Alltopstartups » Google Chrome

Andreessen Horowitz And Others Invest $30M In RockMelt,The Social Browser

Thomas Oppong — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 08:16:31 +0000

RockMelt, a developer of a social, web browsing application, has raised $30M in a Series B funding round. The round was led by Accel Partners, and also included Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. The firm is headed by Eric Vishria, Vinod Khosla and Jim Breyer both join the company’s board as part of the funding.

RockMelt’s web browser is closely integrated with Facebook and other social networking sites. Instead of having to constantly return to their favorite websites and social networks, RockMelt users can view their friends’ Facebook and Twitter updates, get notified about new content on their favorite websites, and start Facebook Chats with their friends from the actual browser program.

Just nine months after its private beta launch, Rockmelt’s browser is available on the desktop and iOS mobile devices, and currently has several hundred thousand active users and over a million installs.

RockMelt is built on top of Chromium, the open source project behind Google’s Chrome browser. RockMelt raised $9.9 million before closing its second round of funding from Andreessen-Horowitz and others.

Useful Tips On Product Launch for Startup Founders

Thomas Oppong — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 21:32:00 +0000

Read Product Launch Promotion by Marshalk
Find and put together a compelling story
Re-check the design in all the major browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE6-8, Opera)
Send out a survey to the dedicated test users (even if they are only family and friends!) and include a few new users who haven’t seen the product yet.
Start looking for places to submit your site.
Using this list of startup related sites and this list of where to submit your startup.
Write compelling stories for each market segment. Each site submission will need a unique pitch customized to the site/person
Write 5-10 sentence compelling story of why your product is great for their audience
Offer for interview or other details in the future
Read Product Launch Promotion by Marshalk, Balsamiq preparing for launch, How Jason pitched to TechCrunch.
This video will be helpful. How not to get PR from top sites
Update your about page to be less generic, and to tell a more interesting story.
Have a blog post ready at launch
People don’t come just because you built it, so you need to have some plan to get people’s attention.
Find tool(s) to track/analyze your launch
Write a pre-launch FAQ
Tech news and review bloggers are hungry for content and if you give them all the info they need to write, in an easy to consume fashion, they will appreciate it and be more likely to write about you.
Put out a press release, attend the startup conferences and employ a successful PR firm if you can.

Google Rolling Out Voice-activated Searches Via Chrome On Your Desktop

Thomas Oppong — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 17:04:31 +0000

Google is now rolling out some of the new search technologies it previewed last week, including search by image and voice search on the desktop.

The features are currently only available via Google’s Chrome browser, but they allow you to search on the desktop by voice as well as drag-and-drop photos into image search for details on what’s displayed.

For voice search, Chrome users visiting Google.com will see a little microphone icon on the right side of the search box. Click the mic and a small box with the instructions to “speak now” will appear. You’ll need a microphone attached to your computer for it to work.

Voice-activated searches are already available on mobile devices like the iPhone and Android-based devices.

The New Google Chrome Now Offers 3D Effects

Thomas Oppong — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 06:18:17 +0000

Google has released a new version of its Web browser Google Chrome to its stable channel today. The updated version offers improvements in security and stability, says Google, most of which will function behind-the-scenes for a better browsing experience.

In a statement issued on chrome’s official blog Chrome is now more secure, thanks to enhancements to Google’s Safe Browsing technology. In addition to protecting you from certain malware and phishing websites, Chrome now warns you before downloading some types of malicious files. We’ve carefully designed this feature so that malicious content can be detected without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs you visit or the files you download.

This release includes support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, which means you’ll get a snazzier experience in some web pages and web apps that choose to implement 3D effects.

Chrome also now gives you more control over the data that websites store on your computer. This includes Flash Player’s Local Shared Objects (LSOs), which were previously only manageable using an online settings application on Adobe’s website.

Ge.tt Wants To Make It Extremely Simple To Share Your Files

Thomas Oppong — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 22:02:26 +0000

Ge.tt is a real-time file sharing service. But what is it really and what can you use it for?

Ge.tt is an instant, real-time file publishing and sharing service. With Ge.tt there is no need for special software or plug-ins. It is a simple file sharing and publishing tool for all types of materials including documents, video, music and photos.

How does it work and what can you use it for?

With Ge.tt you can turn any type of file into web content and share it instantly. You can share documents, video, music and photos in the browser making them instantly available for the recipient. If you sign up, you can even re-use and keep track of the materials that you previously shared.

Ge.tt is 100% web-based and works directly in your browser. No flash required. No applet needed. No installation before you’re ready to go. Just go to your browser and start sharing.

Each Ge.tt-uploaded file also supports a “view” option that allows anyone to look at all shared files, regardless of file type, in a browser without having to download files or worry about file extensions.

TweetDeck Launches Browser-based Beta Version

Thomas Oppong — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 17:34:44 +0000

The TweetDeck team has just announced in a blog post that it has brought TweetDeck to the Web with a browser-based version that requires “no downloads, no App Stores and is not limited to any one brand of web browser.”

TweetDeck has already launched ChromeDeck which has been in use for the past few months.

In a statement issued to launch the web-based version of TweetDeck, Richard Barley stated that:

Since its launch in December last year, Chrome TweetDeck has consistently been the most popular app in the Google Web Store. We are delighted to see that almost 400,000 users are now enjoying the super-slick new interface, and great new features like combined columns, enhanced Facebook integration and the flexibility that running in a web browser brings.

The statement further said that :

So today we are very pleased to announce that we are opening up a limited beta of TweetDeck Web. This new service is built on the same core as Chrome TweetDeck, with the same UI and broadly the same product features (the main difference being that TweetDeck Web does not use Twitter streaming). TweetDeck Web, however, is a standalone web site and requires no downloads, no App Stores and is not limited to any one brand of web browser.

3 Ways To Turn Off Your New Photo Viewer In Facebook

Thomas Oppong — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:15:07 +0000

Facebook has done a lot redesign lately. Page redesign and Profile redesign have mostly been accepted, but some Facebook users do not appreciate the new Facebook Photo Viewer. I particularly do not like the way it displays. I think Facebook can do better than the current photo viewer. These extension can help you get rid of the new photo viewer in Facebook.

1. Facebook Lightbox Killer : A super simple extension which is available for both Chrome and Firefox. Just download it and it will easily disable the photo viewer (theatre, lightbox) in Facebook.

2. Revert Facebook Photo Viewer : Only available for a Chrome users at this time. There are no settings or icons, just install it and it will run silently in the background. After installing the extension, refresh the Facebook page and it will do it task efficiently. According to the developer of the extension, it will not read, transmit or store any of your Facebook data.

3. Better Facebook : It is a free extension for almost every popular browser like Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. It has more than 75 options that will allow you to make your Facebook experience better and in those option one will allow you to disable Photo viewer in Facebook. Check this article by Better Facebook blog here on how to install and disable photo viewer using this extension.

Mozilla Takes On Apple’s App Store With A New ‘Open’ App Store

Thomas Oppong — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 10:42:12 +0000

The first developer release of Mozilla’s Web Application project has been released. Web Apps are applications that run on any device, and can be distributed through any store or directly by the developer.

The first build includes a spec to describe a web application, a set of new browser APIs that includes the ability for a website to “install” itself in a browser, and documentation on how to build what Mozilla calls a free or paid “directory of applications”.

Developers can use this release to publish their application to users, or to create a Web App store or directory. Users can review a gallery of user experience ideas and beta-quality versions of Firefox and Chrome add-ons that integrate the Web App experience more tightly with the browser.

In the coming weeks, Mozilla plans to pursue several new ideas, including:

* A deeply integrated “in browser” experience that spans the entire find, install, launch, use and manage flow.
* Syncing your Web Apps to your mobile devices.
* Supporting native browser controls and OS integration.
* Support for widgets and notifications to make your Web Apps more lively.
* and many more.

ToggleChat Turns Your Search Topics Into Chat Rooms

Thomas Oppong — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 19:35:52 +0000

ToggleChat is a new and innovative browser extension for Google Chrome that lets users connect with other users that are searching for the same thing at the same time.

It currently connects searches from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Amazon, YouTube, Ebay and Craigslist.

“What we’re doing is taking search and chat and mixing them together,” says David Kayo, CEO and Co-Founder. “Search is the starting point of almost everything we do online. Creating chat rooms based on searches enables people to communicate in real time and to find out what others are saying. Some would call this social search, but ultimately ToggleChat™ is unlike anything else.”

“We’re also currently working on expanding ToggleChat™ to other browsers with extensions for FireFox, Safari and Internet Explorer,” says David Kayo. “We want ToggleChat™ to be on every browser and to connect people on any website”

Now You Can Post Twitter Updates Longer Than 140 Characters With Deck.ly From Tweetdeck

Thomas Oppong — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 21:31:17 +0000

Tweetdeck, the software for social-media ‘power users’, has unveiling Deck.ly, the latest strand of its plan to ease its dependence on Twitter and become a greater platform in itself.

Deck.ly allows Tweetdeck users to post Twitter updates longer than 140 characters. Software updates will be pushed out on Monday after some testing, with Facebook support coming further down the line

Iain Dodsworth, founder and chief executive, says users have been “very vocal” in demanding this heretical feature. Users of Tweetdeck’s desktop, Chrome and mobile apps will be able to read these verbose posts seamlessly within the app.

For those using the regular Twitter website or other apps, truncated Deck.ly posts will be readable in full via links to a dedicated website.

“From day one [of Tweetdeck], it was one of the things almost everyone was screaming about,” says Mr Dodsworth. “I’ve been very protective of the fact that [140 characters] is a platform limitation of the services we sit on top of and we have to have an element of respect for that. Going around that core tenet of Twitter could be a sensitive move. We don’t know how they feel about it. But we are tailoring to an audience that wants functionality the general user of Twitter doesn’t care about.”

Via FT tech hub