SellSimple is launching its iPhone app today that people with too much stuff can use to sell it to people with not enough, simply by snapping a picture, adding a price, and selecting any number of marketplaces to post it.

“Using eBay is way too complicated, and Craigslist is a little bit sketchy,” SellSimple chief executive Julian Sarokin said yesterday from West Hollywood, where the company is based. “This is a way to sell from your phone … an easy way to just get it done.”

Letting buyers easily get it done, however, has taken a significant amount of hard developer work getting it done. Initially, SellSimple was just a way to post and sell via your phone on the company’s own marketplace. After initial demos, however, advice from mentors and investors convinced the 21-year-old CEO and his 20-year-old cofounder that posting to multiple existing marketplaces with significant buyer scale was a better idea than starting with an empty storefront.

In other words: chicken, meet egg.

Those mentors and investors include rapper/actor Nas and musician/producer Dr. Luke – who has worked on albums for Katy Perry and K$sha — among others. Together with a few additional angels, they’ve injected $250,000 in SellSimple, making it more than just another app. Which Sarokin is well aware of.

“There’s a really big distinction between an app and a company,” he told me. “Our goal … is that we would become the new eBay or Craigslist.”

That’s of course no small goal. SellSimple wants to achieve it through user experience, a built-for-mobile buying and selling experience that is better than existing sites. And by providing an initial benefit of listing everywhere with one simple tool, easily. In addition, it has built the capability to buy items from eBay, Craigslist, and other sites right into the tool.

One question I had: Will eBay, Etsy, and Craigslist be OK with SellSimple posting listings to their sites and selling items from their services? Craigslist, for one, has had numerous disputes with companies like PadMapper that tapped into its listings.

“We haven’t actually talked to anyone at Craigslist yet,” Sarokin said. “But there are some other apps that do this, and I don’t think it’s gonna be a problem. PadMapper was pulling data, while we’re adding data.”

The app went live yesterday in anticipation of the the launch today, and Sarokin said that the reception has been unexpectedly good: #18 in the list of top free iPhone apps for lifestyle, without any promotion.

He expects to monetize the app with shipping integrations, a 5 percent fee if items are sold via SellSimple’s own marketplace, and commissions on sales of products on eBay or other listing sites. Items sold via other marketplaces, however, are free (minus any fees those sites might charge). And if you list your items for sale via SellSimple, the service will delete your postings on all site as soon as your items are sold.

Here’s a look at the app via video:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In other killer-Google-apps-for-iOS news, YouTube had just launched Capture, a new app for catching, editing, and posting videos from your iPhone or iPod touch.

The app, which aims for quicker startup for on-the-go video capture, gives you automatic color correction, trimming, free background music tracks, image stabilization, and overall faster upload times. It will also remind you to shoot with a horizontal device to avoid “vertical video syndrome.”

Capture will let you share the videos much more easily; you can upload them to YouTube and share to Google+, of course, and you can also choose to share them to Facebook and Twitter. You can do all your uploading and sharing simultaneously, and you can also choose to just share your clips privately with your family and friends or with a URL.

Here’s a quick demo vid:

The whole experience was designed to be fast and easy. As YouTuber Reed Morse writes today on the company blog, “Even if you minimize the app, the video will keep uploading in the background.”

The app should be coming to Android soon, so stay tuned.

This new app comes in the wake of widespread YouTube app upgrades. The website just unveiled its new design, which places stronger emphasis on channels and subscriptions. And the core YouTube iOS app also just got a big update for iPad and iPhone 5 with better support for AirPlay.

Fashion app Poshmark can afford diamonds and pearls now. The company just got a $12 million second round of funding led by Menlo Park Ventures.

“We turned down many, many partner meeting with other firms,” said Manish Chandra, founder and chief executive of Poshmark, in an interview with VentureBeat. “What attracted us to Menlo is that they’re working in this marketplace.”

Menlo is also an investor in Fab.com, a social shopping website with a focus on funky, cool, curated inventory. Though the company is very different from Poshmark, it shows Menlo’s interest in curated, social fashion. Existing investors Mayfield Fund, Invetus Capital, and SoftTech VC also participated in the round.

Poshmark is an iPhone application that lets users sell and buy fashion. It handles the payment transaction and provides a shipping label the seller can print out to send purchased items to their new homes. Clothing and accessories are sold through “Posh parties,” or themed feeds where people can submit their items for a certain amount of time.

The parties see upwards of 30,000 items, which drove Poshmark to release “showrooms” or feeds curated by the party host. These include “Host Picks,” “Designer,” “First Look,” and now “New With Tags.” Chandra says a 100,000-item Posh Party is just around the corner and that some of the funding will be dedicated to creating discovery tools.

“We need to be able to scale the entire platform,” said Chandra, “I think, for us, it’s really constant innovating. It’s figuring out what are the edges with this issue.”

Indeed, over the course of a year, Poshmark sees $100 million worth of inventory go through its channels.

With this funding, we can also expect to see Poshmark on new devices including the iPad, Android, and the broader web. You can expect to see the iPad version come out first, which will include some of the same experiences we currently see on the iPhone, but it will likely take advantage of the space afforded by the iPad and iPad mini screens.

Chandra said the funding will also be used to build out the company’s servers and its infrastructure and to streamline the shipping process.

Currently, Poshmark is only available in the U.S., but after a trip to Spain where Chandra said there was a lot of desire for Poshmark, that might be changing.

“Oh yeah, definitely. I think international is definitely something we want to do.”

Woman with diamond image via Shutterstock

Ziplist, the startup that makes it easier to share and discover recipes, has launched its first set of features since being acquired for a reported $14 million by Condé Nast this April.

The company, which operates independently from Condé, claims to have grown its user base to over a million people. Ziplist lets you browse recipes and assemble shopping lists, which you can sync to an iPhone and Android phone. It has strong appeal for publishers and food bloggers too, who can download a free Ziplist plugin that helps format recipes for SEO purposes.

It has partnered up with food-focused blogs as well as lifestyle and entertainment brands — notably, Martha Stewart Living and the Food Network — to populate its database of over 500,000 free recipes.

The company hits on a new trend for tech startups to bridge online and offline worlds. With Ziplist, if you see something delicious at the grocery store (but would prefer to make it from scratch in your own kitchen), you can scan the item’s barcode and convert the ingredients into a handy shopping list.

Since the acquisition, the company has also worked to build out an algorithm. The new feature set boasts personalized recommendations so you won’t have to browse thousands of recipes to find one that appeals. Updates to the app include:

• Personal recommendations: A new “recipes you may like” feature provides recommendations based on recipes that you’ve saved.
• Shopping list suggestions: An “Items you may need” grocery list based on your most popular selections, like milk or eggs.
• Recipe of the day: The trending recipe  – save it to your recipe  box or add items to your shopping list if you decide to give it a whirl.

Geoff Allen, Ziplist’s founder and chief executive said these “intuitive grocery list suggestions and personalized meal recommendations” make it easier to help users shop. With this new direction, the company faces competition from startups like Foodily, a recipe networking site, and Gojee, which targets users with personalized recipe recommendations.

However, with Condé on board as a publishing partner, Ziplist may have the best shot at reaching a broader audience. Still, I’m not convinced that the core market (people that pour over recipes and painstakingly plan meals) are digital natives. Foodies, do you break out the old recipe book, or do you routinely turn to your smartphones for culinary tips?

Image via Shutterstock 

Bump‘s apps are great for tapping two phones together to share contact info and photos. Now, the Bump team is unveiling Flock, a new app for sharing group photos easily and quickly with everyone in said group.

Flock identifies the photos on your phone that were taken together with your family and friends; it then creates a single album in the cloud and shares it with everyone in that set of pics.

The best part is, all you have to do is install the app. Flock does the rest automagically in the background. For a team that emphasizes the so-simple-it’s-stupid nature of its consumer-facing applications, this kind of set-it-and-forget-it functionality is exactly what we’d expect.

For example, when Bump relaunched its mobile app recently, it pared the whole thing down to just the two most popular features. Risky, yes; dead simple, absolutely.

And when the company recently launched phone-to-computer sharing, it made the feature as simple as tapping your phone on your computer’s spacebar. It’s what Bump CEO Dave Lieb called a “cognitively simple” solution in a phone chat with VentureBeat.

When it comes to sharing photos, Lieb said, “What we want to focus on is the really big pain points, and moving photos was the biggest one. People were sick of emailing photos to themselves or trying to find their syncing cable.”

Ditto for group photos. On the company blog this morning, we read:

We designed Flock so you don’t have to think about it at all. You just live your life like you already do. Spend time with your friends and family; take photos with whatever camera app you prefer. There’s no work for you at all, really. Flock uses new battery-friendly location technology and sophisticated algorithms to magically know which of your Facebook friends you are with when photos are taken. After you leave your group hike, or the night out on the town, or Thanksgiving dinner, Flock will check if anyone wants to share the photos they took and then bring those photos together into a single group album for everyone to enjoy. And because most photos taken by iOS devices are geotagged, Flock can even work backwards in time from before you installed the app! So if you and your friends and family install the app today, you’ll likely unlock lost memories that were trapped on each other’s phones for years.

Here’s a video showing off the new app, starring Lieb himself (he’s the bearded dude):

The new Flock app is in the iTunes App Store now; we suspect an Android version is on the way.

Bump was founded in Chicago in 2008 and currently calls Mountain View, Calif., home. The startup has raised $20 million in funding to date.

top image courtesy of Tyler Olson, Shutterstock

Aviary, the popular in-browser photo editor, is now available as an iPhone and Android app, and it’s coming to Windows Phone soon, as well.

The mobile apps will feature Aviary’s signature fast editing, one-tap auto-enhance feature, and a slate of familiar effects. Extra features for the mobile apps include a souped-up gallery for your recent photos and customization options for the tools you use most in the editor. You can get high-res pics out of the app, and you can also purchase bonus packs of special effects.

The main purpose of the app is not simply to delight you humble consumer types, but rather to show off the company’s mobile SDKs (software development kits) for developers.

“Since we released our mobile SDKs (currently available for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7), we’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback from partners and users alike: everyone loves the convenience of being able to use Aviary within their favorite mobile apps,” the company stated in a press release via email.

“That said, we still heard from a lot of people who wished they could occasionally use it as a standalone photo editing app on their phone.”

The SDK will let developers pick and choose from among Aviary’s editing tools and tweak the UI to meet their own needs and match their apps’ current branding.

And let’s be frank: Aviary is a bit too late to the mobile-photo-editing game to compete with current heavy-hitters such as Instagram or Camera+. Branding this launch as a show-and-tell for developers is, if nothing else, a pretty good way to spin the app’s arrival in the iTunes App Store and Google Play.

Here’s a sneak peek:

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Top image courtesy of David Hammonds, Shutterstock

Souheil Medaghri grew up in an eastern neighborhood of Paris with his two friends, Arnaud Ferreri and Julien Dao [all pictured above]. They did typical kid stuff: play video games, listen to music, chase girls.

But as they grew up and went off to college, the joie de vivre seemed to ebb out of their day-to-day routines. They earned business degrees and, as young, handsome denizens of a global metropolis, seemed assured of successful careers.

“But we realized that our plans for the future were super boring,” Medaghri said in an interview with VentureBeat. “We were not really happy about going to work, working for big consulting firms, going home, and watching YouTube videos. We realized most of the people around the world had this boring routine, so we wanted to find a way to spice it up.”

The trio’s answer to Gen Y malaise is Onefeat, a simple, prettily designed iPhone app that helps you find and appreciate the beautiful within the mundane. We ran into the team at i/o Ventures‘ recent demo day in San Francisco, where they were showing off the app and drumming up investment money from angels and VCs. Medaghri told us he and the fellas want to leave Paris for good and move to California to build their app into a real startup.

Right now, what they have is an infectiously cheerful digital toy that makes life a game. It encourages you to do things that are good for your mind, heart, and soul: to hug your family members, to ponder the meaning of life, to run around in the sunshine. And the more of these “missions” you do out in the real world, the more in-game points you earn.

“All you have to do is to send a picture of yourself doing the mission to get points,” said Medaghri. “We want to build the ultimate stage for the greatest experiences you can live in your life.”

Once you earn enough points, you can start creating missions and assigning point values yourself.

Here are some screenshots from the app, showing the various “challenges” or “missions” users can complete and how they are rewarded:

“As you grow up, you sometimes forget how the world is full of opportunities,” Medaghri told us. “So you spend your money on buying things while the best things in life are still the experiences. An experience is something so simple, so pure, anybody in the world can live. We wanted to create the main stage for it.”

He and his team dream of creating an augmented reality where people are recognized not for being rich or popular but for being purely awesome — for growing a legendary mustache, for being spontaneous, for knowing how and when and why to have fun. And a lot of that is up for interpretation.

“For example, we have this mission called ‘Bring the sexy back,’ where the goal is to be as sexy as you can,” the co-founder said. “You have obviously this cute girl that is the champion, but you also have this guy who cut the word ‘SEXY’ into a piece of cardboard and brought it back to a customer service desk. There were these kids who copied the poses of the cute girl in the exact same way. Almost. And this is hilarious.

“People are so full of creativity when you challenge them and you give them a stage to express themselves.”

As previously mentioned, all three of the young co-founders have business degrees; their interest in technology, while never formally cultivated at university, existed long before they trudged off to business school. Ferreri has been building websites since he was 14; he learned Objective-C in just a few weeks’ time. And Medaghri called Dao “a design genius” who acquired his fresh, pop-perfect style during years of video gaming and watching MTV.

“But most of the things we learned, we taught ourselves online,” said Medaghri. “What’s important is that we don’t have this strong geek culture. We’re just normal kids who wanted to make an awesome product our friends could have fun with.”

It’s good, clean fun, and the team’s onstage demo leaves us with a smile (and this correspondent never smiles at startup demos, ever). With such a warm glow cascading through the aorta of our cold, cold, editorial heart, we almost hate to ask the cliched but inevitable question: How will Onefeat make money on this feel-good app?

“There are tons of possibilities for making money,” Medaghri responded, like a good startup founder should. He outlines a few possibilities, such as brand-sponsored missions (Onefeat recently did a test with CBS for a horror flick launch).

“However, we stopped the monetization to focus on the product,” he said.”We want to deliver the best experience for our players to have fun. Even if someday, we’ll get people to win real things, it won’t be just products or coupons (we think coupons kind of suck) but mostly unique experiences.”

And just like that, Medaghri showed us that our genuine smile and the happiness that brought it is his startup’s chief concern.

“Nothing would make us happier than delivering fantastic experiences to our players.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google released an update to its Google Search iPhone app today, adding a few small features and tweaks that should make searching faster and more intuitive. Let’s take a visual tour of what’s new in the app by searching for my favorite animal, the angora rabbit.

Cleaner design

The new app greets you with a clean search bar and just three buttons: Apps (promotes Google’s other web and iOS apps), Voice (speak your search term), and Goggles (the still wonky search-by-photo feature that only seems to recognize brand logos). Today’s Google doodle, an amazing working moog synthesizer in honor of Robert Moog’s 78th birthday, makes an appearance on the app version as an image, but unfortunately you cannot use it to make beautiful music. At the bottom of search results page is a scrollable bar listing all the available types of search, such as Places, News, Blogs, and Discussions.

Image results go big, beautiful

Grids of different-sized images are all the rage. The image results in the app fill up your iPhone screen completely (just start scrolling to lose the controls), so you can enjoy them without any pesky user interface getting in the way. Tap to open an image (pictured at the top of this article) and swipe left or right to flip through the other image search results. Tap to save an image directly to your camera roll or share it, but check the image rights before going too crazy.

Speedy and slidey

The improvement that does the most to make search faster in my opinion is the new slider. Open a search result and tabs appear at the top of the page. You can slide left to right to get back to your search results. If you want to find a specific word on a page, tap the little magnifying glass in the lower right corner. Google also says auto-compelete and page-load times are faster, but I wasn’t able to test the updated app side by side with the older version to check.

But wait, there’s more

Finally, Google is putting promotion of its other apps front and center, adding an Apps button to the main screen. Tap to bring up a list of Google’s available web and iOS apps. The web apps will open directly in the Google Search app, not Safari.

A mysterious bug that disabled mentions and interactions in Twitter’s mobile applications has finally been fixed.

The Twitter for iPhone application, as of Sunday afternoon, stopped updating to display replies (otherwise known as mentions), retweets, favorites, and other activity in the “@ Connect” tab for some members.

With the release of version 4.1.3, out now, Twitter has remedied the problem, returning the oddly absent activity back to iPhone users.

When VentureBeat inquired about the bug Monday, a Twitter spokesperson directed us to a help page that acknowledged the issue and instructed users to delete and re-add a Twitter account to solve the issue, but did not offer further explanation of the issue.

The Twitter for Android application was also affected with the same malfunction and has since been updated.

