Like Milo before it, Wishpond launched in late 2010 to build a local search engine that aggregates realtime inventory and product listings from brick and mortar retail stores — from big chains to mom and pop shops. The startup has since focused its efforts on developing social commerce solutions for retailers, launching tools like Social Store, which allows any business to quickly create and deploy a storefront for their businesses on Facebook.

While Wishpond, like so many others, is looking to capitalize on the growing interest in social commerce, its solutions have really been developed as means by which to expand on its core competency: Consumer-facing product aggregation and search for retailers. And today, Wishpond is leveraging its technology for the sake of a segment underserved by eCommerce solutions: Shopping malls, launching Mall360, a service that enables malls and shopping centers to offer their shoppers a browsable, searchable product discovery app that works across their Web, social, and mobile properties

As eCommerce solutions mature, more and more consumers are doing their shopping online, from start to finish. However, while 90 percent of shopping begins online today, the majority of people still prefer to buy products live, in local stores, rather than online. For the most part, shopping malls are still in a past decade when it comes to their approach to eCommerce, even though customers continue to visit their stores when they’re ready to buy.

Mall360 gives shopping malls a way to increase their visibility online in a way that lets them better understand and influence potential customers while they’re in the process of making their purchasing decisions, while they’re searching, talking about products with friends, and planning their next excursion to the mall.

For outlets that may house dozens of brick and mortar retail stores, Mall360 lets visitors search and browse through all the products found at the shopping center through visiting the mall’s Facebook page and clicking on a “Shop Our Stores” button, for example.

To enable this cross-platform service, Wishpond is leveraging RetailConnect, its scalable platform that imports, aggregates and processes large volumes of product data from websites, point of sales systems, and eCommerce platforms. It then uses this data, along with its search and publishing capabilities to enable malls to instantly deploy its product discovery app on their mobile and desktop websites, mobile apps, and Facebook pages.

The goal is to be able to give consumers an easier way to search for and discover products at their favorite local retailers, while in turn, giving retailers the ability to boost social interaction, traffic and both website and social engagement. According to the Wishpond team, malls can choose to deploy some or all of the components of its solution, and over the next few weeks, participating outlets will begin to deploy the solution across their digital properties.

For more, check out Wishpond at home here, Mall360 here, or see the video below:

After weeks of speculation, online video creator Machinima announced Monday that it has closed a $35 million funding round led by Google, which also included existing investors Redpoint Ventures and MK Capital. The new financing comes as Google’s YouTube has been investing heavily in bringing in all sorts of new original programming.

The Machinima network is the largest single page view generator for YouTube, with more than 1.6 billion video views in the month of April. And YouTube is an invaluable partner for Machinima, as it is the company’s primary distribution and monetization platform. With the funding, Machinima says it will invest in content and global sales, as well as international expansion and distribution.

For Google, though, it signals another move toward betting on teams that have proven their ability to grow and scale in what used to be the Wild West of online video. Last year, Google acquired Next New Networks and leveraged it to create YouTube Next, a program for helping independent content creators to improve their video production skills, as well as better leveraging social and other channels for grabbing viewers attention. It’s also betting more than $100 million in an effort to fund a whole new group of independent video channels on its platform.

As I wrote this morning, the race to add interesting independent content is on for a number of streaming providers, including Netflix, Hulu, AOL, and Yahoo, all of which see an opportunity to grow an audience of young new video viewers without having to go through traditional broadcast or cable TV distribution channels.

Our very first day of Disrupt NYC is over and the conference started off with a bang. We had memorable chats, dove into fashion for a bit, hung out with the Startup Alley companies and witnessed 15 startups launch their products in our first day of the Startup Battlefield.

Even though we will have brand-new companies launching tomorrow while fighting for the ultimate prize of $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup, we wanted to take a moment to highlight all that we saw today. There were some brilliant companies, so be sure to check all of them out below. The Internet was buzzing with positive words about each. This is going to be a tough battle. Which company was your favorite?

Session 1: Disrupting Learning and Decision Making

SpokenLayer
Read the web with your ears. SpokenLayer delivers the written web as audio. Instantly. Read by authors, real people and really smart robots. In your pocket, on your time.

Answer Factory
Cyfeon invented Answer Factory to improve how businesses made decisions and understand their data. Answer Factory immediately operationalizes any data source, regardless of its format, size or location, resulting in improved answer quality.

