Monday, April 20, 2009

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Google News Timeline Offers A New Way To Search The Past Top
Timelines are becoming an increasingly popular user interface. Today, Google Labs launched a new product called Google News Timeline , which lays out the top stories from Google News in columns for each day. You can scroll down to see more stories or, of course, can search for specific topics or keywords. (It also launched similar image search ) The timeline view gives you a snapshot of the major stories for each day, and you can drag the dates across to go back in time. It seems to favor Time Magazineand Wikipedia Events, although you can get rid of those results with a click. If you want to zero in on a particular topic, you can search for that term to see how a story has evolved over time. The timeline remembers your searches and saves them if you are logged in. You can also switch the calendar to view stories by day, week, month, year, or decade. But why not by the hour or the minute? That is where Google news is weakest and losing out to Twitter search, in my opinion. Finally, to put a finer filter on it, you can search only news quotes, news videos, blogs, magazines, newspapers, Wikipedia, or various other sources. Maybe it could add a bias filter . The idea is a good one, but this is very obviously a Google Labs project. Switching from year to decade, back to day is not seamless.Going from decade to day, for instance, doesn’t bring me back to the present, but to 2003. Similarly, it seems like it has trouble switching from search term to search term. This might be simply because it just launched, but I am hoping Google resolves these issues quickly so I can test it as a research tool. I often find myself looking for articles from the past, and seeing stories laid out on an actual timeline is visually helpful. It would also be nice if you could merge different sources, so that you could search across blogs and news at the same time, for instance. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Google Similar Images First Look Top
A new 20% time Google project has just launched called, Google Similar Images . It’s pretty self-explanatory — when you search for an image and find one close to what you’re looking for, Google can now find ones that it believes to be the same, or similar. This type of visual search is similar to what like.com has been doing for a while, but is potentially much more powerful with Google, as the search giant currently looks at hundreds of millions of pictures of just about anything you can imagine, across the web. But it’s interesting that this is not done by way of optical recognition. That technology is what Apple, for example, is using in the newest version of iPhoto to look at faces in images and determine if other images contain the same people. Because Google already has its vast database of web images and a lot of metadata thanks to projects like the game in which you tag photos, and more recently, sorting images by color, it has a bunch of different data points it can work with to make Similar Images work. Let’s take this new toy for a spin. “ Apple ” is a good query to test this because there is the aforementioned company Apple, as well as the fruit. When you find an image you are looking for after the initial query, it’s easy to click on “Similar images” and get more of the same. This is where Google really takes over and uses its technology to search for images it believes to be similar. For example, if I decide I want the silver version of the Apple logo, I’ll see this: But maybe I want another version of the Apple logo shown on the initial page. In that case, I may see this: Or maybe I decide that I don’t want an Apple, the company, logo at all. Maybe I just want a picture of an apple, the fruit. Then I may see this: As you can see, the filtering works very well. Here’s an interview with Radhika Malpani, the director of engineering working on this project. Watch more in the video from Google below: Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Fairspin Teases Out The Bias In Political News Top
Every news source has its bias, and that is especially true for political news. The same story on the Huffington Post is more likely to have a liberal slant than something on Fox News . Most people figure out which news sources share political views and settle on a few which make them feel comfortable. For those who have trouble identifying left from right, there is now FairSpin , a site that looks like it just launched today. FairSpin takes the most buzzed about news stories from memeorandum (the sister site to Techmeme, but for politics), and lays them out on a page literally from left to right. The Huffington Post, Talking Points memo, and Washington Monthly stories are on the left. The Washington post and New York Times stories are in the middle. And the Wall Street Journal Op-ed and Fox News stories are on the right. If you don’t agree with this pacement, then you can vote on any story, indicating whether you think it’s bias is left-leaning, right-leaning, or “fair.” (I am not sure whether a neutral leaning is more fair than any other, or simply wishy-washy). When you click through to a story, it presents it under a toolbar (yes, yet another frame ) with its own shortened URL, which lets you cast your vote and return easily to FairSpin. For instance, this link http://fairspin.org/read/5093 takes you to a Michelle Malkin post. (This doesn’t work for New York Times articles, however, because it has disabled such toolbars and non-redirecting URL shorteners after the whole Diggbar controversy ). FairSpin shows you your voting history, as well as the community’s, and allows you to hide “highly-biased” stories. It neatly lays out visually what many readers already know, but is a helpful filter nonetheless. Just ignore the side which offends you the most. The site was developed by Stephen Hood, who until recently ran Delicious for Yahoo, and Dave Baggeroer, a designer. You can read more about it on their blog . Stephen Hood most recently ran the social bookmarking service Delicious at Yahoo. Based on this experience Stephen is a big believer in the power of the community to organize information and accomplish goals, and sees an opportunity to mobilize readers to identify bias in the news. Dave Baggeroer Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Live At The Google Labs Press Event: Real Image Analysis, News Timeline, Labs Reloaded Top
I’m among a mass of press at Google’s San Francisco headquarters for a special Google Labs press event. R.J. Pittman , Director of Product Management, Radhika Malpani , Director of Engineering and software engineer Andy Hertzfeld are presenting. My real time notes are below. Look for a new advanced image search product, Google News and other news. My Notes: “Scarcity breeds clarity” says Pittman, talking about Google’s culture of experimentation that persists even in these troubled times. And the real time internet, blogs, tweets, etc., are accelerating innovation. Pittman’s talking about previous Google Labs products, Streetview, Picasa facial recognition, audio indexing (search for spoken words in video) and Google translate. Google Labs is focused on creating early prototypes and getting them into consumer’s hands as quickly as possible. With feedback products are quickly iterated or put out to pasture. New Google Image Search Radhika Malpani is now talking about image search. A week ago Google expanded search to allow users to search by color. Now, Google will allow users to refine content of a specific image. See chart below. In the demo, Malpani searched for beaches and rocks and clicked on the similar images link to find lots of new images. There’s some metadata analysis, she says, but its mostly based on image analysis. Google is releasing this early, Pittman says, to get feedback from users right away. The new service is available here . Google’s blog post is here . Google News Timeline Next up is Andy Hertzfeld, who’s been at Google for 3.5 years, to launch a new product, Google News Timeline . News is often grouped by time. Through the new interface organizes information chronologically by presenting results from Google News and other data sources on a zoomable, graphical timeline. You can navigate over time by dragging the timeline, setting the time scale or just adding a time period. Google is partnering with Freewebs to obtain structured data. The product is an amazing way to look at lots of news data and images over time, to determine trends, do research, etc. The filters for movies, sports scores, music, magazines, etc. make it very easy to slice the data. New Google Labs Google is moving its Google Labs to googlelabs.com . The new site is built on Google App Engine (of course). “We also redesigned the website to make it easy and fun to discover new experiments as they arrive and to follow them as they evolve. We even added an RSS feed and an iGoogle gadget to make it easier to stay up to date.” labs was first introduced in 2002. The new site has an interactive design with comments and ratings and engineer profiles. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Pushed By Celebrities, Twitter Is Poised To Double Its Monthly Traffic Once Again Top
I know, you’re sick of Twitter data. But more keeps rolling in showcasing just how massive last week was for Twitter. The Kutcher/CNN race to a million on top of Oprah showcasing the service on Friday, likely was the biggest week ever for the service. And here’s some data to back that up. The week before the Kutcher/CNN race, Kutcher’s Twitter page got about 176,000 pageviews, according to numbers provided to us by Compete . Last week, his pageviews rose to an incredible 3.2 million — yes, that is just for his Twitter profile page . In the same time span, CNNbrk (the account racing Kutcher) went from 61,000 pageviews to over 900,000. And Oprah, the latecomer, went from 5,000 pageviews (before she ran the account), to over 980,000 — which is perhaps even more incredible considering she made her debut on Friday of last week. Now, Compete’s numbers are sometimes quite a bit off, but the trends are the key here. Overall Twitter.com traffic went from 367 million to over 420 million for the week in terms of pageviews. Meanwhile, unique views went from just over 8 million, to over 10 million. The pageviews on Twitter’s signup page alone went up over by over a million for the week. These celebrities are having an amazing effect on Twitter’s growth. We crunched some numbers earlier today suggesting that perhaps over a million users signed up for Twitter following Oprah’s show. “Twitter is poised to explode once again this month and will likely finish up over 30 million UVs for this month. If that happens they will double their March numbers and jump from #72 in our ranking into the Top 20,” according to a Compete analyst. That comes just a month after it already more than doubled its unique views (at least in the US) last month. Wow. And remember, this data is only for Twitter’s website, it doesn’t include any of the usage from third-party sites/services (thanks, Max). Find the full web traffic chart below. Update : The original signup pageview numbers Compete sent over were off, the updated chart is below. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
TopFans.com Adds Another Way To Worship Celebrities Online Top
Pop culture’s obsession with celebrities is evolving along with technology. Ashton Kutcher reached 1 million Twitter followers and Oprah is now part of the Twitterati. And there is never enough news or information about celebrities to satiate the thirst of fans; they want more and more insight into celebrities’ lives, especially online. The startup that created Zivity, the adult social network and media site which debuted at TechCrunch40, is hoping to create the next-generation of digital fan clubs with its new site, TopFans.com. The site lets fans create celebrity “fan pages,” and then add content, such as images, video, and news, to the fan page. And the celebrities can also interact with their pages by adding their own content, commenting on content and interacting with fans. The pages themselves are similar in theory to a MySpace page or Facebook pages for celebrities, but Top Fans hopes to differentiate itself in several ways. First, celebrities can directly import their Twitter feeds into their Top Fans pages. Like on a Facebook fan page, there is the ability to import RSS feeds into an activity stream. But Top Fans’ technology also crawls the web for news and images of the celebrity that will be imported into the main news feed on the page. Fans can also contribute comments and content to the site feed. The pages include a Digg-like button next to each piece of content that allows fans to vote whether they like the content or don’t like it. The highest rated content goes to the top of the feed. And unlike Facebook, where celebrities often have an “official” page and unofficial pages that have been created by fans, Top Fans ensures celebrities that they only have one centralized page with no duplicates. Pages can be created by fans or the celebrities themselves. Fans are also rewarded when they contribute content to a Top Fans site, thus having the ability to differentiate themselves from other less-passionate fans. Fans are ranked, according to how much content they have contributed, which also gives celebrities a way to see who their biggest fans are. This feature can be especially attractive to a fan of a celebrity with hundreds of thousands of followers, who wants to stand out as one of the most loyal of all the fans. Currently, Top Fans is launching with just “teen idols” and “professional baseball celebrities” (which amounts to 5,000 fan pages) but the end-game is to include Hollywood, internet celebrities, politicians, musicians, bands, etc. TopFans also also created profiles for the Top 1000 Twitterers, ranked by number of followers. This list includes Shaquille ONeal, John Mayer, Chris Sacca, , Ashton Kutcher and TechCrunch’s own Michael Arrington. One potentially problematic issue for Top Fans is how to control the enormous amount of questionable content that’s on the web about celebrities, such as content that is taken by the paparazzi or speculative gossip about celebrities. Celebrities would most certainly not want this sort of content on a fan page. Top Fans CEO Jon Elvekrog says that all questionable news is flagged but said that many celebrities have the feeling that “any press is good press.” I’m not so sure that’s the case, considering the growing amount of lawsuits that celebrities are filing against publications that print misinformation. Top Fans is run by Top Fans Inc., which also owns Zivity. Zivity’s adult site has been able to raise $8 million in funding from top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors and received widespread press since its launch at TechCrunch40, especially after its co-founder, Cyan Banister, bared all on the site. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Stoke Nabs $15 Million For Mobile Broadband Network Technology Top
Mobile broadband network developer Stoke has received $15 million in Series D funding from Reliance Technology Ventures Limited, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Japanese networking company Net One Systems, bringing the telecom network startup’s total funding to $65 million. Stoke raised $20 million in Series C funding in 2007 (led by DAG Ventures ), $19.8 million in Series B funding in 2005, and $10 million in Series A funding. As people are using their mobile phones to download applications, view movies, and listen to music, mobile data carriers need to provide greater bandwidth to support mobile phone usage. Stoke’s hardware provides mobile carriers the technology to let phones access different wireless networks including 3G, GSM, CDMA, Wi-Fi and WiMax and converges wireless coverage to help carriers cope with massive increments in web traffic. For example, Stoke’s technology lets phones seamlessly detect different networks and will automatically enable phones to switch to available networks based on location and availability. Stoke says the new funds will be used to support continuing partnerships with with mobile carriers. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Fox News And MySpace Launch uReport (Not To Be Confused With CNN's iReport) Top
FOX News and MySpace are partnering to launch Fox’s citizen journalism social media platform on MySpace, called uReport. MySpace members can share citizen produced content with the MySpace community, as well as have the chance to be featured on FOX News. FOX News and MySpace are both owned by News Corp. FOX News uReport, which is nearly identical to CNN’s citizen journalism initiative iReport, is a platform through which users can upload photos and videos to FOX News from a computer or mobile device. Members of the MySpace-uReport community can become "uReporters" by uploading video and photos tagged by specific news categories, including entertainment and politics. FOX says that this content could be featured in programming on FOX News Channel and foxnews.com, with FOX News maintaining editorial control of the MySpace page. CNN’s iReport has a Facebook page where iReporters can upload footage, photos and content to the platform but it’s unclear if this footage is used on CNN.com or on the CNN news channel. CNN’s iReport famously caused Apple’s stock to drop after someone posted a false rumor about Steve Jobs having a heart attack. Fox may have missed its chance, since the most activity on CNN’s iReport was leading up to the presidential election and inauguration. CNN partnered with Facebook to cover the inauguration events in January. uReport on MySpace Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Bob Dylan Spurns iTunes, Gives Amazon Exclusive Video Single From Next Album Top
