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How App Stores Can Become A Catalyst For A Developer-Focused IT Universe
Mar 10, 8:18PM
After my panel on Friday at SXSW, Paul Underwood of Deloitte and Will Lovegrove, CEO of Datownia, approached me to talk about their companies. Their viewpoints demonstrate the direction of enterprise app development and the shift to a developer-centric IT world.4tiitoo's eyeCharm Kinect Add-On Lets You Control Computers With Your Eyes
Mar 10, 8:00PM
After I shelled out something like $200 for a Kinect bundle that I ended up shoving in a closet, the team at 4tiitoo may have finally given me a reason to dig the thing out. The Munich-based company recently kicked off a Kickstarter campaign to let Kinect owners control their PCs with little more than some subtle glances, thanks to a $50 add-on they're calling the eyeCharm.Hangtime Looks To Be The Watercooler For Events At SXSW And Beyond
Mar 10, 7:34PM
OK, so maybe we said it would be hard for an app to break out at SXSW this year. But that isn’t stopping several startups from trying. One startup called Hangtime, from serial entrepreneur Karl Jacob, is looking to be the comprehensive Rolodex of events at SXSW and beyond. It pulls in events from Facebook that you have permission to see, ranks them by overall popularity, popularity among your friends and distance among other factors. When you open the app, you can use Facebook to find friends and pull in hundreds of events. You can say you’re “interested” in going to them by clicking a button in the app. The idea is to get people to interact without necessarily committing to going to something. “People don’t necessarily know what they are going to. Nobody likes to commit,” he said. “So we had to make it lightweight and make it super easy for people to share things with each other, but not commit.” In Hangtime, there’s a way to say you’re publicly interested in an event, and then there’s a way to privately share an event with a friend. “That creates this bifurcation,” he said. “It’s a lightweight way of saying that you’re interested in something — but behind the scenes.” Hangtime follows a long line of events-related startups like the now-defunct Plancast and another startup Sosh that try to help people figure out what to do on nights and weekends. Jacob says that other events startups might have just been too early on the market. “The biggest mistake in the past in the core event discovery space was that we had a data problem,” he said. But he said now that social platforms like Facebook have solidified, it’s become a nicely centralized source of data. In fact, the issue now is that there’s too much data and there needs to be better personalization and recommendations, he argues. “A hallmark of these mobile applications is that they shouldn’t require work,” Jacob said. “They shouldn’t require you to enter in things. You have to give people a good experience out of the box.” To get that, Jacob used a pretty ingenious seeding and testing strategy. The company bought ads on Facebook targeted at colleges in the Midwest, such as the University of Missouri-Columbia and others in Arizona, Nebraska and Alabama. They want to see if they could remotely seed an app onMarvel Adds A Dynamic Soundtrack To Its Digital Comics With Project Gamma
Mar 10, 7:00PM
The digital team from Marvel Comics is at South by Southwest Interactive this year to show off some new comics reading experiences that they've created. Today they're demonstrating a technology that's currently called Project Gamma. Basically, it's a way to add music to the experience of reading a digital comic — music that actually adapts to the pace at which you read. As a result, every reader could have a unique experience, said Peter Phillips, the senior vice president and general manager of Marvel's digital media group.Iterations: The Diamond Is In The Comments
Mar 10, 5:00PM
People often ask me some variant of this question: "What's a startup out there that will be a great investment hit but no one really thinks of that way yet?" There are many possible answers, but I'll focus this week's column on one: Disqus. Now, there are many smart folks who believe online comments are either dead or worthless, and they have some valid points. Some believe online comments should exist apart from the original content, whether on Twitter as tweets or Facebook as sub-conversations, or through re-blogging on Tumblr, and so forth. And there are others, like me, who invest time in Disqus as a user because they believe it's the single-best commenting system out there. (Disclaimer: I use Disqus on my personal blog, and all the billions I make my blog are kept in the Caymans.)Jifiti Lets You Teleport Products To Your Friends…Sorta
Mar 10, 4:15PM
The idea for Jifiti came about because Shaul Weisband — one of the creators of the app and company behind it — wanted to "teleport" gifts to friends. While teleportation is still not really possible, the team at Jifiti has done the next best thing and is aiming to incorporate this into a new way of shopping. And I think retailers are going to like it.An Interview With Firefighter, Techie, And E-Publisher John Sundman On What It Takes For Creatives To Make It In A Start Up
Mar 10, 3:00PM
John Sundman is best known for his seminal dot-com-boom cyberpunk novel, Acts Of The Apostles but in his long career he has been a truck driver, a fireman, a construction worker, and an early employee at Sun Microsystems. Sundman's cult following has brought him world-wide acclaim. Now, however, he's working at a startup.Makerbot's Bre Pettis And OK Go's Damian Kulash On The Addictive 'Rush' Of Making Stuff That Works [Video]
Mar 10, 2:43PM
One of the reasons that coming to South By Southwest Interactive continues to be worthwhile despite all its flaws is that it still attracts some of the most intelligent and fascinating people to the same place at the same time. Getting to bump into brilliant people leads to some wonderful conversations, and often gives just the boost you need to go back to 'regular life' with a fresh pair of eyes. Yesterday morning I had the opportunity to have brunch here at SXSW with seven fascinating people -- Tumblr's David Karp, The Onion's Baratunde Thurston, OK Go's Damian Kulash, Vimeo and Elepath's Jake Lodwick, roboticist Carla Diana, Makerbot's Bre Pettis, and GE's Beth Comstock -- for a roundtable discussion organized by General Electric. We had a wide-ranging discussion over the course of the meal, which was all filmed, but it all started out with the group talking about the original sparks of passion that led them to their current vocations.The Facebook Gaming Ecosystem: A Cross-Sectional Study Of The Top-Rated Apps
Mar 10, 2:00PM
Editor's note: Hassan Baig is an entrepreneur who runs White Rabbit Studios, a South Asian gaming startup he founded four years ago in Pakistan. Services like AppData have been providing individual stats for a long time, but snapshot-like analyses of top-rated games on Facebook's App Center have not yet been done. Such a study could be useful for game developers or strategic investors who have a stake in Facebook games and want a macro picture of where the ecosystem stands at the moment.Hoping Not To Be Crowded Out At SXSW, Swarmly Brings Its 'Waze For People' To Android
Mar 10, 2:00PM
It's debatable whether or not SXSW is still a good place to launch your new hot SoLoMo app, not least because you'll likely get crowded out by all the other hopefuls, but that isn't stopping Swarmly from giving it a shot. The app, which quietly debuted on iOS last September, focuses on mainly anonymous, aggregate location data to create something akin to Waze's crowdsourced traffic data but for people. Today, an updated Swarmly lands on Android just in time to help SXSW attendees find where the action's at.CrunchWeek From A Pedicab - Because Why Not, It's SXSW [TCTV]
Mar 10, 1:00PM
Howdy! Welcome to another episode of CrunchWeek, the weekly show where a few of us writers get together and chew the fat on a few of the biggest and most interesting stories from the past week. As you are probably aware (and possibly annoyed about), the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas is in full swing at the moment. Our usual CrunchWeek hostess Leena Rao is holding down the TechCrunch fort in San Francisco this year, so John Biggs and Ryan Lawler joined me for this episode.GitHub Hit With A DDoS Attack, Second In Two Days, And "Major Service Outage" [Update: GitHub Back Up, No Data Breached]
Mar 10, 12:10PM
Services on code-sharing site GitHub have been disrupted for over an hour in what started as a "major service outage" because of a "brief DDoS attack." This is the second DDoS attack in as many days and at least the third in the last several months: Yesterday, GitHub also reported a DDoS incident. And in October 2012, the service also went down due to malicious hackers.Dropbox, Spotify, Gmail, Skype: Are We In A Subscription Bubble?
Mar 10, 10:00AM
Editor's note: Ezra Galston is a VC at I2A Fund, a young entrepreneur at Foundation Capital, a Kauffman Fellows Finalist and a second-year MBA student at Chicago Booth. It seems like nearly every tech business has sought to employ a subscription model for its services. While that makes sense from a business perspective, I wanted to investigate any effects of subscription fatigue on consumer commerce.Backed Or Whacked: Pursuits Of Pet Peeves
Mar 10, 5:00AM
Editor's note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Our furry friends are often labelled our faithful companions, but their loyalty can often come at a price. Indiegogo inventors have been applying creativity to address each of these options to help enable our animal friends to come closer to matching the clean convenience of the immortal robots destined to replace them in the future.Beware SXSW Networking Syndrome
Mar 10, 2:00AM
Editor's note: Geoff Lewis is a principal at Founders Fund and formerly served as co-founder and CEO of Topguest. This email landed in my this week: Hi Geoff! I'm organizing an exclusive dinner on March 9 or 10 at SXSW for a few close friends. @Garyvee might attend and I'd love for you to join. Please RSVP by March 5. "Wow! I'm wanted!" I thought to myself upon receipt. ButFoursquare CEO Dennis Crowley On Whether Hot Apps Can Still Be Born At SXSW [TCTV]
Mar 09, 11:46PM
Much like Twitter got a lot of its early traction at South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) in Austin back in 2007, Foursquare famously started off with a bang when it launched at SXSWi in 2009. So it was great to take some time with Foursquare's founder and CEO Dennis Crowley in Austin at this year's SXSWi to talk about the past, present, and future of launching apps at the conference.Attention Bikers! Chaotic Moon Has Built A Video-Powered Black Box For Your Dome
Mar 09, 11:17PM
Chaotic Moon is probably best known for dev work that it's done for clients like Rupert Murdoch's The Daily, or the Marvel Unlimited app that just hit the Apple App Store. But when one of their coworkers was hurt in a brutal hit-and-run bike accident, they spent some time on a side project designed to help cyclists who find themselves in a similar situation.As It Hits 3M Users After 6 Months, hoppr Checks-In Its Bid To Be India's Foursquare
Mar 09, 10:51PM
While Foursquare has been concentrating on smartphones for some year now, much of the rest of the world has remained on a feature phone (though that of course is changing). So the opportunity to do location-based services has been limited - though not impossible. It has always been possible to triangulate a phones' rough location based on the nearest three base stations using. So taking that idea, last year a new startup called hoppr launched in India, offering real benefits to people who could simply SMS to check in their location and gain benefits with local retailers. That simple strategy has lead to the point today where, after only six months in full operation, hoppr has garnered over three million registrations and over a million monthly active users.A Big Deal For The Middle East, Daily Deals Site Cobone Acquired By Tiger Global Management
Mar 09, 10:47PM
![cobone2[702]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uqwVSe9N7Y5SMe3l-HvRahChq_FWG5ag2pspJ74DYWZ2brkG1NfBWiP1HWWRoV7dqyib6PkdWYWgNuvZ-zddz-SiRoDbQNZMwtreHFREXBq1oGF8eNbzRAYjgPQMc-YvCjCvDseYtwX74046aLBvC7KD-5ipJisA=s0-d)
After months of speculation that its backer Jabbar Internet Group were shopping around for a sale, the leading Middle Eastern daily deals site Cobone has been acquired by investment firm Tiger Global Management. The size of the deal remains undisclosed, though my understanding is that the figure of $40 million that's been touted building up to this sale isn't far off the mark. Furthermore, the acquisition -- which sees Jabber Internet Group exit entirely -- is said to leave Dubai-based Cobone with additional capital to further its ambitions in the region, while its Irish founder and CEO Paul Kenny, along with other key members of the management team, will remain with the company.What Games Are: The PC's Struggle To App-Up Continues
Mar 09, 10:00PM
Sim City 5 is yet another game that exposes an inherent conflict at the heart of the PC, about how connected and app-like or independent it should be. Publishers like EA might be trying to convince PC users to think of their games more as services, but PC users are still as reluctant as ever. So are operating system developers. And so the PC continues to muddle on.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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