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Frequently Asked Questions About Quora | Semil Shah | 2,011 | 1 | 9 | The incredible growth of has also led to an equally incredible growth in chatter, punditry, and analysis about the future of social networking. The opinions range from thought-provoking (“the knowledge network comes online”) to (“the new form of blogging”) to flatly (“this is the next , , or ”). In reality, the elements of discovery, serendipity, and search that dovetail seamlessly from the Quora product have captured the imagination of its users ( ) and have placed the company in a rare, enviable position. During these types of growth periods and transitions, though, some like to sound off, using their blogs, Twitter accounts, and Quora itself to beg for new features, complain about the quality of their experience, and to make predictions that do not take stock of history nor the current context. There is significant hype around Quora, but I believe it’s warranted. As a I result, I’ve attempted to produce a synthesis of the questions swirling around the rise of Quora and to offer answers to them, too. These answers are my own, but of course, you could peruse the or specific related questions below on Quora to answer them yourself. A: Only a handful of sites have Q&A features that offer both producers (contributors) and consumers (readers, voters) of content an incentive to craft, establish, and shape an identity. Where others have tried and failed, such as and , and where some like , , , , and , have successfully tied user identity to the act of Q&A, Quora may be positioned to travel slightly further in this race, if it hasn’t done so already. For instance, users on LinkedIn may think twice about posing or answering sensitive questions, given many employers will look at their profiles. Kommons allows users to publicly direct questions at specific Twitter accounts, where answers are not editable. Namesake has a nice threaded conversation feature, though they seem focused on niche networks and talent search. It’s a big opportunity and many of these sites will fill various needs quite well. While these other sites create separate verticals across topics or people, Quora seems less concerned about protected silos and more interested in fostering communities that consist of a blend of broad and deep domain knowledge across an interconnected network of topics and subtopics. If organized correctly, the information contributed to and categorized on Quora could not only result in the best Q&A site ever, but it may also transform into a new type of search engine and destination for information. : A: Theoretically, yes. Thousands of startups investigate countless opportunities to engage with Facebook users around a variety of activities, and here Quora is no different, though their mission is large, relative to others. While Facebook has its feature, the types of questions posed on Quora, the types of users who answer those questions, and the high level of interaction among users through comments and messaging would be very hard for Facebook to replicate in the short-term because Facebook users are engaging in hundreds of different social networking activities, where the thought of a Q&A dialog may only be of fleeting importance. Additionally, the topic ontology in Facebook is very general compared to the more nuanced set of topics, sub-topics, and cross-referenced topics in Quora. With a new enormous round of funding, Facebook seems poised to go after ideas that will move the needle for them, such as mobile and breaking through in new countries. Finally, Quora users may feel more comfortable interacting around questions and answers away from their personal Facebook accounts, where they can maintain more control over their brand and privacy. : A: Some serious and casual Quora users worry about how the volume and tone of interaction may change as the service adds more users. This was put to a test in December, as follower accounts increased, along with activity on the site. Some observers believe that the genie is out of the bottle, and that the rush of new users will result in a deterioration in the quality level of questions and answers and that Quora may no longer provide them with the knowledge they seek to consume. This will auto-correct over time. In the long-run, the true, lasting value of Quora is built on two key pillars: (1) authentication of user identity and (2) the interest graph. First, as of right now (and hopefully it stays this way), only real people can follow you on Quora. That is very different than the spammy bots that troll on Twitter. When I signed up, I had to connect through my Facebook account, and this helps me reduce any noise in my Quora stream. Second, by allowing me to follow both individuals and topics, Quora has a very good sense of what my contribution and consumption interests are, much more so than Facebook. By understanding my interests and allowing me to shape my experience through that additional filter, Quora’s architecture creates an environment where I can accumulate relevant knowledge very quickly. The campfire can burn bright so long as users continue to place a premium on positive, thoughtful interaction, where the quality of contributions always outpaces of the quantity of contributions. Of course, there will always be people . : A: There are segments of users on Quora. Some choose to only consume information by following certain people or topics. They may or may not send any signals, such as up-voting or down-voting content. Few will ask questions, and fewer will comment on answers and engage in a dialog. All of this interaction is possible because of the free work of a small subset of users who generously ask and/or answer questions through their contributions. While a rational economist may disagree, I believe this trend will not only continue but actually grow because Quora has tapped into a strong behavioral tendency. Those who contribute content to Quora do so because, in exchange for their contribution, Quora gives them the chance to establish a brand, reputation, and areas of expertise. There are no promises, though, and the crowd can shoot you down, but that opportunity is enough for users with knowledge to risk their time in the hopes of learning something new and making meaningful connections in the future. : A: No, and Yes. About a year ago, turned heads until alpha and beta users witnessed first-hand the quality of the experience the site created for them. That investment was prescient. With the surge of users in December 2010, Quora, on its own and with its strong engineering and design team, could have justified a much, much higher valuation given the current climate. In terms of turning into a business, Quora is in the luxurious position of not having to worry about that issue for some time. The growth of the site, relative to the cost of constructing it, has given its small team a longer runway to tackle those sorts of endeavors. Quora has signaled in the future that some of this may involve advertising, but there are many other ways which the site could be at the center of important online activity, which I’ll touch on within in later posts. In the meantime, keep in mind that Quora has a very good idea of what interests its users have, and that is very, very valuable knowledge. : A: The simple answer is “yes.” On the surface, Quora’s itself is newsworthy. Peeling back that layer, the quality of content from those contributing is surprisingly high. It’s one thing for a celebrity business person or technologist to use Twitter. It’s an entirely different atmosphere when one writes a thoughtful, public, detailed answer for a built-in audience to a question that someone else posed. It is in these rare but powerful instances when the site becomes a true quorum. At a deeper level, nearly everyone and every entity— individuals, the press, and eventually, those that work on behalf of brands, companies, and political issues—can inevitably become interconnected in a symbiotic information relationship, where the mutual meeting place is Quora. :
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Post-CES Palate Cleanser: Ocarina Of Tetris | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 9 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWRfQtoaq_0&w=640&h=390]
clogging your brain? This little mash-up (slightly more melodic than ) should help clear your head, and maybe even send you running for your N64 to give this a shot. [via ] |
Streaming CES: How We Did It | Jon Orlin | 2,011 | 1 | 9 | As the 2011 wraps up today, we’d like to share a few secrets. The , with support from , provided more than 20 hours of live CES video coverage, taking our viewers right to the industry and media access only exhibit floor. For a look at video highlights, check out . Hundreds of Twitter questions were answered in real-time, giving our viewers a chance to interact with the company reps and win some giveaways. We also got a lot of questions on how we did it. The traditional, old-school way of broadcasting a live event would involve driving up a satellite truck with a C or Ku band transmitter. Or, getting a special expensive video fiber circuit connected at the venue. But, that would only allow a video feed from a single location. Otherwise we’d need multiple circuits or time to drive and set-up the sat truck at different locations. We wanted to stream at a moments notice, from the Sands Expo during CES Unveiled and the following Media Day, from the inside and outside the Las Vegas Convention Center, and from hotel parties and events all over the Las Vegas Strip. Plus, we wanted to roam the halls without any wired connection. We investigated some RF and microwave transmitter options but they involved great expense and production limitations. We finally settled on a mobile streaming solution, with a backup ‘nearly live’ wired solution. We never needed to resort to the taped backup. We used a provided by our live streaming partner, . The livepack fits in a custom designed backpack. It takes a firewire input containing video and audio from a camera. We used our HVX200a camera and some wireless microphones and a camera LED light. The livepack has 6 data modems and attempts to connect to 3 different mobile phone networks ( , , and ). The signal is put back together by LiveU and then sent to Ustream for live streaming distribution. Giving the bandwidth issues to be expected when (Update: CES now says 140,000) tech savvy people get together in one place, we had some concerns that the technology would work. Those concerns grew when we tried un-successfully to use our mobile phones. But, with its 6 modems, the livepack was able to get a connection 95% of the time. The bandwidth was constantly changing. During the best times, we were getting more than 1Mbps upstream. At a few locations, such as the lower level of the Sands Expo Center during CES Media Day, and inside of few of the exhibitors private conference rooms, we weren’t able enough bandwidth. So, the stream froze, stuttered, or turned into audio only at times. On the livepack, we chose the small video window setting. While a sacrifice to quality, this allowed for more consistent streaming performance. Ustream distributed an encoded feed at 400k, with a 480×270 window and h.264 video. We didn’t get any viewer complaints about the video image quality. Batteries and battery planning was key. The livepack has an internal battery and also runs on hot swappable external batteries. We got about 2 hours on a full external battery and carried lots of spares. We also had lots of camera batteries (not hot-swappable), wireless mic, and LED light batteries. Most of the time, the system worked way above our expectations. But, we did have 2 other non-transmission issues. The camera connects to the livepack using a firewire plug. Not the best, robust connection. Even taped down, that came loose a few times, but there is a monitor screen on the pack that alerted us to the problem. One night, the pack wouldn’t start up. A quick call to the phone number on the pack for LiveU at 10pm Eastern Time, helped us confirm a hardware problem, most likely a loose circuit board. We had just carried it for miles on a busy convention floor. A gentle nudge got the livepack working again. But, we weren’t ready to trust it, and used a backup wired solution for coverage from a fixed location that night. But with another day of coverage coming up with miles of walking the halls, Ustream rushed us a new livepack overnight, and we were up and running on Friday. The LiveU livepack we used has been out on the market for a year and a half. It’s used by streaming video providers and , in addition to broadcast networks. It’s been used at all kinds of sports event and the Grammy Awards. A new HD livepack started shipping last week. It contains 6 to 12 cellular connections (including T-Mobile), and supports Verizon LTE 4G and Sprint and ClearWire WiMax 4G. The new units also feature SDI, HDMI, and analog input, in addition to FireWire. And they output SD and HD to 1080i. Even with our 1st generation livepack, we succeeded in our mission to bring CES directly to our viewers. Our viewers got to hear about dozens of new TVs, phones, tablets, cameras and headphones plus interviews with the and . And behind the scenes previews of the , the , and . And they got a chance to see what it’s like to drive around in . They also got an honest look at CES, warts and all. They saw when we didn’t get into the Samsung event on Media Day, after waiting in a Disneyland size line. And they came along to several booths where no one wanted to talk to us or our viewers even though the booth representatives were standing there talking with other convention visitors. Our viewers gave us instant feedback on what they were seeing, which booths to see, and even some help when we got lost. All in all, quite the interactive, front row, video experience.
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Verizon Will Trip AT&T With The iPhone — Then Point And Laugh With Unlimited Data | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 9 | Uh oh, AT&T. It’s looking , , , likely that the event on Tuesday morning in New York City is all about unveiling that will work on the carrier’s network. And for those of us who have long suffered and struggled with AT&T’s network to be able to use the iPhone (particularly those of us in cities like San Francisco and New York) this is basically Christmas all over again. And in typical Apple fashion, there may be a nice little “one more thing” — but it likely comes compliment of Verizon. Not only does Verizon seem poised to unveil an iPhone, it looks like they’ll do so with the option for unlimited data plans. This is something AT&T last year, smartly disguising it as a better short-term deal for most customers. Of course, the reality is that the data caps are actually a long term play to help preserve their struggling network and more importantly, . But Verizon isn’t ready to go in that direction, apparently. At least, not yet. Yesterday, Reuters an unnamed source says that Verizon will offer the iPhone to its customers with their existing wireless service plans. Today, the Wall Street Journal further that the Verizon iPhone will in fact offer an unlimited data plan, citing “a person familiar with the matter”. AppleInsider has a of what this actually means. While the core talk-time and text plans are largely the same on the two networks (though AT&T has rollover minutes), AT&T no longer offers unlimited data plans. Instead their highest data plan is 2 gigabytes for $25 a month. After those 2 gigs, each additional gig is $10. Verizon, meanwhile, if the plans do stay the same, will offer unlimited data for a flat $30 fee. That’s the same unlimited data fee that AT&T used to offer until they castrated it in June. The timing of the move was curious as it was right before the iPhone 4 launched exclusively with AT&T in the U.S. In other words, they got millions of customers locked into the new plans for at least two years (though previous customers were allowed to keep their existing plans). Oh, and in another bit of curious timing, AT&T also managed to up their early termination fee right before all these new contracts were signed. Imagine that. That move to what’s about to happen on Tuesday, right? Sure… And there’s more. Not only are the standard data rates much better on Verizon, but the tethering plan is better. Currently, AT&T gives you the option to use tethering on your iPhone, but it will cost you $45 a month (your $25 data plus an extra $20 to tether) and it counts against your same 2 GB cap. Verizon, meanwhile, offers tethering for $30 extra but they give you 5 GB of data to use exclusively for tethering with that money. In other words, it’s more expensive, but a better deal because your AT&T 2 GB data cap will be eaten into quickly by your actual iPhone usage. Assuming all of this information is accurate, this looks very, very bad for AT&T. It looks like the larger network that is perceived to be superior is not only taking their crown jewel, they’re kicking them in the nuts while they do it. It looks as if Verizon is confident that they’ll be able to handle the iPhone’s huge data traffic surge, whereas AT&T has already proven that they could not and altered their plans accordingly. Let me pre-emptively include AT&T’s undoubtedly forthcoming spin here. Something like: “Customers are delighted by our data plans that are $5 cheaper than they previously were — and the data cap doesn’t matter because the vast majority of them never hit the 2 GB cap.” Let me then once again pre-emptively call bullshit on such a claim. Sure, most customers may not hit the 2 GB cap now, but everyone is continuing to use more and more data. As a result, more and more people will start to hit that wall in the coming months and years. And that means one thing for AT&T: more $ on overage charges. Of course, the big picture is that Verizon is also still a greedy carrier. While their data plans may look good right now, they’re already said to be looking into the idea of capping them as well. And don’t be surprised if that happens sooner rather than later. Still, for this initial iPhone launch at least, it’s looking like Verizon will be a big, red rose in bloom. As AT&T withers. : AT&T has written to clarify that any customer with a previous contract can choose to keep it even after upgrading to a new device, so I’ve updated some of the wording there. The key point is intact: new customers don’t have the choice of getting an unlimited plan on AT&T, and they do on Verizon. AT&T also wishes to point out that Verizon raised their ETF first. We still find the timing right before iPhone 4 launch suspicious. |
Instagram Shuffle Adds Roulette To Photo-Sharing | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 1 | 9 |
is no doubt the latest rage in photo sharing, recently crossing after less three months of being open to the public. While the company is planning to open up its API in the near future, one developer has built a nifty new app on top of Instragram that has a roulette type of feature to access photos created and published via Instagram’s iPhone app. Called (http://instagram.tk/), the web site displays photos uploaded to Twitter using Instagram in real time. Every time you refresh the page (or click on Shuffle) a new image published by an Instagram user appears. It’s important to note that Instagram Shuffle does not include photos that were not posted to Twitter via the Instagram app (users can also post photos to Facebook and Flickr). So why is this interesting? The photos taken by Instagram users tend to be fairly artistic and visually appealing thanks to the photosharing app’s For anyone who doesn’t own an iPhone and wants to check out what Instagram can do with photos, this site is definitely an interesting resource. As the developer tells us: “Instagram users can find new friends on Instagram Shuffle,and non-users can see what all the fuss is about.” One thing’s for sure-I’m looking forward to seeing what innovative web and mobile apps developers come up with when Instagram does release its API. |
First Look: HTC EVO Shift 4G | Contributor | 2,011 | 1 | 9 |
Evolution seems to be a bit less violent this time around. The HTC EVO Shift 4G attempts to build on the brand started with the much-hyped EVO 4G superphone that launched back in 2010’s summer. Instead of forging a new path with a fresh form factor and top-tier specs, the HTC EVO Shift 4G does things a bit more low-key. That’s not saying the Shift 4G isn’t a quality kit. It is. Inside the somewhat thick body is the same speedy 800MHz Qualcomm MSM7630 CPU found in the fast G2 and myTouch 4G. Up front is a 3.6-inch 800 x 480 LCD which makes the HTC Sense skin running on top of Android 2.2 look bright and crisp. Of course the Shift 4G rocks WiMAX 4G for Sprint’s network along with EVDO Rev A. As with many mobile phones, proper reviews cannot be written overnight and seeing how we just got home from a long week at CES, what follows is more of a first-impressions. We need to see if this EVO packs a better battery life than the first model and that’s something that’s best tested with real life experiences and long-term benchmarks. : |
Five Ways The Verizon iPhone Will Change The Mobile Landscape | John Biggs | 2,011 | 1 | 9 | It has been a litany akin to prayer in certain circles: “Everything will be better when . I’ll buy it then.” But what will a Verizon iPhone really change? Let’s think this through. First, expect iPhone sales to surpass Droid sales for a brief period and then level off. My friend the former Hell’s Angel told me how a Verizon rep sold his niece a Droid X explaining that it was as good as the iPhone. After seeing my her uncle’s iPhone, however, she was gravely disappointed and repeated the litany to herself, albeit with some trepidation as the rumor of iPhone’s apparition on Verizon has been a long time coming. This time, however, we’re almost certain that the prayer will come true. Before you Droid-heads start flaming, accept that, at least until , when Verizon has the iPhone its Droid sales will dip. |
Daniel Raffel's Favorite New Geek Stuff Of 2010 | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 9 | Looking back at 2010, I’m particularly struck by the quantity and quality of new projects that launched. Just when I thought I had time to start reflecting on the year another project popped up onto my radar! And then another. And another! I count myself lucky to be working in an industry with so much creativity and energy. As I started assembling a list of launches from 2010 that caught my eye, I grouped them into : New Products and Services, New Projects, Feature Updates, and Mobile Apps. Rather than restrict myself to an arbitrary number for each category, I decided once again to list all the things that stood out to me. This list is an admittedly subjective batch. or instance, like last year you’ll notice I am clearly interested in specific trends: games, geo services, HTML5, identity, mobile, music, news, social updates, and web development.. I’d love to hear what exciting developments you discovered in 2010!
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My iPad can just about always be found in my backpack. While it’s probably more of a guilty pleasure than a necessary device, I’ve found so many use cases for it that it’s hard to imagine giving it up now. Adoption was definitely assisted by the fact that my 2nd generation Kindle died shortly after my iPad arrived. iPad sales blew analyst expectations out of the market and at the end of the year there’s still no real competition. It’s looking a lot like the iPhone playbook from 2007 all over again. While the screen on an iPad is nowhere near as readable as a Kindle the introduction of iBooks gave consumers another outlet for purchasing and consuming their favorite reading materials. The Magic Trackpad hooked me enough that I bought one for my desk at home and work. I’ve gone all in on adopting a variety of trackpad friendly gestures. Approximately six months in I haven’t missed using a mouse. Airplay introduces easy ways to share media content from one Apple device to another, it’s super handy around the house. Erica Sadun has taken things a logical step further and created which do a few extra things you can’t with Airplay. / / /
Each of these services deserves to be reviewed in their own right and I regret not doing each of them their proper justice because they are certainly not the same. But there’s a theme that’s undeniable when they’re grouped together: people enjoy using services that enable them to share objects that they love! /
In the search for data sets and industries that hadn’t yet been disrupted by social elements, both of these companies appeared to stumble upon the same controversial, general idea with slight twists. While neither has compelled me to publicly share my purchasing data, I think they’re exploring interesting areas and someone will figure out something awesome in this space. Note: Blippy launched in 12/2009.
The Boxee Box reminds me a bit of the Nexus One: it’s a very good, controlled demonstration of the power of the platform. Like Android it’s still easy to stumble on use cases that need work, but what’s there today greatly simplifies the way I consume, discover and share digital media. I’m very excited to keep watching them refine their offering and continue to get even better at what they’re doing. BTW the UI is total eye candy. /
Both of these services make it simple to share content from the cloud, such as images, links, music, videos and files. is awesome but I haven’t found it to excel at simple sharing and distribution like these services. Each of these services is Apple focused with native OS X desktop apps as well as 3rd party support for Windows ( and ). CloudApp’s iOS app is coming soon and Droplr’s is . Over the past few months I’ve noticed more and more services choosing to use these content sharing apps (specifically CloudApp) to distribute content. / /
If it wasn’t for interaction and visual designers the tubes would be fugly. These services are valuable resources for IxD/VisD talent to share and get feedback on their latest work. It’s total design pr0n so prepare to be distracted.
A challenge of adopting multiple cloud services is knowing where your data lives. Greplin provides a single search box that lets you query against multiple services that host your data. This isn’t just handy, it’s becoming necessary. If you use Spotlight on the Mac, it will remind you a bit of Google’s project which launched several years ago.
Coordinating in real-time with groups of friends can be painfully challenging. GroupMe provides a variety of features from group texting to simple conference calling that make it easier to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
There are lots of analytics tools out there to help you understand your webapp, but Kissmetrics has released invaluable tools that help you track how your users are engaging on your site. If you’re looking to make data driven business decisions their service can be a big help. Microsoft
It will take dozens and dozens of games (and service integrations) to fully unleash the Kinect’s potential. This product is very fun and feels downright futuristic. When you first interact with the system it’s understandable why . Microsoft (aka Windows Phone)
Microsoft definitely deserves props for delivering a deep-rethink of their mobile platform that’s not derivative, offers a very aesthetic look and feel, feels f-a-s-t and has awesome Facebook integration. I’m currently carrying Android and iOS devices right now, and have no plans to add a Windows Phone to the mix, but this has definitely caught my attention.
I am a very big fan of the design and technical directions that the NYTimes chrome application has taken. It’s attractive, functional, minimal, works across a growing variety of devices, is semi-customizable and is a great use of HTML5. A definite work in progress but a big step in the right direction. Nuance
Earlier in the year Eric Schmidt mentioned that 25% of Android-based searches in the US market are initiated by voice. Integrating voice recognition into mobile services is a trend that’s likely to accelerate next year and the good news is that it’s never been easier. Nuance has released an SDK for iOS and Android mobile app developers who wish to enhance their applications with voice recognition input and text-to-speech output. Already in use by applications like Amazon’s , Ask.com’s , and this is shaping up to be a great cross-platform voice framework for mobile app developers.
iPhone remote controlled augmented reality quadricopter video games? Sold!
If had to pick just one new web product of the year this was definitely my favorite. It has been both an invaluable resource for me and an extremely inspiring product to watch develop. I could easily elaborate on their impressive tech stack; their appealing visual design; the awesome content and community; or numerous clever product features that demonstrate how thoughtful many of their social interactions are.
It’s hard not to respect what Rdio has pulled off: it’s a streaming music service that’s social, available on multiple platforms, has a decent sized library, is fairly priced, and currently available in the US. This is a very tough space and 2011 should be even more crowded with rumored launches from Apple, Google and Spotify. It will be interesting to see what Rdio has up their sleeves to stave off some stiff competition.
If you don’t have your own wheels and aren’t taking public transport, then finding a clean, safe, unplanned ride in a city like San Francisco can be a bit daunting. Uber’s goals appear to stretch beyond the creature comforts of simplifying a pickup via a mobile app and offering a high quality ride. They seem to want to deeply reset an industry and experience that has seen so little innovation, you kind of wonder if is still working the dispatch.
I’m a little early with this one because it has yet to publicly launch but I’m optimistic and really like the idea. Mike Rundle but essentially he wants to share what he has learned about iPhone UI design and development. He intends to convert small projects he’s worked on into elaborate tutorials that articulate what he learned and how to reproduce them. “Each tutorial has two parts: design and development. The design half discusses how to create a particular app’s user interface in Photoshop with all steps explained along the way including lots of screenshots. It includes the PSD file as well. The development half discusses how to execute that design in code. This half includes the Xcode project.” Signup now to be notified when it launches and get a special bonus treat.
This project was developed by four NYU students who shared a common desire to build an open source, distributed social network that allowed members to retain complete control over their personal information. The money their project was raising through Kickstarter became a bit of a media frenzy. The project continues to be . /
Quality icons are hard to design and often not worth re-inventing. If you use popular mobile applications like Dribbble, Instagram, Flipboard, Twitter, WordPress, or over 1,000 others you’ve almost certainly seen a few of the Glyphish icons. The Pro version is available for sale on their site. A gave its designer Joseph Wain the financial initiative to give away a portion of his existing work and further invest in developing this highly attractive and useful icon set to include support for iOS Retina Displays, amongst other things. While its mission is a bit different, the Noun Project has also taken a . The Noun Project’s goal is “to collect and organize all the symbols that form our language into one easy-to-use online library that can be accessed by anyone. All the symbols on our site are completely free to download, and can be used for design projects, architecture presentations, art pieces – just about anything.”
! If you’re a web designer looking to learn more about HTML5 books like and are great places to start.
is a completely new open protocol inspired by and based on the . OAuth 2.0 allows secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop, web, mobile and other applications. Eran Hammer-Lahav does an excellent job providing additional color and introducing .
The Python community has been developing a wide range of competing web frameworks each with relatively small market share compared to and with very similar approaches. The Pylons Project is an attempt by many projects (specifically , , and ) to consolidate their efforts. original post and announcement are great places to start learning more.
This Windows worm was almost certainly the result of a multi-nation state sponsored effort. Technically this cyberweapon was probably developed and released years ago but it was only discovered this year. Its target was specific industrial hardware used in the manufacturing of nuclear weapons. Its goal was to sabotage uranium enrichment production at very specific facilities. I found fascinating.
These kits provide a simple way to “mod” the latest generation Apple iPod Nano and transform it into an attractive multi-touch wristwatch. It became so popular that it ended up becoming the most funded project of all time on Kickstarter raising nearly $1 million.
I’d have a hard time articulating the importance of Wikileaks better than how Yishan Wong summed things up so I’m just going to paraphrase , “In the past, media was newspapers and the leaking of information to the people of the single country. Much has been made about the internet’s capability to spread knowledge across borders and link the peoples of the world. Wikileaks is the first such internet product to have used this technology to provide true journalistic service to an audience that is no less than all the people of the world. This is citizen journalism of a global nature.“
Gawkergate woke me up and made me a 1password believer. This is one of those apps I should have adopted last year. With new applications available on iOS, Android and desktop applications and browser extensions available for Windows and OS X it’s hard to see a reason why any savvy internet user wouldn’t be using 1password on all their devices. It’s never been easier to manage unique passwords across all of your favorite internet services on the devices you access them from. for $99
I took the opportunity to have my DNA genotyped via during their $99 DNA day deal. They went on to offer a similar deal on Cyber Monday. While my results were chock-full of data, I found their interpretations underwhelming. I look forward to watching this field evolve and my results become more insightful. Through the hard work of many others I’ve come to realize that the understanding of when the Human Genome Project was initiated. Considering what I learned I’d have a hard time justifying paying more than $99 until this field matures. Hopefully, they can find ways to permanently keep the price down. If you had your DNA genotyped you can export your SNPs and run it in 3rd party applications like and learn quite a bit more.
I’ve been using AWS for a few years and am really impressed with how many features were introduced in 2010. They’ve definitely been listening and responding to customer requests. The list of launches in 2010 is large: , , , , , (technically this is from 12/2009), new relational database features from , (a DNS service), significant additional console support, and more. Amazon has done a simply awesome job making this an even greater place for businesses and developers to setup shop. Apple , , , , ,
This year I had to restrain myself from buying practically the entire Apple hardware product line. Apple makes it look easy to design beautiful, innovative products that are also fun to use. I totally regret buying a MacBook Pro earlier in the year and have a hard time accepting the fact that the MacBook Air in our house belongs to my wife. It’s fast, lightweight, and beautifully designed. The iOS 4.2 update is but it delivered a welcome slew of changes to my iPad and iPhone (most notably a unified email inbox and multitasking.) Apple introduced a ton of updates to Mobile Safari in iOS 4.2, which continues to make it my favorite mobile browser. Maximiliano Firtman did an exceptional job even before Apple got around to documenting them on their developer site. I could go on about the updates to the iPhone 4, iPod Nano and MacMini too, but I think these got adequate press coverage.
This real-time analytics dashboard got even better. You can learn more about as well as get some . If you’re into fresh data about what’s happening on your site you’ll almost certainly want to give this service a try.
This service further establishes itself as one of the most useful utilities I have for sharing and backing up my data. This year they squashed a lot of bugs, released and apps, and launched their 1.0 desktop product. Additionally, they added a much requested feature.
It was another huge year for Facebook. There were so many announcements I’m bound to be missing a few obvious big ones. What stood out to me were , (wow, did they quickly collect a lot of metadata about each of us), , , , , , , (how can nobody else be doing anything innovative here), , , , the , and there were a few cool . I’m extremely impressed with their pace and focus.
I’m digging the recent implementation of pushState to on GitHub. They describe how they achieve it using the “new (which really has nothing to do with HTML — it’s a JavaScript API) that allows them to manage the URL changes while handle the sliding.” Very cool stuff.
I’ve always respected Google’s technical prowess and capability to deliver on big, disruptive projects. The that they’ve been working on simply reinforces this reputation. This year they shipped a number of things I’ve enjoyed using on a daily basis. What stands out in particular are , , , , , keeps getting faster and more stable, , and , and big updates to . I’m extremely eager to see what they are planning for 2011.
It’s hard not to appreciate all the tireless work 3rd parties have put into reverse engineering iOS so that consumers have more choice over their devices than Apple provides out of the box. I track what’s happening on the but I’m sure there are lots of places to follow along. Each OS update is a huge challenge for the folks looking to find exploits that will make Apple mobile hardware more flexible. I am very appreciative of their efforts, which find their way to countless projects like Pwnage, etc. This year saw them defeat many challenges as well as hit a few new roadblocks.
If you’re doing any front-end development work and aren’t using it already, jQuery is a javascript library that is highly worth checking out. They shipped 4 big updates in 2010. The amount of new awesome stuff is too long to cover but I certainly suggest you explore what’s new in , , and !
It’s been around for a while but this was the year Kickstarter started showing how revolutionary it has become. Their Most Funded Projects is a testament to how much money it’s helping numerous projects raise. This list happens to feature four projects that were funded through it: Diaspora, Glyphish, The Noun Project, and the TikTok and Lunatik Multi-Touch Watch Kits. While they might have launched some new features it was how people used it this year that was so impressive.
There’s a lot of excitement around Node.js and while it’s certainly not new there were a lot more people hacking on it in 2010. Some things that stood out over the past year included: inviting Ryan Dahl at Yahoo!, Douglas Crockford’s , the coding contest, a Node Package Manager by Isaac Schlueter, announcement of the new in webOS 2.0, a fast and tiny server-side JavaScript web development framework inspired by , and probably lots more I haven’t even begun to hear about or look into.
The Spotify desktop application got a ton of new features in 2010 but the most meaningful to me was the Facebook integration. Sharing music with friends has never been easier. I absolutely can’t wait for it to come to the US so more of my network can discover this truly awesome service that keeps getting better. Their support for local file library management was also a very welcome update. (aka #newtwitter)
Sometimes change takes awhile to appreciate. I’ve been using Twitter since 2006 and it was hard for me to initially wrap my head around #newtwitter. While I didn’t like it at first it has definitely grown on me. I’ve discovered a lot of little features that I initially overlooked and which are thoughtfully designed and implemented. The ability to browse some media content inline was a very welcome addition. I still find I prefer to interact with Twitter via a desktop app or mobile device. While some of that is because there are features Twitter chooses not to natively support I suspect the real reason is that my previous patterns are fairly ingrained in me.
The webkit community introduced a slew of awesome new consumer features but it was the developer focused features that surfaced in the , , and that proved to be most useful to me on a daily basis.
This is a major update to YUI Grids, it’s simpler to use, has a much smaller file size, supports nesting more elegantly, and is significantly more flexible than prior versions. If you are looking for a simple way to handle complicated web page layouts this just might be for you.
(Android, iOS, Symbian)
Technically launched in 2009 but it’s hard to ignore this as one of the breakaway mobile apps of 2010. It’s a fun, addictive physics game that has been faithfully re-created across multiple platforms. (Android and Chrome Browser Extension)
This simple chrome Extension and Android App makes it super easy to send links from your Chrome desktop browser to your Android device. (iOS)
The graphics in this puzzle game lured me in but the more challenging levels kept me interested. Unfortunately, there’s no optimized support for the iPad and it doesn’t look like it’s being actively maintained. (iOS)
This is a highly enjoyable puzzle game that sucked me in on my iPad. (iOS and a beta app for OS X)
The iPhone 4 shipped with a simple way to start taking widespread advantage of mobile video calls. Problem is it’s currently closed, only supports limited hardware profiles and only works on mobile devices over WiFi. I’m looking forward to seeing additional details behind the “open standards” stack find their way into the public domain so that 3rd party integrations can become possible. (iOS)
Entertaining and original karaoke app that lets you sing popular songs from the show Glee along with other people from around the world. I’m not a fan of the show and this app is not my cup of tea but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s very well executed. (iOS specifically iPad)
Korg’s faithful software reproduction of the ELECTRIBE·R drum machine was a great early example of the opportunity for music creation apps on the iPad. Unfortunately, the introductory price has gone up and it’s now a bit expensive. (iOS)
Pictures that have been processed by this app instantly feel like they have just a bit more soul. The attractive images it churns out, simple social features and integrations with numerous popular photo sharing services make it a highly useful and addictive application. (iOS)
Apple made the iPad a great device for both creating and sharing presentations. (iOS)
I dig this simple service for sharing one-way location fixes that timeout in 30-minutes. Bonus points for not requiring everyone to have the application installed or force bi-directional sharing. If you’re in the “share my location now with others” market, , which launched a year back, is more complicated and has more dependencies but is also interesting. (iOS)
The native iPhone and iPad apps now enable Netflix to be usable on mobile devices on the go. Super awesome. (Android and iOS)
Aesthetic newsreader that makes it easy to skim your favorite news sources. (iOS)
Apple provided a long overdue update that now optimizes support for controlling iTunes (and any Airport Expresses on your local network) via your iPad. (iOS)
Very similar to Apple’s Facetime service, this feature adds video calling to other Skype users on iOS. The big advantage over Facetime is that it works over both 3G and WiFi and Skype has a significantly larger network of users. (Android and iOS)
These mobile apps continue to make it easier for vendors to accept payment with common off the shelf mobile devices. The iPad app, which launched this year, is particularly powerful given the flexibility of the additional real estate. / (both on Android)
If you’re running Android and find the keyboard to be challenging to use give these a peek. In the case of Swype, the hard part for me was rewiring my brain to adapt to it. In their own unique ways each of these apps made it faster for me to input text and more easily adapt to using Android. I hope the default keyboard improves and I will not have to continue to hunt for 3rd party premium add-ons in future versions of Android. (Android and iOS)
The iPad application that launched this year is definitely one of those things you’ll either love or hate. The user interface takes a variety of unique approaches at displaying, and framing, 3rd party content within the app itself. The port of Tweetie as the official iPhone client was well done although the signup UI could use some more love. The Android app is a faithful reproduction that feels more buggy than it should. (Android and iOS)
Dead simple mobile payment system for splitting bills with friends and trying to keep things even. (iOS)
Augmented reality finds a perfect use case in this real-time language translator that superimposes translated text over words contained in a live video stream. It doesn’t work perfectly but that it even works at all is crazy. |
Five Ways The Verizon iPhone Will Change The Mobile Landscape | John Biggs | 2,011 | 1 | 9 | It has been a litany akin to prayer in certain circles: “Everything will be better when . I’ll buy it then.” But what will a Verizon iPhone really change? Let’s think this through. First, expect iPhone sales to surpass Droid sales for a brief period and then level off. My friend (a former Hell’s Angel) told me how a Verizon rep sold his niece a Droid X explaining that it was as good as the iPhone. After seeing my her uncle’s iPhone, however, she was gravely disappointed and repeated the litany to herself, albeit with some trepidation as the rumor of iPhone’s apparition on Verizon has been a long time coming. This time, however, we’re almost certain that the prayer will come true. Before you Droid-heads start flaming, accept that, at least until , when Verizon has the iPhone its Droid sales will dip. Second, expect nothing to change in terms of iPhone development over the next few years. I agree with that Verizon will sell a CDMA iPhone and not an LTE model. The GSM and CDMA models will be upgraded concurrently but there is no reason for Apple to release a “better” model on either platform (even LTE) until all carriers converge to LTE. Next, expect a banner year for Verizon. Last year was more of a pennant year as subscribers flocked to AT&T and their That will happen in 2011. Fourth, expect Apple make this announcement quietly and without fanfare. I doubt His Steve-ness will even show up to the event on Tuesday, if that is, in fact, what the announcement is about. Maybe he’ll appear on a screen, benevolently beaming down on the faithful who masochistically stuck with the phone on AT&T and who will be gravely disappointed when they can no longer roam internationally. But considering the iPod Touch has become a Wi-Fi phone that works everywhere, we’re looking at the reduction of carrier control in mobile anyway, so who cares? Now, for the bad news. The Verizon iPhone won’t be much better than the AT&T iPhone when it comes to reception and data transmission – at least not yet. Even anecdotally, as evidenced by this most users use a little more than 200MB of data a month with outliers hitting over 1GB of data. That’s 200MB per iPhone and there are a total of about 11 million AT&T iPhones floating around out there. According to , Verizon sold an estimated 4.4 million Droids. Verizon has 92 million subscribers while AT&T has 90 million. So 11 million AT&T subscribers are slamming the network while 4 million Droid-ites are tapping Verizon’s network gently. So what happens, then, when the iPhone effect hits Verizon, especially on Verizon’s older, slower CDMA network? Verizon will experience the exact issue that has been plaguing AT&T: the curse of success. Contrary to popular belief, AT&T isn’t hobbling iPhone calls and data service out of malice or ignorance. It just hard to serve that much data to that many people. Last Monday in Las Vegas, for example, I had perfect iPhone reception. Add 130,000 people – all but a few of them iPhone users – to the network during CES and you’ve got a mess. I couldn’t make a call or get an email all week. What’s going to happen when Verizon iPhones roll into the same town? Even if you split iPhones evenly (and you won’t, because international users will drive up the GSM-based iPhone count) you’re still overloading both networks. What’s Verizon going to do? Send the Can You Hear Me Now guy to install new cells? Mark my words – Verizon’s vaunted connectivity and coverage will plummet. Heck, if I were a conspiracy theorist I’d note that no longer touts its coverage to avoid potential class action lawsuits. The Verizon iPhone won’t be a solution to the many problems folks in urban areas like San Francisco and Manhattan are experiencing. In fact, it just spreads the pain to two carriers. However, it’s nice to know someone is listening, even a few years after the fact. Steve is truly good and kind. |
How Not To Be Influential? Quora Spam On Mechanical Turk | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 9 | There’s has been in the past couple of days about how can handle its , avoid (i.e. full of nonsense and spam) and scale with grace. As further evidence of a growing success problem, Google spam avenger us to evidence of Quora fraud through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Ironically the above Human Intelligence Task (HIT) involves voting up Internet marketer Larry Genkin’s answer to the very popular and highly contested question Quora’s official policy on : Someone has already made reference to the Mechanical Turk HIT under the . And the answer has been “collapsed” because of the policy violation, which means that no matter how many upvotes it receives paid or unpaid it won’t show up. Repeat offenders of Quora policy are warned and then potentially blocked. Founder Adam D’Angelo tells us that there is currently no system in place to search for/or prevent this kind of spamming “ While this isn’t the first time , right now the item is the only Mechanical Turk task that I can find related to Quora. In contrast there are to click “Follow” on Twitter and “Like” on Facebook for pay. Quora recently addressed concerns about the difficult problem of maintaining site integrity in a post entitled “ .“ It’s a start. |
null | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 7 | null |
Deals Juggernaut Next Jump Hires a CFO, Looks To Add 100 Engineers In San Francisco | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | Groupon gets all the attention, but another deal juggernaut that should be on your radar is New York City-based . The company runs group discount shopping programs for 90,000 corporations and organizations, and MasterCard’s loyalty rewards program. Investment bankers are sniffing around. Merchants offer deep discounts through Next Jump as a way to acquire new customers (read my for more info). Last November, Next Jump started to let people buy things with loyalty points as well. Its 60 million active shoppers are now spending 100 million loyalty points every month (each loyalty point is worth a penny, so that comes to $1 million a month). Before November, they were only burning through about 1 million loyalty points per month. CEO Charlie Kim believes that combining deep discounts with loyalty points is the best way to keep consumers coming back for more. Next Jump is on a hiring spree. It just hired its first chief financial officer, ex-Googler Angus Kelsall, who used to run Google’s international businesses in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Another new addition to the executive team is Andrew Beranbom (he once ran Yahoo Shopping), who will take on the roles of chief social officer and VP of products. It for its talent and plans to hire about 100 more engineers in San Francisco, mostly mobile. They will work under Sandeep Gupta, Next Jump’s chief mobile engineer it last summer. Mobile shopping apps are going to be a huge area of concentration for the company this year. Next Jump CEO Charlie Kim derides most mobile shopping apps as either being meer extensions of websites (eBay and Groupon) or “built for the wrong audience—men not women.” He is looking to change that equation. |
Blekko Bans Content Farms Like Demand Media's eHow From Its Search Results | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | , the perky little search engine startup that lets you customize your search results, is taking the fight against web spam to a new level. It already allows searchers to mark results as spam and keeps a that counts how many spam pages are on the web (743 million and counting). Now it is about to block content farms like Demand Media’s and entirely. The top 20 sites its users have marked as a source of web spam will now be blocked (see full list below). Concerns are that spam is increasingly taking over search results. So much so that Google recently to become more vigilant and downgrade content farms specifically in search rankings. Now Blekko is going to do one better and ban the worst offenders entirely. Here is the list of banned sites: ehow.com
experts-exchange.com
naymz.com
activehotels.com
robtex.com
encyclopedia.com
fixya.com
chacha.com
123people.com
download3k.com
petitionspot.com
thefreedictionary.com
networkedblogs.com
buzzillions.com
shopwiki.com
wowxos.com
answerbag.com
allexperts.com
freewebs.com
copygator.com Your move, Google. |
LG Continues The Thin-Bezel Love With New 47WV30 LED TVs | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 31 |
We all know LG hates bezels. Or loves thin bezels. One of those things. At any rate they are the thick bezels we all have on our TVs and monitors and replacing them with . I love the trend, personally, but it takes more than a thin bezel to make a decent display. What else have you got, LG? The new 47WV30 LED-backlit displays are 47″ and have, strangely, a 1366×768 resolution instead of straight 720p. More is usually good, but you don’t really want to be resizing your image up or down if you don’t have to. They’ve also got 700cd/m^2 and 1500:1 brightness and contrast ratings respectively. The really good part is the bezel, of course, which is less than 5mm wide, though I can’t make sense of the other measurements mentioned . Will these make their way to our shores? Probably not, but hopefully some future iteration of this thin-bezel style will make its way over here. The full press release, for those of you perverse enough to like that kind of thing: With a central focus on product differentiation, the 47WV30 provides industry-leading picture quality thanks to its adoption of direct LED BLU which is superior to LCD in terms of energy saving and lighting quality. And with a 6.9 mm seam size, the slimmest on any 40- to 49-inch display, the 47WV30 can connect seamlessly with other displays for a clearer, more expansive picture. In addition, a special “shine-out film” means the 47WV30 can display crystal clear images outdoors, even in brightness as high as 4,000 lux. The 47WV30 is also a leader in cost efficiency, with low energy use, high durability and low maintenance costs. Taken together, these add up to big savings for business owners. The 47WV30’s customized and integrated solutions make the display extremely convenient to use and deliver tangible improvements to the workplace. In conjunction with SuperSign, LG’s digital signage software, the 47WV30 offers versatile, easily manageable displays for shopping malls, building lobbies or practically any other public places. With a depth less than 92 mm, the 47WV30 blends in with any environment, while its high resolution and zoom in and out functions make it ideal for surveillance in premises such as hospitals, security control rooms and traffic control centers. That picture is cracking me up, by the way. |
Apple Reportedly Blocks Sony Reader App, May Foreshadow War With Amazon Kindle | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | This evening the New York Times published an titled . An alternative title, should the report prove accurate, could be, . Really, things look like they are going to get nasty. According to the report, Apple blocked Sony’s e-reader application from the iPhone and mandated that it would need to sell content via In-App purchases: The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, Apple rejected Sony’s iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books bought from the Sony Reader Store. Apple told Sony that from now on, all in-app purchases would have to go through Apple, said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division. The implications here could be huge, particularly for Amazon. Amazon’s Kindle platform has proven to be very popular, and not just because of the millions of Kindle hardware devices that Amazon is selling. In addition to the dedicated e-reader, Amazon has developed applications for a slew of devices, including iPhone, iPad, Android, desktop computers, and more. And while the platform isn’t open in the same way that Google Books is, it’s still very convenient and far more flexible than Apple’s iBooks, which is only available on the iPhone and iPad. In fact, at this point there’s no reason to buy books through iBooks when you can just as easily download Amazon’s Kindle app from the App Store, which has access to a larger catalog of books, and lets you read those books on more devices. But instead of beating Amazon on price or features, it looks like Apple might just cut them off. Or force them to use in-app payments, which give Apple a 30% cut and would kill Amazon’s margins. Amazon has avoided using Apple’s in-app payments system by kicking users to a browser to complete their transaction, but according to the NYT report (see the bolded section above) it sounds like this will be banned. I’m sure Apple apologists will be quick to back their logic here. they don’t want competitors selling premium content through channels that Apple doesn’t control — otherwise Amazon or Google will start selling movies and TV shows and music through their own media stores. Apple wants its cut of all content that is sold on iOS devices. And then there’s the magazine publishers, who will surely cry foul if they have to run their purchases their Apple but the e-book vendors don’t. But the fact that Apple is apparently changing the rules so late in the game is unnerving. Sony, Amazon, and others have already built these applications and have developed their strategies under the impression that they would be able to sell their own content. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have gotten used to jumping between reading on their iPhone and Kindle device depending on if they’re sitting in their living room or on the subway. That’s the beauty of this one-platform-multiple-device approach. Perhaps Apple will grandfather existing applications (namely, Amazon’s Kindle app) in under the existing rules. But I can’t think of a time that’s happened on iOS. And Apple hasn’t been afraid of pulling the rug out from competitors before — Google Voice was for arbitrary reasons in summer 2009 (it was accepted a few months ago), and who can forget Apple’s decision to developed using Adobe CS5 (which it later reversed course on). We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.