No, that is not a picture of Bob Dylan making out with Jeff Bezos in the back seat of a car on the cover of Dylan’s next album, Together Through Life , but it might as well be. Dylan is giving Amazon a big wet, sloppy kiss by giving it the exclusive video for the first single from the album, “Beyond Here Lies Nuthin.” The video features some great old photo of Brooklyn by Bruce Davidson. But the video cannot be embedded because Amazon either hasn’t yet mastered that technology or it simply wants you to watch the video on its site for easier one-click pre-ordering (the album comes out April 28). Dylan and Amazon aren’t exactly going steady. You can pre-order the album on iTunes as well. But three albums ago, the video exclusive for Modern Times went to iTunes . Dylan switched sometime after that, doing the same marketing maneuver with Amazon for his last album , Tell Tale Signs . Amazon will be promoting the album on its home page until Wednesday. Steve Jobs is a big Dylan fan, so it must hurt not to get Dylan’s undivided digital love. But all is fair in love and marketing. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Oracle Wants To Be The Apple Of The Enterprise, But It Just Became IBM Top
Larry Ellison has always wanted to be the Steve Jobs of the enterprise. With this morning’s announcement that Oracle will buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion , he took a big step towards making Oracle more of a soup-to-nuts provider of enterprise technology. With Sun, he will now be able to build and package together everything from chips and servers to operating systems, Java middleware, databases, and enterprise applications. Here is the money quote from Ellison on the deal: Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up Like Apple, Oracle wants to take away complexity for its customers and bundle the entire IT stack neatly together so that it works without hassles and is optimized for Oracle’s software. With this deal, Ellison has come full circle from his early-1990s mantra of “best-of-breed” systems, which he abandoned long ago. Rather than look like Apple with its dedication to making the perfect product, Oracle just became IBM. It will use Sun’s existing server market share to push Oracle databases and software, and bundle it all with IT services. Sure, it will continue to support Dell and HP and even rival enterprise software, but the sales pitch will be around the bundled product. If that turns out to be a superior product at a lower price, then both Oracle and customers will win out. But to the extent that it takes away choice from IT buyers, it could be an even tougher sell than convincing them to give up their beloved Blackberries for an iPhone. How different really is Oracle buying Sun than if IBM had bought it , other than the price? Sun’s powerful servers are a way to sell expensive software—always have been, always will be. A big motivation for the deal was to acquire Sun’s Solaris operating system and Java. As hardware margins keep getting squeezed, that software component becomes more and more important. At least with Oracle, Sun will stay in the Silicon Valley family, so to speak. But what may be the most valuable part of the deal from Oracle’s perspective, although Ellison hardly mentioned it, is MySQL. Oracle now owns the open-source database Sun acquired last year for $1 billion . As MySQL grows in popularity, it keeps disrupting Oracle’s high-end database business from below. Now Oracle can at least try to disrupt itself, or kill MYSQL (which would be a bone-headed move). What makes more sense is a two-pronged approach: On the high-end, sell highly optimized Sun servers running Solaris, Oracle databases, and Oracle enterprise apps. On the low-end, sell MySQL on Dell and HP servers running Linux. Another unanswered question is what will happen to Sun’s cloud computing efforts , given Ellison’s disdain for the term . Watch him change his tune on that one as well. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
BlueStripe Scores $8 Million For Virtualization Software Top
BlueStripe Software, a company that sells application service management software, secured a $8 million in Series B funding from Valhalla Partners and Trinity Ventures. The company secured $5 million in Series A funding in 2007 from Trinity Ventures. BlueStripe says it will use the funding to expand business operations, create new products and further sales and marketing efforts. Founded in 2007, BlueStripe helps enterprises stage, deploy, and manage business applications in the server environment. BlueStripe’s flagship product, FactFinder, gives businesses the intelligence to manage business‐critical applications during physical to virtual (P2V) conversions, new application roll-outs, and production deployments. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Digg Ditches Microsoft To Sell Its Own Ads Top
Digg is putting an end to its exclusive ad selling relationship with Microsoft after two years, which is one year earlier than the deal was originally set to expire. Starting this Summer, the social news service will begin to rely heavily on its own internal sales force, which will be responsible for selling the majority of its ad inventory, reports Clickz . Microsoft gets the leftovers, i.e. remnant inventory. The partnership between Digg and Microsoft was initially supposed to last until mid-2010, but according to Mike Maser, Digg’s chief revenue and strategy officer, the two always had an understanding that Digg would at some point start selling the majority of its own ads. He added that the company’s internal sales efforts will focus on custom, non-IAB inventory combined with standardized banner ads. This is not necessarily a sign that Microsoft was underperforming, although it’s clear Digg stands to make more money from advertising running its own sales. The move is not a surprise in that regard, and this type of switch happens regularly when websites grow enough to build their own internal sales teams. In January, Digg hired former Yahoo sales exec Thomas Shin , its first ad sales executive, and is currently recruiting a nation-wide sales force. By the end of the year the company hopes to hire a total of five to seven reps in San Francisco, the Los Angeles area, Chicago and New York. Ironically, Digg CEO Jay Adelson put the two following bullet points together in a blog post published earlier this year in which he highlighted what Digg’s focus in 2009 would be on its path to profitability: - Building on our advertising infrastructure - Building on our successful partnership with Microsoft I guess we can now stop calling that last one a priority for this year. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Oracle To Buy Sun For Approximately $7.4 Billion - Hold On To Your Hats Top
Oracle Corporation is to buy Sun Microsystems for $9.50 a share in a deal valued at approximately $7.4 billion, just a few weeks after a deal by IBM to buy Sun fell apart . It looks like Oracle will pay a premium of $2.81 a share, or 42%, over Sun Micro’s closing price of $6.69 a share on Friday. Oracle said the deal is valued at $5.6 billion excluding cash and debt. Oracle is calling Sun’s Java “the most important software” it has ever acquired. The deal, which is expected to close in the Summer and was unanimously approved by Sun's board of directors, has massive implications for the future openness of Java and MySQL. As the NY Times points out , Oracle and Sun are two heavyweights that have been partners for more than 20 years, even if Oracle has been distancing itself a bit from Sun’s server line in favor of competitors like HP and Dell lately because of Sun’s business decline. As a result of this deal, Oracle will now become a behemoth in both the software and the hardware market, and the implications this acquisition will have on the its closest rivals and the market in general will be noticable for years to come. The official release , with emphasis ours: Oracle to Buy Sun SANTA CLARA, Calif. April 20, 2009 Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt. “We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing . We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year , increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” said Oracle President Safra Catz. “The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.” There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community. The Sun Solaris operating system is the leading platform for the Oracle database , Oracle’s largest business, and has been for a long time. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle can optimize the Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other open platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships. “Oracle and Sun have been industry pioneers and close partners for more than 20 years,” said Sun Chairman Scott McNealy. “This combination is a natural evolution of our relationship and will be an industry-defining event.” “This is a fantastic day for Sun’s customers, developers, partners and employees across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of the technology marketplace,” said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, “From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun’s SPARC and x64 systems. Together with Oracle, we’ll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace.” “Sun is a pioneer in enterprise computing, and this combination recognizes the innovation and customer success the company has achieved. Our largest customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly optimized stack based on standards,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips. “This transaction will preserve and enhance investments made by our customers, while we continue to work with our partners to provide customers with choice.” The Board of Directors of Sun Microsystems has unanimously approved the transaction . It is anticipated to close this summer, subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. There will be a conference call today to discuss the transaction at 5:30 a.m. Pacific time. Investors can listen to the conference call by dialing (719) 234-7870, passcode 923645. A replay will be available for 24 hours after the call ends at (719) 884-8882, passcode: 923645. A live audio webcast of the call will be made available at www.oracle.com/investor and a replay will be available for seven days after the call ends. About Oracle Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world’s largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com. About Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision — “The Network is the Computer” — Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com. CrunchBase Information Sun Microsystems Oracle Corporation Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Tweetie For Mac: A Powerful, Native Twitter Client For The Masses Top
Today sees the public launch of Tweetie for Mac , the desktop-based big brother of what many (myself included) consider to be the iPhone’s best Twitter client. I’ve been playing around with a beta version of the app for the last few days since my initial preview last Thursday, and I’m happy to say that my enthusiasm for the application hasn’t waned. It’s sleek, it sweats the small stuff, and it’s going to be my Twitter client of choice for the foreseeable future. But it isn’t perfect, yet. First things first. If you’re one of the so-called ‘power users’ who rely on TweetDeck’s custom grouping features, Tweetie probably isn’t for you. The application goes well beyond most basic Twitter clients in terms of functionality, but it isn’t an uber-dashboard that’s going to take up an entire monitor. If you’re okay with that, read on. At first glance, Tweetie is deceptively simple. The client consists of a single column displaying your latest stream of incoming Tweets, with four icons arranged on the left side where the majority of navigation takes place. Each icon is self-explanatory for anyone who has used the service before: an ‘@’ symbol represents replies; an envelope is for direct messages; and a magnifying glass for search. Navigating beyond this main menu, everything is intuitive - double clicking on a user name takes you to their most recent tweets, clicking on a hashtag runs a search for it, and so on. The application’s real appeal lies in the details. Every time you click to open an image from services like TwitPic, the app displays the picture in a nifty popup rather than opening a full web browser. To post one of your own images, you simply need to drag and drop it from the desktop into the Tweetie window. The app also supports global hotkeys (you can activate Tweetie with a shortcut even if you’re working in a different application). And from an aesthetic standpoint, everything looks great: navigating between sections activates a smooth transition, you can ‘endlessly scroll’ through tweets as the app continuously downloads new ones, and the interface is very clean. Also a big plus: Tweetie supports multiple accounts, which even some of the ‘power’ apps don’t do properly. And while the app doesn’t offer a true columned UI, it does offer a compromise: Tweetie allows users to break search queries into their own windows, which I actually prefer to having one giant unwieldily window taking up my screen. That said, a few of the navigation options are a little awkward, and the application will feel foreign for the first few days that you use it, especially if you’re coming from a multi-column client like TweetDeck . Aside from the initial foreignness, Tweetie does have some issues that may confuse new users. For one, while the app allows you to create as many new windows as you’d like for searching, they’re confusing to activate (you need to click the search button, then go to the menu bar and hit ‘open new window’) and there’s currently no way to pop out the ‘@mentions’ or ‘direct message’ columns into their own windows (this is coming in version 1.1). The option to ‘follow’ a user is tucked away in a drop down menu when it should be more prominent. And there’s also apparently no auto-complete for Twitter handles, which can make responding to friends frustrating. Minor gripes to be sure, but in an app with this much polish they stick out. For a long time I’ve been looking for a Twitter client that felt like it actually belonged on the Mac, and frankly I haven’t had much luck. Twitterific offers a native client, but it is fairly basic. So I turned to more robust clients like TweetDeck, and more recently Seesmic Desktop , which are both very powerful and have a dizzying array of options. But my fundamental issue with both of these apps is that they’re built on Adobe’s AIR platform, which seems to invaribly lead to excessive resource usage on my Mac, not to mention weird UI quirks. I’ve hardly been suffering, but they’re nuisances that have continuously irked me and I’m glad to be rid of them. Tweetie isn’t for everyone, but I suspect its mix of power and simplicity will appeal to quite a few people, particularly those who find other Twitter clients intimidating. Tweetie is available for free with advertising, or for $14.95 for an ad-free version (it will jump up to $20 in two weeks). If you are on a Mac and crave your multiple columns, be sure to check out Nambu , which I’ve also enjoyed using for the last few weeks. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
How Many New Twitter Users Post-Oprah? A Lot. Maybe Over A Million. Top
Late last night, former Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block tweeted out that he had done some research to attempt to quantify the “Oprah Effect” — that is, the number of users who signed up for Twitter after Oprah featured the service on her show on Friday. The number he came to? 1.2 million. So did 1.2 million people actually sign up for Twitter as a result of Oprah? It’s possible, but tracking down this data is a bit tricky. I asked Block what method he used, and he told me he looked at the user ID on a Twitter account from early Friday versus one from the afternoon on Sunday. You see, while most people only know their Twitter name, if you look at the RSS feed for your Twitter account, you’ll see a number assigned to it — that’s your user ID , and Twitter increments it upward as new people sign up. An account I created just now, for example, has an ID of 33471207. One I created on Friday night (a few hours post-Oprah) had an ID 32779621. Does this mean 700,000 signed up between then and now? Probably not. Twitter has a lot of users, but it does not have 33 million. The reason the user IDs are that high is because Twitter stopped incrementing the number sequentially in March 2007. While it’s not entirely clear what method it switched to, at least one theory had it going back and forth between sequential and increments of 10. If that pattern is correct — and there isn’t much to suggest that it is, but bear with me — then it would probably make sense to divide any number you get by 5 (half of 10 because it’s not always going up by 10). But, as I noted, my first number was from Friday night. That was a few hours after the show, and likely after many of the new users had finished signing up. So I went back to look at other users who likely signed up around the same time. Oprah, herself, isn’t a good one to use because while she started tweeting on Friday, her account was actually created in March — 2007, as Twitterholic notes . I’m pretty sure someone else had control of it until about a week ago when Oprah took it over. But Gayle King , editor of Oprah’s O magazine, did sign up right around then. She technically signed up on April 16, the day before the Oprah show. Her ID is 29546945. But, remember that Thursday was the crazy race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to be the first Twitter user with a million followers. It’s likely that a lot of people signed up that day as well, just to join that race. So King’s number isn’t perfect either. But let’s just say that when Oprah started tweeting, the user IDs were probably around 30000000. That means that between then and now it has gone up nearly 3.5 million ID numbers. Divide by 5 and you get 700,000. Again, that’s all contingent on an assumption that Twitter is incrementing the numbers in this odd rotation — which is far from a sure thing. But it’s certainly not doing it entirely sequentially, so it’s not to unreasonable to think that the number of users that signed up between Oprah’s show on Friday and today is somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million. And that’s huge. Almost exactly a year ago, we noted that Twitter likely had somewhere just north of a million total users. The service has exploded in popularity since then, and recent estimates have it somewhere in the 5 to 10 million users range. That means that Oprah may have helped bring on a significant percentage of new users in just a few days. Not that it’s shocking in the least. Yes, some of those users would have signed up anyway, some were there for the Kutcher/CNN showdown, and a lot are likely spam. But a very good chunk are thanks to Oprah. Naturally, I asked Twitter for some actual numbers to share, and co-founder Biz Stone said they hadn’t planned to release any, but thought it might be interesting, and that he’d look into it this week. So you can probably expect a blog post from him sometime this week, though I’m sure it will be vague, showing spikes in sign-ups in relation to other days — rather than actual numbers. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Prezi Is The Coolest Online Presentation Tool I've Ever Seen Top
At last week’s The Next Web Conference , I was part of the 4-headed jury that evaluated all presenting startups and ultimately decided My Name Is E should be awarded the top prize . It was an extremely close call, since we ended up having to decide between the young Dutch company and a startup that built a simply amazing web application you’re really going to want to check out. The tool I’m referring to is called Prezi , and it allows you to create amazing presentations on the web. If you think you’ve heard that too many times, don’t stop reading just yet, because this one is just plain awesome. It’s an entirely Flash-based app that lets you break away from the slide-by-slide approach of most presentations. Instead, it allows you to create non-linear presentations where you can zoom in and out of a visual map containing words, links, images, videos, etc. This is similar to pptPlex , a Microsoft Office Labs project that aims to bring that type of functionality to PowerPoint. It’s really no use explaining how presentations come out without seeing it for yourself, so it pains me that there’s currently no way to embed the examples that are showcased on the Prezi website. Instead, you will need to jump to examples in another tab or window, but please do it: good examples are ‘AIESEC’ and ‘Technical Investigation ICYA’ . It takes a while to get used to the way Prezi lets you create presentations, although the interface is fairly intuitive once you’ve grown accustomed to using the ‘Zebra’. There are a number of tutorial videos to assist you in creating your first Prezi presentations. To get started, you can use the free version which brands every presentation with a Prezi logo, offers 100 MB of file storage, comes with an offline player but without the ability to make presentations private. For €39 a year, you get all that but 5x the amount of storage space and the option not to have your presentations made public. A third ‘Pro’ version costs you €119 per year but features a cool desktop application you can use to create and edit Prezi presentations offline. Besides offering paid versions of the software, Prezi also has other revenue streams, like selling DVDs and offering branding services. Try it out and let us know how your presentations come out! Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
TiVo To Sell Fresh, Localized Bad News To Advertisers Top
TiVo’s growth has stopped, and in fact, its user base is dropping. There’s too much competition in the DVR market from the big cable companies who offer the same service at a lower price bundled with the cable boxes you need to have anyway. So TiVo needs a way to make more money. Selling customer data is always a good way to do that. Now, to be clear, this data will be anonymous, and TiVo has actually been doing this to some extent for several years. But tomorrow, the company plans to unveil a better challenger to Nielsen, the leader in TV audience data, USA Today reports . This type of data is vital to television advertisers because it dictates their ad sales. And TiVo thinks it can provide better data for more markets by using its 3 million plus subscribers, to dish out data that can be broken down by the second. TiVo is trying to play up the fact that such data can be useful to not only advertisers, but to television shows themselves. This way, they can see what parts of shows people skip through — so news shows, for example, can better tailor key content. But this is really about the advertisers, who will want to know what ads people are skipping through, and at what times, during what programs. I’ll make this simple: While not all DVR owners may skip through all commercials, I would bet that anyone who took the initiative to buy a TiVo — a separate box that costs a few hundred dollars and requires a subscription fee on top of your cable bill — skips through just about all commercials, period. This data from TiVo will apparently come from all but the smallest of the 210 television markets. That’s nice, as it’s a lot more than Nielsen, which generally just offers constant in-depth reports for the largest markets. But Nielsen’s data undoubtedly covers a much wider range of the overall population. In fact, that idea led to the most curious line in USA Today’s piece as stated by TiVo’s audience research and measurement general manager, Todd Juenger. He says, that on top of being richer and better educated, TiVo owners tend to be “unfortunately, a little more white” (than the overall population). Perhaps TiVo should just publish its data directly to Stuff White People Like . Seriously though, as a former TiVo owner, I feel for the company. It offers a truly great product, but it’s simply hard for most people to justify paying to put yet another box in their increasingly cluttered living rooms — and asking them to pay yet another monthly fee for it. The cable companies DVRs are absolutely dreadful, but they are cheaper, and come in cable boxes. The company is making some right moves by offering other services , like Netflix Watch Instantly and Amazon’s streaming movie service on its boxes, but it still has to give a reason for users to pay a relatively high monthly fee for the TiVo service. TiVo can sell all the data it wants, but unless it can reverse the trend of subscribers leaving the service behind, none of that will matter. [photo: flickr/ flyinace2000 ] Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Reid Hoffman: My Rule of Three for Investing Top
The guest post below was written by Reid Hoffman , CEO and Founder of LinkedIn. Reid, who’s been a prolific writer lately, is a strong advocate of entrepreneurism and the startup mentality. See his recent Washington Post article Let Our Start-Ups Bail Us Out , and the guest post he wrote here on TechCrunch, Stimulus 2.0: It's The Startups, Stupid . Reid has recently appeared on Charlie Rose, and we had a chance to sit down with him earlier this year for a video interview as well. Reid is an investor in over 60 web ventures including Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, FunnyOrDie, Ning, Last.fm, Six Apart and Technorati. He is also a member of the nominating committee of our upcoming TechFellow Awards with Founders Fund . TechCrunch and Founders Fund announced the first annual TechFellow Awards last week. This is a great time to stimulate investment and recognize and encourage tech entrepreneurs –starting up is cheaper, talent is more fluid, and people are more inclined to take calculated risks. If we can find more ways to spur investment, it will be good for the entrepreneur now and good for society later. As a serial investor, I've enjoyed backing some good Web 2.0 companies, and it's helped me develop a shortlist of criteria to cut the wheat from the chaff. After five minutes of a pitch, I know if I'm not going to invest, and after 30 minutes to an hour, I generally know if I will. Many entrepreneurs are product-focused, which leads them to pitch the brilliance of the product. Others are money-minded, so they can over think the business plan. But neither of these approaches answer the first few questions I want to know as an investor: 1. How will you reach a massive audience? In real estate the wisdom says "location, location, location." In consumer Internet, think "distribution, distribution, distribution." Thousands of products launch every month on hundreds of thousands of new Web pages. How does a company rise above the noise to attract massive discovery and adoption? YouTube did it through existing channels like MySpace, which already reached millions. Yelp had strong SEO, which found them a mass audience searching for restaurants and nightlife. Facebook's University-centric approach landed them 80% adoption across a campus within 60 days of launch. Every Net entrepreneur should answer these questions: How do we get to one million users? Then how do we get to 10 million users? Then how will you get deep engagement by your users. 