Friday, April 24, 2009

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News Corp Pulls The Trigger: Owen Van Natta Now Runs The Circus. Err, MySpace Top
They pulled the trigger: Owen Van Natta is now the CEO of MySpace and will report to Jonathan Miller , the new CEO of Digital Media for News Corp. Van Natta is a former Facebook and Amazon executive who, until today, was the CEO of a decidedly unstable music startup called Playlist. He’s got the resume to run MySpace, but as we said yesterday there are some serious questions around whether he’s the right guy. He still owns a significant part of Facebook and he’s clearly leaving Playlist, and the executives and investors he brought on board, in a bad situation. He joined that company just a few months ago. The rumor is that they’ll now be forced to shut down, although Playlist announces in a separate release that board member John Sykes, a cofounder of MTV, will take over as CEO for now . This has been a dramatic week for MySpace, and the situation probably couldn’t have been handled more poorly . One person close to the situation described the firing of DeWolfe and the hiring of Van Natta as resembling “retarded drunk people riding bumper cars.” We broke the news that News Corp. was looking to replace founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe on Tuesday. Later that day we confirmed the news. On Wednesday News Corp. issued a short press release that DeWolfe was leaving and that cofounder and president Tom Anderson would be moving to a new role. We published a short list of possible candidates for the new CEO, which included Van Natta. Negotiations were concluded yesterday, we’ve heard from a source close to News Corp. During all this time very little news has made its way to MySpace, and even the executives were left completely in the dark. Yesterday an executive of the company asked me if I’d heard any news and whether he was on the list to be terminated. That’s a sad situation. “The clowns have taken over the circus,” he said. More. Much more, on this story later. The full press releases of both announcements are below: News Corporation Names Owen Van Natta Chief Executive Officer of MySpace ______________________ Los Angeles, CA, April 24, 2009 – News Corporation today announced the appointment of Owen Van Natta to the role of MySpace Chief Executive Officer effective immediately. Mr. Van Natta will be based in Los Angeles and report directly to Jonathan Miller, News Corporation's CEO of Digital Media and Chief Digital Officer. A highly-regarded digital executive, Mr. Van Natta, 39, previously served as Chief Revenue Officer and Vice President of Operations for Facebook, where he helped negotiate Facebook's $240 million investment from Microsoft. Earlier, he served as Vice President of Worldwide Business and Corporate Development for Amazon.com. Most recently, he was the CEO of Playlist, Inc., an online music company. "Owen combines a deep understanding of social networking, a keen business sense and the operational experience to guide MySpace through its next phase of growth. I'm confident his leadership will be an invaluable asset," said Mr. Miller. "I plan to work closely with Owen to shape our long-term vision around this vibrant community that already attracts more than 130 million users worldwide." "I'm thrilled to have the privilege to pilot MySpace in what is sure to be an incredibly exciting and rewarding next chapter for the business," said Mr. Van Natta. "I feel honored to build upon the immeasurable achievements of the MySpace founders and look forward to working with Jon and the MySpace team to meet the challenges and make the most of the opportunities before us." While serving as Vice President of Operations and Chief Revenue Officer for Facebook, Van Natta focused on revenue operations, business development, strategic partnerships and technical operations. As Vice President of Worldwide Business and Corporate Development at Amazon.com, he managed global marketing programs and strategic partnerships. He was also part of the founding team of A9.com, the Amazon.com search company, and was responsible for site operations and sponsored-link advertising. Owen earned a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Playlist Names Board Member and Veteran Media Executive John Sykes as CEO MTV Co-founder and Former VH-1 President Replaces Owen Van Natta Palo Alto, Calif., April 24, 2009 – Playlist, the leading social media network where over 43 million music fans discover, create and share playlists, announced today that Board Member and industry veteran John Sykes has joined the company as Chief Executive Officer. As a Co-founder of MTV, President of VH1, and CEO of Infinity Broadcasting, Sykes brings extensive operating experience and industry relationships to the company as it partners with the music industry to provide advertising, subscription and e-commerce services to music consumers. Owen Van Natta will serve as an Advisor to Playlist. "John was a pioneer of the MTV revolution that forever changed the music industry landscape by giving fans a whole new way to discover and enjoy music," said Bob Zangrillo, Chairman of Playlist. "Playlist looks forward to leveraging John's tremendous track record operating media businesses and deep relationships in the music industry as it builds out the world's premier social media service." "Creating and sharing playlists has become a phenomenon in our culture. With over 43 million registered users, Playlist is the number one site where fans go to discover, share and enjoy their favorite music," said John Sykes, CEO of Playlist. "Leveraging our newly forged partnerships with the music community, we can now offer consumers deep access to their music and provide the industry with powerful new revenue streams." Playlist, one of the fastest growing sites on the Internet, continues to establish partnerships with the entertainment industry in an effort to offer a comprehensive collection of content that can be discovered, shared and monetized at www.playlist.com. About Playlist With over 43 million registered users, Playlist is the number one site in the nation where consumers discover, organize and share their favorite music across the social Web. The company leverages over 50 million user created playlists to help media companies and the record industry virally promote, distribute and monetize their content. The company is based in Palo Alto, CA. For more information, visit www.playlist.com. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
TechCrunch Comes to China Top
As regular readers know, I'm working on a book about global entrepreneurship and taking TechCrunch readers along with me. By that I mean, I’ll be blogging about cool companies I find, not that I’m actually chartering a plane for all of you. Sorry, but, you know, it’s a recession. Up next: China. I'll be in Shanghai and Bejing May 9-22. It's my first trip to China, and I have a long list of potential companies and investors to meet, but I want to make sure I'm not missing any gems. So if you know any such gems, local venture capitalists, angel investors or anyone with an interesting entrepreneurial story please email me at sarah(at)techcrunch(dot)com or leave it in the comments. I now return you to your regularly scheduled Friday flood of news about MySpace and Twitter. (PS: This has to be the shortest post I’ve ever written.) Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Project Playlist Fills CEO Void With MTV Co-Founder John Sykes Top
Hot on the heels of the announcement that Owen Van Natta is unceremoniously leaving Project Playlist to run MySpace, Project Playlist has announced that John Sykes will be stepping in as CEO. Sykes is a co-founder of MTV, former president of VH1, and former president of Infinity Broadcasting, one of the largest radio broadcasting companies in the US. Sykes has been a boardmember at Playlist up until this point. Project Playlist is a decidedly troubled company. After showing very impressive traffic numbers late last year, Playlist saw its traffic plummet after its embeddable playlists were removed from both MySpace and Facebook, which were threatened with lawsuits by the major music labels. Under the guidance of Van Natta, who only joined the company in November, the company had been making some headway with music industry. With his extensive background in the music industry Sykes may be able to keep Playlist on the right track, but Van Natta’s abrupt departure isn’t exactly a vote of confidence in the company. Full press release below: Palo Alto, Calif., April 24, 2009 – Playlist, the leading social media network where over 43 million music fans discover, create and share playlists, announced today that Board Member and industry veteran John Sykes has joined the company as Chief Executive Officer. As a Co-founder of MTV, President of VH1, and CEO of Infinity Broadcasting, Sykes brings extensive operating experience and industry relationships to the company as it partners with the music industry to provide advertising, subscription and e-commerce services to music consumers. Owen Van Natta will serve as an Advisor to Playlist. "John was a pioneer of the MTV revolution that forever changed the music industry landscape by giving fans a whole new way to discover and enjoy music," said Bob Zangrillo, Chairman of Playlist. "Playlist looks forward to leveraging John's tremendous track record operating media businesses and deep relationships in the music industry as it builds out the world's premier social media service." "Creating and sharing playlists has become a phenomenon in our culture. With over 43 million registered users, Playlist is the number one site where fans go to discover, share and enjoy their favorite music," said John Sykes, CEO of Playlist. "Leveraging our newly forged partnerships with the music community, we can now offer consumers deep access to their music and provide the industry with powerful new revenue streams." Playlist, one of the fastest growing sites on the Internet, continues to establish partnerships with the entertainment industry in an effort to offer a comprehensive collection of content that can be discovered, shared and monetized at www.playlist.com. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Twitter Eats World: Global Visitors Shoot Up To 19 Million Top
Twitter’s march towards world domination continues apace. This morning comScore released its global numbers for March, 2009. Worldwide visitors to Twitter.com increased 95 percent in the month of March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million, according to its estimates. This compares to 9.3 million visitors in the U.S. alone . These numbers only count visitors to Twitter’s Website, which is not the same as active users and also does not include people who interact with Twitter via desktop or mobile clients (a large portion of users). But the comScore numbers provide a good proxy for Twitter’s overall growth, which was helped recently by Ashton Kutcher’s race with CNN to one million followers, and Oprah’s subsequent adoption of the service. If Twitter can keep this rate of growth up, it should cross 50 million visitors by summer. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
