Sunday, April 19, 2009

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Now Even The New York Times Is Entering The URL Shortening Arena … Kinda Top
Earlier today I covered two new URL shortening services, UnHub and LNK.by , the latest additions to the plethora of basic web applications that many people are growing accustomed to for sharing links on micro-sharing services and social networking sites. And just when I thought I’d had it with that type of service for a while, we caught wind of one that made me raise my eyebrows. Enter NytUrl , the ‘trusted’ URL shortener for NYtimes.com articles. According to the website, the service shortens URLs for NYTimes.com articles, although a quick test shows that it’s definitely not restricted to other websites (see http://nyturl.com/34 and http://nyturl.com/35 ), even if it occasionally says the URL is not valid for any other site. This of course defeats the entire purpose of the service, which is to reassure people clicking the links that they’ll wind up on the NYTimes.com website. My guess is that the ability to add links to other websites will be disabled soon enough. NytUrl also comes with a handy bookmarklet and a basic API , but the website claims this is just the beginning and that there are lots of new features coming soon. Here’s the strange part: this service is not operated or even endorsed by the New York Times. In fact, the official Twitter account @NYTimes uses bit.ly for links to articles, even if some NYT related accounts are apparently already using NytUrl.com, as evidenced by this Twitter search query (and these example tweets ). So what gives? A WHOIS search for the owner of the nyturl.com domain name doesn’t reveal a thing since his or her identity has been protected upon registration, but according to our source this is effectively the work of two NYTimes employees, namely one of the group’s Senior Software Architects, Jacob Harris and in-house developer Michael Donohoe . Which checks out, because Harris is a self-proclaimed Twitter fan and NYTimes aficionado, and according to the bio posted on the SXSW website (where he was a panelist for one of the sessions) he’s also the one who set up the Twitter feeds for a variety of NYTimes related accounts. Donohoe even lists the NytUrl service on his website , so no doubt he’s involved. Update: Donohoe got back to a request for more information but declines to share more details. And in case you’re wondering why Harris isn’t using nyt.com (which is owned by the NY Times and forwarded to the main website) for the service, which would knock another 3 characters off the shortened URLs: our source says this was likely a grassroots initiative which hasn’t been approved by any of the decision makers at the NY Times, and that it’s not clear if it’s even going to be in the future. It does raise interesting questions: is it a good idea for media companies to obtain control over the short URLs they broadcast across the net and link back to their content? Will netizens lend more credibility to media-owned URL shorteners? Or should they just be using what is out there instead of adding yet another one to the fray? (Note that we use tcrn.ch ourselves for our Twitter account, and that you can see the shortened URL for any of our posts right next to the comment box, in this case http://tcrn.ch/Lk ) Your thoughts on this? Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
The Spot Runner Saga Continues: Founders Accused Of A "Pump And Dump" Scheme Top
TV advertising startup Spot Runner really is running on fumes. According to a lawsuit filed by one its irate investors, advertising giant WPP, Spot Runner has “expended all but approximately $20 million of its investor capital, while losing money at the rate of $35-$45 million a year.” The company has raised $100 million since 2006, and at one point employed more than 500 people before a string of layoffs cut that number down significantly. The lawsuit states that the company had a loss of $45 million in fiscal 2008, on revenues of only $9 million. And in fiscal 2007, it lost $35 million on revenues of $5 million. And here’s the zinger. While Spot Runner was losing all that money, its founders and two early investors (Index Ventures and Battery Ventures) sold shares worth $54 million. CEO and founder Nick Grouf took the lion’s share of those proceeds, netting $26.7 million in five transactions between Feb/March, 2006 and March, 2008. Battery and Index each sold $11.7 million worth of shares (nearly doubling their initial investments of $6 million each). While co-founder David Waxman walked away with only $3.6 million and investor Bob Pittman $365,000 worth of shares. The main complaint of the lawsuit states: Rather than working to make Spot Runner a successful and profitable venture, they perpetuated a "pump-and dump" scheme in which they aggressively promoted the Company to new investors (often by promoting that WPP was an investor in and supporter of the Company) and then sold new investors large quantities of their own secondary shares at ever-increasing valuations. WPP alleges that they did this “surreptitiously” and without disclosing it to other investors. As one of Spot Runner’s largest investors, WPP put a total of $11.8 million into the company. But it is hard to feel sorry for WPP. Basically, it argues in the suit that it should have been able to sell its shares to greater fools as well. It is suing because it wasn’t told about the secondary share sales and wasn’t invited to participate until the very last one, and even then only after it complained (WPP was allowed to sell $900,000 worth of stock at that time, while the defendants made off with $17.8 million). What is not clear from the suit is how much of that $54 million in proceeds, if any, came from fundraising rounds for the company itself versus private secondary sales. Spot Runner won’t comment on any of these numbers other than to say “the complaint contains many inaccuracies.” With the IPO window closed for many startups, secondary private sales of stock are becoming more popular, especially for founders. That practice is fine if the company succeeds. Nobody is going to care if the founders took some money off the table along the way if everyone gets rich in the process. It is when things don’t go so well that investors start to complain and the lawsuits start flying. Regardless of the merits of the case, it is not a good sign when one of the largest investors of a startup decides that the best shot it has at ever getting any of its money back is in court instead of in the market. WPP is seeking $13.2 million in damages. And it is not the only one who is angry. Both former and existing employees also feel shafted (read some of the 135 comments on my post about the last round of layoffs , which somehow became an unofficial forum for employees to vent). They never got a chance to sell any of their shares. Full complaint embedded below, via PaidContent . WPP Sues Spot Runner WPP Sues Spot Runner ContentNext Ad agency WPP sues TV ad firm Spot Runner in U.S. District Court. Filed April 9. Publish at Scribd or explore others: Business & Law spot runner WPP Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Bloggers: Let's Band Together and Stop the Hype Cycle Top
Silicon Valley is known for nurturing start-ups in a way no other place can. But it's not all kumbaya here. And one of the most destructive things about Silicon Valley is the hype cycle . And judging by the fact that some bloggers pronounced Twitter “done” the same week the company was featured on Oprah, it’s clear that hype cycle has spun ludicrously out of control. I'm sure you've seen the graphs. If not, it's to the left. In words: A company comes out and no one likes it. It starts to attain huge growth and buzz. Suddenly it's anointed the Messiah. Then something happens. A long time ago, that something was negative: A founder leaving, a down-round, growth that tailed-off or an inability to serve customers. Even then it wasn't necessarily deserved, but the backlash would begin immediately. This company was a laughing stock. What was wrong with them? They'd lost it. They were toast. Well….for another few years. During which a good company would  keep growing. And only later, would they get the true credit for what they'd built. Of course, "experts" would claim they got it all along. A great example is Google—a lauded company that was dismissed when it wouldn't immediately monetize with banner ads in the wake of the bust, then re-anointed when the numbers came out at the IPO, and it began its surge past $700 a share. But the hype cycle isn't confined to companies. It can describe waves of technology – like social networking, RFID or the consumer Internet itself—or people. One of the first examples I saw in the Valley was Marc Andreessen. He was built up as the young, shoe-less God of the Internet that the press brutally tore him down once the crash changed the viability of his second company, Loudcloud's, business. It's still deemed a "failure" in some corners of the Valley, never mind that it was painstakingly