Yahoo and Twitter have partnered to bring tweets directly into Yahoo homepage’s newsfeed on web and mobile, the company announced this morning. The move follows the February relaunch of the front page. At the time, the company debuted a redesigned site with an increased emphasis on personalization, as well as a more modern design.

The Twitter partnership expands upon this earlier mission involving personalization – a key focus for Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer – noting that Yahoo will now ”seamlessly include relevant and personalized tweets alongside stories from Yahoo! and our other sources.”

These tweets will now appear directly in the Yahoo news feed, which offers an endlessly scrollable stream of content, divided into sections like “All Stories,” “News,” “Local,” “Entertainment,” “Sports” and more. The headlines that come from Twitter accounts will be indicated by referencing the source by its Twitter handle (e.g. “@ABCWorldNews” as opposed to “ABC News”) and there will be “Follow” buttons to the right of the stories, allowing users to click to add the news organization to their Twitter feeds.

“Updates direct from politicians, celebrities, media outlets, and other publishers have become an important source of real-time news and information,” Mayer explained in the official announcement today. “140 characters can connect athletes with their fans, capture live chatter from the red carpet, and inspire global debate.”

Though the post did not detail how the addition of tweets specifically ties into Yahoo’s overarching personalization goals, that refers directly to changes that took place following the homepage revamp earlier this year. The front page’s selection of news articles now starts out as a generic grouping of stories, but as users click on content that interests them, the site adapts. The more it learns about a user’s interests, the more relevant and personalized the surfaced stories become. (At least in theory). This technology will now also apply to the tweets.

Yahoo has been moving to reinvent itself under Mayer’s leadership, gobbling up startups, paring down its scattered lineup and launching well-received apps like a revamped Flickr and its new Weather app for iOS, the latter of which may be one of the highest rated iPhone applications we’ve seen, with 4,206 5-star reviews out of 4,832 ratings.

It’s worth noting, too, that the revamped Twitter-powered homepage has a mobile component as well. The update is rolling out to U.S. desktop and mobile users over the next few days, the company says.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yahoo has been gobbling up startups. In the last week or so, it has announced the acquisition of Astrid, GoPollGo, and Milewise. In fact, in a tweet today, Yahoo said that it has “added 22 entrepreneurs to our growing mobile team,” thanks to the three aforementioned companies — plus a mobile gaming startup called Loki Studios.

I’ve reached out to both Yahoo and Loki Studios for details about the deal, but the news seems to be confirmed on the Loki website, where the front page currently announces that the team is joining Yahoo:

It has been a difficult but immensely rewarding journey. We collaborated closely with an incredibly supportive community to continuously iterate and improve upon [Loki Sutdios' game] Geomon. We were fortunate to have been advised by some of the best mentors in the industry and befriended many of our peers along the way. We surmounted immense obstacles, formed tightknit bonds, and worked through a few too many sunrises.

Now, our journey continues. We are thrilled to be joining the exceptional folks at Yahoo!. We believe fully in their commitment to creating outstanding mobile products. We are excited to learn from, work with, and contribute to one of the most well-known pioneers of the tech industry.

The note is signed by seven Loki team members, so it sounds like they’re all joining Yahoo.

The startup had backing from DCM’s Android-focused fund and it was also http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-why-youll-be-jealous-you-didnt-go-to-stanford-inside-startx-2012-1?op=1“>part of the inaugural class at the StartX incubator for the Stanford community.

It’s not clear whether Yahoo will actually be doing anything with Loki’s technology, but in case you’re curious, the company says it was working on location-based games, starting with its title Geomon. The idea is to incorporate data about the user’s location — “including the weather, temperature, time of day, season, and geographic region” — into the game: “Therefore, playing our game on the beach on a warm, sunny day provides a different game experience from playing at home in the city on a cold, winter’s night.”

Update: Yahoo just sent me a statement announcing the deal.

Today we welcomed Loki Studios to the Yahoo! mobile team. Their experience in community and location-based mobile services is impressive and we’re excited to have them on the team.

