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Apple Takes Lead In Smartphone Shipments, But Samsung Is On Its Heels

2011-08-05T04:26:00.003+05:30

According to a report from IDC, Apple shipped more smartphones than any other manufacturer in Q2, stealing bragging rights from a struggling Nokia. With 20.3 million units shipped, Apple managed to nab a 19.1 percent market share, representing year-over-year growth of 141.7 percent. Samsung and Nokia followed behind, with RIM and HTC bringing up the rear.

It’s worth noting that HTC posted record numbers this quarter with 166 percent YOY growth to claim an 11.7 percent market share, up from 8.9 percent last quarter. The HTC Sensation and Evo 3D had quite a bit to do with that, along with HTC’s increasing prominence in China. Even though the company ranks fifth, it still seemed to eat a large portion of RIM and Nokia’s share. But HTC wasn’t alone in that — Samsung took a big bite, too.

In fact, Samsung’s had an amazing year, seeing year-over-year growth of 380.6 percent. Much of that success can be attributed to the Samsung Galaxy S II, which sold 3 million units in its first 55 days on the market. If they can maintain anything like that growth for a little longer, they’ll leapfrog Apple with ease.

Now for the bad news. RIM shipped a little over one million more smartphones this quarter than it did in the same quarter of 2010 — which would be a respectable bump if the smartphone market itself hadn’t seen far greater growth, hitting 106.5 million shipments overall this quarter. So while RIM didship more handsets, they actually lost a ton of market share.

Now for the really bad news. Nokia, as expected, performed worse this quarter compared to last year both in units sold and market share. After a 30 percent drop in units shipped, Nokia now controls just 15.7 percent of the market. Obviously, the transition from MeeGo to Windows Phone 7 has quite a bit to do with this. While MeeGo dies, customers are opting for brand new phones rather than waiting for a Windows-powered Nokia handset. What’s worse, the wait isn’t ending anytime soon, as the U.S. isn’t anywhere on Nokia’s list of countries to get the first Windows-powered handset.

Apple and Android eating Nokia and RIM’s lunch isn’t exactly breaking news, but seeing the actual numbers is always interesting. According to comScore’s latest numbers, Android has taken a 40 percent market share as of June. It just so happens that the manufacturers seeing the greatest growth — HTC and Samsung — also happen to predominantly run Android. It only follows that if Android can continue to grow at the rate it is, Samsung and HTC will follow suit.

What Are The 20 Most Expensive Keyword Categories In Google AdWords?

2011-07-18T23:13:00.001+05:30

Google makes a heck of a lot of money from online advertising. In fact, 97 percent of Google’s revenue, which totaled $33.3 billion in the past twelve months, comes from advertising.

WordStream, a venture capital-backed provider of hosted software that automates most of the manual work involved with creating and optimizing both paid and natural search engine marketing campaigns, has done some research to discover which keyword categories fetch the highest costs per click (CPC) in Google’s AdWords solution.

And of course, they made an infographic based on the results of their research (embedded below).

WordStream compiled data from its own, vast keyword database and the Google Keyword Tool to determine the top 10,000 most expensive English-language keywords over a 90-day period.

Subsequently, the list was organized into categories by theme. The largest keyword categories were then determined by weighting the number of keywords within each category, as well as the estimated monthly search volume and average cost per click for each keyword.

For the record, Google AdWords is an auction-based marketplace where advertisers bid on keywords to compete for top ad placement, with a minimum bid of 5 cents per keyword.

The top twenty keyword categories that demanded the highest costs per click are:

1. Insurance (example keyword: “auto insurance price quotes”)
2. Loans (example keyword: “consolidate graduate student loans”)
3. Mortgage (example keyword: “refinanced second mortgages”)
4. Attorney (example keyword: “personal injury attorney”)
5. Credit (example keyword: “home equity line of credit”)
6. Lawyer
7. Donate
8. Degree
9. Hosting
10. Claim
11. Conference Call
12. Trading
13. Software
14. Recovery
15. Transfer
16. Gas/Electricity
17. Classes
18. Rehab
19. Treatment
20. Cord Blood

Unsurprisingly, the list of most expensive keyword categories is clearly a result from people who, en masse, turn to the Web in search for help, whether it’s for financial, educational, professional services or medical aid. WordStream concludes that the keyword categories with the highest volumes and costs represent industries with very high lifetime customer value: in other words, companies that can afford to pay a lot to acquire a new customer because of the nature of their business.

But I would have personally never imagined that ‘insurance’ would be netting Google up to almost $55 per click. Think about it: that’s about 1,100 times the minimum bid per keyword.

Google+: One Hell Of A Trojan Horse

2011-07-17T15:09:00.013+05:30

There’s no shortage of Google+ in the air these days. Overeager pundits and soothsayers are hoping to be among the most visible voices on the net saying which service or company it’s going to topple, why it’s going to fail or succeed, and why it should or shouldn’t be more like this or that.

It all seems awfully premature, considering Google+ is just getting started, and I don’t mean in user numbers. We’re all familiar enough with Google products to know that practically everything they’ve ever done was launched early and incomplete, whether it went on to succeed (Gmail, Android) or not (Orkut, Wave). Most if not all of the big talk surrounding the network right now will have to be adjusted in a month, six months, and a year from now. It’s fun to speculate, but Google is always playing the long game. Google+ isn’t just half-baked; they haven’t even put it in the oven yet. Let’s not judge the cookie by the dough.

Is it an alternative to Facebook? Yes. To Twitter? Yes. To Yammer, to productivity suites, to Skype, to Office, to Microsoft, to Apple? If it isn’t now, you better believe it will be. Google is like a kind of Troll-Borg. You think they put out something that stands on its own, a “Facebook killer” or an “iPhone killer” — but it’s only later that you realize that the separation from the mothership was just an illusion, and the entire bulk of Google was right there the whole time. But it’s too late — you’ve been assimilated. Problem?

I wrote a long time ago about how all these little projects of theirs would be connected and unified, the way the Romans unified their empire by joining all the little roads to their big roads. I thought it was going to happen with Chrome OS, but a tumultuous mobile market meant a late start there; Google+ is more of a clear step in that direction now.

The thing is, as I wrote then, you can’t take the measure of Rome by looking at just one of their roads. And you can’t take the measure of Google+ right now, because it’s just the first mile. The best way to debut the connecting tissue of their web empire wasn’t to make an OS — the market wasn’t ready for that. So after an OS, what is the most popular and accessible platform? Mobile (check) then Facebook, around which there’s growing enmity, distrust, and boredom. Iron: hot. Pile all the Google services into that big wooden horse and say “here’s a nice, secure alternative for sharing things with your friends.” Don’t mention the fact that lurking inside it (waiting for a reveal a few months down the line) are a hundred ways of sucking users away from their existing services — in ways that neither Facebook, Microsoft, nor Apple can. Is it about social? Yeah, because that was the face Google needed to wear this week. Beware of geeks bearing gifts.

I suppose I’ve done what I cautioned everyone else not to do: speculate on a product that’s barely even there. 10 million users is great, but the meteoric rise and fall of countless web services can bear witness to the fact that the first month is probably the least important in a service’s lifetime. Around Thanksgiving we might be talking about how silly we all sounded talking up the ghost town that is Google+. Or maybe some of us will be calling an emergency meeting in the board room because Google just ate our business model alive.

Whatever the case, I feel confident in saying that Google’s long haul plan for + is subtle, sinister, and far-reaching. Not evil, exactly, but cunning and ruthless. Sure, right now it seems like it’s aimed at Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter, but when the stakes are this high, you better believe they’ve got guns pointed at everyone in the room. Comparing features with its immediate competitors misses the point, and at any rate the landscape shifts so frequently that such comparisons are fleeting to begin with. Think big, and think sneaky. Eric Schmidt seems like a nice guy, but I sure would rather have Zuckerberg or Ballmer for an enemy. I guess we can continue to talk about it, but personally, I’m getting some popcorn first.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe: Skype Vulnerabilities Emerge

2011-07-17T14:55:00.004+05:30

Silly hackers are always trying to ruin the Internet and they have found yet another target in the form of popular VOIP software Skype. According to the sweetest text security report ever, linked from h-online’s recap:

“Skype suffers from a persistent Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability due to a lack of input validation and output sanitization of the ‘mobile phone’ profile entry. Other input fields may also be affected.”

I love that—output sanitization. Basically what this means is that an attacker can embed JavaScript in the mobile phone field of his or her profile description. Skype doesn’t filter this field which means this JavaScript can be executed when a contact of the attacker logs in. From there, all kinds of bad things can happen like account access or even system level access. According to Levent Kayan, the current version of Skype is affected (ver. 5.3.0.120 ) and Skype is aware of the issue and should have a patch available next week. Skype is downplaying the issue a bit noting that “the attacker must appear in the victim’s list of frequent contacts” in order to take advantage of the security issue.