Ark
Ark is a search engine for people. With Ark, you can search for new people, old classmates, new business contacts, and even search your friends across multiple social networks.

Koemei
Koemei is a self-service cloud-platform and API for automated transcription and captioning of video content at large scale.

Incident (gTar)
Incident is a consumer electronics company aiming to make creating and interacting with music as enjoyable and casual as listening to it.

Session 2: Disrupting Processes

UberConference
UberConference is a simple, free and visual conferencing tool.

BroadPeak Partners
BroadPeak Partners brings you K3, an interface harness that standardizes interfaces without the complexity of EAI/ESB.

CallApp
CallApp was founded in 2011 by a group of passionate industry experts, well funded VCs and angels. CallApp makes each call more fun and productive. Powered by a Universal Crowdsourced Contact-Genome, CallApp provides the Ultimate Calling Experience via its Social Phone CRM & Interaction Platform.

Open Garden
Open Garden lets you share your mobile Internet among all your devices.

KurbKarma
KurbKarma delivers a social network for parking that connects people with killer parking to people seeking parking. This mobile app facilitates a peer-to-peer exchange and rewards both parties – parking karma at your fingertips.

Session 3: Disrupting Media

Punch!
Punch’s interactive publishing platform radically reduces the cost, time and risk of creating apps for tablets by removing the need to code. It also enables Punch’s original entertainment iPad app, the “Punch! Culture Shelf”.

StyleSaint
Designer goods for under $100. An online eTailer where the community sets the trends.

Stevie
Stevie turns online video and social graphs into a broadcast-like TV experience, creating entertainment that is personal and social across platforms.

TagBrand
TagBrand is the service for people who love brands.

Babelverse (Startup Alley Audience Choice Winner)
Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt from the Startup Alley and, with little notice, ended up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters: it means anyone can be an interpreter.

Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt from the Startup Alley and with little notice ended up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters: it means anyone can be an interpreter. We covered its launch back in January but here’s a quick rundown.

Machine translation, as we know, is not reliable. So what we’re looking here is a marketplace for translation.

People practice to interpret and move up through the system, towards being more professional interpreters. Think of it as a sort of Demand Media platform for interpreting languages.

It’s a mobile and web app that lets users benefit from on-the-spot ‘real time’ interpretation, in any of the world’s spoken language.

Skilled amateurs and professional interpreters go on the platform and earn money for their time. Professional interpreters are much more expensive – but this democratizes the process.

Competitors include Google Translate Conversation Mode – a feature available on Android, but only for a limited number of languages.

Eventually they want to be able to get to the point where they can do very live translation.

Sprint’s launch plans for the HTC EVO 4G LTE were ruined last week when shipments of their shiny new Android handset were held up by United States Customs, but we’re hearing that they may been hitting doorsteps and store shelves sooner than expected.

According to Sprint, the devices are now currently sitting safely in Sprint’s warehouses and are expected to start trickling out into the world on May 24. And rest easy, you faithful pre-orderers — the world from on high is that you’ll still be getting your devices first.

In case you’re new to this little shipping snafu, shipments of Sprint’s new EVO (along with those of their AT&T-based cousin, the One X) were prevented form entering the country thanks to an exclusion order handed down by the International Trade Commission. The entire convoluted story started last year, but here’s the tl;dr:

Back in July, HTC was found by ITC judge Carl Charneski to have infringed on one of Apple’s patents — specifically, it involved recognizing a particular structure within a set of data and binding it to a particular action. Sounds pretty dry, I know, but if your phone lets you directly a call a phone number by touching it in an email, you’ve seen the patent in action.

At the time, HTC stated that they were working on fixing the offending UI flourish, and part of the holdup for customers was apparently because the phones were being spot-checked for compliance.

With Sprint’s EVO shipments said to be on the move once more, now the question becomes whether or not shipments of AT&T’s One X are as well. I’ve reached out to AT&T for confirmation one way or the other, and I’ll be updating the post as I hear more.

“All people wear clothes!” declared one of Tagbrand’s founders on stage at Disrupt today. That’s true, but let’s review.

DailyBooth was (is still perhaps?) a phenomenon for a time as people became accustomed to sharing their daily lives in a more quirky manner than mere video can afford. (Ok, OK, it’s a bunch of teenagers sharing their zits, but work with me here, people). Now Tagbrand wants to apply that model to fashion, but with a tagging twist.

