Posts Tagged ‘tool’
Cascaad Personalizes Your News Stream In Real Time, Raises Funding
Cascaad, which is billed both as an ‘awareness engine’ and a ’smart social media browser’ by the Italian startup behind the service, aims to make the realtime streams you tap into more about you.
Essentially, the tool is designed to filter the never-ending incoming message stream from your friends and millions of others by continuously distilling which part of the chatter is about stories, things and places that match your specific interests, context and social affinities.
Here’s how the service, currently only available as a beta iPhone app (iTunes link), gets pitched in their own words:
The goal is to potentiate your extended awareness of what is happening right now of personal relevance in your world. It is basically a very sophisticated realtime networked search, discovery and filter engine that distills automatically what both your friends and millions of other people are paying attention to on Twitter and other social platforms into the attention-grabbing stories, things and places that match personal interests and social affinities.
Cascaad will soon be releasing a full-fledged Web-based experience, and the company is also working on integrating new data sources and capabilities, including location awareness, as well as extending the platform’s reach. Last week, Cascaad released its first beta of what it calls the SuperTweet API, which it says will allow third-party Twitter applications to “add smart contextual information and monetization [...], including semantic entity markup, nonintrusive in-text affiliate commerce links, related content [and] social relevance scores”.
The startup was founded in 2008 by Erik Lumer (PhD Stanford, formerly at Xerox Parc and founder and ex-CEO of Internet TV startup Babelgum). The company’s R&D unit is based in Milan, employs 8 people and will be opening an office in Silicon Valley some time this quarter.
Cascaad has raised close to $2 million in financing over two rounds (one in November 2009, and one last month) from Italian VC firm Innogest Capital.
Another venture-backed startup doing similar things is Israel-based my6sense.
Wordle In Trademark Trouble, Seeks Legal Advice
I have much love for Wordle. I’ve used the text cloud generator dozens of time for use in presentations, TechCrunch posts and random stuff ever since I discovered the tool.
But as of yesterday, the application is no longer available, and the website only displays the message copied above. In a notice and a blog post, Wordle developer Jonathan Feinberg says he’s been forced to take the service offline due to a trademark claim against his use of the word “wordle” and states that he’s looking for pro bono legal advice from IP lawyers to fend off the infringement claim.
A quick search on Trademarkia reveals that there is in fact a live trademark for ‘Wordle’, owned by Mark Jordan Koeff, a photographer from Orange County, CA.
Any intellectual property lawyers out there who want to provide the developer with some free counsel? The tool is loved by many and it would suck for the service to have to be rebranded, considering the name awareness Wordle has built up over the years. There are similar tools out there, e.g. WordItOut, but they’re not as good as Wordle.
Feinberg, a programmer who works at IBM Research, can be reached on the e-mail address shared on the Wordle placeholder website and his personal site or via Twitter.
(Via @jackschofield / @digitalmaverick)
The Pitter-Patter of Little Features
I was out of the country for much of 2009, so it wasn’t until I spent two months back in San Francisco that I noticed a big change in the Web community. Babies. I’m not talking about whiny Millennials coming out of college and demanding venture capital for their iPhone app. I’m talking about actual babies. The ones that crawl around the house wearing diapers.
In 2006, I co-wrote a BusinessWeek cover story on the then-burgeoning Web 2.0 movement, and one the hallmarks of the scene was a sense of having been burned by the dot com boom and bust. That was when many of the leaders, investors, and foot soldiers of the Web 2.0 movement had moved to Silicon Valley and had their first taste of startup life. As a result many of them, like Max Levchin of PayPal and Slide or Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter, had lived a rollercoaster of wild life experiences when it came to business—takeovers, ousters, commanding millions in venture capital, but not much in the way of traditional “life experiences.” You know marriage, kids, and the like. Despite having net worths in the millions of dollars, many of them didn’t even own a house. Many didn’t think they had time.
My, how that has changed. The 30-something Valley generation that moved to the Valley fresh after college, stuck out the crash and got in early on the Web 2.0 movement are now married and having babies. Lots of them.
