Friday, May 1, 2009

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The Tasteful Thickness Of Your Free Google Profile Business Card Top
How serious is Google getting about promoting its profiles? Well, aside from now including them in Google Search results, and giving you the option to have a vanity URL, Google is now giving away 10,000 sets of business cards to people that have one. The deal, in partnership with iPrint.com , is being promoted with a huge link at the top of Google Profile pages . The link reads, “New! Order profile business cards to tell your friends about your profile.” Click on the link and you’ll be taken to an ordering page. The cards are pretty basic, but they’re an idea that’s been getting buzz on the web for quite some time. It’s simply a white card with a big Google logo. In the middle is the Google Search box, which has your real name (as opposed to your profile name) inside of it. At the bottom it has the vanity URL for your profile. With the promotion, the first 10,000 people who sign up will get 25 free cards. But you’ll have to sign up for an iPrint account to get them. And unfortunately, these cards are only available to be shipped in the continental U.S. And yes, the card even has an “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. But sadly no, it doesn’t have a watermark . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
The Online Ad Recession Is Officially Here: First Quarterly Decline In Revenues Top
It was the last part of the advertising sector to fall and may be the first to recover, but online advertising is now in a recession. With the four largest Web advertising companies ( Google , Yahoo , Microsoft , and AOL ) having reported March quarter financials, we can get a pretty good sense of how the sector did as a whole. If you add up the online advertising revenues of these four online advertising bellwethers, the total online advertising revenues for the quarter came to $7.9 billion, a 2 percent decline from a year ago and a 7 percent decline from the fourth quarter. The growth of online advertising has been slowing down for a while , but this is the first quarter to experience an actual decline in revenues. Given the poor performance reported by all of these companies during the quarter, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Only Google was able to eke out any annual growth, the rest all saw online advertising revenues drop. The fact that Google’s advertising revenues represents 68 percent of the total and that it saw modest growth helped to dampen the overall decline. On an annual basis, the revenue growth just keeps going down from 18 percent growth in the third quarter to 8 percent in the fourth to this quarter’s 2 percent dip. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, the decline is even steeper. Other than the slight 3.4 percent rebound we saw last quarter in sequential growth, which appears too have been seasonal, the sequential growth rate has been coming down for at least the past six quarters. These numbers represent global advertising revenues, and include network revenues paid to affiliates through AdSense and Yahoo’s ad network. I’ve stripped out Google’s licensing revenues, and for the other companies include only the advertising portions of their online revenues as reported in their quarterly earnings statements. Those interested in comparing this to more official numbers should note that the IAB, which only recently came out with fourth quarter data, only measures domestic revenues for the industry. You can see the numbers I’m using in the table below. Online Advertising Revenues (in millions) 3Q07 4Q07 1Q08 2Q08 3Q08 4Q08 1Q09 Google $4,190 $4,758 $5,086 $5,185 $5,352 r$5,504 $5,331 Yahoo $1,544 $1,590 $1,572 $1,587 $1,563 $1,594 $1,383 Microsoft $670 $860 $840 $840 $770 $866 $721 AOL $540 $620 $552 $530 $507 $507 $443 Total $6,994 $7,828 $8,050 $8,142 $8,192 $8,467 $7,878 Sequential Growth Q/Q 12.73% 2.84% 1.14% 0.61% 3.4% -6.96% Annual Growth Y/Y 18% 8.16% -2.10% Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Online Recipe Search Engine Food.com Is The Kayak.com For Recipes Top
Finding the perfect recipe for a dish can be an arduous and time-consuming task, especially if you want to do a search of multiple recipe sites like Epicurious, Gourmet, and the Food Network for the recipe that best fits your needs. Scripps Network, parent company of the Food Network, has soft launched the beta version of its vast recipe search site Food.com in an effort to solve the problem that most cooks face when they sit down at their computers to find a recipe. Food.com basically searches every reputable recipe site, including Food and Wine, Gourmet, the Food Network, Epicurious, Cooking Light, Martha Stewart, Chow.com and more, and gives you a comprehensive list of possible recipes. The site provides requisite information from the original site (photos, ingredients, prep time, serving info) but it also lets you filter choices by types of meal, type of cuisine, main ingredient, cooking technique, publication, prep time and diet. It makes searching for recipes similar to searching for flights on Kayak.com. In order to see the full recipe, you are taken to the site where the recipe is originally hosted. The other feature which is worth noting is the ability to drag a recipe that you like into an “online recipe box.” Food.com also allows you to download a toolbar that allows you to drag recipes from all over the Web into your recipe box. And Food.com saves all of your recent searches and activity in a recipe stream. Another cool feature is the ability to upload a recipe and then share it with Food.com’s database. I did a search for Chicken Marsala on Food.com, Food Network, Epicurious, and Foodista (a Wikipedia for recipes ) and Food.com gave me the highest number of choices in recipes, from a variety of sources, and easily allowed me to narrow my search down through its detailed filters. Food.com came up with 368 results, Food Network showed 53 results, Epicurious showed 37 results and Foodista showed 2 results (although, to be fair, Foodista attempts to present the one best recipe) With the breadth and capabilities of its search capacity and its innovative interface, Food.com is sure to gain a following as a centralized place to not only find recipes but also to store them. One feature that I thought was missing was the ability to filter recipes by chef, which is something that Food Network allows you to do. Epicurious creates a shopping list for the items in the recipes in your recipe box, which is another useful tool when planning a meal. Food.com is currently in beta, so I assume that Scripps will add more features down the line but for an initial trial, the site appears to be a strong addition to the online recipe search space. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Fixya Adds Product Recommendations, And Why VC's Are Hot For It Top
Ask your average Israeli venture capitalist to name a few companies they’re keeping tabs on and Fixya usually makes the short list—so do Benchmark’s Conduit and Sequoia’s Kenshoo . If you haven’t heard of Fixya, the concept is real simple: It’s a post-sale tech support site. On the one side you have users who ask product support questions, and on the other are users who respond and help resolve said problems. In short, Fixya has managed to build itself up as a UGC powerhouse and is systematically milking the cow for all she’s worth. And now it’s adding yet another udder to milk— Product Recommendations and with that it’s delving into new territory, that of pre-purchase support. Not blown away are you? Understandable. That’s because you need to step back to appreciate just how big this here cow can grow and why VC’s are enamored with it. Fixya’s site content now spans a staggering one million products, covering everything from electronics to baby strollers. The site is seeing 15M unique users (mostly English speaking) that generate 60M monthly page views. (ComScore shows half that, with 7.7M uniques visitors a month—see chart below). 250,000 questions are asked and answered per month—75% of the answers are rated as ‘good’ or ‘excellent,’ with 50% answered within 5-6 hours of posting. Interestingly, most questions are about usability issues rather than technical ones. With its new Product Recommendations Fixya is leveraging the large amount of consumer feedback users are providing about products they already own in order to help other users considering buying the same ones. Recommendations are indicated with an overall thumbs-up/down, along with the number of users whose recommendation was rated as a thumbs-up (Fixya weights the user’s vote on product reliability, ease of use and overall value). There are also written recommendations that help users with deeper insights. The information is all there, but they could do a better job displaying it by taking a cue from Amazon. The end game, explains CEO Yaniv Bensadon, is to establish a type of Net Promoter Score (which is a measure of customer loyalty) for products and their manufacturers. Assuming it can pull it off and traffic comes flooding in, Fixya can turn on an additional revenue stream by allowing its community of 250,000 experts to offer pre-sale support for a premium—this shouldn’t be too difficult seeing as it already does this with post-sale support. Theoretically should Fixya be able to establish the critical mass necessary, it could form a social commerce network, where consumers collaborate with each other on product-specific issues. Back to why the VC’s are hot for Fixya. What’s admirable about the company and what keeps it glued to VC’s radars is its revenue potential. Here are a few fun Fixya facts: SEO – Due to its spanning across so many products it’s managed to institute some extraordinary SEO juice for itself. I Googled four electronic devices that sat on my desk using their name and the keyword ’support’ (i.e. ‘hp l1706 support’, ’seagate freeagent support’) and Fixya came-up in the top 5 results for all. Advertising – 50% of Fixya’s revenue comes from a variety of ad formats (ppc, sponsorship and display). Here's something that blew me away… Again, thanks to its broad product catalog, Google AdSense actually generates real revenue for Fixya. Just how real? They’re generating eCPM’s of $2-3—that’s eCPM, not CPM and on AdSense no less. No one else I know is pulling these numbers off AdSense. Premium Support – Fixya facilitates live support between its experts and users. Incidents are priced between $10 and $20 and Fixya cuts a commission for the facilitation. Lead Gen – Fixya generates leads for local providers of support, warranties and parts. Commissions is the name of the game here as well. Future Directions – In the works are a self-serve ad platform which will allow targeting based on products, categories, brands, and geo-location. Fixya is also planning on white-labeling portions of its services. Doing so will allow it to approach the likes of Sony and offer to reduce costly outsourced tech support by instilling crowd-sourced features (and even generate additional revenue along the way). So there you have it… A company that is able to transform user-generated content into a money making machine. It’s no wonder that Bensadon smiled and said ‘much higher’ when I mentioned to him that I keep hearing $60M as the company’s expected exit mark. You would be smiling too, wouldn’t you? Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
New Hulu Spot: 'The Leary Mission' Top
Hulu has just released the latest in its series of star-studded ads, this time featuring Dennis Leary in a spot called ‘The Leary Mission’. He plays an alien trying to turn humans’ brains to mush by watching TV online. In the ad he gives the following instructions: “Now I need you to take your stubby little human fingers and hit this button on Hulu. Then you can share those TV shows on your bliggety blogs and your Facey-spaceys and your Tweety pages for all of your bookwormy anti-Boobtubey friends.” How could we resist putting the ad on our own bliggety blog: As I’ve noted before , while Hulu doesn’t seem to be taking itself too seriously with these ads (how many other brands portray themselves as alien plots?), they may well play a key role in Hulu’s long term success. The TV shows and movies offered by Hulu are already popping up on competitors like TV.com , and more recently YouTube, though the latter is still quite a ways behind. Hulu dominates in terms of selection for now, especially with Disney’s recent stake in the site (CBS, which owns TV.com, is now the lone major network holdout). But there’s still a good chance that these sites will converge and feature a near-identical library down the line. Hulu continues to refine its user experience, perfecting its search engine and streamlining its player to be as user friendly as popular. But nice design only goes so far, especially when the others can easily copy it. So Hulu is trying making itself a household name, becoming the de facto leader both in selection and brand recognition while the other guys barely have their foot in the door. So far, it seems to be working - Hulu is the number three video site in the US, and is well on its way to taking second place, just behind Google’s properties. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Fanboys Unite: Apple Profiles Twitter Top
By far the two companies I’ve written about the most recently are Apple and Twitter. This is to the delight of some people, and the absolute horror of others. And now I’ve got something that will really whip up the fanboys and enrage the haters: Me writing about Apple writing about Twitter. Yes, Apple has a new business profile of the micro-messaging service that it put up today on its site. The headline may just say it all, “Twitter. Triumph of humanity.” But it’s actually a fairly in-depth look at how Twitter uses Apple products to conduct their business. “Pretty much everyone here at Twitter uses a Mac,” says Alex Payne , Twitter’s API lead, in the video that accompanies the profile. Specifically, the profile is pretty much like a series of talking points about why the Mac is great for business (as you might expect in such a profile). The profile delves into OS X and how it offers just about everything Twitter needs from TextMate to Keynote. And if Twitter team members really need to boot Windows for testing purposes, they just use VMware. Also brought up is the idea that Macs are more secure than PCs. And that MacBook Airs and iPhones has given employees a new state of mind about working on the go. “Historically, people thought about the Mac as something for entertainment or graphics, but now they see the value of the Mac as a serious business tool. The same is true of Twitter,” the profile says at one point. But there are a few interesting tidbits. One is that the profile claims Twitter gets “heavy use” out of Numbers and Pages — two pieces of software in the iWork suite that are much less popular than their Microsoft Office counterparts, Excel and Word. Another talks about the synergy between Twitter and Apple — how the keynote address at MacWorld was a big moment in early Twitter usage history. And how Twitter is now driving a lot of development for both the Mac and iPhone with third-party clients. The profile also claims that many of the team’s software engineers “were attracted to Twitter as an employer because of its bent for the Mac.” And that one of the reasons the office space is littered with Macs is because they are more environmentally friendly than their PC counterparts — a message Apple has been pushing heavily recently. A quote from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wraps up the profile, “Twitter is a minimalist communication tool that is very powerful. The Mac is the same way. It offers beautiful design, simple elegance, and a system that's incredibly flexible and powerful to use." I can hear it now. The fanboys will let out a collective, “Awwww” — while the haters scream, “Get a room.” [via Daring Fireball ] [photos via Apple ] Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
StumbleUpon's Ebay Spinoff Valuation: $29 Million Top
Earlier this month we reported on eBay’s spinoff of StumbleUpon , a company it owned for a little less than two years. Ebay bought the company for $75 million in May 2007. Unknown until now, though, was the spinoff value of StumbleUpon. According to a source close to the transaction, it was $29 million. New investors Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital joined StumbleUpon founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith in purchasing the company back from eBay. Outside investors put in 85% or so of the $29 million, we’ve been told, with Camp and Smith making up the rest. eBay was paid $25 million in cash for StumbleUpon and retains a 10% interest in the spun off entity. $4 million remains in the company to fund operations. StumbleUpon’s revenues are estimated at $5 million - $10 million annually. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
iPhone App Developers Threaten To Sue Apple Over Late Payments Top
We’ve reported in the past on how Apple has not only been late on payments to iPhone app developers, but has also neglected to pay some developers for their app sales at the store entirely. We thought that perhaps our post might call Apple’s attention to the problem. Apparently, developers complaints have gone unheard at Apple and now they are so upset that some of them are threatening to sue Apple for breach of contract. As we wrote earlier, Apple’s delay in payments is affecting some developers but not all of them. Some are being paid but other developers are claiming no payment from Apple for sales and continued poor customer support from Apple. You can read the complaints on the developer forums here and here. Apple's contract, which is embedded below, says that payment will be made to developers within 45 days of the end of the month. Developers are claiming that there are massive delays in payments for as early as last fall and are not being paid the amount of money that the developers are in fact due from sales. One developer, who hasn’t been paid since November 2008, forwarded us an email chain between Apple’s App Store finance team and himself. An Apple employee, who was responding to the developers complaints, wrote that the developer’s continued emails about the late payments was “bordering on harassment,” and claimed that the finance team receives thousands of emails a day and couldn’t get to his right away. Another developer on the forum says that he hasn’t been paid since September and is owed close to $7000 for sales. It’s not clear how serious these threats are. After all, it is a forum and it’s a lot easier to vent and make empty legal threats in an anonymous forum. But it appears that despite the media reports, developer complaints, emails, and calls surrounding the delays in payments, Apple has not corrected its system at all. It’s definitely cause to wonder what is going on with Apple. Didn’t Apple just post its best second quarter earnings in the history of the company? We also recently wrote about Apple’s seemingly unfair refund policy, which puts developers at a clear disadvantage. And Apple owes a lot to iPhone app developers-the App store just reached 1 billion app downloads thanks to those very same savvy developers who have created useful and creative apps. As we wrote in the past, Apple is in danger of alienating developers and giving them reasons why they shouldn't be developing for the iPhone (on the forums, a few developers said they may even give up on the App store)—namely, they're at the mercy of Apple, which is making a habit of taking its developers for granted. iPhone app contract - Get more Information Technology Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Web Searches In Gmail Now Feature 100% Less Leaving Top
I can’t stop drooling over Gmail Labs. It’s simply a great idea for expanding a product, without forcing all users happy with the current one to upgrade to features they don’t want. And tonight may be the best Gmail Labs feature yet: Google Search In Gmail . Yes, it may sound lame or obvious, but it’s a pretty kickass feature. Once enabled, it puts a Google Search widget in the left side toolbar of Gmail. From there, you simply input a query into the search box, and it will pop up the results in an overlay window at the bottom — the same type of window it users for IMs and Tasks. It will show you the top three results in this box automatically, or you can click “more” to expand the box. You can also pop the results out into their own window. Yes, you’ve been able to search Google from within Gmail for a long time, but when you do so using the main search bar in Gmail, it opens another whole browser window for the results. That’s cumbersome. This keeps me right in Gmail and allows me to save multiple queries that I may need again later. And there’s another nice feature. Hovering over any of the results gives you a drop down menu that permits you to send the results to other people via email or IM. It’s seriously getting to the point where I can almost do everything I want to do on the web within Gmail thanks to these Labs widgets. Don’t think Google doesn’t realize that either as it continues to becoming more of a social player on the web. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Should Google Be Paranoid About Losing The Android Name? Top
The name “Android” is at the very core of Google’s mobile initiative. It’s even successfully gotten people to move away from calling the devices “Google Phones” or “GPhones,” something which seemed impossible prior to the unveiling. But Google may be in serious trouble of losing that name — or at least having to pay a hell of a lot of money to keep it. Erich Specht, a man who runs a small Midwestern data company, applied for and was granted a trademark on the Android name in 2002, according to Forbes . Google? Well, it tried to trademark the name in 2007, shortly before its massive Android PR blitz — but it was rejected a few months later. Still, Google pushed forward with trying to gain legal rights over the name, but its appeals were again and again rejected, and its trademark application was apparently suspended last November. So what does that mean? Well, Specht is seeking $94 million from Google (and all the other members of the Open Handset Alliance) for infringing on the Android name. He’ll be in court next week, and Google will have 60 days to respond to him. Given Google’s rejections by the Patent and Trademark Office, this things seems to reek of a high-priced settlement, in which Google gets to keep using the name while paying Specht something substantially less than the $94 million. But, it’s not quite that cut and dry. You see, Specht actually owns the trademark on the name “Android Data” rather than just “Android.” But in the filing, it apparently describes “data” as merely a descriptive word, something which Specht’s lawyer is obviously playing up. In the past, Google tried to play the card Specht didn’t really care about the name and dissolved the company at one point, but that didn’t work. Still, if it can prove that people will clearly know the difference between the Android mobile software and Specht’s small company, Google may have a shot to get the case thrown out. Something else to think about: Maybe Google is actually lucky that there aren’t as many Android phones on the market right now as it may have liked. It could save them a pretty penny if it does come to a settlement. But regardless, just as it’s trying to ramp up the Android platform with dozens of new devices on the way, and a new 1.5 Android software update just out the door, Google cannot be happy about having to deal with this right now. And actually, this is all a bit like deja vu. If you recall in 2007, right after it unveiled the iPhone, Apple was greeted with a lawsuit from Cisco, which owned the rights to the name. The two sides quickly settled — but those were two big companies, not one big company and a little guy. Remember Google, don’t be evil . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
The Wolfram Alpha Demo Returns, This Time With Actual Footage Of The Service Top
Yesterday, days of hype culminated in the unveiling of the Wolfram Alpha search engine, which made its debut at a presentation put on by Harvard University’s Berkman Center. Unfortunately the resulting video footage turned out to be an exercise in frustration (or boredom). Not because it was uninteresting, mind you, but because we couldn’t see the apparently innovative search engine that creator Stephen Wolfram was talking about. Apparently someone has had a change of heart over the media squeeze, because the Berkman Center has posted a new version of the video (or at least 10 minutes of it), this time with footage of the service. This portion of the video includes a number of queries, including calculating the GDP of France (which results in a graph of the GDP over time) and the number in Internet users in Europe, generating a relevant histogram. During a query for the weather in Lexington, Massachusetts, the search engine generated a plot of temperature over time, including a prediction for the near future. A query for $17/hour produced a table of the same conversion at different scales (though it is difficult to make out in the video). The engine looks awesome for science students and researchers. A search for 5M H2SO4 produced a calculation determining how much of each reagent would be needed to make it (basic chemistry, but handy nonetheless). It looks like it can handle a variety of similar calculations, like determining the current state of a chemical at various pressure and temperature conditions, complete with phase diagram. The next query shows off how the engine can be used for health issues. A search for LDL 180 (a measure of your ‘bad’ cholesterol) displays a graph depicting how that figure stands relative to the general population. Wolfram then shows how the engine can perform the same task for a different age range. All in all, I’m impressed. Granted, this doesn’t look like any kind of Google replacement, at least for general search terms or news. And as Danny Sullivan pointed out , these could have been terms handpicked because they performed well on the engine. But I’m excited nonetheless, and look forward to trying it out for myself. Thanks to Ali Abuhassan for the tip. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
