Friday, February 27, 2009

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Mufin Incorporates Powerful Recommendation Engine Into New Native Music Player Top
Mufin , an automated music recommendation engine that actually works (most of the time), has released a new native media player in public beta. The player includes a powerful recommendation engine based on technology developed at the Fraunhofer Institute , allowing users to quickly generate playlists similar to any song they have in their library. The player is for Windows only at the moment, but Mac users can still try out the recommendation technology at Mufin.com , which launched to the public in November. You can see a full list of the new player’s features here Mufin’s core technology is based on finding recommendations based on knowing a few songs that you like. Unlike Apple’s Genius feature, which creates recommendations based on aggregate data compiled from user listening habits, Mufin actually analyzes the sound file itself, ‘listening’ to 40 audio characteristics as it tries to recommend similar songs. In my testing the service has usually worked surprisingly well, though there are sometimes a few bizarre results. Oftentimes these apparent errors actually do share characteristics with the original song I used to gather recommendations, but they are very obscure and sometimes in a completely different genre (which is both the blessing and the curse of using such audio-based recommendation engines). Mufin’s new player incorporates this recommendation technology, alongside a standard set of features that you’d expect from a modern audio player. Beyond creating the recommended song playlists, Mufin’s Player also brings a new twist to music management by allowing users to sort their songs by the way they sound (versus by song title or artist name). But aside from that I’m not sure if there’s a compelling reason to use it over iTunes at this point, especially since you can download a Mufin plugin to integrate the site’s audio recommendations into Apple’s music player (though the plugin is limited to creating playlists, and doesn’t allow users to sort by sound). Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Gary Vay•ner•chuk Expands His Web Video Empire With Obsessed TV Top
Gary Vaynerchuk is going after the Oprah set. The wine wholesaler who launched a career as a Web video celebrity talking about wine and marketing just launched Obsessed , a new video talk show hosted by Samantha Ettus . With Obsessed, Vaynerchuk hopes to move beyond niche programming on the Web to appeal to a mainstream audience. The format of the show is an in-depth 30 to 40 minute interview with guests that appeal to 25 to 55-year-old women. The first interviews on the site right now are with food writer Mark Bittman and floral designer Preston Bailey. Future guests will include Today Show travel editor Peter Greenberg, TreeHugger founder Graham Hill, and BlogHer founder Liz Stone. (They are working on some bigger names as well). Ettus will host the show and be the main star, while Vaynerchuk will come on at the end for 3 minutes to talk about wine, which is his thing. He is the host of Wine Library TV and also serves up regular videos on gary vay•ner•chuk , mostly about marketing. “There is only so much content I can pump out,” Vaynerchuk say. “I need to own as many media properties as possible.” Vaynerchuk and Ettus are co-producers of the new show. Each owns half of Obsessed TV, the production company behind the endeavor. Vaynerchuk’s other projects include a T-shirt search engine and Corkd , a wine rating site he promises to pay more attention to this year. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Kindle Student Edition Rumored to Be In the Works Top
Prime View International, maker of electrophoretic displays AKA epaper makes the screens for Amazon's Kindle 2. That much we know. However, rumors that they are working on a larger-sized touchscreen makes us think they are now ramping up production of the "student's Kindle" we talked about last year . This Kindle will have a larger screen and more research-oriented features - Wi-Fi, anyone?
 
The New York Times Expected To Launch Local Blog Network On Monday (Confirmed) Top
If this post on a local blog about Brooklyn has it right, the NY Times will be debuting a neighborhood blog project next week on Monday. Here’s the gist: Look out, local bloggers, the Gray Lady is moving in on your turf. Starting next week, The New York Times will be rolling out a neighborhood blog initiative starting mid-day on Monday. Our home soil of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill will be one of the two pilot sites (the other site will cover Millburn, Maplewood and South Orange in New Jersey). According to an email that was forwarded to us, the subject matter will include “cultural events, bar and restaurant openings, real estate, arts, fashion, health, social concerns and anything else that goes on in the ‘SoHo of Brooklyn.’” Still according to the blog, the local blog network will be filled with content from the paper’s editors (one for each site) but also rely partially on citizen journalism i.e. unpaid contributions from locals readers who will be able to post everything from short video clips to wedding announcements. Apparently, the network will also feature a map-based real-estate listings section will tie back to the NY Times’ main real-estate site. Update: Jim Schachter, editor for digital initiatives at The New York Times, confirms the news in comments: We expect to sell ads to local merchants using our telesales and self-serve ad solution. Our two pilot sites are staffed with full-time NYTimes reporters. That's not cheap. Obviously, it's also not a sustainable model. We're trying to figure out what would be. Can we create a combination of journalism, technology and advertising that people who don't work for us can adopt? How much or how little oversight by us would be needed to keep the quality high? Would people pay to be associated with us? Would there be enough revenue that some split between us and a non-NYT blogger would work? I'd love to know what readers here think. The New York Times and blogging, it’s not a new relationship. The institution operates a good number of blogs on its own, it acquired and started using BlogRunner back in November 2007, it co-invested in blogging platform WordPress and Federated Media Publishing , and it’s doing all kinds of good stuff with APIs nowadays. That said, its Internet advertising revenues are dropping while its visitor numbers are also in decline. The local blog initiative could be a way to counter both trends, although Sarah Lacy could have a thing or two to say about the former, based on her most recent BusinessWeek column on the expected slow-down of the local advertising market . (Hat tip to Jonathan Butler) Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
OSLO aims to break down mobile social network barriers Top
We’ve had OpenId to make the transport of your ID easier between Web sites. We’ve had initiatives on Data Portability to make it easier for you to move your data around between social networks and other apps. But what we haven’t had yet is a way to allow you to share your location between different mobile social platforms. That’s something that a new, largely European-inspired, initiative hopes to address. The alliance, called OSLO (Open Sharing of Location-based Objects) includes many of the players in mobile social networking and location-based social software. Twelve startups, all of whom serve their users with location-based services, have signed an agreement to enable their combined 30 million users to share location information and interact between networks. Currently most location-based systems operate in a similar fashion to instant messaging systems, and don’t interoperate. The question is, will Google’s Latitude and Yahoo!’s FireEagle come on board? Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Print Your Favorite Wikipedia Articles As Books, Courtesy Of PediaPress Top
Did you know that you can assemble your own wiki pages from Wikipedia and print them out in book form? You can, for a while now , thanks to a partnership between Wikimedia Foundation and a German startup called PediaPress . Last week, the wiki-to-print feature was activated for six more languages besides German but as of yesterday the functionality is also being tested on the regular English Wikipedia (restricted to logged-on users only for now). You can check it out here , but you might want to visit the help pages first. The books can be created with a table of contents or category lists and can be downloaded as free PDF files but also ordered as a printed book from PediaPress. PediaPress books are bound in dimensions 8″ x 5.5″ with a color cover and black & white interior, and the prices are reasonable. The cost of a book depends on the number of pages contained in addition to a base fee (starting at $8.90 for 100 pages) and worldwide shipping that’s charged extra. As indicated by the Foundation, the roll-out for English Wikipedia users will be gradual out of fear for scalability issues, so it’s currently still in test mode. We’re trying to find out when the organization will open it up for non-registered users and will update this post if we learn more. You can find a sample book on the fascinating subject of ‘Amphibious Aircrafts’ here (PDF). And if you’re wondering if PediaPress got a sweet deal out of the partnership, the answer is yes. The Wikimedia Foundation receives (only) 10% of the gross total for each book sold. Another part of the agreement is the development of open source software with the goal to ease the reuse of wiki content in other media or applications. (Image from Wikipedia , hat tip goes to Ross Masters ) Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
MicroPlaza Is a Link-Catcher For Twitter (100 Invites) Top
It used to be that if a link was worth sharing, people would bookmark it for all to see on del.icio.us. Now, they just Twitter it (with a shortened URL). Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to separate out all the Tweets with links in them, and sort them by time or popularity? That is what MicroPlaza does in a nutshell. MicroPlaza is still in a very limited private beta, but I have 100 invites for TechCrunch readers. Once you log in, you are presented with a stream of headlines, along with everyone who Twittered the link to that page. You can see a personal timelime made up only of links from people you are following on Twitter, or a public timeline to see what everyone is linking to. Each timeline has its own RSS feed. The headlines can be sorted chronologically or by popularity. The more people who Twitter about the same link, the more popular it gets. Each time someone Tweets a link, it becomes more popular (although there is a time-decay function so that you only see the most recently popular links and associated headlines. Since most of the time these links are articles or blog posts, MicroPlaza distills the headlines for you and gives you a sense of what is capturing everyone’s attention on Twitter. Any headline can be bookmarked, and you can group the people you follow into different “tribes,” and then keep track of each tribe. MicroPlaza also lets you look at everyone you are following and see their most recent links. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Web 2.0 Expo Europe 2009 Cancelled Top
A message on the German O’Reilly community blog indicates that the Web 2.0 Expo Europe , an annual event held in Berlin, Germany, has been suspended for this year in the face of the worst economic downturn in decades. ( translated version here ) The event, co-produced by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb, had been running for only two years. Web 2.0 Expo Europe was widely known as an outstanding event for the European tech community with a host of excellent speakers, but like many companies O’Reilly and TechWeb are feeling the sting of the declining economy and are being forced to make difficult decisions. Obviously, this is bad news for European entrepreneurs and startups. We’re still trying to get an official comment at this point. The blog post reads that Europeans who would like to visit Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco can register using the code “websf09eu” and thus enter a lottery to win a free entrance ticket plus 3 free nights at a hotel and $1000, but also acknowledges this is not a real substitute for a full-fledged European counterpart of the Web 2.0 Expo. Let’s hope it’ll be back once we get through the storm. (Disclosure: I run Plugg , an alternative European Web 2.0 conference, and Web 2.0 Expo SF is one of our sponsors here at TechCrunch) Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Facebook Pages Redesign Coming Top
Facebook launched Facebook Ads in November 2007 to give brands and businesses a way to create a presence on Facebook and interact with users. Starting next week, says a source with knowledge of the new product, those pages will be substantially redesigned. Today there are countless pages ( example ) that highlight brands. These pages are free to set up, and the Facebook sales team then encourages those brands to buy Facebook ads that point back to the pages. The brands get users who become fans of the page and maybe leave a wall comment. Facebook gets ad dollars, and users never leave the Facebook site. Those pages include standard Facebook features like a Wall for user comments, a News Feed showing changes and updates to the page, and places for photos and videos to be uploaded. Many advertisers also spend a great deal of money customize the page with applications and widgets showing off various products as well. Look for a much more streamlined look to Facebook Pages next week though, with a multitab interface very similar to what Facebook launched to users in 2008. The default view will show the Wall (which may include negative comments unless they are routinely deleted). All the custom apps will be pushed to a second Boxes tab. The Pages will also likely mirror the look of normal user profiles, with an image in the top left corner, etc. The Facebook sales team is soft selling the concept to advertisers now, some of whom aren’t pleased with the changes, we’ve heard. Many of these advertisers have spent significant money designing the pages, and lots more on top advertising the Pages through Facebook. Now the Pages will be changed. Users may love the changes and interact more with the pages. Or they may not. As usual with changes at Facebook, people (in this case advertisers) will scream bloody murder, and then likely settle down. The timing on the change doesn’t seem to be a coincidence - MySpace recently announced that they’ll be launching their own business profile product in the near future. As with last year’s stacked announcements on data sorta-portability, both companies want to be first with new products and features. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
JPG Magazine Has Been Acquired, Lives Anew Top
JPG Magazine , the innovative photography magazine that was composed of user-submitted photographs and shut down last month, has been revived. The magazine’s assets have been acquired by a group of investors who will also continue to employ some of the magazine’s staff, we’ve confirmed with a source with knowledge of the deal. JPG launched in late 2006 with the novel idea of cutting back on publishing costs by accepting user-submitted photos and relying partially on the community to edit the magazine. But despite reaching near-profitability, the periodical announced that it was shutting down on January 2nd when its parent company 8020 Media ran out of money. Within a few days it became clear that JPG might still have life , as a number of potential buyers including Smugmug entered talks, but until now the future of the magazine was in limbo. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Ning Launches Rich, Persistent Chat Feature Top
Tonight Ning will introduce new chat functionality, giving Ning network administrators the oft-requested ability to integrate a rich chat environment similar to the one launched on Facebook last April. Ning’s new chat system is Flash-based, presenting users with a persistent chat bar along the bottom of their screens as they browse through a Ning network. Users have the option of chatting through an interface at the bottom of their screen, or can ‘pop-out’ their chats into their own windows. While the interface will remain consistent across each network, users won’t be able to chat with members outside of the Ning network they’re currently browsing. Ning originally introduced a more basic chat feature last summer, but that version uses either dedicated chat pages or sidebar iFrames, which means they aren’t always visible as users navigate through a network. But even the basic version has proven to be very successful - Ning’s chat traffic has skyrocketed, as seen in the Compete graph below pitting Ning’s IM domain against Meebo’s homepage. To be fair, the graph probably doesn’t take into account Meebo’s traffic that occurs offsite (Quantcast reports that Meebo’s entire network sees more like 12 million uniques), but it’s clear that Ning Chat is rapidly gaining traction. Aside from its growth in chat, Ning has also been posting some impressive stats recently, growing to 4.8 million uniques in January (a 368% growth year over year) despite the fact that the site recently banned porn networks, which some believed were responsible for a significant amount of Ning’s traffic. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Cloud Computing Roundtable Sold Out, But It Will Be Streamed Top
Tomorrow's Cloud Computing Roundtable is sold out. But we have good news. For those of you who can't join us in person, we will be live-streaming the event. Thank you to Sun Microsystems for sponsoring the roundtable stream (powered by ustream and camera work by FutureWorks .) Tune in on TechCrunchIT or Sun.com/cloud TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I will be grilling our panel of cloud-computing heavyweights about where we are with this technology and where we need to go. As Gillmor wrote in a post on TCIT : Short term, cloud computing will slip in as a cost-saving rationale. Near term, the social clouds will expand across workgroups, across business domains, and finally cross-cloud. Then the Golden Age of the Cloud will occur, where applications and services only possible in that environment will guide the next wave of business architecture. On Friday, the dialogue will be about when, not if. When did cloud computing begin? How far are we into the cycle? Is cloud computing a baby or an old man in diapers, and are we going backwards or forwards so fast that we can't tell the difference? Or are we and cloud computing meeting in middle age, each ready for the other? I am also happy to announce the startups who will be giving the main demos prior to the roundtable and the panel of judges who will be evaluating them. Here are the companies and what they will be showing off: Veodia —Video recording through the cloud. BrowserMob —Stress testing Websites via virtual browser instances. Diomede Storage —Cheap, green storage with power-saving technologies at one tenth the cost of Amazon S3. Or so they claim.. Appirio —Stitching together three different clouds. Can it be done? They will be judged by: Dan'l Lewin , Corporate Vice President, Microsoft George Zachary , partner, Charles River Ventures Geoff Ralston , CEO LaLa David Bernstein , VP/General Manager, Cisco David Kralik , Silicon Valley office Director of Newt Gingrich And then we will hold the roundtable. Again, our roundtable participants will be: Marc Benioff , CEO, Salesforce.com Vic Gundotra , VP Engineering, Google Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo Paul Buchheit , Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail Werner Vogels , CTO Amazon Mike Schroepfer , VP of Engineering, Facebook Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning John Engates , CTO, Rackspace Roundtable Moderators: Erick Schonfeld, co-editor TechCrunch Steve Gillmor, editor TechCrunchIT Thank you to Microsoft and the BizSpark team for hosting us at their Mountain View campus. And thanks to Charles River Ventures , Ribbit and FathomDB for sponsorship support of the roundtable and reception.  We looking forward to learning more about a dozen early-stage companies at the roundtable reception. We have a few tables left for companies who would like to demo product at the event, but otherwise we are over capacity. Contact Jeannie with sponsorship inquiries ( jlogo@earthlink.net ) Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Digg Is Working On a Toolbar To Go After StumbleUpon, TinyURL, and All The Rest Top
A super-secret Digg toolbar has been spotted in the wild . We tracked down a beta tester who gave us the skinny on its features. The toolbar lets you Digg or Bury the page you are on, and shows how many Diggs it has already received. There are also links to show related pages, as well as more pages from the same source voted highly by the Digg community or marked as up and coming. Then there is the “Random” button which works like StumbleUpon. It takes you to a randomly-generated page based on your past input and overall Digg voting. By the prominence of this button, it appears that is a feature Digg will be trying to highlight. Users can also share the page via Facebook, Twitter, or email via icons at the top. A drawer slides down to expose additional functionality. Now, here where it gets interesting. For each page, the toolbar creates a shortened URL similar to TinyURL or bit.ly that starts instead with http://digg.com/. . . followed by a six-character code such as “http://digg.com/d1gVha.” When you share a page via Twitter or Facebook, it is that shortened URL which is used. And in fact, for the beta testers, the toolbar can be wrapped around any page simply by sticking “http://digg.com/” in front of any URL, which then gets converted into a shortened version. This technique works for pages that have never been Dugg as well. I could see this feature eventually showing up as part of a browser add-on so that Digg URL’s could be created with one click. The toolbar is not an add-on to existing browsers. It is actually creating a large i-frame around the original Webpage and delivering it on the Digg.com domain. Users can click on an X to get rid of the toolbar frame and be taken to the original page, and the original page gets the hit as well. (This is a similar technique to what Ginx does with its Web-sharing Twitter client). But by running all of the recommended pages through its own domain, Digg can run all sorts of analytics on each page such as how many people viewed it, where people clicked to next, and so on. It is amazing that Twitter has single-handedly created this need for shortened URLs and that a relatively large player like Digg now wants a piece of that market. Click on the screenshot below for a larger image: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
