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And They Hacked, And They Hacked, And They Hacked Into The Night | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 5 | 22 | Jerry Lee Lewis would have been proud. Even as the clock ticked past midnight at Pier 94 in Hell’s Kitchen, there was a whole lotta hackin’ goin’ on. Beginning around noon on Saturday, hackers filed into the spacious room at the site of to begin networking and scheming in earnest. As the day wore on, groups solidified, team names were chosen, and at the height of activity, we estimate that more than 500 hackers were huddled around tables, bent over screens with headphones on — doing their thing. By midnight, Chinese food had been consumed, much Red Bull downed, and most teams had moved past the brainstorming and napkin-doodling stage to full-fledged hacking and aggressive coding. Ideas were beginning to come to life. One hacker Tweeted around 1 am that the even “Twilio cake is looking pretty good right now”. By 2 am, all the beanbag chairs had been accounted for, some were napping, and the crowd had started to thin. And, still, no rapture. Of the hackers polled, interestingly, quite a few said that they were working creative alternatives to dating sites and apps. One hacker was creating a speed dating app, another was creating “the Groupon of dating and a SecondMarket for people”, while others said that they were plugging away at a few HTML 5 games. But will there be group-messaging apps? Here a few hackers take a few minutes to release some pent-up coding aggression by pitching toys against the wall. You can add your pics to the crowd by tagging your tweets and photos with #tcdisrupt and #hackdisruptNYC2011, and you can always find more at the . And some, perhaps, were enjoying a few too many adult beverages during the wee hours, which always ensures that the presentations this morning will be nothing if not entertaining. For those keeping track, my colleague, TechCrunch engineer Rob Saurini, said that, of the hackers he observed with his keen hacker sight, about 90 percent were using Macs. Take that as you will. I personally am using an Apple 2GS. This morning at 10:30, the hack-teams will begin their rapid-fire presentations, given a few short minutes to try to wow the judges with their ideas. The presentations will wrap up by 3 pm, at which point one lucky project (the last Hackathon’s winner was will get a chance to compete with our Startup Battlefield companies on stage during Disrupt proper. Remember to stay tuned during our live broadcast. |
Zuckerberg at eG8 – No Facebook phone | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 5 | 25 | Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance at the E-G8 Forum today in Paris. The largely PR-filled event created by French President Nicholas Sarkosy to address the effects the Internet is having on the G8’s agenda of globailsation witnessed possibly the softest interview Zuckerberg has ever had, and that’s saying something. Interviewer Maurice Levy, as head of Publicis, is a powerful man, but the interview was less than satisfying. Despite this, Zuckerberg revealed a couple of things. Significantly he appeared to kill any likelihood of a “Facebook phone”. Asked by an audience member if Facebook will create devices, he said: “I think we get software development and social dynamics. But we’re focused on building really good experiences with these things.” Almost glibly he continued: “We have a really good iPhone app for instance”. Really Mark, you don’t say? But he also added that “Way more people are using the mobile Web version than apps.” He repeated information that 300m-plus people are using Facebook on mobile phones and that this is growing much faster than Web use is. This is not something we haven’t heard before, but the emphasis on apps and without a mention of devices is significant. This is also consistent with the development of the INQ phone where Facebook was a collaborator on the software side. However, Facebook has already partnered with some manufacturers on making phones with a heavy Facebook focus and branding. And they may well offer a Facebook-heavy mobile OS (probably based on Android). Which wouldn’t be a Facebook Phone, but rather a Facebook mobile OS other phone makers could use. As far as the conference is concerned, Zuckerberg will meet the head of states of G8 tomorrow. It’s significant that he flew in on the last day and will go to the “real” G8, since, by most accounts of people here, the eG8 has been something of an insignificant talking shop where the networking was generally better than the content on stage. Zuckerberg also mentioned the importance of gaming to its platform, noting that Zynga has passed the market cap of Electronic Arts. He also clarified that kids under the age of 13 were not currently allowed on Facebook and if that were to ever change they would have to think about it very hard first – and it was “Not top of the list” in priority. |
Leica Iterates Its Luxury Point And Shoot Series With The V-Lux 30 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 25 |
We liked , but could never really recommend it over its cheaper, nearly identical sibling, the Panasonic . Now we have the V-Lux 30, which appears to have the same relationship with the announced in January. Looks like the same 14.1-megapixel sensor, the same 16x zoom lens, the same LCD, GPS, and so on — but different badge. The Leica costs $750, the Panasonic costs $400. How much are you willing to pay for that Leica logo? |
Why Don't You Get Yourself A Nice Wooden Tie | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 25 |
If you’re the kind of guy that always has to have some kind of off-the-wall tie, this could be right up your alley. No, it’s not pixelated, or LED-lit. Like real reclaimed wood pieces held to one another by sturdy elastic cord. Made by , they come in large and small (how large and how small isn’t specified), both for a very reasonable $34, plus shipping. [via ] |
And The Winner Of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC Is…Getaround! | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 5 | 25 |
Three days and 32 startup pitches later, the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt has been determined. Out of the and two audience choice winners, we whittled the list down to , which include , , , and Without further ado, the two runners-up are and (that’s the first time we’ve had two runners-up). And the winner is…. Watch Getaround win the cup at the award presentation:
Here’s what Getaround told us backstage after they won the cup.
Getaround is a where you can rent a car by the day, hour or week through a smartphone app. Getaround’s all inclusive package, which includes insurance, 24 hour roadside assistance, a Getaround car-kit, iPhone app and a web app makes it easy for people to conveniently car share anywhere. The company’s founder that currently the startup has signed up 1,600 cars for sharing since its launch yesterday, which is 20 percent of car-sharing giant Zipcar’s fleet of 8,000 cars. Getaround was a hit with the judges when the startup pitched the idea on Tuesday; with most of the judges wishing they could have invested in the company. Getaround has received seed funding from General Catalyst Partners, Barney Pell and others. In addition to a $50,000 grand prize, the company has just been handed the Disrupt Cup, taking over possession from You can check out the coverage of Getaround, Sonar and Billguard below: In addition to the Disrupt Cup, some special awards were also given: Audience Choice Winner: Getaround. The Microsoft Bing Decision Award: This award goes to the Startup Battlefield contestant who is helping users make good decisions on the fly. Do@ will win a lunch meeting with Qi Lu, President of Online Services and SEO consultation with the Bing Webmaster Team; and Microsoft will help plan do@’s launch party. A special thanks to our sponsor partners for the conference: Sprint, Google, Drund, Qualcomm, Palantir, TokBox, iContact BrightIdea, Mashery, Twilio, Bing, GE, Media Temple, MailChimp, Zecco, SecondMarket, and Red Bull. You can find a complete list of our sponsors . [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuN2M8evRyw&w=560&h=349] from on . |
The Pioneer AppRadio: Select iOS Apps In Your Car's Dash For Less Than $500 | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 5 | 25 | Here it is, ladies and nerds: the Pioneer AppRadio. As the name implies it’s centered around applications in a smartphone-ish sort of way. All the big boys are here: RDIO, Pandora, and Google Maps along with the driver-centric apps of INRIX and MotionX-GPS Drive. This is possible through the Pioneer AppRadio iOS app that serves up data and app access to the head-unit from a connected iPhone or iPod touch. It lacks the native iOS support , but features enough compelling features to earn a good deal of respect. The aftermarket audio scene has been somewhat stagnant over the last decade. The biggest innovation was navigation and perhaps the addition of a USB host, but GUIs and even prices have stayed about the same. Pioneer has a real chance with the AppRadio to push the rest of the industry into embracing connected data and, in a way, learn to take a back seat to the smartphone by servering a more companion role — as it should be. A WVGA (800 x 480) 6.1-inch multitouch serves up all the action. But there’s nothing behind it. The screen doesn’t flip down to reveal a fancy iPhone dock or even an optical drive. iPhones and iPod touches connect to the unit through a Dock Connector cable that hooks into the rear of the radio so it’s up to the installer to hide this wire. Updates and more apps come by way of a Pioneer iOS app. When an iDevice is connected it unlocks all the wonders of Google Maps including search, routing, directions and even drop pins bookmarks. The iDevice serves up reformated apps to the AppRadio and Pioneer wrangled several popular apps to hit the device at launch and custom versions of RDIO and Pandora are currently available. This iDevice dependency comes at a price, though. While the AppRadio can certainly stand on its own without a connected device, it loses most of its appeal. Also, Android owners need not apply. Pioneer isn’t servering their kind as Bluetooth connectivity seems only for phone functions and not for streaming content or data connectivity sharing. The AppRadio doesn’t have an optical drive and I worry about the capacitive screen handling direct sunlight. Still, the AppRadio is a welcomed addition to the car audio aftermarket scene. Pioneer hasn’t announced the price or exact release date yet, but the press announcement states that the “AppRadio will be available in late June with a suggested retail price below $500.” Side note: big props to our graphic guy Bryce for making based on blurry FCC pics and several emails from a tester. The OS is clearly wrong, but he nailed the button design. |
Amen: Plazes Founder And First Twitter Engineer Team Up For Mysterious Startup | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 5 | 25 | Looking for a startup with a healthy dollop of hubris, a sense of humor, and a shroud of secrecy? Meet , a company that claims to be offering “the best job in the world”. At this point we don’t know much about the startup aside from a few things: it has a very solid founding team, and it has something to do with strongly voicing opinions. The company’s founders include Florian Weber, a very early Twitter employee who played a in that company’s creation (to the point that he has been called a forgotten cofounder). Amen also includes , who formerly founded Plazes, which was by Nokia in 2008. Rounding out the roster are Caitlin Winner (MIT, Nokia) and Ricki Vester Gregersen (Input Squared). Amen is based in Berlin, Germany. Here’s the vague (and hubristic) description on the jobs page: “Tired of mediocrity? Amen is about making strong statements and ultimately about making sense of the world. People have called it “Strangely Addictive”, “Pop-Cultural Engineering” or even “Better than Porn”. Sorry, we can’t tell you more at this point but we gladly will if you apply for a position. Currently we are in private Beta and will be rolling out on different platforms over the course of the year.” There are a few other tidbits of information on the jobs page, like the fact that the company really likes Android (they want someone who “Belives in the Platform”). |
Hasselblad's Newest Camera Gets 200 Megapixels From A 50-Megapixel Sensor | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 25 |
is known for high megapixel counts, but this is getting a bit ridiculous. On the other hand, the engineering solution they’ve employed to create that count is really interesting. Most camera makers, including Hasselblad, increase the pixel count of their sensor by reducing the size of the photosensitive wells and pushing them closer together. This has some benefits, but also drawbacks, one of which is a sort of pixel density wall that Hasselblad has probably been running up against for a while. But instead of making the sensor bigger or packing more into it, that might give them a real advantage over the competition. What they’ve done is mounted the sensor on a piezoelectric motor, which moves the sensor by infinitesimal amounts and takes an exposure multiple times. This allows the single-color pixel wells to be exposed to different parts of the image, creating tiny variations which, properly processed, create more detail and sharpness. Their final output is 200 megapixels, which is almost certainly an arbitrary number they picked, a target that can be reached in a reasonable amount of exposures (six, in this case). You can output to a CF card, but they recommend attaching a hard drive, as the final image can be around 600MB. The need for multiple exposures makes the total shot time extremely long; 20-30 seconds are required, so shots of human beings are pretty much right out. It was actually announced a while back but technical difficulties have delayed it for a while and they’re only now selling it. At $45,000 to start, these aren’t really in our price range, but advances like this in sensor and imaging tech occasionally trickle down, and I think it’s interesting enough on its own. |
RC vCar App Creates Crash-Free Remote Control Car | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 5 | 25 | Remote control cars, while amusing, tend to get in more car accidents than life-size vehicles. If it isn’t rolling off a curb, drifting into a pool, or crunching under the tire of a pick-up truck, it’s just plain out of battery. For that reason, and possibly for success and profit, the folks at Pop Culture Software have launched the , for the , and . Basically, RC vCar is a virtual radio controlled car that you can drive around using augmented reality with no fear of totaling your toy. To be honest, the features of the app aren’t super robust. You have five pretty standard cars to choose from, including a basic red soft-top coupe, a pick-up truck, a pink convertible, a police car with a working light, and a school bus. After selecting a car, you’re taken straight to that augmented reality interface, ready to ride. I tested the app on the iPad 2, and found that the controls were a bit hard to handle on such a large device. On an iPhone or iPod touch, I estimate the app controls would feel almost identical to a real remote for an RC car. The app was pretty enjoyable for the first five minutes, at which point I realized this is definitely more of a “for-your-kids” kind of app. If that’s not convincing enough, remember… you won’t find another remote control car for $.99. |
Whoops: NFC Partner Spoils Google's Surprise Tomorrow. ViVOtech One Partner. Citibank Too? | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 5 | 25 | Google is in New York City. While everyone seems to be aware that it’s a partner event to announce the NFC strategy for their Android phones, Google has refused to confirm it. Well, they don’t have to. One of their partners just did. We just got an email from the PR firm representing , wondering if we were going to the Google event tomorrow. They try to talk vaguely about “Google’s latest innovations”, but that doesn’t matter. Just look at what ViVOtech does. They make NFC software. From their own site: ViVOtech near field communication (NFC) software and systems enable rich mobile commerce solutions for in-store payment, loyalty, marketing, and merchandising. Whoops. ViVOtech’s PR people go on to note that they “worked closely” with Google and “has provided ViVOtech technologies to enrich Google upcoming ‘latest innovations'” Okay then. There’s one partner. An NFC one. The others? (which carries the Nexus S) and we’re hearing perhaps Citibank for the money side of things ( about it on stage today — no comment). Tune in for more tomorrow. |
Whatser to let brands put their stamp on location curation | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 5 | 25 | , the location-based service that and discover new ones, is rolling out a new money-making feature today: Brands can now create collections of their favourite locations, which users of the platform can then ‘follow’. Collections are a form of location curation so in this sense brands get to put their stamp on places that are worth checking out, perhaps around a certain theme that, conveniently, ties-in with the brand’s own offering. So, for example, Heineken could start a collection with rooftop bars around the world that a user can follow. Or Red Bull could host a collection of skateparks around the world. Places can also be tagged so that users are able to see straight away if, for example, they serve Heineken, to stick with our earlier scenario. Brands also get access to anonymous analytics. None of this comes free, however. Depending on size of collection, prices start from €1,000 per-month. But it’s certainly an interesting kind of ad unit and innovative to boot. Dutch mobility company Bugaboo is the . The Bugaboo collection helps users find parent-friendly spots such as parks, shops, museums, cafés, restaurants and playgrounds. It currently houses 350 spots in cities including Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles. |
Getaround Signed Up 1,600 Cars In A Day; That's 20 Percent Of Zipcar's Fleet | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 5 | 25 |
is already disrupting the current car sharing industry, only a day after its launch. As we GetAround is a car rental market place where you can rent a car by the day, hour or week through a smartphone app. Getaround’s all inclusive package, which includes insurance, 24 hour roadside assistance, a Getaround car-kit, iPhone app and a web app makes it easy for people to conveniently car share any where. Today, the company’s founder said that currently the startup has signed up 1,600 cars for sharing since its launch yesterday. That’s 20 percent of car-sharing giant Zipcar’s . Impressive for a bootstrapped startup that has only been open to the public for a matter of hours. Here’s Getaround’s Finalist Presentation:
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Zero Punctuation On Brink | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 5 | 25 | null |
Arrington: Sonar (Which Took $250K To Build) Is Better Than Color Could Hope To Be | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 5 | 25 |
At the TC Disrupt Startup Battlefield finals going on now, after CEO’s . TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington asked founder Brett Martin, how much he spent to build the service which introduces you to people relevant around you. When Martin replied that Sonar took around $250K to date to build, Arrington commented, “This is better now than Color could ever hope to be,” looking at Sequoia investor Roelof Botha for comment or reaction. “When you see something like this do you get bummed out that you put 20 [or so] million into color?” Botha was non-plussed. Sequoia invested about $25 million in photo-sharing app Color’s $41 million Series A round. “I’m comfortable with silence,” Botha, responded. To Botha’s credit Google’s Marissa Mayer was less effusive, likening the Sonar to a feature rather than the service. Sonar monetizes by a “Promoted People” feature, which means that users who want to have prime real estate on the app will pay more, and is as of yesterday revenue positive. “That’s so brilliant and so awful,” Arrington said. Here’s the video of Sonar’s finalist presentation:
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North Korea Working On Making Its Own Computers? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 25 |
A recent evening news report from North Korea showed the insides of a computer manufacturing facility, where the country claims to be . A little digging has shown that one of the laptops in question is actually a super-low-cost netbook already on the market here in the US, but buying OEM hardware doesn’t mean they aren’t working on something of their own. The other PC, for instance, appears to be a bit more customized, and is made to attach to a TV, presumably to reduce cost of entry among the generally low-income households (if low-income is the correct term in a communist economy). The TV-computer and one of the laptops are aimed at education, allowing for transmission and interaction with instruction videos, dictionaries, language programs, and so on. The office computer has the usual office apps and a browser. A spokesman said “The devices and programs of these computers were designed and developed purely using our own expertise,” and the report shows them being assembled, but the discovery of the Sylvania netbook seems to give the lie to that idea at least partially. On the other hand, the OS looks original, and may be the Red Star Linux variant they’ve been working on. Other countries, like India and China, are also exploring the idea of manufacturing and programming their own computers, in order to reduce reliance on western corporations like Intel and Microsoft. More screenshots of the report can be found at . |
