Professional social network LinkedIn has a rapidly growing userbase outside of the U.S., and increasingly users want to access the network from their mobile phone. But until now, the company has only offered smartphone apps, as opposed to feature phone apps. Feature phones actually represent 80% of the devices sold worldwide. Today, LinkedIn is teaming up with mobile developer Snaptu to launch a rich application for feature phones.

According to the announcement, the app will work across 2,500 device models, including those from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and LG. Snaptu focused on bringing the most commonly used LinkedIn features in the new app, allowing users to access their update stream, search professionals on the network, invite fellow users to join their network and accept invitations. Users can also access full users profiles of professionals on LinkedIn.

Facebook also made a similar move, partnering with Snaptu to launch a similar rich app for feature phones. For LinkedIn, this app is particularly important as much of its active userbase is international, where feature phones are more popular that smartphones.

Google’s development strategy is more agile, and products are consistently updated with new features and improvements. For example, in 2010, Google implemented 130 feature releases for its Google Apps Platform. For Google Apps users, new product additions can be overwhelming to keep track of, so today Google is making it easier for customers to access the latest Google Apps features in the timeframe that makes sense for them.

Users can now choose between two feature tracks—rapid release and scheduled release. Rapid Release users will have access to new features as soon as the features have completed testing and quality assurance, and are ready to roll out. Scheduled Release users will access new features on a weekly schedule, with at least a one-week notice following the initial feature launch. These users can also preview feature releases on a test domain.

Both rapid release and scheduled release will involve new feature additions for most of th products in the Google Apps Suite, including Gmail, Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites.

Google says that they expect small business users to participate in rapid release and larger enterprises with more complex IT environments to choose the scheduled release option, as they may need to train more staff members in the new functionality. As Rajen Sheth, group product manager for Google Enterprise tells us, the new release timings give users more visibility into what’s new and how these features will best serve a company or organization’s users.

Sheth says that Google has also developed a communication tool, “What’s New,” to allows users more visibility into Google Apps feature releases, and includes training instructions and more.

Because Google Apps is based in the cloud, feature releases don’t involved downloading a new client or updates. You simply refresh Google Apps to access new features. The timeline choice gives Google Apps users more insight into what they are actively adding to their existing product.

Video conferencing technology company Vidyo is enhancing its platform with support for Apple's just released iPad 2, Motorola's XOOM tablet and Atrix smartphone. The platform utilizes the company’s VidyoTechnology SDK, which is available to third parties, and enables 720p HD multipoint video conferencing that works on a range of mobile devices.

With Vidyo's platform, customers can join video conferences from anywhere using a bunch of devices (see below for a list of previously supported hardware), from mobile phones to tablets or room systems, using client apps built by Vidyo or its partners.

Vidyo CEO Ofer Shapiro says the faster CPU of the iPad 2 and its two cameras make it a platform that “begs for HD multipoint video communication and collaboration”.

The company claims it was able to use its own SDK to enable the iPad 2 to participate in 720p multipoint video conferences within hours of general availability of the high-end tablet computer. For the record: this is on the delivery end, not for actual high-def broadcasting from the iPad 2 (the tablet computer sports a front-facing VGA camera only).

Still, video conferencing support for such a multitude of devices and platforms = pretty neat.

The Vidyo platform already supported the first-gen iPad, iPhone 4, iPod, Samsung Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S smartphone, Google’s Nexus S and multiple other Android devices.

Vidyo OEM partners include HP, Google, Ricoh, Hitachi and others. The company has raised more than $73 million in venture capital to date.

“One reason online education isn't that good is I don't think it is trying to be that good,” says John Katzman, the CEO of 2tor, an online education startup that is trying to break that mold. The company, headquartered in New York City’s Chelsea Piers, just raised a $32.5 million series C financing, led by Bessemer Venture Partners. All of its existing investors—Highland Capital, Redpoint, Novak Biddle, City Light—re-upped. Since it was founded in 2009, 2Tor has raised a total of $65 million.

Instead of focussing on low-hanging fruit like test prep or actual tutoring, 2tor is going straight after the higher education market, partnering with graduate programs to provide the technology platform to extend their classes online. (Not that there is anything wrong with test prep—Katzman previously founded the Princeton Review). Its first partner school is USC, which uses 2tor for both its Masters in Teaching and Social Work programs. Next week, it launches a nursing program with Georgetown and in July an MBA program at UNC-Chapel Hill. The new capital will help 2tor expand to more programs faster.

To give you an idea of the impact 2tor can have on a school, USC’s Masters of Teaching program had about 80 students before partnering with 2tor, and all of them were on its California campus. Now it boasts almost 1,500 students enrolled in the program across 45 states and 28 countries. They all pay the same full tuition and get exactly the same degree. 2tor handles the website, supplying the students with webcams, creating online teaching materials in partnership with faculty, the logistics of finding local schools were the students themselves can practice teaching. The company shares in the tuition revenue.

Expanding its student population nearly twentyfold with 2tor has not hurt USC’s teaching program in the slightest. In fact, it ranks No. 14 in U.S. News & World Report’s recently released 2011 college rankings for education, up from No. 38 in 2008. “One of the reasons great schools have trouble going online,” says Katzman, “is they didn't believe they could do something of the same quality or better quality than the classroom. So you really can't be okay. You need to be great.”

Katzman hopes to keep growing student enrollment in 2tor programs by another 1,000 to 1,500 students this year. His company’s approach to teaching is not to replicate the classroom experience, but rather to improve upon it. “Where you want to go with instruction is to flip things,” he says.

Instead of professors talking in one direction to hundreds of students, a lot of that one-way communication can be done with better teaching materials, including videos of lectures and interactive lessons which can be done asynchronously. The teaching moments come into play after students absorb a lesson and there is back and forth between the students themselves and their professors. Those require everyone to be “present” at the same time, but not necessarily the same place. That’s where the Webcams come in handy. 2tor also has an iPad app for students, and an Android app is on its way.

Ecommerce juggernaut eBay this morning announced that it is making it free to list up to 50 items per month in auctions at any start price, and free to add the "Buy it Now" option to those listings.

Effective April 19, 2011, the new pricing builds on free-listing promotions announced back in January 2010.

In related news, eBay is reducing Final Value Fee rates for Store and Fixed Price sellers (on July 6, 2011), and will apply the Final Value Fee to the total amount of a sale to encourage sellers to give buyers more options for low-cost or even free shipping.

That should be good news for buyers, but not so much for sellers as eBay will take a larger commission from merchants that charge for delivery.

For more information, check AuctionBytes.

As we heard last week, Twitter made a bold move regarding its ecosystem, stating that third-party developers should no longer try to compete with Twitter on native clients; instead they should focus on things like data and specific verticals for Tweets. In the email sent to developers, Twitter said that some 90 percent of active Twitter users now use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis to access the service. Social media analytics company Sysomos decided to track Tweets on the day that Twitter made this announcement to determine if there was any truth to this assertion.

Sysomos analyzed 25 million Tweets last Friday and found that 58 percent of Tweets were sent from official Twitter apps, and 42 percent of Tweets were sent from third-party clients (or non-official Twitter apps). The analytics company highlights the trend that third-party clients are losing marketshare to Twitter clients, as the communications platform expands its offerings, and acquires third-party clients. In June 2009, a Sysomos report showed that 55 percent of Tweets were made using non-official apps, and as we learned, that number has dropped to 42 percent.

Of the outside clients, the most popular apps were in the UberMedia family including TweetDeck, UberSocial and Echofon. Broadly, Tweetdeck accounted for 5.5 percent of total tweets, and out of all the non-official apps, Tweetdeck took 13.1 percent market share. UberSocial has 16.4 percent share, and Echofon saw 9.2 percent share.

It’s important to note that UberMedia, which has been collecting Twitter apps to create a third-party client conglomerate of sorts, recently scuffled with Twitter over privacy issues, policy violations, trademarks and more. UberMedia subsequently fixed the problems, changed its name and everything seems to be placid between the two companies for now.

So why are Twitter’s projections of third-party client usage so different from Sysomos’ analysis? Twitter's number focus on the total number of users per month whereas Sysomos analyzed Tweets sent, claims the analytics company. But here’s the key statement: there could be many Twitter "official" users who are not very active, which is causing the skew in numbers. But in the note to developers last week, Twitter did state that the 90 percent included “active” users. So the question is what constitutes an active user? Daily use or weekly use? Or is it monthly?

Yesterday, Twitter released updated stats on its growing network, revealing that 460,000 new accounts are created per day on average. That’s millions of new users per week. But it’s unclear many of these are active? It’s an answer that may be one of the pieces to the puzzle.

Another reason for the skew is that many Twitter users use both third-party clients as well as Twitter.com, or Twitter clients to send and track Tweets. There could be a good deal of overlap.

Sysomos contends that the active, power users are choosing TweetDeck, UberSocial, Seesmic and other popular third-party clients because they are more feature-rich. These clients also integrate with other social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Like any self-respecting gadget hound, I found myself at an impasse: I have an iPad first gen but I want an iPad 2 . I also have limited funds and a family to feed. So, then, do I keep both iPads and sell the family or perform the opposite of that transaction and sell the iPad 1st gen, keep the family, and buy the iPad 2. After an evening of careful concentration on soul searching, I’ve decided to keep the kids.

So, then, what to do? Knowing that there were a full complement of sites available that would, ostensibly, buy your old gear at a fair price, I began my hunt. I found a number of “gadget recycling” sites and typed in my particulars – a 64GB iPad First Gen Wi-Fi in excellent condition, factory fresh iOS. As a baseline I checked out eBay and Craigslist where I found an iPad 64GB that worked “perfect” in Midtown Manhattan:

Read more…

SignNow, which is readying the launch of a brand new e-signing service, due next month, has raised $500,000 in financing from unnamed angel investors, the startup has announced yesterday.

SignNow’s lofty goal is to revolutionize consumer use of e-signatures, a legally-binding way to add signatures to electronic documents of all sorts.

In tandem with the launch of its product, SignNow CEO Christopher Hawkins has actually written a book entitled: “A History of Signatures: From Cave Paintings to Robo-Signings” ($39.99), detailing the place the concept of the signature has held throughout history.

SignNow is the company behind NotaryNow, a service that allows people to connect to a notary instantly, via webcam, to legally notarize documents.

Sponto, maker of a mobile party discovery application for college students, has scored $200,000 in initial equity financing from Amplifier Ventures. As part of the investment, Sponto has joined the investment firm’s Business Accelerator Program.

Sponto uses the GPS capabilities built into modern smartphones to help students discover, publicize and meet up at parties, concerts and other gatherings, in real-time.

The service is currently in beta and open only to students at the University of Maryland with an UMD.edu email address.

The funding will be used to complete the first commercial release of the Sponto event-sharing platform in the second quarter of 2011, to expand to new schools, and to grow its team.

Timely announcement from Pricelock.com as fuel prices continue to rise: the company, which offers online fuel hedging and price protection for businesses that rely on fuel to stay in business, has raised over $12 million in Series B funding.

The financing comes from Barclays, RenaissanceRe Ventures and Travelers Insurance, with previous Artiman Ventures participating as well. Goldman Sachs, another earlier backer, did not participate this time around.

By aggregating demand, Pricelock aims to empower small and medium-sized businesses across the United States to control fuel costs in ways that were previously only available to large fuel buyers. As Pricelock founder and CEO Robert Fell notes, the funding is timely given the current volatility of the oil market.

Social media and technology company AdGent Digital has acquired ShortTail Media, a tech company with a proprietary platform that allows publishers to deliver video ads in a stand-alone full screen format from any Web page without the need for video content. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

More than 30 publishers currently use ShortTail Media technology, including majors like New York Times, Time Warner, CNN, National Geographic, and The Huffington Post.

AdGent says it will accelerate the roll-out of the platform to publishers throughout the United States and also expand its scope to the UK and the rest of Europe in the near future.

ShortTail Media’s management team will join AdGent with the notable exception of its founder and CEO David Payne, formerly SVP and General Manager at CNN.com. Payne is leaving to take up a senior position at an unnamed US publishing house.

ShortTail was backed by an undisclosed amount of venture capital – General Catalyst Partners is listed on the company’s website as its sole investor.

Exclusive - Spigit, maker of collaborative innovation management software for enterprises, will announce this morning that it has received an equity investment of $10 million from Warburg Pincus. The financing round completes a $20 million investment from the private equity firm, resulting in $26 million in funding overall for Spigit.

The company markets products that allow organizations to tap the collective intelligence of its employees, partners and customers to help them gain insights about their business.

Spigit founder and CEO Paul Pluschkell says the company is on a roll, growing at approximately 300% year-over-year by leveraging platforms like Facebook, SharePoint and mobile operating systems to basically allow innovation to “happen anytime, anywhere”.

According to the Spigit website, its platform is in use by more than 3 million subscribers today.

The $10 million will be invested in “game mechanics, social algorithms, behavioral sciences, and consulting services”, the company says."

