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Posts Tagged ‘Craigslist’

Trendrr Launches Web Charting Dashboard For Entertainment Industry

As the presence of television content on the web increases, the entertainment industry needs applications to measure the content’s performance. Wiredset’s Trendrr, a comprehensive digital data tracking platform, is launching a new realtime dashboard catered to TV networks.

The new tracking platform, which is available to any Trendrr Pro users, allows film studios, networks and record labels to track and aggregate data surrounding their properties and gain instant insights on location, gender, volume, sentiment, and influence as the conversation takes place. The application gathers data from over 50 of the web’s social destinations, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Last.fm, Amazon, Craigslist, and eBay, and delivers users a realtime view of data within a dashboard.

The idea behind Trendrr’s entertainment-focused dashboard is that it will allow the film and television industries to gain actionable intelligence to determine future content decisions. For example, the new application will show a television network is gaining the most reactions by city, if the chatter is positive, and what aspects of a show are gaining traction among viewers and which segment of the population is most receptive to their content. Not only will this data help users determine where to place certain content, but can also help with advertising and marketing strategies. The application is already being used by TV Networks such as NBC Universal’s Oxygen, which is using it for the show, Bad Girls Club.

The application will undoubtedly be useful to to measuring engagement on the web, especially on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. However, Trendrr is entering a space where many others are attempting to launch innovative applications. Scout Labs, Viralheat, PeopleBrowsr and Radian 6 are just a few of the startups that are helping companies, including media organizations, attempt to track movement across the web.

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Square payment dongle demoed for iPhone toting hippies and you (video)

Ever wonder what the offspring of an after-party Twitter and Digg copulation might look like? No, well aren’t you pure and normal. Regardless, we fantasize about it all the time but never expected this iPhone payment dongle to be first from the litter. Square is Jack Dorsey’s (Twitter co-founder) new startup that now has Kevin Rose (Digg founder) on board as an investor and YouTube pitch man for the prototype payment device that plugs directly into the iPhone’s headphone jack. We’ve covered Square before but this is the first video that clearly demonstrates the full capability of the credit card swipe system on a live device. A compelling proposition for receiving cashless payments if you’re a small business owner looking to exploit irresponsible credit card debt or just the average Joe hocking goods at a garage sale, farmers market, or Craigslist. Assuming of course, Square’s cut of the transaction isn’t too egregious. Demo after the break.

Continue reading Square payment dongle demoed for iPhone toting hippies and you (video)

Square payment dongle demoed for iPhone toting hippies and you (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google Expands Its Reference Section With Its Own Dictionary

Google has quietly rolled out its own online dictionary, complete with multilingual support and accompanying photos. The new site was first discovered by the LA Times Tech Blog, and you can access it at Google.com/Dictionary.

It works exactly as you’d expect: type in a word, and Google will give you the definition, part of speech, and maybe a similar phrase or two. If you’re logged in, you can star a word for future reference.

The new dictionary obviously isn’t good news to the many other web dictionaries. Answers.com, in particular, stands to lose out, as it is currently Google’s default whenever a user clicks the “define” link on a Google results page. The Times article says that Google now uses its own dictionary as the default, but I’m still seeing Answers.com as the source, so apparently the switch isn’t live for everyone.

Google has actually offered some dictionary features for a long time. If you Google a query using the format “Define:word“, the search engine will present you with a handful of definitions it finds on sites scattered across the web. Some of these definitions usually come from well known online dictionaries; others, from obscure web sites, which can make the results inconsistent. These aggregated definitions have been available on Google.com/dictionary before now, and now compliment Google’s own in-house definitions.

For those wondering if Google might further expand into territory traditionally owned by reference books — it already has. Last year it launched Knol, a user-edited encyclopedia. That venture hasn’t gone very well: after failing to draw much interest as an encyclopedia, people started using Knol as a poor man’s Craigslist.

