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09 Feb 2010 05:30
Social GamingTiny Speck Uncovers Glitch, A New Flash-Based Massively Multiplayer Game »
GardensBack to the Future: How Apple is Becoming More Like a Carrier Every Day »
Dodge ThisFoursquare Signing Mainstream Partnership Deals Left And Right »on February 9, 2010
Yammer, the San Francisco startup that offers a solid enterprise-grade microsharing and realtime communications service, is expanding its executive team after successfully closing a Series B funding round to the tune of $10 million earlier this month.The company made one internal promotion, appointing co-founder and VP of Technology Adam Pisoni to CTO. In addition, Yammer recruited David Satterwhite to lead its sales efforts, while Steve Apfelberg was brought in as VP of Marketing.
on February 9, 2010
Last July, we reported that the new company by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield had received a name, and was looking to hire. Tonight, Tiny Speck’s first project has revealed itself to the world: GlitchSo what is it? As we suspected, it’s an online game in the vein of Game Neverending, the gaming project that eventually became Flickr (weird, I know). It’s a Flash-based massively multiplayer game, that revolves around solving puzzles. While the game itself will be free, there will be some level of in-game purchases. Or as it’s described on the site:
: Is Apple going too far with its restrictions on developers? Alistair Goodman thinks so and explains why in this guest post. He is the CEO of 1020 Placecast, a location-based mobile advertising startup.
Apple’s recent behavior bears an increasing resemblance to carriers with respect to the walled garden they are creating around the iPhone. Restricting applications, restricting the use of location on the device, blocking Flash, and now potentially taking advertising in house—these moves are taken from the carrier’s playbook with the hope of locking out meaningful competition. Ironically, Apple may very well become the barrier to open innovation in mobile in much the same way as carriers have been before the iPhone came along.
What is clear from the announcement to developers last week about plans to deny some apps that deliver location-based advertising is that Apple intends to control the flow of marketing dollars on the iPhone. Less clear are their plans for sharing the wealth with the ecosystem—but if you look closely at acquisitions like Placebase, key hires and patent filings, what emerges is a potentially more ominous view of a company that can only compete in the direct advertising business head-to-head with Google by seizing control of location-based advertising.
Foursquare continues to sign interesting deals with major players in a wide range of fields. Following the service’s Bravo deal a couple weeks ago, they’ve reached a deal with restaurant rating guide Zagat, according to The New York Times. And AdAge has some details about deals with even more partners, including HBO, Warner Brothers, and the History Channel.The service has been on a roll lately. They’re now seeing over a million check-ins a week, with that rate doubling in the last month alone. And these new deals can only help them as they bring the type of mainstream appeal that it took services like Twitter so long to find.
Nowadays, buzz around brands on the news, blogs, tweets and other social media that spreads through product launches, PR campaigns, earnings reports are as valuable as traditional ad campaigns. But buzz and social dialogue on the web is tough to quantify. General Sentiment has released a report that calculates the dollar value of the buzz, content, and conversation taking place online. General Sentiment’s technology evaluates the volume of mentions and sentiment value regarding a brand, company or person. The algorithm combines this data with website traffic and online news readership figures to determine the purchase-equivalent dollar value of the brand exposure across more than 30 million sources by gauging sentiment, frequency, and exposure of news mentions and social dialogue.
Google topped the rankings, with value of its “buzz” itemized at $669.6 million. Google’s social media reach costs $402 million, with its Twitter reach alone valued at $22.8 million. On the other hand, Apple came in fourth with total buzz reaching $293.2 million; social media buzz valued at $223.7 million; and Twitter reach valued at $5.6 million.
YouTube might be streaming more than 13 billion videos a month, or nearly 40 percent of total individual streams, but when you measure by time spent YouTube only accounted for 26 percent of all viewing minutes on the Web last year. It is not surprising that it commands a smaller share of time spent watching videos than number of streams watched, since most YouTube videos are so short. But what is surprising is how fragmented the Web video landscape remains once you go out past the top 25 sites.
According to comScore’s 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, more than half of all time spent watching videos on the Web (52 percent) last year was on Long Tail video sites beyond the top 25. What you see is a real barbell distribution, with Youtube on one end and the Long Tail sites on the other. Total video views more than doubled between December, 2008 and December, 2009, from 14 billion to 33 billion streams. So there is hope yet for niche video producers
With the continued success of Twitter and other social networking tools, any criticism (or praise) of products and companies is becoming increasingly public. Finding a way to manage these external communications in the internal decision-making process is an ongoing challenge for many businesses. Today, in an effort to help marketers and community managers better deal with such outside correspondence, blueKiwi, an Europas shortlist finalist, has announced the introduction of a free version of its Social Business Platform aimed at integrating outside conversations into daily internal communications to improve the decision making process.
Instead of community managers simply engaging with outside audiences via social networking tools, blueKiwi pulls outside conversations into internal discussions in order to leverage the thoughts and ideas of its user base, much like Salesforce aims to do with Chatter or Bantam Live. It is social CRM. BlueKiwi combines a slew of web 2.0 capabilities: such as collaboration, document sharing, blogging, event posting, and polling, into a single, unified solution. The use of social analytics tools ensures that the most pertinent conversations reach the eyes of the community managers.
It actually took longer than I would have expected for someone to come up with a good mocking of Google’s “Parisian Love” commercial that played during the Super Bowl yesterday. But today brings us just that.The video comes compliments of the Upright Citizens Brigade Beta Team “The Brig.” They’ve named their video “Parisian Oops” and have given it the tagline, “Romance, Consequences, Awkwardness. Search on.” Watch it below.
Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions.
Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas Google (No. 6) served up only 70 billion. (These numbers do not include paid search text ads)
Here’s the full ranking:
Since the launch of the Nexus One, early adopters have likely had one question lurking in the back of their minds: who to take the phone to if it broke. You see, when the phone was first launched, Google was directing people to either T-Mobile (Google’s carrier partner) or HTC (the device manufacturer) depending on the problem, which could lead to an endless circle of hold times and few results. Today, Google has just rolled out its solution: it’s launching its own phone support line specifically for Nexus One customers. Call 888-48-NEXUS (63987) and within a few minutes, you’ll be talking to a real live Google support tech (the line is open from 7AM to 10PM EST).This is, of course, a fairly major departure from Google’s standard protocol of making it incredibly difficult to reach anyone for phone support for most of its products.
MG Siegler on February 8, 2010
Probably the most controversial thing about the blogging service Tumblr is that it doesn’t have a built-in way to comment on posts. You sort of can do it now if you reblog an item and add your own note (which then shows up under the original post), but it’s not the same. And while they still haven’t added comments, tonight they’ve temporarily turned on a new feature: Photo Replies.While it doesn’t appear the feature is working just yet, Tumblr notes that they’re going to turn it on for the next 48 hours as an experiment. When it is on, you will presumably see a new photo icon in your dashboard which will allow you to upload a picture in response to a Tumblr post. So yes, basically it’s a photo comment.
We’re big fans of The Richter Scales, the musical group that have brought us Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,Here Comes Another Bubble, and gut-busting songs at the 2008 Crunchies and most recently the parody of Silicon Valley at the 2009 Crunchies a few weeks ago. The group is releasing an animated video of its song ‘I’ve Got Mail and I’ve Got it Made,’ which was one of the two songs The Richters sang at the first Crunchies in 2007. As you may remember, it’s about what happens to a guy when he follows the instructions in all the spam email he receives. Enjoy!
on February 8, 2010
Last month SecondMarket published data on private company stock sales that they helped complete in 2009. They’ve now released last month’s data as well.A total of a little more than $13 million in sales occurred, with the average transaction size of around $2 million. There continues to be very strong demand for consumer products and services startups (which includes companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, etc.). But the sellers are spread out more evenly across all categories, particularly consumer, IT, Healthcare, energy and cleantech.
36% of the transactions were sales of Facebook stock, and we’ve heard from independent sources that sales are being completed for as high as $40 per share (or a $17.6 billion valuation). That’s a substantial price increase from less than a month ago. Tesla took 29% of the transactions, and sales of Solyndra stock were 28% of the total. Gridpoint rounded the group out with 7% of the total.
With the East Coast and Midwest awaiting a monster snowstorm, popular weather forecasting site Accuweather, is rolling out a timely relaunch of its site. The site, which provides up-to-date local information on weather in the U.S., is launching a beta version of the site that includes a complete redesign and a few extra user-friendly features. The new version of the Accuweather is still in private beta but will be publicly launched to the public on February 15.
On the content side, the general theme for the new version of the site is “weather for your life,” with specialized and interactive weather forecasts for Weather and Health, Weather and Travel, Weather and Home and Garden, Weather and Outdoor Activity in your area. The health-related weather interest sections include Arthritis Pain Forecasts, Asthma Forecasts, Common Cold Forecasts, Flu Forecasts, Pollen Level Forecasts and more
MG Siegler on February 8, 2010
Last year, there was no shortage of developers who were complaining about Apple’s App Store. The situation got so heated that no less than Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, got personally involved with a number of developers having issues. Since then, the complaints seem to have died down quite a bit, but Apple is still on the case.The company has started sending out a survey to iPhone developers asking about their experience with the program. While the long survey covers a range of things, the majority of the questions are about the application review process, and developers’ overall happiness with the program.
Erick Schonfeld on February 8, 2010
Are you a budding Web entrepreneur who would like some pointers or advice from seasoned company founders? MayField Fund and First Round Capital are sponsoring a raffle to give away mentoring sessions with the founders of Digg (Jay Adelson), Flickr (Caterina Fake), Mint (Aaron Patzer), Ning (Gina Bianchini), Slide (Max Levchin), and Zynga (Mark Pincus
The raffle will take place at a private event in Silicon Valley with space for 100 attendees on March 1. But you can win a ticket for the event by applying here. The event and raffle are free, but the 100 attendees in the running will be selected beforehand by partners at Mayfield and First Round.
on February 8, 2010
Since the dawn of Facebook’s Photos feature, users have been tasked with the not-so-terrible burden of having to manually click through every photo in an album. Sure, you can also hit the arrow key on your keyboard to jump to the next picture, but even that repetitive task could send you inching down the treacherous path toward carpal tunnel syndrome. Now, there’s a way to view hundreds of photos without lifting a finger: a new Facebook Prototype lets you turn these photo albums into slideshows. You can activate the prototype hereThe new feature was released as a Facebook Prototype some time last week, and it’s about as basic as they come. After activating it, you’ll find a ‘Play’ button nestled between the ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ navigation buttons in the photo viewer. Clicking it will turn the album you’re currently viewing into a slideshow, displaying a new photo every five seconds. That’s it.
on February 8, 2010
Google is planning to unveil a broad new social product on Tuesday that will integrate with at least two existing Google products. Some details emerged earlier today on the Wall Street Journal (“a new feature that makes it easier and faster for users of Gmail to view media and status updates”), but our understanding is that the product goes well beyond a Gmail integration.
As I wrote last night, there is still a lot of room for improvement in online social services. Status updates, photo and video sharing, review and location based content are not only decentralized today, but are becoming overwhelmed with spam and other noise.
The Google event begins at 10 am. Tune in to TechCrunch for live coverage.
Erick Schonfeld on February 8, 2010
Update CEO Joe Greenstein got back to us. He says, “We actually have not raised any new money recently.”
Movie ratings site Flixster
raisedissued $12.5 million in new sharesfunding, according to an SEC filing. The last time Flixster raised money was a $5 million Series B in April, 2008.The new round brings the company’s total capital raised to $19.5 million.Flixster operates both a Web site and a companion iPhone app, which is the most popular movie app in the App Store. The iPhone app lets consumers find nearby movies, add their ratings, and buy tickets. In January, the company bought Rotten Tomatoes from News Corp for an undisclosed sum. The combined reach of the two movie review services is 30 million people, according to the companies.
MG Siegler on February 8, 2010
Company meetings are a nearly universally hated thing. No matter what line of work you’re in, most are simply a waste of time. And even when they’re important and necessary, they’re still likely inefficient. A new startup aims to show you just how wasteful they are.MEETorDIE is an online tool that asks you to put in information about your meeting, including what company you work for, what industry you’re in, how big the company is, how long the meeting is, and who is attending. When you submit that information, you’re taken to a page that shows how much money your company wasted with that meeting. Below that, you can see the aggregate statistics for how much money your company has wasted on meetings total.
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08 Feb 2010 09:34
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NSFWNSFW: Hey, 1997 – Macmillan called, they want the Net Book Agreement back »on February 8, 2010
Almost two years ago The Filter, a startup backed by Peter Gabriel, launched to bring better music and movie recommendations to consumers. The site got lost in the abundance of more popular music and movie sites out there, so about a year ago CEO David Maher Roberts decided to shift gears and start licensing his recommendation engine to other businesses.
