CitySourced app finally launches in L.A., aiming to help city clean up graffiti and potholes [Updated]

A lot has happened since the Los Angeles start-up FreedomSpeaks made a splash in September with its CitySourced mobile application, a finalist at the annual TechCrunch 50 competition. The app enables anyone with an iPhone to snap a picture of graffiti, potholes or unsightly trash around town, tag it with a GPS location and transmit the data to the city.

The app has been available in San Jose for months, but in talks with L.A., the founders were running in water. With frequent meetings about budget cuts, the city wasn't looking to spend any cash on relatively untested software.

But the L.A. version of CitySourced launched on Friday in the iPhone App Store after months of back and forth between the company and city officials. IPhone owners can download it now and start snapping pictures of junk around town, which the city can review and hopefully fix.

[Updated, Mar. 14, 11:45 a.m. FreedomSpeaks removed the app from Apple's digital store and now plans to launch at the end of the month. An earlier version of this story said FreedomSpeaks had inked a deal with San Francisco, but the company says no final agreement has been made.]

Fearing pressure from competing crowd-sourced cleanup apps, CitySourced is giving the city of L.A. free data for some time. Its co-founders wouldn't say how long, but they're hoping the city gets hooked and inks a deal -- a trial period, if you will.

Otherwise, CitySourced will continue collecting submissions from users but stop sending the city the detailed data.

How drunk is SXSW? Follow the tweeting breathalyzer

Combine a mass of Internet-obsessed geeks and alcohol, and what do you get? Aside from some very awkward social situations, the natural offspring is a Twitter-enabled breathalyzer project.

The hyper-plugged-in crowd that frequents the annual South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, makes no reservations about what it will tell the world.

These are the target consumers for Foursquare, a system for telling friends where you are at any given moment, and for a bathroom scale that blabs about your weight to the world on Twitter.

On the first day of the conference, Danny Newman's alcohol-compatible device was welcomed with exuberance and laughter. Newman, founder of a Washington mobile development company called ID345, is selling mouthpieces for $5 a pop.

"I need to pay for this trip somehow," Newman said.

Stickybits allows you to embed digital content on objects

Last fall, social media entrepreneur Seth Goldstein was hanging out with ace programmer Billy Chasen in Manhattan. They had a pastrami sandwich at 2nd Avenue Deli then walked the streets, chatting about different ways to leave digital traces in the physical world.

A few weeks later, Chasen seized on the idea of creating stickers with bar codes that could be scanned by Android phones or iPhones. 

You could put the stickers on any object. Then you could attach a message to the bar code: say text, a photo, music or a video that anyone could then scan with their smart phone. 

More messages could be embedded and anyone who scanned the bar code could see the stream. People would be notified when someone picks up their message. Each scan and related message would carry a location tag so you could track the object’s movements. 

Like other location-based services, this is technology that no one could have imagined or afforded before the advent of the smart phone, Goldstein said. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that tagging the physical world with digital data via a smart phone could have endless possibilities for consumers and businesses.

Stickybits was born. Goldstein and Chasen got the backing of software mogul and philanthropist Mitch Kapor and venture capital firm Polaris Ventures. In 100 days and with $100,000, they went from concept to launch. Their tag line: “Tag your world.”

The mobile app is free. Stickybits is selling packs of 20 vinyl bar code stickers for $10 apiece.

Already the concept is getting a lot of attention. ReadWriteWeb blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick called Stickybits one of Goldstein's most interesting yet. Not all of his ideas pan out, but Goldstein has a solid track record. He backed Del.icio.us bought by Yahoo, Etherpad bought by Google and Bit.ly which is all the rage thanks to Twitter. He raised $10 million to build a successful advertising network called SocialMedia.com of which he is still chairman. 

Will Stickybits catch on? Kirkpatrick is not sure. "Someone is going to nail this, though. I've long fantasized about being able to use my mobile phone while around town to find out the news, demographic and property ownership history of various locations," he wrote.

Stickybits is handing out free sticker packs to the 12,000 attendees of the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, to see how creative people use them. Goldstein already has plenty of ideas. An Etsy seller slaps a sticker on a custom handbag that plays a video about how the bag was made. A refrigerator comes with a bar code that pops up the owner's manual. A greeting card can be scanned to play a personal video from the sender. Doctors can share medical records.

