Monday, May 18, 2009

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Nokia Tinkering With An Ad-Supported Mobile OS Top
If your carrier offered to take a hefty chunk of change off the cost of a mobile handset be it that you let them put advertisements on the home screen, would you take the deal? Nokia thinks you might. Our source deep within Nokia’s headquarters has just leaked us a bunch of information about the company’s future operating system release, Maemo “Harmattan”. It’s jam-packed full of unexpected twists, including their new-found love for home screen ads. Read the rest of this entry >> Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Microsoft Says Silverlight Installed More Than Firefox, Safari and Chrome — Combined Top
Microsoft’s Silverlight product is most directly a competitor of Adobe Flash. But that’s not who they’re calling out in some data they sent our way today. Instead, the company (or at least their PR firm) is noting that with 300 million installs of Silverlight 2, the platform is installed on more machines around the world than the web browsers Firefox, Safari and Chrome — combined. Damn. Them fightin’ words. Of course, that also not-so-subtly speaks to Microsoft’s own web browser, Internet Explorer, being by far the biggest in the world — despite falling market share . But it’s a bit odd for Microsoft to call all those other browsers out since Silverlight not only works on all of them, but to some extent needs them, if it’s to survive. What’s impressive in Silverlight’s big install number is that it’s just for version 2, which was only released about 6 months ago. That was undoubtedly thanks largely to a few huge events that used the Silverlight platform to stream on the web recently: notably, March Madness and President Obama’s Inauguration. And Microsoft is going to need those kind of deals if it’s going to be able to compete with its aforementioned real competitor: Flash, which has something ridiculous like a 99% adoption rate on U.S. web-connected computers. One of those big partnerships for Silverlight was Major League Baseball’s MLB.com live-streaming service. But back in November, the league announced it would drop Silverlight in favor of Flash. The stated reason was the Flash performs better, though specifics weren’t given. Since that time however, Microsoft has released the beta version of Silverlight 3 and even won an Emmy for the Olympics coverage last summer. Microsoft estimates that some 300,000 developers and designers are working on the Silverlight platform. But it’s still going to be about big time partnerships in getting people people to use it instead of, or at least along with Flash. I fall into that latter category for that very reason. I have Silverlight on my computer simply to be able to stream Netflix movies. That’s a huge partnership for the platform, and one that isn’t likely to go away considering that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is on Microsoft’s board of directors. Microsoft recently revamped its Silverlight blog and is looking for feedback on it. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Facebook Becomes Largest OpenID Relying Party Top
OpenID is getting a big boost today as Facebook goes live with its support as a relying party for the standard. It’s a major win for OpenID, which has long had to deal with major companies only half-heartedly embracing the standard, sometimes announcing support to reap the press coverage only to let the effort languish for many months. Facebook announced its intended support of OpenID in April, and less than a month later they’ve delivered. So what changes for users? You’ll now be able to link your Facebook account with your Gmail account, along with those from other OpenID providers. This means that if you’ve logged in to Gmail to check your messages, and you pop over to Facebook, you won’t have to sign in with your Facebook username - you’ll already be logged in. New Facebook members will also be able to register with their Gmail accounts. Now, Facebook isn’t the first major company to hop on board the OpenID movement - we’ve seen announcements from Google, Microsoft, and a bevy of others. But for the most part these are only signing on as “issuing parties”, which means they’ll let you log in with their accounts on other OpenID supporting sites. But they’re not “relying parties”, which means that they won’t accept OpenID logins created through other services. In other words, Google is happy to let you use your Gmail account to log in to Facebook, but you can’t use your OpenID-enabled Microsoft ID to login to a Google service. Depending on how much Facebook promotes the new feature, it could help OpenID get broader recognition than it currently has (most people have no idea what it is, and many of us who do still find it more than a little confusing). But even if it does see wide use on Facebook, don’t expect big players like Google or Yahoo to follow suit and become relying parties any time soon. Facebook has really been a relying party since its inception - there’s never been a “Facebook ID” because you’ve always used your university Email (or more recently, your personal Email) to log in. So the site isn’t really sacrificing anything by enabling OpenID support. The likes of Google and Microsoft have build many services tied to their own proprietary accounts, and they’re going to be far more hesitant to give those up. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
VoxPop.TV Raises $1.5 Million For Pop Culture Games Top
VoxPop.TV, a San Francisco-based startup that creates embeddable pop culture contextual games for publishers like Entertainment Weekly, E! Online , and Maxim, has raised $1.5 million in Series B funding led by Hearst Interactive Media, with original investor True Ventures participating. VoxPop raised $2 million in Series A funding from True Ventures in 2007. VoxPop will use the additional funding to drive additional product development of its gaming platform. VoxPop’s games, which are often created specifically for publishers and are ad-supported, are based on opinions and predictions on topics and current events (like the Oscars or the Grammy awards). Games range from an E! Online game on what celebrity wore the best outfit to an awards show to picking brackets for March Madness at NCAA.com. VoxPop has also turned its pop culture games into free, shareable widgets for anyone to post on a blog, social networking site or website. Users can even create a "game lobby" of sorts by adding multiple games to a page. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Apple Begins Stress Testing Push Notification Servers Top
And so it begins. With WWDC and presumably the release of iPhone OS 3.0 just around the corner, Apple has deemed it time to begin stress-testing their Push Notification servers. We just received a letter from a (very) trusted source, in which Apple invited them to download a pre-release version of the Associated Press iPhone application, specifically tuned to make a high number of background push requests. Upon adding the application, an iPhone-wide “Notifications” toggle is added to the iPhone OS 3.0 Settings screen, along with the option to toggle Notifications on an app-by-app basis. Screenshots and the full text of the letter available after the jump. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
The IAB Sets Some Standards For Social Ads Top
Editor’s note : Nick Gonzalez is a Director of Marketing at SocialMedia.com , which makes "People Powered Ad" products. Before the advent of ad standards from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the online advertising world was fragmented between any number of display formats. When the IAB launched IAB standards in 1996, an agency could buy media across numerous properties without adjusting the creative. Buying online media became more efficient. Importantly, it freed up advertisers to focus around the message and not the format of the advertisement. Today, the IAB has once again stepped in to help bring clear standards to online advertising with a new set of best practices for social media advertising. It's a welcome change because advertising has been far behind the consumer space with respect to implementing the kinds of social functionality that has made social media properties like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook so popular. As part of a company that makes social ads, I'm excited that the IAB has released a new set of social advertising best practices to help bring consistency to the marketplace, similar to the way IAB standards brought efficiency to online advertising back in the 90’s. The best practices, which were announced at a conference today, include definitions of social ad elements, examples of social ads, recommendations for consumer opt-in, and guidelines for privacy standards . The IAB defines a social ad as: An online ad that incorporates user interactions that the consumer has agreed to display and be shared. The resulting ad displays these interactions along with the user's persona (picture and/or name) within the ad content. The ingredients of a social ad can include profile data, social targeting (by encouraging people to pass ads along to their friends), and social interactions within the ad itself, such as sharing or commenting. The IAB’s guidelines are clear that consumers should have control over what data is shared with their friends, in what context, and that social ads should be explicitly opt-in, with the option to opt out at any time: Since it is essential for social ads to be trusted in order to achieve broad adoption, it is important for consumers to have visibility and control of what can be shared with their social connections The standards were developed as part of a 151-company committee with 218 members (yup, that was fun) including MySpace, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, SocialMedia.com, CBS, Accenture, PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLC, Condé Nast Digital, IDG Entertainment, and Nielsen Online. You can see one of the many example ads above, and the entire document embedded below. Social Media Ad Standards - Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Gnip Adds Facebook Data To Its API Mashup Top
Gnip, a platform that helps move data around from one social network to the next, is now integrated with Facebook so that the platform can access data via Facebook’s recently launched open API stream. Gnip lets data-consuming services like Plaxo that take data from other services (like Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, etc.) collect data from requested users pushed to them. Data consuming services are no longer required to build pollers for any of the publishers pushing data into Gnip, they just give Gnip an endpoint and they push the data to them in real time. With Gnip’s Facebook integration, developers and data collectors can choose the specific Facebook users from among those that have authorized their applications and then Gnip will immediately begin collecting the relevant data, normalize it and deliver it in real-time to the developer’s separate applications. Data consumers using Gnip’s platform can also get public data streams for over 30 social media networks and sites, including Twitter, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, Six Apart and others without ever visiting those sites or accessing their individual APIs, subject only to the terms of service of those networks. Gnip also offers a number of filter options to allow data consumers the ability to create rules based queries based on tags, keywords, etc. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
What's Funny As Hell About The Supposed AT&T iPhone Plan Price Cut Top
Facing criticism that even the minimum iPhone monthly bill is too high for many consumers, AT&T is reportedly thinking about cutting its prices. The big rumored change is that AT&T would apparently offer a limited data package for $20-a-month, a $10-a-month reduction over the current all-you-can-eat plan. This makes me laugh because AT&T clearly thinks consumers are stupid. If AT&T really wanted to reduce monthly iPhone bills it could do something very simple: Start including SMS plans in its unlimited data plans. After all, SMS is data, yet it conveniently falls outside of AT&T’s unlimited service. The reason for this is obvious: Text messages are an absolute cash cow for AT&T and the other carriers. They are also an absolute rip-off , as they cost the carriers next to nothing to transmit. Instead of just folding these SMS fees into the unlimited data plans like rival Sprint does, AT&T wants to pretend to save consumers money by offering a limited data package for $10 less a month. What a joke. Ever since the launch of the iPhone 3G, AT&T has been fleecing customers with text messaging fees. With the first version of the iPhone, users at least got to send 200 text messages for free with their unlimited data plans. With the iPhone 3G’s updated date plan (which was still just as “unlimited” but with faster download speeds), AT&T cut out all free texts and made users pay at least $5-a-month, unless they wanted to pay the utterly ridiculous $0.20 per text. So basically, that was AT&T jacking up the price of the iPhone plans by at least $5 right there. And many people, myself included, use way more than 200 messages, so it’s more like an extra $15-$20-a-month for either 1500 messages or unlimited messages. Again, a joke when we’re already paying for an “unlimited” data plan. Worse, is that a lot of people pay the $5-a-month for the 200 texts, and then go way over, meaning they’re paying a lot more than even an extra $20-a-month for unlimited SMS. So while AT&T reducing data plans by $10-a-month may seem significant, on a month-to-month basis with the SMS fees, it’s really not. And worse, this cheaper iPhone data plan would be limited, and users are probably going to go over that limit as well, which will likely end up costing them more than the $10 they’re saving a month. This “price cut” is pure spin by AT&T. I’m not even convinced that this cheaper plan will be cheaper for anyone in the long run. If it really wanted to reduce the price of the iPhone data plans, it would eliminate the text message fees. And I’m fine if it wants to offer a plan which is the same as the current prices with unlimited text messaging bundled-in, and then offer a cheaper one without the messages included. That’s how it should be. Their “unlimited” plan is a joke. CrunchBase Information AT&T iPhone Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Facebook's fbFund '09 Names First Batch Of Winners Top
Facebook has just named 25 of the finalists for the latest round of fbFund, the social network’s joint program with Accel and Founders Fund meant to help foster quality applications on Facebook Platform. Today’s announcement represents only half of the finalists for this round, and the company says that the other 25 winners will be annouced soon. These 50 finalists will each be given $1,000 in Facebook advertising, but much more important, they will have a shot at taking part in Facebook’s incubator program this summer. fbFund has evolved since its inception in 2007, shifting from a no-strings-attached grant to an incubator model led by Silicon Valley vet Dave McClure . Of the 50 finalists from this round, a select number of winners will be invited to the incubator program, where they can receive as much as $100,000 in equity investment along with training alongside Facebook executives and mentors. The program’s latest round has also shifted focus from solely applications built on Facebook Platform to include those using Facebook Connect both on the web and the iPhone. Here’s a list of the winners: Connect sites: Frintro GovIt RunMyErrand RentMineOnline MyChurch.org GreetBeatz Workstir NutshellMail RunThere DropPlay Magellan (private beta), Life360 (private beta) Vittanna (private beta) Platform apps : Travel Brain Networked Blogs Gameyola Photos I Like Paradise Paintball 3D Veechi Classes BitStrips (private beta) SamaSource iPhone apps : FriendFreak Near+Now (Sortuv) Paparazzi CrazyMenu Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Yahoo Mobile Abandons Its Smartphone App To Focus On The iPhone Top
Score another one for the iPhone. Yahoo is abandoning its mobile app for the Blackberry and other smartphones in order to focus more on its recently relaunched iPhone app. For every other phone, it is concentrating development efforts around the mobile browser experience. People applying for the smartphone app, which is still in beta, are receiving a notice (reproduced below) stating that “Yahoo has decided to cease development” of the app on May 20th. Yahoo Mobile now only has eyes for the iPhone . Rather than create a million apps for every other phone, it is standardizing on delivering the same experience through the mobile browser. Or so it would seem. A Yahoo spokesperson confirms: We are reprioritizing some products to help us better deliver the best possible experiences to consumers on mobile. To streamline our services, we will not develop Yahoo! Mobile for smartphones to focus our efforts on mobilizing Yahoo!, improving Yahoo! Mobile for web and Yahoo! Mobile for iPhone as well as developing new and engaging experiences for consumers, partners and advertisers. We currently have mobile products that reach hundreds of different devices (including Blackberry), and we continue to expand that comprehensive list. The company announced a revamped Yahoo Mobile in February, and rolled it out in April with a new iPhone app and browser support for more than 300 devices . Yahoo Mobile now combines mobile search, your email, IM, and social messaging streams, and personalized Yahoo content such as news, sports, stocks, and RSS feeds. Standardizing on the mobile browser certainly makes economic sense. When it comes to developing apps, Yahoo needs to pick a platform and it is clearly going with the iPhone. Every other phone will have to do with the mobile browser for now. (Although, Yahoo says it will develop apps for other platforms when it sees enough demand. Update : Indeed, I have been able to confirm that new apps for the Blackberry and other mobile platforms with a different look and feel than the discontinued smartphone app are in the works ). While Yahoo is putting a lot of effort into making the mobile browser experience more app-like, it will still never be as fully-functioning as a customized mobile app. There is nothing wrong with betting on the mobile browser. But just last March during a briefing I had with Adam Taggart, head of product marketing for Yahoo Mobile, when I asked whether Yahoo was leaning more towards distribution through apps or mobile browsers, he replied: We are embracing both, apps and browser. We as Yahoo are all about ubiquity. We have a renewed appreciation for the browser because they are getting materially better, but you can always do more with an app on your phone. In the immediate time frame you will see a lot more standalone vertical apps coming out of Yahoo. He positioned the other smartphone apps as a way to address people with Blackberies and other Web-capable phones who have iPhone envy. Here is how he positioned the smartphone apps which Yahoo is now abandoning: The smartphone app is a way to turn your smartphone into an iPhone at no additional cost, if you are envying the iPhone. The smartphone app actually included some features not found in the iPhone app, such as a socially aware address book which could pull contacts from the phone’s native address book and merge that with your Facebook friends, IM buddies, or other contacts on the Web. Don’t expect that feature to come to a mobile browser anytime soon. Here is the text of the email sent to interested beta testers: Yahoo! has decided to cease development of the Yahoo! Mobile smartphone app effective Wednesday, May 20th. So you will not be provided access to the beta program for this product. For the time being, we will be focusing our efforts on the newly-launched Yahoo! Mobile experience for browsers (available at new.m.yahoo.com) and for the iPhone (available via the Apple App Store). We really want to thank you for your interest in being a beta tester. The feedback we receive during these programs is extremely helpful in improving the customer experience across all of Yahoo!s mobile products. In the meantime, stay tuned for more exciting new mobile product releases from Yahoo!. Theres a lot coming and we want to hear your feedback! Many thanks, The Yahoo! Mobile team Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Eric Schmidt's Commencement Address At Carnegie Mellon (Video) Top
Here’s Google CEO Eric Schmidt ’s commencement address at Carnegie Mellon’s 112th commencement ceremony, held yesterday. (Via @CarnegieMellon ) Schmidt’s talk to the audience, which he refers to as the ‘Facebook and Google generation’, is basically about the past, present and future of technology, how quickly and profoundly cultural habits change and how important it is to ‘live in the future’. Surprisingly, Schmidt seems to mention services like Twitter and Facebook more often than Google products. Key quotes: “We got our news from newspapers, your generation gets it from blogs and tweets, and for those of you who don’t know, that’s not what you hear in zoos.” “We thought ‘friend’ is a noun, you think it’s a verb.” “You cannot plan innovation. You cannot plan invention. All you can do is try very hard to be at the right place and be ready.” “How should you behave? Well, do things in a group. Don’t do things by yourself. Groups are stronger, groups are faster. None of us is as smart as all of us.” “You’ll find today is the best chance you have to start being unreasonable, to demand excellence, to drive change, to make everything happen.” Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
UserVoice Raises Funding, White-Labels User Feedback Facilitator Top
Santa Cruz, CA-based UserVoice is taking a couple of steps to break its product free from the in-crowd of early adopters that have increasingly turned to using its service for streamlining internal and customer feedback aggregation. In addition, the startup had announced that it has raised an extra $800,000 from a well-known group of investors, led by Baseline Ventures and joined by FF Angel (the seed investing vehicle for Founders Fund), Betaworks, David Shen Ventures, The Accelerator Group, Net Discovery and Howard Lindzon. UserVoice is essentially a hosted way for businesses to intelligently process the feedback it gets from employees and customers, acting as a social idea generator of sorts. This has proven to be a great way for software companies and web application developers to incorporate the tool into their product websites, basically extending their existing product feedback channels with a way for users to voice their opinions on new features, roadmap, etc. But UserVoice rightly recognizes that there are a lot of corporations and institutions (think education, healthcare, government bodies, etc.) that can benefit from such a service too, and aims to package its main product somewhat differently in order to cater to those as well. For that reason, it’s today releasing a white-label solution that enables its customers to embed branded widgets and communities into their websites and facilitate the streamlining of the aggregation and moderation of incoming suggestions, voting, and user feedback. These widgets can be fully customized with the ability to change the CSS, templates, language files, and more. Along with this, UserVoice is introducing ZeroLogin, a method for users to sign in to UserVoice with the same username and password as the company website that deployed its solution. To see such an integration in action, check out this feedback page on Animoto’s website, which is entirely powered by UserVoice. Last but not least, UserVoice let us know that it has attracted a very knowledgeable advisor to help the company gain more traction: Bob Pearson , who spearheaded IdeaStorm at Dell as the company’s former vice president of communities and conversations. Expect to hear more from this company in the future. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Stand Firm Craig (and Jim) Top
South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster is giving even the normally sleazy Attorney General title a bad name. This is an office that has little to do with protecting the public and everything to do with making high profile attacks on targets that will generate a lot of positive press. All that press leads to a run for higher office. Eliot Spitzer was the alpha male Attorney General, attacking the securities industry, Internet fraud and the mortage industry, among others. He was rewarded with the governorship of New York until his spectacular resignation. Which brings us back to the subject of hookers, and South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster. Earlier this month McMaster, who is of course eyeing a run for governor, threatened criminal prosecution against Craigslist management if pornography and ads for prostitution were not removed from the site. Craigslist took extraordinary measures to comply. But quiet compliance isn’t what McMaster is looking for. He wants handcuffs and a trial, the kind of stuff that Spitzer got. He issued the following statement on Saturday “As of 5:00 p.m. this afternoon, the craigslist South Carolina site continues to display advertisements for prostitution and graphic pornographic material. This content was not removed as we requested. We have no alternative but to move forward with criminal investigation and potential prosecution.” Craigslist fired back in an uncharacteristically emotional post that noted how tame the current Craigslist site was compared to a number of other listing services in South Carolina, including one run by Microsoft. Seriously? The craigslist adult services section for Greenville, SC has a total of 1 ad for the last 3 days, featuring a photograph of a fully clothed person. The "erotic services" section for Greenville, which we recently closed, has 8 ads total which will expire in two days, and even for these ads the images and text are quite tame. Meanwhile, the "adult entertainment" section of greenville.backpage.com (careful with link, NSFW), owned by Village Voice Media, has over 60 ads for the last 3 days, and about 250 in total. In sharp contrast with craigslist, many of these ads are quite explicit, quoting prices for specific sex acts, featuring close-ups of bare genitalia, etc. Of course, no one in mainstream legal circles thinks either company should be subject to civil suit, let alone a criminal investigation. But if for whatever reason you were so motivated, would you target a venue with 9 PG-13 rated ads, or one with 250 XXX rated ones? And FWIW, telephone yellow pages and other local print media have both companies beat hands down as adult service ad venues for South Carolina. Any interest in targeting them for criminal prosecution? Didn't think so. As we wrote previously, Craigslist is the hot site right now that triggers an immediate response from the press (it used to be MySpace, then Facebook). There is no public saftey issue in targeting Craigslist. The only issue is politics, and McMaster sees an easy target. I think he made a serious mistake, though, in targeting Craigslist. Not only are the allegations absurd, but he’s failed to realize the huge community of rabid Craigslist supporters. Spitzer always went after deeply unpopular targets. He would never have touched Craigslist. I say to founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster : Stand firm. Don’t back down. In fact, just turn off the South Carolina site entirely and ban IPs from that state. Forever. And if they press criminal charges, fight it with everything you have. The community will support you, and that’s one hell of a community, with 46 million U.S. unique visitors a month (Comscore, April 2009). Get 5 million of them (less than 1 in 9) to sign a petition calling for McMaster’s resignation (that’s more than the population of South Carolina). It won’t get him to resign, but it may get enough voters to remember how irresponsible he is when the election for governor comes around. And I’m pretty sure that petition will be the top search result for his name for a long, long time. And if you do end up in jail, don’t worry. I promise to visit at least once a month, even though it will be in South Carolina. More on the story at TechMeme . Update: Buckmaster demands an apology . Well played. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
There We Go Again. No, Micropayments Won't "Save Journalism" Top
If you’ve been following the headlines on Techmeme over the weekend, you’ve likely seen more talk about the whole blogger vs. online journalism debate, the short-sightedness of big media and the inevitable demise of its historical business model. Every time that debate heats up, someone somewhere will at some point bring up the unlikely savior of the publishing industry once more: glorious micropayments. This time, it’s The Guardian ’s Frank Fisher taking a stand, and he says not only will micropayments guarantee the newspapers a future, it can also downright “save journalism,” and oh, Google should be the one providing the infrastructure for it, too. Time to debunk “Saving journalism, a farthing at a time” . Fisher correctly points out the dismal state of the economy has driven advertising revenues down, and this puts newspapers in dire need of finding out how it should subsidize its operations in different ways, with the realization that the printing part of the equation is inevitably going to fade away and that there’s too little money to be made from online advertising to make up for the costs of transferring its entire publishing business (as it operates today) to the Web. The rest of his opinion piece comes down to this: wishful thinking and misunderstanding. “Publishers are in a nightmarish situation; they know the print side of their business is struggling, they know punters want their news online, but they can’t see how to make it pay. In desperation others may follow Murdoch’s retreat behind the paywall. Not good news for news addicts. It isn’t so much the money, it’s the usernames, passwords, subscriptions … Actually, it is the money. But publishers need a profit. Information might want to be free – but food and housing isn’t. So is there another way? Some model that brings in more than advertising, but doesn’t exclude casual visitors, either by cost or inconvenience? Well yes – an idea that won’t go away: micropayments.” Publishers are in a nightmarish situation, and in large part they have themselves to blame for that. Fine with me if they want to escape from that situation by retreating behind paywalls - in fact, I encourage them to do so and die there soon so we can kiss that idea goodbye once and for all. How are paywalls bad news for news addicts? Those addicts have been spoiled to death the past few years, to the point where information overload has taken over and made the consumption of news overly tedious. I know because I’ve been one of them ever since I’ve been able to read, and this was long before I discovered the Internet. Introduce paywalls, ease the choice for news addicts, see what happens. Information is now a commodity, so deal with it. And yes, it should be free to end users. But how will that pay for the food and housing of the people working in the publishing industry, you ask? I say it’s not our problem, and tough luck. In no way does the realization that the model doesn’t work anymore mean that the masses, lawyers, the government or any other institution should be bailing out newspapers for screwing up their chance to figure out this Internet thing in time and adapting to it. Publishers need a profit, like any other business, but that doesn’t mean they all deserve to turn one, and certainly not at the expense of better, more innovative publishing businesses that are waiting around the corner. Go read the column in The Guardian (for free) to find out how micropayments for news would work in detail. Basically, it would involve Google doing the bailing out part I was talking about in the previous paragraph. “The transfer potential of [Google AdSense] technology to a micropayments scenario is clear: individuals would sign up with Google, deposit funds. They’d have a unique ID attached to them at that point – an encrypted cookie stored on whichever PC they happen to log in with. When they visit a site with GoogleDosh embedded they’re allowed in, a fraction of a penny is switched to the content provider’s account for every item they read – if visitors aren’t GoogleDosh members, they’re re-routed, perhaps, to a précis, or a sign-up form, or even to a limited trial. The key difference from other micropayment schemes is scale – and that’s what beats individual site subscriptions too – sign up with one scheme, and you get access to thousands of sites. That’s my theory, at least. It’s technically simple – an easy step if publishers accept a single standard, and the success of Google Ads suggests they will. Publishers win, consumers win long-term by supporting content providers, and in the short term, if good sense among sellers prevails, they get a bargain: spending pennies a day for all the content they need.” Publishers win, yes, to a certain extent. Google? maybe. Journalists? Up for debate . Consumers? Not likely. There are some content providers out there who have figured out how to build a business without the need for people to pay to support them, and their number will only grow in size in the foreseeable future. If anything, Google should (continue to) support them, and not the relics of another age. For more perspective on micropayments, you should read “What Would Micropayments Do for Journalism? A Freakonomics Quorum” , in case you haven’t already. I’m lifting this part from the piece, a quote by Marshall W. Van Alstyne (associate professor in the Information Systems department at Boston University and a research scholar at M.I.T) because I think there’s no better way to conclude this post: Putting micropayments on news is like putting tollbooths on an open ocean. Internet users, awash in a sea of information, will avoid new barriers by navigating around them. And frankly, the interests of a free society are rarely served by building barriers between the people and their news. Amen. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Blogging Site For Babies Wee Web Now Helps Tots Save For College Top
Wee Web, a social sharing site for parents of newborns and small children, has merged with the Freshman Fund, a college savings gift registry. The integration of the sites lets parents create a single destination for families to both see updates on children and facilitate donations towards children’s education savings. Created by the founders of online event planner Meetup, Wee Web lets parents create a central social networking site for their babies and children where they can upload photos, videos and Twitter-like updates and then restrict the site to be viewed only by friends and family. The site can be accessed by invitation and family and friends can receive update alerts on additions to the child’s page. Freshman Fund is like a wedding gift registry for college savings. The free service lets friends and family make donations to a child’s college education fund that is transferred directly to a tax-free college savings plan that the recipient chooses. The integration of the two sites is a pretty interesting idea, especially given that college tuition is a hefty expense for most parents. Wee Web estimates that private tuition for a private college can run upwards of $300,000. The ability for parents to solicit donations from the time a child is born until he or she is ready for college could be a very useful tool, especially in light of the current economy. There no shortage of competitor in the baby social network sites space, including BabySpot, KidMondo, and TotSpot which we reviewed here. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
The Real Truth Behind The 104-Year-Old Who Joined Twitter Top
Dear reader, TechCrunch owes you an apology. We thought the “104-Year-Old joins Twitter” story last week was Digg bait created by the media. It turns out it was all just old fashioned re-hashed PR. But at least we are apologizing - unlike the many news outlets that ran with this manufactured story.To explain… On May 15 two UK newspapers ran the story about 104 year old woman “Ivy Bean” / @ivybean104 joining Twitter. We correctly called it out as a ruse , but we got the wrong target. What none of those original stories told you, was that poor old Ivy had not joined Twitter just because it was suddenly the talk of the senior citizens home. No. She joined because home PC maintenance company Geek Squad signed her up, propped her up for a photo opportunity - even using her own account to Twitpic the event - and press-released the hell out of it. And the media fell for it. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Get Ready For Real Time Digg, Whatever That Means Top
Like everyone else , Digg has a serious case of Twitter envy. And they’re doing something about it. In an interview last month Digg founder Kevin Rose told me that the company was working on an overhaul of the Digg service, calling it a “completely new direction” and referring to the new Digg search as an indication of what direction they’re going in. He didn’t (and still won’t) give many details, except to say that Digg needs to to “a living and breathing site” and “a little bit more real-time in nature” (”real-time” is secret code for Twitter, and has been used so much lately that people are mocking it). Earlier in the interview Rose talked about wanting more user participation on the site, with top stories getting 50,000 or more votes (most top stories get a few thousand now). The new product is designed to encourage more user engagement. We’ve taken the relevant clips from the original interview below. Whatever it is, it’s coming sometime soon. Clip Transcript: Rose: What we're working on now is what I would consider to be the biggest overhaul to how everything works behind the scenes, and that's no joke. Like we… Arrington: Front end and back end rewrite? Rose: Completely new directions for us that you will look at and I guarantee you would be like that's a ballsy move. Like it's really, we're evolving and we've got some really exciting things that we believe are going to take us to that turn. Arrington: What’s the timing? Is that this year? Rose: I mean, I'm not going to give out hard dates, but it's some time in the next six months. Arrington: What might that look like? Like, what are we talking about? Rose: Well, we're talking about a revamp of the site. Arrington: Like a logo change? Rose: Yeah, a logo change is going to get us there. We're talking about some lens flares on the logo… Arrington: Well, what are you going to do so that somebody's going to, like, "Hey, here's the stories." And they're saying, "Digg it!" I mean that's kind of it. Right? It's like a one trick pony with bells and whistles attached. I mean, I agree that most of your changes are bells and whistles. So, what is it that you're going to do that doesn’t kill your core idea that's a whole new thing? Rose: I can't go into that stuff right now. [later in interview...] Rose: I will say this. I don't want to get into specific details about the product, but I believe that it's time for Digg to get a little bit more real-time in nature. And we need to be a living and breathing site. And you know, that's an exciting direction for us. I think that's part of the reason why we rolled out a pretty awesome search. It was kind of us experimenting with some of that. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
If The Watchdogs Are Saved: Ethical Repercussions Of A Newspaper Bailout Top
The somewhat depressing and controversial possibility of a newspaper bailout turned into a stone-cold reality in the past few months as politicians, including Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Ben Cardin and President Obama, have hinted at giving the newspaper industry a life vest to save a sinking industry. Kerry, in his dire remarks at the Senate hearing on "Future of Journalism" a few weeks ago, made a call to action to save newspapers and prevent future harm to democracy. Regardless of where direction of this policy is headed, the idea of a government bailout of the news industry, which is supposed to be the “watchdog” of the government, raises a few ethical flags. President Obama echoed Kerry’s concerns at last weekend’s White House Correspondents Dinner, addressing the current state of the industry: “…It’s also true that your ultimate success as an industry is essential to the success of our democracy. It’s what makes this thing work. You know, Thomas Jefferson once said that if he had the choice between a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, he would not hesitate to choose the latter. Clearly, Thomas Jefferson never had cable news to contend with — but his central point remains: A government without newspapers, a government without a tough and vibrant media of all sorts, is not an option for the United States of America.” Obama was perhaps posturing to a room full of journalists, but the message comes across clear: newspapers need help and their existence is a fundamental requirement for democracy to successfully survive. And any time democracy is threatened, the government will come to the rescue, right? Sen. Ben Cardin actually has a concrete plan, The Newspaper Revitalization Act, to aid newspapers in their time of need. His plan allows newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, and thus receive the same tax-benefits as a non-profit organization. Revenue from advertising and subscription would be tax exempt, and contributions to support news coverage or operations could be tax deductible. Cardin’s proposal became a reality on the state-level with this week’s news that Washington’s governor approved a tax cut for the state’s newspaper industry. The law gives newspaper publishers a 40 percent cut in Washington’s main business tax. The catch for Cardin’s proposal is that though newspapers would still be able to report on all issues, namely politics and political campaigns, the government would prohibit the newspapers from making political endorsements. This raises two ethical questions. The first is whether newspapers supported with government funding should be barred from making political endorsements. Political endorsements by newspapers and media organizations are a very essence of freedom of speech. Readers often find value in seeing a newspaper’s evaluation of the candidates given that the paper has in-depth coverage of political candidates throughout the course of a campaign. Putting a muzzle on journalists in this capacity is a step in the wrong direction. There are existing models for publicly-funded or assisted media that are not limited to endorsing political positions. The clearest example of this is PBS networks. PBS is a non-profit media organization that is partially funded by federal and state money (less than 50% of PBS’s revenue comes from government sources). PBS stations are not prohibited from taking a stance on political issues, in accordance