Monday, April 27, 2009

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Google's Schmidt and Microsoft's Mundie Appointed As Obama Tech Advisors Top
Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, and Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, have been named to President’s Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). According to a statement released by the White House, PCAST is an advisory group of the the country’s foremost scientists and engineers who will help the President and Vice President form policy related to science, technology, and innovation. The council includes a who’s who in the science and technology fields, with leaders in climate change, medicine, physics, chemistry, and computer science all holding positions on the council. The group is co-chaired by John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Eric Lander, Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project; and Harold Varmus, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, former head of the National Institutes of Health and a Nobel laureate. Members of the council include Christopher Chyba, an expert on the threats of biological warfare and nuclear proliferation; Chad Mirkin, a noted nanotech researcher; and David Shaw, founder of D.E. Shaw & Co. and a computational biochemistry expert. PCAST was originally established by President George H. W. Bush in 1990. President Obama recently named Aneesh Chopra as chief technology officer, a position that was widely speculated to go to a Silicon Valley technologist. Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Eric Schmidt (among many others) were named as possible candidates. Last fall, Beet.TV sat down with Mundie for an interview. Here’s the video: Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Facebook Opens Up Its Stream API To Developers. Let The Conversation Wars Begin! Top
As we speculated this weekend, Facebook has opened up its activity stream through a new API for developers. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream. One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop , A Twitter client which is now adding your Facebook feed through this API (something Tweetdeck already did in the past through other more restrictive means). Facebook has also created its own desktop notification client to demonstrate what can be built with the API. I just got off the phone with Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform marketing, who tells me that the entire feed will be available through a single API call. A developer could recreate the entire Facebook home page if he wanted to or take parts of the feed and remix it to make something more interesting. For starters, I’d expect most Twitter clients to add the Facebook stream as an additional option. On Tweetdeck, for instance, you can read your activity stream, but you cannot respond in-line. The new Facebook Open Stream API is two-way, so it would allow developers to build apps which allow for that two-way communication inside the app. This is a big deal . It potentially puts Facebook side by side with Twitter in all of these desktop and mobile client applications where a lot of the real-time conversation is happening and lets it compete head-to-head with Twitter. Whichever conversation stream is more interesting will prevail. But beyond the arms race with Twitter, the stream API will open up the possibility for many new applications both within Facebook and outside its walls. An obvious one would be better filtering options for your activity stream. It would be simple to create an app that shows you the most liked or most commented on items in your stream, for example. Or now that stream can be plugged into various social search engines to give you socialized real-time results. Hell, if I could just search my own activity stream, I’d consider that a giant leap forward. But Facebook still only allows developers to cache data for 24 hours, so you wouldn’t be able to build a very powerful search engine or return results from more than a day ago. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Three's Company: Meet Your New MySpace Executive Team Top
Less than a week ago MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe still felt secure in his job . Fast forward to today and DeWolfe is out and a new CEO, Owen Van Natta , is starting his first day on the job. And he’s already got two lieutenants, either of which could easily be the CEO: former AOL exec Mike Jones as COO (he has /mike at MySpace and was one of the first 3,000 members) and Jason Hirschhorn is the new Chief Product Officer. MySpace cofounder and President Tom Anderson , who’s currently leading the product team, is having "discussions" about "assuming a new role in the organization." Hirschhorn was formerly the Chief Digital Officer at MTV Networks and was most recently the head of Sling Media Entertainment Group. Van Natta, Jones and Hirschhorn are pictured left to right above. As we said last week , this was more than a simple CEO change. The entire senior executive team has been restructured with outsiders hand picked by News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. Digital Media chief Jon Miller. From what we hear they’re done hiring for now. But as Van Natta, Jones and Hirschhorn settle in, expect many more changes down the road. Those execs that are still left at MySpace are meeting the new team for the first time today (I’d pay good money to listen in on that). Later in the afternoon they’ll lead an all-hands meeting. The full press release is below. News Corporation Expands MySpace Management Team Michael Jones named Chief Operating Officer Jason Hirschhorn named Chief Product Officer ______________________ Los Angeles, CA, April 27, 2009 – News Corporation today announced an expansion of MySpace's management team with two key new hires. Michael Jones has been named Chief Operating Officer and Jason Hirschhorn has been named Chief Product Officer, effective immediately. Mr. Jones and Mr. Hirschhorn will be based in Los Angeles and report to MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta. Jones has founded and operated several online businesses, including Userplane, a leading provider of tools for online communities such as MySpace. Userplane was acquired in 2006 by AOL, where Jones subsequently served as a Senior Vice President and focused on social media monetization and also pioneered the distribution of widgets and other technology to Web publishers. Most recently, he was the founder and CEO of Tsavo Media, an online content and search network developing next-generation publishing platforms and technology services. Hirschhorn has led both start-up and established online businesses. Most recently he was President of Sling Media, Inc's Entertainment Group, which created consumer-driven applications and services for the Slingbox device. Previously, he was Chief Digital Officer at MTV Networks, where he oversaw the company's digital media businesses, products and strategies. Hirschhorn joined MTV Networks following the acquisition of his company Mischief New Media, which provided interactive services to the entertainment industry. "Michael's operational insight and knowledge of the social media market will prove to be a valuable asset as we set out to evolve the MySpace product offering," said Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer, News Corporation. "From a product perspective, there's no better choice than Jason, who is highly regarded as an incredibly talented innovator, media executive and leader, all qualities I know will greatly benefit our team and our users." "We were attracted to Michael's unique background in building and operating successful businesses that fall directly in our sweet spot, and I look forward to leveraging his skill set as we further refine and shape the MySpace vision," said Mr. Van Natta. "Jason's reputation for creating compelling consumer experiences that leverage the intersection of technology, design and media is unmatched and we're excited to have him join us." "I am so fortunate to have the opportunity to build upon the successes of the company's founders and am eager to work with Owen and Jon and the rest of the incredible management team at MySpace as we enter this exciting new phase in the company's already revered history," said Mr. Jones. Mr. Hirschhorn continued, "MySpace is one of the most alluring innovations of our time and I am honored to collaborate with Tom Anderson and the rest of the MySpace team to take what is already a stellar product into its next evolution." News Corporation (NASDAQ: NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV) had total assets as of December 31, 2008 of approximately US$50 billion and total annual revenues of approximately US$33 billion. News Corporation is a diversified global media company with operations in eight industry segments: filmed entertainment; television; cable network programming; direct broadcast satellite television; magazines and inserts; newspapers and information services; book publishing; and other. The activities of News Corporation are conducted principally in the United States, Continental Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, Asia and Latin America. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Portfolio Magazine Gets Liquidated. There Goes $100 million. Top
Conde Nast is shutting down its glossy business magazine Portfolio , two years after its launch. Conde Nast famously poured $100 million to launch the publication, which went on an expensive hiring spree in 2007 in its attempt to take on Fortune , Forbes , and Business Week . The magazine always seemed to me to have an unhealthy fixation with Wall Street and the hedge fund boom over other industries, but as Wall Street cratered nobody wanted to read those stories anymore. The drop in print advertising, down 26 percent in the first quarter, didn’t help matters either. Portfolio saw itself in the same vein as the Fortune magazine of the 1930s, filled with lush photographs and long narratives. But that formula doesn’t work in an age where business is about speed, not leisure or luxury. It also doesn’t work in an age where monthly magazines in general are increasingly challenged by the wealth of instantaneous business news available on the Web. (And you thought the daily newspapers had it tough). Portfolio’s insistence on favoring its print over its Website content also helped to hasten its demise. If you are going to start a magazine these days, the Website has to come first. The magazine companies still don’t realize this simple fact. Finally, there will always linger the question of leadership. The magazine’s editor Joanne Lippman alienated and drove away much of her star staff. I know people who used to work there, and the stories I always heard were ones of disarray, which is to be expected at any startup, even one with $100 million in corporate backing. Did anyone here even read Portfolio magazine. Does anyone here even read magazines? Oh well, another one for the deadpool . (Disclosure: I used to work at Fortune a long time ago). Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Time Magazine Throws Up Its Hands As It Gets Pwned By 4Chan Top
The hackers of 4Chan have succeeded in completely gaming Time Magazine’s online poll for its Time 100 list of the most influential people on the planet. At the top of the list is Christopher Poole, aka Moot, the founder of the 4Chan online forum, whose members used some coding to get his name to the top of the list. Not only did they help moot win the poll, but they also arranged the next 20 names to spell out “Marblecake, also the game.” Marblecake is a lewd sexual reference, but is also supposedly the name of the chat room where one of 4Chan’s online collective actions, Project Chanology, originated. This is just the “people’s choice” list, not the official list picked by Time’s editors, but still it makes you wonder whether the editors at Time bother to read anything on the Internet. It is pretty well-documented that the 4Chan community was trying to manipulate the poll results. Nevertheless, Time just threw up its hands and named Moot the winner . Time is obviously aware of the controversy, but tries to justify the choice nonetheless by writing that: Moot denies knowing about any concerted plan by his followers to influence the poll, though TIME.com’s technical team did detect and extinguish several attempts to hack the vote. Except Time.com’s technical team didn’t do a very good job, because the top 21 names still spell out the Marblecake sentence. Time knows it was pwned by 4Chan, but simply throws up its hands. Time.com’s managing editor Josh Tyrangiel tries to defuse criticism by admitting that the poll is meaningless. He says, “I would remind anyone who doubts the results that this is an Internet poll. Doubting the results is kind of the point.” Or maybe the point is to name an Internet celebrity and create a controversy so that people click through to read the results. Well played. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Seeqpod Knocked Down, Will It Ever Get Up? Top
Seeqpod , the ill-fated startup behind the kick-ass media search technology used by many music streaming and playlist services and social networking applications, appears to have cracked under the weight of litigation. At the end of last month, we broke the news that the Emeryville, CA-based company filed a petition for Chapter 11 with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California. Now it looks like the service, which many third-party developers use as the underlying foundation for their own offerings, has gone completely dark for the past couple of days. Update: site just went back up with a maintenance notice, about 5 minutes ago (10 AM EST) Apparently, after going down Friday afternoon Seeqpod at one point claimed on its website that it was having server issues and that the service would be restored once the technical problems were solved, but the site went down again 45 minutes after the notice was published and has been unavailable since 10:30 PM EST Saturday night. There’s still no 100% certainty that Seeqpod has in fact permanently closed shop. In fact, MP3 Newswire in a post says it has been in touch with Seeqpod CEO Kasian Franks yesterday and that he reportedly stated the company is merely moving servers. Furthermore, MP3 Newswire quotes Franks as having said that the company is in acquisition talks with a “large media company that was a competitor to Apple”. This could of course be a well-considered strategy to let people know it’s up for sale at all (which under the circumstances, would not be much of a surprise), hoping to squeeze a deal out of say, Sony or RealNetworks. In case this is all just talk and an acquisition never happens, things are not looking too good for Seeqpod, who despite the fact that it claims not to host any files on its own servers has become the target of multibillion dollar lawsuits by music labels like Warner Music , Capitol Records and EMI. The company has raised $7 million from undisclosed angel investors to date. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Brandtology Raises $1.35 Million For Advanced Social Media Tracking Top
Walden International , an international venture capital firm headquarted in San Francisco but with a strong foothold in Asia, has invested S$2 million - Singapore Dollars - (approx. US$1.35 million) in Brandtology . The company, which has its headquarters in Singapore but boasts more offices in China, Malaysia and Australia, provides business and brand online intelligence services out of specialist-manned ‘Command Centres’. Despite its military-sounding name, these centres actually help Brandtology customers make ‘timely and informed strategic decisions’ based on an advanced online conversation tracking system, which mines blogs, forums, micro-blogging services etc. for opinions, aided by specialists who monitor the system for clients around the clock. Brandtology in a statement said it will use the fresh capital to further expand its services in North Asia, where it sees most opportunities for growth. The investment in Brandtology is the first to come out of the early-stage fund Seed Ventures IV Pte., a $13.3 million venture fund Walden International set up as a vehicle for small-scale financing rounds. The firm's funds total over US$1.9 billion in committed capital. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Wesabe Meets Mint In The iPhone Finance App Arena Top
