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30 Oct 2009 08:51
facebookFacebook Rewrites Privacy Policy, Foreshadows Location Based Services »
opentable, iphoneOpenTable Seats One Million Diners Via Mobile Apps »
ustream, videoUstream Boosts Virality, Now Lets You Syndicate Your Comments Across T »on October 30, 2009
For advertisers on the Web, behavioral targeting is held out as the nirvana they’ve been waiting for: the ability to show ads only to those people most likely to be interested in them based on their past behavior. The growth of this type of ad targeting also raises a host of privacy concerns, but setting those aside for a second, do these ads even work? Do they perform better than regular ads? If they did, you’d expect advertisers to pay more for them and for Website publishers to be flocking to them.
At least for Google, the answer seems to be “No.” According to estimates by Jim Brock, chairman of Attributor and a former senior VP at Yahoo, only about 25 percent of AdSense sites are serving targeted ads, which Google calls “interest-based advertising.”
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on October 30, 2009
What recession? Startup Bling Nation just raised $20 million in Series B funding from Balderton Capital for a new cell phone payment system. This brings the startup’s total funding to $33 million since its launch in 2007.
Bling Nation’s ambitions are to establish a revolutionary and comprehensive payments system for physical goods. Here’s how it works. The company partners with local banks in super small communities in the U.S. (where the prominent bank isn’t Citibank or Bank of America). Banks will then offer the consumers who use their services a Bling Nation and “Bank” branded chip that can be stuck onto any cell phone device. The chip will allow any user to make a payment directly out of their checking account similar to a debit payment.
on October 30, 2009
It isn’t the first, and I assume it’s not going to be the last either. Apple and AT&T are facing a new putative class action from an iPhone user who alleges that the companies misrepresented the phone’s MMS (multimedia messaging service) capabilities.
Clyde Bernard Franklin filed the complaint (case 1:2009cv00704) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama on behalf of all Alabama residents last Wednesday.
Robin Wauters on October 30, 2009
As expected, regulatory body ICANN has approved plans to let web addresses be written in non-Latin characters in a move that it calls the “biggest technical change” to how the Internet works since its invention four decades ago.The vote was announced at the last day of the non-profit group’s Seoul conference.
The proposal would mean that domain names could be written in the languages such as Greek, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or Cyrillic and be understood natively by the machines that connect computers together over the web.
Serkan Toto on October 30, 2009
Japan went crazy over the iPhone when it made its debut in summer last year, but China as another big Asian market for Apple seems to react differently. The iPhone officiallylaunched in Chinatoday, offered by China Unicom, one the country’s three big cell phone carriers. But our friends over at major Chinese news portal 163.com are reporting [Google machine translation] that not too many people were actually queuing up to get one, at least in Beijing.
Robin Wauters on October 30, 2009
Finnish startup Fruugo fascinates me to no end. Founded in late 2006, the company set out to build a massive pan-European social e-commerce service, which it finally launched in closed beta at the beginning of this year. Their mission statement? To make Fruugo the equivalent of Google in search when it comes to social commerce on the Web.
The company reportedly raised dozens of millions of euros, at one point flirted with an employee headcount of 150 to 160 people (including contractors) and boasted a rock star board of directors that included people like former Nokia CEO and current Chairman of Shell Jorma Ollila as well as F-Secure Founder/Chairman Risto Siilasmaa. In 2008, they burned through about 14.5 million euros before they even put the closed beta product live and were ultimately forced to lay off almost half of its workforce as a result.
on October 30, 2009
Maybe you’ll recall when I ripped apart the Bing jingle winner back in August. It was bad — real bad. But its creator, Jonathan Mann is a talented guy, and even made a jingle ripping me, which was both better than the Bing one, and funny. Sadly, Microsoft now controls his Bing jingle and is subjecting little children to it.As you can see in the video below, Microsoft has forced a bunch of middle schoolers in Pennsylvania to learn and perform Mann’s Bing song. The horror. It’s hard to watch this without immediately thinking about parents who accept money to allow their child to be sponsored. Is this the future of branding?
Live concert streams seem to be a growing trend for the web’s most popular content and social sites. Last week MySpace streamed their Secret Show Weezer concert in San Francisco. And earlier this week YouTube streamed a U2 concert from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA.
We recently Epix, the movie and entertainment streaming network that works across your TV, computer, and mobile phone. Jointly backed by Lionsgate, MGM and Paramount, Epix is launching its service today with 150 titles, with 3,000 more movies, concerts and shows to be added in the next year.
Epix says that eventually it will be able to provide access to over 15,000 titles, but as we wrote in our initial review of the service, that’s just a sliver of what’s out there, since it’s only the movies available through the studios that are backing the company. And, if you want this content in your living room, you’re going to need Verizon FIOS, which only some 2 million people have.
Skype app developer Netralia is bringing high-quality video recording through it’s app, VodBurner. VodBurner lets users create video podcasts directly from Skype calls using webcams, incorporating recording and post-production editing in a single software package.
The app, which is $9.95, is fairly simple. Once downloaded, it will let you record a video and audio conversation via Skype and will then let you edit the final file within its software. What’s interesting about the app is that it actually detects who is talking (using volume) and will record the video of that person during the time. If both people are talking, the app will record video on both individuals in the frame. You can also add graphics and sub-titles to the videos and publish the clips as ASF files suitable for uploading directly to YouTube and other video-hosting services.
Personal genomics startup 23andMe has just gone through a round of layoffs, we’ve confirmed. The company declined to comment on how many people were laid off, but offered this statement:We have reduced our staffing levels in a restructuring of our workforce. This was a very difficult decision, but one that we felt was necessary to achieve 23andMe’s long-term business development goals and maintain our strength in the industry.
These cuts, which are a reflection of the current economic environment all companies are facing, will allow us to continue to invest in the growth of our Personal Genome Service and research endeavors.
Ustream has just started to roll out a new feature for its live video streams that allows commenters to syndicate their thoughts across four of the web’s largest social sites: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and AIM instant messenger. The feature will go live for Featured shows beginning on Monday, and everyone else will have access soon thereafter.The feature is similar to what Facebook has offered for its video broadcasts (like the one it had for President Obama’s inauguration), where users are invited to update their statuses in real-time as they watch a video. Except with Ustream’s comments, users will be able to check off boxes at the top of the chat window to choose if they’d like to broadcast their updates across multiple services. Each update from the Ustream ‘Social Stream’ box will also include a link to the video you’re watching, which means that the feature can help videos go viral quickly.
Realtime, realtime, realtime — it’s all you seem to hear now with regard to the web. But back in May, it was just emerging as a new trend that looked poised to explode. And one company at the forefront of that was Scoopler, a Y Combinator-backed realtime search engine. Today, being ahead of the curve has paid off, as the service has just raised a seed round of funding from some big name investors.When we intially wrote about the service (remember, very early on in the realtime search phenomenon), we noted that the presentation of results was impressive, but the results themselves were utterly dominated by Twitter. That really shouldn’t have been all that surprising considering Twitter’s popularity in the space. But the service has since added some new features to make it more robust.
Google has just a new form of advertising called AdWords Comparison Ads — a special kind of ad that will prompt users to view a list of sponsored products in a structured format. To get started, Google is running the ads for queries related to the mortgage market, though it has plans to eventually expand beyond that. The ads are in a limited rollout for now, with only some users in some states seeing them.Here’s how Google describes the new ad type:
AdWords uses a host of targeting and relevancy signals to determine the best ads for each query. However, sometimes a user’s query doesn’t provide enough information for us to confidently predict what they want. Take, for example, users who search for “mortgage.” Do they want a new home loan or a refinance? Do they want a fixed rate or an adjustable rate loan? Comparison Ads improves the ad experience on Google.com by letting users specify exactly what they are looking for and helping them quickly compare relevant offers side by side.
Leena Rao on October 29, 2009
Online restaurant reservation site OpenTable has hit a milestone today, seating one million diners via its mobile apps. And the site says that based on an estimation of a $50 average check per diner, OpenTable believes that diners using its mobile applications have generated more than $50 million in revenue for its restaurant partners.
OpenTable allows diners to find and book reservations at more than 11,000 different restaurants in multiple countries via mobile applications for the iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android. Other smartphone users can book reservations through OpenTable’s mobile-optimized Web site.
on October 29, 2009
I was Tweeting with Michael Gartenberg last night about all the great Android games. After all, the Android Marketplace has so many great titles like Civilization Revolution, Canabalt, iShoot, and… oh… wait…All kidding aside, the reason there is such a dearth of great games has to do with some programming choices in Android itself and it’s a problem that can – and should – be fixed before the Droid comes to market this November.
Jason Kincaid on October 29, 2009
Facebook’s VP of Communications and Public Policy Elliot Schrage has posted an update to the site’s blog outlining a major rewrite Facebook is proposing for its Privacy Policy. Schrage writes that the new version eliminates the legalese of the privacy policy the company has used up until now, spelling out what the site is doing with user data in more explicit terms. You can find the proposed document here and the current privacy policy hereThe new terms are certainly easier to read, and they also contain some significant changes (including a couple Schrage doesn’t point out). One of these seems to indicate that Facebook may well be releasing location-related features soon (this is the first time any language related to location has appeared in any of Facebook’s policy documents, Facebook has confirmed) :
“Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.”
on October 29, 2009
Now that the dust is settling on the newly launched Google Music (if you don’t yet have it in your normal Google search results, you can use it here) that integrates LaLa and iLike/MySpace streaming music, all I can think of is this: What were Facebook and Ticketmaster thinking when they passed up the opportunity to acquire iLike?MySpace is the big lottery winner here. They bought iLike for $20 million in August. What they got: a talented (literally) team that is starting to fill the executive ranks at MySpace, the biggest music application on Facebook, and, it turns out, a deal with Google that is now sending massive traffic flow directly to MySpace Music.
Our understanding from sources is that MySpace made an offer to iLike without knowing about the Google deal. Supposedly, since iLike was under NDA, all they knew was that iLike had a big partnership opportunity with some big company, nothing more. In hindsight the iLike deal looks smart even without Google. Add that in and it looks absolutely brilliant. I’m no fan of MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, but I’ll give the man credit here.
Guest Author on October 29, 2009
This is a guest post by Nabeel Hyatt, Founder and CEO of Conduit Labs, which is the creator of Loudcrowd and other social games that help you experience music with your friends. His personal blog can be found at nabeelhyatt.com and he can be followed on Twitter @nabeel.
Yesterday, Facebook announced they are going to drastically alter the way applications can message users once again, likely throwing a wrench into every app developers’ growth rate. Hints of the coming turmoil appeared last week when Facebook changed the way feeds work. This caused enough worry that apparently Mark Pincus, Founder/CEO of Zynga, canceled his appearance at Harvard Business School so he could sit with his team and figure out what the impact would be to the viral rates of their massive hits such as Farmville and Cafe World. That’s not surprising, since getting posts in the feed is critical to continued growth, but the myopic focus on the “viral rate” by some in the industry has created an over-dependence on perhaps the wrong number.
Perhaps you’ve been following the drama surrounding the Someecards iPhone app the past several weeks. If not, basically, Apple rejected the app on the grounds that it was making fun of public figures, like Roman Polanski and Hitler. Satire, it seems, it not okay in the App Store. And that’s fine except that potentially more offensive material like Asian T&A and upskirt apps, are apparently fine.So Someecards decided to give in to Apple and remove any offending content. As such, their app was quickly approved (do what master says and get a cookie). But they’re not giving up the good fight. The guys behind Someecards realize the hypocrisy in Apple’s ways just as much as anyone. But they’ve decided to get their app out there the only way they can and move their fight over to Twitter.
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