Sunday, April 26, 2009

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Pleo Creator Ugobe Declares Bankruptcy Top
The first real casualty of the economic crisis has emerged, and it's a lovable robotic dinosaur. Decreased demand for expensive toys has left Pleo's creator, Ugobe, wallowing in debt. As a last ditch effort to remain solvent, they're going to try to auction off the rights to Pleo, but there's no guarantee that the poor critter will ever be made again. Pleo has always been a favorite over here at CrunchGear, so we put together a little goodbye tribute video in case the adorable robosaurus is indeed extinct.
 
Al Gore Defends His Right To Invest In Green: "Congresswoman, You Don't Know Me." Top
On Friday, during a Congressional hearing on the Obama Administration’s proposal for a cap-and-trade system to curb greenhouse gases, Al Gore had to defend his honor. Marsha Blackburn, the Republican Congresswoman from Gore’s home state of Tennessee, questioned his motivations behind supporting the proposal because of his investments in green startups through his role at Kleiner Perkins, where he is a partner . (Watch the video above, courtesy of Talking Points Memo ). Blackburn comes off as clueless and Gore comes off as defensive. She didn’t seem to know too much about Kleiner Perkins other than that it is a “capital firm” and that it has invested “$1 billion in 40 companies that are going to benefit from cap-and-trade legislation,” or at least that is what she gathered from an old New York Times Magazine article . “Are you aware of that company?” she asked him. Then she asked Gore if he stood to personally benefit financially from these investments, and that set him off: Congresswoman, if you believe the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don’t know me. He pointed out that “every penny” he makes from these investments, his book, and movie go to the nonprofit Alliance For Climate Protection . Blackburn responded by saying that she was just trying to get clarity on the issue, but Gore was having none of it: I understand exactly what you are doing Congresswoman. Everybody here does. . . . I’ve been willing to put my money where my mouth is. Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country? I am proud of it. Is this video from a parallel universe or did the Republican Party become anti-capitalist all of a sudden? Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Swine Flu Spreads Panic Over The Web Top
Earlier today, the U.S. declared a public health emergency over the Swine Flu, after confirming 20 cases of the flu spreading to humans in New York, Ohio, Kansas, Texas and California. More than 80 people have died in Mexico from the disease, which has potentially spread to other countries, including Canada and France. Although Federal officials are urging Americans not to panic about the disease, fear of contracting the potentially deadly flu is quickly spreading over Twitter, Google, and blogs across the web. Swine Flu is the top trending topic on Twitter at the moment, with users rapidly tweeting about the latest news about the disease, including whether it has spread to other states, the Center for Disease Control’s announcement, etc. Google Trends reports that “Swine Flu Ohio” is the 27th most popular search keyword currently, with searches for the “CDC” and “Swine Flu Symptoms” also making the top 100 keyword searches on Google. Google Maps have also been created to chart the spread of the Swine Flu. Below is a Google Map created by a bio medical engineer, that charts suspect and confirmed cases of the Swine Flu in the U.S. and Mexico. Technorati’s index, which graphs the number of times the search term occurs in blog posts across the web, shows that mentions of Swine Flu in blog posts has risen sharply from Friday to nearly 2800 blog post mentions today. Keyword popularity across the Blogosphere This chart illustrates how many times blog posts across the Blogosphere contained the following keywords. swine flu » Configure this widget for your site! Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Here Comes Twitter Spam And How To Fight It Top
A spam-less Twitter feed might just be too good to be true. Spam is becoming an increasing problem on Twitter and something has to be done to separate the wheat from the chaff. Spammers are using Twitter as a tool by replying to your @username, which then causes the Tweets to show up in your timeline. There isn’t really a way to filter Twitter spam directly from a Twitter client. But there may be soon. Loic Le Meur has proposed to add a “report as spam” button to the Twitter desktop clients his company has created, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop. This button would flag the spammer to Twitter (or to a separate database of users) and Seesmic or Twhirl could then exclude the spammer from its client apps after a sufficient number of users report them as spam. Le Meur also says that the clients would manually check the potential spammers to ensure that they are actually spammers. After the clients are established as spammers, Twitter could then delete or block the user accounts. Le Meur says that his Twitter clients will soon include a “report as spam” button and is calling on fellow popular Twitter clients, Tweetdeck and Tweetie, to follow suit. The one potential issue with the flag button, says Le Meur, is that Twitter prefers spam to be reported by a direct message to its spam account “@spam.” But you need have @spam to follow you first (it seems to be autofollowing) before hitting the flag button on a Twitter client. It’s an extra step the user would have to take to make the button usable, says Le Meur. Flagging is a good idea and a great first step to battling spam but what Twitter really needs is an Akismet -like plug-in. Akismet, created by Wordpress developers, filters link spam from blog comments and trackback pings for blogs. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to a blog site, it is submitted to Akismet, which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down on whether it is spam. Akismet says that its plug-in has caught 10.7 billion spam comments from blogs since its launch in 2005. There are a few Twitter applications that let you flag possible spam, but none are tied to the Twitter desktop clients, like Seesmic Desktop or Tweetie. Twimailer gives you a suped-up version of the standard New Follower email offered by Twitter, by providing the user's Bio, Follower/Following numbers, the user's last 10 tweets and the ability to block and report spam directly from the New Follower email. Twerp Scan scans through your followers and flags Twitter users who could be potential spammers. You can control the filtering options that determine who is a spammer (i.e. number of followers vs. following). But Twitter may have to develop or license its own spam blocking software if the problem becomes more prevalent. >Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
The Sorry State Of Online Privacy Top
The Cloud is looming large, offering us ways to store and share our data in ways that were never before possible. We can effortlessly share our documents and photos with our families and friends, while maintaining control over their spread using powerful granular privacy controls. But it’s quickly becoming clear that the cloud isn’t ready for us. Because the services we rely on are letting us down with a frequency that is simply unacceptable. I’ve been putting this post off for a while, mostly because I didn’t want to point to a single breach and call it a trend. But in only the last two months, we’ve covered at least three major web services that suffered security lapses tied to software bugs or scaling issues. In our posts covering these problems, one of our commentors will inevitably say something along the lines of, “that’s what you get for uploading your data to X service “. And the more problems I see, the more I’m beginning to agree with them. For a recap, let’s revisit some of the problems we’ve recently seen. In March I wrote about a bug in Google Docs that would share your files with people whom you’d never given access to. Granted, it would only share these files with contacts you’d previously interacted with, and not the entire world, but this did little to ameliorate the issue - in some cases it would be better to share a supposedly private document with a stranger than a coworker. Two weeks later, we were alerted to a bug on Facebook that would allow users to circumvent any ‘limited profile’ lists they’d been placed on by their friends. For example, if you had placed your boss on a ‘Limited’ profile list so they couldn’t see your latest party photos, they’d be able to get around it. This ‘exploit’, if it could even be called one, was so easy to carry out that I’m sure many people did it accidentally. Finally, earlier this week Twitter posted a note to its Status blog saying it was having issues with “misdelivery of direct messages” . In other words, some supposedly private messages were being routed to the wrong users. Given Twitter’s problems with bugs in the past this didn’t come as a huge surprise, but it’s unnerving nonetheless. When faced with such security lapses, most services try to downplay them by pointing out how few people (relatively speaking) were affected. In the case of the Google Docs issue, Google promptly explained that only .05% of all documents were wrongly shared. But when we’re talking about userbases of millions, even an apparently trivial percentage becomes significant, with thousands of people affected. What’s worse, I’m sure this sort of phenomenon is far more common than we realize. The other services involved just aren’t big enough (or honest enough) for anyone to notice. So why is this happening? There seems to be an accepted notion among many engineers that as their service scales, there is no way that it will be 100% secure. To some extent, I acknowledge and agree with this. Very smart people are always going to be trying to access valuable data by whatever means necessary, and complex security exploits are unfortunately a fact of life on the web. But that doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable for the service to wrongly share user data simply because of a bug. It’s the difference between having your bank apologize for losing your money because someone robbed it, and it telling you that the teller accidentally withdrew a few thousand dollars from your bank account and handed it to someone else. This sort of thing just can’t be happening. My real issue with these security lapses isn’t so much about the misdirected messages or the wrongly shared photos - the odds of these being truly damaging really are quite low. It’s that these problems serve to undermine the public’s trust in ‘the cloud’. Once we get past the security problems, having our data immediately accessible no matter where we are is incredibly valuable - and probably inevitable. It’s only a matter of time before our health records are going to be stored online in some form, simply because having instant access to them can be lifesaving. But if the public loses faith in the integrity of their data stored online, or the security measures protecting it, then it could take years to regain its trust. So what can we do? Though I’ve dabbled in programming for years, I unfortunately am not an engineer by trade (a fact that I’m sure opponents of this post will promptly point out to show that I can not possibly know what I’m talking about). But the answer seems clear regardless. If an application is cracking under load, or is too complex for its own good, then new signups and features should be put on hold until the damn thing actually works properly. The word ‘private’ should not mean “this will remain hidden until we accidentally break something”. To close, I want to make clear that I understand that these engineers are dealing with extremely difficult problems, scaling their incredibly complex services at unprecedented rates. And I respect the hell out of that. But the more often issues like these pop up, the more the general population is going to distrust the security protections of these online services, no matter how good they eventually become. Which is why we need to sort these problems out now. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Google Earth Helps Solve A Plane Crash Mystery Top
The idea behind Google Earth has always been a powerful one: It allows users to explore places that they either can’t or won’t go. But with its vast amount of maps and topographical data, it also is a very powerful tool for combing the Earth — and that can be very useful when you’re searching for something. Which is exactly how it helped a grieving family find a plane that crashed, and took the lives of loved ones, that had been missing for over two years. Despite countless time spent searching all the areas in Arizona that authorities and the family thought the plane might have gone down, there had been no luck all this time in finding the plane. Then, something rather incredible happened. A person who had also been involved in the attempts to find millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, found a picture of a forest fire that had been taken the same day as the crash and in what was thought to be a similar area. He alerted the family, which had set up a website to aid in the search. Remarkably, they were able to find the exact area in the picture using the different viewing angles and topographical data of Google Earth. The family and some volunteers then set out to the area they had pinpointed in the program, using its coordinates. Sure enough, they found the wreckage. While it’s not exactly a happy ending for the families of the two people lost in the crash, Marcy Randolph and William Westover, it does provide closure, Randolph’s family says. And now the family is hoping to help others do similar types of search and rescue using Google Earth. The family has set up a system called MARSI, which stands for Mapped Archive of Rescue & Search Information. On the website they set up for it , they detail exactly how they were able to use Google Earth’s data to find the missing plane. It’s very interesting stuff. And MAST (The Missing Aircraft Search Team), a team which contributed to the Fossett search, apparently wants to use MARSI for future searches, Liz Johannesen, Marcy Randolph’s cousin, tells us. These types of stories remind us that while projects like Google Earth may not be the most important to a company’s bottom line, they can provide something much more valuable to a lot of people. Last week, we heard about the woman who got her stolen purse back thanks to Google Latitude. And this week we have this much more important story involving Google Earth. It is nice to see that the technology we sometimes take for granted in a quickly evolving space, actually can help people in a meaningful way. Below, find some images detailing the search area from Google Maps. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
