Category: Tech news

In response to Facebook’s ever-expanding social universe and the success of mobile-focused networks like Instagram, Dave Morin and company have turned Path into a more personal, mobile-centric social network.

Most of the life-sharing that happens on Path takes place at home — among family and close friends. And while some users may speak one language away from home or at work, they want to be able to converse with loved ones in their native tongue. As a result, Path has been on a mission to expand the number of languages it supports so that users can speak in whatever tongue they please.

Tonight, via its blog, Path has announced that it has added seven new languages to its stable, including Dutch, Norwegian, Traditional Chinese, Thai, Bahasa Indonesian, Malay, and UK English.

As American-born companies extend their networks to reach an increasingly mobile audience abroad, localizing product experience is crucial. International users don’t want to feel that they’re being pandered to, and they’re not eager to jump on board if the experience feels like it’s just a slapdash port aimed at boosting download stats.

Path remains a small team based out of San Francisco, so it turned to its users to help translate and localize the app’s experience for its international users. Though it admits that it’s still very much a work in progress, the goal is an important one.

With its new lingual additions, Path now supports 16 languages in all, including Spanish, Italian, German, Portugese, French, Swedish, Japanese, and Korean.

After raising over $30 million in funding in April, it seems that Path has begun aggressively focusing on international scale and expanding localized support for its 3 million-plus users. This was made even more evident when Path nabbed Shakil Khan from Spotify this spring. At the time, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek told ATD’s Kara Swisher that, while he is sometimes an introvert, Khan “is definition of social, so he was the link to the rest of the world in many ways for me and for the company.”

While Khan remains an advisor to Ek (and is an investor in Spotify), Ek said that he thought Khan was a great fit for the sharing-focused network, as he helps Morin and team transform Path into a global network — and capitalize on the strong growth its been seeing overseas of late, especially in Asia.

In addition to a renewed international focus, Path has also begun adding more functionality and features around health tracking and music. While the majority of Path shares revolve around photos, Path recently integrated with Music Match and the Nike+ fitness platform to allow its users to share what music they’re listening to and brag about how many jogging miles they’ve logged.

Having globally-recognized brands like Nike on board will be key to Path’s long-term success, especially as it attempts to recruit new international users and localize its mobile sharing experience.

More in Path’s blog post here.

Over the last few years one could easily say that Google had lost their way. They were no longer known for search. Somehow they’d turned into a company that acquired a series of nonsensical entities, launched half baked products that eventually hit the dead pool or just got into some really weird shit.

But last year that all started to change as the company announced that it would focus on its core products. Hindsight always being 20/20 it all makes sense. It’s like anything else, really. Spitball as many ideas as you possibly can just to see what sticks. And so whether it was by design or not, Project Glass is the future of Google. Not as a product that will make them billions of dollars but what it means for Google as a company and its future.

“The charter of Google X is to take bold risks and push the edges of technology beyond what they’ve been to where the future might be,” Sergey Brin told a small group of reporters duing demo of Project Glass. “We want you to be less of a slave to your devices. It’s been really liberating and I’m really excited to share it with all of you.”

Brin noted that Project Glass is what Google believes could be the next form factor of computing. As it stands now, many of us are willingly beholden to our smartphones with all the web browsing, twittering, pathing, instagramming and whatever else consuming most of our time. Human interaction has all but faded away. The fact that people play the “stacking game” is comical and cute but a sign of how infatuated we are with technology. Glass has the potential to buck that trend by “keeping people in the moment,” said Steve Lee, Product Manager for Glass. Brin also mentioned that Glass shouldn’t be used to fill idle time or to browse the web and that your phone or tablet perfectly fits those needs.

Dorky as they might look, Glass signals the first glimpse of how to integrate such invasive and important technology into our lives in a more seamless way. Isabelle Olsson, the industrial design guru on the team, says the design of Glass ensures “you can look into people’s eyes.” During my brief time with Sergey’s Glass, I can say that the display didn’t hinder my ability to see or look around. The display disappeared until I needed to see what was being shown. I might never have to pull my phone out again to reply to a text, get directions or snap a photo. So, yeah, I’ll deal with looking like a dork but don’t be surprised to see Glass integrated with existing glasses. Brin did mention that Google has been in talks with eyeglass makers and the like.

While the hardware is still in prototype phase, I overheard Brin say that he’s experienced up to six hours of juice off a single charge. But that can and will likely change based on usage (uploading photos, capturing video, etc.). Photos, for instance, will be stored locally and can by synced with the cloud later. Both Lee and Brin said that they’re working hard to optimize what data is being transmitted and stored both on the device and in the cloud to alleviate any battery woes. There may be settings that allow users to control the content being shared until you’re within reach of Wi-Fi or when you’ve plugged in your Glasses for the night. Babak Parviz, a contributor to Project Glass, said a previous build allowed him to query a voice search for the capital of China broadening his own knowledge base to everything that’s available on the Web.

I asked what actually worked on Glass now and Brin politely skirted the question by saying that they’re testing and implementing various features with each build to see what sticks. Facial recognition, while discussed and experimented with, doesn’t sound like it’s been compelling enough that the team wants to immediately integrate it.

Here’s what you won’t see in Glass: advertising. Brin stated pretty vehemently that they have no plans to integrate advertising into Glass and that the only plan is to simply sell the hardware, which will be “significantly” cheaper than the $1,500 Explorer Editions that were announced today. The Glass team says they’re focused on the quality of the experience and not making it as cheap as possible. (Thank gawd.)

Core Google apps like Gmail and Plus (Hangouts) are being tested now along with Android apps. What isn’t clear is whether or not the Android and Google apps teams are working with the team at Glass and vice versa.

So what was the reason for today’s announcement of the $1,500 Explorer Edition of Project Glass? It’s actually a slight pivot from what they’ve done in the past. For once, the typical Google way of pushing out half-done products might work to their advantage. Parviz, Lee and Brin emphasized how important it will be to involve the developer community to further push the platform before Glass becomes available to consumers some time next year. Speaking of ship dates, Brin says the consumer version will ship within a year of when the Explorer Editions ship. Developers will have access to a cloud-based API that is “pretty far along.”

Does this mean Google wants to compete with Microsoft or Apple toe-to-toe? No. Google will always be the weird kid in the corner who sporadically does something mindblowing. They’re not thinking about what’s going on now but what might happen in the distant future. Everything they’ve done up until now seems like a tiny spec of something larger and greater. The late Ray Bradbury said it best: “Life is trying things to see if they work.” And that appears to be what Google is doing.

Blue Jeans Network, a video conferencing company founded by a serial entrepreneur who has sold two companies to Cisco, is adding another $25 million to its coffers from NEA, Accel and Norwest Venture Partners.

Interestingly enough, quite of bit of that capital will be going toward a marketing campaign meant to woo enterprise customers away from other video conferencing providers. Such is the nature of enterprise-focused companies, which often needs a more marketing and sales-intensive strategy to acquire customers.

The company’s already got a billboard in San Francisco (pictured above) and the goal is to get more companies to switch from pure audio conferencing to video conferencing. Blue Jeans counts Facebook, Match.com and Stanford among its clientele. Today’s round brings the company’s total funding to just shy of $50 million.

Paired with the funding today are a few product updates. Blue Jeans recently launched a browser-based conferencing solution that’s inter-operable with everything from Skype to Google Hangouts, Cisco or Polycom. Then there are some minor feature releases like the ability to build customized log-in pages and single sign-on for employees.

The company recently released a new product meant to kill those expensive video conferencing units called MCUs or multipoint control units, that can cost north of $250,000. Blue Jeans’ video-conferencing service starts at $299 per port (or per party involved in calls).

FindTheBest, the startup led by DoubleClick founder Kevin O’Connor, has built charts comparing everything from financial advisors to dog breeds to smartphones. And now that those charts can be embedded in blog posts, you might start seeing them a lot more often.

O’Connor’s aim, as he’s explained to me in the past, is to create the site where you can find the data you need to make a decision, presented in structured, easily understandable format. (FindTheBest is also trying to use that data to improve classified ads.) The company says it has created comparison widgets for more than 800 products and services.

Grace Nasri, the company’s managing editor, walked me through the widget-embedding process earlier this week. It was a short demo, because it’s really easy — you bring up the topic that you’re interested in, hit the “embed” button, then customize the size of the widget, as well as the specific products and data points that you want to include.

Here’s one reason to be excited: In its own small way, it combats the recent flood of crappy infographics. Most TechCrunch writers hate the infographics that show up in our inboxes— not because infographics have to be terrible, but because they’re often created by firms that are biased, have little expertise in the subject of the infographic, or both, so they pull random data from random sources to make their point. Plus, they’re often badly designed, taking up an enormous amount of space to illustrate something that could have been stated in a few bullet points.

FindTheBest widgets, on the other hand, come from a company whose entire purpose is to collect object data, and the blogger, not the infographic-maker, gets to decide what data will be relevant to their readers. So for example, if TechCrunch publishes a review of a new smartphone, it might be genuinely useful to you guys if we embed a widget showing how the phone’s features stack up against the competition. Bloggers can also benefit financially by adding a “buy now” button and collecting an affiliate fee. And FindTheBest is working with some sites (such as TechCrunch) to create pages featuring the startup’s data, and in those cases, bloggers can use the embedded widgets to drive traffic back to their own sites.

Additional features planned for the future include side-by-side comparisons and charts/graphs.

Yesterday the WSJ outlined how Yahoo’s new, interim CEO Ross Levinsohn is taking the company back to its earlier roots of focusing on advertising around its media properties, which collectively see 167 million monthly online users. The last 24 hours indicates that Yahoo is trying to move fast on that idea. Today the company announced three executive media hires, and TechCrunch has had a look in on a new interactive mobile TV service its using to enhance its video offerings.

And there is more. The news comes less than a day after Yahoo announced a global deal with Spotify for music content, which will see the company integrate Spotify music across its media properties and create content for the Spotify platform, but also move away from offering a music platform of its own. Update: after this article was posted last night, Yahoo added another music partner to the mix: Clear Channel and its online radio service I Heart Radio.

I Heart Radio — which features 1,000 analog and digital radio stations — will start to appear across the Yahoo Media network (which includes sites like Music, Movies and omg!). As with Spotify, Yahoo will also provide content to Clear Channel’s sites as part of the deal. Those sites have 237 million monthly online users in the U.S., according to a statement from the companies. It is further evidence of how Yahoo is trying to expand the content that it offers to its visitors online, as part of its advertising push (more content=more audience=more advertising possibilities for Yahoo).

But what’s interesting is that it appears to be trying to do it on a much lower cost base than before. In the area of Music, TechCrunch understands that Yahoo will be moving out of the music platform and programming service altogether, with the only employees left in the music division those on the editorial side (that is the part where Yahoo has said it would contribute — for example in the form of an app that will exist on Spotify’s platform). As of last month, its service had around 24 million unique users per month, TechCrunch has heard from a source.

The new appointments, on the other hand, point to Yahoo picking up more executive expertise, to better manage those relationships. Rich Cusick, the new VP of entertainment and women’s lifestyles, has a track record in growing (and in some cases turning around) media businesses. Most recently he was at Chemistry.com (a division of Match.com) and has also worked for Daily Candy and Gemstar TV Guide. At Yahoo he will oversee Shine, Health, and its Entertainment properties (omg!, Movies, TV and Music).

John Buchanan, Yahoo’s new head of consumer marketing, is the former VP of marketing at Electronic Arts. And Scott Bushman, who will lead up Canada, Latin America and the U.S. Hispanic market for the Yahoo Media Network, has held roles at Wasserman Media, Metacafe and Disney. Cusick and Bushman will report to Mickie Rosen, senior vice president, Global Media & Commerce, Yahoo; while Buchanan will report to Mollie Spilman, Chief Marketing Officer of Yahoo.

The new video service is another sign of how Yahoo is partnering for its next stage of content development. Developed with a startup called CrowdOptic, the interactive service lets people use their mobile devices at events to record video and their own commentary. When multiple users hone in on a specific point at the event, CrowdOptic’s technology identifies them and they form a “cluster” that can interact with each other. A diagram of how it works is below.

CrowdOptic’s twist on this for Yahoo is that it translates the resulting visuals and texts into a stream of content that runs alongside Yahoo’s video of that event. That means, in addition to the temporary, event-based social networking service, it becomes a second way for viewers to engage with content alongside the main live feed — giving more chances for engagement from TV viewers. It also potentially gives Yahoo another stream of data for its ads business: it can use the data from the event to figure out what is catching people’s eyes and what they are talking about.

The first trial of the service was around a Nascar event last week, and the CEO of CrowdOptic, Jon Fisher, says there will be more joint events to come, including one with a major media and entertainment brand.

How deep will that relationship go? One report raises the idea that CrowdOptic, which has so far had $2.5 million in funding, could even get bought by Yahoo (Fisher is a serial entrepreneur who has sold a company to Oracle in his time). Fisher would not comment on an acquisition but tells me: “I have been doing this for 20 years and this integration is the coolest thing I’ve done.”

It’s Day One of Google I/O, and the company set out to prove that it’s not just about software and algorithms and whatnot, introducing a neat set of hardware devices that are available — or will be soon — to take advantage of its Android mobile operating system.

Among other things, Google debuted the Nexus Q, a media-streaming device that will sell for $299 and connect with Android mobile phones and tablets. It also introduces the Nexus 7, an Asus-made 7-inch Android tablet that was pretty much built for consumption of content from Google Play. And then there was the company’s demonstration of Google Glass, which seems like more of a forward-looking experiment than anything else.

The company showed off some software as well, like Google Now, which provides users with real-time reminders and data on the fly. And it also showed off an updated version of Google+, which is designed to swallow up even more of your social graph, by adding calendar integration and the ability to go into “party mode” and instantly share photos with other Google+ users you’re at an event with.

But really, it was the hardware that stole the show.

The Shift From Software To Hardware

The whole thing seems like a bit of a departure for Google, which in the past was always happy to cede the hard work of building hardware to its partners, was content with showing off all the cool things that those partners could do with its software.

The Nexus Q, let’s not forget, is Google’s first foray into building its own hardware. But it won’t be Google’s last piece of hardware. After all, the company bought Motorola, maker of fine Android handsets and set-top boxes for the cable, satellite, and IPTV industry.

But there’s something deeper going on here, beyond just Google making gear. Take a close look at the Nexus Q and you realize that it’s pretty useless for doing anything as a standalone device. It is entirely dependent on the user to control it with an Android phone or tablet, and to be connected to Google Play to stream content from the cloud. The Nexus Q, in short, is positioned right in the center of a broader Google ecosystem, bridging the divide between Google’s software and cloud services and the hardware that depends on its Android OS.

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

More than anyone over the last decade, Apple has been instrumental in showing how powerful an integrated set of hardware and software can be. Apple devices simply work better than most competing devices and its services are pretty well integrated into the iPhone and iPad.

The most obvious example of the Apple ecosystem is AirPlay, which lets user serve up content from their mobile devices — and soon their MacBooks and Mac desktops — directly to their TV screens through its $99 streaming box. But Apple announced at its latest WWDC developer conference that it is pushing the ecosystem even further, with greater cohesion between its Mac and iOS product lines. That includes more unified messaging and notification services that ping users regardless of the device that they’re using.

The Nexus Q might be a more expensive, less useful version of the Apple TV, but it also shows you how Google is thinking about its place as a hardware vendor and why it thinks it’s important to play in that space. It shows that Google recognizes the need to have an integrated ecosystem to compete against the likes of Apple.

Google’s Not Alone

Google isn’t the only player trying to bridge the divide between the mobile phone or tablet and the TV and all the services that sit in the cloud. Last week, Microsoft took the bold step of introducing some new hardware of its own, announcing its Surface tablet. And it had previously demoed Xbox SmartGlass, which is designed to connect mobile phones running Windows Phone software with its burgeoning Xbox Live media services.

Samsung, meanwhile, is taking a hybrid approach, selling Android phones and tablets but building APIs into its connected TVs that will provide tighter integration between the consumer electronics it sells. And Sony is trying to shoehorn its PlayStation Network onto whatever devices it sells.

The problem is that few companies succeed at building robust ecosystems of products, because few consumers have enough brand affinity to purchase gear from a single consumer electronics manufacturer. With the exception of Apple, no one has managed to truly translate success in one vertical into another. That’s the challenge Microsoft faces as it tries to convince its Xbox customers to also buy smartphones and tablets running its mobile OS. And it’s ultimately the challenge that Google will face as it tries to build an ecosystem of products that are extensions of its existing Android products.

Ads, not payments, are the future of Facebook monetizing mobile, but it needs content to show them beside. The new Follow action announced today could deliver that content by letting you follow someone in a mobile app, and then sending the updates you’d normally see in that app back to your ad-laden news feed.

More content -> more engagement and return visits -> more ad impressions, more money, and more reason for investors to buy. It will send referral traffic to developers, and it’s actually convenient for users too. Why trapse from site to site and app to app when you can see everything your friends are doing everywhere, all from your news feed? You won’t. You’ll sit right there where Facebook can advertise to you.

How Facebook Follow Works

Facebook integrated something similar last week with the Like action, which lets developers take their in-app “heart”, “favorite”, “thumbs up” and other buttons that express affinity, and have them publish stories about the activity to Facebook. That also creates content for Facebook, but only one story at a time.

The new Follow action hooks Facebook into an endless stream of updates. As long as the person you follow keeps doing things in the app where you subscribed, you’ll keep seeing their content in the news feed. Privacy is controlled from within whatever app or service you initially clicked Follow. If someone doesn’t want you keeping tabs on their in-app activity, they have to use the app’s settings to make their updates private.

For example, if Instagram integrated Facebook Follow, when you followed someone new on Instagram, you’d get their photos in your Facebook news feed. Some developers might love this, because it would remind people to visit the app.

Some might think of it as Facebook stealing their content, so they might choose not to integrate. Fledgling apps still trying to build their user base and engagement might be more likely to jump on board than premier apps that already have healthy communities. Each developer will have to thoughtfully consider what there goals are in the current phase of their product’s life. If they’re trying to gain users, Follow could help. If they’re trying to boost in-app engagement and their own monetization, they might be better off forgetting Follow.

Here’s how it looks integrated in one app:

Click one of those buttons and you’ll be alerted on Facebook that you’re following someone via your Timeline’s recent activity.

…and your notifications

Then you’ll start seeing posts like these in your Ticker or news feed

Developers who are already publishing stories back to Facebook via Open Graph about who you follow, like Quora for example, have 90 days to either stop publishing their custom “follow” actions and migrate to this new official one, or stop publishing those kinds of stories.

Why Facebook Follow Is So Damn Important

Facebook wants to be the “Omni-News Feed”. Right now content from all the web services and mobile apps are splintered into their respective in-app content feeds. Most sites don’t do a very good job of monetizing that content. But Facebook knows exactly how: Sponsored Stories.

If Facebook can maintain its massive time on site (which averages 441 minutes per user per month), it will have plenty of room to inject its Sponsored Stories ads into the news feed.

And it may get even better. I’m checking with Facebook PR, but the actions published could potentially be turned into Sponsored Stories, so Facebook could charge the app where they took place to make the stories appear more prominently in the feeds of people already subscribed to them. Facebook could essentially be taking content from apps and selling it back to them.

If you were wondering what Facebook’s long-term game plan is, you’re staring at it. Pull content from everywhere, mix it with ads, keep you reading. And with the carrot of referral traffic to dangle, some developers may be happy to play along.

By simply owning small humans that are ultra-dependent and oftentimes unruly, moms have an incredibly tough job. But after you pile on all the little things — soccer practices, ballet recitals, doctors appointments, etc. — being a parent becomes damn near impossible.

But to that end, a company called VolunteerSpot has just raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from ff Venture Capital here in New York, with participation from various angels in the Central TX Angel Network, Nebraska Angel Network, Angel List, and Baylor Angel Network.

The service lets volunteers of any type, whether it be a group of soccer moms, organizations, or simply a group of friends, organize their volunteer hours online without any extra hassle. So it works a bit like this:

Let’s say there’s a mom (we’ll call her Nancy), who needs help organizing the weekly summer playdates among a group of friendly kids. Once she’s signed in to the service, she can arrange a calendar for the various tasks and volunteer activities required, like bringing snacks, bringing games, or organizing and supervising a game of hide-and-go-seek. From there, the other moms in the group can simply choose their task, click the sign-up button, and be done with it.

The site lets you set up a profile with contact info, should someone need to get a hold of you, along with a record of everything you’ve volunteered for and everything you’re committed to.

But this extends outside of your original network. Once you’re on the site, you have the ability to tap into other volunteer opportunities with a subscription. The service is free to cash-strapped groups like teachers and students, but if you pay $4.99 for the “I Can Help” subscription, you’ll be able to check out various volunteering activities and make a commitment.

Other groups like sports teams, non-profits, and corporate programs are encouraged to contribute by purchasing one of the subscriptions, ranging from $4.99 for an individual to $19.99 for more than 100 volunteers on the network.

VolunteerSpot also offers a freemium payment model for users looking for added functionality and features.

Click to view slideshow.

In the land of tech, we bloggers rarely if ever have to step in front of the camera. But now that Google has launched Google Glass into the world, the camera has turned on us in a fit of rage. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the freak show that is Google Glass.

First up is TC’s own Peter Ha, looking anything but suave in Google Glass. He also apparently forgot his shirt at the hotel.

Of course Mr. Joshua “Late Night” Topolsky would get some time with Google’s Project Glass. He looks so happy wearing the future.

Out of the bunch here, Google Glass looks most at home on cnet’s Rafe Needleman. He looks rather content seeing the world through Google’s eye.

Then there’s AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes. One look into her eyes and you know she feels ridiculous wearing Sergey’s glasses.

Google’s elite were out in force championing the company’s latest pet project. Here’s Vic Gundotra, Senior VP of Social, sporting the Google Glass — in a mighty fine sweater, too.

Like Needleman above, ExtremeTech’s David Cardinal wears Google Glasses with a bit of old world charm. That said, look at the right eye: It seems that Google Glasses makes a rather large blindspot.

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Right now it’s unclear if Google’s Project Glass will really become the future. Google I/O attendees can pre-order the device for $1500. I think Arrington got it right earlier today in saying, “the future. I can imagine in a couple of years we’ll all be wearing these at events. Then a couple of years after that maybe we’ll look back and think we all looked like idiots.”

While people were skydiving into I/O, Google quietly made a massively important announcement about a new feature called Google+ History, which gives apps an API to auto-share content to a private holding tank on your G+ profile, which you can then choose to share from. Developers who integrate History will score added discovery and referral traffic from the 75 million daily Google+ users the search giant announced today.

Testing begins now and Google admits it will be bumpy. But it has the potential to populate Google+ with desperately needed content and make it a destination people actually want to visit.

The idea behind Google+ history is that you do a lot of things on the web, but you might only want to share some of them. Right now Facebook’s Open Graph API often catches users by surprise. Even though they’ve authorized auto-sharing, they might not realize the article they read or video they watched is being broadcasted to friends.

In contrast, Google+ History makes sure users are always in control. Google’s Ken Norton explained in his fanfare-less announcement, “With just a few lines of code your app can privately save moments (like a listened song, or a visited restaurant) to a user’s Google+ history, and from there users can share those moments with others.”

To give developers a taste of how it works, once they sign up, their activity on Google properties including YouTube, +1, Play app purchases, and Intant Upload activity will appear in their Google+ History. The fact that Google is going to be auto-sharing app purchases is big. That’s something neither it nor Apple does with Facebook Open Graph, and it could become core way people discover the apps their friends have bought.

It could offer big gains for apps that publish frequently, like Twitter for example. You might not want to cross-publish every tweet to Google+, but some of them might be fit for syndication. With the History API, Twitter could send all your tweets to your History holding tank, and let you pick which ones to share with which circles.

Vic Gundotra said at SXSW this year that Google+ hadn’t released a third-party publishing API because it didn’t have a good enough algorithm for sorting the feed and making sure loud apps didn’t drown out users actually posting from within Google+. It seems the solution was merely letting users decide for themselves what their friends should see.

Google announced that G+ now has 250 million registations and 75 million daily users. The History API might help it keep up that momentum. By targeting Facebook where its weakest — its public perception of privacy — Google+ could inspire a wave of defectors to join its social network.

A few weeks ago, Google hosted a last-minute press conference in San Francisco to announce its new, highly detailed 3D maps. While many of us expected the company to actually launch the maps then, Google never announced actual launch date. Today, the wait is over, as the new version of Google Earth for Android (version 7.0) now offers access to the new 3D imagery. You can download the updated Google Earth for Android app from the Play store now.

Don’t get too excited, though. For the time being, only about a dozen cities feature these new 3D maps, including most cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as L.A., San Diego, Portland, Boulder, Charlotte, Tucson, Tampa and Rome, Italy (Rome being the only non-U.S. city that currently features the new 3D maps).

At a session at Google I/O today, Google also reiterated that these features will come to iOS “soon.”

Google says that it will continue to release more 3D imagery over the coming months. The plan, says Google, is to offer 3D coverage for metropolitan areas with a “combined population of 300 million people.”

This new 3D imagery is created by using the 45-degree aerial photographs Google is already collecting in many metropolitan areas.

At I/O today, Google also stressed that with Google Earth, the company doesn’t just want people to find information, but also to get lost and just explore. Because of this, it has added a new Tour Guide feature to Google Earth that lets you find interesting sights in the world (in 3D, of course).

At TechCrunch we like to get the rest of the story. That’s why we go in-depth, hard-hitting, and close to the ground. Nowhere is that clearer than in this hardcore, hardball, and soft cheese interview with the folks from the Melting Pot, a popular fondue (from the French “What do we do with this old cheese? Melt it?”) restaurant that may or may not be in your general vicinity.

The Melting Pot has teamed up with Foodspotting.com, a popular site for spotting food, and, like a tempest-tossed couple engulfed by a sea of hot broth, both companies are clawing their way back into the public consciousness by offering a $100 gift card to lucky foodspotters who deign to spot their fondue. I’m not exactly sure how the contest works (presumably you take pictures of whatever fell into your Gruyere) but $100 is nothing to sneeze at nor would you want to because sneezing into fondue can make quite a nasty sort of conglomerate.

I spoke to the very-patient Sandy D’Elosua, National Director of Communications, The Melting Pot Restaurants, about the partnership.

TC: As a fan of fondue, what should you do if you drop your iPhone in a pot of cheese?

Sandy: Well, first off, don’t drop your phone in a pot of cheese. We can’t imagine why anyone would do that. Maybe it’s a #YOLO thing? But hypothetically, if you do, alert a server to retrieve it. That cheese is hot.

TC: Will there be any special discounts for people whose dinners are ruined by their tablemates incessantly taking pictures of food?

Sandy: Did we mention the sweeps component, where one random winner will be chosen weekly to receive a $100 Melting Pot gift card for spotting and tagging fondue on Foodspotting? As long as the photo-taker promises to share said reward with their tablemates, we don’t foresee any issues.

TC: Why a $100 gift card for the Melting Pot? Why not a crisp $100 bill? Once you’ve had fondue once you don’t want it for a while.

Sandy: Because $100 worth of fondue is like a bazillion dollars worth of anything else. OK, maybe we’re a little biased. Truth is, we have more than two million Club Fondue members who are Fondue Fanatics and frequent The Melting Pot on a regular basis. So we figure, you can never have too much of a tasty thing.

TC: Why social media? Why now?

Sandy: Fondue is a social experience. We noticed that diners have been taking photos of our fondue and other dishes on Foodspotting for some time now. It’s a natural connect to partner with Foodspotting to enhance the social experience.

TC: Wouldn’t it be great if there was some sort of tomato sauce fondue and you speared noodles?

Sandy: That would be spaghetti…And that already exists. Using a standard fork.

While the name may be a bit unruly, TalkFavorites.me is a rating system for the best stuff near you. There are no reviews to AstroTurf, no business details to mess up, and no horribly-written screeds against unfairly-judged businesses. Instead, you vote for the best stuff in your area and then consult those lists as you look for, say, the best pizza in West Chester, Penn.

We spoke with TalkFavorites.me founder Chris Dima about his product. He describes it as “Yelp without the fuss” and the goal is to basically make top 10 lists of everything everywhere. He’s launched the site outside of Philadelphia and he’s going to try to expand it to other markets soon. You can try your own Zip code to see if anyone has voted near you.

The premise is that regular reviews sites aren’t helpful. You end up with weird tirades against a bitchy waiter rather than a real, democratic assessment of value. By reducing opinions to a single vote – Best Mojito in Scranton – you reduce much of the noise.

The site is live now and Dima hopes his idea will replace the concept of likes.

“So 1,120 people “Like” Limoncello, an Italian hotspot in my hometown, West Chester, Penn. As a disembodied absolute metric, it’s just not helpful, say, for someone who is looking for an Italian restaurant in the area. What does that number mean? What does it tell you?” he wrote on his blog. “Not much.”

“Users need comparable numbers next to one another. They need the number of “Likes” for all the available Italian restaurants in the area. Numbers like these would then be actionable. The user would gain a better understanding of what’s good.”

Product Page

It seems like schools are the one market where Google is having some success with its Chromebook initiative. Today, the company announced that there are now 500 school districts in the U.S. and Europe that actively use Chromebooks. Google also announced a few new districts that have recently decided to use Google’s web-centric laptops, including Rockingham Country Schools, N.C., Transylvania County Schools, N.C., and Fond du Lac School District, Wis.

One of the reasons Google is able to make this push for Chromebooks in education is that its laptops meet the new hardware and operating system guidelines set by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).

In addition to these deployment announcements, Google is also launching new tools and collections of web apps for students and administrators at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference today. The tools, says Google, will “make it even easier to find, use, install and manage web apps for your entire school.” The grade-level application packs are installable from the Chromebook management console and feature apps that integrate tightly with Google Apps for Education. The organization-specific web app collections allow administrators to curate apps from the Chrome Web Store and recommend them to students, teachers and staff.

A number of companies also launched new educational apps for Chrome at the ISTE conference today, including ST Math, VoiceThread and Achieve3000.

In its announcement today, Google says that “in schools, all you need is web.” That’s arguable, but Google is clearly doing something right in the education space, though even with its latest generation of ChromeOS-based hardware, Chromebooks will likely remain niche products for the time being. For schools, however, Chromebooks are attractive alternatives to traditional laptops. The total cost of ownership for these laptops, after all, is relatively low because they are so easy to manage, virtually immune to viruses and update themselves.

Looked for an apartment lately? It sucked, right? You showed up and you had to fill out an application and submit all sorts of stupid paperwork — credit check, proof of employment, utility invoice (apparently to prove that you can pay a bill, like an adult), etc. And then, if you’re lucky, your name will be pulled out of a hat amongst the other half-dozen people who applied for the same property.

Well that whole process sucks for landlords and property management companies as well. After all, they’re the ones who collect all that paperwork and sort through all that data. Don’t you wish there were a better way? Thanks to Rentobo, there is.

Rentobo provides a platform for landlords, listing agents, and property management firms to not only post their open units across a number of different apartment listing sites, but it gives them a way to quickly and easily get information from prospective tenants with an online application process.

The team, which was part of the Y Combinator Summer 2011 class, started off originally with the idea of auctioning off apartment rentals. But it quickly realized that all the infrastructure it was building would be extremely useful in just getting most apartment listings online. So it began to focus instead on what it could do to automate the process and make things easier for both landlords and tenants.

For landlords, first and foremost there was the listing problem. Craigslist still looms large in most major metro areas, despite its crappy interface and lack of functionality. But then there’s Zillow, Trulia, and other sites as well. Rentobo provides a single listing interface for landlords and listing agents to post to all of those sites at once.

It provides a drag-and-drop interface for adding photos to listings, so that prospective tenants know what they’re getting into before they apply. And since all pictures are stored remotely, landlords aren’t constrained by the limit on the number of photos they can upload to Craigslist. All in all, its listings are pretty gorgeous.

But the listings management part of the software is kind of the easy part. Where Rentobo really excels is in reducing the amount of paperwork that changes hands, by allowing landlords to collect information from prospective tenants through online applications. Tenants could even submit information before they even see the apartment, so that there’s no paper to exchange if they do decide they want to apply for a place.

Rentobo is currently free while users beta test it, but when it officially goes live, the startup plans to make money from landlords based on the number of listings they manage using the platform. It’s also working to add the ability to collect application fees, as well as streamline the process for credit checks directly through the platform. Once those features are in place, it could also make some additional revenues based on applications it processes.