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

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Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes After Dev Shows Craig His New Mashup

Developers take note: if you’ve got a mashup built off of Craigslist’s data, don’t even think about showing it to anyone who works there. At least, that’s the lesson learned by developer Romy Maxwell, who says that Craigslist has blocked both his mashup and every single project built on Yahoo Pipes a few days after a friendly Email exchange he had with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

Maxwell is one of the developers behind a new mashup called Flippity, which lets you plot Craigslist listings on a map. In a blog post, Maxwell writes that he had been having an Email exchange with Newmark over the last few weeks, during which Maxwell asked if the techniques employed by his project would be acceptable under Craigslist’s restrictive Terms of Use.

Newmark replied that “as a rule of thumb, [it's] okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes.” Since the project used RSS feeds and was non-commercial, that seemed to indicate that the project would be OK. Maxwell followed up by asking if he was allowed to ask for donations on the site, which Newmark said he would look into. A couple weeks later, Maxwell sent Newmark a link to a working alpha version of Flippity. Newmark went silent, Craigslist pulled the plug on Flippity and every other Yahoo Pipes project soon thereafter. From Maxwell’s blog:

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw what Craigslist had done. They literally added a check for “pipes.yahoo.com” in the referrer header of any HTTP request, which was then redirected to the home page. In essence, they blocked them. Really, Craig ? This is your response ?

To be clear, Maxwell says that his post isn’t meant to be an attack on Newmark himself. Newmark actually CC’d a customer service representative on a couple of messages during the exchange, so it’s possible that they were the ones who ultimately decided to shut down Flippity and all of Yahoo Pipes.

Maxwell writes in his blog that he and another developer have been building the mashup for 2 months. The goal was to build something that would plot Craigslist listings on a map, offering an easy way to see what goods are being sold in your proximity. There’s already a great mashup called PadMapper that does this for housing, but Flippity was supposed to work for any Craigslist listing. For details on how the mashup worked, check out this post.

Of course, this isn’t really anything new for Craigslist. The site has previously shut down mashups using its data many times before. But they have permitted some sites, like Housingmaps, to tap into Craigslist data for years. And it seems strange that they would ban all Yahoo Pipes apps in response to this.

We’ve reached out to Craigslist for comment and will update if we hear back.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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CitySourced gives Ranters an iPhone App

Are you pissed off about potholes, graffiti or broken street lights? Similar to the Federal government’s efforts with Data.gov and Google’s recent Public Sector release, CitySourced is offering users a chance to take government matters into their own hands. This year’s TC50 third place runner-up, CitySourced is a crowd pleaser on a number of levels. If you’re the type of person who writes letters to congressmen, editors and counsillors, you’re likely to help power this app.

Sponsor

CitySourced offers citizens a chance to photograph their local pet peeves directly from their iPhones. Users send their pictures and complaints to their local municipalities with a couple clicks. From here, governments are recognize the needs of their constituencies and are forced to take action.

While programs like Apps for America and Apps for Democracy work to crowd source programmer-driven applications, CitySourced can be utilized by a non-technical user. In addition to the decision-making data being generated from this service, cities also offer users an active outlet for their frustrations. Instead of sending out arbitrary rants and suggestions to their Twitter accounts, users still get a chance to complain while receiving a direct line to their municipal reps. If cities have the courage to make these complaints public, the site could become as entertaining as Craigslist’s Best Of page while still maintaining its usefulness.

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Got an iPhone? With Fwix, Now You Can Be a Reporter

Fwix, a website for local news, aims to be a “real-time local newswire” for your hometown. Offering a combination of traditional content pulled from newspapers and blogs along with items submitted by citizen journalists, the site reads more like a location-based lifestream than a typical news site. Key to the site’s success will be the inclusion of user-generated content coming in from iPhone submissions. The company plans to launch an updated version of their Fwix iPhone application this week which will allow anyone to file news stories, photos, and videos from anywhere, all geo-tagged thanks to the iPhone’s GPS location data.

Sponsor

The original incarnation of Fwix, launched almost exactly a year ago, focused more on aggregating content from sites like Craigslist and Yelp instead of on local news. Today, the San Francisco-based venture offers up local news streams for nearly 85 cities in the U.S. and has plans to expand internationally later this year.

How it Works

When you first visit Fwix, the site auto-detects your location by looking at your IP address. If you’re in one of the supported cities, you’ll immediately be shown the local homepage for that area. The presentation of the headlines is simple, displaying only headlines and brief one-sentence summaries – perfect for this modern day-and-age where people don’t read entire articles as much as they scan the headlines.

Current news items take up the main part of the page while active (aka “popular”) stories, weather, and site activity panels fill the sidebar. Another interesting feature is the “break” button which appears under each story. By clicking this, you have the opportunity to “break” the story by posting it to Twitter or Facebook. That’s a bit of twist on what people usually mean when they say a news story was “broken by Twitter” – i.e., Twitter was the first place it appeared. In this case, though, you’re just tweeting something that someone already reported. However, in the case of user-generated submissions, you still may be the first to bring the news to the microblogging network.

The iPhone App

According to Fwix’s 22-year-old founder and former Facebook employee, Darian Shirazi, the company’s new iPhone application will make its appearance in the iTunes App Store sometime this week. With the free app, which will let you use your Facebook or Twitter account for sign in purposes, you’ll be able to submit stories, and take pictures and videos (the latter if you use the newer iPhone 3GS which includes video-recording functionality). Your items will then appear on the Fwix web site. You can also use the app to read the news stories from your city.

Although there are plenty of iPhone applications for local news (just do an iTunes search), none really offer what Fwix does. Even CNN’s popular iReport only takes emailed-in submissions for when you’re mobile, there’s no dedicated application. The closest iPhone app competitor is probably outside.in’s Radar (iTunes link), a complement to the company’s own local news service. Radar pulls in relevant news, blog posts, and Twitter updates based on your current location. However, neither it nor any of the others allow you to use their app to actually do reporting like this. And once you’ve submitted your eye-witness report, the news story will make it to the Fwix homepage almost instantly.

With all the talk of the failing newspaper industry and declining revenues, Fwix has come up with an innovative new concept for gathering news. This is precisely the sort of iPhone application your hometown local paper should have thought of first. Unfortunately, they didn’t – which is probably one of the many reasons they’re struggling today. Good thing Fwix is open to syndication. Says Shirazi, the company has some deals “in the pipeline” to offer Fwix content to local media outlets but isn’t announcing anything just yet.

The Fwix website itself gets 400,000 unique visitors per month but their content network receives nearly 8 million, reports Shirazi. (Quantcast reports 7.3 million people globally). If citizen journalists adopt the new app when it arrives, those numbers may soon increase.

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Fwix provides local news, and wants you to be an iPhone correspondent

Fwix, a web site that wants to give you a blend of traditional local news and user-contributed stories, has launched today with an undisclosed amount of funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firm BlueRun Ventures.

Fwix’s stated goal is to be a “newswire for all things local,” sifting through main-stream local media sources, blogs and other social media sites — to bring it all to a single place for you at Fwix. If you visit Fwix, the site will serve you news relevant to your local region. It does so by detecting the location of your IP address — so if you live in San Francisco, it will show you San Francisco news (see screenshot below). The site features news from around the Web, but it also plans to let people submit news from their iPhones (via an application it says it expects to be approved by Apple this week).

There’s nothing earth-shattering about this approach. But at least it’s a fresh attempt to bring you all the local news you want in the most modern way possible — which means letting people supply news they are witnessing via their iPhones. There are a lot of other news sites that try tailor news on a local basis, including Topix, NewsVine, and even Google News (see Google’s San Francisco news). Some of them let users supply news remotely, but I’m not aware whether any of them have a dedicated iPhone application.

Founder Darian Shirazi, 22, has had a fast moving career. He previously worked at Facebook, then started Fotodunk, which was acquired by iLike, where he worked for a while, before leaving to start Redux in 2007. He then founded FlikIM. Last year, he founded of Fwix, which we wrote about here when it launched. At the time, it was focused on taking local items from feeds from Craigslist and Yelp. It has since changed its focus to news.

San Francisco-based Fwix says it is is available in 80 U.S. and Canadian cities.

Fwix says it has an 8 million unique visitors per month. However, traffic measurement company Compete shows the site gets less than 150,000 unique users a month. While Compete is generally considered to under-count the traffic of smaller sites, this is a difference that is more significant than usual, and raises questions about whether Fwix really has the sort of traffic it claims or whether Compete has become completely unreliable.

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Wired takes on Craigslist founder, who promptly walks into a door

Wired writer Gary Wolf has done the best job ever of capturing the enigmatic, inspiring, yet clumsy personality of Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. If you’ve ever met Craig at a party and found it hard to hold a conversation with him, don’t feel bad. Charlie Rose had the same problem on national TV.

Wolf’s assessment of Newmark’s business is that Craigslist has refused to evolve, in part because Newmark is happier replying to customer support email than managing product development. ”Aside from his communication problems and an aversion to exerting authority,” Wolf writes, “he care[s] nothing for entrepreneurship.” As a result, Craigslist blooms with a thousand kinds of flowers, but also a lot of weeds:

“Sometimes entire categories of craigslist are rendered nearly unusable by spam. Con artists prowl the listings, paying sellers with fake cashier’s checks and luring buyers to share their credit card numbers. Other evils are more subtle. Business owners whose judgment is distorted by self-interest fail to understand the rules and put the same item in multiple categories or repost it many times a day to insure it stays prominent, crowding out other sellers. A woman listing a car forgets to tell buyers about problems with the title until they’ve made a long trip out to see it. In all transactions there is a possibility of misunderstanding as well as abuse, and at 99.99 percent perfection there would still be thousands of angry people every month.”

Craig is different from most Internet startup founders. He’s an introvert. He’s not much interested in wealth or in being treated as a VIP. He doesn’t care to follow the latest fads in site designs and features. Craigslist has no Ajax interface, no big happy pastel text, nearly no graphics or images other than those placed in posts by customers. The site doesn’t try to get users to become members of a social network, sign up their friends, or tag, rate, and comment on content created by others. Craigslist hasn’t built an iPhone app. Yet its reach keeps on growing, in part because of Newmark’s dogged ability to contentedly perform the same tasks over and over. He reads and answers a huge chunk of the company’s customer mail:

“Last year Newmark got about 195000 email messages. He estimates that roughly 60 percent were spam. He read all the rest and replied to many. He has a boss now, a customer service manager named Clint Powell, who was hired about six years ago. But he maintains his habits for reasons that have little to do with the normal logic of work. They are part of his identity, an unconventional mode of self-realization through which he took hold of a barrier that always separated him from the world and made it into a kind of performance. Athletes compete. Artists create. Newmark answers email. He knows that this will seem absurd from the outside, but he is blessed not to care. In fact, he likes to treat people to a laugh when he can. It’s sometimes impossible to discern his intention exactly, and this is essential to the effect. On our way out of the cafè, I step aside to let Newmark go ahead, and he walks face-first into the plate glass door.”

Customers seem to sense that Craig and his team are on their side, rather than trying to monetize them. That feeling has built an astonishing level of customer loyalty and fondness for the site. No one remembers MetroVox, the much more aggressively commercial site built in 1999 by Newmark’s former business partner. Customers who found themselves redirected from secondary Craigslist URLs to the slicker-looking MetroVox back-buttoned their way to Newmark’s site.

VC Fred Wilson culled these stats on Craigslist:

For a lot of tech entrepreneurs and the journalists who cover them, Newmark’s way of doing business is somewhere between bewildering and ridiculous. Yet there are plenty of people of a different type who are reading this post and wondering: Are they hiring? Don’t ask me, ask Craig.

[Photos: Wired]

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