With iPhone app upgrade, iLike moves towards front of live music business

ILike is one of the larger music startups to survive the recession (and music-licensing issues). It has managed to become a “self-sustaining” business through its iTunes plugin and its popular social networking applications. Today, the company is expanding while most of the industry struggles, introducing an upgrade to its “Local Concerts” iPhone application, plus more than 250 musicians’ customized apps for iPhone and iPod Touch.

The new concerts app has already become the 15th most … Continue Reading

Watercooler brings new revenue strategy to this fall's Facebook fantasy football season

Watercooler, a company that has gained 25 million users on Facebook sports and television applications, is hoping to rack up the revenue this fall with a new version of its popular fantasy football app, Fantasy Football 2009, that emphasizes a combination of payments and targeted ads. It is using a couple tactics honed over the last year by a variety of social games.

One tactic is a premium service where you can see live results … Continue Reading

MySpace Mail launches, officially part of the new MySpace

While MySpace is figuring out its future as a sort of entertainment portal, an older and but still heavily-used product has made it out the door. MySpace Mail has been upgraded from simple messaging to a full-blown email service. You can send and receive real emails.

Rumors of the email upgrade started at the beginning of this year, but the company has been pretty quiet on the product front since new management came in this … Continue Reading

What real-time data means to me: A better commute

Real-time: It’s a hot new buzzword trying describe the potential that immediately available data can have in our day-to-day lives. But what potential? When I’ve tried to think about how real-time data services are going to transform my daily routine, I haven’t been too successful.

Until I found a couple Twitter accounts a few weeks ago, @caltrain and @bikecar, that have been helping me enjoy a better commute ever since. My main method of getting … Continue Reading

With uncertain future, Bebo gets a new president

AOL might spin out its expensively-purchased social network, Bebo, as it prepares to be separated from media parent company, Time Warner. Or so say long-running rumors. In the meantime, Bebo has a new president: Stephane Panier, its former chief operating officer, who has previously been a senior finance director at Google.

Bebo had some 24 million unique visitors around the world in May, according to comScore, down from 38.1 million a year earlier (which was … Continue Reading

Any port in a storm: Social network Friendster up for sale

Popular-in-Asia social networking site Friendster is up for sale, according to banker documents obtained by TechCrunch. One of the earliest social networks, the company has been haunted by younger rivals, starting with MySpace, which became more popular in the US earlier this decade.

It’s not MySpace, though, that has followed Friendster across the Pacific to countries like the Philippines and Indonesia, where it was until recently most popular. It’s Facebook that’s been gaining ground.

In … Continue Reading

MySpace is a big gaming platform but it hopes to be more of one

Many of MySpace‘s nearly 125 million monthly active users are already playing social games made by companies like Playdom and Zynga. But the News Corp.-owned social network is hoping for more, chief digital officer Jonathan Miller said today at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech conference happening in Pasadena, Calif.

“MySpace is and will be more in the future a gaming platform, a space for people to meet and play games,” he said, adding that the site … Continue Reading

Arrington on Twittergate: "I wouldn’t do things any differently"

As a reporter who blogs — and who has been competing against Michael Arrington for the past couple of years — I’ve been helplessly fascinated by the Twittergate debate of the last couple of weeks. It is a perfect storm of technology news and journalism ethics in the digital age, pitting widely popular microblog service Twitter versus hated, envied, and also popular Arrington and his TechCrunch publication.

And today, I got to enjoy another round … Continue Reading

Twitter 101: An official how-to guide for the David Lettermans of the business world

Microblogging service Twitter is hot — or at least it has been experiencing heat waves of growth. So the company has just rolled out an extensive guide so businesses can get a better understanding of how to make use of its 140-character broadcasting service. Called Twitter 101, the guide includes a whole range of stuff: Simple explanations about its features, case studies from companies like Best Buy and Dell, best practices, and links to some … Continue Reading

YouTube Insight shows global reach of political videos

Yesterday, YouTube began letting video uploaders share traffic statistics with the public via its Insight analytics service. One interesting early result, political technology blog techPresident has discovered, is that you can see who is watching — or not watching — President Barack Obama’s speeches.

Whether or not you think Obama’s open-handed approach to foreign policy is the right one, Insight at least shows that his target audiences are sometimes paying attention.

His speech on June … Continue Reading

With My Career launch, Plaxo moves deeper into business networking

Social address book service Plaxo has been busy over the last few years building out social features, like a lifestreaming service, and integrating social data from sites like Facebook. But now it’s moving deeper into helping people do business networking.

It has recently launched a new part of the site, called My Career. A key feature launching today is the “Company Navigator,” which lets you easily find all the people you’re connected to on Plaxo … Continue Reading

Adknowledge buys Super Rewards, expands to virtual goods advertising

Super Rewards, an Web advertising company that offers points or other rewards to Web users who sign up for services, has been acquired by advertising conglomerate Adknowledge.

It is one of the largest acquisitions to date among companies that build services on social networking platforms.

Super Rewards’ offers — where social game players can earn virtual points to use in a game through signing up for Netflix subscriptions, mobile ringtone services, and other coupon-style ads … Continue Reading

Facebook Connect now available in more languages

Around 70 percent of Facebook’s 250 million monthly active users are outside of the US, and most of them aren’t speaking English. The site has been seeing massive growth around the world, partly the result of Facebook letting users translate the site into their own languages over the past couple of years. Now, the company is aiming to capitalize on its international growth by providing translated versions of its web-wide identity service, Facebook Connect.

Here’s … Continue Reading

iPhone prototype goes missing; Chinese worker investigated, commits suicide

Updated

Last Thursday, 25 year-old Sun Danyong committed suicide after a fourth-generation iPhone prototype he was responsible for went missing. It’s a story, from what tech-industry friends in China tell me, of how Apple’s secretive ways send extreme pressure all the way down the company’s international supply chain.

Sun was a recent engineering graduate, and had landed a job handling product communications for electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn in Shenzhen, a leading city in the industry-heavy … Continue Reading

Panjiva: Using government data as a platform for international trade

The White House doesn’t yet have much to show yet for its efforts to make the government more transparent. But, unsurprisingly, the private sector is forging ahead where there are business opportunities. A fascinating example is Panjiva, a company that processes publicly-available trade data about any business that ships anything into the United States through any seaport in the country. And today, it is launching a new service that lets other companies with international trade … Continue Reading

AOL Ventures gets new leader to clean, rebuild house

Former Googler Tim Armstrong is making more moves to redefine AOL, the struggling and soon-to-be spun off former Time Warner subsidiary that he is now chief executive of. He just named an old business partner, Jon Brod, to run the company’s venture unit, according to BoomTown.

The significance is that Brod will be charged with deciding what new startups and initiatives the company should be investing in or buying — he’ll also be responsible for … Continue Reading

MobileBeat: Making mobile software social

Mobile software on compelling new devices like the iPhone is creating huge new industries, but the world is a year or two away — at least — from seeing the results really manifest themselves.

Or that was the unsurprising consensus among the panelists I moderated yesterday at our MobileBeat 2009 conference (this is one of our last posts about the conference, so bear with me). The panelists included Facebook mobile head Henri Moissinac, payment service … Continue Reading

Can Facebook help apps get iPhone distribution?

One of the biggest problems for iPhone apps is finding users — the main way growth happens now is, paradoxically, by climbing the charts of the iTunes app store rankings. The more popular you get, the higher you get in the rankings, and the more people see you as a result. But Facebook is working on a new version of its popular iPhone app, and it could provide a new way for any iPhone app … Continue Reading

Penguin FB: A truce offering or Trojan Horse from Facebook to Twitter?

Now this is interesting. Facebook, which at one point a few months ago seemed set on becoming Twitter, might now be experimenting with a way of making its service work rather smoothly with the microblogging service. Earlier today, Inside Facebook spotted a tweet from Facebook developer Blake Ross, who said “test” from a service called “penguin fb” (he’s since taken it down).

Facebook has gone around saying that it sees itself and Twitter as two … Continue Reading

Facebook adds 50 million users in 3.5 months, now up to 250 million actives

Facebook likes to keep its traffic numbers close to its chest. Its last update was at the beginning of April, when it said it hit 200 million monthly active users worldwide. Today, it says it has 250 million monthly active users — so an increase of 50 million users over the last three and a half months. This sort of growth, at least in theory, is what the company needs to keep seeing if it … Continue Reading