IAC has expanded its board of directors with a thirteenth seat and elected well-known businessman Michael Eisner, who served as chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company from 1984 until 2005, to join said board, effective immediately.

Prior to his long tenure at Disney, Michael Eisner served as the President of Paramount for eight years after starting his career at ABC. In fact, he was hired at ABC by none other than Barry Diller, until recently chief executive at IAC.

In 2005, Eisner founded an investment firm called Tornante. He’s also chairman of Vuguru, a studio focused on producing programming for the Web and other digital platforms that was incubated at Tornante.

Eisner also serves on the boards of the California Institute of the Arts, Denison University, the Aspen Institute, the Yale School of Architecture Dean’s Council, and The Eisner Foundation.

IAC is a media company with a wide range of businesses, including Ask.com, CitySearch, Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Dictionary.com and Match.com.

In 2009, Amazon launched the Virtual Private Cloud (also known as Amazon VPC), which makes it possible for customers to create their own isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances to connect to their existing network over a secured VPN connection to a datacenter. This promises enterprise-level security. Today, Amazon Web Services is extended the functionality of VPC, allowing users to make their VPC directly accessible to the internet (bypassing the need for a VPN).

Users can actually specify which of their Amazon VPC resources they wish to make directly accessible to the Internet and which they do not. Customers have more control over the virtual networking environment, including selection of IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways.

Part of today’s upgrade offers more customization for VPC users. Enterprise users can create a public-facing subnet for web servers that have access to the Internet, and placing backend systems such as databases or application servers in a private-facing subnet with no Internet access (and a VPN connection).

Users can also store data in storage device Amazon S3 and set permissions so the data can only be accessed from within Amazon VPC or attach an Amazon Elastic IP Address to any Amazon VPC instance so it can be reached directly from the Internet.

Essentially this gives enterprises more flexibility with making private clouds either more accessible or private. As companies become comfortable with a more public facing cloud, it makes sense to give users options with their data security.

Former CareerBuilder founder and CEO Rob McGovern launched Jobfox in 2004 as a job profile site in which individuals could search through job openings displayed on the site’s boards. But the site was tough for recruiters to actively use because they had to comb through profiles of potential applicants. Today, Jobfox is unveiling a new version of the site that hopes to solve this problem. Essentially Jobfox allows corporate recruiters and headhunters to create private hiring networks. Job seekers can create a profile on the site and join corporate networks for companies they are interested in working for.

Jobfox says that the virtue of using its network vs LinkedIn for job seeking is that it is completely focused on job seekers and recruiters as opposed to socializing or sharing content. Because to connections made between job seekers and recruiters are confidential and not published on the network, it also ensures user privacy.

And the site will actually connect with LinkedIn and Facebook to alert you of your friends that work at the companies you want to work at, and it pulls in data from Twitter and company HR sites to alert seekers of job openings not displayed anywhere else.

Members can also “boost” friends or colleagues for jobs and earn financial incentives if the connection results in a hire. It’s important to note that Jobfox focuses exclusively on salaried jobs as opposed to hourly positions or freelance opportunities. Currently, 7,000 companies are represented on the site and roughly 140,000 jobs are advertised per month on the site.

While LinkedIn has also become a popular destination for job seekers, there is certainly room for a number of players in the social recruiting space. What LinkedIn has in it’s favor, however, is a massive userbase (which is nearing 100 million). But considering McGovern’s prior experience in the online job market, Jobfox is definitely worth a look.

“Kleiner Perkins Already Selling Its Twitter Stock” reads one headline on SAI from Friday, alleging that venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has been selling Twitter stock that they bought only a couple of months ago. “A DISASTER IN THE MAKING” says another lengthy diatribe on SAI.

The allegation? That Kleiner invested in Twitter at a $3.7 billion valuation in December, then turned around and sold some of that stock for a profit just a month or two later, at a $7 billion valuation.

Some people may say, so what? People invest with a profit motive. But Kleiner got into Twitter at a sweetheart deal – paying a valuation hundreds of millions of dollars less than rival firms DST and Providence were rumored to have bid. When you take an investor like Kleiner Perkins, you’re doing it because of their name, and because you expect them not to just flip the stock and bring in random new shareholders. Flipping stock just isn’t done by top tier venture funds.

So the allegation is serious, and reputation damaging. Other startups may think twice before taking Kleiner’s money when they don’t know if Kleiner will stick around or just sell the stock at the first opportunity.

The problem is, the accusations in the articles aren’t true, say multiple sources close to Twitter’s management and investors.

