UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, has decided to raise the issue of Google’s influence on the UK government, after uncovering the fact that Conservative Party ministers have held meetings with Google an average of once a month since the General Election two years ago. There have been 23 meetings between Tory ministers and Google since June 2010, with Prime Minister David Cameron meeting Google three times and George Osborne – who as Chancellor of the Exchequer is supposed to meet with business leaders – four times in two years.

The story needs to be a seen in a wider context. The Conservatives have recently come under fire for having too close a relationship to another powerful entity, News Corporation (as did the Labour party during its tenure). A huge inquiry into Press standards has in large part focused on the ties between Rupert Murdoch’s media giant and the Conservatives.

But what the report buries way down in the article, is the number of times the newspaper itself has met with the Government. A Google spokesperson told us: “It’s absolutely right that governments speak with companies about issues that affect their citizens. The British Government makes the list of those meetings publicly available – including the Daily Mail’s 34 meetings over the same period.” In other words, the Daily Mail has met with the Government almost one and a half times a month (on average) since they entered office – that’s quite a bit more than Google has. It’s likely those were high-level meetings, not editorial ones.

That said, the issue does raise the question of Google’s closeness to the UK government and its ability to grab the ear of the Government on a number of topics. It’s the kind of access a lot of companies would be envious of.

Culture minister Ed Vaizey has met the firm seven times. Culture Secretary boss Jeremy Hunt has held four meetings. In David Cameron’s first months as party leader in 2006 and 2007 (though not yet Prime Minister), he spoke to the annual Google Zeitgeist conference.

Three senior figures have moved between the Tories and Google in the last few years. Rachel Whetstone is Global head of communications and public policy at Google and is married to David Cameron’s former chief of staff, Steve Hilton. Naomi Gummer was formerly adviser to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, but is now a public policy adviser to Google. Amy Fisher Was a press officer for Google, and is now a special adviser to the Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman.

On Hilton, the right wing Daily Mail newspaper has rarely missed an opportunity to attack his more radical attempts to shake up government thinking about technology and its effect on society. But it’s more likely that the Conservatives – in part driven by Hilton’s thinking – have realised that the world has moved away from the green-screen, big-IT projects which used to fill the coffers of the likes of EDS and others, towards embracing a more open standards approach. On the ground this has fed into attempts to open up government data, and led also the innovative project known as Gov.uk, which is taking a startup approach to government online, employing many of the UK’s best engineers and tech stars.

It’s also quite something to see a sentence describing Hilton as the “shaven-headed son of Hungarian immigrants” – a phrase which betrays the Mail’s antipathy to alternative thinking.

In March it was announced that Mr. Hilton was going to take an academic post at Stanford University in California to be near his wife who works at Google. He plans to return next year, though it’s not yet clear whether he will re-join the government.

Of course, back in the real world, these West Wing-like moves of advisers between big business and governments go on literally all the time. We don’t currently have the equivalent figures for meetings with Microsoft or Cisco, or Facebook, IBM or other companies, but I’d be amazed if there were not similar factoids waiting to scurry forth if someone someone decided to lift a few rocks. Indeed, Microsoft, Cisco and many other large tech companies have appeared several times at the government’s ‘Tech City’ meetings.

So quite why the Daily Mail has decided to home in on this issue is a little bit of a mystery. It may be that the story was placed as an attack by the Labour Party. Their health IT scheme to store patients’ records failed spectacularly just before they left office, so they would have smarted at the suggestion by Cameron that a company like Google could probably do a better job.

The newspaper quotes Helen Goodman, Labour’s media spokesman, who says “Of course it is important for ministers to listen to business, but a meeting with Google every month does look like the sort of privileged access that small businesses can only dream of.” Unfortunately, she neglects to mention the numerous tiny tech startups that have been invited to Number 10 Downing Street over the last couple of years as part of the government’s Tech City initiative, and its purchase of an entire building – Campus London – in East London which is housing small tech startups that have have nothing to do with Google. (As disclosure, I’m co-founder of a co-working space that’s a tenant in that building, but frankly, I’d point this out even if it wasn’t).

Then again, Google doesn’t help its own cause. In Europe it does not have a great record on tax. As Goodman points out: “Ministers must disclose what they discussed. Did they challenge Google over their repellent tax avoidance, which was uncovered by the Daily Mail?”

It’s here that criticism could land a big punch. Google has been oft criticised for paying tax on less than a quarter of its UK income. In 2010 it generated £2.1 billion in the UK but with its international operations based Ireland, where corporation tax is much lower than the UK, it escapes a great deal of tax.

And Google hasn’t always helped its own cause.

Last month Google executive Naomi Gummer, until recently a Conservative minister’s political adviser, caused a furore in the press when she implied (not unreasonably?) that it was the job of parents to stop children seeing adult content online, not Internet companies. Currently a debate rages in the UK about creating an ‘off switch’ at ISP level to block porn, allowing parents baffled by content settings or Net Nanny software to simply order a ‘clean’ version of the Internet direct from their ISP.

A Conservative Party spokesman told the Mail: “All these meetings have been properly declared and it is normal for relevant ministers to meet with a company of this size.”

Ultimately the Mail’s story does raise questions of perceptions over-all but as a major UK tech player, it would be extremely odd for it not to meet with whoever was in power fairly regularly. Neither Facebook not Twitter, for instance, have anything like the huge engineering bases and offices Google has in the UK. Do we want our politicians to remain in a worldview of tech dominated by the desktop and ‘licenses’ or one where developers, startups and apps can thrive? I’d hazard not.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Some of you are probably reading this post with ad blocker right now — and to be honest, I don’t blame you. Sure, there’s the occasional amusing or genuinely useful ad, but not terribly often, so why not install a plugin and avoid the whole mess? Of course, those ads make money, so if ad blockers become widespread enough, it could be a real problem for online publishers (who have enough problems already).

Israeli startup ClarityRay says it’s not something looming in the misty future — it’s happening now, and it’s only going to get worse.

In a recent study, the company claims to have looked at “over 100 million impressions across several top-tier publishers in the US and Europe” finding that 9.26 percent of all impressions were blocked. The likelihood that someone is using an ad blocker varies significantly by browser — Firefox users are the most likely to use a blocker, followed by Safari (the desktop version) and then Chrome. The report goes on:

The combined market share of Chrome and Firefox is only increasing. Moreover, the great popularity of ad-blockers points to a strong public need; as awareness increases, a free, widely available solution that is one-click away on every platform is bound to increase its consumer adoption. It is, therefore, our estimate that ad-blocking will double within 20 months.

The company’s logic, at least as presented here, didn’t quite convince me that ad blocking will double, but I’m not debating the larger points. Naturally, ClarityRay is offering a solution.

“We believe ad-blocking today is a lot like how pirate MP3′s were before iTunes: they point to a valid consumer need, but do so in an unsustainable manner business wise,” says co-founder and CEO Ido Yablonka.

In other words, Yablonka wants to provide an alternative that addresses the complaints of the “ad intolerant” while allowing publishers to make money. To that end, the company offers two complementary products — one that bypasses ad blockers, and another that allows publishers to offer subscriptions for an ad-free version of the site. So if you’ve installed and ad blocker and you visit a ClarityRay customer, you’ll still see a single ad, Yablonka says. Don’t want to see it? Then pay.

At the same time, Yablonka acknowledges that each publisher has its own audience and its own needs, and he says ClarityRay customizes the program for customer based on crowd analysis.

Even though the company hasn’t received much coverage from the press, Yablonka says it’s already live with several large publishers, totaling 1 million unique monthly visitors. (I’ve asked him to point me to a customer site that we can see the technology in action, and I’ll update if he does.) ClarityRay has also raised $500,000 in funding from Saar Wilf, who sold his company Fraud Sciences to eBay for $169 million, and is now serving as the company’s chairman.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook began public trading today at $38 a share and a valuation of $104 billion. These are the top 25 apps on the social network the day of its initial public offering, as tracked by our AppData traffic monitoring service.

