Niklas Zennstrom, half of the infamous duo that started companies like Kazaa, Skype, Joost and Rdio, took the stage at the Le Web conference this afternoon to talk innovation in Europe and the lessons he’s learned as a European entrepreneur for the last 9 years.
Zennstrom said he found it encouraging to find that so many European entrepreneurs and startups are busy building innovative things in Europe too, and that conferences and Le Web are a great way to bring everyone together.
There’s nothing like shopping online when it comes to finding the lowest price for a consumer product, but when it comes to actually getting something now, online obviously falls far short of driving down to your local retail store. Milo is a local shopping engine that’s looking to help you get the best of both worlds: it lets you search for goods online, and then uses product inventories of the retail stores near you to tell you where you can go buy it. Today the site is announcing that it has reached its 1 millionth user. It’s also exiting beta — it’s been open to the public for a while now, but for its “full” launch Milo is also unveiling some new features.
Milo has slipped under our radar until now, but it’s been around for two years. It recently raised a $4 million funding round with participation from some of Silicon Valley’s most well known investors, including True Ventures, Ron Conway, Jeff Clavier, and Mint.com’s Aaron Patzer (this is his first investment).
Today Facebook is rolling out a new set of more granular privacy controls to its 350 million members. Founder Mark Zuckerberg already announced the changes on December 1, but today they are going into effect.
For every status update, photo, video, or any other piece of content posted on Facebook, members will be able to choose exactly who they want to share it with. Their options will be: “Friends, Friends of Friends, Everyone and Customized.” Facebook is killing regional networks such as “New York” or “Silicon Valley,” which are too big and meaningless anyway.
The World Economic Forum has partnered with YouTube for the last three years to let anyone tell the world how they feel about important issues of the day. Here’s our coverage of last year’s WEF/YouTube partnership, for example. Pablo Camacho from Bogota, Colombia, won an all expenses paid trip to the annual WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland last January based on his submission.
This year the program is back. They’re asking everyone to “pitch the world” and upload a video highlighting an important issue that the forum should address next month. An independent jury composed, among others, of writer Paulo Coelho and blogger Arianna Huffington, will shortlist finalists, and the YouTube committee will then determine the winner. That person will be brought to Davos to address the forum.
More information is here. Submit your videos by January 4, 2010.
Paris-based Pearltrees has been catching interest around the web the last few days not least because a lot of influential Silicon Valley bloggers have descended on Paris for Le Web, but mainly because of its interesting model for visually mapping how people collect and share information on the Web. But today the startup opens the kimono on its full system.
They will announce two new things today: Twitter synchronization (enabling a user to create a pearl automatically from Twitter and to tweet automatically from their new Pearltrees), Pearltrees search, Real time discussion and connection. The other new aspect announced today on stage at Le Web is the Pearltrees Social System.
Mobile advertising network Greystripe is rolling out its ad formats for the Android this morning, offering Android app developers with an an Android SDK and an opportunity to monetize their applications. Greystripe, which has delivered ads into over 300 million ad-supported games and applications on the iPhone and Java platform, says that with the success of its ads on iPhone apps, it makes sense to expand to the growing Android market.
Greystripe’s Android SDK supports pre-roll, interstitial and post-roll inventory. A few developers are already using Greystripe’s Android ads including the Casual Games Network, Adam Schmelzle, and Jump Games. It should be interesting to see how the dust settles following the recent acquisition by Google of competitor AdMob. While it seems doubtful that Google would close the ad market off for Android, the fact remains that Google develops and produces the Android OS and AdMob has Android-specific ads on its network.
YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley gets a surprise earlier this week on a trip to Israel – MyBrandz got a guy to put a YouTube tattoo on his bicep. Hurley, ever polite, took a picture. And said “you’re the first person I’ve seen to use that logo on their bicep…or anywhere on their body for that matter.” Hurley, taking care of business, then went on to ask the guy taking the video to make sure they put it on YouTube.
Video is below:
This is an overview of what was said during the panel conversation at Le Web on Platforms, which was moderated by our own Mike Arrington. (right)
Lots of panelists for this particular discussion – the conference organizers managed to get all of these people on one stage: Ethan Beard (Director, Facebook Developer Network), Cristian Cussen (Director of Business Development at Ning), Brandon Duncan (Director of Platform Engineering at LinkedIn), John Ham (Co-founder & CEO of Ustream), David Jacobs, (VP , Six Apart), Mike Jones (COO, MySpace) and Ryan Sarver (Director of Platform, Twitter).
Online shopping has come along in leaps and bounds since 1994 when the first e-commerce transaction actually occurred — but as dotcom bombs UrbanFetch and Kozmo proved, delivery can be the most painful point in the ecommerce chain. Enter Shutl, which today launches an on-demand delivery platform that aggregates transportation carriers. Think of it as cloud computing for the logistics industry, focusing primarily on local same-day courier firms.
Launching in London first, the service is targeted at multi-channel retailers and their customers, promising delivery within 90 minutes of purchase in urban areas — and all this at a lower cost to retailers than their standard delivery charge. The company is keeping quiet on delivery time or cost if you happen to live in the ‘burbs or the boondocks.
The Shutl platform will initially plug into retailers’ websites, enabling the retailer to offer its customers immediate home delivery of goods, delivered directly from their local stores. All the couriers have GPS units and this data is aggregated so customers can watch their delivery en route in real-time on a map.
Today at Le Web in Paris, Ryan Sarver (a participant in our RealTime CrunchUp last month), Twitter’s Director of Platform announced a new conference that will take place next year in San Francisco: Chirp.
The conference, which will be geared towards developers, is likely to be similar in some ways to Facebook’s F8 conference that is held each year in San Francisco. Not too many details were given but there is a landing page up already for the event (which is scheduled to take place sometime in 2010).
Le Web in Paris kicked off today and as we’ve previously mentioned, TechCrunch Europe is co-organising the Startup Competition.
We’re breaking the news about the startups launching at the event as they happen, so please tune in to our RSS feed and our Twitter account @TCEurope to get the latest updates. Tomorrow we’ll be publishing as wrap on the finalists and the winner.
We’ve already blogged the launch of companies like CloudSplit, Task.ly, Tigerlilly, Stribe, and Friendbinder. And there’ll be plenty more throughout the day.
MySpace is today launching a brand new suite of APIs that will allow third-party developers to tap oodles of data that gets published on the social network, in real-time, on the fly. MySpace COO Mike Jones debuted the new set of APIs on stage at the Le Web conference this morning, showcasing some initial services from launch partners.
The most important one to debut today is the Real-Time Stream API, which allows the full MySpace activity stream to be pushed to third-party websites and apps in, yes, real time. The API includes granular filters that allows developers that leverage it to exercise full control over the amount of data that gets pushed out.
Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver just took the stage at Le Web a couple of minutes ago, and shared some announcements with the audience about the future of the platform and the effect this will have on the ecosystem.
He also shared a milestone for the company: Sarver said 50,000 registered applications to date have been built using Twitter APIs.
The roadmap ahead:
Transparency: “we need to be more public about our policy and intentions”
Communication: “we need to be out there and let our developers know what’s going on”
Utility: “we need to keep providing our robust APIs and enable third-party developers to thrive”
Profitability: “when our partners succeed, we succeed” (more details coming early 2010)
Just a few months after Shutterfly bought Tiny Pictures, they’re already busy pumping out new products. The first is Wink, an iPhone app and web app that allows you to easily turn your pictures into photobooth-esque strips of pictures.
They key to this app is that beyond your regular camera phone pictures, it gives you easy access to both your Facebook pictures (via Facebook Connect), and your Flickr pictures. Once you have those, it takes just seconds to tweak them and send them off to Shutterfly to be printed and delivered to you (or friends) in a special photostrip case. And before that arrives, they send you an email preview of what the photostrips will look like. These strips can also be shared on Facebook and Twitter immediately.
Services like Ustream and Qik have long offered the promise of live streaming video from your mobile phone to the web — except if you had an iPhone. For those devices, that was only possible if you jailbroke your phone. Not anymore.
The Ustream Live Broadcaster has just gone live in the App Store tonight and yes, it allows you to stream live video from the iPhone to the web. And yes, it even works over a 3G connection. And yes, it’s awesome.
Facebook’s Director Development Network Ethan Beard took the stage at the Le Web conference in Paris to talk about the status of Facebook Connect.
Beard’s talk focused on the notion of identity as defined by connections – to people, things, places, etc. “We aspire to be a technology that people use to connect to things they care about no matter where they are,” he says.
More than 80,000 websites and devices (including iPhone and Xbox) have implemented Facebook Connect since it launched in December 2008, says Beard. And more than 60 million Facebook users use Facebook Connect each month. And it’s not just a lot of small sites using the product. Two-thirds of comScore’s US Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect. And some of these sites are even bigger than Facebook (perhaps not for long though).
Mobile Roadie’s CEO Michael Schneider is on stage at the Le Web conference in Paris talking about his do-it-yourself iPhone app builder. The company created an iPhone app for the Le Web event that has had 2,500 downloads so far (for 2,300 total attendees). He went on stage to talk about the app and to announce support for Android in early 2010.
I had a chance to grab him just before he went on stage to talk about his company and show the app. The video is below. We first covered the company in April 2009, and also earlier this month. I like this startup a lot.
Here at Le WebAppsfire just announced the winners of the App Star Awards, which were handed out by the startup to developers of iPhone applications who came up with some innovative tools for the platform.
Caveat: since these are upcoming apps, they aren’t available on the App Store yet. But we have demo videos.
It’s about 9:45 am Paris time here at the sixth annual Le Web conference. Kicking things off is Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, who just launched his new startup, a mobile payment platform and service called Square, talking with Le Web’s Loic Le Meur. There are 2,300 registered attendees at the event, the most ever, and it looks like most of them have jammed themselves into the main floor to see Dorsey talk.
The audience is eating this up. A large screen next to the stage is showing real time tweets related to the talk, and a new one is popping up every second or faster.
Dorsey is kicking things off talking about his initial vision for Twitter (our first post). “I knew the concept was huge,” he said on stage. “The hardest part of any idea is getting started.”
We all know the App Store is broken. But we also all know that Apple is trying to fix it. Last night, Apple sent out notifications to iPhone developers letting them know that they had a new tool to share that will hopefully further open communications with developers.
Apple has announced the availability of RSS feeds for Developer News. While this may not seem like a huge deal, Apple is promising that this will be a good way for developers to stay on top of:
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