Category: Tech news

When you follow someone on social investing site Covestor, you get to see all of their real trades. But now, for some superstar investors on Covestor, following them can also have financial implications. Earlier today, Covestor merged its main social investing site with Covestor Investment Management (cv.im), a separate service it launched nearly a year ago to allow individual investors to mimic the trades of professional and successful individual investors with a proven track record. Now, $100 million worth of executed tracked trades later, Covestor is folding the investment management service into its main site.

In fact, the entire site has been revamped. There is better search and more detailed investor profile pages. When you rank investment returns, you can toggle between the top tracked models which you can track with your own portfolio, and the top personal track records across the entire Covestor community.

By combining the two communities together, it will now be easier to market the tracked portfolio service and to promote the top Covestor investors into investment advisory roles. Currently, there are 70 portfolios which you can track with your own portfolio. The way this works is that you follow a portfolio, and every time that investor makes a trade, the information is relayed to your brokerage account where it is mimicked. Technically, the stock pickers aren’t managing your money. They are simply trading for their own account and selling you the trading data, which Covestor then helps you replicate in your account within two minutes of each trade. You really are following these investors in every sense of the word.

Competing social investing sites KaChing also lets you tie your brokerage account to the portfolios of the best stock pickers on its site. But unlike KaChing, all the data on Covestor is tied to real portfolios. CEO Perry Blacher thinks this makes a big difference. “There is nothing more credible than knowing this guy has skin in the game and he’s in it with me,” says Blacher. (Update: Apparently, KaChing now agrees. It also requires its professional investment managers to invest real money, which wasn’t the original plan). Ultimately, the site which attracts the best investors, and thus delivers the best returns, will win.

Covestor selects which investors can sell their data to users and pays a fee for each subscriber, which can range from $50 to $1000 a year—the investors set the price. Professional portfolio managers are also attracted to the service because it is a way to cut out some of the middlemen like Merrill Lynch and give them direct retail distribution. So a portfolio manager who usually requires a $250,000 or $1 million minimum investment, can set up an automated fund on Covestor to mirror their existing trades and reach smaller investors who only have $5,000 or $10,000 to invest.

“This is an open platform for people to compete and the best will rise to the top,” says CEO Perry Blacher. Covestor members build their reputations through their real-world investment savvy. They can even Tweet out each verified trade.

To qualify as an investment manager, however, there are three criteria. You must share your real trades, you must make available at least a year’s worth of audited trading history, and comply with Covestor’s trading rules such as staying away from illiquid stocks.

In order to follow along with a model portfolio, for now you have to open up an account with Covestor’s partner Interactive Brokers. But Blacher says more broker partnerships are on the way. “The brokers love this,” he says, “because we are busy generating trades for them.” With Interactive Brokers, each trade is only $1, which makes following an active trader more palatable for an individual investor paying for each trade.

Online privacy is a hot topic at the moment, especially when it comes to the browser and social networks. Online privacy company Abine is launching today to provide consumers with comprehensive tools to control and protect their personal information online. Abine has also acquired Firefox privacy add-on T.A.C.O., which is short for “Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-out.” TACO allows any Internet user to opt-out from personally targeted advertising.

TACO will become part of Abine’s suite of privacy tools. The new version of the add-on has been upgraded both to allows you to opt-out of even more ad-networks and to block hundreds of other Web tracking technologies used by companies (including Google, AOL, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Microsoft), to collect, store and sell extremely personal information about individuals’ Internet activity. TACO 3.0 also added support for Internet Explorer.

Abine’s other privacy apps in its suite include a secure log-in app, a plug-in to protect your email and phone number, and an automatic form filling app. Privacy is a huge consumer concern at the moment, so Abine’s launch and acquisition of TACO is timely.

I love simple apps that do one thing and do it well. That is the definition of Treehouse, a new iPhone app made by the Y Combinator startup Fliggo. So what is Treehouse? It’s right there in the title: “Share Moments With Friends.”

Treehouse may be the most simple app I’ve seen yet to allow you to share photos (and videos) from your iPhone with your friends. You start up the app, take (or load) a picture/video, and upload it. From there, it will be placed into your friends’ Treehouse timelines where they can comment on it and “like” it. Each photo/video is also tagged with the location where it was taken.

Again, yes, it’s very basic, but it’s also very well done and fast. Sure, you could do this on Facebook, but your stream there likely has hundreds of other things going on — this is tailor-made for visual sharing and interacting. Treehouse also has a nice notification system to let you know what activity you’ve missed when you open the app — and yes, you can be notified through Push Notifications.

It strikes me that this kind of app is the perfect thing to share humorous photos with friends — such as Bros Icing Bros photos. If you have no idea what that is — well, just go here.

Treehouse reminds me of Radar, the photo-sharing service from Tiny Pictures (which was acquired by Shutterly in September of last year). But it’s even simpler and for now, iPhone-only. The plan is to eventually extend to the other mobile platforms though. Just as with Radar, the question will be how you make money with this kind of service. For now, the hope is just to build a strong user-base, obviously.

If you’ve heard of Fliggo before it’s likely because you’ll been following the story of Twitvid.io, which then became Vidly. Founder Chrys Bader had been trying to perfect the art of sharing video over Twitter (using things like HD video and even Chamillionaire), but while developing a Vidly iPhone app, he realized that it was time to branch outside of being Twitter-centric — probably a smart move given the recent upheaval in the third-party developer community. So he went back to his initial angel investors, got some more money, and built Treehouse.

Bader isn’t disclosing new new amount of money raised, but has confirmed that it’s an extension of their initial seed round from August.

You can find Treehouse here in the App Store. It’s a free download.

June 20th. That’s when AT&T gets the HTC Aria — a phone which, at least in my mind, is AT&T’s first to be powered by Android. What’s that you say? The Motorola Backflip was the first Android phone on AT&T? Sorry, I guess my mind has a tendency to block out tragic events.

With past sins forgiven, I was pretty anxious to check out AT&T’s second venture into Android territory. Our friends from HTC just so happened to be making a trip through my part of town. One quick jaunt over to their hotel lobby later, and I walked away with an Aria in tow. Expect a full review within a few days — but in the mean time, pop behind the jump for my first impressions.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

There’s not a lot to say about Nintendo’s new handheld, unfortunately: our demos are limited to one minute, the lighting is bad, and of course the 3D effect doesn’t translate to pictures or video. But here’s how it felt to me.

The 3D effect doesn’t feel to me to be one of things popping out of the screen, but of depth behind the screen. Things certainly seemed to protrude a bit depending on how you looked and what the scene was, but by and large it felt like the 3D screen was a sort of window into a room, inside which everything was 3D. The 3D effect certainly is real, though.

Read more…

Tonight at 8PM EST, President Obama will be holding a special press conference to discuss the ongoing Gulf oil spill crisis. The event will be broadcast on all major TV networks and live streamed on YouTube’s White House Channel, and will be followed by a special twist: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs will be taking to YouTube to answer questions that have been submitted by the nation.

The White House has just embedded a Google Moderator form into its YouTube Channel, inviting users to submit their questions about the oil crisis. Through Moderator, you can vote up the best questions, and Gibbs will respond to them fifteen minutes after President Obama’s speech tonight ends.

This isn’t the first time the White House has turned to YouTube to more directly respond to the nation’s questions — in February it held a special interview with President Obama, where he was asked questions submitted by the YouTube audience.

Take that, naysayers!

OnLive, the cloud gaming service designed to allow you to play almost any game over the Internet is going live on June 17 and, thanks to a partnership with AT&T, the service is free the first year and $4.95/month after that. You can attempt to sign up here.

OnLive has also released a roster of games including hits like Asassin’s Creed II, Dragon Age: Origins, and Just Cause 2. How do you access it? The service will run in a browser on a Mac or PC and will be available to stream via OnLive’s
MicroConsole TV adapter.

Click through for full release.

Read more…

News broke yesterday evening that social gaming giant Zynga has raised $150 million from Japanese firm Softbank Capital, bringing the company’s total funding up to a whopping $366 million. We’ve confirmed the funding from sources close to Zynga.

The investment from Asia will likely pave the way for Zynga’s expansion into the Japanese market. Zynga already has interests in the Asian market. The company just bought Chinese gaming company XPD Media and opened up an office in Beijing. And earlier this year, Zynga set up shop in Bangalore, India. According to a report by VentureBeat in April, this latest investment is likely part of a larger partnership with Softbank in Japan.

The social gaming market in Asia has potential both in terms of a massive user base and talent. But as Zynga expands its footprint to these areas, the company will also encounter a number of worthy competitors in the region, including Japan’s DeNa group and China’s Tencent and Shanda.

Last fall, Zynga raised $180 million in funding from DST and others. More recently, the company’s valuation was estimated around $4 billion.

Update: Revision3′s statement: “Kevin will be wrapping his involvement as a regular co-host of Diggnation at the end of 2010. The future of Diggnation will be determined sometime in the Fall. We have been talking to Kevin about fforward for some time now and are very excited about this new and very innovative project.”

Digg founder Kevin Rose, after confirming that he’s leaving Diggnation at the end of this year, is now announcing his new show. It’s fforward – pronounced “forward” – and you can sign up to be notified of the launch now.

The new show will be launching in a couple of months, Kevin tells me, “as a weekly live streaming tech/geek culture show.” Rose says he’ll be the primary host of fforward, but will have guests on to debate topics and demo new products.

Here’s what Kevin has to say about Diggnation: “It’s been five years, Alex and I still have fun doing the show, but I think we’re both ready for less travel and something new (Alex currently lives in LA). ffoward is going to be unlike any show I’ve ever done, I’m excited to try some new ideas w/a live streaming audience. Diggnation will continue till the end of this year, we’ll be having a huge final live show sometime in November or December.”

Maybe someone should tell Revision3, which is still claiming no final decision has been made on Diggnation (see update to our post last week) and slammed us for having “incorrect information” when we wrote that Rose was leaving the show. The good news for them – fforward will be on Revision3 as well.

You can follow fforward on Twitter here.

What’s the hottest story on Twitter right now? Cristiano Ronaldo and Portugal in the World Cup? Nope. Brazil? Sorry. Work or shoot: Bryan Danielson and WWE? Nein. No, friends, the hottest story right now is the goings-on over at Nintendo. The company is on stage giving its E3 presentation, and people are sorta all over the place. Has Nintendo’s fan service worked this time around?

Can’t say we didn’t see this one coming. Well, Nintendo themselves announced that there was a 3D version of the DS in development a few months back. But it’s finally official with a E3 2010 debut and it’s just about what everyone imagined.

Facebook is now the fifth largest video site by audience size. ComScore estimates that 41 million people a month watch videos on Facebook, which is more than on Hulu, CBS,, or Microsoft’s sites. What is remarkable about Facebook’s rise as a video destination is that it isn’t even trying very hard to be a video site. “I don’t think Facebook has video strategy per se,” says TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson.

TubeMogul tracks video analytics across the Web, and it just released some interesting data on how videos and video ads perform on Facebook compared to other sites. On average, people who click on a video from Facebook are more engaged.  They tend to watch longer than viewers who arrive from other sources— 1:45 minutes per view versus !:32 for Google (Twitter users are almost the same with 1:44 minutes per view).

This higher general engagement translates into higher completion rates for video ads.  Roughly 40 percent of Facebook video ads, give or take, are watched all the way through across different video ad types.  On the Web in general, video ad completion rates hover around 25 percent.

There are all sorts of video ads on Facebook—banner ads on the side of your feed that take over the page wen you click on them, video ads on app pages, interstitial ads which show a video when you are navigating in between pages. But the best performing video ads on Facebook are in game apps and linked to virtual currency (players watch the ad to rack up points).

“The click-through and sharing rates appear to be higher on Facebook,” says Wilson.  The click-through rate for ads in Facebook games linked to virtual currency is 5 percent, and about 2 percent of those video ads are shared on Facebook and Twitter.  In comparison, video ads across the rest of the Web have click-through rates just above 3 percent, and social sharing rates just below 1 percent.  Even Facebook banner video ads show higher sharing rates (but lower average click-throughs) than on other sites.

Internet communication service provider Skype this morning announced the availability of the popular service on three Sony Ericsson smartphones based on the Symbian platform. Users of Satio, Vivaz and Vivaz pro devices can now use Skype over WiFi or mobile data connection (that is: 3G, GPRS and EDGE).

If that’s your smartphone and you like free calls to your Skype friends on the go, head over to skype.com/m or visit the Sony Ericsson Play Now arena later this month.

Read on at MobileCrunch.

Earlier today, Twitter rolled out a pretty killer new feature: Place support for geolocation. With it, you can tag your tweets to a specific place you’re at, or pipe in your check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla to do the same thing. Tonight, Twitter can’t seem to find anything, let alone the new Places. The service has now been completely down for over an hour.

For long-time users of Twitter, this type of downtime is nothing new. But for the majority of users who have signed up in the past several months, they’re likely accustomed to a pretty stable service. Well, welcome to our world. I don’t know what’s been going on the past couple of weeks, but Twitter has definitely been struggling to stay up.

A note on the Twitter Status blog tonight reads:

We are experiencing site-wide availability issues due to scheduled  maintenance. We’re currently working to address the issues. We’ll update with more information as it is available.

Hmm. That doesn’t sound like a regular “scheduled maintenance” message to me.

Might I recommend 15 or so alternative things to do?

Update: The latest from Twitter:

We’re currently experiencing site availability issues resulting from the failed enhancement of a new approach to timeline caching. Our infrastructure and operations engineers are currently working to resolve this. We’ll update you soon with an ETA.

Update 2: I just heard back from Twitter — bolded part (mine) is key:

We’re currently experiencing site availability issues resulting from a failed enhancement of the site. Our infrastructure and operations engineers are currently working to resolve this.

The site could be down until approximately 3am PT. We’ll continue to update the status blog.

That’s 5 hours from right now.

Fans of the Richter Scales’ work will love this, too. Last year investment banker Terence Kawaja had a music video produced (to the tune of American Pie) celebrating the death of old media. This year he turned things up a notch and went upbeat – lip syncing entrepreneurs singing a song called Tech Star – a parody on Nickelback’s famous Rockstar video from 2007.

I’ve embedded both videos below. And Kawaja has a gift for you if you think you know your stuff – guess as many of the entrepreneurs that you see in the Tech Star video and put your results in the comments. Whoever gets the most right will win a Flip MinoHD camera. I’ll start things off for you by pointing out Fox/News Corp. exec Adam Bain early in the video jokingly complaining about his boss.

Tech Star:

Mad Avenue Blues: