Social Media Archives - Page 4 of 9

We Catch Up With Social Photo Sharing Startup StreamZoo At TechCrunch Disrupt VIDEO INTERVIEW

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 in New York City, our Managing Editor, Cameron Wright caught wind of Phonezoo’s latest startup project StreamZoo. StreamZoo is a multi platform photosharing application for Android and iPhone that has unique elements that make it one of the most popular photo sharing experiences outside of Instagram.

For starters StreamZoo allows users to follow users and streams that are created by hashtags. For example, co-founder Manish Vaidya talks in part three of this interview about how international users in Indonesia and Brazil make streams for their countries which draw more photos from other users in their country.

Wright also talks to Vaidya about the impact that Instagram has had on StreamZoo. Vaidya says that StreamZoo wasn’t really affected by the adoption of Instagram. Users were steadfast in their ways with their photosharing apps. What did happen however, was when Lightbox was acquihired by Facebook and subsequently shutdown StreamZoo found a lot of users migrated to their service. Those users used a stream #lightbox to find each other on StreamZoo.

StreamZoo also offers a badging element reminiscent of GoWalla which was also acquihired by Facebook. StreamZoo has the ability to create badges centered around locations, businesses, fun places to go and events. In fact Vaidya created a special badge unique to just Disrupt.

In Part I of the interview Wright talks with Vaidya about the progress that StreamZoo has made since they met the previous year. They also talk about how the StreamZoo community influences changes in the 8 person Sunnyvale based team. StreamZoo had gone a little notification crazy but quickly reacted to the community adding a more effective way to manage notifications in messages within the UI. Check out part I below:

In Part II of the interview Vaidya talks about the impact of Instagram, Facebook and Lightbox on the StreamZoo application. Check out part II after the break

Toronto Startup: SocialBungy Is A DIY Promotional Platform For Social Media INTERVIEW

Canadian startup SocialBungy is a unique do it yourself platform to hold contests, sweepstakes and other engaging promotions across Facebook, Twitter and even micro-sites. SocialBungy promises not to be a template type tool, but offer all kinds of customizable options to help any size business launch promotions with real gaugeable ROI.

As much as we love reporting about startups “everywhere else” we also love it when we can talk with startups that offer a real benefit to other startups like SocialBungy. If you’re a startup and you’ve been evaluating some of the top level PR agencies out there, you’ve probably found that some of them have minimums per month in the tens of thousands of dollars. With SocialBungy you’ll be able to take your own idea and match it up to the services SocialBungy offers and not break the startup bank.

But SocialBungy isn’t just for the startup. They have programs for startups, small businesses, large brand and even agencies. SocialBungy is backed by the marketing and promotional experience of founder Mike Barwick who spent years in marketing and then launched his own social marketing firm.

“Our goal when launching the company was to make campaigns launched online sexy and engaging again – an area I think other like-minded companies are starting to lose focus on,” says founder Barwick said in a statement.

We got a chance to talk with Barwick more in-depth about SocialBungy, check out the interview after the break.

Israeli Startup: YouHoo Location Based Social Networking For Friends And Strangers

(photo: pcmag)

An Israeli startup called YouHoo was in the Israeli pavilion at startup alley at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012. They have a new spin on social networking, and in particular,location based or proximity based social networking.

As you’ll see in the video below, YouHoo takes your location and polls the people closest to you. It then turns around and shows them to you on your Android powered smartphone. Your actual friends are in pink, your mutual friends are in blue and strangers are in white.

Founder Ohad Assoulin talked to us for a while about his new social network and how he hopes to turn groups of strangers into groups of friends.

YouHoo would make a great icebreaker for trips to the beach, and other locations where a lot of young people are congregating.

Israel is becoming a hotspot for social networking startups, earlier this week we featured a 15 year old named Tal Hoffman from Israel and his new social network based on interests called iTimdi.

Take YouHoo for a spin, sign up for their beta below and watch the video:

Linkage:

More of our TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 coverage here

We’re on a sneaker-strapped, nationwide startup road trip please check it out here

We Talk With Sonar CEO Brett Martin One Year Later, Meet The Here Now Network.

Last year at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC we were out in full force to support Ocean City Maryland native Brett Martin. I city I practically grew up in and lived in for nearly 8 years of my formative years. Aside from that Sonar was the first of true social discovery apps and it was very cool then, and even cooler now after todays announcements.

We were totally stoked when Martin and the Sonar team made it to the finals where they came in as a runner up to high end peer to peer car rental startup, Get Around.

We wanted to know what it was like for the last year for the Sonar team. They didn’t win the cup last year but it seems that being a finalist was just as good.

They tripled their office size from 3-9 and they’ve added a whole new suite of features. They also launched an Android beta, which Martin assures me will be released to the public shortly.

Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 it was all about the Here Now Network. Back in March on a phone call with Martin I expressed some worry over the initial Sonar concept. It was fresh and new in May 2011 but by March 2012 there were apps like Highlight, Banjo and Glancee in the space. Martin kept telling me that they were working on things on their back end that he couldn’t talk about but they would blow me away.

Those things Martin showed off today at Disrupt, the Here Now Network, move Sonar far ahead of the competition again.

Sure there are plenty of apps that do discovery and proximity based discovery but Sonar and the Here Now Network are all about your own personal network of people who are here now. Your closest friends, business associates and family members who are in your immediate area are what matters most.

Martin describes some great use cases in the video below. For example when he steps off the subway on his way into work he checks in. He leaves a status “Just got off the subway, headed to Starbucks does anyone want anything”. That message is broadcast to the Sonar team (his coworkers) as soon as he passes by the office door just down the street from Starbucks. Now he can pick up coffee and bagels for everyone without picking up his phone any more than just checking in and looking at the order.

Another example he gives is that his team likes to go out to an outdoor food court sometimes. They all get different items from different vendors and if one of them finds a table they just check in and say “I found a spot in the shade, southeast corner”. The message is broadcast to his teammates.

There are endless things you can do with that feature.

Check out our talk with Brett Martin on the new features, life for the past year and where he and Sonar are going. We recently saw social discovery exit Glancee take an early exit to Facebook. Martin tells us he’s in it for the long haul.

DC Startup: GrandStand Takes Social Engagement To A Whole New Level VIDEO INTERVIEW

We found a DC startup called Grandstand on #startup alley at TechCrunch Disrupt. What they’re doing will blow some businesses away. Watch the video for some great use cases and the technical explanation. I’m going to describe it in layman’s terms. If you’re a business looking to get real engagement out of social media pay attention.

What Grandstand does is takes aggregated social media data, pulls it and applies it to real world engagements. Think of the Twitter wall concept that burst into popularity around two years ago. Every conference you went to and even some company headquarters would show a hashtag or a Twitter ID on a big television screen for the world to see.

If you’ve ever been to a GDGT event they’re known for their Twitter walls where you’ll find people staring in awe at the Twitter wall waiting for their tweet to show up. The Twitter wall concept is all well and good but in the end you’re just looking at Tweets.

Grandstand takes the Twitter wall concept along with other social networks and for lack of better terminology at 1am while writing this story, makes the tweets, likes, check-ins, statuses and mentions do stuff.

For instance Grandstand has a display at Volkswagon’s headquarters in Germany that shows tweets, and checkins on a map of the globe, and in other unique ways on multiple floor to ceiling screens (check it out it’s in the video).

At South By Southwest in Austin Texas this year Grandstand had a lot of people talking about a refrigerator stocked full of beer. When 10 people checked into the venue the refrigerator unlocked and automagically opened. How cool is that.

Forget text to win, Twitter walls and “like us for a smoothie”, if you’re a company or brand looking to get the most out of your social media you need to check out this video and contact them… NOW!

