What you need to know - 01/27/11

Ronny Kerr · January 27, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/165d

AT&T revenues up $653 million; LinkedIn acquires CardMunch; Twitter still being blocked in Egypt

Telecommunications company AT&T announced its quarterly results, reporting consolidated revenues of $31.4 billion, up $653 million, or 2.1 percent versus the quarter from the year before.

BlueKai, an online auction-based data exchange, bought TrackSimple, an analytics service for media companies.

Cohuman has raised $600K in new angel funding from Diamond II Investments, Jupiter Partners, Stage One Capital and other angels, bringing the company's  total to $1.4 million.

Facebook launched two new powerful security features: a secure HTTPS connection for the entire site and social authentication.

In an effort to lobby Congress to call Google CEO (soon to be former CEO) Eric Schmidt to testify under oath about Google’s personal data-gathering activities, Consumer Watchdog has created a cartoon that borrows actual Schmidt quotes.

Korrio, provider of sports automation platform Playflow, secured $3.3 million in Series A funding from Ignition Partners and private investors.

 

Liquid Robotics, developing products for the emerging marine technology market, raised $18 million of an expected $23 million in its fourth round of funding.

 

LinkedIn acquired CardMunch, a service that allows you to snap a picture of a business card using your iPhone and within minutes, the contact information from that card is transcribed and entered into your CardMunch account.

 

Plum District, a daily deals site for moms, raised $8.5 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers and General Catalyst Partners.

Skype is planning to delay its IPO until the second half of this year

 

 

StayClassy, a startup that powers social fundraising for nonprofits, has raised $1.25 million.

 

Protestors in Egypt are experiencing trouble accessing both Facebook and Twitter, according to widespread reports.

Today's featured entrepreneur is Nick Such, co-founder and director of Awesome Touch.

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CardMunch

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

CardMunch is a mobile business card transcription service that guarantees 100% accuracy on every card. Simply snap a picture with your phone, CardMunch immediately sends it to our crowd labor workforce and within minutes CardMunch sends back a perfectly transcribed contact. CardMunch then backs up the card so you never have to worry about losing a contact again.
Dealing with business cards has never been so effortless.

Twitter

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes. 

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet. 

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

 

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users. 

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.

BuildingLayer

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

BuildingLayer is a collaborative map of the indoor world. We enable organizations to more effectively navigate spaces, track inventory, manage facilities, and visualize other indoor data layers. We're making "lost" obsolete.


BuildingLayer is a...

  Betaspring 2011 Alumni (top 15 startup accelerator)

Cohuman

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

Cohuman is the simplest most powerful way to keep your team in sync. Easily delegate, prioritize and track tasks with all your teams.

It is an intelligent workspace for coordinating people and managing projects. It promotes transparency and accountability in communications allowing teams to get things done more efficiently.

PERFECT INFORMATION 
Cohuman delivers immediate insight into the status of projects, coworkers and the tasks you need to focus on. 
1. We provide unprecedented visibility into a team's collective and individual responsibilities. 
2. Projects and people are presented with lists of tasks that are ranked in order of priority. We utilize metadata to dynamically rank a task's importance relative to the needs of the team.  

BENEFITS 
- Focus: Tasks are organized so people can focus on doing the most important things first. 
- Transparency: Team members have visibility into the shared actions and needs of the group. 
- Accountability: By compelling individual ownership, we reduce business ambiguity. 
- Accessibility: Files, conversations and deadlines are centralized, secure and always accessible. 
- Email Integration: We work seamlessly with email, so those who don't want to login to Cohuman don't need to.  

GOOGLE INTEGRATION
- Attach Google Docs to Cohuman tasks, and we'll handle the permissions
- Sync your tasks to your Google Calendar
- Invite your Google Contacts
- Login and Signup with your Google Account
- Find us in the Google Marketplace and Chrome Store 

 

The long version of our Story:
The challenge we all face in today’s multitasking world is that we are inundated with emails, tweets, social media statuses, collaboration tool notifications, IM’s, buzzes, waves and more. Submerged somewhere in this digital torrent are the tasks we need to act upon as well as the true status of the things we have shared with, or assigned to, others.  

The truth is, we feel productive when we merely click on what’s unread in our inbox (a textbook Pavlovian response). We feel a sense of accomplishment when we stay abreast of the chatter. All the energy and time we invest in doing these things is creating a false sense of “doing” and eating into the time we have to get stuff done. We’re on a diet of electronic junk food. The day goes by and despite having been connected and collaborative, we’ve accomplished less than we thought. What’s worse, we experience that nagging feeling that we’ve forgotten to do something.

Cohuman is an online application that cuts through this digital clutter and gives you the power to make, share and track tasks with anyone. 

We fundamentally believe that the only way to simplify our lives is to know what our priorities are and to be able to focus on what matters. Cohuman is a social network for all your work and personal tasks. When you share tasks with other people, Cohuman is aware of how all your tasks are related. That’s what Cohuman is – a Task Network. In the same way you keep track of your colleagues and friends via Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter, we empower you to get status updates on all the tasks you’re connected to.

Based on an algorithm that takes into account the network value of a task, Cohuman is able to optimize your priorities and those of everyone in your network by assigning each task a score.

Cohuman lets you: 
1. See everything you need to do in one place 
2. Prioritize your day, your week, your life
3. Share tasks with others and follow their status 
4. Trust you are not forgetting to do anything

The market for Cohuman encompasses everyone who is tired of depending on email to coordinate their life or is simply struggling to manage their priorities.

 


24897

Nick Such

Joined Vator on

CEO at BuildingLayer. Past at GE/Toyota/KSTC. Used to race solar-powered cars. Got into Stanford MBA, but chose startup path. I love assembling teams of smart people to solve hard problems.