AlertFox Launches Powerful Web Application Monitoring Tool (Freebies Here) Top
Most web application developers have been there: your monitoring system shows nothing but green lights, yet the app is down or not functioning the way it should. Traditional web monitoring services often don’t dig deep enough to detect glitches in the application code, and database or find that problems arise with bugs in Ajax, Flash or Silverlight front-end applets. German startup iOpus is today unveiling the public beta of a product it claims offers a solution for many a developer or website owner who would like their monitoring services taken up a notch. Enter AlertFox . (free Pro accounts for 100 users, see below) What AlertFox does is provide in-depth monitoring of rich internet applications (RIAs), offering a potential solution for many SaaS and Web 2.0 web service providers out there who are not satisfied with a simple uptime checker that only provides superficial information without detecting the root cause of problems. AlertFox runs directly from the browser (with support for both Firefox and Internet Explorer) and is capable of keeping tabs on the functioning and performance of sites built with ActiveX, AJAX, Flash, Flex, complex HTML or Silverlight technology. Another aspect that sets AlertFox apart from most traditional monitoring services is the real-time monitoring of transactions, e.g. the entire checkout process for an e-commerce store instead of only its uptime. This should come in handy for online businesses for which a smooth buying and selling process makes all the difference in the world. The company is following the freemium approach for its business model, which is subscription-based and as far as I can tell extremely moderately priced. Users can get started with a free account, which covers worldwide monitoring and other basic features but only supports one user and use within the Firefox browser. You’d need to sign up for a Pro account (starts at $49 per month for the time being as a promotional offer) for transaction monitoring with both Firefox and Internet Explorer, support for up to five users and 100% monitoring of Flash, Ajax and Silverlight applications. We’d love for you to take it for a spin and tell us if it lives up to its promise, so we’ve arranged for the company to give away 100 free Pro2 accounts, valid for two years. All you need to do is quickly sign up for a free account and send an e-mail to techcrunch-at-alertfox-dot-com. The first 100 readers to do that will be upgraded without charge, and are expected to come back and share their experiences in the comments. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Google Continues To Center On Location. Adds It To Its Toolbar. Top
Location-based services haven’t yet caught fire, but location itself is increasingly finding its way to web services as a complimentary feature. The latest to use it is the Google Toolbar. If you have it installed, and open Google Maps, it will now auto-center on your location. That’s a small, but useful feature, but the ramifications of this move are potentially much large. This adds location capabilities to the millions of people who have Google Toolbar installed. You may be thinking that a lot of those users with the latest version of Firefox already had it — but this feature is for Internet Explorer only right now. That, combined with Mozilla’s use of its Geode location plug-in (which again, is built into the latest version of Firefox), puts location on a good percentage of browsers in the world. And while it doesn’t mention it, that’s important for Google’s own larger purposes. Its recently launched Latitude location-based network is only useful if it can automatically update your location, or make it really easy to do. Up until now, it has been a pain on a computer. But there are other big things Google could do with location information — such as serve you location-based ads. There are other companies working in that field, but you can bet Google wants to get out in front of them and lead the charge. And with its own toolbar to get your location, it could potentially do that. It also promises the ability to serve up location-based search results with feature. Google has been been working on location for a little while in the mobile space, but most users are still experiencing the web first and foremost through regular computer browsers. Google’s toolbar pulls location data from both IP addresses and nearby Wi-Fi access points — since most computers don’t have GPS built-in. Much like it does with Gmail, Google added a “Labs” area to Google Toolbar today, to test this new feature. It also has a new, simple Chinese version of the Toolbar in this Labs area. Both are IE-only for right now, as I mentioned. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Czech Cloud Startup Good Data Raises Funding From Marc Andreessen And Others Top
