Thursday, March 5, 2009

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Yahoo's Inquisitor Makes Search Shine On The iPhone Top
Last May, Yahoo acquired a startup called Inquisitor which offers a search plug-in for all the major browsers. Today, Inquisitor is available as an iPhone app and it shows how certain features, such as Yahoo’s Search Assist, really shine on a mobile device where you want to keep your typing to a minimum. When you start typing a search in Inquisitor, a list of suggested keywords automatically appears below (just as it does on Yahoo’s regular search engine on the Web). The more letters you type, the more refined the suggestions become, allowing you to select one before completing the word in the search box. Results are presented in large, easy-to-read gray boxes, with favicons and two lines worth of text. Abbreviated news results from two sources appear at the very top if they are available, and can be clicked through to see only news results. Once you click through to a Webpage or article, it is framed by the app. A toolbar at the top allows you to return to your search, making for more fluid navigation. You can always escape the app to view the app in the iPhone’s regular Safari browser as well. There is also an option for emailing links. Despite all the advances in mobile Web devices, they are still constrained. Features that simplify navigation or remove unnecessary steps can still be the difference between a usable app and one that you never return to. Inquisitor is one app on the iPhone I will be returning to when I want to do searches, which is often. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Joost Continues Fight For Relevancy, Teams Up With Social Network Netlog Top
Don’t count out Joost just yet. We recently wrote it still has a heartbeat despite the fact they made the wrong bet years ago by underestimating the power of the web for watching videos. They finally switched to Flash late last year , giving up on P2P , and introduced some social networking features around the video viewing experience to battle established players like Hulu, TV.com and YouTube. Now it’s taking a step beyond that by forming an alliance with Europe’s leading social networking service, Belgium-based Netlog , theoretically expanding its reach to 40 million people. The deal will allow Netlog’s audience to access Joost’s video library straight from its starting page, where they’ll be able to view, share and comment on 57,000+ music videos, TV shows, etc. Activity will be pushed to users’ news feeds, a feature Netlog copied from Facebook like many other community services did after its enormous success became obvious. Earlier this year, Joost was added to the Boxee media directory , but I think this is a more significant partnership. Netlog is growing fast, especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle-East, and it has famously replaced leading local social networks in many countries in Europe and Arabic speaking regions as community portal of choice thanks to its viral nature and extensive language translation program. Targeting mostly young people, it’s been actively looking to expand its array of entertainment services, most recently with the addition of multi-player games and now with videos from Joost. I think both will benefit from this and further anchor their position in Europe while everyone seems to be looking at what happens in the U.S and Asia. Netlog raised €5 million from Index Ventures in April 2007. For the sake of comparison, Joost raised $45 million , coincidentally in part from the same investor, who we recently reported raised a new €350 million venture fund . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Zoho Writer Gets A Makeover And Some New Features Top
Zoho , makers of an awesome web-based software suite comprised of document, project and invoicing management tools, has given its online word processing tool Writer a fresh look along with a couple of new features worth checking out. The Chennai, India-based startup says Zoho Writer 2.0 comes with hundreds of improvements, for the most part on the user interface. But the makeover isn’t the whole story. Zoho is also introducing a couple of enhancements and new features worth highlighting. The menu toolbar, for example, has been completely redesigned and renamed to reflect these changes. Now called the ‘MenuTab’, it categorizes the features as tabs based on functionality and mimics the familiarity of traditional office software by opening a drop-down menu upon clicking. This should make users who are making the switch from the well-known desktop word-processing software programs feel right at home, unless of course they’ve grown accustomed to Office 2007’s ‘ribbon’ menus by now (which I have, by the way). The sidebar in Writer has also been changed to look more like the sidebar in Zoho Sheet. It now includes search functionality (very welcome), multi-selection of documents and support for performing several actions in one go. There were several other enhancements to the application in Header/Footers with support for auto-insertion of fields, Collaborative Editing, inclusion of Word and Character count in status bar, and so on, but maybe it’s best if you just give it a spin yourself. After all, it’s free. Also worth noting is the fact that the changes will be reflected to all applications using Zoho Writer, including internal applications and third-party ones making use of the Zoho Writer API . Update: here’s a screenshot tour (best watched in fullscreen) I like Zoho a lot, especially because of their offline capabilities, easy access thanks to support for Google and Yahoo IDs and the group sharing across different apps feature. That said, some people will simply stick to desktop software for office tasks no matter what, and Zoho is going to have to fight an uphill battle to keep the rest of users from flocking to the web-based applications offered by companies with a vast reach (Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.). Or maybe Zoho will keep on surprising everyone.   CrunchBase Information Zoho Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
It's Time To Start Thinking Of Twitter As A Search Engine Top
At a dinner tonight with a friend the conversation turned to Twitter . He just didn’t get it, and he’s certainly not the first person to tell me that. Specifically, my friend didn’t understand the massive valuation ($250 million or more) that Twitter won in its recent funding . I told him why I thought it was more than justified: Twitter is, more than anything, a search engine . I told him what I thought of Twitter as a micro-blogging service: it’s a collection of emotional grunts. But it’s wonderful nonetheless. And enough people are hooked on it that Twitter has reached critical mass. If something big is going on in the world, you can get information about it from Twitter. Twitter also gathers other information, like people’s experiences with products and services as they interact with them. A couple of months ago, for example, I was stuck in the airport and received extremely poor service from Lufthansa. I twittered my displeasure, which made me feel better - at least I was doing something besides wait in an endless line. I’ve also Twittered complaints about the W Hotel (no Internet, cold room) and Comcast (the usual Internet gripes). More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com , the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer . People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff. Twitter knows it, too . They’re going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable - somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today. And as John Battelle says, its not clear that Google or anyone else can compete with Twitter at this point ( Facebook’s giving it a solid try , though). And it’s not just ads that can bring in the money. Brands need tools to make sense of all this data that Twitter doesn’t yet supply. Third parties like Scout Labs are going to be mining this data themselves, I’m sure. But there are lots of other ways Twitter can tax the utility they are bringing to brands. If they manage to turn down the acquisition offers like Facebook did a couple of years ago , there’s no reason Twitter can’t find revenue streams that will support them as a standalone company. Possibly even a public one. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Global Warming May Get Its Very Own Top Level Domain Top
I’m deadpooling this .ECO top level domain right now. Not because it’s global warming/eco related, there’s plenty of money being thrown around to support just about every crazy green idea out there. I just don’t think the world needs another top level domain, and certainly not one that is designed for “individuals to express their support for environmental causes, for companies to promote their environmental initiatives, and for environmental organizations to maintain their websites.” People like .COM domains , or alternatively country level domains. These other ones are little more than traps to force brands to protect their trademarks during expensive pre-sale periods. The company behind the domain gets the most of the money, and ICANN, the quasi-governmental, quasi-mafia organization that oversees this mess gets their cut as well. The more domain names that get registered, the more money ICANN makes, which lets them hire more staff to stick their noses into more things. Meanwhile, they’re making a mess of the Internet. Al Gore is partnering with the company to help secure ICANN approval and then promote the domain. Which goes without saying. Fred Kreuger, previously the founder of Tagworld (now Social Project ), is one of the founders. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Y Combinator's Airbed And Breakfast Casts A Wider Net For Housing Rentals As AirBnB Top
AirBed and Breakfast , an online portal for renting space on a stranger’s airbed or couch, has re-launched its website to AirBnB , an eBay-like marketplace for all accommodations. Now a Y-Combinator start-up (the startup is currently in the winter session of the incubator), AirBnB, which launched as AirBed and Breakfast last August , found that users wanted to use the site for more than just renting space in someone’s house and were actively posting rental listings for apartments, houses and vacation rentals. The founders, San Francisco designers Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky , and software engineer Nathan Blecharczyk , quickly realized that increased and varied choice is more appealing for consumers and are now re-branding their site to incorporate a variety of local accommodation options. There is also a monetary benefit to opening up the site, says Chesky. For each rental, AirBnB takes a 7 to 10 percent cut of the traveler’s payment (as the rental price of the accommodation goes up, AirBnB will take less of a cut) and also takes a flat 3 percent cut of what the seller receives. With an increase in number of listings and a greater amount of pricier listings, AirBnB has had a jump in the number of transactions and seen a 50 percent jump in revenue plus created a profit. Vacation rentals can be a big business. Recently, HomeAway , a popular vacation rental site, raised $250 million in a venture round and was valued at more than $1 billion. The site still allows users to post airbed and couch listings, which continues to be popular amongst consumers. But with a wider market, AirBnB has 2500 listings and close to 10,000 registered users. While AirBnB has no plans to follow eBay’s auction site model, the start-up would eventually like to post listings directly from the enterprise world (in this case, hotels and property managers), which eBay has been able to do with its marketplace. Now that AirBnB is diversifying its accommodations, it will also face a fair amount of competitors in the rental space. Vacationrentals.com and Free-rental.com are just a few of the many short-term rental property listing hubs available for consumers. But AirBnB maintains that the combination of its former business of renting couches and the apartment and vacation rentals, all at relatively inexpensive price points, will make the start-up popular. With the downturn in the economy wreaking havoc on expensive travel plans, inexpensive home rentals may become more popular amongst consumers. AirBnB provides relatively cost-effective alternatives to staying in a hotel. For example, I saw a listing for a nicely-furnished one bedroom apartment in Midtown for $160 per night. That’s not a bad deal for an entire apartment. And AirBnB offers rooms and couches in cities like Washington D.C. and Paris for under $20 per night. And for of our readers who are looking for a place to crash or a vacation rental, AirBnB is offering $50 off any trip that is booked from now until Monday, March 9th. All you have to do is type in “TECHCRUNCH” when booking. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Y Combinator's Divvyshot Launches Dead Simple Group Photo Sharing Top
Divvyshot , a new Y Combinator company that makes sharing photos between groups very easy, has just launched in private alpha. The site allows groups of users to share full-resolution photos collaboratively both through online galleries and using native clients that will launch in the next few weeks. There are currently 700 invites available, which you can grab here . Divvyshot albums can be edited by multiple users, and can be set as private (only allowing designated friends to upload photos) or public, which lets anyone upload their photos to the album. All photos are presented at a fairly high resolution on the site, and are also available at their original quality for download (you can also download entire albums at a time as .zip files). Once the site’s native clients are released (they’re coming for both Mac and Windows), users will be able to simply drag their photos into a designated folder on their desktop, and they’ll be automatically uploaded to the online group albums and to every other group member’s native client. Founder Sam Odio says that he hasn’t settled on a monetization plan, explaining that he has considered going the SmugMug route and charging for bandwidth/storage. But he’s also thinking of trying to generate revenue by appealing to certain target demographics and then selling them highly relevant customized goods. For example, he believes that Divvyshot will likely appeal to Sorority girls, who may be eager to share their photos between close friends but not on social networks like Facebook. Divvyshot could capitalize on this demographic by selling personalized items (perhaps branded with the sorority’s logo) that featured their photos. Divvyshot looks nice and seems to work well, but it’s going to have no shortage of competition. There are already quite a few photo sharing sites that allow for group collaboration, and services like Apple’s MobileMe allow for photo sharing through desktop clients (you could even conceivably use something like Dropbox ). That said, if it can effectively separate itself by offering a more intuitive (or cheaper) service, it may be able to carve out a niche. divvyshot sneak peak from Sam O on Vimeo . Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
280 North's Atlas Bridges The Gap Between Web Apps And Native iPhone Applications Top
Back when the iPhone first launched and the App Store was still a twinkle in Apple’s eye, the only way to get your goods onto the platform was to develop them as an iPhone-optimized web page - otherwise known as an iPhone Web App. Unable to make use of much of iPhone’s functionality (like the GPS, camera, etc.), Web Apps were quickly considered the inferior option when Apple unshackled the iPhone SDK, opening the doors for the standalone Objective-C apps which have since flooded through the App Store. It was great news for Objective-C developers and consumers looking for rich applications - but not so much for those who’d grown accustomed to developing for the web. At the recent Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, Y-Combinator-backed 280 North announced Atlas , a drag-and-drop visual editor for building desktop web applications with Cappuccino , 280 North’s Javascript-based framework. Near the tail end of the presentation, 280 North co-founder Francisco Tolmasky gave the audience a sneak peek of one of Atlas’ best features: iPhone support. The real trick? Atlas can wrap up iPhone Web Apps like native applications, granting them access to a significant portion of the iPhone API and allowing them to be sold through the App Store. This lowers the barrier of entry for iPhone development substantially, allowing those with Javascript knowledge to create fully functional applications on the platform without requiring them to learn a whole new language. The same limitations that apply to Javascript apply here, presumably - in other words, don’t expect to be throwing down ultra-rich OpenGL-based 3D games, but mid-range apps (such as Twitter clients, RSS readers, etc.) should be completely doable. How the API-related stuff works is still a bit of a mystery. 280 North is keeping mum on their methods for the time being - not only for the sake of maximum impact when Atlas launches in the coming months, but also because they’re still determining which of a handful of approaches will work best. I’d assumed that Atlas compiled the user’s code within a wrapper which served as a middle man, passing API calls to the iPhone and returning the results, but a quick chat with Tolmasky indicated that this wasn’t necessarily the case. If it works as demonstrated, it’s a wonderful idea. We’ll have to keep an eye on this one. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Google Health Now Lets You Share Your Medical History With Loved Ones Top
After months of rumors, Google Health finally launched last May, promising to store our medical records in a secure way that is more accessible, easier to understand, and useful than traditional paper records. Since then we haven’t heard too much about the service, which isn’t particularly surprising given the sensitive nature of the information involved (this isn’t a space where Google is going to take new feature additions lightly). Today, Google has announced that it has launched a significant new feature, giving users the ability to share their medical records with designated family or close friends. The general idea behind the feature is that oftentimes during emergencies family members may not know the details of your medical history, like medical allergies. Such information can be lifesaving, but sharing extremely personal medical information is not something that should be taken lightly. Google is taking lengthy measures to ensure the security of the data, associating invite links to specific Email addresses and allowing users to track who has viewed their records. All shared records are also read-only. One security measure that I don’t understand is the 30 day expiration Google Health is placing on each Shared link. Unless users resend their link every month, it sounds like this feature would be effectively useless in the event of an emergency. I’d prefer a system that allowed me grant permanent access to a close family member, which I could revoke at any time. Update: A commenter below points out that this expiration may only apply to the link itself, and that the sharing relationship remains in place indefinitely provided the link is used within 30 days. Google has confirmed that this is the case. For those users who’d prefer to go the low-tech route, the site is also launching a new feature that makes it easy to print out wallet-sized snapshots of your medical profile, which you can distribute to close family or perhaps just keep in your own wallet. The site is also launching a new graphing feature, allowing users to visualize the progress of health-related metrics like their blood pressure or cholesterol. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
