Saturday, March 7, 2009

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Eric Schmidt Tells Charlie Rose Google Is "Unlikely" To Buy Twitter And Wants To Turn Phones Into TVs Top
It must be Google Week on Charlie Rose. Thursday, Rose interviewed product chief Marissa Mayer , and last night he had an hour-long conversation with CEO Eric Schmidt (embedded here, with a full transcript below). The wide-ranging interview touches upon everything from Google’s origins and how it fell upon its advertising business model by accident to how search and other technologies will change society over the next twenty years. Asked if Google wants to buy Twitter, Schmdit responded: “We’re unlikely to buy anything in the short term partly because I think prices are still high.” And echoing Mayer’s earlier enthusiasm for all things mobile, Schmidt painted a picture of Android-powered devices turning into TVs (and disrupting the current TV model): It’s worth noting, by the way, that if you imagine the power of these mobile devices over a five or 10 year period, they must be possible to do almost everything that we do today with other means . . . . It should be possible to watch television and watch your show routinely on these devices, in very high quality. The technology is just getting there. And when that occurs, it’s a different experience because it’s a personal experience. When I turn on the television, it shows the same shows that I saw yesterday and I watch them and it doesn’t know that I watched them yesterday. What a foolish television. Why is it not smarter? Below is the full transcript, with sections bolded for emphasis (I particularly love the story about how Bill Joy uses search to find new investment opportunities) Transcript : Charlie Rose: Let’s just go back and do a quick history of Google. 1995, Sergey and Larry started, and they create this search engine working at Stanford. How did they get you involved in 2001? Eric Schmidt: Well, Larry and Sergey invented the algorithms, the lessons, if you will, the way our search works today when they were very young and in graduate school. And they founded Google and eventually needed some additional management help, and there was a search that ultimately I got connected to them through one of our board members, John Doar [spelled phonetically]. From my perspective, most of what you see at Google today was invented at Stanford by graduate students. And a lot of the culture, the way we operate is really derived from that culture. Charlie Rose: Your background, though, was as a technologist. Eric Schmidt: That’s correct. Charlie Rose: You’ve been head of technology for Sun Microsystems, you’ve been a CEO. Eric Schmidt: Yeah, and I see myself mostly as a technologist who happens to run a business. Charlie Rose: What was the original mission for Google? Eric Schmidt: All the world’s information universally accessible and useful. Charlie Rose: And how are we doing on that? Eric Schmidt: Well, we have just started. And I will tell you that when you’re 23 years old, and you state that’s your mission, you’ve got a lot of years ahead of you. And Larry and Sergey still have a long way to go on that. Charlie Rose: This is what I’ve always wanted to wonder. I’m told this is true that in the beginning, what you were going to do was sell to people the search technology. We’ll sell this to you, and then you can do search. Eric Schmidt: The first model was just this is an amazing new invention, this ability to search information. And at the time, the web was not so complicated. It wasn’t as obvious that search would be needed because it wasn’t that big. You could sort of look and find things, and you knew people. So Larry and Sergey went around to all of the then powerful internet companies. And every one of them turned them down. Charlie Rose: Saying what? Eric Schmidt: We have a better solution. We don’t know how to work with you. You’re too young, that sort of thing. Charlie Rose: Entrepreneurs have gone through this — there’s not an entrepreneur alive who hasn’t gone to somebody and say good luck, not for me. Eric Schmidt: There’s a rule in – Charlie Rose: Including bankers. Eric Schmidt: The rules in social [spelled phonetically] value that the great entrepreneurs break out early. And I think you see that. And I think part of the reason that occurs is because of the educational system in America with graduate students and young faculty, it’s very, very productive. So you get people right out of college, you get them into a graduate program, and they invent something, and they — all the world is in front of them, and they go for it. It’s one of the greatest aspects of America. Charlie Rose: Well, who decided — what smart person decided that rather than selling the technology we’ll just sell advertising? Eric Schmidt: Well, the initial attempts didn’t work because they heard no, no and no. Meanwhile the money is kind of running out and they’re getting kind of nervous. So they came up with a simple advertising model which one of the engineers invented that worked pretty well. And the small team at the time managed to get a couple of deals. When I showed up, that product was fixed in price and the — Google had invented a dynamic system that ultimately became our product called AdWords. And I remember walking to the very young program manager whose name is Salar [spelled phonetically], who looked to me to be about 21 years old. I had just joined, and I said, promise me our revenues are not going to go down by a factor of ten when your brilliant new product comes out. He said, it’s going to go up by a factor of ten. And I said, no, you know. And indeed he was right. Charlie Rose: And advertising is now, what, 90 percent of the revenue? Eric Schmidt: 98 percent. Charlie Rose: 98 percent. So advertising – [talking simultaneously] Charlie Rose: [unintelligible] been very, very good to Google. Eric Schmidt: We are an advertising company. And you can think of Google as two parts of the company. You can think of it as a user phenomenon and our prime area focus by the way is on end users and solving their needs. And you can also think of it as a business in which case it’s an advertising business. Charlie Rose: Today Google does many things. I mean searches is its primary thing, but you — you created e-mail, Google news. Eric Schmidt: We started off with search. And the early founding team, Larry and Sergey and the initial team invented the advertising model which has done so we will for us. On April 1 of 2004, we introduced our first application which was called Gmail. And at the time, people thought it was an April fool’s joke. We sort of played with that, but it was part of our character. And today we say our strategy is search, ads and apps. Charlie Rose: Search, ads and apps. Eric Schmidt: Ads and apps. And applications they’d make your life better. And we have the ability now because we have so many people using Google to really change the way they use computers and the way this material — the term of art is now called cloud computer. And the idea is to let the computer take care of all the details. All you do is just use it. It’s always there. Google or someone else keeps the information. We don’t lose it, we don’t break it. It doesn’t get viruses, that sort of thing. Charlie Rose: Applications. You have this thing at Google where you can take a day off of each week or 20 percent of your time, say, out of 100 percent, five days, one day, and you can work on anything you want to. How much of that has led to interesting, productive profitable applications? Eric Schmidt: We think the 20 percent time is really the only way we’ve been able to maintain our innovation as we have gotten larger. What normally happens with technology companies is the initial founding team gets older, you bring in traditional management, and although it becomes a better managed company, much of the creativity and the flair and the joy did get lost in the process. By establishing the principal that engineers could spend 20 percent of their time working on whatever they found interesting, we created a culture where there’s this constant flow of innovation. Literally every day there’s another fun surprise. Now, before we get too excited about the 20 percent time, these are engineers. They don’t vary that far from their area of interest. But it gives them an opportunity – Charlie Rose: They’re not finding a cure for cancer. They’re looking at – Eric Schmidt: By the way, if they did, we’d be very excited about it. But what there really doing is they’re saying, in my space, I see all of these new technologies. And there’s a new problem that I see that I want to apply this stuff to. And that’s how the innovation works. Charlie Rose: You also bought YouTube. You have Google news. We’re in a time now, and we’re going to talk a lot about the economy in this conversation because of the roles you have. Acquisitions come up. People are excited these days, the lost several months about Twitter. Does Google want to buy Twitter. Eric Schmidt: I shouldn’t talk about specific acquisitions. We’re unlikely to buy anything in the short term partly because I think prices are still high. And it’s unfortunate I think we’re in the middle of a cycle. Google is generating a lot of cash. And so we keep that cash in extremely secure banks. Charlie Rose: Right. Eric Schmidt: And we’ll wait that out. From our perspective, I think the YouTube application and the DoubleClick acquisition which are the two large ones we did last year and the year before, have been phenomenally successful. Charlie Rose: YouTube has been fueled by user generated. People did it with their cameras. How much of a phenomenon is that going to be in the future of the internet? Eric Schmidt: We think it will be one of the most defining aspects of the internet. Because if you think about it, everybody has phones and every phone has a still camera, and every one of those phones is going to have a movie camera pretty soon. And indeed if you think about it, a lot of the news that you see you’ll see some phone camera video of low quality. Well, five years from now, those will be very high quality videos as the technology gets better. And the joke is that the vast majority of photographs now taken are kept in people’s phones because they can’t get them out of them. Charlie Rose: They can take the picture, but they don’t know what to do with it. Eric Schmidt: So we’re working to solve all those problems. The important thing here is that the phenomenon of user generated content of which YouTube is an example is I think the defining expression of humanity over the next 10 to 20 years. We had no idea that all these things were going on because there was no way to see them. And now if you have someone who is being taken advantage of or abused or put into an inappropriate position, what have you, they can take a picture. They can record what the police are doing in an – [talking simultaneously] Eric Schmidt: There’s a lot of implications. Charlie Rose: Speak to that. Eric Schmidt: Well, the most interesting thing to me is that transparency is how you keep societies honest. And we’ve now because of the internet and because of the digital revolution given people — we’ve essentially given them the ability to see everything. So you can now take photographs, take videos of everything you see in your world and people discover it. And there are whole communities of people who are interested in these kinds of aspects. And they serve as a form of check and balance on the powerful, the rich, the people who might exploit others. It doesn’t necessarily mean for a different outcome, but it means that everybody can’t hide. They have to actually tell the truth. To me, that’s a great step forward. Charlie Rose: And how would it affect politics? Eric Schmidt: Well, there are many ways. Today, if you talk to politicians, a simple story is that in 2006, the house went Democratic. The senate went to Democratic because of a race in Virginia which involves an unfortunate video on YouTube of a Republican candidate losing to a Democratic candidate and on the Democratic side there was another example, there was a video of one of the congressional people in the Abscan [spelled phonetically] scandal, which many people have forgotten. Yet the video brought back those memories and affected the outcome of a Democratic race, an equal opportunity technology. The important point here is that politicians today are well aware of YouTube and its phenomena and they’re more careful. And being more careful is probably good. Indeed, if they are going off and saying things to small audiences, and they go to other audiences saying something very different, I want to know that as a viewer. There are many things as you can imagine in the future. The one I like the most is the politicians BS detector, where basically the — Google is sitting there, and the politician says something, and you can type it in, that’s true or false. Charlie Rose: Yeah. Eric Schmidt: You can decide if you want to leave or cheer. Charlie Rose: It also has this ramification too. People on the Internet now who may have information, if they know something is going on, an investigation by an journalistic organization, it can hold them accountable too. Somebody may have information that some facts used in the journalists report were not true because they have better information or they have information that contradicts. What happens as a result is it’s very difficult now to use completely false statements to inflame the public. You can take the facts you can twist them in the way you see fit, but your facts have to be right. That’s probably a big improvement in governance. Charlie Rose: It also helped then Senator Obama had a difficult moment during the Pennsylvania primary when he went to San Francisco to raise some money. Somebody was in there with a phone and recorded some [inaudible]. Mobile devices will play what role in the future sort of evolution have technology? Eric Schmidt: They’re probably the most important of all. Today, everyone here in the audience has a mobile phone. It’s the last thing you would leave anywhere, head phone, has a GPS, knows where it is. The powerful mobile phones have powerful browsers. They have cameras, as we’ve discussed before. You can do a lot with them. Fast forward a few years from now with the content and the capability of that with a new generation of applications. We expect eventually that the important of uses of the Internet will be on mobile phones. Mobile phone usage is growing faster than personal
 
More Bad News For Online Music Fans: Economy Kills Fabchannel Top
Amsterdam-based online concert destination site Fabchannel is calling it quits after 9 years of digital goodness, blaming the poor state of the economy as a whole and the crisis in the online music and advertising industries in particular. This is the official press release: FABCHANNEL STOPS ITS ACTIVITIES Online concert channel Fabchannel.com ceases its activities as of today, due to bad economic prospects within the music and online advertising market. During the last nine years, Fabchannel have been successfully promoting concert recordings of national and international artists online among a large international audience. The Fabchannel business model bases itself on two essential ingredients: international streaming rights and international advertising/sponsoring revenue. After a substantial investment in 2007, Fabchannel has been focusing fully on increasing its reach among the international audience and the development and implementation of online advertising formats and partnerships. After an energetic start in 2008 with the introduction of video commercials on Fabchannel.com, media partnerships with renowned news sites like nu.nl and Spiegel.de as well as signing a worldwide partnership with Universal Music Group, in the last few months it has been getting ever more difficult to reach the set targets. The audience has not increased as planned, mostly due to the majority of major record labels giving no consent to record their artists. At the same time, the online advertising and sponsoring market has been put under big pressure due to decreasing budgets of advertisers and sponsors. The management and shareholders of Fabchannel expect that this situation is not going to change during the next years. Therefore, they have jointly taken the decision to stop all activities in order to avoid getting into financial problems and, for example, lose the possibility to use the archive they have been building in the future. Fabchannel's concert archive will go offline on Friday 13 March. During the upcoming months, Fabchannel will strive to make suitable arrangements with employees, customers and suppliers. We’re very sad they won’t be around anymore soon and that we have to put this one in the deadpool , but that’s just the way it goes. (Thank to Robbert van Geldrop for the tip) Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Twitter To Start Serving Local News To Users? Top
Germany’s Der Spiegel published an interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams yesterday on its website, and Williams had a couple of interesting things to say. You can find a poorly Google-translated version of the interview here , which features Williams answering the usual, boring questions ‘professional’ journalists tend to ask about the micro-sharing service (the reporter opened the interview with the Pulitzer-prize caliber question “so does Twitter spark narcissism and idiocy?”). But Williams did share something worth noting at the end of the interview. When asked about possible future features for Twitter, he reportedly said that one of the things being considered is an extension that lets people know what’s happening in their immediate vicinity. That would basically mean that Twitter could actively ping users about local events that are going on in their neighborhood, in real-time, based on the location they’ve indicated. As an example, Williams says users could be alerted to the fact a fire is burning a few streets away from where Twitter knows (or thinks) they are. It’s not clear if this feature is under development or merely in the idea stage right now, but rarely does anyone from Twitter give so much insight into the startup’s plans for the future in terms of product features, so we’re inclined to believe it’s coming sooner rather than later. Some questions arise. How frequently would Twitter ping users on local news? In what form (replies, direct messages, SMS, …)? How personalized would this be (what constitutes news for you may not mean the same to your neighbor)? And if it’s only about alerting people in case of emergencies, like the example Williams cites, who would be the one to determine when and why it’s worth sending warning messages out to users? Would they be possibly opening such a feature up to the authorities (police, fire fighters, etc.) so they could be the ones alerting users about potential risks in their vicinity themselves? Last but not least, could this be an indication of their impending revenue model? If you think about it, location-based marketing messages would fit right into all of the above, for better or worse. (Hat tip to TechCrunch blogger Serkan Toto ) Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Google Privacy Blunder Shares Your Docs Without Permission Top
In a privacy error that underscores some of the biggest problems surrounding cloud-based services, Google has sent a notice to a number of users of its Document and Spreadsheets products stating that it may have inadvertently shared some of their documents with contacts who were never granted access to them. According to the notice, this sharing was limited to people “with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document” - a vague statement that sounds like it could add up to quite a few people. The notice states that only text documents and presentations are affected, not spreadsheets, and provides links to each of the user’s documents that may have been shared in error. I’ve contacted Google for confirmation and haven’t heard back, but this seems to be legit - our tipster says that he had previously shared the document listed in his notice, but now it has been reset to show 0 collaborators (one of the precautionary measures mentioned in the note). Update: Google has confirmed that the note is real, and says that it was an isolated incident affecting less than .05% of all documents. The damage may not be widespread, but it’s still an unsettling lapse in security. Here’s the letter in full: Dear Google Docs user, We wanted to let you know about a recent issue with your Google Docs account. We’ve identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge. This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets. To help remedy this issue, we have used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as being affected. Since the impacted documents are now accessible only to you, you will need to re-share the documents manually. For your reference, we’ve listed below the documents identified as being affected. We apologize for the inconvenience that this issue may have caused. We want to assure you that we are treating this issue with the highest priority. The Google Docs Team In short, this is a massive blunder on Google’s part. I fully appreciate the lengths Google has gone to to offer a wide array of helpful online services, many of which are free of charge. But this error highlights why cloud-based services scare many people. Regardless of what a site’s posted rules and policies are, a technical glitch is all it takes to expose your sensitive data. Update: An affected user posted his story and the exchange he had with Google support over the issue on Slashdot . Update 2: A Google spokesperson has confirmed that the note is real: We fixed the bug, which affected less than 0.05% of documents, and removed any collaborators. We also contacted the users who were affected to notify them of the bug and to identify which of their documents may have been affected. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect all documents, and are confident this was an isolated incident. Thanks to Ed McManus for the tip. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Elevator Pitch Friday: Valu Valu Uses A Scientific Pricing Model To Sell Games Top
This week’s elevator pitch comes from Valu Valu , an online marketplace for video games whose prices are based on dynamic scientific pricing, creating the optimal price for both the seller and the buyer. The pitch was concise and outlined the service the the site is delivering well, but didn’t tell us how Valu Valu will make money. After doing a little bit of research, we discovered that Valu Valu charges a 5 percent transaction fee on the total purchases (there’s no transaction fee charged to “local” transactions). The site currently features video games but plans to expand to other markets in the future. Founded by ex-Microsoft techies Emmanuel Marot and Bruno Botvinik, Valu Valu uses a proprietary scientific pricing algorithm that continuously optimizes prices based on market conditions, a.k.a. supply and demand, so that buyers are happy with prices of goods (and thus will make purchases) and sellers make more money. The seller’s price is determined automatically, giving sellers limited control of the price of their goods. Other online marketplaces, like Ebay or Craigslist, allow the seller to determine the price of the item being sold. But Valu Valu’s method saves sellers’ time by establishing a set price, and cuts out haggling or auctioning time. Of course, Valu Valu will face competition in game sales from popular online retailers like Amazon.com and GameStop’s EB Games . I did a side by side price comparison of the “James Bond 007: Quantum of Solace” game for Playstation 3 between Valu Valu and Amazon. Amazon’s price for a new game came in $10 lower than Valu Valu’s estimate for a brand-new game. The Valu Valu’s product that was actually being sold was “just like new” (which sounds like a nice way of saying used), but even Amazon’s used Bond game were selling more than $10 lower once again. Valu Valu just launched the beta version in February, so hopefully the start-up will be able to attract more users in the future. I think Valu Valu may be on to something. It seems like an innovative technology that needs to be tinkered with a bit more. Here’s a screenshot: Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Some Indie Facebook Developers Pulling In Over $700,000 A Month Top
The mass media may be enamored of the rags-to-riches stories of developers on Apple’s App Store, but it isn’t the only game in town for indie developers to strike it rich. We’ve gotten word from SocialMedia , a popular ad platform for social network applications, that one of the company’s clients pulled in over $700,000 in advertising revenues from their Facebook apps in December alone. Granted, this was spread over 30+ of the client’s applications, but the company only consists of a handful of (very prolific) developers. While SocialMedia declined to name the company in question, it confirmed that it was not one of the large social application developers like Playfish , SGN , and Zynga who have raised large funding rounds and have been rumored to pull in over $1 million a month. The news reaffirms Facebook’s position alongside the iPhone as a place to get rich quick (at least for a lucky few). SocialMedia also notes that it has several other independent clients who are making over $100,000 a month. Of course, such results are uncommon, but no more so than they are on the App Store. Also worth noting is that these revenues are entirely based on advertising, while most of the success stories we’ve heard on the App Store have been from premium apps. Facebook isn’t likely to unveil its own premium apps any time soon, but if it ever gets around to launching the payment platform it announced last year, these success stories will probably become far more common. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Pure Digital (Flip Video) In Acquisition Discussions; Cisco May Be Buying (Updated) Top
San Francisco based Pure Digital Technologies , the seven year old company behind the Flip Video line of video cameras, is considering a sale of the company, multiple sources have confirmed. One interested buyer is rumored to be Cisco. Flip cameras - dead simple and small video devices that are tailored towards users who want to upload video to the Internet - have become massively popular. One source says the company has sold more than $200 million worth of the tiny cameras in the last couple of years. Based on reviews of the recently released Flip Mino HD , we’re not surprised. The devices cost between $130 and $230 and have spawned a large group of copy cat competitors. One potential buyer, says a source, is Cisco, which has been more active recently in acquisitions. Ned Hooper , Cisco’s chief M&A guy, is said to be actively looking to buy or invest in consumer startups that offer high-bandwith-using services. A hot startup like Flip, which is helping to fuel the explosion in user generated video (much of which makes its way online), fits in perfectly with that strategy. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, Crescendo Ventures, Focus Ventures, Morgan Stanley, AllianceBernstein and Steamboat Ventures (the venture capital arm of the Walt Disney Company) and has raised at least $68 million in venture funding. Update : We’re getting another source that says this “is a done deal,” that Cisco is confirmed as the buyer and that the price is “north of $500 million.” Founder and CEO Jonathan Kaplan is said to be taking around $80 million off the table personally. This hasn’t been confirmed. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
PlayOn Moves To Rule The Streaming Roost, Adds Amazon VoD And Revision3 Content Top
If you haven’t heard about PlayOn , MediaMall’s PC-to-console video streaming software, you will soon. Moving to become a major player in the streaming content world, PlayOn has grabbed some huge wins lately, and it doesn’t look like they’re planning on slowing down. In a software update hitting today, PlayOn has added streaming support for Amazon’s Video on Demand service along with content from Revision3. PlayOn is available for $40, and currently compatible with the PS3 and Xbox 360. You just install the server software on your PC, then stream the content over your network back to your console of choice. It’s well known that PlayOn is working on adding Wii compatibility, which ought to make it the dominant force in the console streaming market. This news comes just days after the announcement that Roku has added Amazon VoD support to their $99 player, and the service has found its way to TiVo boxes and Sony Bravia TVs as well. If you’re not looking to add a new box to your AV set, PlayOn seems like a fairly solid alternative. PlayOn has long supported Hulu, CBS.com, ESPN.com, CNN.com, YouTube, and Netflix, and these latest additions are rounding things out nicely. Next up on PlayOn’s plate is ABC.com content, for which they’re currently in talks with ABC. It’s beginning to look more and more like the average joe won’t actually need cable or an antenna in order to stay entertained in their living room. We’ve just started putting PlayOn through the paces, but we like what we see so far - if you want to check it out for yourself, a 2 week trial is available at their site . [via Audioholics ] Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
WaTunes Sells Your Music On iTunes And Amazon Free Of Charge Top
WaTunes , a service that helps independent artists get their music into online music stores like iTunes and Amazon, has announced that it is making its service entirely free. The move is a direct attack on competitors like TuneCore , which also helps independent artists distribute their music but charges fees depending on the number of songs being sold and the number of stores the artist would like to sell their tracks on. In the company’s blog post on the new pricing scheme (or lack thereof) CEO Kevin Rivers writes: We’ve went from being free to be charged, to giving 90% of sales, to giving back all the sales earnings. We’ve finally can say that we have raise the bar even higher by providing you guys an ABSOLUTE digital distribution service. As of now, WaTunes will enable it’s customers to continue to sell unlimited music, earn 100% of the royalties, and more, ALL FOR FREE! There are no fees, cancellations, no gimmicks. So now that the company is giving up its entire source of revenue, how is it planning to make money? I spoke with CEO Kevin Rivers, who explains that the site is moving towards launching a music-based social network with rich music widgets and a community of fans and artists (it sounds like it will compete against sites like MySpace Music ). Users will also be able to buy songs through an online storefront, with advertising as the primary source of revenue. The move to make WaTune’s distribution service free is designed to attract a variety of independent artists to the music social network, which he says will launch around June. While this seems like a great deal for artists, it also sounds a little too good to be true. There are already many online music communities, and even if WaTunes does begin to distribute music for a large number of artists, I still don’t see how they’ll be able to convert them into new users on their music portal. That said, free is free, so I doubt WaTunes will have any trouble attracting new artists for the time being. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
WikiPock Will Put An Entire Copy Of Wikipedia In Your Pocket For $10 Top
Would you pay $10 for an entire offline copy of Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia of information that you can get on the Web for free? WikiPock , a Paris-based startup, has compressed the entire English language version of Wikipedia to under 4 gigabytes (not including images), and is selling it for mobile phones. The other language versions are smaller (it also comes in German, French, Polish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish). The application lets you search and read Wikipedia articles on your mobile phone without an Internet connection. It can be downloaded directly, or on its own microSD card. For $15, you can download updates, but only for a year. The first 30 people to send an email to tc[at]wikipock[dot]com will get a free copy. It is available for Blackberry and Windows Mobile phones right now, and will soon be available for the iPhone, Android, and Symbian phones. Since all of these phones can access Wikipedia via their browsers, what you are paying for is offline access, a mobile-friendly format, and fast search. Consumers seem more willing to pay for mobile apps, even when the same information is free on the Web (witness the success of paid apps in iTunes). And at least WikiPock is giving back to the Wikipedia community. Ten percent of all sales will be donated to the Wikimedia Foundation . Update : For those with iPhones, there is a competing app called Encyclopedia that does pretty much the same thing, and also costs $10. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Ticker Feed Ohpan Offers Uber-Personalized News Top
Web design startup AType Studios has launched the private beta of Ohpan, a free personalized side-scrolling interactive ticker feed featuring breaking news, pictures, web links, blog posts, the weather, and tidbits of information. The first 1000 TechCrunch readers to enter the code “TCRUNCH” when prompted here will be able to join the private beta. Ohpan’s technology is enabled by learning about what communities, sources, and topics users like through their actions on the site (like clicking, saving and forwarding comments). Ohpan will also ask users questions to determine what news should be subscribed to a feed. For example, if a user answers “Yes” to a “Do you use twitter?” question, more Twitter news will be published to the user’s feed. Ohpan then combs through thousands of RSS feeds to find news items and then individualizes the news ticker to the users preferences. Upon accessing the site, Ohpan lets users link to Facebook or Gmail accounts or sign up as a guest. When a user clicks on a news item, Ohpan gives the user a snapshot of the article or news, showing the source and images associated with the item. The user can “star” the article to save this item and show more like it in the ticker, “strike” the item to limit similar items, “flag” the item as cautionary, or “publish” the item to add to the user’s collection that can be seen by contacts via Facebook. Ohpan also allows users to create a feed featuring items they have composed. The technology (a proprietary Atype algorithm) picks up on the user’s tastes pretty quickly. And there’s always a need for personalized real-time news. But the value of a ticker (at least on the TV) is having it scroll at the bottom of a screen while a user is viewing other content. Its a little annoying to keep switching between tabs to look at the scroll. Perhaps a widget of the ticker would be a more useful tool, especially if it could also be easily embedded in a social network or stand alone website. Ohpan is also planning to launch an iPhone application in the next few weeks. Ohpan has some innovative plans for the future, including the ability to score ads as one would news items. According to the founder of Atype, Simon Plashkes, ads will be subject to the same scoring system that other content is and if users overwhelmingly strike an ad, it will be removed from the site. Ohpan is also looking to possibly integrate with user’s Google Reader feeds. Users would be able to forward a Reader item into their feed interface. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Facebook fbFund Winner Wildfire Launches Promotion App (Beta Invites) Top
Facebook fbFund winner Wildfire is launching the private beta of its web application, The Wildfire Promotion Builder, which allows companies to create their own branded interactive promotions, including contests, coupons, sweepstakes and giveaways. Using Facebook Connect combined with the power of the application, companies can simultaneously publish promotion campaigns on the designated “promotions tab” on the company’s Facebook page and on the company’s website (campaigns can also be simultaneously run on MySpace, Bebo, and other standalone websites). Wildfire is giving out beta invites for the first 500 Techcrunch readers who sign up here . To be eligible, TechCrunch readers should write “Techcrunch” in the “How did you hear about us?” field at the bottom of the form. Wildfire’s Promotion Builder application is a simple way for companies to cross-promote across various social networks while still taking advantage of the viral nature and rising dominance of Facebook as the top social network. The promotions tab could complement the recent Facebook redesign of company pages to look more like profile pages. Wildfire charges a fee of $0.99 per campaign per day for sweepstakes and coupon campaigns and $2.99 per day for user generated video and photo contests. The startup also offers a premium service that includes custom design features. Coupons, sweepstakes and giveaways are a good way to engage consumers and Facebook seems to think so as well. The social network has used Wildfire’s brand promotion apps to run multiple contests on the site. In fact, the consumer voting application Facebook used to vote on the the fbFund winners was actually created by Wildfire. In December, Wildefire won $250,000 in cash grants from Facebook’s fbFund, a joint venture between Facebook, Accel, and the Founders Fund meant to cultivate and reward innovative applications on the Facebook platform. Here’s a screenshot that shows the application used in the new Facebook “page more like a profile” format: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Lifeblob's Redesign Takes Social Timelines To The Next Level (Invites) Top
Social timelines are going mainstream (see AOL/Bebo ), but startups are pushing them to the next level. Today, Lifeblob , the Indian startup working on ways for you to visualize your life on the net, is introducing a refreshed version of its social timeline creation tool. With it, you can easily patch together a visual representation of your life’s most memorable moments by timestamping certain events and enriching them with photos, text and videos. The end result can easily be shared on a variety of social services, or embedded into any blog or web page (example below). It’s an invite-only service for now, but we have an unlimited amount of invite codes for you. It’s simply techcrunch and you can use it to sign up here . Lifeblob is one of the investments of SeedFund , the Google-backed VC fund who actively looks for early-stage financing deals within the Indian startup community. The company raised its first round of financing of approximately $1 million from the fund in August 2008. It employs only 4 people for now and its business model is centered around advertising - which it will start rolling out after its general launch - and premium services (like branded timelines, etc.) Public timelines on Lifeblob can be searched by other people with ease. If they’re not protected, anyone is able to both view and share the “lifeblobs” with the rest of the world (thanks to an integration with SocialTwist’s Tell-a-Friend service). Privacy settings allow your updates to be private or publicly visible, or for your friends only. You can also opt not to be listed in the Lifeblob directory at all, while still getting a shareable dedicated URL for your timeline (here’s an example for Michael Arrington ). Lifeblob isn’t so much about the concept of lifestreaming as it is about being able to visualize moments in a person’s life, while showing relations to other people whose moments intersect with theirs. Those intersections can take the form of people, places, events, associated tags, and so on. Each intersection shows up as a stacked tile, which launches the associated timeline when clicked on. For example, if Mike Arrington met up with Gary Vaynerchuk, Loren Feldman, and David Recordon after a conference (here’s the photographic evidence that this did indeed happen) and all of them would have indicated this in their timelines or been tagged, you’d get a timeline that shows that connection inside the interface and lets you explore more relations and other people’s lifeblobs simply by clicking around a bit. It also works as a marketing vehicle. For instance, here is a timeline of all of Woody Allen’s movies , with connections to timelines for actors who have appeared in his movies. The UI is nice, but if you click any of the frames in the embed above with a screen resolution lower than 1024×768, you’ll immediately notice it still needs quite a bit of fine-tuning, as you can’t resize it properly and the menu items are all over the place. That said, it’s a pretty cool service reminiscent of tools like Dipity and Kronomy but with a more social approach. Definitely a tool I’d consider using to recap events, which I think it is most suited for. Turning your whole life into a lifeblob seems like a whole lot of work, unless you could auto-update from other services (right now, only Picasa is supported). Here’s a screencast on how it works: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Topify Lets You Manage Your Twitter Followers Via Email (200 Invites) Top
If you are not a Twitter power user, you can ignore this post. But if you find yourself increasingly relying on Twitter and spending way too much time managing your followers, trying to figure out who they are, or responding to their private direct messages, you’ll want to try out Topify Created by former TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon and Arik Fraimovich as a tool they needed for themselves, Topify lets users manage their followers and respond to direct messages directly from their email inbox. Topify is essentially a time saver. Once you set it up (we have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers ) by replacing your email in Twitter’s settings with one that Topify provides which redirects back to yours, you get an email every time someone follows you. The email contains a snapshot of that person’s Twitter activity: a one line bio, location, number of followers and followees, Twitter update count, Twitter tenure, and last Tweet (see image). It basically tries to gives you enough information to decide whether you want to follow that person back, which you can do simply by replying to the email. Topify also lets you reply to direct messages (Twitter’s version of private messages) by replaying directly via email. This saves you the step of having to go back to Twitter and login before responding. These are all basic features which should be part of Twitter, but until then you can use Topify. For public replies to your Twitter messages, you don’t get an email (because Twitter itself does not offer such notifications). Adding @replies might flood your email inbox, but I actually would prefer getting those as well because I find myself often missing replies and not responding until days later, if at all. As Twitter grows and more people come on board, this tool is especially useful during its viral phase, when the number of followers any individual is accumulating on a daily or weekly basis should be accelerating. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
BackType Gets More Conversation Tracking Features, Seed Funding Top
BackType , one of the better conversation tracking tools we’ve come across so far, is releasing a couple of new features today that arguably make it a top gun in the space. The startup, launched in August 2008 on $15k thanks to Y Combinator’s summer program, has also closed a round of seed funding to the tune of $300,000 from True Ventures , led by the firm’s founder and partner Toni Schneider , notably also the CEO of Automattic (the company behind blogging powerhouse WordPress). BackType, unlike commenting enablers like Disqus, JS-Kit, IntenseDebate and coComment, offers a one-stop destination for retrieving comments on just about any topic across a wide variety of blogging platforms and social services (Twitter, FriendFeed, etc.). You can do a simple keyword search but also track people specifically, e.g. Michael Arrington . Evidently, you can subscribe to search query results by RSS feed and e-mail (based on a keyword or only for an article you indicate). You can also feature your own comments across the web on your own blog using a widget. Today the company is introducing a new feature dubbed BackType Connect , soon to be included in their API , which makes it even easier to follow conversations centered around a certain blog post or article. All you need to do is go to the website and enter the URL of the post, and BackType will fetch all the conversations around it and display the gist on one page, along with some stats. As you can see in the second screenshot, there’s also a dedicated tab for ‘tweets’ i.e. Twitter messages, which comes in handy with Twitter now being a real-time search engine and all that. But it doesn’t stop there. BackType is today also launching BackTweets , a separate website where you can track conversations that are going around on the micro-sharing service, based on keywords or URLs (even when they are shortened!). For an example, check a search for ‘techcrunch.com’ . They also created a special page tracking the top links on Twitter , which can be somewhat compared to the functionality of Techmeme (or Tweetmeme , of course). UberVU ( our coverage ) and Artiklz ( our coverage ) offer similar services, although in terms of quality of returned results BackType wins the race, at least for the couple of keywords and websites addresses we tested. In this day and age, it’s essential for individuals, companies and brands to track conversations on the Internet, and BackType makes for an excellent service for weeding through comments on the social web, which can often prove invaluable. The startup still offers the basic functionality for free and is currently still figuring out how to make money from enabling companies and publishers to track those conversations, but it’s not like there are no opportunities there. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Robert Scoble To Leave FastCompany Top
Super-blogger Robert Scoble is leaving his full time job at FastCompany, he confirmed by phone tonight. He first joined the company nearly a year ago and has been running their FastCompany.tv site. He says he’ll continue to write a column for the magazine, but his video work with them is over. Part of the reason behind his departure: His long time sponsor, Seagate, hasn’t renewed their $1 millionish/year contract, he says. As for what comes next, he says he’s nearly ready to unveil a new project. Scoble continues to be on the cutting edge of new Internet technologies, sometimes taking things to an extreme. He was once briefly banned from Facebook for violating their terms of use, and we’ve (only half jokingly) called for an intervention over his excessive use of services like Twitter and Friendfeed . Whatever he does next, it’ll be worth paying attention to. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Comment Consolidation: JS-Kit Acquires SezWho Top
JS-Kit , a company that offers an array of Javascript-based commenting, polling, and ratings widgets, is acquiring the assets of SezWho , a competing enhanced comment system. JS-Kit will continue to keep SezWho’s service running for the next 30 days, during which users will be offered a choice of moving over to JS-Kit or choosing an alternative system. SezWho offered a universal reputation system for comments, allowing visitors to log in using their Email address or OpenID, establishing a reputation system that carries across onto other SezWho-enabled sites. And unlike some other comment systems, blog owners didn’t have to worry about handing over their data to SezWho - for quite a while one of the primary criticisms of some competing services, like Disqus , was that they housed the blog’s comment data, effectively keeping their owners hostage (this is no longer an issue, as these services now offer synced comment archives). JS-Kit’s acquisition of SezWho is not particularly surprising. There’s definitely a need for enhanced commenting systems, but this space is overdue for consolidation. The problem with having all of these discrete commenting systems is that for the most part, they aren’t compatible with each other. Users’ comment histories and reputations are segmented across a handful of competing services, which sort of defeats the point. And aside from JS-Kit, most of these services are free, leaving them vulnerable to drops in advertising revenue and perhaps also deterring major companies from entrusting their data with them for fear that they might go belly up. In the current economy, most of the services are either forced to shut down or seek an acquisition. Aside from its acquisition of SezWho, JS-Kit has also bolstered its presence with the acquisition of Haloscan last summer. The company has also established partnerships with a number of major companies, including Sun and World Now . Some of the smaller services may be dying out, but JS-Kit still has some strong competition. Last fall IntenseDebate , another commenting system, was acquired by Automattic, the company behind the incredibly popular WordPress blog platform. IntenseDebate continues to operate on other blog platforms, and is also slowly having its technology incorporated into WordPress itself. Another increasingly important player in this space is Facebook, which just released a new commenting widget that allows sites to quickly integrate Facebook Connect with only a few lines of code. Users can have their comments relayed back to their Facebook News Feeds, where the conversation can continue. Some large sites have little interest in handing over their data to Facebook without getting much in return, but it’s a system your everyday blogger will love. And that’s a scary prospect for the rest of the widget makers. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Facebook Apps Can Now Use Chat To Go Viral Top
Facebook has just announced that applications on Facebook Platform can now be able to take advantage of the site’s built-in chat functionality, which launched last spring. Developers will now be able to present users with a list of their Facebook Chat buddies, tailoring the list to best suit their application (for example, they can choose to only present friends that already have the app installed). Facebook users have been able to use Chat and their Facebook apps simultaneously since Chat launched (one of its biggest selling points is that it remains open at the bottom of the screen, no matter where on the site you go). But until now applications didn’t really have a way to tap into the power of Facebook Chat to help make their applications more social. Aside from adding an enhanced social element to applications, the new feature could also help apps go viral much more quickly than they would using the standard Email invite system most Facebook apps employ. Developers can now present users with a list their friends who are online (even those that don’t necessarily have their apps installed), who they can then send invites via chat messages. Invites sent over chat have a greater sense of urgency and intimacy, so it’s likely that they’ll be more effective than invites sent through the site’s Email system. Of course, integration with Chat gives apps on Facebook yet another way to try to spam you. In the dark ages of Platform, when every app seemed to spam users with reckless abandon, I might have been more concerned about this, but I suspect Facebook already has some measures in place to prevent abuse. And even if they don’t, you can always just sign out of Chat if things get bad. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Live Stream: Y Combinator's AngelConf Offers A Crash Course In Angel Investing Top
Today some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent angel investors and entrepreneurs are coming together for AngelConf - a crash course in angel investing that is designed to get the many wealthy tech veterans littering the Valley involved in the startup scene. The event was put together by Y Combinator’s Paul Graham , who believes that while there are many potential investors in Silicon Valley, most of them are unsure how to actually get started (he suggests there may be only one actual investor for every 100 would-be angels). AngelConf is designed to help these potential investors get on their feet, with tips on everything from the legal paperwork involved to picking out the best startups. For more details, check out our past coverage here . The event is being streamed for free by Justin.tv . Watch live video from Angel Conf on Justin.tv Included among today’s speakers are: Michael Arrington Paul Buchheit Jeff Clavier Ron Conway Michael Dearing Paul Graham Carolynn Levy Dave McClure Page Mailliard Mike Maples Ariel Poler Naval Ravikant Aydin Senkut Jim Young Andrea Zurek Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Google's Tip Jar Uses Crowdsourcing to Help People Save Money Top
Google is using its Moderator product to help people share ideas on how to save money in recessionary times. Moderator is a tool that helps groups determine which questions should be asked at all-hands meetings, conferences, and online Q&A sessions, among other scenarios. Google has set up a site called Tip Jar , which is powered by Moderator, to gathers money-saving tips in one place and allow visitors to vote and rank them in order of usefulness. The most popular tips will rise to the top of the list. And users can submit tips to the lists as well. Google’s Tip Jar breaks down tips by categories, which include finance, shopping, food, vacation, family and others. A sample of some of the more popular tips include: “Go to the grocery store with your belly full. You won’t buy too many things because you just ain’t hungry.” “Utilize online bill pay with your bank. It keeps you in much closer contact with your money, as you can keep a very close eye on your balance and be in much less danger of overdrafting. It saves you money on stamps and paper checks.” “Buy a flask and carry your coffee/tea to work with you. Coffee and tea only costs pennies to make yourself, but costs $1 or more elsewhere.” “Eat out one fewer time each month. If it costs you $25 to eat out, but only $5 to eat in, then the $20 you save each month allows you to almost completely fund a $500 emergency savings account.” Although Google designed the site to provide tips about saving money, there are many users who are making suggestions on other subjects, such as how to be more environmentally-friendly in everyday tasks. Those tips could easily be an entire separate site, so there is definite potential to create Tip Jars for popular and trendy topics. Tip Jar is a good example of the power of Moderator. Google Moderator is a fairly useful tool to engage a crowd, whether it be within an organization or across the entire web. Google Moderator even caught the eye of the Obama Administration, which recently used Moderator to power part of its Open Government initiative on Change.gov. Moderator was built by Google Platform Engineer Taliver Heath as a side project on top of  Google’s App Engine . CrunchBase Information Google Moderator Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 

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