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| When Google Latitude Stalking Isn’t Such A Bad Thing Posted: 15 Apr 2009 01:54 AM PDT
You see, in her purse, her phone had Google's location-based social networking service installed, and it was updating the location of her phone in real-time. So even though the thief hopped in a car, when the girl called her sister, she was able to tell police exactly where the criminal was. They arrested the man and got the girl's purse back. It's worth noting that the woman said she had the service running on her phone "as a joke," so that she and her sisters could "stalk each other." And that's interesting because ever since it launched a few months ago, jokes have abound about it being a tool for stalking. But at the same time, the program had a user base of over a million users just one week after it launched. People are clearly interested in using location data in social services, but it's usually only negative connotations that are associated with stories about it. Here's a positive one, but it still has some negative undertones. After all, if the girl's sister knew exactly where the phone was, that means Google did too. Of course, Google has a policy not to share that information, but if push came to shove, and the authorities got the right warrant, Google would have to give up such information. Hopefully, you're not a criminal — and if you are, hopefully you're smart enough not to use Google Latitude — but it's still a bit creepy for most people to know that a company has data about where they are at all times. And Google is hardly the only one of these services, everything from Loopt to Whrrl to Brightkite all have varying degrees of information as to your whereabouts if you use them. Location-based services have yet to take off on a large scale, but with Google now in the field, and major players like Facebook and MySpace undoubtedly looking at entering it, it's only a matter of time. And when those huge social networks get into the game, there will be some initial backlash, but then people will start using it. (It may even complement other future lost purse stories.) And slowly, users will let the privacy ramifications fade into the background unless some sort of location-based horror story makes headlines. I, for one, welcome a future with ubiquitous location services in the social layer. Because there are upsides to location as well. This purse snatching incident is a bit extreme, but using location to find friends close by on a service like FourSquare, which I've been using for several weeks now, also speaks well to its potential. I really wish I could embed the CBS clip here, but they apparently don't believe in embeds. Instead, I'll just link to it again and tell you to watch for the reporter reenacting the robbery like a foppish dandy, and point out the ridiculousness captured in my screenshot above. It looks like the reporter asked the woman to hold her phone up to her ear while giving the interview to appear as if she's somehow using Google Latitude at the same time. As if just because Google Latitude is a service for phones, you have to somehow use the voice functionality of a phone to interact it. Oh, old media… Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors See the original post: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| iSkoot Notifier Goes International Posted: 15 Apr 2009 12:44 AM PDT
While it’s certainly no App Store (or even App World, App Catalog, Market or Windows Marketplace for Mobile), if you visit E-Plus’ beta2go site, you’ll be able to find and download iSkoot’s Notifier application. And iSkoot is offering the product for free to the first 500 TechCrunch readers that visit the site and get the app. Back in Feburary, iSkoot launched its Kalaida Platform, which extended the service’s reach to places like Facebook and Twitter. In March, the company opened the platform to OEMs allowing manufacturer’s to offer the service on handsets right out of the box. This is potentially very useful to the million of cellphone users out there who want to use their phones to access services like Facebook, but don’t have a phone necessarily tailored to do so. See the product in action in the video below: Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 Read the original: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Socializr ‘Event Connect’ Looks To Be Your Comprehensive Social Calendar Posted: 15 Apr 2009 12:24 AM PDT
Socializr, an Evite competitor that allows users to coordinate party planning and invitations, is launching a new product today called 'Event Connect' that allows users to aggregate and respond to all of their events from sites like Facebook, Meetup, MySpace, and Evite in one place. The site has integrated with each of these social networks/event sites using services like Facebook Connect, allowing users to see available events that they've been invited to, as well as the events their friends are attending. Each of the sites that Socializr taps into has different degrees of support when it comes to friends and photo sharing, so some options won't always be available. Because the site can showcase both the events you're attending and those being attended by your friends, things can get crowded quickly. So Event Connect also features a number of filters, allowing you to specify at what thresholds you'd like an event to appear on your radar (for example, I can specify that I only want to view events being attended by five or more of my friends). Event Connect can also pull photos from multiple sources, like Flickr and Picasa, and display them side by side. Finally, the service makes it easy to send invitations to an event across multiple social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, at the same time. Socializr's Event Connect sounds like a solid idea, especially for users who have their event invitations scattered across a half dozen social networks and Evite-like services. But it's still another pseudo-social network that I'll have to keep tabs on - I'd much rather get a weekly digest in my inbox letting me know which events are coming up rather than have to keep revisiting the site.
Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. Go here to see the original: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| AOL Appeals To Users To Visit Propeller Again Posted: 15 Apr 2009 12:02 AM PDT AOL's Propeller launched in 2006 as a "Digg Killer" - a Digg like site with editorial oversight that had massive netscape.com traffic directed to it. All those Netscape users were used to seeing a standard news page, though, and didn't quite know what to do at the new site. A variety of changes were made over time, including paying news submitters to lure them from Digg, changing the name to Propeller.com, and occasional layoffs. They even added a mascot. But nothing has stopped the decline of the site, and now AOL is appealing to previous users to come and give it another try. A year ago 4.6 million people a month visited the site (Comscore worldwide). Now its 2.1 million, more than a 50% decline in unique visitors. Page views have also dropped by 50%, to just 6 million/month. Revenue is likely in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars per month at best, meaning that it is almost certainly costing AOL money to keep the lights on at the site. It's pretty clear that Propeller is a candidate to enter the deadpool, although the upside is the people working on it could go to more interesting projects at AOL. But they're not giving up just yet. In an email to registered users who haven't signed in recently (that would be me), Propeller General Manager Tom Drapeau said:
I have my doubts as to whether this'll lead to a spike in unique visitors next month, but it shows they still have some fight in them. Good luck, Tom. I hope our next post on Propeller is something more positive. Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 More here: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Daily Crunch: Get Gadget Edition Posted: 15 Apr 2009 12:00 AM PDT | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Google Profiles Take An Important Social Step With Vanity URLs Posted: 14 Apr 2009 09:43 PM PDT
The service now has an option to use vanity URLs for your profile page, as the blog Digital Inspiration found. This means that rather than having a page located at http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/3223lkn23lkn or some nonsense, it now can reside at http://www.google.com/profiles/YOURGMAILNAME. If you have a Gmail or Picasa account, the URL will feature the user name you chose for those. Otherwise, you can pick a name as long as it's not taken by another Gmail/Picasa account. This vanity layer helps these profiles not only be more user-friendly for sharing, but it will undoubtedly help them show up more often in actual Google Searches. And the ability to search these profiles is clearly important to Google. Back in November of last year, it added search functionality to the Google Profiles area. Still, it seemed like few used it. A few weeks later it rolled out a few other improvements to Profiles, including the ability to pipe in picture feeds and have thumbnails show up. But still, the moves went largely unnoticed.
But Google is clearly trying to build these profiles up as an area you go to to find social information about someone. And it's not just tied to Google products, as Flickr photos can be piped into these profiles, for example. Google looks to be essentially creating a de-facto social network profile page, without having an actual social network around it. Apparently, Google, and all its services, are the social network. Vanity URLs came up recently when we reported that Facebook was finally getting serious about using them. Unfortunately, it is still only for its Pages area, where celebrities and other people of note can get them, but regular users are still stuck with the http://facebook.com/profile=02938042039840 nonsense. Go claim your Google Profile vanity URL now here. Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. Go here to read the rest: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SoundCloud Raises €2.5 Million For Professional Music Collaboration Hub Posted: 14 Apr 2009 08:43 PM PDT
SoundCloud, an audio sharing site geared towards music professionals, has closed a €2.5 million (around $3.3 million) funding round led by Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. As part of the deal, Stefan Tirtey of Doughty Hanson will join the company’s board of directors. We last covered SoundCloud in October, when the site launched in a private beta. Since then it has opened to the public, and now claims 100,000 registered members. The site’s primary function is to help musicians, producers, and other professionals in the music industry share and collaborate around music tracks. These tracks tend to be quite large in size, which makes them difficult to transfer (typically musicians would be forced to resort to FTP or services like YouSendIt, which are hardly ideal for frequent music swapping). SoundCloud solves this issue, allowing members to swap files without having to download them to listen (you can stream them straight from the SoundCloud servers). Musicians can also optionally allow their peers to download their tracks, and can use the site’s analytics to see who has listened to them. The site also offers an embeddable music player that musicians can distribute across the web (example below) which allows users to leave a comment directly on a portion of a song (for example, I could append a comment in the song’s timeline stating that I liked a certain guitar solo). Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. Read the original: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Twitter Fight! Larry King To Kutcher: CNN Will Bury You Posted: 14 Apr 2009 07:26 PM PDT
So far, it's not working all that well for Kutcher. He is gaining followers at a remarkable rate — he now has over 870,000 followers — yesterday he had under 850,000. But CNN is gaining them just as quickly. Yesterday they stood just above 900,000 and now they're just under 930,000. So Kutcher has stepped up his game slightly, offering Guitar Hero to the person who is his millionth follower. Come on Ashton, you can do better than that. King, meanwhile, promises to take on any challenge Kutcher throws his way. He notes, "I'll go on your…Twitter — or whatever it is you do." But he corrects Kutcher that Ted Turner (the subject of Kutcher's throw down yesterday) doesn't actually run CNN anymore. But, he notes that Turner is likely to accept an offer to meet Kutcher face to face on Larry King's show to discuss the feud. So what does everyone think — has Twitter officially jumped the shark now? Larry King is offering to devote a show to a fake race to a million followers — a good majority of which are probably spammers or fake accounts — on a service that sends 140 character messages. It's nice to see all these big time names using the same services we all use, but come on guys, surely there's some real news going on out there (which I fully expect will be echoed about us in the comments of this post — beat you to it!). Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. The rest is here: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Flat keyboard for medical environments features faux-3D keys Posted: 14 Apr 2009 07:11 PM PDT
I'm surprised that it's taken this long for one of these flat, easily washable keyboards to be clearly aimed at the medical establishment, not just in marketing but in design. The Medigenic Infection-control keyboard (catchy) is totally flat, and only appears to have a three-dimensional surface. This means it's super easy to wipe down after some patient yaks all over it, or an infected monkey sneezes on it. It even comes with a mouse that has no exposed cracks where bacteria and the like can make their home.
There's even a dedicated "wipe" key, which you hit before you clean the pus off the sucker. This is a great idea, although I doubt that the flatness enhances typing ability. For the long reports you'll need to write about that fascinating mutation you-know-who exhibits, you'll want to use your office computer. Originally posted here: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| March ComScore Search Numbers Offer A Sign Of Hope For Google Posted: 14 Apr 2009 07:09 PM PDT
ComScore released its search market share numbers tonight for March, 2009 and the first quarter. After a dip in February, the number of searches done in the U.S. on Google and the other top search engines recovered in March. ComScore estimates there were 9.125 billion searches done on Google last month, up 11 percent from February. That growth outpaced the growth at the other search engines (Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask), resulting in Google gaining half a percentage point in market share to 63.7 percent. On an annual basis, Google's core U.S. search volume was up 41.7 percent for the month of March and 40.6 percent for the quarter. That exceeds Yahoo's 25.5 percent annual growth for the quarter and Microsoft's 13.9 percent growth. ComScore's estimates only cover domestic core search, and often don't correlate directly with what Google itself reports, but if Google is seeing search volume re-accelerate that could mitiagte some of the other factors contributing to what analysts expect to be a bad quarter. Here are the figures for growth in the quarter, the month, and total market share (courtesy of J.P. Morgan): Y/Y Growth In Core U.S. Search Queries, Q1 2009 (Source: comScore qSearch)
Y/Y Growth In Core U.S. Search Queries, March 2009 (Source: comScore qSearch)
U.S. Core Search Share, March 2009 (Source: comScore qSearch)
Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 Read more from the original source: |
iSkoot’s Notifier 
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