In a world of Facebook and social sharing, having heart is more important than being smart, according to BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti. Today at Disrupt NY 2013, Peretti discussed the difference between activity that exists on social sites like Facebook versus what people are searching for in non-social situations.

Because of the way people use the social web, tapping into human empathy is a greater way to connect with people than using somewhat salacious content. In the world of Google, people search for naked pictures of celebrities, Peretti explained, but no one wants to be known as the sleazy guy asking for nude photos of Scarlett Johansson on Facebook.

BuzzFeed, of course, is a phenomenon in viral media. But more than just a place to find huge listicles of cute animal photos, the publication is also creating long-form content. That’s something which has confused a bunch of people like me, who don’t really get why there are so many.

Peretti, who also was on the founding team of the Huffington Post (now lovingly owned by TechCrunch parent company AOL), explains: BuzzFeed has so many cute animals is because it makes content for all the different ways that people have emotions.

“If you feel emotion, that means you’re probably human,” Peretti said. “When people complain about all of the cute animals, I ask are you a sociopath or an android?”

That’s the key to why BuzzFeed is so popular on Facebook and what makes it so inherently viral. It’s not about the animals, but about humans expressing themselves in a way that allows them to show empathy and other human emotions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Recent TechStars Boston grad Fashion Project has a different take on the second-hand apparel market. It operates an online store where women can donate their high-end designer items, and others can re-purchase them for less than retail, knowing that the majority of sales are donated directly to charity. The company has now attracted the interest of investors, too, and days ago closed on $1.8 million in seed funding from Atlas Ventures, High Peak Ventures, Schooner Capital, and other angel investors.

As co-founder and CEO Anna Palmer describes it, the idea is to make “fashion a force for good.” Palmer started the company with former Harvard Law School classmate, now COO Christine Rizk. Both founders have a background in the non-profit sector, informing their understanding of the space, but they share a love of fashion, too.

The story of how Fashion Project came to be is rather cute. The co-founders were standing in line at graduation together. “At Harvard, they sequester you for hours and hours, because there are so many ceremonies,” explains Palmer. “I knew I wanted to go into startups, and Christine knew she wanted to do something in business, possibly startups as well,” she says. “By the time we had crossed the graduation stage, we had decided we were launching the company instead of going into big law.”

Fashion Project focuses on a trio of problems facing charitable donations today – especially those involving the donation of high-end goods. For starters, donors who spend top dollar on their items don’t want to toss the goods in a trash bag and leave them at a thrift shop or Goodwill, for example. They’re also not that interested in the tax write-off aspect of thrifting, because donors are only able to claim the sale price of a donated item which is typically low.

On Fashion Project, however, items resell for over 7 times more than a thrift store, on average – a price point designed to help encourage more donations. And for charities in need, it offers them another way to compete for dollars, by instead benefitting from the items’ sales.

Donors who sign up for the site simply fill out a form and are then mailed a donation packet to their house. They load up the packet with their items, and send it back. Once the items are processed and placed online, the donor can also track how well their closet is doing in terms of how much money they’ve raised for charity and the impact they’re having. Since its launch in November, the site has seen a quarter million in terms of the value of donations it has collected to date, but the founders declined to provide details regarding transactions or registered users.

Fashion Project is currently working with over 50 organizations, including Autism Speaks, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, Dress for Success, It Gets Better Project, National Down Syndrome Society, and many others. The donor can select the charity they want to use, and if it’s not listed on the site, Fashion Project will reach out to the organization to bring them on board.

Meanwhile, shoppers can browse Fashion Project’s sales on the site, which is more of a traditional e-commerce experience with the exception being that, at checkout, shoppers see what kind of impact their purchase had. “We always say, it’s feeling like a hero for buying a pair of Jimmy Choo’s,” says Palmer. “It’s kind of a funny thing to say, but since 60 percent of everything you buy goes directly back to charity, you can have a major impact through your purchases,” she adds.

Fashion Project keeps the remaining 40 percent, and donors are sent a tax receipt after their items are sold.

