| Date | Title | Description |
| 07.03.2012 | I’m Already Sick Of SXSW | We’re republishing this timeless classic, because it still stands pretty much as is a year later.
Believe it or not, I had this very same conversation about GroupMe versus Beluga as a preferred messaging app WITH THE SAME EXACT COLLEAGUE to... |
| 05.12.2011 | Facebook snaps up Gowalla for location-based boost | Check-in, travel guide startup is the latest Facebook acquisition
While Facebook is a powerhouse of growth and innovation, it often gets a boost of new tech and talented developers through acquisitions. The social networking giant has just ... |
| 28.10.2011 | Supplanted By Facebook Messenger, Beluga Will Stop Swimming On November 11 | Beluga, the slick group messaging app that Facebook acquired back in March, is shutting down. In a post on Beluga’s blog, the company’s original team of three writes that, beginning November 11, you’ll no longer be able to send messages (th... |
| 09.08.2011 | GROU.PS Lets You Create Your Own Private Facebook | Social groupware platform GROU.PS has just introduced several new features, the most notable of which is a Facebook template called “theBook” that lets you create your own private network with the same look and feel as Facebook .
According ... |
| 20.07.2011 | Live From the Launch Pad: Lessons Learned From the Shuttle Tweetup | Spend your own money to travel to Florida during its least pleasant season, bum a ride to a rented house split with strangers, and wake up on a couch before dawn multiple days in a row. That’s no vacation – unless NASA requests your company... |
| 22.06.2011 | New Wave of Social Networks Have You “Friending” Your Location | This morning, another new startup launched a mobile social networking application where location is the primary feature and friends comes second. Banjo, which shows you all the people nearby upon first launch, is one of many similar service... |
| 04.06.2011 | When Facebook Captured Beluga, They May Have Harpooned It In The Head | When Facebook acquired Beluga this past March, it was an interesting deal for them. Interesting, because they previously had only done deals for talent. But this deal, they told us, was for both talent and assets. In other words, they were ... |
| 23.05.2011 | Disco, Google's Secret Group Messaging App, Gets Pushy With Version 2.0 | Google seems to be going out of their way not to promote Disco, the group messaging app built by Google’s Slide team. When we first revealed the existence of the iPhone app and website (at disco.com) in March, Google wouldn’t comment on it.... |
| 14.04.2011 | Using Windows Phone 7: One Week with an HD7 | I have now been using Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s new mobile operating system, for exactly a week, having temporarily set aside my beloved Android-based Nexus S in the process. To really test a smartphone, and determine what the end user e... |
| 27.03.2011 | Mobile Messaging March Madness | Editor’s note: Guest author Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. He is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semilshah.
On Thursday, I used Yobongo all day, which... |
| 23.03.2011 | Are We in a Bubble? | That was the question I got asked the most during my time in Austin and San Francisco this month. Perhaps it’s become the new ice-breaker at networking events. But also people are genuinely curious and unsure about whether the tech scene ha... |
| 20.03.2011 | Facebook’s latest acquisition: No mobile phone left behind | Snaptu's Facebook app.
Sure, smartphones get all the headlines these days, but what about devices on the other end of the bell curve?
Good, old-fashioned feature phones are the focus of Facebook’s latest acquisition, which was confirmed thi... |
| 17.03.2011 | SMS On Steroids – eBuddy Debuts Realtime, Cross-Platform Messaging App | eBuddy, the Dutch company that enables millions of people worldwide to communicate with each other on the Web and a wide range of mobile phones, is today introducing a brand new application for iPhone and Android. With the app, dubbed eBudd... |
| 16.03.2011 | Group Messaging: Why Now? | If 2010 was the year of location-based services, then 2011 is certainly the year of group messaging. With a slew of new group messaging apps dominating this year’s SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the big questions have been why now and wh... |
| 14.03.2011 | Another Group Messaging App At SXSW 2011 – Grouped{in} | Group Text/Messaging is all the rage at SXSW 2011. One app in the genre that’s making its debut this week is Appconomy’s Grouped{in}. Just getting its app store approval on Friday, Grouped{in} surfaces with many features of similar apps lik... |
| 13.03.2011 | Do We Really Want to Talk to Strangers Based on Our Location? | With SXSW well under way in Austin, Texas, the servers behind apps like Beluga, GroupMe, Kik and FastSociety must be working overtime. After all, people like talking to their friends, right?
In this same batch of apps, we’ve seen another ph... |
| 08.03.2011 | Post-Facebook Deal, Beluga Gets A Final SXSW Tune-Up | Immediately following their launch a few months ago, I noted that Beluga was my group messaging app of choice. I didn’t expect that to change leading up to SXSW — then Facebook stepped in and bought the service. When I first heard about it ... |
| 08.03.2011 | 5 Absolute, Must-Have Apps to Rock SXSW Interactive | Later this week, the madness known as South by Southwest kicks off when thousands of developers, bloggers, social media gurus, founders, venture capitalists and generally geeky folks descend upon Austin, Texas. The nearly week long event, a... |
| 07.03.2011 | Mobile Messaging Startup Kik Raises $8M; Launches Group Chat And Photo Sharing | Mobile messaging startup Kik Interactive has raised $8 million in Series A funding from RRE Ventures, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures. Kik also announced that Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson and RRE Ventures’ Adam Ludwin are joi... |
| 07.03.2011 | I’m Already Sick Of SXSW | I had a conversation today with a colleague to discuss our SXSW Interactive strategy. My coworker figured, rightfully, that SXSW would be a shitshow and that maybe we should use one of the much talked about group texting apps to stay in tou... |
| 07.03.2011 | Why messaging app Kik just got $8M: “It’s so frickin’ fast” | Mobile chat application Kik has just raised $8 million in a first round of venture capital from RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures — thanks to its incredibly fast technology.
Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, who joined... |
| 05.03.2011 | The App Wall | A couple nights ago, a friend sent me a message. “So glad we finally have a way to talk without hanging out.”
He was, of course, kidding. He sent me the message through Yobongo, a new location-based realtime chatting app that launched this ... |
| 01.03.2011 | Facebook Acquires Group Messaging Service Beluga In A Talent AND Technology Deal | Facebook has just acquired group messaging service Beluga, we’ve learned.
Here’s what we know: Facebook has acquired both the product and the team, and the plan is apparently to keep the service open for now. With past acquisitions, Faceboo... |
| 01.03.2011 | Facebook dives into group chat, buys Beluga | Group messaging to be an integral part of social networks and other services in the coming years
Facebook has acquired Beluga, a free and private group messaging service for iPhone and Android devices. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
... |
| 01.03.2011 | Is Beluga one of Facebook’s first real product acquisitions? | Facebook has acquired Beluga, the mobile group-chat startup founded by three former Googlers. And in contrast to most of Facebook’s other deals, it looks like the company may actually use Beluga’s technology.
Beluga allows users to create “... |
| 23.02.2011 | A Sneak Peek Into the Future of Beluga: Going Beyond Group Messaging | The SXSW conference in Austin, Texas is just around the corner and this year’s battle, it seems, is group messaging. The blogosphere is abuzz with talk of apps like GroupMe and Beluga, two forerunners in the field, and yesterday we got to s... |
| 21.02.2011 | Yobongo Will Be In The Running For The Addictive App At This Year's SXSW | A month ago, we detailed a new location-based realtime chat service called Yobongo. At the time, co-founder Caleb Elston didn’t want us to show shots of the app in action because it was still a work-in-progress. But now he’s finally comfort... |
| 21.02.2011 | I Will Check My Phone At Dinner And You Will Deal With It | The next time you go out to dinner, look around. Depending on the restaurant, there will be anywhere from a few people with their heads buried in their phones, to a ton of people in that position. If you don’t see any, keep watching, you wi... |
| 21.02.2011 | Yobongo’s Secret Sauce: Ambient Real-Time Communication | With the South By Southwest Interactive festival just a couple weeks out, everyone is asking “What will be the big app this year at ‘South By?'” One genre we’ve all been looking at this year is group communication. Apps like Beluga, GroupMe... |
| 14.02.2011 | GroupMe Is Now Sending One Million Texts Every Day | Call it the anti-Facebook effect, but this private group text messaging thing is starting to get some serious traction. The chart above shows the growth in text messages per day going through GroupMe, the group chat startup that launched la... |
| 11.02.2011 | This Text Message Will Self Destruct In 60 Seconds | The self-destructing message, whether a piece of paper that mystically disintegrates at the appropriate moment or the microfiche that goes up in a poof of smoke, is a staple of any spy movie and a childhood wish of my own. TigerText, a priv... |
| 03.02.2011 | Boxcar Pushes Towards The Future With Realtime Notifications On The Web | I love Boxcar. In a world where the iOS Push Notification system is pretty much a nightmare, it allows me to sleep easy. We’ve written about it a number of times before, but essentially, it’s an app that allows you to get Push Notifications... |
| 25.01.2011 | Building Better Social Graphs (continued) | I've been thinking for a while now that there will not be one social graph to rule them all (Facebook) but that we will eventually have a multitude of web/mobile services in our lives, each with a social graph we curate specifically for tha... |
| 24.01.2011 | Former Justin.tv VP Launches Yobongo in Private Beta | A little over six weeks out and already everybody’s talking about what company will break out at this year’s SXSW Interactive. There’s been a lot of talk about apps like GroupMe, Beluga and Fast Society, which all make group communication q... |
| 24.01.2011 | Meet HighNote, the high-powered chat app | In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a race among a handful of apps competing to become the coolest, most efficient chat app.
HighNote is the latest mobile application seeking to make text chat more fun. It provides a cornucopia of new ways... |
| 24.01.2011 | I Feel Like A Kid Again With HeyTell, The Social Walkie-Talkie App With 3 Million Users | When I was a kid, there were few things cooler than a walkie-talkie. I recall spending many a night running around hotels causing havoc as my friends and I pretended we were on some sort of secret mission, talking to each other back and for... |
| 24.01.2011 | HighNote Is Group Messaging With A Multimedia Twist | What sets group messaging app HighNote apart from the current wave of group texting apps like Kik, PingChat and Beluga is that it adds a multimedia focus to the act of messaging in multiple.
Aside from being a free Internet Protocol-based m... |
| 21.01.2011 | Congratulations Crunchies Winners! Twitter Takes Best Startup Of 2010 | This year’s fourth annual Crunchies Awards have just concluded, and we’re happy to say that it was an overwhelming success. For those who weren’t at the event or watching our livestream, we’ve included the list of nominees and winners below... |
| 13.01.2011 | Fast Society: Not Your Mother's Group Messaging App (TCTV) | When a good idea comes along, often what you see are multiple startups pop up who were all working on it independently but launch around the same time. Look at Foursquare and Gowalla in geo-location apps or Instagram, PicPlz, and Path in ge... |
| 11.01.2011 | The Group Messaging App That Saved My Butt at CES | At a conference of more than 130,000 people, cell phone service, Internet connectivity and even the sureness that a taxi will be available when you need it is generally in question. Trying to coordinate between multiple people, therefore, c... |
| 07.01.2011 | Announcing Your 2010 Crunchies Finalists | The finalists for the 2010 Crunchies Awards have been chosen. Over 243,000 votes were made across all categories and many outstanding achievements were discussed. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce... |
| 23.12.2010 | Beluga: I May Have Finally Found My Group Messaging White Whale | Group messaging has been something that has been pretty hot for a while now. In fact, it’s gotten so hot that products from other hot spaces are starting to pivot towards it — see: Brightkite. But despite the hotness, I’ve yet to find one o... |
