Maluuba, the Waterloo, Canada-based Siri competitor and TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 Battlefield finalist, today announced that it has added two new features to its voice-powered personal assistant app for Android and Windows Phone: sports and TV schedules. With this, Maluuba users in the U.S. and Canada can now ask it for near real-time sports results and query the service for TV listings in their area by name, genre or channel.

One aspect of the service the Maluuba team has always been proud of is the fact that it has managed to add additional domains to the service quickly. The service started out with 18 domains, including restaurants, movies and general knowledge queries, but the team has continued to expand the range of topics it can handle since then. It has also rapidly expanded internationally since its launch and launched its Windows Phone 8 app earlier this year, too.

With the new sports integration – and thanks to Maluuba’s expertise in natural language processing – users can ask Maluuba questions like “When is the next Blackhawks game?” or ‘How many wins do the New York Yankees have?” and get answers almost immediately. To get this data, the company has partnered with Sports Direct. For TV shows, Maluuba now understands questions like “When’s The Big Bang Theory playing next?” or “What’s on Channel 5?”

“These features are a testament to our vision. Users want exact results, not just blue links that are merely related,” Mohamed Musbah, Maluuba’s product manager, said in a canned statement today. ”When you first use Sports or TV search on Maluuba, you’ll realize how easy and fast search can be.”

With its recently announced “conversational search” feature, Google is also adding more voice and NLP-powered search tools to its feature set. Maluuba, right now, still seems to be ahead of Google in many areas, The company tells me that it believes Google’s entry into this market validates Maluuba’s model and the team doesn’t seem to be afraid of Google for now.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Viewers are asking for more live streaming video, and surprisingly, broadcasters are willing to give it to them. Gone are the days where live events need to be watched on the TV, because I mean, who watches TV anymore? When I watch the game, I’m gonna do so on a seven-inch tablet in the privacy of my bathroom, because there’s nowhere else I can concentrate when the kids are watching Dora the Explorer on Netflix in the living room — or whatever it is the kids are watching these days.

Anyway, keenly aware of this trend, thePlatform — which already helps a number of broadcast and cable networks manage their on-demand libraries — is taking steps to make live event streaming easier for their customers. The company, which is a subsidiary of Comcast, is launching a new, SaaS-based platform which will allow networks to schedule and manage live events, with everything they need, like signal acquisition and encoding, dynamic ad insertion and metadata creation, and automatic archiving of programs when they’re done.

The new live video offering will integrate seamlessly both with thePlatform’s existing on-demand video management system, as well as with the encoders that broadcasters use to take analog signals and make them digital. To start, that integration will include Elemental encoders, although thePlatform’s VP of marketing, Marty Roberts, promises that other encoders will be added soon. But anyway, once your encoder is hooked up to thePlatform, you’re good to go!

After you’ve taken care of that, there’s all sorts of stuff you can do with it. Wanna hit each and every device your device-specific rights contract allows you to stream to? NO PROBLEM.

Let’s say that you can stream to the desktop and laptop, but not mobile phones because you’ve got some exclusive legacy contract with a mobile phone provider where only their subscribers get the game. thePlatform has you covered. It even gets extra bonus points for streaming to the iPad, which no one could have imagined when that contract was put in place and isn’t considered a mobile device. (Yeh, I don’t understand it either.)

How about making money? After all, you’re not gonna stream that football game for free now, are you? NO WORRIES! thePlatform has live ad insertion. You just tell those ads when to run and you’re golden. Cha-Ching!

Wanna add funny graphics or live info while viewers are watching? NOT A BIGGIE. In the same way you just ran an ad, you can also dynamically queue up pretty much any type of media, just like it’s an ad!

And once your live show is over, don’t you worry your little head about re-encoding it and putting it into some on-demand library for all the lamers who didn’t watch it live to come look at it later. thePlatform will auto-archive that shiz for you and feed it right into your on-demand library, with whatever rights management and ad rules and whatever else you want to apply to it.

That way, it doesn’t have to be lost to the ether when all the action is over — the content will have all the same ad cues, chapter breaks, and metadata that was associated with it while it was streaming live. But now viewers will be able to search for it, and find just the moments they want to watch.

So thePlatform has been working with a few different networks — like some of Fox’s regional sports nets and NBC Sports — and things have been all good on their live events. So now the live streaming offering will be generally available to other folks who want to try it. Got a network and wanna do it live! Call thePlatform!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Bidzy, a new platform for connecting local services businesses with customers who need the service they offer in the next few hours, is launching at Disrupt NY 2013 today. Like the best ideas, Bidzy’s premise is simple: allow the customer to specify exactly what they want and the amount they are willing to pay and then let the individual businesses decide if they’re happy to take on a spot of last-minute work on those terms. Job done. Or, rather, credit card charged.

Bidzy’s platform sits in the middle, connecting the right customers to the right local services and holding payment until the work is completed – much like TaskRabbit hooks up consumers with time/skills to offer to other consumers (c2c) who have a task that needs doing. Except Bidzy’s focus is solely c2b – with its twist being that it allows customers to specify what they’re willing to pay.

“I actually don’t think there is anybody else who is allowing customers to name their own price,” says co-founder Dave Thawley, when asked about Bidzy’s competitors. “Or to put a credit card behind their bid… Bidzy is actually reaching out to the merchants on customers’ behalf, saying ‘hey are you free at two o’clock today, are you willing to cut my hair for $35?’ So we feel like we’re the first company to put the equation that way in the personal services space.”

There’s undoubtedly some crossover between Bidzy and Zaarly but Thawley argues that’s “more of a traditional storefront business versus the kind of marketplace that we are today.” Other rivals he cites are Craigslist and “vertical-specific online booking tools” – but, in the latter’s case, he points out that merchants have to provide availability data, something Bidzy does not require them to do.

The main knot Bidzy is trying to work out of the local business ecosystem is the amount of time and sweat it can take consumers to track down a service that suits, especially if they have a last-minute need for it — whether it’s a back massage after a sports injury, a quick haircut when a work meeting is cancelled, or an overlooked oil change before heading off on a road trip. Or a dog walker when you’re presenting on stage at Disrupt.

The idea for Bidzy was sparked after just such an incident. “One of the reasons why we chose to do the service category was based on personal experience where I had been out kite boarding in the day, hurt my back and it was 8PM,” says Thawley. “I was trying to find a massage studio to give me a back massage and I ended up having to call about 20 merchants before I finally found somebody.

Instead of a customer with a last-minute service requirement wasting time trying to track down a business that can fit them in, Bidzy’s platform lets them broadcast a request to relevant businesses in their area. All they have to do is wait for a merchant to accept their bid and the appointment is booked and paid for. For the consumer it’s a low hassle way of ticking tough-to-schedule items off a to-do list.

To make a Bidzy bid, a consumer enters five criteria: the category of service they’re looking for; how far they’re willing to travel; the time they have available for an appointment; the star rating of the business they want to use; and how much they are willing to pay. At launch, Bidzy is using an amalgamation of public-review data to generate its own star rating for businesses, but, as consumers conduct transactions through the platform, it will be able to feed its own data in.

Once the consumer’s bid is submitted, merchants who meet the customer’s requirements are pinged by Bidzy — and each one can decide if it is happy to accept the customer on their terms, with no obligation to do so. The first to accept gets the business. Bidzy will also be able to show customer data to merchants to help them make a decision on whether to accept a bid – such as how many bids the customer has submitted before, and the star ratings they have left.

Bidzy’s founders are keen to point out that, unlike daily deals companies like Groupon – which cast a long and rather chilling shadow over the local services space with their deal-driven customer acquisition model — Bidzy does not place margin-battering requirements on businesses to accept hundreds of customers at a particular offer price. Local merchants with modest means are able to choose to accept each potential sale on a case by case basis.

