Category: Tech news

As we reported in February, betaworks and the New York Times are collaborating to launch a socialnews reader for the iPad called News.me. And we heard more details on the app as it readied for launch this week. Today, Betaworks founder and CEO John Borthwick announced that the iPad app is finally live on the App Store for your viewing and browsing pleasure (link).

News.me, which has been in development since last August, is a social news reading iPad app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall.

The app charges a subscription fee to cover the costs of licensing content from publishers (News.me will pay publishers based on how much their content is read).You can purchase a one-week subscription to News.me through the in-app store for $0.99 or a one-year subscription for $34.99.

News.me faces competition from Flipboard, Pulse, Taptu and others.

We’re big fans of Bnter, an app that allows you to share your conversations with others publicly. The same way you share photos via the web or your mobile phone, Bnter allows you to share snippets of conversations you have with friends on the web. While the startup initially focused on SMS, Bnter recently broadened its scope to allow users to share any sort of conversation, including GChat, in-person chat, email and more. Today, Bnter is launching a free Android app (which joins an existing iPhone app) and is launching a bookmarklet, and in-depth Twitter integration

The Android app (which works on OS 2.1 or higher) is similar in functionality to its iPhone cousin and the web app, and allows you to read your feed of conversations and people you are following, comment, search and add conversations. And because it is a mobile app, Bnter for Android can pull your text message stream into the app so posting is fairly easy.

Bnter’s new bookmarklet, which you can download here, allows for posting conversations directly from open chats in GChat, Facebook Chat, Foursquare comments, GroupMe, Twitter and Campfire to your Bnter profile.

Bnter, which has raised seed funding from a number of high-profile investors including Founder Collective and SV Angel, has also added a feature for automatic Twitter import of mentions on the service. Bnter users easily post Twitter conversations by linking their Twitter account to Bnter, and can review all conversations in a drafts folder before deciding to post the most interesting ones to Bnter.

For the New York Based startup, this release has been somewhat of a challenge. As Sarah Lacy wrote last week, Spark Capital reportedly reneged on a termsheet offered to Bnter, forcing the bootstrapped startup to take some drastic measures (for example, co-founder Lauren Leto isn’t taking a salary) to continue the release and product development. It just goes to show that despite certain hardships and bumps in the road, founders’ passion for their ideas can help sustain a startup in the most trying situations.

Also, you can see Leto explain why she founded Bnter in this recent Founder Stories clip.

It’s no secret that Facebook is deepening its ties with the Beltway crowd. As we saw yesterday, the company hosted a town hall meeting with President Obama and has steadily ramping up its lobbying efforts in 2010, spending over $350,000 on lobbying efforts last year. But the company recently disclosed its Q1 spend on lobbying and the company shelled out a record $230,000 on lobbying activities in the quarter, which is up by over 400 percent from $41,390 spent in Q1 2010. This data is recorded in the U.S. Senate’s lobbying database.

Policy areas of focus for Facebook this year include global regulation of software companies and restrictions on internet access by foreign governments; online safety measures, internet privacy regulations, cyber security, and FCC regulations on net neutrality. A new issue that the company spent lobbying resources on is discussing House, Senate, and Government rules to allow more Government and Congressional offices to access social media to engage with citizens.

Other new additions to Facebook’s lobbying efforts include patent reform and lobbying for Oregon power and water needs to support high-tech growth and investment in Oregon. Facebook just opened a new, energy-efficient data center in Oregon.

In the fourth quarter of 2010, the social network spent $130,000 in the quarter (up from $38,117 in the fourth quarter of 2009). In total, Facebook spent $351,390 on lobbying in 2010. Not only is this quarter the most Facebook has ever spent on lobbying, but the social network is well on its way to surpassing its 2010 total spend in the first two quarters of 2011.

It’s not surprising that the company is building out its presence in D.C. That’s something that both Google, Microsoft and others have been doing for some time now.

In fact, Google also spent record dollars on lobbying efforts this past quarter, shelling out $1.48 million. That’s compared to the search giant’s Q1 spend in 2010, which came in at $1.38 million. Google spent a total of $5.2 million in lobbying last year.

This past quarter, Google’s lobbying strategy for this quarter focused on online advertising regulation, intellectual property and trademark issues, cyber security and online privacy, renewable energy, freedom of expression and censorship, H-1B Visa reform, “openness and competition in the online services market,” cloud computing, tax reform, free trade, Congressional Internet service usage rules and broadband access.

