Location-based apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla are great, but do you really want to know where your friends are—all of the time? Probably not. Banjo provides a useful solution: The app lets you specify a radius for the notifications you receive and alerts you when your friends are within that radius. READ MORE
Mozilla has been expanding its social network. The company has just announced a special release of Firefox with Bing search. This means that users can opt to make Bing their default search engine. Part of a revenue-sharing agreement with Microsoft, the new build is available for download from a Microsoft-hosted site. READ MORE
Grovo, an Internet education and training platform that helps people discover and learn to use Web sites faster than fumbling around on them on their own, just launched a redesigned site. Want to figure out how to use Twitter for your business, or make the most of Google Analytics? There are Grovo tutorials that cover those topics, plus loads of others. Grovo’s content library currently features over 1,000 lessons and provides education for nearly 100 leading sites. READ MORE
StumbleUpon, the personalized discovery engine has hit a serious growth spurt. In the past 16 months, the company has doubled its user base to 20 million people who “stumble upon” interesting web pages that the site has selected. StumbleUpon is now said to drive more traffic to websites than Facebook. READ MORE
Site admins, rejoice: Google Analytics has (finally) launched a real-time dashboard. This feature brings Google in line with similar products like Chartbeat. Users will need to activate the “New Version” link in Analytics to get the Real-Time feature. READ MORE
The “Arab Spring” uprisings and even the recent uprisings in the U.K. proved one thing: In some places, SMS is very much alive. Even without smartphones, protesters, journalists, and activists were able to share visual information with the rest of the world. Twitter is looking to take advantage of that. READ MORE
If you haven’t yet discovered it, Focus.com is a great (and free) place to find business experts. It’s similar to Q&A sites such as Formspring and Quora, but focuses on providing advice for business professionals from qualified and reviewed industry experts through roundtables and online Q&As. I use it all the time and am consistently impressed with the quality of responses I get when posting a question. This week the site is getting even better by launching its enhanced Live Event Platform. While Focus has already offered 1,000 live events to its 1 million members, in the past you could only dial in and listen to speakers. With the new platform, you can now interact with speakers and experts, give your opinions and ask questions in real-time. You can also rate how interesting or uninteresting a discussion is, and give up-to-the-second comments on how you feel speakers are doing. The social aspect is also different, since all your comments and feedback can be streamlined to your social networks—meaning your contacts from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can hear about an event as it’s happening. Learn more at Focus.com or check out its Events Schedule.
Blackberry has got your back in an emergency–or, at least, they’ve developed an app for that. READ MORE
From Monday to Wednesday in San Francisco, TechCrunch’s latest Disrupt Start-up Battlefield competition is showcasing entrepreneurs from 30 start-ups, all vying for a $50,000 prize by making six-minute-long pitches to a rotating panel of venture capitalists, tech influencers, angel investors and Silicon Valley players. Tuesday featured three more sessions of Start-up Battlefield, titled Customer-Friendly Enterprise, Local Networks and Increasing Understanding; here are the start-ups presented in session six: Increasing Understanding. READ MORE
From Monday to Wednesday in San Francisco, TechCrunch’s latest Disrupt Start-up Battlefield competition is showcasing entrepreneurs from 30 start-ups, all vying for a $50,000 prize by making six-minute-long pitches to a rotating panel of venture capitalists, tech influencers, angel investors and Silicon Valley players. Tuesday featured three more sessions of Start-up Battlefield, titled Customer-Friendly Enterprise, Local Networks and Increasing Understanding; here are the start-ups presented in session five: Local Networks. READ MORE
