Social-Game. Gaming & Design Redefined. (Founder Stories) Houston: “In 18 Months, You Are Going To See Little Dropbox Buttons Everywhere” By any measure Drew Houston and his Dropbox team are having a hugely successful run.
In Houston’s final Founder Stories episode with TechCrunch editor, Erick Schonfeld, Houston says he plans to maintain this momentum by focusing on mobile, and just about everything else. Houston says Dropbox has secured a new agreement with HTC, where it “is going to be baked into tens-of-millions of [Android] phones” and like Facebook, Dropbox plans to stamp its product on everything.
News Aggregator Wavii Wants To “Make Facebook Out Of Google,” Bring Relevant Content To You. The problem of how to find relevant content on the web has yet to be solved on a mass scale.
You’ve got cyborg news aggregators like Techmeme and Google news and social aggregators like Reddit and Digg competing with Twitter and the Facebook Newsfeed, all of them trying to get you the news that you want to know, as fast as possible. The Seattle-based Wavii, which has been in super stealth mode until now, takes a different approach to the problem. The startup uses natural language processing and machine learning to parse far corners of the web and bring users personalized content based on their Facebook Likes and feedback. Upon entering Wavii via Facebook Connect, you are asked to pick a combination of 12 topics that pertain to you and rinse, repeat. Wavii picks these initial interests by processing your Facebook Likes, and adjusts itself as you give it more data. Ex-TechCruncher launches semantic Q&A service Beepl.