Photo credit: wharman/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Forkly, an app that helps you find popular dishes at restaurants around you, has released version 2.0 with bigger photos and personalized recommendations.

Forkly launched in September 2011 from Britekite founders Brady Becker and Martin May. The app originally helped you photograph, rate, and share dishes you’ve eaten and loved. With the second version of the app, you can share and find dishes more easily. The app now delivers personalized recommendations of dishes and the ability to browse restaurants anywhere.

Perhaps the most noticeable update in the new version is the larger images, which help you browse dishes more quickly. The app also gives you influence points for using the app and rating dishes, and the update has improved how points are handled.

Forkly competes with Foodspotting, another app that rates specific dishes. Both apps have very similar features and are fighting for the same users. Forkly’s influence point system is absent in Foodspotting, but Foodspotting includes “Guides” of popular and noteworthy dishes curated by foodie celebrities. Other Forkly competitors include Spoondate and Ness.

Forkly 2.0 is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

What if you could walk past people and know who they were, or find out if you have a mutual friend without having to introduce yourself? An app for that launches today.

Highlight is the creation of Paul Davidson, the former entrepreneur in residence of Benchmark Capital. While formulating a company at Benchmark, Davidson kept returning to this “serendipity” that is meeting someone. And unlike the romantics who appreciate life’s little meet cutes, Davidson wants to remold chance encounters into opportunities to have a working knowledge of someone off the bat.

“The real world is just this bizarre-o version of Facebook, and every profile is just a single photo,” Davidson said in an interview, “That version sucks.”

The app, available on the iPhone, is pretty simple. You download it, connect to Facebook and then are asked to close the app. That’s pretty much it. Once installed, the app runs in the background, checking people’s phones physically close to yours to see if they have the app too. If that person has Highlight installed, you’ll receive a notification with their profile information. This profile information includes name, photo, brief description, locations, history of places you’ve crossed paths, mutual friends and more.

“I’m completely convinced that in 10 years you’ll be able to walk into a room and know everyone’s name, all the things you have in common with them … it’ll just be like a sixth sense we’ll all have,” said Davidson.

So what about people who may use the app for bad, stalk people, or case the people they’re going to mug before doing so. Davidson believes that the benefits will outweigh the negatives. He likens the product to Facebook, a social network that holds data that touches just about every part of our lives. Having that data can seem like a vulnerability, but being able to interact socially, share your interests and connect with people digitally is enough to quell most concerns that profiles will be used inappropriately.

The kind of close-proximity connection Highlight offers already exists in other products. For instance, Color allows you to share photos with those in your immediate area, and the Nintendo DS connects you to other nearby DS’s to trade virtual goods.

Davidson explained, “With the right privacy controls, I think anyone would be willing to share some subset of information with some subset of people.”

And users do have some privacy controls, at this point, though they are limited. You can make your profile public, or available only to friends of friends. Davidson says privacy controls will evolve as people try the app and make suggestions. You can also pause the app if you’d like it to stop running while you’re in a particular place. It won’t turn back on until you open the app again.

Perhaps we’re all turning into some digital representation of ourselves. Highlight speeds up the Facebook stalking part of getting to know someone that has become somewhat customary amongst those of the information age.

“It’s not about meeting people,” he said. “It’s about having the technology to surface the meta data of people around you.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Grubwithus, the social-dining startup that helps people meet over meals in real-life, has launched an official iPhone app. The free mobile app is a promising step toward a future service that allows people to spontaneously book meals amongst themselves anytime, anywhere.

The service is already known for its “in-real-life” approach to social networking, bringing strangers together for prix fixe meals that are negotiated with partner restaurants beforehand. The social goals are very open-ended: people use the service to date, to professionally network, or to check out new eateries. It’s all up to the user.

The new app extends all the functionality of the website to the iPhone. It lets you search for and reserve meals, which you can easily pay for with a secure mobile payments system. Before you even sit down for your meal the check is split, tipped and paid. The app also carries over some of the existing social features of the website, namely chatting with friends you’ve made over past meals and viewing their profiles and meal histories.

The app is beautifully designed, with a lot of attention to detail around its wood-based zen aesthetic. iPhone app aficionados may notice Grubwithus has forgone the Apple default iPhone user interface buttons and layouts that most developers work off. Instead, it has opted for a custom-crafted look that reflects the humble, counter-intuitive take on social networking the company is going for. The company will design apps for Android and tablet users next.

I’ve tested the app and it appears fairly stable and fluid, but I haven’t had a chance to book a meal on it, though I have booked several meals through the website in the past, to great (delicious) success.

The app is sure to make the Grubwithus process smoother. In the service’s earlier days, people had to print out “reservation cards” that had directions to their meal, a brief menu overview, and their name written in giant letters. The printouts were problematic: many people didn’t print them out, and restaurants were unsure about using them to confirm guests. I personally ran into these issues at most of my meals. The app changes all that, since it handily includes all the same information.

But the app goes beyond just replicating the old reservation cards. It also adds a social layer that was lacking on the website. Under a tab called “People,” you can scroll through a feed of your friends’ activity, and will receive push notifications when those friends book meals. This solves the problem of meal discovery many people had previously reported.

Co-founder Daishin Sugano also hinted to me that the new app will feature a photo component, dipping in the waters of crowded food “sharing” and recommendation startups like Foodspotting, Nosh, Chewsy, and Forkly. The app is aware of when you’re actually in a meal, and if you open it, there’ll be a photo button allowing you to take a photo and upload it to the site. What will happen with these photos is currently unclear, but Sugano says they have plans for something “more sophisticated” than competitors.

Despite these new features, the app is really a baby step toward the larger goal of allowing people to spontaneously meet for meals anytime, anywhere. This future hyper-connected meal-matrix is foreshadowed by the company’s recently launched “Create-a-Meal” feature that lets users setup their own meals with partner restaurants (a feature that’s soon to arrive on the iPhone). And as Grubwithus partners with more and more restaurants that see the value they’re adding, users will be able to pick spots and times on-the-fly, use geo-location to find one another, pay through the already established mobile payment system, and meet for their meal.

Grubwithus has over 30,000 registered users and a growing base of restaurant partners that currently tops over 650 nationwide. It received $1.6 million in May 2011 for its first round of funding after successfully completing the Y Combinator program. The Grubwithus iPhone app is available for free at the Apple App Store here.

It’s not in the same league as Facebook or a Twitter, or even half the size of Instagram, but GetGlue’s highly-specialized social network for entertainment watchers could be on its way to superstardom.

On GetGlue, more than two million die-hard entertainment fans check-in to television shows and movies, over the web or from mobile devices, to share their enthusiasm and get rewards for their viewing behaviors. Seventy five major television networks have already taken notice, and now investors are doubling-down, placing a $12 million bet on the startup’s chances at mainstream fame.

“2011 was a year where we were doing a lot of innovation in the social TV space,” GetGlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold told VentureBeat. “With this financing, we can continue to play a market-defining role as social television goes mainstream.”

But what is social television, exactly? It’s a niche section of social networking dedicated entirely to (usually influential) entertainment enthusiasts, and the networks and brands that want to reach them.

The space started to take shape in late 2009 and early 2010 with the launch of GetGlue and several other similarly purposed services such as Philo (shutdown after being acquired by Local Response), Miso and Comcast’s Turnerfish, all of which proffer a second screen application experience for entertainment-sharing and chatter. Social television has since evolved to include network-branded applications around popular shows. And, perhaps the biggest sign of a genre-in-the-making, Yahoo acquired television-tagging application IntoNow just a few months after it launched.

Whether mainstream viewers want to take part in these back-channel behaviors is questionable. There’s more than enough evidence to support the idea. After all, a growing number of TV watchers are multitaskers who use their tablets or smartphones for additional stimulation. But it’s taken GetGlue, one of the leaders in the space, more than two years to get to two million members. We’re talking small potatoes compared to Facebook’s 800 million members or the 15 million users of photo-sharing sensation Instagram.

GetGlue’s small user base could be a bit misleading. Application users are an extremely active bunch. Altogether, they have engaged with GetGlue more than 350 million times by checking-in to content, or leaving a rating or review. And the startup saw hockey-sticky growth in check-ins in 2011 — with the exception of December — Iskold said. In November 2011 alone, GetGlue had almost 20 million check-ins.

It’s enough activity that major television networks have run upwards of 680 badge and sticker-style promotions around their shows on the service. And more than 30 networks have embedded GetGlue check-in functionality into their own second-screen applications. The startup made money in 2011 with show sponsorships, said Iskold. Big brands such as Pepsi, HTC, Coke and the Gap all sponsored GetGlue show rewards and content (usually involving the same shows that they were already sponsoring on television).

GetGlue, which released a new version of its flagship iPhone app and revamped its website Monday, will focus its 2012 road map on personalizing the entertainment guide for the user, introducing more supplemental show content and working to allow networks to better customize their experience, Iskold said.

So could this be the breakout year for social television and GetGlue? We’ll be watching (pun intended).

GetGlue’s $12 million round of financing was led by New York-based RHO Ventures. Investors in the startup’s previous $6 million Series C round — Time Warner, RE Ventures and Union Ventures — all re-upped in the new round.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Travel search site Kayak is releasing a new unified iPad and iPhone app today, replacing its standalone iPad app and adding a sleek itinerary-consolidation feature that seems poised to take on TripIt.

This is actually a major update that will turn Kayak‘s free iPhone app into a unified app optimized for all iOS devices, including the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. The two-year-old standalone iPad app will be phased out, which means Kayak faces the tricky task of making sure all of its users switch to the new app.

The updated Kayak iOS app will introduce quite a few new features to iPad users. The design has been simplified, the search interface updated, and iPad users can finally search for rental cars. For those who actually book trips through the Kayak apps, there’s a great new autofill feature that makes it much easier to complete reservations. In the app’s settings, you can fill out a form with all of your information, such as name, address, phone number, email and date of birth — almost everything but credit card information. When you go to book a flight, car or hotel, the third-party site opens within the Kayak app and the information is automatically populated, cutting down drastically on painful iOS-keyboard time.

The coolest part of the update is the Trips feature. While not new — it was on Kayak.com and there was a read-only version on the iPhone app — the feature finally gets to shine on the unified app. “It’s exactly what TripIt is, but free and better,” Bill O’Donnell, Kayak’s chief architect, said in an interview. Like TripIt, the Trips feature consolidates all of your travel details in one place that can be accessed from any of your iOS devices or through the Kayak site.

The tool isn’t just for travel booked through Kayak; it handles restaurant reservations and other miscellaneous bookings too. Anything you forward to the Trips email address from your registered email is added to the itinerary. “You can write your hotel confirmation number on a cocktail napkin, take a picture and sent it to us, and we’ll add it to your trip,” said O’Donnell.

The company is also trying out a new feature that lets you book directly through Kayak instead of being taken to a third-party site. So far, only select hotels can be reserved directly through Kayak, but the company hopes to roll out the feature to other travel options soon.

The new app is fast and well-designed, and could generate some much needed positive press for Kayak. Earlier this month, Kayak pulled its advertising from TLC’s “All-American Muslim” reality show along with Lowes. The company denied it was bowing to pressure from conservatives, glibly saying in a statement, “the show sucked.”

Here are some screens of the consolidated app running on an iPad:

Building on the success of its iPad app, Zite is rolling out a new iPhone-optimized version of its personalized news app today.

Zite lets you build a custom digital magazine by pulling in shared links from bookmarking and social sites, such as Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious and Read It Later. It then builds a personalized selection of articles based on activity from your social profiles. Unlike most of its competitors, Zite learns your reading habits by giving you voting buttons for each piece of content. The idea is to give you more of what you actually want to see without having to disregard all the boring and/or uninteresting stuff.

“A lot of services, like Twitter (for example), suffer from giving you too much information if you follow lots of sources or not enough if you follow just a few,” Zite CEO Mark Johnson told VentureBeat. “I call it the Goldilocks Problem. It’s either too much or not enough.” Logically, that would make Zite the just right amount of information, according to the classic fairy tale story.

Initially, I assumed many of the user interface elements from Zite’s iPad app would get lost in translation of the iPhone’s smaller screen, but that isn’t the case. The experience of reading news is just as enjoyable, especially during idle moments throughout the day (standing in line, boring meetings, waiting for the bus, etc.).

The biggest change in the iPhone version is the app’s navigation. Since side bars aren’t practical for the smaller screen, the news sections are displayed at the top. Switching between news sections is done by swiping the section name horizontally, which is nice if you only have one hand free. Articles from each section are arranged in a vertical stack with thumbnails that help break up the text.

Earlier this week, Zite competitor Flipboard also launched an iPhone version of its popular iPad app. The launch was so successful that it actually crashed the Flipboard service for a time. Clearly, people like the idea of a customized digital magazine even if it’s a fraction of the size. Johnson said that isn’t much of a surprise, as a Zite iPhone app was the most requested feature from users.

One thing you won’t find in both the iPhone and iPad Zite apps is advertising. The company does have plans to integrate advertising, but not until the ad spots are useful/relevant to the user and don’t distract from the overall experience, Johnson said. However, he is optimistic about generating revenue through branded channels, which aggregate news related to the brand’s expertise and help promote its own blog posts. The Zite recently launched its first branded channel partnership with health and fitness retailer Lululemon. The channel is also ad-free and requires opting-in to see its curated content.

Founded in March 2011, the San Francisco-based company was acquired in August by broadcast news organization CNN for over $20 million . Zite faces a growing number of competitors, including Flipboard, Editions by AOL, Yahoo’s unreleased Livestand and recently launched Google Currents.

[iPhone app screenshots via Zite]

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud storage company Box updated its iPhone and iPad apps today, realizing that the world outside the office is no longer an oyster, but a giant second office.

Box has seen people using mobile devices to access the company’s file storage grow 30 times in the last year, and they blame that increase on the mobile workforce. Our whole culture around communication has changed. Once upon a time, we called house and work landlines and happily left voice messages if the person was unavailable. Now we’re smash-guitars-against-the-wall-mad when someone doesn’t pick up their cell phone. Don’t even get me started if you’ve tried them twice with no success. It’s a game of convenience, which businesspeople of all kinds are taking advantage of, be it while traveling or simply to check that presentation before they’ve tossed back the comforter.

“More businesses are helping their employees work effectively from the road and across the globe, especially considering nearly 60% of all corporate employees access content outside the office with their mobile phones or tablets,” the company said in a statement.

Over a million people have already downloaded Box’s apps, so the company is adding new tricks to the bag. Users are going to be able to upload photos and videos to Box and create folders for them on the go. Sure, you could use this to snap some cool photos of the conference floor at Le Web, or share a pretty sunset from your remote meeting, but there are very functional purposes to this feature. Box uses the example of a construction site that needs to send pictures of its progress back to headquarters. It could also come in handy for the small business looking for its second office and wanting to share pictures of the search.

Being able to create folders on the go keeps your photos organized and not floating around your Box storage without purpose. Also included in the app updates is a search function, so you can find the folders or individual files you just organized.

Lastly, you will be able to favorite folders on the go. To favorite a folder or file is to save its contents directly to your phone, so you can access it without internet connectivity. This comes in handy for businesspeople who want to review an announcement on the go, or prepare for a talk when they know they’re going to be stuck in some long tunnels.

The iPhone and iPad apps can be found here. They’re free, though you will need a Box account to use them.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Professional social network LinkedIn launched a new version of its CardMunch application for the iPhone today, which promises to help you make sense of all the people you meet during networking events.

The app allows users to take a photo of paper business cards collected from new and potential contacts. It then converts the information on the card into digital, usable text. The updated iPhone app actually takes that information and matches it with a person’s LinkedIn profile — giving you access to a their common connections, work history, education and more.

The app’s navigation has also been overhauled and split into three main screens: a card capture screen allowing you to snap a photo of a business card, a touchscreen-optimized contact list that mimics a virtual Rolodex, and a screen for each of your contact’s details and LinkedIn profiles.

CardMunch still allows for you to add business card information (and now LinkedIn info) to your iPhone address book. However, the new version also lets you add notes below each of the business cards scanned in while you wait for the card to get translated.

This is the first major upgrade of CardMunch since LinkedIn purchased the company in January 2011 for an undisclosed amount.

The move certainly makes sense for LinkedIn because it makes the company’s social network more valuable where it counts the most — in a real life business setting, where people are exchanging contact information and shaking hands.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Salesforce has revealed a new web-based application called Do.com that combines task management with social features to create a smart way to get things done on your own and in groups.

Several other companies have tried and failed to make task management successful (there’s fresh competition from former Facebook staffers with Asana), so it’s telling to see Salesforce, which is known for its enterprise apps, trying to take a stab in this space. This suggests companies continue to believe there’s a huge market in helping people manage online tasks — and that no one has cracked the nut yet.

Do.com captures the laid-back style of an upstart web application with a simple interface and intelligent HTML5 deployment, but it’s also built with Salesforce’s emphasis on reliability, accessibility and security. It was built on top of Heroku’s cloud app platform and programmed in Ruby on Rails, offers an open API for developers, and has received input from some of Salesforce’s brightest team members.

“Even though Do.com is owned by Salesforce, we think of ourselves like a startup,” Salesforce Senior VP Sean Whiteley told VentureBeat. “We’re a separate team of 14 people, we have our own code base and we’re even in a different building.”

Do.com is an anomaly inside of the Salesforce family for another reason — it’s the first non-enterprise offering the company has ever released. Unlike Chatter, Salesforce’s enterprise social networking product, Do.com app is meant to be used by small businesses and small groups who need to collaborate. By having several people see uncompleted tasks and projects, there’s more pressure to get the work done in a timely fashion.

Because Do.com was programmed using HTML5, it runs in any browser and works just fine on the Flash-less Apple iPad as well as Android tablets like Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. For smartphones, the Do.com team has created a native iPhone app, but it does not yet have an Android app. The team expects an Android app to be ready some time next year.

Do.com is based on popular social productivity app Manymoon, an app Salesforce.com acquired back in February. Outside of emulating Manymoon’s interface, Do.com also followed its predecessor by including a Gmail gadget that makes it easy to assign tasks through e-mail. For example, send a short e-mail to task@do.com and it will automatically detect your address and add an entry. Outside of Gmail functions, Do.com has been programmed to work with Google Apps, Salesforce and Dropbox to make tasks jive with tools your team already knows.

“The goal was to create an app that fits into the applications you already use,” Whiteley said.

Do.com has been in private beta testing thus far, but now the team wants to open its beta to more participants. It has extended an invitation for the first 200 VentureBeat readers that sign up using a select link to give it a spin. Go to the link https://www.do.com/users/sign_up and enter the code “DONKISCHESPOZ” to take part. Those who get in will also get 5 invites of their own so they can bring other people into the app.

“It’s meant to be used with other people,” Whiteley said. “Many times it’s more about fostering a conversation instead of just checking things off a list.”

Do.com will be more widely available in the coming months after it launches publicly. The app is available in several app stores, including the Apple App Store, Android Marketplace, Chrome Web Store, Salesforce AppExchange and LinkedIn Applications. It is currently free, but it will add premium paid features next year. Whiteley said elements like changing the way it looks, adding new fields and deeper administration tools are being explored as potential premium features.

More photos of Do.com’s interface on iPad, in browser and on the iPhone can be viewed below:

CloudBeat 2011 takes place November 30 – December 1 at Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. These case studies will highlight the core components of the cloud revolution: security, collaboration, analytics, mobile usage, increased productivity, and integration. Join over 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Tickets are limited!

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A new food-focused app called Forkly brings the discovery of delicious dishes to center stage — and it’s a beautiful stage, indeed. The app, which is currently on the iPhone but coming soon to Android, is the latest venture from Brady Becker and Martin May, formerly known as the founders of location-based service Brightkite.

Becker’s goal in creating Forkly is to give foodies a way to take pictures of good meals, describe specific items they truly love, rate dishes and share their favorite food finds on social networks. As it gathers this data, Forkly maps out a taste graph for each user and makes recommendations on what other dishes and drinks they should try; this feature is the core of what makes Forkly unique.

Also interesting is the Want button. You can use the app to “want” items at restaurants, and when you’re near one of the locations relevant to your “want” list, the app will remind you to pop in and try that dish you’ve been craving.

Here’s a brief demo showing off some of the app’s features:

Competitors in the space abound, from the already popular Foodspotting to the newly launched Spoondate. Both of these services also put a focus on identifying, recommending and trying specific dishes at great local restaurants.

“For apps like Foodspotting, the photo is the main focus,” Becker told VentureBeat. “In Forkly, the photos are optional; we’re all about capturing your tastes and making use of those opinions. By understanding your likes and dislikes, Forkly helps you discover new places and will show you what’s good once you’re there.”

The app also allows top users to become influencers for specific items and places. Forkly is building out tools for bloggers (to embed and share their food adventures), brands (to tout their best-loved products) and restaurants (to connect with repeat patrons and find new ones).

One of the startup’s initial restaurant partners is Cholon Restaurant in Denver. “We’re using the Forkly API to power their online menu, complete with official photos,” said Becker.

“For brand partners like GreatDivide Brewery,” he continued, “we set them up with official photos and descriptions of their offerings. We’re using taste and influence information to inform some early personalized promotion strategies.”

Both restaurants and food and beverage brands will soon get a Forkly-powered a set of tools “to help them understand those who draws the most influence, track it through the social graph and allow them to market where it counts the most,” Becker said, hinting that this suite of tools would be the backbone of Forkly’s revenue model.

Becker and May’s last app, though no longer widely considered a contender for the lion’s share of the location based social network market, was still a success by Silicon Valley standards. Brightkite was launched in 2007 as a Boulder-based TechStars company, and it exited in 2009 with an acquisition by Limbo. Altogether, the company took around $1.5 million before its sale. Brightkite was briefly headquartered in Burlingame, Calif., but the team has relocated back to Colorado, Colo. to work on Forkly.

The Brightkite experience informed some of what Becker and May are doing with Forkly. “During Brightkite, we did notice a plethora of food and drink photos floating by in the stream around meal times. I think noticing this had some influence on this project…

“The experience of launching a product, it’s ridiculously hard work, but we’re hooked. It feels good to launch a new app.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cats. The iPhone haz them.

The Cheezburger Network, a group of websites highlighting silly picture, has launched its first iPhone application, porting thousands of ridiculous photos from its array of sites onto the iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen.

