Social Media

Competition is growing in the enterprise Twitter market: Austin-based start-up QikCom, which announced its closed beta launch today, adds some fresh ideas to the concept that won competitor Yammer the top prize at TechCrunch50.

User-generated content plays a central role in National Geographic’s dynamic multimedia platform, Senior VP for online content development Rob Covey told me at the Omma Global conference last month. Users can now share their own videos on the user-generated video hub Everyday Explorers, built with online community builder KickApps and recently launched in beta.

People-powered news site Newsvine has seen enormous growth since its acquisition by msnbc.com last year, receiving 963 percent more registrations and 269 percent more unique visitors, msnbc.com has told Beet.TV. I interviewed CEO Mike Davidson about the Seattle-based social news platform at the Omma Global conference last month.

Gigya, the largest widget network, has raised $11 million in Series C funding, bringing its fundraising total since its 2006 launch to $23.5 million, Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch reports.

Open-source social media center Boxee released a patch yesterday that essentially jailbreaks AppleTV, Brian Chen at Wired’s Gadget Lab reports. The patch makes it possible for users to play any DRM-free multimedia file on AppleTV.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Dan Lyons, formerly known as the Fake Steve Jobs, and now a columnist for Newsweek,  showed up the Technology Review’s EmTech08 conference and wasn’t too taken with the panel on social media moderated by Robert Scoble.  Not one to mince words, the curmudgeonly Bostonian declared in his own blog: "It was like […]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The create-your-own-social-network platform Ning has now produced nearly half a million social networks, with a new one created every 30 seconds, CEO and founder Gina Bianchini says. The company will launch an iPhone application on Friday. Jason Pontin, Editor of the MIT Technology Review, conducted this interview for Beet.TV on the MIT […]

User-driven news site Digg announced a major expansion today that will include doubling its staff, growing internationally, improving infrastructure and developing new features. The company raised $28.7 million in a new round of funding led by Highland Capital Partners to finance its progress, according to Jay Adelson’s post on the Digg blog.

Yesterday night MySpace launched its Self-Serve Ad Service, which will allow MySpace users to post advertisements directing viewers to their profile pages. Nick O’Neill at Social Times writes that the service seems to be targeted toward musicians, but its a tool companies can take advantage of as well. Major advertisers are creating profile pages for […]

TimesPeople, the social network where registered users share their interests, will become fully integrated into the NYTimes.com tonight as it becomes part of the site’s navigation.  Also, it will work with all browsers. Previously, it worked only as a Firefox plug-in.

On Tuesday, the WSJ.com unveiled a long anticipated site redesign. It launched to record  traffic, thanks to upheaval in the financial markets.  Yesterday, I sat down with Wall Street Journal Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray to talk about the redesign.

MIXTT, which has dubbed itself "The Social Network for you Social Life," isn’t another Facebook or MySpace, according to founder and CEO Eve Peters. The site is geared toward meeting new people and offline interaction, and profiles are for groups of friends rather than individuals, she says. Instead of poking or sheep throwing, users can […]

Yammer, a Twitter-like microblogging tool for businesses, won the top TechCrunch50 prize of $50,000, TechCrunch announced yesterday. I spoke with CEO David Sacks about the company after he presented on Monday, and he told me that it was "really cool" that judge "Marc Benioff said he liked it the best." Benioff, the CEO of salesforce.com, […]

Rafe Needleman, editor in chief of CNET’s Webware, takes us for visit to the TechCrunch 50 Conference demo pit.  He visits Rate Surfer, Jibidee and Givvy.

MySpace will allow users to upload video files of up to 512 MB from the 100 MB limit it has had in place.  It also will allow users to upload files directly from video camera to the site.

Tweegee is one of the TechCrunch 50 companies.  Kelsey interviewed CEO Shay Bloch on Monday. Here’s what Josh Lowensohn of CNET wrote about the new start-up: Tweegee is a virtual world that mixes e-mail, personal organization, and Flash gaming. It centers on an anime-like avatar that users build part by part. Likewise they can use […]

We are starting to blog dozens of video interviews from the TechCrunch50 conference.  We have a mix of the 50 companies and cool ones we found in the demo pit.  Here is Kelsey’s interview with Pano Anthos, CEO of Boston-based hangout.net — which is one of the TC 50.

Last night House Speaker Nancy Pelosi answered questions about Congress, the economy, and marijuana legalization–posed not by journalists and pundits, but by contributors to online communities iReport.com and Digg.com. The interview is one of the ways CNN is adding the “voice of real people on the ground” to their election coverage, according to CNN.com Senior […]

Netscape founder and prolific entrepreneur Mark Andreesen and his long time business partner Ben Horowitz are making an investment in Qik, the Foster City-based mobile video streaming platform.  Terms of the investment have not been disclosed.

Short-form video entertainment site Metacafe has a new solution to video search. It has launched a new feature called Wikicafe to let users edit the tags surrounding video content.