The new Bing features a three-panel layout, with the left-most a pared-down list of straight search results. The second column appears when users hover over a certain result, and shows dedicated visual results for 150 different categories like restaurants, transit, movies and hotels that include maps, ratings and other information.

This “Snapshot” screen tries to help users take action on those results — for instance, to make a restaurant reservation or check availability at a certain hotel — without leaving the Bing page.

The third column is the most radical change from the traditional search layout — it’s a social friend list and feed that stays on the page at all times over to the right. For each query, Bing will automatically suggest Facebook friends who know about a topic as well as relevant experts from Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn, Google+ and Blogger.

When a user asks one of those people to help with a query, the conversation shows up in an activity feed on the sidebar and also back on Facebook.

Microsoft had considered giving users the option to broadcast — with their permission — all their Bing search queries to Facebook through its Open Graph API. That would have been super controversial, and it was dropped from the release over the last couple of weeks.

Bing search director Stefan Weitz told me that there are a couple of goals for this launch. The first is to show users that “Bing is for doing stuff.” And the second is to acknowledge that search has become too crowded, with additions like social seeming to randomly sprinkle Facebook profile photos throughout the results page.

The new interface’s three panels are, in order, “what the Web knows,” “what Bing knows,” and “what friends know,” Weitz said.

One thing that’s not clear to me is how a three-panel design that’s dependent on hovering will work within the constraints of small mobile touchscreens. Microsoft is demoing that and more at a San Francisco launch event that’s being live-streamed here.

Update: Qi Lu, Microsoft’s president of online services, replied at the event that the three-panel approach should actually ease translations to various form factors, including phones and Xboxes.

“Separating aspects allows us to customize for different form factors, so the experience can be consistent,” he said. Lu added that hovering would be replaced by swiping between panes on mobile devices.

The new Bing won’t be available to all users immediately, but people can sign up to be notified about it here.

The company, which lets users alert their friends to their location by “checking in” via smartphone from coffee shops, bars and other locations, revealed for the first time that it plans to let merchants buy special placement for promotions of personalized local offers in July in a redesigned version of its app. All users will be able to see the specials, but must check into the venue to redeem them.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

It has been relatively quiet there in the Utah desert ever since, which is odd, because it had been such a chatty company, throwing parties to kill old outdated identities, holding complicated math contests to guess its new name, things like that.

Now it’s about to get noisy again. Effective today, you’re going to start hearing a lot more from Domo and from its employees, and not because its new product is ready. Not quite. (James tells me the company will be talking about it this summer.)

No, starting today, all employees — everyone in the company — will be required as a condition of employment to get seriously engaged on social media in all its various forms in order to make Domo part of the wider conversations taking place on Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare and Pinterest and the rest. It’s called the #Domosocial experiment, and will last eight weeks. James puts it thusly in a post on the company blog:

“The program is designed to get everyone here engaged with and learning from consumer and social technologies. The goal is to help us develop a better product, understand the viral nature of web offerings more effectively, assist in getting the Domo brand out there, enable better customer conversations and see what impact it all has on our business.”

Part of the intent, James told me, is a matter of geography and culture. Being based in Utah, Domo employees are probably better than their equal numbers at other Utah start-ups when it comes to being facile with the ebb and flow of the daily global conversation that takes place on all the social spaces. But they’re probably not as familiar with it all as their rivals in Silicon Valley.

James has seen this sort of thing before. He started Omniture in Utah in 1996 and by 2009 sold it to Adobe for $1.8 billion. “With Domo, I wanted to ensure that we are every bit as adept at understanding and leveraging social as any other bleeding-edge startup,” he wrote.

But on top of that, he’s turning the effort into a live case study to see just how much of a difference it makes in Domo’s business prospects, if any. The company will track important metrics and share them with the world. “We’ll track how things change week after week. The good, the bad and the ugly, it’s all going to be public,” he told me.

Though not about everything. There’s a list of “don’ts.” Don’t tweet about deals in the pipeline, don’t debate with or quarrel with the boss on Facebook. Don’t post about meetings or leak financial information.

What do employees stand to benefit? The best among them will be getting cash rewards for their performance, extra days off, that sort of thing.

What does he expect? He’s been exploring social media pretty seriously for the last six months, and occasionally now gets stopped in the local mall by people who recognize him. “You start having influence in ways you didn’t before,” James told me. He learned with a 10-page article he shared on Twitter, where he has about 12,000 followers, that he experienced a 15 percent click-through rate. “The influence will increase dramatically,” he told me. Also, Domo’s development team will have their eyes opened to the finer points of what works and what doesn’t with social features that are under development at Domo. “We don’t want to re-invent what Facebook and Twitter did, but if you’re not intimately familiar with how those things work, then how can you learn from their mistakes?”

Since launching in August, Belly has signed up 1,400 merchants in eight markets, and is adding an average of 100 more merchants each week. Additionally, it has more than 200,000 active users, who have checked into business more than 800,000 times.

The business draws a little bit from Foursquare, because it requires users to check in to earn points; and also draws a little bit from Groupon, because of its focus on local commerce.

But Jeff Jordan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, argued that Belly is not at all like Groupon. “It’s the anti-Groupon,” he said. “Groupon is doing lead generation through discounting. … What Belly is trying to do is loyalty.”

The difference, Jordan said, is that Belly doesn’t require merchants to offer discounts to get consumers to come back.

For example, a Chicago comic book store owner is letting shoppers punch him in the stomach; a Washington, D.C., Ben & Jerry shop is giving away a chance to eat ice cream with Jerry after 200 visits; and a barber is handing over the clippers to frequent customers, who will shave off his own beard.

Jordan, the former chairman and CEO of OpenTable and former president of PayPal, said there are four reasons why he was attracted to the start-up:

1. The management team: Founder and CEO Logan LaHive previously worked at Redbox, and before that, Pay By Touch, the biometrics payments company that raised $350 million in capital before failing.
2. Product execution: Jordan said both merchants and customers like the product. Merchants must install an iPad at the register, where consumers can check in to earn points by scanning a bar code from their phone or a loyalty card.
3. DNA of the investors: Before Andreessen Horowitz got involved, LaHive incubated the company in the offices of Lightbank, the VC fund created by Groupon founders in Chicago. Jordan believes that the one who gets to market fastest will win in this market. Belly has that in its DNA.
4. Connected retailers: Once retailers have an iPad in every store, there will be additional opportunities for Belly to roll out other services.

LaHive said the capital will be used to fuel expansion into new markets and to develop new services. To date, the company has raised $13 million.

Belly charges merchants $50 to $100 a month for the service, which includes an iPad, a case and lock for the iPad, marketing materials, and data and analytics to manage their business better.

Belly @ Berry Austin from Bellycard.com on Vimeo.

That brings with it one big challenge: Collaboration. Managing accounts in such a way that many people can work on them easily and all stay on the same page. HootSuite, the cloud-based social media management service that has styled itself as the client of choice of businesses, today announced a new version, called HootSuite Teams.

The intent here is to do social media on an industrial scale. Social media teams at consumer-facing companies can easily comprise a few dozen people. Until now, companies have had to manage each account as best they can, which has led to some embarrassing gaffes. HootSuite Teams starts by enabling teams of 10 people or more, and then grows from there.

I talked with CEO Ryan Holmes last week. He said the use cases for the new version are many: Agencies that have multiple brands for clients, or big consumer companies like a Procter & Gamble, which have literally hundreds of brands, each with their own campaign. “The average big company has 25 brands that it is managing, and that gets complicated fast,” Holmes said. Add in multiple networks — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google+ — and the complexity increases.

HootSuite is certainly a busy tool. Holmes told me its four-million-odd users are sending 1.5 million messages to social networks every day, which are in turn seen by 1.7 billion eyeballs. Its customers include McDonalds, Pepsi, the New York Times and clothing retailer Free People.

It has also been growing at a healthy clip. Holmes told me it took HootSuite two years to get to its first million users, another eight months to make it to two million, six months to make three million and right now it’s hitting the four-million mark. At that rate, it will hit six million by the end of the year.

No wonder, then, that there are reports that HootSuite is in the middle of raising capital. At the end of March, it raised $20 million from Canada’s OMERS Fund (the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System). Holmes told me that the company is not seeking to raise any capital right now. “I’m always talking with VCs. It’s not impossible that we won’t raise in the next little while, but we’re not in the process of raising right now,” he told me.

OMERS bought its stake through secondary markets. Before that, HootSuite raised $3 million in debt financing, on top of $1.9 million from investors including Blumberg Capital, Hearst Interactive Media, Social Concepts, Millennium Technology Ventures and angel investor Geoff Entress.

Let’s begin by drawing the distinction between a tool and a robot. Tools enable us to work more efficiently. Robots do the work for us (in fact, the original word robata means “hard work” in Czech). The vast majority of the Web sites and apps we use today are tools that enable us to work, play and share more efficiently. Over the last few years, through advances in artificial intelligence and data science, Web sites and apps are evolving. There is a new breed of applications focused entirely on working on our behalf. As humans, we constantly seek means to reduce the amount of work needed to reap rewards from a system. While the tools of today allow us to work less, the robots of the future will eliminate much of the work in the first place.

This incredible transformation is happening right before our eyes.

Your Search Robot

A long time ago, we would search for information by painstakingly looking up sources in a card catalog and reading a book. As much of that knowledge moved online, the directory (like Yahoo!) enabled us to browse and find content of interest. In time, the amount of information flowing online overwhelmed the directory — it would simply require too much work to browse the entire Web. Fortunately, a revolutionary tool, search — Google, really — made it very easy to find the documents that contain the answers we’re looking for. But while search presents us with a huge set of choices, it still takes a lot of work to find the answers.

Today, a new technology is eliminating that work by acting on our behalf to find the answers and even solve our problems. Siri is an artificial intelligence client that turns our devices into a virtual assistant. It removes the steps between searching for answers and finding them. Have a question about converting metric units? Ask Siri. Need to order your mother flowers? Let Siri handle that. Need to make dinner reservations for your date Friday? Let Siri do the work for you. And we’re just scratching the surface. We possess the vastness of all human knowledge in our pockets, yet much of our usage is limited to Angry Birds. This transformation to intelligent machines means we no longer have to work as hard to apply the knowledge locked in our devices; they’ll do the work for us.

Your Location Robot

In the 20th century, an enormous yellow book was delivered to our doorstep every year. We would heft this behemoth and flip through hundreds of pages to find a local business or restaurant of interest. Eventually, that process gave way to more efficient tools as local information moved online through apps like CitySearch and Yelp. Recently, via the mobile check-in, we can be presented places of interest and people near our current location. This new layer of geographical context is great, but checking in is still work.

Today, ambient location apps like Foursquare, Radar and Highlight are beginning to do that work for us. By passively monitoring our locations, they alert us to interesting people and places around us. Over time, as they learn our preferences, they’ll be able to filter these places and help us discover the best restaurants and people wherever we are. At last, we are within reach of the “Danger, your ex-girlfriend is in the area!” robot.

Your Personal Robot

Not that long ago, the primary way we would discover new media was through browsing a printed newspaper, magazine rack or record store. As this content moved online, it became much more accessible and real-time. As the option pool grows, we have to put in more and more work to find the content that’s interesting to each of us. There are more and better options than we could ever imagine. But it would take an incredible human effort to find all the needles in the growing haystack.

To address this, many Web sites have offered customization tools for users to focus their experience. But manual customization also requires a lot of work, and it usually fails to paint the rich, dynamic picture of who we are and what we like. Fortunately, a solution is emerging from companies like Pandora (and, full disclosure, my own company, Gravity). Using machine learning, these platforms get to know you based on the things you read about, listen to, or share. They can then move way beyond customization by generating adaptive, personalized experiences that bring the best content on any website or app right to the top. It completely shifts the paradigm from you having to search for information to information searching for you. It’s like having a personal robot who thinks just like you do reach across the Web and return the best music, stories, videos, even daily deals everywhere you go. “Welcome back to ESPN, Amit. The surf report in Venice tomorrow is 3-4 feet, and the Lakers are leading by 10 points at the half.”

All of this paints just a small picture of what’s to come. Imagine the applications in fields like education, health care, or personal finance (wouldn’t you love a robot that does your taxes?). As the Internet starts to work for us, it will enrich our lives in ways we can’t even imagine. I, for one, am very excited that my childhood dream of owning my own robot is finally coming true.

Amit Kapur is the CEO and co-founder of Gravity, a company that makes the Internet adaptive and personalized. He was formerly the COO of Myspace. As an early Myspace employee, he led the development and growth of Myspace Music and Myspace Mobile.

The three-year-old “big-data” company has now raised some $23 million, and is using the new money to expand into additional business lines.

Metamarkets started out providing data tracking and analytics to digital publishers like AOL, Demand Media and the Financial Times, so they could get a better handle on the value of their ad inventory.

But now it is branching out into other industries where companies generate enormous streams of data, like social media and payment start-ups.

CEO Mike Driscoll won’t disclose the names of his clients in these new categories. But Twitter and Square sure seem like obvious candidates. And it’s worth noting that Foursquare generates an awful lot of data, and Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has made angel investments in Metamarkets.

It’s also worth noting that Driscoll, who co-founded the company and was its CTO, wasn’t CEO until January. He replaced co-founder David Soloff, who Driscoll says now works as a “close adviser” to the start-up.

My understanding is that the swap is at least partly related to that buyout offer Metamarkets didn’t take. People familiar with the company say that Soloff was interested in taking the deal, while his backers wanted him to build a bigger company — and generate a bigger return on their investment.

Driscoll won’t comment on the story behind the change. But he notes that the new funding makes it clear that “Metamarkets is not interested in going out for a small amount of dollars anytime soon.”

“I think too many people in Silicon Valley are shortsighted,” he says. “This is a huge space, and the opportunity is massive.”

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/sommthink)

It’s not all about the filters, of course.

But it is about mobile photos. Facebook is currently the largest photo-storage site in the world, with an average of 250 million photos uploaded per day, as Kara Swisher notes here. A 2011 Pew Internet study showed that 20 percent of Facebook users cop to commenting on a Facebook photo at least once a day. Many felt that Instagram, with its user base of around 33 million — and with about a million of those users having signed up immediately after the Android version of the mobile app launched last week — was increasingly becoming a real threat in the social networking space.

And there’s another small-but-noteworthy value-add here for Facebook as well: Your location.

Instagram, which was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger back in March of 2010, has an easy-to-use geotag feature in its photo-sharing process that lets users tell everyone exactly where they were when they took their photos.

So simple, in fact, some users complained it was too easy to accidentally geotag photos when they didn’t mean to. Last May, the company released an updated version of the app that made it more clear to consumers when they were letting the world know their location.

It’s still unclear what percentage of Instagram photos shared are actually geotagged. Instagram hasn’t responded to AllThingsD for comment yet, presumably because its dozen or so employees are still popping champagne corks.

Anecdotally, my own Instagram feed is filled with vintage-y photos that tell me exactly where people are: Central Park on a nice spring day, the office on a mundane Monday, parts of Italy during a vacation or even that artisanal food shop on a Friday night (hipsters and their photo apps!).

When a location isn’t specified, Instagram loses some of its original appeal: That of the modern postcard, easily shared through a simple mobile app.

Now, let’s look at Facebook’s mostly failed efforts in location up until now. In 2010, the company bought and shut down geolocation app Hot Potato, in a move that was seen largely as an “acqhire.” In December of 2011, the social networking giant bought location-based-turned-local-guide app Gowalla, again for its talent rather than its technology (it also shut that app down). And, in August of last year, the company quietly shut down Facebook Places, due to the fact that few were using it, and instead offered users the ability to add their locations to status updates — or photos.

Sound familiar?

That’s not to say it’s not easy to share your location when you upload a mobile photo to Facebook. The option is right there, in a “Places”-like pin, when you go to share a photo or status update. Update: It’s been pointed out to us that just last week it was revealed that around 200 million users are tagged by location on a monthly basis on Facebook.

Other aspects of the Facebook mobile experience, however, aren’t as seamless, while Instagram has clearly nailed the mobile-only social networking concept.

Mobile location sharing is still relatively nascent. Data shows that usage of location-based social apps on mobile devices grows only incrementally year over year, despite the hype surrounding mobile apps like Foursquare (which Instagram taps into for lists of venues), and the fact that many other apps are introducing layers of location-based “Look at where I am!” features.

And, of course, more recently we’ve seen the downside of those location-based services, with the much maligned Girls Around Me app, which triangulated data from Foursquare and Facebook to let creepers know where females were congregating.

But, for the companies behind these networks, and not the consumers, there’s little downside to knowing more about where you are, allowing them to serve up more local deals and more targeted ads.