Linkage:

Get more info on Grandstand here at get grandstand.com

Here’s more of our great TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 coverage

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Boston Startup: About Last Night The Ultimate Night Life Social App

We love About Last Night for several reasons. First off the crazy Bostonian serial entrepreneurs who co-founded About Last Night are pretty awesome. About Last Night is one of several startups that are incubating in their own personal incubator. Brothers Darren Dodge and Derek Dodge have a bunch of their own startups “cooking in the microwave, we just open the door and check on them” says Darren.

But really, the great thing about About Last Night is the robustness of the platform. They left no stone unturned, but at the same time the UI is appealing and not too cluttered.

About Last Night is about sharing the good times you had last night. The About Last Night crew showed off good times spent Sunday night in Times Square, at Bubba Gumps and other fine establishments around New York.

The app allows you to follow people you don’t know (like Twitter), People you do know (like Facebook) and your favorite night spots and locations (like a reverse FourSquare), again it’s like leaving no stone unturned. It feels a bit like path, but it’s more about the jello shots you did at the Ale House, not waking up at 7:35 with a hangover and brushing your teeth.

They’ve been working on About Last Night for the last six months and they’ve come out with an easy and fun to use app. They’ve got plenty of time to work on even more startups, ya know with the Red Sox sucking and all…

Check out the video below:

Linkage:

Find out About Last Night here

More TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 coverage here

We’re on a sneaker-strapped nationwide startup road trip, check it out here (and support us please)

TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Interview With Connecticut Startup Shizzlr

Shizzlr is a new group platform social event platform with a website and cool mobile app to bit. In a way it’s similar to the startup we saw last year at Disrupt NY called “Salsa” unfortunately that startup had a very short life. Shizzlr has promise though, because of it’s unique feature set.

Shizzlr’s mobile app is available for both iPhone and Android. It allows you to discover local events and places nearby. After that you can share them into a group chat with friends and then decide what you want to do. Afterwards you can even run a poll and get feedback about the event or activity.

Shizzlr was founded by Nick Jaensch and Keith Bessette in the fall of 2009 while they were both students at UConn. They kept working on it after college and saw an official launch in 2010. Now both co-founders are here showing off Shizzler in TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley because they know its the shizzle.

Shizzlr is designed for smaller groups of friends between say 5 and 20. It aggregates local events from Facebook. Once the events are aggregated, users can decide which ones to do and make plans.

It’s an interesting new spin on the social event app. Check it out for yourself at shizzlr.com and watch our video interview below:

See more nibletz.com TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 coverage here

Ohio Startup: Whotever, A New Social Website To Discover Whotever You Want

After South By Southwest in Austin Texas earlier this year, the last thing people want to hear about is a new “discovery” app or platform. It seems everyday another startup is launching to help discover people socially. Well this startup, based in Ohio, called Whotever is hoping to fix that problem.

As more and more social discovery sites pop up, actually using the web or your mobile to discover information on the things you actually want to know about gets harder in harder. Even with basic search engines like Google, the results you get today are much more polluted than the results of say a 2005 Google search.

That problem became evident to Timi Azeez and the other co-founders of Ohio based startup Whotever, 8 years ago. Azeez told nibletz.com:

“About 8 years ago, the three of us were in a heated debate and it prompted us to confirm our facts/findings on the internet. During the research online, we discovered that we could not find exactly the information we needed for our debate. Instead, we spent hours sifting through the data page by page defeating the purpose of the discussion. We realized the internet experience was more hectic than fun and this precluded us to start Whotever.com. It was the first step to improving the users’ experience on the internet.”

That’s the foundation for this new startup that they hope to launch later this year. We got a chance to talk a little more in-depth with Azeez about whatever.

More after the break
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Facebook Hit With $15 Billion Dollar Class Action Suit On IPO Day

Friday was supposed to be a great day for Facebook and by most accounts it was. There were many reports about a party and speech by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday the eve of the IPO, that was one last hoorah.

Friday morning started off great. The stock debuted at $38 as it was supposed to. By midday trading it was up to $40.00 and then closed at $38.32. The performance on the stock market was so-so by some accounts, underwhelming by others. But that’s not that wasn’t the worst news for Facebook on Friday.

