Posts Tagged ‘Launch’

RockMelt, the new socially-focused web browser backed by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, was released (by beta invite request only) Monday. The browser aims to transform web browsing into a true social experience by closely integrating with Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

The browser has been in development for two years, and uses the Chromium engine pioneered by Google’s Chrome browser. RockMelt founders Eric Vishria and Tim Howes recently sat down with PCMag.com to talk about their new toy and how it stands out from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Flock, and all the rest of them.

“All the browsers available today, although they’ve gotten a lot faster, are still just about navigating web pages. We built features into the browser to address people’s three top browsing behaviors: interacting with friends, consume news and information, and searching,” said Howes.

With all the competition, RockMelt faces an uphill battle. Even the critically-acclaimed Flock social browser, which aims for basically the same target, has yet to capture a mainstream audience. But RockMelt has a couple of aces up its sleeve. Read more

Revenge is a dish best served cold, and the relationship between Web entrepreneur Jason Calacanis and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has been downright frosty of late, so it didn’t come as much of a surprise that Calacanis is mounting a direct challenge to Arrington.

Calacanis said he will launch a startup editorial project and event called Launch, taking direct aim at TechCrunch, paidContent reported, keeping its focus on writing and editorial. In fact, Launch will debut as an email publication, Calacanis told paidContent, adding:

When I started with Peter Rojas, blogging was a new format that was faster but still had quality and insight. Now it’s even faster but it has lost that quality and insight. You have a bunch of people writing short stuff with no research and knowledge base. They have no credibility.

If you get people to commit to an email relationship, it’s the deepest, most intimate relationship you can have online — much deeper than Facebook and certainly more intimate than a blog.

I want high-quality insider information, a celebration of entrepreneurship and taking risk. I want it serious and insightful rather than salacious and link-baity.

Until then I’m listening to the audience and testing what they like. But I’m going for something that doesn’t exist in the market — not a blogger writing the story in two hours. The world really wants deeper stuff right now.

Chatroulette has been teasing anxious exhibitionists for days with the empty promise of launching the next version of the site, Experiment #2. On Sunday, the random video chat site went down, hosing a message that said, “The experiment #1 is over now. Thanks for participating. Renewed and updated version of the website will be launched tomorrow.” The next day, the site announced that the new version would be “launched today.” Three days later, Chatrouletters the world over are still on the edge of their seats, many with their pants down, waiting anxiously for the launch.
Read more