What you need to know - Thursday 11/18/10

Katie Gatto · November 18, 2010 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/13da

Gowalla partners with Disney; Big Fish and Zynga regionalize, Apple launches iAd in Europe

Gowalla, a location based social network, has announced a partnership with Disney. This means that Gowalla will be creating a virtual  Walt Disney World and Disneyland Resorts for users to explore. For people who are actually in Disneyland or Walt Disney World Resorts, there will be a map with a check-in stream, curated trips, and a list of the most popular spots in the park.

Milo.com, a ahopping startup, is adding coupons to its service. Before this, Milo.com focused mostly on product stocking.

 

Big Fish Games is expanding into new languages. Its games will now be available in: Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Italian and Swedish. The site will also be adding 12 new payment currencies.

The Amplify business pitch competition in San Francisco is being held today. The compeition  will feature woman-led startups. A list of finalists can be found here.

Nokia announced that its application store, also known as the Ovi Store, has reached  the three million downloads per day milestone. This is significant increase, since at the beginning of this year, it could only boast one million downloads per day.

Zynga announced that it will be launching  localized versions of CityVille. The games will be translated into French, German, Italian and Spanish, as well as allowing players to add region specific iconic buildings, such as the Eiffel Tower in France.

Apple announced that it will be launching  iAd mobile advertising in Europe. The first to get the ads are the UK and France, who will receive the ads in December. Next will be Germany in January. Some of the advertisers who will be represented on iAd include: Renault, Citi, Louis Vuitton, Nespresso, Evian, AB InBev, L’Oréal, Absolute Radio and Turkish Airlines.

MindJolt, a gaming and advertising platform, will be releasing a monetization tool for third party game developers. The tool, called AdJolt, will include both targeted ads and virtual currency.

  At the Web 2.0 Summit, which is being held in San Francisco, Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, talked about the difference between innovation and punditry.

 

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Amplify

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Amplify is a web service that brings human understanding to text. Unlike most semantic technologies, which attempt to merely classify or categorize text, Amplify focuses on the meaning of text. Amplify analyzes the actual meaning of the words - automatically identifying the significant topics, brands, people, perspectives, emotions, actions and timescales contained in the text.

Zynga

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Zynga is the largest social gaming company with 8.5 million daily users and 45 million monthly users.  Zynga’s games are available on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Yahoo! and the iPhone, and include Texas Hold’Em Poker, Mafia Wars, YoVille, Vampires, Street Racing, Scramble and Word Twist.  The company is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, IVP, Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, Pilot Group, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel.  Zynga is headquartered at the Chip Factory in San Francisco.  For more information, please visit www.zynga.com.

Milo.com

Startup/Business

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Milo.com is the free Web site that enables shoppers to research online and buy local – providing the best of both worlds. It combines the advantages of an Amazon-like experience with the ability to touch, feel and get products now at a local retailer. It provides all of the product details and user reviews people have come to expect with online shopping, and then searches store shelves to find the best price and availability for the products shoppers want – right when they want them.

 

Milo.com’s direct customers are top, nationally-distributed retailers, including Best Buy, Nordstrom, Target, Walmart, and dozens of others.

 

Milo.com’s features include:

    • In-stock search filters that allow shoppers to view only in-stock products in the search results and, through an experience comparable to travel site kayak.com, know instantly whether the item they want is currently available at a store near them.
    • Price alerts that notify shoppers the moment a chosen product at a local store reaches a price they are willing to pay.
    • Distance filters that enable shoppers to pinpoint the stores closest to an exact address that stock the items they want.
    • Real-time availability and price updates so that shoppers never miss out on a sale or drive to a store that no longer has the item in-stock.
    • Price comparison across local stores that allows shoppers to find the retailer closest to them with the best price for the product they want.

o   Sale tracking to find real-time sale prices for more than 2 million products at national and regional stores throughout the country.

 

The Milo.com shopper values information, time and money, and uses the site to make a well-researched decision not only on what to buy, but where to buy it to optimize value, enable trial and have it in-hand immediately.