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Square Announces Its Full List Of Angels With Some Surprises (Mayer, Crowley, Fanning)

by Daniel Brusilovsky on Jan.26, 2010, under Gadgets, Tech News

Square, the startup that is making mobile payments for the iPhone, just announced it’s full list of angel investors. Kevin Rose announced his involvement in a video demo (embedded below) he did a few days ago, but until now it wasn’t known who else was involved.

The full list includes: Marissa Mayer from Google, Dennis Crowley from Foursquare, Kevin Rose from Digg, Ron Conway, Biz Stone of Twitter, Joshua Schachter, Shawn Fanning (who’s starting a new venture with Dave Morin), Zachary Bogue, Andrew Rasiej, Greg Yaitanes, Jean-David Blanc, David Lee, Esther Dyson, Robin Chan, First Round Capital and Fritz Lanman. Basically, it’s an extremely impressive list.

Most notable are Marissa Mayer and Dennis Crowley, making their first investments, and it seems like a great investment to get into.

Square has gotten off to a fast start these last few months. When it raised $10 million, it was rumored that the company was valued at $40 million. For a company whose product isn’t even available to the public, that’s not bad. Our own MG got a demo of Square, and saw its potential to democratize mobile payments.


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Rocketbox Lifts Off With Better Email Search For Apple Mail

by Daniel Brusilovsky on Jan.25, 2010, under Gadgets, Tech News

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I’ve been a fan of Apple’s Mail.app for quite some time, even though we’ve had our ups and downs, it’s gotten the job done. One of my biggest beefs with Mail.app is searching through past emails. It’s just horrible.

Central Atomics is hoping to fix that problem with Rocketbox. Rocketbox is a new way of searching your e-mail in Apple Mail.app — it’s more advanced than Mail’s search, with the ability to search by person, a search engine that is up to 200x faster than Mail’s, and powerful filters that make it easy to find what you need.

One neat thing about Rocketbox is its search-by-person suggestions.  Rocketbox analyzes your e-mail correspondence and provides a list of important contacts when you search, so you know who you’ve emailed the most.

Also, Rocketbox will show you Inline previews, with highlighted snippets telling you why a message was found, making it easier to scan through emails. The highlighted section then helps you improve your queries and takes the guess work out of using search.

Rocketbox is extremely similar to Xobni, which is the Windows alternative, with a few more features like social network information, and contact information, etc.

Overall, Rocketbox is a great addition to Mail.app, and the entire search experience. You can get a 30 day trial, or buy the full version or $14.95, but the first 100 TechCrunch readers to use the code “TECHCRUNCH“ can get Rocketbox for $9.95, instead of the regular $14.95, when checking out.


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Vanilla Forums Raises $500,000 For Open-Source Forum Software

by Daniel Brusilovsky on Jan.19, 2010, under Gadgets, Tech News

Vanilla Forums, an open source community forum software technology, has raised a $500,000 (CAD) Series A funding. Vanilla Forums was a Techstars summer 2009 company.

The round was led by Montreal Startup, with participation by eonBusiness, Norseman Capital and Klein Venture Partners. Vanilla Forums, a Montreal-based startup, will use the funds to expand its marketing, development, and sales efforts.

Vanilla has also released its forum hosting platform and additional premium features. According to Vanilla Forums, their hosting platform enables customers to quickly and easily deploy a community forum solution without having to write a single line of code.

Vanilla also released two new premium features, custom domains and ad-removal, with plans to release additional premium features including custom CSS, single sign-on, and forum analytics in the future.

The company already has over 300,000 users, including companies like O’Reilly Media, Rackspace, Mozilla, and more.


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Posterous Jumps On The Revenue Wagon; Signs Coca-Cola for Promo Site

by Daniel Brusilovsky on Jan.18, 2010, under Gadgets, Tech News

I’ve been following Posterous since it’s Y-Combinator days, and I’ve truly been impressed by the service. The way that Posterous has figured out how to bring email back to life is what amazes me (you just email in your posts and photos). But, I’ve always been confused about how Posterous will start making money. It seems these days that all the cool consumer web startups like Twitter and Posterous are having trouble actually figuring out the revenue side of things

So I asked Posterous co-founder Sachin Agarwal how Posterous will actually make money. His answer was simple. Charge for business and commercial use of Posterous.  What about consumers? Agarwal says that Posterous will remain free for consumers, but will just charge for businesses, which reminds me a lot of how people imagine Twitter making money.

One of Posterous’ first “clients” is Coca-Cola, which is definitely a good first start. Coca-Cola is using Posterous for its NCAA “Dept of Fannovation” where people can come up with ideas to improve the experience of being a fan, and a chance to win $10,000.

Coca-Cola’s use of Posterous revolves around the “post moderation” feature. Any Posterous site can be enabled so that anyone can email post@sitename.posterous.com. The site owner can then moderate those posts, and publish them with a single click. This feature can be used to crowdsource images, video, and text from users.

Agarwal declined to comment on how many other companies are paying for Posterous. He did mention though that Posterous is looking to launch paid accounts sometime in the near future.  If companies like Coca-Cola starting to use sites like Posterous for social outreach, there could be a business there after all.


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CrunchBoard Jobs: TechCrunch, Eventbrite, Chomp and More!

by Daniel Brusilovsky on Jan.18, 2010, under Gadgets, Tech News

If you’re on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We’ve added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks, including three jobs here at TechCrunch. Here’s a quick sample:

For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard.


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WooThemes Expands To ExpressionEngine; More Themes Coming

by Daniel Brusilovsky on Jan.14, 2010, under Gadgets, Tech News

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WooThemes, a maker of premium themes for WordPress, is moving its focus from just WordPres to other platforms with todays launch of ExpressionEngine themes.

With support for ExpressionEngine blogs, WooThemes is currently launching two paid themes, Coffee Break and Fresh News, and one free theme, Bueno. All three are compatible with ExpressionEngine 2.0, as well.

According to WooThemes Co-Founder, Adii Pienaar, the company is working over the next few months to port all of their most popular WordPress themes over to ExpressionEngine.

The Standard Package (Single Site License) costs US$90, while the Developer Package (Multi-site License) is priced at US$180 for the themes, much like the WordPress theme pricing.

In addition to the new ExpressionEngine themes, WooThemes also has Drupal, Joomla and Textpattern themes in various stages of development right now. Also, TechCrunch readers can use the code ‘TECHCRUNCH’ when checking out, and you can get 20% off your order.

Screen shot 2010-01-13 at 7.26.11 PM

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.


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Down For Everyone Or Just Me Gets A New Owner

by Daniel Brusilovsky on Jan.13, 2010, under Gadgets, Tech News

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With web hosting services like Rackspace going down time, and time again, Down For Everyone Or Just Me has become a hot spot to check to see if a lagging site is down for everyone, or just you. The site was created as a side project by longtime Twitter engineer Alex Payne, and has managed to grow quite a large following.

Over the weekend, Payne sold the site to Bweeb, Inc, which is known for running Site5 Web Hosting. Although Payne isn’t too sure what Bweeb’s plans are for the site, I suspect they’ll keep its functionality largely the same (and people will keep coming to it).

In a blog post, Payne mentions that the site hasn’t received that much attention lately, and wanted a new owner that would continue development of the site and add some new features.

I had numerous feature requests after the site launched, but turning it into a robust, multi-homed uptime checker was never my goal. All I’ve ever done with the site is:

1. Ported it from a simple Ruby implementation to App Engine.
2. Put some ads on it; first Google AdWords, then later individual campaigns that I negotiated by email. I made about USD $300/month from the site, on average.
3. Wired up a Twitter account that would tweet out sites that were frequently seen by the service as “down” within a short time period. (This functionality has been inactive since November, 2008.)

The price of the sale was not disclosed, but Payne also mentioned that “it was proportional to the amount of time and effort I’ve put into it (that is, not much).” Payne has also made the source code of the site public again.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0


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Yet Another App Store. This Time, It’s Intel

by Daniel Brusilovsky on Jan.08, 2010, under Gadgets, Tech News

Intel CEO Paul Otellini at CES announced an app store for applications on netbooks. The store is called AppUp Center, and it's a place where users can purchase programs that cater to a netbooks’ unique screen size and mobility. Intel AppUp center launched today for Windows and will support Moblin-based open source operating systems and a number of runtime environments later this year. The first set of apps are now available for download, for free or to purchase, and more will be added as they are validated. App categories include entertainment, business, games, education, health and social media. Additionally, Acer, ASUS, Dell and Samsung have announced plans to collaborate with Intel on their own app stores.


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ReelSurfer: A White Label Solution For Video Search

by Daniel Brusilovsky on Jan.06, 2010, under Gadgets, Tech News

When you’re looking for a specific movie clip, it can often be hard to find exactly what you’re looking for on sites like YouTube, which don’t let you search for keywords generated from dialog spoken during a video. That’s where ReelSurfer comes in. The startup processes long-form video and turns it into short, relevant segments that are easy to watch and search through. With this technology, ReelSurfer aims to increase the value of online content by allowing users to find the 30 second segment they really want to watch, and then save, share and buy the content.

Unlike TechCrunch50 company AnyClip, which also offers extensive video search, ReelSurfer is a white label solution. ReelSurfer has multiple solutions for different use cases, including a product that allows you to create a centralized online database for your University. ReelSurfer can archive footage like teacher lectures, making it easy to access and search for future reference. ReelSurfer also comes with its own custom encoder making it easy to download the video to Mac or Windows after the fact.

The company’s advisory board includes Bill Fay (Executive Producer of Independence Day, The Hangover, and 300 and President of Production at Legendary Pictures) and Carl Rosendahl (Founder of PDI, which sold to DreamWorks). The company hasn’t raised any money, and is already cash-flow positive.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0


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An Inside Look At A Twitter Style Guide: 140 Characters

by Daniel Brusilovsky on Jan.05, 2010, under Gadgets, Tech News

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We’ve all seen Twitter grow into the company that it is now, but what was it like when it first started — back when it was still called Odeo, and Twitter wasn’t in existence. As we know, Twitter was spun off from Evan William’s company Odeo, into what we know now as Twitter, the social networking service where you post short messages in 140 characters or less.

Dom Sagolla was one of the employees who worked at Odeo, transitioned to Twitter, and was subsequently laid off in the early days of the company. He recently wrote the book 140 Characters, which is mainly a style guide for the super-short form writing, and a concise field manual that will help you be more effective when communicating in small spaces, like on Twitter. The book also has a foreword from Twitter creator and Square CEO, Jack Dorsey. Sagolla is also using Square to sell his book on the go with his iPhone as well.

Sagolla is the founder of DollarApp, an iPhone development company that makes applications for $0.99. He is also the co-founder of iPhoneDevCamp, an international iPhone development conference which is coming up on it’s fourth conference this year.

What’s interesting about the book is that it comes with a companion iPhone application developed by Sagolla’s company, DollarApp. [iTunes link] The application lets you read the book on your iPhone, as well as a comment on the book via Twitter.

I’ve read the book now, and I have to say — it’s a really interesting read. It goes in depth about different styles on Twitter, and how different styles really affect the way we read tweets. For example, different styles go from comedy tweets that entertain, all the way to drama and poetry. For instance, @TheEllenShow is known for her one-liners.  These different styles reflect on how different users tweet, and distinguish themselves from others.

Oh, and I found out one of my tweets is quoted in the book! You can get on the app on the App Store today, and buy the book on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, Borders and of course, online.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors


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