Archive for: July 13, 2009

This morning is the kickoff of TWS2009 , an event organized by Israeli financial newspaper Globes , and leading Israeli startup blog, the.co.ils with its founder Yaron Orenstein. TechCrunch, in its continued support of Israeli startups, is proud to be a media partner. The event is aimed at showcasing ten promising Israeli startups and to serve as a networking platform for the individuals and companies leading Israel’s startup scene. All ten companies were chosen by a world-class panel of judges , ranging from über-Angel investor Ron Conway , to legendary ICQ founder and current founder and CTO of Dotomi, Yair Goldfinger. Below are the official company descriptions for the ten startups chosen by the judges to present their products on stage in front of over 700 private and institutional investors, executives and entrepreneurs: Shidonni is a web based virtual world for young kids, based on the simple joy of drawing. In Shidonni, kids draw their virtual pets and play with them as they magically ‘come alive’. After creating their pets, children enjoy over 30 different activities and games featuring their own creations and can even share their creation with their friends. Confidela provides businesses and individuals with hassle-free document control, tracking and protection services to facilitate the sharing of sensitive documents with customers, partners or suppliers. Confidela’s flagship SaaS product, WatchDox, is the easiest way for organizations to send documents securely, and control and track who views, edits, prints or forwards them. Cmycasa is a first of its kind “Handshake service” between home owners and furniture retailers. With Cmycasa, users of real estate web sites and “do-it-yourself portals” will be able to visualize in stunning photo-realistic 3D how their new home will look once furnished to their taste. Cellerium is the maker of MobileCanvas, a mobile application platform that ...

TeachStreet, a Yelp-like service for real world classes (cooking, dog obedience, music lessons, ballroom dance, foreign language, golf, yoga, etc.), is launching a marketplace feature for teachers to be able to coordinate payments from students. TeachStreet, which serves seven metropolitan areas in the U.S. including New York City, Silicon Valley/San Francisco and Seattle, allows instructors to upload information about classes. Users can look for available classes, and read and write reviews on the course and the instructor. Currently, the site includes a selection of more than 135,000 classes and teachers, across more than 700 subjects and categories. TeachStreet payments enables credit card payments for a portion of teachers/classes, letting teachers who are unfamiliar with e-commerce be able to elicit sales leads from the web. TeachStreet’s founder, Amazon and JibJab Alum Dave Schappell, tells us that the site is powered by PayPal Website Payments Pro to make it easy for both students and teachers to use the system. TeachStreet charges students a 5% for booking and charges teachers a 4.9% processing fee. Teachers pay an additional 2.5% first-time-student payment fee to TeachStreet. While adding a listing and profile on TeachStreet is free, teachers only pay out to the site when a sale takes place. TeachStreet plans to also let teachers also opt out of the fee-model and pay monthly fee but the pricing has not been determined. TeachStreet doesn’t just simplify e-commerce for teachers. The site is also letting teachers use a call-tracking service (powered by Twilio ), which gives teachers an 1-800 (or local) number that allows any messages to be forwarded to email and lets teachers keep their numbers private. TeachStreet also provides teachers with data and analytics, including number of visits and views, number of sales leads from e-mail messages, phone calls and site-visits, and competitive information ...

If you are developing new iPhone games now, please consider the price wisely. The cheaper is better, according to a recent study about top selling App Store games . At least, if you had plan to increase the game’s sales volume. In a study of the top 100 iPhone games, PocketGamer.biz has discovered something that really isn’t that surprising. The cheaper the game, the more likely it is to sell. Of the top 20 best selling titles, a full 15 cost only $0.99. In fact, 36 of the top 100 cost $0.99. Surprisingly, the next most popular price is $4.99, accounting for 20 of the top 100 titles. Still, the site notes that the top 10 games have an average price of $1.89, so it would seem that cheaper is better, at least in terms of sales volume. [via Joystiq ]

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Dear developers, sell your iPhone game under $2

iPhone users will be able to enjoy this season’s NFL football games via DirecTV’s “Supercast Mobile” app. Despite the app is free — still coming soon to the App Store– and the stream can be accessed over 3G and wi-fi, but the service is not cheap and subjects to local blackout restrictions, too. First, you’ll need to be a DirecTV satellite TV subscriber. Then you’ll need the $280 NFL Sunday Ticket subscription. And on top of that, you’ll need a $100 Sunday Ticket “SuperFan” subscription. But if you’re already leaning that way, then the iPhone app will be a great addition to your Sunday rituals… Customers will only be able to watch the games available on NFL Sunday Ticket channels in the local ZIP code of their billing address–blackout rules apply. Due to NFL broadcast restrictions, some games will be unavailable on SUPERCAST based on your ZIP code. [via Silicon Alley Insider ]

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Stream NFL games from your iPhone

After being scarce for the first couple of weeks following the new iPhone 3.0 software rolling out, apps with Push Notifications are now rolling out at a healthy clip. And that’s great, because the feature is really useful. To a point. The issue I’m noticing now is that if you have too many apps with Push Notifications turned on, the whole system becomes a lot less useful. You see, Push Notifications are basically Apple’s way to get around allowing third-party apps to run in the background of the iPhone. So apps can now send these push messages to your phone to let you know if there’s some kind of message or update that you should open an app for. But if you have a lot of push messages coming in, I’m finding that you either have to pull out your phone every couple minutes, or risk still missing notifications that you probably want to see. The problem is that the Push Notification message indicators are not built for heavy use. If you have multiple push messages coming in to you phone, only the latest one will be shown on the screen. And even when you unlock your phone, it’s hard to tell which push messages have come in. Though you can set a badge on app icons to let you know there is a message, if it was overridden by another message, you are forced to open the app to figure out what it was. And let’s be clear: It’s not like I’m using Push on a ton of applications. I’m basically only using it (regularly) on three right now: Foursquare (a location-based social network [ iTunes Link ]), GPush (which does push for Gmail , which sadly isn’t approved in the App Store, yet), and Boxcar (which does ...

Indie music discovery service OurStage decided to fill me in on how well they’re doing as a startup in the difficult online music business, and I was quite amazed to see how much they’ve progressed over the years. On a financial level, the company has fantastic prospects; they expect to hit profitability sometime next year if all goes well. That should sound like music to the ears of their investors: OurStage raised a healthy $17 million in Series A when they started out in 2007 and went on to raise an additional $3 million in Series B earlier this year. OurStage says it intends to double the amount of financing for the Series B round, which would bring the total investment put into the company to $23 million by the end of 2009. Since launching publicly back in April 2007 the company has been steadily attracting users to join its service, which enables people to discover new independent artists, rank and share music with others and communicate directly with upcoming singer/songwriters and bands. Thanks to viral growth in combination with dozens of partnerships with music festivals, radio networks and media companies like AOL/WinAmp, OurStage is currently nearing 1 million registered users. The company has also managed to sway 95,000 artists into joining the platform, and in combination with the strong user base they currently receive about 3 million unique visitors on the site every month. So how do they monetize the service? By focusing on three good old revenue streams that seem to work well for them: sponsoring, advertising and data services. The latter I think is interesting: OurStage is beta testing a service called TRAViS (shorts for Track Validation Services) that is currently being used by divisions of four major record labels and will be publicly launched in ...

Aaron Levie is the CEO and co-founder of Box.net , founded in 2005 with the goal of helping people and businesses easily access and share information from anywhere. Box.net is now used by millions of individuals, small businesses, and Fortune 500 enterprises worldwide . There’s now a lot of buzz debating the business model of “Free” with the release of Chris Anderson’s new book. Most of the conversation has focused on free media and free consumer services, but ultimately the effects and expectations of free in our consumer lives will begin to emerge within our business lives. Today, there’s no shortage of examples of free or “ freemium ” business software, from commercial services (37Signals, PBworks, Google Apps) to open source (Mysql, SugarCRM), yet, there’s still a great divide of SaaS solutions selling their software with an “older” format (Salesforce.com) and even some with a really old model (SharePoint). Simply judging by the relative market caps of companies pursuing each model, no one in SaaS has built up a substantial enterprise business yet with the model of free or freemium alone. Mysql only got to $50M in revenue before it was acquired, and the majority of freemium enterprise service providers are still in the tens-of-millions range, with few exceptions. Mark Cuban brings an interesting point to the debate: when you live by your free service, you die by your free service. There’s certainly merit in this argument if your business model is an advertising model based on pageview volume alone or if you’re holding up solely because of venture capital. When your uniqueness and flavor dries up, so may your users, and thus your revenue and funding. This was generally Mark’s concern when we introduced the free version early in 2006 (he was an early investor in Box, with ...

Here’s an innovative idea - charge users to beta test a product. Last week I wrote about a snappy new bookmarking tool called Pinboard . The best way to describe it is Delicious before Yahoo mangled that product into an over-featured sluggish shadow of its formerly zippy self. Founder Maciej Ceglowski , a former Yahoo and Twitter engineer, noted a surge of new account request in a blog post , noting that he was putting new resources in place to take on the new users. Today, though, he sent out an email to people requesting accounts telling them they’ll need to pay a “small signup fee” to create a new account: Hello, You’re receiving this letter because you recently signed up to help beta test Pinboard. While we have enough testers for the time being, the site is now also open to regular users. If you’d like to create an account, please visit the following URL: http://pinboard.in/signup/ You’ll need to pay a small signup fee (around three dollars) through Amazon to create the account. This money goes towards the costs of running the site, and the fee helps to discourage spammers. As I make more features available, I’ll announce them on the Google group ( http://groups.google.com/group/pinboard-dev ) and the site blog ( http://pinboard.in/blog/ ). You can also find me on IRC: irc.freenode.net #pinboard If you find bugs while using the site, please send me an email and I’ll try to fix them as quickly as I can. For things that are not bugs (feature requests, critique, suggestions, questions) please post to the Google group so that everyone can pile on. Thanks again for joining me on this project, and happy bookmarking! Maciej Ceglowski This is a side project for Ceglowski, so charging a fee for new users certainly isn’t ...

The “Favorite” is kind of like the unwanted step child feature of Twitter. Though it has been around since the early days of the service, they have never really done anything to promote its use. One would assume you’re supposed to use it to start your favorite tweets, but I don’t use it like that, because what’s the point? Instead, I mostly use it to bookmark tweets that I want to find later. But a new service Favstar.fm hopes to take the Favorite functionality back to its roots, and make it useful. While the fairly popular Favrd service has revolved around favorites for a while, it is basically only useful to show the most favorited tweets across the whole network on any given day. You can find individual user pages, but it’s not very obvious how to do that, and results only go back for a few weeks. Favstar.fm wants to be the all encompassing Twitter favorites destination. The main page shows a recent leaderboard that can be set to show tweets of only a certain level (10 favorites, for example). If you sign in via Twitter OAuth, you get a whole range of functionality, including the ability to follow people from Favstar.fm and see what tweets your friends are favoriting. Also, by signing in it is easy to see who is favoriting your tweets. As we all know, a big part of Twitter is vanity, so many of us likely want to know who is favoriting which tweets of ours. With Favstar.fm, it’s easy to see that. Because it’s aiming to track favorites across the whole network for all time periods, Favstar works a little slower than Favrd does, developer Tim Haines tells us. But it seems like a fair trade-off to get all this data. And if ...

Can’t believe I missed this. Not the song. But the tie up. 2NE1 is the next big thing in Asian pop music and this song was released digitally in March of ‘09. Here’s the full song: The LG Cyon is what you call a “global roaming phone” which is a pretty cool piece of technology allowing you to use both CDMA and GSM networks wherever you travel be it the USA, Asia or Europe. Oddly, the phone’s interior resembles much of the Motorola RAZR and although this might be a big coincidence, I highly doubt. Post from: Cellphone9

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2NE1’s “Lollipop” for the LG Cyon

The Netflix Web site went down on Sunday, though the company said the snafu will not affect the shipment of DVDs or the streaming of Watch Instantly movies on Netflix-enabled devices.

"We're sorry, the Netflix Web site is temporarily unavailable," reads a note on Netflix.com.

"Our shipping centers are continuing to send and receive DVDs, so your movies will be processed as usual," the note continued. "And you can still instantly watch movies via your Netflix ready device."

Netflix said its engineers are working to bring the site back up as quickly as possible, but did not elaborate on the problem.