Good Data , a startup founded in the Czech Republic and with headquarters in San Francisco, has closed a second round of financing - $2.5 million from Marc Andreessen , Ben Horowitz , OATV and General Catalyst . The company has now raised a total of around $4.5 million in capital. You don’t see a lot of startups coming out of Eastern Europe, and even fewer who receive Silicon Valley capital. But founder Roman Stanek is an exception and a highly fundable individual. He sold his first startup, NetBeans, to Sun for $10 million and his second, Systinet, to Mercury Interactive/HP for $105 million. And like his previous startups, Stanek has perfected the running of a tech company with operations in both the U.S. and Prague. Good Data is disrupting a highly lucrative multi-billion dollar market - data analytics. This is a sector dominated by huge software companies like IBM (via their Cognos acquisition ), SAP ( via Business Objects ) and Oracle ( via Hyperion ). Companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the software, plus large yearly maintenance fees. And now Good Data is offering a cloud based solution. For free. Well, not free forever. It’s in open beta currently and there’s no charge at all for the dozen or so companies and hundreds of individuals testing the service. Eventually they’ll start charging a usage fee - they say they’re still finalizing how and what they’ll charge - but it will be far, far lower than the current solutions. The company is entirely run on Amazon web services and boasts that they don’t own or lease a single server. That keeps their fixed costs down to a minimum, with zero capital expenditures and less need to worry about scaling. Too see more about the service check out the demo videos here . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Zero Remains A Popular App Download Number Among Non-iPhone Owners Top
Apps on the iPhone are huge. We know that. As if we needed more proof, Apple moved its billionth app earlier this afternoon. But some recent data from Compete suggests that smartphone owners who don’t have an iPhone, apparently don’t love apps. Or at least, don’t download them. If you look at the graph below, you’ll see that iPhone owners are very diversified in the number of apps they download. Some have only 1-5, some 6-10, some over 31 (that’s me — several times over), etc. But look at the other phones surveyed. A lot of them haven’t downloaded any apps. And those that don’t have zero, seem to prefer downloading only 1-5. Now you see why all of the other smartphone manufacturers are rushing to get their own app store solutions. Of the phones in this list, only BlackBerry has a real rival app store right now — and it just launched. It’s worth noting that Google’s Android platform was not included in the quarterly survey of 1,000 smartphone owners. Its app store, Android Market, has seen the second most amount of activity in terms of downloads behind the iPhone. But it is far behind the iPhone. The other question asked in the survey is also somewhat interesting. While iPhone users love apps, they’re apparently not as willing to pay as much for them as much as other smartphone owners are. For exmple, 16% of Motorola smartphone owners said they would spend over $50 on an app. Only 1% of iPhone owners would pay that price. Of course, iPhone owners are spoiled with a ton of apps priced much less than that. Motorola users, forced to live in a barren wasteland of basically no apps, will gladly pay for something, anything, apparently. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Meebo Brings Real-Time Chat To myYearbook Top
Meebo ’s Community IM is getting its biggest vote of confidence yet tonight, when it is deployed on popular social network myYearbook . Community IM is Meebo’s answer to Facebook Chat, offering publishers and social networks a way to introduce a persistent chat bar at the bottom of their sites without having to develop one on their own. And while Meebo had deployed the product to 25 partner sites before now, myYearbook is the largest by a substantial margin, with over nine million monthly unique visitors. We’ve known this was coming for a long time - in fact, we reported on it when Meebo’s Community IM product was first announced last July. But Meebo took its time to actually roll out the product, having only launched it on three partner sites by the end of January 2009. Since then, things have been moving much more quickly, with Community IM now live on 25 sites. Meebo also has over 65 total partners signed. Meebo is really nailing it with Community IM, offering publishers a way to increase engagement while at the same time giving them another source of revenue (it’s bringing its highly performing interactive ad platform to partners next month). Add that to the fact that real-time community toolbars seem to be quickly becoming the norm (even YouTube is testing its own), and it looks like Meebo won’t have any shortage of partners to deploy Community IM to. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Latest Twitter Bug: "Misdelivery of Direct Messages" Top
For better or for worse, we’ve sort of gotten used to the occasional downtime, lost profile images, and other quirky phenomena that strike Twitter as it goes through its never-ending growing pains. But this crosses the line. This morning Twitter made a post to its official status blog stating that it was, among other things, having problems with phone settings, profile photos, and misdelivery of direct messages . You know, the ones that are supposed to be private. Twitter is blaming the problem on an “underlying data inconsistency in our service”. An update to the blog post at 5:55 AM this morning stated that the issue had been fixed, and that Twitter was in the process of “putting everything back in its right place”, which is apparently still ongoing. It’s one thing for Direct Messages to suck from a functionality standpoint (Twitter’s DM feature is really basic). But it’s another thing entirely for these messages to start going to the wrong people. Imagine if Gmail or Facebook started accidentally sending your messages to the wrong person - it’s a breach of user trust. Twitter did the right thing by reporting it on its blog (though we’ve gotten a few tips from confused users who are getting messages from strangers), but this sort of thing just can’t happen. Thanks to Pierre Fontenelle for the tip. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
More Bad News: The Curtains Close On Lycos Cinema Top
It’s been a bad day for the Internet’s old guard. This morning we reported that Yahoo was pulling the plug on Geocities. Now we’ve learned that Lycos Cinema , one of the social media projects created by the once-massively popular web portal, is closing its doors. Granted, Lycos has been under new ownership for years and has been trying to get a foothold in markets unrelated to the web portal/search engine that made its famous, but it’s still a name many of us associate with the late 90’s, when it was among the most trafficked sites in the world. Lycos Cinema launched over two years ago, with the promise of letting friends watch videos from different computers at the same time using ’simulstream’ technology, which was supposed to mimic the social experience of watching a movie in a movie theatre or over at a friend’s house. The site got a big upgrade last May, when it launched a new chat client and a revamped interface. Unfortunately, it looks like Lycos Cinema never got over its biggest obstacle: a lack of content. We wrote last year that the site hadn’t signed any of the major studios, and by the looks of the current library this never changed. The only studio listed is ‘National Lampoon’, and I can honestly say that I haven’t heard of 90% of the movies featured on the site’s homepage. That may have flown a few years ago, but with sites like Hulu and TV.com offering recent movies and TV shows, there just wasn’t much of a reason to head to Lycos Cinema. According to the notice at the top of the site, Lycos Cinema will close on April 29th. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Apple's App Store: 1 Billion Served Top
Well, it finally happened.  Apple just delivered its 1 Billionth application download from the App Store, which currently features over 25,000 apps (35,000 by one estimate) built by thousands of developers. The significance of the milestone (besides just the 1 billion mark) is that it’s taken only nine months from when the App Store launched on iTunes to hit 1 billion paid and unpaid downloads. Last summer, Apple sold one million 3G iPhones worldwide across 21 countries in the first 3 days on sale. During that same time, iPhone users made 10 million app downloads from the then newly launched iTunes App Store. The count was at 300 million in early December, and the App Store hit 500 million downloads by January 16th.  It took Apple six months to reach the first 500 million downloads.  It would take Apple only three months to get another 500 billion downloads.  By March, 2009, it was at 800 million .  We started keeping track via Apple’s billion-app countdown at around 928,077,779. Apple also offered us a fleeting glimpse of the most popular apps ever, something the company only did once before. Apple apparently already had a hunch of when the billion mark was going to be passed, because the billionth app celebration page was already ready to go. Apple predicted the time when the billionth app would be downloaded: 1:24:06 AM PST on April 23. That didn’t happen. The number of different apps available has also been growing  steadily.  In November, the app store had 10,000 apps, and grew to 15,000 by Apple’s quarterly earnings call in January. Within a month, the app store added 5,000 more apps, bringing the total available apps up to 20,000. By March, the app store has over 25,000 apps .  Now, according to an estimate by App Store analytics firm Mobclix , there are 35.550 apps worldwide. Some lucky iPhone user who downloaded an app in the past two weeks will win a $10,000 iTunes gift card, MacBook Pro, Time Capsule, and iPod touch. We also hosted our own contest to see who could guess when the billionth app would be downloaded and we will release the results soon. Here’s a current list of the top apps, free and paid, downloaded, courtesy of Mobclix. The numbers next to the global stats indicate how many countries had that app ranked as #1.: Top 5 free (Global): 1: Heat Pad - Relaxing Heat Sensitive Surface (17) 2: Skype (9) 3: Ferrari GT Evolution: Lite Version (6) 4: Racing Live (4) 5: Yahoo! Messenger (4) Top 5 paid (Global): 1: Camera Zoom (12) 2: Flight Control (11) 3: Playman Track & Field (3) 4: Wild West Pinball (2) 5: Airport Mania: First Flight (2) Top 5 free (US): 1: Catcha Mouse 2: iDare 3: F-MyLife 4: Heat Pad - Relaxing Heat Sensitive Surface 5: Dictionary.com Top 5 paid (US): 1: Flight Control 2: StickWars - Siege 3: Pocket God 4: iHunt 3D 5: ParkingLot [photo: flickr/thetruthabout] CrunchBase Information Apple iPhone iPhone App Store Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Hiring Of New MySpace CEO Settles Many Old Scores Top