I Wish More People Bcc'd Us On Their Confidential Acquisition Emails Top
Yesterday myYearbook CEO Geoff Cook reached out to FunAdvice President Jeremy Goodrich to talk about a possible acquisition. Based on certain assumptions, Cook said, he’d be prepared to offer $125,000 cash up front, $25,000 in consulting fees and $125,000 in MyYearBook stock. Goodrich emailed Cook back and bcc’d us with his response: no deal. I asked Goodrich, who I don’t know, why he copied us on the email string. His response: “I won’t do that again, I thought techcrunch would find it interesting.” Interesting indeed. I wish all startup founders did this. The email string is below, with some contact information removed. I’m sure Cook is thrilled. Sorry, you were bcc’d on the email. I won’t do that again, I thought techcrunch would find it interesting. Best, Jeremy Goodrich Co-founder, FunAdvice On 4/30/09, Michael Arrington wrote: why am I cc’d on this? On Apr 30, 2009, at 3:42 PM, Info Funadvice wrote: Hi Geoff- First, we’re sincerely flattered that MyYearBook would be interested in acquiring FunAdvice.com. I’m writing this under the assumption this is a real offer and not some prank. In point of fact, our March numbers were far higher than compete would suggest - 3.7 million visitors and 3.4 million uniques…as we see you are a “quantified” publisher, I find it odd, but interesting, that you would mention our compete stats rather than the much higher quantcast numbers (which are pretty close to reality, for our US audience). As we have grown 300% year over year (yes, you read that correctly) comparing April, 2009 with April, 2009…well, your valuation would seem to massively underestimate the value of FunAdvice. Based on Answerbag’s acquisition by InfoSearch Media (later re-sold to Demand) and the sale of faqfarm.com to Wiki.Answers…and, of course, Yedda by AOL…well, let me put this another way. On Quantcast, it shows that your *monthly* uniques are about 2x our size: http://www.quantcast.com/myyearbook.com (those are your real unique numbers…correct?) In any event, your revenue estimate was off by a factor of ten…so, unless we could start talking from the same frame of reference…then, I’m not sure we can move forward with a serious acquisition discussion. Best, Jeremy Goodrich Co-founder & President, FunAdvice http://www.funadvice.com/my/thedude On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 3:26 PM, wrote: Jeremy, I’ve been following funadvice.com and think you’ve built out a great site on a low budget, which is a tremendous achievement. I’m not sure if you would entertain an acquisition discussion, but it appears to me, based on compete.com data, that funadvice.com has 1.3M uniques and 4.2M pageviews in March. I'm not sure what your revenues are, but I would infer about $4200 per month. If those basic assumptions are in the right ballpark, we'd be prepared to offer, assuming we understood traffic sources enough to feel traffic would not plummet on your exit: • $125,000 Cash Up Front • $25,000 Cash After Successful Migration of Funadvice to our servers (would expect 3 mos or less) as a consulting fee • $125,000 in Stock in myYearbook based on the valuation of our last round. Please advise if you would be interested in such a deal. We have the budget to make only 1 such offer this quarter so I would appreciate a response in the relatively short term, as I only have 1 offer outstanding at any given moment. If you'd like to speak more, I can be reached at 609-xxx-xxxx. Sincerely, Geoff Cook CEO, myYearbook Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Xobni Coming To The Blackberry (Leaked Pic) Top
It’s been just one month since email startup Xobni got an investment from the Blackberry Partners Fund , which brought its total B round up to $10 million, and already it has a working prototype for an upcoming Blackberry app. Xobni executives were showing off the app at a Mobile Meetup in San Francisco last night, and the screenshot above found its way into my inbox (which is “xobni” spelled backwards, you know). The app was working, and could be released sometime this summer, according to my source. The photo above shows the app on a Blackberry Bold, and appears to be showing off its contact search functionality. You type in a few letters, and it returns the contact information for every match in your inbox (even people who you haven’t necessarily added to your address book yet). I wonder what else it can do. Xobni, which is a plug-in for Outlook that incorporates data from various social networks , currently does not have a mobile client. But the company has hired a small team of engineers to work on mobile apps, with Blackberry being the first device to get one. Not only is there the connection with the Blackberry Partners Fund, but I’ve been told in the past that there is about 50 percent overlap between Xobni users and Blackberry owners. (There must be an Outlook-Blackberry mental axis out there). So it makes sense to go after the Blackberry first. But the startup cannot afford to ignore the iPhone. Can it? Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
WhitePages Bringing Their Mobile App To BlackBerry Devices Top
