Darrell Etherington April 25, 2012
Beverly, MA-based startup FashionPlaytes today announced a rebrand of its consumer-focused business, renaming its DIY design platform as FPGirls to reflect the site’s change in marketing direction which now focuses directly on ‘tween’ girls aged 5-12, instead of more generally at girls and their parents. Read more
Darrell Etherington April 20, 2012
New York-based Signpost, a startup offering local businesses a one-stop online marketing platform, announced an expansion this week that adds a significant analytic component to its merchant backend, letting business owners see how their own advertising efforts created through the site stack up against Google AdSense and Facebook campaigns, and also against similar efforts by other businesses in their area and industry. Read more
Darrell Etherington April 19, 2012
This week Uber announced a test project in Chicago where it will offer taxi booking in addition to its premium black car service. The cab bookings will cost riders the metered rate, plus 20 percent to cover Uber’s fees and driver gratuities. Read more
Alex Dao April 2, 2012
The word community has overwhelmingly positive connotations – like-minded people connecting, engaging in discussions and collaborating on projects, to name a few. Of course, with the good comes the bad, and companies fostering such connections simply cannot ignore the darker side of community. Usually that means trolls, spammers, and stalkers but recently a few prominent social networks have had to address a perhaps even more complicated issue, that of self harm and the glorification of eating disorders. Read more
Darrell Etherington March 15, 2012
Today, eBay subsidiary and online payments industry leader PayPal introduced PayPal Here, a dongle and software combination for mobile devices that competes directly with Jack Dorsey’s startup Square. PayPal made a point of outlining exactly how many advantages it has on Square (though it didn’t name the competition) during its press conference unveiling Here, and on paper at least it would seem to have a considerable lead. It’s cheaper for merchants to use (flat, all-in fee of 2.7 percent per Read more
Darrell Etherington March 14, 2012
Today Milk Inc. announced its debut product Oink is shutting down, just five months after it was originally debuted by Milk co-founder Kevin Rose back in October of last year, and about three months after its public launch. Oink, a social rating app that tried an approach not limited to any specific vertical, seems to have failed to attract the kind of interest that would’ve made it a viable project for the Milk team long-term. Read more
Darrell Etherington March 13, 2012
At an event today in Austin during the SXSW Interactive festival, music streaming service Rdio introduced a brand new overhaul of its user interface and user experience. The Spotify competitor now has over 15 million tracks in its database, VP of Product Design Malthe Sigurdsson told the crowd, and the new look and feel is designed to emphasize the service’s social and human aspects. Read more
Darrell Etherington March 5, 2012
Smartr, the social news reading service launched in October of 2011, will be shutting its doors as its creators focus their attention elsewhere. Founders Temo Chalahasi and Marc Provost of Factyle Inc. are also the creative team behind Cinemagram, a new iPhone app which debuted in the App Store in February. In an email to Smartr users, Chalahasi said that the team would be “moving on to new things,” and as a result is “unable to support [Smartr's] continued development.” Read more
Darrell Etherington March 5, 2012
Over the weekend, GigaOM’s Om Malik broke the news that Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai is departing the company on what is essentially the third anniversary of the company. The location-based check-in service has gone from the talk of SXSW to now having 15 million users, but the timing coincides with other recent reports that suggest this may be just the beginning of more transition to come for the company remaining co-founder Dennis Crowley now helms alone. Read more
Cheronne Thurab March 2, 2012
Icelandic startup DataMarket, which helps business users find and understand data, recently revamped their business model and debuted a set of new features targeted to data publishers. The company, which initially launched in 2008 and went live with an international data offering in January 2011, changed their plans so that users can access data for free, with subscription plans only in place for publishers. CEO Hjalmar Gislason said the changes were due to a high level of demand. Read more