Whimsical - The iterative workspace for product teams. Reveal - Turn an IP address into company data to identify web traffic. Find email addresses in seconds • Hunter (Email Hunter) Remove Background from Image – remove.bg. Spectacle. Evernote Funding story. Apps platform. DragonDrop. iPad & iPhone apps. Postbox — Awesome Email. GAget — A Google Analytics Widget for OS X. Meet the Next-Generation Payments Systems Set to Drive Future Commerce - Advertising Age - DigitalNext. Task Ave. - Remember what you need to do, where. Why if you miss Siri you’ll miss the future of the Web — Scoblei. Siri is the most useful thing I’ve seen so far this year. But after playing with it, getting an interview with its CEO (video here on building43) it’s even more important for you to pay attention to. It is the best example of what the web will be.
Let’s go back. Web 1994 was the “get me a domain and a page” era. Web 2000 was the “make my page(s) interactive and put people on it” era. Siri is the best example. Why is it so different? Because on the back end they’ve stitched together a sizeable group of APIs from services like Opentable to Flightstats. Before it was common only for a couple of APIs to be joined together, here they have dozens. That’s the other thing. Why is this really new and important?
No, the real secret sauce and huge impact on the future of the web is in the back end of this thing. I just asked Siri “who checked into the Half Moon Bay Ritz?” But the team now could hook up Foursquare’s APIs and make this question answerable. This is the future of the web. Leaked Video: Swyping Versus iPhone Typing. (Swype For Android I.
A year ago, Swype launched a new way to type on a touchscreen phone at TechCrunch50. Swype was created by the inventor of the T9 predictive typing system used on most phones today because he felt that new text input methods for small touchscreens are sorely needed. Today, the startup announced the first phone to use the technology will be the Samsung Omnia II on Verizon. As you can see in the video above, which shows a side-by-side comparison of typing on the Omnia II versus on an iPhone, the way you type with Swype is you literally swipe your finger from one letter to the next as fast as you can. In the video, the Swypist beats the iPhone typist hands down, so to speak.
More phones with Swype built in will be launched next year. Will Swype give Android an edge over the iPhone? Graphic.ly Wants To Blow Your Mind Away With Digital Comics (Vid. Will digital books will ever match printed ones for sheer reading pleasure? What about comic books and graphic novels? I think it depends on what device you are reading them. One of the most visually stunning apps on the iPad, for instance, is the Marvel Comics reader. You just swipe from page to page, and when you tap on a frame it becomes larger and moves forward. The swiping gives the comics a sense of motion you don’t get on paper.
A startup called Graphic.ly is taking a similar approach and adding social elements. The AIR app gives you a taste of what is to come. When you load a comic book—there are about 70 right now and growing from independent comic book publishers, but Baldwin hopes to add Marvel soon—you can click on each panel to make it pop forward and become bigger. The AIR app is decent, but I really want to see this on an iPad. Graphic.ly launched as a TechStars startup last summer when it was called Take Comics. Skype to make group video chat the next killer webcam feature | Starting next week, Skype will begin beta testing a new group video chat feature on Windows PCs, according to the Associated Press. The feature will let up to five people join in on a video chat simultaneously, which is a big leap from Skype’s current limit of two users to a video chat.
Group video chat will initially be available for free, but Skype plans to start charging for it within three to four months, along with other new features. The company also plans to bring the feature to Macs later this year. Skype consumer business general manager Neil Stevens said the group video chat feature was one of the most requested by its users. That doesn’t come as much of a surprise. While one-on-one video chat has been available to consumers since the late nineties, it took the proliferation of broadband internet access, faster computer speeds, and cheap webcam availability over the past decade to popularize it.
Skype has also leapfrogged Cisco at bringing the technology to consumers. Rapportive | Making email a better place. Leverage Sales Navigator insights anytime you send an email. View rich LinkedIn profile data for your contacts directly in Gmail, and use that knowledge when you reach out next. This Chrome extension is available in two flavors, “Lite” for free LinkedIn members and “Premium” for LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscribers. Sales Navigator Lite for Gmail will let you See rich LinkedIn profile data for your contacts directly in your Gmail, and use that knowledge when you reach out next Mention icebreakers, including shared connections, experiences, and interests, to build rapport with your contacts Hover over any email address anywhere in your message to quickly view their profile to stay informed on who’s who With a Sales Navigator subscription, this extension will unlock additional premium features: Save contacts as leads in your Sales Navigator account Use TeamLink to see if prospects are connected to your colleagues and get a warm introduction.
Google, Mozilla, and Opera launch WebM open video project | Vent. Google has spent a lot of time evangelizing for open formats for Web applications and media. Today it took another step in that direction by announcing a new free, open source video technology called WebM. WebM will combine three technologies — VP8 for video encoding (a technology that Google acquired when it bought On2), Vorbis for audio encoding, and the Matroska media container format.
Videos created in WebM can be made available in both HTML5 and Adobe’s Flash format. WebM will compete with H.264 video encoding technology, which is widely supported, but is controlled by the MPEG LA cosnortium of companies. Representatives from browser companies Mozilla and Opera demonstrated WebM video on-stage, showing off the high quality of the video and the fact that developers can build their own custom players. Here’s a full list of partners from the WebM blog post: Web video startup Brightcove, one of the WebM partners, sent the following comment on the news: eType Auto-Completes Your Writing. Everywhere. (1,000 Exclusive. It’s safe to assume that there’s no Web user out there that hasn’t experienced auto-complete. Whether on Google site search and toolbars, Facebook search, or on ecommerce sites like Amazon, auto-complete has become a de-facto usability feature.
Its ubiquity means that there’s a very shallow learning curve for users to get accustomed to it when used outside of the browser setting, and that’s exactly what eType is banking on with its auto-complete-as-you-type product. We have 1000 exclusive invites for TechCrunch readers! Get them while they’re hot, here. Now before you cubbyhole eType as a utility strictly for non-English speakers, here’s an anecdote that may change your mind: There’s an Israeli company called WhiteSmoke, which developed software that enriches written English. The product was originally developed to assist non-native English speakers boost the quality of their writing in emails and such. eType is completely free and a breeze to use. Swype brings its fast touchscreen keyboard app to all Android ph.
What's next in mobile? Find out at MobileBeat, VentureBeat's 7th annual event on the future of mobile, on July 8-9 in San Francisco. Register now and save $400! Swype, makers of innovative touchscreen text-input technology, will bring its software to all Android devices tomorrow, the company told TechCrunch, a technology blog. It’s not a full release of the software — its feature-set will be limited, and it will only be available for a few days. The company’s touchscreen keyboard technology differs from virtual input methods seen on iPhone and Android devices. A Swype employee was able to trounce the previous Guinness World Record for texting speed using the software, so it definitely seems plenty fast.
Swype is also meant for more than just phones — it can technically be used in any device with a virtual keyboard. Android users can grab the Swype app from the company’s site at Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. Home - ExtensionFM. Geoloqi Aims to Unlock the Magic of Mobile Location. I want an app that automatically sends me a link to the Wikipedia entry for any historic building I travel nearby. I want to leave a note for my wife on a map, so she'll get a text message when she bikes past the neighborhood where we first met. I want to see all the places I've gone in my home town and get restaurant recommendations from areas I haven't visited in a long time. Those kinds of things could really happen once a startup called Geoloqi launches soon. Geoloqi turns your mobile location into a platform for messaging, programmed functionality and temporary, limited sharing.
The consumer service could make the dream of passively consuming ambient information about our surroundings a reality and the program's code is intended to enable any other developer to add location services to their applications. It's the fruit of several years of experimental location tracking and the company says it will launch publicly in the coming weeks. You can drop a geonote for Case via this page. Pinger Now Turns Your iPod Touch Into A Free Cell Phone. Earlier this month we took a look at Pinger, the company behind Textfree, a massively popular application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that gives users free, unlimited text messaging.
Since launching in March 2009, users have sent over 4 billion text messages with the app, which has been downloaded 8 million times (these numbers effectively put Pinger in the top ten US carriers, volume-wise). And today at TechCrunch Disrupt, the company is announcing that it’s venturing into new territory: voice calls. Textfree will soon include a true SIP-based VOIP client that works over both 3G and Wifi. The feature is enabled by the fact that Pinger gives all of its users free, unique, real phone numbers (it distributed 1.7 million phone numbers last quarter; AT&T gave out 1.6 million in the same time span). Calling works as you’d expect: hit the call button, and you’ll see a dialpad — you’ll be able to place calls whenever you have a data connection. Pinger says this is only the beginning. Google Acquires Impressive Touchscreen Keyboard Startup BlindType. Google has just acquired BlindType, a very impressive technology that allows you to type on touch screens without even looking at them.
See our past coverage of the startup here. BlindType doesn’t force you to type using a virtual keyboard at the bottom of your screen, which is the norm on most smartphones. Instead, you just start typing wherever it’s convenient— BlindType analyzes the position of your finger taps relative to each other to determine which characters you’re typing (check out the video below to watch it in action). Here’s a post that just went live on the company’s blog: We are excited to announce that BlindType has been acquired by Google!
BlindType’s website may be ugly, but the video demos are very impressive — I’d love to see this technology make its way into Android. 50% Of Android Apps With Internet Access That Ask For Your Location Send It To Advertisers. Be careful what permissions you sign away to your Android apps. A new study suggests that fully half of the most popular apps for Google's mobile OS that access location data are sending it to advertisers without users' consent. The study, conducted by researchers at Intel, Duke, and Penn State, looked at 30 of the most popular apps which ask for permission to access to the Internet and your phone's location. The researchers found that 15 of them were sending that information on to ad networks, and none of them asked permission or mentioned this practice in their end-user license agreements (EULAs).
The study also found some of the apps sending out users' phone numbers or unique device identification codes, also without permission. Two-thirds of the apps committed at least one of these violations. There's nothing inherently nefarious about sending location data to ad networks -- better targeted ads are more likely to be of interest to users, and the revenues from them help keep apps free.
Winamp Wants To Be The iTunes Of Android; Now Out Of Beta With Wireless Sync. Today Winamp for Android is coming out of beta, a month after its initial launch and more than 500,000 downloads later. The public Android release lets you manage your music downloads on your Android and will offer a couple new features, including wireless syncing over WiFi with Winamp on your desktop computer and the addition of Shoutcast radio stations. (Both Winamp and Shoutcast are owned by AOL, as is TechCrunch).
The wireless syncing requires a new desktop version for Windows computers, which is also available today. Winamp is a popular music management software for Windows, with 60 million users predominantly overseas. Instead, AOL is going to ride the Android wave. Just like with iTunes, Winamp lets you mange and play your digital music collection. People spend a lot of time with their own music collections. Could Winamp become a Trojan Horse for a future music streaming service from AOL beyond Shoutcast radio?