Posted by Tom Blue on August 27, 2009 under Companies, Funding, Investing | 
Linksify just got a $500K cash infusion from Jon Fisher. I don’t quite get it to be honest. It seems no better than managing your contacts in Google, LinkedIn, and Outlook. In addition, these competitors are certainly established. I signed up to check it out because the company is in a similar space as my company, Lead411. The interface looks fine, but I wasn’t able to upload/sync in contacts. I, first, tried with Google/Gmail and none of my contacts were sync’ed. I tried it multiple times, but none of them were imported. The next thing I tried was an Outlook sync, but this feature is not available yet. I am suprised they would even go through with a beta launch if you don’t have an Outlook sync. Is that your most important feature?
Posted by Tom Blue on May 18, 2009 under Companies, Funding, Investing, Technology |
I have been using OpenTable for about a year now. It’s a great site and I will continue to use it. I don’t use it to search for restaurants by a specific type or cuisine, but more for trying to make a reservation. When I find a restaurant I want to go to I search for them on OpenTable. I find it easier to do this than to actually call the restaurant. For one, it sends you reminders so you don’t have to schedule it. Second, if there is no availability, it is easy to see the times available that night or for nights around that date. Another cool feature is just looking for a specific restaurant in a certain neighborhood. That is a great option if you are in a large city like New York.
OpenTable also recently priced out their IPO at $12-$14 a share. They could expect to raise around $42M. They did about $16M in revenues in the first quarter of this year.
Posted by Tom Blue on May 12, 2009 under Companies, Marketing, Technology |
I just checked out Twitscoop for the first time. I have heard of it before, but never took a look. Apparently they have just had a makeover. Anyway, the site is very interesting. If you go to their home page, there is a live popular keyword map on the right hand side. It is showing what words are being tweeted and retweeted about. The greatest thing is that it is live. Currently the most popular words are Clemens, errands, Scamming, and Trends. Roger Clemens just released a book today, many people talk about running errands in the morning, and there is a popular Blog post called Scamming Twitter Trends on Mashable today. They exclude Twitter for obvious reasons.
Another really cool feature is their Daily Graph. If you search for a specific keyword and click on graph you will be able to see how many tweets about that word in the past 24 hours, etc. Do a search for pancakes and you should see a rise in the morning and a falloff in the evening.
The only negative I have about their site is that it is slightly messy. Besides that I think they have some really cool features.
Posted by Tom Blue on November 20, 2008 under Technology |
I switched from a blackberry to an iPhone about 2 months ago. I wanted to get an iPhone because Lead411 will be creating an iPhone application for our daily newsletter and company profiles. I really like it for the most part, but its largest benefit is the ease of internet browsing in comparison to a blackberry. Blackberry browsing is practically useless while the iPhone makes it fairly simple. After that, I love downloading applications and I like having a decent camera always with me… The only problem I see is the email functionality. Typing is MUCH slower on the iPhone so I rarely email with it. With the blackberry I could constantly work wherever I was. With the iPhone it is much harder. In addition, downloading emails take awhile and can get stuck if you have too many in your inbox. For example, when I go on a long flight I can no longer download email unless I re-clear out my inbox. I do get a lot of email so I don’t know if that problem will occur with everyone. Hopefully, one day, apple will give the option of a keypad as well as a touch screen keyboard…