CrunchDeals: G2, Sidekick 4G Free With Contract At T-Mobile | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 5 | 25 | If you’re short on cash and desperate for the speedy joys of 4G connectivity, go ahead and cancel your late-night plans for tomorrow. The pink carrier is offering the T-Mobile G2 and the Sidekick 4G smartphones during its After Hours special tomorrow night, from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. And get this: they’re free. Of course, you’ll have to sign up for a new two-year contract with to participate in the deal, but the good news is there’s a pretty good chance you can get out of it once swallows T-Mo. In case you’re unfamiliar, the T-Mobile G2 is a 2.2 Froyo-powered smartphone sporting a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 5-megapixel camera with flash and capable of video capture in 720p, and a 800 x 480p 3.7-inch display. The Sidekick 4G maintains all of the traditions of the name it bears, with some added awesomeness. The Sidekick has a spring-loaded QWERTY keyboard, a rear and front-facing camera, and runs Android 2.2 Froyo. [via ] |
This Brammo Enertia Electric Motorcyle Was Just Spontaneously Given Away At Disrupt | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 5 | 25 |
Enamored of the shiny orange electric motorcyle adorning the stage during the latest presentations here at Disrupt NYC, Michael Arrington decided that it should be given away. Never mind that it wasn’t ours to give, and that we were already significantly over time. Once the idea took hold of his mind, he was not to be dissuaded, and after a short talk with Brammo CEO Craig Bramscher (conveniently present backstage following a panel on next-generation motoring), it was a done deal. |
Behold: TechCrunch Erupt In Iceland (Pictures) | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 5 | 25 | As some of you , I was all set to step on a plane on Sunday to head to New York City for t. Then a giant volcano exploded. But being stranded in Iceland wasn’t all bad. First of all, it’s a beautiful country. Second, when some local entrepreneurs read about our misfortune, they got together and organized an event: TechCrunch Erupt. My friends and I headed over to the event on Monday for conversation, beer, and livestreaming of TechCrunch Disrupt from the U.S. They put this event together at the last minute, and dozens of local entrepreneurs still showed up — on a Monday afternoon. Below, find some images of the event (some of you may recognize a few folks from the U.S. tech community in them — and you may remember the two women in the top picture ). |
Mango Includes A Web-Based Windows Marketplace | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 5 | 25 | Despite the fact that didn’t find it important enough to mention during yesterday’s VIP reception, we think the launch of a web-based version of the Marketplace in conjunction with the roll-out is newsworthy. Just like the App Store, Market, and Appstore for Android, a web-based Marketplace will give users the option to browse and download apps from their PC, and install them onto the phone. in the App Store, users can install apps to their phone from the web-based Marketplace through SMS or email. As we’d expect, the web-based Windows Marketplace will integrate your favorite social networks, and , letting you share and promote apps, along with the option to share an app through email or an embedded link. Also, no need to worry about lost apps when you upgrade to a new phone, as the implementation of a web-based Marketplace will allow Microsoft to save your download history. That way, you can easily re-install your apps straight to your new phone. According to the Windows Developer Blog, the web-based Windows Marketplace will launch alongside the Mango update, which should see the light of day “later this year.” [via ] |
Help Save Aunt Beru And Uncle Owen's Homestead And Get A Nice Watch | John Biggs | 2,011 | 5 | 25 | Uncle Owen! Aunt Beru! Uncle Owen! The Lars Homestead is the actual building used during the filming of Star Wars and it still exists – in a considerably diminished state – in Tunisia. The igloo house is now falling apart but a group of dedicated film buffs – and one watchmaker – want to return the home to its original, super sci-fi state. You can donate to or take part this Kickstarter project that includes a unique watch with a face containing sand from the actual homestead. If you pledge $77 or more you get a real, quartz wristwatch with a small, clever container that holds sand and dirt from the location and keeps, presumably excellent Tatooine time. For $103 or more you get a Premium edition of the watch including an engraved back and handsome aurebesh numerals. You can also grab t-shirts and other Lars collateral from the Kickstarter page and you can help save a landmark in sci-fi history. |
Amazon to create 900 jobs at new customer service centre in Edinburgh | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 5 | 25 | Good news for Scotland. Amazon is to create 900 jobs in Edinburgh, some 500 permanent and 400 temporary jobs. The new centre will handle both internet and telephone customer queries for Amazon.co.uk including technical support for Amazon Kindle and MP3 services. There’s something of an incentive to do this: The new facility is being supported by a £1.8m grant from Scottish Development International to help train new staff and support the construction fit-out of the new premises, expected to open in August 2011. Customer services jobs are common in Scotland given the well educated population, plus Scottish accents are often cited as the most ‘trustworthy’ by UK customers. In January, Amazon announced that it would create a further 750 jobs in Dunfermline and 200 jobs in Gourock. |
Google Employee Redirects Hiybbprqag.com To Google Jobs Page | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | In what is perhaps the most brilliant move in the whole fiasco, it like Google Taiwan employee Chih-Chung Chang had redirected a URL inspired by the Google used to bait Bing, straight to the Google Jobs page. points out that that Chang the domain on February 1st, the day the story first broke, using the Google Taiwan office address. A quick Google reveals that a person by the name Chih-Chung Chang a Google Taiwan employee and another search in ironically Bing (after Google mysteriously failed to bring up more informative results) his google.com email. I’ve emailed both him and Google for confirmation but it seems pretty clear that there’s an affiliation here. Perhaps what’s most awesome about the whole thing is the big “Lets work together” you get on the Google splash page after typing in the now infamous nonsense term . One can’t help but think that Chang innocently bought the domain pre-emptively, in order to circumvent spammers, or worse, Microsoft. Neither Google or Chang have returned my multiple requests for comment. Needless to say now has tons of relevant results in both Google and Bing Thanks: |
Nintendo's 3DS Industrial Design Subtleties, Explained | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 3 |
When I first saw the six months ago, and even later when I saw the , I pretty much just thought of the 3DS as a slightly chunkier DS. But of course the people in charge of designing it know better than that, and when you’re making a device that will be held for hundreds of hours by tens of millions of people… every little thing counts. Nintendo’s president, Satoru Iwata, whom I see oftener than I see some members of my family these days, , talking about what the hard decisions were, what came down from above, what their ideas were, and so on. It’s actually quite interesting — I like these little peeks behind the veil, like when you get to see the and stuff like that. They don’t shy at details, and it’s nice to hear how hands-on Iwata himself was in the process as well: Iwata:The reverse taper was designed so the system would be easy to open, but if something hit it, all the force would hit one place, so it had a drawback when it came to durability against impact from dropping. Akai:Right. Ehara:I thought the shape might have to change. Iwata:You talked about that during the second presentation. Ehara:Yes. Akai:But we didn’t want to change the design, so we searched for a stronger synthetic resin. Iwata:You instinctively knew that you couldn’t produce that design unless you found a stronger material. Akai:Yes. Looking for a new material was the first thing I did after moving to the Research & Engineering Department.
Iwata:And what did you come up with? Akai:A material Nintendo has never used before. A type of high rigidity nylon with glass fiber in it. It’s stronger than other more common resins, but less suited to mass production. Iwata:It does sound like it would be difficult to shape. Akai:It is. You fill the metal mold7 with the resin to shape it, but it’s tough because of the glass fiber in it. As you repeat the process, the mold begins to wear, so we were concerned the lifespan of the mass production equipments would be shortened. So if you end up buying a 3DS, you can be sure it was designed with love and care, and for keeps. [via and ] |
8-Bit Mega Man Straps Serve No Purpose; Buy Them Anyway | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 3 |
What would you do with ? Attach them to your cell phone? Hang them from nails on your Mega Man shrine? Keep them in a secret drawer or maybe under your pillow? Use your imagination. You can’t buy just one, though: ~$44 gets you eight, and there are apparently nine in the set. And you might get duplicates? What the hell? I don’t know. All I know is it’s related, so up it goes on CrunchGear. [via , r, and ] |
Like Any Good Hack, The Daily: Indexed Creates A Feature That Is Needed | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | One thing about that bugged me from the second I first laid eyes on the iPad newspaper that yesterday is that there is no one place where you can see a simple list of every story in the issue. There is a table of contents, but it shows only ten featured stories. Like any good hack, creates a feature that is missing from the original but is deeply needed. The Tumblr blog creates a complete table of contents for . The Daily: Indexed is causing a stir because is a subscription-only publication meant to be read on the iPad. The Daily’s is not much more than brochureware for the iPad app at this point, but there is a backdoor to every story. Whenever a subscriber shares a story via email, Twitter, or Facebook from their iPads—like this one about —the recipients get a link to the story on thedaily.com. You can’t find these stories by searching the site because there is no search or even any way to navigate from the home page to any of the articles. But the pages are there and Baio simply found the links and created a table of contents pointing to each page. I really don’t think this does anything other than provide free marketing to The articles on the Web look like crap compared to reading them on the iPad. And many of the interactive graphics and photos are not available on the Web. It’s just a better experience on the iPad (whether it’s worth paying for is another question, but time will tell). The iPad version could use a better table of contents, though, or an index of every story in the issue. Right now, if it is not one of the ten featured stories in the table of contents, you have to flip through a carousel or timeline of images to see everything. The iPad app would be much easier to navigate if it had a page that was like , but pointing to other stories inside the app. You can see what I mean from this shaky-cam ) I took yesterday at the launch event: |
Too Lazy Or Busy To Read? Topicmarks Summarizes Long Texts For You | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 3 |
Ever come across a lengthy Malcolm Gladwell that all your unemployed friends will probably be talking about later, but you simply don’t have time in between working to read? Well winner was made for the case of Gladwell and even denser documents like research papers and legal texts, breaking them down into digestible pieces when all you really need to read is an executive summary. Using semantic text extraction and personalization technologies, Topicmarks extracts text from the .pdf, .doc, .html and .txt documents that you upload, copy/paste, email in or enter the URL of. The service then gives you the option to view the “Overview,””Facts,””Summary” and”Keywords” of the document as well as “Properties” where you can see the original source. You can also interact with the “Overview” in a multitude of ways, including searching by key word and adding more or less text to the summary as needed. Topicmarks is like a more-fleshed out with an says co-founder It has the same aspirations as enterprise solutions Autonomy and OpenText but available for free to consumers within a certain usage amount. When given the criticism that the Topicmarks.com site sure had a lot of text on it for a service that summarized text (specifically, ) Siebelink told me, Ambitiously, Roland says his future plans are to make the summarization technology readily available across all devices, Topicmarks is currently raising a 500K seed round. [vimeo 19488264]
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The Latest Verizon iPhone Commercial Strikes At AT&T: "Yes, I Can Hear You Now." | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | We’ve made note of both and then . Both are effective and interesting in different ways. But neither takes a shot at AT&T. But a new Verizon one that has just started airing on television, does. At least, indirectly. The new commercial, which we’ve embedded below compliments of quick-with-the-TiVo TechCrunch reader , has a very different tone than the initial “clocks” Verizon commercial. In this one, there is triumphant music playing as glimpses of the iPhone 4 are shown. It almost seems as if it’s meant to conjure up Stanley Kubrick’s . The voice-over begins: “It’s beautiful.” “It’s intelligent.” “Ingenious.” Then the music speeds up. “But does your network, work?” A call comes in. And the person answering the call is revealed. It’s the Verizon guy! “Yes. I can hear you now.” Boom! Then we get the typical message of Verizon’s network being the “largest and most reliable”. Very nice. Wonder if Apple was at all to sign off on it? Or maybe they just prefer not to know as their two partners about about to enter an escalated war of words with one another. For what it’s worth, . : Verizon has just a higher-res version so I’ve included it below. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2H-3Gf_fL8&w=640&h=390] |
It's official – GoSquared gets funded to take the fight to Chartbeat | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | , the real-time website analytics startup, has announced that it’s raised an Angel round from , , , and Thomas Jones. That’s the early-stage investor team at where GoSquared has been resident for some time but it’s only now that the funding is official. That said, terms remain undisclosed, which is interesting in light of competitor Chartbeat’s impressive . The fact that GoSquared is keeping its own numbers close to its chest suggests perhaps that the London startup’s funding isn’t quite on the same level even if (I’ve been using it extensively for a few weeks now). Today GoSquared also , which at first glance seems a little, well, odd. I say that with some admiration as founders James Gill, James Taylor and Geoff Wagstaff are all nineteen years old. They tell me the company, which started out as a display ad network, was actually founded while they were in high school. Now I feel quite old. So how to celebrate a birthday? Roll out a new version of your product, of course. LiveStats 3.1 adds via email for when a site has a traffic spike or unusual lull, perhaps suggesting server issues. |
CarWoo Launches CarWoo Version 2 To Keep Car Buyers Even More Informed | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | YC-funded is announcing its Version 2 launch today. In the same space as , CarWoo is a reverse auction marketplace for cars i.e. it makes car dealers bid for your business and focuses on covering all aspects of car buying transactions up to purchase. In the true spirit of a marketplace, Carwoo says it saves consumers an average of $3763 by making dealers compete against each other. Says co-founder , . In the traditional car buying process a consumer would have multiple dealers, doing what CarWoo does on their own. New features in CarWoo Version 2 include the ability to see offers from dealers on leases instead of just purchases and a name your own price feature on dealer offers, allowing even more of the functionality of an in real life dealer relationship from your computer. Buyers can also now engage with dealers across brands when trying to decide between a BMW and an Audi for example. Along with sale price, CarWoo customers will also be able to get “out the door price” estimates, i.e. prices that include taxes, license, registration which can add up to several thousands of dollars on top of the price you have to pay. In addition, Carwoo 2 will include an e-bay like dealer reputation and ratings system, where buyers can rate their experience with a given dealer as a warning to future buyers. CarWoo founder Tommy McClung says that in fact 53% of the time buyers don’t choose the lowest deal because into account the dealer’s reputation. CarWoo is also announcing two new partnerships, the first with autoguide and the second with autobuying guide , which offers car buying information to consumers. CarWoo is currently working with over 5000 dealers nationwide. Carwoo has $6 million in funding from Y Combinator, Interwest, and notable angels like Paul Buchheit, Joshua Schachter and Aydin Senkut. In order to celebrate the release of CarWoo Version 2, CarWoo will be making their $19 basic plan free (which guarantees that 2-3 dealers will bid for your purchase) for the month of February. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_4B_dDgpHE&w=630] |
Google Unveils Chrome 9 And Credits Reddit For Their Help Fixing It | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | Google has made a big deal recently about not making a big deal about the version numbers of Chrome. “It’s just a number” is the basic take these days. In fact, they can to announce them at all sometimes. But today, they did actually take some time to acknowledge the latest version — and a funny partner who made it all possible. Google has officially rolled out Chrome 9, meaning the stable version of the browser has been updated to that iteration. They don’t make any mention of the number in the about the update, but trust me, it’s version 9. Instead, Google focuses on the three new major features available to all in this build: WebGL, Chrome Instant, and the Chrome Web Store. Many users will already be familiar with all of those as they’ve been on the beta builds of Chrome for a while, and the dev builds longer before that. But still, each is worth noting as all three are now a pretty integral part of the Chrome experience. WebGL brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics support. Chrome Instant brings Google Instant support to the Omnibox. And the Chrome Web Store is part of Google plans to push web apps farther. But the more humorous part of the release comes from the . This post details the bug fixes that have come in Chrome 9. And in it, Google gives a special shout-out to the Reddit community for pointing out one critical bug. As Google notes: Special thanks to the Reddit community, for playing so much of the game “Z-Type” that they uncovered a Chromium audio bug — see below! Below, they detail the bug: [ ] Critical Race condition in audio handling. Credit to the gamers of Reddit! So there you go, while it wasn’t an “ ” bug or even a “ ” one, it’s fun to see Google given credit to another service for pointing out their flaws. |
Dogs, Unicorns, And Mysterious Gongs: Inside Yelp's 5-Star Pad | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | Last week we on TechCrunch TV that took us on a whirlwind tour of Scribd, the popular document sharing website. Feedback to that episode was extremely positive, so we’re not wasting any time in bringing you another awesome tour of a hot tech company. This week’s blinged-out pad: Yelp. We’re still taking suggestions for more companies to check out, so feel free to leave your requests in the comments (be sure to tell us why it’s a great office!). And yes, we’re definitely interested in scoping out startups that don’t necessarily have millions in funding — provided your office has some character. We’ve also gotten a bunch of requests to check out offices in other parts of the country (I hear you, NYC), so we’ll do our best to get out there too. But for now, sit back and enjoy today’s episode. Make sure to listen to my insightful comments, like “Dog!” Once again, a big credit goes to TC’s John Murillo for editing the video.
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null | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 5 | 25 | null |
Twitter Not Testing A URL Shortening Button (But Some Extension Is For Them) | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | : Despite a number of people talking about it on Twitter, it appears that this is not an official Twitter button. How do we know? Twitter engineer Dustin Diaz responded in our comments: This has to be some sort of extension (maybe Bitly? We don’t know) – this is not found in our code source. We’ve reached out to Twitter officially, but have yet to hear back. But I see no reason to not go with Diaz here. So, sorry for getting everyone all excited! It does appear that some extension which multiple users have installed is causing this button to appear — we’re still trying to figure out which one. : For as great as Twitter’s website is now, there’s been one big glaring problem for many people using it: link shortening. Unbelievably, Twitter.com has not offered a way to shorten links either automatically or manually. You had to do it yourself and then paste those shortened links in. Well, good news, it looks like that’s finally about to change. As the site , Twitter today was briefly testing a “Shorten” button next to the standard “Tweet” button on the website. Several other Twitter users have reported seeing this button as well before it vanished. And Gizable’s even grabbed the screenshot above. Another user that it was using Bit.ly rather than Twitter’s own t.co address that they use on their other clients. : Aha! . Their Chrome extension does this as an option. |
Boxcar Pushes Towards The Future With Realtime Notifications On The Web | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | I love . In a world where the iOS Push Notification system is pretty much a nightmare, it allows me to sleep easy. We’ve it a of before, but essentially, it’s an app that allows you to get Push Notifications for a wide range of services — and more importantly, it allows you to organize those messages in a manageable manner. And now their bringing that notification system to the web. The latest version of Boxcar’s website launches today. You’ll notice that it has been completely revamped to give users a pleasing interface that utilizes a Twitter-like two-pane stream system. But more significantly, it also now gives you notifications when new messages come in to any of the services you’ve tied to your Boxcar account. “ ,” creator Jonathan George tells us. These notifications appear both in the browser tab (this shows the number of new messages you have), and as a little notification bar at the bottom of the browser (though this is currently only in the Boxcar window itself and not browser-wide). “ ,” George says. “ ,” he continues. This close connection between mobile apps with web apps is a very cool trend we’re seeing. For example, I love using the on my iPhone, but also being able to use it in the browser when I’m sitting down. Now I can check Boxcar on the go, or when I’m sitting at my computer as well. Incredibly, George says they’ve served up over 700 million Push Notifications now. Look for this latest version of Boxcar on the web to go live shortly. |
And You Thought Tape Drives Were Extinct – Fujifilm Packs 5TB Onto New Cartridges | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | This news isn’t really… to many of our readers, I think, but it’s still cool. The tape drives used as archival backup systems for many companies are the last thing that occurs to people when they think of cutting-edge technology, but the truth is that as long as there is an infrastructure and companies relying on the tech, it’ll keep on being supported. And the latest advance comes from Fujifilm, who in the latest generation of tape cartridges has managed to quintuple capacity. Yes, the new drives hold up to 5TB each, owing to a new BaFe (Barium-Iron) coating that they apply “thinly and lubricously.” What that means I will leave to your imagination. They’re being made for Oracle, who uses them in their enterprise server and datacenter systems. Not stuff you see every day, but probably stuff you’re indirectly accessing more than you think. At any rate, I just wanted to say hell yeah, love the magnetic tape. Keep it up, old-school storage guys. [via and ] |
Formula One Pilots Decry Technology Creep: 'It's Just Not Enjoyable' | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | Red Bull Racing’s “ ,” Mark Webber, seen here , has just about had enough of technology ruining all the fun of racing. Several new systems have been put in place in many of the cars this year, but the systems , apparently. Not only that, but the reliance on all this technology may be distracting, as Webber says drivers ought to be 100 percent focused on the road, but now they’re practically being asked to jailbreak their car while trying not to veer off into the gravel. Veteran pilot Rubens Barichello, of Williams, is also at wits’ end.
The real negative was that we couldn’t just concentrate on driving. It’s just not enjoyable – pressing buttons, changing gear, pressing and holding.
One more driver hates it, and that’s Nico Rosberg, of Mercedes.
You push the button and the thing goes down at the back, so you feel the car get lighter and then you release the button again before the braking and you think: ‘Jeez, what if this thing hasn’t actually gone back to its old position?’ Then you’re off in a big way. It takes a bit of trusting.
Sounds like a nightmare, “push the button and this thing goes down at the back.” Maybe Formula One should go back to its routes, as seen . Scarves and goggles all the way. |
Colbert On Sponsor Bing Copying Google: "hiybbprqag" Is A Word Meaning "You Got Served." | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | The Google/Bing over search results-stealing has gone from inspiring jokes like on Twitter all the way to Comedy Central’s last night, where Stephen Colbert took advertiser Bing to the mattresses regarding the news that the search engine had been caught copying Google’s results. Colbert said. Riffing on the ridiculous synthetic search terms that Google used to entrap Bing (searches like “hiybbprqag,” “juegosdeben1ogrande,” “jiudgefallon,” “indoswiftjobinproduction,””mbzrxpgjys” and “delhipublicschool40 chdjob”) Colbert went out of his way to call out Microsoft, You can read the Danny Sullivan post that started this mess Also, in the same vein. Via / |
Chinese New Year Ushers In Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Sale | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | Look at your calendar. That’s right, it’s Chinese New Year. What does that mean? One, , and two, for iOS . The sale lasts until Sunday. |
Hey Obama, Where's the Startup Visa in the Startup America Plan? (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | Ankur Jain is the 20-year-old founder of the , a group that tries to discover the world leaders of the future and bring them together for support, mentoring and networking. He swung through San Francisco in between being named one of the partner organizations for President Obama’s Startup America initiative and the Kairos Society’s Global Summit in New York February 25-27, no doubt feeling as light and celebratory as this picture I found on his blog. But as impressive as Jain’s organization is, I had some tough questions about the viability of the President’s plan. Most government initiatives to spur entrepreneurship– on a local, national and international level– fail spectacularly. Culturally, structurally and geographically the beltway could not be farther from Silicon Valley. Even if you believe that “replicating Silicon Valley” is feasible, it’s a several-decade initiative, not something that will solve a job crisis now. Parts of Obama’s plan look great, and he’s dead right that an emphasis on federally-funded research and removing barriers to entrepreneurship are national imperatives. But what are the odds his successors stick to that fortitude with pressures to reduce taxes and cut an out-of-control deficit? And what about the most glaring omission from United States Chief Technology Officer on Startup America: A Startup Visa or some kind of immigration reform to ease the war on talent most tech companies are facing? Jain tells us why he’s encouraged by the plan in the video below. |
Ze Frank's Star.me Is Like Being In Kindergarten All Over Again | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 4 |
Every once in awhile you come across people who are entirely original, and is one of those people. While many people as eccentric as Frank end up with not so amazing lots in life, Frank, who originally Neuroscience at Brown, most recently $500K from Andreesen Horowitz, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, Gary Vaynerchuk and Ron Conway to focus on creating novel social games. Now the world gets to see the fruits of his labor. Kicking off today in invite-only beta is Frank’s Star.me is a social network meets social game based around positive reinforcement, or the action of giving people Stars. The appeal of this is very basic but poignant. At our core we all want to be liked and given validation. Frank calls the game, Focusing solely on the exchange of virtual goods or Stars that people can display on their profiles, Star.me is unlike anything else you’ve seen. And off-puttingly positive. When asked who his closest competitor was, Frank said social gaming beast . While granted some of the game mechanics are similar, Star.me and FarmVille couldn’t be further apart. First of all, Star.me follows Frank’s of how to get popular on the Internet, Zynga, not so much. On Star.me you, as a consenting adult, can chose to give out themed Stars with messages like “UR CRAZY,” “UR CUTE,” “BFF,” “Frenemy,” “Bromance,” and (!) “Mom Jeans.” Both the actions of giving and receiving Stars cause new and more diverse stars to be unlocked and obviously, more people sending stars in your direction. Your objective is to give and to get others to give to you through a series of transactions, style. Sort of like life (Hint hint, things tend towards . A personal Star.me profile is like an splash page with visible signs of how much people like you. It features a collection of things that people have taken the time to give you, that they think represent you. In a direct attempt at connecting virtual goods and human relationships, your profile reveals “Stars sent” and “Stars received” as well as inventory you still have to give. When you click on “Give A Star” in the top right of your dashboard you are presented with a palette of unique options which you can choose to distribute to your friends via auto-populating user names from Star.me, Facebook, Twitter and email. You can also chose to share your distribution of Stars on Facebook and Twitter and through a permalink. said co-founder and investor about the service. As of right now, you have to be invited to join Star.me but once in you can invite as many people as you want. If anyone can’t wait and wants an invite, please email me and I’ll send you one, my email is notoriously easy to figure out, especially for tech smarties like yourselves. says Frank who has chosen this as the sole project and platform of When asked what the ultimate utility of this endeavor was, Frank originally heard and when I corrected him told me that would have been a better question. When I quipped that utility and futility were ultimately the same thing he humored me, He went on, True. In terms of future plans, Frank is working on UI issues ( ), tweaking games mechanics, figuring out creative ways to monetize ( ) and figuring out how to give out more Stars, You can watch Frank’s TED talk below. Because it’s awesome. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMkJVXi7Rp8&w=630] |
Bioshock Creator: New Consoles Would Be "Bad For Everybody" | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 4 |
Ken Levine is best known for having created , one of the more cinematic and high-production-value franchises out there. So it seems a little strange at first to hear him saying that a new generation of more powerful consoles would be such a problem. Speaking on an , he said: At this point I have no desire as a developer and zero desire as a gamer to see the next generation come out where I’m sitting right now. It still costs us a fortune to make games on this platform. If they’re going to up the scale, up the art, up the content, I don’t know how to make that and sell it to anybody for under $100 a game. Who wants to do that? It’s bad for everybody. That really puts into perspective, right? It’s an objection I regarding the PSP2/NGP. The amount of work and money being put into AAA games is pretty insane, and if your platform is built around that kind of game, there’s a tradeoff. And right now it seems we’re more or less at the limits of what the consoles and development tools can do on a decent budget. Personally I’m heartened in this debate by the fact that indie and downloadable games are like crazy. You don’t need a thirty million dollar budget to make a great game, and while there will always be a place for the big guns, the word these days seems to be “diversify.” Sony and Microsoft have both taken this to heart, but interestingly it’s Nintendo that seems to have fallen into the bigger rut. That said, it’s actually Nintendo who would benefit most from a new console. We live in interesting times for gaming, friends. Live it up. [via ] |
Contest: Would It Kill You To Dress Up? Jackthreads Can Help | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 4 | , a Thrillist company, is offering a sweet $200 so you can maybe get a nice pair of pants or a shirt to wear on Valentine’s Day so you (and I mean this in the nicest way) won’t look like huge slob. I mean really, whens the last time you bought a nice pair of pants? Maybe a shirt? Shorts and sandals might be fine for your parties but not for going on. Ok. Ok. Don’t get testy. Click through to see how to win.
Do me a favor: go to to pick something out, report back here and comment on what you’d replace out of your current ratty wardrobe with an item from the Jackthreads catalog. An old Rush concert t-shirt? A white dress shirt you wore to your brother’s wedding and subsequent divorce five years ago? A pair of jeans covered in what looks like dried spaghetti squash? Let us know. I’ll pick one winner at random on Monday. UPDATE – Congrats to Patrick for winning our contest. |
Demotix makes hay while the revolutions shine in the Middle East, thanks to Twitter (TCTV) | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 2 | 4 | is a London-based startup which has attracted a new wave of attention since the wave of civil unrest has swept the Middle East, particularly in Egypt. The idea is not new: upload photos and videos to a platform to create an alternative news wire / agency. What is new is that as the mainstream media’s coverage of international events has been shrinking – it is no longer cost efficient to have a guy in some far-flung bureau filing the one annual story a year – so has Demotix’ coverage expanded with professional and semi-professional contributors. In each case Demotix checks out the credentials of contributors, who can then earn news agency fees from their output. It splits the revenue with photographers 50/50 each time the photo or video is sold (major photo agencies take a much larger cut and only pay photographers once). Photos sourced from Demotix have appeared on the front pages of New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, and The Guardian. In August last year it signed a deal with the news exchange giving it access to US distribution. Founder Turi Munthe came up with the idea while he was a political analyst, and now Demotix is becoming a highly efficient middle-man between news producers – the professional and semi-professional photojournalists and videographers – and the news distributors “in all channels in all media.” The site now has 4,000 active contributors for Somalia to Sril Lanka and everywhere in between and operates in over 190 countries around the world As you’ll see from half way through the video, Munthe explains how the unrest in Egypt is coming pretty close to home. Many of his contributors have been beaten by Police and backers of the government in the last few days. But at the same time Demotix is attempting to act like an HQ for contributors in the Middle East, trying to keep them safe and informed about what they can see from “30,000 feet up” as it were, especially by using social media and contacts on the ground. Fascinatingly, Twitter has become – despite what the cynics say – a component for how Demotix talks to its contributors. Communication during the Iran election unrest in 2009 was “all through email”. Munthe that now it’s almost always happening through Twitter initially, then email subsequently: “The tool of choice is Twitter, in Cairo today.” |
NoteSlate: A Simple E-Paper Device That May Or May Not Exist | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 4 |
: It’s not real. It is a concept that was put on the net to gauge attention. They may be getting an investor, but as the device is a fantasy created by a designer and includes no actual product engineering, I doubt we’ll ever see it in real life. Too bad! I’ve seen this thing in a few places today, and while the idea is compelling to me, I’m not convinced that this thing is actually real. I mean, the pictures are all renders, the spec sheet is a fantasy, and a quick search turns up no patents or trademarks. Is this thing just a concept masquerading as a real product? It says it’s shipping in June, so shouldn’t there at least be a video of the thing in action? It’s not that I don’t like the idea. But it shows all the signs of being an idea rather than a real thing. A 13-inch “electronic paper alike” screen? Anti-aliasing? 150 hours of battery life while performing optical character recognition and some kind of active digitizer? $99? I’ll be amazed and excited if this turns out to be real. But let’s be realistic. Under the tablet competition, it lists the JooJoo the Crunchpad… and the . Yeah, I think we’re looking at a cryptogadget here. |
The Verizon Vs. AT&T Ads Prove One Thing: The iPhone Is Helen Of Troy | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 4 | The most recent and commercials are awesome because everyone loves a good slap fight — especially one that is played out in public (for more evidence, see earlier this week). But they’re actually even more interesting under the surface. Because it’s a fight that has only one real winner. But it’s not who you might think. It’s neither Verizon nor AT&T. It’s Apple. Think about it. Both AT&T and Verizon are spending millions of dollars to bash each other in these high-profile commercials. But the overall impact of these commercials is likely to be that they completely cancel each other out. If AT&T feels Verizon is winning, they’ll just order more ads, and vice versa. And so again, the only winner in these ads is the one common element: the iPhone. At first, I found the fact that Apple would sign off on Verizon and AT&T using the iPhone to attack one another . After all, since Apple now partners with both, they have to keep both relatively happy. But this strategy is actually genius. Apple, of course, isn’t going to say a bad word about either (instead, ), but by letting them say bad words about each other, they’ll ensure that more and more and more commercials get made. That’s the way the negative ad campaign game is played. More equals better. And “more” is music to Apple’s ears. Because they don’t have a losing card here. In fact, they only have winning cards. If you choose a Verizon iPhone, Apple wins. If you choose an AT&T iPhone, Apple wins. What we have are two beaus fawning over the same beautiful woman. Each is arguing — again, in public — why they’re the . And considering that the two beaus, Verizon and AT&T, happen to be two biggest carriers in the U.S. that the majority of users are connected to, this battle is making the the beautiful woman, the iPhone, look like Helen of Troy. A year ago at this time, Verizon was spending their marketing muscle pumping up their Droid devices while attacking the iPhone. We’re not seeing those commercials anymore. And the fact that Verizon was so quick to switch up allegiances also has a deeper meaning. When the other ads come out attacking Apple products (like the one Motorola is for the Xoom), Verizon’s change of heart will undercut that ads effectiveness. Because it shows that these companies are only running negative campaigns against Apple because they’re jealous. If those companies get let into Apple’s world, all of a sudden, the animosity turns to pure fawning. To love. Of course, the likelihood that Motorola would ever be let into Apple’s universe is slim. But still, if they were allowed to say, create a device with iOS, is there any question that their ads would do a quick 180? Nope. And that’s exactly why the ads, while possibly effective, don’t really carry a lot of weight. Motorola wants to be in bed with Apple — just like everyone else does. Who wouldn’t, with Helen of Troy? |
Search Underdog Blekko Sees Over 30M Searches In January, More Than 110K Slashtags Created Since Launch | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 4 | Nowhere has the need for a more diverse search market been more apparent than this that Bing was cribbing Google’s notes. While Microsoft VP Harry Shum and Google’s Matt Cutts on a panel together at the Farsight 2011 conference, CEO looked on, more a human symbol of the call for greater market diversity than anything else. Earlier in the week Blekko made the that it would block content farms like Demand Media’s eHow and AnswerBag and is now announcing another milestone, over 30 million search queries in January and over 110K slashtags (curated topics) created since its launch in November. This breaks down to about 10-15 search queries a second and over 1 million searches a day, which is at levels its original traffic spike at launch. In contrast, Google was serving over 88 billion searches a month (the 2010 Comscore numbers have yet to come out as far as I can see). Even though the concept of slashtags is hard to get used to, here’s why I think Blekko has a fighting chance: The company, helmed by Skrenta and is funded to the nines with $24.4 million from investors like Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Jeff Clavier and wildcard Ashton Kutcher. Skrenta told me himself that Blekko isn’t going away any time soon, especially if they keep adding streamlined utilities like the ability to search by , , by , and most recently the ability to search by Facebook “Likes.” Unveiling a three months in is also a savvy move. Blekko keeps getting referenced in articles like this one simply because it keeps reinforcing its place at the search table terms of innovation and press stunts, like its , which is a running meter of all the spam created in the US (1 million pages every hour) or the bold move to ban specific sites when Google only spam filtering algorithms in the wake of critical articles like Once you get past the intimidation of creating a funny sounding slashtag, the site becomes extremely useful on a micro-personal level. Individuals will use it in a different ways, depending on what frustrates you about search. But I have a feeling Blekko doesn’t care if you use it now, it’s got a bunch more tricks in the works to keep you coming back.
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Android Honeycomb's Mesmerizing Bootup Screen | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 2 | 4 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LJrgSC6uh0&w=640&h=390]
Earlier this week we posted an of Android Honeycomb, the tablet version of Google’s mobile OS that will start shipping on devices later this month. But we saved one more tasty bit of Honeycomb for the weekend: the OS’s bootup screen. It looks like something out of Tron, and it’s a nice departure from the boot animation seen on the Nexus One and Nexus S, which features swirling strands of color coming together to form the Nexus ‘X’ symbol (you can watch it below). Apologies for the glare — this wasn’t shot under ideal circumstances. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAFSEsEZnnE&w=480&h=390] |
Help Make This Wild Braille Watch A Reality | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 4 |
David Chavez has a dream. He wants to build that shows the time by moving little rotating dots along the face to spell out the numbers in Braille. Even if you’re not visually impaired, you have to appreciate the ingenuity and usability this watch, called the Haptica, has to offer. The project is up on now, so pop over and pre-order if you’re so inclined. Considering most watches for the blind haven’t changed since the early 1900s – take this for example – this is an interesting step forward.
The watch will cost a little over $250 when/if it’s made and it looks like David is pretty far from his goal so pre-orders should help. Here’s hoping this thing gets built because it could be useful in the dark, allowing you to tell the time before you’re eaten by a Grue. |
iPad Rumors: NFC, Carbon Fiber, And 7" Version Again | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 4 |
I know what you’re thinking: none of these rumors is actually new. we’ve talked about for a while, the carbon fiber thing was around back in November, and didn’t we pretty much dismiss the 7″ iPad thing? Yes, all these things are true. But now somebody is rumoring them . Yes, a “previously accurate source” has that all of the above rumors have more traction than previously thought. I can see the carbon fiber thing happening, and NFC is pretty much a given, but as much as I’d like the 7″ iPad thing to be true, I just can’t picture Jobs sassing the whole idea of “tweeners” and then coming out with one. We hear the new iPad may be debuting as early as next week, though, so I don’t think we’ll be in suspense for too long. |
Robonaut To Make Special Pre-Game Appearance At Super Bowl | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 4 |
Although NASA and GM’s is more suited to spacewalks than end-zone dances, the little guy is still going to . R2, as he’s called, will appear in a pre-show segment and… do I know not what. It’s not like he’s an android, so the whole thing will be a bit scripted, I’m sure. With his magic hands he can probably throw a perfect spiral, though, unlike me. My hands are tragic. He has a speaker where his mouth is, so I suppose he’ll be discussing his picks with Howie Long. But his software isn’t designed for sports analysis, so I’m thinking it’s really the NASA team’s picks. Boy, I should be a detective or something. At any rate, the pre-game show starts at 11AM Pacific, so tune in, grab some wings, and watch a talk about football. Welcome to the future. |
null | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 2 | 3 | null |
Groupon's "Rejected" Super Bowl Ad Is A (Subtle) Jab At LivingSocial | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 4 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R34CwDsWF2o&w=630] The of the social media Super Bowl ads continues, with daily deals Groupon just on its own blog about how it rejected an ad concept where someone goes through a Groupon addiction, an idea conspicuously similar to what people are competitor LivingSocial has up its sleeve for its 30 second ad before this Sunday’s Steelers vs. Packers game. describes LivingSocial’s ad, The details of what Groupon and ad partner Crispin Porter Bogusky have up their sleeve for Sunday are still unknown but we can be pretty sure as to what they’re not going to do (see what got left on the cutting room floor, above). Heh. From the Groupon blog: Last time the two deals sites faced such a head to head comparison was when LivingSocial’s Amazon $10 gift card flash deal over $13 million dollars, beating Groupon’s Gap record of $11 million. Sitting pretty with a $175 million dollar investment from Amazon, underdog Living Social used some of its cash to go in on a pre-game ad a Groupon secured its spot. LivingSocial has over while Groupon had at last count. According to Experian’s rough data site visits in January, LivingSocial now has a 30% marketshare in the daily deals space, encroaching on Groupon’s 60% dominance aided by the success of its Amazon deal. |
Video: Starbucks' Trenta Is Big Enough To Hold An Entire Bottle Of Wine | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 2 | 4 | Just big is the new Trenta size at ? Big enough to hold . Greatest country in history. “Trenta?” Oh, you hadn’t heard? Starbucks a new size for its drinks, and it’s the largest size in its history. Caveat: it’ll only be available for their cold drinks, so no Trenta white chocolate mochas for you. Trenta, Italian for “thirty,” actually holds 31 ounces of liquid. Just sit back and watch the magic. |
They're Commercial Fighting! AT&T Shows How Talk And Surf Is Useful | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 4 | Yesterday, Verizon launched a commercial campaign to highlight that they now have the iPhone 4 with one important feature: . While they never mention their competitor (or humorously, even the iPhone itself), it’s clear who this was aimed squarely at: AT&T. But AT&T is not about to take the punches sitting down. Today, they have their own ad. “Answers” shows a man in his office working when he receives a call on his iPhone. It’s his wife, wishing him a happy anniversary. Naturally, the man forgot. He quickly heads to Google on his iPhone and starts searching for a restaurant to make a reservation at. This is something that would not be possible with the Verizon version of the device. The voiceover hammers their point home a little more directly than Verizon’s commercial did yesterday: “Only AT&T’s network lets your iPhone talk and surf at the same time.” Of course, I’m going to assume the man has access to a computer in his office building. He could have just as easily hoped on that. But I digress — this is war! I wonder what the over/under is on how many of these commercials we’re going to see? I’d bet the over. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M5u6ES7BBo&w=640&h=390] |
Tango Takes Face-To-Face Video Calling Beyond The iPhone With 8 Million Downloads | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 2 | 4 | One of the best built-in features of the iPhone 4 is , the video calling feature that lets you see who you are talking to by using the cameras on both phones. But it only works over WiFi and if both callers own an iPhone 4. Perhaps those limitations are why an app called is the seventh most popular social networking app right now ( ). Tango lets you make video calls not just on iPhones but also on Android phones, and it works over 3G data networks as well. It works on both the iPhone 4 and the 3GS, and even iPod Touches. It’s been growing like crazy on both iOS and Android devices, adding one million downloads every two weeks. In the past three months, it’s grown from about 1 million downloads to 8 million (see chart. Of those, 7.2 million became registered users, and 42 percent (or about 3 million) have made a video call in the last 30 days. Tango provided us with some other stats on its usage and growth as well. About 2.6 million people downloaded the app as a result of a direct invitation, with 45 percent of invites resulting in a download. The average length of a video call is 4 minutes. Downloads are split evenly between iOS and Android, and 60 percent of calls are over 3G or 4G data networks instead of WiFi. (Are you listening Apple/AT&T/Verizon?) Although the U.S. is the single largest country for Tango, the majority of members (55 percent) live outside the U.S. And half of the top 10 countries (South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore ) are in Asia. |
Facebook Turns Seven: From Colleges To Cairo, You've Come A Long Way Baby | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 4 | From founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard to across the US to the cover of TIME magazine to the fingertips of protestors in Cairo, Facebook has probably had more influence over our day to day lives than any other startup this decade. To celebrate its seven years of , the company has put up a graphic up on its Facebook wall, with the message, The image has received over 8,000 comments and 48,558 “Likes” thus far. According to reports the company is user milestone, and that statement is conspicuously an order of magnitude less than if applied to the total world population ( ), so it must somehow relate to the Facebook population itself. If you assume that birthdays are evenly distributed, the 1.5 million number times the 365 days in a year would mean that Facebook has around 548 million users. But birthdays evenly distributed, and February to be a below average month in terms of birth distribution. Of course 548 million is an underestimate, as it’s also possible that the 1.5 million here is just the number of users who have chosen to specify the specific February 4th birthday to Facebook, and the unspecifieds don’t get counted. I’ve emailed almost everyone at Facebook trying to get the actual methodology and received this response … Guess we’ll have to wait until someone fesses up. In the meantime: Most recently the company was in the spotlight for plans to make Facebook Credits the primary form of y and also for being facilitating communication between anti-Mubarak protestors in Egypt. Facebook is valued at over $50 billion dollars, or priceless. image: |
Now Shipping: XM25 Smart Grenade Launchers For $30,000 | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 4 | If you’re in the market for a grenade launcher with a kick and you’re a US soldier, check FedEx for your new XM25 Smart Grenade Launcher, a device that shoots a “25 mm microchip-embedded high explosive round that detonates above or beside the target, showering the enemy with lethal metal fragments.” Sounds like my senior prom!
It’s a bit aged by now, but the Army just started shipping 12,500 devices, “one for each infantry squad and Special Forces team” and according to they’ll ship to the rest of the soldiers in 2012 and 2013. The system has a day and night sight, and it shoots standard RPGs as well in addition to the smart round. It holds four rounds at a time and the sight is almost completely automatic – you lase your target, fire, and wait. Then there’s an explosion. Sadly, it will be hard to get these if you’re not a current Army subscriber, so if you want to try it out I’d suggest hitting ROTC or your local recruitment center pronto. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh4uy5A-lI&w=640&h=510] [ ] |
"Inner City Bike" Is A Minimalist's Single-Gear | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 5 |
I don’t post this because I condone the use of fixies in the city. I post it because these bikes are kind of rad. Sure, fixies are actually impractical in the city, especially one like Seattle, where I live, but there’s something to be said for removing mechanical elements until all you have left is a unicycle with a front wheel and handlebars. More info at . (Oops, I missed the fact that this is actually a 1:1 freewheel, not a fixie; i.e. You can coast down a hill with it and the pedals stay still. Much more practical.) [via ] |
Quora Details Their New Answer Ranking Scheme; Their "PageRank", Of Sorts | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 5 | As you may have seen, last weekend, worked himself into a tizzy because an answer of his was moderated into a collapsed state on Quora. The whole bitchmeme the incident was rather . But there was at least somewhat of a point behind all of it: people began asking more questions about the methods behind Quora’s ranking system. Today, we have some of those answers. Truth be told, Quora co-founder previously that Quora was working on an algorithm to determine user quality well before Scoblegate happened. As he noted on January 21: (2) We’re developing an algorithm to determine user quality. The algorithm is somewhat similar to PageRank but since people are different from pages on the web and the signals that are available on Quora are different from those on the web, it’s not exactly the same problem. We’ll use this to help decide what to show in feeds, when to send notifications, and how to rank answers. Today, fellow co-founder posted some of the details about the new Quora “ “. As he notes, the exact details are a bit complicated, and are going to change, but the main principles for this Quora “PageRank” are as follows: So, essentially, the methods are pretty obvious. Answers with the most votes will be ranked higher (though gaming will not count). Votes from people with a history of good answers will be ranked higher. And answers from people with a history of good answers will be ranked higher. Makes sense. And yes, anonymous answers are included in the above system because Quora will know who you are (they just won’t surface that information). |
Readability Just Became Instapaper's Publisher Payment Layer | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 5 | Personally, I think the concept behind is pretty awesome. It gives you a way to read all your favorite articles on the web without all of the clutter of the web — meaning, mainly, ads. And the recently-launched payment component is even more interesting because it gives you a way to pay back (in a very small way) your favorite writers/publications that you often read on the web. But as one such writer who works for one such publication, clearly I’m biased. I realize that this idea isn’t for everyone. And it’s going to be a fairly hard sell for some people. But that sell may have just gotten a little easier. When Readability last week, they noted a partnership with popular bookmarking service . The main component of this integration was set to be a Readability mobile application that Instapaper’s Marco Arment made (and will release soon) in Instapaper’s image. This is great for Readability since Instapaper is already a hugely popular app on the iOS platform. But a small bit of news today is even better. As Arment today on the Instapaper blog, you can now send you Instapaper logs to Readability. What this means is that you can use the payment element of Readability without having to really use Readability at all (beyond the initial payment set up). So if you like the idea of Readability but still prefer to use Instapaper, that’s fine — this gives you the best of both worlds. And there’s an option when you link your accounts to send everything you save on Instapaper to Readability or to only send items you archive to Readability. That’s also interesting. It gives you a way to selectively pay certain publishers/authors. Writes Arment: Now, you can support publishers automatically from Instapaper: simply link your Readability account in Instapaper’s Account screen. Instapaper will notify Readability whenever you save articles, and they’ll be included in the publisher calculations for your Readability account. You’ll be directly supporting the sites that you save to Instapaper, automatically. Again, this won’t be for everyone. And some people will wonder why you would do this when you can just use Instapaper for free? Well, you certainly don’t have to. But if you’ve ever felt the desire to give a little something back, this is an easy way using a service that’s already pretty popular. Readability allows you to contribute as little as $5 a month, of which, 70 percent goes directly to writers/publishers (split up over all the various ones you’ve read that month, obviously). It’s certainly a model that could fall flat — but if it hits, it could be a nice little bonus for writers on the web outside of the traditional ad-based model. Instapaper has also been a micro-payment subscription model as well. |
Gillmor Gang 2.5.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 2 | 5 | Egypt’s second week without Twitter did nothing to slow down the realtime wave of governments resigning, news anchors hightailing it back to the ironic safety of New York, and iPadders trying to find something interesting in The Daily. Life in the Fast Lane. @scobleizer @dbfarber @dannysullivan @jtaschek @stevegillmor |
In Praise Of Piracy | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 2 | 5 | I’ve had to think a lot about lately. Not that I wanted to. But I recently did some eye-opening contract software development for a DRM-heavy media app, just as our government up here in the Great White North introduced a new and copyright law, and links to started popping up all over the Internet. You probably don’t realize, unless you actually work on a software project laden with DRM, just how much Sisyphean effort goes into it. I estimate fully a quarter of the developer-hours that went into the app in question were devoted to building or dealing with the DRM, meaning a quarter of the total effort did not go into crafting a killer app. Similarly, the countless hours and dollars Sony spent on and did not go into building better products. All this effort lavished on restriction rather than creation reminds me of the great ‘s depiction of the Soviet economy: DRM is the barbed wire of the media world. Nobody likes it except manufacturers, publishers, producers, and copyright holders … a group which includes, er, me. I’ve been stubborn and lucky enough to have had a clutch of novels published around the world—and, inevitably, pirated. As a “content producer,” I’m generally expected (especially by my publishers) to be a staunch supporter of DRM, and piracy’s sworn enemy. It’s easy to see why. Most of the arguments that echo around the Net in favor of unlimited copying range from “intellectually lazy” to “wilfully deluded.” Yes, musicians make up for much of their piracy losses with performance income, but no, the same is not possible for all other pursuits. Yes, Cory Doctorow does very well, but he’s an extreme outlier who markets himself on one of the world’s most popular blogs and has . No, “real artists” will not keep at it regardless of whether they’re paid; passion is only loosely correlated with talent, and those who make a full-time living from their work do more and better than they would as hobbyists. Yes, obscurity is any creator’s primary enemy, but that doesn’t make piracy a friend. No, The Pirate Bay is not just like a library or secondhand shop. Yes, all of these arguments sound like “I want the fruits of your years of hard work, but I don’t want to reward you in any meaningful way!” wrapped in an extremely thin rationalization. Although it pains me to say this, it’s the pirates who are on the right side of history. Empires built on barbed wire inevitably collapse, and the sooner the better; while this one reigns, it perpetuates yesterday’s regimes, and squelches innovation and progress. Is piracy wrong? Yes, but that’s the wrong question. The right question is, which is worse: widespread piracy, or the endless and futile attempt to preserve DRM everywhere? So long live the pirates. Those jerks. Please don’t make me say it again. Ironically, it’s Apple who gives me hope. Yes, Apple, . But I take heart in knowing that people have bought billions of songs from iTunes (a clumsy, irritating tool which offers by far the worst user experience of Apple’s entire product suite) even though they could easily have downloaded them for free. Most people don’t want to steal. If we content producers make our goods cheap enough, and the process easy enough, they’ll be willing to buy them. I hope. So I’ve released of my under Creative Commons licenses, and I’m trying to talk the major publisher who’s agreed to re-e-publish a third to do so without any DRM. So far they’re reluctant: but it’s a leap of faith that all of today’s defenders of DRM will ultimately have to make. |
Everblue.edu Poised To Become The Kaplan Test Prep Of Sustainability | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 2 | 5 | (Everblue.edu) — an environmental education startup with offices in Berkeley, Calif. and Charlotte, N.C. — this week attained accreditation from the group that verifies the quality of non-collegiate, continuing education and professional training programs throughout the United States for the U.S. Department of Education, the . Principal and co-founder of Everblue, Jon Boggiano, says the endorsement allows his business to sell its services to: government helping them adjust back to civilian life; large companies that seek to train and certify their employees in a variety of environmental topics; and professionals or students who use government grants and loans to afford their continuing education. All of the company’s customers prior to its accreditation paid out-of-pocket. Boggiano explained that he and his brother, Chris, a co-founder (along with Grant McGregor) are both veterans hoping to make the U.S. more energy independent, and to prepare the domestic workforce to remain technologically competitive. The duo also worked in the field of test-prep, helping business school hopefuls get ready for the (Graduate Management Admission Test) prior to founding Everblue. With about twenty full-time employees, and fifty contract instructors, Everblue now teaches about 25,000 students per year, combining both classroom-and-online, and all-online courses.”Generally, people come for short-term boot camp type training. Most of the students in the classroom are architects, municipal officials, or anyone who has a hand in designing for communities. They’re collegiate up to retirees,” Jon Boggiano explained. Everblue courses cover the following topics and certifications: Certifications, Weatherization Training; the Home Energy Ratings System (RESNET HERS); the U.S. Green Building Council’s certification of ; the Solar Certification, Corporate Sustainability, and Carbon Accounting. To build its content, Everblue used the open source course management system , Drupal and Articulate software, among other technologies. In 2010, the 5 percent of students who completed Everblue courses used the purely online services. Boggiano says he expects that number to grow to represent 20 percent by the end of 2011. The company currently partners with 60 schools and trade associations to deliver its coursework broadly. It plans to soon deliver multiple language editions of its online coursework to students in China, the Middle East and Europe, and to add more game-like and immersive features to its digital courses, Boggiano said. |
Improving Sales: The Excuse Department Is Closed | Mark Suster | 2,011 | 2 | 5 | Most technology startups seem to be funded by product people or business people. Specifically what is often not in the DNA of founders are sales skills. Nor do they exist in the investors of early-stage companies. The result is a lack of knowledge of the process and of sales people themselves. My first startup was no different. I had never had any sales training so everything we did for the first couple of years was instinctual. While we did fine learning on the fly, it turned out that a lot of what we did was wrong. I’ve started writing up some of those and I plan to continue to build that section out over time. As we grew into several millions of dollars of sales per year it was no longer acceptable to “wing it.” So I did want any rational person who wants to improve does—I hired a coach. We focused together on improving our sales methodology, our training and our comp plans. These days there are even startups to make this easier for all of us. Back then it was a larger than life ex-country manager from PTC named Kai Krickel. He taught me much‚most of it unconventional. Most of it worked and his philosophies have proved enduring to me. He called his business TEDIC. The Excuse Departement is Closed. That mindset always stayed with me and even rung true at the time. Excuses. Whenever I heard why we didn’t feel a sales process at an important customer was going well (or if we lost) I would get involved myself. Invariably the reasons I was hearing why we weren’t well positioned versus my own perception were different. I boil it down to this: sales people are sales people. They are the lifeblood of many companies yet they are different than the traditional technology startup DNA so the ways that you hire, motivate, compensate and assess performance of these individuals will be different. Obviously to understand a “class” of people you have to make broad generalizations. Here are mine. Sales people: Before reading my tongue-in-cheek post, please know that I love sales people. I’ve talked many times on my blog about how they’re the lifeblood of most businesses – even those that pretend like they’re above it all. Treat them well and they’ll love working you. Treat them like the rest of the company and you’ll struggle to hold on to them. Here’s what I learned. It’s my guide to understanding when you’re being gamed.
Startups are the art of the possible. By definition an MVP (minimum viable product) means there’s room for improvement. Your competitors will always highlight a feature here or a feature there that is better. Features don’t win or lose sales—especially in nascent markets. People are buying . They’re buying trust that you’re going to do what you’re saying you’re going to do. Customer also buy social proof because others are acting as strong references. (There is a nascent industry to try and help you with this, too. The best thinker I met on the topic is Mark Organ who founded to solve this. They’re in beta). They give orders to people they like, which is why despite your best well reasoned non-sales ethos – you need to understand that sales people do need money to schmooze. But what customers don’t do is buy features. Don’t get me wrong—a great-looking product can really help support a sale. Customers use features as a rationalization for why they made the decision that they concluded for a complex set of other reasons that they probably don’t even understand. How can I be so sure? Ask yourself how they came to decide what features should they be making the decision upon. Who set in their mind what the “right” feature set was? If it wasn’t you, I guarantee you they were influenced by your competitor—either through their sales efforts or through marketing. So know up front that many times sales people will blame the product when they lose or when they’re losing. It’s never them, their lack of effort or relationships. And as you build out your team and grow you realize that it’s always the other guys fault. It’s why leaders need to be or you’ll constantly be gamed. In a startup you soon learn that not only does the sales guys blame the product, but the product guys blame the marketing guys for giving them too many requirements. The marketing guys blame the sales guys who can’t close their leads. The sales guys in turn say that they didn’t get from marketing. And they all secretly blame you. “It doesn’t look that tough to be a CEO. I’m doing all the hard work anyways.” Stop the madness. You need to teach your sales team and make it clear that you don’t lose on features. They can give you product input, customer requests and wish lists —sure. But the excuse department is closed.
They lost the deal because your competitors dropped their price. Customers seldom buy on price. They buy on perceived value. Sure, you need to be competitive on price. But a sales person needs to be able to demonstrate the business case of why using your product will deliver more total ROI than your competitors. Otherwise you need not keep building out great features—just always drop your price! Of course that’s not true. If your team (and you) see a competitor massively undercut you on price, you sure better be able to sell them on the notion that the temporary offset in a cheaper price won’t match the much greater benefit of working with you. Or whatever. You need to justify value. And this has to be led by your sales teams and driven home through training. Also, don’t give your sales teams too much authority on price negotiations. Given them small authority to discount, give the sales leader a slightly larger level and anything above that comes to your desk for negotiation. Too big of a discount authority will lead to price drops because it’s easier than selling value and doing the hard business-case work. Losing on price is for losers. The excuse department is closed.
If your sales teams think that they can throw in some extra features that you’ll build to win the big contract they will. I’ve seen it a thousand times. They feel like they need to show a customer that they’re flexible, listening to their needs and building features the customer perceives as important. They’ll always lobby you to approve it. They’ll throw in extra storage, extra modules, extra freebies. Hold the line on any additional dev work. Find a way where the bonus program is reflected in any work that has a higher COGS due to dev work and they’ll sell around it—I promise. Don’t let them sell futures. The excuse department is closed.
Sales people will always tell you how far ahead the competition is. It’s the easiest way to justify losing deals, put pressure on your to build the features they want and . Always make your own assessment of your competitors. Talk personally to customers. Encourage the sales teams to give you feedback but make it clear that it’s no excuse for losing. The excuse department is closed.
Sales people are bag carriers. That’s the most important thing in your business to get revenues up. They somehow always want junior bag carriers. The more, the better. They want lots of post-sales support. They want junior staff to work on proposals for them. They want technical sales to help with customer objections. You’re a startup. That stuff is for Oracle or IBM. They need to be scrappy, roll up their sleeves, learn multiple functions. When you hit scale you need to add staff. And division of labor really will drive up productivity. For now? The excuse department is closed.
And my favorite. The quota. It’s always too high. It’s always unachievable. They were always above quota at every other company they’ve ever worked for. It’s all your fault. And when you get their forecasts they’re always sandbagged. And they know that you play games back. Management always sets sales budgets that roll up to a number beyond the actual board budget. Sales people are smart—they know this. That’s where the sandbagging comes. They know you’re going to play games and ask for more so they need to leave room for you to do so. It’s the game everybody plays, everybody says they wish nobody played and yet it’s human nature. Just accept it and play the game. Seriously, you need to be careful about not setting unattainable quotas. But as a general rule—the excuse department is closed. OK, so if you all took that in good enough humor for the broad generalizations that I made, I would say two things to management: Train them, arm them with a great product and sales collateral. Get out there with them—no hiding in the ivory tower. Customers want to see you. It’s the hardest job in the company. They sink or swim on their results. And as a result they’re the best paid people in the company. If they start sucking—they’re out. They know this. . Make their pay-for-performance unlimited, but well structured. They are supposed to be the best paid people in the company. That’s why they endure the jobs that they have and the constant pressure to deliver results. Don’t hire sales people if you expect to be over-the-top cheap on T&E. They need some money for schmoozing. You can book them at budget hotels—but don’t go too far. Treat them with utmost respect or their next interview is right around the corner. |
null | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 2 | 4 | null |
Latest WikiLeak Reveals Google And The State Department Talked To Unblock Egyptian Videos | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 2 |
In response to the escalating , the of WikiLeaks have been Egypt or MENA related. from November 2008 is particularly interesting, revealing that the State Department spoke to YouTube in 2007 regarding the takedown of videos posted by Egyptian bloggers. The cable is an action request for the State Department to contact someone named Pablo at Google ( ) in order to have Google reinstate access to an Egyptian blogger who had complained about removed videos and access when he reported on police abuses. Apparently this action request has a precedent. According to the cable, YouTube and the State Department talked about the removal of video content that exposed abuses in Egypt before, in December of 2007. ¶3. (SBU) In December 2007, DRL and Embassy Cairo worked to convince Google to restore XXXXXXXXXXXXX’ YouTube access after a similar incident. We believe that a similar Department intervention with Google representatives could help in restoring XXXXXXXXXXXXX’ access again. XXXXXXXXXXXXis an influential blogger and human rights activist, and we want to do everything we can to assist him in exposing police abuse. XXXXXXXXXXXXX’ post of a video showing two policemen sodomizing a bus driver was used as the main evidence to convict the officers in November 2007 (ref C). The cable does not reveal why the video content was taken down, and it could be anything from a specific request from the Egyptian government to enforcement of YouTube’s , specifically, The TOS violation charge is probably applicable to a video of policemen sodomizing a bus driver, someone being shot and a woman being abused, the examples referred to in the leak. Apparently Google was convinced to restore the content in 2007, which means it probably had to make a TOS exemption in the cases of content that could be used as evidence in human rights abuse cases. The State Department has contacted American Internet companies about restoring service in times of political turmoil before, most notably in the of Twitter and the Iran election protests. But at the time Egypt was a major ally to the United States, so even the smallest attempts to intercede on behalf of democracy are impressive. I have contacted Google and YouTube for more information as to what actually happened here and will update this post if I hear back. Gawker’s Adrian Chen points out that the blogger in question in the 2007 case was who has been prisoner abuse on YouTube for years. |
First Impressions Using Android Honeycomb, Google's iPad Rival | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | This morning Google to showcase Android Honeycomb, the new version of the mobile OS that is focused on tablets. There wasn’t much news around the OS — we’ve seen it previewed in a few demos — but the team did show off some of Honeycomb’s slickest features, like widgets and an improved 3D rendering engine. But what about actually the tablet OS? For all the whiz-bang previews we’ve seen, very few people have actually written about what it’s like to use these tablets. Unfortunately today’s event wasn’t the ideal place to do a full hands-on, either — there were dozens of reporters and only four tablets (most people got to play with one for maybe five minutes). But I wanted my fill of Honeycomb, so I stuck around til the crowd finally died down, put on my blinders, and took the Motorola Xoom for a 20+ minute spin. Apologies to the guy waiting behind me — I honestly didn’t realize you were there. Here are some of the features and apps that stood out — be sure to check out the video below for some of these in action. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4mbz_bzPls&w=640&h=390] One of the most drastic changes is the move from dedicated hardware buttons to access Menu options to the ‘Action Bar’ — a UI element at the top of the screen with options that change depending on whatever application you’re using. If you’re in the tablet’s browser (which is based on Google Chrome) then this is where you’ll find your open tabs. If you’re in the movie editing app, it’s where you’ll find buttons to import a new clip — but if you hold your finger down on a section of a clip then the Action Bar will populate with options to add a transition or text overlay. In other words, the Action Bar changes dynamically based on what you’re doing in an application. Most applications also include a Settings button in the far righthand side of the Action Bar, though this is only a convention and not a rule. In practice the system seems to work well, and you’ll find that you instinctively look toward the Action Bar whenever you want to find an application option or setting that isn’t part of the main UI. Of course, developers are in complete control over what appears in the Action Bar so there could be some consistency issues. But at least people will actually be able to these options, which is more than can be said about the options hidden behind the ‘Menu’ button on current versions of Android (which many people never hit). Kicks the pants off of the iPad’s browser. Tabs are great, and the fact that the tablet browser syncs with your desktop version of Google Chrome is very nice. Scrolling felt smooth. And there’s Incognito Mode. We’ve seen it showcased a few times now, but Gmail for Honeycomb is awesome — it’s like the iPad-optimized web version of Gmail, but without the slight lag you still find on browser apps. I want it badly. I’ve never cared about copy & paste nearly as much as the people who spend their time complaining about its implementation on the web. But I know you’re out there, so here’s some good news: it’s works well on Honeycomb. If you’ve used Android Gingerbread you’re already familiar with the orange arrows that appear when you go to highlight text. These work pretty well, but there’s one problem: there’s no button to choose what you want to with that text (the solution is to simply tap the highlighted text, which copies it to the clipboard, but some sort of menu overlay would be nice). Things are much better in Honeycomb: when you highlight text, the Action Bar changes from its current options to let you Cut, Copy, Paste, or Select All. Is it exciting? Not at all. But it’s a good example of how the Action Bar changes depending on what you’re doing, and I’m sure some of you are going to be over the moon about this. The UI of Android Market has been revamped for the tablet. I think it’s pretty ugly: the ‘Android Green’ striped lines feel almost like placeholder graphics and it doesn’t look nearly as attractive as iOS’s App Store. But it gets the job done. It hasn’t gotten much press, but there’s a new application included as part of the Honeycomb suite of Google applications: Movie Studio. I didn’t spend too much time in this, but it includes the features you’d expect: transitions between clips, text overlays, and so on. The UI isn’t what you’d call pretty and it may leave some people scratching their heads, but it’s a nice app to have. In general Honeycomb felt snappy — you can see in the video that there’s never really any lag. I did notice some slight jittering when dragging widgets, but was later shown a more recent build of the OS that seemed to fix this. And the fact that the Xoom has 1GB of RAM means that you aren’t going to find your browser tabs emptying the way they do on the current iPad. One of my biggest questions about Android tablets concerns usability. I believe that the iPad has been a hit in part because it is a simpler alternative to normal desktop operating systems, while still providing plenty of functionality for people who primarily surf the web, email, and watch videos. Many people buy iPads not just because they like the form factor, but because they want a computer that won’t prompt them with endless security alerts, software updates, and confusing installation processes. Android Honeycomb is decidedly more complex than the iPad. Instead of a single hardware button used to jump back to the home screen, as there is on iOS, Honeycomb uses a soft button in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. And maybe it’s just me, but the home button doesn’t even look much like a home button (it could pass as an ‘up’ arrow, especially given the fact that the adjacent Back button is an arrow pointing left). And some of Honeycomb’s improvements over iOS could also be considered possible stumbling blocks. If you long-press the desktop, you’ll bring up the widget/wallpaper selector, which some people will undoubtedly activate accidentally (and promptly panic). The third button in the bottom left corner lets you jump between recently used applications — a feature that I’ll love, but could confuse people who aren’t sure what’s going on. But overall the OS is pretty easy to get the hang of. I’d still feel more comfortable handing an iPad to my mother (who absolutely loves hers, for what it’s worth), but the learning curve with Honeycomb isn’t very steep. If you’re comfortable doing more on your computer than email and browsing the web — and have ever felt a little restrained using an iPad — then Honeycomb may feel like a breath of fresh air. Your home screen is no longer simply a grid of your favorite applications — it’s a dashboard populated with content, like your recent emails, favorite chat buddies, weather, to-do list, and more. Widgets aren’t anything new for Android, but they’ve always been cumbersome on mobile devices because screen real estate is so limited (I’ve found myself debating between keeping my Calendar widget or giving myself an extra row of apps on my phone’s home screen). On Honeycomb this is much less of an issue. Widgets are the sort of thing that prove their worth over time (as opposed to during a 20 minute demo), but my initial hunch is that people will love them. Honeycomb also features a new notification system that reminds me of Growl on Mac OS X. New updates slide into view in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, and you don’t have to squint to see them the way you do on Android phones. Again, very nice. This is a big advantage for Android now, but I’ll be surprised if the next version of iOS doesn’t include widgets and notifications. Then again, I was surprised that the last version didn’t include them, so who knows.
The first Honeycomb tablet is the Motorola Xoom, which will probably ship in the next month (the release date hasn’t been announced yet). From a hardware perspective the tablet feels fine. It’s not great — it feels a little too heavy for its size, and I wish the screen resolution were higher — but it’s good enough for people itching to get their hands on an Android tablet. And if you don’t like the Xoom there will be plenty of other choices in the coming months. Judging Honeycomb based on the Xoom would be like judging Android based on the G1 (okay, okay — maybe the HTC Hero). During the last Apple earnings call, Apple COO Tim Cook dismissed existing Android tablets as “ “. And rightly so — they took an OS that was designed with mobile phones in mind, scaled them up to larger screens, and told consumers they were good to go. The Galaxy Tab was supposedly selling anyway, until it was revealed that previously released figures were misleading and that actual sales were . Which shouldn’t surprise anyone who actually used one. : Apparently the Samsung exec who said sales were “quite small” was misquoted — he said “ “. I still don’t think it’s nearly as good as the iPad. But Honeycomb changes all that. It’s a solid competitor to iOS — better, even, in some ways. I won’t be at all surprised if we see Honeycomb explode on tablets the way Android has exploded on mobile handsets since the original Droid launched in November 2009. Yes, carriers and OEMs will undoubtedly add their own skins and bundled applications, but provided they don’t do anything too outrageous to the user experience, Honeycomb feels like a winner. : |
Hacker Takes The iPhone's Voice Control System And Kicks It Up 10 Notches (Video) | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | Long before Apple came along and released iOS 4 and its slide out multitasking/app switching, a lovely lad going by the name of had already hacked together an (arguably better) solution, which he dubbed ProSwitcher. Essentially a clone of webOS’ cards system, it enabled jailbroken iPhones to quickly switch between and close applications that were running in the background. ProSwitcher hasn’t been quite as useful since Apple pushed out their own solution — but chpwn is back, and this time he’s turning the table. Instead of Apple replacing something he built, replacing something built. His target? Voice Control.
Chpwn’s latest release, VoiceActivator, takes Apple’s built in Voice Control system and cranks it up to 11. Once you’ve jailbroken your phone and installed VoiceActivator, you can pop into the settings menu and throw in a voice action for just about anything your heart desires. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrVgvTgyUs8&w=640&h=390] Some examples of possible voice commands: It’s still not as slick as Android’s voice offering, as it seems you’re limited to one or two words and the parsed data can’t be passed into an application — that is, you wouldn’t be able to say “Navigate to pizza!” and have Google Maps automatically load up a search for nearby pizza spots, as you can on Android. Still, incredibly slick, and something to add to that list that Apple keeps finding ways to shorten: the list of reasons to jailbreak. [ |
Canon 600D (AKA T3i) In Korean Agency Listing Suggests Imminent Launch | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 2 |
We heard a while back that Canon might be doing a serious refresh of its lineup soon, and that the most likely place would be the CP+ photo show in Japan coming up in about a week. I’d say 2011 will likely be a shake-up year for Canon, but don’t expect them to roll everything out at once. A new compact DSLR is certainly due, though; the came out about a year back. Which is why seems timely. But while the agency listing it is Korea’s “Radio Research Agency,” that doesn’t imply something like wi-fi built in. The agency has listed items in the past, probably just as a certification that they don’t emit any harmful radiation. At any rate, we’ll keep you informed. |
BranchOut Grew 25x In January, Going From 10K To 250K Monthly Users (TCTV) | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | If you’re like me you’ve been seeing Facebook newsfeed notifications from something called more and more frequently lately. The status updates don’t lie: Branchout, a , has seen explosive growth in January growing from 10K to 250K monthly users, with a total usership now in the hundreds of thousands. We brought CEO into the TCTV studio to talk to him about why exactly the Facebook app was growing exponentially six months after launch, which he says happened because of the network effect after “super connectors” like and LinkedIn founder joined. Says Marini, Marini says that the app’s popularity is now expanding beyond Silicon Valley and into the Scandanavian countries as well as Italy, France and Germany. Marni is also excited at the currently under-explored potential of the Facebook platform for career utilities, as competitor LinkedIn has 45 million active users to Facebook’s 600 million active users. According to Marini, another reason the app has gone viral is that Branchout takes advantage of the inherent social structure of Facebook to make career networking on the platform both a utility and fun, incorporating elements like gamification, career quizzes and contests like in order to appeal to a younger crowd. After all those college kids posting drunken photos now will be looking for a job someday. As some of you have pointed out in the comments, BranchOut recently changed the text on its invite button from “Connect” to “Share” a move that could have contributed to the 2400% growth in January. While I was not aware of this during the interview, I asked founder Rick Marini about the validity of this claim and received the below comment in an email. |
Somebody Buy Me This Oak And Ostrich Leather Arcade Stick, Pronto | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 2 |
Every once in a while I get a hankering to burn through a few virtual quarters playing or on a NEO-GEO emulator, but the truth is I get little satisfaction out of it when I have to use a keyboard. Sure, I could use my 360 controller, but it just feels wrong. No, to truly get the feel of the classics, you need an arcade stick. And this is probably the fanciest arcade stick I’ve ever seen. The / joystick is hand-made in Paris, and is constructed from lacquered oak, with It’ll work with a PS3, 360, or PC,and should be available on the 18th. Price is unannounced, probably because the ostrich leather alone costs as much as a normal arcade stick. I’m not sure if you’ll even be able to order one, or if you have to go to the actual joint to place an order. I kind of hope that’s the case. If I can’t have one, I don’t want anyone else to have one — except Parisians, obviously. Actually it looks like you can pre-order at Hoon. so there’s that. [via and ] |
Portable Rainbow Machine Makes Cheery Vandalism Easy | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/19374769 w=620&h=349]
Making a powered arm to paint rainbows for you? Nice work if you can get it. The thing is actually deceptively complicated: it’s got to have wiring to start and stop the paint cans, and a gearing system to make sure the swing arm doesn’t go too fast or too slow. Very cool. We could use a few more of these in Seattle. I wonder what the rainbow capital of the world is? Probably somewhere weird. [via and ] |
TechCrunch Review: The Name’s iPhone. Verizon iPhone. | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | Yesterday, I made a 45-minute phone call from my office. This seemingly unremarkable statement is remarkable for two reasons. First, I was able to place a call from my office — something which was impossible for me to do a week prior. Second, I made it through the entire 45-minutes without the call being dropped once. Again, this was impossible a week prior. So what changed? Well, my iPhone changed. |
Reuters Knows A Guy Who Knows A Guy Who Totally Saw The iPad 2 Today | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | Have you heard the news? an iPad 2 at The Daily launch even in New York City this morning. Pinky swear. No pictures or anything like that. Just a description that matches every other rumored description that has been floating around for 6 months now. Only with even less detail. Totally happened. I’m poking fun at the Reuters report on the matter, of course. Do I know that it’s inaccurate? No, it could be completely accurate for all I know. But I mean, come on. |
Free In-Flight Facebook Comes To More Airlines | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | The is expanding to several other major airlines. Good news if you don’t mind a few Ford ads getting in the way of your pokes. Virgin America, United Airlines, American Airlines, Delta, AirTran, US Airways and Alaska Airlines are all now. No Southwest, which means I’ll be flying a lot more Southwest. I get on airplanes to get from Facebook. |
TechCrunch Review: The Name's iPhone. Verizon iPhone. | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | Yesterday, I made a 45-minute phone call from my office. This seemingly unremarkable statement is remarkable for two reasons. First, I was able to place a call from my office — something which was impossible for me to do a week prior. Second, I made it through the entire 45-minutes without the call being dropped once. Again, this was impossible a week prior. So what changed? Well, my iPhone changed. I’ve been an iPhone user since day one: June 29, 2007. Over the course of the past three and a half years, the coverage I’ve gotten from my service provider for the device, AT&T, has gone from bad to worse. AT&T would talk about how much money they were putting into upgrades for their system, and would continually promise that things would get better soon. But for whatever reason, in major cities like San Francisco and New York City, the situation has continued to deteriorate. It’s so bad, in fact, that in the TechCrunch office in the SoMa district of San Francisco it’s . Perhaps our office is a Faraday cage — one that only seems to affect AT&T — I’m not sure. But what I am sure of is that our office is hardly the only place in the city where the same is true. And even outside of the Bay Area, there’s a reason why there’s much excitement for the Verizon iPhone. And now it’s here. And yes, it works. Beautifully. I’ve had a chance to carry around a Verizon iPhone for the past week or so. It’s a bit odd to write a review about it now because, well, . This initial Verizon iPhone, of course, is just an iPhone 4. It’s the same phone that was released on AT&T’s network last summer. But it has been slightly reworked to make room for a CDMA chip that Verizon’s network requires, replacing the GSM chip that AT&T’s network requires. But holding it in your hand, most regular users would have no idea that there’s any difference. In fact, the only physical difference is that the single rivet at the top of the device near the headphone jack has been replaced by two matching rivets on either side of the top of the Verizon version of the device. While Apple won’t talk specifics, presumably, this is a change made to the antenna of the device, which is the metal band that wraps around the iPhone 4. As you’re probably aware, Apple had an antenna shortly after the iPhone 4’s launch this past summer. , the issue was real, but it wasn’t a really big issue. And the millions of iPhone 4s that Apple has sold so far are testament to that. This Verizon version of the iPhone 4 seems to have none of the same antenna issues. Try as I might, using the “death grip” and every other grip I can actually do, I can no longer reproduce the same attenuation problem that the previous iPhone 4 model had. I death grip the thing, and no bars drop. More importantly, calls don’t drop and data doesn’t stop. Again, Apple won’t comment, but problem, apparently, solved. Moving on. (Quickly, as an aside, I have noticed that the back of the Verizon version of the iPhone 4 is missing some of the FCC, etc symbols usually found at the bottom of the device — no clue why those are gone, but it’s another small change in the design. It makes the back look even cleaner!) The single most important thing that would-be AT&T switchers and some new iPhone customers will want to know is: how does it compare to the AT&T version in terms of signal, dropped calls, data, etc. The answer, at least in my neck of the woods (again, San Francisco), is very, very good. It’s funny, if you spend time in various parts of this city, you’ll know where you can and cannot use an iPhone. Huge swaths of SoMa, for example, are awful. Some parts of the Mission are even worse. Then there are random streets throughout the entire city where AT&T service seemingly disappears into a black hole. I’ve more or less trained myself to know not to even try to use the iPhone in these parts of the city. So it was very, very odd to test out the Verizon iPhone in many of those areas. But guess what? Nearly across the board, the Verizon version of the iPhone worked — as both a phone and a mini data-sucking machine. I can’t tell you how wonderful it has been to walk through the city while being able to maintain a phone call, or Internet connection. Naturally, there are still a few places I was unable get service, but they’re typically places where it’s understandable — like underground. Many skeptics will be quick to point out that things may change when Verizon’s network gets swamped with iPhones in the same way that AT&T’s was. The difference is that Verizon’s network is already swamped with data-sucking Android devices. Millions of them. Maybe I’m being naive, but I really don’t expect there to be a problem with Verizon’s network in the same way that there was with AT&T’s. And neither does Verizon. We’ll see, I guess. But the early results are very promising. AT&T, in their PR scramble to attempt to hold on to some of their disgruntled users, has been playing up two key things that are advantages of their network over Verizon’s. The first is the ability to make a call and surf the web at the same time. It’s true, you definitely cannot make a call and surf the web at the same time on the Verizon iPhone. To some people, this will matter. But I have really never seen this as a huge issue. If I’m talking on the phone with someone, I’m concentrating on talking with them, not surfing the web. But I realize that everyone is different. But apparently some 90+ million current Verizon subscribers don’t have too much of a problem with this either — as none of them have that capability. The second issue AT&T has been playing up is the speed of their network. It’s “the fastest 3G network” according to their ad campaigns. In my tests, when both phones have had signal, that is also true. There’s no question that AT&T’s network is faster than Verizon’s for data transfers — both up and down. I’ve tried this all over the city a number of times. AT&T is faster. But — and this is a very big — in order for AT&T to be faster, it needs to have a signal. And again, that’s simply not the case in large parts of the city. So speed or not, Verizon still wins this battle hands down in my book. I’ll take Verizon’s coverage over AT&T’s speed any day. As sort of an aside, the one other issue brought up when taking about CDMA versus GSM is that the CDMA version of the iPhone won’t be able to roam internationally. For many countries, particularly those in Europe, that is true. One can only hope that Verizon or Apple come up with some sort of way around this — perhaps partner with another carrier for a deal on a per-use MiFi card to carry around in another country. Or better, just make a CDMA/GSM version of the phone. For now, if you’re going to be doing a lot of traveling, you’re likely to be out of luck. The big new feature that was touted at the press conference unveiling the Verizon iPhone was the “Personal Hotspot” option. This allows you to turn your iPhone 4 into a WiFi hub that can accept up to five connections. of how this will work. And in the field, it’s just as easy as it initially seemed. I’ve used this feature a number of times over the past week. It’s brilliant. It could not be any easier to set up and manage. Once you enable it and connect, a blue bar will appear at the top of the phone’s screen letting you know that the hotspot feature is enabled. And it will tell you how many devices are currently connected. Unlike with phone calls, other data can also come in at the same time you’re using the phone as a hotspot. For example, Push Notifications still stream in when you’re connected. If you receive a call, the phone will ask you if you want to connect. If you do, it will sever your data connection, ending the hotspot capabilities. But when you hang up, you can push one button to resume. Yes, I realize other phones have had this hotspot capability for some time now. In fact, , it was pretty much the only thing I liked about the device. But the iPhone 4’s Personal Hotspot blows it away for one reason: battery life. The EVO’s battery lasted something ridiculously low, like 90 minutes, with the hotspot feature turned on. In my tests, the iPhone 4 can give you a solid 4 hours of hotspot/tethering time. That’s from a fully charged battery, all the way down to zero. I’ve run it down fully twice. Both times, just about four hours. Verizon plans to charge an extra $20 for the hotspot feature. That’s on top of the $30 you’ll pay for data for the iPhone 4 (which is , unlike AT&T’s capped plans). But if you’ve ever owned a wireless dongle, you’ll know that $20 is well worth it — the dongles usually cost you upwards of $60 a month for the same 2 GB of data usage. A few months ago, before the Verizon iPhone was announced, I wrote a post entitled: . The main idea behind the post was to wonder what the Verizon version of the device would be like when Verizon and Apple finally came to terms they could agree upon? As I said at the time, Verizon would undoubtedly love to load the device up with crapware in the same fashion that they’ve done with their , and all of the other devices they’ve sold over time. Apple, on the other hand, obviously would not want that. But would they have to make any concessions to get a deal done? The best part of the Verizon iPhone is that no, Apple did not have to make any concessions. The Verizon iPhone is not a “Verizon iPhone” — it’s an “iPhone on Verizon’s network”. There’s no Verizon branding anywhere on the device aside from the upper left of the screen which shows you the carrier next to the signal strength. There are no pre-loaded Verizon apps. There are no apps that work on the AT&T iPhones that won’t work on this model. Every app you’ve bought in the App Store will install and work on this Verizon version of the device. FaceTime is interoperable over the two devices. So is Game Center. Will Verizon have their own apps in the App Store that they’ll want you to buy? Undoubtedly. But this is very clearly Apple’s device. Not Verizon’s. If you’re an AT&T iPhone customer at the end of your contract who lives in an area with poor AT&T service, you need to get to an Apple or Verizon store next week to get this updated device. Seriously, mark down February 9 on your calendar so that you pre-order it. Then show up at a store on February 10 to pick it up. If you’re an AT&T iPhone customer still on contract who lives in an area with poor AT&T service, I would definitely getting this updated device. It may be a few hundred dollars out of pocket, but think of that compared to what you’ve paid to AT&T over the years. If you’re anything like me, it makes you want to scream. If you’re an AT&T iPhone customer still on contract who lives in an area with good AT&T service, then no, this probably isn’t the device for you. If you’re a non-iPhone user who is interested in checking it out but has been waiting for it to come to Verizon, this is absolutely for you. The caveat to all of this is that it’s well known that Apple releases a new version of the iPhone every summer. Expect this summer to be no different. So if you buy this iPhone 4 on Verizon right now, know that there’s a good chance that an iPhone 5 will be out in six months or less. One can only hope that Apple and Verizon would do the right thing and allow the early Verizon iPhone adopters to upgrade to the iPhone 5 for a heavily discounted (if not fully subsidized price). But it’s still very much up in the air. Hell, we don’t even know for sure that Verizon the iPhone 5 this summer. Perhaps it will be AT&T-only based on some sort of contractual agreement. But the latest rumors suggest that a CDMA/GSM hybrid iPhone 5 that works on both AT&T and Verizon may be the most likely bet. So again, it comes down to how badly you want an iPhone on Verizon right now — and the hope that Verizon and Apple will do the right thing for customers in a few months. For me, as someone who has spent three and a half years fed up with AT&T, the Verizon iPhone is absolutely, 100 percent worth it. I’ve already cancelled my AT&T contract ( ) and I cannot forsee a future where I ever go back. There’s long been a slogan that goes along with many Apple products — “it just works”. It’s also the best way to sum up this review. The iPhone 4 on Verizon: it just works. |
WITN: Is Egypt A Twitter Revolution? No. But Is That Even The Point? [TCTV] | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | After weeks of simmering tensions, finally the has erupted into violence. Even the media has been caught up in vicious battles. No, we’re not talking about Anderson Cooper being , but rather this week’s episode of Why Is This News in which our disagreement over social media’s role in prompting or assisting revolution descends into a full-on fight. Video below. And in case you’re wondering, yes, after the cameras stopped rolling, Sarah punched Paul in the face. Now he knows how Anderson Cooper feels. The difference is, Paul might have deserved it. |
Local Q&A Site Hipster In Acquisition Talks With Groupon | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 2 |
You guys aren’t going to believe this: We’re hearing that daily deals site has been aggressively trying to acquire local Q&A site for a number below $10 million, and that’s before Hipster has even formally launched! A of press coverage originating has turned the site with a funny name into a media darling. One source is telling us that Hipster has been making the rounds of Silicon Valley VC firms as well as boardrooms and was talking with Google about a possible talent acquisition ) before the talks turned into more of an investment prospect for Google Ventures than an acqui-hiring prospect for the mothership due to Hipster’s desire for a better return. According to our source, Hipster is currently raising a seed round in the valuation range of $6 – $8 million. The acquisition talks with Groupon have continued as Groupon has a pretty good chance of increasing its valuation within the next couple of years after an IPO, presenting itself as a more lucrative deal to the ramen-fed entrepreneurs. Why the interest in Hipster? Groupon, which has received much success as an ecommerce site, still hasn’t become the go-to local destination for consumers it aims to be. Our source says that the company is considering potential expansion into a Yelp-like recommendation service, which is why the Hipster acquisition might make sense. Hipster, like a , allows users to ask, route and answer questions about any location in a city from a small coffee shop to something city-wide. Groupon has not yet returned our request for comment and Hipster CEO gave us this statement,
. |
The Daily Show And Colbert Report Return To Hulu Via New Viacom Content Partnership | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | has just struck a with Viacom to return “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” to the content platform. The deal also includes other TV Shows from Viacom’s media networks, including Comedy Central, MTV, BET, VH1, Spike TV, and TV Land to the Hulu Plus subscription service. Viacom had previously the two Comedy Central shows from Hulu last March. Financial terms of the new agreement were not disclosed. From the release: This is a big deal for Hulu. Even when Hulu to distribute Colbert and The Daily Show back in June 2008, it was a major milestone for the then young video service. Viacom subsequently pulled the content, deciding that they needed Colbert and Jon Stewart more than they needed Hulu, especially since Vicacom wasn’t really monetizing the content on Hulu. But with and , Viacom sees the potential for pulling in revenue now that Hulu is pulling in hundreds of millions in revenue. Hulu’s subscriber count is expected to pass 1 million this year and Hulu Plus as a business will have a revenue run rate north of $200 million this year. And Hulu now has traffic which Viacom simply cannot ignore. Clearly, there must be some sort of revenue share but neither company is revealing the terms. Of course, Viacom has not brought CBS’ content to Hulu. Yet. Perhaps the media giant is testing the waters before bringing all of its television content to the platform But with Viacom putting its content back into Hulu, this shows that big media companies have confidence in the platform once again. And this is surely going to help Hulu’s For Hulu CEO Jason Kilar’s take on the new partnership, check out his post on |
Verizon Readies Contact Transfer App For iPhone | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | In anticipation for the iPhone launch day, has released their , only for , to the iTunes store. It transfers contacts from older VZ phones via Verizon’s Backup Assistant, a service that lets users backup their data to the cloud. The transfer service will authorize the cloud download via a code sent through SMS to a Verizon mobile number. Thanks ahead of time, Verizon, we all know how painful contact migration can be. [via ] |
Crysis Continues To Look Awesome In New Trailer (Update: Minimum Specs!) | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_qnnVHWnEk&fs=1&hl=en_US]
After watching the from this morning, we were discussing how the open-ended shooters of yore, like and the first halves of and , are pretty hard to come by these days. I’m not sure exactly how open is going to be, but brother, that doesn’t change the fact that it looks . This isn’t exactly timely criticism, but did feel the best parts of were its least-structured segments, where you had a large area to range around in and a few objectives to accomplish by whatever means necessary. Looks like will be a bit more scripted, but we’ll see. : I also just saw these posted. A whole other post didn’t really seem warranted, so I’m putting them up here: * OS: XP / Vista / Windows 7
* CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz, AMD Athlon 64 X2 2GHz or better
* GPU: nVidia 8800GT 512MB RAM, ATI 3850HD 512MB RAM or better
* Memory: 2 GB RAM
* Hard Drive: 9 GB
* Audio: DirectX 9.0c-compatible
* DVD ROM: 8x That’s not so bad. My current machine could almost run it! Note that these are the specs, not recommended. |
Vague Palm Video Appears To Tease A New Handset | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | What do you see? I know we’re all waiting on the new Palm tablets, but unless said tablets have buttons poking out a full half an inch, this seems more like a phone to me. But… an actual new phone from Palm? Can they.. can they still Its been so long! |
Yahoo Engineer Complains About Lack Of Innovation At Yahoo | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 20 | Right now Yahoo engineer is my hero. Frustrated with with lack of HTML5 support on the web, Johnstone — whose position is currently “Technical Yahoo!” on the team — has decided to take his employer to task, where else? In his Flickr stream. Earlier today Johnstone the above image, with the following barb. Right now Flickr video , but apparently only if it detects you have an iPad. And while the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and even IE9 are compatible with HTML5 (which does not require you to install a plugin to view video), people who want to watch Flickr videos without having to download Flash are out of luck. It’s enough to make a Technical Yahoo! go to ! And yes I’m pretty sure this outburst is out of pure passion for innovation on Johnstone’s part, as his loyalty to Yahoo (which owns Flickr) is clear — At least judging from what he did to |
Twitter Reinstates UberSocial And Twidroyd, UberMedia iPhone Apps Still Await Review | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 20 | Looks like Bill Gross’ has had its API access reinstated for at least two of its apps this Sunday afternoon, after of events led to them being shut down on Friday under the auspices of privacy, monetization and trademark violations. In the their return, Blackberry client UberTwitter will be changing its name to UberSocial and Android app twidroyd will be making no name changes — Both have complied with Twitter’s requests to remedy the offending violations. From Twitter : No word yet on whether the apps are actually functioning as it’s now up to UberMedia developers to provide updates, and users will have to download the new versions of the apps in order to see tweets. The iPhone apps UberCurrent and UberSocial (formerly UberTwitter) have not yet been sent to Twitter for review. http://twitter.com/#!/PerezHilton/status/39119668530786304 Twitter has given us the following statement: Bill Gross tells me via DM that the app updates should be available very soon, Stay tuned! Twidroyd’s ready! You can find it here UberSocial is also now available at
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DST About To Lead Huge Spotify Funding | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 2 | 20 | European streaming music startup is in the process of closing a very large financing, say multiple sources. , the venture firm that has backed Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, is said to be leading the deal, which values Spotify at around $1 billion. The size of the round will be $100 million or more, say our sources. The company has raised at least €82.3 million to date, including a relatively small round of financing from . This new round, though, is at a much higher valuation. The Founders Fund round was rumored to be at a similar valuation as the previous round, a 2009 financing that valued the company at around . Spotify has yet to launch in the U.S., although label deals are apparently, finally, coming together. Unlike previous DST deals, we’ve heard, this will not be a secondary-type financing where founders are taking money off the table. Is it a good investment? DST is known for writing big checks at big valuations, but they aren’t known for throwing stupid money around. They spend a great deal of time, they’ve said in the past, looking at a company’s growth metrics and spreadsheeting out where they might end up. Often their projections end up being much more aggressive than even the company’s. And apparently DST is usually right – Facebook, Zynga and Groupon all look like brilliant investments. No word on how much Apple’s new subscription pricing model, which like Spotify, has freaked out the company or investors. It isn’t a problem with the new funding, we’ve heard from our sources. |
Peter Relan On How CrowdStar Plans To Take On Zynga, EA And Playdom In 2011 | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 2 | 20 | With on Facebook, is now the second largest social gaming network behind Zynga (which has 275 million monthly active users). Second in line in the social gaming race isn’t bad for a startup that has received only $100,000 in funding and is one-tenth the size of Zynga in terms of employees. And with a new CEO at the helm and a fast growing set of popular games, CrowdStar is gearing up for a big 2011 to help the company grow in terms of users and games. We sat down with , of CrowdStar to talk about how he plans to move the company forward in 2011. Relan is also the chairman of the incubator (where CrowdStar first received funding), but stepped into the CEO role recently. CrowdStar, which is best known for producing Facebook social games Happy Aquarium, It Girl, Happy Pets and Mighty Pirates, is currently seeing 50 percent of its traffic coming from international markets. Relan says that expanding globally is going to be a huge market opportunity for CrowdStar in the coming year. One way CrowdStar is hoping to expand to additional markets is through mobile initiatives. But Relan says that it’s not as simple as just putting CrowdStar games in native apps for smartphones or feature phones. “Social gaming on Facebook is totally different than interacting with a game on a mobile phone,” says Relan. He says that with Facebook, users tend to stumble upon games either through advertising or notifications whereas with mobile versions, users actually have to take the action to download the game. This action, he explains, makes a mobile gaming app more of a destination and make the games more hit-driven as a whole. While Relan couldn’t get into too many specifics around product features, he did shed light on how the startup is planning to create this potential mobile gaming hits. First, CrowdStar’s mobile games will take into account location. Geolocation is a key component of mobile interactions, says Relan, and he believes that this technology can seamlessly fit into social gaming. CrowdStar’s mobile games also have a lot more focus on push notifications and will also monetize in a slightly different way from the Facebook economy. Relan says that monetization will still be around virtual goods, but the economic designs are different on mobile apps. Zynga’s expansion strategy has centralized , adding new games, mobile technologies and talent by buying a number of game studios, both in the U.S. and internationally. Relan says that over the next year he plans to build up CrowdStar’s social games on Facebook with a few select acquisitions and would consider raising capital for these purchases. But he’s hesitant to buy game studios that are specializing in mobile technologies, explaining that ‘mobile is still young’, and no one has really figured out what will succeed in mobile gaming yet. Another area where Relan will be focusing his efforts on is building talent. CrowdStar has around 75 employees, mostly made up of developers and artists, and plans to double its employees this year. Acquisitions can help in this department, but Relan says that the competition for talent is a challenge in Silicon Valley. One advantage CrowdStar has over companies like EA’s Playfish or even Zynga, is more of a startup culture. We have more access, and can offer much more equity to employees, he says. Similar to Zynga, Facebook is a central part of CrowdStar’s social gaming platform, as the network brings the social component to the actual games. Relan says that Facebook’s in the news feed, most notably eliminating game updates from the feed, definitely had a negative impact on traffic for CrowdStar’s games. But he sees the potential for the ecosystem to be recharged with the , which the gaming platform has adopted. One way in which Credits could help increase virtual goods transactions, says Relan, is if the virtual currency became an entire ecosystem, and brought a more seamless experience to social gaming. Relan envisions Credits becoming a frictionless platform, similar to the way iTunes is across the Apple platforms. There’s no doubt that for CrowdStar, 2011 will be a pivotal year. The gaming company has a long way to go to catch up to Zynga, which is to be raising $500 million in funding in advance of an IPO in 2012. And there are a number of other players with deep pockets, including EA’s Playfish, and Disney’s Playdom that are also competitive with the bootstrapped gaming company. A large round of funding would certainly help the company keep up in terms of acquisitions. But being the underdog can be a good thing for a startup. Clearly, Relan has a clear plan for how CrowdStar is going to increase traffic and games to its platform and it should be interesting to see if the new CEO can execute on this vision. And while social gaming is seeing massive traction currently, Relan sees a tremendous amount of future growth in arena. “Social gaming is sitting on perfect storm,” add Relan, “And the storm revolves around three basic areas-mobile, internaional and Facebook.” |
Video: Movilway Mobile Point Of Sale Terminal | Jay Donovan | 2,011 | 2 | 20 | It looks like a mobile phone inside of a calculator (and that may be just about what it actually is). Regardless, , a payments platform serving the underbanked mostly in South and Central America, are further developing their self contained cellular POS system. It works mano-a-mano with their pre-paid system for money transfer in order to facilitate payments sans bank account or credit card. Think of it as being like a combination of paypal and western union, in that you go to physical merchant locations to deposit cash into the system, but then can carry that credit indefinitely inside the system and debit it anytime you want at select Movilway merchants. Their goal is to further deploy and make non-cash payments possible in developing markets where having a bank account or credit card may not be an option due to lack of infrastructure. Video below.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB21lkNsGxE&w=480&h=390] |
Come to Office Hours with TechCrunch Europe @TechHub | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 2 | 20 | Attention European startups based in or passing through London. I will be hosting regular “Office Hours” from now on so I can meet you and hear about your company. I’m initially trying an experiment by publishing my calendar availability on Tungle here . My “Office Hours” will be in 15/20-minute sessions (one at a time only please), at , Ground Floor, 76-80 City Rd, London EC1Y 2BJ, UK ( ) (it’s a co-working /hot-desking and desk space place for startups I co-founded, but it’s convenient as I generally work out of there when I’m in London). The Tungle availability looks like 15 minutes, but in practice I only have 15 or maybe 20 minutes for an initial meeting. Right now I have 12 slots a week. And BTW, attending a meeting is a guarantee of coverage on TechCrunch, sorry ;-) If Tungle doesn’t work well I’ll try , but use Tungle for now as it syncs with my Google Calendar. Tungle also doesn’t seem to realise I might be away for a day somewhere, but we’ll see how it goes. The slots are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please also tell me a little about your company in the Tungle invitation so I can at least get a preview of your product. I am mainly interested in meeting startups in consumer Internet, technology, ecommerce, B2B, mobile, social, digital media, or VCs/angels. Thanks everyone, see you there. P.S. Come to too. I now have over 100 requests for meetings. I’m not ging to be able to do everything so some may be disappointed, at least initially, in the first ‘wave’. Apologies in advance. I’ll try to do as many as I am able, given the constraints of other work. Thanks. |
Born This Way | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 2 | 20 | Last night at the dinner table we wrestled with the next generation in the form of our 17 year old. It all began when she asked to borrow my iPad for “a second.” We had been discussing Lady Gaga’s new single, which Naomi insisted was a direct cop of a Madonna 80’s hit, Express Yourself. OK, there might be some similarity — like the whole verse, 75% of the chorus, and the fact that Lady Gaga is in fact Madonna. But I maintain that Lady Gaga is the first and only artist to appear since the Beatles were thrown off the rooftop in London with sufficient gravitas to allude endlessly to in articles about technology. So I did the adult thing to do in this parenting opportunity. I distracted my daughter and grabbed my iPad back. Things got worse fast. Background: everybody in our house has an iPad of their own. Since the kids got their iPads I have never seen them be used. All questions are now adjudicated by “borrowing” the closest iPad which is invariably mine. Google is always used, which is why Android will never run out of subsidy money. I also believe that my daughter’s friends have infiltrated Wikipedia and rewritten all the answers to support pointless arguments they gin up at the dinner table. Within seconds Naomi was back with her own iPad. I had taken the moments she was away to download Born This Way and two new iTunes special releases from the remixed Beatles Love album, Girl and Fool on the Hill. My desperate logic was that I could use the Love remixes, which took elements of original session recordings to refashion new versions of songs, to illustrate how all pop songs are based on the same three cords, or in the case of Born This Way and Express Yourself one chord or two tops. But my daughter was way ahead of me (you think?). Dad, she asked using the formal Dad instead of the silent sneer, Dad, is this how I play this song on the stereo? She was pointing to the little icon to the right of the volume control in iTunes, the one that only appears when you are in Landscape mode as she quickly told her little sister. Suddenly I realized she was about to take my Airplay home theater control away. Yes, each of the four iPads now could push their selection up to the big speakers. Express Yourself now boomed throughout the house. You see, this iPad virus is self-replicating. The horror of it is that my kids are using it to actually learn more about the technology than I can keep up with. Now Ella was displaying her photos on the Sony while Naomi was DJing her music. The two of them were singing along with some ex-Disney rehab star and my wife was hunting down a Simon and Garfunkel live concert I’d given her a few years ago in lieu of actually writing out a Valentine’s day card. I pathetically played a track from the last Little Feat record, selected because it was six minutes plus long and supported one of my interminable war stories about having been at the session for a David Sanborn overdub. This actually worked, because Naomi could only take three minutes of it and retreated to her lab for more hacking. I take solace from the knowledge that she was Born This Way. Now it’s Sunday morning and I’m ten minutes past my deadline. The house is quiet as I scan the Times on the iPad. Techmeme is sprinkled with the usual mix of Apple and social stories. Twitter is stomping on its developer community and all is right with the world. The Fool on the Hill sees the sun going down and the eyes in his head see the world spinning ’round. |
Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why? | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 2 | 20 | The Q&A land rush is on. , of course, has been hyped to the moon, and not without reason. Fortune magazine recently five more Q&A sites, and three new ones just launched: , where your friends answer your questions via SMS; , Q&A on Twitter; and , which is like Twitter for yes/no questions. Is this a bubble full of copycats doomed to wither into Yahoo Answers Redux? – but I don’t think so. I think there’s something important going on here, and it’s more than just questions and answers. I think these are the first skirmishes in the reputation wars. The identity wars are already over. Facebook won, Twitter snagged the silver medal, and . Log In With Facebook and their associated Open Graph have succeeded so thoroughly that Facebook increasingly defines users’ online identities across a whole panoply of sites. But who will define and codify our online reputations? That’s a question whose answer will matter – a lot. Right now we only have ad-hoc measures to determine online reputations: LinkedIn’s recommendations, Twitter users’ following:followers ratio, third-party influence measurements a la , and raw friend/follower/connection counts. That last is the crudest and least useful, which is why Facebook itself isn’t really built for reputation measurement. Quora, however, is a serious contender, if they get their right. But there’s another massively successful Q&A site out there, one whose reputation measurement already has significant effects: , a problem-solving-for-programmers site cofounded by of . While Quora gets all the hype, StackOverflow quietly racks up sixteen million unique visitors a month. It’s by far the most professionally useful site on the Internet. Like many if not most developers, I use it every single workday. One of my complaints about Google is that it should, but doesn’t, catapult StackOverflow into its top five search results for almost every software topic. I like Quora a lot, but if I had to choose between the two, it’d be no choice at all. Quora is interesting; StackOverflow is . Lately, though, Joel, his partner , and the StackOverflow community have spun off dozens of other Q&A sites under the “StackExchange” umbrella, in an attempt to beat Quora and the like at their own game. And are they ever screwing up. Their is to spin off new sites built around themes suggested and approved by their existing community. So what do you get as spinoffs from a coder community? A bunch of StackOverflow subsets for super users, sysadmins, etc., and a hodgepodge of focused on photography, mathematics, Apple, video games, board games, role-playing games, and science fiction. Interesting? Sure. Important? Hell, no. StackOverflow’s killer value is that it’s where people go to solve the problems they’re having at work. That’s a feature that almost all of its spinoff sites completely lack. Having a high StackOverflow reputation is a definite plus, in the software world. I’ve seen it featured on resumes, and it influences hiring decisions. Coders are canaries in the coal mine; in the years to come, members of other fields too will increasingly value their online reputations. But who beyond a vanishingly small minority will care about your reputation on “Atheism”, “Board and Card Games,” or “English Language and Usage,” to pick three new StackExchange sites? Joel and co. should do more than pander to the enthusiasms of their existing community by letting them vet new sites. That leaves them stranded on a social peninsula only tenuously connected to the rest of the world. Before Quora eats their lunch, they should also try to build Q&A communities – and reputations – focused on other professions: law, sales, etc. (And while they’re at it, they ought to clean up their very Web 1.0 UX, and let people log in with Twitter ( Correction – they support Facebook logins already. Mea culpa), to make StackExchange reputations easily exportable to other platforms.) It won’t be easy to seed them and spin them up to critical mass, but it’ll be more than worth the pain, and miles better than what they’ve got now. StackExchange could be a real contender, but first they need to change their strategy. Full disclosure: Setlr was incubated by my sometime clients . |
The Next Mass Consumer Social Wave: Political Expression | Semil Shah | 2,011 | 2 | 20 | People always say things change fast in Silicon Valley. Here, and in other entrepreneurial communities around our country, ideas collide, companies form, money is injected, talent is allocated, and the pace of innovation churns. Entrepreneurship is so accessible, the best talent flock here to found companies like Google. Today, it’s tougher for those foreign entrepreneurs to get here in the first place, which has given rise to the movement, a specific policy within . These are necessary moves our country needs to make to retain the international talent we train and to cultivate more ecosystems to build the next Google. While we try to slowly fix our domestic policies, the world is less patient. Mobile social technologies have nudged citizens into the streets in of Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Algeria, Bahrain, and now Libya. There’s no denying one huge influence in these movements: social networks. Social networks did not cause these revolts, but they greased the wheels. In Egypt, a acted as the stone while it’s citizens banded together as a flint. The result was a spark. And, that spark was fanned by Twitter, a drum of kerosene so inflammable that to enable Egyptian citizens to communicate outside national borders by creating mobile networks where phone calls could translate into tweets. All of this activity got me thinking about what will be the next phase in the social networking revolution, what will reach mass consumer scale, be global, and generate real social and financial impact. There’s perhaps no greater market to disrupt. The fast-moving nature of politics today, whether in “mature” markets such as America or “new markets” such as in Egypt, have paved the way for individuals to express themselves and their interests in a political context. Governments and elected officials may ultimately have no choice but to monitor and cater to these activities. This could be the start of the next mass consumer trend, political expression and organization via social networks directly to elected government officials. Where Facebook connects friends around brands and causes, and where tweets amplify information in real-time, what happens after elections, or after governments are toppled? If citizens inherently want to express their preferences within a democratic republic, how will those interests be best organized, prioritized, and executed? And, who will be held accountable? These tools are currently effective at rallying citizens around an election or protest. But, what about the act of governing? The reality is that citizens often lose interest, and keeping citizen engagement high after an election (or regime change) into the nitty-gritty of actual lawmaking is not easy. Could social networking tools be built to motivate and engage citizens to keep their interests burning bright during the act of governing? One company attacking this problem is based in Silicon Valley: . I don’t know much about them (stealth), other than last year. It’s clear the team’s background is , the are some of the most experienced, and it’s timing could be great. On , co-founder writes: “We’re currently building a product that will fundamentally alter civic participation, and the balance of power in our democracy. $8B is being spent on political influence, much of it on television, it’s massively inefficient and this market will definitely change in the next 10 years…our tools allow voting citizens, votizens, to be recognized and heard by elected officials without resorting to shouting, or extremes.” The team is building a solution for the U.S. market, but that also signals opportunities for entrepreneurs in other lands to pick up on the trend and design systems for their own countries. My belief is that once regimes change or loosen their grip, citizens must continue to push, to take up the equally hard work of self-expression and government, and that this activity is best organized online. Relatively speaking, we have things pretty good in the U.S., so good in fact that (~50%+ only in Presidential races), and when we do, we sort candidates through primaries that are held during inconvenient hours and cater to party extremes. The process produces a showdown where candidates are nudged toward the center, in exchange for modifying campaign promises. And, lots of individual and corporate money trades hands. Politicians use Facebook and Twitter to rally voters to the booths, but what happens after the election? We all know the reality. Elected officials have to calculate their re-election prospects, looking over their shoulders every two, four, or six years, and end up having little choice but to earmark originally well-intentioned bills in order to make sure they bring home some bacon. This is the pork-filled sausage-making of American politics. It’s easy for us to lay blame on them, but it may also be that we are outsourcing too many of our core interests to public officials who carry very different incentives for actually making sure our interests are met. We may hope our interests are taken into consideration, but hope only goes so far. Critics rightly ask for accountability, but changing horses every furlong may sacrifice the short-term for the future. Most citizens in the Middle East do not have these luxuries we take for granted. For them, nations like GMail, Facebook, and Twitter provide that place, a common platform which helps them tap, refine, and express an assortment of pent-up desires, and as we have seen, generate tremendous kinetic energy most levees cannot withstand. I know Votizen is still building product for the U.S. political market, but I would wager if it was ready today and tuned globally, millions would register, interact, and make their voice heard. It may be that entrepreneurs elsewhere in the world are busy working away to provide a solution, either for the world or their country. If you know of tech startups attacking this problem using a social layer, . Here in America, entrepreneurs are trying to use various technologies to improve fundraising, advertising, election security, fraud, voter turnout, and post-mortem analysis. Any online social activity which can educate, connect, motivate, and encourage voters to even turn up on election days is a huge victory. Beyond that, the amount of money that currently goes into campaigns, especially the American presidential races, is an exciting and lucrative industry to disrupt, all by anchoring a product within the notion that people are growing more and more comfortable sharing their views. I don’t mean to suggest this will happen smoothly or quickly. Social layers on top of political interests may tease out voter preferences. Some voters may be willing to give up a bit of eminent domain in exchange for the chance at high-speed rail. Some may be more willing to pay taxes dutifully if they were assured the size of government programs would be cut down. A social network geared toward these impulses could help elected officials figure out exactly “who” wants “what” and how badly. Numbers and identity matter here. Elected governments should have an interest in knowing exactly what its electorate wants. The more they deliver, the greater likelihood they’ll stay in power. The other side of the bargain is that citizens are going to have to accept the reality that not all of their personal interests will be met. That is the risk citizens take with this kind of network change, but without taking a risk, voters may never get the change they want. One can say some of this tension has been embodied within the Startup Visa controversy. It took a committed, of well-known entrepreneurs and investors years and hard work to wedge key visa provisions into a forthcoming law. wonder if it will be . Who knows? A social channel on top of this, beyond fan pages and 140 characters, could harness citizen momentum after the euphoria of elections and carry it into the realities of lawmaking, and more importantly, to spread the bulk of this hard work across the backs of more than just a few committed citizens. Personally, I am grateful for those who have fought for these reforms, and while there are always criticisms to new laws, I find it most interesting to see how entrepreneurs are responding. I am rooting for the entrepreneurs who want to bring online social tools to politics, both here and abroad. We need politics-specific social networks to help increase engagement around local, state, and national elections, but also during the legislative process, to keep the heat on politicians. At the same time, citizens have to work to apply the heat, or else they will get the governments they deserve. My hope is that entrepreneurs ride this awesome, evolving wave of social networking into its next phase. It is a massive wave, and as the global events of the past month have demonstrated, it is not yet anywhere near shore. |
Video: Jurassic Park Debut Trailer | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 2 | 18 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uWRwAgnld0&w=640&h=390]
Jurassic Park is getting a reboot. The game is set to come out in April and the official debut trailer just hit the game sites. Too bad there was never a quality Jurassic Park game and this video makes it seem that tradition will continue. |
DIY Sous Vide Cooker | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 18 | So you want to make fancy food like all them chefs in them fancy Franch restaurants up in the city there? Do you, fancy boy? Well then you’d best get out into the garridge and start building because me and muther aren’t buying you any Sux Vid cooker for $450 so’s you can cook eggs like some fancy Franch cook. When I was in the army we din’t have food processors, just a jackknife and a pail and you cooked a thousand potatoes in half an hour or the other guys’d come in an beat you in the head. So you go make yourself a Sux Vid cooker if you want but I ain’t eatin’ any blanched beans, let me tell it to you that way. |
Facebook Valued At $67.5 Billion In SecondMarket's 10th Auction | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 2 | 18 | we checked in with in late January, Facebook shares had declined from the auction’s at a share (a $70 billion + valuation) to a share which means a $65.5 billion valuation going by its 2.5 billion shares outstanding. While at the time we had speculated about a peak and signs of a decline, shares are up 2.85% this week in SecondMarket’s 10th Facebook auction, at $27.00 a share and a $67.5 billion valuation. What’s changed (again)? Continued market exuberance as Facebook platform developer Zynga’s slowly rises and of a Kleiner Perkins investment at $52 billion. Guess we’ll have to get the interns to update our Full SecondMarket mail below. Subject: Privileged and Confidential – Participate in SecondMarket’s 10th Facebook Auction To Facebook market participants: Last week’s SecondMarket auction cleared at a per share price of $27.00. Attached is the detailed auction results report. Like last week, the minimum sale and minimum purchase will be 10,000 shares. If you are bidding for fewer than 100,000 shares, you are required to open a brokerage account with SecondMarket. Please email XXXX@SecondMarket.com to receive a Brokerage Account Opening Form and return the completed form by Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 5:00 PM EST. Please email your completed Seller or Buyer Information Forms to fb@SecondMarket.com by Wednesday, February 23 at noon EST. To verify receipt of your order, you must receive a confirmation email from fb@SecondMarket.com. If you do not receive a confirmation email, your sell order has not been received by SecondMarket and may be excluded from the auction. Next Week’s Auction Timeline: • Friday, February 18 – SecondMarket will begin accepting Seller Information Forms, Buyer Information Forms and Brokerage Account Opening Forms • Tuesday, February 22 at 5:00 PM EST – Brokerage Account Opening Form due, if bidding for fewer than 100,000 shares • Wednesday, February 23 at 12:00 PM EST – Seller and Buyer Information Forms due • Wednesday, February 23 at 5:00 PM EST – Participants informed of auction results • Wednesday, February 23 at 8:00 PM EST – Transaction documentation distributed to buyers and sellers • Thursday, February 24 at 5:00 PM EST – Wire of 100% of gross purchase price to escrow account due, if allocated fewer than 100,000 shares • Friday, February 25 at 4:00 PM EST – Completed transaction documentation due from buyers and sellers • Friday, February 25 at 7:00 PM EST – Notice sent to Facebook, Inc. By reading this email, the recipient acknowledges and agrees that all of the information contained herein is confidential and that the recipient will keep this information confidential. The recipient further agrees that it will not copy, reproduce, or distribute this email in whole or in part. Please contact us at fb@SecondMarket.com or XXXXXXXX if you have any questions. Please note that the information in this email does not constitute an offer to sell to, nor a solicitation of an offer to buy from, nor shall any securities be offered or sold to, any person in any jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. Regards, Terrence |
null | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 2 | 2 | null |
Does Your PC Meet Crysis 2's System Requirements? | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 2 | 18 | Crysis was (and still is) notorious for needing a pretty high-spec system to run well, but Crytek has said time and time again that the engine powering , CryEngine 3, is far more robust, and therefore won’t require the same kind of horsepower to run well. You know where this is going. VR-Zone to have the game’s recommended system requirements, and they are as Crytek claimed: not too crazy. My own self-made PC (Radeon 5970, which has greatly disappointed me vis-à-vis CrossFire performance but whatever, i7 860 OC’d to 4.0GHz, 8GB memory, all running at 1920×1200) would appear to meet the “highly recommended” specs. I won’t be playing in 3D, but what are you going to do? |
The Samwer Brothers make a killing after selling their Facebook stake from 2008 | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 2 | 18 | The three Samwer brothers behind the highly successful in Germany have sold their shares in Facebook, according to a report in the . Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer (who also own the German language tech news site) sold their shares because “we are at the early stages” and their requirement for capital for their existing investments has “roughly tripled”, according to Oliver Samwer. There appear to be no figures for how much their stake was worth but we can confidently say they have made their money back. In 2008 the Samwers as part of Facebook’s $15 billion valuation round with Microsoft. But given that Facebook is now being valued at $50 billion, they will have made roughly three times as much back. The Samwer brothers founded Alando (sold to eBay in 1999 for $54 million) and Jamba (sold to Verisign in 2004 for $273 million, now part of News Corp.). In 2006 they founded the European Founders Fund to invest in Internet businesses in the U.S. and Europe, but it’s principlally known in Germany as a clone factory which pumps out clones of US startups in the 100 million person German speaking market and sells them back to US companies when they want a European footprint. In the US they have investments in LinkedIn, MFG, HomeAway and ReachLocal. The Samwers were investors in German Facebook clone Studivz, which sold in 2007 €100 million and last year they sold a Groupon clone, MyCityDeal, to Groupon itself for something in the region of €100 million. Whether you like their strategy or not – which appeals less to purist fans of innovation – they are, to put it simply, spectacularly successful at execution. |
Socialcam: A Look At Justin.tv's Upcoming 'Instagram for Video' | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 2 | 18 | Between the likes of picplz and Instagram, image-sharing sites are making plenty of headlines these days. And there’s one obvious offshoot that seems ripe for similar services: video. Granted, Path for video, but it’s semi-private and there could still be an opportunity for a more public service to tap into this trend.That’s where Justin.tv’s upcoming app Socialcam comes in. The app, which remains in a very limited beta, is looking to to offer a straightforward way for people to capture and share their videos with friends — and yes, it’s doing that in a way that is very similar to Instagram and picplz, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I sat down with Justin.tv founder Justin Kan and VP of marketing Matthew DiPietro to get a tour of the app, and have also gotten the chance to play around with the Android version myself. Kan says that it’s frustratingly difficult to share video taken on your phone with friends: email attachments are a pain because of size issues, and MMS leads to heavily degraded video quality. YouTube makes it easy to upload directly from your phone, but the focus there doesn’t seem to be on sharing your clips with a network of friends. And posting a video to Facebook is way harder than it should be, which is why the company started working on Socialcam last fall. A significant number of Justin.tv videos are watched as archived footage (as opposed to live streams), but this is the first time the company will be launching a product that’s dedicated exclusively to recorded footage. The app, which will be available for both Android and iPhone, is pretty simple: after firing it up you’re asked to log-in via Facebook Connect, which is currently the only login option. The app presents you with a list of your Facebook friends who are already on Socialcam and asks if you’d like to ‘Follow’ them (Socialcam uses a one-way follower model like Twitter). After that, you’ll spend most of your time looking at the stream of Socialcam videos posted by your friends. Each video is represented by four frame grabs — tapping on one will cause the video player to pop open the clip will start playing immediately. You can leave comments and ‘Like’ each video, and you can also tag your friends in clips. If you tag a friend who isn’t on Socialcam, it will still show up on their Facebook wall (and the video is playable directly from there — you don’t have to click a link). There are a few other nice touches. I’ve been using the Android app, and aside from some quirks you’d expect from a beta, it’s clear that a lot of attention is being given to the UI, with smooth transitions and so on. One of my favorite features: Socialcam uses face identification when it generates the preview thumbnails for each video, so you wind up seeing photos of your friends instead of a shot of someone’s shoe or the wall. The application also uses “streaming upload” — as soon as you start shooting a video, it will start uploading to Justin.tv’s servers, which reduces how long you’ll have to wait before you can publish it. Kan and DiPietro acknowledge that they aren’t the only ones looking to launch an ‘Instagram/picplz/etc’ for video — given the popularity of these services, it’s an obvious idea. There will be plenty of competition, but Socialcam has a chance at being first to market, with launch planned for just before SXSW. Of course, there’s still the question of whether users will be as quick to latch onto a video-oriented sharing service — people tend to get more upset when you post a video of them without their permission, and it’s obviously quicker to take a snapshot. Oh, and the first 20 people to sign up at will be added to the beta. Be quick!
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Alpina Introduces the Startimer Pilot | John Biggs | 2,011 | 2 | 18 | I’ve been following for years now and I’ve always been fascinated if not a little off-put by their styling. Finally, howeover, we have a chrono that’s actually worth a second look. This is the Startimer Pilot running an in-house automatic movement, the AL-860. It will be on sale this year alongside the AL-950, the Startimer Pilot Regulator that they’re most famous for.
I love the aesthetic here. It’s clean, clear, and to-the-point. After wearing a black-on-black Alpina for a while, I’m glad they’ve gone a bit more traditional. No pricing, but expect the chrono to hit the $5,000 mark. |
Google, Best Buy & Others Form Alliance To Champion AllVid Adapter | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 2 | 18 | The FCC something called AllVid last year, a device that would help deliver “multichannel video programming and Internet content” to whatever it’s connected to. The cable companies freaked out, calling AllVid a one-way ticket to “ignor[ing] copyright, patent, trademark, contract privity, licensing, and other legal rights and limitations that have been thoroughly documented.” Since real life works by pro-wrestling rules, the proponents of AllVid, seven companies ranging from Best Buy to Sony to Tivo, have taken offense to these allegations, and have subsequently , or stable, to fight back against these misrepresentations and half-truths. Cable companies versus the AllVid Tech Company Alliance will headline WrestleMania this year. The companies in the AllVid Tech Company Alliance are Best Buy, Google, Mitsubishi Digital Electronics, Nagravision, SageTV, Sony Electronics and TiVo. They recently sent [PDF] to the FCC imploring it to ignore the cable companies’ many complaints:
It is essential for the Commission to break down the wall separating the home network from [pay TV] networks—not just poke a few holes in it, or rely on progress on the peripheries. The seeds for real competition must emerge in chips, technologies, and interfaces that can be organic to tens of millions of products, services, and consumer uses—not just those presently conceived, but those that innovative minds, and users who can select and adapt their own devices, can conceive.
On one hand we have the entrenched interests of the cable companies, looking to keep your and yours paying X-Amount per month for the privilege of having access to a few random episodes of The King of Queens on demand. On the other hand you’ve got “innovative” companies, and Best Buy, looking to kick-start the Internet-delivered television revolution. With the help of the FCC, of course. Cynics might say that they can’t into people’s homes without the help of the government, but larger forces are at work here. It just seems that a monumental amount of time and energy is being spent on making it so that we can all watch Dancing With The Stars 24 hours a day. |
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