Facebook was served with a $15 billion dollar privacy related class action lawsuit on Friday. The lawsuit filed in Federal court in San Jose combines 21 previously filed privacy cases across the U.S. Law firms Stewarts Law and Bartimus, Frickleton, Robertson & Gorny are representing the plaintiffs.

Stewarts Law issued the following statement:

Facebook users today filed an amended consolidated class action complaint in federal court in San Jose, California in the case In re: Facebook Internet Tracking Litigation, No. 5:12-md-02314-EJD. The class action asserts federal statutory and California State causes of action related to the revelation in September 2011 that Facebook was improperly tracking the internet use of its members even after they logged out of their accounts. The action consolidates 21 related cases filed in more than a dozen states in 2011 and early 2012.

The plaintiffs assert claims under the federal Wiretap Act, which provides statutory damages per user of US$100 per day per violation, up to a maximum per user of US$10,000. Even if Facebook’s alleged actions constitute a single violation of the Wiretap Act per class member, that implies more than US$15 billion in damages across the class. The complaint also asserts claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Stored Communications Act, various California Statutes and California common law.

The class action is being led by court-appointed co-lead counsel Stewarts Law US LLP and Bartimus, Frickleton, Robertson & Gorny, P.C. David Straite, Partner at Stewarts Law, stated: “This is not just a damages action, but a groundbreaking digital privacy rights case that could have wide and significant legal and business implications.” In addition to co-lead counsel, the court has appointed a Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee which includes Keefe Bartels in New Jersey; Mandell, Schwartz & Boisclair in Rhode Island; Eichen Crutchlow Zaslow & McElroy in New Jersey; Bergmanis Law Firm in Missouri; Burns, Cunningham & Mackey in Alabama; and Murphy, Falcon & Murphy in Baltimore. The court has also appointed a committee of former State Attorneys General to advise the class, including former Mississippi AG Mike Moore, former Arizona AG Grant Woods, former Hawaii AG Margery Bronster, and former Louisiana AG Richard Ieyoub.

The lawsuit cites federal wire-tapping laws pertaining to Facebook tracking their users. As you can imagine, on such an exciting day, Facebook hasn’t commented to any site on this matter.

source: Stewarts Law via TFTS

Atlanta Startup: LaunchTable, Find & Collaborate With The Ultimate Team

One of our favorite startups is Cleveland based Foundersync which links founders with each other without the stuffy, snobbery of sites like Founderdating. Foundersync has an excellent back end that will continue to grow over the next few months with an intelligence layer that will yield great results connecting likeminded co-founder teams.

Atlanta startup Launch Table takes over and helps find the rest of the team. Whether you’re a coder with a great idea and you’re looking for a marketing guru, an entrepreneur, and a mobile expert, LaunchTable is a place to find them all.

LaunchTable is obviously a play on lunch table, can you remember the conversations you had about taking over the world at the school lunch table? The best practical jokes, collaborative assignments and parties were planned around the lunch table. One person had all the friends, the other had the parents going out of town, while one person new where to get the extra-curriculars. Little did you know, those collaboration skills would come in handy down the road.

In fact, LaunchTable founder Ian Jones told us in an interview that LaunchTable is for startups looking for that next great business idea or students working on a project. When we attended the Duke University startup challenge earlier this spring we found that several of the startups in the contest had just one or two co-founders based at Duke, others were at Stanford, Princeton, M.I.T., UT and other schools across the country. Had LaunchTable been around earlier they could have taken advantage of it.

LaunchTable shouldn’t be confused with a social network. You’re not there to pick up as many friends as you can. The purpose is to build, create and innovate together. If you’re familiar with Dustin Moskovitz’ new startup Asana, Launch Table is more similar to Asana then Facebook. Now for a minute imagine that you don’t necessarily know the people you’re collaborating with yet. Say you want to meet them and then dive into a project. That’s the back bone to LaunchTable.

