LA-based Sometrics has secured a Series B round of venture capital, led by Walt Disney Company-affiliated Steamboat Ventures and joined by previous investors The Mail Room Fund and Greycroft Partners. In total, $4 million was injected into the fledgling company, we've learned.That brings the total invested in the startup to $5.55 million. The first round was raised back in May 2008. It was the first investment made by The Mail Room Fund, a joint venture fund established by William Morris Agency, Accel Parners and Venrock.
Everyone is still searching for what exactly Google Wave's roll will be in the web going forward. We think it's still too early totell, but one man, Joe Sabia, has put together maybe the most impressive Wave demonstration yet. Is he doing something extremely useful? No. He's using it to reenact scenes from Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting. The result is brilliant.
SHENZHEN, CHINA-- One of my very early posts for TechCrunch referenced the “futurism” of 1950s Americana, where companies like Monsanto and Disney played out dreamy visions of a new automated way of living that never quite came true. I’m writing this post from Shenzhen, in Southern China—a place whose jaw-droppingly impractical-yet-beautiful architecture and building-size LED-lit billboards make the city look like it could be the set for just that kind of dreamy science fiction megatropolis. (Example? The other nights I had drinks outside the InterContinental’s bar, which is shaped like a huge pirate ship.)So imagine my expectations when I set out to see BYD’s “Village of the Future.” BYD—for those who don’t know—is a Chinese powerhouse of battery innovation with more than 130,000 employees, roughly 10% of whom work in R&D. The company is a living, breathing reality check to Westerners who think Southern China is merely a hub for assembling the technology U.S. designs. My BYD guide told me that the company gets at least one member of Western media coming through the office a week, many of them shocked that a Chinese company could be so innovative.
It's that time of year again, when the brash culture of Silicon Valley crashes into the two hour lunch European startup crowd at the Le Web conference in Paris on December 9-10. It's chaotic and sometimes combative, but it's also one of the best startup events in the world. And this year TechCrunch Europe is partnering with Le Web to put on a 20-company startup competition. Yes, I'll be attending this year, despite the fact that the audience last year voted not to invite me back after my post criticizing European startup culture. Time heals all wounds, or something. Organizers Geraldine and Loic Le Meur talk about the conference in the never ending video below. Get your tickets here. This event always sells out, so make your plans now.
Digg founder Kevin Rose launched a side project called WeFollow, a Twitter directory, earlier this year. Twitter users can go to the site and add themselves under a specific category. Without much in the way of marketing, the site has grown to 654,000 Twitter users, all of which went to the site and added themselves. And now, someone with knowledge of the deal tells us, Rose has transferred WeFollow ownership to Digg. This wasn't exactly an acquisition, though, because Digg didn't pay anything for the site. "The data became very useful for Digg," says our source, and it was awkward keeping it outside of the company.Digg has long been planning to launch a more real time version of the site, and we've speculated that Digg will soon surface new top stories based at least partially on stuff becoming popular on Twitter and other similar services. WeFollow gives Digg data on who the top Twitter users are for various categories.WeFollow is also changing the way it ranks users. Currently it's based only on total follower counts on Twitter. In the next day or so, though, WeFollow will change its algorithm and give more weight to users who tag themselves properly, and then have followers who have also tagged themselves similarly. For examply, if TechCrunch is tagged "startups" and a lot of people following TechCrunch have also tagged themselves startups, that gives a lot more weight to our account in that category. This goal is to reduce spam and give better data.Below are screenshots of the new, yet to be launched service. The top shows the SEO tag by number of followers, the current way WeFollow ranks users. The bottom shows ranking by influence. Matt Cutts jumps to the top of the list, even though he's only no. 8 in overall followers.
Something is up at MySpace. Everything was quiet for a long while as they went through executive turnover and mass layoffs. But suddenly they are back seeking the limelight.CEO Owen Van Natta is making his first public interview next week at the Web 2.0 Summit. The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by the same parent company as MySpace (News Corp.) wrote a glowing if somewhat vague turnaround story on MySpace today titled "MySpace Tries to Recover Its Cool." And, of course, MySpace is throwing a party. Van Natta sent an email to Silicon Valley tech and entertainment press inviting them to a "secret show" concert next week right after he's interviewed, with the exact venue and band to be announced the day before.Parties to cover bad (or vague) news aren't a new thing for MySpace - they threw one earlier this year in Europe right as European operations were being decimated. The odd WSJ article, which disclosed the sister-company conflict of interest nine paragraphs into the article, seems to be saying that MySpace will focus on social networking around content as a way to win. In a sentence that appears to be directly from a press release, the article says: "In a strategy shift, MySpace is striving to become an online hangout for people to connect with friends over entertainment content, whether it's the new Pearl Jam album, blogs from celebrities like British pop singer Lily Allen or a karaoke contest for the Fox musical comedy "Glee."" The article also quotes Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn: "This is not an all-things-for-everybody portal...This is a social entertainment experience."