PluggedIn's 'Hulu For Music Videos' Heads To The Deadpool Top
PluggedIn , a startup that launched back in April 2008 as a Hulu for music videos , is closing up shop. The company has run out of money after negotiations for a $2.5 million Series B funding round fell apart at the last minute. Co-founder Brett O’Brien says that PluggedIn is currently seeking buyers for the company’s technology and team for a price of around $3 million (the company’s cost of investment). PluggedIn differentiated itself from the plethora of other music sites by offering a library of over 11,000 licensed High Definition music videos, presented in a simple and aesthetically pleasing interface that was not unlike Hulu’s. Users could browse through over a million artist profiles (which were dynamically generated from content on sites like Wikipedia), and could use an app built on Adobe’s AIR platform to automatically generate a user profile featuring their favorite artists. The site also offered some basic social functionality, though it sounds like PluggedIn development was cut short before ultimately launching a “distributed social media player” that could be embedded elsewhere but still retain interaction between site members. Despite its attractive interface and high quality videos, the site never really took off. This is probably because there are already a number of very well established music communities, like MySpace Music , which have millions of users and many of the same of music videos (albeit at a lower bitrate). HD quality is a nice perk, but most users simply don’t care enough about it to jump ship and join an entirely new community. And unlike some of these competitors, PluggedIn requires the Move Networks video streaming plugin, which raises the barrier of entry (though it is fairly common since it is also used by Fox, The CW, and ABC). That said, PluggedIn’s technology may well be an appetizing prospect for websites that already get a significant amount of traffic. PluggedIn has been added to the Deadpool . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Loopt Adds "Friends You May Know" And Advertisements To Their iPhone App Top
Social networks suck if you can’t find friends that use them. This is especially true for those social networks oriented around sharing your location; for the most part, you end up knowing where you and three other people are before you get bored and give up. Following a trend made popular by Facebook, the mobile social mapping service Loopt has added a “Friends You May Know” feature to their iPhone application, allowing you to find and follow friends-of-friends without having to know their mobile number. Fun new features don’t just write them selves, though, so Loopt has also added a few advertisements throughout the application for the sake of getting some revenue out of their iPhone endeavors. Before this release, not knowing someones mobile number also meant you couldn’t be their friend on Loopt. You could always hop into “Mix” mode, which allows you to chat with people in your general area, but making that friendship connection still required asking them to send over their digits. With this new addition, you just need to know the mobile numbers for a few of their friends. Of course, if someone doesn’t want you to know their phone number, they probably don’t want you to know where they are, either - so you’ll still need their explicit approval. The concept has proven quite successful on other services (friend counts seemed to sky rocket when the feature was added to Facebook back in March of last year), and it should prove especially useful for Loopt. A good half dozen or more services are battling for users in the social mapping arena right now, and Google’s entry into the field doesn’t make things any easier . Add in the fact that the entire concept is fairly new and relatively foreign to most, and Loopt needs to make every possible connection as easy to discover as possible. As mentioned above, this is the first iPhone Loopt release to carry advertisements. Nothing too obtrusive here - they went with AdMob ads, which most iPhone users should be perfectly used to seeing just about everywhere. Oh, and the mandatory disclosure: Loopt built a special version of their application for TechCrunch users, and we consider them a sponsor. The TC’d version doesn’t carry the new friend finding feature yet unfortunately, but it should find its way in before too long. You can find Loopt for iPhone on iTunes here. [iTunes Link] [PSGallery=14rifoi14j] Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Stimulus 2.0: It's The Startups, Stupid. Top
Editor’s note : The guest post below was written by Reid Hoffman , CEO and Founder of LinkedIn. Reid has some strong opinions about how startups can help right the economy, and he offers some suggestions below. (You can also catch him tonight on Charlie Rose , or check out our interview we did with him at Davos). Reid is an investor in over 60 web ventures including Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, FunnyOrDie, Ning, Last.fm, Six Apart and Technorati. While at Davos this year, the conversation spurred a lot of thought about how we can navigate through the economic crisis. Yesterday, I shared a few of these thoughts in a Washington Post op-ed to offer a Silicon Valley perspective to lawmakers. I believe the real fix for the economy is massive entrepreneurship and innovation to create new jobs through new products and services. Here are a few of my proposals: 1. Small business loans . Apply a micro-lending model that has proved successful in developing countries, extending credit lines up to $50,000. Why? Because models of investment besides just venture capital can stimulate the economy. Let's not neglect entrepreneurs who create coffee shops, florists, taxi services or other small businesses that help the economy thrive at the local level. Sometimes, a coffee shop becomes Starbucks. These don't require venture funding; they just need a small business loan to get started and grow. Micro-lending has proved viable around the world — let's do more of it at home. If a service like Kiva.org (disclosure: I'm a board member) can succeed in 12 countries, it can succeed here too. 2. Abolish the limit on H-1B Visas. Remove the cap on H-1B visas and impose a 10 percent payroll tax beyond the benchmark salary for each visa. Then channel the proceeds from the payroll tax into US re-education programs. This is a country founded on immigration. We should welcome the best and the brightest as our own. Abolish the H-1B cap, and give me an economic reason for preferring local. I'll only do foreign if I need to. A 10 percent payroll tax for each H-1B visa can be reinvested in whatever it takes to get American talent up to the same level. This has been proposed previously , but a payroll tax ensures that H-1Bs are used for skilled labor, not cheap labor. 3. Match funds for venture capital and angel investors . Match up to $100 million in stimulus funds for qualifying venture and angel investments if they create jobs in the US. Let these investors keep their normal return plus 50 percent of the returns on the matching funds, while the other half goes back to the government to revitalize further investment. While others feel differently , I disagree that VCs are grinching because of a lack of good opportunities. VC investment declined 30% in Q4 , but I don't believe this is due to 30% less innovation. In my experience as an investor, there are a fixed proportion of good ideas and bad ideas. It's not a percentage that goes to zero. Investors are keeping their powder dry in order to see if valuations decrease and to save capital for their top investments, in case they need more down the road. Let's create incentives to invest now and to invest more widely. Even if there's a higher failure rate, there's also an increased likelihood of funding eventual winners. This is the kind of stimulus that creates not only more jobs, but more start-ups with a chance to succeed and contribute to a sustainable economy. These are just a few suggestions for a dialogue that we, the entrepreneurs, should be weighing in on. Let's get this stimulus invested in the long term before it's spent on the short term. We know how to create markets and products and services. We know how to innovate. Let's invent new solutions for lawmakers to help build a sustainable economy. We don't have lobbyists, but we have our voices and our track records. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Google Calendar Goes Offline For Everyone, But Is Still Hampered Top
In January, Google released an offline version of Gmail based on Google Gears. Last month, it began offering an offline version of Google Calendar to enterprise app customers . Today, the rest of us get to try the offline calendar , which is also based on Google Gears. Once you click on the “Offline” link at the top of the page, the application asks you once to enable Google Gears for the Calendar. After you do that, it allows you to read your calendar when you are not connected to the Internet. A Calendar icon appears on your desktop. When you click on it, your browser opens up to show your recent schedule (it only goes back a month). For the most part, the offline version is read-only. You cannot edit existing entries until are back online. However, you can add new entries. There are obviously some syncing issues going on here, but it seems that Google should be able to figure out how to let you edit your calendar and then sync once you are connected. Without that ability, it is a hampered product. But it is still better than no offline access whatsoever. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Will A Credit Card Solve MySpace's Woes? Who Cares, Get Free Music. Top
MySpace may be in deep trouble , but that isn’t stopping them from capitalizing on middle America (and Los Angeles), which still rampantly loves the site. You can now get a MySpace branded credit card and rack up points to download free music on the site. MySpace and Citi are offering the Citi Forward/MySpace credit card . In an economy where signing up for a credit card is hardly a popular move, the card is being branded “fiscally and socially responsible,” designed to help a younger generation of users maintain healthy credit. The card lowers the purchase interest rate by a quarter of a per cent when customers use credit wisely. The card also lets users redeem MySpace points for free song downloads, offers contests and access to shows, music concerts and other events. Card members receive 50 free music downloads after the first expenditure on the card. Users can also track their spending and learn about fiscal responsibility on a Citi Forward/MySpace page within the network. And users can accumulate additional points by participating in socially responsible acts such as using energy efficient light bulbs or volunteering (though it is unclear how this will be measured and monitored). MySpace has the potential to make some cash from this partnership. Credit card companies pay businesses referral fees for signing up new cardholders and with MySpace’s 75-million-plus U.S. members, this could turn into a viable monetization plan if this is part of the agreement between Citi and MySpace (MySpace wouldn't comment on the financial terms of the Citi partnership). Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Screen Shots: The New Facebook Home Page Top
Here’s a clean look at the upcoming Facebook homepage redesign that will go live next week. The new design will give users the ability to easily feed the news stream by friend type and network, and gives users a much easier way to post links, photos and videos. The news feed will also begin updating in real time without page refreshes. See more here . CEO Mark Zuckerberg also wrote a blog post summarizing the changes here . More screenshots below. The third one shows the new home page compared to the existing version. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Facebook's Response To Twitter Top
Facebook made a number of announcements today about changes to its home page, profile pages, and activity streams. Taken together, these represent a concerted response to the rise of Twitter as a real-time message broadcasting system that goes beyond members’ personal circle of friends. One of the biggest changes is that Facebook is getting rid of the distinction between private profiles and public pages. The 5,000-friend limit will be dropped from the public pages. Facebook doesn’t want Twitter to become the way large companies and public figures connect to fans. Up until now, Facebook Pages haven’t really been the place fans go to connect with their favorite celebrities or brands. For that, they’ve started going to Twitter, where they can get updates in real time. Facebook is also speeding up the updates that populate the news feeds on everyone’s personal page. Before, these would be updated every 10 minutes or so. Facebook’s introduction of real-time updates and a one-sided follow system mimics Twitter’s functionality. While it may be a little late to this part of the game, its user base of 175 million dwarf’s Twitter’s. Explains CEO Mark Zuckerberg: What we're talking about today, is that there's a philosophical change in that we want to converge these public figures (which are one way) and friends (two way connections). Throughout the press conference Facebook emphasized the importance of the activity stream along with the social graph (which is the map of social connections between members). Chris Cox, Facebook’s director of product development, put it this way: The stream is what is happening. We think it is as core as the graph. The graph is the connections, the stream is what is happening. These changes will become evident front-and-center on the homepage. Says Zuckerberg: With the new homepage, that will reflect a much faster flow of information. The redesigned homepage will allow users to sort through and filter their feed more easily. Updates will be able to be filtered by groups, specific friends, family, or by applications. A new publishing box for sharing updates will incorporate the ability to add not just status notes, but also links, photos, and videos. A new widget will highlight items from friends and other connections members interact with the most. In this way, Facebook is trying to strike a balance between its traditional strength as a private communication system and the increasingly public connections being made on the service as well. On the surface these may seem like evolutionary changes, but the stakes are high. Facebook is trying to shore itself up as the foundation for a living, rapid-fire Web where the line between private messages and public content is blurred. Under no cisrcumstances does it want to cede the thought stream of its users to Twitter. Instead of asking, “What are you doing right now?”, the new status update box asks, “What’s on your mind?” Mix in Facebook Connect, and these thought streams can be collected from all over the Web. Despite its already considerable size, Facebook is showing how adept it can be in responding to new threats. If Facebook cannot buy Twitter , it will try to beat it instead. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Liveblogging Facebook's Open Door Press Conference Top
Facebook is holding a two-hour press conference today to go over new products and the direction of the social network. Both Jason and Mike are there live, and we will be updating this post as information comes out. Here are our notes: We’re here at the Facebook press event. This is a two hour event. Facebook hasn’t pre-briefed the press on what they are announcing. All we know at this point is that at least one new product is being launched at noon PST today Mark Zuckerberg just took the stage. He’s talking about FB as a platform to let users share more an dmore information across applications and devices. When we launched in 2004, he says, people weren’t sharing much online. FB provided the basics, picture, name, etc. 1:14 PM: FB now has 175m users sharing hundreds of millions of pieces of data a day. more than a billion photos a month are being uploaded Talking about the importance of Streams. Profile redesign last year was first step. 1:15 PM: Twitter connects with people quickly. myspace has done really with in terms of bands having done well.. we admire what they’re doing Complimenting Twitter and MySpace for what they’ve accomplished. “We’re not exactly sure where this is going to end up” 1:16 PM: Mark is introducing Chris Cox, the Director of Product Development 1:17 PM: Cox built the original news feed product 1:20 PM: Cox is describing the news feed as a personalized newspaper for everyone, based on what’s going on with their friends. “The message of any media or technology is its change of scale or pace” Marshall McLuhan “He talked about how electronic media was going to change what print media had created. No matter where you went in the world, the connection would be immediate.” The thought of this idea is what is exciting to me. 1:25 PM: original Facebook was basically an address book. Could see who was in your classes, who else was in your dorm In 2006, started to focus the profile on what was going on. People could leave status messages. We added Status and News Feed. 1:28 PM: 2007 - Built Platform. Applications were the things putting content into the stream of information that you’re seeing today. 2008 - Made the wall the most prominent thing. You’re not here to really learn about me (favorite books), you’re here to see what’s going on Saw after we made that change that engagement went up, it was a good thing. 1:29 PM: 2009: people want to talk about elections and also talk about what they’re eating for breakfast. This morning it the site was translated into Hebrew and Arabic. It is on its side, really beautiful, you should check it out. Fundamental problem: How do I give my message to the people who care in real time? Picture of graph showing users We come from a world where we were very focused on privacy, tight knit groups of people we call friends. Where we’re going, there are lots of different needs, and that’s what we’re working on today Discussing the different ways we interact with the people we know (Friends, Family, Coworkers, the general public). Whether it is my Mom talking to me and my brothers and sisters, or Anderson Cooper talking to hundreds of thousands of people. The New York Times is not a person, but it is an organization with one voice. The graph is the connection between people and their audience, the stream is the flow of voices in real time, Connect is how we get that out to the Web. 1:35 PM: Cox is discussing the way that FB thinks about how sharing works. It starts with the social graph, connecting voices to their audience. This moves to the stream, and making sure it is consolidated and simple. Finally, FB connect brings sharing in anywhere from the web. first announcement: Pages and Profiles are now the same thing The Mike Arrington feature! unlimited number of people can follow your activities. “We’re calling this the Arrington feature”… As many people as want to can see his profile. NO MORE LIMIT ON 5k friends. Launch partners for Pages: CNN, U2, Barack Obama. oprah winfrey, stanford university, lance armstrong “The stream is what is happening. We think it is as core as the graph. The graph is the connections, the stream is what is happening.” 27 total partners today We’re announcing a new homepage today. Users can now sort through the items in their feed using friend lists, so you can weed through the content you actually want to see in your news feed. At the right side there will be a Highlights widget, featuring items from the friends you interact with most. New Homepage : We’re now moving to Q&A Cox: The limit today with profiles is that you can’t reach a large audience with profiles. You can’t have more than 5,000 people receiving your updates. So now you can set your privacy settings so you still have that intimate connection, but you can distribute your content to far more people who aren’t friends. It sounds like a Twitteresque follow system, in that it’s one-sided. The new News Feed is more real time. The old feed was on a schedule, the new one is things as they hapen, presented with a bunch of controls so you can filter down to what you want. Mark: What we’re talking about today, is that there’s a philosophical change in that we want to converge these public figures (which are one way) and friends (two way connections). People asking for 5,000 friends, don’t necessarily want to connect with 5,000 people, they want to let 5,000 people connect with them. Pages are now similar to user profiles, but profiles are similar to pages in that people can have 1 sided connections. We’re seeing an interesting trend that a lot of people are open to sharing information to specific people. A big part of what we’re doing is sharing information in a safe way. Q: Are you concerned that fans will be upset with the new changes? This isn’t the last time we’re going to be changing things. Need to continue to adapt. We always track the stats. When we have a large amount of feedback (even if it is negative), we can see if the sharing metrics are going up, and at the end of the day that’s what keeps people engaged on the site. We’re posting today the schematic of the new homepage, give them a chance to leave feedback. Q: Are you going to add location based services? Those are going to be important things in the future. We’re at a place today where we think things are increasing in speed, in the future the LBS stuff will be even more possible. We’ve been laying the ground work for lots of rapid changes in the future. Laying technical groundwork, we’re able to rapidly change things on a massive scale. I think you’ll see is a directionality of being able to serve both public and closed services. We’re going to be rolling out a lot more services through the rest of the year. Q: Are you guys going to still be doing lots of importing. Importing was never a very large part of the activity, but it’s important for a lot of people. I think Connect is a much bigger part of the strategy, any website can add one button to Connect, and the user will bring all of their information on Facebook. We rolled out this comment widget with UI similar to Publisher. Want to make it so people can share these things back with Facebook. At the end of the day we’re just one website, trying to extend ourselves around the web. 50% or more of our users come back to the site every day. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
BlackBerry Application Center Gets a New Name: BlackBerry App World Top
Way back in October of 2008, RIM announced that they’d be joining in on the App Store game with the launch of an application outlet of their own. While it has yet to see the light of day, RIM is announcing that at least one thing has since been finalized: the name. The temporary “BlackBerry Application Center” moniker has been abandoned, with RIM instead opting for “BlackBerry App World”. Kind of a step down, in our opinion. Yeah, yeah; a rose by any other name, yada yada. But seriously - BlackBerry App World? Why not just go with “Apps n’ Things” or “Apps, Bath, and Beyond” instead? BlackBerry devices tend to emit an aura of professionalism, and this new name just seems a bit.. silly. The BlackBerry Developers page will see an update around 7 pm (PST) this evening to reflect the changes. At the same time, RIM will be opening up a notification sign up list at www.blackberry.com/appworld (Note: This page is currently dead) for folks who want an alert as soon as the BlackBerry Application Center App World goes live. A cheesy name deserves an equally cheesy nickname - from here on out, we’ll be calling it “Blappworld”. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Ex-Googlers Start Up Likaholix, A Micro-Sharing Service For Personal Recommendations (200 Invite Codes) Top
Likaholix is a brand new web service that lets you share personal recommendations about virtually anything with the world. The tool lets you build a list of things you like and recommend with the help of a pre-populated database of items (think books, movies, tv shows, products, etc.) readily available and put together from sources from across the web. For each of those items, Likaholix provides you with list of landing pages with descriptions, various topics centered around the items along with relevant image and video material so you’d have a central point to add information about stuff instead of having to gather it from multiple sources. The service, which is sort of like a Twitter for personal recommendations, is still in private alpha, but we scored 200 invites for readers: simply head on over here and complete your details. The company is also giving away Amazon Kindle devices to 5 lucky beta testers. I’ve embedded three screenshots below, showing the steps I took to add a like for the movie Office Space (which I honestly recommend to everyone). It’s a very easy process, and you can instantly push your personal recommendations to third-party social networking services like Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed. It’s easy enough to add likes, and it can be a fun and engaging experience when you invite your Gmail contacts (the service also lets you connect your Facebook profile and invite your friends), but I’m missing an incentive that will make me want to go back to Likaholix every time I think of something I like. I’m also not sure about which business model the team intends build around the tool, although I suspect it would be easy enough for targeted advertising to be displayed on your profile pages based on the recommendations you’ve added. Likaholix was founded by Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan, a former Google Product Manager and Senior Staff Engineer, respectively. Both were among the key people behind GMail, Google Base, Google Docs, AdSense and Google Video. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Language E-Learning Startup Myngle Secures €1 Million Euros Top
Amsterdam-based Myngle , which operates a platform for online language education, has just secured nearly €1 million euros ($1.25 million) in the form of a bank loan from Rabobank. The loan is backed by the Dutch government through an innovation program. Myngle had earlier secured €800,000 seed investment from the HenQ fund and private individuals. Myngle, founded by ex-eBay employees, is essentially a “marketplace for languages” where teachers and students can virtually connect and determine if there’s a match for an online course to start between the parties (from both sides). The e-learning platform advocates the use of Skype for video-conference tutoring and accepts online payment transactions via PayPal, so most of the operation is automated and doesn’t involve Myngle staff. Here’s how they pitch the service on their site: Myngle is free for students and teachers to sign up and provides an online environment for live individual and group lessons for basically any language and level from any type of teacher. You can choose your own teacher or student depending on your specific needs, availability and price! If you are a student, you can try out a demo lesson with your selected teacher before you have to pay anything. Myngle claims to have attracted almost 50.000 members in 125 countries since its inception in 2007, and boasts providing language courses in 52 languages. VoxSwap , LiveMocha , Busuu and Babbel offer a similar proposition. Coincidentally, the startup is one of the 20 finalists that will be pitching at the Plugg conference in Brussels next week (which I organize), so we’ll be able to share more about their future plans then. Below is a screenshot and a cheesy introduction video about Myngle. Unfortunately, we were unable to confirm if all the female teachers are as hot as Milagros. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Conveneer Raises $4.5 Million To Turn Cell Phones Into Servers Top
Conveneer , a Swedish mobile startup with offices in Lund, Sweden and Palo Alto, California, closed a $4.5 million venture round, led by the Swedish foundation Industrifonden . Broken Arrow Venture Capital also participated. The company previously raised seed money from the founders and Teknoseed . Conveneer is building a mobile platform called Mikz, which will be able to assign a URL to your mobile phone, making the content on your phone accessible on the Web. In essence, it turns each mobile phone into a Web server. Once your phone has a URL like http://joe.mikz.me, other Web applications and services can ingest the data that is locked in your phone, and also your phone can take advantage of common Web APIs. Mikz can pull information off your phone such as your contacts, GPS coordinates, photos, music, ringtones, and other files. It creates a Web interface for your phone. That is a powerful idea. How well it works in practice, and on which handsets remains to be seen. The company is talking to both handset manufacturers and mobile carriers to embed the service in new phones. Carriers could strengthen their mobile Web offerings by giving customers their own mobile URL. The business model is selling and maintaining these mobile domains, which can provide a Web interface to a mobile phone. This is the type of premium service for which carriers would charge extra. The company’s goal is to launch Mikz sometime this year. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Zynga Brings Scramble To The iPhone Top
Social gaming company Zynga is consistently releasing awesome games for the iPhone / iPod Touch (e.g. Live Poker ), and today they are debuting the popular word game Scramble exclusively for the platform with the launch of the “Scramble Live” app (iTunes link). The decision to bring Scramble to the iPhone specifically was a good one. After all, its Scramble Facebook app is currently one of the social networking service’s top 25 games with more than 1.2 million monthly active users and its popularity is still soaring. Interestingly, Zynga’s new game lets you compete live with other users on Facebook too and even with other people around you in real time if they have the app installed on their devices as well. "Scramble Live" is available for $4.99, with a $2.99 limited-time launch special. Here’s a video that shows the game in action: San-Francisco based Zynga is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, IVP, Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, Pilot Group, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel. The company claims more than 7 million daily users and 30 million monthly users for its games, which it creates for social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and Hi5 in addition to the games it releases for the iPhone / iPod Touch. It competes against companies like SGN , Mytopia and the European MegaZebra . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 

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