Why 'Hater' App's Founder Wanted a Negative Alternative to Social Media. Social networks like Facebook and Instagram are intended to help users share their lives, but Jake Banks believes the language of "likes" used on these services forces us to be overly positive and restricts our ability to be ourselves. That's why he decided to develop an alternative social networking app called Hater, which is intended for sharing all the things you don't like.
"It's really an answer to everything out there in social media. All you can do is 'like' things," Banks told Mashable. "I don't want to be the guy pretending to be someone I'm not. I want to be real and say, 'I'm sitting in traffic and I hate this.'" While you can post a comment like that on Facebook or Twitter, Banks' contention is that providing a dedicated community for dislikes frees up users to re-think the type of posts they share and vent a bit.
Banks spent more than a decade directing commercials and running a New York production company, which also developed apps for clients in recent years. DISQUS - Elevating the discussion. Hangtime Looks To Be The Watercooler For Events At SXSW And Beyond. OK, so maybe we said it would be hard for an app to break out at SXSW this year. But that isn’t stopping several startups from trying. One startup called Hangtime, from serial entrepreneur Karl Jacob, is looking to be the comprehensive Rolodex of events at SXSW and beyond.
It pulls in events from Facebook that you have permission to see, ranks them by overall popularity, popularity among your friends and distance among other factors. When you open the app, you can use Facebook to find friends and pull in hundreds of events. You can say you’re “interested” in going to them by clicking a button in the app. The idea is to get people to interact without necessarily committing to going to something.
“People don’t necessarily know what they are going to. In Hangtime, there’s a way to say you’re publicly interested in an event, and then there’s a way to privately share an event with a friend. “That creates this bifurcation,” he said. Next on the roadmap is improving personalization. Homeland Season 2. Hunch. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer: We're Building A Mobile 'Interest Graph' | TPM LiveWire. Data-Driven Comparison Shopping Platform FindTheBest Raises $11M From New World, Kleiner Perkins And Others. FindTheBest, the data-driven comparison startup led by DoubleClick founder Kevin O’Connor has raised $11 million in Series B financing led by New World Ventures, with participation form Montgomery & Co. and existing investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and O’Connor.
This brings the company’s total funding to $17 million. FindTheBest has a simple ambition: to help people compare different products and services so that they can quickly figure out which is the best one. But what differentiates the startup from the plenty of other comparison sites out there is the data-driven and personalized results. FindTheBest’s in-depth comparison searches crawl large amounts of data. For example, the engine can compare colleges and break down comparisons by acceptance rates, SAT scores, tuition, and more. Sources include public and third party databases, primary sources like manufacturer and vendor websites, and expert and user ratings. Snoox, The Pinterest Of Recommendations, Launches On iOS And Android. When Snoox, the web-based recommendation engine for friends, first launched in November, my only gripe was that searching for recommendations is best suited for mobile, even though giving recommendations feels right on the web. Luckily, my prayers have been answered as Snoox has developed apps for both iOS and Android, just as promised.
The company recently raised $2 million in funding to develop the apps, which have been in the pipeline since launch. In case you are unfamiliar with the platform, Snoox is a lot like Pinterest, but with recommendations. In fact, I like to call it the Pinterest with a purpose, since the art of creating boards isn’t just for later aspirational perusing, but rather to let your friends know what you think is great. Simply log in the platform and start typing in your favorite things. Snoox searches for images on the web, or you can add your own, and from there all you need is to add a link. The Snoox team is well aware that mobile is critical to their success. Arro For iPhone Tells You What To Buy While In The Store…And What To Avoid. Arro, a new mobile shopping companion app for iPhone, is publicly launching this week with a different idea about how to help shoppers in store aisles make a quick decision on whether or not to buy.
Instead of focusing on price matching or personalized product recommendations, the app gives users a shortlist of the top five choices, based on its analysis of millions of online reviews. There are a lot of apps in the mobile shopping space, so the distinctions between Arro and others is important. Explains CEO and co-founder Manish Vij, when you’re at the store, you don’t have time to wade through Amazon reviews. “Arro tells you whether you should buy the model you’re looking at or whether there are better choices,” he says. “And it makes it easy to help a friend who’s at the store and needs advice: simply tap the products you want to share,” Vij adds.
The app first launched into beta in the beginning of November 2012, with just 10 categories to start collecting user feedback. Livestar 2.0: Reviews Done Right (Also, Get A $30 Amazon Gift Card) Livestar first launched at TechCrunch Disrupt a few months ago. It’s a mobile app that lets you see (and write) reviews for the things you generally want reviews for – restaurants, movies, music and other apps.
The company was founded by former Microsoft M&A exec Fritz Lanman. The reason you want Livestar on your phone and use it every day is it combines normal user reviews (like we’ve grown accustomed to on Yelp) with professional critics. You don’t have to scour the Internet for those professional restaurant reviews. Use Livestar to pull up local restaurants and present those reviews for you. Same with music and movies. You can do it all with one app.
Livestar was pretty useful when it launched, but a lot of key features were left out. There are now 200,000 professional critic reviews. 875,000 total reviews. And best of all, add older movies directly to your Netflix queue. All of these service integrations are new with the new version. About That $30 Amazon Gift Card. Stack Exchange Co-Founder Jeff Atwood Launches Forums Startup Discourse, With Funding From First Round, Greylock, And SV Angel. Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Q&A network Stack Exchange, announced today via blog post that he’s launching a new startup called Discourse, which offers an open source platform for running discussion forums. The full name of the company is actually Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., and its goal is indeed to improve the quality of online discussion. However, Atwood writes that he’s following a very different strategy from Stack Exchange, which aims for “the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers”: Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could.
Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already.After spending four solid years thinking of discussion as the established corrupt empire, and Stack Exchange as the scrappy rebel alliance, I began to wonder – what would it feel like to change sides? Opinion-Polling Network Thumb Now Routes Questions By Location For More Relevant Answers. Thumb, the opinion-polling network that lets people get real-time crowdsourced recommendations, has today launched a new update to the app routes questions in a totally new way: by location. This was something that founder Dan Kurani said was always in Thumb’s plan, but that patience was the key.
“We wanted to have enough liquidity to ensure the best possible experience for our users,” said Kurani. And by liquidity, he’s not only referencing sheer user numbers but platform engagement on the whole. The app has seen nearly 24 million unique questions pass through its doors, and over 228 million sessions since launch. The addition of location routing should only boost engagement even more.
In metropolitan areas, the search will be a bit more focused. Since the average Thumb query returns a first response within around 20 seconds, it was very important to Kurani and the team to make sure that there is no sacrifice on instant gratification. New Lists: The Most Recent Lists on Ranker. READ 5 readers How Tall Are The World's Most Important Statues? READ 5 readers Haunting Photos Of Children Who Fought In WWII Names The Best Garbodor Nicknames Pokemon The Best Seismitoad Nicknames READ 5 readers How Tall Are The World's Most Important Statues?
READ 5 readers Haunting Photos Of Children Who Fought In WWII Names The Best Garbodor Nicknames Pokemon The Best Seismitoad Nicknames 36 reranks The Greatest Entertainers of All Time #1 Tina Turner Heavily Upvoted #2 Michael Jackson Most Votes and Most Up Votes #5 Freddie Mercury Heavily Upvoted 97 reranks The Best Characters In The Marvel Cinematic Universe #1 Iron Man Often listed #1 and Top 5 in Reranks #2 Thor Heavily Upvoted #3 Spider-Man Heavily Upvoted 21 reranks The Most Popular Video Games Right Now #1 Minecraft Heavily Upvoted #2 Fortnite Often listed #1 and Most Votes #3 Grand Theft Auto V Top 5 in Reranks and Heavily Upvoted 20 reranks Male Celebrities You'd Want to Be Your Bro #10 Sam Claflin Heavily Upvoted. Most Famous Person Of All Time. Mobile Social Voting App Polar Raises $1.2M From Jerry Yang, John Lilly, Maynard Webb And Others. Social voting app Polar has raised $1.2 milliom from Yahoo founder Jerry Yang at AME Cloud Ventures, Greylock Partners’ John Lilly, LiveOps Chairman and former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Ash Patel at Morado Ventures, Brian O’Malley Mike Dauber at Battery Ventures, Google’s Don Dodge, Sam Pullara, and others.
