The biggest boost is the addition of what Triposo CEO Douwe Osinga described to me as “opinion mining.” The company’s founders are ex-Googlers and earlier iterations of the Triposo apps showed a very Google-like approach to judging the importance of sights – if the algorithms picked up that a lot of people were photographing a particular monument, they judged that it must be important. Now they also search texts written about the sights or facilities in question, analyzing the sentiments that previous visitors have expressed.

“We started tracking social mentions in a number of social sites and used that to come up with a much better measure of what is the best place to have coffee in a city, for example,” Osinga told me. “If you look up what is the best place based on the star ratings of users, [it can be] influenced by naysayers more than fans. If one guy is a bit rude then their star rating won’t necessarily be high. Instead, we do text analysis of what people say about these places and correct for these things.”

Speaking of reviews, Triposo is now also integrated with the Yelp API so users can check out star ratings from that service. Users can also now share tips and pictures with each other more easily, as well as organizing records of their own trips.

The other big change is to do with Triposo’s maps. Despite being headed up by a bunch of ex-Googlers, the company has always used OpenStreetMap, largely because Google Maps doesn’t offer offline access – a total must for those roaming abroad – through its API. OpenStreetMap also boasts more detailed coverage than its Googlish counterpart in certain countries, such as the U.K. and Germany.

However, Triposo previously rendered its maps using in-house technology. Now it’s opted for Skobbler’s GeOS toolkit, which has apparently resulted in faster rendering, as well as a smaller footprint for the overall app. In a way, it’s surprising that the Triposo-Skobbler tie-in took this long to materialize, as both companies are based in Berlin.

On that note, Skobbler also claimed in a release on Wednesday that GeOS, which is still in private beta for now, is seeing “significant interest… from a number of companies, including leading brands in both the travel and automotive space.”

Osinga said the Android versions of the guides would be updated at some point down the line. “We first spearhead our features on iOS and, when we have a good understanding and know how our users like it, we also port it for Android,” he said.

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Over the past couple of years, the Madison, Wisc.-based company said it has attracted more than 2.5 million students “from middle school to Med school,” who have shared more than 100 million notes across Web, iOS and Android apps. On Friday, the company said it raised $9 million in a Series A-1 financing round led by Great Oaks Venture Capital and including the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and other existing investors. The round follows a $3.6 million dollar Series A round in 2010 and brings the company’s total amount raised to $14.8 million.

Through the apps and website, students can upload the content they need to study and then review it on the go. The app tracks what the students get right and wrong but also surfaces other similar content on the platform. For example, if a student uploads material about the Pythagorean Theorem, StudyBlue’s algorithms search for other user-submitted content on the topic and then lets the student review it. Students can see who uploaded each piece of content and then message the author.

“Having to share, compare and debate is a big part of the learning experience,” said StudyBlue CEO Becky Splitt. “The funding is all about continuing to refine our ability to enhance our data and connect students to each other in the most effective way.” She added that the funding will also go towards helping the company scale its team across operations and product development.

Other companies compete with different parts of StudyBlue’s business – digital test prep startup BenchPrep and digital textbook startup Kno, for example, let students create digital flashcards, but  based on content from publishers; Cerego, an online memory management tool, enables students to create interactive notecards for studying any topic; and plenty of apps offer students discipline-specific, static study guides. But Splitt said only StudyBlue tries to give students a “digital backpack” that brings any content in their backpack to their phones.

For now, the company gives students a basic way to track their own progress and monitor their strengths and weaknesses. But Splitt said the company is exploring ways to further capitalize on its growing database. For students, it intends to roll out more guided learning plans that tailor content to students’ mastery level. And, for teachers, it’s looking into creating a dashboard that lets them follow students’ progress – although Splitt said the company knows it needs to tread lightly in this area.

“We’re walking that line very carefully because students see StudyBlue as their place – in college, in particular, [they] don’t want Big Brother watching over [them],” she said.

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Now that it’s bringing on board a new CTO, however, it looks like the Carpinteria, Calif.-based company might have more to talk about.

On Monday, lynda.com announced that it had hired Frits Habermann, the former CTO and vice president of social game operations of PopCap Games (which was purchased by Electronic Arts last year) to expand its cloud infrastructure and build out its mobile and international platforms. Prior to PopCap, Habermann was an executive at Adobe, where he co-founded InDesign and was vice president of core technologies.

Since launching in 1995, lynda.com, which was founded by husband and wife team Bruce Heavin and Lynda Weinman, has built up a library of more than 1,500 video courses serving more than one million individual, corporate and academic members. On the site, users pay a subscription fee of about $25 to access the content, which aims to help anyone from novices to more advanced students learn software, business and creative skills through video tutorials produced in-house by vetted experts. The company has grown without the help of outside investment and, last year, reportedly hit $70 million in revenues.

Habermann said he comes from a family of educators and had been thinking about launching an education startup of his own when he started talking to lynda.com.

“I see a medium-sized company that is poised for growth from the point of view of things I’m interested in – the cloud, social and mobile,” he said. “My role is to help the company get to the next level.”

For starters, he said, he plans to enhance personalization and search on the site so that learners have better guidance carving out an individualized path. He also said that while the company has an iOS app, they’ll soon expand to other platforms, such as Android. Additionally, the site is minimally social in that allows members to share playlists of videos and communicates with users on Facebook, but Habermann said a focus in 2013 will be expanding into the “low-hanging fruit” in social networking.  Beyond that, he said he intends to explore live video, chat and socialization to create a more collaborative classroom – those features may take more time, but he said lynda.com “wants to be the world’s leader in that.”  To help upgrade the site’s technology, Habermann said he’ll be hiring a lean team of engineers, including those in service-oriented architecture and mobile devices.

One of the company’s advantages against its new class of competitors is its strong collection of professionally-produced content, but as other startups are showing, high-quality content is only one part of an engaging online learning experience. Updating its technology to enable more interactive and collective learning experiences will be key to helping lynda.com from falling behind.

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The disappearance isn’t a complete surprise: Twitter cards give you the ability to tap and expand a tweet to display content (photos, videos, article previews, etc.), so when Instagram turned off this functionality, it seemed likely that photos would eventually stop appearing in-stream.

Update: Twitter has put up a blog post explaining the removal, citing Instagram’s removal of Twitter cards:

“Instagram has disabled photo integration with Twitter. As a result, photos are no longer appearing in Tweets or user photo galleries. While tweeting links to Instagram photos is still possible, you can no longer view the photos on Twitter, as was previously the case.”

But for many casual users of the two services, this total removal will introduce them to the social battle going on between Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for total control of their photo experience. Instagram recently rolled out web profiles, expanding its presence on desktops and drawing users further onto the Instagram platform and away from sites like Twitter.

AllThingsD reported Saturday that Twitter aims to have its own photo filters ready before the holidays, proving that Twitter too is serious about getting you to filter and share your photos without any help from Instagram at all. The companies obviously realize how important photos are to getting users to share and interact on the web, so it looks like the competition isn’t stopping any time soon.

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The case against Apple isn’t difficult to make, as even die-hard Apple lovers will admit if you speak in a whisper or ask them after they’ve had a few drinks. As Gibson notes, there is the ongoing usability train wreck that is iTunes, which even long-time Apple users find has a habit of suddenly deleting music and other content with no warning and is actively user-hostile. Then there are social elements such as Ping and Game Center, which are virtual ghost towns (Ping was recently euthanized) and the grand-daddy of them all — the beast previously known as .Mac and MobileMe, now known as iCloud.

As Gibson argues, the ability to offer cloud-based services (which are really just web services with a fancier name) is becoming increasingly important for companies like Apple and Google, as they try to deepen their relationship with users. And while Google has always lagged behind Apple when it comes to the design and usability of its hardware, it has always had a significant lead in the web-services department. Compare iCloud mail to Gmail, or iTunes to Google Play, and Apple is the one that comes out looking the worst, not Google. As Gibson puts it, quoting a friend:

“Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services. I’m a long-time Mac user and a diehard Apple fan, and even I will admit that Apple’s approach to the web has been a clusterf***… Almost anything Apple does which involves the internet is a mess.”

Apple doesn’t really understand the social web

In an attempt to bolster its social features in the wake of the disaster that was Ping, Apple signed a partnership with Twitter that made the service the social plumbing inside virtually all of Apple’s products (and has since signed a similar arrangement with Facebook). Given that it already has that kind of relationship, there seems to be little rationale for Apple to acquire Twitter outright — as financial columnist Barry Ritholtz and others have argued in the past.

