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I'm Having A Party. Here's $50. Bring Cool People — Or You Owe Me $100. | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 4 | 9 | Think about the best parties you’ve ever been to. They’re probably not thrown by some random promoter that you found via a flyer on the street. They’re probably thrown by your friends, or a friend of a friend. And they probably came together organically. Or at least more organically than a party you pay for. I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week following the news that Google is tying all employee bonuses this year . At first I thought this was a joke. . They dance around the word “social” in the wording in the memo, but make no mistake: that’s exactly what this is all about. “ .” Social. And yes, you read that correctly, the bonus can go up or based upon Google’s performance in the social realm. The critics are already jumping all over this one, noting that it looks like all Google employees will be losing bonus money this year. And given the decided lack of success from products like Wave, Buzz, and to a broader extent, Orkut, who can blame them? But on a higher level, it’s the strategy itself that may be the most interesting thing here. Mathew Ingram notes that . While Mike Elgan calls this (as CEO). I actually have a slightly different take on this. I think that on paper, this is actually a good idea and strategy. But in practice, I think it will ultimately be looked upon as a bad thing and may even directly backfire. At this point, at least we know that Google understands the value of social. Hell, they just appointed a SVP of Social ( , which we more or less ). They’re clearly not asleep at the wheel as Facebook zips by them. And they know that unlike Wave, Buzz, and Orkut, they need to get meaningful traction worldwide. With Wave and Buzz, both products saw an initial wave of buzz (see what I did there?). But the hype quickly died down and the products atrophied. Given what we know about Google’s social strategy going forward, and interpreting this new bonus strategy, it would seem that Google wants to do the exact opposite with any new products they push. Instead of launching under some massive buildup and then watching a product not be able to live up to it, they want to do that are propelled by Googlers themselves. Again, on paper this is not a bad strategy. Many of the services you know today started out this way. They didn’t launch with pomp and circumstance, instead they started out small and were pushed by a small group of diehard early-adopters. Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, even Facebook could fall into that category. It’s the same story over and over again. It doesn’t always work — but it has a much better chance than the massive launch route. And much less downside. The problem that I have is that all of those launches were organic (or mostly organic). Naturally, employees of the companies were pushing their products, but at launch, all of them were small startups with just a few employees. The “Google Strategy” of making sure all employees push the products simply wouldn’t have meant much. Instead, they had to rely on the early adopters (some of whom were friends, but that too isn’t enough alone). And the natural progression from there. But Google has nearly 25,000 employees. It seems that will lead to an artificially and prematurely inflated re-creation of the launch environment described above. And that may only serve to create the type of paid-for party that I talked about at the beginning. It’s a party that will attract a lot of people. But it’s not one that anyone will likely remember — or want to go to again. And given that we all now know about this strategy, the initial Googler push will be an even harder sell. We’ll all be very skeptical. So the strategy could actually backfire. Unless… Google can actually get away with this strategy if the products they release are good. Really good. If they’re good, the Googlers’ push should actually accelerate the launches. It won’t matter at that point if the initial push is real or fake, enough people will try the product(s) out and see for themselves. But given Google’s past history in social, this is a very big “if”. Over the past few months, we’ve had more information than anyone about Google’s social strategy and products. We’ve gotten leaks and have talked to people who have actually used the things Google is working on. All of this is still very fluid (see: ), but the constant has been that we have not yet heard of anyone absolutely blown away by what Google is working on. This worries me with regard to this new Google strategy. Having said that, Google still has several things yet to launch, many of which I’m sure we still know nothing about. For all the and (or is it ?) mobile networks, there are likely many more things being worked on. And we also know that Google has been calling in other experts in the space from around the Bay Area to get opinions and advice. But this many-pronged approach has issues of its own. As Elgan points out in his Computerworld post today: People prefer Facebook to Google’s many socially enabled services because Facebook is a place they can go to be social. With Google’s far-flung social services, there is no “place.” There is no party. Google’s approach to social isn’t fun. Google’s strategy of baking social into everything will never, ever beat Facebook. Google needs a social networking site. (But not Orkut.) Mike has stated . One major problem that Google has in social is that there is no one place to go to be social. And it’s pretty clear at this point that there won’t be. That was in the cards a long time ago, but now it’s all about these new products wrapping Google’s other products in social. That’s going to be a really hard sell. I’m left wondering if it wouldn’t be smarter for Google simply to focus on a frontier that hasn’t been won yet: mobile. While Facebook and Twitter are both growing very, very fast in mobile, there’s still an opportunity for something new to come along in that space from a social angle and disrupt them. And Google would have a massive potential advantage with Android. Why not start something totally new from scratch — not tied into any of Google’s very forced social graphs like email contacts — and go from there? . And Google may be indirectly pushing this way with things like the . Speaking of discos, let’s hop back to the idea of a party. Unless their products are truly excellent right off the bat, Google needs their social products to be parties that friends get invited to organically. As we’ve already seen with Buzz, being force fed can lead to . That’s why this new strategy worries me — it’s pretty likely that it will not work. We’ll all be at a party that no one wants to be at because a bunch of Googlers are being paid to invite us. But if that’s the case, at least that extra bonus money saved can go towards the “Buy Twitter Now” fund. |
OMG/JK: Google "Open", Google Re-Org, Google Social | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 4 | 9 | This week’s episode of OMG/JK is all-Google, all the time. Given the big shakeup at the top of the search giant (with co-founder Larry Page taking over the CEO role this week), it should be no surprise that a lot of interesting things are happening. But even more interesting is how things are shaking out. The “open” debate has been kicked up a notch, there’s been a huge re-organization, and the big push towards a more social Google is finally beginning. Jason and I debate all these things. And of course, we get into it over the whole “open” debate. Jason hates it when I say “‘open'”. Watch the video above, and below find some posts relevant to this week’s episode:
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Foursquare Wants To Help Google Employees Get Massive Counteroffers, Too | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 4 | 9 | CEO says he wants to do his part in helping Google employees get their from Google, too (that’s what we’re calling them now, FUM Counteroffers, you can figure it out). He writes: >> “If you’re a Google employee and you aren’t out interviewing at Facebook, Twitter or Zynga you are a moron.” what about foursquare, brother?! we’re hiring faster than we can drop desks in here! where’ the love?! :) ………………………..
Dennis Crowley
co-founder / ceo, foursquare We’ll, there’s the love right there, Dennis. So if you’re a Googler and want for doing nothing more than interviewing at a startup, add Foursquare to that list. And let us know if it works. Dennis adds “we Foursquare jobs are . |
Daily Crunch: Sorted Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 4 | 9 | |
Internet Entrepreneurs Are Like Professional Athletes, They Peak Around 25 | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 4 | 30 | a venture capitalist told me recently while discussing the prospects for a thirty-something founder, Why? Because young entrepreneurs are more creative and imaginative, and are willing put 100% of their lives into their startups, he said. says the VC. He had a number of caveats. First, this only applies to consumer Internet entrepreneurs. Enterprise and hardware startups tend to do better with older founders, where experience (and direct sales experience) matter a lot. And there are plenty of founders that, like Michael Jordan, can peak way beyond 25 (and the is really probably at least a 27). he said, Peak age of startup founders is an endless debate. Vivek Wadhwa says his data shows that older entrepreneurs are , for example. He argues that ageism is more about more than getting value for money. Other data suggests the opposite. Like this – last year Y Combinator said the average age of their founders . Of course they could have selection bias, but Y Combinator is one of the most data driven investors I’ve heard of. if older people did better, they’d be funding more of them. At in New York in May we’ve got a very cool interview planned. says they’ve analyzed deep demographic data for their 500+ investments over the last twelve years or so. It takes years to know how successful a startup will eventually be, so this is particularly valuable data. Will they agree that Internet startup founders should be looking to make a name for themselves before they hit 30, or give up? We’ll know in a few short weeks. |
null | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 4 | 7 | null |
Gillmor Gang 4.30.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 4 | 30 | The Gillmor Gang — Kevin Marks, Danny Sullivan, JP Rangaswami, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — christened the new Gang studio with a surprise welcome to Kevin Marks. It turns out he’s joining salesforce.com on Monday, following JP (six months), JT (7 years), and me, who is celebrating my one year anniversary. Kevin has been a forceful champion of open standards at Apple, Technorati, Google, BT (Ribbit), the Gillmor Gang, and now salesforce.com. Before, and once the festivities were out of the way, we got back to Gang business, namely the continued aftermath of the phone location recording crisis. With free lunch debunked, we tackled the Amazon outage and its impact on the Cloud. You can decide for yourselves, but the consensus is that such challenges will be remembered fondly as a validation of the moment, as with the Gmail outage of several years ago, when the Cloud passed from inflection point to basic services. The velocity of business in the iPad age, where CEOs can see deeply into their companies in realtime, demands a level of interactive services and an iterative feedback loop not possible with the previous generation of software. And that lead to a debate about iPhone video calls and what Danny is looking for in a flying car. |
Daily Crunch: Sandy Bottom Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 4 | 30 | |
The Cloud Has Us All In A Fog | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 4 | 30 | Ever heard of ? It’s an open-source project that “enables arbitrary, anonymous transfers of files between Dropbox accounts.” Dropbox hopes you haven’t; they it this week, and even accidentally reported that it was subject to a DMCA takedown notice, with predictably futile results. I’m mostly sympathetic: I’m a huge fan of their service, Dropship was a clear violation of their terms, and for obvious reasons they don’t want to turn into an anonymous peer-to-peer file-sharing service. Unfortunately, they accidentally built a system which enabled just that. How about Sony’s PlayStation Network? Of course you have. It was so this week that Sony had to . Did you also know that Sony’s PS3 firmware is effectively wide open, because they made a ? Did you know that that’s , and that it raised the spectre of the hacker(s) and turning them into by far the biggest botnet in history? That probably wasn’t what Sony had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enabled just that. How about the new Google Docs Android app? Came out this week, and it’s pretty great. Among its many features is the ability to take a picture of an image with text and have that text and turned into a document. Can’t wait ’til they integrate Google Translate into that, too, and recapitulate last year’s hot app . But I bet book publishers are pretty unhappy. Not long ago, if you wanted to scan a book you had to actually , or buy a copy and turn every page. Now would-be book pirates can just crowdsource 10 people to go to bookstores and take 20 pictures each, et voila: 400 scanned pages in Google Docs. Easier book piracy probably isn’t what Google had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enables just that. This was also the week that people who keep remotely controllable Internet-enabled camera/microphone/GPSes on them at all times expressed when they learned their privacy is at risk. The probably isn’t what the mobile industry had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enables just that. What do these all have in common? The unexpected results of connecting client devices to the cloud. (Yeah, I don’t really like the term either, but it’s better than the alternatives.) People talk about “moving to the cloud,” as if we haven’t already. The heavy lifting may happen on the server farms ( ) but every connected computer, phone, and game console already serves as a computing cloud’s eye, ear, and tentacle. . Unintended consequences. Get used to ’em. My favourite Douglas Adams books are the novels, in which the protagonist makes use of “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things” to solve crimes in hilariously unexpected ways. Now we’re . So we shouldn’t be too surprised to find ourselves moving into a Dirk Gently future, in which off-kilter left-field ricochet consequences happen at an ever-increasing rate. You can bet that those cited above are just the beginning — and that there’s a lot of money to be made in seeing them before they happen. : Aspex Design, |
Silicon South Africa: Google Launches Incubator For African Startups | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 4 | 8 | Google that it will be launching a startup incubator in Cape Town, South Africa, called . The incubator aims to support the local tech ecosystem in South Africa by offering local startups access to seed capital, Google mentorship, and angel investors. Umbono will focus on web and mobile-based startups building solutions to local problems, which also have regional appeal, in an effort to help them “transform their ideas into companies”, according to Google SA country manager . Fittingly, “umbono” happens to be the very Zulu word for “vision” or “idea”. The South African incubator will be structured as a 6-month program, in which 5 startups chosen by Umbono’s panel of angel investors and Google representatives will receive a seed investment of $25K to $50K. The teams will also have access to Umbono’s free office space, bandwidth, and a mentorship network of Google experts, ready to advise the startups on issues from “product design and commercialization to legal incorporation and valuation”, Google said of Umbono in its . Local bandwidth is expensive in Cape Town — so this will likely be very attractive to young tech startups in South Africa. Not to mention the added bonus of $25K. Umbono’s home city of Cape Town, located on the southwestern shore of South Africa, has for years been attempting to position itself as a hub of innovation and technology in subsaharan Africa. , a non-profit organization dedicated to developing information and communications technology in South Africa, has been lobbying Google (and others) to locate their incubators in Cape Town for some time. Along with Cape IT, Cape Town is home to , a similar initiative aimed at fostering tech entrepreneurship in South Africa, as well as veteran incubators, like the highly-regarded, 10-year-old . South Africa has also produced its fair share of successful (and well-funded) startups, like , a website creator that has raised $25 million, , an instant messaging app with over 27 million subscribers, and , a group buying club, which by Groupon earlier this year — to name a few. And now the country’s startup ecosystem adds another notch to its belt by luring Google’s business development talent to its shores. When I asked Umbono spokeswoman Johanna Kollar about why Google chose South Africa and whether or not it has plans for incubators elsewhere in Africa, she told me that, at this point, Umbono is a pilot project. The incubator will test the African waters, and if the model proves to be viable — and beneficial — Google will look to expand into other emerging markets. she said, |
Ralph Lauren Puts Out A Waterproof, Solar-Paneled Backpack | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 8 |
This thing is way out of my price range, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think about having one. The Solar Panel Backpack (very original, Ralph) in the RLX line is… well, it’s a backpack with a solar panel on it. The material isn’t specified, and I can’t really identify it, but they say it’s water-resistant. I doubt you can go diving in it, but it should handle rain, spray, and maybe a quick dip with ease. The solar panel produces a little over 3 watts, which isn’t a lot, but could be enough to put a little juice in your phone. It comes with a battery unit that you can charge up, so you don’t always have to have your device plugged directly in. . Ah well! I’ll keep my bindle, I guess. |
Clearer Shot Of The Alleged Buttonless iPod Touch Looks Nice, Is Fake | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 8 |
Our anonymous tipster who sent the other day, or at least someone claiming to be him, sent this new, clear pic over. Now, we don’t just publish things like this willy-nilly. Our highly-paid team of trained image experts has to vet them first. In this case, there were a couple red flags. See if you can spot them before scrolling down. First, you’ve got GIMP in the file origin (not to mention the picture is from the future). Sure, maybe Mr. Tipster just wanted to crop it a bit or remove some identifying details from the background. But after playing with the levels a bit, I noticed a little bit of a “divot” around the square. Push the contrast and color a bit further, and: Yes, those little smears and repeated patterns are evidence of our friend the clone stamp in action. Conclusion: either our tipster is a new guy trying to take us for a ride (nice try), or it’s the same guy and the are ‘shopped, too. It’s hard to say with those because they’re lower resolution and the device is greasy as hell. I have to say, though, if you look past the fact that it’s fake, that slabby frontage is quite pretty. Not practical, but pretty. |
Technicolor Teams Up With Canon For New Digital Cinema Tools | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 8 |
One of the main objections to video shot on DSLRs is that it’s instantly encoded using a lossy codec, and as a consequence much latitude in color correction is lost. might be taking that particular bull by the horns, though, with this It’s an acknowledged weakness in DSLR workflows, so it makes sense to get some high-level color help from perhaps the most recognized name in color. Technicolor is lending their name and expertise to a new setting called CineStyle, which through mechanisms unknown, retains more information for colorists and cinematographers to adjust. It’ll be shown off at NAB in a few days — perhaps more details will emerge then as to which cameras will be getting the new setting. |
House Of Representatives Is Among Top 10 ISPs Visiting Isthegovernmentshutdown.com | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 8 |
We’re five hours away from what might be . Therefore it comes as no surprise that people are checking and that the site, created by editor to keep us posted on the furlough’s status, would experience a spike in traffic. What does come as a surprise is that a good number of the visits came in through the House of Representatives ISP, pushing the congressional body, which also happens to be the battleground that might instigate the shutdown, into the top ten service providers on Google Analytics. Other government agencies like the Senate, the Navy, Homeland Security, the Justice Department and Health and Human Services were also in the top 50 in terms of referral traffic. Seward registered the Isthegovernmentshutdown.com domain on February 25th but didn’t set it up as a -type single serving site until this week. The site has received over 33K views since Monday, 473 from House of Representatives IPs. And in case you have a theory that’s it’s all one obsessed government employee hitting refresh, 80% of those HofR visits are new. Discuss. |
Frame Wars | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 8 |
Recent reports that have both Peter Jackson and James Cameron shooting films at 48 frames per second (fps) have attracted a lot of commentary, and as this is a blog that covers trends and bleeding-edge tech, it seems like a synthesis of this discussion is warranted. Framerate standards sound like a rather dry topic to begin with, but it’s amazing what difference is created by even a minor shift on such supposedly technical grounds. Understanding why framerates are the way they are, and how they are changing, is fundamental to modern media production, and really is a major part of a number of multi-billion-dollar businesses. It’s powerful information, and more importantly, it’s interesting. Let’s take a look at the psychology and history that have created a worldwide standard for moving images, and examine why this standard is under revision.
I should preface all this by saying that frame standards are best experienced, not analyzed on paper. Very few people have actually experienced the types of media under discussion, just as few people had really experienced a true 3D movie until they saw Avatar. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the taste, and nobody has tasted the pudding yet. The pudding has only just been announced. That said, there is a lot of history and a few misconceptions about why things are the way they are that should be known by anyone who wants to hold an informed opinion. First, , a brief course in neuroanatomy is required: Not enough is known about how we see to simply say “here, this is the way we should make movies,” if that were even possible. But a little knowledge about the visual system helps to understand why some things look the way they do. Light that hits your retina is collected and collated by a number of cell classes (whose technical names I forgo for the sake of clarity), some pulling data from various groups of rods and cones, getting aggregate readings, individual readings, and so on. These mediator cells (like many in the nervous system) actually act as a sort of analog-to-digital converter, sending signals at a rate corresponding to how much light their selected rods and cones are receiving. It’s very, very complicated and I’m really simplifying it, but the end result is that these cells tend to have a maximum regular “firing rate” of around 30 per second, sometimes more, sometimes less. This seems to be the source for the common misconception that we see at 30 frames per second, or that anything beyond that is imperceptible. People can perceive small numbers of photons and can identify images shown for only a few milliseconds. What is conveniently ignored is that while individual cells may fire at that rate, they are not linked to each other via some light-speed network that tells them to fire all exactly in sync. There’s some synchronization, yes, but it happens downstream, as these raw signals from the eye are made into something intelligible to the higher-level visual system. So while the 30fps mark is an important one, it’s not that important — not like at 35 or 40fps, everything suddenly becomes perfectly smooth and life-like. Yet there’s a limit to how many “frames” you can perceive; try flapping your hand in front of your face. Why is it blurry if there are billions of photons bouncing onto a progressive and constant polling of high-frequency photodetectors? Later in the visual system flow, there are some very high-level functions that affect perception. Some optical illusions have been made that show how your mind “fills in the gap” when a piece of an image is missing, and how cartoons animated at extremely low framerates still appear to generate natural motion despite having huge gaps between sequential positions of objects. This process of predictive perception is your brain wanting to make a complete and consistent image out of incomplete and contradictory data. It’s a skill you learned throughout your babyhood and youth, and it’s going on all the time. The set of rules for predictive perception is as extensive and varied as are our personalities. The catalog of shortcuts and refinements the brain makes to visual data would be nearly impossible to make. But I have digressed too far in this direction; the point here is that there rules to perception, but they are hard and fast, nor are they authoritatively listed, whatever some may say. The early days of cinema were a crazy world of inconsistent standards, analog and hand-cranked exposures, and to top things off, both audience and filmmakers were completely new to the art. Early silent films were cranked as consistently as possible, and projected at 16fps. This was established as the absolute floor framerate under which people would be bothered by the flicker when the interrupts the light source. The question of persistence of vision (mentioned above) was answered around 1912, and though the myth persists today, early film pioneers took note. Edison actually 46 frames per second, saying “anything less will strain the eye.” Of course, his stock and exposures were inadequate for this standard, and slower frame rates were necessitated by minimum exposure values. Eventually a happy medium of 24 frames per second was established as larger studios began standardizing and patenting film techniques and technologies — it was visually appealing and compatible with existing two-bladed 48Hz projectors. It might have been 23, it might have been 25 (more on 25 later); it certainly could not have been 16 or 40. So 24 was chosen neither arbitrarily or scientifically. It’s also worth noting that the way film was (and is) displayed is not the way we see things on computer screens and LCD TVs now. The image on screen would be shown for a set time (say a 48th of a second) then the shutter wheel would block the image, leaving the screen dark for an equal time. There’s variation here depending on blade count and so on, but the end result is that there is an image, then darkness, then a new image. Today, images follow one another instantly, since there is no need for a shutter to hide the movement of film. This is important. Television threw a wrench into the proceedings. The display technology at the time prohibited displaying an entire frame all at once, so a compromise was made between film’s 24fps, the fields per second cathode ray tubes were capable of at the time, and the 60Hz alternating current frequency used by the US, producing the familiar interlaced image seen still seen on many analog TVs today. The effect (simulated below) can still be seen today; interlaced recording is still an option, indeed the default, on many cameras. The UK and other countries with a 50Hz AC standard adopted a slightly slower field refresh rate with a slightly higher resolution. This is the beginning of the PAL/NTSC framerate conflict that has plagued motion picture production for half a century. I do want to say here that the 25/50 standard was much more logical than our 24/30/60 one then, and it still is now. I pass over a great period of time during which things mostly stayed the same. A great number of techniques were created for converting analog to digital and back to analog, speeding up or slowing down framerates, deinterlacing, conversion pulldowns, and so on. Although these things are interesting to the video professional, they constitute a sort of dark age from which we are only recently emerging — and this emergence is the reason we are having this discussion. As cinema, TV, and home video migrate to an all-digital, all-progressive frame format, we are ridding ourselves of the hated interlacing (my eternal enemy), of insane microscopic frame differences to allow for analog synchronization (23.976, 29.97, etc, though Jackson is filming at 47.96, not straight 48), and of standards established by the guys who were designing the first . It’s a glorious time to be a filmmaker, and it’s only natural that adventurous types like Cameron and Jackson would want to stretch their legs. There’s still some work to be done standardizing brightness and framerates in digital projectors (there are patents and other nonsense involved), but a world where you can shoot at virtually any framerate and have it displayed flawlessly at the same rate, essentially reproducing exactly what the director and production team produce, is a wonderful thing we should not take for granted. Yet we should also not assume that because things like 24 are old, that they are no longer relevant. Today, moving images are generally shot and viewed at one of several refresh rates: 24p, 25p, 30p, 50i, or 60i. There are more, of course, but these are the end products. Sometimes they’re to each other, which is a destructive process that will soon, thankfully, be obsolete. The trouble is with the notion that higher framerates are better. We’ve written before about the plague of frame-interpolating 120Hz and 240Hz (and more) HDTVs that give an unreal, slippery look to things. This isn’t an illusion, or, to be precise, it isn’t any more of an “illusion” than anything you see. What it’s doing is adding information that simply isn’t there. Let’s look at an example. When Bruce Lee punches that guy in Enter The Dragon, you barely see his fist move. The entire punch takes up maybe five frames of film, and even a short exposure would have trouble capturing it clearly at beginning, halfway, three-quarters there, etc. — plus there would be no guarantee of capturing the exact moment it connected with the guy’s face. Yet with interpolation, a frame must be “created” for all these states. Less extreme, but still relevant: imagine a lamp pole moving in the background of a panning shot. In film projection, it is here, and then it is black (empty frame), and then it is . How do you know how it got from here to there? Remember predictive perception? Your mind fills in the blank and you don’t even notice that the pole, on its trip between points A and C, never existed at point B. You fill in the gap so effectively that it isn’t even noticeable. Again, interpolation attempts to fill in this gap — a gap your mind has already filled admirably, and for which (despite sophisticated motion tracking algorithms) there really is very little data. The result is a strange visual effect that is repulsive to the sensitive, though to be sure many people don’t even notice. Of course, people don’t notice . But that’s just these trendy TV makers who need another big number to put on their sets. The debate is when established filmmakers like Cameron and Jackson say they’ll be using 48fps for their next films, Avatar 2 and The Hobbit (Cameron may actually shoot at 60, it’s undecided, but 48 makes more sense). Many seem to have overlooked the fact that these are both 3D films. This isn’t an insignificant detail. There are complications with on existing projectors, using this or that style of glasses, encoding, and so on. A common complaint was strobing or flickering. Judder is another common effect when 24p content isn’t shot or shown properly, especially in 3D. Filming and displaying at 48fps alleviates many of these issues, as long as you have a suitably bright projector. Cameron and Jackson are making a decision here, that enables their films to be shown the way they should be seen. But what about the decision? This is a touchy subject, and we must be careful not to be sentimental. We don’t shoot on hand cranks any more, for good reason. Is 24 similarly something that needs to be left behind? I personally don’t think so. But is it something that needs to be rigidly adhered to? Again, I don’t think so. Directors, cinematographers, editors, colorists, all have artistic latitude in their modification of the raw footage — look at a scene before and after post production if you need any convincing on this point. What is the framerate but one more aspect to tweak? At the same time, no real filmmaker tweaks something to tweak it. 24 is a , one which engages the audience by and allowing the viewer’s brain to interpret it. Would Bruce Lee’s punch look faster if it was filmed and displayed at 60fps? I sincerely doubt it; in fact, I believe it would look . The implication of speed and movement is a stronger statement — just as in other media, like writing, where the most literal description may not be the best. Just as five words may tell more than a hundred, as fans of Hemingway have it, five frames of Lee’s blurred fist may not adequately document the punch, but they transmit the punch to the audience more effectively than a more high fidelity form of capture. Yet for all this, 24 is not some magical number that cannot be improved, or that’s perfect for every shot or situation. Douglas Trumbull is the most famous talking point referred to by high-framerate evangelists like Roger Ebert. His 65mm, 60fps Showscan format amazed audiences with its unique look in the 80s, yet never caught on. Why? The same reason Edison couldn’t shoot 46fps in 1912. Too expensive, the film industry didn’t (and couldn’t) support it, and audiences, while finding it novel and compelling, likely were even more put off then by its totally different look. If you’ve never seen native 48, 50, or 60fps media, it’s worth noting that it’s actually unnerving, and you really can’t say why. Some people say “too smooth,” but isn’t life smooth? It may simply be that our mind is revolting against the impossibility of a “magic window” showing something so lifelike that is clearly not reality. Even people who have worked in cinema for their whole lives find it difficult to express this very experiential and qualitative difference. The negative reaction to high framerates is also associational. For decades we’ve watched cheaply-produced TV shows shot on video tape or transmitted live at an end framerate of 60i. Flat lighting, bad production in general, and small screens have for our entire lives associated high framerates with low quality. So it’s understandable when objectors to 48 and up say they don’t want their movies looking like soap operas. But if TV had been transmitted at 24p, what would these objectors’ reactions to increased framerates be? Likely they would be lauding the powerful immersive quality of the new format, and writing blog posts consigning 24 to the pit. We have to cast off this learned sentimentality and embrace advances for themselves, but also avoid reckless neophilia by acknowledging their limitations. High framerates, divested of their soap opera associations, simply provide more visual information, and that makes for a superior representation in some situations — most notably, situations when you want to show an image as close as possible to the object actually being present. Nature documentaries, sports, news reports, home videos, these things will look at 48, 50, 60, or more. Feature films and television as well, as long as the director chooses the framerate for a reason germane to the concept or production — as Cameron and Jackson clearly have. But “cinematic” isn’t an anachronism, and our love of the “film look” isn’t a case of Filmstockholm Syndrome, if you will. We like it because — in its right place. And soon, we’ll like 48, 60, and other framerates because — in their right places. Until we’ve all experienced what these new and powerful changes to visual media have to offer, it’s premature to dismiss or embrace any of them exclusively. I look forward to seeing what these talented and pioneering filmmakers have to offer, but at the same time I want to reserve judgment until the data are in. Cinema is an experiential medium, yet it is also a process, and no one can argue against improving how it is produced. I believe that the current “advances” in 3D, resolution, and frame rates are simply more tools to be employed by the skilful filmmaker, more latitude for production, more power to capture and display. We’ll know soon; until then, patience is the word. Wait and see. : Peter Jackson has written about his decision to use 48 in , saying a few of things I’ve said here but mainly reassuring people that he’s doing this because it looks good to him. He included this photo: [image sources: ; ; ] |
Maine School District Okays $200k Budget For Kindergarten iPads | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 8 |
So a school district in Maine has approved $200,000 for . I’m of two minds about this news item. First, I think it’s great to engage kids early on with the prevalent tech of the day. When I was growing up, of course, we used Mac IIs and eventually LC3s, though everyone in the world had PCs. Still, it was good to familiarize us early on with such fundamentals as typing, mouse-based navigation, and file systems. So why not give kids today ? Well, first of all, there are cost concerns. Why are they paying full price, for instance? Why not buy iPad 1s refurb or used? Yet even buying almost 300 brand new iPads leaves plenty of space in the budget, . I guess the other $50,000 will go towards “administrative fees.” But I wouldn’t worry too much. The video above (note to production team: check your aspect ratio) shows how the kids actually are engaging with things on the iPads, and if the teachers think it’s a good use of money, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s that. Now who wants to start a pool for when this school gets its three hundred iPads ripped off? |
Sun Sniper Joins Blackrapid And C-Loop In Screw-In Camera Strap World | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 8 |
I almost didn’t post this because there are already a couple accessories that fill this role: Blackrapid’s and the newer, -funded . But they’re all slightly different and it’s important to be able to choose from a selection rather than just going with the default. The Sun Sniper series has been in Europe for a while and is just now getting US distribution. It’s more like the C-Loop in that it allows for independent spinning at the fastening point, but the Sun Sniper system also includes a steel-strengthened strap (protects against snatchers) and apparently a “shock absorber,” though I see no evidence of one. Right now the standings are: Blackrapid is the cheapest and simplest, C-Loop is best if you already have a strap you can use with it, and Sun Sniper Pro is the full solution if you don’t mind paying for it. The Pro costs 69 euros, which works out to about $100. You can or who might have it on sale. |
Google Buys Mobile Music And Entertainment Platform PushLife | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 8 |
Google has acquired Toronto-based mobile entertainment startup for close to $25 million dollars, Startup North is . The company, which enabled you to port your iTunes and Windows Media player libraries to non-Apple phones like Android and Blackberry has been gobbled up by the search engine in its attempts to move beyond search. Founded in 2008 by former RIM employee Ray Reddy, PushLife let you manage wallpapers, music, videos, ringtones and other media on your cell phone until its acquisition, setting out to Instead it got bought by Google. The grab is particularly interesting in light of that Google might be launching its own music service soon as one could easily assume that Google would want PushLife to perform a similar function when it gets integrated into the Google engineering team in Canada. |
House Votes Against FCC Net Neutrality Regulation (But It's Probably Safe For Now) | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 8 | Last December the FCC approved its regulation to entirely ban blocking of websites or web services by broadband providers, while being vague about what the new restrictions held for mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T. As we in December, Republicans had vowed to give the loophole-filled rules hell when the Congress turned more Republican in January, first voting to the Commission federal funding in February. Today we see the fruits of their efforts again, namely the voting through of , a regulation that would prohibit the FCC from having any authority over ISPs and broadband, thus overturning December’s regulations. One-half of the government wanting to revoke your power isn’t cool and I don’t want to necessarily down play the impact of a house vote but, as Wired’s Ryan Singel , the vote is indeed largely symbolic. Historically, the votes for or against Net Neutrality rules have been divided down party lines, and the resolution would have to pass through the Senate to go into effect, which is unlikely as Democrats are in the majority. President Obama has also said he would veto any legislation reversing the rules if passed by Congress, according to the Sure it could take the votes of two-thirds of the members of both Congressional houses to override a Presidential veto. But as the Senate is currently split 53:47 Democrats to Republicans, and Democrats tend to be pro-Net Neutrality, an Obama veto override seems sort of a stretch. Supporter of the resolution and Oregon Republican representative Greg Walden the , Yes, but it as of yet hasn’t yet unauthorized it either. Stay tuned. |
Kanedaaaa! Akira Bike Replica For Sale On Craigslist | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 8 |
This (non-functional, unfortunately) replica of from was , though it didn’t actually make the final cut (!). It’s now being sold on the LA Craigslist for $4000. Man, that’s the best bargain I’ve seen in . [via and ] |
Weekend Giveaway: A Blackberry Playbook | John Biggs | 2,011 | 4 | 8 | I was originally going to write something like “Weekend Giveaway: An iPod Classic Case Plus Something Else” and then make you guys read the whole post to find out that I was going to include a Blackberry Playbook in the prize and then you’d be angry and come to my house and stuff and nobody wanted that. So here goes: we’re going to give you one lucky reader a Blackberry Playbook. It won’t ship until the official release date – April 19 – but it will be one of the first Playbooks to roll off the assembly lines. Entering, as you probably know by now, is simple. All you have to do is comment. Comment once and only once. Include your email in the proper Disqus field (not in the body of the comment.) I’ll pick one winner at random on Monday at noon Eastern. Special thanks to the folks at for supplying the Playbook. They’ll be carrying the thing on April 19 if you want to line up now. UPDATE – Congrats to SucraM for winning. |
A New Design For InternMatch Humanizes Internship Search | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 4 | 8 | There are a out there that allow you to search for and discover internships. , which to hire a social media intern, is probably the biggest and most well known of the bunch. But, as anyone who’s used these sites knows, the experience is far from perfect. And the same can be said of job search sites like . is entering the internship search and discovery market by focusing on small-to-medium-sized businesses and by building a tool that’s easy to use with an eye-catching design. And I think it’s fair to say that a big part of making user experience enjoyable (and simple) is derived not only from the smooth application of the technology that underlies a particular service, but perhaps more importantly, from how its designed. 500 Startups Founder Dave McClure has spoken on many occasions about the and yesterday the audacious VC put his money where his mouth is and announced the , a seed fund dedicated to helping designers start their own businesses. What’s more, just ask Jack Dorsey . Yesterday at 500 Startups second demo day, InternMatch launched a site redesign that looks fantastic, and Founder and CEO Andrew Maguire told me that the motivation behind the relaunch has largely been to prioritize ease of use. I’ve had my share of internships and have spent plenty of time on internship sites, and from my experience, search tools and results are generally clunky and ugly, and algorithms are imprecise. Some even take on the feeling of servant farms. But, in surfing InternMatch’s new website, I found the UI to be smooth and natural, and it also seems as if the startup is ideologically committed to helping both sides of the equation — interns and their prospective employers. Which will be good for business. InternMatch is attempting to remove some of the barriers to an enjoyable user experience by providing resume and cover letter preparation and templates for free, and by allowing students to search and apply without having to register or sign up. At this point, InternMatch has limited its offerings to the West Coast, because it wants to jump on the “local” bandwagon. They have seeded college and university campuses up and down the coast with evangelists, who are working to build relationships with departments, professors, student clubs, and the students themselves. These evangelists are InternMatch interns, and the startup provides its interns with marketing training, and helps them build comfort with public speaking, and to plan and launch events. For employers, InternMatch launched a Community Page yesterday, which aims to go beyond the traditional listing model by allowing SMBs to tell the story of what it’s like to work at their company. When choosing an internship, students want to see videos and photos of the people behind companies — they want to engage and ask questions. The startup is attempting to do everything it can to humanize the internship search process for students and to allow employers to recruit students who really fit in with their business culture. And, as incentive to employers, if a company does decide to post a listing, InternMatch guarantees that the business will find an intern within 60 days, or it will receive a full refund. , InternMatch raised $400K in funding from a bunch of angel investors, including Dave McClure, Mitch Kapor, Kenny Van Zant, and Raj Agarwal. The startup is currently using the funding to expand the team and increase West Coast traction. As to how InternMatch monetize beyond its angel funding? The business model may actually present one drawback and barrier to entry for its target employer base. The startup charges West Coast employers $99 to post a listing on the site. (And its Community Page is an enterprise level subscription offering, with pricing dependent on the size of the company.) The $99 price tag is high compared to similar services. Internship.com offers free listings, and another cool internship site last August, , charges $40, for example. However, everything remains free to students on InternMatch, and Maguire told me that the startup is working to create exposure and resources for programs like Work Study, which can help reimburse employers who recruit interns with financial aid packages. He also said, in relation to the great paid/unpaid internship debate over the last five years, that the startup will work with all prospective employers to advocate paid internships, especially those that are likely to turn into full-time jobs. Music to an intern’s ears, to be sure. After all, interns who believe that there is potential for upward mobility within their company are much more inclined to work harder and contribute more. InternMatch has the design. Now it just needs the good internships. |
WITN: Abbasso Las Vegas! [TCTV] | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 4 | 8 | As regular readers might already know, Paul is in Las Vegas for a month, reaffirming his belief in the American dream. As a result, this week’s Why Is This News is even less tech-focused than usual. Still, no matter whether you subscribe to Sarah’s view that 33 days in Vegas is 33 wasted days or Paul’s insistence that there are still stories to be found on and around the strip, you can watch the whole debate unfold below. (You can also read Paul’s on the Huffington Post, and follow his (temporary) Twitter account at .) And, for those of you who don’t care about Vegas either way: here’s a video of . |
Mega Man Keychains, Part Deux | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 8 |
Back in February, we saw some great little At the time, I questioned their practical value, though being Mega Man related, they have great value. That is still the case, and would be a great… something, for somebody. I can’t get any more specific than that. You have to buy the whole $36 set, and there are some mystery ones. [via and ] |
Google Increases Lead In Smartphone Market, But Verizon iPhone Wins February | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | comScore’s February mobile report was , and it looks like good news for Google. Android increased its lead as the top mobile platform, growing 7 percentage points since November, and strengthening its top position with 33 percent market share. Following behind Android is RIM, ranked second with 28.9 percent market share, and Apple with 25.2 percent. Microsoft and Palm rounded out the top five, with 7.7 percent and 2.8 percent, respectively. In the big picture, the mobile numbers continue to impress. Over the last three months, an average of 234 million Americans (13 and older) used mobile devices. That’s 75 percent of the population. Nearly 67 million of those mobile users were employing smartphones, representing a 13 percent rise from November. Smartphone usage only continues to grow, as you will remember that comScore’s November report showed smartphone usage growing by 10 percent since the summer of ’10. Of the millions of mobile devices in use this year, Samsung remained the top manufacturer with 24.8 percent of mobile subscribers, followed by LG at 20.9 percent, Motorola at 16.1 percent, and RIM at 8.6 percent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple had the biggest surge since November, gaining a percentage point of market share, though it continues to trail the other manufacturers at 7.5 percent. The principal cause of Apple’s three-month gain? Why the Verizon iPhone, of course. According to comScore, the Verizon iPhone was the most acquired handset in February. Lastly, comScore’s report shows that the many particular uses of smartphones are, again, on the rise. Text messaging, mobile browser use, app downloading, social networking, games, and music all were on the rise on mobile in early 2011. Accessing social networks represented the largest growth on mobile over the last period. |
Apptitude Uses Facebook To Figure Out Which iPhone Apps Your Friends Are Using | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | , creators of music discovery and promotion app , have come out with another hit this week. In the same app-discovery as Explor and Chomp, Apptidude is an iPhone app that shows you the iPhone apps that your friends have most likely downloaded, all based on their posts and Likes on Facebook. Quietly launching in the App Store this week, the app recommendation app is currently number 29 on the Top Free Apps list, most likely because it incorporates social elements and Facebook Connect as a way of gaging what’s actually hot in the anti-social Apple App Store, where homegrown Top 25 lists leave much to be desired. When you initially open Apptitude and log onto Facebook you see a scrollbar of your Facebook friends stack-ranked by the number of apps they’re using. When you click on your friends’ profiles you can swipe through a series of chosen apps and you can also to drill down into specific stats about how many Facebook friends use the app, how many people have Facebook Liked the app as well as into the ability to download directly to your phone. Apptitude creator Shalin Mantri hopes to use all this social app data to eventually create a better way of finding relevant iPhone apps, and tells me that an eventual Facebook-powered recommendations list based on what apps are trending in your social graph will be including in v1.1, which Apptitude will be submitting to the App Store next week. Wish I could be a fly on the wall in the iOS review room on that one. You can download the app |
Alleged Spy Pics Surface Of Kyocera "Katsura" Tablet | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 1 |
Yeah, it’s April 1st, so let’s just put our skeptical hats on, but I don’t really see much reason to fake a random from a random company like Kyocera. Supposedly this “gaming tablet” (whatever that means) is about 10-11mm thin, and is adorned with little flowers on the back. “Katsura” is the Japanese word for a , though the buds on the back appear to be of the unrelated Cercis genus. The decoration and name are the kind of consistent branding that suggest to me this isn’t fake, but beyond that there’s little we can tell. Kyocera is making a tablet… and if it’s as weird as the , it’ll at least stand out from the crowd. for the rest of the shots. Keep the date in mind, though. |
Color Updates Its iPhone App With More Intelligible Icons, Navigation And Faster Speed | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | Bye bye 69 symbol! Valley media darling/scapegoat has updated to 1.0.2 to address certain um, user interface issues. Color’s launch caused a big splash in the Valley a couple weeks ago, due to what some people viewed as an and foolish $41 million in funding as well as problems with the usability of the actual app — Namely that it didn’t work if other people weren’t nearby. Color co-founder Peter Pham tells me the latest update was as in Color listened to user feedback. Already it looks like the largest user complaints have been addressed, at least cursorily. The homepage icons now have text descriptions and are more intuitive to use, like a Map for “Nearby,” a Globe for “Feed,” a Calendar for “History” and a Letter for “News” (the fade text descriptions also really help). The bizarre revolving 69 button has been split into two buttons, the Map and Globe. The Heart button, which allowed users to share photos via Facebook and Twitter, has now been replaced by a more reasonable Paper Airplane button. A Home button also brings users back to their homepage, like it should. Color 1.0.2 also makes it a lot easier to delete a photo, block a user or see more or less of a person (+,-) and view user profiles. In addition you can now choose a Color profile image from your iPhone photo library, which means no more dark, less than ideal profile images. The phone also now comes localized in French, Japanese and Chinese. Color is like Rebecca Black’s Friday video: People hate on it in public but keep going back to it privately. And while this is an improvement over what existed before, Pham tells me there’s an even larger (“p “) re-vamp to come. he said. The Android app is coming tomorrow. |
A Micro SD Reader And Camera In One? The Fuuvi Pick Is A Miracle! | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 1 |
Guys, there’s so little real gadget news out there right now. Bloggers around the world are shriveling up and dying. But I found this tiny morsel: . The Fuuvi Pick takes 1280×1024 pics and 720×480 video. $60, though, really? [via ] |
10 Things That Simply Need To Be In iOS 5 | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | WWDC. It’s like Christmas for OS X and iOS developers. Each year, they flock to San Francisco’s Moscone Center, anxiously awaiting the pair of gifts that Apple annually bestows: the new iPhone, and a bundle of new features upon which they’ll build their next big thing. If whispers and hearsay hold true, this year’s WWDC will only feature the latter; the iPhone 5, says the rumor mill, won’t be showing its face until Fall. Instead, this show is purportedly going to be all about iOS and OS X. While Apple doesn’t come right out and say it, it’s pretty safe to assume that by “iOS” they mean “iOS 5”. Given that we’re writing about iOS on a regular basis and talking about it with readers and friends even more, we’ve got a pretty finely-tuned wishlist for iOS 5. We also happen to know that a heaping handful of Apple folk read TechCrunch regularly — and with the feature lock stage of iOS 5’s development cycle (wherein they absolutely refuse to add anything new and just focus on what they’ve already started) presumably around the corner, we figured there was no better time than now to put it out there.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRU6_QnwNCE&w=640&h=390] We’ve a billion times, but I’ll bring it up a billion more times if we have to. Compared to even the weakest competitors, iOS’ current notification system is absolutely friggin’ laughable. It was understandable, up to a point; back in the ol’ days before the App Store, the only notifications iOS really had to worry about were incoming text messages and the occasional alarm. Toss in a dozen third party apps all crying for your attention, though, and it becomes nigh-impossible to finish a single game of Tiny Wings without wanting to send your handset itself flying off a hill. While the idea is likely one that scares the pants off of the likes of Telenav and Garmin, free turn-by-turn navigation on iOS is pretty much an inevitability. Back in October of 2009, Google turned the entire GPS market on its noggin by bringin’ free (not to mention, well built) turn-by-turn support to Android 2.0+ devices. Nearly a year and a half later, it’s an easy argument to drop in any Android-vs-iPhone flamewar for massive damage. Apple sort of backed themselves into a corner here. Google built the iOS Maps app, and they’re almost certainly not about to give up one of their platform’s finest, most easily pitched selling points by tacking in turn-by-turn. If Apple wants the voice guided goodness, they’ll likely have to build up a Maps app for their own — and with iOS users having grown accustomed to a Google-powered Maps for around 4 years and Apple having next to no experience in the area, they’ve got big ol’ shoes to fill. With all the recent chatter of Apple opening a $1 billion data center and hiring up Maps specialists, however, it looks like they plan on doing exactly that. Sometimes, when I’m bored enough to be wondering about hypothetical situations surrounding iOS in my off-work hours, I wonder if the absence of custom text alert sounds is a running joke amongst Apple’s iOS team. As in, I wonder if they’ve got a running list of features to build for iOS, with “Custom Text Sounds” hard-coded to always have the absolute lowest priority. Only once they’ve ever considered (including the built-in fart button and the hardware laser level) is checked off the list can they start working on custom alert sounds. That has to be it. Otherwise, I simply can’t understand how this feature is still missing. Back when it launched in 2004, its relatively monstrous storage allotment and Beta exclusivity made Gmail the “cool” e-mail service for the Geeky-but-not- -geeky crowd. 7 years later, it still holds that label. The crowd behind the iPhone — or any Apple product, really — is a strikingly similar one. OS X is for geeks (and the friends/relatives of geeks) who are geeky enough to want something beyond Windows but not geeky enough to swear their allegiance to Linux. iPhone is for geeks who want more out of their phone than what most offer, but don’t want to have to fight their phone to keep it working (Deep breath, Android users.) If you were to venn diagram out iOS users and Gmail users, I’d imagine the overlap would be pretty massive. And yet, iOS’ support for Gmail is pretty much bare bones. You see, Gmail has a handful of features (like flagging, starring, labeling, and archiving for example) that really make the service worthwhile. Of those, only archiving is supported in iOS’ built-in Mail app — and even that has only been available since iOS 4. Android, meanwhile, offers Gmail support that rivals that found on the desktop. Whatever chunk of that cool-kid geek crowd Apple holds, it’s not one they want to lose. Next to free turn-by-turn navigation, the ability to run just about anything you want on an Android phone (unless it’s an ) is one of the easiest silver bullets to fire off in any iPhone-vs-Android nerd-war. Apple’s shown time and time again that they’re willing to drop the App Store banhammer on any application that they deem offensive, or that dares use APIs that Apple reserves for their own use. And that’s fine: it’s their store, and they can moderate the content however they see fit. But when you’ve got the gall to lock down that store make it the only way to get apps onto the device (especially when the other guy is saying “Hey, we’ll only let certain stuff on our store, but you can manually load whatever the heck you please!”), you become the bad guy. At this point, loading otherwise unobtainable applications onto the device is one of the few remaining legitimate (read: not piracy) reasons to jailbreak. As exploit after exploit have proven, the jailbreakers will find a way in. Rather than battling them, why not just make jailbreaking less enticing? Hide the option to enable sideloading away, and make them click through a dozen warnings. Is there some danger to letting users run whatever they want? Of course! But it’s dangerous to leave them with running a bunch of tough-to-verify hacks as their only option. The iPhone has WiFi. It has Bluetooth. It has 3G. It has so many means of connecting to other devices wirelessly that it’s almost ridiculous — and yet, transferring even a single song into the built-in music app requires a silly, chintzy cable. With OS X Lion, Apple’s introducing a feature called “AirDrop” that allows you to drag and drop files to any other system in AirDrop mode. Hopefully, iOS 5 will get an AirDrop mode of its own. Tap a button (or launch an App) on the iPhone to drop into AirDrop mode, drag over the relevant media from your laptop, and away you go. No messy cable required.
Once you’ve managed to get your files onto the device, iOS does all sorts of weird stuff to workaround the fact that there’s no real user-visible file system here. Want to put that photo you just took into an album? Nope. Want to attach a file starting the e-mail? Nope! Jailbreak your iPhone, and your lockscreen can very well become one of your phone’s most important screens. See your latest e-mail at a glance! Scan blurps from your favorite RSS feeds! Check the weather forecast ! Don’t jailbreak your iPhone, and your lockscreen can show… erm, a clock. By default, iOS’ lockscreen is pretty much just a means of keeping you from accidentally firing off garbled texts while the phone is in your pocket, with over 50% of the screen wasted. We get it: minimalism is cool. As the screenshot above (of the jailbreak-only modification, statusnotifier) show, things can be minimalist useful. This isn’t so much an iOS thing as it is a hardware thing, and it’s still completely unclear whether or not the iPhone 5 will offer up NFC functionality. With that said, NFC (the technology that will eventually allow us to pay retailers with a quick wave of our phones) is coming. With huge names , this long promised pipe dream is closer than ever to becoming part of our daily lives. The sooner that Apple jumps on the technology, the better. If Apple promises to support the technology — even if it’s just a promise to support it — and to throw their army of iPhone users behind NFC, retailers will be that much more driven to adopt it quickly. Hardware manufacturers will be driven to add NFC to their own products, thereby driving down the cost for everyone. Developers will be able to build on the tech, taking things far beyond the standard tap-to-pay concept that everyone associates with it. It’s 3 A.M. Your iPad is plugged in. It’s on WiFi. It has more juice and bandwidth available to it than it will just about any other time.. and it’s doing absolutely nothing. And yet, any time I open up an application that isn’t Mail — say, CNN, Instapaper, or an RSS reader — it has to sync all the way back to the last time the app was opened. Why make me wait when I want to use my iPad, rather than doing the majority of syncing when I’m using it? There we have it — the top 10 things we’re hoping ‘ for in iOS 5. Think we missed anything? Drop us a comment and share what’s on your wishlist. |
Accel and IDG Double Down on China Partnership, Raise $1.3B in Seven Weeks | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | When Silicon Valley venture firms set out to conquer China five-to-seven years ago, most of them picked one of three strategies. There was the branch office strategy, whereby the China partners and Valley partners would still work as one firm, making all investment decisions together as a unit and sharing in the returns equally. There was the more common franchise model, where a brand name Valley firm lent its name to a group of local Chinese investors, but mostly left them to make their own decisions. And then there was the joint venture model, where a well known Valley firm didn’t seek to create a China office, it just partnered with an existing one. That last tack – the join venture model – is the one Accel took, partnering back in 2005 with IDG Ventures– one of the pioneers of investing in the Chinese consumer Internet. IDG already had a great hit-rate, having backed an all star roster of Chinese Web giants including Ctrip, Baidu, Sohu and Tencent. But it was investing out of a relatively small seed fund with no allocation for follow-on rounds. That meant a early IDG investment in Tencent netted a tidy 20x return– but paled in comparison to the return that South African media firm Naspers got when it bought the company out in the early 2000s. Naspers bought out existing investors for a cool $30 million, giving it 50% of what has become the third largest Internet company on the planet. Ouch. The partnership with Accel allowed IDG to make sure that didn’t happen again, by co-raising two growth funds (which is more like what we’d consider a classic early-stage fund) and a capital fund over the last six years, a combined total of nearly $1.5 billion dollars that has already yielded seven IPOs. “Even though we did very well with previous IDG funds, we could have done better if we had larger fund sizes and could invest more aggressively in follow-on investments,” says Hugo Shong, the founding partner of IDG who negotiated the original deal with Breyer. Last night, the two closed on the third growth fund totaling $550 million and the second capital fund totaling $750 million. Here’s the best part: The funds were raised entirely in seven weeks, mostly from Accel’s existing US limited partners. Ok, part of that is due to a raging Chinese Web bubble: One-quarter of all US IPOs last year were by China-based companies. But it’s still an impressive feat. Breyer had nothing but positive things to say about the partnership thus far, noting that none of the senior IDG partners has left. Indeed, that’s something not even firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia can boast. And IDG has a 99-person team spanning five cities in China. When I asked what hadn’t gone as well as planned — this is China after all– Breyer said, “The most challenging part is the pace of the market it China. It moderates fast when the market declines, and when it’s up and to the right as things have been in China deals are somewhere between being priced for perfection and outright euphoria. Navigating through the euphoria is a challenge.” When I asked if he was worried about a China crash, he laughed and said, “I’m always concerned about crashes– both here and in China.” |
SpaceX: Something Big Is Coming | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th6HQ9RtVCE&w=640&h=390] just announced a press conference for next Tuesday in Washington, DC and released the embedded video as a teaser. Think it’s going to be a rocket announcement? Yeah, that’s probably a good guess and it might have something to do with the company’s massive Falcon Heavy rocket. Anyone wanna go to the Moon? Watch the press conference next week live . (We’ll remind you) |
Making Angels: The Pipeline Fund Announces 2011 Fellows | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | The New York-based , which aims to increase the number of women who become angel investors and social entrepreneurs in the U.S., today announced its inaugural class of Pipeline Fund Fellows and mentors (listed at the end of this post). The Pipeline Fund Fellowship accepted ten women who are influencers in their fields, and have a track record of charitable giving. Together, they will go through a six-month “boot camp” in New York, learning how to route some of their wealth into angel deals, that will score them an equity stake in for-profit, for-good businesses. The founder and chief executive of the Pipeline Fund, (image below) is serious about resolving that she — and — perceived in the investment and startup ecosystem. She believes that women with enough cash to become angels, while they may not be “needy,” could use help from seasoned investors figuring out: what makes a viable portfolio strategy, how they should conduct due diligence, valuations, or scare up a strong pipeline of deals. She’s enlisted accredited angel investors, many of them men she noted, as mentors. Accepted Pipeline Fund Fellows are required to chip in $5,000 each to a collective fund, and agree to select a female-led, for-profit social venture in which to invest their first $50,000 together. They’ll be asked to run a pitch “summit,” which they’ll host in June in New York City, to select the right startup. TechCrunch asked if she is concerned that the philanthropists who get hip to the notion of investing in for-profit social ventures, may wind up slowing down their philanthropic giving. She said she would never encourage them to divert cash from charitable efforts. She also explained:
“This is the inaugural year of our program, so we don’t really know what the impact will be in full, but we will study the outcome carefully. In the application process, we told fellowship candidates, there will be a group decision to be made about funding a social venture. We asked: what if your favorite is not chosen, how will you react? Several applicants said they would consider investing on their own, beyond the Pipeline Fellowship. We view that as a positive for social ventures, and female founders.” [Ed’s note: While optimistic about programs that support a diverse investment and entrepreneurial community, TechCrunch will be interested to see if these newly-minted angels continue to invest in businesses led by women after the session ends. For more on women in tech, investing and startups, check out TechCrunch’s .] Image:
Dawn is the co-founder of NY Tech Meetup, and is also the Apprenticeship Director for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. She is on the board of InSITE, and is a New York City Trustee of The Awesome Foundation. Dawn lives in New York City with her husband and daughter, and received her B.A. from Clark University.
Conor currently works at Good Cents Bookkeeping providing financial management to small businesses while pursuing a Master’s Degree at Rutgers University Business School. She is also a member of Echoing Green’s Social Investment Council. Conor holds a A.B. in Political Science from The University of Chicago. Monica holds a D.D.S. from New York University. She has owned and operated her own dental practice in New York for the last 16 years. Monica is a medical member of the Surrogate Decision-Making Committee of the state of New York, which advises on medical needs for patients with disabilities. Elizabeth Crowell
Elizabeth is the partner/owner at , a Brooklyn-based, boutique retail store that specializes in home furnishings, rare antiques, and specialty gifts. She serves as the Co-Chair of the Atlantic Avenue Business Improvement District Steering Committee and as a Troop Leader for the Girl Scouts of Greater NY. Elizabeth holds a B.A. in Philosophy with a minor in Latin American Literature from Smith College.
Erica is a Senior Vice President in Capital Markets at GE Capital. With over 10 years in debt sales and trading, Erica sells commercial loans raised for corporations and private equity clients across a wide spectrum of industries to investors. She is also the co-leader for the NY/NJ chapter of the Women’s Network at GE, which fosters women’s professional development, and is an active volunteer with Dress for Success; serving as the President of Y.E.S.!, Young Executives for Success. Erica is a member of the creative advisory board for Orchid Worldwide and holds a B.A. in Economics from Wake Forest University.
Kelly is a business strategist and adviser to companies and firms on networking; creating and engaging voluntary communities; and, business relationship development strategies. She is the former President of 85 Broads, a women’s global business network. Kelly holds an L.L.B. from the University of British Columbia and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from the University of Victoria. Diane is the President of Kaslow Fine Art and an investor in Food52.com. She has been actively involved with the development and growth of several charities. Diane holds an M.B.A. from Case Western Reserve University and a B.S./B.A. from John Carroll University.
Jessica most recently served as Regional Vice President of Sales at Atlantis Health Plan. She is a Kundalini Yoga instructor and Shotokan Martial Artist. Jessica holds a B.F.A. in Acting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Emma is a Principal at Booz & Company and is based in San Francisco, California. She leads the firm’s North American Education Practice and currently serves as a Harvard College Interviewer. Emma holds an A.B. from Harvard University in East Asian Studies.
Maggie recently joined the Wright Group, a government relations firm where she assists social justice organizations with their legislative advocacy. Prior to the Wright Group, Maggie worked in the New York State Senate, first as counsel to then Senator now Attorney General Schneiderman and as Judiciary Counsel to the Democratic Majority. In addition, Maggie serves on the boards of the North Star Fund and Resource Generation. Maggie holds a J.D. from Columbia University School of Law and a B.A. in History from Yale University. |
null | John Biggs | 2,011 | 4 | 8 | null |
Mobile Ad Network JumpTap Raises $20 Million | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | Mobile ad network has raised $20 million in new funding, according to a recent out of a $27 million round. This would bring the company’s funding to nearly We’ve contacted the company for confirmation. JumpTap is one of the largest remaining independent mobile advertising networks, in addition to Millennial Media, Greystripe, InMobi and others. Jumptap’s data-driven technology promises highly targeted advertising and the company partners with digital and media agencies, publishers, wireless carriers and brand advertisers to serve an array of mobile advertising solutions. While it’s unclear who the investors are in the round, the company recently with Tokyo-based cyber communications (cci). Part of the partnership included an investment in the mobile ad network, so the SEC filing could relate to this deal. Despite the heated competition in the mobile advertising space, JumpTap appears to be growing, at least in terms of employees. The company added 23 employees since the beginning of 2011 from companies including Apple, IAC, Time Inc, and Maxus. |
Amazon's Cloud Player Tests The Limits Of The Record Labels' Patience | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | Amazon may have introduced its digital locker music service, , before similar services from rivals Google and Apple (that are widely to be launching this year), but that doesn’t mean it will be an easy existence. Not long after the company published a note on its Web site inviting users to give Cloud Player a try did one of the major record labels offer a warning. “We are disappointed that the locker service that Amazon is proposing is unlicensed by Sony Music,” a Sony spokesman said. Is Amazon on a collision course with the music industry, and if it is, could that be a good thing for consumers? The Amazon Cloud Player gives users the ability to listen to their music collection from anywhere they have an Internet connection, either via a Web app that’s compatible with all major browsers or an Android app. (The service is officially incompatible with iOS devices such as the iPhone, but users have nonetheless reported partial success using Mobile Safari.) Users upload their music files, either in MP3 or AAC format, to their online account (or “locker”), and can thenceforth access these files with the Cloud Player. It’s your music anywhere and everywhere you happen to be. Amazon gives everyone with an Amazon account—and who doesn’t have one of those?—5GB of free storage, with premium options available for more storage space. (Not that hard drive space is expensive these days. Scroll to the bottom of your Gmail inbox and you’ll see that Google already gives you more than 7GB to play with by default.) The idea of streaming music isn’t new. Services like in Europe and in the U.S. have long given users the ability to stream music using a variety of desktop and mobile applications. The key difference between these services and the Amazon Cloud Player is that Amazon’s allows you to upload your own music to its servers (“the cloud”), and then access those as you see fit. If you have an old Rolling Stones CD ripped to your hard drive you can’t upload those files to Spotify’s cloud, but you can upload them to Amazon’s. The record labels, which have hardly been friendly to the digitization of music since the days of Napster, don’t necessarily approve of this feature, saying that Amazon doesn’t have the proper licensing agreements in place to offer that kind of capability. Sony Music has been the most vocal opponent thus far. It that it didn’t think its licensing agreement with Amazon would permit streaming music. (The record labels differentiate between giving users the ability to download a song once versus being able to call upon that same song as you see fit. Think you own a song when you download it from iTunes? Think again, as you’ve only purchased a license to download the file once. Ownership of digital music is a thing of fiction.) More ominously for Amazon, it also said that it was “keeping its legal options open.” But what type of problems could Amazon run into? Julie Samuels, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that Amazon may model its defense on how Cablevision successful argued for its remote storage digital video recorder, or RS-DVR, in 2006TKTK. Users would use the RS-DVR as they would a traditional DVR—pause live TV, rewind, re-watch recorded content, etc.—except all of this content was stored on Cablevision’s own servers. Cablevision argued that despite the fact that the hard drive in the DVR was located somewhere else, its functionality was identical to that of a traditional DVR. Amazon could argue the same thing, that all its doing is putting somewhere else the users’ hard drive that otherwise would be sitting on their desk. Perhaps to avoid all of , Amazon is now said to be “ ” courting the record labels to ensure that the service doesn’t land the company in a federal court. Amazon’s not the only company that’s offering such a service. MP3Tunes.com also offers a digital locker, and an assortment of desktop and mobile applications to access that locker. It just so happens that EMI, one of the big four record labels (and founding member of the Recording Industry Association of America), in court since 2007. But if Amazon is able to convince a judge that what it’s doing is just that, merely giving users access to a hard drive that just so happens to be available somewhere else. Unless the record labels are prepared to argue that it’s illegal to set up a Web server (thisismymusiccollection.com) and access its files, in which case the nation’s copyright laws are truly uselessly antiquated. |
'Rachel Sequoia' And 'Share The Air' Were A Prank, But The Pitch Event Wasn't | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyrFWbGiGOc&w=630]
It’s always feels sort of good to be able to de-bunk a prank on April Fools. Now most of us got that Rachel Sequoia’s insane startup pitch for ‘Share The Air’ was fake, but the event it took place at, the SEO-optimized was real in the sense that 5-6 real start-ups pitched there, hoping to practice in front of an audience of 80 people before they pitched VCs. The whole thing was orchestrated by founder Raj Abhyanker and Dan Carlson for two purposes, a) To give young startups a place to practice their pitches b) To add some levity to the mix with Rachel Sequoia/’Share The Air’ parody of Silicon Valley. Actress was paid a $100 for the unorthodox gig and was given two hours to come up with the character after being given slides created by Carlson. She too was surprised by how much pickup the YouTube video, initially uploaded as a personal record of the presentation, received. Said Cherones, Heh. The fake account now has over 2,000 followers on Twitter, the video has over 200,000 YouTube and people have approached SpiralMoon, who is now working on a feature length film, with acquisition offers. The second meeting of the Venture Fundraising Club of Silicon Valley on April 28th. See you there! |
Apple, Google, Amazon, And Pretty Much Everyone Else Sued Over Smartphone Patent | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | Imagine, for a second, that a patent is granted for the following: “A software platform in an Internet Protocol (IP) phone having the ability to be used with different communication infrastructures such as broadband, wireless communication and Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) service. Further, the software platform in the IP phone has the ability to be used with different applications operating on the IP phone. Further, the IP phone has the ability to perform additional functionality than traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) phones, such as searches and advertising, given its ability to converge voice and data within a single terminal.” Think about how many companies that would impact. Pretty much everyone with an App Store, or, hell, pretty much anyone with sort of retail sales application, right? Yep! Turns out, that patent exists — and the company that owns it is looking to sue about everyone.
in question granted back in 2009, to a company called HW Technology. Now they’re taking on Apple and their App Store, Google and their Android Market, and RIM and their BlackBerry App World. Oh, and HTC, LG, and Nokia. Oh! And Amazon, eBay, Hotels.com, Buy.com, and Priceline, and 21 other entities. The filed earlier this week, primarily targets anything that “allows users to complete a merchant transaction without the need to generate a voice call.” Anyone who says there’s nothing wrong with software patents at this point is certifiably insane. Please, let this one get thrown out quick. |
The Tupperware Turret: The Cake Container Is A Lie | John Biggs | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHS1PFXkgnM&w=640&h=510] I realize this is a bad day to show off something amazingly cool, but this turret is worth the abuse. Basically it’s a Tupperware cake container with an airgun inside. It uses a small microcontroller and an IR sensor to accept commands and it can swivel and tilt up and down to take on attackers from all sides. A press of the green button fires and a press of the red button stops the gun.
With these thoughts in mind, I set out to build my own turret that I’ll be able to use against my enemies. Airsoft style. The only burden I will place on myself while building this awesome airsoft turret is that the design involve as few steps as possible from beginning to end, making it reasonably simple for anyone to reproduce. There are full instructions on the Project Page so you and your loved ones can prepare your own special experiments at home using common household materials. |
(Founder Stories) "Every Day, I Try To Get Rejected" | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | If you meet a lot of CEOs and startup founders, you will notice a personality trait that many of them share. No matter how many people tell them they are wrong or stupid, they remain unusually optimistic, almost blindingly so. In the video above, which is an outtake from last week’s with CEO , host talks about the importance of rejection. “Every day, I try to get rejected,” he tells Leto. Sometimes this requires him sending emails to Steve Jobs that never get a response. But being able to handle rejection, and even seek it out, is a crucial skill for entrepreneurs. The flip side of getting rejected over and over again, of course, is perseverance. It doesn’t matter if 49 VCs pass on your startup if the 50th one hands you a check for $1 million, or if 24 engineers say No, but the 25th is a rockstar who says Yes. Getting to yes means letting the negativity wash over you. Leto and Dixon also talk about pitching VCs and the need to own the room. Confidence matters. You need to leave the room with investors thinking there is a one percent chance your company can be the next Twitter, Google, or Facebook. Leto had this experience when she raised money for Bnter after took off. You can listen to the full |
Ex-Microsoft Games Chief Apologizes For ‘Consolization’ Of Gaming | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | Robbie Bach, the former president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division, has apologized to PC gamers for the “consolization” of their hobby. “Am I happy to have been a part of the destruction of PC gaming? No, of course not. But I am proud of the fact that I’ve helped convince a generation of gamers that it’s cool to pay $10 for a pair of virtual sunglasses and that playing online should be considered a premium feature. Look, guys, no one’s stopping your from installing Doom II and playing through that again, right? I mean, what’s the difference between that and Black Ops, really?” Bach, who served as the division’s president from its formation, in 2005, until last fall, made the comments yesterday at the annual Dream-Crushers & Fancy Hats convention, held in Schenectady, NY. The keynote speaker, he made the comments while wearing a beanie bearing the slogan “DLC MADE ME RICH.” “PC gamers have to understand one thing: they’re irrelevant jerks, and the whole world will be much better off if they would go away forever. Nobody in the gaming industry cares how much memory they have or how many slots their GPU occupies. Overclock your CPU? Why don’t you fill a cup of water and see if it gives a damn because I can guarantee nobody at Activision or EA gives a toss. Do you think we’re able to buy pet tigers making sure textures look good at your stupidly high resolutions? We’ve convinced gamers that sub-720p resolutions blown up to fill 60-inch TVs represents the absolute pinnacle in visual fidelity. Besides, people want to be able , not fiddle around with .ini files making sure their FOV—whatever that is—looks good on their monitor. People want to use their mouse to like things on Facebook, not accurately aim their weapon in the 38th shooter they’ve played this year.” PC gamers have long complained that the continued existence of consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3 has all but ruined their lives. Half-baked DLC, terrible graphics, linear level design, and copycat gameplay have destroyed PC gaming, they argue. “I bought because it’s Crytek, and Crytek usually knows how to take advantage of my PC’s hardware,” one anonymous PC gamer told CrunchGear. “And what do they churn out, this Direct X 9 trash? I wish I was never born. Why don’t I just take my PC, drive it to the tallest bridge in town, throw it off, watch it fall, , fly even higher in the air, and then drop it again and watch it smash into a million little pieces. At least then I won’t have to deal with Games For Windows Live ever again when I want to play F1 2010,” he said. “PC gamers should shut up,” said one console gamer who’s probably too dumb to know he’s being trolled. “Like, nobody cares what they think anymore. They’re worse than WWE fans who get mad when they hear the words sports entertainment. Get over yourselves, marks.” |
Hercules Announces The Ultra-mini eCAFE Just In Time For The Next Netbook Revolution | John Biggs | 2,011 | 4 | 1 |
It’s rare to find a netbook that I’d actually like to own but this tiny, Linux-powered netbook is a serious contender. Powered by an ARM Cortex A8 chip, these wee things last 13 hours on a charge and have 8GB internal storage and an SD card for expansion. It has a 10.1 inch display and cost $229 for the “Slim” with a smaller battery and $269 for the one with the bigger cell. It looks like a little Chrome OS notebook for real haxors. I’d totally get one.
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Mars Rover Curiosity Gets Shown Off | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 6 |
The kids over at BoingBoing (lucky stiffs) got invited to NASA’s labs to check out . They’ve got a ton of great pics over there, . Meanwhile, . Damn your sandy environment, Mars! |
Who Needs Flash? New WebGL And HTML5 Browser Game Sets Tron's Light Cycles In 3D | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | , an addictive browser game created by Israeli developer , went live today. The game ports , the futuristic vehicles from the legendary 1982 film , to the browser. Nerd power! Of course, seeing as Tron was recently upgraded , it’s only fitting that light cycles should be given a more contemporary setting in which to compete — especially if that backdrop takes advantage of modern web standards and contexts. In the original Tron, light cycles were matched against each other on a flat grid and were limited to making 90 degree turns, so Cycleblob has set its light cycles in motion on a rotating 3-dimensional field (really, a blob) that floats in space. Just as in the original, if you hit the wall of light left by your or your opponent’s vehicle, it’s game over. The game lets you choose from 10 different blob-fields on which to compete, and you can compete with up to 6 light cycles at 3 levels of difficulty. Shalom wrote the game exclusively in JavaScript, using elements of WebGL and HTML5 to allow the game to come to graphical life in the browser. , which was officially released in March, is a graphics library that basically extends the functionality of JavaScript to allow it to create interactive 3D graphics within ye olde browser. As a cross-platform API within the context of HTML5, it brings 3D graphics to the Web without using plug-ins. WebGL is managed and developed by , a non-profit consortium of companies like Google, Apple, Intel, Mozilla, and more, dedicated to creating open standard APIs through which to display digital interactive media — across all platforms and devices. A prime early example of WebGL at work is the Google Labs’ , an interactive 3D model of the human body. Like Cyclebob, it’s a bit buggy, but the ideas behind it are amazing. Next thing you know, Google will be releasing a WebGL/HTML5-enabled map of the human genome. Shalom said that he created Cycleblob to learn how to best use WebGL and other new open standards and specifications in creating games and to generally explore its applications. Though the applications of these browser technologies are still largely incipient, it certainly looks like Cycleblob’s plumbing could eventually spell doom for Flash. Maybe not. You be the judge. And who wants to bet that, when Shalom develops a mobile app for his 3D game, Steve Jobs pastes it all over the front of the App Store? To see the game in motion, check out the video below: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amFozFKhmxc] |
Microsoft And Toyota Team Up To Create Next-Gen Telematics Platform | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | The battle for the in-dash system is just starting to heat up, as we leave the era of half-hearted in-house interfaces and enter a period where your car will be as powerful and accessible as your smartphone. Ford’s been leading this charge with Sync, and Tesla has a new approach as well, and now Microsoft and Toyota are putting their heads together to make a new platform, and like everything else these days, it’s in the cloud. The announcement is a bit short on details, but it’s clear that this isn’t just a new GPS system using Bing. Microsoft is hoping to position itself as the connective tissue between people and their cars. It’s focused on the 2012 Toyota hybrids and plug-ins; one of the major features will be remote monitoring of battery status. Power and range management and visualization is an under-appreciated and under-engineered feature, as any Leaf owner who thought they had 15 more miles in the “tank” will tell you. takes the form of a ¥1 billion (~$12m) investment in Toyota’s “Media Service” R&D division. Services will roll out next year, but the full system is planned for a 2015 roll-out. Toyota President Akio Toyoda briefly describes some other functions that are partially present in existing systems, but will likely soon be standard ( ): For example, this new system will include advanced car-telematics like virtual operators with voice recognition … management of vehicle charging to reduce stress on energy supply…and remote control of appliances, heating and lighting at home. And with the introduction of Toyota plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles next year…our cars will play a big role in the global expansion of what we call “smart centers” … on-board systems capable of better managing overall energy consumption of cars… driving trips…and homes. Ballmer chimes in to note that cloud will play a big part: These applications will be built on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing platform. Starting in 2012, customers who purchase one of Toyota’s electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles will be able to connect via the cloud to control and monitor their car from anywhere – safely and conveniently. For example, customers will be able to turn on the heat or AC in their car while their vehicle is plugged into the grid or dynamically monitor miles until the next charging station right from their GPS system. Additionally, customers can use these applications and services for power management as cars connect into the smart power grid. Imagine being able to tell a car to charge at the time of day when energy demand is low and therefore, the least expensive. Admirable! Good ideas all, but really the important thing is establishing the car as just another node in your grid of connected devices. If Microsoft can establish a beachhead in the intelligent car system field, that’s a lot of leverage later on as more services start coming to cars as natural extensions of someone’s data environment. Streaming video to the backseat screens, Pandora presets in the radio, calendar notifications with map integration, that kind of thing. Making Bing drivable will also help its share on the desktop. As usual, the main threat to partnerships like this is the tumultuous nature of tech and the danger of a stated four-year development period. While creating a global telematics platform for the world’s biggest car manufacturer is no small task, four years is an eternity and consumer demands may have shifted significantly by then. But you can’t win if you don’t play. Hopefully we’ll hear more and see some prototypes within a few months. |
I Just Rode In An Uber Car In New York City, And You Can Too | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | So do you remember about a month ago when I wrote that (the order-a-car-from-your-iPhone sensation in taxi-challenged San Francisco) is ? (Sure you do. It was a great story.) Well, that day is here. The company soft-launched its service in New York City today. If you download the Uber app, it now works in Manhattan and the outer boroughs. I know because I just ordered an Uber car on my iPhone in midtown Manhattan in the rain, and a big black SUV picked me up in about five minutes. Same great service as in San Francisco. I watched as it located a driver and saw the car move towards me on a street map (see screenshot). My driver, Yosef, was friendly and courteous. He told me he had to pass a rigorous test on his knowledge of New York city streets to become part of the Uber fleet. Everything was charged to my Uber account, and I saw the amount pop up on my iPhone at the end of the ride. I rated Yosef as a driver, and he rated me, and my ride was over. The total amount from 23rd street to Grand Central Terminal, 20 blocks away, was $15—about twice as much as a regular cab ride. (Uber gave me a $10 credit, though, perhaps to ease New Yorkers into the service). The truth is that even though it was raining, I could have grabbed a cab or hopped on the subway. I saw a few free cabs. New York City doesn’t have the same scarcity issue as San Francisco when it comes to cabs or car service. But the convenience totally outweighs the expense in certain situations—when you are late for an important meeting or want to impress a date or really can’t find a cab. I have yet to test the service in rush hour when it really counts, but I think Uber will find plenty of riders willing to pay twice as much for the feeling of a private driver. For those TechCrunch readers in New York City, don’t all order an Uber car at once. There are only a few dozen drivers currently on the service. |
TravAlert Wakes You Up Before Your Bus Or Train Reaches Your Stop | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoqE6z5KvHY&w=630] There’s two kinds of people in this world: Those that can sleep on buses, trains and planes, and those who can’t. If you are the former, you’re welcome — is an GPS enabled iPhone, Blackberry and Android app that allows you to get your precious ZZZs (or read a book, or listen to music) while you travel, without having to worry about whether you’ll miss your stop. Creator Frank Gu came up with the idea after painfully and repeatedly missing his stop on his bus commute, TravAlert works by sending out a GPS ping every X number of seconds to figure out your location relative to your destination. Sleepy travelers can enter whether they’re on a bus or a train and their destination into the app, setting the alert for either minutes or miles away. You can also adjust the alarm’s sound, make it vibrate or even select a song from your phone’s song library. In order to save phone battery life (the app obviously doesn’t work if your phone is dead), Gu has created an optimized algorithm to GPS ping efficiently depending on where you are in the travelling process. If you’re at the beginning of your trip the app pings slowly like every sixty seconds and but as you get closer to your stop TravAlert speeds its pings up to about ten/twenty or so. The app also speeds up after you go under bridges and tunnels in case you lose signal. In case you travel on things other than buses and trains, Gu also has plans to create functionalities for air travel (with airport maps instead of an actual alarm) and for automobile travel, which lets users figure out if destinations like a McDonalds or an outlet mall are “on the way,” using a custom radius “bubble” of two miles. says Gu. I think he’s definitely on to something.
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Zero Punctuation: Pokémon Is For Lunatics | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 6 |
I can’t say I’m all that surprised at on the Pokémon franchise. Of course, it’s not his kind of game, but still. I know I tried Pokémon back in the day, on original Game Boy. Not my style — although turn-based combat (like in old Final Fantasies) is fine by me. I just don’t think I have the urge to… you know, catch ’em all. |
Android Chief Andy Rubin: Nothing's Changed (Except The Deals They Don't Talk About…) | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | Last week, Bloomberg Businessweek published an titled , in which it detailed the decreasing level of openness and increasing restrictions Google is placing on hardware manufacturers looking to take advantage of the hugely popular mobile OS. Despite receiving plenty of attention, Google has remained mum on the article — until now. Android head Andy Rubin has just written a that references “misinformation in the press about Android and Google’s role in supporting the ecosystem” and says that he’s going to “attempt to set the record straight.” The gist of his post: we’re the same friendly green robot as we’ve always been. Whether or not people will buy that is another question. The post highlights a few issues that have been raised in the press. One is the question of whether or not Honeycomb will be open sourced any time soon (Android, which gets plenty of attention for being ‘open’, still hasn’t released the Honeycomb source despite the fact that it’s been on the Xoom for over a month). Rubin confirms that Honeycomb is in fact being held back as the team makes its features compatible with phones, but asserts that it’s still coming and that it “does not represent a change in strategy”. In other words, Android will keep open sourcing each new version (and my hunch is they’ll try to avoid similar delays in the future to avoid this kind of backlash. I also suspect that Honeycomb won’t actually be open-sourced at all, and that the version of Android that does get released will be Ice Cream Sandwich). The second issue addressed: whether or not Google is collaborating with ARM to create a standardized Android chipset. Rubin explicitly denies this, saying “There are not, and never have been, any efforts to standardize the platform on any single chipset architecture.” Finally, and most ambiguously, is the allegation in the Businessweek article that Google “has recently tightened its policies” over what device manufacturers wishing to feature Google apps must agree to. And that’s where things get murky. In the post, Rubin writes that devices wishing to get the ‘Android-compatible’ stamp of approval have always had to conform with both basic compatibility and anti-fragmentation . Rubin writes that they’ve always been there, and that “there are no lock-downs or restrictions against customizing UIs” — in other words, HTC Sense and its ilk are still fine. But the Businessweek article includes some allegations that Rubin doesn’t really address, like these: There will be no more willy-nilly tweaks to the software. No more partnerships formed outside of Google’s purview. From now on, companies hoping to receive early access to Google’s most up-to-date software will need approval of their plans. And they will seek that approval from Andy Rubin, the head of Google’s Android group. The key words here are “early access”. Yes, as Rubin says, manufacturers can still access the Android code once it’s released and the same old rules apply, but there’s no doubt that Google is giving preferential treatment to certain carriers and hardware manufacturers in return for their cooperation. And, as the Businessweek article points out, there’s a strong incentive to get first dibs on a new version of Android. You’re first to market, you get loads of press coverage, and so on. Google can dangle this carrot, and then ask for restrictions that go well beyond what it typically requires. Presumably Google uses its own apps, like Maps and Gmail, as a similar (albeit smaller) carrot. Of course, Google has almost certainly been negotiating such deals since Android first launched. It’s entirely possible given the success of the platform that Google can afford to be more aggressive when it makes its requests to carriers and OEMs — which would explain why they’re upset. Then again, if that means fewer carrier-bundled apps and useless skins, I don’t think users are going to be complaining much. |
This LEGO Lunchbox Wants Nothing More Than To Hold Your PB&J | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | Bring the fun of interlocking bricks to the cafeteria. This officially-licensed lunchbox isn’t anything fancy, but it’s a sure fire way to meet fellow brickheads. (Is that what LEGO nuts are called?) The only downside I can see from my post on top of a LEGO mountain is that it’s only available in certain countries and that doesn’t include the US of A. [ via ] |
Bizness Apps Expands To Android To Bring Your Business Into The Mobile Apps Game | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | , a startup that gives small businesses the tools to quickly and easily build mobile apps, has a bit of a Zuckerberg-ian early history. Well, admittedly the Facebook comparison is a bit tenuous, because Bizness Apps’ story is likely akin to what a much larger percentage of entrepreneurs actually experience. Really, few are lucky enough to turn down multi-million dollar funding or acquisition offers. And, no, the startup probably won’t attract 600 million users, but, at the very least, it’s a useful example for young (specifically, college-aged) entrepreneurs. The startup was founded by , who was, at the time of the company’s founding in 2010, a junior at California State University. Less than four months after launch, the startup raised a $50K round of seed funding from two angel investors, namely CEO (see his reasons for investing ) and founder and CEO of Robert Strazzarino. How Gazdecki raised the funding is a good example for young entrepreneurs and CEOs raising capital: if you believe in your business, don’t settle. In the fall of last year, Gazdecki won a business competition at California State and, as a result, was introduced to Chris Friedland after the event. Friedland took the young entrepreneur out for lunch and whipped out his checkbook in the process, offering to write Gazdecki a check for $25K in return for 20 percent of the company. “As a kid in college, you can imagine how fast my heart was racing”, the founder said of his experience. But, knowing that he was onto something with Bizness Apps, he declined the investor’s offer — checkbook and all. Friedland stayed after him, though, and a week later brought the college student into his office and offered him $50K for 20 percent. Again, Gazdecki politely refused, and walked out of his office. But the investor went after him, waved him back, and eventually talked him to $50K for 13 percent. In the big picture, $50K is not a lot of money, but for a 20-year-old to show that kind of poise is impressive. I would’ve sold for $500 and a grilled cheese. What’s more, Gazdecki tells me that, since November, the team (he added three more CSU seniors) has been growing the company primarily based on internal revenue and hopes to avoid further outside investment. That might be possible. In February, Bizness Apps revenue grew 400 percent, and by 100 percent in March. The CEO said that he thinks that the team can build a $20 million company in a year or two. That’s great and all, but you know what’s cool? A $200 million company. As to where that revenue is coming from? Bizness Apps makes money from monthly support and maintenance fees, but a large portion of the startup’s revenue emanates from its work building an international network of app . In other words, for companies looking to produce more than 10 apps per month, the startup offers a complete white label solution — for a competitive price. This allows, say, regular marketing firms to provide in-house mobile app development for their multiple clients using the startup’s DIY mobile app platform. And Gazdecki is bullish about the prospective international market, telling me that the startup has already worked with businesses in 10 different countries. As my colleague Robin Wauters pointed out , whether or not you believe that every business needs its own app, at $39 Bizness Apps is very affordable for SMBs that don’t want to shell out the big bucks. What’s more, up to this point, Bizness Apps has only offered the tools to create iOS apps, but beginning today, the startup adds Android to the list. As before, Bizness allows small business (restaurants, bars, realtors, etc.) to simultaneously create, edit, and manage app creation and development online — without any programming knowledge needed. And now businesses can hit both Android and iOS users. The price for using a single platform will remain at $39, and those that want to create both Android and iOS apps will pay $59. Considering how cheap the service is — and that apps are custom-made for each business, submitted to the App Store and Marketplace, and regularly updated with new features and improvements by the Bizness Apps team — I think Bizness Apps has great potential. Sure, the apps the team is making won’t be akin to the best native apps on the market, but you can make apps in 5 minutes, and there aren’t any setup fees. Gazdecki told me that, in spite of his company’s growth and appealing prospects, both he and the team will be graduating from California State in May. So, for you slackers out there, it is indeed possible to build a successful company get the requisite amount of book learnin’. Gazdecki said he isn’t sure how they’ve managed to both, but it is possible. Now, imagine if Zuckerberg and Moskowitz had stayed at Harvard. It’s not for everyone, but getting your diploma, while hustling to grow your business, is worth it. Don’t settle for less, and use your failures to make your business — or your next ventures — better. |
Sorenson Media CEO Explains How They're Helping Move Hollywood To The Cloud (Video) | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | Video on the web may be ubiquitous these days, but while uploading a few amateur clips to YouTube is a cinch, things get hairy fast as soon as you start encoding and managing your own video content. From codecs to huge file sizes to actually putting that content in a playable form, handling a lot of video footage requires plenty of processing power and advanced software. One company that’s long been involved in this space is , which offers cloud-based services at an enterprise scale and also develops desktop encoding software like . And this week the company has some big news: Technicolor will be using Sorenson’s ‘Squeeze Solution Pack’ to help power a new cloud-based system for motion picture and television dailies. Dailies, for those of us outside of show biz, are the tapes of rough footage produced and distributed as a film or TV shoot is ongoing — allowing people involved with the production to stay abreast of its progress. And, as Sorenson CEO Peter Csathy explains in the video above, the security of these dailies is of the utmost importance — to the point that some studios still distribute them by hand. Csathy says that the new solution that Technicolor is developing using Sorenson’s technology will give studios a more efficient way to manage this content that doesn’t require sending interns across town. For more details, check out the video. |
null | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 4 | 1 | null |
Snoozing And Losing: A Blockbuster Failure | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | I’d be lying if I said that I haven’t taken some delight in watching the complete and utter collapse of Blockbuster. You see, back when I was a child, our community had a couple of thriving local video stores that were the source of pretty much endless enjoyment for me. Then Blockbuster came along. By then, the company was already a mega-chain of blue and gold awnings that decorated much of the country. They had inventory that simply could not be matched. Unsurprisingly, they crushed the local video stores. This happened all over the country for years. Goliath didn’t just beat David, he obliterated him simply by showing up — and then danced on his grave while entertaining his children. You’d think the sheer momentum of such a behemoth would make them unbeatable. And yet, here we are. Earlier today came word that Dish Network was buying Blockbuster’s assets out of bankruptcy court — in cash. This is the same company that Viacom once paid $8.4 billion for (and later spun them off in their own multi-billion dollar IPO). The fall from grace is almost unbelievable. But it’s actually not if you’ve been following Blockbuster over the past several years. And their tale could end up being a great cautionary one for today’s current crop of giants. And more importantly, it might serve as a point of inspiration for startups going up against a seemingly unbeatable giant. Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. All of these guys may seem unbeatable. If they’re investing resources into a space, you might as well not even try, right? But that’s exactly what Reed Hastings did in 1998 when he started Netflix. He was simply a disgruntled Blockbuster customers who was sick of the ridiculous late fees and thought he could do better with a new approach to movie rentals. Blockbuster undoubtedly laughed at Netflix at the time. In fact, two years later, Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for just $50 million — quite literally pocket change for a company that had held a $5 billion IPO the year prior. Blockbuster refused all such offers, as of the best Blockbuster gaffes reminds us. Instead, Blockbuster put a huge investment into Enron (their broadband services subsidiary). You can’t make this stuff up. It wasn’t until 2004 — after Netflix launched — that Blockbuster realized it needed to enter the online DVD rental-by-mail space. By then, Netflix was already turning a profit and Redbox had just launched. Blockbuster was already dead — they just didn’t realize it yet. It’s such a great example of a company resting on its laurels and getting blindsided. But it’s hardly even fair to call it a “blindsiding”. Blockbuster probably could have done dozens of things to counter the rise of Netflix in that initial six year space. They were either simply too arrogant, too slow, too stupid, or all of the above to make a move. That’s why it’s impressive that Google is to the company right now, when they’re arguably at the peak of their power. Their not resting on their laurels. Hundreds of challengers are gunning for them in a number of areas, and the co-founders apparently saw the company slipping a bit — — and decided to proactively make some bold moves, all of which we haven’t likely seen yet. That’s pretty much the opposite of Blockbuster towards the end of their run. You had a CEO defiantly declaring that Netflix was no real threat. The best quote: “ .” This was a guy, Jim Keyes, who had just attempted to take over Circuit City, thinking that would solve Blockbuster’s problems — more retail stores. A few months later, Circuit City went belly up. The fact that Blockbuster didn’t end up buying them probably saved them from the same fate for the remaining two years of life. Later, Blockbuster’s head of digital strategy had another money quote in . “ ,” he said indicating that they could still beat Netflix. The famed former couldn’t say this stuff with a straight face. So if you’re out there working on a startup in a space owned by a giant, just remember that nothing lasts forever. Even the biggest companies eventually grow complacent and get taken down. There are angles and new ideas all over the place that they simply cannot (or will not) see around their egos and wads of cash. They will snooze and they will lose. Every night used to be a great night to make it a Blockbuster night. |
Mancx launches as a LinkedIn Answers with bounties attached | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | Described as a “transactional knowledge market”, has launched today as a sort of classified ads site for business intelligence. Or to think of it another way: a kind of paid-for LinkedIn Answers where each request for specific information comes attached with a bounty. In fact, Mancx offers users the option of linking their LinkedIn accounts for additional credibility, while at the other end of the spectrum, users can also choose to remain completely anonymous. Each question or knowledge request has a price tag attached to it, although the platform allows for further private negotiation between users, and Mancx sits in the middle, taking a 20% commission. In that sense, the business model is obvious. But will it work? To that end, the company cites research from Carnegie Mellon University which shows that financial incentives provide both better quality and more reliable information in knowledge markets. Or as Henrik Dillman, CEO and co-founder of Mancx, says: “You cannot expect busy individuals and professionals to spend hours researching and answering other people’s business-related questions without reward.” And on one level, that’s probably hard to dispute, although motivations vary greatly, such as building reputation and the so-called trust economy. However, in the case of Mancx – and it’s obviously early days – many of the currently placed ads or requests seem to be quite sales-oriented, which also makes sense. A qualified lead or nugget of industry analysis, albeit paid-for, is in turn monetizable and therefore profitable. In fact, Mancx has dedicated categories for ‘Sales Leads’ and ‘Market Analysis’, along with defining requests by country. That’s not to say that it’s all sales. Some of the listed ads are quite practical, such as “Android/iPhone developer companies in New York area”, which carries a bounty of $150. Mancx, based in Stockholm, Sweden, is privately funded but is said to be currently negotiating a second round of funding. They also say that they have a “patent pending for their solution to managing trade with information.” |
Google Said To Have High Level Mole At Twitter, Makes Massive Counteroffers To Retain Employees | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | Google may have paid as much as $150 million in stock grants to retain key product employees and , say multiple sources. Both were offered the chief product role at Twitter earlier this year (cofounder eventually the position), but Google offered Pichai $50 million and Mohan $100 million, respectively, to stay, say multiple sources. In what could be called an IQ test, both accepted Google’s offer. The stock grants are significantly higher than what we’ve , but the model is the same. Google grants restricted stock to the employee that vests over time (two years in the case of Sundar and 3 or 4 years with Neal, says one source). An engineer last year was in stock to stay. At the time it seemed outrageous. There’s lots to say about the statement Google is making with these counteroffers. comes to mind. As well as Regardless, the fact that large fortunes are being handed out to mid level technical managers is somewhat of a red flag in general. That kind of money is usually reserved for founders of companies that make it to IPO. Actually, most IPO founders make substantially less than that. What’s more fascinating is this. In at least one of the cases . We previously reported that Google had set up a special group to respond to these situations quickly, sometimes overnight. But we’ve never heard of Google making counter offers prior to the actual offer from Facebook or Twitter being made. Multiple sources close to Twitter have said that someone with access to Twitter’s most confidential information, such as who they are interviewing for key executive spots, may be leaking that information directly to Google. In this case, Google may have acted on that information too quickly. And people at Twitter, say these sources, are steaming mad. I spoke to Twitter PR earlier today about this story and they declined to comment. I’ve been unable to reach Google for comment. |
Qwiki's iPad Moment Is Coming (TCTV) | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | Ever since won the last TechCrunch Disrupt in September, it’s been working on an iPad app. In fact, one of its overexcited developers showed me back then. Well, it’s come along way since then, and Qwiki is currently working on the finishing touches before submitting a real app to the iTunes store sometime in the next few weeks. Qwiki founder and CEO Doug Imbruce dropped by my office today to give me a preview. Of course, I tried to get it on video, but he wouldn’t show me a demo on camera. But he did talk about it, and you can see what the main screen looks like in the video above. In many ways, Qwiki was built for the iPad. It is an that animates Wikipedia text-to-speech summaries with images and photos from across the Web. The user interface naturally lends itself to swiping through the animated Qwikis and taking “information consumption off the desktop.” The iPad app will also have “a very interesting geography feature,” Imbruce hints. I’ll let you guess what it is. But Imbruce is a big believer that “location is one of the most important signals of the next decade.” Given the recent in the company by the founders of Groupon (estranged Facebook co-founder ), perhaps Qwiki can find a way to tap into its rich database of local businesses and local Groupons. (Wait, is that the beginnings of a business model I see?) Imbruce also talks about why he moved the company from New York City to San Francisco (recruiting engineers). And just for fun, let’s see that backstage video from Disrupt of the original iPad prototype. |
Why Is This Plain Wall Clock So Compelling? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 6 |
There’s something about on Etsy that just makes me want to buy it. Too bad I don’t have $92 burning a hole in my pocket… any more. Damn ponies! My guy said “Rutger Hauer’s Bifocals” was a sure thing! [via ] |
Lexon's Buro Collection, For Design-Conscious Desk Jockeys | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 6 |
I haven’t used a stapler in years, nor a straight-up calculator, but I remember my days of desk work where I needed this stuff every day. It might be kind of metro to have matching tape and hole punch, but I think I could have pulled it off. The best piece of this “Buro” line from Lexon is this little USB hub/card reader. It’s got a nice understated design but a distinctive color (the lime is better than the purple), and would be genuinely useful on any desk. [via ] |
Twitter Tweets Some Big Q1 Stats; 155 Million Tweets A Day Now | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | Since the first quarter just ended, Twitter’s PR team decided to tweet updates stats regarding the state of Twitter today. Of them, the biggest is that Twitter saw a 41 percent increase in tweets per day (and a 38 percent increase in the U.S.) for the quarter. But the biggest single number isn’t pertaining to Q1 at all, it’s live. Twitter is now seeing 155 million tweets a day. That’s up from just 55 million a year ago, the company says. It’s also up from 140 million . The full stats: https://twitter.com/twitterglobalpr/status/55778413499269120 https://twitter.com/twitterglobalpr/status/55778698284118016 https://twitter.com/twitterglobalpr/status/55779152678223872 https://twitter.com/twitterglobalpr/status/55779286761750529 https://twitter.com/twitterglobalpr/status/55779434350907392 |
Mortal Kombat Tournament Hits Las Vegas May 15 | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | Presumably not too many of you are sitting here watching Fernando Torres do his best impression of a footballer, but I’ll leave that alone until tomorrow. In the meantime, and having nothing at all to do with Chelsea Football Club, the Champions League, or Mr. Torres, there’s word of that will take place at Bally’s in Las Vegas on May 15 and May 16. There’s $21,000 in prizes at stake, so pay attention if you still know how to pull off Sub Zero’s fatalities without checking GameFaqs. The tournament has been put together by Performance Designed Products, the same folks behind that I mentioned a few weeks ago. The tournament uses the Xbox 360 version of the game, and it’s open to anyone over the age of 18. And unless you plan on sleeping on the Strip, Bally’s has special rate for tournament attendees. |
Personyze Allows Website Owners To Scale Personalization For Visitors | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 4 | 24 | Israeli startup is launching its website personalization, segmentation, and analytics platform today. Personyze provides businesses the ability to turn their website into a more personalized site that puts the visitor in the center. The idea behind Personyze is that website owners can quickly and easy ramp up personalization to their visitors. Personyze’s SaaS allows owners to return content in real-time based on each visitor’s past site activity, online search history, Facebook preferences, location, etc., Personyze can give web marketers the ability to personalize the whole site rather than just the ads and banners or landing pages. After a visitor gives permission, Personyze’s Facebook integration allows users to publish messages on visitors’ walls, so website owners can post promotions and offers to visitors. Other features include offline tracking to measure the effectiveness of campaigns, email personalization, custom event tracking and AdWords integration. For example, if a visitor arrives at a website after searching “discount toys,” with Personyze you can redirect the visitor to the “Toys on Sale” page and sort the product display by lowest to highest price. Or you could display a banner that offers customers a 10% discount if they buy that day. And Personyze allows you to send a follow-up email advertising a special promotion on toys for a set number of days, if they did not buy something on their first visit. Of course, for Personyze to truly work, the visitor has to opt-in to this experience. Many visitors may not want to hand over their information, or allow website owners to track their activity. |
Yes Facebook Developers, There Will Be An f8 This Year | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 24 | The Facebook Like button celebrated its this week, on April 21st. It’s ubiquity makes it hard to believe that it was a little over a year ago when Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the third annual to which is now integrated with around 2.5 million websites worldwide, with 10,000 new ones being added daily. While the anniversary of the conference came and went with nary a peep from Facebook, judging by this Facebook Group, there will be an f8 in 2011 (Facebook has confirmed). It’ll be interesting to watch that “f8 partnerships” page in the coming months, to see who, if anyone, gets added from outside the company. Up until now the f8 scheduling has been somewhat erratic (missing 2009 entirely). There have been a total of three f8s so far, the first one happening on May 24th, 2007, the second happening on July 23rd, 2008 and the third one happening between April 21-22 in 2010. In the meantime Facebook has from 24 million active users to . While the conference typically happens in the summer, Facebook has yet to confirm an actual date for 2011 saying only that it’ll keep me posted. Judging by this year’s latency in announcement time, it’s probable that it will be held in late summer, I’m guessing sometime between July and August. As Liz Gannes reports, Twitter has its Chirp conference this year while Google is once again over achieving with a in May. If developer conferences were like college, Facebook would be like the brilliant student who turned in their work late, but turned it in beautifully. |
Fidelis College Raises Money to Actually Support Our Troops | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 4 | 24 | You know what’s awful about every politician blindly saying he or she “supports our troops”? It’s usually a hollow sentiment uttered just to get applause. You know what’s great about every politician blindly saying he or she “supports our troops”? When presented with something that demonstrably helps the troops, there’s zero political capital in obstructing it. And hence, Gunnar Counselman may not only have one of the best entrepreneur names I’ve ever heard, he may also have come up with one of the first Silicon Valley-based, venture-backed online education startups that will help students, make money, and not be crushed by the lame-brain education establishment. Counselman’s company, , does a few things. At a basic level, it will help active duty soldiers get a headstart on college educations. It enables them to do the first two years of general education requirements online while still on active duty. Later, it helps place them at a major university that’s inline with their civilian career goals. And these students won’t fall into the student loan curse, because there’s military tuition assistance during active duty that will help pay for the first two years of credits and the GI Bill to pay for the last two years of college post-discharge. But Fidelis aims to do a lot more than that. Like Geoffrey Canada’s of following inner-city Harlem kids throughout elementary school, high school and college to make sure they don’t fall through the cracks; so too will Fidelis stay with ex-military students, making sure they are taking the right classes, meeting the right mentors and steering towards their dream careers. This starts with a month at “fork & knife school” where the basics of civilian social graces are taught. Beyond that, Fidelis closely tracks the students through graduation and helps with career placement. Inner-city kids and vets may seem an odd comparison, but they share one thing in common: High drop out rates. Despite triple the education resources in the new GI Bill, less than 6% of military men and women use their complete education benefits and only 25% complete the degrees they start. Counselman argues a lot of this is social. He likes to quote an unnamed US Marine when he pitches the company: “They spent sixteen weeks turning you into a Marine. They spent the next four years turning you into a bad-ass Marine who will kick down any door in Falluja. They spend an afternoon telling you what it’s going to be like to be a civilian again.” Of course, Counselman knows this all firsthand as a third-generation marine. He served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, his dad served in Colombia, Somalia and Desert Storm, and his grandfather served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. After his discharge, Counselman headed to Harvard Business School. There’s not a lot to dislike about Fidelis. It helps people who are defending our country. It mostly uses money they are already getting. It makes sure that government money is spent more effectively. And it gives the colleges students who have money to pay their increasingly outrageous tuition. And Counselman says the average score for the military equivalent of the SAT has been increasing since September 11, when enlisting became something that mattered even to many people who had other socio-economic options. It’s now slightly higher than the general US population; it used to be slightly lower. More than that, colleges get students with a different life experience. Students who have made life or death decisions in combat. Students who have perspective on America’s place in the wider world. Students who understand more than the latest features on Facebook, but what the struggle for survival is all about. Some might call them the anti-millennial. Counselman’s dad never pressured him to become a marine; in fact he never spoke much about it. But Counselman was struck one day while studying at Cornell, when a kid started to choke in a restaurant and everyone froze. Everyone except an 18-year-old cadet who sprung into action saving the choking student’s life. Counselman wanted some of , and some of what his father and grandfather had. He wanted to be the guy people turned to in a crisis. “The military is turning out something special,” he says. “It’s just that it’s not a total fit for the civilian world.” Not only did Counselman get some of that intangible Marine-quality, but as you can see from a slide in his investor deck, the three generations even look remarkably alike: Many schools already get this: Counselman was surprised to see that 4% of his HBS class was ex-military. After school, he worked as a consultant at Bain where his bosses would plunk down a stack of military resumes in front of him and ask him to parse through them. They knew there was talent to be tapped coming out of the military, but they had no idea what was an impressive achievement and what wasn’t. A business like Fidelis would be laudable at any point in American history, but it’s especially smart now for a few reasons. There’s an inflection point in our labor markets: There’s an intense talent-war for certain jobs, while millions more can’t find work. Fidelis can help solve the re-training chicken-and-egg problem the country faces for an important subset of people who risked their lives for the rest of us. It’s all the more important post-recession, when 30% of veterans age 22-30 find themselves unemployed. There’s also an inflection point in the education market. As we’ve , for the first time in recent history there’s a debate raging about whether the cost of education is actually worth it. With our preconceived prejudices stripped bare, online alternatives and different approaches to college education are gaining credibility. And then there’s market demand: The US is winding down operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, reducing the force size from 2.2 million to 1.6 million. It’s in everyone’s interest to give those veterans the best chance to succeed in the civilian world. And of course, the founder is always key to the success of any startup. Few people understand the scope of this particular problem and have the skills and contacts to raise venture capital and go solve it. I asked Counselman how many venture capitalists had ever served in the military. He knew of exactly four. It’s a massive disconnect from the years just after World War II when nearly every CEO of a Fortune 500 company was a veteran. Fidelis has raised just raised $2.5 million from Accel and , a firm that specializes in education startups. Phil Bronner of Novak Biddle Venture Partners noted that Fidelis is in the middle of a new trend of education companies partnering with prestigious, traditional colleges, but building a for-profit business around it. It’s a reaction to the University of Phoenixes of the world, where much of the revenues are spent getting students in the door, but the graduation rates are low and the prestige of the degree is questionable. And according to a , those colleges have increasingly been targeting the military, without solving a lot of these more fundamental problems veterans face. “A key difference between Fidelis and the others in the for profit industry is the school from day one is going to be focused on outcomes, rather than focused on an ever expanding enrollment,” Bronner says. For Accel, the deal was a bit outside its norm. Partner said the firm invested because it was one of the first education deals the partnership had seen that was good for students and made clear business sense. “It’s nice to be able to fund a great idea that’s also the right thing to do,” he says. |
What Should You Do With Your Crappy Little Services Business? | Mark Suster | 2,011 | 4 | 24 | There’s a line of thinking in Silicon Valley that you should build product businesses rather than services businesses. This thinking is largely driven by the venture capital industry (and subsequently Wall Street) who are in search of high margin, highly scalable businesses. It’s nearly impossible to get a services company financed by VCs. You’re a small fish. So pervasive has this thinking become that on several occasions startup companies with profitable & fast growing tech services businesses have come to me wanting to change their companies to product businesses or to create “spin outs.” A great recent example of this was a successful group of entrepreneurs who had created a company that will do $10-12 million in revenue at their system integration business in 2011 ($5 million in 2010, $2-3 million in 2009). They feel very confident they can hit $18 – 20 million in 2012. They have created two internal technology “products” and wanted to figure out how they could turn their services business into a product business that could be financed. This team is talented. They wanted advice. And probably some money. I gave them advice I don’t think they were expecting from a VC, It is advice I give entrepreneurs often as I have written here on . Well, let’s look at this exact situation:
There are at least two types of tech services businesses in my mind: – One of the best ways for young startups to finance their business without any dilution is what I call “customer financing,” which is mostly only possible in businesses that target businesses rather than consumers. Customer financing often comes in the form of your company agreeing to build a product with a “sponsor” customer or two and helping them with the rollout / implementation. Often in this strategy you end up giving them the product for free and bill them only services fees. You own the IP you create. The benefits for the customer are: a mostly custom-built product addressing one of their internal needs, the focus of a very talented young startup focusing on their business need & free product – potentially for life. The benefits for you are even more clear: you get to build a product raising significantly less external money (if any at all) and therefore no dilution, you get a customer who will help you figure out the real requirements for your business and you have your first real reference client lined up, which should help with future funding and with future sales. If you set out to build this kind of business you just need to be sure you don’t become a permanent consulting business by default. The “customer-financed” type of tech service business is never frowned upon by VCs – unless you’ve been doing it for 2-3 years with no product business to show for it, by which point they assume you’re the second type of services business. The type of business that is generally shunned in Silicon Valley is the “pure services” business like consulting, system integration, value-added resellers (VARs), customer support businesses, outsourcing companies, etc. I have already outlined some of the economic reasons these can be good businesses as well as the one of the most important – retaining full control in you business. But the broader reason that I often suggest to entrepreneurs is that they’re much easier to build than product businesses even though they’ll never become Google, Twitter or Facebook. Trust me – it is far easier to persuade a business to pay you for your services (a concept they readily understand) than it is to persuade them to buy a totally new product concept and pay for that product. I could go on-and-on with all of the sales-blocking messages you will hear when you try to charge for a product. I’ll repeat: everybody understands paying for services. It’s pure irony. At my first company we would have a product sale of $80,000 where the customer would grind us to get the fee down to $70,000 but would readily pay $25,000 extra for “implementation & post-sales support.” We were building a VC backed software business so I had to focus on the product business. But this lesson in business was never lost on me. And some of my former teammates are now building really awesome services businesses in the exact same field and they own 100% of their companies. Even tech blogs know this. You struggle to get advertisers to pay your CPM rates and get your page clicks up in a business where you become a near commodity to every other website out there. Yet you can run a conference and mint money. If it’s well run, people readily pay for conferences and sponsors readily pay to become platinum, gold or silver sponsors. Tech blogs can theoretically scale, tech conferences are pure service businesses.
I’m not saying the scaling a services business is easy – it’s not. One big challenge is how to grow the company. You end up needing to add staff and take on more risk without knowing what your future demand will be. There are a couple of ways to think about this growth. 1. Start with a network of independent contractors ( )- When you’re a young company with 3-4 people and you land work that requires 7-8 it can be daunting. You don’t necessarily want to take on the extra employees and risks. I recommend that you establish a network of contractors who want to do similar work to you but don’t know how to sell projects or to build a company. They’ll be glad for the occasional extra work. 2. Vendor financing – When you start to win business – let’s say as an implementation arm for tech / business products or as an ad sales team for large tech / media businesses – you can often get financed in a small way by your vendors who are all to happy to have a bigger ecosystem of implementation houses. They won’t do this before you prove yourself but once you hit a minimum scale this is always an option. 3. Angel financing – just because VCs won’t back this kind of business doesn’t mean angels won’t. If you can show a few million in sales and the ability to return dividends in the near-term there are always smart businesses professionals who will consider financing this. What are there other choices these days – money in a bank at 0.5% interest? 4. Bank financing – OK, so this isn’t immediately likely to come from Wells Fargo, but there are tech banks like or that are in the business of financing startups. If you can show regular cashflow and are willing to put your profits into their bank you can often fund expansion this way. Final message on financing – just be careful not to let your fixed costs get too high as a young services business. In a booming tech market like 2011 it’s easy to think your business will always expand. The problem with service businesses is that when the economy turns revenue & profits take a really big and quick hit. Those companies that have a largely variable cost base and make the tough decisions survive for the next boom.
If you build a true “technology services for services sake” business at some point you’ll likely build technology products as part of your projects where you either own the IP or you own in jointly with your customer or business partner. This is where many service businesses make mistakes and go . They get “product business envy” because they read too much TechCrunch about their product brethren raising money at crazy valuations and getting sold at even crazier ones. So they set out to build a product business within a services company. A few problems arise. Firstly, they don’t realize how hard product businesses are. They mistake their successes in selling services as a competency in selling products. This is a huge mistake. Secondly, they often ramp up their cost base to accommodate these costs, which when a down market hits they are more effed than those that stay focused. Finally, the focus on the product (envy) means that they take their eye off of their core business, which is services. So the core business suffers. I saw this first hand. My first career was at Andersen Consulting (one of the largest services businesses in the world). We built a hugely successful global services business yet we never got over our product envy from watching our tech clients. So we created internal software projects and all of the internal consultants on those projects became blowhards who thought they knew how to create software product businesses. We stunk at every product we ever created. We had no sense for gathering real customer requirements. We over-spec’d products. We built for our over-intellectual selves. I can’t think of any great software tools ever created internally by Andersen Consulting. We were a great services business. Period.
So back to my advice to the company I recently spoke to about spinning out their tech business or raising VC. My advice wasn’t to shut down all product / IP initiatives but rather to be clear on their purpose and how to monetize them. – My dear friend in Paris knows this best. He has built some internal technology products to support his services business. They are “loss leaders” for his core business. Instead of going in and trying to hold the line on how much to charge for these products he can tell customers, “Sure, we’ll give you our planning software at cost if you decide to work with us.” His business is booming. These products help him win his core sales. He is not confused about which is the horse & which is the cart. He is building a services business. Instead of owning 1% in options to join a startup tech company he created his own tech services business. He is the majority owner. Higher risk, higher reward than joining as a junior employee somewhere else. – Another important reason for having internal IP in your services business is as a key differentiator against other services businesses. If a customer is faced with two equal choices for companies who can implement Salesforce.com – how do they choose one other than references & price? Imagine if you had built a few modules on top of Salesforce.com that made that product more effective? Even if you didn’t charge for these it would sure increase your sales hit rate. Tech services business in booming markets are mostly about how fast you can sell, implement, manage quality, hire and sell some more. In a down market IP can become a huge differentiator. – Finally, it should be said that in a services business often your implementation rate becomes a commodity relative to others in the market. If you can make an extra 10% on each sale by selling your “add on” products that are at 90% gross margins not only will you increase your win rates but you’ll also add valuable profits to your bottom line. I’m not advocating that companies are crazy to try and be product companies. In fact, that’s all that I fund as a VC. But I don’t want the narrow world of venture-backed companies and the trade rags that report on them to dissuade the overwhelming masses of potential entrepreneurs from building meaningful businesses that are both fun and economically rewarding. |
If Music Be Thy Dream Of Filthy Lucre, Press Stop | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 4 | 24 | I always enjoy seeing science fiction prophecies come true. Last month, . This month, Wolfram Alpha’s , modestly subtitled “A New Kind Of Music.” (Yes, that would be the same breathtaking humility that led them to originally price the Wolfram Alpha app at a hilarious . Fortunately, they subsequently .) It is pretty cool, in a geeky sort of way: music , in the style of your choice—classical, dance, rock/pop, hip-hop, etcetera. Every composition is unique, and can be downloaded as a ringtone. They lay claim to the copyright on all the generated music, mind you, raising the interesting question of what counts as “fair use”, but I’ll leave to Cory Doctorow. What sort of saddens me about WolframTones is that it’s yet another nail in the coffin of ten million teenage dreams of musical superstardom. I don’t know if its Peter Overmann is a fan of the great Australian science-fiction writer , but I do know that he’s just recapitulated something Egan described twenty years ago in his book , in a paragraph that has stayed with me since: I flop onto my bed, and switch on the room’s audio system. The controlling ROM I’ve been playing lately, ‘Paradise’ by Angela Renfield, is one of hundreds of thousands of identical copies, but each piece it creates is guaranteed unique. Renfield has set certain parameters for the music, but others are provided by pseudorandom functions, seeded with the date, the time and the audio system’s serial number. The copyright question leaps to mind because WolframTones is yet another entry in the arsenal of resources that today’s musicians can (and probably will, regardless of the legality) sample and remix. It’s getting crazy-easy to make music these days. Gorillaz’ new album was recorded while they were in tour, and they’ve since even released . Imagine what they’ll do with the iPad 2 and its . Meanwhile, allow musicians to collaborate online. Heck, why bother learning how to play? Or sing? Consider Ark Music Factory, the behind Rebecca Black’s . For only a few thousand dollars, they’ll write and record your music, shoot your pop-idol video, and AutoTune your voice. Meanwhile, the music industry , meaning there’s less money to spread across more artists. Sure, touring can still be lucrative – but goes to those who built their brand before the modern era. There are and always will be meteoric new exceptions, but they’re increasingly rare. Music has grown so fragmented and overpopulated that just finding good new music has become a big problem in and of itself . I keep tabs on the music industry mostly because they tend to be a harbinger for other kinds of entertainment (not least because the music industry released all their wares in a non-DRMed electronic format, also known as the CD, before they quite realized what they had done.) What happens to music will happen to , and then , and then . We’ll see fewer and fewer professional musicians, writers, and filmmakers; instead we’ll see vastly more high-quality work created by part-time hobbyists aided by flashy new technology, and fewer and fewer crossover moneymaking hits. This may be great for fans—we’ll see—but I hope you don’t dream of making music / writing books / directing movies for a living. It was never easy, and thanks to all this amazing new technology, it’s getting even harder every day. Full disclosure: I’m currently doing some contract development work for a semi-stealth mode startup named who are trying to solve that problem. |
@AmericanAir, You Suck | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 4 | 24 | As I sit here writing this post, I am on board an American Airlines flight from Chicago to New York City. I consider it a minor miracle that the plane is actually in the air. After two cancelled flights on this trip alone, a seat without a cushion, and some trouble counting the number of people on the plane which made us return to the gate a second time after another minor problem, I’ve lost count of how many errors American Airlines has now made in this comedy that is my travels. Oh, and also managed to prove that it is an utterly toothless marketing arm of American which fails when it comes to providing actual customer service. I never thought I’d say this as a loyal American Airlines customer who has travelled hundreds of thousands of miles on American over the years, but it may now be Yes, this is going to be a rant. If that’s not your thing, avert your eyes. There isn’t any one thing I can point to that makes me never want to fly American again. Rather, it is everything—a succession of flubs and foibles. I like to believe I am a pretty tolerant air traveler, but everyone has a breaking point. First, a little context. My tale of travel woe begins last Tuesday on a trip to Chicago with my family, which was cancelled due to severe weather. American rebooked us on a flight with a stopover in Minneapolis, but the storms persisted and we were held there for a few hours. By the time we finally landed in Chicago, what should have been less than a three hour direct flight, turned into an 11-hour journey with three small children in tow. But I don’t blame American for that. The airlines can’t control the weather. At least the weather was cooperating yesterday, when we were scheduled to fly back. Except our flight was cancelled once again. This time it was because the crew—the one that was supposed to fly the plane—was not available. They were either over-scheduled or someone got lost along the way, I don’t know. But American didn’t have enough crew members to fly the plane. I never got any notification by email or text message that the flight was cancelled. My wife got a garbled voicemail she couldn’t understand, but it was from an 800-number so she figured it had to be from American. I called, and sure enough, the flight was cancelled. Okay, I told the agent, book me on another flight. All the flights that day were sold out. How about a connecting flight? Sold out. How about on another airline? Sold out. Grrr. It is a holiday weekend, after all, and I needed to get five seats on a new flight. The agent suggested that I take a 6 AM flight the next day. If it was just me, I’d take it. But getting three sleepy kids to the airport that early in the morning was going to be tough. Anything later? The only other flight available was a 6:55 AM flight. My flight was cancelled and I was pushed to the next day. Never once was I offered a hotel stay, a flight voucher or an upgrade. At this point, I started Tweeting out my frustrations: http://twitter.com/#!/erickschonfeld/status/61871692561137664 I just needed to vent. But then @AmericanAIr, American’s official Twitter account, gives me hope with this response: http://twitter.com/#!/AmericanAir/status/61875145823887360 But they didn’t actually do anything about getting me a better flight. They just didn’t want me bad-mouthing them on Twitter (maybe it had something to do with my 31,000 followers). Virgin America got in on the social media PR fun by Tweeting: http://twitter.com/#!/VirginAmerica/status/61900715517411328 Too bad they don’t fly to New York from Chicago. Meanwhile, @AmericanAir got back to me and referred me to the 800-number for AA reservations. Thanks, I already tried them. Not that I should get any special treatment, but don’t offer to help if you can’t intervene on behalf of customers. To me, this really points to where social media marketing fails. It is nothing more than PR unless they can provide actual customer service. Anyway, the worst was yet to come. We rally the kids in the morning, drag my brother-in-law out of bed and make him drive us to the airport. We get there on time, check our bags, get through security. All is good and light in the world. Then we get on the plane. One of the crew members looks at my ticket and warns me that my seat cushion is missing. They are getting another one, though, don’t worry. I don’t even want to know what happened to the old cushion that they had to remove it. The plane fills up, and still no cushion. I’m standing in the aisle in everybody’s way. An enterprising stewardess grabs another cushion from one of the few remaining open seats and places it on my seat. Great, problem solved. Not so fast. An airline maintenance worker comes aboard and informs us that you can’t just move a cushion from one seat to another. They look the same to me and the stewardess. No matter. We put it back where it was. Does the maintenance worker have another cushion with him? No, instead he proceeds to place a “Do Not Occupy” sign on the cushion-less seat. Yeah, I wasn’t going to sit there anyway. A lady switches seats with my son so that we can sit together. Now we are off to the runway. Uh-oh. We have to turn back because “maintenance needs to check something in the cockpit.” We taxi back, they check out the issue, and we are given the green light. Back to the runway we go. We’ve been sitting in the plane for three hours now. And, oops, we have to go to the gate once again because of a discrepancy between the number of people on the plane and the headcount at the gate. That’s right, American Airlines doesn’t even know how to count. Here’s the kicker, when we get back to the gate, they let us off to stretch our legs. Nobody asks for boarding passes when we return. Anybody in the gate area could have walked on that plane. So much for security measures (the stated reason why we had to go back to the gate in the first place). Well, the plane took off eventually. And at least the WiFi works. You’ve still got that going for you, @AmericanAir. : A few days after this story ran, a customer service rep from American Airlines contacted me to apologize for my experience and offered me a $1,000 voucher. I accepted both the apology and the voucher. http://twitter.com/#!/erickschonfeld/status/62171382179561472 |
We're In The Middle Of A Terrible Blubble! | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 4 | 24 | If you’re an early stage venture capitalist or angel investor there is no time like the present to , say valuations are out of control and predict the demise of the tech industry in the very near future. Since they’re in the business of buying low and selling high, any angle that suggests that the buy price should be even lower sounds great to them. If there’s any evidence of said bubble all the press will eat it up. Mostly because they were out buying Internet stocks in 2000 instead of doing their jobs and reporting on the fairly obvious signals that the Nasdaq was about to implode. They won’t get caught with their pants down and their hand out again. Declare a bubble early and declare it often. And there is some evidence laying around. Valuations on a few select private tech startups are pretty darn high right now. And valuations on early stage “Series A” startups have surpassed the all important and are now averaging in the $6 million – $8 million range. That’s bad for seed fund economics. Which leads to paragraph 1 above, followed by paragraph 2 in the press. There are a lot of arguments that whatever is happening today in tech is absolutely nothing like what happened in 1999-2000. If you weren’t in the industry then, it’s understandable that you’d be concerned when you see Facebook being valued at up to $70 billion in private transactions. Heck, even I’m concerned when I see companies like SecondMarket holding public auctions for Facebook stock, driving the price ever higher, and private equity firms like Felix Investments out there pitching Twitter stock as a must have to any retiree with a million dollars. But this isn’t a bubble. It’s more like a Blubble. A Blubble? Yes, a Blubble. Because there is a lot of whining going on. The biggest problem in 2000 wasn’t that companies were being formed in triplicate to address the burgeoning pet food home delivery needs of consumers. Or even that billions of dollars was being invested in new ideas, most of which didn’t work. No, the biggest problem was that no one had any idea how to value these companies. It was clear by the late 90s that this Internet thing had legs. And everyone wanted to be at the party. People flocked to Silicon Valley to take jobs like “Business Development Manager.” Anyone can be a biz dev executive because it’s not a real job. It’s kind of like sales but you usually don’t have any kind of quota. You just work on “deals.” Business development, marketing and sales jobs exploded. If you had experience selling anything, or were willing to give it a try, there was a hot new well funded Internet startup that would hire you, pay you at least $100k, give you a bunch of stock options and then actually loan you the money to pay for those stock options immediately, getting your long term capital gains period started. When I left the law firm I was working at I became VP of Business Development the startup I joined, a former client. I was running the sales group too within a few months. I was 29 and had never sold anything in my life. But there I was, doing deals and in the thick of things. My stock options, Morgan Stanley told me, were worth over $40 million. That story has a sad ending. I’ll tell you all about it later. Short version is that by 2001 I was basically broke and moved to London where I learned to appreciate drinking heavily at lunch every day because that’s what you did in London. But back to the Bubble and the Blubble. The problem in 2000 is that all anyone cared about was revenue. Users and page views were an afterthought. Profit was a pipe dream. But revenue. Now that was something that Wall Street understood and could put a value on. Everything was valued at a multiple of revenue. It didn’t really matter how unprofitable you were. Which is why WebVan, for example, could blow though a billion dollars and be nowhere near profitability and still go public. And then go bankrupt right after investors cashed out big. Everyone lost money on every transaction and nobody cared. Because your stock price was tied to revenue, and when you ran out of money raising another hundred million dollars was nothing more than a fancy powerpoint presentation and a month’s work. As a lawyer I sat in board meetings for my clients. And in those meetings I saw very well known venture capitalists tell these companies to spend as much money as they could as fast as they could, and then raise a bunch more and spend that as fast as they could. Hire anyone remotely competent who comes in the office, they say, and figure out a way to create revenue. Even, they said, if you have to spend $10 to get $1 in revenue. A perfectly reasonable 2000 tech startup business decision – spend $10 million on a massive advertising campaign that may bring in $500k in revenue. The “branding” value makes up the difference, and those few new customers will continue to spend money and tell their friends! Grab territory while it’s there to be grabbed, the thinking went. We’ll figure out the business later. Money was so easy to come by, it made sense to some. Take the startup I worked at, for example, called RealNames. When I was put in charge of sales I was told to get us from zero revenue to $1 million/quarter in revenue. We achieved that goal through hard work and creative accounting. And boom! Morgan Stanley was brought in to take us public. At the first internal meeting for the IPO they told us that we could expect to debut on Nasdaq at a $1 billion valuation, and should trade up quickly to a $9 billion valuation, which was the market price for Ask Jeeves at the time. I had about half a percent of the company in stock. Thus, my $40 million net worth. That IPO never happened because in March 2001 the Nasdaq crashed. And then all those creative revenue deals fell apart. In the most innocent cases Company A would buy a bunch of ads or whatever from Company B. Maybe a $5 million deal over 24 months. Company B would then buy a bunch of stuff from Company A. Say $4 million over 18 months. As long as the deals weren’t mirrors and they were separate and binding contracts the accountants were high fiving everyone. Everyone was doing those deals, particularly the public companies that absolutely had to keep those revenue numbers up to support their valuations. Note that I haven’t said a word about profits. Some people, many of whom were subsequently , were forward thinking enough to begin to hide the fact that these were reciprocal revenue deals. They invented “triangle deals” involving at least three companies so that there were no mirror deals between any two companies. AOL was particularly fond of these deals: The prosecution alleged that Homestore was engaged in “triangular” deals. That meant it would buy goods from a third-party vendor, the vendor would make a purchase from a counterparty, and the counterparty would then place other companies’ advertising on Homestore’s websites and pay Homestore the remaining revenues. The indictment said Homestore should not have recognized revenue on any of the transactions but listed the money as revenue on its financial statements. AOL, the decision said, served as the counterparty in 17 transactions included in the indictment. I once sat in a meeting where a Homestore executive pitched me on participating in one of these deals. Even in the craziness of the 90s, it smelled awful. So to sum up. Raise at least $100 million in venture capital. Spend! Hire everyone (particularly sales people)! Get revenue by any means necessary! Go Public! Sell Your Stock! Run! Drag blubbering angel investors into Series A rounds valuing your company at $6 million instead of $4 million. Hire engineers, lots of them, as many as you can. Don’t hire non-engineers or other overhead people unless you absolutely have to (thus the dearth of VP Biz Devs around). Your APIs are your sales team! Balance fast growth with low burn (through cost controls or profitability). If you happen to have started Facebook, Groupon or Zynga, capitalize on your massive profitability by doing big late stage rounds that value you at something like 30x forward profits (which isn’t that crazy). If you’ve founded Twitter and have no revenue, capitalize on the massive worldwide cultural impact you’ve created instead. But no one. Absolutely no one, is telling startups to raise and spend money as fast as they can. With the possible exception of . I have no idea what those guys are up to over there in crazy picture sharing land. |
The Royal Scam | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 4 | 24 | Roger Nichols died the other day. He was the engineer behind the Steely Dan records, the ones that stood in the great chasm between George Martin’s Beatles productions and whatever is going on today. When I think of what could be of the great realtime stream we’re all building, I hope and trust it will somehow reach toward the quality of that perfection. It felt like a perpetual motion machine, a unique world inside a glass ball, shimmering in the precision of the world’s greatest drummers’ time machine. Some felt it lacked emotion, settling for cool perhaps. You could say that, but as the years went by, the clock kept quietly ticking — through the rage of the punks, the bloat of the eighties, the decades we stopped counting. Like a Kubrick film, exacting in its architecture, with tinges of humor and slashes of jump cuts. Today we talk of bubbles, of the hype cycle, of valuations and pre-IPO marketplaces where we can retain control over the precision of our inventions. My favorite bubble is AirPlay, where Steve Jobs’ hobby as he called it is transformed into a gateway drug for the new media. We know what the iPad is good for, but what a surprise awaited us when we started to notice the little icon that connects us back to the time when music and film and even TV kept us in the know about what was important. Back then music was freed of the tyranny of the cartel’s fear of digital copying. Back then we stole from each other, guilty of the pleasure of honoring those we loved and admired. And the sharing gave back to us this explosion of riches, the feeling of walking among the gods even if we were mere mortals. The sweet insolence of confidence that we were busy inventing the world. You can see that spirit alive today, as it always is. On Netflix, a Marx Brothers film, not the classic ones but a middle-aged one reusing the Casablanca sets. There’s Harpo with that goofy expression, a glint in the eyes that says everything The Clash would say years later as they rocked the Casbah. quoted Nichols saying he didn’t mind the endless retakes of Becker and Fagan: “It would have driven a lot of other engineers up the wall. In my own way, I’m just as crazy as they are.” Back then we called them records as they spun slower and slower, from 78 to 45 to 33 and a third. You could lose yourself in the liner notes, the arcana ) of producers and engineers and musicians and doctors and lawyers and thanks to God et al. Like baseball cards or bird watching or the clocksmith tinkering in his inner sanctum, a world where we all took the time to revel in what we were inventing. There was no concept of users, or the audience back then. We felt like the baseball fan sure that if we turned off the game too soon or failed to wear the lucky hat that day, that our team would lose. If we weren’t in the loop, the bubble wouldn’t exist. Does that sound like the Stream today? It should. Twitter’s power is in our shared assent, our cooperation, our delight at co-writing the liner notes of our time. Still, the tools rebel at our temerity. Word barfs every time I construct a sentence that dangles, splaying a green line below the fragment but not suggesting a replacement. It’s almost a validation of the choice of fewer words, the flailings of the machine as it debates whether to add the style to the dictionary or continue to obstinately tell us it doesn’t learn. It wants to be helpful, but with a schoolmarmish virtual rap on the knuckles. No, it doesn’t like schoolmarmish at all. Real soon now they’ll unlock the two sides of AirPlay, the liner notes displacing the default animals on the HD screen alongside the music. I listened to the new Paul Simon record yesterday, produced with another great master of then and now, Phil Ramone. The CD format is too small for the aging eyes, too dark for the underlit room in this turn off the hall light energy crisis $5 a gallon moment. I’d pay for a channel that pushed the graphics and liner notes and pictures and web site with upsell and concert promos and so on. C’mon guys, the iPad is here. On the record, God speaks (Paul in a close-miked Bill Cosby voice): I found this at my neighborhood record store, aka Starbucks. Simon, who used to be on Warners and Columbia (Sony) with Garfunkel, is now on Hear Music aka Starbucks Corporation. I’m beginning to get that they are joking. And so I will mourn Roger Nichols with the great pleasure of knowing he did what he set out to do: play in the garden of perfection without fear and with no apologies. Back then, they knew what this world was going to look like, because they invented it. Just because Pan Am didn’t survive until the real 2001 doesn’t mean Kubrick was any less of a prophet. Like Steve Jobs and the inventors of the Cloud, those who dare to be perfect divine our shared future. |
OneRiot's 'Social Interest Score' Defines Mobile Audience Segments For Advertisers | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 4 | 24 |
As we wrote earlier this year, a social targeting service for mobile ads, that offers highly targeted ads within mobile apps. Similar to Klout’s social influence score, OneRiot has developed a “social interest score” to define mobile audience segments based on social interest categories. With the new social targeting service, OneRiot allows advertisers to reach targeted audience
segments on mobile, from busy moms to tech influencers to sports guys to fashionistas. Segmentation and targeting are based on factors such as audience interest profiles, demographics, social influence and realtime conversations. OneRiot’s audience profiles are created by mining and analyzing public big data social streams from services (i.e.Twitter). The company says that this data is derived from users that heavily engage with content on their mobile device that is relevant to their current social activity, including status updates, tweets, photos, advertising and more. Now OneRiot is opening this segmentation algorithm up to allows users to see your ‘social interest segments.’ The algorithm is based on a number of factors, including follow graphs, interest graphs, influence graphs, and the content behind links that are shared across those graphs. You simple enter a social media user name that you associate with on mobile (e.g. your Twitter handle) and OneRiot returns your “social interest segments” – along with an example an ad we might show you. H For example, if you follow BBC Top Gear on Twitter, and other friends you follow post links to Auto pages on nytimes.com, then OneRiot would categorize that activity as belonging to the “Auto” category. OneRiot would then work with car brand advertisers like Volvo to help them deliver interest-based mobile targeting campaigns to the “Auto” audience segment on mobile. Audience targeting isn’t new-it happens in online advertising all the time. But it’s interesting to see what segmentation you fall in as a Twitter user and how advertisers are placing you into a particular demographic. We have early access to the tool for 140 TechCrunch readers. Those who are interested can send an email to theteam@OneRiot.com, and the first 140 responses will get access over the next week. |
null | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 6 | null |
(Founder Stories) The GroupMe Guys Reveal How To Land A Job At A Startup | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 4 | 23 | All week long we’ve been running clips from the interview with the GroupMe Guys, co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci. In the video above, they answer some rapid fire questions about how to impress startups during an interview (give great product feedback), what do they look for in “social engineers,” and what is the hardest part of running a startup (delegating and hiring). Host Chris Dixon mentions Paul Graham’s on how founders should split up their time into a Maker schedule and a Manager schedule, and how in practice that turns out to be impossible. “Balancing the founder stuff on top of your actual responsibilities” is really tough, says Martocci. (Disclosure: Dixon is an investor in GroupMe through Founder Collective) The full interview from the past few episodes is below, or you can watch each segment via the related links at the bottom of this post. You can also check out other of or subscribe in . :
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Q&A With Geoff Cook: How We Solved The Chatroulette Porn Problem | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 4 | 23 | When we decided to build a , the best example of Live Video at scale was Chatroulette, and it was full of porn. At the time, 1 out of every 10 video streams on Chatroulette was obscene. Chatroulette was growing in part because it obscene—it was the accident victim and the public was the rubbernecker. Chatroulette’s in March 2010—the same month that Jon Stewart screamed into the camera to end a segment that would be the service’s high water mark. While we were bothered by the content, the visceral social experience that Chatroulette represented was compelling. We loved the serendipity of the Next button, and set out to build a service that would allow the promise of the Next button to be realized. A lot of our effort went into matching users based on location, age, and gender in real time while building out a gaming-platform to give them something to do beyond chat. Since launching in January 2011, we’ve grown to 750,000 video chats a day with 100 times less nudity than Chatroulette a year ago. The core of our abuse-prevention approach is a system that enables us to capture and analyze thousands of images a second from the hundreds of thousands of daily streams. We sample the video streams of users at random, frequent intervals and then conduct processing—both human and algorithmic—on the resulting images. One early finding was that images with faces are 5 times less likely to contain nudity than images without faces. If you’ve ever used Chatroulette, this will make sense as the most common pornography encountered there contains a body part other than, ahem, the face. This is useful information because open-source facial recognition is relatively advanced while other-body-part detection is much less so. As a result, it is possible to use the presence of a face to limit some of the human review problem. The mere presence of a face does not make an image clean. In fact, around 20% of nudity-containing streams also contain a face. However, with a lot of effort and additional processing logic including many factors like chat reputation, social graph, motion, etc., we’ve made the presence of a face helpful in determining “safe” images. Of course “safe” images may themselves be a false negative, and so we do human sampling of these images at a lower sample rate than images not marked “safe.” The heart of our human-powered solution is a two-tiered image review organization that enables each individual reviewer to scan 400 images a minute looking for abusive content. Both groups are 24 x 7 x 365. Our goal is to be no more than 5 minutes delayed in reviewing streams. We have a zero tolerance policy. If two reviewers deem your behavior inappropriate, your account is removed and you are banned from the site forever. Based on our findings, we believe purely algorithmic approaches to moderation will never provide adequate safety. As our product has grown, we’ve noticed Chatroulette make some progress in reducing their nudity problem as well. On a recent night, a review of 1,500 Chatroulette video streams yielded a 1.9% abuse rate—or roughly a 1 in 50 chance of encountering nudity on any click of the Next button. This compares to a less than 1 in 1000 chance on myYearbook. myYearbook requires a login. While much has been made of Facebook Connect as an identity-layer that will discourage abuse, we don’t believe the identity aspect plays much of a role . Someone who is interested in taking down their pants will do it even on their iPhone in the , which was quickly overrun by abuse, despite the fact that every phone can easily identify you uniquely. The more salient aspect is that there be login. So long as there is any login, a user’s device can be blocked—and we’ve found people who take down their pants for strangers generally lack a certain when it comes to circumventing security systems—unlike, say, spammers. We use a technology called to fingerprint devices and ban both the user and their physical device when we detect abuse. Threatmetrix helps provide the teeth of our zero-tolerance policy. Our system for reviewing live video has proven so successful that we are now actively engaged in bringing a similar system to bear on every photo uploaded to myYearbook. In a few months time, we will have perfect insight into every image being posted to the service, and we believe we can make incremental gains there as well by fundamentally turning a report-based system into a pro-active system. Eradicating abuse from user-generated content is a never-ending, human-and-machine-intensive problem that may well spell the difference between success and failure, especially when you are dealing with live video. |
Gillmor Gang 4.23.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 4 | 23 | The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Doc Searls, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — endured technical glitches and a dissection of the disruption formerly known as TV before settling into a debate about privacy. I know, sounds like the usual nonsense, but this show was high quality nonsense. I forget who brought up the famous iPhone/Android hidden recording file crisis, but things quickly got out of hand when one of us suggested that was a feature not a problem. It turns out that not that many people are aware that when we are on the Internet, everything is recorded. For those who seem surprised by this, all those free apps are actually there to harvest our clicks, searches, and other gestures of our intent. As Doc Searls pointed out, how else does Google make money except by random clicks on Adsense adding up to billions. It’s only when we can’t figure out how to delete our wanderings that people get upset. Me — I count on being surreptitiously tracked so I can go back and figure out where I was last week. |
TC Cribs: Meebo’s Headbanging, Rocket-Flinging Office (With Magical Passageways) | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 4 | 23 | We’re back with another episode of TC Cribs, taking you inside the offices of some of the tech world’s hottest companies. This episode features , which rose to popularity as a multi-protocol web-based chat client, and has since gotten tons of traction with their (not to be confused with the numerous drinking holes located in the office, as you’ll see in the episode)). Tune in to learn about Meebo’s traditions, their giant cookies, their hidden staircase to the happiest place on Earth, and the wooden board they call a ‘rock wall’ that is much, much harder than it looks. Seriously, it’s really hard. You’ll see. And do be sure to watch til the end. Also be sure to check out our past episodes of TC Cribs: As always, credit to Ashley Pagán and John Murillo for the camera work, and to Mr. Murillo for the fantastic editing (he’s seriously a wizard). |
Daily Crunch: Analyze Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 4 | 23 | |
Hack Attack: Sony Confirms PlayStation Network Outage Caused By 'External Intrusion' | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 4 | 23 | Unfortunately for and services users, it looks like the widespread network outages will continue. Since Sony’s PlayStation and music networks went down two days ago, there has been a fair amount of public speculation over the cause of the outage. (Largely due to Sony’s tight-lipped handling of public relations.) Many blamed vengeful gremlins loose in Sony’s server clusters and datacenters, while others immediately pointed the finger at , the merry band of hackers that metastasized out of . Thankfully, after 24+ hours of communication silence, Sony has and ended the speculation. According to the electronics colossus, “an external intrusion” is responsible for the ongoing outages of the PlayStation Network and Qriocity. (It probably sounded like at Sony headquarters. Or .) As to who these nefarious “intruders” are: It seems that Sony does not yet know who is responsible for the breach, or if it does, it is instead smartly spending its time sealing areas of vulnerability and trying to get the network back up and running. And though reports of PlayStation’s outage began heating up early Thursday morning, Sony reports that it in fact self-defensively shut down the Network sometime Wednesday evening. According to the network’s blog, So, when I said Sony has ended all speculation, I was really only half-correct. Sony is still not naming the party responsible for the breach, so the speculation will likely continue. (Can you hear the blogosphere cheering?) Anonymous has prior beef with Sony and has attacked the company before, so it’s not surprising many blamed them for the service disruption. (You can read more about Anon’s prior grievances with Sony .) However, (Anonymous Operations), the group’s mouthpiece and network through which members frequently communicate, has adamantly stated via its that it was not responsible for the outage. Though, it seems that this particular announcement was made prior to Sony delivering the news that the problem was in fact due to hacking. So, Anonymous pointing to Sony’s incompetence as the cause of the outages is off base. Sort of. More likely, as Anonymous makes mention of in the announcement, the hack was perpetrated by some offshoot of the group, which is either more angry at Sony than the majority, or is more eager to get its precious . (While I have to admit that I sometimes find myself sympathetic to some of Anonymous’ philosophical stances, it’s hard not to use words like “fundamentalist” when referring to “factions” within the group, and draw structural comparisons between black hatters and terrorists. There are obviously important distinctions here, and line-blurring, but there it is.) Or, on the other hand, we might soon be learning of an as-yet-unknown hacker entity that is making a run at Anonymous for public notoriety. Gulp. The PlayStation Network currently has over 70 million users and is Sony’s online medium for its PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles. Both the Network, and Sony’s Qriocity music service were targeted. As stated previously, in its most recent blog post, Network spokespeople make no mention of how long the outage will continue, but it’s likely that it may take several more days to sort out. And this is after Sony posted yesterday saying that the outage may last for a “full day or two” — after Amazon’s web and cloud services suffered from their own major outage. At this point, the outage has lasted for over 48 hours and has become quite a disaster for Sony. (Or a “kerfuffle”, if you prefer a softer word.) Now, if this were in fact the result of denial-of-service attacks, it’s hard to place the blame entirely on Sony. Few networks can defend against large-scale DDoS attacks, which is, sadly, the point. That being said, the company has known since Wednesday night that there was an intrusion, so I find it odd that it would wait for two days to inform its users — and remove a post from its EU blog early Thursday saying that the outage is a result of All in all, the company’s public relations strategy is, at the least, very confusing. While it’s true that millions of gamers are being inconvenienced and are being forced offline, sure, it’s certainly not the end of the world. But, both for the sake of the company — and its users — a higher frequency of communication and level of transparency has to be achieved. In today’s world, a company can’t allow its official Twitter streams (@Playstation has nearly 800K followers) to go without an update for 24 hours. Especially when 70 million people are affected. So, for everyone’s sake, I hope the Network can get up and running before this turns into the longest widespread network outage (due to hacking) in recent memory. If it isn’t already. We will update this post over the weekend as we learn more. Stay tuned. Sony at around 8pm Saturday that the network remains down due to the fact that company is “re-building our system to further strengthen our network infrastructure”. I imagine rebuilding its entire network is going to take some time, but in the long run, it’s probably best to do this all at once, even if it takes several more days. UPDATE 2: As of 1pm Monday, the outage continues. Today’s update from the PlayStation blog . There is still no word about when the Network will be back up and running. Could be tomorrow, could be next week. From Sr. Director, Corporate Communications Patrick Seybold, |
Google Video Prepares To Enter The Deadpool For Good | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 4 | 15 | Looks like wasn’t the only product on the chopping block today — now Google Video, the mostly-forgotten service that was once YouTube’s rival, is getting the axe too. Google just sent out an email to users who have previously uploaded content to the service informing them that on April 29 2011, the site will no longer host any more videos. Users are being encouraged to download and reupload their files to YouTube. The news was first yesterday by CenterNetworks. Google actually stopped allowing uploads to Google Video back in May 2009, but existing videos have played fine until now. The news will likely frustrate some people, as Google’s assured users that while uploads were being disabled, their content “would remain hosted by Google Video”. The writing has been on the wall for a long time now. Google Video launched back in 2005 — you had to upload footage using a desktop client instead of a web form — and was selling premium content as early as January 2006. But rival site YouTube came out of nowhere to become a viral phenomenon, which prompted Google to in October 2006. We’re adding Google Video to the , though the service still lives on (if only in logo) as Google’s search engine for video at . Here’s the letter that’s being sent out: Dear Google Video User, Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re removing the remaining hosted content. We’ve always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide. On April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback. We’ve added a Download button to the video status page, so you can download any video content you want to save. If you don’t want to download your content, you don’t need to do anything. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011.) We encourage you to move to your content to YouTube if you haven’t done so already. YouTube offers many video hosting options including the ability to share your videos privately or in an unlisted manner. To learn more go here. Here’s how to download your videos: Go to the Video Status page.
To download a video to your computer, click the Download Video link located on the right side of each of your videos in the Actions column. Once a video has been downloaded, “Already Downloaded” will appear next to the Download Video link. If you have many videos on Google Video, you may need to use the paging controls located on the bottom right of the page to access them all. Please note: This download option will be available through May 13, 2011. Thank you for being a Google Video user. Sincerely, The Google Video Team |
Google Kills Tags In Favor Of Boost | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 4 | 15 | Google is , an advertising product for local businesses which allowed them to enhance their Google Maps or Places listings. For a flat $25 monthly fee, local merchants could make their their natural listings stand out a bit with a yellow tag and a few words pointing to offers, photos, menus, or links back to their website. Tags were , the search engines local listings effort, about a year ago after being for a few months. Google sent an email today to merchants using the service notifying them that it will be shut down in two weeks on April 29. One tipster who sent us a copy of the email writes: Seems google is killing this offering. Must be a part of the recent restructuring. It was doing pretty well for my company too, I’m pretty bummed about it. While it’s true that Local is now under senior VP Jeff Huber, there is probably a simpler explanation for why it is getting sunsetted. Tags was an experiment which led to a similar local advertising product called Boost which appears do be doing much better, judging by how much it is now appearing in search results. Boost ads are all of those blue-colored pushpins on Google Maps and in paid search results. Rather than linking to a website, an offer, or a menu, Boost highlights some listings information from Google Places such as an adress or phone number. These are much more useful, especially in mobile search. Merchants don’t want to drive clicks to their websites, they want to drive foot traffic to their stores or calls for their services. Also Boost is a very straightforward . Merchants set a budget and pay per click, whereas Tags appear next to organic results to make them pop and were sold via a flat subscription. Boost is basically a refined version of Tags, and that’s what Google is going with. For local businesses that like tags, they can still buy them across a dozen competing non-Google sites . A tag and customized message can be added to any local business listing on sites like Citysearch, Local.com, and SuperPages, Incidentally, Yext is planning on changing the name of this product to on Monday to PowerListings. Yext CEO Howard Lerman notes that the decision is completely independent, and has more to do with the fact that local merchants understand what a listing is but may have no idea what is a tag. “What this all says is that non-discretionary local is all about the business listing,” says Lerman—”whether its on a mobile device, a search engine, a reviews site, or in an app, listings are how consumers will find and select local businesses.” |
Best Buy May Release Hostage iPad 2s In Nation-Wide Sale This Sunday | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 15 |
There’s been some talk about allegedly in order to have inventory for a big sale. We heard a few different stories and I don’t know what to actually believe, but it appears that those rumors had some truth, because Best Buy is apparently going to launch an event on the 17th (Sunday) across the country. Will it be a crazy price? Free accessory? Or will they simply say “we’ve got ’em, come and get ’em”? It isn’t clear from the memo ( ) seen above. But they’re not manufacturing scarcity — the scarcity is real, and some stores will only have a handful to sell. If you’ve got one on reserve, this would be a good time to drop by, as stores should have inventory and this memo directs people to fulfill previous orders first. Look out for an ad in the Sunday paper; we’ll post it here if we see it. Or you could just skip out on Best Buy’s , buy online, and wait a couple weeks. |
Twitter's Phantom Punch | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 4 | 15 | Yesterday, the story on everyone’s mind in the tech world was the turmoil at Twitter. Led by the written by Jessi Hempel, if you read it, you might think the sky is falling on Chicken Little. Not surprisingly, Twitter responded — sort of. Though it an “official” response, Twitter co-founder put up on his personal blog late last night directly addressing the Fortune article. He even invoked Rocky. Yes. Fight! The problem with Stone’s post is that in any way to the actual content of the Fortune story. Instead, he focuses on Fortune’s history of flip-flopping. They love Facebook, they hate Facebook. They love Google, they hate Google. They love Twitter… You get the point. It’s a smart maneuver by the man who actually used to run communications for Twitter back in the day. (As a sidenote, I fondly recall our back-and-forth emails along the lines of “Hey Biz, why is Twitter down now?” “Hey MG, looking into it.”) But let’s be clear about what the maneuver is: straight-up diversion. Stone’s post is implying that Fortune’s post is simply a continuation of a cycle they follow to build a company up only to knock them down. Though not stated, the underlying idea here is that these stories create more interest and thus, more readers. That’s undoubtedly at least partially true. But again, it’s also implying that there is actually nothing wrong at Twitter. And that’s simply not true. Anyone with any sort of connections to the tech scene out here will know that . That’s not saying the company is collapsing, but Fortune doesn’t say that either. There has been trouble behind the scenes. It’s real. And it’s hardly some well-guarded secret. You’ll notice that Stone does not deny any of that. Again, he simply diverts attention away from it by throwing a punch at Fortune for their editorial practices. “Are there problems at Twitter?” “Hey, look over there!!” Stone also notes that, “Twitter has had so many ups and downs you’d think we would have had more negative press.” Apparently, he hasn’t been closely reading TechCrunch over the years. While all of us love and are addicted to Twitter, we’ve had dozens of — and rightfully so. if , . We even had posts with the title “ “. What Stone likely means, of course, is that the media has been largely kind to Twitter over the years. That seems largely true but for a different reason than Stone concludes. Stone suggests that the mainstream media has shown Twitter nothing but love, but he leaves out the fact that it’s largely because they did view them as Rocky (to borrow Stone’s metaphor) for a long time. As in, they thought Twitter was a joke that could never compete on the big stage. Hell, most of the mainstream media had absolutely no idea what Twitter was until mid-2009 or into 2010. Stone does end his post strong though. “Twitter is an important company and it’s under scrutiny from journalists—this is exactly how it’s supposed to work,” he writes Yes, that’s exactly right. You know what’s worse than getting taken down in the press? Getting no press at all because your company is considered irrelevant (see: above). “Now it’s our job to prove the reporters wrong so they can write an article later about how we have made dramatic progress,” he continues. Again, right. At the end of the day, what matters are results. None of Twitter’s issues are unfixable. And even better, if Twitter continues to achieve growth and gains success from a monetary perspective, it will coat any problems they do have in a fine gloss that the press and others will look right past. You think Facebook doesn’t have internal issues? Yeah, right. Stone then does what needs to be done and (rightly) praises the 400+ employees working for Twitter who are devoting their lives to it. It’s rah-rah from a journalistic perspective, but it’s exactly what a leader of a company needs to do when employees are reading about company troubles in the press. But now I’m glossing over Stone’s glossing over of the real issues at hand. In Rocky’s boxing parlance, his post was a phantom punch. Sometimes you can . But throw too many and you might end up on the wrong side of Clubber Lang’s prediction in : “ .” |
E-Books See Triple Digit Growth As Paper Book Sales Dive | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 15 |
A from the Association of American Publishers reveals that e-books sales experienced “powerful continuing growth” as they colorfully put it, and paper books of all types dipped, compared to the same period (January-February) from last year. This isn’t surprising news, mainly because it isn’t news — and even if it , it’s just history repeating itself; we’ve seen the same thing happen to music. The parallels are clear, though the situations and reactions of the RIAA and AAP are somewhat different. Mostly in that the AAP and other booksellers aren’t being dragged kicking, screaming, and suing into the future, but are embracing it despite its implications. The attempt to push through that big deal with Google seemed to indicate willingness on the part of the publishers to be part of the new order of things. It got as opportunistic and overreaching on Google’s part (a decision I agree with, personally, though the agreement was very forward-thinking), but the fact remains that booksellers are actually excited about the future of publishing, the money to be made, the markets to be reached, and so on. The fact that a report like this can be published without any kind of bitter commentary on the decline of paper books is telling. If the RIAA had issued a report saying that digital sales were up 150% but physical sales were down 25%, it would be accompanied by a few poorly-reasoned shots at piracy. Piracy will in fact be a part of the bookmaker’s lot soon, as well; indeed, it’s already a problem, according to some. With greater sales of comes greater piracy and the threat of phantasmal “lost income,” as the music industry loves to say, but of course you can’t lose what you never had, and their of piracy’s effects poison their credibility. I imagine we’ll see a few quixotic stands by the booksellers as well, and battles like the and the will continue for a few years as standards get hammered out. Right now, for instance, Harper-Collins is making a fool of itself by . Changing the container we get our words in is a natural change, and this level growth should continue, or even accelerate, over the next few years. A $99 Kindle, ad-supported or not, will push another few million of the things out the door, and have yet to make their impact. And unlike the record industry, booksellers are itching to get their hands on these new product vectors. The market won’t begin to settle down until e-readers are as popular as mobile phones and PCs, which I believe will happen despite . Once the device class reaches a reasonable level of saturation, then the battle begins. This growth is the storm before the storm. |
Even More Next-Gen Nintendo Console Rumors | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 15 | A few rumors regarding the next Nintendo console. Only a few minutes after I posted them, I had to update with a few more that had hit in the twenty minutes it had taken me to write it up. And now there are even more! Either a disgruntled employee is seeding these rumors, or it’s deliberate leakage from the big N. The first update is via . 01.net adds some specs to what we knew yesterday, saying that the new console will have a custom three-core IBM PowerPC CPU, a Radeon R700 family GPU, and at least 512MB of RAM. The controller, they say, has a six-inch touch screen and a user-facing camera (!) as well as a D-pad and some bumpers and triggers. This jives with what IGN’s Jim Reilly — essentially that the controller can stream games from the console like a miniature TV. I share GamesRadar’s qualms with the touchscreen thing, and I’m suspicious of the six-inch figure. That would make it almost as big as a Galaxy Tab or PlayBook. I’d guess they’ll keep it small and SD, since HD isn’t really possible at that size anyway at the moment. I’m going to wait for the dust to settle before attempting any kind of coherent opinion on all this stuff. Sounds expensive, though. [via ] |
Weekend Giveaway: An Authentic Darth Vader Costume | John Biggs | 2,011 | 4 | 15 | Spring is upon us and a young geek’s mind turns to thoughts of love. And what better way to win the heart of the guy (or girl) of your dreams than to dress up like in a completely authentic Sith Lord costume (saber not included). People will be able to sense your confidence along with your off-the-charts midichlorian count as you stride up to the bar and, in your deepest, smokiest voice, say to the bartender “I find your lack of MGD 64 disturbing.” You will be, as they say, unstoppable. How do you win? Comment below explaining what drew you, personally, to the dark side. Was it the robots? The choke holds? The cookies? Comment only once and include your email in the proper field. If you don’t include an email I can’t contact you and then you’ll scream in anguish like Anakin falling into the lava. I’ll pick one winner at noon on Monday. Thanks to for the excellent prize. UPDATE – Congrats to Tom Klein for winning the sassy, sassy prize. |
Chatroulette Posts Lawyer's Notes In Privacy Policy For Your Entertainment And Edification | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 15 |
Don’t publish your lawyer’s notes about the various ways you may or may not profit off of user data. Video chat site seems to have just done just that with its privacy policy, publishing lawyer’s notes like … And the precious … “ — right within the policy itself. The “Andrey” being addressed here is presumably the site’s teenage founder . [Note: I’ve been a of Chatroulette since I first , but this was too good not to post. ] I mean it’s standard procedure to get notes like this from your lawyer to review, but not so standard to publish them. Those who want to take a look at the suggested policy revisions can check them out but act fast, as they probably won’t be up for very long. |
Forum Network CrowdGather Acquires Free Forum Host Forumer | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 15 | LA-based Internet forum community has acquired free forum hosting platform Forumer for $400K in cash. will be joining other platforms and as a hosting option for its 65,000 plus online forums. Forumer currently serves 35 million monthly pageviews for 200,000 forums. The purchase increases CrowdGather’s network traffic by 50% from 90 million monthly pageviews at the beginning of this year to 135 million monthly pageviews and 13 million monthly unique visitors (CrowdGather was at 100 million monthly pageviews before the acquisition). CrowdGather (CRWG.OB) has been a publicly traded company since 2008 but just through private placement in March. Apparently it’s spending the money by going on a forum shopping spree, snapping up underpriced forums communities like rapmusic.com and digishoptalk.com and optimizing them for monetization. |
Review: Samson Meteor Mic | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 15 |
An attractive and portable mic for when you want to capture a little more depth and warmth than the one built into your laptop, webcam, or headset.
We saw the Meteor Mic make its debut at CES, and looked forward to checking it out; there’s no shortage of microphones out there, but this compact and nice-looking gadget seemed to stand out from the crowd. The look is a cross between an old-school chrome microphone and a modern device. It has fold-out legs that let you stand it at any position you like, or fold them up completely to make it a little portable silver pellet. It’s really made of metal (well, it’s chrome-plated, anyway), which is reassuring when it’s going in your bag. Too often audio gear for computers (headsets and such) feels chintzy. Not this thing. There’s a 1/8″ out in the back so you can attach headphones and monitor your sound. Volume is controlled by a knob on the front, and there’s a mute button as well that saves you the trouble of turning off the mic in software. It’s a tidy little package, though it does look a little odd with the thick black USB cord coming out the back. As long as you’re doing things stylishly, Samson, why not a custom USB cord that’s a little more petite? It also works seamlessly with your iPad; no setup necessary, just plug it in and go. Note that when you plug it in, it counts as the iPad’s audio out as well as the audio in, so you’ll need to have some headphones plugged into the mic if you want to hear what you’ve recorded. The most important thing is the sound, of course, and the Meteor Mic doesn’t disappoint there. It’s a far richer sound than you’d get from your webcam or built-in mic. Here’s a little sample, compared to some other devices:
I’m sure you hear the difference. If you’re recording a podcast or video with lots of voice (as our video reviews generally have), it’s just better to use a mic that captures more range. Your voice sounds more natural, you can adjust it more easily, and so on. I detected a little bit of reverb that came along with too much gain, and I’d say the sound is just a little warm, though that’s easily adjustable. That said, a headset mic like that on the G35 headset I use produces perfectly usable sound for chatting or using in games. If all you need to do is make yourself understood, built-in mics and headsets work just fine. The question is why should you buy the Meteor Mic over cheaper options from , , or , among others? Well, the design is part of it — the Meteor Mic really is a very convenient package, even coming with its own little sack. There are no drivers, and it works instantly on Windows, OS X, and iOS. Not having the other mics around me to test, I can’t speak to quality, which I realize takes some of the wind out of the comparison, but the Samson does its job well. Chances are different people will prefer the sounds of different mics, and if you can’t decide based on specs, it might be worth ordering two and returning one. It’s also worth noting that if you’re considering buying a microphone for music, it’s worth looking at a traditional XLR mic as well. You can get a classic Shure SM58 and a few adapters for the same price. Since I don’t have the Meteor Mic’s competition here to test it against, I can’t say anything like “buy this over that one,” but I can say that this is a solidly-built, convenient microphone that produces a perfectly decent sound. If you’re a podcaster or use Skype or another chatting service often, put this one on your list to check out. Also, If you’re an iPad-centric worker, and I know some of you out there, this makes for a nice accessory.
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The Betrayal of Bnter | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 4 | 15 | We filmed this week’s on Tuesday, and I started out by asking of about the danger of venture capitalists investing in competitors. There was no ulterior motive on my part. It’s just a question I’ve seen coming up increasingly as dealmaking heats up and VCs invest across a bigger variety of company stages than ever before. And, I’d recently seen that Sabet did write a on the topic. Little did I know then the big drama that had been brewing between Spark and two competitive companies behind for months. Not investing in competitors of existing portfolio companies is great. Even better? Not offering one a term sheet after months of due diligence before you decide that they’re competitive. TechCrunch has learned from three sources that Spark Capital reneged on a termsheet offered to a New York-based startup called , throwing the company into tumult and reportedly enraging its well-known angel investors who we’ve heard include and According to three accounts, Spark principal sought out Bnter’s founder last December, impressed by the company’s beta messaging product and interested to invest. It was just a lean, two-person company at the time, and Leto had no immediate plans of fundraising. The company was gearing up for a big marketing push, and wanted to tap the market once it had better user feedback and growth. But when Spark– investors in such rock star companies as Twitter and Tumblr– came after Bnter, she and her partner were flattered. At the encouragement of existing investors and mentors, they took the train to Boston to pitch the partnership. Spark loved it and negotiations continued for months. In March, the firm emailed her a termsheet, saying it wasn’t signed because the partner in question couldn’t get to a fax machine that moment, but said to consider it signed. Bnter was so star-struck by Spark, the company hadn’t widely pitched itself to other investors, but told the ones that it had talked to it’d be going with Spark. Only then did it occur to the Spark team to check with Tumblr founder to make sure he wouldn’t view this as a competing company. From what we heard, neither Spark, Bnter nor the other angel investors had considered the two competitors, although there is some overlap with Bnter’s core service and the messaging part of Tumblr. But it’s hard to invest broadly in social media and not have small overlaps here and there. According to sources, Karp was incensed, viewed them as clearly competitive and told Spark he wasn’t OK with the firm doing the deal. Fair enough. Whether anyone else agrees or not, Spark asked Karp his opinion and most ambitious entrepreneurs see their future markets as broader than they may look today. But what wasn’t fair was what Spark did next. The firm not only pulled the termsheet, but when existing Bnter investors cried foul, Spark refused to pay a $200,000 break up fee to help cover the expenses the lean company had started to take on as a result of having a signed term sheet and — it thought– $2 million on the way to its bank account. No one has argued Spark forced the company to take on those extra expenses and there’s a dispute about when the occurred, but the company clearly took them on thinking money was on the way. The company had already hired an Android developer to get that version moving as quickly as possible– and now it was in a lurch. Some three months ago it was a hot, up-and-comer in the New York tech scene, backed by some of the biggest name angels in the business. It had no intention of fundraising this soon, but now that it had committed to the process and to growing the company more aggressively the rug had been ripped out from under it. The company could find a way to cover the expenses: It has some deep pocketed angels and Leto has reportedly cut her salary to zero to help the make the company’s ends meet; she also has an existing profitable business that can help bootstrap Btner. The bigger fear is the stigma when it goes out to raise money of having a termsheet that a firm pulled. Raising money for a startup is like putting a house on the market: Just like sitting on the market for a long time makes people wonder what’s wrong with it, so too does a done deal that suddenly falls apart. We should note that no one has indicated that Spark pulled out for any reason other than Karp’s objections. That’s why its incredibly rare that these things happen– particularly without a courtesy break up fee for the entrepreneur’s trouble. We polled a sample of VCs and some told us they’ve never seen this happen before, while others said they see these situations, at most, once a year, but almost always with a break-up fee paid out to the entrepreneur. This isn’t because of legal reasons, because a termsheet doesn’t legally bind investors to do the deal. And it’s not because VCs are altruistic. It’s because this is a small industry built around trust. Sources say that Spark didn’t just hurt a tiny, two-person startup; it hurt the powerful investors behind that startup too. People close to the deal were simply agog that the firm wouldn’t offer to do anything to make the situation better– save offering to reimburse Leto for and legal costs and her train ticket to Boston. We reached out to Bijan Sabet of Spark for comment, and he didn’t want to comment publicly aside from saying, “We have a different interpretation of what happened and we wish the company well.” It remains unclear exactly why Spark– a firm known for treating entrepreneurs well– acted this way, and there’s enough he-said-he-said behind the scenes that we may be missing some details. But entrepreneurs should take a lesson from what Bnter went through: The deal isn’t done until the money is in the bank. |
A wild white iPhone appears! (In Verizon inventory) | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 15 |
Hot on the heels of yet another supposed of white iPhone availability, an honest-to-god has been spotted at Verizon, and although there’s no more information than that such a device truly exists, it suggests that the rumors calling for release in the next few weeks might be true. |
Some Railgun Porn For Your Friday | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 15 |
Back in December we heard about the developed by the Navy. Looks like the private sector is hard at work on these things as well, . In fact, the two systems appear to be very similar: the “bullet” is flanked by a pair of break-away shells that help launch the payload properly. This one also shows the whole launch module more clearly, and the slow-mo bit of the projectile is pretty awesome. I love that this thing went for seven kilometers busting through a steel plate. It doesn’t go as fast as the Navy’s — but it looks to me like the actual railgun mechanism itself is more compact. I have to say this is a lot cooler than . [via ] |
Pico Projectors On The Rise | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 15 |
has forecasted that shipments will triple to ten million units over the next two years. They don’t offer a lot of justification, but I’ve seen all the justification I need any time I show somebody one of these things. “Wait, the projector?” “And how much does it cost?” At that point they’re a little afraid — these things aren’t cheap yet, usually above $300. But drop that by a bit and increase the lumens by a few? These things will be flying off the shelves. |
LivingSocial Financials Exposed: $2.9 Billion Valuation, $50 Million In Revenue Per Month | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 4 | 15 | There’s nothing like full disclosure during the negotiating process in an acquisition deal. for just $3 million in stock, we reported earlier today. As part of the negotiating process they disclosed key financial information to SocialMedia to help that company understand the value of the stock they were receiving in the deal. That information is now in my inbox. SociaMedia is getting around 545,000 shares of common stock of LivingSocial, valued at $3 million. That implies that there are approximately 520 million shares outstanding. At the recent (which is what most people would use for valuation purposes), LivingSocial is a $2.9 billion company. LivingSocial is no Groupon when it comes to revenue, but it’s doing just fine. February revenue was $50 million, says our source, and projected revenue for 2011 (assumed calendar) is a cool $1 billion. Our best guess on Groupon revenue in February was a , so it’s roughly twice the size of LivingSocial. |
Motorola Droid X2 Demoed On Video, Still Looks Exactly Like The Droid X | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 4 | 15 | Outside of the surprising removal of the camera button and an oh-so-subtle color tweak, the original Droid X and the thus-far unannounced Droid X2 are pretty much the exact same phone… on the outside. On the inside, however, it’s a whole different beast. The processor has been bumped from a single-core 1Ghz CPU to a 1.2 Ghz dual-core, RAM has jumped from 512 MB to 768 MB, and the screen resolution has climbed from 854×480 to 960×540. Alas, though it’s clearly a Verizon phone, there’s no mention of LTE/4G support. Care to see just what those specs can do? Check out the video after the jump.
An anonymous tipster sent a video of the Droid X2 in action over to our buddies at . While the glance at the hardware itself isn’t too exciting (again, it’s almost indistinguishable from the Droid X), man oh do things seem to be running smooth. The tipster sneaks in a quadrant benchmark test there at the end, where the handset scores a rather impressive 2453 (whereas the original Droid X scores somewhere around 1442). [vimeo 22454006 w=600 h=338] |
Ask a VC: Bijan Sabet on Competition, MBAs, and What He’d Rather Be Doing (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 4 | 15 | It’s time for Ask a VC, and this week Bijan Sabet of was back. We talked about whether it’s worth it for startups to launch at a conference like DEMO or Disrupt, the decision to turn a profitable lifestyle business into a venture-backed, cash-burning startup, how entrepreneurs in other countries can find US mentors and the value of MBAs. In one of our more personal questions from a reader Daryn asks Sabet what he’d be doing now if he wasn’t a VC. Tune in below for his answers. |
Purchase Sharing Site Shwowp Becomes Buyosphere, Opens To The Public | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 4 | 15 | Like a for shopping, TechCrunch Disrupt alumnus Shwowp is opening to the public today, under a new name and after a complete site redesign and rebranding. Shwowp co-founder Tara Hunt tells me that the post launch feedback for Shwop’s original branding wasn’t good, but the tipping point was when the site won a “Worst Brand Name of 2010” award from blog Ouch. But instead of getting down in the dumps or being stubborn, Hunt did what any founder committed to growing their business should do, she wrote a blog post inviting people to come up with new suggestions. While the survey brought in over 3000 pageviews and over 1200 suggestions, none of them were quite the right fit. Thankfully the original Eatmywords blogger Alexandra Watkins stepped in, and came up with the name Buyosphere which is sort of perfect, in a punny sort of way. says Hunt. The only problem is that the bootstrapped startup didn’t have the cash for the Buyosphere domain, which was being squatted on. Hunt wrote the site owner an email, explaining the (sob) story, she said. Needless to say he took her offer. Now the personal Buyosphere site profiles are called Buyographies, the data analysis of what gets bought is called Buyometrics, its new blog is called the Buyble and the search and product discovery is called Buycuriousness (Okay so I don’t know about that one, but Hunt has plenty of time to work out the kinks). Users can easily add their products and stories (separated into “Haves” and “Wants”) via a Bookmarklet, forwarding an email with a purchase receipt or by clicking Have or Want on an item you see someone else post. You can follow users manually or find friends who are already on Buyosphere through Facebook and Twitter. Users can also create collections or lists of items they have or want like “Dry Shampoos I’ve Tried, and and share them with friends on Buyosphere, Facebook and Twitter. You can see a list of featured Buyographies, featured lists and products on the Buyosphere homepage. Hunt tells me that Buyosphere is currently in its data gathering phase, and that the grand vision is to be like a Mint specifically for purchases. Hunt plans on using the data to provide recommendations to users, and because all the data is personal and based on you actual purchases, Buyosphere was the potential to do a way better job guessing what you like than cookie and web tracking software like . iPhone and Android apps are also in the works. Buyosphere is currently bootstrapped and looking for funding. |
LivingSocial Acquires SocialMedia For $3 Million | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 4 | 15 |
Fast growing daily deal service , which , has acquired long suffering social advertising network , we’ve confirmed. The price was just $3 million, all in LivingSocial stock. Unfortunately, the company had raised around from Charles River Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Naval Ravikant and Jeff Clavier. SocialMedia’s biggest asset today is probably its domain name. But a couple of years ago the company was tearing it up. They were one of the first companies to create a Facebook ad network that used your friends’ pictures in the ads. 2008 revenue was $15 million, and 2009 revenue was on pace to hit $25 million. Facebook tried to acquire the company, says one source. SocialMedia declined, and shortly afterwards Facebook threatened legal action against them for privacy policy violations. What’s most fascinating about the acquisition isn’t the soft landing that the company has pulled off. It’s LivingSocial’s financials and capitalization information, disclosed during the deal negotiations, that has now landed in my inbox. More on that in a follow up post. |
TekTrak: Mobile Location App Helps Reunite A Family After The Japanese Earthquake | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | When disasters of scale happen, like the massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan and sent tsunamis rippling across the globe last month, one of our first reactions is to immediately try to establish contact with those we care about who might have been affected. By phone or by email, by whatever means possible, we scramble to get in touch. Of course, natural disasters often wreak havoc on our lines of communication and, with many people simultaneously attempting to reach loved ones, cellular networks quickly become overloaded. I, personally, will never forget the anxiety of struggling to find and reach relatives in Lower Manhattan immediately following the September 11th attacks. Unfortunately, the disaster in Japan was no different. Phone lines were either down or those that were available quickly became overloaded with calls, and many people had to spend anxious hours waiting to find out if loved ones were alive and safe. Yet, while technology sometimes has the tendency to abandon us in moments of need, it is also a tool that reunites us. We learned today that, , a mobile tracking and security app, provided one Japanese family with this very ability following the March 11 quake. The family (who asked to remain anonymous) was unable to locate their daughter in the disorder, who was at school over an hour from where they lived — or to reach her on the phone. But, because the app works in the background of a phone’s OS, using the 3 hardware components already built into most smartphones (cellular, GPS, and WiFi) to pinpoint its location, the girl’s parents were able to go onto TekTrak’s website to find their daughter’s location. And, once they saw the timestamps in the app’s location history feature, they knew she was okay, because they could see that she had been moving since the earthquake had struck. The father said that it usually took his daughter an hour to return home by bus from school, but on March 11th, it took more than seven hours. Luckily, the worried parents were able to follow her progress home using the app’s web maps. Originally he uploaded the app on his daughter’s phone, he said, to prevent against theft, as the $5 app both enables users to monitor the location of their device at all times and to secure sensitive or private information stored on the phone. Sometimes it takes a disaster to show us the areas of true weakness within our infrastructures, be they communication, transportation, or electrical — and, on the flip side — they sometimes reveal applications or strengths we didn’t necessarily know we had. Obviously, apps that help us stay connected (and aid in search and location) in the event one method of communication disappears can be extremely valuable in emergency situations. So, if your phone should turn off and you are unable to locate it directly, TekTrak allows you to see where the phone was last located (and check location history). The app also comes with a remote ringer feature that allows users to locate their device once they are within close proximity of the phone. Or, if you don’t think you can retrieve the device from that location, users will soon be able to send remote messages to the phone in the hope the person who may have the phone will respond, founders Arik Waldman and Luka Sklizovic said. Albeit a single case, it is great to see an example of technology not only allowing people to reunite with their phones — but, more importantly — their loved ones. For more info on the story, or the app itself, you can check out TekTrak’s blog . |
Apple Announces Final Cut Pro X At NAB: $299 In June | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | It’s NAB (the National Association of Broadcasters conference) in Las Vegas, that means lots of new camera and video stuff. It’s more pro gear than consumer stuff, which is probably why Apple the there to unveil the newest version of their professional video editing software. They’re calling it as revolutionary as the original Final Cut released back in ’99. Guess the were right. ; the whole thing (plus pictures of the event) can be found there. After a preamble where they described FCP has having over 2 million users and teasing the competition, they launched into the new features of FCPX, which has been “rebuilt from the ground up”: Here’s an image of the new UI, via :
And some better pictures from Photography Bay:
The software demoed was currently in beta, but it’ll be available on June 9th for… . That’s really cheap, although it replaces the cheaper Final Cut Express, and Adobe should be coming out with a new version of Premiere Elements soon as well. More info to be added as soon as Apple provides it, specifically info on the rest of the Final Cut Studio suite of applications. We’ve heard we should “stay tuned” regarding those products; I’m guessing they’re not quite ready for their close-up. With new pricing, I’d be surprised to see the rest of the apps go for more than $200 total, if that. Apple’s doing (in my opinion) the right thing for monetization of this segment: push for volume and accessibility, pull in the enthusiast and prosumer market that couldn’t afford the original FCP and doesn’t want to go Adobe. |
OpenBuildings Unveils Its New Architecture Database And Raises $2 Million In Funding | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | The world is full of interesting and amazing buildings that are constantly being photographed and admired. But where do you go online to find them? If you’re one of about 50,000 registered users, the answer is . Or perhaps you’re one of the 250,000 people that have downloaded their iPhone app. Either way, that base is about to expand thanks to a great-looking new site and a fresh round of funding. OpenBuildings is an online database of buildings around the world. Right now, they have over 40,000 buildings in their archives with more being added each day. Started in 2010 by a group of architects studying in London, construction professionals and architecture lovers have quickly latched on to the site. And the new site should attract even more users. As you might expect, the initial impression of buildings on OpenBuildings is a visual one. But once you find a building that you’re interested in, you can drill down into that building’s profile and see a ton of information about it — things like construction status, architect, location, materials, etc. And if there’s not a lot of information, you’re free to add more (provided you create an OpenBuildings profile). And, of course, many buildings have a lot of crowdsourced pictures to showcase the architecture. There’s also a powerful search tool that allows you to filter the types of buildings you’re looking for. The coolest of these filters is a timeline which allows you to focus on just a particular period of time. And soon there will be a way for construction companies working on projects to attach themselves to building profiles — and advertise services. There will be a fee for those (but the first three months will be free). The goal of OpenBuildings is to share architectural knowledge and create a hub for like-minded individuals to interact with one another about their passion. The 40,000+ buildings currently in the system have come from a mixture of the community and a spider tool that crawls other websites looking for building information, co-founder Adel Zakout says. “We’re building natural language processing tools and semantic technologies to help us properly record, tag buildings and infer facts from free text descriptions,” he adds. The iPhone app, , allows users to access all of this information while on the go. And in a few weeks, there will be an Android app to accompany it, Zakout says. All of this is being made possible thanks to a $2 million Series A funding led by and . With the funding, of BlueRun is joining the OpenBuildings Board. The money, which the company notes they weren’t actively seeking out, will help them expand their teams in London and Sofia, Bulgaria as well as work on new tools to further surface great architecture around the world. |
Sugar Inc Raises Another $15 Million To Grow Its Women-Focused Media Empire | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 4 | 12 | , a media company that caters exclusively to women, has closed a $15 million funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners, with participation from existing investor Sequoia Capital. The company has now raised $46 million in total since it was founded in 2006. Sugar’s flagship site is , and it also home to social shopping site , a free blogging platform for users called , and a variety of topical blogs including FitSugar (fitness), PetSugar, and BuzzSugar (gossip). It draws 20 million visitors per month between its sites. Sugar says that the company, which has been profitable for the last year, plans to use the new funding for further acquisitions (it virtual fashion assistant MyPerfectSale last October), international growth, and to extend its brand. The company’s last round of funding was a $16 million in June 2009 — a that it raised $30 million in June 2010 was bogus. |
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