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iOS Hacker Begins Porting Swype To Jailbroken iPhones

When it comes to Swype and their crazy drag-to-type alternative keyboard of the same name, there’s only one problem: it’s really, really tough to give up once you’ve gotten used to it. Alas, I’ve gotta deal with the withdrawal symptoms each and every time I jump from an Android device back to my iPhone, due to restrictions inherent to iOS.

While Swype was purportedly working on something for iOS in June of last year (and, as the rumor mill had it, trying to convince Apple to make it official) all word of it went silent pretty quickly.

The mission has been revived, it seems, albeit with someone else behind the charge: Andrew Liu, developer of the “DreamBoard” theming hack for jailbroken devices, has begun to “port” Swype to iOS.

Read The Rest At MobileCrunch >>


Signup Flow Shows Spotify Costing $4.99 And $9.99 A Month In The US

One day after it announced an imminent US launch with no other details, an American Spotify user has sent us these screencaps showing pricing in US dollars. Only going by these screencaps, the Unlimited US Spotify plan will cost $4.99 a month without mobile streaming capability and the Premium Spotify plan with mobile access will cost $9.99 a month. According to the same source, a free version with limited plays is also available.

Interesting enough, these amounts are less than what European users currently pay, at £4.99 ($8.00) and £9.99 ($16.00) respectively.

It might just be that these are pre-launch placeholder site numbers, the fact that lesser competitor and US first mover Rdio charges the same amounts for what amounts to basically the same plans makes me believe that they might be legitimate (the logic being that the record companies gave both companies similar licensing deals). Peter Kafka also reported the $10 a month for Premium figure when he wrote about the company’s $100 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation earlier this month.

So if the prices are in place what’s the holdup then? Well one source pegs the company as waiting for Facebook to get its music service together  – I’m hearing it’s a partnership with multiple companies including Spotify. In related news, code alluding to a product called Facebook Vibes was just discovered in the download files for FaceSkype video chat.

So while we all wait for the launch of one, or the other or both simultaneously, read Paul Carr’s brilliant post on how Rdio captured the music in America’s heart first.

Update from Spotify PR: ”No details are set for the pricing or details of our US service yet – we’re still testing a number of different options. We’ll be sure to let you know when we have something to announce.”

Information provided by CrunchBase


Keen On… Loic Le Meur: Why Seesmic Isn’t a Failure (TCTV)

“If you don’t adapt, you die,” Loic Le Meur told me when he came into the TechCrunchTV studio last week. And Loic – aka monsieur Pivot – is certainly one of the Valley’s most skilled adaptors. Having founded Seesmic in 2008 as a video aggregation network, he then transformed it the next year into a popular consumer Twitter client before shifting it earlier this year into a Salesforce and Softbank backed enterprise CRM tool.

The pivot, of course, is the thing these days. And Le Meur – perhaps because of his skill as a wind surfer – is a master of sniffing changes in the business environment before anyone else. In contrast with Catarina Fake and Philip Kaplan, Le Meur is strongly opposed to what the calls “the disposable start-up.” For him, he has a moral obligation to his investors at Seesmic (which include Mike Arrington) to adapt the company to the new environment – even if that sometimes means transforming the company into something unrecognizable from its previous incarnation.

So is monsieur Pivot right – is the “disposable company” immoral?

This is the second part of a two part interview with Le Meur. Yesterday, he explained why European start-up entrepreneurs have nothing to learn from their European counterparts. That post sparked a sharp rebuke from TechCrunch Europe’s Mike Butcher. And Loic responded himself in the original post comments.

Why entrepreneurs who don’t adapt, die

Loic Le Meur.

Bonjour.

Bonjour, the only person who would get me to use that word. You are, in your own words, a serial entrepreneur and the CEO of Seesmic, and LeWeb. So welcome. You don’t need any real welcoming to TechCrunch Loic.

Thank you. Yeah, you’ve done a couple of upgrades here.

We’re very sophisticated these days. I want you to talk for our viewers who perhaps aren’t as familiar with you as I am, with the history of Seesmic, which is a company that’s intimately associated with you. How it’s changed, what it’s future is, and why it seems to keep on changing.

Well, I answer this one first. It keeps changing just because as an entrepreneur, if you don’t change you just die. SoI think you have to keep adapting to a situation. You know if you do sailing, you cannot sail against the wind. If the wind changes direction, you have to. I did a lot of races when I was a teenager, sailing races, you have to adapt all the time.

That’s how I see myself, you know Sesmic is like a sports car. We’re changing a lot, otherwise you die, that’s easy.

Well, but sports cars don’t get continually pivot. Do they?

Well no, if you do 360 then it’s not good, in sailing either. We’re not circling around, we started as a, you know, a video company I don’t even…

When was that? What year?

That will be four years ago.

Mike Arrington was one of your original investors.

Yeah. He still is, disclosure. You’re not Mike Arrington though.

Not last time I checked.

I guess, you find. You know, that didn’t work and there was an option and which, I think, is an interesting topic where, where as an entrepreneur when you just launched something and we picked out a 100,000 users, didn’t grow suddenly because I think I exhausted of space of people want to do, you know, video conversations aren’t that many and then I decided I took it to my board and I said and i think that that’s something else that an entrepreneurs should do, is to be proactive to his board.

And I said look, you know, we raised 12 million dollars, that didn’t work, what do you guys want to do. Here is an option that I see, that was the beginning of Twitter. We, acquired the second in chronology Twitter clan which was Twill and funny enough I did it to have video growth. And then that grew, like crazy.

It was one of the first, you know, Twitter clan that was out there. And I recommended we focused on this because I thought that like there’s a Zynga on Facebook that there would be big companies on the Twitter ecosystem that will grow, and I thought it was very interesting. And my whole team and I have a passion for Twitter.

So we did this, and I think the space has changed a lot again with TweetDeck being acquired.

I was sure it was Seesmic versus TweetDeck. Well, there’s no story any more, because we’ve changed again, and now we’re a social CRM.

But did you… Some people, perhaps, would say that TweetDeck beat you. Is that fair? When you were trying to compete with TweetDeck.

In market share they’ve been bigger, for sure. No problem saying that. Now there are some…

Why do you think that was?

Wait, I think it depends on the platform. For example, on Android we’ve always been very successful. We’re hitting like a million installed downloads and a very significant number of active users daily, which I can share with you if you’re interested. But it depends. Focus on the platform and also what we did, I think is very innovative.

We have a plug-in platform with eighty partners on it. I think it’s cool. And of course we have our core user bases growing. But I don’t think we should compare it anymore. This is a subsidiary of Twitter now, right, which makes it interesting because we suddenly started competing with our biggest partner, Twitter, right?

So fortunately I don’t have a crystal ball, but I saw the winds changing direction. A year ago when they acquired Tweety at the shop conference basically was a strong message that: 1. That ‘we’re competing with anyone doing a client.’ 2. That ‘maybe clients are not welcome that much any more’. So we raised money from sales force, and I can explain what we’re doing, but basically we’re like 80% about social CRM, which is targeting the professionals, and not any more of the consumers.

Even though we’re happy have a lot of consumer users, we have a lot. But we’re going after a totally different target, which is mostly Salesforce customers now. We’ll get onto the Salesforce and the CRM market in a few minutes. But why do you think TweetDeck took off, while Seesmic in some senses didn’t.

No, you can’t say that. We have ten percent monthly growth for like eighteen months, so we took off! Now you asked me a question and I gave you an honest answer on market share. You said are you bigger than them? No, they were bigger. But you can’t say we didn’t take off. I can show you my user growth, it’s very impressive and it’s activities seem to be growing very nicely.

Like ten percent a month. So that’s nice, you know, it’s not, not take off

Seesmic’s new CRM business model

Loic LeMure, the master.

LeMuer, not Lemure. And we’ve know each other for such a long time you could at least know to pronounce my name. Just call me Loic, thanks. Or at Loic. Most people know you as “at Loic.” But I have a new name for you.

Okay.

Mr. Pivot, because you’ve been pivoting again, Loic.

Yes.

So tell me about your latest pivot. What’s the French word for pivot? Pi-vot?

Same.

How do you pronounce it?

Pivot. You don’t say the T.

You’ve been Pivot-ing recently, what have you been up to?

As I said, you need to be very agile when you start a business, adapt to current market conditions, and I think the opportunity of building client apps around query is closed, and that pushed us since the Twit acquisition to do something else. And it’s been a year, fortunately we’ve been working on it.

We raised money from Salesforce. What we did is very very easy, we looked at the consumer versus professionals market, and the consumer space around Twitter is basically shut down for what we do, I think. So, when you look at the professionals, you have two types of businesses here. There is one which is helping people manage their social networks, which we do, and which…where we have a lot of growth.