retooled as Opsware and sold for about the same amount as YouTube . People not only trashed the company, but they retroactively trashed Netscape, and Andreessen himself, saying he'd exaggerated his contributions to Mosaic. Of course, Andreessen kept his head down and kept working. Today he's widely regarded as one of the most important mentors and angel investors of the Web 2.0 movement and one of the only people to found two companies that would end up being worth more than $1 billion each. Sure a smug "I told you so" as you count your millions is the best way to silence and embarrass naysayers; it's the ultimate revenge. But start-ups can take a while to reach their final destination—whether that's bankruptcy or an IPO. Forget cold, in the Valley revenge is a dish served molding and with flies swarming around it. There's an element to the hype cycle that reflects human nature. We get excited about technology and tend to overestimate what it can do in a year and underestimate what it can do in ten years. That's not all bad: Being underestimated is why a lot of start-ups catch giant companies off guard. But the blogosphere has turned an already frustrating hype cycle manic. The famous example was Cuil—a company lauded in the morning as a "Google Killer" and trashed before our first cups of coffee got cold. Not quite as extreme is what we've seen with the giants of Web 2.0: MySpace, Facebook and– believe it or not– the three-year-old Twitter. As soon as Facebook launched its platform—as if in unison—the media world decided MySpace was a has-been and Facebook was the king. Sure, Facebook is poised to overtake MySpace in the U.S., but by many accounts MySpace is making more money , increasing engagement and is still one of the largest sites on the Web. That should count for a lot. In the last month, it's been happening to Facebook, and it’s even more absurd. The company is still growing, having passed the 200 million or 250 million user mark, depending on who you believe . And other reports , and my own sources, say the company is doing close to a $500 million revenue run rate. Did I mention we're in an epicly bad recession? How is that a failure? Frequently the people calling for Zuckerberg’s head because of recent “failures” have never run a company, and never even met Zuckerberg. I tend to agree with a guy who’s done both: Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn and one of the most successful Web 2.0 investors in the Valley. “Ultimately you judge a CEO by how well the company is doing, and Facebook is doing pretty well,” he told me a few weeks ago. “I think Mark should answer any criticism by saying, ‘Look at the company; I’m doing fine.’” Did Hoffman like the new redesign? Not especially. But he added this, “It’s good to be bold in what you’re doing; it’s good to be visionary. Personally, I don’t think it was right, but Mark may very well learn from that and the next step will be much more interesting in that direction.” Well said. Guess what, gang? Building a company is hard. No one gets every single thing right. Bloggers harping on each mistake are like the fat guy sitting in the bleachers at a baseball game berating a star player for not hitting a homerun in every at bat. Sure, Facebook’s valuation is coming down from $15 billion. But that was never a realistic valuation for the company. It wasn't even paid by traditional venture capitalists; it was paid by Microsoft and other strategics looking to get a piece of the hot company and not caring what it cost. The company itself didn't value Facebook at $15 billion when insiders sold stock. But is it worth $1 billion or more? Definitely. Even based on a reasonable multiple of revenues. Of the Web 2.0 wave you can count on one hand the companies that can claim that with a straight face. Even more absurd: Now bloggers are starting to say Twitter is done . I thought it was only now hitting mainstream ? It's one thing to take a company like Cuil—that arguably over-represented what it could do—from hero to goat in less than an hour. It's another thing to trash a company that's only a few years old, growing exponentially, well capitalized, and conservatively run with about 30-something employees. (Let's not even bring up the free Sprint ad and the barrage of John Stewart-Ashton-Larry King-Oprah free press.) Look, we all do it to a degree. We fall in love with technologies, and readers and editors suddenly get an insatiable demand for stories about them. It’s reporters’ and bloggers’ jobs to give them what they want, right? But that tips into link-baiting, blindly aiming for that TechMeme traffic and writing a provocative headline that the story doesn’t even necessarily back up. It’s one thing to be the early adopter who gets bored once something is mainstream. It’s another thing to write off a company for the sheer fact that it’s successful, and you’re bored writing about it. Here's the thing: Great start-ups can survive the hype cycle. Horrible companies were going to fail anyway. That may leave some marginal ones in the middle, but let's argue if the press tanks a company, it wouldn't have gotten far ultimately. So maybe the hype cycle doesn’t really do any harm . But who does it help? As bloggers and reporters we're supposed to bring people reality and truth. No phase of the hype cycle is reality: Not the messiah, not the goat simply because big press has grown weary of the topic. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
French Fury: Parisians Hit The Streets In Protest Against Facebook Redesign Top
Granted, Facebook’s recent redesign came with a couple of flaws, and lots of people were upset about the changes, but resorting to street protests to try and turn them around? Apparently, a few people have gathered in Paris to protest against the changes in Facebook, and Alex van Herwijnen was nice enough to send us some pictures he snagged while visiting the French capital. The protesters can be found at the Arche de la Défense , holding signs saying that they’re against the new version of Facebook and that they want the old one back. Clearly, they’re not happy with the redesign even if Facebook has already made some changes due to user complaints ( against Michael’s advice ), or maybe they’re just really pissed because it’s still confusing their mothers . From the looks of it, this is probably a prank or more likely part of a video shoot or something. TechCrunch France’s Alain Eskenazi and I looked around for reports in French media, but couldn’t find anything. I also did a quick search on Facebook to see if there were any related groups or events on the site, but had trouble finding anything in the messy new interface. Maybe I should head down to Paris and voice my complaints with the other protesters? CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
More Ways To Shorten Those URLs: UnHub And Lnk.by Top
URL shortening services are a dime a dozen, and despite wishes for them to vanish (with good reason) they’re here to stay and more popular than ever given the abundance of social services that thrive on short messages and links. TinyURL and bit.ly appear to be the more popular of the bunch, but we’re seeing other services use their own custom URL shortening services at an increasing rate. To name but a few, Digg uses its top domain for the DiggBar and associated links, Posterous uses post.ly to trim down links when they distribute them to other networks and Twitter toolbox HootSuite uses ow.ly . Update: shame on me for forgetting that TechCrunch also has its ‘own’ short URL (tcrn.ch), which you can view under every post and which we use for our Twitter account . We use awe.sm for this. The latest startup to add a URL shortening feature to its service is UnHub , which we covered last month . Paste any URL after unhub.com and if you’re registered for the service, you’ll get a custom short URL you can use to distribute links to articles and such. On top of the linked website will be an iframe (yes, yet another one ) where you can view the number of Diggs, bookmarks on Delicious, and redirects on bit.ly. You can also tweet, e-mail or share the link on a plethora of third-party services right from the toolbar. It’s also personalized, so people can jump to your own UnHub profile from the persistent bar, or straight to the source link. For an example, go to http://unhub.com/pC16 . Another one that just surfaced (in alpha mode) is Lnk.by , which adds a twist to URL shortening in the sense that you can pick a short URL that suits what you’re linking to i.e. it brings some context to what you’re sharing. You can share music files using Lstn.in, videos with Wach.it, photos with Seee.it and articles with Read.im. The service automatically maps known domains, protocols and file extensions so it will pick the most suitable one without the need for indicating it proactively. Other than that, there’s nothing really noteworthy about the service, apart from the fact it comes with an API and a toolbar bookmarklet, and that it was built by an Endemol executive with a friend in just one weekend. Feel to shorten the URL for this article with both services and tell us which one you prefer (or why you hate URL shortening services). Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
UK Tech Icons Launch Seed Fund To Bridge The Gap For European Startups Top
Two icons of the UK’s tech startup world are joining forces to create a new fund to address the so-called ‘equity gap’ in Europe. European Founders Capital (EFC) is being led by Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo , and Brent Hoberman, who set up the dotcom bubble era Lastminute.com but is better known more recently for being a serial angel investor and co-founder of MyDeco . EFC will have an initial $29.5m (£20m) of seed funding but is aiming for $74m (£50m) in total. The idea is to increase the availability of early-stage funding in Europe, which historically lags behind the US, and has led to a gap between early stage and Series A funding. Europe’s seed funding eco-system has never matched Silicon Valley’s in part because the business angel environment for technology is undeveloped and because European VCs have historically not reached much lower than Series A rounds, unless in syndication with other parties. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Herebeforeoprah.com Asks The Important Question Top
It’s not yet clear exactly what effect Oprah had on Twitter by featuring the service (and its first million-follower user, Ashton Kutcher) on her show on Friday. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone tells me he’s going to try and get some numbers as to just how many people signed up thanks to Oprah, sometime next week. But, Twitter Search already reveals that it’s a massive amount. When anything gains mainstream popularity, there are always some early adopters who will start denouncing it. Some do this out of spite, some out of odd principle, some because they think they’re too cool to do something that a lot of other people do. But, I’m here to tell you that there’s another way. Instead of being a jackass and pouting about the “good old days of Twitter,” just visit herebeforeoprah.com . The simple service asks the question, “was _______ here before oprah?” Simply fill in the blank with your Twitter name and if you adopted early enough, you’ll get confirmation of your Twitter street cred. For example, I’m very pleased to get a response , “@parislemon was here before @oprah.” I understand why some of you are upset about Oprah “ruining” Twitter, I really do. I put in countless hours/days/months of mindless 140 character messages just like the rest of you. But suck it up, and get your revenge by letting Oprah know that despite her gaining over 300,000 followers in a day, you beat her to the service. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Hollywood Has A Great Online Distribution Model — If You Hate Selection Top
In a golf tournament, it can be advantageous to putt after another player because you learn the contours of the path to the hole. In a similar way, you’d think Hollywood would have learned from the rough path the music industry took in transitioning to the world of digital distribution over the web. Unfortunately, it looks to be on the verge of missing the putt as well. On the surface, it seems like Hollywood is doing a better job of getting consumers to use their approved methods for transferring content over the web — but the reality is that it’s a mess. And the only reason piracy isn’t so rampant in the US is that our broadband speeds, for the most part, suck. Sure, there are a lot of channels to get films legally over the web. iTunes, Xbox Live, Amazon, Netflix and Hulu are all doing a fairly good job at making the content they’re given, accessible. Unfortunately, it’s the content that’s the problem. If you go to any of those services looking for a specific movie, there’s a very good chance that it won’t be available. And that can be true even if it was available on the service in the past. It’s a nightmare. Farhad Manjoo had a good article yesterday on Slate outlining some of the major problems. One of the biggest ones is that Hollywood’s archaic syndication rules are in play with digital distribution over the web. For example, Hollywood now gives some movies to services like iTunes for rental immediately or soon after they’re released. But because of the deals studios have in place with premium content channels like HBO, after the pay-per-view window closes (iTunes and the other services’ rentals systems are considered pay-per-view), these movies have to be pulled off of the rental services so that the premium channels can get their exclusive rights to broadcast them. Those movies then stay exclusive to the premium channels for 15 to 18 months — let me repeat 15 to 18 months! And from there it only gets worse. After the year and a half in premium channel jail, movies then go to the regular cable channels and big networks for airing. As I understand it, some online rentals are again okay during this time, but then, they often go back to the premium channels for a second run. That means they get pulled once again . This whole process often lasts for seven years or more , as Manjoo notes. It’s only after that time period that movies are really free to be distributed a bunch of different ways. That includes Netflix’s popular Watch Instantly streaming feature — so now you see why the selection of movies on that service is mostly older films. In fact, basically, the only newer ones they offer is because of their deal with Starz, the premium cable channel. That deal may have been one of the smartest ones Netflix has made yet, because at least it gives us access to some movies this side of 2002. The fact that online distribution has to play in this foolish game of broadcast rights tennis, is of course, bullshit. The brick and mortar rental stores of yesteryear, like Blockbuster, don’t have to play by these ridiculous rules. Movies don’t vanish from their shelves because they’re playing on HBO for the next 18 months. If they did, Blockbuster would have been in trouble a lot sooner than its most recent woes (tied to its failure to get out in front of new forms of distribution). So how can anyone really expect any of the online movie services to flourish under such restrictions? They shouldn’t, because none of them truly will until Hollywood changes these rules. And with billions of dollars at stake, Hollywood probably isn’t going to do it anytime soon. In fact, I’d venture to guess that the only thing that will force their hands is if services like BitTorrent, which people use to distribute pirated movies, continue to gain popularity as broadband access and speeds improve. In other words, things may change when Hollywood starts getting screwed just like the music industry got screwed. Seriously, search for a bunch of new movies you want on iTunes rentals, Netflix Watch Instantly and a torrent tracker. Which has the best selection? It’s certainly going to be the torrent tracker — and that gives you the movies for free. The success of iTunes music store has proven that people are willing to pay for content (it’s now the largest music retailer, bigger than even Wal-mart), but the key factor is ease of use — of which, selection is a big part. It’s beyond frustrating to search a service for something you really want to pay to watch, only to find it doesn’t offer it. Hollywood is leaving money on the table. I could go on about other ridiculous things is doing to screw up online distribution. For example, the fact that while a lot movies are available to buy on the day they’re release, most cannot be rented online until a few weeks later. But it’s all part of the same problem. Hollywood is scared to embrace the move to online distribution. It’s still holding out hope that Blu-ray will catch on and become their next multi-billion dollar cash cow. That’s not happening. For most people, Blu-ray simply doesn’t offer enough of an improvement over DVD. Online distribution, with its instant access, does. Will Hollywood realize that too late? Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
A Sign Of The Times: fbFund Shifts To Incubator Model Top
Earlier this week Facebook detailed some of the changes it is making to fbFund, its joint venture with Accel Partners and Founders Fund designed to help reward and foster the most encouraging applications on Facebook Platform, which launched 2007. In prior rounds, fbFund’s primary function was to distribute seed funding, with the last round’s 25 finalists taking home $25,000 and the final winners each receiving $225,000 cash grants. Now the program is expanding to include a new Incubator Program (no doubt inspired by the likes of Y Combinator and TechStars ), which will invite a few startups to interact with key Facebook personnel, as well as some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent entrepreneurs. Among the VCs and companies contributing their expertise to the program are First Round Capital, Tapulous, Zynga, Slide, and over a dozen other that can be found on this list . In addition, Facebook is also announcing today that Eric Ries will be taking part in the program. Facebook will be accepting applications to the program, which is being led by Dave McClure , until April 20th. While it’s still unclear how many startups will be invited to participate in the Incubator program, they will be drawn from a pool of 50 finalists. The program will run from June through August. Also interesting to note is that for this round winners can receive up to $100,000 in equity investment, while previous rounds have been ‘no strings attached’ - a change that may indicate, as VentureBeat notes , that Facebook and its partners may see the current round as being more lucrative than previous rounds (I also suspect, given the greater time investment involved with the new program, that they would like to see some kind of return). For more details, check out Facebook’s blog post here . Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Networks In Motion Wins Mobile Incubation Week, Microsoft's "American Idol" For Mobile Applications Top
There’s a good chance you didn’t even know it was going on, but last week Microsoft hosted a competition for mobile application developers on its Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View, and yesterday announced Networks in Motion as the winner. The startup was one of six finalists - selected out of a pool of 50 applications - invited by Microsoft to come present ideas for applications running on Windows Mobile and get certified for the upcoming Windows Marketplace for Mobile, which is supposed to become the big, central commerce and distribution point for WinMo apps that is currently lacking. The company is widely expected to introduce the latest iteration of Windows Mobile at next month’s TechED 2009 conference in Los Angeles (11 May), although devices running Windows Mobile 6.5 won’t start shipping until after the Summer. Microsoft’s a heavyweight in the smartphone OS market but is getting some serious heat from Apple and its iPhone / App Store (which is about to hit 1 billion downloads ), and is going to be facing even more stiff competition on the mobile application front from RIM / Blackberry, Nokia and Google Android in the coming years. Microsoft is hoping to up the ante with its new mobile OS and its own version of the App Store, but is evidently going to need a lot of good mobile applications once the Windows Marketplace kicks off, and in that sense hosting a competition was probably a good idea (there will be more of those in Europe and Asia in the near future by the way). Too bad for Microsoft, there was little buzz about the event and press coverage of the outcome is virtually nowhere to be found. Anyway, the six finalists were: Brighkite , the location-based social networking service Motolingo , a telematics solution that will monitor car diagnostics and report mobile phone behavior in the car VisTracks , enterprise app for real-time product location and tracking company shipments Networks in Motion , turns GPS-enabled mobile phones into full-featured navigation devices VoiceMuffler , real-time, two-way speech-to-speech translation designed for foreign military personnel and civilian travelers DJ Nitrogen , facilitates legal sharing of user-generated content, such as ringtones and music mash-ups Yesterday, Senior Business Development Manager on Microsoft's Emerging Business Team Brian Hoskins announced Networks in Motion to be the winner, on Twitter no less. The startup is the maker of Gokivo Navigator , an interesting application that brings real-time turn-by-turn visual and audible directions to GPS-enabled mobile phones, combined with hyper-local search and location-based services. In light of the event, Gokivo got some new features to its core offering, including the ability for users to update their Facebook profile with the specific place they are (address/map). They’re on our radar now. Besides the advice it received from and connections it made with Microsoft developers and external experts at the Incubation Week, Networks in Motion will receive ‘early placement’ in Windows Marketplace for Mobile once it’s launched, and also took home a Zune music player. (Via Digits ) Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Venture Capital Down 50%. It's Not Just the Recession, Folks. Top
There's a huge difference between what venture capitalists say and what they do. For much of the last decade some of the same partners that keep saying Silicon Valley will never decline as the startup epicenter of the world are spending every month flying to China. And of course in the post-2000 years every partner said, "Oh we never really got into that whole dot com thing …" Huh. Wonder who did all those deals? Another classic is this one: "Recessions are the best times to start companies! We always invest in downturns! There are fewer competitors, and you get a better caliber of entrepreneur! Dollars can stretch further because salaries and rents are lower! We're not looking to take a company public for years, so why would we run our companies based on the public markets and macro economy?" Bullshit. It fell off a cliff in 2001 and 2002 and it's falling off a cliff now. (More on that in a second.) But there's a difference: Funding levels, returns and the percentage of that money going to new ventures never got nearly as high as they did in the 1999-2000 years. So when we talk about steep drops, we're talking about less of a bubble bursting and more of an industry correcting for more than a decade of scale and liquidity issues. And make no mistake—it's a steep drop. Venture funding fell by 50% nationally from the first quarter in 2008 to the first quarter of 2009, totaling to $3.9 billion, according to Dow Jones Venture Source. That's the lowest total since 1998. PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association had it falling farther to $3 billion. Information technology investments fell 53% year-over-year to $1.7 billion—the lowest since 1997, and the lowest volume of deals since 1995. And clean tech? Well so much for that being the future of the U.S. economy: It fell by 74% to a paltry $117 million. (These numbers according to Dow Jones, see the numbers from PWC/ NVCA in the chart below.) The results are so different than what we saw in the last downturn that I could spend eight posts writing about them. But I'll distill my take-aways to three points for now. 1.    Don't be fooled: This is not just about the recession. Investments in startups declined in the last downturn, but investments in VC firms didn't fall nearly as much. Mostly it was the firms themselves deciding to raise smaller funds. That means venture capital as an industry never had a shake-out from the go-go 1999-2000 era. It's no secret and every VC will admit it: There are a lot of clowns still throwing around a lot of venture money that have no business doing it. (Of course, it's a well-known industry joke that no one thinks he or she is the clown.) Returns, on the other hand, did go down. And they never really got back up, given the amount invested. But the industry is graded on a ten-year time horizon so that didn't matter much. Once returns from 1999 and 2000 fall off that scale, it will. Returns will look at or below the S&P 500 for what is supposed to be a niche, high-risk/high-reward asset class. It takes forever to correct because fund cylces are so long, and the asset class is so illiquid. But it won’t go uncorrected, and the witching hour is getting close. What does this have to do with money going out to startups? VCs are scared for the first time in a long time. There's no obvious high growth sector of the tech economy, and their investors are hit in nearly every nook and cranny of their portfolios. They're not sure how to do their jobs anymore when nothing can go public and acquisitions are few and far between. This is why the amount has fallen so precipitously, especially in Silicon Valley. In past cycles, VCs have pulled closer to home, and the percentage of money going to Valley startups has increased even as the volume of total deals has gone down. Not this time. According to Dow Jones, Bay Area deals fell by 57%– a faster rate than the rest of the country. In clean tech just one deal was done in the Valley. Now, this could point to a savvier Valley entrepreneur who saw the downturn coming. After all, most of the well-known Web 2.0 names like Ning, Slide, Facebook and LinkedIn raised huge rounds just before the economic crisis hit, just in case. That could have artificially boosted the 2008 numbers and artificially lowered the 2009 numbers. We'll have to see how the next two quarters shake out. I expect higher volume of deals in the next few quarters, but also a surge in recapitalizations. More concerning is the free-fall in the percentage going to new deals. During the last downturn it fell to 24%– down from more than 50% during the go-go days and 33% historically. They never got much above that. In the first quarter only 18% of deals went to new companies, according to Dow Jones. 2.    Revenge of the steady-eddy.  What didn't fall, comparatively? Health care and investments in New England. Both have become the reliable base hits of the venture business. When it comes to healthcare, the vast majority of exits are licensing deals with big pharma or IP acquisitions of device companies. There's almost zero expectation of anyone going public–even in better days– because Sarbanes Oxley has cut off the ability for small market-cap companies to go out. The next Genentech? Don’t hold your breath. Similarly, most Boston VCs never really got the consumer Web. Much of their expertise has remained in areas like telecom and healthcare, and many of their investors have morphed into more financial engineers than company builders. This meant that New England fell from the no. 2 region for venture investment for the first time in 2008, as Southern California and New York ascended. It's now solidly back at no. 2 and investments fell a comparatively tiny 16% in the first quarter, according to Dow Jones.  3.    Bye-bye Clean Tech Hyperbole. It's not that clean tech isn't a huge opportunity. It's not that it isn’t an important opportunity. But I've never believed it was the next wave equivalent to the personal computer, as several VCs and even President Barack Obama said during the campaign. For one thing, there's a lot of science that needs to be developed, huge amounts of money that need to be injected, and more government cooperation and subsidies than the US currently has. It's just not the type of investing that most VCs addicted to the crack of quick-to-market, hyper-growth Internet companies can adjust to. Maybe in another ten years, but it’s not the venture guys' salvation anytime soon. Hang in there, startups. Take a hike, clowns.   Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Obama Spurns Silicon Valley Vets, Names Virginia's Secretary of Technology As CTO Top
President Obama will be naming Aneesh Paul Chopra as his choice for CTO during tomorrow’s weekly address, as first reported by the Washington Post and confirmed in this press release posted to the White House’s official web site. Chopra currently serves as Virginia’s Secretary of Technology, and has previous acted as the Managing Director for the Advisory Board Company, where he advised executives on health care operations. According to Virginia’s state website , Chopra was recently recognized by Government Technology Magazine’s for excellent ‘use of technology to improve government’, and he was awarded Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's 2007 State Leadership Advocacy Award. The choice comes after months of speculation, during which many of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures, including Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Eric Schmidt (among many others) were named as possible candidates. Whether or not some of these people actually wanted the position is another story, but obviously President Obama chose a different route. According to this article published in the Washington Post in 2005, Chopra was not a career technologist before he became Virginia’s Secretary of Technology, but he has extensive experience in policy making. He also co-created a venture fund called Avatar Capital, which invested $11 million in 18 companies (though these figures are likely dated). While he may not be a lifelong coder, Chopra has previously stated that his “primary understanding is from customer need, not bits and bytes”. During his time as Virginia’s SoT, he drove the state’s partnership with Google to become sitemap compliant, and also partnered with Cox and Comcast to broadcast free GED classes to Virginian citizens. According to President Obama’s upcoming remarks, Chopra will “help achieve our most urgent priorities – from creating jobs and reducing health care costs to keeping our nation secure. He will work closely with Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients (also being named tomorrow) and recently-named CIO Vivek Kundra. For another perspective on the news, check out Tim O’Reilly’s post Why Aneesh Chopra is a Great Choice for Federal CTO . Via Scobleizer . President Obama’s full remarks for tomorrow are below: It's not news to say that we are living through challenging times: The worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. A credit crisis that has made that downturn worse. And a fiscal disaster that has accumulated over a period of years. In the year 2000, we had projected budget surpluses in the trillions, and Washington appeared to be on the road to fiscal stability. Eight years later, when I walked in the door, the projected budget deficit for this year alone was $1.3 trillion. And in order to jumpstart our struggling economy, we were forced to make investments that added to that deficit through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. But as surely as our future depends on building a new energy economy, controlling health care costs and ensuring that our kids are once again the best educated in the world, it also depends on restoring a sense of responsibility and accountability to our federal budget. Without significant change to steer away from ever-expanding deficits and debt, we are on an unsustainable course. So today, we simply cannot afford to perpetuate a system in Washington where politicians and bureaucrats make decisions behind closed doors, with little accountability for the consequences; where billions are squandered on programs that have outlived their usefulness, or exist solely because of the power of a lobbyist or interest group; and where outdated technology and information systems undermine efficiency, threaten our security, and fail to serve an engaged citizenry. If we're to going to rebuild our economy on a solid foundation, we need to change the way we do business in Washington. We need to restore the American people's confidence in their government – that it is on their side, spending their money wisely, to meet their families' needs. That starts with the painstaking work of examining every program, every entitlement, every dollar of government spending and asking ourselves: Is this program really essential? Are taxpayers getting their money's worth? Can we accomplish our goals more efficiently or effectively some other way? It's a process we have already begun, scouring our budget line by line for programs that don't work so we can cut them to make room for ones that do. That means ending tax breaks for companies shipping jobs overseas; stopping the fraud and abuse in our Medicare program; and reforming our health care system to cut costs for families and businesses. It means strengthening whisteblower protections for government employees who step forward to report wasteful spending. And it means reinstating the pay-as-you-go rule that we followed during the 1990s – so if we want to spend, we'll need to find somewhere else to cut. And this Monday, at my first, full Cabinet meeting, I will ask all of my department and agency heads for specific proposals for cutting their budgets. Already, members of my Cabinet have begun to trim back unnecessary expenditures. Secretary Napolitano, for example, is ending consulting contracts to create new seals and logos that have cost the Department of Homeland Security $3 million since 2003. In the largest Department, Secretary Gates has launched an historic project to reform defense contracting procedures and eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful spending and cost overruns. And I commend Senators McCain and Levin – a Republican and a Democrat – who have teamed up to lead this effort in Congress. Finally, in the coming weeks, I will be announcing the elimination of dozens of government programs shown to be wasteful or ineffective. In this effort, there will be no sacred cows, and no pet projects. All across America, families are making hard choices, and it's time their government did the same. That is why I have assembled a team of management, technology, and budget experts to guide us in this work – leaders who will help us revamp government operations from top to bottom and ensure that the federal government is truly working for the American people. I have named Jeffrey Zients, a leading CEO, management consultant and entrepreneur, to serve as Deputy Director for Management of the Office of Management and Budget and as the first ever Chief Performance Officer. Jeffrey will work to streamline processes, cut costs, and find best practices throughout our government. Aneesh Chopra, who is currently the Secretary of Technology for Governor Kaine of Virginia, has agreed to serve as America's Chief Technology Officer. In this role, Aneesh will promote technological innovation to help achieve our most urgent priorities – from creating jobs and reducing health care costs to keeping our nation secure. Aneesh and Jeffrey will work closely with our Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, who is responsible for setting technology policy across the government, and using technology to improve security, ensure transparency, and lower costs. The goal is to give all Americans a voice in their government and ensure that they know exactly how we're spending their money – and can hold us accountable for the results. None of this will be easy. Big change never is. But with the leadership of these individuals, I am confident that we can break our bad habits, put an end to the mismanagement that has plagued our government, and start living within our means again. That is how we will get our deficits under control and move from recovery to prosperity. And that is how we will give the American people the kind of government they expect and deserve – one that is efficient, accountable and fully worthy of their trust. Thank you. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