We’ll start with daily active users, which is a measure of the most engaged portion of an app’s audience. Note that of these apps, nine are Facebook canvas games. The others are mobile apps, web integrations, desktop apps or a combination. For example, Words With Friends is a canvas and mobile game, Spotify is a desktop and mobile app, and Socialcam has a mobile app, website and canvas presence. The top app, Microsoft, is a web utility that connects Windows Live to a user’s Facebook account.

1.	Microsoft	12,100,000
2.	Draw Something	9,100,000
3.	Texas HoldEm Poker	7,100,000
4.	Words With Friends	7,100,000
5.	Bubble Witch Saga	6,400,000
6.	HTC Sense	5,900,000
7.	CityVille	5,600,000
8.	CastleVille	5,200,000
9.	Yahoo!	5,200,000
10.	Spotify	5,000,000
11.	Astrology	4,900,000
12.	Hidden Chronicles	4,700,000
13.	Yahoo! Social Bar	4,700,000
14.	schoolFeed	4,600,000
15.	FarmVille	4,500,000
16.	Diamond Dash	4,300,000
17.	Socialcam	4,200,000
18.	Zynga Slingo	4,200,000
19.	Bing	4,000,000
20.	Samsung Mobile	3,700,000
21.	DROID	3,500,000
22.	Tetris Battle	3,500,000
23.	Photo Love	3,300,000
24.	Bejeweled Blitz	3,200,000
25.	Daily Horoscope	3,100,000

Next, we present the top 25 Facebook applications in size by monthly active users. This is a measure of an app’s overall reach. By launching Open Graph integrations, many of these apps have rapidly climbed our rankings in the past months, and drawn excessive media attention whenever traffic plateaued or decreased. Of these apps, nine are Facebook canvas games — and they’re not all the same games that appeared in the top 25 DAU list above.

1.	Socialcam	51,500,000
2.	Yahoo! Social Bar	39,500,000
3.	CityVille	36,900,000
4.	Viddy	36,900,000
5.	Texas HoldEm Poker	35,000,000
6.	Draw Something	30,600,000
7.	Static HTML: iframe tabs	29,700,000
8.	MyCalendar – Birthdays	29,000,000
9.	Bing	25,700,000
10.	Microsoft	22,800,000
11.	FarmVille	22,400,000
12.	Scribd	22,200,000
13.	CastleVille	22,100,000
14.	Hidden Chronicles	21,800,000
15.	Angry Birds	21,400,000
16.	Bubble Witch Saga	21,200,000
17.	Spotify	19,700,000
18.	TripAdvisor™	19,300,000
19.	Diamond Dash	18,900,000
20.	Samsung Mobile	18,700,000
21.	Static Iframe Tab	18,500,000
22.	Metacafe	17,900,000
23.	Words With Friends	17,600,000
24.	Instagram	16,700,000
25.	Tetris Battle	15,800,000

Be sure to catch up on Inside Facebook’s IPO coverage and stick with us to see how the app ecosystem evolves with the social network’s new status as a public company.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

INTRO, the ambient location app whose claim-to-fame is how it’s angling to become the “LinkedIn” of the social/local people-stalking space, is now increasing its business-oriented focus. With the iOS app‘s most recent update, due to roll out any day (minute?) now, INTRO is adding features that will allow members of groups to connect with each other, even going so far as to shut off networking with people outside of their preferred groups.

The company, which was already focused on professional (not social) networking, is integrating Meetup, Eventbrite, and LinkedIn groups for improved matching in the new app, as well as support for private groups, like membership clubs and entrepreneur networks, for example.

Explains INTRO Labs founder Anthony Erwin, “some people - particularly the power players, maybe’s it’s a top VC in New York, for example – still potentially want to network, but don’t want everyone jumping at them,” he says. “When they add themselves to a private network [in INTRO], they can switch off all other types of people connected to them.” In other words, INTRO will now help the big-time players do the networking on their own terms. That’s not a bad idea, actually.

The interesting thing about the introduction of this private networking feature is how it’s being rolled out. Instead of putting the burden on the user to configure this stuff in the settings, INTRO works with the network in question to automatically add INTRO users to the networks they’re a member of. Although seemingly a simple idea, doing so involves matching the user’s name, LinkedIn profile, email and location to the network’s private membership roster. Once a match has been made, a new section appears in the user’s profile section showing the badges of the networks they belong to.

(Note: if you’re interested in having a network set up for your organization, Anthony says he’s taking requests via email here:  ant@introlabs.net.)

Upon its initial launch, there are already 40 private networks available, mainly in New York and Londdon, which have the potential to reach to some 1.5 million members.

Also new with the app’s update is support for Twitter SSO, and, just in case the ambient location crown goes to another app (if such a crown ever exists), the company is working on an API, too. This could give INTRO more room to grow – for example, companies and organizations building their own apps for events or conferences could integrate ambient location features to connect attendees.

The update isn’t live in the App Store at the time of writing, but should be rolling out soon. In the meantime, you can grab  the current version of INTRO here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The children are our future. You can learn a lot about the future by watching them, particularly by watching how they use technology and how they consume media, and how that will translate into future business models.

Take newspapers, for instance: Somewhere along the line the younger generation stopped reading newspapers, opting instead to get their news online. (This idea seems quaint, now, for those of us who make our livings writing for web-only publications.) Or take my generation, which somewhere along the line decided that it didn’t want land lines — who wants a phone that only rings in a place you’re rarely at?!?! — and went mobile-first, and in most cases, mobile-only.

I thought about this trend when I saw a study YouTube did with Nielsen, seeking more information about the elusive “light TV viewers.” So what do we know about them? They’re generally younger — under 49 years old — and they tend to be well-off, college-educated, and highly influential due to their interest in social networking. In other words, they’re a highly coveted demographic among marketers.

These aren’t the people who just sit in front of a TV for five hours every day. In fact, they average only about 39 minutes of TV viewing a day, according to the study. But it’s not like they’re great outdoorsmen. Instead, they are finding their entertainment elsewhere — online, on mobile devices, on social networks, etc.

YouTube’s goal was to help advertisers better understand and target messages to this strange beast. The cross-media study with Nielsen looked at how effective ads were across TV, YouTube, and the Google Display Network. (GDN) And not surprisingly, the study found that advertisers can better reach kids who don’t really watch TV by also putting their ads on YouTube and GDN.

Here are the stats to back those claims up: According to YouTube (and Nielsen), campaigns that included YouTube and GDN added four percentage points of incremental reach to light TV viewers. More importantly, it cost 92 percent less to achieve those results online versus on TV. The study also found that putting ads only on TV didn’t reach some 63 percent of light TV viewers — because duh, they don’t watch TV.

But for me, the most interesting thing about this research around the “light TV” segment is that it’s growing, with the number of households opting for broadband Internet over cable TV increasing 22.8 percent over the past year. Granted, that’s 22.8 percent over a very small number, but it’s a much bigger percentage than the increase in the number of people who signed up for cable last year.

The point is that, just like the kids who stopped reading newspapers or paying for landlines, we can probably expect this young generation of people who aren’t really that into TV to continue to not really be that into TV. And if that happens, the $100 billion TV advertising industry will need to find other ways of reaching that audience.

As seen in the study, YouTube will be one of those channels, and an important one — but frankly, not the only one. We can expect to see TV ad spending shift to multiple new outlets as time goes on and marketers seek to reach an ever-growing number of viewers who are on their mobile phones, tablets, and PCs instead of watching TV.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Sales Marketing Manager Leslie Hitchcock is a non-editorial TechCrunch employee. In addition to working at TechCrunch and being super fashionable, she reviews startups and tech products occasionally on her personal blog, Leslie Just Joined.

Two of my favorite things are shoes and tech. That a site exists which combines both…well, where do I sign up?

Shoes of Prey is an Australia-headquartered startup where women (sorry, fellas!) can create shoes of their own design, which are then custom-made to order and delivered within five weeks of conceptualization. Shoes of Prey came to fruition out of the premise that somehow women compromise when searching for the perfect shoe out in the wild; that our ultimate dream shoe lives somewhere inside of us, just waiting to come out. I can get on board with this!

Until recently I hadn’t heard of Shoes Of Prey – most of their business still comes from outside the U.S. But I was given a gift certificate for a free pair of shoes by a friend, and that’s not something I’m going to pass up.

My experience with Shoes of Prey was incredibly positive. While it was slightly overwhelming to begin designing (so many options!), once I settled down and carefully considered the type of footwear I’d want to add to my collection (and it is a collection) the process became easier. What was missing among the shoes I have in rotation was a bright color in a shorter heel than I typically wear. With this in mind, I set about designing.

On Shoes Of Prey, the shoe style possibilities are endless: sandals, pumps, flats, skimmers, brogues (added as an option recently), booties, wedges, platforms. After you decide on the style of shoe, then the true customization begins. Shoes of Prey invites you to consider the details: peep toe, spectator heel, D’Orsay pump, slingback. And more. Heel type and height: stiletto, wedge, block heel. And more. Decorations: bows, trimming, Mary Jane’s. And more. The fabric: patent leather, soft leather, cotton blend, animal hair (sorry I’m not sorry, PETA), snakeskin. And more.

See what I mean by “slightly overwhelmed” and “endless possibilities”? There are lots and lots and lots of choices. Shoes of Prey doesn’t scrimp on options for one’s perfect bespoke shoe. And yet, where there is room for improvement is actually in the details. You might think that’s not possible based on the previous paragraph, but details like grommets, studs, bows, stitching, and different placement of shoe accoutrements are what give non-Shoes of Prey footwear an advantage over these custom-made kicks.

Back to my shoes. After I submitted the order in early April, the reality of bespoke footwear sunk in: “Your shoes will be delivered by May 8, 2012.” For someone significantly lacking in patience, like me, this was depressing news. However! It went really quickly and by the time they were delivered, I had almost forgotten about them. They were even early! But I won’t forget about these shoes any time soon. They are amazing.

When paying between $180-$300 for custom shoes from the site, attention to detail is significantly more important. Where Shoes of Prey excelled was in attentive customer service. I received notice from the site that my “beautiful shoes” (their words) were being delivered and surprisingly the next day DHL waltzed them into my office. (I may or may not have squealed and texted someone that they’d arrived. I get excited about these sorts of things). I’m a discriminating footwear customer and as such I was immediately charmed by the packaging and inclusion of an array of comfort enhancing accessories like cushions for the ball and heel of one’s foot. That Shoes of Prey supplies these items and didn’t force me to buy them myself was a really thoughtful move.

Perfectly timed, my order arrived on the day I was leaving for a vacation. Not one to shy away from a challenge, I immediately put them on and walked them through two airports with nary a blister. For the uninitiated, this is the highest form of a shoe compliment, typically reserved for high-end footwear like Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin. My new shoes also received tons of passing comments on how fabulous they are, naturally.

Revisiting my above disclaimer: a gift certificate may have alerted me to the Shoes of Prey, but I have at least three pairs that I’ve been customizing for my imminent forthcoming order. The only trouble is narrowing down which pair to pull the trigger on. But then again, when have I ever shown restraint in the shoe department? I think I’ll take all three!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Authors no longer have to impress stodgy English majors to get their book a quality review: new research from the Harvard Business Review shows that the aggregate rating of Amazon reviewers are every bit as good as professional book critics.

Professional book critics, on the other hand, suffer from nepotism: critics give more favorable reviews to their colleagues, authors who agree with their ideological slant, and if the book has been given an award by other critics. The result, implies this new research, is that Amazon has democratized the book reviewing process, with consumer reviewers less beholden to special interests and more representative of the book-reading masses. Perhaps most importantly, it rebuts critics who have claimed that Amazon is nothing more than a cauldron of corrupt and uneducated opinions.

Despite the strict editorial firewall between writers and commercial interests, “reviewers may not always have the incentive to provide objective reviews,” explain Professors Dobrescu, Luca and Motta in a new study of the professional book review industry. Newspapers and magazines are 25% more likely to offer a review of an author who has written for their publication before; unsurprisingly, the reviews are slightly more positive. Moreover, professional reviews suffer from self-congratulatory institutional nepotism: novice authors get slammed more often than established ones, especially if they haven’t won any awards.

The new research provides ample firepower against academic critics of consumer reviews, who say that Amazon is a circus of corrupt and uneducated reviewers.

“The democratization of reviewing is synonymous with the decay of reviewing,” lamented Professor of English Morris Dickstein, “The professional reviewer, who has a literary identity, who had to meet some editor’s exacting standard, has effectively been replaced by the Amazon reviewer, the paying customer, at times ingenious, assiduous, and highly motivated, more often banal, obtuse, and blankly opinionated.”

Others have implied that Amazon contains far worse than uncritical literary buffoons; Cornell professor Trevor Pinch, discovered systemic corruption within the ranks of top 1,000 Amazon reviewers, many of whom are given perks for good reviews or abstaining from bad ones.

But, if Amazon really is a literally cesspool, why did Dobrescu and his colleagues find that consumer reviews were nearly identical, on average, to professional critics, (under conditions when professionals would not be biased)? The likely explanation is what social scientists call the “wisdom of crowds.” A randomly selected consumer reviewer is no match for a professional reviewer, but the average opinion of all laymen is less biased than an expert.

This fact was famously discovered by Sir Francis Galton, who found that crowds of people were astonishingly good at guessing the weight of a cow, despite individual guesses being all over the map. Stupid answers are tossed around the actual right answer in equal proportion, marking the truth like treasure on a map surrounded by circular dots (for a fun video explanation of the wisdom of the crowds, check out the PBS video below featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson).

Moreover, psychologists have long known that experts are not the bastions of objective intellectual rigor that they are often made out to be. Berkeley Political Psychologist, Philip Tetlock, famously found that experts are no better at forecasting the future or interpreting evidence than the average layman; and, sometimes, they perform worse than randomly guessing. In Louis Menand’s words, experts “are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys.” Experts, Tetlock found, are biased by their own pre-conceived worldviews, and simply use more sophisticated analysis to unwittingly justify what they already believe.

In other words, both professionals and amateurs are susceptible to bias. But, on Amazon, the masses moderate the corruption, partisanship, and stupidity peppered throughout the crowd. In contrast, we rarely read more than one professional book review, leaving our purchasing decisions up the view of one mind.

At the very least, even if Amazon is biased, consumers will have far more in common with one another than a professional critic. So, as you’re deciding what new political tell-all will accompany you on your next plane flight, feel confident that the unpolished democratic masses have your best interests in mind.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A new breed of social media sites led by visual rather than text-based interactions is now spawning a new breed of marketing service catering to the new format. The latest of these is a startup called Curalate, which is officially launching today with $750,000 in seed funding from NEA, First Round Capital and UPenn-focused MentorTech for a service that lets brands search and track its images across the social network, whether they have been posted by the brands themselves or by everyday consumers.

Although the site is only officially launching today, in its beta format it has already managed to pick up more than 150 brands as customers, its co-founder and CEO, Apu Gupta, tells me. That speaks to how, up to now, there hasn’t been an analytics service available quite like the one that Curalate is offering.

Gupta notes that while there have been a number of companies that have jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon and started to offer analytics to measure how brands are resonating on the social network, Curalate is the first to look not just at what a brand is posting on the site, but it can also track what regular people are posting. In other words, not just the sweater as J.Crew pins it, but as you or I might pin it, too.

“Think of us as playing a giant game of Memory,” he says. “Everytime someone adds that sweater it adds that brand we play that game of memory and delivery the conversation and analytics behind it, all at ‘Pinterest scale.’”

Curalate is then able to track how that one piece of content moves throughout Pinterest and potentially eventually goes to a company’s site to convert into a purchase. Gupta notes that the solutions Curalate has built are proprietary but are based on some known techniques in visual search.

This is a gap that Patrick Chung, a partner at NEA, says is only now starting to get addressed, as brands continue to see huge traffic coming from the image-based social network — contrary to whatever reports we’ve heard that traffic seems to be levelling off at the site.

“Pinterest is being crushed under the weight of its own traffic,” Chung says, who notes that brands can tell that there is a lot of traffic coming to their e-commerce sites from Pinterest, but that’s effectively all they know.

“Brands  have no idea how it’s all happening, it’s just a massive amount of traffic being driven to their e-commerce sites. It’s just an enormous black hole. The complaint is ‘we have all this traffic from Pinterest but we have no idea what this is.” The idea, with Curalate, is that they will be able to now track exactly how that user arrived at its site — so that the brand can then hone and improve how it interfaces with sites like Pinterest in the future. Chung notes that while NEA invests in other social analytics companies — for example Hearsay Social and Sprout Social — Curalate stands apart from these in its focus on visual-based analytics.

Companies that have already signed up to the service in two months of beta use are a testament to how the service, in its early days, is appealing both to other tech-savvy startups but also more traditional brands. The customer list includes Birchbox, Bonobos, Kraft, Neiman Marcus and Curalate’s Philadelphia neighbor, the online eyeglass sensation Warby Parker.

Pricing comes in three tiers: $19/month, $49/month and $99/month for varying levels of service and tracking, Gupta says.

While Pinterest will be the initial focus for Curalate, the plan is to extend it to other social networks that are also making a significant impact not through text but images: other sites that are likely to be added into the mix are Polyvore, Fancy, Wanelo and Instagram, says Gupta.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yext has been making waves of late, what with the spin-off of their original pay-per-call ad business which has been renamed Felix and the launch of their new business, PowerListings. But this is far from the beginning for Yext — the company first hit the scene way back in 2009 at our TC50 conference.

That means founder and CEO Howard Lerman is about as close to a Disrupt veteran as you can get, seeing as though he was launching at Disrupt before we even called it Disrupt (tickets here).

I asked him to come into the AOL headquarters to discuss what TC50 did for his brand and the company’s overall success, as a part of my “Disrupt Alumni: Where They Are Now” series.

In the words of Lerman, TC50 led to a $25 million C-series round led by IVP and Sutter Hill less than two weeks after the company launched. But his advice to new entrepreneurs is very simple. Despite whatever success or difficulties you may have with your business, know that things can always change.

He saw a better growth opportunity for Yext’s PowerListings tool than he ever saw for Felix, the original pay-per-call business. That didn’t necessarily mean that Yext should abandon its root business, but instead they’re growing the two companies separately to get the most value out of each.

Lerman also warned entrepreneurs to be picky and careful about choosing founders. “You’re entering into a marriage with that person,” said Lerman.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies itching to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’re like me, the worst part about going to a baseball game — other than watching your team lose — is having to deal with lines at the concession stands. You end up missing at least half an inning wandering throughout the ballpark trying to find the stand you want. And once you do, you inevitably find yourself behind the one person who somehow doesn’t know whether he wants a hot dog or popcorn, and has waited until he gets to the very front of the line before beginning to contemplate this oh-so-important decision.

Anyway, no more of that — at least for this week, if you happen to be in San Francisco and plan to attend one of the many games that the home field Giants will play against the Colorado Rockies, the St. Louis Cardinals, or the Oakland A’s. Starting Monday, May 14 and extending through Sunday, “Uber for odd jobs” startup Exec will have some of its people in the stands of AT&T Park, ready and waiting to pick up and deliver food goods for fans too lazy or too enthralled with the game to do it themselves. All those users have to do is open up the Exec app, tell it what they want and where they’re sitting, and an exec assistant will be dispatched to fetch that food for them.

But before you start placing orders, be sure to read the fine print: deliveries in the ballpark will still carry the usual $25/hour fare as other Exec tasks, and there’s a minimum 45-minute charge. In other words, you’ll be spending a minimum of $18.75 no matter what you order, so you better make it worth it. Order yourself some Orlando’s BBQ, maybe a Crazy Crab sandwich, and make sure to get some Gilroy’s garlic fries. Oh, and stock up on beer.

The AT&T Park campaign is the latest stunt by the Exec team to test out different scenarios and use cases, and to get users more familiar with the app. According to founder Justin Kan, the biggest hurdle isn’t getting downloads and installs of the new app — it’s getting those who have downloaded to use Exec for the first time. So educating users on practical applications of the app, and showing them how easy it is to use, will be tantamount to the future success of the service.

Last month, Exec allowed users to rent time and chat with various startup founders, with the proceeds going to charity. And it began a program in March through which companies can buy credits for their employees to use the service.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch