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Posts Tagged ‘montreal’

Does the world need more than one Twitter? How about 10,000 of them? That is how many sites are running on the hosted version of StatusNet, which went into private beta at our Realtime CrunchUp last November. Today, StatusNet is opening up its hosted service to all comers in a public beta.

You can think about StatusNet as the WordPress of microblogging. StatusNet is open-source software which can either be downloaded and run on your own enterprise servers or now on StatusNet’s hosted servers. Basic service is free, with plans to charge for premium levels down the line. The premium versions will be ad-free, support unlimited users, larger file sizes, your own domain and design, Facebook and Twitter integration, and XMPP feeds.

CEO Evan Prodromou describes the various ways StatusNet can be used: as an open-source microblogging server akin to WordPress, as the basis for an online community “(ning.com for microblogging); for enterprise (Open Source Yammer), or for a single user to own their social media presence (your own ping.fm).” One of the cooler features of StatusNet is OStatus, which lets you follow people on different social networks all from within your hosted microblogging enevironment.

The largest site hosted on StatusNet is the company’s own identi.ca, but StatusNet will also be hosting microblogging sites for ABC News, Shit My Dad Says (both not live yet at the time of this posting), the Twit Army, Kirsty Ally’s weight loss community Phitter, Germany’s Bleeper, and Today’s Mama. All together, there are more than 1 million registered users across all 10,000 StatusNet sites.

Shit My Dad Says has 1.2 million followers on Twitter and a TV pilot in the works starring William Shatner. He will use StatusNet to push his updates to Twitter while controlling the advertising. ABC News plans to use StatusNet as a central dashboard to push out its headlines and updates to different social networks.

StausNet is based in Montreal and raised $1 million in seed capital last year.

We’ve written about Plancast, a “Foursquare For The Future,” that essentially broadcasts your plans to your online social circle. We’re big fans of the startup, which just raised seed funding from an impressive group of investors. Startup Go Tribal is rolling out a different take on the social planning application, launching a site for a more targeted audience: women.

Go Tribal has simple ambitions. The site basically aims to help women answer the question, “who’s down to go out?” Users can sign set up an account and broadcast message to their friends to see who is down for going out. Of course, you can tap into your social graph via Facebook Connect, Gmail and Twitter, but all of the planning needs to take place on Go Tribal’s site and each participant needs to sign up for an account to start “planning.” Once you see which friends are available, you can vote on, discuss, and finalize your plans. In terms of privacy, there are three levels of privacy for plans. You can opt to go public with your plans, private (plans are only visible to your Go Tribal friends) or locked (plans are only visible to the people invited to the plan).

Go Tribal is oriented towards helping member form informal plans, like grabbing a impromptu dinner with friends. Shruti Challa, CEO and co-founder of Go Tribal, says the service aims to eliminate planning via text, email or Facebook. But one of the virtues of these mediums and networks is that all three can be easily accessible from your mobile device. Although Go Tribal doesn’t have a mobile app available, the startup offers SMS notifications so that you can stay up-to-date with any changes to a plan.

So how does the startup make money? Well, because Go Tribal has a targeted audience, it can offer targeted advertising to restaurants, bars and other local establishments. Challa says that the site is also in the process of incorporating deals at certain restaurants and bars.

It should be interesting to see if Go Tribal can take off. The conventional behavior for people to make casual plans usually takes place over email, Facebook or SMS. It may be tough for the startup to change that natural behavior right away, but with an attractive interface and the proper partnerships (I’m thinking a Yelp or CitySearch partnership), the site could find a loyal following.

You may remember Akoha, a startup which launched at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference which uses “mission cards” that friends pass to each other along with a mission ( i.e. give someone a book or buy someone a meal.) The idea is that users will socialize their missions, using your social graph to compete against friends and determine how your missions performed. Akoha has been played in more than 65 countries since the company’s launch.