So basically it’s the brand managers, community managers, people like that. That’s one. There is another one which is even more more interesting I think, where I think we’re creating our space right now, where we’re alone, is the CRM plus social space, especially on mobile. And I give you the use case: it’s more like salespeople.

So if I meet you and you’re an opportunity for me, now we’re getting into CRM. I want to check you out on LinkedIn maybe. I want to see if there is an opportunity with you. I will log it in the CRM tool, like Sales Force, which is leader. And then I want to maybe follow you on Twitter and add you on Facebook and so on.

But you know what’s the most important is finding leads on those social networks as well. So let’s say you say…you tweet, “I want to change my car.” You’re a lead for a sales dealer, for example, for a car dealer, I’m sorry. And so bringing CRM on one side to social on the other side, especially on mobile.

We have seventy-five to eighty percent of our new users on mobile, mostly on Android is fascinating to me. So that’s what we’re doing, our company is you know, not in that you know, trying for Twitter space anymore. We really value a lot social: Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. But we do it through the use of professionals which are using CRM.

So it’s very different. I move from one ecosystem to another basically, like, very fast. And we are now building mostly for SalesForce, with SalesForce. We have incredible support from SalesForce.

So is SalesForce just an investor? What proportion of the company do they own?

Oh, we made this public. They invested, we invested, we got a four million dollars investment from SalesForce and SoftBank. That’s way like a clear minority for us. It’s a small chunk of our company. I’m not authorized to discuss exact number, but it’s not big.

And what’s the business model? How do you make your money in this new market?

Very simple, we will release end of August new apps which will be on the new mobile. Mobile I just described, which is social on the one side, we already have that. Instead of monetizing this, we’re adding CRM to it and we will monetize it when we have CRM. It will be a per user, per month fee which is the same business model as SalesForce.

We were looking, some engineers and TechCrunch and myself, were looking at the sesmic site just before ths interview. And it promises at one point on the site you’re the only social media tool that you’ll ever need. Is that true for everybody or just for corporate clients?

If, I should probably change that now that you are saying that. It’s a, it’s a tool that embraces Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, now SalesForce, CRM soon and if you use our desktop it has 80 integrations so, for example, maybe you use Chatter Bill so instead of you use Yammer we have both, you choose, right?

Maybe you want to add customer support. We have a zen desk plug in. It’s there as well. You see it’s like, it’s like a puzzle. You assemble the modules, it’s like modular, you assemble the modules you want. So in that respect, yes, we are the only social networking tool in the world that has so many services, 80 of them.

On the immorality of the “disposable startup”

Loic, I’m not even going to pronounce your last name.

You did great.

You’d embarrass me again, in front of this huge global audience.

Yes, I apologize Andrew, I know you, you have thick skin.

Thick or fit? Here we go! Thick.

So, Loic, you are .

You know the French make fun of my French accent all the time, but not the Americans? The English make fun of my supposed American accent. You and I are stuck in the mid-Atlantic somewhere together.

Yes, we’re swimming.

So, you are Monsieur Pivot of the entrepreneurial world. Continually pivoting and very admirable, showing great agility. True of all startup entrepreneurs there in Silicon Valley. Some of them are failing to pivot or not being interested in pivoting. What do you think the advantages of your pivot model is versus the Blippy model, the Katarina-fake model of doing something quickly and then trashing it and then moving on to the next thing.

It’s interesting that you ask that, because I think it’s two different ways of operating. I feel very responsible for money I’ve raised. And very responsible for the angels I have also who invested their money.

You’re on tape now, you can never, they’ve got it forever now.

No, but maybe too much. Some friends of mine who are startup funders say you know, you launch something, it doesn’t work, give back the money that’s left, shut it down, start all over again. Why do you change because I changed twice already basically?

You mean video, Twitter?
Social networking, mostly Twitter, and now Sales Force. At any point I could have just said, “Enough, right. Here is your money back, investors, thank you will start over something. Maybe you want to participate with something new.”

But some people say that’s very moral, as the right thing to do.

That’s what I do because I feel responsible. I think it’s important. I think it’s a long term, imagine as an entrepreneur that you’re defending, as well. our arguments for both because the more money you raise, we’ve raised 16 million dollars, the more like baggage you’re carrying as well. You see what I mean.

You carry that with you. So, I could raise again and again and again, and probably, we’ll see if I need to, but we’re trying to do a revenue now.

That’s the agenda instead of raising. I think it’s going to do great. But it’s two different styles and I was thinking about a blog post actually via disposable startup. And think about Google. Right. Gmail. Hit. Google Maps. Hit. Google Earth, you see the point. But at the same time Google Buzz, not good, they shut down Google Health two days ago.

It’s Google operates that way.

So, why wouldn’t the startups operate the same way it`s like the disposable startup that you launch, you raise whatever, 1 million, 5 million, 10 million, doesn’t work – stop as fast as you can. Do something else, it’s not what I’m doing. I don’t think I would be doing that or I would say at the very beginning.

If you raise money here is what I’m gonna do with it, and if it doesn’t work we’re going to stop. I guess if it’s clear with your investors, fine. But, Blippy was surprised after nine months. Actually the company is still around, but Phil already tweets around this new gig, right? And by the time I, he wrote.

Did you say pivoted?

Pivot. You pivoted.

Twice! I guess Katerina has launched one and now a second company. I’m not criticizing. By the way, I think those are two different ways Did you offer their investors their money back?

We had a discussion when the video thing didn’t take off, and we could have came to that conclusion.

That happened with Twitter, of course, and some of the investors lost out massively. So, it works both ways. Right because they could have been an invester in Twitter.

Yeah.

And I know absolutely some of them, one quote who are very pissed that they could not get in on Twitter.

What do you think you learned most of all from the failure of the first two versions of seasoning that’s helping you now.

I learn absolutely everyday you know. I think I was.

But you’re not answering my question, what did you learn? We all learn everyday.

Well, yeah, what did I learn? I think for the video thing, it was mostly that video is very tough, because not everybody is like you and me, able of discussing in a natural way I think as much as possible in front of cameras. Most people are shy, afraid of their image, they don’t like it stays online as well.

Like Scoble or something like that.

I’m not giving example, actually Scoble is fine, but he doesn’t give a damn right? Yes. But most people like, so that’s one learning. Video, if you look at this period, when I launched Seesmic, the first version of it, it was all about video, it was juice actually launched. There was a number of YouTube competitors, there were, UStream was barely launched.

And that’s apparently a success. wish for John. But you see what my point is that everybody thought video was the next thing, and since then, what happened, YouTube took it all. How many video startups are actually successful? Very few, right? I don’t know many startup entrepreneurs building stuff around videos these days, because it’s very tough.

Have you had any crises though as an entrepreneur in terms of your faith in yourself? You’re clearly a very skilled promoter and marketer, but obviously given the failure of the first two versions of Seasoning there have been some questions about your skill as a startup entrepreneur.

Really? Did you see that somewhere?

Well, it’s something people sometimes say.

Really?

Yes.

That’s very European of you to ask these questions.

Why European?

Because Europeans love to talk about failure and how bad it is. Here we celebrate it. Come on. Well I was a, most of our audience probably don’t know this. I had a company in the 90’s called Audio Cafe, it was a massive failure.

And you failed.

I failed, but it convinced me that I was a terrible entrepreneur, and I’ve never tried it again.

Big mistake, Andrew. Big mistake.

Why?

Why? Because if you failed, that means you learned a lot, and you should…

Yeah, but at a certain point, it’s like, I interviewed Ron Conway. He’ll always invest in someone who’s failed once, occasionally twice, but if you failed more than twice, he’ll never invest in you.

Well, you know, I…

But…Back to the question.

You know, Le Web is a huge success. This is my fifth company. And by the way, this is not failure yet, right? So we’re doing pretty well.


OpenFeint Snags A Former Playdom Exec To Lead Product

Mobile social faming company OpenFeint has nabbed a pretty key hire today—former Playdom exec Ethan Fassett. Fasset will be leading product development at OpenFeint, as senior vice president of product.

Previously, Fassett was Playdom’s executive producer of its San Francisco studio. He helped drive product strategy for Playdom’s San Francisco studio, with a focus on player community engagement and monetization. He helped launch Playdom’s retail-themed social game, Market Street, which peaked at one million daily active users. Prior to Playdom, Fassett worked at teenage virtual world Gaia.

As the SVP of product, Fassett will be working on growing player engagement for OpenFeint through new communication features. He will also aim to improve player acquisition for game developers with distribution tools and programs.

OpenFeint, which was acquired by Japanese gaming company GREE earlier this year for $104 million, currently reaches 90 million users and powers 6,000 games across iOS and Android.

Information provided by CrunchBase


Zynga Combines Privacy Education, Gaming And Rewards With PrivacyVille

Getting ahead of any privacy issues surround your product is an important part of product development for any company. Facebook, unfortunately, learned this the hard way. Social gaming giant Zynga is adding a layer of transparency today with the launch of a new privacy initiative called PrivacyVille.

In typical Zynga fashion, PrivacyVille isn’t your average dull privacy education course but is instead a game-like tutorial that rewards players with the company’s virtual currency zPoints in RewardVille for learning more about Zynga’s privacy practices.

The game is actually modeled after CityVille, so players feel somwewhat at home navigating the game mechanics. You start the game in a small town, and travel through the town to learn more about important sections of Zynga’s Privacy Policy, as well as resources about controlling your information online. For example, when you start the game, Zynga tells you that in order to connect you to other people playing games on Facebook, it takes information from your Facebook profile, such your name, photos, and friends, to allow these games to become more social.

Another privacy tutorial involved informing mobile gamers that Zynga will capture your device ID and IP address. And Zynga says that they and advertisers may collect cookies from your browsing behavior, that the company uses your email address to send alerts, and that while Facebook processes much of the payments for virtual goods, Zynga is using a transmissions technology to make sure your payments info is secure. In all, Zynga has 14 areas in the town for various privacy notifications.

After reading all the notifications, you are then given a short quiz of five questions and will be taken to Rewardville to redeem your points. Also, you don’t need to be connected to Facebook or be registered as a Zynga player to tour PrivacyVille. However, if you are a Zynga player, you will have the option to connect to Zynga’s RewardVille and claim zPoints that can be used to redeem unique virtual items. As a side note, you can play PrivacyVille as much as you want but you will only get the rewards once.

Zynga says that PrivacyVille is not intended to be a substitute for its Privacy Policy or Privacy Center, but is just a more engaging way to explain the company’s privacy interactions.

Reggie Davis, Zynga’s General Counsel says of the new initiative: We know there is an interest in making privacy policies more approachable. We wanted to take a page from our game DNA to create a privacy tutorial that’s accessible, social and fun. We look forward to hearing feedback from players on how we can make it even easier for them to learn about our policies.

This is no doubt a smart move for Zynga. As the company grows, mitigating these privacy stumbles is important. As the company revealed in its S-1 IPO filing last week, privacy regulation and Facebook sharing are challenges for Zynga going forth. In fact, both Facebook and Zynga were sued last year over privacy breaches. And the fact that Zynga is providing virtual currency as an incentive should prevent the privacy initiative from going unnoticed.

Information provided by CrunchBase


S?sh Makes Social Actually Social By Giving You Things To Do In Your City

Back in March, as we reported on Offline Labs‘ initial funding, we also offered up a quick glimpse of their first project, codenamed Project Drag?n. Now the project, actually called S?sh, is ready to be fully be revealed.

The basic idea behind S?sh is a simple one: “find and share interesting things to do,” co-founder Rishi Mandal says. “Life’s too short to be bored,” he continues noting that when most people do things, they tend to do the same things over and over again — go to the movies, go to the same restaurants, etc.

That’s the hole in peoples’ lives that S?sh is trying to fill. And to do that, they’re aiming at the city-level. Launching first in San Francisco, S?sh is a website that gives you a few simple, but key ways to get ideas for things to do. The first way is algorithmic. The main page features a drop-down that reads “I’m looking for” — you select the type of activity you want to do.

The second way S?sh serves up ideas is through curation. Their team will look at all the different activities they’re crawling in a city and serve up what they believe are the best ones that should be highlighted.

The third way is perhaps the most important: what your friends are doing. By tapping into your social graphs on Facebook and Twitter, S?sh shows you a feed of what the people you’re already friends with are interested in doing. You can then start conversations around these activities, and hopefully even do something together.

“Millions of people search for the phrase ‘things to do’ on Google — it’s almost as much as they search for Justin Bieber,” Mandal points out, laughing. But as he shows me, the results that Google serves up basically suck. S?sh, quite simply, aims to not suck.

When a user finds an activity on S?sh that interests them, they can bookmark it with one click. From here, activities can be shared via the normal means: Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. You can also mark down things you’ve already done. And you can actually plan an activity with a simple, easy-to-follow form. In this regard, S?sh is a bit like a more curated and less event-focused Plancast.

S?sh has a huge inventory of sources for their activities that they crawl automatically to put new ones into the system as they become available. It’s not about deals, but that could be an aspect, Mandal notes.

But the goal is an even broader one. “People spend 90 percent of their time and money offline,” Mandal says, noting that their service is all about creating the best online experience to figure out what to do offline. Obviously, the team knows that many have been going after this very thing, but Mandal is encouraged by what he has seen as “many fantastic failures” saying that no one has yet nailed the “elusive” interest graph.

And while S?sh is just a traditional web-based app for now, the goal is to move to mobile quickly. They understand the true potential may lie there. And obviously, the hope is to expand beyond this initial beta in San Francisco as quickly as possible.

“Our end goal is: someone went out and did something amazing,” Mandal says. “The mental model we’re competing for is: ‘What should we do? Let’s check S?sh’,” he says.

To celebrate the launch, S?sh has given us 250 invites to give out to TechCrunch readers. Again, you’ll want to be based in San Francisco (or planning to come here) to use it. Enjoy. Others can sign up to be let into the beta on the site, and they’ll be letting people in on a rolling basis.


Gogobot Brings Game Mechanics And Rewards To Online Travel

With the rise in prominence of the social graph, we’ve seen the proliferation of services like Facebook Connect, which have brought the social web to third party sites and helped make sharing an integral part of the Web’s new plumbing. Social seems to be the default setting these days, but as is often the case, there are a few exceptions. The online travel industry, for one, is composed of sites that came of age early in the evolution of the Web, and by and large, still lacks many of the features of Web 2.0, like discovery, openness, and social integration to name a few.

For how popular peer and friend-based recommendation systems have become for movies, music, and other forms of content discovery, one might think that social recommendations would by now have made their way into the travel planning and exploration process. After all, when it comes to finding good places to visit when you’re traveling or on vacation, recommendations from friends tend to be of the most value. Last November, Gogobot launched to address this very issue, aiming to breathe new life into the online travel discovery space.

With tight Facebook integration and a design geared toward the visual aspect of deciding what places to visit (Gogobot initially hand-curated over 100K photos from Flickr and other open photo resources), the startup positioned itself as the Yelp for travel, or as Mike Arrington put it, “a TripAdvisor that puts users first”.

If you’re someone who travels frequently, and you enjoy reviewing the places you visit and, in turn, want tips from your friends on what places to check out on your next vacation, then Gogobot is right up your alley. For this reason, it’s of no surprise that, according to Gogobot CEO Travis Katz, the site has begun to gain a lot of traffic from Yelp users — those who like to travel, try new places, accommodations, and restaurants, and share their experiences after the fact.

Like Yelp, users can navigate Gogobot by a simple keyword search, but in the case of the online travel site, users can view their friends’ “passports”, which provide images and reviews from all the places they’ve travelled. Gogobot recently added Foursquare and Facebook Places integration, too, so that every time you check-in via one of those services, your checkins show up on your Gogobot profile as well. And, since Gogobot is focused on providing an authentic visual experience, the site automatically tags your checkin with a Flickr image. Once you’ve checkedin, you can go back at a later date and add starred recommendations or write a longer review.

Just as Foursquare has plans to utilize the massive data hive it’s collected from user checkins to create a future recommendation service based on past trends in your checkin activity, the big picture goal for Gogobot is to provide an engaging resource for users to create tons and tons of data around their travel preferences. Eventually, Katz told me, Gogobot wants to build a travel recommendation engine comparable to the one Netflix employs for its movie recommendations.

So, to make this reality, Gogobot needs to become its own data hive, and thus needs to create an engaging user experience that encourages its users to spend time on the site, tagging, reviewing, checking-in, and so on. Today, Gogobot is announcing another key element in the effort to build an addictive resource and data mine: The addition of a gaming layer to its experience.

Gogobot is today rolling out a game layer built on top of Facebook Places check-ins (the first of its kind that I’m aware of), as well as Foursquare, to turn both networks into a source of gaming mechanics that encourage travelers to compete with friends and other members of the community to earn points and badges by going about their daily Gogobot activity. Users can earn points simply by checking-in, but they earn a greater number of points by writing reviews, answering questions posed by other travelers, and commenting on other users’ reviews.

The Gogobot badge system is very similar to the commenting reward system used by The Huffington Post, as well as the badge system in place for content producers on Bleacher Report. Obviously, while game mechanics and badges are by no means a new idea, it is very definitely a novel feature for the travel industry.

Thus, if you’re someone that loves adding stamps to your passport and loves competing with friends and family for those stamps — if the idea of making travel into a game has some appeal — Gogobot has your number.

In just six months since launching to the public, Gogobot users have shared more than 550,000 destinations across the globe with their networks on Gogobot. And though Katz was unwilling to share the site’s number of monthly active users, he did say that users are spending an average of 10.5 minutes on the site per visit, more than twice that of its competitors, like TripAdvisor and Fodor’s. He also said that traffic has grown by 70 percent in the last 30 days, so hockey-stick growth looks like it’s on the way, if not already in progress.

As to how Gogobot will make money: It’s all about lead generation. The site is tightly integrated with Hotels.com, Kayak, Expedia, and TripAdvisor, to name a few, so when you’re checking out a review of a hotel in London, Gogobot allows you to go straight to Hotels.com to get a room and, when you do, Gogobot gets paid. (It also helps the financial cause to raise $4 million in seed funding from Battery Ventures.)

Gogobot was also the winner of TechCrunch’s 2010 Crunchie Award for “Best Design”, so you know it’s gotta be good. But, if you’re still not yet convinced, check out our original in depth review here or check out the site itself here.

Information provided by CrunchBase


WordPress.com Gains Support For OAuth2, Dedicated Developer Portal

In a blog post on the WordPress.com blog, Automattic‘s Justin Shreve this morning acknowledged his employer’s aspirations to turn WordPress.com into more of a platform than a mere Web-based blogging software service.

The company has added support for authentication protocol OAuth 2 to WordPress.com and is debuting a brand new developer portal.

Starting today, WordPress.com supports OAuth 2, an open authentication protocol that basically makes it easier for third party apps to connect with WordPress.com blogs through secure API authorization. That means developers can configure their applications to be able to access a WordPress.com blog without ever asking for personal details such as a password or username.

However, somewhat hidden on the contact page of the new developer portal you’ll find that OAuth2 client access will be granted only on a limited basis for the time being.

The only app using it today appears to be Memolane.

The developer portal contains documents and resources aimed to help developers use WordPress.com technologies to build applications. The portal is fairly sparse t this point, but Automattic says it will be adding more resources and tools as its developer ecosystem grows.

Information provided by CrunchBase


Biz Stone Joins Early Twitter Investor Spark Capital As Strategic Advisor

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is joining Spark Capital (which was an early investor in Twitter) as a strategic advisor, according to Spark Capital partner Bijan Sabet.

Sabet writes that In this role, Biz will help us think through and evaluate new investment opportunities. Additionally he will provide us with valuable insight about our current portfolio companies as well. Sabet actually led Spark’s investment in Twitter and serves on the company’s board.

We heard last week, Stone is also taking a step back from Twitter to re-team with Ev Williams and Jason Goldman (both of whom recently left their full-time duties at Twitter) to re-start The Obvious Corporation. The new venture plans to develop new projects and work on solving big problems aligned along a simple mission statement: The Obvious Corporation develops systems that help people work together to improve the world.

Because of his role at the Obvious Corp.; we’re assuming Biz’s work at Spark Capital will be part time. Spark, which just participated in Foursquare’s massive round, also recently raised a new fund.

Check out our Sarah Lacy’s in-depth conversation with Sabet earlier this year here.

Information provided by CrunchBase


YouTube Unveils Slick Experimental Redesign, Codenamed Cosmic Panda

YouTube has just unveiled an experimental new redesign called Project Panda, and it’s looking good. You can activate the redesign right here (and if you don’t like it, you can disable it from YouTube’s Test Tube control panel).

Some initial impressions: The new design makes significant changes to the way playlists are presented, moving them in some cases from a sidebar to a scrolling horizontal bar of thumbnails just beneath the video you’re watching (it reminds me a little of YouTube’s LeanBack). The video player now has a darker theme that looks more polished, and there’s a dark background behind the player that highlights the content you’re viewing. And channel pages look a lot nicer, with big, wide images for each video.

Here’s how YouTube is describing the project:

So what the heck is Cosmic Panda?

We’re always trying out new things here at the Tube and Cosmic Panda is our way of letting you in on some of the fun.

Here’s what to expect when you follow the cosmic panda over the double rainbow:

  • A new experience for watching videos and playlists
  • More page designs and better editing tools to customize your channel
  • Keep watching when moving between videos, playlists, and channels (Chrome only)
  • Stylish new look and feel
  • You can always jump back to the YouTube experience you know and love by coming back to this page or visiting TestTube.

The redesign is especially noteworthy because for a long time, YouTube was remarkably ugly for being the world’s most popular video portal — it was noisy, navigation was’t great, and the UI just seemed a bit outdated. Things have gotten a lot better in the last 18 months, though — YouTube announced a revamped ‘Watch’ page in January 2010 that was much cleaner (no more stars!) and has made incremental improvements since then. If it rolls out broadly, Cosmic Panda would be the most significant change yet.



Box Scores A Big Enterprise Deal: 18,000 Procter & Gamble Employees Up In Clouds

Box, formerly usually referred to as Box.net, has landed a big customer: consumer goods juggernaut Procter & Gamble.

The latter will bring Box’s cloud content management solution to 18,000 globally distributed employees following some test runs with a select number of P&G divisions.

Procter & Gamble has 127,000 employees across more than 180 countries, so it’s important to note the deal leaves room for increased adoption within the company over the next three years.

Box says the deployment represents its largest enterprise deal to date.

Previously, Box was already powering internal and external content sharing and collaboration for a couple of P&G divisions. Its services are designed to empower P&G employees to share and access information across devices (with mobile applications for iPhone, iPad, and BlackBerry), without any P&G maintenance or upgrades.

Box also says roughly 60,000 businesses and 6 million users are using its services today.

The startup recently raised $48 million in Series D funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Meritech Capital Partners, and Emergence Capital Partners, bringing its total capital raised to roughly $78 million. For your further reading pleasure:

Box.net Upgrades Cloud Storage Platform With New UI And Collaborative Features

Box.net Ups The Ante Against Microsoft With In-Depth Google Docs Integration

Information provided by CrunchBase


Loic Needs To Get His Head Out Of His Silicon Valley

I have the hugest respect for Loic Le Meur. Years before anyone was organising a major tech conference in Europe (outside of the dull corporate IT ones) Loic was charging ahead with first Les Blogs, which became the juggernaut of Le Web. It’s the biggest tech event in Europe (although, now not the only one, which I will touch upon later). When he moved to the Valley a few years ago, he continued with Le Web and brought the A-listers of the Valley back with him to Paris, France. We are all grateful to him for shining that light.

That said, with the greatest respect, I’m going to have to call him out following his interview with Andrew Keen yesterday.

His characterisation of Europe as a market entirely stuffed with clone startups is, well, obtuse, to put it mildly. I’ve even helped develop the startup rally at Le Web at couple of years ago and I simply don’t recall any blatant clones even getting through to the competition. This would be hard if all we had was clones.

What I think has happened – and it’s not really his fault – is that Loic has simply been unable to track what has been happen day to day. Interestingly, there is someone who tracks day to day what is happening with startups and VCs in Europe and he even happens to be on the TechCrunch staff. So maybe one day you may even see my mug opine about the scene in glorious technicolour video. We shall see.


Clean Urban Energy Raises $7 Million To “Turn Buildings Into Batteries”

A Chicago startup Clean Urban Energy (CUE) raised $7 million in a series A round from Battery Ventures and Rho Ventures, the company announced today.

CUE’s software-as-a-service “exploits the thermal mass of commercial office buildings to make [them] more efficient,” according to a company press statement. The software was developed at the University of Colorado, which struck an exclusive, research and development and licensing agreement with CUE in 2008.

CUE claims it can lower buildings’ energy expenses by 15-30 percent through predictive modeling and optimization. The company can also aggregate energy demand across portfolios of buildings in cities, which means it has the potential to provide more macroscopic benefits.

Utilities and grid operators in big cities could use CUE technology to understand how their biggest customers are using electricity, and to introduce price elasticity in cities, encouraging commercial customers to shift power use away from high- to low-price (and lower demand) periods. Power generated outside of high demand periods generally causes less pollution, today. It also relieves power companies from the need to develop new power generating facilities— like coal or nuclear plants that nobody seems to want in their back yard.

With its new found capital, CUE aims to grow sales throughout cities in the U.S. including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston. Jason Matlof from Battery Ventures and Joshua Ruch from Rho Ventures are joining CUE’s board of directors with this round.