Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Professional social network LinkedIn has been seeing a significant amount of growth internationally, 3.4 million members in India, out of 55 million members globally. That’s more than its members in the U.K., which just hit 3 million users. Today, LinkedIn is opening an office in Mumbai India, to set up shop in the area where it’s growing like gangbusters. In October, LinkedIn’s network’s CEO, Jeff Weiner, said in the post that half of LinkedIn’s membership is international, with India seeing the fastest rate of adoption of the network.

Nayan Patel, LinkedIn’s current director of strategic partnerships will be the new director of operations at LinkedIn India. Hari V. Krishnan, country manager of LinkedIn India said in a statement that the new office will focus on forming strategic partnerships with media organizations and other distribution channels. The new outpost will also work to gain more users and promote the use of the platform by third-party developers.

The professional social network has already formed a partnership with Indian media company Network18 that will integrate of business and finance content from its business news channel LinkedIn. UGC from LinkedIn will also be cross-posted to CNBC-TV18, a business news channel in India.

LinkedIn has has a big year. Founder Reid Hoffman recently changed the guard at the company, with Weiner taking the helm as CEO in June. While LinkedIn is a strong IPO candidate, Hoffman recently told us that he’s not in any rush to go public. The company was valued at around $1 billion in its last round of financing in 2008, and has been profitable for the past years. And last week, Hoffman told Reuters that the company plans to pursue an IPO at some point, but not any time soon.

The network also added a number of new features including Twitter integration, and released its API.

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Twitter has just released a collection of the top trending topics on the service for 2009. For the list, they’ve broken it down into: New Events, People, Movies, TV Shows, Sports, Technology, and Hash Tags.

In the post on the matter, Twitter’s chief scientist, Abdur Chowdhury, notes the number of ways that the Iranian election situation showed up on the lists. “#iranelection” was the number one News Event term with “Iran” coming in fourth, and “Tehran” coming in fifth. In Hash Tags, “#iranelection” was number two overall. Obviously, the service is pointing this out to illustrate Twitter’s important role in the crisis, but most of the rest of the lists are populated by popular, but much less significant, fare.

For example, “Michael Jackson” dominated the People list. Following his death, Twitter, and many other services on the web were brought to their knees as people turned to the web for information. “Harry Potter” topped Movies, while “American Idol” topped TV Shows. The “Super Bowl” topped Sports.

Technology was slightly interesting, as “Google Wave” was the top term for 2009. Ever since the service was first revealed over the summer, it’s been on the Trending Topics list pretty much constantly as people have been both talking about it and looking for invites. It’s interesting that most people still don’t seem to understand (or understand how they’ll use) the service, but apparently they love talking about it. Something else interesting is that “Snow Leopard,” Apple’s new version operating system beat out “Windows 7,” Microsoft’s new operating system.

But the most interesting things on the technology list may be what’s missing. “Facebook” is nowhere to be found in the top 10. That seems pretty hard to believe — might Twitter have scrubbed its rival (which later this week will allow for publishing to Twitter) from the results? Also interesting is that “iPhone” does not appear in the top 10, but “Palm Pre” does. And what is “Google Latitude” doing on there? I haven’t heard anyone talk about that in real life, let alone on Twitter. Maybe I’m following the wrong people. Or maybe they’re following me — and tweeting about it.

The Hash Tags list is also worth looking at. It seems there is no way Twitter could have published this list without some level of scrubbing since all the hash tags listed are actually appropriate. Twitter recently talked about the need to curate the Trending Topics area of the site, and it’s clear they remove certain things that they consider to be spam.

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It’s easy to look at sites like Reddit, Digg, or any other substantially large web community, and view their aggregate userbase with a certain level of disdain —  anonymity has the nasty habit of turning reasonable people into world-class jerks. But sometimes we come across stories that reaffirm that there are honest, kind people behind many of these avatars. One such case happened this holiday season on Reddit, where thousands of users have banded together to create what may have been the largest Secret Santa program of all time. And they managed to pull it off.

Reddit user Antonio Cangiano has written a long blog post detailing the program, and it’s really quite heartwarming. The whole thing started when a handful of Redditors decided amongst themselves that a Secret Santa program would be fun. User Dan McComas put together a site called Redditgifts to organize it, with a few restrictions in place to help cut down on trolls (you couldn’t join with a brand new account). After a registration period, the site automatically matched up users as Secret Santas, sharing address information so that they could send each other gifts but little in the way of personal information.

Over 4500 people signed up, and they shipped a total of 5,000 gifts (you could exchange more than one gift if you wanted). The vast majority of the users came through with their shipments, with only a few hundred stragglers. And even with those procrastinators, Cangiano writes that Reddit has far surpassed the former record holder for largest Secret Santa ever.

All in all, users spent more than $160,000 on the gifts and shipping fees.

Now that users are starting to receive their gifts, they’re uploading them to a special Gift Gallery. Most of the recipients seem to be quite pleased with their gifts, and the bulk of the gifts clearly had some thought put into them. Some Santas even cyberstalked their match to get something they’d love. Really, this is just awesome.

For another example of goodnatured geekdom, check out Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play charity which helps distribute books, video games, and toys to kids in childrens’ hospitals. The charity has raised over $5 million since its inception in 2003.

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You know whats nerdier than contrasting the merits of the iPhone versus those of the Motorola Droid (twice)? Pitting the two phones against each other in a sound effect remix battle. You know what’s even nerdier than that? Absolutely nothing.

The folks over at Indaba Music have challenged their users to strive for that pinnacle of nerddom in an all out remix competition they’re calling Phone Wars. The results are… surprisingly pleasing.

Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>

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The battle for the hearts and minds of geo developers creating map-based apps is on. Last month, Twitter turned on its geo API, and services like SimpleGeo and the GeoAPI are offering to do a lot of the heavy lifting for startups that want to create cool geo apps. Not to sit on the sidelines, Google just tweaked its Google Maps API so that it now supports spatial search and search feeds.

Spatial search allows developers to search an area of map for particular features. Their apps would call these searches through a search feed, which can search a boxed area or within the radius of a certain lat/long point. Geo search results can be sorted by different attributes such as distance. Plug this spatial search into Google’s growing directory of local businesses and a developer perhaps could use the API to build an app which shows restaurants or shoe stores within a boundary on a map.

Being able to ask for all the interesting places within a 10 block radius or within a county opens up all sorts of possibilities. Creating geo apps is getting easier and easier with all of these geo platforms springing up. And of course there is nothing stopping developers from mixing and matching different layers of geo data from different APIs.

(Hat tip to Bob Hitching at Geome.me)

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Mobile content delivery company Myxer Myxer is getting into the marketing arena with the launch of MobileStage, a suite of mobile marketing services aimed towards the music industry. The suite of services includes app marketing, analytics, mobile website creation and fanlist management

Myxer says that they are aiming to create a “MySpace Music for Mobile” with MobileStage. The suite is fairly comprehensive and aims to create suite tools to artists to better expand and analyze their mobile offerings. Part of the deal is that Myxer will promote artist apps to its user base of 30 million customers via its own mobile site. Myxer already works with artists for its ring tone and mobile content business. Myxer just delivered 10 million ringtones to iPhone users (and 1 billion ringtones in all) and offers over 2 million free ringtones, wallpapers and videos. Users can also make their own ringtones, videos and wallpaper from music and files a customer already owns.

MobileStage is launching with several partnerships with musicians and digital platforms, including ReverbNation, Kedar Entertainment, Amie Street, SonicBids, OurStage, INgrooves,The Orchard, Audiolife and SellaBand. MobileStage also plans to offer full-track downloads, streaming audio and video, as well as links to artist merchandise outposts, concert ticket purchase options and more in the future.

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Last July, we covered the initial debut of JS-Kit’s Echo, a real-time commenting system.This morning during a media conference call, the CEO Khris Loux announced that in light of the success of the product (and likely because many people haven’t liked the JS-Kit name for years), they are rebranding the entire company as Echo.

During the call the company also detailed the first batch of customers it has signed up for the product. These include CBS/CNet, Discovery Channel, Dow Jones Local Media Group, Hearst Digital News, The Press Enterprise, CanWest, Technorati, and KQED. Loux says that while Echo has several hundred thousand sites on the platform, as much as 99% of the traffic comes from its top dozen partners, which drive between 10-20 million uniques a month.

Echo is meant to help content sites steer the ‘conversation’ back to their blogs and news sites. As more people turn to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed, their comments can become disconnected from the original piece of content (in other words, if I read a blog post, I won’t see comments people have left about it on Twitter). Echo tries to aggregate these comments and display them beneath the original post in real-time.

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Mobile services startup ShoZu is in talks to be acquired by Critical Path, a well-placed source with access to inside information tells us.

Critical Path’s board of directors and shareholders may have approved the acquisition yesterday. At the very least, Critical Path is in late-stage negotiations. We don’t know the price, but it most likely isn’t out of the ballpark.

The sale of ShoZu, backed by $36 million in venture capital, is not going to bring much of a return to its investors, which include Atlas Venture, TLcom Capital Partners and TTP Ventures, among others.

We hear Critical Path isn’t exactly swimming in cash, and the acquisition is only possible thanks to the help of the company’s deep-pocketed shareholders, General Atlantic and the Cheung Kong Group.

ShoZu twice raised $12 million back in 2004-2005 when the company was still named Conigma, and raised the exact same amount again from the same investors and a new one, SEB Capital, back in January 2008.

ShoZu is in the business of helping users of social media services to connect and transfer data to their accounts from their mobiles devices. It markets an application for multiple handsets/platforms that integrates with a wide variety of partner sites and content feeds (including sites like YouTube, Flickr, WordPress, Blogger, Picasa and more).

Its data replication technology allows quick and simple data transfers of text, photos, videos and more to social networking services. That, combined with a reasonably large user base, is what could make ShoZu an attractive acquisition target.

Critical Path, less known to consumers but self-reportedly profitable, sells a suite of social networking and identity management applications and services to mobile carriers and ISPs dubbed Memova that is designed to enable people to “communicate, connect, share and organize their online experience”.

The company was founded in 1997 and boasts offices in Asia, Europe, North and the Americas.

We’ve tried to get in touch with ShoZu and Critical Path on multiple occassions, but haven’t heard back yet. As soon as we receive more information, we’ll provide an update.

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India is a huge market for social networks, with Facebook, Orkut and even Twitter vying for a share of the growing number of web users who are increasingly flocking to social networks in their day-to-day routines. One Indian social network is seeing considerable success on a different platform: mobile. SMS GupShup, a Twitter-like service in India that is primarily accessed via SMS, has grown to 26 million users and now accounts for 5 percent of all text messages sent within India. We previously wrote about the network here.

Part of SMS GupShup’s success has been due to the immense popularity of mobile devices in India. Currently there are 550 million mobile phone users in the country and only 50 million web users, says SMS GupShup’s CEO and co-founder Beerud Sheth. With a 10 to 1 mobile-to-PC ratio and SMS serving as the most popular communications platform, the market is ripe for SMS GupShup to take off. SMS GupShup is currently processing over 480 million messages a month and accounts for an astounding 5 percent of all texts sent within India. Sheth told me that other countries are on the horizon for SMS GupShup, with a focus on entering Southeast Asian markets, including Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

And the microblogging platform has evolved into a social network of sorts, with the ability for members to create and join groups. Sheth says that over 2 million groups exist on the community with the average SMS GupShup member belonging to 2.75 groups. SMS GupShup also has an advertising model in place, with high profile brands such as Microsoft, Cadbury, Nokia, Ford, Puma, Maybelline, Dell, and Sun Microsystems all participating in serving ads on the social network. Brands run SMS ads and can also create branded groups, similar to a Facebook fan page. There are also opportunities for branded content on the network; SMS GupShup recently partnered with an Indian car insurance provider and the Mumbai Traffic Police to deliver branded traffic alerts.

SMS GupShup’s variable costs are fees for text messages, and the service has had to implement caps to keep costs under control. Twitter also encountered this cost issue in it’s SMS ventures in India, with carriers were insisting Twitter pay them high fees to make up for all the tweets being received over SMS for free by users. But Twitter recently struck a deal with Indian carrier Bharti Airtel to expand its SMS service in India.

And its not just social platforms that see the opportunity in mobile communication in India. Nokia recently launched WeMeet, a social texting service. Google even ventured into the mobile space in India, with Google Labs India launching an SMS Channel, similar in theory to an RSS feed.

Backed by Charles River Ventures, Helion Venture Partners and others, SMS GupShup (spawned from Webaroo) has raised close to $23 million and has seen tremendous growth over the past year. It should be interesting to see how SMS GupShup will fare in other countries. It seems that in developing countries where mobile phone usage is much highers than web-usage the service is sure to take off. But its questionable if the site will be able to far against a popular web-based microblogging network like Twitter in the U.S.

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Most press releases are extremely boring. They all say the same things. Not this one.

Today, my inbox was graced by pitch that can only be described as stimulating. It made me laugh, it made me question if it was real, and it made me a little creeped out — all in one. But it is actually relevant to something I’m particularly interested in right now: Location. It’s for a service called FapMapper, a location-based service that allows you to show where you masturbate and/or where you have public sex. Yep.

There are plenty of tagged places in San Francisco already. For example, here’s one that reads, “jerked it watching my neighbor water plants. Hot” — and yes, it includes the address where that took place. Here’s another, “post lunch office bathroom.” At least it was post-lunch, I suppose.

Generally, it’s very poor form to just copy and paste a press release into a post, but this one is just too good for everyone to miss. And honestly, anything I say can’t do this service (which works on the web and through the web interfaces of the iPhone, Droid, Pre and other phones) more justice than how they lay it out. I mean, “mastur-beta” and ““fap” is a euphemism for masturbation that is increasingly popular among young, tech-savvy Web users.” Brilliant stuff. Read the whole thing below:

There’s a Fap for That: Masturbation Mapping Utility FapMapper.com Launches

VAN NUYS, Calif. – At long last, proud masturbators and public sex act aficionados have a fully functional utility with which to document their sexual exploits; FapMapper.com (www.fapmapper.com) is out of ‘mastur-beta’ and ready for primetime.

Compatible with desktop computers, as well as the iPhone, Droid, Palm Pre and other web-capable mobile devices, FapMapper quickly picked up a relatively small but dedicated member base after its beta launch in September.

“We’ve had hundreds of users putting the FapMapper through its paces and submitting suggestions for a couple months now, and we’re finally ready to unveil the official web app,” said Kim Kysar, brand and product manager for Pink Visual, the porn studio behind FapMapper.com. “It’s very gratifying to see this important tool for sexual self-expression ready for widespread use at last.”

While the name FapMapper is a reference to masturbation (“fap” is a euphemism for masturbation that is increasingly popular among young, tech-savvy Web users), Kysar said there’s more going on within the map grids of FapMapper than self-pleasuring alone.

“We’ve got couples posting about having sex on camping trips, people just marking places where they spotted a particularly beautiful woman walking down the street, even things that have nothing whatsoever to do with sex or masturbation,” Kysar said. “That’s just the nature of any social networking tool; once you release it out into the world, the community develops on its own, and decides for itself what to do with the utility you have provided.”

In addition to comments from users, FapMapper now offers revealing statistical data, like the top fapping cities, states and individual users. The map also features icons identifying adult stores where FapMapper users will find Pink Visual titles stocked on the shelves.

“Just in case FapMapper users are in need of extra inspiration for their fapping, we thought we’d throw them a bone, so to speak, and let them know where they can find the latest and greatest Pink Visual titles,” Kysar said. “It’s a great value-add for our retail partners, too, as they are being advertised to a population of truly dedicated masturbators and porn fans without spending a dime for the exposure.”

At the moment, a user named “Bigbwoy” from Toronto owns the top spot on the Frequent Fapper charts, while California is the top state, and San Antonio, Texas is the city with the most “Fap Pins” placed thus far. Kysar said it’s still too early to declare any individual, city or state the “perversion champion” based on FapMapper’s data, however.

“I have to believe that once this thing really gets rolling, you’ll see San Francisco climb the charts from its current position as the fourth place fapping city,” Kysar said. “We clearly don’t have the penetration we need in the southern Atlantic coastal states, either; how can Florida, the ancestral home of Spring Break festivities, not even be in the top 10 Fap States? That’s just downright shameful.”

For more information, visit www.fapmapper.com. Warning: you may learn more about your neighbor’s masturbation habits than you ever wanted to know.

Not sure this beats the best man who rigged his friends’ bed to tweet during sex, but it’s close.

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