And then there’s the poor theoretical dentist, buying up the Twitter shares with little or no information about the company (and I can’t stop thinking of the irony of Henry Blodget looking out for the little guy investor).

On the one hand, you might have a well-off but unsophisticated investor (a dentist, say), who is buying up shares of the red-hot private companies like Twitter because he’s hearing about them on CNBC and because he’s getting emails from brokers who are telling him they can get him in on the next hot thing.

This dentist may be buying the stock even though he’s so wildly unsophisticated (or careless) that he doesn’t even know how many shares Twitter has outstanding, let alone what the company’s real financial performance looks like.

(Don’t snicker: According to insiders familiar with the situation, these are exactly the sorts of folks who are being pitched Twitter stock these days.)
And, on the other hand, you have the seller–Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr–who is on the board of Google and basically on the board of Twitter, who knows EXACTLY what he’s selling.

Here’s what really happened.

Kleiner led a $200 million round in Twitter. They were to take $150 million. The remaining $50 million was to be taken by existing investors, including Insight Venture Partners.

Before the closing Kleiner Perkins decided they only wanted to take $130 million, not $150 million. Insight was happy to take the extra $20 million, and did. Management was fine with this.

Because of a legal complication Insight had to buy the shares from Kleiner Perkins. But they bought them at exactly the same valuation that Kleiner did, so there was no profit.

In other words, this is a huge non-event, and Kleiner didn’t flip the shares. But someone, either a current investor or perhaps one of the investors that was passed on by Twitter, decided to sex this up, a lot, and pass it on to SAI as a story. And I finally got the opportunity to use that dramatic screen grab from Braveheart in a post.

When you ask Yahoo who is in charge of Flickr, they always point to one man: Matthew Rothenberg. Well, technically, there are people at Yahoo above him in charge of the group of products that Flickr is in (Applications Division). But it’s Rothenberg, as head of product, who they’ll tell you is leading the day to day.

Not anymore.

Rothenberg is out as head of product for Flickr. He tweeted the news himself earlier today. He had been on the team for five years, dating back to when original co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake were still running the ship. They left long ago, but Rothenberg stuck around. And for the past two years, he’s been the guy in charge.

One funny thing here is that we had been hearing for weeks that Rothenberg was leaving. But Yahoo kept denying it until the bitter end. But it’s hard to deny a public tweet, I guess.

Here’s their official statement:

Matthew Rothenberg has made the personal decision to move on to a new endeavor.  In the interim, Markus Spiering will be stepping in as head of product management. Flickr continues to have an innovative, energetic and creative leadership team that is dedicated to its community of members. Flickr remains a key priority for Yahoo! and we are fully committed to making it the best photo-sharing experience on the Web.

Note the wording. He made a “personal decision” — Yahoo clearly wants avoid the impression that he’s leaving a sinking ship. But there’s a reason we’ve kept hearing rumors about his imminent departure: the situation is not great inside the once proud service.

Following the leak of the “sunsetting” of Delicious, talk quickly moved to Flickr: what would happen there? Everyone was worried, but Yahoo publicly stated that they were very much backing the service. Still, ex-employees and users alike didn’t seem too sure about its future.

And lately, we’ve been hearing a lot of talk of internal turmoil within Yahoo and the Flickr group. Last fall, John Matheny took over the group Applications Division in charge. He’s an ex-Microsoft guy, and you may recall during the time when Microsoft was trying to buy Yahoo, users took to Flickr to boycott such a deal specifically because they did not like Microsoft. We’ve heard around a half dozen or so folks have left just in the past few months.

Of course, the situation wasn’t said to be much better before Matheny took over. Flickr has had some big time layoffs over the past couple of years and leaders have butted heads with those at Yahoo over direction.

Frankly, it’s surprising that Rothenberg stuck around this long. But now he’s gone (officially, his last day is next week, we hear). He’s moving on to greener pastures.

Former VP of Product at Myspace Todd Leeloy and Myspace Product Manager Joe Munoz have launched a semantic tagging network and link curation service today called Tagging Robot. Tagging Robot currently crawls your Facebook newsfeed and separates your links based on topics, as well as giving you relevant topics data for each link.

Tagging Robot uses NLP and Machine Learning to build users a topic-centered profile, and uses your Facebook Interests and Social Graph to populate the page. What you immediately see on your profile is a list of recommended links (based on followed topics), a list of all links shared recently by your network and your favorites (which you track by clicking the <3 symbol next to each link).

In addition to pulling from your Facebook Interests, you can follow topics on Tagging Robot by clicking on the “plus” or “minus” sign next to the link topic.

The service has shared over 1.5 million links and crawled over 45,000 user profiles so far, with just a hundred beta testers, and Leeloy said that they plan to add link-crawling capabilities beyond Facebook. But this isn’t a consumer product, and eventually users will be able to integrate this functionality onto any site that has an audience and a content index, like a blog or social network. “It’s really hard to demo and API, so we build out the demo as proof of concept” , he said.

“In a world where you encounter 500 links per day, you need to know what’s best from your social network and beyond,” he says. Tagging Robot is an attempt to increase this relevancy, and bring users more signal and less noise.

You can sign up for the beta here.

On Friday, social gaming giant Zynga joined tsunami relief efforts by enabling in-game donations through virtual goods in Zynga games like FrontierVille, FarmVille and CityVille. Today, the company announced that — in just 36 hours — Zynga gamers donated more than $1 million to relief efforts.

Zynga partnered with the Save the Children to raise money for its Japan Earthquake Tsunami Children Emergency Fund.

Zynga representatives said that the campaign was created in under 24 hours and is the largest charitable campaign in company history. It is also the first CityVille Zynga.org campaign.

While we applaud Zynga (and its gamers) for their collective magnanimous spirit, the fundraising efforts continue. Gamers can contribute by buying designated virtual goods like a sweet potato crop in CityVille, a Kobe cow in FrontierVille, radishes in FarmVille, and a royal flush for Zynga Poker — or can donate by using this direct link.

Those who wish to donate in the non-Ville game Words With Friends can use the Save the Children button inside the game. Players in all games within Facebook can also send funds using the Zbar, or the bar that sits on top of the screen. Facebook will also be donating its traditional 30% cut on the Facebook Credits used to contribute to the relief.

Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft has finally decided to put an official end to its Zune media player line. “A person familiar with the decision” has informed them that Microsoft will not be putting out any new hardware in the line, and will be henceforward focusing on integrating Zune functionality with the Windows Phone 7 platform.

Not exactly unexpected; the Zune hardware hasn’t changed since mid-2009′s release of the Zune HD, although it has received several significant software upgrades. The writing has been on the wall for a long time, but whether Microsoft would double down (again) or cut their losses was far from clear. Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.

Continue reading…

Mapping is a big boy’s game, with Google Maps, Bing Maps, and MapQuest dominating maps on both the Web and mobile. But sometimes it takes a startup to push things forward. 3D mobile mapping startup UpNext is hoping to get on the map, so to speak, with its detailed 3D maps of cities and venues like the Super Bowl stadium. The New York city startup, which has been around since 2007, just raised a $557,000 series A round of preferred shares, according to an SEC filing. That amount includes $57,000 that converted from a previously-undisclosed friends-and-family round in 2009. The new round is $500,000 and investors include Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, David Cohen of TechStars (who invested individually), David Tisch and Oleg Tscheltzoff

Co-founder Danny Moon says the company will use the funds to expand its platform from its own mobile and iPad apps to become an underpinning technology for “travel guides, resorts, event planners, amusement parks, to name a few,” which can incorporate UpNext’s 3D maps into their own apps. UpNext allows a level of detail not seen in most mapping technologies, including directories of business inside specific buildings or the ability to zoom down to the seat level inside a stadium, as it showcased with its Super Bowl app.

UoNext will also keep pushing with its own iPhone app. “We’re creating exciting new technology to enable users to explore cities, visually. Think an interactive, social city model that changes in realtime,” hints Moon. Realtime, in 3D,—what more could anyone ask for?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/30/upnext-ipad-fluid/

Zynga is debuting its previously announced points program, RewardVille, today which adds a rewards layer across all of the social gaming giant’s games. Now, Zynga’s 250 million players can earn “zCoins” when they are playing Zynga’s games on Facebook and other platforms.

As you play more of Zynga’s games, you earn zPoints and zCoins which can then be used towards purchasing exclusive virtual goods on RewardVille. The new program is essentially tying rewards between all of Zynga’s games, including CityVille, FrontierVille, FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, Café World, Treasure Isle, YoVille, PetVille, and Vampire Wars.

So users can now earn zCoins and zPoints by playing Zynga games. You can spend your zCoins on cool in-game items in Zynga RewardVille!For some users, Zynga has already enabled them to earn the points. Other users will have to go to RewardVille’s website and activate the program. Once you’ve activated RewardVille, earning zPoints lets you advance your Zynga level, gain zCoins, and just as in the games, unlock different RewardVille items along the way. You can earn as much as 80 zPoints per game or 300 zPoints total in one day. You’ll be able to see how many points you’ve earned on your Zynga Game Bar on Facebook. The more you play Zynga games, and the more Zynga games you play, the faster you'll level up and earn rewards in RewardVille.

In order to redeem your zCoins, you have to visited RewardvVille’s site where you can sign in with Facebook Connect. Zynga will automatically tally how many points you’ve earned and you can use redeem points for limited edition virtual gifts, such as the "Stepped Skyscraper" in CityVille or a "Ring of Fire" in FrontierVille (you can only redeem virtual gifts with points, not cash/credit card). And you can send mystery gifts across games to friends playing other Zynga games.

The idea behind the program is to get users to start playing multiple Zynga games so they can earn more rewards. It unifies the gaming portals rewards and incentivizes users to play Zynga games on Facebook, so they earn these rewards.

So how does Facebook Credits fit into this? The reason Zynga is not using real money with RewardVille is because of Facebook Credits. Facebook recently mandated that Credits will be the exclusive way for users to get their 'real money' into a game, but developers will still be allowed to keep their own in-game currencies. I’m assuming RewardVille’s zPoints and zCoins will be considered an in-game currency.

Of course, RewardVille also gets users to start interacting with Zynga games off of Facebook, which is interesting considering the two company’s tumultuous history. Things seem to be peaceful now, but I’m curious how RewardVille will effect the relationship.

The dust has finally settled on the Sheen media hurricane from the past couple of weeks and bloggers have pretty much moved on in expectation of the next easy content fustercluck. Internships.com however, who paid at least 100K for the Ad.ly campaign (in the guise of a social media intern job post), is reaping the benefits of the two Sheen tweets, and have revealed their related traffic totals to TechCrunch in the wake of the blitz.

According to its internal Omniture data, Internships.com saw 1,035,021 unique visitors (almost two uniques per link click) as a result of the tweets and the subsequent shares and media attention (Representative Todd Leeloy tells me they subtracted out normal and affiliate traffic to get these numbers).

Between the campaign’s run of 1:03pm PST on Monday March 7th and midnight on Friday March 11th, the original bit.ly link received over 475,375 clicks and over 82,148 people applied for the internship, which Internships.com CEO Robin Richards tells me will be boiled down to 50 highly qualified candidates (eliminating all the reporters who applied as an experiment for example).

While internships.com says Sheen is “absolutely not” their spokesperson, in my opinion jury’s still out on what you call someone who is paid to tweet (hint: “spokesperson” would be a good word for it). But whatever you may call it and what ever you may think of Sheen’s lifestyle, these numbers are another bit of evidence proving that Twitter as a marketing tool can no longer be ignored.

In my last post about the Startup Visa, I was very critical of the Kerry–Lugar legislation. That's because it required immigrant entrepreneurs to raise at least $250,000 in financing for their startups, of which $100,000 had to come from American VCs or Super Angels. Few startups raise this kind of seed money—even in Silicon Valley. I couldn't foresee this bill generating more than a few dozen jobs.  Yet our political leaders would have claimed "Mission Accomplished", and we would have lost a valuable opportunity to stem the brain drain.

I was delighted to receive an e-mail, last week, from Garrett Johnson, who works for Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.). Garrett said that the Senator had read my articles and asked his staff to consider my comments. After consulting with Bob Litan, of Kauffman Foundation; Brad Feld, of Foundry Group; Eric Ries, of the lean-startup movement; and other champions of the visa, Garrett had revised the legislation. He sent me a draft of the bill that was introduced today.  This new legislation is even better than I had hoped for. If it gets through both houses—and doesn't have bureaucratic constraints—I expect it to unleash a flood of entrepreneurship.

The new legislation provides visas to the following groups under certain conditions:

1. Entrepreneurs living outside the U.S.—if a U.S. investor agrees to financially sponsor their entrepreneurial venture with a minimum investment of $100,000. Two years later, the startup must have created five new American jobs and either have raised over $500,000 in financing or be generating more than $500,000 in yearly revenue.
2. Workers on an H-1B visa, or graduates from U.S. universities in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, or computer science—if they have an annual income of at least $30,000 or assets of at least $60,000 and have had a U.S. investor commit investment of at least $20,000 in their venture. Two years later, the startup must have created three new American jobs and either have raised over $100,000 in financing or be generating more than $100,000 in yearly revenue.
3. Foreign entrepreneurs whose business has generated at least $100,000 in sales from the U.S.  Two years later, the startup must have created three new American jobs and either have raised over $100,000 in financing or be generating more than $100,000 in yearly revenue.

The investor must be a qualified venture capitalist, a "super angel" (U.S. citizen who has made at least two equity investments of at least $50,000 every year for the previous three years), or a qualified government entity.

The really good news is that this enables foreign students and workers who are already in the U.S. to qualify for a visa. The requirements for them are very reasonable—they must show that they have enough in savings not to be a burden to American taxpayers, and get a qualified investor or a government entity such as the Small Business Administration to validate their ideas by making a modest investment.

Yes, there is a risk for holders of this visa that, if their venture fails or doesn't go anywhere, they must start again or leave the U.S. But that's entrepreneurship—there are no guarantees. This won't appeal to everyone, and it is not meant to. The Startup Visa is for risk takers.

This version of the bill will, I expect, encourage tens of thousands of workers trapped in "immigration limbo", and foreign students who would otherwise return home after graduation, to try their hands at entrepreneurship. Many of these people would not otherwise have considered entrepreneurship; they will now have the incentive to take the risk.

Even though the bill doesn't allow visa holders to work for any company other than their own, I have no doubt that the anti-immigrants will rally against it. They always do, regardless of what is good for the country and of what is good for them. They fear competition and will make claims that these startups will, somehow, take their jobs away.

But the fact is that skilled immigrants create jobs; and recipients of the startup visa will not be allowed to stay in the U.S. permanently unless they do. Right now, these job creators have no choice but to take their ideas and savings home with them and become our competitors. This legislation allows them to create the jobs here.

A lot of hard work has gone into this bill, over the last two years, by tech notables Brad Feld, Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Manu Kumar, Shervin Pishevar, Fred Wilson, and Paul Kedrosky. This group is launching a campaign to gain the bill political support. It is using social-lobbying tools powered by Votizen to take tweets, Facebook posts, and SMS messages and hand-deliver them to Congress. The Startup Visa website details how you can get involved and help the bill to succeed. Now it is your turn to speak up and help us revitalize the economy.

Editor's note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Now that iTunes allows for subscriptions, more and more magazines are putting out iPad apps. The best ones offer new experiences beyond what amounts to turning the iPad into a fancy PDF viewer. This week, Spin magazine is releasing its very first iPad app (iTunes link) which production director Dylan Boelte recently demoed for me (see video).

It’s a magazine app in that includes a digital version of the current issue (which you can buy for $1.99 per issue or $7.99 for a year’s subscription), and it includes other bells and whistles such as recent top stories from the Website and exclusive behind the scenes videos from Spin’s rockstar photo shoots. But it’s also a music app. Each issue comes with a playlist of about 60 songs hand-selected by Spin’s music editors. The songs can be fully streamed in the app. You can listen to them while you are flipping through the magazine or send them to your speakers with Airplay. You can also pay extra to download them.

The one thing that always bugged me about music mags is that the writers sing the praises of bands, or alternatively trash them, and it all sounds convincing enough, but you buy an album based on their suggestion and it’s awful. Or they dismiss the songs that speak to you. Music is so subjective anyway. Now you can actually play some of the songs they are writing about, while you read the review. And you can decide immediately which music reviewers share the same musical taste as you and which ones need to clean the wax out of their ears.

Are 60 streaming-only songs a month worth $1.99 when you can get millions of songs on Rdio or Rhapsody for $4.99 or $9.99 a month, respectively? If you get the $7.99 annual subscription, it comes to less than 75 cents per months, but you can’t really compare the two. Spin is offering a highly curated playlist. If it’s editors really do have better music tastes than the rest of us, then it could be like getting the best mixed CD every month from your friend who is in a band. If the music is meh, then people are not going to renew their subscriptions.

And that’s why this app is notable. Spin’s iPad magazine won’t live or die based on the quality of the writing or the photography or even the “behind the scenes” videos (who really cares about those anyway?). It will live or die based on the musical taste of its editors and how good or awful those playlists are. The main reason people read music magazines are for the recommendations anyway. With the iPad app, now you can just listen to the song recommendations and judge for yourself. It’s a music magazine in its purest form.