Friday, April 3, 2009

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Dice.com Shows 45% Drop In Tech Jobs Top
This morning’s news about the latest unemployment statistics was dismal and quite sobering. The U.S. has lost 5 million jobs in the past 16 months, and the unemployment rate has hit a 25 year high, reaching 8.5%. Our own TechCrunch layoff tracker reports nearly 320,000 tech jobs lost since August. While jobs are being shed at an unprecedented rate, job listings are also being affected, both in tech and general employment sectors. Tech jobs site Dice.com is reporting a 45% year over year drop in available technology jobs for March, continuing the drought of tech jobs in the economic downturn. This drop, as reported by Thomas Weisel Partners, is the highest annual drop Dice has seen so far this year, with February’s listings down 40.4% and January’s jobs down 39.3% (all year over year). In 1Q09, available tech jobs declined 41.4% year over year on Dice.com. Monster.com reports a 27% decline for Q12009 from last year, indicating that perhaps tech jobs are being hit harder than general job listings. And it seems that jobs hit an all time low in 1Q09, job listings declined 22% in 4Q09. Dice said that of the ten reported metropolitan areas, Silicon Valley was hit worst, with available tech jobs down 57.7% year over year. Chicago (down 55.3% y/y) and Boston (down 55.3% y/y) also posted large declines. The Conference Board’s Online Help-wanted Index suggests that monthly job demand dropped 100K in March, down 31% year over year. Our own job site, CrunchBoard, has also seen a sharp decline in available tech jobs over the past three months. A little over year ago 100 - 120 job listings were added to CrunchBoard each month. The number of new listings gradually declined with the onset of the recession and then fell significantly in November 2008, dropping from 68 to 37 listings from the month before. The listings rose slightly over the next few months, with February’s listings hovering around 60. Even though CrunchBoard’s listings don’t meet the magnitude of Dice’s or Monster’s listings database, this decline in available tech jobs is alarming. It’s still not clear if the worst is over when it comes to layoffs and available jobs. Tech companies are continuing to shed jobs and even those companies which appeared to be immune to massive layoffs a few months ago, like Google, have succumbed to letting people go in the wake of the recession. There’s no doubt that the tech industry has been hit hard across the board. But the tech sector survived through the burst of the bubble a while back, and has proven to be resilient even in the most challenging of times. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
European Web Video Network Intruders TV Relaunches Top
About two years ago, web video startup Intruders TV started out by covering tech / internet industry news in Europe with reporters in key countries like the UK, Ireland, France and Germany. Today, the web TV company is relaunching and will soon be expanding its coverage to more countries and other fields like music, movies, cleantech and fashion. The biggest change for today's release of the new Intruders TV is that the company has finally stopped focussing on delivering country-specific content but has instead regrouped all the English-language content in one channel only (the same goes for the French and Italian counterparts). The site and video player have been revamped as well and are well worth a look. Intruders TV produces high-quality profiles of the continent’s most exciting startups and industry events, and regularly publishes interviews with European entrepreneurs and other industry pundits. The company can often be spotted at events across the globe, looking for interesting people to interview. (disclosure: they were also a media partner for my own conference, Plugg) According to Vincent Camara, Head of Content and Co-Founder of Intruders TV, the company so far has streamed over 10 million video plays, conducted 600+ interviews and currently has a library of over 300 hours of HD content available (see example video on the site - the embed code doesn’t like WordPress). Note that all this was done without a dime in funding: the startup has to date been completely bootstrapped by Camara and his business associate Thierry Bezier. So how does the company make money? Camara tells me there are four business models in place, but only two of them are currently bringing in the monthly revenue used to pay its 10 to 15 part-time video reporters: placement of videos via syndication agreements with other video sites based on revenue sharing, and sponsorship of channels (verticals and sub-verticals) by related businesses. The other two revenue streams the company is looking at are 1) the distribution of exclusive content with large video sites in return for licenses and revenue share from advertising and 2) closed circuit VOD agreements with institutions, groups and organised communities where revenue is secured by licenses and sponsorship. In other news, Intruders TV has partnered with technology news site THEINQUIRER to bring to life INQ TV , adding a video presence for the snarky news and reviews site. Check out the site and let us know what you think. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Sources: Google In Talks To Acquire Twitter (Updated) Top