Photo Credit/Flickr/Cliff1066

Greenpeace just released its latest snapshot of major corporation’s impact on the planet with IT data centers the main target. The 35 page report [PDF link] details just how much energy is required to run the massive centers powering the so-called cloud. It’s huge according to Greenpeace, consuming 1.5%-2% of the world’s total power consumption and growing at a rate of 12% a year. Somewhat surprisingly Greenpeace sort of applauds the virtues of living in a massive data cloud, pointing to the advent of the smart grid and increased amount telecommuting. Even digital streaming music gets props for having a smaller carbon footprint than physical media.

But this is Greenpeace and so there has to be some finger pointing and letter grading. The main purpose of this report is to reveal top company’s impact on the environment by mainly examining their dependency on fossil and nuclear fuels rather than using renewable sources. However, even Greenpeace notes that these numbers might not be exact since they were calculated without all the facts. Simply put, these ten companies didn’t divulge this info; Greenpeace pieced together their data. It’s a bit dirty itself, actually.

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With $5 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, webpage sharing service Bo.lt launches today after about a year in private beta. Like a “Bit.ly on steroids,” the service lets you paste any URL into its copy engine or bookmarklet, creating a duplicate of the page on its servers.

Once copied, Bo.lt lets you quickly edit the page itself. You can change the text, edit and delete images and text and change links — either through the Bo.lt visual editor or its HTML editor. You can then share the page on Twitter or Facebook through its customizable URL and let other people edit or make changes which are tracked.

The page editor tool itself is extremely intuitive to use, and is pretty fun if you’re creatively messing around with web pages and pretty useful if you’re trying to complete actual work like A/B testing site code changes or codelessly trying out different headlines, images and fonts on a content page.

Bo.lt serves up realtime analytics on each page, showing you the amount of traffic from Twitter, Facebook and Google as well as providing more webmaster-friendly data like differences in page load time. The service also lets you see all user Bo.lting activity in a Community feed, and lets you explore other users’ activity visually when you click on their profile page.

As with any content aggregation service, there’s always the looming specter of copyright issues, but co-founder Matthew Roche tells me that the tool is content provider friendly in that Bo.lt still serves up a given page’s ads and analytics systems. “It’s way of preserving the form and visibility of the content while increasing the reach,” he says. As a tool enabling sharable webpage changes like this has never existed before, it remains to be seen exactly how content owners will react to their content being altered and shared in this way.

Bo.lt plans on monetizing through premium accounts that give users the ability to create Bo.lt pages under their own domain names as well as other power user features like suppression of the automatic share to the Community feed. Right now partners like Houseplans.com, Second Porch and Smart Destinations are all using Bo.lt to target web pages to customers.

While the simple page-editing aspect of this is pretty awesome, co-founders Matthew and Jamie Roche have a grander vision, “We are building a true page sharing network, you should be able to share webpages the way you share stuff on YouTube and Flickr.”

The service begins rolling out to early signups at 8am PST today, and a hundred interested TechCrunch readers can get priority access here.

What exactly is the deal with all of these group text messaging apps? In the Founder Stories video above, GroupMe founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci tell host Chris Dixon why they think group texting coud be the thin edge of the wedge to something bigger. Call it private social networks. Small groups can do and say things that larger groups can’t.

When Martocci first heard the idea for GroupMe, he wasn’t that into it, but he quickly saw where it could lead to. He thinks it is about helping people make plans and decisions. “We want to be a pocket companion,” he says.

In the interview, the two also recall how they approached the Hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, where the product was conceived and the first prototype was built. The plan was to claw their way onto the main stage, blow away the judges, and get funded on the spot. It didn’t happen quite that way, but almost. The company raised $850,000 later that summer from Ron Conway, betaworks, First Round, and Lerer Ventures, and then $10.6 million earlier this year.

Speaking of Ron Conway, everyone gushes over how great he is to have as investor in the video below. He doesn’t get in the way, he just makes things happen. In terms of investors, Martocci advises other New York City startups to “make sure you get someone from the West Coast.” Dixon concurs: “It shouldn’t be New York Versus California. It should be New York [startups] versus Wall Street.” (Disclosure: Dixon is an investor in GroupMe through the Founder Collective).

Be sure to watch Part I of this GroupMe interview. You can also check out other previous episodes of Founder Stories or subscribe in iTunes.

With launch reviews that rivaled Spider-man: Turn Off The Dark, the Playbook didn’t seem to get any breaks. However, depending on if you’re a “glass half full” kind of person, the company did sell about 50,000 Playbooks on opening day, arguably a fairly strong showing for a device that was not initially well-received.

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Ever since its launch in November 2010, Blekko has been on a mission to eliminate spam and content farms from search results. The human-curated search engine, which is also known both for using actual mammals to edit search results and for its employ of slashtags for easy categorization, announced in March that it had banned over 1 million spammy domain names from its site. Using a new algorithm it calls “AdSpam”, Blekko investigates the quality of a doman’s content, as well as the type of ads it includes, to identify those of the lowest quality. Those that don’t pass muster get the boot — which should be music to any searcher’s ears.

Now, whether or not Blekko can compete with the Googles of the world in the long-term remains to be seen, but I hope so. You might say that Google has rested on its laurels for a bit too long, and, in the meantime, Blekko seems to have been taking the necessary steps to make search a more pleasurable and less spam-loaded experience. Search is desperately in need of a fresh and holistic approach. And, today, Blekko is further rounding-out its competitive engine by going social, announcing that it will be integrating Facebook comments into its results pages.

Considering that the Facebook News Feed has become an extremely popular source for link-sharing, updates, and social commentary — and Facebook Connect now practically blankets the Web — the social network is a logical partner for Blekko. And it gives it that much-envied social flair it had been lacking.

But, how does it work? Using Blekko’s Facebook integration is easy: You simply connect with your Facebook account on the Blekko homepage, and go about your normal searching. The major difference, though, is that when you type “TechCrunch” into the search bar, you’ll still the same search results you would otherwise; yet, now, all mentions of TechCrunch in your Facebook news feed (and thereby mentioned in your friends’ feeds) populate the right column. Look out!

You can also use a hashtag in the Blekko search bar (“/facebook”), and the engine will serve you with results from your Facebook comments and those of your friends. There’s also a box above your Facebook comment results in the right sidebar that allows you to post directly to your wall.

Blekko search was already pretty fantastic, if just for low spam counts, so why the integration? “The Web is increasingly a social experience and search has got to get more social too”, said Blekko Mastermind and CEO Rich Skrenta. “This brings the social graph and social commentary right to the results page. Because what your friend says about information is as important as any expert’s advice could ever be.”

I haven’t yet been totally convinced by the social recommendation evangelists that I’m better off hearing suggestions from my friends than a group of experts, but the social wave has crested, and it’s impossible to avoid. Get on the bandwagon, or get out of the way.

After all, my friends do know what kind of pizza I like, so if I happen to be searching for pizza places on Blekko, this will likely enhance Blekko’s search results. And, on the flip side, though my gut reaction would be to think that search results for something more obscure like, say, “translational research in neuroscience” might not exactly be augmented by the Facebook peanut gallery. But maybe one of my friends happens to be studying that very thing in med school.

Regardless, this is a smart (and logical) move for Blekko, especially considering that it began leveraging Facebook Likes in its search parameters earlier this year. Users who login to Blekko with Facebook can see whether or not their Facebook friends “like” particular search results. Users can also refine their results by opting to search only those sites that have been “liked” by their friends. At first glance, this idea seems fantastic, but it’s really only useful if your friends (in the former example) are actually using Blekko and (in the latter) if they are frequent users of the like button.

The search engine currently indexes approximately 3.5 billion URLs, which pales in comparison to Bing and Google, which are both over 15 billion. Obviously, this is a bit of a problem, because, on top of this, Blekko is such a thorough spam blocker, it can also leave out sites that just seem spammy but aren’t.

On the bright side, Skrenta says that Blekko has been growing traffic every month since launch in November. The site saw roughly 575K unique IPs last month. And that is all organic usage adoption, he says, Blekko does not entertain paid traffic, SEO, facebook viral loops, and so on.

In the end, I applaud Blekko’s efforts to become more social, and look forward to (what I hope) is its inevitable integration with Twitter. Right now you can use the Twitter slashtag to search the site using Twitter’s API, but they haven’t made any Twitter social search integrations, though Skrenta tells me he’s considering it.

Combining actual human editors with intelligent anti-spamming algorithms is a dynamic combo for search. So, here’s to hoping that Blekko gets the kind of user adoption it needs to reach the tipping point and give Google (and Bing) a run for their respective monies.

The New York Times Company this morning reported Q1 2011 earnings per share of $.04, compared with $.08 in the same period of 2010.

Total revenues decreased 3.6 percent to $566.5 million from $587.9 million. The publisher’s operating profit came in at $31.1 million for the quarter, compared with $52.7 million in the same period of 2010.

Approximately three weeks after the global launch of its digital subscription packages, The New York Times Company reports paid digital subscribers have surpassed 100,000, although it cautions that it does not yet have visibility into conversion and retention rates for these paying customers after the initial promotional period.

The NYT’s digital subscription packages were first introduced in Canada last month and globally at the beginning of the second quarter.

Back to the earnings report: NYT’s digital advertising grew 4.5 percent, but it was unable to fully offset the 7.5 percent decline in print advertising revenues in the first quarter.

In the first quarter, total digital revenues increased 6.1 percent to $95.9 million from $90.4 million. Digital businesses include NYTimes.com, About.com, Boston.com, other websites and related digital products. The NYT apparently sold a portion of its stake in job listing aggregator Indeed.com, netting $5.9 million ($3.4 million after taxes).

Digital advertising revenues as a percentage of total advertising revenues were 28 percent for the first quarter of 2011, compared with 25.6 percent in the first quarter of 2010.

Circulation revenues, meanwhile dropped 3.7 percent in the first quarter of the year due to a decline in copies sold across the News Media Group.

Erick recently got a sneak peek at Intuit’s GoPayment app for the iPad, a mobile payment app that lets anyone who sells a product or service get paid on the spot by processing credit cards.

This morning, the company announced that the iPad app is now available.

The GoPayment apps brings a new layout that takes advantage of iPad’s large, high-resolution display and multi-touch interface. It also includes new features such as the ability to add product photos.

GoPayment is compatible with the free Intuit Credit Card Reader.

As Erick wrote when he saw a preview of the app:

GoPayment has been around for two years, but only recently started to target the lower end of the market where Square is gaining traction—small businesses without merchant accounts at banks who don’t already take credit cards.

Another competitor, VeriFone, is making noise in an attempt to enter this market as well, but Square should be more concerned about Intuit. The company already has relationships with 4.5 million businesses through QuickBooks and has a few advantages in payments processing.

Square has its own iPad app, which has been available for over a year.

Funding Circle, the peer-to-peer lending site for small businesses in the UK, has raised £2.5m in a Series A round led by Index Ventures. Unnamed co-investors as well as existing shareholders have also participated, while Neil Rimer, co-founder and Partner of Index, will take a seat on the Board. Before today’s round, the London-based company was Angel funded to the tune of $1.1m from private investors.

Cloud computing is all very well until someone trips over a wire and the whole thing goes dark.

Reddit, Foursquare and Quora were among the sites affected by Amazon Web Services suffering network latency and connectivity errors this morning, according to the company’s own status dashboard.

Amazon says performance issues affected instances of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and its Relational Database Service, and it’s “continuing to work towards full resolution”. These are hosted in its North Virginia data centre.

Aside from announcing that the deal with Microsoft has now been signed, Nokia this morning also released quarterly results.

Nokia, until further notice still the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, reported a (predicted) 1.4 percent decline in profit, albeit beating analyst estimates.

Net income was 344 million euros (roughly $500 million), compared with 349 million euros a year earlier, while sales rose 9.2 percent to 10.4 billion euros.

Smartphone sales were up 6 percent at 7 billion euros.

Nokia shipped 108.5 million mobile devices in Q1 2011 in total, up 1 percent year-on-year.

Nokia’s preliminary estimated mobile device market share was 29 percent in Q1 2011, down from an estimated 33 percent in the first quarter of 2010 and an estimated 31 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The company expects operating margins from its handset business to fall in Q2 – Nokia of course faces stiff competition from iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones in the smartphone segment.

Roughly 10 weeks after Nokia and Microsoft announced an alliance to build a series of Nokia Windows phones, the two companies today signed the definitive agreement for their strategic partnership.

We don’t learn much new from the blog post and video announcing the inking of the deal, except maybe that hundreds of people are already working together toward a multi-year product roadmap and are ‘on-schedule’ to deliver volume shipments in 2012, and possibly make first delivery in 2011.

