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Posts Tagged ‘rotten-tomatoes’

On the heels of the report that Apple purchased chip maker Intrinsity, Apple appears to have made another purchase: Siri, a personal assistant for the iPhone. According to a pre-merger notification released by the Federal Trade Commission, and first noticed by Robert Scoble, the transaction will not be held up by any antitrust reviews. The deal was likely small from Apple’s perspective. Siri is a small startup that has raised $24 million in funding. Update: Siri board member Gary Morganthaler confirmed the transaction.

Siri brings a conversational interface to the iPhone which allows you to ask it to perform tasks for you such as find a French restaurant nearby and book a table, look up movie listings, order a taxi, or look up the phone number and address of a local business.You can read our full review of the app here.

As we’ve written in the past, Siri combines an impressive array of technologies and brings them together on the iPhone. These include natural language processing and semantic analysis. The underlying technology was developed at SRI with $200 million worth of Darpa grants. Siri was spun off to commercialize it and bring it to consumers. It’s last funding round was led by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing (a fact never disclosed before), who also is an investor in Facebook.

In a way, Siri is the “mother of all mashups.” The iPhone app is a conversational interface with Siri’s servers on the Web, which tied into nearly 30 different APIs at launch, with more on the way. These include OpenTable, TaxiMagic, MovieTikets.com, Rotten Tomatoes, WeatherBug, Yahoo Local, Yahoo Boss, StubHub, Bing, Eventful Freebase, Citysearch, AllMenus.com, Gayot, and Wolfram Alpha.

This acquisition can mean two things: Apple will add Siri as a standard app on future iPhones and iPads or it is interested in the underlying natural language processing and semantic search technology to incorporate into its apps more broadly. It second option seems more likely.

Plastic Jungle, a marketplace for gift cards, is hoping to shakeup the gift card market by allowing gift card owners to use certificates for a given store at another online retail establishment. 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.

Plastic Jungle, which just raised another $7.4 million in funding, will partner with online retailers to power a payment portal in the checkout process that will allow shoppers to use a credit from a different store to make an online payment. You enter the gift card like you would a credit card based on the unique serial number and pin code that every major gift card has. Similar to its exchange on the site, Plastic Jungle will offer you up to 92% of the unused balance on the card. So if you want to use a $100 Gap.com gift card at Target.com, you’d receive $92 from Plastic Jungle to put towards your Target.com balance.

Plastic Jungle will then transfer that $92 onto another Target.com card and re-sell the balance of the card on PlasticJungle.com. Plastic Jungle is working with both gift card processors and retailers in order to make the process be electronic and, therefore, instantaneous. And the startup will be implementing this check-out system with a major retailer that will go live with mid-summer (Plastic Jungle declined to name the retailer). And this will only be used and implemented in online transactions.

It seems like a stretch to assume that retailers would be onboard with this. Gap or Target may enjoy when nobody uses the cards though because then they get to keep the cash without handing over any goods. Helping Plastic Jungle make a more liquid market out of gift cards might not be in their best interest

But Plastic Jungle CEO Gary Briggs maintains that with more than $30 billion wasted in unspent gift cards, the ability to transfer balances will jumpstart movement of these cards and inevitably result in more e-commerce transactions and more money for retailers. The startup also just launched a partnership with Facebook, to allows users to sell unused gift cards and receive Facebook Credits.

Briggs recently told us that Plastic Jungle’s 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.

For the past few years, being the “Twitter for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK” has been a popular trend among startups. Now, we’re starting to see a shift. Several new startups are launching as the “Foursquare for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK.” And big brands are actually starting to take notice.

Miso is an iPhone app that incorporates the “check-in” idea with watching movies and television shows. So, for example, if you’re watching that NCAA Tournament this weekend, you can check-in to let your friends what you’re doing. You can then send these check-ins to Twitter, Facebook, or yes, Foursquare, checking you in there in the process (assuming you’ve also attached an actual location to your movie/TV show check-in).

But plenty of other services now are predicated around the check-in idea. What makes Miso the Foursquare for entertainment viewing, is that you earn badges for your check-ins. The idea has already attracted the interest of big-time brands, such as MGM Studios, which decided to strike a deal with Miso for its new movie Hot Tub Time Machine.

Miso has made a special badge for the movie that you’ll get if you check-in to the movie. This is similar to the deals Foursquare has been signing with big brands, such as Starbucks, which gives users a special barrista badge if they check-in at Starbucks.

