TechCrunch
Google Is Reportedly Working On A Service To Help You Share Your Gadgets, Clothes And Other Stuff With Friends
So here is one of the weirder rumors coming out of Mountain View we’ve seen in a while: as Google Operating System’s Alex Chitu reports, Google is apparently working on an app called Google Mine that is meant to help you share your real-world items like CDs, cars, bikes, gadgets or clothes with your friends. The service, which is apparently closely integrated with Google+ is said to be in private beta testing within Google right now.
According to Chitu, the service also allows you to catalog your belongings, review them (which could be cool for purchases) and send requests to borrow stuff from friends. There also seems to be something akin to a wish list and a feature that will allow you to share a list of items you don’t want to share but just want to give away. All of this sharing, of course, happens on Google+.
The service, the report say, is available on the Web and through an Android app. The app also supposedly includes a 3D viewer that’ll show you your objects, though it’s not clear how you would get these models into the app.
Google is obviously not the only company interested in this kind of real-world tracking. Mine, a startup that launched last December and that probably doesn’t have the exact same name by coincidence, is also working on giving its users the ability to track the things they own, but with a focus on what they’ve bought online. This service, though, seems to be more focused on e-commerce than on the sharing economy.
We have contacted Google for a response and will update this post once we hear more (though chances are, the answer will be some variation of “we don’t comment on rumors”).
Cross-Network Ad Startup AdStage Acquires Semply, Raises An Additional $100K
AdStage, a startup promising to make it easy for small businesses and other advertisers to run campaigns across multiple ad networks, is announcing today that it has acquired Semply, an AdWords reporting app for the iPad.
The startup was one of the more popular presenters at the Launch conference earlier this year, where it demonstrated a dashboard from which advertisers can run campaigns on Google, Bing, Facebook and LinkedIn. The platform optimizes ad spending across networks and includes recommendations based on data from similar and competitive companies — in today’s press release, co-founder and CEO Sahil Jain said his goal is to “make online advertising easy and accessible to the masses.”
AdStage says it has raised an additional $100,000 from the Launch Fund, which was created by Yammer founder David Sacks and Launch founder Jason Calacanis to invest in the best startups at the conference. With the new funding, the company has raised a total of $1.53 million.
AdStage describes Semply as “the world’s first full-featured Google AdWords reporting application for iPad,” and it says that during the app’s first month, it was reporting on more than $110 million of ad spending for more than 1,500 advertisers. It was developed by a former member of Google’s AdWords team, Tom Chokel, who’s joining AdStage as a software engineer. (Sam Mazaheri, who’s also from the AdWords team, has joined as director of marketing and product.)
The financial terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but the app itself has already been rebranded as “AdStage -Your Analytics Dashboard for Google AdWords,” and the company says it will continue to offer the app for free.
As for its main product, AdStage Express, the company continues to bring more businesses into the beta program.
Amazon Video Games Store Xbox One And PlayStation 4 Pre-Orders Top 2,500 Per Minute Following E3
Amazon has seen a significant amount of interest in upcoming next-generation consoles, with pre-orders for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 skyrocketing in the wake of E3 and their initial availability on the site. The pre-order volume broke records for the Amazon Video Games store, resulting in a 4,000 percent year-over-year increase vs. console pre-orders during E3 last year.
In just the first day of pre-orders alone, the Xbox One and PS4 managed to rack up nearly twice the value of total sales made via the video game store on Amazon throughout all of Black Friday in 2012, which is traditionally the top shopping day of the year in the U.S. Demand for the two new consoles was so strong that at peak volume, orders were coming through at a rate in excess of 2,500 units per minute, Amazon tells us.
In typical Amazon fashion, the company isn’t revealing specifics about how many total pre-orders have been processed so far, but the company is saying in no uncertain terms that there’s ample demand. The Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 occupy two of the top three spots in the Amazon Best Sellers list for Video Games, for instance (critical smash hit The Last of Us occupies spot two). Additionally, retail store pre-orders of the consoles appear to be strong, too, with some locations selling out of the Xbox One quickly following Microsoft’s decision to reverse its position on used games and DRM.
Relative increases and high order per minute are all well and good, but the real story will be how many of these things actually ship. Nintendo had strong initial sales of the Wii U, but sales quickly tapered off after the holiday season and are basically on life support. But at least based on these figures, there’s still plenty of juice left in the old console market for now.
Intuit Buys Elastic Intelligence, Will Use Connection Cloud To Help SMEs Build Apps
Some consolidation in the area of cloud services for enterprises: Intuit, the business services company that targets SMEs, is buying Elastic Intelligence, creators of Connection Cloud, a product that helps SMEs create DIY cloud-based apps. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Elastic Intelligence was founded by Roger Sippl, the serial entrepreneur who also founded Informix (sold to IBM for $1 billion), Vantive (now a part of Oracle) and Visigenic. He’s also an investor in IFTT, among other things. Sippl is joining Intuit as part of the deal.
Intuit says that it plans to integrate the Connection Cloud technology with Intuit QuickBase, web database software platform. The idea, says Sippl, will be to attract more SMBs to the platform with the promise that apps will be easy for them to develop, “without the need for expensive developers or complex API programming.”
Indeed, this move underscores a wider trend, which follows the larger one of the consumerization of IT, to make services like cloud computing more accessible to the common person — in this case the average SMB user, who will not be an IT professional per se and will be less likely to have the resources to hire engineers for jobs like these. “The Connection Cloud product is a breakthrough solution that makes it much easier to access and share data in the cloud,” Allison Mnookin, VP and GM Intuit, notes in a blog post. “Through this acquisition, we’ll help solve a huge pain point: building applications that integrate and access data across multiple systems without having to custom code to increasingly fragmented APIs.”
Sippl additionally hints that there will be more on the cards going forward. “The team is excited about what the future holds for us,” he says. “Together we’ll be on the leading edge of cloud computing, offering a platform where resourceful employees can easily create customized SaaS applications that access and share the data in their other business systems to drive productivity.”
There have been a number of other companies emerging that are trying to help take ideas like big data, cloud services and apps and create products that help make them more accessible to users less au fait with IT. Looker, for example, raised $2 million earlier this year from First Round and PivotNorth for their “sequel to SQL” to make business intelligence down to ground level.
And GoDaddy, which also approaches the SME market but from another angle, bought mDot this year to offer those taking domains with GoDaddy an easy way to take those sites to mobile platforms.
Prior to this, Elastic Intelligence had raised $3.4 million in funding from Alsop Louie Partners and
CAP-idea.
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