Click to view slideshow.

“A lot of the negativity from merchants towards Groupon is that you’re required to sell 200, 300, 400 appointments in a single Groupon deal,” says Thawley. “What that means for them is for a very long period of time – sometimes upwards of six months – they are just having a very challenging issue pushing all of these Groupon deals through their system without disrupting their traditional customer flow.”

So while Bidzy’s platform may inevitably encourage customers to haggle and perhaps try their luck at getting a discount price, it’s not a like-for-like competitor with daily deals since merchants retain control over whether they take on each new customer. For them it’s a zero risk, low hassle way to get new customers through the door at times when they specifically need them, increasing utilization rates and supplementing their normal cash flow. And at the end of the day, if a customer is trying their luck asking to pay too little, the merchant can just ignore them and wait for a better bid to drop in.

Having talked to plenty of services business in the course of setting up the business, Bidzy’s founders point out that most operate at less than full capacity at certain times of day – “lots operate at 50 percent utilization” overall, says Thawley. And that’s the pretty big business problem Bidzy is aiming to fix — as well as offering consumers a more convenient way to get stuff done. “Bidzy allows local services businesses to monetize what was previously un-utilized time, and to augment their existing customer base in a very bite-sized manor,” he says.

The startup is launching in one city — San Francisco — and targeting personal services categories including hair and beauty, nails, fitness, massage, automotive, and home and pet, which it believes are best suited to the last-minute service/convenience problem it’s aiming to crack. Once usage data starts flowing in it can of course look to adjust the categories it covers, based on where traction is and isn’t taking place.

“We’re the first people to acknowledge that it’s never going to be 100 percent of [local services] appointments going through the Bidzy platform,” says Bidzy’s other co-founder Sven Jensen. “There’s certain situations where people on the consumer side do want more control… The woman who’s going to get her haircut the morning of her marriage is probably going to want someone she’s spent a lot of time researching.”

But for every pre-wedding hair cut there are undoubtedly scores more consumers needing a quick short-back-and-sides on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. And that’s where Bidzy is positioning itself to take a percentage cut of all those extra transactions it makes possible.

Although it’s just the beginning for Bidzy’s platform — which today launches as an iOS app and website (an Android app due in six to eight weeks’ time) — the startup has managed to sign up around 15,000 merchants in the Bay Area already, with relatively minimal levels of merchant outreach (and no paying customers yet).

Thawley and Jensen, have been bootstrapping Bidzy to the tune of just $70,000, which makes its merchant acquisition efforts all the more impressive. Bidzy’s permanent headcount is currently just the two co-founders, although they have used contractors to help get the initial swathe of merchants signed up.

The founders met in San Francisco about five years ago, through another startup Jensen was working on, and started talking about setting up “a platform for what a buyer wants” early last year. They both have retail experience to draw on as they build out Bidzy. After a stint in the Air Force, Thawley headed to business school and went into business strategy consultancy — where eBay become a client. Jensen worked in investment banking before doing the sports equipment marketplace startup which is where he met Thawley.

After the buzz generated by launching at Disrupt, the founders say they intend to start looking to raise their first round — to build out the Bidzy team and technology, ramp up customer and merchant acquisition and start expanding geographically. Fittingly for Disrupt NY, New York is the next city on their roadmap, but they also see a lot of potential for Bidzy in less well-served parts of the U.S.

“We built our technology to have a very rapid rollout across the United States. And our hope is to go from San Francisco to New York, and once those two markets are operating comfortably we think a lot of the value is actually getting into middle America where a lot of these solutions are much less prevalent,” says Thawley. “We’ve got a very automated means of merchant outreach – we spent a lot of time building out our North American database – it’s stuff that should hopefully happen very quickly.”

Questions & Answers

Judges: Nikolaos Bonatsos (General Catalyst), Tracy Chou (Pinterest), Matt Mazzeo (Lowercase Capital), Ron Palmeri (MkII Ventures).

Q: How do you provide apples to apples comparisons of service providers who are used to providing services at different price points?
A: That’s mainly based on star rating. So if you are submitting a bid for a five star hair cut then that’s automatically going to be pushing out to the group of merchants who receive those ratings on traditional online ratings forms so when you submit your bid and if a merchant qualified it, based on their geolocation and their star rating, it’s actually the first merchant to accept the bid that earns your service. This is how Bidzy’s operating on day one. Further down the line — assuming we have merchants that are auto-accepting or accepting at a very fast rate then we’d use our own algorithm to decide what’s going to provide the best experience for the customer.

Q: What are the top use cases that you have in mind? What are the top three verticals?
A: I think different people are going to have different products that they use. Some people would be fine with getting a haircut and using Bidzy to get that last minute haircut when you need something quick and simple. Other people wouldn’t let us go near their hair but maybe something like a manicure, or maybe something like dog walking — or even something like getting your house or apartment cleaned — you as a customer think of more as a commoditised experience. Consumers can still set a star rating to have a level of quality assurance but the more commoditised the experience, the easier for the customer to get their head around it.

Q: One of the challenges is this is a classic two-sided market. You have to have enough providers, in order for people to find people that are willing to fulfil the bid. That’s usually a pretty hard problem to do so how are you tackling that?
A: It’s the chicken and egg problem but we think our chicken lays a lot of eggs. Speaking specifically to the merchant side, we’ve got two main answers to that: we’re offering them a customer at 2pm today whether they want it or not. On top of that, in order to reduce this friction and not have this problem of a lot of boots on the ground in order to sell Bidzy into these businesses we’ve developed a proprietary app that regardless of whether the merchant’s on our platform or not when you submit that bid for the oil change, every merchant in the local area receives a telephone call, an SMS and an email notifying them that this appointment’s available. And they can choose whether or not they log on to the Bidzy platform in order to find out more.

On the consumer side it’s a little bit more of a traditional playbook. We’ve got all of the normal social hooks built into our app  and our website. There’s Facebook and Twitter sharing. We already have a refer a friend program — if I tell you about it and you enter a code, I’m getting $10 to spend on my next bid.

Q: How far along is the company in terms of team, market, customers?
A: We’ve launched about three hours ago. So far the numbers are really through the roof! We’ve been developing for approx. 7 months. The business has been in place for 10. We spent first few months mainly doing research. The team right now is Sven & myself, as well as a team of contract developers but post-TechCrunch we’re hoping to raise a round of funding an build out a more significant sized in-house team. And then we’ve built out the technology to date so we can rapidly deploy across all U.S. cities although we’re launching today in San Francisco

Q: For the first time that somebody fires up the app how are you going to make sure that whatever that person requests, you’re going to be able to fulfil that?
A: We start off by making the customer put bids in our buckets. It’s not a Craiglist format where you can type in free-form text. The customer is pushed in an avenue to structure their data. There’s very few points where you get to put in unstructured data. There’s some bids that we’re never going to be able to offer — if you’re looking for something very specific at two o’clock in the morning and merchants aren’t working at that point. We’re not going to solve that problem; nor is anyone. But speaking to these merchants, a lot of them are small businesses, a lot of them are desperate — they’re working at about 50% capacity. We’re giving them a new channel to get a customer. They know how much they’re going to get, they didn’t have to do anything in advance of it and they get extra money.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Pebble has officially released its SDK, after promising to deliver it during the second week of April. This qualifies, if only just, and arrives alongside firmware update version 1.1 for PebbleOS. The new software update for the hardware brings support for custom watch faces built using the SDK, as well as new options for disabling backlighting and vibrations, as well as fixes for iOS bugs.

The SDK itself is currently just for creating watch faces, not for building apps with other functionality, although we could see some creative software made even with those restrictions. Pebble says its Sports app SDK is coming soon, which should help developers mirror the sorts of functions introduced by RunKeeper.

This is the first time third-party developers have had public access to developer tools for the Pebble platform, so it should give us a hint of what’s to come. And the firmware update fixes for iOS include one that makes the “Allow Pebble to communicate…” dialog appear far less often, which is great news since that’s a majorly annoying bug for people using iPhones with the device.

Thanks Terrance!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Major League Baseball is the stuff of Americana and nostalgia, but it’s also trying hard to keep up with the 21st century. Today, MLBAM, its interactive/digital media subsidiary, said that it has inked a deal with Qualcomm, for the latter to provide technology and engineering support to improve mobile networks at 30 Major League Baseball ballparks. The deal follows an agreement struck between T-Mobile and MLBAM in January for the mobile carrier to help finally break the wired link between dugout and bullpen, and comes as the two parties forecast one-thousand-fold demand for mobile data in ballparks in the near future.

The deal — financial terms undisclosed — will see Qualcomm become an official technology partner of MLBAM. Over the next two years — yeah, a little slower than a fastball pitch — Qualcomm will assigning teams of its engineers to each location to figure out how best to build out access to WiFi, 3G and 4G networks, which will be used not only to simply give ballpark visitors access to the Internet, but also to send more digital content their way.

Qualcomm notes that it’s been doing this kind of work already — it helped consult and implement wireless solutions for the Super Bowl, Olympics and NCAA championship games — but it appears that most of that work was done mainly to support carriers. This direct deal opens the door to more permanent solutions for wireless connection, and is a sign of how MLB itself perhaps hopes to profit from the growth, too. That’s part of a bigger trend: in the UK today, Liverpool Football Club announced a new free WiFi network at Anfield Stadium, built collaborating with Xirrus Wi-Fi.

“Mobile data traffic is exploding, particularly in high-traffic areas such as Major League Baseball ballparks,” Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Qualcomm, said in a statement. “Qualcomm has been preparing for an astounding 1000x increase in data demand, and we are leading the charge with MLBAM to provide passionate baseball fans with access to digital content, resulting in unparalleled in-ballpark experiences.”

The rise of smartphones and always-connected consumers sharing experiences on social networks has had a massive effect in how live sports are watched — at home, on the move, and at the events themselves.

In stadiums, the stories are not always good news, though. This summer, people who managed to get tickets to the London Olympics were discouraged from tweeting at events because it could create network overloads that would disrupt TV coverage. On the other hand, there is a very lucrative business for those who are offering better network coverage to captivated audiences: they can sell people temporary WiFi access or give it to them free in exchange for them receiving ads.

For its part, MLB needs to address wireless for another reason as well: mobile is the primary platform that consumers use to access its own services.

“Collaborating with an industry leader such as Qualcomm is a critical step in understanding and executing on the engineering challenges to achieve scalable, reliable in-venue connectivity,” Joe Inzerillo , MLBAM senior vice president, content technology and chief technology officer, said in a statement. “Consumer demand continues its ascension as the majority of MLB.com traffic comes from mobile devices, a line our fans first crossed in July 2010. Qualcomm’s experience and expertise will be a valuable resource in this process.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Michael Shapiro isn’t the sort of person I’d expect to circumvent the gatekeepers of traditional journalism. He’s a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, and he said he’s been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and Sports Illustrated — in other other words, he seems to be on pretty good terms with those gatekeepers.

Yet Shapiro is launching a new journalism startup called The Big Roundtable. The reason? He said that there are a lot of untested assumptions in the journalism world. As a parallel, he pointed to book publishing, where he said it was long believed that “black people don’t buy books.” There was, in fact, “this whole sub rosa world” of independent black book stores, with its own bestsellers like Iceberg Slim‘s Pimp: The Story Of My Life. Yet traditional publishers had no idea that world existed until the mainstream success of writers like Terry McMillan in the 1990s.