Currently, there is nothing special beyond the badge you get for checking-in at the movie, but eventually the plan is that these types of check-ins could unlock special content from films, for example. There could also be sweepstakes you could enter by checking-in.

Other apps, such as Hot Potato, also incorporate the idea of checking-in to events rather than just places.

Miso is the latest app by Bazaar Labs. Their first app, FlixUp!, a sort-of Rotten Tomatoes for movie talk on Twitter, launched at our Realtime Crunchup last Fall.

You can find Miso in the App Store here. It’s a free download.

News Corp. isn’t beating around the bush with its digital assets. Rotten Tomatoes has been sold off to Flixster. Photobucket went to Ontela. IGN had 20% staff cuts, and MySpace is dealing with co-presidents.

Fox Audience Network, the advertising arm for News Corp.’s digital assets has trudged stoically through all the drama. Under President Adam Bain the entity has grown and now powers the ads not only for MySpace and other News Corp. websites, but also a fairly robust set of third party partners.

Fox Audience Network is the 8th largest advertising networks according to Comscore, with nearly 150 million U.S. unique visitors a month. And it’s a close race. AOL is first with 185 million, and Google is second with 178 million.

So what does News Corp. have planned for it’s star Audience Network group? It’s time to sell. A number of private equity groups have been looking at the deal for some time, say multiple sources, and are preparing to submit term sheets now.

Our sources are a little vague on expected price. Half of FAN’s revenue is supposedly from third parties, and half from MySpace and other News Corp. properties. We’ve heard about current revenues in the $100 million – $150 million range. One source said the price would be around 1x revenue.

We didn’t reach out to News Corp. on this story as they never actually reply, but there will eventually be an announcement on this if the deal goes through.

After nearly a year in development and $24 million in venture capital, Siri is finally ready to bring its personal assistant to the iPhone. Siri brings a conversational interface to the iPhone which allows you to ask it to perform tasks for you such as find a French restaurant nearby and book a table, look up movie listings, order a taxi, or look up the phone number and address of a local business.  The app is now live in the App Store (iTunes link; for now it is recommended only for iPhone 3Gs models because it requires more processing power, but a version tuned for older iPhones will be come out by the end of the quarter)

You simply speak into the phone with a request like, “Find something to do in San Francisco this weekend.”  It turns your speech to text and pushes your request out to an appropriate service on the Web such as Eventful or Citysearch, in this case.  It not only attempts to bring you back the appropriate information based on context, time of day, and your location, but with your permission can go ahead and make reservations or buy tickets as well.  (Read our extensive first-look coverage from last year or watch this sneak-peak video)

Siri combines an impressive array of technologies and brings them together on the iPhone.  These include natural language processing and semantic analysis.  The underlying technology was developed at SRI with $200 million worth of Darpa grants. Siri was spun off to commercialize it and bring it to consumers.  It’s last funding round was led by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing (a fact never disclosed before), who also is an investor in Facebook.

In a way, Siri is the “mother of all mashups.”  The iPhone app is a conversational interface with Siri’s servers on the Web, which tie into  nearly 30 different APIs at launch, with more on the way.  These include OpenTable, TaxiMagic, MovieTikets.com, Rotten Tomatoes, WeatherBug, Yahoo Local, Yahoo Boss, StubHub, Bing, Eventful Freebase, Citysearch, AllMenus.com, Gayot, and Wolfram Alpha.

The app is free, and Siri gets affiliate fees every time you buy something like a concert ticket or make a restaurant reservation through the app.  In addition to helping you do things, it also can be used to set reminders. Simply tell it to remind you by email to make a phone call on Thursday morning, and it can figure it out.  The app licenses its speech-to-text engine from Nuance, another SRI spin-off. Android and Blackberry versions are also in the works.

It’s been six years to the day that Facebook launched, and the company’s massive growth is showing no signs of slowing down. Minutes ago, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a note to the site’s blog celebrating the milestone. In it, he says that Facebook will cross the 400 million user mark this week. And it’s been less than five months since the social network hit 300 million.

To celebrate, the company is holding its own version of a party — it’s Hackathon time. That means all of the company’s engineers are about to embark on all night coding sessions. Previous Hackathons have given birth to things like Facebook Video and its new HipHop PHP converter. Zuckerberg also says that we’ll be seeing some new product launches tonight (we’ll be covering them as soon as each goes live).

