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Posts Tagged ‘Flock’

Lights Go Out For Streamy, Founders Flock To Facebook And Zynga

Alas, personalized news streaming service / social network aggregator Streamy hasn’t been able to find a buyer willing to pay what the two founders were hoping to get for the assets, so the startup is shutting its awesome Web app down – for now.

In a short notice posted online, Streamy says it plans to “hold” the service and “reinvent it when the time is right”. In the meantime, however, both co-founders of the fledgling company have been forced to go out and look for a slightly steadier job. One has landed at social gaming juggernaut Zynga, the other at social networking juggernaut Facebook.

CEO Don Mosites, for one, is heading to Zynga to work on a “new, special project”. He won’t tell me what it is, but he promises it will be “big”. To be continued, I suppose.

The other co-founder of Streamy, Jonathan Gray, will be joining David Recordon (previously with Six Apart) and Monica Keller (previously with MySpace) and become part of the social networking giant’s open source division.

From what I can gather, Gray will be helping Facebook promote the adoption of projects like HipHop, Cassandra, Tornado, Thrift, and others. He’ll also continue working with HBase, which was the Hadoop-driven data back-end for Streamy.

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EC Roundup: The C-Corp question and the magnetic appeal of loudmouths

Here’s the latest from Venturebeat’s Entrepreneur Corner:

Ask the attorney: Should I be a C-Corp? (And other formation issues) – Deciding what sort of entity your start-up will be can be tricky – and that’s just the start of the legal mysteries. Where should you form your business? What issues do you face regarding previous employers? In the first of a two-part series, attorney Scott Walker looks at the hurdles entrepreneurs face when the decide to launch a business.

Why do entrepreneurs flock to loudmouths as mentors? – Granted there is a lack of mentors for budding start-up owners, but entrepreneur Will Herman wonders why people who are so meticulous about their businesses’ details tend to be much less so when it comes to who they take advice from.

China’s VC market may be hitting its stride – Despite a setback due to the recession, China is once again heating up as a possible investment target for U.S. VCs. Attorney Mark Williams, who has worked on numerous transactions in the area, looks at the hot sectors.

Why do VCs blog (and Tweet)? – For decades, VCs intentionally kept their methods secret – but in the past year there has been an explosion of investors giving a peak behind the curtain online. Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital Partners, looks at how many of today’s VCs are writing about their job – and what the appeal is to do so.

How to be a better negotiator – If you can’t negotiate, odds are your start-up isn’t going to last too long. Deepak Malhotra, associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, offers several tips to hone your skills.

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First Look: JotNot Scanner for iPhone updated to version 2.0

Filed under: Software, iPhone, First Look, App Review

There’s certainly no shortage when it comes to iPhone apps that turn your device into a pocket-sized scanner. At various times, TUAW bloggers have reviewed or discussed Readdle ScannerPro [US$6.99 (currently on sale for US$4.99), iTunes Link], DocScanner [US$8.99, iTunes Link], and JotNot [US$4.99, iTunes Link]. Of course, there is also a flock of business card scanners, but what I’m discussing in this post are the apps that say that they’ll replace that flatbed scanner on your desk with a device you already have in your pocket or purse.

MobiTech 3000 just released version 2.0 of the JotNot scanner app, and the update appears to be quite useful. I’ve owned the app for a while and have successfully used it to capture documents for posterity. The update provides a few additional features that I had been hoping for:

• Multipage support
• Automatic edge detection
• WebDAV/iDisk support
• Camera stabilization (requires OS 3.1)
• Automated backup of scans
• Reordering pages
• An extensive web-based help
• In app support

Of the new features, I am most happy about two of them; multipage support and camera stabilization. Multipage support means exactly what it implies; you can scan multiple page documents and have them saved into one PDF document. Previously, JotNot would create one PDF file for each and every document you scanned. That meant that combining PDFs required that you export the files to a Mac or PC, then use something like Adobe Acrobat Pro to merge the files.

Continue reading First Look: JotNot Scanner for iPhone updated to version 2.0

TUAWFirst Look: JotNot Scanner for iPhone updated to version 2.0 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Orkut Slows Hemorrhaging To Facebook By Making Friend Export Tool Nearly Useless

Orkut continues to undermine Google’s Data Liberation Front, whose singular goal is to “make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products”. Earlier this month the Orkut friend exporter, which makes it easy to export your friends’ contact information to a standard CSV file, was mysteriously broken due to a bug. The timing of the bug was more than a little suspect — Orkut has been hemorrhaging users lately in India and Brazil as people flock to Facebook, which takes advantage of Orkut’s friend export tool to help users make the switch. Now Julio Vasconcellos over at Armchairfounder has noticed how Orkut managed to fix their bug while still making it harder for members to switch to Facebook: the tool works, but it no longer includes your friends’ Email addresses.

In other words, now when you export your list of friends from Orkut, all you’ll get is a list of their names, location, birthday, gender, and links to the Orkut profiles. Which means it’s basically useless. Facebook can’t use the data to invite your friends, and you can’t use the data to actually contact and share with your friends, which is the whole point of a social graph.

We reached out to Google about the issue, and a Google spokesperson gave us this statement:

“Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks — when a user friends someone they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click. In order to protect user privacy, we now exclude email addresses from the CSV export file. Of course users can still export their friend lists in the CSV file. In addition, Google Contacts syncs with Orkut, so users can export their Orkut friends’ email addresses from Google Contacts. We support web standards such as OAuth and are working on ways to help users share their data more securely between social networks. We believe strongly that users own their data, and we’re committed to finding ways to make it easier for users to export data.”

Google is right in that this isn’t a standard feature on most social networks, but most social networks aren’t busy touting things like the Data Liberation Front and reaping all the positive press associated with it. And if this is really a privacy issue, it doesn’t make sense that Google would let you export Email data through Google Contacts but not Orkut itself. Spammers looking to figure out how to harvest Email addresses will doubtless figure out the process. Of course, Orkut users looking to make the jump to Facebook probably won’t.

Vasconcellos also points out that Orkut’s tool is unncessarily hard to use, and he’s absolutely right. When I went to test out the friend exporter, I was fairly certain that it simply wasn’t working at all. That’s because every time you click on the ‘Export Contacts’ button the site kicks you back out to your homepage, and only shows the “take your contacts with you” section below the fold. It took me way too long to figure this out (I even tested the feature out in two different browsers). And I doubt most people will put in that much effort.

It’s understandable why Orkut would want to handicap the feature and make it hard to use, but Google can’t have it both ways: it’s either open, or it isn’t.

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Friday Favorite: HistoryHound, bookmark with abandon

Filed under: Features, Reviews, Friday Favorite

Today’s Friday Favorite is a new one to me, but it’s been around for a while. I just picked up the latest version of HistoryHound from St. Clair Software — more famous, probably, for Default Folder X — and have been using it constantly for days. Its hotkey already has its own spot in my muscle memory. Here’s what it does:

HistoryHound indexes bookmarks, history and cache from all of your browsers, with presets for Camino, Firefox 2 & 3, Flock, iCab, OmniWeb, Opera, Safari, Shiira and URL Manager Pro. It means being able to bookmark willy-nilly in any browser and know that you’ll be able to quickly locate noteworthy sites again, in any application.

Not just the bookmarks, though; in the background — with a very low footprint — HistoryHound starts indexing the full text of each page. Then you can search for exact or fuzzy matches, or with Spotlight-style boolean keywords for any text on the landing page. Search comes in two flavors: a tiny popup panel which can be assigned to a hotkey and provides a list of matches as you type, and a full, Webkit-enabled search window with page previews and a multi-column result list.

Continue reading Friday Favorite: HistoryHound, bookmark with abandon

TUAWFriday Favorite: HistoryHound, bookmark with abandon originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Scripps Shares Food Network and HGTV with 5min

Israeli-based instructional video platform 5min is on a roll. After raising $7.5 million in Series B funding from Spark and Globespan Capital Partners, the company just signed a content and advertising partnership with major lifestyle TV network Scripps. Scripps programming such as content from HGTV, The Food Network and the DIY Network will be syndicated through the 5min site. Meanwhile 5min will also share some if its content back to the Scripps online properties.

Sponsor

When ReadWriteWeb first covered 5min in 2007, we described the company as “a place to find short video solutions for every practical question”. Today, as the television industry migrates to web-based interactive content, and as recession-era netizens flock to DIY programming, 5min becomes a more attractive advertising and content platform.

Said Lisa Choi Owens, Scripps’ senior VP of online distribution and partnerships, “The partnership with 5min gives us an innovative opportunity to vastly expand engagement with Scripps Networks brands by reaching additional targeted consumers across the Web.” The network plans on offering ad placement packages across relevant 5min content as an additional option to advertisers.

Discuss

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BillShrink’s new recommendation engine tells you where to stash your savings

BillShrink, a startup that advises its users on how to reduce their monthly bill payments, today launched a new savings tool that recommends the best savings and CD accounts for conserving cash. Calling itself a decision engine, the Menlo Park, Calif. company says it analyzes interest rates offered by more than 60 banks to help users choose the most lucrative combination of accounts.

BillShrink has evolved a lot since its launch last spring. It started out as a service to help users find the cheapest cell phone plans to fit their needs. Soon after that, it started telling people which credit cards to choose for the greatest savings as well. Earlier this year, it introduced a new tool to help users find the nearest gas station with the lowest prices. As you can imagine, all of these features proved to be very popular in the past year following the economic downturn. As consumers tightened their belts, they turned to web solutions for living within budget, and BillShrink picked up a lot of the business, particularly in June when its traffic shot up to 500,000 unique monthly visitors (according to Compete). Overall, it says it saved Americans more than $750 million in the last year.

Now that the economy has started to turn around, the company says it wants to help its users grow the money it has helped them save. The new savings account and CD recommendation tool is meant to do just that. To provide its customers with the best options, it takes into account their monthly saving goals (defined by the users), the fees attached to certain accounts, ATM locations, and liquid versus illiquid cash needs. With all of this data, it confidently tells its users where to put their money, the company says.

BillShrink is one of a flock of companies aimed at saving consumers money in their everyday lives. Mint, recently acquired by Intuit, did roughly the same, allowing people to set budget targets in different area of their lives and recommending deals and offers to save cash. Both Wesabe and Green Sherpa are incredibly similar, although the latter offers a paid subscription service to help its users monitor their general cash flow.

The company last raised funding in October 2008, bringing in $8 million from Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. It has now raised $10 million to date.

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The RockMelt Mystery. Is it Just a Facebook Browser, Or Will It Break The Mold?

Marc Andreessen is backing a new browser company called RockMelt. Not much is known about RockMelt other than it is being designed by an all-star team (including software engineer Robert John Churchill from the Netscape days) and that it is tied into Facebook through Facebook Connect. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a screenshot of the sign-in page and speculates that RockMelt is in fact a Facebook browser. Miguel Helft at the NYT leans in that direction as well.  It kind of makes sense since Andreesen is on the board of Facebook, but I suspect it is only half the story.

A Facebook browser, however, is a good metaphor for thinking about how browsers, in general, need to change.  What would a Facebook browser look like? Well, to start with, you would be able to see updates from your friends on Facebook, share your own updates and media right from the browser, and perhaps IM with your friends through Facebook chat. While those set of features would be convenient, they are nothing revolutionary. Flock, which calls itself the social browser, already incorporates Facebook Connect (and Twitter and other social networks to boot), but it hasn’t taken off. And Facebook itself offers a toolbar for Firefox that lets you see notifications, search Facebook, and share links. There are plenty of other Firefox add-ons which incorporate Facebook features as well.

But the Facebook connection may just be the starting point for a much more ambitious piece of software. Andreesen said as much to the NYT in an interview earlier this year, which Helft quotes from in his article:

Mr. Andreessen suggested the new browser would be different, saying that most other browsers had not kept pace with the evolution of the Web, which had grown from an array of static Web pages into a network of complex Web sites and applications. “There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch,” Mr. Andreessen said.

What sorts of things is he talking about? Making the browser social appears to be at the top of the list. The first thing you do is connect to Facebook. But that could just be a building block for a social browser that handles Web apps in an entirely new way. The browser was built around the Web page metaphor, but increasingly the most interesting things happening on the Web do not necessarily exist on any one Web page. They exist in real time data streams (such as Facebook’s portable News Feed and Twitter) and in richer Webtop applications. A modern browser should be designed not only to surf the Web, but to manage your information streams and Web apps all in a seamless user interface.

Whether or not RockMelt is tackling this broader challenge, I don’t know. But I hope it is because we need to move the ball forward with a radical, yet accessible, new approach. Radical, yet accessible—that is the challenge. It must be radical enough to open up new, more efficient, avenues of information discovery, creation, and interaction. It must be a communications platform as well as a browsing platform.

The original browser model was one of consumption, of reading Web pages as if they were documents. Despite all the progress of the past decade, we are still stuck with that legacy to a large degree because it is built into our browsers. So what would a true social browser look like? Below is my own wish list of features (some of these are available as add-ons or in existing desktop clients, but there is an opportunity to unify them in one seamless experience):

• It would have multiple modes for browsing, search, following social data stream, and launching Web applications
• The home page would be a stream reader which brings together real time streams from across the Web (which Facebook now has with Friendfeed).
• IM, email, and public messages (status updates and Tweets) would be always accessible in the toolbar or a sidebar
• It would support a variety of Web apps which could be launched seamlessly within the browser without going to a Website and logging in.
• One-button access to sharing services of your choice (Flickr, Posterous, Youtube, Wordpress)
• Real-time search and alerts from across the Web (social stream, news, finance sites, sports sites, etc.)
• Support for Google Gears to give the browser offline capabilities as well as local caching and a light database for computing tasks

That’s just off the top of my head.  If you were redesigning the browser from scratch today, what would it look like?

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