It’s still to be determined how Instagram’s photo-sharing services will align with Facebook’s, even though Mark Zuckerberg has vowed, for now, to give Instagram room to breathe. Maybe the answer, though, isn’t in “active” check-ins. It might just be in your photos, already telling everyone where you are by sight and deed.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s a video from the archives in which Instagram’s Systrom tells Digits host Simon Constable and me how he thinks Instagram helps those other social networks:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120409/oh-and-another-thing-about-facetagram-your-location/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20120403/so-what-exactly-can-location-aggregators-do-with-our-foursquare-data/ http://allthingsd.com/20120403/so-what-exactly-can-location-aggregators-do-with-our-foursquare-data/#comments Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:00:51 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=191821 You might have heard about the Girls Around Me scandal this weekend, where an app got taken down that correlated Foursquare check-ins with Facebook profiles to show nearby women on a map.

The widespread analysis of the matter was that Girls Around Me was creepy, but that people should realize that when they publish their locations online, bad things may happen. Technology writers, in our enthusiastically adopted roles as the white knights of online privacy, urged readers to lock down their Foursquare and Facebook profiles.

The situation made me curious about what, exactly, location aggregators are being allowed to do with our location data. It’s one thing to share where you are with your friends, or with what you think is a small audience of early adopters. But what’s more tricky — and can often feel icky — is when that information is exposed in a different context.

According to Foursquare, Girls Around Me broke its platform policy by aggregating information across venues. That got the app’s API access yanked. But Foursquare apparently wasn’t effectively policing API use, because the app launched in December and seems to have gone unnoticed until bad press brought it to light.

In its public rebuttal, Girls Around Me developer i-Free argued that other apps, like Banjo and Sonar, “provide the same or more extended functionality using location data provided by APIs of major social networks.”

Is that true? On Quora, Foursquare platform evangelist Akshay Patil went into detail about what rules i-Free was breaking, and what others are doing that’s okay. (A Foursquare spokeswoman confirmed to me that his answer was legit and accurate).

Patil said the specific problem was a part of the Foursquare API called “herenow,” that shows which users are currently checked in at a location. These are the groups of little user faces that logged-in Foursquare users can see when they look up any place within the system (it’s easiest to look up places nearby, but you can manually check any venue). Outside developers aren’t allowed to aggregate that information across multiple venues.

Plus, Girls Around Me was threatening or invasive of users’ privacy, did not have a privacy policy, and misused Foursquare’s trademarks, Patil said.

Patil said Foursquare planned to make the restrictions around this “herenow” data clearer in the future.

But what about those other people-seeking applications built on top of Foursquare, like Banjo, Sonar and wheretheladies.at?

This is where it gets a little tricky, with each app doing something a bit different. Banjo doesn’t use check-ins that are shared only with other Foursquare users. I believe the app used to do this in its very early days, but currently Banjo only aggregates Foursquare check-ins when they are publicly cross-posted to Twitter.

Meanwhile, Patil said that Sonar does use “herenow,” but only on a venue-by-venue basis, and more tastefully than Girls Around Me. The main interface for Sonar is a list of nearby venues with the number of people at them, but you have to click on each place to see the people there, so that seems to be the distinction. There’s also no map view.

Wheretheladies.at, which was a side project of two guys from Path and Milk that was also built around women’s Foursquare check-ins, now appears to have been taken down as well (update: Scratch that; it’s up now). But Patil said that app’s Foursquare API use was okay because it showed counts of number of women at a venue, not user identities.

I know I’m getting deep into the weeds, and I apologize for that — but I think clarity around these details is important. What’s clear is that Foursquare needs to be more vigilant about policing developers access to its users’ location information. And users obviously need to be aware that it’s possible that their check-ins could be misused, so they should be careful.

But the reason people use Foursquare is not to have more privacy.

The point of sharing our locations is to explore new places, meet new people, and brag about doing cool stuff. I doubt that the majority of the population will be volunteering where they are on Foursquare anytime soon. But those of us who want a little more serendipity in our lives now know a bit more about how our information will be used.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120403/so-what-exactly-can-location-aggregators-do-with-our-foursquare-data/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120403/andreessen-horowitz-gives-22m-to-flirting-site-skout/ http://allthingsd.com/20120403/andreessen-horowitz-gives-22m-to-flirting-site-skout/#comments Tue, 03 Apr 2012 12:30:33 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=192500 Skout, a social discovery start-up, has raised $22 million from Andreessen Horowitz. The smartphone app for flirting with nearby people has seen strong international adoption, though it isn’t sharing its total number of users. Skout used to be more like Foursquare — also backed by AH — but it got much more traction when it turned toward dating. AH also backed a flirting app called LikeALittle, which is currently revamping itself to be called Circle.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120403/andreessen-horowitz-gives-22m-to-flirting-site-skout/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120402/social-media-memory-app-timehop-adds-pinterest-for-your-past/ http://allthingsd.com/20120402/social-media-memory-app-timehop-adds-pinterest-for-your-past/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 22:14:27 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=192345 The world’s gone Pinterest-crazy. Ladies like to use it. Web sites want to be it. Others could possibly want to sue it.

And now another social media app is introducing “Pinterest-like” boards: Timehop.

Timehop, in case you’e never used it, is a nifty social media aggregator that sends you daily emails to remind you exactly what you were doing a year ago today. Checked in on Foursquare at your favorite lunch spot? Timehop refreshes your memory. Tweeted that you were eating lunch? Timehop helps you recall that excitment, too. Instagrammed a picture of your lunch? Timehop reminds you of the time you treated your burrito as though it were an Annie Leibovitz subject.

Now when Timehop sends those daily emails, there will be an option for users to “favorite” certain posts and add them to a Pinterest-looking board on Timehop’s Web site. While these items can be added only through the daily email, this is Timehop’s first real Web feature. Until now, Timehop’s site has primarily just been a place for people to sign up for the service.

The boards right now are private, and users can only have one, which by default is called “Favorites.” Eventually, Timehop says it wants to allow people to have multiple boards and make their boards public to spur social interactions with friends online.