Today, Akoha is launching an free iPhone app and a redesign of its site. Akoha’s iPhone app. With the new app, Akoha has increased the number of missions that can be played. A now Akoha is rewarding players for completed missions with badges, similar to Foursquare’s badge model. Akoha is also allowing users to socialize missions by integrating with Twitter to allow users to broadcast completed tasks.

Akoha was founded by Austin Hill and Alex Eberts, who together co-founded Zero-Knowledge Systems (now Rdadialpoint) in 1997. In 2008, the startup received $1.9 million in funding from David Chamandy (co-founder, Lavalife), Ron Dembo (founder, Zerofootprint.net), film producer Jake Eberts (Chariots of Fire, Ghandi), and seed fund Montreal Start Up.

Montreal-based StatusNet, the company behind the open-source microblogging service identi.ca, is closing an $875,000 seed round today. Investors include Montreal Startup, iNovia Capital, Fotolia co-founder Oleg Tscheltzoff, and Xavier Niel. The startup, which changed its name a few weeks ago from Control Yourself, raised a previous seed round of $150,000 from Montreal Startup in January, 2009.

StatusNet wants to become the WordPress of microblogging. It created an open-source microblogging software platform (formerly called laconi.ca, now called status.net) which anyone can download and run on their own servers. Now, it is working on a hosted version of Status.net, currently in private beta. (We have 50 invites for anyone who includes the invitation code “TC09″ on the signup page).

The company recently hired Brion Vibber, the former CTO of Wikipedia, as its senior software architect. It also hired the former community manager from Creative Commons, Jon Phillips.

The bet here is that just as millions of people run their own blogs, millions of people and companies will want to run their own microblogs as well. Offering a microblogging platform as a hosted service will allow StatusNet to pursue a strategy similar to WordPress.com. It will offer the basic service for free, and then charge power-users for extras. Note that Wordpress is itself pursuing this strategy with P2 (which used to be called Prologue), as are other startups such as Shout’em.

The real market, however, is likely to be with businesses that want to run their own private Yammer-like micro-messaging service. The fact that the software is open-source is appealing to many CTOs. Already Motorola, SAP, and Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) are testing out the private beta. StatusNet plans to charge corporations about $1 per user for basic service, just like Yammer.

Currently, Status.net is only available as a download (which can be run behind a firewall). There are about 2,000 public microblogging sites in total running on status.net right now, with somewhere between 200,000 to 300,000 active users. The biggest site running on status.net is the Twitter clone identi.ca, which the StatusNet itself runs as a way to demonstrate its technology. It has only about 80,000 active users.

As I pointed out more than a year ago, identi.ca is never going to rival Twitter. But StatusNet is not trying to do that. Any StatusNet microblogging service can act as a Twitter client and send out messages to Twitter as well.

The idea of a federated, open-source microblogging platform is powerful because of its distributed nature. In fact, Twitter might want to think about doing something similar, and sell Twitter server software to corporations.

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Pretend, for a moment, that you’re one of the creative minds at the iPhone app development house, Smule; you and your team have had a series of back-to-back successes, and your audience has come to expect certain things of you; they expect the utmost highest design quality, for it to be music-related, and — perhaps worst of all — some level of maturity. When expectations are high and narrow in focus, how are you supposed to unleash your creativity?

If you’re Smule, you go and establish a second company as your first company’s evil twin. Then you release an application involving zombies in bikinis.

If you’re a computer science graduate a year out of college, there probably isn’t a celebrity you’d be more excited about knowing than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. So when he takes a minute to record a video with you to prove to your younger brother’s friends that you actually got a job at the company, it’s something you are pretty proud of. And the fact that Zuckerberg does this kind of thing is one of the reasons why Facebook wins. Watch the whole video with Dan Muriello here.

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

Well, the teaser site launched a week ago and we’ve known about the sequel for a long time, but today, Ubisoft “officially” announced Assassin’s Creed 2 . And it’s coming from Montreal for a holiday 2009 launch

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Ubisoft officially announces Assassin’s Creed 2, dated for holiday 2009