Updates over Media, Marketing en Publishing
Depending on who you ask, Foursquare could be in a great place as far as growth, or in a bad place. We’ve heard about potential acquisitions, difficulty fundraising and everything in between. One thing we do know is that Foursquare needs your che…
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Cheers, the app and social network built around giving users the chance to celebrate the good things in their lives, has raised a $2.5 million Series A funding round led by MindFund and including Charles River Ventures, Trinity Ventures, AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and others. The startup launched just over a year ago in February, and is still very much experimenting with its positivity-based social network, according to founder Farhad Mohit.
Hubble, a new mobile application for private social networking created by the team that developed Flip Video, is launching today to serve as the secure hub (get it? Hubble?) for family communication. The app currently supports text messaging, voice messages, photo and location sharing and alerts, and may extend into other real-time communication methods like voice and video in the future, too.
When Snoox, the web-based recommendation engine for friends, first launched in November, my only gripe was that searching for recommendations is best suited for mobile, even though giving recommendations feels right on the web. Luckily, my prayers have been answered as Snoox has developed apps for both iOS and Android, just as promised. The company recently raised $2 million in funding to develop the apps, which have been in the pipeline since launch. In case you are unfamiliar with the platform, Snoox is a lot like Pinterest, but with recommendations. In fact, I like to call it the Pinterest with a purpose, since the art of creating boards isn’t just for later aspirational perusing, but rather to let your friends know what you think is great. Simply log in the platform and start typing in your favorite things. Snoox searches for images on the web, or you can add your own, and from there all you need is to add a link. Snoox automatically tries to add in a “Click To Buy” link from Amazon, Best Buy and GrubHub. The mobile applications offer the same experience as the web, letting users post recommendations or browse through them. Obviously, creating boards full of beautiful imagery and links is best suited to web, but the time I need a recommendation most is when I’m out, on the go, and am looking for something fun to do. The Snoox team is well aware that mobile is critical to their success. Founder Guy Poreh mentioned that a great deal of their traffic is already coming from mobile. However, “we wanted to make sure we had an infrastructure that could support structured data search,” said Poreh. “It’s much easier to build out that backend on the web first.” See, Snoox wants to nail the beautiful, aesthetically pleasing nature of Pinterest on the creation end. But on the search side, Snoox wants you to be able to search the word “hotels” and find recommendations straight from your Facebook friends, as opposed to 10,000 pages of Pinterest madness from what could be total strangers. Most companies launch on one platform before the other, but Poreh tells me that the competitive landscape is heating up, and that if they’re going to launch, they need to launch big. As you may already know, Stamped (another recommendation platform) was bought up by Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo, and Thumb (yet another recommendation
Let’s Date, the iPhone dating app founded by Suicide Girls co-creator Sean Suhl and backed by Los Angeles incubator Science, Inc., is releasing its first significant update since the app’s national launch a month ago. The big focus — allowing friends to recommend potential dates to each other.
First of all, regular users will now be able to make these recommendations. If you find someone who might interest a friend, you can share that person’s dater card (that’s Let’s Date’s distilled version of a user profile) as a link via SMS or email.
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Last year, Storylane launched a site for users to share stories that are a little more thoughtful or serious than what you’d find on other social media properties. And thanks to a recently launched iPhone app, you can now browse those stories when you’re on-the-go.
The concept behind Storylane is pretty straightforward — founder Jonathan Gheller wants it to be the home for personal thoughts and stories that go deeper than a quick Facebook or Twitter update. The site prompts users to answer questions like “What have you learned from your failed relationships?” and “What are the most important lessons you’ve learned in life?” You can follow individual users to see their stories, and there are also pages to browse trending content across the whole site and within individual topics. You can’t post full comments, but you can hit buttons to say that you liked a story, or that it inspired you, and so on.
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If you’ve been to a live event recently, like a football game or a, you’ve probably noticed that the majority of people around you spent most of their time huddled over their smartphone. It’s true of life now, too, as people now interface with the world through Instagram rather than their eyeballs, but this even more true for live events.
BuzzMob launched in 2011 to capitalize on our mobile obsession with a location-based fan engagement app, designed to help facilitate and channel the social chatter at live events. The app aims to create a more engaging experience at live events by offering a focused, virtual community message board, which allows users to tap into a realtime community feed of images, tips and status updates from fellow event-goers.
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Koozoo is launching today in San Francisco and Austin with a new twist on social video.
The emphasis here is on utility, rather than performance and entertainment (though it can be entertaining too). Wouldn’t it be useful to know if the weather is nice at a nearby park? (Hmm, maybe that example is mostly effective in San Francisco, thanks to its microclimates?) Or whether a nearby store or restaurant is particularly crowded? Koozoo founder and CEO Drew Sechrist is trying to build up a network of live video streams that can give you that information.
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eBay-owned Svpply is debuting an Android version of its Svpply mobile application today, which brings its catalog of over 2.4 million hand-picked items from 110,000 stores to the Android operating system for the first time. The company, which was acquired by eBay just this September, had first launched on mobile in May 2012, offering both iPhone and iPad optimized versions of its service.
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