When FriendFeed launched new themes back in June, I wanted but one feature: The ability to create my own. Today, I got my wish.
Despite being purchased by Facebook for close to $50 million earlier this week, FriendFeed is still rolling out new features. Today brings customizable themes, which allow you to tweak your template to make it as pretty or as ugly as you would like. Naturally, I’m going for ugly, as I stated my desire to mimic the excellent “Eggplant Orange Juice With Blood” theme I created for Gmail when that service launched customizable themes.
So far, my best effort (below) is called “Dictionary.com Cheer Carrot Theme” after my new favorite website. To FriendFeed’s credit, they make it pretty hard to make a truly ugly design, like you can easily do on Gmail. One reason is that theren’t are as many variables to change the colors of.
One interesting note about these themes is that by default, you will see other users’ themes when you click on their profiles. You will also see the themes that admin’s create in rooms that they manage. You can turn this off, and choose to only see your theme, in the settings.
And just for comparison sake, the old Gmail design I did:
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I want live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone. You want live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone. Everyone wants live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone - except for Apple. Though such applications have been available through unofficial means for over a year now, Apple remains mum on the matter. There they sit in Apple's review queue, rotting away beneath an "In Review" label. Looking to find some way onto the platform, developers have begun to scale back their applications until they reach a point Apple is willing to greenlight. We saw it earlier this month with Ustream's streamless app, and now Qik has followed suit. Beginning today, Qik's own sans-streaming app is available for the iPhone 3GS.
For many people, the term “Scavenger Hunt” conjures childhood memories of running around the neighborhood on a quest for knickknacks like thimbles and socks — an experience that loses its luster beyond the age of ten or so. But as it turns out, they’re big businesses: major corporations and universities have successfully used more elaborate scavenger hunts as team building exercises, and a well-designed course can be extremely fun. SCVNGR is one young startup that’s managed to tap into this niche market very successfully, and today it’s launching a new consumer platform that will allow anyone to build their own scavenger hunts, which will work with any mobile phone. The new platform, called XPLR, is now in private beta, and the first 100 TechCrunch readers to go here and enter the code ‘TECHCRUNCH’ will be able to sign up and build their own missions.
In conjunction with the news, the company is also announcing that it has closed a $750,000 funding round from Highland Capital.
SCVNGR is still a very new company, making its debut last fall as part of the DreamIT incubator program. But it’s already seen use by over 300 universities, including Harvard and Princeton, as well as corporations, who have used the company’s enterprise-grade game builder for things like employee team building excercises and orientation events. It’s a fantastic idea for a number of reasons: games are easily deployable with little to no cost outside of licensing the platform, it works on any cell phone, and games can be tweaked with a minimal amount of effort.
XPLR (pronounced ‘explorer’) is meant to serve as a more accessible framework to build these games. And, unlike the more robust SCVNGR builder, XPLR is free. It comes with a number of restictions: you’re limited by how many people can play the game simultaneously, you can’t tell which users have been playing (as you might want to in a commercial app), and the platform is only for non-commercial, non-institutional use. But if you wanted to set up a tour of your hometown, or perhaps a barcrawl for your friends to follow, this is exactly what you’d want to use. You can see a screenshot of the editor below.
So how do the games actually work? If you’d like to try one out for yourself, there’s a free application for the iPhone that includes a training game, but here’s the gist of it: the service sends questions to the phone, oftentimes alongside a text, audio, or video clue to help figure out the answer. Once you think you’ve solved it, you type in your solution and if you’re right, you proceed to the next question. The system works fine as a basic puzzle game, but it’s far more engaging when it’s used for scavenger hunts, with questions that require you to actually walk to a certain landmark. For example, there are a number of SCVNGR missions set up for the city of Boston, which guide users through some of the city’s most well known landmarks. Here’s an example series of questions, taken from a Philadelphia tour:
Clue: Which is greater? This stairs in this famous staircase in Philadelphia or the sequels in this never-ending saga? Answer: Rocky Steps Challenge: Great! Now run there and tell me, on the statue of Rocky at the top, what size shoes is he wearing? Answer (obtained by looking very carefully at Rocky’s shoes): 9.5 An alternate challenge could have been: Now take a photo of your and your team doing the Rocky Pose at the top! Send in the photo to move on!
SCVNGR offers apps for iPhone and Android, but they’re also playable on more basic phones too using SMS (just sent a special keyword to the company’s shortcode and the game will start sending you clues). That said, the smartphone experience is definitely better: some games include multimedia clues, and there are also special photo missions that ask users to submit pictures of themselves doing various tasks. These photos get uploaded to the site’s server, and whoever is running the mission can then distribute them as mementos later on.
SCVNGR is really doing a great job with its service, and its impressive roster of customers is a testament to that. We’ll be keeping an eye on them in the future.
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We guard the final 50 new products and startups that launch at TechCrunch50 closely, and don’t let anyone know the final list until the day of the event (not even press gets the list). But we also generally pre-announce one of the presenting companies to give the audience a taste of what’s to come.
And this year, I’m very proud to announce that Penn & Teller will be launching a new consumer tech product at TechCrunch50.
The duo has worked together for 30 years, and in September they’ll be celebrating their fifth year as headliners in their own theater at the Rio All-suite Hotel & Casino, as well as two Emmy nominations for one of my favorite shows, their Showtime series "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" (I even embedded a clip of their show in this post about bottled water).
Plus, Penn Jillette will be on stage showing their new product for the first time to the 2,000 or so people who will be at TechCrunch50. And I think you’re going to love it.
CrashCorp, the joint venture between former Digg Lead Architect Joe Stump, and former co-founder of Socialthing, Matt Galligan, have released two videos of a proof-of-concept app developed for the iPhone.
After speaking to Galligan, he mentioned that CrashCorp is changing the direction of their company. He also notes:
Right now, there’s a gap in the market, as it relates to making it easy to add persistent location to mobile apps. We’re simply addressing that gap by providing an end-to-end location solution for app developers. Part of that solution will include developing SDK’s for mobile devices, that will allow app developers to quickly add new ways to view location data.
One of these views might be something similar to the proof of concepts Galligan posted to his Flickr account, which are embedded below for your connivence.
In its developer Google Group, Twitter has just made the announcement that it is releasing an early preview of a brand new API: The retweeting API. And that’s not all, Twitter is in the process of completely revamping its retweet functionality.
From the looks of it, this could mean some pretty big changes on Twitter. As you can see in the mock-ups above and below, the retweet (written as “RT” in most tweets) is no longer a part of the actual tweet itself, but rather is a link below the tweet. While that certainly is a cleaner way of doing things, it will be interesting to see if this makes retweeting less or more enticing. And it could potentially help users find new people to follow (more on that below).
But as co-founder Biz Stone notes on the Twitter blog, the current method of retweeting on twitter.com is a cumbersome process of copying and pasting. They want to change that. He calls this “Phase One” of “Project Retweet,” and notes that it is going out to developers first so they can be ready for the change, and indicates that it’s not quite ready for prime-time:
We are still sketching out exactly how this feature and its API counterpart works. Sharing our thoughts before launching means developers will have the opportunity to prepare their applications. In a few weeks or so we’ll launch the feature on our web site and because app developers had a chance to prepare, it should become available across most of the Twitter ecosystem about the same time. This way, we can all enjoy retweeting—however we choose to access Twitter.
And the ramifications of this are potentially even larger. With the new method, all of your friends will see the original tweet you’re retweeting in their timeline (unless they have this option turned off). So if I’m not following @ev (Twitter co-founder Evan Williams) in the example that Stone drew to the right, I will still see his tweet in my stream because Stone retweeted it. This seems like a great idea for new follower discovery.
Stone notes that the new retweet look will launch to a limited group of users first for a set period of time so the team can test how it will work on the system. It will then get a wider roll-out in a few weeks.
Writes Twitter developer Marcel Molina in the Twitter developer Google Group about the new API:
Retweeting has become one of the cultural conventions of the Twitter experience. It’s yet another example of Twitter’s users discovering innovative ways to use the service. We dig it. So soon it’s going to become a natively supported feature on twitter.com. It’s looking like we’re only weeks away from being ready to launch it on our end. We wanted to show the community of platform developers the API we’ve cooked up for retweeting so those who want to support it in their applications would have enough time to have it ready by launch day. We were planning on exposing a way for developers to create a retweet, recognize retweets in your timeline and display them distinctively amongst other tweets. We’ve also got APIs for several retweet timelines: retweets you’ve created, retweets the users you’re following have created, and your tweets that have been retweeted by others.
Below find some screenshot mockups of what this will look like.
At this point, it seems like people are just talking themselves in a circle about the rumored Apple Tablet. Everyone is so excited for it, not matter what it actually is, that they’re starting to convince themselves that it could drop as soon as next month. Rumors of that date started after an all-over-the-place report last month by the Financial Times, that seemed to suggest the tablet was both being prepared for September, and for the latter holiday season at the same time. As we said at the time, it seems unlikely that either are true.
And today brings more people backing that up. Sources tell The Loop that the tablet will definitely not be a part of the September event (which is likely to focus on music and the iPod, just like all other Apple September events do). Jim Dalrymple writes:
Very reliable sources familiar with the product have said speculation of the tablet being introduced during the September event are flat out wrong. The Apple tablet, they said, would not see the light of day until the first part of 2010.
In linking to Dalrymple’s piece, Daring Fireball says basically the same thing, “I'm almost certain there's no tablet coming this year. It's a 2010 thing,” writes John Gruber, who also has a very good track record on these types of things.
The point is that while all indications are that a tablet (or large-form iPod touch) is coming from Apple, 2010 seems like a much more likely launch window. Apple has spent the past couple of years doing smaller, more focused events centered around specific product categories. A September event with an Apple Tablet would simply overwhelm the other announcements they plant to make there, like the “Cocktail” project, iTunes 9 and entirely new iPod touches.
Instead, I’d bet on Apple doing another special event in the first quarter of 2010, focused around this new device and maybe previewing the iPhone 4.0 SDK which this thing may have something to do with (just a guess there). Remember, Apple isn’t doing Macworld this year, so it doesn’t necessarily even have to be in January, but rather they’ll wait until they’ve perfected it. Whatever it is.
I recently had the pleasure to help out on a music video shoot here in the northwest, noteworthy not just because a great video resulted, but because we were shooting with twoRED One cameras plus a custom RC helicopter for aerial shots. It was interesting being behind the scenes and I thought I'd share a little of the fun. The video itself, for Mt St Helens Vietnam Band's "Albatross, Albatross, Albatross," can be viewed in HD over at Vimeo. The opportunity to see a group of local freelancers and entrepreneurs coming together to make such an incredibly professional product was extremely valuable — technology has democratized and accelerated the independent film and music community to a degree I hadn't realized. I was brought on because I had access to some special locations (most of the aerial and forest shots are near some family property in the San Juans) and so I could shoot a little behind-the-scenes video of the production. More details, video, and production stills below the fold.
There are ads, and the there are ADS. Dictionary.com now features the latter, in what I can only describe as the most in-your-face advertisement I have ever seen on the web. About the only thing that could catch your eye more is if its next ad is for a porn or dead kittens.
Very clearly, the washing detergent Cheer is now sponsoring Dictionary.com’s homepage, but I’ve never seen a site with an ad so big that I’m not sure there’s actually a service being offered at all. Bing features huge pictures on its site too, but they’re tasteful images that provide a nice backdrop, this is just God-awful. And worse, the entire thing is clickable, to take you to Cheer’s page.
This make the huge ads that MySpace and IMDb run (shown below), look tasteful. And it almost makes me forgive ESPN.com for its greedy advertising practices — almost. And yes, it’s kind of like Pandora, but you listen to Pandora, you don’t have to look at it.
I know times are tough, and everyone including us needs to sell ads to make the business work, but come on. At what point do you stop being a service and start being a billboard?
Luckily, if you are actually able to find the text input box to look up a word, the resulting page doesn’t feature the same ad backdrop. Unfortunately to do this initial search, you have to visit the page. Which I probably won’t be doing anymore.
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It's nice that the Apple Tablet - we're calling it the Tapplet - rumors are circulating. August is a horrible time for tech. There's not much out there right now, just a few headsets and some early back-to-school stuff. The retail refresh hasn't hit - that comes in about October - and the Interwebs are quiet. It's great to have a little bit of frisson in our lives, something to put on our Christmas lists. With that we present today's Tapplet rumors. First, we have rumor of a September 8event at Apple HQ for music devices. This is Apple's traditional time for releasing new music gear. It's just before back-to-school and it gives them a little time to get stuff into the retail space by October, just when kids are starting to break the iPods they got last year. So what could it be? Could it be a new iPod? iPods with cameras? Or it might be...
A lot of people today are excited about the new Zune HD. And that’s great news for Microsoft, as it has been attempting for a few years now to even just steal some buzz from Apple in the MP3 market, if not sales. Well, they’ve succeeded in the first part, but the second? That could be much more difficult.
Microsoft’s new device sounds great: OLED screen, HD radio, HD video (720p) outputs, powerful Tegra chip, and most importantly a iPod-beating price of $219.99 for the 16 GB variety, and just $289.99 for the 32 GB version. That latter is a $110 savings over the comparable iPod touch, which the Zune HD clearly targets. And now it has a very real release date: About a month from now, September 15.
Are the planets aligning for a hit version of the Zune, finally? Not so fast.
Apple typically takes the first week of September to hold a press event to show off its new iPods. Last year, the event was on Tuesday, September 9. This year, that same second Tuesday is on September 8. Music industry sources tell MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka that Apple is going to hold an event the week of September 7. Bingo.
So yes, it looks very likely that Apple will hold its next iPod press event one week before the launch of the new Zune. And what does that likely mean? Aside from Apple likely talking about the “Cocktail” music format project it has been working on, also very likely to drop are the new iPod touches. Yes, the device the Zune HD is competing against. Uh oh.
Why uh oh? Well because while the Zune HD looks good compared to the current iPod touch, the new versions will certain be seeing some upgrades. What are the two most likely upgrades? A camera, which the Zune HD doesn’t have. And a price drop. Again, uh oh.
It’s not clear if Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has some inside information here or if he’s just making a prediction, but what he writes today certainly sounds like it could be the case for the new iPod touches:
The Zune HD prices look good compared to today's iPod Touches, but not so much compared to the new camera-equipped ones Apple is set to announce next month (16/32/64 GB for $199/299/399).
That would make the Zune HD 32 GB only $10 cheaper than the comprable iPod touch. And again, with no camera, and no apps (at least not yet anyway). The Zune HD could still very well hold an edge with an OLED screen (it’s not clear if a new iPod touch would feature that) and the HD-outputs, but would that really be enough to dethrone the dominant player in the market?
Look, the Zune HD does sound very nice, and I’ve said as muchmany times. But the overall idea of the Zune is still a bit odd to me. It’s Microsoft burning money to compete is a market (MP3 players) that is slowly fading away. Now, there is undoubtedly a plan to get apps on it eventually, and I’m sure games, to turn it into more than an MP3 player. But right now, there is basically no mention of any of that by Microsoft. So that means that when it does happen, it will likely be months from now.
And even with those, the bigger question remains: What’s the end game here for Microsoft, which makes its money off of Windows and Office?.
My point is that Microsoft has spent the entire lifespan of the Zune chasing Apple’s tail, for what? The first hard drive-based Zunes came years after the iPod, and didn’t sell well. Then it released a Flash memory version well after the first flash iPods, and that too didn’t sell well. Now it has an iPod touch competitor 2 years after the iPod touch was released. On paper, it sounds promising right now, but come September 8, it’s likely to be one-upped by Apple yet again.
It’s not hard to see how this plays out, sometime next year we’ll hear about a new Zune HD that has a camera and has app support. The question is will the Zune HD have made any headway into Apple’s market by then? That is far from a certainty, despite the nice-looking new device.
What I’d really like to know is who plans these events for Microsoft? How on Earth didn’t they not realize that Apple has an iPod event pretty much every year now in the first few days of September? I’m sure it would have been a big pain in the ass, but why not put everything you have into ramping up production earlier and getting it to market before Apple can respond?
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One major obstacle to use of Macs in the enterprise has always been the absence of Outlook. Sure Macs have Entourage, but the program just doesn't cut it for business users entrenched in the ways of Outlook. Those set on using a Mac have often resorted to partitioning their hard drives or installing programs like Outlook2Mac to access the program. Soon such tactics will no longer be necessary, as Microsoft has announced the availability of Outlook in the next version of Mac Office. The change will likely be implemented in the new version of Office that is set for release in time for the holidays in 2010. In the mean time, those using Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition will enjoy steps Microsoft has takent towards making the experience more Outlook-like. The release comes as part of a new business edition of Mac Office designed to provide Mac users with better connection to Microsoft Exchange Server, and improved compatibility across platforms. Microsoft's Mac unit is also building the Outlook software from the ground up to ensure compatibility with Mac's backup and hard-drive search features.
Last May I wrote about reMail, a new iPhone application that brought full-text search to the iPhone. It was quite impressive (especially given that the iPhone lacked any search functionaly at all at that point), but the application had a few problems that kept it from really catching on, including a subscription fee and some possible privacy issues (it required users to hand over their Email login credentials). Today, that changes: reMail is launching an entirely new application on the App Store that should allay any privacy concerns and features a one-time price of $4.99 instead of a subscription. You can download it here.
The last version of reMail relied on the company’s optimized servers, which were much more efficient at running search queries than most Email providers. However, that technique came with one caveat: it required users to hand over their login credentials. I pointed this out last time I wrote about the company, figuring that most people probably wouldn’t mind too much, but CEO Gabor Cselle says that it was a surprisingly common complaint — people are just unwilling to hand over that login data (which is probably a good thing). Fortunately, reMail 2.0 does away with this problem.
The new version of reMail downloads the entire contents of your Mailbox — every single message — onto your iPhone, which it then stores locally. That may sound undesirable for those of us with large Email boxes that are many gigabytes large, but the reMail team has done an excellent job at compressing data for its search index: Cselle says that they’ve managed to squeeze 100,000 Emails into 500 megabytes (most Email accounts are only a fraction of that size).
To get started, you’ll have to download your entire mailbox to your phone which will take some time (Cselle recommends setting the phone to Wi-Fi and leaving it over night), but the service will pick up where it left off if you have to have to cut it off mid-way through the download process. Searching itself works exactly as you’d hope, showing results only a second or two after you’ve typed a query, with matching words highlighted.
Of course, the iPhone 3.0 software update finally introduced Email search to the iPhone, which may lead some people to wonder why reMail is even necessary. Cselle points out a few major benefits: for one, reMail’s search is around five times faster than the iPhone’s, and it searches full-text (the iPhone only searches headers). And reMail retains its full functionally offline, while the iPhone’s search often requires a data connection to search older messages.
As I’ve written before CEO Gabor Cselle is a guy who really knows Email. Here’s a brief bio of Cselle from our last post:
He wrote his Master's thesis on Organizing Email, worked on the Gmail team, and was also VP of Engineering at Xobni, which he left last year to pursue his own company. The company's backers include Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, who built a little application called Gmail (they also co-founded FriendFeed). These guys know what they're doing.
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This is a guest post by Andrew Scott, a serial entrepreneur in London, CEO Rummble, Non-exec UnLtdWorld.com, founding board m.Love & and “lover of all things mobile”.
In 1901 a Swedish immigrant to America called Johan Nordstrom founded the Nordstrom department store. In 1975, by now a national chain, a Nordstrom customer walked into one of their stores to return a set of tyres he'd bought. The salesperson gladly took back the set of car tyres and gave the customer a refund. Nothing weird about that, right? Except Nordstrom has never sold tyres.
Many of you may have heard this story before; it's one of many legendary tales of great customer service from Nordstrom and best of all it's true.
According to a chap called Efraim Turban "Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation."
Like us all I have copious tales of despair dealing with corporate giants. I'd say the worst offenders used to be banks, but in today's world of mobile everything, the mobile network operators have definitely claimed that crown.
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We’ve seen two quarters of declines in online advertising revenues, but signs of a recovery, or at least a reset, are beginning to show. In a note today explaining why he is bullish on Google, Citi Internet analyst Mark Mahaney makes the case for cautious optimism.
He predicts stability in search advertising revenues, a significant increase in spending by retail advertisers in both search and display ads, and major growth in mobile ad revenues. While it is “too early to call the quarter,” his checks with search engine marketing firms suggest that overall spending and cost-per-clicks will at least be in line with the second quarter.
On top of that pillar, there is the “snowballing momentum” for mobile search ads. He writes:
Advertisers are seeing 10X increase in click-thrus via Mobile devices. Mobile Search activity is ramping fast this Smartphone Summer, and ad dollars are following.
That is off a small base, but growth is always good. With all of the new Web phones from the iPhone and Android to the Palm Pre and Blackberry, the Summer of Smartphone Love seems to be paying off.
Finally, Mahaney sees movement in spending budgets among ecommerce companies. In contrast to 3 percent annual growth in marketing spends among these retailers in the first half of the year, he expects them to ramp up online advertising spending by 20 percent in the second half of the year as they gear up for the holiday season.
But will growth in mobile and retail be enough to move the needle for the entire industry?
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In June, Facebook became the fourth largest site in the world after only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites. But how did it get there? Click through the slideshow above to see the advance of the Facebook Death Star across key markets (the U.S., UK, France, Italy, and Spain).
Each slide shows a snapshot in time, starting with January, 2008 to June or July, 2009. The charts are based on comScore data and show the relative reach (X-axis), usage (y-axis), and time spent (size of bubble) on various popular sites in each market over time. Facebook is represented by the blue sphere. You can see how it moves across the Web universe passing sites such as AOL, MySpace, and YouTube (overseas) and getting a larger and larger as it progresses.
In the U.S., Facebook’s growth continues at a remarkable pace, but the changes in the UK and France are the most dramatic. In the UK, in particular, note how a year ago it was it was neck and neck with Bebo, but by June Bebo had shrunk and lost reach, while Facebook had gone on to pass Yahoo, YouTube, and eBay as well.
(Hat tip to UK reader Trevor Johnson for sending the slides)
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(Relatively) good news from China for the World Wide Web as a whole today: The government today announced it will (partially) back down over its controversial internet monitoring filter software "Green Dam Youth Escort". As a reminder, the software is supposed to protect Chinese web users from harmful content, especially from online porn, and was to be made mandatory with all PC shipments in the country from July 1 this year.
I've been testing an HD projector here at the house and, in its initial, out-of-the-box setting we found that the picture was ridiculously "sharp." The picture, I suppose, looked like an old Dr. Who episode where the action on screen is smoother than the background, creating a jarring disparity when watching movies with lots of movement. It's sometimes called the "Soap Opera Effect." We decided to do a little digging to figure out why. Most film is recorded at 24 frames per second, but your LCD TV probably either displays at 60 fps or 120 hz (hertz is just a measurement of frequency per second). There are three main ways to cope with this. First is to simply display each frame longer, this is the oldest technique in LCD tech. However, its undesirable side effects include the possibility of motion blur, or of judder. Judder is an artifact of adjusting the framerate and it looks like a sort of stutter in movement that would otherwise be smooth (a slow pan, for instance). The second technique is one used on Plasmas and CRT TVs. Instead of showing a bright image the whole time, they display the frame, then a short frame of either darkness or a very dimmed picture. This alleviates much of the issue with judder and motion blur as it allows your brain to fill in the gap faster than you can consciously notice. It is also an old technique, and is used in theaters. It provides the traditional cinema feel.
The economy may still be trying to pick itself up, but one beneficiary of tighter budgets is outsourcing marketplace oDesk. Web developers and software engineers looking for project work can find jobs on oDesk, and employers can post jobs. Workers download PC-monitoring software which lets employers keep track of exactly how long they are on the job, even if it is in their pajamas at 3 AM.
As a result, oDesk publishes aggregate data on the “oConomy” and how many collective hours a week are being billed through its service. In July, the hours worked on oDesk surpassed 100,000 a week for the first time, and $65 million worth of work was posted on the site.
That is still a drop in the bucket of the overall tech economy, but it is an indication that outsourcing is growing in the down economy. Competitor Elance, which covers a broader set of industries, shows similar trends.
Philadelphia based DreamIt Ventures, a pre-seed stage venture firm and incubator founded in 2007 by David Bookspan, Michael Levinson, and Steve Welch, has just announced the most recent batch of startups to complete its second annual 12 week program.
In a similar vein as Y Combinator, TechStars, Launchbox, and other incubators, DreamIt Ventures provides up to $30,000 in seed funding and twelve weeks of tutelage to local startups in exchange for equity. Below is a description of each company in DreamIt’s class of 2009, as provided by DreamIt co-founder Michael Levinson.
Notehall is an online marketplace that allows college students to buy and sell lecture notes and study guide materials to fellow classmates helping them get an edge in their specific classes and best prepare for exams.
Notehall is currently active and generating revenue at the University of Arizona, Arizona State, and University of Kansas and has 13,000+ active users and 5,500+ documents available for sale. In Notehall's marketplace, college students have earned over $13,000 from selling their class notes and study guides.
While at Dreamit, Notehall has successfully launched an automated recruiting campaign at Drexel University and is planning to rollout its service to more universities beginning in Fall 2009. Notehall is also in the process of completing a capital raise.
OurShelf is a social cataloging site that lets users manage their belongings, lend or find the items they need faster and cheaper. Users save money from borrowing short-use items such as books, music, movies, and videogames from friends and they make money from selling their unused items to multiple third-party sites, like eBay and Craigslist.
The site provides users with a digital shelf. They can catalog their belongings through an import functionality or OurShelf’s search engine. A populated shelf allows users to create a highly personalized shopping and item management experience. OurShelf achieves this by laying an item graph (complete with related items and reviews) over a social graph. It's like del.icio.us, except for the physical goods users own.
For many people, the amount of information coming into their inboxes is overwhelming. And for news-tracking professionals and resource-strapped small businesses, this information overload costs precious time and money. There has to be something better than Google Alerts.
Parse.ly is a tool that tries to understand users’ unique interests to filter and prioritize content from thousands of news and blog sources across the web. Parse.ly always tries to show users the content most relevant to their interests first, so they will spend less time on low-value items.
Parse.ly also automatically learns users interests, and recommends increasingly relevant content over time. Moreover, Parse.ly is designed with a spare web interface to provide people with the most productive reading experience.
Postling is a tool that helps small businesses face the daunting task of social media marketing. The company comes from two founders of Etsy.com (Chris Maguire and Haim Schoppik) and Etsy’s former head of product management (David Lifson), Postling lets users publish content simultaneously to the major social media platforms, including blogs (Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Tumblr), Twitter, and Facebook. In addition, marketers and entrepreneurs can view and respond to comments left by readers across various social media.
Small business owners told the Postling team that they would be willing to pay for a social media marketing tool that saves them time and spares them from learning how to navigate yet another website. They listened and created Postling. The service costs $9/month or $90/year.
SeatGeek is a web application that forecasts sports and concert ticket prices on the secondary market, analogous to what Farecast (now Bing Travel) does for airline tickets. For ticket buyers, this application helps them determine whether they should buy a ticket now or wait until the price drops. For sellers, it helps them identify the optimal time to sell their tickets and increase their profits margins.
SeatGeek's crawlers have compiled millions of ticket transactions and have also aggregated other factors that influence ticket prices. SeatGeek’s patent-pending technology uses this data in an algorithm that attempts to accurately predict ticket prices.
Currently, SeatGeek offers a free version for ticket buyers that is monetized through affiliate fees. In October it is launching a premium subscription service for brokers and other ticket sellers
Straight Up English is an innovative Web-based English-language learning company. Straight Up English is hoping to solve the most persistent speech challenges for non-native speakers of English, helping them improve comprehension and communication in areas such as word stress, intonation, and pronunciation.
The company applies research-based teaching methods from linguistics and education, allows for feedback and self-correction, and has a consumer-oriented, intuitive interface. Straight Up English has a deep focus on oral communication skills unique to English and its multi-modal approach.
It is creating web and mobile applications, as well as cultivating English-as-a-second-language communities among students and teachers to build brand awareness.
Three Screen Games is producing social games across all three screens (pc-mobile-tv). Their first game, released this August, will be FanGamb, short for Fantasy Gambling. FanGamb is a new online game for sports fans that creates a competition between friends to see who the best sports bettor is.
FanGamb is designed to overcome the limitations of traditional fantasy sports games by being more fun and keeping players more engaged. While all sports fans can enjoy the game, the marketing plan is focused on reaching male sports fans, ages 16 to 25. Three Screen Games is in the final process of closing a six figure seed round.
Trendsta is a marketing platform that puts products in the hands of the most influential teens on the web. Trendsta tracks those teens as they create buzz about those items. Since this summer, Trendsta has landed a number of notable clients including Atlantic Records, Penguin Books, Neutrogena and Polaroid. Trendsta works with the most connected teens who have been written up in publications including Teen Vogue and the New York Times.
Trendsta’s partners helped build myYearbook, Owned (a top 10 Facebook app) and several lead-generation websites. Now they are solving the problem of how marketers can connect with a generation that can no longer be reached through traditional advertising channels.
Jobaphiles.com is an online marketplace where employers can auction their part-time jobs and one-time gigs. Through a transparent bidding process, Jobaphiles enables employers to hire the most qualified and competitively priced applicant, saving them time and money
Employers post jobs, and job seekers bid down the wages. Job seekers effectively compete for a job by having knowledge of other candidates' qualifications and their bidding price, and employers are able to hire the most qualified person that fits their budget.
Kidzillions is an online allowance and chore management system that lets kids spend and save online. Unlike other online allowance systems, Kidzillions combines the benefits of budgeting, saving and responsible spending, helping kids learn essential lessons about personal finance and accountability in a cashless society.
Kids like it because they’re able to work for real money to buy real stuff easily, and parents like it because their kids are excited to save and (hopefully) do extra chores around the house.
Simply by Apple’s law of averages, the likelihood that the following two videos are real, is very small. If someone was able to sneak out one video of the Apple Tablet in action, it’d be a miracle, but two? Now you’re just tempting fate. Still, that isn’t stopping Brian Lam of Gizmodo from wondering if there could be something to these (even though his colleague disagrees). And you know what, even if they aren’t real, Apple should consider hiring whoever made them, because this seems like the right idea.
Sure, certain details are off, like the text alignment on some of the elements as ZDNet points out. But just look at this system in action. It’s like having multiple iPhones on the same giant touch screen (and that may actually be exactly what this is).
Regardless, whatever this is or isn’t, I want this. I was unsure if the app model would be better or worse than running a version of regular OS X on the Apple Tablet, but I’m definitely leaning towards better recently. And after seeing this, I hope Apple is too.
Also enjoy some images posted in the MacRumors Forums of the same purported device.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Say you’re a startup, and say your plan is to make money (crazy I know), but maybe you don’t have the infrastructure in place to accept payments for whatever your business model is. There are plenty of solutions out there to do this for you, but CheddarGetter, which itself is a startup, wants to be the easiest and most affordable one.
The idea is to have a service with an interface that any developer can figure out, but at the same time, has flexible options so that it can support models like subscriptions, micro-billing, or donations. And the main key to all of this is its rich APIs, which you can read about here.
Using CheddarGetter, you won’t have to worry about declined credit cards, coding for pricing changes, handling trial times and all the complicated stuff that comes with payments. And the services does things like automate email sending for confirmations, and gives you an analytics package, to make your job easier.
The key part aside from ease of use is obviously cost. And CheddarGetter sounds pretty compelling with prices starting at $39 a month. Larger rivals can charge hundreds of dollars a month for the same services. And CheddarGetter has no setup fees, transaction fees or percentage fees. It’s simply the $39 a month and then forget about it — assuming you stay small.
If your startup takes off and you need to manage beyond 1,000 customers, the prices obviously go up. The Advanced package is $169.00 a month for up to 10,000 customers, and the Premium package is $549.99 a month for up to 50,000 customers. Or, if you only slightly go over the alloted number of users, there is a small per-customer overage fee you can choose to pay rather than upgrading. And no matter what payment scale you’re on, there are zero transaction and setup fees.
CheddarGetter is the first startup to launch from SproutBox, an Indiana-based incubator. It’s currently accepting applications for a new crop of early-stage startups, but hurry, the deadline is August 15.
The service isn’t set to launch until September, but we have 100 invites to give away now. Simply visit this page and use the code TECHCRUNCH1 in the ‘Got a Beta Code?’ box.
Seattle-based Z2Live, a new mobile social gaming platform, is announcing a second round of financing tomorrow - $3 million from Madrona Venture Group (also Seattle based), topping off the $1 million they raised from Madrona last year. Paul Goodrich from Madrona is on the company’s board of directors.
The company describes itself as “the first mobile multiplayer game platform,” and has created a multiplayer platform for the iPhone/iPod Touch products. They also offer a set of services to implement subscriptions. The platform, they say, supports a wide variety of social games, including: turn-based casual games, racing games, role-playing games, and eventually the most sophisticated first-person shooters. The platform is free, Z2Live takes a cut of revenues from the games.
When FriendFeed 
I want live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone. You want live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone. Everyone wants live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone - except for Apple. Though such applications have been available through 
For many people, the term “Scavenger Hunt” conjures childhood memories of running around the neighborhood on a quest for knickknacks like thimbles and socks — an experience that loses its luster beyond the age of ten or so. But as it turns out, they’re big businesses: major corporations and universities have successfully used more elaborate scavenger hunts as team building exercises, and a well-designed course can be extremely fun. 
We guard the final 50 new products and startups that launch at 
And the ramifications of this are potentially even larger. With the new method, all of your friends will see the original tweet you’re retweeting in their timeline (unless they have this option turned off). So if I’m not following 
At this point, it seems like people are just 
I recently had the pleasure to help out on a music video shoot here in the northwest, noteworthy not just because a great video resulted, but because we were shooting with two 
It's nice that the Apple Tablet - we're calling it the 
A lot of people
One major obstacle to use of Macs in the enterprise has always been the absence of Outlook. Sure Macs have Entourage, but the program just doesn't cut it for business users entrenched in the ways of Outlook. Those set on using a Mac have often resorted to partitioning their hard drives or installing programs like Outlook2Mac to access the program. Soon such tactics will no longer be necessary, as Microsoft has 
This is a guest post by 
(Relatively) good news from China for the World Wide Web as a whole today: The government 
I've been testing an HD projector here at the house and, in its initial, out-of-the-box setting we found that the picture was ridiculously "sharp." The picture, I suppose, looked like an old Dr. Who episode where the action on screen is smoother than the background, creating a jarring disparity when watching movies with lots of movement. It's sometimes called the "Soap Opera Effect." We decided to do a little digging to figure out why. Most film is recorded at 24 frames per second, but your LCD TV probably either displays at 60 fps or 120 hz (hertz is just a measurement of frequency per second). There are three main ways to cope with this. First is to simply display each frame longer, this is the oldest technique in LCD tech. However, its undesirable side effects include the possibility of motion blur, or of judder. Judder is an artifact of adjusting the framerate and it looks like a sort of stutter in movement that would otherwise be smooth (a slow pan, for instance). The second technique is one used on Plasmas and CRT TVs. Instead of showing a bright image the whole time, they display the frame, then a short frame of either darkness or a very dimmed picture. This alleviates much of the issue with judder and motion blur as it allows your brain to fill in the gap faster than you can consciously notice. It is also an old technique, and is used in theaters. It provides the traditional cinema feel. 
Philadelphia based 
Say you’re a startup, and say your plan is to make money (crazy I know), but maybe you don’t have the infrastructure in place to accept payments for whatever your business model is. There are plenty of solutions out there to do this for you, but 
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