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33Needs Brings Crowdsourced Funding To Social Startups | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | The crowdsourced funding craze is picking up steam. Tonight we see the launch of , a site where socially-minded startups can raise initial seed funding from individual contributors on the Web. It is meets . Social startups post their “needs” in terms of how much money they are looking to raise, what problems they are going to solve and how they are going to do it, along with a video to help spread the word virally. People can invest $10, $100, $1,000 or more, and in return instead of getting shares in the company, they get a promised percentage of revenues for a specified period of time like 5 percent of revenues for three years. The startups seeking funds are for-profit ventures, as is 33needs. Some of the launch startups include , which wants to bring renewable energy projects to different communities in the U.S., and , a new clothing company which feeds hungry children with part of its profits (see video below). 33needs itself takes a 5 percent cut of any money raised, and nothing if the goal is not met. Generally, thee social startups are trying to raise anywhere from $50,000 or more get their businesses off the ground. They all try to mix profits with creating social good, which increasingly also resonates as a marketing strategy to consumers who want to feel like they are making a difference in the world. Whether or not they actually are is a different matter, but the most enduring social startups will end up being those who create a measurable impact. The company was founded by Josh Tetrick, a social entrepreneur and former Fulbright Scholar who worked in Africa and for President Clinton. He doesn’t see 33needs as a replacement for angel or seed capital, but rather as a launching pad for ideas that may otherwise never have made it beyond a dinner conversation. “It’s a launching pad that builds fans, breeds a loyal base of people who’ll buy your stuff and use your product,” he argues. “There is so much pent up demand to invest in this stuff—not donate, but invest.” But using crowdfunding to help start companies, as opposed to microloans for projects (Kickstarter) or people (Kiva), sets a higher bar. These require more money than a simple project. One of the key learnings from Kickstarter, for instance, is that small projects can grow into full-blown startups, but they don’t have to (watch this ). With 33needs it will be all or nothing. So the startups better make their pitches really good. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljR8TvUNoWs&fs=1&hl=en_US&width=”620″height=”400″] |
Real Estate Community RentJuice Gets $6.2 Million From Tim Draper And Highland Capital | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | , an online community that allows real estate agents and brokers to view rental data in real time is announcing its Series B round of $6.2 million in funding today, led by and esteemed founder . While not consumer facing, RentJuice is still useful to consumers as it can provide a broker with up to the minute data on whether a given property is available, thus preventing inaccuracies. It gives brokers “one-click syndication” or the ability to automatically post properties to consumer real estate sites like Craigslist, Trulia and Zillow. RentJuice also offers premium accounts where users can upgrade to features that automate administrative work like lead gen, advertising and paperwork. RentJuice attempts to disrupt the days it usually takes for landlords to complete paperwork and manually fax over hotsheets to agents and is focused on speed. Said CEO , RentJuice will also be using the money to expand its staff, and is currently
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Sony Patent Shows Cool Folding Grip For Point And Shoots | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 31 |
When it comes to point-and-shoots, you generally don’t see too much variation in the lens covers. They usually either have an automatic one or a piece that slides out of the way in one direction. A filed by Sony, however, shows off a pretty radical design that might set their cameras apart from the rest. The idea’s really simple: the front bit not only slides over, but pops out and locks (pop and lock?) to form a little hand grip, while simultaneously uncovering the lens. Though I usually don’t support adding extra moving parts to something simple like a compact camera, this is cool enough that I have to give my seal of approval. More pics at the patent. [via and ] |
Err, Call Me: Vumber Gives You Throw-Away Phone Numbers For Dating, Work | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | By now you’ve probably heard of Google Voice, a service that lets you take one phone number and configure it to ring all of your phones — work, mobile, home, whatever — with plenty of settings to manage your inbound and outbound calls. But what if you wanted the opposite: a service that lets you spawn a multitude of phone numbers to be used and discarded at your leisure? That’s where comes in. The service has actually been around for four years, but it was originally marketed exclusively toward people on dating sites. The use case is obvious: instead of handing out your real phone number to strangers, Vumber lets you spin up a new phone number, which you then redirect to your real phone. Then, when your date reveals that he hates animals and has lived in his mother’s basement for a decade, you can simply deactivate the number. Around 30-40% of the service still caters to online dating, but Vumber can be used for other things. Cofounder Cliff Wener says that some of Vumber’s biggest customers are advertising agencies that use it to assign different phone numbers to regional ad placements in print media, so that they can track the response rate (this isn’t unique to Vumber — other firms that cater exclusively to advertisers offer similar features). Beyond these two examples, Wener says it’s tough to track down the more niche use cases, because the whole service is anonymous, and you don’t have to tell Vumber what you’re using a phone number for. But it’s not hard to come up with some creative ideas. The service works with just about any phone, and it’s now bolstering its smartphone presence to streamline its interface. An application is already available for iOS, with an Android app coming next month and SMS support on the way as well. Vumber isn’t the only service that lets you set up a secondary phone number — , which we’ve before, does as well. But Line2 is really catering to users who just need one extra number, not a slew of them. Vumber costs $9.95 per month for your first number, with additional numbers available on a sliding scale starting at $3.95 (you can negotiate bulk discounts). Vumber raised $2.5 million in private capital before the company was acquired by video chat community in November 2009 for an undisclosed sum.
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StrikeAd raises Series A round for its mobile ad platform | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | , the mobile ad startup, has raised a Series A round from German VC firm eValue, which has also backed the European video ad network, . As is often the case with regards to European investment, the actual amount remains undisclosed. However, it’s said to enable StrikeAd to “accelerate the development and deployment of its technology platform as well as help drive the company’s strategy for international expansion.” In addition, StrikeAd has announced its new advisory board, which includes ex-CEO of Qype, Stephen Taylor (also formerly of Overture and Yahoo Europe), and Reza Behnam, previously a partner at IDG Ventures and the founder of online ad buying platform ADZ. StrikeAd’s flagship product is described as a mobile advertising “Demand Side Platform”, which allows advertisers, agencies and brands to plan, optimise and deliver mobile ad campaigns. It does this by letting media buyers and planners create dynamic campaigns across Supply Side Platforms, Ad Networks, operators and territories – via a single console – thus “reducing time, cost and complexity while offering greater control, better data, and improved ROI.” The UK-based company was founded in July 2010 by Alex Rahaman and Simon Wajcenberg. StrikeAd has offices in London and New York. |
Google Dethrones Nokia As Top Seller Of Smartphones | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | Android has passed yet another milestone in its race to the top: With 32.9 million handsets sold globally this last quarter, it has ousted longtime champion Nokia (with 31m) for the title of . It’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, of course, since Nokia also makes its own handsets, but quibbling aside, the toppling of such an iconic mobile company is no small event. The numbers don’t seem to include tablets, though it recently transpired that even the top-selling Android tablet sales were, to quote Samsung, We won’t see the Honeycomb effect until later in 2011. But it seems as though Android still has nowhere to go but up — that is, if you consider downmarket “up.”
The battle at the top for dominance of the tech-savvy smartphone crowd continues to be a three-way battle between Google, RIM, and Apple, and whatever your allegiance, you have to admit that it’s far from an easy fight for any of them. The good news for Google is that unlike its competitors in the $200-phone, $100-plan range, Android is ripe for spreading to the feature-phone market, where it can easily out-feature the chintzy flip-phones from Samsung and Sony Ericsson and reach a market numbering in the hundreds of millions. We’ve already seen strong-selling lower-cost devices, like the , and it’s just a matter of time before Android is the default operating system for the free phone coming with a $50 all-inclusive plan. In the meantime, Android is growing significantly faster than the iPhone, though opening up Verizon as a carrier may provide a serious boost to sales. RIM is also feeling the heat, with lots of international clout but little brand relevance among the younger demographics. Some may say that 2010 was Android’s breakout year, but it’s entirely possible that 2011 will be even more so, as Google broadens its tentacles even further into the average human’s life. And what of Nokia? The former market leader has been dragging its feet for four or five years now, and even their newest projects show little promise or originality when compared to their competitors. Google and Apple have eaten Nokia’s cake, and while the latter can still rely on its dumbphones for a steady source of income, that source is increasingly under threat from Android, and they’re running out of time to make a play for their former lofty position. |
Review: Dell Streak 7 | John Biggs | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | Short Version: Here we go again: another impressive 7-inch Android tablet with a Gorilla Glass screen, 4G networking, and a suave interface. But is this thing more of the same or something new? The tried-and-true 7-inch tablet is, by now, old hat. In fact, little about the Dell Streak 7 is new except the clear emphasis on media playback and T-Mobile’s 4G wireless. On the aggregate, I’d say that this is a strong showing for Dell and does just enough to stand out from the current tablet crowd.
We must approach the Streak 7 in light of the 100+ Android tablets that were announced or released at CES this year. Given that everyone and their dog is selling a tablet, it can be hard to differentiate yourself in a saturated market. What Dell has done with the Streak 7, then, is created a use-case based on media consumption. The Streak 7 is a tablet . UI cues force the device into landscape mode and the port on the long lateral edge of the device confirms that emphasis. It runs Android 2.2 and it runs it well, although the Android purist will note that 2.3 is the latest version. The Tegra 2 processor is able to handle most of the unique UI elements Dell has added to the device – we’ll discuss those shortly – and everything is snappy. The HSPA network hit about 1.8 Mbps in a 4G coverage area, which was more than acceptable (but far from the “theoretical peak download speeds of up to 21 Mbps” T-Mobile promises) and the front-facing camera allows for effortless Qik videoconferencing. The screen is bright and has a nice wide viewing angle, although the definition visibly diminishes much past about 130 degrees. In short, all the parts are in the right place and they work well together. The UI is where the Streak 7 is different from other tablets, including the . The Streak is meant to be held only one way: the landscape position. Although it does handle position switching through the built-in sensors, there is one decisive aspect of the design that ensures you’ll keep it held sideways. If you’ll notice, up in the corner the hard buttons are all angled in one direction. At first I thought the buttons would shift, like magic, to re-orient themselves, but, sadly, I was mistaken. To briefly digress, I posit that these hard buttons will contribute to a slight confusion when it comes to this device. As writes: Design is about making decisions. Those who prefer Android, I’m sure, don’t see this as a big deal at all — let “the market” determine in what order these buttons should be. Those who prefer iOS find it appalling — Google should have done the work at the outset of determining the one true order for these buttons. Although it will eventually be easy to overlook those buttons, I think they point directly to a more-media centric usage pattern for the Streak 7 and their position – high on the upper right side – will force the device into one position for most users. Again, this is fine. It’s a general purpose “tab,” not quite a tablet PC and not quite a smartphone, and it exists to allow folks to simulate some of the applications at which the iPad excels, mainly video playback and gaming. The custom Dell UI reinforces this notion by placing items on the home screen on little “stages.” There is the Social Media stage with Twitter, Orkut, and MySpace (JK all the way. It’s Twitter and Facebook) as well as an email stage. The main “stage” features many entertainment apps quite prominently. However, bear this in mind when comparing this to something like the Galaxy Tab. The Galaxy Tab is a portrait device while this is a landscape device. It’s not a true distinction since both can work in either mode, but it is something to consider when choosing one of the other. Aside from the odd buttons, the rest of the Streak 7 is pretty standard. You get a good quality rear camera, a decidedly worse front camera, a few basic controls on the body – volume and power – and little else.
The rear camera takes acceptable pictures and includes a flash. The front camera is a bit more pixelated but the images are acceptable, as we see below.
Here’s a low-light shot.
The Streak 7 supports Wi-Fi Sharing and USB Tethering. T-Mobile also includes “safe-mode” control for kids. It also supports GPS mapping and the entire Android Store so you can use it for ebook reading and other assorted activities. Text input is very smooth and haptic feedback along with Swype “gesture” support makes this device considerably more usable. The device is also smaller and lighter than any of the other Android or iOS tablets I’ve seen, which is an added plus. It’s about eight inches long and four inches wide. There is no removable battery but a bottom flap opens to reveal a full SD card port and SIM slot. Aside from the problem I had with the button placement, I think this is a very capable media-centric tablet. It isn’t going to blow the roof off of the industry but in a general sense it is a great media device with enough chops to make it usable as a counter- or coffee table-top browsing tool. The Streak 7, like the the original , is a smartphone masquerading as a tablet. That is not, on the whole, a bad thing: you get some of the best features of Android in a form-factor that is more conducive to media consumption. However, the Streak 7 is worrying because it launches on the cusp of another Android version, 3.0, that promises a more unified tablet UI. Provided this device will keep up with the times over the next few iterations of Android, I’m all for recommending it as a sturdy and slight Galaxy Tab or iPad alternative for the media enthusiast.
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Yammer Swings Back at Jive with a Survey and Salesforce with a Video (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | The social enterprise wars are heating up. Last week, Jive’s Tony Zingale came on to talk about a that showed quantifiable value his customers were getting from Jive’s software and Yammer and Salesforce get the bulk of the industry press. I invited Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Yammer’s David Sacks on the show if they wanted to rebut anything said. Sacks took me up on it, bringing his own user survey, a funny video aimed at today’s Chatter launch, and some fighting words. All are below.
[youtube url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuSLk5FkNrs”]
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Build A Cellphone Car Mount Out Of Spare Office Supplies | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 1 | 31 |
Why not do something productive with the last few minutes of your workday and actually make something. Go to the supply closest and grab a large binder clip, some string, a durable rubber band and a bit of duct tape (black if it’s available). Got it? Good. First, look at this pic of the end result and try to build what you see. Of course you could always head over to Lifehacker for the , but it will feel so much better if you construct it yourself. At least that’s what my mom used to tell me. |
Former eHarmony Head Greg Waldorf Joins Accel As CEO-In-Residence | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | is announcing today the addition of former head CEO as CEO-in-residence. Waldof spent eleven years at eHarmony and five as CEO before leaving the company a couple of weeks ago and landing at Accel as of today. While at eHarmony, Waldorf oversaw an online dating business that raked in more than $1 billion in revenue. Under his helm the company expanded into over 15 countries worldwide. Waldorf has previously worked with Accel on the board of real estate startup Trulia. Waldorf told us over the phone that he’s most excited about the companies with freemium business models given his background in paid services like dating. He’s also interested in spending some time in Accel’s New York and London offices as so many interesting things are happening internationally with regards to entreprenuership. As Accel CEO-in-residence, Waldorf will be succeeding LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and former Googler Singh Cassidy who went on to found Polyvore. When asked what his number one piece of advice for budding entrepreneurs is Waldorf said “pick your partners wisely.” Accel recently its New York branch, joining its offices in Silicon Valley, New York, London, Bangalore, New Delhi, Shanghai and Beijing. The VC firm has has also had some recent notable exits, including that of Diapers.com to Amazon for , Admob to Google for and Playfish to Electronic Arts for Image via |
Instructure Launches To Root Blackboard Out Of Universities | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | Mozy Founder launches today. He’s hoping to disrupt the entrenched player in the University LMS space, Blackboard, and take a big part of its $377 million or so in revenue. In 2007 , an online backup solution, for $76 million. Coates stayed for another year, then left. Since then he’s been helping integrate into American society, and he’s a big WWII buff. He purchased and restored a M18 Hellcat Tank Destroyer. You can see the restoration process (he keeps it in his garage). And here’s a of his wife blowing the crap out of the side of a gravel pit. I like how Coates rolls. The guy has a fully operational M18 Hellcat Tank Destroyer in his garage. When he’s not blowing things up or helping other people, he teaches a venture startup course at Brigham Young University. And that’s where two of his students came up with the idea of making a better Blackboard. If you’ve been in college in the U.S. since around 2000, you’ll know all about Blackboard. Last year the company raised around $1.5 million, nearly half from Coates himself, and got to work. They now have 20 employees and working with twenty six educational institutions, of which have left Blackboard entirely. Instructive is offering their Canvas LMS product as a hosted SaaS solution. Universities can also download an unsupported open source version of the product, or install a for-fee version with support. a commercial the team created for the product, based on the Apple “1984” commercial. That flamethrower is also his. Watch to the very end to really see it in action. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCIP3x5mFmw&w=630&h=390] |
RIM Shows Off The Playbook's Business Features | John Biggs | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekQNkl6gAOE&w=640&h=390] a long describing some business aspects of the RIM . It’s mostly for IT nerds so you don’t absolutely have to watch it if you don’t like hearing some dude talk about email sync in monotone, but at least it will give you a little time with everyone’s favorite upcoming tablet. |
Kickstarter: The aTrackt Improves Apple’s Keyboard And Trackpad Ergonomics | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | I wasn’t convinced this particular project was worth its salt, but a little reflection convinced me. I don’t use Apple’s dainty little desk accessories — I always go back to a nice, meaty mechanical keyboard and high-performance mouse, because Apple’s keyboards are like toys and the trackpad is no good for gaming. But hey, some people like ’em. The trouble is their naturally light and slippery nature, which causes them to slide about and become separated. I would have thought Apple would foresee this and install powerful magnets in that round bit of the casing, so they’d stick together, but they didn’t, so it’s left to the ever-inventive fans to justify their purchase with a home-brewed accessory. The on really does solve the problem, and passes the only test it needs to, in my opinion: if I had the keyboard and trackpad, I wouldn’t be caught dead without one of these as well. The idea is extremely simple: a bar of aluminum with space for the feet of the peripherals to go in; they rest at the same height they normally would, so nothing is really changed about the user experience — except that now, your trackpad won’t go on walkabout. It doesn’t appear that the bar has any kind of non-slip surface on the bottom, though, which would be handy. That said, if this guy can put together a whole Kickstarter project and we can’t even be bothered to put a piece of gaffer’s tape on the bottom of the thing, that bespeaks a certain consumer entitlement I’d rather not admit to. I’m not sure $50 and $100 for the normal and “go” versions respectively are going to fly, but then again, the appetite of Apple users for expensive accessories is bottomless, so maybe I shouldn’t naysay just yet. I’d also lose the irregular bolding in the logotype; it makes me angry. At any rate, and if you can spare a ten spot to nudge it towards its relatively modest $8000 goal, I’m sure Mark would appreciate it. |
Your own mini-me? Sculpteo lets you print a real-life 3D avatar | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | This is pretty cool. , the online 3D printing service, has launched a new product that lets users turn two photographs of a person into a real-life figure – a mini me or physical avatar if you will. The Paris-based company is interesting in that it’s in-part positioning 3D printing, a relatively new method of producing a real-life object from a 3D file, as a consumer-facing proposition. The result is that it’s as easy to print 3D models as it is to print old-fashioned photographs or related 2D-printed merchandise such as t-shirts, mugs or mouse-mats and the like. Here’s how it works: Users upload 2 photos (front and profile) of the person they want to print as real-life figure from which Sculpteo’s artists interpret the visuals to generate that 3D model, an image is then sent to the user for approval. They can also choose the model’s clothing and colours. Once signed off, the user then receives their 7 to 10cm tall real-life figure via the post, which comes from Sculpteo’s 3D printing shop in France. The cost: from €59.90 or £50 depending on the size chosen. Additional copies of the same model can be ordered at a cost of €30 upwards. Sculpteo’s service overall isn’t limited to specific consumer gifts, however, but can be used by professionals too. Basically, pretty much any simple 3D drawing using common 3D software, such as Google Sketchup, can be printed. Alternatively, models based on 3D files found on the likes of or Sculpteo’s own library, can be turned into a real-life model. |