HP Upline Gets Disconnected, Heads To The Deadpool Top
Well, that didn’t last long. HP’s Upline, a backup service that offered unlimited storage for $59/year, is closing its doors. Since launching last April, Upline has faced issues with extended downtimes - a pretty major offense for a backup solution. But it’s likely the ultimate reason for the shutdown is that Upline was never really able to get much traction in a crowded space with very little in the way of differentiation. That said, there’s clearly money to be made in online storage, as evidenced by Hitachi’s recent acquisition of storage and backup solution Fabrik this week and EMC’s $76 million acquisition of Mozy in 2007. Below is the letter sent to HP Upline users, who will have until March 31 to download their files. In a classy move, it looks like HP is going to refund all fees customers have previously paid for the service. Thank you for your interest in HP Upline. HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service on March 31, 2009. HP will no longer be backing up your files to the HP Upline servers as of Feb 26, 2009 at 8 am Pacific time. HP will keep the file restore feature of the Upline service operational through March 31, 2009 Pacific time in order for you to download any files you have backed up to Upline. If you have a paid subscription to HP Upline, you will be refunded the full amount of the fees you paid for the service. That refund will be credited to the credit card account or PayPal account that you used to subscribe to the Upline service. If you do not receive the refund prior to March 31, 2009, please contact our customer service team at https://www.upline.com/support/email.aspx. HP looks forward to offering you additional technology products and services in the future. Thank you. HP Upline team HP Upline has been added to the Deadpool . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
AIM for iPhone Grows Up, Paid Version On the Way Top
While there may still be a lot of confusion surrounding the future of AOL, that didn’t stop the folks in Northern Virginia from recently overhauling their popular AIM instant messaging app for iPhone (and iPod touch). Available in two tasty flavors, free (”AIM Free”) and paid (”AIM Paid”), AIM 2.0 for iPhone now provides SMS notifications, has location-aware services, and supports multiple accounts (among other updates). It appears as though all of the application updates have been included in both the free and paid versions, with the major (and obvious) difference being the inclusion of ads in the buddy list of the AIM Free app. So, what’s the big deal here? What do all the changes mean? Well, for one thing, now when you first sign in, the app will ask you if you want to share your current location: Want to see where your friends are hanging out? You can share your location with your Buddies (or everyone) and see Buddies who are sharing their location. Users are given three options: 1. No, don’t share location (default); 2. Share only with people on my Buddy list; or 3. Share with everyone. Once you’ve made your selection (let’s say we pick option 2 or 3), a new Group will be added - “Near Me” - showing other contacts within your vicinity. As Ars Technica points out, “there is no control over how large one’s nearby radius is” and thus, it is not exactly clear how near or far any of your contacts may be from your current location. What you can control, is the frequency of your location updates by navigating to: My Info > Preferences > (scroll down) Frequency. Here, you can select between 3 options: 1. On Startup; 2. Every 5 min. (default); or 3. Every 2000 feet. Beyond location-awareness, AIM 2.0 also features SMS capabilities. Users now have the option to send an IM to a screen name, or alternatively, can send an SMS to a contact’s phone number (works on both iPhone and iPod touch). The app now includes both a buddy list and a contact list, to take advantage of these new features. Also, you can now stay logged-in for up to 24 hours, even if the AIM app has been closed. This allows you (iPhone users only) to get notifications via SMS when you receive a new IM and offers a work-around until Apple enables real Push notifications. Other notable new features include the ability to use photos (taken with an iPhone) as buddy icons and the option to configure/switch between multiple screen names at any time. Are these new features enough to take down competing IM apps such as IM+, Fring, Truphone, and others? Only time will tell. AIM Free (2.0.1) is currently available for download, while the cleverly named (but as yet unpriced) AIM Paid is still pending approval (at the time of this writing). Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Alaska Airlines Begins Testing Satellite-based In-flight Wi-Fi Top
Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Live Blogging The Facebook Conference Call Top
We’re live blogging this morning’s Facebook conference call, during which Mark Zuckerberg is planning to “announce the new steps Facebook is taking to improve user understanding and ownership of the Facebook terms of service and, more generally, the policies of the Facebook service”. The call begins at 11 AM PST. To coincide with today’s call, Facebook has also announced that it is Opening Up Its Terms Of Service To Input From Users . After a brief delay. Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s VP Communications and Public Policy, is introducing the call. Mark Zuckerberg: Today we are going to talk about a set of documents that will be the governing documents of Facebook from here on. . . . We feel this is fairly unprecedented, giving users this much involvement into the process. The purpose of Facebook is to make the world more transparent and open. The governing documents are the framework of how we want to move forward with this. Last week we put up an old set of terms after we got feedback from a newer set of terms that we put up. What we are talking about today are things we've discussed at Facebook and our principles for a long time. We took last week as a strong signal that people care about Facebook. These are the foundational policies. The policies, principles, rights and responsibilities are really the foundation for the things we are going to build. The rules for how we want to govern the site. What we’re talking about today is policy, not product. We are open to putting the documents up to a vote. The rules people must do when on the site and what we must do, a two way thing. There will be Comment periods, a council that will help on future revisions. ” We do not own user data, they own their data. We never intended to give that impression and we feel bad that we did.” This document is a foundation that we’re going to use our decisions going forward.” Q: How did you go about changing the terms of service last time? Zuckerberg: The terms were similar to what other sites have. We actually shortened our terms from 15 pages to something much smaller. But we made some mistakes, and the complaints were completely fair. But what we’re doing now is totally unprecedented. Q: Who decides what the vote determines? What if you disagree with them? Schrage: We feel confident they’ll make good decisions.. Q: You’ve been here before. Did you not learn from Beacon that people will rebel against changes in Terms of Service? Zuckerberg: Beacon wasn’t a change in Terms of Service. This was a dialog around the governing terms of the site. People use a lot of services on the web, but this is one of the only ones where they’re sharing their information. Schrage: Part of the challenge is that what was proposed with new ToS is remarkably consistent with what other sites have their ToS. Some of the blogs criticizing our ToS had Terms that were just as broad, but Mark’s point is that people share so much more on Facebook so we have to be held to a higher standard. Q: You mentioned that the amount of user involvement here is unprecedented. As an increasingly international organization, some of these continents like Europe have more stringent laws. What are your considerations for international laws? Ted: We of course pay attention to the laws… Q: Can you comment on steps Facebook is taking to determine phishing, malware? Schrage: That’s not really the purpose of the call today, feel free to contact us about that later. Q: You were already asked about Beacon. What could you have learned from the News Feed response? How do you manage expectations to people Twittering that you’re allowing users to write your ToS? Zuckerberg: We’re going to build product according to the goals we’re laying out. We should have been communicating about these products more broadly. Q: Is there not a need for contract language somewhere? Ted: I encourage you to look at the statement of rights and responsibilities. We have not just what you see as the ToS for users, but also for advertisers and developers. We have shrunk 44 pages of material to around 5.5 in this document including all three of those terms. That concludes the call. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Facebook Opens Up Its Terms Of Service To Input From Users Top
After the uproar that ensued when Facebook tried to change its terms of service a couple weeks ago, along with its subsequent backpedaling and public assurances that users own their data , the company is trying a different tack. It is inviting users to comment and contribute on proposed changes to its terms of service. Facebook has posted a p roposed set of Facebook Principles (reprinted below) and proposed Statement of Rights and Responsibilities . Members can discuss these proposals in two groups dedicated to each set of statements ( here and here , respectively). During a conference call , CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained: Today we are going to talk about a set of documents that will be the governing documents of Facebook from here on. . . . We feel this is fairly unprecedented, giving users this much involvement into the process. He also reiterated: We do not own user data, they own their data. We never intended to give that impression and we feel bad that we did. Here are the statements: The Facebook Principles We are building Facebook to make the world more open and transparent, which we believe will create greater understanding and connection. Facebook promotes openness and transparency by giving individuals greater power to share and connect, and certain principles guide Facebook in pursuing these goals. Achieving these principles should be constrained only by limitations of law, technology, and evolving social norms. We therefore establish these Principles as the foundation of the rights and responsibilities of those within the Facebook Service. 1. Freedom to Share and Connect People should have the freedom to share whatever information they want, in any medium and any format, and have the right to connect online with anyone – any person, organization or service – as long as they both consent to the connection. 2. Ownership and Control of Information People should own their information. They should have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service. People should have the freedom to decide with whom they will share their information, and to set privacy controls to protect those choices. Those controls, however, are not capable of limiting how those who have received information may use it, particularly outside the Facebook Service. 3. Free Flow of Information People should have the freedom to access all of the information made available to them by others. People should also have practical tools that make it easy, quick, and efficient to share and access this information. 4. Fundamental Equality Every Person – whether individual, advertiser, developer, organization, or other entity – should have representation and access to distribution and information within the Facebook Service, regardless of the Person's primary activity. There should be a single set of principles, rights, and responsibilities that should apply to all People using the Facebook Service. 5. Social Value People should have the freedom to build trust and reputation through their identity and connections, and should not have their presence on the Facebook Service removed for reasons other than those described in Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. 6. Open Platforms and Standards People should have programmatic interfaces for sharing and accessing the information available to them. The specifications for these interfaces should be published and made available and accessible to everyone. 7. Fundamental Service People should be able to use Facebook for free to establish a presence, connect with others, and share information with them. Every Person should be able to use the Facebook Service regardless of his or her level of participation or contribution. 8. Common Welfare The rights and responsibilities of Facebook and the People that use it should be described in a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which should not be inconsistent with these Principles. 9. Transparent Process Facebook should publicly make available information about its purpose, plans, policies, and operations. Facebook should have a town hall process of notice and comment and a system of voting to encourage input and discourse on amendments to these Principles or to the Rights and Responsibilities. 10. One World The Facebook Service should transcend geographic and national boundaries and be available to everyone in the world. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Yahoo's Bartz Cleans Up House; CFO Jorgensen, Mobile Chief Boerries Out Top
Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz is streamlining the company and picking which executives will remain on her team and which ones won’t. Chief Financial officer Blake Jorgensen will be departing , as will the head of Yahoo Mobile, Marco Boerries, among others. Getting a bump up are Ari Balogh, now CTO and head of all products, and Hilary Schneider on the advertising side, now head of North America. David Ko will be taking over mobile, reporting to Schneider interestingly enough rather than to Balogh. In her first blog post, Bartz writes : So today I'm rolling out a new management structure that I believe will make Yahoo! a lot faster on its feet. For us working at Yahoo!, it means everything gets simpler. We'll be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer. For you using Yahoo! every day, it will better enable us to deliver products that make you say, "Wow." In addition to getting rid of unnecessary layers of management (and, oh boy, does Yahoo have plenty of that), Bartz also says that she is going to get the company to pay more attention to its customers and to burnishing its brand. To that effect, she is creating a “Customer Advocacy” group to speak for the customer inside Yahoo, and she promises to clarify “what the Yahoo! brand stands for. . . . Look for this company's brand to kick ass again.” In a note that just went out, Barclays Capital analyst Doug Anmuth says of the CFO’s departure: We are not surprised by Jorgensen’s departure given that he was largely brought into the company by Sue Decker who left YHOO upon new CEO Carol Bartz’s recent appointment. However, we are increasingly concerned about Yahoo!’s thinning management ranks & about who internally will help guide new CEO Bartz as she moves deeper into the Internet space & soon makes critical strategic decisions for the company. In other words, where are the star hires? (Note that Bartz has hired a new Chief marketing officer in Elisa Steele). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Yahoo SearchMonkey Adds Facebook Profile Actions Into Search Results Top
Yahoo just embedded some Facebook functionality directly into its search results via SearchMonkey . When you search for a person on Yahoo, if they have a public Facebook profile, a link to that profile will appear in results, along with a photo and several actions you can take. these include adding them as a friend, “poking” them, sending them a message, and viewing their friends. You can see how it looks like in the image above, which shows results for Yahoo marketing VP Raj Gossain . The blue links under his name are the actions you can take. These are similar to the deep links SearchMonkey added to Yahoo Search for Wikipedia results . The links save you at least one step. But I’ve also noticed that the Facebook profile is often far down the results page. I wonder if this will help to change that. By all rights, Facebook should be the default people search, whether on Facebook or on search engines like Yahoo and Google. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Import Facebook Photos Into Your iPhone Contact List with Photo Phonebook Top
How much overlap is there between your Facebook “friends” and the real contacts in your mobile phone’s address book? If those two world’s align and you have an iPhone, you might want to check out a nifty utility called Photo Phonebook ( iTunes link ). It finds the matches between the people in your iPhone’s contact list and your Facebook friends and downloads their Facebook profile photos. (Right now, there is a limit of 100 photo downloads because of memory constraints on the iPhone, but the developers are working to fix that). Next time a Facebook friend calls, their Facebook photo appears on your iPhone. It also appears in the address book. When your friends change their profile photos on Facebook, they change on your iPhone as well. HotorNot founder James Hong, who is an adviser to the developers behind the app, says: The novel idea is for people to basically start publishing their picture to other people’s phones, taking control of what picture represents them. Sort of like if you could control the ringtone that plays when you called someone, rather than them setting it. Photos taken with the iPhone can also be published directly to Photo Phonebook’s directory. The plan is support more phones in the future, and other image sources ranging from photos to avatars. This seems like the type of feature Facebook itself should make available through its mobile apps. It would also be much more useful if you could download and sync phone numbers between your Facebook contact list and your mobile phone. But then you might actually have to talk to some of your so-called Facebook friends. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
TechCrunch Roundtable & Meetup In Warsaw, March 19 Top
TechCrunch is hosting a Roundtable and Meetup in Warsaw on Thursday March 19, 3pm-6.30pm. “TechCrunchTalk Central & Eastern Europe” will feature an afternoon of panel discussions and some evening networking with CEE startups and the investment community. The event will be live video streamed. Please grab a ticket here. Read on for details: The TechCrunchTalk event - put on by TechCrunch UK & Europe - is aimed at bringing together the Web/mobile startups and the VC community. It will be the day after the Mini Seedcamp event for startups. TechCrunchTalk CEE will feature two quick-fire panel discussions with the hottest entrepreneurs and investors selected for their leading views on the market, with topics focused around the following themes: • Central and Eastern Europe is a hotbed of tech talent, but how best does it capitalise on this? • What will help CEE countries create the next Internet giants of the future? • What do startups need the VC community to do better? • What are investors looking for? What are the hot trends? Why Warsaw? In the past 15 years Central and Eastern European countries have experienced dynamic growth in the last few years. EU accession significantly lowered risk profiles which has led to the inflow of foreign capital and now entrepreneurship, producing new technology companies and, in turn new, hunting grounds for VCs. Poland is the largest country in the region and an emerging hub for CEE startups. Please contact our event organiser Petra Johansson on petra [at] twistedtree.co.uk for any enquiries about demo tables or sponsor packages. Press enquiries for press passes to rassami [at] rassami.com. The event will be followed by product pitches from three to five companies (products or startups that actually launch at the event will receive extra consideration, but it is not a requirement). If you have a startup ready to launch then and would like to give a demo, send a brief pitch to TechCrunch UK & Europe Editor Mike Butcher . And I’m happy to report we’re also getting some help from our friends at Warsaw-based New Europe Events, who’s TMT.Ventures'09 Warsaw conference is happening on March 5, at the Warsaw Stock Exchange, Poland. More Upcoming TechCrunch UK & Europe Events London 21st April Topic: A day-long event for UK & other European startups. More details to follow Sign up for further info Stockholm 27th May - Nordic and the Baltic states event for startups and VCs Topic: Connecting Northern Europe - Where are the strong and weak links? Sign up for further info Berlin 10th June – More details to follow Topic: How does Berlin and Germany become a key node for European Tech? Sign up for further info London 9th July – TechCrunch Summer-Party Topic: Party! Sign up for further info Past TechCrunchTalks: Barcelona 19th February - "Mobile 2.0″ event alongside Mobile World Congress Topic: The future for Mobile 2.0 startups. Archive here Paris 25th February Topic: Building the Tech scene in France, scaling across Europe and the world. Please check at TechCrunch UK for the video archive shortly. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Google Friend Connect Hooks Up With Blogger Top
Google has integrated Friend Connect with its weblog publishing service Blogger . Essentially, this enables people to start following (i.e. subscribing to) blogs using their Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID accounts and turns Blogger more into a social network than a straightforward blog publishing service. Blogs that you follow will be listed in your Blogger profile and the integration will also leverage existing relationships, meaning you’ll be able to quickly see if your friends are also following those blogs. The integration was announced on Google’s new Social Web Blog , and the post promises more goodies in the future: And this is just the first step in the integration, so be sure to stay tuned for further improvements, including an easy way to add OpenSocial gadgets through Blogger and the integration of the commenting features. Here’s a video: Just two weeks ago, Google introduced what it calls the Social Bar , a way for webmasters to include a small strip on top of their web pages and to enable them to add links for drop-down gadgets that lets visitors do things such as sign in via Friend Connect, see who else has signed in recently, check out comments, etc. Google Friend Connect, which is the company’s own data portability effort , was opened up for all websites in the beginning of December 2008, right when Facebook made Facebook Connect generally available as well. And thus, the battle for who will control access to your online identity continues. My guess is it’ll go on for a while before someone can be declared the winner, if at all. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Lawsuits Galore: Songbeat Silenced For Now, Won't Go Down Without A Fight Top
With a comic message on its website saying that the service has gone away to enter the 36 Shaolin Chambers of Software Kung Fu but will return stronger, music discovery application Songbeat lets its visitors know that it has received a first blow in court after Warner Music (and other music labels) sued the German startup for enabling users to stream and download music without permission. Songbeat essentially allowed you to scour the web for MP3s using integrated search for Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM, iASK and more, stream tracks and even download them from a neat and fast desktop application. This comes fresh off the heels of the news that Warner Music is suing Seeqpod and even a developer that was using the application’s API, which prompted us to write that they’ve reached a new low. It’s not getting any better today. Warner Music succesfully sued the startup in a Hamburg court last week, so they have a court enactment which they also served last Friday. Songbeat says it will respond with a fast appeal but has taken the service offline for the time being just to make sure. The company believes it has a good chance of winning the appeal; I’m a bit less optimistic but I like the fact that the startup firmly believes they can make the labels start listening to them instead of chasing them around. One can always dream. Either way, Songbeat says it will be back online soon. The company says it’s currently in talks with music labels and will continue to do so even if it loses the case for good. If the latter should happen, the startup plans to relocate and simply reboot the service anyway. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 

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