CrunchBoard Jobs: Product Manager, Technical Operations Manager Top
This week we saw quite a few new jobs on CrunchBoard , companies are still adding positions in New York, Silicon Valley, Boston, Philadelphia, and Austin. For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard . Dont’t forget we’re looking for a few good hackers here at TechCrunch. New jobs on CrunchBoard : Product Manager BillShrink - Redmond City, CA Software Engineering Manager- Core Site TripAdvisor - Newton, MA Software Technical Support Engineer Articulate - 100% Telecommuting Technical Operations Manager Yelp, Inc. - San Francisco, CA Junior Software Engineer doubleTwist - San Francisco, CA Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Did Twitter Just Quietly Start Twitter Connect? If Not, It Should. Top
Yesterday, on its Twitter API Wiki, Twitter quietly unveiled a “Sign in with Twitter” feature. It’s a very simple idea: It gives you the option to use your Twitter ID as your login for third party services. But what’s more interesting is what Twitter could do with this. Basically, this could be the first step at launching a “Twitter Connect” of sorts, the same type of platform that Facebook is building with Facebook Connect and Google is building with Friend Connect. To most people, at its most basic level, Facebook Connect is useful right now simply because it allows you to sign into other services with your Facebook account. This is nice because hundreds of millions of people already have a Facebook login, and Facebook Connect eliminates the need to fill in all your credentials to yet another service. With millions of people already using Twitter and it is exploding in growth recently, Sign in with Twitter would be useful for the same reason. But why sign in with Twitter over Facebook? Well, Twitter touts its integration of OAuth , the open standard for secure authentication, but most end users don’t care about that. What they would care about though is having the ability to sign in to a service with their Twitter names and interact with the micro-messaging platform to say, easily tweet out whatever it is you are doing. If you’re reading an article, you could tweet out the article with one click without leaving the page. If you’re playing a game, you could tweet that out from within the game. Yes, that’s a lot less powerful than some of the proposed uses of Facebook Connect, which promises to port a lot of your online activity into your Facebook profile. Facebook’s grand goal with this seems to be becoming the centralized place for all of your activity online. But Facebook is a lot more complicated than Twitter, and one of the reasons Twitter has exploded in usage is because of its simplicity. And already a ton of services are popping up that are build on top of Twitter, just as Facebook’s Platform allowed services to be built on Facebook. But one key difference is that Facebook is still a relatively closed environment in that regard. Twitter is anything but. Most applications built on top of Twitter seem to have no front-end connection with the service beyond maybe a name that is “Twit____” or a logo. Facebook applications all reside in Facebook. But that’s another reason why Facebook Connect is so important to the social network. It allows other sites to leverage its platform (though not really the Platform) that aren’t affiliated with Facebook. But again, Twitter’s simplicity could make something like Twitter Connect viable. And it would seem to be more open, which developers tend to like. As Yahoo’s Eran Hammer-Lahav wrote about Sign in with Twitter yesterday, “It is Open done right.” Of course, Twitter is still far, far behind Facebook in terms of users. And at the end of the day it would seem the the service that controls the most users will win what ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has named the “calling card” battle. MySpace is in the battle as well, as is Google. But Facebook up until now has seemed to have most of the momentum in this space. Twitter could alter that a bit. If it cares to. [sign in buttons by Peter Denton ] Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Indie iPhone App Developers Rallying Around OpenFeint Top
Gaming has proven to have huge appeal on the iPhone. Because of that, there are a thousands of games in the App Store — which is great for consumers, but it can also be overwhelming. And it can be frustrating for developers who can see their work easily lost in the sea of apps. The iPhone social platform OpenFeint is trying to alleviate some of those problems. And it has rallied some big indie iPhone game developers to the cause. The developers behind Trism, Boulder Dash and Pocket God among others have aligned themselves with the OpenFeint platform. Pocket God has recently spent a long time at the top paid app in the App Store, and it still holds the number two spot. Trism, has been one of the most popular games for the iPhone and it has made its developer, Steve Demeter a lot of money — something which Apple itself has played up a few times. Demeter had actually been working on his own platform, called Onyx , but dropped development of that to get on board with OpenFeint. But why are these app integrating OpenFeint? Well, the developers see it as a way not only to add a social layer to their apps — users get profile pages, Facebook-like walls for others to write on, the ability to chat in games and more — but, the platform now includes a new feature dubbed “One Touch iPromote,” which gives users a simple way to find and buy other OpenFeint-supported games their friends are playing. OpenFeint users can invite other users into “lobbies,” where everyone can see what everyone else is playing. A user can then decide to play the same game or click on the link to buy it. Basically, these developers are creating their own sub-ecosystem outside of the App Store to get the word out about their games. And that’s an enticing proposition for a lot of indie app developers who don’t have the marketing resources of some of the bigger game studios that are now moving in on the iPhone platform. And when it includes games that already rose from nothing to become hits, like Trism and Pocket God, the idea is even more enticing. And this is a smart play by OpenFeint founders Jason Citron and Danielle Cassley (who named the platform after their early hit game for the iPhone Aurora Feint) because it gives developers a reason to use their platform rather than simply go with Facebook Connect (which you can also use with OpenFeint). Facebook unveiled Facebook Connect for the iPhone at SXSW a few weeks ago, as an easy way for developers to leverage the huge social network to add a social layer to apps. So what’s in it for OpenFeint? “One Touch iPromote will be based on revenue sharing. When a user clicks on a game in a Feint Lobby and then goes on to buy that game the developer and OpenFeint will get a percentage of that sale,” an OpenFeint spokesperson tells me. There are now 21 iPhone games using the OpenFeint platform. Version 1.5 of OpenFeint was unveiled today with this new One Touch iPromote feature. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Another Contender Emerges: Posterous Takes On TwitPic With New API Top
