Twitter Launches An Issue Tracker And Other New Features For Third-Party Developers

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

In early September, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey posted a note to developers asking for feedback on how the network could better serve them. From the post: We want to know what additional materials you need from us to help you build products, boost distribution and expand your reach. It looks like Twitter has taken this feedback into account, and has rolled out a number of new features for developers based on their responses.

One of the main developer requests was a centralized issue tracker. Twitter has now launched a dedicated Issue Tracker, hosted on its new developer portal, which will replace the existing Google Code Tracker.

Another piece of feedback was a clear policy on API changes. Twitter will now give developers a minimum is 30 days advance notice before ‘sunsetting’ anything. For more broad, sweeping changes, Twitter says it will be flexible with developers and give them as much time as possible.

Rate limits are a big issue for Twitter developers and the company says that it permits 350 requests per user (oauth_token) per hour if you’re making authenticated calls and 150 per hour against the calling IP address for unauthenticated calls.

The goal is to scale usage of the API with the growth of a developer’s user-base and as they bring on more users, they will get greater access to the APU. Twitter also said that it is committed to push Site Streams, which will allow apps to receive real-time updates for events such as mentions, follows, timelines, and more, out of beta by Q1 of 2011.

Twitter promises to be more communicative overall with developers and especially help third-party developers work through authentication issues using oAuth.

By investing in creating new tools and features for developers, Twitter is clearly making a more concerted effort to work with third-party developers. In the past, there have been come miscommunications and it’s wise for the network to start listening to what developers want and need. In March, Twitter basically told developers to avoid competing with them on native clients. It’s not that Twitter doesn’t want developers to build off their platform, they just don’t want developers to build clients that mimic Twitter’s own services. As we’ve written, this is business, not personal. Regardless, it’s good to see Twitter taking actions to smooth things over with developers.

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

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YouTube Launches Movie Rentals For The UK

TechCrunch Europe is edited by Mike Butcher (FRSA, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts). As well as editing TechCrunch Europe, Mike is involved in a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment called TechHub (@TechHub), in London initially. A long time journalist, Mike has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including... ? Learn More

YouTube has rolled out its movie rental service in the UK. Youtube.com/moviesnow features over a thousand feature films including The Dark Knight and Reservoir Dogs alongside British classics like Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The UK is the third country to get the service, following the US and Canada.

Prices for the films range from £2.49 to £3.49. Users have 30 days to watch the movies rented and then have 48 hours to finish the movie.

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Fampus Launches Social Events Site For Universities

Good startups often emerge from situations where the founder is attempting to solve a problem they themselves have. That was certainly the case with collegiate events site Fampus, created by 22-year old Brittany Body, now a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As a new arrival to the university in 2008, Brody wanted to get involved on campus, but was frustrated by the lack of a dedicated site that listed both on-campus and nearby community events. So she created Fampus.

There are, of course, plenty of events sites already out there. Behemoths like Facebook and Meetup.com, for example, compete in this space, as do event search, listings, and ticketing focused sites like Eventbrite, Plancast, Eventful, Zvents and dozens of others. There are also local competitors, like Metromix, for example. Even Bing is in on the event-listing action.

What Brody wanted, though, was site that showed her all of University of Wisconsin-Madison events right down to the Chess Club meetings and Greek mixers, alongside popular community events.

To get Fampus started, Brittany sought help from entrepreneur (and dad) Brad Brody, who now serves as President within the organization. Over the next couple of years, and with the help of a growing staff that now includes 12 full-time employees, Fampus was engineered, designed and, as of last month, quietly launched.

Today, Fampus has 7 colleges on board, each aided by on-campus interns who help promote the site, find partnering opportunities and offer local feedback. Current schools include Grand View University, Drake University, Simpson College, Iowa State University, University of Iowa, University of Nebraska at Lincoln and University of Wisconsin-Madison. Fampus aims to triple that number over the course of 2012. And it has identified a total of 300 target schools it wants to reach.

In order to join Fampus, students, as well as administration and faculty, need to have a .edu email address. (Yes, just like Facebook required back in the day.)

Featured events appear on the Fampus homepage, and students can click if they’re attending, “keep me in the loop” to bookmark them or “thumbs up/thumbs down” to aid in Fampus’ event recommendations. Surprisingly, there’s no calendar integration yet, but this was not at the top of students’ requests, the company says. For now, users can track their planned events and history on their profile page.

