-
21 Nov 2009 12:17
Michael Arrington on November 21, 2009
Google Voice was GrandCentral before Google acquired that company back in 2007. Like most Google acquisitions it took a long time to fully rebuild the service on Google’s infrastructure, and even today Google Voice is still in private beta.But lots of changes are coming. Google Voice should roll out publicly shortly. Users may be able to port their existing phone numbers to Google if they choose. Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5 will give the service a client soft phone plus enhanced VoIP capabilities. And who knows what part Google Voice will play in in the upcoming Google Phone.
So a little housekeeping is in order. And the first item on the checklist is to shut down the GrandCentral website on December 31, 2009. Users were upgraded to Google Voice earlier this year, but old GrandCentral messages are still on the old site. So if you want to keep them, Google suggests you download them soon.
The email:
- 288 comments
- 227 comments
- 150 comments
- 148 comments
- Video: Google Chrome OS's Interface, 7 Second Boot Time, And More117 comments
Guest Author on November 21, 2009
Editor’s note: Today, being a news junkie requires not just the ability to keep up with hundreds of breaking stories a day, but the ability to redistribute those stories to your followers and news sites. To get some insight into the modern news junkie, we asked Mrinal Desai to share with us how he screens the news in the guest post below. Desai is the co-founder of CrossLoop, but some of you may recognize him more from Twitter or Techmeme, where he tips stories every day—580 of those tips have appeared as headlines since the beginning of this year. You can read his last guest post here.
Like many out there, I have been, am and always will be a news addict. For many news junkies, it is the fleeting, current fix of information about a breaking topic that interests them, only to be replaced by the next headline. They jump from headline to headline, forgetting the one they just read as they move on to the next one.
For me personally, news is not only timely information on the current state of affairs but also a way to take a deep dive, to connect analysis and information together and learn through application. I am looking for insight. It could be patterns, it could be knowledge about an industry or it could be an opportunity to become introspective and ask questions.
Keeping this in mind, here is a snapshot of my consumption and distribution of news both offline and online. I’ll divide the way I screen the news by the screens on which it comes to me.
John Biggs on November 21, 2009
Good afternoon, readers! What does Santa have in his bag for you today? Interestingly enough, he was unable to bring his bag because this printer is far too big for it. We present, for your inspection, the Kodak 5250 all-in-one: a scanning, printing, faxing, photofinishing machine that can best the big boys in the printer race.Best of all, the 5250 has built-in WiFi so you can stick the printer on your network and print from any computer in the house. Take a look at Kodak’s 5250 product page and then click through to figure out how to win.
Vivek Wadhwa on November 21, 2009
When pitching to VC’s, entrepreneurs hype the heck out of their ideas, years of experience and management teams. But I’ve never heard of anyone touting their luck or connection to God. After reading the posts on TechCrunch, one could easily get the impression that God doesn’t play much of role in Silicon Valley. But ask any successful entrepreneur in private what made them successful, and you might just hear a different story. In a research project my team just completed, the majority of 549 company founders told us that their most important success factor, after “experience” and “management team”, was “good fortune”. Many respondents wrote in comments stressing the extreme importance of faith and God.You didn’t think that successful entrepreneurs were this pious did you? Neither did I. After all, what did God have to do with Google aside from Jeff Jarvis stealing his book title from fans of Jesus and their much copied meme? Did God build the Internet? Did he build the microchip? I’ve never been religious myself and have always believed that with hard work and determination, you can surmount just about any obstacles. But I also learned the hard way that you can do everything right and fail. Sometimes you do just about everything wrong and make it big. My belief: success is 51% luck and 49% execution. You need to execute with precision, but a little luck goes a long way. It is always good to have God on your side. So it was interesting and illuminating (pun intended) to see what other entrepreneurs thought about this.
Greg Kumparak on November 21, 2009
The sudden surge in interest in Android (largely due to all of the hype surrounding the Droid) has caused a lot of developers to reconsider the platform. Atleast one major development house, however, isn’t impressed.
Earlier today, Alexandre de Rochefort, Finance Director of Gameloft, told an investor conference that the company had “significantly cut [their] investment in Android platform, just like … many others”. Gameloft is one of the largest mobile games companies around, having pulled in roughly $132 million in the last three quarters alone. While there are plenty of fish in the developer sea, this can’t be one that Google is happy to see swim away.
Robin Wauters on November 21, 2009
Do a search for Google Wave on the App Store from your iPhone or desktop client, and you’ll see an application called just that pop up, ready to be installed as soon as you fork over $0.99 (or €0.79 in my case). One caveat: it’s not built, authorized or in any way endorsed by Google.Spotted by Stuart Dredge over at Mobile Entertainment, the unofficial Google Wave iPhone app seemingly slipped past Apple’s usually and notoriously rigorous quality assurance and trademark compliance team and made its way to the App Store (iTunes link – up to you to decide if this is something you want to pay for).
TechCrunch Europe on November 21, 2009
This is our third guest post written by a London-based VC. To allow them to speak plainly without jeopardising their fund or their career in the small village that is the London VC scene, I’m allowing them to post anonymously. FYI, LondonVC is a genuine VC and TechCrunch Europe has met them face to face.One of the biggest challenges for any investor (regardless of the stage/type of investment they target) and founders alike is hiring great talent. In early stage investing the team may be the single criteria upon which an investment decision is based (considering how many times when that’s all there is to go by) and even in later/growth stages, while the founding team has been historically crucial, bringing someone new in to help “get the company to the next level” can be the difference between investing or not.
Something I’ve realised and have to admit is that while obviously the absolute pool of talent is smaller here in the UK/Europe than it is in the U.S. (and that cannot be disputed nor is it anything more than a function of population) another factor. It is one which I keep hoping will change, because if it doesn’t it threatens to make a small pool even smaller. And that is a cultural and behavioural issue: work ethic.
Robin Wauters on November 21, 2009
Last week, it was reported that AOL – amid restructuring efforts in the lead-up to the imminent Time Warner spin-off and IPO – was putting its instant messaging service unit ICQ on the block and had hired bankers Allen & Co. and Morgan Stanley to assist in the sales process. According to the reports, AOL was looking to offload the asset for $300 million and talking to a pair of non-US companies about an acquisition (likely in a part cash, part stock transaction).
Question is: who are those potential buyers?
Peripherals, they say, are the spice of life. Well, maybe they don’t say that, but they do say it about variety, and peripherals add variety to your computing life. If you’re reading this on a stock HP desktop, clicking on links with the mouse that came with it, and trusting your data to that 512MB USB stick they gave you at work, then you should consider accessorizing.
Honestly, it’s impossible to work in these conditions. I’m writing this from the TechCrunch Real-Time CrunchUp; a one-day event in San Francisco celebrating the joys of the ‘real-time’ web. Sounds awesome, right? It is.I’ve been on stage, heckling participants on the marketing panel, I’ve been Tweeting from the audience, I’ve been following the live-blogging of the panels. Generally I’ve been living the real time dream – which probably explains why I haven’t done any actual work all day. And now I’m twenty minutes away from my deadline, and I still have to read a week of TechCrunch and figure out everything that’s happened this week.
Oh, and to make matters worse, Arrington has filled my work room with dogs.
Welcome, then, to a completely – and appropriately – real-time edition of This Week On TechCrunch.
Keith Teare was hanging around the Real-Time CrunchUp today showing off his newest project – Speedi.ly. What does Speedi.ly do? One thing, very well and at scale. Speedi.ly takes a piece of content, or grabs the content from a URL, and analyzes it. It does this very fast and it outputs some key data. Speedi.ly tells you the language of the content, categorizes it (topics, keywords), and additional metadata. This metadata payload is exactly what Robert Scoble is talking about with his SuperTweet idea.
Here’s what Speedi.ly returns for this story we wrote on the Skype/eBay sale:
Extracting meaning from the Web is a difficult undertaking. Keyword search skims the surface of contextual meaning that is locked in Web pages, Tweets and feeds. That’s where semantic search comes in. The semantic web deals with looking beyond simple links that make up the web to understand a deeper meaning and context behind that content. The Ellerdale Project, which launched in alpha this past week, is hoping to add context to search by using semantic technology to power a real-time search platform.
Ellerdale mines the real-time stream, including Tweets, RSS and the, to identify topics, messages and articles that link together based on content, not keyword. So If you looked up Sarah Palin on Ellerdale’s site, you’d see a semantic graph of related content, such as Oprah Winfrey (Palin just appeared on Oprah a few days ago), The Republican Party and John McCain.
-
20 Nov 2009 18:54
Live from the RealTime CrunchUp »
List MashupsFacebook Agrees To Set Friend Lists Free. »
Realtime CrunchupSalesforce’s Benioff Talks Social Enterprise Strategy, Chatter, More »
Live StreamLive From The RealTime CrunchUp »on November 20, 2009
“Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” – Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, co-founder of FriendFeed, currently doing vague infrastructure things at Facebook.Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus.
So can we kill email?
-
Want To Try Out Google Chrome OS For Yourself? Here's How.
238 comments -
225 comments -
171 comments -
Entrepreneurs: Start. This. Company. Now.
147 comments -
140 comments
on November 20, 2009
For our last discussion at the RealTime CrunchUp, we’ve got a panel on actually generating revenue from these services. Participating in the discussion are some of the Valley’s top VCs and veterans of the space.
Brian Singerman — Founders Fund
Ron Conway — Angel Investor
Dan’l Lewin — Corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business Development at Microsoft
George Zachary — Charles River Ventures
Paul Buchheit — Facebook/FriendFeed
Andrew Braccia — Accel Partners
Michael Arrington — Editor and Founder, TechCrunch
Moderated by Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeldon November 20, 2009
Today at the RealTime CrunchUp, representatives from some of the top companies involved in location based services came together to talk about the current state and future of geo-based services.Participating in the panel were:
Matt Galligan, co-Founder of SimpleGeo
Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter
Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare
Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
Justin Shaffer, Founder of Hot Potato
Elad Gil, CEO of Mixer Labs
Moderators were our own Erick Schonfeld and MG Siegler.on November 20, 2009
Rippol, the video discovery site that combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting content, has launched to the public at today’s RealTime CrunchUpWe recently took an in-depth look at the service, but for those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a recap: Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It then looks at meta data from video content ingested from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and uses machine learning to identify videos it thinks you’ll like. From there you can browse through various genres to look at recommended videos
on November 20, 2009
At our Real-Time CrunchUp today in San Francisco, we are hosting a panel titles “Media Streams: Are These The Utlimate Marketing Vehicle?”
Panelists include Sean Rad, CEO of Ad.ly; Ryan Amos, co-founder of DailyBooth; Jesse Engle, CEO of CoTweet; Robin Bechtel, a celebrity agent and Philip Nelson, SVP of strategic development for NewTek.
Below find my live notes (paraphrased):
Jason Kincaid on November 20, 2009
Today at the RealTime CrunchUp we saw the launch of VideoLobby, a new service founded by Peter Urban that’s looking to make it easier to create professional-looking webcasts, complete with custom branding. The service is an extension of Urban’s “sales software for real people” service SmibsUrban says that while some other services offer embeds, you’re generally responsible for building your own branded site to insert those in. That’s where VideoLobby comes in: the site helps you build your own custom video portal, and then allows you to include streams from services like QikUstreamJustin.tv. The company calls itself the “Blogger for real-time video”.
The service doesn’t just make your page look nicer, though — it can automatically pull in comments from Twitter and Facebook, and also allows users to submit questions directly from the show’s page. Stream administrators can use a management system to heck off their questions as they answer them. And the service is completely free.
on November 20, 2009
Rotten Tomatoes is a great site because it takes all the movie reviews from around the web and condenses them into an easy-to-understand aggregate score. But let’s be honest: Most movie reviewers suck. Why not instead rely on people in your social circle to recommend movies to you? That’s the idea behind FlixUp.This new iPhone app unveiled at our Realtime CrunchUp event in San Francisco today essentially scans Twitter for what people are saying about a movie and shows you a rating based on that. It can return a general score from across Twitter, or the tweets about the movie from people you follow on Twitter.
on November 20, 2009
You know the retweet button you see on content spread throughout the web? You can thank TweetMeme for that. Long before Twitter’s new Retweet functionality existed, this button was the way to share on Twitter. And it still is for content not on twitter.com. But now it’s time for TweetMeme to think about making money. And they’ve come up with a way that people are either going to love or hate.At our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco today, TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead has unveiled AdTweets. As you might expect, this involves ads that appear on your site — but with the addition of a retweet button. Yes, you can also retweet these ads just as you would any piece of content.
on November 20, 2009
The first randomly selected audience winner today at the RealTime CrunchUp is SuperFeedr. They are an API service that works with both XMPP and PubSubHubbub (which at the first CrunchUp) to create realtime content feeds.As they noted on stage, it’s hard to demo something that is API only, but one implementation that we’ve written about before is Excla.imwe wrote about recently. This allows for the realtime tracking of keywords on Twitter via IM. But this idea works for all content.
Jason Kincaid on November 20, 2009
With services like Ustream.tvJustin.tvKyte, and Qik bringing live video streaming to the masses, the web is turning into a viable competitor to television for real-time content. But while all of these services are great for bloggers remotely broadcasting footage,or streaming live events, but they come with a few problems: video content isn’t optimized for search engines, and unlike TV, there’s no closed captioning. PlyMedia is looking to change that.
The company is launching a service that will offer real-time captions and super-fast transcriptions to suit the needs of live streamers.
on November 20, 2009
At today’s Real-Time CrunchUp, Mozzler launched its real-time search engine based on Twitter. Mozzler, which has real-time functionality, searches Twitter for the most popular content in the last six hours based on retweets.
You can search Mozzler by keyword, similar to searches you can do on OneRiot and other search engines that include Twitter results. Results can include videos and images as well. Mozzler has also created numerous categories of searches under technology, entertainment, sports, business and more.
Jason Kincaid on November 20, 2009
Last year, we saw the launch of identi.ca, the open-sourced alternative to Twitter. At the time, we wrote that the company was never going to rival Twitter. As it turns out, that’s not the goal of parent company StatusNet. Instead, the startup is looking to become something akin to a ‘WordPress for microblogs’. That is to say, they make a platform that others can easily download and install to their own servers. And today they’re showing off the next major step in their platform: a hosted solution for those who don’t want to bother with managing their own install, which will be hosted on status.net.In effect, Status.Net is to the StatusNet platform as WordPress.com is to WordPress. Status.Net will offer a free package for very basic use, and will then offer a number of premium packages that give access to premium features. We first heard about the upcoming product last month when StatusNet raised $875,000, but until now they haven’t introduced the platform to the public.
on November 20, 2009
I’m a big fan of keeping things simple, but that doesn’t mean things have to be bland. Google search results are pretty bland. Sure, sometimes you get returned things like YouTube thumbnails or pictures, but many results are still just a monotonous stream of blue links. Google tried to break this stream up a bit with its Search Options, an expandable feature, that gives you a left-side toolbar. But even that is just a bland series of links. Google is finally thinking about changing that.Today, Google has begun testing a new look for Search Options. This offers more visual approach to this sidebar, including colors and graphics (oh my). As you can see in the screenshot, “Everything” (regular Google results), “News,” and “Blogs” are a few of the newly visual tabs. There is also a “More” area that shows other things like “Maps.”
on November 20, 2009
Angstro, a 2008 TechCrunch50 startup, launched with a product that socialized the content on the web by tapping into your social graph. At the Real-Time CrunchUp today the startup is launching Knx.to, a real-time search engine capability and API that looks up most recent social information about any of your friends, from their LinkedIn profile to their Flickr account to their Facebook profile.
In order to understand Knx.to’s virtue, it’s best to see the technology implemented in an application. Ribbit Mobile, a Google Voice competitor and cloud-based VoIP telephony service, recently launched with the capability of integrating any calls to a contact with your social networks, which was powered by Knx.to.
on November 20, 2009
Qwisk, which is launching today at the Real-Time CrunchUp, is an innovative new way to add a social twist to your browser. The site, which is a product of Y Combinator-funded company Socialbrowse, connects with you with your friends on Facebook and Twitter in real-time as you browse the web. We have 500 invites exclusively for TechCrunch users. You can redeem these invites simply by clicking here.
It’s important to note that Qwisk is a browser extension, not a plug-in to a browser. On the site’s page, you sign into your Facebook and Twitter accounts via Facebook Connect and oAuth. Qwisk will then add a sidebar to your browser that will show a feed of Facebook status updates and Tweets. You can also share any link or content to Twitter and Facebook from the sidebar itself.
Leena Rao on November 20, 2009
Seesmic is having a huge week. The startup that develops Twitter and Facebook clients for the web and desktop just unveiled a native Windows client at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference earlier this week. At the Real-Time CrunchUp today, Seesmic is launching its first venture into the mobile space with impressive apps for both the Android and BlackBerry, which are now available for download here. This is a pivotal moment for Seesmic because the startup is now conquering all the mediums—web,desktop and mobile. I sat down with Seesmic’s co-founder, Loic Le Meur, to test out the apps.
The BlackBerry app, which works with the devices running OS 4.6 or higher, has a extremely sleek nice interface, which is optimized for BlackBerry users with all sorts of efficiencies. You can quickly change from different timelines, easily switching from your inbox, to mentions, to direct messages. Plus, you can monitor various Twitter accounts within one appp. When you send a Tweet, you can shorten a link via Bit.ly, and upload pictures or videos via yFrog. One compelling feature is the ability to email a Tweet to a contact directly from the Tweet.
on November 20, 2009
Yesterday, Twitter changed its organizing question from “What Are You Doing?” to “What’s Happening?” But the new call to action might be better suited to Hot Potato, a startup launching right now at our Realtime CrunchUp. Hot Potato is releasing an iPhone app which lets you create a stream of conversations around events based both on your location and what your friends are doing.
Hot Potato is a micro-messaging app that organizes the conversation stream by events. For Hot Potato, an event can be anything that is happening right now: a basketball game, concert, party, street fair, buying a new car, or even just two friends on a bike ride. An event is whatever is happening that people want to share.
Jason Kincaid on November 20, 2009
Today at the RealTime CrunchUp Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took the stage to talk about the social enterprise with Erick Schonfeld and Steve Gillmor (he also introduced us to a new real-time Salesforce Chatter platform). Benioff has also signed a pair of copies of his book Behind The Cloud, which we’re going to be giving away to attendees of today’s conference.To win one, just tweet out your favorite moment of the RealTime CrunchUp so far, and include the hashtags #CrunchUp and #Cloud in your tweet (#CrunchUp is the conference hashtag, and #Cloud will let us know who’s entering the contest).
We’ll announce the winners in this post later today, and you’ll be able to pick up your signed book at the front table. Obviously you’ll have to be present to win.
on November 20, 2009
Today, during the Filtering the Stream roundtable at our RealTime CrunchUp, Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur asked why Facebook isn’t giving third parties access to their Friend Lists. Obviously, that’s a good question now that Twitter has starting giving third parties access to its Lists feature via an API. Normally, you’d expect a canned response along the lines of “we may do that in the future” or “we’re thinking about it,” but Facebook’s VP of Platform Bret Taylor was much more candid.Taylor said that Le Meur’s request seemed “reasonable” and continued “we should do that.” “We’re not working on that. But we should be,” he continued. So there you go, done deal. Great. It would seem that soon, third parties should have access to the list filters that Facebook uses.
Leena Rao on November 20, 2009
Salesforce.com co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff is sitting down with TechCrunch IT editor Steve Gillmor and TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld to discuss the socialization of the enterprise. Benioff recently unveiled his own social strategy for Salesforce: Chatter. Debuted at the company’s Dreamforce event, Chatter allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their business. Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups within the platform, enabling them to be connected via a unified stream. In addition, developers will now be able to tap into Chatter’s API to build social enterprise apps off of platform. While Chatter looks and feels like a social network for the enterprise, Benioff is quick to nix that moniker, preferring to call the platform a collaboration tool.
Below find my notes (paraphrased):
-
Want To Try Out Google Chrome OS For Yourself? Here's How.
-
20 Nov 2009 00:43
Bidding For GoodsBigDeal.com Reinvents And Legitimizes Swoopo's Auction Model »
Operating SystemsLive From Google's Chrome OS Event »
spin-offs & lay-offsAs AOL Heads For An IPO, It Leaves 2500 Employees Behind »
The public debut of Google Chrome OS today has the press abuzz over the potential of the new web-based operating system. And now that it’s open sourced, you have the chance to try it out for yourself. Unfortunately, most people aren’t ready to undertake the daunting task of actually taking Google’s recently open-sourced code and turning that into a bootable computer. So we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself). No, this won’t get your computer booting Chrome OS natively (and frankly, you probably wouldn’t want to yet anyway). But it will get it up and running in a virtual machine using the free software VirtualBox, which is available for Macs, PCs, and Linux. First, a few caveats: we didn’t create the Chrome OS build ourselves — it was downloaded from BitTorrent. In theory it could possibly have been tweaked by some malicious hacker to steal your Google account information (this is unlikely, but who knows). There’s an easy fix if you’re worried though: just go make a throwaway Gmail account, and use that to play around with the OS. Also note that because this is running in a virtual machine, you’re probably not going to be seeing great performance (like that 7 second boot time). But it’s more than good enough to get a feel for the OS for yourself.
- 356 comments
- Live From Google's Chrome OS Event198 comments
- 194 comments
- 162 comments
Nicholas Deleon on November 19, 2009
We’re only about five weeks away from Christmas, so now’s as good a time as any to talk about (drum roll, please) e-books. Amazon kick-started the e-book market (with apologies to earlier e-book readers) with the introduction of the Kindle in the fall of 2007. Two years later, Barnes and Noble, IREX, and Sony announced new or updated e-book readers of their own.The question becomes, which e-book reader is right for you? The truth is, they’re all very similar, so it should come down to what books their compatible book stores carry. Oh, and price, of course.
on November 19, 2009
For security nuts and enterprise clients, Cisco is launching an iPhone app, called Cisco SIO, to put Cisco Security Intelligence Operations in users’ hands. The app gives giving users real-time access to security information and also lets users create personalized alerts to show security threats that could impact their network.
Powered by the Cisco’s Security IntelliShield Alert Manager Service, the app informs, protects and enables IT staff to respond in real time to alerts and threats to the network. The application will deliver data on early warning intelligence, threat vulnerabilities and sill suggest solutions to any problems that take place. It also provides unique IP and URL address e-mail and Web reputation look-up powered by the Cisco’s IronPort SenderBase Security Network. Via the app, you’ll also be able to access Cisco security news and information from the company’s blog, Twitter feed, podcasts and press releases, which Cisco hopes to use to engage with the greater security technology community.
Tomorrow’s Real Time CrunchUp in San Francisco is going to be a blast. It’s an all day event absolutely filled with the thought and business leaders in the space, as well as a whole slew of newcomers launching new startups.And we’re starting off with a bang. Twitter COO Dick Costolo is on stage first for thirty minutes of cold war style interrogation by Steve Gillmor and me.
And we want your help.
Let us know in the comments what questions you’d like us to ask. We can’t promise that Costolo will answer those questions, but we can guarantee that we’ll ask them. And if your proposed questions are good enough, you can get into the event. We’ll give up to five passes (the last seats in the house) to anyone with deeply insightful ideas. Just make sure to use your real email.
Don’t limit yourself to Twitter-related stuff, either. If Twitter is willing to give advice to Rupert Murdoch on how to run his newspapers, then absolutely anything goes.
Earlier this month, Twitter rolled out a Spanish language version of its service. This was the first language to gain native support beyond English and Japanese. Today, it’s announcing French support as well.As the service announced in October, it needed help from the community in order to roll out to the so-called “FIGS” languages. That is French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Just over a month later, 2 of those are already complete.
on November 19, 2009
eBay has just announced that it has completed the sale of Skype, valuing the company at $2.75 billion. The investor consortium who is the buying party and will control an approximately 70 percent stake is a group led by Silver Lake Partners and includes Joltid (i.e. the company founded by Skype’s original founders) and “certain affiliated parties”, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and VC firm Andreessen HorowitzAs previously announced, eBay received approximately $1.9 billion in cash and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million. The company also retained an approximately 30 percent equity investment in Skype. The company also purchased senior debt securities with a face value of $50 million as part of a Skype debt financing.
on November 19, 2009
Back in August, Twitter announced that it was getting ready to roll out an ambitious new project: Geolocation. The idea was to be able to attach a location to every tweet. Today, the API for the feature has been officially turned on, but location is not a part of the main site — yet.This means that applications that have been built using the APIs — such as Birdfeed, which we previewed recently — will be the first to be able to use location features. As Twitter notes, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and a few others are also supporting location right now.
on November 19, 2009
If you’re addicted to , like we are, you’re probably addicted to reading it on your mobile phone too. The problem is that the experience hasn’t been great. There was a mobile version of the site, called Mini-Techmeme, but no one seemed to know about it. More importantly, it didn’t give the full Techmeme experience because it didn’t include discussion items. Today, Techmeme has launched a new version of its site optimized for smart phones.If you visit the regular Techmeme site now on devices like an iPhone, a Palm Pre, or the new Verizon Droid, you’ll see a site optimized for touchscreen phones. The site include three main tabs, “Top, ” More,” and “New.” These represent the three key areas of Techmeme’s main site. This tabbed navigation allows you to easily jump through the sections. Each section contains the main headlines and a right pointing arrow which you click on to see the discussion items.
on November 19, 2009
Velcome, darling! Look what we have for you! Sergey Brin wearing VFF KSOs, CrunchGear’s favorite – as Greg calls them – “crazy monkey shoes.” He wore them to the ChromeOS event and Michael took a few candid shots of him. I’m personally a VFF convert and I’m very impressed that Sergey is willing to walk around in these. Embiggen after the jump.
on November 19, 2009
Ever since Google started talking about its Google Chrome OS, developers, competitors, and observers have been wondering why Google needs two operating systems: Android and Chrome OS. At today’s chrome OS briefing, Google was asked whether Chrome OS would support Android apps. The answer is no.
Of course, as Michael pointed out during the Q&A, Steve Jobs said the same thing when he launched the iPhone without apps, and then when he was ready, it was all about the apps. But Google had a good response: they want to make web apps work well on Chrome OS and therefore will only be focusing on those. Later on Sergey Brin touched on the same theme when he said, “Call us dumb businessmen, but . . . we believe the Web platform is a much simpler way.”
Here’s the initial exchange from MG’s live notes:
MG Siegler on November 19, 2009
After being restricted to just a handful of cities for the first several months of its existence, Foursquare is now in a period of rapid expansion around the globe. Fresh of its launch of 15 European cities a couple week ago, today the site has rolled out support for 50, yes 50, new cities.Though they haven’t formally announced the massive expansion yet, which pretty much doubles their total (they had 53 cities previously), Foursquare’s Harry Heymann tweeted about the addition today. And if you look in the site’s city drop down list, you’ll see a huge list of new cities.
on November 19, 2009
While you won’t be able to sense it at first, expect to feel a high frequency buzz from the direction of Redmond in the next few months. That’s the Windows 7 and Office group fearing the rise of a new juggernaut on low-cost computing hardware, ChromeOS.ChromeOS may not be powerful, it may not play Far Cry and it may not run Microsoft Office but it’s a game changer. The underpowered laptops that limped along under Vista, XP, or 7 will fly under a new ChromeOS regime and thin-and-light laptops will fall below the vaunted $199 mark as the so-called “Microsoft Tax” – basically the small cost manufacturers pay for OEM licenses – disappears.
on November 19, 2009
We recently wrote about stealth startup Project Fair Bid, which aimed to reinvent and legitimize a controversial bidding model pioneered by Swoopo. Today, Project Fair Bid is emerging from its cocoon as BigDeal.com, an auction-based e-commerce site which takes a different twist on the questionable paid bidding model.
Similar to Swoopo, BigDeal lets users purchase virtual bids $0.75 each which can then be used to bid on goods ranging from video games to high-end televisions. Whenever you bid on an item, its price increases by $0.15 and an extra 30 seconds are tacked on to the duration of the auction. With this model, items end up selling substantially below their market value. But one of the main criticisms of Swoopo was the risk of losing your money spent on bids (regardless of whether you win or not) when the auction concludes. BigDeal takes a couple of steps to mitigate this risk.
Jason Kincaid on November 19, 2009
This morning Google unveiled its much-anticipated new operating system, Google Chrome OS. We were there to liveblog the event, and we also captured a portion of the live video stream that Google was broadcasting. This clip below includes a look at Chrome’s incredibly short boot time (clocking in at only around 7 seconds for a cold boots), some of the apps ChromeOS will be able to run, and the operating system’s interface. Google says that the UI will likely change significantly before Chrome OS ships, but this gives us some idea about how it will work.Check out the video below.
Erick Schonfeld on November 19, 2009
Still not sure why Google is building its own operating system? It created this animated video to try to explain why the Web needs a new OS, and why that OS should be Chrome. Google just showed the video at its Chrome OS press event which MG is liveblogging
on November 19, 2009
Twitter has implemented a small change today, which by comparison to Retweets and UI redesigns isn’t such a huge deal but it’s definitely worth mention. Twitter’s prompting question above the box from which you Tweet from has been “What are you doing” since the microblogging platform launched. Today, it’s been changed to “What’s Happening.”
It’s a wise move because “What are you doing” seemed too narrow for the platform. Broadening the question to match all the things people use twitter for was necessary. Considering that Twitter is now used for breaking news, that term doesn’t really cover it. Here’s the full text of co-founder Biz Stone’s blog post:
MG Siegler on November 19, 2009
We’re here today in Mountain View, CA at the Googleplex for an event during which Google is promising to give a lot of details about Chrome OS. This includes a full product rundown and details about the formal launch, which is expected to occur early next year.Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Google’s Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS are speaking at the event. And there will be a Q&A session afterwards.
on November 19, 2009
There continue to be conflictingviews as to whether iPhone developers actually make money from ads on the iPhone. One issue is that free app developers who advertise in games end up paying on a CPC basis, in which the click takes the visitor to the App Store. But often times the actual download doesn’t take place, so the developer is left paying for clicks that don’t produce conversions, says mobile game advertising network Greystripe. Now the network is changing its ad network economics around to help developers mitigate this issue.
Greystripe is offering a $0.99 per download program available today to guarantee iPhone application developers downloads of their free apps. Of course, this comes with a catch. Greystripe is offering download program to publishers who spend a minimum of $10,000 and is being offered on a limited basis to the first 200 developers who apply. The first 100 qualifying developers who email techcrunch@greystripe.com will gain instant access to the program.
MG Siegler on November 19, 2009
Ahead of its press event to talk about the new Chrome OS Google has just posted the source code for Chrome OS on the Chromium site. As you can see in the file structure, Google is doing the same thing it does with Chrome, which is based off of Chromium, the open-source component. So yes, it does appear there is something called Chromium OS, which is the open-source version of what will become Chrome OS.
Jason Kincaid on November 19, 2009
This morning at Under the Radar, former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump and Social Thing founder Matt Galligan are taking the stage to unveil SimpleGeo, their new infrastructure for location based services. We’ve been following the company over the last few months and uncovered some basic details earlier, but this marks the first time the founders are talking about the company in public.SimpleGeo is akin to an ‘Amazon Web Services’ for location: developers looking to integrate location based services (LBS) can plug into some simple APIs and SimpleGeo will do most of the legwork for them. The startup originated as a gaming company, but after spending four months building out their location platform, Stump and Galligan realized they had stumbled across an opportunity: location is soon going to become an expected feature in many applications, and there’s no reason developers should have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to include the feature.
-
19 Nov 2009 04:01
Science Of DatingYour Looks and Your Inbox »
Gaming PortalsZynga To Launch Smash Hit FarmVille On FarmVille.com »
Good Question!The Eight Best Questions We Got While Raising Venture Capital »Sarah Lacy on November 19, 2009
BANGALORE, INDIA — It’s almost as if Russian cell phone carrier MTS has bought the naming rights to Bangalore. I half expected my immigration stamp to read “BANGALORE! ™ BROUGHT TO YOU BY MTS.” The carrier recently launched service in the uber-competitive Indian telecom market and has erected billboards every twenty feet or so. I have never seen so much advertising by one company in one space. They all sport an agro looking dude with his face twisted in some rebel-yell while he does inscrutable things with robots and mechanical arms holding different tech gadgets.Why have these ads made such an impression on me? Because I’ve spent a week sitting in stopped Bangalore traffic looking at them. Ironically one keeps boasting: CONGESTION-FREE MOBILE NETWORK. Sitting still and listening to the honking of cars, mopeds, bikes and rickshaws all around me, it’s an easy guess that, if true, MTS could be the only thing congestion-free in India.
Now that India has one of the world’s best mobile infrastructures, it needs a decent road infrastructure. And a smart entrepreneur needs to come up with a modern fix.
- 310 comments
- 168 comments
- 157 comments
- 138 comments
- Murdoch Warns That Without eTablets, "Newspapers Will Go Out Of Business."106 comments
on November 19, 2009
First of all, yes, everyone on Twitter now should have access to the new Retweet functionality. Currently, only Twitter.com and a handful of clients support the new mechanism. But did you know that you can also trigger the new Retweets via SMS?As the Twitter mobile account noted earlier tonight, if you simply send “RT USERNAME” to 40404 (at least in the U.S.) it will automatically retweet the last tweet of whatever username you entered has sent. And yes, it will be a new-style Retweet.
on November 19, 2009
Yammer, a twitter-like service for closed groups, continues to add new features that I wish Twitter would implement as well. In the last day or so they added a simple notification for unread messages that syncs across the many ways users can access the service (mobile, AIR, browser). The notification is available through the Yammer API as well.Twitter needs something like this. Various Twitter clients built by third party services try to do it on their own, but without the feature at the API level it only works if you access Twitter just from that client.
Yammer has consistently pushed new and useful features quickly to users.
If you don’t use Yammer at your business, you should. We’ve been fans of the service since launching at TechCrunch50 in 2008. It has replaced email for most of our in-office communication. And the service is very reliable, other than the occasional service outage while their CEO David Sacks is off playing poker in Vegas
The company is also getting more serious about the Android platform. Until recently the only Yammer app for Android was created by Nullwire. Yammer acquired the product from Nullwire and will now develop it in-house. You can download it here
Okay, we’ve uncovered Engadget’s big secret: Surprise, redesign! (No, sadly, it’s not a golden heffer or starchild or iPhone-killer.)The new look is quite magazine-like. Look for it to go live shortly.
This message currently graces every page on Engadget. Not sure what they’re up to, but it’s promised to be “awesome awesome stuff,” editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky tweets.In fact, beyond the in your face teaser promising that, “What’s next is coming now. Stay close.”, Topolsky has been tweeting teasers all night. So founder Gabe Rivera decided to respond (below):
The common portable media player has a tough existence. It’s expected to handle many tasks well, while being rugged enough to withstand daily (ab)use. It’s expected to look nice, it’s expected to provide more-than-decent battery life, and it’s expected to provide a simple enough interface that it can be operated almost exclusively while on the go. If the world’s greatest mom were a consumer electronics device, she’d be a portable media player.And while there’s no shortage of portable media players in existence, here’s a quick list of some worthy gift options (in no particular order).
Remember the flurry of new features Bing rolled out last week? Bing announced Wolfram Alpha results for nutrition searches, more in-depth weather results, enhanced hover previews, better maps, and turned MSN Video into Bing Videos. Well, it turns out it is also quietly launched another feature which highlights the latest posts from news sites.
If you do a search for “TechCrunch”“New York Times,” for instance, underneath the summary information and deep links there are the three latest headlines under “Latest posts.”
There are a host of directories of iPhone apps on the web as well as applications that make personalized recommendations of apps, such as Chorus, that might catch your fancy. Mplayit enters this space hoping to combine these two ambitions into one, comprehensive Facebook app.
Mplayit’s directory of iPhone and mobile apps includes all 100,000 plus iPhone apps and a smattering of other mobile app as well. Each app has a dedicated page where Mplayit will post videos of the app (created either by the developer or pulled from YouTube), a detailed description of the app and reviews. You can also click to buy the app from Apple’s App Store (from which Mplayit receives a affiliate fee).
SharedDoc is an online document platform that lets anyone upload a document online and then share the file to a community, so they can add comments. We have 500 free invites for TechCrunch readers here.
Once you upload a Word or Google Docs document to SharedDoc’s platform, you can send email invites to a friends or colleagues to comment on the document. In order to comment, a user needs to set up an ID. Users can then highlight portions of the the document where they’d like to leave a comment and post their input.
Every few weeks Internet dating site OkCupid uses the power of anonymized data to share a few truths about the online dating scene and human nature in general. To be sure, these reports are often highly controversial and aren’t going to be showing up in scientific literature any time soon, but they’re generally interesting (and often amusing) reads. The latest report to come out addresses ‘Your Looks And Your Inbox’, charting the number of messages users receive in relation to how attractive other members rate them.Some of the conclusions aren’t surprising. The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme. But there are a few interesting phenomena.
This story just screams amateur hour, although I can’t figure out exactly who’s the amateur. Maybe everyone. A CEO says too much in an interview and gets fired. Lawyers go after the blogger to get content removed. And a partner is pissed off. Not bad for a day’s work.It involves TweetPhoto, a service we’ve been writing about since last April. The company has had their rite-of-passage fight with Apple over an iPhone app, and they’ve done a deal with Kodak that got them some additional press. But until now, no serious drama.
TweetPhoto (now former) CEO Dan Caulfield did a 23 minute podcast interview with Frank Peters earlier this month. He apparently said too much in the interview, disclosing confidential information about partnerships. He was fired by the company for the transgression.
That’s enough drama to make me want to listen to the podcast. But it gets better. The company also had its lawyers fire off a letter from its law firm to Frank Peters, demanding that he remove the podcast.
Just to be clear, a company is threatening legal action against a blogger for posting an on the record sound recording of the company’s CEO.
For the last 20 years I’ve been playing racing games here and there, and when they started becoming realistic (i.e. the cars weren’t square and the engine noises weren’t square waves), the enormity of the sound challenge never really struck me. Engine, road, and tire noise, plus accurate doppler effects, different crunches and thunks for impacts… the list goes on. As if that wasn’t enough, you have to worry about engine noise contaminating your samples.So it’s no wonder that some game designers from Microsoft jumped at the chance to use a Tesla for recording game audio. No engine noise and careful mic placement means you can get tire squeal, or any other audio component of driving, almost completely isolated. Now, I know you guys aren’t really that hot for the details of audio production, but I know you like fast cars. And it actually is pretty entertaining to see a Tesla with so many big hairy mics on it that it looks like a pussy willow.
Well done, Apple. You’ve finally done it. You’ve got the world bending the knee for a device they’ve never seen, and which you deny exists. Condé Nast has declared that Wired will be Apple tablet-compatible by mid-2010, although they admit that Apple hasn’t actually told them how they might go about doing that. While this isn’t exactly comparable to adjusting office doorway heights in case someone hires a Yeti, the parallels are clear.Of course, it’s not so strange to want to streamline your product for tablet access. Make sure column flex doesn’t break the layout, don’t put critical links in rollover menus, that sort of thing. But if the Apple tablet is anywhere as interesting as people hope it will be, I doubt you’re going to be reading Wired in a browser anyway. Quixotic would be too kind a term for what they’re doing; not only are they tilting at windmills, but the windmills don’t officially exist.
Cisco has confirmed that the next version of the Flip Video camera, everyones favorite tiny video camera, is getting Wi-Fi. The model is described as having “a large screen that slides to reveal the record and menu buttons underneath.”Pocket-lint is also reporting there won’t be a touchscreen. You can, however, upload video that you take over Wi-Fi.
Sorry for the short notice but I thought it might be fun to toast to Turkey Day and the launch of our our Gift Guide.I’m teaming up with Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV for an impromptu CG meet-up in New York. We’ll be meeting at 7pm Friday at Heartland Brewery, 35 Union Square West, in Manhattan. We should be able to commandeer the back of the pub for our purposes.
Online advertising company Adknowledge has obtained the advertising business of SocialMedia.com, a social media advertising platform. The terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.
