Polar's Sticky Polling App Gets Stickier With Its Latest Update, Closes In On 8M Total Votes
The overall landscape of mobile apps is an interesting one, with most of the top free titles on Apple’s App Store being games or services pushed by massive companies like Twitter (Vine) or Google (Maps). Is there a place for yet another service to pick up steam before a larger network like Facebook re-creates copies its functionality? That’s the interesting future that lies ahead for Polar, the up-and-coming polling app for iOS, that is built for speedy interactions with either complete strangers or people you know. You can set up a poll in seconds, and you’ll start getting responses quickly, almost within seconds of submitting it. The company raised $1.2 million in February to build out its team and expand its functionality as quickly as possible. Two months later, it has released a new version that hopes to increase discoverability of polls, thus increasing interaction. Polar founder Luke Wroblewski is obsessed with data and is willing to discuss most of what he’s learned since ...
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Facebook Isn't Holding Back Their Growth: MessageMe Raises $1.9M And Grabs 1M Users
MessageMe, the multimedia messaging app that got smacked by Facebook last week, isn’t letting that hurdle set back their growth. The company said today that it has more than 1 million users, is sending 500 notifications now per second and recently picked up $1.9 million in funding from a large syndicate of some of the Valley’s best-known investors. They include True Ventures, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Social+Capital Partnership. The company’s angels also include Airbnb’s Brian Pokorny, Hiten Shah, Eric Wu and TinyCo CEO Suleman Ali. While the messaging space is incredibly competitive with apps from Facebook, Apple’s iMessages plus the big Asian clients like Tencent’s WeChat and NHN’s Line, MessageMe thinks it can carve out a space because of the way it quickly pulls in rich media like doodles and videos. Basically, they think it’s a lot more expressive than standard messaging and silly as it seems, ...
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Facebook Wants To Make Your Voice Plan Obsolete, Adds Free Calling To Its iOS Application
Following last month's rollout of free voice calling in its standalone Messenger app, Facebook has today updated its flagship iOS application to offer the same functionality. In the version 5.5 update live now in Apple's App Store, users in the U.S. and Canada can phone their friends directly from the right-hand sidebar within the application.
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And the 2012 Start TWS Competition Startups Are…
It's that time of the year for one of the Israeli startup community's staple events, TWS. This year the event's founder, and Pops CEO, Yaron Orentstein is collaborating with Israel's most popular tech blog, Newsgeek.co.il to showcase some up and coming Israeli early-stage startups (and a couple from Europe). Here are the startups presenting on-stage in Tel-Aviv this morning: Overwolf adds a layer of functionality to any game without any change to the game's code. Functionality can include Facebook, instant messaging and an in-game browser. There's also the ability to add an in-game AppStore, a cross between between World of Warcraft's add-ons and an Apple's AppStore. WorkWith.me is a social recruiting network where instead of recruiters having to search for and court candidates themselves, the recruiting is crowd-sourced. When a candidate matches a position their friends will be asked by the recruiter for feedback and endorsement. The final twist is that it will be the friends who will ...
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