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techcrunch50 posts

Filed under: Business, Web services

Local business finder RedBeacon wins TechCrunch50

Whether you love TechCrunch or hate it, you must admit that the TechCrunch50 conference does a decent job of generating exposure for startups. I had never heard of this year's winner, RedBeacon, before TechCrunch50, and I have no doubt that the publicity the company gets from the event will be at least as valuable as the $50,000 prize. RedBeacon is a local business finder that TechCrunch describes as comparable to OpenTable, but for booking services instead of making dinner reservations. You can enter the type of service you want, and it will give you a list of recommendations to browse, with reviews, hours and even how each business is rated on Yelp.

Like last year's winner, Yammer (a Twitter for businesses), RedBeacon is best described by comparing it to an existing product. At least this year's finalists, while derivative, seem like they fill important gaps in our online lives. Threadsy aggregates incoming messages from all your social networks. AnyClip attempts to beat YouTube and Hulu at showing you the specific movie scene you're looking for (although I have no idea how they're going to get that past Hollywood lawyers). Although it's not the most glamorous of the bunch, my vote would go to CitySourced, a mobile app for photographing and reporting issues like potholes to your city government. Not only does it feel like the freshest concept out of the final four, it also might do some civic good.

Which startup should have won TechCrunch50?


Filed under: Internet, Humor

Kanye interrupts Arrington at TechCrunch50

We simply couldn't resist.

(In case you didn't catch Kanye West's antics at the Video Music Awards this weekend, here's some context.)

Filed under: Internet, E-mail, Web services, Beta, web 2.0

OtherInbox: One mailbox to rule your junk mail

OtherInbox
If you've ever bought anything online you know that there's no such thing as a simple, one-time transaction. Once you give an online retailer your email address there's a good chance you'll continue to get emails letting you know about other items the company would like you to buy, coupons, or sales until the day you die (or opt out of these email messages, whichever comes first). And that's if you're lucky. There's also a chance that your email address will be sold to marketers and you'll start getting messages from dozens of companies you've never done business with at all.

There are a bunch of services that provide you with disposable email addresses that disappear after a few hours or days. You can use these services to create a temporary email address to sign up for a new web service or purchase an item online. But you need to sign up over and over again every time you need an email address. OtherInbox simplifies the process by letting you register for a single account which comes with a virtually unlimited number of email addresses.

Here's how it works. You register for a free account and you're assigned a custom domain like username.otherinbox.com. Any time an email is sent to any address ending with @username.otherinbox.com it will show up in your inbox. Messages will automatically be sorted into folders based on the address they're sent to.

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Yammer is Twitter for business: What are you working on?

YammerTwitter lets you share short messages with the whole world. Yammer lets you share them with your coworkers (or anyone who has an email address on the same domain as yours).

The idea is to use social networking tools to enhance intra-office of intra-team communications. Users can post short messages to let members of their team know what they're working on, ask questions, or talk about what they saw on TV last night. There doesn't seem to be a hard 140 character limit on Yammer like there is with Twitter, so you can post longer messages. But since you're unlikely to be following thousands of users, it should be much easier to keep track of conversations on Yammer than Twitter.

In order to create a Yammer account you need to sign up with your company email account. Gmail, Yahoo!, or Hotmail addresses won't work. Once you've created an account for your company you can invite more users on the same domain or communicate with others who have already signed up.

Yammer's basic service is free and includes a web client, a desktop client built on Adobe AIR and Blackberry app. An iPhone versions is coming soon. The company charges $1 a month (per user) for administrator accounts. So if you want to be able to monitor your workplace network you'll have to pony up a few bucks. As Webware's Rafe Needleman points out, this may be an unsustainable proposition. While I can see some small businesses using Yammer, larger companies with a few dollars in the bank can easily spend some time building their own Twitter-like application if they want to. I'm not sure why anyone would need to pay for Yammer service.

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With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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