Twitter courts enterprise users with new authoring tools, reduced spam
Twitter is cleaning itself up and finally adding a few features to entice more professional users.
Today the company said it had reduced spammy tweets to about 1 percent of its total stream. Those include links to phishing or malware sites, duplicate tweets that are posted over and over again, and accounts that suspiciously follow and unfollow other accounts to get attention.
The company has been increasing its clean-up efforts, boosting the size of its … Continue Reading
DEMO: MagInify Call Center wins the $1M prize
DEMO, the technology launchpad conference co-produced by VentureBeat and IDG, is wrapping up, and we’ve selected the big winners among the more than 60 companies that showed off new products. Attendees (not demonstrators) voted for their favorite companies, and eXaudios won for its MagInify Call Center, a customer call center that detects callers’ emotions. With the People’s Choice award, eXaudios will get $1 million worth of free advertising in IDG publications like CIO Magazine, Computerworld, … Continue Reading
Greplin shines a spotlight through the cloud
One of the most useful features of Mac OS is Spotlight—hit “command-space bar,” then type a term into the search field and Apple quickly skims through everything on your hard drive. As more data moves to disparate places online, however, more personal info is escaping Spotlight’s beam.
Enter Greplin, which presented today at incubator Y Combinator’s Demo Day. When it launches, the company plans to index data from any cloud-based service you give it access … Continue Reading
Nowmov: A StumbleUpon for real-time video
The real-time web is a hyperactive, fragmented place, and lurkers who want to now what’s happening now have to search through myriad services and filters. Y Combinator-backed Nowmov wants to help the energy-challenged masses stay informed by bringing the real-time web to couch potatoes — in video form.
The company, which will launch soon, takes the most popular videos of the moment and serves them to viewers. Visitors to nowmov.com, are immediately given a video … Continue Reading
DEMO: Sutus lets small businesses set up IT infrastructure in just a few minutes
Sutus is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
A company called Sutus wants to deliver most of the technology a small business needs to run in a single product called Business Central. The company announced its latest version, Business Central 5880, today on-stage at DEMO, and also … Continue Reading
Dudes can pay hot girls to play online video games with them
If you’re a lonely gamer dude, then GameCrush might be your ticket to meet a hot girl.
That’s the basic pitch of this social networking service, where guys scan pay cash to play hardcore video games with attractive females on the GameCrush site.
You can try playing everything from online casual games to Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer combat, according to IGN. The site, which launched today, lets dudes view the profiles of “PlayDates.” The profiles … Continue Reading
Placecast raises $3M more for location-triggered ads
Placecast, a company that lets retailers send mobile advertisements to nearby shoppers, has added $3 million more to its second round of funding.
The company’s Shop Alerts system allows consumers to volunteer to receive advertisements from stores that they like. Then when you walk close to that store, you might receive text messages with information about sales or other special offers. You might not be planning a trip to that store, the offer could entice … Continue Reading
Crocodoc makes it easy to annotate documents in real-time
Crocodoc, a startup incubated by Y Combinator, recently launched an easy way to annotate documents on the web. Today, it’s speeding that process up, by displaying collaborators’ annotations in real-time.
Existing annotation options tend to be expensive, complicated, or limited to a specific format. Adobe Acrobat Pro, for example, costs $449 and is limited to PDFs (although it includes more than annotation). Microsoft Word includes some annotations features, but again, that’s just for Word documents. … Continue Reading
Life360 aquires item-recovery service Foundog
Life360, an online platform of safety and security widgets you can use to protect your family, today announced it has acquired item-recovery service Foundog for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will help support Life360′s item-recovery services for corporate customers.
Life360 offers various widgets that customers can choose from, including Emergency Messenger, which helps keep you in touch with family during emergencies or disasters, and Life360ID, which helps you provide the right care during a medical … Continue Reading
Eye-Fi releases wireless cards that speed uploading of photos to web
Eye-Fi is launching a new generation of wireless memory cards today for uploading photos quickly to the web.
The X2 family of Eye-Fi cards can wirelessly upload photos to the web twice as fast as their predecessors. Anybody with an Eye-Fi card and a camera with a standard SD card slot can upload photos from Wi-Fi hot spots. Participating hot spots include thousands of Starbucks, McDonalds and AT&T Wi-Fi locations.
The cards are available today … Continue Reading
DEMO: Everloop brings social networking to the tween set (video)
There’s a reason Facebook, MySpace and other big social networks don’t allow people under age 13 to join. There’s questionable content on most of them, and almost any member can be contacted by strangers. But new entrant Everloop, currently launching at the DEMO conference in Palm Desert, Calif., seeks to give tweens, ages eight to 13 a safer social networking platform of their own.
Everloop actually provides more functionality than Facebook, allowing its members to … Continue Reading
DEMO: Keep track of your expenses from anywhere with Tastr's Xpenser
Tastr is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
Expense tracking has historically been a tedious and time-consuming affair. Xpenser, a new offering from Tastr, aims to reduce the headaches involved by making it simple to track your expenses from anywhere.
The free service is more streamlined than … Continue Reading
DEMO: Vic Wave brings more free calls to your computer
Vic Wave is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
Skype has become a popular way to make cheap calls from your computer, but those costs can still add up — it’s not free if you’re calling a land line or cell phone, rather than another Skype account. … Continue Reading
DEMO: NetToons lets anyone become an animator (video)
NetToons is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
NetToons is launching a real-time animation platform today that lets just about anyone create their own animation to share with friends on the web.
At the DEMO conference today in Palm Desert, Calif., San Francisco-based NetToons is showcasing an … Continue Reading
DEMO: Teneros offers companies a way to track employees on social networks with Social Sentry
Teneros is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
Teneros’s Social Sentry may just be the lowly office worker’s worst nightmare. The software, unveiled today at the Demo Spring 2010 conference, enables companies to easily track their employees when they visit social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.… Continue Reading
DEMO panel: The key to attracting consumers is doing something useful and simple
Even in 2010, consumers are an elusive bunch. Getting them to use web-connected TVs and new kinds of gadgets hasn’t been easy. Companies have been befuddled about what will get traction in the living room.
The hard part is designing a consumer tech product or service that is simple enough and useful enough for consumers to pick up without a steep learning curve. A panel headed by VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt Marshall at the DEMO conference … Continue Reading
DEMO: Network Hippo organizes contacts, sends alerts to keep you networked (video)
Network Hippo is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
Network Hippo, provider of software that helps you organize contacts in your various social spheres to advance your career or business goals, is launching today at DEMO.
The software draws contact information from all of your email accounts … Continue Reading
Apple selling iPhone 3GS without contract, still locked to AT&T
You can now pick an iPhone 3G or 3GS from any Apple Store without the need for a two-year contract from AT&T, according to 9to5Mac. AT&T also offered no-contract iPhone 3Gs (before the release of the 3GS) last year.
The contract-free phones include the 8GB iPhone 3G for $499, the 16GB 3GS for $599, and the 32GB 3GS for $699. Apple is also limiting customers to one contract-free phone per day. Despite the hefty price, … Continue Reading
Y Combinator presents 26 new startups
Startup incubator Y Combinator is hosting its semi-annual Demo Day today. Twice a year, the Mountain View, Calif.-based incubator parades its latest batch of companies onstage to present before potential investors.
This afternoon, 26 companies will pitch their business plans. Approximately half of them have not yet launched. We’ll be in Mountain View to cover the ones that catch our fancy.
Y Combinator companies generally receive about $5,000 plus an additional $5,000 per founder and … Continue Reading
Heyzap lets Facebook game developers publish their games to the web
Heyzap is liberating games from Facebook, allowing social game makers to publish them directly on the web.
The new platform will let game creators to maximize their audiences for games that have proven themselves on Facebook or the hi5 social network. It takes as little as an hour to half a day to adapt a Facebook or hi5 game for the web. That’s why 15 game publishers, with a monthly combined reach of 50 million … Continue Reading
