Category: Tech news

As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, iOS 4 is out and spreading across iPhones like wildfire. With it, comes the ability for third-party apps to run certain tasks in the background. One of those tasks is background location — an awesome feature which we previewed in our review of Loopt 3.0 earlier today. But Loopt has been in the location game for a long time — what about startups that want to get into location right now and support the newest functionality? SimpleGeo has you covered.

The location infrastructure startup is today adding to its array of options, iOS 4 location support. With it, companies will be able to implement background location services for iOS 4 with a few simple code tweaks. How easy is it to implement with SimpleGeo? Geofencing, the ability to track when a user crosses a certain location-based plane, will take about six lines of code, co-founder Joe Stump tells us. Background Tracking will take about 30 lines of code. From what I hear, this is much, much simpler than trying to write this stuff yourself. And this is all done in SimpleGeo’s cloud.

As an example, Stump tells us, “So you basically just say, ‘Track parislemon’ and we handle that in our API along with record history.’” “I can then come back and say, ‘Show me the last 10 places parislemon was‘,” Stump continues. Creepy? Sort of. Powerful and easy? Yes.

Another example is that when you switch neighborhoods with a location service, it could alert you that someone you know is around you (similar to something Loopt 3.0 offers). Or SimpleGeo’s data could offer you the ability to do something as easy as automatically know when you enter a new state and give you a message like: “Welcome to the Sunshine State.“

SimpleGeo hasn’t yet determined full pricing for this option, but Stump notes that the first million calls will be free. He gives a full technical overview of how exactly this all works in his post on the matter.

When we first wrote about BarMax in January, there was a lot of interest in the iPhone app for one obvious reason: it cost $999.99. While it may not have been the first $1,000 app (the useless gimmick app, I Am Rich, can claim that title), it was the first to seemingly be worth the high price tag. Apparently, users have agreed. As the app meant to help law students pass the bar exam is already profitable and ready to roll out a version to cover another state: New York.

The first BarMax was specific to California because each state has different bar exams. This second version will cover New York’s version — effectively doubling the number of people who will find the app useful. Between those two states, they’ll have almost half of all bar exam test takers covered, company chairman (and the guy behind the original idea), Mike Ghaffary, tells us. To be clear, this latest version will be a separate app from the first one (called BarMax NY), but that’s just as much because of app size limits — these apps have so much information in them that they’re over 1 gigabyte in size.

As I said above, the California version has done very well. Ghaffary says that over 100 students have downloaded the app so far. That may seem like nothing, but remember, we’re talking $1,000 here. That means the app has rung up over $100,000 in sales — in case it’s not clear enough, that’s the same as a $0.99 app being sold 100,000 times. In fact, these 100+ sales have been enough to make the entire venture profitable, Ghaffary says.

And the students who have downloaded BarMax clearly like what they’re getting for their money: the app has a 4.5 star rating in the App Store (out of 5 stars). Why are they so happy with a $1,000 app? Because it’s anywhere from 1/3 to 1/4 of the price of its main competitor, BarBri, which has dominated the bar exam test prep space for decade. Clearly, they’re shaken up by BarMax’s entry into the field. And again, BarMax was just in California so far, with New York in the mix now, they’ll have a whole other reason to worry.

And BarMax isn’t stopping there. With the money they’re making, they’ll be extending to other states as well. Next in the pipeline are Illinois, Texas, and Florida, Ghaffary says. They’re also hard at work on an iPad-specific version of the app, built from the ground-up. This will take a while to build out, but Ghaffary expects huge things from it when it’s ready.

Ghaffary also notes that not only is Apple comfortable with the pricing of BarMax, “they love this thing.” The fact that they’ve featured it in the App Store in recent weeks seems to prove that. Last week, the $1,000 app was #6 in the What’s Hot area of the App Store, and it’s the #36 in top grossing apps, Ghaffary says. And that doesn’t count the thousands of users who are downloading the free ethics exam (a separate exam you have to take) version.

Some of you may have read about the incident of a kid accidentally buying the $1,000 app. Ghaffary says they were ready to step up with a refund, but Apple beat them to it.

BarMax NY was submitted late last week to the App Store for approval, look for it soon in the store. Meanwhile, you can find the CA version here — but don’t click to buy by accident.

These are the stories that make my job worth all the hassle and stress.

Two guys create a company called Precision Polling that allows quick and easy phone polls. We write a story in January saying it’s like Survey Monkey for phones – “Precision Polling Is A Survey Monkey For The Phone.” And a few months later – today actually – Survey Monkey acquires them.

The size of the transaction isn’t being disclosed, althought Survey Monkey CEO Dave Goldberg tells me it’s relatively small given the stage of the company, and it’s a stock and cash deal. cofounders Guarav Oberoi and Charles Groom will stay with the company and continue to work from Seattle.

Survey Monkey now has about 20 employees in Portland and another 30 in Palo Alto. We estimated 2009 revenues at around $45 million. Not bad for a service that let’s people easily create Internet, and now phone, surveys.

Both CNN Money and MarketWatch have added curated stock and finance tweets to their sites. But they aren’t just showing unfiltered tweets based on a query or hash tag – instead they’ve turned to StockTwits, presumably for more relevant data.

Messages only show up on StockTwits if you add a “$” before a stock symbol, and the company also carefully moderates messages and blocks users who tend to spam. The result is a fairly clear, mess-free stream of rumors and trade information that some obsessed trader types may somehow find useful. At the very least it’s entertaining to read things like “@bradybrown Dammit… I go to a meeting and $AAPL falls off a cliff!!! WTH???”

CNN has added a StockTwits widget to each stock summary page (example). MarketWatch is using the StockTwits trending tickers widget, which shows hot stocks (as in, what everyone’s talking about, not necessarily what’s moving up or down in price).

When Loopt first launched on the iPhone alongside the App Store in 2008, it looked to be an awesome new location-based service. Apple clearly agreed, as they gave the app plenty of face time: demo slots on stage at major events, appearances in commercials, promotion in the App Store, etc. But the early version of Loopt had a fatal flaw: to work properly, the app had to be running all the time. Now, this wasn’t really Loopt’s flaw, since the iPhone did not allow third-party applications to run in the background — but it was still a flaw. Today, that flaw gets corrected — sort of.

The new version of Loopt, 3.0, which is set to appear in the App Store at some point today, is built to use Apple’s new iOS 4 software (formerly known as iPhone OS 4). The biggest new addition to the software is the ability for third-party apps to run processes in the background. Yes, this is somewhat limited, but included in what you can do is location-updating in the background. And Loopt 3.0 takes full advantage of that. But at the same time, it also still offers the functionality that proved to be more popular on the iPhone: check-ins.

While continually updating location apps like Loopt failed to catch on in a major way due to the earlier iPhone limitations, check-in based apps like Foursquare and Gowalla have gotten traction recently by getting around this limitation because they explicitly make a user check-in at a venue. The idea became so popular that in November of last year that Loopt pivoted away from implicit location, to this check-in model with version 2.0 of its app. Version 3.0 shift back a bit towards the implicit background location, but marries it with the check-in.

So how does background location work with Loopt 3.0? Well, when you check-in to a venue, there is a new “Live Location” area at the bottom of the check-in screen. This is a slider which allows you to set how long you’d like Loopt to update your location in the background without you having to do anything. This slider can be set from anywhere to a few minutes up to 8 hours. When it’s set, if the iPhone notices you’ve left an area (which it can tell by your phone switching cell towers), it will update your location on the Loopt map that is built in to the software.

Now, it’s important to note that Loopt is thinking about the privacy ramifications of this. They have a setting to make it so that background location updates can only been seen by a small subset of your social graph. This way, you can make it so only a group like your family can see where you are in real-time. And again, to see this, they’ll have to load up the map on Loopt since this background location feature won’t explicitly check you in at a venue — it just shows where you are on this map.

If you do allow your larger social graph to see this background location information, you can imagine that it may lead to even more serendipitous encounters than the current batch of check-in apps do. As I’ve noted recently, one big downside of check-in apps is that there’s no real way to “check-out” — that is, let your friends know you’ve left a venue. The only way to do this is to check-in someplace else. With background location enabled, your friends could see that while you may have checked-in to the pizza joint an hour ago, you’ve since left and are a mile away from there.

This background location features offers something else cool: if Loopt sees that a friend of yours (using background location) is nearby, it can send you a Push Notification to alert you of that.

It’s worth noting that the iPhone limitation wasn’t the only thing keeping background location from taking off. After all, phones such as those running Android and some BlackBerry phones have had the ability to update location in the background for some time. And while apps like Google Latitude say this model is working on Android, the public largely doesn’t see it that way — at least not yet. The underlying issue here seems to be that by having explicit check-ins, it’s a natural security barrier. People can only know where you are when you explicitly say where you are. With background location, you have to remember that you may be telling people where you are implicitly.

Latitude does things like ping you every so often to remind you that you’re sharing this data, but it’s still kind of a clunky user experience. As I mentioned, Loopt’s method is to set the slider for how long you’d like to update you location in the background — and no matter what, it times out after 8 hours unless you explicitly turn it on again. This seems like a pretty good idea.

On top of the new background location feature, Loopt 3.0 brings an overhauled UI. The new main screen is a big improvement (think: main iPhone screen or Facebook main screen).

Judging from Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley’s comments to us last week, Loopt should have a healthy head start with this background location functionality. But if it proves to be successful, you can bet the rivals will hop on board quickly. Latitude, meanwhile, it evaluating trying to bring a native app to the iPhone for use with iOS 4 — you may recall Apple wouldn’t let them in the store the last time around, so they built a web app.

When it’s available, you can find Loopt 3.0 here in the App Store. It’s a free download.

Startup Buddy Media, a company that provides social media management tools to brands, is adding a new feature, called +Global, to its Facebook management system to allow marketers to publish customized fan pages in multiple languages on Facebook.

Previously, marketers managing Facebook pages for brands would have to create separate pages for each country, making the process more fragmented and the design inconsistent. The new feature allows administrators to serves unified Facebook content based on user country and language settings. So a user in Germany would see the same content of a Facebook page as a user in the U.S., but the content would be in German. Brands can also customize content, promotions and social applets to various countries within one system.

Starwood Hotels and Resorts are one of the first brands to implement the new feature, and is now serving customized language and content on its Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) Facebook page to guests from the U.S., Spain, Germany and China.

The feature seems like a useful tool for brands and marketers to save time and money to be able to engage international users more efficiently. As more brands look to Facebook to engage with consumers, Buddy Media is seeing considerable growth. The startup finished 2009 with 150 clients, and has already added 45 more in 2010 alone. In addition to Starwoods, other well-known brands that use Buddy Media’s platform include Budweiser, NBC’s iVillage, designer Tory Burch, and the NHL. And the startup is was profitable at the end of 2009, and is on track to make $20 million in sales this year.

In our ongoing coverage of the life and times of Jason Calacanis, the video below is instructive on many levels. Calacanis—who is an Internet entrepreneur (the CEO of Mahalo), conference organizer (our former partner in TechCrunch50), and Web celeb—loves to play high stakes poker.

In fact, next week he will be one of the players on The Big Game, airing on Fox, in which businessmen are paired up with pros.

In the clip below, Calacanis loses a $204,400 pot to ten-time World Series Of Poker champion Doyle Brunson, who beats his two kings with three sixes. Brunson was so sure of his hand that he ran the river card three times, and won each time. The look of disbelief on Calacanis’ face at the end is priceless. “It looks like the Internet millionaire just had a server crash,” intones one of the commentators. And before that, “Jason is not a very experienced player.” Ouch.

To be fair, Brunson is one of the best players in the world, and Calacanis squeezed out at least one moment of glory in another hand. He won’t tell me how he did overall, but notes that a “Mahalo logo on TV for 5 nights” and a sponsorship he finagled “means I’m protected on the downside.”

There’s no doubt that BP’s brand value has been affected by the explosion of its Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico in April. And as the damaged rig has been dumping thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf each day and causing massive environmental casualties, BP has been on a social media and advertising campaign to repair some of the damage.

Brand measurement firm General Sentiment’s Media Value Report has measured the damage made to the oil giant’s reputation from negative sentiment online. General Sentiment’s technology evaluates Twitter, Facebook and over 30 million sources of content to evaluate sentiment about a brand.

So how much is the damage to BP’s brand worth? General Sentiment says nearly $1 billion. Since June 1st, BP has lost more than $32 million a day in brand value.

To be exact, General Sentiment’s report contends that BP has lost $949,071,279 in total media value since April, with the media value cost of each gallon spilled in the Gulf at $6.66. So far, BP has released roughly 142,500,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf since April, says the brand measurement firm.

To put this in perspective, BP has lost much more than $1 billion in market value since the spill. Since April 21, BP’s market value has dropped from $184 billion to $96.5 billion, dropping by roughly $87.5 billion in a matter of two months.

You can download the report here.

What better way to enjoy your customized dress shirt than to nibble on your customized chocolate bar? I mean, you’re wearing a nearly one-of-a-kind shirt, why should you be burdened with the same chocolate bars devoured by all the other chumps in Abercrombie shirts? Chocri has you covered with CreateMyChocolate.com. You want white chocolate with banana chips and blueberries? Sure! Or how about dark chocolate with peanut butter chips topped with marzipan carrots? You got it!

Read more…

Mobile Web usage continues to grow by leaps and bounds as smartphones with large touch screens become the new normal. One quick data point comes from the United States Golf Association and IBM, which runs its Websites. During the 2010 U.S. Open golf tournament last week, 1.7 million people visited the U.S. Open’s mobile site, a 518 percent increase from last year. In contrast, the regular site saw only 4.2 million visitors, during the week, up 8 percent.

In other words, nearly 30 percent of traffic to the U.S. Open site was from mobile devices. The fact that golf fans didn’t need to fire up their laptops or turn on their TVs to find the latest scores and keep up with the play was enough to make the mobile site take off. And the mobile site was pretty stripped down—there was an all-text news feed, scores, tee times, and some video.

Really, that is all you need. Mobile sites should still be built for delivering quick bursts of information. When you are on the go, you probably don’t have time to wait for a busy page to load with graphics you can barely see anyway. But before touch-screen phones, the mobile Web was too difficult to navigate. Remove the friction of getting on the Web, and people will come in droves.

Discovery engine startup StumbleUpon today announced it has hired two new directors to expand its sales and partnership teams, both previous Google employees.

Anthony Napolitano, a former key member of the sales teams for several of Google’s products, including TV Ads, Analytics, Checkout and AdWords, will be joining the company as Director of Sales.

Oliver Hsiang, until recently manager of strategic partner development at Google and former product manager at Yahoo, Microsoft and Chipshot, is StumbleUpon’s new Director of Strategic Partnerships.

In a press release, StumbleUpon founder and CEO Garrett Camp boasts about the double steal from Google and says the company has hired 15 new team members in the last three months alone.

Looks like StumbleUpon is faring well after about a year after its spin-off from eBay – the ‘social search engine’ company recently also reached 10 million registered users.

Welcome to the future, or at least like the first five minutes of it. iOS 4.0 should be available now for iPhone 3GS and newer (post 2009) iPod Touches. Do you have an iPhone 3G or (shudder) the first iPhone? You’re SOL, my Luddite friend. Go back to the commune, you hippie.

I kid, I kid. Why spend the money if you don’t need to and besides, we’ve been playing with iOS 4.0 for a few weeks now and here are our initial comments.

1. Multi-tasking is still in its infancy – Apple gave developers very little time to really go full-bore on the problem of multi-tasking. As a result, you’re basically dealing with a form of proto-multi-tasking that may or may not do what you want it to do. MG wrote about this last weekend:

The component that all of these apps share is the ability to do fast app switching. What you may traditionally think of as multitasking isn’t the same on iOS 4. Multiple apps aren’t running all of their functions in the background at once — obviously, this would take up resources and eat up battery life. Instead, Apple allows third-party apps to do certain functions in the background now, as well as create an easy way for all apps to save their states to enable this fast app switching.

So you’re not going to go all Minority Report on your apps. You’ll be able to switch out of one app – a game, say – to hit a GPS program, but there is no definitive guarantee that you’ll be able to swap back into the game where you left off. In fact, Backgrounder, a jailbroken app for background activity, works better than multi-tasking in iOS 4.0 right now.

Read more…

There are a number of online destinations to find recipes, including Epicurious, All Recipes, Bing and FoodNetwork.com. But a new company is trying to disrupt this arena with a powerful semantic food search portal. Yummly is launching a new food search site to find and share over 500,000 recipes on the web.

Similar to other recipe sites, Yummly aggregates recipes from around the web. But what differentiates the site is its powerful filters and search features. Not only can you filter results by type of food, course, and ingredient, but you can also break down recipes by diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, and sources.

You can also edit and save any recipe with ingredient substitutions and adjustments based on your preferences; Yummly will recalculate the recipe to reflect the new ingredient amounts. So if you wanted to cut a recipe down to one portion, Yummly will recalculate the ingredients you need for a smaller version of a dish. And Yummly calculates the nutritional value for each recipe, showing you the breakdown of calories, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Users can also import and add their favorite recipes from other websites and save them in their Yummly recipe box. The site also ‘learns’ what users like to eat from their recipe searches and then offers them customized, taste-specific recommendations based on their preferences.

Founded in 2009 by former StumbleUpon and eBay employee David Feller, Yummly could be one of the more powerful food recipe search engines in the market. The site also has an impressive list of angel investors and advisors, including Michael Dearing, Harrison Metal Capital; Jeff Jordan, CEO of OpenTable; Bruce Shaw, President of The Harvard Common Press; Bill Cobb, former President of eBay, and a former executive of PepsiCo and Yum Brands; Brad O’Neill, CEO, TechValidate and founding investor of StumbleUpon; and Justin LaFrance and Geoff Smith, co-Founders of StumbleUpon.

The biggest challenge Yummly will have is drawing traffic to its site. But once foodies start using the powerful search portal, I have a feeling that they may never return to other recipe sites.

You love Motorola, don’t you? You’ve been rockin’ each of their models before even the RAZR was cool. So you’ve no doubt been excited by the upcoming sequel to the brought-moto-back-from-fiery-doom Droid: the Droid 2.

Yes, the Droid 2, not X. I know it’s getting a litle confusing remembering which Droid is which, but let me remind you: the Droid 2 has a physical QWERTY, the X doesn’t.

But anyway, Android and Me have posted the world’s first* hands-on video with the device, as well as run the device through a few benchmarks.

And what did they find?

Follow the read link to find out.

Read more…

I’ve been known to give Facebook a hard time over its lax security and disregard for user privacy, but, frankly, Google’s doing a pretty good job at keeping up.

Not to be outdone by the social networking site, the search giant has already got into hot water for the overzealous nature by which it collected WiFi data when driving around towns in 30 countries creating its Google Maps Street View.

As we reported at the time, Street View cars had been “mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks” since 2006, although we didn’t see it as a major privacy issue, stating that it wasn’t likely that Google grabbed enough data about many individuals to make it a real concern. Google, of course, said pretty much the same thing.

Now it seems that they (and we) were wrong.