The days of avoiding congestion on your ride home from work have gotten much safer. Israeli start-up Waze, the world’s fastest driving community centered around a mobile app that let’s the community provide news on traffic and navigation issues, has released a new iOS application today. As reported by The Verge, this free GPS and navigation app is now featuring a hands-free way to activate and file reports without jeopardizing your safety while you’re driving.

Waze has received some pretty good press over the past year or so for its usefulness to help make people’s commute less painful. If you were in the Los Angeles area when the I-5 was shut down for a few days, Waze was promoted as one of the apps to help get you around town easily and probably helped shave driving times. And it looks like word is being spread around the major cities around the United States to use the app. I’ve tried using it once or twice, but often when I found myself driving, it didn’t make sense for me to look at the phone while driving. In fact, it’s pretty dangerous to do so and one might feel compelled to use Waze to report an accident while they’re driving–only to hopefully not find themselves a victim or the cause of another one.

The Verge reports that Waze grew impatient with Apple to open up the API for its famed and often-spoofed Siri application for developers to take advantage of, but with no resolution in the near future, they decided to go with Plan B. Using the iPhone’s proximity sensor, users can now activate a voice-controlled interface in its application. Just wave your hand at your iPhone and it should initiate the voice-control, allowing you to quickly navigate, report traffic, and alert the Waze community as to nearby road hazards. One difference, and probably a good one, between Waze’s technique and Siri? You won’t need to touch the screen or push a button to interact with the app. This will help allow drivers to concentrate on driving, but still allow them to contribute to the greater good without being distracted. No word yet on whether this can be done with the Android app, but this is definitely a good move for drivers safety. Oh, and this update to the iPhone will work for those in the US and in Canada.

Oh, and some other nice lil’ tidbits that are with the latest release? Sharing! Yes, that’s right…Waze now comes with sharing features where you can let anyone know via text or email that you’re running late and it’ll include your current location, ETA, and your destination. Looking at their screenshots, it seems that this is a template message where all you have to do is enter in the number and/or email address and it’ll ping whoever you send with your Waze GPS location.

Here’s a brief video from Waze that tells you more about their hands-free application:

The world is slowly shifting towards being a Google-dominated society…well, at least on the Internet, that is. News broke today by the Wall Street Journal hinted that the search engine giant is very close to launching a cloud-storage service that many think will rival Silicon Valley’s best startup (as named by TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and GigaOm during the 2011 Crunchies) Dropbox. Being called “Drive”, it’s Google’s attempt to catch up to all the innovation being done in the cloud-storage space by younger and leaner companies. But is it actually Google’s loss for rolling something out so late in the game? It only seems logical for Google to have this cloud-storage product rolled out today now that they have most of the other pieces in play already. But we’ll get into that in a bit…but for now, let’s look at what the Wall Street Journal says about Drive:

Drive will most likely mimic all the features that one currently gets out of Dropbox or any of the other cloud-storage services. It’ll allow you to store photos, documents and videos on Google’s servers so that they will be accessible from any web-enabled device (tablet, laptop, desktop, and mobile). According to the WSJ, “if a person wants to email a video shot from a smartphone, for instance, he can upload it to the Web through the Drive mobile app and email people a link to the video rather than a bulky file.” The service is set to launch within the next few weeks or months and, like all the other competitors in this crowded field, will offer a freemium model where most people will get a free account, but if you need more space and additional features, then you can pay for a premium account. Just how much space is allotted for the free version remains in question, but with the average space limitations from Dropbox, Oxygen Cloud, Box, and others being about 5GB (Dropbox is actually 2GB), it probably won’t shock me if Google tries to one-up it and give up to 10GB in storage. That’s all a guess since Google will want to give people enough of a carrot to try their service, fall in love, and convert to a paid account. We shall see…

But how will Drive ever catch up to what many consider to be the industry leader, Dropbox? Well probably by offering free accounts to all of their Gmail accounts (350 million users)–that will easily gain it more users than Dropbox (45 million users). Sure, Google would gain instant fame, but the hard part is to entice the users to keep using the service. And that might be Google’s greatest challenge, but it isn’t too far-fetched of an thing to solve. Already, Google has its grips in us with email and millions of us are also addicted to using Google Docs as well  and now with 25 million active Google+ accounts all tied to your Gmail account, it seems that the search engine is going to want to be managing your Internet experience. And I hate to mention it as well, but imagine the additional revenue stream that Google will get by serving ads within their cloud-storage interface? They could easily create some algorithm that not only currently scans your email, Google+ activity, documents, and search history, but with Drive, they can offer contextual ads based on what music, videos, and files you have stored in the Cloud. Scary, but the potential is there.

GigaOm is saying that “Drive would be yet another in an array of new consumer services from Google which added Google+ web conferencing and collaboration in June…Google Music which stores users’ audio collections…adding consumer cloud storage service is another way for Google to leverage its prodigious infrastructure.” And they’re right. Google has slowly got themselves in order and realized that they need to start releasing all the pieces to the public and eventually it’ll all form together, like Voltron, to create an immersive Internet experience that allows the user to do everything that they want, while allowing Google to strengthen its offering while also enhancing their search engine and advertising monster capabilities.

I suppose now we take the “wait and see” approach. When they’ll launch it remains to be seen, but hopefully there’s a big enough selling point that separates it from Dropbox or it’s just going to be another cloud-storage service and we’ll wonder why it was even hyped up to begin with.

If you’re interested in what’s happening in the tech community or even here in Silicon Valley, then most likely you’re on Techmeme checking out the top headlines affecting the community. Just recently the news aggregator website underwent a redesign and now it looks much cleaner and organized, at least in my opinion. And its founder, Gabe Rivera, is slowly adding beneficial services to the site to help the tech industry be better informed. A few months ago, it was a job board that listed the startups and tech companies who are hiring and this list has grown to include Google, Tumblr, Yammer, Amazon, Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, Square, and Foursquare. But now, the next update to the site has been launched: an event calendar for the tech world.

Now I know what you must be thinking…there’s Plancast for that, right? Or wasn’t someone using Facebook or Upcoming for this? What about Meetup? Well those are all well and good, but we’re not talking about one of those one-off meetups or tweetups at an open bar. These events are more for the entire masses and so far include things like seminars, panels, conferences, hackathons, and things not specifically located here in the Silicon Valley. As TechCrunch’s Eric Eldon points out, this move by Techmeme is an attempt to “solidify the site’s position as the watercooler for anyone in tech” and he’s right — nearly anyone in tech will probably refer to a story that has been headlined on Techmeme. And to clarify on what events will be featured on this calendar, anyone can submit an event to Techmeme, but only those events that are “expected to produce the kind of news that appears on Techmeme” will show up (quote courtesy of TechCrunch).

So what you’re getting is a filtered and properly curated event list from Techmeme. This shows promise because while people are trying to get their stories and posts featured on Techmeme, the same will be for the events as well. There are definitely too many tech events happening around the world at any given time – believe me, I’ve tried to keep up with just the San Francisco events on my own calendar, but it became quite an enormous ordeal. So if you want your launch event or your tweetup to be listed, then perhaps Plancast and Facebook might be the best way since Techmeme will probably filter it out. The exceptions? Events involving major announcements or product launches, or conferences including candid interviews with a major industry figure or even earnings announcements, and other kinds of virtual events will be listed on Techmeme.

There’s even a paid option that they’re rolling out with their event calendar if you’re so inclined to go this route. If you pay, they’ll highlight your event and offer more prominence and even add a call to action next to it! And if you pay, you get more leniency on what events you want to have on the calendar.

Regardless of the route, it will be interesting to see what events are featured here and how this progresses. Congratulations to the Techmeme team!

Yesterday, one of the biggest news stories was about one of the tech world’s media darlings: Path. It turned out that within their iPhone application, Path had been importing whole contact address books from users into their system. This lead to a big uproar within the community and has some even raising the issue about user privacy. Of course, this whole conundrum about privacy isn’t lost on me since I penned a post saying that I felt that Path’s saving grace over being “just another Facebook”  was that it was a private social network…only 150 people of my dearest and closest friends would see the photos and thoughts unfiltered. Well if, on one of the biggest platforms out there, Path purposely (or unintentionally) imported contact information into their servers, then that would clearly raise some cause for concern.

How serious has this become? Well so big that one of Path’s investors, CrunchFund’s head and founder of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, has published a blog post stating that Path’s founders, Dave Morin and Matt Van Horn, should immediately “nuke” the data in the servers. However, one needs to wonder whether all the hoopla was over the fact that Path imported the address book contacts or if it was that they didn’t give users an option to either opt-in or opt-out (I personally would have liked to have seen it be opt-out by default). And I notice that there are some significant differences between Path’s iPhone version and their Android cousin — for one, I’m asked whether I want to add certain people from my address book on Android. There was never this problem for these devices. Nevertheless, now that this error has been done, Path should probably purge the lists and invite people to do so, but only after making it 100% clear what’s going to happen with this data and reassure people as to the benefit.

And they’ve stated that they’ve done so and put their money where their mouth is:

We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path.

TechCrunch writer and CrunchFund partner MG Seigler wrote that while we’re up in arms over the privacy concerns (while totally valid and justified), we might want to step back and analyze the situation to see why Path did what they did–basically we need both sides of the argument:

One thing overshadowed by this situation is that there’s a reason Path was doing this — and it was anything but nefarious: it makes the service more useful. Path is about your personal connections and the best way to establish those connections is for Path to find your true friends also on the network. What’s a great signal if someone is a true friend? If their information is in your address book and if you’re in their’s.

And he’s right…Path is designed to offer us more signal than noise and only those chosen few who we entrust with our phone numbers and reciprocate and place their numbers in our address book are probably more likely to interact with us on a private social network like Path. Nevertheless, Path’s Dave Morin has quickly and publicly apologized for this incident and admitted their mistake.

Whether people accept it or not remains to be seen. Jeremy Toeman from LIVEdigitally thinks Path has betrayed his trust…he didn’t want to publish photos of his kids on Facebook and may have decided to use Path for this, but since this issue arose, privacy fears have come back. When I read his post, he’s right…Path is also at the crossroads and will need to be firm on what their stance on privacy is. With this issue plaguing Path for a while, will people be a bit more timid in using the service? Or does anyone really care and believe that privacy is dead?

No matter the answer to that, Path is learning from its mistakes, getting more users, and chugging forward.

Photo Credit: Balotelli’s clash with Parker went unpunished by referee Howard Webb. Photo: Getty

All Things D is reporting that professional social network powerhouse, LinkedIn, will be buying contact start-up Rapportive. The deal isn’t official (yet) and there’s nothing on either Rapportive or LinkedIn’s blog, but seems there are sources saying that it will happen. Not wanting to comment on the validity of this rumor, I wanted to instead focus on the fact that this would be a great deal in the making for both companies – should this actually happen, that is.

In case you’re not familiar with Rapportive, it’s a service that integrates inside Gmail to provide you helpful information about your contacts right inside your inbox. So if you’re crafting an email to a business colleague, that contact’s information and social graph (as long as it’s public) will be displayed right on the screen where you might normally see Google ads being displayed. This is especially helpful since you’re going to get to apply some more context to your emails to help make it more personal. Since its founding in 2010 by Rahul Vohra, Martin Kleppmann and Sam Stokes, the goal of the service was to allow people to immediately see what people look like (using social media avatars), where they’re based, and they do. And just like the name implies, the service is meant to help people establish a rapport that can lead to more conversations, relationships, and success. There’s no doubt that Rapportive has been successful in this area as over 20 million lookups are being done through their system every month!

So why the sudden interest by LinkedIn? Since LinkedIn is the 800 pound gorilla in the professional social network scene, it makes sense that creating some sort of rapport is essential to getting any business done. Whether you want to connect with a potential business partner, looking to hire someone, or even want to be the one that’s hired, a Rapportive-LinkedIn marriage would be beneficial for the end user. Since Rapportive is right now available on Gmail, one might wonder about it’s limited nature and how good it will be in the long-term. In a report by Return Path, at the end of 2010, Gmail had over 193 million users – granted it’s way less than Yahoo! and Hotmail, but it’s picking up steam at a much faster rate than the other two. In 2011, Comscore estimated it at 260 million users, meaning that it’s drastically catching up to the email leaders. So eventually in the near future, Gmail will be the dominate leader in email service and with Rapportive’s integration, LinkedIn will have a great opportunity to extend professional profiles further out there.

Even ReadWriteWeb agrees that LinkedIn and Rapportive would be a match made in heaven. And with LinkedIn’s last acquisition of business card scanning technology Cardmunch, LinkedIn would be able to bolster its offering and create a warehouse of professional contact information. I’ve always wanted to find a way to take all the business cards that I get from conferences and events and mesh them into a contact relationship management system and have it all linked to a professional bio that is updated and associated with my email address book so all I have to do is type in that email address: john@johndoe.com and find out how I know him, how things have been since we last talked, and make the email more meaningful. No longer will I need to waste unnecessary emails chit-chatting…it can all be personal again.

Jon Mitchell from ReadWriteWeb probably puts its best:

LinkedIn is already the go-to network for work contacts. It’s the most comprehensive professional profile most people have. Plus, it’s already openly making moves to be a more extensible service, bringing its human resources know-how to other sites that need it.

Ideally, it would be a great move for both teams and the hope is that this isn’t one of Silicon Valley’s most famous “acqui-hires” where they go for just the talent and not the technology. It is definitely a compatible service and will be a boon for people using LinkedIn.

Photo Credit: “Don’t you come a step closer” by Ed Yourdon/Flickr

Last night, at the All Things D’s D:Dive Into Media event in Dana Point, California, Peter Kafka sat down with Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo to talk about the company and get an idea about the direction it was going. In case you’re interested, the entire conversation was liveblogged and you can read it here. But as I was reading it, I found something interesting about the conversation — Twitter is redefining its role in the world of communication. Some may think that it’s a medium to broadcast their message across the Internet, but rather, Mr. Costolo is telling the world, at least today, that Twitter is just the messenger. In fact, they’re not a media company. He responds that they’re in the media business whereby they distribute traffic and are one of the largest drivers to all sorts of other media properties. So by that definition, the media companies are those that are using the service to broadcast–brands, startups, politicians, and the average citizen.

During this interview, Twitter’s CEO was pressed on a whole lot of issues like SOPA and PIPA and even the 2012 elections. Many probably criticized Twitter for not participating in some sort of “black-out” a couple weeks ago over the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act that was being debated in Congress, but Mr. Costolo defended Twitter’s actions by saying that “there were 3.9 million tweets that day about SOPA and PIPA. When you’ve got an amplifier like that, you don’t pull the batteries out of the microphone.” Seems logical to me because how else are you going to communicate your anger while still protesting?  It seems that Twitter has taken on the life of the messenger quite well and that you shouldn’t “shoot the messenger”. In other words, just like communication was done through paper mail or telephone tree or even email and message boards, so too now can people use Twitter as that medium and it seems Mr. Costolo is letting the service be all about the people and allowing them to communicate – as long as it adheres to all local laws.

As for the 2012 election, Mr. Costolo believes that it’s going to be the Twitter election — more than 2008 was. Why? Because it seems that all party presidential candidates and other potential office-seekers are using Twitter to get their message across. Just look at how yesterday, California Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, joined Twitter. The fascinating thing about 2012, according to Mr. Costolo, is that this was apparent during this year’s State of the Union: “When Obama made the spilled milk joke, there was this collective groan, and we didn’t have to wait for the pundits to tell us that. Republicans live-tweeted.” News happening isn’t late breaking anymore…it’s just breaking. Mashable has analyzed these comments and believes that Twitter has become an essential platform for reaching voters and for gathering and responding to feedback in real-time — and they’re entirely right. No longer are we going to have to go attend a rally just to get 30 seconds with that candidate to ask them questions or ask one of their surrogates. Instead, if the candidate is serious about talking to as many people as humanly possible, voters can send a tweet and get some sort of a response back. Moreover, evangelist voters can create a rapid grassroots effort to help get out the vote as well.

Twitter has definitely helped shape the way people communicate with one another and as I look at the company, I don’t see another AT&T or Verizon or media company that controls the Internet airwaves. Rather, it’s a technology that we can use to communicate. No longer is the pen mighter than the sword…it’s the tweet that rules.

Photo Credit: kenyee/Flickr.com / Peter Kafka and Dick Costolo via All Things D

It’s an interesting morning here in Silicon Valley as we wake up to discover some updates in the startup world. Sure, people coming and going are nothing new or surprising, but within the influence metric space, there’s a lot of discussion going on about whether it’s good or bad or even relevant for companies to figure out and use. At the forefront of these conversations are the evangelists — these are the people who will go out into the world and praise the name of these startups and help show you the light as to why you want to use them. Today, there are two influence metric giants out in the world: Klout and Kred. And while they are both great, they each have different news to share.

Porter Gale joins Kred as Chief Evangelist and Advisor

One of the best marketers in Silicon Valley has just joined up with Kred as their Chief Evangelist. Porter Gale, probably best known recently for being the Chief Marketing Officer of tech-friendly Virgin America airlines, will be the startup’s lead advisor on their new Kred Stars and Kred Leaders program. Basically, she’s going to be their evangelist who will help educate and help marketing executives while also developing advocacy programs with the community. It’s a very smart hire and something that I think plays well to Mrs. Gale’s strengths.

When asked about her thoughts about Kred, Mrs. Gale responded:

Kred is an essential marketing metric for brands that want to build and tend to close, trusting relationships with their audience.  Kred’s community-based approach creates unprecedented opportunities to identify influencers and reach the small close networks of people that share their interests.

Kred is an off-shoot product created by PeopleBrowsr, a social analytics startup with offices here in San Francisco. Kred measures influence in online communities within specific interests. A competitor to Klout, rather than ranking influence based on scores from 1-100, they offer it from 1-1,000 and claim to be the only influence measurement based on 1,000 days of social data.

Congratulations Porter!

Klout lacks a bit of influence with the departure of Megan Berry

Also announced today, Klout’s Senior Marketing Manager (and perhaps the main person people receive responses from online), Megan Berry, announced that she was giving up her post and moving on to found her very own startup, LiftFive in New York City. In her blog post, Ms. Berry states that with her startup, she’ll be helping other companies grow communities and to get the amazing products from these startups into the hands of the right people. LiftFive seems to be gearing up to help startups gain traction. And for Ms. Berry to use her skills from Mobclix and Klout, two well-known and successful startups, it seems that LiftFive will be something worth checking out.

Of course, Ms. Berry’s departure from Klout leaves a hole in the startup for someone to come in and take her place. For the past several years, she’s been one of the main personalities that people who had questions, comments or complaints about the service turned to. It was under her watch that the Klout Perks program started off and eventually hit its stride – with partnerships with large brands like Nike, FOX,  Disney and even Virgin America (probably even working with Porter Gale! What a twist!). And one of her lasting legacies will certainly be the Klout Squad program, which the service established last year to help gather more feedback to better adapt their offerings.

But all is not lost, as the Klout marketing team has grown over the years and there are going to be some great people to take over these programs and help move Klout forward. But it’s probably safe to say that the service lost one of their biggest evangelists.

Good luck to you Megan!

Photo credit: Porter Gale by Kred. Megan Berry by Ken Yeung

Last week one of Bub.blicio.us‘ long-term media partners and friends, Liana Burtsava of Trendy Lime, was a partner at the Startup Week Vienna that welcomed 100 investors, 70 speakers, and over 1,000 guests to beautiful Vienna, the city known as the bridge between Eastern and Central Europe. Thanks to Liana, we are connected to blogger Vukasin Stojekov of Seebhub.me and the unfolding of startup events in Europe.

Contributed by Vukašin Stojkov of SeeHub.me of Serbia:

Morten Lund, investor and entrepreneur from Copenhagen, Denmark

A plethora of keynotes, presentations, panels and workshops participated in last weeks event in Vienna. Oliver Holle and Erik Bovee of Speedinvest held fantastic informational presentations. I have heard a fair share of VC presentations, but these guys really killed it. Not only did you learn a lot, you could enjoy it too due to their great presentation style. The Startup Week Viena is a must for early stage startups, and I hope to hear them in the future, ideally when they come to Belgrade. One of the best motivational keynotes was given by Pascal Finette on Wednesday, when he compared startups to running a marathon and shared his lessons with entrepreneurs in the audience.

TechCrunch day was awesome. A small part was due to Mike Butcher being on the stage where he is a Superstar. He is awesome presenting himself, moderating a panel, having a fireside chat or even presenting an awards ceremony.

A great piece of motivation and inspiration came on Thursday with Facebook’s Christian Hernandez highlighting Serbia’s Nordeus as his favorite European success story. This was an illustration of how close Nordeus and Facebook are which I believe many in this region take as a signal that one can indeed make it BIG on a global scale no matter where one comes from. Our last day on Friday, we had a chance to hear Doug Richard’s amazing story about his biggest mistake and I can not wait to hear from him again.

Mike Butcher of TechCrunch, soaked with champagne by the winners of the Start up competition, MySugr

The Networking was the best part of Startup Week for me. My biggest impression from this event was a who’s who in the CEE startup scene which was a significant upgrade from the traditional circuit of conferences I have attended in the past. I had the chance of meeting and talking with amazing people from Germany, Austria, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia. You name it, they were there. It was a great experience at what is poised to become one the central European startup events. This year’s edition was just a sign of things to come.

More photos from the conference found on Facebook. (photo credit Luis Kentzler)