stickybits in your pantry
food52 has attached a ton of their amazing recipes to various products out there.
We’ve recently come up with a new way for you to access food52 recipes while you’re at the grocery store, or even while you’re wandering around your kitchen looking for something to cook. Using the StickyBits application, we, along with a few intrepid volunteers, have linked hundreds of our community’s recipes to the bar codes on ingredients all over the country.
Read more about it on their blog and get scanning. Yummy!
now sticking: official bits
with stickybits, our goal is to make things more interesting, by enabling people to attach digital content to physical objects. at launch, our application allowed anybody to add videos, photos, or comments to barcodes. it was first come, first serve: if you were the first one to scan an object, your bit came first. everybody else’s bits appeared sequentially.
the feedback we got was to improve how the bits were organized, so that it was easier to have conversations about the most interesting content. we also heard from barcode owners that they wanted tools to promote their own content and interact directly with users scanning their products.
today we are pleased to announce our latest version of stickybits which incorporates this feedback. there are three key improvements:
- official bits: now the owners of bar codes can dynamically pin their most important content to the top. using our code manager, owners (such as brands) can show different content such as videos and promotions to users scanning their products. our first strategic partner for official bits is pepsico, which is using stickybits to communicate with consumers through its products. learn more here.
- voting: users can now vote up or down the content that other users have attached to codes, so that the best content rises to the top. this provides a social incentive for people to add great content.
- threading: stickybit content is now threaded, which means that users can communicate with other users and respond to their attachments. this turns stickybits from a bulletin board of sequential attachments into a threaded conversation.
so go ahead and upgrade to stickybits 1.5 and try out these new features. and if you are interested in attaching your official bit, email us.
thanks,
- the stickybits team
Around the World in 80 Days
Our friends at neigh*borrow are trying a really neat experiment with stickybits.
They are taking the book ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ and seeing if they can get the book around the world in that time or less. You’ll be able to track the books progress with stickybits.
Phase one will be getting the book from NY to SF. The only rule is no mail. You need to pass it on and it needs to travel with you.
You can read a bit more about it on their blog
Python developers
stickybits is hiring! After an awesomely successful launch at South by Southwest in March, we’re now working on building out our next version. And it’s pretty ambitious, so we need some serious talent to pull it off.
What is stickybits?
stickybits.com allows people to attach digital content to barcodes. When those barcodes are scanned (via our iPhone or Android apps), you’ll see all the content that has been attached. What makes us unique is that all this is done in a social and fully open read/write way.
What does that exactly mean?
Imagine putting a barcode on your business card that when scanned showed your resume. Or put a stickybits sticker into a birthday card and record a personal video. Then when your friend scans it, they’ll see the video. Take that one step further and have all your friends attach videos to the same card. You’ll also get notified when it gets scanned.
You can see a great video walk through done by App Judgement here http://revision3.com/appjudgment/ip_mau_stickybits
We also recently presented at the New York Tech Meetup http://bit.ly/c9PtjW
The response has been fantastic, just check twitter http://search.twitter.com/search?q=stickybits and our press coverage http://stickybits.com/press/
What are we looking for?
We’re looking for a Senior Python Engineer who has tons of experience building out and architecting backend systems and APIs.
Skills we are looking for are:
We’re located in New York City and this job would be fulltime, working out of our office in Union Square. Join us and be part of the emerging startup tech of NYC!
Stickybits was founded in early 2010 by Billy Chasen (creator of chartbeat, co-founder Betaworks) and Seth Goldstein (founder of SocialMedia.com, Majestic Research, Co-Chair IAB). Stickybits is funded by Polaris Venture Partners and Mitch Kapor.
Contact us at jobs -at- stickybits.com to apply
Scavenger hunt
Ken Marchant has put together a little scavenger hunt in London. If you’re in that neck of the woods, go play!
The World’s Biggest Stickybits Barcode
We can confirm that this is in fact the biggest stickybits barcode we’ve seen.
Great job Blue Fountain Media!
Here’s a link to them setting it up
SOME NEW FACES AND A SWEET API
Since launching in March, we have seen some awesome uses of stickybits, from a scavenger hunt through London to photo-tagged family trip to Disney World. Much to our surprise, people are even scanning products in grocery stores and creating social networks around brands. Through all these examples, people are using the stickybits platform to tell stories about objects and make things more interesting.
We are now ready to take it up a notch:
- New Investors: Today we welcome two new investors into the company, First Round Capital and Lower Case Capital, who are joining existing investors Mitch Kapor and Polaris Venture Partners in a $1.6mm seed+ round. For years, First Round’s Howard Morgan has been a Rabbi to entrepreneurs and has better pattern recognition than any early stage investor we know. Howard, who will be joining our board, says that ”with Sticky Bits, the explosive growth of the social web is extended from people and locations into the world of objects.” In addition to welcoming Howard, Josh and the rest of the First Round team, we are also psyched to have the real Chris Sacca participating in this round. Chris was involved with many of the key partnerships early on at Google, and has recently, as an angel investor, helped Twitter become the platform it is today. According to Chris, “Stickybits makes the physical world more interactive, engaging, and participatory. The platform is driven by the energy of each of the users, and so far these users have made me think, taught me, opened my eyes, and made me laugh my ass off.” Our new capital will enable us to grow our team so that we can increase adoption and integrate with more partners. (If you know somebody looking to join a killer startup, check out www.stickybits.com/jobs)
- Advisors: Gary Vaynerchuk and Yishan Wong have joined the company as advisors. Gary is a force of nature. We were blown away by his presentation at SXSW this year and loved his book “Crush It!.” According to Gary, “The second my brother AJ called me over and said “Hey look at this” I was in love. Stickybits potential in the marketplace is staggering and obvious. I also see a future where barcodes extend stories for brands which will become a vital space for many companies.” Also joining us is Yishan Wong, who was most recently Director of Engineering at Facebook, and before that Engineering Director at PayPal. Yishan describes how “Stickybits can be the missing link between real-world objects and the tagging-based overlay of the internet. With barcodes already everywhere and a convenient scanning interface via today’s smartphones, this means we finally have an easy and obvious way to attach shareable data to everything around us.
- API: stickybits is a platform that enables anybody to build applications that connect the digital and physical worlds. An open and flexible API is essential to this vision, and so we have launched our API at http://api.stickybits.com. This enables developers to write and read bits to any code (barcode, QR code, etc). All of stickybits.com is written on top of this API, so anything we’re doing developers can do too. In addition to supporting our API, we are busy at work on a new iteration of the stickybits app that will be released in June.
The growth of smartphones means that soon everybody will be carrying a handheld scanner. Couple this with the proliferation of machine-readable codes, and you get a world that, for the first time, can be truly augmented with digital information. We believe that scanning things, like checking in or updating your status, will become a core social media experience. Our goal is to become the best tool to do so.
stickybits was mentioned in the School Library Journal and they were kind enough to send us a copy. Thanks guys!
Android 1.6+ update
We’re excited to release our next version of our Android app! It’s now compatible with Android 1.6+ and has tons of improvements to it. It also has the brand new RedLaser scanner inside, adding a much improved scanning experience.
If you didn’t notice, scanning barcodes in our iPhone app is pretty awesome. It was created by the good people of Occipital, the creators of one of the top paid iPhone apps, RedLaser.
We’ve partnered with Occipital and have some really cool and exciting things coming up with them.
You can use the QR code below to get our updated Android app in the marketplace or search for stickybits.
