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Windows Phone Marketplace Hits 50,000 Published Apps | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 27 | With Microsoft and Nokia making a pronounced push to expand Windows Phone’s reach, they need the support of their app developers to give the platform some staying power. Fortunately, it looks like Windows Phone is picking up steam on the app front — reports that 50,000 apps have been published in the Windows Phone Marketplace ahead of their initial predictions. There is, as always, a bit of catch — the number only refers to the number of apps that have been published, so you won’t find all 50,000 apps available for download in your neck of the woods. All About Windows Phone figures that nearly 6,000 apps were published in the marketplace and were subsequently pulled either by Microsoft or the developers themselves. Even so, Windows Phone has hit the 50,000 app mark in just 14 months — it took Android 19 months to hit that milestone, while iOS only took 12. Even if the exact number is a bit sketchy, there’s one thing that nearly all sources can agree on: the platform is growing. Back when the Windows Marketplace hit 40,000 apps, new submissions happened at a rate of about 165 per day, while today’s milestone sees daily submissions hovering around the 265 app mark. That Windows Phone is being embraced by more developers is heartening, but there’s still the question of quality to contend with. The Windows Marketplace is no stranger to spammy submissions that often buried better apps, although to make it less of an issue for developers on the up-and-up. Even so, the practice of mass uploading near identical apps continues: take rkg4u, for example. This developer has had into the Windows Marketplace yesterday, and all of them essentially aggregate content from different sections of CNN and the BBC’s websites. Are these apps useful? Arguably. Do they add anything new or novel to the Windows Phone experience? Absolutely not. And lest you think that I’ve cherry-picked that example, take a look at the marketplace’s — for every useful app you’ll find, there are likely to be 10 feed readers surrounding it. Now the issue of app quality isn’t one that’s unique to Windows Phone, but in a time when Microsoft is fighting for market and mind share, it certainly isn’t helping. While Microsoft tries to make it easy for Windows Phone users to sift through all the junk, the state of their app store could be a ticking time-bomb for them and their users. While potential customers may be swayed by the right hardware and the right OS , a bad balance between compelling and crappy apps could ensure that those who gamble on Windows Phone may not stick around for the long haul. What we need now are killer apps for Windows Phones, the ones that make Android and iOS users look on with unabashed envy. Consider this a rallying cry for all you Windows Phone devs out there — make something great, and let us all know about it. |
Italy Fines Apple $1.2 Million Over AppleCare Sales | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 27 | Today, Italy’s antitrust body has fined Apple, Inc. $1.2 million (900,000 euros) for pushing customers to buy its without adequately disclosing the support that already comes with their device. In Italy, companies are actually by law to provide two years of free support to customers, which, according to the Italian Antitrust Authority, was not clearly explained to Apple customers either online or at the point-of-sale. The report, available via a news blip on or as the full press release , specifies that the fines are being leveraged against three of Apple’s local divisions: Apple Italia, Apple Sales International and Apple Retail Italia. 400,000 euros of the fine is for failing to inform customers of their right to two years’ free support provided by Italy’s Consumer Code law, instead only recognizing the one-year manufacturer warranty. This practice occurred on the websites at store.apple.com and apple.com and at the point-of-sale, says the group states. In other words, customers were sold the AppleCare service even though that protection would overlap with the guaranteed free support provided by law. The remainder of the penalty (500,000 euros) was for selling the AppleCare service itself, after failing to properly disclose the protections, as noted above. Italy says that Apple will need to update its website within 90 days with information about the existence of the two-year guarantee. This is not Apple’s only legal trouble in the EU. The company is also involved in and in with e-book publishers. |
Airtight Is Airplay For Your Google TV | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 27 | Proof of concept though this is, purports to be the first app that will enable Apple’s Airplay on the Google TV. Priced at a mere 99 cents, the app allows you to stream non-DRMed movies to your TV via any Airplay-enabled device like an iPad or iPhone. Music and mirroring are not yet supported and you have to have an update Google TV with the Android Market available. Because of these limitations I wouldn’t recommend that you pick up a GTV just to run Airplay and, because it isn’t Apple-sanctioned, expect plenty of breakage down the line. However, it’s nice to see some cool apps/hacks are percolating up through to the Google TV, thereby improving the platform for all. |
Fire Emblem: Nintendo Announces First 3DS Game With Paid Download Content | Serkan Toto | 2,011 | 12 | 27 | They have been fighting against the concept of making customers pay for extra game content for years, but as previously , has now changed its strategy. According to a report by Japanese business daily The Nikkei, Nintendo has chosen Fire Emblem as the first game on the 3DS to offer paid download content. , the latest title in the , is scheduled for release in Japan in spring 2012 (it has been announced earlier this year). The Nikkei says that players will be able to download additional content for “several hundred yen each time” (100 yen currently translate to US$1.30), payable via pre-paid cards available in various Japanese electronics stores or via credit card. In the case of Fire Emblem, buyers can get additional levels after completing the game, for example. If the report is to be believed, Nintendo is already planning to release more 3DS games supporting the new billing functionality from summer next year. Apparently, the (the successor to the Wii that’s set to debut in 2012), will be getting paid download content as well. |
Google+ Launches 3 New TV Ads Featuring Muppets, Bill Walton & Some Engaged Chick | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 27 | What do you do when your ? Advertise! That strategy has seemingly been working well for the Google Chrome web browser ( ), so Google may as well give it a shot with Google+. Google has released a trio of new TV commercials promoting its fledging social network, featuring Hangouts with celebrities like the Muppets as well as NBA announcers, Bill Walton, Kenny Smith, Steve Kerr, Spero Dedes and Jon Barry. There’s also one of those heartstring-tugging promos showing Hangouts in action, with kids talking to grandma, a girl telling her friends she’s engaged, New Year’s Eve kisses and other such cheesiness, all complete with an Apple-esque background track. The strategy to focus heavily on Hangouts in the new TV ads is a smart one. Google’s multi-person video chat tool, which allows up to 10 participants to “hang out” (for free), is probably the number one selling point for Google’s social network. And even if the first commercial is a bit treacley in its depiction of the feature (hey advertisers: enough with the Apple imitation in your TV ads!) it’s at least presenting an easy-to-grasp use case that will help educate mainstream users about Google+. More importantly, the commercials demonstrate the one viable reason as to why you may want to try Google+ in the first place, given that much of the network is an engineer’s re-creation of Facebook: Hangouts. Hangouts are cool. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo390-3ohW4&w=640&h=360] The other two ads show off the Muppets (seeing a resurgence of cool themselves) and a goofy one featuring NBA announcers keeping up their craft during the strike by calling a home game…taking place on a driveway. It’s pretty funny (and would probably be a lot funnier to me if I actually watched sports, but hey, I get it). [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSsJtzPng5U&w=640&h=360] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3uqtFEe6eo&w=640&h=360] Given that two of the three commercials involve celebs, it’s important to point out that celebrities’ use of Google+ Hangouts has not been without its own (minor) controversy. In fact, the Muppets themselves were at the center of that debate not so long ago, when they launched their first Google+ Hangout, promoted as a chance to “Hangout with the Muppets.” Sadly, , only an ad for the Muppet movie. While still arguably more engaging than a YouTube video spot, Hangouts usage by brands is still very much a challenge for companies looking for the right way to connect with their audience. I haven’t caught these commercials on air myself as I prefer pre-recorded TV, but some of our tipsters sent in the NBA one. (Thanks!) You can check them all out over on . |
The Avengers: A True Tale Of Bad Customer Service | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 27 | With all this talk of 360-degree customer service and Zappos ninjas who help babies out of burning buildings while taking orders for clogs, it’s nice to remember that for every heartwarming tale of customer satisfaction there is a dude like Paul Christoforo. The tale begins with a controller accessory. It’s called the Avonger en-kontrol (my misspelling) and it’s some kind of octopus that helps you press more buttons on your game controller. in February 2011 so you can check it out there. A quick web search will bring up the actual product. I’m not about to give them any Google Juice. Plenty of people pre-ordered and waited patiently for the devices to ship. One customer, Dave, emailed the company with a question: I ordered 2 of the upcoming PS3 controllers (invoice xxxxxxxxx—Nov 3, 2011). Any chance of getting an update of when these items will ship? I’m not really happy about being forced to pay upfront then have the advertised date of “Early December” be completely missed without any sort of update on availability. I really need one of them for a X-mas present as well. Anyways, looking forward to finally using one of these bad boys. Thanks and happy holidays. -Dave The “marketing guru” Paul Christoforo (who runs (amazing, right?)) eventually gets into a heated Internet exchange with Dave ( ) and ends his tirade with this gem of social media marketing done right (warning, NSFW language): LOL Thanks for the Free PR I know the Editor N Chief of Kotaku , IGN , Engadget I’ll be meeting them at CES .The noise complaint was for people high up on the food chain in a corporate world of real estate you have no clue about. Thanks for the Rice Rocket Compliment too love me some motorcycle . Send that over to Engadget you look like a complete moron swearing and sending your customer service complaints to a magazine as if they will post it or even pay attention do you think you’re the first or the last what are they going to do demand us to tell you were your shipment is or ask for a refund on your behalf … Really … Welcome to the Internet ? Son Im 38 I wwebsite as on the internet when you were a sperm in your daddys balls and before it was the internet, thanks for the welcome to message wurd up. Grow up you look like a complete child bro. I Don’t have my controller so im gonna cry to the world … Really ?? Hey take that free time and do something more productive. All you had to do was check the like everyone else , people have inquired but you’re the douchiest of them all J To all our pre-order customers looking for information on the status of their orders after a busy couple of months The PS3 Avengers are on their way from our Manufacturing plant overseas. We are aware that everyone is anticipating having their Avengers under their Christmas Tree and were doing our best to get these orders shipped out as fast as possible. We appreciate you as loyal customers and for supporting our company. Customers will start receiving their products this week before Christmas and After Christmas and into the New Year. As a token of our appreciation we are offering all our pre-order customers and new customers 10$ off your next order with us just enter Avenger1001 at Checkout. Thank you and Happy Holidays! Oh and FYI When a street date gets pushed by a publisher on a video game you pre ordered do you cry to them too ? You just got told bitch … welcome to the real internet check kotaku in 2 weeks when they are reviewing free PS3 Avengers we send them as well as G4 and all the other majors hell yeah , don’t forget to check Amazon, gamestop.com, play n trade , Myers , Frys and a ton of other local stores coming your way you think you speak for billions son your just a kid you speak for yourself no one cares what you think that’s why were growing and moving 20-50 thousand controllers a month. We do value our customers but sometimes we get children like you we just have to put you in the corner with your im stupid hat on. See you at CES , E3 , Pax East ….? Oh wait you have to ask mom and pa dukes your not an industry professional and you have no money on snap you just got told.
If you tl;dred that, here is one of the pertinent points: This is the 38-year-old (and presumably president of a company that is apparently trying to make a living selling marketing accessories) responding to a customer. I doubt this strategy is in the Amazon CSR handbook. The fact that I’m writing about this feeds directly into Christoforo’s sense that any PR is good PR, but I assure you that’s not the case. Battles against Internet tag teams that involve , , rarely end well and products marketed by petulant 38-year-old former real estate salesmen rarely, if ever, ship. It’s easy to build a buzz on the Internet, and it’s just as easy to kill it in a few keystrokes. Wurd up. UPDATE – After many machinations, it’s clear the behind this project and that it’s a legitimate device. Don’t hold responsible for this debacle. |
A Geek’s Guide to China’s Silicon Valley | Kai Lukoff | 2,011 | 12 | 27 | Twenty years ago, Zhongguancun was but farming fields and small houses, far from the city center of Beijing. The ‘cun’ at the end of Zhongguancun literally means “village.” As with much else in China, the change has come lightening fast. Today, Zhongguancun is China’s closest equivalent to Silicon Valley. It’s host to electronics super malls, research centers, publicly-listed tech giants, and hundreds of startups. During my walk to work between twenty-story office towers, it’s hard to imagine this land was farmed but one short generation ago. Here are three reasons why Zhongguancun (or the larger Haidian district) has grown into China’s top tech hub:
Right next door are China’s top two universities, Peking University and Tsinghua University. But the northwest of Beijing is also home to countless other universities, including technical universities like USTB, BIT, BUPT, and Beihang. It’s the raw talent pool that has American industry leaders and politicians bemoaning a new “engineering gap.” The transition from farming village to technology hub began with technology research. In addition to the universities, funding came from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and later multinational corporations (MNCs). As Daniel Shi notes on , “There is just a ridiculous number of MNCs with their R&D centers in Beijing: Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Oracle, BEA, Alcatel Lucent, Google. Nowhere in the US do you have such a huge concentration of R&D organizations in one city.” Soon, a small market emerged in Zhongguancun to sell electronics to students and academics. Jack Xu, founder of lite-blog Diandian, describes a in that scene: In 1997, Zhongguancun Technology Park was a tiny village. It had only two buildings, and an assortment of entrepreneurs hustling their programming skills, taking government contracts, and hiring [Tsinghua] students like me to do the work. At times they might get RMB 100,000 for a contract, but pay us only RMB 5000, thus retaining 95% for themselves. Back then I could make a mere RMB 2000 a month, 1000 for myself and 1000 for my parents, so they wouldn’t need to farm anymore. To me, it was a responsibility, to survive on my own as early as possible. It was also because of my work in Zhonguancun that I became a well-known programmer in a small circle and later a real opportunity came along. That real opportunity was Jack Xu’s meeting with Joseph Chen in 1998. Today, Chen is the CEO of the social network (NYSE: RENN), where Xu worked for five years, including as VP of the Interactive Division.
In America, an entrepreneur hears “government” and runs the other way. In China, government is best kept close, out of choice or necessity. The Internet is one of the most private of industries in China, one of the few without huge state-owned firms, but the government still plays a key role. At the early stage it can be government contracts, subsidized office space in a tech park, or financing from a government-affiliated research institution. The government wants to build Beijing as a showcase capital in all aspects, so there’s extra funding for tech too. Once a startup reaches scale, government connections are key to everything from payment licenses to “content management.” When your video website is blocked because it was found to contain sensitive political or pornographic content, who you gonna call? Virtually all business in China is of “strategic national interest,” but some is extra-strategic. All media firms or even sites with user-generated content must have a big presence, if not their headquarters, in Beijing.
A tech hub can build momentum that feeds upon itself. Startup founders come out of research centers and large technology firms, drawing upon their network for advice, seed funding, and talented employees. When the boss leaves to launch his own venture, it’s common for half of his division—the talented half—to go with him. The employee networks of Beijing-based tech giants like Baidu, Sohu, and Sina are becoming Chinese versions of the “PayPal Mafia.” In “ ,” Paul Graham of Y-Combinator writes, “I think there are two components to the antidote: being in a place where startups are the cool thing to do, and chance meetings with people who can help you. And what drives them both is the number of startup people around you.” Like Silicon Valley, Zhongguancun also has a critical mass of people who are crazy enough to do startups. I wrote that Zhongguancun is China’s closest equivalent of Silicon Valley. The caveat is because there’s a lot happening elsewhere in China too. China’s three Internet giants are Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, but only search giant Baidu is headquartered in Beijing. Hangzhou is home to the Alibaba Group and its e-commerge empire (Taobao, TMall, Alipay, and Alibaba.com). Neighboring Shanghai is rich in gaming, MNCs, and venture capitalists, although they fly up to Beijing to do most of their deals. As far as tech hubs, this area is second after Beijing. Shenzhen is the headquarters of Tencent, China’s largest social networking and gaming company. Equally impressive is the hardware hacking coming out of the region. It’s home to countless entrepreneurial Shanzhai electronics manufacturers who copy, mix-and-mash, to create “ ” handsets and “commemorative” . When you hear about “ Chinese-flavored Android devices”, it’s Shenzhen leading the charge. Other up-and-coming hubs include Dalian, Chengdu, and Xi’an, Silicon Valley is often said to draw top talent because it has one of the best living environments on earth. No one would say that about Beijing. Beijing is an acquired taste, one that’s often smoky with pollution. In a Sinica Podcast discussing , China hand Jeremy Goldkorn of the blog Danwei.org called it “the anti-lifestyle capital, the anti-San Francisco.” The unpleasantness of the city, the lack of Shanghai’s creature comforts or Shenzhen’s sunshine, gives it an edge. There’s a gritty determination to seize the moment, whatever the obstacles in the way. One friend told me that Kai-fu Lee was recently asked why his startup incubator InnovationWorks wasn’t based in picturesque Chengdu, where the cost-of-living is low and the ladies are said to be the fairest in all of China. Lee jokingly replied to his entrepreneurs that when they’re happy and relaxed, he’s not. But do not mistake it for a city of automaton entrepreneurs. Beijing is at once “the center of authority a hotbed of creative thinking” as Evan Osnos writes in “ .” There are . Sites that start as copycats evolve to become unrecognizable from the original, like the red-hot microblog Sina Weibo that today bears little resemblance to Twitter. When TechCrunch held its first international Disrupt Conference, it was right to come to Beijing. It’s dynamic, messy, and very different. But Silicon Valley aside, there’s no better place on earth for tech right now. |
Spire: A New Legal Siri Port For Any iOS 5 Device | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 27 | Well-known iOS hacker (aka Grant Paul) along with have a new tool for installing Siri on jailbroken phones. The Siri port, called “Spire,” works on any phone that can run iOS 5. However, because Apple only officially supports Siri requests coming from the iPhone 4S, a proxy server address is still required. Oh, there’s one more thing: Spire is legal. While it’s technically been possible to run Siri on non-iPhone 4S devices, , those ports have violated Apple’s copyrights. Siri’s resource files, images and code are not meant to be copied and widely distributed. So instead, Spire downloads Siri itself directly from Apple. Clever! Once the 100 MB download is installed on the jailbroken device, users will have to configure the software with a proxy server address. Explains Paul via the , “Apple has made it very likely impossible to defeat the authorization requirement [for Siri]. I reverse engineered it, and it does not appear possible to connect Siri to the cloud without information from an iPhone 4S.” Remember, hackers don’t often throw around words like “impossible” too often. Clearly, Apple has some heavy-duty security in place for managing Siri requests. So how does one get a proxy address for Siri then? Paul suggests that you could ask an iPhone 4S-owning friend for their authentication tokens. But more interesting is his speculation that we will soon see for-pay Siri proxy services that charge a monthly fee for access to a copy of Siri installed on their own iPhone 4S devices. A third possibility – and one the hacker community would have to build – is to rip out Siri’s guts and replace it with Google Chrome’s to decode the Siri requests and return results. In other words, as of now, Spire is a good first step towards a legal implementation of a Siri port, but it’s going to be hard for people to until there are solutions for legal Siri proxies, too. Spire is available now in the jailbreak app store, Cydia. |
Social Censorship in India: Much Ado About Nothing | Semil Shah | 2,011 | 12 | 11 | TechCrunch Another year, another attack on the Internet. Lately, though, it’s not a loose collective of individual hackers sitting in dark rooms trying to wreak havoc. This time, stronger forces and vested interests are stepping into the game. In the U.S., bills that threaten how content is shared online surfaced in Congress. Large media companies are leveraging their power to team up with some elected officials. These forces are being met with resistance courtesy of some of the most esteemed technologists the web has to offer. Whether it was MIT Media Lab’s passionately the importance of open-source movements in the , or of Union Square Ventures openly SOPA, or the founders and investors (including USV and ) of Tumblr the platform to encourage users to directly contact their elected officials in opposition to SOPA, influential technology personalities (many with roots in Mozilla) have focused attention on ensuring the web remains open for any consumer self-expression engines that come to pass. As a democracy, the U.S. is in a privileged position to have these public debates. Some countries (like those in and around the Korean peninsula) don’t have that luxury, which is why it was curious to see a high-ranking minister in the Indian government recently make global headlines around a meeting he called with the Indian offices of the major social networking sites to discuss the monitoring. [Read reporter reporting on the story, .] At issue, according to India’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, (and as reported by the ), were messages slandering one of India’s most revered and powerful political individuals, . And there you have it. In a matter of a few weeks, the world’s most powerful democracy and the world’s largest democracy engaged in their own specific battles over the future of how information can be monitored and circulated online. Whereas in the U.S. the fight centers around freedom of expression (through sharing) and copyright, the suggestion made by India’s Sabil tugged at the core of self-expression itself, monitoring potentially disruptive comments generated by social media in the name of preserving the peace within an extremely diverse democratic society. On their own, it’s likely Sibal’s statements and the corresponding kerfuffle are much ado about . India’s mainstream media is expert at drawing out inflammatory statements from persons of interest, and powerful members of the Indian government are oftentimes all too willing to supply those soundbites. In this particular case, it’s possible Ms. Gandhi, someone who is powerful and revered, expressed frustration over seeing her name slandered on social sites and enlisted Sabil to draw attention to it. Naturally, the Minister invoked some arcane laws that could be enforced, yet most recognize India is home to millions of innately expressive people who would be nearly impossible to silence. Or, the negative comments in social media about Ms. Gandhi could be the early foments of a deep-seated, not-often-discussed fear among those with media or government power in India. What if hundreds of millions of citizens, the majority of them young, pick up smartphones (after completely skipping desktops and laptops), sign up for social services, start connecting with others and sharing their views, and begin to express frustration (either with their real names or anonymously) in a manner that amplifies exponentially, to the point where reality is distorted and the status quo is challenged? As any reader of (or contributor to) knows all too well, not many take the time to leave glowing comments. It’s in the comments where the status quo is challenged, and that’s why comments are important for debate and discussion. It’s too easy to mock Sibal as clueless in making these types of statements. Let’s not forget he’s a professional politician in India and, therefore, quite savvy at this game. The Indian government isn’t going to act on these kinds of laws because the people will not allow it — especially those technology enthusiasts currently playing host to and his sojourn to the Indian capital. More likely, Sibal may be using the mainstream media to send a message, a friendly reminder to technology companies headquartered outside its borders, as well as its own citizens, that the Indian government wants its brand of democracy to grow and not face resistance from within. Ironically for India, this all highlights a great paradox it will face: A young, energetic country rising in economic power, continuing to grow in many diverse ways and developing newer technologies by the day. And in pursuit of these large markets, normal citizens will become empowered and have access to tools that make them more productive and relevant, potentially to the point where they could challenge parts of a complex Parliamentarian system that protected them for so long. The fun part is that it’s not a matter of “if,” it’s simply just a matter of “when.” India’s democracy has, so far, been quite remarkable at remaining intact despite the country’s extreme social, religious, and economic diversity, and there’s no reason to think it won’t adapt as the culture changes with new communication devices and channels. Setting India aside, one could look at 2011 as a potentially historic year with respect to governments and each one’s citizenry. Of course, the year began with in part of the Arab world, spanning from the Middle East to North Africa [related: a great on human routers by ], and most recently, protesters in Russia taking to the streets to dispute elections and express frustration with its most powerful leader. Here in America, the #Occupy movement, though still largely undefined, has reached mainstream status in terms of name recognition. We don’t know what will happen to it in the next few weeks, or in 2012. This is the nature of the time we live in, combined with the hardware and software tools we have at our disposal. Despite the reams of predictive statements you’ll read over the next few weeks, the only for 2012 is that it’s likely to be as uncertain as 2011, and as a result, those with deep, wide, and entrenched interests — such as the mainstream media, or even government — could continue to see gradual shifts in the balance of power from highly-centralized system to ones that are composed of loosely coupled groups, working in concert, attempting to make the world they want to live in for themselves, no matter what stands in their way. Photo Credit: Flickr / |
The $99 TouchPad Sale Overwhelms Ebay As Consumers Snatch Up The Discontinued Tablet | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 12 | 11 | And like that they’re gone. $99 TouchPads hit ebay right on schedule and were gone within minutes. But that’s to be expected, really. It’s not often that a solid piece of hardware like the TouchPad is available for so cheap. And thanks to , the tablet’s operating system, webOS, will be around at least in some capacity for as long as there’s a demand (and developers). The sale started at 7pm EST on HP’s ebay store indicated. Both the 16GB and 32GB models were available for $99 and $149, respectively. I watched the 16GB model disappear from ebay within 10 minutes. As of this post’s writing, 2 hours after the sale began, only one SKU of the $150 32GB TouchPads although those will likely be gone soon as well. But good luck as ebay is still flaky hours after the sale started. Twitter and forums sites quickly relayed the troubles of many buyers shortly after 7. Ebay was crashing. PayPal was lagging. The whole thing was a mess. For a short moment in time, HP’s tablet was anything but an unwanted iPad clone. Some what surprisingly, consumers could buy more than two TouchPads. The original memo indicated only two SKUs, which as interpreted as two TouchPads per person. But there were several SKUs for each the 16GB and 32GB. Some buyers likely took advantage of this and bought up a gaggle of TouchPads. This land rush of sorts reaffirms that consumers overwhelming want a tablet but are seemingly turned off by the current prices. The iPad dominates the $499 and higher price point and Apple has encountered little trouble selling units even at that price. Competitors have not been so lucky for a number or reasons. However, instead of fighting the iPad directly with competitive hardware, Amazon and Barnes & Noble are undercutting the current champion with low-cost hardware and a curated (some would say walled) user experience. It’s working. The $199 Kindle Fire was the top seller on Amazon for weeks before it was even released. Likewise, B&N more than a million Nook Tablets in just a month. Consumers want a low-cost tablet device — to produce starting in 2008. Tonight’s fire sale might be the last HP webOS hardware the world sees for a while. But webOS isn’t dead. HP stated last week that there will be new hardware in 2013. As for the operating system itself, HP is releasing it under an open source license, effectively releasing a domesticated animal into the wild. But for a very short time that puppy was loved. Unfortunately, it’s owner (Palm) didn’t have the room to let it grow so the dog was sold to HP who, as it turns out, didn’t have the patiences or the time for proper development — you know, metaphorically. But now that webOS is open, or will be shortly, the TouchPad has a real shot at living a full life. |
Sean Parker And Shervin Pishevar At Le Web: “If You Don’t Fail, You Haven’t Tried Hard Enough” (Video) | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 11 | [youtube=http://youtu.be/jxNhc64b_po&w=640 &h=400] Last week at , Alexia interviewed and onstage in what turned out to be one of the most-buzzed about sessions. Here is the full video for your weekend watching pleasure. It’s a great discussion that ranges across the state of startups, venture capital, music, and . Parker bemoans the surplus of venture capital for its effect of diluting the talent in the tech industry, a point he’s . “It prevents the aggregation of talent around great ideas,” he says. He emphasizes the need for a great team from the get-go. “People are the greatest asset class,” Pishevar agrees. The conversation quickly turns to Gowalla, which recently was acquired by Facebook, and why it . “If you don’t fail, you haven’t tried hard enough,” says Pishevar. He warns against “success amnesia.” Behind every great success there are failures. Learn from them. “The product was too similar to Foursquare,” says Parker, noting the obvious. He thinks that “there were things they could have done,” which he suggested to the team at the time, but “they did not want to consider alternatives.” Both however say they are happy with the outcome (Parker is a big Facebook shareholder). Speaking about his own failures, Parker says, “We failed with Napster to build a legal licensing model. As a result, we watched the industry we loved collapse.” But “the biggest failure we made there was hiring. We built the wrong team.” He warns that when you have a startup with a lot of hype, “it inevitably attracts a certain breed of parasitic leech that if you do make the mistake of hiring, you have to realize your mistake quickly and eradicate it like you would any kind of insect.” |
Navarrow Wright: There Is A Diversity Problem In Silicon Valley | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 11 | Race and Silicon Valley has been in the news lately, especially after CNN used an of TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington to promote a documentary on the subject. Lost in that was a more substantive discussion of the issues. Namely, is Silicon Valley a true or does it have a diversity problem? , the co-founder of Global Grind and current CTO of , which operates and other sites, came into the TCTV studio to have “the race conversation” with me. “It is a meritocracy at some level,” Wright acknowledges. “I think the challenge is how do you get involved in that ecosystem.” In his view, one of the biggest factors keeping the number of black tech entrepreneurs down is that not enough people from his community are trying to become entrepreneurs. There is a “perception problem in the minority community,” he says, that “it is easier to become a celebrity or athlete than an entrepreneur.” How do we change that? Watch the video. |
comScore: U.S. Online Holiday Spending Surges 15 Percent To A Record $25 Billion | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 11 | comScore just its U.S. online holiday spending numbers for the season to-date, and as predicted, consumers continued to spend online in record amounts. For the first 39 days of the November to December 2011 holiday season, $24.6 billion has been spent online, which is a 15 percent increase compared to the same days last year. The most recent week ending Dec. 9 reached $5.9 billion in spending, up 15 percent with 3 days surpassing $1 billion in spending. For the holiday season-to-date, six individual days have surpassed the billion dollar threshold, led by Cyber Monday at $1.25 billion. To put this in perspective, seven individual shopping days have surpassed $1 billion in spending, and the majority of these took place this year. leads with $1.25 billion in sales, and Monday, December 5, 2011 now ranks as the second heaviest spending day in history at $1.18 billion. So why are so many people flocking online? It’s partly due to more emphasis on coupons and deals as well as an increased amount of free shipping offers by retailers. Another interesting factor to consider is how much mobile helped contribute to this year’s surge in online spending. More and more consumers are , and making purchases on their mobile phones both from their couches, desks and from inside brick and mortar stores. E-commerce companies are quickly catching on to this trend, and are even offering strong incentives (i.e. ) to use and buy via mobile apps. And there are still more big spending days on the horizon. Tomorrow brings Green Monday. The term “Green Monday” was coined by eBay in 2007 to describe the Monday occurring around the second week of December, which has tended to be the heaviest online spending days of the year, as it is one of the last days of the week where consumers can purchase and still receive shipping by the holidays. Over the past six holiday shopping seasons, “Green Monday” has consistently ranked among the top spending days of the season. Free Shipping day is also this week, which is a marketing event that takes place Friday, December 16, and is also one of the last days when merchants offer free shipping with delivery by Christmas Eve. comScore says that in past years Free Shipping Day has helped boost online spending activity later into the season. Last year’s Free Shipping Day, for example, was the third heaviest online spending day of the year at $942 million, a 61 percent increase from 2009. With more spending on the horizon, clearly e-retailers are in for a very merry holiday season. |
Google’s 3 Top Executives Have 8 Private Jets | Jon Orlin | 2,011 | 12 | 11 | A surprising piece of news was buried in an article this week. Friday, the three top executives at , , and , are offering to pay $33 million to finish the restoration of the historic airship hangar at Moffett Field. The giant structure, built in the 1930s and called , sits a few miles from the Googleplex and it’s well known the Google executives have special permission from NASA to park their jets at Moffett. The jets are not owned or operated by Google. Instead, the 3 Google leaders operate the fleet through an LLC called H211. Google has no official relation with H211. Ken Ambrose, the Director of Operations for H211, announced the funding offer at a public meeting this week. He also complained that NASA, which owns Hangar One, has taken too long to respond to the offer. On first glance, it sounds like a purely noble gesture by the Google trio. The building is in the middle of a project to strip toxic materials in its siding. Lack of taxpayer funding to complete the project has raised fears that could lead to the demolition of one of the world’s largest freestanding structures. But, as the Mercury News reported, “There’s a catch: They want to use up to two-thirds of the floor space of the hangar to house their fleet of eight private jets.” Most of the members on the Hangar One committee, along with the local congresswoman, support the idea, although there is some concern about the public-private partnership. But whoa. Wait a minute. The Google execs own eight jets? 2.6 jets per person, for the 2 co-founders and the executive chairman? In 2007, TechCrunch on the Google execs first jet, a modified Boeing 767 and the controversy it created. (See Search Engine Land’s for more info.) In addition to the Boeing 767-200, they own two Gulfstream Vs. Later, in 2007, the team picked up another Boeing, a 757 this time. A NASA lease document with tenant H211 lists those four planes. ( ) Images of the Google jets can be seen . Despite some fake images appearing around the web, there’s no Google logo on the planes. In 2008, the New York Times reported they appear to have added a to their fleet. But, counting the fighter jet, that’s only 5 jets. What about the other 3? Perhaps, the Merc got the number wrong? Thanks to a “Google Search,” two more articles came up confirming Ken Ambrose said “8” planes at the meeting. One in the , and another with of the Moffett Field Restoration Advisory Board subcommittee meeting on a Moffett Users website. At the meeting, a member of “ ” said they don’t want to see “Google” in 200-foot letters on the hangar as part of the deal. Ambrose said the Google team didn’t want that either. TechCrunch is trying to contact Mr. Ambrose for more information about the additional three jets. The Google leaders and their friends are not the only ones using the jets. NASA conducts flights on the planes with its own researchers and equipment to gain scientific data. That deal was part of the unusual agreement with NASA allowing the Google team the use of Moffett Field, an airport closed to private aircraft. When that deal was announced, it raised concerns from the local community leaders opposed to expansion at Moffett. Other Silicon Valley private jet owners and users, who are not allowed to use the airport, couldn’t have been pleased either. The Google jet fleet has been a source of fighting and controversy over the years. The on the lawsuits with its contractors and the famous dispute, settled by Schmidt, over what size beds the co-founders would have on the plane. Of course, lots of CEOs and executives own or lease private jets. On one hand, the Google leaders can spend their money any way they please. Their time is valuable, and using the jets makes them more efficient. On the other hand, using private jets is not very environmentally friendly for leaders of a company that prides itself on being green. . Speaking of private jets, Michael Arrington posted this photo of the TechCrunch jet on his in 2010. It hasn’t been seen since our AOL buyout.
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Verizon Cuts $50 Off The Droid Xyboards On-Contract Price But They’re Still Too Expensive | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | It seems that Verizon (or Motorola) got the message: The Droid Xyboards when tied to a 2-year commitment. Until today, Verizon was selling the 10.1 Xoom 2 for $529 and required a 2-year contract. Ludicrous. Well, after today’s price cuts, the prices are less absurd, but just slightly. Verizon lopped $50 off the on-contract price making the with retailing just $379. Of course buyers are still required to sign on the dotted line in order to get that price. But the unsubsidized models didn’t get the same love. Never mind that the new tabs are essentially downgraded versions of the 10 month old Xoom, these models still retail for $699 for buyers smart enough to avoid the contract (but dumb enough to want the tab in the first place). Even with the lower price, the 2-year commitment is very troublesome. By essentially locking an early adopter (every single Android tab buyer still qualifies for this title) into already dated hardware, carriers are dramatically slowing the adoption rate. If Apple or AT&T had employed the same tactic with the original iPad, the iPad 2 would surely not been as big of a hit. But now, whatever delusional Android fanboy buys a Xoom 2 from Verizon on-contract, barring paying the high ETF, they’re locked into that particular model until at least 2013. It looks like everyone’s to blame for another Motorola tablet failure. |
The Gizmon iCA Might Be The Ultimate iPhone Camera Case | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | There are iPhone cases and then there are…more iPhone cases. There are probably close to a gazillion different iPhone cases available now. But none are as elaborate as the — at least none I have seen. The case — if you call it just a case — is made of 32 different polycarbonate parts, it features a conversion lens mount with additional optional lenses, and adds a working shutter button and optical viewfinder. There is even an optional faux pancake lens for additional street cred with the camera nerds. It gets better, too. No, seriously, this contraption is genius. The case is available in white, black, and retrotastic orange. Both corners feature eyelets for a neck strap because, you know, if you have such a case, it deserves to live outside of a pocket. There’s a tripod mount even a mirror inside the fake lens for self portraits. Four Corner Store the Gizmon case in the States along with a host of other unique photography-themed items. The iCA alone cost $65 with the strap running an additional $30 and the lenses costing $45 for either the macro or fisheye. It’s really a fair price to pay to dress your modern smartphone as a sexy rangefinder.
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Google Testing New Email Subscription Ad Format | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | Google is experimenting with its Google Adwords offerings, attempting to go beyond regular text ads with Google Email Subscription Ads, allowing companies to buy ads that automatically fill in a “Subscribe to newsletter (or whatever, I’m assuming)” slot with a given searcher’s Google email address during a search. Emailblog earlier this month that the ads were with automaker Honda (ads which I still can’t see), and it seems like those offerings have expanded to results for email marketing services AWeber and Constant Contact (ads which I can see). Clicking on the “Privacy” button next to the subscription button lets you know that your email will be sent to the advertiser — In case that wasn’t clear(?). When asked to explain what exactly was going on, a Google representative gave me the following statement (which is basically a more official sounding version I just said): Something tells me TONS of email marketing companies will be using this once it’s actually official. My requests about whether or not (and when, if so) this will become a permanent feature have as of yet gone unanswered by Google. |
Could ‘Watched On’ Facebook News Feed Stories Save Netflix? | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | After a , Netflix stands to replace some of the 800,000 subscribers it lost. It’s savior? The Facebook news feed. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives of 1988 to allow people to opt in to having their movie rental activity shared. This Act had ‘s launch in the US. Now the Facebook news feed is beginning to show “Josh Constine watched The Walking Dead on Netflix” stories that point back to the Netflix site. After being enticed by something a friend has watched, Facebook users might sign up and pay on so they can watch too. So far we’ve only spotted these stories coming from Facebook employee profiles. Above you can see how they look (ignore the Netflix logo I added). They would appear in the Ticker, news feed, and Timeline. They may just be tests in preparation for the official US launch of the Netflix Facebook Open Graph app. Regarding the roll out of the news feed stories, Facebook declined to comment and we’re awaiting a response from Netflix. The Facebook Open Graph platform launched at f8 in September has helped Facebook users. This contributed to the 1.5 million new paying subscribers it pulled in this year. That kind of growth could help Netflix bounce back from a that scared off subscribers, an embarrassing scrapped move to , and its . Despite these issues, than on its competitor Hulu. The TV studio-backed Hulu launched its own Facebook app in July, and then which offers several ways to share videos with friends. Netflix could grow its lead over Hulu through the US release of its Facebook app and the viral distribution it would receive through the news feed. Netflix won’t be the only company capitalizing on Facebook’s Open Graph platform, which can automatically share a user’s in-app activity with their friends. Facebook yesterday announced that non-partnered third-party developers would begin to have their . That means in addition to seeing what friends “read”, “watched” or “listened to”, any developer will be able to gain news feed, Ticker, and Timeline exposure for their apps. Until then, Ticker and Timeline are a bit sparse, providing added visibility of apps like Spotify and The Washington Post reader. Netflix should be hoping to get its app legal for US launch before Facebook gets more crowded. : A Netflix spokesperson confirmed that “currently only Netflix employees and non-US members can connect their Netflix and Facebook accounts. Unfortunately US members can not currently connect their Netflix accounts to Facebook because of the ambiguous Video Privacy Protection Act. We hope this will change soon.” |
Tiny Flashlight Illuminates The Kindle Fire’s Appstore Impact | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | Early this year, Amazon made a : it took advantage of the open nature of Android to launch an Android Appstore — one that serves as a direct rival to Google’s official Android Market, which comes installed on many Android devices. Thus far, Amazon’s early traction hasn’t been particularly strong, primarily because the Appstore is such a pain to install: you need to dive into your phone’s Settings menu, enable a scary-sounding option allowing the installation of ‘non-Market’ applications, and then manually download Amazon’s store yourself. Most Android users aren’t going to take the time to do this, even though Amazon is doing its best to offer plenty of incentives like free and discounted top-tier applications. But things are starting to change, thanks to the Kindle Fire. The Fire, which is Amazon’s $200 challenger to the iPad (and the entire tablet market), unsurprisingly comes with Amazon’s Appstore pre-installed, so users don’t have to jump through any hoops to use it (in fact, they don’t really have any choice but to use it). And, as Amazon this morning, there were a lot of Kindle Fires sold over the holidays. But just how much growth did the Appstore see as a result? Nikolay Ananiev, the developer behind the popular application Tiny Flashlight, has shared some stats that give quite a bit of insight into how the Appstore is faring. He says that prior to the holidays, Tiny Flashlight was doing around 800-1000 downloads per day — a far cry from the roughly 200,000 downloads he gets each day on Google’s Android Market. But last week, Amazon’s store started picking up steam: was downloaded over 3000 times on December 23rd, and skyrocketed to 33,000 downloads on Christmas day (see graph below). To put that in context, Ananiev says that the application was downloaded at least 310,000 times on Christmas (he can’t give an exact number, as Google doesn’t break it out by day). Put another way, Google’s store drove nearly ten times as many downloads on Christmas day — but given that the Kindle Fire has only been out for a month and a half, Amazon should be encouraged by these results (though we’ll have to wait and see if the growth is sustained). Note that Ananiev says that the application hasn’t been placed on any featured area on Amazon’s Appstore, though it is highlighted in organic lists on both stores as one of the top Utility/Tool apps. Ananiev also says that Tiny Flashlight now ranks among the top 30 applications overall on Amazon’s Appstore, and based on his observations, he guesses that the top three applications average more than 70,000 downloads a day. Oh, and if you’re interested, you can find Tiny Flashlight on Android Market , and Amazon’s Appstore . |
Update: Facebook Officially Releases “Messenger For Windows” Desktop Client Following Leak | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | : Facebook tells me it has now made the Messenger for Windows in its . Users can also learn details about the client there. Still no sign of a Mac version, though.] The test group for “Facebook Messenger for Windows” just got a whole lot bigger. Israeli blog has leaked a Facebook CDN for the desktop chat client last month. The client includes notifications and the Ticker which link back to Facebook.com, and therefore could drive engagement with the website. Messenger could also pull market share away from other desktop chat clients like AOL Instant Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. The client will help Facebook in two core ways: I just tested the Facebook Messenger for Windows client version 2.0.4373. It’s snappy and functions intuitively. It can float or easily be snapped to the desktop’s sidebar. Similar to the standalone mobile Messenger apps Facebook released this summer, frequently contacted friends automatically move into a favorites section above the complete list of friends who are online. My only gripe is that the log out button is relatively hard to find. AIM and Windows Live Messenger should be worried. Sorting through a buddy list of cryptic screen names can’t match the user experience of an authenticated identity chat client. Facebook’s client also delivers messages to whatever device a recipient is currently using. That means even if a recipient isn’t currently logged in, they’ll easily be able to access their messages. AIM and Live Messenger will still be useful for staying in contact with internet pals who aren’t your real friends, but Messenger for Windows seriously reduces the unique value of these services.Clients that handle chat across different platforms exist, but to work with Facebook they take configuring that can confuse and deter mainstream users. Facebook could potentially kill the download link to prevent the app from reaching more users before its official launch. So, if you want it, . Even then, Facebook could release an update to the app and cease support for this leaked version. However, this would interrupt its test and force those it actually wanted to give access to to re-download. There might be some unseen security or stability bugs that need to be fixed. Still, Facebook shouldn’t worry too much about this leak as product looks good. Instead, it should consider capitalizing on press of the leak by soft launching now. [ : Facebook has done just that. An is now publicly available in its .] |
600,000 Calls Later, Callin’ Oates’ Developers Share Their Code | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | When called me up to talk about his new project, Callin’ Oates, I laughed it off and called it “silly”. Built with the help of a friend to satisfy the new-hire requirements at Michael’s new job (at Twilio, where every employee has to build an app with their cloud-based telephony API) it’s an on-demand Hall & Oates hotline. Call the number, pick a song, hear Hall & Oates music. Simple. One week, 600,000 phone calls, and a of later, it’s probably safe to say this little weekend project was a success. I still think it’s silly. To celebrate their success, (the aforementioned friend) the service’s code and a quick tutorial on how to put it all together to build a hotline of your very own. Think of the possibilities! Bob Dialin’! Rung D.M.C! The Rolling Tones! Alas, gag clones aren’t Butler’s intention in releasing the code. Instead, the guys hope that bands will take the concept and make their own hotlines as a new form of promotion. Sure, that kind of ignores that a good chunk of Callin’ Oates success presumably stems from the hokeyness of the whole thing — but hey, free knowledge! Butler is releasing the code via his newly formed blog, where he plans to dive deeper into developing with Twilio’s APIs over time. And for the curious: Butler is neither employed nor affiliated with Twilio, outside of his friendship with Michael. At the peak of the Callin’ Oates excitement, I found out Selvidge and Butler were going on the local ABC affiliate for an interview. Dared them to sneak a “meow” in there somewhere… and they did. Catch it a minute and thirty seconds in: |
comScore: Apple Grows Mobile Marketshare From 9.8% To 11.2%, But Samsung’s Still Top OEM | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | comScore has its latest numbers regarding the mobile landscape here in the U.S., finding that Samsung is still the top OEM with a 25.6 percent marketshare, up just .3 percentage points from the three month period ending in August. Meanwhile, Apple’s price drop on the iPhone 4 along with the introduction of the iPhone 4S has taken its share of the market from 9.8 percent to 11.2 percent. Mind you, this report doesn’t include holiday sales numbers (Galaxy Nexus, included), and as we know thanks to . It’s unclear how exactly those activations were split among the two platforms, so there’s no telling if it actually made a difference in market share, but it’s worth considering. These numbers also include feature phones as well as smartphones. LG (number 2) and Motorola (number 3) both slipped a bit during this time frame, along with last place RIM (which is to be expected, seeing that RIM is doing silly things like ). As far as the mobile OS is concerned, Google still reigns supreme with a 47 percent market share, up from 43.8 percent last period. Apple comes in second, taking its share from 27.3 percent to 28.7 percent, while RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia all slipped this period. Most notably, RIM lost 3.1 percentage points in platform market share, dropping from 19.7 percent in August to 16.6 percent. |
7moments Is A Beautiful New Way To Share Private Photos In A Group | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | We’re all familiar with the pain of having to share photos with people. I’m not talking about the staff party album on Facebook, I’m talking about moments that matter – the family holidays, the weddings, big days like those. And this remains an ongoing issue. We can share Dropbox folders all we like. Everything still has to be downloaded and the interface does not suit viewing, especially on tablets. We can ask friends and family to sign up to a private Flickr group, but that’s still another hurdle. Lots of photo and file sharing services are rubbish and many people remain afraid of Facebook’s now quite public nature. Now, a new startup out of Berlin has come up with something it calls the ‘Dropbox for photos’ where you can privately exchange photos in a group: . With 7moments the default is private photo sharing and the design – mixed with functionality – of the site is really its USP. This is a really nice experience in a photo sharing web site. Everyone who has access can download the photos and it’s much easier to use than a Flickr group (where everyone has to have a Yahoo name, then join Flickr etc etc – this is just one click). The private nature works very well. It certainly feels different when someone presses ‘Love’ on a photo which only two people have access to. It’s biggest competitor os ZangZing which we wrote – however, you can easily breach privacy on ZangZing by importing someone’s private album of Facebook Photos into the app. On 7 moments you can only import your own. You can add pictures, download them and add people to sets of photos. You can zoom in and rotate photos and horizontal photo scrolling makes it an ideal Web app for iPad. Photos can be imported from Facebook or drag and dropped from the desktop of Mac or PC and from within iPhoto. Although running as a private beta right now it’s easy to pick up an invite. Business model? It looks like they could ultimately charge for this in a freemium style, such as having a free service but charging for a wedding skin for an album or perhaps filters or ‘era themes’ like the 1950s etc. Started in June, this startup team consists of Stefan Kellner, CEO, David Linner, CTO and “@Kosmar” – CPO and UX, Chief of Product. Incidentally Kosmar is one of the most famous UX designers out there, having come up in 2005. |
Burned By Fleeing Customers, GoDaddy No Longer Just ‘Doesn’t Support’ But Actually “OPPOSES” SOPA | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | Just in time for the aptly named day, our favorite PR piñata just emailed a number of press, with a fresh statement from new CEO . From the email … The statement is from our newly appointed CEO, who makes it clear, we don’t just ‘not support SOPA,’ Go Daddy “We have observed a spike in domain name transfers, which are running above normal rates and which we attribute to GoDaddy’s prior support for SOPA, which was reversed,” said Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman. “Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.” In the statement GoDaddy admits to seeing a “spike” in domain transfers due to its SOPA support — I’ve emailed them to put an actual number to the spike and have yet to hear back. For those that haven’t , domain registrar GoDaddy removed itself from the official over the weekend after ambiguously saying it “didn’t support” SOPA the week prior. Because its support eventually led to a mass exodus of customers, the company faced accusations of purposefully slowing down domain transfers, and even got to the point where it had representatives , begging them to stay. Not the most amazing situation, for any business. So now GoDaddy straight up “OPPOSES” SOPA (ALL CAPS theirs) — But is a statement like that enough to bring customers back? Or is this another case of too little/too late? To read more of our in-depth SOPA coverage |
Facebook Started Saturating The US Market In 2011 | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | Most third party web measurement firms have provided a steady drumbeat of positive growth news for Facebook over the years, as the company has gained tens of millions of users in the US and around the world. But now the social network appears to be reaching market saturation among internet users in some of its early key markets, with one firm showing nearly 75% of all US internet users on the site. Instead of raw user growth, the numbers to watch going forward will be around engagement. The saturation trend has become especially obvious in 2011 here in the US, its first and most important country by size and revenue. The graph below shows Facebook traffic from July of 2009 through the most recent numbers I could find from all publicly available data sources, including , , , , and Facebook’s own (which provides rough reach estimates for advertisers buying targeted ads on the site). The two most consistent sources of data that I have observed in the years that I’ve been tracking Facebook traffic trends are comScore and the ad tool, and they highlight saturation the clearest. ComScore showed Facebook with 102.9 million unique US visitors in November of 2009, 151.7 million a year later, and 166 million last month. So around 15 million new visitors this year versus nearly 50 million in 2010. In terms of market saturation, comScore showed internet usage at 221 million unique visitors in November, indicating that 75% of all US internet users are now actively using Facebook. That’s more than any single other service on the web (although Google and Yahoo can appear larger if you combine all of their diffuse properties). Similarly, the ad tool similarly showed Facebook with 99.3 million active users in November of 09, 145.3 million in that month of 2010, and 157.4 million last month. Of course the company will do its best to reach the other 25% of the online population, through continuing to build out its products and platform and mobile devices. But that’s going to be more and more difficult, as it runs up against pockets of users who prefer using rival social networks, or no social networks at all. The other measurement firms have been all over the place, although they tell relatively similar stories when you zoom out from the monthly anomolies. Compete and Quantcast have regularly adjusted their methodologies after the fact. They haven’t said so, I’ve just observed that, so I’m left unsure of what to make of their Facebook findings. Meanwhile, Nielsen has irregularly published its numbers, (openly) announced methodology changes, and shown odd trends like a big drop in September (the last time it provided monthly US Facebook data). In terms of engagement, Facebook has said over the years that around half of all users log on every day. Nielsen has more color here, showing that Facebook users spent an average of around 7 hours and 45 minutes on the site per month as of August and September, which is far more than any other site. Facebook doesn’t provide official counts by country, and irregularly updates its worldwide user count — it last said it had 800 million active users, back at its . But you can already see it focusing on engagement in terms of how it talks about itself. As founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at f8, “the next era, the next 5 years, will be about apps and depths of engagement now that everyone has their connections in place.” [US Earthlights image via .] |
LTE-Capable Windows Phones Should Ship In The First Half Of 2012 | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | There are a lot of naysayers out there when it comes to the Windows Phone platform, but as many haven’t really given the OS a fighting chance. Some of it has to do with the fact that people often equate cost with quality, and most Windows phones are (at the moment) rather inexpensive. But Redmond apparently has plans to get some higher-end devices on the market next year. According to (who has yet to formally reveal his sources, but promises the news is legit), Microsoft and its partners will release at least three new LTE-capable Windows phones in the first half of 2012. The Nokia Ace, HTC Radiant, and Samsung Mendel will all run on AT&T’s 4G LTE network during the first half of next year, the Ace specifically hitting shelves on March 18. Thurrott also claims that the Nokia Lumia 710 (which does not run on any 4G LTE network) will head to Verizon in April of 2012, three months after it hits T-Mo shelves in January. Past that, we know very little about the new LTE Windows phones. Will they run Mango? Tango? of what is supposed to be Microsoft’s update plans leads us to believe that Apollo won’t make its way onto the market until late 2012, but it’s unclear whether or not the incremental Tango update will be included on this next batch of phones. Either way, it’s good to see Windows Phone catching up to Android when it comes to LTE support. And if things go as we expect them to, iOS may be the last to join the 4G LTE party. |
How to Survive Your First Year As An Entrepreneur | James Altucher | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | I loved talking to the skankiest prostitutes at three in the morning with a camera crew around me, fires burning in the street, sad, abused people clinging to scraps of life for their pleasures, bailed out prisoners and the drug dealers waiting for them to be released, homeless addicts with nowhere to go and they only weren’t freaks if you saw them at three in the morning . In short, I loved my job. Entrepreneurship ruined it. I’m not like how Mark Zuckerberg describes himself: “a builder”. My guess is, I’m not like most of the smart people who read this blog who go out there and build things to improve the lives of others. And yet, I kept doing it to myself over and over again. Once you enter the world of ” you can’t go back to being spoon-fed by the pencil factory anymore. Sadly. I had a regular job at HBO. My title: Junior Programmer Analyst in the IT department. I told HBO, “you do original TV programming so why not do original web programming.” And magically, from 1996-98, they let me do whatever I wanted to do at three in the morning and then put it on their website. My original job was to do some Unix/ Oracle thing that I was totally unqualified for and didn’t know how to do. So I figured out a more fun idea for myself and persuaded them to let me do it. (Rockefeller. The opposite of me) Someone in the marketing department at HBO told me, “You CAN’T DO THAT.” But, as the readers of this blog already know, who is going to do anything. For John D. Rockefeller it was to roll up all the oil companies in America. Nobody thought he could do it. For Andrew Carnegie, it was to buy all of the steel companies in America. For Larry Page, it was to build the 100th search engine without any ideas about a business model. They became billionaires. For James Altucher, it was to interview all of the prostitutes at three in the morning in NYC for almost no money. We each have the built-in predilections given to us by genes, upbringing, and whatever black magic you call god. Then other entertainment companies started asking me to do the same thing for them. “Can you make our web presence entertaining and fun?” We want fun, they all said. So I jumped ship. Entered the world of the wild. Suddenly I was an “entrepreneur”. I didn’t even know what that meant. I got to the office. I had nobody to call. And nobody would return my calls anymore. I was no longer at HBO. I would cry every day. I wasn’t a natural businessman. But I tried to learn from the 5,000 or so mistakes I made that first year. All I’m saying is, thank god you first-timers have me to now tell you exactly what you should do in your year of being an entrepreneur. Do everything I say below or you’ll probably fail. I’m dead serious. – Only hire people when you are absolutely desperate for more hands. And then start with freelancers. So you can fire them right away. When people raise money from VCs I notice the first thing they do is hire people. After my first company, which was profitable from day one and never raised a dollar, where I raised $30 million from VCs and then hired $30 million worth of people, was fired as CEO and from the board, they then raised another $50 million or so and sold a year or so ago for about $1. – . If VCs put money in your business then no matter what they say, keep cash in the bank. Don’t act like a big company all of a sudden. Do you really need your lawyer at $400 an hour to take notes at a board meeting? Do you really need a board meeting? You don’t need a secretary until you have at least five, paying, profitable customers, if ever. You don’t need a head of sales or marketing your first year. are the head of sales and marketing. You don’t need any VPs. You’re VPs. You just started! – In order, here is the easiest cash you can get for your business Note that the VCs are near the end. Maybe you never need them. Why does everyone chase big-time VCs all the time? Do you really need $10 million in the bank. You just started! I shoud’ve made this point number one. Don’t even start your business unless you have a customer. – Give equity if you have to. Sell your first baby ). Do whatever it takes to get one paying customer. If you are a content site: get a sponsor. If you are a product or a service, get a customer. If you can’t get a customer then that means you have a shitty product or you’re not passionate enough about it. Go back to the drawing board. Take an extra $5,000 and make some new features. Note: I said “$5,000”. Not “$10 million”. – – I mentioned this . Say “yes” to everything. EVERYTHING. If they need surgery performed on them, you’ll do it. If they need a database updated and your company makes tennis balls then say, “no problem, I have a guy for that. He was the database expert of Bangalore. And now he makes tennis balls for us. I’ll send him over Saturday morning to fix your database. And he’ll bring some pastries.” – . Even if you have to do stuff for free. Just get them to yes. They can’t say no, for instance, if you say, “we can blow up your enemy for free.” – for every customer. But only the first time. Don’t kill yourself for everyone all the time. You need sleep! – Don’t go there ever again. – If you don’t stay healthy: physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, in your first year, its a guaranteed failure. I’m an expert on failure. Not having the four legs mentioned above means the chair you are sitting on is going to break and you are going to fall. – , get paid as quickly as possible. Get paid up front. You’re never going to do business with that person again. If his version of “chance” was hiring you then that’s it. He’s back to the pencil factory for his next vendor (no insult to pencil factory workers.) – to come in for all of your employees. This assumes you have an office. Ideally, you have no office. But if you do, and employees are there, then get a masseuse. Make: “thank god it’s Friday” mean to your employees: “I’m so glad I’m going into the office today.” I had 50 or so employees at my first business when we got sold. Massages for everyone except me on Fridays (I don’t like anyone to touch me). – . But you have to do it. If you have a potential client, move it from the phone to the meeting, to dinner as quickly as possible. Dinner seals the deal. Pick up the tab. Ask about their love lives. If they are lonely, hook them up with your best single friend of the appropriate gender and sexual preference. – There’s three ways to do that: The best new customers are your old customers. The second best new customers are your old customers’ friends. . Hire their mentally-challenged nephews. Contribute to their charities. Volunteer where they volunteer. Give double everyone else when they run in one of those stupid marathons for cancer. I say “stupid” because why can’t the cancer thing just ask for the money without forcing people to run for 26 miles. Your entire free moments of the first year of being an entrepreneur should be spent thinking of favors to do for your clients. of “Super connecting” to build up your clients’ networks. The bigger their networks, the more valuable yours becomes. Don’t horde your network or your favors. – any employee with a negative attitude. Employees start to smoke in the stairwell and talk about you. So negative attitudes spread like a cancer. The only way to get rid of advanced cancer is radical chemotherapy to burn off the bad cells. Fire all negative employees immediately. No second chances. You won’t regret it. This doesn’t mean keep only yes-men. But the no-people have to work with you, not against you. If they start grumbling in anger, then they are fired. – , only hire them if they are immediately bringing in enough revenues and profits to cover their salary. Everyone else is a waste of time. – . Companies have a hard enough time selling their own products. Nobody really gives a shit about your products or services. Maybe in year two. But in year one, if someone wants to resell you then say, “sure, give me some phone numbers to call right now.” Then refer to the corollary above. – Remember, they over-promised and over-delivered the time. Then they began to disappoint (or perform like everyone else). Call up the decision maker and offer to do a little project for a little bit of money and . You’ll be first on the speed dial when your competitor eventually disappoints. Which they will. Nobody can make the best purple tennis ball forever. Remember the easiest new customer is…err… your old customers! And then their friends. And then…your competitors’ customers. – By the way, I plagiarized the post that link goes to. But you’ll never find where I plagiarized it from. Just don’t make those nine mistakes in your first year or you will fail. Free PDF of my latest book if you can guess where I take the 9 mistakes from. Then, on the first day of your second year, if you follow the above, you’ll have customers, cash flows, a network of contacts, new friends who will kill for you, and your entire personality will be different. For the worse. So go back, try to repeat all of the above, and In order to stay sane while you get rich. By the way, you still might fail on that first business. But now it’s too late for you. You’re never going back to the pencil factory. You’re an animal, you hunt in the wild, you dig your sharp teeth into flesh and enjoy it, and at the top of the mountain you roar like a lion and everyone cowers in fear. |
Good Luck Occupiers, But Here’s Why “Facebook For Protesters” Won’t Work | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | Members of the Occupy movement are building a “Facebook for protesters” called The Global Square, . Less than a traditional social network, it’s an international collaboration network. While a valiant effort, I see 3 big problems with the project’s concept that will limit its success and impact. The Global Square is designed to allow Occupy Wall Street, local Occupy movements, and other protesters to coordinate and share knowledge across different content management systems. Some of the reasons for starting the project that its developers told Wired include: I agree, The Global Square is something Occupy and other protesters need. To scale Occupy’s flat organizational structure, it will require a way for geographically dispersed groups to interact without using representatives. I believe in Occupy’s goal of widespread, grassroots institutional change, and The Global Square will help. However, here’s why it might not work as well as planned: Coordinating different groups is great, but then what? A major distribution mechanism for the movement’s message has been the corporate social networks. That’s because there the message can reach an uninitiated mass audience and grow the movement’s ranks. In contrast, a dedicated protest could devolve into an echo chamber of the converted preaching to the converted By organizing via these mainstream networks instead of on a dedicated protest network, there would be no loss of momentum from planning to execution. It would also make it significantly easier to onboard new members. If The Global Square and the Occupy movement at large is going to succeed, it will at least need a substantial presence on Facebook and Twitter. It might be better to build there too. Pent up discontent with Facebook and Twitter has in part been relieved through Diaspora and other existing open source social networks. offers a great deal of flexibility in how individual, decentralized “pods” function. Working within Diaspora rather than parallel to it could be more efficient. A “Global Square pod” could also draw participation from those already familiar with Diaspora — a demographic that likely has a lot of overlap with protesters. Unless data was housed in international waters, The Global Square’s data and messages would still be subject to subpoena by the government of wherever it was hosted. If located in the US where its developers reside, The Global Square could make it more difficult for law enforcement to request data than Facebook, or even with authorities. Still, its creators could be punished if they don’t comply with direct court orders for data. With all the corruption and lack of transparency in today’s governments, changing the system is a noble goal. There are definitely advantages to developing a new, dedicated tool for this purpose. To accomplish its end goal, though, The Global Square will need to harness world’s frustration as efficiently as possible. An isolated network may raise too high a barrier to participation. |
Tubalr Is Like Having Your Own Personal 80’s MTV | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | Say what you will about YouTube’s affinity for cats or their audience’s collective inability to write insightful comments, but there’s one thing that YouTube really just doesn’t get enough credit for: saving the music video. As MTV losts its original love in favor of and re-runs of , music videos went without a proper home for nearly a decade. Then came YouTube. The only bad part about watching music videos on YouTube? Everything else on YouTube. The soul-crushing comments; the gawdy artist backgrounds; the endless recommendations. That’s where Tubalr comes in. It’s YouTube’s glorious music video collection, minus all of that darn YouTube. Looking past the fact that Tubalr has a downright ridiculous name (is that supposed to be tubular? Tuba Lore? Two-baller? No idea), it’s quite great. You punch in an artist name, then pick either “only” (to play only that artist’s videos) or “similar” (to play videos from similar artists.) It queues up a big playlist, and you can go about your business as the tunes play on. Think Pandora’s concept, mashed up with Youtube’s music video archive. The search algorithm still needs a of tuning (a search for “Reel Big Fish” built a playlist of nineteen music videos… and one clip called “Jessica the Hippo”, which was three minutes of an older gentleman talking to a hippo at a zoo.) but this is definitely something I expect to have running on one of my monitors throughout the day. |
Tampa’s TechStars Network Member Gazelle Lab Opens 2nd Location In Orlando | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | , the brand-new Tampa Bay-based member which just held in November, is expanding its operations. The accelerator has just announced the opening of second location in Orlando, Florida, where it will be working with local academic institution Rollins College. The Orlando team will be led by founder , CEO of Florida’s . You may remember hearing about that company as being the first to win the to manage a database in the newly-opened “white space” spectrum. Licursi will be responsible for leading the fundraising for the Orlando crew, along with three other founders and support from the original St. Petersburg team. In addition to Lucursi, Orlando’s Gazelle Lab founders include , Executive-in-Residence, Crummer Graduate School, ; , Ph.D., CEO of .; and , CPA, Interim CFO, at . This is only the second TechStars member to open an additional location. TechStars proper, of course, has multiple locations across the U.S. while network member Startup Bootcamp is live in a few cities in Europe. As to why there’s a need for more locations so early into the group’s founding, Gazelle Lab founder Daniel James Scott explains that the team feels that the region deserves a statewide effort. “One of the biggest lessons we had during the first cadre of Gazelle Lab is that if we are going to accomplish our missions of building community and a true seed-stage funding pipeline, these would have to start happening at the state level,” he says. Scott says there’s been demand for even more Gazelle Lab-branded programs across the state, but Orlando had the right mix of founders, investors and partners that Gazelle could plug its support, mentors and application pipeline into. With this announcement, the group is hoping to tie together all of central Florida into a cohesive early-stage funding scene, while tapping into the talent from area universities like Rollins, USF, and others. Florida entrepreneurs are invited to apply to program . The group is also supporting , which lets you send in your application to multiple accelerator programs at once. |
Holiday Shopping Wrap-Up: Apple Makes Top Performing E-Commerce Site List, Amazon Excels On Mobile | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | According to the end-of-season benchmarks from web performance division, Apple.com was among the top three best-performing retail websites during the 2011 holiday season. Meanwhile, Amazon made the list for the top m-commerce sites. The sites were ranked from November 21st through Christmas Day using Compuware’s which compares how U.S. retailers’ sites perform in comparison with typical non-peak periods. As we previously reported, , with $35.27 billion in sales with web retailers from November 1st through December 26th. The impact of the increased number of shoppers was definitely felt, says Compuware. Its , which measures consumer satisfaction with site performance, degraded during the 2011 holiday period. This was, in part, due to the fact that half of the top retailers increased their homepage’s size after Cyber Monday, which caused slower response times. Those who didn’t do so saw better consumer satisfaction results. The top 10 retailers’ average Gomez Performance Satisfaction Index (GPSI) for the season was 52, compared with an average of 35 for the top 50. As for the top retailer websites, on the e-commerce front the top three were: JC Penney and Apple were the only two sites that performed better than the baseline, Compuware notes. On the mobile front, sites stayed stable through Cyber Monday, but performance decreased afterwards with the biggest drops on December 5th and then again from December 16 – 22. The top ranking mobile sites (on smartphones) for the same period were: |
Is Verizon Joking? Paying Online/By Phone Will Soon Cost You An Extra $2 | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | Yesterday obtained a leaked internal document from Verizon that had a surprisingly annoying little tidbit within: “Beginning 1/15/12, there is a $2 ‘convenience fee’ for making a credit or debit card bill payment online or via call-in channels.” Sometimes leaks are faked or forged, and I hoped against hope that this particular leak was a load of malarkey. But alas, has apparently received confirmation via email that Verizon will in fact impose this “convenience fee” starting January 15. Happy New Year, everyone. , Verizon has laid out a few ways for you to avoid such a . I realize I’m harping on it, but the only joke bigger than this $2 fee is the fact that they’re calling it a “convenience fee.” Convenient to whom (other than Verizon, of course)? You’d think that processing online payments would actually be more convenient for Big Red than processing paper payments, and it doesn’t necessarily encourage environmental friendliness, either. Either way, you won’t have to pay the extra $2 if you choose to send in an electronic check through My Verizon Online, My Verizon Mobile or via telephone. Using Autopay will also rid you of this charge if you’re using credit/debit/ATM cards or electronic checks. If you pay through customer home-banking services, pay in-store at the kiosk, or use a Verizon Wireless gift card or device rebate card to pay a bill in-store, online or by telephone, the fee will also be waived. Obviously, you can always pay with a standard paper check mailed directly to Verizon Wireless along with your bill (the same way people paid their bills in the olden days), but some of us live in the 21st century. Verizon customers who don’t check the blogs or news as much as you fine people will be notified at the time of payment (both online and by phone) that an extra $2 is being charged. |
Keen On…. Kurt Andersen: Why 2011 Has Only Just Begun (TCTV) | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | While 2011 is almost over, the year has only really just begun in terms of determining its historical significance. 2011 wasn’t, of course, just another year. Like 1989, 1968, 1917 and 1848, 2011 was a revolutionary year, one that – from Cairo to Athens to Tunis to Wall Street to Moscow – may have changed the world forever. And to mark the historic nature of 2011, magazine just made its person of the year. According to Kurt Andersen, who ‘s cover story for its Protestor edition, rebellion was the “defining political trope of 2011” – thereby making it a “great year in world history”. And, as Andersen told me over Skype, this “contagion” wouldn’t have happened without social networks like Facebook and Twitter which, he insists, were “key” to the 2011 revolutions. The Internet, Andersen thus explained, has emerged as the alternative to the free press in countries like Egypt, Russia and Tunisia; without it, he insists, there would have been no revolutions anywhere in 2011. This is the second of a two part interview with Andersen. Yesterday, he told me why nothing (outside technology) has much in the last twenty years. : Earlier, this post tested a new experience with the Streamliner player, that lets viewers jump around a video based on notes. That test has concluded but you can check it out on the Streamliner website at this . |
Kicksend Goes Mobile With A New iPhone App For Instant, Asynchronous Sharing Of Big Files | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | , the Y Combinator-incubated web file-sharing tool for the non-technical crowd, had just raised $1.8 million in funding from True Ventures, with participation from Digital Garage, SV Angel, Start Fund, and Milo Founder and CEO Jack Abraham. The team was heads-down fixing, tweaking, and developing some new features for their file-sharing service. But, today, the startup is going mobile with a new iPhone app to let users take all of their photos videos they have stored on their phone and instantly send them to any friend, list of colleagues, or email address, instantly — across platforms. For those unfamiliar with the service, has launched web and desktop apps that connects users in realtime, enabling them to drag and drop big batches of files from their desktop and have them delivered instantly to their desktop and web apps. And now this functionality has arrived on mobile. Kicksend’s advantage over other file sharing media is that it has no size limits, is private, and works asynchronously — unlike IM. With Kicksend, there is no need for share folders and permissions, and now with its mobile app, the startup is live on all the major platforms. Like its desktop and web apps, Kicksend allows users to send large batches of high-res photos and videos from their phones to any friend, instantly, regardless of whether or not they’ve downloaded the Kicksend app. Basically, Kicksend has enabled simple file-sharing on the iPhone, so if users send documents from other apps, or, say, you’re using GoodReader and you view a PDF, users can choose “Open in Kicksend”, you can share that with any other user in realtime — something that will be awesome for all those holiday photos. Thus, documents, photos, and videos will appear instantly on the recipient’s desktops and mobile devices in realtime, or, in turn, users can view, send, and comment privately on PDFs, documents, photos, videos and more. If recipients don’t have the Kicksend app, they can receive files via email with links to download within minutes. There are a ton of file-sharing services out there, but Kicksend has a great user interface, is extremely simple to use, and pretty much allows users to send any size file easily, instantly, to any device, across any platform, offering notifications and statistics to boot, so that users can see how many people in a group have downloaded the file. It’s a great tool. For more, . |
The Most Important Gadgets Of 2012 | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | Rather than looking back (which I’m sure we will), I thought it would be nice to look forward to 2012 and beyond and note some of the gadgets that will change the world in the next few years. I’ve included mobile, gaming, and computing gadgets but I think 2012 will also be the year of Windows Phone, 3D printing, and fitness technology that actually makes a difference. I’m not expecting much in the way of massive change this next year, just more of the same, but better. Here are our picks for the best of 2012. and – Fewer things sell more products than weight-loss claims. Luckily, thanks to some new devices designed to help us get fitter, those claims are no longer snake oil. Take a look at and (and the other devices competing in the cyberhealth space). These devices promise what geeks crave – stats – and also promise better health and decreased body mass. It’s a desk-jockey trifecta. While many fitness devices won’t make it past 2013, I think weight-loss systems like Autom and pedometers like FitBit are the future of fitness. You can’t change what you can’t measure, and these devices let you measure just about everything. – A year ago I would have written Nokia off as a dead company. They were rudderless, without product, and perceived, at best, a commodity feature-phone player in a very competitive smartphone world. With the arrival of , however, Nokia is looking to take back the low end and win the business of folks who are either too busy, too annoyed, or too cash-strapped to invest in iOS or, increasingly, the more powerful Android flagships. To the anti-Microsoft contingent, Windows Phone is . In reality, we’re talking about Microsoft: when have they ever been on time. There are plenty of folks out there without smartphones and no one ever got fired for picking something from Redmond for their IT fleet. Sure, the $50 Lumia 710 requires a two year contract with rebat and all that rigamarole, but the key number isn’t “2-year contract:” it’s $50. – This small, Brooklyn-based company isn’t very big but it’s very powerful. The company just raised $10 million and is working on better ways to get 3D printing to the masses. While not many of us – myself included – can see the value in a 3D printer in the home, I see 3D printing as a technology that just hasn’t caught up with our imagination. A decade ago a laser printer was a distant dream machine that cost thousands of dollars and seemed out of reach for many consumers. Now you can get a color model for a few hundred and every tech-savvy household has at least one color inkjet that can produce better photos than almost any photo lab. 3D printing is in the same boat: the machines are prohibitively expensive and complex, but with a few UI and marketing twists, I foresee a day when the kids print out model car parts the way they print out book reports. – Thinking back on the great netbook debacle of a few years ago: the rise in popularity, the fall in pricing, and their eventual death, it’s not difficult to imagine the ultrabook is phase two of the hardware-maker’s lemming rush. However, ultrabooks are a necessary addition to the laptop ecosystem and should be taken seriously. I could definitely see a large buyer picking up a few thousand ultrabooks for employees rather than a few thousand fat-and-heavies from Dell and Lenovo. It makes sense in terms of power, price, and portability.
– Love it or hate it, first salvo against the iTunes juggernaut. Amazon wants to sell you stuff. They don’t want to impress you with a tablet that runs Ice Cream Sandwich and can compute SETI@Home strings. The device is Amazon incarnate, an all singing, all dancing tablet for readers that will become, for many, the primary way to consume streaming video. I’m not suggesting the Kindle Fire is great, but future Fires will be on the 2012 Christmas lists for many casual tablet users.
– I put the Vita here not because it will be particularly successful (handheld gaming is a hard business and phone gaming is making it even harder), but because it is the first of the next gen consoles to roll, inexorably, towards our living room. The Vita will ship in 2012, followed by E3 announcements by all the majors about updated hardware (I’m betting on a new Xbox announcement this year, but I doubt it will be released until 2014). The Wii U is next on the upgrade list while Microsoft and Sony are still trying to figure out what a next gen console is supposed to do and what it’s supposed to look like. |
“Goodbye, With. Hello, Path 2.” Morin Migrates Users to New App | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | Dave Morin and Path’s secondary standalone app “is winding down”, according to a tweet, email, and . “Now tweet who you’re with directly from Path”, the email explains. The encouraged migration signals the end of Path’s experiment with a stripped down, single feature experience. : A from With confirms that it will cease to function at some point today. http://twitter.com/#!/withme/status/148122008520110080 Path’s blog posts says “After a long and friendly coexistence, two apps have become one. And the pair has settled on a name: Path 2.” With’s end just resurfaces the standalone vs comprehensive app debate. Companies have to decide whether their apps should provide many functions but bury them in menus, or offer rapid access to one function. Path recently released its more comprehensive 2.0 update, which has led to of the app’s user base. Rather than force users to waste home screen space and choose what they want to do first, Path 2.0 simply integrates With’s functionality. In addition to tagging who you’re “with”, you can share your sleeping habits, music, and now standard content like photos and location. Morin’s former employer Facebook is moving in the opposite direction. This summer it released its standalone Messenger app based off of its acquisition Beluga, and we hear it’s still working on its in June. I see this as a slippery slope where instead of bloat you get a fractured experience. I like comprehensive apps that let me bounce from once use case to another without having to exit to the homescreen, so I’m happy to see With go. Often times the functions split between apps are highly related, and saving one extra click through a menu doesn’t seem to warrant downloading and updating an extra app. The With sunset will also keep Path’s team focused on building a distinct experience from Facebook and Twitter where you .
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A New Path: Path Grows Daily Users 30x Since Relaunch | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | There is something about waking up day after day to write about people who take risks; You end up rooting for some of them. This is the case with photo-sharing underdog . Almost every investor I’ve talked to loves founder and wants him and his talented team to succeed. Morin has managed to hold on to top talent like and despite stiff competition and poaching attempts from some of the hottest startups in the Valley. Morin famously to Google for $100 million, and at the time we broke that story, the murmurs around the tech world were that that wasn’t necessarily the smartest decision. Which is why it’s cool to stick around as a tech writer, sometimes the people you end up rooting for, win. Path changing course from photo-sharing to everything sharing, in a beautifully wrapped package with emphasis on simplicity. Many have likened the product to a better designed Facebook for your phone, which is fair and probably a compliment. But everything isn’t coming up roses, and the product still has kinks it needs to iron out. But still, the relaunch is a success; Morin tells me that users are sharing more things on the new Path in a day then they had on the old Path in a year — at a rate of 12 moments per second. The company is seeing 30x the number of daily active users, going from 10K to 300K in two and a half weeks. Rumor has it that it’s seeing 100k downloads a day (Morin wouldn’t confirm). Morin is most happy about the fact that over a million people have shared when they wake up and go to sleep via the app. And over a million and half people have now downloaded the new Path since its launch — it took the company a year to get to its first million. These numbers are encouraging, miraculous even — and now the story of Path will follow its efforts in sustaining usership after this second post-launch spike. Morin says he’s dealing with scale problems now (many users are reporting too many friend requests, a “good problem to have”) and building out the next features. “It’s been delightful to see the response,” he says. Of course. |
AskAMEE is like Google meets WolframAlpha for carbon footprints | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | , backed by O’Reilly and Union Square Ventures among others, set out in 2008 to map, measure and track all the carbon and energy data on Earth. That’s a big job, and competes with others like to do it. It’s since won contracts with the likes of the UK Government, CNN, Google, the list goes on. But what it hasn’t cracked is a consumer-facing app which gets the issue of ‘carbon footprints’ into the mind of the ordinary member of the public. That’s changed with the of which effectively combines a search engine and calculation tool (a bit like Google + WolframAlpha). It’s pretty intuitive and is thus able to make climate change science and calculations quite a bit more accessible to the average Joe or Jane, assuming they can get the hang of using it. For instance you can work out the carbon footprint of 10kg of strawberries, and 1 parsec in a Mini Cooper. More usefully, AMEE has also been busy developing a “ ” which will be able to automatically calculate your travel carbon footprint with your Foursquare check-ins – A big move is opening up its platform to the developer community and organising a in January. It is also integrating with Minecraft and Autodesk (embedding foot printing into the design process). A Universities initiative now has over a dozen partners. New CEO, Tim Murphy, who used to run Dun & Bradstreet (founder Gavin Starks is now Chairman and involved in key partnerships and outreach). Here’s an interview we did recently with founder Gavin Starks: |
Aetna Reveals It Acquired Healthagen, Developer Of The #1 Mobile Health App iTriage | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | At an yesterday, health insurance and tech giant revealed that it acquired , though it did not disclose the price. Aetna’s Chairmen, CEO, and President Mark Bertolini told investors “About a month and a half ago we bought at little company called iTriage…the fastest growing consumer application in healthcare today.” iTriage lets users check symptoms, find doctors, make appointments, and do medical shopping. It will be augmented with new features and become part of Aetna’s accountable care organization. Bertolini said “We’re going to begin to change the health care industry by giving people tools they can put in the palm of their hand.” Aetna’s goal is to get customers more engaged with their health care via iTriage, and thereby prevent them from sliding to other providers. Bertolini said iTriage will aid “retention, which is the catalyst for growth.” The app’s 3 million iTunes downloads will also bring Aetna new potential customer, and Healthagen’s digital relationships with hospitals and urgent care facilities. The privately held Lakewood, CO-based Healthagen hasn’t announced any funding, and also offers iTriage for Android tablets. iTriage recreates the experience of popular web-based symptom checkers like WebMD, but for mobile. Not only can these apps act as portal to expensive purchases and services, they can collect valuable data on trending ailments. Considering iTriage’s early lead in app vertical, the acquisition looks like a smart move for Aetna. ‘ deep coverage of the investor conference indicates that Aetna will add cost estimation to iTriage. This will help Aetna’s customers to “be a partner in reducing the cost of care”, according to Dr. Charles Saunders, Aetna’s Head of Strategic Diversification. This could significantly reduce Aetna’s own costs. Additionally, Bertolini said regarding Aetna’s iNexx health care app platform, “we will give away the SDK for both the consumer platform and the provider platform to allow anyone to write apps to be sold on our platform.” This could create more opportunities in the mobile healthtech market that is projected to . |
Healthtech Accelerator Rock Health Peels Back The Curtain On Its Second Batch Of Startups | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | , the healthtech space is heating up, and a lot of serial entrepreneurs with consumer web experience are turning their focus to fixing some of the big problems inherent in the legacy health systems we have today in the U.S. and abroad. Yet, in spite of the $1 billion pool VCs have poured into startups last year, for example, healthtech startups, specifically, aren’t seeing a lot of that capital. There are a lot of challenges inherent to launching a healthtech startup that companies in the consumer web just don’t have to deal with, HIPAA-compliance, among others. While it’s difficult for all startups, establishing B2B relationships and intricate partnerships is no simple task. That’s where health-focused accelerators like come into the picture. (And we need more.) Rock Health has a great list of mentors ( ), and list of financial and health-related is growing fast as well. Today, the company is officially pulling back the curtain on their second batch of startups. There are 15 companies in this batch, which will begin the 5-month Rock Health program beginning in January 2012. (You can read more on the accelerator’s .) Without further ado, here they are: is creating a web and mobile platform that provides clinicians with evidence and expert-consensus based, best practices in the form of highly actionable clinical algorithms. The startup wants to make it easier and quicker for clinicians to give their patients the best possible care. is the first, online patient-focused breast cancer management tool that allows patients to comprehensively organize, manage, and communicate important information throughout the breast cancer experience. empowers ordinary people with simple yet powerful tools to experiment, gain insight and take charge of their health and wellbeing. is a mobile-based electronic health records and workflow automation software for home health care agencies. It also allows for new participation by family members via an online portal. With increased efficiency, agencies will be able to retain and attract new customers at a higher rate. is a healthy living community and marketplace for young women. Young women are preoccupied with health and wellness (diet, weight, birth control, STDs, mental health, skin, etc.), but existing health sites are clinical, target everyone or target moms. Cognitive Health Innovations provides an online environment to help people address mental health issues and achieve personal growth goals using scientifically validated psychotherapeutic techniques and structured social interactions. is the Bloomberg for Doctors. Docphin is a platform that personalizes medical news and research. In an environment that includes over a thousand medical journals with content that is increasingly complex and fragmented, physicians have grown tired of searching for relevant news. Docphin was created to address the “find” problem which has challenged physicians for decades. Docphin’s platform enables users to easily personalize the news and research that matters most to them and their patients. is creating a dynamic, social population management tool that’s designed to help medical providers manage their patient population, disseminate information about new health care trends, and take immediate action to improve the health of their patients. is a home health care marketplace that helps families find high quality caregivers at the lowest cost. Caregivers on our network range from non medical home care aides to physical therapist to licenced registered nurses. is a crowdfunding platform that lets friends and family motivate one another to achieve health goals with money and rewards. Think KickStarter for personal health motivation. ( .) Helpful Systems is building an analytics system to predict and identify patients who are most at-risk for developing a hospital-acquired infection based on patient demographics and behavior patterns, hospital staff behavior patterns, and hospital logistics. shares medical images on the iPad. Doctors have access to a patient’s medical images anywhere, anytime, and can collaborate with their colleagues. is developing a powerful mobile health monitoring product that will reveal new insights about stage zero care. The startup’s initial product will be the first mobile sensor system to provide continuous metabolic panel data wirelessly to patients, providers, and the chronically ill. is a spin-out from Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program 2011. We are developing open innovation tools and a community of developers and entrepreneurs to catalyze innovation around sensor devices and applications. Our long term vision is to crowdsource the development of a medical tricorder which will enable low cost medical diagnosis to be performed by anyone, from anywhere. aims to unlock social exercise by allowing people to share and discover exercise sessions around them. Think Meetup meets Foursquare for exercise. |
SOPA Delayed – But Not For Long | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | The extremely unpopular bill was supposed to be the last order of business today as the House Judiciary Committee prepared to break for the holidays, but a parade of objections and amendments (over 50) kept the bill in discussion and at last the committee adjourned without resolving the issues. What was expected in this contingency was for the committee to resume work whenever the House reconvenes in January. After all, with such controversial and far-reaching legislation, it is better to take one’s time. But no: the committee has announced it will continue markup this coming Wednesday, the 21st of December. Very few of the suggestions by opponents have been heeded, and the chairman, Lamar Smith (R-Texas), demonstrated his contempt for these concerns with the following words, which I am sorry to say make me very angry: I am pleased that the unfounded claims of critics of the Stop Online Piracy Act have overwhelmingly been rejected by a majority of House Judiciary Committee members. The criticism of this bill is completely hypothetical; none of it is based in reality. Not one of the critics was able to point to any language in the bill that would in any way harm the Internet. Their accusations are simply not supported by any facts. This casual, smirking dismissal of the from people who are more informed than himself, and which unlike the media lobbyists and other proponents have little to gain from their advocacy, is distressing. The only place the committee seemed willing to make a change was holding off on some of the bill’s portions until a study could be made on the potential effects to DNS and other critical systems. Smith said he would consider a briefing. It’s telling how badly the bill’s supporters want this thing to go through that they’re willing to come in right in the middle of the holidays to do work that could easily be done a few weeks from now. We’ll follow up on Wednesday, when the bill is likely to be approved and sent on to the House. |
MyYearbook Hits Half A Million Daily Mobile Users, Launches iPad App | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | It’s hard being a social network not called Facebook, but isn’t one of those erstwhile rivals being sold off for assets. Instead, it’s been seeing strong mobile growth and revenue growth over the last year, building on its in July. Expect both to accelerate with the launch of its new iPad app today (available ). The company is now reaching half a million mobile users daily across major operating systems, chief operating officer and cofounder tells me, with 200 million (unduplicated) monthly sessions in total. Android has grown to be the largest, beating iPhone usage by two to one. The that the company did earlier this year seems to be paying off. Revenue is also up. After posting revenues of $23.7 million last year, it’s grown to $36.3 million in the 12-month span through September. The new iPad app, which you can download here, improves on the existing mobile interfaces by adding a multi-pane interface for doing things like flipping through profiles while using specific features like apps. Look for it to get more of the main myYearbook.com site features early next year, Cook says. MyYearbook has transitioned from its roots as a high school social network to, in its words, the place to “meet new people near you.” That obviously translates to lots of dating-oriented features. It’s been and other apps in-house, powered by its own virtual currency, that are designed to bring strangers together. The iPad app already has some of those features in place, but so far it’s been monetizing through ads. The virtual currency is coming to mobile next quarter, Cook says, along with the games, which should help mobile monetization increase considerably. Dating apps, including mobile ones, have been quiet but substantial businesses. Cook also says that the iPad launch should be a hit with its users, a company survey recently showed that a large percentage of them are expecting iPads from Christmas. He’s aiming for a repeat of last year, when the sales of iPod Touches helped fuel the year’s growth. |
Review: Grand Theft Auto III 10th Anniversary for iOS | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | In October of 2001, Rockstar Games dropped a bomb on the gaming world. That bomb was called Grand Theft Auto III. In just one release, Rockstar shifted their flagship 2D series into a 3D world, introduced an enormous chunk of the population to the concept of massive sandbox games, and stirred up of many controversies that the company has since become known for. Just over 10 years later, GTA3 is back — but now it’s . As of yesterday, it’s available for iOS and Android. Same game, same grit, same campy over-the-top action… but in your pocket. So, how has the game held up? How well did it make the jump from controller to touchscreen? Is it worth your $5? Lets go ahead and answer those immediately: Surprisingly well, moderately okay, and probably. For a game that’s probably older than the TV sitting in your living room, Grand Theft Auto 3 is still remarkably entertaining. I won’t wax on too much about the gameplay itself; many did that a decade ago, and it’s still the same game (save for a few little perks ported in from modern GTA games, like instant retries on failed missions) it was then. What worked well then still works well today: you run around, explore, go on a few hundred missions, then blow up everything in sight whenever all that gets boring. It’s not what most would call “gorgeous” by today’s gaming standards (read: it’s ), but it really does still look . The audio is also wonderful, with an absurd amount of dialog, sound, radio chatter, and music crammed into the 500 MB package. At the very least, it’s a wonderful testament of how far technology has come; what required a big ol’ dedicated gaming console just a decade ago now runs effortlessly on an itty-bitty battery-powered slab of glass. To say it “runs effortlessly” requires a bit of a caveat, though. Rockstar claims support for all of the more recent iOS devices, including the iPhone 4, iPad 1, iPhone 4S, and iPad 2. On the latter two, it’s butter. On the iPad 1, graphic quality takes a massive hit (see the comparison shot above) — and still, framerate issues tend to rear their head. (Alas, I don’t have an iPhone 4 handy to test it on, so I can’t comment on the compatibility there.) Look up at the screen shot above. The buttons! They’re everywhere! You can feel your hands cramping already. It’s actually quite playable — in most cases, at least. The D-pad drops wherever you put your thumb when you’re hoofin’ it, and the other buttons are big enough that they’re not too much trouble to find (Oh: and if you think you could layout a better control scheme, you can re-arrange/re-size them in the settings screen.) Driving isn’t too bad either (though, is it easy to flip your car now. I don’t know if they tweaked the physics engine or something, but it’s far easier to find yourself upside down and covered in flames than I remember.) Shooting, however, is a rather terrible experience… which is unfortunate, considering how crucial it is to the game as a whole. The game has an autolock system which, even after fair amount of playtime, never seems to work the way I expect. It’s not so bad as to make the game impossible (just quite frustrating at times) but is detrimental enough that it influences my recommendation. As for said recommendation: if you’ve never played through GTA3, I wouldn’t suggest having the mobile experience be your first. The controls, while acceptable, just take away too much of the magic. GTA3 is a great game and was far ahead of its time; if it’s going to be played by a newcomer, it deserves to be played as originally intended. If you played through the original (or started it, and never got a chance to finish before Mom slung the PS2 at a garage sale) and are just looking to swim in nostalgia, however, it’s easily worth the 5 bucks. You can find GTA3: 10th Anniversary |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 12 | 29 | null |
OkCandidate Snags OkCupid’s Approach, Tells You Who To Vote For | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | While I wouldn’t expect it to fly with its current name for very long, check out this project that came out of (where it walked away as runner-up). Called , it’s OkCupid… for voters. Instead of finding you the best romantic candidate to date and make beautiful love babies with, it tries to determine which presidential candidate is most compatible with your beliefs. Like OkCupid, OkCandidate begins with a series of questions. You drop in some details about your political beliefs, acknowledge which answers you find acceptable, and mark how important you find that particular issue. In the end, OkCandidate ranks each candidate on a 0-100 scale. To be clear: at this point, I couldn’t recommend anyone actually use this to pick their candidate. Given that it was built in ~12 hours for a hack day, it has its fair share of limitations that could be cleared up with a bit more effort. For example: it’s completely opaque as to how it’s forming its compatibility ratings and from where it’s pulling its information, so the ratings at the end lack reason or explanation. It’s also curiously missing information/ratings regarding incumbent president Barack Obama , so its ratings are currently limited to the Republican candidates. So why write about it? Because I really like the concept, and hope the team (or someone else) builds it into something wonderful. Everyone gets a vote — but not everybody bothers to be informed. Maybe it’s because they’re too busy; maybe it’s because they’re intimidated by the mountain of information they’d need to pore over. A tool like this (albeit one with a bit more transparency and explanation behind ratings) would, at the very least, help people take the first step towards narrowing down a pick. If something like this exists, drop a comment and let us know. I’ve done my fair share of searching, but my Google-Fu fails to turn up anything well-made and intended for use with the upcoming election. |
Little iPads, Little Pixels, And Resolution Independence (An Apple Rumor Medley) | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | Another crop of Apple rumors has grown up under our feet, and it seems a little reaping is in order. Two rumors are making the rounds, both of which warrant a little consideration but should, as usual, be taken lightly until more substantial evidence appears. Both have their origins in Digitimes, which prides itself on catching scraps of news from upstream suppliers but isn’t always correct in its conclusions. Earlier this week a little bird that the upcoming redesign of the MacBook Pro won’t simply be thinning down the body, but will upgrade the displays to a mind-blowing 2880×1800 resolution. And then just today there has been a recurrence of the . The implications of the first rumor especially are quite serious, and while the second one seems unlikely, its resilience must be acknowledged. Let’s talk about the little iPad first. I wrote in October that essentially these reports could easily be exaggerations of the usual testing companies like Apple do. , but that was more than a year ago, and things change. The Fire has proven that many people do indeed want a smaller tablet, and everyone would think it a fine joke if Apple went back on that and said “we waited until we could do it right.” Supposedly this smaller iPad would retain the 1024×768 resolution, which is really the only option they had. The size is significantly smaller, but the fact that it’s 4:3 means that it’s also quite a bit larger than the Fire and other 7″ tablets. Here, I made you this chart, which may even be accurate: Looks like a fairly comfortable size, this supposed 7.85″, like a slightly stubbier Galaxy Tab 8.9, which I think is a great size. It would naturally be extremely thin and light, much more so than the iPad 2. But it’s hard for me to believe they would simply put this thing out there without any kind of real differentiating feature. The iPod Classic, Nano, Touch, and Shuffle are all very different products, not just different sizes. It doesn’t seem likely that this rumored smaller iPad would be just that — smaller. To simply reduce the size would be to admit a design failure, and Apple would hate to do that. But from the very little info that’s out there (two reports giving the screen size and a late-2012 date) we can’t draw any conclusions. The resolution upgrade for the MacBook Pro series is what’s really blowing my mind. Apple isn’t the only one looking into high-PPI screens (it’s something of an arms race, really), but they leapfrogged everyone with the iPhone 4 screen and hope to do the same elsewhere. It would be an extremely powerful sales tool to have all primary Apple products be high-resolution. People see the screen of the iPhone 4 and they instantly understand how it’s better (though competition is getting tougher). They’ll see the screen of the new iPad and these high-res laptops and they’ll understand it there as well. Text will be clearer, images will be sharper, and no doubt Apple will have a few flashy features that demonstrate other benefits. But it’s not quite that simple. With the iPhone, moving to high-res meant a bunch of upgraded art, sure, though the 2x mode saved a lot of trouble and looked just fine for the most part. But compared to the iPad and especially to OS X, the iPhone is really quite a limited ecosystem in many ways as far as the display and interface goes. The question of resolution independence, then, again rears its head. Resolution independence, for those who have forgotten, is where an interface does not use bit-mapped graphics like, say, buttons 50 pixels wide and 15 tall, with rounded edges formed by falling off in graduated steps, producing the illusion of a curve. Instead, it uses either very high resolution versions of those graphics or scalable vector-type graphics to ensure that visual elements can be displayed at any resolution with the maximum fidelity possible. The curve on the corner of the button would not be measured in pixels but calculated geometrically and rendered in pixels as best it can be. It’s not demonstrated perfectly (the proportions ought to be the same) but you can see how a seamlessly scaled UI might look here: Apple has an on-again, off-again relationship with resolution independence. They’ve made some strides, such as in how icons are scaled, but creating a scalable but consistent interface is tricky; PPI, DPI, scaling, filtering, and all their effects on design are a jungle few care to walk into. And at any rate screens haven’t had a high enough resolution to make the work of creating a resolution-independent interface worthwhile. Until now, that is. For the present, 2880×1800 is big enough that current high resolution of the 15-inch MacBook Pro (1440×900) would neatly fit inside via pixel expansion, meaning that UI elements would appear the same size on this new device, but would be “rendered” at a higher resolution. For the present, I say, because it is only natural that OS X should, like iOS, be remade with the benefits of high resolution in mind. Given that there has been talk of this change for years, and that we’ve seen concrete examples here and there where it’s useful on current screens, I would say that Apple has been working on this design overhaul for quite a long time. It’s going to be their main volley against Windows 8, which, though it has a lot going for it, is very unlikely to beat Apple to the punch on this. But they can’t introduce it with the new MacBook Pros, which will likely ship in the second quarter of 2012. Lion has, relatively speaking, just arrived, and the changes are too major to be included in anything less than a full decimal release. I don’t have a solution to this problem, and it may be that the rhythms at Apple will have to be disrupted in order to fully take advantage of this new technology. The last thing that must be said about all this high resolution talk is that it may mark a return to the high end for Apple. For a couple years now, Apple has been focusing on cost and volume, driving down on-contract prices for the iPhone, aggressively pricing the iPad, and bringing the MacBook Air (once a luxury item and likely could have stayed there) below $1000 — to say nothing of how they’ve cooled towards professional applications like Final Cut Pro. But this new screen not only commands a premium on its own, it will also actually . Possibly, in the first round, a major upgrade for several hundred dollars. The MacBook Pros will live up to the moniker; the Air will be the low-cost laptop and the Pro will be the high-cost one. What will accompany this turn? I don’t think desktops are ever going to be an Apple focus again; too much of their IP is in portability. I’m thinking that these MBPs will be able to be specced out to desktop levels, though, as if Apple still wants people to use their computers for serious media purposes, octa-core processors and 16 gigs of RAM will be in demand. That all is just my personal speculation, though. One more word and then I’m done. I’ve seen a few articles crying about Digitimes as if it were deliberately trying to damage Apple by leaking these items. Let’s be realistic. Apple is one of the biggest companies in the world, and arguably the most important company in consumer electronics. It is perfectly right that Digitimes and other outlets like it should want to focus on this massive, interesting company and the devices which for a few years now have been leading the rest of the industry. They report these things because these things are what they report. And don’t forget that their Apple coverage, while it gets the most attention, is only a fraction of what they cover. Whether these things are true will only be seen in time, but the topic of resolution independence and high-res displays is one which gives way to many other discussions and has many tangential implications, some of which I felt needed to be explored. It all starts with pixels. |
TC Gadgets Weekly Webcast: The iPad Mini, CES, And A Coffeemaker | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | This week the lads and I talk about the iPad Mini, our huge booth at CES, and my new . We also discuss how much it’s going to cost us to interview 50 Cent at CES this year, which is pretty darn wild. Want to hear this in audio form? I’ve extracted the audio from the video webcast and saved it to a that you can or . Hopefully you enjoy this version as well. |
Your Nexus S Could Taste Ice Cream Sandwich As Early As Today | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | Nexus S owners rejoice! While your Galaxy Nexus-toting friends have been rubbing a bit of Ice Cream Sandwich in your face, the year-old Nexus S will soon get its own taste of Android 4.0. According to the , the rollout to Nexus S users will begin today and will continue through “the coming month.” Ah, but there’s a bit of a catch — from what I can tell, the update is only meant for users of the bog-standard GSM Nexus and not the slightly more flashy 4G model. Sorry Sprint folks, you’ll just have to wait a little longer for your chance to shine. Or will you? If waiting’s not really your thing (it certainly isn’t mine), there’s no shortage of custom ROMs to flash that will get you running Android 4.0 as fast as you can say “rooted.” Sure, it’ll take a little more effort than wailing on the “Check for updates” option on your device’s Settings screen, but for some it’ll beating waiting for who-knows how long. Google has even offered up a list of tips for Gingerbread users who finally get to update. If you haven’t gotten a chance to play with ICS yet (or if you’re waiting for your update to install), — things have changed just enough so you’ll have to reset your Android-oriented muscle memory. |
Sprint “Disabling Use” Of Carrier IQ On Affected Devices | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | Just a day after Minnesota Senator Al Franken published reports on , Sprint seems to be taking steps to distance themselves the mobile monitoring company. According to , Sprint has confirmed that they will be disabling their use of Carrier IQ software on affected devices. They’ve got a lot of them too: in response to an inquiry from Senator Franken, Sprint recently revealed that 26 million Sprint devices have made it into customers’ hands with Carrier IQ on-board. For now, it seems as though Sprint simply won’t be “tasking” devices for diagnostic data, and that the software will remain on those devices. That may change soon though: a report from indicates that HTC and Sprint’s other hardware partners have been asked to push out over-the-air software updates that don’t include Carrier IQ. Sprint representatives offer no comment. The one thing Sprint doesn’t make mention of is what the next step is. If this turns out to be the end of the two companies’ long-term relationship, then it stands to reason that Sprint will no longer be asking hardware partners to integrate Carrier IQ’s software going forward. That is, at least, until they can figure out another way to get that much-needed diagnostic information. Now that a major carrier has discontinued their use of Carrier IQ (at least for now), an important question comes to mind: what does this mean for Sprint’s network? The two companies have worked together since 2006, and I doubt that their relationship would have continued for so long unless it actually resulted in improvements for the network and for customer satisfaction. Sprint’s email mentioned “evaluating options regarding this diagnostic software as well as Sprint’s diagnostic needs,” which to me speaks to the importance they place on maintaining their network. I can’t help but wonder if we’ll see how valuable Carrier IQ’s data is to carriers if/when the two companies part ways. |
Gillmor Gang Live 12.16.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | The Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor – are recording live today at 1pm PT. Recording is concluded. The show will be available 10am Saturday morning Pacific time. |
T-Mobile’s White Samsung Galaxy S II Is Going For $99 This Weekend Only | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | The is a very special phone. Even though it’s been on the market for quite some time now, it’s still one of the more beastly competitors on Android-flavored shelves. Of course, it’s always had the price tag to prove it, going for between $230 and $250 just about everywhere. But T-Mobile has a pretty sweet deal going on a white Samsung Galaxy S II for this weekend only, and it could save you up to $130. The white Galaxy S II hasn’t been available for that long, so if the new new thing is all that matters to you then fear not. The deal is only available online, so don’t go traipsing into a T-Mobile asking for your $99 Samsung Galaxy S II. After a $50 mail-in rebate and a signature on the dotted line of a two-year contract, T-Mobile is slashing $130 off one of the most popular phones of the year. I have yet to see such a great deal on the GS II, so if you’re into white phones and are ready to sign your soul over to T-Mobile (possibly, again), head over to and get the ball rolling. [via ] |
Keen On… Walter Isaacson: Was Steve Jobs a Tyrant? (TCTV) | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | At the heart of the enigma of Steve Jobs lies a riddle about authority. On the one hand, Jobs was an intrinsically anti-authoritarian figure whose life was a litany of rebellions against every kind of convention. On the other hand, however, Jobs often seemed to run Apple like a personal fiefdom, shaping products and strategy according to his own whims and instincts. So, I asked Jobs’ biographer, when he came into the TechCrunchTV studio earlier this week, was Steve Jobs a tyrannical leader? Isaacson, whose best-selling explores this riddle in some detail, told me that Steve was “more collaborative than he is given credit for.” Like other authoritarian personalities, Isaacson explained, the best way to bring out Steve’s democratic instincts was to scream at him. When you resisted him, Issacson told me, you got promoted. And if you didn’t, perhaps he implied, you got fired. This is the penultimate excerpt of my interview with Isaacson. On Monday, he talks about where he sees Apple going in a post Steve Jobs future. , he talked to me about Jobs’ historic significance. |
Mark Your Calendars—In 2012, TechCrunch Will Bring The Crunchies, Disrupt, And More Events | Susan Hobbs | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | We are gearing up for 2012 and getting ready to bring you some major events you will want to put on your calendars. Our dates are already locked in for the Crunchies, Disrupt NYC and SF, and our annual summer bash at August Capital. International events are also in the works. TechCrunch will kick off 2012 with along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat on Tuesday, January 31, 2012. tech party to start the year will move to this year for both the awards ceremony and the famous after party. Nominations for the entrepreneurial spirited categories are in and being tabulated. Voting begins in early January. Make your voice heard and vote for your favorites.The next ticket batch release will occur before the holidays. Look for announcements to come on TechCrunch. TechCrunch Disrupt will return to New York in 2012 with the pizza-and-caffeine-fueled on May 19 – 20, 2012. The TechCrunch Disrupt New York conference will follow on May 21 – 23, 2012 where our fun loving friends at will pass the Disrupt Cup to the newest Startup Battlefield winner. Last year, and Paul Graham shared their investment strategies with Charlie Rose, shared why Square will be more profitable than PayPal, and battled it out with 30 other excellent companies to take home the Disrupt Cup. Each year we all break out our summer dresses and button-downs and head south to Sand Hill Road for the . This past summer we held our before the afternoon sun beckoned and you can expect more community building and fun in 2012. August 3rd is the date for 2012’s soirée In September, TechCrunch Disrupt will return to San Francisco with the taking place on September 8 – 9, 2012 and the conference on September 10 – 12, 2012. As previous Startup Battlefield companies can attest, nowhere else can you launch your company where you are offered the audience, investors and media spotlight as when you launch at TechCrunch Disrupt. This past Disrupt in San Francisco brought us and giving us their insights as well as sharing his perspective about the founder’s mystique and what’s wrong with Google while movement made their case. 2012 promises to keep our participants and readers on their toes. In 2011 TechCrunch Disrupt went global with the introduction of an emerging international market conference in Beijing, China. The two day event kicked off with a bang with TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy interviewing in his first live interview with an international reporter. The conference continued with great interviews with , , and more. While it was our first Startup Battlefield presented outside the U.S., it certainly wasn’t our first Battlefield of international launches. In the end, was the clear winner, capturing the spirit of tech between Silicon Valley and China and took home the Disrupt Cup and $50,000 check. We’re looking for another city outside of the U.S. to join Beijing in the ranks of TechCrunch Disrupt’s global presence. Where would you like to see TechCrunch Disrupt next? Mark your calendars and save the dates. If you’d like to become a foundational part of the TechCrunch Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact . Stay tuned for more event announcements to come! |
Goodbye, Heather | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | , the business brains behind TechCrunch, will be stepping down at the end of the year as general manager of AOL’s technology properties (including TechCrunch, Engadget, Joystiq, and TUAW). AOL GM Jay Kirsch, who oversees Autos, Finance, and Industry on the business side, will be adding Tech to his responsibilities. Editorially, TechCrunch will remain independent under me. (Editorial and business groups are separate at AOL). Heather almost five years ago, working out of a spare bedroom in founder Michael Arrington’s house, and built it into the profitable media and conference business we have today with a staff of more than 50 people. AOL Tech is one of the fastest growing businesses inside AOL. If I had to choose one word to describe Heather it would be “tireless.” She is a tireless leader, a tireless strategist, a tireless negotiator, a tireless organizer, a tireless sales person, and a tireless champion of TechCrunch in general. Somehow, on the side, she managed to create entirely new products like CrunchBase. Michael often said that hiring Heather was the best business decision he ever made. After he with AOL (and TechCrunch) last September, Heather stayed on to help steady the ship and set it on a new course. I am truly sorry to see her go. She is an amazing business partner and a rare talent. Just one example: Last year, when Heather was negotiating the final deal terms with AOL to purchase TechCrunch, she ran the conference during the day without a hiccup, and then literally stayed up all night to get the deal done in time for it to be announced on stage the next day. Thank you, Heather. We can’t wait to see what you do next. |
Nerds Rule, Help TechCrunch Beat Maxim In A Turntable.fm Battle For Charity Now | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 16 | “I’m a nerd, and I’m here today to stand up for the rights of other nerds.” Right now, TechCrunch is in a charity Turntable.fm DJ battle vs. Maxim magazine. Help me win it for the nerds, and the kids. Go to the MaxCrunch Turntable.fm room and click the “Awesome” button while DJ TechCrunch plays to help us win. Money raised by this Tech The Halls event benefits One Laptop Per Child, and helps ensure the next generation of nerds and entrepreneurs has access to technology. : Victory for nerds and laptop-needing kids alike. The battle just ended, and the final score was TechCrunch 249, Maxim 119. Thanks to everyone who helped us raise money for this great cause. You helped , and donated enough to buy the kids their laptops! Big thanks to everyone who listened and all the publications that participated. You can still . is trying to raise $10,000 for and give 50 kids their own laptop, and you can . Your money goes a long way, as their rugged laptops are designed to last, and they help children get engaged in their own education. I’ll be spinning some sweet rock, dance, and hip hop songs to liven up your Friday afternoon. If there’s a song you want to hear, write in the chat of the Turntable.fm and I’ll try to play it. Let’s do this. Go to the Turntable.fm room, click “Awesome” whenever DJ TechCrunch spins, and lets get these kids some laptops. [Image credit: ] |
Gillmor Gang 12.28.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | The Gillmor Gang goes enterprise in a conversation with Paul Greenberg, the eminence grise of the CRM, now Social CRM world. Gangsters John Taschek and Steve Gillmor decrypt Paul’s latest from the front. Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor. Recorded live Wednesday, December 28, 2011. @stevegillmor, @jtaschek, @pgreenbe |
Bank Shuts Down Local Online Advertising Company WebVisible For Not Paying Debts | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | Local interactive advertising firm has shut its doors. According to a note sent from the company’s CEO to employees, WebVisible ran out of cash, and Silicon Valley Bank is shutting the company down. WebVisible’s software allowed advertisers to manage local online campaigns on Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. The company’s services were offered directly affiliate partners to local businesses, franchisors, and national advertisers Previous WebVisible partners include AT&T, British Telecom, Yellow Pages Group of Canada, EarthLink, and The McClatchy Company, among others. WebVisible, which was founded in 2001, has raised from Sutter Hill Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Adams Street partners. Here’s part of the note sent to employees: We are still trying to get confirmation from the company, and will update when we hear back. |
Why We Should All Give Google+ The Finger | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | “Google+ is about sharing the right updates with the right people – making sharing online just like sharing in real life. Hanging out on Google+, with your family, your friends, or new friends you don’t yet know, is more than just multi-user video chat. It’s about eliminating borders and bringing people together around the world. It’s about people.” This blogger got a pic of himself removed from Google+ yesterday, and another blogger about it, and then the original about that blogger. Here’s why the image removal was significant, BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza. “But Google describes Plus as “sharing in real life”. It describes it as an “identity service”. The middle finger, pointed at no-one in particular, is hardly a scandalous gesture; here it triggers a vaguely-defined policy that’s being applied to a service marketed heavily as a public venue for free expression.” First of all if you’re not flipping any specific person off in your photo, you’re not really offending anyone are you? Someone I know actually innocuously points to things with their middle finger because they grew up in a place where individual fingers aren’t assigned obscene status. To actually remove someone’s photo because of such a culturally-specific constraint (a gesture indicating what, exactly?) is absurd. What’s more absurd is that the protocol is hard to scale; It’s easy to track what is up to with his avatar because he’s so visible. I’ve been , and my pic is still up, though it might not be after this post. In Greece it is an insult to show the palms of your hands to people, in the Middle East the soles of your shoes, is Google going to start censoring this kind of stuff too? Internet companies have different ways of dealing with the issue of “mature or offensive content” imagery. Facebook runs through profiles manually to boot out the nudes and Instagram uses a community review process that filters for different categories. It is essentially up to the company what kinds of content it does and does not accept, sure. BUT it’s just too funny (and begs to be harped on) that of all the social networks, the one that wants to be the most “real” is the one that blocks the bird, and not all these . What’s next, it starts starring out the word “fuck” in status updates? Something’s gotta give Google. Can you really, truly argue that a middle finger is that universally offensive? And if anything it’s “immature” content. Already a good number of Google+ users have changed their pics in homage to Siegler (Hey, it’s an easy and surprisingly satisfying fight). We’ll keep you posted. |
Fab’s Fabulous Year—Now Doing Over 100,000 Orders A Month | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | In many ways, 2011 was the year of the pivot. One startup that successfully switched gears was , which started the year as a gay social network and ended it a design-oriented e-commerce site. Founder Jason Goldberg created the below to illustrate all the changes the company has gone through, from its pivot in February to raising in July, another in early December, and all along the way. But one slide in particular caught my eye. It shows Fab’s order growth shooting up from just above 20,000 orders in July to about 40,000 in September and then jumping to nearly 100,000 in November. Orders in december continues to climb, Goldberg tells me, and the company is on an annualized revenue-run-rate of almost $70 million. Of course, that is annualized based on December, which is the best month of the year for retail. But that implies Fab will do almost $6 million in revenue this month alone. A lot of people were introduced to Fab this holiday season, and if they like what they got they will return next year to shop some more. Fab’s ambition is to become the “Amazon.com for design.” Its investors are betting that it can get there and turn that 100,000 orders a month into a million orders a month and more. [slideshare id=10708910&doc=fab2011timeline-111228104652-phpapp02] |
Find Out Which Brands Are Winning On Google+ With ZoomSphere (Hint: Android is #1) | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | Facebook has AppData, Twitter has Twitaholic, and now Google+ has its own independent brand page rankings site: . It shows which brands have the most followers, activity, +1s, shares, and comments, and slice the data by time, page category, and country. Oddly, the site doesn’t rank user profiles like does — just brand pages. Still, by augmenting its existing charts for Facebook and Twitter, ZoomSphere could become a comprehensive resource for brands charting their own performance, assessing competitors, or scoping for potential partners. So who’s winning ? Mostly news outlets, bands, and technology companies. Considering that Google+ is notorious for Google fanboys, it’s little surprise that Android tops the international follower charts, and 6 Google properties reside in the top 25. Mashable, The New York Times, Breaking News, and TechCrunch are all in the top 20. The most popular bands reveal a slightly more mature demographic on Google+, with older acts like Coldplay, Train, and Pearl Jam ranking significantly higher than on Facebook or Twitter. No brands have come close to reaching 1 million followers, while only 3 individuals — Britney Spears, Larry Page, and Snoop Dogg — have accomplished the feat. This shows that mainstream users who casually subscribe to lots of their favorite brands and celebrities haven’t joined Google+’s . Instead, avid technologists and news readers courted by the social network’s invite-only launch seem to make up its core user base. One myth that could be dispelled by ZoomSphere’s charts? That there are no women on Google+. High rankings for country duo Sugarland, Burberry, and H&M which claims the #4 spot seem to suggest otherwise. In terms of features and feel, ZoomSphere offers a solid product. Charts and graphs look polished, its easy to compare different pages, and the option to view by country reveals some interesting demographic distinctions. For example, Dell ranks #17 worldwide, but as #2 in the UK, showing Apple’s rise might not be so swift in Britain. Some features that could improve ZoomSphere would be Google+ user profile charts, and the ability to view a single brand across its Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ presences. Established market research providers have been slow to launch Google+ brand charts, giving ZoomSphere an opportunity to become the go-to source for this data. Now it just needs so more brands actually want them. |
Blip.tv Just Raised $6 Million, But Where Is The Audience? | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | Blip Networks, which operates , is raising more money. According to an the New York City company sold $6 million worth of stock beginning on December 22, 2011 in an offering that could expand to as much as $11.1 million. Presumably, this is part of a Series D offering, since Blip raised a Series C in May, 2010, almost 18 months ago. The total raised to date is now . Blip is trying to become a . But it is becoming increasingly hard for any video site that is not Youtube to carve out a niche for itself. A quick glance at comScore and shows that Blip.tv’s audience has been pretty much flat all year. ComScore estimates Blip.tv’s U.S. visitors at 1.4 million, down from 1.6 million in July. The Quantcast numbers show a similar trend line, with 1.1 million U.S. visitors and 2.4 million global (see chart above). Blip has always been more of a distribution network to other video sites than a pure destination. It serves the top native Web video talent by giving them one place to manage all of their videos across the Web, including YouTube. The team there is talented and has been a fixture of the online video industry since its early days. But last Spring it made a big push to become more of a video destination site in its own right. It doesn’t appear that strategy is paying off. : I spoke with COO Steve Brookstein this morning. He confirms that CEO and founder Mike Hudack is leaving the company, as was previously , but so is co-founder Dina Kaplan (as ). Brookstein is running the company as a search for a new CEO “steeped in digital media” continues. (Brookstein is from the cable industry and is more of an operator). The $6 million was an inside round by Blip.tv’s existing investors, Bain Capital and Canaan Partners, and the round is still open. Brookstein says the attempt to become a destination site is “just one pillar of a multi-tier strategy.” Total video plays worldwide are tracking at 300 million amonth, with 70 million of those in Blip.tv’s own player (which is where it can serve ads—it’s main source of revenue). The company has 55 employees and is “exactly on our business plan,” says Brookstein. It is not yet cash-flow positive. “We decided to continue investing in the business,” he says. Stay tuned. |
CrunchDeals: Get Yourself A Thing-O-Matic For $999 | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | is pretty pricey – $1,299 for the kit and $2,500 for the assembled kit – but (and this is my professional opinion) it is amazing and everyone in the world should own one. That said, Fab.com has a special deal on Thing-O-Matics this week – $999 for the kit and $2,000 for the assembled device – one of the first and biggest discounts ever on the entire system. You can but you’ll have to create an account to pick it up at this price. The sale started yesterday so you have two days left to pull the trigger. Why do you want a 3D printer? Heck if I know, but I think 3D printers are kind of like color printers in 1990. You never really thought you’d own one but they were pretty darn cool and eventually the price will be so low that everyone has one. |
Will UK Prime Minister get an iPad app for work? Unlikely. Here's why. | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | According to some today the British Prime Minister, David Cameron is to get “his own personalised iPad app” to stay on top of Government business. Cameron is known to use an iPad to read newspapers and catch up on media generally, as evidenced by taken at a party conference last year. But this report sounds just a little like a slow news week combined with some idle chatter over the Christmas party season amongst the Whitehall press gang and the ‘spads’ – insider shorthand for Special Advisers. Exhibit A: Both reports in The Telegraph and The Times newspapers talk about “Programmers inside the Cabinet Office.” Update: Correction: there is the quite new “ ” under Francis Maude. No news on an iPad app though, as yet, and nothing on their . There has of course been the Data.gov.uk project for a while, but this focused on opening up government data. Exhibit B: The planned app is said to include “real time” news information from Google and Twitter. Well, how can we put this? The best apps for those are the ones provided by those companies. Indeed, Twitter generally frowns on third party client apps, so one doubts this claim stands up. Exhibit C: Evidence that Cameron users technology has been added to the reports as a way to indicate that he’d use an iPad app for official government business. This evidence includes the fact that he uses email and text messaging. No further comment… Exhibit D: The app is “expected to be ready by March”. This is a pretty slow app development cycle. Exhibit E: The app is said to contain the latest data on NHS waiting figures, crime stats, unemployment, etc. All freely available on current department web sites. No app is required for this. Meanwhile, any app that had confidential government briefing papers would have to pass massive security testing. Perhaps this is the reason for the March deadline? Hard to say either way. Exhibit F: Apparently the idea for the app was inspired by No 10 “advisers visiting the US”. The biggest advisor to do this was Steve Hilton, who took a widely reported trip to Silicon Valley a couple of years ago. Our sources on the matter: “Hilton demands such things on a regular basis.. and is politely ignored for the most part.” That’s not to say it didn’t happen that way, but this is sideline information. So is this an actual app or simply a secure web page added to the home screen on an iPad? Because frankly that would take less time, cost less and also feed into the government’s own declared position on opening up government data. As (Whitehall’s first full-time website specialist ) put it: “Either way it would seem to be against current policy.” Why? because the ‘Government Digital Service’ (GDS), has come out against apps in principle as they are ‘proprietary by nature’. Photo: : Tom Loosemore, who works with the GDS “none of us in position to confirm or deny” existence of iPad app. Update II: GigaOm which say the iPad app may be real. |
Taleo’s Recruiting Solution Processed 15% of Last Year’s US Hires | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | Other than Salesforce, no cloud SaaS provider handles more transactions than . The stats the company revealed to me about its 2011 are staggering. The Taleo talent and recruitment solution helped enterprises hire 3.1 million people, roughly 15% of the year’s US hires. It had 50 to 60 million visitors to the job listing sites and other services it powers. Bootstrapped but now publicly traded, Taleo serves 5,000 customers including half of the Fortune 100. When companies need to hire huge numbers of employees, they come to Taleo. For example, Taleo helped Macy’s onboard around 80,000 hires in just 8 weeks to prepare for the holiday season. Thanks to Taleo’s infrastructure, Macy’s was able to quickly re-hire seasonal workers from last year because it already had verification and feedback for each person. Since founded in 1999, Taleo has led to more hires than the entire population of San Francisco. The company breaks down into two core components. The Taleo Talent Exchange is a pool of over 250 million job candidate profiles where clients post over 260,000 new job openings per month. Clients source potential hires from the exchange and can then route them into the Taleo’s management solution. The SaaS management solution helps businesses source candidates through job boards, recruit through referrals on social networks, assess a candidate’s potential, and track them through the hiring process. Once signed, employees can be efficiently onboarded, set up with goals, and monitored for performance. Development software lets employees learn new skills, and a succession planning system helps businesses determine who to promote. Finally, compensation planning and analytics systems let enterprises optimize their talent investments. As an older, established business, Taleo is still a little shaky on mobile and social. It has been developing , a location-based mobile recruiting app. It’s designed to show recruiters any job candidates who are nearby so they can connect with them for some spontaneous in-person networking. I doubt it will work, though, because the chances of a recruiter being nearby a logged in candidate with skills for the positions they’re looking for is low, and few candidates will want to randomly meet with a recruiter while out getting coffee. The new is a little backwards too. Users can subscribe to listings of jobs that meet their criteria. However, the app doesn’t show bookmark jewels in the Facebook navigation menu to alert users when new matching openings have been posted. That means users could easily forget to check the app and might miss the listings they were waiting for. In the coming years, Taleo hopes to use its legacy in the space to fend off competitors like , and which . Karl Ederle, Vice President of Product Management at Taleo tells me “You cant hire more engineers to build 10 years of interesting data.” It’s also been staying ahead by making a . While the in the US, the unemployment rate is still high. For Taleo, that fact could actually help its revenues, which were $291 million for the 12 months preceding October 2011. More companies than ever are now looking for talent management solutions to make sure their HR departments don’t drown in applications.
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Khan Academy Jumps To 4M Uniques Per Month (Up 4X From Last Year) | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | Oh, how I love Reddit AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) posts. In almost all cases, the inherent down-to-earth nature of a community-driven interview leads the most interesting of people to open up in genuine, honest ways that they otherwise might not in a one-on-one interview. Plus, they’re almost always jammed with all sorts of interesting facts and stats. Take with Khan Academy’s founder, Salman Khan, for example. Currently the top post on Reddit, Khan has spent the last two hours detailing everything from their recent growth and his workflow to the team’s plans for the future. Depends on the video. If I do an example problem in, say, algebra, I don’t do any prep so it takes me about 10 minutes. If I am thinking about introducing a complex topic that I already know well, I think about it on my walk to work so it may be 30 mins -1 hour total. If it is a topic that I need to brush up on, it might be half a day. When I did organic chemistry, I spent 2 weeks immersing myself in the subject before making the first video. Mark Twain. Muhammad Yunus. Bill Cosby. Richard Feynman. Bill Gates (regardless of how you feel about Microsoft, he has redefined philanthropy and is directly saving a ridiculous number of lives. He’s also amazingly smart and down to earth) . I can barely speak English :)
Seriously, we will try to eventually address this. Don’t know exactly how and there is a lot other stuff in the pipeline, but, i agree, it is important. While these are some of my favorite bits, it’s just a tiny chunk of what Khan has covered. I’d highly recommend checking out the full AMA (especially if you’ve got a particularly pressing question — as of the time this post went live, Khan was still answering things.) |
Subpug RSS Reader Looks To Pull You Away From Google Reader | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | As far as web sites go, there’s only one site I look at more than Google Reader. You’re on it right now. There’s nothing technically “wrong” with Google Reader, but when you look at it every five minutes, every day of your life, another RSS reader option is super exciting. Enter . It’s a new RSS reader that just launched on Christmas and it’s pretty slick if I do say so myself. It’s aimed toward more of the light news reader, rather than someone like myself with thousands of subscriptions. Still, it gets the job done. You can choose from certain pre-subscribed options like Gadgets, Music, Fashion, and even Geek Humor, or you can build your own/import your Google Reader OPML. The set up process takes all of three seconds and you’re ready to read, mainly because there’s no sign up or log in of any kind. The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s a totally different look from Google Reader, with a grey background and a nice, clean layout. But there’s more: on the left-hand side of the page you’ll see comments from the story that’s highlighted. I find this to be a pretty smart addition to your average RSS reader. I mean, what’s a post without the comments? Users can also choose to hide certain topics from specific feeds, and there are options to share on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. Subpug also added some cool cross-device functionality. One thing that really bugs me about Google Reader is that it doesn’t translate well to mobile, at least on iOS. Android users are lucky enough to have a pretty solid Google Reader app, but the same certainly isn’t true for the iPhone clan. Google Reader in mobile Safari is tolerable, but nothing special. For something better you have to pull your Google Reader subscriptions into a third party app. Getting Subpug up and running on your phone and/or tablet is easy as pie. Simply enter your email address into the proper field on the settings page, and you’ll be sent a link. Click the link on your phone, bookmark it, and you’re ready to go. On mobile the experience can be a bit frustrating if you have thousands of subscriptions (it loads a bit slow, and froze on me once), but as I said Subpug is meant for the casual reader. I also found that the desktop web app loads slower than Google Reader, so it then becomes a trade-off. If a fresh new look and the ability to read comments as you go is important, a few extra seconds during refresh may be a fair price to pay. If speed is the name of the game, you may want to wait until Subpug cleans itself up a bit. Either way, we’re glad to see another strong option fall into the RSS reader category. |
Does Microsoft Really Need A Windows Superphone? | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | A made the rounds earlier today, and if its contents hold true, then Microsoft will be going big on hardware when it comes time for Windows Phone Apollo to take the stage. Even though the budget-friendly Tango update will hit devices first, Microsoft has apparently made the development of “superphones” a priority for next year. One of the things that I really enjoy about Windows Phone is that it doesn’t need the latest-and-greatest hardware in order to give users a consistently smooth experience. Take devices like the Focus Flash for example — AT&T will give you one for something like a penny these days, and I’d say the device runs about as well as any other Windows Phone on the market. That’s a good thing — creating a sense of consistency across devices at all price points means that nearly every user has the same (hopefully solid) experience. By the same token, it also creates a problem of differentiation. When the experience of using the OS is very close across different devices, hardware manufacturers have to find ways to make their handset the one to buy. Whether that’s by going with a big display or a physical keyboard is up to the vendors to decide, but Microsoft’s supposed push for “superphones” with the Apollo update may mean that Microsoft will try and face Android on their own terms. That’s where Microsoft falls into a trap, and I can’t really blame them. Companies like Samsung and Motorola have taken their OS of choice and have thrown it on devices for every potential market they can think of. Meanwhile, blogs and pundits like to wax technical everytime a new spec sheet is released, which creates a sense of around numbers and clock speeds and megapixels. The end result is an environment that’s overloaded with options, with only the best performing ones receiving any limelight. That’s not to say a device’s specs aren’t important. In fact, they’re absolutely important to the extent that they help deliver a great user experience. After a while though, the law of diminishing returns kicks in — adding a slightly faster processor makes a device look better on paper, but actual performance gains could be negligible. But Windows Phone has arguably . Sure, it could stand a few tweaks, but I don’t think what Windows Phone needs can be addressed by new hardware. Not yet. anyway. The limiting factor is the OS itself. It runs very well even on first-generation hardware, so would beefing up components make that much of a difference? The concept of a superphone, with whatever specifics that may entail, hinges on the notion that it can deliver more than what a run-of-the-mill device is capable of. Dual-core processors and LTE radios would be welcome additions to the platform’s hardware lineup, and I’m sure they’ll appear in Windows Phones soon anyway, but hardware additions at best will only lead to feature parity with the competition. It all comes down to how big a step forward the Apollo update is. It was long rumored that the “Apollo” codename referred to Windows Phone 8, and it’s apparent ship date in Q4 2012 means that a lot could happen between now and then. If some drastic changes take place, then the superphone concept may be better able to deliver a WP8 experience than current hardware. But will it be enough to solidify their presence in the market? If the road map is legit (and hasn’t been made irrelevant), then waiting until Q4 2012 for their first superphones hit the market could put them at a terrible disadvantage against Android’s quick updates and Apple’s end-of-the-year marketing power. It’s bound to be a pretty gruesome fight no matter what developments arise between now and then, and Microsoft had better hope that their approach pays off. |
23andMe Snags GeneticScreening.com For A Mere $2200 | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | Quick, how many pairs of chromosomes do you have? If your mind just drew a blank — or an image of Ethan Hawke fiddling around with tweezers in GATTACA — then you probably aren’t alone. The answer, of course, is 23 pairs, for a total of 46 chromosomes. And it’s what the name of well-funded genetic testing company , which has raised some to date, refers to. Despite the reference (which may not be obvious to most people), that name isn’t a bad one, as it makes an intimidating topic sound more friendly and accessible. But now the company has another option at its disposal that’s a lot more straightforward (and SEO friendly, no doubt): . As was first by DomainShane, 23andMe cofounder Anne Wojcicki bought the domain for a mere $2200 on Sedo in the last two weeks. The domain now redirects to 23andme.com. The domain is a big deal for the company. 23andMe is easy enough to remember, but the term ‘Genetic Screening’ is a generic term that can encompass countless types of tests, and could eventually become extremely popular in Google searches. DNA testing isn’t exactly a hot topic for most people just yet, but it will be — in the coming years such testing is likely to explode as researchers uncover which chunks of DNA contribute to which traits and diseases. Reached for comment, the company confirmed that it has indeed acquired the domain, and that while there are no immediate plans for using it, it “may be integrated into continuing business development planning.” |
Geico Turns One Man’s PR Trash Into Their Own PR Gold | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | And that, friends, is what we call (Meme-ment?) For those left wondering why Geico suddenly forgot how to type coherently, here’s . The TL;DR version: one brazen marketer got a bit too cocky in his (typo-riddled) responses to a customer, word spread, and the acrid wrath of the Internet rained down like hellfire. Geico jumped at the opportunity to juxtapose their PR style with a little jab, and the Internet fired a mountain of love (in the form of retweets and Reddit posts) in their direction for it. This is how Twitter . For the companies out there somehow still trying to wrap their head around this whole Twitter thing: just do what Geico does. Have a real human responding (preferably someone who considers the Internet their second home), and give them the flexibility to respond like a real human would. Let them be funny. Let them make little inside jokes. The Internet hivemind will appreciate it. And for those looking to get a few more laughs out of this fiasco, there’s already a user-made . |
Crazy “Spam” Email About Print Cancellation *Is* Actually From The New York Times | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | If you’re a subscriber — or — you may have received that following email this morning, implying that you have cancelled your subscription. Many many people did, it’s all Here is the text of the email in question: Dear Home Delivery Subscriber, Our records indicate that you recently requested to cancel your home delivery subscription. Please keep in mind when your delivery service ends, you will no longer have unlimited access to NYTimes.com and our NYTimes apps. We do hope you’ll reconsider. As a valued Times reader we invite you to continue your current subscription at an exclusive rate of 50% off for 16 weeks. This is a limited-time offer and will no longer be valid once your current subscription ends.* Continue your subscription and you’ll keep your free, unlimited digital access, a benefit available only for our home delivery subscribers. You’ll receive unlimited access to NYTimes.com on any device, full access to our smartphone and iPad® apps, plus you can now share your unlimited access with a family member.† To continue your subscription call 1-877-698-0025 and mention code 38H9H (Monday–Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. E.D.T.). some users are reporting that the email IPs , an email firm that the uses that just so happened to be hacked last spring. While many are leaning towards the hack theory to explain this morning’s confusion, it’s also possible that someone at Epsilon and did something silly like hit “reply all.” Wow, this story is getting even more cray; media reporter Amy Chozick claims that email came from a Times employee, “not employed by outside firm Epsilon,” according to a spokeswoman. It should have gone to approximately 300 people and went to over 8 million, Chozick . https://twitter.com/#!/amychozick/status/152128299160702976 The confirms that the email was an internal mistake in a statement. “An email was sent earlier today from The New York Times in error. This email should have been sent to a very small number of subscribers, but instead was sent to a vast distribution list made up of people who had previously provided their email address to The New York Times. We regret this error and we regret our earlier communication noting that this email was SPAM.” In any case, all this confusion has made for some choice Twitter hilarity. https://twitter.com/#!/pourmecoffee/status/152140801495937024 https://twitter.com/#!/NYTimesComm/status/152099060248092672 https://twitter.com/#!/pkafka/status/152104392575827968 https://twitter.com/#!/nickbilton/status/152102323886358529 https://twitter.com/#!/alexia/status/152102542598356992 https://twitter.com/#!/eslawiniplant/status/152105975862665216 https://twitter.com/#!/Megan/status/152109112321257472 https://twitter.com/#!/alexia/status/152114560696983553 https://twitter.com/#!/pbump/status/152113034301673472 https://twitter.com/#!/NYTSpam/status/152109822450466816 |
Kindle Accessory Maker Files Suit Against Amazon | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | M-Edge, a small Maryland-based company responsible for many popular Kindle cases, last week filed suit against Amazon. According to the , M-Edge claims that Amazon has repeatedly tried to change the terms of a contract put into place all the way back in 2009, and has bullied the accessory maker each time it fights back. In the original contract, Amazon was to receive a 15 percent commission on all sales that go through Amazon’s Kindle store front. Apparently this wasn’t enough for Amazon, who later requested an increase in commission to 32 percent and threatened to remove M-Edge cases from the store if the Maryland-based company didn’t concede. After finally reaching new terms, M-Edge alleges that Amazon then asked for the difference in commission on cases sold before the increase. Each time M-Edge fought back, Amazon threatened removal from the store and even went so far as to say that M-Edge would no longer get early access to Kindle designs, according to the filing. “This case presents a classic example of unlawful corporate bullying,” reads the suit. “M-Edge developed a very successful product line: personal electronic device jackets with multiple features for the Kindle and other e-readers. Amazon thereafter repeatedly sought to hijack the product through threats, deceit, interference with M-Edge’s customer relationships, and patent infringement.” Ah, patent infringement. I sure haven’t gotten my fill of those beautiful words. M-Edge also alleges that Amazon is currently infringing on it holds describing a book light-equipped ereader cover. Amazon currently sells the Amazon Lighted Leather cover (pictured, right), which M-Edge cites within the suit. The accessory maker is looking for a permanent injunction as well as damages. |
Verizon Customers Dealing With Third Data Outage In One Month (Update) | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | It seems like December just can’t end soon enough for the folks at Verizon — we’re getting reports that Verizon’s data network is on the fritz. Like both other times this month, not everyone is affected, but I can safely say my little part of New Jersey is without data. Users on have reported similar issues in parts of Georgia, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania, California, Virginia, Washington, Texas, and Maryland. Interestingly, the outage only seems to be affecting 4G devices, as reports that 3G only handsets seem to work just fine. 4G handsets on the other hand can’t seem to pick up either 3G or 4G service, so hopefully you’re not using your Galaxy Nexus for anything too critical. Each outage becomes harder and harder to swallow, if only because Verizon has never revealed the cause of these issues. It’s especially frustrating because Verizon’s was intended to get as many customers up and running on their LTE network as soon as possible. They wanted to preserve the quality of service for customers with 3G-only devices, but I can’t help but wonder if Verizon’s plan was a bit too successful. I’ve reached out to Verizon for a comment, but haven’t heard anything yet at time of writing — we’ll keep you posted on the situation. a Verizon Wireless spokesperson reached out with the following statement. We are investigating reports of some customers experiencing trouble accessing the 4GLTE network. The network itself continues to operate and all customers continue to be able to make calls, send text messages and utilize data services. 3G devices are operating normally. Verizon has confirmed that the outage was fixed overnight. |
Keen On… Kurt Andersen: Why Nothing Much Has Changed In The Last 20 Years (TCTV) | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | We all know that not much happens in the week between Christmas and the New Year. But less well know is how little has happened culturally in the last twenty years. Indeed, so little has happened in this time (except, of course, for all the all-important caveat of technological change), according to the writer and broadcaster that we are still listening to the , watching the same sort of tv shows, wearing the same style of clothing, driving the same kind of cars and living in the same kind of homes as we were in late Eighties. Andersen describes this as a and suggests that at its root may lie the ever quickening pace and ubiquity of technological change. That’s because, as he told me when we Skyped last week, all our creative energies are going into technological innovation, which might have frozen innovation in all the other cultural sectors of our economy. As the Internet changes everything, Andersen seems to be saying, culture becomes our anchor amidst all the creative destruction wrought by technological innovation. This is the first part of a two part interview with Andersen. Tomorrow, he talks about Time’s Person of 2011 – . |
Verizon’s Next DROID RAZR Already Spotted In Their System | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 17 | Because the name “Verizon DROID RAZR by Motorola” seemingly isn’t long enough, it looks like Verizon’s already planning another RAZR . I kid, of course (does the name even matter? Everyone outside of the tech scene just calls every Android phone “the Droid” anyway), but I pick on the name because it’s pretty much the only thing we know at this point. Spotted lurking in VZW’s inventory system by , it looks like the next handset in the DROID RAZR series will be the DROID RAZR MAXX. Motorola just launched a phone (the HD XT928) in China last week that could pass as the RAZR’s twin, save for two big differences: it has a 720p screen (1280×720, while the original DROID RAZR comes in at 960×540), and a 13 megapixel camera (vs 8.) The current thought is that the HD XT928 and the Droid Razr Maxx are one in the same, though it’s all conjecture at this point. Keep an eye out and let us know if you spot anything, won’t you? |
Facebook For Android Finally Has More Daily Active Users Than Facebook For iPhone | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 17 | For the first time, the Facebook for Android mobile app has eclipsed the daily active user count of Facebook for iPhone. The Android app launched in September 2009 more than a year after its iPhone sister and has been playing catch-up ever since. Both are developed internally by Facebook. This week the two were briefly tied, but the Android app is now pulling away with 58.3 million DAU compared to the iPhone app’s 57.4 million, according to the . With the Android device base and Timeline now available for Android but not yet for iPhone, I expect this gap to widen. [ : Facebook released on December 18th.]
‘s monthly user count of 85.4 million still lags behind the . However, this stat isn’t as important as DAU, or stickiness — the percentage of monthly active users that return daily. Android’s stickiness is 68.2%, compaed to iPhone’s 57.9%. This could indicate that Android devices appeal to a younger, more Facebook-engaged audience, or to more hardcore technology users in general. The iPhone’s role as a fashion and status symbol may be drawing less engaged users. Another explanation for the Android app taking the lead is that Facebook released an in October which now has . Though many users likely switched from using the unoptimized iPhone app on their iPad, some probably came from unofficial third-party apps. Until Facebook for iPhone is updated to support Timeline (which it was on Dec. 18th), some of the app’s users some may stray to the HTML5 mobile site and slow the app’s growth. Meanwhile, can help the app grow its lead. For reference, Facebook for BlackBerry has , and Facebook for Windows Phone has . User counts of the Facebook apps matter because they can influence where Facebook devotes mobile development resources. For years, features were first released for the iPhone version, possibly because its higher user count made it more of a priority. If the Android app becomes significantly more popular, Timeline might be the first of many features it gets early. [ : This could set an example for other companies to develop for Android first as well.] And that could sway people choosing what phone to buy. This is a coming of age moment for Android. |
Zynga COO John Schappert On Going Public, And What’s Coming Next | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 17 | Zynga is still in its quiet period for another 24 days after going public yesterday, so chief operating officer wouldn’t answer my more specific questions about the company’s future plans when I talked to him last night. After opening up at an , the company had a before closing down 5% yesterday. But as Schappert emphasizes to me in the interview below, is here for the long-term and its investors should be thinking that way, too. He adds some color to the roadshow video the company has been showing investors over the last couple weeks, discussing the company’s expansion plans across social and mobile platforms, and internationally. John Schappert: Like we talked about on the roadshow, we have a larger bank account to invest in future of gaming, notably social gaming, which we think is where play is headed. When we think of growth, there are a few different areas. We’re investing in existing games to drive bookings [revenue-generating events like the purchase of a virtual good]. We’re also working to create new franchises and genres, like Castleville, which we recently launched on Facebook. That also means more international expansion. We’ve just started localizing a year ago with CityVille. John Schappert: I can’t go down to country. But CityVille launched a year ago, and it was our first game that was localized into five languages at launch. Now, we launch in a dozen languages, and we continue to add more. We’ve built it into the engine. Related to that, we’re making progress with localizing payments. Two months ago, if you were in Europe and purchasing virtual goods in games, you were still buying in US dollars. Now you can buy in the euro and the pound. International is an area we’re going to continue to invest in. John Schappert: We’ve invested heavily. We’ve already talked about growing mobile by ten times to more than 11 million DAUs. It’s still early on Google Plus, we still have hopes that Google will continue to invest there. Hopefully it’ll turn into a nice platform. We’re also on Tencent [a leading web copmany] in China. And they’re like Google. They’re very dedicated to it. They’re both big players with lots of audience, who we’ve built great social games for. John Schappert: I can’t give much detail on Tencent. It’s still very early for us. We’ve spent a lot of time on localizing localize. even more with content. very early going for us. But we’re very proud about mobile. If you look at AppData, and at our Facebook DAU, and compare our mobile stats to our closest competitor on Facebook, you’ll see that we compare quite favorably. We have new game engines on mobile coming out now for CityVille Hometown, FarmVille Express, Words With Friends…. I would say when we look at mobile, we don’t separate by saying they’re mobile not social. We create social games on every device, so you can play anywhere and everywhere. John Schappert: We can’t provide any forward projections, but in the roadshow we talked about ads, how they’ve grown 160% — very fast. We do see it as a nice area of opportunity. engagement… all our s-1 stuff. We’re reaching 227 million monthly active users. Big brands love that. We’re partnered with Dreamworks for Kung Fu Panda, and lots of others. We offer unique ways to integrate advertisers into games. Best Buy in Cityville was interacted with 110 million times. John Schappert: Google is continuing to improve marketplace, continuing to invest and further develop it. There are also a lot of new devices, and more coming this holiday season with Kindle Fires and iPads and other tablets and phones showing up under Christmas trees. The activation on all of this is pretty spectacular. I can’t break out how Words With Friends is doing on the Kindle but it’s a top mobile game. I mean, people play it even when they shouldn’t on airplanes…. John Schappert: Our message to investors one day in is the same as on the road. We look at this for the long-term, we’re not making short-term decisions. It’s not single day or single hour. We’re looking at the long-term of play, the long-term of Zynga and connecting the world through games, and that’s hopefully what people are investing in — the future of social gaming and play. John Schappert: People who are thinking about working at Zynga should go to our web site and apply. With respect to M&A, it remains the same — we’re actively looking for great teams, studios, IP…. when we find those, it’s a great add to our company. Conduit Labs built Adventure World, CastleVille is from Bonfire. In terms of larger acquisitions? We’re looking at a lot of different companies of all different sizes, and we’ll see what makes sense. John Schappert: A lot of people watch things and don’t watch follow-up. But what we’re most proud of is follow-up. Our users stay engaged — we have five out of the five top games on Facebook today, and some of the titles are not new — and that’s something very few people can say. [Schappert avatar via .] |
This Is Not The Net You Thought You Knew | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 12 | 17 | You know how the Internet works, right? Of course you do: you’re a TechCrunch reader, a power user. You know what that “HTTP” means in your address bar (if you’re not using Chrome.) You know that behind the scenes, the Domain Name System translates your requests for domain names like to numeric addresses like , and secure connections are encrypted by SSL. You know that web servers send HTML, the of the Web, over the wires (or the air) to your computer, and that web developers write JavaScript to control what your browser does with it. …Unless you’re actually a techie. In which case you probably already know that the above description — let’s call it the Classic Web — is increasingly completely false. What follows is a little technical, but bear with me, I have a larger point. (Also, even if you’re not a techie yourself, you need to have understanding of what today’s tech does, and how it does it, in order to make intelligent decisions.) Why doesn’t Chrome show the iconic “http://” before web addresses any more? Because it, like Amazon’s and soon , doesn’t necessarily use HTTP any more. Instead, where possible they use Google’s far-faster replacement, SPDY, which also lets servers push data to browsers, instead of having to wait for requests. That Domain Name System? It’s actually , an extension which guards against the massive security holes in the original system. And your so-called secure connections? Well, SSL was actually replaced by some time ago, which fixed some security holes, but not the biggest: browsers automatically accept security certificates for any site from literally hundreds of different authorities, any of which can be, and , compromised. Yes, this is insane. The EFF’s initiative might eventually solve the problem; in the interim, Chrome is than other browsers, because it lets site owners specify which certificates are OK. (Do I sound like I’m telling you to use Chrome? Not exactly. I mostly use Firefox, because Chrome any equivalent of Firefox’s security- and sanity-enhancing , and probably never will.) As for JavaScript — sure, all browsers it, but almost no developer pure JavaScript any more. Instead we use library frameworks like , which has more or less conquered the world, or use higher-level languages like CoffeeScript (which I dislike, for among other reasons) or even Google’s contentious new language Dart, which both compiles to and is ultimately intended to replace JavaScript. , almost seems to like it. In Google’s defense, their new server-side language is widely admired — even though, ironically, it signally fails the “The name of your language makes it impossible to find on Google” — and their tech is . Alas, I can’t see any other browser supporting it anytime soon. But at the end of the day, your browser is still mostly getting and rendering HTML, right? Don’t be so sure. For one thing, “vanilla” HTML is a smaller and smaller part of the . For another, it’s increasingly HTML5, . What’s more, there’s an interesting trend towards web servers that serve no HTML at all. Battlefield 3’s “Battlelog” web site is between client and server. My former co-worker Michael Dykman (whose co-workers generally, without provocation, suffixed his name with “the greatest programmer who ever lived”) has developed a pure XML/XSLT web framework, : as its says, “ ” The Classic Web is beginning to look like a kludge. Mostly because it was. Slowly, fitfully, three-steps-forward-two-steps-back, the tech community is finally refining it into something more secure, streamlined, and powerful. The last time something like this happened was when AJAX support hit modern browsers. Non-techies don’t realize it, but it was that innovation which ushered in Flickr, Google Maps, and the whole Web 2.0 boom. I expect HTML5 — greatly aided by the little-known back-end iterations I’ve tried to itemize above — to have a similar effect on the web and everything we do there. Including, maybe, the much-foretold, long-forestalled decline and fall of the Empires of Apps. But more on that in next week’s column… OK, so there’s no real evidence that the removal of HTTP from Chrome’s address bar is actually related to its use of SPDY. “No HTML at all” up above is too extreme: “no dynamically generated HTML” would be better, as the very first pageload still has to be HTML. People can and do argue at some length about the semantic distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘vanilla’ JavaScript, but I maintain — with considerable confidence — that JS written with jQuery is qualitatively different in content and approach than ‘pure/vanilla’ JS. Last I checked, Chrome’s NotScript wasn’t a substitute for Firefox’s NoScript, as it worked by merely masking rather than stripping out JS on a site-by-site basis: alas, I can’t find a detailed technical analysis that compares the inner workings of the current versions. : QbiT, . |
Gillmor Gang 12.17.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 12 | 17 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — celebrate the freeing of Heather Harde, the health of realtime, the obsolescence of Office, and the gamification of deep enterprise apps. It never ceases to amaze how some people rescue defeat from the jaws of victory, but Techcrunch’s loss of its business leader is our gain. As @scobleizer shows on his undulating realtime screens, Techcrunch past present and future continues to be at the bleeding edge of the social wave. Just as Microsoft continues to box itself into an innovation-free corner and give disruptive energy room to thrive, so too does AOL watch value flow from editorial through the technologies it uncrunched and onto the social mobile platform. As the crowd of another era shouted, the whole world is watching. The revolution will be streamed. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Facebook Shareholders Suck…(Or, Why This Is Not Bubble 2.0) | James Altucher | 2,011 | 12 | 17 | Facebook shareholders suck. I know this because this past week I tried to help someone sell about 30 million shares of Facebook for $31 a share. These are weird transactions because never before in history has a private company so large ($80 billion in value) had so many random people buying and selling shares of it. On the one side are these semi-mythical demigods called “co-founders” who hit the jackpot. On the other side are literally kings of some ancient lost kingdoms in Asia that suddenly want to own tens of millions of shares of Facebook before the IPO. In the middle are enough people to fill a small country. There are at least three lawyers (buyer lawyer, seller lawyer, random middle lawyer that keeps popping up and you never know his name but he’s there somehow and nobody knows why). You have 1-3 broker dealers for the buyer, 1-3 for the seller. (See also, “ ) Then you have to figure out a spread. So the seller has to agree to $30, the buyer $31, and the dollar in the middle is split 15 ways. Its 30 million shares so that’s $30 million in the middle and everyone feels this is the transaction of a lifetime and they need to get a piece. And then, all of a sudden, the secretary of the mistress of the random king wants to get at least half of the spread in the middle or will block the whole thing. So everyone needs to get on the phone again. At 11 pm at night on a Saturday. And hagggle out fees. I introduced the buyer and the seller as a favor but I have no other involvement. But through the course of this I became an expert on everything you can possibly know about Facebook shares. All the prior transactions. Which shares are “Rofer” (i.e. “right of first refusal” for those not in the “Facebook share biz”), which shares are locked up, have they been already sold and resold, we need to see POF (“proof of funds”), we need to see “Proof of shares” (nobody says “POS”, nobody even jokes like that). Everybody’s already been screwed once, twice, three times, , by people who claim to have shares or funds but don’t. They just want to be in the middle (“we’ll find the shares later,” “we’ll find the cash later”). There’s a king somewhere on his toilet thinking about the 1% of Facebook he will soon own. There’s a demigod in San Francisco or Colorado or also in Asia dreaming about all the cash he will be covered with in his gold-plated jacuzzi. But nobody will move on price. The sellers think Facebook is going to $100 (so why are they selling?). The buyers think “we have all the cash” and won’t budge. And everyone in the middle cries themselves to sleep because they are dreaming of either new houses for all of their grandkids or they assume the deal is off forever. But then new buyers show up and the old buyers disappear. And new sellers show up and the old sellers are gone. And the ongoing conversation continues but nobody knows who is real. Nobody is real. Someone is real. I need proof of funds. Well, I need proof of shares. They’re in escrow. Series A has the same restrictions as Series B. No they don’t. (from the Oprah Winfrey Show) And then: Can you also introduce me to Mark Zuckerberg? No I can’t. Nor can I introduce you to Randi Zuckerberg. Or Sheryl Sandberg. Or Jessie Eisenberg. I can’t introduce you to anyone who has “berg” as their last syllable. My wife me: don’t write this article if you really want to help your friends. Maybe the deal won’t happen. What deal? Do you think a billion dollars won’t get transacted because I write a few little words? Do you think anyone cares? But I have to write it. Because it’s all a long segue into “bubble 2.0”. There’s no bubble 2.0. And while I’m at it: there was never a bubble 1.0. Let me explain. A bubble occurs when an asset moves up today because it moved up yesterday. Think about it. I’m not going to define it more than that. (fr the Hollywood Reporter - the "co-founders of Facebook") The Internet went up in 1999 because now, 12 years later, everyone on the planet uses the Internet. And many Internet 1.0 companies: Ebay, Amazon, let’s throw in Apple, lets even throw in Google although it was late to the game, and a slew of others, are at all-time highs in value and create tens of billions in earnings. Because they are real. Why are they at all-time highs? Because everyone was right about the Internet. Everyone did eventually start using it. It did make commerce easier throughout the world. It did make corporate IT easier. It did allow companies to fire parts of their workforce because they are now replaced by easy to use technology (the for the now probably permanent 8-9% unemployment we have: every corporation used 2008-9 as an excuse to fire the dead weight the Internet created in their workforce. I’ve had Fortune 100 CEOs admit this to me: “well, everyone was firing people. So finally we were able to.”) Just like when cars appeared we were able to fire all the people who rode horses. Internet usage went from 30 million people to 2 billion people worldwide. That’s not a bubble. Groupon, no matter what you read about their stock, their moat, their people, their competition, their model (“its a coupon business”), is the fastest growing company in revenues in world history and it started in November, 2008. Zynga is another one of the fastest growing companies in world history. Facebook has 800 million users and is slowly but surely figuring out how to extract $2-$3 a year from every customer (which will give it a value of about $100 billion). Facebook is a mini-Internet. It’s an organized Internet. We’ve all moved our “home pages” to be our “Facebook pages”. Companies flash their Facebook page on their commercials now instead of their own websites. So imagine the value of the entire Internet. Discount it just a little. That’s Facebook. Or maybe Facebook + Twitter + Google. And then everyone who builds tools to service those behemoths. That’s dot-com 2.0. It’s not a bubble. So why does everyone call dot-com 1.0 a bubble? Wasn’t it? Wasn’t there pets.com? And a sock puppet? A venture capitalist might invest in 20 companies. 10 might be zeros. 5 might be losses. 3 might be small wins. One or two might be home runs. That’s different from the normal everyday investor portfolio where everyone expects all of their stocks to go up. In 1999-2000, the public was given the chance to have a venture capitalist-style portfolio. It didn’t work. And in anger it was called a “bubble” and then a “bust”. Tulips! they said. Tulips don’t have $80 billion of cash in the bank like Apple does. Tulips never had $43 billion in revenues like Amazon does. Venture capitalists will wait five to ten years for their payoff. The average investing public will wait five to ten minutes or it’s a bubble. Again: the dream came true: the Internet actually did bloom to billions of users. That’s not a tulip garden. (See, “ “) Tulips won’t have a billion in earnings like Zynga will if not next year then the year after. Tulips won’t have billions in earnings like Facebook will in the next several years. Twitter, Facebook, Etsy, Groupon, Zynga, Yelp, Craigslist—these are the dreams come true. We use these companies and they deliver value for us. They’re real. Now excuse me. The king of Shangri-La wants to buy more Facebook shares. And I have to get on the phone and pretend I can introduce him to Mark Zuckerberg. |
Google’s Winter Easter Egg: Let It Snow In Search | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 12 | 17 | Google is full of hidden within search queries. Remember the Here’s one more that’s been discovered, just in time for the holiday season. Type in search, and you’ll see snowflakes falling down the page. The first hit is the Christmas carol ‘let it snow’ by Dean Martin (which we’ve embedded below). Eventually your search results page will cloud over and the search button turns into a defrost button to clear out the clouds. Here’s a of some of our favorite easter eggs over the year. Enjoy! [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN7LW0Y00kE] |
Daily Crunch: Low Tech | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 12 | 17 | Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets:
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Toshiba Thrive 7″ Review: Cute, But Clunky | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 12 | 17 | While the 7-inch Toshiba Thrive is much more comfortable in the hand than , many of the best features in big brother never migrated over to the 7-incher. That said, this still may be the slate for you if gaming and web-surfing take precedence over e-reading. Otherwise, I’d point you to the Amazon Kindle Fire. Despite less connectivity than big brother, I actually enjoy the much more in the hand. It’s rather thin compared to the 10-inch model, with rounded corners and slightly angled edges. The charging port is placed squarely on the bottom of the slate, which makes it annoying to play around with in landscape while charging. A 3.5mm headphone jack sits up top, with a power button, volume rocker and auto-rotate lock all along the top left side. Below that you’ll find a plastic cover protecting a microUSB, miniHDMI, and microSD card slot. If you can dig back into the corners of your memory, you’ll recognize that the 10-inch Thrive came will full-sized USB and HDMI and SD card ports. The 10-incher also had a removable back cover and interchangeable battery, which isn’t the case on the Thrive 7″. The same rubberized, textured finish along the back panel is still present, though, and makes the tablet even more manageable. I actually let this thing sit on one leg for most of the time I used it, and it automatically gripped my pants so that it never slipped once. (Look, Mom! No hands!) When stressed, the Thrive 7″ crackles and pops quite a bit. But I didn’t find anything so suspect that would lead me to believe this isn’t a solid build. I’d say the Thrive’s best feature would be its display. A 1280×800 pixel resolution on a 7-inch display is pretty beautiful, and Toshiba has of course layered its Adaptive Display and Resolution+ technologies on there, as well. The display doesn’t take prints as much as some other slates I’ve dabbled with (talking to you, Sony Tablet S), but of course, there’s no such thing as an entirely print-free display. As far as input goes, the display is super responsive. It was able to follow my finger in scrolling, even while I flicked it back and forth as fast as possible. Most Android tabs have a bit of a lag on that front, but the Thrive 7″ kept up with my pace. The Toshiba Thrive family is special in that it runs pure Android 3.2 Honeycomb. No annoying overlays. No unfamiliar UIs. Just Honeycomb, the way you know how to use it. Toshiba did include its media player, along with a handful of other pre-loaded apps like Netflix, NFS Shift, File Manager, and Quickoffice HD, but on the whole this is a very vanilla experience. Of course, access to Google’s apps such as Google Maps, Google Talk, and the Android Market is included. I did have a little trouble with the Thrive’s 5-megapixel rear-facing camera. The shutter is frustratingly slow, though I was surprised to find that in camcorder mode the camera actually adjusts well between low-light and well-lit settings. I tried to do all my work on the Thrive one day (which in retrospect was a bad choice on a 7-inch tablet), from 8am to 6pm. It made it to around 3pm before giving out, which includes the usual breaks for bathroom, food, and an occasional mission on Grand Theft Auto III for iPhone. The good news is that it charges quickly. I was able to go from dead to 85 percent power in less than half an hour. When it comes down to it, the 7-inch Thrive is a solid, albeit hefty, little Android tablet. Even without the full-sized ports, there’s still quite a bit of connectivity there and we saw perfectly acceptable performance the whole time. However, the price tag puts this little guy in a tough spot. For just a couple hundred more, you can nab yourself an iPad, and anyone shopping for something a little lower on the pricing totem pole has plenty of options. Most notably, the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus is just $249 from T-Mobile, though that requires a two-year agreement. Of course, we do have the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, which certainly can’t compete with the Thrive in terms of performance or capabilities. Then again, that won’t matter to the novice user.
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null | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 28 | null |
Backed By Tandem, UpOut Launches A ‘Realtime Yelp’ For Spontaneous Local Event Discovery | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 10 | This summer, raised a $40 million fund to continue investing in its incubator and capital fund, both focused exclusively on startups building solutions for the mobile space. One of the four companies (which includes JungleApps, GimmieWorld, and Flit) funded in Tandem’s most recent batch is coming out of private beta today to get young people off the couch and into the fray. , as its name implies, is an online event discovery service that wants to get you involved in fun activities that are happening right now, in realtime. Founded by two young Babson College entrepreneurs, Martin Shen and William King, UpOut is intending to do for local events what Yelp has done for the local restaurant market, showing what’s nearby, what’s inexpensive, and what people like you are recommending. Co-founder Martin Shen says that the local events space is still largely dominated by traditional print media, like TimeOut and other hyperlocal weekly print (and online) publications. But he thinks that those traditional media outlets that have made the jump to the Web are outdated, inaccurate, and fail to offer simple ways to identify the most interesting events, especially those that pertinent to young people. The issue is that many young people, whether they’re in college, working at startups or big companies, are busy defining their careers, studying — in essence, they’re work a lot and they’re busy. But the younger working stiffs of the world are often forced to be spontaneous in their leisure or nightlife activities. Shen says that few young people plan a night’s activity much before they actually leave their apartments. That’s why UpOut is focusing on the spontaneity aspect of planning a night out, as the startup seeks to offer an event-centric, location-enabled solution that people can use while they’re on the go. Rather than combing through a list of events that may be expired, static or irrelevant, UpOut has created a service that is designed to recommend events and activities based on location, interests, social media signals, and your favorite venues — all based on what’s happening around you now. Along with AOL and Yahoo, and hundreds of newsweeklies, there umpteen services that are trying (or have tried) to address local events, but both Tandem and UpOut believe that the “spontaneous” element has really been lacking in the many approaches taken to local event recommendations. Both King and Shen and had been running a web design business out of their dorm room at Babson, but Shen told us that he’s not a big planner, nor are most young people, and they were having trouble discovering cool events when they had opportunities to take a break from coding and designing. Shen said that he was tired of wheeling through event listings to find events that seemed appealing, only to show up and discover that the price of admission wasn’t exactly conducive to a founder — or college student’s — budget. So, he says that the partnerships that the team has forged, and the events database they’ve built, are focused on non-ticketed events. And when the events they showcase are ticketed, most tend to be under $40 — that’s where they see the most demand. UpOut is adding 1,000 entertainment events, happy hours, and specials a week (in categories like Arts, Music, Touristy, Relax, etc) — all of which are happening right now. Users can mark events they’re interested in as “awesome”, which can be saved for later viewing, or follow their favorite categories. The service also uses your event preferences to serve you more relevant results as you go. Unfortunately for those not currently located in the Bay Area, UpOut’s event listings are SF-only at this point, but Shen says that the team is working on launching its service in new cities beginning in early 2012 — as well as launching a mobile app. The startup is using the infusion of capital from its Tandem investment to hire programmers. For more, check out , and let us know what you think. |
Louis CK Sells Latest Film, DRM-Free, For $5 Per Download | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 10 | Following into the wild world of micropayments, comedian Louis CK is offering his latest concert film, , as a DRM-free download or stream for $5. Once payment is tendered, downloaders can both stream and download the movie twice. Once those four chances are used up you have to pay again, although because the MP4 file is DRM-free there is nothing stopping you from watching again and again, projecting it on a building across the street, or making a tiny flip book of Louis CK excerpts. However, Louis does ask that you not “torrent” his film: While I’m sure this is already available on the pirate boards, it’s a bold step for a comedian to break with the traditional models of distribution and it’s a testament to CK’s understanding of his young, plugged-in audience. Given that his eponymous television show is probably the best thing on TV since and that his comedy is top notch, it behooves you to check it out. |
How Can Local Businesses Avoid The Horror And Structure More Effective Daily Deals? | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 12 | 10 | Couponing has been around forever, but the popularity of digital offers, daily deals, and group buying is fairly new. We’ve gone through the honeymoon period, watched the meteoric rise of Groupon, its overvaluation, IPO — and thankfully, through it all, we’ve seen increasing scrutiny on the space, especially over just how profitable daily deals actually are for local businesses. The debate has raged over the daily deal model’s clever repackaging of old ideas and just how valuable the Groupon model is as an advertising mechanism for local merchants. Rocky was probably a little overzealous in saying that , but there is no doubt that there are , just as there is no doubt that there are , both as an advertising channel and a tool for customer acquisition and retention. In the end the scrutiny is essential, just as it is to find a middle ground — falling into the extremes of “daily deals are the best!” or “the daily deal industry needs to die!” misses the point that offers and daily deals can work, but only if they’re structured correctly. Otherwise, they can go wrong and go wrong quickly. this summer, the horror stories over daily deals often come from merchants who negotiate poor deal terms, don’t track redemption or customer spend, and don’t understand the economics of running a daily deal. puts some numbers to the current flux in the daily deal industry, pointing out that 72.8 percent of merchants indicated openness to considering a different daily deal site. Merchants are open to trying your site’s model if you can prove that you have their best interest in mind and can structure deals that can help them retain customers and offer them more than a simple 50/50 split of profits. That’s how they can differentiate their value propositions. There may not be a cure-all model, but for the space to remain healthy going forward, it’s important to pose some prescriptions for merchants on how to structure daily deals so that they can get the most out of them. It’s an important conversation to have, and I hope you’ll weigh in. , a new daily deal aggregator and deal map founded by former Googlers to bring “a bit of organization and simplicity to the wild and wooly deal market”, has created an infographic for local businesses on how to design profitable deals and make them work. Check it out and let us hear your feedback. Let’s make this industry better. |
Catching Up With IntoNow Before The Republican Debate (Video) | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 10 | Social TV these days usually means a companion app on your iPad that lets you Tweet along with your friends and fellow fans while you are watching TV. These apps work best for live events (the one remaining time in the age of the DVR when a large mass of people actually watch an event at the same time). , which was bought by Yahoo and app last month, is partnering with ABC News to provide live audience polling during the Republican debate tonight for people who “tag” the debate inside the app. If you are not familiar with IntoNow, it is like Shazam for TV shows. With one click, it gathers an audio profile from the iPad’s microphone and figures out what show you are watching. Then you can see related Tweets, and chime in. Adam Cahan, the founder of IntoNow who still leads the product at Yahoo, came by our office in New York to give us a demo of the new iPad app. The video is above. |
Get Your Nominations In Now For The 2011 Crunchies Awards | Elin Blesener | 2,011 | 12 | 10 | There are only a couple days left to nominate your favorites for this year’s . Already, we’ve received over 150,000 nominations from the tech community, with hundreds more trickling in every couple hours. Coming this January 31st at 7:30pm PT, we will be hosting the 5th Annual Crunchies Awards with and . The ceremony is taking place at the gorgeous and , with an incredible after party following the ceremony. We have some really big surprise announcements coming soon, all of which we will share with you in the coming weeks. Now is the time to nominate. Nominations close to the public this December 13th, at 11:59pm PT. That gives all of you only three more days to nominate who you believe is the most deserving. We have this year, with topics ranging from: Best Social Application, VC of the Year, Best Time Sink, Best Mobile Application, CEO of the Year, Best New Startup of 2011, all the way to Best Overall Startup of 2011. Some winners from last year include: DailyBooth, Yuri Milner, Cityville, Google Mobile Maps for Android, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, Quora, and Twitter who took Best Overall Startup for 2010. You can view the full list of winners from last year Tickets to the 2011 Crunchies Awards will go on sale next week and they go extremely fast, so be sure to keep your eyes out for them. So, who do you think deserves a Crunchie Award this year? maybe? What about the for Best New Device? Or do you think Best New Device should go to the ? Leave your thoughts in the comments below and ! |
Double Hubble Bubble Trouble | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 12 | 10 | OK, I’m worried. Here’s why: Lo these many years ago, in the long-gone spring of 1996, I set out to San Francisco to make my software fortune, armed with a freshly minted degree from . The second of the interviews I’d arranged via email — a radical notion, then — consisted mostly of playing with my potential employers, but during the little time devoted to talk, I asked them: “Do you think this whole Internet boom is getting a little overhyped?” The company’s CEO looked shocked, and said: “No way. First, my grandparents in Florida have still never heard of the Internet. Second, when they do, that’s when things are going to boom.” He leaned closer, with the wide, wild eyes of a true believer. “Because the Internet changes , for .” They didn’t hire me. (I’ve never been good at first-person shooters.) Instead I wound up doing consulting work at the investment bank that led Netscape’s IPO, and rode the subsequent boom . It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was a giddy crazy time a lot like now. Because, you see — Every tech bubble needs a narrative. A guiding myth, if you will. A tale that gives otherwise intelligent people good reason to be . The dot-com bubble had “The Internet Changes , For !” Well, this burgeoning new bubble now has a myth of its own: Marc Andreessen’s “ .” Consider these surreal quotes from by Venkatesh Rao at : “The one absolutely solid place to store your capital today … is in software developers’ wallets,” “if you have money and you happen to find a talented developer who seems to like you and wants to work with you, you should give him/her your money to build something, … if you don’t have money, you should offer up whatever other kind of surplus you do have,” “software is now the core function of every company, no matter what it makes or what service it actually provides.” If that isn’t a bubble mentality, I don’t know what is. Now, as , I’d certainly this to be true. And Rao isn’t the only one saying it: even slightly less starry-eyed media are beginning to sound like the choir to his solo. The “the steady march of that most protean of technologies — computing — as it makes further inroads into every scientific discipline and industry.” The “computer programming continues to gain allure and relevance amid the rise of mainstream tech companies like Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. and almost every industry going digital.” I want to make it clear that I am not actually disagreeing with any of those statements. Software eating the world. The Internet changing everything, for everyone. But these sea changes don’t happen anywhere near as fast as true believers think. “Tech bubble” has two meanings: ‘excessive valuation waiting to be popped,’ yes, but also ‘the distorting membrane inside which the tech world lives.’ Within it we surf exponentially ever faster, fuelled by Moore’s Law ( ), but we also suffer from what I call “Moore’s Lens”: like the first, flawed Hubble Telescope, our perspective is skewed. In particular, we tend to think the rest of the world can and will change as fast as the the tech world does. It ain’t so. Even when those changes do come, they never happen the way the believers expect. If in 1999 you had told a dot-commer that a tech company would be the most valuable publicly traded company in the world twelve years hence, they would have nodded –but if you had told them it would be , they would have laughed at you pityingly. Furthermore, it’s weird and disconcerting to think of software-eating-the-world as some kind of endgame. On the contrary: as Neal Stephenson , “Let’s get back to work doing interesting and useful things … We can’t Facebook our way out of the current economic status quo.” Shades of Peter Thiel and Max Levchin the current state of innovation in the world today at Disrupt SF. Software won’t eat the world tomorrow, and even if it does, that won’t automatically make anything better. Anyone who tells you differently is living in a bubble. NASA Goddard, . |
TC Gadgets Webcast: Jakarta Blues | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 10 | This week HP open-sourcing, RIM’s problems in Jakarta, and giving away a few Speck iPhone cases. Join us, won’t you, in the TC Gadgets Webcast? This week we have a special giveaway. We’ll pick for commenters at random below to win a of your choosing. There is a whole slew of them available, so winners will be able to choose from an assortment. Comment below and be sure to watch the webcast for more info on the cases. |
Today Amazon Will Give You $15 To Use PriceCheck and Screw Local Retailers | Josh Constine | 2,011 | 12 | 10 | Today, December 10th, Amazon is offering a you’re going to love and your local brick-and-mortar retailer is going to hate. Use its and get 5% off your purchase, up to $5 at a time, as many as 3 times. Why the discounts to use PriceCheck? The app is designed to get you to visit local shops, try out a product, submit valuable pricing data to Amazon, leave without buying anything, and make your purchase on Amazon instead. Actually scanning an in-store item isn’t technically required to get the discount, though Amazon doesn’t make this clear at first. The webpage for the deal states “Get a 5% discount just by checking a price”, but you can check a price by typing in a product’s name from home without submitting a local price. If you read the terms it says “In-store price submission and location confirmation are optional.” Amazon explains the local pricing data helps it offer competitive prices. That’s exactly right. Because it offers such a wide range of products and makes the real money from hooking users on its shopping experience, Amazon can afford to lower its prices to beat out brick-and-mortars. PriceCheck helps it identify which products it needs to put on sale, and the one-day discount will get shoppers used to looking on Amazon for these deals. Now, I’m no luddite. Efficient technology’s march over old models is natural and inevitable. But using shoppers to gather reconnaissance on its offline enemies is pretty aggressive. It also promotes where users get the benefit of checking out a product in person, but then neglect the shops that pay overhead to offer that service. There’s little that brick-and-mortar stores can do to stop this. If they berate people for scanning their products with PriceCheck, they’ll just push them right into Amazon’s clutches. Shoppers will have to decide whether to take the discount, or support their local mom-and-pop or even their local Walmart which at least keeps jobs nearby. But in this economy, most people’s allegiance is to their wallet. |
Tagged buys Topicmarks to help discover people easier | cloudbrows | 2,011 | 12 | 10 | The social discovery service, , has announced an acquisition of , which uses semantic engine to summarize content. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. At the time of the acquisition, Topicmarks was used in over 160 countries, and was especially popular where English is the second language. Now, Topicmarks is expected to help Tagged match people to people and people to interests in an elegant way, according to Aaron Patzer, Topicmarks’ advisor and investor. Tagged, which has 100 million users, has been on the acquisition spree recently, buying and an instant messaging client, . One of the founders of Topicmarks, , originated from Poland. The company was founded in 2010, won a number of contests and became a finalist at the mini Seedcamp Copenhagen and subsequently 2011 . |
Health Conscious Mom Commerce Site Ecomom Raises A Healthy $4 Million | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 12 | 10 | Mom commerce site has raised $4 million in a Series A financing round lead by . The round was followed on by investors , , , , , , , , , , , Ed Wilson, , Zac Zeitlin, and Bruce Leak. Cue Ball’s John Hamel will be joining the board. ecomom CEO tells me that what sets ecomom apart from other mom-targeted commerce sites is its expert curation, with an editorial staff culling eco-friendly and healthy products. “Everything that goes in, on, or around a growing family is available and every product has been deeply researched and evaluated against over 70 separate criteria — focusing first on ‘is it healthy and safe’ then ‘is it useful and cost effective,’ “he says. The site offers anything from diapers to nail polish to parents who want healthier product options for their their children. “Domain rocks, product rocks, customer segment everything rock,” the infamous Dave McClure tells me, explaining why continues to invest in the service, “What mom doesn’t want to buy healthy stuff for their kids?” Right? |
Fly Or Die: The New Xbox “Metro” UI | John Biggs | 2,011 | 12 | 10 | Erick isn’t much of a gamer, which is why he’s particularly suited at assessing the new 360 UI, dubbed by those in the know. Aside from the obvious changes in design, the UI actually makes it easier for guys like Erick to use the Xbox to watch movies, Youtube videos, UFC fight, and other media ephemera that thus far has been lacking in the Xbox experience. knows that the 360 is reaching the end of its life cycle and next gen stuff will probably be announced by the next E3. That said, this update allows the stragglers – folks who have been thinking about an Xbox but who may not play games – to purchase the device as a media center rather than a games machine. We look at the UI and some of the apps in this episode of Fly or Die and, most important, assess just how good a sniper Erick is in MW3. |
Michael Moritz On Klarna’s $155M Round: “This Is The Public Financing Of Twelve Years Ago” | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 12 | 10 | On Friday, a little-known Swedish ecommerce payments company called raised a massive from DST and General Atlantic. Its previous round was a scant $9 million in May, 2010 when it was discovered by Sequoia Capital and superstar partner Michael Moritz took a board seat (yes, he actually flies to Sweden for the board meetings). “This is the public financing of twelve years ago,” Moritz tells me, “it is just done privately.” Klarna’s mega-round fits into a growing trend with successful internet companies that build out a substantial business on a few million dollars, then don’t take on any more money until they do a huge round. Examples include , which recently raised after only raising $7 million before, and with its round (Sequoia was an early investor in both of these as well). These are also starting to be called because investors shovel in the money once it’s clear the company is a winner. The buyers in these “pre-public investment rounds” are the same investors who would have previously bought IPOs, funds like General Atlantic, DST, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Tiger, and Wellington Capital. It is global capital chasing returns. Klarna could have gone public. It is on track to double revenues to about $120 million this year, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski estimates. And it’s been profitable on a pre-tax basis since 2005. It has 600 employees and clears $2.5 billion worth of e-commerce transaction through its payment system. “I think overall it is better for businesses to stay private because you have more latitude,” says Moritz, “more freedom. The inevitable mistakes made during the hurly burly of developing a business are not penalized by people who do not understand it.” Moritz is a patient guy. He knows Sequoia will get its return down the line. The company makes it easier for consumers to complete e-commerce transactions by allowing them to pay they receive the goods instead of when they order them. It solves the abandoned shopping cart problem. Using sophisticated machine learning and other techniques, Klarna tries to figure out the risk of somebody not paying. It essentially extends consumers credit by paying the merchants. Then the consumers pay Klarna. “We want to separate buying from paying,” says Siemiatkowski. “Paying creates a lot of friction. The only information a consumer needs to provide are her name, address, and email—not even a credit card number. The fraud rate is very low, says the company, because they use all sorts of data—from traditional credit checks to what items you are buying to how you enter your email address—to assess risk. The key thing about Klarna’s model is that the first purchase is always the riskiest. Once a consumer has paid Klarna for a purchase there is a pretty good chance they will pay again. The service started in Sweden (where 20 percent of all e-commerce sales already go through Klarna), then spread to Norway, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and most recently Germany (where it is growing at more than 1,000 percent annually). “When we started it, people said it was a Swedish phenomenon,” recalls Siemiatkowski, “then a Nordic phenomenon, then a Nordic-German phenomenon. We think this can work in basically any geography.” But Klarna can become a multi-billion dollar company if it just conquers the rest of Europe. “The greater European theater is obviously an enormous market,” notes Moritz. “For American companies, Europe, despite its importance, is always a second act. For Klarna, Europe is its most important market, and that flavors everything.” And its European roots may serve as an advantage as it expands there. Moritz adds: “Weirdly enough, payments is an easier business in Europe than U.S. because of the EU. Once sanctioned in one member state, you have freedom to roam elsewhere.” Whereas in the U.S. there are state-by-state laws and regulations to contend with. Finally, Klarna takes over the whole payments stack. Its fees are not split up between issuing banks, payment gateway providers, and the digital wallet. It delivers all of those services and keeps all the payment fees itself, which can vary between 1.5 percent and 2.5 percent. But the fees are not so important because Klarna promises to actually boost sales by removing barriers to buying at checkout. Merchants who adopt Klarna end up seeing as much as half of their checkouts paid through the service, as opposed to 5 percent to 10 percent for other “alternative” payment services like PayPal. |
Daily Crunch: Arena | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 12 | 10 | Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets:
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With 1.6 Million Daily Users, Cut The Rope Launches A Comic Series | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 12 | 19 | Cut The Rope is popular. Anyone who’s ever spent 30 seconds looking at the App Store’s Top 10 list could tell you that. But just popular is it? How many people do you think are actually playing with that little candy-obsessed green dude each day? That’s how many. 1.6 million unique users, daily. Ridiculous. Lookin’ to tap that monstrous money keg for a few more greenbacks (or, as they so eloquently put it, to “broaden the reach of the Cut the Rope brand”), ZeptoLab has just launched a digital comic series focusing on the game’s main character, Om Nom. I won’t delve too deep into the plot here, but as you might imagine (if you’ve played the game), it involves Om Nom, some rope, and some candy (spoiler alert: he eats the candy.) “But wait, Greg! Didn’t they launch a comic quite a while ago?” Almost — but not quite. They the comic back in July, with intentions to ship it in August. It took a bit longer than expected to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, but they’ve managed to sneak it onto the App Store just in time for the holiday rush. Interestingly, the company had previously mentioned physical copies of the comic being printed — no word on where those went, as of yet. ( The company says the print books were always intended to launch a bit later than the digital copies, and that they’re still planning to release them.) Three digital issues are available now. First one’s free, and the rest will set you back 2 bucks a pop. You can find the comic book app in the here. Oh, and for those scroungin’ for a few more Cut The Rope stats:
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Interview: Cornell’s Dean Huttenlocher, On Expanding Into NYC And Building A Tech Ecosystem | Eric Eldon | 2,011 | 12 | 19 | to build the big new technology campus on Roosevelt Island that New York City has been looking to create. The plan is to foster a strong technology ecosystem by bringing in lots of talented technical people and have them focus on building innovative businesses on top of the traditional industries in the city. So I got on the phone with Daniel Huttenlocher after the press conference in New York earlier today, to get some more details about what his university is aiming to accomplish. As the of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS), and a distinguished computer science professor at the University, he’s been in the middle of the effort to get the new campus. In the extensive interview below, he provides more details on the types of students that the school will be looking for, and how he sees it adding to the development of a strong technology ecosystem in the city. As he explains, no one fully understands what makes an ecosystem form, but good technical schools are clearly a component — that New York could use more of. Huttenlocher has the right background for the job ahead. His research spans computer vision, autonomous vehicles, social networking communication, and software development management. He has 22 patents and more than 50 published papers. He’s also been involved with a few tech companies throughout his career. You can find out more about him . Officially called the NYCTech Campus, the facilities will be a joint effort with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The plan is to begin moving in by 2017, and finish constructing 1.3 million of the 2 million square foot facility by 2027. In 20 years or so, the campus is expected to have 2,500 students and 280 professors. The expectations are high, and reflect the city’s efforts to iterate beyond its traditional industries like finance and advertising. A new study by New York City projects that the campus will generate above $23 billion in economic activity, along with $1.4 billion in tax revenue over the coming 30 years. In terms of job creation, construction will account for 20,000 near-term jobs, and the campus will provide 8,000 permanent ones. The study also estimates that some 600 companies will be spun out, that create another 30,000 jobs. To boost all of this, the campus will also introduce a $150 million fund for New York City startups. (Official announcement , and more campus images .) Daniel Huttenlocher: Any successful tech ecosystem in any city has its own characteristics. There’s already a fairly vibrant one in New York but it’s “adolescent” in the sense that it’s not at the scale of Silicon Valley or even Seattle or Boston. But there’s definitely a lot here. Our approach is to take what we think is unique and look at what kind of role we can play. In terms of the unique parts of the ecosystem, the tech world is undergoing major shifts. Historically, the new technologies that have driven things have been pure tech plays. Increasingly, the value of tech is not coming as much from the pure tech side, and much more from people who deeply understand who to take it and transform something. Amazon is my favorite example. It’s a tech company and a retailer, and you can’t separate the two. In New York City, that’s really the huge advantage — the presence of all these other industries. Daniel Huttenlocher: Academically, we’re looking at shifting away from traditional university campus disciplines. There’ll be key disciplines involved — computer science, electrical engineering, operations research, applied math — but those disciplines need to be in the context of other disciplines where tech is being applied…. hubs that combine tech and other fields. In media, for instance, there are relevant areas of the social sciences, like sociology and psychology. It’s about building interdisciplinary groupings that focus on these domains — Connective Media, Healthier Life, and the Built Environment. That second one isn’t just health care, but things like lifestyle types of apps. The third is about smart building technology, green buildings. If you look at startup companies in New York, there’s certainly media. That’s a big, active area in the city’s economy. For health, you’re seeing some startups there. But I’d say it’s the leading edge of the startup world. Then with green tech, that’s the bleeding edge, and there are relatively few companies. There’s a lot of growth potential in all these areas from a jobs perspective, and we see the academic areas that support them are not pure tech. The degrees offered — masters and PhDs — will require students to apply to the New York campus, based mainly on their interests in terms of faculty and programs. They’ll have significant entrepreneurship and business requirements. Students need to be interested in that. For those who want pure tech, there’s Ithaca [Cornell’s home campus]. The faculty is also going to be a mix of those only in the city and some who are spending time on each campus. I’m personally spending a lot of time in the city and may end up there. One of the defining features is that students will have mentors. There are 50,000 alumni in the New York, with a significant portion in businesses where tech is playing an increasingly important role. Each students will have a local mentor working in business just like a student on a campus has a faculty advisers. We want students to come up with new ways of thinking based on things they’ve learned very recently, that have commercial potential. Daniel Huttenlocher: It really helped give us confidence in the practicality of all of this. The number of faculty who own joint appointments in both places, that have labs in both places — we realized we could do the same for technical fields. We’re also operating other large academic institutions in New York City, and we’re experienced with other aspects — constructing buildings, fundraising, etc. When talking to the mayor [Michael Bloomberg], one of the big components is that we’d have an academic vision tailored to the city. Our alumni are also unbelievably supportive of it. [Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert K. Steel] has joked that out of our 50,000 local alumni, most have called him already to encourage the deal. Daniel Huttenlocher: While this all turned in to a competition — at least to some people — every school that’s participated is great. It’s about finding the right match, not about which is better. I have a lot of really good friends at Stanford. And they may also end up here some day. Daniel Huttenlocher: I know quite a bit about that. I worked at Xerox PARC in the late 80s and early 90s. What’s interesting about tech in Silicon Valley is that a lot of innovation comes outside of some corporate entities. Xerox, Fairchild Semiconductor and Paypal have all been incredible cauldrons of innovation, with literally dozens of companies spinning out of each. What causes those things to happen? I don’t think anybody understands yet. Some of it comes from having the right universities around. Some of it comes from companies. The whole ecosystem creation process is, frankly, very poorly understood. What we think is clearly absent in New York City right now is enough of the right kind of engineering talent. Everyone has a hard time hiring good software engineers — in the valley and everywhere else. New York has that problem much more than elsewhere in the country, it really needs that kind of tech talent. That’s what we view we’ll bring to the table very quickly. Develpoing a vibrant ecosystem comes from having multiple companies at multiple stages of development, and will come from places you don’t expect. [At this point in the phone interview, Huttenlocher is interrupted by his partners at Technion leaving the room, and I overhear them say an appropriate departing line: “now we start the real work.”] Daniel Huttenlocher:The plan is to start operating more or less immiediately. We’re starting to look for new [temporary] space, with some leased already, and some possibilities for others. Cornell has a lot of operations in the city already, including the medical college and architecture school. It’ll probably involve leasing additional space. We need to start attracting the good engineering talent, and we need a neutral meeting ground for all of the companies. That’s an important role that Stanford plays in the Valley. It helps people come together outside of the domain of one corporate entity or venture firm. We want to play that role quickly. We’ll start having students down here as soon as we find space, and certainly by the fall. Some of that will depend on admissions and other things that take time. Some students will already be at Cornell, who it’d make sense to bring down and start working with companies. Although, a lot of the young startups in the city already have Cornell engaged with them. I’ve personally had meetings with more than 200 people in the local tech industry in the last few months. So it’s a matter of how do we really start to engage with the companies, and get them hooked up? Daniel Huttenlocher: Yeah. We’ve gotten ourselves as a world into a place where we’re not creating enough good jobs. This isn’t really just about New York. It’s really about global innovation. Every city has its own flavor, that people identify with, and that helps to create great new companies. I mean, this won’t stop me from spending quality time in Silicon Valley…. If we can get a bunch of tech-oriented cities, that’s good for everyone. |
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