Adknowledge says that the move will “strengthen” the company’s position as a monetization platform for publishers of social apps and social games. SocialMedia, which company specializes in advertising across social networks, was most recently working with MySpace to develop and deploy ‘Interaction Ads,” which is an advertising product that can prompt a MySpace member for input and use that, along with MySpace’s social graph, to tailor the advertising shown to their friends.
Greg Kumparak on November 18, 2009
As the TechCrunch Network’s resident mobile guy, I was given the task of writing up a list of apps for each smartphone platform that you ought to buy as little e-stocking stuffers for your loved ones. It was to be my primary contribution to CrunchGear’s ultra-amazing Holiday Gift Guide; my festively themed magnum opus.
But there’s a problem with this idea: it can’t be done. It’s not because I’m lazy (which may be true), nor because I don’t have any apps to recommend (which most certainly is not). I can’t recommend apps for you to buy for others, because you can’t buy apps for others.
on November 18, 2009
I’m a big fan of street style focused-fashion, microblogging sites, like Weardrobe, where anyone can post pictures of their coordinated outfits for others to admire and emulate. Like.com, a visual shopping search engine, has acquired Weardrobe for an undisclosed amount.
Weardrobe is user generated, social platform for personal fashion. It is a place where people can catalog their own clothing and easily browse through the ‘lookbooks’ of other people’s street style. Users can upload photos, tag what they are wearing, and organize these items in a virtual closet to share with others. Weardrobe was also a winner of the 2009 fbFund competition.
Michael Arrington on November 18, 2009
On Monday we broke the news that MySpace was in late stage negotiations to acquire music service iMeem. Those negotiations are now concluded, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and an agreement has been signed. MySpace will acquire most of the assets of iMeem for a purchase price of around $1 million in cash.$1 million isn’t the “real” purchase price for the company. Some assets are being left behind, say our sources, including millions of dollars in accounts receivable plus some other cash. All or most of these assets, plus the purchase price, will be used to pay off some of the debt iMeem has accumulated.
About half of iMeem’s 55 employees will now work for MySpace. The rest, we’ve heard, will be looking for a new job.
One question that’s still unanswered – will the iMeem service live on? That’s completely up to the music labels, say our sources. iMeem’s deals with the labels terminate on this acquisition. The service is running at breakeven, we’ve heard, so MySpace may push to keep iMeem alive.
One thing is clear – MySpace is getting the iMeem assets for an absolute steal. I wouldn’t be surprised if other bidders suddenly get interested in iMeem and try to disrupt the deal before it actually closes.
I don’t know about you, but I have a male geek crush on Cooliris, the startup behind this splendid technology that enables users to browse photos and videos from the Web, their desktops or their iPhone devices in a visually attractive 3D manner that one really has to try to get a feel of how amazing that can be.Publishers are starting to notice that too, and are increasingly turning to the startup to make some of their own imagery and video content more visually appealing and browsing it, well, downright sexy.
Latest premium publisher to join the fray: CBS Interactive’s TV.com.
-
18 Nov 2009 10:32
Email IntegrationMicrosoft Outlook To Become More LinkedIn »
Web PhonesThe Google Phone Is Very Real, And It's Coming Soon »
A Social OdysseyLocation Is The Missing Link Between Social Networks & The Real World »on November 18, 2009
Yesterday we wrote about the soon to launch Google Phone, a Google branded Android phone that we believe will hit the market in early 2010. Lots of people are saying there’s no way Google will enter the phone market directly and compete with all these handset manufacturers who have bet on AndroidDaring Fireball, PC WorldIntoMobile are among the doubters. And a lot of people are pointing to a Tom Krazit/CNET article last month that quoted Google’s Andy Rubin: “We’re not making hardware…We’re enabling other people to build hardware,”“Rubin, vice president of engineering for Android at Google, scoffed at the notion that the company would “compete with its customers” by releasing its own phone.”
Normally I’d just point to the fact that many companies deny the existence of products until the day they announce them. Apple scoffed at the notion that they’d ever build a phone until they announced the iPhone, for example. The last thing Google wants is a lot of confusion among handset manufacturers just when those manufacturers are putting the finishing touches on their own Android phones.
But there may be another way Google will argue that they aren’t “competing with customers” by launching their own device – technically, it may not be a phone.
The Google Phone may be a data only, VoIP driven device. And Google may be lining up at least AT&T to provide those data services for the Google Phone, says one person we spoke with today.
- 250 comments
- The Google Phone Is Very Real. And It's Coming Soon207 comments
- 151 comments
- 134 comments
- 134 comments
on November 18, 2009
Professional social network LinkedIn is showing a little Microsoft love today. In conjunction with the announcement of the beta of Microsoft’s Office 2010 at its Professional Developer Conference, LinkedIn and Microsoft have partnered to offer an add-on that integrates much of your LinkedIn contact information with your Outlook contacts.
The add-on to Outlook will provide professional and social context to any Outlook users everyday email experience. When you received an email from a contact who happens to be a member of LinkedIn, Outlook will show a collapsible pane that will show information on what the contact’s latest activity is on Linkedin.
on November 18, 2009
We’re here at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual cloud computing event in San Francisco. CEO Marc Benioff is delivering the keynote and we will be live-bogging the news below. Salesforce has had a banner year, reporting strong earnings yesterday for the third quarter, launching a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2; and rolling out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses. So what is the future? Benioff has long praised the virtues of the real-time cloud and said recently that real-time technology is not only crucial to Salesforce’s offerings but is the future of the company’s products. Benioff has even praised Twitter for making the transition between the cloud and real-time web seamless.
Today, Salesforce is making its own venture into the stream with Salesforce Chatter which allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their business. Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups, enabling them to be connected. In addition, developers will now be able to use the Salesforce Chatter platform to build social enterprise applications, and all 135,000 native Force.com applications will be able to tap into Chatter.
Benioff will also be revealing more about Salesforce Chatter and his real-time strategy at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp on Friday, November 20.
on November 18, 2009
Media on the Web is going from a solo affair to a shared experience. We are seeing this in everything from CNN live news videos enabled with Facebook chat to Meebo Rooms and Tiny Chat. Today, a new startup from Los Angeles called Qlipso is launching its own virtual rooms where friends can share videos and play Flash games with each other.
The service is in private beta and is a Windows-only browser plug-in for now, but you can get one of 1,000 invites here. Click on “Get Started” and ignore the beta key request. Send an email to the contact listed (betsy) and put “TechCrunch Invite” in the subject line.
on November 18, 2009
Funny observation made by The Times-Tribune newspaper editor and Internet content director Jeff Sonderman, especially given the seemingly never-ending quarrels between newspaper publishers and the search giant.At least two of the search suggestions still indicate newspapers are important and ‘not dying’.
Erick Schonfeld on November 18, 2009
We’re just two days away from our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco. The CrunchUp agenda is chock full of goodness. Since our first event back in July, the momentum around realtime has accelerated. We find ourselves awash in realtime streams of data, and these realtime streams are becoming the new center of attention on the Web. During the conference we’ll be drilling down into what’s next for realtime in terms of making this stream manageable, adding new tributaries to the stream such as geolocation data, and building businesses on top of it.
As if the amazing lineup of speakers (from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Seesmic, Brizzly, Hot Potato, Tweetmeme, DailyBooth) and startup product launch demos were not enough to drop everything right now and buy a ticket, I am going to give you one more reason. We’ll be giving away a half-day sailing excursion to one lucky ticket holder at the event.
And remember, you can justify taking a half-day off to go sailing as a “team-building” activity.
Robin Wauters on November 18, 2009
Fring, a tool for social communication through mobile phones, has (finally) landed on the Android platform, enabling users who own one of the many phones that run Google’s free open source system to download and install the application onto their devices for free.With fring, users can make free VoIP calls over Skype, MSN, Google Talk and via hundreds of SIP providers. The app also supports live chatting through ICQ, Yahoo, and more, and also boasts support for Twitter.
Fring on Android works over 3G, GPRS or WiFi connection.
Robin Wauters on November 18, 2009
We wrote that Twitturly filled a bit of a void when it was launched in April 2008 as a sort of Techmeme for all that gets linked on Twitter. Much of the initial excitement over its link tracking abilities ebbed away rather swiftly regardless, and competitors like Tweetmeme and Topsy have stolen much of Twitturly’s thunder since its launch.Joel Strellner, who started the project, finally put Twitturly up for sale on Flippa ten days ago, and the auction just ended. Only five bids came in, and the sale ultimately netted no more than $8,500 – Strellner was hoping for double that amount.
Steve O'Hear on November 18, 2009
London-based Mendeley, which calls itself “the Last.fm of research”, has announced that it’s reached something of a milestone today – claiming 100,000 users and 8 million research papers uploaded to the site in less than a year since its launch. Furthermore, the online database is doubling in size every 10 weeks, says the company.That’s pretty impressive stuff and should Mendeley’s database continue to grow at the current rate they’ll overtake Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, the world’s largest online research paper database, in April 2010.
on November 18, 2009
Location-based marketing platform Placecast has raised $5 million in funding from Quatrex Capital, Onset Ventures and Voyager Capital.
Placecast’s platform uses proprietary algorithms that weave together location information and other data from audiences across the web, mobile, and email. Placecast then analyzes inventory, segments audiences and targets ads for maximum relevance for advertisers and publishers. Placecast manages all of a publisher’s web and mobile inventory, as well as serves targeted ads and messages into outgoing emails.
Robin Wauters on November 18, 2009
Have young children? You might want to check this out, particularly if they’re taking their first steps on the Web right about now.KidZui, the web browser that’s built for kids, is today launching KidZui 5.0, featuring more functionality for parents and children to discover and share the Internet together.
on November 18, 2009
Imagine a world where you sit at your computer and you never go outside. Where you never see another human being. This is the world that sites like Google and Facebook want you to live in.Though they’d never admit to such a thing, the reasoning should be obvious: The longer you’re at your computer, the more time you’re spending on their sites. The more time your spending on their sites, the more ads you’re being served. The more ads being served, the more money they are earning. No matter why these sites originally started, or what features they add, that is, quite literally, the bottom line. They’d have us strapped to a chair with our eyes taped open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, if they could. The only difference is that we’d have a contraption on our arms to allow us to click on the ads being shown every so often.
Thankfully, we don’t quite live in that world yet. And there are a couple factors pushing us the opposite way from that. Mobile devices are the biggest one. But even that is still just a screen. You may not be chained to a desk using it, but as plenty of people with an iPhone will tell you, you may end staring at this screen even more than you do a desktop or laptop monitor throughout a day. But there’s another up and coming factor working against our screen slavery: Location.
on November 18, 2009
Facebook is coming to a PS3 near you as part of the latest 3.10 update, which will be rolled out over the course of the next day. We knew it was coming, but Sony has been vague about exactly when the update would land. Turns out it was sooner than most people probably guessed, coming only a day after the November 17 release of Facebook’s integration with the Xbox 360.Here are some of the features listed on the press release Sony just issued about the update:
Showcase Trophies: Instantly share trophies you earn in PS3 games in your Facebook stream. Simply sync your PS3 system and easily show off your accomplishments to friends and family.
PlayStation Store Purchase Log Publishing: Let friends and family on Facebook instantly know which PlayStation 3 games you’ve purchased. The PlayStation Store, available to PS3 and PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system owners through PlayStation Network, features over 200 downloadable games, many of which are exclusive to PS3 or PSP system owners, in addition to over 4,000 pieces of add-on game content.
Game Event: With a few quick clicks of the controller sharing select game events, progress and statistics is now easier than ever with the Facebook integration.
on November 18, 2009
BREAKING: German media giant Burda has used its digital arm to purchase a 25.1% share in XING, the business social network that is biggest in Germany and competes with LinkedIn. The 1,323,041 shares were sold to Burda by Cinco Capital, the investment vehicle owned by the former XING co-founder Lars Hinrichs. Priced at €36.50 per share, the deal is therefore worth €48.3 million. This makes Burda Digital the largest shareholder in XING.More details to follow
The debate over Droid v. iPhone rages on, but lots more Android surprises are on the way. Get ready for the Google Phone. It’s no longer a myth, it’s real.The next “super” Android device will almost certainly be a HTC phone that’s much thinner than even the Droid or iPhone – The Dragon/Passion. This is the phone the senior Android guys at Google are now carrying around and testing, at least as of a couple of weeks ago. If you’re willing to give up the Droid’s keyboard, the Dragon/Passion is going to be a really cool phone. It should be fully available very soon.
But it isn’t the Google Phone. Everything up until now has just been a warm up to the Google Phone.
Way more interesting are the rumors we’ve been hearing for months about a pure Google-branded phone. Most of our sources have unconfirmed information, which we describe below. But there are a few things we have absolutely confirmed: Google is building their own branded phone that they’ll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba).
There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.
That’s it for confirmed, super-high confidence information, which frankly isn’t a whole lot more than we all heard back in late October. But we also have a few more details as well that we’ve gathered from a number of sources. Everything that follows we still consider to be just well-sourced rumors:
About two weeks after debuting the latest beta build of Opera Mobile for Nokia and other Symbian/S60 smartphones, Norwegian software maker Opera is bringing the latest beta version of its custom mobile browser application to Windows Mobile-powered devicesMicrosoft’s operating system for mobiles is taking quite a hit lately, having lost one third of its smartphone market share since 2008 according to research firm Gartner.