When it comes to startups in the online personal finance sphere, most people think of Mint . But another player in the space, Wesabe , has been holding its own as well, seeing some nice growth in the past year. Which one you use is probably a matter of personal taste, but perhaps you were mesmerized by Mint’s slick iPhone app. Well, now Wesabe has one as well. So how do the apps stack up? Well, there are two key differences: Mint’s looks nicer, but Wesabe’s is more dynamic. What I mean by that is, with Mint’s iPhone app you can only see an overview of your finances, and look at things like the budget you set up online. With Wesabe’s iPhone app, everything is editable. And that’s a nice feature because more than a few times with Mint, I have seen a transaction categorized wrong, but had to login on my computer to edit it. One cool feature that comes out of this ability to edit and add transactions from the app is that you can use your phone’s GPS to geo-locate wherever you made a purchase. This means you won’t have to type out the name of every merchant if you really want to take a hands-on approach and enter every purchase you make manually. The app also allows you to tag items on the fly, which is core to Wesabe’s offering. If you’re really worried about security, you’re probably not going to use either of these apps. But one nice thing Wesabe’s features is a separate security layer that allows you to set a password for accessing the app. This is great if you don’t have a password set on your iPhone and worry about losing your phone and someone seeing your finances. Wesabe’s iPhone app gives you access to all the accounts you set up online through the service. Unfortunately, while you can sign up for a Wesabe account through the app, you cannot import any bank accounts or credit card accounts through it — you’ll have to go to a computer to do that. Wesabe CEO Marc Hedlund tells me that functionality will be available in an upcoming release of the iPhone app. Ultimately, the choice of which app you’re going to use on the iPhone will come down to which service you use. But if you’re deciding which to sign up for and being able to edit your finances easily on a mobile device is important to you, than Wesabe may be a good choice. Find the Wesabe app available for free in the iTunes App Store . Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Confirmed: Former AOL Exec Mike Jones To Take COO Role At MySpace Top
We’ve confirmed our story from the weekend that former AOL exec Mike Jones will become the COO of MySpace. This makes him the number 2 executive of the reorganized News Corp. subsidiary under new CEO Owen Van Natta . A third new executive may also be announced later today. An announcement will be made later this morning. Jones and Van Natta will join Jonathan Miller , the CEO Digital Media, at MySpace’s Los Angeles offices today to address employees. Jones is a well respected entrepreneur who founded Userplane , a video chat service that added social features to dating and other sites. Userplane was bought by AOL in 2006 for around $40 million. The acquisition was made at the time that Jonathan Miller was the CEO of AOL, and Jones knows Miller well. As we said in an earlier post about the changing of the guard at MySpace, News Corp. is making a clean sweep of the top executives . Cofounder and CEO Chris DeWolfe is out. Cofounder and President Tom Anderson is is having "discussions" about "assuming a new role in the organization." Our guess is that the final Cofounder, CTO Aber Whitcomb , is next to go. Jones left AOL in 2008 to start a new company, Tsavo , which sources tell us is off to a very fast start. The company raised a substantial amount of capital from American Capital and has made a number of acquisitions . Sources also say that the company is profitable. Jones will be stepping into a board of directors and advisor role, and he certainly leaves the company far more structurally sound than his new boss Owen Van Natta did with his own Project Playlist . This is the kind of executive that many hoped Miller would bring in to run the massive MySpace property, which remains one of the largest sites on the Internet despite lagging badly behind Facebook in growth . Jones won’t have the same authority in the No. 2 position at the company, but if Van Natta is smart enough to give him room to run it will be a good sign for the company. Another good sign - Jones is a long time user of MySpace and is very active on the site. CEO Van Natta barely has a presence , and Miller isn’t yet on the site. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Have Kindle, Will Travel — And Stay Up-To-Date Thanks To Offbeat Guides Top
I used to think the Kindle was stupid. Then I bought one and realized I was wrong . It’s still way too expensive, but it’s great at what it does. And what it does keeps on expanding. Now, it takes a step into the up-to-date travel guide market, with a partnership with the customizable travel guide service, Offbeat Guides . Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to find 500 of the company’s newest guides in the Kindle store at prices ranging from $3.99 for smaller cities to $7.99 for larger ones. Here’s why these are great. Just like the Offbeat Guides regular guidebook products, its Kindle-ready guidebooks are way more up-to-date than traditional guidebooks. While there have been some guidebooks available on the Kindle in the past, most are only updated once a year. Offbeat Guides are updated every month. This means they can include information such as real-time events for specific cities, like concerts or festivals. It also means the guides can have a Kindle menu option to find out something going on in the city you are visiting that night. For tourists who don’t know anyone in a particular city, that’s a great feature. There are a couple downsides. Naturally, because the Kindle only handles grayscale images, you won’t get the full color pictures you usually find in other tour guides. And because the Kindle’s screen isn’t ideal for displaying maps, tailored, local maps that are a part of Offbeat Guides regular guides aren’t included here. But, at 10.2 ounces (for the latest version), the Kindle is likely lighter than regular tour guides. And, if you’re planning a multiple city trip, you can obviously load up a bunch of these guides on one Kindle. One thing that particularly excites me is the fact that you can also view these on your iPhone if you go somewhere and don’t feel like carrying around a Kindle. Because the Kindle app on the iPhone stays in sync with the Kindle content, you can bookmark pages and look at them later on your phone. Offbeat Guides has been working on these Kindle-tailored guides for 6 months now, CEO Dave Sifry tells me. He also notes that there are 5 times as many cities available as compared to other guides. Right now, if you plan on traveling to a city often and want the most up-to-date guide, you’ll have to buy a new one each time. But Sifry says they will explore the possibility of having subscriptions for certain cities if customers demand that. Such a feature may even be useful to locals of a particular city to know what is going on. But the focus right now remains on leisure and business travelers, he says. Find a full list of the Offbeat Guides Kindle options here .   Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
TC/CG Meet-up: Important Helsinki Update Top
I’ll be in Helsinki next week and I’d like to plan a very informal meet-up on Tuesday, April 28 at 8pm . All those attending, please email me at john@crunchgear.com with the subject line “RSVP HELSINKI.” NOTE - The new start time is now 8pm. We’ve decided to have the meet-up at A21 on Annankatu 21 [Google Map] . PLEASE RSVP ASAP so I can offer them a head count. N.B. If you have a start-up to discuss, please have some information handy, preferably in electronic form. It will probably be hard to do demos unless they’re on a mobile phone, but if you contact me beforehand we can probably sit down to look at your product on a laptop. Best of all, F-Secure , the anti-virus people, will be sponsoring an hour of drinks from about 7pm-8pm. Anyone wishing sponsor another few hours should email me. UPDATE - Nokia is chipping in from 8pm-9pm! For last minute changes follow me on Twitter . See you in Helsinki! Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
AOL Launches Online "News Magazine" PoliticsDaily Top
AOL is adding a twist to old-fashioned political journalism with the launch of its new political news and blog site, PoliticsDaily.com. The site, which will primarily focus on in-depth political commentary as opposed to breaking news, will only provide original content, from long-form analysis to blog posts on issues in the U.S. political landscape. Led by former New York Times Washington Correspondent, Melinda Henneberger, PoliticsDaily wants to tie the old media’s in-depth political analysis with a sustainable digital medium PoliticsDaily is the brainchild of Martin Moe, senior vice president at AOL and is built under Bill Wilson's new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. MediaGlow, which recently launched topic directory Love.com, runs AOL News, Engadget and TMZ.com, among other properties. PoliticsDaily is part of the AOL News network, which received more than 27 million unique visitors in March, according to comScore stats. New York Times Digital by comparison had close to 46 million unique visitors in March. PoliticsDaily has enlisted a “dream team” of experienced political journalists from both new and old media, including Walter Shapiro, former columnist for USA Today and former Washington bureau chief for Salon; Jill Lawrence, former national political correspondent for USA Today and columnist for the Associated Press; Carl Cannon, former Washington bureau chief for Reader's Digest and White House correspondent for the National Journal and the Baltimore Sun; Lynn Sweet, blogger and Washington Bureau Chief of the Chicago Sun-Times; and Patricia Murphy, founder of Citizen Jane Politics, a non-partisan website for women. The site will include blogs such as “Woman Up,” a blog focused on political issues from a woman’s perspective; “The Daily FLOTUS,” a blog which focuses on First Lady Michelle Obama; and “The Cram,” a student-focused blog on political news. Consumers are more frequently looking online news for political news, as we saw in the past presidential elections and during the current downturn in the economy. PoliticsDaily hopes to be a mainstream source of analysis and news and shuns the idea of being a news aggregator. While the all-original content includes both long-form articles and blog posts, the site will not be primarily focused on breaking political news—perhaps leaving the real-time, short-form news to other political news competitors like The Politico,The New York Times, The Huffington Post and the A.P. The competition in the political news sphere is tough, especially online. PoliticsDaily will have to build a credible brand with its original content, going up against media organizations that have long been offering in-depth analysis, like the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Atlantic and The Huffington Post. PoliticsDaily will also face some competition from The Politico, which incorporates blogs, breaking news, interactive multimedia features and in-depth reporting into one site. And while the New York Times and Washington Post are hemorrhaging money from their print publications, their in-depth political coverage and analysis on their websites is strong, deploying a wide array of multimedia, blogs and long form commentary. News broadcasters sites also provide popular political coverage—CNN.com. MSNBC.com, and FoxNews were among the top five trafficked news sites following the election in November. Moe maintains that PoliticsDaily’s long-form magazine content will differentiate the site from The Politico and other real-time focused news sites. Moe pledges that the differentiation between PoliticsDaily and the Huffington Post will be even more clear. Moe says that while the Huffington Post is largely a content aggregator, has a leftward bent, and doesn’t pay many of its bloggers, PoliticsDaily will be 100% original content from “experienced” paid writers, and will be “poly-partisan” with perspectives from the liberals, centrists and conservatives. Of course, with the financial backing of AOL, PoliticsDaily has the advantage of being able to pay all those editors and reporters. But if PoliticsDaily is supposed to be an online new magazine, why isn’t AOL’s sister subsidiary Time Inc. running it? Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Apple May Hear Verizon Now Top
At the risk of repeating myself for the millionth time, in many peoples’ minds, the Achilles’ heel of the iPhone is the network it’s on in the US: AT&T. Since the day it was announced as being exclusive to that provider, people have been wondering one thing: How long until it’s on Verizon? Rumors have surfaced time and again about the possibility, but today brings perhaps the most concrete news yet that the two sides are talking. The two sides are discussing the possibility of getting Verizon version of the iPhone ready for 2010, sources tell USA Today . There are likely two reasons it would take until next year. The first, is that Apple’s exclusive contract with AT&T runs through next year. The second is that a Verizon version would presumably have to be CDMA-ready, which means the innards of the iPhone would have to be slightly tweaked, as the current iPhone is GSM-only (which AT&T, and most other cell networks run on). Perhaps now we know why it’s been reported recently that AT&T was pushing hard to get Apple to extend its exclusive deal another year, into 2011. Verizon is AT&T’s main rival in the US, and is actually larger. But Verizon lacks the one device that people are switching networks just to get. In announcing its most recent earnings, AT&T said that as many as 40% of all customers who sign up for iPhone contracts are new to AT&T — that is huge. But here’s something to think about: A new iPhone is almost for sure going to launch sometime this summer. It will be AT&T only — and, you will presumably have to sign up for a new 2-year contract to get it (and certainly you will have to do that to get it for the subsidized price). If people know a Verizon iPhone is possible in 2010, will a lot of potential buyers hold off? I think so. Hell, given the recent issues I’ve had with AT&T’s network, I’d consider not getting the new iPhone if Verizon was really a possibility for next year. But it’s still a big “if” at this point. Who knows, Apple would just be talking with Verizon (the company that originally spurned the iPhone) just to increase the pressure on AT&T to give them a sweeter deal. You know, negotiations 101. But if Apple truly does envision the iPhone as a product that it wants to dominate the market with, it will need to get onto other networks eventually. It seems inevitable, but is 2010 the year? Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Facebook To Let Others Play In Its Stream Top
Seeing the explosion in growth of Twitter right now, it’s pretty clear that the hot trend on the web is to have a service which acts as a central hub for information, and allows third-party sites and services to built on top of it. For most of its life, Facebook has been almost the exact opposite, insisting that developers work from within its walls to keep much of the data — and the users — there. Tomorrow, it looks like Facebook may be knocking down its dam to let its streams of data flow more freely. Facebook is expected to announce that third-parties will now have access to data from the site that was previously unavailable, before an event set to take place at 4PM PST tomorrow. The Wall Street Journal has a few of the details, including that developers should be able to access the all-important photos and videos that users upload. Apparently, these third-party developers, assuming they get users’ permission to use this data, could build their own sites and services with some of it. Also of note is that apparently Facebook will begin supporting more open standards for the transporting of data. It’s not yet clear exactly what this will mean, but presumably it could help alleviate some of the issues I wrote about last week in noting that Facebook, Google and others were creating what were essentially proprietary profiles, that forced all of us to actively use and update all of their services. I’ll be very interested to see what this means when it comes to Facebook Connect. If Facebook really is opening most of its data, it would seem to me it’s a smart move to stop some of the momentum that smaller rivals, like Twitter, are getting. After all, Facebook still has its big stick — over 200 million users and more importantly, their data. Now it may be able to fully swing it. [photo: flickr/ rachel thecat ] CrunchBase Information Facebook Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
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. Topify, a nifty service we reviewed recently, gives you a more comprehensive version of the standard New Follower email offered by Twitter, by providing the user's Bio, Follower/Following numbers, the user's most recent tweets and the ability to block and unfollow potential spammers 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 To Become No. 2 At MySpace Top
Update: This story is now confirmed . 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. My guess is this is real. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 

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