The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘interests’

If you’re a frequent TechCrunch reader, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with Groupon, a rapidly growing startup that offers steep discounts on local goods and services. It’s a great idea: the deals are only activated once a certain number of people sign up for them, which makes the service viral and allows businesses to quickly gain lots of new customers and move inventory (and consumers obviously save money in the process). What you may not realize, though, is that there are quite a few other companies that offer very similar deals. Now sites like 8coupons a Yipit are letting you find all of these deals in one place.

8coupons is a pretty straightforward site: it uses your IP address to figure out where you are, and then serves up both national and local deals — the same kind you’d find in your local newspaper. Now, it also features a section for Groupon-like “Deals of the Day”. The feed for San Francisco currently includes a handful of deals from Groupon, including 50% off a sightseeing tour, and there are also some deals from competitors including Townhog, Group Swoop, and Bloomspot.  8coupons says that there are actually around 30 different companies across the United States offering similar kinds of deals (Groupon is the largest), and they’re new aggregating them for 10 markets in the US, including New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Yipit is very similar, and it also allows you to get daily Email digests showcasing deals from these Groupon-like services. I actually like the UI for Yipit better (it’s much more polished), but the service is currently only serving five cities, compared to 8coupons’s ten. Yipit has some other services too, including Spotter, which is a deal-finder that learns about your interests and habits to suggest deals that will best match you. But that’s NYC only for now.

8coupons has been around for much longer than Yipit: it launched in August 2007 as a mobile coupon service.  After signing up with your phone number, you can receive regular coupons and offers from local businesses via SMS. The company has since branched beyond just SMS (though it’s still offered) to include a website full of aggregated deals. 8coupons has 150,000 users and sees around 1 million uniques a month.

For the past few days, Nokia has been trying to get everyone excited about.. something. They piqued our interests by sending out press event invites (for separate events in the UK and the US, no less), then revved the hype machine with a good ol’ fashion countdown timer.

The US announcement is still a few hours away, but they just pulled back the curtain over in the UK — and while we can’t say for certain, I’m pretty sure the talk of the event will be the same on this side of the pond. The big secret? Free turn-by-turn navigation is now available for roughly 20 million Nokia handsets around the world.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

We recently wrote about Sidebar, an app that wants to help smartphone users with the process of finding the perfect apps for their phones. Sidebar is debuting its first app and guess what? It’s not an iPhone app-it’s an Android app! While Sidebar’s Android app is built for all Google-powered Android phones, the app has been configured specially for the newly released Verizon Droid. Android users can download the app here.

Sidebar will ask you a series of demographic questions (gender, age, location) and a series of questions to determine your interests and content preferences (i.e. what type of news do you prefer, do you play online games, what types of outdoor activities are you interested in). Once Sidebar figures out a rough sketch of who you are, the app will begin to recommend mobile content to you. Content consists of videos, games, music, apps, ringtones, podcasts, promotions, news articles. The app will load no more than 12 content recommendations per day, which will last for 24 hours until the next batch of recs are sent to you. Recommendations include a short synopsis of the app or content and a screenshot or image. If you like the rec, you can save it and and download or access it later.

While the Android Market no doubt needs an improvement, its promising that nifty apps like Sidebar are coming to the Android before hopping on the iPhone train. We’ve seen Sobees and Seesmic take a similar approach. Because the iPhone market is so saturated, it could make sense for developers to perhaps gain a following from other smartphone users, and perfect their iPhone offerings in the meantime.

Sidebar seems like a compelling app for an Android user. Although the number of apps on the Android Market doesn’t yet reach the magnitude of content on Apple’s App Store, there still is a value in receiving customized recommendations for mobile content. Android’s app store features top paid and free apps, but doesn’t have an in-depth personalized recommendation feature that competes with Sidebar. And the app suggests other types of mobile content, like ringtones, videos, news and more.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Seemingly overnight, Apple has become the poster child of the responsible, Green company. (Apple recently posted all the details of its efforts; Greenpeace is now BFFs with Apple.) In fact, it’s so pro-enviroment (as if anyone is anti-environment!) that it just quit the U.S

Go here to see the original: 
Apple quits U.S. Chamber of Commerce over environmental policy

With over 85,000 apps on Apple’s App Store alone, the task to find apps tailored to your needs and likes is daunting. Who wants to sift through that? Sidebar is hoping to help smartphone users with the process of finding the perfect apps for their phones. An app in itself, Sidebar will ask you a series of demographic questions (gender, age, location) and a series of questions to determine your interests and content preferences (i.e. what type of news do you prefer, do you play online games, what types of outdoor activities are you interested in). Once Sidebar figures out a rough sketch of who you are, the app will begin to recommend mobile content to you.

