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TechCrunch (10 unread)

September 03, 2010
5:38
YC-Funded Cloudant Launches Its NoSQL Cloud Database Platform
» TechCrunch

YCombinator-funded Cloudant, a database platform built around Apache’s open source CouchDB framework, officially launches after three years of hard work.

Cloud-based like Cloudera and Amazon Web Services and part of the NoSQL movement, Cloudant scales your database on the CloudDB framework but also provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and support so “You don’t have to think a lot up front about what your database is going to look like.”

Going up against Goliaths like Oracle, Cloudant focuses on scalability, flexibility, and high availability. Its method of data storage is ideal in any situation in which data is generated in a distributed way, such as with sensor networks, web servers, and mobile device service, in essence “small companies with big data.”

Cloudant was founded by MIT Physics PhDs Alan Hoffman, Adam Kocoloski, and Mike Miller and recently received a seed round of $1 million dollars from Avalon Ventures.

The company currently has has 1,300 users and 10 paying customers and hopes to be the leading provider of CloudDB moving forward. Says founder Mike Miller about future plans, “There will be some huge changes in what web stacks will look like and we want to remain poised to be the cloud service that underlies those technologies.”

CrunchBase Information CloudantInformation provided by CrunchBase
5:25
Important: Gmail Priority Inbox Should Now Be Available To All
» TechCrunch

It’s hard to remember a product I’ve become so dependent on quicker than Gmail’s new Priority Inbox. I’m so addicted, that the few times I’ve accidentally clicked on the old “regular” Inbox view in the past week have really annoyed me. So much so that I actually moved that view into my “more” drop down (you can drag any sidebar item in there). And now I have good news: you can all share in this addiction.

While it began rolling out to users on Monday, Google is now saying that Priority Inbox should be available to all users (including Google Apps users) today. Look for the “New! Priority Inbox” message in red in the top right corner of your Gmail account to activate it. There’s a slight learning curve with it, so you’ll still probably want to watch Google’s official video. But once you get started, it’s unlikely that you’ll go back.

Overwhelmingly, the people I’ve talked to since the feature started rolling out on Monday are also now addicted to the feature. But some seem deadest against it, instead preferring to use their own filters to better tailor their mail consumption. I’m a big filter user myself, but I simply could no longer keep up with the amount of message coming into my inbox — I needed someone, or something to sort it for me. This isn’t a longterm solution for the email problem, but it will work for now.
Have you been using Priority Inbox this past week? Tweet your thoughts: Tweet CrunchBase Information GmailInformation provided by CrunchBase
3:10
Six Apart’s Vox Heads To DeadPool
» TechCrunch

When Six Apart launched Vox, a blogging/social network platform with strict privacy controls, in 2006, investor David Hornik had high hopes. Vox is an “amazing blogging platform,” he said, because “Finally I have a place where I can post pictures and video of my kids without concern about who is looking at them.”

Vox will be shut down on September 20, says Six Apart.

What they’re not saying is why. Part of it is likely cleanup for a merger that the company continues to flatly deny – CEO Chris Alden will have fun explaining his way out of that one if it actually happens.

But it’s also that Vox is just pretty much a ghost town. The site has just 5.7 million monthly uniques, says Comscore. And if you really want to show family pictures to your friends, you’ll probably make the effort to just wade through Facebook’s privacy settings quagmire. As for private blogging, well, it just isn’t all that SEO friendly. WordPress ate their lunch, and they do private blogs, too.

We’ve put Vox into the TechCrunch DeadPool.
2:09
How Tagged Found A 100 Million User Path Post Facebookocalypse (Video)
» TechCrunch

Heard of Tagged? Back in 2005 it was a teenager-only social network, catering primarily to U.S. high school students as Facebook charged through the college crowds. By 2007 they were profitable and worth over $100 million.

Just one problem though. Facebook eventually started letting high school students in, and then everyone else. Tagged responded by opening up to everyone, too. But by mid 2007, CEO Greg Tseng tells me, Tagged knew it was in trouble.

“Facebook beat us,” he said. “We were just another social network…but not in the top five.”

So Tseng and team decided to reach out to users and ask them what they wanted. “The most important thing we learned was that people were using our site to meet new people.”

Bingo! Facebook isn’t big on helping you meet new people. You can search by name, and you can click on friends of friends, but you can’t just find new people you aren’t already connected to via someone else. At Tagged, people were using filtered search to meet people. For sharing activities, dating, or whatever.

“We focused on being the best place to meet new people for any social reason,” Tseng tells me.

Dating is obviously a big part of this. Facebook doesn’t have dating profiles. And there’s a stigma associated with Match.com and other dating sites, at least for some people. But on Tagged people can meet and date or engage in other activities. “Going to Tagged is like going to a bar with friends, and you will probably meet new people. Going to Match.com is link going to a singles event, and there’s a stigma with that.”

Users definitely agree. In 2007 Tagged had 20 million active users. Today they’ve hit 100 million. 1/3 to 1/4 visit the site each month and the site has 5 billion monthly page views.

And they’re spending money. Virtual gifts. VIP accounts that let you do things like see who’s viewing your profile for $20/month. Revenue has grown to $30+ million, and Inc. named them one of the 500 fastest growing companies two weeks ago. 2011 revenue should be $50+ million, says Tseng.
CrunchBase Information Tagged Greg TsengInformation provided by CrunchBase
0:48
Visual Website Optimizer: Another Way To Run A/B Tests On Your Site
» TechCrunch

A/B testing, which entails running multiple versions of a site at once and tracking which one performs best with users, is a key part of launching a new version of any website.Visual Website Optimizer, which I’ll just call VWO from here on out, helps users manage this often complex process. The service shares some similiarities with a Y Combinator-funded startup called Optimizely, which launched in July.

Among some of VWO’s features are multivariate testing (you can adjust more than one item on your site and VWO will run them in various combinations to determine which ones have a positive effect), heatmaps showing off where users are clicking (which are useful for visualizing where your visitors are clicking for different variations of a site), and split URL tests, which gives you the option to redirect
traffic to two alternate versions of your website.

The site also has WordPress, Drupal and Google Analytics plugins, and allows testing of pages which are behind login/signup wall and enables segmentation and running targeted tests (say, for example,
you want to test only new visitors who came to your site searching for ‘Techcrunch’.

Customers can use VWO’s API to integrate the data and management into their own dashboards. And VWO will track conversions across different domains via third party cookies, send email notifications of test results, and will send automatic screenshot generations of variations for archiving and reporting,

The bootstrapped startup is also seeing significant growth in traffic handles by its severs; its servers are now handing 540 million pageviews per month, a 500 percent increase in month-to-month traffic.
And VWO’s platform is being used by a number of well known companies including Microsoft, RackSpace and Vendio.
CrunchBase Information Visual Website OptimizerInformation provided by CrunchBase
0:35
Twitter For iPhone Push Notifications Are Being Internally Tested; Rolling Out Soon
» TechCrunch

To many users, Twitter for iPhone (the artist formerly known as Tweetie) is perhaps the perfect Twitter client (though I’d argue that the new Twitter for iPad is right there with it). But the one thing it has been lacking and that users knock it for is the lack of Push Notifications. Well, good news. They’re coming. Soon.

Twitter is currently internally testing the feature, we’ve confirmed. Interestingly enough, we learned of its existence when the latest version of the app went out yesterday (the universal binary that included Twitter for iPad). It appears that users who have iOS 4.1 installed (which just hit Gold Master for developers, but won’t be official out until next week) get the option to enable Push Notifications for Twitter. They don’t appear to be working yet, but the feature is definitely there.

Here’s Twitter’s statement on the matter:

We’ve been testing push notifications internally. When we launched Twitter for iPad, there was a configuration error that caused us to offer push messages to a small set of users. We’ve stopped sending push messages, but users may see an option to turn on push until we release an updated version of the app. So, push isn’t ready yet but we look forward to rolling this out soon.

I’ve asked Twitter to clarify what exactly is getting pushed. I assume DMs and @replies are two options, but it will be interesting if search items or specific lists are options as well. Twitter hasn’t gotten back to me on that just yet.

Currently, a few third-party apps enable Push Notifications for Twitter, notably, Boxcar and Notifo (via Push.ly).

[thanks Nick]
CrunchBase Information Twitter iPhoneInformation provided by CrunchBase
0:34
Notifo for iPhone Gets Free User-to-User Messaging, Real Time Twitter Notifications
» TechCrunch

Last time we wrote about Notifo, we called it a “simple mobile notifications platform for anything” — and really, that’s probably the best way to describe it. Take your iPhone, install the Notifo app, hook it up to your favorite services (like Twitter, or GitHub) or any of the “Projects” (read: plugins, like Growl alert forwarding, or Chrome-to-Notifo ), and bam! You’ve got push notifications coming down to your iPhone from just about anything you could imagine.

