Facebook originally started testing a new free (minus and data usage fees you incur from your carrier) calling feature for users of its Facebook Messenger app for iPhone in Canada early this year, and now the service is available to U.S. users as well. The free call button app now shows up in the app for U.S. users, in any conversation where both parties are using the Facebook Messenger app.

This is a pretty handy feature for users of the social network, especially since unlike with Skype, Viber or other VoIP calling apps, you already likely have a wide network of contacts you’d actually want to have live voice conversations with built-in and ready to go on Facebook. And while it isn’t entirely free on cellular connections, since it uses your data connection, it is completely free at home on Wi-Fi, which means it can likely replace a home phone for a lot of users if they’re still hanging on to one, or at least for-pay at-home VoIP services.

As Josh noted in his post on the pilot launch in Canada, this isn’t built on the Skype network, which one might guess based on the partnership between the two companies for voice and video chat. Instead, it’s Facebook’s own attempt to own every channel of communication for its users. It looks like the Canadian trial went well, but we’ll be watching to see how this works with the much larger U.S. user base.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

At first, the marriage between Skitch and Evernote looked like a perfect match, but after Evernote launched the completely redesigned Skitch 2.0 for Mac, the company faced quite a bit of backlash as the new version did away with Skitch’s idiosyncratic design and many of its most popular features. Today, Skitch co-founder Keith Lang posted an apology on the Evernote blog and outlined the company’s plans to get Skitch 2.0 to the point where it becomes “the more appealing choice” for die-hard fans of the previous version.

Here is part of what Lang has to say about the update:

I am really excited about the newest release of Skitch for Mac, but troubled by some of the negative reaction from some of our oldest and most loyal users. After thinking about this for the past few weeks, I realized that we’ve underestimated how deeply ingrained Skitch had become into many people’s daily workflows and how disruptive even small changes could be. We’re going to fix it.

The previous version of the app, Lang says, “was being held together by five years of duct-tape and good intentions.” To move forward, the entire app had to be rewritten. To turn the application into a modern Mac program, the team had to start from scratch.

Looking ahead, though, the Skitch team plans to reinstate a number of 1.x features that the community has been most vocal about. Among these are FTP/sFTP uploads, the ability to automatically create sharing URLs, short URLs, direct hosting of Skitch images, multiple fonts and custom colors, streamlined cropping and resizing and automatic type tool selection. That, combined with some of the changes the company made in version 2.02, should go a long way to make Skitch 1.x users happy.

In addition, Lang writes, the team is also working “on some really amazing stuff that should appeal to our most loyal users as well as bring in many millions of new fans.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last December, file-sharing startup Kicksend went mobile, with an iPhone app designed to enable easy sharing of photos and videos that are captured from your mobile device. Now, six months later, the startup is taking that same functionality and making it available to Android users as well.

Kicksend, which was incubated as part of the Y Combinator Summer 2012 class, aims to make file-sharing easy, with a way to share and access photos, videos, and other large files across multiple platforms. The startup has a web application at kicksend.com that lets users connect to all their files online. It also has access through a desktop app for Mac users, and an app for iPhone users as well. And now it’ll be available on Android as well.

Frankly, there’s a ton of file-sharing companies out there, whether you’re talking about Dropbox, Box, WeTransfer, or YouSendIt. So why go with Kicksend? For one thing, it allows users to privately share with friends and family. There’s also no real limits for file size or the number of files or amount of data users can share. That’s how Kicksend it trying to differentiate itself — by being all about large files and groups of files. It also has in-app commenting so that users can chat with each other about the files that they’re sharing.

Kicksend raised $1.8 million in a seed round led by True Ventures in November. Also in the round were Digital Garage, SV Angel, Start Fund, and Milo Founder and CEO Jack Abraham.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Search engine ranking startup Positionly has secured $300,000 seed funding from Berlin-based led by seed VC Point Nine Capital and joined by Angels Mariusz Gralewski and Michal Skrzynski.

The idea behind Positionly’s service is that small business owners don’t need to know about SEO. Its clients already include TD Bank Opower, ESPN and TUI. Users can either enter search keywords manually or upload them from .csv files or a Google analytics account. The Poland-based service then tracks search engine rankings over time, generating simple search engine reports. Pricing ranges from $19 to $99 per month.

However, its service proposition is not unique. For example, Link Assistant targets individual users as well as corporations with its desktop software Rank Tracker. The company boasts Microsoft Germany, MasterCard and General Electric amongst its 380,000 clients and is completely bootstrapped.

Positionly enters a crowded market. SEOmoz received $18 million in backing earlier this month and offers Rank Tracker within a broader SEO monitoring service priced at $99 per month. Conductor got $10 million funding back in 2009, and Searchmetrics raised $11 million with a recent found this past January 2012.

Editor’s note: This post is written by contributor Natasha Starkell, CEO of GoalEurope, an outsourcing advisory firm and a publication about outsourcing, innovation and startups in Central and Eastern Europe.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has added six more companies to its list of ad providers that have agreed to its terms for working with developers on the platform, since we last looked at the end of March. Some are better known than others, and include in alphabetical order, the amusingly named Appflation, Deal United, EasyAds, NextPerformance, Secco Ads, and Unified.

Ad providers, whether online ad networks, in-game offer providers, or others in the ecosystem, need to agree to follow rules set by Facebook around how they access data about users, the formats they use to target, and other criteria intended to protect users as well as Facebook’s ad-driven business model. Google continues to be absent, most likely because the company aggregates and analyzes user data through its AdSense performance ad network, in ways that Facebook does not allow.

The total number of approved developers has now reached 83, a wide mix of companies, some of whom have been quite active on Facebook and some of whom have not been. A few more details about the new additions: Appflation provides very few details about itself, Deal United is a long-time offer provider based in Europe, EasyAds is a Bulgarian online ad network, NextPerformance does online ad retargeting (with a French focus), Secco Ads is also an ad network, and Unified has not yet launched.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Content discovery engine StumbleUpon, which most recently received 17 million in Series B funding, is unveiling a new ad platform today, StumbleUpon Paid Discovery. Whereas the old Stumble ad model was primarily targeted to getting traffic for publishers, StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp tells me that Paid Discovery is setting its sights on bigger brands, like movie studios promoting a movie or stuff like NFL teams promoting their sites.

Paid Discovery ads (which can range in format from websites, videos to mobile sites etc) will show up in a Stumbler’s stream without them having to click on a banner or other kind of intermediary mechanism. Advertisers can drill down on the targeting the ads as well, by around 500 different topics and demographics like age, gender and location as well as by mobile platorm.

Users can also rate the quality of the ads, and more upvotes means additional (free) traffic.

Paid Discovery introduces a tiered pricing plan, serving priority and analytics services for campaigns, charging advertisers .10 or .25 per unique user depending on when the ad is served. The price points also include access to revamped system of analytics which takes into account information like user upvotes, demographics, share patterns and time spent on site.

We took some time to talk with StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp about the new platform and how it will affect the service’s more than 14 million users as well as advertisers. You can watch the entire interview above.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Check out Opera.com“, a spokesperson for the eponymous Norwegian software company asks of me. I oblige, and what I see seems to be Opera Software co-founder Jon S. von Tetzchner‘s email inbox, browseable and all.

Evidently, this isn’t the man’s actual email inbox, but seemingly the result of a night of drunken brainstorming by the marketing team at the wacky browser software maker.

Nevertheless, the actual news can be gathered by browsing the emails to von Tetzchner: Opera has apparently hit the 150 million user milestone.

That is up from 140 million last September, if you’re keeping count.

For the record, this is the total number of users, across the board, which means that they’re counting both their desktop and mobile browsers’ users as well as people using its products on connected devices other than phones and computers, e.g. television sets.

Obviously, that means there’s some overlap in users, but nevertheless, it represents tremendous growth for the oft-underestimated company.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We had the chance to interview YouTube Product Manager Hunter Walk at Gigaom’s NewTeeVee conference and talk to him about some of the milestones YouTube has reached since it was founded in 2005 (Warning, my voice is LOUD).

Along with the impressive statistic that there are now 50,000 hours of new video uploaded daily (35 hours of video uploaded every minute, up from 24 hours a minute a few months ago), Walk revealed that YouTube now boasts over 2 billion video playbacks a day, 150 million of those being on mobile devices.

Walk also said that the company’s two main priorities are improving personalization features as well as search. With hundreds of YouTube partners making six figures a year, Walk says that YouTube will be focusing in 2011 on giving its community more tools to create better content, such as a livestreaming functionality for all users as well editing tools and improved ways of finding programming. Says Walk, “We’re not really a media company, we’re technology driven.”

One of the ways YouTube is using technology to improve user experience is through the recently launched experiment YouTube Topics, which are metadata tags that if implemented will eventually allow you to search YouTube for stuff like whether a music clip is live, in HD or about snowboarding, for example.

Walk said that YouTube is committed to making the specific content people want more accessible, “It’s a challenge, how do we find the few hours that everyone cares about? How do we program for you, and how do we give you an easier way to browse through the site?”

Whatever the answer is, they’re working on it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch