Friday, February 13, 2009

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Microsoft Splits Up Zune Team, New Hardware Still Coming Though Top
When Microsoft started laying folks off in January, we were afraid the Zune might be directly affected ; it was. The big wigs at Redmond separated the Zune department into hardware and software teams. The bulk of the developers went into the software and services department where they are headed-up by the same suit that runs Microsoft's Mediaroom and Media Center TV businesses. Interestingly enough, the hardware geeks are now working with the WinMo guys. We kind of figured it would have been the other way around.
 
TechCrunch Roundtable At Mobile World Congress: Mobile 2.0 - Where Next? Top
TechCrunch is hosting a Roundtable and Meetup at Mobile World Congress on Thursday next week. “TechCrunchTalk: Mobile 2.0 - Where next?” at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona will feature an afternoon of panel discussions and some great evening networking with mobile startups and the investment community. The event will be live video streamed on TechCrunch. Please grab a ticket here. 2009 promises to be the year many of the predictions made about the rise of mobile may start to come true. Startups in the space are poised to take advantage of affordable mobile Internet access and sophisticated handsets like the iPhone. The question is, can they do it? That’s what TechCrunchTalk will seek to tease out from the assembled entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists that back them. TechCrunchTalk Mobile 2.0 will be at Hotel1898 Barcelona on Thursday 19th of February, 3pm-6.30pm, with networking over drinks till 9pm. Please contact our event organiser Petra Johansson on petra [at] twistedtree [dot] co [dot] uk for any enquiries about demo tables or sponsor packages. The topics will focused around a number of themes, including: - What will be the mobile trends over the coming year? - What are VC's looking for? - Can the power of the operators really be disrupted? - What value can be created in the mobile world in difficult economic times? To help us explore these questions we'll have on hand: Roundtable Discussion Davor Hebel, Fidelity Ventures Jean Schmitt, Sofinnova Peter Vesterbacka, Some Bazaar Bob Last, Taptu Marc Rougier, goojet.com Andrew Scott, Rummble (Two more to be confirmed) Roundtable Moderator: Mike Butcher, TechCrunch UK 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 Mobile startup ready to launch on February 19 and would like to give a demo, send a brief pitch to TechCrunch UK editor Mike Butcher . The event is currently sponsored by LiveCLIQ Inc. Other sponsors slots are still available. LiveCLIQ Inc. LiveCLIQ is a leading provider of 2-way, 3-screen Digital Media Streaming, able to stream network and user media on Mobile, Internet and TV platforms. The Company offers its hosted services to media properties, consumer brands and mobile carriers. LiveCLIQ’s user media site, www.livecliq.net, that enables people to stream live and recorded video from their mobile phones to public and community destinations on the web. LiveCLIQ’s Magellan interface provides a media overlay upon Google Earth in which geo-located media are displayed with user, title and tags enabling contextual media searches. The Company’s founders include product and business leaders from Apple, Microsoft Xbox, Netscape, Motorola and MobiTV. LiveCLIQ is based in San Francisco, California. In addition, we’ll be holding a series of TechCrunch events in Europe this Spring and Summer, all focused on bringing together and networking the European tech community. The week after Mobile World Congress is TechCrunchTalk in Paris . If you wish to be on the mailing list for information about all the up-coming events, sign up on our Amiando account here . And there is lots more information here . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Comeks Runs Out Of Cash, Seeks Buyer Top
This was one of the weirdest incoming pitches I’ve received in a while. Finnish startup Comeks , which I’d never heard of before, contacts us to tout its product, a nifty application that lets you generate funny cartoons based on the pictures on your phone and enables you to push them out to social networking services, and then casually lets us know they’re up for sale. I got in touch with co-founder and CEO Arto Viitanen, who told me the startup simply ran out of money, after raising €400,000 from Accel Partners about two years ago when the outlook for internet and mobile startups was way better than in the current economy. With the seed funding, the company produced a tool called Comeks Shorts , which lets you send visual SMS messages for the price of a normal SMS message. Last week, they added to that service “Fun Photo Blogger”, a tool that lets you create funny cartoons with available artwork (speech bubbles, add-on stickers etc.) in combination with your own pictures, both on the web and from your mobile device (with the help of custom applications for J2ME, the iPhone and Android). I tested Comeks on my iPhone ( App Store link ) and actually liked playing around with it. It’s pretty fun to mess with pictures from your photo gallery, and you can easily share cartoonized images to other sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr, which basically turns it into a (free) visual microblogging application. You can see a bunch of examples of that on Viitanen’s Tumblr blog . I have the feeling that the company was a bit too early for this type of thing, and that the story would have been different had they only started out now, even though it would have been virtually impossible to raise venture capital for it in the current climate. The startup attracted about 170,000 registered users to date, but Viitanen admits that many of them are not active. The team has been taking on other projects for the past 6 months to be able to keep paying the bills, but has no intention of pulling the plug out of the Comeks service just yet. They’ll keep the servers running for the thousands of users that still make use of the application, and meanwhile they’re looking for a buyer to step in and pick up development where they stopped. Hope springs eternal. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Y Combinator's AngelConf Teaches Would-Be Investors How To Get Started Top
It’s no secret that Silicon Valley is teeming with wealthy tech veterans, many of whom are eager to try their hand at angel funding a few new startups. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them are put off by the logistics of figuring out exactly what they’re supposed to do (handing out money isn’t as easy as it sounds). In light of this, Paul Graham and the team at Y Combinator are putting on a special event, dubbed AngelConf , that will bring together some of the Valley’s most prominent investors to tell these prospective Angels how it’s done - and hopefully help give a new wave of startups a chance to make it big. The event will be held on March 5th at Y Combinator’s office in Mountain View and will be free of charge, though you’ll need to request an invitation from its homepage . Graham believes that there are probably 100 times as many would-be angels who haven’t actually gotten around to investing as there are actual ones. He should know - he spent seven years after selling Viaweb before he started his Y Combinator incubator. And during the time since founding Y Combinator he’s also found that the number of startups emerging is directly related to the amount of angel funding available. Even a modest boost in the number of angel investors could be a boon to the startup community, especially in light of the economy. From the event’s homepage: Have you thought about investing in startups, but didn’t know how? You’re not alone. Investing in startups seems mysterious and difficult. How much are you supposed to invest? What legal agreements do you need? Where do you find startups to invest in? How do you pick winners? AngelConf was designed to answer these questions. Silicon Valley’s most prominent angels have generously agreed to spend an afternoon explaining the secrets of angel investing, from mundane matters like deal terms to questions we all still wonder about, like how to tell which startups will succeed. Here’s the roster for the event, which includes our own Michael Arrington: Paul Buchheit Jeff Clavier Ron Conway Paul Graham Dave McClure Mike Maples Ariel Poler Aydin Senkut Jim Young Andrea Zurek Michael Arrington Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
CamSpace Brings Wii-Like Interactivity To Flash Gaming Top
CamSpace , the innovative technology that allows gamers to use their computer cameras to play Wii-like games , has added support for Flash, making its platform accessible to a much broader range of developers (prior to today CamSpace was restricted to traditional .exe games). To get started, users will still have to download the CamSpace client here , which includes a few dozen games and will be adding more on a frequent basis (sorry Mac users, CamSpace is still Windows-only). CamSpace’s technology revolves around detecting up to four objects in real-time, and translating their movement and rotation into in-game actions. To get started, users are asked to activate their webcams with their objects out of frame for a few seconds, then they hold them in front of the camera briefly until the system recognizes them. Any object will do, provided it is bright and has a near-uniform color (we used highlighters), and the tracking seems to work very well provided there’s adequate light. While many Flash games probably wouldn’t work with CamSpace, some of them translate surprisingly well. For example, the classic ‘Kick-Ups’ game that involves clicking on a soccer ball with your mouse to keep it bouncing in the air is very fun and addictive - I spent far longer testing it than I needed to, and looked a little ridiculous in the process as I waved a highlighter wildly trying to get the ball to stay up. CamSpace isn’t the first system to merge video with gameplay (I recall the PS2’s EyeToy did something similar if a little more basic, though it never really seemed to catch on). But it works surprisingly well and only takes a few minutes to install. That said, it still needs some work - the interface can be confusing, and the fact that it is still Windows-only is frustrating (though a Mac version is on the way). Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Google Pulls The Plug On Its Radio Ads; Retreats To What It Knows Best Top
Google is pulling the plug on its Google Audio Ads and Adsense for Audio products, and is looking to sell off its Google Radio Automation software business. The moves come less than a month after the company decided to stop selling print ads , another experiment to expand beyond Web advertising that went nowhere. Google expects to lay off as many as 40 people as a result of exiting the broadcast radio advertising business. We’ve added teh number to our Layoff Tracker . It also marks the failure of Google’s $102 million acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting two years ago, which formed the basis of these businesses. The dMarc deal could have been worth as much as $1.13 billion if the business hit certain milestones. But radio stations and the companies that own them never gave Google the advertising inventory it needed to make it a real business, despite Google’s outright attempts to buy market share . You’ve got to wonder whether dMarc would have made more inroads on its own had it not sold to Google. As it was, fear of Google’s growing power no doubt played a role in the lack of cooperation from the radio industry. And in this environment, even Google can’t fund money-losing projects forever. So it decided to take its marbles and go home, staying in the audio ad business only as it applies to streaming audio on the Internet. Google says it will still continue to pursue its dreams of serving better TV ads , but it is not clear Google is making much progress on that front either. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Rules of Engagement: Users Are Spending More Time On MySpace Top
We’ve dug a little deeper into today’s latest set of Comscore data. As we noted earlier today, Facebook continues to show tremendous growth, and may well catch up to MySpace in terms of U.S. unique visitors by 2010. But another interesting trend, and one that is important to advertisers, are the increases in engagement both networks have seen over the past year - a metric that MySpace has been building a firm lead in. Since last month, MySpace saw the number of minutes each U.S. user spent on the site per month grow 15%, to 266.3 minutes - a new record for the social network, and a 31% increase since last January. Facebook has also shown an increase over the last month, growing 4% since December to an average of 176.6 minutes per user, but has only grown around 3% year over year. And MySpace is still besting Facebook by around 90 minutes per user. As the graph below shows, MySpace has had the advantage here for quite a while, but the recent spike is likely due to the site’s launch of MySpace Music, as well as growth in MySpace Video . In the struggling economy people are spending more time at home, which tends to benefit these media-heavy sites. Page views are also up for both social networks, at least in the short term. MySpace’s page views are up nearly 10% since December to 579 pages per user per month, while Facebook has grown around 3% in the same time period to 337. Figures for both sites are smaller than they were a year ago, likely because they have both been introducing UI improvements like AJAX that don’t force users to refresh their page for every action. Such improvements generally help with lengthening visits as users are less likely to get frustrated, but they also lead to deflated page views. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
YouTube Hopes To Boost Revenue With Video Downloads Top
YouTube took a step towards monetization by allowing partners to charge users for downloads. In this “test” initiative, selected YouTube partners can offer their video downloads for free or for a fee (determined by the partner) paid through Google Checkout. Most videos in the test are currently charging about $1 each. The partner can also decide how the downloadable video will be licensed to the user - whether it will be restricted to a private non-commercial use video, or whether it can be used under Creative Commons. YouTube’s university partners, which include Stanford, Duke and UC Berkeley, are also testing free downloads of lectures and events. And a small group of YouTube partners (YouTube mentioned partners khanacademy, householdhacker and pogobat in their blog post) are using the