The application lets iPhone owners quickly browse through images from sites on the Cheezburger network.  It does the job — that is, getting images of stupid cats and other animals to an iPhone user as quickly as possible — pretty well. But the app is a little dodgy at first (it crashed a few times), and sometimes the animations aren’t all that smooth. The buttons for the app also do not give any indication that the user is pressing the button, such as changing color or shape, which feels a bit weird.

As with the main site, users can share photos and videos they like over Twitter, email and Facebook with a few swipes and button presses. The app also delivers users to the LOLmart, an online store that features merchandise with LOLcat photos. There isn’t a native store for the app, so it just takes users to the main web page, not a version optimized for mobile devices.

The Cheezburger Network is known for bringing pictures of “LOLcats,” an Internet meme involving ridiculous captions for various cat photos, into mainstream popularity. The captions are usually intentionally misspelled and come across as some kind of pidgin. The meme was popular on image-hosting sites like 4chan before the Cheezburger network came into being.

The Cheezburger Network recently bought meme encyclopedia Know Your Meme from Rocketboom, the site’s original owner, to serve as a complement to its current meme repository called Memebase. That site is much more like I Can Has Cheezburger, the company’s flagship site, in that it simply hosts memes rather than documenting the creation and evolution of each meme. It was reportedly a seven-figure deal, though no exact financial details were disclosed.

Ben Huh started the company in September 2007. The Seattle-based startup has been profitable since them and now attracts 16.5 million monthly visitors adding up to 375 million pageviews and 110 million video views. The company recently raised $30 million from Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, Madrona Venture Group and SoftBank Capital.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive mobile trends at our fourth annual MobileBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the rise of 4G and how it delivers the promise of true mobile computing. We’re also accepting entries for our mobile startup competition at the show. MobileBeat is co-located with our GamesBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.

Somewhat reminiscent of Twitter’s “promoted trends”, the startup will now enable brands to show up in a “Featured” tab on its iPhone and Android applications, where fans will be able to create groups under those featured brands and opt in to receive news, offers, contests, and reminders. Case-in-point: my friends and I are planning to attend the Coachella music festival, so we create a group for us under Coachella’s featured group.

These brands, which range from TV shows like MTV’s “America’s Best Dance Crew” to the singer Bon Jovi, as well as the Bonaroo and Coachella music festivals, are essentially partnering with GroupMe as advertisers. Since fans opt in to the branded groups and generate conversations and banter about the brands, it could be quite an appealing option for brand marketers .

GroupMe tested out something similar at the SXSW conference earlier in the year: It let conference attendees create groups and receive updates from that group. The service was actually one of the most talked about among a slew of messaging services at the conference. Now, it’s looking to use the same concept to crystallize a business model — the earliest of its contemporaries to try to do so. Will this move be enough to get the big bucks coming in?

Bizness Apps, a self-service tool for creating simple iPhone apps, today announced at DEMO Spring 2011 that users will be able to simultaneously create apps for both iPhone and Android using the company’s service.

The company, which focuses on small businesses, allows users to easily create, edit and manage an app online without any programming knowledge. Users can create an account, customize the app based on the businesses information and determine any features it may want, which may include GPS, Facebook and Twitter sharing, messaging, check in coupons, event calendars or an information tab.

Bizness Apps isn’t the only ones looking to create apps for businesses. The company notes that Mobile Roadie and SwebApps are its main competitors. Though Bizness Apps may have an advantage as it only charges $39 a month for its service with no set-up fee, compared to the others which range from $29-$100 per month and $400 plus in set-up fees.

The Chico, California-based company, founded in 2010, has raised an undisclosed angel round, though cofounder and chief executive Andrew Gazdecki notes it was under $500,000. The company has created more than 500 iPhone apps to date.

This is an attempt to snare an audience for a sophisticated simulation experience by creating a lighthearted and entertaining lightweight app. That’s a common strategy for a lot of brands trying to make a living in the digital online world.

Avatars are virtual characters. In Blue Mars, you can create these 3D animated avatars with a great deal of realism. The Honolulu company is using the mobile iPhone app as a way to market its larger virtual world, which resembles the Second Life virtual world but has much more high-end 3D graphics.

With Blue Mars Mobile, you can use the same avatar in the iPhone app as the one you can create in virtual world.

Blue Mars launched its open beta in October, 2009 and began selling virtual land to third-party developers in January 2010. The company was founded in 2006 by Henk Rogers, who introduced Tetris to the world, and Kazuyuki Hashimoto, former chief technology officer of Squaresoft and former vice president at Electronic Arts.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The deluge of information rushing by on Twitter may get a little less intimidating.

Brizzly, the social media client from the team behind Google Reader, just launched a wiki-style guide to Twitter trending topics that stays long after hot stories fade from view. Each trending topic will get its own guide page that is a permanent source for up-to-date information where anybody can see the latest about a topic. Brizzly users can edit these pages to add context or the freshest news.

It’s a pretty interesting concept with lots of implications for journalism, if Brizzly can push enough users to participate and curate the pages. If the company is successful in engaging its community, it may have a much more diverse group of editors than Wikipedia in the long run — especially since the encyclopedia has become more exclusive. Brizzly was among the first companies that allowed regular users to add explanations for why certain keywords had sudden bursts of mentions on the microblogging network.

The company has made a bet on a wiki-style approach to curating information on Twitter by acquiring WikiRank, a visualization web app based on Wikipedia data, from Small Batch. Brizzly CEO Jason Shellen says the company will be integrating Wikirank technology into the Brizzly Guide over the coming months.

Last but not least, the company launched an iPhone app today that offers all the standard features: support for multiple Twitter accounts, lists, geolocation, the ability to upload photos, retweets and custom tabs. The special extras unique to the app are the Brizzly Guide and the ability to temporarily mute people you follow.