Livestreaming service Ustream is throwing a big party tonight, and like so many Silicon Valley parties, it’s doubling as a product launch, where executives are demonstrating the company’s Broadcast For Friends app for iOS. (It stands for BFF, which is, okay, actually kind of clever.)
Senior Vice President of Marketing David Thompson took a break from party-planning to give me a quick demo of the app. He says one of the main goals is simplicity, which is one reason why BFF is launching as a standalone product, rather than an addition to the existing Ustream iPhone app. To start making a video, you just enter a short description, a privacy setting (whether you want it to be viewable to everyone, just to your Facebook friends, or entirely private), and choose filter. → Read More
Facebook used to only let you set a single privacy setting for all your old profile photos, but now there’s a privacy widget on every past profile photo. This puts your Profile Photos album in a special category alongside Mobile Uploads that Facebook tells me “gives people more granular control” over photos you upload one at a time. More controls may translate into more willingness to upload photos.
Your current profile photo and cover photo are still public, though, so you might want to keep the beer and cleavage out of those. → Read More
Twitter’s Michael Sippey announced a bunch of upcoming changes to the company’s API in a blog post today. We’ve already summarized the post, but here’s the big picture: Things are about to get tougher for developers of traditional client apps.
A lot of the new restrictions come under the category of “Developer Rules of the Road.” For example, developers will now have to follow the Display Guidelines rather than treating them as, well, guidelines. Also, applications that are pre-installed on mobile devices need to be approved by Twitter first. → Read More
Ignore us. Ignore the pressure from the media and Wall Street to make more money now as lockups expire and your stock price dips to new lows. The only thing you need to remember is “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.” That’s your leader Mark Zuckerberg in his pre-IPO letter to the world.
I say this because I worry you may be veering off course in a fit of desperation to please investors. This week you announced two new ad units that give businesses unprecedented access to the news feed. They pose grave threats to the user experience and your ability to accomplish your mission of bringing us all closer together. → Read More
Is Hipstamatic, the iPhone photo app that was an early hit on the App Store, on the rocks? TechCrunch understands that Synthetic, makers of the app, has recently had to let go of much of its engineering staff, among others, as part of a wider restructuring as it looks for cash. A number of public tweets (embedded below) also point to people leaving.
The news comes as a surprise, given that Synthetic says that it has been profitable since the second week after it launched. It is projected to make $22 million this year (from $10 million in 2011). Contacted for a response to the news, a spokesperson confirmed that Hipstatmatic is restructuring but nothing more: ”Business is moving forward as usual, and we’re heads down focused on making beautiful, creative and fun products for our community and the world.” The company to date has never had VC backing.
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Would you like to bet on what may be the next big thing in games? Place a wager on real-money gambling, and you could be in for some good returns. Today, when games developer Big Fish launched a new iPhone app called Big Fish Casino, it announced it would raise the stakes in the UK by introducing real-money gambling into it (courtesy of well-backed gambling platform Betable) — making this the first time that a real-money gambling game will be available in the App Store.
This may be a first for the App Store, but it’s part of a growing interest in real-money gambling. The news comes just one week after the introduction of the first real-money gambling app on Facebook (also in the UK) and at the same time that a report has emerged of Zynga lobbying hard to get in-game gambling cleared in the U.S., too.
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Wait, I’ve seen this one before, back when it was called Please Rob Me and based on Foursquare. The folks (folk?) behind the latest “social networking privacy experiment” called We Know Your House have just brought their website back online, following a swift takedown of their Twitter account after media reports disclosed what they were up to. In case you missed it: We Know Your House is an attempt to raise awareness about the information people casually, and unknowingly, reveal when posting to social networks. In this case, We Know Your House shows the tweets from people posting that they’re at home and then links those tweets to an actual street address, as provided by Twitter’s geolocation data. → Read More
If part of the game in streaming music is to have the biggest catalog of tracks, then today Rdio made a significant move to turn its volume up to Spotify levels, and gain some street cred with indie fans in the process: it announced two key deals with CD Baby and TuneCore, both independent music aggregators, that ramps up its total track number to 18 million songs, and adds some 250,000 new musicians into the catalog.
The deal also will mean a much bigger route to getting music on to Rdio for unsigned artists, which will now be able to offer their tracks via Rdio in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Great Britain, France, Sweden and Finland.
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Reddit AKA the front page of the internet for cat gifs and atheist rage comics just earned a Guinness World Record for largest online Secret Santa game. Over the last three years, RedditGifts facilitated anonymous gift exchanges between 30,025 participants (including Stephen Colbert) in 115 countries. Only the Reddit team gets the award and they’re not sharing it with all the users although I’m sure if asked, one of the team members would do a IAMA about how their life changed thanks to a piece of paper.
Just like how RedditGifts was started, it was a random Reddit user named someguyfromcanada (pictured) who got the ball rolling with the stat nerds at Guinness. → Read More
While collective consumption has really taken off in the last year thanks to the Airbnbs and Ubers of the world, carpooling and ride-sharing have been around a bit longer. But for the last few years, a number of ride-sharing startups have been making headway in areas where carpooling traditionally has lacked, like safety — the biggest obstacle standing in the way of mass adoption for collective consumption startups. While there isn’t a whole lot of differentiation among the ride-sharing set, Ridejoy is looking to change that.
For those unfamiliar, the YC-backed startup brings people together for long-distance road trips (which they define as those trips over 50 miles), allowing drivers to “sell” their extra seats to riders for cheap. Now that it has 3K active rides listed at any given time and some money in the bank, the startup is looking to expose its ride-sharing experience to a new audience with the launch of a new iPhone app. → Read More
The neverending patent wars keep on raging, and Spotify is the latest to get targeted in the social media skirmishes. The music streaming company is getting sued by Nonend Inventions, a Dutch company, which claims Spotify is infringing on five of its U.S. patents covering streaming media, peer-to-peer search, and retrieval and playback techniques. Nonend says altogether it holds more than 40 issued patents and patent applications in the areas of peer-to-peer networking and streaming technology. This is the first suit it has filed in defense of these.
The complaint, which we have embedded below, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, against Spotify Limited and affiliated companies, today. Nonend is demanding a jury trial in the case.
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Unruly, a social video distribution platform whose technology helped power viral campaigns like Evian’s Roller Babies and Old Spice’s “Man Your Man Could Smell Like”, just released its results for the fiscal year ending on March 31. The company says it tripled revenue from £6.0 million to £17.6 million (at current conversion rates, that’s about $27 million).
The Unruly platform is called MEME, which stands for Media Engagement and Measurement Engine. Brands and agencies come to Unruly with videos that they’re hoping to turn into viral hits. Unruly distributes the video to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, influential blogs, and other sites — the goal is to target the audiences that are most likely to help a video spread. The company says it has now delivered more than 2,000 social video campaigns and that comScore’s Media Metrix report for April pegged Unruly’s reach at 917 million unique monthly visitors.
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Airtime planned to reach millions through real-time Facebook Chat invites to video calls. But private messages can’t go viral, so two months after launch it’s hoping for growth through public video posts to Twitter and Facebook. Since AppData shows Airtime as having just 1000 daily and 90,000 monthly actives, finding a distribution method that snowballs is crucial to the company making good on the $33.5 million fronted by its investors.
With this “limited public release” of video posts, its first Twitter integration, and an enhanced buddy list, Airtime users gain ways to tempt more friends to hop aboard, and not just one at a time. → Read More
Facebook seems determined to impress investors, as today it begins testing an aggressive web and mobile news feed ad unit that lets Pages pay to show their posts to people who didn’t subscribe to them. Previously, Pages could only reach people who weren’t fans with ads in the web sidebar or through Sponsored Stories noting someone’s friend had interacted with the Page.
These new non-fan news feed ads will let Pages push their best content all across the social network, but could lead businesses who’ve spent years earning and buying Likes to ask “What was the point?” → Read More
As the lines between Google and Google+ grow blurrier, so do privacy norms. Today we’re posed with whether we want our location made abundantly clear to anyone we share G+ posts with. Now when you post to G+ from mobile and you enable automatic location sharing or geo-tag yourself at a local spot, a big Google Map of your exact location is shown in the G+ stream on the web.
The combination of exact geo-tagging and these maps give Google+ much more aggressive location sharing than Facebook or Twitter. It certainly enriches the feed, but injecting maps into G+ requires us to be more conscious of what we expose. → Read More
Klout, the site that aims to measure your online influence, has made some big changes to its scoring system, and it has a new look to match the new algorithm.
Founder and CEO Joe Fernandez says that the old Klout score looked at less than 100 “signals”, while the new one looks at more than 400. Put another way, he says the amount of data points that the company analyzes daily is expanding from 1 billion to 12 billion. For the first time, Klout is including measures of real-world influence in its scores — in other words, it’s looking for signs that you’re Kind Of A Big Deal offline, even if you don’t have hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. Those real-world data points include your Wikipedia page (if you’re cool enough to have one — I’m not) and your job title on LinkedIn. → Read More
AfterCollege launched in 1999 as a simple job board for entry-level positions. In spite of a bubble burst and more than a decade in between, the company soldiered on, staying afloat (and profitable) thanks to revenue generated from charging employers to post jobs on its site. With a plethora of job sites out there to choose from, like CareerBuilder and Indeed to name two, AfterCollege has managed to attract and retain a steady flow of paying customers because it works closely with individual academic departments within universities, allowing employers to target job postings to students who will actually find the postings relevant. → Read More
Indulge yourself with a beard wig, toy Lamborghini, or $5 sunglasses on Lish, a new impulse shopping site from Payvment with two-click purchasing powered by PayPal. Today’s launch sees Payvment expanding beyond Facebook ecommerce storefront tools by redirecting all traffic from its old Shopping Mall app to this Pinteresty discovery portal for its merchants.
Lish surfaces fun, affordable products from Payvment stores in real-time based on what’s trending. Unlike the controlled shopping experience of Amazon, you might not buy what you need on Lish. But you can always find something you want. We’re giving away a few hundred early invites within. → Read More
Salesforce has officially closed its acquisition of Buddy Media, but it looks like it is far from closing the door on what it intends to do in the space of enterprise and social communication. Today the company announced Social Communities, a private social networking service where users can engage with customers and partners using some of the features that have largely become commonplace in this era of social media. These include user profiles, real-time feeds, trending topics, recommendations and influence measurement. The platform also incorporates the cloud-based business processes and database services that form the core of Salesforce’s business today. Set for a limited pilot in the autumn 2012, the service will be available generally in the second half of 2013.
The move looks like a clear salvo from Salesforce to competitors that are also converging on the nexus of social tools and enterprise services. They include Microsoft — which already has Sharepoint and is upping the ante now with Yammer; as well as smaller companies like Huddle and Hootsuite, which respectively offer cloud-based collaboration platforms and social media dashboards to serve the two sides of enterprises’ social media needs.
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Facebook has today moved one step closer in its proposed acquisition of photo-sharing app Instagram. The Office of Fair Trading in the UK has given the deal the all-clear.
The announcement was made via an RNS regulatory statement, which briefly says the OFT would not refer the deal to the Competition Commission. A spokesperson for the OFT has given us more detail:
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San Francisco, CA
San Francisco, California
