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XYDO, The Web’s Social Network For News, Brings Daily, Customizable Briefs To Your Inbox (Invites) | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 8 | 25 | Where do you get your news (besides TechCrunch, of course)? Some of you may like that familiar tactile experience of newsprint, ink on the fingers, but chances are that your news consumption takes place mostly online — or on a mobile device. But thanks to the content fire hose that is the Internet, there’s a lot of irrelevant junk floating around out there, and, thus, the focus of digital readers and content distributors has turned to improving the filters, aggregators, and readers that channel the noise into signal. Whether your go-to resources for realtime news happen to be Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, or the TechMemes of the world, we’re all looking for an easy, curated, and social, way to consume content from the sites we trust — as well as those we like but don’t visit as often. , a startup that launched in May and , has hopped into the social news space by offering a user experience that combines the best parts of sites like Digg and Hacker News in an effort to serve you with relevant, curated, and social news from top content houses. XYDO has met with early success (over 750,000 unique visitors in August alone) because of that very idea: It wants to be a newsfeed that effectively prioritizes the content that actually matters to you. For starters, it does this via its web platform. But what if we don’t want to click over to XYDO.com every time we want to get the latest headlines? To expand on its news personalization mission and to try to hit users with a virtual version of a rolled up newspaper right at home, the startup is today announcing the launch of , which aims to deliver personalized and relevant news based on a user’s social interactions, networks, and footprints — all via email, the place they’re likely to be at least once a day. News via email? Well that’s nothing new, you might say. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But XYDO is hoping to offer a value proposition and an occasion to rethink this stance by combing the Web and your social networks to provide a really simple, realtime method to get news via the inbox. XYDO Brief takes advantage of the same social sourcing mixed with actual human curation technique that it is used by its flagship product. Every piece of content that enters its system (from over 100,000 content sources) is scored based on the recommendations of the startup’s 2 million+ contributors and curators. Using its secret sauce of social network aggregation and prioritization mixed with crowdsourced curation, XYDO serves its users with between 10 to 12 personalized headlines in every email — that have passed these socially-tested benchmarks to ensure the news you’re receiving in your inbox is the news you want to see. The default setting on XYDO Brief is one email a day, but users can go in and select different categories of blasts (be it “tech” or “politics”) that they’d like to receive, as well as how many of these briefs they’d like to receive — and at what time of day. For those who live on wire services, this seems very similar; it’s the broadly available email version. So, for those of us who spend all day in our inboxes anyway, being able to tinker with a simple service that’s fairly customizable, in an effort to provide an easy way to read the news without having to go search our social networks and favorite content sources — is huge. Also of note: XYDO is providing TechCrunch readers with 500 exclusive (and free) invites to check out their new product. . Then come on back and let us know what you think. |
Aiming To Be The Dropbox Of Music, Mecanto Launches An Affordable Streaming And Storage Service | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 8 | 25 | If you’re a fan of cloud-based music lockers, it’s a good time to be alive. , Amazon somewhat surprisingly beat Apple and Google to the music streaming and storage punch with their “Cloud Drive” and “Cloud Player”. Both Google and Apple have since launched cloud music offerings (or betas thereof), and all three continue to improve and evolve as time marches on. As a music fan, it’s great to see cloud music storage and streaming services moving forward in tandem, even if we all have to admit to having our own personal favorite. Because, frankly, the more competition in this space, the better. Which is why you should be paying attention to a new startup that’s entering stage left: . Yes, today, a new cloudy music service enters the arena, promising unlimited music streaming and storage to listeners all over the world — that won’t put a dent in your wallet. Tel Aviv-based Mecanto is hitting the scene this week with a cloud-enabled music-player and storage service that is easy to set up and features all the things a user wants from their trusty neighborhood music locker: Unlimited storage and streaming, the ability to automatically sync your iTunes library and PC folders with your online account (from multiple PCs), global availability, playlist editing, video, easy browsing, and cross-platform functionality. Also doesn’t hurt that users can find Mecanto on the Web, or go mobile on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Symbian. The MeCanto mobile interface is pretty nifty and offers users the ability to easily listen to songs and albums, or create playlists. Songs stream over 3G or WiFi, and users can listen to any song they want without having to worry about how much space the song takes up on their phone. Here’s to you, cloud. It’s sounds like a great start, right? Sure, but with names like Amazon, Google, Apple, Spotify and umpteen others staring them down, Mecanto definitely has an uphill climb ahead. That being said, right now affordability is a strong selling point for the Israeli music service. Take a look at its competitors: Spotify Unlimited and Premium cost $60 a year and $120 a year, respectively, iCloud comes in at about $25 a year, Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Cloud Player cost at least $20 a year (and unlimited storage may be a limited-time offering). Google, on the other hand is currently free, but there’s little likelihood that it will stay that way for long. In comparison, at $20 a year, Mecanto is an appealing alternative to the big players, especially as it offers worldwide availability, cross-platform integration, and instant uploads — a suite which its competitors only offer in pieces. Furthermore, first time Mecanto users get a free month-long trial of the service, at the end of which they can pay $20 for the whole year or split it up at a $2 monthly rate. To begin using, users only have to download a small application to their desktops, which will then upload and sync all of your music automatically. Bada bing, bada boom. The best part: Mecanto’s upload process is accelerated, which means that users can access their music almost instantly, even before the upload is finished. Listeners can access their music right away, or they can choose to upload their files at a slower pace, saving bandwidth without having to worry about delays. Not wanting to be antisocial in the Age of Facebook, the music service also offers social features, including the ability to add YouTube videos to one’s account and playlists as well as the ability to share those YouTube clips on Facebook and Twitter, Last.fm scrobbling of tracks, sharing current tracks to social networks, multi-desktop sync, and smart categorization of tracks. As to file support? Mecanto works with MP3, M4A, WMA, OGG, FLAC, and most of their derivations. Mecanto’s so-called “three screens and a cloud” platform really is a great alternative to the big names in the space, and a “Dropbox for music” isn’t an unfair analogy. Sure, it’s design isn’t quite up to par with some of the others, but its affordability, worldwide availability, and cross-platform functionality may just give Mecanto the legs it needs to be taken seriously in a space crowded with familiar names. So far, the startup has raised $2 million in funding from private angels, but you can be sure the startup will be seeking more cash as it begins to scale and rolls out worldwide. The Israeli music locker is definitely worth a look, especially under the auspices of a free month-long trial and the fact that . I mean, who doesn’t like a music deal? Check it out. |
Local Business Reviews Site Angie’s List Files For $75 Million IPO | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 25 | After Jive’s filing yesterday, local business reviews site is throwing its hat into the ring, filing an this afternoon. The company will raises as much as $75 million, according to the filing. As we’ve written in the past, Angie’s List offers consumers a way to review and rate doctors, contractors and service companies on the Web. The company launched in 1995 with a focus on local home, yard and car services, sits at the intersection of local search, user-generated content and subscription-based services. To date, Angie’s List has raised nearly $100 million from Battery Ventures, T. Rowe Price, City Investment Group, Cardinal Ventures and others. As of June 30, 2011, the company offered its service to paying members in 170 local markets in the United States. Angie’s List has grown to 820,000 paid memberships, the growth of which has been driven largely by its national advertising strategy. But the company shelling out big bucks for maketing and advertising, spending $30.2 million and $29.2 million on marketing to acquire new memberships in 2010 and in the first six months of 2011, respectively. In 2010 and the six months ended June 30, 2011, Angie’s List’s revenue was $59.0 million and $38.6 million, respectively. In the same periods, the company took a net loss of $27.2 million and $25.8 million, respectively. The company says that since 1995, the site has collected 2.2 million reviews of local service providers from members. |
Ness Serves Up Their First Personal Search App Catering To Restaurant Discovery | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 8 | 25 | Last night I went out to dinner. But I didn’t pick where I was going, Ness did. The place was good. Score one for Ness. We previously covered in July, talking about the technology that would power their eventual apps ( ). Today, the first such app has gone in the App Store, called simply, Ness. It’s a personal search engine catering to restaurants. And it’s good. Whereas most food and restaurant recommendation apps focus on ratings from the general population, Ness is tailored around social as well as your own tastes. Others have tried this before as well, but Ness seems to have it nailed thanks to a ton of data they’ve already been pulling in before the app even launched. They can do this because they hook into Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter (as well as a few other, smaller sources) to find signals about certain restaurants. Are people tweeting about liking them? Are users checking in there a lot? Those kind of things. This helps to determine what restaurants Ness should show to you within the app. When you first load up the app, you’re asked to rate ten places you’ve been. This helps calibrate your “Likeness” score, the key to the recommendations. These Likeness scores show up as a percentage likelihood that you’ll like the restaurant being shown. This alongside proximity and the social data determine what restaurants are shown to you. But the app is also more of a search engine in the more traditional sense as well. You can easily search for different types of food, whether they’re broad or specific. And you can choose to search in other cities. Or you can alter the search settings to restrict a search by price and weed out bigger chains, for example. When you find a place you like, you can drill deeper to get hours of operation, phone numbers, a website, etc. You can also save places to come back to later. And you can share restaurants with friends with the click of a button. They key to the app though is the ease of use and the accuracy of the data. I was constantly finding the Likeness ratings were roughly correct for what my actual rating would be for restaurants I’ve been to. And the system will only get better as you rate more venues. The look and feel of the app is also beautiful. I’m told that we can thank an original iPhone team member formerly of Apple and now with Ness, for that. Remember that restaurant recommendations are just step one of what Ness hopes to offer. The next steps are to point the Likeness engine towards shopping, music, nightlife, and entertainment. All of that could make for one killer, subjective mobile search engine. You can find Ness in the App Store . Sadly, it’s U.S.-only for now. |
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Keen On… Does the Internet Need More Global Regulation? (TCTV) | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 8 | 25 | In the wake of the London riots, there has been intense about whether the Internet – and particularly social media networks like Twitter and Facebook – needs more regulation. But according to the US State Department’s recently appointed Coordinator for Cyber Issues, the riots early this month do not represent an excuse for governments around the world to regulate the Internet. I caught up with Painter earlier this week at the where he spoke on a star studded about the post Wikileaks and post Egypt world. Painter’s message to the world is unambiguous. The Internet not only enables freedom but also prosperity, the Hilary Clinton appointee told me. And America, he promised me, is firmly committed to making the Internet a “very large” part of its foreign policy as it actively supports free speech and democracy around the world. |
Netflix Hits The Asus Transformer, More To Come? | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 8 | 25 | Quick! Asus Transformer owners! Check your system updates. The Internet with claims that build 8.6.5.9 enables sideloading of the Netflix app. Right now, only the Lenovo IdeaPad K1 and ThinkPad Tablet are Netflix certified, forcing owners of other Honeycomb tablets to side load the app, something that previously wasn’t possible on the Transformer. It’s rather surprising that this official update adds the ability. If it was intentional or not, owners should probably install the app without haste. The next build could remove the ability. But if it was intentional, the move is further proof that manufacturers are not afraid to go around Honeycomb’s limitations. OEMs had to employ back-door hacks and 3rd party software to include a working SD card slot. Now if only Motorola would do something similar for the non-functioning SD card slots in the GED Xooms. |
Pandora Posts Record Revenue Of $67M In First Quarter As A Public Company | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 8 | 25 | In its first quarter as a , music streaming service Pandora record revenue in Q2 2012. For the second quarter fiscal year 2012, total revenue was $67 million, a 117% year over year increase. For the second quarter fiscal 2012, on a GAAP basis, the net loss per per share was $(0.04). The non-GAAP net income per fully diluted common share was $0.02. In terms of net income, Pandora took a loss of $1.8 million for the quarter. But Pandora’s Q2 advertising revenue was $58.3 million, a 118% year over year increase. Subscription and other revenue was $8.7 million, a 112% year over year increase. The company revealed that total listener hours were approximately 1.8 billion for quarter an increase of 125% compared to approximately 800 million for the same quarter a year ago. Estimated share of total U.S. radio listening at the end of the second fiscal quarter was 3.6%, up from 1.8% a year prior. According to Pandora, the service had 37 million active users in July. In a release, Joe Kennedy, President & CEO of Pandora said this in a statement: “Pandora is personalizing radio — and consumers are enthusiastically embracing the dramatically better experience…At the same time, advertisers continue their adoption of Pandora’s multi-platform ad solutions, resulting in our 6th consecutive quarter of year-over-year triple digit revenue growth. In addition to continued high growth in web revenue, Pandora’s mobile advertising revenue for the first time comprised approximately half of total advertising revenue as we lead the way in the nascent but fast growing mobile advertising market. Pandora continues to grow our market share of U.S. radio as we fundamentally transform one of the last forms of traditional media.” On the earnings call, Kennedy said that mobile represents 70 percent of Pandora’s usage. And mobile now accounts for half of the company’s ad revenue. As we at the time of Pandora’s IPO, mobile as been a significant contributor to Pandora’s growth as a company. Another growth area, says Kennedy, is the placement of Pandora in the car. The company already has a number of deals in place, including one with Ford Motor Company. Kennedy also said that Spotify isn’t really a threat to its business and usage. There’s hasn’t been “any impact from the digital music services launched in the past few months,” asserts Kennedy. “We’re focused on radio.” Pandora is forecasting Q3 revenue to be in the range of $69.5 million to $72.5 million, (representing year-over-year growth of between 84% and 92%, respectively), and yearly revenue to be in the range of $270 million to $275 million (representing year-over-year growth of between 96% and 100%, respectively). |
Taboola Raises $9 Million To Power Video Recommendations Across The Web | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 8 | 25 | , a service that powers many of the video recommendation widgets you find across the web, has raised a $9 million Series B funding round. The round is being led by Crescent Point, which is based in New York and Asia, as well as Evergreen VC, which has participated in previous rounds. This round brings Taboola’s total funding to $15 million (it a $4.5 million round in November 2008, and a $1.5 million round in November 2007). Taboola gives publishers a turn-key product for offering recommendations on whatever video platform they’re using (it’s integrated with Brightcove, Ooyala, and other services). This is actually easier said than done — surfacing related videos is hard enough, and then there’s the matter of gauging whether they’re videos people will actually want to watch. That’s Taboola’s speciality, and it’s landed plenty of notable clients, including the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, and Bloomberg. The service does extensive analytics on the performance of each video, generating a score for each called ‘EngageRank’ (it also tries to tailor the recommendations to each user). And that often leads to — the company says it drives as much as 2.5 times as much video watching on Bloomberg. Alongside the funding, the company is announcing a new milestone: the service now generates 250 million recommendations per day across its publisher partner sites. |
The Next Steps In Robotics And Computer Vision: Behavior Analysis, Situational Awareness | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 8 | 25 | We’ve seen some interesting developments lately in the fields of robotics and computer vision. They’re not as academic as you’d expect: enormous tech successes like the Roomba and have relied as much on clever algorithms and software development as they have on marketing and retail placement. So what’s next for our increasingly intelligent cameras, webcams, TVs, and phones? I spoke with Dr. Anthony Hoogs, head of computer vision research at Kitware, a company that’s a frequent partner of DARPA, NIH, and other acronyms you’d probably recognize.We discussed what one might reasonably expect from the next few years of advances in this growing field. Kitware is a member of what we might reasonably call the third party in tech, one not often in the spotlight. Hoogs’s research division relies on government contracts and DARPA grants. We tend to cover privately-funded companies and products, with venture backing or corporate R&D budgets, which are often more high-profile. We’ve written before about the necessity of making sense of all the data being produced on the battlefield, what with cameras in every platoon, on every vehicle, and looking down from every aircraft. And then there’s the enormous amount of footage produced by domestic surveillance: security cameras private and public, traffic cameras, and the like. The amount of media produced by all these devices and networks is far too great to be effectively monitored by humans. That’s where Kitware comes in. The next step in computer vision, Dr. Hoogs says, is what they’re working on: behavior analysis. Just as something like the Kinect needs to distinguish between a reach for the chip bag and any number of gestures, in surveillance footage it needs to be determined whether something is or not. “Interesting” is an incredibly complex notion, however, not nearly as simple as setting thresholds on movement and object shape. What Kitware is working on for military and surveillance purposes, however, would be equally at home in our own devices. Reducing thousands of hours of security footage to a few minutes of relevant footage is only one way to apply the algorithms and software they’re making. Allowing the analysis to happen in real time is the breakthrough that needs to happen in order to bring it to the living room. I asked whether better and more prevalent image sensors had made this easier, but he feels that the main catalyst has actually been better processors. I should have known: more sensors means more data, but not necessarily useful data. In the meantime, algorithms already effective at lower fidelity can be run faster and more frequently. This has already hit things like point and shoot cameras, which are struggling to apply it to useful features and end up just adding more and more face-detection numbers. But the potential is huge. The end result is that every camera will effectively become a robot with situational awareness, capable of tracking and classifying every object in its vicinity, from a waving hand or smiling face to stress on a beam or an improperly parked vehicle. On that subject, privacy becomes an issue. Until now, Kitware has largely relied on public databases for its research: images and video where legality is established. But as I wrote in , the law and public dogma are things that consistently lag behind technology, and this is no exception. Should home security cameras maintain an off-site database of “trusted” faces? Should neighborhood cameras record frequent comers and goers, but flag strange people and vehicles? And will people act differently when they know their TV is “watching” them? It’s a complicated issue, and luckily one Dr. Hoogs gets to steer clear of. Their job is enabling the technology, not applying it prudently. Kitware also and it is widely used; other companies like are also hoping to become the de facto standard for emerging interfaces like depth control and object recognition.
I asked what we could realistically expect in real products over the next year or two. Dr. Hoogs feels that virtualized and augmented reality will be the next wave of consumer products to use it. Your phone already knows where it is, which direction it’s facing, what businesses are nearby, and so on. Early entries like Google Goggles and Layar show potential, but the processing and infrastructure both need upgrading before it hits the big time. The big push comes when companies need to close the gap between the academic findings and a product. That means putting an end to development and features, something pure researchers can have trouble with (“it’s not finished!”). But as Microsoft showed with the Kinect, and many other companies are showing with intelligent image manipulation tech, the possibilities for product are as great as the possibilities of simply advancing the field. |
Facebook Users Uploaded A Record 750 Million Photos Over New Year's | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | It doesn’t come as a huge surprise, but it’s still staggering to think about: over the New Year’s weekend, Facebook saw photo uploads from its users. That’s a lot of celebrating, and it sets a new Facebook record. The stat was just by Facebook marketing director (who is also founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister). We’ve reached out to Facebook to ask what the last record was, but I’m guessing it was set over Halloween, which has historically been the biggest day for Facebook Photos. To give some context to that number, in July Facebook said that more than 100 million photos get uploaded every day (that average is higher now, obviously). Here’s another stat: Flickr had its 5 billionth photo uploaded in September 2010 — Facebook would get that in a week or two if photos were uploaded at the rate they were last weekend. That’s a little apples-to-oranges (though Facebook does now offer support for high quality image uploads), but it gives a sense of the scale of Facebook Photos. |
Twitter And Facebook Really Are Killing RSS (At Least For TechCrunch Visitors) | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | Earlier today, we ran a “ ” post featuring some key data WordPress.com sent our way for 2010. Interesting stuff all around. However, as some people have , in our top referrers for the year, Facebook is nowhere to be found. Further, Google Reader, an RSS reader, comes in number three! Is Facebook dying? Is RSS ? . It would appear that referrer data is just a bit screwy. I ran that data against our own data coming directly from Google Analytics. The view from there is quite a bit different — and interesting. For 2010, according to Google Analytics, here were our top 10 referrers: As you can see, like the WordPress.com data, Twitter is number one, but the rest are switched around. Facebook pushed Digg to number three. And Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) swapped with Techmeme. Google Reader, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found in the Google Analytics data. Actually, it is — it’s a subset of the google.com traffic (which doesn’t include search traffic, which is far above any of these referrer sites). Drilling down, Google Reader was actually the number 11 overall referrer to TechCrunch in 2010. Further, it was way down from 2009 — . In other words, yes, RSS is slowly dying. At least when it comes to the most popular feed reader sending traffic to TechCrunch. So what rose up in Reader’s place? Well, here are the top 10 referrers to TechCrunch from 2009, according to Google Analytics: Again, Google Reader was a subset of the google.com data. Drilling down, Reader would have been number 6 by itself, just ahead of Hacker News (again, news.ycombinator.com) and just behind Facebook. Of all the properties in the top 10, Reader had by far the most dramatic fall. Twitter an Facebook, meanwhile, saw the biggest rise in 2010. That makes sense since those are the two most often associated with the slow death of RSS. Both shot through the roof when compared to 2009. Twitter nearly doubled as a referrer to TechCrunch and Facebook the amount of traffic it was sending. Techmeme, Hacker News, StumbleUpon, and Reddit all had nice bumps in sending us traffic. Digg fell quite a bit, though not nearly as far as Reader. Now, a part of all of these bumps is simply because TechCrunch had more content overall in 2010 when compared to 2009. But that makes the Google Reader drop even more interesting. Sure, people can read TechCrunch through Reader without clicking through, but why the huge drop unless fewer people were actually reading it that way? We’ve reached out to WordPress to see why their data seemed to over-count Reader while massively under-counting Facebook (which was number 20 on WordPress’ list). A couple other interesting data points: |
Chatroulette Gets A New, Weird Revamp | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 3 |
Forgotten for months after an , everyone’s favorite video chat site has come up with the following solution to its problem of declining usership: Skins! After following a cryptic tweet from the Twitter account ( down a rabbit hole, I discovered that you can now change your background on Chatroulette while you chat. In my brief foray, I’ve seen everything from Greek mythology-theme to rainbow hyper-color to sunburst to paisley to the hot pink we’ve got going on above. Unfortunately the video part of the chat doesn’t seem to work for me on my own computer at the moment, and I had to switch computers to get the above screencap. On about my fifth try, I got asked to take a user survey which may or may not have won a me a free iPad. There is also strange, “Go green, date your neighbor” link at the bottom of the site which leads to . I didn’t venture any further. I’ve emailed Chatroulette founder to see if he has plans for anything more than an interface refresh and Trapper Keeper-inspired graphics in order combat and will update this post if/when he gets back to me. On a more positive note, I’ve yet to see anything NSFW. Maybe the skins are working after all? : It gets curiouser and curiouser. Ternovskiy just emailed to inform me that is not an official Twitter account, and despite what Google trends is showing, site traffic has been up since October. The Skinsroulette feature, which the company did not intend to announce, was put into effect a couple days ago. Here’s what his own internal Google Analytics dashboard shows, below.
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MyFacture raises €1 million so you can invoice clients from your mobile phone | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | , a little French startup situated in La Rochelle has just announced that it has raised €1 million with . Not to worry if you haven’t heard of many startups from La Rochelle, the town’s entrepreneurial activity isn’t exactly that of Paris, Nantes or elsewhere. Still, this company – founded in January 2010 – managed to score funding in order to bring its invoicing software to mobile platforms – namely smartphones and tablets. I guess this means entrepreneurs will now be happily sending invoices directly from their mobile phones while on the go. For anyone who isn’t familiar with the concept, MyFacture essentially facilitates the creation and management of invoicing. Rather than invoicing via Excel, independent entrepreneurs (France has lots of independent entrepreneurs because of the that was created in 2008) and small businesses can use MyFacture to generate invoices in a few clicks. Aside from being able to simply manage clients and generate invoices, users can also send them via email or even use the company’s mailing service – starting at €1.50 per document sent. Still, even if MyFacture is planning on taking its SaaS solution to mobile devices, it won’t be the first French startup to do so. , one of its local competitors with over 7,100 users, already has released its very similar billing software for both the iPhone and Android. Yet, it’s just a mobile version of its website and not a real application. And , another of the local players, still isn’t showing signs of going mobile. The company founded by the former team behind Cleargay (now ), a dating startup that was acquired by French dating giant in 2007, offers its service for a monthly subscription starting at €7.50/month. But if you want to try the service (in French) without paying, the company offers a free trial period of 30 days – so that you can finally ditch Excel invoicing. |
TechCrunch 2010 In Review (Care Of WordPress) | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The reads Wow. The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at The Louvre Museum, it would take 10,306 days for that many people to see it. In 2010, there were new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 27,041 posts. The busiest day of the year was August 11th with views. The most popular post that day was . The top referring sites in 2010 were , , , , and . Some visitors came searching, mostly for , , , , and . These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010. 231 comments and 38 Likes on WordPress.com 155 comments 272 comments 285 comments and 13 Likes on WordPress.com |
Quora Fact-Checks Quora On User Milestone | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | Earlier today, got a nice write-up on . The article talks about all the buzz the Q&A startup has been getting (something ). But at the bottom of the post, something interesting happened. “ ,” Fast Company wrote, citing that noted that the profile image numbers had passed 500,000. Obviously, that’s a nice milestone, and popped up to celebrate it. The only problem? Quora hasn’t actually hit that milestone yet. How do I know? Quora, of course. Within a half hour of the 500K congratulations post going up on Quora, it was being updated in realtime describing why the numbers Fast Company was citing were wrong. Specifically, investor Matt Cohler cited co-founder Charlie Cheever saying, “ Cheever had actually that back in early November that the methodology people were using to calculate user numbers was no longer correct. This is a similar issue that has occurred with Twitter, Foursquare, and others in the past. Of course, if Fast Company had just been reading TechCrunch in December, they would have known this. Seemingly, on Quora is how many users are actually on Quora. We also went the old school route and reached out to Cheever just to clarify. “ ,” he writes. “ ,” he continues. So all at once you can see both one potential problem and also the actual potential of Quora. There’s so much information flowing through the system, that it’s getting hard for all of it to be monitored even if it has already been fact-checked. But when something is wrong, it gets corrected in minutes before your very eyes. Again, of Twitter and blogging before that. Information appears to be more like living organisms than static words on a page. So how many users does Quora actually have? Since Quora is no help there, we’ll do the old school way: deduction. If you believe that Quora changed the way they handle those IDs sometime in October, it seems likely that they have something over 200,000 but less than 500,000 users now. If my friend requests (and those of several others I’ve talked to) are any indication over the past few weeks, it has got to be inching up towards the latter. |
Paul Buchheit Looks Back At His First Years As An Angel Investor | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | If you follow technology news, is a name that seems to pop up all the time. Among other things, he invented Gmail, built the first prototype for AdSense, coined Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, cofounded FriendFeed (which was acquired by Facebook), and a partner at . Oh, and he’s also a prominent angel investor, with stakes in dozens of startups. Today, Buchheit has posted on his first three years as an angel investor. Between 2006 and 2008 Buchheit invested a total of $1.21 million across 32 companies. He writes that half of those were either acquired or dead, and that between all of the acquisitions he’s netted a 10% gain. Of course, many of the companies that haven’t been acquired, like Weebly and Meraki, are sure to bring him much more down the road, so he’s in good shape. His post is worth reading , and it shows that even the smartest investors (Buchheit may be relatively new to the investing game, but he’s certainly one of the smartest) are bound to make missteps. One of the more amusing passages: Of the current acquisitions, only two have yielded a greater than 10x return: Heroku and Mint. Unfortunately they were also two of the smaller investments, proving that I don’t know what I’m doing, or at least showing that I need to make a point of investing more money into the best companies (Mint was oversubscribed, but I don’t remember why I didn’t put more into Heroku). Buchheit also describes the improving quality of Y Combinator companies — as a partner at YC he’s obviously biased, but it’s a trend that I’ve observed too (as have many investors and other reporters). And for those of you ready to pull out your pocketbooks, Buchheit closes out his post with two key pieces of advice: 1) Assume you’ll lose your money and 2) Plan on investing in a large number of companies. |
Reddit Has Banner Year, Boasts 232% Traffic Growth | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | Social news site has on a remarkable 2010 filled with and user engagement growth. Most notable? The jump in pageviews from 250 million in January of 2010 to 829 million in December of 2010, a 232% growth. Reddit has increasingly become a favorite haunt of many in the social media community, especially both its casual and core users leading to . Digg which , is now valued at just $102 million. The site still has more monthly unique visits than Reddit, according to Comscore. Says power Digger and active Reddit user , It’s no surprise that Reddit’s emphasis on a steadily increasing its userbase is now reflected in increased traffic and site time per visit (by 2 minutes and 40 seconds). But can the company sustain these monumental numbers in 2011, with no major competitor downfall in site? Barrera thinks so, |
WITN: Book Publishing Has A Better Future Than Music and Movies (Thinks One Of Us) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | Aaaand… we’re back. Fresh from our Christmas and New Year break and ready to talk about the Most Important Stories Outside of Silicon Valley. Stories like, uh, Kevin Rose’s . But, yeah ok, while the jumping off point might be a stretch, we soon get to the meat of this week’s episode: whether we’re seeing a move from fame for fame’s sake to a more targeted, troll free kind of media. And also whether mobile platforms are going to prove to the saviour of the content industry. Ohh, it’s good to be back. Video below. |
Microsoft Corp Dev Exec Bails, Raises Angel Round For Hot Stealth Startup | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | Microsoft Senior Director of Corporate Strategy and Acquisitions quit his job a few weeks ago. I heard rumblings about this and assumed he’d be focusing an angel investing full time – for the last couple of years he’s done it as a part time hobby. But nope, that’s not what he’s doing. He’s started a new company that’s creating a “social utility” mobile application called 5Star. And he’s raised somewhere around $1 million in an angel round from first tier angel investors, says a source. That’s all we know right now. Will post details as we get them, or when Fritz starts answering my phone calls again. |
OK, "Pivot" Is Officially Over-Used | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | Maybe you all saw this, but I’m catching up from vacation. It seems even the venerable, old-school is the over-use of the word And they are doing it in old-school cartoon form, no less. (As pointed out by Eric Ries .) If you can’t read it below the caption says, “I’m not leaving you. I’m pivoting to another man.” Brilliant. For the good of the industry, I think TechCrunch should implement some sort of online “swear jar” for press releases, pitches and Tweets containing the word “pivot.” (Apologies to Tagged. I realize the irony of this post coming directly after . The first step is admitting even we have a problem…) |
PS3 Cracked Open Even Further With "Root Key" Discovered | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 3 |
Just a few days after the PS3’s security was at a hackers’ convention, famed system breaker GeoHot has what is described as the “root key” for the , a hex sequence that identifies code as legitimate. I’m no hacker so I don’t want to overstep my expertise here, but this seems to be a pretty serious breach. But can Sony put the cat back in the bag? Of course, Sony putting the cat in the bag was the reason for all this hackery in the first place. They really incurred the ire of the net . Really, Sony, what did you think was going to happen? At any rate, this isn’t some script-kiddie tool for playing pirated games, though it will surely be used for that eventually. And it doesn’t seem to be something Sony can fix quickly — a lot of embedded software and likely already-pressed games rely on this code, so it may be that this door is open forever. [via ] |
null | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 8 | 25 | null |
Fitfinder re-launches as Floxx, for mapping the beautiful people | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | , the re-launched Fitfinder now backed by serial UK Angel investor Doug Richard, has re-emerged after a difficult birth on the campus of a UK university. To rewind quickly: Last year , 21, a final-year computer sciences student at University College London, founded of a UK site integrated with Facebook and Twitter allowing students to flirt. Sounds like The Facebook huh? Except this student was £300 for bringing his university into disrepute. only started in May but rapidly expanded to universities across the country before having to be taken down. UCL said it had been contacted by a number of other universities unhappy about FitFinder. It fined Martell £300 under UCL’s “Disciplinary Code of Bringing the College into Disrepute” and told him that failure to pay the fine would put his degree at risk. FitFinder had, of course, risque content, allowing students to “spot” attractive people in at their college and post a message about them in the hope they’d get a response. Women’s groups have criticised the site while supporters call it merely tongue-in-cheek. Martell took the site down, but was later contacted by Richard. So what do we have? Well essentially it’s the same site. You can post 140 character messages that describe anyone you think is “hot” that has caught your eye. With the new Floxx, you can post on a map, effectively plotting where the “fittest” (as in good looking) people have been hanging out. As the site says “This makes it very easy to decide where you should grab your next coffee!” Richard thinks it will be bit. Let’s see. I am waiting for the first Daily Mail headline employing the word stalking… |
Production 3DS Makes An Early Debut On Camera? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu64QDf7v1o&w=640&h=390]
This video purports to show the final hardware, though the criminal behind the camera seems to spend more time spinning it around than actually using it. It’s not groundbreaking or anything; I mean, I got to play with one , but this would be an actual production unit and its dimensions, finish, etc are all established. It looks to be substantially the same as what we tested out all those months back, but sitting it next to a DS lite does emphasize the thickness of the thing, though it has a smaller footprint. Let’s hope it’s not too heavy for extended use. I had plans for this sucker. [via ] |
Of course LoveFilm wants to sell to Amazon | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | It’s that Amazon is in talks to acquire LoveFilm, the UK-DVD rental and online movie-streaming company. The deal is said to be worth $312 million, but in all honesty we are not surprised. The talks have been going on since at , and Lovefilm has been looking for an exit ? The investors dearly want an exit from what we hear. Amazon already owns 42 percent of LoveFilm which acquired Amazon’s DVD rental business in 2008. |
Apple: Actually, $50 Billion Isn't Cool Either. You Know What's Cool? $300 Billion. | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | Last night, the Internet was set ablaze by the news that Facebook was taking more money at a valuation of . That’s massive. But it’s actually only 1/6th of the value of another closely-watched company in the tech space: Apple. Apple hit the $300 billion market cap milestone today after surged 2 percent to open 2011. That makes them only the second public company with such a high value, the other is . Apple, obviously, had a very impressive 2010. A year ago, they were the fifth most valuable public company at “only” a $213 billion market cap. At the time, they were still over $40 billion rival Microsoft in the tech space. That changed in May when Apple for the first time since the early days of the companies. Since then, Apple has padded their lead, and they’re now $60 billion ahead of Microsoft — now the second most valuable tech company. So can Apple take the top spot? Well barring any (god forbid) sort of oil incident, it would take at least as good of a year as they had this year — and maybe better. Exxon is currently valued at $375 billion. Their stock has surged over the past 6 months adding something like $100 billion to their market cap. At the current volume, Apple’s stock would need to be trading at about $410-a-share for them to pass Exxon. The stock is currently at just under $330-a-share. But a year ago it was around $210-a-share, so another killer year could do it. But again, Exxon’s stock shows no sign of slowing down either. So it may take Apple at $500-a-share to do the trick. That’s probably too tall of an order for this year, even with the iPad 2 and Verizon iPhone . Shifting back to Facebook, obviously it’s not fair to compare a private with a public one. But it is interesting to see their assumed value of their tech peers. At $50 billion, Facebook is already worth more than Yahoo and eBay, both of which are public. They’re behind Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. But if and when it’s determined that they should IPO (or if that’s determined for them by the SEC), that value should change quickly. Of course, Facebook’s revenues for 2010 are expected (at the high end) to be around $2 billion. For some perspective, Apple’s revenues were just . They’ll be even higher for the quarter closing in a few days. Apple could be approaching $100 billion in revenue each year, up from $50 billion (again, Facebook’s overall value) . For some better perspective, as of last quarter, Apple had $51 billion (and cash equivalents) in the bank. |
StumbleUpon Sent 700M Pageviews To Other Websites In Dec, Is Growing 20% Monthly | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | Social discovery service when CEO tweeted out that it had in terms of referral traffic on . According to Statcounter, StumbleUpon is now responsible for 43% of all major social media site (StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Myspace and Digg) traffic on the 15 billion pageviews that the analytics service tracks. Facebook is at 38%. When a company with 13 million users is outpacing one with 500 million on one specific metric, additional context is needed to understand exactly what is going on. I spoke with Camp earlier today about what exactly this recent news means for the company and why StumbleUpon seems to be killing it since August, clocking in about 1.9 million unique visitors in November according to Comscore. The site has served up over 700 million “Stumbles” (referral pageviews to other websites) in December 2010 compared to 400 million Stumbles in December of 2009, according to internal analytics. Camp says that the service has been growing at 20% month over month for the last couple of months, partially because it introduced StumbleUpon for and an . Mobile engagement, which represents 5% of all Stumbles, is growing at 40%. Web-only Stumbling, as opposed to the vast oeuvre of browser plugins and toolbars, is growing at a 25% rate. The site also gains around 500-600K new registered users monthly on average and boasts a 40% daily active user rate. ” says Camp on the recent traffic spikes, Camp also explains the discrepancy between Facebook and StumbleUpon’s end goals in contributing to referral traffic, he continues, A confluence of factors led to the latest milestones, says StumbleUpon VP of Business Development Marc Leibowitz: StumbleUpon is also breaking even according to Camp, and at around 65 employees that means revenue is in the ballbark of 10 million annually (When asked if this guess was accurate, Leibowitz told me This is not true.). In any case, beating Facebook at anything is a hell of a way to start 2011 strong. Congrats guys. |
#LessAmbitiousMovies Aims To Sort Of Take Over Part Of Your Twitter Stream | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | Hey you know what’s happening right now? , the craziest Twitter hashtag meme I’ve ever seen, pacing at around 200 tweets per minute. The basic premise is to tweet out the titles of popular films but watered down and less ambitious, get it? What’s notable about the meme is a) for some inexplicable reason it is not trending and b) that since it started a couple of hours ago the hashtag has suddenly saturated my (and ) entire Twitter stream with hilarious faux movie titles like “Being John Stamos,”Harry Potter and the Chamber of Nothing,” and “The Devil Wears Zara.” Maybe because it’s the first work week after the holidays and we all need to let off a little steam, but there something deeply satisfying about coming up with these. Go ahead try one. And yeah, someone really should It’s now trending — I’ve contacted Twitter for more information on how rapidly this is scaling as this as this seems to be the fastest growing hashtag in awhile. : Twitter’s response at 9:14 PST, I don’t blame them. In the meantime, here’s the Google Trends graph of the frequency in realtime updates including the hashtag. And here’s some of my favorites, below: https://twitter.com/#!/granulac/status/22520192374411264 http://twitter.com/#!/gabrielsnyder/status/22509055503241216 http://twitter.com/#!/fromedome/status/22493359511707648 http://twitter.com/#!/peretti/status/22509954883649536 http://twitter.com/#!/bradnelson/statuses/22500680912609280 http://twitter.com/#!/rachelsklar/status/22491275823423488 http://twitter.com/#!/sacca/status/22507002223656960 http://twitter.com/#!/cpen/status/22500256579059712 http://twitter.com/#!/brooke/status/22502869248774144 http://twitter.com/#!/parislemon/status/22501128826527744 http://twitter.com/#!/LeenaRao/status/22499834715971584 http://twitter.com/#!/thatdrew/status/22498350678941697 http://twitter.com/#!/stop/status/22498260279099392 http://twitter.com/#!/fromedome/status/22495436023533569 http://twitter.com/#!/caro/status/22494991045632001 American Neurotic — Lux 🐉 Alptraum (@LuxAlptraum) http://twitter.com/#!/andylevy/status/22508840322859010 http://twitter.com/#!/candiRSX/statuses/22504233844604928 |
Twitter And Foursquare Explain Their SXSW Explosions: Hustle, Buzz, And Maybe $11K | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | Now that it’s 2011 and we’re back in the swing of things, a lot of startups are already undoubtedly laying out their launch plans for the year. And while anytime seems like a good time around these parts, a lot of startups pencil in the festival in Austin, Texas as a good potential launching point. Why? Because it’s early in the year (early March), with a ton of people and hype, and a few of the most successful launches in recent years took place there. You can always tell the most successful launches because the press the following year will say, “who is going to be this year’s ______ of SXSW?” The two most obvious companies that fit that bill are Twitter and Foursquare. (Well technically Twitter didn’t launch at SXSW, but that was definitely their coming out party in 2007.) And coincidentally, two founders of those two companies have taken to Quora today to both answer the question: ? Yes, I get to write about Twitter, Foursquare, and Quora in the same post. Twitter co-founder that Twitter launched prior to SXSW “to a whimper”. He says that the company made a decision to target SXSW for some publicity in 2007 simply because it seemed like a lot of the then “thousands” of Twitter early-adopters were heading there. He specifically credits two things they did there with helping the explosion of interest. First, they set up a tweet visualization screens and negotiated with the conference to put them in the main hallways in the Austin Convention Center. “ ,” Williams notes. The second thing they did was to create a SXSW-specific feature that allowed people to join Twitter simply by texting “join sxsw” to their 40404 SMS shortcode. When people did that, they would show up on the screens around the conference. And you’d be following the half-dozen Twitter “ambassadors” that were other users at the conference (consider that the first SUL). Williams notes, however, that it didn’t seem like a ton of people signed up for the service that way. “ ,” he concludes. Foursquare co-founder a different take. His big launch was two years later, at SXSW 2009, and the conference was already much larger at that point. His two main keys to a big SXSW launch are to “hustle” and to do everything in your power to get viral word-of-mouth buzz just before the conference. “ ” Crowley writes, saying that they spent $0 on marketing that year. As for hustling, Crowley says that “ .” Crowley also says that you should take advantage of Twitter early on for both feedback and support. “ . Get people to spread the love,” he writes. He also suggests using a service like GetSatisfaction to gather a collection of “superusers” to help out with troubleshooting and bugs. Finally, he says that it’s probably wise to have someone not at SXSW watching the ship during the actual conference. “ ,” he says. But Crowley’s most interesting tidbit comes in a comment below his answer: don’t focus on the press / media / bloggers. Focus on making something you think is awesome. Focus on making something you think other people will also think is awesome. The rest will prob just happen. In an answer below that, another crucial point: FIrst of all, be sure that your startup makes sense for SXSW – both Twitter and Foursquare (and indeed Dodgeball) were highly suitable for thousands of geeks crammed into a smallish downtown with intermittent net connectivity and a desire to co-ordinate with each other. If your startup is an Enterprise Sales tool, you might be better off launching somewhere else. Consider this the official countdown kickoff to the “who will be this year’s ______ at SXSW” stories. |
Sales Are At A Trickle On Google's Chrome Web Store | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 4 |
In December, after of anticipation and discussions with third-party developers, Google finally the — an online portal that lets users purchase and ‘install’ web applications like TweetDeck, MOG, and hundreds of others. It’s one of the first platforms that helps developers monetize web applications using a unified payment system (in this case, Google Checkout), and it’s going to be deeply integrated into Google’s Chrome browser. Unfortunately, as far as we can tell, nobody is really buying anything on it. The UI for the Chrome Web Store looks very similar to iTunes, and, just like iTunes, one of the most prominent sections is a list of ‘Top Paid’ applications. Sitting at the top of the list is , a colorful little app selling for $1.99 that lets you play twelve children’s songs, like ‘Wheels on the Bus’. And, according to the Web Store stats, it’s been installed six times this week. Ouch. To be fair, Google isn’t sorting its ‘Top Paid’ list in order of purchases (though I’m not sure why) — a few of the other applications in the list are doing better, but even those are still showing lackluster sales. The paid application with the most recent activity is , which has 65 weekly installs and sells for $2.99 (less , so it gets around $2.56 a pop). In other words, it’s earning around $165 a week. That’s not but given that every other app on the store is probably making less than that, it’s not good. Now, it’s possible that sales slowed a bit over the holidays, but the impact couldn’t have been that huge. There is, however, one more significant explanation for this: Google hasn’t done much to expose the Web Store to users. In fact, the current stable release of Chrome still doesn’t actually feature the Chrome Web Store anywhere — it only shows up if you go to the Web Store directly and install an application. That said, Google placed banner ads for the Store on some sites (including TechCrunch), and the store got loads of publicity at launch, so it’s not like it’s a secret. There are some free applications that are getting far more attention, like , which has 8,000 installs this week. Obviously it’s common for free applications to get more installations than premium apps, but the discrepancy — 65 paid installs versus 8,000 free — seems pretty steep. One thing is clear: Google has a long way to go with the Web Store. It’s still impossible to distinguish applications that are basically just bookmarks from those that are full-fledged web apps. And while the purchase flow itself is pretty simple (you can buy something in a couple clicks, assuming you already have a Google Checkout account), I think Google will have to put some work into educating people on what exactly they’re paying for.
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CES 2011: Let The Madness Begin | Contributor | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | Here we are again: CES. We’re all here in Vegas ready to bring everything the massive trade show offers to your interwebs. There’s going to be livestreams, hands-ons, liveblogs, all with a fair amount of debauchery. should serve up all your CES needs with the UStream window embedded up top and the latest news directly underneath. The Ustreaming festivities kick off tonight with an event called CES Unveiled, which is sort of like a mini-CES with the best from the show jammed into one room with each vendor only having a few folding tables to display their wares instead of massive booths. Tomorrow is filled with press conferences and general chaos followed by the actual show starting Thursday morning. It’s a fast week filled with more content consumption than most can handle. We can’t. But we’ll do our best. Check the CES site often as the news flys fast and furious and the Ustream will be constant once the show is officially underway. |
Chegg Hires Former Netflix COO To Manage Massive Textbook Warehouse | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | Right about now, as college students across the country start to go back to school for the Spring semester, things are starting to pick up at 600,000 square foot warehouse in Shepherdsville, Kentucky. The warehouse sits right next to the main UPS shipping hub and across from a Zappos warehouse. The textbook rental company sees its busiest times peak twice a year at the beginning of each college semester. Books from last semester come in around Christmas and new ones start going out by New Year’s. “To me,” says CEO Dan Rosensweig, “watching the ball drop is just inverting the rental tracker.” The books that come in need to be inspected, sometimes repaired, and shipped out again for the next batch of student textbook renters. The warehouse has the capability to ship nearly 17,000 books an hour. “On our biggest day hundreds of thousands of books are processed,” says Rosensweig. To manage the operations, former Chegg board member Tom Dillon has officially joined the company as senior vice president of distribution. Dillon was the first chief operating officer of Netflix, and set up its hub-and-spoke DVD distribution centers. (Former Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy is also a board member). Since demand for Chegg’s textbooks is highly seasonal and concentrated in those two times a year, Chegg must staff up both its warehouse and customer service with temporary employees. Chegg employs a couple hundred people full-time, but it quadruples its staff during peak times, with more than 500 workers in the warehouse alone. But Chegg is fanatical about customer service, and bulks up on customer service reps to answer students questions during rental season. Despite competitors like and , Chegg remains the undisputed leader in the growing textbook rental market. The company plants a tree for each book it rents, and over the past three years it has planted over 4 million trees. “From peak to peak we are seeing excellent growth,” reports Rosensweig, “we don’t feel we have hit penetration or are even close yet.” And while it is still early, so far numbers are up this year again. Rosensweig wouldn’t go into specific financials, but he did confirm that the company did better than it had been projecting for the year. Onstage at Disrupt last September, when I threw out our 2010 revenue estimate of , at the time he said it wasn’t far off the mark. Round that up to $150 million and that is probably pretty close is my best guess. Chegg already rents to students in about 7,000 of the 8,000 college campuses nationwide, and its focus is to spread across campuses to more students and to rent more books to existing customers. It also and , which help students pick courses and study for them. The company has raised $219 million to date, most recently a last Fall. Shipping books is a capital-intensive business, and eventually it could be threatened by the rise of digital textbooks. In fact, Chegg co-founder Osman Rashid is to offer digital textbooks to students. Rosensweig thinks that in a few years digital textbooks could be a factor, and he’d like to offer them to students if there is demand for them. Already Chegg offers digital textbook supplements online. But for right now, he says electronic textbooks are “insignificant.” He points out some of the challenges. “Battery life is not better than a book;” publisher availability is not complete (all a student’s textbooks need to be available on one or what’s the point); and, “Right now, it is less expensive to rent a physical textbook than to get one digitally.” He expects all of these things to change, but not overnight. Until then, he’s got a huge warehouse to keep humming at full capacity. |
Twitter Math: If Accounts Were Ranked By Followers, This Would Be The Equation | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | If you ever wanted to know where you rank among Twitter users in terms of the followers you have, that’s the equation. Well, for most of you anyway. Twitter tech lead Pankaj Gupta that equation out earlier today. A Twitter Equation: If accounts were ranked by #followers, approx. rank=exp(21 – 1.1*log(#followers)). e.g., 331 with 1M followers! Sure enough, exp(21 – 1.1*log(1,000,000)) = 331.272, if my math is correct. And by “my” math, I of course mean math. The caveat is that this equation only holds if you have between 100 and a million Twitter followers, Gupta . “ ,” he notes. But since that range covers the vast majority of Twitter users, this should be useful to see where you stand. Plugging numbers (31,074 followers) into the equation puts me at a rank of around 15,085 in this system. , with 58,722 followers, would be ranked around 7,490. , with 156,709 followers, would be about 2,544. All of this is particularly interesting since we know that Twitter has for every user. This is something Twitter might even make public in the future. But this equation has nothing to do with that, apparently. ,” Gupta tells us. I still prefer to use . Also, if my math is correct here (and by “math” I mean deduction skills). That means that Twitter has roughly 331 users with more than a million followers. |
Nintendo DS Is Now The Best Selling Console Of All Time | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | has let the world know that the DS is the single best selling video game console of all time in the U.S. It makes you wonder whether or not Nintendo really ought to be concerned at all with the likes of mobile phone-based gaming. After all, isn’t , , now available on non-mobile phone platforms? Nintendo has sold 47 million DS systems so far. That takes into account all the types of DSs out there: plain ol’ DS, DS Lite, DSi, and the DSi XL. I’m not sure if the 3DS will be considered part of the “DS family.” Clearly it will be big. In other Nintendo sales news, they also managed to sale 34 millions Wiis to date, having added an additional seven million last year. Happy days at Nintendo. |
Not Just IPOs: The Surprising Increase of Big Liquidity through Buyouts (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | Around 2006 there was a sudden increase in so-called “partial liquidations,” where entrepreneurs could take some money off the table during a mid-stage funding round. Considered unheard of at the time, now they’re the norm for companies doing well. Then in 2009, we saw the rise of secondary markets, which allowed early stage investors and employees to take some money off the table at more frequent intervals. That’s still controversial in some quarters, but becoming the norm for hot companies– and at huge sums. And now, Dow Jones VentureSource has been tracking a new trend in the same vein: An increase in private equity money not just cashing out some founder or early investor shares, but buying the whole company as a way for everyone to exit and still keep the company private. In 2010, there were 23 buyouts of venture-backed companies by private equity firms totaling $1.9 billion. That’s a small percentage of the overall liquidity last year, but more than half of the $3.4 billion brought in by IPOs. And like IPOs, these buyouts usually represent larger exits than corporate acquisitions. These three trends–partial liquidations, secondary trades and private buyouts– are all intermingled and all symptoms of the same problem: Most startups hate the idea of being a public company. In most cases, this urge to find liquidity elsewhere has nothing to do with Wall Street demand for growing companies; it has to do with companies and founders not wanting to file. That’s a massive cultural shift from the ecosystem on which the Valley and the Internet was built. It also is emblematic of the strong divergence between short-term flips for the singles, increasingly long-term investment horizons for the homeruns and the relative lack of doubles and triples in the middle that . Interestingly, this buyout trend isn’t just because IPOs have been out of favor for the last few years. In a poll, more than 50% of VCs told Dow Jones VentureSource that they expected private buyouts to as a viable exit strategy in 2011 even as the number of big IPOs increase. In many cases, the buyout is a just step to an eventual IPO, in others it may be the final destination. This is strange, because buyout firms and venture capital shops used to be the polar opposites of the private equity world. One was known for taking has-been public companies and helping streamline and relaunch them anew inspiring books like , and the other was known for creating huge, new companies from nothing but an idea inspiring books like . Few people saw a trend of one cashing the other out coming. Jessica Canning, research director for Dow Jones VentureSource, joined us via Skype to talk about the trend, whether it’s a good or bad thing for venture returns over time, and who is most likely to write the biggest checks as the trend continues. |
null | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 3 | null |
CES 2011: Let The Madness Begin | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | Here we are again: CES. We’re all here in Vegas ready to bring everything the massive trade show offers to your interwebs. There’s going to be livestreams, hands-ons, liveblogs, all with a fair amount of debauchery. should serve up all your CES needs with the UStream window embedded up top and the latest news directly underneath. The Ustreaming festivities kick off tonight with an event called CES Unveiled, which is sort of like a mini-CES with the best from the show jammed into one room with each vendor only having a few folding tables to display their wares instead of massive booths. Tomorrow is filled with press conferences and general chaos followed by the actual show starting Thursday morning. |
California Can Now Search Arrestee's Mobile Phones Without A Warrant | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | Good news: the state of California . The new regime will only affect people who have already been arrested, so it’s not as if police officers will be able to search your cellphone at routine traffic stops. But still: yeah, it’s sorta lame. In 2011, even more of your rights will be chipped away. The California court that ruled in favor of this new way of being referred to an earlier U.S. Supreme Court ruling that basically says anytime you’ve been arrested you automatically forfeit any right to privacy to “anything of importance they find on the arrestee’s body.” Clearly the California court has deemed that cellphones and the like are “of importance,’ so they’re now subject to police seizure, presumably as they’re looking to find evidence of a crime. Back in the day, you would have expected to be served with a warrant to allow police to look for evidence, but not more. Spy Report: A man has just accused of being “an Apple convention” at because John, Matt, and I are sitting on a bench writing with MacBooks. It’s slightly embarrassing. I’m not an Apple fanboy, sir, it just so happens that I bought a MacBook three years ago. |
TV Content Check-In App Miso Lands $1.5M From Google Ventures And Hearst | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | The check-in app for TV content has just announced $1.5 million in led by Google Ventures with Hearst Interactive Media also participating in the round. The startup had previously last May from angel investors and from Google Ventures. Similar to GetGlue, Tunerfish and others, Miso applies Foursquare’s check-in model to television content. The idea behind Miso is that as you watch TV shows and movies, users can check-in to this content, follow specific shows and earn points and badges for interacting with this content. Miso offers iPhone, iPad and Android apps for users on the go as well as a web app. The startup now has 100K registered users (which actually seems small compared to GetGlue’s ), and is rolling out an API to partners. And Miso, which is developed by , landed a pretty high-profile new media partner—Oprah’s recently launched OWN Network. Specifically, if users check-in to Oprah’s Search for the Next TV Star show on Miso, users will earn exclusive OWN badges. Miso’s founder Somrat Niyogi writes that 2011 will bring a new strategy of expanding interaction beyond just the check-in, and it should be interesting to see how the startup plans to do this. Niyogi, who thinks there isn’t really a long term value for badges as rewards, says the “second-screen” market is still relatively young relative to TV content, and there is a lot of potential for advertising on this new experience. And having Hearst, with its media empire of television stations, and Google as media partners isn’t a bad way to start the New Year. |
Performance marketing company LeadMedia acquires MediaFactory | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | , the European online performance marketing company with headquarters in Paris, has acquired Sao Paulo, Brazil-based . Founded by Stephane Darracq (a French serial technology entrepreneur) and backed by private equity firm , LeadMedia provides clients with Internet marketing solutions, including qualified traffic generation, lead and traffic re-targeting, online customer relationship management (CRM), lead generation and technology solutions for “behavioural and semantic targeting”. The acquisition of MediaFactory, which is actually being billed as a merger, could see LeadMedia group reach a turnover in excess of $25 million in 2011 with its expanded team of 100 specialists based in Paris, Sao Paulo and Los Angeles. Interestingly, prior to soaking up MediaFactory’s operations, the company already had a presence in Brazil since 2009. Stéphane Darracq, Chairman, LeadMedia, talks up the “economic vigor” of the sector, while Truffle Capital co-founder describes Brazil as now representing LeadMedia’s “second home market.” Founded in 2002 in Paris, Truffle Capital invests in the IT, life science and energy sectors via €400 million under management. |
HP Sends Out Invites For A webOS Announcement On February 9th | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | This one just hit our inbox. Looks like HP’s got an webOS-focused announcement brewin’ up for February 9th. It’s not the surprise mid-CES announcement that some (not us) were predicting — but given how noisy CES is looking to be, that’s almost certainly for the better. We will, of course, be there. “Think Big”? webOS Tablet(s)! “Think Small”? New webOS Phones! “Think Beyond”? Uh.. webOS-powered Buzz Lightyear dolls! (Also, note the absolute lack of Palm branding anywhere on the invite. Has the brand phaseout begun?) |
Groupon Files Lawsuit Against Australian Clone "Scoopon" | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | An announcing a lawsuit filed against Australian Groupon clone . The post explains the unprecedented move of taking legal action against a Groupon clone, which apparently is squatting on the Groupon.com.au domain name. The case and in the meantime Groupon will be doing business in Australia under the name Stardeals. Says CEO Andrew Mason: “The worldwide proliferation of Groupon clones has been . One particular clone in Australia called Scoopon, created by the brothers Gabby and Hezi Leibovitch, has been making life difficult for us. Scoopon went a little further than just starting their Groupon clone – they actually purchased the Groupon.com.au domain name, took the company name Groupon Pty Limited, and tried to register the Groupon trademark (filing for the trademark just seven days before us) in Australia. The way we see things, this is a classic case of domain squatting – an unfortunate reality of the Internet business. As Groupon became internationally known, opportunistic domain squatters around the world started to buy local Groupon domain names, thinking that we’d eventually be forced to buy them at an insane price. In fact, we tried to do just that, reluctantly offering Gabby and Hezi Leibovich about $286,000 for the Groupon.com.au domain and trademark—an offer they accepted. But now they’ve changed their minds, and we believe that they’ll only sell us the domain and trademark if we’re willing to buy the entire Scoopon business from them. Left with no other options, we’ve filed a lawsuit against Scoopon, claiming that their Groupon trademark was filed in bad faith (amongst other things).” Groupon will in its home state of Illinois, despite Scoopon being Australia-based. While it remains to be seen how valid a claim on a US trademark will be considered internationally, with Groupon in the process of raising nearly , it certainly has a war chest to go after any of the thousands of clones stepping on its toes. |
Zero Punctuation: Top 5 of 2010 | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | A bit NSFW (of course) but totally worth your time. I mean, what else are you doing. Let Yahtzee run down the top five games of 2010. |
Female entrepreneurs wanted – Astia opens applications for its European accelerator | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | I won’t get into the “ ” debate but any help for startups is definitely a . On that note, , the not-for-profit “venture accelerator for women-led high-growth companies”, is calling for applications from UK and European startups for its Entrepreneur Programme, to be held in London in March 2011. Specifically, it’s targeting Technology, Life Science and Clean Technology companies. Held annually in Silicon Valley, New York, and London, Astia’s Entrepreneur Programme provides women entrepreneurs with access to resources and experts in the pursuit of the capital needed to grow their startups. Participants this year will spend five days in London (between 14-18 March 2011), attending a series of workshops, one-on-one sessions and discussions with investors, entrepreneurs and the like who’ll help to show the way to successful fundraising and “growth strategies”. But they’re not left hanging: This is also followed by an eight week advisory period which includes investors, CEOs and business professionals from the Astia community of over 1000 men and women. Select companies will then present to the investment community at the Astia Investor Forum on 12th May 2011. Prior Forum attendees include Accel, Octopus Ventures, Index Ventures, Atomico, and the Technology Strategy Board. And it’s not just talk. Astia says that since 2003, more than 60% of the companies showcased at its Investor Forums have secured funding or an exit within one year, totalling more than $750 million raised and 21 exits including two IPOs. The 2011 (via ). Online screening will be done by investors, CEOs and business professionals until February 18th, followed by in-person interviews on February 24th. We’re more than a little concerned by Astia’s mechanism of asking startups to . |
Quora Signups Exploded In Late December — Then Doubled From That This Week | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | So this service , it’s getting pretty hot. But up until now, we’ve only be able to how hot it actually is. But today they’ve finally shared some actual information — on Quora, naturally. Specifically, Quora engineer Albert Sheu has put up a long answer to the question: The reason Sheu gives includes a brief explanation of how the service works. When someone adds an answer or updates one, everyone else on that page sees the new information in realtime. That’s obviously not easy to scale, and Sheu says they’ve never tested it beyond 2 to 3 times their normal load. That was an issue at the end of December because they started seeing spikes of their normal activity. Why was that? Sheu credits a few things, namely, us: On December 28th, we saw between 5-10 times more activity on the site than usual. A number of blog posts, including ones on TechCrunch, Scobleizer, CNN, and others fed a huge number of new users to the site. Later in the day, “Quora” hit the San Francisco trending topics list on Twitter, pushing our system beyond its ability. Sheu credits Amazon’s EC2 system with allowing the service to get back up to speed relatively quickly. But the fact of the matter was that they simply weren’t really prepared for such a spike. And given how big it was, that seems understandable. Further, Sheu writes, “ .” And it’s a good thing they did that, because this week, just one week later, the service has seen even bigger growth. Look at the two graphs below that Sheu has shared. The first one represents the late December explosion in signups. The second one is the explosion this week. As you can see, the giant growth from the December week has been far eclipsed by the growth this week. In fact, he says the signup surge this week has been as it was in the late December period. “ ,” Sheu notes, thanking the engineers that helped keep things up. It seems as if most Quora users had seen the massive influx of new friend requests on the service in the past week or so — now you know why. I wondered if it was something Quora changed with regard to autofollowing, so I asked the company. “ ,” co-founder Charlie Cheever told us last night. Sheu’s data clearly confirms that. And he seems like a good resource to have for scaling — he’s previously worked at both Twitter and Facebook. So we’re sorry Quora for contributing to the problem. But it sure is a nice one to have. |
Netflix Streaming Is The Gateway Drug To Internet TV | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | Nobody likes cable TV, although we all pay exorbitant sums for it to be piped into our homes. That is why the idea of being able to (and related bill) and replace it with a variety of streaming video services from the Internet is so appealing. So far, however, you what you watch on cable with Internet TV. But that day will one day come, and the gateway drug to cord cutting and embracing Internet TV is Netflix streaming. In a presentation put together by J.P. Morgan’s Internet analyst Imran Khan (which also goes into and trends) is the slide above, which shows the results of a consumer survey titled “Netflix Watch Instantly subscribers are more likely to consider dropping their cabe packages.” Of those surveyed who stream one to two movies and TV shows a month from Netflix, 47 percent would “consider dropping pay TV,” compared to only 33 percent of non-Netflix subscribers. By the way, the fact that a third of people who don’t even have access to Netflix streaming are ready to ditch cable should worry the industry even more. But once they get into the habit of streaming video from the Internet, the number of potential cord cutters goes up by 14 percentage points. Netflix may not have the most recent Hollywood films available because of the which add a 28-day lag to the movies that Netflix gets, but streaming is taking off. Already Netflix streaming accounts for during primetime, and you can sign up for a . I have a review-unit Boxee Box, which I only pull out occasionally because most Internet video simply can’t compete with the gazillion channels I get from Verizon FIOS TV. But Netflix is supposed to come to the Boxee Box by the end of the month, and once that happens I can guarantee the amount of Internet TV I am going to watch will go up at least five or ten times. Yes, I can hook up my laptop to my TV in the living room today and stream from Netflix to the big screen, but it is kind of a hassle and I’m too lazy, especially when I am feeling lazy. And being lazy what watching TV is all about. Once I get Netflix to a box always connected to the TV that I can control with a remote . . . oh boy, bring out the popcorn. |
Panasonic Sort-Of Announces The Viera Tablet | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 1 | 5 |
CES 2011 was set to be filled with tablets and Panasonic briefly showed off their first entry into the form factor. Viera Tablet, as it will be called, will connect to “cloud servers” but that’s about all we know at this point. The tablet will be officially announced in Panasonic’s home country of Japan “in a few hours” although it sounds like it will be at the Panny CES booth so we’ll grab some hands-on as soon as we can. The company expects to launch the slate to the global market later this year. |
Report: Facebook Revenue Was $777 Million In 2009, Net Income $200 Million | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | DST and Goldman Sachs’ in Facebook has obviously the tech and financial journalism pot and is now coming to light regarding the social network’s financials. On this note the that Goldman is now offering potential investors a Facebook “snapshot” which outlines site traffic, ad statistics and other analytics. Additional details about 2009 revenue were also revealed during the Goldman solicitation process. From : The unofficial “ game has been going on for a long time, but we have to say Inside Facebook came the closest for 2009, pinning it at around Their estimated breakdown below.
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Confirmed: Tweetie 2 (Twitter) for Mac Is Coming! | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | About an hour ago, the hot rumor that Tweetie 2 for Mac would be launching tomorrow morning. The source of that information was which posted an image they received of the product, which is being renamed “Twitter for Mac”. We can now confirm that the screenshot is very real, we’ve heard from a reliable source. Further, we noted that Twitter was being unusually quiet about the image/news — they won’t respond to any inquiries about it! Well, there’s a good reason for that too. We’ve heard that the shot was actually leaked by someone within Apple and there’s currently a hunt underway to figure out who it was. That means Apple likely has both companies on lockdown. They are not happy. So when the Mac App Store launches tomorrow morning at 9 AM PT, expect to see Twitter for Mac there for download complete with native retweet support, realtime updating, and drag and drop tweets. And while we haven’t heard anything specifically about the pricing, I think it’s a safe bet that it will be a free download. Previously, Tweetie for Mac was free with ads or $19.95 to get it ad-free, but that changed when Twitter bought it. They also made Twitter for iPhone (formerly Tweetie) free. |
Official Google Video Preview Of Android 3.0 Spied Briefly | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | An official video promoting Android 3.0 Honeycomb has just appeared on YouTube, apparently without any accompanying fanfare from Google. It’s on the Android Developers channel, but one would expect at least a blog post to show off the various nuances of the new interface. Actually, as I was writing this very paragraph, the video was taken down, so I’m guessing this was unintentional. Good thing I downloaded the 720p version and got screenshots of all the interesting bits! We’ll have video for you momentarily, but for now, enjoy these screengrabs of Android 3.0. |
Zynga To Acquire Flock, The Social Browser That You Never Used | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | Zynga is acquiring , a beleaguered startup founded in 2005 by and , we’ve confirmed. The deal should be announced shortly. The company has raised nearly in venture capital, although the last round was closed in 2008. We do not know the terms of the acquisition. Both Google and Twitter were also bidding for Flock, we’ve heard from one source – perhaps to get Flock’s engineering talent, which is very highly regarded. Flock first launched it’s social browser in 2005, and we in August of that year. At the time, prior to Twitter and the rise of Facebook, “social” meant writing blogs and social bookmarking, and not much else. Flock was not a hit. It struggled over the years, eventually from using from Mozilla to Chromium as its core. But usage was never really there. And now they have a in a market that’s never been proven to exist. This is Zynga’s eighth acquisition in as many months: XPD in Beijing (May), Challenge Games in Austin (June), Unoh Games in Tokyo (August), Conduit Labs in Boston (August), Dextrose AG in Frankfurt (September), Bonfire Studios in Dallas (October) and Newtoy Inc. in McKinney, Texas (December). Lots of acquisitions, and . From the : I’m very excited to announce that the Flock team will be joining the social gaming phenomenon, Zynga. This month marked Flock’s six-year anniversary and, from the beginning, we’ve always believed in the transformative power of social. We knew that it would change everything we do online, so we worked hard to make it easier and more rewarding for you to discover, enjoy and share the relationships and content you’re passionate about. And so, it is incredibly exciting and rewarding for us to take our expertise and passion for great products to one of the hottest and most innovative companies in the world. With over a quarter of a billion users, Zynga has captured the imagination of the world. Their dedication to understanding what social game users want and to delivering a wildly popular gaming platform is already legendary. And, they’ve only just gotten started… Our team will help Zynga in achieving their goal of building the most fun, social games available to anyone, anytime – on any platform. Flock’s dedication to its products and users allowed us to achieve over 10 million users around the world with two products on the Facebook top 10 list of the most popular desktop apps. We thank our users for their unwavering support and dedication, and we’re thrilled to be going to a platform that shares our passion for combining great user experience and technology. What an awesome way to kick off 2011! Best wishes for a Happy New Year, Shawn Hardin |
Things about the Endless Facebook Speculation that Have to Be Said | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | I’ve avoided writing something about the Goldman Sachs- Facebook deal, because God knows the rest of the blogosphere has been doing enough speculation for the entire world. But four things I’ve read in the last 24-hours need a serious rebuttal. . I don’t care if it reaches 500 indirect individual shareholders through the Goldman transaction, a public company is one where the general public is able to invest and existing shareholders are able to sell shares, without approval from the company first. That isn’t happening. Deals like these have indeed been Facebook’s way of the pressures that would force a company to go public for some time now, so there are IPO-like ramifications from these deals. But that doesn’t change the fact that a tiny fraction of people are able to buy and sell shares. That’s a huge fundamental difference that affects everything about the way a company operates. Anyone who has run, worked at or covered a public company and a private company for any period of time knows that. Beyond that, it’s just an argument of semantics. These two deals are not apples-to-apples comparisons, by any means. For one thing, this isn’t an IPO no matter how badly some members of the tech press want it to be. (See point #1) To my knowledge, Google never let its users or everyday people buy pre-IPO shares. But beyond that, the comparison misses a fundamental difference in the relationship between Silicon Valley and Wall Street from the days when Google was founded and today. This difference has been widely documented, is far broader than just Facebook, and has been brewing for more than ten years. It’s part of a continuum that started with the excesses of the dot com bubble, culminated with huge changes on Wall Street that hurt the ability for smaller companies to go public and the desire for entrepreneurs to take them public, and has been like partial liquidations, secondary exchanges and buyouts. This is about an industry as a whole looking for other ways to get liquidity that don’t sacrifice price and independence. That’s the reason deals like these aren’t confined to Facebook. What’s more, Facebook and companies like it are actually in Google’s footsteps, in many respects. Compared to its generation, Google waited an extraordinarily long period of time to go public and did so very much on its own terms, so that it could protect its ability to be nimble and above the whims of activist, short-term hedge funds and traders. For all of its marketing, you could argue Google’s IPO was anti-the-little-guy, because it pioneered the modern use of a dual class of voting and the company refused to give earnings estimates or play other annoying Wall Street games. The company boldly drew a line in the sand and essentially said, “You want to own shares in us? Here’s the deal.” And for its generation, Google initially offered a pretty small float of shares, which was one reason the price soared. If you look at the reasons behind why Facebook is doing what it’s doing, I’d say Mark Zuckerberg is following the spirit of the Google playbook, not going against it. I have a lot of respect for John Battelle, but I just don’t get that Facebook trading on the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange means the company is a more responsible steward of our data. This is more of the hangover from that Google “do no evil” nonsense. For-profit companies are financially motivated not morally motivated, and nothing makes you more financially motivated than being publicly traded and having to produce quarterly results to please Wall Street. Look at what happened to daily newspapers once they were owned by publicly traded companies who cared more about seeing 10% growth year-over-year than being stewards of local news. Battelle raises a good point about the risk of Facebook using all it knows about us for selfish gains, but I don’t see how reporting quarterly numbers suddenly makes that go away. Does anyone feel like they know everything Google is doing with our data by reading its SEC filings or listening to a scripted conference call? I don’t. And frankly, I’m more worried about the things Google knows about me. The information about me on Facebook is what I have volunteered to share with people. Google has information on everything I’ve ever searched in the privacy of my own home and the content of my inbox. That’s a hell of a lot scarier if used for its own gain. But as a user, I still trust Google with all of this, because it’s ultimately in its best interest as a company not to abuse that public trust for short term gains. Same goes for Facebook whether I can buy a share of it or not. Going public doesn’t force a company to be good, anymore than a wedding ring forces a man to be faithful. (See Enron.) The reason entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman, and countless others who opted to sell their companies in the last few years do not want to go public has nothing to do with disclosing quarterly numbers. It has to do with the brain drain of employees leaving for the next hot, pre-IPO company. It has to do with a CEO’s job becoming more about managing Wall Street and the press than building the business. Being public brings with it an almost inevitable shorter-term focus. And most important for someone like Zuckerberg, it means the CEO can’t spend his time obsessing on product, which is mostly what he cares about. I remember discussing this with Zuckerberg back in 2007, as he was anticipating passing the 500-shareholding-employee mark. This was reportedly one of the things that pushed Google to go public in 2005, and this conversation was well-before Facebook came to a settlement with the SEC that allowed the company to skirt the rule about reporting numbers if a company has more than 500 individual shareholders. I asked Zuckerberg if it would be a trigger to go public, and he said no and added, “disclosing information is the least of the issues I have with being a public company.” Now, two things are obvious: A lot has changed since those early days, and Facebook will go public one day. That has always been the plan. No one has argued otherwise. And by virtue of time, growth and continued outside investment that date is a lot closer now than it was then. None of us really know for sure if it’ll happen sooner or later, but based on everything I know about Zuckerberg, disclosing financials isn’t going to make a bit of a difference on the timing. Like Google in its pre-IPO days, Facebook is operating from the ultimate position of strength. Even if the Goldman deal hadn’t happened, the company wouldn’t hurt for cash. No one is going to force this company to go public before it is ready, and all the steps it’s taken in the secondary market make it less likely to happen any time soon, not more likely because they are addressing the very reasons companies used to go public. |
null | Mg Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 4 | null |
Flattr rolls out direct donations, Wikileaks likely to benefit greatly | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | Earlier today, the official Twitter account of , the micropayment startup , that they were “excited excited excited …”, so we knew something was up. Now we’ve learned that the service, which enables users to ‘Like’ sites and content but with real money, is indeed rolling out something new: the ability to donate specific amounts of money to Flattr users directly. So rather than relying solely on the albeit innovate model of simply divvying up a pre-allocated monthly pool of cash (starting from €2), no matter how thinly that’s spread if a user chooses to “Flattr” a high number of sites, a chunk of that change can now be sliced off at will. And while any user will be able to receive donations, , which amid controversy has been shunned by traditional players MasterCard, PayPal and Visa, from the new feature greatly – donations are anonymous with a minimum payment of 2 euros. It also paves the way for Flattr to migrate further towards the holy grail of peer-to-peer payments (think: mobile phone as wallet) in which handing over cash digitally becomes as easy, if not easier than it is physically. On that note, via a third party app for Android phones, earlier this week it emerged that Flattr has in actual fact entered the off-line world. lets users scan a physical QR-code off-line, which is tied to a user’s Flattr account, bringing details of who or what it is you can give money to. In fact, as the QR-code is ultimately tied to a Flattr URL, it will work across virtually any mobile browser ( ), though the Android native app is likely to be a more eloquent experience. Is that the smell of disruption in the air? |
Google Officially Posts Android 3.0 Sneak Peak, Touts "Holographic" UI | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | If you were on the Internet today, you undoubtedly saw that Google accidentally posted an overview video of Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” on YouTube earlier — then quickly pulled it. Before they did, and grab all the key screenshot of the Tron-like overview. Now Google has officially reposted the video, as well as a brief overview of Android 3.0 . Google was clearly waiting for the OS to be previewed at CES in Las Vegas. Now that it has, here’s what they have to say: Honeycomb is the next version of the Android platform, designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets. We’ve spent a lot of time refining the user experience in Honeycomb, and we’ve developed a brand new, truly virtual and holographic user interface. Many of Android’s existing features will really shine on Honeycomb: refined multi-tasking, elegant notifications, access to over 100,000 apps on Android Market, home screen customization with a new 3D experience and redesigned widgets that are richer and more interactive. We’ve also made some powerful upgrades to the web browser, including tabbed browsing, form auto-fill, syncing with your Google Chrome bookmarks, and incognito mode for private browsing. on Google working on this completely revamped UI for Android back in June. At the time, they were aiming for the 2.3 “Gingerbread” release, but that was pushed — to what you see here in 3.0. At first glance, this UI looks impressive, and an improvement over what Android has looked like until now. And that is particularly important if Google is going compete with the iPad and attempt to own the tablet space in the same way that they have the smartphone space this year. Personally, I think I’m most excited for the true Chrome-like tabbed browsing. Obviously, Google says to stay tuned for more, as Honeycomb isn’t expect to hit until later this year. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPUGNCIozp0&w=620] : And T-Mobile has just posted some new UI videos for Honeycomb. Find them below. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5LNJ9rjTlY&fs=1&hl=en_US] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i_IkO_L0zc&fs=1&hl=en_US] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHZWAE1kKzY&fs=1&hl=en_US] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU1Y62IP-b4&fs=1&hl=en_US] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66u7lzve1e8&fs=1&hl=en_US] |
Yammer Proclaims The Death Of Old Media Through Old Media | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | You know how , so imagine my joy this morning when I drove into work this morning (at 8am as always) and saw this awesome piece of artillery right in front of my office. Yeah, our officemate has decided to wedge a billboard-sized nail in the coffin of old media (i.e. “one-way communication”) which conspicuously includes print magazines, newspapers and eh hem, billboards. Says Yammer marketing designer Aria Shen, Yammer, a Twitter for enterprise, says it bought the 6K per month/3 month billboard run because it’s hiring and wants to attract engineers. Good call: The around our 410 Townsend office is like startup Mecca. Zynga has also gone the billboard route, with we’ve heard is in the 30K a month range. As to the pricey billboard’s ultimate recruiting effectiveness in the age of infinite two-way Internet distractions? Well it caught my eye didn’t it? Maybe old media has some staying power yet?
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X5 Music secures EUR 7m investment from Northzone to hit the States | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | Swedish music company has secured a 7 million Euro investment from Northzone Ventures, which also happens to the be the lead investor in that other Scandinavian music startup you’ve probably heard of, Spotify. X5 Music is a digital record label operating largely in Europe. It plans to use the funding to sign American artists and to increase X5 Music´s current catalogue. This USA expansion makes them the first Swedish “record label” in 50 years to do so. It will also be opening up a new office in New York at the beginning of 2011 and investing in music catalogues. It’s business plan is to be the “best alternative for major American artists” says Johan Lagerlöf CEO at X5 Music. It’s kind’ve odd to see a VC invest in a record label but Torleif Ahlsand, general partner in Northzone Ventures says that, via X5, Northzone is getting a deeper involvement into the value chain within the digital music area, a market they believe has lots of growth potential. The investment in catalogues – which have a lot of potential for the future, is key to that. Last year X5 Music had over 10 albums on the American Billboard chart, although it only distributes digitally and is based in Stockholm. |
Is @Betfairpoker the new @ShitMyDadSays ? No, really | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | The wonderful thing about Twitter is that is can be used in many different ways. was a simple account which recounted the saying of a New York pensioner in all their unfiltered glory, and even became . But corporate entities – and it has to be said, startups – rarely do anything so brave. Not so which, has been running a Twitter account, , to promote its Poker section. Except the link to the Poker section on the profile is just about all you’ll see to associate it with the world of betting, poker, or anything so mundane and temporal. Instead, whoever is running the account is taking it on a wild, fantasy-filled flight of fantasy and with total official sanction. Why? Because we just checked with Betfair’s PR people and they say it’s an official account just, you know, doing it’s thing. So here for you is a selection of tweets from today. But it’s clear this account has been waxing poetically from weeks now. Admittedly it might not be news to you, but it surely looks hilarious to us. In fact, it’s so good, I might even take up Poker… |
Tweetie 2 Coming With The Mac App Store Tomorrow? Mum's The Word From Twitter | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | This afternoon, a site called Razorianfly a very interesting tidbit of information along with a purported screenshot to back it up. According to the site, Tweetie 2.0 for Mac is launching tomorrow . : If true, this is big news for Mac users who have long feared that the beloved app had been left for dead since Twitter and its developer, Loren Brichter, back in April of last year. That acquisition included both the iPhone and Mac versions of the software. But while Tweetie for iPhone was relatively quickly turned into Twitter for iPhone, Tweetie for Mac has only seen minimal bug fixes. Meanwhile, Brichter was hard at work on Twitter for iPad. So is it coming? Well, the normally chatty Twitter PR team seems oddly silent at the moment. Has the company in Cupertino told the startup to ignore all questions about the product? Perhaps. But I’ve had several conversations with the company about the status of Tweetie for Mac over the past year. The gist is always more or less “it’s not dead, but it’s not actively being worked on.” The last actual statement we received from them was in October: We aren’t actively planning Tweetie for Mac 2, but we maintain the app for current users. For example, over the summer we updated the client to use OAuth and improved MagicMouse support. We also made the app available for free. At that time, Brichter was as to the future of the product. And while Twitter said they weren’t “actively planning” a release, the word from MacHeist director John Casasanta was that Brichter was in fact actively working on it — it was just coming along slowly. Casasanta was in a unique position to know about it because he had promised a pre-release build of Tweetie 2 for Mac for people who bought the MacHeist bundle last year. But that was before the Twitter deal went down. So could Twitter have ramped up development of Tweetie for Mac over the past 2 months? It’s certainly possible. The last big project, New Twitter, was completed in September. And Apple announced the Mac App Store on October 20. Apple may have reached out to the company to see if they could launch the app alongside the new store — which again, will be tomorrow. We had heard that Apple previously approached Twitter about having a Safari extension ready to go for that launch as well. As for the screenshot, the images of the various users are all Twitter employees. And the two icons attached to the account loaded on the app are both controlled by Brichter. The file size (2.0 MB) also seems to match up well with that of the current Tweetie for Mac. Of course, all of that could be faked by a person who knows what they’re doing. But it’s also worth noting that Twitter does use that dark icon for test software. When it goes live, the icon becomes Twitter blue. So yes, this could be an internal shot. Long story short, it’s still very much a “maybe” for tomorrow. But it’s an increasingly strong “maybe”. : |
Zynga Hires Fourth Ex-MySpace Exec | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | The MySpace talent exodus continues, and Zynga seems to be taking more than its share. In 2010 they hired , formerly a MySpace VP, the communications team. Soon after former MySpace CEO joined Zynga EVP. Now, we’ve learned from multiple sources, they’re hired two more. , a level 51 Cityville player and formerly head of product at Facebook and SVP of User Experience and Design at MySpace, joined Zynga late last year. And , GM of social at MySpace, has resigned and will start at Zynga in the next week or so. Zynga is clearly making a push to make its games more engaging, and it seems quite willing to do so at MySpace’s expense. Zynga did not respond to a request for comment. christina |
Official Google Video Preview Of Android 3.0 Spied Briefly | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | An official video promoting Android 3.0 Honeycomb has just appeared on YouTube, apparently without any accompanying fanfare from Google. It was on the Android Developers channel, but one would expect at least a blog post to show off the various nuances of the new interface. Actually, as I was writing this very paragraph, the video was taken down, so I’m guessing this was unintentional. ( : it was just displayed officially for the ) Good thing I downloaded the 720p version and got screenshots of all the interesting bits! We’ll have video for you momentarily, but for now, enjoy these screengrabs of Android 3.0. : Here we have the lock screen: And the home screen; note the TechCrunch link there. Thanks for reading, Google!I’m a big fan. This is clearly the same type of desktop we saw on at All Things D. Nice big widgets and a four-corner layout for hot spots. Next, moving over to another screen, this appears to be a collection of social widgets — follow your friends’ latest updates and so on. Now, a dashboard-esque screen with all your virtual desktops displayed, and widgets to grab: The new browser, looks slick and minimal: The new Gmail interface Andy was demoing. If I remember correctly, this type of app should be able to be broken down to smaller widgets. Or something. Fragments, I think he said. Google Talk interface and two-way video chat:
Google Maps, with more of the same black-and-grey theme: Looks pretty solid, and looked nice in action. But we’ll probably get a hands-on soon, as Motorola is probably going to announce their Xoom tablet in just about an hour. We’ll update this as soon as video goes live. |
The "Digital Newsstand" Race Becomes: Who Is More Willing To Trick Users, Apple Or Google? | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 2 | Breaking news: old school publishers seem hell-bent on insuring their content doesn’t catch on in the red-hot tablet space. A story in this evening details how Google, Apple, Amazon and others are all racing to try to do deals with major publishers in order to set up their “digital newsstands”. Of course, all of this as the publishers seem to be aware that tablets (okay, ) are actually taking off this time and they’d be wise to get on board. The problem, naturally, is that they want to be on board on their terms. And those, naturally, are old school terms. In other words, out-of-date and somewhat sleazy terms. Here’s one main blurb of the WSJ piece: Apple is planning to share more data about who downloads a publisher’s app, information publishers can use for marketing purposes. According to people familiar with the matter, Apple would ask consumers who subscribe to an iPad version of a magazine or newspaper for permission to share personal information about them, like their name and email address, with the publisher. Some publishers remain unhappy with this arrangement because they think few customers would opt to share such data, according to these people. So what the publishers seem to be demanding is that Apple opts users into sharing information without telling them. Or, to put it another way, “make it opt-out or we opt-out”. Classy. few customers would opt-in to sharing such data. Because who the hell wants to be marketed to relentlessly just because they signed up for a magazine subscription? No one. Except that’s the way the magazine subscription model . Not because it’s a good model, but because in the days before technology started destroying print, people were naive enough not to realize what was going on. Obviously, the publishers would like to transition that happiness in slavery to the tablet space. And while Apple doesn’t appear to be biting on that at this time, the publishers apparently are turing their sights towards chief rival Google. From the piece: In recent weeks, these people say, Google has told publishers it would take a smaller slice on any sales they make of Android apps than the 30% cut Apple typically takes on iTunes sales. Google has also proposed giving publishers certain personal data about app buyers to help with marketing related products or services. It’s not clear if in the Google scenario this would be opt-in (like Apple is proposing) or opt-out. But if Google wants to secure these deals ahead of Apple, it’s pretty clear what they’ll have to do. Hopefully they won’t do that. Apple is also apparently on the verge of a new feature in iTunes that would allow for publishers to offer simple content subscription services. This too has been rumored for some time, and makes a lot of sense. After the initial interest wore off, it seems that most magazine apps are dwindling in sales numbers. The reason for this is obvious: they’re far too much money and too much of a pain to download. To get Time each week, you have to pay $4.99 each time. There is no subscription option. Others, like Newsweek, do have a subscription option, but it’s a bit convoluted. And others, like the Wall Street Journal, have an option (their own) that’s even more convoluted. In order for the digital newsstand idea to work, it has to actually be a newsstand. As in, a centralized place where you can find and buy anything you’re looking for with a few easy clicks. You know, like iTunes. The stand-alone app model isn’t working for this content. But the publishers are wary of iTunes because they don’t want to give Apple the 30 percent cut, and, more importantly, they want that subscriber data. And so we appear to be where we were a few months ago, at a stalemate. Talking to Google about a rival newsstand seems like a good bargaining tool, but the Android platform still doesn’t have a tablet that’s nearly as popular as the iPad. Amazon has the popular Kindle device, but it’s in black and white and doesn’t exactly seem like the future of magazine content consumption. You can be sure that Apple will want something like this digital newsstand in place by the launch of the iPad 2. And as they like to do, they’ll probably launch it even if they only have a few publishers on board. And there will be some on board. Because they stand to lose a lot more than Apple does if they don’t get their content to hit on the iPad. |
$1 Billion Isn't Cool. You Know What's Cool? $50 Billion. Goldman And Facebook Agree. | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 2 | While everyone has been busy wondering Facebook was going to IPO, most were looking past the first question: is Facebook going to IPO? But not TechCrunch alum Evelyn Rusli and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Tonight that Goldman Sachs has just led a major new investment in the social network. An investment that values it at a nice round $50 billion. And the likely reason is so Goldman can take Facebook public. More specifically, Goldman has invested $450 million in Facebook while Russian firm (and current large stakeholder) Digital Sky Technologies threw in another $50 million for a total of $500 million in this round. But the round is more complicated than that as apparently Goldman will be able to unload some of its stake to DST, according to the report. So is the IPO a done deal? Not exactly. While Facebook itself hasn’t given a timetable for the milestone, many were expecting it to happen in 2011. But more recent indications suggest it will more likely occur in 2012. Facebook, obviously, wants it to happen as late as possible so they don’t have shareholders to answer to. But that’s the thing; with all the investment they’ve taken, and the red-hot activity on the secondary markets, they already do have a lot of shareholders — they just don’t technically have to answer to them. Yet. The SEC is said to be looking into whether or not that Facebook is improperly skirting around the rules for going public. Either way, Goldman looks to make a a good chunk of change before the IPO as well. From the report: In a rare move, Goldman is planning to create a “special purpose vehicle” to allow its high-net worth clients to invest in Facebook, these people said. While the S.E.C. requires companies with more than 499 investors to disclose their financial results to the public, Goldman’s proposed special purpose vehicle may be able get around such a rule because it would be managed by Goldman and considered just one investor, even though it could conceivably be pooling investments from thousands of clients. If that doesn’t piss the SEC off too much, that is huge for the firm. They’ll get fees for all of that. But not drawing the further SEC attention will be hard given that Goldman is said to be trying to raise up to for Facebook from investors at that $50 billion valuation. Remember that it was barely a month ago when on Accel Partners selling off a big portion of their Facebook stock at a $35 billion valuation. Of course, they made something like a 247x return on that sale, so it’s hard to argue with it. A few weeks later, we noted that Facebook had in valuation on the secondary markets. With this investment, that valuation has just been validated. As if needed any more buzz leading up to its DVD release next week… Oh and Facebook could use some of the money on. |
Apple iPad And iPhone 4 Top eBay's Most Popular Searches For 2010 | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 1 | 2 | With eBay handling more than U.S. product searches a quarter, the marketplace can show what items are most desirable in a given time. We about what was trending on eBay during the holiday shopping period, and today the market place is releasing its most popular product searches in 2010. Apple dominated the list, with the and taking the top two spots, respectively. These gadgets were followed by Victoria’s Secret, Nintendo Wii Games, Nintendo DS, Playstation 3, Nikon d90, diamond ring, sunglasses and laptops. While there were some outliers in the list (i.e. Victoria’s Secret), it seems that searches on the marketplace were dominated by electronics and gadgets. The iPhone 4 eBay’s “top shopped” list, which top products that consumers actually bought (as opposed to searched for) on eBay. In terms of top shopped, the iPad followed the iPhone 4 in fifth place. Collectively, the iPhone 4 (which sold 1.6 million related products) and the iPad for over 2.2 million related products sold (this includes cases, etc.). Interestingly, neither the iPad or iPhone 4 made Amazon’s this year (both are not sold on Amazon); the Kindle took the stop spot on Amazon’s list. |
Square Starts 2011 with A New Round At A Big Valuation | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 2 | While much of Silicon Valley spent the last two weeks skiing or otherwise reveling in all that money made this year from acquisitions, partial liquidations and , Square founder was apparently hard at work. TechCrunch has learned that Square is in the process of closing a large round of funding. The company is being valued, we hear from multiple sources, at somewhere close to $200 million. We don’t have confirmation on who did it, but we hear that Sequoia Capital was in the mix to lead this round, along with , Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Our sources say Sequoia ended up on top and will lead the round. A strategic investor is also likely to invest, sources say. Someone like Visa, Mastercard, or American Express. Sequoia would be a seemingly strange fit. It’s not a firm known for doing later stage deals or for paying up on valuations. But lately the firm has deviated from that playbook with deals like and . We hear Square’s funding was a competitive round, but have also heard that several of the top firms we expected to be in the running had some concerns about the steep valuation relative to Square’s traction, despite admiration for Dorsey and the team. Payment companies are hard to build, with fraudsters trying to exploit it and big competitors trying to run you out of the market. Square has become a media darling and has attracted an enviable team — including — but market traction has been more elusive. It could still be a company that is so transformative it moves America’s GDP as Newsweek a year ago, but there’s a lot of work to do first. Still, Square is millions of dollars a week in transactions, and we hear they’re closing in on a million dollars a day. This has the earmarks of one of those deal that VCs look back on in ten years and say “I told you so!”– we just don’t which side of the debate will have the bragging rights.
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Like 'Twitter For iPad'? Check Out Its Facebook Counterpart, Facepad | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 2 | In what has become one of the not-so-great mysteries of technology, Facebook still hasn’t launched a native iPad application nine months after the device made its debut, despite the fact that many thousands — perhaps even millions — of people search for it every day. Of course, that hasn’t stopped some enterprising developers from launching Facebook applications of their own — ‘ for Facebook’, which is made by a third-party, has become one of the App Store’s most . But that application is hardly perfect, and now it has a new challenger: , a Facebook application that has clearly taken many design cues from Twitter’s innovative iPad application, which was in September. The similarities are obvious, but that isn’t a bad thing. The biggest involves the way new windows are handled: just like Twitter for iPad, when you tap on a link to a piece of content Facepad will slide a new window onto the right hand side of the screen. This allows you to quickly jump to a linked article and then back to Facebook without losing your place, or between multiple friend profiles — something that isn’t so easy using a normal web browser. The application allows you to keep dozens of these tabs open at once, so you can flick across a bunch of profiles in a few seconds. It’s pretty slick, and people seem to like it. Since launching last week, Facepad has managed to get quite a bit of organic growth. In its first twelve hours the application served over a million ad impressions — that doubled to 2 million impressions after 24 hours. Now the app is up to tens of millions of page views and is the 15th most popular application on the App Store overall. At its core though, Facepad is still a reskinned version touch.facebook.com, the web-based version of the social network that Facebook has optimized for touchscreen displays (Friendly, another third-party app mentioned earlier, also uses as its core). This means that, aside from the handy nav bar at the left hand side and the window swiping, much of the application still feels like a regular website, which isn’t ideal. Cofounder Cole Ratias says that will change with the launch of Facepad V2 — the team is working to make the whole application feel more like a native app, so you’ll be able to do thinks like flick through photo albums the way you would in the iPad’s default photo application. Ratias also says that the team doesn’t want to implement anything that feels half-baked — for example, he points out the chat feature in Friendly, which takes up the full screen and feels a bit clunky. Facepad will also offer chat, but not until it can present it in smaller window overlays. Facepad is the first product from a new startup called , and the company has bigger ambitions than just becoming a better way to browse Facebook (though they’ll take that, too). In the future the company plans to integrate a gaming platform into Facepad featuring Facebook Connect-enabled, casual games that use Loytr’s APIs for monetization and other functionality (this way Loytr will be able to take a cut of revenue). The company has other plans beyond Facebook, though Ratias declined to describe them in much detail for now. Of course, there’s little doubt that Facebook is going to be release that’s better suited for the iPad’s large display — but based on comments from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, when it comes, it may . Zuckerberg says that Facebook doesn’t currently have enough resources to develop separate native apps for each platform, so it makes sense to make a web-based solution. One big thing to note: the current version of Facepad has a bug that will cause it to crash on iPads that are running iOS 3.2. That’s an older version that lacks key features introduced in 4.2, like multitasking, but a significant number of users are still running it. Facepad has submitted an update that fixes the bug and is waiting on Apple to approve it. : The new version has been approved, and you can .
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FriendFeed Traffic Is Actually Up Since The Facebook Deal; Thanks Largely To Turkey | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 2 | . You remember it, right? It was that awesome service that Facebook in August 2009. It was a smart deal all around. Facebook got an awesome team of developers and product people, while FriendFeed got to translate some of what they were doing to a service with a reach as large as any on the web. Unfortunately, it was a somewhat raw deal for many of the people who actually used FriendFeed. While the team and Facebook said it would be staying up, many users left and for most it became . Or did it? There’s a hot thread on Quora right now talking about the demise of FriendFeed called: So far, there are 29 answers, many from people in the tech community who still do use it to surface information (this is what I loved it for as well). But the best answer comes from , one of the service’s co-founders, who is now the CTO for Facebook. “ ” Taylor writes. A quick glance at seems to back up this claim. While this data is never perfect, it does usually give a good overview — and sure enough, it shows that Japan and Turkey are now ahead of the U.S. in regional popularity (though it has Japan first on the list). It also shows traffic to be about the same (or slightly above) what it was around the time of the acquisition (there was a spike just prior to the event, ). Also, our own Mike Butcher the huge Turkish usage of FriendFeed about a year ago for TechCrunch Europe. As he wrote at the time, “ .” All of this is particularly interesting since aside from keeping the servers up, the old team and Facebook have done basically no work on the service — it exists in a state of “ ,” as fellow co-founder put it. But many of the features of FriendFeed, such as real-time updating, are still ahead of many other social services that attempt to do the same thing. That’s true even though Facebook has much of the technology behind it. |
Minimalist Turntable Plays Your Records Minimally | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 20 |
This isn’t the first turntable we’ve seen that’s been stripped down to its bare parts, but it has the distinction of being more a deconstruction than a compacting of function. and others like it take the whole turntable idea and crush it into a single slab, but seems to keep the structure of the classic record player but remove anything extraneous. There’s an argument for both, and I can’t decide which I’d actually rather have. The concept one has a built-in speaker, which is handy… but it’s not exactly portable in the first place, so you don’t really need to care about built-in speakers. The Crosley is portable, but you’d need speakers as well. Eh! They’re both sweet in different ways. [via ] |
Seven Technologies That Will Rock 2011 | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 2 | So here we are in a new decade, and the technologies that are now available to us continue to engage (and enthrall) in fascinating ways. The rise and collision of several trends—social, mobile, touch computing, geo, cloud—keep spitting out new products and technologies which keep propelling us forward. Below I highlight seven technologies that are ready to tip into the mainstream 2011. Before I get into my predictions, let’s see how I did last year, when I wrote Some of my picks were spot on: the ( ), (Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, mobile location-aware search, etc.), (it became an ) and (now even ). Some are still playing out: (it’s made great strides, but isn’t quite here yet), (lots of cool apps have AR functionality, but for the most part it is still a parlor trick), ( and pushed it forward), (Square and other transaction processing options came onto the scene), and (Salesforce pushed Chatter, and tons of social CRM startups pushed their wares, but enterprises are always slow to adopt). And one got pushed to 2011: (we are ). What’s in store for 2011? Some of these themes will continue to evolve, and some new ones will gain currency. Here are seven technologies poised to rock the new year: What technologies do you think will make it big this year? |
null | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 1 | 5 | null |
Verizon's "Countdown" iPhone Ad: Watch It Here So You Don't Have To Watch American Idol | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlN3BgsV1nc&w=640&h=390]
Although, as usual, I feel a little silly posting a commercial, this one from Verizon thanking their customers for sticking it out (whether they really did or not) is too decent to skip. It should be playing a lot in prime time, but of course that means you have to watch prime time shows to see it. Or you could just hit play right here and get the same experience. Yes, we spoil you. |
Toy DSLR Actually Shoots Stills And Video, Has Swappable Lenses | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 20 |
Although this might actually also work as a gag gift your favorite photographer, it might be a pretty cool thing to give a kid, too. I mean really, if you want them to like the idea of interchangeable lenses and cameras, a little thing like this would be great way to introduce them. It’s called the , and it costs around $110 (if you can figure out how to order and deliver to a non-Japan address). It shoots 1600×1200 stills and really, bad video, though at a full 30fps. The fun part is that there are actually three extra lenses to choose from, which presumably have actually different optical qualities. They cost… looks like around $50 each. Yow! A little more and you could pick up an lens for your DSLR. [via ] |
Want To Open Your iPhone? Use This $2.35 Screwdriver | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | I’m not sure why it took a screw type change to open everyone’s eyes that Apple’s approach to hardware and software is over-protective and damaging to , especially when the problem of an uncommon screw type is easily solved by . Shouldn’t we be worried about all the other heinous things Apple, Sony, and other consumer tech companies are doing? The things we can’t fix by googling them and making a three-dollar purchase? |
Next-Gen BlackBerry Curve Gets Caught On Camera | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | See that lovely, BlackBerry Curve-lookin’ thing up there? According to , that’s none other than the next generation BlackBerry Curve (or, as they allegedly refer to it as inside RIM, the BlackBerry “Sedona”) we saw . While N4BB’s source only named a few specs, they’re just about identical to what trickled out before: 512MB, and BlackBerry OS 6.1. Oddly, they go on to say that the screen appears to pack a resolution “much higher than any current BlackBerry”. Thus far, we’ve been hearing that this Curve’s screen runs at 480×360. While that’s certainly than the 320×240 resolution we’ve grown accustom to with BlackBerry Curves prior, it’s still relatively low by modern smartphone standards. |
TechCrunch Interview With Eric Schmidt, Larry Page And Sergey Brin | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | Late last summer we were ready to break a big story – that would be stepping down as the CEO of Google. Multiple sources and all that jazz. The basic story was that he was tired (who wouldn’t be), and that the idea of competing, and probably losing battles, against Apple and Facebook for the next decade wasn’t all that appealing. Who would replace him? That was the rest of the article. But Google insisted the story wasn’t accurate, wasn’t even close to accurate, and generally contained no accuracy whatsoever. We killed the story, since their denials seemed fairly straightforward and honest, and we found no other independent sources. Knowing I’d be annoyed by today’s news that of Google most likely explains why Google offered to let talk to the Trinity – Larry, Sergey and Schimdt – this afternoon in the flesh. At least, I assume they were in the flesh on the other end of the phone. The well rehearsed message coming from all three of them is that this is a good decision, it’s not a rushed decision, and it’s a decision based purely on what’s best for the company. Schmidt stressed that Larry is ready to take the CEO position because for the last decade he, Sergey and Schmidt made all important decisions together. “The only difference is that Larry will get the credit and attention,” said Schmidt, saying that Larry is more than ready for the job. And Schmidt will certainly still be around as executive chairman in case things slip. Schmidt also stressed on the phone that this is a good way to make Google more efficient. He earlier in the day that they wanted to “simplify our management structure and speed up decision making.” I asked him for examples where slow decision making and/or a complicated management structure had hurt them in the past. “There’s an example every hour,” he said I also asked Schmidt how much of the decision was personal, since that’s what we heard over the summer. He pointed out that he isn’t stepping down, he’s “stepping up” and that he’ll now be able to focus more on big picture things for Google like “deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership.” He’ll still be an employee after the change, and he’ll still take his $1/year salary. Schmidt responded similarly to my question about their to Fortune that the three would work together for twenty years. He’s still part of the team, and they’re all still working together. Words aside, this is clearly Schmidt taking a much smaller role at Google. And there’s nothing wrong with that given the decade he just finished off. “No one in the universe could have done a better job as CEO of Google,” Larry said early in the interview. Few people would disagree. But that doesn’t mean Schmidt wants to fight the same fight over the next decade. Eating Microsoft’s lunch may have been the salad days for Google. Now they’re fighting dual wars with Apple and Facebook, , in my opinion, aren’t completely in their favor. Read more about the story . |
YC-Funded AppHarbor: A Heroku For .NET, Or "Azure Done Right" | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | You may be noticing a trend: there are a lot of startups looking to mimic the easy-to-use development platform that made Heroku a hit with Ruby developers and offer a similar solution for use with other languages. In the last few weeks alone we’ve written about (which, as you’d guess, focuses on PHP) and (which aims to support a variety of languages). And today we’ve got one more: , a ‘Heroku for .NET’. The company is funded by Y Combinator, and it’s launching today. AppHarbor will be going up against Microsoft Azure, a platform that developers can use to deploy their code directly from Visual Studio. But co-founder Michael Friis says that Azure has a few issues. For one, it uses Microsoft’s own database system, which can lead to developer lock-in. And it also doesn’t support Git, which many developers prefer to use for collaboration and code deployment. Other features: AppHarbor has automated unit testing, which developers can run before any code gets deployed (this reduces the chance that they’ll carelessly deploy something that breaks their site). The service also says that it takes 15 seconds to deploy code, rather than the fifteen minute wait seen on Azure. Friis acknowledges that there are a few potential hurdles. For one, some .NET developers may be used to life without Git, so it may take some work to get them interested (Mercurial support is on the way, which many .NET developers already use, so this may not be a big deal). There’s also going to be competition for the small team, which currently includes Friis, Rune Sørensen and Troels Thomsen. AppHarbor is first to launch, but there will be others: and are both planning to tackle the same problem, and they won’t be the last. |
Is This Google's Groupon Clone? Well The Logo Fits. [Update: Confirmed] | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | A on Mashable shows that Google will be imminently launching a Groupon clone, called Google Offers. By the look of the documents they have received from a source this product seems like it would be your run of the mill Groupon clone, Ha. adds another piece of the puzzle with a Google hosted Google offers logo, of the URL . It matches the one in the document below. The 404 page for is also graphically unique from those of and , which both land on similar pages. Last time the search giant attempted a foray into the deals space, it reportedly offered Groupon itself $6 billion for an acquisition. Groupon didn’t bite and looks to be progressing towards an IPO at a $15 billion valuation. I’ve contacted Google for a confirmation and will update this post when they respond. Google confirms that this is indeed their Groupon clone in a statement to [scribd id=47286019 key=key-2o3m00yhqexg512hl3sz mode=list] |
Verizon's First iPhone Commercial: It Begins | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | Well that didn’t take long. Here it is, the first Verizon iPhone commercial. As you can see, the focus is on clock — the first one on 11:59 — implying that people in all different walks of life are waiting for something. There’s the noise of a click constantly ticking in the background as a low hum becomes a louder hum. Then the voice over: “ ” The clock strikes 12. A girl smiles. “ .” Cue the iPhone 4 logo. Cue the Verizon logo. Cue the launch date: 2.10.11. And then the new tagline: “It Begins”. , there’s nothing about Android. Nor is there anything about AT&T. It’s only about the iPhone. And Verizon. Together. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlN3BgsV1nc&w=640&h=390] |
Amazon Pegs September 27th As The Star Wars Blu-ray Release Date | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | Star Wars is on Blu-ray. That’s a fact, jack. Sometime in September is what the initial announcement stated. Now, Amazon is listing the actual date as September 27. You know what this means? It’s time dig out the trusty Travel John and camp out in front of Best Buy. [ via |
Video: This Concept Phone Is Pure Madness | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHLrPOTYNQg&w=640&h=390] You know the cool thing about “Concept” products? They don’t really have to make complete sense. Take the one in the video up above, for example. Crazy long screen? Neat! Buttery, ultra minimalist interface? Gorgeous! Touch sensitive frame? Er, sure. Connectivity allowing you to put three of them side-by-side to make a little on-the-go PC? … Seriously? Still, it’s damn fun to look at — and according to , this guy just won top accolades in a Concept Design competition in China. I look forward to using this phone while soaring through the clouds with my solar-powered jet pack. |
Hadoukinect! Kinect Hacked To Play Street Fighter | John Biggs | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCOwNT2mZuU&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3] An enterprising young hacker has connected the to a keyboard controlled game, thereby allowing him to throw real punches at Dhalsim.
The code to run the interface is – it’s basically a set of physical triggers that fire off key combinations – and there’s also a nunchaku add-on that allow for some true man-on-machine action. |
The Saddest Pink Infographic About Women In Tech You'll Ever See | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | — Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg “ WPromote Infographic There was an extremely Google earnings call at 1:30 pm today and I’d like to write about some startups at some point before the day ends so I’m not going to waste too much time with this one. But here you go before I forget, an infographic about women in tech that is pink, includes images of Sarah Palin, Paris Hilton, porn star Jenna Jameson and Snooki, and asks hard-hitting questions like and Ostensibly this is holding up Google’s , Cnet’s , Facebook’s , PR consultant and Net -A- Porter CEO as female technology career role models (you can follow the flow chart to see which one you should emulate) and indeed they are. But how does have anything to do with technology? Imagine asking this question to Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or Jack Dorsey from Square (who is, , fashion forward). My biggest problem with this is that it makes what must have been years of grueling achievement look so ephemeral, (?) From experience, being a woman in this industry means a ton of being passed over for stuff, condescended to and if you are eventually successful, . It’s no The women who have been highlighted here are smart, driven and have worked hard for their success. They deserve so much more than being reduced to an infographic bobble-head on a cartoon body. And in case anyone was wondering, I am “Caroline McCarthy.” |
TestFlight: Super Simple, Over-The-Air App Beta Testing Comes To The iPhone | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | If you’ve ever had to test an unreleased iPhone application or wanted to test yours with real world users, you’ll know what a pain it is. The UDID thing is bad enough, but the process of having to drag and drop .ipa and provisioning files to the copy of iTunes on the computer you sync with is ridiculous. Why on Earth can’t you do this over the air? That’s exactly what brings to the table. The service provides an over-the-air app installation solution that is massively easier to use than the current iTunes sync model. How do I know? I’ve actually used it. Before we heard about their launch today, I used TestFlight to test another startup’s iPhone app. I was blown away by how simple the process was. I immediately wished all startups would use this solution. Obviously, TestFlight hopes all customers have the same reaction I did. And the truth is that many others already have. In their testing phase, companies like Posterous, Twitter, and Icon Factory have used their solution to try out new versions of their apps. Beyond simple over-the-air installation, another big plus to TestFlight is that you can group testers together to serve them up different versions of your app. So, for example, if you want people in your company to see one version, but investors to have another, you can easily do that. And you can track the stats for each. There’s also a “recruitment” feature to allow devs to find potential testers if they’re looking for more. All of this is still subject to Apple’s device testing limits (which is why the UDID is still needed), but again, TestFlight makes the process so much better. And naturally, it works for the iPad and iPod touch as well. While the service is free to developers who want to try it, there will also be an enterprise version that they plan to charge for. That pricing hasn’t been determined yet, but co-founder Ben Satterfield tells us it will include installable licensed versions plus other to be determined features. |
Speaking of… Social Venues with Nic Adler of The Roxy [TCTV] | Cyan Banister | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | We read a lot of news about amazing companies when they receive financing, have a change in leadership or launch new products, but we rarely get a glimpse into the companies and people that use those products and tools in incredibly meaningful ways. This week’s Speaking Of… is with Roxy owner , son of Lou Adler who’s famous for producing bands/acts such as Cheech and Chong, The Mamas and the Papas and films such as Up In Smoke and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Lou Adler is also the creator of the Roxy nightclub that Nic now runs and operates. The is a 37 year old international brand that was born the same year as Nic and has been the destination for legendary bands through the decades. Nic grew up around musical legends such as Bob Marley, Guns and Roses, etc. and when he took over the club, he had a very different vision for how it should operate. Lou ran a very successful club using traditional promotional tools, but the club was eventually displaced by bigger and hotter venues in different parts of Hollywood and deeply impacted by the move of consumers searching for how to spend their time using Internet tools and ditching old media. Even though Nic’s father was a naysayer and didn’t approve of Nic’s new ways of operating the business, Nic forged ahead and eventually his father came around once he saw the results. There’s no denying that Nic was correct in changing everything, because if it wasn’t for social media, the Roxy would no longer exist. Now, I hate the word social media and really, the word social, because it is so overused. When I hear someone say they are a social media “expert”, I vomit in my mouth a little. However, The Roxy is a strong example of how focusing on making your venue/business social really can work and is absolutely necessary in order to be relevant in today’s fast moving world. Nic says that social media, to him, is a mirror of how your business is performing. It isn’t all about reaching out. He’s learned more about his business through real time interaction than he ever could have before. He places so much importance on this as part of his business that he’s hired Kyra Reed, co-founder of Markyr Media, and several other team members who’s sole job is to interact and build meaningful relationships with fans + customers. Nic’s openness for embracing new widgets, applications and tools actually shocked me. He’ll throw anything against the wall to see if it sticks and he’s hoping more and more startups develop tools that he can put to use in the club. Nic is also thinking about coming to the Bay Area to host a Roxy Presents event where he brings in an awesome band and listens to startups pitch him on ideas. The top idea that wins would get a chance to be featured in his club. If this interests you, please let us know in the comments and we’ll pass it along. The Roxy was the first venue of its type to use and they were pretty excited with the results, but experienced some backlash from some of the music community when they did it, but his experiments turned out to be a huge success, drawing in more customers and ultimately benefiting the bands. The venue has almost 140k fans on Facebook and 53k fans on Twitter (the most fans/followers for a venue of their kind online). This is a small number for a famous person or a big brand, but for a venue this is an astronomical number, especially when you consider the club’s capacity is 500 people. This fan base they were able to build isn’t just local. It’s global and it caught the attention of . They published a this week to show how effective their ad campaigns have been. The community they have built has absolutely changed how they do business and most importantly, has made them profitable and sustainable once again. I went down to LA to get a tour of the Roxy and was invited on a journey through what they call the “Social Strip”, which is a group of businesses that have banded together in order to help one another. You might think, “ahh, well, isn’t that nice?!”, well, it is, but business traditionally wasn’t done that way. The businesses on the Sunset Strip saw themselves as competition and refused to work with one another. What changed? Well, changed them. The Roxy was the first to come online and they did one simple act that changed the history of entertainment venues on the Sunset Strip. They said hello and welcomed a fellow club when they started their Twitter account and gave them a shout out and a retweet. They started being social online with their neighbors. Eventually, they all met in person and shared their financial woes and banded together to help one another. Businesses in the Sunset Strip coalition include the world renowned 200 person venue The Viper Room, The Comedy Store and House of Blues and they are adding new businesses every month. When one venue is closed, they cross-promote the other venue and so on, which ultimately increases the happiness of their shared customer base. The Sunset Strip almost died, but now people travel across town to experience a night of fun at these venues and we have Nic Adler’s determination and faith in Twitter, Facebook, Groupon and Topspin to thank. He put 3 years of continuous effort into using these tools, even when early signs didn’t pay off and eventually reached a tipping point that saved his business. Pretty cool and I think you’ll enjoy the interview with Nic Adler and Kyra Reed below: |
Shazam continues to invade the living room, partners with cable channel Syfy | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | The living room and, specifically, television is ‘s next growth target. That’s something as the service aims to expand beyond its music recognition roots to become a wider discovery technology for all sorts of content. And today, the London-headquartered company has announced its latest television tie-in, partnering with Syfy for a series-long “TV tagging initiative” for the cable channel’s new U.S. show Being Human. The way it will work is as follows: The Shazam logo will be ’embedded’ into the program ready for users to tag the show. This entails them holding their phone up so that it can listen to and recognise the episode in question from which Shazam will provide links to exclusive video and previews of upcoming episodes, access to playlists from the series, downloads and competitions. One way to think of the technology is as an audio barcode, which instead of relating to a particular song, points to a TV episode. It’s not the first time that Shazam and Syfy have hooked up. The two companies partnered in September last year to pilot the ‘TV tagging’ concept with season finales of Warehouse 13 and Eureka. Shazam is also putting the concept to work with other broadcasters and advertisers too. Aside from Syfy (NBC Universal), TV partners include HBO, as well as major brands, such as Levi’s Dockers and Lynx. That’s not to say that Shazam is neglecting its musical heritage. Just last week the company added to its mobile app for iPhone and Android so that users can access Spotify directly through a new ‘Play in Spotify’ feature, which upon Shazam recognising or recommending a song, takes them directly to Spotify where they can listen to the full track. |
RB5X “Intelligent Robot” From The 80s For Sale On eBay | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 20 |
While this particular item, like most electronics in the 80s, probably overstates its capabilities to some degree, it does seem like a pretty great little testbed for up-and-coming — at least in the early 80s. Time has rendered this little guy’s 8K of RAM rather inadequate, and I’m not sure people want to program their robot in BASIC any more. Aside from the outdated control mechanisms, this thing is surprisingly forward-thinking: it’s got modular slots for adding functionality like a robot arm or disk drive, it has pressure-sensitive bumpers and a system for remembering the layout of the room it’s in, and a “Polaroid Rangefinder” sonar sensor to aid in navigation. , or try your luck on the bids. Note that it does not come with the arm, or batteries, though the seller seems to know where you can get such things. [via ] |
SARTRE Road Trains Continue Testing | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 18 | I posted about these back in December and people seemed interested, so I thought I should just post . There’s not a lot of new information, but if you follow you can watch a video with the system in action. I wonder why the lead truck has to be so damn big? |
Low-Cost Cherrypad Android Tablet Not So Low-Cost Anymore | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 18 | You may remember the Cherrypad, a that, while receiving , still sold a few units out of sheer cheapness. The latest version of this budget device, however, isn’t so budget. The specs have gone up, and with them, the price. Mobile Magazine has (unconfirmed at the moment), and the improvements actually put it in the running… well, not with the Xoom or iPad, but certainly with the Galaxy Tab. It’s getting a higher-res 7″ screen (1024×600) and a capacitive touchscreen, replacing the lower-res resistive screen of the old version. It’s also getting dual cameras with flash and 8-16GB of onboard memory (plus MicroSD slot). Android 2.2 is what it’ll probably ship with. Most importantly, perhaps, there’s a new 1GHz Cortex A8 CPU with 512MB of RAM, HDMI out, and a GSM antenna. That makes it a relatively modern, all-purpose tablet. The price, please? Apparently “in the $300-$400 range” — unfortunately for them, that doesn’t undercut the far more well-known Nook Color, and may even get direct competition from the iPad, depending on what happens over the next month. At any rate, it should get an official announcement in a few weeks, and we’ll keep you posted. |
Life360's Family Safety App Embraces The Check-In, Then Surges | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 20 |
For the last two and a half years we’ve been tracking the progress of , a startup that looks to help you keep your family safer by offering a variety of tools, like protection against identify theft and an alert system to monitor for sex offenders in your neighborhood. It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to go viral. Except that’s what just happened. Recently, Life360 has been adding over 10,000 families per day — it just set a new record last week, with 72,000 family signups. In total, it is approaching 1 million registered families, 363,000 of whom were active last month. And these are we’re talking about — the absolute number of downloads is higher. So what’s driving the growth? The sudden boost in press attention has helped. Life360 has recently been profiled in a number of newspapers and on CNN. And the messaging hasn’t been focused on making it sound appealing to technophiles — Hulls says that it’s middle America families that are really latching onto the service. Parents, it seems, like the notion of turning their child’s new smartphone into something that can make them safer. The other catalyst has been a relatively minor tweak in the application’s UI. Life360’s mobile applications on Android and iPhone have offered a ‘Panic’ button for some time — if a child hits it, their parent will immediately receive a message via push notification, SMS, or email. Life360 kept that functionality, but it recently changed the name of the button to a less alarming “Check In”, and things have taken off from there. Hulls says that parents, as you’d expect, like the peace of mind of knowing that their children are safe. But kids aren’t big fans of the Big Brother approach of constant location tracking, and the check-in system is a compromise. Parents simply tell their kids to ‘check-in’ via the Life360 app every so often — it only takes one tap, so it’s less of a hassle than sending a text message. When the child checks in the parent receives a notification with their GPS coordinates. And parents are apparently telling each other that they’re happy with the system, which is driving further growth. The Check In feature still has some room for improvement: it doesn’t actually associate the coordinates with a nearby venue, and there isn’t a text field for the child to explain where they are (Hulls says that this increases the friction, so kids are less likely to check-in). But he says that even without this context, many parents are happy that they’re getting the digital equivalent of a thumbs up from their child. And there’s a new version being released next week that adds additional features. Finally, there’s been one last key to the sudden surge in growth: Life360’s mobile apps are free. Previously the startup had more of a focus on its premium services (which include offering GPS-equipped hardware for keeping tabs on your children, an alert system that can monitor if sex offenders are moving to your area, and so on). Now the focus is on getting distribution with the free mobile application, with plans to upsell these premium services, and other new ones, down the line. Life360 has raised a total of $1.5 million, and is in the process of raising another round of funding. Other services that also look to help parents keep tabs on their children include AT&T’s FamilyMap (powered by and . |
DriveSmart Android App Plays On Parental Fears Of Teens Texting While Driving | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 18 | You just shouldn’t text while you drive, even if you are a dextrous teen used to multitasking all day long. Yet people still do text (and Skype and email) while they drive, and not just teens (cough, Michael). There’s not too much you can do about it. But is coming out with an Android app for T-Mobile called DriveSmart Plus which plays on the fear of parents everywhere that their kid is going to wreck the car or worse while texting. DriveSmart Plus uses the phone’s GPS to determine when a subscriber is in motion and likely in a car. It then disables the ability to read or send text messaging while driving and transfers all calls to voicemail or handsfree Bluetooth. The app is $4.99 and they are going to sell a ton of these, but it is not going to stop any teens who want to keep texting. The app has a big override button, which teens will be using a lot, even if they have to explain to their parents why they were overriding the controls. Parents get notified when the app is overridden, but I can already hear the excuses: “That wasn’t me, Mom. It was Rufus. I was giving him a ride home and he grabbed my phone.” Building on the parental surveillance theme, Location Labs is also launching another geo app that works on all T-Mobile phones called FamilyWhere. This one allows parents to locate any family member on the family phone plan. They can also set up location alerts to make sure their child is at school or home before a certain hour. I’m sure it works great on spouses too, although it is not being marketed as a way to spy on adults. It’s all about safety, folks. Location Labs, formerly WaveMarket, creates geo-fencing apps for carriers and also . DriveSmart and FamilyWhere are examples of the types of apps that can be create don its platform. |
Yahoo Turns To The Enemy To Simplify User Registration | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 18 | says from earlier today. In fact Yahoo has let users create new accounts on Flickr with their Google credentials since last summer. It’s been tested as part of an internal Yahoo project to spur user signups. A lot of people apparently bail out during the account creation process at various Yahoo sites. Part of the problem is that the process is lengthier than it needs to be because you’re also effectively signing up for a Yahoo email account, too. Even if you never use that account. There’s so much spam with email that there are a lot of extra steps with account creation. We’ve heard from sources that test has worked spectacularly well. After the addition of Google, account signups have increased by more than 20%, apparently, which is more than 10,000 new accounts daily that they otherwise would have lost. There’s no promotion of this, that extra 20% is just from higher conversions during the signup process. Fewer people are bailing out. Facebook comes next, an obvious step. Which should increase conversions a whole lot more. |
Analog: A Melancholy Photographic Tribute To Darkrooms And Enlargers | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 18 |
If there’s anyone reading out there who ever did their own developing and printing, they should check out documenting the few remaining darkrooms in London. I love the look of these things; one day I’ll have my own darkroom, though I don’t think I’ll ever attempt color printing. There’s an over at Wired, along with some links to related projects. Check it out. |
Next Question: Did Apple Surpass Microsoft In Profit Last Quarter? Or Will It Be Next Quarter? | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 18 | Earlier today, Apple announced their . The record-breaking numbers saw revenue surge to $26.7 billion — over $6 billion ahead of their previous best quarter (which was ). But even more impressive may have been how much profit grew. Apple’s net income was also a new record for them at $6 billion for the quarter. That’s a full $1.7 billion above their previous record (again, Q4 2010). And it begs the question: could Apple have passed Microsoft in the one remaining financial stronghold this quarter as well? For years, we’ve all heard how Apple was so pitifully small compared to the behemoth that is Microsoft. Then something funny started happening: Apple started growing. Fast. But instead of focusing on market share growth, Apple on bottom-line growth. And soon Microsoft wasn’t laughing anymore. Last March, when that Apple would soon pass Microsoft in market cap, initial reactions were “it will never happen” (they were over $50 billion behind at the time). Then when it became clear that not only was it going to happen, but that it would happen soon, the defense shifted. By the time it did in May, the defense became “so what? Microsoft still makes so much more money than Apple.” By October, that argument went out the window too. — and it wasn’t even close. So the defense shifted again. “Who cares about revenues. Look at the profits.” It’s true that Microsoft still did hold an edge last quarter in profits: $5.41 billion to $4.31 billion. Despite Apple’s higher revenue, the margins are much better in software, obviously. But still, it’s only a matter of time. With the $6 billion profit posted today by Apple, they’re ahead of the $5.41 billion Microsoft posted last quarter. But Microsoft hasn’t yet announced their most recent earnings (they will next Thursday). And like Apple, Microsoft should see a healthy jump in both revenues and profits because it’s their holiday quarter (technically Q2 2011 for them). But will it be enough to once again hold off Apple? It seems pretty likely. Looking over Microsoft’s previous results, their Q2’s are typically their strongest quarters (again, holiday time). From Q1 2010 to Q2 2010, profit jumped from $3.57 billion to $6.66 billion, for example. Yes, it almost doubled. But that was a bit of an odd quarter as Microsoft recognized a ton of Windows 7 upgrade revenue after much of it was deferred after launch. In other words, it was an abnormally strong quarter. Two years ago, Microsoft actually saw a modest decline from Q1 to Q2. But the entire country was in an economic meltdown at that point too. Still, even with a relatively modest quarter, Microsoft should be able to add a few billion to the bottom line. They’d only have to add $700 million to surpass Apple’s $6 billion profit. So again, it shouldn’t be an issue. …This quarter. The real test will come next quarter (Apple’s Q2 2011 and Microsoft’s Q3 2011 — confusing, I know). While Apple CEO Steve Jobs will still presumably be on sick leave, Apple is poised to unleash the Verizon iPhone and the iPad 2. Both could mean new bonanzas for the company. And while revenues and profits typically fall after holiday quarters, those two products could be enough to blunt the fall enough that Apple could well surpass the also falling Microsoft. I just wonder when Apple has passed Microsoft in market cap, revenue, and , what the next defense is going to be? I suspect market share. That’s just about the only thing left. |
Concept ZIP Jacket Lets You Control Your Media With Clothes-Related Gestures | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 18 | [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/18820170 w=620&h=349]
You might remember the , a hoodie with integrated earbuds, so you could pop your mp3 player into the pocket, plug it in, and boom. This jacket concept from Jennifer Darmour is a little more evolved, though I wonder if it’s taking the concept too far. But I’m posting it anyway, because the lady in the video made me. The idea (if you can glean it from the well-shot, but rather overdone demonstration video above) is that you would control your media machine by interacting with the jacket itself: zip up to turn the volume up, zip down to turn it down, and tug on the retractable HoodieBuddie-like earbuds to prevent them from bouncing all over the place. Of course, arbitrarily tying together two actions like that results in trouble: what if you’re getting warm, but the song is quiet? I’d have designed it so it only affects your volume when you’re pressing a button on the zipper piece itself — or maybe just give up and decouple the two functions, and install some sort of handy, understated controls on the cuff of the jacket, or the collar. So, Jennifer, consider my suggestions. The next video you can do at my place. It’s very picturesque. Bring that lady. [via ] |
Video: Tesla Model S On The Road | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 18 | [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/18614767 w=620&h=349]
I feel like there’s something missing from this video of a Tesla Model S cruising down the road. Oh yes, the thumping music and roaring engines that usually accompany these road-type videos — on Top Gear, anyway. Isn’t it a little creepy how quiet it is? If you’re looking for more Model S love, . I actually like the silver color better, though. The Model S is set to be Tesla’s break-out vehicle; despite lots of media attention, limited production facilities (read: every one made by hand) have limited Roadster sales to around 1500. But Tesla hopes to sell a hundred times that number of the far more practical four-door sedan you see here. Availability isn’t really announced, though. . |
ReneSola Claims New Wafer Will Boost Solar Cell Efficiency To 17.5 Percent | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 1 | 18 | ReneSola (NYSE: SOL) a major manufacturer of solar products based in Jiashan, China announced this week that its new silicon-based wafer, dubbed the Virtus, boosts multicrystalline solar cell efficiency to 17.5 percent. The company plans to sell the Virtus Wafer to manufacturers of multicrystalline solar cells. Its earlier customers in this segment have included: , and . JC Solar, a wholly owned subsidiary of ReneSola which makes multicrystalline solar cells and modules, will both test and use the Virtus in its products, of course. Why is ReneSola shouting their un-verified wafer claims to the rooftops? Is this really a huge breakthrough? Companies like SunPower in San Jose, California or SunGrid in Australia have been producing solar cells for years that are even more efficient than 17.5 percent. However, monocrystalline cells and panels have tended to be more expensive than polycrystalline varieties due to more complicated manufacturing requirements. ReneSola’s Virtus Wafer could help bring the cheaper-to-make variety of solar tech — multicrystalline solar cells and panels — to be about as efficient as monocrystalline varieties, without being as costly to manufacture. (Making solar power more affordable, eventually to the point where solar is at parity or better versus coal and oil, remains a holy grail within the sector.) ReneSolar plans to embark on pilot production of their Virtus Wafer in early 2011, according to a company press statement. Thus far, the wafer has been tested in solar cells made by some of the company’s clients, and in their own labs. However, it has not been tested by the U.S.-based , a verifier of cell efficiency claims, nor by an NREL equivalent in another country. The wafer still has yet to be tested in use within solar in any lab. Those initial tests of panels incorporating this wafer are under way, a company spokesperson confirmed. ReneSola’s competition in the quest to build a better wafer — one that improves the efficiency of solar photovoltaics, but is not more expensive to manufacture — range from the venture-backed Boston startup, to a fellow, major solar manufacturer in China, |
null | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 1 | 20 | null |
Designer Gas Cans Are Haute Couture, Haute Octane | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 18 |
I don’t know what to say about , other than that they’re great. They’re ordinary gas cans that have been branded with YSL, Chanel, and so on logos and patterns. Sure, you could stencil your own, but then you wouldn’t pay thousands for a gas can. I kid, I kid, they’re not even for sale as far as I can tell. [via ; image: GirlX] |
Apple COO Tim Cook Dismisses Android Tablets As “Bizarre” | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 18 | Apple’s iPad is a hit. The company sold 7.3 million iPads in the December quarter of 2010, a 75 percent increase from the previous quarter. But judging from all the Android tablets announced at CES, it is about to face an onslaught of competition. So far, though, Apple COO Tim Cook has “no concerns” with the tablets that are out there today, and goes so far to call current Android tablets “bizarre.” On today’s , Cook characterized the competition as falling into two buckets: Windows-based tablets, which are “big, heavy and expensive” and suffer from “weak battery life,” and current Android tablets, which are “scaled-up” smart phones. Here is his response to the question, based on MG’s notes: |
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