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In Amazon's Android Appstore, Fat-Fingering Will Cost You — Literally | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 24 | A couple days ago, in on Amazon’s new Android Appstore, I noted that the app buying process may be a little easy. You see, just scrolling through the feed of apps, I accidentally clicked a buy button. That immediately triggered a transaction. And guess what I found out today? There are no refunds. You might not think this is a big deal because while the Android Market gives you 15 minutes to get a refund ( ) Apple’s App Store also technically doesn’t have an app refund process (though you can get one if you jump through some hoops). But there’s a big-little difference between the App Store and the Appstore (besides the tiny name difference, that is): an entire click. In the App Store, it’s actually two clicks to buy an app. You first click click on the price, and then the button turns into the bright green “Buy Now” button. It’s only after this second click that the transaction happens. This more or less stops mis-clicks. Further, if you haven’t been browsing the store in a while, they’ll prompt you to re-enter your password before you complete a purchase. In the Appstore (again, Amazon’s version), it is literally one click. If you touch the screen in the wrong place — whoops — you just bought an app. Of course, this is assuming you have one-click purchasing turned on. But if you do on the web, you will in the Appstore. That’s what happened to me. It’s super-convenient when it works. And super-annoying when you make a mistake. On Amazon’s website, one-click is great because it greatly speeds up the buying process. But since most of the things you buy on the website are tangible things that have to be shipped, it’s relatively easy to cancel a mis-click. Not so in the Appstore where there is nothing to ship. And it wouldn’t be a huge deal except for the fact that Amazon isn’t offering app refunds. How do I know? Because after some digging on Amazon’s website to figure out how to possibly get a refund, I had to send an email about my erroneous charge. (For the record, they did erase my charge, but indicated that they were making a one-time exception in doing so.) Long story short, if you’re prone to mis-clicking on touchscreen, make sure one-click purchases are turned off on Amazon. Otherwise it will cost you — literally. |
Record Industry: Limewire Could Owe $75 Trillion – Judge: "Absurd" | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 24 |
So we’re all pretty desensitized by now to the mind-blowing stupidity on display by the record industry in its foolhardy attempts at assigning damages in piracy cases — was anyone surprised when they told one woman, who had shared 24 songs, that she ? Yes, ridiculous. But this — is beyond ridiculous. This is… sublime. The record companies suing Limewire were asked to estimate the damages that should be paid by the file-sharing service. Their estimate? $400 Billion on the end, and at the high end — $75 dollars. That’s more than the GDP of The judge, in a refreshing stroke of good sense, and the plaintiff’s approach “untenable”. The $75tn figure relies on an interpretation of copyright law that provides statutory damages for each instance of copying, and with the numbers of downloads and individual songs the industry is alleging, the money adds up quickly. Even the $400bn figure is certainly grossly inflated, however “conservative” it may appear to Virgin, Atlantic, Sony, and so on. It was decided that an interpretation of copyright law enabling the music industry to sue for more money than they’ve made in the history of recorded music was necessarily wrong, and accordingly the damages were reduced to “a single statutory damage award from Defendants per work infringed, regardless of how many individual users directly infringed that particular work.” That amount will vary, of course, depending on the number of works that can be shown to be infringed, and the award per work decided on by the judge. It matters not because Limewire will have to pay less (they’re probably bankrupt already just from legal fees), but because it enforces a “reasonable” interpretation of our antiquated copyright laws, and limits the potential value of a shared song. It’s not exactly analogous, but at least it would be something for the aforementioned Jammie Thomas-Rasset to lean on in court. Which record company owns the rights to “The Times They Are A Changin'”? They should give it a listen. [via ] |
Gorgeous Wooden iPad 2 Cover Is Like A Smart Cover, But Far More Tasteful | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 24 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SI6K-k_rBo&w=640&h=390]
When you get an expensive, beautiful device like an , you want to spoil it. A cheapo case feels wrong on it, and personally, I think Apple’s Smart Cover (while cool) is a little… synthetic and gadget-y. You know what I mean? I like the more organic stuff. Fortunately, the Dutch have come to the rescue!
This beautiful wood cover works just like a Smart Cover — it turns your iPad on and off, rolls up to be a stand, and even has microfiber on the underside so it dusts your screen whenever you use it. I just love how the wood articulates. And it fits flush with the screen and everything. I love this! It’s not available yet, but will cost 50 (~$70) when it ships later this month. . [thanks for the tip, ] |
It's now easy being green: Alven Capital pumps another €1 million into QuelleEnergie | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 3 | 24 | Wondering how you can make your home more eco-friendly? That’s easy, just let do the math. The Paris-based company has developed a platform allowing users to receive customized advice on how to maximize their energy efficiency. Users simply answer some 20 basic questions about their homes – including the size, shape, date of construction, roof type, etc.) – and QuelleEnergie then proposes a number of possible solutions: a solar water heater, a timed or programed heating system, solar panels, etc. And now is investing another €1 million into the company to make it even easier to be green. Alven Capital had made an initial investment of €500K in QuelleEnergie in January 2010. The company founded in 2008 helped become more energy efficient last year. The service is currently only available in France and the platform is stil only in French. Therefore, this round of funding will likely go to further developing QuelleEnergie’s offers in France – including reinforcing the company’s marketing efforts and increasing the number of installation partners to 1,200. The French competitor of US-based joins , and as . Alven has announced investments totaling to €6.5 million since the beginning of this year. |
Video: ShopSquad's CEO Explains Their Personal Shopper Network | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 3 | 24 | Yesterday about , a new startup that looks to use the web to connect shoppers with expert shopping assistants. The company just closed $1.25 million in seed funding, with participants in the round including Josh Silverman (former CEO of Skype and Shopping.com), David Sacks (former COO of PayPal, CEO of Yammer), Jeff Fluhr (founder and former CEO of StubHub), Selina Tobaccowala (founder of Evite.com) and Charles Carmel (VP Corporate Development at Cisco). In light of the news, we invited ShopSquad CEO Charles Katz to stop by our TechCrunch TV studio so that we could ask him a few questions about the new service. Check out the video interview above, in which I ask Katz to outline how ShopSquad works, and how the site plans to make sure that its advisers really know their stuff. I also briefly discuss my summer working at Office Depot. Tune in! |
Samsung App Store Hits 100 Million Download Mark | John Biggs | 2,011 | 3 | 24 | Ten months after Samsung launched their own App Store for Bada devices, the company reached the 100 million download milestone, a notable result for what we can only termed as a Quixotic quest. The rush to app download nirvana began with the last year. There are currently 13,000 apps available on the platform. Users in France, Germany, and Spain downloaded 40% of the total, making them the biggest consumer of Bada apps. While this is all well and good, it seems a bit dangerous for Samsung to rest on its laurels here. The Bada app store exists in a situation where a feature phone has its own apps and OS and there is no mention made of how many of those apps are paid. One hundred million is fine and good but current success in the Bada framework, especially considering the inexorable move towards Android in the app phone marker, does not guarantee future success on the platform. |
Digital Polling Utility CivicScience Scores $1.2 Million In Seed Funding | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 3 | 24 | Pittsburgh-based startup , an intelligent polling utility that offers a host of audience measurement and analytics tools for publishers and advertisers, has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from a group of institutional and angel investors to expand its platform partnerships and automation technology as well as ramp up its hiring efforts. The seed round’s investors include marketing research company, , national polling company , and , director of and former owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The seed round adds to the $1.6 million in funding the startup has already raised, bringing total investment to $2.8 million. “Another polling startup?” you may ask in exasperation. Yes. (And personally, speaking non-objectively, my allegiance is with , the addictive and hilarious brainchild of former TechCrunch developer, Ben Schaechter.) But seeing as CivicScience is currently polling 11 million people per month and its software is being used by organizations like The International Brotherhood of Teamsters and The National Rifle Association, the startup shouldn’t be offhandedly dismissed. (Unless of course you want to be haunted by the ghost of Charlton Heston.) Headquartered not far from Carnegie Mellon University, CivicScience has close ties to the , as the software behind the service was developed by a team of engineering graduates and many of its staffers are alumni. How does it work? CivicScience’s technology uses an API and customized widgets to plug into the types of polls commonly found on many third-party websites, social networks, and mobile platforms. This means that CivicScience polls integrate easily with those you may already be running on your site. Or, if you’re not currently on the polling bandwagon, the startup’s designers will build polls that match the look and feel of your site. The technology can deliver up to three (owner-approved) poll questions to users each time they visit. It then uses impressive-sounding things like machine learning and predictive modeling algorithms to identify return users and collect statistics based on those visitors in order to build rich (but anonymous) profiles over time. Those profiles are broken down into categories and demographics and show brand and issue preferences — the stuff that’s valuable to marketers and ad wizard-types. As the startup uses its technology to build a database of visitor data and poll responses, it also provides you with a custom dashboard containing tools for viewing, analyzing, and sharing this data with your sales team, advertisers — and even your mom. CivicScience licenses its technology to publishers at no cost, so how does it make money? The startup’s business model is based on selling syndicated and custom research products from the data it collects from its partner sites. According to CivicScience CEO John Dick, a network of distribution partners then sell the aggregate data into retail, financial services, public affairs, and other verticals. If and when it uses your anonymous audience data in a paid report, he said, you get a revenue share. Pretty cool. The startup initially targeted major newspaper websites, blog networks, and niche content sites with its technology, but with its new funding round, CivicScience plans to build on polling work it had already done for the Republican National Committee site, expanding to include brands, government agencies, political sites, educational institutions, and more. The startup’s tech seems like it would be great for the many ad-supported sites out there, who, by nature, are all looking to get a better sense of who their customers are and what blows their hair back, so to speak. As long as the polls are designed well and aren’t springing onto unsuspecting visitors every other second — in other words, if they’re annoying — then this could be a nifty tool for your site. The CivicScience Team has provided me with of their funding announcement. It’s hilarious and is required reading for everyone. Enjoy. |
French software gurus launch new investor group Seed4Soft | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 3 | 24 | It wasn’t too long ago that France seemed somewhat void of much early-stage investment activity. But then last year, a number of new seed funds popped up – like , and . Plus, a handful of new business angels have also sprung to life, especially since the French government has allowed citizens to their by investing in a startup since 2008. Adding to France’s budding seed environment, some 13 French software gurus are officially launching a new entrepreneur-turned-investor group called today. Seed4Soft may somewhat ressemble French seed fund ISAI in that its are a number of successful entrepreneurs – including the likes of (the former CEO of Sparus Software, sold to Zenprise), (former CEO of AS INFOR, sold to CEGID) and (CEO of Exalead, sold to Daussault Systèmes). However, Seed4Soft presents itself as a club of entrepreneur-investors rather than a proper fund. The network plans to invest roughly 300K€ in 3 to 4 companies within the next year. And as the team is a rather impressive group of software entrepreneurs, Seed4Soft is naturally hoping to provide more value than simple cash for software development. Seed4Soft will be but is naturally considering projects from neighboring francophone countries, including Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium. The focus will be more on B2B projects with innovative business models in the SaaS and Open Source space. And it seems some have already scored the “Seed4Soft” label, which is given to investments where at least 1/3 of Seed4Soft’s members participate. For anyone interested in submitting a project, no need to send in a detailed business plan; simply apply by filling out the and sending in the necessary details. |
Audible.com Audiobooks Now Available (For Real) On Kindle | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 3 | 24 | You can now download more than 50,000 Audible.com audiobooks on your via your Wi-Fi connection. You’ve always been able to download Audible audiobooks from the site itself, then transfer them to your Kindle via a USB, but now you can do so . There’s really not much more to this story, other than to mention that when you first sign up with Audible they give you a 30-day free trial. |
RT: Twitter En Route To Floor Of UK Parliament | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 3 | 24 | Anti- people should probably click elsewhere for a few minutes, for it looks like the micro-blogging service to making its way to the floor of the British House of Commons. I long for the day when our very own congressmen can tweet “distinguished gntleman from ohio wrng about budget, follow me 4 truth.” A rules committee there has said that MPs should be be allowed to use the service from the floor provided it doesn’t “impair decorum.” MPs will be allowed use devices no larger than a sheet of A4 paper. Laptops are still banned. The idea is to allow MPs to bring in digital notes (on, say, their iPad) and maintain communications ties with their constituents from the floor. A report shows that 225 MPs are on “the Twitter,” and that, should the committee recommendation go through, there will be a one-year trial before it becomes set-in-stone policy. |
Venture Capitalists May Hate AngelList, But They're Still Using It | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 3 | 23 | , a sort of social network that brings entrepreneurs and investors together to talk about and fund deals, is more controversial than the average Joe might think. But one thing’s clear, top tier venture capitalists are using the site to find companies. Partner recently , citing too much noise in the email flow from the site, as well as a personal issue with the herd mentality of investors around certain deals. That created more yelling and personal attacks by bloggers than I’ve seen in a while (much of it ). Most of the small angel investors I talk to love AngelList because it gets them information on some deals, and information is hard to come by when you aren’t a celebrity investor. But when I ask more well established investors about AngelList, they usually reply with something like “meh.” What those investors are saying and what they’re doing appear to be two different things. According to date supplied to us by AngelList founder , well known venture firms are requesting lots of introductions to companies (a first step towards investing). Here are the venture firms, ranked by number of introductions requested: 1. General Catalyst – 64 intros
2. Atlas Venture – 61 intros
3. Bessemer – 60 intros
4. First Round – 53 intros
5. Charles River – 44 intros
6. IDG Ventures – 41 intros
7. Partech – 40 intros
8. Accel – 40 intros
9. Andreessen Horowitz – 39 intros
10. Polaris – 39 intros
11. Index – 34 intros
12. Spark – 27 intros
13. Redpoint – 26 intros
14. High Line – 23 intros
15. GRP – 23 intros
16. Highland – 22 intros
17. Balderton – 21 intros
18. Metamorphic – 20 intros
19. DFJ – 20 intros
20. Floodgate – 19 intros
21. Mayfield – 17 intros
22. Sequoia – 16 intros
23. Matrix – 16 intros
24. Shasta – 14 intros
25. Google Ventures – 14 intros This certainly suggests that someone at those firms are paying attention, and actively involving themselves in the AngelList process. Here’s what , a Managing Director at , has to about the value of AngelList in response to a question on Quora: AngelList is an incredibly powerful platform for connecting entrepreneurs with capital and has rapidly become one of my best sources of early-stage dealflow. I read every summary the system sends me. Here’s one reason AngelList is a big improvement for me: most entrepreneurs are all too familiar with how inefficient and time intensive a process raising capital can be but may not realize that this is also true for the investors. To make the best investment decisions I want to see as many deals as I can but the traditional method of companies contacting me by email, usually referred through someone we both know, imposes a non-trivial amount of overhead in that each intro then requires a followup – which is most often to politely decline – and which requires care to avoid offending any of the parties involved. This may only take 15-30 minutes but when you’re seeing 3-5 new deals/day, it adds up. On AngelList, in contrast, I’m presented with a clear, crisp “elevator pitch” in the introductory email and further have access to a detailed summary with a single click. Because there is no human introduction involved at this stage, if the deal isn’t a fit I can just hit “delete” and move on. This is the best of both worlds – I can see as many deals as I want with none of the wasted time on the no-fits. Very excited to see where Naval and Nivi take the system over time. I think they are really on to something here. Why are these venture firms so active on the site? Nivi says two reasons – 1. There are startups doing Series As and beyond on AngelList.
2. Lots of VCs are co-investing with angels in Seed rounds. Whatever their reasons, they’re using it. Even if they hate the fact that it exists. |
Sweet Winning DARPA Combat Vehicle Designs Shown Off | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 23 |
Last month we mentioned how DARPA and Local Motors were trying out a crowdsourcing model for . Well, the entries have been vetted and voted on, and they’ve . They’re pretty awesome — kind of like the stuff I used to draw in school, but… you know, . Here are the top 3 (more at Local Motors):
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Panasonic's GH2 Gets Reviewed | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 23 | has posted their (as usual) exhaustive and technical review of latest camera, the . We’ve been looking forward to this one, and it doesn’t disappoint: it addresses some of the failures of the GH1 while improving and expanding on the feature set and ameliorating noise issues. I’m still waiting on the (or Panny’s own ), personally, but this GH2 does look like a sweet piece of kit. |
Kinect Lets Surgeons Navigate Medical Data In The OR | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 23 |
Once again I am pleasantly surprised with the truly useful and helpful applications being thought up for the . Just last week we saw a hack providing a for the blind — clumsy and rough, but the idea that it’s possible from off-the-shelf components and open-source software is mind-blowing. Now we see an incredibly practical medical application: . Although a nurse or intern could do it, this frees more hands and eyes for essential surgery support and allows the operating surgeon to check things out directly and instantly. Odds the guy in the video is a gamer? It’s only been used to assist a few surgeries so far (at Sunnybrook Hostpital in Toronto), and there are no concrete plans to expand it to other hospitals or commercialize the tech, but considering how useful it is, and how easy to implement, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this in many more locations come 2012. [via ] |
Sega Auctions Rare Items For Japanese Relief | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 3 | 23 | A few days after the Japan disaster struck, you could find numerous Japanese gaming companies pledging millions of dollars toward disaster relief. That’s still the case, but I also wanted to mention what Sega of America was doing to help. The company , and 100 percent of the proceeds will, naturally, go to disaster relief. There’s 20 items up for grabs, and a few of the highlights include: a classic Dreamcast “It’s Thinking” hoodie (currently at $355); a Sonic the Hedgehog 15th anniversary statue ($150); and a one-of-a-kind piece of Outrun outwork ($182). The auctions are part of the broader organization. I did also mean to mention the other day that SteelSeries had cut the price of by 25 percent, and that it will give 25 percent of the proceeds from these mice sales toward the Japanese Red Cross Society. This goes through April 15. |
That Was Fast: The Speak-To-Search Extension For Chrome | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 23 | It seems like just yesterday that I was writing about to let you speak to the browser by way of HTML5. In fact, it was just yesterday. But that hasn’t stopped a team from coming up with a Chrome extension to get it to work in search boxes across the web. is an extension that Dugley Labs churned out in record speed yesterday. With it, many of the search boxes you visit on the web gain the little microphone icon that when clicked, allows you to speak your search. It works on Google, Bing, YouTube, Hulu — a ton of sites. And it works well. Saying “TechCrunch” on Google returns results for TechCrunch. Saying “MG Siegler” on Bing returns results for me. Saying “Friday video” on YouTube returns . It’s great — but also a little buggy. For example, the microphone shows up on Quora, but it doesn’t actually work (I think their auto drop-down may be to blame). And the microphone sometimes appears in odd places, like the title box in WordPress — but it still works! The best implementation has to be Google with Instant turned on, because it allows you to search without hitting the keyboard at all. Of course, this type of technology is old hat in the mobile space — meaning it’s a couple years old. But it’s still nifty to see on the web without any plug-in needed. I suspect we’ll see a lot more web apps and extensions that take advantage of this. In fact, has already implemented it on their site, . Currently, the plugin requires Chrome 11 beta (or dev), but the feature should be moving to the stable builds soon as well. |
ZTE Breaks Fiber-Optic Speed Record: 10Tbps Over 640km | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 23 |
ZTE’s research into long-distance high-speed data transmission has : their system maintained a transfer speed of over 10Tbps over 640km single-mode fiber optic cable — for a sense of scale, your home broadband might be around 10Mbps, or about a millionth of this rate (though the technologies aren’t really comparable). The tech was presented at a Los Angeles fiber optics conference and will probably carry quite a few of your bits some day in the future. |
World's Highest Solar Array To Be Built In Tibet | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 23 |
is planning on building a major solar power installation at one of the highest inhabited places on the planet: the Tibetan Plateau. The county of Sangri, 4000m (13,123ft) above sea level, has been chosen as the site for the latest of this company’s green power plants, and will generate around 20MWh of power yearly for the surrounding area. In areas like this, power is not always generated at a major regional installation like a nuclear or coal plant, and relying on hydroelectric power depends on weather patterns that are more prone to long-term failure (e.g. drought) than something like solar. Suntech has donated dozens of these solar systems to the community; the founder and CEO says: We’re proud to invest in preserving the region’s fragile ecosystem by providing an economically-viable and sustainable solution for electricity generation. From the desert sands of Arizona to the peaks of the Himalayas, anyone can look up and harness nature’s cleanest and most abundant energy resource. And he notes that the extremely high plateau provides an excellent environment for solar: low moisture and temperatures, but intense sunlight. Good for these guys; distributed, medium-size power grids like this are a great way to both improve living conditions in remote areas and advance the science and presence of renewable energy solutions. [via and ] |
Google TV PM Brittany Bohnet Leaves Google To Found A Startup | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 23 | Google TV Product Lead has just announced that she’s leaving Google after four years to try her luck as an entrepreneur, presumably as a co-founder of an as of yet un-named startup. At Google Bohnet was a Product Marketing Manager who worked on products like Maps, Earth and iGoogle, but most recently Google TV. Before Google Bohnet worked in PR at Apple as well as Marketing at Tiny Pictures. Bohnet has also been a founder before, being the CEO of Median Media which was a PR consulting company for Silicon Valley startups. We’ve contacted Bohnet for more details and await her blog post about the matter. Bohnet most recently made TechCrunch in about her engagement to PATH co-founder Bohnet tells me her company is still in “stealthish-mode,” which means that you’ll probably be hearing about it first here. Says Bohnet on taking the risk and becoming an entrepreneur,
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Views.fm Makes Dropbox Look Sexy | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 3 | 23 | The Web is a medium for sharing. Whether it be photos, videos, music, links, code, we share the content we produce and consume all the time. The rise of the social graph has only brought more attention to the ways we share and with whom we share. After all, sharing is caring, amirite friends? , I talked about some of the problems that remain in a specific (and familiar) part of the content-sharing sphere: file-sharing. At the end of the post, I mentioned the popular cloud storage, sync, and file-sharing startup, , as a service I use frequently. Part of what makes Dropbox so great is its simplicity — you download the utility, create an account, and you can easily share all of your electronic files in a virtual cloud folder, collaborate with friends and colleagues, and sync between devices and hard drives. Boom. Though Dropbox is fast becoming a Silicon Valley darling and passed the 4-million-user mark at the end of January 2010, parts of the Dropbox sharing experience are lacking. (Admittedly, like every other site out there.) Sharing an entire Dropbox folder, for example, remains difficult unless it’s your Public folder. The sharing options are limited, and the utility’s photo display doesn’t really have a great interface, either. Enter: , a viewer that enables quick and elegant presentation of your Dropbox content. Views.fm allows you to create either public or secure, privately-shared folders that are automatically organized in an easily scan-able thumbnail view. The creators of Views.fm, and , are both designers and engineers (Cieplak is currently the Creative Director at and Love is the Senior Developer at ) and have worked as freelancers and employees at media organizations. In doing so, they’ve become all-too-familiar with the tools available to share media, Cieplak said, especially in a professional setting: “Views.fm is our effort to make that file sharing process suck less”. Both admit to being regular Dropbox users and big fans, but said that they think the utility is optimized for “dork on dork collaboration” and doesn’t allow for advanced presentation to clients or friends and family. So, they built Views.fm on the Dropbox API to take advantage of the fact that, if you’re a Dropbox user, your files are already organized in its cloud. This makes the file-sharing fast and easy. Views.fm offers you the capability to share your files publicly by giving anyone with the link to the folder the ability to browse and download the shared folder — or privately, in which your folders are only available to those you invite via email. Enhancing the Dropbox experience, private sharing also enables you to view and edit who has access from your shares list and provides the ability to comment on the folder itself as well as individual files. So, that means you can share a folder with 80 people without having to let each person know that he or she isn’t the only one with whom you’re sharing the file. Most cloud services cater to one type of media, (like Vimeo for video, Soundcloud for music, Flickr for photos, for example), which is great for final presentation and user consumption, Cieplak said, but not so much for iteration. Therefore, Views.fm offers unique layouts for each variety of media, be they audio files, audio folders, images, or regular files. You can see the -inspired audio file interface on the right. Views.fm makes it really easy to use its site as a portfolio, as all you have to do is share a folder full of images, and it takes care of the rest. Views is really designed to allow creative people (Cieplak cited the many underpaid contractors, specifically) some elegance and edge for a final presentation to clients, as well as collaborative tools to rapidly iterate. Currently, Views.fm is only available for Dropbox, but the creators said that they are hoping to add as many services as possible, as soon as they can. But, at this point, they are both still working full-time for their respective employers. In the end, it seems that the optimizations that Views.fm adds to the Dropbox viewing experience will likely only be truly useful to sharing addicts or habitual users of the cloud sharing service. To the rest this may just be a sexy Dropbox skin. There’s nothing that says Dropbox couldn’t simply add some of these features themselves, or acquire the startup to integrate for them. At this point, Views.fm is totally free and the founders said they plan to keep it that way for the foreseeable future. But, without a revenue model on the horizon, they probably shouldn’t quit their day jobs just yet. |
null | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 3 | 24 | null |
Dorsey Is Back In Action At Twitter, And That May Be Formalized Soon | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 23 | While everyone is going gaga over it’s the gradual return of another creative genius to 795 Folsom Street that’s got die hard Twitter fans all hot and bothered. Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey, as by Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson, is currently in talks with Twitter management to expand his role. We’ve confirmed independently that this is indeed the case. We’re hearing, and its that Dorsey is even more involved in meetings at Twitter following Evan Williams departure as CEO, going beyond his capacity as Chairman and getting more hands-on with product strategy. And Dorsey has been showing up for “Tea Times,” Twitter’s Friday meetings. But sources say that nothing has been formalized yet, and it is unlikely he would step down as CEO of Square for something at Twitter. Dorsey invented the micro-blogging service in 2006, while he was at Evan William’s podcasting startup Odeo. Dorsey became CEO of Twitter in 2007 and then was kicked out in favor of Evan Williams in 2008. Williams relinquished the CEO role in fall of 2010 to Dick Costolo, who is primarily responsible for steering the company in the direction of a viable business model namely Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends. Perhaps one poignant sign that the Dorsey/Twitter relationship has thawed? Dorsey’s about Twitter’s beginning, on its five year anniversary. Twitter PR gave us the following official statement regarding Dorsey’s position with the company, If one thing’s known for sure, it’s that Twitter is a ten minute walk from Square, and Dorsey’s been going back and forth a lot. Image via/
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Color Looks To Reinvent Social Interaction With Its Mobile Photo App (And $41 Million In Funding) | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 3 | 23 | $41 million. From Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank. Pre-launch. That’s how much a brand new startup called Color has to work with. Your eyebrows should already be raised, and here’s something to keep them fixed there: this is the most money Sequoia has ever invested in a pre-launch startup. Or, as the Color team put it, “That’s more than they gave Google.” But the founding team goes a long way toward explaining it. Headed by — who sold Lala to Apple in late 2009 — the company has attracted a wealth of talent. It has seven founders including Nguyen and company president , who previously was CEO of BillShrink. And its chief of product is DJ Patil, who was previously LinkedIn’s chief scientist. So what exactly is Color? : The application is now available for the iPhone at . Android is coming tonight. At first glance, it looks like another mobile photo app, like Path, Instagram, or PicPlz. You take snapshots with your mobile phone (the app supports both Android and iOS at launch) and they appear in a stream of photos. And there aren’t even any of those trendy lenses to spruce up your images. Sounds pretty basic, right? [vimeo 21413899] But the beauty of Color stems from what it’s doing differently. Unlike Instagram and Path, there isn’t an explicit friend or following system — you don’t browse through lists of contacts and start following their photo stream. Instead, all social connections in the application are dynamic and established on-the-fly depending on whom you’re hanging out with. And your photos are shared with everyone in the vicinity. In some senses this is the Twitter of photo apps — it’s all public, all the time (I’m ignoring Twitter’s protected tweets, since most people don’t use them). Another way to look at it: it’s almost the complete opposite of Path, which is built around sharing photos with an intimate group of friends. It’s difficult to explain what Color does with a bullet list of features, so I’ll try painting an example that hopefully demonstrates how it works. Say you walk into a restaurant with twenty people in it. You sit down at a table with four friends, and start chatting. Then one of your friends pulls out their phone, fires up Color, and takes a snapshot of you and your buddies. That photo is now public to anyone within around 100 feet of the place it was taken. So if anyone else in the restaurant fires up Color, they’ll see the photograph listed in a stream alongside other photos that have recently been taken in the vicinity. In a crowded area these streams of photos will get noisy, so Color also has some grouping features. Tell it which four people you’re eating with, and Color will create a temporal group with a stream of just the photos you and your buddies have taken. But here’s the twist: because everything on the service is public, you can also swipe to view groups, to see what the tables next to you are snapping photos of. And you can always jump to the main stream, which shows a mishmash of photos taken by everyone. It takes some time to wrap your head around, and my time with the app was limited, so I can’t really vouch for how well it works. But there’s some very interesting technology that’s working behind the scenes to make Color more than just a simple group photo app. First are the social connections, called your Elastic Network. All of your contacts are presented in a list of thumbnails ordered by how strong your connection is to that user. Whenever Color detects that you’re physically near another user (in other words, that you’re hanging out), your bond on the app gets a little stronger. So when you fire up the app and jump to your list of contacts, you’ll probably see your close friends and family members listed first. But if you don’t see a friend for a long time, they’ll gradually flow down the list, and eventually their photos will fade from color to black-and-white. These social connections are important because they’re the only way to view a stream of photos beyond those have been taken near you. If you fired up Color in that restaurant example from earlier, you’d only be able to see photos that had been taken by friends and strangers within 100 feet of that restaurant. That is, unless you jump to your social connections. Tap on your best friend’s profile photo, and you’ll then be able to see all of the photos that have recently been taken within 100 feet of . In other words, Color is trying to give you a way to see everything that’s going on around you, and everything that’s going on around the people you care about. The Groups feature also makes use of this elastic network. In the restaurant example above, the application would likely already know who your friends were based on your previous interactions and would automatically place them in the same group — you wouldn’t have to manually do it yourself. Color is also making use of every phone sensor it can access. The application was demoed to me in the basement of Color’s office — where there was no cell signal or GPS reception. But the app still managed to work normally, automatically placing the people who were sitting around me in the same group. It does this using a variety of tricks: it uses the camera to check for lighting conditions, and even uses the phone’s microphone to ‘listen’ to the ambient surroundings. If two phones are capturing similar audio, then they’re probably close to each other. So far I’ve described a compelling and unique photo app with some neat tricks. But how exactly is Color going to make “wheelbarrows of cash”, as Nguyen says? At this point the company is still very early on, but it eventually plans to offer businesses a self-serve platform for running deals and ads as part of the Color experience (you fire up the app to see the photos being taken around you, and you also see the special of the day, for example). But that’s just the start. Nguyen has visions of fundamentally changing some aspects of social interaction and local discovery with the app, which he considers part of the so-called Post-PC movement. Using all of the data being collected (remember, the app is taking advantage of all of your phone’s sensors), Color hopes to eventually start recommending nearby points of interest, and maybe even interesting people. There are still plenty of questions, even about the existing service. This kind of voyeurism — you’re sharing photos with the world and looking at photos from strangers — could take a while to get used to. People may reject it entirely. Or it may be completely addictive. There’s really no way to tell until people start using the app in the wild. The future is unclear, but promising. And with this much money in the bank and a staff of 27, Color has plenty of time to hone in on what works. :
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YouTube Now Helps You Make Movies…Without A Camera | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 3 | 23 |
By now you’re undoubtedly familiar with the incredible amount of footage that’s uploaded to YouTube — the current count is 35 hours of video uploaded . And with video cameras integrated into smartphones, tablets, and computers these days (not to mention dedicated video cameras) it’s easier than ever to record that content. Unfortunately, there are still plenty of people who simply don’t have access to recording equipment. Today, YouTube is looking to do something about that. The site has just launched a new portal at where you can design your own video clips using , , or , each of which lets you ‘build’ custom videos featuring virtual avatars, custom speech, and more. Each of these third party apps has now been integrated into YouTube. Choose one, and you’ll jump into their editing interface where you can put together a video for free. Each of them also offers freemium options (more sound options, animations, etc.) which you can pay to access. YouTube says there’s no financial relationship between these partners — it just wanted to give everyone a chance to participate on the site (the third parties will obviously benefit from the exposure, though). And while it was already possible to crosspost a video from GoAnimate, Stupedflix, or Xtranormal to YouTube, this makes the process more seamless and will help introduce the apps to new users. There’s just one problem, at least for now: the third parties are responsible for hosting their editors, and they’re currently under heavy load so they aren’t working very well at the moment. YouTube says that the partners will be working to compensate for this increased load and that they should perform better soon. I tried to make a video on Xtranormal but couldn’t get it to work. But here’s a classic video built using the tool: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBCaS-lz1_k&fs=1&hl=en_US]
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London School Of Economics: No, Piracy Has Not Killed The Music Industry (But The Industry Has Certainly Changed) | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 3 | 23 | A new London School of Economics study that the music industry needs to stop complaining about the deleterious effects of illegal file-sharing. Why? As so many people have been saying for so many years now, it’s not that file-sharing (both legal and illegal) has caused people to stop consuming music, but it’s that file-sharing has changed the way people consume music. The days of the music business being a case of “band releases album, people buy album” are pretty much over. And what’s replacing that? Again, : people are now consuming experiences, and not simple shiny plastic discs. You support a band, and you’ll buy their album from iTunes or stream it from Rdio, or hear it on Sirius XM. But you’re also far more likely to see them the next time they come to town, you’re much more likely to walk away with a bunch of t-shirts and other merch. You’re going to tweet the drummer after the show “great set~!” and he’ll tweet back a secret code for, I don’t know, a free download of the set, or maybe exclusive video or whatever. You’re going to play their songs in Rock Band or DJ Hero. There’s more involved, in other words. The music business’s problem is that it doesn’t have its finger in any of those pies. It won’t make money when the band goes on tour. It won’t know that the lead singer is hosting a “secret show” in the next town over for free. The only thing it has it the ability to sell either A) shiny plastic discs, or nowadays, B) iTunes of Beatport. So when the labels say “the industry is dying,” well, perhaps their tiny slice of the industry isn’t what it once was, but that doesn’t mean people are going to stop listening. Right? (Let’s not forget the extent to which the labels have tried clinging onto their business model, at one point charging someone like Apple for the 30-second clips it uses in iTunes. Madness) Oh, and let’s also not forget that the global economy had all but stopped not too long ago; people are still losing their jobs left and right. So the idea that people still have the ability to pay x-amount for an album that sounds like the every other album currently available… Again, this is much the same that has been written since, I don’t know, 2002 or so, but it’s nice to see a proper LSE study behind it. |
Geohot Has Left The Country | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 23 | : meant to add this when I heard it yesterday: Geohot has communicated that he really is just on spring break, as was suggested. It appears (according to court documents) that George Hotz, AKA Geohot, PS3 and iPhone hacker extraordinaire, has been hounded out of the country by Sony’s intense legal proceedings. Just a short while after a federal judge granted Sony unfettered access to Hotz’s and (on a question of , I might add), Sony alleges that the kid has fled the country, This comes on the heels of the from Sony requesting trial in California, an obtusely reasoned exercise in legal sleight-of-hand, designed to browbeat Judge Spero into acquiescence. Hey, it worked for the last couple things they wanted. The latest letter to the judge describes how Hotz, despite denying it, did in fact create a PSN account. The evidence on that front is unassailable: he bought a new PS3 down the street and registered an account under his old forum handle, “blickmaniac.” Why he would lie about it is beyond me; I would have said that I agreed to the terms, and subsequently found the contract against my interests, and abandoned it — it seems that the is more or less a loss of your “privilege” of running software covered by that license, and companies seem to choose not to enforce that. It’s not said exactly that Hotz has gone to South America to escape trial, but that’s a pretty inescapable conclusion given the pressure on him right now. Somehow I doubt that was done on official legal advice. But perhaps he can lay low until this suit is successfully contested without his presence. Or maybe he’s just there for spring break? [via ] |
San Francisco Doing Everything It Can To Drive Zynga And Twitter Away | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 3 | 15 | See San Francisco, unlike most other cities in Silicon Valley, has a 1.5% payroll tax. And is that they consider gains on stock options part of payroll, meaning that any San Francisco based company going public or being acquired could get hit with a massive tax bill in the tens of millions of dollars. They’ve got Twitter jumping through hoops to avoid the tax. The company will be forced to move to a new location in order to get a six year payroll tax break. But only if the Board of Supervisors votes to approve the legislation on Wednesday. The upside is that Twitter employees will have immediate physical to prostitutes, drugs and weapons – the qualifying area isn’t exactly an up and coming neighborhood. The city isn’t thanking Twitter for bringing all these high paying jobs to San Francisco, either. Rather, some supervisors don’t want the tax break at all, and seem quite willing to see Twitter bail to tax-free Brisbane. Supervisor : The stupidity of that statement is self evident. But the city has another potential disaster on its hands – Zynga. The company is already moving into its new on Townsend Street, which is outside of the proposed tax free/hooker area. We heard Mayor and Board of Supervisors President met with Zynga at their offices today to negotiate the issue. I contacted Zynga to ask about the meeting. They confirmed it happened, said it was “positive and productive,” and “they appreciated the city’s interest in Zynga’s future growth.” They wouldn’t comment further. We have heard, however, that Zynga is already looking to expand beyond the city into other areas in Silicon Valley. They already have offices in Sunnyvale and Los Gatos, for example. Our sources say Zynga is prepared to drive future employee growth outside of San Francisco. They’ll always keep some presence in San Francisco, say our sources, but may even consider moving the corporate headquarters south. Whatever happens specifically with Zynga and Twitter, the city needs to do a very big reality check and soon. Tech startups aren’t just driving some job growth in the city, they’re driving absolutely all of it. Zynga hired 800 people in 2010, and they’re hiring another 1,500 in the next year, most of which would be in San Francisco. Twitter has a similar story. Those two companies, plus Salesforce, account for most of the technology job growth in the city. Even if they cut specific deals for those companies, other startups understand that San Francisco wants a big payoff from tech startups. And the venture capitalists see absolutely ridiculous statements like the one from Supervisor Avalos above. If the city wants venture capitalists to steer clear of San Francisco startups, and for startups in general to not even consider the city as a place to do their business, they should keep doing exactly what they’re doing. On the other hand, if the city wants to attract lots of high paying, high growth jobs, they need to reverse their policies and their messaging. Because right now they look like a pack of fecking eejits. Particularly Supervisor Avalos. They can have all the taxes they want, but if there aren’t any companies there to pay them, it isn’t going to be very helpful. |
Don't Take Our Word For It: Get iOS Game Scores From Metacritic | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 15 |
Metacritic is well-known for providing a valuable meta-review service for games and media, but until just recently, iOS games were out of its purview, aggregationally speaking. They’ve got , which really are getting big enough that they deserve their own britches. So when we recommend something like , you can go check if I’m just a worm-lover, or perhaps . I assure you I am neither of those things. |
Koribo Leira: The Perfect HTPC Keyboard? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 15 |
Little-known maker Koribo has put out a unit called the that looks like a couch potato’s dream. Indentations on the underside that fit onto your legs? Really, Koribo. How deliciously . This sucker has it all. Multi-touch trackpad on the right side, a cluster of play control buttons on the left — even plain old channel up/down controls! Sure, it’s not much of a looker, but let’s be honest. If you wanted a cool-looking home theater setup, you’d go with a Boxee Box. But no, you’re running Windows XP off a five-year-old HP box in the closet. Anyway, I can’t think of a more fitting way to control your OGG/MKV collection. and have reviews for you. They cost around $50 if you can find one. [via ] |
In Preparation For Its "Social Buying" Launch, 'Facebook Deals' Get A New Landing Page | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 15 | On the tail of that Facebook will be testing a new deals service, Facebook has removed its old Deals locator landing page and put up a new Facebook Deals subscription page which allows interested users to subscribe for its coupon-like checkin deals. Subscribers will eventually get updates via email. Facebook in a statement. More details on the product have not yet been posted. The new feature will center around social buying and this new feature will focus on people who want to sign up for activities with their friends, like a dinner or Pilates class. Facebook tells me that businesses will be able to sign up for the deals soon and that Facebook users will be able to buy deals in the next few weeks. The new deals landing page supports San Francisco, Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego with “more cities coming soon.” The in-stream updates are not yet live. |
Yeah, I Could Rock That: AMD's 5×1 Eyefinity Setup Looks Sick | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 15 |
Tom’s Hardware got up close and personal with a at AMD’s Ontario office. It’s running off one of the new Radeon 6990s, and the 5×1 mode lets you use portrait orientation to minimize horizontal seams. But when are we going to get some of these bezel-less monitors I keep hearing about? I know , but hurry up, dudes. . I’d probably get sick playing Dirt like that. |
Cute Pixelated Camera Decals For Your Wallz | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 15 |
The “z” in wallz is for “zany”! I saw these little a few weeks ago when they were making the rounds, but didn’t see much to them in the way of practical applications. I stand by that assessment. But now they’re available in physical form, as you can . Are you, or do you know, a photographer with an interest in the twee and pixelated? Step right up. There are a ton of cameras to choose from, though unfortunately they come in pre-selected packs, so you can’t just represent Nikon or what have you. That said, you can choose between 30 small (3-5″ wide) or 10 large (~9″ wide) — the sets cost $36 or $40 for the “medium format” large set. Cute. Get your hipster photog significant other a set of these, they’ll love ’em. [via ] |
Your Daily Well-Designed Ceramic Stove | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 15 | We get no end of emails here telling us to cover stoves more often. Our tips line is simply jam-packed with stove requests. Please stop! I yield. CrunchGear is becoming StoveCrunch, and this is the first post of a new era. were put together by Adriano Design for La Castellamonte, and while not many of us here in Seattle use pellets and wood to heat our home, these efficient, space-age designs would look great next to our CB2 couches and Wallpaper magazines. Hey, you asked for it. You got it. StoveCrunch is here to stay! |
Tech Companies Come Out In Force For Japan Relief | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 3 | 15 | Companies across the tech world are doing their best to help recover following the earthquake and subsequent tsunami. That’s in addition to the general outpouring of support shown to Japan by other, “non-tech” people and organizations. With that in mind, I’ve taken a few moments to round-up some of the efforts I’ve spotted online that aim to make a little bit easier for the people of Japan. MapQuest’s recently launched, crowd-sourced maps service , and the idea is for people on the ground to affix it with helpful labels along the lines of “road’s out here” or “clinic located here.” The hope is that the crowd-sourced maps will be fleshed out to the extent that they can be given to government officials, the Red Cross and other charities, etc. to help them plan their relief efforts. MapQuest has worked with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency to ensure that the maps on the site accurately reflect the damage caused by the tsunami. Google, too, that point to relevant sites and agencies, including a handy Google Checkout Red Cross donation box. The MMO Eve Online, which we discussed at some length , also has rather novel program called . What it does is give players a quick and easy way to convert plex (the in-game currency) into real world currency and then have it donated to various relief organizations. Players have donated some $63,000 via the program so far, and it’s in effect until March 31. Both Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Time Warner Cable that calls to Japan will be free for the next few weeks. A number of Japanese video game publishers, including Nintendo, Sega, and Sony to donate several million dollars toward relief efforts. Those are a few items I’ve found with just some quick searching here and there. If you know of any other sort of “tech response” to the crisis feel free to leave it in the comments, or send it to of tip lines. |
SoundTracking Sings The Praises Of "Mobile-First" And "From-The-Ground-Up Social" | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 15 | Late last week, , a new iPhone application from Schematic Labs that allows you to easily share not only the music you’re listening to, but the music you’re listening to in the that you’re listening to it in. Yesterday at the conference in Austin, Texas, I got a chance to sit down with co-founder for his thoughts on the app and the space. Jang talks about the rise of the “mobile-first” experience, noting that phones are good enough now to match the websites that have been built for years now. And in many ways, the experience is better because mobile is so personal. Jang talks about his inspiration for SoundTracking when he was traveling around Europe and wanting to share the music he was listening to on the go, but in a way beyond text. He also talks a bit about the competitive landscape out there right now. With the mobile photo-sharing apps like Instagram, PicPlz, and Path all getting a lot of buzz, everyone is seeking to find the next genre that will hit. Schematic Labs aren’t the only ones betting on music experiences, . Jang thinks that’s great, because it’s a space that probably should have existed earlier and competition will drive it forward. Jang also talks a bit about the existing players out there like Shazam and SoundHound and his love for them. At the same time, they weren’t built “from the ground up” to be social. This is something Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is also fond of talking about — that . Watch the full interview above. And find SoundTracking in the App Store . |
eXo Platform kicks off "the year of PaaS" and extends enterprise portals to the cloud | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 3 | 15 | Yesterday, Gartner that 2011 will be the year of Platform as a Service (PaaS). Not only does this mean we’ll be seeing a wave of innovation but also a consolidation of various offers over the next few years. Well, we’ve perhaps already witnessed a bit of consolidation. Like with VMware’s acquisition of WaveMaker just last week. This acquisition – which took place only a few months after – should naturally strengthen VMware’s PaaS range. As for innovation, new offers are also starting to pop up – especially with Amazon Web Service’s in January. More traditionally an Infrastrure as a service (IaaS) provider, AWS seems to be clearly making its way towards PaaS as well. The product (still in beta) is designed to let developers upload their application and then keep their hands off while the system automatically handles deployment. And coincidentally, is also launching a new cloud-based service for java developers, called eXo Cloud IDE. The Franco-American company is the publisher of a user experience platform for java, aiming to make java applications and websites faster to build and easier to deploy. Cloud IDE, which will be in private beta through the 2nd trimester of 2011, is the first of a series of free services to be provided in the eXo cloud services package. This hosted environment facilitates social coding and the collaborative development of gadgets and mashups that can be deployed directly to popular java PaaS. In the future, the team says it would like to extend support beyond java to cover additional programming languages like Rails, .NET, Node.js, and Play. The company – which , Yann Aubry, to lead the company’s sales efforts in the EMEA region – has also announced the launch of eXo Platform 3.5, a multi-tenant user experience platform for java systems. In addition to multi-latency and cloud management capabilities, the new platform apparently features a number of improvements making it easier to write, test and deploy gadgets, mashups, HTML5 and content applications. The company founded in 2003 closed a €4 million Series A round with Auriga Ventures and XAnge last year. eXo – which been called one of the “three musketeers” of French open source (alongside Bonitasoft and Talend) by French Newspaper La Tribune – says that it seeks to provide the shortest and most efficient path to the cloud for java enterprises with its new offers. Developers, feel free to chime in. |
Study: Mobile Ad-Tracking Systems Are "Blind" To 80 Percent Of Apple iOS Devices | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 3 | 15 | Apple mobile iOS devices (iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches) are used by 130 million people, but they present a huge blindspot to advertisers. All Apple mobile devices use the Safari browser, as do millions of Apple laptop and desktop computers. Safari blocks third-party cookies by default, which is good for privacy and good for consumers. But it is bad for advertisers who rely on browser cookie tracking to measure the effectiveness of their ads. , which offers a way to manage paid search advertising, conducted a it provided to TechCrunch which shows that 80 percent of the time iOS devices don’t count paid-search conversions (i.e., clicks) because cookie-tracking is turned off. On the Mac, the undercounting occurs 50 percent of the time. All told, when you count all browsers, 38 percent of all paid-search clicks are not being counted. These numbers are for so-called third-party cookies, not first-party cookies which come only from Websites you visit. Third-party cookies are served from various advertising networks or monitoring tools, and they are required for any type of retargeting across multiple Websites. While Marin only looked at paid search ad conversions, the numbers should hold true for display ads as well. Not only are ads not being tracked properly on most Apple devices, but if they were tracked properly, Marin suggests that Apple devices actually perform better. As part of the study, Marin compared actual ad conversions to Windows computers as a baseline. While the perceived conversion rate of search ads is 56 percent lower because of the undercounting, the actual conversion rate is 23 percent higher. Following the maxim that you don’t get paid for what can’t be measured, this blindspot poses a growing challenge to the online advertising industry, and Google in particular. (And you thought Apple was just doing this to protect consumers). The way around the blindspot is to use first-party cookies served from the Websites people visit, or to come up with better ways to measure the performance of online ads. But that’s the topic for another post. |
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Zune Team: Chill Out About The Zune's Death | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 15 |
Yesterday’s that the has died (in pure, player form at least) are being downplayed by Microsoft. In a post over at Anything But iPod, Zune Hardware business guy Dave McLauchlan had this to say:
NO information about our future plans, no matter what the incarnation, has been shared. Until then treat with healthy skepticism anything you read. ALL consumer electronics products have a lifespan, and the Zune HD is 18mo old. We were completely frank about this year’s Zune hardware being the WP7 phones, and we continue to both sell and fully support the Zune HD line of products. And as I’ve promised – we continue to bring new apps and games to the platform. So, clear enough, right? Yes, but also just unclear enough for us to continue with our original understanding of the Zune’s “death”: no new dedicated Zune hardware is likely, and the service itself will be integrated into a larger suite of media management tools, probably a big unified one for rollout around the time the big Nokia push happens. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but it’s sad considering how solid the Zune HD and subscription services are. But thanks to Dave for setting the record a little straighter. [via ] |
Netflix Android App Hijacked From The LG Revolution, Leaked To The Internets | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 3 | 15 | The LG Revolution , but some crazy resourceful lads have already managed to get a full dump of the handset’s innards. As we showed you (before anyone else!) , the LG Revolution just happens to be the only Android handset with the Netflix app on it right now — but now that the system dump is in the wild, the hacker-type crowds have ripped it out to be shared with everyone. Alas, there’s a bit of bad news.
