.

We’ve seen news aggregators before, but NewsCred has a few options that are less common. For one, the site allows you to write editorials, which can be incorporated into the front page (or the topic specific sections). And the site will soon offer a premium version called NewsCred Pro, which is designed to help you further customize and even monetize the papers you’ve built. With NewsCred Pro, you can host your paper at a personal domain, run your own advertising on the page, eliminate NewsCred branding, and further customize the layout and newspaper template. Together, these features could allow you to build a Huffington Post-style news hub, complete with your own opinion pieces, focused on whatever topic you wanted.

NewsCred has done a nice job putting their custom papers together, and most of the site looks very well done (though I did find some poor results as I searched for topics to add). But the new space it is entering is going to be competitive. For one, homepage sites like iGoogle allow users to include news feed widgets. And there are sites that are more directly competitive, like Meehive, the Kosmix-powered custom news site (covered here). That said, NewsCred may be able to build a business helping users build their own niche news portals, the same way Ning appeals to users building custom social networks.

NewsCred closed a seed round of funding last year from private investors in the US, UK, and Switzerland, as well as “one of the large Silicon Valley VC firms” (the company won’t disclose the names of their investors).

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One of the reasons text messaging is so popular is because it’s so simple. Anyone with just about any kind of mobile device can do it. And that’s why it was ingenious when the Obama administration set up a special number and got the major U.S. carriers on board to allow people to very easily donate $10 to the Red Cross to help with the disastrous situation in Haiti following a major earthquake. So far, that program has raised over $5 million from over a half million different mobile phone users, someone from the U.S. State Department confirmed today.

As of the last update, the number stands at $5.2 million. Of that, more than half have apparently come from AT&T users ($2.63 million), the company told us today. If you’re still interested, simply text HAITI to the number 90999. A $10 charge will be attached to your next cellphone bill.

AT&T shared their data today after I reached out over some confusion about whether the company was actually profiting from this fundraiser. Yesterday, in a hurry to get the program going, the service was still charging users for sending this text messages, apparently. But when they realized that, they made them all free, and went back and retroactively removed any charges users may have gotten by texting for the cause. Nice move.

This texting drive, being run through mGive, a non-profit working with the Red Cross, is also leveraging Twitter and Facebook to help get the word out there. Donations are said to be coming in to the tune of $200,000 each hour, so they’re very likely coming close to $6 million raised at this point. Impressive stuff.

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For the past several weeks I’ve only used one web browser: Google Chrome for Mac. Sure, it’s still in beta, but it’s fast and generally bug-free. That said, there have still be a couple of annoying issues. One was that there was no extension support (aside from Chromium builds), but that changed last week in the Chrome for Mac dev build. The other was that you could not manage your bookmarks. That changed today.

The latest dev channel release of Chrome for Mac, 4.0.295.0, released today, brings with it a bookmark manager for the first time. While you’ve been able to import bookmarks from Safari for a while, you had no way to manage them. Basically, it meant that you had to use Safari to manage them and to make the change in Chrome, go into your file system, delete the Chrome bookmarks file, and re-import anytime you wanted to make a change. With this new Bookmark Manager, Chrome for Mac is now at full systems go for me. Yes, it’s still missing a few other features such as full-screen mode and application shortcuts, but for day-to-day usage, it’s solid.

Google is calling this first crack at a bookmark manager “rudimentary,” but I’m using it now and it has just about everything I need: drag and drop, copy and paste, click-to-edit, and delete. There is still one minor thing missing: the ability to manage the “Other Bookmarks” area.

Along with the Bookmark Manager addition, Google fixed several bugs that caused crashes in Chrome for Mac, and added another nice feature: a multi-touch way to open new tabs. If you hold command and do a three-finger swipe on a MacBook (or two-finger swipe on the Magic Mouse), Chrome will open a new tab with your previous or next page from the one you are currently on. To open the previous page in a new tab, you hold command and swipe left. To open the next page, you hold control and swipe right. It’s actually pretty useful.

Again, these changes are only in the dev channel build of Chrome for Mac right now, which you can find here. But you can expect them to trickle up to the beta channel shortly.

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Mobile video advertising startup Transpera has raised $2 million in funding according to an SEC filing. The company most recently raised $8.25 million in 2008, which was accompanied by an undisclosed amount in Series A financing received in July 2007.

Transpera develops an ad platform that enables the distribution and monetization of Web videos on mobile phones. With the so-called Transpera Ad Platform (TAP), the company offers mobile video publishers and carriers a suite of promotional and distribution building tools to enhance the end user experience, and advertisers a way to market their wares by serving targeted ads in the form of interactive display banners, pre-roll videos, overlay ads, post-roll experiences and mini sites. There’s even a spin-off platform tailored specifically to the iPhone, which is steadily gaining traction as mobile web usage skyrockets.

The platform is in use by a number of established information and entertainment brands, including Associated Press, CBS News, Disney, Discovery Communications, Fox Reality Channel, and MTV Networks. Transpera also recently brought on Jason Weisberger as President and COO. Weisberger was the former COO of Federated Media.