Event attendees can comment and upload photos, the latter which can be optionally posted to Facebook, too. Twitter integration is also present.

Fampus supports itself through a combination of locally focused advertising (banner and sidebar ads) as well as some sponsored event listings. The site aims to keep sponsorships to a minimum, though, because event curation is its key selling point. To that end, there is no process for listing an event of your own on Fampus. Instead, it’s primarily a database-driven site where events come in through through partnerships with event promoters, venues and its own on-campus ties. Users can “suggest an event” through a new Fampus feature, however.

A mobile app (available next week) for iPhone and Android offers close to 75% of the site’s main functionality. It also includes event check-in and, interestingly, an event check-out feature. (Something more location-based social networks should have).

As to whether Fampus will one day “pull a Facebook” and open up to a broader audience…well, never say never, but for now, the company’s goal is to remain a university-closed system.

Funding for Fampus is from an undisclosed sole angel investor as of this moment, but the company may pursue VC dollars starting early next year.

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Rentlord Launches A Socially Connected Market To Let Landlords And Tenants Manage Their Rent

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

You know what’s not that fun? Apartment searches. Also landlords. Luckily, launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt is Rentlord, a social platform that allows landlords and lessees to painlessly create and manage their rent, leases, contracts, and much more. Rentlord boasts a socially-connected market that lets users find homes and apartments based on a trust gradient enabled by integration with your social graph. Rentlord allows users to find a home or tenant, then start a contract online, as well as connecting members of the home with one another and allowing landlords to manage the property in tandem with their tenant(s).

How does it work? Once users sign up for Rentlord, they can list their apartment or house once, including images, details, a description, at which point Rentlord automatically geotags the listing, blasts it out over social channels, and cross-posts across UK rental portals — free of charge. Users can send messages to each other to meet in person, close deals in minutes, using Rentlord’s customizable contracting utility — all from the comfort of a single platform.

The startup has been working with lawyers in Europe to draw up a contract form so that landlords and lessees can do everything online, keep track of their leases, and complete every part of the renting process on one platform. Those contracts are stored on Rentlord permanently, so you can always refer back to the contract, and never have to worry about devious landlords switching up the terms of the lease.

As part of creating an all-in-one portal for renters and landlords, Rentlord also offers users the ability to pay their rent through the platform, split bills with housemates, and receive reminders when its time to pay the rent or pay utilities. And for those on the apartment or house search, the startup’s platform enables you to locate restaurants and points of interest that are close to the location of the place you’re interested in to help you decide if its the right neighborhood for you.

And for those already renting, the platform enables you to call in a local plumber, report a leak to your landlord, and organize your domestic life. As to how they’re making money, for all those transactions taking place on Rentlord, the platform takes a commission on those transactions, though Founder Colin Tan tells me that the commission is low enough that users won’t be scared away.

Rentlord is currently available in the U.K., but it will be rolling out functionality in the U.S. over the next month. The startup also announced today that it is backed by Seedcamp, the european micro seed fund for internet technology companies based in London, as well as Dave McClure’s 500 Startups.

For more on Rentlord, check ‘em out at home here. Cool startup.

Rentlord is the online way to let and sublet homes.

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Bing Launches Airport Maps For 42 US Cities

Microsoft’s search service Bing is today announcing the launch of airport maps for 42 major airports across the U.S., with plans to expand to other airports over time. The new feature is available now in Bing Maps on the desktop (some airport maps were previously available on mobile).

With this, you can see inside airports in order to locate terminals, check-in counters, restrooms, shops, restaurants, baggage claim areas, information desks and more.

You can find the new maps by searching for the airport name on Bing, the airport’s city or its code, or you can search for a flight number and click on the included “map” link. A link on the airport maps page also lets you send the map to your mobile device for later access.

The addition comes shortly after Google’s release of its new Google Flight Search feature, made possible through its acquisition of flight data company ITA – a move that Microsoft and others had fought. Flight and travel-related search had been one of Bing’s advantages, thanks to earlier integrations from travel price finder Farecast, acquired back in 2008.

Google offers its own airport maps (for example: my local airport here), but the maps are limited to airport layout in some cases, not what’s inside. For example, the interior of my airport shows just a couple of businesses, like Starbucks and car rental stations, but not check-in counters or restaurants. For larger airports, like LAX, Google may show a bit more data, but it’s still incomplete. However, with Google’s launch of Google Travel, it’s only a matter of time before Google’s own airport mapping offerings are filled out even more than they are today.

In addition, Google has been moving into the indoor mapping space, even going so far as to provide Street View shots inside businesses for Google Business Photos.  That it would soon start providing a version of Street View for airports would not be surprising.

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Google Analytics Catches Up With Real-Time, Launches Enterprise Tier

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). ? Learn More

Google Analytics, the immensely popular suite of tools that Google offers to help webmasters track their site traffic, is getting a big boost this week: the service has launched a real-time dashboard that updates with user events as they happen.

That’s a big deal, as it brings Google more in line with popular real-time analytics products like Chartbeat, which allows you to track things like how many people are currently on your site, and how much traffic each individual article has gotten in the last few minutes. Prior to today’s launch of real-time, Google Analytics reports typically had a delay window upwards of three hours (and often longer), which meant this kind of tracking wasn’t possible.

In its blog post announcing the news, Google highlights how you can now use Analytics to gauge the impact of various social channels, like Twitter and Facebook — and you’ll be able to quickly tell if your custom analytics query is working as intended, without having to wait 24 hours to see the results. In order to see the new Real-Time feature you’ll need to activate the ‘New Version’ link in Analytics, which is in the upper-right hand corner of the screen.

In addition to Real-Time, today the Analytics team has also announced a premium tier for enterprise companies who want more support (and datapoints tracked) than Google offers with its free service. Google says that for an unspecified price, companies will be able to get phone support, SLA guarantees, and increased data limits.

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Vimeo Launches Audiosocket-Powered Music Store To Bring Tunes To Video

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

At F8 on Thursday, The Social Network will by all accounts be making its official foray into music, with scrobbling and music content galore headed straight for our news feeds. Ahead of Facebook’s new music service, Vimeo is announcing its own musical news, thank you very much, that has some interesting implications for artists and filmmakers and music technology. You may know Vimeo as the quality YouTube alternative that’s long been a place for semi-pro videographers, filmmakers, and Vloggers to host, share, and present their video content. Today, Vimeo is taking its long-awaited leap into the music world with the “Vimeo Music Store” — a custom-designed music licensing solution that will allow Vimeo’s video buffs to search for, discover, and license songs for both non-commercial and limited commercial use.

Powering the nuts, bolts, and backend of the Vimeo Music Store will be Audiosocket’s Music-as-a-Service (or MaaS) platform, a cloud solution designed to allow digital media companies to easily integrate music search, discovery, and licensing. The Vimeo Music Store, which represents the first commercial implementation of Audiosocket’s solution, will allow users to take advantage of all the benefits of a music library that contains more than 100 categories of integrated metadata, all from inside the friendly confines of Vimeo’s platform.

Vimeo users will also have the benefit of access to Audiosocket’s library of 33,000+ legit songs in the new music store, enabling the video platform’s users to select and license a wide variety of tracks that they can use as soundtracks for their video productions, with the ability to then distribute them over the Web, and film festivals, and so on, without worrying about an RIAA SWAT team descending from the roof.

On the flip side of the partnership, Audiosocket’s music artists will now have the benefit of a sizable new distribution channel (along with guaranteed royalty payments on licensed music) and exposure to Vimeo’s audience of more than 50 million monthly visitors — many of them semi-pro and professional filmmakers.

On this note, obviously the real key to Vimeo’s music store is that it opens the door for musicians to monetize their work in personal video creation: An area that’s traditionally been tough for artists to make any significant profits. In this way, Audiosocket’s MaaS platform could prove to be a great way for indie musicians to receive both widespread, multimedia exposure (with attributions) and make some extra income, potentially turning Vimeo into an even more appealing musical alternative to YouTube for the world’s melody makers. (Especially as Audiosocket’s catalog specifically features content from emerging bands, composers and record labels, making it a great tool for indie music discovery.)

It’s also great to see the evolution in the relationship between music and technology — and now the cloud — as Audiosocket’s MaaS platform, which is designed for integration into video and photo sharing platforms, virtual worlds, online games and social networks, could have a disruptive effect on the way music is licensed in digital media. And we all know how much music licensing has been in the need of workable, affordable solutions (really, innovation). Just ask Napster.

After all, when you get down to it, amateur filmmakers really have no idea where to start when it comes to music licensing, and vice versa; both parties want to take advantage of the benefits without the hassle, but they’re by and large clueless on where to start.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether Vimeo users will be willing to pay to license Audiosocket’s music content, the pricing structure of which currently stands at $1.99 per track for personal, non-commercial, and web-use for casual users and $98 per track for commercial, web-use licenses for professional users. Thankfully, much of the content will be available for free thanks to Creative Commons Licensing, but professional users may be heard issuing a few groans.

Nonetheless, this could really be a real future-altering partnership for Audiosocket and is no doubt a great bonus for Vimeo users, but it also seems as if the video platform will need to go bigger with its song catalog if it’s to truly make waves.

For more, readers can check out an embeddable widget which includes sample tracks from Audiosocket’s library here and for a look at the Vimeo Music Store, check it out at home here.

Vimeo is a cleanly-designed video sharing website that allows people to publish their videos for public consumption or just for friends and family. Vimeo launched support for high definition video in October 2007, further establishing itself as a leading video hosting platform. The website is owned by the media conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp and operated by Connected Ventures.

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Audiosocket is a music media and technology company that provides artists with the opportunity to monetize their work through both traditional and new media licensing. Placing high standards on the quality of their catalog, Audiosocket is very selective about the content it delivers to the market place. The company only works with artists, bands and composers that are active and creating culturally relevant content. When accepted onto the roster, artists have agents working to deliver their music to the market...

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TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington Launches A New Blog, Uncrunched

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). ? Learn More

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, who recently left the company he founded over six years ago, is back in action. Or at least, he has proven that he still knows how to set up a WordPress blog.

Arrington just tweeted a link to Uncrunched, which will be his personal blog from here on out. There isn’t really much there yet, save for his first post titled, ‘Here I Am’. That’s it — the post consists of just the title — but presumably his later posts will be a little more content-heavy (fingers crossed that this new role as General Partner at CrunchFund is just a ploy to unearth all of Silicon Valley’s dark secrets).

Which brings us to the comments.

Arrington has apparently decided to use the basic WordPress commenting system. It’s a brave move (you may remember the TechCrunch comments of yore), but the trolls haven’t overwhelmed the blog just yet.

In keeping with time-honored Internet tradition, the first comment on the blog is “omg. first.” — congratulations to former TC developer and Cake Health cofounder Andy Brett for claiming the top spot. And an ‘A’ for effort to Philip Kaplan, who wrote “first” despite being the blog’s twelfth comment. The remainder of the comments are generally positive, though there are a few outliers, like the one embedded below.

Disclosure: Arrington was my boss for a long time and I ate a lot of his cereal when TC was still based out of his house.

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995), and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. His clients included idealab, Netscape, Pixar, Apple and a number of startups, venture funds and investment banks. He...

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Piictu Launches, Grabs Seed Funding To Grow Its Game-ified Photo Sharing App

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

Last week, another photo sharing app hit the scene. But before you commence with groaning, Piictu is more than just another photo sharing app, it’s “a fun and simple way to talk and play with pics”. Still groaning? Hold on just a second. In a crowded space, Piictu’s value proposition is that it is offering a new kind of visual network where interactions take place through direct “picture conversations” — not just your average, run-of-the-mill photo sharing.

Piictu Founder Jonathan Slimak says that photos are traditionally static objects of memory, so with his new photo sharing app, he wanted to transform pictures into a conversation medium, and objects of interaction. But what does this mean exactly?

In terms of the daily Piictu experience, for starters, a user uploads a picture, gives it a caption, and immediately receives picture-based responses from other Piictu users, which forms — yup — a picture stream. Where this differs from the pack is that Piictu’s streams are set up in such a ways as they can then be made in the form of a sequential game or center around a question like, “who’s your favorite Ninja Turtle?” As to the former, Slimak cited the example of a number game that focuses on picture-based replies that continue the sequence in a game. For instance, I upload a picture of a vanity license plate that reads “Number 1? and you might respond with a picture of a two dollar bill, and so on.

Slimak says that the idea came from his experience watching the World Series on TV. His friends were posting pictures of themselves in their favorite teams’ jerseys to a group MMS app. The problem is that most of these images would never be seen again, lost in the pile, but still had great future value for ongoing conversations. So, Slimak created Piictu as an optimization of MMS group chat, with an obvious nod to Instagram.

“Instagram does photo sharing perfectly”, he said, but there’s still room for photos to become the source of rich conversations and game-ified interactions. If you’re one that thinks one picture is really worth a thousand words, then Piictu is the app for you. What’s more, if you were a Photovine user, look no further. The experience of Piictu is remarkably similar to Google’s app, which was retired last month when the Googles shut down Slide.

Giving the TechStars startup a further boost, we’ve learned, is a recent infusion of $750,000 in seed funding, led by SoftBank, RRE, and Betaworks. The round also included angels like Jon Steinberg from Buzzfeed, Josh Guttman from Outbrain, as well as others. (TechStars also contributed to the round.)

Picture streams have been increasing in popularity in tandem with the rise of microblogging. Just as Twitter recently added image galleries to each user’s profile, so are many platforms looking to take advantage of the rise in pictorial conversation (thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and their cameras). Each photo sharing app has to find its niche, and Piictu has already gained some early adoption as a result of its bet that picture streams will only continue to play an increasingly important role in how we interact and converse in our daily life.

And, as is the trend today, it doesn’t hurt to open the platform up to game-ified use cases. Slimak said that, going forward the team plans to add leaderboards to each new photo stream, with the number of “likes”, shares, and views likely determining its ranking.

As to how Piictu plans to monetize its free app? The founder said that he sees Piictu as a great venue by which brands can engage visually with their customers and encourage them to submit original, user-generated content — though it remains to be seen how that will manifest.

But my hunch is that the team just might be onto something with their focus on conversational photo streams. Stay tuned for more.

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Yardsellr, The eBay For Facebook, Grows To 5 Million Strong, Rebrands; Launches Marketplace For Fashion

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

In November of last year, TechCrunch broke the news that Yardsellr, the eBay for Facebook (without the auctions), had raised $5 million in series A funding from Accel Partners. At the time, the investment seemed testament to the growing interest in the value of bringing eCommerce to Facebook in order to expose it to, you guessed it, your social graph.

Since then, Yardsellr has mostly remained under the radar, building out its platform and quietly growing its user base. Today, the startup is making a couple of big announcements, starting with a high-level rebrand. The motivation? Yardsellr Founder and CEO Danny Leffel tells me that his company wants to do for the eMarketplace what social gaming companies have done with studios. So, that means in practice that Leffel and company have started YellowDog Media, which will become the overarching entity, or studio, behind a diverse catalog of transaction-based titles. Yardsellr was the first title, and today the company is announcing their second: Sty.ly.

Sty.ly, simply put, is a new social marketplace for women’s fashion. As Yardsellr was formed to be a person-to-person marketplace built on Facebook in which users can connect with other people selling everything from vintage guitars to Hello Kitty collectibles, Sty.ly is the same — for fashionistas. (You can see here why Yardsellr has drawn comparisons with eBay — not to mention that Leffel worked at eBay for five years and knows the business well.)

With Yardsellr, users can follow products in their news feed, talk to friends, share, and when they’re interested in making a purchase, move over to Yardsellr.com to use the site’s secure transaction mechanism to complete the sale.

Since launching, Yardsellr built out over 4,000 of what it calls “blocks” — or niche communities based on particular interests — in which users can follow, browse, and connect with like-minded people based on their love of vintage guitars, or whatever the case may be. All they have to do to join one of these blocks is “like” it on Facebook. Compare this to traditional eCommerce, which focuses their verticals based on product categories. The former is inherently more communal, social, and geared towards real engagement with actual people.

Sty.ly was born out of both those “blocks”, and obviously the growing demand for eCommerce platforms that target women’s fashion in particular. Thus, with Yardsellr as the template, Sty.ly will become a social platform (based on Facebook) for those who want to buy and sell new, lightly-used and vintage items, from designer labels to boutique finds. Voice is what matters in social commerce, Leffel said, and he’s betting that the Yardsellr model — the one that’s a bit eBay and a bit Etsy — will work well for Sty.ly’s target audience, and other niche audiences going forward.

And so far, it seems to be working. In a soft launch of Sty.ly, Leffel and team found that more merchandise was sold in two weeks on Sty.ly than Yardsellr sold this year. As for Yardsellr, since November, the platform has grown steadily at a rate of 35 percent per month in terms of gross merchandise sales (in both the quantity and value of products changing hands).

According to Leffel, on any given day, there are more than 120,000 items for sale through Yardsellr, with 6,000 new items listed for sale each day. What’s more, Yardsellr has grown into a community of over 5 million people, 175K of which are monthly active users. If both titles can sustain that kind of continued growth, the company might not even need to consider a series B.

Going on from here, naturally, the company plans to add further “studios” for particular interest groups, so that eventually Yardsellr will become the general store-type marketplace for those random odds and ends that will be complemented by Sty.ly as well as that future drove of secondary targeted communities (or titles).

But why social? Leffel told me that what used to be so special about eBay was that it’s eFlea marketplace lent itself well to the formation of communities that aggregated tightly around particular interests. Those small communities incubated fierce friendships and bonds among those buyers and sellers that loved, say, first edition novels.

Leffel told me that the eBay team used to joke that there were marriages that happened because of those communities. Of course, eBay has gone on to focus more on commoditized goods, to compete with the likes of Amazon and Walmart, but the goal for YellowDog’s properties is to capture the feel of the old eBay — and find that mix between the loneliness of traditional eCommerce transactions and the scalably social aspects of Facebook.

When the social graph meets the interest graph, Leffel said, commerce is a natural byproduct. It certainly seems that the industry is reevaluating its stance on social commerce, and its long term viability, and if this model proves workable in the long run, Yardsellr, Sty.ly, and YellowDog seem poised to be close to the front of the pack.

Yardsellr is an online marketplace which uses social networks to connect buyers and sellers. Yardsellr believes that people are natural born buyers and sellers. In the tradition of neighborhood garage- and yard-sales, we make it easy for you to list and sell, or find and buy whatever you want. Best of all, the buying and selling is done by regular people like you. That means you get great prices from folks you can trust within your network or...

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Cake Health, The ‘Mint For Health Insurance,’ Launches To The Public

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). ? Learn More

No matter how healthy you are, health insurance still has the uncanny ability to give you a headache.

First there are the bills, which always seem way steeper than you were expecting. Then there are the non-bills that look a whole lot like bills, which may lead you to assume those envelopes that hold real bills are non-bills, too (cue creepy phone calls from credit collectors). Oh, and good luck checking those bills to make sure your insurance is actually paying for everything it’s supposed to — and that the doctor is charging the correct rate.

It doesn’t have to be this way. At least, I really hope it doesn’t. And a startup called Cake Health might be the answer.

The startup, which I first wrote about back in May, is hoping to become the ‘Mint for Health Insurance‘. At the time it was in a limited private beta, and now, at the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield, Cake is opening to the public. Oh, and the TC Disrupt Judges love it.

To get started on the service, users are first prompted to enter the credentials for their health insurance account — the company says it supports the top healthcare providers, covering some 150 million Americans. After entering your login, the service will pull in all of the key data: how much you’ve paid out-of-pocket this year, how much your insurance has covered, how much of your deductible is paid, and so on.

It’ll also look at the benefits your plan offers, giving you reminders to use any benefits that you might forget about (like a yearly eye exam, or dental checkups, for example).

Oh, and the site also has a feature that addresses the bill headaches mentioned earlier. Namely, it’ll let you take a snapshot of your bills, and your ‘non-bills’, to compare what you’re being billed, and what your insurance is paying. It’ll even tell you if you should negotiate with your doctor/hospital over how much you’ve been charged (the company has told me that there are actually a surprising number of errors when it comes to these bills, as they are typically created manually).

Finally, the service is also offering health insurance recommendations, drawing from 13,000 plans to recommend the ones best suited to your needs and price rnage (it’s like Mint and BillShrink in this regard).

As I wrote when I first saw the service, the biggest obstacles facing Cake Health are the fragmented healthcare industry, and earning users’ trust. Cofounder Andy Brett (who, disclosure, was formerly an engineer at TechCrunch), says that the company has developed scraping techniques that help it quickly process information from many providers, even if they don’t have a structured API. As for the latter issue, there will likely be some people who are averse to handing over their data to a startup (I’d argue that healthcare information is even more sensitive than financial data). But there are also plenty of people (probably a large majority) who won’t be especially worried, and the company says it’s taking security seriously.

BG: I think this is Mint for this space. I love it. Best presentation so far.

TC: I love this, it’s brilliant and needed. How difficult is it to upload all my information. This model sems to work well if I invest a lot of energy into the inputs.

A: We work hard to reduce the amount of friction that a user would have signing up. We’ve built the technology on the backend to pull in the data no matter what format you find it in.

TC: I think you need workarounds, I don’t know my login information.

SM: I wonder how you’re going to scale; how do you get people beyond early adopter?

A: First answer is how do you get beyond early adopters… anyone’s documents, HR summary, your EOBs, can be sent to docs@cakehealth.com. If you’re not tech savvy, you get online. To scale, getting the word out.. employers are helping with distribution.

Everyone loves it.

Launch Date: September 13, 2011

Cake Health is an online system that helps users understand and manage their health care. Cake Health provides a central place to track all your healthcare plans online. It updates your plan status so you know what’s covered, automatically categorizes your claims, tracks your out-of-pocket expenses and alerts you to possible overcharges.

Learn more

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Microsoft Launches Windows 8

Say hello to Windows 8, Microsoft’s next-generation operating system.

Microsoft is unveiling the new OS at its Build Conference in Anaheim, Calif. The OS, a complete rebuild of Microsoft’s flagship product, is designed to work with both tablets and PCs.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft Has Sold 450 Million Copies of Windows 7

We’re here at Microsoft’s big event. Check out the liveblog to get our unfiltered thoughts.

View As Slideshow » Microsoft demonstrated a lot of Windows 8 devices, including tablet devices, at its Build conference in Anaheim, CA. Windows 8 Devices: A Closer Look These are some of the devices running Windows 8 at Microsoft's Build conference.

"Your personalized lock screen shows you unread emails and other app notifications. The image shown here is a photo of the road leading to Mt. Cook National Park in New Zealand."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"See your apps and content in a glance on the start screen."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Pick the files you want to send or share from one place."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Touch browsing is fast, fluid and intuitive."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"The thumb keyboard feels natural and comfortable."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Large buttons help you type on the touch keyboard."

Courtesy of Microsoft

Windows division President Steven Sinofsky Windows division President Steven Sinofsky takes the stage at Build.

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Windows 8 Developer Preview Launches Tuesday [PICS]

Can’t wait to get your hands on Windows 8? You can get it tonight — as long as you’re willing to suffer through countless bugs without any technical support.

Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 on Tuesday at its Build conference in Anaheim, California. The tech giant detailed how its next-generation OS bridges the gap between tablets, laptops and desktops with a lightweight system that is built for both touchscreens and keyboards.

Windows 8's features include a Metro style interface, fast boot times (Windows loads in less than eight seconds), a new Windows Store for apps, communication between apps, support for ARM and Intel-based hardware and countless UX and UI changes that are a dramatic departure from its predecessors.

While attendees of the Build conference already have access to the Windows 8 Developer Preview (our review is coming soon), you can take it for a spin as well, starting Tuesday, Sept. 13 at 8 p.m. PT. That is when Microsoft will post the download links for Windows 8. During the developer preview, Windows 8 will be free. It will be available in 32 and 64-bit configurations.

Be warned, though — this is not a finished product. It will come with bugs, constant updates and lots of incompatible software. And Microsoft will not be offering any technical support for the OS. If you install it, you’re on your own.

If you want to get a better idea of what is coming in Windows 8 before you install it, check out the screenshots we’ve collected below. Let us know if you intend to try out the new Microsoft OS in the comments.

View As Slideshow » Microsoft demonstrated a lot of Windows 8 devices, including tablet devices, at its Build conference in Anaheim, CA. Windows 8 Devices: A Closer Look These are some of the devices running Windows 8 at Microsoft's Build conference.

"Your personalized lock screen shows you unread emails and other app notifications. The image shown here is a photo of the road leading to Mt. Cook National Park in New Zealand."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"See your apps and content in a glance on the start screen."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Pick the files you want to send or share from one place."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Touch browsing is fast, fluid and intuitive."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"The thumb keyboard feels natural and comfortable."

Courtesy of Microsoft

"Large buttons help you type on the touch keyboard."

Courtesy of Microsoft

Windows division President Steven Sinofsky Windows division President Steven Sinofsky takes the stage at Build.

View the original article here

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Votizen Launches “Virtual Precinct Walk” For San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee’s Election

Votizen, a new platform for connecting registered voters with elected officials, is launching the first-ever “virtual” precinct walk today, starting with San Franciscans for Jobs and Good Government, a committee supporting Ed Lee for Mayor of San Francisco. This virtual precinct walk is a modern update on traditional door-to-door campaigning, where previously, a politician’s supporters would walk through neighborhoods, knock on doors and encourage their fellow citizens to go out and vote.

With Votizen, this process has finally been brought into the 21st century. It allows online volunteers to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to send out personalized messages to their friends. These messages ask friends to commit to voting in an upcoming election.

The promise of Votizen is one of using social media properties, and their vast databases of millions of users, to revolutionize grassroots campaigning. The revolution comes by not only by taking the campaigning online, but by leveraging the social connections between friends in the process. It also connects user accounts to voting databases in order to track whether those who promise to vote actually follow through.

“The connection of the databases is the technological feature that wasn’t available before,” explains Ron Conway, Votizen investor and founder of San Franciscans for Jobs and Good Government. The critical mass of users – 400 million on Twitter and 750 million on Facebook, is nothing to sniff at, either. In addition, LinkedIn support is on the way and for technological laggards, a system for email authentication (often involving a follow up phone call), is available.

The registration system may be a bit more cumbersome than other online sites, and that can hurt conversions to some extent, admits David Binetti, Votizen Co-Founder and CEO, but the end result is a database of authenticated, registered voters.

Once a registered voter is confirmed on the service, they can then volunteer to be a “precinct captain.” In this role, the voter uses the service’s built-in social networking tools to reach out to their Facebook or Twitter friends, asking them to respond to a simple question: will you pledge to vote for (insert politician’s name here)? Friends can respond “yes” or “no.” And in this initial first run with the new technology, the candidate in question is San Francisco’s Ed Lee.

When friends respond “yes” to a voting pledge request, Votizen then tracks whether or not that vote has actually occurred. The system encourages its users to vote by absentee ballot, so it can scrape records from the voter database, and then thank those who did, indeed, follow through on their commitment to vote. Those who did not are pinged again as a reminder.

Beyond facilitating these social grassroots campaigns, Votizen users can also update their voter records, learn about the candidates and the issues and take a stand on those issues, writing letters to their representatives.

By year-end, the platform will be up-and-running for local, state and national campaigns, including the presidential elections.

Votizen, which received $1.5 million in funding back in December, has several big name supporters in the tech industry, both as investors and advocates alike.

Not surprisingly, Randi Zuckerberg, former marketing director at Facebook, focuses on its use of social networking services. “Votizen has developed an important way to reach voters who may not respond to the same tactics that campaigns used until now,” she says. “The virtual precinct walk has the potential to turn conventional campaigning on its head and inspire more people to vote.”

Twitter Co-Founder and Obvious C0-Founder Biz Stone is also a supporter, noting that “people bring about change with a little help from technology, and this is a shining example.”

Meanwhile, Conway puts it most simply: “Votizen’s platform ensures we are reaching the right people: the registered voters who will decide the election.”

“It’s going to allow people to do virtually what they used to do manually,” he says. ”It replaces the phone and the feet.”

But will a campaigning mechanism of this nature disenfranchise those citizens who don’t have the same access to the Internet as others? Not for long. A later release will support a similar sort of campaigning, but uses SMS messages instead – a technology present even in the most basic phones.

Launching in the tech hub that is San Francisco should get Votizen off to a good start. Amid talk of bubbles and the lack of big ideas, Votizen stands out as a startup trying to impact a real change. Says Binetti,”let’s make a statement: Silicon Valley can help improve the political process.”

Those interested in joining Votizen can sign up to do so here.

Below, an infographic depicting old political campaigning vs. the new.

Votizen provides an authenticated platform that directly connects registered voters and elected officials through social networks, making civic engagement simpler and more meaningful. By verifying that each voice belongs to a real voter in the real world, Votizen legitimizes social media in politics and increases the influence of voting citizens in guiding the day-to-day decisions of our elected officials.

Learn more

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