Examples include not only Levchin and Williams, but Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path and now Small Batch, Narendra Rocherolle of WebShots and The Start Project, James Hong of HotorNot, Jason Calacanis of “the Jason Nation,” Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr and now Hunch, Ben and Mena Trott of Six Apart and more. At a recent dinner party at our house, my husband and I looked around the table and realized for the first time in a decade in the Valley we were the only ones without a babysitter. Recently married Phillip Kaplan of FuckedCompany.com/AdBrite/Blippy told me he had big news at lunch the other day and my immediate question was, “Are you having a baby?”
I’ve asked a few people what caused this about face, at a relatively late stage of life compared to elsewhere in the US. Many said it’d taken them a while to find “the one” and once they did, a baby felt right. Many others had gone through the insanity of the dot com bubble, the brutal crash, and then jumped back on the treadmill for Web 2.0. Now in another recession, it just seemed like there should be something more.
This kind of thinking would be anathema a few years ago, but several entrepreneurs have said in private conversations, “This current company could go under, but I still have my family.”
To anywhere else in the US, this may sound “So what? People have babies all the time.” But in the Valley, this is a staggering injection of work-life balance into the 24/7 Web space. Perhaps it’s just the reality of this generation getting older. After all, the still early-20s Mark Zuckerberg isn’t having kids, neither is the still-acting-in-his-early-20s Kevin Rose. But given the supernova of the late 1990s, it’s a big population of Web influencers and taste-makers that are all of the sudden cooing and speaking in baby-talk.
What does this mean? For people like me, who live here, lots of little things, like kids birthday parties and chats about diaper rash. But for the Web, it means something too. This generation has always designed out of need, they’ve built things they’d like to exist. My bet is that in the next five years we’re going to see a boom of baby and kid Web and gadget ideas, as the people with the most clout (and in some cases, money) in the Web world start to realize how the rest of 30-somethings in America live.
Inbox2 Debuts Public Beta Of Message Management Desktop Client For Windows
Leena Rao picked a great title when she wrote a post about fledgling Inbox2 late last year, writing that the startup essentially aims to rule all incoming communication streams, as the Web service turns your email and micro blogging updates from friends and contacts into a single, ever-synched activity stream.
Now, the Holland-based company is launching a nifty, free software program (Windows only for now) that does exactly the same in the form of a native desktop client.
Inbox2 collects all messages, document attachments, links and contacts from your existing email and social network accounts and brings everything into one place. The app doesn’t merely import incoming streams for consumption, as it also allows you to reply, search and manage all those incoming communication streams without having to login to multiple accounts.
The list of supported services is key, and impressively long: the app boasts support for (deep breath) Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, AOL, any custom IMAP/POP3 account, and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yammer and Hyves.
In addition, Inbox2 allows the user to organize their inbox around people or content discovery, including through social and real-time channels. In that sense, it reminds a lot of Threadsy, one of the TechCrunch50 finalists, but they haven’t publicly launched yet. Also worth checking out for different reasons is OtherInbox.
If you even use but two of the services that Inbox2 supports, I suggest you try out the Web service to start and give the desktop client a good whirl if you’re on Windows. It might just be that messaging management tool you’ve been longing for.
Me? I’m waiting for them to integrate simple RSS reader functionality into the tool.
Visage Mobile Gets A $4.5 Million Infusion From Qualcomm And Others
Visage Mobile, an enterprise mobility management company, has raised $4.5 million in Series B funding from Qualcomm Ventures with Worldview Technology Partners, ATA Ventures, Vesbridge Partners, and Emergence Capital Partners participating in the round. This funding brings the company’s total funding up to nearly $100 million.
Visage Mobile’s SaaS application basically lets businesses have control and visibility over all of the wireless devices and spend within their companies. The service will organize how many wireless devices are being used in your company, which employee is using a device, your company’s monthly wireless spend and how your wireless spending breaks down. Additionally, Visage Mobile helps businesses set policies to govern employee usage of smartphone and mobile broadband.
Visage Mobile says the new funding will be used to invest in product development, and additional services to help businesses take control of their mobility budget and inventory.
StuffBuff Social Bidding System Hits Beta And You Can Try It Here
StuffBuff, a TC50 company, has officially launched bringing with it social, embeddable auctions for the masses. What is StuffBuff? It’s basically an auction site with a social bent. Instead of wading into a mess of used sleeping bags and broken Nintendo DSes on eBay (true story!), you head over to StuffBuff and set up an auction. You can then embed the auction into your FaceBuzzBookTwit page. Unlock “entertainment auction” sites like Swoopo, this is a straight up auction service with two little additions.