“Basically, we’re making Timehop more social and interactive and turning it from a purely consumption experience (read a daily email) into more of a place for social interactions on the Timehop website,” co-founder Jonathan Wegener said.

Formerly known as Foursquare and Seven Years Ago, and then PastPosts, Timehop first launched during Foursquare’s hackathon event last year. Like other social media apps — such as the maligned Girls Around Here app — Timehop aggregates all the data you’re sharing through other social media networks. But you have to give Timehop explicit permission to do so when you first sign up for the service, and until now the core of Timehop’s service was sending data through private email.

Timehop’s Wegener has also said in the past that the company might look to aggregate data from personal calendars to add value to the service, something that Greplin already does by culling and organizing user data from various mail accounts and calendars.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120402/social-media-memory-app-timehop-adds-pinterest-for-your-past/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120402/l-a-stories-hipswap-tries-to-take-the-creepy-out-of-craigslist/ http://allthingsd.com/20120402/l-a-stories-hipswap-tries-to-take-the-creepy-out-of-craigslist/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:56:24 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=191988

Last week, I visited Los Angeles to get a gander at some of the many digital companies that are doing some interesting things down south of Silicon Valley.

First stop: HipSwap, a community-based marketplace that is now in 14 U.S. cities after initial tests in Los Angeles and New York City.

Its goal is to de-creep the experience — because no matter how it’s done online, local buying and selling still has a lot of glitches. Using a visual approach (think Pinterest), with hipster social hooks (think Airbnb) and focusing on location (hmm, perhaps think Foursquare), complete with delivery in some cities, HipSwap is hoping to differentiate itself from big players in the space, such as Craigslist and eBay.

The app-heavy HipSwap allows anyone with stuff, including boutique merchants with quirky stuff to move, to quickly snap photos of items, price them and then — presumably — sell. Payment is made via PayPal or credit card, with HipSwap in between the buyer and seller, to ease the transaction’s typical awkwardness.

Because it is local, the items are varied, from trendy baby strollers to funky furniture to antique sewing machines. And, because it is in the L.A. area, HipSwap is also pushing celebrity fare, with a charitable “Shop My Closet” marketplace and video series, which recently included Kyle Richards from “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

The Santa Monica, Calif. start-up recently closed $1.1 million seed funding from a number of prominent investors, such as Founders Fund, Greycroft Partners, as well as former Microsoft exec — and early Pinterest angel — Hank Vigil and Mahalo President Jason Rapp.

Here’s a video interview I did with co-founder and CEO Rob Kramer about the interesting retail concept:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120402/l-a-stories-hipswap-tries-to-take-the-creepy-out-of-craigslist/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120401/girls-around-me-app-maker-we-pulled-out-of-itunes-but-we-didnt-do-anything-wrong/ http://allthingsd.com/20120401/girls-around-me-app-maker-we-pulled-out-of-itunes-but-we-didnt-do-anything-wrong/#comments Sun, 01 Apr 2012 12:35:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=191853 You can’t get “Girls Around Me” from Apple’s iTunes store anymore, and the company behind the app says it took it out voluntarily.

Sort of.

Russian developer i-Free Innovations says it yanked “Girls Around Me,” which was supposed to let users learn about/track down women in their area, because it didn’t work anymore.

The app was supposed to mash up data from Foursquare, Facebook and Google Maps. But Foursquare had cut off access to its data after tech blog Cult of Mac first raised privacy concerns about the app.

But i-Free also insists that it wasn’t doing anything wrong — all of the data it was serving up to its users was publicly available stuff, provided voluntarily by Facebook and Foursquare users.

Whether those users really understood how publicly available this data is debatable, and it’s stories like this that are going to make that debate more urgent.

For now, here’s the full text of i-Free’s statement, via The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog:

Girls Around Me app was designed to make geo-social exploration of popular venues easy and visual.

We follow the geo-social trend for mobile devices that is supported by numerous location sharing services, networks and apps. Many other mobile apps provide the same or more extended functionality using location data provided by APIs of major social networks, i.e. Ban.jo or Sonar.

Girls Around Me does not allow anonymous usage of the app. It is impossible to search for a particular person in this app, or track his|her location. The app just allows the user to browse the venues nearby, as if you passed by and looked in the window. The Girls Around Me user has to be registered in Foursquare and must be logged in this service to be able to see anything in Girls Around Me. The app Girls Around Me does not have access to user login and password, authentication is carried out on the social network side. Girls Around Me shows to the user only the data that is available to him or her through his or her accounts in Foursquare, and gives the user nothing more than Foursquare app can provide itself (when you browse venues around you in Foursquare, you can see how many people checked in there and you can see their profiles and photos, even contacts and social networks profile). The aim of the app is to make the usage of this data more convenient and more focused on finding popular and crowded venues.

Girls Around Me has no ability to change, limit or expand information that is available to the user through his or her account in social network. Girls Around Me does not use any self-developed or third party services to search for extra information apart from the information the users share with others. Girls Around Me does not put together data from different social networks.

The Facebook accounts shown as available to send a message are the accounts that Foursquare users make public in their profiles. Girls Around Me does not allow anonymous usage of the messaging service. We made it perfectly clear that any personal message can only be sent from the user’s account in Facebook (if he or she has one), and it can be done only if messaging is allowed by privacy settings of the recipient user.

The app was out for several months already and has not been promoted in order to first to receive user feedback and address privacy concerns, if necessary. Girls Around Me was downloaded more than 70 000 times. Since the app’s launch we’ve seen numerous positive comments from users who claimed that the app helped them to discover “hot spots” – venues that are popular among girls or boys. Since the apps launch till last Friday nobody ever raised a privacy concern because, again, it is clearly stated that Girls Around Me cannot show the user more data than social network already does.

We understand that privacy is a serious matter. We were planning to continue developing the app and limit it to showing only public places and venues. We understand that user generated data might not reflect the real public or private user space (a user can indicate his private space as public and vice versa), but we intended to bring our best effort to work on the available APIs to develop filters to limit user access only to public venues shared by other users.

We are absolutely convinced that it is good and important to educate the users to take care of their privacy and what they share publicly. But we believe it is unethical to pick a scapegoat to talk about the privacy concerns. We see this wave of negative as a serious misunderstanding of the apps’ goals, purpose, abilities and restrictions. Girls Around Me does not provide any data that is unavailable to user when he uses his or her social network account, nor does it reveal any data that users did not share with others. The app was intended for facilitating discovering of great public venues nearby. The app was designed to make it easier for a user to step out of door and hang out in the city, find people with common interests and new places to go to.

We have removed the application from the iTunes Store, because the users get repetitive error message, and we feel that until we find a solution and be able to provide full service, we should restrain from acquiring new users. We shall put our best effort to support the apps existing users and address their concerns.

We are working on providing all necessary comments and data to prove our good intentions. We were (and are) making our best efforts to develop an app that fits user expectations without going beyond the restrictions of social networks.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120401/girls-around-me-app-maker-we-pulled-out-of-itunes-but-we-didnt-do-anything-wrong/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120322/congress-questions-ios-developers-on-privacy-data-collection/ http://allthingsd.com/20120322/congress-questions-ios-developers-on-privacy-data-collection/#comments Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:47:37 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=189328 As part of its inquiry into Apple’s consumer privacy protections, Congress has requested information from dozens of developers about their data collection and usage practices.

On Thursday, the Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters to 34 social app developers, among them Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Path, Tapbots, and even Apple, which develops the Find My Friends location app for iOS. Their purpose: To put to them the same questions the Committee has been grilling Apple on. One top concern is how developers treat personally identifiable information.

“At any time, has your iOS app transmitted or have you stored any other information from or about a user’s device — including, but not limited to, the user’s phone number, email account information, calendar, photo gallery, WiFi connection log, the Unique Device Identifier (UDID), a Media Access Control (MAC) address, or any other identifier unique to a specific device?” one question reads.

The distribution of these letters comes less than a week after the Committee asked Apple to send a representative to Washington to explain to it in person how the company is protecting the personal information of iPhone and iPad users.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120322/congress-questions-ios-developers-on-privacy-data-collection/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120317/great-app-pectations-when-innovation-leapfrogs-phone-capabilities/ http://allthingsd.com/20120317/great-app-pectations-when-innovation-leapfrogs-phone-capabilities/#comments Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:00:23 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=186267 As comic Louis C.K. would say about technology: Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.

Nowhere is that more true than in the world of smartphone applications, as app developers push the possibilities of how to use our smartphones’ location awareness and reach well beyond what our mobile data plans and battery lives seem to be able to support, especially in densely populated spaces.

It’s kind of sad, because for a while the release of new devices has set off rushes of creativity, with developers using touchscreens and accelerometers and other sensors in ways that seemed to make science fiction real.

With every available power outlet in use, a popular FedEx promotion brought a "human charging station" to the street. Thankfully it didn't enlist homeless people.

We see great stuff like phone cameras being used for everything from detecting heart rates to translating paper menus from one language to another. We watch serendipitous location-sharing tools go from typing in an address five years ago (Dodgeball), to linking with a crowdsourced database three years ago (Foursquare), to ambient awareness this year (Highlight).

The disconnect between app dreams and phone reality was particularly evident at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin this past week, where official attendance hit nearly 25,000, up 27 percent from last year. Combined with everyone else in the hip Texas town, including many SXSW partiers without passes, that made for phone network overload.

And when our phones are constantly searching for a signal or tracking our locations, their battery life tends to suck. Literally.

As most did, I had a hard time getting mobile data during all five days I was in Austin, with ongoing weak 3G service on my iPhone 4 on the AT&T network. AT&T wouldn’t give me a comment on its SXSW performance beyond a map of its event service plan, including 220 Wi-Fi hotspots and a couple of “COW” (cellular on wheels) trucks.

Other outlets also reported that bad data access at SXSW 2012 was a problem for many people. (Although not everyone and not every device had issues: Walt Mossberg was pulling down 18 Mbps back in his hotel room on his new Verizon LTE iPad that he was testing.)

Here’s the problem: SXSW has become a place where app developers come in the hopes that they can persuade a dense, social audience of early adopters to try their shiny new way to find what’s going on and where. Hundreds of start-ups lust after the idea of “winning SXSW,” following past examples of Twitter and Foursquare, and, to a lesser extent, GroupMe.

There was much debate, egged on by tech bloggers, about who would be crowned the SXSW winner this year. I think the consensus was that nobody won, although Mophie battery packs for the iPhone and sponsors who brought charging stations should get an honorable mention.

But I’d argue that one of the reasons it was impossible to “win” in 2012 was that these location and communication apps were hindered by poor service and battery life impact.

Foiled again! My repeated attempts to check in on Foursquare distracted me from yet another scintillating panel.

Also, as aged as they are in comparison to the newborn location vampires, Foursquare and Twitter still dominate SXSW. There were 755,373 total tweets with the keyword or hashtag “SXSW” during the Interactive portion of the festival, according to PeopleBrowsr. At one point, I had the 3,702nd concurrent Foursquare check-in at the Austin Convention Center.

“Foursquare’s part of the fabric of SXSW,” said Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley in an onstage interview at the event. I think he’s right.

But then Crowley took it a step further: “Foursquare in Austin at SXSW is like Foursquare of the future. It’s going to be everywhere.”

If that’s the case — and I’m not sure it is — I don’t think the future sounds so great. Because using Foursquare at SXSW was actually a total chafe. It often took four tries to send my Foursquare check-ins to the server. The error messages were constant.

More daring apps like the new Highlight — which constantly tracks users and pings them when they are near people with common friends and interests — had even more problems. One morning when I loaded up Highlight, the app told me that I had been in close proximity to 10 people the night before between 1 am and 2:30 am, over on the other side of the river from where I was staying.

Boring as I am, I was home in bed by then.

When I asked Highlight co-founder Paul Davison why the app messed up, he said Highlight had been experimenting with using mobile cell towers to locate users, because GPS has such an impact on their batteries. The cell tower had apparently retained my location while I was sleeping across town, not having opened the app and sent it an updated location.

(Although, to be honest, I don’t really want to share where I am while I’m sleeping — which is a very different concern.)

Thus, I found that a good SXSW icebreaker question was: “So, have you uninstalled Highlight yet?” In an unscientific but anecdotally significant number of cases, the answer was yes. Why? Almost always: Battery drain.

Davison said Highlight — which only launched in January — is working to improve accuracy and decrease battery impact. He added that he’s hopeful people will overlook these issues.

“For many, the ability to see profiles of the people standing nearby is so new and exciting that they want to try it out now, even if the location precision and battery life is not yet where they’d want it to be,” Davison said.

Foursquare’s response was similarly optimistic. As far as service goes, “things have gotten much better [at SXSW] in the last couple of years and are continuing to improve,” said a spokeswoman. “And battery life should be much better next year with the iPhone 5, iPad HD and new Android handsets launching.”

Everything might be exciting, but if your phone’s dead, you’re not using it. That makes me and many others unhappy.

Because while I’m sure better and more expensive services and devices will be on the market next year, I’m also sure SXSW 2013 will be even more jam-packed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120317/great-app-pectations-when-innovation-leapfrogs-phone-capabilities/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120311/the-power-of-power-at-south-by-southwest/ http://allthingsd.com/20120311/the-power-of-power-at-south-by-southwest/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:14:06 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=183365 People in Austin are going to extreme lengths to recharge their iPhones, iPads and other digital devices.

Folks are apparently so desperate for a boost they are willing to pull out their USB cords and plug them into a stranger’s jacket or pants.

FedEx has six people running around South by Southwest in USB-charger-equipped outfits. The specially equipped coat and trousers are filled with dozens of ports tied to Mophie battery packs. The shipper is also offering up another kind of recharging — serving up free lunch from a FedEx-branded food truck, along with the option to eat at picnic tables with built-in USB and power ports.

“We know people want free food and free power,” said FedEx’s Brian Hurt. “Those are two things we can give them.”

FedEx is looking to both build goodwill with entrepreneurs and tout a relatively new mobile app that lets people ship packages without ever printing a label.

Sunday’s shrimp po’boys, served up in a “lunch box” reminiscent of FedEx’s signature shipping packages, were a particular hit, though some also took the time to plug in.

“All I need is coffee,” said digital marketer Bradley Shende, before noticing that gratis java was also available.

FedEx is far from alone in trying to grab an audience by offering a power boost. Samsung, which places its recharging stations permanently at airports and other public places, has one of the stands at its booth.

AT&T has a number of recharging lockers that let visitors lock up their phone while it charges, allowing the owners to do other things. Google has a station with lots of USB cords in its Android booth — though, not surprisingly, there are no iPhone dock connectors.

Getting enough juice for one’s digital gadgets has become an increasingly important issue at tech events, including January’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Of course, there are also plenty of people at the Austin Convention Center, like every conference, sitting on the floor next to any available outlet.

And, for those who aren’t plugged in, Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley offered up a public service announcement on Twitter, specifically addressing all the newbies to the event.

“Don’t forget ‘ABC’ (Always Be Charging),” he tweeted on Saturday.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120311/the-power-of-power-at-south-by-southwest/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120309/rain-douses-austin-as-crowds-flood-into-sxsw/ http://allthingsd.com/20120309/rain-douses-austin-as-crowds-flood-into-sxsw/#comments Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:43:20 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=182419 It’s pouring in Austin, and my AT&T data connection is already choking. For the past few years, the wireless provider has added network capacity for SXSW. In response to my tweeted complaint this morning, AT&T just sent over a map of temporary Austin hot zones and cellular on wheels (see below).

But with the rain keeping thousands of us indoors in the same spots, it doesn’t seem to be enough.

SXSW’s press office told me it won’t release attendance numbers until later in the festival, because new people will keep buying tickets during the event. With the registration line twisting for hours throughout the Austin Convention Center, it seems almost abusive for the organizers to let more people in.

Last year’s SXSW Interactive had 19,000 badged participants, up 40 percent from the year before. Based on my own anecdotal experience with flights, hotels and lines so far, there are way, way, way more people here.

There are currently more than 3,700 people currently checked in on Foursquare to the main Austin Convention Center location, and conference sessions haven’t even started yet.

SXSW is a hugely lucrative event for its organizers and for the Austin economy, with the interactive, film and music festival bringing in an estimated $167.8 million in revenue to the region in 2011.

This year, even in the rain, the city is more crammed than ever with branded tents and domes for corporate parties and showcases for cellphones, soft drinks and cars.

But the official program isn’t the end of it. This morning, I had breakfast with the folks at Zaarly, who have 14 staffers on the ground in Austin, and only one conference badge among them — for their biz-dev guy.

Zaarly is co-hosting a party tonight with Twilio and Startup Weekend, in a venue that holds 300 people. They have received more than 12,000 RSVPs.

Zaarly, which is a peer-to-peer marketplace for goods and services, is actually optimistic about long lines being a marketing opportunity. CEO Bo Fishback said he has contracted workers who will stand in lines throughout Austin this week with “Z” signs above their heads, and who will charge people who want to take their spot in line between $10 and $50.

Especially if it’s still raining here on Monday, I imagine people will pay far more than 50 bucks for spots in line to get into the free Jay-Z show at SXSW put on by American Express.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120309/rain-douses-austin-as-crowds-flood-into-sxsw/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120307/the-essential-sxsw-tech-tool-kit/ http://allthingsd.com/20120307/the-essential-sxsw-tech-tool-kit/#comments Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:29:58 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=181252 Hey, over here! Yeah, you — the person who’s pretending to respond to work emails while trolling the Internet today for anything related to “Apple” and “iPad.”

There’s something else happening this week: SXSW Interactive, where techies gather to share ideas and drink and flick their barbecue-sauced fingers over their smartphones as they rave about the next big app that’s going to connect them to the person … standing right next to them.

AllThingsD will be there in full force, as my colleague Liz Gannes wrote. And it’s a good thing she did, because SXSW travel planning tends to be so haphazard that it’s hard to know if you’re going or not until it’s in writing. For ourselves, and for others who are heading down to Austin, we’ve put together the Essential SXSW Tech Toolkit for the five days of the festival.

RSVP to All Your Parties With One App
At this point, whether you’re going to SXSW or not, you’ve probably received a hundred or so party invites, and have painstakingly responded to them one by one. On the off chance that you still need to RSVP, there’s an app for that. WillCall, nicely profiled on TheNextWeb, is a last-minute-ticket-purchasing app that’s letting techies RSVP to 50 SXSW parties in a few clicks. WillCall’s standard mobile app runs on iPhone and Android devices, but for SXSW RSVPs, users will have to log in to this Web app through Facebook Connect.

You’ve RSVPed. Should You Bother Waiting in Line?
Now that you’ve responded to all those party invites, how do you determine which ones are worth waiting in line for? Localmind, a Quora-for-Foursquare app that lets users pose live questions to people in various locations, is working with a mobile karaoke lounge called (RV)IP to give real-time information to app users about what’s happening in downtown Austin. Localmind users will be shown all of the parties and events going on, and will be able to send questions to people at the events to get the scoop on what’s going on inside the party. (During the afternoon, the kararoke RV transforms into a mini spa, offering free massages, treats, and maybe most importantly, phone charges. What more do a bunch of overworked geeks need?)

The Official SXSW Mobile App
Okay, parties aside: We’re in Austin for work. And that means navigating the maze of venues, panels and pop-up stands. Womzit, a recently-launched “word of mouth” iPhone app that lets users make a recommendation by snapping a photo, rating the object or place, and sharing it with friends, is powering the official app of the conference, called SXSW GO. SXSW GO lets users browse panel schedules and speakers, search for venues, view full maps, and offers various social options, including the ability to post photos, share via Twitter and Facebook, and check out conference attendee profiles. The app is available for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7.

Because You Can Never Have Too Many Photo Apps
Pixable is like a Pinterest for Twitter and Instagram, only you log on through Facebook Connect. (I know, my head hurts, too.) Here’s what you need to know: During SXSW, Pixable will be showcasing shared Twitter and Instagram photos in a real-time updated stream, provided that the photo posts are tagged with #SXSW. In order to access the feed, log into Pixable and select the Hashtags dropdown in the upper right-hand corner. The app is available on the Web, on iPhone and on Android phones. Pixable will also be showing off its SXSW photo feed at the FEED House, a 20,000 square foot art space in downtown Austin that’s being transformed into an interactive experience by Twitter and Samsung.

Get in (Rain) Gear
Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but it’s supposed to rain in Austin this weekend. Before you leave your sleeping quarters to hightail it or hail a pedicab to the Convention Center, check your smartphone’s weather app. And pack an umbrella, just to be on the safe side. Opportunistic tech start-ups, now’s your chance to put your stamp on a range of wet-weather gear. You’re welcome.

How to Get Around Town
Peer-to-peer services are all the rage: You can use Airbnb to rent out your apartment, TaskRabbit to outsource your chores, ParkatmyHouse to share your driveway, and Done to do it all for a good cause. Since getting around SXSW can be challenging, why not rent someone else’s car? Getaround helps people “un-idle” their cars by offering an online marketplace for them to rent them out. After launching last month in Portland, Ore., it’s now bringing its services to Austin, just in time for SXSW. Rental fees start as low as $3 an hour — though the typical compact car costs about $45 a day — and each rental is insured for up to $1 million.

What About the Local Mobile Social Craze?
What about Highlight, you ask? Or Sonar, or Glancee, or Kismet, or NTRO? Some of those mobile social discovery services have already been pretty hyped-up. We’ve got them on our radar, as well, and are going to take some time to evaluate how the apps work, both in a crowded tech space and IRL (that’s Internet speak for “in real life”), to see which ones stand out from the pack.

What we’re really interested in are the next next big mobile social discovery check-in apps, ones that would invite us to parties that haven’t been planned yet, allow us to check in to bars that haven’t been built yet, or connect us with people that don’t exist yet. Like Foursquare, only … Futuresquare. You read it here first.

(Feature photo courtesy of Flickr/DHGatsby)

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120307/the-essential-sxsw-tech-tool-kit/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20120306/american-express-will-pay-you-to-tweet-sort-of/ http://allthingsd.com/20120306/american-express-will-pay-you-to-tweet-sort-of/#comments Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:00:25 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=181138 Here’s how you can turn 140 characters into cash, or at least credit: A new American Express promotion will reward Twitter users with discounts on some goods and services if they tweet or retweet certain messages. Card users who connect their Twitter accounts with their Amex accounts will see credits appear directly on their statements. Amex helped Twitter launch its “self-serve” platform last month, and has connected with Foursquare for a similar offer.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120306/american-express-will-pay-you-to-tweet-sort-of/feed/ 0