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GetComparisons: A Tale Of The Tape For Anything | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | Nexus S or iPhone? Kindle Fire or iPad? Samsung TV or LG TV? When people try to make such decisions, they usually look for as much data as possible so they can compare choices. For many gadgets, that’s relatively easy because you can compare similar specs such as CPU speed, RAM, screen size, etc. But what about for everything else? That’s what the startup is going after. They aim to be the “Epinions for comparisons,” founder says. The service is all about gathering user-written product reviews and formatting them in such a way that it’s easy to compare things. While a service like does a great job of this for gadgets, Arabolu found a pain point in trying to figure out if he should use for blogging. So that’s the service he set out to build. “We want to own the mindshare for comparisons on the web,” Arabolu says. “But we don’t want it to be Britney Spears versus Lady Gaga — we want to focus on products and services that people spend time and money on,” he continues, noting that they started with web products but are now broadening their scope. It’s all about what comparisons the users are interested in seeing, he notes. Anyone can request a review on the site. And again, it’s the users who then populate the reviews. “We provide a template for the reviews,” Arabolu explains. “It’s somewhere in the middle of Quora and Yahoo Answers,” he continues, noting that they wanted to make it as simple as possible, but also make it robust enough to provide good information. Reviews feature individual attributes that go from one to five stars ( , as I explain here). But there’s also plenty of room for users to explain their ratings. In terms of the fear that people may game such a system, Arabolu says their commitment to transparency in the reviews will mitigate that. In fact, the plan is to let official representatives for companies fill out specs and explain features of products as long as they’re properly identified as employees of the brand. Arabolu says that he started building GetComparisons a year ago with two contractors. In March of this year, he hired his first full-time employee, and now they are a team of five. The Atlanta-based startup came my way after I did a talk a couple months ago and agreed to sit down with one company in the audience as voted on by the community. They beat out 52 other entries, so clearly have some people pulling for them. GetComparisons just got done with a new redesign this week. One thing you won’t find anywhere on the site: ads. “We spent too much time on our UI,” Arabolu says. |
Why No Kindle Touch Or Fire For EU, UK? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | Jeff Bezos that these days, “if you are just building a device you are unlikely to succeed.” He certainly seems to be backing that statement up, with the launch of the producing more optimism than the last ten non- tablet launches combined. It seems that people do indeed like the idea of a purpose-built device that does a few things well, walled garden or not. But Bezos glossed over the other side of the “make your own ecosystem” coin: providing and administrating that ecosystem not only requires immense resources, but can occasionally cause major roadblocks. In this case it appears that , for reasons and duration not specified. It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that they’re , would it? Amazon hasn’t replied to my queries, and given that they haven’t publicly commented on this so far, I don’t expect much of an answer even if they do. In the meantime, let’s look at the possibilities as to why this roll-out is limited, in order of escalating likelihood. You can’t release a wireless product unless it’s been cleared by the FCC here in the US, and there are similar agencies throughout the world that conduct their own, slightly different testing. However, submitting devices to these authorities is a matter of course and I doubt Amazon would simply fail to do so. And the devices are too similar to others out there to cause any serious delay in their approval. The way works, in a nutshell, is it offloads some rendering and querying to Amazon servers, which in a way request a page on your behalf and then stream it to you in an optimized format. This man-in-the-middle technique isn’t new in principle, but having it as the default mode of communication for a major device is. It’s possible that the system has run afoul of regulations prohibiting private data from being routed through a third party like this. Naturally Amazon would be using localized datacenters, but the ownership of the data may fall into a grey area not yet fully approved by the EU and UK ( ). This is an interesting idea, but I don’t think the law is that protective, nor that similar between the UK and EU, on this topic at least. Furthermore, this does nothing to explain why the Touch isn’t available, either. It uses the same “experimental” browser as the rest of the e-ink devices. This is almost certainly it. Despite spending hundreds of millions on Euro content providers like , they just don’t have the libraries and rights in order. Bezos took his own advice about launching just a device, since without a superior selection of content, the Amazon Fire is just a second-rate tablet with an Amazon veneer. They’ve spent years developing relationships and clout here in the US, and Bezos can be confident that they’re providing not just a good tablet experience, but a huge selection of content along with it. Clearly he’s not confident they can do the same in the EU. Unfortunately, this doesn’t explain why the Kindle Touch is unavailable. My only thought is that the new touch interface hasn’t been localized to the various other regions yet, but that seems like a rookie mistake, not something Amazon would be likely to overlook. I feel fairly sure that the Fire is unavailable because Amazon hasn’t yet assembled a quorum of content partners, and a piecemeal release in some countries but not others would go contrary to their regional release strategy. But why a device that only differs from the competition in brand and interface (the Kindle Touch is nearly identical to the Nook Touch and Kobo Touch) would fail to be released is still a mystery. I can think of no credible reason why Amazon would want to only launch in the US, so I believe there must be some insoluble problem, or several, at the heart of it. Or maybe I’m just missing something really obvious. If you have any compelling conspiracy theories or know something I don’t about any dispute or law that might prohibit these devices from being sold, please share. Until Amazon comments on this, it’s all speculation. : several commenters suggest it’s a supply chain issue. Time will certainly tell, though personally I’m still backing the the content thing. Reports said Amazon had orders in for four million units to be sold just in 2011. I’d say that’s a lot to book for just the US, but I could be wrong. And I don’t see the suppliers failing to fill the order; the device isn’t made of uncommon components. |
Spotify Hires Another Former Googler To Head Asian Expansion | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | Setting its sights beyond the west after a successful US launch and the recent unveiling of , subscription music service has hired former Google executive as General Manager Asia-Pacific. I’m hearing that Brody is currently in Australia talking to potential recruits, and Spotify itself has confirmed the GM position and that Brody is looking to hire people in Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney. Prior to Spotify, Brody was CEO at Koolanoo Group, Vice President of Business Development at Tudou, and a Strategic Partner of Development at Google China (and first employee apparently). He has lived in China for over 10 years. Spotify is already available in the US, the UK, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Finland but obviously has yet to set up shop anywhere in Asia — Spotify would not provide further details on a timeline for its Asian-Pacific launch. This will be the fourth former high-level Googler hired by Spotify, the startup having recently picked up for a business development role, Jeff Levick as head of ad sales and as of today Richard Gregory, who I’ve heard but not confirmed will be taking an executive position at Spotify US. The Spotify team totals around 400 people and last time I checked in, it was looking to hire another 100 people to support its expansion plans. This number could only be increased by the success of the company’s Zynga-like social efforts — According to Inside Network’s App Data Spotify has gained since f8. The one million new user number seems about right; An informal glance at my Facebook Ticker right now is telling me that a hell of a lot of you use Spotify. |
You Might Have Klout, But What’s Your Kred? | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | Reputation on the Internet is a tricky thing to measure. But with the rise of social media—with its retweets, likes, +1s, replies, and followers counts—companies are trying to keep score. If you are a big user of Twitter, you have probably checked out your score or at least heard of it. Well, soon Klout will have a competitor called K . It is currently accepting sign-ups for a gradual rollout starting next week. Kred is the latest product from social data mining startup . “We have been receiving the firehose since 2008,” says CEO Jodee Rich, referring to the full , “indexing it since then. We have sorted it by community and topic. We look for small close networks of people and look for how they can be just as influential as rockstars.” Every person or account on Twitter has a Kred score, which is made up of two parts: the influence score and the outreach score. Your influence score is a measure of your ability to inspire others. It is a number on a scale from 1 to 1,000, and is based on how often your tweets are retweeted, how many new followers you are gaining, and how many replies you generate. (Kred also looks at Facebook likes and Google +1s, but Twitter is the main source of data). It is very much like your Klout score. The Outreach score is measured in levels and is a reflection of how generous you are with retweeting and replying to others. Kred also figures out which of 200 communities you belong to based on the information in your Twitter bio (which is not always a great description of who you are). It can show you the influence of your whole community and how you rank in that community. “Everyone is an influencer somewhere,” says Jodee. “Our job with Kred is to show you where you have influence.” Brand managers will be able to define their own communities (for a fee), which they will then be able to track. So how is this different from Klout? The main difference is Kred’s transparency. It shows you exactly how you got your score and lets you drill down to every retweet to see how many points it was worth. A normal retweet might be worth 10 points, but one from somebody with high Kred might be worth 50. A mention is worth more than follow, and so on. Since Kred is calculating everyone’s scores in realtime, it normalizes your score against the average. Kred also lets you incorporate your real-world accomplishments like degrees, honors, awards, and certificates. You will be able to send Kred a PDF proving an offline achievement, and they will add it to your Kred. |
Nice Work If You Can Get It: Apotheker Leaves HP With $10 Million Severance | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | Massive severance packages are nothing new, but sometimes you just feel the need to call attention to them. Ousted HP CEO Leo Apotheker is leaving the company with a , plus a $2.4 million bonus and $3.7m in stock (more if you count the other 440,000 vested shares). I understand that this high pay is part of our business culture, but really, now. Is it possible that HP was in a death spiral and only Apotheker’s sound judgment caused them to get away with a mere 45% drop in value? It seems unlikely that they’d kick him to the curb after less than a year if that were the case. But no, he’s leaving with millions in cash and stock , and HP will even be paying for the lawyers who negotiated the package, and they’ll pay up to $300K if he feels like moving. Of course, I wouldn’t have wanted to live that year in Apotheker’s shoes. He faced some extremely difficult decisions and massive internal changes following the acquisition of Palm. The best of men would have struggled. But his handling of Palm and webOS is wide open to criticism. It was a billion-dollar deal that needed to be shaped while it was hot, and (although there was certainly a good amount of internal politics that had to do with this as well) he didn’t do that, and now it’s a billion-dollar boondoggle. Perhaps Hurd’s ambition is partly to blame as well, but I don’t think many would compliment Apotheker’s work in this critical area during his reign. His big move to split up the business was certainly ballsy, but so was the charge of the light brigade. HP’s customers and the market both found it a disturbing development, the world’s biggest PC company flailing about like that. Acer too has its entire strategy needs revision, but it was done with caution and humility. I’ll stop there before I naively dig myself any deeper. But I just wanted to register fresh astonishment at this culture that throws money away like this. I’m surprised Apotheker was allowed to leave with his . All the information is , if you’re curious. |
Kobo Vox Android Tablet Leaks On Retailer Website | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | It looks like and aren’t the only ones who want to get into the LCD scene. Kobo, who like them has a , must have felt left out of the 7″ LCD device race, and apparently is releasing the Vox to fill that gap. We actually heard about the Vox in an FCC filing a couple weeks ago, but held off on posting because there wasn’t much to say. But today the device was , where a number of specs were revealed — though we should take them all with a grain of salt. The few details revealed include an industry-standard 1024×600 7″ LCD, 8GB of internal storage, an a Micro SD slot. The battery is said to last six hours, and a number of Kobo-esque features are built in, like , Reading Life, and syncing content with other devices that have Kobo’s reading app installed on them. It also “supports open standards and even keeps an archive of all the books you’ve downloaded,” the meaning of which isn’t quite clear. The “Vox” (Latin for “voice”) may refer to the ability to “connect highlighted words to audio.” In Future Shop’s specs, several e-book types are supported but not images or video, which I’m certain is a mistake, as graphic novels are mentioned in the product description. It’s ever-so-slightly larger than the Kindle Fire, but at 400g, a tiny bit lighter as well. The price was $250 in Canadian dollars, though that may change. claims to have a picture of an early version of the device, in case you’re curious. |
The Europas Awards for European tech startups launches – enter now | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | , the European Tech Startup Awards, were held for the second time December 2010, in London, supported by . It was the culmination of a month of online voting by the European tech startup industry for the finalists, where some 33,126 votes were cast, judges deliberated over the results and over 350 people joined the cream of Europe’s startups, VCs and entrepreneurs at a huge awards event. This year it’s getting bigger to get the community even more involved, create an even bigger event, and find the best startups in Europe. You can enter and tickets are . We are still taking sponsors for categories. For sponsorship opportunities please email Mike Butcher ( mike [@] mbites.com ) for further details or . Also follow the event on Twitter and on . The Europas will be identifying the hottest tech startups in Europe right now, taking hundreds of entries, sifting through them with a large advisory board and then submitting the picks to a public vote which the entire industry can participate in. The results will then be merged to find the winners. . (Please read the instructions in full). from on . To enter The Europas your startup’s product must have been launched within the last 2 years (from September 2009, the business can be older). If your startup has received external funding, then it can ONLY be a Seed or Series A round of funding. Startups that have taken Series B rounds and beyond are NOT eligible to enter. Entrants can come from the “EMEA” region (Europe, Middle East and Africa). Entries must be in by Friday 7 October. The Awards Ceremony will take place on Thursday, November 17 at the Carbon Bar in London’s West End. It’s a cool modern bar and you’ll be joined by 450 of the crème de la crème of Europe’s tech startup and venture capital scene. There will be drink, food and we’ll be able to party ALL night.
Best Education, Recruitment and Jobs Startup
Best Commerce, Finance or Payments Startup
Best Business or Enterprise Startup
Best Advertising or Marketing Tech Startup
Best Transport or Travel Startup
Best European Startup Programme
Best Startup Tool For Startups
Best Mobile or Apps Startup
Best Sport or Leisure Startup
Best Entertainment, Audio or Video Startup
Best Gaming or Social Games Startup
Best Culture (Fashion, Art, Music) Startup
Best Social Platform or Networking Startup
Best Service Provider to Startups
Best Startup Founder / Co-Founders
Best VC of the Year
Best Exit in 2011
Best Angel or Seed Investor of the Year
Best Startup Advisor/Mentor of the Year
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Sony To Stop Comping 3D Glasses For Theaters – Because Movie Tickets Aren’t Expensive Enough Already | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | Sony, which provides many theaters with the projectors and hardware needed to display 3D cinema, has informed those theaters that starting this spring, it will . From now on they’ll have to foot the cost themselves — and by “they” I mean “we,” because obviously the theaters aren’t going to voluntarily pick up this extra expense. Most theaters use a passive 3D system (often RealD), since expensive active-LCD glasses aren’t really an option to deploy in bulk. The polarized glasses (not pictured, obviously) are cheaper, but still cost ~50 cents per moviegoer. Multiply that by the millions of people who might see any given 3D blockbuster-type movie, and you’re looking at quite a sum. Sony’s been footing that part of the bill, but has decided they’ve had enough of that. Their letter to exhibitors puts May 1st as the last day they’ll be providing glasses. Theater owners will be angered (no one likes an extra few million in red ink) but I’m guessing Sony wouldn’t do this if it didn’t feel the balance of power was on their side right now. You may or may not like 3D, but it’s a part of the business right now and big 3D movies are likely the highest-margin showings a theater will have all year. They can’t afford to be the one theater in town that doesn’t do 3D, so they’ll pay. Studios like Disney and Fox have also chipped in for glasses, and never implied that the comping program would last forever. Still, it seems like the life support is being pulled a little early, and, as always, the cost will be passed on to the consumer. |
Microsoft Cracks Down On Spammy Windows Phone App Submissions | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | There may be more than 20,000 apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace now, but it seems as though some “developers” are intent on fiddling with the cool-to-crap ratio. As low-quality, low-functionality apps flood the marketplace, Microsoft will be limiting developers to starting tomorrow. Microsoft had previously set the number of apps a developer could have , which was honestly sort of a joke. Sure, it’s entirely possible that some super-motivated developer would want to submit 20 legit apps at the same time, but how likely is that? Or, better question, how good could any of them possibly be? Not very, if the marketplace’s is any indication. Those 6 apps you see up top, for example, are just a fraction of the 40 that “developer” Jonathan Toh Jun Hong uploaded between September 22 and 24. As you may be able to guess from the icons, they’re all essentially RSS feeds for a slew of popular sites. While those in and of themselves aren’t terribly harmful, the fact that they were submitted and bury new (and potentially good) apps is. Developers who violate Microsoft’s new rule will have to face a number of penalties, ranging from the “unpublishing of apps” to “temporary or permanent suspension of an offending developer’s Marketplace credentials” depending on the severity of the situation. It’s great that Microsoft is taking steps to defend the quality of their marketplace, but I’m not sure dropping the number of allowable submissions per day is going to be enough. It’s a question of scale — if some developers (and I use that term loosely) are capable of cranking out and submitting 20 useless apps within a day, they’ll have no problem doing the same for 10. What’s really needed here is a more stringent approval process that prevents junky apps from making into the market in the first place. With Mango already beginning to hit handsets, Microsoft needs to figure out a better solution and quick. |
Foxconn’s $12bn Brazil Expansion Stalled In Negotiation Stage | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | Earlier this year it was reported that Foxconn had decided it was going to try to diversity its global holdings by establishing an iPad factory in Brazil. Their reasoning seemed fine: the economy is expanding, there’s a tech-savvy populace, and the government, they figured, would be game for few little sweetheart deals to get the ball rolling. As it turns out, not so much. “The project for a Brazilian iPad is in doubt,” said one Brazilian official, . Foxconn is “making crazy demands” and the Brazilian government appears to be unyielding on tax and funding. Brazil may be overplaying its hand here. Foxconn employs around a million employees last I checked, and manufactures some of the most popular electronics in the world. Brazil has grown relatively rich on its natural resources, but joining first-world industry in such a big way was always going to be hugely expensive. Shying away from the cost (instead of floating it with potential growth as collateral, like everyone else) shows they just aren’t willing to do business the way the big kids do it. Not only does an iPad-producing factory require an enormous initial investment, but it requires a workforce and infrastructure that Brazil appears to lack currently. Training and education are reportedly inadequate, and Brazil clearly isn’t at the stage of industrialization that China is, in which entire cities are built around factories. $12 billion was just the cover charge — once you factor in a decade’s worth of tax breaks, kickbacks, road and power improvements, housing subsidies, and so on, the real cost starts to emerge. The best bet, it seems, is to start spreading the costs around in the private industry. The government and construction industry is already stretched thin preparing for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, so it might be that laying the foundation and establishing joint ventures with existing tech companies (for shared resources, campuses, and improvements) is the only way this deal will go through. Either that or they bag it and start again with slightly less ambitious plans — or perhaps Foxconn will simply find a partner who doesn’t mind playing the game. |
Sync By 50 Headphones Leak Early, Appear To Be Appropriately Street | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | 50 Cent’s wireless headphones are finally nearing release and I just received multiple pics and a full spec sheet concerning the upcoming high-end model. Sync by 50 uses the now-popular unibody casing but features full on-board playback controls — something no other headphones can proclaim. Housed in each can is a 40mm driver, which is surrounded by a memory foam cushion. The 3.5mm wireless adapter is said to broadcast the signal 50 feet and somehow allow four simultaneous wireless connections through an unnamed wireless standard. The spec sheet brags that the headphones features a professionally tuned digital EQ along with 16-bit lossless digital sound. The headset apparently charges through micro USB and ships with a wired mic cable (classy) and a hard-shell carrying case. However, the spec sheet doesn’t state the price or release date. These headphones have had a long journey. 50 Cent (or one of his many companies) teamed up with Sleek Audio last year who later proudly displayed their joint effort at CES. That deal last May. Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s SMS Audio then picked up the project and whose founder is now the president at SMS Audio. 50 Cent joins Dr. Dre and Ludacris in the headphone game. My source couldn’t dig up the price but indicated that this model along with a wired headset and earbuds will launch within the coming months. However, don’t expect these to be inexpensive. Beats By Dr. Dre showed there’s a market for premium lifestyle headphones and this model seems to employ a fair balance of style and technology. It’s going to be pricey.
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China Takes First Steps Toward A Space Station, Launches Tiangong 1 | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | As NASA’s , China’s space program is making big leaps with plans to have a manned space station in orbit by 2020. This morning (around 9pm in China), the Tiangong 1 space station module blasted off from a desert in the northwestern area of China. The reported purpose of this mission is to practice docking with other modules, which is essential to building a space station (obviously). Tiangong 1, literally meaning Heavenly Palace, was carried into orbit by a Long March-2FT1 rocket, reports . It provides 15 cubic feet of space in which up to three people can live and work. The plan is that the space module will orbit the Earth for about a month, at which point another unmanned spacecraft called Shenzou 8 will dock with Tiangong 1. This will be China’s first mission involving docking, and completion of the nine-year plan will make it the first country to launch and maintain its very own space station. A from China Manned Space Engineering Project spokeswoman Wuping: The main tasks of Tiangong Ⅰ spaceflight include: to provide a target vehicle for space rendezvous and docking experiment; to primarily establish a manned space test platform capable of long-term unmanned operation in space with temporary human attendance, and thus accumulate experiences for the development of the Space Station; to carry out space science experiments, space medical experiments and space technology experiments. Short term goals aside, it’s worth wondering what China plans to do with this space station once it’s completed. It’s clear that China has been getting more and more aggressive with its space program, completing space walks, increasing the number of astronauts in each mission, and planning a trip to the moon by 2030. The overall goal, however, is still a mystery. Check out footage of the take-off below: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIcL9aXpOYE&w=640&h=360] |
Myspace Owner-Specific Media Hit With Layoffs | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | Myspace owner- has laid of a percentage of its staff today, we’ve confirmed with the company. Specific Media said these layoffs took place in sales and operating areas, and was part of a consolidation effort to eliminate redundancies between the two businesses. As Specific Media says in a statement: Specific Media says that “less than 8%” of the company’s employees were laid off. Specific Media has about 750 employees, so around 50-60 employees may have been let go. Apart from Myspace, Specific Media is an ad technology company that aims to help drive viewership for content owners, engagement for brands and relevance for consumers. The company allows marketers to buy digital ads across the Web, TV, online video, mobile platforms. Of course, you may know that Specific Media (along with ) earlier this year from News Corp for around Part of that deal included letting go half of Myspace’s then staff of 400 employees. These layoffs are in addition to those cuts made in June. Chris Vanderhook, Chief Operating Officer at Specific Media and Myspace issued this statement about the news today: “We’ve made great progress in integrating the companies post acquisition, and have identified new ways to streamline the businesses. In addition to the synergies realized, there have been some real innovation and big progress made toward achieving our goals…We are well on our way to executing our plan and will invest in our strategy as we continue to grow.” Unfortunately, Specific Media recently to scale-back the elaborate plans to debut the new Myspace. Traffic has also been declining for the beleaguered social network. |
Google Analytics Catches Up With Real-Time, Launches Enterprise Tier | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | Google Analytics, the immensely popular suite of tools that Google offers to help webmasters track their site traffic, is getting a big boost this week: the service has a real-time dashboard that updates with user events as they happen. That’s a big deal, as it brings Google more in line with popular real-time analytics products like Chartbeat, which allows you to track things like how many people are currently on your site, and how much traffic each individual article has gotten in the last few minutes. Prior to today’s launch of real-time, Google Analytics reports typically had a delay window upwards of three hours (and often longer), which meant this kind of tracking wasn’t possible. In its blog post announcing the news, Google highlights how you can now use Analytics to gauge the impact of various social channels, like Twitter and Facebook — and you’ll be able to quickly tell if your custom analytics query is working as intended, without having to wait 24 hours to see the results. In order to see the new Real-Time feature you’ll need to activate the ‘New Version’ link in Analytics, which is in the upper-right hand corner of the screen. In addition to Real-Time, today the Analytics team has also a premium tier for enterprise companies who want more support (and datapoints tracked) than Google offers with its free service. Google says that for an unspecified price, companies will be able to get phone support, SLA guarantees, and increased data limits. [youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNIQ7lxIXxg’] |
Swatch Announces Touchscreen Watches | John Biggs | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | Ugly though they may be, these Swatch watches have a trick up their sleeves. Using the same technology found in the Tissot T-Touch line, these Swatch Touch watches are touch-sensitive and allow you to swipe through different functions and control most of the watch features with a simple finger tap. The Touch 2011 models support two timezones, a date display, chronograph, alarm, and timer. There are no buttons and it has a curved glass display and weirdly proportioned numerals. It has an integrated strap. The watches will ship on October 26 and cost about $150. Adding touch capabilities to watches isn’t new – there was a clever Swatch model that allowed you to switch timezones by tapping on the crystal – but this wholesale abandonment of buttons and controls is fairly intense. |
Music Piracy Down As Streaming Services Take Over | John Biggs | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | The Swedish polling company, Media Vision, has released a about downloading habits in the country where Spotify was born. Their results? 23 percent of Swedes download music illegally, down 2 to 3 percent since 2010. In short, music piracy, at least in that market, is falling rapidly and much of that decline can be attributed to the popularity of services like . As , there’s no way to compete with free, but when content is made available on multiple platforms for a fair price it’s clear that consumers will react favorably. Obviously this is a small sample (4344) and a small country but it is very telling. If a country with a high rate of broadband use and the wherewithal to use and understand streaming services can make a dent in music piracy, can the rest of the world be far behind? Greg Kumparak said that whenever he tells folks about services like Spotify and , he gets wide-eyed glares of disbelief and a pledge to sign up immediately. Why? Because piracy is hard. Ripping CDs is hard. Digging through torrents is difficult. It doesn’t make any sense for anyone over the age of, say, 22, to be digging through The Pirate Bay to find an REM discography. Sure it’s easy to find if you know where to look, but why not just type “REM” into a music service and spend the rest of the day rocking out? So what happened between 2009 and now? Well, many of these services expanded beyond the desktop to the smartphone, allowing you to listen to music on almost any device. I, personally, listen to Rdio on two laptops, a desktop, two iPhones, and a Sonos system (not all at once). I have no desire to sync all of those machines to one static library any more than I want to download every single new release that comes down the pike. A $9.99 per month streaming service makes a lot of sense, especially for folks who don’t want to futz much with files. Will streaming destroy piracy? Absolutely not, but it will go a long way to chipping away at the perception that music is free. [Image: / ] |
Make It HD: Star Trek TNG Remastered For Blu-ray | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | Hold onto your phasers — the dream of many a Trekkie is about to come true. . Every one of the show’s 178 episodes will be released eventually, though not all at once. Why such a slow release? Well, it turns out that instead of upconverting and selling for a premium, the producers of this new version are doing it right. How right? They’re scanning the original 35mm footage, cutting together the shows from that, and re-creating the original effects in high definition. Now that’s what I call a remastering. George Lucas, take note. They’re leading the whole project with a sort of proof-of-concept disc comprising the pilot episode and two fan favorites, “Sins of the Father” and “The Inner Light,” from seasons three and five respectively. Perfect for fanboy screenings, and it alleviates the inevitable problem of the weak first two seasons of the show arriving as the vanguard of this new release. While high definition occasionally reveals details mercifully obscured by videotape transfer and SD resolution (flaws in makeup, costume, and set design), it’s generally a positive thing and with a big-budget show like (I learned today that its budget was over $1m per episode) chances are those aesthetic flaws will be minimal, and with luck it’ll look like this: The release will be full 1080p with 7.1 DTS audio reconstructed from the show’s original tracks. I’m guessing it will be widescreen, since they weren’t shooting on a “flat” 1.85:1 Panavision setup. Whether they composed for that, I don’t know (i.e. you might be able to see the edge of the set on the full 35mm frame), but either way it should be a widescreen image. Expect the first “sampler” Blu-ray, entitled , to hit on January 31 of next year for $22, and the rest to follow. |
Paul, I Accept Your Resignation | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | Paul Carr, one of our columnists who was hired for his grandstanding ways, has decided to fall on his own sword and on TechCrunch. I believe this is the second or third time he’s quit in public in the past couple weeks. I keep losing count. He thinks he is somehow being loyal to Mike and standing up for the editorial independence of the site. But he is not. He is just grandstanding. Paul’s resignation post reads like the brave stand of a man of principle. But the truth is that Paul doesn’t really know what he is talking about. And he certainly doesn’t speak for TechCrunch. He is not even a full-time employee. I tried to reach out to him and was hoping to have an honest conversation about his future (or lack thereof) at TechCrunch. Instead, he blindsided me with his post by publishing it as I was boarding a plane. At any other publication, Paul would have been fired long ago. And his post would be taken down. But I will let it stand. When Paul was hired, he was promised that he could write anything and it would not be censored, even if it was disparaging to TechCrunch. I will still honor that agreement. Paul likes to groan a lot about TechCrunch’s supposed loss of editorial independence. Yet he cannot point to one instance where he was blocked from saying what he believes on TechCrunch, and I am not going to start to do that now. I am also not going to get into all the details of what happened behind the scenes during the drama which unfolded in the past few weeks here at TechCrunch. But I will say this. To suggest that Arianna appointed me editor single-handedly is untrue. Also, I want to be very clear that I accepted the editor position at TechCrunch under the condition that our editorial independence be maintained. Arianna Huffington personally guaranteed to me that would be the case and that she has no interest in influencing our coverage. Michael has a about what constitutes editorial independence. I think we’ll all just have to agree to disagree on that one. Paul, thank you for your contributions to TechCrunch, and I accept your resignation. |
Sony’s New PSN Terms Of Service Prevent You From Joining Class Action Suits Against Sony | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | Version 12 (September 15, 2011) of Sony’s new (PDF) states, on page 18: Just thought you should know that in order to play games on their service, you’re being required to give up a very relevant method of legal recourse. I actually was about to sign up for a new PSN account, but I think I’ll hold off for a while. I don’t want to get too deep into this, but the news is making the rounds and it seems to be just the latest shady way in which Sony is manipulating the law and the rights of others to their own liking. , and while they’ve worked hard at making things right for those affected by the and hacks, their response to that too was . Shenanigans in license agreements and terms of service are nothing new. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be disturbed when Sony makes us agree not to sue them before we can play our games. You can opt out of the updated arbitration process by actually mailing in a document saying you want to. Simply send a letter to this address containing your name, full address, PSN account number if applicable, and a clear statement to the effect that you do not wish to resolve disputes through arbitration: ATTN: Legal Dept
6080 Center Drive, 10th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90045 Be advised that you must do this within 30 days of agreeing to the terms. |
Six Must-Watch On-Stage Videos From Disrupt | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | [tc_speakertext_off]We have hours and hours of quality video from this year’s , and you can browse it all , but there were a few on-stage interviews and discussions that we felt were unmissable. Whether they’re funny, interesting, or controversial, these show the quality and variety of the guests and topics we get to feature at Disrupt. Click the titles to view the original posts with our summary and commentary, as well as transcripts of the videos. The rest of the conference can be found at our . This all-star panel of VCs and (perhaps former) angel investors was consistently interesting and entertaining. Arrington moderates as Ron Conway, Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, Josh Felser, and Aydin Senkut dispute the best way to help and fund entrepreneurs. Capped vs. uncapped, VC vs. angel, due diligence vs. whatever the opposite of due diligence is. The end was inspiring, as Conway instructed anyone there from SV Angel to help the long line of entrepreneurs building up at the question mics. He then went down to the show floor and braved the frenzy himself. This talk was controversial among our readers. Could a guy who urged people to and a guy who really speak to the question of “hard problems”? The discussion on the stage is interesting whether you buy their premise or not. Our commenters bring up some very salient points as well, which you can read at the original post. There have been allegations that Facebook has, shall we say, had a spurt of inspiration following the unveiling of Google+. Mike Schroepfer is given the chance to defend their new features here, and to explain some recent decisions to change or eliminate features. And of course, it’s fun to put companies on the spot when we’ve got inside information. In this case Jason brings up the unannounced and . The subsequent “death stare” is pure gold. The mega-rich investing in space travel are often written off as modern-day Don Quixotes with too much money on their hands. I myself have done so. But Elon Musk isn’t some lunatic miser, building expensive toys to satisfy his vanity. He and others like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are investing where the industry fears to tread. I love the dispassion with which he refers to astronauts as “biological cargo.” And on a more grounded topic, Musk’s comparison of our education system to the vaudeville era is simultaneously esoteric and insightful. For someone who’s been with Silicon Valley veteran Sequoia for over 20 years, you’d think Doug Leone would cut more of a visible profile in the valley. Despite his seeming reticence to publicize himself and his company’s funds, he’s candid here. His perspective is slightly detached, as one who perceives the beginning end of his investments, and his commentary is astute. More of an insider than many insiders, yet thinking outside the outsiders. Paul Graham’s Y Combinator “office hours,” in which YC company founders get brief but to the point advice from this startup wizard, , so we were looking forward to the sequel. Graham didn’t disappoint, doling out encouragement, criticism, and sage advice in general to entrepreneurs who were at a loss. Worth a watch if only for the looks of intense attention maintained by Graham and YC partner Harj Taggar practically the entire time. That’s as many videos as I dare embed without risking browser implosion, so if you’re looking for more video, go to and start scrolling. |
Lyst comes out of the closet to open up high fashion | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | While the retail or ‘high street’ fashion world has been gradually populated by startups looking to create communities of fashion lovers (such as ), the more rarified world of high fashion has remained largely untouched by online. This is an anomaly, because if there is one thing to be said about high fashion it’s that it has passionate followers. Done right, that ought to translate into passionate users of online services. , a startup founded by Chris Morton, Sebastjan Trepca and Devin Hunt, is gaining traction with high fashionistas and looking to achieve just that. It’s latest enhancement – launched to coincide with London Fashion Week – is designed to allow fashion fans to be alerted as soon as clothes on the catwalk become available to purchase, usually some weeks later. All major fashion house have runway shows these days, but you can’t by those clothes for months. So Lyst’s new feature will add an item to a list and as soon as an item of clothing comes on sale at a store, anywhere in the world, you’ll get an alert. The startup raised a £950,000 seed round in November last year from Accel, SPA, Ventrex, Angels in New York and London, although the funding was not announced at the time. It’s now putting that war chest to good use with a public Beta which came out this May. With many high fashion designers coming online, often with sites which might look good but don’t have any kindo of social feeds, users are unable to follow all the designers they want. So Lyst has scrapped these sites for information. To create that luxurious high fashion experience, they scrape the original large images of the clothes, which are usually hidden behind badly designed Flash sites. The data is then structured it and into a taxonomy. Out of this, and to build engagement and virility, they created something like a Twitter for fashion. People can follow people or fashion brands and that goes into a feed. It’s all about adding context to products – people will see someone added a shirt that’s recommended by a friend, or the editor of vogue. This act of curating builds a wish list. Anything you add to your list is then tracked, telling you where to buy them or where they are available. This harvests the intent to buy as well as generating the intent to buy. Lyst is less about gaming, and more positioned as a tool. Whereas Netaporter tackled more mainstream fashion, Polyvore is about chatting. Lyst has technically combined the two with community and a pure affiliate model. Lyst also has just one way of making money – on a commission basis. So if they don’t generate a sale their partners don’t pay anything. That incentisivises them to make the site as engaging as possible for users. Users are now in the “tens of thousands” and have double in the last month, says Morton. So it looks like Lyst has a chance of taking on the £50 billion high fashion industry, and perhaps democratising a normally impenetrable world. |
Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Program: Posterous Raises $5 Million | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | Um, oh hey guys, what’s up? Nothing much over on my side, except that I’d really like a Diet Coke. Also, I’m hearing that nascent photo sharing app née blogging platform is raising some money. So yeah that’s what’s up over here in my neck of TC HQ. Chew on this if you’re in the mood for some actual tech news; the simple blogging service and Tumblr competitor has just raised $5 million in Series B according to multiple sources. Taking part in the round will be , newcomer and existing angels. On Monday Posterous and focus around Posterous Spaces, which — in the same vein as Google Circles — allows users to pick and choose whom they share specific content with. Thus far the product has received response from users. I’m just going to assume that Posterous will be using the cash to increase its engineering team, because that’s what I usually write every day in these things. This new funding comes in addition to another $5.14 million in seed, angel and Series A financing from , , , and others, making the company’s total funding to date $10.14 million. I think I just might go get that Diet Coke now. |
Seven States Oppose AT&T/T-Mobile Merger, AT&T Isn’t Worried | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | “This proposed merger would stifle competition in markets that are crucial to New York’s consumers and businesses, while reducing access to low-cost options and the newest broadband-based technologies.” So sayeth New York Attorney General , who is joined by the attorneys general of six other states in support of the Department of Justice suit that sought to halt the pending AT&T/T-Mobile merger. And so the AT&T/T-Mobile craziness continues. The states that have come out in favor of the DoJ suit are New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington. Even when facing mounting opposition, AT&T seems rather nonplussed about the whole situation. AT&T spokesperson Michael Balmoris has stated that “it is not unusual for state attorneys general to participate in DOJ merger review proceedings or court filings.” Translation: they’re not very worried about it. It certainly doesn’t hurt that AT&T can count on the support of 11 states who have publicly endorsed the deal. Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming have all thrown their support behind AT&T and T-Mobile, presumably because they stand to benefit from increased wireless build-out and more jobs. The merger also received a spirited defense yesterday by a small contingent of 15 House Democrats (nearly all of whom received ), who encouraged President Obama to settle in favor of the deal. For the truly curious, only Arkansas, Georgia, and Kentucky overlap between the list of states that support the merger, and the states whom those 15 Democrats represent. After all this, AT&T has a only few more obstacles to face when the case goes to trial. Not an impossible task, according to : it just means AT&T needs to convince a few more people before a settlement can be reached. |
George Costanza’s Infamous Wallet Is The Star Of New Google Wallet Commercial | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKGptWtzeaU&feature=player_embedded&w=630] While Google Wallet didn’t come out this summer Google has just unveiled first Google Wallet commercial, starring none other than Seinfeld’s George Costanza and his overstuffed wallet. For those of you who aren’t familiar, the George Costanza wallet was made famous in the Seinfeld episode where George carries around a wallet so fat that it interferes with him sitting and makes his back hurt. It looks like Google has remastered the explosion scene from that episode to promote its NFC product, directing people to http://www.google.com/wallet for more info. I’ve emailed Google for specific Wallet launch dates and will update this post when they get back to me, in the meantime, here is some dialogue and scenes from the original episode. : This isn’t just my wallet. It’s an organizer, a memory and an old friend.
: Well, your friend is morbidly obese.
: Well, at least I don’t carry a purse.
: It’s not a purse, it’s European. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoPf98i8A0g&feature=player_embedded&w=630] |
RIM’s BBM Service Suffers Partial Outage In Canada, Latin America | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | RIM, to put it mildly, has been having it rough these past few days. Among other things, they’ve failed to hit their quarterly revenue goal, sold far fewer PlayBooks than they had hoped, and potentially let their market share slip into . After all that, RIM didn’t need any more problems, but another one has popped up anyway: it seems that their BBM and email service is partially down in a handful of countries. A quick Twitter search shows that subscribers in Canada and Latin America seem to be the most stricken by the partial outages, with the Financial Post reporting that pockets of users on three of Canada’s carriers (Rogers, Bell, and WIND) have been affected. Meanwhile on the southern front, states that the partial outage has affected people in Venezuela, Colombia, Panamá, Chile, México and Argentina. The outage may even be more widespread, as the reports that sporadic tweets from the UK and Egypt indicate similar service issues. https://twitter.com/#!/BlackBerryHelp/status/114744172682027009 RIM has acknowledged the outage on their official account, but the feed has yet to offer any salient details. In fairness, this may not be an end-of-the-world scenario for BlackBerry users, but the timing for RIM is atrocious. While I’m sure they have teams fighting to find a fix, consumer confidence in the Waterloo-based company may dip even more as a result of today’s issues.
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Y Combinator-Backed SellStage Wants To Help You Better Showcase Your Products — With Video | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | If you’re advertising a product, would you rather simply have an image of that product, or have your consumers be able to watch a video of that product in action? Unless you’re sarcastic like myself, you probably answered with the latter, because the truth is that videos help products sell online. This is true even for those vendors that sell products that one wouldn’t necessarily assume would be made more attractive with video. Consider Zappos, for example, which currently offers over 50,000 product videos. Zappos also happens to do a pretty good business. For , a startup from this summer’s batch of Y Combinator companies that is launching today, Zappos is the standard. But most big eTailers are far behind the shoe seller in terms of video content. So SellStage is launching a platform that is designed to make it easy for both big and small businesses to add video content to their websites to showcase their products. Product videos tend to be different enough from other video content that it needs a specific, if not niche, solution. Videos also tend to be a pain in the ass to integrate with product pages, as you can’t just take your normal embed approach, because it will take up too much space, and may even displace the product images. So, SellStage wants not only host and stream your product videos, but also play them in a lightbox. So after your product video plays, you want a call to action, not simply a replay link. Of course, SEO is critical eCommerce sites, and that most product videos don’t take this into account, so SellStage automatically generates sitemaps optimized for video search crawlers. On the merchant side, SellStage offers great value proposition in that all you have to do is add one line of Javascript to the product page, and the startup handles the rest, the players, the hosting, and the streaming. You can then drag and drop your videos where you want them, all with a few clicks. What’s more, SellStage videos work on iOS devices, which a lot of product videos don’t because they use Flash. The startup is also working on tools to make video production easier, including this forthcoming iOS app, and some “you shoot, SellStage edits”-type features. The startup, while still in its early form, is going to be very useful to marketing departments who want to manage video on their eCommerce platforms, especially for those who have a large product catalog and want to add 500+ videos and not have those turn into 500 IT requests. “Retailers who consider their expertise a competitive advantage need to find a way to use their greatest asset – their knowledgeable sales staff”, SellStage Co-founder Tom Saffell said. “To differentiate their online stores from everyone else. Video lets them do that”. Retailars already have everything they need to make great video: The store is set, the sales staff are the actors, and the script is whatever you say to the customers in store — your sales pitch, says Co-founder Thomas Escourrou. But how is SellStage going to monetize? The Co-founders told me that they are going to establish a tiered pricing structure that takes into account how many videos the company wants to make, host, and stream, and whether or not they want production assistance from SellStage itself. As the startup moves forward, it also will begin giving its customers more customization options. SellStage is launching in private alpha today, but is making 50 priority invites available to readers. Simply visit and enter “concorde” for a sneak peek. |
Wrap It Up: Photos From Our First TC Gadgets/Mobile Meet-Up | John Biggs | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | It’s been a long while since we had a formal Gadgets/Mobile meet-up and I’m proud to say that this one, sponsored by Samsung, was a roaring success. We had people who drank far too much, people who ate far too many Cheez-Its (there were, sadly, no hors d’oeuvres so we made do with grub), and people who won excellent prizes including Samsung Galaxy S II phones, Samsung tablets, and other goodies. We hope to have more of these things in the future where you guys can meet and greet TC G/M writers in your own home town and in your own special way. Thanks for making this one a roaring success, San Francisco, and we’ll see you soon. Here are a few highlights from the shots we took; we’ll update this post with Samsung’s own photos as soon as we hear back from them. The full-size pictures can be found in this set at the .
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null | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 9 | 29 | null |
Track Your Dog With Retriever, The Compact GPS Dog Collar | John Biggs | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | One of the cooler gadgets we saw at Disrupt this year was the new Retriever GPS dog tracker. Completely redesigned, this device lets you track Fido wherever he does roam and will let people know where to take him or her if lost. The device lasts about a week on one charge and will go into sleep mode if it hasn’t been activated in a while. I sat down with the company founders and their stuffed dog, Gibby, to discuss the technology. |
TenMarks Raises $3 Million For Personalized Math Learning SaaS | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | Education technology startup has raised $3 million in new funding led by Catamount Ventures with Birchmere Ventures participating. , at , is joining TenMarks’ board. TenMarks offers a cloud-based service that provides a personalized practice and learning software to help teach students of varying skill levels math concepts. TenMarks aims to supplement classroom instruction, and assign work to students on the topics they cover in class, based on their abilities. Students use hints and short video lessons to refresh what they know and learn what they don’t. Another version of TenMarks gives teachers the ability create personalized curriculums for each student (called playlists), which contain math concepts from various grade levels. TenMarks Math is free for teachers to use with their students and more than 15,000 classrooms and 250,000 students across all 50 states have used TenMarks Math over the past 6 months. And the startup says that its software is seeing meaningful results. A study conducted at the Everest Public High School in Redwood City, California showed that students using TenMarks Math made as much as a 36% improvement in their math scores over a 6 week period, with the average student showing a 10% increase. Another elementary School in Novato, California used TenMarks over the summer for students, and saw more than 80% of their students who used TenMarks score higher after the summer break, versus an expected decline. Technology is no doubt we are learning and education in general, and startups like TenMarks should see additional growth as more and more teachers and instiutions catch on to this trend. |
The New Social Network: Who’s Nearby, Not Who You Know | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | There’s a new concept for social networking services taking root, and it’s not about re-creating your offline social graph on the Web, like Facebook does today. It’s about discovering the people who are nearby you now – the ones you probably would like to meet. This type of discovery mechanism is already being made possible by a number of services, including the checkin apps like and , the automated discovery of nearby folks via and , the group chatting in , and the micro-networks that emerge through . All of these companies are playing with the idea of location-based social networks, attempting to connect you to others around you through varying means. At this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, even more services emerged to compete in this space, too. The powerful capabilities of today’s mobile smartphones are allowing for a new kind of networking: social discovery services, not social networking services. Discovery services are focused primarily on highlighting the users within close proximity to you and connecting you to those who you might want to meet. Facebook, meanwhile, aims to connect you to people you already know. “Discovery” on Facebook is limited to searching for names or networks (e.g., schools, workplaces) where the introductions themselves previously took place. But there are ephemeral, ever-changing social networks that we participate in daily. These have been left largely untapped by Facebook: the people working out at the gym, shopping for groceries, playing basketball, taking their dog to the park, watching their children on the playground, and so on. They’re the networks you stumble into and out of every day, and they aren’t composed of your close friends, Facebook friends or otherwise. They’re just people who share your interests at that same moment in time. The guy ready for a pick-up game of b-ball. The coupon-clipper finding deals at the grocery store. A new puppy’s owners hoping for a doggie play date. A couple of standout apps from Disrupt hope to better highlight these types of networks by introducing you to the people you want to know. One, an app called (iTunes), is based around interests and activities. You join a group (surfers, for example) and the app pushes notifications to you when others nearby are interested in the same thing. For now, the groups are pre-built by Holler itself, but it’s in the process of rolling out a system where users can build their own groups. However, there will be some level of filtering and control, so duplicate groups are not created. Holler is well-designed, with a clean and minimalist layout, which makes it easy to use from first launch. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problem many other “social” apps do at first – not enough people are using it. To address the issue, Holler’s creators are thinking of exposing all the groups to the app’s users, not just those nearby, which would still allow for socializing around interests. While that may increase engagement, it takes away from the app’s core promise of proximity-based socializing – its mobile meetups on the fly. In a similar vein, another TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley company, , has built a mobile app that also aims to connect users based on interests. But in Mingle’s case, it’s about introducing yourself to others nearby, in the hopes that you two share an interest, instead of connecting around a commonly held interest like “shopping” or “exercise,” for example. Mingle users fill out an introduction card and post it to their current location. Others “mingling” at that location can see one another, and take the conversation offline, if desired. It’s what Foursquare could do, if it wasn’t so stuck on listing the “others here” with only an avatar and a first name, last initial (arguably useless information, unless those people are already real-life friends). A third app from the Startup Alley is a little more out there, but interesting. Called , this mobile app lets you leave virtual “bubbles” containing text, photos, videos, music and more at a given location. Others can come along later and find your bubble and interact with it, or even change it. You’ll see who has “touched” your bubble and can then chat with them in real-time. There’s more too it than that, but those are the basics. igobubble feels more art project than the next big hit in mobile socializing, but at least they’re thinking out of the box. Instead of just re-creating the structure of a traditional social networking site (with profiles, listed interests, avatars), it’s thinking that tying content to a location is the first step in enabling mobile social discovery. That’s certainly a different take. It’s not about who you are, it’s about what you did at that location. Other intriguing ideas in the location-based social space included Disrupt Startup Alley participant , makers of a mobile app that will map photos to locations for the purpose of instant scrapbooking and remembering old friends, and , a contact-sharing app for nearby users. But have any of the new apps (or old ones, for that matter), really hit the nail on the head when it comes to social discovery? and are great, but feel more like tools than networks of their own. chat seems a bit lacking without context. mobile meetups can’t work if it can’t gather enough participants. feels more business-networking driven than social. is an interesting idea, but doesn’t have the execution down. It seems like each service could be a part of a bigger whole – a new proximity-based social network that puts location first, people and content second. A new network no one has yet been ambitious enough to attempt to design, so focused on a single niche or feature instead. Foursquare, at least, has the critical mass to get there, but is stagnating with its continued emphasis on the manual check-in. The company should be increasing automation for regular check-ins, building out user profiles and letting users connect via common interests surfaced by their regular activities. It should suggest new friends based on behaviors combined with “friend-of-a-friend connections.” At the very least, when a big group of friends check-in together, it should alert the users in the group who aren’t connected to each other of the missed opportunity. It should even consider letting users pick and choose add-on services to run within the app. Yobongo’s chat, CardFlick or Mingle’s introductions, and igobubble’s content sharing could all be Foursquare features one day, and not standalone applications, if Foursquare had a wider vision for its future. In the meantime, it’s fun to experiment with the latest and greatest in proximity-based social networking, thanks to the new TechCrunch Disrupt Alley startups mentioned here and others. Whether any of them will become breakout hits, however, will have to be left for the market to decide. |
Keen On… How To Make Movies and Money (TCTV) | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | “Artists need to be business people too,” filmmaker told me when she came into San Francisco’s TechCrunchTV studio. Shlain, whose movie launched earlier this week, is a pioneering movie maker not only because of her award-winning films but also because this innovative businesswoman has figured out a way to make money in today’s digital economy. “The gates are open right now,” Shlain told me about a 21st century movie business that is, she says, “completely different” from the 20th century studio model. And that’s because, she explained, filmmakers now have the technology to directly connect with their viewers. Put 50% of your energy into the making of the movie, she thus told me, and the other 50% into promoting it on networks like Twitter and Facebook. Tiffany Shlain proves that creativity and entrepreneurial innovation not only can but must coexist in today’s digital economy. Filmmakers, writers and musicians should listen carefully to her advice about leveraging the power of their audience. Watch the first part of my interview with Tiffany Shlain |
Who Spends The Most In Freemium Games? Battle Of The Sexes Edition | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | Just last week, I wrote about a data dive by mobile research firm (who, thanks to their mobile analytics SDK, has a sample group of about 20 million users across 110,000 iOS/Android apps) on out the most cash in freemium mobile games. Almost immediately, the top rated comment was something along the lines of “That’s cool and all — but where’s the breakdown by gender?” Here it is. Flurry looked at this topic from a number of ways. First up: who spends the most time in freemium games? Which sex is most dedicated to tending their virtual farms for carrots they can never eat? Looks like it’s about equal. Guys spend more time in-game almost across the board (especially in the 25-34 age range), but the difference is consistently ever-so-slight. This data also suggests last week’s findings that the vast majority of people spending time in-game (regardless of sex) are under 35. Now, what about the money? Anecdotal evidence would have lead me to guess that females would be the big spenders here — turns out, gents take the lead. Dudes are spending around 16% more in freemium games than their dudette counterparts, at 58% vs 42%. Folks in the 25-34 age range (especially males) prove to be the most valuable, with the 35-54 age group swooping in for a surprising second. So, what can we gather from this? While that 16% cumulative difference between sexes certainly isn’t trivial, it’s not quite as monumental as it may seem. The female kind still accounts for a staggering of money spent overall — so if you’re looking to maximize the money hittin’ your pocket, it seems like a good idea to really toe the line between which audience your game focuses on. To get all KINDS of gender-stereotypey here for a second: Too much cute-and-fuzziness, and you’ll scare away the largest money spending group; too guns-and-ammo, and you might be spooking off just shy off half of the folks who would consider shelling out. It’s not a shocking concept: when you’re banking on the idea that some small percentage of your audience will spend money in a game you gave away for free, you want your app’s focus to be friendly to as big of an audience as possible. And for one last bit of data: if you’re wondering which group is spending the most (these folks will, after all, only come back to the checkout stand so many times), the answer is once again males between 25-34. You can find Flurry’s |
More Disrupt Beijing Speakers: Kai-Fu Lee, David Li, Fritz Demopoulos and More | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | With all the recent TechCrunch drama– not to mention my own busy September — you might think our upcoming Disrupt Beijing conference had gotten pushed to the back-burner. You’d be wrong. We’ve been busy ferreting out and booking more of the hottest names in the Chinese startup scene to augment our keynotes by Tencent CEO Pony Ma, Chinese angel and entrepreneur Lei Jun, and a of who are traveling to China along with the TechCrunch staff. One of our most anticipated keynotes is no stranger to Silicon Valley: Innovation Works founder and former head of Google China Kai-Fu Lee. Lee is one of those who has deep experience in the US with top companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google and deep connections in China as well. He in 2009 when he quit the top job at Google China and opened an incubator for Chinese entrepreneurs in the same office complex. Innovation Works recently raised an additional . Lee was one of the first people to lobby hard for a TechCrunch conference in Beijing during one of my reporting trips to the country a few years ago. He said he’d do whatever we needed to help make it happen, and we took him up on his offer, making Innovation Works our local partner for the event. We appreciate all their help so far. Some of our other speakers may not be as well known in the Valley as Lee, but they are up-and-coming rockstars of the Chinese tech world. David Li is the CEO of YY.com, a social media company in China that allows people to connect in groups around certain activities and interests over voice, video and text. It first debuted in July 2008 and already has more than 200 million registered users and fifty million monthly active users. More staggering: On average each active user spends a whopping seven hours per day on the site. YY.com is one of several widely anticipated IPO candidates leading China’s tech scene. A few other Chinese startups being watched closely by investment bankers are the trio of group buying giants: Lashou, Meituan and 24quan. There are thousands of group buying clones in China, but these are three of the largest, and we’ll have their founders and CEOs on stage together. If you’re a Groupon hater, you’ll love this panel, because these guys are absolutely murdering Groupon in the market. Ecommerce has lagged entertainment and gaming in the Chinese Web scene, but it’s suddenly getting . We’ve invited some of our favorite up-and-comers on stage, including Fangfang Wu, founder and CEO of kids’ clothing etailer Greenbox and Lu Dong, the CEO of La Miu. La Miu– an online lingerie company that has succeeded where Western brands like Victoria’s Secret have failed– is literally one of the sexier ecommerce companies in China. We’ll also have a panel discussion about the state of investments, exits and valuations, after a challenging summer for Chinese IPOs. VCs from top firms like DCM, Qiming, GSR Ventures, Northern Light Venture Capital and others will talk about what they’re seeing in the market. Some of them will hang around to judge the Startup Battlefield. Stayed tuned to the for more details on the judges. Lastly, it wouldn’t be a conference by a Silicon Valley-based media company in China without addressing the elephant in the room: Why do so many Silicon Valley companies fail so badly in the country? We’ll put the question to one Westerner who has succeeded wildly in China: Fritz Demopoulos. Demopoulos cofounded Chinese sports portal Shawei back in 1999, selling it to the Tom Group before the market crashed. He followed that up by cofounding Qunar, which $306 million from Baidu. Buy your tickets , if you haven’t already! Early bird pricing ends October 10. If you want to understand the Chinese tech scene, you don’t want to miss this conference. We’re also now selling entry-level exhibitor sponsor package directly on the Beijing Disrupt website on the . TechCrunch Disrupt is about integrating companies with the event experience — instead of creating standalone exhibition space, we incorporate demo areas in with the main traffic flow of the conference which is accessible to all attendees. We provide the tables, signage, power and Internet connectivity; Exhibitors only need bring a sizzling product and unbridled enthusiasm! Sponsors may also use the space as a meet and greet area. Exhibitors also receive a block of 4 full conference passes and inclusion in all the event online and printed on-site materials. Stay tuned for more announcements! We’ve still got a few more speakers and special announcements up our sleeves… |
This Is Facebook’s Project Spartan [Screenshots] | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | Facebook mobile developers page is , first of all because it starts with a statistic, “350 million users access Facebook from a mobile device every month,” which was just and then because it describes Facebook mobile web app features and includes screenshots that are unlike anything we’ve seen live. From what I can tell from the screenshots, the app’s core components, icons for Bookmarks, Messages, Notifications, and Friend Requests, seem to match the screenshots of Project Spartan earlier this summer. As we’ve , Project Spartan is the HTML5-based mobile application platform that Facebook has been working on with 3rd party developers for a while now. The text copy of this super-up-to-date page — like from the future — describes a Facebook Mobile App integration on iOS and Android (the screenshots visible are iOS I’m assuming), except it doesn’t seem to be a Facebook Mobile App that anyone actually has access to. And the links for further screenshots of the app on Android and iOS don’t seem to work. The developer-focused features presented here, including Bookmarking for apps, the flow from a Notification of a friend invite to a third-party app and App Search also reek of Spartan, which we’ve heard was built with the objective of getting developers to use Facebook as the distribution platform for games and other Facebook apps. Could this just be a really fancy revamp of the existing Facebook Mobile App? Maybe, but if so it’s some revamp. I contacted Facebook for more information as to what exactly this is a while ago and they have yet to get back to me (or pull the page down), a fact which is interesting in and of itself. In case they do eventually pull it down, I’ve included the entire page as a PDF below. Aaaaaaand it’s down. What took you guys so long? We’ve confirmed with multiple sources that Spartan and that Facebook plans on unveiling the final product early next week.
[scribd id=66772602 key=key-7ogcr9gpissyw77wzc2 mode=list] |
Real Journalism, VentureBeat Style | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | And that, by the way, is why anyone who cares about real journalism mistrusts TechCrunch—Dylan Tweney, VentureBeat TechCrunch has plenty of critics. But I don’t think I’ve ever read such a botched attempt at a takedown as a post published this evening on VentureBeat by Dylan Tweney titled, (which has now been taken down—here is a ). Tweney emailed me about 20 minutes before he posted claiming, “We have proof that you guys trade favorable coverage for future exclusives, and we’re going to publish this evening.” What exactly was this “proof”? Apparently, the founder of a startup sent VentureBeat an email trying to get some press for a minor news item in exchange for future exclusivity. In the email, which was addressed to VentureBeat, he mentions the name of a Techcrunch ad sales person. Also, a VentureBeat writer is married to an advisor of the company. (Yeah, I am confused too). That’s it. I am not sure what this proves other than that Tweney does not know what the word “proof” means. Perhaps it proves that some startups will do anything to get coverage. What makes this even worse, was that the email was actually intended not for TechCrunch, but VentureBeat, as the startup founder Verdi Ergun pointed out after the post went up. We here at TechCrunch were sort of flummoxed by the initial report. None of the writers here at TechCrunch have ever heard of the company or talked to them. We’ve never written about them. And we’ve never run any of their ads. We have no connection to the company. In other words, VentureBeat’s story, headline, and conclusion were utter bullshit. Maybe that is why Tweney quickly changed his opening lines from: AOL-owned tech blog TechCrunch is often accused of trading favors for exclusives.
Now we have proof. to Now we have an e-mail that appears to back up the claims. Actually, VentureBeat didn’t even have that. Someone asking to trade favors for coverage is not the same as someone actually getting those favors. But somehow an email sent to VentureBeat was enough for Tweney to concoct a story from whole cloth about how TechCrunch trades favors for exclusives all the time. For the record, that too is utter bullshit. While we are on the , here is a suggestion. If you are going to make outlandish claims in search of pageviews, it is a good idea to have evidence that backs up your own claims and headlines. Journalism, whether new or old, is about being right. Also, when you throw a punch, it works better if you are facing your opponent. : TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, who obviously has a lot of insight into the way TechCrunch operates, has written calling out VentureBeat as well. VentureBeat retracted the story and has . |
Farmeron, the "Google Analytics for farms", gets investment from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups | Ivan Beres | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | Ever had cows instead of users? You’ve probably never thought about building software for farmers, but just raised a round of investment as well as support from , a seed fund and startup aggregator led by Dave McClure. Farmeron is buidling an analytics package inspired by the numerous tracking apps you might have used, such as Omniture or Google Analytics, but built for farms. Farmeron’s solution is a slick web based application in which you, as a farmer, can keep track of your animals, their feeding, deaths etc. Like we all have profiles on Twitter or Facebook, each animal in Farmeron has its own profile as well. This lets farmers follow not only the performance of their farm as a whole, but also individual animals. While McClure has confirmed the investment, 500 Startups hasn’t yet disclosed how much they’ve invested in Farmeron, a startup quite different from the likes of BackType or Recurly. It’s also the first startup 500 Startups has invested in Croatia as well as Southeastern Europe in general, thanks to Seedcamp. Farmeron was one of the , even getting €25,000 when the winner, GrabCAD, decided they didn’t really need it due to a recent investment round from Matrix Partners and Atlas Ventures. Farmeron is currently in private beta and their CEO says they’ll be moving to Mountain View in the next couple of weeks to continue developing the product. While the product might seem odd at first, their potential market is huge with few competitors. |
New German initiative pools ad media to take stakes in startups | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | While startups in the US, especially in the Valley, tend to be able to find funding at different stages of their life-cycle, there remains significant funding gaps remains in Europe, a disparate market of multiple countries. While the seed stage is gradually being addressed by programmes like Seedcamp, SpringBoard, StartupBootcamp and others, the stage just before venture capital kicks in remains problematic. Often that first round of VC is designed for a significant marketing push or expansion. But a new German initiative looks like creating an exciting model for other countries to follow. It’s really worth watching how this pans out. The newly created takes a “media for equity” approach. Acting like a venture capital fund, it selects startup which are going to benefit from a cross-media advertising campaign. The investment is based on a specific media plan tailored to the startup. Although GMPVC is not revealing the stakes it is taking in companies we understand the amount is quite low because they don’t want to actively manage the investments. Thus it feels like something of a win for the consumer-focused startup trying to get mind-share amongst consumers. Thus, three large German media groups are investing their media inventory in the Pool to support internet entrepreneurship in Germany. N24 is Germany’s leading news channel. More than five million viewers tune in to N24 every day. REGIOCAST is a leading German radio company and reaches 11 million listeners every day. Wall AG, a member of the JCDecaux Group, provides outdoor advertising on about 89,800 high profile advertising spaces, including 6,475 advertising spaces on public transportation such as tramways, busses, underground trains and trucks. This is also the first time (apart from Sweden where there is an existing initiative) that several large media groups have jointly provided advertising in a barter deal to start-ups. It has to be said, media companies very seldom cooperate on anything. The pooled media consists of TV, radio and out-of-home advertising and is exchanged for an equity stake in high-growth businesses. The Pool also sets up the startup with people who are experience in entrepreneurship, angel investing and venture capital. Now, the first campaign has gone live for a new international online-shop offering home products . The investment will the equivalent of €400,000 in outdoor media advertising consisting of 3,000 posters from WallDecaux Premium Outdoor Sales in 10 German cities. Dr. Niko Waesche, Founder and Managing Partner of GMPVC says “Media for equity is a perfect way to align interests and incentives behind a high growth business.” |
Google And Samsung Announce October 11 Event: Nexus Prime Imminent | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | It looks like the wait for the elusive Nexus Prime may soon be over. Samsung has just started sending out invites for a special Samsung/Google event that’s being held on October 11 at 11:30 AM in San Diego. The topic isn’t listed, but the invitation says we’ll see “what’s new from Android”. The Prime, which has been rumored for months but is still unconfirmed, is expected to be the first device running Ice Cream Sandwich — the next major Android update, which will unify for ‘mobile’ Gingerbread OS with ‘Tablet’ Honeycomb. It’s also expected to be a beast specs-wise, with a dual-core processor, 4.5″ or 4.65″ , and 4G. Oh, and my favorite rumor: it’s supposed to be running on Verizon’s top-notch 4G network. Google’s Nexus line of phones, which have included the Nexus One and Nexus S before now, are unique in that they come with ‘Vanilla’ Android, without any carrier or OEM modifications. They’re also typically the very first devices to get updates as they’re released by the Android team. I’ve been using a Nexus One as my primary phone for nearly two years now and have also used the Nexus S extensively — both of them have been excellent, and I’m not expecting the Prime to disappoint (though I am a bit concerned by the rumored huge screen size). Aside from the Nexus Prime, the event may well feature other Samsung-made Android devices — perhaps we’ll see a Nexus tablet as well. |
Official Flickr App Arrives For Android | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | Being an Android user as well as a Flickr user has been dangerous territory for quite a long time now. There’s been no official app, and the third-party ones haven’t been too hot. Luckily for us, Yahoo has finally dropped a Flickr app that not only has their official blessing, but doesn’t suck at all. It’s quite full-featured, not just a photostream browser. You can, of course, look at your own pictures or those of others, and the experience is pleasant and Flickr-y. You can even directly download the full-size images to email or use as wallpaper. The app starts up in your activity stream, though, where your recent favorites and so on are shown. Naturally nobody likes my photos, but I assume more accomplished photographers will welcome the easy access to recent comments and favorites. There’s a nice little camera app in there, too. You can choose different aspect ratios, apply filters (named after places and imperfectly represented in the menu), add details, and send directly to social networks or email addresses. And naturally they go right into your Flickr account as well. Here’s one I took for demonstration purposes. It has the “Java” filter applied. Not an Instagram-killer by any means, but again, Flickr lovers will like it. Unfortunately you can’t add to sets, which would be handy for keeping your mobile shots separate from your “real” pictures. It’s a solid little app if you’ve got the bandwidth for it (you might want to use the wi-fi) and don’t need any of the more advanced features like groups and collections. Hopefully they’ll expand the community portion a little more in the next release. . The app is just called “Flickr” and is published by Yahoo Inc, in case it doesn’t show up for your search right away. |
Video: Jeff Bezos Demos The Kindle Fire | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | The highlight of today’s was when CEO Jeff Bezos finally announced the about midway through. We captured it on video, and you can see for yourself how Bezos introduced the device. He demos the unique interface, which highlights the media you’ve interacted with most recently. There is also Whispersync for movies, which lets you pick up watching a movie where you left off when you move between devices. And he even plays Fruit Ninja to show off the dual-core processor’s speed. You can also watch our hands-on videos for both the and to see the devices in action some more (but the one above is the only one with Bezos). And here is more of the Kindle Fire and the rest of the . |
BetterLesson Grabs $1.6 Million To Let Educators Find And Share The Best Lesson Plans | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | Primary and high school teachers already have a hard job. It’s difficult to envy the pour souls who had the unfortunate position of educating the type of disorderly rapscallions like myself at a young age. Not to mention, enduring low wages and a system largely devoid of the same technological aids that have come to assist nearly every other profession. When it comes to the actual daily process of designing the curricula that students will follow, teachers basically have to create their own, ad hoc, every night. There are lesson plan sites, but most of the content is outdated and disorganized. Lesson plans haven’t really made the jump into the digital era. A Boston-based startup called launched to address this pain point with a simple mission: Provide an easy way for educators to connect with each other and share their lessons. As Co-founder and VP of Operations Erin Osborn and Founder and CEO Alex Grodd are both former teachers themselves (and Jonathan Hendler, the third co-founder and CTO has a mom who was a career teacher), they were tired of watching as cool, original lesson plans would disappear into the folders and hard drives of obsolescence. So the founders set out to design an open, social platform to aggregate the best K thru 12 teacher-generated content. Since launching, BetterLesson has attracted a community of “tens of thousands of educators”, , and has collected hundreds of thousands K-12 lesson plans. Last year, , the 112-school charter network, joined the platform and helped the team “develop a suite of premium features” for schools. In less than a year, the site’s paying customers have grown to over 200 schools. To help it grow, the startup has announced that it has officially closed a $1.6 million series A round of venture funding from a host of venture firms, including Highland Capital Partners, General Catalyst, New Markets Ventures, and NewSchools Venture Fund — as well as angel investors like Steve Kaufer of Trip Advisor, Matt Greenfield (Stonework Capital), and Shawn and Jennifer Carolan of Menlo Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund, and more. BetterLesson will use the new round of funding to ramp up hiring and continue building out its platform and going after user acquisition. Speaking of funding, beyond outside investment, how is the startup monetizing? BetterLesson offers premium, on-site networks for enterprise customers, for which it charges a fee. The majority of the platform is free for educators, but school districts etc. can customize their home page and access enhanced functionality by opting for this premium network subscription. Considering the startup allows teachers to browse a serious repository of documents, presentations, lessons and even complete units and courses, all through a simple search interface, and upload their own lessons onto a dashboard, you can see why teachers will love this kind of resource. Then add the ability to share curricula directly with international educators and receive feedback, and you’ve got yourself a goddamn deal, as Dave Chappelle would say. For more on how BetterLesson works, check out the video below: |
Lucky eBay Buyer Demos Ice Cream Sandwich On Video | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | Why is it that random eBay shoppers always seem to have the best luck? In what has to be one of the most fortuitous purchases I’ve seen in a while, someone picked up a Nexus S off of the auction site that just happened to be running a build of Google’s latest Android update: Ice Cream Sandwich. Well, that’s the story, anyway. Thankfully, our lucky buyer was able to contain his or her excitement long enough to take some pictures and video and send them to The images in question look remarkably close to a handful of Ice Cream Sandwich pictures that leaked last month, but the video manages to explore ICS with a bit more depth. The phone’s lockscreen, for example, bears more than a passing resemblance those seen on scores of Honeycomb tablets. On top of that, holding down the Home button brings up a new multitasking menu that allows users to quickly jump from between apps. Otherwise, all of the changes in design language we spotted last time are still around. If I may : The distances between app icons and their names have increased a bit, and though the change is minor, it makes the whole layout feel more open. The notification bar is probably the biggest change, with room for bigger icons and updates. The app drawer also seems to have undergone a facelift, with different headers for apps and widgets, and an integrated link to the market for easy access. It’s always good to have a grain of salt at the ready when something like this happens, but this new media lends a bit of credence to the original leak. Either someone is pulling the strings on an elaborate hoax here, or Ice Cream Sandwich will look as it does here when it finally ships .
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3Pb6IyFvfg&w=640&h=360] |
Motorola Finally Comes Through With Xoom LTE Upgrades | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | Xoom users, rejoice! Despite having to stick it out for a few extra months, the 3G version of Motorola’s ambitious 10-incher is finally starting tomorrow. Frustrated users may remember that the Xoom was originally slated to get its LTE upgrade some time in Q2 2011, but months have come and gone without a firm release date. The process is (fortunately) still free, and remains the same as the one we heard outlined all those months ago. For those of you who haven’t jumped ship and bought a LTE Galaxy Tab 10.1, you’ll be able to ship your Xoom directly to Motorola, where they’ll perform the upgrade and send the unit back. Motorola says the entire operation should only leave you Xoom for about six business days. If you decided to hold off on buying a Xoom until you could get one with an LTE radio pre-installed, your wait is nearly over too — Motorola says those units should start popping up in stores starting on October 23. While I’m glad Motorola finally managed to keep their word on this one, it’s seems a bit crazy that users are only now getting their updates, even when a significant hardware refresh is . By throwing the Xoom an LTE bone, Motorola’s giving their tablet enough staying power to last through the holidays, but who knows how much longer the Xoom will last after that. |
Can Twitter’s Self-Serve Ad Product Meet Rosy Expectations To Drive Revenues To $400M By 2013? | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | As Twitter CEO a few weeks ago, advertising is a key strategy for the company. “Our advertising method is the only one we need to be a big business,” he said at the time. And Twitter has rolled out a number of new products including Promoted Tweets. But according to a new Twitter’s ad revenue is expected to be lower this year, and will grow significantly over the next few years once the platform’s self-serve ad product rolls out. eMarketer estimates global ad revenues at Twitter will grow 210% to $139.5 million in 2011, up from just $45 million in 2010, in the company’s first full year of selling advertising. For background, eMarketer forms its estimates for advertising spending on Twitter through an analysis of estimates of consumer usage, marketer usage, ad pricing, and impressions on Twitter, as well as revenue estimates from research firms and other sources. Earlier this year, eMarketer that Twitter would have $150 million in ad revenue in 2011. Because of Twitter’s slower-than-expected rollout of several ad offerings including ad sales offices in markets outside the US and a self-serve platform, eMarketer has adjusted its numbers. However, eMarketer says that once these products and teams are in place, Twitter’s ad revenue will continue to grow at a fast pace. In 2012, Twitter will earn $260 million in worldwide ad revenue, up 86.3% over 2011. In the U.S. alone, Twitter will reportedly pull in around $234 million in 2012. International ad revenue will reach $26 million (from $5.6 million in 2010), or 10% of total ad revenue, eMarketer estimates. By 2013, eMarketer estimates worldwide ad revenues at Twitter will reach nearly $400 million. Of course, for perspective Facebook’s ad revenue is expected to top this year. But self-serve advertising, which Twitter is expected to start testing in the near future, could help the company grow rapidly in Facebook’s direction. eMarketer says that self-serve advertising accounts for about 60% of Facebook’s ad revenue, and Twitter could see an acceleration of growth in advertising once this product is launched. But the question still remains when Twitter’s self-serve ad platform for brands will eventually launch. |
Well done Google – But TechCity needs to storm the Olympic Park next | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | There are two sides to the story of Google’s move to startup / developer hub slap bang in the middle of of Shoreditch, where so many London/UK/European startups seem to be congregating. Drawn by the cluster effect and the plethora of events in the area aimed at developers, Google’s move surely makes sense. But behind the scenes I happen to know that Number 10 has been lobbying for this kind of move for some time. In fact, rarely have I seen a government quite so pro-tech / startups as this one, to be frank. After the announcement last year by David Cameron to brand East London “Tech City UK”, I expect a lot people thought the whole thing would be forgotten. I didn’t hold out much hope myself. But, incredibly, once every couple of months since then there has been a major meeting either at Number 10 or in Shoreditch itself involving senior government advisors, large and small tech companies. Where possible, I’ve also attended and listened in. The convening power of these events to some extent is greater than the event itself. Generally you will hear from a telco like BT about broadband rollout or from an incubator. Where possible there is a little friendly debate, shall we say, about how all that is going (especially about BT’s broadband!). But afterwards the conversations and meetings arranged off the back of these are great for the network to develop. But a couple of things are going to have to happen for this to just get a lot better. First of all we need more startups at the table in front of the advisers. That’s why I’ll be recommending that any further Tech City events have at least 50% startups at the table. Also, let’s look at the initiatives. Facebook s running events. Amazon is running events – startup masterclasses started this week. Virgin Business Media is ‘trialling’ super-fast broadband in various co-working spaces. It’s all OK. But an eco-system it does not make. That leads me to my second point. We need more than commitments about “innovation centres” being created in the East of London. We need an eco-system where startups are *acquired*. Where the founders go on to make investments in other startups, and the whole process is repeated. To sound an unfashionable note in this age of austerity – we need more millionaires, and more Geek millionaires at that. So, Google, and the rest, this is what we want: We want more M&A people in London. From Google, we want a replacement for Anil Hansjee, . We want a top dog M&A person for Europe, with a support team, who can acquire start-ups. And we want exactly the same from all the other large tech companies committed to Tech City. We want boots on the ground. Thirdly, we want the craziness around the Olympic park to be sorted out. To my mind this is a great place for large corporate tech companies to locate, not startups as such. Plus, it is perfect for Cleantech and Greentech companies. It’s large and has plenty of space for wet labs etc. Unfortunately the Welcome Trust proposal has gone nowhere – although pitching it via the media probably didn’t help their case. And it’s getting worse. I have heard the famed Broadcast Centre – where thousands of media people will be during the games – has had proposals for… a ski slope and a super large freezer unit. Hardly an auspicious ending for a three times redundant building which can stream 20,000 HD channels simultaneously. What an astounding waste of sophisticated infrastructure this would be. Meanwhile, it’s a waste of human resources that are here right now. We have 300 or so highly skilled engineers working on the technical infrastructure of the Olympics who will still be in London when the games end. No wonder their tech communications manager . So here’s my fourth idea and proposal for the Olympic park: Housing for engineers! You know what the problem with London is? It’s expensive. When you want to hire five rockstar coders (some prefer “gentleman coders” bizarrely. cc. Tariq Krim / Emi Gal) from Estonia or Budapest or wherever, you can do so – but they can’t even afford to move to London. So let’s requisition – nay, let’s storm “The Bastille” of those athlete villages after the games and claim a few blocks for the tech people. Can you imagine block upon block of innovative people housed so close together? That is your next Facebook or Google right there. And that is what Tech City should do next. I hope they are listening. And the fifth proposal? Hey, that’s going to be in your comments below… |
NASA To Invite 150 Of Its Twitter Followers To Mars Rover Launch | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | While giveaways and “follow us and win!” contests aren’t always worth calling out, this promotion from is too great to pass up. They’re planning on inviting 150 of their followers to . Yes, the actual launch, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The tweetup will take place just prior to the launch window, which begins at 10:21 a.m. EST on Nov. 25. That is, of course, the day after Thanksgiving, which is a NASA holiday. So activities commence on the 23rd and you can forage around Orlando for spare turkeys. You’ll return for the launch on the 25th, and you’re welcome to stick around for up to an extra 24 hours if the launch is delayed by bad weather or sabotage. Note that this trip is not paid for! You will be invited to the launch and will have a chance to tour the facility and rub elbows with NASA staff, but you’re responsible for your flight and accommodation. What, you think they have room in their budget to put up 150 freeloaders for three nights? Registration opens at noon eastern time on October 5th and ends on the 7th. You have to have a Twitter account to win, which sadly leaves me out. They’ll be releasing updates and registration info with the hashtag , so keep an eye out. |
Self-Service Ad Platform isocket Grabs More Funding; Partners With Google; Steals Rubicon Exec | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | , a startup that makes it easy to buy and sell online advertising, is making a few big announcements today, including the closing of a multi-million dollar series A round of funding from their existing seed investors (the startup raised $1.8 million back in 2009), which includes some big name angels/VCs like Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, David Blumberg of Blumberg Capital, Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, and David Cohen of TechStars. (Disclosure: TechCrunch uses isocket to power its direct advertising.) In addition to its new infusion of capital, isocket is announcing that it has poached Ben Trenda from the . Ben is joining isocket as VP of Sales. (where he was the VP of Agency Relationships) to join Rubicon in April of last year. At Rubicon, Trenda was responsible for launching the company’s realtime bidding business and helped the Project grow to the second largest ad exchange behind Google. In addition to powering direct advertising for publishers like Mashable, VentureLoop, GameZebo, and Appolicious, isocket is officially announcing that it is has added Aol Tech properties, including TUAW (and will soon add Joystiq and Engadget) to its roster of clients. isocket has also forged a supply-side partnership with Google to integrate with its DoubleClick ad server, which means that the company will soon be plugging directly into DoubleClick For Publishers (a service used by the majority of major publishers) to bring direct ad sales straight to its customers without all the traditional hassle. isocket Founder and CEO John Ramey told us that publishers like the Cheezburger Network are already using this DoubleClick integration, and the adoption is going very well for both isocket and Google. To give a sense of what isocket does, the startup’s service makes it easy for advertisers to connect with premium publishers to buy advertising and, in turn, makes it simple for those publishers to sell their digital ads. Traditionally, for publishers who want to sell ads, sales staff (or founders, etc.) would have to manage their relationships with buyers over the phone, by email, and Excel. It involves gathering ad mockups, inventory-ing, a lengthy back and forth over size of ads, formatting, pricing, etc. and management of the whole process in spreadsheets. Simply buying an ad directly, an act that should be two-click easy, turns into a multiple-week-long process that is a pain in the ass for everyone involved. isocket’s products seek to streamline the process by allowing publishers to setup a profile, create their ad inventory, and then essentially offers a micro-marketplace from which advertisers can peruse those ads and all related info, and buy the ads they want with a few clicks. It’s a self-service platform, and the publisher is emailed directly once an interested buyer chooses to purchase the ad, allowing them to accept or reject. Once they approve, isocket takes care of the rest. And today, the startup is announcing a feature that adds additional functionality for advertisers, allowing them to place orders straight from their agency’s software that they already use — they can now search listings of premium publishers and their best inventory without having to worry about using other platforms to do business. Essentially, with the addition of these new features to its platform, isocket has created a robust platform for premium inventory with the benefit of programmatic direct sales via its API. What this means is that publishers can now share their inventories directly with the buying tools advertisers already use, like demand side platforms and media planners. In other words, less hassle, quick sales, and more orders. Now, with isocket’s APIs, users can search the platform’s curated catalog of premium publishers, search third party publishers as well, view what inventory is available at what prices, place orders directly (and programatically), make payments, and access metrics on ad performance. Some of this may sound obscure and a bit niche, but for advertisers, marketers, and publishers, isocket is building a pretty nifty platform that really brings direct ad sales into the digital era. For a deep dive into isocket’s announcements, . |
Which Wireless Carrier Stores Your Private Data The Longest? | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | Your cell phone knows all of stuff about you. It knows , which websites you’ve visited, who you call most, and, depending on how many times you’ve found yourselves drunk with your cell phone handy, what you look like without pants on. But still, you can be comforted in knowing that all of that information can be destroyed with little more than a brick and a bit of unchecked rage. But what about the stuff that live on your phone? The other half of the wireless formula, the carriers, know a hell of a lot about you too. Who holds onto that data the longest? Based on a Department Of Justice document obtained by (after the ACLU obtained it with a Freedom Of Information Act claim), there’s… not really any clear cut answer. Each carrier seems to be the worst in at least one department. As much as I’d like to praise any one carrier for being a champion of privacy rights, it seems impossible. All of them suck in one way or another. The moral of the story: be it location or browsing data, every carrier stores potentially damning evidence on you. Don’t do things you wouldn’t want prying eyes to see on your cell phone, because that data probably isn’t going anywhere for a long, time. |
null | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 9 | 16 | null |
New Humble Bundle Tries Different Pricing Tack | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | If you’ve watched the gaming world at all over the last year or so, you’re probably aware of the , a charity-orientated promotion where you pay what you want for a few standout indie titles. The few so far have had a great reception, raising millions for charity (EFF and Child’s Play). A new one has just launched with acclaimed strategy shooter as the main draw, but there’s a new wrinkle in the pricing scheme. Instead of just having the whole bundle available for any price you want to pay, you receive either just or the game plus the previous bundle depending on how much you give. Give under the average and get the game, give over the average and get the bundle. It’s a little bit brilliant. Paying over the average (around $4.40 as I write this) will almost certainly be the more popular choice, as it gets you quite a bit of extra content (the excellent and its sequel). And what happens when you pay over the average? You raise the average. It’s a nice, soft way of setting a price floor without preventing cash-strapped (or just cheap) people from paying a buck for a good game. The average price has gone up a couple pennies just as I’ve written this paragraph, and when you’re looking at sales in the hundreds of thousands, those pennies start to add up. So far they’ve sold over 30,000 bundles and have raised above $130,000. The sale’s just beginning (it goes for two weeks), so those numbers should rise quite a bit. Head on over to the to buy or just check things out. And here’s a video of the games involved: [youtube w=640 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bH7Cooa5zs] |
Microsoft Wants To Pick Your Brain For Windows Phone Tweaks | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | Mango has already begun to trickle out into the wild, and Microsoft is still trying to figure out exactly what their Windows Phone users want. Case in point: they’ve just unveiled their , where users can submit and vote for ideas that they would like to see implemented in Windows Phone 7. All snark aside, it’s a much better alternative to shooting your ideas out into the ether via Twitter, as the is quick to point out. By centralizing all of their users suggestions, Microsoft can look at potential improvements and see where user priorities lay. Despite only being open for the past few hours, a few ideas (like the three above) are already picking up steam among the Windows Phone fanbase. For the most part, the ideas tend to range from completely reasonable (a user named DevilSpawn wants less finicky capacitive keys), to the impossible (oggyb wants all existing Windows Phones to be able to wirelessly tether, even though some devices just don’t have the hardware for it). Out of this first batch of ideas, my favorite comes from Timo, who wants to see deep GroupMe integration in Windows Phone to “enable free global texting” to anyone. While it’ll almost certainly never happen, it’s at least theoretically possible: Skype has recently acquired GroupMe, and Microsoft not-so-recently acquired Skype. Also interesting is the fact that Microsoft’s use of means people won’t be able to stuff the ballot boxes. Users are limited to a total of 10 votes, and you can only give a particular submission up to 3 of them. Once an idea is accepted for consideration, those votes go right back to your pile for use on another worthy submission. With the site still in its infancy, none of the submissions have gained enough traction to warrant a further look from Team Windows Phone. Methinks Microsoft is trying to live up to their new tagline here, but let’s see if anything actually comes of it. |
Mobile devs need to get to OverTheAir this week | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | I remember when was all just fields… Just kidding. This year Europe’s largest mobile developer event lands in the UK’s Bletchley Park, the home of the World War II code breakers. Appropriate. From 9am September 30th to 5pm October 1st, up to 400 developers & designers from around the world will meet for 36 hours of non-stop mobile development. Based on the Hack Day model, attendees will share the space used to crack World War Two’s most complex codes. In honour of the location, they are re-enacting WW2 over the two days, culminating in a live show on stage of the D-Day landings (if they’d taken place on Twitter, with mobile devices, loaded with pyrotechnics). There will be over 100 talks from the world’s leading experts in mobile development and design. It will also host an O’Reilly Ignite event on the Friday night. |
TCTV: Hands On With The Kindle Fire | John Biggs | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | The Kindle Fire is the device we were all waiting for and when it arrived it did not disappoint. The Fire is a 7-inch media device that plays well with all of Amazon’s media services including the book store, the video store, and the music store. It includes a web browser and supports Amazon’s own Amazon App Store, a branch of the Android App Store that focuses on apps optimized for this device. Priced at $199, the Fire should arrive in late November and, as Matt notes, it will probably be of this season. It’s not hard to see the appeal – a price point far below the iPads but with all of Amazon’s media services built-in. Here is the upcoming Fire commercial that showcases the product and, more important, explains the monosyllabic name. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUtmOApIslE] |
OMG/JK: Sh*thead Lists, Touching On Windows 8, And A Goodbye To Mike | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 17 | Despite our , Jason and I had the chance to sit down to do an episode of OMG/JK yesterday. We focused on a few key topics: Facebook’s new subscribe social option, their smart lists, the first Windows 8 developer preview, and TechCrunch Disrupt. Obviously, it’s impossible to talk about Disrupt without mentioning Mike’s exit. So we address that at first, before going on to discuss the startups. Below, find some relevant links to the things we talk about. |
Six Must-Watch Backstage Videos From Disrupt Plus The Music (TCTV) | Jon Orlin | 2,011 | 9 | 17 | [tc_speakertext_off]It’s been a very busy week at TechCrunch with our Disrupt conference and other internal disruptions, so you may have missed some great and revealing interviews. Devin Coldewey wrote a post with the . But there was a lot of activity going on backstage too. We did more than 60 interviews with entrepreneurs, VCs, Angels, CEOs, and a Mayor. Click on video titles to view additional information from the original post including a summary, commentary and comments. The rest of the conference can be found at our . Also, if you find yourself missing or still humming the tunes from Disrupt, you can download the music created for us by in . Just moments after they won the Disrupt Cup, co-founders of Shaker sat down to talk with the TechCrunch team. Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard explains what a ‘flip’ is and what’s next for iPad tablet reader. Find out if an iPhone version is on the roadmap. Sarah Lacy described these segments tweeting “Mike Butcher is delightfully manic in start up alley.” Find out what she was talking about from the ever surprising Mike Butcher. There are two additional video segments within the . Shervin Pishevar and his Menlo Ventures has $20 Million to invest in startups. Companies that are accepted will receive between $50k and $125k. Find out what he is looking to fund. MG Siegler asks Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom how they manage their fast growth. Facebook Co-Founder and Asana Co-Founder Dustin Moskovitz tells Leena Rao how his new company is going to be another game changer. All the Disrupt videos, including the Hackathon presentations, can be found on . |
Disruptive Tendencies | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 9 | 17 | Early on Day One of , Silicon Valley legends and came out on stage with a grim message of doom: “Innovation in the world today is somewhere between … outside of computers and the Internet, we’ve had forty years of stagnation.” Meanwhile, Startup Alley boasted a large number of trivial, me-too apps, all too often marketed as “Airbnb for X” or “the gamification of Z” or “the business card … reinvented!” The judges were acutely aware of this: one of them dryly commented, re , “It’s nice to see people tackling harder problems than restaurant check-ins.” All true. But this relative stagnation is, at least to some extent, an inevitable corollary of previous innovations. It’s unfair to compare any other field to “computers and the Internet,” since we’re governed by and have been for fifty years; that kind of exponential growth just isn’t going to happen in any other industry. One subtle side effect is that innovative minds are naturally drawn towards the one domain where exponential growth sheds revolutionary new possibilities every few years. That leaves a thinner talent pool for other fields. Something similar, albeit smaller, is happening with mobile/local/social. Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Android have opened up whole new territories of innovation, including a new crop of low-hanging fruit, and we shouldn’t be surprised that most ambitious young startups are trying invade and harvest that space rather than tackling harder problems. That’s what looks like a bubble: but a lot of smart people have a more nuanced take, like Indy Guha of Bain Capital, who says, “it’s not a bubble, it’s just frothy.” Yes, it was really depressing going straight from a keynote interview with , who builds and , to an excited announcement of a new platform that “lets you build mobile games for two platforms at once!” Woo. Hoo. Sigh. But we have ever been a species that prefers amusement to exploration. To my mind it’s still a little too early to howl, a la Allen Ginsberg, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Facebook.” But do let’s keep a wise eye on the possibility. VCs there all : if you want to start a company, move to Northern California. "It's tough if you're in Cleveland. We cannot help you. If you're a young, I would absolutely advise coming to the Bay Area." -Leone — Jon Evans (@rezendi) "We see a very strong indication that where you're located does matter…come to Silicon Valley." – Joe Krauss, Google Ventures — Jon Evans (@rezendi) Michael Arrington disputed this onstage, and asked the crowd, who seemed to mostly agree with him … but I think they were wrong. It’s true there are hotspots elsewhere, eg Israel, but every industry has natural centres of power. If you want to make movies, there are plenty of second-tier power centres, eg France, New York and Mumbai, but L.A. still dominates. Similarly, if you want to build a startup, you can do it elsewhere, but Silicon Valley remains our Hollywood. Now, this won’t be the case. Bollywood may one day outpower Hollywood. Even as I type this, a Chinese company is the biggest Web IPO ever. Eventually the centers of power may shift — but let’s not confuse predicting the future with thinking that it’s already arrived. I suspect TC Disrupt will be remembered in part as the event where mobile travel apps finally erupted into the mainstream. I particularly liked , which lets travellers connect with locals who want to meet them, and , remote travel via augmented reality. Then there were ; Audience Choice winner ; and Gowalla’s that they are essentially pivoting to become a travel guide. Add that all to last week’s , and the trend is clear. This faintly saddens me personally, because it probably means pet project will no longer be the best free Android/iPhone guide-to-anywhere — but at the same time, it’s about freaking time. Of travel is going to be all about mobile, and of the future of travel guides is crowdsourced data on smartphones. I’ve seen a bunch of complaints that this only works if you travel with a roaming plan, and many people don’t. That’s true for some of these apps, but look where the puck is going. Roaming costs are diminishing, and eventually they’ll disappear. Yes, I said “disappear.” That’s right. . Many were appalled. I was not. Don’t get me wrong — I would have voted for Bitcasa, who I think were head, shoulders, and torso above all the other competitors, and potentially a huge game-changer. I was really disappointed by the judges’ questions during their session, and I wasn’t alone… . = awesome ≠ Dropbox. Cross device storage ≠ virtual machine storage. C'mon judges/DBox investors. — Joel Resnicow (@resnicow) …but I still really liked Shaker. Let me just take a moment to demolish the complaints that there have been other attempts in this space (eg Habbo Hotel) that went nowhere. When the iPhone came out, people said “History shows Apple can’t do mobile devices, look at the Newton.” When Facebook took off, many people were bewildered; didn’t the world already have Tribe.net, Friendster, and MySpace? To be clear, I am not predicting that Shaker as going to be as big as Facebook or the iPhone: I’m saying that “something like this been done before, and it didn’t work” is almost never a valid criticism. The question is, has it been done And Shaker might be doing it right. I had mixed emotions about them at first – This Shaker thing is surreal. Like The Sims for real life, or Second Life meets Facebook. Points for sheer weirdness, I guess. — Jon Evans (@rezendi) but then I warmed to them: It's no Bitcasa, but I must admit, I kind of love Shaker. It's like a weird, awkward half-step into our screwed-up future. — Jon Evans (@rezendi) Obviously not everyone felt the same… can't believe shaker won disrupt. wow. now i might quit ;) — Sarah Lacy (@sarahcuda) …but for what it’s worth… http://twitter.com/paulcarr/status/114380416869343232
A few other things I saw that I liked: : JD Lasica, . |
Weekend Giveaway: Toshiba Thrive Tablet | John Biggs | 2,011 | 9 | 17 | At TechCrunch, we don’t just want you to survive, we want you to thrive. That’s why we’re offering one Toshiba Thrive tablet to one lucky commenter. What is a Thrive? It’s a with plenty of gusto and it’s waiting to wing its way to your home, office, cloister, or dance hall. Here’s how to win. Comment below. Since this is the first weekend giveaway in a while, I’m going to limit this to US addresses only and don’t whine about Facebook comments, Mr. GNU License. Until we figure out a more capable way to pick a winner, this is how we’re going to do it. Comment once and only once and I’ll close the contest on Monday at Noon Eastern. Thanks for playing and have a thriving weekend. Update – Congrats to Joey Ruhl, winner of the Thrive. |
Daily Crunch: Bite Size | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 9 | 17 | Here are some of yesterday’s posts on TechCrunch Gadgets:
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The Mobile Picture Wars, The Moskovitz Manifesto, And Other Big Themes From TC Disrupt SF | Semil Shah | 2,011 | 9 | 17 | TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 is over. After three days of launches, pivots, interviews, and demos, I’ve finally had a chance to catch up on sleep and digest what just happened. In no particular order, here are my thematic takeaways from this year’s conference: I was naive to think the mobile picture-sharing wars started and ended last year, with Instagram the winner. Not so fast. Location-based check-in company , struggling to keep up with for mindshare within a market where the value of a check-in is being into question, smartly transformed into more of a (around location and pictures). Blogging site , to keep up with , refocused to launch “ ,” focused more on public and private sharing of pictures and video within various groups. (Incidentally, Tumblr could become with as it keeps .) And the camera wars continue. A new site by , , seeks to organize pictures around experiences. partner went on the about their investment in , which is set to release its next photo app, , with deep sharing ties into , which is to be building its own dedicated picture app. made a move to aggregate pictures around user accounts with a viewer reminiscent of (picture tagging within Twitter, from ), which I believe is still the most beautifully-designed picture app of 2011 but has not really stuck yet. Maybe even stealth startup, , may as well also leverage mobile pictures, as after all, she is a founder of . Mobile photo-sharing remains a very space and, at least for now, may present that elusive “thin edge of the wedge” with which a new startup can breakthrough and build a social network. During a with , of and Andrew Stalbow of (maker of ) discussed thought processes for building applications for new and emerging platforms. The bottom line is that both companies, which are two of the most downloaded apps ever, are committed to building for platforms where users reside. It’s about the users. If a bunch of users end up on Windows Mobile 8, expect Pandora to be there, too. At the same time, Conrad suggested that experiments with building HMTL5 applications (that could become the “lingua franca” across multiple platforms) is a possibility, too, though it is not just there yet. announced a new editor numerous HTML advancements to its platform, some of which are entirely new. While the benefits of developing in HTML5 are obvious for developers (lower costs, more efficient, and skirting app store rules), the costs to users among many designers and developers could be high enough to warrant caution in some cases , especially on the iOS platform. On the few HMTL5 apps I’ve used, the experience just isn’t the same (or even close), and developers may end up thinking twice about this path on certain platforms. It will be interesting to monitor how much technical advancement can be achieved in HTML5 and if users could, in some cases, be indifferent between these experiences on mobile. I don’t know much about (other than his co-founding of Facebook and ), but it was fascinating to hear him with about his views on the startup ecosystem. It’s worth watching the video, but briefly, after logging seven years in the Valley to date, Moskovitz believes that the current startup ecosystem, where early-stage money is so accessible, is driving founders to build companies based on narrower value propositions, so much so that it’s becoming difficult to find the right talent because its dispersed. He even speculated that had Facebook been founded in 2011, he wasn’t sure if the company today would find the right talent to execute on the vision. Moskovitz also believes that ex-Facebook employees who are now founders are often driven by a common ethos to build a lasting company, as opposed to building to sell, even if that presents mildly irrational along the way. I was impressed with his willingness to speak his mind given his quiet profile. co-founder , a successful angel investor (and investor in ) and founder of , sat down to chat with the . As you’ll see in the , Rose is careful to warn that Milk’s first mobile offering, “ ,” will be followed-up by two to three others, and honorably recognizes that no one really knows how app launches will do in such a rapidly moving, competitive environment. I have noticed a larger trend of newer mobile companies adopting the “labs” , which I believe softens expectations around big initial launches and signals to investors, the tech press, and early adopters that their endeavors are very much experiments and to expect more of them in the eternal quest to build that killer app. The rise of the “Lean Startup” movement has both inspired a huge cadre of developers to build quick and iterate fast, yet has also generated a tiny backlash (the “ “) and raised the eyebrows of some of the Valley’s most successful investors, such as , who recently in response to a question inquiring about the number of successful Internet companies using this method: “there are none.” The movement’s current figureheads, mainly and Stanford’s , bring droves of research projects and years of experience in the industry. with Intuit founder Scott Cook and Instagram founder Kevin Systrom at Disrupt. This movement has struck a chord with technical founders in particular, perhaps partly because this methodology provides a basic business operations and management framework to those who don’t have those types of experiences to draw from. Of course, I’m drawing generalizations here. On the flip side, I’ve talked to some investors and entrepreneurs who feel constrained by this level of thinking and want to start big, right off the bat. As is the case with most things, the truth probably lies in the middle and is best applied on a case-by-case method rather than a system of belief. By now, everyone knows that investors, both individual and institutional, are tinkering with ways to market themselves to entrepreneurs. They are blogging more, participating in social media, attending more events, investing at the seed stage, and staffing up with business-related professionals (and professional ad-hoc networks) to keep up with the times. These manifest themselves in different ways. During the conference, for instance, bemoaned being called a venture “capitalist” and prefers “ .” He also believes many investors are primarily driven by “doing deals” rather than helping entrepreneurs. You have to hand it to Khosla, who is a successful venture , and there’s no shame in that. The top firms continue to invest in the early stages, with investors from , , and saying as much. A year ago at Disrupt, announced its early-stage , and this year, announced a new “ ” with . Both of these vehicles exist to allow institutional investors to invest more quickly in interesting early-stage startups. The next day, partner with Arrington to discuss his latest investments, a few of which are overseas, such as (Brazil). He has also been visiting Berlin, which he believes is a good place for startups. Some investors prefer (for various reasons) to invest close to home, and some investors are looking outside Silicon Valley and slowly outside national borders for those unique opportunities. Investors often say they want to see more bold, seemingly-impossible concepts. Well, here you go: During Tuesday’s , one of the presenters was , at first a seemingly strange startup for Disrupt (a social network to help you grow your own food), but after some reflection, it struck me as one of the most unique concepts during the whole event. I’m not saying they’ll turn into , but as judge casually remarked after the demo, they’ve sort of “created for farming, in real life.” The idea of tending to backyard and community gardens is slowly spreading across the nation, ever since U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama made this one of her key in promoting good nutrition. I’d recommend watching the , too. After the demo, Chien offered advice: briefly, he encouraged the founders to think about how to (1) partner with local service providers to help with buying garden supplies and installation, and (2) connect with local restaurants who want locally grown produce from excess supply. Now, this is a new spin on “online-to-offline commerce.” No promises that this company gets there, though many hope they do, and I think the interaction between Chien and the founders highlights the importance of entrepreneurs finding the right investing partners who can help stretch their business ideas and also pushes back against some of the current prevailing gossip winds that investors are only good for their money. Expect the anticipation of Facebook’s IPO to slowly grow as the year ends. Two of the company’s most prominent leaders, and , visited to discuss product, engineering, social ads, and a range of other topics. In the last few months, Facebook has changed course on “ ” and “ ” yet rolled its Beluga into a super-slick iOS . At the same time the Facebook execs were on stage, there was some press speculation that Facebook wants to delay any IPO until September 2012, possibly later, though there were conflicting accounts. Booking around $3b in annual revenue, the social network isn’t under any immediate pressure to file, except for pent-up demand among vested employees and investors. The IPO expectations are rising, and no doubt Facebook is just scratching the surface of what it can potentially do, but there will soon be more and more pressure on Facebook to live up to those expectations, even if they have been inflated unfairly by others. Whatever Zuckerberg ends up doing, he may want to send a message to troops that there’s more to build, or perhaps he feels that with revenues growing, social ads not exactly figured out, that it’s better to refocus and make sure that whenever the IPO hits, all the loose ends are tied up. Some of the most successful super angels (or micro-VCs) like ( ), ( ), ( ), ( ), and ( ) engaged in an interesting, sometimes rambling, with new club member Mike Arrington ( ) about a range of topics. Even though some of these topics are obviously worn out, it’s worth watching the . In particular, there’s a detailed discussion about uncapped convertible notes and the entrepreneurs who are able to negotiate for those kinds of terms, even though it presents more risk for early-stage investors who are already taking great risk. Second, Arrington raised an interesting question about the difference between a super-angel investment (which sometimes requires a product or traction) versus the truer sense of angel investing, from family, friends, and those who have been successful in the industry and community. What’s clear from the video is that even though we tend to lump super angels into one investing class, they are all very different, are driven by different signals and investment theses, and therefore, should be approached differently by hopeful entrepreneurs. Well, there you have it. Remember, this is just one personal take on bigger themes I noticed during interviews and one simple man’s attempt to find some signal within the noise. It would be even more interesting if you could comment below on other themes you picked out from the event (good or troubling), and I’ll make sure to follow up and comment. Thanks in advance, and on to China for . |
Spotify And Ford Team Together To Showcase The Music Service’s First In-Car Integration | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 10 | Today at the TechCrunch Hackathon, Ford, the second largest automaker in the U.S., teamed with Spotify, the fast-growing Swedish music service that recently arrived in the states, to demonstrate the current opportunities for in-car app innovation as well as the new voice-activated system. Just to clarify: This isn’t an “official partnership”, it’s just a cool hack meant to demonstrate how easy it is to integrate with SYNC. For those unfamiliar, Ford SYNC is the in-vehicle communications and entertainment system that allows drivers to make hands-free phone calls, as well as control music and other in-car entertainment with their very own vocal chords. SYNC recently added integration with (in 2011 Ford Fiestas for now) to allow hands-free use of smartphone apps in the car. At Hackathon today, Ford offered developers the opportunity to learn more about SYNC’s API and demonstrate how to integrate apps like Spotify into SYNC. This is Spotify’s first in-car integration, and it’s still an initial hack, but it’s a pretty good start. We’re hoping this becomes a long-term Ford/Spotify strategy. The tremendous growth of smartphone apps has created the need and the opportunity to provide the same voice-controlled solution for apps that drivers are now using in the car — but it also has to stay safe. “Look ma no hands!” is never something you want to hear while in a car with someone. SYNC provides users, through voice assistance, with the ability to easily control their car’s multimedia and app functions, and at at the Hackathon today Spotify is on board in the passenger seat. According to Julius Marchwicki, the SYNC AppLink program manager, TC Hackathon was the perfect place to launch to give developers the information they need on Ford’s new API and SDK to get developers hacking on in-car entertainment and app goodness. So just what’s possible for developers with SYNC AppLink at this point in its development? When working with SYNC-enabled smartphone apps, developers are able to create a voice user interface using SYNC’s in-vehicle speech recognition system, write information to the radio head display or in-vehicle touch screen, using the text-to-speech engine, the in-vehicle meny system to provide commands for their mobile app, and vehicle data, like speed, GPS location, and fuel economy. All good stuff to know, and it’s nice to see Ford, a company that didn’t look so hot a few years ago, getting in on the innovation train. SYNC AppLink will be available in 10 models (of Ford vehicles) beginning in 2012, including Ford Fusion, the Fusion Hybrid, Mustang, Shelby, Fiesta, F-150, and more. |
TCTV: Roaming The Hackathon Hall | John Biggs | 2,011 | 9 | 10 | We ran through the Hackathon this afternoon, asking folks what they were working on. The results, obviously, were quite varied and very impressive. Our favorites? The dudes working on an air guitar for the iPhone and some other cats working on image-based logins and data sharing. It’s a bit on the long side but everyone was quite interesting and, arguably, entertaining. |
Meet Ten Disrupt Hackathon Hackers | John Biggs | 2,011 | 9 | 10 | Here are ten hackers we met at today’s Disrupt Hackathon. These folks have steeled themselves with snack food and coffee and are hacking away as we speak. Rob Banagale is the founder of a new product launching at the Hackathon, so we’re going to let him debut the name. In the words of Rob, “it’s a new identity service that lets you represent yourself through a series of pictures.” We’re not quite sure what that means but we’re excited to see. A couple of Rob’s tech heroes include Steve Jobs, and Arthur C. Clarke. His proudest moment of hackery was when he added Twitter integration to a live music chat room for live music fans. He seems cool, but his picture says it all. Blue Steel, baby. He’s based out of Seattle, but if you want to get in touch with Rob, hook up with him on Twitter: Conrad has a bad case of carpal tunnel, but he’s still ready and raring to go. As CTO, he’s launching his new product at Disrupt’s Start-Up Battlefield. Obviously, he was a bit sparse with the details, but his launch isn’t the only reason he’s here. Conrad is looking to hire, and he made a great choice in looking here. A couple projects he’s working on during the Hackathon are an auto-tagging system for language processing, and building a rudimentary webapp based on his API in time for the launch. Some of Conrad’s heroes are Steve Jobs, Larry Wall, and Kevin Mitnick. Find him on Twitter: Monica is a third-year student at UC Berkeley, and this is her first trip to Hackathon. She is here with a group of more experienced hackers, and said she felt she had to come. “Everyone tells me that the Hackathon is such a pivotal moment in people’s lives. I had to come.” Her group is brainstorming through a few hacking ideas, but things are still up in the air. Luckily, most of the pressure is off Monica. She’s here for the experience, not the cash. Want to get in touch with Monica? Check her out on Twitter: Maria flew quite a ways to come to our Hackathon (she’s from Greece), but she seems stoked to be here. And I’m personally pretty stoked she’s here, too. Maria is a designer for BugSense. They have a number of different products in the works/on the market, but today’s project is called Ping Pong Hero. It’s basically a way to use your Android phone as a ping pong paddle, and play a virtual game of table tennis sans table, ball, or real paddles. The app will even share real time scores and stats to your friends who can’t see the action live. Very cool. Maria’s point of pride is Bug Sense, a six-month old start up with over 1,000 active users. If you feel like chatting her up, visit her Twitter: Guy’s group was silly, and didn’t register. So he’s been waiting for them since the Hackathon started. Based in Sunnyvale, CA, Guy is all about safety — at the last Hackathon he built an app that alerts you of nearby wildfires. This time he’s switched things up, but we wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise. Guy’s hero is Bill Gates, which is a refreshing choice amidst all the Jobs fans. Follow Guy on Twitter: Josie is from L.A., and made her way to San Fran this weekend after a very successful stint at last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt. You may remember her product, People’s Choice Award winner, Miso Music. Today, her plan is to build a gaming app, also based on music. You are asked a series of trivia questions related to playing music, or perhaps even put on the spot to play an “F” on the nearest instrument. When Josie grows up, she wants to be like Angie Chang of Women 2.0 and Miso Media’s current CTO, Ryan Tsukamoto. Interested? Follow Josie on Twitter: You may recognize the name, and if you don’t you obviously aren’t reading very carefully. Along with being one of Josie’s heroes, Ryan is also the CTO at Miso Music. While Josie works on her music trivia game, Ryan is focusing on an augmented reality app that lets you play musical instruments. Right now, the focus is on a set of air drums. Ryan is originally from Hawaii, but is currently based in L.A. His hero is Alonzo Church, and his proudest moment is winning that People’s Choice Award last year. That would be my proudest moment, too. Want to learn more about Ryan? Danil’s company is launching this week on Start Up Alley. But today, his focus is on a product that has to do with the after world. We can’t go into too much more detail, but it’s definitely a necessity in today’s world. It’s possible that Danil has come further than anyone here at the Hackathon — he’s from Siberia. Unfortunately, the rest of his team couldn’t quite get visas in time, so he’s skyping with them on a mid-sized LCD at his table. Dan’s hero is Loic Le Meur, who you may recognize from Seesmic. If you want to know more about Dan, check him out on Twitter: Visiting for the Hackathon and for his brother Ben’s birthday, Zac came all the way from Tallahassee, FL. He and his group are still brainstorming, but one thing they seem to have ruled out is the overly common social networking angle. Zac deals mostly with the back-end of the business, while his brother Ben is more the face of the company. His heroes include John Carmack, and his bro. Zac, oddly enough, doesn’t have a Twitter account, but you can get to know his brother Ben: Last but not least among our Hackathon Hackers is Jennie Lees. She lives in the Bay Area, but her accent proves her English roots. The plan for today is to improve Hacker News for mobile, and eventually personalize it by bringing in other news sources. A few of Jennie’s heroes include the oft-mentioned Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Hacker News’s Paul Graham. One of her proudest moments was surviving the Hackathon last year, and building something that worked: an app that rated start up pitches in real time. If you want to get to know Jennie better, follow her on Twitter: |
The Disrupt Hackathon In San Francisco Has Officially Begun | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 9 | 10 | Every hacker is different, and that’s exactly what we expect to see when this is all through. Something new, something different — all with the potential to disrupt. So far about half of registrants have made it into the venue, with the rest still signing in. Laptops are already fired up, hackers are putting their heads together, and the energy in the room is palpable. I’d guestimate that about 90 percent of the laptops in here are Macs, and the great majority of those are MacBook Airs. Apparently that’s the hacker’s notebook of choice. A full snack bar, shown below, is ready and waiting, though these guys seem much more preoccupied with getting their hack on. We’ll keep you posted with the coolest projects throughout the day, but for now check out the first few photos of the madness.
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The Disrupt Hackathon Is Powering Up! | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 9 | 10 | It’s nearly noon and the Disrupt Hackaton Hackers are converging on the Design Center Concourse like zombies hunting only one thing: caffeine. We’ll bring you posts from the floor as the festivities start but we thought it would be nice to see the building in its pristine state before countless cups of coffee, pizza rinds, and soda pop cans litter the landscape like the detritus from some wild-eyed steampunk-inspired Woodstockian bacchanal. We’ve got volunteers, editors, writers, and other various staff members plugging, pulling, and untangling in preparation for a day of hardcore hackery. Here are a few choice shots from the show floor as we set up and, most important, we just discovered three old arcade games in a hidden hallway including the ever-popular . We’ll have updates throughout the night.
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null | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 28 | null |
Two Key Features Of Facebook Music: Scrobbling And Track Unification | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 10 | Yesterday, we outlined a bit of what . One big launch will be their official foray into music. Today, we’ve heard more about that launch. One thing we’ve heard from a very good source is that a key aspect of the service will be “scrobbling”. The term, made popular by Last.fm, means that when you listen to a song, it gets sent to your profile without you have to do anything. I assume there will be a way to turn this off, or a way for you to selectively share songs, but this is a key to the service. Not that a post-music-to-profile feature should be surprising. Facebook’s core feature is the feed, and music will now make it even more robust. In fact, depending on how popular Facebook Music is, it could end up being one of the biggest sources of feed content. And I think it will be pretty popular based on the second bit of information we’ve heard. Facebook Music will also apparently offer content resolution between all the different music partners involved. This means that if you’re listening to Rdio and a track goes up on your profile, a MOG user can click on the track and still hear the exact same song in full. Essentially, you’ll only need to sign up for of the major music services Facebook is launching with to be able to access most content (there undoubtedly will be some songs available on one service but not another, so it probably won’t be fully seamless, but I assume you’ll be able to hear previews regardless). This content resolution will likely be the most important aspect of Facebook Music. It turns Facebook into the great social music unifier. You can share songs without having to worry if your friends will be able to hear it or not based on what streaming service they use. It’s not clear what partners Facebook has gotten to agree to this unification beyond Rdio, MOG, and Spotify. It’s certainly possible that while other services will be a part of Facebook Music, those three will be the key ones. In terms of functionality, we’ve also heard that there will be a standard player that plays music without interruption from page to page as you browse Facebook. on the persistent controls as well as a larger Music Dashboard area. Malik stated that the player would be at the bottom of Facebook, but we’ve heard that Facebook has been testing variations on this player, so it’s not yet clear where it will reside (top, bottom, etc). : Inside Facebook’s Josh Constine has an interesting : what if the desktop software team at Facebook was working on a scrobbler that could also work with iTunes to import listens? Those tracks could then by matched and played via Spotify, MOG, Rdio, etc, on Facebook Music itself. Constine notes that he doesn’t have any inside information on this, but he did following our post from May on . Even if that isn’t a part of the initial roll-out, this makes a lot of sense down the road for Facebook Music. Or what about a Last.fm for the service? And what would Apple think of all this? |
294 Patent Lawsuits Were Filed In August 2011; Mobile Handset Complaints Up 25 Percent Yearly | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 9 | 10 | There’s no question that the Google is paying $12.5 billion for Motorola . In July, an anti-Google consortium raised for Nortel’s patents (and they ). Interdigital, Kodak, and others are looking to sell their patent portfolios. As my colleague Erick Schonfeld wrote recently, we are in the midst of a . One startup, , is aiming to help companies gain insight into data and analytics on patent litigation. And unsurprisingly, the company’s online patent litigation database is being used by most of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley. The company is just did a study on mobile handset litigation. According to Lex Machina’s data, mobile handset lawsuits are up roughly 25 percent a year since 2006. In fact, in August of 2011 alone, there were 294 patent lawsuits, 8 percent of which were mobile-related. Currently, Apple is involved in 97 open patent cases ( an example of one). Motorola Mobility is involved with 38 open patent cases. We’ve known that there is a rise of patent trolls, and causing companies billions. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently pointed out in the patent system, and believes that crowdsourcing is the future to reforming patents. But until any reform happens, the flawed system is here to stay. For background, Lex Machina was spun off of a partnership between Stanford Law School and the Stanford Computer Science Department. Initially, the research behind the company was funded by the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship and companies like Apple and
Genentech. It was then spun off and funded by and ULu Ventures. Lex Machina is announcing free access to its service for small mobile app makers who have been sued (not a bad deal considering access is usually $10,000 per year, per seat on the SaaS model). Companies who want to request access should email access@lexmachina.com. |
Samsung Quietly Continues To Conquer The World | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 9 | 10 | Is there anything Samsung doesn’t do? The same week I bought myself a shiny new , they launched a for use in the developing world. Unlike any American or European company, Samsung Electronics manufactures smartphones their memory chips, TVs their screens, computers their hard drives. They’re the only entity that’s both arms dealer and aggressor in the midst of the biggest arms race the tech world has ever seen. (Meanwhile, their sister companies in the build both ships and skyscrapers, sell life insurance, and operate theme parks.) Their exceeds that of Apple or Microsoft, and their global reach is unparalleled. Sure, they’re a patent with Apple the – but at the same time, ; even if they lose every legal battle, every iPad/iPhone/iTouch sale will still in part into Samsung’s coffers. Their flagship phones and devices , but they also maintain their own entirely separate smartphone platform, and have even kept one finger in the pie, while . Oh, yes, and they’re also apparently launching a any day now. Six months ago this seemed like a pointless lack of focus, and reminded me of William Gibson’s Josef Virek: “ ” But now that Google has bought Motorola, and there’s a real risk of other Android vendors becoming second-class citizens, it seems like wise long-term thinking. So does that solar-powered netbook. Developing markets are ripe for a massive boom in consumer technology, but are still hampered by shoddy infrastructure, especially . That means both rural areas and megacities alike will welcome tech whose lifespan is prolonged by solar power. Of course, the real action will be in cheap smartphones, as , and as shown in Kenya this year, where Huawei’s $90-with-no-contract Android phone has . I expect that within the next six months, Samsung will launch its own bare-bones, cut-price Android phone — and maybe a companion solar charger — to join Huawei in targeting the five billion people who live outside the current “traditional” smartphone market. And here’s another intriguing left-field prospect. Their products compete directly with Apple’s, in both the courtroom and the market, and now that Google has bought Motorola, they too have become half a competitor. But Samsung doesn’t have anything remotely like the software talent or online presence you find in Cupertino and Mountain View. If they wanted to expand into that space as well (admittedly a big if) they could take a half-step in that direction by acquiring poor crippled Yahoo!. It would be relatively cheap, by Samsung’s gargantuan standards; it would fit nicely into their megaconglomerate soup-to-nuts strategy; and I suspect it would also be the best thing to happen to Yahoo! in a long time. |
Gillmor Gang 9.10.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 9 | 10 | The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — rallied from big media’s confusion over how to grapple with reality. For @dannysullivan, the notion that Apple dominates the social moment (@stevegillmor says this) flies in the face of reality, or at least last years’s model. For @scobleizer, Google+ is becoming the home of conversation, while @kevinmarks takes umbrage at the idea that Apple and iOS are only for rich people (@stevegillmor doesn’t say this.) @jtaschek spends some of his social capital reimagining new names for the AOL/Yahoo fantasy merger, and @stevegillmor sees blue sky ahead as iOS 5 and its push notification bus pulls into town. @dannysullivan, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek, @stevegillmor |
The Fragmented Mobile Information Race | Semil Shah | 2,011 | 9 | 10 | Mobile devices are shifting many individual computing behaviors, perhaps none more significant than how we search for and receive information. Right now, it’s moving at warp speed. In between the time I finish this draft and its posted, it’s entirely possible another company or service launches in this space. Every time we “swipe open” our mobile devices, we seek out dopamine hits from receiving new emails, texts, notifications, or other bits of digital media. A good chunk of this current mobile activity revolves around the personalized search and Q&A space, which leverages these behavior in new ways. By now, on traditional computers, we know how to find the information we seek, whether via sites like , , or through social networks. On mobile, however, our information needs and habits shift. On the go, we typically want smaller bits of information quicker, usually calibrated to our location. We are less likely to engage in longer discussion, and more likely to add questions in the hopes that machines, crowds, or some combination can produce relevant information. This shift has opened the floodgates of activity in the personalized search and Q&A space, with an impressive number of new applications vying for user attention in a crowded marketplace. Currently, “normals” with smartphones predominantly search for information on their mobile devices through Google, Wikipedia, or, on occasion, various social networks (either via dedicated applications and/or through the browser). Other apps exist for certain needs, such as , , or for location-specific information and reviews, and for personal search, or services such as , , and even , which allow users to ask questions and (hopefully) receive good answers. This crowded landscape is about to get even more fragmented. In the last month, unveiled their beautifully designed iPhone app, which machine learning techniques to search, filter, and tune results for restaurants, with the added benefit of learning about your tastes from your social graph and more frequent use of the app. They will eventually move into other areas. iPhone app, by , is somewhat similar to Ness without the social inputs. iPhone app lets users browse nearby, scrapes reviews (and menus), and encourages users to ask and answer questions. users to ask questions linked to a specific location with tie-ins back into various social networks, as does , which I presume Hipster will do, too, which is somewhat tangential to approach of offering location-specific information. iPhone app takes things a step further, asking users to connect major social networks to aggregate potential questions around locations. (This is a very crowded space, so was really hard to include everyone or even come close.) In that app I happened to stumble into a Q&A thread where an employee from Quora had offered an answer. Which begs the question: How is Quora handling mobile? As I’ve and as the company has , it seems their iPhone app could be released soon. Mobile is a tricky play for Quora given how dense the site’s information is, though their mobile site has served users well so far. Their first isn’t likely to include the ability to capture images and pose questions by picture. In the meantime, apps like offer a service whereby users can receive information about the pictures they upload, which is sort of what will eventually do, too. Quora’s transition to mobile will meet similar challenges faced by other established Q&A sites with significant traffic, mainly and , which each have a few iPhone apps available but seemed to have paused on native solutions. One of the newest entrants, by , is set up as a lightweight Quora-style interface where users can post their “needs” and the community can make suggestions to “fill” those needs. They have hinted at a mobile app soon, too, perhaps one tied to SMS integration. The importance of asking and answering questions on the go isn’t lost on the incumbents. In December 2010, Fluther with the hope of capturing Twitter’s question-related activity, though results haven’t emerged yet. Facebook has the in place for a “Questions” feature, allowing users to distinguish posts between “updates” and “questions,” as well as a slightly hidden feature of asking specific friends to answer, all backed by a topic ontology that is almost as impressive as Quora’s. (It’s fair to wonder, also, if they’ll release a separate mobile app for “Questions” as it has for “Messages” and is poised to for pictures.) LinkedIn “Answers” generates decent traffic. Google Aardvark last year for similar reasons, but recently announced it was the project, though it remains uncertain if they’ll bake some type of Q&A feature into future versions. The competition in this space is incredible, reminiscent of the mobile photo-sharing wars of 2010. It’s safe to say that no one really knows what’s going to happen in Q&A, though it does seem really smart folks have decided that, perhaps one day (or sooner), Google’s traditional search on mobile may need to have more layers of signals in order to continue to provide relevant results for users on the go. Let’s take it a step further. What about next-generation technologies that can make the experience for the everyday mobile user more magical? Perhaps will integrate technology from its of Siri and transform the iPhone? Perhaps another handset maker will nail a -like speak-to-text integration? Perhaps we can simply take a picture of where we are and receive tailored information immediately? Perhaps Google, after its of Motorola, will reign in Android and potentially even free handsets to ensure Android’s growth? Or, maybe it’s something as simple as or as wild as , which rich metadata around most of the iPhone’s sensors in order to implicitly paint a digital image of one’s physical and social whereabouts. The sheer level of competition is amazing. No doubt the folks who built must be shaking their heads, especially since they’ve redesigned their own interface. And, in mobile, users’ search behaviors could change so dramatically if given the right tools, so much so that it could eventually threaten search incumbents’ traffic and brand. In particular, Google has trained us to search by keyword for over a decade now, but in real life, this way as humans. Rather, we often search by posing questions to others around us, an activity that is inherently social, and are influenced by many social signals. And now that the social layer is permanent, and now that many apps can leverage a device’s location (and other) sensors, it’s possible to combine these variables and use a mix of crowdsourcing, curation, and machine learning to provide users with more robust and more relevant information. This paradigm poses a long-term threat to Google from many angles. To be clear, we are not there yet. Google search will dominate for some time. Google has a powerful, global brand, and now that they are moving to controlling more of the mobile stack with their purchase of Motorola, it’s not out of the question that they will do whatever they need to do to keep Android relevant, perhaps even giving away free phones in exchange for building and maintaining a G+ account? Whatever the outcomes may be today, mobile search and specifically the mobile Q&A market is wide open, up for grabs, and will continue to be an outpost in the Google is currently fighting. And while all of us keep asking questions, I wonder who or what will provide the answers: will it be humans, or machines, or a bit of both? https://twitter.com/#!/semilshah/status/109355385240027138 https://twitter.com/#!/cyrusradfar/status/109363946158432256 |
Applications For Paul Graham’s Office Hours Close Today. Get Your Applications In Now. | Elin Blesener | 2,011 | 9 | 10 | One of the most popular Disrupt sessions is . (See video below). We are bringing it back to Disrupt SF on Monday, September 12th. If you are attending Disrupt and would like to be considered, be sure you fill out the form below and fill it out soon. We will consult with Graham to select the best candidates, based on which ones can get the most out of the interaction onstage and will provide insightful lessons for the audience. At the start of the session, Paul will select five companies from those finalists. All finalists need to be prepared and ready to walk on stage immediately. Get your applications in now! |
Hi5 Confirms “Significant” Layoffs, Wraps Them In Mumbo Jumbo Speak | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | Earlier today, we heard social network was laying off a large number of their remaining employees. When we pinged them about this, we expected the usual “no comment” or simply no response. Instead, here’s what we got from President/CTO Alex St. John: In support of our market strategy to launch next generation social gaming platform by early next year, our operations team migrated the site infrastructure to the Windows Server OS. This enabled us to consolidate servers, reduce data center costs and increase site performance (We achieved a nearly 12:1 reduction in server and database requirements). We have also been building the next generation site in a new architecture, .NET framework, and have moved away from Open Source and Java technology. As we have recently turned the corner on our technology migration efforts we have been able to significantly reduce the number of positions required to support the older hi5 site and are in the process of re-organizing the company to focus entirely on the development and deployment of our next generation social play site. Did you catch that in there? “we have been able to significantly reduce the number of positions required to support the older hi5 site and are in the process of re-organizing the company” Poor phrasing and verboseness aside, yes, there have been a large number of layoffs. That’s too bad. I feel like I’ve read this particularly story several times over the years. There were big layoffs in and as well. I recall about the massive round of layoffs at Hi5 in 2009, and the company trying to tell me the story was “inaccurate” but refusing to say how it was inaccurate. It turns out it was accurate. Though I don’t think anyone with the company back then is still with the company. Once the third-place social network behind only Facebook and MySpace, Hi5 then pivoted towards gaming completely, and raised a new . Now it’s on to another “next generation” version of Hi5. And apparently it’s one that requires much less manpower. Says St. John: We are still in the process of planning the next generation site launch and expect to release more information to the press as we finalize the details of the launch date and launch feature set. The departing folks were very talented and we hated to let them go but our business is changing rapidly now. We hope that other great companies in this area snap them up quickly. : We’ve confirmed with the company that 28 people were let go (19 full-time plus 9 contractors). These employees were working on site operations. |
Daily Crunch: Beans & Chips | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 9 | 10 | Here are some of yesterday’s Gadgets posts:
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The Guy Behind The Qwikster Twitter Account Realizes What He Has, Wants A Mountain Of Cash | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | Last night, Jason went to bed a normal man, with a normal Twitter account (albeit one with a weed-smoking Elmo as the avatar), and a few dozen followers. This morning, Jason woke up to an inbox full of messages, thousands of new followers, and wants to sell his account for many thousands of dollars. As we , Netflix made a rather fundamental mistake in launching : they didn’t make sure they had the name locked down on all of the big social networks making the announcement. As Jason’s luck had it, he had long owned the @Qwikster handle. He’s willing to part with it — he just wants to make sure he’ll “be making bank” first. After over a month of silence, Jason’s @Qwikster account sprang back to life just a few hours ago and, likely to Netflix’s horror, has been more active today than it ever was before. Jason keeps touching on the idea of selling the account between poetic bursts like “I’m about to go play soccer n I got stug by a fucken bee” and “I just got scared I went into the shower turned on the water n then stuff started falling I was lik omg wtf lol”: Jason seems to have rallied the, erm, expert counsel of his friend Gabriel ( ) who says they’re “not talkin til the offers get in 6 figures”. Someone should probably tell Jason that selling Twitter handles is strictly against Twitter’s , and attempts to do so can quickly result in the banhammer being dropped. Then Qwikster gets their name, free of charge. |
Inspired By ‘Minority Report,’ Immersive Labs Raises $810K For Digital Display Recognition | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | alumnus is announcing its $810K in seed funding today, led by investors , Robert Semmens, Windquest Group, Teddy Schiff and followed on by , Andy Keller, Simon Gelfand, Jay Weintraub, Peter Krupp and Mac Harman. Along with the new funding, the company is also announcing Justin Holmes joining the team as CTO and Jill Miller joining the team as EVP. Immersive Labs is working on futuristic advertising displays like those in the well known book and film , which tailor advertising to the individual viewer. Immersive Labs’ digital signs use cameras and facial recognition technology to determine viewer characteristics like gender, age, distance and time spent viewing the ad in order to then serve up the advertising that would be most relevant (see the demo video below). The targeting technology has shown an over 60% increase in viewer attention time during pilot tests, according to CEO Jason Sosa. Immersive Labs plans on using the money to bolster its development team, and hopes to have the technology ready to hit the Los Angeles and New York markets by the fall — Which is kind of scary, come to think of it. |
Nikon Hypes Up Mystery Wednesday Launch | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | A new website has just gone live, the rather curiously-named . I guess didn’t want to sell. It consists of a lot of yellow, a countdown at around 43 hours as of this writing, and the ominous message “I AM COMING.” What is coming? Well, we’re guessing it’s Nikon’s . We saw some leaked specs a while back, and have been seeing patents and rumors for a months. The cameras are supposed to be quite compact, with 10.1-megapixel sensors an a 2.7x crop factor, with a new “CX” lens system. The higher-end V1 would have an EVF and the cheaper J1 would sport a built-in flash. Both would have a 3-inch LCD on the back and possibly an interesting form of motorized zoom. A whole new Nikon system could be a major win if they get a quality product out before arch-rival Canon, but it could also be a colossal boondoggle if the devices fail to draw buyers away from the rapidly-improving micro four-thirds standard and others like it. That said, launching a working product is an accomplishment in itself, and if they’re on their second iteration when Canon decides to join the party, that’s worth it whether the camera is a hit or not. We’ll be watching closely for news and maybe we’ll even find ourselves in a position to handle the new cameras come Wednesday. |
Disrupt Beijing: Niklas Zennstrom, Kevin Systrom, Hosain Rahman and More Are China-Bound | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | We’re not done announcing our all-star lineup for Disrupt Beijing. In addition to top Chinese Internet names like Tencent co-founder and CEO , proven successes like YouTube’s and top up-and-coming Western names like Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka and Evernote’s Phil Libin, we’ve got even more startup experts lined up. I’m thrilled to announce that Skype co-founder will be joining us in Bejing as well. As co-founder of Kazaa back in the Web 1.0 days, Zennstrom was on the bleeding edge of the peer-to-peer music revolution that helped make the Web cool. He followed that up with a wonky plan to leverage peer-to-peer technology to make cheap international phone calls that initially no one wanted to fund. That idea would become Skype– a company that sold to eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005, was bought back, and sold again to Microsoft for . Few entrepreneurs have managed to achieve multiple billion-dollar-or-more exits in their careers– fewer still have done it twice with the same company. Skype is also one of the only Western Web companies of its generation to achieve huge success in China. Today, Zennstrom is interested in doing more investing in China through his London-based venture firm , so this is a keynote local Chinese entrepreneurs will not want to miss. We’re also bringing Instagram co-founder with us from the Valley. Instagram has been a runaway success locally and globally. On stage, Systrom will talk about the journey and what’s next for Instagram. Off-stage, he’ll be exploring China for the first time. Not all the US speakers are new to China. In fact, China has been core to the success of two of our other speakers’s companies: of Jawbone and of ShoeDazzle. The scorchingly hot has raised more than $100 million in funding in the last year and has some of the biggest names in the Valley behind it– from Andreessen Horowitz to Sequoia Capital. It has achieved something few Valley companies have in the last decade: Building a cutting edge hardware company. And Rahman couldn’t have done it without Chinese partnerships. Similarly, Brian Lee’s has leveraged China’s supply chain prowess to invent a new, business model for ecommerce. Lee and Rahman will tell us about their experiences doing business in the country, and why more Chinese entrepreneurs don’t exploit these endemic advantages to create their own branded, product companies. Stay tuned for even more speaker announcements of this can’t-miss conference in coming weeks. As a reminder, tickets are , and are still open for the startup battlefield and the . Thanks as always to our partners at , who are working hard to ensure the event’s success. If you have any doubts about whether you want to apply or attend, I encourage you to watch from last week’s stellar Disrupt San Francisco conference. |
Smartphone-Powered EEG Makes For Creepy Meetings | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | The Technical University of Denmark has put together a portable EEG system consisting of a low-cost scalp monitor and a smartphone app. It’s not the biggest technical breakthrough, but I find it comforting to see these pocket computers, more powerful than our PCs were a few years ago, being used for something other than social media and finding the nearest Starbucks. The team at milab, part of the Cognitive Systems Section at DTU, is focused on “mobile context awareness, media modeling, and user experiences.” So it’s natural that they’d want to put together something like a . It’s really a fairly straightforward system: a commercially available headset is connected to a wireless USB receiver, which is in turn attached to a Nokia N900. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_66KAOzXhU] The data from the EEG (live gross activity data from the regions around the contacts) is instantly decrypted by the phone and converted into an 3D OpenGL-based animation. Total time from reading to display is around 150ms. This allows for quick, on-site monitoring without the need to wheel around a station or set up a laptop. Easy deployment and natural settings are very important for psychological experiments, and I know for a fact that having one of the full-on, gel-enhanced, wires-everywhere EEG caps on interferes with your normal thought processes. It can decode brain states enough, it seems, to perform some rudimentary actions like scrolling through galleries or opening and closing apps. The greatest thing, though, is the new style of meeting they seem to have invented: It reminds me of the meetings conducted by the big blue guys in . Will we be required to wear these in the future at AOL? Will we be shocked into submission if we don’t maintain proper alpha frequencies during HR lectures? Mercy! [via ] |
Facebook’s Spartans Ready For Battle, But War Won’t Come At f8 | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | Facebook’s f8 is quickly approaching — by all accounts, it’s . Ten days ago, I laid out some of what . Now it’s time for one important update — for something not coming: . Facebook’s HTML5 app project (which will not be called Spartan at launch) is ready to go. But the latest word is that Facebook is worried that the project is so ambitious and the ramifications of it will be so large that there’s some concern that it may overwhelm some of their other big announcements at their event. The fact is that they have so much coming that they don’t need to announce it just yet. Originally, developers were told to have Spartan projects ready to go by July. But the scope of the project expanded to include not only mobile Safari, but Android and desktop browsers as well. Then the plan was to launch at f8, and Spartans (that is, Project Spartan developers) were going to be a part of the lower-key f8 hack event the following day. Now it looks like Facebook will have another event a week or two after f8 dedicated to Spartan, we’re told. A separate event will also give more time for key Spartan partners to present. Right now, those include companies like Zynga and others big players, we hear. It will likely be a giant HTML5 love-fest. But again, don’t worry about f8. All indications are that the amount of stuff coming will be overwhelming. Everyone knows about the , but we’ve been hearing about something else that will be bigger. Stay tuned. : And here we go: we’re hearing Facebook will use f8 to . This is all about populating data in the Newsfeed around actions and intent. Think: Beacon, without the controversy (or so Facebook hopes). |
Source: Facebook To Launch Read, Listened, Watched, And Want Buttons | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | The cat is out of the bag that Facebook is going to launch at its developer conference f8 this week. We’ve heard about the that could be debuting in a few days, but as the this past weekend, Facebook is planning for ways to surface personal content better. And we’ve heard from a source that Facebook will introduce new buttons on the wall that will begin introducing some granularity to the “Like” concept. We’re told these new buttons are “Read,” “Listened,” “Watched.” The network will also soon launch new social commerce buttons like “Want” following the introductions of the aforementioned buttons. It’s important to qualify that this is from a source (and not from Facebook) but from what we hear, Facebook users will be able to click Read, Listened, Watched on content in their news feed. And soon, “Want” as well. And it’s unclear what will happen to the Like button and how these new buttons will affect the Like button. And we don’t know what Facebook will do with this data, but there is so much the network do with the data from these buttons. It seems pretty obvious that ad targeting would be a huge opportunity as well as the capability of delivering a more personalized experience for users. Not to mention that brands, retailers, entertainment companies and other businesses will be able to gain segmented data around the Like. If all of this is starting to sound a bit like Facebook’s infamous Beacon project, it shouldn’t be too surprising — from what we’ve heard a key part of these new Facebook features is to provide Beacon-like functionality in terms of auto-populating News Feed stories based around intent and actions. But they’ll do so without the advertising and privacy ramifications. At least for now… The introduction of these new, granular buttons would certainly add more depth to content surfaced by media sharing apps as well as from retailers, which is in line with previous reports of what’s being launched. We’ll keep you updated on what else we hear is in the pipeline for f8 (and we know what’s ). : that the motto for f8 will be “Read. Watch. Listen.” — that sounds exactly in line with the buttons we’ve heard about. |
In-Game Ads Become The Target Of Scene Hackers | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | The “Scene,” a loosely-knit network of hackers extant in some form or another since the days of diskette-based media, is in many ways the precursor to Anonymous. Unlike that slightly schizophrenic collective, the Scene’s marching orders have always been clear: distribute movies, TV, music, and games within itself — and if they leak to the general public, well, what they do with it is their business. This rich subculture deserves a post of its own (their ASCII art and NFO banter alone, in fact), but today they are in the middle of making yet another change to the way they strip content of its unnecessary components. First it was NoCD, then it was cracked-DRM, and perhaps now, no-ads. In-game advertising is kind of a third rail right now in gaming. With many publishers and dev houses under fire for things like day-one DRM, “premium” content that should have been included to begin with, and platform-exclusive items and maps, further exploitation of gaming content might push more gamers towards the dark side. Case in point: a recent update to the long-awaited and well-reviewed that adds advertisements for the new Blu-rays to loading screens, sending users into a frenzy. Their frustration isn’t hard to understand. They for this game. Why are they being advertised to? Why wasn’t this mentioned before? Why activate it now?? Why ? Will be next? While the Scene is ostensibly a private community, it has grown to be a reliable “service” that breaks the fetters publishers add to their content. Originally it was simply about freeing games and programs from their disk-based distribution method, a side-effect of which was the necessity of modifying how the program was installed and run. Later, as games began to check whether the “play” CD or DVD was in the drive, though that disc held no content necessary to run the game, Scene hackers started snipping out the portions of EXEs that looked for the disc. Still later, as more complicated forms of verifying the legitimacy of games and apps developed, an arms race developed. Circumvention methods for StarForce, SecuROM, and always-on DRM have grown increasingly complicated, and the modifications to the games themselves have become extremely sophisticated. But the goal has always been the same: free the content. Whether it’s for the Navy tech who wants to play Assassin’s Creed 2 while off duty on the carrier, or for the lazy/unscrupulous basement-dwelling game pirate, the principle is the same. Information wants to be free, be it text, graphic, video, or interactive. In-game ads present a different problem. They don’t limit the functionality of the game; in fact, they are frequently closely integrated with it. Sponsorships, real cars, everyday products, these things often make a game better and more realistic. So no one has really cared to go in and excise the code that puts a Subway ad on the virtual street. Ad-supported gaming on Android is blowing up. Targeted ads on browser-based gaming networks boast huge viewer minutes per display. Yet this addition by Eidos, or whoever made the decision, has been harshly criticized, and a number of cracks and fixes have shown up on the net that address the ad issue. Why was this time worse than, say, Need For Speed: ProStreet, which rubbed sponsorships in your face and had raceways fairly wallpapered with ads? Because not only are these ads totally unrelated to or integrated with gameplay, but they were added after the fact and without any warning. It’s a breach of trust. I wouldn’t download any right now, as none of the reputable groups have made a patch, but Reddit user go1dfish has that should work. The outpouring of frustration and resultant support from the hacking community suggests a dire future for in-game ads. DRM has grown to be a punishment for legitimate users, and in-game ads will soon be the same way — not because either one is fundamentally a bad thing (even Blizzard’s has some good reasoning behind it), but because companies are going to refuse to implement them reasonably. There will likely be a bit of an internal war in the Scene over whether a no-ads version of the game is “proper,” as technically the ads may be part of the game. But I remember the in-Scene conflict over CloneDVD groups, which more or less worked itself out as the situation evolved. In the end, ads will be a burden to the user (because publishers have no common sense), and people with the skill to remove them will develop the desire to as well. , the firm responsible for the DE:HR ads, says that according to its research, Three-quarters of gamers surveyed said they feel better about a product advertised in a game and 70% said they feel in-game ads give the company a cutting edge image. Four out of five say they feel games are just as enjoyable with ads. I’m sure many of us would find something to disagree with there. But my impression is that there simply isn’t enough data right now. In-game ads aren’t nearly as prevalent as banners, text ads, flash ads, interstitials, 30-second spots on Hulu or broadcast, or on-screen placement. It seems unwise to draw conclusions so early in the game, but I would submit that gamers as a demographic are far more technically savvy than the average, and I’m pretty sure that correlates with rejection of online advertisements. In-game ads not being rejected yet speaks more to the scarcity and relative mundaneness of attempts so far. When Chun Li starts chugging Red Bull between rounds and attributing the power of her (I write from memory) to that drink’s refreshing taste and unique blend of… well, you get the idea. Gamers aren’t going to buy it, so to speak. The decreasing relevance of moddable platforms, however, suggests that this imminent advertising revolt may be a small one. After all, you can’t patch iPhone games, or at least no one but a microscopic set of users are going to. So unfortunately, the process of consumers wising up to tricks like in-game ads is counteracted by the process of them being less and less in control of the platform on which they are advertised to. They’ll make a ruckus, but like so many boycotts, complaints, and petitions before, they’ll end up buying the game for their favorite console anyway and cursing the publisher for a few seconds the first few times they see an ad. After that, like on every other platform, they’ll cease to perceive the ads as an intrusion, but simply as an unwanted but natural extension of the medium. So unfortunately, the Scene’s battle against in-game ads won’t result in a groundswell of casual gamers cutting the advertisements out of their games. And the fact is that they are more of a vestigial component of the games distribution system now. Game-as-service is the new word, and things like Valve’s free-to-play TF2 and Call of Duty’s are likely more representative of the future of gaming. Fairlight, Skidrow, Razor 1911, Myth, Class, and all the rest of the groups are proud holdovers from a simpler time, a marginalized Illuminati of piracy. |
Obama Hits Up Silicon Valley One More Time With $35K+ Sheryl Sandberg Dinner | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | Silicon Valley, President Obama just can’t quit you. In the Bay Area and free this weekend? Got 35K to toss around? Well if you’ve ever wanted to meet an in-office President now’s your chance to attend an Obama , going down at Facebook COO house in Atherton on Sunday the 25th. This Obama “Victory Fund 2012” dinner at the house comes after the President made appearances at Google exec s Palo Alto house last fall (at a comparable $30K a pop) and attended an in February at Kleiner Perkins VC John Doerr’s house — Where the guest list included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Cisco’s CEO John Chambers, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Genentech Chairman Art Levinson, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and VC Steve Westly Doerr. Obama also hung out at Salesforce CEO house in April. So why so much SV love? Obama has positioned himself as technology-sector friendly throughout his campaign efforts and candidacy, recently being by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook HQ, hosting a Twitter town-hall and Threadless’ former CTO as his campaign CTO. On a budget but still want to rub elbows with the President? Former Symantec CEO John W. Thompson and his wife Sandra will be an earlier and cheaper reception at $2,500 general admission and $7,500 for a photo (Obama will cut you a deal at $10K if you’re two people). |
Google Wallet Goes Live On Sprint, Visa/Discover/AmEx Support On The Way | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | As we , Google has just announced the official launch of Google Wallet. Google Wallet, if you recall, allows you to pay for products in the real world by tapping your NFC-enabled Android phone against a compatible card reader. Now, there’s a bit of a catch: even if you’ve got an NFC-enabled Android phone, you might not be able to dive into Wallet just yet. Google is initially launching Wallet exclusively on the Sprint Nexus S, leaving AT&T/T-Mobile/etc. Nexus S owners waiting for their little taste of the future. Bummed by the limited launch? Don’t be. This somewhat-cautious approach is really the only way they do it: NFC is still a relatively new technology, with a complicated network of partners, and, most importantly, involves . Google is really the first company with the power to move the world towards NFC — but even for them, it’s going to be something of an uphill battle, and they’ll have to take things one small step at a time. Fortunately, Google also just announced their next huge leap: support for Visa, Discover, and American Express cards. In today’s release, Google Wallet supports just two payment methods: Citi MasterCards, and a Google Pre-paid card which anyone with a credit card can fill and use. With the announcement that they’ve licensed the aforementioned trio above, however, Wallet should evolve to support just about any card you’ve got. Got a Sprint Nexus S? Ready to get to spending like some crazy time tourist? All you need to do is ensure your handset is turned on. Wallet is being rolled out to hands automatically, so no Marketplace download is necessary. As a nice little bonus, Google will kick down $10 on a Google Pre-paid card to anyone who gives Wallet a try by the end of the year. I’ve spent the last few weeks dabbling with a pre-release build of Google Wallet, and |
TechCrunch Review: Google Wallet | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | I have seen the future, and it is called Google Wallet. Note, however, that this future is just that: the future. As in, something not . I’ve lived with Google Wallet in my life for the past week or so, and have walked away thoroughly impressed — but while Google Wallet , don’t expect it to kick your actual wallet out of your pocket any time soon. , Google announced their mission to kill your wallet. Tying into the near field communication (NFC) system built into select Android handsets, Google Wallet allows your phone to act as your credit card. By tapping your Android phone against a compatible card reader available in select retailers, your payment credentials are transferred to the merchant without any swiping or physical cards required. While the idea of combining your phone and your credit cards may terrify some, Google Wallet is (at least in theory) more secure than their real world plastic counterparts. If your phone’s screen is off, the transmitter chip can be powered and stores no data (thereby preventing a passing hacker from skimming your card as he walks by). If you haven’t used Wallet in the past 30 minutes or so (or if you’ve manually locked it), a PIN is required before anyone can use your cards or even see which cards your Wallet contains. Every time I use Google Wallet, the person on the other side of the register looks at me like I’m Marty McFly and I’ve just stepped out of the DeLorean, hoverboard in hand. More than once, as I touched on above, they wondered aloud if I’d just pulled some techno voodoo on their system (though my favorite reaction of all was easily “Oh my god! iPhone 5!”) When Wallet works (as it did for nearly all of the transactions I tried at compatible NFC readers), it works really, really well. It’s lightning fast, ultra-intuitive (turn on display, tap phone to reader. If you haven’t punched in your PIN recently, do so and tap the phone again. You don’t ever need to launch the app manually.) The merchant simply sees it run through their point of sales machine as any other card might, the receipt prints out, and you’re on your way. When it doesn’t work, things get a bit… awkward. The one time the system failed, the merchant legitimately had no means of figuring out why. My phone’s screen read “Sent!”, their card reader made all of the appropriate bloops, and then.. nothing. I tried an NFC-enabled AmEx card I had handy, and it worked without a hitch. This was a location that I’d used Wallet at before. These same mystery issues can pop up with credit card payments system, of course — but with the newness of NFC and that air of caution that a few folks conveyed, you should probably be prepped to explain yourself. Google Wallet will not work everywhere your credit card will. It won’t work everywhere there’s an NFC-friendly card reader, either. Wallet requires an NFC reader based on a new-ish specification, and only a select bunch of retailers have gotten around to updating. With that said: even out in the relatively low-tech East Bay of California, I had no trouble finding locations to at least test things out. Making that effort considerably easier was an included application, which can find and display all compatible retailers near your current location or any location you manually input. The list of compatible retailers within a 5-mile radius of my home was about a dozen items long, almost entirely made up of Jack In The Boxes, CVSes, and 7-11s. Therein lays one of Google’s biggest challenges: getting these card readers . The readers are by no means Google Wallet specific (as mentioned above, the reader just needs to be based on a relatively new spec, but is the same tap-to-pay reader already used by Visa/AmEx/Mastercard) and the card vendors themselves have long been making the push — but until these things are nearly ubiquitous, your wallet (or at least one physical credit card you keep at arm’s reach) isn’t going anywhere. On Day 1, Wallet supports just one third-party card: the Citi Mastercard. I don’t have one of those, and had a hard time finding anyone who does. Fortunately, Google is well aware of this. For those of us with other banks and other cards, they’ve created the Google Pre-paid card. You add funds to the pre-paid card from any other credit card you’ve got, then tap into this pre-paid pool whenever you make a purchase. It’s not the most convenient extra step, but it at least opens up Wallet to just about anyone with a credit card. Google has just announced that they plan to support Visa, Discover, and AmEx cards in future releases — alas, no timeframe was given and it’s not clear whether or not support will be rolled out on a bank-by-bank basis. The Google Wallet app is executed with near perfection. It’s gorgeous, thoughtfully designed, and perfectly intuitive. The app is made up of four sections: Payment Cards, Loyalty Cards, My Offers, and History. displays all of your Wallet-ified credit cards in a horizontally scrolling carousel. A small toggle below each card allows you to set anything in your e-plastic armory as the default. You can also add retailer-specific giftcards to your collection, though the only retailer supported at launch is American Eagle (Google promises more are on the way. I believe Subway is on board for the future.) looks nearly identical to Payment Cards, but is meant for your myriad “Buy 10 sandwiches, get one free!”-type cards. As with giftcards, though, the only retailer at launch is American Eagle (but again, more are said to be on the way.) lets you view any nearby promos you’ve purchased through Google’s daily/local deals app, Google Shopper. The section is a bit bare bones on day 1. It can currently display only the timestamps of your recent transactions ( ), leaving out any details regarding where it was used and even how much was spent. Google tells me this is something they plan to address quickly, but they just couldn’t get it done in time for launch. Google Wallet is great, magical, impressive, and all sorts of other positive adjectives. But today’s launch is just a small, but meaningful, first step. NFC-based payments via Mobile is something the world has long unanimously agreed would be awesome, but nearly all of the progress toward it (at least in the US) has been behind the scenes. This is the first time the public has really gotten to play with it — and while it’s going to take a few years (at the very least. Think about how many shops still insist on “Cash Only”.) before it’s ubiquitous enough to kill your wallet, Google seems in it for the long haul. (… now, can anyone tell me what the heck I’m supposed to do when the battery dies and I’ve left my wallet at home?) |
Vuzix Wrap 1200VR Glasses Can Track Your Head Movements While You Game | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | Looking for a nice pair of new glasses? What about glasses that make you feel like you’re watching 3D content on a 75-inch display? Well, that’s quite a specific request you’ve made but Vuzix has what you’re looking for. The company today announced its new pair of virtual reality glasses called the Wrap 1200VR. These are almost identical to the , but have special head-tracking capabilities for gamers. The WVGA displays in front of each are 800×480 but can handle video input in 720p, and can be individually focused for each eye. The user can also position the displays to account for their unique inter-pupillary distance. As far as that head-tracking technology goes, it comes with a compass and nine sensors. The new glasses support more than 100 titles for 3D video and/or head tracking, including titles like , , and . If you wear contacts or even glasses, no worries. The Vizux Wrap 1200VR can fit “comfortably” over most prescription glasses. And just like when you go to the movies and slap on that super cool pair of RealD specs, your contacts will remain unaffected. The glasses connect to almost any Windows laptop or desktop, with support for Windows 7, Vista, and XP in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Optional interfaces also allow for a connection to component video devices like the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. If you have $600 laying around and no fear of looking like a gadgets geek, check out the Vuzix Wrap 1200 VR glasses available now at . |
The TechCrunch Gadgets Webcast Episode 2: Gaming, Movies, And Trackpads | John Biggs | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | Is the second time the charm? Probably not, but Devin, Matt, and I all discuss the gadgets lying around our offices including Logitech’s new remote trackpad. We also discuss , , and the value of disk-based video services. A little bit of housekeeping: We’re still shaking out some of the bugs in this system but, in general, I think we’ve got the formula down here. Next up we’ll try to grab some HD video of ourselves and improve the motion quality considerably. Let us know what you’d like to see out of these and we’ll try to take your suggestions into account. |
Keen On… Sir Martin Sorrell: We Have to Get Consumers to Pay for Their Content (TCTV) | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | It’s Stream time again. Last year, when I interviewed the co-founder and CEO of at the company’s annual Stream unconference in Athens, Sir Martin argued that And this year, Sorrell, who presides over the world’s largest advertising company, a global leviathan with 153,000 people working in 2,400 offices in 107 countries, was equally scathing in his attack on free online content. Arguing that giving away quality content was a “dreadful mistake” that resulted in many digital media companies “crucifying themselves”, Sir Martin said that not charging for online content is the “wrong” business model. “We went down the wrong road from the beginning”, Sorrell told me about early Internet business models. And he argues that we are making the same mistake with our obsession today with “openness” and “transparency”. The pendulum will swing, Sir Martin predicts. People are going to demand what he described as “closed systems” in which they will happily pay for privacy from the transparent social web. |
Orbotix Wants Sphero Beta Testers Before The Holidays Hit | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | Everyone’s favorite smartphone-controlled robotic ball got a minor facelift , but it may need just a bit more polish before it officially gets pushed out the door. That’s why Orbotix has quietly put out to play with the Sphero ahead of its launch later this year. Of course, not just anyone will get their hands on a Sphero of their very own: Orbotix will only choose from US-based applicants who have already reserved a Sphero. Those chosen few should also be willing to play with the thing on pretty consistent basis (Orbotix suggests a few minutes every day) to see how well it holds up to real world use. Beta testers will be able to spend a month with a near-final Sphero, but fret not in case you aren’t chosen: Orbotix is looking at adding new users on a rolling basis between October and November. While it’s a great way to reward those who already pre-ordered, Orbotix seems to be cutting it just a little close with their timing. By the time their beta program finishes, the holiday launch window will be right on top of them. It won’t pose much of a problem if the feedback is unanimously good, but Orbotix could be caught in a dicey position if something unfortunate is unearthed during their pre-holiday trial period. |
Expect This Year’s f8 To Be Huge — The Biggest Since Facebook Platform Launched | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | Last week at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference, I had the opportunity Facebook’s VP of Engineering . It was a great talk: I asked him about his favorite features on Google+ (he said something about loving competition), and there was even a brief mutual death glare. A few minutes after the interview, I chatted backstage with Schroepfer and Facebook VP of Global Communications and asked about their impending f8 developer conference, which takes place on September 22. Schrage’s eyes grew wide — he paused, then said that this was going to be , and that it would go down as either the most important, or the second most important f8 yet. When I asked which of the previous three conferences might best it, he said that only the first one, back in 2007, stood a chance. Which is when they originally Facebook Platform, allowing third party developers to tap into the social graph for the first time. He also made it clear that he believes this f8 will be bigger than conference, which was no slouch: it saw the launch of the Open Graph API, Instant Personalization, and the now-ubiquitous Like Button, among other things. In other words, we should expect this year’s f8 to bring a lot more than the video and music services that have already been . Frankly I don’t think either of those would fundamentally alter the Facebook experience — they’ll make some people happy, and they may help services like Rdio, Spotify, and MOG get more users, but there’s still going to be a lot of friction getting people to change the way they consume media. Instead, I’m guessing we’ll see some much bigger changes — things that alter the way Facebook’s graph works, and that will enable a new class of applications to flourish (like, for example, those aforementioned media sharing apps). I’m still digging to find out the specifics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if these changes revolve around broader sharing. After all, so much content on Facebook is already shared with a ‘Public’ setting — Facebook just needs to start surfacing that content to more people. Facebook’s Subscriptions feature is a great example of this. At risk of tooting my own horn more than usual, I’ve watched my Subscriber count grow from zero to 2,500 in less than a week (that’s way faster than I’ve ever accrued followers on Twitter). I can’t take much credit for the growth though — the only thing I posted was a photo of puppies. Instead, this uptick is fueled by the way Facebook works suggestions into News Feed and various widgets. If Facebook can create similar viral growth around content shared from other apps, that would be a big deal, indeed. |
Japan Game Awards 2011 At The Tokyo Game Show: Here Are The 10 Winners | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 9 | 19 | The closed yesterday with not too many spectacular announcements, but several interesting games were on display. Japan’s Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association ( ) asked the 222.668 attendees of the show this year what their favorite titles were. And here’s the complete [JP, PDF] (no ranking) of Japan’s most loyal gaming geeks for the 10 best new (yet unpublished) titles of the Tokyo Game Show 2011: |
Google Taps Kleiner-Backed Inrix To Provide Real Time Traffic Data For Maps And Navigation Apps | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 9 | 26 | Realtime car traffic data company has been selected by Google to provide traffic data to help power the search giant’s navigation and mapping applications. Inrix, which just from Kleiner Perkins and August Capital, aggregates and crowdsources real-time traffic information from more than 30 million sources including cars, taxis, delivery vehicles, trucks and other channels, Inrix’s data software aggregates and enhances traffic-related information from hundreds of public and private sources and then sells this data to mobile app developers and websites. Currently the company offers data for 22 countries across North America and Europe and reaches more than 100 million users. Inrix’s other partners include Audi AG, ADAC, ALK, ANWB, Coyote, the Ford Motor Company, I-95 Coalition, MapQuest, Microsoft, NAVIGON, Tele Atlas, Telmap, TeleNav, Texas Transportation Institute and Toyota. In an ongoing independent test of traffic information in the world, the University of Maryland found Inrix’s real-time traffic information to be accurate within 5 mph of actual traffic speeds over 90 percent of the time. Inrix says that the flexibility and architecture of its fusion engine and APIs makes it easy tof partners to integrate the data. With Google, Inrix went from contract to implementation in under 45 days. Initially available in 8 countries, Inrix’s real-time traffic information for all major motorways will be integrated with Google products and services online and on mobile phones. The Google deal is no doubt a big win for Inrix. Google Maps is easily one of Google’s more popular products, and a partnership (if things go well) should be a big revenue boost for the Kleiner-backed company. The deal, however, is not exclusive. Google will be getting some of its traffic data from other sources. A Google spokesperson issues this statement: |
With Moneyball In Theaters And October Closing In, Baseball Geeks Get A Mobile App | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 26 | For baseball fans, that magical month is almost afoot. October: The time in which we look on, annoyed, as our favorite team heads to Florida to play golf, or stumbles, gets injured, and whimpers quietly out of the playoffs. It’s a testy time for most, but still one most of us would never miss. Another thing baseball fans have likely noticed: — a book written about the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane and his use of sabermetrics and other newfangled ways of keeping tabs on which players are undervalued, etc. — has been made into a film and is being shown in theaters nationwide. For those unfamiliar with any of the above, the reason this is of interest to baseball fans? Moneyball highlighted a then ongoing re-conception of what metrics and methods teams and organizations use to evaluate players. Thanks to Moneyball and the ascendancy of Bill James and his sabermetrics, geeks were finally able to secure a place in the clubhouse. I haven’t yet seen Moneyball, but it’s on my towering list of things to do this week, to be sure. So, in the spirit of a close wild card race, the encroaching playoffs, and the release of Moneyball, here’s a cool new app for iOS called that is, simply put, a fast and easy way to get baseball stats on your iOS devices. Now, stats geeks can go mobile. With authority. The reason I’m excited about this app? It was created with the casual fan and the advanced stats geek in mind, which means that it includes both traditional stats (hits, RBIs, batting average, etc.) as well as stats (OPS, FIP, wOPS+) for every player and team going back to the 1870s. It’s also updated daily for 2011 season and will be updated for this year’s playoffs as well. Baseball Mobile’s data is all stored within the app, too, which means that you can open new pages and run search queries instantly, whether you’re on an airplane or suffering from AT&T’s service. Sure, there are tons of sites out there on the web that offer a wealth of baseball stats, but they can be hard to find for the casual baseball fan, and many of those sites aren’t optimized for mobile. Plus, who wants to own another ESPN app? It’s nice to be using something made by an independent developer that has no affiliation with the Disney-owned death star of sports media. The app is a great way for average fans, fantasy buffs, stats geeks, and players themselves to easily swipe through current and historical stats — and it’s a great way to win a bar bet with Tony, who thinks that he knows everything about Carl Yastrzemski’s statistics in the ’67 season. And, hey, even Manny Acta, the Cleveland Indians’ manager, seems to like the app: https://twitter.com/#!/Mactriber_11/statuses/113388606084755456 . is another app out there that has some similar use cases, but Baseball Mobile wins because it will present stats in your favorite format, do so on a team-by-team or player-by-player basis, and the app doesn’t have friction when you choose a new team’s stats because all the info is right there in the app. Users can also switch between regular stats and sabermetric stats by simply swiping the player’s profile without having to return to the main page. Pretty cool. As to who’s responsible for this app? Mike Gilberg is a first-time iOS developer, so users may notice that the design isn’t exactly perfect. There’s plenty of room left for improvement, but that doesn’t mean that this isn’t app isn’t an awesome primer for baseball fans heading into the playoffs. It also happens that Gilberg has both served as a ballboy for the New York Metropolitans and worked in the organization’s operations department, building and applying advanced stats — some of which have made it into this very Baseball Mobile app. Thus, what Gilberg may lack in app development experience, he makes up for in familiarity with the geeky world of baseball statistics. And if there’s any sport that is stat-centric, baseball is it. and let us know what you think, baseball fans. Oh, and Android is on its way. |
Political Sons Launch Ruck.us, A Social Engagement Platform Based On Issues, Not Parties | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 9 | 26 | In honor of — and the impending campaign — we bring you a political startup. Before you gag, give it a chance; I think this is a political startup that might just get your vote. Launching today is : A social and political engagement platform that allows like-minded individuals to find each other, connect, and to take collective action based on issues, not political affiliations. On the surface, that doesn’t sound particularly earth-shattering. We’re pretty sure both Facebook and Twitter enable this kind of grouping — as does Fox News and MSNBC (and No Labels and Americans Elect). But it does help that the Ruck.us co-founders both have politics in their blood: Ray Glendening is the son of former Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening and Nathan Daschle is the son of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Naturally, both guys have been involved with the democratic party professionally, having recently worked for the Democratic Governors Association. However, in a move that will likely strike a chord with many people, both young and old, Glendening and Daschle have since effectively given up on political parties, because, , “the two parties have simply failed to keep pace with today’s world”. Sounds about right. The idea is not just to be antiestablishment or people without a country, but that the two-party system is a somewhat limiting mold for the U.S.’s diverse population and the nuanced nature of many people’s political views. The population is becoming increasingly idea and issue-centric, and the social media generation wants to feel connected and, at the same time, take advantage of customization, personalization — not to be force-fed cookie cutter antidotes. Of course, this sounds like the rhetoric of many-a-democratic candidate in the past, candidates that often go on to forget those values once they get to Washington. The principle motivation behind Ruck.us, then, is to bring people together around collective action, no matter what party or ideas they ascribe to. In practice, this means that Ruck.us users simply visit the site, sign up, and select the issues that are relevant to them individually — whether that’s one issue or 25. As the user pokes around the site and responds to the user-generated questions they come across, the platform serves the user with a “Ruck”, which is the 50, 100, or 250 people (the size is elastic) that share the same viewpoints. The Ruck then constantly changes as the site learns more about the user and their political DNA. Next, the site establishes a communication feed, in which users can see what their Ruck is discussing, what links and stories they’re sharing, etc., as well as what your group is doing — the actions they’re taking, petitions they’re signing, who they’re donating to, and so on. Again, the focus here is on issues rather than political parties. The idea, Glendening told TechCrunch, is to replicate those core party functions, outside of the two parties, just as Obama for America and the Tea Party paved the way for external organization during the last election. Technology provided the two groups (at great long last) with the ability to so, and Glendening says that, with Ruck.us, they hope to enhance that functionality and take it one step farther. While there are a slew of non-profits out there seeking to organize people around ideas and causes, Ruck.us is certainly different in that it’s a startup, and it’s definitely for-profit. That being said, Glendening was adamant about avoiding an advertising-supported business model, especially one that would rely on annoying banner ads. The startup has received a small round of venture funding, but the co-founder said that sponsored actions (if a person indicates they are an environmentalist, then they might benefit from being served with the Sierra Club petition that’s currently before Congress, for example) as well as partnerships. And on that latter note, Students First, LiveStrong, and Rock the Vote are all currently partnering with Ruck.us in the hopes of using it as a channel to reach their target audience. While Ruck.us is founded on an idea that many people can relate to (finding a place to congregate around causes that speak to them, outside of party demarcations and agendas), it’s true that many politically-conscious and active people already have plenty of places to express their views and get in touch with people who think the same way. It remains to be seen if, without a target, specific audience, Ruck.us will be able to gain the traction it needs to become a valuable resource. But the idea itself is definitely worth testing. For more, or check out the video below: [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/29282211 w=640&h=380] What is Ruck.us from on . |
Quora Gets Threaded Comments, Comment Voting, Editing And Images | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 26 | Q&A site has just unveiled of its commenting system, the most notable change being the implementation of a threaded commenting feature for the discussions under a question and its subsequent answers. The new threaded comments allow users to reply to specific comments in an answer thread, intuitively by entering text into the Reply box under each comment. In addition Quora now lets users vote on the helpfulness or validity of a comment by clicking on the up arrow and down arrows, just like they do for helpful/unhelpful answers. As if that weren’t enough (!), Quora users can now also embed images in comments, and edit a comment in place. Ironic exclamation mark aside, this editing thing is actually pretty cool, eh hem, Facebook. Like Facebook comments, Quora comments require that users be logged in with their real accounts in order to participate in a discussion. People who wish to remain anonymous with a question can’t comment on answers and if you engage in a question with your real account then switch over to an anonymous setting you lose your comments. The response from the users I’ve asked about the new comments thus far has been mixed, with some saying that the feature is a net positive, reducing the noise in comment threads, and others holding that the nested comment UI is a bit overwhelming. “The design of the feature is… uh, well, it’s kind of terrible,” influential user Yishan Wong “But I’m not too concerned; I’m sure it’ll be worked out.” Quora power user Semil Shah hopes that this feature is a sign of future Quora expansion, “Theoretically, a ‘Quora comments’ feature could spread across digital media and content sites and provide an interesting alternative to Facebook’s social plugin, mainly because Quora does verify identity but also allows for anonymity.” Quora’s has his sights set on the present, “What we’ve seen is that people like to talk about and discuss posts and questions, and this lets them do it in a way that’s more organized as well as much more fun and responsive.” |
A List Of Things Paul Carr’s New Startup Isn’t | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 9 | 26 | “The companies who enjoy the most success in revolutionizing the book industry (as opposed to simply creating a totally new medium) will be those that disrupt the publishing process, the writing process, the distribution process — but leave the actual reading process the hell alone.” — Apparently my former colleague and fellow Diet Coke fiend is post-TechCrunch, instead of heading back to professional blog jockeying like the rest of us pixel-stained wretches. Yay Paul. So what on earth is it already? Well Carr himself told me that the startup is a media-play, traversing the intersection between old media and new media — “the third way,” as he puts it. Okay. Hitting a brick wall with Paul, I tried other avenues. When I reached them earlier, investor told me that he was “asked to be vague” and investor told me that he “appreciated my reporting skills” but that he wasn’t going to talk specifics about his investment until Carr did. What gives? Didn’t Carr once on entrepreneurs who engaged in these kinds of reporter-evading tactics? Oh well, here’s what I’ve got: Carr says in his that the Las Vegas-based startup will “directly address an issue [he’s] and I’ve heard he’s recently been talking to people with Kindle publishing backgrounds about joining his team. If I had to guess, I would say that whatever it is some sort of attempt at a creating a new ebook/ezine-related publishing experience. Carr tells me that he is indeed hiring, but wouldn’t comment on what for. Perhaps entreaty toward the creator of the Kindlegraph provides a clue? Fed up with my constant badgering, Carr gave me a list of 25 things his startup isn’t, full email below: Dear Alexia, As promised, here are a list of twenty-five things my new company won’t be doing…
Creating a rival to TechCrunch Any other kind of blogging Last minute hotel deals Creating any kind of social network for xxxx Giving a shit about your social graph Printing books Any other kind of gamification A browser plugin that explains to blog readers why something “is news” Anything that helps “brands” do anything with “social media” ContentFarmville: (“social gaming + seo = profit!”) Building a robot army to kill anonymous commenters Developing a better Barbiecam Adding soundtracks to crossword puzzles Publishing a newspaper Creating a crowdsourced database of Julian Assange’s hypocrisies “I, Mac” – A gourmet Mac and Cheese franchise for hipsters Selling fancy pens Selling shitty pens Badges Airbnb for nap pods A microblog platform for public resignations Potterless: a virtual community for grown-ups who hate Harry Potter Wifi on planes (note: this may already exist) Dogs with tiny hats Quora
Hope that’s helpful. Miss you guys, Paul |
Walk Score Takes Wraps Off Slick New Apartment-Locating Tool | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 26 | You might be familiar with , a site that crunches mapping data into a simple “walkability” score for a neighborhood or region. You know, whether food and entertainment are nearby, whether transit is available, and so on. It’s being used by more than 10,000 sites that list apartments and real estate now, providing an at-a-glance impression of how much you can expect to need your car. They’re sitting on a ton of data from transit authorities, OpenStreetMap, and user input, and have decided to leverage that into a more user-centric tool, Apartment Search. It basically turns the telescope around; instead of taking a place you like and providing a commute and walkability score, you put in your workplace and desired commute, and it finds places for you within that trip time. And it looks really cool while doing it. To be honest, when I heard of Walk Score back in the day, I didn’t trust it. Still don’t, really. Anecdotes about walkability from friends I’d trust, and my own feet, but standardizing this vague concept has always seemed a suspicious enterprise to me. But this repurposing of the data makes perfect sense. Here’s a video so you can see what the service looks like: [vimeo http://vimeo.com/29509407 w=640] It should also be at Walk Score’s site. The way it spreads reminds me of an unstoppable contagion in a Hollywood White House briefing. “In 45 minutes the zombies could be as far as Ballard, sir. Which is a tragedy because that neighborhood was really starting to come up. Great farmer’s market and vintage stores.” Really, though, this seems a more relevant statistic to me than the actual Walk Score. Gauging commute times is a touchy business, but Walk Score co-founder Matt Lerner assured me that their estimates are very carefully calculated, with padding time for walking between stations or waiting for trains. It calculates routes differently depending on which is best for driving, walking, busing, and such, so it’s not as simple as it looks. Express trains, shortcuts through parks, it’s all in there. The presentation is what makes me like it, though. The active involvement of the user and dynamic visual representation of the data are satisfying and practical. It aids in discovery, and of course those little rich apartment listings (you can filter by price, size, etc.) are easy to browse and easy for Walk Score to monetize. What’s not to like? Well, it’s not very mobile. It would be nice to be able to save a neighborhood, directions, and a few interesting apartments to a mobile apartment finder app. They may also have a hard time drawing users in, since this service is more centralized on the Walk Score site and isn’t quite as universally embeddable. and see how their estimates stack up against your known commute times, and also see where you be living. As for me, my neighborhood is a “walker’s paradise” and my commute is about ten steps, so I’ll be staying where I am. |
Piston Cloud Launches pentOS, An Enterprise OpenStack Distribution | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 9 | 26 | is today emerging from stealth and introducing its new enterprise-ready cloud operating system for private clouds called . The new OS is built on , the open source IaaS cloud computing project that now has over 1,450 contributors and 110 participating companies, including NASA, Rackspace, Citrix, Intel, Cisco, Arista Networks, Microsoft and Dell. With pentOS (Piston Enterprise OSTM), the focus is on the private cloud environment, an area which has been somewhat neglected in today’s OpenStack landscape. The new OS addresses enterprise’s most pressing concerns, including security, compliance and integration with existing systems. For starters, unlike OpenStack, which is a cloud automation layer, not an operating system, is bare metal up, built on a hardened Linux distro that doesn’t include anything expect what’s required to run OpenStack. It also includes the industry’s first implementation of , a cross-industry standard launched in early 2010 to automate the process of auditing cloud service providers, and which has become the security standard for OpenStack. In addition, pentOS comes with Piston CloudKey, essentially a USB stick that lets you edit a single config file to make changes to a private cloud. When you’re ready to deploy those changes, just pop the USB key into a switch, and the switch will automatically install the software to the servers. It’s a 99.99% automated, hand-free installation, says Piston Cloud. is based on open standards and is designed to be vendor agnostic. It supports a variety of switches and servers. At present, Arista switches are supported, but those from HP and Force10 will be supported soon. It can also run alongside other public or private cloud environments, including those from Rackspace, Dell, Amazon, Internap, Korea Telecom and more. The software will be available as a preview starting October 3rd, and will become commercially available on November 29th. Licensing will be on a per server basis and subscription packages will include annual support. Pricing has yet to be determined. Piston Cloud’s CEO and Co-founder, Joshua McKenty, was technical lead and cloud architect of NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform, which formed the cornerstone of the OpenStack project. He currently holds an appointed seat on the OpenStack Project Policy Board. Meanwhile, Piston Cloud’s CTO and Co-founder Christopher MacGown was technical lead at Slicehost, acquired by Rackspace in 2008. The company in Series A funding back in July, in a round led by Hummer Winblad and True Ventures, with Divergent Ventures and others participating. |
Amazon’s Small Gamble | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 9 | 26 | The news that Amazon’s tablet was real was , but not quite a shock to the industry. Bezos months ago, and had it coming in late summer, which was optimistic but not far off; the Fire will be . One question I always had, though, was how Amazon would justify putting out this device when they’ve spent so long slagging the iPad as an e-reading platform? Simple: the Fire isn’t an e-reader. Sure, you can read books on it, but its main function is acting as a wedge for all those sadly-overlooked Amazon services. Apple sells you on one platform then keeps on nudging you until you accept the rest. iTunes, iPhone, iPad, OS X, it doesn’t matter which you do first, the point of the ecosystem is to make you use all of them. Amazon is trying for a similarly lateral play. Amazon’s web services powers a ton of the web. They’ve got cloud coming out of their ears. A fraction of their infrastructure would power the day-to-day media and data needs of millions of consumers. They own the water main, but they lack a firehose. When people think music, they think iTunes. Movies, they think Netflix. TV, they think Hulu. Or any number of things. But Amazon does so many of these things, often with better pricing or selection. If they can get a device out there and dangle a suitably enticing carrot, people will find themselves entrapped in a web of savings. Some say it’ll be Amazon Prime. Sure, why not? When the ecosystem is as locked down as the Kindle Fire’s is reported as being, you pull in a nice fat return on investment. Prime is a small price to pay. Amazon knows you have to spend money to make money, and they’re going to be spending a amount of money to get this thing into a million homes. You think the original Kindle flew of the shelves? That brutalist-looking thing? They sold a few, but then they sold the upgrade. Progress was being made, and now that product that wasn’t ready to go big was suddenly being massively improved. Apple is trying this with the Apple TV, minus the improvement part. You have to make people think they’re getting in when the getting is good, and Amazon might be able to hit that sweet spot in the low-cost tablet wars. The new Nook presents them with a challenge. It’s too late for Barnes and Noble to make any major changes to the product before they launch , but the sales of the Nook Color give it some headway. It remains one of the very few Android tablets out there that can be easily differentiated, and a refresh to that platform would have given Amazon’s device the feeling of retaliation rather than attack. It’s being said that the device was rushed, and that it’s a Playbook clone, but that’s oversimplifying things. It’s the most viable product they could come up with on a schedule, and I seriously doubt it’s going to be the last, whether it’s a success or not. And , Apple has no reason to be scared. But all the other tablet makers should be shaking in their boots. As yet few have convinced consumers to shell out iPad money for Android quality. The big hardware rush happened too early and consumers were underwhelmed. However, a cheap and recognizable Amazon tablet might just sell to the people who have regarded the Xoom and Galaxy Tabs as early adopter devices. Amazon threatens to put out a “whole” device, limited as it may be, and the wholeness of the iPad environment is a big part of its selling power. Android, as much as I like it, isn’t whole. So how could Motorola or Samsung put out a whole device when its main component is unfinished? Kindle will launch whole, and people will be very quick to perceive that. The fun thing is that as big a deal as this seems, the risk they’re taking is really tiny. Millions of Kindles are being sold right now and because Amazon is positioning the Fire to basically be a shortcut to everything at Amazon but e-books, the two devices aren’t, strictly speaking, competitors. In fact, with a $99 Kindle on the horizon (don’t deny it, Amazon), they could start giving them away with the Fire tablets and lock out the competition on two fronts. Meanwhile, sales of the original Kindle, which is synonymous with e-reading, will continue to grow and Amazon will continue to dominate, even as its competitors outclass it (the new touchable and are great). If you want to lead the industry, it helps to have the best product, but it’s by no means required. Come wednesday, expect a big value play to get consumers interested: a year of Prime, a bunch of free TV shows or movies, or maybe even a free ad-supported Kindle if you buy now, now, now! Anything they can do to take the wind out of the Nook’s sails and make their tablet a one-of-a-kind device and value, it’ll all be on the line. But even if they only sell a dozen, don’t expect them to fold. Amazon is too interested to stay away from this gun fight, even if all they’ve got this week is a knife. P.S. Does anyone else think they should have called it the Candle? |
YC NYC: Paul Graham Shares The Antidote To Startup Poison | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 9 | 26 | In took them a few years, but has finally stormed Manhattan. Albeit — much to the chagrin for some of the people reading this — for one night only. No, despite some of the rumors that had circulated around tonight’s event, Y Combinator is not opening a branch in NYC. But the YC crew in attendance, which included nearly all of the firm’s partners and a dozen YC alumni, did share plenty of anecdotes and advice with a massive crowd of 800+ New York-based entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs-to-be, and an array of other people interested in the world of startups. The keynote of the evening featured a talk by Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham, who tackled an issue that’s been pervasive in the NYC vs Silicon Valley debate: what are the key ingredients needed to foster a startup community, and does NYC have what it takes? His talk had one prevalent theme: “On the other hand…” Graham uttered that phrase many times during his talk, partly in jest, and partly because there are so many uncertain factors at play when it comes to determining whether NYC is a great place to build a startup. Graham kicked off his talk by trying to identify what fundamental things make a startup hub so well suited for building a company. “Startups fail by default,” he said, which is why launching one anywhere outside of a startup hub has such dismal results. But for some reason, certain areas (namely, Silicon Valley) have a sort of antidote that reduces this inherent likelihood of failure. But what is that antidote? In short, it’s Sean Parker (Graham referred to the incident when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg met Sean Parker on a sidewalk by chance — Parker later became Facebook’s founding President and played a key role in setting up the company’s equity structure). More generally, the antidote is a high concentration of smart, driven people who are interested in entrepreneurship and technology, and the likelihood of bumping into someone who can help you increases drastically. Graham then moved on to discuss the things that NYC has going for it. On the plus side, Graham says that the citizens of NYC have a greater desire to make money than those of any other city in the US — moreso even than their counterparts out in Silicon Valley. But there are some factors working against it. Silicon Valley, Graham says, is a sort of immovable force — it’s already very far ahead, and the only way NYC would be able to catch up with it would be for Silicon Valley to help it by starting to fail. And that isn’t happening — Graham says Silicon Valley is more of a startup hub than ever. Unlike most places in the country, it’s actually cool to have a startup in Silicon Valley (many people outside of the Bay Area tend to view entrepreneurs as if they’re currently unemployed). In the Valley, “they have learned to not default to skepticism”, Graham says. Graham also addressed the type of technology companies that seem to be emerging in both regions. Silicon Valley, he says, seems to be the hotbed for the ‘Platform’ companies — those services like Google and Facebook that can be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Graham doesn’t see NYC as the launching pad for companies of this size, at least not yet. But he adds that perhaps NYC can be a place for companies that don’t need heavy technology behind them to flourish (and companies in some areas, like finance and fashion, may be better suited for NYC to boot). Graham’s conclusion: NYC isn’t about to overtake Silicon Valley any time soon, in large part because of the well-established financial sector there — but he still thinks NYC is a good place to start a company. He recalled a talk Ron Conway gave during a YC dinner last year, when Conway revealed that 20% of his investments were in NYC (that number used to be much smaller). The key to starting a successful company in NYC, Graham says, is to make sure you have connections with the Valley. One good way to do this is to get Ron Conway as an investor, but there are certainly other routes. These days, Y Combinator still insists that all companies participating in the program move out to Mountain View for three months. After the program, when a founder says they’re moving back to a city that isn’t exactly known for startups — Minneapolis, for example — Graham does his best to talk them out of it. But the ones that say they’re headed back to NYC? He doesn’t try to stop them. |
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