Technology News and IT Business Intelligence

Last week, the newly renamed Google Places added a ton of features to help local businesses create a directory page right on Google. Today, Google’s Street View is joining the partyby showing links to local business listings right in Street View. As you turn around in Street View, names of local businesses and other “Google Places” will show up overlayed on top of buildings. As you hover over those names, a small pop-up window shows some of the listing details such as business name, phone number, and ratings.
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As Google Maps extends its dominance in the social mapping world, mapping startups are having trouble competing. Platial, a Kleiner Perkins-backed social mapping startup, is heading to the deadpool.

Platial, “the people’s atlas,” allowed users to make and share their own maps. Using Google Maps API, Platial let anyone put locations markers over any point on the map they’ve visited and then annotate it with pictures and comments. You could easily embed and share your maps on other sites. In 2007, Platial acquired a competitor in the social mapping space, Frappr. In the blog post announcing Platial’s demise, it wasn’t clear what the exact reason was for the site to close its doors but the startup said it would be updating its blog with details about the shutdown in the near future.

Platial received backing from many notable investors and venture funds. They took $800,000 in angel funding in October 2005 from Kleiner Perkins; Byers, Omidyar Network, Ram Shriram, Georges Harik, Jack Dangermon, and Ron Conway. In February 2007, they raised an additional $2.6 million from Keynote Ventures, with participation from most of the previous investors. We’ve added the startup the deadpool.

It begins: Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek is harshing on all our buzzes by announcing that according to an unidentified source at Hon Hai Precision, a CE manufacturer, the iPad could be delated until April. The source said that there were only 300K units available for a March launch, which may put a damper on what we’re calling iPad Awareness Month.

He expects Apple to sell about 1.2 million units in 2010 and 3.5 million in 2011.

Because I’m equally qualified to make stuff up about Apple, I believe his numbers are way off. As for Hon Hai and the production problems, this could be true or it could be sour grapes. Remember: CE companies in China dig at each other all the time and even attempt pump and dump stock schemes by leaking bits of news and selling when the stock is hot. Considering he couches all of his terms in analyst speak, there’s no telling what’s going on here:

“An unspecified production problem at the iPad’s manufacturer, Hon Hai Precision, will likely limit the launch region to the US and the number of units available to roughly 300K in the month of March,” he writes, “far lower than the company’s initial estimate of 1,000K units. The delay in production ramp will likely impact Apple’s April unit estimate of 800K as well. It is also possible that, given the limited number of units available in March, the launch will be delayed for a month.”

I’m calling BS.

via BrainstormTech

New York, the city that never sleeps, may finally meet its match. TechCrunch is coming, and we’re bringing three days of non-stop conference and startup-competition energy, May 24-26.

We call it TechCrunch Disrupt because we want to debate what’s really changing in media and technology right now, what’s causing disruption and what we need to do about it to survive and thrive in real time.

Each morning, we’ll explore media and technology disruption themes through hosted panel discussions, keynotes, roundtable conversations and select product demonstrations. We’ll bring the experts, thought leaders, top entrepreneurs and business leaders and others together to talk about what’s next. And why. With lots of audience participation.

Each afternoon, we take our morning debate into the field. New startups and products will be unveiled and will compete for recognition and a top prize in the Startup Battlefield.

This is a tournament-style launch platform where startups demo their products and impress the audience and panel of experts over multiple rounds of competition. Everyone gets stage time to show their stuff, and plenty of direct feedback. But then they’ll jump into head to head competition with the other startups.

Experts and seasoned veterans will be brought in to mentor and judge startups on product, business models, team, design and usability and more. And the final round will put startups in the hot seat where some of the most successful entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business executives will grill them in front of the audience and see how they perform. It’ll be a little bit like pitching a top VC, except it will be done live on stage in front of thousands. Audience voting as well as expert feedback will factor into final competition scores.

One startup will emerge the overall winner and take home a $50,000 cash prize. But all of the startups get an incredible launch event for their product, and priceless feedback from people who can really help. And, best of all, it’s free for startups to launch at TechCrunch Disrupt. Save those dollars for your product.

Applications open today (March 1) and will be reviewed on a rolling basis through midnight pst, Friday, March 26. There are no fees to apply or compete in the Startup Battlefield, and startups from around the world are welcome to submit for consideration. In fact, we go out of our way to help non-U.S. startups get the support they need during the application process to maximize their chances.

Where can you fit a battlefield in New York City, you ask? We found 100,000 square feet of space in the Soho-West Village neighborhood. We promise you haven’t been to a conference venue like this before. It’s actually an ex-Merrill Lynch office that’s available on short-term lease. It’s a perfect metaphor for disruption. And it gives us almost unlimited room for creativity, exhibits, lounges and demos. In typical TechCrunch style, save room for the after parties each night too.

Tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt are on sale now. Best rates are available through March 31.

Better to disrupt than be disrupted. Hope to see you there. More details will be coming on the Disrupt Blog.

Last week, Citibank found itself in the eye of an Internet storm after it was revealed that the bank had blocked the business account of Web startup fabulis over (non-existing) ‘objectionable content’ on the company’s blog.

The topic was all the more sensitive because fabulis operates a social network / lifestyle website targeting gay men.

A Citi representative was quick to apologize to fabulis founder Jason Goldberg (see updates to our previous story), but has now taken its official response a step further by reviewing and effectively making changes to its policies around Internet business account customers.

Here’s the note, straight from Citibank’s online discussion forum (emphasis ours):

Citibank Message About Internet Business Accounts

At Citibank, we have learned a great deal from recent customer issues related to Internet business accounts. Mistakes were made in some instances, in which we apologized and corrected the problem. These issues made it clear to us that the language in our branch procedures was not specific enough and left too much room for interpretation from one account to the next.

We recognized that we needed clearer and less subjective guidelines with regard to opening Internet business accounts. And there were clearly gaps in training and communications around these specific branch procedures. Based on all these learnings, we’ve taken action and this week we updated and clarified our procedures for opening all Internet business accounts.

Banks are required by law to conduct due diligence and understand the nature of business accounts. For Internet business accounts, we have made it clearer to our bankers what the due diligence process entails. For example, we will continue to reserve the right to decline or suspend an account if we find illegal or discriminatory content, or if the site involves gambling or pornography. Beyond that specific due diligence, however, we do not monitor or evaluate our customers’ web content.

We are providing additional training in this area to ensure the procedures are uniformly and correctly followed. Also, our bankers are now required to have additional consultation with senior level banking executives when questions arise about these accounts before making any final decisions. This will help to avoid misunderstanding and subjective decisions, and promote greater consistency throughout the process. And we remain committed to working with our customers to try to resolve any issues.

As a global organization, we also recognize the power and promise of diversity. In that spirit, we reiterate Citi’s commitment to serving customers, hiring talent and supporting a broad array of organizations that promote diversity. To learn more about our diversity efforts, please visit: http://www.citigroup.com/citi/citizen/diversity/index.htm.

These recent customer issues have been a useful learning experience for us. We again apologize for any misunderstandings that may have occurred. We are committed to improving every day and we’re working to better serve our customers.

I pinged Goldberg about the changes, which have also been communicated to him in an individual e-mail. He says he’s amazed that while the Obama administration can’t seem to get banks to change their ways, “we the people of social media” can. He adds:

How anyone at Citibank could have reviewed fabulis and classified it as “porn” is beyond us, and it speaks to how backwards and antiquated its policies were.

Amen to that.

Still, Citibank is being quite transparent about the whole ordeal and seems to be moving to make amends quickly.

What do you think about the whole situation?

Plugg, the annual conference organised by my TechCrunch colleague Robin Wauters, is due for next week on Thursday (11 March). I’ll be there along with other European tech industry pundits, bloggers, venture capitalists and many entrepreneurs, to listen to a slew of presentations by executives from Nokia, Opera Software, Index Ventures, Duval Guillaume, eBuddy and many more (full program can be seen here).

If you’d like to come too, TechCrunch Europe is pleased to offer a 25% reduction on the ticket fee for our readers – simply use promotion code plugg-25percent upon registration and you’re all set.

And if for whatever reason you’re a European startup that couldn’t make this deadline, then check out how to apply for Geek’n Rolla in London on April 20th.

Meanwhile, at Plugg, I’m most looking forward to the yearly Start-Ups Rally, an on-stage pitching competition between European startups. Over the weekend, these 20 startups, who will be pitching a group of judges and the audience in attendance, were announced by the event organizers.

Let’s take a look at them, shall we?

In alphabetical order, these are the 20 fledgling companies that will get some stage time to woo the crowd:

- aNEWSMe (website – CrunchBase profile)

“Tired of one page readers at your news site? aNEWSme personalized recommendations engine is here for you!”

- Apprupt (website – CrunchBase profile)

“An affiliate network for mobile apps that offers developers the chance to increase downloads, while publishers are enabled to monetize their traffic with relevant content.”

- CloudSplit (website – CrunchBase profile)

“Cost Control for your Cloud Spend”

- Collibra (website – CrunchBase profile)

“Collibra brings together social software and semantic technology to close the gap between business and IT, reducing application integration complexity, mis-implementation risks and mis-communication.”

- Datpresenter (website – CrunchBase profile)

“Datpresenter provides learning and training software for professionals. Our platform is a hosted (SaaS) or installable next generation WebTV and Intranet TV presentation platform for delivery of rich media programmes & webinars.”

- Distimo (website – CrunchBase profile)

“Distimo offers tools and reports to make distribution of mobile apps easy and transparent.”

- English Attack (website – CrunchBase profile)

“English Attack! is the world’s first 100% entertainment-focused, 100% free online method for learning English.”

- Fits.me (website – CrunchBase profile)

< “Fits.me is a Virtual Fitting Room for Internet Clothing Retail. Trial demonstrated it increased clothing sales 3 times and dramatically reduced returns by 28%. It changes clothing eCommerce.”

- Flowr (website – CrunchBase profile)

“Flowr introduces real-time collaboration into your enterprise.”

- Gigswiz (website – CrunchBase profile)

“GigsWiz, a startup based in Helsinki, Finland is building set of statistics and analytics tools for the music industry.”

- Hipui (website – CrunchBase profile)

“Hipui redefines mobile user experience and app development. We enable sensor interaction and advanced graphics outside native apps. Cross-platform code runs in cloud, which delivers the UI to devices.”

- Inbox2 (website – CrunchBase profile)

“Inbox2 is a premium, connected lifestyle application that brings communication and the people you communicate with into a single, synchronized application on the desktop, web or mobile.”

- Lumo Research (website – CrunchBase profile)

“Lumo Flow is a seamless collaboration environment for businesses. Share documents, have discussions and get projects done. Secure and reliable.”

- Raz*War (website – CrunchBase profile)

“Quality shaving as a service at fair prices.”

- Sclipo (website – CrunchBase profile)

“Sclipo offers affordable & easy web learning apps integrated with social tools for millions of teachers & small organizations, who can not afford expensive and complex eLearning solutions.”

- Shotools (website – CrunchBase profile)

< “We help professionals to embrace social media as part of their organization.”

- Smarkets (website – CrunchBase profile)

“Smarkets is a simple, smart way to bet on your favourite events.”

- Stupeflix (website – CrunchBase profile)

“Stupeflix brings groundbreaking innovation to the online video world by providing the fastest, most scalable, flexible and affordable way to create high quality video content on a massive scale.”

- Submate (website – CrunchBase profile)

“SubMate is social commuting: save your regular commutes and discover all the people you see everyday.”

- TweetMeme (website – CrunchBase profile)

“TweetMeme provides the top retweeted stories as shared by users on Twitter & aggregated by category or channel. We also have the most used retweet button on the web! To find out more visit our site.”

Alex van Someren is a “Dealmaker” with the Global Entrepreneur Programme at the department of UK Trade and Investment. A serial entrepreneur specialising in IT software and hardware product development businesses, he’s had two exits through IPOs and is now Entrepreneur in Residence at Judge Business School. Below, he answers our recent guest post which attacked the way UK business regulation authorities treat small but fast-moving startup businesses in the same way as regular, slow-moving ones.

Azeem Azhar’s article about UK small business bureaucracy doesn’t tally with my own experience running businesses in the UK. In fact, from what other entrepreneurs are telling me it’s a lot easier here than in most developed countries.

I wonder whether he’s tried starting a company anywhere else in the world? Just this past Monday I was listening to a guy complain to the Prime Minister at a conference that he’d been to the USA for three weeks and during that time he still hadn’t managed to get a trading subsidiary incorporated there. I’ve done it myself in an afternoon in England.

At this point I must declare an interest, because nowadays I work part-time for Her Majesty’s Government as a Dealmaker for the UKTI Global Entrepreneur Programme – supporting start-ups and helping to get more of them to relocate their headquarters to the UK. In my former life I was a serial entrepreneur: since age 19 I’ve grown four businesses in the UK, from being a self-employed Sole Trader, through two small VAT-registered Limited companies, to a full IPO of a London Stock Exchange-listed PLC. I like to think this makes me better informed, rather than just biased, and of course I’m writing in my own personal capacity here.

My view is that running a business is mainly about overcoming obstacles. Obviously, it would be nice if there were fewer obstacles. Most of the time, it’s true, we have better things to do like polish our products, locate more customers, negotiate with partners etc. But the reason there is government paperwork often has to do with enjoying special perks.

If you want limited liability, so you aren’t personally at risk for a business failure, then you have to file accounts and directorship forms at Companies House.

If you want to enjoy the autonomy and tax advantages of being able to recover VAT and offset expenses against profits, then you have to provide some supporting information every quarter, all of it online nowadays.

If you want to enjoy the really spectacular perks, like tax breaks for capital gains (e.g. the EIS scheme), or tax-free share options (e.g. the EMI scheme), then I think it’s pretty reasonable that you have to fill in a few fairly complex forms, and take the time to get them right, and file them.

By the way Azeem: they pay me my VAT by direct bank transfer, so you might want to spend a few more minutes on that HMRC website.

So, is everything perfect? Of course not – in particular, small business banking is in a total mess. It’s shockingly complicated to open a bank account here, and the bank’s cowardly culture means that Anti-Money Laundering regulations and the Data Protection Act are held up as excuses for all manner of obstruction and bureaucracy.

As for debt-based borrowing it’s laughably difficult right now, despite the Enterprise Finance Guarantee scheme (which is actually supposed to ensure that the Bank doesn’t even bear the risk if the loan goes bad). Azeem and I are in total agreement about this; even if he did misattribute the quote from Star Wars to Carrie Fisher (it was actually Harrison Ford).

So, can we remove more obstacles and make things even simpler for start-ups? Well, we’ve made a fair amount of progress with online filing of Tax and VAT returns. It’s true that the HMRC website user interface experience plumbs the depths of Government website design (which were already pretty deep), so there’s another thing Azeem and I agree about.

Now we’re starting to hear that politicians from both parties are getting the message about improving transparency of Government, from Gordon Brown adopting Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s open data proposals to David Cameron promising the TED conference that every Government contract over £25,000 would be up on a website for all to see, if he was elected. If this trend continues, we’re facing the real prospect of being able to interact with our bureaucratic machinery in real-time over RSS, XML and HTTP. That sounds pretty slick and Web 2.0 to me.

I spend some of my time working with entrepreneurs from overseas who are thinking about moving their companies to the UK. They don’t have a totally smooth ride: banks are useless in new and interesting ways; visas have been a problem for some; new procedures are a pain, and of course they feel like a distraction.

But business is all about overcoming obstacles, and the obstacles in the UK are generally a lot smaller than elsewhere. The people who are really going to succeed as entrepreneurs are the ones who understand this and just deal with it.

Then they can get back to running their businesses, and enjoying the proceeds.

Shout’em today adds a major new feature to its service which could well super-charge it into a whole different place: location. The white label service lets you build a Twitter-like social network, but it now leverages Foursquare’s API and Twitter’s GeoAPI.

The mobile-optimised social networks can be private, location-based and used by any niche group. So far Shout’em has apps for java phones, the iPhone, android. They are now adding a Blackberry app to that roster. All will be leveraging the location feature. In addition Shout’em is throwing in some augmented reality magic into its iPhone app. The Android app is still in progress.

According to the startup, users can control control access, look and feel, without requiring any programming or development skill and the networks can be created in minutes. Prior to this, Shoutem had a 11,000 whitelabel networks on its books, including WE Harlem, NFL Shouts and Ranch & Rodeo.

CEO Victor Marohnic told me the move was prompted by the fact that people aren’t able to create their own social mobile communities with location at the core.

Shout’em is increasingly out-iterating much larger but older and slower moving white label social networks like Ning.

Backed by seed investment from the Croatian government, Zagreb-based, 25-strong Shout’em is part of the Five Minutes Group, which is an agency which builds social networking and Web 2.0 services for the likes of Vodafone and Microsoft.

The New York Times Company has teamed up with RMG Networks to have some of its digital content displayed on part of the latter’s network of out-of-home screens. The partnership is said to bring NYTimes content to some 850 screens, located in district cafés and eateries in the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco markets.

The new initiative, dubbed “NYTimes.com Today”, will feature the latest news headlines, photos, and a selection of videos exclusively from NYTimes.com – along with advertising units – on the digital location-based network operated by RMG Networks.

There’s also a mobile aspect to the story, as viewers can head to NYT2day.com on their phones to receive a direct link to the NYTimes.com Today mobile site, featuring the full articles displayed on the – smaller -screens.

Let’s take a closer look at the NYT’s newest distribution partner.

RMG Networks is headquartered in San Francisco but has local offices in New York, Chicago and Beijing. The company was founded in 2006 under the name Danoo and boasts an undisclosed amount of funding from National CineMedia, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and DAG Ventures – all investors also have one or more representatives on its board.

The company says it’s capable of delivering digital content and advertising to over 60,000 video screens nationwide, enabling it to reach up to nearly 25 million viewers every month.

RMG Networks’ management team is comprised of Garry McGuire (CEO), previously Chairman of Icon Internet Ventures, and former executives from companies such as Yahoo, LevelVision, Screenvision and McKinsey & Co.

Back in July 2009, when the company was still named Danoo, it acquired IdeaCast and rebranded the combined entity RMG Networks.

(Image via Venturebeat)

Google Buzz might have been pushed out too soon, but there are already at least a dozen apps for Google Buzz, most of them unoffical. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough to start BuzzAware, a Google Buzz app directory. BuzzAware is started by the same folks behind Twitdom, a Twitter app directory with more than 1,500 apps.

Some of the apps in BuzzAware include:

Browser add-ons for Firefox (Buzz It!) and Chrome (Chrome Buzz)
Google Buzz desktop app built on Adobe Air
Buzz buttons (Buzzr) and counters (BuzzStats) for your Website or blog
A bunch of WordPress plugins
A Buzz search engine (Buzzy)
Ways to send your Buzz stream to Twitter (BuzzCanTweet) and import your Twitter contacts to Buzz (Tw2Buzz)