It was the right move. Today, the Filter powers recommendations for sites and devices with a combined reach of about 20 million people, with two more large media deals in the final stages of converting from a trail to a full license which will bring its total reach up to 85 million. The startup’s revenues went from $150,000 in 2008 to about $1 million in 2009. “All that money came from licensing,” says Roberts. “I think we git $2,000 from Google for advertising.” Since November, the company has been “borderline breakeven.” And it just added to its board of directors former Google engineering VP Doug Merrill, who <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/01/another-
Leena Rao on February 8, 2010
With the Super Bowl yesterday came the time-honored Super Bowl commercials, each costing $2.5 million for a 30-second spot. Even Google got in on the game with its first ever spot receiving rave reviews (although the commercial wasn’t new). But which commercials went beyond TV to score on the Web? Reprise Media released a report that ranks Super Bowl advertisers based on the level of integration between their television commercials and presence on the web in terms of search and social media. According to Reprise’s scorecard, Boost Mobile,HomeAway,E*TradeGoogle were the marketing standouts out of last night’s commercials.
Reprise decreed that Boost Mobile and HomeAway, which were both first-time Super Bowl advertisers, had the best cross-channel promotion from the tube to the web. E*Trade and Google followed with compelling ad spots that encouraged users to look to the web for more information. Who fumbled? The Pop Secret/Emerald Nuts, Prudential, Dodge Charger and all movie commercials had the least amount of cross-channel integration.
on February 8, 2010
Social music player TuneWiki has raised an undisclosed amount of additional funding in a Series B round led by Motorola Ventures and joined by Intellect Capital Ventures, HillsVen Capital, Novel TMT and prior investor Benchmark Israel.TuneWiki says it will use the investment to expand its product offerings for mobile platforms and the Web. The company will continue to focus on the use of song lyrics in new ways that connect music fans with new products.
On the heels of the EU’s approval of Oracle’s$7.4 billion deal to acquire Sun Microsystems, the tech giant has opened up the purse strings to acquire application management software provider AmberPoint. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and the acquisition is expected to close in the first half of this year.
AmberPoint’s software helps organizations diagnose and resolve issues in application performance and business transactions, such as insurance claims processing or account provisioning where multiple applications need to work together.
AdvertisementJohn Biggs on February 8, 2010
Vitamin D Video has officially gone out of beta and is now available in 1.0. The basic, single camera version of the software is available now for free while a two camera version costs $49 and unlimited cameras costs $199. The software watches a web-based camera – including many popular models from Linksys and D-Link – and records motion as it it happens, even alerting you when humans step into the frame.I’ve been using the beta for months now with a Linksys WVC54GCA and I consider the software an early warning system for the home. Since I work up in the attic I can’t always tell if I’m facing a friend or a foe at the front door so I rely on Vitamin D to ping whenever someone comes into the frame. Special motion sensing systems also pick up lights and other activity outside while the system can also email clips to a mailbox whenever an event occurs or ring a chime.
Leena Rao on February 8, 2010
Loopt continues to ramp up its focus on location-based deals. The pioneer of the mobile social network is launching a new app called LooptCard, which lets mobile consumers tap into offers, coupons and discounts by checking-in to spots. Today, Loopt is partnering with deals site Mobile Spinach to offer users deals and coupons for local merchants via the Loopt App.
The deals are part advertising part coupon and will only be featured in San Francisco for now. Coupon site Mobile Spinach will offer dozens of deals exclusively to Loopt users and through their own site per week. For example, Blowfish Sushi, a Sushi restaurant in San Francisco, offers any signature roll for free which typically costs $10-$15 per roll. Loopt users show their phone message at the restaurant to receive these discounts. Loopt says it will be rolling out the offers in LA and New York in the coming months.
TechCrunch Europe on February 8, 2010
It looks like some major consolidation is about to go down in the Central European Internet market, and in particular Poland.According to local newspaper reports, the largest Internet group in the region, Naspers/MIH Group, is conducting due diligence of assets belonging to DST (Digital Sky Technology)-owned holding Forticom, including the “Facebook-of-Poland” Nasza-Klasa.pl which has 23 million users. Naspers/MIH Group and DST already together own the largest Russian online portal Mail.ru
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A consortium of investors led by The Walt Disney Company is currently engaged in advanced talks to invest in Bus Online, China’s leading in-bus digital media and advertising company, sources tell ReutersThe deal, which would provide Disney with a new platform to promote Mickey Mouse in China, is oddly said to involve Google, which is a minority investor in the consortium according to the news agency’s sources.
Leena Rao on February 8, 2010
Trackle, the personalized web and realtime feed tracker, is going pro with the launch of premium tracking services aimed at marketing and PR professionals looking to track mentions of clients across the web. Trackle.com’s web service lets users create personalized RSS feeds for data such as the latest crime in a user’s neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket prices, updated job listings, sports scores and more.
On Trackle, marketing, PR and sales professionals can set up realtime tracking alerts for key words to track press coverage and mentions across Tweets, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and the web. The initial service will allow users to enable “Trackles” for a select number of keyword categories, including company, person, brand, SEC filings; website changes and LinkedIn updates. Trackle will email and SMS alerts for mentions and even provide users with graphs and charts detailing results. The service is available for $9.99 per month.
on February 8, 2010
AMEE, the US/UK-based startup that aims to build the largest engine for computing greenhouse gas emissions, has secured a $5.5m series B financing lead by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside existing investors, including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures. AMEE will use the funding to expand its geographic reach and platform.The prize AMEE is aiming for, known in the sector as “enterprise carbon management”, is expected to reach $4 billion by 2017 because of government and consumer pressure to address climate change. AMEE’s engine is now being used by companies offering carbon accounting or business intelligence software, as well as governments, multi-nationals and SMEs.
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A decade ago most of us were using AltaVista or something similar for search. No one was really complaining very much about the huge amount of spam and other noise that cluttered the results because we didn’t know there was a better way. Then Google came along with Page Rank, and had a profound effect on the quality of Internet search. Suddenly (and it really was that sudden), we couldn’t imagine going back to AltaVista and searching pages of results for the thing that Google gave us immediately.For a good history of search, get John Battelle’s The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.
The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.
Everything is decentralized, and no one is working to centralize stuff. I’ve got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook (and even a few on MySpace), reviews on Yelp (but movie reviews on Flixster), location on Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, status updates on Facebook and Twitter, and videos on YouTube. Etc. I’ve got dozens of social graphs on dozens of sites, and trying to remember which friends puts his or her pictures on which site is a huge challenge.
Wikia, a for-profit group of user generated wiki sites that was founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales in 2004, is now a profitable company. CEO Gil Penchina says the company’s revenues grew 4x in 2009 while they kept costs in check. Late last year the company reported strong financial results, but hadn’t yet reached true profitability.He won’t disclose what revenues are, but the company currently has 40 employees and has open spots for a dozen more, he says (although I only count eight positions on their jobs page).
Wikia sites attracted about 21 million unique worldwide visitors in December (Comscore), and those visitors racked up over 2.7 billion page views. The company attracts around 8 million U.S. visitors monthly, they say.
Back in July 2008, Tapulous released a music game for the iPhone called Tap Tap Revenge (TTR). The game proved to be a massive hit, growing to 1 million users within its first few weeks. Over the last year and a half, TTR and its sequels have become the most popular series on the App Store, with over 25 million installs. And tonight, Tapulous is ready to release an entirely new music-focused gaming series: Riddim Ribbon (iTunes link), featuring the Black Eyed Peas.Riddim Ribbon is a fusion between racing, popular songs, and to some extent, remixing music. After choosing a song, the game throws you into a hyper-colorful racetrack, where you pilot a futuristic spherical vehicle. The track is filled with small orbs (which are good) and obstacles (which are not), and there’s a path showing you where you should be driving. To control your vehicle, you tilt your iPhone from side to side. Most of this is standard fare for racing games, but Riddim Ribbon comes with a twist: you actually can modify the music you’re listening to during the race depending on how you navigate the course.
As predicted, Hell has indeed frozen over. Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sent a tweet hinting at something most people probably never expected to see: a Google Super Bowl ad. But the contents of the ad, and even the product it would be promoting, remained a mystery. Moments ago some 90 million Americans watched as Google showed off the search functionality that it’s famous for, in an ad called Parisian Love. We’ve embedded the ad below.Yesterday, John Battelle correctly predicted that the ad would be running during the Super Bowl.
Yesterday, California’s Chief Technology Officer, P.K. Agarwal, wrote that the government is using a crowdsourcing tool,IdeaScale, to get a consensus on the ideas to spur IT innovation around the California’s IT systems. IdeaScale, which is a crowdsourcing tool produced by startup Survey Analytics, is gaining serious traction as a crowdsourcing tool for government agencies. Currently, 23 agencies in the U.S. Federal Government are using IdeaScale to power crowdsourcing initiatives.IdeaScale’s technology allows citizens to submit ideas to a site and then vote on their favorite ideas via a Digg-like voting system. The ideas that have the most favorable votes bubble to the top. Agencies can also participate in the discussion by commenting on ideas and posting updates, effectively creating a community around this ideation.
: This is the fourth in a series of posts on the state of online video by guest writer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan
. He is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo.In Search of Profits
Ten years ago, web companies didn’t generate much revenue. These days, web companies are some of the most profitable around. Online video is where the Web was ten years ago: in investment mode as video companies that are generating high revenue are not necessarily the most profitable. Are those companies suffering low margins because they’re investing in the future or are they fundamentally lower-margin businesses?
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on February 7, 2010
When the mobile payment service Square launched in December, VeriFone rushed to get its own version on the market. A couple weeks ago, they accomplished that with the launch of PayWARE Mobile. Now they’re looking to take out their competitor the good old fashioned way: out-spending them.VeriFone is already heavily advertising its PayWARE Mobile product with huge ads in New York City taxis. As you can see in the picture, VeriFone is paying for big screen real estate on the screens that are in the backseats of all cabs in the city now. The ad shows a large picture of the device (a piece of hardware that you attach to your iPhone) and promises users that not only will they be able to accept payments with the iPhone with it, but that they will “never miss a sale.”
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Leena Rao on February 7, 2010
We all know that Ashton Kutcher is a fan of Twitter. Last year, Kutcher raced CNN to a million Twitter followers (Kutcher won). Kutcher hosted Saturday Night Live yesterday night, and as a web exclusive, SNL released this bit Kutcher did about Tooter, which Twitter-like network that broadcasts Kutcher’s flatulence emissions, or “gissions.” It’s up to you to decide how funny the sketch is, but it’s certainly an entertaining poke at the celeb’s love for the microblogging network and social media. Watch a video of the sketch after the jump.
Devin Coldewey on February 7, 2010
Everyone with eyes in their head can see the bright future of multi-touch displays, but the huge variety of technologies out there makes it hard to place a bet. Will capacitive film rule? Or will it be the IR overlay? Or will Microsoft’s foresight in nurturing the Surface project pay off once they reveal their new, flatter display? Well, there’s one more competitor joining the already-crowded field, and they’re coming in heavy with $18 million in funding.There is some question of whether FlatFrog will be able to create a product that’s truly distinct from the competition, but this money should go a long way toward getting their name out there and their tech up to spec.
on February 7, 2010
Here’s a recap of all of the interviews and other videos of technology executives who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week:Mike Butcher on February 7, 2010
There’s a certain irony that TechCrunch’s in-house satirist Paul Carr is currently slaving over the sequel to his book about his failure to launch a startup. Fridaycities was to be a site which allowed anyone to swap information in real time about London, and eventually other cities. The site failed, Paul wrote his book (and a few other things, let’s admit) and the rest is history, including our little run in, thankfully.If only he’d done it in the era of Facebook rise into the mainstream. Because today, two weeks after launching, the Secret London Facebook group has 182,010 members and counting and is poised to propel its 21 year old creator into her first startup.
Bristol university graduate Tiffany Philippou originally set up the group in response to a competition from ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi to win a mere summer internship. However, it seems unlikely that Tiffany will be too bothered. There’s now a holding page and Twitter account (@secret_london) as Secret London morphs into a full-blown startup.
Leena Rao on February 7, 2010
The website Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest software vendor, has been hacked. The hacker has posted a “For Sale” message on the site, which is written in both French and English. Ironically, the company produces security systems software. The hack is believed to be a DNS hijack, which is similar to the breach that Twitter succumbed to last year. TechCrunch was also recently hacked earlier this year.
Vivek Wadhwa on February 7, 2010
“People in technology businesses are drawn to places known for diversity of thought and open-mindedness”, is what Professor Richard Florida concluded after studying the growth and success of 50 metropolitan areas in the U.S. The most successful regions were those with the most gays, bohemians, and immigrants. These groups flourish in Silicon Valley, and its diversity has undoubtedly provided it with great advantage. But after attending the recent Crunchies Awards, I realized that something important is still missing — women entrepreneurs. I was shocked that the only woman CEO on stage during the entire event was TechCrunch’s own Heather Harde. Nearly all the companies that competed in the event (other than the PR firms) had males at the helm. This dearth may be one of the reasons for which the Venture Capital community is in such sharp decline, and why the Valley isn’t achieving even more success.An analysis of Dunn and Bradstreet data shows that of the 237,843 firms founded in 2004, only 19% had women as primary owners. And only 3% of tech firms and 1% of high-tech firms (as in Silicon Valley) were founded by women. Look at the executive teams of any of the Valley’s tech firms – minus a couple of exceptions like Padmasree Warrior of Cisco, you won’t find any women CTOs. Look at the management teams of companies like – not even one woman. It’s the same with the VC firms – male dominated. You’ll find some CFOs and HR heads, but women VCs are a rare commodity in venture capital. And with the recent venture bloodbath, the proportion of women in the VC numbers is declining further. It’s no coincidence that only one of the 84 VCs on the 2009 TheFunded list of top VCs was a woman.
Paul Carr on February 7, 2010
This time last week I rattled off the world’s laziest column. I was struggling against my book deadline which expired 24 hours later and I simply didn’t have time to write anything else. This week should have been different; I should have finished the book days ago and now be sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping a Diet Coke martini and lazily writing a long, well-thought-out column about some vital issue of the day. Why it’s inadvisable to write a mea culpa in the passive voice (otherwise it’s just a ‘culpa’). Something like that.And yet, and yet – the fact that, seven days later, I’m still sitting at my desk and I still haven’t delivered the manuscript to my publisher, should give a hint to how perilous things are right now. I’m Wile E. Coyote about five seconds after he looks down and realises he’s overshot the cliff. And yet despite my urge to sack off this week’s column and focus on lessening the size of crater I’m about to leave in the desert floor, there’s something on which I can’t remain silent on any longer. Four words which I’ve been seeing again and again all week, and which threaten to drive me mad…
Robin Wauters on February 7, 2010
Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel, has an absolute disdain for mobile phones. All of the ones he has purchased in the past, the man writes on his personal blog, ended up being “mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights” even though they were naturally all phones run on open source operating systems.Things have changed now, he adds, now that he has caved and bought Google’s Nexus One a couple of days ago. Torvalds has owned a number of phones before, including Google’s G1 device and ‘one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones’, but it took for Google to add multi-touch capabilities to the Nexus One before he finally broke down and bought one from the company’s web store.
I hope we can just let this go now, and move on with our lives. I promise to try to use a headset much more often while driving in those states that require it, and otherwise abide by the laws of the land.
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06 Feb 2010 21:19
The Big GameLooks Like Google May Have A Super Bowl Commercial »
Give CA Your Best IT IdeaCalifornia’s CTO Responds To Our Challenge With His Own »
Charlie RoseWalt Mossberg, David Carr And Michael Arrington Talk iPad »
If you can’t laugh at yourself…Robert Scoble insisted (insisted!) that we take these photos. Possibly to let the healing process begin after yesterday’s Google phone drama. And he isn’t the only one who wants to turn this into some kind of meme.
I hope we call just let this go now, and move on with our lives. I promise to try to use a headset much more often while driving in those states that require it, and otherwise abide by the laws of the land.
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on February 6, 2010
Today, the blog Chromium Notes, which is written by a developer who works on the open source project (that Google Chrome is built on top of), posted a very interesting graph: one that shows the number of code commits to WebKit. Notably, it appears that Google has overtaken Apple as the organization that contributes the most commits to the open source project.Now, the author is quick to point out the caveats of the graph (and does so for four paragraphs), and notes that he was hesitant to even publish it because of how easy it is to misinterpret. The graph, while it shows commits, doesn’t weigh more important ones versus less important ones. Nor does it in any way measure the ways in which companies or individuals contribute to WebKit in other meaningful ways. That said, it does clearly show that in late 2009, Google surpassed Apple as the company that now contributes the most (again, in terms of commits) to the project.
on February 6, 2010
While Google is a company built on advertising, for the most part it has stayed out of advertising itself on the dominant medium: television. Yes, there have been those short ads for Chrome and a few for Android that it has been involved with. And Google is even said to have considered an ad during the Olympics, but that was killed at the last second, apparently. But now, it looks like Google may be ready to advertise itself on the biggest stage possible: the Super Bowl.Google CEO Eric Schmidt has just posted this very intriguing tweet:
Nicholas Deleon on February 6, 2010
If I may, I’d like to play devil’s advocate to something I wrote a few days ago. To quickly summarize, Boxee took issue with NBCU’s Jeff Zucker’s characterization that Boxee was some sort of rogue piece of software, and that Hulu is in the right whenever it blocks access to the XBMC-derived media player. How about this: maybe Hulu is right to block Boxee? Let’s see where this takes us.Guest Author on February 6, 2010
The following is an excerpt from Chip and Dan Heath’s new book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, which will be released on February 16.One of the most consistent findings in psychology is that people behave differently when their environment changes. When we’re in a place where people are quiet (church), we’re quiet. When we’re in a place where people are loud (stadiums), we’re loud. When we’re driving and the lanes narrow, we slow down. When they widen, we speed up again. This may seem obvious, but when we try to make change at work, we often make the mistake of obsessing about the people involved rather than their environment. Often the easiest way to drive change is to shape the environment.
This environment-shaping strategy was used in 2006 by Becky Richards, the Adult Clinical Services Director at Kaiser South San Francisco hospital, who was determined to drive down medication errors. On average, nurses commit roughly 1 error per 1000 medications administered. That’s an impressive record of accuracy. Still, given the huge volume of medications delivered at Kaiser South, that error rate led to about 250 errors annually, and a single error can be harmful or even deadly. For instance, if a patient received too much Heparin, a blood thinner, the patient’s blood would no longer clot and the patient could hemorrhage. If a patient got too little Heparin, he could develop a blood clot that could lead to a stroke.
Richards believed that most errors happened when nurses were distracted. And it was all too easy to get distracted—most traditional hospitals put the medication administration areas right in the middle of the nursing units, which tended to be noisiest places on the floor. Tess Pape, a professor at the University of Texas who has studied medication errors, said, “Today we admire people for multitasking, we celebrate people who can accomplish many things at once. But when you’re giving out medications is the last time you should be multitasking.”
Guest Author on February 6, 2010
Editor’s note: In a pair of posts a couple of weeks ago, contributing columnist Vivek Wadhwa highlighted the antiquated nature of the state of California’s IT systems and the way contracts for those systems are doled out to legacy IT firms. He then challenged Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to come up with ways to rebuild California’s IT systems at one tenth the cost. California CTO P.K. Agarwal responds in this guest post with his own challenge: walk the talk and give him your best IT ideas. He’s even set up a crowdsourcing site to gather them.
Vivek, I’m glad to see you are challenging the readers of TechCrunch the same way you challenge the audiences of your speeches.
The debate that has erupted on TechCrunch in response to that challenge is particularly interesting to me because it focuses on a question that my colleagues and I have spent a lot of time trying to find an answer to: What’s the best way to migrate California’s legacy portfolio to new technologies? And there are many other related questions.
on February 6, 2010
Charlie Rose had The Wall Street Journal/All Things D’s Walt Mossberg, The New York Times’ David Carr and our own Michael Arrington on his show Thursday night to talk about the Apple iPad. The video is below, and you can also watch it on the Charlie Rose website, .
About half an hour ago, a post that was published on the Digital Inspiration blog hit Techmeme. The title of that post left little to the imagination: it read “TechCrunch Removes Reader Comments From All Older Blog Posts”. That allegation in itself is inaccurate, as is most of the rest of the article, so I felt compelled to respond quickly and offer our side of the story. Which, on a sidenote, we weren’t asked for by the person or people behind the blog (at least not to my knowledge).
Guest Author on February 6, 2010
(Editor’s note: Centralized Web job boards are in decline. Dan Finnigan, CEO of Jobvite, explains why in this guest post. Previously, he was Senior VP at Yahoo and GM of HotJobs, and before that a Director on CareerBuilder’s Board as CEO of Knight Ridder Digital.
Monster’s acquisition of Yahoo HotJobs signals a significant landscape change for a job board industry facing significant economic pressure and I believe the deal also marks a “new normal” in how companies are hiring talent. Online recruiting is transitioning away from “the Big Three” job boards. The Internet is becoming the job board.
Of course, unloading and closing properties that are not part of Yahoo’s strategy going forward is smart. (Though selling a job advertising board smack in the middle of this downturn and extreme unemployment must have been as hard as selling an empty, foreclosed home in Las Vegas right now.)
on February 6, 2010Michael Arrington on February 6, 2010 -
06 Feb 2010 03:54
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Pretty VideoTwitter’s Development History Beautifully Visualized In A Video »
PartnershipsFacebook Takes Over Its Own Display Advertising From Microsoft »
Digital FashionGoogle Is Now Selling Signature $300 Designer Scarves »on February 6, 2010
The history of P2P file sharing service Kazaa (which actually started life as “KaZaA”) is known to most of us born in the eighties or before, and consists mainly of copyright related lawsuits and adware-ridden software. The gist of the story can be found on its Wikipedia profile, but what many seem to forget in present times is that the service is still around, serving users an unlimited amount of (licensed) songs for a $20 monthly subscription fee.
Recently, a Symantec security program apparently identified the Kazaa desktop client as high-risk, flagging the software as adware. This prompted Brilliant Digital Entertainment, the company that operates Kazaa, to issue a special notice / consumer alert to its customers.
And it isn’t pulling any punches.
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on February 6, 2010
Nsyght is a startup we broke just before the Christmas vacation which focuses on making realtime streams manageable and is similar in scope to FriendfeedCliqset
It currently integrates accounts from Twitter, Facebook, digg, Vimeo, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Delicious, and Last.fm – with other networks planned – and has now introduced a bunch of new features.
on February 6, 2010
Blippy, the Twitter-like service that lets users publish the details of all their purchases, is just a couple of months old. But it already got Stephen Colbert’s attention (thumbs up). And now it has Amazon’s too (thumbs down).Cofounder Philip Kaplan first mentioned that Amazon had turned off Blippy’s access to the service on an episode of TWiST with Jason Calacanis. I spoke to Kaplan tonight about Amazon’s reaction to Blippy.
on February 5, 2010
Ah, the college library photo. Look through any school’s brochure, and there’s a good chance you’ll see photos of an ethnically diverse group of students pouring over the same math problem together, all of of them inexplicably grinning ear to ear. It’s a nice thought, but unfortunately it doesn’t happen all that often — instead, many students wind up studying alone, and when they can’t figure something out, they’re out of luck. Now, entrepreneur Pooja Nath is looking to turn this kind of group learning into a reality for more students (at least online) with her startup PiazzzaPiazzza is still in a private beta and has quite a ways to go before public launch, but we got a sneak peek at its current progress. The site is designed to help classmates share their questions and answers in a format that’s a bit like a mixture between a wiki and a forum.
Guest Author on February 5, 2010
Editor’s note: This is a guest post written by Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of Brightcove. Prior to Brightcove, Jeremy founded Allaire Corporation which was subsequently acquired by Macromedia due to the success of their web development tool ColdFusion. At Macromedia, Jeremy helped create the Macromedia MX (Flash) platform. You can see a recent interview of Jeremy here. As one of the guys who helped build the Flash Platform, we asked him to weigh in on the recent HTML5 v. Flash debate.The recent introduction of the new Apple iPad has stirred the discussion over the future of web content and application runtime formats, and shone light onto the political and business battles emerging between Apple, AdobeGoogle. These discussion are often highly polarized and irrational. My hope in this post is to help provide some balance and clarity onto this discussion.
I have a particularly unique perspective, stake and role in this discussion. My first company (Allaire) was born during the advent of the Web, with the idea that a browser and HTML could form the basis for creating content-rich, interactive software applications, ones that didn’t require native code and could be platform and operating system independent. We built ColdFusion as a way to realize this vision. We later became deeply committed to the world of HTML as a developer format, acquiring and building HomeSite, what was the world’s dominant Windows-based HTML authoring application.
on February 5, 2010
Earlier today I was driving to Google for a product briefing, minding my own business, talking on my Google phone with Google PR and trying to figure out what Google building I was supposed to be driving to. I stopped at a crosswalk for a bunch of Googlers to pass. And this guy, who’s wearing a Google employee badge, decides it’s time to take a stand against cell phone use in cars. So he stands in front of my car and won’t move. That’s right, it was his Tiananmen Square moment.
Cars behind me start swerving. I back up to go around him. He steps forward, vigilant in his defense of the law. I’m off the phone now, and snapping this picture didn’t help getting him to move on. The light changes. The light changes again. Cars are now backed up behind me.
I’m not sure what comes next in a situation like this. I can either drive over him or park my car. So I put the car in park, open the door to get out and discuss the situation with him. That’s when he ran away. His mission, apparently, accomplished.
on February 5, 2010
Yesterday, we got a nice little breakdown of which clients are used most often for the location-based service Foursquare (hint: still the iPhone). Today, the company has some new big news to share via a tweet: they’re now doing over a million check-ins a week.Not even a month ago, Foursquare noted that they were seeing a check-in each second. We extrapolated this out to show that they were getting roughly 86,000 check-ins a day. But if you stretch those numbers out over a week, you get “only” 600,000 check-ins. That means that in under a month, Foursquare’s check-in rate has almost doubled. Actually, it has doubled. As Foursquare also notes in the tweet, the last seven days have seen 1.2 million check-ins.
on February 5, 2010
Twitter just recently launched a new Twitter Engineering blog, and to kick things off, one team member, Ben Sandofsky, decided to share a video he made representing Twitter’s development history. The video was made using Code Swarm, a software tool used to visualize data.As Sandofsky notes, “it isn’t exactly scientific, but it still goes to show Twitter’s explosive growth mirrored in engineering.” More importantly, it looks awesome. You can see the shift in Twitter development from Jack Dorsey in the early days (2006) to Blaine Cook to Alex Payne to Twitter’s now large team of developers. Each team member is represented in the video by their Twitter avatar.
on February 5, 2010
It’s no secret that Facebook Photos is massively popular, with the company boasting that it receives a whopping 2.5 billion photos uploaded every month. And as the site continues to grow — it just passed 400 million users — that number is only going to get more staggering. Unfortunately, the photo uploading experience hasn’t always been smooth; you’ve to wait for the photo uploads to finish, and the entire process was just sort of clunky. Today, the company announced that it’s rolling out an improved photo upload browser plugin.The new plugin includes a new photo navigator that should make it easy to choose the photos you want. And once you’ve started the upload process, you can browse to another page — the plugin will keep uploading the files in the background.
on February 5, 2010
EventVue set out three years ago to transform the way people interact with and network during events. Today, sadly, they have announced they are shutting downIn an overlay message that appears now on the main site, co-founders Rob Johnson and Josh Fraser write:
on February 5, 2010
In October, computational engine Wolfram Alpha launched a slick iPhone app. The only problem? They miscalculated what it should cost. The app is great and all, but it’s simply not worth $50 when you can use the website for free.Today, they their first major update to the app, version 1.1, which brings with it one new feature: new keyboards. Specifically, Wolfram Alpha now has a “default” keyboard, a “math” keyboard, a “Greek” keyboard, and a “symbol” keyboard. As they describe it, “the specialized keyboards that greet you when you first open the Wolfram|Alpha App, have been painstakingly constructed to ease the burden of entering queries.” Fair enough, these are definitely nice to have for advanced queries. But do they justify the $50 price yet? Nope.
on February 5, 2010
Every year as broadband reaches more people, online education keeps growing and growing. So far, though, most online education focusses on vocational courses, test preparation, or supplemental tutoring. One startup trying to bring entire degree programs online is 2tor, which just closed a $20 million Series B funding at a rumored valuation of around $100 million. Highland Capital Partners led the round, with previous investors Redpoint, Novak Biddle, and City Light Capital participating. Last June, the company raised $10 million in a Series A.
“What is unique about 2tor is they are the first online education program to go after the high end—elite programs at elite schools,” says Paul Maeder, a founder and general partner at Highland who will be taking a board seat. 2tor was founded by John Katzman, who previously founded test-prep giant Princeton Review. Originally, he wanted to start 2tor as a division of the Princeton Review, but it goes after such a different part of the education market that he decided to pursue it as a standalone startup instead. In partnership with universities and graduate programs, 2tor designs and produces fully-accredited online degree programs, and even recruits the students as well.
on February 5, 2010
Google Maps has just a new and nifty feature: suggestions of similar places to your search query in maps. So if you search for Best Buy in your designated area, Maps will suggest (in the more information tab) nearby businesses and places that might be of interest to you, such as other Best Buy stores in the area.
Apparently, suggestions to places aren’t based on a specific characteristic. Google uses a “broad set of signals” to deliver recommendations. Google says they are working on the technology and from my experience, it’s definitely rough. For a search for Best Buy in Chicago, I received recommendations for any businesses that had the terms “Best Buy” in it.
on February 5, 2010
The concept of “checking-in” has become popular in the location space. But as the concept gains popularity through the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla there’s no reason it can’t be extended beyond location. A new iPhone sports app, FanPulse, takes the idea of checking-in to sporting events — that you don’t have to be at, just be watching.And the app comes at a perfect time, as of course, the Super Bowl is this weekend. If you’re unable to watch the game with some of your friends, FanPulse offers an interesting way to interact with them about the game in realtime. If you check-in to the Super Bowl between the Colts and the Saints, it will show up on your friends’ main Pulse stream within the app. If they click on that item, they’ll be taken to an area where they can also check-in to the game. From here you, and any other friends that join the area, can chat about it as you watch the game.
MG Siegler on February 5, 2010
Say what you want about Skittles’ branding on the Internet, but at least it’s never boring. Following the decision last year to change the Skittles.com homepage into a Twitter Search page, which led to to things from racial slurs to pedophilia talk showing up, they’ve now redesigned again. And the result is once again interesting.Titled “Experience The Rainbow,” Skittles.com is now a never-ending (it auto-refreshes to keep going as you scroll down) page of trippy, odd, and colorful images. For example, the first image is a clown dressed as an astronaut. As you keep scrolling down, you get a mixture of this weird stuff alongside fairly clever marketing and statistics for the candy. As a weird sumo wrestling graphic shows, Skittles currently has over 3,600,000 fans on Facebook, but only 272 followers on Twitter (because they just started their Twitter account yesterday along with this website).
Sarah Lacy on February 5, 2010
There may be no topic high-profile women in the Valley tire of more than the question of why there aren’t more high-profile women in the Valley. I’ve written about it for nearly every publication for which I’ve worked. No matter who I talk to, the upshot always seems the same: Most people wish there were more women CEOs in the Valley, the few that do exist hate talking about the topic because they’d rather just be recognized as good CEOs or founders, and people tend to blame the problem on a lack of women in science and math and the lack of a work-life balance when starting a company.I don’t mean to sound insensitive. There are definitely times my life has been harder as a woman just writing about this scene. But wake me when there’s something new to say.
Still want to obsess about it? Then you should start by reading the new book “Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age,” by Kurt W. Beyer. (Chance to win a free one below!)
on February 5, 2010
When it comes to display advertising on its own site, Facebook is taking full control of its inventory away from Microsoft. Even prior to Microsoft’s initial $240 million investment in Facebook in 2007, the two companies had an advertising partnership giving Microsoft the ability to serve display ads on the social network. That was a three-year deal which was up for renewal. The two companies just finished renegotiating it, and Microsoft will no longer be serving up display ads on Facebook.
However, Bing will still power Web search on Facebook and will serve up search ads. The relationship with Bing will actually be expanded to be global (before it was just U.S.) and to include smart answers and other guided search features within Facebook. Expect Facebook’s Web search to start looking a lot more like Bing. As far as social search goes, however, Facebook continues to develop its own search technologies which return realtime results from your personal stream.
on February 5, 2010
We all know Marissa Mayer is a tech nerd turned fashionista, and it looks like her taste for designer clothes is rubbing off on the search giant.
But unlike the media or mobile industries, the fashion industry appears safe from Google. Google is selling “Google-inspired” scarves and other clothing to the public that were designed by emerging designers. Last year, designers who participated in a Vogue and Council of Fashion Designer program were asked to create a one-of-a-kind item inspired by Google in some way that reflected Google’s aura. Google transformed the finalists creations into iGoogle Artists themes but selected three of the designers to produce and sell their Google-inspired couture.
on February 5, 2010
Scrapblog, a startup that lets you build rich Flash-based online scrapbooks, has raised $2.5 million in series B funding from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures. The startup had previously raised $7.5 million from Longworth Venture Partners and Steamboat Ventures.
Scrapblog offers an online editor that allows users to decorate their scrapbook with text, images, colorful themes, and other embellishments, which can then be shared on the web or printed out. The startup also launched a new QuickMix tool to allow users to make simple scrapbooks on the fly. Scrapblog recently brought on a new CEO, Jill Braff, to lead the company after startup’s founder and CEO Carlos Garcia, stepped aside. Braff most recently led worldwide publishing efforts including licensing, marketing and sales as SVP of global publishing at Glu Mobile.
Robin Wauters on February 5, 2010
PayPal isn’t working properly in India. eBay’s electronic payment juggernaut appears to be blocking personal transactions to or from accounts of India-based users. It is reversing personal transactions; transactions involving businesses are still allowed.A reader checked in with us yesterday to let us know PayPal notified him that the company had stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India (full e-mail can be found below).
This does not appear to be an isolated incident: see , here and here for more reports, although we gather commercial payment transactions are unaffected at this point.
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04 Feb 2010 05:49
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Epix, the movie and entertainment streaming network that works across your TV, computer, and mobile phone, has landed its fourth cable deal: Charter Communications. In the past few weeks, the network also landed a deal with Cox Communications and Mediacom Communications. We wrote about the service herehere. Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Jointly backed by Viacom, Lionsgate, Paramount, and MGM, EPIX provides access to over 15,000 movie titles. The company originally signed a deal with Verizon FIOS, which was somewhat limiting considering only some 2 million people use Verizon’s cable service. Cox brings more clients to EPIX with its base of 6.2 million customers, which including 2.7 million digital cable subscribers. Mediacom, the 7th largest cable provider in the U.S., will bring with it a base of 1.3 million subscribers in 22 states. And Carter, which is the fourth largest cable provider in the U.S. will bring EPIX to 5.7 million homes by May 2010.
Jointly backed by Viacom, Lionsgate, Paramount, and MGM, EPIX provides access to over 15,000 movie titles. The company originally signed a deal with Verizon FIOS, which was somewhat limiting considering only some 2 million people use Verizon’s cable service. Cox brings more clients to EPIX with its base of 6.2 million customers, which including 2.7 million digital cable subscribers. Mediacom, the 7th largest cable provider in the U.S., will bring with it a base of 1.3 million subscribers in 22 states. And Carter, which is the fourth largest cable provider in the U.S. will bring EPIX to 5.7 million homes by May 2010.
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Mike Butcher on February 4, 2010
Everyone knows “realtime” has been a hot tech category for the last year or so but as we all know the ‘realtime problem’ is getting some kind of intelligence out of that firehose, and, crucially, eventually working out if or how it can be monetised. Search found its way with keyword targeting, but what will happen around realtime? The Cognitive Match startup is applying artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content (product, offers, or editorial) to realtime content. It’s doing this in part by relying on an academic panel of professors in artificial intelligence from Universities across the UK and Europe who specialise in machine learning and psychology. The idea is to ensure maximum response from individuals, thereby increasing conversion, revenue and ultimately profit.
Last year it raised a Series A investment from Dawn Capital, rumoured to be in the $1m+ ballpark. Today Dawn has stepped in again with a follow-on Series B investment of $2.5m which the company will use to accelerate its growth. That takes it’s war-chest to around $3.5m
on February 4, 2010
In November 2009, Apple a feature dubbed iTunes Preview, which essentially enabled people to see what music is available on iTunes from their Web browser without the need to fire up – or install – the desktop software program. At the time, you weren’t able to actually listen to a sample of music tracks from your browser, but that changed earlier this year when Web-based audio previews were quietly added (paving the way for the imminent roll-out of iTunes.com
This morning, Apple activated the iTunes Preview feature for iPhone / iPod Touch applications in addition.
on February 3, 2010
When you’re on your way out of a job, there’s a lot of fun ways to exit. Some choose to take all the staplers in the office, some show up to the last day in shorts, some pull a Jerry Maguire. And some tweet out a haiku.That’s exactly what Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz did tonight. Here’s his tweet:
Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more
Really, what more needs to be said?
on February 3, 2010
SGN founder and executive chairman Shervin Pishevar is an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. Back in 2008, he shared a semi-lucid and beautiful post about entrepreneurism that he emailed to friends during a trip to Eastern Europe.Then, late in 2009, he found himself wandering through Europe as part of one of Dave McClure’s Geeks On A Plane adventures. After an evening at the BetaHaus in Berlin, Germany, Pishevar put on his iPod and stumbled across Jay-Z’s song “A Star Is Born”. Inspired, he set upon a creative mission: to create a cover version that captured the spirit of Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship.
After penning the lyrics, Pishevar took advantage of the services offered by GreetBeatz, a startup that lets you contract professional rappers to sing anything you want (he paired up with Thunda). And thus Silicon Valley’s rap anthem was born.
on February 3, 2010
With more than 140,000 apps on the iPhone alone, there is a real need for services which help you find the best apps. Apple’s iTunes ratings and genius recommendations only go so far. One startup attacking this problem is French-Israeli AppsFire, which just raised its first angel round. AppsFire was co-founded by former TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon and Yann Lechelle.
The investors are a group of successful French entrepreneurs (yes, they exist), including Marc Simoncini (CEO of dating site meetic.com), Jacques-Antoine Granjon (CEO of Vente-Privee.com), Xavier Niel (CEO of French ISP Free), and entrepreneur and angel investor Jean-David Blanc (who also recently invested in Square). The amount raised wasn’t disclosed but it is believed to be in the low seven figures.
Michael Arrington on February 3, 2010
Something tells me Kwedit, which launches today, is going to be a hit. It’s a new payment service that absolutely doesn’t guarantee payments. In fact, its unreliability is what makes it so attractive to social game publishers and other people selling virtual goods. It’s also a great way to let the unbanked masses out there pay for stuff without getting sucked in to scamville-type scams. The product is called Kwedit Promise.Here’s how Kwedit works: they let users take on fake debt instead of paying for virtual goods with real money (or via scammy or legitimate offers). A user promises to pay later. It’s not an enforceable promise, and there is really no consequence if a user doesn’t pay. But there are built in incentives to pay it off, and Kwedit expects some percentage of people to actually do so.
As users take and pay off, or default, on Kwedit promises, a virtual Kwedit score moves up and down just like a real-life credit score.
Users get more credit (err, Kwedit) when they actually pay the stuff they agreed to. And if they don’t pay, the kwedit score goes down and getting more Kwedit becomes difficult. There’s some risk that users will try to sign up under another name to start fresh – but since most of the virtual games are on social networks and tied to established identities, that won’t work very well.
Greg Kumparak on February 3, 2010
Wuh-oh! Considering its popularity and the number of handsets floating around out there compared to the number of security exploits discovered thus far, I’d say Apple has done a pretty good job of keeping things locked down.
As this just-discovered flaw proves, however, nobody’s perfect. By combining a weakness in an enterprise feature with a bit of social engineering, an anonymous hacker has discovered a nearly sure-fire way to fool iPhone users into installing a potentially harmful file.
on February 3, 2010
There was some hoopla yesterday about the news that Hulu had broken the 1 billion videos viewed in a month threshold in December. And rightfully so, it’s the first video service to do that other than YouTube. But there’s another hot property that is rising fast in the streaming video realm as well: NetflixThe movie rental giant crossed into the top 20 video sites on the web for the first time in December, according to numbers from ComScore. Specifically, they now sit at number 19, just ahead of Break Media, and just behind Justin.TV. And with over 127 million views last month, and rising fast, it shouldn’t be long before they’re in the top 15 with the likes of Facebook and ESPN.
on February 3, 2010
If you co-founded the company that became Google AdSense, as Gil Elbaz did with Applied Semantics, you don’t have any problem finding investors when you want to start a new venture. Elbaz sold Applied Semantics to Google for $100 million in 2003, and his latest startup, Factual, last October. He doesn’t really need the money, but so many all-star investors were clamoring to get in that he raised just over $1 million in an angel round.
His angel investors include Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz via their Andreessen Horowitz fund, Bill Gross via Idealab, Esther Dyson, Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos, as well as New York City seed fund the Founder Collective
on February 3, 2010
As you may have heard by now, Netflix has agreed to movie studio demands that they not rent new movies until 28 days after their DVD release. The idea is that this will help drive DVD sales, which have been plummeting in recent years, taking billions out of the pockets of the studios. Right now, this deal is only in place with Warner Brothers, but you can be sure that the other studios are going to want the same deal. Netflix says it’s going along with this because most of its customers care more about catalog (older) releases than newer ones. But the popularity charts suggest otherwise.Each month, Netflix releases a list of the top 25 rented movies for the previous month on its Facebook page. This week, they gave out the data for January 2010, and guess what? Of the top 25 rentals, over half (13) would not have been fully available to rent for the month under the new 28-day rule. And some wouldn’t have been available at all. Clearly, this new policy is going to have a bigger effect on Netflix users’ rental habits that the company wants you to believe.
Michael Arrington on February 3, 2010
Up next in our series of tech interviews at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week: Gina Bianchini, the CEO of social networking service NingNing has never had the press attention of Facebook and Twitter. But there are 41 million registered users on Ning, and Gina says that 92 million people a month worldwide visit Ning sites.
We spoke at length in the interview about how the world sees Ning, and how Ning defines itself. Anyone can easily create a Ning social network, cobranded or white labelled. 2.5 million of them have been created so far.
In some ways Ning networks are competitive to Facebook Pages (here’s the TechCrunch Facebook page). Both allow for a presence inside of a social network. And when faced with a choice, most may choose Facebook simply because it has so many hundreds of millions of users to help word spread virally.
Gina doesn’t see it this way. She notes that Facebook pages have limited features and are locked within Facebook itself. Ning allows for deep social experiences around brands and things. Instead of the product competing with Facebook (and Twitter, etc.), she sees Ning as the center of an ecosystem that includes all of these products. A fascinating excerpt from the interview:
on February 3, 2010
We recently wrote about the traction that how-to video site and producer Howcast is seeing online. But there’s another information and how-to video startup that is dominating the space: 5min. The company is a syndication platform for instructional, knowledge and lifestyle videos, both professionally produced and user-generated. The service’s video library boasts 150,000 of videos across a variety of categories (e.g. food, health, home and garden ), submitted by media companies and independent producers from around the world.December’s comScore data shows that 5min saw 30.5 million unique viewers, ranking just below Turner Networks (30.6 million unique viewers) and just above AOL (30 million unique viewers). Google saw 136 million unique viewers and Hulu saw 44.2 million unique viewers. 5min ranks as number 14 out of 100 properties in ComScore’s video metrix, according to unique viewers. In terms of videos streamed, 5min saw 75.4 million streams which pales in comparison to Hulu’s 1 billion video streams and Google’s 13.2 billion video streams for the month of December. If 5min was ranked by streams, it would most likely rank lower on the list, as AOL and other video properties had more streams than the startup (AOL saw 210 million streams).
on February 3, 2010
Yahoo has ben trying to unload HotJobs for a while, and it finally came to a deal with Monster, which will take the site off of Yahoo’s hands for $225 million in cash. As part of the deal, Monster will continue to power Yahoo’s job listings for three years.
Both HotjobsMonster have been lagging newer job search sites such as Indeed, which searches the entire Web for job listings. According to comScore, Indeed’s jog search reached 8.4 million individuals in the U.S. in December, 2009, compared to only 5.4 million for HotJobs and 6.1 million for Monster. Maybe with the acquisition, Monster can take the top spot again, although there is a lot of overlap in those numbers.
on February 3, 2010
Earlier today, we noted that Loopt has launched a check-in for charity campaign to raise money for Haiti. Rival Gowalla is doing something similar as well.Called “Hearts for Haiti,” Gowalla’s campaign will take place on Monday, February 8 in the San Francisco Bay Area. When someone uses the service to check-in at one of three selected locations during a specific time, Gowalla will donate $50 in that person’s name to the American Red Cross for each check-in. So basically, all you have to do is show up at one of these places, check-in, and you’re donating to charity. The goal is to raise $20,000, the company notes. The selected venues include two different Peet’s coffee shops and a Barenaked Ladies concert in San Francisco on that day.
on February 3, 2010
We recently wrote about location-based mobile social network Loopt’spush to launch deals for check-ins, and today, the startup is putting use check-ins to philanthropic use. For every check-in at Chipotle, Panera Bread, or Whole Foods around the country, Loopt will donate $1 towards the Haiti earthquake relief. Half of the proceeds from the check-ins will be given to the American Red Cross and the other half will be donated to Doctors Without Borders.
Loopt founder and CEO Sam Altman said the spots were chosen primarily because they are seeing many check-ins at these vendors. It’s truly a generous and worthy initiative and it also provides a noble inventive for users to enable Loopt’s check-in technology, which the startup recently launched.
on February 3, 2010
There’s been a lot of hoopla the past week over Amazon’s fight with book publisher Macmillan. The main issue is that Macmillan wants higher prices for its e-books, while Amazon wants to keep prices down for its Kindle device. Amazon went as far as to pull all of Macmillan’s books from its store, but quickly admitted that they’d eventually have to give in to Macmillan’s demands. Why? Well the obvious answer is Apple, whose new iPad device with its iBooks Store is allowing publishers to set higher prices. But don’t forget Amazon’s other rivals too.One reader wrote in to tell us how he was looking for The Politician, a new book by Andrew Young about John Edwards. The book, which is published by Macmillan, is not available on Amazon.com right now due to the dispute. When the man noticed that he turned to Amazon rival Barnes & Noble for the book — and from the looks of it, he’s not alone. The book is actually the number one best seller on Barnes & Noble’s entire site. On another rival’s site, Borders, it’s the number five best seller.
on February 3, 2010
We wrote about Bantam Live, an online workspace for business teams that has “social CRM” features, when the startup presented its product at TechCrunch’s RealTime Stream CrunchUp last July. Today, Bantam is launching the commercial version of its social workspace and is rolling out premium features to its product.
Bantam Live’s software-as-a-service product provides an online workspace for business teams that includes a real-time dashboard stream of messaging and workflow activity along with a native social CRM application. Members can share information, track activity, and manage contact and company relationships inside and outside the organization via the real-time activity stream.
John Biggs on February 3, 2010
Do you dream of jet boots and ninjas from space? Sure, we all do. Well, the future just arrived in my mailbox, friends, and it’s the Kempler & Strauss W Phone Watch, an unlocked GSM phone inside a watch. Is it amazing, you ask? Does it come with a jet pack, you ask? The answers are “Yes” and “No.”The phone is about as big as a Garmin GPS watch and has a touchscreen and small camera. I’m going to wear this thing for a few days and report back on how it feels to wear the entire world on your wrist but this far it seems to work fine. The screen is amazingly hard to type on without a little stylus, but it’s fun to try. Interestingly, you can even make and take calls without a headset.
How much does it cost? $199, friends, and it’s available for pre-order now. While it will never replace the standard phone, it’s nice to be able to tell people to talk to the hand. Or talk to the wrist. Or whatever.
Click through for a video Quick Look. Look for a review next week.
on February 3, 2010
If you’re a startup looking for some early angel investments, you probably have a list of people you’d love to work with mapped out in your mind. Unfortunately, there’s also a good chance that you have absolutely no idea how to get their attention and pitch them. Today Venture Hacks is launching a new project that may help with that. Dubbed StartupList, Venture Hacks will start sending a weekly Email digest featuring three startup pitches that will get Emailed to some of Silicon Valley’s most respected angel investors. Venture Hacks founder Babak Nivi likens it to a DailyCandy for startups.The project is a followup to the Venture Hacks AngelList, which launched yesterday. AngelList is a basic directory of over 80 established angel investors, including their all-important contact info (or, at least, the best people to get a reference through), what the investor looks for in a startup, and other key information.
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02 Feb 2010 02:42
Funding StreamUstream Gets $20 Million Now, An Option For $55 Million More Later »
PicsA First Taste Of What The Google Tablet’s Interface Will Look Like »
RumorApple Has Another Tablet In The Works. More Like A Mac Than An iPhone »on February 2, 2010
In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin published a paper[PDF] titled Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine, in which they outlined the core technology behind Google and the theory behind PageRank. Now, twelve years after that paper was published, the team behind social search engine Aardvark has drafted its own research paper that looks at the social side of search. Dubbed Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine, the paper has just been accepted to WWW2010, the same conference where the classic Google paper was published.Aardvark will be posting the paper in its entirety on its official blog at 9 AM PST, and they gave us the chance to take a sneak peek at it. It’s an interesting read to say the least, outlining some of the fundamental principles that could turn Aardvark and other social search engines into powerful complements to Google and its ilk. The paper likens Aardvark to a ‘Village’ search model, where answers come from the people in your social network; Google is part of ‘Library’ search, where the answers lie in already-written texts. The paper is well worth reading in its entirety (and most of it is pretty accessible), but here are some key points:
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on February 1, 2010
Streaming video site Ustream has just pulled in a massive new round of funding: $75 million. This second round was led by SoftBank, a Japanese telecom giant. Previously, the site had raised just below $13 million in funding, which came from its Series A in 2008 and its angel round in late 2007.Update: While Ustream noted the $75 million number, SoftBank has clarified that they’re investing $20 million now for a 13.7% stake in the company with an option to invest up to $55 million more by 2011 — which would make them Ustream’s largest shareholder with over 30% of the outstanding shares.
Perhaps even crazier is that the service is saying that additional funding commitments are pending from other investors in the U.S. and Asia, so the round could actually be larger than the $75 million when all is said and done. We’re hearing reports that there was quite a bit of competition to be involved in the round, and apparently all the dust hasn’t settled yet.
on February 1, 2010
Stealth startup Makara is launching publicly tonight with its cloud-based application deployment and management platform. Formerly known as WebappVM, Makara has raised angel funding from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The startup also raised $6 million last year from Shasta Ventures and Sierra Ventures.Rather than offer a system management software designed for traditional application environments to the cloud, Makara’s cloud-based platform leverages the virtual layer to allow developers to rapidly deploy, scale and monitor applications in cloud environments. The product, which is self-service and self-managing, is available for free on its site.
on February 1, 2010
Late last week, I wrote a post about how netbooks running Chrome OS and the iPad were on a collision course. Some people took exception to that, noting the iPad was only a touchscreen device while Chrome OS was created to be used with more traditional computing form factors, like netbooks and laptops. But there’s a new concept video that has surfaced on a Chromium Project page that very much shows how the two could and should compete head-on in the touch tablet space.Again, this is just a concept video at this point, but it clearly shows what the people building Chrome OS are thinking about for future products. Oh, and in case you’re worried that since Chromium OS is an open source project, this is just some random person making these videos that Google is unlikely to use for Chrome OS, they were made by Glen Murphy, a Googler working on Chrome (with a sense of humor
Jason Kincaid on February 1, 2010
Last week, the world saw Apple’s long anticipated tablet device, the , for the first time. In the aftermath since that announcement, a few things have become clear: it will be great for some people, but its apparent lack of flexibility (at least in its first iteration) may leave something to be desired. It’s increasingly looking like the best alternative will be Google’s Chrome OS, which is clearly on a collision course with the iPad. And tonight, we’ve come across some very impressive mockups of what Chrome OS may look like on a tablet form factor.The photos have been posted to the official Chromium site (Chromium is the open source project behind Chrome and ChromeOS). And while Chromium is not actually part of Google, it appears that these mockups were put together by Glen Murphy, Google Chrome’s designer. In other words, there’s a good chance that the final version of Chrome OS will resemble this.
Jason Kincaid on February 1, 2010
JamLegend, the LaunchBox-backed ‘Guitar Hero For The Web’, has just reached a fairly major milestone: it’s now signed up over 1 million users. Co-founder Andrew Lee says that the site is up to around 60 million total song plays, of which 45 million have come from registered members. He says the site has seen especially good growth since it integrated Facebook Connect.For those that haven’t used it before, JamLegend takes the music-as-a-game formula popularized by games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and brings it to your web browser. Gameplay is pretty simple: a series of colorful dots scroll down the screen, each representing a note or chord in a song, and you rhythmically tap the proper keys on your keyboard to “play” each note.
on February 1, 2010
As you may have heard by now, many of Apple’s new 27-inch iMacs are more like iLemons. While the systems themselves are fine (and fast) there have been a ton of reports about problems with the screens (including mine and at least one other TechCrunch writer). Apple issued an update on December 21 that did not fix the problem for most of those users. Today, they have issued another update — so far, so good.While the December 21 update was titled “27-inch iMac Graphics Firmware Update 1.0,” this new update is called “27-inch iMac Display Firmware Update 1.0.” A slight variation, but a big one, as this apparently is altering the display firmware itself rather than that of just the graphics card. As with the other update, this takes a few minutes to install. This update is also about half the size of the previous one.
MG Siegler on February 1, 2010
In the movie Contact, when revealing to main character Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) that there is actually a second space travel machine that was being built at the same time as the first one, but in secret, S.R. Hadden (John Hurt) says, “why build one when you can have two at twice the price?” Apple, it seems, may have the same line of thinking.By now, we’ve all seen the iPad and know just about everything about it that we possibly can. But did you know that the secretive company may actually be hard at work on a second device already? Now, before I say anything else, take this information with a grain of salt. While it originated from a good source, it was a second-hand source. Meanwhile, I’ve corroborated some the main details with another source, but not some of the smaller ones. That said, from what I’m hearing, Apple is pretty far along on work on second tablet device. A bigger one. And this one may be much more like a Mac than an iPhone.
MG Siegler on February 1, 2010
Maybe the single most useful feature of Gmail for me is how you can “star” items to highlight them to come back to later. In Google Reader, this starring feature also exists and is hands-down the best feature of the service. Today, Google Newsadded the same feature, and it’s also awesome.Now, I’ve never been a big fan of Google News. In fact, I think it’s pretty awful in many ways. But this is a great addition. Much like with Google Reader, I can now scan through Google News and pick out the stories I want to save to read later simply by clicking on the empty star icon to the left of the headline. Even better, by using these stars, Google News is actually able to better tailor its news surfacing experience for you. When there is new news about a headline you previously starred, Google News will bold it for you, making it easier for you to find on a quick scan.
on February 1, 2010
Who exactly is the market leader in textbook rentals is no longer just an academic debate. Online textbook rental service Chegg recently sent its rival BookRenter.co a lawyer letter (embedded below) demanding that it stop using the phrase “#1 In Textbook Rentals” on its Website. That is Chegg’s marketing slogan, and it even registered the phrase as a trademark in 2008.
But how can a company trademark being No. 1, especially in a nascent market that is evolving rapidly? In addition to Chegg and BookRenter, bigger players such as Barnes & Noble are getting into the textbook rental game. Chegg’s trademark isn’t going to do it much good in fighting off such encroachments. And even if Chegg is the biggest online textbook renter, the offline book rental market is much bigger with companies like Follett dominating.
on February 1, 2010
Fynanz, a peer to peer lending platform for student loans, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DFJ Gotham Ventures, The Brazos Group, Zelkova Ventures and JBR Media Ventures. This latest round of funding brings the startup’s total funding to over $8 million. Fynanz will use the funding to expand its credit union and student lending marketplace, and for the development of additional lending programs including financial literacy initiatives. Fynanz, which in 2008, applies the peer-to-peer lending model of starups like Prosper to student loans. Students can apply for loans and participants can help fund these loans. Unlike Prosper or other P2P lending sites, Fynanze guarantees each loan. And since they are qualified educational loans, the students can deduct the interest from their taxes once they start paying back. To reduce its risk, the startup looks at other factors in addition to credit scores when evaluating each student borrower, including grade point averages and what school the student is attending.
Jason Kincaid on February 1, 2010
2009 was a good year for Meebo, which saw its Meebo Bar spread to over 130 partner sites. The chat bar, which also makes it easy to share content, now reaches 110 million unique visitors according to Quantcast (74 million according to comScore), and is growing at a clip pace. But not everything has gone exactly according to plan — on certain sites, the chat bar isn’t being used as much as Meebo would hope. Today, the company is looking to change that by modifying the way it authenticates users. From now on you will no longer need to sign up for a Meebo account to access all of the Meebo Bar’s features — you’ll be able to enter your credentials for services like AIM, Google Talk, and Facebook Chat and use all of the functionality immediately.I spoke with Meebo Senior Director of Product Chris Szeto and Director of Business Development Daniel Bernstein about the changes. They say that one big misconception people have about the Meebo Bar is that while it has a very broad reach, that doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of people are using it — people who visit a partner site see the bar even if they never touch it. The Meebo team says that engagement is higher than you might expect, and that 32% of its users are authenticated.
Leena Rao on February 1, 2010
Marketing software company Unica has made its second acquisition of 2010. The Nasdaq-listed company is buying up UK-based MakeMeTop, a UK-based search bid management technology. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Earlier this year, Unica acquired Pivotal Veracity an email marketing startup, for $17.8 million.
MakeMeTop’s technology will be branded as Unica Search OnDemand. MakeMeTop will help Unica to allow online marketers to automate and optimize their keyword buys across search engines including Ask, Baidu, Google, LookSmart, Microsoft’s Bing, Miva, Yahoo, and Yandex, while also manage their bidding and reporting across multiple currencies and languages.
MG Siegler on February 1, 2010
When Google launched Extensions for Chrome in December, they had around 300 of them ready to go in their gallery. A day later, that number was already up to 500. By now, there are a few thousand available, and that number just got multiple by several times as Google has announced that the latest official version of Chrome, version 4, now natively supports Greasemoneky user scripts.As Google engineer Aaron Boodman (who also happens to be the creator of Greasemonkey) writes today on the Chromium blog, on the popular site userscripts.org there are over 40,000 scripts alone. While he notes that not all of the user scripts written for Greasemonkey will work seamlessly with Chrome immediately (because of the differences between Chrome and Firefox), that should only affect 15%-25% of those over 40,000. He also notes that Google will continue to work on issues on their end to improve compatibility with these Greasemonkey scripts.
on February 1, 2010
Continuing his series of Davos interviews, Michael talks to Slide CEO and founder Max Levchin in the video above. Levchin discusses the ” shift from advertising to virtual goods” and reveals that most of Slide’s revenues now come from sales of virtual goods, whereas it was the reverse a year ago. Slide makes some of the most popular apps on Facebook and other social networks, and the fact that it is no longer focussed on advertising says a lot about the prospects for social ads. Last year was a huge transition for Slide, made possible by the fact the company has raised a total of $78 million
Levchin is now steeped in the dynamics of virtual goods and how to get people to pay for them, which he discusses at length in the interview. He makes a distinction between buying virtual goods as a “consumption decision” (because you want to level up in a game immediately, for instance) and an “investment decision” where you spend to improve your standing in a community. He believes there are “less diminishing returns” in getting consumers to make see spending on virtual goods as an investment rather than just consumption.
MG Siegler on February 1, 2010
Location-based services continue their hot streak when it comes to funding, as Ambient Industries has received an extension to their seed round to build out their application Flook. Alongside this news, Flook is gaining a number of new features to expand it location-based discovery elements. The extension of the funding from Amadeus Capital Partners and Eden Ventures totals close to $1 million, we’re told. This is on top of the undisclosed amount they raised from the same investors in late 2008.Flook is a location-based service that has both a web app and an iPhone app. It can probably best be described as a StumbleUpon for location-based discovery, as that’s pretty much how you use it. On the iPhone app, which launched a few weeks ago, users create “cards,” which contain a title, a picture, and a caption. You then tag the card in the correct category (“funny,” “art,” “food & drink,” etc) and when you upload it, Flook tags your location to it, so that others will find it. Users browse these cards on the main screen either by simply scrolling through cards near them or cards from people they follow on Flook. The cards you like the most, you can “collect” to view later.
David Diaz on February 1, 2010
In the midst of massive headcount cuts, another AOL exec is departing the newly-independent company. Ralph Rivera, previously the Vice President of AOL Games and AOL Latino, where he was responsible for AOL’s portfolio of online casual games and helped expand its international reach, is leaving to become President of Major League Gaming, Online. MLG is a small but growing professional competitive video game league. Rivera will be tasked to lead digital strategy and online product development for the growing company.
Major League Gaming has shown strong growth in the past few years. The company claims 10 million unique visitors per month, more than double from a year ago, and 6 million video streams. The company has taken $46 Million in funding since inception and have recently landed Doritos and Hot Pockets as advertising partners.
Erick Schonfeld on February 1, 2010
Facebook is well on its way to taking Yahoo’s spot as the third largest Web property in the world. (Google and Microsoft are No. 1 and No. 2, respectively). Last summer Facebook took the No. 4 spot globally, displacing AOL, but according to comScore there was still an estimated 241 million unique visitors a month separating it from the No. 3 site, Yahoo. In December, 2009, that gap narrowed to 125 million unique visitors globally. (That was also the same month Facebook passed AOL in the U.S. to take the No. 4 spot domestically).
In December, 2009, Facebook attracted 469 million unique visitors, up an incredible 31 million visitors from the month before. To put that in perspective, in a single month Facebook gained as many new visitors as Yahoo did all year. That one-month gain was also the equivalent of adding as many people as all of Digg or half of Twitter.com. Meanwhile, Yahoo lost 7 million unique visitors from November to December to end the year at 594 million unique visitors.
on February 1, 2010
The Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs (aka SVASE) has set up a new seed funding program for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in conjunction with newly established early-stage investment firm Cambridge West VenturesOn the East Coast, meanwhile, things are in motion too, with the introduction of a new seed startup fund dubbed IA Venture Strategies that was founded by New York angel investor Roger Ehrenberg
Leena Rao on February 1, 2010
BlueKai, an online auction-based data exchange, has raised $21 million in funding from GGV Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Battery Ventures. This round of funding brings the startup’s total funding to $35 million. Launched in 2008, BlueKai aggregates data from shopping and research activities across the Internet and provides this data on-demand for marketers, ad networks or publishers to boost the quality and scale of their ad targeting initiatives. Data buyers include many of the top ten US online ad networks. The new funding will be used to further product development. In particular, BlueKai is looking to incorporate realtime technologies into its platform.
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01 Feb 2010 00:26
Badge EnvyDoes Foursquare Have A Douchebag Problem? »
Book WormsAmazon Caves To Macmillan’s eBook Pricing Demands »
On EbayTwitter Followers Are Worth Less Than A Penny Each »on January 31, 2010
On Friday, I caught up with Carly Fiorina by phone for 30 minutes while she was in between stump speeches in her campaign for U.S. Senate for the state of California. We covered a lot of ground, including the new competition in the Republican primary from Tom Campbell who recently bowed out of the governor’s race, the need to cut spending, grow the economy, rethink government contracting, China, H1B visas, the burdens of Sarbanes-Oxley on small companies, and how technology can help women in the workforce. “In this day and age where it’s all about brain power,” says Fiorina, “the nation with the best brain power wins.”
The last time we interviewed her, she was John McCain’s “Victory Chairman” (a prematurely presumptuous title). Even though she is behind in the polls right now, she is very confident she can win the primary and ultimately knock Democrat Barbara Boxer out of the Senate. She talks a lot about cutting government spending. One good idea she proposes: “Let’s put every agency budget up on the internet for everybody to see. People would be outraged at how their money is being spent.”
Fiorina also thinks the Sarbanes-Oxley financial rules for publicly traded companies need to be revisited: “I think Sarbanes-Oxley is an example of the dangers of a rush to legislation in an emotional moment. . . . I absolutely believe that new businesses, smaller businesses shouldn’t have to comply with the full scope of Sarbanes-Oxley, and I think there’s no question that Sarbanes-Oxley has had a chilling effect on companies’ decisions to list here as opposed to perhaps listing on other exchanges around the world
You can listen to the entire interview or read the transcript below:
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Amazon Caves To Macmillan's eBook Pricing Demands
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on January 31, 2010
With seeing fast growth and starting to be embraced by elements of the mainstream (like their new deal with Bravo), it might be decision time.A popular part of the gaming element of the service is gaining badges, virtual tokens that show you’ve done a certain task on the service. Most of these are clever, like the Photogenic badge when you check-in to three different places with photobooths. But some are a bit more risqué, like the Douchebag badge. As Foursquare keeps growing, will there be pressure to get rid of these?
on January 31, 2010
A new development in the Amazon vs. Macmillan fiasco. Amazon just posted an announcement indicating that it will be “capitulating” to Macmillan by selling the publishers’ books for their desired prices.Macmillan is trying to price their e-books at $15, while Amazon prices e-books at $9.99. Macmillan’s CEO John Sargent said that unless Amazon sets the price of new e-books to $15, the publisher will not distribute new books to Amazon when they are released. On Friday, Amazon basically banned titles, both paper and digital, published by Macmillan by refusing to directly sell them. And Macmillan took out an ad in the Publishers Marketplace magazine protesting the tactics being used by Amazon regarding pricing.
on January 31, 2010
I sat down with Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week to talk about his business. Brightcove isn’t the sexiest startup out there. They’re a video platform – giving websites the tools they need to host and stream video, for a fee ranging from $100/month to “six figures per year” for the largest customers. For the most part users never see the Brightcove brand. And Allaire is just fine with that. He just wants happy customers.
The company launched in 2005, has raised just over $90 million in venture capital, and is approaching profitability, he says. Allaire says he wants to build a public company, and is happy being based in Boston.
The full video is below.
on January 31, 2010
Back in October, Google changed the mobile navigation space when it launched Google Maps Navigation for Android. While the product itself is solid it also has one killer feature: it’s free. This has forced the makers of other non-free navigation tools to scramble to convince users their products are still worth paying for. Verizon is the latest to do so with its VZ Navigator 5, launching tomorrow.So what would make it worth paying for? Verizon has a few new features in this latest update, but one of the ones they are touting the most is social media integration. Specifically, you can now update your Facebook status by way of VZ Navigator. This in and of itself isn’t that interesting, but you can also send out your location to Facebook with this feature, apparently.
Jason Kincaid on January 31, 2010
Last September, YourVersion took the stage at TechCrunch50 as the DemoPit People’s Choice winner, after receiving the most votes from conference attendees. The startup’s goal is fairly simple: to help you find content that you’re interested in, in real time. And now it’s bringing its application to the iPhone. You can download the free app hereThe app is pretty straightforward. First, you enter some topics that you’re interested in. Every time you launch the app, you’ll be presented with a list of these topics. Clicking on one will bring you to a list of recent blog posts, tweets, and other content that contains those topic keywords. You can also filter through this content by source, allowing you to see only content from Twitter, news sites, and so on. If you’ve already set up an account on the YourVersion website, you can sync that with the app (any items you bookmark or share from the app will be reflected on the site as well).
on January 31, 2010
Orli Yakuel noticed that Google has quietly added a new icon in the ‘Compose Mail’ window of its free webmail service Gmail, enabling users to run search queries from within the interface and insert results and URLs straight into drafted e-mails or open chat conversations.
This is an expansion of a Google Labs feature, simply dubbed ‘Google Search’, that was introduced back in April 2009 as an optional setting in Gmail.
Erick Schonfeld on January 31, 2010
It used to be that Twitter followers were worth something, or at least people thought they were worth something, which is the same thing. It was only about a year ago when Jason Calacanis was offering $250,000 to buy a spot on Twitter’s Suggested User List, which would have guaranteed him perhaps a million followers before Twitter ended up revamping the SUL to be less monolithic. He never got on the list, but if his offer would have come to roughly $0.25 per follower.
Today, you can “buy” followers on eBay for less than a penny each. Some of the Buy-It-Now listings include 5,000 followers for $20 (which comes to 0.4 penny/follower), $5,500 for $40 (0.7 penny/follower), $1,100 for $10 (0.9 penny/follower). You are not actually buying followers outright (Twitter doesn’t allow people to transfer their followers), but rather services which “guarantee” getting your account up to the promised number of followers through “proven and safe methods.” Some even only count reciprocal followers (followers who follow back).
Paul Carr on January 31, 2010
Columnist’s Note: In a little under 24 hours, I have to submit the final manuscript of my next book. My original deadline – January 1st – sailed past weeks ago, as did the one-week extension I awarded myself on the basis that no-one does any work in the first week of the year. This last deadline, though, is immovable: lawyers and editors and typesetters and proof-readers are standing by; the thing has to be printed at some point. I haven’t slept for days, my blood is an 80:20 Caffeine:Provigil blend and I can’t feel my fingers. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t have time to write this week’s column.And yet, I still have a contract with TechCrunch – one that’s no less binding or legally enforceable than the one I have with my publisher. By hook or by crook, 1000 words have to appear in this space. I briefly considered outsourcing this week’s column to India – or maybe employing some Indians on H1Bs here; I gather that’s the future. But then I remembered that employing people costs money. Next I considered asking one of my journalist friends to take over for the week; but there’s always the danger that they’ll be better at the job than I am and I’ll find myself unemployed. Again. I needed a solution which a) fills space, b) is free and c) is unlikely to put me out of a job.
And that’s when it hit me – I should commission a Guest Post
Guest Author on January 31, 2010
Editor’s note: This is a guest post penned by Ethan Nicholas, developer of the million-dollar iPhone game iShoot and the newly released Kim Rhode’s Outdoor Shooting. Before the iPad was even announced, Nicholas was already conceiving his next game with the tablet device in mind.
The Internet is a funny place. After Apple announced its new , I cringed at the hate being directed its way on sites such as Slashdot and Digg. Even the guys at Penny Arcade, whom I normally agree with, said “that iPad presentation had to be the worst thing I’ve even seen on on the Apple stage” and that Apple had failed to make a case for the device.
If you believe them, the iPad is going to be a massive flop.
Well, the unwashed masses on the Internet also predicted that the iPod would be a failure. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.
Guest Author on January 31, 2010
Calvin Chin is an American entrepreneur who lives in Shanghai. He founded Qifang, a P2P lending site for Chinese student loans. You can read more about Qifang here. He attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this last week, where China was the center of attention. We asked him to write this guest post and share his unique perspective as an American building a startup in the heart of China.Here at Davos it seems China keeps coming up in two ways – neither of them positive. One, with the worst of the crisis behind us, people are turning from last year’s hopes of China as economic savior to China as free-rider keeping its currency cheap, bullying its minorities and shirking its responsibilities in Copenhagen. Two, in the tech community, seems everyone is talking about Google, Chinese government hackers and censorship.
My view, and I think it’s one that many in China would probably share, is that while free access to information and the rest of the world is inherently a good thing, so is political stability. The Chinese government has earned a lot of slack for raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and if things did go out of control a heck of a lot of people would get hurt. So even if they want China to be plugged in to the rest of the world to encourage innovation and Chinese tech entrepreneurship (which I think they do), they’d put that priority after getting most Chinese people better lives.
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31 Jan 2010 01:18
Davos VideoOwen Van Natta Talks About His First 8 Months Running MySpace »
Tablets Vs. NetbooksThe iPad And Chrome OS Are On A Collision Course »MG Siegler on January 30, 2010
Sometimes tips come in that seem too good to be true. Take today, for example. I got a tip that Bill Gates’ new site, The Gates Notes, was running on a Linux-powered server. This would be ironic since Gates is of course the founder of Microsoft, which is Linux’s biggest competitor in the server market. It would be the equivalent of catching Gates or CEO Steve Ballmer being caught using (and not just signing) a MacBook at a conference. So is it true?A quick search on Netcraft shows that thegatesreport.com sure enough looks to be running on the Linux OS. But wait. The results also say that web server is Microsoft-IIS/7.0. That doesn’t sound right, so what gives? Well, it turns out that because Gates is using Akamai to mirror his sites’ content in the event of massive traffic (or more specifically, something like a DDoS attack), this data is being filtered through there. Akamai uses Linux for its servers, so that’s what OS is being passed back to Netcraft. But at the same time, to make things more confusing, the Akamai servers are still passing back the correct server header for Gates’ site: Microsoft-IIS/7.0.
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Guest Author on January 30, 2010
The following guest post was written by Edo Segal (@edosegal).
Earlier last week, as the day was coming to an end and I was speaking with my 5 year old at bedtime we shared the highlights of our day. I started by telling him the company that created the iPhone is about to come out with . . . I paused—how do I describe it?—well, a “big iPhone” I said. About this big, I gestured holding my hands about 10 inches apart. “Wow, Amazing!” was his instant reaction as his eyes lit up. Even my 5-year-old knows that bigger is better, especially when it comes to tactile interfaces. In fact, the advantages are probably more obvious to his generation than it is to ours.
For this first generation born into a world of the iPhone, Wii and soon the Xbox’s Project Natal, the distance between the metaphor created by these devices and the reality of their interaction is constantly shrinking. My wife is currently doing her PhD research on the merits of tangible interfaces for young children in education and the data is telling. There is no doubt that there is great potential to enhance learning with tactile computing. Through that lens the “Bigger iPhone” is akin to a bigger yard to play in or a bigger room. This insight is telling. For these kids the iPhone’s primary function is by no means a phone. It is first and formost a gaming device, followed by a networked camera, followed by everything else. Through this lens one can see the importance of the iPad in the historical trajectory of our human-computer interaction. What’s lost in all the complaints about what the iPad is lacking (multitasking, camera, etc.) is that people need to view the iPad on more than its merits as a first-generation product. Rather, they need to understand it in context of the evolutionary arc of computing.
on January 30, 2010
Last fall, TechCrunch50 startup ClientShowpresented its innovative application to help creative, advertising and marketing professionals show, pitch, share and sell their work to clients more effectively through real-time collaboration and communication. Similar to a WebEx for creative professionals, ClientShow allows users to essentially create a “virtual agency” to collaborate and share ideas with clients. This week, the startup is debuting its platform in private beta. We have 1000 invites for Techcrunch readers here.
The application, which is built on Adobe Air, includes a dashboard which lets the agency view client lists, projects and pitch sessions at a single glance. The dashboard acts as an organizational launching pad, where you can see attached notes and images about upcoming pitches and a schedule of sessions. The second feature is a “work” section which actually lets you set up and prepare for the sessions. You can drag and drop your files into the application, where you can view the projects.
Vivek Wadhwa on January 30, 2010
In the State of the Union Address last Wednesday, President Obama said “the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy and America must be that nation.” At the same time, on the other coast, 75 clean energy investors, entrepreneurs, and researchers were debating whether the U.S. can gain this leadership position. They agreed that even though Silicon Valley leads the world in technology, it is not clear if it will ever lead in Cleantech. The Valley may develop some breakthrough technologies, but without government help these are unlikely to translate into global leadership. The technology world is rightfully allergic to government assistance and intervention. Cleantech is different, however, and we aren’t dealing with a level global playing field.Guest Author on January 30, 2010
This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur who has gone to the Dark Side of VC. He started his first company in 1999 and was headquartered in London, leaving in 2005 and selling to a publicly traded French services company. He founded his second company in Palo Alto in 2005 and sold this company to Salesforce.com, becoming VP Product Management. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner focusing on early-stage technology companies.TechCrunch Europe ran an article in November of last year that European startups need to work as hard as those in Silicon Valley and I echoed the sentiment in my post about the need for entrepreneurs to be maniacal about their businesses if one wants to work in the hyper competitive tech world.
on January 30, 2010
YouTube has long introduced ways for users to annotate their videos and add links to external websites, other videos on the site, and more. But I haven’t seen that many people or companies make use of video annotations in creative ways – I don’t spend that much time on YouTube to be honest, so maybe it’s just me.Belgian electro band The Subs got in touch with us to let us know how they use video annotations to spice up their The Famous Videocast project, and the result is pretty neat if you ask me.
on January 30, 2010
Intellect Wireless, a tiny company based in Reston, VA has filed suit against over mobile picture/video messaging technology it claims to have successfully patented years ago.
The patent infringement suit was filed on 28 January in Illinois Northern District Court.
The complaint states that Apple infringed on the company’s patents when it provided wireless portable communication devices (you know, like the iPhone) that “receive and display caller ID information, non-facsimile pictures, video messages and/or Multimedia Messaging Services.”
Guest Author on January 30, 2010
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of posts by guest writer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan Previously, he wrote about the State of Online Video, and 12 Surprising Things Holding Back Online Video Advertising. In part 3 today, he examines how videos are found and consumed online. Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, a producer of premium, informative and entertaining video content. The company’s catalog of 5,000 videos has generated over 110 million streams since 2006.
To try to understand—let alone guess—the future of video advertising, one needs to start by looking at the biggest trend in media over the past few decades. In November 2006, Bear Stearns Cable and Satellite analyst Spencer Wang published a study called “Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment”. While Bear Stearns has since been acquired by JP Morgan and is now a mere footnote in business books, the study’s findings are more relevant than ever. Let’s examine 8 key factors behind online video consumption
Michael Arrington on January 30, 2010
I sat down with MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland earlier this week to talk about his first eight months on the job. This is one of Owen’s first video interviews since taking the job last AprilWe talk about Van Natta’s vision for the once-mighty MySpace. The site was at one time the worlds largest social network and had more page views than any other U.S. website. But in the last couple of years it has been eclipsed by Facebook’s stunning growth.
Still, Van Natta and team have a plan. The MySpace of the future will be all about the social experience around content, and the company’s strong offerings in music and music videos through MySpace Music will be the cornerstone of that effort. From the interview:
Michael Arrington on January 30, 2010
This speaks for itself. Thanks to Phil Santoro for creating it and sending it us (a play on the iphone v. rock joke). -
29 Jan 2010 23:07
Murder On The WebGoogle Twists Knife In IE6, Pulls Support From Docs And Sites »
VC LeaderboardTop 25 Most Active Dealmakers Of 2009 »
Check-InWindows Mobile Finally Checks Out Foursquare »on January 29, 2010
“We don’t know how to build a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk.”“Netbooks aren’t better at anything.”
Those two quotes are both from Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The first was during an earnings call in late 2008 when Jobs fielded a question about why Apple wasn’t cutting prices amid the rising success of netbooks. The second came on Wednesday as Jobs was unveiling the iPad
Apple has made it clear all along that they had no plans to build a netbook. And true to their word, they haven’t. But that doesn’t mean that Apple didn’t feel there was a need for a device that resided in between a full laptop and a mobile phone — in fact, that’s squarely where Apple is positioning the iPad. With it, they feel that they’ve created a $500 (for the baseline version) device that is superior to every netbook out there.
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on January 29, 2010
A lot of people use Twitter as a primary way of getting information quickly these days. Accounts such as BreakingNews are hugely popular because they offer up stories to their 1.6 million followers (and even more through retweets) instantaneously. Topicfire, a realtime news aggregator we covered in December is now trying to extend that concept to all different topics.While there are no shortage of services attempting to leverage Twitter to distill information for different topics, Topicfire’s streams seem pretty solid thanks to the use of their HeatRank technology, which is the same thing that powers Topicfire itself. While there are a few factors that go into HeatRank, the main driving force behind it are comments on stories. If they’re coming in fast enough, the HeatRank will get pushed to 10.
on January 29, 2010
Electric car company Tesla Motors has filed for a $100 million IPO. There were rumors recently floating around that the company, which is led by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, would go public “soon.” One interesting tidbit from the filing: Musk only takes $1 in yearly salary.
Another interesting factoid: In the filing, Tesla states that it has seen net losses in each quarter since inception. The company expects to continue on the same path until it starts to deliver larger quantities of its Model S sedan, which is not expected until 2010 or later. Tesla took a loss in the first three quarters of 2009 of $31.5 million which is less than its loss for the same period in 2008, which was $57.3 million. Gross profit for the first three quarters of 2009 was $7.8 million compared to $561K for the same period in 2008. Sales for the first three quarters of 2009 topped out at $93.4 million. As of last December Tesla had sold 937 Tesla Roadsters in 18 countries. The company also saw a total of $108.2 million in revenue since its inception in 2003 until September of last year.
on January 29, 2010
In case it wasn’t obvious, being an entrepreneur is risky business. Even those that get investments have a relatively small likelihood of a successful exit. So early-stage investment firm First Round Capital has a plan to alleviate some of the risk: an entrepreneur’s exchange fund.For those not aware, an exchange fund in this regard is exactly what it sounds like: company founders are given the option to give up a small piece of the stock they own in their venture in exchange for a piece of the action of the larger pool of all the First Round portfolio companies that choose to participate. Basically, this allows these entrepreneurs to diversify their own holdings without having to sell any stock. More importantly, it lowers their risk of walking away with nothing while adding an incentive to see other companies in the portfolio succeed.
Leena Rao on January 29, 2010
This has not been the greatest start to the year for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Days after news of the latest security flaw in Internet Explorer, Google is adding fuel to the fire by phasing out support for IE6 for two of its Google Apps products, Docs and Sites (which recently got an aesthetic upgrade
For both the consumer and enterprise versions of Google Docs and Sites, the only browsers that will be fully compatible are Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0+, Mozilla Firefox 3.0+, Google Chrome 4.0+ and Safari 3.0+. The phase out will take place beginning March 1. While you’ll still be able to access Docs and Sites from IE6, you will have restricted functionality and many features won’t work, making the applications for the most part useless. We hear that Google will be phasing out IE6 support for the remainder of Google’s major products, including Gmail and Calendar, over the coming year. This isn’t Google’s first move to phases out IE6 functionality for its products. Last July, the search giant began phasing out YouTube support for the Microsoft browser. For users of IE6, the online video site began pointing to ‘modern’ browsers like Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.5 as alternatives. A similar prompt will now take place on Docs and Sites for users who are browsing from IE6.
on January 29, 2010
Which venture capitalists funded the most companies last year? We went through our funding data in CrunchBase to come up with the Dealmaker Rankings below. The most active VC was Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which invested in 57 deals throughout the year by our count, followed by Kleiner Perkins (49), New Enterprise Associates (47) Intel Capital (46), Sequoia Capital (42), First Round Capital (34), and Accel (33). You can see all top 25 in the interactive table below, which is followed by another table for just the fourth quarter of 2009. Mohr Davidow and DAG Ventures broke into the top ten for the quarter. You can compare those to the tables we published for the third quarter
The rankings are based on the number of deals each firm participated in during each time period. But you can also you can also re-rank the table by clicking on the different column headings to find the VC firms which participated rounds with the largest total or average values. By doing that you can see that the bigger VC firms with the most capital to deploy, such as New Enterprise, Kleiner, Accel, Venrock, and Sequoia, were the most active in the bigger rounds. The fbFund, True VEntures, First Round, and Charles River Ventures dominated the smaller, earlier stage rounds. And then interestingly, firms like Benchmark, Greylock, and Highland Capital were active at both ends of the spectrum.
on January 29, 2010
The iPad’s fate isn’t in the hands of Apple. Jobs & Co. has done their part and made the device. The iPad’s success lies solely in the hands of developers. Because unlike the iPhone or iPod touch, the iPad doesn’t really have a core function. The iPhone is nothing more than a glorified telephone and the iPod touch is just another PMP. But what’s the iPad? A big iPod touch?None of the iPad’s functions seem to define it. Ebook reading? That may turn out to be just a novelty feature for many buyers. Web browsing? Maybe, but the Internet is formatted for a mouse and keyboard, a tablet simply doesn’t offer much, if any, advantage over a netbook or computer running a full OS. Early reports are even suggesting that the iPad isn’t even a solid media player because of its 4:3 aspect ratio.
Then there are the millions upon millions of apps Apple has accumulated over the last two years. They, and new iPad-specific ones, are the key to success for the iPad. Without them, the iPad would just be another concept-of-function device, targeted at a small crowd with its limited capabilities of web browsing, task management, ebook reading, and media playback. The apps will likely prove to be the justification many people will need to purchase the iPad.
MG Siegler on January 29, 2010
For much of the past year, the major criticism of Foursquare was that it only worked in a few select cities in the U.S. and was basically iPhone-only. In the past few months, both Foursquare itself and a growing core of third-party developers have changed that. Today brings yet another expansion in the Foursquare universe with the beta launch of a Windows Mobile app.To be clear, this app is only meant for touch screen Windows phones, and you need to be running either Windows Mobile 6.1 or 6.5. But if you have those, you can submit your email address here to be let into the beta. Once they kick the tires in beta for a bit, the plan is to submit the app to the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Windows Mobile Sr. Product Manager Anand Iyer writes today on his personal blog. Iyer has been working on this project on the side for a few months now, and made the app along with the help of development house Touchality.
on January 29, 2010
Popular location-based social network Brightkite has simultaneously released mobile apps for some Nokia as well as Palm smartphones.The release of the apps follows earlier launches of Android, BlackBerryiPhone applications.
Gagan Biyani on January 29, 2010
Like bad beer, cracker jacks, and drunken fans getting hammered in the parking lot, smack-talking and sports-betting are staples of American sports. And that’s why Bema Studios created Smackdaddy, a free iPhone app [] that allows you to both bet on games (currently just NFL, NHL and NBA) and tell your friends they smell. I got a chance to play with Smackdaddy this Sunday and loved it – it is easy to use, intuitive, and addictive
Leena Rao on January 29, 2010
Social bookmarking service Delicious is kicking the year off with a few enhancements to its service and interface. Delicious, which has made Michael’s favorite products list for the past three years, allows you to store, access and share your bookmarks and links from around the web.
The service has updated its bookmark display options in a more compact interface, combining all of the options to th right of the Tagbar. Tag Options has been reshuffled and moved it to the sidebar where the tags are actually listed, which makes sense.
on January 29, 2010
We’re hitting the 2010 GSM World Mobile Congress again. And TechCrunch Europe will be returning to Barcelona on Feb 17 for yet another interactive and live-video-streamed session.
We’ll be featuring some of the most innovative and interesting mobile startups and investors in Europe.
You can get your tickets to the event here. Here’s the programme for the day so far.
on January 29, 2010
The momentum around local online advertising is growing, especially with the expansion of the Web to mobile devices and flowering of Geo-mobile apps which need a way to make money. Today, Citysearch is throwing its hat into the local advertising ring with the launch of CityGrid, a set of APIs which makes all of Citysearch’s local listings content and advertising available to other Websites and mobile apps. The APIs include more than 15 million local business listings, 3 million user reviews, and access to 500,000 local advertisers looking to reach people near their places of business.
I sat down with Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti at IAC headquarters in Manhattan to get an overview of CityGrid (watch the video interview above). Citysearch itself is a 12-year-old site which Herratti has been updating, but it is not really growing much anymore and it is feeling considerable competitive pressure from Yelp and, even more so, from Google Local.
To counter that pressure, Citysearch already distributes its local listings content to about 100 sites and mobile apps with a collective reach of 100 million people (about a quarter of that is Citysearch.com). “I thought what if I took all the tools that we put together to build Citysearch and put it on a platter, an API and web services layer,” says Herratti. Specifically, he is referring to all the descriptions of local businesses, the reviews, photos, videos, hours of operation, offers, menus, metered phone numbers, merchant messages, and more. “What if I open that up to publishers big and small?” he asks. “I let them take it and enhance their experience, and get more pageviews.”
on January 29, 2010
Listen: cry me a river about Flash and multi-tasking. If Apple wants to keep multi-tasking for their own apps in an effort to prevent folks from making their OS run like Windows Mobile on a good day, be my guest. Push servers work great for always-connected applications. As for Flash, I think it’s all political.
Anyway, rant over. Those little minxes at 9to5mac found Flash running in Safari on the iPad. If you watch the video after the jump, you notice that when they browse the NYT you can see the Dining section pop up. The Dining section is usually represented by video in a Flash box.
on January 29, 2010
Every so often you find a game so addicting that you can’t stop playing it. I’m that way with two games on the iPhone: FieldrunnersCiv Revolution. Close runners up are iShoot (there are only so many times you can launch nukes) and now Crush the Castle.Designed by Armor Games, CtC was originally a Flash game ported to the iPhone.
To play you load up a trebuchet with weapons (rocks, firebombs, whatever else) by tapping once. You tap again launch and then tap to release at some point in the arc. The items swing out into space and land at some point on a castle that is essentially made of beams. The beams react in a naturalistic way meaning they move as if they were real beams and you then crush little people underneath them. Rinse. Repeat.
Leena Rao on January 29, 2010
There’s no doubt that President Obama’s White House has been using technology more than any other previous administration. The President has a Twitter account, is using YouTube in innovative ways and has even developed an iPhone app. The White House is releasing some impressive engagement numbers from this week’s State of the Union address.The White House had a live stream of the speech that was embeddable on blogs or websites. Nearly 1.3 million people tuned into the WhiteHouse.gov’s live video feed of the speech, which is a ten-fold increase in traffic over the most popular live-streamed event. Unfortunately, the White House doesn’t have any concrete statistics on the number of unique streams of the speech from the new iPhone App, but says that nearly a terabyte of data was served to iPhones with the application during the event.
Robin Wauters on January 29, 2010
Social networking company Tagged.com has been awarded more than $200,000 in a default judgment against Erik Vogeler, who spammed thousands of Tagged members by sending them unsolicited messages with links to an adult dating website. In a ruling issued earlier this week, a U.S. District Court Judge in the northern district of California found Vogeler guilty of sending messages to 6,079 Tagged users and assessed damages of $25 per violation for a total of $151,975. Court also ordered Vogeler to pay Tagged $50,000 in attorneys’ fees and to cease sending commercial emails through Tagged.com.
Leena Rao on January 29, 2010
Apisphere, a startup that delivers location-aware technologies to mobile applications, has raised $4.6 million in funding according to an SEC filing. Apisphere creates mobile applications that use location-aware technologies to provide customized information to users.
For example, the startup created Apisphere for Outlook, a location aware plug-in for Microsoft’s Outlook that lets users to send and receive automatic messages on their mobile devices or GPS-enabled laptops based on their Outlook calendar and location. So when a meeting is scheduled in Outlook, the plug-in will provide relevant location-based information around the event including mapping, real-time traffic updates and geo-triggered voice and text messages for reminders on the go.pping, real-time traffic updates and geo-triggered voice and text messages for reminders on the go.
Robin Wauters on January 29, 2010
An SEC filing has revealed that video ringtone sharing community Vringo has filed to raise an estimated $64.3 million$13.8 million via an initial public offering of stock and warrants.The company plans to trade on NASDAQ, with Maxim Group serving as lead underwriter. Vringo shareholders include Warburg Pincus, who invested $12 million for a 31.9% ownership stake in 2007, and undisclosed private investors.
Update: the initial $64.3 million IPO figure was inaccurate. Dow-Jones News Service has filed a correction to its story on Vringo’s filing of a Form S-1 with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The correction makes clear that the funding target for Vringo’s proposed IPO is $12.0 million, with the potential to reach $13.8 million if an over-allotment of shares is exercised.
Robin Wauters on January 29, 2010
Chances are you’ve never heard of Netbiscuits – I sure hadn’t. But the company operates one of the world’s largest B2B web software platforms enabling thousands of publishers to create, manage and generate revenue from mobile websites. Netbiscuits serves the mobile Internet programs for brands like Yahoo, MTV, and eBay, and well known digital agencies such as Razorfish, Isobar, and ad networks like Google-owned AdMob. To give you an idea of its size: globally, Netbiscuits claims to deliver more than 1.5 billion mobile page impressions on a monthly basis.
This morning, the decade-old company announced that it has partnered with Universal Music Group to help the music company expand its line-up of direct-to-consumer mobile content and services.
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