MySpace parent company News Corp. continues to leak, off record, that Owen Van Natta is in the final stages of becoming the new CEO of MySpace (one of the more obvious candidates on our list yesterday). Van Natta certainly has the experience on paper to run the company - he was a business development executive at Amazon, the chief revenue officer at Facebook and most recently the CEO of music startup Playlist.com. If the leaks are correct, he’s in the final stages of contract negotiation and his hiring will be announced shortly. He knows social networking, music/media and the Internet in general, and will certainly be able to get his hands around MySpace’s business. But his hiring is leaving many scratching their heads nonetheless. Van Natta owns a significant percentage of Facebook stock and is of course intimately knowledgeable about their business. At the very least it’s bad form for him to join Facebook’s primary competitor. At worst there may be legal issues since it will be extremely difficult for him to continue to protect confidential Facebook information in his new job. But it’s widely known that Van Natta feels betrayed by Facebook for not making him the CEO and has a deep dislike of Mark Zuckerberg. The revenge factor in taking the top job at Facebook’s biggest competitor must be making him feel somewhat vindicated. But…what about Playlist? He took the job just last November, less than six months ago. Investors are relying on him, as are employees, many of which he’s recruited since he joined. To walk away from that job so quickly doesn’t say much for his character. Perhaps there are unknown facts that mitigate the situation, but it doesn’t look good. As bad as Playlist’s business looks right now, the CEO has an obligation to investors and employees to see it through to the end and try to create a good outcome for the company. At least Van Natta has tried MySpace, and even logged in a couple of days ago. He has six friends on the service and has uploaded a few pictures. His presumed new boss, Jonathan Miller , has yet to create a MySpace profile of his own. This is actually the third time recently that Van Natta has interviewed for a MySpace-related job. He was a top candidate to lead MySpace Music, but his attempts to sell Playlist to the company as part of the deal left a bad taste in DeWolfe’s mouth. Van Natta also interviewed for the CEO Digital Media job that eventually went to Jonathan Miller. The whole circus around MySpace this week settles a lot of scores: News Corp execs, long dismayed at DeWolfe’s close relationship with Rupert Murdoch, are gleefully leaking news around DeWolfe getting fired. The fact that they effectively announced Van Natta as the new CEO may have given them some immediate gratification, but it also puts him in a very strong negotiating position - if talks break down now News Corp. looks even more ridiculous than they already do. Van Natta gets his revenge on Facebook, but leaves his current company in terrible situation. And the MySpace executive team sits in stunned silence as they await news on which of them will still have a job next month, and who their new CEO will be. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
LookStat Raises $500k For Microstock Photography Analytics Top
LookStat , an analytics platform for photographers that sell their work online in micro-stock marketplaces, has closed a $500,000 Series A funding round led by Founders Co-op. Lookstat is a tool for photographers that allows them to track their earnings across online stock photography sites like iStockphoto, Shutterstock, and Dreamstime, with support for Fotolia, 123rf, and Stockxpert coming in the near future. The site can automatically identify when the same image is being sold at multiple sites, and can aggregate all sales for that image into one place. Lookstat is also currently tested a workflow platform designed to help photographs distribute their content. While the site is currently free, it will eventually begin to charge a subscription free, though it will likely remain free for any photographers who earn less than $100/month. While LookStat may be addressing a niche market, it’s one that is growing steadily. In February we saw Fotolia reach one million registered members, with 1.5 million paid downloads a month (Comscore currently reports that they have over 2.8 million unique visitors). Competitor iStockphoto, which was purchased by Getty Images in 2006, gets over 4.8 million monthly visitors. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Adeo Ressi Fights "Atrocities Of Investors" With New Class Of Founder Stock Top
Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute , a seed stage incubator and mentoring program that we first covered last month , is set to release a set of legal documents this afternoon that promise to protect startup founders from, as he eloquently puts it, the “atrocities of investors.” The new documents, created by Wilson Sonsini attorney Yoichiro Taku , are posted publicly on the website. They have a variety of novel rights and privileges: Creation of a Class F Founders stock that has 2:1 board votes per founder and 10:1 voting power over normal common stock. These shares vest monthly without a cliff and have single trigger acceleration. Class F holders get acceleration on change in control and approval rights on new investments, liquidity events, Board size, and dividends. A clause that requires the payment of $100,000 to the Founders Institute in the event a founder leaves the board of directors to give a disincentive to firing founders down the road. Grant of a warrant to the Founders Institute to buy 3.5% of the fully diluted stock of the company in the form of the equity sold in the first round of financing, which is pooled for participating founders and mentors. The stock grants and any penalty fees paid are put into an exchange fund that all participating founders have ownership in. Therefore, all companies participating in each class have some stock in all the other companies - a great way to reduce overall risk. One big winner in each class means everyone gets a little bit rich. 60% of the warrant stock goes to the founders, the institute keeps the other 40%. There’s a risk that these extremely favorable founder terms could create problems when the companies try to raise outside funding. Ressi says they won’t let a financing die from these terms and will likely waive rights if forced to. His reputation will require that - if these agreements protect founders he’ll be a hero, but if they kill financing deals the program will collapse. Applications for the first startup class are open until May 10. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Tighten Up Those Apps Or Android 1.5 "Cupcake" May Break Them Top
Android developers are obviously excited about the new 1.5 version of the SDK. The so-called “Cupcake” update features several new features and overall improvements. But, “don’t get too excited yet,” a post on the Android developers blog reads today. Apparently, the new release is going to break a number of current apps. And these aren’t just random apps. Google said it has extensively tested some of the most popular apps in the Android Market, and found that many were broken due to “bad techniques.” As such, it created a list of five things to avoid when building your app — and suggests that anyone who developed an app using Android 1.0 or 1.1 pay attention. The list is pretty straightforward. Google says you shouldn’t use Internal APIs, and shouldn’t go overboard with layouts. But one of the more interesting ones is “Bad Hardware Assumptions.” This notes that developers should not build for the Android assuming the hardware its running on has certain specs. The example they use is the physical keyboard, which the G1 has, but other upcoming Android phones — like the HTC Magic (aka the G2) — will not. This speaks to a problem the Android platform presents developers, that the iPhone does not . While it’s great that Google has opened up Android and wants it to be on as many devices as possible, that also means that developers will need to develop programs that can be used on many devices. iPhone developers, on the other hand, know exactly what they’re developing for, as there is only one device (well okay, two with the iPod touch, but it has the same basic specs) that it will run on. Here’s the 5 techniques Google says Android developers should avoid: Using Internal APIs Directly Manipulating Settings Going Overboard with Layouts Bad Hardware Assumptions Incautious Rotations Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Yahoo Quietly Pulls The Plug On Geocities Top
Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Yahoo! is unceremoniously closing GeoCities, one of the original web-hosting services acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $2.87 billion . (Fun venture fact: Fred Wilson’s Flatiron Partners was an investor). In a message on Yahoo!’s help site, the company said that it would be shuttering Geocities, a free web-hosting service, later this year and will not be accepting any new customers. Existing customers will still be able to access use GeoCities but Yahoo! is encouraging these customers to upgrade to Yahoo!’s paid Web Hosting service. GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques. There are plenty of other Website creation and hosting services out there, including blog platforms such as Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad, as well as Website creation and hosting services such as Ning, Webs, Jimdo, Snapages, Weebly, and countless more. GeoCities never really kept up with the times, but always remained a decent pageview generator. One of the pioneers of web-hosting sites, GeoCities gave users personal publishing tools and created “neighborhoods” within its web platform for users to be able to create pages, add a picture, text, a guest book and a website counter. Long before MySpace, Geocities was known as a place where teenagers, college students, and eventually others could impose their own garish taste upon the rest of the world. Here is one Geocities homepage we found from 1996: In honor of GeoCities and all that it has given the Web, whoever can come up with the worst GeoCities homepage design of all time will get a TechCrunch T-shirt. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Google Product Search now plays friendly with iPhone and Android Top