All that notification sending takes two things: users to send the messages to, and a message pushing backend to handle all the heavy lifting — the same two things, as it just so happens, that one would need to create a basic instant messaging service. And so they have.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
September 02, 2010
22:37
Twitter Now Over 145 Million Users, Almost 300,000 Apps
» TechCrunch
When I read Twitter CEO Evan Williams post tonight about the state of Twitter from a mobile perspective, the first thing that jumped out at me what that Twitter for Android, an app Twitter worked hard on, isn’t even in the top 10 most-used apps for the service. But Williams also used the post to whip out some impressive numbers. Chief among them: Twitter now has over 145 million registered users (though presumably less than 150 million, or he would have said that). And there are now nearly 300,000 registered apps in the Twitter ecosystem.

The latter number above is technically the number of registered OAuth apps in the ecosystem (and includes multiple instances of some apps). Twitter made the switch over from basic authentication to OAuth a few days ago, leaving behind some apps, such as the old Tweetie (which was reborn as Twitter for iPhone). Williams says this number of registered apps has tripled since their Chirp conference — which was only this past April.

Other big numbers thrown out there by Williams:
- Mobile users have jumped 62% since mid-April
- 16% of all new users to Twitter now start on mobile (it was 5% before Twitter started doing branded mobile clients)
- 46% of active users use some sort of mobile Twitter experience
- 78% of people who interact with Twitter still do so through twitter.com — though that number includes people who use more than one app
- m.twitter.com is the second most-used Twitter interface at 14%
- SMS and Twitter for iPhone are tied at 8%
Lastly, he throws in that Twitter’s Promoted Products (read: their first big monetization pitch) has “exceeded our expectations.” No word on if that means Twitter has turned a profit, but that seems pretty unlikely. Still, revenues are undoubtedly growing.

CrunchBase InformationTwitterInformation provided by CrunchBase
22:06
Um, Where’s Twitter For Android On Twitter’s Top 10 Apps?
» TechCrunch

This evening Twitter CEO Evan Williams put up an interesting post about Twitter mobile usage. By just about every measurable metric, it seems to be skyrocketing. He also included a graph of the top 10 ways people are now using Twitter. This includes both Twitter’s own apps and third-party clients, but notably, Twitter for Android is nowhere to be seen.

I’ve confirmed with Twitter that this isn’t a mistake. It seems that Twitter for Android is in fact not in the top 10 ways people interact with the service. That’s incredible considering that Twitter for iPhone is number 4 and Twitter for Blackberry is number 5. Both of those were built by the Twitter team, just as the Android app was.

Even crazier, it’s behind third party clients TwitPic, TweetDeck, Echofon, UberTwitter, and even Google Friend Connect!

Obviously, Twitter downplays that in the post (and by downplays, I mean, doesn’t mention it), and instead only mentions Twitter for Android in the intro to say that it “launched a new version this week.” Remember, “new” is the best tactic to get people to try something.

So why is next to no one using Twitter for Android? Twitter won’t say. But I suspect it may have to do with the awful experience of trying to find apps in Google’s Android Market. Twitter for Android is by far and away the best client for the platform — but you’ll note that none of the other popular Android Twitter clients made the cut either.

So perhaps Android users just don’t like using Twitter? That’s probably not the case. Remember too that a lot of the newer Android phones come with custom skins that often include Twitter functionality without the need for a separate app. Still, for browsing tweets, Twitter for Android is much, much better. People should be using it, but they’re apparently not.

Update: One other thing undoubtedly at play here: Twitter for Android only works on Android 2.1 and later. Again, that’s largely an Android issue as fragmentation is preventing people from upgrading.

More: Twitter Now Over 145 Million Users, Almost 300,000 Apps
CrunchBase Information Twitter AndroidInformation provided by CrunchBase
21:59
Record Numbers Pinging Ping.fm Thanks To Apple’s Ping
» TechCrunch

An interesting beneficiary of Apple’s launch of music-oriented social network Ping—social status updater Ping.fm. According to Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur, Ping.fm saw a record number of accounts created yesterday (Seesmic acquired Ping.fm earlier this year).

Could it be a coincidence? Definitely, not. When you Google “Ping,” Ping.fm is the second result under the golf equipment site PING (this doesn’t include News results). Apple’s Ping is actually the fourth result (not including Video results). On Bing, Ping.fm is the third result, behind the golf company and the Wikipedia page for Ping. Clearly, as people starting becoming curious about Apple’s Ping yesterday on search portals, they also found Ping.fm in results.

Le Meur declined to reveal the exact number of accounts created but he did say that the number of accounts created was three times the normal rate in a given day. Apple actually licensed the name Ping from the golf company, as PING owns the trademark.
CrunchBase Information Ping.fm Seesmic AppleInformation provided by CrunchBase

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