EQ Network Converts Videos To Mobile-Friendly Formats While Inserting Ads Top
The web is filled with video content, but there are different formats that don’t always play nicely with all players. The most obvious example of this is the hugely popular Flash format, which does not work on the hugely popular iPhone. EQ Network has an answer for that and other format issues, and wants to offers content owners a way to serve up ads in those video post-conversion. The company’s Media Delivery Bar can be embedded on a page below any video player. This gives viewers an easy-to-understand option for converting and sending a video to a specific type of device they may want to watch the video on — like an iPhone. You simply enter an email address or cellphone number that you want to send the video to, fill out some quick demographic information, and within a few minutes, the video will arrive in a format tailored to your needs. The demographic information part is key. That’s how EQ Network hopes to serve up ads to you that are embedded within those videos. Because it knows your sex and age range, these are highly tailored ads that in theory will lead to better returns. But the ads themselves are kind of annoying. Rather than being overlay ads at the bottom of a video, they stop the entire video and make you watch them, similar to what you have to sit through on Hulu videos. Of course, for most of the content that this Media Delivery Bar will be used for, it probably won’t be hit Hollywood content like Hulu has, that people seem to be okay with sitting through some ads to see for free. But to smaller content providers, EQ Network’s solution could be an intriguing one. “Virtually all companies that we met with confirmed our model and can't wait to use the bar to instantly deploy their videos without having to ad additional infrastructure or up-front costs,” Equilibrium (the company behind EQ Networks) CEO Sean Barger tells me. That sounds suspiciously optimistic, but testing the solution out, it does work well. I took a web video that wouldn’t play on my iPhone, hit the iPhone button on the Media Delivery Bar, and it formatted it so that it will play on my device. But the big boys in the field, like YouTube, will continue to go with their own solutions. For example, YouTube reformats all of its Flash videos to the h.264 format to play on the iPhone (and Apple TV). If any one device gets big enough and won’t support Flash for whatever reason, you can be sure they’d do the work reformating the videos to play there as well. Likewise, Hulu would likely choose its own solutions if and when it decides to make its site compatible with devices like the iPhone . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Steve Jobs On The Value Of Stock Options Top
On March 18, 2008, Steve Jobs was deposed by the SEC during its investigation of Apple’s stock option backdating scandal. The deposition was never made public until Forbes published it on Friday, after obtaining it through a Freedom of Information Act request. (Full deposition embedded below) Jobs explains his reasoning for why he asked the board for mega grants of options for both himself and his top executives, but claims ignorance of the mechanics of how that was done after the board approved the grants themselves. (It was the falsifying of board minutes for a meeting that never occurred, not the backdating per se, that got Apple’s former general counsel Nancy Heinen into hot water with the SEC—this deposition was for a case against her). There aren’t too many revelations on the legal front in the document. But the document provides the first detailed account of the incident from Steve Jobs himself in his own words. What comes through in the deposition is how Jobs sees himself and his’ fierce loyalty to those who work for him. For instance, after selling NeXt to Apple in 1997, his initial reason for acting as a consultant was to get “some of the NeXt people into some jobs where they could help Apple.” He himself was reluctant at first to take on the CEO role at Apple because he didn’t want the people at his other company, Pixar, to “think I was abandoning them.” Then when it came time to reward his “ultra key” executives with one million options each, two of them were from NeXT. While he was taking care of his top lieutenants by trying ti “surprise and delight them with what a career at Apple could be”, he was “hurt” that Apple’s board didn’t do the same for him. So he had to have a little talk with them about swapping his 20 million then-underwater options for 7.5 million new ones, which they did. I’ve excerpted some of the juicier bits from the deposition below. Some names were redacted in the original, but I’ve reinserted them in brackets where it is obvious who Jobs is talking about I’ve also bolded some parts for emphasis. (In the transcript, “A” is Jobs). 1. On coming back to Apple and becoming CEO in 1997: Q: And I guess, just to go back in time then, I want to just try to understand a little bit the transition from having the title consultant to becoming CEO. Could you just describe that transition for me? A: Well, when Apple bought NeXT, Apple was pretty messed up . It was pretty easy to see. And I was trying to help in my arm’s length role. I was trying to help Apple by getting some of the NeXT people into some jobs where they could help Apple, and that’s pretty much all I was doing. . . . Q: Okay, Did the board in fact fire [Gil Amelio] the following week? A: Yes. Q: And did you take on the role then as CEO? Jobs: Well, no, I did not. I was very concerned that Pixar was a newly public company with shareholders, employees, and I felt that - - to my knowledge there had never been a CEO of two public companies before. So I felt if I took the job, the Pixar shareholders and employees would think I was abandoning them. Q. Mm-hmm Jobs. And I decided I just - - that I couldn’t do that. So I took the title of interim CEO and agreed to come back for 90 days to help recruit a full-time CEO. Q. How did that recruitment effort go? A. I failed. Q. And when you say you failed, is it that you didn’t find anyone that you thought would be suitable to take on the role? A. Yes. Apple was not in good shape and everybody knew it and the kind of candidates that we were being offered up by the headhunters were not very talented. Q. Okay. In other words, not the sort of people who could turn Apple around? A. Yes. Q. Okay. So after that 90 days, what happened next? A. Well, it just kind of slid into the fact that I stayed. I kept the interim CEO title for quite some time, a number of years. 2. On the origins of the 4.8 million-share mega grant to Apple’s top executives: A. Apple was in a precarious situation in that we’d, you know, had the internet bubble busting, and I thought that Apple’s executive team and the stability of Apple’s executive team was one of its core strengths. And I was very concerned because Michael Dell, one of our chief competitors, had flown Fred Anderson, our CFO, down to Austin, I guess, him and his wife, I think, to try to recruit him . And I was also concerned that [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] two very strong technical leaders, were also very vulnerable. So I was very concerned that Apple could really suffer some big losses on its executive team with the business environment we were in and the competitors coming after our people. . . . Well, I talked with the board almost every meeting about, you know, key personnel, because I think that’s the key asset Apple has, is its talent . . . Q. All right. And who did you consider to be these ultra key people? A. [Timothy Cook] who at the time I think was our Executive Vice President of Operations, maybe sales and operations, actually. Fred Anderson, our CFO. [Jon Rubinstein] head of hardware. [Avi Tevanian] head of software. Who am I forgetting? I think those were the four key ones. Two of those ultra key people, Rubinstein and Tevanian, came from NeXT. Jobs helped them get hired by Apple after the sale of NeXT in the first place, and then rewarded them down the line with options on one million shares apiece. Today, Rubinstein is competing against Apple in his role as the executive chairman of Palm, which is backed by Silver Lake Elevation Partners, where Anderson is a partner. That’s gratitude for you. 3. On the question of whether Apple was trying to pick a grant date for the options to maximize the return to the executives, Jobs tries to dismiss how important a role that played in the process. Q. And sort of in this framework of options being, in part, a retention tool, is the idea to try to get a lower price so that there is the potential to maximize one’s profits on the options? A. You know, this has come up before. I have to tell you, for these options to be worth anything, the stock has to go up so much compared to a dollar or two at the beginning . . . And so if these guys were going to realize the kind of money they could make elsewhere by staying at Apple, you know, they were going to have to make tens of millions of dollars. These guys are really senior guys. Several of them, you know, could be CEOs of a few big companies and a few medium-size companies. So for them to realize that kind of a gain here, it’s a lot more than a small variation in a strike price. Nevertheless, with one million shares each, every $1 increase translated into a $1 million gain and a million dollars is still a million dollars. But Jobs wasn’t just rewarding his lieutenants, he was trying to keep them. The “mega grants” were designed to be one big grant instead of smaller grants every year. 4. Jobs explains the reasoning behind his compensation strategy: One of the things that I felt was that rather than giving them shares once a year, as is common in some companies, I would rather give them four years’ worth of stock upfront. . . . the key thing is if the stock goes up, which we always hope it does, then the golden handcuffs are dramatically increased , which is what I was hoping would happen. And on the subject of his own grant of 7.1 million options at the time, Jobs says that he negotiated so hard for it because he felt he wasn’t getting the recognition he deserved: Q. Could you just tell me a little bit about the process of how this all came to be? A. Well, it was a tough situation, you know. It wasn’t so much about the money, because a very small percentage of my net worth is from Apple. Q. Okay. A. But everybody likes to be recognized by their peers , and the closest that I’ve got, or any CEO has, is their Board of Directors. And as we’ve seen in the discussions of the past hour, I spent a lot of time trying to take care of people at Apple and to, you know, surprise and delight them with what a career at Apple could be - - could mean to them and their families. And I felt that the board wasn’t really doing the same with me. Q. Right. A. So I was hurt, I suppose would be the most accurate word , and, you know, the board had given me some options, but they were all underwater. They weren’t underwater necessarily because of our performance, but, you know, the bubble had burst in the dot-coms, and here I had been working, you know, I don’t know, four years, five years of my life and not seeing my family very much and stuff, and I just felt like there is nobody looking out for me here, you know. Q. Right. Okay. A. So I wanted them to do something and so we talked about it. Steve Jobs Deposition Publish at Scribd or explore others: Taxes & Accounting Business & Law backdating stock options Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Former AOL Exec Mike Jones May Become No. 2 At MySpace Top
One thing MySpace has is a lot of holes in the executive ranks. Founding CEO Chris DeWolfe has been hurriedly replaced by Owen Van Natta (our thoughts on that are well known). Cofounder and President Tom Anderson is having “discussions” about “assuming a new role in the organization.” And last month three of the top (and most capable) execs (COO, SVP Product Strategy and VP Technology) left to start their own company . More MySpace execs will soon be leaving, voluntarily or not, as Van Natta fills the gaps and adds loyal lieutenants. The first announcement will likely be a replacement for the COO spot, who will be the no. 2 exec at MySpace. A number of current MySpace execs are hoping for the job, particularly Jeff Berman , president of sales and marketing. But our understanding is that the COO spot is definitely going to an outsider. The most likely candidate, we’ve heard from sources, is former AOL exec Mike Jones . Jones’ company, Userplane , was acquired by AOL in late 2006. And Jones worked closely with former AOL boss Jonathan Miller , who is now overseeing all of News Corp.’s digital assets, including MySpace. Jones is a well respected executive who has proven product experience (something sorely lacking at MySpace). If he joins, he’ll likely become a valuable asset to the company. He’s a smart pick if MySpace can get him, and frankly would have been a much better choice for the CEO spot than Van Natta. Like Van Natta, though, Jones already has a day job. He left AOL to start Tsavo in August 2008. Tsavo was in the news again this last February . News Corp. hasn’t responded to a request for comment, nor will they. More surprising, Jones, who is a personal friend, hasn’t taken any of my 15 calls today, or responded to voicemails or emails. That means he is either on an airplane, or he’s avoiding me like the plague. Until we get further confirmation, we’re categorizing this as a rumor. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Owen Van Natta's Infamous Tenure At Project Playlist Top
