Gabi: A Very Unique, Superlative Interface For Browsing Facebook

Screen Shot 2012-06-21 at 2.04.45 PMWe’re familiar with it all by now: the Facebook news feed, the notifications and the ticker. Plus, there have been plenty of Facebook clients, readers and iPad apps. Given all of those years of iterations since Facebook was launched all the way back in wee 2004, what is left to be completely rethought?

Apparently a lot. I took a look at an app called Gabi from a Berlin-based iOS developer named loui Apps. It’s completely unlike any other interface I’ve seen for Facebook. For one, it’s literally about asking superlative questions (see the featured image at the top).

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Y Combinator-Backed Local Marketplace App Yardsale Launches Nationwide

yardsaleYardsale, a mobile app to help folks sell goods to local buyers, is now available throughout the U.S., after a long, long period of testing in the San Francisco Bay Area. The latest version of the app, which hooks into Craigslist and enables users to easily list items for sale, hopes to take on other local marketplaces by reducing the friction associated with creating listings, and then dealing with flaky buyers afterward.

The Yardsale guys believe that everyone has some shit they’d like to get rid of, if only Craigslist and eBay weren’t such a pain in the ass to deal with. On Craigslist, you’re faced with buyers who’d rather spend time haggling than actually buying your stuff. And when you do agree on a price, you never know whether your buyer will actually show up to, you know, buy the items. As for eBay, well, you are up against a growing number of small businesses, which have cropped up to largely make individual sellers seem irrelevant. In either case, it’s not a good user experience.

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Better, Stronger, Faster: Tumblr 3.0 For iPhone Has Arrived

tumblr-mainAh, there’s nothing like the sweet smell of highly-anticipated app updates in the morning. As CEO David Karp promised at last week’s F.ounders conference, the new version of Tumblr’s iOS app has now arrived. And it’s a doozy. (I mean that in a very good way). The app is completely redesigned, a lot faster, and offers a ton of new features ranging from Spotify support to gesture-based shortcuts.

The first thing you’ll notice, of course, upon logging in, is a radically different new post screen. While the app had previously featured colorful icons for things like “text,” “photo,” “audio,” and “video,” etc., the new post screen has gone for a black background with richer, bolder icons. It almost gives Tumblr’s iOS app an Android-like feel, to be honest.

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Uncomfortable With Facebook Auto-Sharing? Tap The Deliberate New “Like Action” For Web and Mobile

Facebook Like With CautionEvery developer wants Facebook referral traffic, but not all apps have actions that fit well with auto-sharing, and others might not want to post to Facebook without their users’ express permission. So today Facebook launches a Like action for mobile and web apps. Don’t call it a “Like Button” though, as instead of immediately being one-click, the new Like Action requires a user to give publishing permission to an app first. The Like Action will also generate activity Facebook can turn into Sponsored Stories, the center of its mobile monetization plan.

Though subtle, this is actually a big step forward for privacy on Facebook in addition to being growth tool for developers. The Like Action means apps that want growth don’t have to tack auto-sharing onto some action or invent their own “love” “favorite” or “hell yeah!” button. That will give developers the flexibility to add deliberate sharing to more sensitive types of content that could have caused auto-sharing disasters.

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Ex-Googlers Launch MightyText, An iMessage For Android Users

Screen shot 2012-06-19 at 11.11.12 AMDuring their lengthy careers at Google in both senior technical and product management roles, Maneesh Arora and Amit Sangani were able to geek out on products like AdSense, AdWords, and the now-defunct Google Health. Arora tells us that, while his time at Google was defined by smart people and ambitious ideas like these, in development there was often a tendency to “over engineer” without thinking about “the average user.” He said that, while Google employees always had Gchat open and used Google Voice (or Wave while it was still alive), none of these products were able to effectively address the true value prop of communication tools for a mainstream audience: Syncing. Especially when it comes to texting.

Arora says simply, “To me, it makes no sense that I have to have my phone in front of me to communicate … If I leave it in another room, or in the car, or at home, I essentially have to retrieve it to see who’s calling or to receive incoming texts.” So, Arora and Sangani set out on a mission to give Android users the ability to view and reply to text messages no matter what device they happened to be using. After several months of beta testing, the pair are today officially launching MightyText — an app that aims to give Android users their own version of Apple’s iMessage.

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Evernote By The Numbers: 34M Users, 1.4M Paying, And The Relative Merits Of Different Platforms

libin with loicPhil Libin, the CEO of note taking app Evernote, is sitting on a $1 billion valuation and plans for an IPO, and while it may be a while yet before it follows through on going public , today at LeWeb in London he revealed new numbers for just how much the service is getting used, and how much money different platforms are bringing into the pot.

He said that the company now has 34 million users overall across all platforms — mobile and web — with the number of paying users now at 1.4 million: that’s a significant rise on the 25 million overall and 1 million paying users Evernote last reported as recently as May, when it announced its $70 million round.

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After Seed Labs, Cvent Snags CrowdCompass For $10M To Double Down On Mobile Event Apps

Screen shot 2012-06-19 at 4.34.57 AMIt’s been an active seven days for Cvent, one of the largest event management companies in the world you’ve never heard of. The company, which offers web-based software for online event registration, management and more, has been on a mission to go beyond B2B services. Since raising $136 million last year, Cvent has re-focused on more consumer-facing event solutions, especially on mobile. As part of this new direction, Cvent made its first-ever acquisition last week, scooping up Austin-based event app developer Seed Labs for $4.2 million.

Given its new consumer aspirations, venture backing and strong recent growth, we said last week that “it wouldn’t be surprising to see Cvent continue making strategic acquisitions” in the near future. Although we are soothsayers, we didn’t expect it to be so soon.

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Instagram’s Systrom: Video Is Hard But Cinemagram Is Interesting; Also, Focus On Big Problems

Screen Shot 2012-06-19 at 10.48.46 AMStartups like Viddy and Socialcam are angling to be the Instagram of video — that is, to figure out some simple way of creating, editing and sharing mobile videos, in a way that resonates with users like the photo-sharing service has.

But it’s hard, Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom said on stage at Le Web London today, because of the medium. Videos take minutes to load. “Users want a faster experience, they want to produce quickly. [With Instagram] you can take a photo and make it beautiful in seconds.”

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Spun Out Of Evri With $3.5M From Paul Allen, SportStream Brings Its Social Sports Platform To The iPad

game dashboardThe Web is noisier than ever before. Content is being produced en masse, in realtime, making it increasingly difficult to separate the signal from the noise. Evri, the realtime content discover engine, aims to help you find the signal by indexing millions of news sources, turning that unstructured data into topic-based channels to let you more easily follow subjects that interest you, rather than just following the same old news sources.

Turning its technology to mobile, and then to the exploding sports content market, Evri launched a suite of apps for iOS and Android called SportStream, giving fans access to realtime news from a whole mess of content sources, integration with their social feeds, etc. Proving just how serious it is about the sports market, Evri announced that it has spun out SportStream as its own company, backed by $3.5 million from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital — just in time for the arrival of SportStream on the iPad.

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Rewind.Me Lets You Explore Your Digital History, Then Rewards You For It

Screen shot 2012-06-13 at 10.57.26 AMTechnology is all about looking to the future, but with so many different virtual identities and social networks it’s tough to keep track of who you’ve spoken with and where you’ve been. The Rewind.Me iOS app wants to change all that, and let you dive into your past experiences to enjoy them once again.

The idea is simple. Imagine you went to a delicious Greek restaurant in March around one mile from your apartment but you just can’t seem to remember where it is. Rewind.Me imports your entire Foursquare history and makes it searchable by date, location, and category. You have the option to search by distance (1 mile), category (Greek restaurants), and date (March, 2012). You also have the option to search nearby based on where friends have visited, and scroll through a calendar view of places your friends have visited in the past.

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