Posts Tagged ‘MediaBeat’
Week in review: Digg founder admits mistakes
Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
— Digg, the pioneering social-news site that lets users vote on top headlines, began to lose momentum during the recession because it pulled engineers from designing new features to improving revenue, founder Kevin Rose said Wednesday.
— Apple tipped its hand on future iPad designs by filing for patents in China.
— Digg is trying to work its way out of the traffic hole it created with its botched redesign attempt. This week it announced the return of several popular features from its previous version.
— Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search and user experience, talked about how she sees Facebook and about whether or not it’s a competitor.
— Research in Motion founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis hit the stage at RIM’s BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, where he unveiled the company’s long-awaited tablet — the BlackBerry Playbook.
And here are five more posts we think are important, thought-provoking, or fun:
— Jajah, the internet phone company that was snapped up by Spanish telecom giant Telefonica for $207 million, is declaring war on calling cards.
— Vinod Khosla, dynamic founder of Khosla Ventures, said, “You can reduce more carbon by painting your roof white than you can by buying a Prius.”
— How can you tell when a CEO is lying? It turns out that it’s slightly more complicated than monitoring the movement of their lips.
— AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong announced that he has acquired popular tech blog TechCrunch.
— For Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the next step in technology is the same that it has always been — augmenting humanity to handle information that a human brain couldn’t otherwise keep up with, and just make things work.
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Flash app platform Sprout reinvents itself as AdVine ad platform
, a San Francisco startup that first launched as a platform for building Flash applications, has been refocusing its technology on ad-creation. In case the shift wasn’t clear, Sprout signaled the new focus today by relaunching its flagship product under the name .
One of AdVine’s big attractions is the fact that it creates ads that can display both the Flash or HTML5 formats. Those ads will use Flash on Web browsers, then they’ll play in HTML5 on smartphones that don’t support Flash. Sprout’s interface has been compared to Adobe’s design program Photoshop, and it’s supposed to make the ad creation process quick and easy for designers. The should help with this too.
Adam Taisch, the company’s vice president of business development, said Sprout is on a two-week development cycle, leading to a constant flow of new features. Just in the last few weeks, Sprout has added click-to-call and click-to-text options in the ads, he said.
Designers can use AdVine to create mobile ads that are compatible with Apple’s iAd format. In the demo video below, a demonstrator uses AdVine to assemble an iAd for the movie Tron: Legacy and also shows what it’s like to interact with the ad.
Sprout launched at the conference now co-produced by VentureBeat.
Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at . Startups and big companies alike are encouraged to submit their discovery tactics to our . Early bird discounts are available until September 22. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, .
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Sprout blossoms into the AdVine ad platform
, a San Francisco startup that first launched as a platform for building Flash applications, has been refocusing its technology on ad-creation. In case the shift wasn’t clear, Sprout signaled the new focus today by relaunching its flagship product under the name .
One of AdVine’s big attractions is the fact that it creates ads that can display both the Flash or HTML5 formats. Those ads will use Flash on Web browsers, then they’ll play in HTML5 on smartphones that don’t support Flash. Sprout’s interface has been compared to Adobe’s design program Photoshop, and it’s supposed to make the ad creation process quick and easy for designers. The should help with this too.
Adam Taisch, the company’s vice president of business development, said Sprout is on a two-week development cycle, leading to a constant flow of new features. Just in the last few weeks, Sprout has added click-to-call and click-to-text options in the ads, he said.
Designers can use AdVine to create mobile ads that are compatible with Apple’s iAd format. In the demo video below, a demonstrator uses AdVine to assemble an iAd for the movie Tron: Legacy, and also shows what it’s like to interact with the ad.
Sprout launched at the conference now co-produced by VentureBeat.
Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at . Startups and big companies alike are encouraged to submit their discovery tactics to our . Early bird discounts are available until September 22. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, .
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Kno shows off its new textbook tablet (video)
, a startup designing a tablet computer for students, today announced a cheap, single-screen model.
The Santa Clara, Calif. company doesn’t have any devices available yet, but it already announced a dual-screen tablet. The idea is that you could read a book on one screen, then take notes or do other work on the other screen. The single-screen version will be more affordable, said co-founder and chief executive Osman Rashid (who also co-founded ). Among other things, the lower pricing might make more sense for students who aren’t in college yet.
Both the single- and double-screen models should be available before the end of the year, Rashid said. Even if they were built for the double-screen tablets, all the books and apps need to work on a single screen, so content should be accessible on both devices without extra work from the developer.
Rashid demonstrated the single-screen tablet for me backstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco today, and you can watch the demo below.
from Andreessen Horowitz and others.
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At last, Justin.tv users can broadcast live video from their iPhones
Over the past few months, live video startup has been inching towards bringing live video broadcasting capabilities to the iPhone. In March, it . Two weeks ago, it with broadcasting capabilities. And today, it’s releasing version 2.0 of the iPhone app — finally with broadcasting features of its own.
Once it became technically possible, live broadcasting from your phone seemed like an inevitable next step for video startups, since it frees them from complicated camera setups (like the Ustream rig I lugged around at the Consumer Electronics Show in January) or the computer webcams that most people use. Michael Siebel, chief executive of San Francisco-based Justin.tv, said mobile broadcasting should dramatically expand the livestreaming audience. The Android application is already catching on fast, with 20 percent of Justin.tv’s broadcasters using it within the first two weeks. That should only grow with time and the release of the iPhone app.
I stopped by the Justin.tv office last month to get a preview of both apps. It seemed like the team had taken a lot of care to build a video experience that was simple to use while also incorporating plenty of features and interactivity. That’s particularly important for grabbing new users, since there are already livestreaming iPhone apps on the market. Justin.tv said that unlike competitors Ustream and Qik, its application can use the iPhone 4’s front-facing camera, allows users to control the phone’s camera flash, hardware-encodes the video, and allows broadcasters to chat with their viewers from within the app.
Justin.tv also said it has a higher frame rate than competing apps, as you can see at the end of the demo video below — that avoids the stuttering, slideshow-quality footage that you see in some videos. I haven’t experimented with the app too much, but the video quality I saw in my demo seemed to match the quality in the video below.
The company is backed by Alsop Louie Partners, Tim Draper, and incubator Y Combinator. You can .
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Greystripe’s mobile ads break free from their app prison
As the mobile advertising industry grows, most of the attention has focused on advertising inside applications, not on mobile websites. Since the iPhone’s enormous app ecosystem is one of its main draws, it’s no surprise that , but other ad networks have taken a similar route. Mobile ad startup was all about apps, until today.
Now, the San Francisco startup is launching a new feature called RevMax for Mobile Web. With it, mobile website publishers can run ads that have all the slickness and interactivity of the Greystripe ads that run in native applications. Those ads use the company’s Lightning Technology, which takes ads created in Adobe’s Flash format and converts them so they work on non-Flash devices like the iPhone.
Chief executive Michael Chang said that until now, the advertising that you’ll find on most mobile websites is just a dinky little banner. By making the ads bigger and more prominent, and incorporating richer media, Greystripe can dramatically increase the clickthrough rates, he said. The company already tested the feature with select publishers, including the IAC-owned sites CollegeHumor.com, Dictionary.com, and Evite.com. The tests showed that smaller banner ads saw average clickthrough rates of 0.56 percent, while a large, rich media ad saw a clickthrough rate of 1.31 percent.
This move seems to fit into recent debates about for consuming content on smartphones. But Chang said Greystripe isn’t choosing one over the other. For publishers like IAC, there are some properties that make more sense as apps, and others than make sense as websites. With Greystripe, you can make money either way, or through a combination of the two. And the brand advertisers that Greystripe works with care mainly about reaching a specific audience, regardless of which phone they’re using, or whether it’s in an app versus the mobile browser.
“The trend we’re seeing is a need to reduce fragmentation,” Chang said.
Greystripe has raised $17.6 million in four rounds of funding, most recently $2 million from Peacock Equity. It says it serves ads in more than 2,500 applications, with “a number of developers” () earning more than $100,000 per month from their ads.
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DEMO: Yapper makes it easy for media publishers to build mobile apps
SachManya is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.
, a maker of mobile publishing tools, helps media companies create applications without writing any code. The startup is launching version 2.0 of its mobile app platform, called , today at DEMO.
Using Yapper, short for Your App Maker, publishers of books, magazines, and newspapers can build a mobile app in just 30 minutes with a visual tool that shows what the app will look like as it’s created. The first version of Yapper focused primarily on republishing RSS feeds as iPhone apps, but Yapper 2.0 allows publishers to build apps for iPhone, iPad, Android devices, and BlackBerrys.
With Yapper 2.0, users can also integrate new app features such as in-app purchases of digital content, push notifications, and user-generated content. Such content is produced through , SachManya’s first product, a citizen journalism platform that allows users to post their own stories and photos online.
Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Yapper’s early customers include Palo Alto Online, which is part of Embarcadero Media, and the West Seattle Herald.
Native iPhone apps start at $499, with additional fees for features like user-generated content and push notifications. Creating the same app for Android costs an additional $399. SachManya CEO Chintu Parikh explained that apps for each mobile device have a separate price because Yapper builds each app in its native language, a requirement of some mobile-device platform makers.
Founded in 2009, SachManya is currently in conversation with potential investors.
Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at . Startups and big companies alike should consider entering our . Early bird discounts are available until September 15. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, .
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