Good news, BlackBerry users! Never again will you need to kludge around in your browser just to dig up a number or determine who’s behind the number that just called. Following the success of their iPhone and Android applications, WhitePages will soon be announcing the upcoming availability of a native BlackBerry application. It’ll still be a few days before the app makes its way to the BlackBerry App World, but we’ve been tinkering with a pre-release copy for a few days now. The Major Features: People Search: Being as this is the first thing anyone thinks of when you mention WhitePages, this one’s pretty much mandatory. Pictured above. Business : Search by business name or category. Their business database seems relatively exhaustive and up to date. Reverse Search: Know a number, but don’t know who owns it? Punch it into reverse search, and they’ll dig through their database to try and pin it on someone. Company: As far as we can tell, this feature is making its mobile debut in their BlackBerry app. By searching through “a number of public and proprietary data sources”, Company search allows you to find the contact information for people who work at a specific company. Company name and last name are required. We tested it with a few major chains (Starbucks, Blockbuster) and it functioned as expected, listing their position within the company (where available) and contact information. A bit creepy, but equally useful. Recent Results: Even if you’re outside of signal range, you can look through the details for a number of your most recent searches. Due to a limitation of the BlackBerry OS, one feature we’ve grown fond of in the Android port won’t be making an appearance: real-time CallerID for incoming calls. They’ve worked around this as best they could, adding a quick link to the reverse search function from within your BlackBerry call log. Highlight the number, hit “Search WhitePages”, and it’ll do the heavy lifting. It’s not nearly as handy, but it’s the best they can do within their boundaries They’ve integrated the application into the OS in other ways, as well. From within any listing, you can initiate a call, add a contact, send the details via email, or get directions via the built-in BlackBerry Maps application. The application seems rock solid overall, and does just about everything you might expect - or, at least, it does everything the iPhone port does (plus an extra trick or two). Unlike the iPhone app, however, the BlackBerry version won’t be free. Fortunately, it’s not going to be too hard on the wallet; at $6.99 for 6 months, the per-month cost comes in at under $1.17. This app has just been submitted to the BlackBerry App World, so it should be available within the next few days. Initial availability will be limited to the BlackBerry Bold, though versions for the Storm, Curve, and Pearl will be released shortly thereafter. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Twitter Brings Search On Site To All Top
For the past several weeks, plenty of my friends have had the new Twitter interface featuring both Search and Trending Topics on the main page, but I had yet to see it. Today, I log in to see that I’m finally special enough to get it as well — only to learn that it’s now officially been rolled out to everyone . Say hello to the new Twitter.com, it’s a lot like the old one, but with the two important features. Search works great because it’s all done on the page without any reloads. And perhaps the most useful feature is that you can save searches that you do over and over again. Also included in the right hand sidebar is Trending Topics, which keeps track of the hot items people are searching for across Twitter. Not surprisingly, right now Swine Flu takes up the top two spots, with Mexico a little below it. As Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes, “Every public update sent to Twitter from anywhere in the world 24/7 can be instantly indexed and made discoverable via our newly launched real-time search.” And he goes on, “With this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important—a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now.” Some of us have been saying that for months, if not years, of course, but Stone is right that with Search and Trending Topics now right on the main page, both are more powerful than they’ve ever been. And it all looks exactly as it should. It keeps Twitter simple , while adding some very key features. And if you don’t like the way they look, you can collapse them for a more traditional, minimal Twitter look. I wonder if this will affect some of the third party Twitter clients that have been built? After all, these are two core features that people wanted on the site, and now they have them. I know I’ll be tempted to use the site itself even more now. And that’s something Twitter would no doubt be happy with — especially if it keeps putting new sponsored links in the upper part of the right sidebar. Now if only there were a way to group users together and/or filter them on the site… Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Facebook Gets Three Times More Efficient At Finding Photos In Its Humungous Haystack Top
With more than 15 billion photos (and 60 billion image files with replication for different sizes), Facebook eats up a lot of storage with its photo application alone. Members are adding 220 million new photos every week. Facebook currently has more than 1.5 petabytes of storage for its photos, and that is growing at a rate of 25 terabytes a week. Last year, Facebook spent an estimated $30 million on NetApp storage appliances alone just to keep up with the growth of photos and other uploaded content. To reduce some of these costs, Facebook decided to engineer its own storage architecture called Haystack . Now more details have emerged about how that system actually looks and works. In a nutshell, Haystack will allow Facebook to switch from expensive, commercial storage appliances to commodity off-the shelf hardware. It is going from a traditional network file system to something more akin to stripped-down network application that does only what it needs to do. Not only will Facebook get the cost savings of going commodity, but they also get a 3X improvement in storage capacity. In other words, what used to take 30 discs to store, now will take only 10. With so many billions of images, serving the right one is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. With a traditional network file system, a lot of metadata goes flying around detailing when files were last modified, what directories they are listed in, and so on. All of this metadata creates a bottleneck as it is passed back and forth. So the two Facebook engineers who built Haystack (Doug Beaver, Peter Vajgel, and