The company said that it’s not disclosing the terms of the deal, and that Geomon will be shut down.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

OpenSignal, the UK startup that has made a name for itself with its Android and iOS apps that crowdsource cell phone coverage based on data picked up from users’ devices, is branching out into another area that consumers love to obsess about: the weather. Today, the company is launching a new app for Android devices, WeatherSignal, which takes data gathered from different sensors, such as light meters and barometers, which come as part of a smartphone’s hardware, to create real-time, crowdsourced pictures of what the weather is like on a hyperlocal scale.

The app, the company notes, works best on a Samsung Galaxy S4, which is the most souped-up of all Android devices right now, “and other higher end Android phones will have a lot of the same features as well…but all Android devices released on will at the very least be able to contribute temperature readings and manual weather reports.”

Brendan Gill, the CEO and co-founder of OpenSignal, describes WeatherSignal as a “side project” at the moment, leveraging the platform that they have built out for OpenSignal itself.

“We got into this after seeing what you could do with the sensors on devices using the barometer on devices, which lets you measure humidity,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.

The idea was also helped along by an accidental discovery that Gill and his team made: as part of their larger look into device diagnostics and how they might use them, OpenSignal found that they could measure the ambient temperature around a particular device based on the temperature of the device’s battery.

“We ran an experiment and looked over a large number of people where we saw that it correlated with temp around the world,” he says. They have since written an algorithm that describes how this works, and they are collaborating with scientists based at the Royal Meteorological Institute of the Netherlands on an academic paper around this, which is under general submission right now.

While OpenSignal itself has a clear path to a business model right now — run as a free consumer service, the diagnostics can potentially also get collated, in an anonymized way, and delivered to carriers either to improve their own cell phone coverage, or for competitive intelligence against others (no announced customers yet) — WeatherSignal is at a much earlier stage in its life.

“We are just focused on consumer traction,” Gill says. “To be honest the simple plan is that we don’t have a grand monetization plan for the weather at all right now. It’s not a market that we know that much about but the premise is that we can make better weather predictions.” Plus, he points out, it’s relevant to so many types of businesses. And, as I’d point out, weather is a perennial favorite app category for smartphone users.

This also points to a wider ambition for the startup, backed by O’Reilly AlphaTech Venture, Passion Capital and Qualcomm Ventures, for what they plan to do with their business longer-term. “The vision is that we want to be a data company,” Gill says. “Lots of companies are gathering crowdsourced data from mobile devices these days. We think our solutions are effective because they are far more scalable and passive. We don’t ask a lot of people in order to source what becomes rich data.” He says they are not currently seeking any further fundraising at this time to further build out this strategy.

As with OpenSignal, WeatherSignal will be focused on anonymized data, and users can opt out of contributing even that, relying instead just on using the app based on other users’ data input. Gill and his team are working on an iPhone version now, too.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Betaworks is a fairly unique entity, as a holding company that creates, acquires and invests in a wide variety of startups and products, including most recently Marco Arment’s Instapaper. Betaworks founder and CEO John Borthwick took the Disrupt stage today to talk about his company and its investments, as well as the products it has created in-house like Giphy.

Borthwich says he sees how the Betaworks approach is strange, but on the other hand, it makes the most sense versus other models of investment and startup financing. The idea for how Betaworks operates was inspired by Borthwick’s time as head of digital at Time Warner, a company which had varying stakes in a wide range of businesses, a minority share here, a majority there.

“When I was at Time Warner running tech there, I appreciated that not everything was a wholly-owned asset,” he said. “It’s kind of a combination, and that’s what I’m building at Betaworks.”

Betaworks is a “collection of things,” Borthwick says, some of which it owns tiny pieces of, some of which it has created in house, and some of which are full acquisitions. Most of the things it does it builds, he says, including Poncho, Giphy and a new game to be released mid-week. But all the properties, both those built by Betaworks itself, and those that the company takes on ownership stakes in, are part of a larger puzzle.

