Forget Spotify – here comes another attempt to make money out of digital music borrowed directly from the shareware world.
Nokia’s Ovi Store has hooked up with mobile music discovery app Shazam to offer a try-before-you-buy version for its handsets running Symbian OS, S60 5.0 and Symbian OS S60 3.1 and 3.2.
These include the new N97, the 5800 XpressMusic, the E71 and the N95 range. A fully featured version of Shazam which integrates with the Nokia Music Store is available for free until 30th November. Read More
These two videos, leaked to us by a Vodafone insider, show a new product called Vodafone People that bears a striking resemblance to Zyb, the mobile phone utility and social networking site that Vodafone bought last year for €31.5m ($44.5m).
But we don’t think Vodafone wants us to know about it just yet. Although there’s a Twitter account with just over a hundred followers, nothing’s going on there and you won’t find much by Googling either. What’s clear, though, is that Vodafone is now aiming squarely at integrating social networks, an area which the Three network has pushed heavily to date.
Vodafone People has “active contacts”, similar to the old Jaiku format and seems to be taking on INQ Mobile (which has an exclusive contract with Three in the UK) by syncing contacts on multiple devices and details with Facebook. In other words, Vodafone appears spooked by Three’s focus on social networking.
The German Yelp counterpart Qype continues its expansion. This time they go south and have launched an Italian version of their review website. Registered Qype members evaluate businesses, places or services such as bars, restaurants, stores, petrol stations, nurseries, doctors, pet shops or sports clubs.
Founded in 2005, Qype claims to be Europe’s largest review portal with more than 14 million users. Italiens will not only find loads of already written reviews in their own language, they can also use the popular Qype radar for mobiles. That’s a nifty freeware application for iPhone and Android devices which shows nearby businesses and uses GPS.
A number of significant developments have emerged today in the SpinVox saga. Andrew Orlowski at the Register broke the story this afternoon that former Alcatel-Lucent CEO Patricia Russo joined the firm as a director on 2 June 2009, only to leave on 10 August. Russo is one of the most high-profile business women in the US and would have been a terrific asset to SpinVox given her experience and connections in the telecoms industry. But she left as quickly (and quietly) as she had arrived. Why?
Meanwhile, word reaches us that SpinVox finally has a CFO: John Botts, who has been on the board of directors since August 2006. SpinVox has had no CFO since August 2008, when Andrew Cherry left. SpinVox has a high turnover of financial staff: since June 2008, two high-level executives have come and gone. How long will Botts stick it? More to the point, why has Botts taken the role at all? He’s a high-powered banker and deal-maker, far too experienced to be CFO of a start-up. One source we just spoke to commented that John Botts coming in as CFO “is like Mandelson coming in as Deputy PM. Botts is semi-retired!” So what’s going on?
Travel search and price comparison site Skyscanner has just been upgraded with a “holiday search” function, adding deals from Thomas Cook, Airtours and others. It offers total itineraries from these providers, rather than just flights. From today, it can tap into 35 million holidays. Trips can be searched by destination, duration and the type of trip and then compared by price, star rating and so on. Read More
O2 Germany will not block VoIP services like Skype any more and has no plans to charge extra for their usage. Until now, all four German mobile network operators had banned the use of mobile VoIP in their terms of services. Technically it was possible to use it, bt it was verboten. But O2 clients can now use internet telephony like any other data service with O2′s internet packs and their cellphones. That is a fairly striking blow against bigger competitors T-Mobile and Vodafone, which at first wanted to block Skype in their networks and now try to charge extra. Internet telephony puts their juicy profits from international phone calls in danger.
Yesterday, Twicli, the photo and video sharing utility for Twitter, rolled out a set of new features. There’s now audio support, you can tag friends in photos and a friend activity feature helps you keep track of what others are up to.
There’s a new “multimedia tweet box” which gives you more control over how your tweets appear and “mixed content sets” that enable you to tweet a single link to multiple items. Twicli’s profile pages also look more like Twitter’s now, since they’re importing your background and avatar.
Gogul (sound familiar?) a new browser project specifically designed for at safe-searching and surfing for children has launched in Russia – but it has shades of China’s infamous Green Dam project. The new online service, consisting of a search engine and Internet Explorer add-on, allows parents to control their kid’s internet access – in other words it’s a kind of Net Nanny software. This allows parents to set the schedule and duration of their child’s internet usage and get the detailed statistics of the pages they visit. It’s pretty standard stuff in this realm. In addition Gogul (love that name!) will only provide access to pre-approved pages and will prevent the launching of any new browser windows that aren’t ‘on the list’.
Scoreloop has just announced it closed its second financing round, with a $2.8 million / €2 million cash injection from new investors Earlybird and existing investor Target Partners, which was the seed funder for the Munich-based company. The funds will be used to fuel the growth of the company and to establish (or solidify) its position, especially in the realm of the iPhone. Since launching its technology in May 2009, Scoreloop has over 500 registered game developers that have published more than 40 Scoreloop enabled games in the iPhone App Store.