One of the many unsavory aspects of the hiring of Owen Van Natta as the new CEO of MySpace : the rewriting of recent history around Van Natta’s involvement in Project Playlist. The communications group at News Corp. (MySpace’s parent company) is busy spinning Van Natta’s departure as a simple transition from one job to another, but that’s far from the truth. Nor does their story take into account the sad state of the company that he ran for just a few months before leaving for greener pastures. Here’s how News Corp spins this: This is a natural changing of the guard as a CEO of a small startup takes a bigger job. There was an orderly transition, and Project Playlist has a new CEO with great experience. Nothing to see here, please move along. Here’s the real story: Van Natta joined Project Playlist in November 2008 , just about five months ago. He told investors and employees he was in for the long haul. And he hired an executive team under him that came with his promise that he’d lead the company to a win. Bob Pittman invested in the company, he told recruits, which is true. But he also let rumors that the company raised $20 million in new funding fly. In fact the company raised much less than that. And Van Natta also underplayed the problems with labels, suggesting that deals were imminent and the litigation was going to be settled. And now that Van Natta has abandoned the company, they’ve had to scramble to find someone to run the company. That’s why John Sykes, who was already a board member, was forced to step in. In fact, we’ve heard, Van Natta’s playing down of the music label litigation led directly to the downfall of the company. The labels complained to MySpace and Facebook and threatened to sue them as well if they didn’t ban Playlist from their social networks. Both companies backed down quickly, and Playlist lost their main channels of distribution. MySpace banned them on December 19, Facebook followed on December 23. If Van Natta had made fewer bold statements, sources close to the labels say, those threats against MySpace and Facebook may have never been made. Project Playlist traffic has plummeted since Van Natta took over the company. In October 2008, the month before he joined, 704,000 people visited the site from the U.S, according to Comscore. In March 2009 it had fallen to just 234,000. Page views also fell dramatically, from 9.6 million in October to just 6 million in March. Here are the traffic charts (unique visitors on top, page views below): If Van Natta hadn’t ruffled so many feathers at the labels with his promises that litigation was nearing settlement, it’s likely the pressure on MySpace and Facebook would never have materialized, say sources, and traffic would have continued to climb. At this point Van Natta likely wants everyone to simply forget about his infamous tenure at Project Playlist and focus on his more recent jobs at Facebook and Amazon. He doesn’t list the company on his LinkedIn profile at all (although he’s had five months to update it). Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Twitter's Real Edge: It's not Scary Top
When I was writing my last book , I used to go run at the gym for about an hour every morning to clear my head. The TVs were always set on ABC, so I’d zone out to either “Live with Regis & Kelly” or “The View”–two shows I’d never watched before. I was always struck by the constant fear mongering about the Internet, particularly on “The View.” It seemed every day there was a story about pedophiles patrolling MySpace, ex-wives putting retaliatory dirty-laundry-airing videos on YouTube and 20-somethings getting fired because of college keg party pictures on Facebook. The message to housewives was loud and clear: DO NOT LET YOUR KIDS USE THESE HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE SITES! Yesterday after a pretty brutal morning, I found myself sitting on the couch, flipping channels for a little background noise and settling on my old jogging buddy “The View.” Mainly because Lil’ Wayne was the guest and the combo of my favorite saucy rapper and ultra-right-winger Elizabeth Hasselbeck sounded TiVo-worthy. It was the first time I’ve watched the show in at least a year. Imagine my surprise that Joy was texting away on her Blackberry while on air, and a conversation about a study that showed good friends could help you live to 100 years old immediately brought up Twitter. “This is why I am on Twitter ,” Joy said, “We’re all on it now except for Whoopi…We like to have all these friends. It’s like a community of people who are interested in you.” Nods all around. Turns out– as I learned from “The Soup” on Friday night–they’ve been talking about it all week, as has every other Oprah-wanna-be. Yes, even Tyra. (See video below.) Wait a minute, ladies. Wait. One. Minute. You’re telling me that you are blasting your every move out to a bunch of strangers’ mobile phones, and there’s no fear of stalkers, crazed fans or psychos? Not even from Elizabeth? I had to check to make sure I was really watching “The View.” It’s easy to dismiss this as yet more celebs jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. But that masks the really remarkable thing Twitter seems to have pulled off. It has seemingly side-stepped the whole fear-of-technology mania that usually plagues most social media sites as they start to tip mainstream. There was that little report about terrorists using it and that was pretty much it. Throughout 2007 I heard these same ladies make the argument that spending all this time on MySpace and Facebook was eroding kids’ abilities to make friends. Now just two years later, the same people are equating Twitter with real world friendships. What gives? Is it that everyone has finally gotten used to the idea of real world and digital friendships overlapping? I doubt it. Because you still hear fear mongering with a lot of the other sites. There’s just something about Twitter that’s less scary. And that may prove its biggest strength and differentiator. I think part of it is how simple the site is to use, the flexibility of using it via the web or mobile, and the relatively low barrier to that “a-ha!” moment. You know, the mini-endorphin rush you get from knowing what your friends are doing at any moment, or for a celebrity, hearing from fans in a more direct, more immediate way then you could before. But that’s only part of it. I think the key to Twitter’s mainstream celeb success has been the asynchronous, non-committal nature of the site. As Facebook and MySpace grew, we all experienced that social pressure akin to seeing someone on the street that you know, but don’t want to talk to and wondering how you can politely avoid them. Most people who indiscriminately add “friends” just because they asked don’t wind up really using Facebook to connect with actual friends, because they don’t want to over-share photos, contact information, or videos with “friends” who are essentially strangers. But on Twitter, the personal information is contained by the restraints of the site itself. It’s just short text updates, unless you chose to link to a picture or video. People feel like they know you, while you actually give up very little personal information. You get intimate connections with as many people as you want, but on your own terms. People can follow you, without you following them. You can still see what people you aren’t following are saying about you and respond, or not. And you can add someone for a bit, then unfollow them, frequently without them noticing while they still follow you. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn CEO and uber-Web 2.0 angel a few weeks ago. He pointed out that lifecasting never took off in a big way because it was originally conceived as video. Many people don’t want to show that much of their lives, and most friends just don’t have the time to watch. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s just that sometimes we’re not great editors. We tend to think we’re more interesting than we really are. But Twitter is noncommittal, bite-sized lifecasting in a manageable text form. It’s similar to how I refuse to check one long rambling voice mail, but I’m happy to scan hundreds of texts or emails. Hoffman compared it to the difference between watching a vacation movie of your friend sitting on a boat in the water for an hour, versus reading one 140-character Tweet that your friend was sitting on a boat enjoying the sun. Ironically, the asyncronicity of Twitter was hotly contested by a lot of early adopters who pressured the Twitter team heavily to change it to an auto-follow model. Evan Williams & crew always held out, convinced it was of key importance to how the site would grow and scale. Looks like they were right. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Googler Defects To Twitter, He Tweets Top
Last month, Douglas Bowman, the design lead at Google, left to become the creative director at Twitter. Today, a former co-worker joins him. Dustin Diaz, who was an engineer working on Gmail, resigned from Google and announced he was taking a job at Twitter, on Twitter . “It’s kind of shocking we couldn’t keep him,” another Googler tells us, calling Diaz “one of the best frontend developers around.” But of course, Twitter is the hot new company, just like Facebook was months back when it was stealing employees left and right from larger companies — like Google. As he famously blogged about, Bowman took exception to some of the mentality surrounding design at Google, and cited it as a reason for leaving. As a frontend engineer, it’s certainly possible Diaz felt similar. He did, after all, author a book called “ Pro JavaScript Design Patterns .” Or, as I said, maybe he just wanted to go work for the hot company. Update : Diaz was nice enough to tweet us a picture to use representing his move. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Dropbox: Now Effortlessly Syncing Files For 1 Million Members Top
Dropbox , the Y Combinator and Sequoia-funded file synchronization startup that makes it easy to share files across multiple computers at once, just hit a major milestone: it now has over 1 million members. And as the graph below shows, much of that growth has come in the last few months, with over 900,000 signups since the product’s public debut at TechCrunch50 last September. We don’t hear about Dropbox too often (it seems that they’re a bit too secretive for their own good at times), but their product rocks, and is gaining fans quickly. We’ve been using it around the TechCrunch office for over a year now to collaborate on group projects and keep key files handy regardless of which computer we’re using. And we’re not alone - I often hear about other startups that are using Dropbox for their own projects, including Facebook’s Dave Morin . Dropbox is going to be introducing a few key features soon, too. One of them is Peer to Peer sharing, which will allow users on the same network to share their files directly through their routers, without having to first upload them to Dropbox’s servers. The service’s web interface also just got a UI refresh, though many people simply use the folders that the Dropbox application integrates directly into your desktop. CEO Drew Houston wouldn’t talk about how many of Dropbox’s users are paid (the service offers a free version with a limited amount of storage), but he says that the site’s referral program has been driving signups, with the service seeing around 22-25% growth month over month since launch. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Creepy Alert: Isthisyourluggage.com Top
If you’ve traveled enough, there’s a good chance you’ve lost your luggage before. Sure, it’s annoying as hell, but most people get it back within a few days. However, some people, for whatever reason, never claim their lost luggage, and the airlines then auction it off for charity. That’s where isthisyourluggage.com comes in. The site, run by some anonymous person, collects this auctioned off luggage, and takes pictures of it to put on the site. Yes, this person opens the lugguage, takes out all of the items, and photographs them. Yes, this is creepy. But it’s also a great web oddity. The main page of the site features pictures of each suitcase, you can click on any of them and get taken to a page that shows the pictures of each item inside. If you click on this picture, it zooms in, giving you a closer view of the items. I haven’t noticed anything too out of the ordinary, though one bag has a sort of strange nurse’s outfit, which may or may not double as a stripper outfit. At least the creator of the site is honest. As they write on the about page, “I GO TO THESE AUCTIONS AND BUY THE CASES SO I CAN PHOTOGRAPH THEM FOR MY WEIRD VOYEURISTIC PASSION.” [via twitter/mbaratz ] Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Show Your Best Talent, Win A Ton Of iPhone Apps Top
Last week, we held an absolutely massive iPhone App Giveaway spree . Over a span of about 12 hours, we gave away hundreds and hundreds of promo codes across 50+ different iPhone applications. It was a blast, but all good things must come to an end - but it’s not over just yet. Throughout the competition, we hung on to one promo code for each app. We’ve taken all of these promo codes and put them together, forming one ridiculously huge omega-prize. One lucky person is going to take home a copy of every application we gave away that day - plus more. That’s dozens upon dozens of applications, worth hundreds of dollars in all. Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >> Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Following Their Massive Layoffs, Hi5 Gets A New Leader Top