From the press releases:
• LiveHaggle – This “first of its kind” chat-based auction system was
developed using PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API, and enables members to
engage in real time chat with sellers and other bidders across any Web
site or blog, while committing to bids in the conversation.
• Blink! – An addictive twist on Dutch-style auctions, this tool asks
users, “How long can you hold out?” Items are presented for sale at a
starting price that drops throughout the course of the auction, the more
auction participants the faster the price falls. The first bidder takes
home the product.
To show you dudes an dudettes how it works, StuffBuff has set up an auction for a PS3 with all proceeds going to Stupid Cancer/I2Y.
It can only be a matter of time before eBay tries their own embeddable auctions so StuffBuff has a short window of interesting opportunity. How could you use it? Well, maybe you could auction off a date with yourself on your blog or Facebook page! Just imagine if all your readers could compete for your undivided attention and, in this amorous month, affection.
Hands-on Video: Windows Phone 7 Series in action
While we were allowed to play with the just-announced Windows Phone 7 Series operating system behind closed doors a few hours ago, it was a strictly no-photo, no-video deal.
We just left a slightly more public showing of Windows Phone, where representatives had handsets at the ready - and this time, video was okay.
Apologies for the slightly off focus - I was literally on my tip toes, camera turned upside down, reaching over the heads of the massive group of people crowding around the two devices Microsoft thought to bring.
Huddle Takes Top Prize At Microsoft’s SharePoint SocialFest
Last week, Microsoft invited seven BizSpark startups from around the world to a special event called the SharePoint 2010 SocialFest. Each company was invited to spend the week working in close collaboration with Microsoft SharePoint team members, as they tried to take their existing products and see how they could be used to leverage SharePoint. The event culminated in a demo day on Friday, when each startup showed off what they’d managed to put together in the preceding four days and a panel of judges chose the best one.
Here’s a video with Lynda Ting, Microsoft’s Director of Business Development, Emerging Business Team, explaining the goals of the program:
Cortex Intelligence
Cortex began as a text mining company, and spent the last five years perfecting its ability to automatically identify places, entities, companies, and other important pieces of text, making it easy to sift through large volumes of data. The company has also built sentiment analysis into its technology. For this competition, Cortex built tools that would allow a SharePoint user to automatically import tweets, blog posts, etc. based on their search criteria. For example, I could use the tool to run a persistent search on my company’s name and pull those results into SharePoint.
Calinda Software
Calinda looks to help companies more efficiently communicate by changing the way they use Email, looking to do away with the endless replies, CCs, and confusing chains of messages. To help, Calinda allows you to generate a map of these messages, allowing you to see at a glance who is sending what, and to whom. The company’s SharePoint integration allows you to pull these maps into your SharePoint hub. You don’t need to install any software to get this working with your email client.
Confer
Confer is a communications platform for companies that includes features like microblogging, status updates, and real time chat (some of this functionality can be seen in software like Campfire and Yammer). The company offers a click-to-call service, including audio recording of conversations and transcriptions, much as you’d find with Google Voice. For the SocialFest, Confer integrated much of this functionality into SharePoint.
Huddle
Huddle, which took the top prize at the competition, is designed to help companies collaborate with their partners — its mission is to be the “world’s best online B2B collaboration platform”. The service, which launched in 2007, allows companies to share files, organize meetings, and collaborate even when they are not operating within the same firewall. For its SharePoint integration, the company allows separate SharePoints to link together, bridging corporate firewalls while still maintaining the permissions and other rules that have been established by each company.
Leverage Software
Leverage Software builds social networks for the enterprise. This week, one of its goals was to build something to help companies collaborate, without forcing them to expend extra energy to use their collaboration platform. The product is called DesignSpaces, and it analyzes your Emails and extracts relevant data, like attachments and events, which it then organizes for you. In the future, coworkers can look through the workspace to find older attachments, message threads, and so on. The company has a number of Fortune 500 companies as customers, and around 1 million people using the platform.
