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05 Jul 2009 10:46
Erick Schonfeld on July 5, 2009
The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser.
Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers.
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- The Reality Of PR: Smile, Dial, Name Drop, Pray.84 comments
on July 5, 2009
The chances of me being genuinely amazed at something I see a Belgian tech company achieve are rather slim. But occasionally, it happens. Last week I went to local entrepreneur meetup BetaGroup and saw five startups pitch their stuff to the 200-person audience. The last one to get its five minutes of fame was Cherry, a new mobile operator that promised to “revolutionize the telecom world”. Needless to say, I was as curious as I was skeptical.
Then the company’s CEO got up on stage, introduced himself, took out his Nokia smartphone, called some random guy in the audience and had him call him back on his phone afterwards. Projecting his mobile phone screen on a bigger screen for everyone to see, he demonstrated how he didn’t need to launch an application and just browsed his contact list to call the other person. Standard functionality, sure, but the cool part of it was the fact that the phone was lacking the presence of a SIM card, which is supposed to identify you as a subscriber of a telephony service.
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05 Jul 2009 00:59
Michael Arrington on July 4, 2009
One thing I hated about being a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini back in the day - we got to work on really cool deals (the last deal I worked on before leaving for a startup was the AOL/Netscape merger), but we were only brought in at the very end to paper everything. We fought over the fine print in the contracts after the meat of the deal was ironed out by CEOs. Skinning and dressing whatever the hunters bring back to the cave is fine for some people. But it’s not exactly being in the middle of the action.PR firms today aren’t much different than corporate lawyers. They are paid to perform a service. They like to think of themselves as core to the strategic action of their clients. But more often, they’re just there to spin whatever happened in the most favorable light possible. Then they smile and dial and pray for coverage. Occasionally they are called in to smother a story, which is mildly more exciting, I imagine. But when a CEO is wondering what she should do next to drive her business forward, she generally doesn’t call her PR firm for advice. Or at least I hope she doesn’t.
PR firms are apparently just as frustrated by always being in the back seat as the law firms are.
I’m fascinated by Clair Cain Miller’s article in the New York Times today about PR in general and the birth of a startup, Wordnik, specifically.
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- Short Is Sweet: Postcards Begat SMS Begat Twitter88 comments
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04 Jul 2009 16:06
Leena Rao on July 4, 2009
For all of you World of Warcraft fans out there, there’s a new Twitter client that is worth checking out. TweetCraft is an in-game Twitter client for WoW that lets you send and receive Tweets within a game. If you are busy in the middle of a WoW match, you can put Tweets in a queue to send when it’s more convenient.
The client also lets you upload in-game WoW screenshots using TwitPic and will automatically send out Tweets when you log in, enter an instance or get an achievement.
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- Authorize.net Goes Down, E-Commerce Vendors Left Hanging101 comments
- Want The Obama "Hope" Artwork On Your iPhone? Nope, Says Apple.86 comments
Devin Coldewey on July 4, 2009
Before everyone gets in a huff, let’s consider Amazon’s intentions with these patent applications. Surely they would never allow advertisements to be placed in books which you have purchased legitimately at full price, so let’s put that out of our heads. But what if you could take a few bucks off the cover price at the cost of a few contextual ads relating (if possible) to the book’s content? Personally, I wouldn’t mind — partially because I don’t use a Kindle or intend to any time soon, but more because it’s a no-lose situation. Amazon wouldn’t risk alienating its loyal Kindle base with dirty tricks like this, so it’s safe to assume it’ll be at least somewhat opt-in.An abundance of free or reduced-price content would widen the appeal of the reader — I imagine many people are put off e-books by the idea that they are not getting their money’s worth. As offensive as the idea of inserting ads into a book is to me (and surely to the average reader), it’s almost certainly part of a value proposition which increases the utility of these expensive little buggers.
Nicholas Deleon on July 4, 2009
Dearest CrunchGear readers: I recently had the honor and privilege of speaking to Karen Dyer, who is not only the voice of Sheva Alomar, from Resident Evil 5, but who also did said character’s motion capture. I hope you enjoy it on this day, our day of freedom.Obviously, “K” is for Karen, and “N” is for Nicholas. With that…
N: Well, first off congratulations. Resident Evil 5 was a big hit. It sold something like 4 million copies.
K: That’s what I hear!
N: Excellent. But before we get into the game, I just wanted to bring up something I saw on your bio. It says here you’re known for your circus skills, and I just wanted to say how that awesome that is. And I wanted to ask, where do you study that? Because I don’t know if your average community college offers that type of training.
Jason Kincaid on July 4, 2009
It’s no secret that bloggers love their polls — they’re a great way to increase user engagement, and sometimes you can even get some useful data from them. But most people probably don’t realize just how popular these polls really can be. PollDaddy has just released some of its latest stats, and they don’t fail to impress: the company is now serving 430 million poll impressions per month, with a reach of over 74 million people worldwide, giving it a Quantcast rank equivialent as the 22nd most visited online service in the world.That success is due in no small part to PollDaddy’s acquisition by WordPress’s parent company Automattic last fall. Bloggers could embed PollDaddy into the WordPress blogs (as well as other popular blogging platforms) long before the acquisition, but now PollDaddy is also being included as a feature on WordPress.com, Automattic’s premium hosted blogging platform — and home to over 8 million blogs — that appeals to users who don’t want to deal with having to set up their own blog install. In other words, PollDaddy is now accessible to a much broader audience.
- VP Development/Product ManagerAEP, a for-profit, majority-owned subsidiary of Misnomer, Inc., a 501(c)3
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04 Jul 2009 07:29
on July 4, 2009
Recently, I’ve noticed something. If you send me an email, the likelihood that I’m going to respond is pretty small. But if you send me a message on Twitter, the likelihood that I’ll respond is much higher. Certainly, part of it is that I get fewer messages on Twitter. But you might be surprised at how close it’s getting in volume when you add @replies to direct messages. The bigger factor for me, is the length of the messages.If I open up an email and see it filled with paragraphs of information, guaranteed my eyes are going to glaze over. Certainly sometimes it’s an important message that I do need to read, but most of the time it’s just a core message filled with paragraphs of bloat. I don’t want or need the bloat, I need the core message. And that’s why I love Twitter. You simply cannot go over 140 characters. And more often than you may imagine, that’s enough.
Now, on the face of it, plenty of people will disagree with me on that point. But think about it. In an age where we’re bombarded by tons of information, from multiple angles, all day long, there is something beautiful about brevity.
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- TechCrunch50: You Want Advertising? We'll Give You Advertising112 comments
Sarah Lacy on July 4, 2009
Like most things on the Internet, there’s a good side and a dark side to where the media business is headed.The good side is very good: thousands of layers of mostly needless middlemen and processes are being eliminated as journalists get a direct channel to their readers. And, because it’s a two way medium, readers get that channel right back. And in the cases where the subject of an article has been wronged, the Web gives them powerful megaphones to fight back. In short, the more everyone has a voice, the more reporters are challenged to make sure they are right, because they will be called out.
Look at what happened with the plagiarism scandal around Chris Anderson’s new book. Anderson says it was a mistake around a change in how they were going to use citations, and I take him at his word. But it’s safe to say any author who’d considered borrowing heavily from Wikipedia won’t now. We like to think that we act virtuously because of personal or professional pride, but nothing enforces those ethics like the real possibility of getting caught and hugely embarrassed.
But the bad side is also very bad. The elimination of those layers – typically fact checkers, editors, lawyers and just time to make sure a work is fully baked—also allows mistakes, lazy reporting, a dependence on rumors, and hot-headed, unfair treatment to subjects. Worse: The metrics around the Web make it crystal clear which kinds of stories drive the most traffic. That leads to salacious reporting for the sake of clicks and comments.
It’s easy to point the finger at blogs, especially by certain members of old media losing money quarter-after-quarter. (Cough, cough.) But this is not just a technology change as most corners of media are fighting for survival, it’s become a cultural change. And this week, I’ve been struck by two non-blog examples that reflect the tension.
Right about now most people reading this probably have guessed the example of salacious reporting and unfair treatment I’m driving at is Ben Mezrich’s new book on Facebook. I’ll say upfront I haven’t read it. Galleys have been very closely guarded. Once I do read it, if everything everyone who has read it has told me is wrong, I’ll apologize for what I’m about to say. But, on a professional level, I find the ethics behind this project disgusting.
Mike Butcher on July 4, 2009
It’s not often that Internet companies last 10 years, but Moonfruit in the UK has proved pretty resilient. It survived the dotcom boom the first time round, launching with VC-backing, growing to 65 staff and cutting back to two staff in the space of a couple of years. It’s a wonder why they didn’t exit in the most recent boom, but here they are still, plugging away. And their resilience is proving to be an asset as their 10-years old web site building business comes back into fashion, even as more recent competitors like Weebly, Yola, MyDragnDrop and Webnode, and many others, try to capture the market for people who want to build simple web sites. So what’s the best way to re-invigorate an internet brand after 10 long years? Get trending on Twitter, that’s how. So Moonfruit has been giving away 10 Macbooks for every year of their operation, beginning this week. The result is that it has become the top trending term on Twitter three days in a row, as all people need to do is add the hashtag #moonfruit to their tweet. An algorithm is randomly choosing a winner. There are five days left. By the second day this week it had reached 2.5% of all twitter traffic. But could the stunt backfire as fast as it worked?
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03 Jul 2009 22:16
on July 3, 2009
It’s not easy to launch a successful WebEx competitor. Most businesses have long since established their “system” for dealing with web meetings, using old standbys like WebEx or GoToMeeting. And those businesses that are willing to venture into the unknown have had plenty of cheaper alternatives to choose from, like DimDim, for quite a while. But that isn’t keeping CallWave from launching one of its own, dubbed Fuze Meeting. And while it’s not going to be an easy space to compete in, Fuze Meeting doesn’t disappoint.As far as startups go, the history of the company is pretty unique. CallWave was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CALL. After reaching a peak soon thereafter of over $15 per share, the stock dropped steadily, dipping as low as 50 cents early this year. Deciding to cut its losses, the company delisted itself from NASDAQ on Monday after buying back shares from public shareholders at a 44% premium over the current market value and paying out a total of $10 million. CMO Patrick Moran says that the company did this on its own accord, and that its hand wasn’t pushed by any banks or VCs. CallWave will soon change its name to Fuze Box to reflect its new position as a startup.
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- New Logo For MySpace: No Longer A Place For Friends105 comments
The beta testing stage can be the cornerstone to the successful development of a new site. And many startups have to conduct and implement beta testing of sites, surveys and analytics internally, which can be an daunting task when you are launching a site. Prefinery lets startups outsource the whole beta invite process, from start to finish. Prefinery is offering 100 TechCrunch readers with beta invites to test the site. You can sign up here. Use the invitation code “TECHCRUNCH” when signing up for the service.
Prefinery’s ambition is to create a valuable first experience for beta testers and to help startups in collecting and organizing information that will result in a better product. Prefinery will do anything and everything when it comes to the beta testing process. The service will create a splash page for your product, generate an HTML sign-up form with fields and survey questions, create an automatic welcome e-mail/message, take signups into a queue, approve users, and trigger invite e-mail. The service will also generate invite codes and assign quantities.
Okay, it’s not exactly the Camp David Summit that took place in 2000 between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but sometimes the littlest gestures can go a long way.A couple of days ago, upon hearing that Microsoft had officially joined Twitter, the official Linux account sent out a tweet welcoming them. “Welcome to Twitter, @Microsoft!,” they said. The tweet sat unanswered for over a day, and it seemed like Microsoft may never answer. But about a few hours ago, they did. “@Linux thanks, nice to be here,” they replied.
on July 3, 2009
I don’t recall how the YouTube user Pruane2Forever, aka “Sexman”, came on my radar, but I definitely remember a few of his videos from a couple years ago. (Here’s a old favorite — Not Safe For Work.) Basically, it’s this kid who does movie and new media reviews that are (or at least used to be) unintentionally hilarious. These days, he apparently has quite the following on YouTube, as he has over 150 videos that range in popularity from tens of thousands of views to over a million.One of his most popular ones was a video from 4 months ago in which he calls out rapper 50 Cent. Sexman wonders how 50 still has “street cred” after doing endorsements for Vitamin Water, makeup and dildos (I’m not kidding). “What else is he gonna do? 50 Cent diapers for your little gangsta?,” Sexman wonders at one point. He concludes that 50 Cent is “just a media whore!”
Well, 50 Cent has responded. Yesterday, the rapper posted a video alongside Sexman, who apparently flew from Canada to New York to meet up at the rapper’s request.
Despite our best intentions, it looks like the DEMO v. TechCrunch50 war will continue, even with DEMO under new management.In 2007 we launched the first TechCrunch50 event - a place where companies can launch to rabid fans and tech press. These launching companies are the stars of the show, and they don’t pay a cent to attend. We thought DEMO’s longstanding policy of forcing launching companies to pay a $20,000 fee was ridiculous, and led the conference organizers to make decisions based not on the merits of the startups but simply on who was willing and able to pay. Not only do we let startups launch for free, we give the top one a $50,000 prize.
Our conference has grown rapidly - nearly 2,000 people attended TechCrunch50 last year while DEMO languished in San Diego with a paltry few hundred. To be fair, our events were on the exact same dates, so they were hit doubly hard. This year we moved our dates to give them some breathing room. We thought we were done battling DEMO.
But today DEMO announced that they’re giving away a “massive” prize - $2 million in advertising credits - to the top two startups at the event. The press is eating it up, saying that TechCrunch50 looks paltry in comparison.
Of course, there’s a catch. The “advertising” is remnant stuff on IDG properties (IDG owns DEMO) and will certainly be priced at rate card. They’ll also charge for creative and other expenses. Meaning there is very little actual value. I’m guessing that the amount of advertising actually delivered would be in the tens of thousands of dollars of value, at best. And, of course, every startup launching still needs to pay to launch.
But whatever. You want adverting? We’ll give you advertising.
on July 3, 2009MG Siegler on July 3, 2009on July 3, 2009- Remote Part-Time PHP/MySQL Web DeveloperCaribou CMS
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03 Jul 2009 13:24
Leena Rao on July 3, 2009
When we reported on Kiva.org’sdecision to open up its micro-lending platform to U.S. entrepreneurs, Kiva CEO Premal Shah told us he was concerned about backlash in the community. Shah acknowledged that the decision to open lending to U.S. recipients may draw criticism because it goes against the idea on which Kiva was founded—lending to help development in third world countries where credit options are limited.
It looks like Shah’s prediction was correct. There is now a lending team on Kiva’s community platform titled “Unhappy Kiva Lenders.” The members, which total 375 lenders from around the world, are angry that Kiva is extending loans to U.S. entrepreneurs. The team’s page states that “including borrowers from the USA has undermined the very core of what made [Kiva] so unique and special; small, impactful contributions to entrepreneurs in impoverished situations in developing countries.”
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on July 3, 2009
Start Mobile has managed to get 18 separate iPhone applications approved by Apple. So you’ll imagine their surprise when one of them was recently rejected. But you may be even more surprised to find out why.Apparently, Apple doesn’t like the way one piece of art in the app depicts President Obama. Is it out of line or tasteless? Well, you can determine for yourself, because you’ve undoubtedly seen the art in question before: It’s Shepard Fairey’s famous “HOPE” image of Obama that was everywhere during his Presidential campaign.
So why on Earth would this be rejected? Well, here’s the wording in the rejection:
It contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states: “Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”
“Ridicules public figures”? This image is hanging in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian — yet, Apple apparently finds it inappropriate.
on July 3, 2009
One of the most effective ways to amplify your message on Twitter is to get your followers to retweet it to their followers. Retweeting is also becoming a popular way to pass links around Twitter. They are becoming the new currency of the Web because of the power of passed links. One service in particular, Tweetmeme, is cornering the market on retweets by making it easy for blogs and other sites to add a retweet button to every page. You can see one at the bottom of this post. Just click on it, and it will take you to your Twitter account and populate a message with a “RT,” the headline, and a short link. Go ahead, do it now. Do it again. Okay, thanks.
Lots of sites use Tweetmeme’s retweet button, and it drives a lot of its overall traffic. Nick Halstead, the CEO of Fav.or.it (Tweetmeme’s parent company) says that the buttons are so widespread right now that they are generating 196 million impressions a week
month. In other words, that is how many pages load with the buttons everymonthweek, and some portion of those result in actual retweets. Halstead is making some improvements to the retweet buttons. Before each retweet generated by the button would include a promotional “via @tweetmeme.” That has now removed to make more room for the actual headline and link. Next week he is going to introduce an image button which can be included in RSS feeds and emails to spread the retweet love even further. And sites will be able to embed a retweet counter to show how many overall retweets they get every week.John Biggs on July 3, 2009
Before I go defile myself with burgers and beer I wanted to jailbreak my iPhone 3GS for you all. The process was amazingly simple. Using a Windows netbook - it doesn’t work under Windows 7 - I simply installed iTunes and ran purplera1n. It took a second to reboot then it rolled through recovery mode, rebooted, and an app called Freeze appeared. Freeze then installed Cydia and all was right with the world.on July 3, 2009
Does embattled music streaming site imeem think it can take on iTunes? For the most part, nearly every streaming song on the site has a download button which links to both iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store. But it is quietly testing its own music download store which bypasses iTunes and Amazon and sells MP3s directly. For instance, this is the case with some Sub Pop artists, such as Iron and WineThe Shins. When you hit the download button on songs for those artists, a window pops up showing the album where that song came from with with the option to download the entire album or any individual song for $0.99. You can then pay imeem directly by credit card or Paypal and download the song to your computer.
(Screenshots after the jump).
on July 3, 2009
Talk about a serious outage. Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net has been down and out for several hours, a number of tipsters inform us. That has big implications: since the service is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on their websites (example), it likely means millions are being lost during its downtime. PayPal and Google Checkout are still up and running.It’s unclear when the downtime started exactly, but the consensus is somewhere between 5 and 7 hours at this point (11 AM Eastern), with e-commerce vendors desperately looking for ways to contact the company or get any first-hand information about what’s going on and when the problems will be resolved. Twitter, meanwhile, is buzzing with the news as the United States wakes up (hashtag #authorizenet).
(see updates after the jump)
Sarah Lacy on July 3, 2009
It’s been a nice two weeks in San Francisco, but in about 10 hours I’m headed to SFO’s international terminal again. This time, I’m going to London. I’m traveling as part of a group of bloggers, authors and videographers called “The Traveling Geeks,” whose mission is simply to go to various cities around the world and try to learn as much about its tech scene as we can. Our first trip was to Israel last year; now we’re headed to London.It’s a rag-tag group that includes Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Meghan Asha of Nonsociety, Robert Scoble of everywhere, videographer JD Lasica and many other fine geeks you can read all about at the link above.
As a Sarah-Lacy-bonus-feature I’m sticking around London an extra week, mostly to do some interviews for my book. But I’ll also be meeting with companies, handing out an award at the TechCrunch Europas Awardsfor European startups, hosted by our network site TechCrunch Europe, and—yes, Arrington—writing some posts as well on what I find.
We’re kicking the whole trip off with a Tweet-Up this Sunday night. I think we’ve got about 50 slots left if you act quickly! Yes, there’s a fee to get in, but it comes with free drinks, food and all the Scobleizer you can handle. And, if that’s not enough for you Euro-techies, Intel is giving away a few laptops. (Intel is a sponsor for the trip. For more on sponsors and our ethics statement go .) Discount code and other details are here
Hope to see you all there or at the Europas!
on July 3, 2009
At the end of last May, Yahoo released an experimental version of Placemaker, a “geo-enrichment” platform. What it does is help developers make applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic content (think RSS feeds, web pages, news, status updates etc.) and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup. In layman’s terms: it can detect places by scanning content and is capable of putting the aggregate data on a map.While Placemaker does not serve as a geocoder and thus does not perform address recognition on street-level, it is perfectly capable of geo-extracting and indexing documents or atomic units of text, giving third-party developers the means to mark-up and index Web content geographically in a globally-aware, locally-relevant, and language-neutral manner (and Geo Microformats-compatible, too). But the process of parsing the data could sure have been made a lot easier, and if you weren’t a developer there wasn’t really any use for the tool at all.
on July 3, 2009
According to The Hollywood Reporter, movie studio Universal has won a bidding war to pick up the film rights to the classic Atari video game “Asteroids”. Initially released as an arcade game back in 1979, Asteroids featured a triangular space ship that needed to be navigated through an asteroid field.The object was to shoot and destroy masses of rock and the occasional flying saucer while avoiding smashing into both, so we suspect it will not turn out to be romantic comedy.
Matthew Lopez will write the script for the feature adaptation, which will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the producer of both Transformers movies as well as the 2005 adaptation of the Doom game.
Robin Wauters on July 3, 2009
Different markets have different needs for marketing products or services. We all know that much. But that doesn’t take away the weirdness of a company like Google advertising its core product (online search) by using ink that was printed on paper. Guilty of this hideous crime (I kid, I kid) is Google India, who apparently ordered some targeted quarter-page advertisements to appear in a variety of city supplements of The Times Of India, the leading English-language daily newspaper in the country.
George Hotz, the 20-year old hacker who
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03 Jul 2009 02:43
Daniel Brusilovsky on July 3, 2009
George Hotz, the 20-year old hacker who originally unlocked the iPhone, has released a jailbreaking application for the iPhone 3GS codenamed “purplera1n.” It’s currently Windows-only (Windows 7 not supported), and requires the latest iTunes installed, and an iPhone 3GS with the 3.0 firmware. Hotz mentions in a blog post that the jailbreak for Mac is “coming soon.” The iPhone Dev Team did release a unlock for 3.0 which did not work on the iPhone 3GS, but Hotz’s version does (although it doesn’t free you from your current carrier).
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Michael Arrington on July 3, 2009
On Wednesday I spoke with antitrust attorney Gary Reback, the man who spearheaded the push to break up Microsoft in the nineties. The event was hosted by HBSTech at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.If anyone in the world can make antitrust law interesting, it’s Reback.
Much of the hour plus conversation focused on the history of antitrust law and Reback’s experience in big antitrust cases from his new book, Free the Market!: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive (buy it here). But we also spoke about current events and his concerns that lax antitrust enforcement has led to less competition today in tech than is optimal.
