OpenStreetMap, the Wikipedia-like crowdsourced mapping service, announced a couple of changes today that will make it easier for anybody to contribute. Starting today, you can easily suggest corrections when you browse maps on OpenStreetMap. In the spirit of crowdsourcing, these proposed corrections will be farmed out to the service’s volunteers. Then the organizations, writes Harry Wood in today’s announcement, “a local mapper can visit the location to check the suggested information, and then update the map.”

This new feature is meant to allow more users to participate in the mapping process, even if they don’t have the time or skills to get involved in the details of creating a local map. Users who spot issues just have to click on the “add a note” button in the bottom-right corner of the window and suggest the change.

It’s worth noting that these suggestions don’t have to follow any specific format and users don’t need to have an OpenStreetMap account to suggest changes. Notes, Wood writes, “are free-form natural text, read by other people, making this a very simple way to communicate any problems we notice about the map without needing to get to grips with OpenStreetMap and its tagging system.”

Later this year, OpenStreetMap also plans to launch a new HTML5-based map editor, which will also make it significantly easier to create and edit maps.

“By making it even easier to add to the map, we’re increasing the amount of on-the-ground knowledge we can capture – further distancing OSM from the traditional map data companies and their lack of local expertise,” Simon Poole, the chairman of the OpenStreetMap Foundation said in a canned statement today.

Google Maps, of course, also allows users to report problems with its maps, and the company constantly updates its maps. It can often take quite a while before the team gets to look at all the reports that come in.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Online payments startup WePay has been on a roll lately. The company is processing hundreds of millions of dollars in payments annually, and adding more than 1,000 active merchants per week. But it wants to accelerate that growth even further, by rolling out payment buttons that will allow anyone to add in-line payments to their sites with just a single line of code.

WePay is a Y Combinator-backed startup originally formed mostly to make it easier for groups to collect money and make payments together. But it’s recently gone beyond just helping out groups, providing an ultra-simple platform for anyone to collect and manage payments online. It’s added support for event registration and ticketing, custom invoicing, donations, and e-commerce. A few weeks ago, it even rolled out a white-label payments API and lowered its prices to court third-party developers and better compete against PayPal and others.

Now the company is making it even easier for websites to collect money, sell goods, or receive donations, by offering up a way to accept payments right on a client’s website. For site owners, adding a WePay Payment Button is as easy as embedding a YouTube video — they merely add a small cut-and-paste piece of code to the site. Those buttons also enable site owners to take payments directly on a site, without redirecting to a third-party payments site like PayPal.

WePay Payment Buttons come in a couple of different flavors — site owners can use “add to cart” buttons, as well as “donate” and “register” buttons. All carry WePay’s typical pricing structure, which is just 2.9 percent and 30 cents per transaction for credit cards, and 1 percent plus 30 cents for bank payments.

WePay has raised a total of $20 million since being founded in 2009, including a $10 million round led by Ignition Partners that it announced in May. Other investors include Highland Capital Partners, August Capital, and angels such as Max Levchin, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, and Steve Chen.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Netflix is making it even easier for kids to bypass channel surfing and search for their favorite shows and characters, with an updated app for the Xbox 360. The latest version of Netflix’s Xbox 360 app, which went live this morning, brings its increasingly popular ‘Just For Kids’ user interface to the gaming console.

Netflix’s Just For Kids UI debuted nearly a year ago, offering its younger users an easier way to find and watch their favorite shows. Unlike Netflix’s usual user interface, which highlights movie box art and descriptions, Just For Kids is character-centric, so that toddlers can navigate what they want to watch based on which popular characters most appeal to them, whether it be Dora The Explorer or Spongebob Squarepants. Since introducing the UI on the web, Netflix has been busy porting it to other devices, such as the Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 3, Apple TV… and now the Xbox.

For the Xbox 360, the updated app is a clear win, as it will mean even more media consumption on the game console. Microsoft seems to be pushing the Xbox more as a media hub than a game console these days, so grabbing the attention of a home’s youngest users is one way to solidify its place in the living room.

That said, the emergence of the interface and increased Netflix viewing from younger viewers might be having an effect on traditional children’s programming channels. Viacom has seen a fall in ratings at its Nickelodeon channels, for instance, which seems to coincide with the broader release of Just For Kids.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We first wrote about Tiggzi, a DIY mobile app maker that gives you far more flexibility than most of its competitors, when it launched its public beta a few weeks ago. Since then, the service, which was developed by software engineering company Exadel, has added quite a few more features, making it even easier to develop relatively fully featured apps with its drag-and-drop interface. Among these new features are the ability to expert native iOS binaries and to export Windows Phone source code (Tiggzi promises that the option to export the compiled binaries for Windows Phone is coming soon). Tiggzi also added support for AT&T’s text messaging and MHealth API. Starting later this month, Tiggzi will also launch its own database solution, Tiggzi DB.

The idea behind Tiggzi is to give developers as much flexibility as possible by letting them use virtually any REST API on the Internet in their own apps. Combined with the service’s drag-and-drop interface, this gives developers the flexibility to quickly create a prototype or even a working app for internal and external use, while still giving them the flexibility to use any API they like. Tiggzi also offers its own repository of plugins to make adding commonly used APIs easy.

You can read more about how the service works in detail in our previous post here.

Since its launch, the company added support for sending text messages through AT&T’s messaging API, as well as AT&T’s mHealth solution. Tiggzi also updated to the latest version of jQuery mobile and, as the company told us, now has one developer working full-time on this open-source project.

Due to its reliance on third-party APIs, Tiggzi doesn’t currently offer its own database service. Instead, it refers users to services like Parse or StackMob. Starting on June 21st, though, Tiggzi is launching a private beta of its own database service.

Starting next week, Tiggzi will also simplify the development process for those who need both native and HTML5 apps. Instead of making users create separate projects for each, the service will soon let its users choose a hybrid approach. Developers will be able to build just one app and then export it as an HTML5 app or as a native app (or both), depending on their needs.

Giveaway: 10 Free Tiggzi Pro Plans

To celebrate all these launches and help you get started with its service, Tiggzi is hosting a webinar tomorrow at 11am PDT/2pm EDT. Tiggzi is also randomly giving away 10 6-month pro plans worth $50/month to those who register for tomorrow’s webinar using this link.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A lot of adtech startups have focused their attention on ways to improve the process of measuring, buying and delivering online ads, but here’s an example of a company getting some traction for a solution that to better sense of how a company’s online activities relate to what customers do to interact with the company offline: the UK-based AdInsight, which connects a user’s browsing history with how he then interacts with the company on a phone, has picked up £1.6 million ($2.6 million) in a Series A round from Eden Ventures.

The investment is the first round of funding for AdInsight, which has been around since 2008 and counts TUI Travel, Thomas Cook, RAC and British Gas among its customers.

While there has been a big drive to migrate customer service as much as possible to the web — innovations from companies like Twilio making it even easier to incorporate calling functions directly on to sites, for example — AdInsight’s approach is, in a way, more old school, in that it accepts that the majority of users are still going to be taking to their traditional phones to contact a company at the end of the day.

Ross Fobian, co-founder and CEO of AdInsight, notes that the company has seen “phenomenal expansion” over the last 18 months for what he calls the “missing link” between online marking and offline buying.

The company’s flagship product, AdInsight Clarity, works like this: a proprietary solution, in the form of a piece of Javascript, is attached to a company’s site and to individual ads to track what each visitor is doing on the web and then linking that activity up with individual users by assigning unique telephone numbers to each of them, for when they eventually pick up the phone to call the company.

By tracking what sites a person visited, and where he clicked, AdInsight can then offer data to companies about what online marketing has been effective (and what has not) to convert an online browser into an offline user of their services.

The company also offers a service where it attaches unique phone numbers to specific online ads — again so that companies can gauge how specific marketing activities are converting into (potentially more costly, but potentially more lucrative) phone calls.

AdInsight says that it also integrates Google’s Adsense and Adwords analytics into its reports so that companies can track that activity against call conversions, again tracking that back to specific visitors.

Richard Hamnett, the other co-founder and CTO of AdInsight says that the funding from Eden will be used to hire more staff, invest in infrastructure and continue its product development.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Internet chat is older than the web, but it still remains one of the best ways to keep people engaged with a site. And for good reason: people like talking to each other. Or at least, they like to share their opinions with the knowledge that someone, somewhere is reading them.

Now Y Combinator-backed startup Envolve is making it even easier to integrate chat boxes into your site by launching an API that offers chat-as-a-service. And it’ll let you integrate chat into nearly any webpage with a quick snippet of JavaScript. You can try one of their chat boxes out on TagChat, which lets you chat about trending topics on Twitter.

For some context on what Envolve is doing here, it’s best to look at the company’s history. Envolve has actually been around for a year now, iterating through several versions of the product. First, it offered a browser chat bar similar to the Meebo Bar and Facebook Chat. This bar prompted users to create Envolve accounts, which would allow them to chat with friends on the site they were currently browsing, as well as on other sites with Envolve integrated.

That didn’t get much uptake (people didn’t want to create yet another account), so the site later allowed websites to merge the toolbar with their own user account systems — which has fared better. The toolbar is now integrated into 20,000 sites including Destructoid and eleven sites run by Universal Music. All told, the partner sites account for 400,000 messages being sent per day, and over 45 million have been sent overall.

Thus far, Envolve’s chat products have offered side-wide chat, allowing users to engage with their friends. Today’s launch is different in that it allows sites to programmatically generate chat boxes for individual pages. So, for example, an online retail store could automatically create a chat box for each of its items without having to manually insert embed codes for each. This API is limited to desktop websites for now, but a mobile version is in the works.

On the backend, Envolve offers analytics and options to help site admins cut back on spam — you can require users to authenticate before they can start chatting, and there are also some default filters.

Envolve offers two pricing levels: the more basic, ‘consumer’ levels will allow up to 150 users to chat on the site concurrently, while the enterprise level has no limit and charges based on how many visits the site receives. Note that even users who don’t actually start chatting count as a visit, because they’ll still see what other people are chatting about.

Envolve’s competitors include Meebo (which has the Meebo Bar) and Wibiya.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’re all pretty familiar with tagging people on sites like Facebook and Flickr. It’s a great way to let the people who are in the pictures know you’ve uploaded shots of them, and it’s also a good way for others to see who the persons are in the photos they’re looking at.

But what if you’d rather steer clear of the walled gardens of the Web and upload photos to your own website or blog? Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to tag those, too?

Enter Stipple, a recently launched startup that lets you tag images across the entire Web (see example on BritneySpears.com). The company is today launching People Dots, a feature that allows users to build a bridge between Stipple and their Twitter and/or Facebook accounts.

If Stipple is enabled for your website or blogging platform, which requires placement of a small snippet of code, you can upload photos to your site or blog like you’re used to. Using an inline editor, you can use People Dots to quickly label your friends.

Their ‘dots’ will then show their names, along with a link to either their Twitter or Facebook profile. That way, visitors will be able to click through to that person’s account to connect with or follow him or her (it also shows the person’s latest tweet if applicable).

The editor also boasts auto-complete functionality that that pulls from your list of friends, making it even smoother to add “people dots”.

Also cool: when you label your buddies with Stipple’s People Dots, you can opt to send notifications to the persons in question. This can be in the form of a Facebook status update or via a tweet posted to your own Twitter account, including a mention of the “dotted” person. Notifications are enabled by default but can easily be switched off.

Very cool if you ask me and very well executed – going to enjoy playing around with this one.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The most popular note type created by Evernote users is a webpage. It seems that people love to save webpages in Evernote! Now Evernote is making it even easier for sites to get saved into notes with the announcement of the Evernote Site Memory Button. This is something of a departure from the historical Evernote modus operandi, where the user invokes a client application or opens up the Evernote website: the Site Memory Button is a server-side implementation, and sites that want to use it need to specifically add it. Once added, though, any Evernote user can use the button to add the page to their list of notes. The note will be pre-populated with content selected by the site owner, including title, and even have tags helpfully suggested.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch