Startups

Just for a moment, forget Facebook is building an Instagram rival — and instead, realign your focus on this informative infographic about the company. The app that was launched late last year has caught the imagnation of world with its in-built fancy filters. For some iPhone users, it has become the standard option for sharing pictures. Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, always shares photos on Twitter through Instagram. Even his profile pic has a filter on it. via

What happens when founder of Delicious, and two senior Google and Delicious executives decide to build a product? Well, without a doubt you would expect to see something spectacular. TastyLabs, the startup that the group(Joshua Schachter, Paul Rademacher and Nick Nguyen) founded last year claims to reorganize and redefine social networking – at least that’s what the company’s splash page says.  So, when their first product graduated from their labs today, I was super excited to give it a try. Jig is a Q and A site with a hint of social element. But the timing of the launch couldn’t [...]

Google was quick to exploit privacy flaws of Facebook with Google+ — and a new California startup Zerply is doing exactly that with Linkedin. As you may remember, Linkedin rolled out new kind of ads few days ago; ads that used users pictures to sell products. Scary as it may sound, this format was first used by a Facebook advertiser two years ago, and Linkedin simply happened to adapt it to its site. The focal point of concern was that the feature was enabled by default and many users were caught unaware. Bloggers and privacy advocates slammed Linkedin for risking [...]

While there are a lot of Q & A sites on the internet already, what differentiates one from another is the kind of audience one attracts. Quora for example is heavily used by the techies. Going local on the other hand is another way sites set themselves apart from the crowd, which is exactly what Drumo is up to. The site is heating up Q&A space on the other side of the world, specifically in Asia and Australia – with its own localized Q&A service. In fact, it is first such site to launch there. Drumo, like any other Q&A [...]

Twitter rolled out its photo sharing service yesterday and the news meant Twitter stabbed its eco-system again. This time though, it were the photo sharing services that were badly affected. TwitPic was one of them. To our surprise, the company did expect it coming and silently built a Twitter clone Helloo. Noah Everett, founder of TwitPic says the site has been getting users immediately after it turned the site live even without publicly announcing it. Being a Twitter user, you will find Hello strinkingly similar to Twitter. But this is where the similarity ends. The service lacks a lot of [...]

Bagcheck has just announced that it has been acquired by Twitter and that the site would continue to exist on the internet. The site which went live seven months ago allowed users to share their interests in the form of “bags”. Bagcheck founder Sam Pullara would be joining the Twitter engineering team and the content on the site will remain available unless Twitter kills it off. The company is pretty much excited by the acquisition and shares it on its blog: “We’re very excited to announce that Bagcheck has been acquired by Twitter. But as with any acquisition, things may change [...]

Reach.ly, a Latvian based startup has announced the launch of its new service that connects potential twitter guests with hotels. The tool allows hotels to send potential guests a greeting, an advice about the city, or discounts and offers. Reach.ly removes booking agencies out of the way and allows hotels to directly communicate with customers. Reach.ly’s algorithm mines Twitter to find tweets that are about trip to a city. These tweets are filtered out and presented in Reach.ly’s interface. Hotels can then pick individual tweets and communicate with the users. Will it work? If the company is to be believed, 9% of [...]

If you are using Google+ heavily, then you might be all too familiar with Social Statistics: a site that ranks top Google+ users. Now the guys over there have added another nifty little feature called the “Cloud View“. The feature arranges list of top Google+ users in a form of a cloud. The users are ranked based on number of followers and the respective profile pics are stacked up side-by-side. The feature is so intuitive that it has hooked me on. Rather than following a plain boring list, I can play around and know where a person stands with respect to others [...]

While social networking is often considered a B2C platform, Bizzingo’s Bizz.net claims to be the only B2B social networking site on the internet. Launched today, Bizz connects like minded businesses and provides them a social networking and search experience similar to what Facebook and Google provide for individuals. Bizz allows companies to set up detailed profile pages that allow them to describe what they do, what they sell, and their specific business needs, all indexed to highly searchable results. The business profile will also enable them to present their company’s products or services through videos, images, and collaterals — including [...]