What is the moral of the story? Until next week, remember that your mother-in-law overseas (with whom you Skype on a regular basis) can now compromise your system and bring you down! Beware!

The Space Debris Threat And How To Handle It

2011-07-17T14:38:00.007+05:30

Yesterday marked a momentous day in U.S. history as NASA launched its final space shuttle, ending a 30-year era. Four astronauts—commander Chris Ferguson, pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Rex Walheim and Sandy Magnus—are leading the 12-day Atlantis mission, the 135th and final flight of the storied space shuttle program. After Atlantis returns to Earth, NASA will officially retire the program and shift its focus to developing next-generation crew exploration vehicles (CEV) capable of carrying crew and cargoes to Earth’s orbit, the moon and Mars.

But just days before the Atlantis launch, something unexpected made headlines.

Rocketing past the International Space Station at 29,000 miles per hour, a piece of space debris came only 1,100 feet away from a collision, forcing crew members to take refuge in two space capsules reserved for an emergency escape.

Since the launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957, Earth’s low orbit has become increasingly filled with man-made space debris—objects ranging from a single fleck of paint to larger explosion and collision fragments to entire defunct satellites. Just two years ago, an Iridium satellite collided with an expired Russian Cosmos spacecraft, significantly contributing to the amount of debris already orbiting the Earth.

A piece of debris as small as one centimeter traveling at incredibly high speeds can completely destroy an operational satellite if the orbits of the two intersect. Leveraging existing technologies, more than 20,000 objects have been catalogued by Space Command, but it is estimated that more than half a million pieces exist. Though untracked, these pieces of “space junk” can be lethal to our space systems—from military space systems to commercial systems to civil space systems—no one is invulnerable to the threat.

Our Increasing Dependence on Space

Throughout the past ten years, space has become inextricably linked to all aspects of human life. Just try to imagine one day without essentials like ATM machines, GPS devices, DirectTV and Weather.com. Both private activity and global commerce largely depend on communication, remote sensing and navigation satellites from space. Just three years ago, world government space program expenditures reached historical highs of more than $62 billion dollars.

Similarly, space has become vital to military operations. Investments in satellite communications programs have been climbing rapidly, reaching $6.6 billion spent in 2008 for both non-classified defense and civil programs. But the increasing importance of space to daily life, global commerce and national security has given rise to a major concern about the vulnerability of American space systems to disruption in the event of international conflict.

Consequently, more than 128 satellites are planned for launch in the next decade driven largely by our nation’s defense sector.

But this growing number of satellites in orbit around the Earth has made space a much more hazardous place in recent years. Low orbits have now become so crowded that operators are regularly forced to make emergency maneuvers by firing thrusters to avoid disasters.

This coupled with the rapid proliferation of space debris highlights the imperative for more precise space tracking and surveillance improvements.

Emerging Opportunities

In the near future, enhanced “space situational awareness” capabilities will be paramount to detecting and reporting on the proliferation of space debris and ever-increasing numbers of space objects in Earth’s lower orbits.

As various organizations and individuals focus on developing the next disruptive technology to combat the space debris crisis, the U.S. Air Force is simultaneously working to improve its space surveillance capability. First it wants to replace its current Space Surveillance System, or VHF Fence, which has been in service since 1961. The replacement program, dubbed Space Fence, will be designed to provide enhanced space surveillance capabilities to detect, track and measure these smaller pieces of debris as well as commercial and military satellites. For example, Space Fence will be able to detect a piece of debris the size of a softball traveling at 17,000 miles per hour from more than 1,800 miles away. This enhanced capability will allow precise cataloging of up to 10 times the number of low earth orbiting objects than the current systems in place.

Most importantly, Space Fence’s enhanced situational awareness capabilities will provide more accurate positioning data, providing satellites and spacecraft with much longer lead times to assess potential collision dangers and make more timely and strategic maneuvering decisions. For example, had this technology been operational during last week’s close call for the International Space Station, Space Fence would have provided highly accurate tracking data long before the threatening piece of space debris even approached. Instead of having only 15 hours of lead time, NASA could have had much more time and information necessary to make an informed decision to maneuver—or not—eliminating the need to consider an emergency crew evacuation.

Space Fence will be designed to create a larger field of vision using sensors in both hemispheres to provide a more complete picture of orbiting objects. Delivery of the first radar system is expected by 2015.

Once we have better data about what kind of debris is out there, we can develop all sorts of products and businesses to take advantage of the data and build better systems to avoid it. That’s where entrepreneurs and computer programmers come in. Improved situational awareness will create a host of opportunities for those daring enough to solve one of the most challenging problems keeping us from fully realizing the commercial potential of space: debris.

Microsoft Leaked Its Own Social Networking Secret, Then Swore It Was Accidental

2011-07-09T23:20:00.018+05:30

Hot on the heels of all this Google+ madness, Microsoft has “unintentionally” leaked its own social networking platform. Whether this is a grab at all the hype or a genuine mistake on the part of some IT guy, we still have one question: What the heck is a Tulalip? I kid… Fusible, which picked up the story first, discovered that the name Tulalip is also the name of a Native American tribe located near Redmond, Washington, Microsoft’s home turf.

The teaser page pictured below was published to the web today on socl.com, which is apparently owned by Microsoft, reports Fusible. There are rumors that Microsoft is the lucky buyer of Social.com, which would mean they paid $2.6 million for the domain name alone.

From the looks of it, this will likely be a venture into “social search” with Bing running the show. “With Tulalip you can Find what you need and Share what you know easier than ever,” reads the teaser tagline. Notice the capitalization of Find and Share? Yep, we’re pretty sure this will be where search meets share, which is kind of good news since you can’t do a Google search within Google+ (What’s that all about, anyways?). Oddly enough, there are Facebook and Twitter log in fields on the teaser page, which leads us to believe that this will be a rather light foray into social networking rather than a heavy-duty Microsoft experience. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em right?

The teaser page has since been pulled, while Microsoft swears it was an accident. Here’s what they replaced it with: “Thanks for stopping by. Socl.com is an internal design project from a team in Microsoft Research which was mistakenly published to the web. We didn’t mean to, honest.” Well, we’re still not sure if we buy into that whole “we didn’t mean to” part, but either way, we’re glad it happened.

How Hydrostor Aims To Change The Power Game By Storing Energy Under Water

2011-07-09T23:20:00.017+05:30

There has been a fair bit of concern in recent years about the ability of our power plants to supply adequate electricity during periods of peak demand. Hydrostor, a Toronto-based company, is taking a different approach in offering a solution that allows plants to store their power using compressed air in underwater storage tanks.

More specifically, Hydrostor takes the excess energy created during periods of off-peak consumption and converts that energy into compressed air via an air compressor, which in turn inflates accumulators placed under the surface of a body of water. The depth of the water keeps the air at a constant pressure, helping to store the energy potential.

When power is required, the air is released through an expander and electricity is produced. Through the heat-exchanger, modern compressors and expanders, the system approaches adiabatic operation, achieving efficiencies over 70 percent.

This technology has the potential to address the intermittent nature of renewable energy, help decongest transmission and distribution lines, and create better efficiencies of existing generation.

To date, Hydrostor has relied heavily on government and research grants to get started. They are now seeking further funding from both private sources and government groups to expand. They are currently in the pilot stage of a number of projects.

The benefits are obvious—tapping into a store of power when consumers demand it, rather than constantly maintaining a higher-than-normal supply would create a more efficient network. Hydrostor estimates that over 50 percent of the world’s biggest load centers are located by water and would therefore be candidates for their system. If this model proves true, it would save billions of dollars and the years it takes to build new generators. Hydrostor is not looking to replace new generation projects, but merely to make the existing grid more effective and reliable.

The company was founded by Cameron Lewis in 2010 when he identified the need for a more efficient way to store electricity. Cameron estimates that the cost of storing energy using his system is 50 percent cheaper than storing electricity via batteries.

He came upon the idea while working at a wind farm in Northern Ontario, and saw the potential of power storage. Alternative power sources, such as wind, require some sort of power storage mechanism to create an augmented base load. For the uninitiated, “base load” refers to the minimum amount of power that a utility or distribution company must make available to its customers at any time. A base load is traditionally created by running plants 24/7 to generate the required energy.

One of the traditional knocks against renewable energy comes over the question of what to do when wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, since demand for power never stops. Cost effective storage of that power would make it possible to create a reliable base load and enable smart grid technologies.

The ripple effect from this application would be widespread as there becomes new opportunities for energy arbitrage and increased viability for renewable projects near large bodies of water. One of the potential limiting factors of the success of Hydrostor will be its adoption at a larger scale.

All current projects are 1 to 4 Megawatts (MW) in design, while larger plants start in the hundreds of Megawatts. Cameron insists not only that this system can scale, but as soon as they have a demonstration facility to prove out costs to the industry, there can be large scale adoption across the industry.

Hydrostor is based in Toronto, Ontario Canada and is part of the MARS Cleantech Portfolio of companies.

Now You Can Use LinkedIn To Stay Up To Date On Who’s Getting Hired (And Fired)

2011-07-09T23:20:00.016+05:30

Today, LinkedIn passed Myspace to become the second largest social network in the U.S. LinkedIn has seen a surge in traffic since it went public in May and reached an all-time high of 33.9 million unique visitors in June.

Taking advantage of the professional social network’s continuing growth, Roger Lee, the co-founder of PaperG, has built a cool little service called, aptly, Job Change Notifier. As you may have already guessed, Lee’s service enables you to track and receive notifications when one of your LinkedIn contacts changes jobs.

As such, the service allows users to keep tabs on “persons of interest”, be they startup founders, executives, to find out when they resign, get poached, or are acui-hired. The service will also likely be useful to business-to-business startups and companies that sell their products to other businesses, as it allows them to discover when their allies are promoted or move into decision-making roles, for example. It’s also an easy way to stay up to date on your professional network and congratulate your friends and contacts for snatching up that job that you had your eyes on.

Lee used LinkedIn’s API to build the site, but is not affiliated with LinkedIn in any way, though he says that he has been contacted by LinkedIn employees, who have expressed interest in the site.

Of course, not everyone updates their LinkedIn profiles immediately following a job change, especially for those who have been let go, and there’s generally some lag time between a job change and its corresponding update on LinkedIn, but it’s still the fastest way to find out about your contacts’ career moves.

Using the site is easy, and set up is quick: Users simply enter their email addresses to receive alerts, choose which LinkedIn connections they want to track, and bada bing, bada boom, you’re ready to track.

Though Job Change Notifier only launched a few days ago, the site is already tracking over 300,000 profiles and continues to add swaths of profiles every day. Though Lee wasn’t able to give me a good breakdown of usage analytics quite yet, he did say that the site has already become popular among startups, sales and biz dev executives, recruiters, and, unsurprisingly, LinkedIn employees.

Lee said that he’s already been asked by LinkedIn if he would be interested in going to work for them, but he has no intention of leaving PaperG. (We covered PaperG back in August.) So far, notifications are only available via email, but depending on early user feedback and demand, Lee may add further notification channels as traffic increases.

It’s a great tool, and it gives TechCrunch writers another way to keep tabs on all you upwardly mobile professionals out there, so get back to work. Because we’ll be watching.

Update: It seems a similar service was also covered today on Boston.com that is like Job Change Notifier, but for recruiters. The company is called Bullhorn (as is the software they make), and the feature is called Radar, which “tries to identify talent before that talent is actively out looking for a new gig”. Interesting. Worth a look as well.

LinkedIn Surpasses Myspace For U.S. Visitors To Become No. 2 Social Network; Twitter Not Far Behind

2011-07-09T23:19:00.003+05:30

Professional social network Linkedin surpassed Myspace in terms of traffic to become the No. 2 most visited social networking site in the U.S. in June. LinkedIn, which has seen a resurgence of traffic after its IPO in May, reached an all-time high of 33.9 million unique visitors in June compared to Myspace, which saw 33.5 million unique visitors (that’s down from 34.9 million in May). Hopefully Myspace’s new owners can recharge the troubled social network.

Twitter posted record U.S. traffic, with June as the first month the site saw over 30 million unique visitors. Twitter.com had 30.6 million unique visitors in June, compared to 27 million unique vistors in May. The increase in traffic is actually a big win for Twitter, which splits traffic between its own mobile clients and the many third-party clients that are used to access the network.

Facebook also reached an all-time high in terms of U.S. traffic in June, according to newly released comScore data. In June, Facebook saw 160.8 million unique vistors in the U.S., which is up from 157.2 million uniques in May. The company also announced that it crossed the 750 million active users mark worldwide in June as well.

Tumblr saw 11.8 million unique visitors in June, up from 10.7 million unique visitors in May. In June, we reported that Tumblr was seeing around 400 million pageviews per day, thanks in part to international growth and faster response times.

Google To Buy Mobile Loyalty Card Startup Punchd

2011-07-09T23:18:00.004+05:30

We’ve just gotten word that that Google plans on acquiring digital loyalty card service Punchd.The team, which consists of developers Reed Morse, Xander Pollock and Niket Desai (and formerly Grantland Chew), will most likely still be working on Punchd within Google according to our source. While our original source pegged the deal at a low seven figures, a second source pegged the acquisition price at more than $10 million.

Punchd, which is basically the digital equivalent of the “Buy 10 Get One Free Card” offered by coffee shops and supermarkets, is part of Dave McClure’s first 500 Startups brood. The acquisition makes complete sense for Google considering how much the NFC and deals space is heating up and the recent Google Wallet announcement.

It’s been a great week for 500 Startups, which has now sold a company to Twitter (BackType), LinkedIn (CardMunch) and Google. Punchd itself actually made our list of “The Seven Most Interesting Startups At 500 Startups Demo Day” back in April (Guess Google agreed).

Fun fact: The company were accepted to the 500 Startups brood of “little monsters” after they “Iced” McClure.

Mozilla Labs Launches ‘Web Activities’ Experiment, Lets Web Apps Talk To Each Other

2011-07-08T22:48:00.002+05:30

Mozilla has just posted an update to its Labs blog, where it shows off some of the new projects that it’s been working on (which sometimes serve as previews of features that eventually get baked into Firefox or open web technologies). You’ll need to install the Firefox Open Web Apps extension to use them — and these are primarily developer-focused for now — but they both sound very nifty.

The more exciting of the two features, at least in terms of the potential for innovation, is what Mozilla is calling Web Activities (the concept has also been referred to as web intents and was originally conceived by Google Chrome developer advocate Paul Kinlan). It has a basic-sounding but very important goal: allowing multiple web applications to ‘speak’ to each other seamlessly.

The usefulness of the feature is best described with an example.

Right now, a web-based image editing app that wants to give users access to their photos that are already hosted online would have to bake in APIs for the popular services (Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, etc.). And if a user had a photo hosted on a smaller service, they’d probably be out of luck — or have to manually upload them again. Using Web Activities, that wouldn’t be an issue — the web apps would speak in a standardized ‘language’ with each other without requiring the developer to integrate an API for each individual service.

It’s a nifty idea, and it’s one that’s already working quite well on a platform you may have sitting in your pocket: Android’s intents system does the same thing, allowing arbitrary applications to communicate with each other. This project sounds like it’s still very early on, but it has the potential to make web apps much more powerful.

The other new feature showcased on the Labs blog involves web app installation. Over the coming months more web services will probably be launching web apps (in the sense that they’re available through Mozilla’s upcoming app market and the Chrome Web Store), but users may not be aware of them. Mozilla’s solution: if you browse to a site that offers a web app, it will display a small popup notification prompting you to install it.

Of course, both of these features are still experimental and may never be widely rolled out. But my hunch is that both of them have legs — the app discovery feature seems pretty obvious and helpful, and Mozilla is working in tandem with the Google Chrome team to bring the Web Activities project to fruition.

Indian Social Network SMS GupShup Wants To Help Small Businesses Reach Mobile Users

2011-07-08T22:46:00.004+05:30

SMS GupShup, a Twitter-like service in India that is primarily accessed via SMS, is launching a new service today for small businesses, BizShup. The new product allows small businesses to create mobile campaigns and send messages to the network’s 45 million members on the fly.

Launched in April 2007, SMS GupShup (spawned from Webaroo), seen traction from advertisers and brands looking to connect with Indian consumers. Businesses can target users based on location and community. Advertisers on the platform include Pepsi, eBay, ICICI Lombard, Microsoft, Cadbury, Vodafone, Nokia, Ford, Puma, Maybelline, Dell, Kingfisher, Sun Microsystems and ING Financial.

Bizshup is aimed at small businesses who hope to advertise to the network’s users. The business tool provides a group messaging platform for businesses that allows them to form groups, send messages, create ads, and track analytics. And businesses can create an SMS campaign, at scale, on the fly, from a mobile device.

For example, business owners can use a ‘Keywords’ feature to attract new customers; the first step is to define a keyword and associate a phone code to it – for example, “To get cool discounts SMS PIZZA to 9220092200.” Users who send PIZZA to 9220092200 will automatically be added to this business’ customer list. Business owners can distribute coupons that can be redeemed at the point-of-sale location. Previously in beta, BizShup has already run hundreds of campaigns to test the service.

As we’ve written in the past, it’s unclear SMS GupShup will fare as Facebook and Twitter continue to grow in the country. As more consumers have access to the internet (in addition to mobile phones), they will certainly flock to these networks. But SMS GupShup certainly has done a fairly good job of implementing advertising in the SMS-based social network, and thanks to these revenues, revenue grew by over 400% in 2010.

From Your Clipboard To Just About Anywhere: Sharing Files In One Click.to

2011-07-08T22:45:00.003+05:30

That was a tough headline to write, because it was difficult to summarize what the Click.to app does in one short sentence.

But if you’re a Windows user, I encourage you to check it out anyway (Mac folks will have to wait a couple more weeks).

If you’re anything like me, you use the CTRL-C command a lot. What Click.to does is display an ‘action bar’ whenever you copy something to your clipboard – whether it’s a photo, text or an Excel spreadsheet – that enables you to share the file in question to a variety of social networking and other online services, or other Web-based and even desktop applications.

For example. When the app is running in the background, CTRL-Cing a picture on your desktop lets you easily – and quickly – send the file to your Facebook profile, add it as an attachment to an email you’re sending with Outlook, or open the image in Adobe Photoshop.

Or copy any string of text, whether it’s from a conversation inside a chat window, a Word document or a browser tab, and jump straight to IMDB, Wikipedia or Google search.

It sounds a bit silly, but it’s easy to get hooked on the app because of its sheer speed. Use it for a while and you’ll find that you really do waste a lot of timing performing actions like opening an app and clicking a few times before you can actually share a file.

Click.to can help alleviate that problem.

The pop-up bar that you get every single time you copy something to your clipboard can get annoying fast, though, but fortunately there’s a way to hide it automatically for specific applications (e.g. Skype or Google Chrome). Unfortunately, you can’t hide the bar only for specific Web apps (e.g. WordPress).

Another gripe: Click.to decides which apps you’re most likely to use with any given action, so for examples it hides Twitter and Gmail when you CTRL-C an image, even if that’s exactly where you wanted it to end up.

Other than that, it’s a neat little app that adds value for oversharers such as myself. I particularly like the fact that you can create your own actions in just a couple of steps, which I used to create a shortcut for searching companies in CrunchBase as an example.

In spite of the app’s name and logo, the company behind the tool – Axonic – doesn’t own the click.to domain name, although they’re trying to buy it from the current owner.

Head on over to clicktoapp.com and give it a whirl.

Celebrity And Brand Advertising Startup Ad.ly Launches Social Analytics Platform

2011-07-08T22:40:00.010+05:30

You may remember Adly, a startup that in-stream ad network for celebrities and brands on social platforms like Twitter and MySpace. The company was also helping celebs promote brands on Facebook, but got the boot from Facebook (read more about why here). For background, Ad.ly links up advertisers with influencers and celebs and then distribute links to marketing campaigns through the celeb’s Tweet streams and MySpace updates streams with full disclosure.

Today, the company is launching an analytics dashboard which is designed to help top influencers manage and grow their audiences on Twitter. The dashboard provides brands and celebrities with audience demographics of their followers and reveals who your top influencers are, which influencers and fans are messaging you, mentioning you, and retweeting your content.

Adly will also show you which other celebrities and brands your fans follow, and how many fans you share in common. You can see who your “Mega Fans” are (the ones with the greatest reach and potential influence); follower growth over time, the gender breakdown of a follower base compared to the average Twitter audience, and the geographic breakdown of an audience compared to that of the average Twitter audience.

For example, Snoop Dogg (@SnoopDogg) has more Twitter fans in Texas than he has in New York. Jet Blue (@JetBlue) can see that 24 percent of its followers are fans of 50 Cent (@50cent). Old Spice (@OldSpice) can see that 28 percent of its followers are fans of Charlie Sheen (@CharlieSheen). The New York Times (@NYTimes) can see that 29 percent of its followers are fans of CNN Breaking News (@CNNbrk)

Adly Analytics also allows celebrities and brands to grant managers, agents and staff access to their Adly Analytics without sharing their Twitter passwords.

There’s no doubt that analytics are now integral to any brand’s social media strategy. There are a number of startups that offer in-depth social media analytics such as Viralheat, HootSuite, PeopleBrowsr, Netvibes and Topsy. And we’ve seen some pretty major exits in the social media analytics world, including Radian 6 and Kosmix. Providing analytics alongside Adly’s ad and endorsement platform, makes sense.

Of course, we know Twitter could have its own high-powered analytics platform in the works, especially considering the company’s recent purchase of social media analytcis startup BackType as well as last year’s acquisition of Smallthought.

For now, Adly doesn’t seem to be in danger of violating Twitter’s advertising TOS. But Twitter hasn’t been the most developer-friendly company, and has cracked down on some companies using advertising on the platform. Adly also hasn’t written off recently acquired Myspace yet. Adly CEO Arnie Gullov-Singh believes Myspace may have comeback, especially when it comes to engaging celebs. Perhaps that’s why JT’s on board?

Mark Cuban-Backed Device Identification Startup BlueCava Raises $1.5 Million

2011-07-08T22:40:00.009+05:30

BlueCava, a startup that has developed technology that enables its customers to identify unique connected devices such as smartphones, TV set-top boxes, gaming consoles, computers and more, has raised $1.5 million in debt funding according to an SEC filing.

Late last year, the company had already raised $5 million from billionaire investors such as Mark Cuban and oilman Tim Headington.

BlueCava says its device identification technology is actually about 15 years old and dates back to Australian inventor Ric Richardson, who was also the road manager for the band INXS.

Years after cooking it up in the nineties, Richardson’s idea became U.S, patent #5,490,216, and he later sued Microsoft (and many others) for infringing on his patent.

In 2009, a jury awarded Uniloc USA (which BlueCava was spun out from) $388 million excluding damages or interest in the case against the Redmond software giant.

You can read more back story here and here if you’re interested.

BlueCava says the technology can theoretically identify the 10 billion (citation needed) internet-connected devices on the planet. The identification helps its customers target advertising and combat fraud, among other use cases.

It’s a most interesting startup to keep tabs on – to give you an idea, its advisory board members include Joe Sullivan, Chief Security Officer at Facebook and Ellen Moskowitz, VP of Fraud Management Solutions at MasterCard.

The Five Best Things About OS X Lion

2011-07-08T22:39:00.003+05:30

If all goes according to rumored plan, OS X Lion should hit stores by July 14 alongside new hardware to run the new OS. I’ve played with the Gold Master over the weekend and I’m pleased to report it is stable and a unique version of OS X, more complete than other, iterative updates like Snow Leopard. I won’t bore you with all the new stuff under the hood but let’s look at a few of the cool new features MacLovers will soon be using on a daily basis.

All My Files View – All My Files is just that – all of your files, ordered by kind, name, date, and modification times. It’s a bit hard to figure out All My Files at first but once you see the utility, it becomes indispensable. You can also organize your own views, selecting files of a certain type that you edited in the past few days or finding all of the disk hogging images on your hard dive. It’s nothing too earth shattering, but it’s useful.

Launchpad – Does that picture remind you of anything? The icons? The little app folders? The little dots at the botton to signify current page? Of all the cues Lion takes from iOS, this spot is most strikingly hints at a future touch interface. Add in four-finger pinch and zoom gestures and you have almost instantaneous access to your apps.

AirDrop – AirDrop is like Dropbox for OS X users. You can see other computers nearby and send them files just by dropping them on their icon. It’s a bit hard to demonstrate it without other Lion users around, but it should be interesting when it starts to work. It will also be an excellent way to send kitten pictures to your co-workers while they’re trying to work.

Mission Control – OS X Lion does away with spaces and instead offers a new four-finger scroll movement that slides between your desktops and Daskboard. Gone is the “Dashboard flying in from outer space effect” and instead Dashboard appears to be another desktop. Mission Control shows a real-time representation of every app currently running and offers instant access to the windows you currently have open.

The New Mail – The new Mail app allows for threaded conversations, a la the iPhone and has a decidedly iPhone-like interface. The Junk Filter changes an email’s color and refuses to download images until you request them and there is a simple, two pane interface (emails and a viewer) that can pop out to a three-pane (a list of accounts appears) interface if needed.

Runner Up… Diskless Install! –

This has to be one of the coolest aspects of the new Lion – a completely DVD-free install. You grab the DMG, mount it, and run the update. A few minutes later you have OS X Lion on your machine. It is a real boon for those running Airs and it makes you feel a little better because you’re helping the environment and not wasting a DVD.