You can’t… actually stream anything, right now. While the dudes over at are thinking it’s just a matter of the Netflix team firing up things on their end, I think there might be more to it than that; last I’d heard, Qualcomm and Netflix had partnered for the DRM/Security setup in this app, requiring specific hardware in the device’s chipset (beyond that already found in most Snapdragon phones) before playback can go down. In other words: unless something’s changed or the always-clever hacking community finds a workaround, chances seem pretty good that streaming will only work on the handsets that they intend it to work on. On the upside, you can still use this leaked APK to browse around Netflix and manage your queue. That’s a start, right? You can find the download link over at . |
T-Mobile, Sprint Waive Japan Calling And Texting Fees | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 3 | 15 | As we yesterday, U.S. carriers AT&T and Verizon both announced that they would be waiving calling and texting fees for their users who were calling Japan, in the wake of the devasting earthquake and tsunami in the region. Since then a number of other smaller carriers are joining the mix. T-Mobile USA is allowing postpaid customers to make calls to Japan without charges through March 31, 2011. Text messaging will also be free to and from Japan until the sale date and customers can make Wi-Fi calls to and from Japan free of charge as well. Similarly, Sprint fees for to and from Japan for customers who are on the carrier’s networks, retroactive from March 11 and continuing to April 10, 2011. Both carriers are also waiving text message fees to mobile giving campaigns. Additionally, and have all waived their long-distance fees to Japan. Photo Credit/Flickr/ |
Facebook Bans Mark Zuckerberg Action Figure | John Biggs | 2,011 | 3 | 15 | MIC Gadget can’t get a break. After being C&Ded for selling action figures, now they can’t even sell these goofy little “Poke” figures of Mark Zuckerberg. The figures went for $69 bucks – a bit much for a statuette of some rich dude – but they were obviously all in fun and I doubt that Facebook is planning a huge executive action figure push this Christmas. However, MIC is now no longer allowed to sell the figures and even received a C&D from a Beijing law firm: “(1) immediately stopping manufacturing and sales of any products infringing the legitimate rights of Mr. Mark Zuckerberg and FACEBOOK, including but not limited to the Action Figures, any accessory containing FACEBOOK’s trademarks; (2) immediately destroying all remaining products infringing legitimate rights of Mr. Mark Zuckerberg and FACEBOOK; (3) immediately disclosing the accounting of your sales of the Mark Zuckerberg Action Figures and any other infringing products; (4) immediately remove all depictions or listings for the Mark Zuckerberg Action Figures from your website.” If you thought you could still grab one, you’re out of luck. made them say “The figurine is discontinued, and will not appear on Earth anymore.” They did not, however, mention potential moves to outer space. |
Dragon Age II Metacritic User Reviews Padded By BioWare Employees | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 3 | 15 | Yet more evidence that applying a number score to a work of art, be it a movie, a novel, or a video game, is a complete waste of everyone’s time. Well, unless you’re the publisher of that work of art, or otherwise stand to benefit from being able to say, “The critics agree: it’s a ten out of ten!” People associated with BioWare (if “caught” is the right word) giving Dragon Age II user scores of 10/10 at Metacritic. I suppose this isn’t as serious as when Belkin was caught paying people to give its products good Amazon reviews, but it something about it doesn’t sit right. A Reddit user discovered a 10/10 Dragon Age II written by someone with the handle Avanost. A couple of keystrokes later, thanks to mighty Google, revealed Avanost as BioWare employee Chris Hoban. was written by BioWare social network (read: message board) mod. Both reviews have since been removed. No, this isn’t exactly the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, but it’s worth discussing for a moment. EA, Dragon Age II’s publisher, that this isn’t a big deal at all, and that people vote-up their stuff all the time. It happens in the Oscars and it happens in presidential elections. (In fact, I could have sworn that it was considered uncouth to vote yourself as a presidential candidate. Then again, it was also considered uncouth to openly campaign for yourself, as you can read about in about the American Civil War.) But while it may not be a big deal, it certainly betrays some sort of expectation I’d have as an everyday person reading up on the game. The problem with Metacritic is that it’s completely useless. People who like something, in this case, Dragon Age II, give it a 10/10 while saying things like TOTALLY AWESOME BUY EIGHT COPIES. And people who dislike it give it a 0/10 with TRASH ON WHEELS BIOWARE SHOULD BE ASHAMED. There’s no nuance, no substance. It’s the equivalent of yelling into a bullhorn at a bullhorn factory. The point of a review isn’t to come up with a number, but to discuss the merits of the item in question. Who doesn’t laugh when they see a site give a game a fraction of a score, like an 8.2? What could that extra two-tenths represent? Why not an 8.3, or an 8.4? Why is it all that much better than an 8.1? Maybe if we get past this obsession with with labeling this or that work of art with all powerful number we won’t see such sillines. |
Google's Revamped iPhone App Now Worth Using; Could Be Better Still | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 15 | Google’s flagship native app for the iPhone has always been a little odd. First of all, it was called “Google Mobile App”, which seemed a bit redundant. More importantly, it just wasn’t really worth using instead of google.com in the Safari web browser itself. But fixes both issues — and showcases how it could be ever better still. What was the “Google Mobile App” is now simply “Google Search”. And as you can see, it looks completely different. The homescreen is now a nice big Google logo with the search box. It also allows you to easily sign in to your account. And when you do a search, this graphical interface rolls upward to reveal the results. And a swipe to the left reveals different categories to filter your search. In other words, Google’s native iPhone app finally feels pretty native, rather than just feeling like their mobile website crammed into a native shell. And the swipe-activated filters, voice search, and Google Goggles all bring the native awesomeness. And the Push Notification options for Gmail and Calendar finally seem to be speedy enough to actually use. But again, it could be even better. At the bottom of the screen in the app is an “Apps” bar. This both gives you one-click access to Google’s entire list of mobile apps and shows you Gmail unread counts, which is great. But the apps themselves are still mobile apps, not native ones. So when I see I have unread Gmail messages, I’m kicked out of the app and into Safari to load it on the web. Mobile Gmail is just about as good as a mobile app can be in my opinion, but it could still be much more powerful as a native app. HTML5 just isn’t there quite yet. Now, who knows if Apple would even approve a native Gmail app, but if this new Google apps had native Gmail built-in, it would become my most-used app immediately. Calendar and Docs would be better too in a native skin, rather than a mobile web one for now. Still, the app is definitely an improvement, and a great upgrade. I anticipate actually using it now. Now if only Google could fix the bugs and slowness in the native Google Voice app… |
Video: Peter Vesterbacka Gives The Angry Birds Update. A Franchise Is Flourishing! | Jay Donovan | 2,011 | 3 | 12 | I ran into Peter Vesterbacka again at and he was kind enough to give me the update since I saw him last at the Mobile World Congress. Dude is everywhere…and busy. Here’s the short version, but watch the video below to get the info straight from the Mighty Eagle himself! [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ek51VlRkfk&w=480&h=390] |
Lightbox Photos Wants To Be Your New Android Camera App (SXSW) | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 3 | 12 | Although Android adoption is growing at a huge clip compared to the iPhone (not hard, since there are so many more devices and plans), iPhone apps still remain the benchmark for the smartphone app experience. In part this is down to the fact that many companies build an iPhone app first and an Android version some time later, which is often inferior in user experience. Part of the reason is that little things like the pull-down-to-refresh features that are often in Phone apps come default with the iOS platform. But to make that kind of feature work in an Android app you have to build it from the ground up. That means there is a space for a creator of ridiculously good Android apps. Step forward Thai Tran and Nilesh Patel with , their new startup which has taken a $1.1 million seed round from some of the top VCs and Angels in the UK and US. A private beta of their first app, Lightbox Photos, launches this week at SXSW, with the founders in attendance handing out invitation codes to the private beta. The app will be presented at the . You can sign up here to get on the invite list for the . |
From "Businesses" To "Tools": The Twitter API ToS Changes | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 12 | Yesterday, Twitter made a swift and sweeping move to . In an to developers, Twitter laid out the new rules. Essentially, third-party developers should no longer try to compete with Twitter on clients; instead they should focus on things like data and specific verticals for tweets. Not surprisingly, there’s quite a bit of against this maneuver. In making these changes, Twitter also had to chance their . And we thought it would be interesting to compare the old ToS to the new one. We can do that thanks to the magic of Google, which has dated January 3, 2011. Below, find the key redline changes. Overall, you’ll note that the document is now much more strongly and directly worded than it previously was. And it’s clear that user privacy is also more of a focus than before. But the key change may come in the first paragraph: January 3 version: We want to empower our ecosystem partners to build valuable around the information flowing through Twitter. March 11 version: We want to empower our ecosystem partners to build valuable around the information flowing through Twitter. Now perhaps you see why the ecosystem, the “partners”, are so enraged. (Note that this isn’t the full document below, just the sections with the main changes): |
There Is No SXSW. The Perfect Extension For Those Not Here. | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 12 | By now, even if you’re not at SXSW, you’re likely . Why? Because every other damn tweet is about SXSW. I’m here, and tweeting about it, and I’m sick of it. But luckily has created the perfect extension. is an extension for both Chrome and Firefox that alters Twitter.com to remove all tweets that reference the conference. But that’s not good enough. So the extension also blocks tweets from all those Twitter users known to be attending SXSW! It’s brilliant. It’s not perfect, but it’s close. And it’s easy enough to turn the extension on and off from Twitter.com (just click on the new link at the top of your stream that shows you how many tweets are being hidden due to SXSWness). From here you can also decide to just hide tweets with the hashtag #sxsw or #sxswi and/or the . And lest you think Lanyrd are just SXSW haters, they’re also the ones behind maybe the best for Austin. They’re just smart enough to realize that not everyone cares about the conference — or worse, that some people are forced to unfollow users to stop the influx of SXSW-related tweets. Other startups have extensions to selectively block tweets from your stream — is a great tool for — but Lanyrd is built for one purpose alone: nuking tech/film/music hipsters. You’re welcome. |
SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch: The Game Layer Is Coming (SXSW) | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 3 | 12 | Today’s SXSW keynote speaker is , founder and CEO of location-based gaming startup . SCVNGR has had a big week — on Thursday the site launched a called that combines some of the retention mechanics seen in location-based games with the steep deals offered by sites like Groupon. Priebatsch, who maintained an apparently super-human energy level throughout his talk, discussed how many of the gaming mechanics seen in the virtual world will be applied in the physical world to create a so-called “Game Layer”. “It’s brand new and has not been built,” Priebatsch says. “The last decade was the decade of social — it took connections between friends, family, and coworkers and put them online. It’s called Facebook. The social layer traffics in connections.” Conversely, Priebatsch says that the Game layer traffics in influence — “It will influence where we go, what we do, and how we do it.” Next, Priebatsch outlined how many of the principles we associate with games — levels, rules, rewards, motivated players, etc. — are exemplified by our school system. The problem, he says, is that school has an engagement issue: people are bored. Priebatsch explains that the under the grading system we’re all familiar with, there’s a constant possibility of failure. One bad day can drop you from an A to a B. This, Priebatsch says, is bad. “It’s a game mechanic, and it’s letting people lose in a game you don’t want them to lose”. His solution is a progression dynamic, where instead of being graded for each assignment and test individually, everyone starts at zero ‘experience points’ and then works their way up to higher levels. His next topic was one that’s also familiar to both students and games alike: cheating. The disincentive for students isn’t on cheating itself — it’s on getting caught. Under the traditional system it’s the teacher versus the students, and the students work out ways to cheat without the teacher noticing. But there’s a different solution. At Princeton, exams are not monitored by a teacher or TA. You walk into the classroom, your test is on your desk, and there’s a box to turn it in. The only rules: you have to sign an honor code, and complicity is a crime — in other words, all of the students are supposed to watch out to make sure their peers aren’t cheating. This has dropped the number of cheating incidents at Princeton from 400 to 2 cases annually. One of the more interesting topics Priebatsch covered were the faults currently seen in location-based games like SCVNGR, Foursquare, and Gowalla. In one telling pie chart, he showed just how few people, relatively speaking, are using these services (it’s a small slice of the pie). Priebatsch says that the big rule that these games have — users must be at a certain venue in order to check in — are too restrictive. They limit the number of people that can be engaged with, and the window of time that the service has to get the user’s attention. Another issue: reward schedules. Priebatsch explains that rewards have been shown to be very effective, leading to spikes in engagement and activity. But it’s not a perfect system — handing out rewards can set users up to expect them everywhere. Without the reward as an incentive, people often stop checking in (he points to the Gap/Facebook deal as an example, and says that he believes many of the users who participated in that deal have stopped checking in). Priebatsch closed out the talk with a demonstration of what he calls communal gameplay and communal discovery. Everyone in the keynote hall was given a colored card — there were a handful of different colors, and the cards were distributed at random. The audience was then asked to swap cards with their neighbors so that each row of seats was the same color. The audience was given 180 seconds to pull of the task, and they did it with a minute to spare. The feat, Priebatsch says, is an analogy for how much people can get done with decentralized leadership, applying local solutions to global problems. And somehow — Priebatsch didn’t really get into giving any concrete predictions — the ‘game layer’ is going to help make this happen.
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Ask a VC: Mike Maples Defends Digg's Honor and the Kno (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 3 | 12 | , my guest on Ask a VC this week, is known for backing some of the best Web 2.0 entrepreneurs early on and hunting down “Thunder Lizards” or the 15 truly disruptive companies that hatch each year. But some of his most celebrated investments have turned controversial. In this video he defends Digg’s honor against some tough reader questions and defends Chegg’s co-founder and chairman Osman Rashid’s decision to get into hardware. For non-haters, he answers some general questions on why he doesn’t back more middle-aged entrepreneurs and how much of a stake he needs to do a deal. Enjoy! And check out our earlier interview with Maples and his three companies that got away . |
Jake Gyllenhaal Movie 'Source Code' Markets Itself To Techies | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 12 | Between movies being , a critically acclaimed movie about Facebook, and Twitter basically serving as a backchannel for the Oscars, Hollywood increasingly has to reconcile itself with the Internet’s influence on storytelling as well its power as a distribution mechanism. Directed by Duncan Jones, is a movie about a soldier who finds himself as part of a strange military project. The source code is literally a computer program which allows him to take over another man’s identity during the last few minutes of his life, in order to um, not blow up a train. What’s more interesting than the story line is the fact that the Summit Entertainment has built the Facebook game in order to promote the film, the first “ Okay but what does this buzzwordgasm mean? Well that fans can scan in codes they find on movie posters and other sundry swag, or visit Facebook or the movie’s actual site ( ) in order to complete “social media tasks” which basically amount to posting thinly veiled promotion about the movie onto their Facebook walls. If a user completes all five tasks, their profile image becomes part of a “movie poster” on the Enter The Source Code website, style. While the actual “The Source Code Mission” game is not particularly engaging, it definitely an early sign of the new digital direction. And we took some time to speak with Director (who has 40,000 Twitter followers!) and star Jake Gyllenhaal (who apparently is sneaking onto Twitter under an alias) about what they thought about the film’s hardcore interactive marketing push and the Internet’s effect on moviemaking in general. |
Nintendo Begins 3DS Demo Tours Around The U.S., Canada | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 3 | 12 | The is still a few weeks away from release here in North America (March 27, to be exact), but that doesn’t mean you can’t play with it . Nintendo in cities around the country where you can, in their own words, “be one of the first to experience the Nintendo 3DS system before launch day.” What cities are involved? Four cities get the 3DS demo, and they are: New York at Grand Central Terminal Chicago at the Citigroup Center Los Angeles at Third Street Promenade San Francisco at Pier 39 And don’t worry: there are similar events , too. Nintendo also says that 3DS units will be at select retailers in the weeks leading up to the launch date, so don’t freak out if you don’t live in or near one of those aforementioned cities. In other 3D news, last night I was on with (of fame), and we discussed all sorts of fun tech topics including, but not limited to, 3D. So if you have a spare moment! |
This Post Has Nothing to do with #SXSW | Mark Suster | 2,011 | 3 | 12 | For the next four days if you’re in the tech industry you’re going to hear a non-stop stream of information about SXSW. It’s the time of year when many new startups are struggling to rise above all the noise and be heard. And when everybody is shouting it becomes overwhelming. I’m actually in Austin at the moment. It turns out this is “ ” and since I’m a shareholder in , TextPlus (7.7m monthly actives), I thought I should come here to represent. With all these companies vying for attention & others just here to soak up the vibe I thought I’d write a much broader piece on how startups can make the most of their attendance at any conference or event.
Plan out your most important events to attend. You may choose some where your customers aggregate, others where you hope to find biz dev partners & still others where you want to meet investors. Many startups get caught up in the conference circuit. They have fun & meet tons of interesting people and they confuse this with the need to do be at every major tech event. . While conferences can be intoxicating they can also be very unfocused, narcissistic and hurt your team back in the office. Choose wisely. Don’t worry about all the folks bragging on Twitter, Instagram or FourSquare about being at the latest event. Feel good in knowing that while they’re at the latest conference, !
The most impact you’ll have at conferences is when you plan meetings before you go. I know it sounds obvious but trust me most people don’t do this. It’s very easy to get a sense of who will be attending an event before you go. Don’t assume that you’ll fortuitously run into potential customers or biz dev partners. Write them in advance and request meetings. The most experienced conference goers (bigger company ones) often book suites in hotels and plan meetings rather than attending any actual sessions. The single most important thing about a conference in my opinion is the fact that all of your important contacts are in one physical location. Don’t leave it to chance. Book ’em.
I’m not a big fan of panels. But not everybody has yet earned the right to do keynotes and the truth is that there are some good benefits of sitting on the right panels. I wrote a . Educate your audience on a topic, don’t be a blowhard overly promoting your company. You’ll get way more from an audience respecting your insights and contributions. They’ll want to meet you later. Remember that most panels are painfully boring & those panelists who entertain people will be the most remembered. Have a dialog with your fellow panelists. Don’t be afraid of some friendly controversy – it adds spice. Just be polite about it. And don’t be a panel hog – you might get to say more to the audience but if you care about your fellow panelists you’ll piss them off. I actually think one of the most misunderstood reasons to be on a panel is actually getting to know the other panelists rather than just talking to the audience. You have a certain bond after you’ve sat on a panel together. So don’t piss them off by hogging minutes for an audience that won’t remember you 5 minutes after you’re done. Grab business cards of the other panelists and follow up after the show.
Speaking of panels, don’t sit through them all. If you have a few topics you really want to hear – plan them in advance. But the truth is that nothing truly interesting is really ever said on a panel. People are too guarded – they know they’re under the spotlight. So you won’t REALLY learn anything new. I spend 90+% of my time at conferences in the lobby and I always have. Yes, it’s partly due to ADHD. But really you want to be building connections with people. While the conference is going on there are always people outside the rooms in the lobby. That’s your best chance to get people that would ordinarily be really difficult to get a meeting with.
I’ve been to many of the TechCrunch 50, Disrupt and many similar events over the years. The most valuable time for me personally was at the W Hotel after the event. I showed up around 10pm and hung out with a bunch of people I hardly ever get to spend time with. There was no artificial table between us, we weren’t scurrying between one meeting to the next. We didn’t have any documents due that night. We just hung. And when you’re out socially with other people you form a tighter bond. Just is. If you gave me a choice between the late night cocktail and the morning keynote I’d be sipping martinis every time.
The other secret conference trick that is orchestrated by the true zen masters is to schedule a dinner and invite other people. It’s a great way to get to know people intimately. Start by booking a few easy-to-land friends who are interesting. Work hard to bag a “brand name” person who others will want to meet. All it takes is one. Then the rest of your invites can mention that person’s name on the guest list (name others, too … obviously) and you will be able to draw in some other people you’d like to meet. Another similar strategy is with customers. If you invite 3-4 customers and 3-4 prospects to a dinner with 2-3 employees and some other interesting guests you’ll be doing well. Potential customers always prefer to talk to existing reference customers than to talk to just your sales reps. Final tip, sometimes a dinner can be too expensive for an early-stage company yet picking a killer venue is one of the best ways to bagsy high-profile people. Everybody loves to eat somewhere hot. So why not go in on the dinner with two other companies. That way you’re all extending your networks and splitting the costs. Plan dinner early enough that people can still get out afterward and do other events that may be going on.
I’m not being moralistic here. I like a drink as much as the next guy and have had my share of hammerhead nights. But an important conference is not the place to do this (except maybe SXSW from what I hear). For starters you’re obviously bound to do stupid things when you knock too many back. And trust me there’s always the people who don’t drink very much and when you come into contact with them you won’t represent yourself as well as you’d like. Save the boozy nights for back home. Or save it for the after party with your closest colleagues. But if you want to maximize your conference experience lay off the last few drinks. Oh, and don’t do crazy man dancing at the party. I see that often. It’s embarrassing. Worse than wedding dancing. You know who I’m talking about.
When you walk up to somebody who you’ve met before always start by re-introducing yourself (unless you know them really well). Of course they’ll probably remember you, but often you forget the context of how you know somebody so without that slight prompt the connection isn’t made. I wrote a detailed post on .
Some people are great at schmoozing – even when they don’t know anybody else. You know the type – naturally charming and conversationalists. Well, that’s not most people. I often suggest that people get a wing man. Get somebody that roams around the conference with you. It’s far easier to meet people when there are two of you together (just like it’s easier when you’re at a bar trying to meet people when you’re single). Don’t confuse this for just talking with your buddy for the whole event. That’s dumb. You’re there to network and connect with new people. Just use them as an effective way to hunt in packs.
I’d estimate that less than 10% of people follow up after conferences. And those 10% all probably all sales people. You grabbed all those business cards for a reason. Take the highest priority ones and write them a short note within 3 days of the conference ending. In the email write something that will remind them who you are. Find something unique to say so they’ll remember you. If it’s not too forward you can even try for a follow-on action – perhaps getting together next time you’re in town. Obviously only request this where it seems appropriate. But no follow-up = wasted meeting in the first place. Shame. Now after all this, don’t you feel better about not being in Austin? |
SXSW 2011: Initial Thoughts? | Jay Donovan | 2,011 | 3 | 12 | Rolling into Austin, TX yesterday on a warm, sunny afternoon for SXSW 2011 was a nice change of pace for me considering that the typical mid-March day in the Midwest is cold and rainy. Fortunately, multiple preparatory tasks, like badge collection, registration and the like did not prevent me from wandering around the conference and city. I haven’t seen much yet, but the things I did see, were definitely unexpected. Stay tuned for more interviews and coverage as the conference begins to hit stride on March 12. In the mean time, just know that:
1. You can get into a pillow fight in the middle of the street here in Austin.
2. You can test out what it’s like to receive corporal punishment at the conference (part of an anti-corporal punishment campaign for schools).
3. Apple really can on short notice – even in a Gold’s Gym. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDhnOJwDLY8&w=480&h=390] |
The Walled Garden Has Won | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 3 | 12 | Ten days ago Google discovered that apparently innocuous Android apps with “DroidDream” malware that included an Android rootkit, with the of creating a smartphone botnet. It infected more than a quarter of a million devices before Google intervened. The in me immediately began to wonder what would happen if built a wildly popular game that doubled as a botnet beachhead. Imagine if Angry Birds was secretly the world’s biggest botnet: even without root access to its install base, those hypothetical black hats could grab private data from tens millions of people, and/or probably DDoS every wireless network in the developed world, especially if it ran as a background service with location access. That will never happen, of course: it’s what security guru Bruce Schneier calls a “ .” But it does illustrate that you couldn’t stop a Trojan app like that in advance. Android Market security is based on permission requests when an app is installed: such requests are routinely ignored, since nowadays almost every app asks for full Internet and SD card access. , you might say, In which case you should really stop kidding yourself. Most apps seem to be reviewed in an hour or less (after days in the queue.) Apple appears to check the libraries they link against, and maybe they can decompile to the original source code, too – though I doubt it – but iOS apps are written in Objective-C, which includes support for C itself, a language for which labyrinthine obfuscation has become . Any developer worth his/her could write an iOS app that includes code whose use only becomes apparent when the app receives a secret signal. Once upon a time, not so long ago, people talked about how “ ” (like AOL and CompuServe, back in the day) would inevitably lose out to the free, wild, open Internet – and most software was preinstalled, shrink-wrapped, or downloaded from a trusted site. But nowadays users download potentially untrustworthy software from trusted sites. (See also: the Mac App Store.) That’s why providers need the that Google used on DroidDream; that Apple for years, and is on “unauthorized” iOS users as well as apps; and that Intel is now , so that phones (and computers) running Intel chips can be killed with a simple encrypted SMS. Ten years ago people were at the notion of Intel adding a unique ID to all of its processors. Today every phone has a unique ID, and yours is probably uploaded to apps’ servers multiple times a day. Not so long ago, people were outraged that Amazon could and arbitrarily delete books from users’ Kindles; last week they for Google to exercise essentially the same power. Giving all that power and control to Amazon, Apple, Google and Intel in exchange for security may ultimately be a reasonable and necessary tradeoff — but that kind of centralization of control still makes me more than a little uneasy. As the as their first and only computers, Android and iOS will increasingly dominate all Internet traffic. (What about RIM and Windows Phone? I expect they both have kill switches too, but really, who cares; wake me up when one of them has won next year’s war for third place.) Android is a walled garden just like iOS, subtler but no less forbidding. And you can’t even escape the app garden via your browser, because your browser is, in and of itself, an app. While we weren’t looking, the walled garden won. James Whitesmith, |
null | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 3 | 15 | null |
(Founder Stories) Stack Exchange CEO: "Nobody Wants To Find Yahoo Answers In Their Search Results" | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 3 | 12 | There sure are a lot of Q&A sites on the Internet, but not all Q&A sites are the same. In the video above, CEO Joel Spolsky talks about the origins of Q&A sites and his competition. Stack Exchange operates and other peer-reviewed knowledge sites. Spolsky minces no words in his contempt for the Big Daddy of Q&A sites, . “Yahoo Answers is Teenage chat,” says Spolsky. “Nobody wants to find Yahoo Answers in their search results. It is one-sentence gibberish.” Stack Overflow, in contrast, . Stack Overflow users gain reputation by giving the best answers, and answers are peer-reviewed. It doesn’t cover every topic under the sun, either, just programming. Stack Overflow is often , another geeky Q&A site that attracts tons of smart people. With Stack Exchange, Spolsky is broadening to other topics and communities such as cooking and photography, but he will only go where his audience takes him. Given its roots with programmers, that means that new Stack Exchange verticals may not be as mainstream as those of competing sites, but that’s okay with Spolsky. The Stack Exchange sites are still growing 40 percent to 50 percent per month. (Watch and of this interview and other episodes of , which is now available ) |
Social Is Too Important For Google To Screw Up With A Big Launch Circus | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 3 | 13 | Google will launch a “major new social network” imminently at the SXSW conference, early this morning. They were stupendously wrong on timing – Google told us and that there was absolutely nothing launching in the next few days at the event. The product details they got were fairly correct, though, from what I’ve heard from sources who’ve seen Google’s product iterations over the last few months. Google will focus a lot on groups of friends and how you share with them, and try to differentiate themselves from Facebook in this and other ways. But that’s beside the point. Google doesn’t appear to want to have a big launch announcement around the product, now or down the road. They keep releasing (or dealing with leaks) new social features in drips and drabs: , , . I’m guessing we’ll see more small releases over time, and won’t get hit with any big announcements just yet. This isn’t based on any sourced information, just my hunch based on what I’ve seen so far. In particular I note Google’s sudden reluctance to even admit that they have an actual social product. Why? Big press announcements are excellent opportunities to get the press completely focused on you for a day, and get blanket coverage on both tech and mainstream media sites. Lots and lots of people will rush to join the service, and if those people like it they’ll get their friends to join. But, really, there’s nothing Google could launch that would get people to ooh and ahh. They’ve already sort of had their strike 1 and strike 2 in the social space with Orkut and Buzz. And big launches like Google TV and Wave didn’t turn out so great, either. Apple certainly a successful social network with one big press push, either. There’s really nothing that could be launched that people would say “Wow, Facebook’s in trouble” by Google or anyone else. Even if Facebook itself launched today no one would be particularly excited. What makes Facebook exciting is that everyone you know is using it all the time, so you need to, too. So all the stuff that Google is putting together won’t be hurting Facebook all that much, at least for several years. The last thing they want is some big press event that everyone can point back to for those years and say Google blew it again. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be pushing aggressively in social, and launching new products and features. Citi analyst cited Efficient Frontier data in a recent report showing that marketers are spending 6% on Facebook of what they spend on Google, and getting comparable click through rates and ROIs. He also says that Facebook today looks a lot like Google did in 2004, and that Google’s growth trajectory post 2004 could be a proxy for Facebook’s future growth rate: 6% of Google’s Ad Spend Jives With Facebook’s 2010 Revenue — EF’s data point that marketers are spending 6% of what they spend on Google, implying Facebook rev of ~ $1.8B (based on Google’s 2010 rev of $29.3B). In our opinion, this is roughly in-line with the rev that FB may have generated last year, and we think FB made 25-30% net margins. For context, in the year that Google generated $2B in Net Rev (2004), its Net Margin was 24%. In our opinion, Google’s growth trajectory post 2004 could be a proxy for FB future growth rate – given what are similar growth end-markets in Internet advertising. Also, over the last several years, Google has expanded Net Margins to 40%+. Funnily enough, if people assume Facebook will grow like Google has over the last several years, Facebook’s valuation would be right about – $50 billion and $100 billion. That means Google is trying to get its share of a huge new online advertising market that will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap. That market is just developing now, and those dollars, notes Mahaney and Efficient Frontier, are being taken from offline advertising dollars. In other words, Google is playing for the long term. And I don’t think they’ll risk that opportunity by having a huge press circus and hoping for the best like they did with Google Buzz, Google Wave and other products. Instead they’ll boil the frog, and hope that in a year or two they’re a serious competitor in Facebook’s world. What I do expect, though, is for enough stuff to be released that Google can at least talk about their social strategy to developers at in May. A controlled physical environment packed with Google fanboys. That’s a much better place to do a song and dance, even a muted one, than in front of the fickle and party crazed crowds in Austin. |
Daily Crunch: Shapes Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 3 | 12 | |
LaunchRock And Vencorps Want To Give $30K To The "Best" Startups #SXSW | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 13 | , the startup that wants to help companies launch by setting them up with viral launch pages, is also launching a contest during SXSW. Companies that use LaunchRock pages to get beta signups will now have the chance to win $30K ($25K as a standard from collective VC firm Vencorps). The contest is sponsored by LaunchRock, Sprout Social, Slate Studio, CloudSponge, HootSuite, Posterous, Rapleaf and VenCorps and consists of two parts: The first part is how many signups a startup is able to generate using the LaunchRock, up to $5K. The second consists of the VenCorps’ contribution, where LaunchRock startups who generate the most “social proof” via @ mentions in tweets and votes on Vencorps.com (from March 15th onwards) win 25K . Technically two different startups could win each contest. Signups for the first part have already started, but the voting for the second will commence on March 15th and run through April 15th (sign up ). The top nine companies in terms of buzz will enter into the finals, and the winner of that contest will be announced on April 31st. LaunchRock has also set up a leaderboard for SXSW startups on top of the Chupacabra at 400 E 6th Street and Trinity, and is ranking startups based on tweets in a number of categories. Right now it looks like is in overall. |
Testing Backs Up iPad 2's Purported Graphical Prowess | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 13 |
, comparing it with the original and the . I’m actually pretty shocked by how far ahead it is. I considered Apple’s “9x faster” boasts to be more or less exaggerations of still-significant gains, but this thing is taking the Tegra 2 to Remember, though: the Tegra 2 is pushing ~25% more pixels, and Android 3.0 is still a new OS with much optimization in its future. That said, damn. There are more benchmarks . |
StumbleUpon Unveils Paid Discovery, Its New "No Click" Ad Platform | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 13 | Content discovery engine , which most recently received 17 million in Series B funding, is unveiling a new ad platform today, StumbleUpon . Whereas the old Stumble ad model was primarily targeted to getting traffic for publishers, StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp tells me that is setting its sights on bigger brands, like movie studios promoting a movie or stuff like NFL teams promoting their sites. Paid Discovery ads (which can range in format from websites, videos to mobile sites etc) will show up in a Stumbler’s stream without them having to click on a banner or other kind of intermediary mechanism. Advertisers can drill down on the targeting the ads as well, by around 500 different topics and demographics like age, gender and location as well as by mobile platorm. Users can also rate the quality of the ads, and more upvotes means additional (free) traffic. Paid Discovery introduces a tiered pricing plan, serving priority and analytics services for campaigns, charging advertisers .10 or .25 per unique user depending on when the ad is served. The price points also include access to revamped system of analytics which takes into account information like user upvotes, demographics, share patterns and time spent on site. We took some time to talk with StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp about the new platform and how it will affect the service’s more than 14 million users as well as advertisers. You can watch the entire interview above. |
Video: Foursquare's Naveen Selvadurai Gives "One Year Update" At SXSW 2011 | Jay Donovan | 2,011 | 3 | 13 | At last year’s SXSW I caught a moment of Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai’s time and their plans for the upcoming year. We were able to speak again this year and Naveen gave me the update on what has changed for the company since our last conversation. The short answer is that both the company and user-base have grown significantly. When I last spoke with him there were around 300,000 people using Foursquare to check-in and now there are over 7 million users. That, coupled with their recent loyalty deal with American Express, means we should be on the lookout for expanded services and features in 2011. Check out the video below for the update. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbuQXnhJZwQ&w=480&h=390] |
Swimming in the Appstream | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 3 | 13 | Moving from iPad 1 to iPad 2 has been an exercise in confusion followed by fear followed by despair and now acceptance. I have no idea what I’ll be left with, given that I’ve attempted to move from one Mac Book Pro to another, back up iTunes to DVD, upgrade to 4.3 of iOS on 2 iPhones and the old iPad 1, and finally move everything that’s left to the new iPad 2. At this point I really don’t care what happens, just that it does. Apple haters can jump in anytime with comments (oh, wait, they can’t anymore on the new Facebook Connect what-is-your-real-name gateway) about how iTunes should go away. Maybe, but who can say if this insanity would be improved by making it wireless. So while I’m waiting to be dismayed by the elimination of music, Mad Men 4th season files, family photos, contacts, , and other arcana I don’t realize I’m going to miss, I’ll talk about something else. We’ve been watching Twitter and Facebook, but mostly Twitter, upend the business of news as practiced by major networks around the world. While developers moan about Twitter’s consolidation of power in its core applications, the cable networks have restructured themselves around providing live video and talking head context with a Twitter feedback loop as editorial monitoring. Even when Twitter and other realtime traffic is driven underground by government or corporate censorship, the Twitter backchannel persists via the media and their new masters, the blogs. This is not a new media revolution but a classic political one, carried on the backs of realtime social networks that move faster than any attempts at shutting them down. Twitter’s ability to nail up instant affinity groups with direct messages and @mentions has created instant power centers that transcend borders and the previous political institutions. The speed with which Wisconsin Republicans pushed through their union-busting legislation is evidence of this restructuring, as will be the Democratic counterattack funded by the first blushes of a electorate-rallying 2012 recall movement. Mistaking this for yet another Web revolution misses the changes brought about by Apple’s App Era. Apps blend realtime information with transactions, fueling startups and app platforms in much the same way that Obama used the caucuses to gather people and resources who in turn marshaled a disruptive wave of financing. As Twitter-esque collaboration tools such as Chatter move to the business community, the same restructuring around the influence of individual contributors is transforming companies in the same dramatic fashion. It’s been fascinating to watch the networks tweak their release schedules and marketing to reflect this new reality. Reruns are a thing of the distant past, victim first of the summer reality shows that don’t support replays, and then the rapid undercutting of marketing strategies by the Twitter underground. Before a show has the legs to survive the 8 show network commitment, trending topics pick winners like Charlie Sheen over so-called family fare. Sheen’s rapid adoption of Twitter and live streaming video may seem desperate and out of control from a messaging perspective, but the move to Apps and the iPad may prove prescient. We’re seeing an odd similarity between incumbent governments and network programmers, where the upstarts are laughed off as delusional right up until the fans swarm the streets. And the reverse, when Twitter executives are derided as ruthlessly crushing their developer communities. Neither analysis is compelling; Egypt fell because the military backed the rebels, while Twitter third parties like Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur moved to the enterprise before the door slammed shut on the client side. Where rapid disruption is occurring is at the intersection of the social and mobile waves. The noise emanating from South By SouthWest is notable for its fragmentation. Group chat is this year’s model, but the real action is in the media disruption. iPad 2 and its expanded AirPlay capabilities will be popular among those of us who already are shifting away from Sheen reruns to NetFlix and socially-chosen series. But look out as AirPlay hits the enterprise, with a next wave of presentation and authoring software built on HDMI cabling today and the MobileMe back end tomorrow. Microsoft Office is looking more and more like the Mubarak regime when you can move from push notification to workgroup commentary over FaceTime and Twitter. It’s clear from recent moves that Facebook and YouTube will go after NetFlix on the consumer side, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where that leaves CNN and its ilk. Most of the tech conferences are now streaming live; entertainers will do a Sheen too as their contracts expire. It won’t be easy, with the major studios still locking up the big screens, but time is not on their side. Sex and rock ‘n roll still sell mainstream, but savvy entertainers like Lady Gaga and Steve Jobs are blending generations into a new more elastic population that straddles age and humor in a disruptive mix. Network programmers still covet the young crowd, but they’re harvesting the boomers’ deep pockets with experiences that reach back into the soundtracks and comedy of their generation. The Appstream, with its fertile landscape of @mentions, multitasking, and analytics, is increasingly fueling the realtime revolution. Now back to our movie, . |
5 Years Later, Jack Dorsey Tweets About Twitter's Beginning | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 13 | 5 years ago today we started programming Twitter ("twttr" for short). 8 days later the first tweet was sent: — jack (@jack) Did you know it was exactly five years ago today that and a few other team members working at Odeo first started to work on what would become Twitter? How do I know? Dorsey is about it right now. While programming began five years ago, it wasn’t until eight days later, , that Dorsey sent the famous first ( ) tweet: “inviting coworkers”. Dorsey also that it was exactly five years ago that they got the official go ahead on the Twitter idea, then called “ “. He has also shared ( ) the conversation he had with about the project on that day. The first mention: me: Biz! How goes? We’re starting work on the twttr implementation today. Biz: really?! NICE Dorsey also that the reason they initially droped the vowels out of “Twitter” was to try and get the SMS shortcode. …But Teen People already owned it. Dorsey to share more of his original drawings, emails, and notes about the early days of Twitter. Naturally, he’s going to share them on Twitter. I've been digging through all my drawings, emails, & notes from around that time. I'll share them over the next 2 weeks right here on — jack (@jack) We were given the go ahead to work on the idea that morning. An IM conversation with letting him know: — jack (@jack) The team was small: came up with the name & managed, & I programmed, designed, all under the roof of Odeo & . — jack (@jack) The name Twitter came from Glass & the Oxford English: "a short inconsequential burst of information, chirps from birds." — jack (@jack) However, we wanted to focus on mobile, so we dropped the vowels to get the SMS shortcode 89887 (TWTTR). Too bad Teen People owned it. — jack (@jack) I drew out the original idea on this notepad around 2001, named stat.us. Just needed the right time & team. — jack (@jack) inviting coworkers — jack (@jack) |
Following Earthquake, Japanese Officials Fear Partial Nuclear Meltdown Underway | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 3 | 13 | A massive earthquake that struck off Japan’s northeastern coast on Friday— taking 1,200 lives, with thousands still unaccounted for and ten thousand feared dead by police — also damaged multiple nuclear power plants there. On Sunday, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said at the Fukushiman Dai-ichi nuclear complex, was likely under way. The partial meltdown follows a blast on Saturday at one unit of the complex, where operators are working to cool the reactor core by injecting seawater and boron into its containment vessel. Also on Sunday, according to the Japan’s Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) reported a state of emergency at a another facility, the Onagawa nuclear power plant; while its three reactors remained under control, the emergency alert was related to radioactivity readings in the area that exceeded allowable levels. Eric Talmadge and Mari Yamaguchi reported for the :
“More than 170,000 people had been evacuated as a precaution… Edano said the radioactivity released into the environment so far was so small it didn’t pose any health threats. A complete meltdown — the collapse of a power plant’s systems and its ability to keep temperatures under control — could release uranium and dangerous contaminants into the environment and pose major, widespread health risks.” While facing the terrifying prospect of multiple nuclear meltdowns in their country, millions of Japanese households remain without electricity, food and water currently. The natural disasters could have caused even more damage if not for Japan’s investments in advanced warning systems, and constant updating of building codes to deal with earthquakes, especially. warned of strong aftershocks ahead; their website suggests a 70 percent chance of a magnitude 7-class earthquakes through March 16, 2011. As oil prices are skyrocketing, generally, and energy demands are rising the United States’ energy chief, Steven Chu, recently asked Congress to consider an American along with renewable sources like solar and wind. The situation in Japan, however, underscores controversy around designating nuclear as a clean energy source. |
Grilled Cheese, Beer, And Other Awesome Stuff: An Interview With GroupMe At SXSW | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 3 | 13 | The food is being provided by GroupMe, the group messaging app that, along with competitors like Beluga and Fast Society, has received plenty of buzz in the buildup to SXSW. We swung by their food stand for an interview with cofounders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci (and to grab some food for ourselves). Tune in to learn how things have gone for GroupMe so far in Austin, why they chose to give away grilled cheese sandwiches, and adventures in Phish concert parking lots. Oh, and sorry for calling it “South by”. I hate when people do that. |
(Founder Stories) Joel Spolsky On Startups: "Have A Co-Founder Otherwise You'll Go Insane" | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 3 | 13 | All this week on Founder Stories, we’ve shown segments from Chris Dixon’s interview with CEO Joel Spolsky, who also writes the blog. In the final rapid-fire Q&A video above, Spolsky doles out some advice to other startup founders, primarily “have a co-founder” to share the load, “otherwise you’ll go insane.” And “make sure you figure out who wons what,” he adds, and do that up front. As Dixon points out, the last thing you want is to have to explain to later investors why some guy named Frank who was only around for 3 weeks owns 30 percent of the company. ( : Host Chris Dixon is an angel investor in Stack Exchange). Spolsky also explains why he admires Bill Gates more than Steve Jobs, why his favorite charity is (crowdsourced funding FTW), why he finds it easier to hire people in New York City, and dishes on the group think in Silicon Valley. Below is the entire 30-minute interview, or you can watch it in segments. In , Spolsky talks about when to raise VC cash and how he seeded the original community with the readers of his blog, in he rails against what bad SEO has done to the Internet and why he chooses to go deep in each vertical site Stack Exchange rolls out, and in he rags on Yahoo Answers. It’s worth watching the whole thing. Other episodes of are also now available . |
Join Us For The TechCrunch/TUAW Reader Meet-Up At SXSW Sponsored By Peel | John Biggs | 2,011 | 3 | 13 | It’s that time again: time to revel in Web 2.0! We’re teaming up with and for our first annual reader meet-up in Austin. Meet the TC crew. Have a TC brew. Enjoy some TC chew (quantities limited). All this – and more – will be made available to you. Please and remember that its at 201 E 5th St Unit #108 [ ] (It’s a big loft) from 6pm to 10pm. Expect food, booze, and music plus Peel’s own brand of Interactive TV featuring the . Plus fun. Lots of fun. |
Hungover At SXSW? Use Zaarly To Get Your Gatorade And Advil | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 13 | “The must-have app of SXSW would be the one that lets people with hangovers order Gatorade/Advil deliveries. Make it happen Zaarly.” — Jason Kincaid If you’re like most people at SXSW the time change today and the drinking last night has hit you like a iron hammer. Well luckily , the HTML 5 mobile app that connects buyers and sellers in a localized market place, is now live today in Austin. So if you’re stuck in bed needing Gatorade and Advil (or a change of clothes, or an iPhone charger, or …) you can now hit up on your phone and put in your order. With Zaarly people who want things and people who want to provide services are brought together in an unprecedented way, with the focus on the buyer’s needs as opposed to the sellers. Buyers post what they want and how much they’re willing to pay and sellers can log in to Zaarly view the needs and prices of tasks around them. Sellers bid for the tasks, and the buyer chooses the best one, with Zaarly connecting the two via an anonymous Twilio-powered phone number. While, like Craigslist, the service basically runs on the honor system, Zaarly community managers keep close watch and filter out bogus and inappropriate offers. Zaarly also has an amazing story, having gone from an LA Startup Weekend winner to 1 million in funding in a little under 3 weeks, impressing the likes of Paul Buchheit, Ashton Kutcher, Felicis Ventures, Bill Lee, Naval Ravikant and Lightbank with its disruptive concept, despite being a work in progress. I caught up with co-founder here at SXSW, paying a visit to the Zaarly “mobile world headquarters,” or basically an RV in a parking lot by the Austin Convention Center, to talk more about the ins and outs of the proximity based market platform. Right now Zaarly is only live in Austin, but Fishback tells me he will be rolling it out on a city by city basis after the SXSW push is over. Stay tuned, and hydrated.
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Lightbox wants to be Android's new camera app, raises $1.1 million from Valley players | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 3 | 13 | Although Android adoption is growing at a huge clip compared to the iPhone (not hard, since there are so many more devices and plans), iPhone apps still remain the benchmark for the smartphone app experience. In part this is down to the fact that many companies build an iPhone app first and an Android version some time later, which is often inferior in user experience. Part of the reason is that little things like the pull-down-to-refresh features that are often in Phone apps come default with the iOS platform. But to make that kind of feature work in an Android app you have to build it from the ground up. That means there is a space for a creator of ridiculously good Android apps. Step forward Thai Tran and Nilesh Patel with , their new startup which has taken a $1.1 million seed round from some of the top VCs and Angels in the UK and US. A private beta of their first app, Lightbox Photos, launches this week at SXSW, with the founders in attendance handing out invitation codes to the private beta. The app will be presented at the . You can sign up here to get on the invite list for the . Lightbox Photos, connect the Android camera with social networks – something existing apps haven’t achieved to the same extent. I’ve seen a demo of the app and it works very well. Instead of requiring a constant network connection to show photos backed up onto the Lightbox servers, the app will run in background to sync your photos so you can can use Lightbox Photos while offine, thus making experience identical to local browsing. Patel and Tran raised the money in order to build a team in London, and the ambition is high. “We want to build the most badass mobile team in the world and we want to do it in London,” Tran told me. “All the investors are Silicon Valley investors. So everyone is willing to take the bet that this team can do it all from London and rival the best teams anywhere.” Previously, Tran was product manager at YouTube where he was responsible for partnerships with European TV broadcasters. Prior to that, he was Product Manager for Google Maps. This guy knows how Google thinks. The round was from Index Ventures (Neil Rimer, Danny Rimer), Accel Partners (Andrew Braccia), SV Angel (David Lee), 500 Startups (Dave McClure) and angel investors Beth Ellyn McClendon (formerly UX Designer/Product Manager for Google Maps, YouTube, Android, and Google.org), Brian McClendon (VP Engineering at Google), Charlie Oppenheimer (EIR at Matrix), Michael Herf (formerly CTO of Picasa), Pasha Sadri (founder and CEO of Polyvore), Shishir Mehrotra (head of Monetization at YouTube). |
Let The Honeyclones Begin: The Pioneer DreamBook ePad H10 HD | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 14 |
Right off the bat, let’s just make something clear: this isn’t from Pioneer, makers of quality audio devies. No, this is a tablet by Pioneer , a major Australian laptop maker that makes a whole line of Android — but this (catchy) is their first Honeycomb device. It costs $700 (Australian) naked and is actually quite competitively specced: Tegra II 120 (it’s what’s in many upcoming Honeycomb tablets), a gig of RAM, a 10.1″ 1280×800 capacitive screen, dual cameras (5 and 2 megapixels), 16-64GB SSD, GPS, 3G, and yes, it ships with Honeycomb. Those are really almost exactly the specs we see on the Xoom and Galaxy Tab 10.1. Why should you choose them over this? Well, they’re probably built better, and you might get a better return policy (big company, new device), but really, there’s not much difference. And at 760g and 12mm thick, it’s not like it’s that chubby either. They’re shipping in April (supposedly), but don’t blame me if it gets lost in the post between Australia and wherever you live. If you’re looking for an “off-brand” Android tablet, wait a couple months and there will be a hot dozen to choose from. The price will go down, too; even the clones can’t beat the iPad on price right now, hardware differences aside. [via and ] |
Jobfox Rolls Out Social Private Networks For Online Recruiting | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 3 | 14 | Former CareerBuilder founder and CEO launched in 2004 as a job profile site in which individuals could search through job openings displayed on the site’s boards. But the site was tough for recruiters to actively use because they had to comb through profiles of potential applicants. Today, Jobfox is unveiling a new version of the site that hopes to solve this problem. Essentially Jobfox allows corporate recruiters and headhunters to create private hiring networks. Job seekers can create a profile on the site and join corporate networks for companies they are interested in working for. Jobfox says that the virtue of using its network vs LinkedIn for job seeking is that it is completely focused on job seekers and recruiters as opposed to socializing or sharing content. Because to connections made between job seekers and recruiters are confidential and not published on the network, it also ensures user privacy. And the site will actually connect with LinkedIn and Facebook to alert you of your friends that work at the companies you want to work at, and it pulls in data from Twitter and company HR sites to alert seekers of job openings not displayed anywhere else. Members can also “boost” friends or colleagues for jobs and earn financial incentives if the connection results in a hire. It’s important to note that Jobfox focuses exclusively on salaried jobs as opposed to hourly positions or freelance opportunities. Currently, 7,000 companies are represented on the site and roughly 140,000 jobs are advertised per month on the site. While LinkedIn has also become a popular destination for job seekers, there is certainly room for a number of players in the social recruiting space. What LinkedIn has in it’s favor, however, is a massive userbase (which is nearing 100 million). But considering McGovern’s prior experience in the online job market, Jobfox is definitely worth a look. |
A Legacy Lives On: T-Mobile Sidekick Reborn As The Android-Powered Sidekick 4G | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 3 | 14 | Call me a nerd, or call me nostalgic — but I loved the Sidekick series. Though that love fizzled over time (partially due to hardware issues in the later Sidekicks, partially due to the fact that smartphone prices plummeted while their user-friendliness skyrocketed), the first three Sidekicks are still some of my favorite devices ever. Today, just two weeks after T-Mobile and Microsoft announced that they’re , T-Mobile is officially unveiling something they (and I) hope can bring life back to the Sidekick series: the Android-powered, Samsung-made Sidekick 4G.
From pictures of the hardware, it looks like Samsung has kept of the things that Sidekick fan know and love. The overall shape remains unchanged, and it still packs a roomy-lookin’ 5 row key (which I’m really, hoping is on par with Sidekicks prior). Alas, there is at least a change or two that the more devout fans might not like: the handset’s signature (and oh-so-awesome) display spin-out has been replaced with something they’re calling a “pop-tilt” hinge (we’ve confirmed that this display slides, rather than spins), and the physical trackball has been replaced with an optical trackball. We’ll be checking this thing out at CTIA Orlando (March 21-23) in just a few days — check back in then for our hands on impressions! In the mean time: what do you think? Is this a worthy revival of the Sidekick line? |
Apple A5 Teardown: It's Bigger And Better | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 14 |
The silicon fiends out there will want to take a look at Chipworks’ inside the . There’s not much there for laypeople, though at over 120mm it’s more than twice the size of the A4 (53mm ), which, as you may imagine, allows them to fit more cores, more transistors, and a bigger GPU. It’s still more or less “off the shelf,” and manufactured by Samsung at the moment (though it’s possible that will change with Apple’s recent partnership with TSMC), but that doesn’t stop it from being an effective hardware combination and one they have not failed to take advantage of. As we saw over the weekend, . Keep an eye on the for further updates. |
DRAMA IN TWITTERLAND: Featuring Kleiner Perkins, John Doerr And A Dentist | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 3 | 14 | “Kleiner Perkins Already Selling Its Twitter Stock” reads headline on SAI from Friday, alleging that venture firm has been selling Twitter stock that they bought only a couple of months ago. “A DISASTER IN THE MAKING” says lengthy diatribe on SAI. The allegation? That Kleiner invested in Twitter at a $3.7 billion valuation in December, then turned around and sold some of that stock for a profit just a month or two later, at a $7 billion valuation. Some people may say, so what? People invest with a profit motive. But Kleiner got into Twitter at a sweetheart deal – paying a valuation hundreds of millions of dollars less than rival firms DST and Providence were rumored to have bid. When you take an investor like Kleiner Perkins, you’re doing it because of their name, and because you expect them not to just flip the stock and bring in random new shareholders. Flipping stock just isn’t done by top tier venture funds. So the allegation is serious, and reputation damaging. Other startups may think twice before taking Kleiner’s money when they don’t know if Kleiner will stick around or just sell the stock at the first opportunity. The problem is, the accusations in the articles aren’t true, say multiple sources close to Twitter’s management and investors. And then there’s the poor theoretical dentist, buying up the Twitter shares with little or no information about the company (and I can’t stop thinking of the irony of Henry Blodget for the little guy investor). On the one hand, you might have a well-off but unsophisticated investor (a dentist, say), who is buying up shares of the red-hot private companies like Twitter because he’s hearing about them on CNBC and because he’s getting emails from brokers who are telling him they can get him in on the next hot thing. This dentist may be buying the stock even though he’s so wildly unsophisticated (or careless) that he doesn’t even know how many shares Twitter has outstanding, let alone what the company’s real financial performance looks like. (Don’t snicker: According to insiders familiar with the situation, these are exactly the sorts of folks who are being pitched Twitter stock these days.)
And, on the other hand, you have the seller–Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr–who is on the board of Google and basically on the board of Twitter, who knows EXACTLY what he’s selling. Here’s what really happened. Kleiner led a $200 million round in Twitter. They were to take $150 million. The remaining $50 million was to be taken by existing investors, including . Before the closing Kleiner Perkins decided they only wanted to take $130 million, not $150 million. Insight was happy to take the extra $20 million, and did. Management was fine with this. Because of a legal complication Insight had to buy the shares from Kleiner Perkins. But they bought them at exactly the same valuation that Kleiner did, so there was no profit. In other words, this is a huge non-event, and Kleiner didn’t flip the shares. But someone, either a current investor or perhaps one of the investors that was passed on by Twitter, decided to sex this up, a lot, and pass it on to SAI as a story. And I finally got the opportunity to use that dramatic screen grab from Braveheart in a post. |
Web Apps On iOS Being Throttled By Last-Generation Engine | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 14 | This probably sounds worse than it is, but it’s strange that it should be an issue at all. It appears that web apps and games launched from the home screen (as opposed to being used in the browser) do not at present have access to iOS 4.3’s improved , and are restricted in using web-related cache and resources they would otherwise have when used in-browser. It could be that the Nitro engine simply hasn’t been extended for use by the non-browser web UI tools, but one developer says that the Safari team indicated the problem would not be fixed.
It’s a pretty serious oversight when Apple has indicated such an interest in HTML5 and standards-based apps, but it’s also worth considering that it has a large interest in making such apps available via the App Store, where they have editorial control and revenue possibilities. By refusing to give web apps that have “gone native” access to the improved Javascript engine or preventing them from being run while offline (another new trouble), they could be trying to subtly prod users in the direction of paid or ad-based “real” apps. On the other hand, it could also be just a slow roll-out of a complicated new bit of code and the developers being affected could just be a minority being affected by this very specific problem. If you’re interested, there are a number of threads and other sites investigating this issue . |
Sneakers Built From Computer Parts Look Amazing, Amazingly Uncomfortable | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 14 |
Just take a second to look at how cool these are. Made by Gabriel Dishaw, the “Junk Art Air Max+” is constructed from discarded tech and junk, from heatsinks to typewriters to oxygen tubing from a 747. They’d probably slice your feet to pieces if you tried to wear them, but it’s a great effect, isn’t it? [via ] |
TouchPad In June, webOS On PCs in 2011, Says HP's Apotheker | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 14 | HP’s was announced about a month ago, but no solid shipping date has been set. I’m not sure what it is about companies announcing products with no real information on availability, but tablets seem to be especially prone to this phenomenon. We heard , then we heard , and now HP’s Leo Apotheker, , has said that yes, June is the month it will ship, alongside the new and . He also remarked that he wanted webOS to make its PC debut this year — though a full roll-out would have to wait until 2012. I’m interested by skeptical. PCs are PCs and tablets are tablets. I think crossing the breeds may make for a bit of a mutt. |
Wikio rumored to be closing an 8-figure investment round, on its way to becoming Euro internet champ | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 3 | 14 | Yeah, this round of funding is huger than huge. Well, at least for Europe. And while it may be nowhere near Groupon’s, like, -round, it is definitely amongst the bigger deals on this side of the Atlantic. Multiple sources have confirmed that they are currently in discussion with Luxemburg-based , who is in the process of securing a very large round of funding. While no official information has been released, the 8-figure number could easily hit 9-figures in USD given the current exchange rate. That would make it one of the biggest rounds of funding to take place in Europe this year. The company founded by Pierre Chappaz, who also founded price-comparison site (which went to Yahoo in 2004 for €475 million or $670 million), could be on his way to building the European internet giant everyone has been waiting for. The so-called “European equivalent of ” currently manages 6 flagship products, including blog platform , , , , local search engine and recommendation site . According to internal statistics, these 6 properties counted over 120 million monetized visits for the month of February alone. The last half of 2010 was especially active for Wikio, who not only with Overblog but also Nomao. Apparently, the fusion with Overblog has proved very successful; in February Overblog reported its strongest growth in traffic to date, hitting 98 million visits for that month alone. Then, towards the end of 2010, the company a €4 million round of funding followed by the launch of Wikio Experts, a “content on demand” platform for publications to source freelance writers. The 140-person company seems to be working its way towards becoming the European social internet leader. But does it make sense to call Wikio a potential Euro internet champ? For starters, there are currently 11 seasoned entrepreneurs in Wikio’s management team, incuding , , Bertrand Quasada, Laurent Binard and (in addition to Pierre Chappaz). These entrepreneurs are not on their first startup and they’ve gone through previous acquisitions. In addition, the company is generating cash and is almost profitable; it was not seeking to raise any money after the round that it closed in December. And finally, the multiple platforms of this pan-European group are complimentary in nature and continue to hire across Europe. Still, while the company’s investors include and , Wikio is potentially lacking an A-list investor needed to take it to the top. Furthermore, the company could be criticized for being slow to integrate with social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. And it was a little late to get on tablets and mobile platforms. Naturally, this round of funding will be very telling for the company’s future. We’ll see shortly whether the capital is provided by European investors or by American investors that are preparing to facilitate Wikio’s transatlantic development. We contacted Wikio’s team for comments. The company’s marketing director, Frédéric Montagnon, tried to remain rather under the radar but didn’t hesitate to mention that “if there is a round of funding, it’ll be a big round do to things on a bigger scale and why not go beyond Europe…” |
R.I.P. Microsoft Zune, 2006-2011 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 14 |
Bloomberg is that Microsoft has finally decided to put an official end to its media player line. “A person familiar with the decision” has informed them that Microsoft will not be putting out any new hardware in the line, and will be henceforward focusing on integrating Zune functionality with the Windows Phone 7 platform. Not exactly unexpected; the Zune hardware hasn’t changed since mid-2009’s release of the , although it has received several significant software upgrades. The writing has been on the wall for a long time, but whether Microsoft would double down (again) or cut their losses was far from clear. Let’s just have a quick trip down memory lane. CrunchGear was one of the first in the world to see the Zune after a Microsoft employee unwisely (or perhaps wisely) left one on the table at a Seattle dive bar with bloggers around. We covered it feverishly, as it seemed to be a dark horse competitor to the iPod that might actually stand a chance. The unique (but cumbrous) sharing features, the brown shell (which, despite ridicule, was their most popular Zune), and the all suggested… well, something new and interesting. Various updates brought us to today’s Zune HD and Zune software, both of which must be complimented for a truly original and effective interface. I still use the Zune HD and it still gets compliments. But sales were never what Microsoft hoped, perhaps because of Microsoft’s on-the-fence attitude about apps and additional functionality. While the iPod touch is plainly billed as an iPhone sans phone, the Zune was billed as being all about the music – except it was all about the cloud – except it had apps – except it didn’t have a clock – except it was in Windows Phone 7 – except it was in the Kin… and so on. It wasn’t a total albatross (it’s sold several million and the streaming service is well-liked) but that’s not much to throw in the face of the indomitable iPod. It’s a sad story, in which Microsoft is unable to find the right gun for a bullet. However, with the choice to integrate with WP7, and the imminent roll-out of WP7 via Nokia, the Zune service will probably live on, though almost certainly as part of a larger media and data cloud service (perhaps the “Ventura” project ). Their forward-thinking pioneership in streaming and subscription music (now reflected in cloud music services like Rdio and Spotify) are not forgotten, either. Zune DNA, and hardy DNA it is, will survive in the Metro interface and everywhere else thin, clipped sans-serif text is found. One could say this was their plan all along, as part of their “three screens” wraparound service, but the fact is it’s been plan B all along, and now that the Zune has failed to dent Apple’s share from the media player side, they’re going to try a different tack. As for the player? No new hardware means the Zune HD is the last of its breed, though it will likely be sold for a while longer. Hell, at $179 I still think the 32GB version is a great deal. And now that you know there won’t be a Zune HD 2, the original is, in a way, future-proof. So long, Zune. It’s been a long, brown trip. : Zune’s hardware business development guy has , downplaying the report but pretty much confirming what we’ve written here, that the Zune as a discrete player and brand is being rolled into WP7. |
Video: Q&A With Yobongo's Caleb Elston At SXSW 2011 | Jay Donovan | 2,011 | 3 | 14 | A while back, Caleb Elston’s new location-based chat app and service called which lets you chat with people in your general vicinity. Creepy for some, cool for others, it nevertheless is a new way to communicate with people you may or may not know. I caught up with Caleb at SXSW and he was able to give a few more details about the “Affinity Algorithm” running behind the scenes, and how it will help shape the relationships you build with the app. Video below. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzfcHww7wr8&w=480&h=390] |
LoveThis launches – because your friends know best | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 3 | 14 | Who do you trust most when it comes to recommendations: an algorithm or your friends? Or perhaps a mixture of machine learning your social graph. That’s something that a lot of startups are trying to figure out right now. , which launches out of Beta today, is firmly in the social camp with its ‘black book’ of your friends’ recommendations, from websites and apps, places to eat and go, or something more practical like a good plumber. That may sound like a very general list of recommendations but the site’s premise is that your friends not only know best but also vouch for products and services all of the time, just not necessarily when you actually need those recommendations. LoveThis attempts to solve this problem of recall by encouraging users to store this info as structured and searchable data for later use. Notable also is the startup’s founder: Alexis Dormandy, former Virgin Group board member and a founding director of both Virgin Mobile and Virgin Active. He has since been Chief Marketing Officer at Orange and been Chairman, investor and advisor to a variety of European businesses. Signing up to LoveThis is encouraged via Facebook and a user can also link their Twitter account. The latter is so that they can tweet their recommendations using the #lovethis hashtag to post them to LoveThis. That sounds cool in theory but since the service works best the more structured its data is, users have to actually login to LoveThis to edit any Twitter-originated recommendations to ensure they match the required format. Likewise, recommendations can be sent via SMS if a user has provided a mobile phone number. The need to edit later is a bit onerous but support for Twitter/text messaging keeps LoveThis feeling spontaneous, mobile and real-time. Three boxes ticked. As well as entering recommendations into the site, users can search for recommendations on any topic via their social graph i.e. people they’ve friended (and therefore trust) on the service, which is the whole point. Interestingly, however, LoveThis also offers up ‘Experts’ as a separate tab in those results. These are super users picked out by the service who are screened based on their expertise. Anybody can apply to be an expert. So, yeah, your friends know best, according to LoveThis but not always. Based in London, UK, LoveThis has been in private Beta for two months and is privately funded. |
Flickr Burning As Yahoo Fiddles: Head Of Service Walks Away | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 14 | When you ask Yahoo who is in charge of Flickr, they always point to one man: . Well, technically, there are people at Yahoo above him in charge of the group of products that Flickr is in (Applications Division). But it’s Rothenberg, as head of product, who they’ll tell you is leading the day to day. Not anymore. Rothenberg is out as head of product for Flickr. He the news himself earlier today. He had been on the team for five years, dating back to when original co-founders and were still running the ship. , but Rothenberg stuck around. And for the past two years, he’s been the guy in charge. One funny thing here is that we had been hearing for weeks that Rothenberg was leaving. But Yahoo kept denying it until the bitter end. But it’s hard to deny a public tweet, I guess. Here’s their official statement: Matthew Rothenberg has made the personal decision to move on to a new endeavor. In the interim, Markus Spiering will be stepping in as head of product management. Flickr continues to have an innovative, energetic and creative leadership team that is dedicated to its community of members. Flickr remains a key priority for Yahoo! and we are fully committed to making it the best photo-sharing experience on the Web. Note the wording. He made a “personal decision” — Yahoo clearly wants avoid the impression that he’s leaving a sinking ship. But there’s a reason we’ve kept hearing rumors about his imminent departure: the situation is not great inside the once proud service. Following the leak of the “sunsetting” of Delicious, talk quickly moved to Flickr: what would happen there? Everyone was worried, but Yahoo publicly stated that they were very much backing the service. Still, ex-employees and users alike . And lately, we’ve been hearing a lot of talk of internal turmoil within Yahoo and the Flickr group. Last fall, John Matheny took over the group Applications Division in charge. He’s an ex-Microsoft guy, and you may recall during the time when Microsoft was trying to buy Yahoo, users took to Flickr to boycott such a deal specifically because they did not like Microsoft. We’ve heard around a half dozen or so folks have left just in the past few months. Of course, the situation wasn’t said to be much better before Matheny took over. Flickr has had some big time layoffs over the past couple of years and leaders have butted heads with those at Yahoo over direction. Frankly, it’s surprising that Rothenberg stuck around this long. But now he’s gone (officially, his last day is next week, we hear). He’s to greener pastures. |
MicroCenter Takes Up To $200 Off MacBook Pro | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 3 | 14 | Here’s a quick heads-up for you on this Monday afternoon. MicroCenter on your purchase of one of laptops. That’s handy. There’s no “catch” nearest I can tell. No having to buy a year’s magazine subscription, no having to pay for some additional warranty. That means you can get an entry-level MacBook Pro for $1,099 ( $100), or the top-of-the-line model for $2,299 (down $200). I’d point out that you could probably build two gaming PCs for $2,300, but that’s neither here nor there. |
Digital Textbook Startup Inkling Nabs 'Multi-Million Dollar' Investment From McGraw-Hill And Pearson | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 3 | 22 | a startup that develops an innovative digital textbook platform, has scored a ‘multi-million dollar investment from educational content giants and Current investors and also participated in the financing. The company, which an undisclosed Series A round of funding in August 2010, declined to reveal the exact amount of funding raised in this round. Inkling’s technology delivers interactive textbooks that include the ability to collaborate, add multimedia and communicate within content. The startup adds another layer to online textbooks by adding 3-D objects, video, quizzes, and even social interaction within the content. Inkling’s sync technology lets students collaborate in real time by sharing their notes and highlights with one another. And students can see comments from their friends and professors right alongside their own notes. Clearly, an investment from textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson is a big endorsement for the fledgling company which only launched last year. Both publishers have also committed to build interactive editions of their top titles for the Inkling platform. Inkling has also struck similar deals with a number of other higher education publishers, including John Wiley & Sons, W. W. Norton and Wolters Kluwer. As we Inkling launched an iPad app to show the power of its platform. The app, which featured a photography textbook, includes over 100 videos, interactive diagrams to help you understand the effect of lighting and equipment settings, workshop videos, high resolution images, and the full text of the original book. Within the book, you can watch videos from the author’s lighting and photography workshop and commentary on his photography and how he captures his images. Inkling’s deals with McGraw-Hill and Pearson are comprehensive. Inkling will feature the top 100 undergraduate titles from McGraw-Hill Higher Education as well as medical education and reference content from McGraw-Hill Professional. Pearson will be using Inkling to feature its MBA curriculum, as well as a number of undergraduate arts and sciences titles. |
Tired of Angry Birds? Get even with What a Stupid Pigeon | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 3 | 22 | There’s probably no need to remind you that has over 40 million monthly active users. Or that Finland-based just closed a with and to develop internationally and launch the game on PC and video game consoles. The game that inspired Loic Le Meur’s at LeWeb has generated over 2 million just through selling . But what if you’re just plain old tired of Angry Birds? What if you’re looking for the opposite of the game that’s been a raging success? Well, if that just so happens to be the case, you can take your anger out on those no-good birds with . Developed by French companies and , the game lets you drop-kick pigeons as far as you can. Users naturally gain points for distance and – unlike Angry Birds – for avoiding obstacles. And while this game is currently only available on Facebook, I can see kicking pigeons being a wildly popular activity on a touch screen. The English version of What a Stupid Pigeon currently counts some 106K users and the French version counts roughly twice as many. Antvoice currently has developed – the most popular being with 2.1 million users in 4 languages. To make a quick comparison, French social gaming success hit game counts only 200K more users. The majority of the applications published by Antvoice are available in 4 languages and the French market represents 30% of the total user base. Like many social games, Antvoice’s business model is based primarily on the sale of virtual goods. For games like What a Stupid Pigeon, users can buy accessories and objects used to “battle” their friends. The company currently generates 80% of its revenue through the sale of virtual goods, processed via s micropayment solution. Regardless of whether or not you decide to make an in-app purchase, don’t hesitate to get even with those Angry Birds and kick some lame, virtual pigeons. |
DIY WristWatch Turntable | John Biggs | 2,011 | 3 | 22 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfFWFbSO8Gk&w=640&h=510] Skrikitty skrikitty scratch! This odd little turntable lets you rock the wheels of steel from the comfort of your own wrist, in turn becoming the most popular of your peer group excepting the kids with real talent and/or good looks. You can read the or just watch the video a few times. Your call. |
DIY Electronic Business Cards: You Know, For Nerds | John Biggs | 2,011 | 3 | 22 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud7QIuD4lUM&w=640&h=510] Although a post that begins with “over the past six months I have set up fairly complete printed circuit board fabrication lab in my apartment, cheaply and safely” can be somewhat disconcerting, I believe that a man with the chops to make a PCB fab in is apartment is a man worthy of knowing. Luckily, that man, one Jared Foster, has made these fancy persistence-of-vision business cards to share his info with you.
The process includes full instructions for creating an etching tank, oven, and any number of electronical doodads. Sadly, this is so far beyond my ken that it might as well be Swahili. |
Chumby 8 On Sale Tomorrow For $199, Ships April 5 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 22 |
Everyone’s favorite extra screen/robot/app platform, , is back for another round. They showed off their new model at CES (where we them) but there was no sign of pricing or availability. No longer! The Chumby 8 (named for its 8-inch screen) will ship on April 5th, and you can . Good deal? You be the judge. The Chumby platform is a weird one, to be sure, but there are a ton of Flash Lite apps that should run just fine on the new hardware, and the 8″ 800×600 touchscreen is really quite practical for on-desk use. Plus there’s a full web browser. Although I have to say I’m sorry to see that their weird design has given way to something more anonymous (but practical). It’s got an 800MHz Marvell CPU in there, 128MB of RAM, a mic, speakers, headphone out, and has SD and CF storage. Not nearly as powerful as today’s tablets, but if you’re looking for something stationary and quirky, it could be for you. Here’s the full press release, which explains it better than I can, really: Next gen chumby arrives April 5 for $199, pre-orders begin today San Diego, CA — March 23, 2011 — chumby industries today announced the release
of the chumby8, the much-anticipated next generation chumby device. Officially
launching on April 5, the chumby8 is priced at $199 and available today for pre-orders
at chumby.com/store. With a sleek new design, an 8-inch LCD touchscreen, enhanced
features, and over 1,500 free apps, the chumby8 delivers a personalized stream of your
favorite apps in addition to serving as a digital photo frame and music player. “The chumby8 truly marks an evolution of the chumby device and software platform,
creating a more personalized and user-friendly Internet streaming device that
will complete any connected home or office” said Derrick Oien, CEO of chumby
industries. “We’ve taken the time over the past year to listen to chumby fans and owners
and incorporate their feedback into the new chumby8 and created a great multi-purpose
connected device capable of tailoring to all.” New features of the chumby8 include: New, modern industrial design available in black and red. Customized skins
available from Skinit
8-inch 800×600 touchscreen LCD
Two USB ports, CF and SD slots make it possible to upload pictures, music and
other personal media of your choosing turning your chumby8 into a personalized
digital photo frame and music player
New web browser support, allows you to access links within apps
Revamped UI and streamlined navigation allows you to manage apps and
channels directly from the device. The chumby8 comes preloaded with ready-to-
play themed channels showcasing the best chumby apps in entertainment, news,
humor, games, kids, sports and more
Updates to share features make it easier to send photos, videos and apps to
friends and family
Robust Internet radio offers over 10,000 internet radio and podcast stations,
including Napster, Pandora, SHOUTcast, iheartradio, Mediafly, New York Times
and CBS, with more to come.
Full alarm system allows you to wake up to your favorite music stations and apps
Task scheduler allows you to perform a routine task on your device like entering night mode at a certain time or playing music.
Flash Lite 4 update to support AS3 coming soon The chumby8 has access to over 1,500 free applications— ranging from music and
social networking sites, news and entertainment gossip, to video clips and sports scores.
Content is available from well-known media sites including: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter,
MTV Networks, Groupon, People.com and many others. Users can monitor their social
networks, view and share their photos from sites like Flickr and Photobucket, watch
sports clips, play games, or choose from a multitude of clock applications to display on
the touchscreen device. About chumby industries chumby industries, based in San Diego, California, is a software company that works
with consumer electronics OEMs to bring a rich and personalized Internet experience
to a multitude of connected products, ranging from devices as simple as clock radios
to high-definition televisions. The open chumby platform enables developers to easily
create Flash content for chumby-powered devices resulting in a constantly growing
catalog of more than 1,500 applications. For more information visit chumby.com or follow
us on twitter @chumby. |
43 Promising Startups Present At Y Combinator's Biggest Demo Day Yet | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 3 | 22 | Twice a year, holds special events called Demo Day, when its most recent batch of startups present to a packed room full of top investors. It’s the grand finale of the program, where entrepreneurs have a few minutes to show off what they’ve built in the hopes of raising a seed round to help their companies stay afloat for at least a few more months (and hopefully much longer). Of course, Demo Day is a bit different from what it was a year or two ago. The spectre of a $0 bank account is further off, as Y Combinator companies are now being offered $150,000 in convertible debt by , the fund created by Yuri Milner and Ron Conway’s SV Angel. And there are now more companies than ever — 43 companies presented during Demo Day this afternoon, which means they’re each given a bit less time. But the spirit is still the same. It’s a whirlwind introduction to some of the most promising tech startups around, and investors are so eager to attend that Y Combinator has had to start offering Demo Days per session. The investors at today’s session (which is generally more desirable than day two) had something special in common: YC cofounder Paul Graham announced that all investors in attendance had previously invested in a Y Combinator company. We’ve already covered many of the companies that presented today (and most of the others were off the record). Here’s a handy list of links to our past coverage.
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On Firefox 4 Day, Chrome 11 Hits Beta With The Ability To Talk To Your Computer! | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 3 | 22 | As you’re aware by now, earlier today Mozilla officially unveiled Firefox 4 to the world. At first glance, it’s a great update . And that’s good, because that’s exactly what they need to combat the fast-rising Chrome browser from Google. But Google isn’t sitting still either. This afternoon, Google Chrome 11 into beta. On the surface, users might see this as little more than the version which brings . But underneath, there are a couple awesome new things going on as well. One of the new features is added support for the HTML5 speech input API. This means that you’ll be able to talk to your computer and Chrome can interpret it. Those who have become accustomed to doing this on Android and other mobile devices will love this. More importantly, it’s an HTML5 spec that any developer will be able to take advantage of, not just Google. If you’re running Chrome 11, . It works very well. You speak, and the browser is able to transcribe what you say. No Flash, no plug-in. Yep. Awesome. The Chrome 11 beta also bring an initial take on GPU-accelerated 3D CSS, Google notes. This means that developers will also be able to create websites with 3D effects using CSS shortly. Again, very cool. As the version numbers have been rapidly increasing, Google says it doesn’t like touting new version bumps. But this one is pretty nifty. And it should go stable fairly soon as well. |
Actually A Good Idea: Toothbrush With Built-In Toothpaste | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 22 |
Tired of keeping around a tiny toothbrush for travel, or leaving nice ones at the hotel by accident? Don’t like to have to keep little 3-oz toothpaste tubes in a drawer in the bathroom? . Now, I do like this concept, though there are a few issues that come to mind: In conclusion, I’ll take my chances with regular toothbrushes. [via and ] |
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse Warns Of The Danger Of Duopoly In Cell Phone Land | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 3 | 22 | AT&T’s for T-Mobile this weekend wasn’t just a surprise to the general public. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse was also “shocked” to find out about it. “That one was not on the radar screen,” he tells CNBC’s Jim Cramer in an interview today ( ). He didn’t think it would be possible because of antitrust issues, and he is definitely playing up those issues now. Hesse doesn’t like the deal one bit because it will make Sprint a distant third after AT&T and Verizon in the U.S. mobile market. (A combined AT&T-T-Mobile will have more than 100 million subscribers, as does Verizon already, while Sprint is half that size with 50 million). He’s already to complain to Congress, and he’s practicing his arguments on TV. He warns Cramer of a duopoly situation: If this transaction goes through you’re talking 79 percent, or roughly 80 percent of the market controlled by two companies. I think that’s a little too much–too much concentration. AT&T thinks that the DOJ will look at share in local markets where it is not as concentrated, and also argues that the merger will be good for the country because the combined entity will spend billions of dollars to spread mobile broadband across the country. The numbers Hesse cites are in terms of mobile contracts. But even if you look at revenues, Hesse figures Verizon and a post-merger AT&T-T-Mobile, “if it’s approved by the DOJ and the SEC, you’re talking 74 percent of the market of all the wireless revenues in the US market being controlled by two companies.” And that is dangerous, he continues, because they are not just wireless carriers, they are “vertically integrated companies” with landlines and backhaul networks that other telecom companies like Sprint rely on. He worries that giving them more market power will just embolden them to squeeze Sprint even more on backhaul fees: Roughly a third of our costs of operating the cell site goes to AT&T and Verizon, who’s–to pay for access. And those rates are usurious. They’re very, very high. And so we would hope to see our back hall costs come down dramatically, at a minimum. Is that a concession he’s fishing for in the form of a break on Sprint’s backhaul fees? Well played, sir. |
Netflix Shares Soar, Site Goes Down | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 3 | 22 | It’s not a great day for the Internet, folks. Web services seem to be dropping like flies. For several hours today, , causing several TechCrunch writers to consider writing on legal pads and posting on Craigslist. Some even considered posting on HuffPo. Don’t worry, they’ve been fired. On top of this, and much to the chagrin of the video-on-demand watching public, Netflix went down for what seemed like a century. I subscribe to Netflix Instant, and as you can see from the message above, I was not allowed to watch my “programs” this evening when I wanted to. Not cool, Netflix. Not cool. Those trying to access Netflix mobile were also shut out from using the service. Some iPad users received an error message that read, “The requested URL /WiHome was not found on this server”. Ironically, this outage occurred a few hours after Netflix stock was upgraded to “outperform” thanks to , “who lifted the stock price target to $280”. Very audacious indeed. CNBC crazy man Jim Cramer agrees, that he thinks Netflix is worth twice its current price. Netflix stock price hit an all-time high of $247.55 last month, and today rose 4.2 percent, to $221.88 in late trading. What’s more, the service now boasts over 20 million subscribers and that the service has become the largest source of U.S. Internet traffic during peak Web-surfing hours. Yes, it seems that Netflix could break the Internet — that is, of course, if the Internet doesn’t break Netflix first. Naturally, the Web has been a-flutter with Netflix related chatter, with many of its subscribers taking to Twitter to express their frustration, like this Tweet from one Paula Simone: “dammit! netflix isn’t working. I had to put my dvd of arrested development in the xbox by hand! BY HAND! what is this 2009?” Of course, sees a silver lining for the video hub, “Netflix’s current outage and the complaints about [it] in Twitter show how integral it’s become to entertainment for the tech generation”. Subscribers even created , so you know it’s bad. Netflix publicly recognized the outage in its own Twitter post around 4p.m. PST, but has yet to explain the cause of the outage or project a timeline for when the service might be available again. Netflix spokesman Steven Swasey said he did not yet have any details on what caused the problem. Amazon, which has been trying to compete with Netflix in on-demand-video (and launched its last month but has been forced to watch the big red video service . Amazon currently only offers about 5,000 titles, compared to Netflix’s 20,000+, so the eCommerce giant is likely very pleased with what transpired today, and may very well be massaging its hands and whispering “eexcellent” . The outage today presumably just goes to show that Netflix will have to invest more in its data centers and servers to make sure the streaming option remains available, because users likely won’t stand for these kind of interruptions much longer. Pitchforks and torches are on the horizon. In the past, to its subscribers following large-scale outages. It remains to be seen whether it remained down for long enough to call for such compensation, but from what I saw on Twitter, many were suffering serious abandonment issues. Some were even forced to exercise instead of watching on-demand video. I know. God help us all. As of 7:30pm, my Netflix is back up, but no official word from the company as of yet. We experienced some WordPress issues earlier today and, as a result, an early iteration of this post was published. Updates have been made and problems fixed. Specifically in regard to Netflix’s current stock price, which is $221.88, $172.69. Also, according to my calculations, it is no longer Q3 2010, it is Q6 2015. Thank you for your comments. Our sister site Engadget (via Crain’s) the sad fact that Showtime will not be renewing its license with Netflix this summer and, as a result, will not renew “streaming access to older seasons of currently airing shows like Dexter and Californication”. Damn shame. @NetflixHelps at 9:30pm PST, saying that streaming is officially back online. Mobile device outages are still a work in progress, and no explanation as to the cause of the problem yet. I, personally, blame Hollywood. at 2pm Wednesday that it will be offering compensation to the streaming subscribers affected by the outage. Details to be arriving in our inboxes sometime today, methinks. I applaud Netflix for doing the right thing. After all, doing the right thing involves giving me money. |
Google Joins The Patent Madness With "Methods For Enticing Users To Access A Web Site" | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 22 |
I guess the USPTO felt they were leaving Google out of the game, what with Apple Microsoft , and Paul Allen . So they went ahead and granted Google’s request to . Yes, that’s right: among other things, they are claiming the method of creating a special logo and then providing special results if you click that logo. In their defense, the patent was filed for in 2001. Of course, that’s not much of a defense. I think we can all find plenty of examples going back more than 10 years of this exact sort of thing. And really, isn’t it just an online analog to, say, putting up a sign on the store that says “Spring Sale, 50% Off” – and then having the spring collection just inside the door? A little digging would surely turn up similar ideas to the storytelling thing. I’ve seen countless promotions like that. If Google invented something new, this patent doesn’t seem to drill down far enough to include only that. There really isn’t too much more to say, other than the usual deploring of the state of the patent system, which proves itself over and over to be completely inadequate and inappropriate for handling today’s intellectual property. Yet the necessity of such a system (in one form or another) and the enormous backlog of data associated with it are poisonous to attempts at modification. It’ll likely take billions of dollars and a visionary “Cyber Czar” to make it happen, though of course I’m sure we all have simple and effective solutions that fit on bar napkins. Modernizing our patent system isn’t something we can take lightly, and the transition will be weird and difficult. But it’s got to be better than this. I mean really, Google. A method for enticing users? [via and ] |
null | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 14 | null |
TechCrunch And Millions Of WordPress.com Blogs On Pause Due To Back-End Outage [Update: We're Back!] | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 22 |
Notice anything different about this post? How about that are orange? Yes, that’s right, I’m blogging off of CrunchGear because it’s been impossible to access our WordPress.com back-end for a little over two hours. CrunchGear is hosted on RackSpace so it isn’t affected. WordPress.com has told our developer that the issue is an internal, programmatic error. The error seems to be affecting the entire site network, so it’s not just us but millions of others sites like and people’s personal blogs (WordPress.com serves 18 million publishers). They’ve also revised the ETA for restoring service multiple times, with no fix in site. Trying to access the TechCrunch back-end currently results in an error message. We’ve seen the gamut of error messages over the past three hours. Last time we experienced WordPress issues it was due to but that is apparently not the case here. I’ve contacted WordPress.com for more details and will update this post (hopefully on ) when I hear back. And we’re back! Looks like our CMS is working again. |
Groupon Wants To Hire Over 100 People In Palo Alto Office, Buys Billboard Campaign | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 3 | 22 | Daily deals site has joined the in an effort to bulk up staff at its West Coast office. Groupon PR representative Julie Mossler tells me it’s looking to hire over 100 developers and technologists at its 409 Sherman Avenue location in Palo Alto by the end of this year — Specifically in data, analytics, networking, mathematics and Ruby on Rails. said Mossler. Billboard campaigns on the 101 are said to run in the 30K range and have been most famously . In this specific campaign a Groupon billboard with a discreet G went up on Paul Avenue near the Cesar Chavez exit on March 9th (below). The big push happened on March 21st, with the tagline unveiled just yesterday. The campaign will run until July and the company plans to set up more billboards shortly. Groupon has 2,000 employees in its Chicago offices, another 3,000 in its affiliate offices around the world. Groupon also has the cash in its coffers to hire, having gone through a $950 million venture round back in January, with rumors of an IPO by the end of this year. Its most recent valuation was reported by Bloomberg to be $25 billion. Groupon, whose core product can be thought of in and of itself as a form of marketing, has had a mixed history with ad campaigns — Notably pulling its consumer-facing Super Bowl campaign after a wave of backlash. Mossler tells me that the billboard campaign has been successful so far, Those interested can visit |
Judge Rejects Google Books Settlement: Make It Opt-In | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 3 | 22 |
Federal Judge Denny Chin between Google and written content creators, saying that the proposed (in discussion ) is over-broad, and takes too many liberties on the part of orphan works and other potentially disputable items. The agreement would have put millions of books, in and out of print, online, but Chin suggested that the nature of the agreement (opt-out rather than opt-in) was too permissive of Google’s “scan first, get permission later” approach, and that it essentially rewarded them for illegal behavior. Seems to me that rewarding illegal behavior is pretty common these days, but we’ll assume that Chin meant well here. In the summary of his decision, Chin says: While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the ASA would simply go too far… Indeed, the ASA [Amended Settlement Agreement] would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case. I think it’s fair to say that while the agreement is headed in the right direction, it also has an air of frontier justice to it. Google has set itself up to be the only reasonable partner, and the only real provider of this information, making them the de facto default for online distribution (Bezos right away). Legitimizing the legal grey area Google’s work exists in seems like a dubious precedent. Chin also cited copyright concerns, though the policy suggested in the ASA seems reasonable enough: Google may not display in-print Books at all unless and until it receives prior express authorization from the Books’ Rightsholders. The ASA does give Google the right to make Non-Display Uses of in-print Books. (ASA § 3.4).Google may display out-of-print Books without the prior express authorization of the Books’ Rightsholders, but its right to do so ceases when and if the Rightsholder directs Google to stop. Amazon and Microsoft pointed out (as noted in the Judge’s objections) that by approving the agreement, he may effecting a mass-transfer of copyrights without the consent of the rightsholders, and against the laws restricting such far-reaching copyright actions to Congress. It’s certainly arguable that an agreement such as this one, regardless of how sober it appears to be today, is as likely as not to appear incredibly shortsighted when any serious reworking of copyright law (in light of services like Google Books) takes effect. In some cases judicial activism” might be welcome, but I think I understand his unwillingness to take this chance when the affected parties worldwide number in the millions. Switching from an opt-out to an opt-in model seems to be the magic bullet here. Unfortunately, that complicates things for Google. Well, the other way around complicates things for concerned rights-holders. As the primary force behind this action, it behooves Google to assume whatever level of responsibility is necessary to make it work. Will they do so? The clock is ticking, and their advantage in having preemptively scanned all those books (in good faith, but still outside the law) is dwindling. Here’s the full ruling, for your perusal: I’m glad that Chin is careful to state that he is cognizant of the potential benefits of such a system, but objects on ethical and technical grounds. Different from . We’ll continue coverage as soon as Google or the other parties involved have an official response other than disappointment. |
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