Beet TV

Google Alerts can’t distinguish people with common names, according to Angstro CEO Salim Ismael. His company, which presented at Techcrunch 50 Monday, uses an algorithmic solution to find news mentions of a user’s specific contacts and aggregate them into a personalized newspaper.

There are a lot of widgets on the web, but TechCrunch50 presenter Tingz has created a solution that works across almost any platform, including iPhones, Blackberrys, Macs OS X, and Windows Media Center. The widgets look and act the same on each device and automatically sync up, according to CEO Patrick Hunt.

MIXTT, which has dubbed itself "The Social Network for you Social Life," isn’t another Facebook or MySpace, according to founder and CEO Eve Peters. The site is geared toward meeting new people and offline interaction, and profiles are for groups of friends rather than individuals, she says. Instead of poking or sheep throwing, users can […]

Conference attendees voted alternative newsroom iamnews the best of the 100-plus companies exhibiting in the TechCrunch50 demo pit, awarding the company People’s Choice and the opportunity to present onstage Wednesday as the conference’s 52nd start-up. Attendees received three TC50 poker chips when they checked in and could vote for one company in the Demo Pit […]

Purple States TV, an online political show reported through the eyes of five citizen journalists, will syndicate its videos to The Washington Post politics site beginning tomorrow, founder and executive producer Cynthia Farrar told me in an interview on the Beet.TV rooftop earlier today. The videos will be featured on the front page of the […]

The success of leading personal finance Web site Mint.com since its win at TechCrunch40 last year gives some idea of what might be in store for this year’s winner, Yammer. The real prize, or course, isn’t the $50,000–it’s the publicity.

TechCrunch awarded five jury selection prizes at the TechCrunch50 conference yesterday in addition to the top prize, which was awarded to Yammer. FitBit’s discreet activity-tracking gadget, to go on sale this December exclusively on the company’s Web site, earned the company one of the runner-up spots.

Yammer, a Twitter-like microblogging tool for businesses, won the top TechCrunch50 prize of $50,000, TechCrunch announced yesterday. I spoke with CEO David Sacks about the company after he presented on Monday, and he told me that it was "really cool" that judge "Marc Benioff said he liked it the best." Benioff, the CEO of salesforce.com, […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Today at the TechCrunch50 conference, Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google, announced Google’s plans to make scanned newspaper archives searchable through Google News. Over 100 newspapers are available at the product’s launch today, Marissa told me in an interview after her session.

The hip hop artist Consequence, who released his debut album "Don’t Quit Your Day Job" with Kanye West’s label G.O.O.D Music last year, is building his grassroots celebrity status online, he says. His Kyte channel "ConsTV" has received 1.4 million hits and his Web site itsthecons.com, started in the Winter of 2007, will be finsihed […]

More online viewers watched coverage of the Barack Obama acceptance speech and coverage of the Democratic National Convention on August 29 on msnbc.com than any other news site, including CNN, the company announced today, citing Nielsen Online numbers.

Nielsen teamed with Integrated Media Mesurement Inc. to create the first out-of-home national television rating system, the companies announced yesterday. IMMI uses cell phones to measure consumers’ media consumption wherever they happen to be, making it possible to track viewing in locations like gyms, offices, and bars.

The first blockbuster web series has yet to be born, as Brian Stelter observed in his “New York Times” article Sunday, but there are plenty of content creators trying to change that. Santa Monica-based web production company Generate launched the political satire web series “Republicrats” August 18 and will premiere the second season of dark […]

Last night House Speaker Nancy Pelosi answered questions about Congress, the economy, and marijuana legalization–posed not by journalists and pundits, but by contributors to online communities iReport.com and Digg.com. The interview is one of the ways CNN is adding the “voice of real people on the ground” to their election coverage, according to CNN.com Senior […]

HOLLYWOOD/NEW YORK —  The creators behind "Lonelygirl15" and the UK-based "KateModern" have produced a new web series based in the LG15 universe, "LG15: The Resistance," set to premiere September 20. It’s been a long journey since the pretended non-fiction debut of "Lonelygirl15" in 2006; the creators have formed social entertainment company EQAL and raised $5 […]

Short-form video entertainment site Metacafe has a new solution to video search. It has launched a new feature called Wikicafe to let users edit the tags surrounding video content.

HiveLive, a platform for building business-oriented custom social communities, lets users create custom blogs, wikis, and forums with Web 2.0 building blocks called Hives. While a social network like Facebook is geared toward the mass consumer market, HiveLive is carving out a viable niche for itself the enterprise market. The company’s different focus means it […]

College Humor inked a six-episode deal with MTV last month, according to a brief report in MediaPost , and a pilot from the College Humor creators will air this fall. I interviewed CHTV Original Content Director Sam Reich and senior writer Amir Blumenfeld at the College Humor offices last week. We didn’t get any details (on […]

Universal Studios’ ad campaign for the upcoming "Heroes: Season 2" DVD, launched on Metacafe today, brings collaborative commercial mashups to the online video space. Viewers can use Kaltura’s collaborative editing tools on the Metacafe Heroes 2 channel to remix videos and create their own "Heroes moments." This campaign is the first of its kind in […]

Free Tibet 2008 reports today that Brian Conley, creator of citizen journalist video blog Alive in Baghdad, was detained Tuesday in Beijing with friend Jeffrey Rae. Conley’s wife received a text message at 12:30 Beijing time yesterday that said, “In jail. All fine.” Conley and Rae shot and distributed video of a Students for a […]