Similarly, Shapiro isn’t criticizing any particular editor, but he said that submitting to the shrinking number of magazines that support long-form journalism means subjecting yourself to the taste of individual editors. He said he’s often asked by students and colleagues whether the New Yorker or a similar magazine might be interested in a particular story: “The answer is probably not. This is not the era in which I came of age.”

The web has spawned new venues for selling that long-form journalism, like the Atavist, Byliner, and Amazon’s Kindle Singles program, but Shapiro said they’re still applying the same editorial model. With The Big Roundtable, he hopes to do things differently. Shapiro has assembled a group of 50 readers, who are supposed to vet the stories. The first 1,000 words of each submission gets sent to a subset of those readers, who are then asked whether they’d read more. (That’s all they’re asked — Shapiro said that in earlier versions of the system, readers offered more detailed feedback, but “it felt like homework” and “it quickly devolved into workshopping — you know, ‘I wouldn’t choose a semicolon here.’”)

If someone in that first group likes the excerpt, then it’s passed to a second group, and if someone likes it there, only then does an editor — specifically Mike Hoyt, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism review — start working with the author. Ultimately, Shapiro plans to sell a new nonfiction novella on the site every week, and the writer will get $1 from each sale.

Hopefully, this will allow The Big Roundtable to find work that didn’t catch the attention of particular editors but will still resonate with some readers. In that vein, Shapiro is looking for finished pieces rather than commissioning articles in its advance — this should be a story that you had to write, and you just haven’t found a home for it.

“If you’re going to say, ‘Well, I don’t know, I want to take my idea to some place where they can pay in advance,’ my response is: Go with God,” Shapiro said.

He also said he wants to expand the reading group from 50 people to “hundreds”, with a broad set of tastes and experiences, but Shapiro emphasized that it’s not quite the same thing as crowdsourcing.

“The thing about crowdsourcing is, it’s a crowd,” he said. “By its very nature it’s a huge, undifferentiated bunch of people.”

To illustrate his point, he pointed to the Literary Digest, a magazine that, in 1936, polled millions of people and as a result predicted that Alfred Landon would beat Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the presidential election — which was very, very wrong. Shapiro’s point: That it’s less important to have an enormous group of readers, and more important to make sure that it’s the right mix. Put another way, Shapiro is emulating the Algonquin Round Table (a famous group of writers) and “scaling it out intellectually.”

To help fund The Big Roundatble’s costs, Shapiro has been raising money on Kickstarter. He recently passed his $5,000 target, but he said he deliberately set the goal low to make sure that he would meet it. He’s hoping to raise more money, which would presumably support The Big Roundtable for a longer period of time and allow it to get a little more ambitious. Shapiro said he’s going to be exploring other funding options, too.

“I’ll be looking at things like grants or investors to establish a real, ongoing laboratory, a laboratory in which … this is all to be shared,” Shapiro said. “I’m welcoming competition. If this spawns more digital publishing ventures based upon our knowledge, then I will believe that we are succeeding.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“I have a tip that can take five strokes off anyone’s golf game: It’s called an eraser,” Arnold Palmer once remarked. Yes, Even brave enough to wear ridiculous clothes and hack a small white ball around a manicured lawn, golf is a difficult and sometimes humiliating, sport.

Luckily for golfers, John McGuire feels your pain and is on a mission to make the game just a little less painful for anyone daring (and ignorant) enough to pick up a club. His new company, Active Mind Technology, wants to give the golfing masses access to the same tools traditionally reserved for the pros by leveraging the same wearable sensor-based technologies found in health-tracking devices like Fitbit, Basis and Jawbone’s Up.

And who better to assist in that endeavor than the mastermind behind the design of products like Jambox, Jawbone and Jawbone Up? Joining McGuire and his team of twenty is Yves Behar, the design and branding guru (and Chief Creative Officer of Jawbone) known for helping to design the products mentioned above as well as those for PUMA, General Electric, Samsung, Prada and more.

While Behar hasn’t assumed a title in the company, McGuire tells us that he has not only led the design of the UI, UX, branding and packaging of Active Mind’s newest product, he’s also and investor and “thankfully, even acts like a founder,” he says.

This week, McGuire, Behar and team officially unveiled Game Golf, a wearable product that employs a combination of sensors, GPS and NFC technologies to provide golfers with a stream of data and feedback to help them improve their scores.

Essentially, the device, which includes transmitter tags that are inserted into clubs and a receiver that can be attached to your belt, track every shot a user takes during a round, as well as distance, club selection and so on. And, a la health and fitness trackers, Game Golf compiles this data and syncs it with the cloud, allowing users to then access their performance data via its mobile app on their mobile devices and personal computers.

Golfers can then share highlights of their round and their overall progress with friends by way of their social network(s) of choice, and see the percentage of shots that they hit in the fairway, greens in regulation, and putting performance. Backing its software, the team has designed Game Golf’s battery to accomodate two full rounds of data tracking before requiring a charge.

Though that all equates to a good start, one feature that’s conspicuously absent is that the device is not able to measure the velocity of one’s swing (or its relative accuracy). his could deter some early adopters, it’s not a flat-out deal breaker; however, adding this capability down the road could become a significant selling point for those sitting on the fence.

And, unfortunately for those looking for instant gratification, Game Golf isn’t yet available in stores. Instead, the company has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo through which it hopes to raise $125,000 in an effort to finance its product development and distribution. In spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that it will cost a hefty $249 when it does become publicly available in stores, McQuire tells us that Game Golf has become the fastest money-raising campaign in Indiegogo’s history, raising $63K in 12 hours.

Now, two days removed from launch, the campaign has raised over $108,000. At this rate, it should meet its goal within a week, which the founder takes as a promising sign of the potential demand for its golf tracker.

Based on its initial concept and after recruiting well-known pro golfers like Lee Westwood and Graeme McDowell to help with early testing (and invest), Active Mind was able to raise seed financing from a bevy of reputable investors, including Chamath Palihapitiya, Jerry Yang (of AME Cloud Ventures), Morado Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital and Ed Colligan (the Former CEO of Palm) — to name a few.

“Game Golf gives everyone access to crucial data that can dramatically improve your golf game and handicap,” McDowell says of its appeal to golfers. “[It's] intuitive, doesn’t disrupt your game and is essential for any golfer looking to understand their game better and knock down their handicap.”

With its Indiegogo campaign acting as a proof of concept, the startup is currently in the process of raising what McGuire tells us will be a $4 million series A round. If Game Golf is able to sustain this early demand, it will eventually look to expand into other sports, like board and motor sports and soccer, for example.

While the near-term plan involves serious iterating around Game Golf, McGuire said that the platform is being architected in such a way that it will be able to eventually help users measure activity — and provide a gamification and social layer — across multiple sports.

As to Game Golf, the founder said that users can expect to see its public launch sometime this summer.

For more, find the startup’s Indiegogo campaign here, along with video demo below:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

FindTheBest, the data-driven comparison startup led by DoubleClick founder Kevin O’Connor has raised $11 million in Series B financing led by New World Ventures, with participation form Montgomery & Co. and existing investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and O’Connor. This brings the company’s total funding to $17 million.

FindTheBest has a simple ambition: to help people compare different products and services so that they can quickly figure out which is the best one. But what differentiates the startup from the plenty of other comparison sites out there is the data-driven and personalized results. FindTheBest’s in-depth comparison searches crawl large amounts of data.

For example, the engine can compare colleges and break down comparisons by acceptance rates, SAT scores, tuition, and more. As we’ve written in the past, the quality of the data they’ve gathered from government and other trusted sources, the transparency into how the data is sourced, and the tools available to slice, dice and manipulate it make FindTheBest a compelling destination.

