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Mar 26, 4:08AM
As we just
broke the news on, Google has a secret group messaging project that was built from within their confines:
Disco. Slide, which
Google bought last year, are the ones responsible for the app. And since word is that they're allowed to run autonomously within the company as their own startup of sorts, the app probably doesn't have anything to do with Google's broader social strategy. Still, it's a group messaging app that Google owns. So how is it? Well, it's very barebones right now. We've been playing around the app every since we stumbled upon it, and it's pretty safe to say at this point that it's not yet a GroupMe/Fast Society/Kik/Beluga/textPlus-killer. But it is also still in beta, and the iPhone app design implies that it will expand beyond its current shell which is little more than a way to organize group text messages.
Mar 26, 3:39AM
It seems like Google has made a foray into the group messaging space today with
Disco, a new iPhone app and website. Well, they sort of have.
The service utilizes the Disco.com domain that Google bought
at Domainfest last year for $255K. The Disco.com site went up today and the beta app hit the App Store yesterday, but no one noticed it — until now. And here's the thing: it was made by Slide.
Mar 26, 2:21AM
Innovative web and mobile payments platform
Dwolla is announcing today its FiSync integration for financial institutions, a technology which lets users of participating banks integrate with with the Dwolla platform. FiSync will let members of partner financial institutions to send and receive money via phone, web, Twitter and Facebook as well as at real life stores instantly. Because of a technology partnership with The Members Group, a full Dwolla FiSync core integration will eliminate the 2-3 day wait times associated with Automated Clearing House transactions and will allow users to directly send and receive funds from their bank accounts, with out the need for a pre-loaded Dwolla account.
Mar 26, 1:30AM
It has been one month since Apple
unveiled a developer preview of their latest operating system, OS X Lion. And while the initial deployment was
a bit rocky, Apple appears to have worked through their initial Mac App Store distribution issues. And now another update looms — and it's potentially a big one. Specifically, Apple is gearing up to deploy an OS X Lion update to developers that they may be classifying as the "GM1" release, we've heard. "GM" or "Golden Master" is a title reserved for software that is complete. But from what we've heard, this is only the initial Golden Master candidate. In other words, don't get too excited just yet.
Mar 25, 11:34PM
Stroll through downtown Palo Alto right now, and there's a chance you'll pass by one of the most buzzed-about startups in the Valley:
Color, the new
photo-swapping service that raised $41 million pre-launch and has been met with waves of hype and
backlash. Color's office is pretty nondescript from the outside — that is, until you notice the handwritten note that's hanging on the door. Color CEO
Bill Nguyen, who sold Lala to Apple in 2009 before starting Color, has written a letter to passersby inviting them to come inside and check out the office — where they'll actually be able to submit ideas for the product. Here's the full text:
"What is Color? We are an open social network for your iPhone and Android.
Mar 25, 9:27PM
We're now two days into to the life of Color, and it's still the tech story that everyone in the blogosphere wants to talk about. Yesterday, I detailed why so much of that talk is directly related to the massive funding they were able to secure, rather than the product itself. And I wondered why so many people seemed to be rooting for it to fail spectacularly rather than succeed? The answer, it seems, may be quite simple. There were some great discussions in the comment section (can you believe I'm saying that?) of yesterday's post and a number of people reached out to weigh in as well. Of those, the most interesting perspectives were from entrepreneurs. A common refrain among them points to a simple reason for the Color backlash beyond the larger "bubble" talk: no one wants to root for Goliath.
Mar 25, 9:02PM
"Technology has been one of the biggest drivers of new vocabulary for centuries" -- Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large for the O.E.D.
The Internet's importance as a preserver and driver of language use has been reinforced this week with two key symbolic developments. The first is the news that the Internet-isms OMG, LOL and the usage of "heart" as a verb have made the Oxford English dictionary, throwing purists into a tizzy, because basically people generally hate change (it took about fifteen years for people to finally accept that the doubled-up adjectival noun "web site" would inevitably become the all inclusive noun "website." And it took the AP Stylebook about twenty to eventually join the two).
Mar 25, 8:41PM
Gary Vaynerchuk is a busy guy. I don't expect him to pick up the phone every time I call. After all, he's on a book tour or something, and busy tweeting, and drinking wine. But then I saw the picture above. Yup, that's Gary V on his cell phone in front of a poster advertising his new book, The Thank You Economy. The poster lists a phone number, (646) 401-0368, and asks prospective readers to: Call now and the author Gary Vaynerchuk will answer this or any other question about The Thank You Economy.* *Unless he's in a plane or meeting
Mar 25, 5:52PM
Two days ago, I published the chart below with monthly estimates of Groupon's U.S. revenues. The chart shows a startling 30 percent falloff in February from the month before. As I noted in the post: Again, these are just estimates based on the equivalent of scraping Groupon's site, and thus could be missing something.
Well, at least for February, it looks like those numbers are way off. The post obviously caused some ripple effects to the extent that Groupon had to start addressing the issue with potential hires. As a result, it knocked loose the real revenue numbers for February and January. Groupon wouldn't comment on the revenue numbers when I asked them about it, but according to a source, Groupon is now privately countering the numbers in my post: instead of $62 million in U.S. revenues, the company did $103 million in February. And that is up from $92 million in January (compared to the $89 million in the original data).
Mar 25, 5:43PM
The New York Times, struggling to find its place digitally, has just released an iPhone update today, three days before its paywall plan is put into action. Well what's new? In addition to an interface touch up and the option to swipe between stories, the app now has Recently Viewed items at the top of it's Sections section, followed in order by Photos and Video, which were not at the top before. The update purportedly will add more videos and slideshows to the app, so the re-prioritization of these options makes sense (and also cents, as these two content types have proven to be the most addicting for readers). The NYT Blogs like Dealbook and Media Decoder have (finally) been relegated to their own section, at the bottom of the app. 
Mar 25, 5:35PM
APIs are like websites: they are available most of the time, but unfortunately not all the time. Website and application performance monitoring startup WatchMouse monitored the uptime of 50 of the most popular APIs (as ranked by ProgrammableWeb) for a month to see which are the most reliable - and which ones are rather flaky. WatchMouse, which also publishes API statuses in real time at API-Status.com, found that ten of them performed without a single hitch between February 16th to March 17th, including goo.gl, Quora, eBay, Google Maps and Basecamp. 
Mar 25, 5:30PM
As you may have heard, professional social network LinkedIn passed 100 million members this past week. Amid an upcoming IPO, this was a pretty significant milestone for the social network. And today, LinkedIn co-founder and chairman Reid Hoffman has sent the first million members an email, personally thanking them for joining the network in its early days. TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld received a note (he is member #261,186), which we've embedded in the post. The note reads: I want to personally thank you because you were one of LinkedIn's first million members (member number [ ] in fact!*). In any technology adoption lifecycle, there are the early adopters, those who help lead the way. That was you.
Mar 25, 5:27PM
For today's giveaway, we are giving a Xbox Kinect package away to one lucky reader. This package comes with the Xbox 360, a Kinect, and a game. Microsoft broke records by selling 8 million Kinects in 60 days and the Kinect has become the world's fastest growing game console. Want it? Just follow these steps to enter.
Mar 25, 4:33PM
Last year Facebook announced that it will be working to help Y Combinator companies create "transformative social experiences", giving them preferential treatment and access to company resources. By no means a guarantee for success, but still a big deal. Today Facebook is announcing a partnership with European startup accelerator and fund Seedcamp. Seedcamp startups will receive product, technical, and design support as well as early access to beta products and programs on the Facebook Platform. 
Mar 25, 3:44PM
Pulse, an innovative news reading app for mobile devices, has updated its iPhone and Android apps with a number of new features including new content sources and improved sharing with social feeds and news discovery features. Pulse, which is developed by Alphonso Labs, launched last year via an iPad app as a more seamless (and visually appealing) way to read your RSS feeds. But recently, Pulse ditched RSS in favor of hooking up with APIs to access content. Pulse's home screen renders stories from your feeds on a dynamic mosaic interface and via a touch interface, allows you to swipe up and down to see headlines from various sources, and right and left to browse stories from a particular source. 
Mar 25, 3:20PM
Team USA play Argentina tomorrow at the New Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey, and while we're all excited to see Messi & Co. pretty much run circles around the team, at least our boys will look good in the process. Nike continues to supply the United States Men's National Team with its official kit, and once again there are a few improvements worth highlighting. So let's do just that now. First off, it's red! Yes, Nike has finally produced a red kit, to go along its usual white (home) and blue (away) designs. That's not really tech-y, no, but it's probably the first thing you'll notice. Nike says it created the red kit in response to fan demand: USA, home of the red, white, and blue, so where's the red? Along those lines.
Mar 25, 3:15PM
There is no doubt that mobile commerce is heating up. The market is expected to be a multi-billion dollar sector in 2011 and eBay, Amazon and many other online retailers are launching designated apps for smartphone platforms. Zappos has furthered its footprint in m-commerce with the launch of an Android app. Similar to the online retailer's iPhone and iPad apps, you can search, browse, read reviews, share, and buy shoes, handbags, clothing, jewelry and more via the app. Purchasers get the same benefits of shopping on Zappos.com, including a 365-day return policy and 24-7 customer support. Of course, Zappos is known for its customer service and has a dedicated team covering support for mobile sales. 
Mar 25, 2:51PM
Google is moving in many directions—mobile, browsers, productivity apps, operating systems, social. At first glance, it may seem like it is trying ever so hard to move beyond its giant one-trick pony: search. What people keep forgetting is that it is a pretty good trick. Benchmark Capital VC Bill Gurley reminds us how good this trick is in an excellent post that looks at Google's market expansion strategy not as one of a series of aggressive offensives, but rather a highly defensive strategy. Warren Buffet famously describes the best businesses as "economic castles protected by unbreachable 'moats.'" Search is Google's economic castle (perhaps with other forms of online advertising such as display thrown in there), and everything else is a moat trying to protect that castle. Android is a moat. The Chrome browser is a moat. The Chrome OS is a moat. Google Apps is a moat. These are all free products, subsidized by search profits, that are intended to protect the economic castle that is search. 
Mar 25, 2:07PM
Japan is crazy about Twitter, and today local toy maker Takara Tomy has announced Twimal (short for "Twitter Animal") [JP], a super-cute toy "pet" that can reads out tweets loud for you. The white version does this with a female voice, while the blue Twimal uses a male voice.
Mar 25, 2:00PM
It appears there's an arms race taking place in the mobile gaming world, and as is often the case in Silicon Valley, it starts with engineering and development talent. Google, for one, took some serious measures at the end of last year to stem the flow of its engineering talent to Facebook. Many companies go out of the way to court and retain top developers, but it's traditionally been the deep pockets and reputations of big players like Apple, Google, and Facebook that win out. However, it seems digital gaming companies didn't receive that particular memo. Following on the heels of yesterday's announcement that monetization and distribution platform Tapjoy will be launching a publishing platform to support game developers, while investing significant capital in early-stage game development, Flurry declared that it will be following suit. 
Mar 25, 1:54PM
Cloud and managed hosting startup Voxel has raised $5.5 million in Series A funding led by Seaport Capital. As part of the transaction, Jim Collis of Seaport Capital will join Voxel's Board of Directors Voxel delivers high-performance on-demand managed hosting infrastructure services over its own global IP network and content delivery network. The startup's services include on-demand physical and virtual cloud servers, content delivery networks, and application hosting. 
Mar 25, 1:44PM
Video encoding service provider Encoding.com this morning announced that it is opening the beta version of its Vid.ly video URL service to the public. In a world littered with an enormous variety of smartphones, tablet computers and browsers, it's not easy for publishers to put up a video online that can be watched by anyone, anywhere. With vid.ly, Encoding.com aims to alleviate that problem by enabling publishers to create what it refers to as a 'universal video URL', designed to play videos everywhere.
Mar 25, 1:40PM
A newly released Android app, Nuclear WatchDawg, reveals where nuclear power plants and associated safety and environmental concerns are within a fifty mile radius anywhere in the U.S. NuclearWatchDawg aggregates data from some 30 sources, mostly government and academic research labs whose research is in the public domain. Lee Guthman, who develops new apps and ventures for the GVW Group in Highland Park, Illinois noted: "We developed this app because there is heightened interest in nuclear power following the earthquake in Japan, and damages to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant there. In the U.S., people want to know what they're living or working nearby, how big these nuclear facilities are, and what are the known issues around them, if any..." </blockq
Mar 25, 1:24PM
Finally! Sonos To Release Android Controller App In March, exclaimed an understandably excited Michael Arrington back in February. Alas, bad news has just come in for my boss and many other Android handset owning Sonos users. According to the company, testing of the Sonos Controller for Android is taking a bit longer than they'd anticipated, which means they will not make that March deadline after all.
Mar 25, 12:29PM
A reader, Mike, sent in a tale of woe so odd and draconian that I'm not even sure what to think of it. On one hand, Apple is protecting its interests when it comes to fake gift cards and other potentially costly hacks and, on the other hand, their reaction is far out of proportion to the actual situation. Mike's account was hacked in January of this year and $80 worth of iTunes cash drained from his account. This is similar to the hack that occurred over the summer resulting in "about 400" hacked accounts and continues even to this month as evidenced by this thread in Apple Support. Mike writes: A few weeks after Christmas my iTunes account was hacked and the $80 in gift cards I was given for Christmas were drained by the hacker. I contacted Apple, was treated well and had the fraudulent purchases restored. After securing my account, things were back to normal until a week ago.
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