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Thursday
Jul282011

ShowMe App Lets Anyone Create Lessons to Make Online Learning Accessible to All



WHAT: Create lessons on a virtual whiteboard with a voice-over, then share them with the ShowMe community. The community votes lessons up and down, with the best lesson of the day appearing on the homepage. Available for free as an iPad app for lesson creation. Users can access lessons on the ShowMe website.

LAUNCHERS: San Kim, CEO and Karen Bdoyan, CTO. San founded Easel Learning, which helps students prepare for the SAT and learn algebra using iPad apps. Karen is the co-founder and CTO at Easel. He worked for Lycos Europe and founded/sold a startup in Europe before moving to the U.S.

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Wednesday
Jul272011

Demand Media Stock Crashes as Lockup Ends, and after Company Sends Cease-and-Desist to Critical Blogger

Demand Media (NYSE: DMD), which publishes sites like ehow.com and what some consider a content farm, had a rough day in the stock market now that the six-month lockup period for selling insider shares is over. 

Demand Media stock closed at $10.69, a 7.45% drop from yesterday. While today was a bad day for the market in general – the NASDAQ fell 198.75 points and the Dow fell 75.17 points – the drop is significant. The company's share price has continued to fall since April.

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Wednesday
Jul272011

Aggressive Google: Gmail Team Asks You to Do an Email Intervention  

Google under Larry Page is uber aggressive, and the latest salvo comes in the form of EmailIntervention.com, a slick website that enables you to do an intervention with your Yahoo, Aol and Hotmail-using friends and family members. You know, the ones who constantly have their emails hacked.

Among web-based email services, Gmail remains in third place. According to Hitwise, Yahoo Mail was the fifth most-visited website in the U.S. for the week ending July 2, 2011, with Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) in 7th and Gmail in 10th place.

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Wednesday
Jul272011

Humble Bundle Launches Third Game Bundle and Makes over $500K in First 24 Hours


Just one day into its third offer, Humble Bundle has sold about 117K game bundles using its name-your-price model, bringing in more than $558K (at press time) and putting it on track to out-sell bundles 1 and 2.

Each Humble Indie Bundle contains five games that work on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. None of the games has rights-management restrictions so customers use install them as often and wherever they like. Customers can divide the money between charity, game developers and the company itself. Bundles are only available for two weeks.

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Wednesday
Jul272011

ThinkNear Helps Local Businesses Attract Customers in Slow Periods to Evolve the Deal Space


WHAT
: Restaurants, hair salons and spas tell ThinkNear when their businesses are usually slow and how much they are willing to discount. An algorithm uses this information plus variables like weather to generate and distribute mobile ads to drive customers during slow periods. Customers click on the ad to get the coupon (which has a tracking code), then show it to the merchant on their phone for the discount.

Free three-month trial right now. The monthly fee of $99 guarantees businesses 5K impressions a month but not a certain number of customers or deals offered. Nightly emails report how many people saw their ad, how many clicked and how many claimed.

Available only to merchants in New York. Los Angeles coming soon.

LAUNCHERS: CEO Eli Portnoy and John Hinnegan, head of software engineering. Both worked at Amazon (but not together). Eli previously founded a company that matched low-skilled laborers like dishwashers and janitorial staff with employers.

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