Last year, Zaarly launched its real-time mobile marketplace to connect users who need stuff done with those who will do it for them. But Zaarly is going beyond just making its platform available to all comers, and helping some of its top sellers create even more compelling marketplaces with the launch of Zaarly Storefronts.

Through Zaarly Storefronts, selected Zaarly sellers will now have a place to showcase their talents, with customer-facing websites that highlight their products and services to potential customers. Zaarly’s marketplace previously worked by letting users respond to requests for various services. But now, those with Zaarly Storefronts will be able to proactively sell to users in need of certain products or services. They will also be able to receive orders, confirm details, and accept payments through the platform.

To introduce Storefronts, Zaarly has handpicked* sellers who have proven very popular already on its platform, and given them tools to take their businesses to the next level. It’s a pretty high-touch operation, though, and a little different from just rolling out a platform that anyone can post their services to. For instance, Zaarly is sending out professional photographers and helping them build custom webpages that will appeal more to customers.

At launch, Zaarly will have about 120 featured sellers in San Francisco, with more than 1,000 items available through their storefronts. All items fall under one of its top 10 categories, which range from “Business Services” to “Wellness & Fitness” to “Home Services & Repairs.” While the initial launch is in San Francisco, Zaarly has also been aggressively on-boarding users in markets like New York and Los Angeles, and will introduce Storefronts in those markets as well.

While Zaarly started with service providers who have already had some success with its platform, it’s also taking applications for others who wish to create their own Storefronts. The hope is that over time, Zaarly will be able to reduce the amount of hand holding need to roll out each individual page.

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* Other people writing in today’s Web-speak might say “curated,” but those people are assholes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A new legal startup is launching to the public soon, hoping to shake up the legal documents space. LA-based DocRun is announcing that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from VC Michael Hirshland’s new fund, Resolute.vc, Google’s Don Dodge, and Kima Ventures.

While some details of what DocRun is doing are still unclear, but we know the startup is trying to disrupt the online legal documents and advice space, but by adding quality, personalized documents to the mix as opposed to simply offering form contracts like LLC agreements, rental agreements and more. DocRun wants to provide highly customized, attorney-level, state-specific legal documents at a fraction of what they would cost from a lawyer.

At public launch, DocRun will eventually provide hundreds of personalized documents, including everything from prenuptial agreements to operating agreements to employment agreements, all specially tailored to each individual user using an adaptive Q&A engine.

The startup is the brainchild of CEO and lawyer Jennifer Reuting, who has actually founded two legal startups previously, InCorp, a registered agent and compliance firm, and MyLLC, and company that helps companies incorporate as businesses. She’s also the author of Limited Liability Companies For Dummies.

There are a number of companies who offer form legal documents on the web including LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer. As Reuting explains, the aim of DocRun is to democratize the legal space by not only providing legal documents to consumers, but also to offer tools that can fully customize personal and business documents.

The startup is in invite-inly alpha right now but stay tuned.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Guitar-maker Peavey has teamed up with audio electronics experts Anteres to create an auto-tuning guitar. While these things aren’t new – Gibson has had robotic tuners for a while – this system is unique in that it senses and corrects the pitch of the strings regardless of tuning, which means you can do all sorts of interesting tricks with vibrato even in what would amount to be an untuned guitar.

Peavy describes it thus:

The guitar is physically no different from any other electric except for an upgradable module to handle tuning. While you probably still have to tune this guitar a little, once it is set up you can change quite a bit about it programmatically, reducing the need to fiddle with machine heads during your red hot solo.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The continually increasing size of hard drives means we can all store more pictures, music, games, and so on, but as with the transistor counts in Moore’s Law, those increases don’t come easy. Companies like Toshiba, TDK, and Seagate are forever looking into ways to increase the number of bits they can store inside a drive. It’s already an astounding amount, but they always seem to find a way to improve it further.

Today’s advance comes from Singapore’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, where Dr Joel Yang has figured out a way to fit several times the number of bits in a given area. The secret? A little salt in the mix.

Hard disks have a surface covered in tiny magnetic granules, each only nanometers across. Groups of them clump together to form tiny, semi-regular islands. The hard drive head flies overhead and flips these islands one way or another to create 1s and 0s.

Those tiny granules are formed by exposing a certain solution to a nanolithographic process (but of course we all knew that already). Dr Yang found that by adding a bit of salt to solution, they were able to produce superior grains. They’re not actually smaller, but instead of having to clump a bunch together in an island, each individual grain can be manipulated individually into a bit storage unit. This means that the data density of the disk’s surface can be increased immensely.

They’ve demonstrated data storage at 1.9 terabits per square inch, which is about four times what the very best hard drives today are capable of. And they’ve made granules small enough that drives based on this new process could reach all the way to 3.3 terabits per inch. That means that your drives could hold as much as 18 terabytes in the near future.

Yang actually developed the salty solution when he was at MIT, but it looks like IMRE gets to reap the rewards, at least if they can commercialize it. We probably won’t see drives based on this tech for a couple years, but the improvement is notable regardless. The full paper can be read here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google Analytics, the immensely popular suite of tools that Google offers to help webmasters track their site traffic, is getting a big boost this week: the service has launched a real-time dashboard that updates with user events as they happen.

That’s a big deal, as it brings Google more in line with popular real-time analytics products like Chartbeat, which allows you to track things like how many people are currently on your site, and how much traffic each individual article has gotten in the last few minutes. Prior to today’s launch of real-time, Google Analytics reports typically had a delay window upwards of three hours (and often longer), which meant this kind of tracking wasn’t possible.

In its blog post announcing the news, Google highlights how you can now use Analytics to gauge the impact of various social channels, like Twitter and Facebook — and you’ll be able to quickly tell if your custom analytics query is working as intended, without having to wait 24 hours to see the results. In order to see the new Real-Time feature you’ll need to activate the ‘New Version’ link in Analytics, which is in the upper-right hand corner of the screen.

In addition to Real-Time, today the Analytics team has also announced a premium tier for enterprise companies who want more support (and datapoints tracked) than Google offers with its free service. Google says that for an unspecified price, companies will be able to get phone support, SLA guarantees, and increased data limits.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and most recently Foursquare, is adding more services today, totaling 10 different ways to measure your social influence on the web. Klout is adding five new networks—Blogger, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram and Last.fm, allowing Klout users to add their influence on these networks to their Klout score.

For background, Klout evaluates users’ behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals on social networks. On Twitter, Klout’s influence score is based on a user’s ability to drive action through Tweets, Retweets and more. On Facebook, Klout will examine how conversations and content generate interest and engagement, via likes, comments, and more, from the network’s nearly 700 million users.

While Klout hasn’t given specifics on how these new services are factoring into your score, you can make assumptions based on each individual network. For LinkedIn, Klout could be evaluating your number of connections, and updated on the site. And presumably, your Foursquare Klout is based on how often you check in, how many mayorships you’ve earned, and more.

For Instagram, measurement could be how many likes you have on your pictures. Flickr could also use the same metric. Last.fm is an interesting addition, considering its the first music-based service that Klout has added. Perhaps a Spotify integration will come coon?

Users can choose connect their accounts to their Klout score in their profile. Klout says that connecting an account wil never lower your score, but it may increase the score.

And not to be forgotten, Klout should be adding Google+ as a measurement metric soon.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s a simple law of e-commerce: the more consumer reviews there are on a product, the more sales will result.  ”As review numbers go up, conversions go up, and SEO traffic goes up,” says  Cathy Halligan, SVP of sales and marketing for PowerReviews (and former CMO of Walmart.com).  PowerReviews powers 23 million reviews across 5,500 sites including Staples.com, Gap.com, ToysRUs.com, and eFaucets, and is adding about 1 million reviews a month.  But all of these reviews are siloed on each individual site.  Today, PowerReviews is making it possible for brand sites to syndicate their reviews to e-commerce sites for the same products through a new product called BrandShare.

Consumers often go to brand sites to do research and leave reviews there, but most brand sites don’t actually sell their own products.  PowerReviews already has a product catalog across its network of 35 million products. It will now take any reviews, whether they were written on its software, a competitor’s, or a home-grown review system and allow brands to syndicate them to existing PowerReviews customers.

For products that don’t have any reviews on a retailer’s site, this is a way to fill up those pages with reviews.  Halligan says that going from zero reviews to one review with 4.2 stars or better improves conversion rates (sales) by 20 percent.  And while it only takes 7 to 10 reviews to get a stable star rating, keeping reviews fresh helps with search engine optimization.  Getting people directly to a product page through search thanks to an indexed review has an outsized impact on sales conversions as well.

Social sharing also helps.  People can share their PowerReviews on Facebook.  And each share is worth $15.72 in incremental sales.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook Pages — the social network’s profiles meant for businesses, celebrities, and public entities — are becoming an increasingly important way to establish a long-term relationship with customers and fans. Many businesses are sprucing up their Pages with applications, and everyone is always on the hunt to get more Likes and Comments on their Updates (posts with higher user engagement will show up in more News Feeds).

Facebook’s built-in Insights tool does a decent job helping you keep tabs on your Page’s performance, but there’s some data that may be even more important: how your arch-rival is doing. Which is where ContentAide, a new startup from VentureBeat writer Cody Barbierri, comes in handy.

The service is pretty straightforward: tell it what Facebook Pages you’d like to keep an eye on, and the site will automatically generate a daily report on how that Page is performing. This isn’t just a Page’s overall ‘Like’ count either — ContentAide will also send you each individual status update and photo posted, along with how many Likes and Comments they received. You can receive reports for your own Pages and for competitors’ Pages as well.

Barbierri says that ContentAide uses an algorithm to figure out the relative success of each status update — if your page has hundreds of thousands of fans, then obviously it’s much easier to get 50 ‘Likes’ on a post than if you only had 1,000 fans, and the reports take this into account. Down the line, Barbierri hopes to add some deeper analysis, like automatic reports on what types of updates have been most effective.

ContentAide is charging $20 per month for one daily report and goes up from there — Barbierri says that in addition to individuals and small businesses, the service is looking to cater to consultants and firms that may want to receive multiple reports every day.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

During Google’s third quarter earnings call today, CEO Eric Schmidt was asked, “With the Web becoming more social and realtime, how does Google compete in that world?” The question comes on the heels of yesterday’s announcement by Bing that it is bringing in more data from Facebook to make its search results more social.

Schmidt’s response essentially is that the Google’s search algorithm will absorb more realtime and social data over time: “With respect to social and realtime, we use complex signals to do ranking. Over time we will add realtime and social cues.” Some of this comes in the form of direct data feeds, such as Google gets from Twitter. But to really be social, search needs to be personalized to each individual’s own social stream.

Schmidt acknowledges as much: “We are quite convinced that produces a better search result for people who choose to give us that information. We want people to be more logged into Google.”

In other words, Google will give you better search results if you share your social data with them. He was later asked what can Google do if it does not have a direct relationship with all of the major social networks (meaning Facebook)? How then does it capture the social signals? Schmidt was careful not to answer that one too directly other than to say, “There are ways we can do that.” Another option he hinted at was for people to volunteer that information to Google.

And you wonder why Facebook only allows you to take your personal data in the form of a downloadable .zip file rather than an ongoing stream you could simply hand over to someone like Google. No, Google’s best bet is to get you to start generating a social stream through Google itself.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch