Tuesday, May 26, 2009

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The Awesome Potential Of Retweet Top
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by David Sacks, the Founder and CEO of Yammer and Geni. Previously he was the COO of PayPal and produced the Academy Award-nominated movie "Thank You For Smoking." Sacks says he’s incorporating the retweet feature into Yammer, his “Twitter for the enterprise” product that launched at TechCrunch50 last year. While there are many new features that Twitter could launch, the most powerful are likely to be based on behaviors that users have invented themselves. That's exactly what happened with @replies. Users started addressing each other by their @usernames. Twitter noticed and officially supported the feature. As a result, Twitter is on its way to becoming the discussion board for the web. There is one other user convention with that kind of potential: Retweet. A retweet occurs when a user reposts an interesting tweet. As with @replies, users established the notation organically: you type 'RT' followed by the @username of the original author and then the message. The problem is friction. You have to copy & paste the message and then the author's username. Frequently you have to edit the original message because the extra meta-data pushes it over 140 characters. Because of the accumulation of meta-data, retweets are even harder to retweet. This means that interesting messages don't spread more than a generation or two. Retweet support built into clients like Tweetdeck is only a partial solution. It eliminates the need to copy & paste messages but not to edit the original. Twitter should officially support this feature by adding a 'RT' option to messages. Clicking this button would repost the original message in your followers' feeds. The reposted message would appear just as you saw it (except for a tagline showing who retweeted it), and could itself be retweeted. (See my 'Before' and 'After' screenshot.) The ability to retweet retweets is critical because it means that messages could spread throughout the twittersphere frictionlessly. I believe this would make Twitter the leading way that memes spread in our culture. Twitter could accelerate this phenomenon by surfacing analytics about the most retweeted messages, allowing users to see the ideas (and links) that are spreading fastest throughout the world or in their local networks. One other suggestion: A follow button appearing under the original author's avatar in a retweet would make it easy to follow that person. Thus retweet would ensure widespread distribution not just of interesting content but also of interesting people. This would help level the "celebrity" bias on Twitter, allowing regular people to quickly build a following by posting interesting messages. In the absence of such a feature, many people conclude that it's too hard to get discovered if you're not a celebrity. Like search and @replies, retweet plays to Twitter's core strengths — discoverability and easy sharing. In the war between sharing platforms, it's hard to see how Facebook could copy this feature, because its privacy settings would prevent the frictionless spread of content. If Twitter becomes the dominant platform for discovering and sharing information when privacy is not important (including most status updates and all links), Facebook might suddenly look like a small subset of the sharing universe, reserved primarily for private news and media sharing. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Microsoft's Bing Logo Leaked By Way Of Favicon? Top
Within the next few days, Microsoft is expected to unveil its latest attempt at trying to be a player in the world of web search. After it has failed to get live.com any traction against Google, it will apparently launch a new engine called “Bing” — the project formerly known by its working title “Kumo.” This should be unveiled at the D conference which starts today in Carlsbad, CA — but it looks like Microsoft may be giving us a peak at the logo a tad early. While it appears that Microsoft may have already taken it down, I visited bing.com in my browser about 10 minutes ago and sure enough saw the favicon you see above. It’s a lowercase “b” with a yellow/orange dot in the middle. It would appear that this will be at least a part of the Bing logo. The light blue and yellow/orange color combination matches that of Kumo. I find that combination to be quite ugly — sort of like the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball uniforms ( below ) from the 1990s — but hey, that’s just personal taste. All that really matters is now the search engine actually performs. This favicon, which again, may only be a part of the logo, also looks a lot like the logo for Blinkx , the video search engine. That features a red lowercase “b” with an eye in the middle. See them side-by-side below. Microsoft is spending some $80 to $100 million on a marketing campaign for Bing, according to Ad Age . That’s huge by any standard, but especially when you consider that Google only spent $25 million on all of its marketing last year. I don’t know what Microsoft plans to spend all that money on, but I get the sneaking suspicion that Bing Crosby will be involved in some way or another. [thanks DD] Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Now You Can Avoid Euro Disney In Google Earth, Just Like You Did In Real Earth Top
In 1992, Disney decided to build upon the huge success of its Disneyland and Disney World theme parks by opening Euro Disney in a suburb of Paris. The company had previously licensed its name for a resort abroad just outside Tokyo, but the European version was a more ambitious project being handled by the company. It started out as a nightmare. Simply put, people didn’t go to it. And now you can avoid going to it from the comfort of your own home thanks to the magic of Google Earth. Just as it did last year with Disney World , Google Earth now has Disneyland Paris (as it was rebranded to in 1995 following its thud of an opening) rendered in 3D. Disney has provided the program with some 85,000 photos — a huge 450GB worth — to make the renderings as realistic as possible. All the rides are there, the castle and even over 500 landscape elements. Following its rebranding, and the opening of some new rides, Disneyland Paris was able to somewhat turn things around, but it remains far in debt. Having a virtual representation of your theme park in Google Earth isn’t going to help that. Is it going to convince more people to go visit the park? Unlikely. But it’s a cute distraction for me for about 15 minutes. And it shows how good some of these 3D renderings are getting. The Disneyland Paris layer can be found in the “Gallery” folder of Google Earth 5.0. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Taking Yahoo Meme For A Spin: It's A Mediocre Tumblr Clone Top
We recently broke the story about Yahoo launching a service in Portuguese dubbed Meme that on the surface seemed to be tilting towards a Twitter-like service. But now that we’ve received an invite code from a user in Brazil, we know it’s nothing like Twitter at all. It’s all about micro-sharing, sure, but that’s just about where the comparison ends. Yahoo Meme is much more like micro-blogging service Tumblr than anything else, and it’s a mediocre clone at that. Here’s how it works: you create an account with your preferred username (Yahoo profile required), and you basically start off with an empty blog that you can fill with text, images, videos, music or a mixture of those media. All you can add to your blog - apart from the content - is a title, a 100-character description and an avatar. You can visit my account here . There are no other settings for customizing your Meme blog, at least for now, and so far there is no way for people to create a comment thread underneath the content you post nor for you to share your posts other than a dedicated URL that points back to the update. You can search other people’s public accounts and follow them - which is essentially the same as subscribing to a blog’s RSS feed - and once you do this the updates from these users will also appear in your own stream. It’s similar to Tumblr in the sense that there’s a ‘Repost’ button (see second screenshot) that works exactly the same way as the ‘Reblog’ feature that’s baked into Tumblr. That said, Tumblr gives you way more customization options, lets you update your blog in a variety of ways, offers basic analytics and comes with an API. Yahoo Meme has none of that for now. It’s unclear whether Yahoo is merely bucket testing this new service in one language only (although it is one that is spoken by more than 200 million people) and planning a more extensive roll-out in the long run, or if this is as far as it goes. We’re also not sure if there are more features on the way, or if it will continue to be as rudimentary as its current incarnation. Either way, it needs a lot of work before it can appeal to a wider audience than some early testers. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Live Blogging The Facebook Conference Call Top
This morning Facebook announced that it had accepted a $200 million investment at a $10 billion valuation from Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies. Over the last few weeks there have been reports of the company turning down investments at lower valuations, and debate over if the investors would get a coveted Facebook board seat (DST did not). Facebook is holding a teleconference to talk about the new investment. Below are our notes. Mark Zuckerberg: Despite a pretty tough economic environment, our revenue is up and growth continues. Removing barriers to communication across the web. Advertising products performing strongly. Now have tens of thousands of advertisers. On track to create a nice self sustaining business. Lots of firms have approached us. DST approached us with an investment background demonstrating advanced background in the power of social networks. Getting this money gives us a cash cushion. Not going to talk about how it’s going to be used, but nice to have the flexibility. Yuri Milner (DST Chief Executive): Giving some background on DST. Largest internet investor in Russian and European markets. One of largest groups involved in exclusively internet companies. Organized as a holding company, not a fund. Since 2005, have raised and invested over $1 billion. Investment in Facebook underscores belief that social networks change the way people communicate. We’re convinced Facebook has potential to be one of the most valuable internet companies globally. Q: How does this affect Facebook’s approach with regard to an IPO. Zuckerberg: We want to take money that will help us realize the long term vision of the company. For lots of startups the IPO is the end goal. That’s not the case for us, it’s a milestone along the way. It’s not something we see happening on the immediate horizon. Q: About Facebook valuation with common stock. Zuckerberg: Nothing to report there at this time, we’ve structured a few different transactions. Over the next few months (over the summer) we’ll have more to announce. Question about the Microsoft valuation Zuckerberg: It’s important to note that the Microsoft deal was part of a larger partnership with the company. That was a strategic partnership with a lot of different components. That was a year and a half ago when the market was at its peak. This is only taking the form of an investment right now with DST, we’re hoping it can work into other things over time. Q: How are you going to monetize international audience? Zuckerberg: I want to let Yuri speak about this, because of his experience with other social networks. Milner: Advertising and micropayments generated by users themselves. (seems to imply that Facebook will be doing payments soon, which has been long rumored) Zuckerberg: The different models are advertising, a number of things we’ve experimented with. The bottom line with the other social networks abroad is that they’re doing well, each with a different model. Q: Idea about projected advertising revenues going forward? What do you see your role as? Zuckerberg: As a private company we don’t share revenue numbers. I can tell you what we’ve shared so far. A couple of months ago everyone outside the company was underestimating our performance. We expect our rev growth to be greater than 70% year over year. We know that with our current rate of growth we’ll be cash flow positive some time in 2010. This relationship is purely cash buffer. Milner: *joke about joining management of Facebook* Says that he has his own business to run. Q: Can you talk about why Facebook is not interested in larger brand ads? Zuckerberg; We’re actually very interested in it. We’ve got a dedicated team, building out international offices. Sandberg: We’re working with the largest brands around the world. Our ads are specially designed for the Facebook environment, so they look and behave differently. Q: Quick question about the preference shares you’re issuing to DST. How similar are these to the ones Microsoft got in 2007? Zuckerberg; We’re not going to discuss the preference structure of the stock. I’m going to duck that one. Q: I was wondering if the $10 billion valuation includes any debt, and if the company carries any debt at all. Zuckerberg: This is an equity investment. There is some information that has been public about debt from equipment, but this is equity. Q: To be clear on this valuation. The $10 billion doesn’t refer to common stock. So how should we think of the valuation of Facebook itself. Zuckerberg: That’s really up to you. As a private company there’s not really a market for the shares. One of the reasons we haven’t been as focused on that. The common stock valuation would be different from this. Q: How many other suitors did you have? Did you line them up and pick from the highest bidder? Zuckerberg: There were multiple discussions, we were comfortable with DST, felt like I really learned a lot from my conversations with Yuri. Q: Is this the largest foreign investment in Facebook? Zuckerberg: There has been other information that has been available, but the size of those things haven’t been public. Q: There was buzz about Facebook working on a video chat feature, does this investment give you a little breathing room to focus on that kind of feature. Zuckerberg: We’re testing that currently. Don’t think the investment has much bearing on that. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Facebook Takes That $200 Million Investment From The Russians At A $10 Billion Valuation. Top
Facebook is taking that rumored $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment group. DST will take a 1.96 percent stake in the company, giving Facebook a $10 billion valuation. Facebook ultimately did not have to give up a board seat to DST in return for the cash. But DST is getting preferred shares for it’s $200 million. When Microsoft bought preferred shares , it valued Facebook at $15 billion. Since then the market has come way down and various valuations for Facebook have been thrown out between $4 billion to $6 billion. And recently, Facebook turned down an investment valuing the company at $8 billion, with the stipulation that the investor get a board seat. During a conference call today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg he confirmed that other investors had approached Facebook, saying: “It was really at our option to find someone we wanted to work with on our terms.” No doubt, part of the appeal of taking the Russian money was to set the company’s new valuation at something easier to stomach than what the common stock was going for in private sales. But this investment may affect the valuation of the common stock as well. Additionally, DST has the option to buy another $100 million worth of common stock from existing employees and investors. Although, during the conference call, the suggestion was made ( update : confirmed) that these are being treated as two different transactions with different valuations. Facebook announced a program last year to let employees sell some stock to private investors, but that program was put on hold. Facebook hopes to give some of its employees liquidity with this separate deal with DST, which it views as a long=term investor. Despite recent public statements from COO Sheryl Sandberg saying that Facebook does not need the money , it can certainly use the cash to fund its growing operations, including bandwidth, storage, and engineering costs. During a conference call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that the investment will give Facebook “a good cash cushion” and give the company more flexibility “for strategic options” (which is code fro acquisitions), although he also says the company has “no plans currently.” It is not clear that $200 million is enough to buy the company it really wants to buy ( Twitter! ). Zuckerberg adds: “This investment is purely buffer for us. It is not something we needed to get to cash flow positive.” He expects Facebook to be cash flow positive in 2010, and says the company has been EBITDA positive for five consecutive quarters, going on six. And what about an IPO? “It is not something we are thinking about right now, not something we are rushing towards,” claims Zuckerberg. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
When 1.3 Billion People Are Too Many Top
There's one big Web 2.0 question we'll never know the answer to: Could YouTube have survived on its own? There are a handful of industry-changing Web 2.0 names including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But unlike those other Web 2.0 behemoths who have the luxury of waiting out revenue challenges as their user base surges and the economy recovers, YouTube’s runaway success meant extremely high bandwidth costs and legal worries early on. It's one of the only companies in that list that should have sold early while the momentum was high. Evidence: Nearly three years after the acquisition, the mighty Google still hasn't figured out exactly how to monetize all those eyeballs either. Industry estimates say YouTube spends half a billion or more a year in bandwidth costs. That's not to say it was a bad acquisition, particularly considering Google's stock currency was tantamount to monopoly money back then. But you have to wonder, if YouTube were alive today, how much more would it have been forced to raise and at what terms? You can get an inkling by looking at the fortunes of a handful of Chinese equivalents: YouKu, Tudou, and 56.com. The three tell a lot about the Web in China. YouKu is based in Beijing, Tudou is based in Shanghai and 56.com is based in Guangzhou – and each is representative of the strengths of the region, according to several dozen interviews I did in China over the last two weeks. Situated at the nexus of Chinese startup culture and government influence, YouKu is widely credited as being the best at playing the startup game. Drawing off the Shanghai’s strength as a media hub, Tudou prizes self-expression as you can see by its Facebook-esque  employee-graffiti-ed walls (right). And like a lot of emerging Chinese tech powerhouses to come out of the Guangdong province, some say 56.com has the best sheer technology of the bunch. YouKu and Tudou both claim to be the largest, while 56.com suffered from a several week government closure last June . The three are also emblematic of the flood of US money trying to get a piece of China: Among others, General Catalyst and Granite Global Ventures invested in Tudou, Sutter Hill Ventures invested in YouKu and Sequoia Capital, Disney and Adobe backed 56.com. The three are also examples of the Chinese habit of taking something popular in the US and doing the China version. The temptation is to think ideas that worked in the U.S. plus the world’s largest Internet market equals closest thing you can get to a sure thing. But the so-called "China Factor" has been a mixed blessing for these sites. 56.com's closure is emblematic of the challenges these companies face sitting at the crossroads of a closed China and a (more) open China, as user generated video blurs the lines of media and information and video is a powerful way of telling a story. But that's not the only unique "China Factor" challenge. The sheer size of the world's largest Internet audience is sucking these companies’ coffers dry, as they work to do what YouTube couldn't in the less developed Chinese online advertising market. The companies are literally growing too fast for their own good. As a result the number of players in the market have shrunk from 200 pure-play video sites in 2007 to about ten in 2008 and only a handful today. Those numbers are according to Gary Wang, CEO of Tudou. (Pictured above.) It was the first to launch back in 2005 and in the first six months of business the site did half the video traffic in China. That terrified Wang and his co-founder Marc van der Chijs. Today, the site has to proactively throttle back the size of its pipeline, knowing full well it’s giving a lot of users a bad experience. But Wang doesn't have much of a choice. He's raised a whopping $85 million and doesn't want to tap the markets again until his revenues are break even, and while growing, they're not close now. It's a catch-22: More traffic could bring in more ad revenues, but the bandwidth costs would also be too crippling to prove out the model. "We could be five to ten times bigger if we wanted to," he says. "It's purely a financial decision." All the Chinese sites have some advantages over YouTube. Chinese Web surfers tolerate a lot of ads and bling online and, with more limited media options, they tend to watch clips for longer. That means they won't necessarily balk at pre-rolls. Tudou has five-second pre-rolls, and YouKu has 15-second pre-rolls. And while a lot of haters like to call the sites nothing more than havens for pirated content, that's not exactly verboten in China the way it is in the U.S., so there’s not the same legal threat for now. The battle may be going on half-way around the world, but it has all the makings of a Valley-LA grudge match. Most of the people I met in Shanghai argued why Tudou was stronger, while those in Beijing argued YouKu had the edge. A few even said that 56.com's tech advantage and content partners like Disney could make it a compelling dark horse. But all three should probably worry less about each other and more about someone winning. Because that's the big fear of most people who live in China and love the sites: That the fire hose of traffic kills them before online ads catch up. And then it's back to those pirated DVD shops for everyone. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Kindle Notes And Highlights Now Accessible On the Web Top
About a half hour ago, Amazon opened up a new feature on the Kindle: the ability to read your notes and highlights on the Web. Readers have always been able to make notes and highlight text on the Kindle itself. Now those annotations appear on your account at http://kindle.amazon.com . Once you sign in, you can see all your notes. While this opens up all sorts of possibilities, Amazon is taking a very conservative approach. You can’t share your notes with others. You can’t even edit them in your browser. All you can do is read them. That makes the feature little more than a Web archive of your notes and highlighted text snippets. It is a convenient feature, but why not enable sharing? Why can’t I share an excerpt with my friends on Facebook or Twitter (with the beginning of a quote and a short link)? Amazon needs to connect the Kindle to the rest of the Web. Hopefully, this is the first step in that direction. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
OpenX Keeps On Growing, Raises $10 Million More Top
We’ve talked about online ad server OpenX quite a bit in the past, and for good reason. The company, formerly known as Openads, is led by former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller (Chairman) and ex-Yahoo exec Tim Cadogan (CEO) and has in the past shown it’s serious about growing fast and making money in the process. More recently, we covered the launch of OpenX Market , an alternative online ad exchange platform operated by the Pasadena, CA-based company. Today, OpenX is announcing that it has raised a Series C venture capital round to the tune of $10 million, which brings the total of funding raised by the company to a healthy $30+ million . Worth noting is that the extra financing is coming from a new lead investor, which is increasingly rare in these troubled times: DAG Ventures led the round, with existing investors Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital and First Round Capital participating. Jonathan Miller, who recently was appointed as the new Chief Digital Officer of News Corp. also chipped in. OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan in a brief interview didn’t want to go into detail about the valuation of the company after this round, other than that he was pleased with it. He did say that there was still large part of the Series B round ($15.5 million, closed in December 2007) left on the company’s back accounts and that there was no real need for them to raise money, “which of course is always the best time to raise money”. Cadogan also told me the company is focused on making OpenX Market a success and to continuously add new publishers to its open ad technology platform Ad Server. To date, it has attracted over 38,000 publishers representing 150,000 websites for the latter, and Cadogan also informed me that Market has doubled since it launched a little over a month ago, with a current monthly run rate of over two billion impressions. More strong figures: OpenX claims that from December 2008 to April 2009, the monthly run rate of impressions for the OpenX Hosted product grew more than 500% to 7.5 billion impressions, with the number of sign-ups for the new product now exceeding 10,000 in six months since its debut on the market. (Disclosure: we use OpenX to power part of the ad serving here on the TechCrunch website) Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Nokia Ovi Store Launch Is A Complete Disaster Top
This was supposed to be a glorious day for mobile phone giant Nokia . The Finnish company got out-innovated by Apple a couple of years ago with the introduction and subsequent success of the iPhone and the iTunes App Store, and has been desperately trying to catch up with Cupertino’s disruptive initiatives ever since by launching a couple of new devices on one hand, and consolidating its software & services business on the other hand. Today sees the worldwide roll-out of Nokia’s Ovi Store , the company’s response to Apple’s App Store (and other centralized content stores for mobile phones and OS’es), and no doubt the company is watching the launch unfold on a global scale with watchful eyes. Here’s the thing: the launch is an utter disaster and I assume (hope) Nokia executives are outraged with the way things are going. Update: the Ovi team posted a response to the recurring problems, see below. Since I’ve seen the Nokia Ovi Store website come up a few hours ago, I’ve been trying to browse the selection of apps to select 10 that users should download to start off . I found that the store was down most of the time I was trying to snoop around, pages often didn’t load, and if they did they nearly always did extremely slowly. Despite the fact that I constantly needed to refresh and hope for pages to load, I figured that the service must be getting pounded from all the press it’s getting and was willing to forgive the slowness and regular downtime for the time being. But this has been going on for hours on end now, and there’s no sign of improvement. It gets worse. Out of the ten applications I recommended earlier today, three suddenly disappeared from the Ovi Store for no obvious reason. Searching for them yields no results, but they do pop up in the ‘related items’ section when you’re browsing alternative applications. Nokia offers no explanation why the content suddenly became unavailable, or if and when they will be back. Meanwhile, some apps are showing up twice (e.g. Qik ). The user experience sucks too. Navigating the online store is downright complicated, and the categories being assigned to certain applications and content are way off at times. Entering basic search queries (e.g. ‘games’) often leads to zero results or a freezing page. Publisher profiles sometimes have nothing but a poorly embedded logo, an extremely short description and no link to their own website (e.g. inTouch ). To add insult to injury, we hear people with an Ovi account are unable to use their credentials for logging on to the new service, but that they are being told that there’s already a profile with their username when they attempt to register for a new account. That means Nokia is basically blocking registered users from using its new service at this point. Update: All About Symbian lists more problems that need solving . I’ve contacted Nokia’s press services to give them a chance to respond and detail how heavy the load on their servers has been this morning, but the only conclusion I can make at this point is that the Ovi Store launch is a complete fail on Nokia’s part with a service being rushed out the door before it was ready for prime time. My advice to Nokia: tell us you’re open for business when you actually are. Update from the Ovi team: “Shortly after launching the Ovi Store at 2 am ET, we began experiencing extraordinarily high spikes of traffic that resulted in some performance issues for users accessing store.ovi.com and store.ovi.mobi. We immediately began to address this issue by adding servers, which resulted in intermittent performance improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused Ovi Store users and encourage you to continue giving us feedback as we develop the service further. The Ovi Store device client, however, has continued to perform very well and there were no reported issues from users logged on through that entry point.” Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Nokia's Ovi Store Opens For Business: 10 Must-Downloads To Kick Off Top
Nokia’s very own centralized application marketplace, dubbed Ovi Store , today officially made its way to the public arena as we expected . It will have to stand up and fight against other notable mobile content stores such as Apple’s App Store, Windows Mobile Marketplace and BlackBerry’s Application Center. Nokia is rolling out the app and content store globally (with credit card support), but currently reserves operator billing for customers in Australia, Singapore, Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, Ireland and the UK. Additional countries and languages will be added throughout the year, with AT&T planning to make Ovi Store available to its customers in the U.S. later this year. Nokia claims more than 50 of its mobile devices are compatible with the service as of today, with more slated to roll out over time, and estimates that around 50 million people with Nokia devices will be able to license content and download applications from the Ovi Store right now. The news is now completely out there and people are testing the service like crazy, which means it can be a little slow or downright unresponsive at times. Update: actually, the launch is a complete fail . We’ve browsed the online store extensively and hand-picked 10 applications we think you should download and install first. Note that the available content you can download depends on which device you’re using, we’ve selected the option ‘any phone’ to increase the chances of these being available for you as well: * Qik (Photo & video, free) - Ovi Store listing : a powerful way to share live video from your mobile phone with friends everywhere you go. MobileCrunch knew it was going to be one of the featured apps in the store back in March. * FlyScreen (News & Info, free)- Ovi Store listing : an application that lets you add your favorite web services (in widget form) to your phone's sleep screen, enabling zero-click access to the content you use most. * Photobucket (Photo & video) - Ovi Store listing : lets you log in to your Photobucket account, upload photos from your phone to your album and search its public repository of photos. * Flight Info (News & Info, free) - Ovi Store listing : key in any airline code and flight number and track terminal, departing and arrival information. * Assassin’s Creed (Games) - Ovi Store listing : end the Third Crusade from your mobile phone. Update: seems to have disappeared from the store somehow. Alternative: Wolverine (€5). * Twittix (Social Networks, €1) - Ovi Store listing : Yup, it’s a mobile client for Twitter. * MobiSystems OfficeSuite 5 (Business, €20) - Ovi Store listing : OfficeSuite is a complete mobile office solution, allowing you to create, view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files away from your office. Support MS Office 2007 files. * RISK (Games, €5) - Ovi Store listing : Enjoy the classic board game playing against up to five cunning computer opponents, each with distinctive tactics and unique levels of aggression. * AP News (News & Info, free) - Ovi Store listing : Yes, we know, it’s AP, but this app does give you a good overview of breaking news and photo galleries to boot. * World Traveler (Utilities) - Ovi Store listing : allows travelers to plan and manage journey activities and provides instant access to relevant information and services. Update: seems to have disappeared from the store somehow. Alternative: WorldMate 2009 (free). Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Twitter May Not "Transform Television," But Its Jump Is Interesting Top
When news broke earlier that Twitter was working with some Hollywood types to develop a television series , the web nearly imploded on itself. Some assumed that the show would be about the people behind the scenes at Twitter, some thought they may have a chance to be on television because they use Twitter, some were outraged that Twitter would make a TV show rather than improving their own service, some thought it was Twitter openly endorsing the stalking of celebrities, most thought it was odd, to say the least. So Twitter co-founder Biz Stone weighed in to clarify a bit. It’s simple really: Twitter has signed an agreement with a production company to allow them to develop a show based around the service. Stone was vague when it comes to specifics, but it reads like Twitter will have little if anything to do with the show, and really will just lend its name and likeness (perhaps even in the title). It’s similar to what the company has done in the past with Current (for Hack the Debate) and CNN (for its various shows that heavily use the service). And it’s similar to other projects that are in the works with a few other networks. But it’s still quite interesting for a few reasons. First, from what Stone wrote, it sounds like Twitter hopes this will be the first of many shows built around the service. That’s interesting because it’s an extension of Twitter’s goal to be a powerful new platform. It already is one on the web, but that’s now expanding into different mediums, like television. And that’s notable because you don’t see many other startups — or even big web companies — make that jump. While the service has seen extreme growth in recent months, Twitter is still nowhere near the size of something like Facebook in terms of users (200+ million versus maybe 30 some million ). But services such as that, or even Google, aren’t dictating the content of shows the way Twitter is now doing. Sure, these other services pop up on television shows from time to time to make cameos — and yes, there is a movie about Facebook in the works — but Twitter is a springboard which shows are being built around . That’s a notable difference. Second, one would assume that Twitter stands to benefit financially from such television deals. While it won’t be Twitter’s ultimate business-model, if a network were to pick up any Twitter show, the revenue split with Twitter would undoubtedly be more substantial than say, a partnership with a third-party website built on top of Twitter. Third, this movement of Twitter into the entertainment sphere, does raise some interesting questions about Twitter versus TWiT (This Week In Tech), Leo Laporte’s popular video and podcasting network. This has been an issue in the past, but died down because ultimately TWiT and Twitter were in two different games. But if Twitter enters Laporte’s world, he may be moved to respond with his trademarks, as he noted yesterday . “ Twitter’s open approach might have the power to transform television—the dominant communications receiver worldwide ,” Stone said of the news. That reads a bit arrogant, or at the very least presumptuous, and while it would be easy to immediately dismiss such a comment, it does speak to Twitter’s potential power as a platform. Because the service hasn’t yet bloated itself with the bells and whistles that other services have, and has stayed mostly true to its quick, mobile usage roots, it could be the one startup that is able to break out of the web service stigma. Yes, plenty of services have “mainstream” usage now, but those are still considered web properties that regular people just happen to use. We may not like to admit it, but it’s still just not considered very cool to use any of these services rather than say, actually meeting up with a group of friends in person. But we’re moving to a world where not only will using these services move beyond seeming like something that geeks do, but where you don’t even think about the notion of a “web service” or being “offline.” An ascension of Twitter into entertainment could hasten that. I’m not saying that it will — hell, the Twitter show could absolutely suck — but I am saying that no one is developing television shows entirely around Facebook. It brings me back to perhaps my favorite scene from the television show Mad Men . While setting up his presentation for Kodak’s new Carousel slide projector, Don Draper says, “ Technology is a glittering lure. But there’s the rare occassion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product. ” For an increasing number of us, Twitter is starting to fall into that category. Whether the larger public can be engaged in the same way, remains to be seen. For now, it remains a glittering lure. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Smashwords Launches Flexible Ebook Affiliate Program Top
Smashwords , an online Ebook store for independent authors and their publishers, is launching a new affiliate program that will allow external sites to generate revenue by linking to Ebooks that are being sold on the Smashwords store. Affiliate programs for bookstores are nothing new. Typically online publishers will link to a book and will get a cut of the proceeds if the store linked to makes a sale within a certain timeframe. But the emergence of Ebooks is changing the landscape. Amazon, which has built up its affiliate program for traditional books over the last decade, does not give affiliate publishers any portion of the purchase price if a visitor winds up buying an electronic book. Smashwords is looking to capitalize on this omission by offering web publishers an alternative. The Smashwords affiliate program is offering commissions of 11% of the net selling price (the sale price less any PayPal fees) for all of its online books (authors can optionally opt out if they’d like). And the store is giving authors and publishers the ability to control how much of a commission they’d like to offer above that 11% - so an author could bump it up to 50% or 80% if they were willing to exchange revenue for increased exposure. You can find the full details of the program here . Smashwords launched a year ago, and has grown to offer 1,300 Ebooks primarily from independent authors, though some small publishers are beginning to sign on as well. All of the content sold is DRM-free (you can read it on your computer, or devices like the Kindle) and authors receive 85% of the net proceeds of any Ebooks that they sell. Other players in this space include Fictionwise and Scribd , which just launched its online store, though neither of these offer an affiliate program. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
RT: @Microsyntax Sets Out To Make Sense Of #twittergrammar Top
One of the side effects of Twitter’s 140-character limitation is that users are coming up with their own microsyntax and abbreviated Twitter grammar to make their Tweets more expressive. If your are merely retweeting someone else’s tweet, for example, you acknowledge that by placing a “RT” at the beginning of your micro-message. If you are replying publicly to another user or just referring to them, you indicate that with an “@username.” You can even add hashtags to a tweet so that it shows up in searches for specific topics (please use “#twittergrammar” if you are going to RT this post). New conventions pop up every day. To make sense of them, and develop new ones, Stowe Boyd is launching Microsyntax.org tomorrow. In a debut blog post , he insists that it is not a “standards body,” but that is effectively what it might become. And we need one, because Twitter isn’t setting any standards. You can follow @microsyntax to keep on top of the latest Twitter lingo. Microsyntax is not just about coming up with commonly used abbreviations. It is also the way that structure can be added to the mess that is Twitter today. Hashtags, for instance, lets you find all tweets about a particular subject or event. We probably need more microtags for different purposes. The problem with the microsyntax approach, however, is that it appeals mostly to the command-line crowd instead of to the average user. Nevertheless, if a microconvention becomes popular enough, then Twitter itself can adopt it, as it has with the @replies (although it has messed that up by mixing in retweets that simply mention your name and aren’t truly replies, but I digress). What’s your favorite microslang and what do we need to add to the microlexicon? Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
300 Things I'd Like To See From Twitter Before A TV Show Top
It’s not a bad joke, Twitter is apparently somehow involved in a new TV show . Among other things, this earns it our rarely used “WTF” in sign language image. Twitter has not yet responded to an email, but investor Fred Wilson seems to think it’s a good idea, saying “TV isn't TV anymore. It's just the largest screen in the house.” So we’ll wait for more details of the show to surface before we write the inevitable blog post trashing the idea ( update: details! ). In the meantime, Twitter, as a heavy user there are a nearly unlimited number of things I’d so much rather you guys spend your time on than going Hollywood. Here’s a few key ones, I’m guess lots more will show up in the comments and we’ll get to at least 300 or so things Twitter could better spend its time. Keep The Lights On. Twitter is still not a stable service . Fix Track. This is the “Google Alerts” feature of Twitter that made a brief appearance in 2007 but was stripped out in the uptime wars of 2008. It may have made sense to remove it at the time, but we’re long past due on this much needed feature. Fix Search. Twitter’s main value is as a search engine , and it’s pretty broken . There’s lots of work to do here. Stop Breaking Stuff. Twitter just doesn’t seem to feel comfortable in its own skin, making changes to suit the masses that are just confusing and need to be reversed. Fix Private Messages. Twitter’s direct messages (private messages) has occasional hiccups. Sometimes they are mis-delivered , as in they go to the wrong person. That just can’t happen. Maybe Launch Some Features. Twitter is so concerned with uptime that they rarely (never) launch new features. Sites like FriendFeed are embarrasing them with innovation, and others like Facebook are copying the core Twitter service. I get that uptime is important, but if you have time for meetings in Hollywood, you have time to add new features. Spend that time interviewing new engineers at the very least. You need more people badly. Ok, that’s six. Let me know what you’d like to see Twitter do before working on a television show in the comments, and we’ll add the smartest and most entertaining to the main post. Update: Some of the better suggestions from comments: Groups/Friend List — @zee and @blackrabbit Increased/No limit for API requests — Sam Houston and Jeff “A business model.” — @robinwauters Spam filtering — Sean Percival Integration with Steam — @carltonprest 30-second edit window — @Sheamus Analytics — @MiikoMentz iTunes Genius-like recommendations engine — Wesley Barrow Auto-linking of hashtags — @silvaldropout Threaded conversations — jcunwired Some of the suggestions were a bit more amusing: “surrendering to FF” — Johnny Schroepfer “Limit the amount of followers a cat can have to 499,999.” — @robinwauters “Gonorrhea - something I'd like to see before a Twitter TV show.” — Dante “A phone number where I can short the stock of the TV network that plans to air this show.” — swag “I'd like to see Twitter allow people to order cheesecakes by tweeting @twittercakes, before I would like them be involved with a TV show.” — @chacha102 CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Viralheat Measures And Analyzes Real-Time Content On Twitter, YouTube And More Top
As YouTube and Twitter have become essential marketing tools for brands and companies, there has been an emergence of startups that help marketers track the buzz around a certain individual or brand. Radian6, Visible Measures, Omgili, Omniture and a plethora of others offer tools to monitor blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites for mentions of a company or individual’s name. Startup Viralheat is entering this space with the private beta launch of its affordable social media measurement product that scours social video sites including YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo, and Twitter to deliver real-time results of consumer generated content on these sites. Viralheat allows you to create profiles to track an individual’s name or a company’s name across nearly 30 video sites and Twitter. The platform’s Twitter tool provides data on how many total mentions an item had on Twitter for the week and for the given day, the most active Twitter user who has Tweet about a brand, the most common language of Tweets, percentage of Tweets about a brand that are Retweets, the most active day of the week for mention of a brand and a sentiment breakdown of Tweets. For example, a profile created for “Obama” shows there were just over 7,000 tweets today including the name “Obama,” and over 32,000 total Tweets this week. The service also provides a graph of the number of Tweets over the past week and shows the most recent Tweets about the item updated in real-time, which you can Tweet out directly from Viralheat’s platform or email to others. The video tool will filter the breakdown of a brand or individual over video sites, letting you know how many mentions were made over each video platform. The video dashboard will let you know what the most popular video was, how many videos were found with a certain brand or name in a given week, the average number of video downloads per day and how many total views the videos received in a week. Similar to the Viralheat’s twitter feed, the site pulls in a real-time feed of the videos and allows you to email or tweet links to the videos directly from the platform. Any data from the Twitter and video dashboards can be exported directly into PDF files or Excel spreadsheets, making it easy for marketers to share this data with others. Viralheat also lets users share a snapshot their profiles of brands, trends, individuals, etc. with the public. Under a trends page, anyone can see the performance of profiles of brands or individuals broken down by subject (politics, sports, movies, television). Viralheat’s service could be a cost-effective and user-friendly way to view social metrics data from Twitter and video sites. And the price for the tool is easy on the wallet—for $10 per month, you can track 10 profiles on the site. For $40 per month, you can track 50 profiles. There’s no doubt that tracking Twitter is useful to companies and brands, but Viralheat’s reach is currently limited. One major drawback is that the site doesn’t allow you to track other social networks where brands are commonly mentioned, such as blogs, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Flickr. The startup says that it has plans to incorporate blogs, sites and social networks into its dashboard over the next few months and will not be planning to change its pricing structure when these services are added. Viralheat also plans to add an app store-like marketplace where users can add extra tracking items, such has the ability to track top keyword searches and tags for a profile. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
The App Store Hype Gets A Dose Of Reality Top
Yesterday developer Rick Strom wrote a blog posted titled “ The Incredible App Store Hype “, in which he detailed some of the revenue stats he was seeing from the iPhone applications that he had released (some of which rank on the App Store’s top apps lists), and what other developers could expect to make accordingly. His conclusion? That most of the 36,000 applications on the App Store aren’t selling at all - for many apps, most days go by without a single sale. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. As marketplaces go, the App Store has a very low barrier to entry that makes it easy for anyone to sell their wares, which means that it’s flooded with apps. There’s no way Apple could prominently present these 36,000 applications to users without overwhelming them, which means most apps fall into obscurity as soon as they’re submitted. If you can’t find a way to get the word out, nobody is going to find your app on their own. Now, as someone who regularly likes to cover the success stories of the App Store, I thought this would have been fairly obvious to other developers and have thus failed to insert disclaimers that these cases were not typical results. But the fact that Strom’s post was written seems to indicate that perhaps we need to make this a bit clearer. So here goes: The App Store probably will not make you rich. To underscore the point, let’s go over some of the stats presented by Strom. His application Zen Jar ranks #34 on the Social Networking top apps list. And while most of us would probably assume it would take at least a hundred daily downloads to place there, the reality is quite surprising: Zen Jar reached the 34th position with only 30-35 downloads a day (or around $20 a day for a 99 cent app). Similarly, Sprint Board Pro , which ranked 95th in the Board Games section of the store with 6-8 daily downloads. Granted, these aren’t exactly the most popular categories, but If it takes fewer than 10 downloads a day to make the top 100 bestsellers of any category, that’s saying something. Strom likens the App Store to a lottery, with the time and cost spent developing your application as the price of admission. And I think he’s right in this respect. The thing is, I don’t really see how this differs from many professions where the rich and elite are given heavy media coverage while everyone else toils away in obscurity. This is true for the entire entertainment business, where actors train for years just so they can vie for a limited number of spots. Most writers struggle to have their books published, let alone see them become popular. Basically any job that has the potential to make you rich is going to require a combination of hard work, talent, and luck. Those with lower barriers to entry will see huge amounts of competition. There’s a reason everyone isn’t wealthy. Strom writes that software entrepreneurs frequently use the “huge successes” of a market to gauge its potential, rather than looking at the average outcome. I think this may be true for some of them, just as some would-be actors venture to Hollywood with the expectation of simply jumping into the spotlight only to find themselves waiting tables at a diner. But I think that most developers understand the risks involved, and how unlikely it is that their app will hit the big time. The same can be said for most of the web entrepreneurs I meet. They may invest many months or years into their work, but they know that the vast majority of new online ventures are bound to fail. So for all of you iPhone developers who are new to these somewhat discouraging facts of life, I’m sorry if I (and the media as a whole) have failed to underscore the low probability of striking it rich on the App Store. To those of you who keep building things anyway: rock on. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
LogLogic Raises $8.8 Million for IT Security Management Service Top
LogLogic, a security and log management firm that helps companies sort though log data and manage their IT systems, has raised $8.8 million in an extended series D round of funding, led by Focus Ventures with Sequoia Capital, Telesoft Partners, Worldview Technology Partners, INVESCO Private Capital, SAP Ventures, CM-CIC Private Equity, Crédit Agricole Private Equity and ELAIA Partners participating. This brings LogLogic’s total funding to $58 million. LogLogic plans to use the financing to fuel growth into new markets, including database activity monitoring. LogLogic recently acquired security management company, Exaprotect, for an undisclosed amount. LogLogic offers companies a suite of software products that helps IT departments make sense of logs of IT audits, compliance, threats, and other operational data. Competitors in the secerity management space include RSA, IBM and ArcSight. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Twitter Heads To Hollywood, Plans To Develop TV Show Top
Twitter is crossing mediums to develop a TV show, according to a Variety report. Joining forces with LA-based production companies Reveille Productions and Brillstein Entertainment Partners, Twitter plans to launch an unscripted show that will put “ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format.” Variety says the show’s concept was the brainchild of novelist Amy Ephron. Founded by NBC Entertainment exec Ben Silverman, Reveille Productions is known for producing TV hits like ABC’s Ugly Betty and NBC’s The Office. The company was apparently bought by Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine Productions in February 2008 for $125 million. Update: Tell us what you’d rather see Twitter work on before a TV show . (Photo credit: Flickr/ Vlastula ) Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Connect Your Thoughts To The Mindex With Imindi (Private Beta Invites) Top
What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger. Adam Lindemann learned that the hard way with iMindi , a startup trying to create a “thought engine” that was skewered by our judges at last year’s TechCrunch50. “It almost destroyed us,” says Lindemann. But he and his team have completely redesigned the product, which creates a mind map of your thoughts based on semantic indexing technology, and lets you “merge” those thought maps with related ones created by other people. It is still rough around the edges, but is a vast improvement over the original concept. Today, iMindi is launching in private beta, and we have 1,000 invites for TechCrunch readers ( sign up here ). The drubbing iMindi received at TechCrunch50 last year was brutal. After Lindemann’s presentation (see video below), Mark Cuban, who was a judge, laid into him: Maybe I'm missing something, but that just sounded like the biggest bunch of bullshit I've ever heard in my life. You want millions of people to create a virtual decision tree, and create a virtual mind meld, and then get advertisers to mine the virtual mind meld. Why would you want to invest the time? Lindemann and his co-founder Galen Kaufman were devastated. Investors wanted to pull out. “It was a complete disaster,” says Lindemann, “but it was the best thing that could have happened because they were essentially right. If we would have launched in September, we would have failed.” The main problem with the original design was that users were expected to manually connect their thought maps to other people’s thought maps. It was very labor intensive, and it wasn’t clear why anyone would invest the time. There are still some UI issues, but the connections are now automated, and it is easier to dump in data from other places on the Web. Let me take a step back and explain what iMindi is today and what it hopes to become. When you create an account, you are encouraged to sign up for different “think tanks,” which are topic areas of interest. These include “Innovation & Technology,” “Wealth and Finance,” Fashion and Style,”"Travel and Adventure,” Sports,” “Pregnancy and Parenting,” and “Mind, Spirit, and Religion.” You can create your own think tank topics. Once you’ve signed up for a few think tanks, you are ready to enter your “thoughts” on that topic. You can enter your thoughts directly, just like writing a blog post. Or you can cut and paste from blogs, articles, or other sources on the Web. (Soon it will be possible to ingest your existing thought stream from other sources, such as an RSS feed from your blog or your Twitter feed). Once you you are done entering your thought, iMindi runs it through its semantic index and creates tags for all the major concepts it recognizes. The concepts are hyperlinked in your post and presented as a thought map below. Clicking on any concept reveals other entries you have made with the same semantic tags. If they are truly related, you can “merge” the two thoughts and they will be connected on the mind map. iMindi is still hit or miss in identifying and mapping the right concepts. For instance, I entered a post I wrote called “Jump Into The Stream” and it produced the mind map at right. It correctly identified the people mentioned in the post, a date, and the fact that the “stream” is a “metaphor” for information consumption related to another metaphor, “the page.” But other than “Yahoo” and “Google,” it failed to identify any of the smaller companies at the center of redefining teh Web in terms of information streams (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.). So its semantic index needs to get better, but it would be easy for iMindi to allow users to add their own tags or edit existing maps. Where this becomes interesting is that you can also find other people whose posts/thoughts have created the same semantic tags, and merge your mind map with theirs. In this way, iMindi hopes to help you find like-minded people. Once you do find them, you can follow them and their thoughts in the think tanks where your interests overlap. The more people who merge their maps with yours, the greater your “mind rank.” You also can see everyone’s thoughts in a particular think tank as a stream when you explore that think tank. In this sense, iMindi shares an approach with Twine , which is also powered by a semantic index and lets you follow other people’s interest feeds. Twine is much better funded and at a more mature stage of development . (Twine’s parent company, Radar Networks, has raised $18 million, whereas iMindi was built with only $500,000 so far). But iMindi’s focus on creating these mind melds is promising. We are increasingly drowning in people’s thought streams already (Twitter, Facebook, FreindFeed, you name it). iMindi today is still too much work. But if it follows through and lets you actually ingest these thought streams you are already creating and following elsewhere, it could be a valuable filter. Imagine being able to map your entire Twitter stream, or the streams of individuals you are following, or just individual Tweets, and mapping those across time. Putting a semantic layer on top of Twitter, or any stream of content is a powerful way to explore related thoughts and concepts. The mind map connects related thoughts not by links, but by analyzing the underlying language used to express those thoughts. In a world of ever-larger information streams, we need better ways to navigate those streams. Semantic mind maps could be one way. iMindi still has a lot of work to do before we get there. It needs to remove steps from the way it lets you create “thoughts” and link to other thoughts. Personally, I’d lose the think tanks concept or put it into the background. Right now, if you don’t look in the right think tank, you might miss a related thought if somebody entered it into another category. iMindi needs to let its thought engine do even more of the work in connecting thoughts together, or at least exposing them to users. Lindemann is aware of these limitations, and is keeping an open mind about how to make iMindi work. Sign up for the beta and give him your thoughts. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Farkie Lets You Download YouTube Videos, MySpace Playlists And Much More Top
Farkie is a free online tool that lets you extract and download multimedia content from websites and social networking services, including videos from YouTube and MP3 files from MySpace playlists. The web-based file downloader has been in public beta for about two months now, works without the need to register and is easy as pie. All you need to do is copy-paste e.g. a public YouTube video URL, and Farkie will offer the video file to you in a variety of formats (MP3, AVI, WMV, WAV MOV or FLV). I converted the video of Susan Boyle’s performance in the semi-finals of Britain’s Got Talent and was able to download it in just a matter of minutes, albeit with a bit of quality loss. Firefox users can install an add-on that will dock a toolbar with which you can easily download videos by merely inserting the public URL and hitting a button. Likewise, by entering the URL to a public MySpace profile into Farkie and clicking download, you can easily extract the playlist from the page and display all of the songs found in the list, ready for download in MP3 format. You can also use Farkie to download scripts, stylesheets and images from any website, or to scrape Flash games from the multitude of online gaming sites out there. While this tool can come in handy quite a lot, I’m pretty sure some people - particularly at Google and MySpace - are not going to be happy with it. YouTube, for example, has in the past made it clear that it intends to crack down on services that allow for video downloads from the site - we should know -, especially now that it’s rolling out a video program of their own along with several of its partners. Enjoy Farkie while it lasts. Or check out similar services like File2HD.com as an alternative. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Russian Investment Firm Poking Facebook For Board Seat Top
When the WSJ broke the story about Russian tech investment group Digital Sky Technologies looking to buy a stake in Facebook for $200 million - a deal that would value the private company at $10 billion in preferred stock - there was still some uncertainty about whether the firm was gunning for a seat on Facebook’s board of directors as part of the investment offer, of if they’d be happy with just purchasing equity. This is important, because we know Facebook recently received a term sheet for a similar venture round of funding at a lower valuation ($8 billion) which was turned down because it was based on the requirement of a board seat. By now, everybody knows well that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is quite serious about retaining control over Facebook’s board of directors and hence that the requirement of a seat is a touchy subject for any new firm looking to buy a piece of Facebook. Now it seems that the investment proposal Digital Sky Technologies (DST) made to Facebook did in fact also require a board seat for its founding partner Yuri Milner , President of DST Advisors. It’s speculated that this would ease the path for DST to merge some of its social networking properties, which include Mail.ru, Odnoklassniki.ru, Nasza-Klasa.pl and particularly vKontakte.ru (a popular social network for Russian speakers with almost 35 million registered users and ironically, a Facebook copycat) with Facebook at some point in the future. We’ve contacted both DST and Facebook for comment. It’s important to note that it is still unclear whether Facebook has made any decisions around accepting or rejecting the investment offer made by DST, or even if it has already responded to its outreach in any way. But if the company ends up accepting the financing offer, we’ll know what how much the company values a board seat at: $2 billion. (Source: Russian business newspaper Kommersant , via Quintura Blog ) Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Exclusive: Everything There Is To Know About Nokia's Next Tablet Top
Move over, Nokia N97 . Your bigger, badder, unannounced brother is on the way - and one of our sources at Nokia has just clued us in on all of the details, from worldwide launch targets to hardware specs. Nokia's next tablet device is designed in the same vein as their N810, albeit significantly more polished. Though it doesn't appear to have an official name as of yet, it's referred to internally as "N900″, "Rover", or "Maemo Flagship". We'll be referring to this device as the N900 for the rest of this post, though it's quite possible that this name will change. Read the rest of this post >> Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Sonic The Hedgehog Races Onto The iPhone. But Do Its Fake Buttons Slow Him Down? Top
The iPhone is quickly becoming the platform of choice for nostalgia-inspiring classic games, with releases like Myst and Wolfenstein now landing on a regular basis. The latest addition, and the one that may strike closest to home for those console gamers of the early 90’s, is Sonic The Hedgehog. The game is now available for a reasonable $5.99, and you can download it here . Now, I’d consider myself a pretty experienced gamer, and there are few games that I feel more attached to than the original Sonic the Hedgehog series. At a time when most popular games consisted of hopping and bopping on enemy baddies at a leisurely pace, Sonic brought something new to the table: speed . Sonic could race across the screen at a breakneck rate, clearing entire levels in under a minute or two (if you knew what you were doing), with the framerate keeping up the whole way. And he had an edgier attitude to boot, making him substantially cooler than the colorful plumbers representing that other gaming company. So does the iPhone edition do justice to its console predecessor? To be honest, I was ready to bash the game when I first saw it. I’m not a fan of the control scheme some developers are adopting to port these classic games, which typically consists of a virtual joypad in the bottom left hand corner of the screen with a few virtual buttons on the right side. Visually the buttons successully mimic the gamepads of yore, but they lack any tactile feedback at all, which gets frustrating when you’re trying to dodge bullets or leap from cliffs and you accidentally hit the wrong button. Fortunately, Sonic doesn’t suffer too badly. Make no mistake, the controls are far from perfect, and I’d prefer a gamepad to a glass screen any day, but Sonic’s simplicity keeps it mostly playable. This is primarily because the vast majority of the time you’re going to be holding down the right arrow button, with occasional quick taps to the left, so your thumb doesn’t have to do much hunting. But while the controls are acceptable, the game suffers badly from lag - an oddity given that Sonic was originally supposed to show how fast the Genesis was. It’s unclear if this is something that could be fixed with a software update or if the iPhone’s RAM and CPU simply can’t keep up with the blue hedgehog, but the gameplay definitely suffers. I found myself plummeting onto deadly spikes far more often than I should have been, and I’d like to think most of those falls weren’t due to rusty thumbs. In any case, I think the game is worth a download, particuarly if you were a fan of the original. That said, I’m hoping that if Sonic is a hit for Sega, developers don’t take it as an indication that they should be porting every game in their archive with this virtual joypad setup. Because frankly, it often stinks, and is only passable in this case because of Sonic’s basic control scheme. Sega has apparently built an iPhone emulator using the joypad that would allow them to pump out these games at a rapid fire pace, and at this point I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Fortunately the iPhone 3.0 software update will allow for the release of actual joypads that can plug into the phone, which would make it a device that could really do these classics justice. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 

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