Sidebar will recommend daily content to you within the app, including videos, games, music, apps, ringtones, podcasts, promotions, news articles. The app will load no more than 12 content recommendations per day, which will last for 24 hours until the next batch of recs are sent to you. Recommendations include a short synopsis of the app or content and a screenshot or image. If you like the rec, you can save it and and download or access it later.

The startup has also recruited two seasoned professional to help run operations. Patrick Kennedy, a former Sony Pictures Digital exec, joins the company as president and CEO. At Sony, Kennedy oversaw Sony’s entry into mobile entertainment and the creation of Sony Pictures Mobile. Sidebar’s new COO is Kieran Hannon, former CMO of online retailer Cooking.com and former marketing EVP at Helio.

Kennedy tells us that the app, which is free, will be available on Apple’s App Store and for other smartphones, such as the Blackberry and Android within the next three months. The service around Sidebar is compelling. While there are other ways to find recommended apps, such as the App Store itself, and websites like 16 Apps, it’s great to receive the personalized recommendations on your mobile device.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Having spent the past couple of days in Finland visiting some of the country’s most interesting startups, the omnipresent Nokia and attending the great MindTrek conference, I’m starting to get some insight into the Finnish tech scene. In short: it’s relatively tiny but surprisingly fascinating.

Apart from Dopplr, Jaiku, Floobs and some others, I wasn’t really all that familiar with the web startup scene in Finland, but I’ve met a couple of companies I’m going to feature on TechCrunch Europe over the next couple of days.

First up: Muxlim, a media company that is all about ‘enhancing the Muslim lifestyle’.

You’ve probably seen ads on TV and the Internet for Florida-based Cash4Gold, a service that buys gold from people (watches, rings, other jewelry, etc.) via the mail. You send in your stuff, the company sends you money. You have twelve days to say you don’t accept their offer and you get your gold back. The company pays shipping (both ways if necessary) plus insurance.

The service launched in early 2008 to a perfect storm of soaring gold prices and a down economy. But still, it’s more than surprising that the company raked in $90 million in revenue in the first year of operations according to a source close to the company. Profit, even after paying out cash to sellers and a huge marketing spend, was in the $30 million range.

Revenues in 2009 are on track to hit $160 million, says our source, with a similar profit margin. That implies $50 million or so in 2009 profits.

The company decided to buy a Super Bowl commercial in 2009, featuring MC Hammer (pictured in image above, sans dignity) and Ed McMahon. You can watch it here (embedding is disabled for some reason). Television, not Internet advertising, continues to be their most profitable marketing, says our source.

The business velocity attracted the venture capitalists, of course. Sometime this year the company took a sizable investment from Mangrove Capital Partners and possibly other investors as well. Mangrove is notable because they’re a European firm (and also one of the first investors in Skype).

So what’s next for Cash4Gold? Competition. A number of clones have launched in the U.S., which is driving marketing costs up. The company recently launched operations in the UK and will continue international expansion. They’re going to have to do some serious brand building and lock up key strategic partnerships if they intend to create a long term business. But in the meantime they’ve made a ton of money off a very simple but very good idea.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The second company to emerge from the TechCrunch50 DemoPit as a peoples’ choice winner is YourVersion, a discovery engine that looks to help recommend new content based on your past searches and interests. The company was among the top two recipients of TechCrunch50 tokens, which are used by conference attendees to vote on their favorite companies in the DemoPit, and shares today’s Peoples’ Choice Award with oDesk.

YourVersion launched today, and looks to help users search for content across blogs, multimedia sites, Twitter, and other social sites, updating with relevant content in real-time. Rather than force users to run the same searches multiple times or rely on a clunky bookmark system, YourVersion pays attention to your interests, and presents results accordingly. You can browse through results from all of these content sources, indicating which ones you like (or dislike) using thumbs up or thumbs down functions.

For mobile users, YourVersion offers an iPhone application, which you can download for free on the App Store here. There’s also a Firefox extension that allows users to quickly share their favorite blog posts and news articles on Facebook, Twitter, and other services.

Q: So it’s like Digg and reddit without needing user submissions? Do you have commenting?
A: Yes, this also helps prevent the editorial tone you get on those sites. We will have comments in the future.
Q: How do you get more passive discovery?
A: There’s a line between implicit and explicit. You’ve got thumb, share, etc as explicit. Below that is implicit — if people repeatedly go to the same sites again and again on the same topics, that’s a good indicator.

Video:

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Digg announced a seemingly small, but rather interesting change on its blog today: It has added a “rel=nofollow” tag to every link on the site that it doesn’t trust. What this means is that all the spammers who submit their stories to Digg, are now basically out of luck.

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.

I’m now ripping off Ron and Fez bits wholesale . In a gripping discussion today, the radio show debated the following question that’s 100 percent relevant to our interests here at CrunchGear: what invention has changed the most since its inception? The question is not “which invention has changed mankind the most,” but what invention today looks or works totally different than Version One did.

See the rest here:
What invention has changed the most from Version One to the Present Day?