test offer as a revenue generation and distribution tool. This initiative would also allow users to access videos offline. YouTube is a innovative product but very expensive and not profitable. Everyone knows that Google has been looking for ways to make money from YouTube, especially in a struggling economy, and it looks like as thought they are flirting with this option as a revenue generator. Google has rolled out several ways to generate revenue, including through YouTubevertorials , selling search results , and ad revenues from big content partners . Google hasn’t indicated how much YouTube would be making from this partnership but we assume that they are hoping to make some cut from this down the line. YouTube is soliciting applications from partners to collaborate on the pilot partnership, but it is restricted to US-based partners only. Will this work? We have a huge amount of traffic to our YouTube download tool so that may be an indication that this new venture could work out to Google’s advantage. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
VoxPop.TV Creates Pop Culture Games For The Masses Top
Ever seen a pop culture clickable game on MTV or Entertainment Weekly asking you to predict and vote on who is going to be a winner in a latest awards show? Or asking you to vote on who is hotter, Beyonce or Britney? Chances are the game was made by San Francisco start-up VoxPop.TV . The under-the-radar VoxPop.tv (the company’s services were launched in 2007) is tapping into a relatively niche market by creating pop culture contextual games for publishers like Entertainment Weekly , E! Online , and Maxim . Unlike traditional casual games, these highly contextual and sometimes ad-supported games are based on opinions and predictions on topics and current events (like the Oscars or the Grammy awards). Games range from an E! Online game on what celebrity wore the best outfit to an awards show to picking brackets for March Madness at NCAA.com . VoxPop has turned the games into free, shareable widgets for anyone to post on a blog, social networking site or website, and users can even create a “game lobby” of sorts by adding multiple games to a page. Users are able find games through VoxPop’s own Game Lobby or through publisher sites like Entertainment Weekly or BillBoard. VoxPop seems to be creating a solid revenue base from creating both ad-sponsored games for publishers and publisher-sponsored games. The turnaround for a game is around an hour, so VoxPop can create a “Who wore it best” game for the Oscars for a publisher and post it by the end of the awards show. And VoxPop hasn’t seen much of a dropoff in sales with the economic downturn. The company said that publishers have less staff and less content and are looking for online games, like VoxPop’s applications, to fill content. There doesn’t seem to be another company doing this niche work out there; and VoxPop said its main competitors are the in-house capabilities of publishers. But VoxPop says creating a pop culture games in-house can be costly and time-intensive. We recently wrote about Heyzap , another online gaming start-up hoping to break into the digital space. VoxPop’s co-founders, Mike Derezin, Bill Armistead, and Michael Hoffman, said the hardest battle was forming partnerships with publishers. Word-of-mouth publicity has helped tremendously, they added. VoxPop received around $2 million in series A funding from True Ventures in 2007 and currently creates close 60 new games a month. The company is hoping to create even more innovative games down the line and wants to offer self-service game production to publishers in the future. Here’s a sample game and screenshot: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Looks Like Facebook Just Took The Top Spot Among Social Media Sites Top
This past December we reported on how Facebook was coming up on Blogger to steal its top spot among social media sites when measured by total unique visitors worldwide. Now, it appears as though Facebook has finally done it. Data from comScore , which unfortunately goes only through December 2008, shows how Facebook’s visitors (221 million) basically matched Blogger’s (225.5 million) by the end of the year. That’s a gap of just 4.5 million versus the gap of 21 million that existed in November. Assuming Facebook’s upward trend continued in January (and Blogger’s remained flat), the social network sits on top of the roost now. Facebook stands out from the others not only because it’s the most popular; it’s also the only one showing consistently healthy growth. Chris DeWolf in a recent interview with Charlie Rose said how he doesn’t expect Facebook to pass MySpace by 2010 in terms of U.S. unique visitors (as we’ve predicted in the past). But that prospect is still inching towards reality, as shown by the graph below. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Fav.or.it Closes Funding Round For Corporates To Track Your Blogs And Comments - And Reply Top
Blogs and commenting aggregator fav.or.it has closed a new round of funding close to $710,00 from an angel round taking their total funding to date to around $1.5m. The UK-based startup is also launching a about to launch a new property, FeedBroker.net . This separates some of its functionality into a new site which would allow for licensing RSS feeds external to any other site, including fav.or.it, and send the lion-share of ad-revenue back to content owners - not unlike what Feedburner was supposed to do but never quite got around to it. Launched in beta in October 2007 and public from June last year, the site - with perhaps the most annoying URL known to man, but hey… - aggregates content from thousands of blogs and websites and streams them into a network of vertical channels. In this respect it’s not unlike a bunch of Google News Channels but the difference is logged-in users can comment on fav.or.it’s platform and the comments will appear on the original blog . Disqus already makes use of Fav.or.it's full API for commenting, for instance. Thus fav.or.it has been compared to “commenting systems” like CoComment , SezWho , Tangler , and Intense Debate . But it’s now expanding beyond this to allow brands to pay for channels that aggregate the conversation around their brand/product and use it to engage with customers. Think of it as a centralised command and control system. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Why We Often Write About Twitter And Will Continue To Do So Top
As most of you readers know, we regularly cover stuff related to Twitter over here on TechCrunch. When we do, we often get bashed by people in comments for writing about the startup and the slew of applications that make use of the Twitter API so much. Sometimes we’ll get e-mails and - ironically - messages on Twitter from people who are downright angry or disappointed in us for doing that. So we wanted to take some time to explain why that’s the case, and why you’re likely going to continue reading about them on this blog. We should note that this post was fueled by Allen Stern from Centernetworks, who published an article yesterday about why he doesn’t write about Twitter every day that hit Techmeme shortly after. For the record: we don’t write about Twitter related news and applications every single day, just more often than most startups. Also, we’re not the only ones doing that (ReadWriteWeb, for example, had three posts related to Twitter up yesterday, four if you count the Ginx coverage too). So why is that? I’ll tell you why it isn’t first. It’s most definitely not because Twitter is currently the hot Silicon Valley startup with known faces running and backing it, because they raised millions in funding or because they almost got bought by Facebook for much more money than was invested in them. Heck, I work and live thousands and miles away from San Francisco and I don’t know any of the people tied to Twitter well enough to be biased because I would have a blind spot somewhere. But I am an avid Twitter user, and I see its value and potential growing every day. We all do here at TechCrunch. We see an ecosystem of developers swarming around the Twitter API like moths around a flame, and the quality of applications that come out of that ecosystem is limited only by their creators’ imagination (well not really, but you get the point). We receive e-mails in our tips inbox and profile submissions almost daily about Twitter related tools, and most of the time we take a mental note but don’t write about them. But sometimes something resonates with us and we want to share that with you. Why would you expect us to write about small startups getting seed funding (most recently FrugalMechanic , Diddit , Pollsb and Tvinci ) but not if it’s for a Twitter desktop application ( TweetDeck )? Why would you want us to cover e-commerce related startups ( WujWuj ) but not if it’s tied to Twitter ( TwtQpon , Dell , Tweba )? Why wouldn’t Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey joining Ustream.tv as an advisor constitute as tech news? And ask yourself: if all the talk about Twitter’s business model is so irrelevant, why does a post about its potential revenue-generating plans garner 175+ comments (and counting)? If nobody cares about Twitter, then why does a Kevin Rose guest post on how to get more followers trigger no less than 365 people to share their thoughts in comments? If it’s the Twitter downtime posts that bother you (just yesterday, it was out for about an hour ), why not just skip reading them? It’s not like the titles are misleading or anything. Point is, Twitter has grown into far more than just a messaging or status updating service, and anyone who really uses it or develops for it knows that. It’s where news gets broken and what more and more celebrities openly turn to to start getting social with the community. It’s an almost perfect crowdsourced Q&A tool. It’s a place where companies can do business while people can choose to engage only with their peers instead. It triggers and support the organization of worldwide charity events (e.g. today’s Twestival ). Basically, it’s as social as social networking services can get. And it’s still growing like a weed , too. That is why we like Twitter, and why we don’t intend to stop writing about it anytime soon (and we’ll mix the positive with the negative too). You have the comment section to give your opinion, as usual, but try and keep it classy. By the way, you can follow TechCrunch on Twitter (with the occasional update from Mike Arrington) as well as TechCrunch UK , Crunchgear and Crunchbase , and these are our individual accounts: Erick Schonfeld , Jason Kincaid , Mark Hendrickson , Leena Rao , Mike Butcher , Roi Carthy , Steve Gillmor , Serkan Toto , Henry Work , John Biggs , Greg Kumparak , Asad Akbar , Peter Ha and myself ( Robin Wauters ). (Image from Darkmotion - no link because the original image contains a word that is offensive to many) Update: our sincere apologies to all who were offended by the original image that we took from another blog, we genuinely didn’t notice that there was such an offensive word on it until 30 seconds after we published. Obviously, it still got caught by some RSS readers, so again, we’re sorry. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Nightlife Application Breaks Away From Facebook, Tries To Stand On Its Own Two Feet Top
The Scene , a new social network geared towards improving your nightlife, is making its public debut at the Twiistup 5 event in Santa Monica, CA today. After three months in beta, the company is announcing the seed round of funding it has raised from Velocity Interactive Group and angel investor Marko Babic. An iPhone application (for when you’re stumbling around the streets at 1:00am looking for the next bar) has also been released. The Scene has a strong “let’s go out to a club and get drunk” vibe to it (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But it makes me wonder how many people who have this urge will actually boot up their computers and start planning out the best way to go about it, let alone carry the iPhone app around in their pockets and post updates to the site as their nights go on. The founders - four graduates from the University of California at Berkeley - obviously felt the need to create a whole new site around this idea, one that could possibly supplant MySpace as the most party-inclined social network around. The Scene started off as an application on Facebook called TheBarBook , which currently has about 6,250 monthly active users (although the company claims it has over 150,000 total users). It’s previous incarnation as a Facebook app shows through clearly in the new site’s design. Many elements, such as the Wall-like area called “My Feed” that displays prominently on the homepage, were blatantly recreated from Facebook. Things to do on the site include sharing your status, adding photos, creating events, viewing profiles, and making friends. The Scene is also a lot like Yelp, with a near identical set of search boxes at the top of each page that asks you what type of establishment you want to search for and where. Each bar, club and lounge in your area is given its own profile page where users can post quick notes (effectively mini-reviews) and add their own events. Perhaps most usefully, each venue page also shows a list of related places under the header “People Who Go Here Also Go To”. And you can see everyone else enjoys your favorite dive bar under a list simply called “People Who Go Here”. One thing I’d recommend to the team behind The Scene is to open up user profiles. Whenever I click on someone’s avatar, it takes me to a page where I’m abruptly informed that I can’t see the person’s information because I’m not friends with them. This is too much like Facebook where it needs to be a lot more like MySpace. After all, half the point of going out at night is to meet other people who like to have fun, too. Addendum: I should note that The Scene isn’t the first social network to try translating social network activity directly into real-world experiences. College Tonight tried to convince college students to “get up and get out” (but not via Facebook) and failed spectacularly. It’s still trying under a new name but appears to have been forced into side services like college merchandise sales. Update: Co-founder Erik Ober has since pointed out that one of the reasons they decided to leave Facebook and build their own site was “due to Facebook’s platform restrictions”. And he explains that TheBarBook’s current low usage numbers are a result of having not worked on the app since last summer and migrating the app’s users to The Scene. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Skyfire Bumped Up To v0.9, Learns To Be Social Top
Skyfire , a mobile browser for Windows Mobile and S60 which quickly became a favorite around these parts for its abilities to playback Flash video and a number of other rich media formats, has just gotten the update treatment. While it brings the obligatory bug fixes and optimizations that any pre-1.0 release should, the biggest new feature is what they’re calling the “real-time activity wall”, which is essentially an aggregator for RSS feeds, Facebook, and Twitter. It comes preloaded with Digg, ESPN, Google News, Hulu, YouTube and Yahoo! News, but adding in new feeds is a matter of 3 or 4 clicks. Once you’ve plugged in your Facebook/Twitter account info, you can change your status directly from the reader. Facebook and Twitter clients are nothing new - especially in the mobile realm. There are countless varieties. The primary benefit of it being in the browser, however, is sharing: if you’ve stumbled across a new page you want to tweet about, you can do so directly from the “Share” menu. No copying and pasting URLs or, worse yet, retyping them. Also new in this release is WVGA and WQVGA support - so if you’re toting around a Samsung Omnia or an Xperia X1, Skyfire now plays friendly with your handset. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Innovative iPhone Developer Smule Raises $3.9 Million Top
Smule is one of our favorite iPhone developers - besides putting together ridiculously addictive apps like Ocarina ( iTunes Link ), the team is also especially adept at tapping into the iPhone’s network effect , even on something as basic as a virtual lighter . Today, the company has announced that it has closed a $3.9 million funding round led by Granite Ventures, with Bessemer Venture Partners, Maples Investments, and Jeffrey C. Smith (the company’s co-founder and CEO) also participating. The company combines the talents of Smith, an experienced entrepreneur, with Dr. Ge Wang , an Assistant Professor at Stanford’s Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (who is the company’s other co-founder). Wang is partially responsible for the development of ChucK , an “on-the-fly audio programming language” that allows Smule’s apps to create and transmit realistic music over the iPhone’s network connection. Wang also conducts the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (video here ), and the Smule Ocarina orchestra, which played at this year’s Crunchie awards (video here ). Some of Smule’s other applications include Zephyr , a interesting app that combines audio and visual effects to respond to your touch, and Sonic Vox , a voice shifter. Overall Smule’s apps have gained over 1 million users. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Mixx Still Growing (But Not Fast Enough), Relaunches Website Top
Mixx is steadily growing, and they’re hoping to spur even greater traffic increases with a completely revamped website. But every social news service is showing growth, and Mixx actually appears to be lagging if you compare publicly available data. Last time we wrote about Mixx, they were touting healthy traffic numbers and boasting the fact that Hitwise report suggested that its users are more mainstream than those of their main competitor Digg . Today, the company says its visitor numbers have increased to about 7 million per month (citing January figures), which is up from 5.8 million in October 2008. Meanwhile, all the big social news and discovery services are showing healthy growth, and Mixx appears to still play in the minor leagues. Take a look at this snapshot from Compete , for example, which show Digg is thriving and Reddit is steadily outpacing Mixx. Google Trends paints a slightly different picture but still pegs Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon to be more popular than Mixx. Quantcast , finally, says Mixx receives about a 1/5 of the amount of visitors Digg does. For the sake of comparison: Mixx raised $3.5 million in funding so far, while Digg pocketed $40 million to date. Mixx is launching a new website today to better serve their existing users, which they claim have provided all the feedback that was used to put together the revamped web presence. We’ll let you be the judge ( more info here ): Old Mixx New Mixx   CrunchBase Information Mixx Digg Reddit Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Yammer Aims To Bring Microsharing Inside Corporate Firewalls Top
Later today at the LA Twiistup event, the makers of Twitter-for-business application Yammer will announce a new, hosted version of its software that will enable companies to install it inside their corporate firewall. This was an inevitable move for the venture-backed startup to make if it wanted to expand its reach to larger companies who have security policies in place that would prevent users from communicating via the internet (something the normal SaaS version requires). Customers will be able to switch back and forth from the SaaS version to the hosted one, since Yammer promises to transfer network information between both versions upon request. Pricing is $12 per seat per year, although the company says it will change its pricing according to the size and scope of its customers. The Yammer software can be installed on top of existing infrastructure and comes with a licensing agreement and support contract. On a sidenote, Yammer has recently announced that it has open-sourced its iPhone application . The documentation can be found on GitHub . Yammer was the overall winner of the TechCrunch50 conference and recently raised a $5 million round of funding . We’re quite happily using it internally here at TechCrunch, although it’s had its uptime problems before. And if I can quickly slip in a feature request to the team: please add presence status updates for people in the network! Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Google Buys … A Paper Mill? Top
Consider it a sign of the times when internet company Google acquires the buildings and premises of a mill site from a paper, packaging and forest products company that caters to the print industry. Today, Finland-based paper group Stora Enso has announced that Google is buying the buildings and most of the Summa Mill site, where production of paper was ceased last month in January 2008, for approximately €40 million ($51.7 million). From the press release: Stora Enso has signed an agreement to sell the buildings and most of the Summa Mill site in Finland to Google Group of Companies for approximately EUR 40 million.The sale is expected to close by the end of the first quarter 2009. The transaction will improve operating profit by approximately EUR 38 million, of which approximately EUR 15 million is a reversal of earlier impairment, and will be recorded as a non-recurring item in the first quarter 2009 results. Google is expected to announce its plans or future investment “in due course”, and has agreed that part of the mill site will be further transferred to the City of Hamina for other industrial uses. Update: obviously the space is most likely going to serve as a data center, which has now also been confirmed by Reuters . An earlier (brutally honest) press release from Stora Enso reveals that the mill site was closed down because of “persistent losses in recent years and poor long-term profitability prospects” It continues: “Despite tremendous efforts by its employees, the mill cannot compete in today’s and tomorrow’s markets using expensive virgin wood fibre, much of which is imported”. You can read the whole release about further cost reductions and lay-offs here . (Thanks to Jens Agerberg for the tip) Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
The AP Reveals Details of Facebook/ConnectU Settlement With Greatest Hack Ever Top
This is almost too good to be true. The Associated Press has uncovered the details of the Facebook/ConnectU settlement using, of all things, copy and paste. After taking drastic preventative measures to keep the settlement confidential, including barring reporters from the courtroom and redacting portions of the documents, Facebook has been foiled by the most laughable lull in security I’ve heard of: Large portions of that hearing are redacted in a transcript of the June hearing, but The Associated Press was able to read the blacked-out portions by copying from an electronic version of the document and pasting the results into another document. Read that again. Just, wow. Now for the juicy details: The document reveals that Facebook’s internal valuation of the company is $3.7 billion, or $8.88 per share - far less than the $15 billion implied valuation established by the Microsoft investment in 2007 (though this comes as no surprise, as a value around $4 billion has been rumored for months). Under their settlement, Facebook agreed to pay ConnectU $20 million in cash and 1,253,326 shares of common stock. The stock was worth $45 million, based on the Microsoft valuation, but only $11 million under Facebook’s own appraisal. Something worth noting from these figures: Facebook paid out $20 million in cash, but only around $11 million in stock based on its own valuation (when the news of the supposed $65 million settlement was revealed yesterday by a lawfirm’s advertisement, many speculated that it was primarily in stock). The high cash value (at least compared to the stock) may indicate that the ConnectU founders really did have some compelling evidence in their case. Then again, $20 million in cash is still fairly insignificant to Facebook - it may have well been worth paying even if there was no damning evidence given that it was supposed to make the case go away forever. So much for that. Via Techmeme . Update : If you’d like to see the full text for yourself, you can find the PDF of the relevant document here . It appears that the issue is tied to the PDF, as the ‘copy/paste’ trick works with this document. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 

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