We’re really excited for Ian and what he’s building in Atlanta. Like the Nibletz team he’s out running all over the east coast getting people excited about creating at the LaunchTable.

Check out our interview after the break
Read More…

How Zuckerberg Cut Eduardo Saverin Out Of Facebook

Business Insider is reporting to have the email in which Mark sent to his Lawyers to try and cut Eduardo Saverin out of Facebook. This move, which later cost Mark 4-5% of the company and will bank Saverin around $5 Billion once the company goes public this Friday. In a move in which Wall Street wants to paint Mark as someone who can’t run a major company will show just how ruthless he can be at times.

Santa Barbara Startup: Talentwire Connect To Mentors Who Do What You Do INTERVIEW

Do you like what you do? Are you looking for like minded people? Do you feel like you could offer someone who does what you do advice? Would you like to learn more about the profession you’re in? These are just some of the questions that will be answered when you join the new talentwire.me platform.

Talentwire is a platform that connects professionals to each other and allows mentorship, sharing and more. Users can share via simply writing about what they do, asking and answering questions and even doing how to videos. Talentwire integrates with Facebook for quick logins.

Once you’re in the Talentwire site at talentwire.me you can select your profession, or “what you do” and then drill down even more. For instance I found a category for news media after clicking through media and arts. There’s categories for every profession under the sun from healthcare to actors, computer coders to fashion, and the platform is still building.

Talentwire founder Sam Sperling has been hard at work promoting his new startup. They debuted at South By Southwest in Austin Texas this past March and then went on to TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam. At SXSW Sperling was flanked by scouts from other social networks in the professional space like LinkedIn, BraveNewTalent and Dice.

We got a chance to speak with Sperling.

Interview after the break
Read More…

Facebook Updates Mobile News Feeds To Display Photos Much Larger

As of late, Facebook has been avidly beginning to change a lot of things when it comes to the mobile end of their social network. Whether iOS or Android, updates have been steadily rolling out to these platforms and predicting what they contain is an almost impossible task. Facebook continues to make changes, and whether we like them or not, we are stuck with them. Unless of course, a lot of people complain, then Facebook might think of changing things back, which is exactly what happened when they tried to add those Messenger and Camera shortcuts a few weeks ago.

Facebook has updated their mobile experience yet again, however, this time it is a rollout that will happen to mobile users automatically, and it is not dependent of what device you are using. Because Facebook pulls their News Feed UI straight from their actual mobile site, all they have to do is change that coding, and it will begin to roll out to all of their apps. What they have done in their most recent rollout, is change how we view pictures in our mobile news feed. Photos that are posted now show up 3X bigger in the news feed, and they really begin to take up a lot of real-estate on your screen, depending on how often your friends post photos. Some are calling the changes a response to Google+’s new mobile update, or that it is just an obvious photography focus possibly due to the recent Instagram acquisition. The photos sort of “pop” off the news feed, breaking the edge of the posts, and also have a shadow that gives them more of a 3D presence. The changes have begun rolling out today, and should start appearing in mobile timelines everywhere very soon. Let us know in the comments if you like Facebook’s new approach to photos, and be sure to check back with Nibletz for more news and updates.

Source: CNET

Startup Quick Byte: twiDAQ

For todays Startup Quick Byte we take a look at twiDAQ a site that mixes both Wall Street and Twitter into one. Located in Bath, United Kingdom this company takes Twitter to another level that even has me interested. After having raiser $48,000 in funding so far, twiDAQ is using peoples love affair for Twitter and wanting to do more with it to a whole another level.

While some sites like Klout mask and try and hide how things are rated, twiDAQ holds no such qualms as they clearly post it on their site Here

There are two principal models for setting the share price; performance & demand. What we’re all seeing at this early stage in the market is the dominance of performance over demand which is allowing small stocks to rise in price.

Currently, only on the Web and iOS and free on both markets. So if you are into Twitter and just want more. Make sure to check it out. No words yet on an Android application yet.

Where to find:

Website

Twitter

Facebook