I'm here at the Palo Alto Research Center, where the Churchill Club is hosting an interview with Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's Chief Operating Officer. Altimeter Group Founder Charlene Li is moderating the discussion. Below, I'll be taking liveblogging my notes throughout the interview.Q: What does Facebook mean to you personally? What are your favorite things to do? How much do you use it?A: I use it a lot. Have used it since before I joined Facebook. Back in college I had a 'little sis' though a mentorship program (she was in elementary school). I couldn't find her later on when I tried to find her. But earlier this year I got a message from a girl asking "Are you the Sheryl Sandberg". And it was her. I'm on Facebook several times a day. It's open all day. I stay in touch with the girls I grew up with, and the people I know now, through work and outside of work.
Boxcar is easily my favorite Push Notification app on the iPhone. It's 1.0 version was great, and it's recently approved 2.0 version is even better. Unfortunately, some users complained because it was $2.99 to buy, but used Apple in-app purchasing system to extend its features, charging $0.99 for additional ones. So developer Jonathan George is trying something new.Following the announcement today that Apple would now allow in-app purchases for free apps (the feature was previously only available for paid apps), George has decided to make Boxcar completely free. With this free version, you will still get 1 free service (Twitter Stream Push Notifications, Twitter Search Push Notifications, Facebook Notifications, etc), and you will be saving the $3 that you can then use towards buying other services, which will now be $1.99 per service.
Just hours ago, Apple made an announcement that has developers everywhere dancing down their collective, metaphorical street: In-App Purchase is now good to go in free applications. This, of course, comes just months after Apple essentially told a room full of journalists that such ideas were nonsense - that free apps should always remain absolutely free.Still - hindsight is always 50/50, or whatever that saying is. There were really just too many advantages to allowing it to let it pass by any longer. Freemium applications! Upselling! It made In-App Purchases seem less tacky to the user! Hurray. But there's one major factor that isn't quite so obvious; one issue that this, to some limited extent, solves: piracy.
Twitter has rolled out its new Lists feature to a larger portion of its user base right now. The feature allows you to group users you follow together and then lets you share those for others to also follow.Setting up a list is simple. Currently, the homepage features a Lists banner that allows you to start simply by clicking on the "Create a new list" button. Once you do this, an overlay appears and you just type in the list name (which Twitter then converts into a permalink along the lines of twitter.com/USERNAME/LISTNAME), and set the list to be public or private. This is obviously an important distinction as the public one, others will be able to see, while the private one will be for your eyes only.
During Google's third quarter earnings conference call today, one message came out loud and clear: Google's mobile strategy is starting to pay off. "Android adoption is about to explode," declared CEO Eric Schmidt, explaining that all the "necessary conditions" are set for growth: There are now 12 Android phones out there (most recently the Motorola Cliq) across 32 carriers in 26 countries. The whole Android strategy, of course, is to offer an low-cost, fully-featured, open-source OS and hand that to the cell phone manufacturers so that they can concentrate more on designing desirable hardware. And what does Google get out of all that? More mobile searches, which could be one of its biggest sources of growth in the coming years.
There was more than one attendee at TechCrunch50 last month that thought stealth startup Clicker deserved to win the top prize. The company has created a video search engine that really helps users find the content they're looking for - full episodes of TV shows online - quickly. All the mess associated with most video searches on other sites is removed. Our full writeup, including a video of their on stage demo, is here: TC50: Clicker Wants To Be TV Guide For The Web.Clicker has started to send out a few invitations to people who've signed up on their home page. Those lucky people who've gotten in have five invitations to give to their friends.But what if you don't have a friend who's already in,? We're here to help. Just be one of the first 1,000 people to sign up at tinyurl.com/TC-Clicker and you'll get instant access.
YouTube is on the path to profitability in the "not-too-distant future," Google reiterated today during its third quarter earnings call. And while that may sounds all well and good, they actually had some more specific impressive numbers to back it up.One is that YouTube is now monetizing over a billion video views a week. Last week, YouTube announced that it was serving over 1 billion video views a day, so if you do the math there, it means that YouTube is monetizing one every seven video views.
Apple has just announced that it will now support in-app purchasing for free applications on the App Store. This is absolutely huge news for developers, and will likely lead to a fundamental shift in the way applications are marketed and priced.Up until now developers of premium applications have faced a major problem: they had no way to offer feature-restricted version of an application for free that users could pay to unlock if they liked what they saw — a model that's quite common on desktop software. This led to the creation of the so-called 'Lite' versions of applications, which generally offer a reduced featureset, but require users to download an entirely new application, which obviously isn't ideal. Now, they won't face this hurdle. They'll be able to ditch the Lite version entirely, switch their currently premium app over to free (which will lead to more impulse downloads), and give users the chance to upgrade their featureset down the road.Updating with more
