Wednesday, February 25, 2009

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World Economic Forum Announces New Batch Of Young Global Leaders (Mark Zuckerberg, Chad Hurley, Kevin Rose And More) Top
The World Economic Forum has just published its annual list of Young Global Leaders, recognizing “between 200 and 300 outstanding young leaders from around the world for their professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world”. The list of honorees, besides celebrities like Coldplay’s Chris Martin and F1 legend Michael Schumacher, includes a good number of people from the technology and Internet industry, so here’s a quick run-down of the names you might know: Mark Zuckerberg - founder and CEO of Facebook Kevin Rose - founder of Digg Chad Hurley - co-founder and CEO of YouTube Josh Silverman - CEO of Skype Michael Birch - founder and CEO of Bebo Premal Shah - President of Kiva Lisa Huddleson - Corporate Foundation Executive Director at Dell Vinodan Lingham - CEO of Synthasite Paul Bassat - CEO of Seek Suranga Chandratillake - co-founder and CEO of blinkx Michael Cannon-Brooks - co-founder of Atlassian Andrej Nabergoj - co-founder and CEO of Noovo Kamal Quadir - founder of CellBazaar Ashok Vemuri - Senior VP, Banking and Capital Markets at Infosys Technologies Habib Haddad - co-founder of Yamli Josh Spear - founding partner of Undercurrent For the full list, click here (PDF). Drawn from a pool of almost 5,000 candidates, the Young Global Leaders 2009 were chosen by a selection committee (PDF), chaired by H.M. Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, comprising 31 eminent international media leaders. The recently published list of active YGLs includes names like Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Tony Fadell (Apple) Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com), John Battelle (Federated Media), Peter Thiel (Clarium Capital), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Uday Khemka (Sun), Tariq Krim (Jolicloud), Philipp Justus (PayPal), Lila Ibrahim (Intel), Esther Duflo and Kristin Forbes (MIT), Jack Ma Yun (AliBaba), Jorge Blanco (Avaya), Bill Nguyen (LaLa), Tero Ojanpera (Nokia), and Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook). Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Google App Engine Offers Pricing Plan Beyond Quotas; Grab A Free I/O Ticket To Celebrate Top
Google has released a new upgrade for its popular App Engine service that allows developers to pay to extend their application’s resource quotas beyond those that have historically been offered by the free service. According to Google this has been the platform’s most oft-requested feature, as developers with rapidly growing applications have been unable to expand beyond the set thresholds to meet demand. Developers will be able to set aside a specified amount of money each day, which will be distributed across fees related to CPU usage, bandwidth, storage space, and email (you keep any money that isn’t spent that day). For more details, check out the company’s blog post here . To coincide with today’s announcement, we’re giving away three more tickets to Google’s upcoming I/O event this May. If you’d like one, leave a comment below telling us how you’re going to use Google’s new premium quota extensions, and we’ll pick out the best ones. Be sure to use your real Email address so we can contact you directly. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
MySpace Inches Closer To Offering Full-Fledged Webmail Service Top
Last month we reported that MySpace was planning to launch a webmail service - a move that could instantly make it one of the web’s largest Email providers (provided a substantial portion of its users took advantage of the feature). Today we’ve received a number of tips that MySpace has introduced some new messaging features that indicate that the transition is well underway. Most notably, the site now allows users to send a message to multiple friends at once, as seen in the shot below. The feature works as advertised: as users begin typing their friends’ names, an autocomplete window opens with a list of matches. Each picture in the ‘To’ line is a link to that user’s MySpace profile, which makes it easier to confirm that you’re messaging the right friend. While the company wouldn’t comment on its webmail plans, MySpace has confirmed that the new feature launched today, and also detailed some of the other upgrades to the site’s messaging functionality. The site now offers an at-a-glance view of your sent messages so you can see if your friends have read them (frankly I find this feature to be a little creepy, but it’s not uncommon in standard Email clients). Users will also be able to attach video files to their outgoing messages. Of course, while the site’s interface may be gradually moving towards that of most webmail clients, it is still missing one key feature: users don’t have a dedicated name@myspace.com Email address yet, so they can’t receive incoming mail. But as we noted last month, the company has started moving its corporate Email addresses from name@MySpace.com to the domain MySpace-inc.com, paving the way for users to occupy the name@MySpace.com addresses. We should note that Facebook has also been slowly adding features to its messaging platform. While we haven’t heard anything directly related to a Facebook webmail application, the site clearly strives to be a central hub for social communication on the web, so it wouldn’t be surprising if it has similar aspirations (especially if MySpace’s experiment goes well). Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Microsoft TechFest: 'Surface' Upgrade Projects Images Beyond The Screen Top
We’re big fans of of Microsoft Surface, the interactive multitouch tabletop that acts a bit like an iPhone on a much larger scale (though the technology used is completely different). In fact, we like the Surface so much that we’re one of the few private organizations to actually have one. So today when I saw some new technology may well work itself into a future version of the innovative product, I was more than a little enthused. The new technology showcased today allows Surface-like devices to effectively project two different images in the same space. One of these projections is shown on the display as it normally would be, while the other is projected through it, so that it appears on anything that is held above the Surface (watch the video if this doesn’t make sense - it’s very cool). The technology works by rapidly alternating which of the images are projected at a speed that makes the transition undetectable to the human eye. The technology can also be applied to a basic hand held electronic viewfinder that can shift the user’s perspective of the Surface image in real-time (again, see the video). Note : It is tough to see the projected images in the standard-def YouTube video, so make sure to click on the ‘HD’ button to watch the high definition version. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Ginx Helps You Find And Follow The Experts on Twitter Top
Ginx , the third-party interface for Twitter that makes it easier to share news with friends, has added a new feature that organizes experts into groups so you follow their ongoing commentary on your favorite topics. Each group on Ginx is created and administered by a single owner who determines who the experts are in a particular field or category. For example, here’s a group of journalists who are focused on covering Apple news. It’s run by the user mirthlab and members include John Gruber and Arnold Kim . Currently there are 11 groups in total on Ginx, and all of them are listed in this simple directory . The others include one about China and another about Arizona politics . If you’re interested in hearing what the experts in a particular group have to say, you can become a follower of that group with a single click. All of the tweets from the group’s members will then show up in your Ginx timeline, regardless of whether their tweets are related to the group’s topic or not. When asked about whether it would be better to just show followers those tweets that are relevant to a group’s topic, co-founder Pierre Omidyar insisted that getting the whole stream of tweets from group members actually lets you learn more about who the members are as people. And in turn, this makes the news and commentary you get from them more personal. This new groups feature is a natural addition to Ginx’s core functionality, since it advances the notion that Twitter should be used to learn and educate others about the world. It does pose the risk of information overload, however, since by joining just a few groups, you’re expanding the number of people who contribute to your timeline considerably. In anticipation of this problem, there are checkboxes next to the timeline that let you temporarily remove all tweets from a particular group. But something tells me that most users will still want to be part of only one or two groups at a time, lest they have trouble separating the wheat from the chaff. Only select users have the power to create groups, although I’m told that this will change soon so that anyone can set up their own. Everyone can start following the existing groups today, and if you’re not already a Ginx user, the first 100 users to sign up with this code will get in: 842A11AC93EA. Update: We’ve created a group with TechCrunch employees that you can follow. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Microsoft TechFest: Qik Meets Photosynth With Impressive Panoramic Mobile Movies Top
I’m here in Redmond, Washington at Microsoft TechFest 2009, where Microsoft is showcasing many of the projects its researchers around the world. The event is filled with impressive demos covering diverse topics ranging from advanced user interfaces to improving computer-based learning in developing countries. We’ll be posting videos throughout the day, the first of which is a demonstration that essentially combines the mobile video broadcasting of services like Qik with Microsoft’s image and video stitching technology that can be seen in its impressive Photosynth product. The technology can take multiple live video streams focusing on the same subject (as you might find at a concert), and stitches them together to create one large panoramic video. For a full demo, see the video below. It’s important to note that while many of these technologies are extremely impressive, they may not be seen in consumer devices for quite some time (if ever). Still, given the fact that products like Microsoft’s Surface emerged from similar research projects, these may well be a window into the future what our gadgets will soon be able to pull off. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Paid Search Just Got Visual: SearchMe Launches AdView Beta (Free Ads For First 500 Signups) Top