From the blog post:

ESPOO, Finland & REDMOND, USA – After 10 weeks of intense collaboration, we are pleased to report that Nokia and Microsoft have signed the definitive agreement for our strategic partnership to build a new global mobile ecosystem that is unlike any other.

It’s a bold claim.

But collectively we’ve moved from intent to agreement in such a short period. Actually, it’s even faster than we expected which makes this a perfect example of our commitment to our partnership and the speed at which we plan to move together.

On tidbit of news from the announcement: Nokia and Microsoft are making Windows Phone developer registration free for all published Nokia developers in an effort to entice more developers to start building apps for Windows Phone.

Tel Aviv-based Yotpo announced today that it has raised $800K in seed funding. The funding was led by 2B Angels and PLUS Ventures, two early stage Israeli investment firms focused on communications and new media.

According to Yotpo Co-founder Tomer Tagrin, the startup will use the funding to expand its user base, ramp up hiring, and position itself for launch later this year.

So what is Yotpo? It turns out this is a surprisingly open-ended question, as the startup only opened its doors to public beta testing a few days ago. But, in the big picture, the company describes itself as a social business-to-business tool that “makes your customers happy” by facilitating a better user experience — specifically for the owners of blogs and eCommerce sites.

Though “making your customers happy” may sound appealing, I think that’s what most businesses might say they’re trying to accomplish. So what does that mean for Yotpo, in application? To begin with, as mentioned, Yotpo will be targeting bloggers and eCommerce sites, with plans to expand beyond these venues down the road.

So, for example, let’s say you own your own blog. You may then be familiar with the challenge of attracting new readers to your site, and once you’ve got them reading your content, with the challenge of how to keep them coming back. Not to mention, the tricky task of getting your readers involved and engaged by commenting, re-tweeting, sharing, and so on.

In turn, bloggers often struggle with creating content that is truly valuable to their user base, and keeping that content applicable as new users arrive and the tastes of existing users change. Of course, this isn’t a problem we at TechCrunch are familiar with, but it’s been known to happen.

So, say you’ve just written a post about a new Apple gadget, Yotpo is creating a tool that will read the content of your post and serve your readers with real opinions about the new gadget from elsewhere on the Web. As a blogger, you would embed Yotpo’s tool on your site, enabling it to read your post and (in realtime) scour the Internets to search for related content. Using its algorithm (“special sauce”), it will aggregate opinions on identical subjects, rank them based on how valuable they will be to your users, and then serve them to your faithful.

The idea being that your reader, now informed about what others are saying about this very gadget, will be more likely to engage with your content, share a comment, re-tweet, and continue to visit your site. As is often the case, there may be loads and loads of content about the particular subject you’re writing about, and your reader may not have been able to wade through each and every article. Thus, serving him or her with targeted excerpts (the “bottom line”, as Tagrin calls it) from the most relevant articles and blogs on equivalent topics could very well make them feel more informed, fitter, happier, and stronger. Or at least one of those.

The application of this idea to eCommerce is easy to see — if marketplaces can serve their shoppers with opinions, reviews, and analysis from others who have bought similar products, for example, then you’ll have more intelligent (and presumably happy) buyers. Obviously, sites like Amazon and Yelp (and hundreds of others) already offer thorough reviews by customers who have enjoyed (or not enjoyed) similar products, or restaurants — and offer recommendations for similar products. That idea is not new.

But applying the instant, realtime review and analysis option to bloggers and smaller eCommerce sites is appealing. The ability to use one widget or plugin, (or in whatever capacity Yotpo’s tool is realized), to aggregate and serve users with relevant opinions across the Web is a valuable goal. Hey AdSense makes tons of loot based on not-so-dissimilar model.

Of course, creating an algorithm that smartly serves readers with real analysis and opinion and not just content based on some keyword that happened to match up with the aggregating algorithm is easier said than done. And, of course, how the tool’s interface is designed, whether it shows 1 opinion or 30, a single line of text, or entire paragraphs, remains to be seen. That’s the real kicker. Good design, easy-to-use, and works everywhere. Now that could have lasting effects.

The startup is still in beta, so there is time to work these things out and do necessary testing and due diligence. At the very least, it will be interesting to see how the startup puts its idea into practice.