Sources include public and third party databases, primary sources like manufacturer and vendor websites, and expert and user ratings. The information is then presented in tables with filters and ratings. Last year, FindTheBest started to incorporate personalization by capturing explicit data from users.

FindTheBest also runs a network of sites built on its proprietary data content platform which include: FindTheData, helping consumers find data within a variety of verticals; FindTheCompany, a directory of US companies and organizations; FindTheListing, listing home rentals, items for sale, and pets; FindTheCoupons, helping shoppers find coupons and promotional codes.

O’Connor says that people are always talking about data these days but data is useless when it is sitting somewhere, and is not being analyzed and categorized. Where data can be particularly useful is where it helps drive decisions, which is what FindTheBest is doing, he says.

The platform has since expanded from colleges to doctors to financial advisors to dog breeds and even classifieds. Categories include Business, Education, Electronics, Health, Home & Family, Motors, Software, Sports & Recreation and Travel & Lifestyle—with more to come.

FindTheBest plans to use the funds continue to enter new market segments, expand internationally and build out monetization of the platform.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

C&A is this week’s top gainer for retail and consumer merchandise pages. The Dutch chain of fashion clothing stores has seen a rapid increase in PTAT across its multiple global region this week. The international brand has over 3 million page Likes for all its different pages.

This list is compiled with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

#	Name	People Talking About	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1	C&A	618,470	0	+574,399
2	Foot Locker	293,749	0	+128,863
3	Spencer’s	351,864	-13,313	+105,707
4	Champs Sports	144,534	0	+89,194
5	Amazon UK	150,103	0	+58,331
6	maurices	80,175	0	+45,395
7	ZALORA Philippines	101,313	0	+44,856
8	Dollar General	97,722	+2,575	+44,779
9	Strapya World Fan Page	48,902	0	+43,225
10	The Animal Rescue Site Store	61,030	0	+36,491

C&A’s English page does not have a large PTAT by itself, but is bolstered by utilizing global pages. There are no Northern America stores so it is the other pages that are the ones that are earning engagement. There may not be many Likes on the English page, but it does receive a lot of shares, which is perhaps the most valuable type of engagement. Shares lead to more appearance in news feeds.

For U.S. brands, Foot Locker was the most engaged page. The page shares stylish pictures of basketball shoes. The most popular post this week came from a post about new Jordan shoes that were released on Feb. 23. It seems that the page is not currently running ads. Because of the popularity of the Jordan shoe brand, it is likely that the majority of the post’s 55k likes have come from the page’s 4.6 million fans and friends of fans who shared the post.

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about retail and consumer merchandise pages as well as other categories.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Google’s Super Sync Sports Chrome Experiment is what happens when you put modern web technology, smartphones and a love of 80s sports games into one rather wacky package where cupcakes race moose heads for virtual gold. The new game, which Google announced this morning, runs in your desktop browser, but you use your smartphone or tablet as the game controller to make your avatars run, cycle and swim.

Super Sync Sports uses new browser technologies like the HTML5 audio, CSS3, SVG and Canvas, but the highlight is obviously its use of the Touch API to recognize the gestures you make on your mobile device and WebSockets to make sure your phone(s) and browser stay in sync. Up to four players can join in every race.

We’ve seen our fair share of cool browser demos recently, but Super Sync Sports’ ability to turn your mobile browser into what is essentially a very basic Wii U GamePad clearly shows how far our mobile and desktop browsers have come over the last year or so.

To get started, you have to fire up Super Sync Sports on your desktop browser and mobile phone or tablet (Android 4.0+ and iOS 4.3+). After choosing whether you want to play a multiplayer or single-player game, you simply type a sync code into the web app and then it’s off to the races. The music will quickly drive you crazy, but the overall experience is quite a bit of fun, especially if you manage to recruit a few other people to play with you.

Google says it will publish more information about how it built this experience in the next few weeks. Until then, you can always use your browser’s built-in developer tools to take a look under the hood.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch