TechCrunch
Thumb Social Polling App Merges With YPulse Research Firm, Rolls Out Thumb Pro For Brands
Instant polling app Thumb has just announced that it has merged with YPulse, a research insights firm that focuses on millennial opinions and behaviors. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Thumb is a mobile app that launched back in the summer of 2010 as Opinionaded, aiming to get real-time feedback for life’s toughest, and sometimes silliest, questions. Users simply pose a question to the network, and receive instant feedback from a group of their peers.
In 2011, the app rebranded as Thumb and has seen solid growth ever since. To date, the app has seen over 1.5 billion opinions come through the network.
The latest move by the app was to add a shopping category back in November, which seemed like the first step toward letting brands engage directly with users on the platform.
That said, the merger with YPulse is setting the stage for the roll out of Thumb Pro, which gives brands a dashboard to communicate directly with the Thumb audience.
This will not only allow brands to get instant feedback on new promotional ideas, products, and ad copy, but it will allow them to respond to those who’ve given an opinion to get further feedback.
Thumb Pro has three pricing tiers, starting at $95/month for the basic plan and going all the way to $995/month for the most full-featured option.
So what does YPulse get out of this?
Well, according to Thumb founder Dan Kurani, YPulse already has the infrastructure and relationships with brands to push Thumb further into that space, all while capturing the troves of data collected on Thumb users.
Since YPulse is in the business of peering into the world of young adults, Thumb seems like a great place to have an authentic, comfortable conversation with millennials in their own environment.
Dialapp's Predictive Dialer For Android Knows Who You're Going To Call Next
A replacement for your Android smartphone’s dialer (you know, the phone) may not sound revolutionary, but a new app, called simply Dialapp, wants to change your mind about that. From the makers of quantified self/personal assistant Friday, Dialapp organizes your call log first by those you want to call right now, then beneath that offers the traditional timestamped history of the calls you’ve answered, placed, and missed.
“The call history tab has been in phones for over a decade now,” explains CEO Narayan Babu. “But it is the most unimaginative way to put list of people to call. I am not going to call the pizza guy again after I called him and got my order,” he says.
The idea with Dialapp, and the other “applets” from Dexetra, the startup which raised a small Series A round from Sequoia Capital (India) and Qualcomm Ventures earlier this year, is to make our smartphone-based personal assistants and other apps more personalized and predictive. With Friday, it does this by keeping a history of your communications and activities, including calls, texts, emails, photos taken, and more, and combining those with other events your phone records, like your location, time of day, or events like battery drains, for example, as well as with data from third-party services like Facebook or Foursquare.
The end result is an assistant which can answer questions like “who did I text yesterday?,” “who called me in New York?,” or “where did I call John last?”
On top of this platform, other standalone apps like Dialapp, or the company’s previously launched travel diary Trails, can tap also into that data. In Dialapp’s case, it can then make smarter predictions about who you’re about to call.
“The back-end is powered by Friday,” says Babu. “So over time – start seeing it getting intelligent within three to four days – it learns what your talking patterns are based on your location, time, etc.” He adds that if you already use the Friday app, then Dialapp can also use data from Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, and more to better understand who you talk to in which context.
The app has been in beta testing for a couple of months, but is now live in the Google Play store here.
Sorry, iPhone users, this is not something that would work for you. I mean, really, you can’t even replace your keyboard, you know?
StickNFind Releases An SDK For Its Clever Bluetooth Tracking Sticker
Think of the possibilities, developers. Find lost keys or the TV remote or a child. Make an electronic Marco Polo game! Embed the StickNFind Bluetooth sticker in a museum exhibit as a sort of supercharged RFID educational system. The world could be yours.
With StickNFind’s new SDK, the company behind the novel Bluetooth sticker is hoping developers will make the little device more than a one trick tiny horse.
Right now StickNFind is more of a proof of concept than practical consumer electronic. Attach this little Bluetooth sticker to something and then find it using the Android or iOS. It’s like an RFID tag but slightly thicker than a quarter.
StickNFind uses Bluetooth technology, so it still works in situations with limited cell phone reception. The company said it has a range of about 100 feet. Other features include a “virtual leash,” so you’re alerted when something moves a certain distance away. It plans to sell two stickers for $49.95 or four for $89.95.
The company demoed the technology at our CES booth earlier this year. It works as advertised. And now with this SDK, hopefully developers can take it from a novelty to a practical device.
Watch Microsoft Unveil Windows 8.1 Preview Live Here
Microsoft is kicking off its Build developer conference today at 9am. The company has already announced that it will unveil Windows 8.1 in a Preview version during today’s event, but beyond that, we actually don’t know all that much about Microsoft’s plans for today’s keynote.
It’s a fair guess that Julie Larson-Green, who is now in charge of Microsoft’s Windows Division, will be there, but in the past, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has also regularly made appearances at Build (he does have a thing for developers, after all). We also expect to hear a bit more about the future of Windows RT and maybe see some new hardware, too.
The keynote is scheduled to start at 9am Pacific and we will embed the live video from Microsoft’s Channel 9 here once it becomes available.
Real-Time Analytics Startup DataTorrent Raises $8M From August Capital, Joins Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang As Investor
DataTorrent has raised $8 million in a round led by August Capital for its Hadoop-based, real-time data streaming platform. The company had previously raised $750,000 in a seed round with participation from Morado Ventures, Ex-Yahoo Chief Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures and well-known angel investor Farzad Nazem.
It is the first investment in the data analytics space for August Capital General Partner David Hornik since investing in Splunk, the machine-learning company that had an initial public offering last year.
With Hadoop 2.0 platform as its foundation, DataTorrent has built a platform that can monitor tens of millions of events on a per-second basis. In Hadoop 1.0, customers would get batch files, which provided daily analysis that they received from the Hadoop distributions they had set up to monitor their businesses. But now these customers want the data in real-time. They want to have access to the analysis from the data that is getting stored in log-files as it happens, not a day later.
Customers use the DataTorrent platform to hook into a message Bus, which serves as a data integration platform for processing the millions of data events that they need to monitor. This may be sensor data from factory machines, weather data or any other source of data that needs monitoring. The DataTorrent real-time stream monitors the data and sends out alerts. So, for instance, a media advertising company can be alerted when a click-through-rate dips below 5 percent. Alerts can be created to warn a customer if a machine is going down or if too much memory is getting used or any other relevant issue that may arise which a customer needs to know about.
The data is processed in-memory. DataTorrent crunches it and correlates different dimensions and adapts in reat-time as data volumes expand and detract in the normal course of the day.
The platform is fault-tolerant, meaning it is resilient to disruptions that could force a system down and loss of data.
Co-Founder and CEO Phil Hoang started with Yahoo! in 1996 when there were five or six engineers. When he left, Hoang oversaw 3,000 engineers. Since then he has worked a lot with ex-Yahoo people who had their own businesses. He said he was helping a company in the online ad space. It became clear that they needed real-time results. The customer would buying advertising impressions in an ad exchange. They would then serve ads, earning revenue from those who clicked through. They would then get batch reports a day later. Once day they might make $30,000 and the next would lose $75,000.
He said he realized there was a shift happening. The amount of data companies were using had scaled and they needed to adapt to it in real-time. He started the company about a year ago with Amol Kekre, who serves as CTO. Kehkre was the architect and senior engineering manager for Yahoo! Finance. His work there included building Y! Finance’s real-time data architecture.
In the case of the media company, DataTorrent looks at the costs, the revenues, the volume of clicks and other factors in real-time that comes in unprecedented volumes. A customer can see immediately if the impressions they are buying are not performing.
The company says its streaming platform is designed to fit on top of Hadoop 2.0, making it compatible with Cloudera, MapR and other Hadoop distributions.
It’s machine data that needs processing in real-time. There are a growing number of ways to get to the analysis of data that comes off the factory floor or Internet advertising. But data is so relative and often requires different filters on it to get the desired results. Google and the other data factories are all seeking to help customers find meaning to it. The question will become how ready customers are prepared to process data and analyze it for their own purposes.
No comments:
Post a Comment