So one month after the release of its community application Scoreloop finds a great validation for its product, while Earlybird gets in on one of the most interesting new business areas around.
In Amsterdam today, the makers of mobile Augmented Reality (AR) browser Layar announced version 2.0 of the browser as well as a slew of new layars which have been produced since they opened up their API to developers. A ‘layar’ is information overlaid on the camera view of your mobile phone, e.g. the asking price of an apartment for sale in the building your camera is pointed at. Layar will be pre-installed on the new Samsung Galaxy Android phone about to be released in the Netherlands and the Android version of the browser is available for download in the Android app store. The iPhone version will be available as soon as Apple updates its API to allow access to the iPhone camera.
Both on TechCrunch.com, and by our own efforts on TechCrunch Europe, we try to do two things: 1) cover the tech market journalistically 2) engage with the market as player and commentator, trying to push things forward. We do the latter most often by highlighting new startups, companies and individuals we think the wider market should hear about. But the majority of the time we actually take a pretty upbeat view of things, especially at TechCrunch Europe. Why? Because the market for tech startups remains at a relatively early stage here. Yes we could argue long and hard about what stage it’s at, but generally speaking the majority of the stuff we come across is often still in development. That will probably be the case for a while, but it doesn’t mean we can’t cover it. When I first started writing about Favorit three years ago, Nick Halstead was just another crazy geek with this mad idea to build a new platform for blog comments. Guess what? It didn’t work, but we covered him and eventually that platform became the basis for Tweetmeme, a hugely successful Twitter aggregator and platform. When we started writing about Huddle in 2007, Andy McLoughlin and Alastair Mitchell had a seemingly insane idea to take on the mighty BaseCamp. In 2008 they are the only collaboration partner for LinkedIn and a Europas winner.
But there is another side to our support for the startup community. We get to ask questions. That’s our role. We’re part of the media, but, crucially, we’re also part of the community itself. We hang out with tech companies and tech people all the time. TechCrunch Europe is part of the eco-system. We’re like fertiliser – not only are we able to nurture, but just occasionally we are forced to pour a bucket of shit over something, just so that something new and better can grow up.
Which brings me to the entire story surrounding Spinvox right now and certain commentators who seem suggest that TCE and other parts of the media are ‘out to get them’.
Teachers’ resource sharing site Teachable.net has closed a significant round of funding, apparently ahead of schedule, from four high-profile angel investors, including Chris Paterson and Ben Barton. Paterson was previously chairman of Macmillan Education and Barton worked at Rising Stars. Both have experience with offline content companies. The remaining two angels are Bill Liao, founder of XING and Divang Mistry, founder of CTN Communications. Liao is a significant addition given his XING pedigree.
Teachable.net wants to increase the range of services it offers teachers, including “proven, creative lesson resources”. In these days of smothering public sector bureaucracy, the site has the potential to become a brilliant resource for overworked teachers. Read More
Wakoopa tracks application usage in order to recommend new software, games and web applications. It has two main groups of users: professionals and hedonists. The professionals are generally developers or designers who enable the usage tracker during working hours and account for around 60% of users. Hedonists use Wakoopa to track games and entertainment applications. These users are stereotypical early adopters; what they use today we may all be using tomorrow.
The company just released its latest State of the apps report showing trends in application usage in Q2 2009. The report is based on 110K users of which 88% are male, although female users account for half of the top users. 40% are in the US while 30% are from Europe. It’s easy to bowlderdize a report like this especially when looking at trends across all users, e.g. Linux users have an entirely different usage profile to Windows or Mac fans, but there are some interesting patterns here.
Most popular applications
Firefox has clearly won the browser war in this group with 55% of users. It is the most popular browser across all platforms. Facebook is the dominant web site with 17.9% of usage time followed by Gmail at 10.5%. Twitter usage is growing steadily but still only accounts for 4.32% of usage time even though 25% of Wakoopa users are on Twitter. Windows Live messager is the most popular IM tool, followed by Skype.
WhiteLabelDating.com, as its name suggests, is a service that enables you to build your own dating site. It provides software, billing solutions and hosting. All you need to do is feed in a brand, a bit of the design work and then market your new site. Pretty cool, huh? I’m not sure how much money is being made in online dating start-ups at the moment, but there are quite a few new players and many of them are experiencing large numbers of sign-ups. (Do people get randier in a recession? Apparently so.)
Having witnessed the extent to which humans are involved in transcribing messages for SpinVox, I have become concerned about the privacy of my data and personal communications. Although I’ve now cancelled my SpinVox subscription, I know (because CIO Rob Wheatley told me) that SpinVox, like Google, keeps data – which in SpinVox’s case means recordings of your messages – “for as long as possible”. Based on a quick search of my inbox, I reckon SpinVox are holding recordings of about 250 messages that were left for me between April and July of this year.
But that’s not really the problem. After all, Google knows a lot more about me than that and I’m sure my ISP and the government do too. My concern is that I believe the majority of my messages were listened to by a person I don’t know in another country. That’s the point at which SpinVox may be falling foul of UK and European data regulations, and it’s the weak link in the privacy chain.
Under the Data Protection Act, the Information Commissioner’s Office must be informed of any company that processes personal information. It must also be informed if that information is transferred outside of the EEA.
According to the Guardian, although SpinVox has been through the notification process, the ICO is currently investigating whether the company’s entry on the data protection register “is both accurate and complete, especially with regards to the transfer of personal data outside the EEA”. CEO Christina Domecq insists that it is. James Whatley, writing on SpinVox’s official blog, also denied that SpinVox is in breach of data protection legislation. But it isn’t really for them to decide: that’s the ICO’s job. Read More
Well, we learnt our own harsh lesson about this recently, but now other media are finding they just can’t “pull stories” in the age of Twitter. MP Kerry McCarthy has been appointed as Labour’s new media campaign chief and a Guardian story outlined this in a story tonight on its site. Except it doesn’t. Tonight (Sunday night) the story has been pulled from the site and now shows a “We haven’t been able to serve the page you asked for” sign.
According to one fast blogger on the Independent newspaper’s blogs (hosted on the Russian-owned LiveJournal, of all places?!) a handful of the press were given the story under embargo for tomorrow, and Labour bloggers were to be briefed on it tonight – possibly in an effort to placate those social media mavens out there. Labourlist, perhaps the largest Labour blog, has already put out its 2,000 word Q&A with McCarthy tonight (Sunday) and it looks like the Guardian was supposed to link to that post. [Update: Indeed, it did].
But the Guardian, despite no doubt holding the story under the media management of Number 10, accidentally published their story before the bloggers were briefed. So guess what? The story was then retweeted about 50 times in about 10 minutes with lines line “Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy (@KerryMP) has been appointed as Labour’s new media campaigns spokesperson”. Er, guys…?
Not a company to miss cashing in on a trend, SocialToo fired an email out this evening advertising their “unfollow everyone” facility.
It’ll cost you $25 to have SocialToo unfollow everyone for you. Personally, I’d rather keep my credit card in my back pocket and spend an hour clicking, but if you’re one of those people who has auto-followed 25,000 strangers and needs a way out, maybe it’s a reasonable price to pay. It’s worth noting that once you’ve coughed up, you can re-use the unfollow everyone function as many times as you like. Read More
Last week, we reported on Tweetmeme’s huge traffic surge, speculating that it could make Tweetmeme a buy target. But it seems that’s not the case: shortly afterwards, Twitter announced it was revamping the very concept of retweeting and launching its own retweet API. You’ll no longer have to use up valuable characters with “RT”, “via” and so on: the retweet will soon appear separately, as a kind of metadata attached to the tweet. So what does this mean for services like Tweetmeme and the upcoming (and somewhatcontroversial) Retweet.com?
Well, firstly, those services will need a bit of a re-write. But they’ll also need to consider whether offering services around retweets makes sense when Twitter has made it clear that retweeting is going to be part of the core product from now on.
All of a sudden, Twitter seems to be quite aggressively establishing its ownership of the terms “tweet” and “retweet”. The web interface just started referring to updates as tweets and Mesiab Labs’ “@retweet” account, which they intended to use for Retweet.com, has been mysteriously suspended. Kevin Mesiab has launched an appeal to “free” the “hostage” account, accusing Twitter of “playing dirty”. Read More
“Are Penn and Teller really launching a product at TechCrunch 50?”
As I typed the message to Arrington, I could barely contain my glee. For a few strange years, starting towards the end of my teens, I worked as a magician – making good money and impressing girls by turning card tricks at corporate dinners and in fancy restaurants.
It’s a long story, but one strangely common among people who ended up working on or around the web. For some reason a youthful interest in magic often comes hand-in-hand with a career in technology. It’s probably something to do with being a geek.
Arrington’s reply was both a confirmation and a warning: “Yes they are. And if you write anything that stops them coming, you’re fired.”
Forget Spotify – here comes another attempt to make money out of digital music borrowed directly from the shareware world.
A number of significant developments have emerged today in the SpinVox saga. Andrew Orlowski at the Register 
Travel search and price comparison site 
Yesterday, 
In Amsterdam today, the makers of mobile Augmented Reality (AR) browser
Both on TechCrunch.com, and by our own efforts on TechCrunch Europe, we try to do two things: 1) cover the tech market journalistically 2) engage with the market as player and commentator, trying to push things forward. We do the latter most often by highlighting new startups, companies and individuals we think the wider market should hear about. But the majority of the time we actually take a pretty upbeat view of things, especially at TechCrunch Europe. Why? Because the market for tech startups remains at a relatively early stage here. Yes we could argue long and hard about what stage it’s at, but generally speaking the majority of the stuff we come across is often still in development. That will probably be the case for a while, but it doesn’t mean we can’t cover it. When I first started writing about 
Teachers’ resource sharing site 
Well, we learnt our own 
Ever since 
Last week, 
“Are Penn and Teller really launching a product at TechCrunch 50?”