Like Quora more thinks about mobile devices, they drop a PIN on the spot

MG Siegler at TechCrunch to write for the 2009 year. It covers web, mobile, social, big companies, small companies, almost all. And Apple. A lot. Prior to TechCrunch it covers different technologies beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, mg attended the University of Michigan. He previously lived in Los Angeles, where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where ... ? Read More

Some of the most interesting and relevant content on Quora linked from their seats. So far, however, not much done to Quora concentrate these data using the location. Today they start.

A new feature going live soon will allow users to specify location information by topic. For example, if the theme of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, now you can drag and drop a PIN to indicate where on the map. This place will display each time you view the topic. And the map can be set to show satellite or terrain view (they're using Google Maps). You can also enter specific addresses.

This may not sound like a big deal, but it most likely indicates where Quora thinks about heading to the location itself. The company noted that, as more people use the service from their mobile phones, location-based questions and answers are becoming increasingly important. This is something that other startups as Hipster, were built around.

Location more generally also allows Quora link topics together in a new way. For example, if you are considering a trip somewhere, you could look at interesting information around the area you're headed, than might otherwise have surfaced on the overall query.

It looks like Facebook is not only taking place more seriously.

Quora, founded in June 2009, for the first time in private beta in January 2010. Quora is a collection of constantly improving the questions and answers is created, edited and organized by everyone who ...

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In an effort to be Dropbox music, Mecanto launches affordable streaming and storage services

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If you're a fan of cloud-based music boxes, this is a good time to be alive. Back in March, Amazon somewhat surprising beat Apple and Google storage and streaming music from their "Cloud drive" and "Cloud player". Google and Apple have since begun to cloud music victims (or their Beta), and all three continue to improve and evolve as time marches on.

As a lover of music, it's great to see cloud music storage and streaming services, move forward in tandem, even if we must all recognize that our own personal bookmark. Because, frankly, more competition in this space, the better. That is why you should pay attention to the new startup, which enters the stage left: Mecanto. Yes, today, a new service cloudy music includes Arena, promising Unlimited Music streaming and storage of the listeners around the world is not to put a dent in your wallet. (TC 1000 Mecanto offers readers free 6 months subscription. Huzzah! See below for more information.)

On the basis of the Tel Aviv Mecanto hitting scenes this week to support cloud music player and storage service, easy to set up and all the things the user wants from their trusty neighborhood music locker: unlimited storage and streaming, the ability to automatically sync your iTunes library and PC folders with your account (with multiple computers), global accessibility, playlist editing, video, easy overview and cross platform functionality. Also doesn't hurt that users can find Mecanto on the Internet or go mobile iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

MeCanto Mobile interface is very stylish and enables users to easily listen to the songs and albums or create playlists. Stream songs over 3 G or WiFi and users can listen to any song they want without having to worry about how much space the song took on a phone. Here's to you, clouds.

This sounds like a great start, right? Of course, but with names like Amazon, Google, Apple, Spotify and numerous other staring down Mecanto definitely has uphill climb ahead. In doing so, accessibility is a strong selling point for the service of Israeli music. Look at your competitors: Spotify unlimited "and" premium cost $ 60 per year and $ 120 per year, respectively, iCloud comes in at around $ 25 a year, Amazon Cloud drive and cloud player is worth at least $ 20 per year (unlimited storage may be limited time offer).

Google, on the other hand is currently free of charge, but there is little likelihood that it will stay that way for long. For comparison, at $ 20 per year, is an attractive alternative to large Mecanto players, especially as it offers worldwide access, cross platform integration, and instantly uploads — suite, which its competitors only offer to pieces.

In addition, users are free for the first time Mecanto month service at the end of which they can pay $ 20 for a whole year or breaking it down into $ 2 monthly. To start using, users can download a small application for desktop computers, which will then download and synchronize all the music automatically. Bing, Bada boom Bada boom probable cause. The best part: to accelerate the process of downloading Mecanto's, this means that users can access their music almost instantly, even before the download is complete. Students may obtain direct access to their music, or they can choose to upload your files to slower bandwidth savings without having to worry about delays.

Not wanting to be anti-social at the age of Facebook music service also offers a social function, including the possibility of adding a video to YouTube account and playback, as well as the ability to share these YouTube clips on Facebook and Twitter, Last.fm scrobbling tracks Exchange current track for social networking, bidirectional synchronization and intelligent categorization tracks. As for the support files? Mecanto works with MP3, M4A, WMA, OGG, FLAC and a big part of their language.