In light of the event, here’s a collection of screenshots of Facebook profiles and homepages from the last few years (Facebook actually put most of this gallery together in honor of its fifth birthday, but it’s always fun to look back at how far the site has come). Also note that the last screenshot in the timeline has its days numberd — Facebook is currently rolling out another redesign.

A lot has changed, much of it for the better. But I still miss the glory days when a poke took up a quarter of my screen.

News Corp is unloading more of its digital assets. This time it’s the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, which is being acquired by startup Flixster, which has the most popular movie app for the iPhone and other mobile devices. The purchase price was not disclosed, but it was at least in part a stock transaction. News Corp now owns a minority stake in Flixster, which has only raised a total of $7 million in venture capital.

Flixster already shows Rotten Tomato reviews and ratings within its iPhone app (you can contrast the critics’ reviews from Rotten tomatoes with Flixter user reviews). Putting the two companies together certainly strengthens Flixter. The combined reach of both is 30 million unique visitors a month across all different platforms, according to the companies. Just looking at their websites, Flixster has 10 million monthly global unique visitors versus 7.5 million for Rotten Tomatoes (see chart below).

In October, News Corp sold off Photobucket to Ontela for $60 million. Expect it to divest more of its digital businesses this year.

Photo credit: Flickr/[177].

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Software giant EMC starting the New Year with another acquisition. EMC is acquiring Archer Technologies, a company that develops governance, risk and compliance software. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2010.

Archer Techonologies’ software will be folded into EMC’s Security Division. The company has six million licensed users of its software and boats and impressive client list that includes 25 of the Fortune 100. The software tracks the lifecycle of corporate policies and objectives, analyzes and manages business risks, and compliance. EMC says that Archer’s technology will help its customers manage risk in their IT infrastructure.

EMC has made quite a few acquisitions in 2009; buying SourceLabs, FastScale Technology, Data Domain, Configuresoft and Varonis Systems. It looks like the purse strings are opening up again this year.

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At our Realtime CrunchUp in November, Bazaar Labs showed off their iPhone application Flixup, which scans Twitter to create aggregate scores for movies. Tonight, just in time for the busy Christmas movie-going season, they’re launching the website for the service.

The website works just like the app. The main page shows the “Top Movies” based on the amount of talk on Twitter. For example, right now Avatar leads the pack by far. Flixup’s Buzz meter also shows if the talk about the movie is positive (green), neutral (yellow), or negative (red). Avatar is not only being talked about the most, but it’s also very clearly green, which is impressive (it’s definitely worth seeing if you missed our screening of last week).

And just like the iPhone app, Flixup works better if you sign in with your Twitter account (via OAuth). If you’re signed in, when you click on a movie title, you can see the conversations about the movie on Twitter that your contacts are having. You can also click to see all the conversations on Twitter about the movie. And you can rate the movie (on a 1 to 5 scale) or say if you’re interested in seeing it or not and tweet all that out with the click of a button.

On the individual movie pages you can also get additional details about the film and see its trailer. And Flixup features its Rotten Tomatoes score as well. This is appropriate since when the iPhone app was previewed, we called it the “Rotten Tomatoes for Twitter movie talk.”

You can find Flixup’s free iPhone application in the App Store here.

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Rotten Tomatoes is a great site because it takes all the movie reviews from around the web and condenses them into an easy-to-understand aggregate score. But let’s be honest: Most movie reviewers suck. Why not instead rely on people in your social circle to recommend movies to you? That’s the idea behind FlixUp.

This new iPhone app unveiled at our Realtime CrunchUp event in San Francisco today essentially scans Twitter for what people are saying about a movie and shows you a rating based on that. It can return a general score from across Twitter, or the tweets about the movie from people you follow on Twitter.

But the key is the filtration. Plenty of people say things about movies on Twitter that are worthless, but FlixUp has what it believes to be the perfect algorithm to sort out the useful movie tweets from the not useful ones. They call it the “Twitter Noise Assassin.” And the results seem solid for how the collective views the film.

It’s been said that early buzz on services like Twitter can now make or break a movie, so a service like Flixup is the next logical step. They not only show if people are liking it or not liking it, but you can see how much people are talking about it.

The company behind FlixUp, Bazaarlabs, also has plans to extend this idea to other entertainment categories beyond movies. And eventually they plan to use more than Twitter as their data source, such as Facebook.

The app should be out in a couple of weeks.

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