TechCrunch Europe is hosting TechCrunch Munich at the Sun Microsystem offices in Munich today from 2.30 pm Munich time (1.30pm London, 8.30am New York) onwards, followed by networking drinks. We'll be hearing startup pitches and speakers in this key German city in the European startup ecosystem, focusing on a number of current and relevant themes for the tech community here. The event is sold out.After the jump you'll find the live stream (the event is in English) and a run down on the event and supporting sponsors. The Twitter hashtag is #tcm09.
A real-time trend-tracking platform that trawls the web using semantic analysis to make sure that all hits for a band's name are contextually correct. That's the pitch of MusicMetric, which has today launched the beta release of its music industry trend-analysis, targeted at bands, promoters, record labels and agencies.The idea is that you can greatly reduce the number of false positives which you'd be likely to get if you just typed the band's name into Google Trends, for example. Potential competitors would be Big Champagne or Next Big Sound though MusicMetric hope to differentiate themselves by using text-derived data to measure the public opinion of a band rather than relying on counting plays and hits alone.For TechCrunch readers we have 250 free 30-day subscription - more details after the jump.
Startup 7 Degrees is launching PeopleMaps, a social business application that aims to give professionals direct visibility into how they are connected to any person or company. Basically, PeopleMaps sifts through educational, social and business information to determine personal and professional relationships between people. PeopleMaps allows users to automatically search their personal contacts from Outlook, LinkedIn, Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo, while simultaneously searching data from public Internet sources. The application's graph engine then analyzes all of this data to determine “connection paths” to any person or company, which lets you see how you are connected to any person or company. PeopleMaps also pulls in bios of individuals (when they are public info).
The big, obvious take away from Apple's Q4 earnings report earlier today was that it once again crushed the estimates. And not just its own forward-looking estimates, which are always laughably low, but even the estimates of the most optimistic analysts — by a lot. But some of the other numbers from today were just as impressive, and some of the information, even more interesting.
I follow a lot of people on Twitter, so I understand when people say they sometimes get tired of mundane messages from people they often barely know in person. In particular, the amount of coffees one has in the morning, what he or she is having for lunch, which airport terminal they're currently waiting for a plane in and why their relationships are complicated are often of little interest to people following you on Twitter, besides maybe your parents. (Yes, I plead guilty too)But the latter category of tweets now at least have a dedicated home with the launch of Relatious, a micro-blogging community site for people who enjoy sharing every little detail about their love and/or sex lives.
I'm still not sure if the Twitter stream is the right place to be for advertising, but with the way the company set out to make it easy for developers to build upon their platform with open APIs, it's no wonder so many ad networks have sprung up since it got started. Its massive growth and the fact that the San Francisco startup is a media and celebrity darling probably helped in that regard, too.One of the companies that is dabbling with advertising on Twitter - even if Biz & co seem to be reluctant to do some serious testing of their own - is Ad.ly, an LA-based startup that launched about a month ago.
While the various forms of social media are becoming increasingly important to brands, Apple is one company that hasn't exactly rushed to get involved. Sure, they have a few accounts here and there, but they're not exactly Google, with their 500 Twitter accounts (okay, it's really more like 50). But they could be slowly warming up to the idea.Back in March, the company started tweeting from its first official Twitter account, iTunesTrailers. They even went so far as to highlight the account on their Apple.com Trailers page. Thanks to the suggested users list, that account now has well over 1 million followers and they're probably seeing a not entirely insignificant amount of traffic coming from there. And now they've added a few more accounts:
Welcome to the era of completely computer-less webcams. We tried the Avaak Vue a few weeks ago with mixed results but this new system, called Dropcam, looks more useful for homes and small businesses.The kit allows for multiple cameras to be connected to the Internet via wired Ethernet or WiFi. You simply set it up, plug it in, and start streaming. The system records video at 320x240 pixels at 15 frames/sec. The cameras weigh 3 ounces and are about an inch thick.
Earlier this evening the LA Times Tech Blog ran a post claming that Google has unrestricted access to Twitter's protected tweets, or, as the Times put it, the "key to the city". And you can apparently search those tweets with a not-too-difficult advanced Google search. As supporting evidence, the post includes snippits of supposedly protected tweets from Bill Clinton's Twitter account, with messages like, "John Edwards...why did you," "NY Gov got caught with a," "Oh Hillary, 3rd place in," and "I have been too depressed..."What, you say? Those sound like some bizarre things for a seasoned politician to be tweeting about? Yeah, I had the same thought. So I did a bit more digging, and as it turns out those tweets didn't come from Bill Clinton at all, at least not the real one. Instead, they came from someone who was masquerading as Bill Clinton at some time in the past, when they were cached by Google. But now they can all be found under the Twitter account NotBillClinton.
Google CEO Erick Schmidt stated emphatically during Google's most recent earnings call that "Android adoption is about to explode." We agree - despite developer hiccups, Android is about to have its moment in the sun. An avalanche of new devices are hitting worldwide markets, and some of them are serious contenders.Our bet is that the upcoming Motorola Droid will be the breakout winner from this batch of phones. But here's the complete list of officially announced Android phones, as well as stuff that's just rumored at this point. Bookmark this post, and keep a lookout for updates.Here are the Android contenders:
That's no fun. Barnes & Noble was probably expecting to get all the attention tomorrow with its fancy-pants press conference, but the Wall Street Journal had to go ruin all the fun by letting the Nook ebook reader out of the bag today. Yeah, that's the name. Nook.
Jive, the maker of a all-in-one social enterprise software, has raised $12 million in Series B funding from Sequoia Capital. Jive previously raised $15 million in Series A funding from Sequoia in August of 2007.Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive combines computing with social collaboration. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more. Jive says it will will use the funding for product development, to "expand its partner ecosystem," and grow its sales and customer support teams. The company, which is profitable, recently launched integration with Microsoft SharePoint, letting Jive users easily access data and content from the CMS into Jive’s software.
IBM is enhancing its VMControl software for managing data centers to give enterprise users a single point of control across multiple types of IT systems and virtualization technologies. Combined with IBM's Tivoli software, VMControl allows for combinations of physical and virtual IBM servers to be managed as a single entity, called "system pooling." IBM says this approach optimizes virtualization by helping corporate data centers simplify management functions and better share and prioritize use of critical resources such as CPU, memory and storage. Having centralized control over virtualized environments lets companies manage large amounts of information and processing resources and then parcel them out to applications when and where they're needed.
Kosmix, the reference engine that dynamically generates comprehensive topic pages as soon as you search for them, has just acquired a small startup called Cruxlux. Cruxlux has spent the last two years building an engine that can take any two people, places, or things and tell you how they're related. Terms of the deals were not disclosed, other than that that it was in both cash and stock.If you're a fan of the classic game 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon', you'll love the Cruxlux engine. The company has built algorithms that will automatically figure out how various people, places, things, and topics are related through a handful of steps, using sources across the web. Say, for example, I wanted to see how TechCrunch is connected to President Obama: the site first says that TechCrunch was founded by Michael Arrington, who is connected to Stanford Law School (he went there). That in turn is connected to Harvard Law School (they both use non-letter grading systems). Which brings us to Harvard Law School, which Barack Obama attended. With each step, the site has a 'how' feature that tells you how the subjects are related.
