The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘social-networks’

The last of the four location based social networks I had a chance speak with at  SXSW Interactive 2010 was actually one of the early services into the space. You may remember seeing  Loopt on one of the many iPhone television commercials to dominate the airwaves in the last year or so. Loopt’s original  broadcast model was a bit different than the more pervasive  check in model we see trending nowadays, but the company’s soft-spoken and articulate Co-Founder/CEO Sam Altman was quick to note that Loopt actually offers both broadcast and  check in methods for communication with friends.

The rest is here:
SXSWi 2010: Q&A with Loopt Co-Founder/CEO Sam Altman – Pt 1

Is this the greatest photo in the world? Apparently so! It’s a 26-gigapixel (!), 220-degree panorama of Paris. If it’s not the greatest photo in the world, then, according to its photographers, then it’s certainly the largest

Go here to see the original:
Is this the greatest photo ever?

Pixelpipe, the service that lets you syndicate text, audio, video and image files to 120 different social networks, blogs and sites, is adding geolocation functionality to its site with a Foursquare integration. The true virtue of Pixelpipe’s service is the fact that it lets you publish all types of files to various social networks and sites from a centralized place. And the startup offers its service on mobile devices, including a nifty Android app, as well.

Using Foursquare’s API, Pixelpipe now allows you to add check-in to a location with a link to media captured at the venue, which is hosted on your Pixelpipe Page. And you can check-in to a location with media (text, photo, video, audio or a file) with Pixelpipe’s Android app. Pixelpipe will present a list of venues to a user. The number after the venue represents the number of recent check-insFor example, if you are at SXSW, you can record an audio clip or video and post the media long with your check-in to the Austin Convention Center. The link will lead vistors back to your Pixelpipe landing page.

Sort of like a Ping.fm for media, Pixelpipe automatically distributes any new audio files, images, or videos to your profiles on social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed. You can choose to group these services by tags, so you can be more selective about where you’d like to to post the content. Pixelpipe’s CEO Brett Butterfield tells me that Brightkite and possible Gowalla integration will be rolled out in the future.

As the geolocation wars heat up, it seems like web applications and mobile apps, both new and old, are getting into the location game. Hot Potato, SimpleGeo and new startups StickyBits and Social Great have hooked up their applications with Foursquare. And Foursquare competitor Gowalla upped the ante with a new release.

Aol launched Lifestream, a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say Aol. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone product at lifestream.aol.com.

Like Friendfeed, Lifestream aggregates a number of third party social networks – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc., so if you follow a Lifestream user you’ll see all of the content that user publishes on those networks, and Lifestream automatically pulls in content from people you already follow on those various social networks, so you don’t have to create yet another new friend list. Lifestream isn’t yet integrated with Google Buzz, but Aol says it may be coming soon.

Users can filter out content from specific networks if they like, on a per user or broad basis. A way to think about this – “noise cancellation for social networks.”

Lifestream also lets users publish back to social networks. Status updates posted to Lifestream can be posted back to Facebook, Myspace and/or Twitter. Lifestream also optionally notes your location in your status updates via GPS on mobile devices, or you can manually add it instead.

That’s not it though. Users can sign in to Lifestream using their Facebook account via Facebook Connect, making it unnecessary to remember separate account and credentials for the site.

You also have a variety of choices in how you use Lifestream. You can access it via the website, an AIR application, or via iPhone and Android applications. As I said above, the mobile applications are particularly useful because they auto-note your location for easy check-ins, and you can post pictures you take from the phone.

That mobile version of the product is what excites me most. You can see where your friends are checking into on, say, Foursquare, click through to a place page and then go there yourself and check in. And Lifestream allows you to follow places just like people, so you can see whenever someone checks in to your local cafe or bar. That ability to follow places is probably the single best reason to use Lifestream.

The Lifestream product is simple, intuitive and really, really useful. Frankly it’s what Google Buzz should have been – both an independent social network on its own, but very deep integration into all of the other social networks you are likely to use daily. It’s nice to see actual innovation coming out of Aol.

Google just launched a new feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search which could take local shopping search startup Milo out at the knees. Whenever you do a Google product search from a mobile phone, blue dots will appear next to items which are in-stock at nearby stores. The image at right is from a search I just did for “HDTVs.”  The blue dots are subtle, but they certainly distinguish those results. Google has partnerships with Best Buy, Sears, Williams-http://www.crunchbase.com/widgetSonoma, Pottery Barn, and West Elm to show local inventory, and it is inviting other merchants to apply to participate as well. Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra previewed the local product search last December, but it is now live.

Highlighting local inventory in product search results is exactly what Milo does, although it works on the Web as well as mobile. Milo will have to try to keep one step ahead of Google now that its business has been targeted as a feature of Google Product search.

The good news for Milo is that nobody really uses Google Product Search. It is not even highlighted as one of the products on the Google iPhone app, for instance. Maybe that will change, now that it has a geo-enabled set of results.

When you are looking for stuff to buy, it always helps to know where you can buy an item nearby. The vast majority of people who shop on the Web actually just use it for research, and then go local to buy.

Milo CEO Ted Dziuba responds via a Tweet:

Google Product Search has availability for 5 retailers vs. Milo’s 49. Super cool web service, bro.

How long before Google closes that gap?

Google Product Search has availability for 5 retailers vs. Milo’s 49. Super cool web service, bro.

Shout’em today adds a major new feature to its service which could well super-charge it into a whole different place: location. The white label service lets you build a Twitter-like social network, but it now leverages Foursquare’s API and Twitter’s GeoAPI.

The mobile-optimised social networks can be private, location-based and used by any niche group. So far Shout’em has apps for java phones, the iPhone, android. They are now adding a Blackberry app to that roster. All will be leveraging the location feature. In addition Shout’em is throwing in some augmented reality magic into its iPhone app. The Android app is still in progress.

Last week busuu.com closed their first funding round from an undisclosed Austrian serial angel investor. The total sum is also not clear, but appears to be just below €500,000.

Busuu.com is a two year old, online community based language learning startup, launched out of Spain, founded by non-Spaniards, Bernhard Niesner (Austria) and Adrian Hilti (Switzerland).

hi5, one of the world’s most popular social networks, has been actively remodeling its site to cater to the gaming industry. Last fall, the social network launched a totally revamped site that places a much stronger emphasis on games and virtual currency, along with a new avatar system. Today, the company is furthering this strategy with the acquisition of social gaming developer Big Six. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. See the full release below.

Big Six’s founders, Kevin Gliner, Monty Kerr and Chad Hansing, will join the hi5 management team. Hi5 says the deal will boost the social networks efforts in developing in commerce platforms and payment processing offerings. Right now, gaming is a central part of hi5’s strategy for growth so it makes sens for the social network to acquire innovative technologies and talent. The games section of hi5’s site accounts for around 1/3 of the site’s traffic, and direct user payments through the game already account for 15% of hi5’s revenue.

Apart from the currency and payments technology, Big Six’s social gaming platform will also become part of hi5. With the massive success of Zynga and Playfish, it makes sense that hi5 would try to create a social network that centers around gaming itself. hi5 has over 60 million members, which is a far cry from Facebook’s 400 million users.

In December, hi5 brought on a new president, gaming industry veteran, Alex St. John, to help lead the social network’s efforts. Earlier in the year, the company suffered from layoffs and also hired a new CEO, Bill Gossman.

hi5, the largest social entertainment site focused on gaming, today announced the acquisition of social gaming company Big Six. The Austin-based company was founded by gaming veterans Kevin Gliner, Monty Kerr and Chad Hansing, all of whom will join the hi5 management team, as announced separately today.

The deal enhances hi5’s growing leadership in commerce for virtual goods and games. Building on hi5’s current commerce platform, which includes a global virtual currency called hi5 Coins, support for over 60 payment methods worldwide, and new advertising-based transactional capabilities – the Big Six acquisition brings significant new technology and software platforms in the areas of payment processing, fraud detection and conversion optimization. In addition to its proprietary commerce platform, Big Six also designed a social gaming platform which will become part of the core hi5 site.

“The Big Six team and technology are a perfect complement to what we have already developed at hi5,” said Bill Gossman, CEO of hi5. “Over the last two years, we have made a substantial investment in building out the industry’s most robust commerce infrastructure for virtual goods and gaming and this acquisition will considerably augment both our commerce platform and domain expertise.”

“We are excited to be joining a company that shares our philosophy and vision for how social gaming will evolve,” said Kevin Gliner, co-founder and CEO, Big Six. “This deal is a perfect match because it enables us to accelerate our go-to-market plans by leveraging hi5’s huge global audience.”

A bill introduced today in the Senate by Democrat John Kerry and Republican Richard Lugar proposes a new type of visa for immigrants who create startups and jobs in the U.S. A similar proposal is part of an immigration reform bill in the House. The Startup Visa has been controversial and will no doubt draw fire from anti-immigrant forces and xenophobes. But if we are going to be giving away visas, giving them to people who will help build the U.S. economy and create jobs is hard to argue against.

The Startup Visa Act of 2010 would create a two year visa for immigrant entrepreneurs who are able to raise a minimum of $250,000, with $100,000 coming from a qualified U.S. angel or venture investor. After two years, if the immigrant entrepreneur is able to create five or more jobs (not including their children or spouse), attract an additional $1 million in investment, or produce $1 million in revenues, he or she will become a legal resident.

The bill would carve out a new “EB-6″ class of visas from the existing “EB-5″ class of visas which has a higher threshold for becoming a legal resident. So it’s not really that radical. The EB-5 requires immigrants to invest at least $1 million in the U.S. and employ ten people.

The Startup Visa sends the right message to prospective immigrants: create jobs, get a green card. A group of 160 venture capitalists and angel investors support the bill, including Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Fred Wilson, Dave McClure, Ron Conway, Mike Maples, Reid Hoffman, Chris Sacca, Jeff Clavier, Bijan Sabet, Josh Kopelman, and Chris Dixon. If you agree that the Startup Visa is a good idea, you can find ways to support it here and here.

KODA.us, a social recruitment service for employers to recruit young professionals, has received an additional $1.5 million injection of private angel funding.

Back in August last year it raised $1 million in angel funding on top of an existing $2 million, so it now has, you guessed it, $4.5m in capital.

KODA wants to bring social networking and job recruiting together into one unified service, claiming that it is “more professional than Facebook but more personal than LinkedIn”. The jury is out on whether this market space actually exists.

Job seekers get to broaden their CVs with personal attributes and relevant life experience, with the theory being that employers will get more out of it. On the other side, employers themselves get to portray job openings with more “branding” to get across their corporate culture. Sounds like traditional “advertising” to me.

And it must be said, LinkedIn, XING and other professional social networks seem to be doing just fine at getting peole jobs.

Perhaps we are in the midst of a generational shift in how CVs work? Leave your comments below.