“People are sick of shitty customer service,” said FastCustomer co-founder, Stephanie Hay. And she and her team aim to do something about it. Their first product, for the iPhone, Android, and other platforms, allowed you to search for a customer service number – say Adam & Eve – and press a button. The program waits on hold for you and then calls you on your phone immediately upon connecting. The company saw 100,000 downloads and estimates that they saved people 1 million minutes of hold time. They’ve just launched a new telephone concierge service, 1855-DONT-HOLD (855-366-8465), that allows you to call in and perform the same operation. In short, this thing stays on hold for you. The whole process usually takes less than an hour. “We asked ourselves ‘How can we remove the pain for the customer service experience for the end user?’” said Hay. The co-founders are Aaron Dragushan of Wondermill, the aforementioned Hay, and Paul Singh of 500 Startups. They closed a $750,000 seed round last September. The company currently handles 1,000 calls per day and hopes to handle more with the new phone number. “After hearing ‘Please stay on the line, your call is important to us,’ on repeat, we talked about how awesome it would be if humans never had to wait on hold with technology again,” said Hay. “So now, with the introduction of our concierge-level service, we’re trying to make customer service experiences — dare I say — actually enjoyable.” The company works closely with companies to ensure proper routing. Premium services allow companies to completely control the user experience, from assigning the correct phone numbers to modifying the notification messages. They also white label the service for corporate clients. The new phone service will launch shortly but you can try the in-app service now. Read More
Last night, Time Inc. threw a pretty badass party in Manhattan to celebrate “Ten NYC Startups To Watch.” Among the ten were Fancy Hands, a site that offers up a personal assistant for every and any need you might have, and Stamped, a social network that lets you put your stamp of approval on the things you like. We pulled aside founders of both companies to find out a little more about them, their business models, and why they think they deserve a spot on Time Inc.’s list. In the case of Fancy Hands, founder Ted Roden justified his slot on the list with staying power. He’s been working on the site, that up until a recent $1 million funding round was entirely bootstrapped, for three years, with the site alive and growing for the past two years. In his opinion, Time Inc. chose Fancy Hands because it’s not necessarily all about how much hype you get at launch, but your ability to scale and grow over time. For Stamped the story is a bit different. After asking co-founder and CEO Robby Stein why he was named one of Time Inc.’s 10 best startups, his answer was all about disruption. “We think that we’re trying to do something that will hopefully disrupt the way people think about discovering new information, and really transform the model from one that’s more crowd-sourced and anonymous to one that’s extremely personal,” said Stein. Read More
Here’s an iPhone app for those moments when you’re wondering, “Okay, I’ve got some free time right now — what should I do?” Weotta Go is actually the latest product from Weotta, a startup that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last year. At the time, the company had built a website that helped people make plans, such as figuring out where to eat dinner tonight. The iPhone app, on the other hand, is more focused on spontaneity — say you’re at work and want to find somewhere nearby to grab a sandwich, or you’ve just met up with some friends and don’t know where to head next. So when you open up Weotta Go, the results are tailored to the time and location. For example, when Grant Wernick came by the TechCrunch office on Tuesday afternoon, the app showed us lots of nearby lunch spots. Then he changed the clock on his iPhone to later in the day, and we started to see happy hour recommendations. When I opened the app this morning, it listed coffee shops near my apartment in Noe Valley. You can also filter the results based on how far you’re willing to go (the narrowest filter is “2 blocks”), the price, the category (activities, attractions, coffees and sweets, food, and sporting events), and the context (is this just for guys, girls, kids, or a couple on a date?). Even better, the app changes the results on-the-fly. Its recommendations are delivered as a stack of photos, which you can tap on for more information, drag down to save in a list, or swipe across to say that you’re not interested. As you do that, the list will change to show you more items in the categories that you’re interested in and less of everything else. After you’ve created a Read More
Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... → Learn More Carefully cultivating your Facebook presence can be tough enough when you only have your personal profile to deal with, but it’s a completely different story when you’ve got a full-blown Page (or three) to manage on top of it. To help those particular users stay on top of things, Facebook has begun to roll out a new app (called, imaginatively enough, Pages Manager) in a small handful of markets, though we in the U.S. can’t play with it just yet. As far as the design goes, the Pages Manager app should be familiar territory for anyone who’s ever used the standard iOS app, though a few thoughtful additions make the prospect of keeping tabs on multiple Pages a little less hairy. All of the Pages a user has admin rights to can be accessed from the app’s left pane for quick access, and those admins will get notifications whenever a user interacts with a Page under their purview. Thankfully, notifications can be handled on a Page-by-Page basis, so it’s easy to enough tune out trolls if need be. Perhaps most importantly, the app allows provides on-the-go access to Page Insights — the metrics that track Page performance and user engagement through likes — so admins will always have an idea of where they stand. For now, it seems as though only users in Australia and New Zealand can access the new Pages Manager app in the App Store, though Read More
Creating and publishing content-rich, interactive ebooks without programming skills or distribution power: that’s the problem New York- and Seoul-based startup Moglue is trying to solve. The TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing finalist offers two products: MoglueBuilder (a desktop app that makes it dead simple for authors and artists to create and publish interactive ebooks) and MoglueBooks (an ebook store on iOS for users who just want to browse and consume content). MoglueBuilder (download for Windows and Mac) has been in open beta for a few weeks and was downloaded by more than 20,000 creators worldwide so far, according to Moglue. With the new version that just launched, authors and artists can create interactive ebooks using a drag-and-drop-based UI and directly publish them to MoglueBooks to reach their audience – no programming required. Moglue is currently focused on children’s books, but the platform is suitable to make any kind of content interactive. It’s possible to spice up texts with images (backgrounds, characters, etc.), effects, sounds, and animations. For instance, a bird appearing in a children’s book could start flying up into the air and chirping when touched by the reader’s finger to make the story more appealing to children. All elements can be customized in the property editor to, for example, determine how high the aforementioned bird should fly on the given page when touched. Creators can also record and add voices to each page to tell the story: all that kids need to do in that case is to listen, interact with the elements and touch the screen to turn pages. MoglueBuilder offers a whole range of other bells and whistles, i.e. background music, that can be uploaded and added to the ebooks. With Moglue, amateur authors can create interactive ebooks that actually look and sound fantastic. Just check the 11 sample ebooks that are currently available in the MoglueBooks iOS app (which is Read More
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 Read More
It’s been amazing how technology-enabled aggregation can make certain things in life so much easier — spaces such such as travel planning, real estate searching, and news reading come to mind. But when it comes to the financial space, that disruption hasn’t quite happened yet. Most of us have a retirement account here, a checking and savings account there, a credit card or two somewhere else, and so on. And we still deal with each one on its own. Getting one picture of your entire financial portfolio is not a very common thing. That’s where Personal Capital wants to come in. The company, which launched last year, provides a suite of software aimed at helping people manage their investments, banking and personal finances — no matter where they are — through one central suite of web and mobile apps. Personal Capital is supported by some real industry weight: Its CEO and founder is Bill Harris, who was the longtime chief exec at Intuit, and thus far the company has taken on $27 million in venture capital funding. Earlier this month Personal Captial was named “Best In Show” at the FinovateSpring, a conference in San Francisco focused on all things financial and technology related, so it certainly seems to be onto something big. So when Personal Capital put out its first iPhone app last week, we asked Harris and product VP Jim Del Favero to stop by TechCrunch TV and give us a hands-on look at the service. Watch the video above to hear about why it’s a good thing to show your “entire financial life” in one place, how Personal Capital is different from other financial software providers such as Mint and SigFig, why people about to cash in through the Facebook IPO should manage their money in a modern way, Read More
“Social magazine” Flipboard may have to think up a new tagline for itself, as tonight the company is rolling out an update which greatly expands its focus beyond text-based content to also include audio. The rollout features integrations from NPR, PRI (Public Radio International) and social sound platform, SoundCloud. Also of note, Flipboard is launching its third localized edition with the debut of a Flipboard app for Japan, following its previous launches in China and France. And there’s an update which will matter a lot to a smaller number of users: integration of Apple’s VoiceOver controls to provide better access for the visually impaired. Unless you’re based in Japan, the biggest news today is the introduction of the audio content to what’s primarily been a text-focused, magazine-like platform for reading news, blogs and updates from your social networks. But when you think about it, the addition makes sense – news is often delivered through multiple formats, not just text. And Flipboard already has a video section, we should point out. The audio integrations will be highlighted in a newly added category, simply called “audio,” which will appear after the Flipboard app update (version 1.9) gets pushed out tonight. The section will showcase the curated selections from NPR and PRI including content like NPR’s “Fresh Air” and PRI’s “The World,” for example, as well as content from SoundCloud. However, a search option will also be available so users can find any audio content that Flipboard might now host. SoundCloud users will be able to listen to their sets, favorites, and people or artists they follow, but you won’t need to have a SoundCloud account to take advantage of the new offering. Audio is background-enabled, too, allowing you to exit the app while continuing to listen, or while continuing to browse through Flipboard. In speaking Read More
Over the past six months, the folks at Staircase 3 have been keeping tabs on the devices that have been downloading their OpenSignalMaps network monitoring app, and so far they’ve recorded downloads onto 681,900 separate Android devices in 195 countries. Now they’ve taken all that data and splayed it out for all to see, and it highlights rather nicely how big a headache fragmentation can be for developers. For the most part, the results are as you’d expect — runaway hits like Samsung’s Galaxy S II was the most represented device among the 3,997 distinct models they spotted, and Samsung Android devices were far and away the most widely used. What really gets me is how many other devices and brands fill up the rest of that list. Seriously, if you haven’t yet, go look at it. Mouse over some of the smaller blocks, see if there are any brands or devices that ring a bell. It’s pretty crazy to see just how many players are in the field, and nothing against Staircase 3 — their app is actually pretty damned useful — but it’s not an immediate must-download for every user. That there are gobs of Android devices floating around out there isn’t exactly a shocker, but data like this really drives home the issue. With so many devices running so many versions of Android with who knows many carrier and manufacturer mandated tweaks onboard, how is a developer supposed to make sure that all of their users gets a consistent experience? They can’t, unless they’re willing to test like crazy. Google chairman Eric Schmidt famously downplayed the term “fragmentation” at this year’s CES, suggesting instead that people call it “differentiation.” It’s hard not to agree with sentiment on some level — after all, one of Android’s key strengths is Read More
They say if you want to understand the future, you have to look at children. And if my 10-year-old cousin’s chat history is any indication, we will soon be communicating in emoji, Egyptian hieroglyphics or some other kind of pictographic language that renders the 2,000-year-old Roman alphabet obsolete. Sometimes she sends me full e-mails like this (except it goes on forever): . It either means ‘My cat ate my homework,’ or it’s the Five Stages of Grief in a single word. I’m not really sure. Anyway, there is a mobile app for that. It’s called Zlango and it’s backed by Benchmark Capital, Accel Partners and DAG Ventures. Zlango is a mobile chat app that is on emoticon crack cocaine. Instead of pure text-based chats, it supports emoticons married to words. There are standard packs of pictures in the app, but users can upgrade and pay for new packs of themed emoticons using virtual currency. There are Walking Dead-themed packs, Terminator-themed images and ones that draw their inspiration from anime. When you type words in Zlango, it will auto-suggest different emoticons from its library of more than 1,000 free images. Mock it as you may, but the app has a few hundred thousand active users every day, which is good for a mobile app that is not a game and is only on one smartphone platform, Android. It came out last October and has delivered 10 billion icons so far. Plus, it had been growing at a 20 to 25 percent month-over-month rate in April. Zlango is unusual in that it takes a business model from the gaming world and applies it to texting. There are plenty of chat apps out there, but many are very advertising-dependent like Pinger or are paid apps like WhatsApp. By using virtual currency, Zlango can make consumers Read More
Flipboard Expands: Adds Audio From NPR, Public Radio & SoundCloud; Introduces Japanese Version - TechCrunch