Should You Really Be A Startup Entrepreneur? | Mark Suster | 2,011 | 1 | 30 | One of the most common questions that entrepreneurs who meet me for the first time like to ask is, “Do you miss being an entrepreneur? Aren’t you ever tempted to go back and do it again?” The obvious answer is yes. When it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. I guess it’s kind of like crack (not that I know from experience). It’s addicting. I know this sounds superficial. If you’ve taken the roller coaster ride that is a startup – you know what I’m talking about. But I’m very happy now. I’m enjoying being a VC. I thought I’d talk a bit about the differences I’ve experienced between being an entrepreneur & a VC – you know, from “both sides of the table.” I was asked by somebody recently in a private message on Quora about whether the individual should leave his comfortable job to become an entrepreneur. You would think the obvious thing I would tell somebody is, “yes, of course it’s a great idea.” You’d be surprised. I often advise against it. I really have to know somebody’s personal story and circumstances to know whether it is suitable for that person. In this particular case I wasn’t convinced it was a good idea from the limited information I had. The following is a short excerpt of what I said, And I mean this. I’m sure everybody has their own definition of the attributes of an entrepreneur. Some of the ones I would identify are: The truth is that in my experience very, very few people really enjoy the “pure” startup environment: months with no salary, months with no live product and lots of trial, error & rejection. Even many successful entrepreneurs tell me that they’d prefer to do a buy-out the next time rather than go back to square one in a startup. NOT easy. There are a larger number of people who enjoy coming on when an idea has become validated and thus “de-risked” but I still think this is a small number of people. And also there are a large number of people who would like to do startups in theory, but have high cost bases (family, real estate, school loans, whatever) that makes it very difficult to take the kinds of risks required. And what gets lost in reading about the glamor of Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon and the like is that most startups fail. And for ones that do get sold often most of the employees don’t really make huge upside gains. You don’t read about these garden variety outcomes online – only the high profile exits or busts. Mostly you read about fundings, product releases, big valuations, and M&A. So readers of tech journals gain a bias of the chances of success. I’m not trying to be negative. But I start most conversations with “wantrepreneurs” by saying, There’s nothing quite like shipping V1.0 of your product. You’ve come full cycle from vision, to hiring some people, raising some cash, arguing about direction, setting a release date, missing a release date, feeling like you’ve effed everything up, regrouping, rethinking, getting back on track and then setting your baby loose into the wild. And then. Whew. Sit back and watch usage. Get your press coverage. Either you arc up emotionally or you arc down. There’s not a lot of flat line. Snap. Great story on TechCrunch! Inbound calls from partners, people who want to join, from friends. You knew it all along. Your vision was right. VCs are calling wanting meetings. La vita e bella. Uh, oh. Fawk. Facebook DID NOT just announce that! Scoble is saying your best days are behind you? No, I think we can still be huge. We’re just going to have to change our focus a bit. Weekends. Evenings. Regroup. Team losing a bit of confidence in you. VCs pushing out your meetings a few weeks. WTF? Just a month ago they were all emailing you! Well, you still have 6 months runway. What if we pivot slightly? Not a total change – just a different way of making money. What if we dropped the code that would compete with Facebook and instead go after this other area? Relaunch. Oh, man. Our user numbers are up. Awesome! Loving this new direction. It’s all good. But … only 2 month’s cash left. Let’s just not pay ourselves for a couple of months. The junior devs need it. They’re month-to-month. I think we can be like the and stretch this cash. Do we tell our team? Can they handle knowing we only have 3, maybe 4 months cash? Or if we say that will they all be putting out the word to their friends to look for their next gig? Great new product release. Another good article. VC meetings going well. Holy sh*t!!! We just landed the biz dev partner we’ve been working on for 9 months. They love us! Awesome! $2 million in VC. Life couldn’t be better. All your buddies want to join. No. Google DID NOT just acquire our main biz dev partner. What? Google doesn’t know if they’re going to honor our contract? We now have to re-convince everybody? But we had a term sheet !!! You can’t believe it. Eight beers that night. Maybe even tequila. And the next morning – water off a duck’s back. We’ll find a way. Startups weren’t mean to be easy. Back to work. Anyone who has worked in a startup will know that this narrative is not exaggerated. If anything it’s the tame version. Every one of these events (with names changed) has happened to companies I’ve worked at or closely with. Most of them in the past 12 months. I’ve personally experienced much worse. Imagine how Flurry felt when Steve Jobs called them out by name. They seems to have bounced back nicely. I remember being a few months before my wedding wondering whether I would walk down the aisle unemployed. It was 2002 – the “dog days” of the Internet and we were running out of cash. I remember an employee asking me whether I’d fill out their paperwork to get a home loan when we only had 3 months of cash in the bank. What do you tell somebody in that situation? I remember having a merger called off at the last minute and having a planning meeting at a pub to figure out how to run a bankruptcy process (luckily, we never had to do it). And I had all the VCs play head games with me. One investor played chicken with me by threatening not to approve my next-round financing unless I gave him more equity. He wasn’t willing to put in more money but he had “blocking rights.” I had 10 days of cash. He was going on vacation for 2 weeks and told me, “Too bad, I’ll deal with this when I get back.” I literally told him to fawk off and sue me. That is a true story for which I have witnesses. I hung up. He called back and said, “OK, do the deal.” Really? I had to go there? I learned this lesson long ago – many investors wait until you’re staring at a cliff before committing whether to re-invest in you. It is risk minimization + maximum leverage. I swore never to do that as a VC. Many VCs don’t realize just how destructive this is to team spirit and confidence. Penny wise, pound foolish. But there is nothing that would ever replace the rush of being on the top of the startup emotional curve. Winning my first million-dollar contract. Getting on the front cover of the most prominent VC magazine in Europe (was called Tornado Insider). Acquiring a competitor with complimentary assets whom we long wanted to beat. Walking into an office at the London Underground and seeing every workstation open and using our product. I was watching “Meet the Press” this morning and they put a big screen behind the guests with TweetDeck open and showing the constant stream of information about Egypt. That must have been a proud moment in the offices. And on the bottom of the emotional startup curve there is nothing crappier than having to lay off 60 employees in one day. Been there. It tests your soul to have to ask close friends to leave the business. Losing a deal that you had worked on for months after being told you won, having it snatched away from you, will ruin some nights of sleep. There are moments like being on stage when your demo crashes, reading about your competitors raising a ton of cash or having one of your top team members resign that test your will. My SVP of Sales & Marketing quit 30 minutes before an important board meeting. Dick. And that’s what it’s like – all superlatives. Your highs are super high. Crack. Your lows are unexplainably low and lonely. It’s the startup roller coaster world. And I miss it. There’s still a cynical entrepreneur in me regarding VC. In my experience many in the industry still think about “my CEOs” or “my companies” as though they are pawns on a chessboard. I’ve heard many a VC comment, “Yeah, I told the company to do A,B,C and they didn’t listen. The management team wasn’t strong enough. That’s why we didn’t succeed.” That’s the rationalization for the failure. And all too often I hear upon success, “Yeah, I was actively involved on that one. Our advice is what helped them target the right market, hire the right team, build the right products.” And there are some delusional people who really believe it. I remember this attitude really well from working in consulting where people took too much credit for “creating new strategies” and deny any responsibilities for failed initiatives. The reality is that the majority of successes & failures are created by and experienced by the entrepreneurs. The VC sense of accomplishment or failure is blunted by being slightly removed and by the portfolio effect. I think it looks something like the graph below. But there are many great VCs also who see the entrepreneur as their customer as they should do and are realistic about how much of an impact we advisors and financiers really have. We enjoy our jobs. We love working with entrepreneurs. . We’re paid well to spend time with smart people who want to change the world. We control our hours, our travel and our investment areas. We get to ride your ride, too. But as above, the highs just aren’t quite as high and we don’t have to sweat the lows as much. When I first considered leaving to become a VC I obviously called all of my VC friends and asked their opinions. It’s a very tough decision to walk away from a senior role at what I consider one of the most successful tech companies of Internet era. Almost universally they said, “Are you crazy? If you’re going to leave, go do another startup? Don’t go into VC.” Huh? Here they were in what I thought was one of the most sought after jobs and they almost all told me not to do it. I was baffled. It was 2007. It was well past the Internet boom, well into Web 2.0, before the really profitable years of social networking and when many in the industry were despondent. Really. What I garnered was that many VCs secretly wanted to be entrepreneurs. They were envious. Let me explain. Let’s say you became a partner in a VC fund in 1995 and started investing heavily in 1997-99. You felt invincible. As John Doerr, the revered partner at Kleiner Perkins said it was, “The largest legal creation of wealth in history.” You were minted. Golden. Making bank. King makers. Internet pioneers. I remember wrote an interesting article about it. They talked about how the dream job for Harvard MBAs used to be investment banking where you wore your Rolex watch, drank $200 bottles of wine at fancy New York restaurants and vacationed in the Hamptons. Suddenly the VCs and Internet pioneers were buying Patek Phillipe watches, ordering $1,000 bottles of wine, getting all of the best restaurant reservations and flying private jets. At the time all investment bankers secretly wanted to be VCs and many did just that. But the “gilded age” ended quickly. The days of quick flips, quick IPOs and astronomic returns had come to a close. If you became a principal or a new partner in 2000/01 you had a good salary but as it turns out you were very unlikely to see a large upside “carry” return for quite some time. Nobody really talks about this. So here’s the deal. There are many VCs who have been made partner since 2000 and haven’t previously had an exit of their own. They’ve probably watched smart teams, younger than them, walk in with a paper napkin, get funding, build a modest company and sell it for $20-30 million in 3-4 years pocketing $8 million for each founder. It looks so easy. It looks so alluring. That’s where the envy comes from. But they don’t have a great idea. And they have the status of being a VC. And a comfortable salary. And the chance at diversified returns. So it’s hard to put your neck on the line and try. But those returns won’t come for 7-10 years for many of them. Some, not ever. That’s why when I met and heard he was giving up his VC career to run a startup I was seriously impressed. It takes cojones – hats off to him. So while you’re struggling to get access to VCs and those that meet you seem unwilling to commit – at least take comfort in knowing that many of them secretly long to sit in your chair, as much as you might find that hard to believe. I promise you. They envy your courage, freedom and upside possibilities. Not all VCs want to be entrepreneurs, of course. But I’ve heard it from many, many a VC that they feel the calling to try. Most won’t. Me? I’m committed to . I have 3 partners with whom I work really well and whom I respect. We have a broader team that have become our close colleagues & friends. I’m enjoying the diversity of working with 6-7 portfolio teams on a regular basis on strategic issues. I’m enjoying watching them grow from nothing to meaningful businesses. Would I take another hit off the startup pipe? No time soon. But I’d never say “never.” It’s such a rush. Just please make sure to enjoy the ride (up and down) while you’re there. When you finally get off it’s a long line and you have to be really committed to want to get back on. Roller Coaster image via on Flickr
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WikiLeaks Founder Assange Tells 60 Minutes: "Our Values Are Those Of The U.S. Revolution" | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 30 | In an with , WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange compares his values to those of the Founding Fathers of the United States and argues that he is actually playing “inside the rules.” He defends his actions by leaning heavily on the First Amendment, stating that “our founding values are those of the U.S. revolution.” On the possibility of facing prosecution in the U.S. for leaking sensitive diplomatic cables and military documents, he argues: “There’s been no precedent that I’m aware of in the past 50 years of prosecuting a publisher for espionage. It is just not done. Those are the rules. You do not do it.” Both the U.S. Justice Department and the Pentagon are conducting a criminal investigation against Assange and WikiLeaks, but if WikiLEaks is charged with a crime for publishing classified documents, it begs the question of whether other publishers such as the (which also published part of the documents) could also be prosecuted. Of course, the U.S. government is not currently going after the New York Times. It is going after WikiLeaks. But Assange makes the case that should not be tolerated: If we’re talking about creating threats to small publishers to stop them publishing, the U.S. has lost its way. It has abrogated its founding traditions. It has thrown the First Amendment in the bin. Because publishers must be free to publish. Below are some key exchanges from the interview transcript. Watch the whole interview (Part I above and Part II below). Kroft: There’s a perception on the part of some people who believe that your agenda right now is anti-American. Assange: Not at all. In fact, our founding values are those of the U.S. revolution. They are those of the people like Jefferson and Madison. And we have a number of Americans in our organization. If you’re a whistleblower and you have material that is important, we will accept it, we will defend you and we will publish it. You can’t turn away material simply because it comes from the United States. Kroft: You’re shocked? Someone in the Australian government said that, “Look, if you play outside the rules you can’t expect to be protected by the rules.” And you played outside the rules. You’ve played outside the United States’ rules. Assange: No. We’ve actually played inside the rules. We didn’t go out to get the material. We operated just like any U.S. publisher operates. We didn’t play outside the rules. We played inside the rules. Kroft: There’s a special set of rules in the United States for disclosing classified information. There is longstanding
Assange: There’s a special set of rules for soldiers. For members of the State Department, who are disclosing classified information. There’s not a special set of rules for publishers to disclose classified information. There is the First Amendment. It covers the case. And there’s been no precedent that I’m aware of in the past 50 years of prosecuting a publisher for espionage. It is just not done. Those are the rules. You do not do it. Kroft: There are people that believe that it has everything to do with the next threat. That if they don’t come after you now that what they have done is essentially endorsed small, powerful organization with access to very powerful information releasing it outside their control. And if they let you get away it, then they are encouraging… Assange: Then what? They will have to have freedom of the press? Kroft: That it’s encouragement to you… Assange: And? And? Kroft: …or to some other organization? Assange: And to every other publisher. Absolutely correct. It will be encouragement to every other publisher to publish fearlessly. That’s what it will encourage. Kroft: To publish information much more dangerous than this information. Assange: If we’re talking about creating threats to small publishers to stop them publishing, the U.S. has lost its way. It has abrogated its founding traditions. It has thrown the First Amendment in the bin. Because publishers must be free to publish. Kroft: It’s a dirty word. And people think that what you’re trying to do is to sabotage the workings of government. Assange: No. We’re not that type of activists. We are free press activists. It’s not about saving the whales. It’s about giving people the information they need to support whaling or not support whaling. Why? That is the raw ingredients that is needed to make a just and civil society. And without that you’re just sailing in the dark. |
Quora Is Really About A Better Wikipedia, Not Robert Scoble's Hopes & Dreams | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 30 | Robert Scobleized Quora today. It was only a of weeks ago that I mentioned super-blogger penchant for taking very strong positions on technology and startups and then reversing those decisions completely on a whim. I love him for his quick retreats. And I certainly admire a man who’s willing to rethink his opinion after weighing new evidence. But that’s not what Scoble did when he earlier today. He decided that Quora was a blogging service, or some kind of Friendfeed or Twitter-like place for conversations. And when he realized that it doesn’t do those things very well, he lashed out. Basically, he got mad that people downvoted his stuff. “It’s a horrid service for blogging,” says Scoble. Yup. I agree. Quora isn’t a very good place for blogging. Because other people can edit or remove your stuff. It’s the sort of place where you have to behave yourself if you want to be heard. That’s exactly not blogging. The thing is, most of us have always known that. Quora is ostensibly a Q&A site. But that’s like saying a car is a device for burning gasoline. Or, in Robert’s case, he’s mad that his car won’t cook him dinner. When you think of Quora, think about Wikipedia, not Twitter or FriendFeed or a blog. It is a knowledge base. It says so right on the . Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question. One way you can think of it is as a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking other people. Eventually, when you see a link to a question page on Quora, your feeling should be: “Oh, great! That’s going to have all the information I want about that.” It’s also a place where new stuff–that no one has written about yet–can get pulled onto the web. Accumulating Knowledge
People use Quora to document the world around them. Over time, the database of knowledge should grow and grow until almost everything that anyone wants to know is available in the system. When knowledge is put into Quora, it is there forever to be shared with anyone in the future who is interested. When I read “Over time, the database of knowledge should grow and grow until almost everything that anyone wants to know is available in the system.” I definitely think of Wikipedia. And I definitely don’t think of a clean, well lighted place for Robert Scoble to have conversations with his followers. Like Wikipedia, Quora can be a horrid place to voice an opinion. The community (led by Quora’s moderators) want a certain type of content. Stuff that isn’t about wit and rhetoric, but about getting experts to talk about things that they deeply understand. And since Quora bought the domain name and put up the site, they get to do that. Even if about it. |
The Triple Crown | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 1 | 30 | History shows us that when disruptive technologies appear, the battle lines are drawn between those who are empowered by the innovation and those who fear they lose such power. So it is with the iPad and its iOS platform, which has sparked a counter attack in direct proportion to the speed of its adoption across the computing landscape. From the desktop to the handheld, from the media it displaces to the media it rehomes, from the companies who benefit to those who are undermined — the pace is quickening. As my daughter used to say in pre-school, let me undersplain something to one such victim, Microsoft. When you send out your troops to tell enterprises why the iPad sucks, be very careful to not include facts about Windows machines as proof of anything. As a longtime resident of OS/X, I have no use for Windows machines generally. But specifically, nothing about Microsoft-based products comes close to the worst aspects of the iPad circa Version 1. You know the list: Flash, no Office, etc. These are features of the iPad, not problems. Investing in Flash is like putting money into a parking meter with a one-hour limit. After you reach the limit, the money goes in and doesn’t count for anything. Plus you can’t get it out. Office creates documents that require email to scatter unevenly across disorganized cc and forward silos where the resulting cloud of authority mangles both management and employee incentives. Etc. is everything else you might want to do on the iPad that Windows machines can do but don’t want to because it destabilizes legacy Microsoft revenue streams. This last point is why comparing a shipping viral product to a non-existent OS-orphaned one is so absurd. But Microsoft is not stupid; they must think they can stall long enough to change the subject again. Which leads to the next surprising iOS data — Netflix streaming via Apple TV passing iPad streams. Actually, it’s intuitive if you use both products as I do. Netflix is a cute trick on the iPhone, a traveling companion on the iPad, made for Apple TV and the home screen. With Fox and ABC talking about dropping Hulu in favor of Netflix, Apple TV, and Xbox, the market may be compressing rapidly into a two-party system. Netflix is interesting because it is the first service to follow the disruptive arc of the iPad. Every time the iPad is analyzed, the projections are anywhere from just plain wrong to what amounts to a niche. Doesn’t run applications… now there’s an AppStore. Doesn’t run Flash… now there’s a Flash converter app. Apps don’t support a magazine subscription model… Tuesday they will. Won’t be accepted by IT… 80% penetration. Will be overwhelmed by Android tablets… Apple will Verizon them with iPad 2. Netflix: Doesn’t run this year’s shows… just announced limit of 2 simultaneous streams per subscription. Two problems that actually combine to further growth of the disruptive network. With 20 million subscribers already accounting for a big chance of YouTube style bandwidth, the studios are threatening to starve the service to protect cable and satellite and DVD pricing and windows. The solution: bump up to higher sub price to free up streams for family of four, producing high value customers that finance newer content. Also moving the service rapidly from DVD/Blue Ray to all streaming. What’s left? Live news and events, which Hulu Plus is talking of acquiring before Netflix gets too big. What is reminiscent of iPadnomics is the speed with which the disruption is underestimated, the naiveté with which the backlash is orchestrated, and the resultant vaulting of the service into a near-incumbent position before the deposed incumbents can retrench from the initial mistaken counterattack. Netflix is already at the stage where iTunes was when the music cartel tried to cap it. While Amazon may be a cheaper service without so-called DRM, there’s no device comparable to Apple TV at the end of the value chain. Instead there are the almostees like Google TV and Spotify, trying to patch together enough coverage to simulate the Netflix/Apple TV combination on the video side and iTunes/iOS on the music side. It’s not so much about Comcast replacement as they want you to think, because live programming has not been built out in this new Net model. A la carte programming is not yet worth piecing together from a cost perspective; it’s easier to keep the cable package and pay the on demand freight as Hollywood continues to roll out mediocre product. Many of us are spending for a home theater experience plus cable/satellite and testing the broadband cap with streaming over Apple TV and Netflix. Right now for a family of four we’re spending $100 for first run and shifting the mid-tier to 8 bucks a pop plus the Netflix bill for the balance. The first news network to realize they are really competing (and losing – see Egypt) with Twitter and Facebook may talk with Hulu but will think twice before pissing off Apple or Netflix. Then we wait for HBO, or watch AMC or some such to replace them. Already Netflix at 20 million beats Showtime and Starz at between 17 and 18, with HBO not far enough ahead at 27. Similarly, streaming has disrupted the technology business. Where Comcast and HBO have the most to lose to the Cloud in media, Microsoft and Office do in the enterprise. A generation of netizens is tweeting, retweeting, and @mentioning the stream, before emptying an InBox coming under attack behind the firewall. Microsoft can let some air out of the tire by announcing an OfficeTalk skunkworks project, but taking over the desktop from Outlook without a mobile strategy will be fighting the last war. Redmond is in between a rock and a hard place. The next version iOS 4.3 supports advanced gestures for navigating between apps. As iPad developers support push notification in their next revs, the difference between micromessaging and the Inbox is secondary to the position in the alert queue. Microsoft could push these realtime messages to the front, but in doing so Outlook is further marginalized by competition with direct messages and @mentions. The Microsoft of the last few years could take part in a conversation about open data, but with Ozzie and Muglia gone and former-Office-now-Windows-chief Sinofsky cementing power, it’s a stretch to assume Microsoft won’t go classic in its bet on Office as the gatekeeper. The wildcard here is Mac AppStore, where Apple has the opportunity to unify the social Office as a layer of cooperating apps. Write to the iPad, and run also on the Mac. If Microsoft decides to extend its OneNote iPhone app across Office, they will either up-port it to iPad (and implicitly replace native Mac with native Mac Apps) and damage WindowsPad, or push it to Android with even more disastrous consequences. With Apple TV on iOS, it’s write once run anyappware. Watching Secretariat this weekend reminded me of the iPad/Netflix story arc. After close victories in shorter races at the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, the Belmont Stakes shaped up as an endurance test thought to bring the speedy come-from-behind horse back to earth. Instead Secretariat broke from the gate and won going away, leaving the field far behind by 31 lengths. Perhaps we’re not at the same point in Apple’s race, or at the very moment when the studios pull the reins back on Netflix’ run. But I wouldn’t bet on it. |
Zuckerberg On SNL: "I Invented Poking" [Video] | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 30 | ‘The Social Network’ star Jesse Eisenberg hosted “Saturday Night Live” tonight and opened the show talking about the movie’s impressive Oscar nominations. The monologue then switched to video of actual Facebook CEO watching his two “Berg” doppelgangers backstage, “Why can’t I go in there, I’m the real Mark Zuckerberg? |
Cloud-Based Storage Coming To PS3 (But For A Premium)? | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 1 | 30 | is that cloud-based game save management will be coming to the beginning with firmware 3.60. Hate the idea of managing your saves? Don’t worry, for it looks like the feature will only be available to subscribers. Outrage! “Cloud-based save game management? What’s that?” A good, honest question, amigo. The long and short of it is that every time you save your game (provided the game works with the new service, which is said to be named “Online Saving”) a backup copy will be sent to Sony’s servers in the sky—hence the “cloud” metaphor. The idea is that should anything happen to the saves on your hard drive, there will always be a copy on Sony’s servers. So let’s say you were bitten by . (There’s a glitch in the game, due to be patched any minute now, that leads to save data being corrupted if you play for too many consecutive hours—something to do with data fragmentation.) You lose the saves on your hard drive, but don’t worry: there’s a copy on Sony’s servers. Copy those over and you’re back in business. Of course, syncing data with the cloud opens up the possibility of further glitches, as players of . But on the whole it’s a useful feature; nothing wrong with backing up your data, right? Valve that the PS3 version of Portal 2 will have Steam-based cloud storage, meaning that your local saves will be mirrored on Valve’s servers. It’s the same basic technology, but it would seem to be a feature that merely comes with the game, no having to subscribe to PlayStation Plus. At least that’s how I understand it, but I could well be wrong. The questions now become A) when will the Xbox 360 see something like this and B) how long will PS3 gamers continue to wait for cross-game voice chat? |
iPad Mags Need A New Blueprint | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 30 | Ever since the iPad came out, print media companies have been feeling their way in this new medium, but so far they’ve just been stumbling over themselves.
They are latching onto the iPad as a new where people will somehow magically pay for articles they can get for free in their browsers. But if they want people to pay, the experience has to be better than on the Web, and usually it’s not. This sorry state of affairs is true for both magazines and newspapers. The iPad app, for instance, is gorgeous but crippled. All the links are stripped out of the articles, even from the blogs. Meanwhile, most iPad magazines are little more than PDFs of the print issues with some photo slideshows and videos thrown in. They end up being huge files—I recently downloaded a single issue that was 350 MB, some issues of are 500 MB—with the same stale articles as in the print version. Replicating a dead-tree publishing model on a touchscreen is a recipe for obsolescence. Despite the poor reviews and uninspiring number of downloads, media companies sold millions of dollars worth of advertising last year for their iPad apps because advertisers want to be associated with anything shiny and new. Make no mistake: advertising dollars are driving media companies to embrace the iPad, not readers. The same is true for the this week of News Corp’s iPad-only newspaper, , but at least it will be built from the ground-up for the iPad. I suspect it will take a while for it to reach its true potential—it’s hard enough to launch a new publication as it is without reinventing the reading experience—but I am curious to see where it goes. However, I am not holding my breath. I’ve already written on what should look like. From a reader’s perspective, the optimal iPad newspaper should be three things: At the very least, Apple should fix the in iTunes. Right now, each new issue of a paid magazine or newspaper must be bought separately as an in-app purchase. But subscriptions are not going to save the media companies. In fact, they’d be smarter to give the apps away for free and make more money from the advertisers, who want to reach as many people as possible. The ads should also be worth more because they just look better in an app where they look more like a magazine ad and can take over the whole screen when tapped on. But making these media apps social and realtime is the key. It should be constantly updated like a blog or Twitter. And it should be social like in that it shows me what people I follow are reading and retweeting elsewhere by unpacking their links into full articles, images, and videos. More so than iPad newspapers, iPad magazines have a real opportunity to break the mold, but they can’t do that if they are just trying to repurpose their print publications. Starting from scratch like is the right idea. But what magazines are better at than newspapers is really packaging the news, distilling big ideas, and presenting stories in a narrative arc that sticks in readers’ minds. If I were creating an iPad mag it wouldn’t look like a magazine at all. It would look more like a media app, and there wouldn’t be any subscription or even distinct issues. New content would appear every time you opened it up, just like when you visit TechCrunch or launch Flipboard or the Pulse News Reader. In order to make it addictive, it would have to be realtime. But it would also be more selective than simply reading everything that anyone links to in your Twitter or Facebook streams. Instead, it would present readers with a continuum from original articles and videos to curated streams by topic. The curated streams would combine Tweets from the staff writers and editors with those of other journalists, entrepreneurs, and experts for any given topic or section. These streams would be unpacked Flipboard-style into a magazine-like layout, but with more filters to show trending stories and highlight the ones which are getting the most buzz. At the same time, there would be a view showing only the articles from that publication. And there would be other ways to navigate the app than just a reverse-chronological stream of the latest posts. In addition to the hourly drumbeat of breaking news and analysis, there would be longer narratives. These would not necessarily be 10,000-word articles (although those could be part of it), but rather taking readers through a series of experiences to tell a story. Maybe you start with an article, followed by a video interview with the subject, an interactive infographic, and then wrap up with a selected Tweet stream about the topic. At every point, the reader would be led by the hand from one experience to another, coming away with a fuller understanding of the topic. Supplemental images and data should always be at her fingertips. And, of course, the reader could dive right in by commenting, Tweeting, sharing, taking opinion polls and all the rest. A digital magazine or newspaper should feel like a media app, not like a PDF viewer. It needs to take advantage of technology to tell better stories. These include both presentation technologies (immersive panoramic photos, interactive charts) and data-sifting technologies to filter the news from outside sources. What do you want to see in a media app that you are not getting today? |
Confirmed: SoundCloud takes funding from Index and Union Square | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 1 | 8 | As we hinted four days ago, was indeed talking to Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures about investing. It’s confirmed today that both firms have made undisclosed investments. SoundCloud was looking to raise another round since its last was in April 2009, from Doughty Hanson Ventures for EUR 2.5 million. Since then it has scaled in adoption and taken on bigger offices and more staff. The Berlin-based audio-streaming service for sharing music – not unlike a YouTube or Flickr for audio – recently passed two million users. The startup, which has a freemium model where a Pro account costs €29.00 per year, has already attracted attention from Union Square’s Fred Wilson on his blog. It recently launched a round of new iPhone and Android apps allowing users to and a new Mac desktop app. |
OMG/JK: I Wonder If The Verizon iPhone Comes In Red | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 8 | It’s time for your favorite part of the week: the new episode of , featuring fellow TechCrunch writer MG Siegler and myself talking about the hottest stories in tech. And this episode’s a great one (though that should come as no surprise). This has been a remarkable week in technology news, especially when it comes to the iPhone and Android (which, as you may have noticed, happen to be subjects MG and I like to talk about). In this episode we go over the impending release of the iPhone on Verizon (I’ve never seen MG more giddy), the Amazon Android App Store (say that three times fast), the new video demo of Android’s tablet OS Honeycomb, and Apple’s new Mac App Store. This is also a special episode because it only features one camera (the rest of them are down at CES). It’s sort of like being on a ride. Or something. Yeah, we’ll go with that. Here are some articles relevant to the topics we discuss:
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null | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 31 | null |
Gillmor Gang 01.08.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 1 | 8 | weighed in on the inevitable Year of the Tablet discussion from New York, where my view of Apple dominance is met with healthy skepticism but no real counter argument. Borthwick’s Bit.ly service continues to prosper even as Twitter consolidates services and clients in-house. As a self-described former member of the entertainment cartel (AOL), he declined repeatedly to join my cartel-bashing while essentially agreeing with me. Androiders and ably represented the Android-will-beat-Apple-if-we-have-to-ship-individual-tablet-models-for-each-customer crowd. Marks even had one of the paperweights that he brandished on camera. I fended off a plea from @Borthwick to fix the RSS feed for the 7 remaining people who would rather podcast than stream. Other stuff was talked about. I had fun. |
Can Google Get Its Mojo Back? | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 1 | 8 | A spectre is haunting Mountain View. No, not bed bugs: . Google is in serious decline. I don’t see how they can deny it. They have famously always been a data-driven organization, and the data is compelling. Business Insider’s list of cited no fewer than four from Google: Buzz, Wave, Google TV, and the Nexus One. have erupted in Google Maps. Many of . Influential luminaries like , , and (way ahead of the curve) say their core search service is much degraded from its glory years, and the numbers bear this out; after years of unassailable dominance, Google’s search-market share is diminishing—it dropped an eyebrow-raising 1.2% just —while Microsoft’s Bing, whose UI Google tried and to copy earlier this year, is on the rise. Even their money fount, AdWords, is problematic. An illustrative anecdote: I recently experimented with a $100 free certificate for my own , and found my ad got stuck “In Review” indefinitely. According to users on AdWords’ discussion boards, this is common, and the only way to fix it is to file a help request. I did, and the problem was soon repaired—but what happened to the speedy algorithmic solutions for which Google is famous? The general tone on the AdWords forums is exactly like that on those devoted to the other Google service I use a lot, : users on both frequently complain about the way Google neglects and/or outright ignores them. I like App Engine a lot, but it’s prone to sporadic bursts of inexplicable behaviour, and some developers are because of Google’s perceived reluctance or inability to fix its bugs and quirks. Another example: a bug in Android’s default SMS app which sent text messages to incorrect recipients festered for until a spate of high-profile coverage . How can they neglect problems like that in their only big hit of the last five years? Never mind what happened to ? Once upon a time, Google was the coolest place for a techie to work. Not any more. While I can’t quantify this, I’m confident that most engineers will agree: somehow, over the last 18 months, their aura has faded and their halo has fallen. Once their arrogance was intimidating and awesome. Now it just seems clueless. I feel a little bad being this critical, because I am—or was—a giant Google fan. I admire their China stance, and the way that they innovate like crazy and constantly take chances, not all of which pay off. I had an Android before Android was cool. But this is no mere losing streak; this is systematic degradation. They seem to be rotting from the inside out. What happened? The same cancer that sickened Microsoft: bureaucracy. A claims that “the bleak reality of corporate growth” is that “efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy.” A famous (and brilliant) by Moishe Lettvin, a former MS employee, explains why Windows Vista was such a turkey: at the time, every decision—and every line of code—had to filter through seven layers of management. My sources tell me that since then Microsoft has become much more efficient, and their recent successes—XBox, Kinect, Windows 7, Windows Phone, Bing—testify to this. Kudos to them. Can Google do the same? Let’s hope so. But their situation is more difficult and dangerous: they could conceivably lose 90% of their business in the space of a few months, if a qualitatively better search engine comes along. That’s not likely to happen, but it and I’m almost beginning to hope that it does. It’s not like they’re Yahoo!, halfway past the point of no return. Google is still a giant money machine full of brilliant engineers. Google Voice could be huge. If the are true, they have another hit in the wings. Even their make strategic sense to me. Still, the trajectory is clear; they’re in decline. They seem to have finally stopped believing their own press releases and realized that they have a problem—but is it too late? Has Google grown too big to succeed? I fear that the answer is yes. |
Boxee Box Update Rolls Out Today, Hulu, Vudu Imminent [Update] | John Biggs | 2,011 | 1 | 8 |
A cryptic Tweet from points to a new firmware version rolling out in the next few hours, one that probably promises and content on what Matt calls : Nevermind John. He meant to say Netflix, not Hulu. |
Confirmed: Index And Union Square Invest In SoundCloud | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 1 | 8 | As we hinted four days ago, was indeed talking to Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures about investing. It’s confirmed today that both firms have made undisclosed investments. SoundCloud was looking to raise another round since its last was in April 2009, from Doughty Hanson Ventures for EUR 2.5 million. Since then it has scaled in adoption and taken on bigger offices and more staff. |
Daily Crunch: Concept Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 1 | 8 | |
AOL's Awkward Billboard Ad About Your Boss | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 1 |
I still don’t get why parent company spells AOL in all caps but uses “Aol” in its logo. There’s probably a around here somewhere that explains it. But that isn’t what this post is about. This is a picture of a new billboard ad recently put up along highway 101 in Silicon Valley, visible to southbound traffic around the Whipple exit a few miles north of Palo Alto. We first heard about it from a tipster, who called it “odd.” And I agree. It’s not that AOL isn’t super awesome to work for some of the time. They have a great in Palo Alto that we don’t have to actually go to, and Molly in human resources is extremely helpful and efficient. AOL is Shangri-La to working at Yahoo. But people aren’t exactly fleeing their jobs to go there, at least as far as I know. If you want to go work somewhere in Silicon Valley before your boss does, it’s Facebook, Twitter or Zynga. The pre-IPO startups. It seems a little, I dunno, over-confident. Nevertheless, they’re hiring. So if neither you nor your boss can get a job at one of those hot pre-IPO companies you may want to consider an exciting and rewarding career at AOL. People with extremely large red heads are preferred. |
Brooklyn-Based EXOVAULT Will Clad Your iPhone In Metal & Wood | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 1 | 8 | Yes. Another iPhone case. But these aren’t your typical American-designed, Chinese-made mass-produced cases. These are designed and made in Brooklyn, NY by people who are clearly committed to their craft. They’re a bit pricey with prices running between $70 and $195, but they’re unlike anything else and seemed to be built to last. |
TextWeight Tracks Your Weight Loss Progress, Bugs You Through SMS | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 1 | For me and many others “lose weight” isn’t just a New Year’s Day resolution, it’s an every single morning one. But yeah, there’s nothing like a crashing boozy halt to a December spent scarfing crappy chocolates and piling on the gravy to make you feel like you should hit the gym, especially after hitting the scales. A simple service created by Kevin Morrill, holds you to your New Year’s weight loss vows by sending you a reminder text at 8am every morning, to which you reply (on the honor system) with your weight. textWeight then creates a graph of your weight loss progress, so you can measure every pound lost towards your goal over time. While sites like , , and all try to solve a similar problem, I’ve yet to see anything so simple focusing on weight loss. And true that 8am wake up text is way harsh, but Morrill is working on time adjustment features as well as other ways of scaling the project. Users with less fortitude can also stop recieving texts any time by sending “stop” as a reply to any textWeight message or clicking the stop button on the website graph. I just signed up to receive my first annoying text tomorrow. I can’t, um, weight. |
Streamonomics | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 1 | 1 | God bless 2010 as the year when everybody, including Twitter, caught up to Twitter. Now that we know the importance of streaming realtime, what are we going to do with it? I’ve been doing some thinking as I recover from a pinched nerve that has made it agony to do anything other than feel sorry for myself. Thanks to painkillers, acupuncture, and the iPad, I’m slowly regaining most everything but my sense of humor. Luckily, the world continues to provide comedy (Rose Parade announcer Bob Eubanks tagging a marching band version of I Want to Hold Your Hand by hoping Stevie Wonder was listening) as we struggle to graft new technologies onto old memories and habits. Twitter provided a running commentary on this effort, from the 3D version of the Yuletime burning logs channel to Yoko suggesting John would have loved Twitter and Facebook. It certainly would have shortened the Lost Weekend. Imagine (cough) his tweet stream: Crawled off to sleep in the bath, isn’t it good @NorwegianWood. Speaking of Apple TV, I went out and bought another one to go with the largest Sony screen I could get delivered from Amazon along with a freebie home theater audio add-on. Both kids got iPads from the grandparents, and already they’re lobbying for Apple TVs for their rooms. The good news here is that at a hundred bucks plus an HDMI cable my eldest can handle that from her baby sitting stash. She thinks I’m dreading her coming of age at 18. Thank god she doesn’t read TechCrunch. What she does do is watch Netflix constantly. Amazingly, for one streaming sub of 8 bucks a month everyone in the house can now watch different Netflix shows simultaneously. Or download a newer show or movie to the iPad and Airplay it to a free screen somewhere in the house. Suddenly weekends are argument free — no more endless Disney channel blaring on the unwatched living room TV. instead I can push Mad Men season 1 to the big screen and 5.1 sound, and if the little one complains too much, push it or her into a bedroom. You can extrapolate from this streaming culture in several directions. In the home, television and gaming are now virtualized. The content comes in via various services, is attached to the streaming network, and is consumed and metadata-tagged across devices before being pushed back out on the mobile network. As we vote for these services with our clicks and device shuttling, the amount of revenue will grow to a meaningful share of delivery models. That in turn will drive advertisers and companies seeking relationships with audiences toward an equitable business revenue stream on both sides. As a result, Netflix will be able to produce useful metadata that can be mined to reduce the cost of customer acquisition, in their case Hollywood windowed content. This produces interesting economic effects, such as AT&T losing customers to a Verizon iPhone but saving even more overall by lowering the expensive acquisition costs of the iPhone subsidy. Similarly, if Apple TV/Netflix customers present a more influential cloud of metadata across the same recent/archive content base as Comcast provides, the media cartel may decide to lower the cost of their premium content to preserve a direct connection to the targeted audience. Put in dollars, we spend $350 a month on Comcast (triple play including broadband and something called a land line I have no use for) and perhaps $30 or so on on demand movies. Let’s say $140 of that is for broadband (50 megabits downstream) and basic cable, so add $8 for Netflix and $50 for Apple TV recent movies and shows. There’s about a hundred bucks delta there, which will probably convince Comcast to unbundle some of their premium network shows to tap the new Airplay audience without losing a percentage of those customers. Seems counter intuitive but look what Google does with Maps, Google Voice, and Gmail. Trade lock in for a bigger slice of a broader targeted market. The real competitor is Facebook, which faces the same calculation as Netflix in expanding revenue to keep the balance of value while growing the streaming audience. The DVD market is already dead, but BlueRay will not replace the revenue. Once we move to realtime acquisition and deployment of content, we’ll never go back. Simply put, the quality (or lack of it) of television and first run movies will encourage us to wait for the majority of it to hit the download or streaming venue and cherry pick the hits in the theaters. And those cable or satellite services that count on us not switching will find the rich metadata moving away from them even if we keep both services until the shakeout runs its course. Once, or while these network effects accelerate, the shape of the set top box will change even more dramatically. Take a look right now: the Comcast DVR dwarfs the Apple TV. With his little hobby, Steve Jobs has done to TV what Twitter has done to news and the iPod did to music. By leapfrogging the hard drive to the Cloud, he’s created a streaming user experience across the entertainment media that we won’t leave. Fail whales, stuttering broadband, whatever — we’ll just move up the stack and pay à la carte if we can’t wait for the bits to flow again. By the time the network traffic is overwhelming, the increasing leverage of the streaming cloud will pay for repaving the cowpaths. None of this is winner take all. In fact, the rapid construction of the realtime cloud depends on healthy competition to create comparisons we can evaluate. Much is made of Apple’s controlled platform versus Google’s Android openomics. But In actuality Google’s model requires them to keep HTML 5 and H264 open across both platforms in order to preserve the ubiquity of search data and YouTube. Google preserving Flash on its platform buys them allegiance to a desktop model that is being replaced at the very moment as we’re switching to the streaming cloud. If we arrive at the ? Icon or click on an image to start a video that doesn’t work, we don’t blame Apple, we blame everybody else. By contrast, Apple lets Skype offer video conferencing on the iPhone over both WiFi and 3/4G. Although some think that will hurt FaceTime, I think it provides a ubiquity path for FaceTime to absorb Skype much as iChat effectively did with AIM. In the meantime, the small number of people who use 3G with the Skype client will not tax AT&T or Verizon if that happens. And letting Android phones into FaceTime gives Apple the broader market while preserving the ability to innovate across the streaming stack. That’s when the streaming cloud welcomes the enterprise. Happy New Year. |
Facebook Close To Naming Sun Microsystems Campus As New Headquarters | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 1 | It’s been less than two years since Facebook its 150,000 square foot office space at 1601 South California Ave in Palo Alto, but the rapidly growing company is already itching for a new home. Now we’re hearing from multiple sources that Facebook has chosen the site for its new headquarters: the former Sun Microsystems/Oracle campus in Menlo Park CA, just off the Bayfront Expressway at 1601 Willow Road ( ). The campus is around six miles from Facebook’s current home, and is bordered by Menlo Park and East Palo Alto. The move doesn’t come as a surprise. Facebook had practically outgrown its current offices on S. California Ave before it even moved in, and it’s already subleased additional space at 1050 Page Mill Road, just down the street from its current location (employees can take shuttles between the two buildings, but it’s not very convenient). With over 2,000 employees and no signs of slowing, the company needs a lot more leg room. Facebook says it isn’t a done deal quite yet (actually, they wouldn’t even confirm the location they’re looking at): “We are exploring options for a long-term location to fit our growing business needs. We are in the due diligence phase on one potential site, but it would be premature to offer any specifics. We hope to have more to share in the near future once things have been finalized.” Prior to moving to its current home on S. California Ave, Facebook occupied a handful of buildings that littered downtown Palo Alto near University Avenue. Based on Facebook’s comment it sounds like this new space could become their home for the foreseeable future. Back in 2003 Google had similar rapid growing pains and began subleasing SGI’s office space in Mountain View — it later this land and expanded after its IPO.
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California Bill Criminalizing Online Impersonations In Effect Starting Today | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 1 | California’s SB 1411, which adds a layer of criminal and civil penalties for certain online impersonations, goes into effect starting today. The consequences include a fine of up to $1,000, and/ or up to a year in jail. So don’t go and do something crazy like on Facebook. There may be consequences. The full text and a summary of the are below. There’s a good overview and analysis of it as well, on . The state has created a new crime, and a new section is being added to the penal code. There has to be intent to harm, intimidate, threaten, or defraud another person – not necessarily the person you are impersonating. Free speech issues, including satire and parody, aren’t addressed in the text of the bill. The courts will likely sort it out. Hopefully without my direct participation. SB 1411, Simitian. Impersonation: Internet.
Existing law makes it a crime to falsely impersonate another in
either his or her private or official capacity, as specified.
Existing law also makes it a crime to knowingly access and, without
permission, alter, damage, delete, destroy, or otherwise use any
data, computer, computer system, or computer network in order to
devise or execute any scheme or artifice to defraud, deceive, or
extort, or wrongfully control or obtain money, property, or data. For
a violation thereof, in addition to specified criminal penalties,
existing law authorizes an aggrieved party to bring a civil action
against the violator, as specified.
This bill would provide that any person who knowingly and without
consent credibly impersonates another actual person through or on an
Internet Web site or by other electronic means, as specified, for
purposes of harming, intimidating, threatening, or defrauding another
person is guilty of a misdemeanor. The bill would, in addition to
the specified criminal penalties, authorize a person who suffers
damage or loss to bring a civil action against any person who
violates that provision, as specified. Because the bill would create
a new crime, the bill would impose a state-mandated local program.
The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local
agencies and school districts for certain costs mandated by the
state. Statutory provisions establish procedures for making that
reimbursement.
This bill would provide that no reimbursement is required by this
act for a specified reason. THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS: SECTION 1. Section 528.5 is added to the Penal Code, to read:
528.5. (a) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any person
who knowingly and without consent credibly impersonates another
actual person through or on an Internet Web site or by other
electronic means for purposes of harming, intimidating, threatening,
or defrauding another person is guilty of a public offense punishable
pursuant to subdivision (d).
(b) For purposes of this section, an impersonation is credible if
another person would reasonably believe, or did reasonably believe,
that the defendant was or is the person who was impersonated.
(c) For purposes of this section, “electronic means” shall include
opening an e-mail account or an account or profile on a social
networking Internet Web site in another person’s name.
(d) A violation of subdivision (a) is punishable by a fine not
exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by imprisonment in a
county jail not exceeding one year, or by both that fine and
imprisonment.
(e) In addition to any other civil remedy available, a person who
suffers damage or loss by reason of a violation of subdivision (a)
may bring a civil action against the violator for compensatory
damages and injunctive relief or other equitable relief pursuant to
paragraphs (1), (2), (4), and (5) of subdivision (e) and subdivision
(g) of Section 502.
(f) This section shall not preclude prosecution under any other
law.
SEC. 2. No reimbursement is required by this act pursuant to
Section 6 of Article XIII B of the California Constitution because
the only costs that may be incurred by a local agency or school
district will be incurred because this act creates a new crime or
infraction, eliminates a crime or infraction, or changes the penalty
for a crime or infraction, within the meaning of Section 17556 of the
Government Code, or changes the definition of a crime within the
meaning of Section 6 of Article XIII B of the California
Constitution. |
Daily Crunch: 1.1.11 Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 1 | 1 | |
Twitter For Mac Is Like Massively Multiplayer IM — Will It Alter Twitter Itself? | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | Back in August, I first got to try out the Twitter Streaming API via the User Streams feature which was being beta tested on a new version on popular third-party client TweetDeck. “ ,” was the title I went with. For this post, I sort of wanted to use the title “If User Streams Is Crack, Twitter For Mac Is A Crack Pipe.” Then I thought better of it. Actually, I didn’t. I’m simply mentioning it now instead of in the title because I thought the title I used was a bit more in line with what I actually wanted to say. But the truth is that the newly launched Twitter for Mac is one of the most addicting, and more importantly, engaging, products I can recall seeing. Just watching it update in realtime is fascinating enough. But when you actually start to have a conversation with people and can see them responding to you in realtime, it becomes more like an IM service instead of the way we’ve typically viewed Twitter: with static one-off messages and maybe a reply here or there. And I’m wondering if now that Twitter has added the realtime User Streams to an official product, if it won’t fundamentally alter Twitter itself? Shortly after it launched this morning, Erick gave Twitter for Mac a resounding “ “. But Erick’s a TweetDeck guy. As much as I liked the idea of TweetDeck with User Streams turned on, I couldn’t get into it. There’s simply too much going on with a UI that sort of looks like a nightmare to me (complete with the black background). And while you can customize it, it’s designed in a way that’s all about cramming as much information in front of your face as possible. It’s just not my cup of tea. But Twitter for Mac is beautiful. It’s simple, speedy, and highly usable. And during my first day of usage today, I’ve noticed my tweeting actions changing a bit — and from others I’ve talked to today, I’m not alone. Now when I tweet, I instantly see the replies come in thanks to User Streams. This is much faster than it is even on Twitter’s website, because they hold them back and make you hit a button to refresh. And with all these Tweets coming at me in realtime, I feel the urge to respond more quickly than I normally would. And this results in a realtime conversation taking place over Twitter — which is why I compare it to IM. Granted, for those not in the conversation who follow the people I’m responding to, this has to be pretty annoying. But it’s also interesting. It’s like having a conversation in a crowded room where anyone at anytime can stop and listen to you if they want. Why would they want to? I don’t know. Why does anyone want to follow anyone else on Twitter? And obviously that’s been an issue before, but never like this. The realtime-ness ups the conversation greatly judging by the few I’ve had today and others I’ve spoken with about it. And again, it’s addicting. I sort of feel weird having a conversation in realtime with friends in a public forum, but what the hell, why not? It’s kind of fun. Maybe someone is actually interested in passively listening and joining in as they please. Maybe I’m crazy, and a weird edge case, but I do wonder if the realtime User Streams implementation could alter the way people use Twitter. What if it becomes more noisy (and I’m don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, just in a different way)? Does that ruin Twitter or make it even more addictive? Obviously, the people using Twitter for Mac are going to be a smaller subset of the larger audience. But it’s still now an official product. What if Twitter rolls out the realtime feature to their website? That type of realtime system use to lead to huge engagement on FriendFeed, a service with tens of millions of fewer users than Twitter. The results could be quite scary (again, maybe in a good or a bad way). Either way, I love this latest version of Tweetie reborn as Twitter for Mac. Back to the crack pipe. |
French Groupon clone Bon-Privé scores €1.5 million to conquer more French territory | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | Perhaps now that is happily being valued at , investors all over the world are getting all the more interested in the local group daily deal platforms. Brand new Moroccan clone is rumored to be raising a round and France’s closed its first round of funding back in July. And now another French Groupon clone, , is announcing that it has raised €1.5 million. This is the first round of funding for the French startup founded back in February 2010. In-line with most of the Groupon clones, Bon-Privé offers between 40 and 90% discounts on exclusive offers to bars, restaurants, shows, etc. The site is currently live in 4 French cities – Paris, Toulouse, Nantes and Nice – and is planning to cover 10 French cities by the end of the year, starting with Bordeaux, Lille, Marseille, Lyon and Strasbourg. Like everywhere else, France counts a fair share of Groupon clones – with some of them specializing in a single product, like how specializes in wine offers. And then there are a number of offer comparison sites that should help users find the best deals around. For France, these are sites like , and . New York-based – which is more of a deal aggregator and search engine – is also available in France and should help users make better sense of all the deals being thrown around. Also, if anyone out there thinks the Groupon model slightly resembles that of French private sales site, , you’re not alone. Vente-Privée founder, Jacques-Antoine Granjon, actually flat-out suggested on stage at that Groupon was based on his company’s model. Bon-Privé currently has some 300 businesses that are providing offers to their 150,000 French user-base. Yet, even with their plans to conquer more French territory, Groupon is still in the lead with offers available in roughly 30 French cities. Still, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the deals are any better; personally, I think Groupon risks sending a few too many emails and there isn’t always a lot of variation in the offers provided. But there are still great deals to be had and it will surely suffice until Dealissime (currently in Paris, Marseille and Lyon) or Bon-Privé make it to additional French towns. |
Serena Capital drops €3 million on Yakarouler, another car-related e-commerce startup | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | It is only the 6th of January and I’ve already been able to announce 3 French startups who have raised funding in the New Year on TechCrunch France: , and now . This last one has just announced a first round of funding of €3 million round with , the same French VC firm that is behind . Yakarouler is a Paris-based startup of 33 people that sells new car parts online. With over 400,000 products from some of the best-known manufacturers, Yakarouler will be continuing its development in France. The company founded in 2006 not only provides new car parts for all kinds of cars but also delivers them to a network of over 500 fitting stations throughout the country. Furthermore, the site is also able to put customers in touch with the nearest car garage. It’s most likely this last element that really completes the service and distinguishes Yakarouler from other local competitors, like or . Interestingly enough, this is not the first time Serena Capital has invested in a car-related e-commerce startup. The firm is also an investor in , a multibrand car distribution platform that greatly simplifies the difficulties associated with buying a new car. Users can find up to 6,000 models from 30 different car brands and the site also mentions that there can be discounts of up to 35% on various prices. Serena Capital has not disclosed the amount they have invested in the company. |
Ask a VC: Questions about the New Enterprise Boom? Ask Jason Green | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | After a Holiday hiatus, Ask a VC is back and we’re kicking off the new year with Jason Green of Emergence Capital. Emergence was started to fund the software-as-a-service craze of the early 2000s. That wave has had mixed results, but Emergence had several of the big hits including Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors. Green himself was also an investor in like DoubleClick, aQuantive and AskJeeves. Enterprise software fell out of favor during the Web 2.0 consumer boom, but now, many investors believe a new wave of more disruptive, more sophisticated cloud-based services is bubbling up. Emergence already has one strong horse in that race with Yammer. Wonder how they view the upcoming Salesforce.com Chatter v. Yammer battle royale? I intend on asking Green. What do you want to ask him? We’re taping early tomorrow morning so send in your questions now to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com. |
Pandora and the Final, Crucial Internet Radio Frontier: The Car (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | At CES this week, Pandora made two announcements that get its popular Internet radio service into cars, one for and one for BMW. But while exciting, the reality is these are still hacks that use your smart phone to solve the big car Internet radio problem: Connectivity. It’s a big problem but a crucial one for Pandora to solve if it wants to realize its mission of being wherever radio is. According to Pandora’s CTO Tom Conrad, 50% of all radio listening happens in the car– and frankly I’m surprised the number is that . I pulled Conrad away from the madness of CES to ask him when I’d be able to buy or rent a car and see AM, FM, CD, Satellite Radio and Pandora– all native. Hint: The only thing Pandora has ruled out in getting there is becoming an automaker. |
Floxx hits the skids as UK campuses start shutting it out | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | , the re-branded Fitfinder we , re-emerged after a difficult birth on the campus of a UK university after being banned as leading young mids astray from their studies. To re-cap: Floxx allows students to “spot” attractive people in at their college and post a message about them in the hope they will get a response. Womens groups have criticised the site while supporters call it merely tongue-in-cheek. 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. Kinda creepy I guess. However, in a similar manner to Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (you know, the FashMash scene), Floxx is causing a stink at UK universities yet again, raising questions about whether it will take off . We’ve tried out Floxx and it’s also hard to see the application – this would be better off as a mobile app – a sort of . We’ll be speaking to founder soon to get their take on the progress of the site investor Doug Richard “the hottest startup in the UK this year and the best investment of my life”. |
CheckPoints Hits A Million Check-Ins, 600K Bar Code Scans | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | Fast moving shopping rewards app and finalist has hit a couple of milestones this week, 2 1/2 months since its launch. Co-founder Mark Dipaola tells us that the app now boasts 1 million store check-ins and 600K barcode scans, or users scanning the barcodes of participating products in participating stores. Dipaola also expects that the app will clock in about 1/2 a million users (not downloads but actually people who have registered for the service) on the iPhone and iOS platforms by the end of this week. Says Dipaola, ” CheckPoints has partnerships with major brands like Belkin, Tyson, Energizer, Kmart and recently added Frito Lay. Over ten of their partners boast at least a billion dollars in market cap. Self-funded, CheckPoints has recently had some funding interest due the mobile/social rewards space’s (which includes and ) rapid growth. Di Paola is currently exploring whether to continue as a bootstrapped startup or explore other investments.
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The Mac App Store Offers A Taste Of OS X Lion And The Future Of The Platform | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | The Mac App Store is going to be huge. Sure, you look at it now and see that it’s largely populated with a lot of apps you don’t want and will never want. But there are already quite a few gems (namely some key games) on day one. And the smooth execution of how it works makes it very clear that this is the future of software distribution for the Mac platform. And some of those apps themselves also speak to the future of the platform. It’s no accident that Apple baked the Mac App Store directly into OS X rather than making it a stand-alone app. Apple clearly means for every Mac user to eventually have it. In a way, you could almost think of it as really the first feature of OS X Lion, we’re just getting it a few months early. And why not? If Apple realized they could make it work with OS X Snow Leopard, why force all users to upgrade to get access to it? Apple will continue to sell software from their Apple stores, but the selection will . It will start with the Apple-made apps — the key pieces are in the Mac App Store on day one. The other big Mac app publishers will eventually get on board because they won’t be able to turn down this new built-in distribution channel. But there’s something deeper going on here. Look at the two most popular apps right now: Twitter for Mac (free) and Angry Birds (paid). Twitter looks more like an iPad app than a Mac app. Gone is the dated “Aqua” user interface that most Mac apps still carry. It has been replaced by a sleek, black and gray UI. It’s something that seems to look a bit like what people originally thought a new “ ” interface could look like. Gone are the light blue scroll bars. Instead, Twitter has a light gray scroll bar that seems to blend into the side of the app. It looks a bit like the latest version of iPhoto and QuickTime. And that’s probably not an accident. This should be closer to what more OS X apps start looking like starting with Lion. At least I hope that’s the case — it looks great. Angry Birds points to something a bit different. You open the app and you have no choice but to go full screen. This is another feature touted in OS X Lion, full-screen apps. And it’s something Apple has learned from apps on the iPad, and is borrowing. Windows are being shut — or rather, fully opened. This full screen experience allows you to navigate the app more easily with touch. Yes, you can use your mouse to play the game, but it’s a much better and more seamless experience if you have a Magic Trackpad (or a MacBook trackpad). It’s just like a bigger version of the iPhone/iPad game. You swipe your finger to pull back the bird and let go to fire. To bring up the menu, you swipe three fingers down. To zoom in or out, you pinch. To move the view to the right or left, you use two fingers. We’re seeing the shift to touch on the desktop happening before our eyes with apps like this. It’s no longer going to be point-and-click but . And Angry Birds isn’t alone there. Other apps that were iOS-first, like Flight Control, also utilize the Magic Trackpad if you have one for a touch experience. Or if you have a MacBook, you’re set to go with the trackpad on those. These are the that I suspected we might see in the Mac App Store. They’re apps that were iOS first, but now are moving to the Mac. They’re sort of micro-apps that are built around a touch experience and ported to the Mac with the help of the trackpad and a virtual cursor. Games are the first to come, but there will be others. And there will be many new hybrids. Using the Mac App Store for the past few hours, my overall thought is: how did Apple not do this sooner? You click to download an app and it’s done. No tricky installation needed. And you hop on to a different machine and can re-download any app you’ve already bought. Updates are all centralized. And I’ve probably spent more today on apps than I have in the past year total. Now just imagine when the apps get really good. And when some of these hybrid ones I’m talking about start hitting the store. Yeah, the Mac App Store is going to be huge. |
Hours After Launch, Lackluster Apps Inspire A "Worst Of" The Mac App Store | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 6 |
If you’re as as we are, you probably spent a couple hours this morning exploring the or as I like to call it, the Productivity Toilet. And you are not alone, hours after launch some industrious (and foul mouthed) UI enthusiast has created a Tumblr compilation of terribly designed Mac Apps. While we found it on Twitter of course, we hear this has been making the rounds at all afternoon, “ one employee told us. True. These two in particular made me spit out my coffee.
And in case you’re curious what the bar is, here is Apple’s actual HIG ( , basically developer UI recommendations). Enjoy. |
Hands-Off Video Demo: The Unnamed Samsung 4G LTE Smartphone For Verizon | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2YUJB5GwR0&fs=1&hl=en_US] Unless Samsung’s trying to pull some sneaky SEO shenanigans, I’m pretty sure they’re not actually planning on taking this thing to market with the name “4G LTE Smartphone For Verizon” — but if they’ve got another name for it right now, they’re not sharing it. Like with , Verizon wasn’t down to let me paw at this thing. Fortunately, they down to give me a demo on video. Get to watchin’! |
Quick Hands-On: Fujifilm's Gorgeous X100 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 6 |
Oh man, I was so pumped to get my hands on this thing. This is the beautiful retro-styled, APS-C sensored, dial-covered compact camera we heard about a few months back, and immediately fell in love with. It’s got a “hybrid viewfinder” that either works as a regular see-through thing with overlay, or you can flip a switch and it becomes an EVF. Plus, just look at that sucker. ; we’ll have a review unit soon.
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Hands-Off Video Demo: The HTC Thunderbolt for Verizon | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q77ncYFWs9c&fs=1&hl=en_US] At long, long last, Verizon has pulled back the curtain on the HTC Thunderbolt. After months of covering the various rumors surrounding this thing (not to mention watching it change names constantly, from the Zeus to the Incredible HD to the Mecha to the Thunderbolt), finally seeing it get announced conjured up some pretty strong feelings of Deja Vu. With that said, I’m glad it’s here — and I’m even more glad that Verizon was down to give me a quick video run-through of the handset immediately after its debut this evening. Alas, they wouldn’t let me touch it, so I’ve got no real “Hands On” impressions to share. (Though I did sneak a poke at the soft-touch back. Shockingly, it was soft to the touch.) |
Ustream Is Also Coming Bundled On Verizon's 4G Android Phones | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | Verizon is really looking to push the capabilities of its 4G network when it arrives on Android handsets later this year. Earlier today we wrote about the carrier had forged with streaming music service to put that company’s apps on every 4G Verizon Android phone. Now has announced a similar partnership: every 4G Verizon Android phone will be shipping with Ustream installed as well. The application will let you both broadcast and view live video streams, with integrated chat and social network integration for posting your videos to Facebook, Twitter, etc. Obviously this is good news for Ustream in terms of getting exposure, and, as with MOG, this is the kind of application users are going to be eager to try to test out their new speedy connections. This is the first time that Ustream will come bundled on a mobile phone. These partnership can be huge when it comes to boosting adoption, as evidenced by Qik’s from 600,000 to 5 million users in the last year, largely due to its partnerships (Qik was just by Skype). |
Personal Raises $7M From Steve Case And Others To Help Consumers Protect Their Digital Data | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | Under the radar startup has just announced a round of funding from a group of impressive backers. Personal has raised in a Series A round of investment from and Steve Case’s with participation from and Eric Semler of TCS Capital Management (although this indicates the startup raised $7.3 million) Founded by the same management team that built business mapping application (which was acquired by NAVTEQ in 2006), Personal aims to give consumers control over their digital data. Details are still sparse on how Personal does this, but the company says that it helps users prevent companies tracking, compiling and selling digital information without the consumer’s consent. In particular, Personal highlights the invasiveness of online tracking as a problem in the consumers web. Shane Green, president and CEO of Personal says, “We aim to fundamentally turn the tables to empower consumers to become gatekeepers of their information and, if they choose, be rewarded for granting access to it, even anonymously.” Personal, which is in private beta, is certainly emerging at a time when online privacy is a heated issue. Whether it be via Facebook, or through online advertising tracking methods, consumers are more aware of the privacy issues surrounding their digital data. Personal could be away for consumers to regain power over their data on the web. |
Hands-On Video: LG's First Verizon 4G Phone, The Revolution | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | There’s only so much we can say about the just-announced LG Revolution, given that Verizon’s still staying mum on the pricing and release date (outside of “sometime before the second half of 2011”). With that said, one thing’s for sure: as I am with all of the 4G Android phones Verizon has announced this week, I’m pretty sure I’m in love. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4NvcOYqVpE&fs=1&hl=en_US]
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Verizon Officially Unveils the 4G-Enabled HTC Thunderbolt | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | After months and months lurking around the rumormill under a plethora of names, Verizon has made the HTC Thunderbolt official at CES 2011. Join us after the jump for the specs.
What do you think? Not quite on par with the that trickled out a few days ago, but it’s still pretty dang slick. |
Live from Verizon's 4G Press Conference at CES 2011 | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | We’re Live at Verizon’s Press Conference in Las Vegas. The bandwidth is all of shaky, but we’ll keep the updates coming as long as the bandwidth Gods allow it.
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The Crunchies: Video Highlights (TCTV) | Jon Orlin | 2,011 | 1 | 24 | In case you missed last Friday night’s fourth annual , or want to relive the excitement, you can watch the entire show above. The sold-out event was attended by 1,000 people at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Ten times that number viewed the live webcast. Congratulations to all the winners, runnerups and nominees. We’ve edited down video clips for each of the awards and other segments below. Click on the images to view the videos in a new window.
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HighNote Is Group Messaging With A Multimedia Twist | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 24 | What sets group messaging app apart from the current wave of group texting apps like , and is that it adds a multimedia focus to the act of messaging in multiple. Aside from being a free Internet Protocol-based messaging app for members, the service (available on the iPhone, iPad, iTouch and Android as of today) is unique in the richness and range of messages you can send and receive. With HighNote you can share music, video, (through iTunes), voice recordings, pictures, maps and pretty much any media that’s fit for a phone. says CEO Marc Barach. With over 20 customizable greetings like and as well as the ability to change the alignment, color, style and size of your text, HighNote is probably most appealing to those just starting out in their text messaging careers, especially with its ample supply of emoticons. Yes the app is very obviously gunning for the teen market like any other social service. It has a comprehensive “Quick Reply” section (giving you options like “Love it”/”Hate it”) as well as a feature called “Pulse,” that from what I can see lets users opt into quizzes like “Music,””Sports,””Celebrity Gossip,” and “Fashion” and is more importantly rife with potential for ad targeting. Rich messaging through HighNote is free for HighNote members. Not as as Kik, the app sends a normal SMS with a browser link to the multimedia content combined with an invite to non-members. Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Phone 7 versions should be available shortly. You can view HighNote’s demo below and find the app [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an6fmJ4haY0&feature=player_embedded&w=630] |
Fujifilm's Anti-Counterfeiting Watermarks Are Just Cool-Looking | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 24 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPbmZjA-YYA&w=640&h=390]
If you’re a big manufacturer of media and components like Fujifilm or Sandisk, you need to make sure that products on the market are actually from your factories and not some knockoff that just copied your packaging. Counterfeits can be remarkably like the real thing (as any counterfeiter can tell you), and it’s a constant race between the thief and the thieved to be able to show proof that an item is the real thing. is a special kind of image printing process that controls light “at a nanometer level.” Well, yeah. If it were at a meter level, you’d be controlling MF radio waves, am I right? At any rate, these little labels are full color and can only be viewed through a special lens, as you can see in the video above. Now if a supplier gets a shipment of this or that Fujifilm part or product, they can be totally sure it’s the real thing as long as the label looks right — at least, until the counterfeiters catch up with this technique as well. [via ] |
SafetyWeb Acquires iHound And myID, Pushes People-Centric Security Solution | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 24 | is a Silicon Valley startup that until recently has on serving anxious parents who want to know what their kids are up to on the tubes. But they’ve been on an acquisition tear – , and now two more small security startups – and They aren’t disclosing the terms of either new deal, other than to say that each deal involves both cash and stock. The company is also on the verge of launching new products based on internal development as well as the stuff brought over from the three acquisitions. And they aren’t just focusing on child safety any longer. SafetyWeb cofounder argues that device-centric security is becoming a commodity, and points to robust and free malware being offered by for PCs and for Macs, as examples. Companies like Norton and MacAfee are squirming to get people to pay anything for their software. SafetyWeb is arguing that People-Centric solutions make better business models. People are concerned about online privacy, identity, reputation and safety today. There are niche products for each category, like Lifelock for identity and Reputation Defender for reputation. But no one has tacked all of these problems with a single subscription product. That’s where SafetyWeb is heading, says Arone. |
WITN: No, New York Media, It Isn't 1999 All Over Again (Thanks For Asking) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 24 | In this week’s , we discuss the latest Silicon Valley bubble. Or specifically, we discuss why there isn’t one – and why New York media has to stop claiming there is every time a company has a high valuation. Yeah, Business Week’s Chris Farrell, we’re . Video below. |
MoshiMonsters launches first toy range, aims at $22 billion US market | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 1 | 24 | Tomorrow , the educational social game aimed at young children, is moving heavily into licensing its brand. It will also launch its first toy range at the London Toy Show, in conjunction with Master Toy partner, Vivid. MoshiMonsters now has over 30 million users worldwide – creating a tonne of kids who would really like toys based on the characters. The line is being stocked by all major UK retailers (Tesco, Sainsburys, Toys R US, Argos, The Entertainer etc) and an international roll out to the US is coming soon. This is a new direction for brands aimed at kids. In the old world toys might give rise to a game, usually lame. These days the games are creating the real-world toys, and Angry Birds is just another game moving in this direction. It’s no surprise that Moshi founder Michael Acton Smith and Peter Vesterbacka from Rovio / Angry Birds realised they have a lot in common after meeting at this week’s DLD in Munich: Toys are big business, worth $22 billion annually in the US but it is one of the few major industries that hasn’t been massively disrupted by the web – yet. Now it appears this is starting to happen. Historically, to launch a successful toy range you needed a major TV show or Film to generate attention, or if you were a lone inventor, you’d sell your idea to one of the giants like Mattel or Hasbro. But now content is giving rise to new brands which can be launched by anyone and if the idea resonates with kids, a major licensing program can be spun off. The flip side is that licensees are keen to get involved because the risk is removed as the IP has proved itself by creating an a real fanbase. The Spring/Summer range, which hit UK shelves last week and includes Talking Monsters, soft toys, collectable figures and backpacks. The initial range focuses on the six key Monster characters, Poppet, Katsuma, Diavlo, Zommer, Furi and Luvli and the highly collectable ‘Moshlings’ (pets for the pet monsters – of which there are 48, with a few deemed ultra-rare). Many products incorporate special codes which unlock extras within the Moshi Monsters website, providing extra value to kids. The initial lines will be followed by a range for Autumn/Winter 2011 including interactive feature plush, a playset, games and further collectables. The Moshi toys join a other products including Moshi Bandz, membership cards and gift packs, trading cards, Top Trumps, calendars, posters and books. I caught up with Smith at DLD in Munich. |
What Is Quora’s Biggest Challenge? | Semil Shah | 2,011 | 1 | 24 | By now, everyone has an opinion of and is waiting to see if their mom starts following them there, too. In the past week, in addition to winning the Crunchies award for best new startup, it is also the target of growing skepticism. Well-circulated articles have been written about the company’s ascent. from the Wall Street Journal wrote a in which she asserts Quora is “uninviting, geeky, and poorly explained.” from GigaOM wrote about the site’s , wondering if one day the site will wish “it had remained small and exclusive.” On Sunday, TechCrunch contributor Vivek Wadhwa on why he does not buy into the hype around Quora. Quora does face some real challenges, but I believe they are more nuanced than some of the other critics have suggested. In this last post on my series on Quora, I will lay out what I believe to be the short-, medium-, and long-term challenges facing the company and product after using the site for the past six months. The most immediate issue, simply put, is noise. How can it make sure that users are not inundated with discussions they care nothing about? Whereas Quora started with a small group of users, early-adopters’ primal fears revolved around maintaining a coveted signal-to-noise ratio. For some, those fears became reality in December, when the site in new users and traffic, and as the system absorbed more questions, answers, and voting and commenting interactions. The company hopes its forthcoming “PeopleRank” algorithm will help readjust current conditions in favor of signal-rich activity. Right now, however, there are are five main noisemakers: In the medium-term, over the course of 2011, two announcements will signal key strategic moves: Beyond the noise and the expansion of the product to mobile and as a platform, in the long-term, in my opinion, the key challenge for Quora will be to continue to maintain an environment that fosters genuine, interesting, and fun engagement between real people—not brands or companies. Users will need strong incentives to keep contributing and consuming information on the site. Threads must continually improve over time. That will require the site to continue to be not just useful for users, but a site that helps them discover new knowledge and connect with other people with similar primary and/or secondary interests. Some of this interaction could be social, such as sharing recipes, or it could be educational, or it could lead to more meaningful real-world relationships. Quora will also have to continue to draw the attention of clusters of topical experts in disparate locations, especially outside of Silicon Valley and technology. It must do all of this, of course, as it experiments with some forms of advertising, licensing schemes, or other avenues for making money, given their content will be so structured from the start. These are certainly all big hurdles, and it appears to me that the short-term ones are trickier than the long-term ones, but if Quora can strike the right balance, the opportunity their small team has already created will only get larger. |
Further Leaks Show Off Potential Interface, Specs For HP's webOS Tablet | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 24 | Last week, we saw what appeared to be a legit leak of , previously known under the moniker . Pre Central has gotten hold of some slightly less exciting, yet still interesting, design documents showing off potential UI ideas. I don’t want to spoil their day by just re-posting everything they got, so . There are no actual screenshots, but a lot of it shows basic ideas that probably were eventually fleshed out. I like the idea of many different gestures, and the keyboard looks nice, if lacking in symbols. They better get this thing out right quick, though. The market’s going to be pretty crowded come Spring. Oh yeah, and then there is . |
Kinect + Minecraft = Full-Motion 3D Statues | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 24 |
We saw this little hack in an earlier stage a while back, but didn’t post it. I’m posting this update now, because it’s just too nuts to pass up. The details of the project, which basically imports still data from the Kinect and rebuilds it with blocks in Minecraft, . The movies were put together by saving, rendering, and then pasting together multiple frames. “Phase 3” is underway, though, and may automate that process. [via ] |
null | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 1 | 6 | null |
3G Nook Discontinued, Lack Of Demand Blamed | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 24 |
It seems that although the business is , the 3G version of Barnes & Noble’s Android-based e-reader has never been much of a hit. Engadget has it that the cell-enabled variant of the Nook is , though you can still pick one up while supplies last, and of course you have the Color and wi-fi Nooks to choose from as well. |
Atrix Keyboard-Screen Dock Could Cost As Little As $150 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 24 |
The , which won many at this year’s CES, is famously able to dock with a laptop-like accessory and provide a more natural working environment. I was suspicious that this dock would be rather expensive, but someone claiming to have inside pricing info from Best Buy says it’s actually . I don’t think that’s so far out of the question — I mean, it’s essentially a small external monitor with a plain keyboard and a specialized dock. Besides, they want to make it affordable so people will buy the phone, which is of course the more important purchase. No information on the other little cradle yet, though. We’ll update if we hear any more Motorola’s superphone. [via ] |
8-Bit Funding: Kickstarter For Indie Games | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 24 |
We’ve had a few posts on projects on CrunchGear lately, mainly because we think it’s a great way to bring attention to what we think are interesting and innovative hardware projects. However, one thing that doesn’t get a lot of love on Kickstarter is games. Things like have their own financial momentum, but it’s hard for an indie developer to get the idea out there and garner a few bucks to fund early development. is an attempt to create a site where that can happen. I mention it mainly because I’m a fan of indie games, but also because I know our readers appreciate real new ideas when they see them, and sometimes may even want to throw a few bucks in that general direction. Right now the site is still being put together and the bugs being worked out, but hopefully in a few months it’ll be populated with lots of developers’ projects and goals, so they won’t have to rely as much on that lonely “donate” button on their personal website. [via ] |
Weekend at Myspace: And Other Upcoming Silicon Valley Movies | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 24 | Whether the audience agreed or not, our favorite part (of ours) of the was the movie posters bit. Inspired by the success of the Social Network, we’d brainstormed a few ideas for Silicon Valley themed movies of our own, complete with promotional posters to help with the pitch. In case you missed seeing them , here they are. The first is – a remake of weekend at Bernies, starring MySpace as Bernie…
(Aww – just look at them pretending it’s still alive.) Then there’s “ “… Angelgate made big news this year and so it’s inevitable that it would get the Hollywood treatment. Sure enough, here’s our Dave Mcclure vehicle: “ “… (It’s hard to tell from the poster, but that’s Clavier in the dog costume.) Finally, the one we’re most excited about: a big budget remake of High Noon relocated to tech town and starring our own Michael Arrington and Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky…
All coming soon to a theater near you. |
Nintendo Clarifies Some 3DS Questions, Stonewalls Others In Interview | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 24 |
I’ve gotten used to the fact that Nintendo and a few other companies will pretty much never tell you what you want to know, just what they want to know. Makes me feel a bit like I’m parroting PR, but for something like the , we’ll take what information we can get. In this case, Nintendo is on form and deftly maneuvering around specifics, while still managing getting a few solid answers out. , but the most interesting points are: So basically, we can expect more info closer to the I’m looking forward to it, mainly for the revamped classics. I think the killer original 3D games will take a while to come out. |
I Feel Like A Kid Again With HeyTell, The Social Walkie-Talkie App With 3 Million Users | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 24 | When I was a kid, there were few things cooler than a walkie-talkie. I recall spending many a night running around hotels causing havoc as my friends and I pretended we were on some sort of secret mission, talking to each other back and forth over these devices. Then cell phones came along and changed everything. For a short amount of time, push-to-talk technology in some phones replicated the idea. But smartphones quickly put an end to the fun. But there’s hope for the walkie-talkie making a comeback. At least in app form. In fact, maybe it already has very quietly. An app called already has 3 million users. HeyTell is an app for the iPhone and Android phones that allows you to instantly send short voice messages to other users. Or, as they put it: “push-to-talk, starting at $0.” The app is the brainchild of the husband-and-wife team, Steven Hugg and Jen Harvey, who created the company . In the Fall of 2009, the two quit their jobs and decided they were going to focus on building some sort of application based around voice technology. By February of 2010, they had the idea to replicate the fun of a walkie-talkie. So, like any entrepreneurs with an idea, they decided to pack up their things and hit the road for a multi-month road trip across the United States. Wait, what? Yes, oddly, the duo created and launched HeyTell while doing a cross-country trip. They would stop at locations for a few weeks at a time, then pack up and head off again. They started in Washington D.C. and ended in Seattle. Then they headed back — when I spoke to them today, they were in Baltimore. Hugg recalls the time they got the alert that HeyTell had gone live in the App Store — when they were in a customs line after a quick trip to Mexico during their journey. Harvey recalls having to reboot a server from the beach. So how has HeyTell managed to grow so quickly? Mostly from word-of-mouth, the duo say. They haven’t put any traditional marketing dollars into the effort, instead they’re mainly spreading through their method of inviting other friends to check it out via SMS. And the app has been bringing in revenues for the couple since day one. Part of that is the in-app add-ons you can buy, such as voice masking effects and the ability to communicate with large groups at once. But a bigger part is advertising in the app, Hugg says. It’s enough money to keep the team the pair self-employeed and focusing on expansion. Hugg says they have the infrastructure in place now to scale to about 100 million users. And they’ll be focusing on international expansion soon in an attempt to get there. Harvey says that users are sending about 1.5 million messages a day now on average. And that at the peak times, 35 messages are sent a second. And while the group messaging apps like and are getting a lot of love at the moment, HeyTell is much larger than either. And they’ve also been cited as one potential app that could be big at this years SXSW festival. Hugg says that the app is perfect for organizing a gathering or talking to your relatives while seeing where they are on a map. But the key is that messages are quick. There’s no need for a formal “hello”, he notes — the idea is to get to the point. Hugg says this fits in with how people tend to communicate these days. It’s not long phone conversations, it’s quick burst messages. “ ,” he notes. To company is completely self-funded for the time being, but Hugg acknowledges that given their growth, they’ve had a lot of interest from potential investors. But the two would like to keep the company to themselves for a while, to see how big they can get it. They note that they’re happy to be iPhone and Android-only for the time being, but they’re considering other mobile platforms as well. You can find HeyTell in the App Store . Or search for it in the Android Market. |
Cubeduel Now Back In Action, Says We Like Facebook Employees Best | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 1 | 24 |
Last week, the service that’s a hybrid of Hot or Not and LinkedIn, went offline due to some serious growing pains. Initially, it was unclear whether the site had gone down because its content was somehow inappropriate, or whether it had simply gone viral too quickly. Director of Communications Hani Durzy stepped in to say that had exceeded LinkedIn’s API limits and was shut down accordingly. The question then became: would Cubeduel have to restructure its site or would LinkedIn generously increase its API limit to accommodate Cubeduel’s rapidly growing user base? Today, Cubeduel Co-Creator Tony Wright answered this question, informing us that LinkedIn had almost immediately stepped in on Cubeduel’s behalf, raising the API ceiling fivefold to allow for a greater flow of traffic. Now that Cubeduel has had the opportunity to analyze some of its initial data, they’ve drawn a few interesting conclusions. Of course, these are to be taken with a grain of salt as the methodology is slightly unorthodox. After sifting through the numbers, we see that LinkedIn employees have voted over 21,000 times, Microsoft employees have voted over 50,000 times, and Google employees have voted over 36,000 times. While it appears that Microsoft is the most eager user of Cubeduel, it may be for this very reason that they are losing the recruiting war to Facebook. Yes, after crunching more than 100,000 Cubeduel votes (from a number of big tech companies), the proof has entered the pudding: current and former Facebook employees were voted up 10 percent more frequently than employees of any other company. So, there’s the sad, naked truth. We really just can’t get enough of Facebook — at home or at work. |
Review: Zoom Q3HD Camcorder | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 24 |
A versatile and useful pocket cam for people who value the audio portion of their video, but its high price may make those on the fence opt for a cheaper, more rugged model.
Pocket cams are convenient little devices, but they sacrifice a lot of image quality by having a tiny lens and sensor, and although people don’t often think of it, they also sacrifice audio quality by having a simple mono microphone, often poorly placed. This doesn’t seem like a problem until you truly can’t make out what’s being said because of traffic noise or what have you. The Zoom Q3HD attempts to fix this by putting a pair of high-quality (compared to other pocket cams, anyway) microphones at the top, which are also more sensitive. We may as well be honest and admit that this isn’t a new product. The Zoom Q3 has been out for a while, and this is an HD refresh. But to be fair, it’s a new design and the complaints relating to the old Q3 were often video-related. At any rate, the HD one is here now, and we’re reviewing it. The device is very light, more so than other pocket cams, and really has the feel of a toy rather than a piece of equipment. I can’t say I’m too pleased with that, but it is at least well put together, and includes a USB connector (on a rather short leash). There are a number of ports on the side for audio in and out. The battery compartment is in the front, but is secure enough that I doubt you’ll accidentally pop it out. Operation is quite simple, like other pocket cams: you have a big red button for starting and stopping the recording, a d-pad surrounding it, and buttons for mode, menu, and delete. The buttons themselves aren’t noteworthy; they’re buttons. The d-pad could be more responsive, but I got around the simple graphical menu system fine. There’s really not too much configuration that needs to be done with these simple camcorders anyway. The options are mostly self-explanatory: a couple frame and scene modes for video, and some bitrate/format options for audio. AAC and PCM are your choices, bitrate from 160 to 320kbps, and you can change the low cut and gain settings. Video is no better than your average pocket cam, but the Q3HD does have a refreshingly wide-angle lens. It’s not something the average shopper thinks of or notices, but most pocket cams have millimeter equivalents of maybe 50mm, when what you really want is something below 30. I’d put the Q3HD at around 35mm in angle, which makes framing shots easier. It’s not autofocus, unfortunately, so you’re stuck with a fixed infinity focus starting at around 18 inches from the lens. Par for the course with pocket cams, though you can find autofocus camcorders easily for under $200. I wanted to make a video showing the improvement a Q3HD provides in the audio department, but things weren’t really working out as I hoped. I realize that makes it sound like the device doesn’t actually do anything different, but I assure you it does. It’s much, much better at filtering out voices in a crowded room, and making sounds much warmer and more natural to the ear. The pinhole mics often found on pocket cams and even some mid-range camcorders tend to muddle everything together, but the Q3HD (as has been noted in its previous version) really does make for better sound. One thing that helps is a quick switch for going between low gain, high gain, and auto. While it does a good job auto-leveling, occasionally you might want to minimize background noise or just be sure you catch every word, and the switch from lo to hi is instant and noticeable. It’s especially handy having the live levels feedback on the video screen at all times (though the actual video itself is relatively small, unfortunately), as it lets you know when you’re clipping or not getting enough sound. Another thing the Q3HD provides is a wealth of ports. A built-in USB cord is convenient, but it also has analog TV out, HDMI out, and 1/8″ lines in and out. This means it can be a plain sound recorder or a microphone for your DSLR or camcorder; you can turn the camera function off and just use the sound-recording function. Basically what we’ve got here is a video blogger’s multitool. It’s no better than the competition when it comes to video quality, but the much-improved microphones provide better stereo separation, more warmth, better clarity, and also function as a digital voice recorder and external microphone. At $300, it’s nearly double the price of its Flip and Kodak competition, however, and it’s not a particularly rugged device, so consider what your needs are before dropping your dollar.
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Google Says Removing 'Reader' Link In Gmail Was A Mistake, Aims To Bring It Back Today | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 23 | Hmm … Maybe RSS isn’t after all? After the of the Google Reader link in Gmail with a link to Google Photos caused a on Friday, Google has vowed to bring the beloved RSS product back and tells TechCrunch its removal was accidental. And while Google is uncertain as to exactly when the highly dramaticized link will be back, the Gmail team is working hard on a fix and is targeting Monday morning, according to representative Victoria Katsarou. So why remove the link in the first place? Google decides what links appear in the Gmail navigation bar based on popularity, i.e. page views, number of users and clicks from the bar. New products needing promotion are also considered. According to Katsarou, Google Photos (Picasa) had made the cut and was to join Reader in elite navigation bar status, with a fifth top level link added to the bar. Apparently someone somewhere made an error and the Reader link was dropped into the “More” menu instead. The official Google Reader Twitter account about the mistake on Friday, but that hasn’t stopped people from emailing us about how upset they are about the change. Reader fan Craig Cosmo went as far as integrating the link back, in his browser extension. So for those of you who can’t wait until the Google fix, you can get your precious Reader link back into Gmail You’re welcome. It’s back! |
Report: PSP2 To Be Released By Year-End, With OLED Touchscreen And 3G | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 1 | 23 | , Sony is planning to hold an event (now dubbed “PlaysStation Meeting”) in Tokyo this Thursday, probably to unveil the PSP2. Today, Japan’s biggest business daily, The Nikkei, is reporting that Sony will indeed unveil the device on that day, and they also have some information on what features it will come with. According to The Nikkei, a usually very reliable source, you can expect: The paper also says that the PSP2 will be more expensive than the $203 the PSP currently goes for in Japan (not really surprising) and that Sony plans to roll it out by year-end (in Japan, at least). |
Good Thing For Green Tech? GE Chief, Jeff Immelt, To Chair Obama's Council On Jobs | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 1 | 23 | On Friday, President Obama appointed General Electric’s chief executive, Jeff Immelt — an advocate for — chairman of his panel of outside economic advisors, the newly branded Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. This council was formerly known as (the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board). Immelt was a founding member, and takes the chairman reigns from Paul Volcker. GE is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of The company makes everything from large wind turbines, to electric vehicle charging stations, to good old lights and appliances. Could the rising political influence of Jeff Immelt (image, below) be a good thing for green innovators in the U.S.? Could clean tech newcomers, small businesses and competitors suffer from policy endorsed by the CEO of the established giant? The Mark Trumbull reported: “[Immelt’s selection] opens the door to potential conflicts of interest. GE’s future profits are intertwined with government policies in the US and elsewhere. It makes equipment used in energy, infrastructure, health care, and defense. On Wednesday, when Obama sang the praises of export-related contracts that US firms have won in China recently, GE deals figured prominently. [While] economists say growing exports – for GE and other firms – are one vital way for the US to grow jobs…Even in a best-case scenario for exports, America will need lots of other jobs, as well. Some business leaders worry that an expected move by the Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon emissions could impose damaging costs on the economy.”
Noting GE’s plans to develop a net-zero home with solar and wind power, its competition for clean tech startups and inventors, Ecomagination, and its recent efforts to put small wind turbines in homes and businesses, contributor Tina Casey saw Immelt’s role as a good thing for all that’s green and clean in the U.S. She even defended his company’s earlier habit of outsourcing jobs, copiously: “The initial reaction to President Obama’s announcement has been mixed, mainly due to GE’s past record of outsourcing jobs. However [since] 2009 you’ll find Immelt admitting that too much outsourcing… hurt the U.S. economy, and calling for a domestic manufacturing revival to get us out of the doldrums. That puts him squarely in line with Obama’s call for an economy ‘fueled by what we invent and what we build…'” President Obama gushed about Immelt in a :
“…GE’s CEO [is] one of the most imaginative and visionary business leaders in America. [He] has agreed to head up our new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. The purpose of this council is to help us find ways to grow our economy by investing in our businesses here at home. And under Jeff’s leadership, I’m confident that they’ll generate good ideas about how we can spur hiring, educate our workers to compete in the 21st century, and attract the best jobs and businesses to America rather than seeing them spring up overseas.”
Check out the rest of on Immelt, and let us know if you think he’s the right man for the job(s) and a good thing for green sector innovation. Images via: |
Sean Parker calls The Social Network "a complete work of fiction" | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 1 | 23 | Early Facebook backer Sean Parker, on stage at European conference DLD, just gave perhaps his most comprehensive reaction to The Social Network movie yet, calling it “a complete work of fiction.” During the end of the movie his character, payed by actor Justin Timberlake, is at a party where drugs are being taken and various beautiful models are wondering around. “I kind’ve wish my life were that cool,” said Parker. “But I’m a geek from Silicon Valley and there are no Victoria Secret models in Silicon Valley,” he said. In fact, this would be so unusual that “If you walked down the street in San Francisco with a model, there would be people there laying down at your feet” (presumably he meant out of respect). But Parker added “The most part which was most frustrating for me was were the character played by Justin Timberlake who just happens to have my name, writes a cheque to Eduardo – who I remain in contact with – and throws it at his face, and has him thrown out of the building. This guy in the movie is just morally reprehensible.” Clearly, Parker smarts at the movie but his interview on stage at DLD shows that he remains relatively relaxed about his portrayal, mainly because the Timberlake characterisation bears no relation to reality. It looks like |
The AirPlay Network | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 1 | 23 | Week One of the Age of iPad was barely weekended when Keith Olbermann was removed from his position at NBC/Comcast. I missed his final show, mostly because I stopped watching it and all the cable news channels once the election was over. But then I remembered we are now in the , and guess what I found when I turned on Apple TV. There it was right in the podcasts section, ready to stream. Parsing the language I heard the same thing we heard earlier when Steve Ballmer fired Bob Muglia, when Eric Schmidt was kicked “upstairs,” when I was asked to leave along with my wife and a friend from the Crunchies because the room was too full. In the last case, I refused to move, waiting until the venue manager moved on to people more her size. I wonder what would have happened if Muglia just said, no, Steve. I’m not going anywhere. We’ll get back to Eric and the boys in a minute, but in the Age of iPad, all is not as it seems. Take Olbermann for instance: firing him seems like exactly what NBC doesn’t want. It dredges up the recent Leno fiasco in a visceral way, suggesting that even if Conan’s new show might as well be emanating from Siberia, at least he suffered no bad will for telling NBC where they should get off. By contrast, I wouldn’t touch NBC at 11:30 with someone else’s hard disk. I don’t put much stock in Comcast being behind the Olbermann firing, because showing him the door doesn’t just hurt MSNBC, it hurts CNN and Fox as well. First of all, the only cable news coverage of the number one story of last night was on CNN and Fox. Tonight’s NBC Nightly News studiously ignored it, and somehow I doubt the Today Show will touch it either. Without any credible reporting from one of the 4 major networks, the other three have little to pivot off of, no comparable story about how cable news is being squeezed out by the Age of the iPad. That’s what happens when you become the story. The unreported story is that a new network has emerged with new rules of engagement. Once the hall monitors had retreated from the Crunchies auditorium, I pinged my former overlords at TechCrunch and soon we were escorted backstage to an empty sofa. The sound was difficult, and I didn’t much feel like standing in the wings. But then I realized that combining the audio in the room and the sound of the crowd with Twitter produced an excellent new medium. I could hear Dick Costolo and Mike Arrington toss a few softballs around, and knowing Dick’s background as a standup comedian, wait a few seconds after the laugh for the punchline to appear on my iPhone. Bear in mind that this is not the Golden Globes or the Grammies but an industry tech event being streamed live worldwide in realtime over Twitter and Ustream. Given the people I follow and the @Mention Cloud, we now have a microcast network that levels the playing field between all such events. Already the networks are bending to the new iPad reality, broadcasting the Ricky Gervais pummeling of Hollywood live at 5 on the West Coast, because Twitter has already eviscerated the results on the East Coast if they are embargoed. Gervais’ jokes cut to the bone all the more because his victims knew this was going out in realtime. He said what? Actors or anchors, it doesn’t matter. When someone bypasses the big network to get straight to the audience in realtime, something big has changed. Olbermann had a 4 year contract worth a reported $30 million, or something north of $7 million a year. Let’s say he goes direct to iPad once a day, and takes Rachel Maddow with him. Push notify the audience of a rundown of each show along with headlines as they occur. Oh my, suddenly Comcast is happy to charge for the increased download bandwidth to support the model. And they don’t have to split the rate increase with the network, especially nice since they own one now. Of course, Disney is ABC is Apple, so they might have some interest in bypassing the cable network business and going directly to revenue. That will bring Fox in, who are already playing ball with Apple TV on a test basis, and new power houses like whatever network produces Mad Men. Mad Men, by the way, is now the flagship of our go-to realtime network. We’re just starting Season Three, which I paid 22 bucks for and downloaded to my iPad for Airplay in whatever room the kids haven’t commandeered for Xbox Kinect. It’s realtime, just 1962. Chatting with Dick Costolo after the Crunchies, I told him what he already knows, namely that the Twitter iPad app rocks. Then he said a very smart thing, that he thinks they should use the iPad implementation as the base platform and conform the other apps — web, iPhone, Android — to it. I couldn’t agree more. The iPhone may have started the revolution, but now it is a peripheral to the iPad. As is Apple TV, which is way more than a hobby. Gone are the traditional networks. They are not dead, but rather absorbed into a new state of mind, one where we view our time as more valuable to us if we can sculpture it. I resisted Mad Men for years because I was already years behind. But AirPlay gave me the ability to try the first one, then “save” money on the first season, then let the mediocrity of the network offerings slowly but surely be routed around by streaming the now-addicted time machine of 1960. The year Kennedy was elected, the first television president, the dawn of realtime crisis, political and social upheaval, you know what I mean. For those of you too young to remember, this was the time of not just Walter Cronkite but Huntley and Brinkley, not just the Beatles but the Stones, not just Miles but Hendrix. When Olbermann quits, he’s firing Glenn Beck. And when Steve Jobs steps aside he’s firing Schmidt too. Google’s job is to provide competition for Apple, to slipstream alongside the economic juggernaut Jobs has unleashed. Muglia’s ousting appears to be payback for Ozzie quitting, and in so doing Ray fired Ballmer, not the other way around. The Age of the iPad has launched a wave of desperate moves, of actors and anchors testing the waters of the emerging economic model, of CEOs acting like COOs when what is needed is real leadership and insight. Costolo is one of the new breed, tempered in the crucible of the comedy circuit and the RSS politics of Feedburner and Google acquisition indigestion. Nothing about the Google realignment suggests any material change in the equation, and Microsoft’s retrenching around Sinofsky may prove the same kind of miscalculation NBC made in betting on Leno 2.0. At the end of Season Two, Don Draper beats back a move to demote him or worse by pointing out that he has no contract with which to contain him, no non-compete to keep him away from the competition. Suddenly they serve at his pleasure. According to reports, Olbermann can’t go on television for some period of time, but can do anything he wants on radio and the Internet. The AirPlay Network awaits. |
Fly Or Die (Crunchies Edition): GroupMe, Uber, Square | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 23 | In this week’s episode of , the show where CrunchGear editor John Biggs and I attempt to predict the survival chances of hot new products, we did a special Crunchies edition. Each of the companies we feature— , , and —was nominated for a Crunchie award. At some point in the show, a founder of one of the three companies comes on to respond to our verdicts (we don’t know who it is until he shows up, which is part of the fun). You can watch the entire 20-minutes show above, which starts with GroupMe, or skip directly to the segments about or . GroupMe is one of the new group texting apps that have popped up this year (see also and ). Group texting is nothing new, but the combination of smart phones in everybody’s pockets (which make it easier to set up ad hoc texting groups) and a reaction against the public nature of other messaging systems like Twitter or Facebook, is making group texting increasingly popular. GroupMe, which was at a TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon last year, does a decent job of helping you create groups on the fly from your phone’s address book. The app only sets up the group, and then all the messaging happens through SMS, which is fine, but I just wish that you could use the app as well to see all the messages and reply, and even to archive messages. SMS is ubiquitous (you don’t need a fancy iPhone or Android to use it), but it can also be expensive if you are not on the right plan. One of the most fascinating companies we are now is Uber, which helps you get a car in San Francisco through an app on your iPhone. I was able to use it on during my trip, and once the app located me in cab-less downtown San Francisco, a car came within two minutes, and I could see where it was on a map as it was getting closer. Uber has nailed the back-end dispatch problem with its fleet of participating drivers, but the app itself needs some work. I mistakenly entered my email when I was registering (which is not hard to do on an iPhone), and then couldn’t start over again because Uber associated my phone number, and thus my account, with the wrong email. This is a problem the company is aware of and fixing. Once I got that squared away, though, the app thought I was in Kansas for some reason and I had to manually move the pin over to San Francisco to get started. Getting the front-end right is key if Uber wants to capture more customers. The bigger challenge, however, remains the resistance of the entrenched taxi industry in different cities which will fight Uber as it tries it expand. I want Uber to fly, but I argue the other side in this episode. Finally, Square is putting a by transforming iPhones into credit-card swipers. Small businesses and even individuals can now take credit card payments, and they get sophisticated analytics on the back-end. There are a lot of companies going after this space, including Intuit and other larger financial institutions. Can Square survive the onslaught by being more nimble? Tell us what products you’d like to see covered in future episodes. |
Sean Parker Calls The Social Network "A Complete Work Of Fiction" | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 1 | 23 | Early Facebook backer Sean Parker, on stage at European conference DLD, just gave perhaps his most comprehensive reaction to The Social Network movie yet, calling it “a complete work of fiction.” During the end of the movie his character, payed by actor Justin Timberlake, is at a party where drugs are being taken and various beautiful models are wondering around. “I kind’ve wish my life were that cool,” said Parker. |
SheFinds Helps Women Shop More Efficiently Online | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 1 | 23 | is a blog network and buying guide that helps busy women shop online. SheFinds, which includes and recently launched publishes editorial content featuring click-to-buy items applicable to its specific vertical audience. Editors curate shopping guides for products within each vertical. For example, MomFinds will publish editorial guides for the best toys for kids under 3 years old. Founded in 2004 by Michelle Madhok, SheFinds aims to be a one-stop shop for women’s shopping needs. Madhok was part of the founding team of CBS.com, and headed AOL’s women’s channel, and found there was a need for a women’s-focused site that used human editors to curate the Web for interesting and useful products. Flash forward seven years and Madhok’s network is generating over $1 million in annual revenues has been profitable almost every year since inception. In 2010, revenues jumped 135 percent and the media network saw record profits. SheFinds, which has raised in funding, has a similar model to other women’s focused e-commerce sites such as Refinery29. But Madhok says that the company is hoping to differentiate itself by being able to generate revenue through advertising, product placement, and affiliate channels as well as through featuring quality content for the modern woman. And most recently SheFinds launched BrideFinds, as a shopping guide for brides to be, featuring content on everything from flower girl dresses to satin wedding shoes. And the network started featuring online sales and deals for each vertical, making it easy for shoppers to track deals and events on their favorite retail and flash sale sites.
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null | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 24 | null |
Apple's First Verizon iPhone Commercial Also Touts AT&T: "Two Is Better Than One" | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 23 | Two days ago, Verizon posted their first iPhone teaser commercial to their YouTube page. The tagline? “ .” Now, it looks as if Apple is ready to follow suit with its own marketing muscle. But they’re not just playing up the Verizon iPhone, but rather the fact that it’s now on networks in the U.S. The tagline for this one? “Two is better than one.” The 30-second clip below was posted to YouTube today. It’s a fairly standard iPhone ad with a hand holding up an iPhone 4 in front of a white background. Except in this commercial, there are two iPhone 4’s side-by-side. As Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz plays, the dueling iPhones perform the same tasks in the same way — though there are differences in the pictures being looked at, and the websites being visited, etc. Then the focus shifts to one the devices to show off iPhone 4’s features. Then it’s back to the two phones, culminating in a side-by-side FaceTime conversation. The phones are then removed, revealing both AT&T and Verizon logos. Then the tagline is put up. Then the iPhone 4 logo. This type of commercial . Since AT&T is still a vital partner for the device, Apple can’t afford to alienate them by putting out Verizon iPhone-only commercials. It’s the why it was Verizon, and not Apple, that led the announcement of the device earlier this month. Further, the commercial works because Apple emphasizes that the device on the different networks are the same, you just have a choice now. That’s not entirely true, since the Verizon iPhone won’t be able to do talking & surfing at the same time (insert the joke about the AT&T iPhone not being able to do calls ), but all the core iPhone features will be the same. One thing not touted in the commercial is the Personal Hotspot . Verizon still hasn’t announced the pricing for this, and Apple still hasn’t confirmed that it will come to AT&T also with a future iOS upgrade (though it like it will be the case). [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTbaUTRlbJQ&w=640&h=390] |
Webmission is back and it's worth considering | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 1 | 15 | Three years ago was more than a simple trade mission taking Internet entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley. It ended up creating a great gel in the UK startup scene. Well it’s back and thanks to TechCrunch we’ve negotiated an extended deadline for companies to apply for Web Mission 2011 until Friday 21st January. This year they are aiming at “Web Economy” startups in mobile, social, semantic and real-time web; Cloud2; social gaming; and 3-D/RealVR environments. Here’s the info: The top 20 judged UK Web technology companies will travel to San Francisco March 5th – 11th 2011, following on from the Game Developers Conference and leading on to SXSW, to explore opportunities for growth with key investors, potential partners and customers, media and other stakeholders in Silicon Valley. Applicant companies will be assessed on their ability to do meaningful business in the US; from setting up office, to finding funding, to extending their network and developing sustainable transatlantic relationships. The companies will also be assessed on their business viability and the strength of the management team. The final selection will be balanced to form a mix of companies that show the breadth of what the UK has to offer in this space. In a very few cases, some criteria may be relaxed for younger companies presenting particularly innovative ideas. WebMission11 is run by Polecat in collaboration with Oli Barrett from the Co-sponsorship Agency, Scott Cain from the Long Run Venture, the Technology Strategy Board, UK Trade & Investment, Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe and TechCrunch. For more information on WebMisison11, please contact mission@meaningmine.com or check out click here to apply. “The WebMission represents an amazing opportunity for the best of entrepreneurial UK Talent to visit Silicon Valley and learn for themselves the differences that make the US a breeding ground for innovation and, more importantly, successful execution of ideas” – Michael Birch, Co Founder, Bebo |
Oversized Assets Indicate 2048×1536 Resolution On iPad 2 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 15 | A couple image assets included in the latest version of iBooks seem to have the same naming convention as iPhone apps have when they must accommodate both old and new iPhone displays. In other words, the images imply that the iPad 2 will undergo a similar transformation: remaining the same size while . (I always make that mistake) If this true, you can sign me right up. Although the IPS screen is bright and has a great viewing angle range, I’ve always found its resolution distracting. I thought I left 1024×768 behind back in the late 90s. And the new generation of tablets promises quite a significant jump: 1280×800 would show 720p content very well, and the new form factors are 16:9 or thereabouts. The asset in question, resaved to JPEG for bandthrift: The only trouble is that this resolution jump is perhaps even more difficult to make than the iPhone 4’s. Making high-density panels like that isn’t easy, or cheap, and if you combine these rare new displays with the expected improvements in form factor, you might be looking at a significant premium. I’d guess the new iPad would debut at $100 more than the old one, while the old one will remain available and sell for $100 less. That’s just my take. Interestingly, these assets were previously noticed by in August, but I don’t remember much of a hullaballoo about it at the time. Maybe I just missed it, but at any rate these images shipping inside the newest iBooks suggest it wasn’t just a test version that accidentally leaked back then. As for whether it’s a “retina” display, which is what people seem to be debating in the comments at the blogs, let’s all remember that “retina display” is Apple marketing, and the term has little technical relevance. I’m perfectly satisfied sticking to objective measures like pixel density, response time, and brightness. |
The Block Album | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 1 | 15 | Every few eons we get another swarm of stories, usually involving Dave Winer versus the rest of the universe. Sub-themes include , , and . Typically Dave uses the event to launch yet another version of Radio 8 tricked out to convince us that his lack of business model business model beats traditional data silo roach motel closed software. It may sound like I am pursuing a personal vendetta. I’ll admit to some mixed emotions about Winer and his attempts to regain control of what he calls RSS but is in fact a new socially adept layer dominated by Twitter. Starting with my post on TechCrunch, I’ve stated the obvious, that RSS has become at best a formative technology that has led to the development of realtime social streams of citations. When Winer led the development of XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS, blogging, and podcasting, he was often the single reason these technologies broke out of their original niche and expanded across mainstream media, tech platform players, and a broad coalition of individuals who could now make a difference. For Winer, success proved a difficult pill to swallow. In calling the moment as I saw it, I in no small part was emulating what I view as Winer’s incredible sense of strategy. When Twitter took off, I teamed with Winer to organize BearHugCamp, so named as the result of a post where I described Winer’s strategy of bearhugging a similar technology to create more momentum and an adhoc standard. But bearhugging Winer himself only goes so far; he likes to be the hugger, less so the hugged. This presents a problem when Winer’s motivation seems to be to absorb all post-RSS innovations under the blanket RSS model. When some Google engineers produced a service called PubSubHubbub, Winer attacked it as a bigco project even though it was created expressly as an open service that could and was adopted both by Google and non-Google companies and individuals. Then Winer produced RSS Cloud, which he pitched as being unencumbered by bigco politics. Certainly having a choice is a good thing, but I found the motivation for the effort to have more to do with Winer’s view of his legacy than any notable difference in technology or what is called openness. But what I initially called out as a turning point had less to do with what RSS did and more to do with what it didn’t. Twitter’s social metaphor, the Follow, created a data model for extending and amplifying attention, something I had been exploring for some time beginning with attention.xml and continuing with the AttentionTrust and its attention recorder plug-in. With the ability to track and model the intersecting clouds of people, who they follow and are followed by, we could now begin to cultivate the full value of the realtime stream, its content, and its gestural metadata. RSS and its popular renderings such as Google Reader were succumbing to overload. BearHugCamp succeeded in describing the possibilities for unifying around a defacto set of APIs that would speak across Twitter and its much smaller competitors. Perhaps too successful, because Twitter developed so much velocity that other sites such as Identica (now statusnet) using a clone of the API were vulnerable to Twitter gating realtime access to its full firehose. FriendFeed and even Google Buzz were also constrained from symmetrical access to and from the Twitter stream. Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed has still not precipitated realtime pushing of its updates into the Twitter stream. Bearhugging has passed its moment of opportunity, at least for now. In the aftermath, Winer has shifted to attacking Twitter as closed while promoting what he sees as an open federated approach that uses his RSS Cloud work at the center. The biggest problem with trendjacking the open meme is that the cloud makes size irrelevant. You can operate in the realtime Twitterverse with a few well-chosen @mentions and be virtually indistinguishable from any Fortune 500 megaprise. In that climate, attacking big companies for proprietary manipulation is as good as attacking oneself. From there it’s a long slow slog trying to define what open is in such a way as to advance your particular proprietary interests. In the RSS argument, Twitter is demonized for having control of the stream. Certainly the company has the ability to pull metadata out of the message body and establish a proprietary wrapper, as they’ve done with retweets. But to service their third-party client platform, they’ve made their proprietary wrapper available via their API. When you click the retweet button in the Twitter clients, the API produces this string — you: @retweeted: and the message body. In other words, your username followed by a colon (minus the @ symbol,) the @mention of the retweeted user followed by a colon, and the body with text, URL citations, and any other @mentions. In effect, Twitter has established an open standard around the @mention syntax. When a Twitter retweet is consumed by a down-level client, the object is translated into you: RT @retweeted: message body. This format and its analog via the API are the open standard for retweets, since every other kind of manual retweet and Twitter retweets all conform to the same syntax and output. As long as Twitter retains this format, the standard persists. And it encourages other players to support the standard, thereby increasing the “lock in” for the standard. As with the way many defacto standards emerge, we see Twitter syntax being used in Facebook messages even though the @mention syntax is not officially recognized. Quora uses the @mention to push you back into its silo, rather than out to Twitter. If the @Mention Cloud is open, then what does that say about RSS? Does RSS support the @mention extension for retweets? Probably, but if not, why not. If it’s supporting the open standard, then it’s supporting the broader micromessaging standard. Which makes sense for RSS, given micromessaging has garnering the lion’s share of attention. Which was the whole point of my original post about the death of RSS. That’s what happens when foundational technologies become oil. They live on as fuel for the new black. This of course is hard to swallow when you’ve spent years struggling to get sufficient momentum to send RSS into orbit. Many of us have been doing that for years, not just Winer, but also a broad coalition of journalists, technologists, publishers, entrepreneurs, and competitors. We knew a game changer when we saw it and made it an imperative to support it until it could accelerate under its own power. And like all proud parents, at some point we have to kiss our children on the forehead and see them go out on their own. What RSS did was create and nurture an information landscape based on the authority of the author. It allowed those authors to gain such authority both within and outside the media infrastructure of that time. But it also gave rise to a separate wave of authority, that of the reader, the analyst, the commentator, and so on. The blog post maintained its central role even as it absorbed every other document and media type, and it was joined with a seat at the table by a metadata stream of attention and gestures. Suddenly the root object was the @mention, whether a Tweet by the author, a retweet by a reader, an @mention of other such authorities, the implicit clouds of such signals. Winer indirectly recognizes the power of the @mention. In a , he acknowledges sitting on the @mention stream as his favorite view into the Twitter cloud. Of course, he mentions this (cough) in the context of explaining why he blocks anyone who spams that view by using @davewiner to force his attention. Blocking not only removes the blocked offender from his follow stream, but also from the @mention view. Winer mentions one side effect that blocking produces, that the blocked person can no longer follow or view the blocker’s tweet stream. But interestingly, blocking an identity also blocks @mention updates of that user by other people that also include @davewiner. Retweeting a post with one name which then is retweeted by another produces a conversational thread opaque to the blocker but visible to the rest of the network. That may be a desirable effect, but until Track or some more flexible block mechanism is offered, Dave’s blockmention model is unlikely to gain traction. The is the new black and nothing will stop it, just as nothing will slow the steady march toward the cloud in general. The @mention cloud scales beyond what I know to what we know, elastic in context and realtime relevance. RSS lacks the core components of the social web, and survives as a really simple reminder of how to get where we are going. Certainly it could and should be reworked to mine the @mention cloud precepts. Call it @RSS Cloud. |
Gillmor Gang 1.15.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 1 | 15 | Bob Muglia moved on from Microsoft this week, and I for one was not a little surprised. You see, Bob is one of the few Microsoftees that sits (sat) across the two worlds of Microsoft. One is the old world, of Windows and Office and the predominant position in the technology community. The other is where the company sits today. Bob was comfortable in both places, in a way that no-one has been since, well, Bill Gates roamed the halls. That’s not to say that Bob is a direct peer of Bill, but rather that Bill was able to sit across old and new through sheer force of saying it was so and therefore making the distinction irrelevant. Bob had a more parochial role, but his understanding of the underlying dynamics, what the strategy was and would be, was comprehensive in its ecumenical flavor. When he and Ray Ozzie played doubles with the media, they fit together in surprising ways. Such was Bob’s skill that he would turn a softball aimed at Ozzie into a screamer hit back at the unsuspecting questioner. Ask Ray whether Silverlight was going to replace Windows Presentation Foundation and effectively subsume Windows into an Internet OS, and he would say no by saying yes. Then Bob would say yes by saying no. Put the two together and you got one answer. Tuesday that answer changed. When Ray Ozzie quit, there was a reasonable interpretation that things would continue as planned. When Bob Muglia quit, you could no longer make that assumption. Ray had Bill’s blessing, Bob had a business unit with growing revenues. In effect, he was a consigliore to Ozzie, the guy that could manage the often challenging relationship between what makes money at Microsoft and what that would have to become in the Cloud era. Put another way, he could walk into a poker game with Sinofsky and put some chips down to call a bluff. The bluff is that Windows revenue trumps everything, that Windows Phone will get its share, that a Microsoft tablet will stop both Apple and Android from eating the heart out of Office. As we found out on today’s Gillmor Gang, Google is being called on another such bluff. Namely, that yanking H.264 from Chrome is all about the open Web. That WebM will stop Apple from eating the heart out of Android and Chrome and maybe YouTube. Already Google is re-explaining the move. But not soon enough to stop Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek and me from having some fun on the Gang this week. Danny Sullivan’s filibuster about who is the better friend of the user is worth the price of admission alone. Robert Scoble is getting smarter by the week, and Kevin Marks, well, it was fun to see the ex-Googler voice outrage at Google’s moronic move. Even noted Android fanboy John Taschek recognized that the more pressure Apple puts on the carriers, the happier users get regardless of which phone they buy. In the good old days of tech media, Microsoft led the charge in impossibly convoluted contortions around self-interested maneuvers. Today Google has taken over that role. And the new Microsoft stands as a pale shadow of itself, fighting tooth and nail to rescue defeat from the jaws of victory. With Steve Ballmer as Donald Trump: Nice job, Bob. You’re fired. Thanks for the material, guys. |
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