Category: Tech news

Over six months after announcing its plans to acquire leading mobile ad network AdMob, Google has finally closed the deal. The news comes a week after the FTC unanimously approved the deal, after holding it up for months as it decided whether or not to block it on antitrust grounds.

When it finally reached a decision, the FTC pointed to Apple’s recent entry into the mobile ad market with iAds as evidence that there would still be plenty of competition in the nascent mobile advertising space (an argument that we made before, as did many others). The FTC may have also been swayed by blog posts from developers questioned during the FTC inquiry who felt that the deal should go through. Some developers also wrote that they felt like the FTC had an agenda and that they were being pressured to say things that would hurt Google’s cause.

Can we get better government through game mechanics? We are about to find out. Today, ChallengePost was named the official online “challenge platform” of the U.S. federal government. Any government agency that wants to run a challenge to get ideas from citizens can use ChallengePost as a way to gather ideas and even offer cash prizes for the best ideas.

ChallengePost ran the NYC Big Apps contest and Michelle Obama’s Apps for Healthy Kids challenge. Many of these challenges revolve around tapping into government data in creative ways or creating software with some sort of civic benefit.

ChallengePost will be creating a new central hub for government agency challenges. It will launch in July. Putting all the challenges in one place will make them easier to find. However, agencies are not required to use ChallengePost. They can use other platforms, if they prefer. For instance, NASA uses InnoCentive because a lot of scientists and engineers hang out there. But ChallengePost is the official one that has been vetted and approved. The government challenges will also appear on ChallengePost.com.

It is not every day that a startup lands the federal government as a customer, but this is one of those “no-cost” contracts. “The platform is completely free,” says Bev Godwin, Director of the Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement at the U.S. General Services Administration. In other words, ChallengePost won’t be making a dime off it directly.

But it is a great promotional reference for ChallengePost, and the company can charge for extra services, such as consulting around how to define a challenge “There will be additional services that have a price,” confirms CEO Brandon Kessler. He won’t go into details of what those services will be, however, nor what he plans to charge taxpayers for them. Ah, transparent government in action!

After three full days, our first TechCrunch Disrupt conference is now over. By all metrics it was a big success — and that includes on Twitter. The #tcdisrupt hashtag was a Trending Topic in New York City (where the conference was) basically the entire time it was going on. And many of the individual startups that launched appeared on the list too at points. The Twitter and Facebook analytic company RowFeeder ran some numbers about the show — they’re pretty interesting. Below, find some of their data.

To get this info, they looked at both the hashtag “#TCdisrupt,” and the phrase “Techcrunch Disrupt.” The first chart below shows huge spikes during certain parts of the show. Obviously, Carol Bartz’s fireside swearing session got a lot of play, but so did the “Lean vs. Fat Startup” debate between VCs Fred Wilson and Ben Horowitz. The startup battlefields each day did well, as did the final competition.

As you might expect, the tweets dropped off after-hours, until late night after the parties ended when people may or may not have been drunk tweeting.

The second chart shows the tweet share among the five finalists for the TechCrunch Disrupt Cup. Interestingly, Soluto was also the winner in tweets, while runner-up UJAM was second in tweets. Certainly some of this is skewed by the fact that they were the winner and runner-up, but it would seem that according to Twitter, the top two were the ones that most interested the audience.

The total Disrupt related tweets according to Row Feeder? 21,054. Very impressive. Of course, that doesn’t count misspellings — and I know that a few times, even I wrote “#tcdistrupt” or something similar as I was rushing to be first to tweet about something.

Also interesting is where the tweets were coming from. Obviously, a huge percentage were in New York (again, where the conference was held), with the Bay Area coming in second, but Los Angeles and Boston had strong showings as well. The fact that so many people watched the live stream (more on that soon) of the event seems undoubtedly was the reason for the surges in these other cities.

In what may very well be considered the geekiest sort of fandom possible, I consider myself a fan of Matias Duarte. As I’ve written before: “Wherever this guy goes, awesome user interfaces follow.” He and his team at Danger built a tremendously usable interface for the Sidekick, his work at Helio (especially the stuff that went to waste at the end, never to be seen by the public eye) was incredible, and then.. then there was webOS.

Say what you will about the Palm Pre and Pixi from a hardware standpoint, but the software that runs on’em is pure user interface gold. That’s largely because of the work of Matias and his team. Alas, Palm just lost Matias to the lil’ green robot that could: Android. Google has confirmed that Matias is joining them as the Android team’s User Experience Director.

Score one for Google.

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Today, Facebook is releasing its first official SDK for Android, offering developers on Google’s mobile OS an easy way to tie their Android native apps to Facebook Platform. As AllFacebook noted last week, this SDK is actually more advanced than the iPhone SDK because it features Facebook’s Graph API, which was unveiled at its f8 developer conference last month.

According to the post on Facebook’s Developer blog, the SDK also uses OAuth 2.0 for authentication and the ability to publish stories to Facebook using Feed forms.

I spoke with Facebook’s Steven Soneff about the SDK at Google I/O last week, where Facebook was offering a developer preview. Soneff said that there have been ways to integrate Facebook into Android applications before now, but that these have really been hacked together from the iPhone SDK, and weren’t officially supported by Facebook.

Hopefully this is a sign that Facebook is taking Android a bit more seriously. Facebook’s iPhone SDK launched over a year ago. And the official Facebook application for Android has always felt inferior to the iPhone version — it has been improving, but it still has a ways to go.

No matter the social service, a common key feature is the ability to reshare something. Facebook has “Share,” Tumblr has “Reblog,” and, of course, Twitter has “Retweet,” to name a few. The feature provides a simple way for users to do something social without having to do much themselves. And today, Google Buzz is gaining its own such feature — but don’t call it “Rebuzz,” instead, it’s called simply “Reshare.”

When added to Buzz’s current arsenal of “Comment” and “Like” (and Email), Reshare completes the social circle that most of its competitors have set up. It works exactly as you’d expect: if you see a Buzz post you like that you want to share with your followers, simply go to the bottom of the post and click the Reshare button. An input area will drop down and you’ll be able to add your own comment on top of whatever Buzz you’re resharing. This will then get injected back into your followers’ Buzz streams.

The key to this may be the ability to leave your own comment on top of anything you reshare. This makes the functionality more like a Tumblr Reblog than a Twitter Retweet. The inability to leave your own comment with a Twitter Retweet has been the subject of much controversy amongst Twitter users. Previously, Retweets were an organic thing done by the community, in which you shared something simply by copying and pasting a previous tweet led by “RT @username.” Twitter, in the hope of making this process more streamlined, baked it into the service, but left out the ability to add your own commentary. As a result, some people still do it the old, manual way (or use clients that do it the old way).

A few notes about Buzz Reshares:

• As you might expect, you can only reshare public Buzzes
• It’s a two-click process (“Reshare” then “Post). Google debated making it one-click, but decided having the option (in the drop-down) to reshare something with a limited group of people was important.
• Everyone who has reshared a post will show up (as a tiny icon) below your comment when you reshare something.
• The same content being reshared multiple times will be collapsed below the latest one in your feed.
• The reshare function forks the conversation to a new thread. Google thought a lot about this, but ultimately decided this was the best way for now. They’re thinking about a non-forking option too though.
• Liking a shared post only “likes” the reshared version, not the original share.

So, about the name. I asked Google why they chose to go with Reshare rather than the obvious “Rebuzz.” They pointed me to the picture below. Apparently, Rebuzz was being considering but was ultimately killed because it “sounds kinda lame.” That’s somewhat true, but for branding purposes, I think it may have been the right call. And I suspect people may call it this anyway. They also considered “Repost” but wanted to avoid introducing a new verb. So ultimately they went with the most literal choice.

The ability to reshare was one of the most requested features, the Buzz team says. And it competes a strong run of 16 new features in 15 weeks (they had been shooting for one new feature a week) — of course, many of those were features that users demanded to make Buzz less annoying. It’s getting there.

This Reshare feature will be rolling out to all Buzz users over the course of the day.

Geo-messaging startup BlockChalk raised $1 million in seed financing from an impressive group of investors, including Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, the Founder Collective, Battery Ventures, Harrison Metal, Josh Stylman, Tom McInerney, and David Liu. Schachter, in particular, has been investing heavily in geo startups (he is also an investor in Foursquare, SimpleGeo, Square, and Plancast).

BlockChalk makes an iPhone app that lets you leave notes around your neighborhood. They can be anonymous to report things like crimes, or a public shout-out to great neighbor. It uses a geo-fencing approach to revealing messages. Each message is pinned to a specific location, block or neighborhood, which other people using the app can see when they are nearby. As MG wrote in January:

You load up the application on your mobile device, it locates you, and you leave a message. This can be whatever you want: A note about a good cafe, a tip of something in the neighborhood to watch out for, a request to borrow something that someone else may have in the neighborhood, etc. When other people also using the app come upon the area that you’ve pinned your “Chalk” (their word for message) to, they’ll see it on their screen in a stream of Chalks.

The founders are Stephen Hood, who used to head up the product team at Delicious, Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design, and Josh Whiting, a former senior engineer at Delicious and Craigslist.

Friends Around Me is a mobile app for iPhone and iPad that searches around you for nearby friends — or anyone else willing to say hello — and enables you to view their profile, look at and rate their photos, chat with them, or send them virtual gifts.

The service joins together your Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook networks, allowing you to check in to venues and update your Twitter/Facebook status from one place. Best of all, the service doesn’t require yet another social network registration: you can sign in using Facebook Connect or the Twitter API.

One cool thing about the service (that will probably freak out the privacy paranoid) is that there are no restrictions on whose profile you can view, or who you can chat to. Plus, you get to see and respond to everyone who has viewed your profile, making it a great tool to meet new people. Of course, there are options to hide yourself from strangers, but where’s the fun in that?

Recently-launched mobile payments startup, Boku, has announced that they have received a strategic investment from VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. Boku has declined to reveal the funding amount from this round, but to date the company has raised a whopping $38 million since its launch a year ago. As part of the deal, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz will also take on an advisory role for Boku.

Boku, which just raised $25 million and rebranded its platform in January, doesn’t require users to have a credit card or bank account to make a micropayment. Users enter their cell phone number on the site, reply to a text message and then all virtual charges are automatically charged to the user’s monthly cell phone bill. As we’ve said in the past, it’s ridiculously easy. The company also acquired Paymo and Mobillcash over the past year, systems that had significant international reach, Boku gained a strong base of users around the world. Currently Boku is available in more than 60 countries and on over 200 carriers worldwide.

The company has also made a few key hires on the product side. David Yoo, former SVP and Chief Product Officer at AT&T Interactive; and Kevin Grant, former VP of Sales for MobiTV, are joining the executive team as SVP of Strategy and SVP of Sales, respectively. Both will be working to create new partnerships and reduce carrier fees in the mobile payments space.

While mobile payments are set to gain considerable traction on social network, one potential obstacle to adoption are the high fees that mobile carriers charge to the payment systems (which are then passed on to the publisher). Boku told us last June that different cell phone carriers charge varying fees that range between 10% to 50% of the purchase price, which is a hefty amount in transaction fees. But Boku is steadfast in its commitment to remedy this issue. Ron Hirson, Boku’s marketing chief, says the company is ramping up negotiations with carriers to lower these fees. He says that carriers will eventually see the benefit in lowering fees as they will gain a critical mass of users. “We want to do what PayPal did for email to the mobile phone,” says Hirson.

Of course, Boku faces another obstacle besides just carriers. The company faces competition from fellow mobile payments giant Zong, which just raised $15 million in funding and is the mobile payment provider for Facebook Credits. Zong also recently launched an alternative payments system, called Zong+, which lets users bill microtransactions to credit, debit and prepaid cards.

But Hirson says that Boku also has a presence on Facebook and is steadily growing its availability on the world’s largest social network. The startup powers mobile micropayments for a number of popular game developers, including Playdom and Playfish, which was acquired by Electronic Arts last year.

YouTube has always been known for its, shall we say, vocal community. But until now, the only way users had to respond to each other was through the site’s infamous comments, or via video responses — there hasn’t been a particularly good way for YouTube video uploaders to ask their subscribers for opinions. Today, YouTube is launching a new feature that allows channel owners to poll their audience in a more structured manner: it has embedded a customized version of Google moderator, a tool that launched back in fall 2008. The tool allows your subscribers to vote responses up and down, and has been tweaked to allow for both text and video responses (it is also embeddable).

Moderator has previously been integrated for a handful of YouTube events on CitizenTube, including interviews with President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper; now it’s open to anyone. The feature is pretty straightforward: you enter your question/topic, decide whether you want to allow both text and video responses, and decide how long the poll will run.

This is a perfect feature for YouTube. Many of the site’s millions of users do actually have something interesting to say, but their voices can be lost among the myriad spammy (or just plain stupid) comments left by other users. This gives channel owners an easy way to engage with their audience, without having to sift through the cruft to find the good responses.

Here’s a video showing off how the feature could be used:

TweetDeck, the popular Adobe Air desktop app for social networks (though an HTML5 version is on the way), has now integrated Foursquare into its latest release. The move represents the latest from the startup to grab the “social dashboard” crown against the likes of Seesmic and others, although Tweetdeck seems to be heading towards a kind of “Pro User” space more than anything else.

Now, adding your Foursquare account into Tweetdeck adds a location column. This has the handy benefit that Foursquare tweets can now be filtered out of your “All Friends” twitter column. A lot of people will probably welcome this as they tend to polute Twitter rather than adding anything to it. Now, the location column has a map button at the bottom. Clicking on this lets you view a live map of friends checking into Foursquare. Tweetdeck plans to extend this map shortly to be available in a separate view on a check-in item in the location column.

Facebook is under a lot of heat right now for how it shares our personal information. So much so that it is trying to simplify its privacy controls to so that nobody gets surprised when that embarrassing drunk photo you thought you were sharing only with a close set of friends finds its way all over the Web. (Hint: don’t put up drunk photos of yourself on Facebook). But this problem is only going to get worse.

Right now, what people share on Facebook is usually pretty tame: a status update, photo, a link, a video, an action in an app. The ones with the greatest potential to creep people out are the geo-specific ones, which probably explains why Facebook is taking its sweet time to roll out its own geo features like geo-tagged updates and photos. If you think the current uproar over Facebook privacy is bad, wait until Facebook embraces location-based apps in a big way.

This is not just a Facebook problem. It is an issue every major Web service is starting to deal with from Google to Twitter to Foursquare. They all want us to overshare and make it almost too easy for us to do so. The more we share with them about where we go and what we like to do, the more they can show us what other people who we care about are doing nearby or have done in the past. That basic premise is what is so compelling about geo apps. I can check in at a restaurant in the West Village on Foursquare and see that Fred Wilson ate there once and loved the lamb bolognese. That is a very powerful recommendation because I see that right before I look at the menu when I’m hungry and trying to decide what to eat.

When it comes to geo-privacy there are two extremes. Foursquare makes you explicitly check into each place where you want to share your location. That is good for privacy—you only have yourself to blame if you broadcast your location from the strip club—but it makes using the application a bit of a chore. You have to remember to pull out your phone every time you enter a new place and look like a dork while you are checking in. It is also rude when you are at a bar or restaurant with friends and everyone (all the guys, usually) are looking down at their cell phones, but I digress.

On the other end of the spectrum is Google Latitude, which constantly broadcasts your location everywhere you go, but only to people you allow to see it and only at the level of detail you are comfortable with (by city or general neighborhood, for instance). Latitude is a set it and forget it model. This makes you look like less of a dork, but the problem is that you do forget it and you end up either broadcasting your location when you would rather not or, worse, you never have any reason to interact with the application.

Somewhere in between the concept of the explicit check-in and constant geo-tracking is the notion of geo-fences. The idea is that you would basically draw fences around neighborhoods or other locations from where you want to broadcast where you are and places where you don’t. So maybe anytime you travel a certain distance from your home or office, the geo-sharing could begin. This concept is easier said than done, but startups like SimpleGeo are working on making it possible.

Drawing geo-fences is still a lot of work. What would be more helpful, perhaps, would be the ability to tell an application to broadcast your location anytime you are in a public space—a restaurant, a park, a bar, a conference. It would then tell you via a notification when it detects that you are in such a place before it shares out the location. But getting constantly pinged as you walk down the street could get annoying as well. Maybe it would know to ask only a few times a day or when it detects your friends or lots of other people nearby.

As apps and mobile devices become more geo-aware, a balance will need to be struck between the over-sharing creepiness of constant location broadcasting in the background and the annoyance of the constant check-in chore. On Tuesday, at our Disrupt conference, Facebook’s VP of Product Chris Cox described a future where phones are “contextually aware” so that they can “check into flights, find deals at grocery stores,” and do other things for us at that right place, at the right time. “These things take a bunch of clicks now—it’s all wasting time,” he said. “The phone should know what we want.”

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley and Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra were also on that panel. Crowley built Foursquare specifically around the check-in and the idea of getting rewarded for exploring the real world. Gundotra later told us:

There are some people who want to check in and who love the game dynamics. There are other people who may want much more of a passive model where the phone just passively gives them dynamic information and it is less about the game dynamics.

Intuitively, the idea of our devices working for us automatically in the background is much more appealing. But you have to ask yourself: Do you want ease of use or do you want control? Somehow these companies are going to have to give us both.

Image Credit: Flickr/TheGiantVermin

Gist, a recently launched web service that aims to organize your communication streams, has released an Android app. Gist, which offers services that help you keep tabs on the people in your professional network, allows you to see past messages and attachments from each contact, news about their company, and their recent messages on services like Twitter. The company also has a free iPhone app available on the App Store.

The Android application includes a dashboard with new, blog posts, Twitter updates, and Facebook updates for your contacts. Gist’s app will create in-depth profiles for every contacts including updates from social networks like Facebook and Twitter, mentions in the news, and email correspondence across multiple inboxes, including Gmail, Outlook and Lotus Notes. And an events tab will give you updates on meetings and information about contacts you are set to meet.

Gist, which raised $6.75 million in funding last year, launched in 2008 as a “professional” communications manager, aimed at satisfying the filtering needs of a business user. Like the web service, the app organizes your streams according to your email contacts so it’s a useful way of following your colleagues, friends and professional contacts.

The company was founded by T.A. McCann, an entrepreneur and former senior employee in Microsoft’s Exchange Server Group. It was started and initially funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital. Gist also recently acquired Learn That Name, a game that uses your LinkedIn contacts to help you remember the names of your business acquaintances. The company also just launched a nifty gadget for Gmail.

Saplo, a Swedish startup that uses semantic technologies for text analysis, has raised $500,000 in seed funding from Professor Göran Grosskopf, Chairman of the Stichting INGKA Foundation (the parent company of the IKEA Group) and Martin Liljeberg, Founder of the SOVA chain of stores (Sweden’s largest chain of bed stores).

Saplo’s technology extracts data from articles, forums, blogs, wikis, and will evaluate opinions on a given topic, find related articles, or produce relevant tags. Saplo will be able to tag articles by classifying words, and extracting topics from text. The technology can also find articles in large text collections that have similar meaning and can be used for contextual recognition or sentiment analysis.

These technologies can analyze text from blogs, news articles, Tweets, documents, web text and more. Currently, Sapplo only works for the English and Swedish languages. Media companies rely on these semantic technologies to tag and organize the enormous amount of content on their platforms. Saplo faces competition from Nstein, and others.

If you’ve been waiting to get the Nook experience on your iPad, your wait is over. Barnes&Noble just announced the availability of their Nook app, available free from the App Store.

Nook is behind in the race to ereader hegemony so they’ve decided to add a few iPad specific including eight different fonts, customizable line spacing and margins, different font sizes, and themes. In short, B&N reps said, “It’s a giant canvas.”

The app has two book “views:” grid – showing all of the covers and split which shows details of the book on a split screen with the cover. You can also lend books to friends by shooting emails to contacts using the built-in contact book interaction.

The app supports in-book search, bookmarks, and syncs among devices. It also supports ePub formats. They also said the Android App is arriving this summer.

Click through to read the full release.