south by southwest
TastemakerX, The App For Hipsters Who Totally Heard That Band First, Raises $1.2M
techcrunch.com
TastemakerX, an about-to-launch startup that will help music fans get credit for discovering the next big thing, has raised $1.2 million in Series A funding. The company plans to launch its mobile app in early March, at South by Southwest — which seems perfect, given the event’s strong representation from...
Does it help the homeless to turn them into a Wi-Fi hotspot? | John Bird
www.guardian.co.uk
The idea of homeless people as hotspots is unpalatable until you consider the opportunity for them to become content providersTurning homeless people into internet hotspots, as they're doing at the South by Southwest Festival (SxSW) in Texas this week, has a certain ring of familiarity to it. A woman who...
The Damning Backstory Behind “Homeless Hotspots” at SXSWi
www.wired.com
Logo Courtesy BBH Labs It sounds like something out of a darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia. But it’s absolutely real — and a completely problematic treatment of a problem that otherwise probably wouldn’t be mentioned in any of the panels at South by Southwest Interactive. Homeless Hotspots is “a charitable experiment”...
Blurtt Wants You To Express Yourself With Mobile Memes
techcrunch.com
A new iPhone app called Blurtt makes it easy to combine words and text — it may not sound like a big deal, but co-founder Jeanette Cajide is pitching it as a new way to express yourself. After all, she says there are some things that just can’t be communicated...
SXSW In A Nutshell: Homeless People As Hotspots
www.readwriteweb.com
South By Southwest 2012 can be summarized thusly: An impossibly-named marketing company called Bartle Bogle Hegarty is doing a little human science experiment called Homeless Hotspots. It gives out 4G hotspots to homeless people along with a promotional t-shirt. The shirt doesn't say, "I have a 4G hotspot." It says,...
Twitter: An Increasingly Great Platform For Instagram
techcrunch.com
Twitter has been working hard over the last year to make photo sharing a core part of its product. It took over the photo-hosting role from third parties and gained deep new integration with Apple’s iOS, among other initiatives. But there’s also a big new winner coming up on top of...
Storify Brings Drag-And-Drop Social Curation To The iPad
techcrunch.com
Storify has become one of the main ways that people can create stories from social media — the startup says it has been used by 22 of the top 25 news sites in the United States, and that its users have curated a total of more than 3 million social...
Mystery music app TastemakerX nails down a $1.8M funding round pre-launch
venturebeat.com
It hasn’t even launched yet, but TastemakerX has already sealed a reasonable deal to lock in funding from Silicon Valley investors. Now that’s what we call rock n’ roll. The social-mobile-music app raised a $1.8 million chunk of change for its first round of institutional funding. Investors include Baseline Ventures,...
CNN in talks to buy Mashable for $200m
www.guardian.co.uk
Global news network said to be in advanced talks to buy the social media news website founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005CNN is on the verge of buying social media news website Mashable for "upwards of $200m", according to reports.The global news network, which is owned by Time Warner, is...
Instagram, One Of The Biggest Threats To Facebook, Has 27 Million Users
www.businessinsider.com
Instagram founder Kevin Systrom announced at South by Southwest that the photo-sharing service has surpassed 27 million registered users, reports TechCrunch. Speaking yesterday, he said, "Out of all the users who have been active in the past week, 67% of them were active yesterday." He called it Facebook-level engagement,...
Trey Ratcliff On The Rise Of Social Photography [TCTV]
techcrunch.com
Trey Ratcliff, the travel photographer known for popularizing HDR (high dynamic range) photo techniques online through his very popular Stuck In Customs blog and more recently his own apps and Google+ page, was in his hometown of Austin, Texas this week as the South By Southwest Interactive conference descended...
American Express transforms Twitter hashtags into savings for cardholders
venturebeat.com
American Express is giving cardmembers one super compelling reason to tweet about promotional offers: instant savings at name brand U.S. merchants. The company has launched a “Tweet your way to savings” program Tuesday to encourage members to sync their AmEx cards with Twitter and tweet special offer hashtags in...
Instagram for Android coming soon, ‘better than iPhone app’
www.bgr.com
During the annual South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger of Instagram teased the company’s long awaited Android app. During an interview with TechCrunch, the duo said that an Android version of the app is coming “really soon.” Systrom briefly showed the app running on his...
Does SXSW Still Matter?
gizmodo.com
There's a famous photo from SxSW taken 10 years ago, with just about every significant blogger at the time all gathered around one table. Many of them went on to form incredibly influential companies, like Flickr, Twitter, and yes, Gawker. Today, a lot of those same people are skipping...
CNN to buy Mashable for around $200 million, report
news.cnet.com
Rumors of the potential acquisition becomes talk of the town aat South by Southwest conference [Read more]...
How to Fix Location-Based People Discovery
techcrunch.com
Philip Cortes is co-founder of people discovery startup Meeteor. Follow him on Twitter @philipcortes. No clear winner came out of South by Southwest’s battle of people discovery apps. Highlight seems to have received the best press, and according to Robert Scoble, about 5% of SXSW used the service. Despite this...
Just.me Wants To Be The Go-To Social App On Your Phone
techcrunch.com
Keith Teare, co-founder of TechCrunch and partner at incubator Archimedes Labs, isn’t thinking small when it comes to his new project Just.me — he says that it’s “asking and answering the question of what would happen if the phone was upgraded to be truly social.” The app hasn’t launched yet,...
Apple set to unveil iPad 3 on March 7
venturebeat.com
Wednesday, March 7 is the date covetous Apple fans can finally catch their first real glimpse at the much-ballyhooed iPad 3, according to a new report. Citing reliable sources, iMore editor-in-chief Rene Ritchie declared that we can expect Apple to unveil its newest tablet on the first Wednesday in March....
Sean Parker: Defeating SOPA Was The “Nerd Spring”
techcrunch.com
You might not often connect Al Gore and Sean Parker, but the pair took the stage together this afternoon at South by Southwest, and they made similar points — that the democratic system has been broken by a flood of special interest money, and that the Internet could be the...
How Forest Whitaker Wants to Crowdsource Filmmaking [TCTV]
techcrunch.com
Turns out, Forest Whitaker isn’t just an Academy Award winning actor and accomplished producer and director — he’s also really into technology and social media. He brings together both worlds as a co-chair of JuntoBox Films, a brand new kind of movie studio that brings together its own social...
A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work
www.wired.com
While most of the tech world was partying at South by Southwest in Austin yesterday, Yahoo announced it was filing a lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly infringing on 10 patents from their 1,000+ patent warehouse. I’m no fan of Facebook, but this is a deplorable move. It’s nothing less...
Meet The 17 Lucky Employees And Investors Behind $1 Billion Instagram
www.businessinsider.com
Instagram was acquired by Facebook today for $1 billion in cash and stock. It only has 13 employees. If all employees had equal shares (they didn't), that'd be $76.9 million per worker. Meet 11 of the lucky employees and 5 investors behind Instagram. Two other employees were hired during...
Printed poster plays music clips
www.bbc.co.uk
Posters that play music via printed circuits formed with conductive ink are being demonstrated at the South By Southwest Show in Texas, USA....
What Is the Point of... #Hashtags?
www.readwriteweb.com
Whenever a new Web trend comes along, there are people who ask, "What is the point of this?" If millions of people are using something, there has to be a reason. In our What Is the Point of... series, we'll explain it to you. This week, we're asking, What is...
gTar iPhone guitar hands-on
www.engadget.com
When we first caught word of the gTar, it was a bit of a mystery, with an online presence amounting to little more than a low-res press shot, an enigmatic YouTube teaser and assorted specs coming out of South By Southwest and various investor sites. This week, however, brings...
Instagram for Android now available in the Google Play store
www.bgr.com
One of the most popular photography applications ever to hit Apple’s iOS platform is now available for Android. Instagram allows users to capture photos and edit them using a number of filters that give images a unique retro look. Pictures can then be shared with other Instagram users, and...
Publicate: Think of it as the portfolio for all of your creative content
thenextweb.com
South by Southwest. It’s undoubtedly one of the largest technology gatherings in the United States, full of promising young startups hoping to make a name for themselves. But little did I know that I’d be sharing a house with a guy named Chris Bradley who has developed one of the...
Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?
www.inc.com
The partners behind a one-time "next big thing" go to South by Southwest to win back the adoration of the tech world--and figure out how to make their partnership work.Last summer, Turntable.fm set techie hearts pounding: Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein, co-founders of a struggling start-up called Stickybits, had pulled...
How The Karma App Makes Gift-Giving Slick And Social [TCTV]
techcrunch.com
Karma, the gift-giving app made by the founders of TapJoy, made its official debut just two weeks ago. But with $5 million in funding from heavyweight venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, Karma has clearly caught the attention of some important people. So we caught up...
Glancee To Release Big SXSW Update With Past Encounters, More Location And More Android
techcrunch.com
Let’s say you want to use your phone to find interesting new people or reconnect with nearby friends — without revealing your exact location. Glancee is the app for you, particularly if you’re an Android user. And the polished competitor to Highlight is getting a big update today, ahead of South...
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