Oh Froogle , how far you’ve come. As they’ve been doing with products throughout their services suite, Google announced this morning that they’ve revamped the Google Product Search page for iPhone and Android. If you’re familiar with Google Product Search from within a standard browser, you’ll feel right at home. Search for products by name or type, sort by various criteria (low to high, high to low, rating, etc), and view product details or reviews. Outside of the aesthetics, there wasn’t much that needed changing for the jump to mobile - so not much changed. An increasingly common practice in the smartphone space is the idea of price comparison and product research by camera-based barcode scanning, something which Google has yet to really build upon in Product Search. Having begun to play up the convenience of Product Search when on the go, might they be considering adding a Product Search-powered barcode scanner to the Google iPhone App or the Android platform? Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
MySpace Local Now Open To The Public Top
It may be in the process of hiring a new CEO, but the MySpace machine keeps on rolling. Last month we got our first look at MySpace Local , the joint project between Citysearch and MySpace that combines the popular social network with Citysearch’s extensive database of business listings. The new property has quietly launched the public, and you can check it out here . While MySpace is relying on Citysearch’s massive database of business listings (which includes hours, addresses, photos, menus, and videos), it’s starting from scratch on the review side of things. That might have handicapped a smaller site, but given MySpace’s audience, it shouldn’t take too long for the site to get populated: since it went live seven days ago, MySpace users have already written over 60,000 reviews. At launch MySpace Local is offering reviews on restaurants, bars, and other ‘nightlife’ listings, with more categories coming in the near future. The site is also going to begin to allow users to book reservations to restaurants in its directory. MySpace is taking advantage of its social graph to personalize the site as much as possible, highlighting reviews left by your friends and syndicating your actions (such as writing a review) back to your MySpace activity steam. Because the reviews are being written by the people you know, you’re more likely to look at them and leave one of your own. These features are certainly appealing, but why is MySpace creating a new destination site when MySpaceID could presumably do many of the same things (Citysearch integrated Facebook Connect in December)? MySpace says that while MySpaceID is coming to Citysearch eventually, the two sites will likely appeal to two different audiences, which is why Citysearch was on board in the first place. Because MySpace Local is directly connected to the social network, users can jump to it seamlessly without having to worry about logging in. Through MySpaceID, users would still have to go through a brief authentication process, which raises the barrier to entry (and is still a fairly novel concept for most people). The other reason why MySpace is building out its own product? Advertising. The site allows local businesses to take advantage of MySpace’s self-service MyAds product, which will allow them to selectively display their banner ads to local MySpace users. This opens up MySpace (and Citysearch, which is participating in a rev-share deal) to new sources of revenue from both local establishments and national brands, like Coors and Outback Steakhouse. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Android Catches Up To Palm In Mobile Ad Market Share. IPhone Still Blows It Away. Top
Android is making steady gains in mobile ad market share, accounting for 6 percent of all mobile ad requests measured by AdMob in its latest March metrics (full report embedded below). That puts it neck and neck with the Palm OS, compared to a 5 percent /7 percent share split in favor of Palm just one month before. . Windows Mobile Devices also saw a share decline from 13 percent to 11 percent, while Blackberry’s RIM OS gained a point to 22 percent, and the iPhone stayed the same at 50 percent. AdMob measures ad requests from both mobile browsers and mobile apps, thus its numbers are a good proxy for mobile Web usage (minus paid apps which don’t serve ads, of course). On a device level, the Android G1 (HTC Dream) actually overtook the Palm Centro, becoming the No. 4 smartphone in terms of Web usage in the U.S. (after the iPhone, the Blackberry 8300, and Blackberry 8100). But the iPhone still dwarfs Android. As a point of comparison, AdMob measured 72 million ad requests for Android in March, 2009 versus 607 million for the iPhone in the U.S. Wordlwide, the iPhone had 995 million ad requests, and if you combine it with the iPod touch the total grows to 1.66 billion. But is this even a fair comparison? The number of iPhones out there outnumber Android phones by nearly 20 to one ( 21 million iPhones have been sold to date, compared to estimates of about one million for the G1). Given these ratios, the disparity in Web usage measured by Admob makes sense. As more Android phones are introduced, that should help its numbers. One major driver of ad requests on both platforms has been the proliferation of standalone apps. Admob measured the growth in ad requests following the launch of each app store on Android and on the iPhone, and found that the growth rate for the iPhone was 88 percent a month versus 47 percent for the Android. But both outgrew other platforms by a wide margin. Once the Palm Pre comes out and the Blackberry App Store gains more traction, it will be interesting to see whether the relative strength of the iPhone and Android continue. Admob Metrics March 2009 - Get more Information Technology Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 

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