Tiger Pistol Raises $1M...

Tiger Pistol , an Australian startup offering social media marketing tools that it describes as both “small business friendly” and “enterprise powerful”, is coming out of its closed beta test today and launching to the public. It’s also announcing that it has raised $1 million in angel funding. Co-founder and CEO Stephen Hibberd says that the goal was to create something that could take most of the difficulty and uncertainty out of creating marketing campaigns on social networks. You can start off with pre-built campaigns and templates, so you don’t have to create anything from scratch, and you’re tapping into Tiger Pistol’s knowledge about best practices. There’s a drag-and-drop interface, so you can customize those campaigns without any technical knowledge. Then you can track the data about your campaign’s effectiveness and reach, including the number of participants and their conversion rates. Now, there’s clearly a glut of social media marketing tools out there already, but what caught my attention was the variety of customers that Tiger Pistol serves. Yes, there are many small businesses who participated in the closed beta, but the company says it also worked with larger customers like Expedia, Hotels.com, The Weather Channel, Village Roadshow, Under Armour, and the BBC. Hibberd says he wants Tiger Pistol to be a global product, so it works in any language, and customer support live chat is available 24 hours a day, so companies in any timezone can reach out for help. All told, there were 1,600 participants in the closed beta from more than 100 countries. There was a strong response in the Asia-Pacific region, Hibberd says, but the United States saw the largest number of installs. Tiger Pistol is currently limited to Facebook, but plans to add Twitter, LinkedIn, Sina Weibo, and Kaixin001 soon. The funding it was led by Australian investor David Solomon. It sounds like the round was actually raised a little while ago (Hibberd credits it with “getting us where we are now”), so Tiger Pistol may raise more in the not-too-distant future. As for the company name, it refers to the tiger pistol shrimp , which can apparently make the loudest sound on Earth. I guess that’s intended to illustrate, in a way, the power of social media. The weirder part is the fact that the tiger pistol shrimp uses the noise to stun and eat its prey — whether or not that weakens the metaphor or actually improves it is an exercise I leave for the reader.

The Weather Channel Bea...

In an effort to streamline its digital offerings, The Weather Channel has today announced that its popular iPhone app has undergone a major redesign. It started with the launch of the iPad app, and just a few weeks ago The Weather Channel followed suit on the web . But the iPhone marks a major portal between TWC and its consumers, in that mobile and weather undoubtedly go hand in hand. The redesign reminds me a bit of HTC’s Sense 3, with the home screen offering up a weather-themed background based on the weather outside. The user interface seems much more navigable, but the features themselves are getting a bump as well. The revamp streamlines the TWC app in a big way, in that you can have as much or as little weather as you’d like when you hop in the app. You’ll obviously get automatic weather updates, but the ability to save more locations or expand more detailed information within the app makes it a much more friendly user experience. It’s clear that The Weather Channel is trying to unify its digital products. The company added social sharing features to the web site, which will also be available on the iPhone app. This includes the ability to upload a photo of your local weather and publish it to iWitness, Facebook, or Twitter. We spoke with EVP of digital products at The Weather Channel Cameron Clayton about the direction in which these products are headed. While this release represents possibly the biggest improvement in The Weather Channel App for iPhone to date, it’s just the start of what we’re setting out to accomplish. Yes, we’ve staked a claim with the accuracy of our weather forecasting with our TruPoint technology, but soon we’ll take that to the next level and tell users when rain will start and stop, as we do on the new weather.com. But we also plan to expand the social functionality during severe weather events and beyond to allow people to connect through weather at all times. Additionally, we’re in the infancy of our global expansion on mobile, which we will rolling out over the coming months and years. According to that, sounds like quite a lot of work has yet to be done, but either way the new TWC iPhone app is a huge improvement over the last version. So if you’re interested in downloading the app, head on over to the Apple App Store and check it out. Click to view slideshow.

Triposo’s Mobile Travel...

Back in September, Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga, two ex-Googlers, unveiled their new mobile travel guide, Triposo , setting out to do for travel content what Google and PageRank did for search. The startup developed a set of algorithms to crawl and parse the Web’s biggest travel information databases (like Wikitravel and Open Street Maps), before ranking the data to determine which pieces have the most relevance to its users and serving them up as rich travel guides. Of course, this is no easy task, and Triposo has been in an ongoing process of honing these content algorithms, launching 30 destination travel guides for iOS and Android to help test the waters and encourage user feedback. Today, Triposo is ready to take its next big step forward, officially unveiling its new and improved iOS app, which aims to make the old hands of travel content, like Lonely Planet , shake in their boots. The main attraction of its new app, says COO Richard Osinga, is that Triposo is now a “self-starter” — in other words, a travel guide that actively offers suggestions as to where users should go next. Traditionally, he says, travel guides require users to do all the work in terms of search and discovery, but, as you make your way around, the startup’s new app takes into account your location, the time of day, the weather and the hours of local businesses in your vicinity to present you with the best destinations and travel options. In Rome and need to find the best coffee place nearby? Triposo has your back. But what is perhaps the coolest feature of the new Triposo app is that they now register the direction one is looking in, so that as a user roams the streets of a new city, the app highlights the top destinations in front of them. Osinga says that, while this may sound like a complicated augmented reality app, the user experience is in fact simple and straightforward. That’s the key to Triposo: It’s free, it works offline so you won’t incur roaming fees, offers travel guides for dozens of countries, more than 8,000 points of interest, and 250K places, has a travel dashboard, weather updates, currency converter, and foreign language phrasebooks. Plus, it allows you to point your phone in a certain direction and identify points of interest nearby, all while managing to avoid an overwhelming and cluttered user experience. In the eight months since launch, Triposo has seen over 1 million iOS downloads and over 700K Android downloads. Its algorithmic approach to travel recommendations makes it somewhat different from the many friendsourced social travel apps out there, but the more data it crawls, and the more its users engage, the smarter the apps’ recommendations become. The startup’s early traction has continued to make it appealing to investors, as Triposo recently added a second, small-ish tranche of seed funding from new investor CrunchFund, as well as contributions from its existing investors, which include Chris Sacca, Taher Haveliwala, Google Wave Co-founder and Google Maps Lead Engineer Lars Rasmussen, and InterWest Partners. The new infusion of capital brings the startup’s total funding to just over $700K. For more, check out Triposo at home here . Video intro below:

SF Climates iOS App Off...

As a resident of NYC, I find little use for the SF Climates iOS app that all of my San Francisco-based friends (read: social media whores) are boasting over today. But a lot of you do live there, so you might find it useful. Let’s say you live in the Marina and for some reason need to go to the Dogpatch or vice versa but you’re unsure what the weather is like. Or maybe the grit of the Mission is getting to be a bit much and you want to hang out with a bunch of babies in Noe Valley. Do you pack a sweatshirt or put on shorts? From personal inexperience, I’ve never been able to layer properly in San Francisco and this would have come in handy last week. Powered by Weather Underground, the free app boasts current temp, wind (speed and direction) and forecast for each of the City by the Bay’s 17 different microclimates (read: neighborhoods). If only they’d launch one for NYC. *sigh* Since the app has been in the wild for three weeks, there’s bound to be a few of you who have been using it. If so, have you found it useful? SF Climates [Apple App Store]

The Weather Channel’s R...

Today, The Weather Channel celebrates its 30th birthday. It will officially feel old at concerts and hot new night clubs. To mark the occasion, the company has revamped their website, weather.com , to keep up with the times. Weather is a very information-based vertical — there isn’t a whole lot one can do to spruce it up. But TWC is looking to personalize the experience as much as possible. That said, you’ll notice the redesign as soon as you visit the site. Information on your area will be displayed immediately at the top of the page, along with an ever-changing background that reflects the conditions in your area. For example, if it’s rainy where you woke up this morning, the background of the home page will be grey and rainy. If its a clear night, you’ll see a dark background with stars. But obviously it goes much further than that. Weather affects our every plan, even if it’s indoors, so the ability to “Love” or “Ugh!” the weather is only a natural progression as social networking completely takes over our lives. I spoke to the Weather Channel’s Cameron Clayton, EVP of digital products, who explained that “hating” or “disliking” is a bit harsh. But you should feel free to “Ugh!” the crap out of a cold, rainy day. Along with this social integration comes the ability to see what other people in your area are saying about the weather courtesy of new trending keyword graphics from Twitter. This feature only pulls from people in your area to tell you how your neighborhood feels today about the weather. The content on the home page will also change as the site learns your personal interests. So if you like to barbeque on the weekends, information and stories on your weekend weather will be more prominently displayed to make sure your plans don’t get ruined. Speaking of raining on a parade, the new weather.com can predict the future. Well, it can at least predict when it’s going to rain, and better yet, when it’s going to stop raining. TWC made it very clear that no one is doing this but the Weather Channel. Another important new feature is the social emergency broadcast system. When you see a severe weather alert on the site, you can instantly share it with your social networks to keep friends and family in the loop about your safety. Soon enough, the site will also allow you to monitor any severe weather alerts that may be affecting others in your social networks, so you can clue them in if they aren’t already prepared. The redesign comes in conjunction with the recent release of the TWC iPad app , and it would seem as though the company is revamping across all channels to prepare for our highly digital future.