Hey, mobile developers, have you ever wondered where users are when they interact with your apps — like down to the level of whether they’re in a Starbucks or the McDonald’s right across the street? A startup called Placed can tell you so you can act accordingly. Read more »
Gift cards are big business: The industry as a whole brings in $100 billion annually. But gift card companies are not exactly known for being on the cutting edge of technology. But San Francisco-based startup Giftly is bringing serious innovation to how gift cards work. Read more »
If you’re like most people, you probably don’t know your neighbors all that well — if at all. That’s where a startup called Nextdoor wants to help. Nextdoor lets neighbors create private websites where they can exchange local information while getting to know each other better. Read more »
If you’re a major organization like the University of Southern California or a publication like The Economist, it’s still a big undertaking to build and maintain a website that suits your needs. Enter Pantheon: A new service for running a sophisticated Drupal-based website in the cloud. Read more »
German startup Gigalocal has good backers and a name that seems inspired. But can its focus on a local market be enough to help open up a gap in the increasingly busy — but still relatively unproven — field of service marketplaces? Read more »
Even in these days of social networking over-sharing, some of the most important details of our lives remain in completely unwritten form. Proust, a startup that bills itself as a private place for families and friends to share memories, is trying to change exactly that. Read more »
With all the great languages, databases and cloud hosting options available, now is a great time to be a software programmers. But that same variety makes it very difficult to be the IT manager tasked with configuring applications. That is where PaaS startup DotCloud comes in. Read more »
Wildfire Interactive has had solid success with its flagship product, CEO Victoria Ransom tells me. Since the company’s public launch two years ago, Wildfire has attracted big name clients, grown its staff, and become profitable. But the Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup isn’t resting on its laurels. Read more »
If you think downloading yet another mobile app featuring photo-sharing, geo-location, and social networking is crazy, prepare yourself for a moment of insanity. MeetTrover, a nifty new iPhone app launched in May that perfectly fills the gaps left by Instagram, Foursquare and Yelp. Read more »
Lot18, the membership-only daily deals website for high end wine, is set to expand into three new product categories: food, epicurean travel, and spirits. Lot18 will start rolling out the new verticals, starting with food, within the next several weeks, CEO Philip James tells me. Read more »
Online advertising platform startup Taykey officially launched out of stealth mode Thursday with the announcement of a $9 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. The round officially serves as the two-year-old company’s series B funding and brings Taykey’s total investment to $11 million. Read more »
The travel web search has been one of the tech industry’s most crowded and cutthroat spaces since the launch of Expedia 15 years ago. But the stiff competition didn’t stop Adam Goldstein, the CEO of San Francisco-based startup Hipmunk, from throwing his hat in the ring. Read more »
Gamification startup Badgeville expects to book $10 million in sales for 2011, its first year in business, according to CEO Kris Duggan. He claims that being the new kid on the gamification block is an asset. “We’ve built this over last year with modern approaches.” Read more »
When teenage country singer Scotty McCreery won American Idol Tuesday night, it took lots of people by surprise — but the folks at Seattle-based startup Likester weren’t among them. That’s because Likester predicted that McCreery would win Season 10 of American Idol back on April 13th. Read more »
Resilient Network Systems, a San Francisco-based security and networking startup targeted at healthcare industry, has secured more than $5 million in Series A funding. Resilient’s technology is targeted at enabling the transfer of health records and other related information safely and securely over the Internet. Read more »
Online children’s clothing swap website ThredUP has attracted a user base that, for the most part, lives their lives well outside of the tech industry echo chamber. And according to CEO James Reinhart, that’s a big reason why his company has been so successful. Read more »
Depending on who you ask, social stock market Empire Avenue is either an empowering personal branding tool or another sign of the downfall of modern society. But according to the startup’s CEO, the company is based on a much deeper philosophy than meets the eye. Read more »
In recent months, 500px has become the new favorite site of a lot of Flickr “power users.” What’s especially remarkable is that the company, which is bootstrapped and currently has just four full-time employees, has attracted all this growth purely through word-of-mouth. Read more »
99Designs acquired a devoted customer base, logged millions in annual revenue, and achieved profitable operations without taking on a dime of venture capital. I sat down with employee number one and CTO Lachlan Donald to find out how the company bootstrapped its way to profitability. Read more »
Despite some bad examples of gamification, the concept of adding game mechanics to tasks has merit as I’ve said when done in a thoughtful way. And that takes offering real world rewards, said Irving Fain, CEO of New York start-up CrowdTwist. Read more »
Posterous, the email-based blogging platform, aims to keep things simple and easy to use, but it can’t resist adding new more advanced features such as increased support for groups, premium accounts for businesses, proximity-based geoblogs, and a better bookmarklet to bring in outside content. Read more »
Crowdsourcing is often used for fairly menial tasks: correcting databases, screening offensive images, transcribing audio. But what if you could make those little bits of human labor even more menial, discrete and interchangeable? That’s what the Finnish company Microtask does. Read more »
Six months after we first met the founder of Greplin just after he came up with the idea for the company, he’s found a co-founder, raised funding, launched a beta and gotten so much interest he had to stop accepting new testers. Read more »
I had a chance today to catch up with Metricly, a San Francisco-based company that just launched in public beta with the simple premise of making its customers an aggregated dashboard of all their web analytics systems, using both external and internal databases. Read more »
Solariat today launched an advertising platform for forums, social media and Q&A sites called AdLib, which uses linguistic analysis to automatically generate sponsored replies to users’ questions. It’s a twist on search-style contextual advertising to seem more native to online communities and conversations. Read more »