I don’t recall ever paying for a TypePad blog, but apparently I did. I learned this today when I logged in for the first time in years to see that the site I had set up in 2005 was deactivated because my credit card had expired. Lucky for me, I don’t have to pay anymore because TypePad has finally launched a free version of the service.TypePad Micro will be very familiar to anyone who has ever used Tumblr or Posterous in the past. I hate the term “micro-blogging,” but that’s essentially what this is in the eyes of some people. That is to say, it’s a platform that makes it easy to quickly post items you find that you enjoy from around the web. You can certainly use it to write more traditional blog posts if you want, but the clear emphasis is on sharing links, photos, music, and other quick-share items from around the web.
Career related sites like Monster and others are meant for people who are looking for a specific type of job or area. But what if you don’t know what career or job opportunity you want to pursue? Daily Endeavor is a site that’s designed to help students and job seekers learn about job opportunities and then decide which career suits their skills and interests.
Daily Endeavor’s founder Matthew Mahoney says the sites is focusing on content in the social change areas such as education, microfinance and human rights. Ultimately, the site’s goal is to profile 100,000 types of jobs over the next 3 years. The site is hinged on getting people to write detailed descriptions, reviews and guides about their jobs and experiences
One way Digg can help, Adelson said, is by helping these news sites with their advertising using techniques similar to the ones Digg has implemented.
-
17 Nov 2009 18:14
Tablet ReadersMurdoch Warns "Newspapers Will Go Out Of Business" Without eTablets »
All Will Be RevealedGoogle Holding Chrome OS Event Thursday. »
Wall Of ShameEcommerce Sites Rip Off Customers »Guest Author on November 17, 2009
The rapid development of interesting web services can be attributed to the ability of each successive builder to create a layer upon what others have built. The existence of APIs and callable web services means that each builder can add value on top. When you combine this with crowd-sourcing, you effectively pour lighter fluid (in a good way) on this layering process. The only remaining element required is a taxonomy to insure that the crowd-sourcing creates content that is structured enough to make sense despite coming from many hands.PublicEarth, a Polaris portfolio company that is launching today, takes the power of API layering, crowd-sourcing, and taxonomy and focuses it on maps. PublicEarth describes itself as a wiki of places, specializing in collecting all those “long tail” places that most other databases tend to overlook.
- 223 comments
-
143 comments -
109 comments -
The Post Transaction Marketing Wall Of Shame: Hundreds Of Well Known Ecommerce Sites Rip Off Customers
99 comments -
94 comments
David Diaz on November 17, 2009
Thinking about moving your electronic services to the cloud? LiveOffice, an SaaS provider of email archiving and hosting, makes the leap that much easier with the release of their CloudMerge technology–offering email archiving for most cloud email providers on the market. In addition to supporting cloud based email archiving, LiveOffice is able to archive email which is on-premise, thus creating a unified archive for all of your email.A core belief of LiveOffice is that your email archive should be portable. By hosting your archive on their end, customers are able to migrate from their current provider to a cloud provider without having to deal with the possibility of losing precious information. Additionally, if customers are dissatisfied with their cloud provider down the road, they can migrate to another provider seamlessly–while keeping all their emails–due to the capabilities of LiveOffice’s products.
on November 17, 2009
Last week we reported on Shakira’s decision to use Ustream and Facebook to live stream the debut of her latest music video, Give It Up To Me — a move that’s a fairly huge departure from the standard MTV route we probably would have seen a few years ago. Ustream has just given us the stats of yesterday’s launch, and it’s clear that it drew quite a crowd: over the course of the ten minute live stream, Shakira’s video had 95,000 unique viewers during the initial broadcast. And over the course of the last 24 hours, the video has seen a total of over 500,000 views.Ustream says that Shakira video wasn’t its most popular of all time — the streams for Michael Jackson’s memorial service and President Obama’s Inauguration saw much more traffic, with 4.6MM and 3.8MM total streams respectivly. But those streams were both hours long, while Shakira’s stream lasted a mere ten minutes. It’s also important to note that these viewers were likely more engaged than they would be if they were just staring at the tube.
on November 17, 2009
Before there was an iPhone, Android and App Store, there was Yahoo! Go. Launched in 2006, Yahoo! Go was an application offered news, mail, weather, traffic, and Yahoo! search from a mobile device. Today, Yahoo is announcing that Yahoo! Go will be shutdown on January 12, 2010.
The app seemed to be ahead of it’s time when it launched but now is useless thanks to Yahoo creating prettier, more powerful, personal content-focused apps that specialize in products, such as Flickr, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Messenger. Yahoo released three versions of Yahoo! Go but hasn’t released a new version in the past year. The last iteration of the app included a mobile widget platform and was available on select Nokia and Windows Mobile devices
on November 17, 2009
Old habits die hard. Rupert Murdoch believes that the future of the newspaper business is subscriptions—electronic subscriptions. He’s done with giving away his news for free on the Web and to search engines like Google. Instead thinks that Kindle-like tablet computers can save the media industry. It’s a notion that’s been floated before: an entire newsstand in a color tablet which delivers electronic versions of any newspaper or magazine you want for a monthly subscription of $15 to $19 a month.
It’s got to work, otherwise, he warns from his soapbox, “Newspapers will go out of business. All newspapers.” In an interview on his own Fox Business (embedded below), he explains his thinking:
on November 17, 2009
Joyent, the Californian provider of cloud computing solutions – although they like to refer to that as delivering “web application hosting Infrastructure as a Service” – today announced that it raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Intel CapitalThe news comes only a few weeks after Intel helped the 5-year old company launch a cloud computing service in mainland China, reportedly the first ever to launch over there.
Joyent says it will use the extra cash to accelerate its product development and expand its sales & marketing efforts around the world.
on November 17, 2009
Google is planning to hold a special Chrome OS event at its headquarters in Mountain View, CA this Thursday morning, we’ve just been notified. The plan is to give some technical background information as well as show off some demos, we’re told. More notably, they will be giving a “complete overview” of the new OS, which they say will launch next year.Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Google Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS will be speaking at the event. And there will be a Q&A session afterwards.
The problem: users have complained about the autofocus feature on the Droid since day one. As in, it didn’t work (). Last night I wrote that some users found a fix – clean the lens. It turns out that probably didn’t do a darn thing.But there were even better conspiracy theories out there, such as Engadget’s idea of a secret software update, which quickly spread around the Internet.
It turns out that wasn’t true, either. And we’ve confirmed that there’s no such thing as a secret software update on Android phones anyway, at least according to people at Google. Updates, even security updates, must be approved for installation by the user.
So what was the real reason for the problem, and the fix? Well, it fixed itself. The problem, as MobileCrunch duly noted, was an issue with the phone’s timestamp: “According to Google Engineer Dan Morrill, there is an unfortunate bug in the Droid’s autofocus routine. It improperly rounds a timestamp used in the calculations, which somehow throws the entire focusing process off. Today it works, and tomorrow it will work…but 24.5 days from now, the bug will be back.”
But by the time the problem cycles back again, Verizon will have pushed out a fix for the problem.
As we say around the office, Android is freedom from the iPhone. But sometimes that freedom feels a little bit like this:
on November 17, 2009
This had better be a bug (I assume it is though other TC staffers aren’t so sure). If not, this is perhaps the worst UI change I’ve ever seen. I refuse to believe that Twitter is really trying to add your DM inbox/sent messages, and all those new retweet categories to the main stream like that. Unless they read my post the other day and decided to do the opposite. And what on Earth is up with those numbers? Why the hell do I need numbered tweets in my stream, this is not Sesame Street.
on November 17, 2009
ShopSavvy was one of the best early Android applications. It launched in October of last year after winning one of the initial Android Developer Challenge top prizes (when it was still known as GoCart). But despite the success it has seen on Android, one question remained: When would it be available for the iPhone. Today, it finally is.Developed by the guys at Big In Japan, ShopSavvy is an app that allows you to use your device as a portable barcode scanner. You point your phone’s camera at any barcode and it will read it, do a product look up, and give you information about the product, as well as where you can find it online or at nearby stores and for how much. Obviously, something like this is a window shopper’s dream.
on November 17, 2009
DocuSign, an e-signature service, has raised $2 million from Second Century Ventures. The venture firm is the investment fund of the National Association of Realtors. This brings DocuSign’s total funding up to $30 million.
DocuSign, which was founded in 2003, allows companies to get legally binding signatures quickly over the internet instead of over the fax or mail. DocuSign certifies digital signatures over the web, acting as a intermediary who holds the documents and verifies the identity of the signature. The digital signature business was really opened up during the turn of the century with that passing of the UETA ESIGN acts, which clarified the legal grounds for electronic signatures nationwide. To date, more than 48 million signature events have been executed using DocuSign and service currently has 2.5 million users.
on November 17, 2009
Most startups have about a billion things to worry about. For many of them, this includes execution of their business model. With online ad networks depressed, increasingly, a number of those companies are starting to explore subscription-based models. But there are a dozen reasons why that can be a pain. Enter RecurlyRecurly, which is a startup itself, is entering private beta today. The core idea behind the service is simple: To make it simple for startups to be able to offer subscription-based services as an option. They provide an easy-to-use system with a nice user interace and good analytics that lays on top of the dealings that must be done between a payment gateway (such as Authorize.NET) and the startup.
on November 17, 2009
Today Ditech networks is announcing that it’s releasing a fully automated version of its PhoneTag voicemail-to-text technology that can operate behind a company firewall, making the service available to the many businesses and organizations where privacy and security are important. The service will also be readily available to enterprise customers, as it is fully functional with Mutare’s popular Enabled VoiceMail servers (though businesses will have to pay to active it). The service will also work on older PBX’s.James Siminoff, Ditech Chief Strategy Officer (and former SimulScribe CEO), says that this is the first fully automated voicemail-to-text service that can operate behind the firewall. Most services, he says, rely on some degree of human transcription for accuracy, which makes them unsuitable for organizations that deal with sensitive information (a competitor called Spinvox has been in hot water for using humans to transcribe text that was supposed to be automated, leading to an uproar over privacy issues). PhoneTag’s fully automated solution is capable of around 85% accuracy, which makes it a viable solution for businesses that don’t want their voice messages routed outside of the company. PhoneTag also offers a human-powered service for users who aren’t handling sensitive information, which can get up to 97% accuracy.
on November 17, 2009
Later today Senator Rockefeller is holding a U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation full committee hearing on Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and their Impact on American Consumers. He released a report on his findings in advance of the hearing.
The documents contain a lot of previously unavailable information on the size of the market, and where the money is flowing.
Background: hundreds of well known ecommerce companies add post transaction marketing offers to consumers immediately after something is purchased on the site. Consumers are usually offered cash back if they just hit a confirmation button. But when they do, their credit card information is automatically passed through to a marketing company that signs them up for a credit card subscription to a package of useless services. The “rebate” is rarely paid.
Intelius is one company that is using these scams to go public. But scores of even more well known ecommerce companies use these scams as well, including: 1800flowers, Buy.com, Classmates.com, Columbia House, Expedia, Hotels.com, Fandango, FTD, Hotwire, MovieTickets.com, Orbitz, Priceline, Shutterfly, Travelocity, US Airways and Vista Print. Each of these companies has received over $10 million in PTM revenue, according to the report. Hundreds more received less.
Affinion, Vertrue, and Webloyalty are the three largest companies partnering on these scams. The report states that these three companies have earned over $1.4 billion in revenue from 35 million transactions. 4 million people are currently enrolled in the plans.
TechCrunch Europe on November 17, 2009
Movie-streaming service Voddler (the so-called ”Spotify for movies”) has received about 3.4 million Euros (35 million SEK) in funding from a group of private investors. The money will supposedly go into developing the service.Voddler has chosen to not to give out any info about the investors or how large their share in the company will be. The company has about 50 share holders to date. One of them is Deseven Capital where Voddler’s CEO Marcus Bäcklund is a partner.
on November 17, 2009
Today brings good news for PC users everywhere. Seesmic is launching a native desktop client for Windows. Seesmic’s founder and CEO Loic Le Meur made the announcement today at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles. Le Meur says that providing a desktop client that was native for Windows was of huge importance because 80 percent of Seesmic users run their apps on a PC.
There are a few native Twitter clients out there to have been formatted for the Mac, such as Tweetie and Twitterfic. Windows users have previously limited options when it comes to native Twitter clients and are forced to either used web-based clients or use desktop clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop. These are both based Adobe’s AIR platform, which is notorious for eating up memory and CPU cycles, along with weird window placement quirks.
Matt Burns on November 17, 2009
This is embarrassing. Not only are the Microsoft Stores a clear copy of Apple Stores, but now the employees are trying to be spontaneous and stir up customer reactions with a weird bastardization of Improv Anywhere. See what I mean after the jump.
Robin Wauters on November 17, 2009
Newspapers continue to struggle with finding an economically viable and sustainable business model for the production and distribution of news on the Web, and not a day passes without me reading about some idiotic statement about the future of online news or journalism made by someone in charge of something at one of the world’s beleaguered newspaper and/or magazine publishers.Today we have James Harding, editor of News Corp-owned The Times, giving some insight into the publisher’s plans to generate revenue from the online edition of the paper to an audience of senior editors and executives at the Society of Editors conference in Essex, per PaidContent
The plans? To charge for 24-hour access to the website of the daily newspaper in combination with a subscription-fee based model.
Daniel Brusilovsky on November 17, 2009
If you’re on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We’ve added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks, including two jobs here at TechCrunch. Here’s a quick sample:- Conferences & Events Producer TechCrunch – Palo Alto, CA
- VP, Marketing Eventbrite – San Francisco, CA
- Network Engineer Six Apart – San Francisco, CA
- Senior Web Developer TV Guide – New York, NY
- Sr. PHP Developer GOSO.com – Washington, D.C
Leena Rao on November 17, 2009
TechCrunch50 demopit startup Lottay, which lets you create an online gift that people can put money towards, has raised $475,000 in Series A funding from DFJ Frontier. The startup has also recruited former Evite exec Harry Lin as CEO.
Lottay, which uses PayPal’s newly released Adaptive Payments API, lets anyone create gift pages with detailed descriptions and pictures of a particular goal or gift and then friends can contribute to the site via PayPal.
-
17 Nov 2009 02:34
PrivacyLost Phone Number Groups On Facebook Are A Spammer's Paradise »
Playlist NirvanaAnother MOG All Access Teaser Video »
Home Tweet HomeTwitter's New Headquarters As Shown Off By Employees »on November 17, 2009
One problem that has plagued a lot of Droid users is a malfunctioning autofocus. Take a close up picture of a barcode, or a high contrast image, or various other photo types, and the autofocus just doesn’t work properly. You can tell the phone has auto-focused when green frame lines are visible in the corners (another way is to view images after you’ve taken them and see if they are, cough, blurry).A lot of people have complained about the problem, even our own guys over at MobileCrunch: “The main issue is with the auto-focusing system, primarily because it just doesn’t work.” Here’s a video of the problem. More complaints here
Most users where hoping for a software upgrade in the near future that would fix the problem. But now some users are happily finding another, somewhat lower-tech fix – cleaning the lens with a soft cloth: “This works and sounds crazy. I just read that if you clean the camera lens really good with a soft cloth you will get the green focus. I’ll give anything a try so I did it. My camera now focus’s all the time. Green focus on all my shots. Supposedly there is a little bit of oily film over the lens and when wiped clean it fixes the issue. give it a shot and report here. I can tell you it worked lol…4 shots, all green….”
- Twitter's New Headquarters As Shown Off By Employees (Pictures)175 comments
- 137 comments
- 108 comments
- 98 comments
MySpace is in late stage negotiations to acquire music streaming service iMeem, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. MySpace is on a bit of an acquisition spree – they acquired iLike, another music service, three months ago.The iMeem acquisition isn’t yet finalized, we’ve heard from sources, and awaits approval from various stakeholders.
We don’t know the price of the acquisition, but this isn’t going to be a big win for investors. iMeem has raised at least $25 million (that we’ve been able to track) plus at least another $10 million in debt. But the difficultly in making a free streaming music service work as a business model forced them to make some hard decisions. Earlier this year they renegotiated label contracts and recapitalized the company, bringing in $6 million in fresh capital.
iMeem found a way to survive a few more months. But now they’re under the financial gun again, we’ve heard, and investors aren’t willing to put more capital into the company. But MySpace is stepping in to acquire the company.
Facebook application SocialCalendar is currently the go-to calendar for users to manage their social lives on the network with over 13 million total installs and about 2 million monthly active users. Greetings card empire Hallmark is hoping to ride on SocialCalendar’s coattails with the relaunch of the app as Hallmark SocialCalendar. Hallmark has made a significant investment in SocialCalendar, says founder Raj Lalwani, but declined to disclose the financial details.
SocialCalendar lets you plan events among Facebook friends, get movie showtimes and integrate events into a public calendar. Users can also import and get email reminders about events, birthdays and anniversaries and lets users buy virtual good icons as presents for friends and to mark events on calendars.
There was lots of news late last week about a proposed modification to the Google Books settlement agreement. Today there was going to be more news – a televised debate about Google Books on Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour. But, alas, Google backed out.The details are of the fight are subtle, but all the hubub centers around what’s broadly called orphan works – where it’s hard to figure out the author/rights holder of a given work. Depending on how broadly you define orphan works, they make up between 2 million and 8 million of the 15 million or so books that have been published in the U.S. And while this is the apparent battleground, the real fight is over the whole Google Books scheme.
Google says they’re saving humanity, or something close. Which is probably a stretch. Their opponents, fueled by donations from Google competitors (among others), says Google wants to “establish a monopoly over digital content access and distribution; usurp Congress’s role in setting copyright policy; lock writers into their unsought registry, stripping them of their individual contract rights; put library budgets and patron privacy at risk; and establish a dangerous precedent by abusing the class action process.”
As usual, Paul Carr sorts it all out for us. And while the details of a legal settlement on how the rights around digitized copies of old printed books aren’t exactly riveting, the players involved sure do make it a lot of fun to watch.
…Because the Open Book Alliance isn’t led by just anyone. No, one of the guys in charge over there is Gary Reback (pictured above). The man who many credit with taking down Microsoft. I interviewed Reback a few months ago, and Google Books was one of the topics we discussed.
As we noted last night, Google looks to be on the verge of unleashing Chrome extension support in a major way. Not only does the home tab page on the new builds of Chromium (and the dev builds of Chrome) feature not-yet-turned-on links to what looks to be an extensions gallery, but there are plenty of references (and pictures) in the Chromium boards as to what Google is planning with extension support. And actually, Google’s own sample extensions have already started working with builds of Chromium.As you can see in the screenshot, both the Google Mail Checker and (Chromium) BuildBot Monitor are up and running in a new build of Chromium. In fact, they’re even working on the latest builds of the dev version of Chrome for Mac, which just got updated tonight as well (they weren’t working with the previous build). The one other sample extension, “Subscribe in Feed Reader” doesn’t appear to be working yet on Macs, but images posted earlier by Google Operating System indicate that this is working on Chromium builds for Windows. To find all of these sample extensions, go here.
Tonight, Xobni is selectively allowing users to download a new version of its client with a number of UI enhancements. This launch coincides with Xobni’s new Salesforce extension. This is notable because it marks the launch of premium extensions for the first time, that give the company a new potential revenue stream.Here are a few of the bigger UI changes: As you can see in the screenshot, there’s a new set of horizontal tabs to better filter content. Xobni is also now surfacing links exchanged between contacts for the first time — previously, there was just a way to do this for files exchanged. Also new, the Twitter extension element now includes a direct message (DM) option. LinkedIn support has been improved, as has some of the analytics.
Love it or hate it, there’s no doubt that “citizen journalism” — the trend where ‘regular people’ record video, snap photos, and tweet live from breaking news events — is quickly gaining steam. One of the biggest catalysts for the trend has been YouTube, which gives people an easy way to upload and share the video footage they shoot from the heat of the action. And while we’ve seen some media sites, like CNN’s iReport, attempt to take advantage of this user submitted content, many news sites haven’t found a good way to integrate it. Today, YouTube is launching a new application that looks to make this easy for all media organizations. Dubbed YouTube Direct, the new open source application will allow news orgs to integrate a video upload tool directly into their sites, where they can accept and review user uploaded footage.The new tool will allow news organizations to screen video uploads as they come in, and use the best clips for their broadcasts and on their websites.
Google Sites, which launched a little under two years ago, have given businesses and consumers a way to quickly build their own websites with no HTML knowledge required, making it relatively easy for anyone without a technical background to build a simple website. Now, Google is making it infinitely easier for anyone to create sleek websites with new feature Templates.
For those that aren’t familiar with this product, Sites is the reincarnation of Jotspot, which Google acquired back in 2006 (though the two products look totally different). The product is Google’s easy-to-use website and wiki builder that’s widely used by businesses, though there’s a consumer option available.
A mere week after Adobe Systems reported that it would be shedding nearly 700 employees or 9% of its total worldwide workforce, the company is releasing two highly anticipated new products that have been in the works for a while: Flash Player 10.1AIR 2.0.Both of the products are being released with a ‘beta’ label at the same time for all 3 major operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux) and x86-based netbooks, and are available now via Adobe Labs.
People who were still hoping for a beta release of the new Flash Player for mobile will be somewhat disappointed by the fact that they’ll have to exercise even more patience.
Remember all that talk about Bing starting to fizzle in September? Well it didn’t happen, and now October numbers and Bing gained another half a point to reach 9.9 percent market share of U.S. searches, according to comScore’s qSearch service. Five months after launch, Bing has steadily gained two points of market share.
And it is keeping the pressure on, with deals to index realtime data streams from both Twitter and Facebook (Google also has a deal with Twitter, but not Facebook), a deal with Wolfram Alpha for nutrition and diet data, and the constant rollout of new features such as better video search.
“LOST MY PHONE!!! GIVE ME YOUR DIGITS!” Sound familiar? For years, many people who have recently lost their phones have turned to Facebook to reunite with their friends. But rather than use the site’s integrated phone directory (which is probably more comprehensive than you think) they take a different approach: a new Facebook group declaring that their address book is gone for good. These groups often wind up with over a dozen phone numbers from friends who leave their numbers on the group’s wall. Turns out, that’s often a bad idea — in some cases it’s incredibly easy for spammers to harvest these phone numbers from Facebook. All it takes is a little Google trickery.
Earlier today we received a tip showing just how easy this ‘hack’ was to execute, yielding many thousands (perhaps even millions) of phone numbers. I quickly alerted Facebook to the issue, hoping that they might do something to somehow fix it before I wrote anything. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen — Facebook’s view is that users shouldn’t be using these groups (at least not public ones) to share their phone numbers. And Google has cached many of these numbers, so it’s unlikely they could do much anyway.
Back when I was a teenager my parents had a simple rule – I had to be home by midnight. There was a doozie of an exception, though. If I was drinking they didn’t want me to drive, so all I had to do was call home, tell them I was drinking and I could stay over at a friend’s house. You can imagine that my parents pretty much thought I was an alcoholic in high school since twice a week like clockwork I called home at 11:45 pm to let them know I was too drunk to drive home and would be staying the night at wherever. Most of the time I wasn’t actually drinking, but who wants to go home at midnight? One time I remember calling home from Las Vegas (a four hour drive from Huntington Beach where I lived) to let them know I had had a couple of beers and would be staying at my friend John’s house down the street until morning (oh, right, like there’s anything you can do about it now, Mom).
Today things are different, though. And seeing iPhone apps like iCurfew just makes me shudder. Kids are still going to stay out late and not tell their parents what they’re up to. They just have to get way more creative about it, I guess. Because iCurfew tells your parents exactly where you’ve been and where you are now. You can send messages back and forth along with a handy Google map showing where the little troublemaker is right at that moment (probably outside a 7-11, trying to get someone to buy them beer).
Any kid worth his salt will try to figure out a way around this. My thought is to pay off someone to hold onto your phone and hang out at the movie theater messaging nice things to your parents while you are off doing God knows what. But I’m sure some enterprising young hacker to be can come up with a much more elegant solution.
But they better hurry, because adding a breathalyzer to this thing is probably next.
Since Twitter’s inception, SMS (text messages) has been an important and popular way to use the service. For a while last year, it looked like that functionality was slowly going extinct as at one point, only the U.S. and India still had it enabled due to carrier fees. But this year, behind Twitter’s head of mobile, Kevin Thau, SMS has come back with a vengeance, restoring it in places like the UK, and striking new deals in India and Indonesia. And today brings the first of a new type of mobile deal: MMS support for Twitter in the UK.The deal, announced on the Twitter blog by Thau, allows Orange UK Twitter users to send picture messages to a number (86444) to be posted to their tweet streams. The reason this works is because Orange UK runs a photo site called Snapshot, which will host the pictures and tweet out a link to them automatically.
Social Network application developer and advertising platform RockYou has raised a whopping $50 million in a Series D round of financing from existing investor Softbank, we’ve confirmed with the company. RockYou, which launched in November 2005, has now raised $119 million in capital and has revenues rumored in the $30 million to $40 million/year range.The company continues to develop and acquire social networking applications, but a big part of their business is serving advertising to their own as well as third party apps. And they are now taking a deep dive into the rather sensitive area of in-game offers. Last week the company spoke publicly about Scamville, saying that they would only offer Facebook compliant offers. When asked what types of offers that includes, the company said they’re looking at paying users to watch and respond to videos (like clips from upcoming movies), and getting them engaged with nonprofit groups like ASPCA and UNICEF.
There are 213 million monthly users of apps that RockYou owns directly or has advertising relationships with, says the company. And tomorrow they’ll launch a new virtual goods application on MySpace, called Gifts By RockYou, that lets users buy gifts for friends.
Devin Coldewey on November 16, 2009
The New Oxford English Dictionary has announced that 2009’s Word of the Year is unfriend. While it is perhaps not used as broadly as the newly-verbed friend, the latter is already in the dictionary, so they can’t very well call it new. The best they can do is run with unfriend, which implies and extends the other. A worthy choice, I think, with “currency and potential longevity,” as Oxford’s Senior Lexicographer puts it. It set me thinking, though: how prescient have Word of the Year choices been? Have they infallibly documented the rise of tech in mainstream language and culture? —or are they a dusty collection of buzzwords, a history of folly and haste? And really, which of those is the truer depiction of the world of technology?I examined Oxford’s WotY lists going back as far as their blog documents them, and consulted a few other word-tracking sources. Unsurprisingly, the popularity and continued pertinence of new words have been as unpredictable as the technologies they describe. Still, the world from a dictionary’s perspective makes for a unique retrospective.
MG Siegler on November 16, 2009
Perhaps the most annoying thing about Twitter as a platform is that it’s nearly impossible to find people you may know through third party apps. Essentially, you have to know their Twitter handle already to find them, or rely on some other more convoluted method rather than just say, looking them up by name. Soon, that won’t be an issue any more.As Twitter has posted in its Twitter API Announcements Google Group today, there is now a new Find People API. This will extend the “Find People” capabilities that exist on Twitter.com to third-party developers. Presumably, as with Find People on the site, you’ll be able to search by first names, last names, businesses, and brands, on top of usernames.
MG Siegler on November 16, 2009
FMyLife has been a true web success story. Not only have the creators turned it into a hugely popular website in under a year, but they’ve already gotten a book deal, and now a TV deal out of it. But with success, comes the need to protect that success. As such, FMyLife is now going after a similar site, FMySexLife, sending them a cease and desist notice today.The truth is that since FMyLife has seen some success, there have been multiple clones that have popped up using a similar look and feel while slightly tweaking the concept. For those not up to speed on FMyLife, it’s a site that allows you to post (anonymously or not) short blurbs about why your life sucks. Just in case you need me to spell it out for you, FMyLife stands for “F*** My Life.” FMySexLife (I’ll let you figure out what that one stands for) extends the concept to allow you to post about why your sex life sucks.
on November 16, 2009
It’s been a long decade, but AOL will once again be an independently traded company on December 9, when Time Warner will spin off shares. Every Time Warner shareholder (disclosure: including me, from when I was employed there) will receive shares in AOL using the following formula: one share of AOL will be distributed for every 11 shares held in Time Warner.
In other words, we finally have an approximate market capitalization for AOL. The business will be valued at
1/11th1/12th the value of Time Warner. At today’s market cap of $37.8 billion for Time Warner, based on a closing price of $32, that implies a$3.4$3.15 billion market cap for AOL. Unless Time Warner shares surge over the next few weeks, it will be in that ballpark. Update: My initial math was slightly off. As some commenters point out, the implied value is 1/12th of Time Warner since at the time of the distribution everyone with 11 shares will receive an additional share. SInce we know how much Time Warner is worth, it is possible to come up with an implied value for AOL based on that ratio, even though that value will change the minute the shares start trading.
Evite competitor and event planning platform MyPunchbowl is acquiring I’m In, a site for group travel and local trip ideas. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
MyPunchbowl allows users to create beautiful online invitations and track RSVPs. The platform also provides tools that let you find supplies, organize an after party and even set a date, via an algorithm that recommends the best date for your party. The site also allows you to set up gift registries, save-the-dates, message boards, integrate Google Maps’ to display the location, and share comments, photos, and videos. Basically, MyPunchbowl helps you plan and organize an event from start to finish.
Michael Arrington on November 16, 2009
MOG continues to tease us with short videos showing parts of the upcoming MOG All Access music service. Last week they showed a video on playlist creation – the best part was seeing how search works. Now they’ve uploaded a new video that shows robust music discovery through playlist searching. Type in any number of artists and see playlists that include all of those artists. You can also combine artist names with tags (Miles Davis Dinner Party, etc.).I’ve been able to test the service and it’s the real deal. I criticized MOG for charging for music when it was first announced because there are free services from iMeem, MySpace Music and others. But since then the landscape has changed – Spotify may not launch for free in the U.S., MySpace Music may move to a paid model, etc.
MOG is focusing on the user experience and making it easy to find and play music. That’s a big difference from the free music streaming services that exist today – those services actually don’t love it when you stream a song because they are paying somewhere between $0.004 and $0.01 per stream. MOG isn’t paying per stream, and so they let you get to and play music very, very quickly. Spotify also does this, but it isn’t available in the U.S. and lacks the social component, which the video shows really helps with discovering music.
MOG says the service will launch soon. It’s going to be very, very good. And if you don’t want to pay the $5/month, you can always write a music blog under their umbrella and get it for free.
-
16 Nov 2009 11:07
PolishedA Big Google Chrome Extensions Push Is Imminent (Pictures) »
Video ProsBrightcove 4 Adds Support For The iPhone, Facebook, And Live Video »on November 16, 2009
Up until now, Foursquare, the hot location-based service, has only let a handful of developers play around with its API. Starting today, the company is formally unveiling it, hoping that a robust app community will form around their data.Here’s the way they’re describing it:
The foursquare API enables developers to build applications that interact with the foursquare platform. You can use the API to create new ways to check-in to foursquare or visualize the data generated by the foursquare community. Our API is still a work in progress and we look forward to your feedback and suggestions!
- 272 comments
- President Obama Admits That He's Never Used Twitter, But Thinks The Chinese Should Be Able To103 comments
- Microsoft's Loss, Google's Gain. Don Dodge Gets A New Job89 comments
- 87 comments
- 69 comments
Jeremy Kessel on November 16, 2009
Attention Battlestar GalacticaAndroid OS fans, Samsung has just taken the wraps off its newest Android-powered smartphone, the Galaxy Spica. By the sound of that name, it appears the Cylons have taken control of Samsung’s mobile division.The newest soldier in the ever-growing ‘droid army features a 800MHz processor (just like its Moment sibling) and is the first Android smartphone to include native DivX support (so you won’t have to convert your downloaded collection of BSG to watch on the go!). Along with the improved codec support, the Galaxy Spica (GS) also touts other improved multimedia-centric features like the inclusion of DNSe 2.0 for “better sound quality” and 3.5 mm jack for use with your favorite headphones.
on November 16, 2009
Startup Tinychat, which started out as a simple IRC-style chatroom app to complement conversations on platforms like Twitter, has been steadily building out its innovative platform to include video chat and screensharing options and Facebook Connect.
Today, the startup is launching Tinychat.tv, a Ustream-like streaming platform that lets users live stream any video conversations or shows that are hosted on Tinychat live to the web. The site, which was built out using Tinychat’s API, lets anyone launch a branded page and channel where they can then conduct and stream multi-participant shows. Tinychat will not be charging for bandwith and will let users fully customize the landing page that hosts the videos. Visitors can comment on the page via Facebook and Twitter, subscribe to a show and more. Plus, the new site is just one example of the applications,such as a live streaming video site, that can be easily built from Tinychat’s API.
Leena Rao on November 16, 2009
The Social Collective,LaunchBox Digital-incubated startup, recently launched to provide event planners and marketers with a cost-effective browser-based service targeted at enhancing the event experience for both attendees and sponsors. The Social Collective even caught the eye of high-profile event organizers and was used during SXSW and Oracle Open World this year. Today, the startup is launching a second product, called Crowd Campaign, to let users easily launch a contest and then leverage the power of their social graph to promote the campaign. We have free one-year premium accounts (worth $5000 for each account) for the first 100 TechCrunch readers who sign up for a campaign and enter the “techcrunch” promo code here.
When setting up a contest via the web-based product, Crowd Campaign offers the ability to customize the contest’s subdomain, upload a logo and background image,write a Terms & Conditions page, set colors and styles, insert Google Analytics tracking code and more. Contest winners can be decided by popular vote or by an “expert panel” or some combination of both. And contests can include text entries, photo or video submissions and links to other content such as blog posts or web site. Crowd Campaign also offers management tools for removing offensive content, merging duplicate entries and tallying entries, votes and page views.
on November 16, 2009
YouTube has just announced that it has partnered with Univision, the United States’ most popular Spanish language network, to bring a selection of its content to the world’s most popular video site. The agreement includes rights both to short clips and full length content.Videos will be drawn from the Univision network, TeleFutura, and Galavision, and will also include footage from special events. Content will be rolled out over the course of the next few months. This is the first time Univision content will be available on the web outside of the network’s own properties, though this is a nonexclusive deal (don’t be surprised if we see similar content pop up on Hulu, TV.com, or other media portals soon).
on November 16, 2009
Did Facebook finally unfriend iLike? It certainly looks that way. Facebook is restricting iLike from showing people’s music data in their profiles (the songs and artists they like) or alerting them to upcoming concerts through Facebook notifications. The ban on notifications appears to be part of Facebook’s recent moves to fight app spam. It is not clear what music data specifically will be pulled from profiles, but that could cover all the data iLike collects about users—their music preferences and recommendations.
Even though iLike is the top music app on Facebook, with 12 million active monthly users, the two companies have been on the outs ever since iLike was picked up for a song by arch-rival MySpace. The recent deal with Google Music to show iLike/MySpace Music results added insult to injury
Leena Rao on November 16, 2009
As the iPhone is increasingly used by businesses, more large companies and startups are providing customized productivity apps to serve this community. Roambi, which launched a free app earlier this year, allows for data in spreadsheets and documents to be easily viewed on the iPhone in customizable charts and graphs.
MeLLmo, which has develops Roambi, is making a play for the enterprise market today with the availability of Roambi Pro, a secure, hosted service that lets companies transform data from Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, or business systems like Salesforce.com into interactive visualizations that cab be viewed on the iPhone.
Doug Aamoth on November 16, 2009
The Year of the Netbook. That’s 2009. You can’t walk into a consumer electronics store without seeing netbooks everywhere. Actually you can’t really walk into a consumer electronics store, period, since they’re closing up faster than costume shops the day after Halloween. But that’s another story for another time.While traditional netbooks sales will almost certainly see a decline in 2010 as they make way for the new class of low-voltage ultraportables, there’s still plenty to choose from this holiday season. Here’s a handful of purchase-worthy netbooks – in no particular order — for your perusal. The only real rule for this list (besides having to be a netbook) is that screen resolution must be greater than 1024×600. Those 1024×600 netbooks are so 2008.
on November 16, 2009
Let’s kick off the week on a positive note: innovative startups in the U.S. continue to attract capital from investors, and in turn are doing their part to counter the trend of the rising unemployment rate in the country.
Evernote, an information capturing service provider, recently closed a $10 million round while personal TV service Sezmi has been able to add another $25 million to its already sizable war chest. In addition, mobile advertising network operator Millennial Mediascored $16 million in Series C funding. And, as we’ve already covered, Outright has raised $5 million in venture capital from Sequoia et al.
Robin Wauters on November 16, 2009
Sequoia Capital has led a second round of funding for Outright, provider of a free and drop-dead simple online bookkeeping service, investing $5 million in the fledgling company together with returning backers First Round Capital, Shasta Ventures and SoftTech VC.Outright (formerly called GoBootstrap) launched its online bookkeeping app in public beta earlier this year after raising $2 million in seed funding from undisclosed angel investors and the VC firms that have now joined this second financing round alongside Sequoia.
Robin Wauters on November 16, 2009
I wasn’t kidding around when I wrote that Rdio, the latest online music venture backed by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis – the original founders of Kazaa, Skype and Joost – was assembling a killer team by hiring away top talent from some of the most promising startups in the digital music space while still in stealth mode.The latest name to surface on LinkedIn is that of Wilson Miner, a designer, web developer and entrepreneur from San Francisco.
Leena Rao on November 16, 2009
A plethora of rap and hip-hop artists have jumped at the opportunity to create branded iPhone apps, Including T-Pain,Snoop Dogg,Lil’ Jon,Soulja Boy and P. Diddy. Now 50 Cent is getting an app of his own, in partnership with Vitamin Water. The free app, called 50’s Sound Lab App, lets users create and share their own mixes of “Baby By Me”, a single off of 50 cent’s latest album, Before I Self Destruct. You can download it here.
The app is powered by mobile digital entertainment studio Moderati’s Romplr remix platform. Romplr allows fans to interact with music by creating their own versions of tracks by artists. Users can record and share their personal mixes via Facebook, email, or on Romplr’s site.
Robin Wauters on November 16, 2009
Networking and security services provider 3Com got hit by a shareholder class action suit seeking to block the $2.7 billion merger agreement with HP that was announced last week. The core allegation: 3Com was sold off too early, for too little.The plaintiff in this case, New York bankruptcy lawyer David Shaev, filed the action last Thursday in a Delaware Court, claiming the proposed agreement – which involves HP paying stockholders of 3Com $7.90 a share – constitutes a breach of 3Com’s fiduciary duties owed to public shareholders. He argues that 3Com’s directors should have pushed for a higher price.
MG Siegler on November 16, 2009
For some time now, Google Chrome has been working with a number of extensions — but unofficially. That’s about to change in a big way, maybe as soon as tomorrow. And some digging through backchannel chatter reveals some of Google’s intentions here.As first spotted by DownloadSquad earlier today, Google appears to have tipped its hand a little early. In the newest builds of Chromium across all the platforms (yes, even Mac and Linux), you can clearly see the jigsaw puzzle area in the lower right hand corner. This is in the same place that the colorful stripes usually appear to take you to the Theme Gallery. But clicking on this area currently redirects you back to google.com — but as you can see when you hover over it, clearly there will be something at https://chrome.google.com/extensions, presumably an Extensions Gallery.
President Barack Obama has one of the most popular Twitter accounts with over 2.6 million followers. It should be no real surprise that most of the time it’s not him tweeting from it, instead its various people within the White House communication team that use the account to send out information. And now that he is the President, certainly there are some security concerns with him using something like Twitter. But, did you know that he’s actually never used Twitter at all?That revelation was made tonight during a Q&A session at a town hall event with Chinese youth that was held in Shanghai this evening (which was streamed live on the web). The President fielded a question about the restricted use of Twitter in China and he had this to say, “I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.“
Time Inc just launched a new technology blog called Techland, headed up by one of our former CrunchGear editors Peter Ha. Time magazine’s senior tech writer Lev Grossman is also a contributor. Techland covers the intersection of gadgets and geek culture, and is aimed at a mainstream audience.
Some of the debut posts cover the movie 2012, Samsung’s new Android phone, and a recap of Apple’s legal victory over clone-maker Psystar. It’s a crowded field, but the appetite for gadget culture is seemingly endless.
During IBM’s Q3 earnings call a few weeks ago, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge highlighted business analytics as a sector where Big Blue is investing significant amounts of cash. The company recently acquired data analytics company SPSS for $1.2 billion and business analytics firm RedPill. Tonight, IBM is unveiling a new internal analytics product that the company is touting as the “largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics in the world,” which launches internally with more than a petabyte of information. Along with this internal product, IBM will launch a companion product for clients to build upon this cloud-based architecture, called IBM Smart Analytics Cloud.
The internal product, dubbed Blue Insight, will provide 200,000 employees in IBM’s sales and development department with the ability to extract data and information to make decisions and gain further insight at the point of sale. Blue Insight will gather information from nearly 100 different information warehouses and data stores, providing analytics on more than a petabyte (1,000 terabytes or 1,000,000 gigabytes) of data. For example, sales execs may use customizable queries of real time data to understand revenue opportunities and how many sales in their region are closing to help improve prediction. Or a manufacturing process engineer can evaluate real-time data on the plant floor to identify trends and data to improve yield and reduce shipment delivery times.
It’s been about a year since Brightcove released the last upgrade to its professional online video platform with Brightcove 3. On Monday, it’s going to release Brightcove 4, and it’s a massive upgrade.
Brightcove 4 now supports a native video player on the iPhone, in Facebook, and live video streaming on the Web. It’s got Twitter integration for sharing videos, faster-loading video players, the ability to switch between Flash streaming and HTTP, adaptive streaming based on a user’s device and bandwidth, behind-the-firewall video delivery, support for most major ad servers, better analytics, and a new, cheaper, entry-level subscription service called Brightcove Express.
The biggest new feature is the iPhone player. Instead of clicking off into the Quicktime player, Brightcove uses the Quicktime APIs to render the player within an app. Developers are going to love this because they can skin the player any way they want, tie it into the same ads served through a publisher’s Brightcove player on the Web, add email and Twitter sharing, and Coverflow-style browsing.
It was just 11 days ago that Microsoft’s “ambassador to startups” Don Dodge was laid off as part of a broader workforce reduction. Last week he showed up in Silicon Valley to “see friends” as he put it. But it was clear that he was also interviewing for jobs. We sat down with him to do a proper exit interview while he was in town.
I got a few tips from Googlers that he was seen roaming their Mountain View headquarters, and I confirmed tonight that he has been offered a job at the company. He has accepted, and will shortly begin working for the company that he only recently considered the enemy.
-
15 Nov 2009 19:50
Irvine-based mobile phone app developer Rock Software is launching an iPhone app called Mark Cuban’s Puzzle Palace. The app, designed for adults, is $0.99 and lets users turn images into puzzles.Cuban’s image is on the home screen of the app, and users can choose to turn some of his personal pictures into puzzles, or use your own. The app is available now at rockapp.com/cuban (redirects to iTunes).
You compete for fastest time to put a puzzle together.
If I had an iPhone I’d definitely buy this just to make fun of Mark the next time I run into him. Alas, I’m on a Droid, so I’m safe for now.
- 350 comments
- 239 comments
-
235 comments -
Skip The Hand Shake Now Has A Wristband
77 comments -
News Corp Wants To "Lead" The Media Industry To Its Own Demise
74 comments
John Biggs on November 15, 2009
It is officially on: we’re running our super duper, extra sassy Holiday Gift Guide from now until the end of time, giving you the latest in hot gift ideas for you and yours. Why are we doing this so early? Because we have so much to give away this year it’s scary. That said, let’s hit the slopes and shush our way into Gift Guide Nirvana.What do you need to do? Well, first you have to click through to our gift guide and keep your eye on daily posts for news of what we’re giving away. We’re starting off with the five days of Peek Pronto: five full days, one Peek Pronto each day. How do you win? Just comment using your actual email and we’ll pick a winner a day from this post. We’ll also run other giveaways concurrently with this one, so fear not.
on November 15, 2009
One of the reasons I broke down and bought a Kindle earlier this year was a favorite service of mine, Instapaper, the simple bookmarking tool, rolled out Kindle support. Despite my belief that the Kindle is a) way too expensive and b) a fleeting technology that will be replaced by all-in-one devices, my job requires that I read a lot of online content, and Instapaper + Kindle support allows me to do so without having to spend all my time at the computer. That said, Instapaper’s Kindle support has always been less than ideal. Today, developer Marco Arment (also the lead developer for the micro-blogging site Tumblr) has done something about that.on November 15, 2009
I’ve spent the last week throughly enjoying my new Droid, and while I’ve come across some problems, most of my issues have simply been with the fact that Android does things differently than the iPhone — the transition just takes some getting used to. But there’s one big issue that needs far more than a UI tweak: Android Market. If there was a theme common to nearly every Droid review, it was that Android’s app selection just doesn’t cut it compared to the iPhone. I think that consensus is only half the story. These reviewers are finding that Android has a weaker selection of applications than the iPhone not just because some of their favorite apps aren’t there, but because actually browsing the Market just isn’t as enjoyable as what Apple’s iTunes offers. If Android’s Market’s perception as a poor man’s App Store is going to change, this experience needs to improve.Currently, all Android Market browsing and transactions are done through an application that comes with the phone. This mobile application used to be pretty bad (it didn’t even offer screenshots of the apps), but was finally overhauled in September to be more competitive with the iPhone’s mobile version of the App Store. The new version is a big improvement, but browsing the store from the phone isn’t exactly a good time — you can only see a few apps at once, so scrolling through various lists gets tedious.
Sarah Lacy on November 15, 2009
DELHI, INDIA–“I’ll take you! I live there!” a small boy with a blue shirt and a perfect toothy grin said as he ran ahead of me. His quiet friend in yellow jogged beside him smiling shyly, his jet-black Elvis curl bobbing on his forehead. The boy in blue stopped a few yards in front of me turned around, beaming and added in Hindi, “I know computers quite well.”These weren’t middle class kids on the well-trod, parent-driven Indian path to seats at IIT. These were Delhi slum kids, whose families likely live on less than $2 a day. And yet, for the last five years, they’ve spent several hours of their free time every day playing games and learning English, Math and Science on computers.
So how have they bridged the much-agonized-about digital divide without a hand out from a chip company, computer company or wealthy philanthropist? A for-profit Indian company called NIIT
Guest Author on November 15, 2009
Affiliate marketing is 15 years old this month—CyberErotica is said to have launched the first program in 1994. The adult industry has always been ahead of the curve, but I digress. Despite 15 years of existence, which is essentially an eternity in “online years”, the performance based marketing method is still in its infancy. Sure, there are lots of affiliate programs that exist for many online etailers (and other sites that seek sales, leads and visitors) and $2.1b was paid out last year from affiliate programs, but affiliate marketing is still not as easy as it should be for website/blog Publishers to implement and get compensated for their referrals.For those that don’t know, affiliate marketing works like this—a company with a product or service for sale pays a referral fee to Publishers (marketing companies) that can drive sales, leads, or visitors to them. The Publisher is taking on the risk here—they might be outlaying their own cash on advertising to promote the product/service, or they are linking to that company’s product/service in the content of their site’s own webpages (when they could be linking to another company instead). The Publisher signs up for an account with the affiliate program and is then given “trackable links” to use in their content, which track referrals back to them. Most etailers have an affiliate marketing program in place—for example, Amazon.com’s Associates program will pay 4%-15% referral fees to you when a visitor of your website clicks a link on your site and makes a purchase at Amazon.com.
Twitter & Facebook Turn Everyone Into An Affiliate Marketer
Most recently, it’s not just websites/blogs that are referring sales, but rather individuals themselves, who are using realtime sites like Twitter and Facebook to influence their friends and followers by recommending products to buy, music to listen to, and movies to watch. These realtime discussions are becoming important sources of referral sales and leads for websites—if someone is asking on Twitter what digital camera they should buy, you bet your ass that Amazon.com wants anyone on the Internet responding to that user’s question to be linking to a camera for sale on Amazon.com (and not Walmart.com or BestBuy.com). Amazon.com wants to make sure that those influencers are compensated for referring people to buy from their website, which thus positively reinforces them to continue linking to Amazon.com product pages in the future.
John Biggs on November 15, 2009
Here are some stories from the past week on CrunchGear.
CrunchGear wants to kiss you this HolidayNSMB Super Skills TrailerThanko’s USB powered, Dinosaur foot-shaped slipper keeps your feet warm
on November 15, 2009 -
15 Nov 2009 04:22
RealtimeAll Aboard The Micro-Message Bus »
CrunchUpDo You Have What It Takes To Give A Realtime Pitch? »on November 15, 2009
No Righteous Cause is complete without a colored wristband. That’s why I’m so excited that the no-hand shake movement (yes, movement) now has an official blue wristband for people who want to show that they support the effort. Get a ten pack of them here for $20.Here’s who has (sort of, not really) pledged their support for the No Handshake cause to date:
- 399 comments
- 340 comments
- 224 comments
- India is morphing into a global R&D hub, but can it ever take on Silicon Valley?177 comments
-
124 comments
Paul Carr on November 14, 2009
So Belle de Jour was real after all. The Internet’s most famous anonymous sex blogger – turned best-selling author – turned internationally successful TV series – has finally outed herself in the UK’s Sunday Times. And it turns out she’s a character straight from the pages of XKCDFrom her interview with the Times’ India Knight, we learn that Belle is in fact Dr Brooke Magnanti a specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology who ran out of money during the final stages of her PhD thesis and decided to become an escort to make ends meet. So to speak. Add in the fact that Magnanti was already a reasonably well known science blogger and ‘The Secret Diary of a London Call Girl‘ was born.
Despite Belle’s growing fame, and the determined efforts of journalists around the world to out her, Belle’s anonymity remained intact – mainly thanks to a complex series of agents and shell companies that allowed her to receive payment for her work without compromising her identity. Even her agent didn’t know her real name until this week when Belle herself chose to out herself, granting an interview to Knight, one of her harshest critics.
A better example of someone operating on her own terms it’s hard to imagine. Anonymous bloggers everywhere can read Belle’s story and take heart in the fact that it really is possible to be both successful and anonymous in the Internet age.
There’s just one problem: it isn’t.
on November 14, 2009
This past summer, Daniel Raffel was desired. Google was pushing hard to hire the product manager, we hear from a source. And there are whispers that Twitter and Facebook were also in pursuit of his services. Basically, it seems like he had his choice of the companies in Silicon Valley that everyone wants to work for. So where did he end up? Yahoo.Yahoo hasn’t exactly seemed like the ideal place to work over the past couple of years. Besides just the Microsoft acquisition offer distraction (and subsequent search deal), and the CEO shuffle, the company has lost much of its sterling polish that it once had during the dot-com era. But what’s even more odd is that Raffel has worked at Yahoo before. It’s where he made a name for himself by helping to create Yahoo Pipes, the popular content mashup tool. But a few years ago, Raffel took off to work at Pioneers of the Inevitable, where he helped make Songbird, the open source desktop music player.
on November 14, 2009
At the beginning of 2009, during a now-famous strategy meeting, Twitter’s executives asked themselves, “Are we building a new Internet?” At the crux of that question was the realization that Twitter “introduced a new form of communication to the world.” Public micro-messages are now everywhere—on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Bing, Yahoo, AIM. They are infiltrating every part of the Web, particularly as the backbone of realtime search.
Yes, status updates (which are a form of micro-message) existed before Twitter, but it is the growing public nature of these messages which makes them exciting. For one thing, they need to be public in order to be visible to search engines. But when Twitter and other companies talk about building a new Internet, they don’t mean that 140-character messages are going to replace web pages. Rather it is that these realtime streams are becoming the center of people’s attention on the Web, and sending them off in all different sorts of directions.
These streams are the new Internet not so much because of the micro-content which they contain, but because they are a more efficient means of communication. Remember, the Internet at its core is a communications system. The battle going on now between Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others is to control this new realtime layer of communications on the Internet. Each one wants to be driving the micro-message bus.
Steve Gillmor on November 14, 2009
The Gillmor Gang debated the virtues and otherwise of the smartphone’s latest pretender to the iPhone crown: Droid. Michael Arrington led the Droid’s faction, with a QVC-like enthusiasm for the power of Any Phone That Runs Google Voice. Of course, he keeps his iPhone and iTouch a handy arm-grab away, but with Droid he may finally have some rationale for excommunicating himself from the Apple bosom.The New York Times’ Saul Hansell provided context at the telecom level, while ex-monopoly telecom BT’s JP Rangaswami placed his and BT’s bet on the future of open platforms such as Android. JP’s partner in crime at BT and subsidiary Ribbit, Kevin Marks, supported Arrington’s vision of a game-changer in voice, while Robert Scoble was happy to defend the iPhone with faint praise just so he could have something to argue about with Arrington. He also elicits some new CrunchPad details from Mike.
on November 14, 2009
At the Web 2.0 Summit a few weeks ago, MySpace CEO Owen Van Nattaoutlined the strategy for the social network to perhaps regain some of its former glory: the “socialization of content.” While MySpace may not be seeing major growth in terms of new users, the social network is gaining major traction on its communities that are based on niche verticals, such as MySpace Music. Van Natta said that he thinks MySpace has a unique position on the web because of its music deals with all the major labels and the independent ones in the music space. Van Natta’s strategy is being applied in other verticals and MySpace Fashion is one niche community that has flown under the radar but features compelling content.
MySpace Fashion, which had a significant UI overhaul last week, aggregates news and provides original content about all things fashion and style, including established and unknown designers, clothing, accessories, trends and celebrities. The site and all of its features, which like all for MySpace’s niche platforms, can be fully accessed by non-MySpace members, making it a web destination as opposed to an enclosed community. The MySpace fashion community currently has includes over 500,000 MySpace members but site is also being accessed by non-MySpace members who simply want to visit the sites to checkout the latest trends and news about fashion.
Search the Site
