TinyPetition Aims To Become The Default Petition Engine For Twitter
June 18th, 2009 by Robin Wauters
Dan Blake from Harkness Labs - who is working on far more projects at the same time than he could possibly tell me about in just one conversation - recently filled me in on his latest Twitter-related venture, TinyPetition.
Basically, Blake is looking to address the apparent need for a tool that allows the many opinionated people that inhabit Twitterland to voice their concerns about anything that gets their hearts pumping: a digital petition engine that can quickly spread online thanks to the viral nature of Twitter and the concept of retweeting in particular. Continue reading
Animoto Is Already Cash-Flow Positive, Raises Another Round To Go To 11
June 18th, 2009 by MG Siegler
In a world where most startups choose gaining users over making money, Animoto is an odd exception: It's doing both. Since launching in August 2007, the company has signed up some 750,000 users, and some 10% of those are paying customers. And that's allowed the company to run cash-flow positive since December of last year, CEO Brad Jefferson tells us. And it could keep going on like, but like most startups that taste success, it wants to do more.
So it has raised by far its biggest round of funding to date, a $4.4 million Series B led by Madrona Venture Group. With an already proven business model, Jefferson says the company just wants to accelerate everything it's doing, and push harder. That means a more diverse roadmap and more importantly, a much broader distribution strategy with more partnerships. One of those partnerships with with iStockphoto, whose founder, Bruce Livingstone, participated in this round. Continue reading
Exhibition Over: Yahoo Gallery Closing
June 18th, 2009 by MG Siegler
One thing Yahoo has been very good at over the past year is closing down services. Today brings news of another one shutting down: Yahoo Gallery. Come July 14, it will be no more.
Yahoo Gallery was a project that never left beta testing. It was intended to showcase cool applications that were built using Yahoo's various services and APIs. And while it was a decent idea as a way to show off cool things like Flickr apps, it never really took off. Here's Yahoo's explanation message about the shuttering: Continue reading
What’s Ghetto? Pushing Digital Album Sales On Twitter (Video)
June 17th, 2009 by Erick Schonfeld
If Twitter is good for one thing, it is for promoting whatever it is you have to sell. Some of the best self-promoters out there are rappers, and they've taken to Twitter just like every other type of celebrity. Just as Twitter can drive traffic to Websites, it can also drive music sales on iTunes.
On a panel at the 140 Characters Conference yesterday, Xavier Jernigan (@xjernigan, the director of digital marketing at Universal Motown Republic, described how Twitter help put one of his new artists, Asher Roth (@asherroth), on the map. Roth released his first album, Asleep In the Bread Aisle, on iTunes on April 20, a Monday. The night before he Tweeted out to his followers (he currently has 69,566) that the album would be on iTunes. And then he Tweeted out a short link which opened up to the album page in iTunes. With no other marketing, the album rose to become the No. 1 digital album for the week. Since then, it has sold about 100,000 copies. Continue reading
Ask Waves Its Arms To Tell Everyone It Also Does Q&A Search
June 17th, 2009 by Erick Schonfeld
One of the most active sub-genres of search right now in terms of startup and new product activity is question and answer sites. Some searches are subjective and best answered by another human being. The success of Yahoo Answers proved this and spurred a raft of competitors to try their own hand at making Q&A better. These include Wiki Answers, Mahalo Answers, Aardvark, and Hunch. Now Ask, arguably the original Q&A search engine (in that it encouraged searches to be asked as a question, not that the answers came from other humans), is waving its arms to remind people that you can ask questions and find answers there as well.
In fact, it is doing a little more than that. Today, it launched a Q&A tab on its site which taps into a new database of 300 million pairs of questions and answers, which it has crawled and indexed from around the Web. In other words, it is crawling the other Q&A sites to look for the best answers to a particular question. It is also applying some semantic and clustering filters to group similar questions together and to try to surface the most relevant results. It is more of a search engine for Q&A sites than a Q&A site itself. You can't answer any of the questions, just search for what other people have answered on other sites. Continue reading