GAG, the world’s largest and fastest growing online comedy community, today announced a new mobile app for its wildly popular irreverent and hilariously funny content. 9GAG’s new mobile app – named “9GAG” makes it even easier for people to quickly discover, express and share visual entertainment through photos and videos by delivering seamless access from nearly any mobile device, including both Apple iOS and Android platforms. The only official mobile app from the creators of “9GAG” is available immediately from http://9gag.com/mobile and through the Apple App Store.
In addition to launching a mobile version, 9GAG today announced that it has received $2.8 million in seed funding from venture capitalists and angel investors led by early stage investment firms Freestyle Capital and True Ventures. Joining Freestyle Capital and True Ventures are First Round Capital; Greycroft Partners; returning investor 500 Startups; and individual investors Scott Banister (co-founder, IronPort); Chris Sacca (Lowercase Capital); and David Tisch (TechStars), among others.
Get ready America: the 2012 Olympics are about to begin! That’s right, in one week, the Summer Olympics are set to kick off in London, England and it’s attracting a lot of attention, at least from a technology standpoint. Whether it’s about their use about social media for its athletes or how it’s rumored to be the most social in the history of the Olympiad, or anything else, there’s a whole lot going on with this historic event.
But the Olympics are much more than just sports. It’s also about building a better community and to do some charitable good. This year is no different and even the tech community is getting involved with one of the Olympic’s global events to help promote tolerance, peace, and fitness in the world.
Known as the “Walk A Mile” event, this campaign is supported by the 2012 London Olympics and also the US State Department’s Hours Against Hate tolerance campaign designed to help showcase the potential of young people to change the world. To help promote the “Walk A Mile” event, InterAmerican Gaming, in partnership with Dave Stewart, Rock-it Media, Kiip Rewards, PayPal, and Xtreme Labs, just announced the release of their new fitness mobile application, SoFit.
I can’t tell you how much I love riding Uber. Ever since I’ve moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve been hanging out downtown and other neighborhoods until late at night when there’s either no bus service readily available or a scarcity of cabs and in desperate need to get home. My problems continue when there are cabs available and either (a) don’t stop, or (b) do stop and tell me that they can’t take me to my destination. Why? I have no idea…but while some might decide to wallow in their desperation about just how they can get home, thankfully I have Uber to come in and save my day. While I’m not enjoying the fact that it’s quite expensive over the course of time, every now and then, I find it necessary and that even worth spoiling myself over just to call on Uber to get me home or wherever I need them to take me.
So you’ll understand my excitement when I travel to another city and discover that Uber is there as well–just this past weekend, I was in Los Angeles and decided to venture out from my hotel to a bar to hang out with my friends. Normally I would probably hop in a cab, but after finding out that Uber was servicing the area, I decided to go that route and was pleased with the response.
Unfortunately, my experience with this great disruptive service isn’t necessarily shared by everyone–not every really cares for what Travis Kalanick and Ryan Graves has done, and there are some that are trying to stifle it in favor of continued promotion of a traditional system and favored industry. In Washington, DC, a town with a growing tech community, the city council recently debated over an amendment to their city that would revolutionize their dilapidated cab service, but punish Uber’s DC service. Why? No one really seems to know the truth to why the DC city council would go that route, but some may speculate that the taxi industry is a powerful lobby in the city. Even politicians have tried to punish the startup–in early January, DC Taxicab Commission chairman Ron Linton used a sting to try and claim that Uber’s operations in the nation’s capital were illegal. Other cities have been hammering on the service as well. But what do they have to fear? Another method for people to get around? Something ingenious that uses technology to help provide better response? An even easier method that would help expedite payments? Who knows, but it seems to have gotten worse for Uber…
The world of business has just drastically changed and one of the most established enterprise companies in the world just gained one of the most liberal and rebellious to have ever emerged onto the social scene in the past decade. Ever since Yammer, a well-funded social collaboration company, first came on the scene after taking the top prize at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, there has been a shift in the business paradigm. And now, on the heels of their recent announcement of Yammer’s acquisition by global software giant, Microsoft, this popular startup is poised to achieve even greater success and help disrupt the way people are doing business.
Perhaps commonly known in its beginnings as the “Twitter for Enterprise”, Yammer has come a long way in its short four year history to become the de facto service for millions of customers, many of whom are represented in companies that make up the Fortune 500 group. Under the terms of the acquisition, Microsoft will purchase the social business company for $1.2 billion in cash and will join the Microsoft Office Division, which is led by the division president, Kurt DelBene. When asked why they purchased Yammer, Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, responded with “The acquisition of Yammer underscores our commitment to deliver technology that businesses need and people love.” It seems that the software giant saw some great potential that Yammer had versus what they could have possibly mustered using their own social enterprise software called Sharepoint. We’ll explore that a little bit later on, but suffice it to say, according to the announcement, Yammer won’t be integrated into the collective of software right away:
Yammer will continue to develop its standalone service and maintain its commitment to simplicity, innovation and cross-platform experiences. Moving forward, Microsoft plans to accelerate Yammer’s adoption alongside complementary offerings from Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype.
If you’re involved in the business side of your company, chances are that you’re going to have sat in on a conference call with more than two people. We’ve all been there wondering about whether or not the company even has a dial-in number, putting it on a calendar, jotting down notes and figuring out who said what–it seemed that the only thing that the traditional conference call services really care about was highlighting this, but not really any additional services. It was all about connecting people to accomplish a simple phone call, but not really connect them.
UberConference aims to solve this dilemma and help disrupt the boring old phone calls of yesterday that many business-types are accustomed to. The winner of TechCrunch Disrupt New York, this service brings what they call a “whole new visual dimension to audio conference calls”. It appears to want to be more context into your ordinary conference calls in a manner that you’ll derive some more value out of it. Started by Craig Walker, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist with tremendous experience in VoIP technology–he created DialPad in 2001 and co-founded GrandCentral which was acquired by Google in 2007 and became Google Voice–the service puts forth some creative features designed to help you get the most out of your conference call so you won’t have to stress out about its aftermath (e.g. who said what? what did they mean by that? what did he say about that thing?).