with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, but PBS and the government has been embroiled in several sticky situations involving political bias and politicians feeling that they can somehow control PBS’ coverage. Most recently, Kenneth Tomlinson, the former Republican chairman of the Center for Public Broadcasting, the non-profit in charge of distributing federal funds to public television and radio stations, openly criticized PBS for a liberal bias. Tomlinson even hired an outside investigator to evaluate whether PBS’s political news coverage was slanting towards the left. In fact, it was revealed that most viewers didn’t think PBS’s news favored liberals; however, Tomlinson and other Republicans engaged in a heated debate questioning the bias of the well-respected news organization. Like PBS, the BBC, UK’s largest media organization which is partially funded by taxpayer money, has found itself embroiled in its fair share of accusations of political bias. Some would argue that PBS represents a segment of the media in the U.S. whereas a newspaper bailout would effect thousands of news organizations. I fear that if most mainstream newspapers and organizations took on a similar model to PBS, many politicians would feel that they had the free reign to not only question, but investigate, the bias of any unfavorable news coverage if it didn’t lend support to their political leanings. The second ethical question is whether journalists will be able to deliver unbiased reporting of the very people and institutions that are helping to subsidize their jobs. I think journalists at PBS have done an effective job of objectively reporting the news, despite the political pressure the organization faces from politicians. However, newspapers and thus journalists who are “saved” by government intervention are in a slightly different situation. From its inception, PBS was meant to be a non-profit news organization which drew funding from a variety of sources, including the government. In the case of a newspaper bailout, the government could don the image of a “knight in shining armor” to journalists who, without the bailout, would be unemployed. Will all journalists and media execs buy into this? I’m not sure of the answer but the adoption of this perception surely could effect objective news reporting. Yet having an appreciation for a policy, and letting that appreciation impact professional integrity are two different things. Would the politicians who supported the bailout receive favorable coverage? Most journalists would respond with a resounding no, as they should. Journalists are all beholden to an unwritten code of ethics when it comes to reporting the truth. And even in one of the most disastrous modern-day cases of a politician’s efforts to control the media, journalists have still proven that they fight to report the truth. Italy’s prime minster, Silvio Berlusconi, has been accused of limiting the press’ freedom of expression by controlling negative coverage of his government on state-run media networks and papers as well as the institutions he controls financially. Many Italian journalists have retaliated, quitting their jobs, forming protest groups, and advocating fiercely for greater freedom of speech. These reporters have chosen dissent and unemployment over submission and employment within a state-biased media. But the dilemma becomes significantly more cloudy when the people throwing a life vest to the drowning industry are the same people who need to be evaluated through an objective lens. And the question remains in the case of a bailout, if there will forever be the government’s shadow hanging over the media organizations who survive thanks to these benefits. (Photo credit: Flickr/ VaxXzine ) Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Jump Into The Stream Top
Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages. Web companies large and small are embracing this stream. It is not just Twitter. It is Facebook and Friendfeed and AOL and Digg and Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop and Techmeme and Tweetmeme and Ustream and Qik and Kyte and blogs and Google Reader. The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness . This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter , encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos, and videos. What does this mean for how we will come to consume information? John Borthwick from Betaworks has identified the real-time Web as a key investment opportunity (Betaworks portfolio companies include Twitter, bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Chartbeat, and Tumblr). He admits he and other investors are still feeling in the dark, but he describes the shift he is trying to capitalize on this way in a post titled “Distribution . . . now”: First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages. In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration - yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and still very much evolving. A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow. In a sense, he is trying to rationalize his investment strategy. But if he is correct, the shift from pages to ever-widening eddies of information will have a dramatic downstream impact on many Web businesses, especially media businesses. This rising stream has the potential to fundamentally change the contours of media distribution on the Web. Large destination sites like Yahoo and AOL, already weakened as distribution hubs by search and social networks, now face the prospect of becoming completely bypassed. No wonder AOL is sticking the stream in every part of its service, from its homepage to Bebo to AIM. (Yahoo is grappling with the emergence of the stream as well, but so far still thinks it can hold onto its place as a central traffic and distribution hub). The stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them. Already, we are seeing Web pages adopt the stream as a new user-interface . Web pages are increasingly being designed as places to present the most relevant streams of information. And with streams of data spreading everywhere , search actually becomes more important than ever as a navigation tool. As Borthwick points out: Traffic isn’t distributed evenly in this new world. All of a sudden crowds can show up on your site. Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled. The problem, more than ever before, becomes one of information overload. How do you keep from drowning in the deluge? Borthwick suggests letting go of teh notion that you can ever master the stream, even just your own personal data stream of friend’s Tweets, updates, blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube video finds and so on: This isn’t an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of — its a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we can’t attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it. So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge. (Photo credit: Flickr/ Justin Lowery ) Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Did The UK Press Con A 104-Year-Old Woman Into Joining Twitter For Digg Bait? Top
There’s a popular story on Digg right now about a 104-year-old British woman who uses Twitter. It’s an obvious headline: “ World’s oldest Tweeter talks cuppas and casserole .” It’s Digg bait. But what’s worse is that if you examine the story closely, it looks like the UK press may have gotten the poor old lady to sign up for Twitter just for their story! The story is about how Ivy Bean uses the hot social network to post mundane updates about her 104-year-old life. But take a look at the picture in the story. On the screen next to Bean, you’ll see her Twitter page with a whopping two updates. These two tweets were sent out at the same time, the day before the story ran in a number of UK publications. In other words, Bean signed up and sent her first two tweets at the time all these guys were writing their stories. Or, to put it more clearly, this whole story was staged. Bean sent out her first tweet at 2:02PM PST (6:02PM local time in the UK) on May 14, it read “ I’m enjoying Twitter for the first time and having my photo taken” (the picture used in the articles). The Sun, which also ran the story, has an even better headline. “ 103-year-old Ivy loves to Twitter ” — clearly, she does — I mean, she had been using the service for a whole two seconds before the story was being reported. Worse, The Sun gets poor Bean’s age wrong (they say she’s 103 years old). We get some flack for running a lot of stories about Twitter, but this is just pathetic. Though maybe it shouldn’t be surprising. Twitter is red-hot right now and “world’s oldest Twitterer” is an easy Digg headline. And the Telegraph, which did get the Digg headline, gets nearly 10% of its traffic from Digg, according to Compete . Does anyone know any 105-year-olds? I need to contact them for a story. And I’ll be nice enough to give them a Twitter ID that doesn’t imply they won’t make it to their next birthday. [photo: PA] CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
The Music Store Apple Forgot About Top
Last January Apple released iLife ‘09, the latest addition to its highly regarded multimedia suite that ships with every new Mac. At the time, much of the media attention went to iPhoto and iMovie, which introduced impressive facial recognition and video stabilization respectively. But me? I was captivated by the GarageBand Lesson Store, a virtual marketplace built into Apple’s music authoring program. The store features song lessons taught by the artists who wrote them, including established musicians like Sting and John Fogerty. Combined with an extremely polished platform for delivering the lessons, I thought that Apple’s Lesson Store might be the company’s next revolution in digital music . Was I a little overenthusasitc? Probably. But I’ve toyed around with quite a few of the learning programs and videos out there, and the GarageBand lessons have serious potential. And with lessons going for $5 a pop, even if Apple only saw a tiny fraction of the sales it sees on its other stores (as would probably be the case), it could still drive substantial revenue from lesson purchases alone. Perhaps even more important, at least from Apple’s perspective: a robust lesson store would serve as a perfect marketing vehicle for driving more Mac sales. Imagine a commercial with John Mayer or Eric Clapton wailing away on their guitars for thirty seconds. Close with them saying, “You want to play like me? I’ll show you. Only on Mac”. Sure, most people would never actually get around to playing through too many lessons (after all, learning how to play an instrument takes some hard work), but the knowledge that they could work through those lessons would be enough to drive even more computer sales. Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t really done much with the Lesson Store since its debut in January. At launch, it featured 18 ‘basic lessons’ (nine each for guitar and piano), along with ten ‘artist lessons’ which feature accomplished musicians showing how to play their songs. It was a decent selection to begin with, but it was hardly comprehensive. But it had potential: Apple surely had the clout to attract more major artists, and we were bound to see frequent updates, right? Not quite. Since January there has been exactly one update, which introduced a whopping three new artist lessons , bringing the grand total to 13. Given how varied musical tastes are, I’d be surprised if any one person was interested in more than four of them. So much for that idea. Aside from releasing more artist lessons, Apple would do well to release a tool that let independent artists and teachers build lessons on the GarageBand platform. Apple could take a cut of each lesson sale as it does on the App Store, and users would get a much broader array of material. Now, I’m well aware there are quite a few music lessons stores scattered across the web, including NowPlayIt and iVideoSongs , which offer high quality video lessons, some of which feature the artists themselves. But for every quality site there are countless spammy sites, and it can be hard to tell the good ones from the bad at first glance - not to mention the fact that many fledging musicians don’t know these sites exist in the first place. A unified storefront from Apple, complete with user reviews, could be a boon for teachers and students alike. So come on, Apple. Let the music play. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Not A Typo: Six Apart Opens Up Suite Of Products For Rival WordPress Top
Anil Dash, chief evangelist for blogging software platform Six Apart, announced today that blogging platform has launched a a plugin that provides WordPress users with access to a suite of Six Apart’s add-on features for blogs. Dash made the announcement at WordPress blogger convention WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. While some of Six Apart’s functionality have been available to WordPress users, this is the first time the site is offering these services as a suite to a rival blogging platform. These features include TypePad AntiSpam, a free open source anti-spam service; TypePad Connect, a commenting profile service; integration with Six Apart Media, the site’s advertising network; and inclusion with blog directory Blogs.com. Dash says that this move represents “baby steps” in Six Apart’s tentative first efforts to provide a suite of features and functionality to WordPress users. This a big deal, considering the long standing rivalry between the two blogging platforms. Last year, the two companies had a heated duel via company blog posts, Twitter and in TechCrunch comments. Perhaps this integration between the Six Apart and WordPress will help settle the peace between the competitors. And perhaps this is a strategic move on Six Apart’s side to integrate with WordPress, a widely popular platform in the blogging world. One thing is for certain— it’s a blessing for many WordPress bloggers, who will now be able to use the plugin to access some of the useful features of SixApart without having to switch platforms. WordPress offers its own free and paid features for bloggers including a stats system and the commenting and spam technology Akismet (which TechCrunch uses). Here’s a video clip of Dash talking about WordPress plug-ins and blogging: Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 

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