Here’s a heck of a rumor that we’ve sourced from two separate people close to the negotiations: Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. We don’t know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding. Twitter turned down an offer to be bought by Facebook just a few months ago for half a billion dollars, although that was based partially on overvalued Facebook stock. Google would be paying in cash and/or publicly valued stock, which is equivalent to cash. So whatever the final acquisition value might be, it can’t be compared apples-to-apples with the Facebook deal. Why would Google want Twitter? We’ve been arguing for some time that Twitter’s real value is in search. It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn’t even have a horse in the game. In a post last month called It's Time To Start Thinking Of Twitter As A Search Engine, I wrote: 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. If this is accurate, it’s a brilliant deal for Google - the value of Twitter is only going to go up over time. And it will be Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s second sale to Google - they sold Blogger to them just five years ago. But there’s one big question - where’s Microsoft in all this? Letting Twitter go to Google only hurts them, badly, in the long term search game. This is an asset they need to be competing for aggressively. Of course, it’ll be sad to see Twitter become just another subsidiary of Google, if this happens. I would have liked to have seen the company spread its wings a little longer to see what it could do. Updated: Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine. But discussions between the companies are confirmed. Update 2 (4/3/09) : In a non-denial blog post entitled “Sometimes We Talk” Twitter co-Founder Biz Stone says: “It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects.” Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
DiggBar Keeps All Digg Homepage Traffic On Digg Top
DiggBar , the new shortURL and toolbar service from Digg, is certainly useful. I expect it to become my default short URL service on Twitter since it is so easy to create a short URL by simply adding Digg.com/ in front of any URL. It will redirect to a short Digg URL like digg.com/d1npNz , which is this story rendered with the DiggBar (click that Digg button!). The Twitter crowd already loves this based on all the chatter I saw on the site today. This will also expose a lot of new people to Digg since anyone that clicks on the link will see the toolbar wrapper with the view count, Digg comments and other information on the top. And it will also increase Digg’s overall traffic substantially - unlike other short URL services, Digg doesn’t simply redirect to the longer URL. It keeps you on Digg and shows the site being pointed to in an iframe wrapper. You can get to the underlying URL by clicking on the X button on the top right. But Digg didn’t stop there. They’re also using DiggBar for all stories on Digg as well. So all those home page stories that send massive amounts of traffic around the web are now redirecting right back to Digg, too. That keeps all that traffic in the Digg ecosystem, to the detriment of the sites being linked to. For most purposes those sites won’t care. The page is still rendered and includes the advertising. The way most internal analytics software works means that page views will still be counted. But some services, like Comscore, won’t necessarily see the visit to the site, and will penalize the domain name. I’d expect Digg to add text advertising to the DiggBar over time, sooner rather than later. It should be a material revenue source for them. Overall it’s a brilliant move by Digg. I’m surprised no one has complained yet though about Digg home page traffic no longer going to the sites being listed. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
PhoneBook Arranges Your iPhone Contacts For You Top
PhoneBook (iTunes Link) is a new iPhone application looking to make it as easy as possible to call your most important contacts. The application plugs into your AT&T account, allowing it to dynamically rearrange your list of contacts depending on how often you call them. After entering your carrier account information, PhoneBook can suck in your call data, which it can then use to update your list of friends so that the ones you call most are always the easiest to dial. Using Facebook Connect, users can import and automatically assign photos to their friends’ phone numers. The app also allows users to monitor their phone usage (so they don’t get charged for extra minutes). Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I doubt many people are going to jump through the hoop of entering their phone carrier’s account information primarily so that the photos of their friends are arranged in the proper order. Most people simply don’t call that many friends, and there are plenty of similar apps that allow users to rearrange their contacts without having to let the app access potentially sensitive data. Granted, there are some services like BillShrink that ask for the same information, but that site has a more practical use that may be a little more enticing: it saves users money. That said, there are certainly some cool things that can be done with this kind of data - PhoneBook just needs to figure out some innovative features that will tantilize users enough to sign up for the app. The PhoneBook developers say that more features are on the way, and that they may eventually offer premium features to generate revenue (it may also serve up advertising for free users). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Digg To Finally Fix Search - See The Screenshot Top
Digg may have 19 million unique visitors and nearly 85 million pageviews (Comscore worldwide, Feb ‘09), but one thing it’s never had is a decent search engine. There’s no rhyme or reason to the ordering of results. A lot of stuff just seems to disappear. And the filters are overly complicated. That’ll change in the near future, the company noted in a blog post today. And since we’re so curious about what the new Digg search will look like, we hammered them until they gave up a screenshot. The new search appears to have much more relevant results, taking into account the popularity of the story as well as the newness for “best match.” Other simple filters include “most dugg” and “newest first.” Compare that to the very old, not very relevant results you get now . The new search also has a left sidebar with key stats, such as aging, how many stories with a certain number of Diggs, stories broken out by media type (news, video, images), and by topic. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Betaworks Launches Chartbeat To Track Who Is Paying Attention To Your Website Right Now Top
The default mode for Google Analytics and other Website tracking software often makes you wait an entire day to find out what is happening on your site. There is a 24-hour delay (although this can often be changed in settings). Speed up the feedback loop, and Websites in theory could become even more responsive to traffic and attention peaks or to unexpected sluggishness. Betaworks , John Borthwick’s startup holding company which has stakes in Twitter and Tweetdeck, and spun off bit.ly, has just launched Chartbeat . Keeping with Betaworks’ focus on real-time data services, Chartbeat offers a dashboard for Website owners that monitors how many people are on their site at any given second, where they are coming from, which pages visitors are looking at the most, as well as conversations and links from Twitter. It also shows average load times, what percentage of current visitors are returning, how many are reading, how many are actively writing in comments or engaging with the site in some other way, and how many are simply idle. Webmasters can set up alerts for traffic peaks and site slowdowns. All it requires is one line of Javascript to be inserted on a site and then it pings Chartbeat every 10 seconds. The dashboard also offers a historical view, and even lets you play the dashboard through time like a movie so that you can see for instance what was going on during a particular peak—where was traffic coming from and what were visitors looking at. If you choose, you can also share your dashboard and make it public. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has done so for his blog A VC . Click through to his blog, and then you can see the results on his Chartbeat here . The video below also shows what it looks like. Chartbeat is offering a free 30-day trial and then wants to charge $10 a month for the service. Competing real-time Web analytics services include Get Clicky and Woopra (which we covered here ). Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Palm Demonstrates a Plethora of Pre Apps at CTIA 2009 Top
In a tucked away room in the CTIA 2009 North Hall, Sprint and Palm are demonstrating a number of Pre applications for the first time. Earlier this afternoon we got a bit of footage of Classic , a PalmOS emulator by MotionApps ‘ primarily intended for running any legacy applications you may have laying around. Since then, we’ve also had the opportunity to check out the Pandora, Fandango, Sprint TV, FlightView, and Nascar applications, and we’ve brought back a boatload of video for you to check out. For all videos below, I’d recommend hitting the HQ button for the sake of visibility. These applications are all pretty dang gorgeous, so the extra click is worth it. Pandora: They were one of the first to be disclosed as being in the know when it came to the webOS SDK , and now they’re one of the first with something to show. Pandora brings all the streaming radio functionality you’d expect of an app to bear the name, but leverages the Pre’s notifications bar to serve as a media controller from outside the app. Fandango: Like all of the apps Palm had on display, the Fandango application is reaaally smooth. The UI is gorgeous, it localizes theater times and ticket availability via GPS. A bit of a neat trick: it can automatically add the movie to your calendar, making sure you don’t miss your flick when you lose track of time whilst grabbing a pre-show drink, and allowing you to invite others. Sprint TV: The fact that the Pre is launching exclusively on Sprint is a bit of a big deal. Unlike AT&T with their iPhone deal, Sprint is making sure to get some of their services onto the device right out of the box. Sprint TV is one of Sprint’s popular offerings, allowing you to pull live video feeds from CNN, Fox Sports, Disney, ABC, the Speed channel, and others. FlightView: Gotta pick up grams at the airport? Want to check if her flight is on schedule? FlightView is a fairly basic application, but it serves a purpose. Punch in the flight info, and you’ll get notifications of any changes along with access to a live flight tracker once it’s in the air. Recently searched flights are automatically stored for later viewing. Nascar: Not to unfairly generalize here - but is there all that much overlap between the Palm Pre’s audience and devout Nascar fans? Whether it sees much use, the Nascar application seemed well designed. The demonstrator had a bit of trouble getting it to connect to video streams while we were recording, but we’d seen cars successfully tearing around the screen just minutes before. I’ve gotta ask: Any Nascar fans out there dying for the Pre? Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Skype iPhone App Downloaded One Million Times In First Two Days Top
We knew it’d be a hit, but not that much of a hit. The official Skype iPhone application , announced earlier this week , hit the iTunes Store last Tuesday and since then it’s seen an astonishing one million downloads to the popular Apple devices, which is nothing short of amazing. That translates to approximately 6 downloads per second . In the blog post announcing the milestone, Skype blogger Peter Parkes says he’s “confident that it's one of the fastest-downloaded iPhone apps ever”, which means he’s not really sure. And since we don’t know either, we’re reaching out to you, dear readers. Does Skype now hold the record for reaching the million download mark fastest for a free app, or not? (Hat tip to Pat Phelan ). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Search Suggestions Come To Gmail Top
Google just rolled out a search autocomplete feature for Gmail; If you turn on “Search Autocomplete” from the Labs tab under Gmail Settings, you’ll get suggestions in your search box while you are typing like you do in Google’s search box. The search feature is pretty easy to use and definitely helpful. If you are looking for a contact, you can just type a couple letters of the person’s first or last name and the feature will provide a list that matches the search query. Google has added some advanced features like the ability to search in specific places (e.g. in chats or sent items), or search for messages with attachments by certain type (e.g. docs or photos). But finding that email from six months ago among the tens of thousands in your archive just got easier. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Yelp Focuses On Mobile, New And Improved iPhone App Coming Soon Top
Local review sites like Yelp have irrevocably changed the way consumers find businesses in a particular area, and truly given power to the consumer in finding the best place to eat a meal, grab a drink, etc. And the potential of putting local reviews and listings on mobile devices is immense. Yelp’s existing iPhone app is less than a year old and it already accounts for 5% of Yelp's overall traffic, which adds up to be around roughly 1 million monthly visitors. In the next few days, Yelp will be launching a new version of its popular iPhone app which we’ve reviewed. The new app gives consumers even more ease in automatically reviewing businesses via their iPhone and enhances its exiting GPS capabilities. The updated version of the app now lets Yelpers write review directly from their iPhone through a Twitter-like “Quick Tips” feature that allows users to create 140 character tips. This was sorely lacking in the original version. The tips will be accessible on the iPhone app and the site itself (if popular) and will also be shown in a feed using GPS capabilities when users search businesses. Like before, the app leverages GPS in the iPhone to list reviews, tips, and photos written and taken around a users location. The app will also feature a Friend Feed feature that will pull in your friends activities. Users can also draft a full review of a restaurant, bar or business from their iPhone and then post it later to Yelp.com. Yelp is also upgrading the app to become more compatible in Canada and the UK. Since its launch in 2004, Yelp caught on pretty quickly and has seen consistent growth. Yelp currently has over 5.5 million reviews in the site. Google Analytics says Yelp has had 20.5 million unique visits in the past 30 days. Comscore’s estimate for February was a little more conservative, at around 7 million unique visits for Yelp.com. But Yelp’s monthly unique visits more than doubled from the same month, last year. Along the way, Yelp has decimated most of its competitors. Insider Pages laid off 2/3 of their staff and sold quickly to CitySearch in February 2007, Intuit said "goodbye" to Zipingo in August 2007, and Judy's Book closed their doors in October 2007. CitySearch remains as Yelp’s lone competitor in the local reviews space. To date, Yelp has raised 31 million in capital. The combination of local reviews and mobile is so compelling because Yelp now allows consumers to post reviews as they are eating, drinking or visiting a business. Think about the review of a restaurant that had bad service. Likely, the consumer will be emotionally charged about the poor service. Before the iPhone app, the consumer would write the review after the restaurant visit, when he or she had cooled off a bit. Now, the angry consumer can enter a particularly distasteful, and emotionally charged review directly from the restaurant’s table. Additionally, the combination of using GPS to see reviews of businesses directly where you are in an area is fascinating. Yelp is making it incredibly easy for consumers to quickly access listings, reviews and ratings of businesses without having to input there location. Of course, the transparency and potential negative backlash businesses can suffer from sites like Yelp or CitySearch, has ignited businesses to fight back. Businesses have started anti-Yelp websites and even sued Yelp users for negative or unfair reviews. Yelp lets businesses fight back with a suite of tools to take part in the conversations consumers are having about their businesses. Yelp’s next move should be incorporating Facebook Connect with its site and iPhone app. Currently, you can add Yelp friends on the site and get personalized feeds of reviews from people who are your friends and random people who share your local restaurant or bar tastes. But it would be really cool to be able to see your Facebook friend’s reviews of local businesses, similar to MySpace Local, a partnership between MySpace and CitySearch to combine CitySearch business listings in the MySpace community. Here’s a video detailing the new version of Yelp’s iPhone App: And screenshots below: Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Technorati Lays Off Another 10 Percent Of Employees Top
Blog search engine Technorati has laid off close to 10 percent of its staff, or 4 employees in its PR, engineering and general admin areas. The company’s CEO, Richard Jalichandra confirmed the layoffs. He says they were necessary for the company to continue on the path towards profitability. The reduction will leave the company with 37 employees. Technorati suffered an earlier round of layoffs last September, letting go 6 people and also implemented pay cuts for remaining staff. We’ve added this to the layoff tracker. Jalichandra maintains that the blog search engine is growing and layoffs were necessary to “fine tune” its business model to eventually become profitable. Last fall, Technorati acquired AdEngage to join the company’s newly formed blog advertising network, Technorati Media. Jalichandra says that while the timing of launching an ad network a few months before the market crashed wasn’t optimal, quarterly ad revenue has grown by 6.5 times since the launch of Technorati Media last June, when presumably its revenues were negligible. Jalichandra also says that Twitter and Facebook are changing the blogosphere—but in a good way. He says that Twitter and Facebook are just other platforms on which blogs can gain visibility, and Technorati is beginning to track activity on those platforms as well. For instance, here’s a link to Jalichandra’s Twitter page on Technorati. Nevertheless, traffic to Technorati itself over the past several months has flattened at about 5 million unique visitors worldwide, and is declining in the U.S., according to comScore. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Five Startups Take Flight At Web 2.0 Launchpad Top
I’m at today’s Web2.0 LaunchPad, where five startups have been selected to present pitches in the keynote room of the Moscone Center. At this point the name ‘LaunchPad’ is a bit of a misnomer - companies don’t actually have to launch here to get accepted. Rather, it’s more of a place for companies to showthemselves in the public eye, in front of a crowd of VCs, members of the press, and a panel of judges. This year’s judges include VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb , and Anand Iyer of Microsoft BizSpark . Federated Media’s John Battelle is acting as the MC. Summaries and selected questions from the panelists are below for each company. After the presentations, a real-time audience poll awarded PhoneGap with the top prize. 80legs is a service that allows developers to crawl the web quickly, at a relatively low price. Spidering the web has historically been a time consuming and expensive process, which makes it impractical for small to mid-sized startups. 80legs says it will allow developers to crawl up to 2 billion pages a day, with costs running $2 per million pages crawled and $0.03 per CPU-hr used for analysis. 1 Trillion pages on the Internet right now, typically you have to invest in big datacenter. Need to spend millions of dollars normally. Q: What’s the secret sauce (Judges are concerned that other companies could replicate something similar, trying to brute force it.) A:Our sister company has a grid computing system. They integrate with desktop apps, use excess bandwidth, idle power. That’s the hardware part of it. We’ve solved many of the problems associated with web crawling, and passing and storing data efficiently. zeaLOG allows users to visualize the things they’re keeping track of in their lives. Hacking is a Web 2.0 term for self-improvement, doing just a little bit more to improve. Allows users to visualize many metrics, such as saving weight. Users can share their progress with friends, so that they can help motivate each other. The visualizations are impressive, with colorful dynamic graphs. Can track number of pushups you’ve done, Twitter followers you have, Word Twist IQ, etc. Extremely open, allow you to embed graphs into blogs. Opening API to feed any kind of data in. Opening to third parties. Kirkpatrick: I was excited at first, but felt deflated pretty quickly. There are a bunch of apps for passive tracking.. There’s effort required on this site. A: Users are coming up with many ideas for things they’re looking to track… Iyer; I’m a heavy user of Mint, the lead gen model works for them. Have you thought about integrated lead gen? A: We’ve thought about investigating it. Because of privacy issues, there’s a fine line.. We’re small and lean our costs are lower for right now. Figuring out what users like. Marshall: A lot of Web 2.0 companies are surprised at how hard it is to get people to come back. What are things you can do to get people to come back? I think think a lot of these activities last for 6 months.. A: We’ve had people look at more ongoing things (movies they’ve watched). What seems to happen is natural virality, people will show it to coworkers, spouse. People seem to come in groups. PhoneGap is a ‘cross platform for mobile applications’. There’s lots of hype around the iPhone, but there are other devices: Nokia, BlackBerry, Palm, Android, Windows Mobile. We need to write in all of these different languages. PhoneGap, you write in HTML+JavaScript, works on all of them. It’s open sourced, has native API access. Community is growing quickly. Today they released an emulator that allows developers to jump between different interfaces so they can see what their application will look like in each phone on the fly. PhoneGap is funded by Nitobi, which has been around for ten years. Kirkpatrick: I like it. I was wondering if you could speak to what people were saying when the Pre came out, about not being able to create heavy-duty apps. A: I think we’ve seen that you can. It would be difficult to do 3D games, but for social network, etc HTML and JavaScript are more than you need. Marshall: Any other companies doing this? A: Yes, there are a few doing the multiplatform approach, not aware of any that are doing HTML/JavaScript model. Bantam is an online social workspace for business coworkers. Allows users to post notes to an activity feed, which can include status updates and action updates (e.g. when a file is uploaded into the system). In some ways seems similar to Yammer , though Bantam includes more options like Events and a more feature-rich control panel. Small-mid sized businesses. Kirkpatrick: I wonder why I would want to use a proprietary technology to microblog A: Bantam isn’t going to be for everyone, but I don’t know of an alternative that does what Bantam does. I don’t know of any open source alternatives that let you do this. Marshall: Group of writers looking communicate, we haven’t found a perfect solution. This is the sort of thing that’s really valuable - a workflow combines with real-time updates. My concern is that everyone knows this, I think SocialText released something very similar. A: Competition is a beautiful thing. Iyer: What kind of feedback are you getting about security concerns? A: Outages are always the first issue. It hasn’t been an issue thus far. Many of us get overloaded with business cards. And even if you get it into your system, you’ll forget who they are months later, and their contact info may change. dubmenow is looking to solve the business card exchange problem. Works on any phone (iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile), anything with SMS. Small application. Captures date, time, and location. Can save to the cloud, and to your mobile phone. LinkedIn invites, Address book backup, CRM integration. Iyer: Can you talk about differentiation a bit? There are other similar products out there. A: This isn’t a new idea. Palm tried it ten years ago. The challenge it was platform dependent (had to be on Palm). And even then it wouldn’t remain up to date. Kirkpatrick: When so many people have identities on the web now (you can Google them), why do I need to store contact information locally? A: Once you make exchange easier, how do you manage it… Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
DiggBar Is Here. Go Shorten Those URLs Top
Last month we wrote about the new Digg toolbar product called DiggBar. It launched today. If you want to try it out immediately, just add “digg.com/” before any URL at all (the image above is using the techcrunch domain). The toolbar is made for the new Twitter generation, which has a desperate need for very short URLs to fit in the tiny space allotted per message. Digg is going to be a popular player in this space because of the easy way to create the URLs (just pop digg.com in front of anything), as well as the stats that they provide in the toolbar wrapper: number of views, comments on the story, and related stories. StumbleUpon has their own product called su.pr coming shortly as well. Here’s the official post from Digg on the product, and a demo video: DiggBar from Kevin Rose on Vimeo . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Gary Vay•ner•chuk Turns His Internet Celebrity Into A Seven-Figure Book Deal Top
Garyvee (aka Gary Vay•ner•chuk ) is crushing it. The wine retailer-turned-video-blogger is cashing in his Internet fame for a seven-figure, 10-book deal with HarperStudio . That comes to at least $100,000 per book, which is decent for first-time an unproven author, but he is going to have to hustle to keep up the interest for ten books. His first one comes out in September, and is called: Crush It! Turn Your Passion into Profits in a Digital World. One thing Vay•ner•chuck has going for him is a built-in audience he cultivated one e-mail at a time, starting with his his popular video wine blog, Wine Library TV . Then he started branching out beyond wine into marketing, motivational speaking, other Web video shows , wine-review site Corkd , and even T-shirt search (because everyone is always looking for a good T-shirt). So can Garyvee turn his 80,000 daily videoblog fans and 160,000 Twitter followers into actual paying customers for his book series? Do those people even read books anymore? If only 10 percent end up buying each book, HarperStudio will be happy. Update : Vay•ner•chuk responds in a few places via video in comments below. In this comment , he points out that what attracted him to HarperStudio is a 50/50 revenue share (presumably once each book hits profitability) which gives him a bigger upside should the books do well. That is a much more entrepreneurial model than most book publishers are comfortable with, and hopefully we’ll be seeing more like them. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Opera Browser Chosen For "Mobile Office" Computer In Ford Pickup Trucks Top
Can the Web save the Big 3 automobile companies? Probably not, but making Web-friendly vehicles could help to sell a few more cars. Tech companies have increasingly been showcasing web applications for automobiles. Microsoft was working with Hyundai on making an in-car computing system and OnStar may be incorporating Twitter into its vehicle systems. Now Ford will be allowing owners of the Ford F-150, Super Duty, E-Series and Transit Connect trucks and vans to access the web from their vehicles through the Opera mobile browser. Opera will be the featured browser on Ford’s first broadband-capable, in-dash computer. Ford is purposely installing these computers in trucks and vans to appeal to contractors, farmers, and construction workers to turn these cars into “mobile offices.” Truck owners will be able to use the in-dash browser to access sales information, contact databases, job-site plans, inventory lists, calendars, e-mail, or even the weather. The Ford Work Solutions in-dash computer is integrated into the vehicle's center stack, filling the same space normally occupied by the standard radio. It is equipped with a 6.5-inch, high-resolution touch screen, four gigabytes of memory, a secure digital slot for added memory, a USB port, a wireless keyboard, a mouse, and a bluetooth-enabled, battery-powered inkjet printer. The concept of a “mobile office” that incorporates Web 2.0 capabilities is definitely compelling. If Ford rolls this feature out to other cars besides SUVs and trucks, the idea could really take off. For instance, it would be a great option for cars in rental fleets that are commonly used by business people who are on the go. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Virgance Looks To Turn Green Options Media Network Into A Blogging Empire Top
Virgance , the unique ‘Activism 2.0′ startup that is looking to improve the world while making money in the process , has announced the latest addition to its portfolio of campaigns. The company has revealed that beginning six months ago it began quietly acquiring a number of blogs, namely the Green Options Media Network - a collection of 15 blogs, each of which is focused on a different portion of the environmental space. Since the acquisition the blog network has managed to become profitable despite the floundering economy, and has seen its writing staff grow significantly. But according to Virgance, they’re just getting started. Green Options was founded back in 2007, and has grown to around 2.5 million monthly unique visitors. The network’s most popular blogs include Gas 2.0 (a blog focused on alternative fuels) and CleanTechnica , a blog that examines the latest trends in clean tech. The network sees around 30-40 new blog posts a day, though some of the niche blogs are updated less frequently than the others. Since acquiring Green Options, Virgance has largely been concentrating on revamping the network’s backend, which had previously been unable to cope was huge rushes of traffic (the blog network is regularly seen on Digg and even the Yahoo homepage, and has previously had issues with downtime). Virgance was able to tap into its resources to sovle these issues, and Green Options articles have been recently featured on the Yahoo homepage without a hitch. Now that the blogs can keep up with traffic, Virgance CEO Steve Newcomb says it’s time for ‘Phase Two’. Virgance is looking to turn Green Options Media into something of a media empire akin to the Huffington Post, featuring frequent submissions from notable politicians, executives, and celebrities. At the moment most of the site’s content is written by a handful of staff writers and a over 100 citizen journalists and reporters. And it already has some impressive contributors, including San Francisco Mayor Gavin Gavin Newsom, who writes an article every two weeks. Newcomb says that we probably won’t start seeing too many more well known authors sign on until the summer, but the blog is already seeing steady traffic regardless. Beyond that, Newcomb says that he’s looking to extend the company’s blogging properties beyond ‘Green’ and into other fields. Of course, this is all easier said than done - it probably won’t be easy to recruit all of these politicians and executives, and even if Green Options can create a sizable audience, it’s going to be difficult to convert them into readers of unrelated news (building the next Huffington Post isn’t going to be easy). Aside from Green Options, Newcomb says that Virgance has more campaigns on the way, some of which will be unveiled at the company’s next Equinox Event on Tuesday. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Stanford Course On How To Build iPhone Apps Will Soon Be Available On The iPhone Top
Want to learn how to create an iPhone app? Later this week, aspiring app creators will be able to start watching a popular Stanford computer science course on developing iPhone apps right on their iPhones. Stanford will start distributing the course for free as a video podcast through iTunes U . (The podcasts can also be watched on iPods and computers, obviously). With more than 25,000 apps out there, which have been downloaded more than 800 million times , the competition is fierce for making the best apps. Apple itself provides a wealth of information for developers about its SDK, but for those who need a little more guidance or a refresher in the basics, watching these videos is like continuing education. The videos are not on iTunes yet, but the first one should appear within the next few days. Why pay to go to Stanford when you can get the lecture on iTunes for free? Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
With Hadoop, Amazon Adds A Web-Scale Data Processing Engine To Its Cloud Computer Top
Slowly but surely, Amazon keeps adding capabilities to its cloud computing services. What started out as pay-by-the-drink storage (S3) and computational processing (EC2), now includes a simple database (SimpleDB), a content delivery network (CloudFront), and computer-to-computer messaging (SQS). And today Amazon added a web-scale file system data processing engine with Amazon Elastic MapReduce . (It is a framework for accessing data stored in file systems and databases). This is actually a big deal because it allows developers to better take advantage of the massive computing power Amazon has to offer and create applications which process huge reservoirs of data (conveniently stored in Amazon S3) in parallel. MapReduce is the name of the data processing framework Google created to index and search the Web. It literally breaks up huge computational tasks and spreads them to different servers. This is called mapping the data. Once each processor is done with its portion of the math problem, it sends the result back so that all the different partial answers can be combined and then “reduced” into one final answer. Amazon is using Hadoop , which is the open-source version of MapReduce. Yahoo also started using Hadoop last year. While Google and Yahoo use this technique for searching the Web, it can be used for any data-intensive computational problem. Amazon lists the following examples: “web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research.” Indeed, Hadoop is also the underlying technology used by IBM in its Blue Cloud initiative . There is even a startup called Cloudera , which offers its own Hadoop computational services on top of Amazon’s EC2. They just got a huge competitor. But more startups can now create Web-scale applications at a fraction of the cost they could before. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Microsoft Releases All New Windows Live Client For Windows Mobile Top
Windows Live may seem like a failure in the eyes of many a TechCrunch reader, but there are a number of services that continue to thrive within the scope of a vast, mainstream audience. Hence it’s worth noting that Microsoft has released a new application for Windows Mobile devices that encompasses a slew of Live services used by dozens of millions of people every day. The new version (v10.06.0046.0800) of the Windows Live For Windows Mobile client, which is evidently free of charge, includes mobile versions of Windows Live Hotmail (works with both both pull and push sync), Windows Live Messenger (finally!), Windows Live Contacts, Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft Live Search and enhanced photo upload capabilities. The app comes in a Pro version for touch-enabled devices and a Standard version for non-touch phones, and is available in 25 languages. The mobile web version is also still available, and features a new beta version of Windows Live Hotmail which offers a number of welcome additions like the ability to see full HTML pages within e-mail messages and a new email search feature, next to a revamped UI and navigation enhancements for touch-screen devices. (Hat tip to Microsoftie Coolz0r on Twitter ) Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
MyHeritage: Avoiding the MetaCafe Curse Top
BNEI ATAROT- In case you don't recognize it, that dateline is the name of a small village about forty-five minutes from Tel Aviv. Don't worry, my concierge hadn't heard of it either. It may actually have more roosters than people living there. But tucked away, in a hundred-year-old house built by German Templars is one of the most exciting Web companies in Israel: MyHeritage . It's also completely outside of the Israeli Web "scene." I've never seen founder Gilad Japhet at any of the Web mixers, and I've never gotten a pitch from his PR people. In fact, I had to do a bit of hounding to get a meeting. But don't be fooled by the low-profile: MyHeritage is boasting some of the best numbers of any Israeli Web startup. It’s got 31 million registered users, who have documented 330 million family members, some living and some dead. The company has been backed by blue chip investors Accel Partners and Index Ventures. And Japhet told me on Monday, the company is starting to bring in real revenue from premium services and eCommerce