2. What is your unique value proposition? The Internet space is crowded. A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user. Many entrepreneurs create incremental improvements on existing products. This can be big – Google revolutionized search when AOL and Yahoo! were presumed to have it locked up – but more often, the pitch sounds like, "It's a dating site, but for senior citizens…" I want to see innovation that is categorically distinct from existing propositions. Digg lets users decide which headlines are newsworthy. Last.fm tracks music listening with an iTunes plugin and buffer great music discovery. Flickr enables users to share and tag photos in new ways. 3. Will your business be capital efficient? This may be the most important of the three. Even if you have a mass audience and unique value prop, a business fails without cash flow. An initial round of financing is important, but how reliable is later financing? Will investors see the right elements in the next stage? Your product must scale intelligently – this is why I like software. A well-coded site can adapt to mass demand without its capital expenditures scaling out of control. A product like TypePad can grow to 10 million users without half the growing pains of a service like WebVan, the Web 1.0 startup that attempted to deliver groceries to users' doorsteps. Try reaching Facebook scale with a service like that. With these three elements in place – mass audience, unique value, stable funding – a startup has time to discover where it can make money. Few business plans ever pan out like their owners intend. PayPal started as a plan to beam payments between Palm Pilots. Google raised funds with a vision to capitalize on enterprise search and ended up in advertising. The formula is to build an audience with a great product – then secure enough funding to figure out how to make it pay. Since I'm focused on building LinkedIn, I'm not currently investing in new projects, but I firmly believe now is the time to take smart risks as entrepreneurs and investors. I hope these criteria help startups make better pitches as they fundraise, and maybe even encourage others to take the plunge. Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential, and if these criteria help a few more companies find capital, it's a win for everyone. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Kadoink Seized By Creditors Top
Kadoink , a text messaging marketing startup based in San Francisco, has been seized by creditor Hercules Technology Growth Capital after failing to maintain the financial requirements of a $2.5 million line of credit. CEO Scott Cahill says that there is still a “substantial amount of cash remaining” that is being returned to Hercules, and that they are looking for a strategic buyer to keep the service alive. The company has announced just $5 million in funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, but they may have burned through substantially more than that. There was rumored to be a previous angel round of nearly $2 million, and the founders took $3 million or so off the table in 2008. Sutter Hill may also have bridged the company an additional $2 million Along with the venture debt, the company may have raised as much as $14 million in capital. At this point, all equity holders other than the cashed-out founders are wiped out. The startup provided text messaging based marketing services on behalf of brands, similar to competitor Mozes . We’ve added it to the deadpool . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Now Even The New York Times Is Entering The URL Shortening Arena … Kinda Top
Earlier today I covered two new URL shortening services, UnHub and LNK.by , the latest additions to the plethora of basic web applications that many people are growing accustomed to for sharing links on micro-sharing services and social networking sites. And just when I thought I’d had it with that type of service for a while, we caught wind of one that made me raise my eyebrows. Enter NytUrl , the ‘trusted’ URL shortener for NYtimes.com articles. Update : The site and all the redirects were taken down “due to abuse.” According to the website, the service shortens URLs for NYTimes.com articles, although a quick test shows that it’s definitely not restricted to other websites (see http://nyturl.com/34 and http://nyturl.com/35 ), even if it occasionally says the URL is not valid for any other site. This of course defeats the entire purpose of the service, which is to reassure people clicking the links that they’ll wind up on the NYTimes.com website. My guess is that the ability to add links to other websites will be disabled soon enough. NytUrl also comes with a handy bookmarklet and a basic API , but the website claims this is just the beginning and that there are lots of new features coming soon. Here’s the strange part: this service is not operated or even endorsed by the New York Times. In fact, the official Twitter account @NYTimes uses bit.ly for links to articles, even if some NYT related accounts are apparently already using NytUrl.com, as evidenced by this Twitter search query (and these example tweets ). So what gives? A WHOIS search for the owner of the nyturl.com domain name doesn’t reveal a thing since his or her identity has been protected upon registration, but according to our source this is effectively the work of two NYTimes employees, namely one of the group’s Senior Software Architects, Jacob Harris and in-house developer Michael Donohoe . Which checks out, because Harris is a self-proclaimed Twitter fan and NYTimes aficionado, and according to the bio posted on the SXSW website (where he was a panelist for one of the sessions) he’s also the one who set up the Twitter feeds for a variety of NYTimes related accounts. Donohoe even lists the NytUrl service on his website , so no doubt he’s involved. Update: Donohoe got back to a request for more information but declines to share more details. And in case you’re wondering why Harris isn’t using nyt.com (which is owned by the NY Times and forwarded to the main website) for the service, which would knock another 3 characters off the shortened URLs: our source says this was likely a grassroots initiative which hasn’t been approved by any of the decision makers at the NY Times, and that it’s not clear if it’s even going to be in the future. It does raise interesting questions: is it a good idea for media companies to obtain control over the short URLs they broadcast across the net and link back to their content? Will netizens lend more credibility to media-owned URL shorteners? Or should they just be using what is out there instead of adding yet another one to the fray? (Note that we use tcrn.ch ourselves for our Twitter account, and that you can see the shortened URL for any of our posts right next to the comment box, in this case http://tcrn.ch/Lk ) Your thoughts on this? Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
The Spot Runner Saga Continues: Founders Accused Of A "Pump And Dump" Scheme (Updated) Top
TV advertising startup Spot Runner really is running on fumes. According to a lawsuit filed by one its irate investors, advertising giant WPP, Spot Runner has “expended all but approximately $20 million of its investor capital, while losing money at the rate of $35-$45 million a year.” The company has raised $100 million since 2006, and at one point employed more than 500 people before a string of layoffs cut that number down significantly. The lawsuit states that the company had a loss of $45 million in fiscal 2008, on revenues of only $9 million. And in fiscal 2007, it lost $35 million on revenues of $5 million. And here’s the zinger. While Spot Runner was losing all that money, its founders and two early investors (Index Ventures and Battery Ventures) sold shares worth $54 million. CEO and founder Nick Grouf took the lion’s share of those proceeds, netting $26.7 million in five transactions between Feb/March, 2006 and March, 2008. Battery and Index each sold $11.7 million worth of shares (nearly doubling their initial investments of $6 million each). While co-founder David Waxman walked away with only $3.6 million and investor Bob Pittman $365,000 worth of shares. The main complaint of the lawsuit states: Rather than working to make Spot Runner a successful and profitable venture, they perpetuated a "pump-and dump" scheme in which they aggressively promoted the Company to new investors (often by promoting that WPP was an investor in and supporter of the Company) and then sold new investors large quantities of their own secondary shares at ever-increasing valuations. WPP alleges that they did this “surreptitiously” and without disclosing it to other investors. As one of Spot Runner’s largest investors, WPP put a total of $11.8 million into the company. But it is hard to feel sorry for WPP. Basically, it argues in the suit that it should have been able to sell its shares to greater fools as well. It is suing because it wasn’t told about the secondary share sales and wasn’t invited to participate until the very last one, and even then only after it complained (WPP was allowed to sell $900,000 worth of stock at that time, while the defendants made off with $17.8 million). What is not clear from the suit is how much of that $54 million in proceeds, if any, came from fundraising rounds for the company itself versus private secondary sales. Spot Runner won’t comment on any of these numbers other than to say “the complaint contains many inaccuracies.” Update : In a letter sent out to employees on Friday, Spot Runner argues that its founders did nothing wrong and in fact were actually doing investors a favor by selling them shares from their own private stash (see full text of email below): When these sales occurred, there was overwhelming demand for Spot Runner stock and the company did not want to dilute existing shareholders by issuing new shares. Therefore, the founders (in 2006) and the board members and other preferred shareholders (in 2007 and early 2008) agreed to make room for important, new investors and respond to their desire to invest in Spot Runner by selling their own shares. In 2007 and 2008, WPP and other preferred shareholders were given notice that the sales were occurring, and they had the opportunity to participate in the sales. In fact, WPP signed various documents acknowledging this opportunity With the IPO window closed for many startups, secondary private sales of stock are becoming more popular, especially for founders. That practice is fine if the company succeeds. Nobody is going to care if the founders took some money off the table along the way if everyone gets rich in the process. It is when things don’t go so well that investors start to complain and the lawsuits start flying. Regardless of the merits of the case, it is not a good sign when one of the largest investors of a startup decides that the best shot it has at ever getting any of its money back is in court instead of in the market. WPP is seeking $13.2 million in damages. And it is not the only one who is angry. Both former and existing employees also feel shafted (read some of the 135 comments on my post about the last round of layoffs , which somehow became an unofficial forum for employees to vent). They never got a chance to sell any of their shares. Full complaint embedded below, via PaidContent . Update : Below is the e-mail Spot Runner sent out to employees on Friday, after word of the lawsuit broke: Team, As you may have heard, WPP, a minority shareholder (less than 3%) in Spot Runner since 2006, filed a lawsuit against the company and its board members primarily related to the sale of Spot Runner stock and Spot Runner's communications with WPP. This situation is unfortunate, as we appreciate and value the relationships we have with all of our investors and we had hoped for a long and supportive relationship with WPP. We believe these claims are without merit and will vigorously defend against them, including taking all necessary legal action to protect Spot Runner's reputation. We feel strongly that WPP's complaint contains many baseless accusations and want to give you a broader perspective on the matter. This lawsuit is unrelated to our products and services – it is centered on legal agreements entered into with WPP, a sophisticated investor, regarding the way that shareholder stock sales were handled. WPP alleges that Spot Runner's board members failed to disclose to WPP the stock sales by shareholders, allegedly in violation of the board's obligations to stockholders, among other things. We are confident that Spot Runner complied with all of its obligations under the various shareholder agreements. When these sales occurred, there was overwhelming demand for Spot Runner stock and the company did not want to dilute existing shareholders by issuing new shares. Therefore, the founders (in 2006) and the board members and other preferred shareholders (in 2007 and early 2008) agreed to make room for important, new investors and respond to their desire to invest in Spot Runner by selling their own shares. In 2007 and 2008, WPP and other preferred shareholders were given notice that the sales were occurring, and they had the opportunity to participate in the sales. In fact, WPP signed various documents acknowledging this opportunity. Spot Runner and all of its employees conduct business with the utmost integrity. Our team, technologies, and products and services are core assets of which we can all be proud. It is because of your hard work that we have come this far. To that end, we continue to drive hard toward successfully launching Project Malibu and realizing its full potential. You also should know that our board members remain majority shareholders in Spot Runner – a concrete sign of their commitment to and confidence in the business. Our outside counsel will work with the board and management team to develop a formal reply, which ultimately will be filed with the court. These legal proceedings should not affect our day-to-day operations. We are grateful that we can count on you to remain focused on serving our clients and partners to the best of your abilities. Thank you again for all that you do for Spot Runner. WPP Sues Spot Runner WPP Sues Spot Runner ContentNext Ad agency WPP sues TV ad firm Spot Runner in U.S. District Court. Filed April 9. Publish at Scribd or explore others: Business & Law spot runner WPP Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Bloggers: Let's Band Together and Stop the Hype Cycle Top
Silicon Valley is known for nurturing start-ups in a way no other place can. But it's not all kumbaya here. And one of the most destructive things about Silicon Valley is the hype cycle . And judging by the fact that some bloggers pronounced Twitter “done” the same week the company was featured on Oprah, it’s clear that hype cycle has spun ludicrously out of control. I'm sure you've seen the graphs. If not, it's to the left. In words: A company comes out and no one likes it. It starts to attain huge growth and buzz. Suddenly it's anointed the Messiah. Then something happens. A long time ago, that something was negative: A founder leaving, a down-round, growth that tailed-off or an inability to serve customers. Even then it wasn't necessarily deserved, but the backlash would begin immediately. This company was a laughing stock. What was wrong with them? They'd lost it. They were toast. Well….for another few years. During which a good company would  keep growing. And only later, would they get the true credit for what they'd built. Of course, "experts" would claim they got it all along. A great example is Google—a lauded company that was dismissed when it wouldn't immediately monetize with banner ads in the wake of the bust, then re-anointed when the numbers came out at the IPO, and it began its surge past $700 a share. But the hype cycle isn't confined to companies. It can describe waves of technology – like social networking, RFID or the consumer Internet itself—or people. One of the first examples I saw in the Valley was Marc Andreessen. He was built up as the young, shoe-less God of the Internet that the press brutally tore him down once the crash changed the viability of his second company, Loudcloud's, business. It's still deemed a "failure" in some corners of the Valley, never mind that it was painstakingly retooled as Opsware and sold for about the same amount as YouTube . People not only trashed the company, but they retroactively trashed Netscape, and Andreessen himself, saying he'd exaggerated his contributions to Mosaic. Of course, Andreessen kept his head down and kept working. Today he's widely regarded as one of the most important mentors and angel investors of the Web 2.0 movement and one of the only people to found two companies that would end up being worth more than $1 billion each. Sure a smug "I told you so" as you count your millions is the best way to silence and embarrass naysayers; it's the ultimate revenge. But start-ups can take a while to reach their final destination—whether that's bankruptcy or an IPO. Forget cold, in the Valley revenge is a dish served molding and with flies swarming around it. There's an element to the hype cycle that reflects human nature. We get excited about technology and tend to overestimate what it can do in a year and underestimate what it can do in ten years. That's not all bad: Being underestimated is why a lot of start-ups catch giant companies off guard. But the blogosphere has turned an already frustrating hype cycle manic. The famous example was Cuil—a company lauded in the morning as a "Google Killer" and trashed before our first cups of coffee got cold. Not quite as extreme is what we've seen with the giants of Web 2.0: MySpace, Facebook and– believe it or not– the three-year-old Twitter. As soon as Facebook launched its platform—as if in unison—the media world decided MySpace was a has-been and Facebook was the king. Sure, Facebook is poised to overtake MySpace in the U.S., but by many accounts MySpace is making more money , increasing engagement and is still one of the largest sites on the Web. That should count for a lot. In the last month, it's been happening to Facebook, and it’s even more absurd. The company is still growing, having passed the 200 million or 250 million user mark, depending on who you believe . And other reports , and my own sources, say the company is doing close to a $500 million revenue run rate. Did I mention we're in an epicly bad recession? How is that a failure? Frequently the people calling for Zuckerberg’s head because of recent “failures” have never run a company, and never even met Zuckerberg. I tend to agree with a guy who’s done both: Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn and one of the most successful Web 2.0 investors in the Valley. “Ultimately you judge a CEO by how well the company is doing, and Facebook is doing pretty well,” he told me a few weeks ago. “I think Mark should answer any criticism by saying, ‘Look at the company; I’m doing fine.’” Did Hoffman like the new redesign? Not especially. But he added this, “It’s good to be bold in what you’re doing; it’s good to be visionary. Personally, I don’t think it was right, but Mark may very well learn from that and the next step will be much more interesting in that direction.” Well said. Guess what, gang? Building a company is hard. No one gets every single thing right. Bloggers harping on each mistake are like the fat guy sitting in the bleachers at a baseball game berating a star player for not hitting a homerun in every at bat. Sure, Facebook’s valuation is coming down from $15 billion. But that was never a realistic valuation for the company. It wasn't even paid by traditional venture capitalists; it was paid by Microsoft and other strategics looking to get a piece of the hot company and not caring what it cost. The company itself didn't value Facebook at $15 billion when insiders sold stock. But is it worth $1 billion or more? Definitely. Even based on a reasonable multiple of revenues. Of the Web 2.0 wave you can count on one hand the companies that can claim that with a straight face. Even more absurd: Now bloggers are starting to say Twitter is done . I thought it was only now hitting mainstream ? It's one thing to take a company like Cuil—that arguably over-represented what it could do—from hero to goat in less than an hour. It's another thing to trash a company that's only a few years old, growing exponentially, well capitalized, and conservatively run with about 30-something employees. (Let's not even bring up the free Sprint ad and the barrage of John Stewart-Ashton-Larry King-Oprah free press.) Look, we all do it to a degree. We fall in love with technologies, and readers and editors suddenly get an insatiable demand for stories about them. It’s reporters’ and bloggers’ jobs to give them what they want, right? But that tips into link-baiting, blindly aiming for that TechMeme traffic and writing a provocative headline that the story doesn’t even necessarily back up. It’s one thing to be the early adopter who gets bored once something is mainstream. It’s another thing to write off a company for the sheer fact that it’s successful, and you’re bored writing about it. Here's the thing: Great start-ups can survive the hype cycle. Horrible companies were going to fail anyway. That may leave some marginal ones in the middle, but let's argue if the press tanks a company, it wouldn't have gotten far ultimately. So maybe the hype cycle doesn’t really do any harm . But who does it help? As bloggers and reporters we're supposed to bring people reality and truth. No phase of the hype cycle is reality: Not the messiah, not the goat simply because big press has grown weary of the topic. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
French Fury: Parisians Hit The Streets In Protest Against Facebook Redesign Top
Granted, Facebook’s recent redesign came with a couple of flaws, and lots of people were upset about the changes, but resorting to street protests to try and turn them around? Apparently, a few people have gathered in Paris to protest against the changes in Facebook, and Alex van Herwijnen was nice enough to send us some pictures he snagged while visiting the French capital. The protesters can be found at the Arche de la Défense , holding signs saying that they’re against the new version of Facebook and that they want the old one back. Clearly, they’re not happy with the redesign even if Facebook has already made some changes due to user complaints ( against Michael’s advice ), or maybe they’re just really pissed because it’s still confusing their mothers . From the looks of it, this is probably a prank or more likely part of a video shoot or something. TechCrunch France’s Alain Eskenazi and I looked around for reports in French media, but couldn’t find anything. I also did a quick search on Facebook to see if there were any related groups or events on the site, but had trouble finding anything in the messy new interface. Maybe I should head down to Paris and voice my complaints with the other protesters? CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
More Ways To Shorten Those URLs: UnHub And Lnk.by Top
URL shortening services are a dime a dozen, and despite wishes for them to vanish (with good reason) they’re here to stay and more popular than ever given the abundance of social services that thrive on short messages and links. TinyURL and bit.ly appear to be the more popular of the bunch, but we’re seeing other services use their own custom URL shortening services at an increasing rate. To name but a few, Digg uses its top domain for the DiggBar and associated links, Posterous uses post.ly to trim down links when they distribute them to other networks and Twitter toolbox HootSuite uses ow.ly . Update: shame on me for forgetting that TechCrunch also has its ‘own’ short URL (tcrn.ch), which you can view under every post and which we use for our Twitter account . We use awe.sm for this. The latest startup to add a URL shortening feature to its service is UnHub , which we covered last month . Paste any URL after unhub.com and if you’re registered for the service, you’ll get a custom short URL you can use to distribute links to articles and such. On top of the linked website will be an iframe (yes, yet another one ) where you can view the number of Diggs, bookmarks on Delicious, and redirects on bit.ly. You can also tweet, e-mail or share the link on a plethora of third-party services right from the toolbar. It’s also personalized, so people can jump to your own UnHub profile from the persistent bar, or straight to the source link. For an example, go to http://unhub.com/pC16 . Another one that just surfaced (in alpha mode) is Lnk.by , which adds a twist to URL shortening in the sense that you can pick a short URL that suits what you’re linking to i.e. it brings some context to what you’re sharing. You can share music files using Lstn.in, videos with Wach.it, photos with Seee.it and articles with Read.im. The service automatically maps known domains, protocols and file extensions so it will pick the most suitable one without the need for indicating it proactively. Other than that, there’s nothing really noteworthy about the service, apart from the fact it comes with an API and a toolbar bookmarklet, and that it was built by an Endemol executive with a friend in just one weekend. Feel to shorten the URL for this article with both services and tell us which one you prefer (or why you hate URL shortening services). Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
UK Tech Icons Launch Seed Fund To Bridge The Gap For European Startups Top
Two icons of the UK’s tech startup world are joining forces to create a new fund to address the so-called ‘equity gap’ in Europe. European Founders Capital (EFC) is being led by Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo , and Brent Hoberman, who set up the dotcom bubble era Lastminute.com but is better known more recently for being a serial angel investor and co-founder of MyDeco . EFC will have an initial $29.5m (£20m) of seed funding but is aiming for $74m (£50m) in total. The idea is to increase the availability of early-stage funding in Europe, which historically lags behind the US, and has led to a gap between early stage and Series A funding. Europe’s seed funding eco-system has never matched Silicon Valley’s in part because the business angel environment for technology is undeveloped and because European VCs have historically not reached much lower than Series A rounds, unless in syndication with other parties. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 

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