Jason Sobel) decided to get rid of much of this metadata. As they explain on Facebook’s engineering blog : The new photo infrastructure merges the photo serving tier and storage tier into one physical tier. It implements a HTTP based photo server which stores photos in a generic object store called Haystack. The main requirement for the new tier was to eliminate any unnecessary metadata overhead for photo read operations, so that each read I/O operation was only reading actual photo data (instead of filesystem metadata) All of that metadata is stored in what Facebook is calling “needle.” Each needle pulls together the metadata for hundreds of thousands of images. The needles are paired with an index to make up the Haystack object store. You can read all the technical details on the Facebook engineering blog . The company will keep its existing network file system for the 15 billion photos already uploaded (after all, those NetApp boxes are sunk costs). But going forward, all new photo uploads will be handled by Haystack. And in the future, Facebook may even open-source the architecture so other companies can benefit from it. Not bad, for something that was built by three engineers. (Photo credit: Flickr/ Vitor Antunes ) Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
BuddyPress Launches: May A Thousand Social Networks Bloom (Someday) Top
BuddyPress , the side project of blogging powerhouse WordPress, has just hit version 1.0 and has officially launched. It’s basically a social layer that you can lay on top of your WordPress (MU — more on that below) blog to give it some of the social network features that you’re already familiar with from larger social networking sites. Here’s what version 1.0 features : Extended profile, private messaging, friends, groups, “the wire,” activity stream, blog tracking and forums. Yes, that’s a lot of stuff in a first version — and it looks great (see the screenshots below). All of these features should be relatively straightforward from their names, except “the wire,” which is basically like your Wall on Facebook. People can go to that area and leave messages. And slated for release in 2009 are yet more features, including: Status updates and photo albums. Sound familiar? While WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg is quick to point out that BuddyPress is not meant to be yet another stand-alone social network in your life, his post about it seems to poke directly at the larger networks like Facebook and MySpace. “I mean all your friends are already on Myspace, but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit exactly into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework to use. Maybe even someday you'll be able to connect your BuddyPresses to each other and to the existing monolithic social networks,” Mullenweg writes. That reads a lot like, “hey a lot of people are pissed off by the big social networks terms of service issues, and their set ways of thinking, why not use BuddyPress?” And depending on how well this impressive feature set works, some people just might. It’s also worth noting that in an interview he did with us a couple weeks ago, Mullenweg described BuddyPress as “Facebook-in-a-box.” But there’s also a catch to BuddyPress for the time being: To install it, you have to be using WordPress MU , the multiple-user variety of the blogging software that is a bit more complicated to set up and is used much less than traditional WordPress. But Mullenweg’s comment that BuddyPress “currently requires” WordPress MU, would seem to indicate that eventually it will roll out to the larger WordPress community as well. BuddyPress has been in development for over a year, and was originally called “ChickSpeak.” This name is much better. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Live: George Zachary Interviews Tesla CEO Elon Musk Top
This afternoon Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary is sitting down for a one on one interview with Elon Musk , the CEO of Tesla whose other credentials include cofounding SpaceX and PayPal. The interview promises to be an interesting one - Musk hasn’t been known to pull any punches . Michael, who is attending the event, is streaming it live using Qik. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Ad.com Sells For $1.4 Million Top
The domain Ad.com sold for $1.4 million yesterday at domain name registration company Moniker’s TRAFFIC conference in Silicon Valley. The winning bidder was Divyank Turakhia of Directi.com and CEO of Skenzo, a domain parking company. Moniker made more than $2 million in domain names at the TRAFFIC auction, with Ad.com taking the highest bid. Bottledwater.com took the no. 2 spot at $45,000 and Athletic.com received the third highest amount, selling for $40,000. $1.4 million may sound like a lot to spend on a domain, especially given the current state of the economy. But Ad.com is a two-letter domain that is easily pronouncable and actually means something, so it’s definitely valuable in the domain market. And a recession doesn’t seem to be stopping companies from spending the big bucks for desirable domain names so Turakhia may be able to flip Ad.com for a profit. Travelzoo bought Fly.com for $1.8 million in January. Vibrators.com was sold for $1 million a back in November and A&T's YellowPages.com paid $3.85 million for YP.com in December. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Ruba: An Online Travel Guide Where Photos Speak Louder Than Words Top
Travel guides are a dime a dozen on the web. But for the most part, they’re not very conducive to really exploring - it’s not much fun to click through various guides to get a feel for where you’d like to visit, because each guide is loaded with a wall of text. Ruba , a new travel site that launches today, is looking to offer users a way to visually browse through cities and their attractions around the world, offering photo-rich guides and an emphasis on making it easy to quickly discover new locations. The site is headed by Mike Cassidy , who has founded a number of successful companies, including Xfire , which sold to Viacom in 2006 for $102 million. Cassidy says that his team has worked to create a very clean site that is very snappy and easy to casually browse through, with a strong technical emphasis placed on search. Rather than ask users to tag the guides they create, the search engine identifies keywords in their descriptions and titles. And while this can be prone to false positives, in the demo I saw it seemed to work quite well (a search for ‘kids london’ resulted in guides like “Top 5 Things To Do With Kids In London” and “The London Aquarium”). Guides are all written and submitted by users, with Ruba pulling from Google and Flickr APIs to help pinpoint locations and provide some sample photos (users can submit their own, too). Cassidy says that users have been building guides to both serve as references for others, and also as a way to chronicle their own trips (which other users can in turn benefit from). Travel is a tough space to break into, with well established sites like TripAdvisor dominating user review submissions and countless smaller sites looking to find their niche. From the get-go, Ruba is looking to spread virally. The site features integration with Twitter and Facebook Connect, allowing users to broadcast where they’re headed and ask friends for input (I think this will work especially well on Facebook, as items will appear in users’ News Feeds). The biggest question about the site’s viability is the fact that everything is user-submitted, including the blurbs about each location. If the site can build a strong community as Yelp and Flickr have, then this won’t be an issue. But if people frequently visit the site and can’t find the city or attraction they’re looking for, they won’t be likely to submit their own guides (it’s the chicken and the egg problem all over again). That said, I suspect that many people will enjoy building their own guides. Trip Advisor may have a larger community, but there’s a certain appeal to being able to stamp your name on your guide, embedding it in your blog and sharing it with friends so your thoughts don’t get lost in the shuffle. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Want To Avoid Swine Flu? There's An App For That Too. Top
Yesterday, we talked a bit about how some companies are clearly trying to capitalize on the Swine Flu craze that is sweeping the nation. Naturally, someone just had to make an iPhone app. And the winner is IntuApps , which has Swine Flu Tracker, waiting for approval from Apple before it’s released into the App Store. IntuApps’ Barry Schwartz, who is also a blogger , sent along some screenshots of the app. In it, you can see the current Threat Level for the disease, a map showing confirmed and suspected cases, a symptoms area to inform people, and an alert page for breaking news on Swine Flu. Everyone is joking about Swine Flu because of the whole pig angle, but it is at least somewhat of a serious threat. And while this iPhone app may be the latest thing to capitalize on it, it’s also pretty useful as a way to know what areas to avoid on the go. It’s good to know that IntuApps will be giving the app away for free when it is available in the App Store. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Guess Which Brand Is Now Worth $100 Billion? Top
Millward Brown, a subsidiary of the WPP, has come out with its annual list and report, BrandZ, that ranks the most valuable brands in the world. Unsurprisingly, Google tops the list for the third year in a row, with the Google brand valued at $100 billion, rising 16% in value over the past year from $86 billion. Microsoft comes in second, with its brand valued at $76.2 billion, only rising 8% in value over the past year. Last summer, Google had the no. 2 reputation in the world, according to The Reputation Index , and Microsoft didn’t even break into the top 40 (the company was ranked #43 in terms of reputation). In last year’s BrandZ rankings, Microsoft was third on the list behind General Electric, so the company has inched a little closer to Google. Other notable tech companies that made the top 10 in this years most valuable brands list were IBM (no. 4, valuation: $66.6B), Apple (no. 6, Valuation: $63.1B), China Mobile (no. 7, Valuation: $61.2B), and Vodafone (no. 9, valuation: $53.7B). Ten of the top 25 brands are technology brands. Amazon is no. 26, AT&T is no. 28, Cisco is no. 30, eBay is no. 54 and Yahoo is no. 81, falling from no. 62 last year. Yahoo’s brand value went from $11.5B to $7.9B. Here’s the top 20 list and a screenshot of the top 100 below: 1. Google ($100 B) 2. Microsoft ($76.2 B) 3. Coca-Cola ($67.6 B) 4. IBM ($66.6 B) 5. McDonalds ($66.5 B) 6. Apple ($66.1 B) 7. China Mobile ($61.2 B) 8. GE ($59.7 B) 9. Vodafone ($53.7 B) 10. Marlboro ($49.4 B) 11. Walmart ($41 B) 12. ICBC ($35 B) 13. Nokia ($35.1 B) 14. Toyota ($29.9 B) 15. UPS ($27.8 B) 16. Blackberry ($27.4 B) 17. HP ($26.7 B) 18. BMW ($23.9 B) 19. SAP ($23.6 B) 20. Disney ($23.1 B) 21. Tesco ($22.9 B) 22. Gillete ($22.9 B) 23. Intel ($22.8 B) 24. China Construction Bank ($22.8 B) 25. Oracle ($21.4 B) Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Time's 100 Most Influential People Includes 4chan And Twitter Creators Top
This list is in. Time has released its annual Time 100 list , honoring the most influential people in the world. There are a lot of interesting names including Sarah Palin and President Obama, but let’s focus on the names from the tech sphere. Moot (the creator of 4chan), Jeff Bezos, The Twitter Guys, Sam & Dan Houser, Jack Ma, Robin Chase, Nathaniel Silver, Nandan Nilekani, and Shai Agassi have all been included. And some of their write-ups are really interesting because of their authors. For example, Moot is written up by the man perhaps now best known for being the “Rick” in the “Rick Roll”, Rick Astley. The “Twitter Guys” (founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey) are written up by Ashton Kutcher, the first Twitter user with a million followers. And Jeff Bezos is written up by Bill Gates. Here’s a line from the Twitter story that will no doubt infuriate those that hate Twitter: Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. In his profile of Moot, Astley admits that at first he was a bit embarrassed by the phenomenon of Rick Rolling, but then embraced it. Oddly, he spends almost the entire article talking about himself. He also uses the word “bonkers.” 4chan dominated the online voting portion for the Time 100 list, to win it easily and his followers even manipulated the 20 runners-up to make a joke . But Time kept its promise to honor the winner. [photo: Robyn Twomey for TIME] Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 

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