The race is on to become the dominant media sharing site on Twitter, with favorites like TwitPic and newcomers including PhotoBucket’s TwitGoo vying for popularity as Twitter begins to hit the mainstream. Now Posterous is looking to join the race with a new API that developers can integrate into their Twitter apps with a minimal amount of effort. We’re big fans of Posterous , the dead-simple blogging tool that makes it incredibly easy to post text, photos, and other media online. To post a photo or post to the site, you simply send an Email message to the generic post@posterous.com address, and the site does the rest. And you can optionally have the service automatically syndicate each of these posts to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and a number of other services. Now, Posterous is looking to become even more convenient. Its new API allows developers to add Posterous support to their Twitter clients, which means you’ll soon be able to send photos to the service from your iPhone or desktop much the same way you would with TwitPic or one of its many competitors (assuming the clients integrate the service - more on that later). But Posterous isn’t looking to simply serve as yet another competitor offering a near-identical featureset. Instead, the company believes that its blogging platform is superior to the basic photo galleries offered by other services (and Michael agrees - he’s been posting his photos here ). The service supports multiple photo uploads at once, which are automatically placed into photo galleries, and can also generate embeddable players for audio and video files (though its API is starting off with support for images only). Users can optionally use their own domain names with the service, which means that they can more easily track analytics. And finally, users can download media in its original format, while some competitors only offer compressed versions for download. I prefer Posterous to the other image platforms because it’s much more flexible. But as I wrote yesterday about TwitGoo, the key to the service’s success (at least as a TwitPic alternative) will lie in getting integrated into popular Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Tweetie. It’s not clear how selective these clients are at this point, but they’re going to have have to start making choices, otherwise users are going to be overwhelmed with the number of services they have at their disposal. That said, Posterous is making the process as easy as possible on developers, as it uses the “exact same methods, parameters, and response codes” as TwitPic. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
A New Business Model For Skype: Turning Phone Numbers On The Web Into Paid Ads Top
While eBay prepares to unload Skype via a sale or IPO next year , it is busy looking for new ways to make money off its 405 million global users. They already account for an estimated 8 percent of international calls, and many of them are increasingly paying for SkypeOut calls to regular phones. Its revenues last year were $551 million, but it wants to get to $1 billion by 2011. To get there, it might have to start thinking local. In fact, it has already started trials in Europe and New Zealand with Yellow Pages businesses that turn business phone numbers on the Web into free calls. Mike Boland at the Kelsey Group explains the concept : The idea is that Skype is used by 405 million global subscribers to make free and cheap calls. Why not position it as a complementary tool to help find and drive calls to local businesses too? This was the same idea behind the launch of SkypeFind (which we covered here ), but takes it a step further. Essentially it broadens this to the larger Web, where most local search activity is already happening. What the idea requires is that phone numbers that show up throughout local search results be hyperlinked to launch a Skype call. The SkypeFind feature he mentions is basically a local business directory within the Skype client which nobody uses But currently there is a browser plug-in that works with Skype 4.0 , the latest version, that turns any phone number on the Web or search result into a clickable Skype call. In order to use the feature, you need to pay the normal SkypeOut rates. The idea Skype is playing with is to make those calls, or at least some of them, free to consumers. Instead, a Yellow Pages company would buy up the calling minutes in bulk and either offer it as part of the fees it charges businesses to list their numbers in its directory or charge the businesses on a click-to-call basis. How they decide to price it will probably vary depending on the type of businesses being called. Lawyers and plumbers, for instance, would be more likely to pay for phone leads on a click-to-call basis. For other businesses, the Skype feature would act more as a retention strategy. Click-to-call ads have been tried before, but this turns the actual phone number into an ad. Click it, and you call the business you were looking for, and the call is paid for by either the business or the Yellow Pages partner. The $32 billion Yellow Pages industry is quickly moving to the Web and Skype has the ability to light up any business phone number found on the Web. Presumably, the Yellow Pages partners would only pay for numbers in their directories, so Skype would have to come up with a way to indicate which calls are free and which ones are not. And there is no reason to limit this to local calls. As people continue to use Skype increasingly for free long distance calls, making money from local calls might be the key to getting to that $1 billion in revenues. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Laguna Is A Hacker At Heart, And Other Fine Jobs At TechCrunch Top
We love our new TechCrunch world headquarters in downtown Palo Alto, and we’re working hard to fill it with smart, hardworking and fun people. Team members needed: Developers (2) : We think it’s critical that next-generation media companies actually build product and test new apps developed by other start-ups. It gives us street cred and keeps us engaged in the community. It’s also creating new assets for our business. In the last year, in addition to launching our own CrunchBase structured-wiki product and API, Henry and Mark were some of the first developers to have access to roll out Facebook Connect, Google App Engine and Yahoo! BOSS search. And we have many more great projects ahead of us. Rails developers preferred, but raw talent and drive are most important to building out our team. Great developer perks include our new (used) Segway, Microsoft Surface, outdoor deck, unlimited supply of caffeine, and friendly dog-wonder, tester-hacker Laguna . We also host major events throughout the year and lots of cool start-ups pass through our office every day. Developer, Summer Intern . We have one paid internship available for a developer. Open to college students. Our paid summer internships for CrunchBase and Events have been filled, but if you’re interested in working part-time at TechCrunch this summer for academic credit (or just great experience), please send your resume to gene [at] techcrunch [dot] com. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Gmail Now Tells You Who You Want To Email Top
Not sure who else to add to that group email? Gmail Labs now has a useful “suggest more recipients” feature that suggests contacts that you might want to include in a group email based on the people you’ve grouped together as email recipients in the past. For example, if you often send family emails to your mother, father, husband, sister and brother, when you start composing an email to your mother and father, Gmail will suggest adding your sister, husband and brother. The feature is triggered only after you’ve added at least two recipients to the email. To enable the feature, go to Gmail Labs and turn it on as a setting. This clever feature is just one of the many nifty innovations that has come out of Gmail Labs, including offline access, contact time zones, search suggestions, an undo button, multi-pane viewing, and many more. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Hulu For The iPhone? Yes, Please. But Don't Get Your Hopes Up Just Yet. Top
Ask people what their favorite website is, and increasingly you’ll hear Hulu (at least in the US). The NBC and Fox-backed online video service just kicks ass when it comes to content, interface and overall execution. And now it’s apparently going to attempt to translate that into a kickass iPhone app, according to Business Insider . Sure, there are other iPhone apps that offer video streaming such as Joost , i.TV and TV.com , but none come close to Hulu in terms of content and public appeal so far. But the most interesting part may be that the Hulu app would apparently work over 3G connections, as well as WiFi. The current crop of video streaming apps are mostly confined to WiFi usage — no doubt at least in part because AT&T doesn’t want streaming video clogging the pipes. In fact, there’s a rumor going around right now that AT&T is the reason that Apple rejected an app by SlingPlayer from the App Store. That hasn’t been confirmed, but the thought is that just like the supposed Hulu app, the SlingPlayer app would have worked over 3G. So if a Hulu app does carry the same functionality, it stands to reason that it would be rejected as well. But, the new iPhone 3.0 software, due this summer, touts live video streaming as one of its core new features. Perhaps Hulu could work with Apple to get such an app working. And the rumored new version of the iPhone supposedly will offer faster connection speeds, which could help ease the bandwidth strain AT&T would see on its end. Hulu has gotten itself into a bit of controversy on the web recently as it has been in a sparring match with the popular media center software startup Boxee . Hulu’s content partners, it seems, don’t want their content easily accessible on a television — a process which Boxee greatly simplifies for many people. But their position for Hulu on a device like the iPhone could be different because it gives them another outlet to monetize their content via ads. Of course, you have to wonder what Apple would think about a Hulu app, because it sells through iTunes many of the television shows Hulu streams for free. You can’t currently browse to Hulu through the iPhone’s web browser because the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, which Hulu uses. Business Insider’s Dan Frommer tells me his source on this Hulu app is a trusted one, but that the time frame for the launch is hazy. That, mixed with the potential problems with AT&T and Apple leads me to warn everyone: Don’t get your hopes up just yet. [photo: flickr/ tivol ] Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
People Who Switch To Macs Like To Dance, And Other Strange Hunches Top
it’s been only three weeks since the launch of Q&A site Hunch , but already it’s amassed answers to 4.3 million questions. By taking visitors through a series of questions to get to know them better, Hunch can begin to make guesses about the right kinds of answers for each individual by making correlations across between people who answer similarly across different topics. It’s sort of like collaborative filtering for information. Co-founder Caterina Fake of Flickr fame shares some of the correlations Hunch has been able to find so far. Some of her findings: * People who believe that alien abductions are real are more likely to blame Nancy Pelosi for the financial crisis. * One of the best predictors of whether people agree they should switch to a Mac: whether they like to dance. Are PC users less fun? The data has spoken. * Fake ID users are more likely to be happy at startups. Also, people who like sports video games are more likely to have had a broken leg at one point (which would explain why they like to sit on the couch and play football instead of go out and, you know, actually play football). And on the subject of Facebook versus Twitter, the Hunch data suggests that “Facebook people” are more social than Twitterers in actual social situations like a party. Facebook people mingle with more people, including strangers, whereas Twitterers stick to people they know. Other differences? Facebook people spend more on shampoo and like to drink more. Whereas “Twitterers report that they have oily skin.” In other words, Twitter is for geeks. I knew it! Don’t tell Oprah Hunch’s data set will become available to researchers next week through a special “researchers API.” Can’t wait to find out what other correlations come out of it. (Photo by Ira Mejías ) Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Twitter Working On A New Tweet Feed, Testing It With FriendFeed Top
If you’ve been a user of FriendFeed for the past few months, you’ve probably noticed how slow the importing of tweets has been. But something changed a couple days ago — tweets started showing up almost instaneously in feeds, after they were posted on Twitter. That’s because FriendFeed is testing a new type of backend feed that Twitter is developing. This new feed is interesting because up until now, FriendFeed has been one of the few services with access to Twitter’s XMPP feed. Some have called the XMPP feed the “fire hose,” because it sends out a massive amount of data quickly, as opposed to importing a feed by way of RSS, which is limited and slow. But XMPP has been anything but fast these past few months, so a new solution was needed. This new feed is still experimental, but here’s what we know: It’s HTTP-based, and, at least for FriendFeed, it will replace the XMPP feed. Twitter is using FriendFeed as a testing ground for it, but eventually, if it works, it should be opened to other services. “Hopefully we can identify what works and what doesn’t. Whatever we determine from this test, will inform how we move forward,” Twitter’s Jason Goldman tells me. And it has been a bit glitchy so far. When FriendFeed first implemented it on Wednesday, it was nearly instaneous — FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit sent out a tweet and one second later it was on FriendFeed. But in subsequent days, the feed slowed down quite a bit, sometimes taking as much as 20 minutes for a tweet to come though. It was a bug that Twitter believes it has fixed, according to Buchheit. Twitter is an important part of FriendFeed, as tweets make up a high percentage of content on the site. Of course, Twitter is becoming an important part of a lot of services, so hopefully this HTTP-based feed will one day mean near-instantaneous tweet access for all. [photo: flickr/ uwe hermann ] Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
TechCrunch Poll: How Much Did VC Investing Drop In The First Quarter? Top
VCs are feeling the heat from the recession. Money, both outgoing and incoming, isn’t drying up completely, but the numbers keep going down. In terms of exits, during the first quarter of 2009 there were zero venture-backed IPOs and only 56 M&A transactions, according to the National Venture Capital Association, down from five IPOs and 106 M&A exits in the first quarter of 2008. The disclosed value of those M&A deals in the first quarter of 2009 was $645 million, down from $4.5 billion a year ago. And money going into venture funds from limited partners has also plummeted over the past year. Only 40 funds raised new money during the quarter, down from 71 the year before (1Q08) and 47 the previous quarter (4Q08). In dollar terms, the total raised in the first quarter was $4.3 billion, down 39 percent from the year before (1Q08). And now we are waiting to find out how much money VCs put into startups during the first quarter. Mind you that VC investing for the fourth quarter of 2008 already hit a low, with the total dollar amount invested in venture financings at $5.4 billion, down 33 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 (when it was $8.09 billion). That number was also down 26 percent from the third quarter of 2008 (when it was $7.3 billion). We’re not too confident that the report card for the first quarter of 2009 will be any better. Considering the continued drops in exits and fund inflows from LPs, the number might not be pretty. So how bad will it be? Take your guess in the poll below. How Much Venture Capital Went Into U.S. Startups In 1Q 2009? ( surveys ) Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
As Court Prepares Shackles For The Pirate Bay, Other Torrent Sites Are Ready To Replace It Top
Despite some early fumbling by the prosecution, a judge in Sweden handed down a guilty verdict today in the case against The Pirate Bay , the popular BitTorrent search site. The four founders, who still seem to think this is a big joke, each face one year of jail time and a $3.6 million fine. The site will continue to function for now as they appeal the decision. Even though the Pirate Bay does nothing more than point to other places on the Web where people can find BitTorrent files, including both legal and illegal downloads of music, movies, and other content, the court ruled that the Pirate Bay assisted in wholesale copyright infringement. Nobody should really be surprised by this ruling. In the past, companies such as Napster and Grokster got into trouble in U.S. courts for similar types of “vicarious infringement” and “inducement” to infringe. The music industry still spends an inordinate amount of money on legal fees (although it has come down from the $140 million it used to spend annually, not counting whatever it cost the RIAA to go after those 35,000 file-sharers before they decided that was not a cost-effective policy ). And it will continue to spend money going after big sites where file-sharers congregate. That is the stick part of its carrot-and-stick business model. They are still trying to figure out what the carrot will be , but increasingly it looks like licensing ad-supported streams on the Web. In the meantime, people will continue to download or stream free music wherever they can. Even if the Pirate Bay is ultimately shut down, there are already plenty of other torrent tracking sites ready to take its place. One of them, Mininova tracks nearly as many torrent files (1.13 million versus 1.7 million for The Pirate Bay) and already has more Web visitors. According to comScore, Mininova had 26.2 million unique visitors worldwide in February, versus 14.6 million for the Pirate Bay and even old-school torrent-tracker Torrentz had 13.7 million and has been running neck-and-neck with the Pirate Bay in terms of visitors. Other estimates put the Pirate Bay users at 20 million. Regardless of what happens to the Pirate Bay, torrent freaks have plenty of other options and always will. If the music industry really wants to fight illegal file-sharing, it needs to work on planting more carrots. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Um, Facebook. Your Developer Site Has Been Defaced Top
It looks like the mobile page on Facebook’s developers wiki has been hacked defaced. Take a look here . I guess that is the downside of putting your developer site on a wiki. The question is why hasn’t anybody changed it back? Update : Someone is paying attention. Site is now back to normal. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 

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