If you’ve seen Danny Boyle’s movie Sunshine, you may be a little disappointed: NASA’s mission to visit the Earth’s Sun won’t include sending people up there. But it will be sending a spacecraft into the Sun’s atmosphere, approximately four million miles from its surface. The project, called Solar Probe Plus, is slated to launch sometime before 2018.
Four million miles doesn’t sound very close, but it’s still very exciting, since this is a region no other spacecraft (created by us) has ever encountered. NASA plans for the project to “unlock the sun’s biggest mysteries.”
Although the spacecraft will be relatively far from our star’s surface, its carbon-composite heat shield will have to withstand intense radiation, as well as temperatures exceeding 2550 degrees Fahrenheit.
“The experiments selected for Solar Probe Plus are specifically designed to solve two key questions of solar physics – why is the sun’s outer atmosphere so much hotter than the sun’s visible surface and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system?” said Dick Fisher, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division in Washington.
“We’ve been struggling with these questions for decades and this mission should finally provide those answers,” said Fisher.
[Image credit: NASA]
More About: mission, NASA, space, spacecraft, sun, Sunshine
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We’ve just gotten an email from Twitter stating that staffers are testing push notifications amongst themselves and the company will be rolling this feature out to all users soon.
Push notifications would enable users to get instant, real-time updates for certain types of tweets — probably DMs and @replies and perhaps other kinds of tweets, as well.
A few lucky users accidentally got the new feature with the Twitter for iPad application which was recently released.
“When we launched Twitter for iPad, there was a configuration error that caused us to offer push messages to a small set of users,” wrote a Twitter spokesperson. We’ve stopped sending push messages, but users may see an option to turn on push until we release an updated version of the app.”
“We’ve been testing push notifications internally,” the rep continued. “Push isn’t ready yet, but we look forward to rolling this out soon.”
Twitter for iPhone, formerly known as Tweetie, was made available to the public three months ago. Since then, it’s skyrocketed to a top spot as one of the most-used Twitter interfaces. In fact, 8% of all users of Twitter access the app via Twitter for iPhone.
As for Twitter’s official iPad app, which just launched late last night, we don’t yet have any data on how much use that app is getting, but we do know that its interface is exciting and well-designed enough to get geeks around the web pretty excited; stay tuned for our full write-up and review later tonight.
What do you think of push notifications for Twitter mobile apps? Are you looking forward to getting real-time updates from those you follow?
Image courtesy of Flickr, tsevis
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It’s something you’d expect to hear from your mother, not your government, but New York’s newest laws are all about exercising common sense when looking for love online.
Sounding like something between a schoolteacher and a public service announcement, the Internet safety act will require online dating websites to warn their users about the potential perils of web-based romance.
The caveats seem like the kind of best practices any mindful Internet user would have internalized years ago. Things like not giving out your physical address and providing your own transportation on initial dates, for example, are no-brainers.
But the act also includes clauses about not revealing your employer or last name; a simple search engine could be used as a tool for stalking or much worse in the grimmest scenarios.
And another point made in the act is proof of how much dating has changed in the past 20 years: Users are warned against giving out their phone numbers in the first volley of emails back and forth between themselves and any strangers they may meet on a dating site.
Basically, the government is trying to make sure dating websites do everything they can to keep users from releasing identifying information until it’s safe and appropriate.
Although online dating is huge business, we can’t imagine many companies having a problem with this requirement of consumer awareness, depending on how it’s carried out. In fact, such a law might even be beneficial on a national level. One other state — New Jersey — has enacted such a law already.
What do you think of the Internet safety act in New York? Do you think it’s an appropriate, common-sense measure for dating websites to have to take? Or is it a futile reaction to Internet-linked violent crimes, which may have little to do with dating sites specifically?
Let us know your opinions in the comments.
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Since Twitter acquired Tweetie and rolled out an official iPhone client, the company has focused more and more on improving the mobile experience across all smartphone platforms.
Twitter CEO Ev Williams wrote just now on the company blog that mobile usage of the site is up 62% since in just over four months, and 16% of all new Twitter users are starting out on mobile devices as opposed to web signups (this number is up from just 5% earlier this year).
In the days before Twitter started issuing official apps on a platform-by-platform basis, the company wasn’t seeing the kind of mobile adoption it had hoped for. Williams wrote, “Even though there was a plethora of third-party Twitter apps, people were having trouble finding and selecting one because none were called ‘Twitter.’ This kept them from using Twitter at all.”
The company adopted a new strategy for mobile; rather than leaving all the mobile app development to third parties, Twitter decided to consolidate efforts. In the short term, this caused some consternation for third-party devs; however, looking at Twitter’s stats, it’s clear the company did the right thing for its shareholders and bottom line.
Twitter acquired Tweetie in May this year; this was our first indication that Twitter would be creating and distributing its own mobile apps for a change. Tweetie was revamped and renamed Twitter for iPhone in May. A BlackBerry app was released in April, and the company’s official Android Twitter app was released later the same month.
Twitter is also seeing strong growth in its mobile site and SMS service, and Williams notes that third-party apps such as TweetDeck continue to be valuable and important parts of the Twitter mobile landscape.
And as for the long tail, Williams writes, “There are a tremendous number of other apps that people are using, not necessarily as their main Twitter client, but as an alternative way to create or view Tweets. The number of registered OAuth applications is now at almost 300,000 — this number has nearly tripled since Chirp [Twitter's developer conference, which was held in April in San Francisco].”
While the above chart shows percentages of unique users per app, we’d also love to see a breakdown by volume of tweets.
Has your own mobile usage of Twitter changed or grown at all with Twitter’s releasing several official apps? Do you still use third-party applications for tweeting on the go? Let us know what you think about these stats in the comments.
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The increasingly popular online shopping site Thefind has finally found a way to connect with Facebook — without being creepy.
It’s not a technical breakthrough — plenty of sites now work with Facebook to let users log-in — but Thefind has been grappling with how to integrate with Facebook in a way that’s relevant and privacy-respectful.
The company even went invited Wired.com to sit in on its internal discussions this spring about how the shopping site might integrate with Facebook users profiles, how it could mine them and what just felt creepy. Those conversations happened as Facebook experienced a massive backlash over its privacy changes, including a system called Instant Personalization, which automatically turned your profile data over to Yelp and Pandora if you visited their sites while still logged into Facebook.
Thefind largely shelved its plans — basically, waiting out the storm and seeing if Facebook would grow up a bit. (For the back story, see “The Inside Story of How One Company Didn’t Mine Facebook“.
On Thursday, Thefind turned on its first real use of the Facebook log-in. Those who choose to login using their Facebook accounts give the site permission to see their profiles and their friend profiles. Thefind then matches up the pages and stores and brands you’ve liked or become a fan of on Facebook, and lets you add them to the list of brands and stores you like on Thefind. Your search results are then adjusted so that items from the stores you like, whether that’s Target or a designer boutique or both, show up more prominently in your search.
But more intriguingly, when you look at an item in Thefind’s results, you can use the Facebook “Like” button to say you like a certain brand or a store. You can also see tiny profile pictures of your friends who like a store or brand, and how many people total on Facebook like a brand or store. The key, however, is that those “Like” buttons aren’t liking a profile page or brand on Thefind — they are tied to the retailer or shoe company’s fan page on Facebook.
“The idea behind the face is that the person you know is an ambassador,” said Ron Levi, a vice president at theFind. “There’s a little reinforcement for a retailer [who has the Facebook widget] when people come to their fan page or website.”
“But with theFind, now ‘Likes’ work to the retailer’s advantage,” Levi said.
Hurricane Earl is expected to wreak some havoc on the East Coast this Labor Day weekend. According to the the National Hurricane Center, Earl is expected “pass near the North Carolina outer banks tonight [Thursday]… and approach southeastern New England Friday night.”
President Obama has declared a state of emergency for North Carolina, and FEMA has deployed teams to North Carolina, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine.
Whether you live near the National Hurricane Center’s official “Forecast Cone” or you’re one of the 34.4 million people who planned a trip for this weekend, you’ll want to keep an eye on Earl. Here are some resources to kickstart your tracking:
Government Resources
The National Weather Service
Get your weather warnings and advisories right from the source on top of a color-coded map. You can also use the site to check in on where Earl is likely to hit and whether or not hurricane force winds are probable in your area.
NOAA’s nowCOAST
Make a customized, real-time map using NOAA data. Decide what location, information, and time you’d like to view and what data layers you’d like to activate, and nowCOAST will make a map for your request. This is a great tool for people who actually know something about weather, but it can leave the beginner hurricane tracker a bit confused.
NASA Earth Science Office
See what the hurricane looks like from outer space by taking a look at the latest satellite pictures direct from NASA’s Earth Science Office. The site offers a number of different satellite views, include infrared and water vapor readings.
Weather Media Resources
MyFoxHurricane.com
Very helpful for connecting with other hurricane tracking nerds, this dedicated hurricane website from MyFoxTampaBay and the FOX Network hosts a live chat in addition to its other hurricane resources. Interesting maps include the hurricane’s predicted path map, the wave height near the storm and a radar map that zooms in on the Outer Banks.
The Weather Channel
The Weather Channel’s Hurricane Central allows you to view where Hurricane Earl has been and where it’s projected to go. There are also separate maps for hurricane advisories, tropical storm advisories, wind speeds and wave heights; the site also has satellite maps for specific regions. The maps aren’t as flashy as some of the other sites on this list, but they are very easy to read and understand.
AccuWeather.com
If you want to see what Hurricane Earl looks like – and we’re not talking radar – watch this footage taken from directly above the eye of the storm. These brave NASA pilots apparently let an AccuWeather videographer on board. Hopefully this is as close to Earl as you will get.
The site’s frequent video coverage of Hurricane Earl is also a great resource.
Google Maps Mashups
Ibiseye
Ibiseye puts the storm’s history, projected path and at-risk areas on one Google map. It’s especially useful for finding at what time and with what intensity the storm is expected to reach a specific point. A graphical synopsis of the storm’s winds, pressure and wind field is also available.
StormAdvisory
Another Google Maps-based resource, StormAdvisory plots Hurricane Earl’s actual path and wind speeds as well as its projected path and wind speeds.
Weather Underground
The tropical weather section of Weather Underground includes radar, satellite, wind and forecast maps. The stand-out feature, however, is the site’s trademarked “Wundermap,” on which you can choose layers of information to display.
Stormpulse: A Hurricane Tracking Dashboard
Stormpulse is all you need to track Hurricane Earl’s vital stats. The dashboard displays every the essential detail, including current category, wind speed and movement, on one screen. You can switch the map to radar or satellite and select a point on the map to calculate its distance from the hurricane.
Mobile Resources
- The Weather Channel App for iPhone or BlackBerry
The free version of the Weather Channel’s app for both iPhone and BlackBerry will alert you to weather advisories in your area and check in on the current forecast. The iPhone version comes with an updated local video forecast as well. If you want more from your weather source, a $3.99 iPhone version of the app comes with access to an entire video center and a database of beach condition reports. The Weather Channel also claims this is the only weather app with animated future radar.
- Hurricane iPhone App
Anything a storm tracker could want: animated satellite and radar, computer models, NHC bulletins, forecasts, your distance from each forecast point and all the vital stats (including wind speed, direction and pressure). You can keep this $1.99 app on your phone after Earl has passed for the latest updates from government hurricane centers.
- Hurricane Wallpaper Android App
Download this $0.99 Android app, and you’ll never be without your weather map. You can keep the current National Hurricane Center’s Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Activity image up on your phone as your wallpaper.
- MyFoxHurricane iPhone App
The resources of MyFoxHurricane.com (as discussed earlier in this post) in a $3.99 iPhone app. Get access to breaking news and videocasts from the site as well as radar and satellite images. You can also look at past hurricanes in your area to see how Earl compares.
- Hurricane Hound Android App
This Android app shows the storm’s current position, projected storm track and storm warnings on a Google map. It also lets you know how far away you are from the storm at any given moment. And it’s free, which we like.
- AccuWeather.com iPhone App
Not fancy but still free, AccuWeather.com’s iPhone app will alert you to weather advisories in your zip code. Aside from accessing the usual web forecast, you can also access video forecasts for your area.
- Hurricane Central Web App
Tired of downloading apps? Hurricane Central is a bare-bones mobile site for hurricane information. It pulls maps, advisories and other hurricane announcements from the National Hurricane Center.
Twitter Resources
- @VisitNC: The official tourism site for North Carolina, the state which is predicted to take the brunt of the blow, is tweeting travel conditions and beach closings as well as posing some interesting questions, such as, “What message in the sand would you write for Hurricane #Earl?” It’s good to see them keeping a sense of humor.
- @CNNweather: Breaking news from CNN, including new weather warnings and forecasts.
- @breakingweather: AccuWeather.com’s Twitter feed for breaking news (including hurricanes).
- @TWCBreaking: If you prefer the Weather Channel to AccuWeather, this is its very similar breaking news Twitter feed.
- @MyFoxHurricane: Twitter resource from Fox’s dedicated hurricane website (mentioned above).
- @hurricanes: The Science News Blog’s hurricane coverage, which focuses on the Atlantic region.
- @wunderground: Severe weather warnings and updates from Weather Underground.
- @stormpulse: Frequent storm updates and advisories on tropical storms and hurricanes.
- @NASAHurricane: NASA is equipped like no other organization to cover hurricanes (e.g., they’re able to fly directly into the eye of a hurricane). Follow this feed so you don’t miss their updates.
- @hurricanetrack: Let someone else track the hurricane in person. Get live video streams from HurricaneTrack.com.
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More Social Media Resources from Mashable:
- 5 Fun FarmVille Accessories
- Facebook Privacy: 6 Years of Controversy
- A Brief History of Digg
- 20 Cool Twitter Accounts for Daily Fun and Inspiration
- 7 Cool Chrome Extensions for Twitter
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, EricHood
More About: accuweather.com, hurricane, Hurricane Earl, hurricane tracking apps, ibiseye, mobile apps, myfoxhurricane, NASA, NHC, stormadvisory, stormpulse, the weather channel, tracking apps, twitter, weather underground
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Facebook is apparently testing a new subscription feature that would allow users to receive alerts any time a specific friend takes certain actions on the social network.
AllFacebook reports that it has noticed the new feature popping up on friends’ profiles. Facebook told the blog, “This feature is being tested with a small percent of users. It lets people subscribe to friends and pages to receive notifications whenever the person they’ve subscribed to updates their status or posts new content (photos, videos, links or notes).”
In other words, when you click to subscribe to a user, you’ll get a new Facebook notification in your notifications bar at the top of the site or on the mobile device of your choosing any time that other user posts content. We’re not sure yet if you can subscribe to someone who’s not a friend, which is much more stalker-like, or if notifications include likes and comments (right now, it sounds like they won’t).
We at Mashable are hoping this is an opt-in (or at least an opt-out) feature. If Facebook thinks subscriptions are a useful for the majority of average users, people who might want to get special notifications for family members’ or loved ones’ activities, they’re also potentially damaging if rolled out to jealous “frenemies,” vindictive exes or nosy bosses.
What do you think of the “subscribe” button? Is there anyone in your life you’d subscribe to? What about others subscribing to you — would you like or dislike that feature?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
[img credits: AllFacebook and jvk]
More About: facebook, Subscribe
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Facebook is bolstering the security of user accounts through the launch of a new feature that gives users the ability to see their overall account activity and remotely log out of active sessions.
Have you ever logged into your Facebook at a public computer, but forgot to log out when you left? What if you left your Facebook account open at home with a snooping brother, sister or spouse? They would have access to sensitive personal information or could wreak havoc by posing as you.
These are the problems that Facebook is attempting to address with the gradual rollout of remote logout. The new feature appears under the “Account Security” section of Account Settings. Account Security displays the most recent activity related to your account, including location, device name, time and device type/browser. This should give you a clue as to whether you left Facebook open at a public computer or just left it running at the office PC.
That’s not all, though. To the right of any active account is a link for remotely logging out of your Facebook account. “In the unlikely case that someone accesses your account without your permission, you can shut down the unauthorized login before resetting your password and taking other steps to secure your account and computer,” the Facebook team explained in blog post published earlier today.
This is a welcome security update from the world’s largest social network. For many, Facebook accounts hold information as sensitive as e-mail (and Gmail has had remote logout since 2008). Anything that provides more control over a user’s security is a win in our books.
Have you ever wanted a remote logout feature for your Facebook account? Let us know in the comments.
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Late last evening, Apple released iTunes 10 and its new Ping social network to the public. Assuming you were able to access the service, you may have noticed the ability to add friends via Facebook Connect, a feature we mentioned in our first-impressions post last night.
That feature disappeared earlier this morning, as first noted by Peter Kafka. So where did the feature go and why did it disappear?
According to AllThingsD, Facebook was responsible for turning off Apple’s access to its Facebook Connect API. Typically this API is open to just about any application developer. However, with higher-volume apps (think social games and services with lots and lots of users), Facebook apparently requires a special agreement for these kinds of connections.
According to AllThingsD’s sources, an agreement between Apple and Facebook couldn’t be reached, so Facebook cut off access. Apple subsequently removed the feature from its service. Users can still be added by searching by name or via e-mail address. However, it’s important to note that the e-mail address is the one associated with a user’s iTunes account. I have a special iTunes-only address in place, which means that anyone who wants to follow me will have to use my name.
This isn’t the first time Facebook has turned off its data hose to another company. Twitter briefly introduced a Facebook follow feature before Facebook shut off access.
Apple and Facebook have worked together in the past, most notably with the Share via Facebook option first introduced in iTunes 9 and the App Store Facebook Page.
As it stands, if you did manage to use Facebook Connect with iTunes Ping last night, the app itself is still visible in Facebook and you can see which friends are also connected.
We would be surprised if this feature didn’t make a reappearance at some point. That’s a good thing, because Facebook is becoming the de facto social graph for many users and makes the friend discovery process much easier.
We’ve reached out to Facebook and Apple for comment on this particular issue.
More About: apple, facebook, itunes, itunes ping, Ping
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It's officially over. After Dell pulled out of the running this morning, HP has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire data storage company 3PAR, for $33 per share in cash, or a value of $2.35 billion. The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies.
This morning, HP upped the ante with an offer worth $33 per share or $2.4 billion. 3PAR accepted HP's bid and Dell withdrew.
E-mail has invaded every aspect of our lives. We don’t need a survey to tell us as much, but new research from Xobni and Harris Interactive confirms that we’re not alone in dealing with e-mail overload.
2,200 adults 18 and older in the U.S. and U.K were surveyed on their e-mail habits and attitudes. Most respondents — 72% in the U.S, 68% in the U.K. — indicated that they check e-mail during their time off. A large percentage of Americans also check e-mail in bed (19%), and while on vacation or during days off (50%).
When queried about their outside-the-workplace e-mail activities, nearly half (46%) of the American respondents indicated that they do so to ease their workload. Thirty-seven percent are afraid they’ll miss something important (guilty as charged), and 27% check work e-mail when off the job because it is expected of them. Another 26% keep up with e-mail while on vacation because they simply can’t handle the volume otherwise.
When comparing e-mail behaviors by gender, there are some subtle differences in habits. Men, for instance, are more likely to check e-mail in bed — 21% of men claim do so, while 16% of women admit to the practice. Of course, this bed-checking trend also skews toward 18- to 34-year-olds, who are twice as likely (31%) than 35- to 54-year-olds (15%) to do so.
The real-time nature of the web and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are likely contributing to our always-on attention spans, and hence, contributing to the e-mail overload problem. We can only hope tools such as Rapportive, Gmail Priority Inbox and Xobni’s add-ons will help our cause.
Image courtesy of revrev, Flickr
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Plenty of criticism has already been directed towards the new social network that’s baked into iTunes 10 — Ping — with an emphasis on the user (not to mention rumblings about a fleeting Facebook integration). But there’s one contingent of users no one has really mentioned yet: the bands, many of which are still unable to get in on the action as of this afternoon.
Immediately after hearing about Ping yesterday, I sent out a flurry of e-mails to band friends, urging them to, “Get on this now!” Everyone was stoked, ready to replace their MySpace pages with revenue-making destinations on the brand new iTunes social network. However, when they logged in and tried to figure out how to create said page, they were met with confusion.
I spoke with Eric Victorino, of the band The Limousines, and he said he spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to set up a page to no avail. And this is band with music already available on iTunes. I also spoke with PR people who represent some other popular bands, and they were unclear as to how to get their bands on the service as well.
Bands usually don’t have direct contact with iTunes — musicians distribute their jams through services like TuneCore which then deal directly with iTunes — so perhaps this degree of separation is the issue. We’ve reached out to Apple to ask how a band goes about getting a page on Ping.
In the meantime, I remain unimpressed with Ping — unable to follow bands that I actually like. Currently, iTunes recommends I follow 14 bands, all heavy hitters like U2, Diddy and Lady Gaga. Yup, no Phoenix, The National or Arcade Fire (all indie bands of the less-than-indie persuasion — I wasn’t expecting Jeffrey Lewis to be up in there yet, anyway). No wonder iTunes was so off with its recommendations — none of the bands I like are currently on the service. I can follow Katy Perry, though:
Still, you can “Like” and “Post” a band’s album via the “Album” page, and check out some concert listings as a result of Live Nation’s recent partnership with Apple. In the example below, Mashable’s Christina Warren can show how much she digs Guster, despite being unable to follow them:
Now that doesn’t mean bands can’t get in on the action by creating a run-of-the-mill user profile. It seems that Ben Folds joined up this a.m. I followed him. As did more than 200 others. Too bad it’s not really Ben Folds. I know because I asked him this morning whether the profile was real and he replied, “Probably not legit.” We’ll probably see more faux artist pages popping up in the future, unless some kind of verification process is introduced. (That’s not really an uncommon issue. Facebook is crawling with fakes. Still, doppelgangers are doubly confusing when dealing with a new service.)
Yesterday, scads of publications — including Mashable — heralded “>Ping as a potential “MySpace killer.” That doesn’t seem likely, however, until the service manages to make itself more accessible to the bread and butter of any music discovery service: the musicians.
MySpace is easy to join and is an admittedly simple way to get your music out there. It even recently introduced new profiles for artists, as well as the capacity to feature up to 25 songs on one’s profile. That’s a ton of music, and, come to think of it, something that Ping lacks: the ability to listen to full, streaming songs. Thirty-second clips aren’t going to do much for music discovery when it comes to bands in the “lesser-known” realm. (A musician friend even joked last night that he would have to compress all of his songs into 30-second dance jams if he wanted to get his tunes heard on Ping.)
Yes, Ping emphasizes the music fan’s experience — the experience of sharing music with friends and benefiting from their tastes — but how is one to expand one’s taste when access to less mainstream fare is so limited? Yes, we imagine iTunes will expand the service to more musicians as the days wear on, but we feel that in order to grab the populace at the onset, the experience of following and interacting bands should have been richer at launch.
Reviews: Facebook, Mashable, MySpace, Ping
More About: apple, itunes, music, Ping
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Apple's recently-unveiled Apple TV device is one of many that can pull video from the internet and display it on a television, but only two networks -- ABC and Fox -- agreed to rent their shows through them.
This week’s big Apple announcement featured one big disappointment: Apple TV’s relative lack of, well, TV. Out of all of the hundreds of channels available on cable and satellite, only ABC and Fox agreed to offer their programs for rent on Apple TV. The fact that Steve Jobs is the largest single shareholder in, and on the board of, Disney — owner of ABC — perfectly illustrates this digital divide.
The technology to deliver any mix of on-demand and programmed television through the internet rather than through cable and satellite networks has existed for years. A slew of set-top boxes and “Media Center” computers were already perfectly capable of hooking up with large television screens at high resolutions with full surround sound before Apple took another stab at its “hobby” with a smaller, sleeker, simpler Apple TV.
The reason that technological breakthroughs and changing viewer habits haven’t made much of a difference even though ratings for TV overall has been in a steady decline for at least a generation is simple: Television networks have a monopoly on television shows, even though they make and own almost none of them. The people who make TV shows depend on the networks for seed money. Neither side would call this a perfect system, but it works. And it makes lots of people lots and lots of money.
Television networks are essentially the venture capitalists of video, placing bets on promising entrepreneurs and their crazy ideas which will cost a lot to develop. Just as it is in the high-tech world the payoff can be can be huge. But most programs which do get the green light fail. For every Lost there are dozens of Virtuality’s. Plenty of money gets spent on shows that nobody outside of the networks ever sees — the networks finance hundreds of pilot projects every year, and each one can cost millions to produce — but only a third or so ever air, according to Variety.
Their willingness to take huge risks dictates the need to score the occasional smash hit that will subsidize the surplus of bad decisions. So until the network VCs figure out how port the golden goose to IP-delivered television, no technology on earth will significantly change things.
Some people have cut the cord, but among them are viewers who don’t care for standard network fare, are willing to dip into illegal bit torrents and/or don’t mind complicated setups. Sure, we have Hulu for certain new shows, and Netflix for old ones, but it could be a decade or so until you’ll be legally able to watch whatever you want online.
Eventually, television networks stand to gain by cutting cable and satellite companies out of the equation and relying instead on consumers to finance the delivery and decoding of content with their own internet connections and set-top boxes — but don’t hold your breath, because it’s going to take a while, regardless of advancing technology.
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As we pointed out earlier, today is Google Chrome’s second birthday. Since it launched in beta on September 2, 2008, it has come a long way (it’s already 6 versions deep). Back then, it was Windows-only, with official Mac and Linux support only coming late last year. But now it’s on the verge of another milestone: becoming the top browser coming to this site.
I’ve checked out our logs over the past few years to see how well Chrome has been doing compared to its rival browsers. The numbers are shockingly strong for such a new entry — particularly in the past year. Obviously, TechCrunch has a tech-centric audience, but I don’t think it’s off-base to say that you’re also a leading audience of early adopters that often point to where the general public will be in the future.
The numbers are clear: Firefox is in trouble. It has been the top browser since we began using Google Analytics to record stats back in 2007. By 2008, it was nearly 25 percentage points ahead of the next closest rival, Internet Explorer. As of yesterday, it stood just 3 percentage points ahead of the next closest rival, Chrome.
Here are the numbers. In August 2010 (the month that just ended):
- Firefox: 33.98%
- Chrome: 26.22%
- Safari: 18.40%
- IE: 13.23%
- Mozilla Compatible Agent: 5.46%
One year ago, in August 2009 (right before Chrome’s first birthday), the numbers looked like this:
- Firefox: 45.91%
- IE: 20.61%
- Safari: 18.85%
- Chrome: 10.09%
- Mozilla Compatible Anent: 1.83%
Two years ago, in August 2008 (right before Chrome launched), the numbers looked like this:
- Firefox: 55.63%
- IE: 31.21%
- Safari 9.76%
- Opera: 2.23%
- Mozilla: 0.62%
By September 2008, the month Chrome launched in beta, it had an immediate impact. But remember, it was Windows-only at the time:
- Firefox: 52.36%
- IE: 28.55%
- Safari: 9.18%
- Chrome: 6.58%
- Opera: 2.05%
And just for fun, let’s go back three full years, to August 2007.
- Firefox: 48.81%
- IE: 40.61%
- Safari: 6.59%
- Opera: 2.29%
- Mozilla: 0.72%
Chrome has clearly taken a bite out of Firefox, IE, and even Opera’s already small share. Safari is up big over the past couple of years as well, but its growth has seemingly stalled over the past year — despite iPad browser usage (in terms of visits to TechCrunch) exploding.
Of course, overall traffic to TechCrunch is also way up over these past few years. It just appears that more and more people who are visiting are now doing so via Chrome.
Let’s look at the numbers from yesterday:
- Firefox: 34.68%
- Chrome: 31.09%
- Safari: 15.65%
- IE: 12.77%
- Mozilla Compatible Agent: 3.48%
Yes, it’s just a matter of time before Chrome is on top.
As a humorous aside, IE with Chrome Frame, the plug-in Google made to make IE behave like Chrome, is now a bigger source of traffic to TechCrunch than Opera Mini or BlackBerry. While still tiny, it too is growing.
We were enamored of your childlike delight. We reveled in the remixes. But now, Double Rainbow Guy, we are less than amused. What’s the sure-fire way to kill a viral video? Festoon it with dollar signs.
Yup, the above video is a commercial for Windows Live Photo Gallery, and yup, the actor in said commercial is YouTube user Hungrybear9562 (a.k.a Paul Vasquez and the man behind the rainbow). Vasquez burst onto the scene back in July with a tripped-out vid featuring the man himself crying over a lovely pair of rainbows (the video has since amassed more than 13 million views on YouTube). Now, we’re crying over the end of innocence.
Yes, ad companies, it’s smart to hitch your wagon to what’s hot right now (i.e. the memetastic realm), but why not come up with something, well, new? The Double Rainbow guy was sooooo two months ago, guys.
[via Buzzfeed]
Reviews: Windows Live Photo Gallery, YouTube
More About: double-rainbow, MARKETING, microsoft, money, viral video, Windows, youtube
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Prepare to get hit by a ton of Sammy marketing. The commercial embedded here is likely just the first wave of Samsung’s assault on the iPad. And it seems that they’re going about it the right way, too.
The commercial simply shows off the Galaxy Tab‘s capabilities in an Apple-ish sort of way. We’ve said all along that if any Android tablet has a chance to steal marketshare away from the iPad, it’s the Samsung Galaxy Tab and this commercial, along with our extensive hands-on, seems to confirm our thought. Now all we need is to know is its price tag and when it will hit stores.
Skype — apparently pleased with its five-way beta group video-calling functionality — has just released a new version of Skype 5.0 for Windows that doubles group support. It now allows for up to 10 video callers.
Skype 5.0 beta two is already available for download; it includes 10-way video calls, automatic call recovery and a cleaner user interface. The update is also said to improve call quality and includes a number of bug fixes to make the overall experience much smoother.
Of course, the standout feature is 10-way video calling, something that certainly one-ups their own previous offering and makes it suitable for even larger virtual team meetings and mini family reunions. Of course, it also makes Gmail’s video-calling functionality look like the ugly step sister — a proactive move on the part of Skype to combat recent buzz surrounding Gmail Voice Calling.
Still, Skype does caution that 5.0 is beta, and hence, very buggy. It’s also limited to Windows users, and 10-way video calls require all group chatters to be using the same second beta version of the app.
Have you tested out five-way video calls? Are you ready to upgrade to the 10-person variety? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Reviews: Gmail, Skype, Windows
More About: group video calling, Skype, software, video calling, voip
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Taking a business from idea to reality involves a good deal of attrition, ingenuity, and compromise. But no matter how much these three factors align in your favor, chances are you won’t get far unless you have some sort of funding.
Traditionally, you could get your hands on some capital by wooing the wealthy to support you, getting rich yourself, or persuading a venture capitalist that your idea has potential. But an increasingly available option is to enter a competition.
The following eight contests can supply some cash for your startup or, even if you don’t win, help you better prepare to seek funding from other sources.
1. MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition
Since 1989, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has hosted independent contests throughout the year that are collectively known as the “MIT$100K” (originally the MIT$10K). In the elevator pitch contest, competitors have 60 seconds to persuade judges of their business’ potential. The top prize is $10,000, which isn’t a bad pay rate for a minute-long performance.