The model is simple enough. Take and upload photos of what branded clothes you are wearing and tag them. Effectively, it’s a photo check-in for brands, or ‘Foursquare for fashion’, if you will.

The twist is that users are encouraged to tag up pictures with a visual tag of what brand each item of clothing is. Alas, the site does not yet do visual recognition of the clothes. Maybe one day…

TagBrand doesn’t call this check-ins, but – wait for it – “brand-ins”. People can then comment or vote on the brands their friends are wearing. Clearly the opportunity here is to capture a fashion-obsessed audience and provide a platform for advertisers.

Thus, although Tagbrand is like DailyBooth if everyone on DailyBooth was obsessed with fashion, it’s this tagging element which looks pretty viral.

The product combines contains brands, polls and e-commerce. There’s a lot of virality built into the service – every tags has a Twitter or Facebook button on it.

But clearly the people who do this are obsessed with fashion. TagBrand gives them the tools to be obsessive. The polls certainly feature makes the experience more entertaining when you’re trying clothes out.

Now, clothing brands and retail stores are constantly chasing these people. This is one way of delivering them a highly targeted audience. Tagbrand’s business model is based on creating a special marketplace for them which is visible while browsing the brand’s tag on a photo. The stores provide Tagbrand with a price-list and its system attaches them to a “Recommended” block.

So while browsing their friends’ clothes, users see the real-world item beside the image and can purchase from there (click are on a CPC basis). Users also get delivered latest news on brands they such as new collections.

Admittedly they have older competition in the UK operation, WIWT.com, but Tagbrand’s visual tags are a slightly cuter way of doing it.

TagBrand has secured a $100,000 seed investment from Russian investor Glavstart, while founders Ivan Olenchenko and Alexandr Kobozev have been working on startup projects in Russia for a while now. (And we should add they did a pretty good pitch at a TechCrunch meetup in Moscow last year).

Q&A

Judges asked about extending the app into giving users the ability to upload their own home made brands, and that seemed to be on the cards according to the founders.

Currently in Russian and English, the app launches today in the US.

The Judges also had an issue about copyright and the images uploaded, which seems a fair point.

Right now 80% of usage of the product is on the iPhone app versus 20% on the web.

So far they’ve had 15,000 registered users in 2 months with no promotion/marketing just in the Russian market. With about $4.5 billion spent annually on advertising clothes, they reckon there’s plenty of money to be made out there. Da!

We spend more and more time on social networks, but sometimes it can feel like work. I mean, scrolling through your news feed isn’t work work, but it’s not quite as easy as vegging out on your couch and watching TV.

That’s where a new startup called Stevie comes in, with a website launching today at Disrupt, along with mobile apps that function as remote controls. Stevie looks at content shared in your social network feeds and elsewhere on the Web, and it assembles that content into TV shows that you can watch, shows with names like The Comedy Strip, Music Non-Stop, and Celeb TV. Naturally, the shows incorporate video content that your friends have shared, but they also include things like Facebook status updates, tweets, shared headlines, and birthdays, running mostly as tickers under the video. Essentially, it’s a way to watch Facebook and Twitter on your TV.

Co-founder and Chief Creative Technologist Gil Rimon argues that this is the right way to do “social TV.” Apps like GetGlue, which offer check ins and other social interactions around existing TV content, aren’t a good fit for how people watch TV now, because they ignore its essentially passive nature. Stevie takes the opposite tack — instead of trying to encourage new types of behavior, it’s introducing new content into the traditional couch potato experience.

Rimon compares the app to Pandora. In the same way that Pandora learns your musical tastes and preferences, automatically delivering music that’s tailored to your tastes, Stevie uses something that the team calls “The Stevie Factor” to look at your social data (such as Facebook Likes) and automatically stitch together the videos and other content that you’ll probably enjoy.

When Rimon demonstrated Stevie for me, I was particularly impressed by the look and feel. Granted, I don’t watch much TV aside from Game of Thrones and Doctor Who, but the video content struck me as quite bubbly and polished, especially for something that was being algorithmically assembled on-the-fly. Rimon’s experience in TV writing, editing, and presenting probably helps with that. I expect Stevie will become even more appealing when it’s available on connected TV devices.

The company has raised $300,000 in angel funding from investors including Jeff Pulver and Gigi Levy, and it’s participating in the Microsoft Accelerator for Azure program in Tel Aviv. Oh, and if you’re interested in couples who run startups, here’s another one — Rimon is married to his co-founder and CEO Yael Givon.

You can visit the Stevie website here, download the iPhone app here, and download the Android app here. (Again, the apps aren’t standalone experiences, but remote controls for watching on the browser.)

Disrupt Q&A

Q: How do you connect the Internet to the TC?

A: We’re not delivering hardware — it’s a web-based experience, with more devices (starting with iPad) coming soon.

Q: Who is your competition?

A: No direct competition, though of course there are other video discovery companies. But they’re not replicating the TV experience. The real competitor might be old-fashioned TV channels.

Q: Why hasn’t connected TV taken off?

A: That’s changing — see, for example, the growth of Apple TV.

As we covered earlier today, the fashion vertical in tech has exploded, with myriad unique companies clamoring to take a bite out of Amazon’s lunch, and a chunk out of the trillion dollar apparel industry. One of the most unique premises I’ve seen thus far is StyleSaint, a startup which at first glance seems like a Pinterest for fashion, but with a unique real-life twist.

To use StyleSaint in its current form, log in with Facebook or Twitter and create an account, once logged on, you can choose from over 55K “tear sheet” images from which to create your own Stylebook, once you’ve got more than ten tear sheets loaded, you can hit the “Create Stylebooks” link in the top right and StyleSaint will automatically import, then publish, the last ten sheets you’ve torn. Alternatively you can drag-and-drop the tears to create a custom stylebook. Click on “Create” to publish to the site.

In addition the resulting books are Facebookable, tweetable and embeddable, the embeddable stylebooks function as an overlay on embedded sites, preventing traffic re-direction. In addition to social sharing layer, users who want to drill deeper into the StyleSaint community can apply to be part of the StyleSaint Creative Collective, the group of passionate editors that scours the web looking for, linking to and tagging stunning, fashion-related images.

While the stylebook portion of the site is delightful as a content play, the most compelling thing about StyleSaint is that co-founders Brian Garrett and Allison Beal eventually want to use the collective data from the style booking activity to come up with its own line of clothing. “StyleSaint is the only company editorializing the phenomenon of image discovery and curation and combining it with a manufacturing, vertical eTailer ecommerce model,” Beal writes. “It will definitely be the hardest part of our site.”

Hoping to come up with a new, wholesale product (5-10 SKUs) every couple of weeks, Beal tells me that all pre-production on the clothing line will take place in LA, as the company has teamed up with the same manufacturing partner who is responsible for producing the Mary-Kate & Ashley line, The Row, STQ, James Perse and Vince. Beal views the site’s competition as Modcloth, NastyGal & ASOS once the the eCommerce components come into play. The company wants to unveil the offering around fashion week next fall.

StyleSaint is currently seed funded by Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Crosscut Ventures and LA angel investors. Beal hopes to raise a Series A in the next couple months, to finance its commerce arm.

Judges Q&A

Q: How exactly do you use the stylebooks to build fashion?

A: We use them collaboratively, and build a meta-stylebook.

Q: Have you thought about changing the business model? To pre-order or subscription?

A: Yes, we’ve thought that pre-order wasn’t for us, and many people do subscription better.

Q: You’ve talked a lot about inspiration, but I haven’t heard very much about your business model.

A: We’d like to think of ourselves as Net-A-Porter meets Zara. The “Shop” button is going to be right next to “Explore” and “Create” on the site.

GitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has been growing like gangbusters. The site now has over 1.6 million registered developers, hosting over 2.8 million repositories on everything from jQuery and Ruby on Rails to node.js and Redis. At the outset, Github was just a side project, a tool to make developers’ lives easier (its first slogan: “Git hosting: No longer a pain in the ass.”) Github is still a boot-strapped operation, but as both its user base and its own hacker collective (now at 73 strong) have grown, there has been an increasing demand for tools that fall outside Apple’s domain.

Today, about 50 percent of GitHub’s traffic comes from Windows users, and, as a result, the startup has finally heeded demand and is now officially bringing the party to Windows, launching a desktop app to address the challenges of developing on Windows and to make it easy for Windows developers to collaborate in open-source and private repositories.

GitHub released a similarly-targeted Mac client last year, which has since seen wide adoption. However, as popular as Apple has become, the majority of enterprise development still takes place in a Windows environment. As a result, GitHub has been looking to make its platform more appealing to corporate developers and enterprise, and its new Windows app intends to do just that.

Developing in private or open-source for Windows has lagged behind in terms of adoption among developers because they’ve lacked a full toolset for project collaboration, GitHub CTO Tom Preston-Werner says, so, with its new Windows client, the startup just made it easier to get up and running using Git and GitHub on Windows machines.

GitHub for Windows is a native app that runs on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and even the pre-release Windows 8, and includes a complete installation of msysGit. The app syncs users’ code to the cloud and allows developers to clone their repositories right from the app or directly from GitHub.com with its new “Clone in Windows” button.

Of course, anyone who’s been following GitHub’s progress will notice that it took the team more than a few days to finally release its Windows client. As one might expect, the reason for this was, besides a need to tear down development hurdles for Windows developers, that the team wanted to create an app (and a toolset) they would actually use themselves. In order words, to build a Windows app by Windows developers — for Windows developers.

To do that, GitHub has been amassing a pretty serious team of developers who collectively — aside from having cache in the community — own quite a bit of experience developing on and for Windows. For starters, GitHub brought on Phil Haack and Paul Betts, both of whom left Microsoft to join GitHub to help ship the app.

Before GitHub, Haack led the development of both ASP.NET MVC and NuGet, among other things, during his four-plus year stint as a senior program manager at Microsoft. Paul Betts joined Github following a four-year run at Microsoft, where he worked on Vista, and created development tools, among other things.

GitHub for Windows also relied on help from Tim Clem, Cameron McEfee (the guy behind GitHub’s Octocats), and Adam Roben to get the startup’s new app ready for shipping.

Developing tools that are useful to Windows developers right out of the box is essential to the success of GitHub. Of course, most big companies are still hesitant to put their code in the cloud, and although the startup puts most of its focus on open source project hosting, it’s free. The company makes its money off of its private repositories, and so better tools for companies and corporate developers could mean a significant boost in revenue for GitHub.

Of course, it’s also for the love of a challenge.

For more, find GitHub’s announcement here.

It’s a familiar story in the tech world: A company wants to build a consumer product, finds that the necessary tools aren’t available, creates its own tools, then realizes it has created a broader platform.

David Bennahum offers some examples: Zip2. Vignette. TypePad. And yes, his startup Punch!, where Bennahum is co-founder and CEO, and which is launching its publishing platform at Disrupt.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the launch of the Punch! app, which offers current event themed games, usually with a satirical bent. (Or, as Bennahum describes it, “culturally relevant content that could only exist on a tablet.”) Some of the early games included one where players choose the wardrobe of then-presidential candidate Rick Santorum, and a general pop culture quiz with challenges like ranking Farrelly Bros. movies based on box office success.

Behind the scenes, Bennahum says the challenge was to add content in a timely manner, so that it was “topical and relevant” — relatively easy for a newspapers or magazines that are only uploading new articles and other content, but harder for Punch!, which doesn’t create articles but rather “mini apps.” To introduce new content at the right pace, Punch needed to cut down on the development time, and it needed to avoid triggering the App Store review process whenever it added a new game.

So that’s what the Punch! publishing platform does. It offers a content management system where companies can create apps without writing any code in Objective C. Like Punch! itself, these apps shouldn’t just offer a tablet-optimized version of a printed product, but instead include interactivity and gaming. It includes templates for content types like maps, “drag to fill,” and games and quizzes.

And Bennahum says that by “creating an environment that sends scripts to effectively render these app-like experiences,” publishers can introduce mini apps without adding code, which means that once they get the initial approval from Apple, they don’t need to wait on further approval for every new piece of content.

The Punch! platform will allow publishers and other media companies to pay Punch to license the technology and, optionally, to provide additional services to help get them get started.

As for the Punch! app itself, Bennahum says it has now seen 35,000 user sessions. The next challenge is getting on a more regular publishing schedule, which should hopefully happen in the next few weeks.

You can read more about the publishing system here.

Disrupt Q&A

Q: What existing tools is this replacing?

A: To create app-like experiences, most publishers are hiring app development studios. Or they’re using tools that are replicating the print experience.

Q: Tell us more about the pricing.

A: $15,000 license for the year, versus $150,000 on average for app development.

Q: Who are the ideal clients?

A: Media/entertainment companies that have already experimented with tablets and been frustrated with what’s available. Also, brands that want to engage their audiences. Punch! could also partner with companies to create new publications.

Q: What about distribution and discovery tools are you offering?

A: None yet. This is probably for customers who are already engaging an audience on another medium.