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Appolicious, a comprehensive iPhone and Android app directory with a social twist, has launched a compelling new feature today: the ability for users to create curated lists of iPhone apps and Android apps. The new feature, which is similar in some ways to Twitter’s list functionality, allows anyone to create lists of their favorite apps by category and lists are limited to five apps. Appolicious has also launched an iPhone App Developer Directory that aims to connect businesses with app developers.

Appolicious, which just raised $1.5 million in funding and debuted an iPhone app, tries to make sense of the 100,000 apps on Apple’s App Store and the 16,000 apps on the Android Market, but with a social twist. So not only can you find apps based on category or topic, but you can share those apps with your social graph on Twitter and Facebook, review apps, and more. Via its technology, the application will scan your iTunes directory for your downloaded app and will integrate them into your Appolicious library. It’s similar in some ways to oneforty, an app directory for Twitter. The ability to create lists is a sure to be popular amongst users of the platform and could be a useful resource for consumers looking to get both user and expert opinions on apps in certain categories. Curators of lists can list apps, the reason and rationale behind their choice, any related links or tweets, and why they’re qualified to make that selection.

Founded in May of this year by former Yahoo VP, Alan Warms, Appolicious is hoping to expand its platform to include Android, Blackberry and other smartphone apps. Warms is a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Buzztracker to Yahoo in 2007. Warms is enthusiastic about the new iPhone app business directory, which he hopes will become a defacto resource for businesses, brands, retailers and developers. The directory will launch with several thousand profiles of various app developers.

The startup faces competition from Appsfire, 16 Apps, mPlayit, and others.

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Micropayments startup PlaySpan has struck a major deal with games publisher THQ to power payments for its virtual currency. PlaySpan powers micro-payments across over 1,000 video games and virtual worlds and has virtual goods storefronts on Facebook, MySpace, within games and on its standalone site. THQ will be using PlaySpan’s payment methods to allow online gamers to purchase ICE (the company’s virtual currency) for the game Dragonica Online.

PlaySpan’s platform is attractive to many game publishers because it offers more than 85 global payment methods. And the payments platform also provides a comprehensive credit card processing and fraud risk management services. Dragonica Online is a popular free-to-play multiplayer online casual game that allows players to purchase additional content and features via ICE cash.

The micropayments startup has been doing fairly well in the space, striking similar deals with Nickelodeon and hi5. PlaySpan recently revealed some telling numbers about the strength of the virtual goods space, reporting that over $30 million was spent on virtual gifts this holiday season. Last year, PlaySpan acquired micro-transaction app developer Spare Change, which powered micropayments across 700 social networking apps on Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.

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Eastman Kodak Company (in short, Kodak) has filed lawsuits against Apple and Research In Motion, alleging that both have infringed digital imaging technology patented by the company.

The complaint, filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission, claims that Apple’s iPhone devices and all RIM’s camera-enabled BlackBerry phones infringe a patent that covers technology related to a method for previewing images.

Separately, Kodak filed two suits today against Apple that claim the infringement of patents related to digital cameras and certain computer processes.

In a statement, Kodak says it remains open to negotiating an agreement with both Apple and RIM, which it claims to have tried reaching for years.

Kodak says it has licensed digital imaging technology to some 30 companies, including major players like Nokia, Samsung, LG and Motorola, and that all those companies currently pay royalties to Kodak over use of its patented technology.

Said Laura G. Quatela, Chief Intellectual Property Officer, and Vice President, Eastman Kodak Company:

“Kodak has a long history of digital imaging innovation and we have invested hundreds of millions of dollars creating our industry-leading patent portfolio. In the case of Apple and RIM, we’ve had discussions for years with both companies in an attempt to resolve this issue amicably, and we have not been able to reach a satisfactory agreement. In light of that, we are taking this action to ensure that we protect the interests of our shareholders and the existing licensees of our technology.

Our primary interest is not to disrupt the availability of any product but to obtain fair compensation for the use of our technology. There’s a basic issue of fairness that needs to be addressed. Those devices use Kodak technology, and we are merely seeking compensation for the use of our technology in their products.”

On Dec. 17, in an action involving Samsung and Kodak, an ITC Administrative Law Judge issued a ruling declaring that the Kodak patent covering color image preview (No. 6,292,218) was valid and enforceable, and that Samsung’s camera-enabled mobile devices infringed upon that Kodak patent. Samsung and Kodak have since settled.

Kodak is now seeking from the ITC a limited exclusion order preventing the importation of infringing devices marketed by Apple and RIM.

In both U.S. District Court actions against Apple, Kodak is seeking to permanently enjoin Apple from further infringement as well as unspecified damages.

In the first suit against the Cupertino tech giant in District Court, Kodak alleges infringement of two patents generally covering image preview and the processing of images of different resolutions. In the second suit, Kodak alleges infringement of patents that describe a method by which a computer program can “ask for help” from another application to carry out certain computer-oriented functions.

The patent at issue in that suit, Kodak notes, was also the subject of litigation with Sun Microsystems, in which a federal jury in 2004 found Sun’s Java software infringed; that case was settled by Sun paying Kodak for a license for the patents.

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