“Just because something is made from atoms, not bits, does not mean that it is not dynamic,” Goldstein said. “We have just never had a way to connect objects to each other or to people. This is an attempt to make visible all kinds of social dynamics around objects that otherwise have been invisible.”

-- Jessica Guynn

SXSW notebook: Panelists, audience have fun debating fair use

It'd be cool to inhabit the mind of a present-day 16-year-old. Or terrifying. Either way, you'd probably get a stark sense of what, if anything, the new generation of media consumers thinks about copyright. If you're a kid with an Internet connection and unlimited access to a world of instant content -- movies, TV, music, words, images and everything else -- how much do you really understand the fuzzy and complicated  rules about what you're allowed to download, remix and republish?

Even adults can't agree on the answers to those questions -- including some who are paid experts in copyright law. Earlier this week at SXSW, Jason Schultz of Berkeley's Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic ran an entire session on the nuances of so-called fair use. Schultz played a series of online video clips containing repurposed material. After each one, he had a pair of intellectual property attorneys debate whether the filmmaker was an outlaw pirate or an artist engaged in protected creative expression. 

In the corporate corner was Ben Sheffner, an entertainment industry attorney whose client roster has included 20th Century Fox and NBC-Universal, and who worked on John McCain's campaign. And in the creative freedom corner was Julie Ahrens of Stanford Law's Fair Use Project. (The lawyers were arguing standard positions, not their personal opinions.)

After the arguments, Schultz took a vote to see where the 100-or-so-person audience stood on whether the video was fair use. Here's a thumbnail of the panel:

Video No. 1: Synchronized Presidential Debating from 236.com

Sheffner: "CNN or some of the other copyright owners that may have supplied this footage spend millions and millions of dollars on their news-gathering operations. They send huge trucks with lots of equipment and lots of technicians around the country and take these pictures. They need to recoup those costs. When people want to remix or reuse or rebroadcast that footage, they think someone should have to pay for it." 

Also: "What I found out during the campaign is that a lot of the motivation from news organizations making copyright claims is not really even about the money, it's that ...

Media companies learn to mash up at SXSW

It’s been a few years since mashups became a hot thing in the tech industry. Companies would open their programming tools, known as APIs, to the public, and then enterprising developers would come up with new tools built on the company’s platform. Think of the way people merged apartment listings from Craigslist with Google Maps, or the way companies built applications that make it easier to read, post and search on Twitter.

Mashery, a San Francisco company, is now taking the concept to other companies, including some unlikely candidates. At the Circus Mashimus, a lounge the company set up at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, Mashery is showing off how it’s building APIs for the New York Times, Best Buy Co., Netflix Inc. and others.

For media companies such as the NYT, Associated Press, Reuters, and British newspaper the Guardian, Mashery enables developers to create applications using their content –- which in theory helps drive traffic back to those companies’ websites.

If the companies "wanted a new user experience, they’d have to build it," said Oren Michels, Mashery’s chief executive. "They know that they don’t know everything about what their users want. If someone else has an idea, let them build it."

-- Dan Fost

Dennis Crowley: Foursquare doesn't use Google's Dodgeball code

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley. Credit: Anne Hong via Flickr.

Several years ago, attendees at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival loved keeping track of each others' whereabouts using a service called Dodgeball. They could enter their location on a mobile phone, and it would be broadcast to their friends.

Google Inc. bought Dodgeball in 2005, but the service never took off, and the company pulled the plug on it (and other services) two weeks ago. Undaunted, Dodgeball founder Dennis Crowley and a partner, Naveen Selvadurai, have released a new similar service called Foursquare. Once again, the faithful are eating it up.

"Foursquare is blowing up," said Tara Hunt, a blogger and consultant. Although she used to use Twitter to figure out where her friends were, she said that Twitter now has too much noise and ...

Author Julia Angwin talks up 'Stealing MySpace' at SXSW

For all the dirt that gets dished on the MySpace social network, very little of it has spilled about MySpace itself. But in a new book out today, and unveiled at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, author Julia Angwin unveils the somewhat tawdry story of the company’s roots in spam, porn and spyware.

“When I started reporting on MySpace, as I discovered its history, I couldn’t believe it had never been told,” Angwin, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, said in an interview. “The founders kept it hidden. You had to dig to find it.”

Despite her best efforts, the founders, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, did not talk to Angwin for her book, “Stealing MySpace: The Battle To Control the Most Popular Website in America.”

“They were always polite and nice,” she said. “They never said, ‘No,’ but they never said, ‘Yes.’”

In a way, she said, “having no access is such a gift. You have to check your facts so much. You can only say what you can prove.”

Even though some reviews note that the founders don’t come across as model citizens in the book, Angwin said she grew to respect them. “I have a lot of admiration for their spirit and pluck,” she said. “They kept throwing things at the wall in the face of failure. They found the right thing, and it stuck.”

Angwin found herself in a somewhat challenging position while she worked on the book: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns MySpace, bought Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal. Suddenly she was writing the unauthorized story of one of her boss’ prime assets.

“It didn’t change anything,” Angwin said. “They’ve been very good to me.”

-- Dan Fost

Snapshots from SXSWi 2009

Canadian photographer Kris Krug has been nice enough to share some of his SXSW Interactive photos with us. As we hit the last day of the event, it's interesting to see that his photos capture many of the themes that attendees have noticed.

The first trend is somewhat predictable. Among movers-and-shakers of the Web and even film, there seems to be one thing that binds them all together: Mac laptops. And of all the MacBooks, the MacBook Pro notebook in particular seems to be everywhere. In fact, SXSWi may be the easiest place to talk about Mac products or to borrow Mac accessories (like the quick use of a power adapter) -- or to feel out of place if you're clacking away on a Dell.

More photos after the jump.

SXSW: Is the Internet killing everything?

Visitors to Austin's South by Southwest conference arrived Friday to a sky like a wet blanket. A cold, wet blanket. We traipsed our way from panel to panel, grumbling from beneath convenience-store umbrellas, wondering about the possibilities for eating barbecue in a rainstorm.

In the same kind of way, discussion at the new media portion of this year's conference was shot through with a chilly strain of winter. At least five panel titles mused grimly about which parts of the old culture are headed for the graveyard. "Is Privacy Dead?" one asked. "Are PR agencies a dying breed?" worried another, and while we're at it, "Is Web 2.0 Killing the Sports Business?" Others didn't even bother with question marks, declaring the death of friendship, personal blogging and print media.

It's true that giving your proposed panel an extreme name is a surefire way to grab attention and thereby boost your chances of winning a spot on the crowded schedule. Except I took a look back at last year's listings, and there wasn't a deathwatch in sight.

No, this year a woeful economic climate has compounded the problems of a slow-footed industry that's watching the Internet turn its revenue streams into...

Read full article here

-- David Sarno

Latest Twitter + SXSW trend? #fakesxsw

Real attendees of South By Southwest. Credit: Kris Krug.

Maybe they're jealous. Perhaps they're justifiably perturbed that Twitter is being flooded with tweets from and about the South by Southwest Festival. Regardless of their motives, some folks on Twitter are pretending as if they are at SXSW. Behold the Fake SXSW meme, which you can follow on the micro-blogging site with the #fakesxsw hash tag. The trend has resulted in some harmless chuckles.

A fellow named doug pretends he's got a great hotel:

        doughamlin: @malbiniak Staying at Casa el Doug. It's glorious. #fakesxsw   

Proben is pretending he sat in on an interesting panel discussion:

        proben: @fakeceo's keynote was inspiring but it turns out that there's already a Chinese knockoff version of #fakeproduct available #fakesxsw

       
Jackola has a busy night ahead of him:

jackola: About to head over to the #TotallyAwesome #stage at #fakesxsw. Want to #meetup at the #afterparty where all the #coolkids are?

As someone who has been here for a few days, I can say that these tweets and most of the ones on #fakesxsw are mighty close to the ones flying around from real SXSW-goers. Reason enough to follow the parody parties as well as the legit ones.

But if the whole thing just annoys you, feel free to join the crowd celebrating their absence: Not at SXSW.

-- Tony Pierce [Follow]