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A Brief Explanation Of Why Minecraft Matters | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 15 |
On Wednesday, it was announced that a game called had hit a million sales. This probably isn’t the first time that you, a denizen of the internet, have heard that word. But unless you’re in the habit of following up on every indie game mention you happen to see, there’s a good chance this particular title might have slipped under your radar. So what is , and why is everyone talking about it? The game itself, which you buy and download directly from Minecraft.net, is in what some call the Sandbox genre. It means that you’re given free rein in a world where there is little or no plot to drive gameplay; the gameplay emerges from the tools and the world you’re in. In a way, popular games like and are sandbox games despite overarching narratives, and Second Life was an attempt to make community-driven sandbox world. takes it a step further: the entire world is generated from scratch, and all you start with are your own two hands — blocks, rather. See, that’s the other thing about . It has a visual style that both arrests the eye and allows for unique gameplay: the entire world is made up of blocks of various types: dirt, cobblestone, obsidian, lava, water. And you can combine these blocks to create tools, machines, doors, and so on. Use stone to create a furnace, and use the furnace with the coal you mined to fuse sand into glass, or make clay into tile. And of course you need metal, which doesn’t just lie around: procedurally-generated worlds imitate the real ones in that ore is rarely found above ground, and you must dig or explore huge natural cave systems to collect the iron, gold, diamond, and other elements. There’s even “redstone,” which acts as an electrical signal carrier, and, combined with the simple logic of switches and delays, has led to elaborate productions like this simulated within the simulated world. New and interesting projects like and are being made literally every day. One server is building a scale model of the Vatican. Combine all this natural variety with a day/night cycle, roving monsters, and essentially an endless landscape (one collaborative world I’ve explored, Aporkalypse (right), must span the equivalent of a hundred square miles), and you have perhaps the most open-ended sandbox game ever created. To truly understand the draw, you have to try it, maybe watch a few , and explore the . But so much for the game’s considerable charms. Sounds interesting, you say, but why should I care that a few guys have put together a cool little indie game? The reason you should care is because a team of four or five people using free libraries and cross-platform tools have just made a mockery of the last five years of franchise-oriented, $50 million budget, yearly-release, AAA game development. And it’s not just a fluke. The Humble Indie Bundle, , , and a number of other extremely low-budget titles have electrified the gaming community, while games with millions in marketing budget like and fall flat on their face critically and commercially. Gamer discontent with these barren blockbusters is palpable, and is the new poster boy for it. The game isn’t technically finished; in fact it only recently left pre-beta state. It’s buggy, missing major features, and to make things brief, you kind of have to it. But it also doesn’t have B-movie voice acting, a scruffy 30-ish white protagonist, DLC, a movie deal, console exclusivity, or any of the other hundred things that plague gamers in practically every major release. Notch (Markus Persson), main developer, was in the right place at the right time with the right product: a vehemently anti-commercial game that emphasizes creation, community, and ingenuity. Oh, and did I mention it’s cheap, you got all future updates for free, and it’s cross-platform? (Update: I should have been more clear: Alpha buyers got all updates for free, but now that the game has entered beta, that is no longer the case.) The business model he chose sounds like suicide: develop on spec, release an unfinished product, let it promote itself and trust the community. At least, that sounds like suicide to a producer at EA or Take Two. But to an internet entrepreneur, it’s as familiar as mom’s apple pie. Not long ago, the big releases in the software world were the latest from Adobe or Microsoft — now we are seeing a bottom-up trend that’s totally disrupting that model. Sure, we all still need Word and Photoshop, but what about things like ? They’ve probably got a line out the door making offers. It’s true, they’re working with tools developed by millions of dollars in research by Apple and Google, but few tools (like the ) are really built from zero at the moment. Shoulders of giants, and all that. It wasn’t until recently that game development could truly be said to be democratized, if it even is today. The need for specialized equipment, access to dev kits and internal code libraries from Sony and Nintendo, huge art budgets and so on is dissolving. And with lower costs and personally motivated developers come not only lower prices but, some say, better games. and are both examples of how a few good ideas, executed in an accessible and affordable way, will outsell franchises by orders of magnitude. With gaming threatening to unseat cinema and TV in terms of time and cash invested, this change from a top-down to a bottom-up development process isn’t just a curiosity, it’s a momentous change. The time has come when not only are the tools for creation available to the dedicated independent developer, but also the means of distribution and popularization. The heavy hitters in the industry will find themselves much more under threat soon from the proverbial two guys in a garage. success may seem a lark born of big-budget backlash and social media, but pretty soon, that kind of success won’t be a lark, it’ll be a back door to a billion-dollar market. |
The 4-Hour Body: The Real App You Are Working On Is An App Called Yourself (Review) | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 1 | 15 | Tim Ferriss is a 33-year-old Silicon Valley angel investor, consultant, Singularity University advisor, and former entrepreneur who in 2007 published a book called ; in 2008 won ‘s “Greatest Self-Promoter of All Time” prize; and last month published a sort-of-sequel, . His books seem roughly equally divided between really worthwhile, interesting advice and totally ridiculous crap. What’s most interesting about them is their approach. In his own bizarre yet effective way, Ferriss has become the world’s first hacker-guru. And I hate to admit it, but I must confess: I have halfway become a devotee. attacks self-improvement in the same way Silicon Valley startups strive for success: data-driven decision-making, A/B testing, iterative development, willingness to pivot. (Watch Andrew Keen’s with him). This isn’t new. A sizeable subset of the hacker community has been “hacking their body” for years, and sites like have grown around that approach. Ferriss, though, is the first to promulgate that ethos to the general population – and he has been wildly (and deservedly) successful. rocketed straight to the top of the bestseller list. It helps that he’s obviously a really charmingly enthusiastic guy, and a good writer to boot. But it’s his commitment to evidence-based decisions that sold me. Ferriss can’t stop citing the science behind his conclusions, had a blood-glucose monitor implanted in his body as part of his three years of research, and writes proudly about the time he spent weighing everything that went into or came out of his gastrointestinal tract. Better he than me. I’ve known for years that I’d eventually have to start paying attention to my diet to maintain my fitness level; so my girlfriend and I decided that this painstakingly researched eating plan – an iteration from the paleolithic, South Beach, and low-glycemic diets of yesteryear – was for us. Not that it’s just a diet book. There are sections about ultra-endurance running, optimizing the female orgasm, living on less sleep, gaining muscle, and “becoming superhuman.” (See the “ridiculous crap” caveat above.) But it’s his data-driven slow-carb eating plan that struck me most, because, well, it’s wildly effective. I spent a day in headache-ridden sugar withdrawal at first. Who knew I was a junkie? Since the first week, though, it’s been bizarrely agreeable. Our general mood and feeling of wellbeing has improved. The mid-afternoon downbeat lull no longer hits. Judging from my weightlifting and running, I’m near a lifetime apogee of fitness. Our desire to eat bad food has diminished. I do miss beer, but wine and Laphroaig fill that void. (I have, however, not stopped eating fruit. Sorry, Tim.) And the weight loss was startling. I wasn’t that interested – I’m not particularly thickset – but when I boarded the 4-Hour train, our fancy-schmancy scale reported that I weighed 197.6 pounds. Ten days later, after morning coffee & protein? 187.0. (For calibration, I’m 6’1″.) I assume most of the difference is water weight, but still, that part actually seems to work as advertised. I expected no less, given the the data that drove it. I know, I know: “why are you writing about your lunch on TechCrunch?” Because my lunch is a data-driven iteration from the previous state of the art – in other words, a technical innovation. Look beyond the Valley (and its counterparts around the world) and you’ll find that approach can and will pay dividends almost anywhere. |
OMG/JK: Pushing Google's Nonexistent Buttons | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 15 | Earlier this week we had a of OMG/JK to mark the launch of the Verizon iPhone, but we’re already back for more. I know what you’re thinking: this may be the best week, ever. In this episode we discuss recent rumors about the iPad 2 — which will likely come with a new, higher resolution screen and a SD card slot. We also take a look at the rumors that the iPad and iPhone may soon ditch their single, iconic buttons. Next, we examine Google’s recent bold moves to promote WebM and move away from H.264, which has the web in a bit of a tizzy as it debates what this will mean for the future of web video. Finally, we take a broader look at some of the problems that Google has had lately, and why the public and the press seem to have been criticizing the search giant more than usual. And yes, we do a deep analysis on rampant rumors that Facebook may shut down on March 15. Or not. This episode ran a little long (we had a lot of ground to cover when it came to all of the negative press aimed toward Google). So we’ve included handy links below that will let you jump to each topic.
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How To Make An 8-Bit Twitter Avatar | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 12 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAJas-q2BOA&w=630] It’s a great story, by an 8-bitted post by UK artist and designer , San Francisco interactive designers , and took the idea to the next level by 8 bit-ing their Twitter avatars, which inevitably went viral among the tech set, finally consuming MG Siegler and myself in a blaze of pixelated glory about a day ago. http://twitter.com/#!/Percival/status/25232421565763585 While Addison, Kowalski and Demarzi are actually planning to launch an social gaming app based on the characters soon, we just thought they looked cool in and of themselves as avatars. http://twitter.com/#!/andrewpbrett/status/25458459512143872 Kowalski has made the above video in case you’re interested in making your own. Overcome by mad 80s nostalgia I tried it out earlier, to much success. (You need Photoshop): Open Photoshop. Press Command + K for “Preferences.” Select “Guides, Grids and Slices” and enter “Every 50 pixels” for “Gridline” and “5” for “Subdivisions.” Create a new document 100 px by 100 px. Use “Option + Delete” to fill in the background. Use the Shape tool to make a 4 X 4 square for a face. Use the same tool to draw in hair, neck shading, etc. Click on “Filter,” “Add Noise” and set noise to 1%, “Gaussian” and “Monochromatic.” Use the Burn tool and artistic license for the rest. Image: |
Union Square's New $165 Million Fund Is All About Growing With The Network | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 15 | Back in December, indicating that Union Square Ventures was raising between $135 million and $200 million for a new “Opportunity Fund.” The offering wasn’t complete and the firm could not discuss it, but today partner Fred Wilson explains in a what the new fund (which ended up being a $165 million fund) is all about. The fund is not about going after different opportunities than Union Square has been focussed on since the outset. It is that the size of the opportunity Union Square is focussed on—which Wilson describes “Internet services that create large networks”—is larger than ever. And the new fund will provide more dry powder to invest in network startups, whether they need $25,000 or $25 million. Wilson explains: Since 2004, the opportunity to invest in networks has evolved. In 2004 the entire market capitalization of the social media sector was probably less than $100M. Today a single company in that sector is valued at over $50B. The amount of venture capital focused on the sector has exploded. Networks that did not exist in 2004 now consume a huge chunk of users’ time and attention, making the launch of new networks more challenging. The opportunity to invest in networks has changed, and once again we are changing with it. Union Square is an investor in Twitter, Zynga, Tumblr, Foursquare, and Disqus—all of which fit under the network thesis. As these companies grow and command higher valuations in private rounds (Union Square sat out Twitter’s latest ), the Opportunity Fund will allow Union Square to keep participating. It will also be tapped to invest in companies in later rounds (something Union Square has shied away from so far, they like to be first) and other special situations such as spin-offs. Interestingly, Union Square is not committing to invest all the money raised. Maybe they should have called it the Dry Powder Fund instead. |
Daily Crunch: Squid Vicious Shot First Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 1 | 15 | |
There's Absolutely Nothing You Can Do About Spokeo, So Stop Whining | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 12 | There’s been a surge of messages to us asking us to please write about and expose , a company that collects and then sells your personal information. Mostly this is from all the mainstream press the service has been getting. . “Please expose this like you did with ,” read one message. Here’s the deal. There’s absolutely nothing you or I can do about it. Data laws are so lax in the U.S. that companies can do this sort of thing quite legally. Heck, even the WSJ, which got all worked up over , couldn’t much bad about Spokeo. You’d think they were or something. In 2006 I about , a company that basically does the same thing as Spokeo. What happened next? Did they cower in shame and disappear from the Internet? No, they raised a . And then last year SalesCrunch…er…Salesforce, for $142 million. Yeah, we sure showed them. Look, the kind of person who starts a company like Spokeo isn’t the kind of person who really cares about bad press. It’s just a bunch of free marketing. What angers me, but doesn’t really surprise me, is that the (click the link if you actually think they serve consumers) has rushed to Spokeo’s defense in a blog post. See . In my opinion panic is probably the best way to react to this. Because unless various state Attorneys General pause their governatorial election campaigns for a moment to actually do something about this mess, all that’s going to happen is this – someone will buy Spokeo for a boatload of money. And anyway, you’re all enraged right now, but by next week you’ll have forgotten all about this. |
Touring the Panasonic Booth | John Biggs | 2,011 | 1 | 12 | null |
An iPhone On Verizon? Sold. | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 12 | Well, I hopped on a last-minute flight across the country, got stuck in a snow storm, had my flight home cancelled, had to find a new hotel, and now I think I’m getting sick. But it was all worth it. Because I got what I came for: the Verizon iPhone. Actually, I don’t have one just yet. Like all non-Verizon customers, I’ll have to wait until February 10 to get one (Verizon customers get access on February 3, which is a fairly classy move to reward loyalty). But I will have one soon enough. That’s been the question asked of me the most these past two days: will I get the Verizon iPhone? You’re damn right I’m getting the Verizon iPhone. was more pragmatic in his initial thoughts following the Verizon press conference on whether you should upgrade or not. Certainly, for some current AT&T iPhone owners, it doesn’t make sense. But for me? I’ve been waiting for this day for over three years — how could I not switch? When I bought the original iPhone the day it came out in 2007, I had only ever been a Verizon customer. I was happy with the network on my little and decidedly un-smart RAZR — even with Verizon’s piece of shit software on it and the crapware. I wasn’t planning on buying an iPhone. In fact, I thought it would be crazy to do so. The thought going through my head at the time was actually a bit like : $600 for a phone?! But then I went to an Apple Store on day one to see what all the fuss was about. I picked one up. 30 seconds later I was buying it. At first it wasn’t so bad. AT&T’s Edge network was pretty slow, but seemed to work fairly well. I also don’t recall a lot of dropped calls at the time. Then Apple dropped the price and the masses rushed in. Then came the iPhone 3G. AT&T’s network was crushed and the rest is history. . . . AT&T has been completely unable to fix their network in several major metropolitan cities these past three years. Sure, some of that isn’t entirely their fault (the permits needed for new towers, etc), but there are plenty of other things they could have done. The SXSW festival is a great example. Two years ago, the AT&T service there was the worst I’ve ever encountered. It was actually completely unusable. No calls, no texts, no data. Last year, miraculously, with even more iPhone users there, ! How? AT&T spent the money to bring in a bunch of extra equipment for support and backup. Why not do this in say, San Francisco? Or New York? The buildings are too tall. The land is uneven. Yadda, Yadda. A lot of excuses. Money has a tendency to solve problems — except when you don’t want to spend the money that needs to be spent. Further, AT&T knows when you drop a call just like Netflix knows when you can’t stream a movie. When that happens, Netflix automatically emails you to offer you money off of your bill for the inconvienience. It’s not a lot. . AT&T? Nada. Worse, if you try to call to complain, you’ll be on hold for an hour. Then the call will drop. Or, if you do get through, they might suggest you buy their MicroCell. Their $150 MicroCell to make your $100+ a month service work. You have got to be kidding me. At the very least, that thing should be given for free to every AT&T customer who drops calls on a regular basis. After all, that device actually helps customers AT&T by offloading usage to a broadband connection. . What a joke. Also a joke are the very reports on if that rip-off box even works. And the fact that they to sell us one for the TechCrunch office even though we have absolutely no AT&T service anywhere inside our office. Happen to go to CES this year? I hear AT&T was a bundle of joy there as well. Most accounts had Verizon having more actual devices on their network there, yet that network seemed fine according to those who were there. Weird. I could go on and on, but this is really just kicking a dead carrier at this point. Dead to me, at least. I hope AT&T can figure out their problems. I really do. The funny thing is that the biggest network breakthrough they’ve had in years may come thanks to Verizon: when they offload millions of customers to them. That should actually do real wonders for their network. Back in September of last year, I wrote about my hesitation to get my hopes up for the iPhone on Verizon. The reason was spelled out in the title: . I was worried that Verizon would use some of their newfound smartphone leverage with Android to try to force Apple to give into silly demands for a device on their network. Demands ranging from small (branding) to large (crapware). Thankfully, though I’m sure they tried, that’s not going to be the case. The iPhone on Verizon will look like an iPhone on AT&T, just with a different carrier name in the corner. There will be no pre-loaded VCAST apps or secondary bullshit app store. In other words, it won’t be a “Verizon iPhone”, it will be an “iPhone on Verizon’s network”. I don’t know how Apple pulled that off. There’s talk that the subsidy paid to Apple for each phone might be slightly less than it has been from AT&T. Or maybe Verizon was just really sick of customers asking when they’d get the device. Or maybe they just as well, and whatever else Apple dreams up in the future. But this: “ ,” Verizon President Lowell McAdams . Is music to my ears. Can you imagine Verizon not branding any of the Android phones on their network? Or even just not loading it up with their crapware? And yet the iPhone is getting neither. Beautiful. Will I miss not being able to talk and surf at the same time? No. Honestly, I never really do that anyway. I do recognize that’s a big issue for some people. But I have 93 million others backing me up: current Verizon customers, none of whom have that feature. . Will I miss not being able to roam abroad? Let me tell you about my last two trips abroad. I went to Japan, signed up for AT&T’s ridiculous $200 for 200 MB data plan. I came home, they charged me something like $700. Why? No good reason. Then, last month, I went to Paris. I signed up for AT&T’s ridiculous $200 for 200 MB plan. I came home, they charged me around $650. Why? No good reason. Both times, the charges were removed after a lengthy phone call and a week-long process. But why the hell did I have to do that at all? And when I tweeted about it both times, dozens said the exact same thing happened to them. Hell, it happened to people I was with on those trips too! My point is that if I really need a phone overseas, I could buy one for cheaper than what AT&T will try to charge me to roam. I’ll bring my Verizon iPhone and use it on WiFi when it’s available. Or I’ll jailbreak an old phone I have and pop out the SIM. No biggie. The actual biggest issue for me is the looming iPhone 5. We all know it’s coming, the question is if it’s coming to Verizon as well as AT&T in June? And if it does, do early-adopters catch a break and still get the ability to purchase the new version at a discounted price? Or are we screwed? Or does it go AT&T-only first? I don’t know. No one outside of Apple, AT&T, and Verizon do yet. Hell, maybe only Apple does. That’s an issue, I’ll admit. But there are options: if a new one does come, sell the few month old one online or to a friend and use the money to buy the new one and move your contract over. Or look at it this way: an unsubsidized iPhone at $600 is a mere 4-6 months of actual smartphone service that you’re already paying for. It’s not pretty, but it’s important to remember that the big money you’re spending isn’t on the phone itself, it’s on your contract, both with AT&T and Verizon. The same is true of early termination fees. But that’s just me trying to justify it for you. The truth is that I don’t need to justify it to myself. I’ll gladly buy the iPhone 4 on Verizon, and then if the iPhone 5 comes to Verizon in June, I’ll gladly buy that too. It’s worth it to me after years of headaches and thousands of dollars poured into the nightmare that is AT&T. It’s time to make a statement by taking away their right to send me a statement. So yes, I am getting the Verizon iPhone. |
Mitek Systems Shows Off Their Smartphone Banking Apps | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 1 | 12 | “Point. Shoot. Pay — or Deposit.” That pretty much sums Mobile Photo Bill Pay and Mobile Deposit from Mitek Systems, which uses smartphone cameras to take mobile banking to the next level. |
PC Shipments Recover Somewhat; Apple Share Jumps In U.S. | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 12 |
The latest numbers for worldwide and US computer shipment sales have been by research group Gartner, and the results are about as interesting as they usually are; that is to say, . 2010 was a hard year in some ways, perhaps most so in that netbook sales, which boosted PC sales hugely in 2008 and to a lesser extent in 2009, have pretty much hit the wall. Tablets, or to be precise the and the of other tablets, have done their work in taking a bite out of the cheap-PC market, though as many will likely point out in the comments here, they are very different devices. Nevertheless, the iPad has dented netbook sales, and as tablets mature, that trend will likely increase. Apple’s portion of the US pie has increased quite significantly: a 23.7% jump brought them to a total of 9.7% of all computers sold in the country this last quarter. Why are more people buying macs? That’s a more complicated question than it sounds. I’d like to give some credit to the iPad, which may have taken quite a few people off the fence, but at the same time, many people might have bought an iPad instead of upgrading their current mac. It would take a separate survey to establish whether that’s true, and unfortunately, I don’t have enough minutes on my phone to make 3,000 random phone calls to iPad owners. So it’s a mystery for now, but the end result is that Apple is on the rise. As usual, HP is on top, but it’s losing ground to Lenovo and Toshiba, who seem to be eating up all the new growth. Hopefully the HP webOS slate and new notebook lineup will convince consumers that it’s okay to buy from the big guy. The next year will be clutch for PC makers. Tablets will increasingly replace netbooks and other portable computers, and the all-purpose hub for storage, media, high-power processing, and so on, will be further marginalized (though it’s still got plenty of life in it). The market will become large enough and diverse enough that tracking it won’t be a matter of tracking “iPad” and “other.” Total volume for tablets will be 20-30 million at least. At the same time, Intel’s new Sandy Bridge platform and the AMD Fusion APUs will make ultraportables and notebooks far more attractive and practical than they were last year, so you can expect a bump there too. Desktop sales, not so much. At least, that’s my take. |
Video Of Four- And Five-Finger Gestures On iOS 4.3 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 12 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEivxDY82bw&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3]
It’s a good thing they implemented these, or they might have been left behind by the multi-screen desktops of both and the . There isn’t much to say about the video (via ), but it’s nice to see it in motion. I suppose the apps must be left-to-right in order of being opened. |
SalesCrunch: Pissing Us Off Isn't Much Of A PR Or Marketing Strategy | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 12 | Big news today with the announcement that and have money a startup called . Their products include CrunchConnect and SalesCrunch. Sounds kinda familiar. Our sites include TechCrunch, CrunchGear, CrunchBase, MobileCrunch, etc. A big deal? Not really. We’ve dealt with people using “Crunch” in their names before – sites like ArabCrunch, a blog about startups in the middle east that everyone thinks we own. Usually we just dismiss these people as jerks who want to leverage off our brand because it’s not crowd pleasing to exercise intellectual property rights. AOL legal may or may not have a different position on it. My guess is that the company named themselves this because they knew we’d write a post saying how lame it is, and any press is good press. But these are serious people. Not only are Accel and First Round legitimate, top tier firms, but founder is a former founder and exec at Trulia. By phone today Black says he reached out to our CEO months ago by email to discuss their name, but we never responded. No surprise there, email doesn’t really have of getting read by us most of the time. But the fact that they knew it was an issue, one important enough to discuss with us, makes me wonder why they didn’t email once again, or pick up a phone. Black also said he didn’t think it was going to be that big of a deal, mentioning Captain Crunch cereal. And that the “crunch” part of the name helped with the idea that they’re helping out sales people. Why not just pick another name to launch your brand, though? I think something like sales…um….force would be perfect. Yes, Salesforce. Now there’s a name that sounds like it could be a winner with salespeople. They should have gone with that one, I think. 3…2…1…aaaand here come the haters in the comments. Here’s the email from Black. It was a “courtesy” notice, not an offer to discuss whether or not they would go with that name. Dear Heather, My name is Sean Black, founder & CEO of SalesCrunch, a new addition to the First Round Capital portfolio. We will be announcing our funding in a few weeks and we wanted to give you and your team advanced notice as a courtesy given the use of the word Crunch in our name. Like Nestle, we are in a very different business from TechCrunch. SalesCrunch is a sales training automation software (SaaS) company building tools that power on-demand sales training over any web-enabled device to help companies and their employees increase predictable sales productivity. You can read a little more about us here, but please feel free to contact me directly should you have any questions. Congratulations on all that you have accomplished since joining TechCrunch. It has been impressive to watch. I hope to meet you in person in the not too distant future. Sincerely, Sean |
The Italian entrepreneur who moved his team and got funded in 19 days | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 1 | 12 | Italian entrepreneur is currently 22 years old – but he was only 19 when he first started looking for funding for his startup. For roughly 2 years, he and his cofounders met with every last investor on the Italian Peninsula and without any success. But despite their empty pockets, they weren’t ready to throw in the towel on their startup, an API marketplace for cloud-based services named . As of April 2009, the team moved into a garage in Milan where they spend 10 months coding night and day. They still didn’t have the money they were looking to raise but managed to scrape by on a few small grants. Then in September 2009, Marco and his team mates headed to San Francisco, where they were able to demo a simple prototype of their product at TechCrunch50. It was after this experience that the team decided they would pack their bags and move across the Atlantic for good. Still desperately looking for funding, the team arrived in Silicion Valley in January 2010. , one of Marco’s two co-founders (along with ) who is currently CEO of the startup, all the details of their quest for funding on the company blog; the team went to every last event in Silicon Valley, called every person they knew and asked around for help. But never in their wildest dreams did they think they would get funded in just 19 days. In all fairness, it’s not a huge sum of money – $101,000 to be exact. However, the investors are original Youtubers and . Donahue, for the record, is also an investor in car-sharing platform . And other business angels have also chimed in since the initial funding. When I first heard Mashape’s story, I was kind of blown away. Sure, we often hear that it’s more to get funded on this side of the Atlantic than over in the States but European entrepreneurs often idealize and over-simplify the situation in Silicon Valley; just because there are more investors does not necessarily mean that it rains money. If we ask Marco about the situation, he says it’s entirely cultural. In Italy, the investor community is smaller and has less money than in Silicon Valley. Therefore, they don’t want to take a risk by investing in a new and innovative model – they want to invest in something proven and secure. Thus, they fund models that already exist, which ends up slowing down local innovation as a consequence. Mashape’s “ for cloud services” launched in private alpha back in November and the public launch is expected shortly. The platform makes it so that any developer can easily distribute their API to all of Mashape’s user-base. Along the lines of startups like , , and , Mashape has a number of developments lined up for this year; the starup plans to add an additional 5 people to the team, support additional languages (Ruby, Python) and launch its API billing system. Despite everything, Marco and his cofounders don’t necessarily think that the US is a business Utopia either. But while the States may have some economic and social problems, he says that at least “the American dream is still up and running.” |
Uh Oh: Asus Tablets May Not Ship Till Summer, Will Not Have Android 3.0 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 12 |
Remember when we went to Asus’s CES press conference, and they showed us several nice-looking tablets, all of which we were told would run Android 3.0? I sure remember, because I was there. As it turns out, that might have been — there’s no polite way of putting it — It seems that Asus was a little overconfident, and did not know what specifications would be required to run Android 3.0, so they just said their tablets would have it without knowing whether that was true. That’s pretty shameful, guys. When the Inquirer asked Asus’s marketing specialist John Swatton about this, he said the announcement “was a mistake.” Actually, John, it’s not a mistake when you say something you know isn’t true. To thousands of people. Who then report it to millions. It’s called systematically spreading disinformation. Not only that, but the tablets won’t be out until the third quarter of 2011. With the Xoom and almost certainly the iPad 2 coming out in 1Q, and then the rest of the tablet army hitting sometime in 2Q, I think we can safely write off Asus as a player in the 2011 Tablet Wars. |
Kabbage Raises $6.7M To Give Online Merchants Working Capital To Grow Their Businesses | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 1 | 12 | Atlanta-based startup has raised $6.65 million in new funding led by with David Bonderman, founder of TPG Capital; Warren Stephens, CEO of Stephens Inc.; and the participating in the round. Kabbage is essentially a way for online merchants and sellers on marketplaces like eBay to get capital they otherwise wouldn’t qualify for at a bank. Kabbage uses technology to analyze online merchants’ sales and credit history; customer traffic and reviews; and prices and inventory compared to competitors. Via PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API, Kabbage will make cash advances available to eBay and other online marketplace sellers fairly quickly (Kabbage says that many transactions take as little has ten minutes). Kabbage makes money off of fees charged to merchants for the working capital. Fees depend on how long the online merchant keeps the capital (6 month maximum) and the customer’s repayment risk. Rates range from 6 percent to 16 percent of the original advance amount. While the startup only supports eBay for now (via a with PayPal), Kabbage plans to use to the funding to expand to other platforms, including Amazon and Etsy. |
U100 From iRiver Is Sexy And Zune-Like; You Will Probably Never Have One | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 12 |
Now, I’m not saying that this particular gadget is the best thing in the world, but I do have to say that I like the look, and of course microSDHC support and a big battery are a plus. The interface looks very -like, right down to the circled triangle for “play” and the sans-serif, left-aligned white-on-dark typography. Maybe they did it first and Microsoft copied them? Whatever the case, the has a 3.1″ 480×320 touchscreen, 4-16GB of space inside (remember, you’ve got a card slot too), and a big ol’ battery that promises a full 50 hours of audio playback, or 11 of video. Even my can’t match that. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qubEAHsQVMw&rel=0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3] [via and ] |
PSP2 To Be Announced On January 27th? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 12 |
The fact that there is a PSP2 is kind of an open secret: Sony hasn’t said a word, but developers have they’re working with them, and we saw some . Now the same site that showed off the pics is claiming (sources be damned!) that Sony is planning a big meeting with select press to The timing is good; they definitely want to get it out in the open before the 3DS hits, or they’ll be buried. And if they’re smart, they’ll put the hardware specs and capabilities front and center, since the 3DS can’t match them there. VG247 isn’t naming any names, but another blog has stepped forward to say they’ve confirmed this. It’s all speculation at the moment, though, so don’t get too excited. We’ll update if we hear anything to confirm or deny all this stuff. |
Hopeful Plaintiff Sues Yahoo, Digg, Reddit, Fark, TechCrunch, And Others | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 12 | Oh no, we’ve been sued. This week’s hopeful plaintiff is Gooseberry Natural Resources LLC, who filed a complaint in a Los Angeles federal court against Reddit, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Digg, Fark, Geeknet, TechCrunch, Newsvine, Yahoo and others. We, along with our fellow defendants, have allegedly been violating US Patent No. , titled . The invention underlying the patent appears to be the notion of typing text into an admin system, storing that text on a server, and then publishing it on the Internet. The patent was awarded in 2002. The good news is this. AOL has a whole legal department to deal with these…people. Someday I really hope to get every who’s ever us up on a stage and then let TechCrunch readers throw rotten tomatoes at them. That would be cathartic. The complaint is below. A commenter points out that the plaintiff spelled their own name incorrectly at the top of the complaint. [scribd id=46777513 key=key-285ymeqbs677o7v3zbih mode=list] |
Woo! Minecraft Hits 1,000,000 Purchases | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 12 |
We just wanted to shout out a congratulations to wildly successful Minecraft creator Notch, who has created one of the weirdo sleeper hits of the year. With virtually no promotion, only word of mouth and a reasonable price, this indie exploration and creation game has . I’ll leave the implications of this on the bloated, franchise-obsessed AAA game community to your imagination. I’m a happy owner of Minecraft myself, but I like to say to Notch: more monsters! No need for cake! |
OnSwipe Raises, Like, A Million Dollars | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 12 | , the WordPress plugin that makes your blog look like a native app is branching out, with a new one million seed round of funding, a new name ( ) and homebase (New York). The round, which was completed in a marathon 30 days, was led by Spark Capital, Betaworks and AdMob investor ENIAC Ventures. Angel investors like Hubspot CEO Dharmesh Shah, Jennifer Lum, Roy Rodenstein and Wayne Chang also participated. OnSwipe is also part of the NY TechStars class, a.k.a the OnSwipe is a pretty sure investment bet when you think about it as innovation is increasingly about user experience. Tablet publishing, with 50 million tablet users at the end of 2012 according to a Forrester , is the definition of a growing industry within the space. And OnSwipe founder is committed to the cause, wanting the content experience on the iPad to be beautiful, engaging and monetizible. He will be using the recent funding to expand the platform from WordPress to other CMS platforms like Moveable Type , eventually allowing any website to achieve the look of an HTML5 native tablet app. Says Baptistse, Baptiste explains that he chose the name OnSwipe, Baptiste has and his mission fits in with the mission of lead investor Spark Capital. Lead investor Alex Finkelstein, general partner at Spark, explains The startup also plans on hiring a new team with the financing, and is looking for between 8-10 engineers. Says Baptistse, |
Nissan Apologizes For Slow Leaf Rollout | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 13 |
Being the first affordable all-electric car on the market, the was kind of guaranteed to be a big seller. But their way of going about selling the thing seems to have given their customers unrealistic expectations of when their cars would actually arrive. People have been given extremely vague promises of when their car will arrive (“4-7 months”?), and theories have arisen in the community to the effect that Nissan is attempting to manufacture scarcity. Nissan is hitting back, or rather soothing back, and has regarding the rollout intended to get their customers to put down the pitchforks. Nissan’s Senior Vice President of Sales Brian Carolin says: We probably gave an expectation of availability which in hindsight was too early. Our engineers are incredibly crucial and they want to make sure that every [Leaf] coming out of the gate is absolutely right. The rate of climb has been probably a little slower than you’d expect. They were just taking their time in Japan to make sure everything was perfect. We’re at the leading edge of technology and the engineers just wanted to make sure that the car was absolutely spot on. Fair enough, but I feel that Nissan really didn’t manage expectations very well. We all know they needed to get the name and the reservations out there as early as possible so they could ship before cars like the and stole their thunder. They might have overdone it a bit. |
RIM Orders One Million Playbooks – Let The Games Begin! | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 13 |
Last week we heard that Motorola is aiming to ship 800,000 or more of its Xoom tablet in Q1. Aren’t we like halfway through Q1 already? But I digress. Now RIM is showing its manufacturing volume cards. All one million of ’em! Yes, RIM has placed its orders with manufacturers, and is , according to Digitimes. That’s a lot! But as we’ve seen, the Playbook is actually quite a compelling device, and with other options on the market, consumers might actually be shopping around instead of driving straight to the Apple store. |
News Corp's The Daily iPad Newspaper Delayed By "Weeks, Not Months" | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | While we may all have our own opinions on whether News Corp’s iPad-bound newspaper, The Daily, is a boondoggle or simply before its time, I think we were all at least looking forward to seeing what it was like. People were curious about Virgin’s (though I haven’t heard a word about it since), and naturally want to know what it is that Rupert Murdoch has spent so much money on. We heard a few days back that it would be making its debut on the 19th (with Steve Jobs rumored to be in attendance), but it seems that wasn’t in the cards. All Things D has learned (from a slip-up at an internal News Corp meeting, no doubt) that The Daily will not, in fact, be launching next week, but , probably some time in February. And they blame Apple! The nerve. |
Groupon Said To Be Valued At, Like, $15 Billion | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | Ready for more ” kind of reactions? is that the daily deals site has been seriously discussing going public with Wall Streeters this week, with a rumored IPO sometime in Spring. The report also amps up Groupon’s valuation to more than double the $6 billion Google had offered for the company just months ago, at about $15 billion From : Groupon is on a tear, recently raising $950 million dollars from investors such as , and Morgan Stanley in the largest ever financing round for a startup, according to the . Groupon, which has on its international expansion plans as of late, also hit a milestone today, over $1 billion dollars saved through the use of Groupons. Here’s Groupon CEO , the behind the rise of group couponing, in an interview for Crain’s [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNSLhO5U05E&w=630] Image: |
T-Mobile G-Slate Hits The FCC, Doesn't Show Its Face | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 13 |
Oh Federal Communications Commission, you are such a tease. You show us of that sexy little tablet! At least, I assume it’s sexy. The model number of the is LG-V900, but beyond that there isn’t much to glean here. It could very well be 9″, though, and that outline definitely shows a 16:9 aspect ratio. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, since the had the UI in 16:9. Motorola’s seems to be slightly closer to 16:10, but it’s likely they’re the same. There’s still no release date, but with FCC approval and other tablets knocking at consumers’ doors, I think we can expect a more comprehensive announcement from T-Mobile within, say, two months. [via ] |
Very Cool: Flashbulb Going Off, Filmed At 1052FPS | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/18623681 w=620&h=349]
There’s not a lot to say about this, but super-slow-motion shots like this are always cool, and of an old-school flashbulb is even cooler than most. The little tendrils are beautiful, aren’t they? Shot with a Phantom. [via and ] |
Hybrid Streetlights: Good Or Bad News For Utilities? | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | Urban Green Energy — a New York City startup that designs and manufactures small wind turbines — has released and installed the first of its new, “hybrid” or wind- and solar-powered streetlights. Designed for primary use in parking lots or over highways, UGE’s Sanya streetlights include a standard setup of the company’s 600 W Eddy wind turbines, along with a steel tower or pole, solar panels, lead acid batteries of the variety used in many cars, controls and light emitting diodes (LEDs) made by suppliers from Asia and the U.S. They can store up to 5 days of power, and can be customized to cast a particular color of light according to the . The UGE Sanya could take some business away from utilities by generating power from off-the-grid renewables for use in the pervasive, on-all-night streetlights. In many U.S. markets today, electric companies are the ones who actually install, maintain and power communities’ residential streetlights. This traditional business model has caused problems recently for various municipalities and utilities that serve them. In (as reported by Andrew Barksdale for The Fayetteville Observer, N.C.) Progress Energy ( ) is threatening to turn the streetlights off, unless the town pays a bill over $100,000 there, or gives PE permission to charge monthly fees to customers it serves in the area. It’s even worse in (as reported by Chad Lawhorn for the Lawrence Journal World & News). The city’s auditor, Michael Eglinski, believes the power company in charge of streetlights there, Westar Energy, is overcharging Lawrence for electricity it provides, failing to meter precisely, and worse is using woefully inefficient bulbs deliberately to boost sales. Consumers can’t turn streetlights owned by utilities on or off, nor can they swap out old bulbs for highly efficient ones. The arrangement doesn’t feel fair to every resident. Utilities’ sympathizers, on the other hand, point out that they are responsible for things like repairing street lamps should a tree branch or car accident take one out, and incur other costs to keep cities safely lit. The UGE Sanya streetlights could provide one benefit to utilities, though. Since they’re grid connectable, the lights can send excess power from the wind turbines and solar panels back through the grid. That helps utilities fulfill regulatory requirements to increase the percent of power they get from local, renewable sources. Nick Blitterswyk, founder and chief executive of UGE, said more than 100 Sanya streetlights sold in the product’s first month on the market. None of Sanya’s buyers have been utilities in the U.S. Queries have come from municipalities, retailers and hotels eager to illuminate their properties, cut electricity costs, and win a green public image. A mechanical engineer at , Mateo Chaskel, said that the constantly moving turbine technology in the lights should last twenty years, requiring just an annual maintenance check-up, barring natural disasters or accidents. Not including the batteries, the LED lights and other parts within should endure as long as the turbines, he said. He hopes they’ll reduce waste from spent bulbs, along with maintenance costs for companies, cities and utilities that switch to the Sanya. The streetlights are assembled at a UGE facilitly in Asia, and shipped to San Francisco for distribution in North America. They usually qualify for a 30% rebate from the federal government. The city of San Francisco recently installed the hybrid lights as part of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s . More recently, Chaskel said, they were installed in about five sites in Pusan, South Korea. They will soon be installed in lots and along city streets in: San Jose, Oklahoma, Ohio, the Virgin Islands, Australia, and Poland. Photo credits: traditional street light via and Sanya via |
News Corp's The Daily iPad Newspaper Delayed By "Weeks, Not Months" | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | While we may all have our own opinions on whether News Corp’s iPad-bound newspaper, , is a boondoggle or simply before its time, I think we were all at least looking forward to seeing what it was like. People were curious about Virgin’s (though I haven’t heard a word about it since), and naturally want to know what it is that Rupert Murdoch has spent so much money on. We heard a few days back that it would be making its debut on the 19th (with Steve Jobs rumored to be in attendance), but it seems that wasn’t in the cards. All Things D has learned (from a slip-up at an internal News Corp meeting, no doubt) that The Daily will not, in fact, be launching next week, but , probably some time in February. And they blame Apple! The nerve. Supposedly, The Daily was supposed to take advantage of a new feature in the Apple economy that would push new content automatically to your device or devices. Basically a pay subscription service, like a regular newspaper. But the word is that Apple’s not ready to go live, and they’ve caused News Corp to delay the launch until such a time as the feature is actually complete. Considering that can’t possibly take too long, the source of this information has shared that the delay is on the order of weeks, not months. Or at least, that’s when they’ll announce the next delay. this thing is going to go down in flames. , but I do know that the kind of person who buys an iPad is far more likely to be taking advantage of all the free content on the net. They don’t get up in the morning and pick up the Times from their doorstep. They pull their iPad off the nightstand and check their feeds. That said, if they can even get 5% of the 8-million-strong iPad membership to pay $5 a month, that’s a triumph. It will depend on their opening move, however. If they’re smart, they’ll give it away for a good long time — 90 days, perhaps. If they can run on fumes for that time and then fill the tank when people find they actually like this little app, then they’re fine. But if they try to charge for admission up front, they’ll be high and dry. |
Is This The Galaxy S Mini? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 13 |
It was only a couple days ago that we saw pictures of , and now we have a baby-sized one that’s supposed to be its little brother. Supposedly this guy has a 3.5″ 320×480 screen (probably Super AMOLED, to maintain the Galaxy style), runs Froyo 2.2, and has a 5MP camera on the back. Processor is listed as Qualcomm’s budget MSM7227. Model number is S5830, and it’s quad-band with WCDMA support. The rectangular home button and general layout remind me of a sort of chubby, compact version of the reference Galaxy S. and . Supposedly it’ll be shown off at MWC; we’ll be there, so don’t you worry. [via ] |
If this Conference Room Table Could Talk… (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | Earlier this week, we did a on a new venture firm called and if you checked out the CrunchBase profiles of the three founders you saw a pretty wide depth of experience. Paul Martino has started four companies, most recently Aggregate Knowledge, and he was one of the first investors in Zynga. Duncan Davidson was most recently managing partner for the Leviathan-like VantagePoint Venture Partners, and founded several companies including Covad Communications– a DSL pioneer that went public and was valued as high as $9 billion. And Richard Melmon’s roots go back to the early Intuit days, through the legendary Regis McKenna, onto VisiCalc and eventually co-founding Electronic Arts. In a relatively young industry, those are some deep venture roots. Apparently, their conference room table has seen about as much action. In a fun final segment we reminisce with the Bullpen guys. Enjoy! |
ShareSquare Gets 150K To Build Out Its QR Code Platform [Invites] | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | Mobile QR platform launches in beta today with the announcement that they’ve already got 150K out of a 500K seed round under their belt, from angels , of ff Assett Management, and of Hacker Angels. In the same space as and , ShareSquare is a QR Code creation platform specifically for music and entertainment brands. With ShareSquare’s CMS, artists and promoters can deck out branded merchandise like posters, promos, flyers and even bumper stickers with QR codes corresponding to a custom HTML5 web app (see a mockup one for Justin Bieber, to the left). Fans with a QR code scanner like RedLaser, can then scan the code to check out related content such as MP3s, music videos, contests and, eventually, make purchases. The ShareSquare CMS also allows realtime placement and by media (i.e. billboard vs. poster vs. sticker) tracking analytics for QR codes as well as something ShareSquare founder and graduate calls “Like Lock,” where fan Facebook “Likes”unveil special access to prizes and exclusive content. Content is monetized through ads. On a trial run for six weeks, ShareSquare has been working successfully with Hollywood agencies and studios like William Morris Endeavor and Disney. A QR campaign for artist Mitchel Musso reached 2,500 posters, 10,000 packaging stickers and over 181 shopping malls nationwide. Gallica explains the challenges of the space, Indeed, taking the entertainment route might be a winning move for the L.A. based company which will also be doing band leaderboards at SXSW, says Galica. Readers interested in taking us ShareSquare on their 500 free invite offer can register , using the code TCRN500. <
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Formula One Will Be Available In HD This Year (Finally!) | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | Good news: will be in HD this year. You’d have thought that such a fancy racing circuit would be broadcast in HD already—how many years has Nascar been in HD?—but no; we’ve had to wait. Long overdue, yes. The entire world feed will be in HD starting this season, which begins this March in Australia. That means it’s up to your local F1 provider whether or not they want to carry the feed. , and . Sighs of relief all around. This makes the second big tech announcement concerning F1 that’s been made in recent weeks, the other being that with new, smaller engines with lower fuel consumption than the current models that will kick off in two years. It’s tough to stress how grateful I am for the transition to HD. How many years has HD been mainstream? I know I had one in time for the 2006 World Cup, and I’m well certain I was several years behind the curve already. But it’s good to know that we can look forward to a year of Ferrari belly aching in HD. Plainly, it’s about damn time. |
Ship or Get Off the Pot | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | On Tuesday Steve Ballmer fired Bob Muglia, and Google fired H.264 from Chrome. The tubes are heated up with analysis of these two seemingly unassociated events, and I figure I’ll mash them together into a counter-intuitive scenario. The unifying driver: Tuesday’s new iPhone 4 announcement from Verizon. We hear lots about Android these days as a million tablets bloom at CES. But the world we’re hearing about is the one where Apple lives in a one-carrier model. It’s a Model T world where you can have any color as long as it’s AT&T. Every day people walk into any other carrier store and walk out with Android, because they don’t know the difference. Contrary to the pr, the Android sell to the broad market is not about Open v. Closed, or store v. market, or any of the direct feature comparisons. That’s because the features are comparable, the experience is similar, the sell is based on stepping up to the iPhone experience whether it’s called Kleenex or Cheerios or the supermarket knock off. The knock off becomes the brand. But in doing this jujitsu, Google has created a climate where the knock off is vulnerable to attack if the rules that got them there change. Google having given the carriers a reasonably indistinguishable knock off to sell, Apple can now safely drop the exclusive wedge for disintermediating carrier profit margin havens such as tethering and IM and eventually VoIP. Snap. Verizon offers iPhone 4. Forget the slight redesign, forget the lack of multitasking between data and voice, forget the pricing models for unlimited, tethering, and video chat over 3G. Now the store brand is competing directly with the actual iPhone. Naturally the pent-up demand by Verizon contractees will blow out the overall numbers. But much more importantly, Apple is free to ship an iPhone 5 across the board, where existing contractees can be marketed to with bundled services, i.e. the new TV, the new Enterprise, the new Office. One device, with the carriers battling for the most attractive rendering of services. This is where we switch over to Google’s H.264 move. Faced with ship or get off the pot, Google will do whatever it needs to do to establish its platform as a unique and valuable proposition. With H.264 store brand adoption over 50%, Apple has reached the point where its Flash blockade is no longer painful to the majority of iOS users. With a broad non-exclusive base opening up, Apple is free to blow out the market unless something radical is done — destabilize the inevitability argument around Flash-is-dead by a weird combination of OpenFUD and brute force. Never mind that it tells its developers and Chrome adopters to never believe a word Google says about its motivations and reliability of partner strategy. In effect, Google is broadening its mission statement from “What’s good for the Web is good for us” to “What’s good for the Web and bad for Apple is good for us.” At best, it’s Google water-testing VP8 to gauge its patent liabilities; at worst it’s a weak signal if they reverse course. It suggests a certain thin-skinnedness over the Verizon deal and its bandwagon implications, and underlines the alacrity of the timing (over the next two months) within which Chrome will be crippled. And the short term fix is to continue to support Flash as a way around having to download another plug in. The weird thing here is that this begins to feel like a Google version of a Silverlight play, starting with video and Chrome and then marching through the other browsers via YouTube. Silverlight is seen by some as the reason Bob Muglia was sent packing, most likely by Steve Sinofsky consolidating power to succeed Ballmer. Muglia and Ray Ozzie were surprisingly in synch around using Silverlight as a stalking horse for embedding Windows in an uber Web OS, disagreeing (or subtly agreeing) only over the timing of the transition. While Ozzie owned the vision and strategy, Muglia owned the execution and a rising revenue base in the Servers and Tools Business. The black helicopter noise suggests Muglia was undermined by the retrenchment around Silverlight he surfaced in an interview with Mary Jo Foley, but here again Apple’s Verizon deal around iPhone 4 and a Verizon iPad threatens Microsoft much more directly by accelerating iOS and damaging both Windows Phone and the MIA Windows tablet. Just as with Android market success, Ozzie and Muglia’s success at destabilizing private cloud margins for servers and the increasingly irrelevant and collaboration-free Office platform in order to save the company has created an Azure economy that needs to be managed by a new breed of president, or by Ballmer directly. Google has moved way past Microsoft in mobile, and now Apple is moving back out in front of both. Ironically, Ozzie leaving cut Muglia’s legs out from under him, as his P&L looks good compared to everybody else but Sinofsky’s. In the Ozzie/Muglia era, Microsoft learned how to speak a newer language of openness and resolve to move forward into the cloud. In the Sinofsky/Ballmer era, they get to keep the cloud because they have to, and try and manage their way out of the collapse of their enterprise channel before Office is pulled out from under them. Meanwhile, a new generation of store brand social workers are using a new message bus, with Apple driving the innovation curve around a realtime set of dynamic objects. FaceTime, AirPlay, the Mac AppStore, the Twitter realtime Mac app, and so on. Once again: Verizon capitulates on behalf of the carriers to Apple. Google, flush with having educated the market across the carriers about the superphone, suddenly shows weakness and collapse of trust messaging by trying to damage Apple via a phony open source/standards gambit. Microsoft, flush with barely being all in on the cloud, fires its cloud chief to appease the old guard’s Ballmer heir by completing the Silverlight coup, papering over its mobile collapse, and rolling back to the state Ozzie had rescued them from. iOS wins 2 out of 3 phone sales, 4 out of 5 tablets, transforms its Mac OS to the new iOS mobile AppStore, and competes head to head with Google and its old Microsoft model. Thanks, Verizon. |
VBS.TV And Reddit Are Leading Us Into The Golden Era Of Information Discovery | Contributor | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | Something just happened online that is highly indicative of where we’re headed in terms of new media. Look at these two stories on and . They are totally independent from each other and nine months apart, but the two sites are presenting readers with unparalleled access to a fascinating story: how an Oklahoman was inspired by a ’60s-era underwater adventure show, went on to work at NASA to develop self-sustaining habitats, and is now developing an undersea colony off the Florida coast. One did the video and the other is hosting a nearly-live conversation with the NASA engineer right now. It’s stories like this – stories that would once rate a few feature pages in Discover magazine or Omni (remember Omni?) – that are now percolating through the Internet, to our benefit and to the detriment of old media who can’t keep up. Now we get the real story sans any nonsense graphics, anticlimactic taglines or fluff. It’s the future, everyone. |
Cubeduel: Hot Or Not Meets LinkedIn. Your Darker Side Will Love It. | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 13 |
People sure do love judging their coworkers. And now it’s easier and more addictive than ever. Meet , a site that launched two days ago and is quickly making the rounds on Twitter. After landing on the site, you’ll be asked to connect with LinkedIn via OAuth. Next, you’ll be presented with photos of two of your former or current coworkers, prompting you to choose who you’d prefer to work with. Click one, and the site will show you another pair. Then another. Vote 20 times and you unlock access to see how other people have ranked you. Yeah, you’re already hooked. But that’s not all. The site records the votes (which are all anonymous) and tallies them, allowing you to browse individual companies like Google or TechCrunch, to see which employees have won the most ‘duels’ based on votes aggregated from all users. In other words, it gives you a nice, easy to read ranking of the ‘best’ people in each company (more on that later). The site is the brainchild of Adam Doppelt (cofounder of UrbanSpoon) and Tony Wright (cofounder of RescueTime), both of whom have left the startups they helped found to work on other projects, including this one. Wright says that CubeDuel came together over the course of the last two weeks. Since launching yesterday “thousands” of people have signed up (the site still has pretty poor analytics tools) and over 50,000 votes have been submitted in the last day. While the site certainly falls somewhere on the evil spectrum, it’s not as bad as , which write anonymous reviews about their peers. Sure, you might end up ranked in the last 10% of your company on Cubeduel, but since there are no comments you don’t have to potentially deal with coworkers insinuating that you’re corrupt or devious. It’s fun and feels slightly mischievous, but it also has some flaws. One of these involves the fact that you’re compelled to choose between one person or the other, even if you don’t know one of them very well (yes, there’s a ‘skip’ button, but it feels like a cop-out and the site doesn’t go out of its way to say you should only vote for people you’ve actually worked with). As I tested the site I found myself favoring people with whom I’d worked directly, even if I couldn’t really say whether they were a better worker than the other. There’s also the charm factor at work — if you knew everyone at your last company (and most people liked you), then you’re probably going to fare better than the guy who churns out great code in a quiet corner of the office. Then again, as Wright says, the charm factor is always at work in the workplace anyway. So why is the site spreading so quickly? Aside from appealing to the darker side of human nature (which is more viral, naturally), Cubeduel prompts you repeatedly to share the site with your friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (part of this is because you need at least four votes before the site will show you your own ranking). It’s too early to tell if this is just a fad. If it does have some legs, Wright says that the site could figure out some ways to monetize it by packaging data in much the same way that Glassdoor does (he says the site could also let people rank they’ve worked at). |
AOL's Q1 Winter Luge Goals Revealed | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | Around here at , they tend to keep us out of the loop on corporate strategy because they know we’ll we find. So imagine my surprise to find a box with AOL snow globes and first quarter stretch targets sent to my office in New York City (which is not at AOL’s headquarters, by the way, but the same office I’ve always had because, well, they don’t really want me in their building—despite being an AOL employee, I can’t even get an AOL ID to enter unannounced). This box has been sitting around since the holidays, and inside is a little motivational package with five AOL Winter Luge 2011 snow globes and bookmarks/postcards (see photo above). On the back of the postcards are the company’s goals for the first quarter dubbed “Q1 Winter Luge.” Some of these have been reported before, like doubling homepage traffic, which in and of itself would be huge. But there are others too, including growing ad sales revenue by 20 percent, doubling engagement on the local Patch sites, organizing around “towns” (we are in Tech Town!), , and expanding the ads, which replace clutter on the page with incorporating different interactive elements like video or maps. So while the news today was about how AOL is —some of the content areas where it is not so strong—the bigger strategy revolves around these goals. While there was no other information in the package other than the cards and the globes, it seems clear to me that these are very much stretch goals but ones worth striving for. In case you have trouble reading the goals in the photo above, here they are—and below that another interpretation of the Winter Luge at an AOL party (photo cropped to protect the not-so-innocent, but note the “AOL 2011” engraved into the side of the ice luge): |
Linux Foundation posts schedule of events for 2011 | Scott Merrill | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | 2010 was a busy year for the , and their recently posted suggests that this year will be just as interesting. In addition to LinuxCon and the Collaboration Summit in the US, there’s also LinuxCon Brazil, LinuxCon Japan, and for the first time ever LinuxCon Europe. The latter is running concurrently with the and the . The call for presentations is open at all of the Linux Foundation’s 2011 events. Since many of these events are invitation-only being a speaker might be a good way to get to attend. The CFPs ( , , , ) list a number of suggested topics, so if you have anything compelling to say about those aspects of Linux, submit a presentation! You can register for an event, or submit a proposal in response to the Call for Presentations, at . |
HP Also Holding A Second webOS Event On February 9 To Woo Developers | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | A week and a half ago, we were to join HP on the morning of February 9 for an “exciting announcement”. But it appears that they’re now also reaching out to others about event later that day. This new invite reads: “HP webOS. The future revealed.” Below that, it lists the same February 9 date, but lists the time as being from 7 PM to 9:30 PM. And it will be in the same venues: Fort Mason Center, Herbst Pavillion in San Francisco. So what’s this all about? The next line is key: “Please join Jon Rubinstein and the HP webOS Engineering and Developer Relations teams for a special presentation and developer community reception.” In other words, it’s a developer event being held the night after they reveal what they’re doing to reveal at their press event. Makes sense. It looks like HP wants to get to work ASAP. So what’s actually being announced? Speculation has been that webOS 2.0 would be more formally unveiled at that time. But we also now know that tablets will definitely be a part of the day. How? Because HP EVP Todd Bradley CNBC as much yesterday. When he was asked a questiona about tablets, Bradley responded that “ ” So, webOS 2.0, tablets, and probably some new phones in the morning to woo the press. Then a developers, developers, developers event at night with Rubinstein to get everyone who will actually have to support the new stuff excited about the future of the HP webOS platform. |
Instagram For The BlackBerry [Screenshot] | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 14 | Inspired by the epic , Myspace VP has come up with a mock hypothetical of what the popular photosharing app would look like on the text-heavy and camera-weak BlackBerry platform. The above image is particularly humorous when coupled with the fact that Instagram, which just hit , has not yet launched on Android. Percival’s ultimate message here is intended to go beyond humor however as he’s actually posted the image to Instagram as , Going “Popular” or viral with “Likes” on Instagram has become a bit of a status symbol amongst the tech set as of late, and it will take some pretty creative maneuvering to get people to “Like” a branded photo of a Peets or Starbucks logo, no matter how artful.
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Live In Oklahoma City? Watch Out For a Hot White MacBook With Cancer Research Data Inside | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 14 |
Attention seedy underbelly of Oklahoma. If you happen to be moving any hot laptops, please check if one of them is There’s a reward (contact details at the link) and it’s the right thing to do. The rest of you out there, please consider |
Twitter For Mac's Spectacular Hidden Little Feature: Tweet Anything From Anywhere | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 14 | I love Twitter for Mac. Love it. It has completely my day-to-day workflow. And it has I use Twitter itself. And that was before I found out about this killer little hidden feature today: Tweet from anywhere. I don’t know how I missed it before, but apparently installing Twitter for Mac adds a new “Tweet” command to basically a ton of apps running in OS X. first pointed this out earlier today, and now I can’t get enough. For example, if you’re browsing the web in Safari or Chrome, highlight a word or passage and right-click. At the bottom of the drop-down, you’ll see the “Tweet” command. Hitting it will populate a tweet for you with the highlighted section. And it works in TextEdit, iChat, Calendar, Mail, etc. If you read it, you can tweet it. One thing I wish it did in web browser was automatically add a link as well as the text you’re highlights, but baby-steps. I have a feeling that will come. And yes, plenty of plug-ins have had this ability for a while, but now it’s system-wide. It’s as if Twitter is now baked into OS X. |
Edible Concept: Tetris Sugar Cubes | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 14 |
I believe I saw something like this a year back that looked like it was created by licking normal sugar cubes and sticking them together, forming tetrads. As fun as that sounds, I’d just as soon have my Tetris pieces fully formed right out of the bag. That’s what aims to do. I know I’d buy them, and they’d be a hit at any coffee shop around here. There are three troubles, though, that I can foresee. First, you might get a lot of broken ones in a loose bag. This can be solved by packing them together like the boxes of normal sugar cubes, but produces problem number two: how are you going to organize all those tetrads into a cohesive shape without any gaps? You’ll literally need to hire professional Tetris sugar-lump organizers. The pieces could slide down from the top and the workers would have to put them into place, forming solid lines all the way across so the box is totally full. Did I just blow your mind? Problem the third: if each of these is as big as four sugar cubes… you want some coffee with that sugar, buddy? [via and ] |
PS3 Hacking Case Judge: Why Is This In My Courtroom | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 14 |
Just a little update on the Sony/George Hotz . You know, the one where Sony tries to put the cat back in the bag. Well it turns out that their reason for filing suit in California is that YouTube, Twitter, and Paypal are all based on California. Wait, what? See, Hotz allegedly received donations from Paypal (he denies it), and news of was posted on Twitter and YouTube by fail0verflow. Are Sony’s lawyers smoking crack? Do you try a mugger at the mint where the money he stole was made? Fortunately, If anything involving Google or Facebook could be brought to California, then potentially “the entire universe would be subject to my jurisdiction.” Nice gig if you can get it. Sony then suggested the case should be tried in Federal court close to Sony’s American headquarters… because it says so in the PlayStation terms-of-service agreement. I’m not sure that’s binding, Sony, especially since Hotz obviously to those terms, and rendered the agreement null long ago. Seriously, though, the trial will be delayed and possibly moved to Hotz’s home state, beautiful New Jersey. We’ll keep you posted, as the results of this case could actually be relevant to the end user. |
I Cannot In Good Conscience Recommend Buying This Yoda Robe | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 14 | Normally I would have passed this by. But since I one cheesy Star Wars tie-in today, I figured why not make it two? (what man wears a velour robe?) comes with a flip-up Yoda head and Rebel Alliance badge. Perfect for the man who . It costs £49.95, which is too much. [via ] |
Unfortunately, These Han And Greedo Bookends Are Sold Out | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 14 |
Where these came from, I don’t know. I’ve done a little searching and there don’t appear to be any Han/Greedo cantina bookends anywhere on the internet. It’s too bad, because they’re definitely the coolest Star Wars bookends I’ve seen… and brother, I’ve seen a lot of Star Wars bookends. over at Flickr. There are others: , simulating the tense trash compactor scene from , is pretty fierce. I don’t like that it’s enclosing the prequels, though. The Jabba’s Palace one is weak. I’m not even going to link to it. I’d rather use that $200 to have someone punch me in the face. |
Facebook Shares Hit $28.26 Per Share, That's a $70+ Billion Valuation | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 14 | The SecondMarket Facebook shares auctions are back on after a holiday break, and the valuation is up big time. The last auction prior to this one closed December 15 at $22.75/share. Today it hit $28.26 per share. With 2. 5 billion or so shares outstanding, that’s a $70.65 billionish valuation. A ago shares were trading on SecondMarket at a $50 billion valuation. What’s changed? The announced earlier this month increased the hype even further. No wonder the to these trades. Sounds like a little before the peak. The email from SecondMarket is below: Subject: Privileged and Confidential – SecondMarket’s Facebook Auction Update To Facebook market participants: Thank you to those who participated in this week’s SecondMarket auction for Facebook shares. The auction was successful and fully cleared at a per share price of $28.26. Next week, the floor price will be $26.25 and we will require a minimum sale of 25,000 shares. In observance of the national MLK, Jr. holiday, please find the adjusted auction timeline for next week below. If you own shares that you are eligible to sell and wish to participate as a seller, please complete the attached Seller Information Form and submit it to SecondMarket at fb@secondmarket.com by Thursday, January 20 at 7:00 PM EST. Please see below for detailed results on previous auctions and for next week’s adjusted auction calendar: Previous Auction Results: Total Shares Cleared to Date: 2,721,265 over five auctions Clearing Price in Most Recent Auctions:
January 12, 2011: $28.26
December 15, 2010: $22.75
December 8, 2010: $21.90
December 1, 2010: $21.01 Next Week’s Adjusted Auction Timeline: • Thursday, January 20 at 7:00 PM EST – Seller Information Forms due • Thursday, January 20 at 8:00 PM EST – Buyers informed of share quantity available and minimum purchase amount • Monday, January 24 at 12:00 PM EST – Buyer Information Forms due • Monday, January 24 at 5:00 PM EST – Participants informed of auction results • Monday, January 24 at 8:00 PM EST – Transaction documentation distributed to buyers and sellers • Wednesday, January 26 at 4:00 PM EST – Completed transaction documentation due from buyers and sellers • Wednesday, January 26 at 7:00 PM EST – Notice sent to Facebook, Inc. By reading this email, the recipient acknowledges and agrees that all of the information contained herein is confidential and that the recipient will keep this information confidential. The recipient further agrees that it will not copy, reproduce, or distribute this email in whole or in part. Please contact us at fb@secondmarket.com or 212.668.3919 if you have any questions. Please note that the information in this email does not constitute an offer to sell to, nor a solicitation of an offer to buy from, nor shall any securities be offered or sold to, any person in any jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. Regards, Boyd |
Posterous Cofounder Garry Tan Steps Down, Heads To Y Combinator | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 14 | , one of the cofounders of easy-to-use blogging service , is moving on from the company. Tan will be leaving to take a position at Y Combinator, where he will serve as a designer in residence. Posterous doesn’t put much weight on titles, but Tan had a hand in the site’s engineering, design, and product development. Posterous isn’t taking off as quickly as its competitor , but it has a solid audience and has recently released a neat feature. Tan didn’t elaborate much on his reasons for leaving, but says that it boils down to wanting to work with smaller teams, which he’ll be able to do at Y Combinator (Posterous is now at around 13 employees). He also added that Posterous is going “gangbusters” and that he expects 2011 to be “really phenomenal”. Posterous has over $5 million, including Y Combinator funding and a Series A round in March 2010. Here’s Tan’s announcing the news on his Posterous blog: Just as Posterous has prospered, grown and changed, so to is it time for me to evolve my role. Effective today, I’m ending my day-to-day development with Posterous and moving into an advisory role. Though my day-to-day may change, my faith in the team and the product is unchanged and unwavering. Posterous is in good hands and on the right track to fulfilling its potential. I am proud of what we’ve built together and look forward to the future with anticipation to see where the team and you, the users, take this very special community. My greatest passions lie with the early stage of building world-changing consumer products. To that end, I’ve decided to join the team at Y Combinator as a designer-in-residence and help the dozens of top pre-seed startups in the newest Winter 2011 batch reach their potential through excellent user experience. I am greatly thankful to our team, investors and most of all our users for all the amazing work and adventures. Thanks for all of your support. |
84 Of 97 Congress Representatives Supporting NBC/Comcast Merger Took Comcast Money | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 14 | I can’t work up any real outrage over this, because really, did anyone think that big business deals like this are anything but bought and paid for in Washington? But seriously, guys, you could stand to be a little more discreet about things. I mean honestly. When 84 out of 97 reps supporting the bill can be shown with little effort to have taken money from the company about which they’re supposed to be impartial, it makes us all look bad. ranged from $1000 to $25000, and can be cross-referenced with the letter of support linked (PDF). [via and ] |
Want To Know What Your Friends Think? Ask Polling Site GoPollGo | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 14 |
Former TechCrunch developer left TC a couple months ago to launch his own startup and today we finally get to see the fruits of his labor. Sick of the poor analytics, lack of geographical information and little vote analysis on industry leaders like Poll Daddy, Schaechter built to maximize what he felt was the potential of polling services. Says Schaechter, The beautifully designed site is based on a freemium model. It’s simple to make an embeddable poll like this , this or this . Users can then share it with friends via Facebook and Twitter, get comments or discover new polls. Premium subscribers can also access analytics on their polls, segment voting data and as well get reports like the one below. Schaechter has already had hundreds of users and hundreds of thousands of pageviews since he launched the site two days ago and plans on opening up the premium features to big brands soon, Schaechter’s future plans include building out the feature base and community for the bootstrapped GoPollGo as well as raising funding to potentially hire more people. he says. You can take the “Apple vs. Google” poll , or just have it out in the comments.
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Ask a VC: Satish Dharmaraj on India, the Beauty of Fragmentation and Farmers Markets (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 14 | I have a dilemma with Ask a VC. Generally, I’m trying to do shows that are under 10 minutes, so they’re more consumable. But in the case of Ask a VC, I want to get to as many reader questions as possible and would rather not cut someone off when they are giving you business advice. So starting this week we’re going to post the whole show as usual below, and give you links to each question and answer. That way if you don’t have 15 minutes to watch it all, you can still find out the answer to your question or a question that you are grappling with. I usually find that its easier to consume long-form videos in podcast form than during my daily blog reading, so as a reminder, you can also the episodes of any of our TCTV shows from iTunes. This week, Redpoint Ventures’ Satish Dharmaraj was our first return guest and we got to a good number of questions including: |
null | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 13 | null |
HiJack Sucks Power And Data From Your iPhone's 3.5mm Audio Jack | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 14 | [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/14453136 w=620&h=349]
This is great. have put together a little device that can be powered and communicated to via the audio jack on your iPhone. This allows for low-power peripherals to be used with that port instead of Apple’s connector, saving money on both sides of the equation. No licensing, no proprietary hardware. The parts used cost a total of $2.34 in bulk, and the audio port can deliver “several milliwatts at 3 V to a load and offers a bidirectional communications channel at a data rate of 8.8 kbaud.” There won’t be any data-heavy applications, then, but it’s more than enough to transfer text or a remote signal for a TV or tuner. Not sure if that’s enough power for a sustained wireless signal, but it could probably manage bursts with a little power management. They envision small, low-power sensors for things like moisture sensors, element detectors, and so on. Very cool. [via ] |
Cubeduel Goes Viral Too Quickly, Stumbles Over LinkedIn API Limits | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 1 | 14 |
Yesterday we about , a service that mixes the best (or worst) of Hot or Not with LinkedIn. Fire up the site and it will show you photos of two coworkers — pick the one you’d prefer to work with, and Cubeduel will present you with another pair of photos. It’s addictive, a bit evil, and has skyrocketed in usage over the last few days since it launched. Unfortunately, it took off a bit too quickly. The service earlier today for reasons that were initially unclear — did LinkedIn block the site because it ranks coworkers in a way that isn’t exactly flattering to everyone, or did the site just get too popular, too fast? Turns out it’s the latter — Cubeduel has exceeded LinkedIn’s API limits (which is what one of the site’s creators, Tony Wright, initially guessed). Here’s an explanation from LinkedIn Director of Communications Hani Durzy: We did not shut Cubeduel down. The application was using our open LinkedIn Developer Platform, which has a daily access limit that is publicly documented. Our developer platform limits are designed to protect our members, and have been in place since the platform program was introduced a year ago. We are in communication with the people behind Cubedeal to discuss how they can move forward. We are always interested in seeing our platform used in creative, innovative new ways by developers.
I followed up by asking if the site might be allowed to exceed the standard API limits, or if Cubeduel would have to find a way to restructure the site to fit within the normal constraints. The answer to that isn’t clear — Durzy says they’re still talking to each other. Wright says that before the API limit was hit Cubeduel was far exceeding his expectations — he told me yesterday the site would get “hundreds of thousands” of ranked users by the end of the week. Now he says they were “well on our way to millions” before the API limit kicked in. |
Dell Adamo Price Cut By Another $100 To $799 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 14 | Fire sale! It looks like Dell is trying to clear out inventory of the sexy Adamo line of laptops. Perhaps they’ve got something else cooking? Something thinner and -ier? At any rate, they cut the price by $200 , and . $799 is really a good price for this thing, guys. But at this rate, they might drop it to $699 in February. Buy now or take the risk? It’s up to you, . It’s up to you. |
Here's Your New Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 1 | 14 |
Hi, this is . You may remember him from such other Hollywood films as , or….. . [ ] |
Using Your Blackberry In Illinois Could Send You To Prison | Jon Orlin | 2,011 | 1 | 22 | This is one of those technology and legal stories that is hard to believe in this day and age. If you are in Illinois, you better be careful where you point your cameraphone or voice recorder. Chris Drew, a Chicago artist, and Tiawanda Moore, a former stripper, are facing up to 15 years in prison for eavesdropping, according to a in the Chicago News Cooperative. Drew used an Olympus voice recorder to commit his crime and Moore used her Blackberry. Moore is scheduled to go on trial early next month for recording Internal Affairs investigators when she filed a sexual harassment complaint. Moore claims the investigators tried to get her to drop her complaint, so she took out her Blackberry and started a recording which resulted in her arrest. Drew goes on trial in April for recording his conversation with Chicago police officers, without their permission, when he was arrested for selling art without a permit. It’s just a misdemeanor to sell art with no permit, but the voice recorder is causing much bigger problems. Both are being charged under the rarely enforced The Illinois Eavesdropping Act, which makes it illegal to audio-record either private or public conversations without the consent of all parties. Illinois is with “two-party consent” eavesdropping laws on the books. A challenge to the law earlier this month when a US District Judge ruled there is no “right to audio record,” claiming it would be “an unprecedented expansion of the First Amendment.” That’s saying there is freedom of speech, but even in public, there isn’t freedom to record. That may come as a shock to millions of iPhone, Android, and Blackberry users. Here’s the kicker, which got both Drew and Moore in deeper trouble, according to the story. Audio recording a civilian in Illinois is a felony with up to 3 years in prison the first time you do it and up to 5 years if you do it again. But the are much stiffer if you record certain people. Audio-recording a law-enforcement officer, state’s attorney, assistant state’s attorney, attorney general, assistant attorney general or judge in the performance of his or her duties is a Class 1 felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Most states have an exception for civilians recording police conversations in public. But not Illinois. There is an exception in Illinois that allows law-enforcement officers to legally record civilians in private or public. But, not the other way around. Nowadays, nearly everyone is carrying around a camera and phone capable of making audio recordings. As Adam Schwartz, an ACLU lawyer who has challenged the law pointed out, when “something fishy seems to be going on, the perfectly natural and healthy and good thing is for them to pull that device out and make a recording.” You might think twice about making that recording if you are in Illinois. For a more detailed look at this issue nationally, see from reason.com. |
Andreessen Horowitz Hires a New Partner…from Sales? | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 14 | When Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz launched , they talked a good game about things being different; about having a smorgasbord of partners skilled in different areas that could tag in-and-out of portfolio companies as appropriate. And a lot of that sounded like the usual “value-add” venture capital spiel. But two funds into the firm’s life, that vision is starting to take shape. Witness today’s announcement that Mark Cranney will be joining the firm as a partner. Cranney isn’t some techy whiz-kid, visionary founder or even a financial wizard. He’s a sales and operations guy and his job will be to help teach Andreessen Horowitz’s predominately engineer-centric founders and CEOs to be a little bit more like those things many of them decry: a sales guy, an MBA, a grown-up manager. Look at him! He even like a sales guy! In addition to coaching founders and helping them find the right management talent to hire, Cranney will be building essentially a pre-sales organization within the firm that will constantly scout purchase-level managers at Fortune 500 companies, to pave direct lines to them and know in advance what kinds of products they want to buy, leading to a shorter, almost pre-qualified sales cycle for Andreessen Horowitz’s companies. “The weakness at a lot of venture capital firms is that we know the CEOs or CIOs, but we don’t know the managers making the purchase decisions,” says Horowitz. I asked how big this group would be and Cranney declined to answer saying that was “proprietary” (See! He talks like a grown up manager too!) but he scoffed when I called it a “gargantuan task,” pointing out he’d built huge sales teams from scratch several times in his career. “That’s the easy part,” he said. Not for the typical geeky founder, of course, and that’s the point. Like a lot of the firm’s team, Cranney worked at Opsware with Horowitz and Andreessen, where he was the executive vice president of worldwide field operations. He grew the headcount from 10 people to 350, grew revenue from $18 million to $150 million, and had four years of 100%+ growth in new bookings. That’s just not a skill set you see at most VC firms. If this team works as advertised, it’ll be a huge, huge advantage for the firm. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this become a trend among the well-heeled venture funds, especially if this renaissance in business software blooms. As Cranney says: “If you want to sell to companies you gotta put boots on the ground. That’s not changing.” |
Seedcamp reveals the 18 companies selected for London | roxannevarza | 2,011 | 1 | 22 | Last week we announced that was spreading it’s wings and , à la . And yesterday, Seedcamp the 18 companies selected to participate in on January 25th. According to the blog post published by the team, this event received a record number of applications from across the globe – including India and Australia. And despite the strong majority of UK-based companies on the list (although nowhere near as many UK companies as ), the 18 teams selected actually represent 9 different countries. Here’s a rundown on the killer startups who made the cut: (London, UK): a network for smaller publishers to find advertisers, which operates on a credits-based system. (Paris, France): a mobile-based loyalty rewards platform, allowing local businesses to engage and reward customers. (Milan/Modena, Italy): DIY e-commerce solutions for blogs, social media and soon mobile devices. (London, UK): a location-based platform for users to share information about events and parties. (Sheffield, UK): a social-commerce platform for small independent businesses. (London, UK): a social platform for users to find cool activities and meet people nearby. (Tallinn, Estonia): an online marketplace connecting engineers and manufacturing companies. (Helsinki, Finland): real social games for iPads & tablets, to be played with friends in bars, at school or at home. (London, UK): online shopping platform allowing users to interact with individual shops, view profiles and buy products. (London, UK): a video-chat marketplace where users can buy and sell advice. (London, UK): SaaS solution to integrate innovative features into mobile and desktop applications. (Lisbon, Portugal): a recommendation system to facilitate finding pertinent information in large databases. (London, UK): “Linkedin for parents” or a social referral network for finding babysitters and other child-related services. (Tours, France): online creative applications company, behind a photo-painting application with natural media brushes and tools. (Milan, Italy): online price-comparison tool to save shoppers time and money. (Saint-Quentin, France): sales-oriented mobile applications for making calls, customer notes, CRM updates and sending documents. (Ljubljana, Slovenia): Free voice and video calls over internet, straight from the browser. After Seedcamp London, the next event will take place in . for this event are open and will close on February 3rd. |
UFC Files Lawsuit Againt Justin.tv As It Tries To Elmininate Illegal Online Streams Altogether | Nicholas Deleon | 2,011 | 1 | 22 | has continued its fight against copyright infringement , the video streaming Web site where, UFC alleges, people can watch its events for free. UFC takes issue with “Justin.tv’s repeated and ongoing failure to meaningfully address the rampant and illegal uploading of video of live Pay-Per-View UFC events by members and users of the Justin.tv website.” UFC (and Ustream) for the names of people who had streamed events illegally. Everyone is in a tough spot here. Clearly UFC is well within its rights to go after people who illegally stream its events—a bar in Boston was actually dumb enough to publicly display an illegal stream last year, —but it would do well not to follow the path that the music industry followed, suing everyone under the sun in order get its way. Again, it has every right to do so, but I’m not so sure that it’s the best way to go about doing things. Justin.tv can do but so much, too. It can have extra staff patrolling the site on nights when there are UFC events, and that staff can take these streams down as they find them, but the truth of the matter is that they’ll come right back in an endless game of whack-a-mole. I have a hard time believing Justin.tv executives are sitting there ignoring UFC streams, or even tacitly approving of their presence. That’s a surefire way to be sued out of existence. As a fan of the sport, I do think there’s more UFC could to do combat piracy other than suing Companies A through Z. UFC’s already doing a pretty decent job of embracing alternative distribution methods—you can watch UFC events on and , for example—but there’s still room for improvement. , but the price, $45, is on the steep side. Surely we’re not going to pretend that watching an Internet stream is as satisfying an experience as sitting in front of a 60-inch HDTV, even if you’re savvy enough to know how to connect your computer to said HDTV via an HDMI cable. A cable or satellite PPV will never buffer or choke up because your roommate decides to fire up BitTorrent. I don’t see why a company like Ring of Honor or Dragon Gate USA can offer full pay-per-view events on a site like for $15 a pop while UFC wants $45. (I also don’t understand why I still have to pay $10 extra for the HD version of UFC events on DirecTV—who still watches sports in standard definition in 2011?— but that’s a complaint for another day.) More than anything else, these lawsuits are the product of the transitional age we’ve entered. Internet streaming of video is , but raise your hand if you’re prepared to throw out your collection of Blu-ray discs in favor of something like . (I’m still shocked that people will voluntarily watch Netflix streams of movies—why not break out a VHS copy of the movie? It looks just as good.) UFC going after streaming sites like Justin.tv may help fight copyright infringement in the short term, but that doesn’t even address other forms of streaming, such as peer-to-peer streaming—to say nothing of people downloading Pay-Per-View events after they’ve aired. Again, this is a very tricky situation for all parties, and I’m not sure there’s any simple solution to be found. |
Video: The Crunchies Song! | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 22 | Those of you who attended the last night or watched the live stream were lucky enough to see perform a new song that he wrote specifically for the event. “The Crunchies Song” sums up the event pretty nicely. Find both Mann’s live performance and his official video for the song below. You’ll note that this is actually Mann’s 750th song on YouTube. Yes, he has created a song everyday for over two years now. You might recall some of them, as we’ve posted a number of them — like the one he wrote , the one he wrote about , the one he wrote about the (which Apple even at their press conference), the , and, the one that first put him on our radar, the (and the ). Mann even wrote a song to us on the AOL deal. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36IwajSHweE&w=640&h=390] |
Arrington Ambush Interviews Crunchies VC Of The Year Yuri Milner | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 22 | Last night at the , of Digital Sky Technologies won the VC of the Year award (Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures was a close runner-up). Milner has almost single-handedly created a new class of mezzanine venture capital, allowing companies like Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga to postpone IPOs while still getting a ton of liquidity and huge valuations. Before he could leave the stage after accepting his award last night, Michael tried to ambush interview him. Milner deadpanned his way through the every question, and the result was pretty entertaining (see video above). Arrington asked why his investment philosophy is working out so well, noting that Milner invests at what many people at the time think are absurd valuations. “Because of absurd valuations,” replied Milner. Arrington: “Has that ever not worked out for you?” Milner quipped: “We’ve only made three investments: Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga.” Arrington: “What happened with Twitter?” (a deal DST wasn’t able to get in on). Milner: “Nothing happened.” |
TechCrunch Disrupt Winner Qwiki Hits No. 1 On Google Trends 'Hot Searches' In The U.S. | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 1 | 22 |
Buoyed by news that early Facebook co-founder led an investment in the startup, and startup has hit no.1 on Google Trends in the U.S. That’s a pretty impressive feat for a startup that was virtually unknown six months ago. And the company is still in What makes Qwiki so compelling is its ability to on the fly that combines text, audio, and animated photos. It presents information in a highly visual way, assembling photos and spoken text from Wikipedia and other sources to create visual guides to millions of topics. The startup’s technology is no doubt disruptive and could become a completely new way in which we consume information. Qwiki is planning to launch an , which is in the works. Below is a video of Qwiki’s first demo at Disrupt. |
Gillmor Gang 1.22.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 1 | 22 | The one connective tissue is the tectonic shift in technology caused by the iPad, or as @Scobleizer pointed out, the iPhone. Though @DannySullivan and @KevinMarks insisted on extolling the virtues of the free and open Web, there’s no doubt in my mind that Apple’s (and particularly Steve Jobs’) combination of design, control of a hungry niche marketplace, and political savvy adds up to a defining moment that rolls up media, technology, consumers, and the enterprise. And instead of running plays from their own playbooks, Apple’s competitors are working to undermine or dilute the impact of iOS. Schmidt was not so much a victim of the Apple blitzkrieg as the notion of Google inevitability, or certainly invincibility. No one event or fumble seemed to add up to a reason for the firing, but rather there was the feeling of the absence of a strategy, a game plan, a vision if you must, of how to move beyond the lock on the world’s search market. It felt like the way the pioneers must have felt when they ran out of land at the Pacific Ocean. Cut off from China, shut down by the consumer electronics manufacturers with Google TV, and facing a developer base confused by old style jousting with Apple around H.264 and HTML 5, Brin and Page decided to graduate from middle school. Whether Brin can nail social any more than he has tried for the last few years, or Page can soften up the media against his DNA, the striking question we had was not whether the Schmidt move was too radical but rather why not do the same thing with Ballmer. As @JTaschek ticked off the definition of what a modern CEO does in the Age of Facebook and Twitter, it occurred to me that both Google and Microsoft should look toward someone who comes from the the Industry Formerly Known as the Media to turn things around. Besides, Ricky Gervais is out of work. |
Daily Crunch: Harsh Martian Edition | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 1 | 22 | |
null | Cyan Banister | 2,011 | 1 | 14 | null |
Predictably (And Idiotically), Russian Media Link Airport Bombing To Modern Warfare 2 | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | I’ve run out of outrage to direct at the perpetrators of anti-video-game foolishness who pervade the media worldwide. The issue has been run down many times, by far more capable people than myself, perhaps most visibly in the furor surrounding and its “controversial” mission in which your character is forced to kill civilians in order to keep his cover intact. . That particular teacup has a new tempest in it this week in the aftermath of the tragic airport bombing in Moscow, as Russia Today brings the game in as , complete with absurd testimonials from “experts.” I think I’ll refrain from comment on how mind-blowingly ignorant and reactionary this “report” is. Discuss. Or, actually, no. Let’s not. |
First Previews Of Fujifilm X100 Start Popping Up | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 25 |
My love for the X100 is no secret. I was excited when it was , ecstatic to , and even named it my personal . So I’m a little jealous (but I understand, Fujifilm, I understand) that a few photo outlets on the net are getting their units for hands-on previews. is practical and thorough, as usual, and Norwegian site Akam.no has put up (against Fuji’s orders) showing ISO performance. That’ll probably get taken down, so check it out first. [via ] |
Nikon Wants To Turn Your DSLR Viewfinder Into… A Projector | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 25 |
, filed by Nikon in Japan, is really baffling me right now. The idea is that the viewfinder or eyepiece would serve not only as a something to put your eye to and frame shots, but also as a pico projector. Isn’t that a little dangerous? At first I thought, why not shoot the image out the front? But of course there’s no way to accommodate the lens that’s on there. So I guess it has to go out the back, and you don’t want to add any more openings to the internals than necessary, so it’s got to be the viewfinder. But really, these justifications would only be offered by an industrial designer if you put a gun to his head and told him to integrate a projector with a DSLR. No sane designer would ever want to integrate with . Even if you have a million failsafes, people won’t like it. Man, can that really be what they’re patenting? The picture looks different. But the description is pretty specific. They’ve already got a projector camera, so we know they’re crazy, but are they crazy? At any rate, , so make what you will of it. [via ] |
HTC Flyer Specs: Sense UI, HSPA, Dual Cameras | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | HTC’s upcoming tablets hve been peeking out from various non-official sources over the last few weeks, starting with a , then a few . And now someone has leaked what they claim is more or less . It’ll have the same Qualcomm Snapdragon processor as the Desire HD (model MSM8255), and the 7-inch touchscreen will be 1024×600. So, similar dimensions to the Galaxy Tab. The Flyer also has dual cameras, plus HDMI out. And it’ll support HSPA, the high-bandwidth 3G technology that debuted with the . It’ll also have a new version of Sense on it, which apparently HTC has modified to be more desktop-y (not sure if I’m happy about this). The device is also listed as shipping with Android 2.3, which will put it at a distinct disadvantage to the other tablets coming out. That said, the 10-inch Flyer (or Scribe, whatever it may be called) will likely ship with 3.0. [via ] |
Abound Solar, Thin-Film Panel Makers, Ready To Cross The Pond | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | Abound Solar, which makes thin-film cadmium telluride solar panels, has that will allow the company to receive feed-in tariffs in the U.K. and pursue sales there aggressively. With a feed-in tariff, utilities agree to pay a premium, but stable, rate for power generated from renewable sources, both as the utility uses the power, or as it is fed back through the grid to be redistributed and sold elsewhere. Often , feed-in tariff are meant to drive the rapid adoption of clean energy by homeowners and utilities alike. Critics believe they give a better payout to utilities, and hurt consumers, or that they tip the scales in favor of one technology (like solar) over others (such as wind, or geothermal) unfairly. Solar subsidies in France, Bloomberg reported last week, led to an all-out boom in the installation of residential solar systems, and then to . The agency that guaranteed premium rates for solar generated power can’t cover as much as installed systems have begun to produce at the locked-in, higher-than-market rates according to the report. As a result, the country is cutting the incentives, and that could hurt solar companies that have heavily invested, there. A similar thing happened to the in Spain around 2008, according to a report by analyst Stephen Marcus for Cleantech Group. Japan is currently considering now, too PV-Tech reported today. A decision there is due in February. Abound Solar’s modules previously received certifications from Underwriters Laboratories (UL) and the California Energy Commission (CEC) which helped the company to gather momentum, domestically. The company manufactures its technology in Indiana, having recently secured a federal loan guarantee of $400 million to build its operations there in a facility that once made auto transmissions. To date, Abound Solar (formerly known as AVA Solar) has raised $150 million from private investors and institutions, including: Invus Group, DCM, Bohemian Companies, Technology Partners, GLG Partners, and the Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Program. Mark Chen, a director of marketing and product manager at Abound Solar, said on Tuesday: “We have no immediate projects in the pipeline in the U.K. but are optimistic about our market potential there, as the government is highly supportive of solar. We will follow some of our existing customers there from Germany, Italy and the U.S. including probably Juwi Solar and WirSol both German companies.”
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Minimalist Swiss Block-Clock Is Beautiful, Incredibly Expensive | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/19131982 w=620&h=349]
Why is it that the coolest things are always out of my price range? Wait, don’t answer that. Let me rephrase. Why is it that the coolest things are always out of my price range? Case in point: , which beats the seconds with its little blocks, then opens up crazily to reveal the actual time whenever you it to. But what’s even cooler than this blocky clock? The matching wristwatch: So what can you expect to pay? Well, the wall clock is a mere 90,000 Swiss Francs, so with tax and exchange monsieur is probably going to clear $100K. Yeah, I told you it was up there. Not sure what the watch costs, but I guarantee you’re not going to get it for Casio prices. Or even BMW prices, really. [via ] |
Why 'Angry Birds' Wouldn't Make Sense On Facebook | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | Three weeks into his job, Facebook Director of Gaming Partnerships made bold advances to developers during the M&A panel at . When discussing what games should be built on what platforms, Ryan said, referring to Facebook, a statement which made some noise in the crowd. Ryan went on to say that single player games like the immensely popular on the social network, as building on the almost 600M strong Facebook platform isn’t just about an endless supply of users but about games that highlight interactions. When asked to explain further about ‘Angry Birds’ versus a game like ‘CityVille,’ Ryan said, When asked if there was a game that wasn’t on Facebook that he thinks should be Ryan said When asked if Facebook would ever acquire a gaming company or go into the content business themselves Ryan said no, “ Image:
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Twitter Confirms That They're Being Blocked In Egypt | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | Earlier today, on a lot of chatter that Twitter was being blocked in Egypt amid rising protests. We can now confirm that they are being blocked. Two tweets from the service tonight confirm it. “ ,” Twitter communications head Sean Garrett just out via their new PR account. “ ,” he continued in a second . The protests began happening in Cairo this morning after people rallied together using services like Facebook and Twitter, and after seeing similar protests in Tunisia about corruption. http://twitter.com/#!/twitterglobalpr/status/30063209247408128 http://twitter.com/#!/twitterglobalpr/status/30063554946146305 |
PicPlz Adds Dropbox Support To Preemptively Cure Filter Regret | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | We’ve all walked down the street and seen someone with a weird tattoo and thought, “they’re going to regret that later”. What may seem cool at the time, might not seem so cool years from now. Is it possible that the current crop of mobile photo filters will lead to the same type of regret? clearly thinks it’s possible. A new feature the service today is integration. This nifty ability has been turned on from the backend, so iPhone, Android, and web users can use it immediately. And if you do use it, you’ll be able to automatically save both your original photo and your filtered photo to your Dropbox account in the cloud. It’s a cool integration that’s a good idea. I’m sure we’ll see more mobile services utilize it. But the reasoning behind PicPlz’s move here is just as interesting. As they write: This way, you can use picplz to post images with filter effects and not worry about: Permanently and irreversibly altering your valuable pictures Leaving the unfiltered version of the picture trapped on your phone While PicPlz, like rivals Instagram and Hipstamatic, is built around the idea of taking and sharing photos that have been altered using filters, they’re also clearly aware that some users are hesitant to do this. In fact, there’s no shortage of people who think this type of behavior is simple a fad that will pass. And then we’ll all be longing for our original, unfiltered pictures — we’ll want to remove the tattoos. Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen. Plus, both PicPlz and Instagram have already allowed you to save both the original version of a picture and the filtered version. But this new integration does make it a bit easier to not think about. |
Real Blogs Don't Have Interstitial Ads | Michael Arrington | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | Hey, if I , I have to be able to take it, too. And today I have. We’ve put up this ridiculous interstitial ad here on TechCrunch that appears the first time you visit the site. It’s an ad for Dell. I like Dell, and before I went to Macs I mostly bought their computers. But the ad sucks. Anecdotally I’ve heard that interstitial ads perform well because they don’t give the visitor any choice. They view the ad, then they get on the site. Lots of impressions and clicks and stuff that the sales guys love. But like you I don’t like them. I tend to stop visiting sites that show them. They aren’t as bad as the ridiculous ads that float over the text you’re trying to read, but they are in the same ballpark. They also slow the site down significantly. In the past our sales guys have brought up these kinds of ads, and our CEO Heather has shot them down. In this case I’m not sure who’s responsible. AOL has now taken over some of our ad sales, I believe. And our awesome sales team (who has to put up with ) is handling the rest. I think so anyway, normally I don’t pay much attention to that side of the business. So far my internal requests for more information have been ignored. Whoever did it, I’m going to try to stop it. Which will probably involve six hours of internal meetings and at least one power point deck. So at least you know that it’s going to cause me a lot more pain than it’s causing you. You’ve got that going for you, which is nice. |
Android In-App Payments Coming Soon — Were Delayed Because Developers Were Busy | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | Today at the conference in San Francisco, Inside Network’s Kim-Mai Cutler sat down with Eric Chu, a group manager at Google for the Android platform. The two discussed the platform mainly from a developer perspective. And the initial question may have been the most interesting. When asked about the status of an in-app payment system for Android, Chu noted that it was set to launch last quarter, but it was forced to be delayed. Why was it delayed? “ ,” Chu said. “ ,” he continued. “ ,” Chu said promising that instead in-app purchase ability will come this quarter. “ ,” he said. Cutler asked if the plan was to use carrier billing for this in-app purchases when it does launch? Chu responded that they’ve invested a lot in carrier billing over the past several months. “ ,” he said. But he said it wouldn’t just be carrier billing, they’d use the Android Market payment system as well, and they’re working on adding other methods. When they do add more, developers won’t have to do a thing, Chu said. Later, a question from the audience asked if the in-app system would require the latest versions of Android, Chu ensured everyone that the majority of current Android devices will be able to use the system. Chu also reiterated that apps coming through the Market will have to use Google’s own payment offerings. But those outside the system can take advantage of Android’s openness. |
Did the French government just sell Dailymotion back to itself? | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | So let’s just get this straight. , a French-born competitor to YouTube, by Orange which will acquire about 49% of the company for €58.8 million or about 160 million dollars. Orange can gradually increase its stake to 100% by 2013, however, it appears the deal is not formally signed yet. Reportedly Orange has an has option to buy the rest later, just as soon as the last half of the company has collapsed in value because no-one else will be competing for other 51%. We spoke to an investor inside who told us that Dailymotion has done well against the YoTube giant and it’s P&L had started to turn a corner towards “exciting growth.” This is “not a basket case business” he said and while it wasn’t setting the world alight it wasn’t a case of investors searching around for someone stupid enough to buy it. However, it is the case that the French government screwed around with this deal. Dailymotion raised money from the Fonds Stratégique d’Investissement (FSI), the French government’s sovereign wealth fund. The FSI is also a large shareholder of France Telecom, of which Orange is a subsidiary. So essentially, the French government just sold Dailymotion to itself. More pertinently are the implications for traditional “10x” VC in Europe. Only Balderton and Index seem to be doing $100m exits but there precious few other VCs doing that kind of deal in Europe right now. Atlas Venture and Partech International invested $9.5m in 2006. Advent Venture Partners and IDInvest Partners invested in Dailymotion in 2007 the tune of $34m and is clearly not going to see anything like the “10x” exit normal venture capitalists require. Let’s not even mention the $25m added to the pot in 2009 from all existing backers. As an early investor only Atlas will have done ok. Dailymotion and YouTube both started in 2005 but the latter was sold to Google for $1.65 billion. But let’s not be unkind. Dailymotion has been profitable since the end of last year, it’s traffic had improved greatly, helped partly by the emerging market of India and in Turkey, where YouTube is routinely banned thus making Dailymotion the default option. So the story of Dailymotion is not over yet. But European VCs have a lot of thinking to do right now. |
So Why Should You Care About NFC? | John Biggs | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | If you asked most folks what NFC means they’d probably mumble something about the Giants and wave you off. However, Near Field Communication is here to stay and if Google and Apple’s current and are any indication, we’ll be using NFC devices in the next two years, at least in some specific environments. First, though, what Near Field Communication (NFC)? At its core it’s a low-power radio system that allows short-range data transfer at distances around 3 inches, or 10 centimeters. There are multiple modes, although the most important is passive mode, in which a device acts as a programmable smart card. For example, an NFC transmitter could pose as any number of RFIDs as well as interact, albeit briefly, with security systems and payment kiosks. In short, an NFC transmitter becomes both a wallet and a personal ID.
Why would you want NFC in a phone? Well, NFC is entering the common lexicon through improvements in mass transit payment systems ( as well as ). If you’ve ever been to Japan, you’ll remember the ubiquitous penguin cards used to get into the Japanese metro. However, given the American animus against mass transit — to the extent that in Ohio they gave up Federal cash rather than connect — I doubt that Apple and Google are consider that a priority. However, the iPhone 5 and other NFC-capable phones will be headed to Asia and Europe and so can be used there. There are, to be sure, commuters who would love NFC in the DC, NYC, and SF metros, and that’s not a small constituency. However, it’s not enough to roll out an entire mobile infrastructure for. Our own that NFC will make for an easy way to connect mobile devices with each other. However, NFC isn’t quite the mobile mesh personal area network we’ve been looking for. There are better and easier ways to get data from point A to point B than add an entirely new radio stack. However, general payments seem to be the real value play here. Read this: The main goal for Apple would be to get a piece of the $6.2 trillion Americans spend each year on goods and services, Crone said. Today, the company pays credit-card processing fees on every purchase from iTunes. By encouraging consumers to use cheaper methods — such as tapping their bank accounts directly, which is how many purchases are made via PayPal — Apple could cut its own costs and those of retailers selling Apple products. Qualcomm is already at the forefront of this movement and the eventual move from credit cards to NFC devices with Paypal-like sign-up and cash dispersal is well on its way to launch. Why hasn’t it come yet? Well, the biggest bottleneck is the current install base of credit card machines and the associated costs of upgrading the entire credit card network at once. Presumably card readings currently supporting the RFID payment system will also support future NFC standards, an important concern. In the end, you will have to start caring about NFC simply because it is coming sooner than later. I’d estimate we’ll have general awareness of the topic by 2012 and actual adoption in the US by 2015, thereby relegating “dumb” credit cards to the junk heap of history. Apple and Google are simply looking for a way to cash in on the wave of conversions before that time comes — a noble (and shrewd) goal. |
Bartz On Facebook: They Have More "Little Impressions," We Have More "Display Revenues" | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | At the tail-end of Yahoo’s conference call today, CEO Carol Bartz was asked about competition with Facebook in display advertising. Facebook has come out of nowhere to account for of all display ads on the Internet. “There is some confusion about whether Facebook leads in display advertising,” Bartz responded. “It is because they have a lot of little impressions. We actually lead in display revenue.” But in fact, the two may be neck and neck. In 2010, Yahoo’s reported display ad revenues (after taking out traffic acquisition costs, the part they give to partner sites which run its ads) were $1.89 billion. Meanwhile, Facebook’s for 2010 were $1.86 billion, with ad revenues expected to more than double to $4 billion this year. Take this comparison with a grain of salt because one is real audited numbers versus an estimate of a private company’s business, but if that estimate is anywhere near correct, Facebook will soon surpass Yahoo in display ad revenues as well as impressions, if it hasn’t already. Yahoo showed significant improvement to its bottom line in the fourth quarter, with profits doubling to $312 million. However, its revenues of $1.2 billion (again, minus TAC) were down 4 percent. To fend of Facebook, Yahoo has to get overall revenues growing again, and fast. Yahoo is growing profits by cutting costs (as it did today with ) more than by growing its business. Although if you break down Yahoo’s revenues, display ads is the one bright spot. It was up 16 percent to $567 million in the quarter, whereas search revenues were down 18 percent to $388 million. (See earnings slides below). Bartz also seems to have a better answer to the question, What is Yahoo? She seems to have settled on Yahoo becoming a “great content” company. In other words, a media company. “We just want to create content that is interesting to people,” she said. Don’t we all. [scribd id=47564026 key=key-27mc78aw7crm7ij6di0w mode=slideshow] |
Harman Kardon SB 16 Soundbar Simplifies Your Home Theater Setup | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 1 | 25 |
Home theater aficionados probably won’t be interested in this minimal setup, but I kind of like it. The five-speaker-plus-sub thing is great if you’ve got a room for it, or can afford to outfit it correctly, but for the average apartment-dweller or someone who just doesn’t care that much about surround sound, a good soundbar like this SB 16 from could be just what the doctor ordered. It connects directly to your TV or A/V receiver, and there’s a wireless subwoofer that you can place wherever it resonates best. The soundbar isn’t underpowered, either, with two 3-inch drivers and one 3/4 tweeter for each channel, totaling 100 watts. Add the subwoofer and you’ve got, well, adequate sound for most shows and games. I was just watching Star Wars last night on my laptop, and even with those tinny little speakers you can still get into a movie — but I’m not a surround sound connoisseur by any means. The thing is about this soundbar, though, is it costs $600, which puts it in competition with plenty of semi-budget surround systems. It’s got a nice, convenient design and (one hopes) decent sound, but it’s putting itself out there with that price. People may not believe it’s much better than built-in speakers on some TVs. At any rate, — inputs, remote settings, and such. |
Jive's CEO Throws Down the Hammer on Competitors, Plans 2011 IPO (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | Enterprise software isn’t as sexy a topic as the iPhone or consumer apps. So why do I love to cover it? The fights. While most consumer Internet companies view their market as a warm and fuzzy place where there can be multiple winners, in enterprise software, it’s a slug fest. Companies are competing head-to-head for deals and customers want as few software vendors as possible. That means scrappy founders who love to joust– especially those trained in the school of His Royal Highness of Jousting, Oracle’s Larry Ellison. In this second segment of our sit down with Jive’s CEO Tony Zingale, he throws down on competitors like Yammer and Salesforce and explains why he loves his competitors’ freemium model, saying “They’re the best lead gen source we have, because the moment anyone gets serious they call Jive.”(By the way, if a named competitor would like to come on TCTV and have your say, you’ve got our number.) Only an enterprise software exec would say someone calling his sales force “ex-Mercury sons-of-bitches” was “flattering.” For part one of our interview, where Zingale details the ROI of social enterprise software, go .
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Ge.tt launches its 'realtime' filesharing service | Steve O'Hear | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | , the browser-based file publishing and sharing service, gets an official launch today. The service, which on the surface competes with a plethora of filesharing offerings such as , or newer entrants , claims its Beta version went “viral” in November, seeing 10,000 sign-ups despite the fact no sign-up is required (although doing so unlocks additional features, such as longer storage times and analytics). Three million file downloads have taken place since. The Danish startup’s main pitch with Ge.tt is an emphasis on realtime filesharing as well as doing away with the need to download plugins or desktop software. What the ‘realtime’ aspect actually refers to is that files can be shared before they’ve finished uploading, which if managed properly makes a lot of sense. There’s also little friction, since many file types – images, music, video etc. – can be consumed within the browser too. So, again, this makes it more realtime. For now the complete service is free and ad-supported but Premium accounts are clearly the way forward. Planned for sometime this quarter, large file sizes will be an option as will higher quality video and audio sharing capabilities, and better statistics. |
Sony Ericsson Announces Integration Of Facebook's 'Single Sign On' Across All Android Phones | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | In an industry first, Strategic Business Developer Martin Essl just announced that Sony Ericsson will integrate Facebook’s system across all its Android phones in the next couple of months. Launched in December, Single Sign On is like Facebook Connect for mobile apps, removing friction because it allows you to log into all apps that use Facebook Connect just by logging into one. Essl did not go into the specifics of the integration but revealed that the Facebook app for Android will come preloaded on all phones and there will be an (optional) initial walk through process for Single Sign On as part of the phone setup. Essl also said there would be additional integrations beyond what the Facebook app can already do. says Essl. Connecting mobile and social is a huge thing theme here at the conference and panel moderator Mattheus Krykowski hinted at this announcement at the beginning of the talk by affirming that because it offers easy accessibility of the social graph on mobile. Being able to easily import your friends contact information into your phone is becoming a mobile game changer and Sony Ericcsson’s move to adopt Single Sign On for Android is subtle but bold, as Facebook nears 600 million users (1/10 of the world) the solution to this problem will be increasingly one sided. Other panelists, like Storm 8 founder Anil Dharni, expressed doubts, holding that the Single Sign On system was still |
Fling Mini Joysticks For iPhone Seem A Little Overkill To Me, But Hey | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 3 |
I’m not a fan of the dual-stick touchscreen controls in iPad games. The analog stick simulation just isn’t very intuitive to me, plus my thumbs get sweaty. So getting a physical analog stick on there, which the Fling does for the iPad (or any tablet, really), seems like a natural thing to do. But on an iPhone? Apparently people were asking for it. Did they count on the sticks taking up a third of the screen? Well, if this seems reasonable to you, feel free to . [via ] |
Video Messages Integrated Into Windows 8? | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | I’ve always wondered why we don’t have a more robust video- and audio-messaging system. I mean, you can send an email, and you can video chat, but why can’t you send a 10-second video clip the way you’d send an email, to be watched at the recipient’s convenience? I guess there are ways, but it’s far from common. A tiny icon on the lock screen (seen at right; in the video ), , suggests this may be a built-in feature in the new OS. There are also references to a video app called “Chatter,” though an online communication product already exists by that name, so it may just be an internal code-name. We’ll know more when Microsoft sends out its APIs and dev kits later this year. [via ] |
Rumor: Apple To Bring iOS To AirPort, Time Capsule | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | chews the fat on the possible extension of iOS (in some form or another) to AirPort and other peripherals. The move would make sense: a unified code base and the ability to sell apps for yet more platforms are both desirable. It would also allow deeper integration between the Mac and any wireless accessories for which the router serves as an intermediate. Will we hear about this at WWDC? No way to be sure, but I would guess this kind of thing would accompany a announcement, not a software one, so my guess is no for now. Maybe when they show the we’ve been hearing about. |
White-Hot Flickr Alternative 500px Raises $525K In Series A | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | As the complaints about to pile on, scrappy Toronto-based service continues to grow, going from 1000 users in 2009 to over 85K (around 45K of which have joined in the last three months). And after two years of bootstrapping, the startup is today announcing its $525K Series A round with investment from , and Says co-founder Oleg Gutsol, “The idea of making 500px arose from Evgeny [Tchebotarev] and I having difficulties with the current available platforms — there wasn’t a good service that would allow us to display our photos is a visually pleasing way and be easy to use. I think we tried every somewhat popular service online and still were not quite satisfied. So we decided to build one ourselves.” Founders Gutsol and Ian Sobolev migrated their Livejournal-based photo sharing community to the current site on Halloween 2009 with little fanfare. Recently garnering some as well as drawing in Flickr power users like , and and this of Flickr migrations, the site grew 60% in the last 30 days, bringing in an impressive 2.5 million visits last month. Despite its unexpected scales, 500px is committed to its main goal to help photographers reach larger audiences, with Digg-like Popular and Upcoming pages as well as an editorial staff that curates the Editor’s Choice and Fresh collections. “We encourage young talent,” says Gutsol Tchebotarev, “It is not uncommon to see someone new joining our site and have their photo appear in our popular feed in a matter of hours.” Gutsol plans on using the money to hire more engineers, like everyone else in tech right now, hoping to build a “global platform” for digital photography. The company currently makes revenue by offering a $50 pro-account that gives users custom layouts and giving photographers the ability to sell their prints. |
CrunchDeals: Canon SD1300 IS Point And Shoot For $70 At Radio Shack | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | This is a great deal for a solid point-and-shoot — the was $200 a year ago when it came out, but if you’re near a Radio Shack, you can drop by and — if they have one. I’d call ahead. With 12 megapixels, a 4x zoom, and a 2.7-inch screen, it’s not breaking any records, but you can trust it to take decent pictures (or make a great gift). [via ] |
Review: HTC Flyer | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 3 |
A promising aberration. The Flyer is barely a viable product, but it hints at potential that is almost surely being unlocked in the labs of HTC right now.
When I first heard about the Flyer, I thought to myself “This thing is going to suck, but the next one is going to be awesome.” And I’m pleased to say that my pithy little judgment was more or less correct. The Flyer is a device almost no one will be happy with, but it’s clearly the precursor to something really, really awesome. The idea is simple and compelling. A medium-size tablet that supports pen input. Think of the possibilities! Actually, yes, think of the possibilities. Think of all the things you’d want to do with a pen. Jot quick notes and have it recognize your handwriting. Use gestures to forward emails, mark things read, etc. Draw notes on documents and have it convert to standard annotation. Thought of a few? Bad news: you can’t do any of them. That’s why this review is short. There’s a whole new implementation of Sense here, big versions of HTC’s famous widgets, a custom app and desktop manager. But none of these things are worth talking about because the only thing that makes the Flyer worth considering is, at this time, useless. What can you do with the pen? You can write on any screen and have it save as a screenshot to your Evernote account or gallery. You can draw in the Notes application. You can scribble on your e-books. That’s pretty much it. An entire hardware platform built around the idea of pen input, and the software barely supports it. Anywhere, you understand! 90% of the time, when you put the pen to the screen, it’ll freeze for a second and then you’ll just be drawing on your desktop or app. Helpful if you want to take screenshots a lot, but not if you want to, you know, use this amazing active pen technology for rich media interaction, precision edits on pictures or audio, handwriting recognition, and so on. It’s also unclear when you can use your pen to touch things (buttons, for instance) and when you have to use your finger. And the pen options and button can be touched by the pen. Why? I’m happy to say that the pen works pretty well, though it’s by no means amazing or different from what’s out there. The pen is a decent size and weight, grips easy, and registers on the screen quickly. Lag is barely noticeable and the resolution of the input is good. You can write small if you’re careful, and dot your “i”s with some precision. There’s a bit of lag when “touching down” for the first time in an app or on the desktop, but generally it’s not bad. I’m more concerned about the feeling of writing with a plastic tip on a glossy surface. It feels unnatural and the clacky noise it makes when you’re writing isn’t heartening. The pen itself has two working ends and two buttons. One end can be a pen, the other an eraser, or a “plain” touch, or a special drag. The buttons act as modifiers. The device is a bit heavy, but good-looking, with a front-facing camera for video chats and another one on the back for, you know, pictures. It’s reasonably thin but nothing to write home about. The tapered back and sides actually make it feel larger than it is. There are dozens of tablets for you to choose from; why would you choose one running a custom build of Android 2, with what amounts to a prototype pen interface? There’s no reason to. But even as I disparage this device, I feel real excitement for its successor (perhaps the “Scribe” we heard about before “Flyer” was made official). A slightly larger version of this, with a higher-resolution screen, better pen integration, and so on? Hell yes. But until then, this larval device should be avoided by everyone but the most ardent of early adopters.
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Firm looks to raise €5m to develop EEG headset for smartphones | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | plans to do a capital raise of 4 to 5 million Euros in order to fund the development of its advanced EEG (electroencephalography) headset for the BCI (Brain Computer Interface) market. Still confused? Basically, it wants to develop a smaller, easy to use, EEG device that can be used for mobile smart phones as well as the PC. The upshot is using a small portable headset to run apps on smartphones. Star Trek! Mind Technologies wants to make their EEG headset and thought controlled software “a household name.” We’ll see. For now, the race is on to replace that bluetooth headset with something a tad more powerful. |
Ico And Shadow Of The Colossus HD Remasters Get Priced And Dated In Japan | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 3 |
The remastered HD versions of classic PS2 titles and are finally within reach. Kind of. , they’re going to be hitting Ye Olde Nippon come September 22nd, and will cost ¥3980 (~$50) individually or ¥6980 (~$87) . US timing and price are TBD, but at least we’ve got a ballpark now. [via ] |
Adobe CEO: Android Will Beat iOS On Tablets | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | ’s big man upstairs Shantanu Narayen is betting on ’s Honeycomb platform rather than ’s iOS in the current battle for tablet OS supremacy. Can anyone guess why? If you said “Flash support,” you’re right on the money. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has long been against the use of on iDevices, openly calling the software insecure and crash-inducing. While that could certainly be Jobs’ genuine opinion, Narayen believes that the issue actually has much more to do with the companies’ differing business strategies. “It’s a business model issue,” Narayen said. “It’s all about control of the applications that you can run on that platform that bring that platform to life.” The Adobe boss also tried to squashed the myth that there is no such thing as Flash on iDevices. “What Apple doesn’t allow us to do is to build Flash content within the browser,” Narayen added. “If you can build the application using our tools and compile it down to the iDevice platform, that works.” [via ] |
Nikkei Re-Confirms Nintendo's New Controller Will Have Touchscreen, Camera | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 6 | 3 |
Japanese newspaper the Nikkei has just that confirms the rumors of the last couple months, namely that new system (codenamed Project Cafe) will indeed use touchscreen controllers with cameras built-in. We had before, but the Nikkei has a little more credibility than “a source.” The controller will have a six-inch touchscreen and camera, , and will have tablet-like functionality. At this rate the new controller is going to be twice as expensive as an actual ! We’ll find out next week just what Nintendo has in store for us at E3. |
Forget Google, DoJ Fears Apple Gaining Nortel's "Stockpile Of Nuclear Weapons" — Here's Why | MG Siegler | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | Two months ago, that they were bidding on bankrupt Nortel’s patent portfolio. Why? it’s a defensive maneuver to protect the “relatively young” company from would-be patent predators. And Google is very serious about it. They put up the $900 million “stalking-horse bid” (the initial bid) for the over . Given the stakes, it should be no surprise that the U.S. Department of Justice is looking into the bidding. But interestingly, it may not be Google they’re too concerned with. As today, the DoJ “hasn’t found any major competitive issues that would lead it to challenge [Google’s] purchase of the patent portfolio.” But the same is apparently not true of Apple. The government is concerned about Apple’s history of intellectual property protection, WSJ cites sources as saying. In other words, DoJ feels fairly confident that Google would not be aggressive in going after rivals if they won the patents. Apple? Yeah, not so much. They’re concerned that these patents would simply be new weapons for Apple to use at their disposal. Alexander Poltorak, CEO of General Patent Corp goes one step further, telling WSJ, “You’re acquiring a stockpile of nuclear weapons as far as patents go.” Of course, it hasn’t even been confirmed that Apple will be bidding on the patents. But again, given the stakes, it seems to be a pretty fair bet that they will. Another a few weeks ago says that RIM is also considering a bid. While not stated, the DoJ probably isn’t too concerned about them either, since they’re a smaller player than the big boys, Apple and Google. But what about the biggest boy? Microsoft. Microsoft is actually not believed to be bidding on the patents because they already have a licensing agreement on them. And this agreement would transfer over no matter who ultimately won the patents. And that’s good news for Microsoft. If DoJ has a problem with Apple bidding on the patents, you can bet they would scream bloody murder if Microsoft did. First of all, . More importantly, in the tech space, they are the king of patents. (Well, aside from .) While Apple is believed to have something like 4,ooo – 5,000 patents, Microsoft has something like . Google? They have , we hear. Gaining Nortel’s 6,000+ would leapfrog them ahead of Apple, but they’d still be very far behind Microsoft. Meanwhile, if Apple won the rights to the patents, they’d cross the 10,000 mark. And Microsoft? They’d be approaching 25,000. But again, the number is less important than the suspected intention. Google has simply not shown a history of aggressive IP protection. In fact, they’ve apparently never affirmatively asserted a patent, in legal terms. (Basically, they’ve only delved into IP agression as a pre-emptive or defensive measure.) Certainly, you could argue that this is because with less than 1,000 patents, they’re in no position to go after anyone. But the DoJ seems convinced enough that they won’t even with these 6,000 new patents in their pocket. Apple, apparently, is going to need to do some more convincing along those lines. The auction takes place on June 20. The rhetoric from all these companies leading up to it should get interesting. |
null | Lora Kolodny | 2,011 | 1 | 25 | null |
500Friends Allows Retailers To Reward Customers For Social Actions | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | Consumers are engaging retailers on Facebook and Twitter now more than ever. Whether it is Liking a deal, Tweeting the link to a product, or even participating in a contest, shoppers are mentioning and interacting with these e-commerce sites on a daily basis. The problem with traditional online loyalty programs mirror offline programs, they only focus on rewarding users for simply their purchases. The challenge for retailers is not only how to track online mentions, but also how to meaningfully reward consumers for these mentions. Enter Y Combinator-backed , which offers a platform called Loyalty Plus, which allows retailers to reward their customers for social actions. The SaaS allows retailers to track users Tweeting their purchases, Liking the Facebook page and referring friends. It also allows merchants to reward other actions such as writing product reviews, entering sweepstakes or signing up to newsletters. Each action gives the user points, which can be used towards discounts, or even put towards charity donations. Consumers sign into the Loyalty Plus program on a retailer’s site with their Twitter and Facebook account information and the retailer can then track the social activities of consumers as it relates to their brand. And the addition of the program on a retailer site is fairly simple—the merchant just adds one line of javascript. In terms of cost, Loyalty Plus ranges from $2,000 to $30,000 per month. It sounds like a lot of money, but 500Friends is focusing on major retailers and e-commerce sites. For example, Hotels.com is a customer. Loyalty Plus a compelling idea, in my opinion. Not only does it help retailers engage purchasers and their best customers, but it also helps the company reward consumers. And when consumers feels happy about a brand, especially one that saves them money; it helps business both online and offline. And 500Friends, which in 2010 from Y Combinator, is led by a strong team with experience in the e-commerce and marketing industries. Co-founder has founded and sold two e-commerce companies. CTO Bob Tekiela was formerly CTO of StrongMail and VP of Technology at Sapient Corporation. The company has raised and undisclosed amount of funding from a number of notable investors including Jeff Fluhr, Steve Newcomb, Naval Ravikant, Ben Ling, Eric Chen, Chris Yeh, and 24 others—they have a total of |
Venture Crapital Lets You Play The Tech Bubble As An HTML5 Game | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | Whether you’re on , who held that we weren’t in a tech bubble at the AllThingsD conference, or the now revised (“All signs point to a real bubble, probably starting later this year when a lot more companies start to go public.”), there’s no denying post that we’re in a bubble of people talking about whether or not we’re in a tech bubble. Hence , an HTML5 game built at TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon by , , and . The game, whose creators mostly work at startups themselves, lets you role play an early-stage VC with millions in your piggybank to throw at startups based on TechCrunch headlines. The goal is to sell before each bubble pops, making a return so you can throw more money. You know, sort of like a real life investor. The most impressive part of the game is that it actual company information from Crunchbase. Creator Dmitri Cherniak explains the game mechanics behind it: “Basically the small companies start off with a small radius, but have a fast growth rate because they are super agile. If you invest in them early, you’ll get better returns. The ones that turn green mean they are growing, the ones that are red, are slowing down their growth and you’ll start to lose money. Once you have money invested, it shows you the total amount you have vested in that company. If you click on a bubble you’ve invested in, you get back all that money. But if it is gets too big, it’ll pop and you’ll lose it all. If a lot of them start to pop, then a whole bunch more will pop too, like a real bubble. Each time you throw you invest a half million. If you miss a bubble, you lose that money. That’s part of the game element. If you run out of money, you have to start over. The banner at the bottom generates news stories, which affect how the bubbles grow too. Bad news means bad growth, Good news means good news for the company its about.” Brilliant. Also: You can watch the team tell me that their closest competitor is eBay below and follow them for updates at |
Samsung Galaxy S 4G (Refurb) Hits T-Mo's Prepaid Site With $350 Price Tag | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 6 | 3 | On a scale from one to ten, how excited do you think we were to see the Galaxy S 4G (Refurb) go live on T-Mobile’s prepaid site? If you guessed somewhere around a six or a seven, good job! If you guessed eleven, you don’t quite understand how scales work. While the Galaxy S 4G isn’t exactly a brand new piece of kit (it’s a few months old at this point, and likely to be replaced by the Galaxy S II before too long), we still give T-Mo an A for effort here. A reasonably high-end Android handset for $349.99, sans-contract, on a prepaid bill? Sure — we’ll take it. Alas, there’s some bad news: as of right now, it’s listed as “out of stock”. Depending on how many refurbs T-mobile has laying around, you may have to be a bit proactive with the refresh button if you want to get one any time soon. For those of you who don’t quite remember the Android-powered smartphone, here’s a little refresher course on the Samsung Galaxy S 4G’s specs: [via ] |
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