The Executive Summary contest compares teams’ two-page summaries of their projects for a prize of “MIT$100K glory” and judge feedback that is helpful for the third contest: the flagship Business Plan Competition.
In the Business Plan Competition, semi-finalists are selected based on their executive summaries. They’re given mentors and expense accounts with which to prepare a 20-page business report and presentation. Only MIT students or teams that include an MIT student are eligible. The winner takes $100,000 in cash and prizes.
Other colleges like the New York University Stern Business School, Rice University, Duke University, and The University of California at Berkeley run similarly prestigious venture capital contests.
2. TWITCH
TWITCH (Twitter Pitch) is technically an add-on to the MIT$100K, but it’s cool enough to warrant its own place on our list. The contest asks contestants to convey their business ideas in 140 characters or less for a $500 cash prize. Entries are made by tweeting submissions that include the hash tag #100kTwitch, and votes are accumulated by getting others to retweet it.
The first contest took place this year, and the posted standings showed the first place tweet to be:
3. GE’s Ecomagination Challenge
GE teamed up with four venture capital firms to offer a total of $200 million to startups working on innovation in renewable energy, grid efficiency, or energy-efficient homes. Five $50,000 cash prizes will be awarded to winners of the two-round competition. Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired Magazine is the sole member of the judging panel who isn’t a GE executive.
4. Clean Tech Open
A great opportunity designed specifically for clean technology startups, the Clean Tech Open provides training and the chance to win up to $250,000 in investment money and services. Entrants work one-on-one with assigned mentors to write an executive summary, which is then used to select semi-finalists. Semi-finalists pay a fee for a training program that includes business clinics and mock judging. The teams submit full business plans and give a live presentation to determine five regional winners and one national champ.
5. PITCH: Women 2.0 Startup Contest
This contest literally asks teams to mail their pitch on a 7X7 napkin. Each team must have at least one woman and one technologist (defined as an “engineer, scientist, mathematician, biologist, etc.”), and their napkin must be accompanied by a two-minute video pitch. A handful of entrants are selected to present their pitch at the annual PITCH Night in San Francisco. Prizes include meetings with venture capitalists and other startup services.
6. Venture Labs Investment Competition
In 1993, BusinessWeek called the Venture Labs Investment Competition (originally the Moot Corp Competition) “the Super Bowl of World Business Plan Competition.” In 2004, Inc. Magazine called it “the Rose Bowl of business-plan competitions.” Whether that indicates a drop in professionalism or an increase in fun and enthusiasm depends on how well you know sports, but it’s hard to argue that the competition is anything but prestigious. Started in 1984 by two University of Texas MBA students, the Austin-based competition was attended by 40 teams from 12 countries in 2010.
7. Intuit’s Love a Local Business Competition
Once a small business registers or is nominated for the Love a Local Business site, customers and supporters can vote for them between July 1 and September 30. Votes function as raffle tickets: the more votes a company gets, the better its chance of winning a random drawing held at the end of each month (July, August, and September).
The winners of the monthly drawing each win $5,000 and advance to the final round in which a panel of judges selects the business most “loved by its customers, vendors, employees, or local community” to receive a $25,000 grant.
8. Amazon Web Services (AWS) Startup Challenge
Startups that use Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure to run their business can compete to win a global prize of $50,000 in cash or in AWS credits and mentoring support, including a year of AWS Premium Gold Support. Fifteen regional semi-finalists and six overall finalists will also receive prizes.
More Startup Resources from Mashable:
- 6 Ways to Recruit Talent for Startups
- 5 Lessons to Learn from Web Startups
- 40+ Essential Social Business Resource
- 5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed
- 20 of the Best Resources to Get Your Startup Off the Ground
Image courtesy of Flickr, wwarby
Reviews: Flickr, love
More About: amazon, amazon web services, Business Lists, Clean Tech Open, Competitions, Contests, Ecomagination, entrepreneur, Entrepreneur contests, funding, GE, intuit, List, Lists, Love a Local Business, MIT$100K, Moot Corp, startup, TWITCH, venture capital, Venture Labs Investment Competition
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I often point to my first post on Twitter, the day it launched in 2006. Why? Mostly because of how wrong I was. Best line: “I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.” I also love that original vowel-free logo.
The first couple of comments to that post are classic as well:
I do not understand the utility of adding the SMS messages to a public webpage or making messages from my network public. I would have to pass on that type of offering. The ability to make messages private should be added asap.
and
i do not want to be woken up at 4 a.m. because my friend got drunk and decided to text Twttr with “asdl im at barasdf sooo drunksalkfjs”…i find it interesting such an annoying feature is supposedly causing viral growth…i’m done developing social software if the key to success is to be intrusive
and
So is it pronounced twitter or twatter?
With the benefit of hindsight it’s clear that I was…a bit off on how Twitter would play out. As were most of the commenters, although commenters are often negative just to be negative. And the most wrong of all? The Odeo investors who elected to take their money back rather than port it over to Twitter.
My point here is that you never know which startups will make it and which won’t. As a blogger I say it like I see it, but I’m wrong a lot. It’s why I’m not a venture capitalist, where wrong decisions tend to have real consequences. And this is also a reason for us all to give startups a little breathing room when they’re finding their space in the world. Startups evolve. The world evolves (things have changed a lot since 2006).
That dumb startup that’s just a rehash of that other thing from before, with a twist, just may turn out to be something special. Perhaps world-changing special. It’s why I like The Man In The Arena so much, and why I’m an eternal champion of the entrepreneur.
Fora.TV has always been playing a dangerous game—trying to sell long-form online video about intellectual ideas. That’s like trying to sell sunblock to the cast of Jersey Shore. Fora calls itself Hulu for “the Thinking Man’s Web.” (There’s a Thinking Man’s Web?)
Eighteen months after closing its $6 million series A round and long time magazine editor Blaise Zerega took over as CEO, Fora seems to be grinding it out. The traffic has tripled and it’s now streaming about three million videos per month, mostly captured from conferences and high-level events. Those aren’t close to YouTube numbers, but considering the intellectually demanding content– think Timothy Geithner talking for an hour about the best ways to stimulate the economy—it’s impressive.
Despite its limited size, Fora has a few high-brow sponsors like Mercedes Benz who want to reach its rarefied audience. Conferences love it, because it gives them a sophisticated way to broadcast content to people who can’t attend. Anything they make is money that would have been left on the table otherwise. For instance, 150 people attended a talk by Stanford’s director of design earlier this year, but 500 people watched it live over Fora. Thirty days later more than 325,000 watched it. And this was just a talk about how some students set up an incubator at Stanford. It may not be a YouTube-sized business, but there’s clearly something there.
And, as of today, Fora has a new $5/month subscription to watch and download most of the videos without ads. The site still offers pay-per-view pricing for specific talks, too. Think of the business model like cable TV, Zerega says. There are basic packages and premium packages and stuff you pay for individually ala On Demand. Think of their content like the Discovery Channel. No doubt when it launched, media executives were saying, “People aren’t going to watch long form non-fiction content on cable! Shark week? Who cares about sharks?”
Everyone wants to post live video of their events these days, but it’s incredibly hard, expensive and time consuming to do well—something we’ve all learned getting TechCrunchTV up and running this summer. What gives Fora an edge is that it can do everything from filming a conference’s content to writing headlines and speaker bios to cutting the film into watchable DVD chapters and three-minute teasers to writing transcripts. And increasingly, Fora is working on distribution, trying to get that content available on as many platforms as possible. Already Fora is on Boxee and Comcast.
There are so many wonky, technical, tedious details in that process that most think-tank or university conferences just don’t have the staff or know-how to tackle. Put another way—maybe Fora doesn’t solve an obvious problem for millions of viewers (I have an hour to kill…..where can I find a lecture on free market economics?) but it does solve a big problem for thousands of conferences and event planners, who in turn will push that content to their constituents.
It’s no surprise Zerega was the managing editor of Wired during its “Long Tail” days.
People in Silicon Valley have focused on the set top box as the lever to attack the cable industry. Cable boxes blow, but that’s a losing battle.
So why is media ecosystem built around the mobile phone.
You need a whole new ecosystem if you’re going to dislodge cable. Cable controls the whole stack, as people in IT like to say. From the content owners, which are addicted to the huge licensing fees only cable can afford to pay; to the distribution networks; to the consumer devices; to the eyeballs; to the advertisers: Cable owns the stack.
If you want to beat cable, you need to create a whole new ecosystem for reaching consumers and changing their habits. Has Apple done that? I think so.
In the Apple TV ecosystem, the phone is not just an iOS controller, it is the hub of a new personal mobile media center. Don’t get distracted by Apple’s video rental service. It sucks, for now, and won’t get people to cut the cable. But they will buy the Apple TV box, because it is cheap and they have iPhones and iPods and iPads, and they see the inexorable logic of closing the loop between their Macs and their phones and their mobile media devices and their TVs.
This loop will make it really easy for people to start consuming new kinds of content on their TVs. I bet they’ll start to use it. A lot. This is what is disruptive about the new Apple TV, not the $99 price or the rental service. Apple TV is a paradigm shift, because you always have your phone but no one lets you integrate your phone into the media center.
Guess what? Apple just did that.
People generally only think about the network/lock-in effect of Apple’s devices/services when they’re thinking about how dangerous it is. But just like with Microsoft, it’s dangerous because it works. It works really, really well.
(Thanks to Tim Carmody, Gadget Lab’s newest addition, for that last graf!)
See Also:
Alexander B. Howard is the Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent for O’Reilly Media, where he reports on technology, open government and online civics. He’ll be reporting live from the upcoming Gov2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., on September 7-8.
Every year, poison control centers get more than one million calls for pill identification. Each one of those calls costs nearly $50. Social software is helping biomedical researchers collaborate on better ways of identifying drugs. “Pillbox is a digital platform for communities to solve challenges related to pharmaceutical identification and reference,” says David Hale, the program manager. The National Library of Medicine’s mission is to gather, curate and distribute the world’s biomedical information, said Hale.
Pillbox is an open government initiative from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration that could transform how pharmaceuticals are labeled in the future. The interactive web application currently allows visitors to rapidly identify unknown solid medications, like tablets or capsules, based upon their shape, color and other markings. Pillbox remains a research and development project, so users should not be making clinical decisions just yet. Right now there are over 1,000 images of prescription drugs in the system, with many more to come in the next few months.
Beyond its usefulness, Pillbox is a public health platform that was created in a unique way — by utilizing open source data. Here are four ways the NIH approached this endeavor using the open and social web.
1. Connecting Open Data to Civic Hackers
Pillbox is a “collection of projects focused on a single goal: improving the health of citizens,” said Hale. That goal could be realized through social gaming mechanics, an area that’s familiar to Foursquare users and FarmVille players. “There’s a Facebook game in development based on the Pillbox API,” he said. After Hale attended Sunlight Labs’ Great American Hackathon last December, a developer took him to a D.C. Ruby users meeting. There, the civic hacking community got excited about using Pilllbox data in a game.
To move the game forward, the developers had to build a search interface in Facebook Markup Language (FBML) for Pillbox. “When they’re done, they’ll give the code for the pill ID interface to NLM,” said Hale. The game isn’t live yet, but Hale hopes to see an iteration online by the end of the year. As of the last build of the game, messages are scrambled between players “to protect privacy.” These messages come with a pill image. Players then have to use the Pillbox ID system to identify pills and unscramble message.
2. Sharing Code on GitHub
“When these developers were building [Pillbox], they found it didn’t have any wrappers for the API,” said Hale. “So they wrote them in Ruby, open sourced them and shared them in a Pillbox space on Github, an online open source code sharing community. Now the wrappers are there for anyone to use.”
Subsequently, a Python developer who was at the meeting working on another project at the Hackathon, took it as a challenge to do it in fewer lines of code, said Hale. He also created Python wrappers for Pillbox and posted them.
“That’s the power of open data, ‘coopetition’ and social media,” said Hale. “Consider the development of hundreds of lines of code, Ruby and Python wrappers, and that interface. How much would it have taken to do this otherwise?”
3. Connecting Washington to Innovation
Hale has used social media extensively to collaborate with clinical staff, patients, and developers, empowering and enabling communities to solve health challenges. In particular, Hale is active on Twitter as @LostOnRoute66, where he tweets about patient safety, biomedical informatics, social media strategy, user experience, music, and food. “Social media was the key channel. It was through Twitter that we maintained these relationships and built new ones.”
One of the challenges for the government research community in Washington can be its distance from the technology communities in Silicon Valley, Boston, Texas and Seattle. “Pillbox was built outside with the community,” says Hale. That’s an important shift from the way traditional projects have been approached. “Due to [conferences like] HealthCamp and to connecting in the Valley, we saw a different way of approaching the issue,” said Hale.
Initially, there were just giant institutions called Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacies taking pictures of the pills, said Hale. “We realized it wasn’t just the images — it was the data behind them, and access to that data. When I talked with the community in the Valley, I realized there was more that was possible. We’re not just putting up pictures of pills, we’re putting up a platform, and thereby changing the ways that people work with government. It’s the information that’s important, not the website. It’s about understanding the power of adding an open API to your data.”
Additionally, an increasing number of government agencies and civil service workers are using SlideShare to disseminate presentations. Hale is no exception. His presentation on Pillbox from January 2010 is embedded above.
4. Call for Participation Using the Federal Register 2.0
This summer, a team of developers and designers relaunched the FederalRegister.gov, the online presence for the legal newspaper of United States. The Federal Register 2.0 is one of the better recent examples of open government, as it makes the often arcane business of government more transparent and understandable to citizens. Hale says that the NIH will be posting a “Call for Participation” where they ask pharmaceutical companies to send them samples of their tablets and capsules.
If the public-private relationship bears fruit, they’ll take high quality pictures based upon Pillbox’s process, send the images back to the pharmaceutical companies and, if approved, put them into Pillbox. Those images could then be sent to the FDA, where they coud get included on a label.
“That would enable images of drugs based upon a single body of standards, which could then enable identification through smartphones,” said Hale. “The secret sauce isn’t the images when this is done but the background processing. We’re creating tools and services which make open data available to everyone, accessible, and in the public domain.”
More Tech Resources from Mashable:
- 5 Open Data Apps That Are Improving Our Cities
- 5 Ways Government Works Better With Social Media
- How the U.S. Engages the World with Social Media
- How Social Media Can Effect Real Social and Governmental Change
- 6 Ways Law Enforcement Uses Social Media to Fight Crime
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Anykeen
Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, Python, Twitter, iStockphoto
More About: david hale, federal register, github, hackathon, national institutes of health, national library of medicine, nih, NLM, open data, pillbox, Python, Ruby on Rails, slideshare, sunlight labs
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When Danish entrepreneur Tommy Ahlers sold his 'social phonebook' ZYB to Vodafone in 2008 for €31 million and joined the company, it didn't seem like he would stay forever at such a slow-moving corporate entity. And sure enough he has now left. But ever the restless entrepreneur he's decided against lying on a beach somewhere and careered headlong into a new startup which is poised to come out of stealth mode.
Ahlers has now invested in, and become the CEO, of Podio, a hot new startup out of his home town of Copenhagen. I'd heard excited whisperings of the company when I was in the city recently, and indeed, Podio has been around for one and a half years as a boostrapped project, but with big ideas. It's now open via invitations – either from Podio or from existing users - and it's pretty awesome.
It’s hard to believe that two years have passed since the Chrome browser first hit the web. In that time, Chrome has come to control more than 7.5% of the worldwide browser market, according to Net Marketshare. Sure, Internet Explorer and Firefox hold 60.4% and 22.9% respectively, but if one considers that after 10 years, Opera holds less than 2.4%, then it’s fairly impressive.
Now, on its second birthday, Google has released a stable build of Chrome version 6. Heralding itself as “The Modern Browser,” Chrome 6 does indeed boast a number of improvements, but as with previous updates, the focus remains on speed and simplicity.
Like its previous release this summer, the new version has Adobe Flash built in. The important thing here, however, is its handling of HTML5, which remains topnotch.
With the increasing prevalence of HTML5, it’s hard to imagine a world where Chrome’s browser share does not continue to grow.
Reviews: Adobe Flash Player, Chrome, Google
More About: adobe, adobe flash, chrome, chrome 6, Firefox, Google, HTML5, internet explorer, opera, webkit
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HipChat, a recently launched private instant messaging service for companies, has added support for voice and video chat as well as guest access.
Similar to Campfire, HipChat provides a simple application for communication within businesses. HipChat offers both a web and desktop client based on Adobe AIR that lets you chat with your entire team at once, or hold more private discussions with select team members. The application includes support for quick attachment sharing, notifications when you receive a message, and a searchable web archive for past messages. It’s incredibly easy to use and setup and doesn’t require a company email address.
The newest version of HipChat adds the ability to enable video and voice chat with fellow users. This feature will be included with the paid plans for the service. Guest access enables employees to generate URLs that allow non-HipChat members and people outside their company to access group chats.
It’s actually a pretty nifty feature for any business that wants add another communication layer (besides email) with clients, vendors, or contractors. Guest Access could also be used to offer live customer support for a business. Like all chat history, guest messages and files are archived automatically but guests can only access the chat logs created during the time they were invited to the room. Like video chat, GuestAccess will be includes in the paid versions of HipChat.
For a bootstrapped startup, HipChat seems to be gaining traction in the space. The company has “thousands” of companies using its application, with over one million messages sent since the company launched in private beta.
HipChat was founded by Garret Heaton, Pete Curley, Chris Rivers, who previously founded calendar startup HipCal, which was acquired by Plaxo in 2006. At Plaxo (which was eventually acquired by Comcast) the team helped build out Plaxo Pulse. HipChat, which recently raised $100K in funding, faces competition from 37 Signals’ Campfire and Yammer.
Banksimple has just raised $2.9 million in a Series A round to fund their ambitious alternative online banking startup for full-service, fee-free banking. The round includes investments from First Round Capital, IA Ventures and Village Ventures, a collection of industry veterans with extensive startup portfolios.
Banksimple’s mission is to reinvent the way consumers bank, both online and off. In 2011, the startup will offer bankers an online-only banking solution designed to eliminate traditional service fees, provide stellar customer service, offer predictive money management and integrate social media into the system.
The funds will allow Banksimple to forge ahead with crucial banking partnerships that will form the financial backbone of the platform. The money will also help the company finance its initial test run of the service with friends and family before the end of the year.
“To get customer service right for banking, we need to build a technology company,” said CEO Joshua Reich in an interview with Mashable.
Banksimple had previously raised $190,000 from angel investors in a seed round. To date, the startup has raised nearly $3.1 million — money enough to last them through the end of 2011, according to Reich.
Image courtesy of Daniel Y. Go, Flickr
Reviews: Flickr, Mashable
More About: banksimple, funding, series a
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