Kwedit , the innovative and suddenly controversial payments platform for virtual goods, is releasing some early data. The service lets users promise to pay later in lieu of a direct credit card payment when they want virtual currency for social games like Farmville. [...more]
We’ve talked a lot this week about the so-called “ Location War ” brewing at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas starting tomorrow. That war will happen, but actually, there are likely to be a lot of winners because a few of the location-based services should be able to leverage the exposure to gain usage after the conference [...more]
Back in November of last year, the location-based social event service Hot Potato launched at our Realtime CrunchUp. Today, they’ve taken what was a solid service , and made it a lot better with a number of upgrades. First and foremost, there is a new iPhone application that just went live in the App Store. [...more]
This morning Google announced a new Blue Dot feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search that shows whether a product is in-stock at nearby stores. This seems to pose a threat to startup Milo , which highlights local inventory in product search results both on the web and mobile devices. [...more]
Aol launched Lifestream , a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say Aol. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone product at lifestream.aol.com . [...more]
Consumer Reports has a new report on which computer company has the best tech support. Apple wins! That's what happens when the same company controls the hardware as well as the operating system (and several of the most prominent pieces of software). The highest ranking PC manufacturer is Dell for desktops and Lenovo for laptops [...more]
With Microsoft becoming increasingly marginalized in areas like mobile media, DirectX is becoming less of a must-use toolset and more of a gaming-specific one. [...more]
Lucid Imagination , the startup that commercially distributes the open source Apache Lucene and Apache Solr search technology, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Shasta Ventures with Granite Ventures and Walden International participating in the round. This brings the company’s total funding to $16 million. [...more]
Pelago knows that just about every location-based app in the world is seeking coverage right now just prior to SXSW where they will all battle Highlander -style. So they approached me with a pretty smart pitch: curing the “social rut.” What they mean by that is these days, despite the prevalence of social networks, people are actually less social than ever because they’re being roped into playing games like Farmville and Mafia Wars for hours on end [...more]
Over the last six months, doubleTwist , the iTunes alternative that lets you manage your music, videos, and photos, has really been stepping up its game. In October the company integrated an Amazon-powered MP3 store, allowing users to download and sync their music directly with any of hundreds of compatible devices, much as they would with the iTunes/iPod combo. And today’s it’s adding a new feature that makes it an even more viable iTunes competitor: support for podcasts [...more]
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