Operating out of a warehouse in Boston, Fashion Project’s operations and distribution efforts have been the focus up until now. “We spent a whole lot of time at the beginning of the company making sure that the backend operations were completely nailed start to finish,” says Palmer. “I feel like we’re in a really good spot and can handle as much volume as people want to throw our way.”

Going forward, the company will use the funding to help with growth. It’s preparing to launch a new website this month, which will be mobile-optimized. Around the same time, the company will announce participation from some high-profile fashion industry players, too, likely joining as celeb donors. Native mobile apps are also on the longer-term roadmap for the company.

Interested users can sign up for Fashion Project here, to either donate or shop.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zite, the CNN-owned iPhone and and iPad app offering aggregated content that’s personalized to your interests, launched a big revamp back in December. In some ways, Zite 2.0 was a success — for one thing, article views per user per day went up 11 percent. On the other hand, co-founder/CTO Mike Klaas and Senior Software Architect Emuye Reynolds told me that there was definitely some pushback from the app’s fans, and in fact Zite’s star rating in the Apple App Store has dropped.

“Anytime you change anything, people are going to be upset,” Klaas said. “But I think we underestimated the amount of people who would feel that way.”

That’s why Zite is releasing version 2.1, which mixes old and new features in an attempt to take the user criticism into account. To be clear: This still looks like Zite 2.0, so people who were hoping to a return to the old navigation system are out of luck.

But there is one immediately noticeable change — Zite has gotten rid of the cute owl logo that it introduced with the redesign, and it has gone back to a more subdued, text-based logo (while incorporating touches of the new color scheme). Apparently, users really, really didn’t like the owl, and some even said they had to hide the app because they thought it was so ugly.

I was a bit surprised by this, because I like the owl (I like the redesign too). I asked if that says something about the Zite user base (which is a polite way of asking whether they’re old and stodgy), and while Klaas acknowledged that’s probably a factor, Reynolds added, “More than not matching our users, it didn’t match our product.”

Another complaint from users was the disappearance of the ability to swipe left and right to browse different topics. Klaas said the redesign introduced another way to browse different sections (namely Topic Tags, which now account for 13 percent of section views), but overall the amount of sections browsed by the average user has gone down. At this point, the discussion got a little arcane, as Klaas and Reynolds explained how they tried to reintroduce the feature in a subtle way that didn’t interfere too much with the new design, but the point is, users can swipe left again and they’ll be taken to a new topic.

A third issue: When you switched to the web view of an article, the redesigned Zite app would wait until it was fully loaded to show you the page, which made users feel like they had to wait longer. And that, too, has been tweaked, so that articles appear more quickly, even if they’re not fully loaded.

Oh, and the company re-added LinkedIn and Google+ sharing buttons, if you’re into that kind of thing.

There are some wholly new features in Zite 2.1 as well. Perhaps the most important is a History feature, which lets you see reverse chronological of every article you read in Zite — so if you’re thinking, “Gosh, what was that really interesting TechCrunch post I read yesterday?” you can easily look it up again. The text, spacing, and coloring have been improved, a change that will probably be invisible to many users, but when I looked the two apps side by side, 2.1 is significantly easier on the eyes.

Looking back, Klaas admitted that Zite may have been a little too aggressive with its redesign. After all, it makes sense that existing users would like the old features (that’s why they were using the app, after all), even if Klaas and his teammates think they can do better. He described his approach to 2.1, and to future changes, as being open to feedback as long it’s compatible with the company’s vision, and not “asking for a different product” altogether.

You can read more about Zite 2.1 here and download it here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LG and CES are made for each other. The company may not make the best smartphones (with the exception of Google’s Nexus 4), or get the most attention all year round, but when they whip out the big screen TVs at their massive CES booth, it’s easy to get on the “Life’s Good” bandwagon.

Unfortunately, TechCrunch is one of the few attendees at the show that isn’t all that interested in television, which is why we were so pleased to stumble upon this cute little NFC printer, the LG Pocket Photo.