Last month, the social network hi5 cut a large percentage of its staff following a new round of funding that didn’t materialized . Now, the self-dubbed “world’s leading social entertainment web site” is getting a new leader at the top. Bill Gossman, formerly the CEO of the online advertising service Audience Science, is taking over as CEO of Hi5. Grossman was brought in by Hi5’s largest shareholder Mohr Davidow Ventures, where Grossman was a former partner and is a current executive in residence. In the release (below) you can read between the lines to see where Hi5 is looking to head as it continues on at a smaller size. The site, is now focusing on forms of entertainment like casual gaming and micro-payments. Hi5 also recently partnered with Paymo to power mobile payments for virtual goods. Gossman, who obviously has experience in monetization, will now try to monetize hi5. The company’s former CEO, founder Ramu Yalamanchi, will stay on and take the roll of Chief Product Officer. With nearly 60 million active users, the service has a good sized audience, but it’s long been far behind the big boys in the social networking space, MySpace and Facebook. Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide with 294.7 million unique visitors, with MySpace is coming in second with 125.7 million unique visitors. hi5 gets about 63 million monthly unique visits worldwide but only 3.7 million of those are from the U.S., according to ComScore's March stats. And the problem with its audience is that a good chunk of it is in countries where it will be hard to attract advertisers, as VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon notes . Below, find the press release: San Francisco, CA; April 24, 2009 — hi5, the world's leading social entertainment web site, today announced the appointment of Bill Gossman as CEO to lead the company through its next phase of growth. Ramu Yalamanchi, founder and CEO since the company's inception in 2003, will assume the role of Chief Product Officer to lead the company's product strategy in the social entertainment space. This change augments the hi5 executive team with seasoned leadership, particularly around monetization of the company's huge global audience of over 60 million monthly uniques. As the former CEO of Audience Science, Bill brings considerable expertise in online advertising, behavioral targeting, and other forms of audience monetization. He has also built and led several companies through similar stages of their organizational growth. "The founding team at hi5 has built a tremendous asset in one of the world's largest online communities, and a truly global distribution and monetization platform for games and other social entertainment content," said Gossman. "I'm excited to be joining the organization to help leverage that asset by focusing on our continued leadership in the social entertainment space and building a scalable, highly profitable business." As Chief Product Officer, Ramu will focus his operational responsibilities on leading the product and engineering organizations to deliver innovative, world-class features that differentiate hi5 in the social entertainment space – particularly extending hi5's successful micro-payments infrastructure and maximizing that revenue stream for the business. "It is great to have Bill joining hi5 at this exciting stage of our business," said Yalamanchi. "We have been incredibly successful in building a huge global audience and pioneering the social entertainment space. Bill brings highly applicable, stage-relevant leadership experience, particularly in monetizing online traffic and building scalable sales organizations, that will help take our company to the next level." With over 25 years experience leading high-growth organizations in the digital media space, Bill helped pioneer the behavioral targeting category at Audience Science and is an expert in monetizing online audiences. His previous positions include CEO of Sabrix and founder and COO/CFO of @mobile, a wireless Internet software company sold to Software.com for $400 million. Bill is a former partner and current executive in residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, the lead investor in hi5. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Wolfram Alpha Getting A Public Preview On Tuesday Top
When it was first unveiled in March, Wolfram Alpha , a new type of search engine created by computer scientist Stephen Wolfram , got a lot of buzz. Naturally, some people threw out the “Google killer” title — but it seems to be a different beast, as it’s all about knowledge search. That is to say, you ask a question, and you get an answer — with Google, you ask a question and you get a link to a bunch of documents. That may sound a bit bland, and simplistic, but the select few who have seen it, seem to think it works really well and could be a game changer . The rest of us won’t know for sure until May, when it’s scheduled to launch. But if you want to catch a glimpse of how it will work, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard is hosting a webcast on Tuesday of an event with Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard. The sold-out event will be streamed live on the web at 3PM EST this coming Tuesday on this page . And Harvard is calling for web users to participate in the preview by submitting questions, by @replying or direct messaging BerkmanCenter on Twitter during the event, or joining their IRC chat. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
AOL's Secret Love(.com) Top
AOL has a new content site in open beta called Love.com - it’s been live since early this month but hasn’t attracted any press attention to date. AOL hasn’t announced it, and it isn’t linked to from any other AOL properties. But it’s already a vast site covering 350,000 topics that attracts 100,000 unique visitors a week through search engine links and word of mouth on Twitter, Facebook and other sites. The site has a home directory at love.com, and topic sites are organized under subdomains. Current content on literally anything you can think of (or at least that I could think of) is there: dogs , The Beatles , sex , money , rock and roll . Hamsters . Barack Obama . You get the picture. Search engines love this stuff. The site is built under Bill Wilson’s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. The content is all automated, with main articles pulled from third party sources via Relegence, videos from YouTube, Twitter messages linking back to individual pages, and links to major news sites. All of this is automated and requires very little human involvement. Right now AOL isn’t saying much about Love.com, other than they plan to roll it out officially sometime later this year, and that the goal is “to create sites with content on any topic that people love.” Love.com is described on the MediaGlow site as “The Love.com Network covers all the topics you love, all under one big roof, with hundreds of thousands of topic blogs to suit fans of all things.” Eventually, we hear, users will be able to create a customizable home page which brings in content from specific topics they want to track. Love.com originally launched in 2003 as a personals site. it was later changed to simply redirect to Match.com, which has a long term partnership with AOL. More on AOL employee Frank Gruber’s blog . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Dear Owen: Good Luck With That Top
Just how big a task does MySpace’s freshly appointed CEO Owen Van Natta have in front of him? Let’s take a quick peek at the latest global traffic stats from comScore which just came out today. On a global basis, Facebook attracted more than twice as many visitors in the month of March as arch-rival MySpace. Facebook had an estimated 294.7 million unique visitors in March, 2009 on a worldwide basis, compared to 125.7 million for MySpace. While Facebook gained 19 million visitors during the month, MySpace gained only 2 million. In terms of pageviews, MySpace has seen a drop of 20 percent since January (to 37.9 billion), whereas Facebook has seen growth of 22 percent in the exact opposite direction (to 87.3 billion). And while MySpace is still bigger in the U.S., Facebook is closing that gap fast. Owen Van Natta must figure out some way to reinvigorate MySpace and keep it from languishing its way towards mediocrity. Maybe the answer is to turn MySpace Music into the new engine of growth for the entire social network or focus on some other niche where MySpace can win. But if Van Natta’s ambition is to retake the top spot in social networking, well, good luck with that. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
A Sign Of Things To Come: Naked Pizza Erects Twitter Billboard Top
It was only a matter of time. Naked Pizza , a uniquely healthy pizza joint in New Orleans, has replaced its “call for delivery” billboard in favor of something a bit more unorthodox: its Twitter handle. The restaurant now features a large Twitter bird above its storefront, inviting passersby to follow ‘ NAKEDpizza ‘ for special deals. Aside from being among the first brick and mortar businesses to so prominently feature its Twitter handle, Naked Pizza is notable for a few other reasons. Its menu was created to offer the “world’s healthiest pizza”, with each slice only weighing in at a fraction of the calories and fat of standard pizza, while still tasting delicious, according to Yelp reviewers . Oh, and Mark Cuban just partnered with the company to turn it into a national franchise. To be honest I was skeptical of the sign at first (it’s fairly easy to Photoshop the Twitter logo onto a billboard), but I’ve confirmed with the New Orleans sign company that installed it that it’s real. And while it’s still a pretty strange sight to behold, it makes perfect sense. With the growing ubiquity of smart phones, free 411 services, and Google Local on the computer, looking up a restaurant’s phone number is trivial. And phone numbers only form a very fleeting bond with the business, anyway. But if a business can get a customer to add their Twitter handle, it gets a free channel to constantly remind them that they exist. By tweeting out promotions a few times a week, Naked Pizza will maintain a presence in the customer’s consciousness, and the customer gets a chance to score some cheap pizza. This isn’t the first time Twitter has been featured on a billboard. Just last week, Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter handle was displayed on thousands of digital billboards across the country in support of his quest for 1 million Twitter followers. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
NYC's Pogby Aims To Become The OpenTable For Events Top
Why is it that you can book a table at a fancy restaurant through OpenTable, but you can’t book the bar for a corporate party? That is the question that a startup in New York City called Pogby is trying to answer. Barely in beta, Pogby is an event booking service founded by Joshua Gooch, who used to run JetBlue’s Website and helped build its TrueBlue customer loyalty program. Pogby aims to become the OpenTable of events, where corporate event planners and others can find and book venues for parties. Pogby is one of the finalists competing in a startup competition at NYC Entrepreneur Week, where I was a judge today. The site is really not much more than an online demo right now, with only a half dozen venues in New York City on the site. But Gooch and his VP of sales Duane Lawrence plan to sign up 50 to 100 restaurants, bars, and other event spaces in short order. They are focusing on New York City to prove the concept. (This is really early stage—the company is still looking for seed funding). Each venue on Pogby gets its own page with pictures for each available event space, along with a calendar showing availability and a booking engine. Gooch knows a lot about reservation systems from his time at JetBlue, and you can see some of the design influences on Pogby. it’s a fairly simple concept. Find a venue, check pricing and availability, and book online. Pogby plans to charge venues an 8 percent commission fee for any bookings and eventually will introduce a $99/month subscription fee. A typical event can cost $4,000 or more, and event spaces typically go unused 70 percent of the time. So any extra events a restaurant or venue can capture is worth the fees. Why hasn’t anyone done this already? There is an obvious need for this service. Pogby however faces a few challenges. First, it needs to sign up a critical mass of popular event spaces before anyone will take it seriously. Second, it needs to make it easier for venues to sign up themselves in a self-serve fashion (this is coming, but to appear on the site right now involves too many manual processes). Third, it needs incentives to prevent people from looking up availability on the site and then calling up on their own to strike a better deal. (A discount would be good). Fourth, it needs to give event planners a way to negotiate prices and other terms on the site. Fifth, it needs to look beyond New York City. But the biggest threat might come from OpenTable itself, which could add event booking a sa feature fairly easily since most of its restaurants rent out spaces for parties as well. Until they do, Pogby has an opportunity to carve out a niche for itself. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Celebrities + Twitter + A Good Cause = A Retweet Explosion Tomorrow? Top
The race between actor Ashton Kutcher and CNN to a million Twitter followers at first seemed to be little more than an exercise in online vanity. But then it transformed into a race to help out a cause, Malaria No More , in a meaningful way. But really, why does anyone need a race to do that? With that in mind, tomorrow, Kutcher , with his nearly 1.4 million followers , and Digg’s Kevin Rose , with his over 500,000 followers , along with other notable users plan to use to Twitter as a platform to further the cause. The message they will send out is simple: “Every 30 seconds a child dies from Malaria. Nets save lives. Support World Malaria Day = http://bit.ly/30Io8 ” Just from those two users, the tweet has the potential to be seen nearly 2 million times on Twitter. But the real power will come when people start retweeting the message. Savvy Twitter users will know that retweeting (copying a message to all of your followers that someone else sent) has become the key to sending a viral message on Twitter. And given the celebrity angle, mixed with a good cause, I think it’s a pretty good bet this may be one of the most retweeted messages ever for the service. And we’ll play along, because it is a good cause . And if you feel like doing your part, send out the message above tomorrow as well, or retweet it. More importantly, if you’re able, donate to the cause to buy nets to help save children in Africa. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 

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