Liaise
Liaise, which we’ve covered before, is a service that allows you to automatically extract meeting information, to-dos, events, and other key data from Emails with a minimal amount of effort on the user’s part. With its SharePoint integration, Liaise can feed this information into your SharePoint site so you don’t have to manually enter dates, commitments, and other information.
Loqu8
Loqu8 allows you to integrate immediate data lookup into your computing experience (it’s a bit like those integrated dictionary browser extensions). But it allows companies to build their own lexicons as reference, which makes it easier for employees to understand company-specific buzzwords and acronyms. Using SharePoint, the service can pull in supporting data from databases, Excel spreadsheets, and other files.
WooRank Screens Your Website, For Free
WooRank is a brand new service designed to let website publishers and marketers evaluate the SEO-friendliness and other aspects of their Web sites on the fly, free of charge. If this reminds you of what HubSpot built with its Website Grader tool, it’s because the concept is extremely similar.
WooRank evaluates Web sites based on 50 criteria in an automated fashion, free of charge, and provides helpful SEO and other tips. A premium version will be offered in about 3 months: for a yet-to-be-determined fee, publishers and marketers will then be able to screen Web sites based on up to 120 pre-defined critera, get served more personalized tips as well as references to online tools that they can use to increase the findability and performance of their Web sites.
Update: site seems to be down or at least terribly slow due to our coverage, so hang in there.
I gave the tool a spin and generated a report for techcrunch.com – turns out we’re worthy of a WooRank of 82.4. While I have absolutely no idea what that means exactly, according to these statistics we’re well above the average. In the overall ranking, we even made the top 50, ahead of sites like the Apple Store, MySpace, ESPN.com and NYTimes.com (take that, New York Times, we haz bigger WooRankz!).
Apparently, we need to work on our headings, immage attribution tags, meta description and keywords, XML sitemap(s) and other aspects like Web standards compliance. We score pretty well on content (number of indexed pages), off-site SEO (particularly on the social media level) and website usability and load time.
Frankly, that’s a lot of valuable information available free of charge, so I’ll be curious to know in a couple of months how WooRank will try to entice people to pay for more detailed information and improvement tips.
WooRank was built by fellow Belgians, namely digital marketer Jean Derély of BetaGroup and the founders of interactive agency 1MD.be. Since soft-launching the service a couple of days ago, 27,000 reports have already been generated by some 7,500 visitors.
For more online tools, check out Website Grader but also HitTail and LotusJump.
WooRank Screens Your Website, For Free
WooRank is a brand new service designed to let website publishers and marketers evaluate the SEO-friendliness and other aspects of their Web sites on the fly, free of charge. If this reminds you of what HubSpot built with its Website Grader tool, it’s because the concept is extremely similar.
WooRank evaluates Web sites based on 50 criteria in an automated fashion, free of charge, and provides helpful SEO and other tips. A premium version will be offered in about 3 months: for a yet-to-be-determined fee, publishers and marketers will then be able to screen Web sites based on up to 120 pre-defined critera, get served more personalized tips as well as references to online tools that they can use to increase the findability and performance of their Web sites.
Update: site seems to be down or at least terribly slow due to our coverage, so hang in there.
I gave the tool a spin and generated a report for techcrunch.com – turns out we’re worthy of a WooRank of 82.4. While I have absolutely no idea what that means exactly, according to these statistics we’re well above the average. In the overall ranking, we even made the top 50, ahead of sites like the Apple Store, MySpace, ESPN.com and NYTimes.com (take that, New York Times, we haz bigger WooRankz!).
Apparently, we need to work on our headings, immage attribution tags, meta description and keywords, XML sitemap(s) and other aspects like Web standards compliance. We score pretty well on content (number of indexed pages), off-site SEO (particularly on the social media level) and website usability and load time.
Frankly, that’s a lot of valuable information available free of charge, so I’ll be curious to know in a couple of months how WooRank will try to entice people to pay for more detailed information and improvement tips.
WooRank was built by fellow Belgians, namely digital marketer Jean Derély of BetaGroup and the founders of interactive agency 1MD.be. Since soft-launching the service a couple of days ago, 27,000 reports have already been generated by some 7,500 visitors.
For more online tools, check out Website Grader but also HitTail and LotusJump.