Mecanto in the so-called "three screens and a cloud" platform really is an excellent alternative to the big names in space, and a "Dropbox for music" is not an analogy unfair. Course design isn't quite up to par with some of the other, but its availability, worldwide access and cross platform functionality can simply give Mecanto feet, it has to be taken seriously in a crowded with familiar names space.

So far run raised $ 2 million in funding from private angels, but you can be sure that the startup will seek more cash as he begins to scale and rolls out around the world.

Israeli music locker is definitely worth a look, especially under the auspices of the monthly demo and the fact that the first 1000 readers to TechCrunch, which here will receive free testing within six months of service. I mean, who doesn't love music deal? Check this.

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DoughMain raises $ 5 million for Gamified financial education platform for kids

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DoughMain, launch, which brings together family coordination and financial education in simple, real and gamified platform, has announced that it raised $ 5 million seed funding for a number of private Angel investors. Round of funding is used to support the production and release of DoughMain.com, as well as contribute to the development of DoughMain in mobile applications.

But what exactly is DoughMain all about? DoughMain President and Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Damato said that run goal is simple: she wants to give families across the country, a simple solution that allows them to coordinate the activities of households and, in doing so, expose their children to important financial management skills.

DoughMain assaults the household, offering users an integrated family services as a chore calendar Tracker and benefits (or compensation) instrument, as well as three initial age relevant gaming sites to make American families operate like clockwork and give children a fun and useful tool to help them learn (in a sense, age-appropriate) retain, use and dispose of the money.

Launch of the so-called "family coordination platform allows parents to customize DoughMain platform so that it acts as a secure, personalized micro network for his family. Within this network, family members can view each of their own responsibility, that efforts should continue to be provided, for example, as well as the whole family. (Presumably so that they can error their younger brothers and sisters until they fulfil their responsibilities and learn how to balance their checkbooks.)

Parents can control the amount of information you can gain access to their children, whether it is possible to create calendar entries or to show that a particular chore was completed. Because the platform are updated in real time, parents can reward them obedient children to achieve them, with "DoughPoints", run the virtual currency, or by enhancing their benefits through a rigid, the American currency. specify that the chore is complete. Because the information is updated in real time, parents may

At the top of their family coordination platform for startup offers options for financial education, which is neatly integrated with worries and financial experience that their children to navigate within the interaction with the platform. Platform offers developed teacher content through secure gaming platforms like TheFunVault.com, a Flash game that teaches basic money management lessons for children aged 5-9, or SandDollarCity.com, a multiplayer virtual world where children aged 8-12 to manage the family candy stops, or, finally, the IRuleMoney.com, a site that as the financial content and contests for teens.

It is planned that the mobile version of DoughMain will be released in September that would allow families to stay in touch and coordinate on-the-go. For more check DoughMain homes here.

DoughMain, Princeton, NJ-family service provides coordination and financial education.

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Diffbot sees the Internet as people do now free for developers

Diffbot is geeky and incredibly interesting technology that uses robots, algorithms, computer vision and artificial intelligence to handle content on the website so how can a man. "The whole Internet can be broken down into 30 different types of pages" explains co-founder Mike Tung, also known as "Mike," and "Diffbot Diffbot you can define them all." Diffbot knows the difference between a social network profile, blog, home page, product page, events page and dozens more.

Diffbot today released his first set of APIs that are now open for all developers for free. Running can significantly affect the types of applications that developers can create, and for consumers, this means that a variety of intelligent applications is about to quit.

New APIs: on demand & follow

With two APIS available now, developers can create applications that will automatically extract the values from the pages of the applications that understand the trends and who says it, applications that provide RSS feeds, where no one had been available previously, and apps that announced only the relevant parts of the Web page, ignoring the ads, header, and footer copy.

And that's just for starters. Future APIS will enable developers to automatically turn the pages event calendar appointments, social network profiles in the vCard format or to automatically extract the delivery prices or feedback from product pages, among other things. Although Diffbot does not have an established road map, he looked forward to the launch of these new APIs for several months.

Today, the first 2 API available are:

On-demand API: this API consists of page types "Frontpage" and "Article". The first is used to analyze a site's pages and index pages using common layout markers as headers spoken, photos, articles, ads etc article API extracts text clean article, photos and tags. (For example, see Readably).Follow the API: This is used to track changes and updates to any Web page. Diffbot automatically determines the portion of the page that a developer wants to follow and extracts the metadata as the names, images, text, summary and more, and then segments page relevant sections (see photo).

What can Diffbot actually?

These APIS are already used speech recognition system for companies like maker nuance, AOL (Disclaimer: TechCrunch is owned by AOL), social media monitoring firm SocMetrics and others.

AOL uses Diffbot to retrieve the title, author, image, text, video, themes, and other metadata for its new iPad mag AOL publications. Nuance uses technology to improve its processing into a product for physicians, natural language processing, which requires an understanding of the complex medical terminology. SocMetrics sends a bit.ly short links to Diffbot to get the full text of the article text and so that it can determine which users of social media are saying about what topics most.

These are just a few examples of big-name. There are fewer, but just as innovative use cases out there, too. Like Hacker news radio for example, which reads the Hacker news and comments to you. Or FeedBeater that allows you to easily turn any URL into an RSS feed automatically (one of the first creations Diffbot). Or created by Diffbot Twitter feed that tracks changes to a Web page for the city of São Paulo, Brazil (as it has no RSS), and tweets updates.

The new self-service platform for developers is free up to 50000 API calls per month. Cloud plan provides $ 500 calls per 100000, and then $ 0.002/call after that. Managed business plan requires a custom pricing.

Diffbot was founded by Mike Tun and Leith Abdulla, both Stanford graduate students to leave to create a company. The idea arose from the desire to Tung automatically track new appointments on the Web site of the class automatically, using the technology. Diffbot was also the first launch, sponsored by the Stanford incubator programme, now called StartX (formerly SSE Labs).

Diffbot, founded in 2008, two students at Stanford, applies the methods of computer vision in order to obtain the semantic structure of Web pages. Diffbot analyzes documents a lot as a person, using ...

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Nextpeer allows developers to turn single-player game in multi-player games

Nextpeer is a newly launched Mobile Developer Toolkit that enables you to quickly and easily add multi-player gaming their single-player game developers. With Nextpeer at the tournament and social SDK (software development kit) developers can add custom features that allow users to join their games in real time, social tournaments where they compete with other users for the top scores or achievement.

The idea is so simple, it's surprising it hasn't been done before. People like mobile games and they are together to play games, but so far the only way developers can create multiplayer games — by creating a multi-player game from scratch. However, with the Nextpeer, any game can become a multiplayer game.

How it works

For users of Nextpeer too easy to use. Gamers to start an application, click the "online tournaments/multipoint-player" and sign in using Facebook connect. This takes them to the screen, which displays live tournaments available to join – experience similar to join Zynga Texas Hold'em tables, for example.

The player then places a bet to take part in the tournament. (This part is optional and will depend on the game).

When the tournament begins, gamers not played alongside each other in the sense that all the characters on the screen together. Instead, the user plays the game, as usual, but gets real-time notifications on their status, for example, "you're in the 3-rd place! Hurry Up! "or "Daniel is going to win!" depending on the game could be the first to reach a certain number of points receive achievement, complete the task, etc.

At the end of the session players table has gone away, and if a winner is declared the winner takes all, rate other players virtual money in the form of a Nextpeer currency.

A separate application to search for Nextpeer games is the Next

Nextpeer currency will be available for purchase in the accompanying Nextpeer mobile applications (not out yet), which will also feature games that use technology Nextpeer. Company founder and CEO Shai Magzimof recognizes that had not yet been worked out details of how the share of income will work, but it could be something like 90/10 (developer/Nextpeer).

However, the share of income is not the main reason why developers will use technology Nextpeer, said Magzimof. More importantly Nextpeer will allow developers to yet another channel for disseminating and marketing opportunities, both within the Nextpeer a separate application and its Web site. Access to more players, particularly more active, regular players, means increased opportunities for income generation through the monetization of your own game, whether it is a virtual economy, advertising or paid downloads. And Nextpeer promises to stay regardless of the income in the game can be.

Join the beta!

Nextpeer SDK initially available for iOS only (Android will come later), and the company already has a few games in testing. It is also negotiating with other developers, large and small/indie. (And "big" we mean really, really, really big.) Interested developers can sign up now to join the private beta here. Nextpeer application will go live within a few weeks.

Magzimof previously participated in Y Combinator startup program, which later became Greplin. Founder and Technical Director Daniel W previously was a developer on Fring and co-founder and Vice President Itamar Mule also co-founded Mobile Games Studio social expeditions. Nextpeer-this is a summary of the Android app Innobell, who made phone calls, social. The company attracted angel investor $300000 from Morris Wolfson.

Nextpeer is a platform multiplayer mobile game that adds a social aspect of multiplayer games.

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Yipit's daily report about the transaction: industry earnings profit dips, Groupon and travel deals take off

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

Yipit, a site that collects and recommends daily transactions, based on custom field and interests (6 million dollars and raised back in June with many VCs), released some interesting data trends today on daily transaction space. In General, July was not a memorable month for the industry daily deals, although there have been several clear winners, including all your favourite transaction site, big kahuna Groupon.

Based on data collected from more than 650 daily transactions services, Yipit discovered that the industry's total revenue fell in July to 7% in North America's largest markets — in spite of a slight overall increase proposals. The data also shows that the number of daily deals sites, decreased slightly in July, with 38 sites of deals, closing their doors, compared with 36 new sites launched.

While the big players, according to the report, Groupon in revenue decreased 4% from June, as, unlike the income fell by LivingSocial significant 18 per cent. Although the gap has widened its Groupon rival in July, income both companies declined by more than 20% in the first half of July, compared with the first half of June. However, although the Groupon in revenue in the second half of July have actually increased in the second half of June, LivingSocial has declined. Also note: Groupon more than twice the gross revenue than LivingSocial. Not a good month for Groupon in competitor.

As one might expect on the previous data, Groupon nabbed a little market share at the expense of its competitor, reversing a trend that persisted over the past several months. Groupon thus continues to maintain his iron grip on the proportion of the total market, representing almost 50 per cent of the total daily transaction market, more than doubled to 21 percent, LivingSocial and so much more than the next opponent in the list, Travelzoo and currently make up only 5 percent of the market.

GroupOn also owned a high gross transactions in July, the report said, as his Photoboom of America decide to generate income in the top 30 $575,505 North American markets. GroupOn and LivingSocial dominated the top ten gross is seen in space, six of the top 10, compared with four for LivingSocial.

Other interesting data points include the fact that, despite its relatively small chunk of market share, compared with the top dogs, Travelzoo, continued to actively expand its "local transaction", offering an increasing number of transactions available in the top 30 North American markets on 48 percent, record revenue growth of more than 35 per cent.

And it seems that just as Google you must mention in seemingly every other industry trend report, search giant is now find their way into daily transactions statistics as well as Google offers "to continue to have a significantly lower prices and revenue from a transaction than Groupon, LivingSocial deals" or according to the report. In doing so, while Google offers the average number of vouchers was only slightly less than Groupon and LivingSocial, income from transaction was significantly lower.

Google offers launched in Portland, but has expanded to New York and San Francisco. Of course while Google plans to begin making waves in new towns, especially in view of the fact that the report notes that Google offers fought in Portland in July, the creation of less that 10 per cent of the income that Groupon in Portland in July.

But perhaps the big winner in daily space "travel deals" websites, which continued to grow in July accounted for six of the top 10 deals in July — and became the third largest daily deal category with travel deals, accounting for six of the top 10 deals and almost 15 per cent of income in the industry.

Extract image courtesy dagger tools.

Yipit units and recommends the best daily deals, based on the ground and the interests of users. Yipit attracts its 330 active daily transactions from the transaction, including service and buy from LivingSocial ...

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Jumio comes to WordPress, makes blog readers webcams in credit card readers

Jumio, a new technology that transforms your webcam in credit card readers, now offers a plugin for WordPress websites. New Jumio Netswipe-ins allows site visitors to pay for products or make donations quickly and easily, simply, holding up their credit cards to their computer webcam.

For publishers, WordPress by adding Netswipe to their site is simple-just download, install and activate like any other WordPress plugin.

With the new plugin WordPress site owners receive a "Netswipe PayMe" button that can be placed anywhere on their website. All payments are managed through your Jumio account, which is provided free of charge after registration.

After you download the WordPress plugin here, just unzip it and upload the folder "Wordpress_Jumio_Payment_Plugin" at the '/wp-content/plugins/' directory. Then activate the plugin through the plugins menu in WordPress. You can then configure the options in the menu "settings for WordPress. (More detailed instructions can be found here).

Jumio started last month, introducing its seamless, integrated solutions for merchants and developers for the failure of the payment industry. This is not only the technology easy to use, also adds a layer of security to digital operations to the physical card must be present in order to address the webcam Jumio to work.

Initially, the technology is available only for Desktop Web sites, but later this year, the two parts of the mobile solutions become available. This part of the system Jumio will include a mobile app and developer libraries. Jumio mobile developer tools are an aspect of the solution that is most like a Card.io, which offers similar tools.

Jumio received $ 6.5 million in funding from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and other investors back in March.

Jumio offers advanced technology, which increases security and ease of use for credit card payment via the Internet. Jumio is the inventor of Netswipe, a patent pending solution that turns ...

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