Whoozer : le réseau social de proximité. Sortir et Echanger avec votre quartier. Path’s Consistency Of Tone. Editor’s Note: Brenden Mulligan is an entrepreneur and product designer who created Onesheet, Webbygram, TipList, ArtistData, MorningPics, and PhotoPile. You can find him on Twitter at @mulligan. Admittedly, I have a negative bias towards overhyped startups. If a company gets a lot of attention before they do anything significant, I’m less likely to try their product and when I do, less likely to have a positive feeling about it. I realize this is a weakness I need to overcome, but it’s the way my mind works. There are few better examples over the past few years of overhyped startups than Path. Two years ago the company, after much uber-super-duper-stealth-mode speculation, launched a sub-par photo-sharing product that offered little utility over the other products in the space. Realizations like this don’t come easy and it’s led me to think a lot recently about why the network appeals to me so much.
Consistency of tone When I open Path, I’m seeing experiences people are having. Twitter. Playfire Hits A Million Users Of Its Analytics For Gamers. Playfire, a social network designed entirely for console and desktop video gamers launched in 2008. That makes it one of the older social networks, but unlike others of its ilk it has not rested on its laurels. Last year they re-worked the site to run entirely on automatically tracked data. Literally speaking, users can create a profile once and forget about it, allowing the site to track all their in-game activity.
Their profile then delivers to them in-game stats, custom themes, favorite genre graphs, favourite games and many other features. Now, that might not sound like a lot, but you have to remember that this is a different environment to the web. To use Playfire is very simple – you just enter your username or Xbox Live, PS3 or Steam.
Raptr, which has raised raised $27 million in funding, is the only other company which can do similar things. Playfire has raised $3.1 million from Atomico and angels including Michael Birch and William Reeve. Pearltrees lève 5 millions d'euros et prépare un modèle freemium. Loin de la Silicon Valley, les startups françaises dont l’unité de base en matière de levée de fonds est le million d’euros ne courent pas les rues. C’est pourtant le cas de Pearltrees, qui vient de boucler son quatrième tour de table, avec cette fois une levée record dans sa jeune histoire : 5 millions d’euros. Pour ceux qui seraient passés à côté des épisodes précédentes, Pearltrees est un service web de « social curation », autrement dit un site qui permet de collectionner, organiser et partager toutes les trouvailles que l’on repère sur le web dans une page simple et conviviale, sous forme de « perles » regroupées en grappes thématiques, les « pearltrees ». 15 millions de perles ont été créées à ce jour par les membres du site.
Si cela ne vous parle pas, je vous conseille juste d’essayer : c’est plus facile à utiliser qu’à expliquer. 4 levées de fond en 3 ans, et monétisation en vue… le site Pearltrees. Playing The News: To Push Social Gaming Forward, Two New Startups Look To The Real World. When most people think of social gaming, they likely think of Zynga and its flagship titles, like FarmVille and CityVille — or even Words With Friends. Yet, as Facebook social gaming matures (right along with mobile technology and platforms), we are starting to see studios begin to push the boundaries more, looking for new ways to engage and educate gamers, maybe even reinventing the wheel while they’re at it. One example is the New York City-based startup Playmatics, part of the Swiss-based Shadow Government Ltd., which collectively raised $1 million last year to build a new game franchise called Shadow Government.
For those unfamiliar, beginning with mobile and later moving to Facebook, Shadow Government looks to bring real-world data and modeling to the social game sphere. To do that, the startup has partnered with the Millennium Institute to leverage its economic and sustainability data, and government-modeling software to allow players to build and run their own virtual countries. Swoop Gives Food Websites An Injection Of Local Deals. Swoop, a startup that’s launching today, says it’s giving food websites a new way to convince readers to stick around, and to make some money in the process. CEO Ron Elwell says Swoop’s technology can look at the text of a food website and automatically inject links to local deals when they’re relevant. So, for example, if a site includes a recipe that calls for mayonnaise, Swoop can insert a link at the mention of mayonnaise, and if the reader clicks on it, a small window will open showing any nearby deals on mayonnaise.
Users can specify their zip code and which stores they’re interested in seeing deals from, and they can create shopping lists of the items they want. Elwell says Swoop will add more personalization options over time (the company tracks repeat users through cookies). You can see a Swoop-linked site here. There are other companies offering to insert advertising or affiliate links into online text. Beyond Facebook: The Rise Of Interest-Based Social Networks. Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Jay Jamison, a Partner at BlueRun Ventures, who focuses on early stage mobile, consumer and enterprise investments.
He also serves on the boards of AppCentral, AppRedeem, Foodspotting, and Thumb. You can follow Jay on Twitter @jay_jamison or read his blog at www.jayjamison.com. With the pending public offering of Facebook anticipated to be the largest tech IPO in history, it’s an interesting time to think about where we go from here. Some say “social is done,” Facebook is all the social media anyone would ever want or need. Unquestionably, as it nears one billion accounts, in the solar system of social media, Facebook is the Sun — the gravitational center around which everything social revolves.
But while some may pronounce that Facebook is all the social we’d ever need, users clearly haven’t gotten the memo. The numbers tell the tale around users’ appetites for these new interest-based social networks. Both. How New York City Went Digital in 2011. Since 2010, New York City has strived to become a global digital leader. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and commissioner Katherine Oliver announced NYC Digital last July, with the mission to create a better civil society and stronger democracy with the use of technology - engaging, serving and connecting New York.
Rachel Sterne is the city's first chief digital officer. Her goal at NYC Digital is to use technology and digital media to improve communication with residents and business and enhance government transparency. Alongside Bloomberg, Sterne created Road Map for the Digital City, which outlines plans to make New York the world’s leading digital city.
"The state of the digital city was strong in New York when we began developing the roadmap," says Sterne, who credits Bloomberg's administration with digital development supporting efficiency, transparency and public engagement. "But we are New Yorkers, and we don’t rest on our laurels. Access Open Government Engagement Industry. Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Mark Zuckerberg, "A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg" Delicious Adds Collaboration and One-Ups Pinterest With Privacy. Delicious has just announced 4 new features to make its stacks, or collections of links, more social. Because the only thing better than a bundle of your favorite kitten websites is bundle co-created by you and your friends. You can now collaboratively build stacks, comment on whole stacks, respond to a stack with a stack similar to a YouTube response, and create private stacks.
The features will permit new use cases like stealth cooperation and give Delicious an advantage over Pinterest which doesn’t offer private boards yet. Private stacks make Delicious more than just a broadcast channel for your taste. In conjunction with the new collaboration feature, you can also silently assemble and discuss links with others, and later decide to present them to the world. Pinterest doesn’t offer private boards yet. The collaboration feature lets you invite friends to edit your stacks. Commenting on entire stacks lets you have conversations about the interconnections between links. GuideHop and iStopOver Team Up To Fuse Local Activity And Rental Discovery (P2P Style)
SXSW 2012 is sneaking up on us; believe it or not, it’s just around the corner. As you may know, Austin’s music/film/tech conference attracts big names, tons of press, and notable companies each year — geeks flock to the event just as they do for CES. On the tech or “Interactive” side, there’s a lot of hoopla and way too much media coverage, but some interesting startups do still manage to emerge (or at least solidify their reputations) at the festi-conference each year. Foursquare and Twitter, to name two, both owe tips of the cap to SXSW. Those traveling to the festival always start early, as hotels fill up fast. And since these conferences will cost you a bit more than a ticket to Burning Man, many of the more adventurous souls look for accommodations that are cheaper (and more exciting) than that offered by some measly hotel.
There are a million ways to find local activities, but GuideHop hopes to capitalize on the growing buzz around peer-to-peer marketplaces and social travel.