Shaker’s 3D Meetup Spot...

Shaker won TechCrunch Disrupt SF last year with its 3-D virtual nightclub built on top of Facebook, and June 8th it will finally launch in North America with the help of the music industry’s Live Nation and BandPage. Until then you can sign up for Shaker , and when you do, you’ll get a classic album cover of Bob Marley, The Clash, or another legend remixed with your Facebook photos and data. The partnerships, promotion, and landing page all point to a big focus on music as a social lubricant for hanging out with people on Shaker. It’s been a wild eight months since Shaker won Disrupt . It raised a $15 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures, and joined by CrunchFund, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter, Justin Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun, and Israel’s Pitango Venture Capital. It also scored some more money from Motorola Mobility (now owned by Google), threw some online parties for New Year’s Eve and the NBA All-Star Game , and hosted a peace conference featuring Hillary Clinton. Shaker’s racked up tens of thousands of requests from people wanting to set up their own place to gather online with friends, fellow activists, and sexy strangers. Many of them will get their first chance to party or mingle on June 8th at 7:53pm PST when Shaker launches its first public meeting place. A concert may be in store for Shaker’s launch since it’s work working with Live Nation , which owns Ticketmaster and one of the world’s biggest musician management firms, and BandPage , who became the de facto musician profile app on Facebook. But Shaker isn’t trying to be Turntable.fm. Instead of everyone just staring at the DJ, music is what will break the ice so Shaker users can meet each other or have something to talk about. That’s good news for the Internet, where those things can get awkward fast. It’s actually kind of absurd that when we think of “social” online, we think of feeds of text and photos. If you’ve ever jumped on Facebook or Twitter on a Friday night, it can be a little depressing — just a bunch of updates of people doing fun things without you. Video chat services like Google Hangouts are good for small groups, but they devolve into chaos and lag once you get too many people on at once. Shaker could seem like a gimmick to some, and it’s too silly or filled with gamification, that’s all it might end up being. But if its team can make Shaker feel like a real, natural virtualization of ourselves, it could make it cool to sit home alone on your computer. Because you won’t really be alone.

Qwiki Launches A Publis...

Qwiki , the startup that won Disrupt in 2010 , is announcing a new platform today for bloggers and other online publishers. The company’s initial product basically assembled a multimedia “story” around Wikipedia articles, with images, videos, maps, and more. But the vision was bigger — to present a new kind of information experience. Now Qwiki is pitching its platform as a way for publishers to quickly and easily create short, interactive stories, which can be embedded on the publisher site and also featured in a “channel” on Qwiki. Initial partners include ABC News, which is embedding Qwikis throughout its website, and fashion publisher Stylecaster . You can watch some of the sample ABC News Qwikis here . In some ways, they look like regular news broadcasts, but presumably assembled with much less time and effort thanks to Qwiki’s technology, and with a layer of light interactivity (allowing viewers to drill down on individual topics). “What interested us in being the first media organization to use Qwiki’s innovative new video format is the ease with which reporters and producers can create informative and creative video content in almost no time,” says Maya Baratz, senior product manager at ABC News. “We plan to use Qwikis regularly on  ABCNews.com  and  Goodmorningamerica.com  on Yahoo!” Qwiki seemed to have a bumpy 2011. It raised $9 million from big-name investors including Lightbank (the investment fund of Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky) and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, then released an impressive iPad app that took off quickly . However, it also lost its famous co-founder Louis Monier (who founded search engine AltaVista) and other technical executives . This might look like a new direction, but a Qwiki spokesperson tells me, “This isn’t a pivot.” He says the startup will continue working on its consumer products, while also making this platform available to consumers soon. Qwiki will be demonstrating the platform at Disrupt this afternoon.

9M Users Strong, MapMyF...

MapMyFitness is a veteran of the online health and fitness space, with the first iteration of its website appearing back in the summer of 2005. Since then, the startup has developed a suite of fitness-oriented websites (like MapMyRUN.com, MapMyRIDE.com, MapMyWALK.com, et al) to let users track and store their running, cycling, walking and hiking endeavors, along with accessing a database of international routes, fitness calculators, nutrition tracking, events listings and more. MapMyFitness has long had a stable community of committed users, but over the last year, things have been moving steadily north. CEO Richard Jalichandra (who joined the startup from Technorati last year) tells us that MapMyFitness recently passed 9 million registered users, and that, collectively, its mobile apps have amassed over 30 million downloads, making it one of the biggest players in the fitness tracking space. The good news for MapMyFitness, however, has been the recent telescoping growth in registrations (not downloads), with the latest 1 million registrations occurring over the last 40 days. That’s an increase from the 54 days it took for the site to go from 6 million to 7 million users, and the 47 days it took to pass 8 million users. All in all, that’s 3 million new users in the last 5 months, and the CEO says the company is today seeing 25K new registrations a day, significant when viewed against its nearly 7-year history. It’s based on this recent uptick in activity that MapMyFitness is today launching one of the biggest feature updates the platform has seen since rebranding in 2007. The startup has completely rebuilt its portfolio of websites, and is now beta testing three big new features: Updated routes, personal challenges, and courses, with the main attraction, Jalichandra says, being the latter. The CEO claims that the introduction of its new feature makes MapMyFitness the only online fitness service to have integrated Google Maps API v3.9 (the latest version of its API) and leverage its full functionality. What does that mean? While MapMyFitness users could already plan, track, and share their routes, Jalichandra says that Courses adds a notable difference in performance and user experience, enabling users to go beyond the actual route. By incorporating realtime info on traffic, weather, safe routes, directions, realtime elevation, and custom markers, now users can go beyond the route, planning the best Segway route home from work, for example.. Really, the feature is intended to bring MapMyFitness into the gamification/Foursquare era, as it provides both hardcore and casual athletes with both leaderboards and check-ins. Courses offers an automatic “check-in activity” for every exercise logged to track the speed, distance, consistency, and intensity of workouts, ranking users by gender, age, and weigh on the platform’s new leaderboard. There’s also a group segmenting feature that allows users to compare themselves, leaderboard-style, against specific groups, be they local clubs, friends, or fierce cycling rivals, backed by a points system that incorporates personal best times and monthly consistency, awarding badges to the users with the most overall points on climbing courses, those with the most completions of a course, the fastest time, etc., etc. Courses will span MapMyFitness’ five primary categories, including cycling, running, walking, hiking and winter sports, as well as hundreds of subcategory specialties (like unicycling) and enables users to create new Courses directly from their iPhones, BlackBerrys, Androids, Windows Mobile phones and iPads. It also helps that Courses leverages the startup’s database of more than 50 million routes, 1 million climbs, and 30K event courses through realtime processing, allowing users to measure fitness and track progress in realtime or over time. With RunKeeper on a laudable mission to build “the health graph,” alongside an API that’s already attracted 50+ integrations , big funding , and a platform that’s quickly becoming one of the top destinations for tracking and sharing fitness routines, incumbents are feeling a little bit of pressure. But, as its name implies, MapMyFitness does maps better than most, especially now that it is powering its new features with Google’s latest mapping technology. According to the startup’s CEO, other than Strava , MapMyFitness is the only platform that offers realtime GPS activity leaderboards, and he thinks that components of the service, like route mapping, the ability to send a route to your phone to route with directions, along with the ability to choose from over 40 sports give its service a leg up on the competition. MapMyFitness also capitalizes on three revenue streams: Media, digital commerce and subscriptions, and enterprise software, with this diversity resulting in the startup’s revenue doubling each of the last four years, the CEO says, and is projected to triple in 2012. This has allowed the startup to avoid raising outside investment beyond its series A in 2010 and to grow, under its own volition, to a team of 78, giving it an advantage over its competition in terms of good old human capital. With its a deep database of courses, routes and trails, some added stickiness thanks to leaderboards and check-ins, and some big data collection and storage capabilities on the back-end using postGIS, it wouldn’t be surprising to see MapMyFitness continue in its accelerating growth trajectory. And maybe even find a little funding waiting in the wings. Also, don’t be surprised if MapMyFitness ends up being featured by Google at some point. My guess would be here . Courses will be available initially through a private beta test for first 100,000 users who sign up here . iPhone and Android MMF users will only see superficial changes reflected in its new site — now available to one and all — at new.mapmyfitness.com . Widespread access to Courses et al will be offered later this summer. What do you think?

The 15 Startups That La...

Disrupt NYC day two has just wrapped up. During the conference today, Michael Arrington demanded to know from Ron Conway when he was going to run for Mayor of San Francisco (he kept saying he would “never” ), our very own Josh Constine grilled Tim Armstrong with questions about AOL, layoffs, which publication he likes more: Huffington Post or TechCrunch (he said “both”), and we watched 15 more amazing startups battle it out for the ultimate Disrupt prize — the Disrupt Cup and $50,000. Starting tomorrow at 3:30pm ET we will have our Startup Battlefield Disrupt finals. Yesterday, we wrote detailed articles with pictures and pitches from all of the startups who presented . Below are the ones who were featured today. Out of these 30 companies, both from yesterday and today, five will be chosen to fight it out for the ultimate prize. We will have an all-star panel of judges tomorrow for the finals and things will probably get intense; people always get a little crazy at the finals, but as you can imagine, it’s a blast to watch. So, take your time in reviewing all of the stellar startups below. Compared to the brilliant ones yesterday , which startup do you think will make it to the finals? Going further, any guesses on who you think will win it all? Tune in tomorrow for the results! Session 4: Disrupting Local SpotlessCity SpotlessCity helps local dry cleaners connect with customers in a brand new way and lets people finally get their clothes cleaned in the same convenient way they already handle all of their other chores – online. Mirth Mirth is a principled objection to the frenzy of details. It’s a card-linked loyalty experience for the regulars of business with character. SnipSnap SnipSnap is the first mobile application to let you scan, save, and redeem printed coupons on your smartphone. It was featured by Apple on the App Store front page and rose to a top-50 ranking after going live. Centzy Compare services in your area by price, rating, hours, and more. We use paid crowdsourcing to gather comprehensive data from every local business, including the 75% of them that don’t post their information anywhere else online. Cardify Unlock VIP rewards and perks at your favorite places when you pay with a credit card that’s connected to Cardify…. throw away your punch cards and keep that phone in your pocket. Session 5: Disrupting Collaboration Vinlymint Vinlymint is a real-time creation web application that easily fits into your existing production methods, allows you to store and manage projects from a single place and collaborate with anyone, anytime and anywhere. Postwire Postwire enables you to make a private webpage for each client. You can collect videos, photos, web links, and documents and share them on each client’s private page. Sunglass Sunglass is a cloud-based platform that enables designers to collaboratively build tomorrow’s products, buildings and cities, democratizing access to 3D content across formats. Talkdesk Talkdesk allows any company to create a call center in 5 minutes – all in the browser. Apptegic Apptegic helps online businesses keep and up-sell their existing customers. Use Apptegic’s online service to understand each of your customer’s visit patterns, actions, and business metrics and to respond appropriately in real-time. Session 6: Disrupting Identity Networks Hmmm Hmmm empowers you to express and share your life without inhibitions. You can tailor your online-identity like you do in the real-world, as you interact and selectively share with people from every walk of life. Social Stock Social Stock is a stock market of places and people, where every place and person has a stock price based on their social interactions and enables trading social shares in places and people. About Last Night About Last Night is your social network for nightlife. It’s about the party last night, the concert last night, or the date last night. Do you want to know where the hot party is happening, where your friends are, or what is happening at your favorite hangout? Do you want to know who is performing at your favorite club, or learn about special deals and offers? Are you visiting from out-of-town and want to know where to go? About Last Night is for you. Hownow Hownow is a mobile app that allows users to post geo-fenced messages in order to have semi-anonymous, locally relevant conversations. Buyou (Startup Alley Audience Choice Winner) Buyou is a free online mall that aggregates various brands into one beautiful, easy to use interface. And while it’s great that the app begins learning your taste through your likes and dislikes, it’s even better that it relays that information back to its brand partners. This means that a retailer like Express will begin to learn the clothes you like and more asily target clothing you may enjoy to you. All in all, it was a very fun day. And will be even more fun tomorrow. See you then.

SpotlessCity Just Broug...

When you live in New York City, there are certain expectations of what you should be able to accomplish easily. You can get almost anything delivered straight to your doorstep, whether it be food, groceries, toiletries, or pot. But there’s one service that is still stuck in brick-and-mortar land, and to be quite honest, it’s shocking that it’s stayed offline and off of our doorsteps for so long: Dry cleaning. Sure, you can get a bag of clothes picked up, washed, and dropped back off, but there’s no service that aggregates all of your nearby dry cleaners and compares prices, available pick-up/drop-off times, and books it for you (Seamless-style). But no more — SpotlessCity is finally here. The service asks you to input your zip code and address, and automatically pulls in all the dry cleaners in your area. You can then enter in a pick-up and drop-off time, based on the dry cleaner’s availability, and that’s all there is to it. A delivery person knocks on your door, picks up your giant bag of wovens and delicates, and promises to see you again tomorrow (or whenever you have scheduled the drop-off). What’s better, perhaps, is that dry cleaners go through an almost identical process to end-users in terms of signing up and getting started. The dashboard can be accessed online, and now through a brand new iOS app that was just launched on-stage. SpotlessCity works with local dry cleaners to take a fixed percentage of all orders that come through the online service. Dry cleaning partners will not be allowed to mark up prices for SpotlessCity customers, nor will users ever be charged for pick-up/delivery or for the service as a whole. Most dry cleaners, especially in New York City, are small mom-and-pop shops that don’t have the resources to have a robust online presence, if they have one at all. SpotlessCity works as the middle-man to bring in new customers for dry cleaners and offer an easy, seamless method for getting your dry cleaning done. Founder Hissan Bajwa sees a bigger vision than “the Seamless of laundry” with this product. Along with providing an online platform to small dry cleaners, it’s worth mentioning that most people have no understanding of the various levels of pricing and quality at different dry cleaners. SpotlessCity will eventually offer an education to consumers, matching them with the right dry cleaner based on the type of clothing they wear. After all, a banker probably needs a different dry cleaner than a college student. SpotlessCity has thus far raised a $200,000 seed round from friends and family, and is now launching out of the pilot phase to expand past Brooklyn and Manhattan into the other boroughs. Click to view slideshow. Q&A Q: Can you expand this with other services? A: Yes we have plans to add services that are natural when you’re already shopping for a dry cleaner. Q: What is the problem that you’re solving for dry cleaners? A: When we talk to cleaners, they love the idea because in NY they have pick-up/delivery service. Phone is a noisy way to connect to customers and they want to get online because the phone takes time, people, and isn’t as quick. But since they’re small businesses they can’t build out that online platform with functionality. Q: In Open Table there are a lot of restaurants to go to, but with dry cleaning people just always go to the closest one? A: If you have a cleaner in your building, sure. But most people don’t want to lug around their stuff or get on the phone. Even in buildings with dry-cleaners, they may not like that cleaner. But they don’t want to shop around. Q: Have you checked out if it will work outside the city? A: Since we put up a beta site we’ve been contacted by dry cleaners all around the country. Right now we’re working on how to deploy to new cities, especially suburban cities that have a different delivery/pick-up model. Q: What is the rate that you charge from dry cleaners’ sales? A: We negotiate cleaners by cleaners. Our general rate is around 10 percent. Q: Then it would take a lot of transactions to break even? A: As we move into other cities we’re exploring more of a licensing franchising fee. Q: So what kind of volume do you need to break even? A: We have pretty good protections, and we’re on track to hit the volumes we need to break even. Q: How are you finding customers? Through salespeople or dry cleaners? A: Right now we’re very geographically limited. Three neighborhoods around town. So a lot depends on hyperlocal marketing. We have hit the streets, used refer a neighbor, and found that word of mouth has been great for us. Q: You say you’re like Uber for dry cleaners. Have you thought about launching other categories as well? A: We’ve thought about other household cleaning services. Things that make natural sense when you’re looking for dry cleaning. We want to focus on recurring services, so house cleaning. We’ve found that once people use SpotlessCity they keep coming back. Q: You’ve chosen to focus on convenience above all else. Is there a reason why you choose that? A: It’s still a bare bones site. We want to collect and add reviews but it needs to be done in a thoughtful way. If you’ve ever seen dry cleaners reviews, they’re often just rants. We need to keep them organized and meaningful, based on metrics so that they can educate consumers. Q: Are you worried this will only work in a high density city? A: We obviously want to deploy in similar markets like San Francisco, Boston, and D.C., but the encouraging thing is the fact that we’re getting contacted by cleaners in Denver and Miami. There is a marketplace there. It just has to be pivoted a bit for those markets.