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Evernote-linked blogging platform Postach.io rolls out premium tier and introduces new features

Mar04
by on March 4, 2014 at 3:58 am
Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, blogging, Product Updates

shutterstock 142997428 520x245 Evernote linked blogging platform Postach.io rolls out premium tier and introduces new features

Blogging service Postach.io, which slots into popular note-taking app Evernote, has rolled out a premium tier for its members at $5 per month, or $50 per year.

Screen shot 2014 03 04 at AM 11.18.20 730x313 Evernote linked blogging platform Postach.io rolls out premium tier and introduces new features

Postach.io, which is currently still in beta, allows you to write posts right from Evernote using a dedicated notebook and lets you set keywords like ‘published’, ‘page’ or ‘avatar’. More than just writing content, the blogging service also hooks into commenting tool Disqus, and supports Google Analytics and Markdown. It allows for custom domains and social sharing too.

The new premium tier gives you the choice of creating as many sites as you like, password protect them, and have multiple Postach.io users post to the same blog, with their own avatars.

Other than introducing the premium tier, Postach.io has also released a bunch of new features and improvements for its users. You now get an option to upload your custom profile avatar or logo directly on the site. This means you can no longer just add a note tagged ‘avatar’, but individual authors can maintain their own avatars in their Postach.io accounts.

Another new feature is the Social Bar — which lets users follow sites that get listed in their dashboard, so it becomes easier to keep tabs on new content. You can also like posts that you find interesting, either from the site itself or from the Discover Feed.

Social Bar 730x261 Evernote linked blogging platform Postach.io rolls out premium tier and introduces new features

Embed codes have also gotten a revamp — they now use the same detection as WordPress shortcodes, therefore becoming more reliable. Postach.io has also added Flickr single-photo embeds that work with both full and short URLs, as well as SoundCloud and Pixton embed codes.

Read – The 15 best blogging and publishing platforms on the Internet today

Headline image via Shutterstock

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Airpnp: It’s like Airbnb, but for toilets

Mar04
by on March 4, 2014 at 2:31 am
Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, Shareables

shutterstock 136162238 520x245 Airpnp: Its like Airbnb, but for toilets

We’ve all been in a situation where nature calls at a crowded event and an empty toilet is nowhere to be found. Airpnp is an experimental service that aims to solve this problem — by letting residences and businesses rent out their bathrooms to people in their immediate location who need to use it.

Airpnp is now available for users to lease out their bathrooms through a mobile optimized Web app, and native apps are in the works. The service itself will be put to test during Mardi Gras 2014 in New Orleans, which happens on March 4. There are currently a handful of toilets listed on the site spanning a range of prices — some bathrooms are free, while urinating at a hotel bathroom where “Tom Cruise, Nicholas Cage, Frank Sinatra, and Walt Disney have all peed” requires a payment of $10.

Users can even rate their pee experience afterwards to see how each restroom ranks — though in a time of desperation, it probably doesn’t really matter how great the toilet is.

airpnp toilet Airpnp: Its like Airbnb, but for toilets

It seems like the so-called “sharing economy,” which includes Airbnb and ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, is here to stay — after all, it has now even spread to the most basic of needs: peeing. 

➤ Airpnp

Headline image via Shutterstock

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Paracosm shows off impressive crowdsource 3D mapping software used in Google’s Project Tango

Mar03
by on March 3, 2014 at 10:51 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Google, Shareables

True innovation in mobile is hard to find nowadays, which is why Google’s Project Tango has received so much attention: bringing 3D motion tracking to a mobile device has immense potential. One way to leverage such technology would be crowdsourced 3D mapping. According to Paracosm, Tango can already do just that:

The Florida-based software startup says it contributed a dense mapping tool to Project Tango that can visualize large-scale environments in real time. In fact, as you can see in the video above, two devices can be used to collaboratively map a house thanks to Paracosm’s algorithm, which it is making available to developers via its Reality API. Now all we need is to get our hands on a few of these devices, and I’ll immediately forget all about my Nexus 5.

See also – Google unveils Project Tango smartphone prototype with revolutionary 3D sensor chip

Image Credit: Google

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Shutterstock goes after the enterprise with acquisition of digital asset management service WebDAM

Mar03
by on March 3, 2014 at 9:48 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider

Shutterstock has reached an agreement to acquire WebDAM, an enterprise-friendly service for managing digital assets.

WebDAM helps marketing and creative teams share access to important project files and images. According to the announcement, the company’s client base has a “significant portion” of large enterprises. Shutterstock could gain better access to enterprise clients by integrating its stock photography service with WebDAM.

➤ Shutterstock to Acquire WebDAM, Leader in Web-Based Digital Asset Management

Disclosure: Shutterstock partners with The Next Web on our Creativity Channel.

Thumbnail credit: jcjgphotography / Shutterstock

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Blood, sweat, and tears: How we got from 0 to 500K downloads on a budget

Mar03
by on March 3, 2014 at 8:57 pm
Posted In: Analysis and Opinion, Around the Web, Design & Dev, Entrepreneur, How-To's, Social Media
Pages: 1 2 3

savings piggy bank 520x245 Blood, sweat, and tears: How we got from 0 to 500K downloads on a budget

Gili Golander is a co-founder and CMO at Bazaart. Bazaart is the most beautiful way to mix your photos into mind-blowing images.

When I started my startup journey two years ago, one word came to my mind whenever I thought about marketing: liars.

You see, coming from a UX background where the focus is on giving people a great product experience, I tended to look at the marketing side of business as something reserved to slick types – characters often played so well by George Clooney.

As time passed and I took on the marketing role for my startup (while everybody else was busy coding), I started to see marketers differently. Today, I think of them as storytellers.

When you’re marketing a startup, you don’t have a fat marketing budget. In fact, more often than not, you have no budget at all – at least when you’re just starting. Your mission is to grow, and for B2C companies it means more users.

How do you approach this daunting task? Here are some tips and tricks that helped me grow the downloads for our app Bazaart from 0 to 500,000 organically, spending very little to no money at all.

Launch into an existing community, or piggyback one

When we launched our MVP, we were taking part in an accelerator program in NYC. This meant that we were on three-month deadline, hoping to show some traction by demo day.

We chose to integrate our product closely with Pinterest, which was the talk of the town in the summer of 2012, and allow our users to do more with their carefully curated photos. Even though our MVP was very limited, the core feature of photo collage editing was already there, so it gave Pinterest users a real value.

We launched a week before demo day and were able to generate a good media buzz (I’ll get more specific later) by piggybacking Pinterest and reach a go-to market that was highly relevant for us at the time. This is how we generated our first wave of downloads and it had cost us nothing at all.

We didn’t invent this approach. Investor Fred Wilson calls it finding “entry points” in his post about marketing and mentions similar examples for Twitter, Tumblr and Quora.

Instagram launched into a community of influential design oriented Twitter users, which allowed it to generate 25K downloads on launch day as it reveal in this excellent video. Find an existing community that’s right for your startup, or piggyback one, launch into it and it’ll make for a great start.

Next:: If you’re gonna go global, plan it from the start

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