Tweetsheet Turns Your Tweet Activity into a Pretty and Sharable Infographic

We do love a pretty infographic, especially personalized ones like Tweetsheet that present your Twitter data by monthly activity for the past 12 months, most retweets, geographic impact (U.S. only), best followers and favorite themes. Each bar in the total tweets chart "above ground" shows in green the chunk of tweets replied to or retweeted.

Tweetsheet will only load your last 3,200 tweets (a Twitter-API limitation), so extremely prolific users may not see a full year of data. Also, we noticed it can take a bit for all your data to load and the sections to populate. You can only create Tweetsheets for your accounts, though anyone can see a Tweetsheet the owner has shared.

Clever bonus: click the bird on the left side of your Tweetsheet and it will hop into a slingshot, Angry Birds-style. You rack up points for knocking down the bars in your chart (yes, you can hit replay and tweet your score).

Tweetsheet is a teaser product from

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Good Geek Fun: GitHub Makes Campfire Bot Hubot Open Source


Any company that relies on the group-chat service Campfire to manage workflow could use a chat bot to automate everyday tasks like finding images -- or fun things like giving a quote from a movie.

GitHub, where millions of developers store and share code, loved its Campfire bot Hubot so much the company rewrote the code and just made it open-source.

Anyone can host Hubot for free on Heroku. The bot comes with some scripts although GitHub's Corey Donohoe is encouraging developers to write their own (in CoffeeScript or Javascript) and contribute to the repository.
 
Corey tells LAUNCH, "Many of our employees have been
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Dispatch Promises to Become your Front Door to the Cloud


WHAT: Dispatch brings together an individual's cloud services into one place. When the service launches, it will support Dropbox, Google Docs, and Gmail, allowing you to drag and drop things between services, preview files, launch into different Google Docs accounts, and send packages of things from your different services to anyone in your social graph.

LAUNCHERS: Jesse Lamb, CEO; Nick Stamas, Gary LosHuertos and Alex Godin.

WHY: Non-techies don't have one easy place to store all their data in the cloud or move that data from one cloud-based service to another. Existing cloud storage services are not social.

WHEN/WHERE: Oct. 18, 2011 / New York [ beta expected to launch in about 10 weeks or early January 2012 ].

BACKSTORY: "We've been interested in the cloud for a while," Jesse tells LAUNCH via email. "We were one of the early developers to use
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Ordr.in Gives Restaurants One Platform to Bring Orders from Any Website, App or Device


WHAT: Ordr.in is an API for online food ordering. Participating restaurants receive orders from any website, app or device connected to Ordr.in's national network. Developers can embed the Ordr.in API on their website orapp and get a cut of orders they generate.

LAUNCHERS: David Bloom, CEO, and Felix Sheng, CTO.

WHY: Many restaurants don't yet take orders online, and those that do are probably not available on relevant apps or devices. Online restaurant orders is a $170B market opportunity in the U.S. alone.

WHEN/WHERE: 2011 / New York.

BACKSTORY: "I ran the restaurant business development team at American Express for five years." David tells LAUNCH via email.
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How to Use Quora Infographic -- Not Just for Newbies


Leave it to a scientist to break down Quora into a color-coded flow chart that not only explains how the social Q&A service works but how to follow its etiquette.

Kent Cavender-Bares, founder of the Minnesota-based environmental nonprofit Dialogue Earth, tells LAUNCH he has used Quora since May 2010 and made the graphic "to help new expert collaborators that I plan to bring to Quora in the coming months as part of Dialogue Earth's "EarthQ" project."

Kent wants the general public to better understand environmental issues, and he sees Quora as the right place to have such serious conversations.

"These are very polarized issues, and I believe
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Want a 360-degree Panoramic Photo? Toss the Ball Camera

If only every thesis was this cool: computer engineering student Jonas Pfeil made a patent-pending throwable panoramic ball camera as his final project at the Technical University of Berlin.

All you have to do is throw the foam-padded ball in the air and its 36 fixed-focus 2 megapixel mobile phone camera modules will snap photos when the ball reaches its highest point (as measured by the ball's accelerometer). Once the ball is back in your hands, you can download the photos via USB and immediately see them as one image on your computer.

As Jonas explains on the Ball Camera website, "It can capture scenes with many moving objects without producing ghosting artifacts and creates unique images." The promotional video [ embedded above ] shows panoramic images of a city square and the great outdoors.

[ Screen shots after the jump. ]

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Stepping Back From The Angel Bubble

[ Photo courtesy of Fir0002/Flagstaffotos via Creative Commons License ]By Jason Calacanis

Everyone is talking about the startup bubble popping today thanks to a Wall Street Journal story that Fred Wilson responded to. You can read about all this on the awesome Techmeme aggregator here: http://www.techmeme.com/111013/p15#a111013p15.  

No one can call a top to the market, but VC Mark Suster did last year, and I was right there with them letting folks know that I'm taking a "pause" on angel investing right now.


Why am I taking a pause and what do I think of this market?

A couple of reasons, and some related observation
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Super-Scaling Server NGINX Raises $3M, Plans SF Office & "Fruitful Relationship" with Dell


Less than two months after forming a services company based on its open-source, high-performance web server, Russia-based NGINX has raised $3M in a Series A and will open its San Francisco HQ before the end of 2011.

Investors are BV Capital, whose global portfolio includes Sonos and Angie's List, Russia-focused Runa Capital and an entity affiliated with MSD Capital, the private investment firm of Dell CEO Michael S. Dell.

NGINX co-founder Andrew Alexeev tells LAUNCH the latter is "very interesting to have because Dell has been very proactive in regards to combining open source with offering of their core product" and he hopes NGINX will have a "fruitful relationship" with Dell.

NGINX servers are known for helping companies scale to billions of pageviews with modest resources. The company's first product -- a commercial-grade connection processing and optimization software platform -- will debut in mid-2012. NGINX already has customers but is not releasing names just yet.
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Cool Dot-Com Flashback: The Deleted City Brings Back Geocities (video)

If you were around for the dot-com boom, you probably built a free personal homepage on Geocities, a pioneering and popular community site in the late 1990s that Yahoo bought for over $3.5B in January 1999. And you probably forgot about Geocities until just now.

But enterprising Dutch designer Richard Vijgen has now created The Deleted City, a data-visualization "map" of Geocities' neighborhoods from data the Archive Team rescued before Yahoo wiped out Geocities for good in 2009 despite pleas to save it. The Archive Team is a group of volunteers committed to "saving our digital heritage."

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Nifty Email-Counting T-Shirt Shows People You're Too Busy to Talk (video)

Is your inbox overflowing? You might want to make an email-counting t-shirt like the one Boston-based developer Chris Ball and his biophysicist wife Madeleine Price Ball put together.

The components: a t-shirt preprinted with numbers along the Y axis, an Arduino LilyPad micro-controller, LED lights, a power supply that requires one triple-A battery, conductive thread, a bluetooth dongle, and an Android phone with open-source software just for the email-counting shirt. Chris wrote the code, and Madeleine, who works on the Personal Genome Project at Harvard, did the sewing.

[ See screen shots after the jump. ]

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Exclusive: Mark Suster Considering Office Space for LaunchPadLA


VC Mark Suster of GRP Partners told LAUNCH that he's "considering the possibility of office space" for his two-year-old program LaunchPadLA, which selects and mentors entrepreneurs in the Los Angeles area to strengthen the local startup scene.

He says he will have a decision on office space in the next 30 to 45 days and noted that Accel Partners is not involved [ see our previous story ].

Mark acknowledges that taking on office space would change LaunchPadLA's approach because
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Flickr Launches Photo Session--Google Hangouts for Photos--and New Android App

Flickr has just launched Photo Session so up to 10 people can look at photos together, draw on the photos and chat about them in real time from their desktop computer, iPhone or iPad.

The new Flickr app for Android has Instagram-like filters and allows sharing to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and WordPress.

See screen shots of Photo Session after the jump.

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Digerati Who Ordered the Kindle Fire Today


Plenty of people are asking "Will you buy a Kindle Fire?" the 7" color touch-screen tablet Amazon debuted this morning. But we are most interested in who among the digerati are paying the sweet price of $199 for it.

In addition to our founder Jason Calacanis (who has ordered two), angel investor Bill Lee confirmed on his Google+ post about the Kindle that he's ordered his already. That same post is where we learned that Georges Harik, angel investor and advisor to the Google Ventures team, said he was going to get one. Georges called the $199 price "pretty compelling."

We saw that GDGT co-founder Peter Rojas added the Kindle Fire to his GDGT "want" list.
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Zeo Launches Smartphone Version of Sleep-Management System at Price for the Masses



WHAT: Zeo Mobile ($99) is a lightweight, wireless headband that measures brain waves to determine sleep quality and uses bluetooth to communicate that data to the iPhone, iPad and select Android devices. Data from headband is 90% as accurate as data from clinical sleep lab.

Alarm on the smartphone app wakes you at the optimal moment (when you're in and out of REM sleep) so you feel refreshed when you awake. [ REM sleep restores the mind, deep sleep restores the body. ] Use the Zeo Mobile app or Zeo website to analyze sleep patterns, add notes/journal entries and learn ways to improve your ZQ (sleep) score. Link sleep data to those in wellness/fitnees apps like DailyBurn and RunKeeper [ see our story ].

Existing product, Zeo Bedside (new price of $149), uses a headband with a proprietary alarm clock. Both Mobile and Bedside products include an email-based coaching program.

Zeo Mobile ships Oct. 26. Best Buy, an investor, is making Zeo products available in all stores. Launching in the U.K. in October and mainland Europe in time for holiday shopping.

LAUNCHERS:  Ben Rubin, CTO, and CEO (not a founder) Dave Dickinson, whose background is in biotech. Other co-founders are Jason Donahue, former VP of brand management (now at Harvard Business School) and Eric Shashoua (in medical school).

WHY: Sleep is critical to overall health, and most Americans don't get enough or enough quality sleep. Sleep clinics are only for those with serious sleep problems. Consumers have no reliable products for sleep management. The smartphone product needed to appeal to a larger audience that includes health-conscious people, not just frustrated sleepers.

WHEN/WHERE: Zeo Mobile: Sept. 26, 2011 / Newton, MA. Company: 2004 / Providence, RI.

BACKSTORY: While taking a basic psychology class at Brown, the founders learned that if you wake up at the right time, you feel more refreshed. As sleep-deprived students, they were
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Sweet Feature: AngelList Tells Investors Their Best Match


Angels are addicted to AngelList, which, like any great startup, continues to roll out features that make finding, following, connecting with and investing in cool startups easier.

One that caught our eye -- the "best match" for an investor. As AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant tells LAUNCH via email, "It's just showing you

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Color Embraces Faceook with App for "Visiting" FB Friends via Live Broadcast from Your Phone


You're probably wondering what Color CEO Bill Nguyen and his team have been up to since the app for seeing and sharing photos with those around you launched -- then fizzled -- this spring [ see our story ]. The problem: every time you opened the app, no one was there.

As we learned from a company source, the Color team realized they needed to build their app around Facebook's huge membership. In development for the last six months, Color is previewing the new version of their app for iOS and Android phones at the f8 conference today.

The app still has the ability to take and share photos -- now with Facebook friends who are nearby -- but the big news is that Color will let you "visit" your friends. They're calling it a "social gesture" similar to a "like." It clearly puts Color on the lifecasting path [ see our profile of the Kogeto panoramic camera Dot ].

Here's how it works.
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Chill Launches Live Event Rooms with Streams from Ustream, Justin.tv and YouTube Live


After experimenting with live streaming the TC Disrupt event last week, Chill has tweaked the interface (for the better) and officially launched its live viewing rooms. The rooms promoted today included a Bon Jovi concert, a "South Park" marathon, and "This Week in Venture Capital" (produced by a company LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis co-founded).

The streams come from the same companies you'd think Chill is competing with -- Ustream, Justin.tv and YouTube Live. We have asked the Chill team about the business model for live streaming and their relationship with these companies.

Among the site improvements we noticed:
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Remember These Guys? Diaspora* Eyes Potential October Launch

Diaspora* gained publicity in May 2010 when it quickly raised money on Kickstarter to build an open-source alternative to Facebook just as Facebook was taking heat for privacy issues. Now, 16 months later, a long overdue email to would-be users confirms the project remains alive and has an expected launch date of late October.

"We’re pushing out hundreds of thousands of invitations as quickly as we can -- thanks for bearing with us," team Diaspora* writes in the email.

LAUNCH has contacted Diaspora* for a comment regarding their potential October launch and why it waited so long to send an update.

Diaspora* wants to create a new and better social web that its users, called Diasporans, own and control...

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Ditch Your Latin Placeholder Text for Slipsum's Samuel L. Jackson Character Quotes


If you need placeholder copy for your current project, may we suggest slipsum.com, a "Pulp Fiction"-inspired take on the classic Lorem Ipsum that generates quotes from Samuel L. Jackson movie characters?

The hilarious NSFW site shows a cartoon version of Jackson -- called Samuel L. Ipsum -- thrusting a gun. On the left-hand side, profane instructions tell you to choose the number of paragraphs you would like, a header tag, and whether you want paragraph breaks inserted.

One of the quotes Slipsum gave us: "You think water moves fast? You should see ice. It moves like it has a mind. Like it knows it killed the world once and got a taste for murder."

The best heading we got: "No man, I don't eat pork."

For those at work, there is a
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