It’s incredibly small — you can probably fit the little guy in your back pocket — and it uses a new Z-ink (or Zero ink) technology to print 2

It started with an assumption, really. Snapchat, a photo-sharing application that auto-destroys images seconds after being opened, launched in September 2011 with zero media coverage. A homegrown product, built by two Stanford guys, grew to now see over 50 million snaps per day today. In fact, Facebook launched a clone of the app just Friday.

It wasn’t until the company made its first milestone announcement, nine months after launch, that the media picked up the story. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton whipped out all this cute PEW research on sexting in adults and teens, and referenced “suggestive” marketing materials and even pointed out the app’s “mild sexual content or nudity” warning.

From that moment on, whether in milestone achievements, feature and expansion announcements, or stories about Facebook’s new Snapchat clone, Snapchat was branded a sexting app.

The Myth

Snapchat is a lot like Pinterest. Coverage of the service came way later than its troves of users.

Being late, and of a different generation than the majority of the app’s users, many members of the media jumped on the click-happy sexting story instead of the truth.

“We were worried that usage and growth would decrease if the sexting publicity made Snapchatters feel uncomfortable,” said co-founder Evan Spiegel. “In hindsight we shouldn’t have underestimated the loyalty and creativity of our community. The uptake has been remarkable.”

And it has been. Snapchat is currently sending over 50 million snaps per day, with over 1 billion sent in total. Plus, word on the street is that Snapchat is raising a round of funding between $8 and $10 million. And up until this Friday, there were also rumors that Facebook was launching a clone, and it did.

Snapchat suddenly became a huge deal, and the urge to understand it (and explain its success) became important. And in the mind of tech reporters, the blogosphere, and the general media, there’s only one explanation for using an app that sends and then destroys self-portraits: sexting.

And the app’s marketing materials and app user warning didn’t help. The original screenshots on display in the App Store were of pretty girls in bikinis. The app warned of “Mature/Suggestive Themes” and “Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity.”

“To be fair, our early marketing materials were a bit amateurish. I took those photos on the beach with friends,” said Spiegel. “They were fun and playful at the time, but didn’t represent how the app was actually being used.”

The Conspiracy

Whatever Spiegel’s intentions, the media ran with the sexting story. After all, in a media that loves turning a sclerotic eye on made-up teenage perversity (“rainbow parties,” “jenkem”), Snapchat was solid gold.

Best of all, this Snap-sex trend was lining up with the evidence. There was even a Tumblr site called Snapchat Sluts documenting one man’s sexting rampage.

The confusion is understandable, given the nature of the app and its self-destructing pictures. The media are a generation of tech users that are incredibly obsessed with privacy. We would make this logical leap in the wake of Anthony Weiner and every teenage girl who’s ended up with a nude pic on the internet.

In any case, story after story popped up about Snapchat, all of which mentioned it’s popularity among sexting teens.

Turns out, almost every reporter to use both the words Snapchat and sexting in an article is a user on Snapchat. I know this because Buzzfeed discovered Snapchat has public user profiles on the internet, showing users top three most frequently snapped-with friends and their Snapchat score (a count of Snaps sent and received on the platform).

These writers fall into two categories: real users who are active on the platform (which is clear from their scores), and users who downloaded the app , used it once or twice to better understand it, and then wrote a story on it.

I learned that the former group is predominantly chatting with each other. For example, Katie Notopolous of BuzzFeed, who wrote this story about Snapchat’s super risky public profiles, chats with Gawker’s Max Read (who wrote this) and her Buzzfeed colleague John Herrman, and both Herrman and Notopolous chat with a Gizmodo writer Sam Biddle. Sam snaps occasionally with less active user Joel Johnson, longtime Gizmodo employee.

Then there’s the folks who’ve written about Snapchat being the sexting app, but barely ever use it, like Gizmodo’s Adrian Covert (story), GigaOm’s Eliza Kern (story), CNET’s Jason Parker (story), and the NYT’s Nick Bilton (story). Yep, the same guy who started the myth doesn’t even use the app.

There are two conclusions we can make. The first is that the same folks who serve you a round of tech news with your morning coffee and bagel are also in a Snapchat sexting ring. The second option is that the very same people who have repeatedly assumed that Snapchat is for sexting, and propagated that myth, don’t use Snapchat for sexting at all.

Weird, huh?

The Facts

“Social media has generally relied on surveillance as the mechanism for stimulating feelings of connectedness,” Spiegel explained. “We’ve found that using Snapchat to live and share in the moment can make you feel like you’re face-to-face with a friend even if they’re on another continent.”

Truth is, there can never be any evidence that Snapchat is used primarily for sexting because the service deletes photos immediately after they’re opened, both from the recipient’s phone and from their servers. This means that there can not be any real evidence for or against sexting on Snapchat.

And you know what? By a very small percentage of users, Snapchat probably is used for sexting for a very small percentage of the time.

When you’re sending over 50 million snaps a day, a few of them are bound to be of naughty bits. But 80 percent of those snaps are sent during the day, with a spike during school hours. Whatever the sexting stats may be, they’re more likely using Snapchat to cheat on tests than to sext.

Snapchat wasn’t built for sexting, which seems clear from the fact that pictures self-destruct in less time than it takes to fully enjoy a nude pic. But some see this as a security feature for sexting, which is a matter of opinion.

However, the UI (which is actually quite amateur) doesn’t really suggest “Let’s Get It On,” with lots of yellow and bubbly blue and a friendly ghost for a mascot. Valid, but still an opinion, and one which opponents can argue is meant to lure young demographics to the sexting platform. Let’s, instead, focus on the evidence.

The user warning on the app, referenced in many Snapchat articles, means nothing. Every photo sharing app has one like it. Check out Instagram’s.

Also often referenced, the “suggestive” marketing images (which have since been swapped for new ones) were a mistake, but not one worth crucifying the app for.

And let’s not forget that Facebook just cloned this app with Poke. Is Facebook really trying to tap into teen sexting? Probably not. They’re tapping into something much bigger than that.

The Real Story

There is a big difference between the way a 24-year-old and a 19-year-old see social networking. It seems like a small gap, but some crucial changes happened during this time that has most certainly differentiated today’s teenager from yesterday’s.

The first was the release of the iPhone in 2007, which changed photo-sharing as we know it. People take photos of anything and everything now, because their camera is in their pocket, and uploading those photos to the internet takes three clicks, tops.

The second crucial change was the public opening of Facebook in 2006.

My sister is 19 and I am 24. I was 19 when the iPhone came out, and I was a senior in high school when I first got Facebook, a year before it launched publicly.

My sister was 14 when the iPhone came out, first got on Facebook at age 13. Unlike myself, her friends have had smartphones (and have been taking pictures with them) throughout their entire high school (and now college) career. And many of them are now documented neatly on her Timeline.

The pressure to maintain an appropriate, attractive presence on the Internet has weighed on me since college. It’s been with her for her entire life.

This is the difference between the people writing about Snapchat and the people using it.

My sister is one of the biggest Snapchat users I know, and the pictures she sends me of herself are awful. That’s not the usual for her. She’s 19, and will force our family to stand in 100-degree weather for hours to get the perfect shot of her smile.

The snaps she sends me could be called ugly — her on the porch, in the dark, with a goofy look on her face. If she was posting this on Facebook, or Instagram, or even sending it to me on MMS, it wouldn’t be the same picture. It wouldn’t be so ugly.

But there’s an intimacy that comes with Snapchat that makes those pictures safe, and much more enjoyable than seeing yet another perfect picture of my sister on Facebook. I see her as she really is.

It’s about as real as you can get in a world where everything happens through an all-seeing eye of 1′s and 0′s.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the old days of the web, Plaxo tried to solve the problem we all have when friends change their contact details, but by avoiding the tedious manual entry. But Plaxo was heavyweight, complex and had a spammy experience. Fast forward to 2012 and Brewster has an ambitious iOS app startup tackling the same problem, and backed by Union Square Ventures. They have the ambition to make the contact book on phones smarter and ‘context’ aware.

Then there’s Phonedeck. Phonedeck appeared last year to bring a lot more context to our phones, such as who we contact most. Last year we were calling it Rapportive for your phone.

But in doing so they realised they might be able to tackle the age-old contacts problem, but crucially via the native address book on your smartphone.

Now their brand new Android client (you can grab it here) is a full-blown re-working of their app. Let’s call it a major pivot.

It introduces “Connected Contacts”. Now, this completely revised Android app transfers key features from the Phonedeck web application to the phone and creates a peer-to-peer contact book that could – at least they claim it could – make contact management obsolete. An iOS version is on the way.

Most users’ phone contact books contain outdated contacts, don’t sync with social networks, and leave you to do all the hard work.

Phonedeck’s new version now effectively transfers the ownership and the responsibility to keep the contact details up-to-date with the owner of the data. That means they can edit their contact details in all their friends’ phones by directly writing into their NATIVE phone books (on Android, iOS and even Nokia Series40). Each new bit of information gets pushed out to all connected phones within a few seconds. Thus instead of managing 500+ phone contacts the user will only be required to manage 1 contact – their own.

Crucially, Phonedeck does not build a separate contact cloud but directly writes updates into the phone’s native phone book – so there is no syncing hassle.

A pretty good use case here is changing countries and switching to a local SIM card – you just change your number and that change goes to everyone on Phonedeck.

There are other cute features like being able to change your profile photo as you go (perhaps a picture of where you are).

A dashboard assembles all relevant contacts based on time, past communication history and phone events such as missed calls. A classic contact list view adds the information of the last phone interaction (Call, SMS) to each contact. You get statistics on your most important contacts.

An iPhone client should be launched later this year with more or less the same feature set.

Phone deck is based in Berlin, Founded in 2010, and has raised over €1m seed financing led by leading Angel investor, Christophe Maire.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’ve ever had to think about whether Uncle Phil (the one with the ear hair) should be sitting next to Aunt Clara (the one with the walker) or with the other guys at Frank’s table (“Drunk” Frank), SocialTables has you covered. The site, recently relaunched with an entirely new UI and design, allows party planners to create mockups of their space, plop guests at different tables, and then organize the whole party via an iPad in real time. Never again will you have to cut out little circles and put little scraps of paper on the dining room table with each guest’s name: this thing can do it for you.

The platform is built in HTML5, which makes it easy to use in the browser, and the system pulls social data from each guest in the guest list, allowing party planners to seat like-minded people together or, barring that, create a little frisson by sticking cat lovers with stoat fans. It’s completely collaborative and non-linear so multiple users can work on the same floorplan.

Founded by Dan Berger at Fortify Ventures in DC, the app is live now and received $500,000 in seed funding. They’ve already served up 3,500 events to over 100,000 guests, which suggests they have a heck of a lot of traction.

“A few years ago I was going to a wedding and thought ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if I saw the seating chart so I could know where the cute girls were?’ said Berger. “I added this idea to my list of ideas (like every startup dude has) and didn’t do anything about it. I started working on it early last year.”

What struck me when I first saw it in DC was the smooth interface and sexy graphics. It looks like something you could put in front of a stressed out bride and groom and they could spend a few short minutes dragging folks around the dance floor so Paul “Pervo” Carson doesn’t sit next to the bride’s religious roommate from college.

“This wasn’t about making just another app,” said Lead Designer Brian Pensinger. “Events are beautiful and unique. The software used to plan them should be beautiful as well.”

One of the company’s advisers is the inimitable Gary Vaynerchuk, the dude who looks at wine on the Internet.

The service is available now and is free to try. Enterprise versions are available based on customer requirements but start at $500 per event.

If I were getting married or hosting a huge gathering of the North American Buffalo Society again, I’d totally rock out with this service. It’s an interesting way to disrupt the events space and quite attractive to boot.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

PowerInbox, the email platform company that makes messages interactive, has just crossed 1 million email views. The startup has expanded from its initial, limited set of third-party services supported (Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, etc.), and can now run over 50 “email apps” in your inbox. These apps allow for interactive content from sites and services that range from Spotify to Hulu to Pinterest, and even to those you might not expect, like The White House and MSNBC, for example.

According to founder Matt Thazhmon, the company has fielded over 200 app requests from users to date, and has been busy beefing up its lineup in recent weeks. Some of the more notable new additions include Wikipedia, Vimeo, Ustream, Tumblr, The Onion, Scribd, Spotify, Slideshare, Pinterest, MetaCafe, Kickstarter, Justin.tv, Grooveshark, Hulu, ABC News, Foursquare, Flickr, ESPN, College Humor, CNN and Amazon, to name a few.

If you’re not familiar with the startup, what PowerInbox does is offer a way for users to interact with their favorite web services from within their email messages. For example, you can like, reply, comment or tweet from emails coming from Facebook and Twitter without having to open another window and visit the website. Thazhmon says that Twitter is the most popular of all the supported apps, with 30% of PowerInbox users tweeting from their email. The company also offers business-friendly features that allow marketers to customize emails with interactive features of their own, or build messages that also include “apps” like their brand’s Twitter feed or Facebook wall.

Another cute new addition rolling out today is something called “PowerInbox icons” which, sort of like Gmail’s superstars, highlight messages from various services using a visual indicator. Retailers can send emails with an icon of a purse for a sale on handbags, or a shoe icon for a sale on shoes, for example. Amazon messages have Amazon’s “a” logo, Pinterest, the red “p,” and so on. Users can then quickly scan their inbox to see which emails they want to open. Early reports indicate that this has led to increased open rates, says Thazhmon, which now hover around 26%.

Another PowerInbox integration launching now has just outed a new email startup. Philterit (beta) is building a visual inbox that includes a dashboard and system for separating personal emails from brand messages. The platform is also designed to work on mobile and tablets. (More on this later!).

Along with the 1 million email views, Thazhmon says that PowerInbox is now seeing daily engagement of over 80%, support for 8 email clients (including 4 directly integrating with the service), and is planning to begin its Series A discussions in August.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Nexus 7 is a fantastic tablet — for the price. To me and many others its only downside is lack of built-in wireless data connectivity. It can only connect to the internet’s tubes through WiFi.

Google apparently agrees. I won’t spoil the cute commercial but let’s just say the dad isn’t using a WiFi hotspot to entertain his son.

With WiFi hotspots, phone apps, and USB modems, there are a ton of ways to feed a tablet or computer wireless data while on the go. But none are as seamless or efficient as a built-in solution. Requiring another device adds another potential point of failure.

Still, even though the Nexus 7 is only WiFi-only, it’s still an amazing tablet that’s totally worth its price. But I wouldn’t buy it. I’m spoiled by a Verizon iPad and, before it, a first-gen Xoom. I simply cannot imagine owning a tablet that requires another device to connect it to the internet. I mean, I really don’t want to bring my phone along on a camping trip, but a tablet is a must-have to keep the kids entertained. What else are they going to do camping? Get dirty and have fun? Pssh. It’s Kingdom Rush time!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

May is going to be a busy month here in the city. Along with Disrupt and the continuation of our highly successful Office Hours sessions, we’re also hosting an ironically massive “Mini” Meet-Up in NYC on May 8.

Startups, investors, and general dreamers will have the opportunity to speak with each other, as well as parts of the TechCrunch editorial staff to network, pitch, and be merry. There will be a lot of beer.

Along with over 600 of you fine geek-flavored humans, John Biggs, myself, Chris Velazco, Matt Burns, Eric Eldon, Peter Ha, Josh Zelman and possibly Alexia Tsotsis will all be in attendance.

TouchTunes, one of our sponsors, is providing a photo booth machine as well as a little Karaoke hub for anyone who thinks they can top Drew Houston’s rendition of “Rocket Man”.

Past that, we’re also bringing in what I expect will be hundreds of pizzas to feed your cute little pitching mouths, courtesy of MyPizza, a new food sponsor.

We’re currently working on an after party event, to make sure that bass keeps bumpin’, bumpin’ (this beat goes boom, boom).

I personally can’t wait, and I hope you’re even a fraction as excited as I am. So if you’re interested in attending, head on over to our PlanCast page and put your name on the list.

Here’s another look at our sponsors:

Yext helps provide amazing local search results with PowerListings, a local information hub that syncs listings across a network of premium sites and mobile apps. With Yext PowerListings, small and large businesses can quickly and easily update their business information, photos and specials from one central location. Today, Yext PowerListings syncs information for over 45,000 locations.

Traducto is a powerful and easy to use translation and localization app.
With Traducto users can leverage human translation to translate documents, emails, newsletters, social postings, marketing materials and more. TraductoPro allows developers to convert iOS or Mac apps, into a multilingual application, making the app available to a wider global audience. By making it simple to localize your application and offering 16 different language translations, TraductoPro is designed to reduce the pain typically associated with localization. Our integrated approach combines automating app localization through direct Xcode integration, with a high quality human translation service all within a single application. TraductoPro offers support for content translations, app store metadata and Xcode projects localization.

WhatRunsWhere is a competitive intelligence service for online media buying. It allows you to look up what advertisers are doing online; where they are running ads, who they are buying their inventory through and what exact ads they are using. WhatRunsWhere allows you to see what is happening on any website; who is advertising there, who’s selling the inventory for them and what ads are they using. With data from multiple countries and actionable insights regarding the data, WhatRunsWhere quickly allows anyone to dissect advertising campaigns resulting in reduced risk and a higher ROI media buying process.

Parlor® is the creator of unique branded communication applications: GroupCall™, TopicTalk™ and MobiCast™. Our goal is to make useful tools to communicate globally, both efficiently and for free. We will be unleashing these three awesome applications on iOS and Android at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012. Follow us at http://Parlor.fm for news and updates.

Speak to any business in the world with MyGenie™, a location-based 2-way communication platform that allows iPhone and Android users to speak to businesses in real-time! It’s free, it’s quick, and it’s simple to use. No need to find a manager, an email address, or a telephone # to contact. With MyGenie™ consumers send questions, comments, complaints, feedback, and more (can also upload photos) directly to any business they choose via their smart phones. Businesses can immediately respond (and include special offers) via a business portal. MyGenie™, not just ratings, not just feedback, it’s anything and everything you want it to be! Free on Apple App Store and Android Market.

Return on Change (RoC) connects innovative startups and investors who are looking to change tomorrow’s world today. Entrepreneurs with great ideas need capital funding to jumpstart their businesses, and investors are looking to help fund the next big idea. RoC provides the online medium through which startup companies and entrepreneurs will be able to pool capital through crowdsourcing. For more information about Return on Change, please visit www.returnonchange.com or contact RoC at RoC@returnonchange.com.

PeoplePerHour is Europe’s leading marketplace connecting startups and entrepreneurs to freelance talent worldwide and we’ve just landed in NYC! Project by project we’re awakening an enormous latent workforce, from the stay at home mom and the retiree to the moonlighter and the hobbyist, removing the constraints of the traditional 9-5 office. Be it for a quick logo design, building a website, copywriting or a small translation… we’re helping businesses keep their core lean and to get the job done fast. Our vision is for this to be the defining factor in the future of work.

TouchTunes Interactive Networks is the largest interactive out-of-home entertainment network in North America. TouchTunes provides entertainment and marketing solutions to 52,000 bars and restaurants. Founded in 1998, the network has become the largest of its kind with 54M monthly users who played more than 900 million songs in 2011. The TouchTunes mobile app allows consumers in bars, restaurants, hotels, retail and arenas to play any song from our catalog without having to leave their seat and is socially integrated. TouchTunes network is the largest digital out-of-home advertising network in the US (Nielsen) and includes TouchTunesTV, a unique screen-within-a-screen interactive television experience that provides custom advertising capabilities, venue promotions and social networking opportunities. TouchTunes is a privately held U.S. corporation with offices in New York City, Arlington Heights, Illinois and Montreal, Canada. For further information, please visit us at touchtunes.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch