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:

Trendy Lime has done it again with their own interpretation of Valentine’s Day.  This year, join them for an exclusive Gods and Goddesses Ball complete with everything the higher deities of the social networking scene deserve: cocktail reception, incredible DJ hosted music set, an interactive entertainment program and endless networking and socializing.

Set at the sultry Harlot Club, a venue for San Francisco’ elite, this will prove to be an evening of social networking at its finest. The Harlot club sports a high-ceiling lounge furnished with eclectic pieces that range from the Gothic to the eye catching.   The God and Goddess Ball is sure to be a night to remember as we invite our attendees to rejoice in the spirit of dance, socialization and networking.  Aphrodite will be envious as you mingle with some of the hottest social professionals and trend-setters.  Gamble with Loki as you navigate the social scene with like minded individuals who are interested in technology, travel, photography, fashion and media.  Make Bacchus wish he was there as you dance the night away to one of the area’s hottest DJ lineups.

There will also be a FASHION INSTALLATION by PinkWeave, high-end online shopping portal featuring emerging upscale designs from around the world. There will be Gods and Goddesses come alive intertwining the magic of fashion in its most artistic form and lifting your senses to a sublime beauty where you would like to dwell forever.

A photo-show, “URBAN GODS & GODDESSES” by Italian blogger and social media guru Luca Sartoni, will be featured with some of the Silicon Valley tech celebrities being featured in the show.

Come dance the night away to the tunes of DJ Nader. Dress as your favorite god or goddess and mingle with other tech-savvy, fashion-centric professionals.  Unleash your inner deity and dress in theme: toga, fantasy, mythology all provides inspiration for costuming.  Once again Trendy Lime will set the bar for high society networking at this celestial event.

Admission: $10 Early Bird / $20 Regular Price, tickets at http://gngsf.eventbrite.com

Trendy Lime is the world’s trendiest network and events production house, setting the standard for classy exclusive events in the hottest of venues in San Francisco, LA and Sao Paulo.  Our international social network comprises 4,000 members – over half of which have a masters or doctorate degree.  Most of our members enjoy professional careers in Finance, Law, Media, High Tech, Marketing or Fashion and 4 out of 10 of them speak 3 or more languages. Every fifth member of Trendy Lime holds a C-level position.

Sponsors include: MaryKay, Bloomingdales, Samsonite, RedBull, jetBlue Airways, intel and HP

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.

Business can be rough, especially when dealing with customer service. Whether it’s failure to provide adequate Internet service or airline mishaps or even catching a cab, people are getting tired of the status quo when dealing with a company’s representative. They’ve taken to going onto social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and even on blogs. So when technology is being used to revolt against customer service, shouldn’t the technology also catch up to benefit it as well?

This is where UserVoice comes into play. This enterprise service has been used by many brands and businesses to reach out and connect with their customers in order to help stem the tide of anger against them. Since 2008, UserVoice has been around to help empower customers to speak and help businesses understand. Through the use of feedback forums, support systems, and other tools in their arsenal, UserVoice allows you to offer your feedback and lets the community contribute to what’s important and what’s not as much. In a sense, it’s like letting the crowd handle your customer service, but in a constructive way that the business can pay attention and easily respond or implement the needed changes. And just about a year ago, the company launched a brand new service designed to help companies better respond to feedback: Helpdesk.

As part of their new package, Helpdesk is designed to give companies a bit more control over their customer service, but without all the unnecessary tools for integrating feedback and case tracking. But on the other hand, it offers businesses more than simply receiving feedback from the customers. Helpdesk is geared towards allowing people to submit support tickets, allow for service rating, and also promotes humane treatment of customers.  And it looks like this gamble has paid off for UserVoice. After a year out in the market, Helpdesk has received it’s 1,000,000th support ticket. According to UserVoice CEO, Richard White, the fact that the usage of Helpdesk has been so great is because companies are recognizing that they need a better experience for both their team and customers. He says in his post, “these are people who want to have a conversation with their customers…and they want the tools to make this easy.”

It makes perfect sense what he says because back in the day, we’re all used to picking up the phone and speaking with a live representative, which soon turned into an automated message that never allowed us to speak with a human (so impersonal). Now, in the digital age, we’re demanding better and through social media, we’re using the technology to force our way back to speaking with humans–because customers don’t want to be treated like they’re just a number anymore. When we want help with a problem with a business’s product, we’re going to want to receive it somehow and that could be through a company’s support forum where the more users that have that problem can vote it up, or by submitting a ticket that receives a much needed response in a timely manner. The technology and practice that UserVoice has is surely picking up steam as their customers are still growing: from Worksmart Labs to Blackbaud to Seesmic, Posterous, and even Rackspace…the growth is becoming phenomenal.

Congratulations UserVoice on your success and your one millionth Helpdesk ticket!

Photo Credit: Call center workers by contrapart/sxc.hu

Have you ever tried to set up a press page for your company? Do you even know what belongs on one? Well look no further because Totem, an independent provider of press page solutions just launched their flagship product into public beta. The goal from creating your own totem is to help set up location where people can find information about your group. In customs that subscribe to the totem, these symbols are a representations of a group of people, such as a family, clan, group, lineage, or tribe. So what it seems that the service Totem is providing is to offer a symbol of the company/group that marketers and interested people can find – a totem, if you will.

Just who would be benefit from Totem? Most likely not established companies like Proctor & Gamble or any other enterprise company since chances are that they’ll be too big or have the resources necessary to bring on big agencies like Edelman or Burston-Marstellar. So we need to think a bit smaller and that points to only one logical choice: small businesses/startups. Startups are usually very small that they wouldn’t have enough resources to handle developing a press page — this is probably the last thing on their list, way behind actually creating the project and raising funds. So that’s where Totem will benefit them. And it seems like a perfect fit because of who created the service: Jones-Dilworth.

Wait, that name doesn’t sound familiar to you? Jones-Dilworth is a power public relations agency based in Austin, Texas and focused on helping early stage startups in technology to market. They’ve been doing so with folks like Siri, Wolfram Alpha, Twine, 80legs and more. Maybe this is a way for them to get more clients, but the ulterior motives are far outweighed by the fact that they’ve created something that caters to startups – it’s almost like a freebie to start off with. It might seem like linkbait to you, but when you see what options you have with Totem, it might make you think about it.

First of all, it’s super simple to sign up for your very own Totem. Just fill out your basic login credentials and then you’re off. Over the next four screens, you’ll be asked to name your press page, create a custom URL for it (e.g., domain.totemapp.com) and then provide the standard contact information for people to reach out to you for press questions or information. In the last step, you’re going to add resources to your totem and this can be recent articles, press releases and blog posts. Documents, screenshots, infographics, product sheets, headshots, and other relevant information can also be dumped into your totem to make it appealing to the media.

So what’s it look like? Well see below…

As you can see, the above example is Totem’s own totem and it looks like a pretty solid template. That’s probably what you’re going to get when you have a “do-it-yourself” simple press page. But what’s good is that you’re going to be able to provide all sorts of contact information for people to reach you, and it’s not just limited to traditional methods. You can include your blog RSS feed, links to you on social networks and even stream your tweets right on your totem. A bookmarklet can be added to your browser to allow you to easily capture coverage and publish it to your press page — Totem makes it much easier to share your good fortune.

Josh Jones-Dilworth, co-founder and CEO of Totem (and also the agency that bears his name), says about Totem: “Totem is a best-of-breed solution that provides incredible agility to organizations that are struggling with mission-critical press page updates. Look at most press pages out there — they’re ugly, incomplete, full of jargon and almost never get granular enough to properly serve anyone. We’re revolutionizing the press page, at long last.” And I agree — they are providing an incredibly agile service to fledgling companies and also aesthetically appealing to users and viewers.

But with this template press page, there’s got to be limitations as well, right? Yes, since it’s a free plan, what you’re going to get are unlimited press pages with all the features the press is looking for. The ability for collaboration with your co-workers and clients, free hosting, a press widget to embed on your site/blog, and a scrolling “as featured in” widget for your homepage are also part of the free package. But, if you pay the one-time $99 upgrade fee, you’re going to be able to customize your domain so that instead of linking to yourstartup.totemapp.com, you’ll point the press to press.yourstartup.com. Oh, and separate yourself from all the other Totem users too since your upgrade will allow you to customize your page and white label your page as well.

According to Jones-Dilworth, press pages have long been the “low-hanging fruit of PR and marketing programs”, but they rarely get the attention they deserve because they require a tremendous amount collaboration between webmasters, designers, community managers and outside consultants. Totem is going to eliminate those business barriers and puts the marketing team in control of the press page, a vital marketing asset. In an almost meta-fashion, Totem is disrupting the press room world by creating a new press room. It’s press room 2.0!

Go ahead and check out Totem yourself and see what you think about it.

Exciting news for startups eager to make a name for themselves while getting a big chunk of change for their effort. In today’s LAUNCH newsletter, Jason Calacanis announced that his LAUNCH competition has raised over $250,000 in prizes thanks to the help of Charles River Ventures. In next month’s LAUNCH festival, Calacanis and the select judges will award one of 10 prizes to some lucky startup within two separate competitions: 1.0 and 2.0. Within each category are five individual prizes, including Best Presentation, Best Business Model, Best Design, Best Technology, and Overall Winner/Best in Show.

What separates 1.0 from 2.0? For those who have never had any press, public demos and if they’re in closed alpha or beta, then you’re in the 1.0 category. However, if you’re experienced and just launching a new product or a significant new version of an existing product, then you’ll want to be in the 2.0 category. Of course, LAUNCH doesn’t want you to feel left out if you’re already been around the block and just want to promote yourself. Unfortunately that means no on-stage theatrics for your company, well not necessarily. You can apply for a spot in the demo pit and if the judges come by and love your stuff, they may select you to jump on stage to pitch the crowd.

With Charles River Ventures supporting LAUNCH, one winner will receive a $100,000 investment in the form of a convertible note without a discount or cap (similar to the notes provided to Y Combinator companies) and will have George Zachary as an advisor.

Other prizes that the LAUNCH festival will have include admission for one fortunate startup into the TechStars program next semester, while another startup will get a $51,000 investment for being the winner of the 1.0 competition. Of course, Calacanis makes us all aware that you could win multiple prizes — if you win the CRV award ($100k) and then get the TechStars prize, then that startup stands to gain a $269k investment just for being at LAUNCH! Who knows what will happen this year at LAUNCH!

You can buy a ticket to the LAUNCH festival at the Design Center Concourse in San Francisco by clicking here. The event is from March 7-8 and features judges like Cyan Banister, Paul Bragiel, David Cohen, Tony Conrad, Don Dodge, Rob Hayes, Dave Goldberg, Tony Hsieh, Dave McClure, Peter Pham, Kara Swisher, Robert Scoble, Andrew Warner, and Bill Warner — and those aren’t all of them!

Startups, get your entries in and good luck in your launch!

In a bid to help increase their reach and add more significance to their metrics, influence measurement service Klout purchased the mobile and local neighborhood app Blockboard. The exact terms aren’t being disclosed, but according to Klout’s blog, they see this acquisition as an additional way for them to build an amazing local-mobile app  and will help make Klout useful and accessible no matter where people are.

If you’re not familiar with Blockboard, it’s a neighborhood app that allows the community to really become a virtual community. It’ll allow your neighbors to chat with you and others to talk about issues plaguing the community like potholes, vandalism, graffiti, crime, observations, and even converse with one another — almost like a private community Facebook. But surely this private community Facebook model fits into Klout’s metric platform, right? Well…it doesn’t seem like it. In a post on TechCrunch, writer Leena Rao states that Klout will use the technology and the team to invest in local and mobile product efforts. In looking at the deal, it appears that Blockboard was an “acqui-hire” and should be a good one if the local and mobile strategy pays off. For now, people who are checking their Klout score only knows what their scores are from a global perspective — there’s no localization to help advertisers and businesses figure out what a customer’s influence is within a specific region, county, or city.

But what’s the deal with Klout wanting to go mobile? Isn’t the site already mobile? No, it’s mobile-friendly…you just have to go to their site and view your profile and sign in through the browser and there’s your score. What Blockboard brought to the table is something that Liz Gannes from All Things D remarked in her post when talking about their authentication: the first time someone uses Blocboard’s iPhone app, it validates via GPS that they are located in a particular neighborhood. So now, your Klout score can let you size up your friends and whoever you’re with, all depending on where your phone is. For example, if you happened to be at the Super Bowl last Sunday and part of the collective group tweeting away, the NFL could use Klout to determine who is the most influential tweeter there and give them a spontaneous perk and the service would know you’re there based off of your phone GPS.  Might seem a bit unrealistic, but who knows what mobile opens up for the service. Whether this localization will allow brands to view people based on more filtered Klout scores (e.g., if you’re influential about technology, photography, and sports–what are your individual scores for each of these topics?). This would help with better targeting by brands and advertisers.

The acquisition of Blockboard is the latest string of strong news by Klout. In December, they topped over 10 billion API calls, have more than 4,000 API partners, and indexed over 100 million profiles. With strong funding and their recent round of $30 million from Kleiner Perkins and more, what lies ahead for Klout?

You can read Blockboard’s post about the acquisition here and Klout’s statement here.

Photo Credit: Business handshake by acerin/sxc.hu

You might have missed it, but last night, one commercial aired during the Super Bowl that had a direct tie to the Silicon Valley. It was the Best Buy “phone innovator” commercial and aired featuring Philippe Kahn, the inventor of the camera phone, Ray Kurzweil, the inventor of text-to-speech synthesis, the founders of Shazam, Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square, Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, and the creators of Words with Friends (with a great hat-tip to Alec Baldwin). It was a great spot that featured some of the tech world’s biggest, brightest, and legendary inventors and mobile pioneers. It kind of is a backhanded compliment to have it be associated with Best Buy though, in my opinion, but it still is a great commercial. Nice of them to also focus on some of the people you didn’t know were part of the startups – like with Square, the only founder most people know is Jack Dorsey.

Anyways, what did you think of this Best Buy commercial? You can watch the whole thing here.