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Posts Tagged ‘product-manager’

For much of the past year, the major criticism of Foursquare was that it only worked in a few select cities in the U.S. and was basically iPhone-only. In the past few months, both Foursquare itself and a growing core of third-party developers have changed that. Today brings yet another expansion in the Foursquare universe with the beta launch of a Windows Mobile app.

To be clear, this app is only meant for touch screen Windows phones, and you need to be running either Windows Mobile 6.1 or 6.5. But if you have those, you can submit your email address here to be let into the beta. Once they kick the tires in beta for a bit, the plan is to submit the app to the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Windows Mobile Sr. Product Manager Anand Iyer writes today on his personal blog. Iyer has been working on this project on the side for a few months now, and made the app along with the help of development house Touchality.

This isn’t (yet) an officially sanctioned Foursquare app, but Iyer and crew have been working with the Foursquare team since before the public APIs were made available to get it done. Foursquare itself made its iPhone app and the just-launched BlackBerry app, but the Android app and the WebOS app (that works on the Palm Pre) were also done by a team outside the company. This addition of a Windows Mobile app leaves Symbian as the only major mobile OS with a native client, but work is also being done on that front. Foursquare also offers a limited mobile web version.

Foursquare itself is hard at work on a complete revamping of their main website. While it currently serves as a way to view some of your location data, you can’t do things such as check-in from the site. For that, I’d recommend using the excellent FoursquareX application. Unfortunately, that is Mac-only for now.

While Apple is being lamented here and there for not supporting Flash on its shiny new iPad – boy does Cupertino have a strong dislike for the platform – Adobe has already responded to the news on the official Flash Platform blog.

The blog post, unambiguously titled “Building iPad Applications with Flash”, is mostly just to remind people of the company’s Packager for iPhone product, which will enable developers to make Flash apps function on the iPhone / iPod Touch through a work-around whereby Flash apps can be easily converted into iPhone apps using Creative Suite 5 (CS5).

We’ve written before that this could turn 2010 into the year when approximately 2 million Flash developers could potentially start cooking up stuff for the iPhone en masse. You can now add the iPad to that, it seems.

The company notes:

We announced the Packager for iPhone at MAX 2009 which will allow Flash developers to create native iPhone applications and will be available in the upcoming version of Flash Pro CS5. This technology enables developers to create applications for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad (though applications will not initially take direct advantage of iPad’s new screen resolution). It is our intent to make it possible for Flash developers to build applications that can take advantage of the increased screen size and resolution of the iPad.

For that latter part, Adobe points to this article by Christian Cantrell, Product Manager and Application Developer on the AIR team. The article goes in depth about how developers can build apps using Flash with authoring with multiple screen sizes and resolutions in mind.

You won’t be able to fire up, say, Hulu through your browser on the iPhone or iPad any time soon, but Adobe appears determined to show the world that Flash has its place on Apple’s products one way or the other.

And it’s also sending a message to Flash developers that they can and should stick to the platform rather than look at other ways to join the App Store goldrush.

If you’re on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We’ve added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks, including three jobs here at TechCrunch. Here’s a quick sample:

• Conferences & Events Producer
  TechCrunch – Palo Alto, CA

• Software Engineer
  uvLayer – San Francisco, CA

• Network Engineer
  Six Apart – San Francisco, CA

• Senior Online Product Manager
  MOO – London

• Build Release Engineer
  Kakai, Inc. – Santa Clara, CA

Also, don’t forget that we’re looking for a Conferences & Events Producer, Account Executive and CrunchBase interns here at TechCrunch!

For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard.

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Website monitoring service InternetVista vigorously measured the uptime and response time of seven of the most popular Internet retail websites from Monday morning November 24 until midnight November 28, to see how the online outlets would cope with the Black Friday madness, traditionally one of the busiest shopping periods in the United States both on the Web as in meat space.

InternetVista pinged Amazon.com, Apple.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Dell.com, Target.com, ToysRus.com and Walmart.com every minute for the entire workweek from multiple datacenters located around the world, in order to find how well the websites were handling the influx of visitors looking for great bargains. Turns out all of them managed to stay online the whole time, with the exception of a brief period of downtime that was registered for the Toys”R”Us website, although notably most of the websites clearly suffered from slower response times at busy times.

The report – embedded below – shows that the uptime of six out of seven online retail websites was 100% for the entire period, with only Toysrus.com experiencing downtime for 5 minutes (meaning the site still registered 99.9% uptime in total).

Perhaps not so surprisingly, practically all of the measured online retail websites suffered from slower response times – particularly on Friday afternoon and evening – with the exception of computer manufacturers Dell and Apple, whose websites actually loaded faster at the end than at the beginning of the week.

On average, Walmart.com scored best with an average response time of 0.512 seconds, just beating Apple.com, which came in second with an average loading time of 0.513 seconds. Dell.com’s performance stood out as the poorest with an average load time of 2.75 seconds, at one point even taking nearly 50 seconds (!) to load in its entirety.

Have you shopped at any of the measured websites last week? Did you notice any slowness?

InternetVista – Uptime of Online Retailers during Black Friday –

InternetVista – Online retailers on Black Friday – report –

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MySpace seems to be on a bit of a hiring spree. Over the past few months the social network hired Mark Rosenbaum as Chief Financial Officer, Alex Maghen as CTO (he was formerly CTO of MySpace Music), former AOL and Tsavo exec Mike Macadaan as VP Product, and former Facebook Director Katie Geminder as SVP of User Experience and Design. Now MySpace has recruited a product manager from LinkedIn, Christina Wodtke, to be the general manager of social.

Wodtke was previously a Principal Product Manager at LinkedIn and ran the activity stream (which recently got a little Twitter-happy), communication products, and the events application. She also built the search and marketplace design team at Yahoo, and helped to redesign search, shopping and local products. Wodtke will fall under the purview of chief product officer Jason Hirschhorn.

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Don’t you sometimes wish you had a map of every place you’ve ever been? Well, if the concept of such detailed self-tracking doesn’t creep you out, you can now do that with Google Latitude, the mobile app that lets you broadcast your location to your friends.

Google Latitude just turned on Location History as a new feature in Google Latitude. Whenever Google Latitude is on, it records your location, and you can go back to see where you’ve been. To mitigate some of the obvious privacy issues this brings up, only you can see your location history, not your friends. And you can delete any location from your history, like that Dunkin Donuts you tried to stick up last night when you had the munchies.

Another new feature is location alerts. You can now get an alert anytime a friend of yours who allows you to see their location on Google Latitude is nearby. To cut down on constant alerts every time you go to the office or home, it tries to learn where you go every day, and only gives you an alert when you are in a place it deems to be “unusual.” In order for the alerts to work, your location history needs to be enabled, so the two features go hand in hand.

Geo streams such as the ones produced by Google Latitude are becoming increasingly common. In fact, we are devoting an entire panel to Geo Stream sat eour Realtime CrunchUp on November 20. Steve Lee, the group product manager for Google Latitude, will be on that panel.

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We grabbed Google’s Marissa Mayer backstage just after her launch of Fast Flip. Michael asked her about that name change, Google’s on going innovation with news online, and whether any big players did not want Google using their content with this new product.

Her product manager was also on camera. Mike’s question to him? Rate Mayer as a boss on a scale of one to ten. It’s just not TC50 until we get someone in trouble with his or her boss.

The video is on the jump.

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

Yext, a popular local business search engine that for some reason managed to stay under the radar so far, is launching a new product dubbed Yext Calls at the TechCrunch50 event today that’s bound to raise some eyebrows.

Local businesses can use the Yext Calls software to process incoming phone calls and organize them based on semantic analysis of what was said during the conversation, providing them with an easy way of searching or browsing through them at any point. Based on keywords that occurred in the call, the software can detect that e.g. price estimates were requested for a car repair or which part of what type of vehicle the caller was having problems with exactly.

The program can even automatically detect if any appointments were made during the conversation, giving the local business owner or representative an easy way of scheduling their calendar based on relevant keywords that were used during the call.

Ultimately the analysis of the phone calls helps Yext make their flagship product, the local business search engine which they claim gets visited by over a million users a month, more detailed for visitors and at the same time more effective for listed companies. Basically the data that gets drawn from the phone calls analysis helps business owners get more qualified leads via the search engine. The way this works is that a local business owner can indicate that a call was relevant to his core business by giving it ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’, which in turn leads Yext to better decide if they want to show the company in the results when a specific keyword gets used in a search or not.

I personally think this is a great way for Yext to automate the improvement of their search engine’s accuracy while at the same time providing huge direct and indirect benefits for local business owners. It also helps that the service is basically free and listed customers only pay per call received.

Expert panel Q&A:

Q – Roelof Botha: who transcribes the phone call?

A: the answer is: we leverage several core platforms, totally automated. The business answers the phone calls.

Q – Roelof Botha: are you helping local business with their SEA/SEM campaigns too?

A: our partner network takes care of that side of the equation.

Q – Paul Graham: you already have an existing business that’s making a lot of money?

A: Yes, $20 million in revenue and growing fast. But we are a startup, expanding into a new territory: pay-per-action phone calls. We only charge for actions that are relevant to the local business owner.

Q – Roelof Botha: how do you convince business owners of your value proposition?

A: it’s an end-to-end solution for them to advertise smarter on the Web.

Q – Marc Andreessen: is there adverse selection? are the merchants who are most likely to want phone calls least likely to get the web to get them?

A: We found most merchants overall prefer to receive phone calls.

Q – Paul Graham: why local business, and not national ones?

A: Some are suited for that, but mostly if they work with local dealerships for example. We focused on Yellow Pages categories.

Q – Paul Graham: What’s the biggest of the 12 categories you support now?

A: Health and fitness.

Video:

Pictures:

Extra coverage:
TC50: Yext transcribes, searches phone calls for local businesses VentureBeat.

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The web is loaded with sites offering listings and reviews for local services, with mainstays like Yelp and Craigslist leading the pack. But when it comes to actually executing a transaction with one of these service providers — establishing details like establishing a price and timing — most people still turn to their phone books to call the service. RedBeacon is a new service making its public debut today at TechCrunch50 that further streamlines this process by bringing the OpenTable model of online transactions to much broader spectrum of services.

Using the site will be easy for anyone who has used a local review service like Yelp. Simply type whatever service you’re looking for (be it plumber, gardener, or hair stylist), and the site will present a list of recommended service providers in your area. RedBeacon also employes natural language processing so it can figure out exactly what you’re looking for (for example, “Cupcake maker” would search for any bakers in the area). The site will then present a list of proviles for each match, featuring reviews and comments from other users, basic information like their hours, and star reviews imported from Yelp.

To figure out exactly how much a given service will cost, you first detail what you’re looking for and the site begins an auction among the matching providers, where each bids on how much their fee will be. Once you’ve picked a provider, you can schedule your time online, without having to ever pick up the phone.

The site also has a feature that allows you to quickly find workers for projects that don’t require any training. Say, for example, you needed someone to hand out 500 cupcakes at TechCrunch50. RedBeacon would let you post a job, and then would automatically ping RedBeacon members in your vicinity to see who was available. They could then respond with a price quote, as well as an ETA for when they’d be able to perform the task.

The site is launching today in a limited beta, inviting local services to fill in their profiles. And in two weeks, it will launch to the public, allowing anyone to start hiring local providers.

Q: How do you get over the chicken and the egg problem?
A: We’re launching two weeks early to invite providers to join before opening to the public. Also don’t need to necessarily have lots of providers, just need some in each category.

Q: How do you reduce friction
A: Can receive Email or text message notification. Just enter the time and hit submit. It’s also complete free for them to respond to jobs and create a profile.

Q: ServiceMagic seems to be the same idea.
A: Started in the mid 90’s, started by IAC. They charge service providers lots of money to sign up initially, and charge every time they receive a lead, even if they don’t win.

Q: Is there a class of job you anticipate being especially popular?
A: In the Bay Area, household services (handymen, maids, gardeners). But never know how people are going to use your products.

Q: Have you thought about focusing on specific verticals?
A: Yes. We’re reaching out to strategic verticals (less than five). But we’ll support virtually any occupation.

Video:

Pictures:

Other Coverage:
TC50: Need someone to mow your lawn? Redbeacon creates a market for local services. VentureBeat.

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

If you’re on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We’ve added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks. Here’s a quick sample:

• Product Designer
  TokBox, Inc. - San Francisco, CA

• VP, Products
  TokBox, Inc. - San Francisco, CA

• Product Manager
  Ustream - Mountain View, CA

• Research Scientist
  Orange Labs San Francisco (France Telecom R&D) - San Francisco, CA

• Sales Account Manager
  Glu Mobile Inc. - San Mateo, CA

For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard.

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