transactions. (Think: sending flowers and candy to your parents for their anniversary). Japhet admits the company should have focused on this earlier, but says the lean operation should be break-even by the end of the year. After a tour, Japhet said, "How long do you have? Because when I get going, it's hard to stop." He's not kidding. He also took the liberty of giving me a bigger notepad. I think I asked one question, but mostly nodded and ate the homey selection of apples, pears and bananas that was laid out for us. But I'm not sure there's anyway to tell the story of MyHeritage quickly. It's been a long road and little has come easily for this company. As a result, more than a few people have described Japhet as a little crazy. That's ok. I like crazy entrepreneurs. Frequently, you have to be one to succeed. After all, when he started MyHeritage no one was interested in a mainstream Web genealogy startup. He bootstrapped the company for years, mortgaging his house and begging a German company for free access to its facial recognition software. He was turned down for venture capital so many times, when he finally got a small round from prominent Israeli angels, he had to give up a lot of equity. "Have you ever heard this word 'Chutzpah?'" he asked smiling. It's not that Japhet is modest: He clearly crowed over MyHeritage's technology and other things he believes he's done well. But he openly admits where he has struggled. One of the most pivotal events in his company's history: The launch and monster $100 million valuation of competing site Geni.com. On one hand, it legitimized the space. But as his investor Simon Levene of Accel told him, "Be careful what happened to MetaCafe doesn't happen to you." The story of MetaCafe is one you hear over-and-over again in Israel. The company is still alive, but the founders have left , traffic has stalled, and according to Arrington at least, acquisition attempts were thwarted . In case you aren't familiar with MetaCafe, it was a lot like YouTube, only it launched earlier. It was growing nicely when, like an Israeli cabbie, YouTube came out of nowhere and sideswiped MetaCafe. (Yes, I'm trying to make Israeli driving jokes in every post about the country. I'm actually a big fan of the taxi drivers here. I've arrived at meetings in record speed over the last two weeks.) If I've heard about the so-called MetaCafe curse at least two dozen  times since I've arrived, no doubt Japhet has heard about it more. After six years of building this company, putting a strain on his family and having to give away most of his equity to keep it alive, Levene's words were like a call to action. "He didn't say we were going to lose," Japhet says. "He said, 'You're going to work really, really hard to make sure you win.'" And as TechCrunch has reported, MyHeritage is killing Geni in traffic, and buzz-wise everyone seems more excited about Geni founder David Sacks' newer company, Yammer . Japhet likes Yammer too. "David Sacks is a very talented guy and now I only have to compete with half of him," he says. I've always been a huge fan of Geni's user interface, and it's still better. But MyHeritage gives you more to do. While everyone in Israel has been in a lather about Face.com this week, MyHeritage has long had pretty impressive facial recognition software that could also tag photos on Facebook, Flickr and other sites. Again, Face.com is glitzier, but at least Japhet knows this is a weakness. This is the real reason he bought the UK's Kindo recently. "They didn't have a ton of assets, but they were good at UI," he says. It's been a tough road for Japhet. Maybe he built the company too early. Maybe he should have focused more on the Web than a downloadable client. Maybe he should have focused more on revenues a few years ago. But there's also an advantage when things don't come easily for entrepreneurs: They take nothing for granted and are less likely to get sideswiped by an upstart. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Twitter Confirms And Details New "Discovery Engine" Top
We’ve been getting a lot of tips today and yesterday about the limited roll-out of a new Twitter homepage design, which gives the search functionality a more prominent place along with some additional features. We couldn’t see it ourselves on our accounts, but now co-founder Biz Stone has confirmed the changes in a blog post , calling the new feature a ‘discovery engine’. (see it here on the Flickr account of Adam Jackson) With the redesign, the search box has moved to the right sidebar of the interface (only for a small subset of users at this point), where Stone claims it’s a more ‘natural part of the Twitter experience’. I agree, and it shows that the company realizes very well that real-time search is a killer feature they should be nurturing and monitoring very closely. When you do a search, the results no longer appear on a separate page but remain on the homepage, and by default it only crawls the tweets from the accounts you’re following searches the entire public Twitter stream. You can also save search queries and revisit the results at a later time. Since the searches you save stay on your homepage, this feature makes it a lot easier for people to keep track of conversations around a given topic (e.g. a brand, event or person) and also sort of makes the plethora of third-party monitoring tools obsolete for basic queries. We’ll have to see how this will affect the applications that are currently centered around monitoring Twitter conversations (take for instance, the Yahoo Sideline desktop app we covered yesterday ), but it’s clear that the more emphasis Twitter puts on that, the less relevant they become. Twitter is also going to display popular trending topics below the search box, which will in turn make it easier for people to discover what the Twitterverse is talking about the most at any given time. Stone reminds us Trends is in beta, but like he says, it has potential. Meanwhile, a lot of people are still reporting missing tweets and direct messages, a problem that’s been lingering for several weeks now. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 

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