“If you look at the products out there I think of them more as ecosystems or clusters of things,” Borthwick said. “There’s a strong relationship between the products that we build or invest in at Betaworks, they all fit together like a puzzle [...] Thinking about the entire puzzle instead of trying to invest everything in the highest growth piece is what we’re doing.”

That’s why Betaworks was interested in building a Google Reader replacement, since it fits right between Instapaper and Digg in the content space. At the time, they couldn’t talk about the Instapaper piece since that was still in progress, but that was the thinking around that group of acquisitions; they make up a larger picture. In general, Borthwick says that Betaworks is concerned more with high engagement users than with pure numbers, and all those apps have that dedicated, impassioned user base ingredient.

Borthwick says that there’s a new game coming from Betaworks midweek, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of that. He also seemed to suggest that Betaworks is currently in the process of raising additional funding.

In general, the Betaworks approach seems like an interesting variation from the traditional VC investment portfolio, and you get the sense that there’s a grand design. As Borthwick puts it, “it’s the puzzle that fascinates.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google just released Google Now for iOS through an update to the Google Search app for iOS. Google maintains that the service is exactly the same as Google Now on Android, though certain flourishes like swiping upward to launch the application sadly cannot carry over to Apple’s closed iOS ecosystem.

In other words, Google Now pulls in information from all of Google’s services. So even if you’re an iPhone user, chances are you have a Gmail account, a Chrome account, a Google calendar account, etc. Google Now for iOS isn’t built into the OS the same way Siri is, but because users will already have various Google accounts, the service maintains almost all the same functionality as Google Now for Android.

There are, however, a few Google Now cards that aren’t available on iOS, including Boarding Pass, Activity Summary, Events, Zillow, Fandango, Concerts, and Nearby Events.

“The history of Search can put Google Now in the best context,” said Baris Gultekin, Director of Product Management at Google. “It’s gone from serving links to being able to serve up links, and images, and videos, and deliver a rich experience. And then we wanted to answer natural questions, both in text and in spoken word. So to us, Google Now is the next step. It is answering the question before you ever ask it.”

Google Now is a service that has been baked into Android ever since Google introduced Jelly Bean in June of 2012. It pulls information from all of your Google services, like Search, Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Chrome browser history, and anything else that is connected to your Google account, to provide pertinent information before the smartphone owner knows they need it.

So how does this work?

Well, once Google Now learns where you work, live, what you’re interested in, and what you’re searching for, it can help you with things like remembering meetings, dressing for the weather, and even keep you punctual.

Google Now knows when there’s a disruption to your train’s service or a pile-up on the highway you take to work, and tells you to leave a bit earlier that day.

If you’re traveling, Google Now helps you find things to do nearby and provides translation to keep you in the loop. As Gultekin put it so eloquently, “during travel is when our users need us most, and we want to give them the best experience possible when traveling.”

There are a whole host of “cards” that integrate with all of Google’s services to provide the most complete and detailed information to get through your day, tailored entirely to your little world.

In many ways, Google Now is an answer to Apple’s Siri along with the handful of apps that are working to offer a digital assistant-type service. Though voice navigation isn’t really part of the Google Now equation the same way it’s present in Siri, the end goals are still the same: to give you the information you need as quickly and naturally as possible.

Launching the product on iOS makes sense considering that Google tries to spread all its services across multiple platforms, rather than offering a closed Android experience for Googlers. After all, not all Gmail users own an Android phone, right?

To use and enjoy Google Now for iOS, simply head to the App Store and download/update the Google Search app.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’re an Iron Man fan, you already know about Jarvis, Tony Stark’s personal assistant (who’s either a human or a virtual AI, depending on how long you’ve been following the comic). Jarvis is the glue that keeps Stark’s business, personal and super hero lives running smoothly. Which is why Jarvis is a perfect name for the digital assistant built by a team at this year’s Disrupt NY Hackathon.

Hack co-creator Felix Rieseberg talked me through how Jarvis works, using APIs provided by Twilio, Weather Underground and Ninja Blocks to help you control your home and check the current conditions, headlines and what’s making news, and more, all just by dialing a number from any telephone and issuing voice commands, It’s like a Siri, but housed on Windows Azure and able to plug into a lot more functionality.

Rieseberg says that a practical Jarvis is still quite a ways away, since it’s not a true AI and could get easily frustrated in real-world conditions. But the appetite is clearly there: he said he was already approached and offered seed investment based just on the quick demo that was shown of onstage, where Jarvis turned off a Ninja Blocks-connected Philips Hue lamp.

What Jarvis embodies is a natural next step for the connected home and digital personal assistants, but Jarvis is more a proof of concept than a shipping product. Still, one day soon controlling your home from anywhere and gathering information will be just as easy as making a phone call, and Jarvis is a suggestion that day isn’t too far off.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s only been about six hours since our Disrupt NY Hackathon officially began, and we’re starting to see our intrepid hackers hit their stride. Granted, some of them are a little farther along than others — Darrell found one guy who made an Arduino-powered robot for physically testing apps and devices — but there’s still plenty of time to bring some of these wild-eyed designs to fruition. Let’s take a peek at what everyone else is working on, shall we?

William Hockey, Zach Perret and Michael Kelly are trying to create a better way to visualize your credit card purchases. The so-called Rambler web app leans on the Plaid API to access a user’s spending data and the Foursquare API for location information — the idea is that users will be able to see their purchases splayed out on a map.

“By attaching geolocation and categorization data to transactions, we can hopefully see how an individual spends their time, goes on trips, and travels around the country or their city,” Hockey said.

Meanwhile, Adrian Benjamin, Troy Payne and Michael Mendez are working on a project called FavorRabbit. They admittedly drew on the TaskRabbit for inspiration. The concept is simple enough: it’s not entirely unlike TaskRabbit, but users can request either a small, big or a huge favor of fellow FavorRabbits via a web app and leave reviews for how well they were executed.

Altruistic users can replenish their favor stock by (you guessed it) searching for local favors by category and performing them for others. The notion of using favors as a sort of currency is a curious one, but we’ll soon see if these guys can make it work.

One of the bigger teams I’ve come across while roaming around today is dedicated to making the process of finding flights more social. Gillian Morris, Timo de Winter, Dan Hackner, Thinh Vu, Peter Kaszubinski, Michelle Lee, Nasr-Kyrillos Kelliny, and Camilo Marulanda are working on a flight search engine/booking system that taps into your social graph to show you friends in places you’re thinking of traveling.

What’s more, the team is trying to evaluate your social connections and highlight friends it thinks you may want to visit. It’s a tall order (especially considering they’ve got about 16 hours left to finish it), but some of them have been trying to disrupt the travel market for a while now — Morris and de Winter took home first place at THack London back in 2012.

Facebook already lets its users send gifts to each other, but Andrew Emerson, Vishal Gupta, Aaron Lu, Cyrus Rahman, Pat McCreary, and Anthony Guidarelli don’t think it works the way it should. To fix that, they’re working on gftr, a service that allows Facebook friends to create gift campaigns for each other. In a nutshell, gftr lets people pick one to three gifts for their friends, and invite others to contribute varying amounts to the cause.

We’ll see how it turns out, but I’d much rather get one gift than hundreds of birthday greetings on Facebook.

Of course, not every hacker here is trying to reshape industries — some are just looking to make our lives a tad easier. Consider WeatherLight, a project by Andrew Jiang, Neil Liang, Rachel Tsao, Zicong Pan, and Joe Li.

By combining a Philips smart lightbulb, Ninja Blocks sensors and a pair of temperature and humidity detectors, the team wants to give people an at-a-glance idea of what the weather is like — the lightbulb changes color when it’s sunny, cloudy, raining or snowing.

Alix Boulud, Eric Matzner, Venkat Rao, Tom Rutka are slaving away on a project that could help stay safe once you leave your house and hop in your car.

They’ve spent the past few hours slaving away on a GM vehicle app that automatically fires off a text message to pre-determined people once you get close to their location. The app taps into the Google Maps API (for now anyway, according to Boulud) to determine the car’s proximity to its destination, while the Twilio API ensures the message reaches its intended destination.

Only time will tell how these and other projects turn out, but we’ll be here documenting the development process as it unfolds. Stay tuned!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It was only about three weeks ago when the team behind predictive intelligence app Sherpa announced a hefty seed round and that it was rolling the app out to private beta users. Now it seems they’re all ready for prime time… with a few changes.

Since there’s already a glut of mobile apps named Sherpa floating around out there, founder and CEO Bill Ferrell thought it was high time for a bit of rebranding — to that end Sherpa has been renamed Osito, and it’s ready for you to download in the iOS App Store.

Here’s a bit of background in case you haven’t been keeping tabs on the app formerly known as Sherpa. Long story short, Osito is a predictive intelligence app that picks up on your location and scans your calendar and connected email accounts to display information about your day. While it’s easy enough to draw comparisons between Osito and services like Google Now (especially since there are some aesthetic similarities between the two), Osito’s biggest draw isn’t that it’s able to surface pertinent information on the fly.

Rather, it’s that the app is awfully smart at figuring out when it should display what it does thanks to its thoughtful reliance on location triggers. If it sifts through your email and happens upon a boarding pass for instance, you’ll only see it once you’re actually within range of the airport you’ll need to use it in. Osito’s work begins well before you set foot on the plane — in that particular case it will chew on your email to figure out when you should begin your trek to the airport and give you an idea of the weather you’ll encounter on your way there.

As a result of the three or so weeks that app has been open to private beta testers, Ferrell and rest of the team have added a handful of new features to the mix. This time around there’s improved support for hotels and accommodation information — users will get a notification the day before they’re slated to check in, plus another once the app detects that you’re near the hotel in question. The bigger change here though is that the app is more thoughtful about displaying what you should be doing next. Going back to the travel example, the app can now provide you with the ability to call taxis from within the app or display info on airport parking to help keep your sojourn moving smoothly.

“People like the information we’re surfacing,” Ferrell points out. “But they want it to be more actionable. Now we’re making sure to attach the right ‘next step’ buttons”

What really stuck me during my time fiddling with the app was just how rarely I actually had to fire up the app proper — Osito is plenty eager to display push notifications when it thinks you should be doing something, so you could certainly just let the app run in the background and react to whatever pops up. At this point Osito’s approach still feels like an understated one, and that’s just how the six person team likes it… for now.

“Our goal isn’t to be in your face,” Ferrell said. “That’s not the good stuff. The good stuff is sending you something when you actually need it.” That said, there have been more than a few internal conversations about what Osito will be able to do down the road — timely notifications are just the tip of the iceberg. Ferrell is awfully bullish on the concept of Osito as a platform and just not an app, and confirmed that the startup has been in talks with multiple potential partners who are interested in building experiences on top of Osito.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Long before the era of iPads and Snapchats and holographic Tupacs, some of the greatest minds in tech and science spent their life trying to understand weather patterns. Since, we’ve evolved to have an almost overwhelming amount of data on what today’s weather will be like, and it’s entirely possible that we’ve gone overboard with the notion of being ready for a little rain.

That’s exactly the premise that Poncho, a new startup launching out of betaworks, operates under.

Sure, you could download apps or log in to weather sites and get all kinds of hourly forecasts for the whole country, Doppler radar readouts, weather news (which is usually the most boring type of news), and a host of other types of information. Or you could see a daily breakdown of the weather in a way that’s meaningful to you, and only to you.

Poncho works by first learning about your daily routine. When you sign up to the service, you’re asked a series of easy questions about the flow of your day: when do you wake up? Do you have any pets you need to walk? When do you head into work? What time do you take lunch? When do you leave work? How do you commute?