We spent a lot of time on Google. His chief concern is Google Books (jump to the 30 minute mark), and he argues that a DOJ investigation is appropriate. I’m more concerned with competition in search and search marketing, and we spoke about this as well.
The video is below (plus a way to get his new book for free):
Analyst firm Next Up Research has published an extensive report on Linden Lab, the San Francisco company behind virtual world Second Life. The research is based on aggregate data and is available on SharesPost, a site set up to trade shares of privately held companies (if you register, you can download the report for free from that page, or you can find other valuation reports on companies like Facebook and LinkedIn). The report goes rather deep into the valuation of the Linden Lab, which it pegs at somewhere between $658 million and 700 million.
More on that later.
Now that Linden Lab has been around for nearly 10 years, and with its product Second Life celebrating its sixth birthday since launching publicly in June 2003, we thought it would be a good idea to take a close look at the report and see how the company’s doing according to the analysts. First of all, you may be wondering if anyone is still using Second Life at all. The answer is yes, and users are very active on there
Google received some unfortunate news today, with the U.S. Department of Justice formally announcing the investigation of the $125 million settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to pay authors a nominal fee for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web. The settlement has drawn its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. But Google keeps on plugging away, making its book search better and better.
When I first signed up for GrandCentral a few years ago, I lived in a different city. As such, I had a different area code. And that was fine until I moved and Google, which bought GrandCentral in 2007 and subsequently put it on lockdown, prohibited me from changing it. I didn’t think much of it until my GrandCentral account magically transformed into a Google Voice account a few months ago, taking a good service and making it excellent. Unfortunately, I was still stuck with my old number. But now, there’s an option to change it.The “Change your number” functionality, as spotted today by Boy Genius Report, is great news for users like me. Unfortunately, it will cost you to change it. There’s a one-time $10 fee, which in my mind is well worth it. Best of all, Google Voice will activate your new number right away and still keep your old one active and forwarding to the new one for three months.
Since the debut of the App Store last summer, my iPhone has become an indispensable part of my workout routine. The phone makes it easy to track your workout progress both in the gym and outdoors, where applications like RunKeeper allow you to use the phone’s integrated GPS to plot your bike or running course on a map. But there’s been one annoyance that’s aggravated me (and many others) to no end: the limited control you have over your music once you’ve launched one of these fitness apps. Fortunately the iPhone 3.0 software update finally fixes this, and a RunKeeper-like application called Fitnio(iTunes Link) has managed to beat some of its more well-known competitors to the punch.Until the release of the iPhone 3.0 software update, developers were unable to access the phone’s music library. In order to play music as you ran, you’d have to first open up the phone’s iPod application, pick a playlist, then switch over to the excercise app. Once there, you could use your headphone’s multifunction button to execute some basic commands (next song, pause, and previous song), but if you wanted to switch playlists you were out of luck.
on July 2, 2009Jason Kincaid on July 2, 2009on July 2, 2009Robin Wauters on July 2, 2009 -
02 Jul 2009 16:34
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Hottest Tickets In TownAgenda For Real Time Stream CrunchUp On July 10 »on July 2, 2009
After months of dismal unemployment numbers, this morning’s continued growth in the unemployment rate from 9.4% in May to 9.5% for the month of June reinforces the fact that the U.S. is still very much in the midst of recession. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Labor reported today that employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, compared to 322,000 jobs in May. Unfortunately, the tech industry is still feeling the heat of the recession, with the rate of available jobs not improving much from the past few months, according to technology jobs site Dice.com.
Tom Silver, senior vice president of Dice.com, told us this morning that Dice.com is reporting a 44% year-over-year drop in job listings for the month of June. May’s year-over-year decline hovered around 45%. And Silver also points to a rise in the Department of Labor’s unemployment rate for the “Computer and Mathematics sector,” (the area best associated with the tech sector). June’s unemployment rate for the tech sector almost tripled year-over year, from 1.9% in June of 2008, to 5.4% in June of 2009. While Silver says that the tech job market is certainly better than during the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, the number of job opportunities have remained stagnant over the course of the past few months.
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on July 2, 2009
July 1, 2009 - the day the music wars started in earnest. Last night the guys from Dovecote Records, a small music label based in New York, were hanging out at their local bar. Employees from file sharing startup LimeWire showed up to have a party. There was confusion over the ownership of some pizza, and a riot almost ensued.Woman: “Who the FUCK are you? And why are you eating our pizza?”
Kosuke and Paul look confused. Kosuke: Are you joking? Is this a joke?
Woman: No this is definitely NOT a joke. I want to know who you are and why you’re eating our pizza.
on July 2, 2009
You may have noticed that Twitter has started hyperlinking hashtags. Those are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. For instance, try searching for #realtimecrunchup. Now that they are hyperlinked, when you click on a hashtag, you are led to the search result page for the specific hashtag. Others have been implementing this; FriendFeed (big surprise) has been doing this for awhile. Some of the Twitter clients, including the desktop versions of Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop also provide hyperlinks to hashtags.
For Twitter, search is a navigation tool, and this functionality is yet one more way to allow people to easily discover new Tweets outside their group of followers. This trend started when they added the search box to everyone’s home page last April.
on July 2, 2009
Yesterday, we wrote about what Facebook was planning for the next major release of its iPhone app, version 3.0. The big update will contain 15 new features, probably none bigger than the addition of event management to the app, finally. But there was one thing Facebook developer didn’t mention yesterday, and it’s a big one: Video uploads from the iPhone 3GS.Hewitt just started working on the feature yesterday, thinking it would be something that would come in the next release, after this one. But he was surprised at how quickly he was able to get it up and running and so he tweeted out today, “3GS video uploading for the Facebook iPhone app is a go — didn’t plan to include it in the 3.0 update, but it was really easy to code.”
on July 2, 2009
Last fall Google launched a revamped version of its Blog Search, converting the site’s frontpage into a automated news portal similar to sites like Techmeme. It has its fair share of issues (for one, it’s subject to the same problems of automated grouping as Google News is), but it was a step in the right direction for the site.That said, it has been missing some key features. For one, there hasn’t been a good way to track breaking news stories as they happen — generally stories only pop up as they gain momentum and are written about by multiple sites, which can take quite a while (relatively speaking). There also hasn’t been a way to subscribe to a feed of the latest stories via RSS, which nearly every other similar site offers.
on July 2, 2009
Ever since its redesign a few months ago, FriendFeed has been one of the standard-bearers of the real-time web. That’s because while a lot of sites claim to be real-time, FriendFeed is one of the few that actually updates continuously as data comes in. Starting today, any search you do will also get that same real-time treatment.Enter any query into FriendFeed’s search box and you’ll see a constantly updating stream of items related to it. It works for advanced searches too. Best of all, it also searches through comments left below items. And these results can even be embedded in other blogs, as you can see right now on the FriendFeed blog.
MG Siegler on July 2, 2009
A little over two hours ago, a Google employee posted a note in this Google Groups thread indicating that Google App Engine was “seeing elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates.” He noted that the problem began around 6:30 AM Pacific time and that the team was looking into it. A few minutes later he updated that Google App Engine was going into “unplanned maintenance mode” — over 4 hours later, it’s still not back up.That’s a long time for any service to be broken, but especially one that is the backbone for many startups’ web apps. What’s worse is that while Google is updating the Google Groups thread, the actual App Engine Status page has been down the entire time as a result of the problems, so people are going there for updates and seeing nothing.
MG Siegler on July 2, 2009
An internal AT&T memo that was leaked today is full of very impressive number regarding the iPhone 3GS — numbers that once again show why AT&T’s exclusive contract with Apple to sell the iPhone in the U.S. is so important.The iPhone 3GS’s launch gave AT&T its best sales day at its retail stores — ever, its second largest traffic day at retails stores, the most transactions it has ever processed in a day, the most orders through att.com in a single day ever and the biggest features sales day at att.com ever. Oh, and it led to the most upgrade eligibility checks ever, which is not surprising at all, though most were probably disappointed.
What’s crazy about all this though is that while many people were expecting the iPhone 3GS launch to pale in comparison to the iPhone 3G launch, it actually exceeded it in just about every way when it came to actual sales (at least through AT&T’s stores and online). The lines may have not been as long at stores because of pre-sales, but sales overall exceeded the 2008 launch day numbers, and all of the heavy holiday shopping times. And apparently iPhone 3GS sales exceeded the iPhone 3G launch day sales by noon Central time.
on July 2, 2009
What is the best way to sift through a stream of information? The list view seems to be the most popular because it is information-dense and easy to scan, but it can be overwhelming. More visually appealing ways to manage data are needed. Twine, a site which lets you collect and subscribe to different interest feeds, just introduced a new way to wade through its streams.
The new Flash visualization presents your stream of shared links as a deck of headlines which you can shuffle through (see video below). A slider along the bottom, lets you cycle through the deck by time, and arrows underneath let you move sequentially, or you can just click on a deck in the background to move it forward. If you want to learn more, you can flip each deck to read a snippet and link to the full detail page. The semantic tags associated with each item also show up on the side and can be clicked on to navigate through the deck.
Erick Schonfeld on July 2, 2009
Ever since OS. 3.0, the latest operating system for the iPhone, launched on June 17, prices among the top 100 apps in the iTunes App Store have been fluctuating wildly as developers push out apps taking advantage of all the new features in the OS. Some of the new features we are starting to see in apps include push notifications, turn-by-turn navigation, cut-and-paste, embeddable maps, access to external accessories, search within apps, and subscriptions.
Mobile app distribution service Distimo just put out its June iPhone App store report As you can see from the charts above, the average pricing among the top 100 paid apps was pretty steady until the middle of the month, when developers started to test different price points. The most popular price for an app remained $0.99, but the month of June saw more top apps priced at $1.99, $4.99, and $9.99 (the green bars on the chart above).
Update 2: I’m not ‘pro-censorship’, but in this particular case it’s understandable behavior on Twitter’s behalf, period. I’m sure they didn’t mean to interrupt or ban tributes to a deceased person.
- Systems Architect MywIre
- Application DeveloperThe Ohio State University
- Marketing Communications SpecialistLocal Story
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02 Jul 2009 07:02
on July 2, 2009
It’s one thing when Internet companies like Facebook adopt OpenID, it’s another when a giant retailer like Sears Holdings Corporation embraces it. Sears has just announced that it will enable over 1 million monthly MySearsMyKmart visitors to use their Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or other accounts to log into the community websites, enabling them to write product reviews and share information about products and services without the need to create a separate account.Customers will also get access to special offers and coupons in return for their participation in the community.
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- Once Again, Twitter Trending Topics Polluted By Spam (Or Not)113 comments
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on July 2, 2009
Really curious to find out how this is done exactly, but someone somewhere has managed to change a real trending topic on Twitter - #MrsSlocombe - into something childish, as you can tell from the screenshot above. Strangely enough, when you do a search for the less appropriate trending topic, not a single result pops up (for now).
Update: ok apparently it’s a legitimate trending topic (see origin here, it was meant as a tribute to British comic actress Mollie Sugden on the occasion of her death, so fans, celebrities and Brits in general started to tweet it) but Twitter is just blocking search results from appearing (which is good).
This may seem like something mundane at first glance, but many people (including reporters worldwide) track Twitter trending topics for breaking news, and it worries me that they can be manipulated.
Robin Wauters on July 2, 2009
comScore has aggregated some data based on its World Metrix audience measurement service and put together a study on social networking worldwide. Surprisingly, it appears that the Russians are more engaged with social networking than the rest of the planet (or the biggest slackers at the office, depends on how you look at it). The study found visitors in Russia to spend 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month on average, at the same time - once again - confirming Vkontakte.ru’s leadership in terms of popularity with 14+ million monthly visitors.To put that level of ‘engagement’ in perspective: the average world-wide is 3.7 hours and 525 pages per visitor. Among the 40 individual countries reported by comScore, Brazil ranked closest to Russia at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours). The United States is ranked number 9, with 4.2 hours and 477 pages per visitor per month.
From the “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic file”: The new MySpace exec team has promised changes (”we have…laid the groundwork for an exciting new chapter of innovation for MySpace”). And they’re delivering. A couple of hours ago they changed the MySpace logo. No longer does it say “MySpace.com - A Place For Friends.” Now it simply says MySpace. The old logo is below.We’ve confirmed that the change just occurred this evening, although MySpace PR is as usual not responding. They refuse to confirm that the logo is new, or say why they changed it. It sure is absurd to have a conversation that goes something like “So it looks like you’ve changed your logo this evening? No Comment. Uh huh. Ok, so any official reason why you changed it? No comment.” Trade secrets, I guess. And heck, I’m just happy someone still works there to pick up the phone.
MySpace is also on the warpath to get more users. At login they now strongly suggest you log into your email and invite friends (hopefully they’ll avoid turning this too spammy). And they’ve also added a “people you may know widget” that shows friends of friends.
We’re also hearing that MySpace will be removing some of the ugliest ad units that adorn the site today. Whether that’s an effort to clean up the user interface or simply a sign of slowing ad sales, we’ll probably never know.
Twitter has long had an official Facebook application that allows users to update their Facebook status with tweets. It’s quite useful for those of us who don’t want to have to spend all day updating multiple services with the same messages. The app has over 250,000 monthly active users. But if you’re not already one of them, I have bad news: You’re not allowed to use it.For the past several days, anyone who has tried to install the app has been greeted with the following message:
Error while loading page from session test
There are still a few kinks Facebook and the makers of session test are trying to iron out. We appreciate your patience as we try to fix these issues. Your problem has been logged - if it persists, please come back in a few days. Thanks!
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01 Jul 2009 20:32
Our Real Time Stream Crunchup is only a week and half away (get tickets here). We’ve been working hard to pull together the best startups, investors, engineers, and marketers developing products and platforms which take advantage of real-time data and communications in new ways. The real time stream is fast becoming a dominant metaphor for consuming information, increasingly displacing or at least transforming the traditional Web page. It has implications for startups, venture investors, media, search, and business, in general. We’ll explore all of these facets in panels, on-stage interviews, demos, and a roundtable.
Twitter to Facebook have already embraced the stream, but they are only the beginning. An whole new ecosystem of real time stream platforms and apps is emerging before our eyes. In fact, so many companies wanted to demo their product launches at the CrunchUp that we had to turn some away. But we still managed to fit in about a dozen demos, many of them will be seen for the first time.
The speakers lineup includes founders and executives from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Meebo, WordPress, Seesmic, Virgin America, Tweetmeme, Qik, and more. Individual panels will do deep dives into the market opportunity, the real time platforms, real time search (something I am very excited about), and real time business. By real time business, I mean how businesses are adapting to the stream as a tool for marketing, brand management, customer engagement tool, internal communications, and even resource allocation. Putting together this conference has opened my eyes as to how far-reaching the real time stream is already, and these are early days.
I hope you can join us to see for yourself. Below is the (almost final) agenda:
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- Big Websites Start Running Bigger Display Ads. Big Mistake.141 comments
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While not every tweak to YouTube’s system deserves a post, this one is pretty significant, though very straightforward as well. First, the 1GB file limit for YouTube videos has been doubled to 2GB; this is a boon to many users who have been uploading high definition content more than a few minutes long. Ten minutes of 1080p footage can easily exceed a gig, especially if you’ve been editing it and weren’t careful about re-encoding. A 2GB limit should soothe that particular pain.Next, the update now allows for direct linking to HD streams, as well as easy embedding of same. While it wasn’t impossible before now to get an HD video by default on your page, or to link right to one, it required a little work. But now YouTube has apparently decided that they are ready for the bandwidth shock as thousands and thousands of users default to HD instead of SD — increasing the average amount of bits being sent by a huge amount.
It’s Twitter day at Microsoft, apparently. Not only did the software giant announce that it would start adding tweets to its Bing search results, the company actually started officially using Twitter today.To be clear, Microsoft had a rather large presence on Twitter before through its various departments/products/services, but now it’s using the main /microsoft account to tweet. The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people. So far there have been only 2 tweets and the account only has about 1,000 people following it. That should change, fast.
Bing is something of a rarity for Microsoft these days: It’s a product that actually has good natural buzz. And for good reason too, it’s a solid product. For certain queries, it seems more useful than even, yes, Google. (And not just porn queries.) And Microsoft isn’t squandering away this opportunity, it’s keeping its foot on the gas, today attacking what is perceived to be Google’s weakness: Real-time search results.While that’s a little misleading — Google actually does have plenty of data that gets into its system almost immediately — what everyone seems to mean by real-time results these days is Twitter results. And that’s exactly what Bing is adding. Kind of. As it notes on its blog:
With the news surrounding the implosion of Joost and the startup’s move towards providing white label video platforms for companies, we thought it would be a good idea to check in with one of Joost’s new competitors. As we wrote in our post about Joost’s prospects as a white label video community provider, there is already plenty of competition, including Brightcove, Magnify, and Ooyala.
Brightcove is perhaps the best-known player in the space. But another one which has been relatively successful in creating interactive video sites for brands is Magnify.net. The video hosting and sharing platform, which launched in 2007, is rapidly growing its white label service and is expected to be cash-flow positive by the end of the year, according to co-founder Steve Rosenbaum.
on July 1, 2009
It may sound kind of silly, but when I talk to people outside of the tech world about Bing, the first thing brought up is usually how they like the pictures. And now Microsoft has created a contest on Facebook to let one user get their own picture featured on Bing.The Bing Summer Travel Photo Contest is asking Facebook users to submit their best summer vacation photos. The community will then vote on them, and the winner will get its day in the sun, so to speak, on Monday, August 3 — appearing to the millions who visit Bing on that day.
Naturally, there are some rules for these photos as Microsoft probably doesn’t want kickass keg party pictures on the Bing homepage. Obviously, no alcohol, smoking, guns, violence or nudity will be allowed. But Microsoft also doesn’t want any pictures with recognizable people or any third party trademarked images, so they don’t get sued.
Peter Ha on July 1, 2009
Wiimbledon 2009 has come and gone and I’m happy to report that it was a great success! We had 98 tournament participants and everything went off without a hitch. With the help of generous eBayers, tournament attendees and Barcade, we’ve raised somewhere in the vicinity of $5,000 for the Child’s Play Charity. On behalf of CrunchGear, WiimbledonChild’s Play, I’d like to thank the following sponsors for hooking us up.on July 1, 2009
It’s been a big day for Facebook, with news earlier this morning that the social network will soon be totally revamping its privacy settings and making it easier to share with the entire web. Now developer Joe Hewitt, who is responsible for Facebook’s massively popular iPhone application, has posted a note to the site describing some of the new features we can expect from the latest iteration of the app, which he says is “98% done”. Hewitt doesn’t give an exact release date, but we can likely expect it very soon.on July 1, 2009
Facebook’s privacy conference call just ended, and it’s clear some major changes are going to be coming to the social network soon. Some of these, like a totally revamped privacy control page, are both long overdue and very welcome. But others, like the Transition Tool, seem ripe for disaster.Facebook clearly wants its users to become more comfortable sharing their content across the web, because that’s what needs to happen if the site is going to take Twitter head-on with real-time search capabilities. Unfortunately that’s far easier said than done for the social network, which has for years trumpeted its granular privacy settings as one of its greatest assets. Now, those settings are turning into problematic obstacles.
on July 1, 2009
There’s been quite a bit of controversy over the past several hours over words and images related to Twitter being used by third-party developers. Yesterday, Twitter seemed to threaten one party over the use of the word “tweet” and some UI elements that were similar to Twitter’s own. This morning, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone clarified Twitter’s position on this a bit for us, stating that, “As part of this support, we encourage developers of new applications and services built using Twitter APIs to invent original branding for their projects rather than use our marks, logos, or look and feel.”But there was still some confusion about what Twitter was actually saying, and more importantly, what it was planning to do with violators of this. So now Stone has written a blog post further clarifying things.
Last summer we broke the news that Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block would team with former editor-in-chief Peter Rojas to create a new gadget startup. Today that new startup, GDGT, launches. Gadget lovers rejoice - this is a social site where you can obsess over those tiny bundles of tech joy among others just as geeky as you.
GDGT (pronounced “g-d-g-t,” but I like to just say “gadget”) is a highly structured wiki that centers on tech gadgets. Like our own Crunchbase, anyone can edit any information on the site, but everything is structured which allows for lots of slicing and dicing of the data.
Users select gadgets that they own, used to own, or want, and can add reviews and ratings. Blog reviews are threaded into the discussion as well:
Jason Kincaid on July 1, 2009
This morning Facebook is holding a conference call/web share for press outlining changes the site is making to its privacy options. Facebook hasn’t given us much of a heads up as to exactly what they’ll be changing, but there’s a good chance it will have something to do with the ‘Everyone’ sharing settings the site has recently been toying around with, which takes the social network one step closer to mimicking Twitter’s functionality. There’s also a chance Facebook will be overhauling its convoluted privacy control pages. The call begins at 10 AM PST.on July 1, 2009
In the first 24 hours since its release yesterday, Firefox 3.5 has been downloaded more than 5 million times. (It took only a few hours to pass a million). That is certainly respectable, but doesn’t quite measure up to the mania that Firefox 3.0 set off last summer, when it achieved a “world record” 8.3 million downloads in a single day. Maybe we’ll have to wait for Firefox 4.0 to beat that record. But Firefox 3.5 might still beat the 11 million downloads Safari 4 got over its first three days of availability.
on July 1, 2009
Gmail is constantly adding features to help people become more organized. Today, Google has tweaked its Labels feature to add more functionality to the labels toolkit, helping users implement labels in a more organized way. Your labels will now be located in a new area on your Gmail interface, above your chat list and grouped together with Inbox, Drafts, Chats and other system labels. You can also now control which labels you’d like to show on your UI and you can hide the rest under a “more” tab.
Of of the more innovative features that has been added is the ability to drag and drop messages into labels, just like you can with folders. You can also drag labels onto messages too. It’s also possible to drag labels into the “more” menu to hide them, making it easier to change labels than going to the Settings function. This feature is huge for those people who complain about Gmail not having some of the drag and drop features of Outlook.
on July 1, 2009
, will close today, Wednesday July 1 at 11.59pm London time (GMT/BST). So best get voting. This public vote will be mixed with voting from our advisory board of European tech luminaries to produce the final shortlist. The awards will take place on July 9 next Thursday, with over 300 people attending from all over the European tech scene. There is more information about the Devin Coldewey on July 1, 2009on July 1, 2009- Manager, Optimum Online Product ManagementCablevision
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