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04 Nov 2009 06:02
Survival Of The FittestMint's Patzer: "We Will End-Of-Life Quicken Online" In 6 To 9 Months »
Real Time SearchTopsy Reveals New Products and Tools »on November 4, 2009
I haven’t noticed this myself today, but it appears at least a subset of Gmail users are inadvertently drawing closer to an inbox with zero unread e-mails thanks to a nasty bug that marks messages as read even before the user opens them. Former TechCrunch writer Ouriel Ohayon was one of the first to signal the bug on Twitter – with many of his followers echoing the phenomenon – and a quick search shows other users are seeing the same thing.
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- Zynga Takes Steps To Remove Scams From Games87 comments
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- Scamville: Zynga Says 1/3 Of Revenue Comes From Lead Gen And Other Offers84 comments
on November 4, 2009
ThoughtWorks Studios, a software development startup, is launching a new version of its project management tool, Mingle, and is rolling out integration with Google Wave.
Mingle has been upgraded to feature a communications platform within the application, called “Murmurs.” A mix of an IM and Twitter-like microblogging format, Murmurs allows anyone involved in a software project to have online conversations that are associated with a specific Mingle project.
on November 4, 2009
I wasn’t joking when I wrote Newsy has one of the best iPhone apps for news consumption on the go. But the startup is more than just about mobile applications: it’s on a mission to build a solid news destination site that collects and analyzes perspectives from multiple sources and wraps these views into snack-sized videos.The company has now recruited Pam Maples as VP of Editorial to help out with ramping up the content side of the equation. Maples is the former managing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of the largest newspapers in the Midwestern United States, and its website STLtoday.com
on November 4, 2009
We already knew Waveboard was bringing Google Wave to both the desktop and the iPhone with two dedicated clients, but you’ll be interested to know the iPhone app is now live on the App Store and available for less than a buck (iTunes link).As you can tell from the short demo video below, the app does exactly what you think it does: it displays ‘waves’ and lets you search historical ones, start new ones and manage your contacts. It also opens external links in a custom browser without the need to leave the app. Waveboard also supports push notifications through a workaround (you need both the Prowl iPhone app and the Mac version of Waveboard), although they did say the next iteration will have proper push notifications
MG Siegler on November 4, 2009
Tonight, Amazon sent an email to members of Amazon Associates letting them know about a new feature: Twitter integration. Basically, when you’re logged into your Associate account, you’ll see a new “Share on Twitter” button on your Site Stripe (a management toolbar along the top of the page). As you’d expect, clicking this button will prepare a tweet complete with a shortened URL to send out of all of your Twitter followers.Here’s why this is interesting: As Amazon clearly notes at the end of its email (copied below), you will earn referral money for anyone that clicks on these links and buys a product. Obviously, links that bring in referral fees are nothing new, this has been going on with blogs for a long time. But Twitter users do love to click on links, so this feature could actually mean some real money for popular Twitter users with a massive following. And it’s yet another way that companies — and now even Twitter’s users — are making money off of Twitter, which Twitter won’t see a dime of (presumably, anyway).
In an efficient ad marketplace, the top keyword usually goes to whoever can spend the most money on it, normalized for conversion. Who can afford to spend the most money? Unfortunately, it’s not always the company with the best product, service, or price; under pure laissez faire advertising, it can be the company that tricks, lies, and steals more pennies out of each customer than any competitor. This often forces ethical competitors to make a very tough choice: roll over and stagnate (or die), or play a similar game. Playing to win means staying microscopically behind the red line or breaking the rules and not getting caught.Let’s keep that as the backdrop as I tell a sordid story about lead generation on the Internet.
[Ireland] Social media consultants Simplyzesty started using Twitter Lists to list blogs. However, a brainwave has lead them to take Twitter Lists to their logical conclusion: creating lists of Twitter users in entire countries. They’ve launched a Twitter list for the UK and the list of users in Ireland is currently going crazy. They call it “crowdsourcing populations”. Who knows – this could end up being a sort of crowd-sourced yellow pages/people directory.A couple of hours ago they launched a USA version with a script built to make the listings automatic. The plan is to do is to cover the USA in 72 hours.
In our October 8 post on the state of the Skype sale and litigation, we ended with a prediction: “The likely outcome of all of this remains the same – Joltid will get a stake of some size in Skype. But given the players involved, anything could still happen.” If GigaOm and the NYTimes are right, that’s exactly what’s happening. Even the “anything could still happen” part.The old Skype founders will now have a stake in Skype according to unnamed sources. That makes sense. It was what eBay was negotiating with Skype long before the current buyout offer, and the team has to get something in exchange for dropping the intellectual property litigation
But Index Ventures, the architect of the deal, is apparently out. For Silverlake Partners and Andreeseen Horowitz to agree to that either means there’s too much money involved for anyone to be worried about business loyalties, or there’s enough of a smoking gun that Index had no choice but to get away from the deal and all that liability.
Whatever the truth, everyone is in for a wild ride. Nobody who does business with the Skype founders ever seems to come out of it happy. Maybe Marc Andreessen has the patience to change all that this time around.
Just one problem, though. No one has ever described Marc Andreessen as a patient man.
Last night we broke the story that Google would be teaming with a number of well known artists to launch a promotion for its Music Onebox search, which was released last week. Turns out, it’s launching a bit sooner than we thought: beginning tonight a number of well known artists will be offering exclusive songs and free downloads through Google’s Music search. To get the freebies and exclusives, simply run a Google query for the artist’s name (the album name works too in some cases).One clarification: while these songs are being presented and promoted on Google, they’ll also be available on the site that’s actually streaming the songs — be it MySpace or Lala. In MySpace’s case the songs could also be potentially be surfaced on other search engines, though it sounds like artists will be asking their fans to search for them on Google as part of the promotion.
The One Laptop Per Child project has seen mixed success. With competition from similar, but more familiar-looking items from Intel others, the OLPC found itself suddenly competing in a market it had no intention of entering. But they’re out there, they’ve had some serious orders, and despite some other speed bumps, has certainly lent a hand in increasing computer literacy in the developing world.You may remember that the sequel to the XO laptop, as the OLPC hardware was actually called, was spied at Davos in January after its initial debut in May of 2008. It was noted at the time that there was some doubt as to whether it would be made, and now those doubts have come to glorious anti-fruition. The XO-2 is dead — but only because Negroponte decided it should be a tablet.
SwingVine, a site that lets you see what content is trending on the web, is adding real-time functionality. SwingVine aggregates data and news from across the web, analyzes the volume of online buzz and the reputation of various sources, evaluates user interactions on the site itself, and other information to surface the the most popular and noteworthy content on the web. It’s a hybrid of an aggregator of information on pop culture and news and an analytics site that actually measures what people are looking for on the web.
Adding the ability to see trends and buzz on the web in real-time makes complete sense for SwingVine. The startup determines trends based on factors such as volume, recency, and growth rate of web news, sales data, critic reviews, onsite pageviews, clicks, and other data points around topics. Swingvine is also launching a Facebook app to mine and aggregate trends from your existing Facebook friends, incorporating social results into your trends. You can connect SwngVine with Facebook via Facebook Connect.
The industry is definitely making big changes to self regulate around social gaming offer scams (complete background here, with updates). Zynga, the largest social gaming company and the worst offender when it comes to scams, said yesterday that they will take steps to remove scams from games. They were quickly followed by RockYou.Today MySpace is making a big move itself. They are instituting a “zero tolerance for app scams” policy, says CEO Owen Van Natta, and are amending their apps developer terms of use to further restrict the types of offers than can be presented to users.
The existing terms of use already prohibit many types of scams and require clear and accurate descriptions of offers. But as we’ve shown in previous posts, sometimes a clear and accurate description hidden at the bottom of a page in 8 point type isn’t all that useful.
Many of us spend hours a day on our browsers surfing the web both at home and from the office, but we don’t really do much with our web history, which could really serve as a goldmine of information. Nebul.us, a startup launching today in private beta, is looking to tap into this data, leveraging it to offer a cloud-based web history, a productivity tool for monitoring how you’re spending your time online, and a social link sharing service. The site is now in private beta, and 500 TechCrunch readers will be able to gain access by using the invite code ‘techcrunch’.Here’s how it works: after installing a browser plugin (the service currently has support for Firefox with IE, Chrome, and Safari on the way), your browser will start monitoring your browsing history and uploading it to the service. Everything is intitally locked down in a private mode — meaning nobody else can see it — unless you visit the site and explicitly decide to share it with your friends.
When the iPhone OS 3.1 update rolled through town, it brought with it a handful of new features – but it also killed off one, not-so-official feature: unauthorized data tethering on AT&T.
Early this morning, the endlessly ingenious iPhone hacking community released Blacksn0w, a carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Even if you have no need to plug in a different SIM card than what was originally intended, however, Blacksn0w still has its perks. Namely, it brings the aforementioned unauthorized data tethering right on back.
We’ve just walked through the process, and it went off without a hitch. If you’re interested in doing the same but don’t want to do it alone, we’ve thrown together a handy step-by-step guide, just for you.
Last month, Twitter noted that it was seeking volunteers to help translate its service into other languages. Today, the first of those is ready to go, as Twitter has formally unveiled support for the Spanish language.The Twitter Blog has a post about it right now, but co-founder Biz Stone has cheekily written it entirely in Spanish. We’ll go ahead and translate it for you:
An update to our post in late October about OneRiot and Yahoo partnering to build real time search results into Yahoo: OneRiot CEO Kimbal Musk now confirms the relationship. The new search engine will go live tomorrow. In the email, Musk says that OneRiot results will appear in the main Yahoo search results page for certain queries:
Today, we are pleased to confirm that OneRiot is working with Yahoo to deliver realtime search results to Yahoo users. We have been working with Yahoo for 18 months, initially as the launch partner for the Y!BOSS platform and now as the provider of realtime search results. Yahoo joins a list of 70+ partners who utilize the OneRiot realtime search API (others include Microsoft and Reed Elsevier). During an initial test phase, OneRiot results will appear on the main Yahoo Search Results Pages (SRPs) for certain queries, complementing Yahoo’s usual results. OneRiot has a robust realtime index of the web and orders search results via PulseRank, the company’s proprietary ranking algorithm which reflects the current social buzz around any piece of web content.
More than 1/3 of all Internet users worldwide visit MSN every month. 400 million people. That’s way more than AOL’s 80 million, and not ridiculously out of reach of Yahoo’s nearly 600 million. But still, it’s the most popular Internet portal that no one actually ever goes to. Starting tonight though that’s going to change. Or at least, MSN is changing. We’ll have to wait and see how usage numbers are affected if at all.
The most notable change is a new logo and lots less blue (a screen shot of the old MSN is below for posterity). Everything is sleeker and easier to read. Not as many links. More video (hot HD stuff using Silverlight). Lots and lots of Bing bling and Live.com services.
And of course, there’s Facebook. And Twitter.
Log right in on the bottom right of MSN. Half of their monthly visitors are already Facebook users, says Microsoft. And 15% use Twitter. So having the ability to read and create Facebook and Twitter messages right from the portal page is a good idea. For users with Silverlight, more advanced apps will be available.
Microsoft will roll out the new version over time. But if you want in right now, and just absolutely positively can’t wait in line, you can see it immediately by going to http://preview.msn.com.
Yesterday, Intuit closed on its previously announced $170 million acquisition of personal budgeting site Mint, making Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer the new vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group. He is now in charge of not only Mint.com, but also all of Quicken’s online desktop products. What will his first order of business be? I spoke to him today to find out.
“Over the next 6 to 9 months,” he says, “we will end-of-life Quicken Online and their customer’s data will be migrated over to Mint.” Just a few months ago, the Quicken Online team was questioning Mint’s success. Now, Patzer is their new boss.
It’s not so much revenge as it is a smart business move. Intuit doesn’t need two different online financial planning sites for consumers, and it bought Mint because it couldn’t beat it. Combining the two is the obvious move. (Both help consumers keep track of their money and spending by monitoring their bank accounts, brokerage accounts, credit cards, and other financial accounts).
Michael Arrington on November 3, 2009
Real time search and discovery engine Topsy is releasing a bunch of new products and tools this afternoon.Topsy is all about the power of the ReTweet on Twitter. When the service first launched publicly in May we noted that ReTweets are the new currency of the web. And it isn’t just the number of retweets that matters (which is subject to large scale spamming efforts). It’s the authority of the people doing the retweeting, too.
One way Topsy is distinguishing itself from competitors like OneRiot and TweetMeme is by holding on to data forever. Most real time search engines are focused on right now, which is exactly what people want. But they dump data periodically, and anyone looking for older stuff won’t be able to find it. Here’s a sample search for “skype andreessen” on OneRiot (4 resutls), TweetMeme (0 results) and Topsy (37 pages of results, which can be sorted and filtered by time). So when you want to look up old Tweets around a link, Topsy has the data that no one else is currently showing.
John Biggs on November 3, 2009
I just got my hands on the the Twitter Peek aka the Tweek and I’m trying to figure out who, specifically, this is for. First, consider this my review: this device is not very good if you’re a Twitter “power user” like myself or anyone else with maybe 100+ followers and a few hundred folks you follow. To be clear, this isn’t quite Peek’s fault as they’re clearly not interested in pleasing folks like you and me. They’re looking for folks from a different aviary, presumably new Twitter users who haven’t quite gotten hooked but are interested in the service enough to stick with it and have $199 burning a hole in their pockets absolutely right now and don’t really follow very many people. If you know any of those people, please send them to Amazon to pick this up.For the rest of us, this thing is pretty rough. I follow 2104 people and so this thing was buzzing and Tweeting all afternoon until I finally turned it off. Weird batches of tweets would come in, all from one person, for example, or weird messages like “Oh Hey, you’re Tweeting so much! We’re going to try to catch up” or something to that effect. It’s also really slow. You have to click twice to read a Tweet – once to bring up the menu and once to read the Tweet – and scrolling is really bad. And it makes a buzzing and a tweeting noise when tweets come in – which is all the time. And it’s $99 with 6 months free or $199 for life. And it only does Twitter. No email. No texting. I’m really selling this thing, aren’t I?
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