It’s tough to overcome some of the biases that have become second nature in most businesses. But if you’re John Lucker, who’s a Principal at Deloitte, overcoming the “human factor” can be critical to the success of driving organizational change. Overcoming that is necessary, however. Read more »
What Zynga acquired from OMGPOP isn’t just a hit game or the team that built it. It’s not buying ad or sales revenue from Draw Something users. What Zynga’s really buying is a huge engaged audience that it can funnel into its other social gaming properties. Read more »
Zynga has acquired OMGPOP, adding Draw Something to its list of popular social and mobile gaming titles. Zynga reportedly paid OMGPOP for some $180 million, plus another $30 million in employee retention. Read more »
Animoto updated its iPhone app Wednesday, adding a much requested feature — the ability to add videos in addition to photos when creating video slideshows on their mobile devices. That puts its iPhone app more on par with competitors like Magisto and Vidify. Read more »
PubNub, which provides real-time messaging to web and mobile apps, just raised a $4.5 million Series A round of financing led by new fund Relay Ventures and Silicon Valley’s TiE Angels. The funding comes after PubNub recently processed more than 100,000 messages per second. Read more »
Airbnb expects a ton of bookings during the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, but it wasn’t the only game in town. So the U.S.-based startup is taking out some of the competition, with the acquisition of Crashpadder, which is its biggest competitor in the U.K. market. Read more »
Eventbrite is giving event planners a new way to sell tickets to their conferences, meetups and other events, with the introduction of a new, branded credit card reader designed to work with its “At The Door” iPad app. Read more »
If your company gets its food catered every day, you’ve probably heard of ZeroCater. More than just an awesome service, it’s also a great story about one dude that created a business by solving a problem for himself and offering that service to others. Read more »
A new startup called 42Floors is devoted to taking away some of the pain of searching for commercial real estate, making your search for office space more like searching for your next apartment, with a web-based interface to scan based on price and location — and pictures! Read more »
Digitalsmiths has added social recommendations to its product offering, creating a more comprehensive way for users to search and discover videos. That technology brings in real-time data from Twitter and other social networks, to help users choose shows based on what everyone’s talking about. Read more »
A new app called PayDragon hopes to make it easier for small businesses to accept orders from users without their having to wait in line to order. Once a user has downloaded it, he or she can add items from a menu simply by scanning a QR code. Read more »
TaskRabbit is launching a series of video interviews with “founders, entrepreneurs, executives, journalists and consumers” who are authorities in the Collaborative Consumption space. The series, called Collaboratively Speaking, kicks off with a conversation between TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque and RelayRides founder Shelby Clark. Read more »
In 2010, Rumblefish launched a website called Friendly Music to make licensing soundtracks for YouTube videos ultra-easy. Now it’s added a lot more music tracks and improved the discovery process, enabling users to search for tracks based on mood and occasion. Read more »
PayPal’s has released a new triangle-shaped credit card reader to allow merchants to accept offline transactions. But where PayPal’s pitch shines is in its ability to allow PayPal Here merchants to accept payments for goods whether the sale happens in person or from online inventory. Read more »
Givit is giving FlipShare users a place to store all of their videos. Cisco will alert them that they can port the videos over to Givit’s private video-sharing service, which will provide up to 2 GB of free storage to all former FlipShare users. Read more »
Do you want to see the most relevant stories from all your friends, or all stories from just your best friends? That’s the fundamental difference between what Facebook will show you in your news feed, versus the information shared on Path. Read more »
Uber announced a revamped version of the app to deal with surge pricing when it hits, which will better illustrate to users exactly how much fares have been increased. The update now provides a new average fare notification and clearly lets people know when rates expire. Read more »
SXSW 2012 was all about location-based social interactions, with Highlight being the belle of the ball. But for all the hype ahead of the show, a number of people I ran into there didn’t seem to understand why they would even want to use these apps. Read more »
Metro car services company Uber is expanding, with Toronto coming online this week. But it’s also exploring new possible features, like the ability to select the type of car you want to ride in. And what’s up with the BBQ delivery at SXSW? Could Uber become a delivery service? Read more »
A new startup called AgLocal is launching soon, which will give consumers a choice beyond just going to the local grocery store for meat. It also hopes to reduce inefficiency on the farmer’s side, by enabling independent farmers to sell their cuts directly to consumers. Read more »
The Tiny Review has ported its app’s functionality to the web, with a meme generator called TinySX. The site is focused solely on capturing the intricacies of SXSW, and to see what memes emerge from those both on the ground in Austin and at home. Read more »
With its latest redesign, Vevo takes music video viewing beyond the stop-and-start video experience available on most streaming sites today. With continuous playback of videos and Facebook connectivity, Vevo makes watching music videos online sorta like watching MTV back in its heyday. Read more »
Turner Broadcasting might not exactly be known for innovation. But it’s looking to change that, with the launch of a new accelerator program called Media Camp, which hopes to seek out and help early-stage startups focused on solving problems for media companies. Read more »
Docstoc founder Jason Nazar wants to make it easier for anyone to start a business, any kind of business anywhere in the U.S. To do so, he’s launched License123.com, which is like a one-stop shop for all the business permits and licenses a new business needs. Read more »
Highlight is already the hot app to have at SXSW, and the event hasn’t even started yet. But an update provides a more intuitive dashboard and adds a few key features to give users more ways to communicate with each other and save them for later. Read more »
I had high hopes for the new Apple TV and the type of interactive experiences that it could usher in. And while 1080p video is great and all, I can’t shake the feeling that this new $99 box has so much potential completely untapped. Read more »
Your phone now knows who you are, where you are, and who you might want to see. And at SXSW, all of those things are coming together in several apps that will make it easier to strike up a conversation in a roomful of strangers. Read more »
Video Q&A startup VYou is massively extending its reach with the release Monday of an Android app. That app, which follows the release of an iPhone app last September, could greatly increase the number of mobile users VYou can attract. Read more »
Last year, Localmind launched its crowdsourced location app at SXSW, allowing users to ask local “experts” anything about nearby bars and restaurants. This year, it hopes to alleviate some of the frustration of a town filled with dozens of parties and tens of thousands of partygoers. Read more »
Redpoint and BV Capital’s eVentures have combined forces to go after some of the fast-growing entrepreneurial activity taking place in Brazil, together launching a new firm called Redpoint eVentures that will have a local presence in that country. Read more »
Square is giving small vendors the tools to make intelligent decisions with the same sort of inventory management and analytics data that larger competitors take for granted. And it has the potential to make an even greater impact than its payment processing piece has made. Read more »
The big first-day pop in Yelp shares means that it’s now worth $1.5 billion. So what’s it to do with its newfound riches? Here’s a look at a few companies that might be an interesting fit, if Yelp were to go shopping for acquisitions. Read more »
Early results of Udemy’s Faculty Project have been pretty successful, with more than 50,000 students signing up for the program. But that’s not all: Udemy is also bringing on ever more prestigious faculty, with its first Ivy League professor soon coming on board. Read more »
The New York Post claims that Apple plans to launch a new streaming TV service this year. But take a closer look at the supporting evidence, and it doesn’t seem like Apple is actually trying to create its own bundle of video channels at all. Read more »
Zynga’s move to create its own social gaming network outside Facebook is a positive shift to reduce its dependence on someone else’s social network. But being a platform provider and aggregator of entertainment options is a hard business and not one to be taken lightly. Read more »
There’s increasing evidence that Apple’s March 7 event will bring not only an update to Apple’s iPad tablet, but also to its Apple TV streaming box. That could mean not just an updated streaming device, but increased convergence between Apple’s mobile and streaming video platforms. Read more »
Finding a place for your dog to stay while traveling can be a huge pain. Dog Vacay seeks to help dog owners find hosts to take care of their canines while they’re out of town, providing a network of affordable, local dog boarders. Read more »
Justin Kan has a new venture called Exec that aims to make hiring temporary help easy and seamless. Launching to the public today, the Exec iPhone app lets anyone hire an assistant to do his bidding at a flat rate of $25 an hour (plus expenses). Read more »
Facebook is giving brands new tools for managing the way they interact with users on the social network, with updated Pages that will provide a better visual experience to users and advanced administrative tools for responding to user messages. Read more »
Mobile ratings app maker Tello is launching Tello for Business, a Web-based way for business owners to get detailed analytics about customer interactions and respond to them in real time. It’s also announcing a $2.7 million Series A round led by Bullpen Capital and True Ventures. Read more »