What happens when you make paid search ads both relevant and visual? Searchme , the search engine startup which presents results as a stack of full-page previews that you can flip through, is hoping to find out with the beta launch of AdView. Its first foray into advertising, AdView is SearchMe’s version of AdWords, except that instead of selling of paid text links it will be interspersing into its results clickable previews of entire Webpages, videos, or other visual advertising. If you are an advertiser and want to try it out, SearchMe is giving a free trial to the first 500 companies or individuals that sign up here . That’s right, you get to run a free ad campaign on SearchMe for 30 days. To see how this works, search for “Ralph Lauren” and if you flip through to the third result, it will be an ad that shows a landing page for its fall collection. In other words, the Website becomes the ad itself. This approach is similar to what StumbleUpon does, with ads placed in every 20 or so Stumbles. But the ad unit can also be a YouTube video which can be played without leaving SearchMe. For instance, check out the third result when you search for “Mac” (SearchMe inserted one of the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads for demonstration purposes). This could potentially be a very effective form of advertising. It is almost like a magazine ad where the ad is a Website. Advertisers who create visually appealing landing pages I suspect will do better. And it is also a potentially powerful way to target video ads, combining keyword targeting with a TV-like viewing experience. (Check out SearchMe’s own video commercial embedded below, which it plans to run as a TV spot) SearchMe is not huge by any means, but it provides a nice sandbox to experiment with new types of advertising. Quantcast shows some decent growth over the past six months to about 3 million visitors in the U.S. That is certainly large enough to test the ROI for visual paid search. And its organic growth suggests that the idea could catch on. Certainly, it doesn’t hurt that Apple is training consumers to become comfortbale with the page-flipping metaphor. One of the key features of its just-released version of the Safari browser is a similar Coverflow-like treatment of bookmarked pages and browsing history. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
China's Social Network QZone Is Big, But Is It Really The Biggest? Top
Tencent , China’s largest Internet portal mostly known to us for its hugely popular instant messenger product QQ , published an updated report on the user numbers of its social networking service QZone last week. The report was only available in Chinese, but the folks over at Web2Asia were kind enough to translate it. And if the self-reported numbers are not too much of an exaggeration, they’re nothing short of mind-blowing. Even taken with a healthy grain of salt, the stats Tencent are presenting deserve a mention: the report claims more than 200 million people were using QZone as of January 31, 2009, surpassing international players like Facebook (which recently announced 175 million registered users) and MySpace. For the sake of comparison, we took a look at the worldwide comScore stats for the aforementioned social networking services, but they only give you an overview of visitor numbers for QQ.com instead of QZone separately (which has its own subdomain). To be frank, we don’t even know if the comparison flies because we’re not sure where QQ the communication (IM) service ends and where QZone the social network begins. Going back to Tencent’s report, it states that about 150 million out of the total 200 million are actively contributing on Qzone by posting blogs, sharing photos, and interacting with other users. In Qzone, about 4 million users are supposedly uploading an average of 60 million photos every day. Furthermore, on February 9 the company’s instant messenger QQ reportedly recorded more than 50 million concurrent users. The numbers are so impressive that we dug a little deeper, stumbling upon a report on DataCenterKnowledge which also wonders if QZone is bigger than Facebook globally or not. The article points to Netcraft’s latest monthly web server survey , which this month started including the Qzone blogging service. Netcraft: “this month’s inclusion instantly makes the company the largest blog site provider in the survey , surpassing the likes of Windows Live Spaces, Blogger and MySpace.” Facebook is under-reported here because Netcraft's survey doesn't capture all the activity at social networks and instead zooms in on sites rather than users. Furthermore, QQ has more social networking services targeting various markets besides QZone. QQ Xiaoyou, a service targeting students in universities and high schools, has over 20 million registered users and it only officially launched in January, 2009 (it’s been in private test mode since June 2008). If QQ doesn’t operate the world’s largest social networking sites already, it will soon. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Reunion.com And Wink Morph Into MyLife.com Top
When Reunion.com and Wink announced their merger in early October 2008, the company indicated that it would be relaunching under a different brand name and with a completely overhauled website in early 2009. That day has finally come, and henceforth the merged companies will live on as MyLife . The website for Reunion.com already redirects to MyLife.com, while dedicated people search engine Wink still has its own web presence. MyLife, however, already integrates Wink’s technology, which means the new hybrid social platform is now a full-fledged search engine which not only finds people—thanks to aggregated search across social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace—but also helps visitors connect with them all on the same site. On its company presentation page , MyLife boasts that it can locate over 750 million online profiles via its search index today. Reunion.com has been getting decent traffic lately, rising to 15.4 million U.S. unique visitors and 18.2 million worldwide last month, according to comScore. Google Trends also paints a picture of continued growth, albeit almost exclusively for North America. That basically means MyLife is now effectively the fourth largest social network in the U.S. after Facebook, MySpace and Classmates.com, leaving behind a bunch of more talked-about companies like Bebo, LinkedIn, Digg and Imeem, if you compare comScore data for January 2009. According to Founder and CEO Jeffrey Tinsley , Reunion grew 92% last year and its revenues for 2008 was somewhere in the vicinity of $52 million. Up until now, the company has raised $26.4 million in venture capital over two rounds, and it has used $6 million of this capital to acquire five companies to date (Wink, GoodContacts, MyAddressBook, Planet Alumni, and HighSchoolAlumni.com). Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
TC50's plaYce Launches Real-World, 3D Game Platform as a Service (500 Invites) Top
plaYce which showcased at last year’s Techcrunch50 is today announcing the beta launch of its Game-Platform-as-a-Service, aimed at assisting game developers bring high-quality 3D game play right into the browser. Games in plaYce are based on 3D renderings of real cities such as San Francisco and New York. 500 private beta invites for both users and developers are available exclusively to TechCrunch readers here . Casual games on the Web are quite bland when compared to “Tripple-A Games”—high budget titles typically produced by game studios such as EA. The type of games developed and/or distributed by the likes of Zynga, SGN, Kongregate or Oberon just don’t cut it for “real” gamers which are used to superior high-quality game play and graphics. plaYce tackles this matter by allowing high-quality games to be streamed into the browser. The company claims it delivers quick-engagement by initiating play within a minute for games ranging from 300MB up to a few gigabytes in size. Granted, that is indeed quite a bit of time to wait for a game to load, however, the game quality is in a different league than the quality of current casual games (see the video embedded at the end of the post). Users are required to install a 7.7MB plug-in (the “plaYce player”) in order to play games utilizing plaYce’s technology. IE & Firefox are supported on PCs, with Linux and Mac coming soon I’m told. plaYce is targeting independent game developers who will be able to port existing games or build new ones from scratch. The company’s Game-Platform-as-a-Service includes: Game Streaming – Where the user’s current and predicted point of view in the game define what piece of data needs to be upload to the client. Graphics Engine – In-browser complex rendering including soft shadows, shaders, lights, particle effects, etc. Game Arenas - Currently San Francisco, Manhattan and a few large open terrain areas, with two major European cities and Hong Kong on the way. Game developers can also model 3D arenas in any standard 3D modeling tool and then import it. Game arenas that “float in space” are also supported. Facebook & OpenSocial Integration – Allows users to import friends into games. Micro transaction & Virtual Goods – Game developers will be able to implement these in any game. In-game advertising – Provided through Massive and Double Fusion . Services – Game lobby, security, asset management, quality of service. Like any technology there are “performance envelops”… Game developers will have to be aware that the scenes are streamed and that there are hardware considerations (CPU, graphics card, etc.). Developers should also be aware that the plaYce API is written in C++, with the next version supporting Lua . The company’s business model will be based on micro-transactions, virtual goods, in-game ads, and rev-share with game developers. Developers will not be charged for the use of the platform. plaYce is showcasing its technology with Downtown Defender , a game it developed itself (it does not plan to enter the game production business). The company describes the game as: Downtown Defender brings the game mechanics of "Desktop Tower Defense" and the emotion of a realistic, giant monster movie into a tight, high impact experience. Using a Black Hawk Military helicopter, players will defend San Francisco from waves of massive creatures by dropping powerful gun turrets into strategic positions. Players will also need to rescue people on the ground from being eaten alive. The more people the player collects, the greater man power they will have for their turrets. Here’s a video of the game play: > Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Why Social Networks Are Good for the Kids Top
The other day I asked somewhat tongue-in-cheek whether Tom Friedman had ever visited Silicon Valley. Today, I'm wondering if Lady Greenfield has ever used a social networking site. The professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford and the director of the Royal Institution has the United Kingdom up in a tizzy about the idea that Facebook, Bebo and Twitter are warping their children's minds. She warned that social networking sites "are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilized, characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize and a shaky sense of identity." I'm not a psychologist, nor am I a parent, so let me start by saying she might be right that these sites are harmful in some cognitive way. But I think she's wrong to assume social networking is devoid of a "cohesive narrative and long-term significance." I can see where she's coming from, but like a lot of people who don't actually use these sites, she's missing a fundamental shift from Web 1.0 chat room days to Web 2.0 social networks: Real identity. We no longer "go to the Internet" to interact with some shadowy user name where we pretend to be someone we're not. Ok, maybe people on Second Life do. But sites like Facebook and Twitter are more about extending your real identity and relationships online. That's what makes them so addictive: The little endorphin rushes from reconnecting with an old friend, the ability to passively stay in touch with people you care about but don't have the time to call everyday. Facebook makes me a more considerate friend because I now remember people's birthdays. Over Geni, I stay in touch with my niece who I used to see once a year, but is now helping me map out our family tree. Via Twitter, my parents and in-laws know everything happening in my life so that when I call home, we have substantive conversations, not the awkward, "So…..whatcha been up to?" variety. In dozens of cases, these sites have made my real human relationships longer lasting and more substantive. They have actually given me a longer narrative, because it has rekindled friendships with dozens of people with whom I'd lost touch. Greenfield may well have a point when she argues that the young brain can't handle over-stimulation of "fast action and reaction." But isn't that the same argument we've been making about all technology and entertainment for decades now? Indeed, I’m of the MTV generation and all those fast cuts and blaring sounds were supposed to warp my brain long ago. (I know some TechCrunch commenters who would argue it has…) Everything has a trade off, and I'd argue the benefits in communications, education and collaboration of the Web far outweigh the negatives, and indeed give us greater benefits than we get from TV or Guitar Hero. I do share one concern with her: Whether over saturation online leads to a lack of empathy. This is something that is being debated throughout the blogosphere right now. As we all become public personas in our own sphere we're increasingly subject to the same abuse, scrutiny and haters that actual celebrities have to deal with. Such anonymous venom is, after all, why you are reading a post from me on TechCrunch right now. But I'm hopeful that the direction social networking is headed in is the answer to this, not the problem. As more of our social graphs move online, via Twitter or Facebook, the more the same social pressures of the real world come to bear. Compare anonymous YouTube comments with Twitter comments. Generally, Twitter is more kind and substantive, especially among users who Twitter under their real names. Now compare that to comments on Facebook. Almost all of the comments on someone's photo, video, status are supportive and empathetic, because the site has mimicked real world relationships and with that real world pressures. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
12Seconds Teams With TweetDeck, Enhances Third Party API Top