But Gibson point isn’t that Apple should buy Twitter to make itself more social. He says it should do so because Twitter understands how to build, run and grow a large-scale web service that handles hundreds of thousands of interactions every minute — something that he seems to believe is more or less impossible for Apple to do on its own. As he describes it:

“Not only does Twitter use some of the most advanced web technology, they invented it… Apple should buy Twitter not for its social network, but for its talent and technology. That talent and technology could undoubtedly help bring Apple and iCloud into the 21st century. The social network is basically an added bonus.”

Having advanced his theory, Gibson then goes on to list all the reasons why it probably won’t happen, including the fact that Twitter probably wants to stay independent and try to justify its estimated $10-billion market value, and Apple is “too in denial about the failings of its antiquated approach to the web to consider dropping such a huge amount of money.” As it becomes more and more of a media company, Twitter is also likely to lose some of the engineering talent that would make it worth acquiring, Gibson says (something he argues is already happening).

That said, it’s an interesting idea. There is no question that Apple’s biggest shortcomings lie in the area of web services, and there is no sign of it attacking that problem in any real way, although some Apple fans are hoping design guru Jony Ive will be able to help now that he is taking over responsibility for the usability of all of Apple’s products, as opposed to just the hardware. Merging cultures is never easy, but Twitter may be the closest thing to a plug-and-play solution for the company — unless of course Apple wants to reach for the stars and make a takeover bid for Google itself.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Mr Pics / Shutterstock.com

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When Trover arrived it was a tool for friends to recommend off-the-beaten-path travel destinations. But a few months ago, CEO Jason Karas noticed that his users weren’t friending their real life friends on the service that often. And they weren’t building itineraries as much as tabulating beautiful architecture or beaches they wanted to see someday, pulled from photos uploaded from all over the world. The collections weren’t, in other words, immediately practical. They were far more aspirational.

“This is a big change. It’s not originally how we designed the service,” Karas told me in an interview earlier this week. “We’re finding that people are ‘snacking’ on this instant or virtual adventure-type content. And when we’re looking at our stats, it’s reflected in the stats: people view more than 20 images in a session, and they’re not looking for a specific thing. They’re just consuming.”

Trover users started adding my Greece pictures to lists with titles like “Dream Destinations.”

Those stats show that in the past 45 days, when Trover had begun testing out some updated features (more on that in a minute), page views were up 35 percent, and in the last year, up 300 percent.

As regular readers know, I’m a fan of apps for travel. I truly enjoyed Trover in its first incarnation — but that’s likely because I fit the profile of people who consider travel and discovery a hobby and I mostly just uploaded photos I took on trips. I did start noticing back in the spring, however, while uploading pictures to Trover during a trip to Greece, that many users, none of whom I was friends with in real life or virtually, were “thanking” (the equivalent of liking) me and adding my pics to their lists. The ones that stood out to me the most were lists titled “Love to Visit” and “Dream Destinations.”

And, as Karas explained, those are the norm now, not the exception. The number of lists created every day has doubled in the last month. And at least half are these kind of aspirational or pleasure lists. To respond to its users’ wishes, in July Trover started rolling out subtle but important feature changes. These include giving a human editor the job of populating the app’s landing page with the best or most interesting content on Trover to pull users in right away; improving the search function and making it prominent so users can immediately jump to a location or group of images they may want to browse; and adding the ability to scroll through full-screen photos more fluidly — previously you had to click on a photo to view it full-screen and close it before advancing to the next photo.

All of these moves are about increasing users’ engagement in the app, which is far more entertainment-based than trip-planning, Karas said. “It’s kind of like NatGeo … a wisdom builder [app],” he said. “You’re learning a little bit. It’s not fully lean-back entertainment, it’s just [someone thinking] ‘I just want to be a little bit wiser about something.’”

Pivoting in the right direction

This is all actually good news for Trover. As anyone working in online travel search or making a travel tool knows, it’s a really, really hard business. Because very few people are always looking for a discount flight. No one is always planning a family trip to Disney World or a honeymoon or a road trip. So it’s really tough for new, small companies that are not named Kayak or Priceline or Orbitz to get a foothold because they have to constantly try to engage new users over and over again.

That’s why moving from being a tool that people only use to plan trips to an app people use to build collections of things they like (a la Pinterest) and engage in because they feel a part of a particular community centered on exploration, is a stroke of luck for Trover. Sure, it has to compete with the Pinterests and the Instagrams of the world for places people go to kill time or discover new things. But if it is able to eventually grow its user numbers beyond the 200,000 it has right now, they’ll be able to sell ads that are highly targeted because each user is giving them so much information about the things they like and the places they want to go.

And they have time. Trover was spun out of Travelpost, another Seattle-based travel company, and has the funding to tinker around while it finds its sweet spot.

To engage Trover users even further, the company does have more new features planned very soon, including lists that multiple users can contribute to and a desktop web portal so users can upload images not currently on an iPhone or Android device.

Karas admits lists weren’t the element he’d previously imagined he’d be building his app around. “Who would’ve thought when we started this? But that’s the way we’ve been playing it: experimenting like crazy, seeing what people want to do.”

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The next version of iTunes is getting a pretty dramatic makeover, according to a brief report published Wednesday evening by Bloomberg. The changes will reportedly be the biggest the software has seen and will be implemented before the end of the year.

There aren’t a lot of details regarding specific changes Apple will make, but the few that are detailed are telling:

The company will more closely integrate its iCloud file-storage service with iTunes so users can more seamlessly access and manage their music, videos and downloaded software apps across different Apple gadgets, the people said. Apple also plans more features for sharing music, the people said.

So Apple is going to integrate iTunes with iCloud. That makes sense: Apple has made it clear that iCloud is a core company strategy “for the next decade.” But it’s also clear that Apple doesn’t really have a choice. It has to move iTunes into the cloud and into the future to more fully embrace its post-PC worldview.

iCloud is just over a year old and in that time it’s come a long way. Customers have signed up for it — 125 million so far — and Apple has been integrating more products into it. Last year it introduced music, photos, contacts, mail and calendar syncing, and iTunes Match with iCloud. At WWDC this year Apple says iCloud will be integrated with its browser, Safari, Documents and apps in forthcoming OS X Mountain Lion, and it beefed up Photostream sharing features. Apple is methodically expanding iCloud to its product lineup — iTunes is just one of the next products on the list.

The competition is also something Apple has to be keeping an eye on too. Amazon and Google are both coming for it with their cloud-based content services. Google showed on Wednesday that it’s starting to get serious about going after Apple’s iTunes strategy, by adding movies, TV shows and magazines to its Play store.

Plus, iTunes is aging and could use a good polish. It started as a place to discover and buy music, but Apple’s continued to tack services onto it over the years: it’s no longer just a place to discover and buy music, but TV shows, movies, digital books, online learning courses, podcasts and, of course, the massive and successful App Store. This isn’t spelled out in the report, but it’s also worth wondering whether Apple will use this opportunity to make the software more manageable. Perhaps by taking a page from the iOS team, which has successfully been able to split apart Music, Videos, App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks and most recently, Podcasts, into distinct apps.

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For the unfamiliar, BuzzFeed is the brain child of technology and marketing whiz Jonah Peretti, who delights in churning out stories with pretty pictures for the “bored at work” crowd. The site’s bread and butter is stuff like “37 Items the Kardashians have slapped their name on” and “Flock of Angry Kittens gets a Bath” that are intended to generate a maximum amount of Twitter and Facebook hoopla. BuzzFeed  recently launched a politics vertical that offers items like “Eight Images from Mitt Romney’s business career” and “A Very Sad Picture of Newt Gingrich.”

So why is the ever-serious New York Times getting mixed up with this potpourri of pop culture reporting? The move is actually a shrewd one.

First, BuzzFeed recently hired Politico’s Ben Smith to lead up its politics vertical. Smith is one of the very best political reporters of his generation and he made his name in the online environment. His presence will give the NYT-Buzzfeed venture both gravitas and tactical guidance (in addition to the silly stuff, BuzzFeed’s political coverage has also included insightful coverage of health care, immigration and more). The new web video presence will also complement the Times fledgling online show TimesCast Politics.

Second, the New York Times stands to learn of a ton of new social media tricks. Unlike traditional news outlets, BuzzFeed is all about turbo-charging stories for social channels, an approach that recognizes that social is increasingly driving online news consumption. This means that the Times has an opportunity here not only to increase the visibility of its convention coverage but also to develop tools it can employ in other areas of its reporting. The Times could, for instance, be in a position to bring a BuzzFeed-like touch to its MOMA reviews or its World Series coverage.

Finally, a bit of BuzzFeed brashness will be a welcome addition to often dull convention coverage. The gatherings that once provided high political drama are now little more than tedious tub-thumping pageants — maybe more viral video will change that.

“We think BuzzFeed’s energy and keen ear for how political stories play out in the social sphere will be a valuable and interesting contribution to The Times’s video presence,” said Jim Roberts, assistant managing editor of The New York Times in a press release.

[Image by Muriel via Shutterstock]

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Kullect (pronounced like “collect”) is what they call a “social memory” app. It’s a place where you start collections of things you like, whether that’s your favorite lunch spots, pictures of cute cats, inspirational quotes, memes or videos. What you curate is a reflection of you

This might sound like Facebook or a blog, but Kullect is meant to be simpler. No need to mess with complicated privacy settings, nor does it require learning blogging software. Kullect is meant to be an easy, mobile-first experience that anyone can use to build their digital collections while keeping the time and place of where you found it.

“People generate a lot of content, but not all of it gets shared and there’s not a great outlet for it,” said Sasank Reddy, CEO and co-founder of Kullect. “With Facebook you might end up spamming your friends, on Twitter stuff disappears. And maybe you don’t want to start a blog.”

CEO Sasank Reddy

I’m not ready to post a full review of Kullect, but I think they’re onto something here. You can upload photos, for instance, that you might not necessarily want on Facebook, but that you really want to save somewhere that’s accessible online, say, your favorite mac and cheese dishes at restaurants, and that you can continually add to. I already have bookmarked restaurants I like on Yelp and favorite dishes on Foodspotting, but the idea behind Kullect is that everything you like is accessible in one place, not across different apps or services. Plus, I can personalize my collection of mac and cheese dishes and other people can comment on them — it’s a little more fluid than the way other single-topic services are organized.

COO Jeff Mascia

Kullect was started by Reddy and Jeff Mascia, who is COO, in 2010. The app grew out of graduate-level research on mobile sensor networks they were doing together at UCLA.

They’ve since moved to San Francisco and plopped their four-man team into a co-working space in the city’s South of Market district. They’re funded purely out of their own pocket with some help from family and friends and they still have a long ways to go — they have a couple thousand users of their app, and in their own words, a lot of polishing to do. But one of the things I liked about talking to them is that right now they offer great insight into what it’s like developing a social, photo, and discovery-oriented mobile app right now.

Here’s what I learned:

Mobile first, of course, but the web still matters. Mobile devices are the primary way people will curate or start their collections, but that’s not where the story ends. With Kullect, each collection uploaded has a webpage associated with it, and soon there will also be Kullect widgets to display those collections on other websites like Tumblr and Facebook.

“Mobile is the input, but the web is important for viewing it,” Reddy said.

Filters on photo apps aren’t a bonus anymore, they’re required. “People have come to expect filters as kind of a standard thing,” said Mascia.

There’s also somewhat of a standard emerging in the basic kind of filters users want, said Reddy. “We know people want the filter where the dark elements come out, and the one where they look vintage-y,” he said. “It’s not rocket science, just a matter of figuring out how to do that.”

The Kullect team isn’t a group of photography experts, so they set about sort of reverse-engineering the filters they wanted by taking a picture, apply effects in Photoshop and figuring out how to translate that look into lines of code. And thanks to iOS 5’s API for image transformation, they have some extra help.

Building an Android app can be tough on bootstrapped startups. Not because of the actual development phase as much as the testing process. Funded by family, friends and themselves, “We can’t afford enough Android phones to test, but we do our best,” said Mascia. “We try to use our friends’ phones.” But that’s still a relatively limited amount of Android phones they have access to. An equally cheap but much more difficult option? “We contemplated going to a Sprint store,” they joked. They didn’t, but they’re not the only mobile developers who’ve contemplated desperate measures to see if their app works on Android’s largely fragmented platform.

Despite that, Reddy and Mascia are not ignoring Android for fear of not having a product to offer a huge segment of mobile phone customers. But they do have some advice: Don’t try to take your iPhone app and make a replica with Android.

“It’s not the same,” noted Reddy. Make a version of your app that takes advantage of each OS’s features. And of course, “You need to have someone that uses Android — as in, make sure your developer is actually using the OS.”

Helping people find stuff they like is how you keep users coming back. It might sound simple, but getting discoverability right is hard.  You see services like Pinterest and Twitter  who get this right and their users stick around. “The discoverability side is where we’re going — helping people find stuff they care about, and figuring out what people like and suggest more interesting stuff to them,” said Mascia. As a place for people to express their creativity and their interests, Kullect won’t do well if users can’t find new things to follow or learn. Getting that right will determine the fate of their app — and so many like it.

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