Polar is the brainchild of co-founder Luke Wroblewski, a former VP at Yahoo and the co-founder of BagCheck, which was acquired by Twitter in 2011. The idea behind Polar came when Wroblewski and his partner Jeff Cole noticed that friends were looking for things to do during their “downtime” on their phones, when people would normally check Tweets or Facebook. He felt that there was an opportunity to allow consumers to spend this time on a mobile app using other social interactions. Polar’s iOS app lets you vote on photos polls about fashion, film, food, and much more. It’s sort of like a “Hot or Not” for the modern world. Why the high engagement? Opinsy: Your Opinion Counts. Thumb. Instant Photo Polls for Friends | Polar. Check For appFigures Brings App Metrics And Sales Data To The iPhone. App development firm Lemon Labs just released a new iOS application aimed at mobile developers in need of tracking their app downloads and other metrics while on the go.
The tool, which uses the appFigures API, offers an alternative to services like App Annie, Distimo or even appFigures‘ own website – none of which today offer their own native mobile experiences. AppFigures, for those unfamiliar, is a popular service for taking data from iTunes Connect, Google Play and other app stores, and putting it into a more usable format for developers. Lemon Lab’s new app, “Check for appFigures,” solves the problem of having to browse the appFigures desktop-sied website using an iPhone, by bringing key statistics to a downloadable iOS application. The app offers a clear and simple overview of importnat metrics like app downloads, updates, and sales. It also allows developers to quickly see these figures for various date ranges, including “all time,” “last 24 hours,” and 1, 3, 6, 9 or 12 months.
Fandrop Debuts A Digg-Like Service For Viral Media, Hacks Its Way To Over 1 Million Pageviews Monthly. Fandrop, a new content sharing site started by a group of growth hackers, is debuting today to help you find out what’s trending across the web. The site surfaces things like tweets and Facebook posts, YouTube videos, images from sites like imgur, articles, web pages, and more.
In some ways, it’s similar to other social networks and social sharing sites, in that you can friend and follow other users, create profiles, build collections of content, and post things you find to the Fandrop platform. But according to co-founder and CEO Ken Zi Wang, the big differentiating factor here is Fandrop’s technology and focus on finding the content that’s trending around the web. Wang says his interest in social content began with his second startup, a social news network called Buzzreport, but he’s always been curious about how virality works on the web. When you go to the homepage today, it’s a mix of clickable distractions – funny videos, gifs, photos, posts, music videos and more. Swipp Launches Social Interest Graph Platform To Go Beyond The Facebook Like. Swipp, a Mountain View-based startup taking the wraps off of its products and platform today after two years of development and with $3.5 million in funding from Old Willow Partners. The startup has been cagey about what exactly it was building until now, but co-founders Don Thorson and Charlie Costantini provided me with a demo of the Swipp’s “global social intelligence platform, commercial and consumer apps” ahead of today’s official launch.
Thorson (Swipp’s CEO) and Costantini are no strangers to innovation and product development. Thorson was once a creative director at Apple, as well as a top marketing executive at both Jajah and Ribbit. Costantini was also at Ribbit, and also held an executive position at Talenthouse, a creative social agency for celebrities and brands. “Swiff is a new type of social intelligence platform, and on that platform we’ve built a new class of social intelligence apps,” Thorson explained in an interview. Dashboard - swipp.com. Yelp to Add Health Scores for Restaurants in San Francisco, New York.
If you live in New York or San Francisco, it's about to get even easier to find health information for restaurants in your city. Yelp, the popular business review website, announced Thursday that it has started adding hygiene scores for restaurants in San Francisco and there are plans to add similar scores to restaurants in New York next. The hygiene scores, which are on a 100-point scale, are based on inspection data from the city and a standard developed in partnership with local and federal government officials. Yelp is working with the technology departments of the cities of San Francisco and New York to collect and add this information into its database.
"While ratings and reviews are incredibly powerful ways to guide spending decisions, we're always looking for new ways to supplement the information to provide a better experience for consumers," Yelp's co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said in a statement. Images courtesy of Flickr, Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com and Yelp. Inside Social Commerce - Covering the Intersection Between E-Commerce and Social Networking. Mouthee.