12seconds.tv , the ‘ video Twitter ‘ that allows users to send brief video clips counting twelve seconds in length, has announced that is now fully integrated into popular Twitter client Tweetdeck , which will now allow users to both record and receive 12seconds messages (previously they had only been able to receive messages). The site is also going to begin allowing third party sites and applications to integrate 12seconds recording functionality through an API (as with TweetDeck, they previously had been unable to record messages). Developers will need to request a key to access the API, and will gradually be allowed to access the system over the next two weeks. The news marks a significant win for 12seconds, as it will instantly help expose it to the many TweetDeck users, many of whom are considered Twitter ‘power-users’ and are thus more likely to be interested in this kind of rich media sharing. Other services that have also been integrated into TweetDeck include TwitScoop , which tracks hot trending topics on Twitter in real-time, and StockTwits , a Twitter-based community revolving around stocks and investments. Loïc Le Meur’s Seesmic is behind TweetDeck competitor Twhirl , so it’s worth noting that the latter Twitter desktop client already offered integration with a video conversation service. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Sedo Pushes For More U.S. Domain Parking Business With RevenueDirect Acquisition Top
Online domain name marketplace Sedo has acquired RevenueDirect , a domain parking and monetization service, from its parent company and registrar Dotster . Sedo, itself owned by the German internet marketing and media company AdLINK Group , is pushing for a bigger foothold inside the United States as it does in the rest of the world. As DomainNameWire points out, the deal makes sense because Sedo is a significant Google advertising partner across the globe, while RevenueDirect has a similarly strong relationship with the search and online advertising giant in the U.S. Sedo also closed a strategic partnership with Dotster to further integrate its services into their registration and inventory management solutions. The financial terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Happy Kindle 2 Day! Top
We should be getting our review units in any minute. Is there anything in particular that you want to know? First, check out this and this then leave your questions in comments. Thanks! Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Google Groups Page On Gmail Shows Adult Material Amidst Serious Outage Top
It’s bad enough for Google that businesses and consumers across the globe are being left without web access to Gmail for hours , but to add insult to injury someone hacked the created a Google Groups page on Gmail (link NSFW) at the worst possible time, adding images that leave nothing to the imagination as well links to adult content elsewhere on the net on top of the page. Update: per comments, this is not an official Google group but a user-generated one most likely deliberately set up now to take advantage of the fact Google has other things on its mind right now than checking up and moderating new groups on the subject of Gmail. Title edited. That said, this is the very first result that shows up when you search for ‘Gmail down’ so they might wanna take a look at this quickly. Update 2: someone at the Googleplex just did and deleted the group, which was up for at least 25 minutes. Update 3: weird, it dissappeared for a while but now you’re able to access it anyway after a warning message. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Trouble In The Clouds: Gmail Turns Into Gfail Top
Thousands of Twitter messages carrying the words “gmail” or “gfail” will teach you that Google’s free web-based e-mail platform is currently down around the world . A Google spokesperson told Pocket Lint that their engineers are working on it but have no clue why the errors are turning up. Meanwhile, a Google representative posted this on a its help pages : We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by February 24, 2009 6:30 AM PST detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. (POP3 / IMAP seems to be still functioning, and the problem doesn’t appear to affect other Google Apps at this point) I’m not buying the small subset part, and considering the fact that Pocket Lint says the problem started occuring around 10:20am GMT, 3 hours before even telling everyone what’s going on is an incredibly long timeframe in my opinion. Update: Gmail is supposed to be coming back now, at least for some. But Google is also dealing with people posting adult content on Groups pages related to Gmail. Update 2: there’s a status box on the Gmail Help homepage that says the outage started at 1:30 AM PST, which means the problems have been occurring for nearly 2 hours and a half at the time of this update. The message now reads that access has been restored without any indication of time. Update 3: the problem appears to be solved for most users now, 3 hours after Google indicated that it was aware of the errors. This comes a couple of weeks after the chaos when a reportedly human error caused Google’s search engine to erroneously flag the entire internet as malware . Curious to see what their response to this outage will be, as this is not the first time this has happened . Good thing Gmail went offline with Google Gears some time ago. Update 4: Google’s official statement was just blogged . If you've tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we're having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email. We're working very hard to solve the problem and we're really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won't be able to send or receive emails. We're posting updates to the Gmail Help Centre at http://mail.google.com/support/ and Google Apps users can visit the Google Apps help centre at www.google.com/support/a. Thanks for bearing with us while we sort this out. We’ll report back as we make progress. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Mio.tv Picks Up Spanish Social Network Wamba For €4 Million Top
Latino-targeting online entertainment and communication services provider Mio.tv has acquired Spanish social network Wamba for approximately €4 million euros with earn-outs according to various Spanish and Latin-American media. Considering the fact that the startup had raised €3 million from early Skype investor and serial entrepreneur Morten Lund back in 2007, this isn’t exactly a home run for the Spanish company. Nevertheless, this is good news for Lund, the colorful European web celebrity who TechCrunch UK earlier this year reported to be personally bankrupt after a series of investments gone awry. According to earlier reports, Lund retained 40% of Wamba shares in return for his investment. Mio.tv aims to become the default bilingual online portal for the millions of latinos on the web, offering a slew of online video channels, gaming, social networks and communication services. The company’s Chairman and CEO, Manuel Garcia-Duran, told EuropaPress that Mio.tv is buying Wamba for its reach in the Latin-American community and cites 8.4 million registered users for the social network. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Founders At Work: Uncovering The Truth Behind A Hotmail Founder's Claims Top
In 2007 Jessica Livingston , a founding partner at Y Combinator , released a book called Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days in which she transcribed over thirty extensive interviews with some of Silicon Valleys most notable successes. Included in the book was an interview with Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia , who detailed the experiences he had raising money for the webmail startup and its subsequent acquisition by Microsoft for a tidy sum of $400 million. In the interview, Bhatia made some strong accusations regarding early-stage venture fund Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), stating that DFJ had actively tried to dissuade other VCs from investing in the company (so that they could be the only ones to invest in Hotmail’s funding rounds). He also denied that DFJ’s Tim Draper had come up with the idea of including ‘viral’ taglines at the end of each message inviting new users to join Hotmail, instead attributing the idea to Hotmail co-founder Jack Smith. Today Livingston has written a blog post asserting that some of the statements made by Bhatia are incorrect: I received evidence yesterday that some of the things Sabeer Bhatia said in his interview in Founders at Work were false. The evidence indicates that (a) Tim Draper rather than Jack Smith had the idea of putting a Hotmail ad at the bottom of emails sent by the service, and (b) that DFJ didn’t disparage Hotmail to other VCs interested in investing. The corrections are notable for a number of reasons. While Founders At Work may not be a national bestseller, it has become very popular in the startup community (it currently ranks second on Amazon’s list of books in the ‘High-Tech’ category), so Bhatia’s claims may well have impacted DFJ. In the tight-knit Silicon Valley community, reputation is extremely important among VCs and such statements can be damaging, even if the events involved occurred well over a decade ago. The fact that Tim Draper was also apparently responsible for one of the elements that helped make Hotmail massively successful also serves to dispel the myth that most investors’ only contribution is money - clearly, the good ones have far more to offer. Livingston isn’t at liberty to share the evidence that led her to believe that Bhatia’s statements were false, but the fact that she wrote the blog post indicates that it is extremely compelling (authors don’t take such corrections lightly). It also sounds like Bhatia had previously requested that the statements in question be removed from future editions of the book, though he didn’t indicate that they were untrue (it sounds like his burnt bridges were coming back to haunt him). In a post on a message board, Livingston writes: Sabeer approved the interview before publication, but after the book was published he asked me to remove those parts if there was a second edition. He didn’t say specifically that the things he said were false, just that they hurt people’s feelings. (Many people in the book cut stuff out of their interviews, but usually because the material was controversial or confidential, not false.) But once I got evidence that what he said was actually false, it seemed appropriate to post a statement about it immediately. None of the other things people said in interviews were false that I'm aware of. Since leaving Hotmail, Bhatia has begun a number of other ventures, including Live Documents , an online Microsoft Office clone that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere fast. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Microsoft Quells Severance Firestorm, Lets Ex-Employees Keep Their Cash Top
On Saturday we published a letter sent out to some recently laid-off Microsoft employees explaining that they had been overpaid in severance - and that Microsoft wanted some of its money back. Something had clearly gone wrong during Microsoft’s first mass layoffs, as we began to receive more reports that ex-employees had gotten similar letters, and that some had actually been under paid. One original tipster has detailed how he felt when he initially got the notice: Right away I was angry because when I got my severance check, I immediately created a budget to stretch this out as long as possible. I know we’re in a recession now and I don’t know how long I’ll be unemployed. And now here comes this letter totally destroying the budget and on top of that, there’s no detailed information on how the error occurred, no details breaking down the severance pay. Microsoft initially refused to provide any details on the incident, instead stating that it was a “private matter between the company and the affected people”. And then the news began to spread. Since Saturday, well over 300 news outlets have covered the story. Many of them have deemed this to be a huge PR misstep, but it’s likely that Microsoft PR never even knew about the letter in the first place, and were only alerted to it after the fact. In any case, it’s clear that nobody ever considered how people would react if the letter leaked to the public. Today Microsoft has announced that it will allow the former employees to keep any overcompensation they were sent (with overpayments averaging around $4,500), and that those who were under-compensated would be paid in full immediately: Last week, 25 former Microsoft employees were informed that they were overpaid as a part of their severance payments from the company. This was a mistake on our part. We should have handled this situation in a more thoughtful manner. We are reaching out to those impacted to relay that we will not seek any payment from those individuals. While there was some speculation that the issue could have been widespread (perhaps extending to many of the 1,400 employees laid off on January 22nd) only around forty five people in total (including 20 who were underpaid) were affected by the billing issue. Each of them is being personally contacted by Microsoft HR chief Lisa Brummel. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
With Chernin Out At News Corp, What Happens To FIM? Top
Peter Chernin, the long-time president and COO of News Corp, is leaving the company after protracted negotiations over his contract could not be resolved. Chernin’s salary was $28.8 million in the last fiscal year, which was $1.3 million more than even Rupert Murdoch’s take-home pay. Chernin helped Murdoch build and oversee his vast media empire over the past 20 years, and his departure no doubt will raise all sorts of questions about the future of the company. He will be leaving when his current contract expires on June 30. For instance, what will happen to Fox Interactive Media (FIM)? This particular corner of the Murdoch empire is where News Corp keeps all of its Web businesses: MySpace, Photobucket, IGN, Scout, Chernin was its biggest supporter and internal sponsor. Peter Levinshon, the leader of FIM, was considered to be within Chernin’s camp. Although Chernin and Murdoch worked hand-in-hand, they are also very much opposites and a competitive rivalry always existed between the two. News Corp executives often identify with one boss or the other. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, for instance, is considered a Murdoch guy. With Chernin gone, perhaps this is as good a time as any to take another look at FIM and what purpose it serves. Its original purpose was almost as an internal M&A fund for Internet startups. But now those businesses have grown up. Other than MySpace, which contributes the vast majority of FIM’s revenues and profits, it is not really clear what the point of FIM is. Photobucket could just as easily be part of MySpace. And some of the other businesses could be integrated into other operating units, or sold off. The overhead of running FIM with all of those expensive lieutenants could be reduced as well. Investors would certainly like to see MySpace broken out as a separate business, instead of having to back out estimates of its performance based on FIM numbers as a whole. Complicating matters is that the employment contracts for MySpace founders DeWolfe and Tom Anderson are up for renewal later this year (each one reportedly makes $15 million a year). Would DeWolfe want to broaden his control to new fiefdoms within News Corp, or would he try to avoid taking on what appear to be deadweight businesses? Or maybe FIM just remains as it is: an anachronism within News Corp. (Photo by What Counts ). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 

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