After you’ve answered, you can choose to receive your daily weather updates by SMS or email.

“The core objective is to have Poncho become a default part of your routine,” said co-founder Kuan Huang. “We want to take you away from the noise of other apps and clients and give you the weather in a simple way.”

Updates from Poncho are clean and easy to understand. You get a general outline of the day, along with specific temperatures for the times Poncho knows you’ll be out and about in the world.

Huang is part of the hacker in residence program at betaworks, which is led by Paul Murphy and aims to pull talented engineers into the betaworks family in order to co-found and develop great ideas into full-fledged service. Unlike traditional accelerators, there is no application process and there really aren’t any strict curricula either. In fact, betaworks isn’t really an accelerator at all.

Rather, betaworks seeks out the most talented and creative entrepreneurs to supply them with everything they need to turn an idea into a business, at no up-front cost to the engineer (or Hacker in residence, as betaworks calls it). betaworks does provide a team, co-working space, and mentorship like a traditional accelerator, and they also take an unspecified slice of equity in the business, but generally the program operates very differently from traditional accelerators and incubators.

Poncho is just the first in a string of forthcoming product launches for betaworks, so stay tuned.

To sign up for Poncho, head over here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

Crowdfunding sites have become a breeding ground for smart watches and even a fair number of dumb watches. But assuming one opts in for such a portable time-telling conveyance, that usually leaves a second wrist available for product targeting. For those willing to join together with the band, a range of both inventive and connected wristbands have cropped up to ensure that ever more of your bodily real estate remains adorned with functionality. This week’s column will look at wristbands that don’t connect to smartphones whereas next week’s column will look at their higher-tech cousins.

Whacked: UVeBand. The rabbit holes of sites that feature products vying for your pledges is so deep that you can obtain just about anything through them except, perhaps, Vitamin D. Yes, as the weather warms across much of the country, there’s a stronger case for feeling the warmth of our closest star upon our skin. Those who believe in the theory of epidermal warming, though, say we must temper exposure to dangerous rays that can burn us. Sunscreen can certainly help, but who wants to think about the best time to reapply when enjoying warm weather fun?

An offer of help came from the sunny paradise of Oxfordshire, UK, where Inovia has created UVeBand, a water-resistant wristband that detects exposure to ultraviolet rays and gives off a gentle vibration when it’s time to reapply sunscreen. Backers would receive a band in such Yankee-Candletastic colors as deep-sea blue, poppy red, lemon zest and harmonious linen. Not enough backers felt the burning passion to contribute, though, and the campaign wound up with less than a tenth of the £80,000 sought.

Backed: PocketBands. The PocketBand isn’t the first crowdfunded wrist wear to enable one to store a trivial cache on the go. Chicago served as the birthplace of Gokey, a wristband designed primarily for runners wanting to keep a key at hand securely.

The PocketBand’s design is a bit less daring but a bit more functional. In addition to carrying a key or two, it can accommodate a folded bit of currency (take that, minimalist wallets!), a stick of gum, a small pill or two, SD card or other similarly sized objects.

With about 13 days left in the campaign, PocketBands has attracted about double its $10,000 goal and should be serving as a thin layer between wrists and tiny necessities in May in a range of colors and sizes for about $10.

Backed: Buntastic Band. The anonymous inventor of the Buntastic Band hails from Provo, Utah, where she is a full-time student with a part-time job. That kind of time pressure can lead to only one thing: concern about the looks of your locks. With time on her hand not occupied by a watch on her wrist, she created an unassuming leather wristband that can lead a double life. By pulling hair through a slit in the band, rolling it and re-fastening its snaps, the Buntastic transforms from wristband to hairbun-enabler, allowing any woman to unleash the inner schoolmarm at a moment’s notice.

As any scrunchie user will tell you, the Buntastic Band is hardly the first hair product to find at least a temporary home on the wrist, but the $10 product’s campaign has tripled its funding goal before winding down. Delivery is expected in May; Bunpits, you’ve been put on notice.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch