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Snug Nugget Launches A Pay-What-You-Want Book Bundle
Aug 04, 1:13AM
While I can't quite imagine what a "snug nugget" really is without descending into the scatological, but what the company does is quite interesting. This new website offers bundles of books with a retail value of about $30. They expect users to pay about that and they donate 14.3% to charity. The current crop of books looks promising if you're into thrillers and fantasy and hopefully they'll continue these bundles with bigger names to draw in some more donations. All of the books are DRM free and come in Kindle, ePub, and PDF format. You check out via Paypal and Google Checkout.AKQA Chairman Tom Bedecarre Says Advertisers Want More 'Elbow Room' On Facebook
Aug 04, 1:01AM
In the final discussion of our Facebook ecosystem CrunchUp today, AKQA Chairman Tom Bedecarre and Facebook VP Greg Badros took the stage to address Facebook's advertising strategy. Bedecarré wasn't as skeptical as his new boss Martin Sorrell (whose advertising conglomerate WPP just announced that it's acquiring agency AKQA, and who has said that Facebook is "not necessarily an advertising medium"), but he made it sound like the company has a lot of work to do to win over advertisers. The numbers tell part of the story. Bedecarre (who's the middle figure in the photo) said that WPP is upping its spend on Facebook ads this year from $200 million to $400 million — that's nice progress, but less than 1 percent of its total $65 billion in spending.Users Claim Twoo Is Spamming Their Friends, Social Network Says It's "Just Not Clear Enough"
Aug 04, 12:25AM
Users are complaining that Twoo, a social networking service, is sending unwanted messages to their contacts. Co-founder and CEO Lorenz Bogaert counters that this is a misunderstanding and the company is working to fix it. Users, both those who have emailed me and who have posted public reviews in the app store, say that the mobile app is intentionally designed to be tricky and cause the user to invite their entire address book.With Condiment, StyleDiary Founder Patricia Handschiegel Combines Lifestyle Content And Commerce
Aug 04, 12:05AM
Patricia Handschiegel, who founded fashion media company StyleDiary (and eventually sold it to StyleHive) is back with a new startup bringing together lifestyle content and commerce. Handschiegel says she's been interested in that combination since her time at StyleDiary, but thanks to the acquisition, she didn't really pursue it. Nowadays you hear a lot more about bringing content and commerce together, but Handschiegel says that for the most part, it an area being tackled by e-commerce companies who start posting articles or other kinds of content featuring their products. With her new site Condiment, she's taking the opposite approach, focusing on content first and then building the store.Man Builds A Real, Working Wall-E That's Still Eternally Hunting For Eve
Aug 04, 12:00AM
Mike Senna, a California-based roboticist, has built a real, working Wall-E that can move around, wave, and call out his own cute name in a rattly, digitized voice. Mike is the guy who built a real, working R2-D2 and his latest project is a real masterpiece of animatronics and robotic motion.Facebook's Big Challenge: Building A Stable Platform For Developers While Maintaining User Experience
Aug 03, 11:00PM
Today at The TC CrunchUp at the Fox Theater in Redwood City, a group of founders and entrepreneurs took the stage to talk about the future of Facebook's platform, where it's been and where it's going as a result. Although the company's stock has been limping of late, Facebook continues to be impossible to ignore -- by the end of June, for example, the platform was seeing 955 million monthly active users, with 81 percent of those coming from outside the U.S., and more than 230 million people playing games on Facebook.com every month. Although it may seem like Facebook has plenty on their plate in terms of stock downturns, ad monetization strategies and more, Facebook Director of Product Management Doug Purdy said that a big challenge facing Facebook today is building a solid and stable platform for third-party developers via its APIs.Peter Deng On How Facebook Develops Mobile Apps
Aug 03, 10:55PM
Peter Deng of Facebook said on stage at the TechCrunch CrunchUp today that the company's mission is now focused on mobile. There is no single team that is focused on mobile, said Deng, Facebook's director of product development. Instead, each group, be it the messaging or location teams, are thinking about mobile development.Lover.ly Gets To Know Users, Vendors Better With New Features: My Style And My Portfolios
Aug 03, 10:32PM
In the newly crowded wedding space, Lover.ly has found a way to not only make money but also connect brides and grooms with the best possible vendors for their wedding. If you have yet to dabble on the platform, it's much like a Pinterest for brides, offering a curated imagery-based interface to market wedding bloggers and vendors while helping brides plan for the big day. But founder Kellee Khalil had a broader vision for the startup: to become a bride's one-stop recommendation platform. And that's just what Lover.ly has done. The platform just got a brand new feature called My Style, which takes into account all of the user's "loved" and "bundled" items to recommend more excellent products, ideas, venues, etc.230 Million People Played Games On Facebook.com In The Last 30 Days
Aug 03, 9:57PM
Doug Purdy, Facebook's Director of Developer Products, just announced that 230 million people played games on Facebook.com in the past 30 days and that 8 of the 10 top grossing iPhone apps are integrated with Facebook. This is an interesting bit of news when thinking about actual user interaction with the service and what third party developers could expect to see when building for the platform.Zynga VP Sean Kelly: Zynga Will Make Back The Money It Spent Acquiring OMGPOP
Aug 03, 9:54PM
Peter Deng was joined on our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp stage by Zynga product development VP Sean Kelly, Bump CEO David Lieb, and Xyologic co-founder Matthaus Krzykowski to tackle the prospect of creating and nurturing "modern" mobile applications. One of the juicier tidbits that came to light during the panel came courtesy of Zynga's Kelly, who noted he believed that the company would make its money back on its multi-million dollar OMGPOP acquisition. "It's been a good contributor to our numbers," Kelly said to moderator Kim-Mai Cutler.Another Round Of Google Shutdowns: Google Apps For Teams, Google Listen & Google Video For Business
Aug 03, 9:52PM
Google just announced yet another batch of services it plans to discontinue in the near future. Most of these are relatively obscure products that probably didn't have a large amount of traction. In this round, Google is shutting down three products, as well as a number of company blogs that had become redundant or just weren't updated very frequently. The products include Google Apps for Teams, Google Listen and Google Video For Business.Google Ventures-Backed MediaSpike Brings Product Sponsorships Into Social Games
Aug 03, 9:22PM
Blake Commagere, who's probably best known for building early, popular Facebook apps like Zombies and Vampires (hey, remember those?), has started a new company called MediaSpike to tackle one of the big problems he faced as a developer: Integrating sponsored product placements into the games. Commagere says those placements were one of the most effective and popular ways to monetize — in fact, when some of those campaigns ended and the sponsored content disappeared, "Users would actually complain." On the other hand, he says that managing the process was "incredibly difficult." Without any tools to help with the process, everything took a lot of time, whether it was determining where the sponsorship would appear, creating the media assets (i.e., the art for the sponsored product), and then providing all the data that the advertisers wanted. Then, when the next campaign came around, he'd have to start from scratch and do it all again.Facebook Doubles Release Speed, Will Roll New Code Twice A Day
Aug 03, 9:04PM
Facebook announced in a blog post today that they are doubling the site's release speed, rolling Facebook onto new code twice per day. "Last week, in conjunction with the opening of our engineering office in London, we decided to double the release speed of facebook.com and indeed "ship often," release engineering manager Chuck Rossi writes.VP Mike Schroepfer: 7,000 Different Types Of Mobile Devices Access Facebook Every Day
Aug 03, 8:18PM
Why is mobile such a challenge for Facebook? Well, for starters, 7000 different device types are used to access Facebook each day. At today's Facebook Ecosystem Conference, VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer said that part of the difficulty Facebook faces in reaching mobile users is just that there are so many different SKUs. As a result, Facebook can't re-build mobile apps and iterate on the experience in the same way it does for the web. Now that Facebook is on so many platforms, most of its focus is on refining the apps and making them better. Facebook generally pushes updates to its platform on the web every day or even twice a day, but that's not something that the company can do for mobile. So the company is working on a new release schedule specifically for its mobile apps. Android apps are shipped every four to six weeks. Facebook for iOS isn't quite on that type of schedule, yet.Gillmor Gang Live 08.03.12 (TCTV)
Aug 03, 8:03PM
Gillmor Gang - Doc Searls, John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, Danny Sullivan, and Steve Gilllmor. Recording has concluded.HTML5-Centric Artillery Raises $2.5M To Make the Browser The Console
Aug 03, 7:57PM
A challenging area that has seemed perpetually ahead of its time, HTML5 gaming has seen many startups come and go as Flash or native iOS and Android development have held their own. Yet the lure of having true cross-platform play keeps entrepreneurs coming. Now some former early Facebook and early Google engineers are attacking the problem with a new startup called Artillery. They've raised funding from a stellar cast of investors including First Round Capital, Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson's Signia Ventures, Chris Sacca's Lowercase Capital, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, longtime former Googler Ben Ling, Greylock's Ali Rosenthal, Bubba Murarka, Tim Ferriss, Crunchfund and Kevin Colleran, who was one of Facebook's first 10 employees. "We set out to solve the problem that real games don't exist in the web browser," says CEO Ankur Pansari, who was an early Facebook engineer.Live Now: Watch TechCrunch's Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp
Aug 03, 7:50PM
For all its successes Facebook has yet to conquer mobile. With that thought in mind TechCrunch is hosting our 5th annual CrunchUp today at the gorgeous Fox Theater in Redwood City, CA. Throughout the day leading developers, Facebook executives and industry experts will take the CrunchUp stage and speak on the state of Facebook's platform, products, ads and mobile initiatives. Our live stream is available below, thanks to our partner Ustream. You can join the conversation on Twitter using #crunchup.Google Takes Political Online Ads Local, Allows Campaigns To Target Congressional Districts
Aug 03, 7:42PM
Google's tools for tracking the upcoming U.S. election later this year mostly focus on the presidential election. It's no secret, though, that Google - thanks to its various advertising services - also makes a good amount of money from political campaigns that compete in smaller contests, including the 435 races for seats in the House of Representatives this year. This year, thanks to the recent redistricting of many congressional districts, quite a few of these races are very different from just two years ago and many districts now include new media markets that can make reaching voters hard. Today, Google launched a new tool that allows political campaigns to simply select their district and ensure that their ads are shown only within their district. This tool, says Google, allows campaigns to "quickly and easily target their search, display, mobile and video ads *solely* within that particular district's border."Fol.io Is An Online Market For Digital Products
Aug 03, 6:49PM
Producers of digital goods have a few problems. The first is finding good clients (preferably not these clients) and the second is building a popular portfolio of work. But without the former, you can't create the latter and vice versa. That's where fol.io comes in. A Manhattan-based company, fol.io aims to make it easier to sell digital assets. Founded by Cillian Kieran and Simon Keane, the site is designed to make it easier for web creators to grab handsome, usable graphics for their projects. Rather than futzing with Photoshop all day, they can grab a "share this" button for a dollar or a funny little graphic for $3.Procured Health Nabs $1.1M From Bessemer, Athena Health Founder To Help Reduce Health Costs
Aug 03, 6:34PM
Procured Health, a startup that aims to help hospitals better discover, evaluate and adopt quality medical devices, is today announcing that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from a flock of angels and VCs. Investors in the startup's first round included Zimmerman Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Fidelity Biosciences, NaviMed Capital's Bijan Salehizadeh, CEO of Bloom Health Abir Sen, Kal Vepuri of Trisiras Group, former Athena Health CFO Carl Byers as well as Athena Health co-founder and CEO Jonathan Bush -- to name a few.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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