Saturday, May 30, 2009

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Village Voice Wishes McMaster Would Hate Them, Too Top
And you thought the South Carolina v. Craigslist story was dead. If anything sucks more than being the target of an ambitious but delusional gubernatorial candidate who has suddenly developed a bit of a fetish for prostitution, it’s being ignored by that candidate. As far as Village Voice sees the world, Craigslist just got a bunch of free press. And they want their share. When Craigslist management was facing a criminal investigation for listings on the site they did the smart thing. They talked about the law, and they pointed out that the real smut was on other sites that were being ignored by the South Carolina Attorney General. If you really want hard core porn and prostitution, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster pointed out, check out Village Voice’s BackPage.com . That’s all body fluids under the bridge now, of course, since a federal judge smacked down McMaster and forbid him from stalking Craigslist management. But Village Voice is still smarting from those Buckmaster links in that blog post. Yesterday they issued a very official press release titled “Village Voice Media to Craigslist CEO Buckmaster: Calm Down, Back Off; There is Nothing Wrong With a Little Competition.” In an email, Village Voice’s PR firm accuses Buckmaster of “leveraging the legal bind he’s in to damage Craigslist’s competition.” The real reason for the press release and press outreach, of course, is to get a little bit of the spotlight pointed to backpages, too. Because their official story doesn’t make sense. Backpages has adult ads, lots and lots of them, and they’re proud of it: “We will continue to exercise our right to accept legal adult postings,” they say. All Buckmaster did was link to a whole bunch of them. And since backpages desperately needs the traffic , what they really should be doing is thanking Craigslist, not attacking them. What we learned today: If you really want to pay for sex, backpages is the place to go. Full press release is below: Village Voice Media to Craigslist CEO Buckmaster: Calm Down, Back Off; There is Nothing Wrong With a Little Competition PHOENIX, May 29 /PRNewswire/ — Last Friday, Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist, fired a deliberate, unnecessary and wholly inaccurate shot across the bow of Village Voice Media and backpage.com, our online classified advertising property. Given the serious nature of what Buckmaster inferred in his post about Village Voice Media newspapers and backpage.com, we can’t sit on our hands and be silent. In the original blog post, which was later “submarine” edited to reword and soften some of the attacks towards Village Voice Media, Buckmaster complained that politicians are attacking Craigslist but not Village Voice Media and other media outlets because they have a “need for positive stories and campaign endorsements from those very same newspapers. “Is it possible that writing stories critical of Craigslist’s (relatively tame) ‘adult service’ section is more career-friendly than attacking their own employer (or journalistic media brethren) for operating a (far more graphic) ‘adult service’ section of their own?” Buckmaster and Craigslist are in a tough, and in many ways, frightening situation - they have a number of moralistic state Attorneys General threatening them over their adult ads, and a raft of bad press following the terrible tragedy in Boston that the company is admittedly in no way responsible for. But, the manner in which Buckmaster is responding to this pressure - by disingenuously lashing out at competitors and caving to political pressure - is inexcusable, and displays a remarkable lack of sound judgment. In 2002, Village Voice Media recognized the forces that were changing the classified advertising market and created backpage.com to answer that challenge. We’ve put a lot of work into making it the No. 2 free classifieds site in U.S. We’re fine with being No. 2, proud in fact. Buckmaster, apparently, is not. Instead of working with his competitors to find a way to solve, or at least mitigate issues surrounding adult ads - the shortcomings of automatic content filters is something we are all trying to fix - Buckmaster simply attempted to take the competition down with him. And, his methods leave much to be desired. First off, our newspapers don’t endorse politicians and rarely have anything nice to say about them, so to say that politicians aren’t going after Village Voice Media because they need our endorsement isn’t viable. Secondly, Buckmaster is only complaining because a competitor is challenging his economic advantage in the free classified arena - which he built in part on adult ads - and has made him a very wealthy man. His talk of building community and serving his users rings hollow. It now appears that, as is so often the case with New Age entrepreneurs, it’s all about the money. We will continue to exercise our right to accept legal adult postings from our users and concentrate on growing backpage.com. We are aggressively building additional technical solutions as well as increasing our manual site inspections to improve efficiency of removing content that is illegal or otherwise violates our Terms of Use. About Village Voice Media Village Voice Media is a collection of 15 weekly newspapers and daily Web sites, including New York’s Village Voice, the LA Weekly, Denver’s Westword and the Phoenix New Times. Online, in print, and on mobile devices, VVM’s products combine music, food and events coverage with gritty, hard-hitting journalism to create the most powerful city guides in each market. While the focus of the brand is local, its free classifieds site backpage.com, partnership with social recommendation engine LikeMe.net and national sales force, Voice Media Group, extend its reach on a national level. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Don't Watch This: Newest Twitter Worm "Best Video" Is Spreading Top
Warning: It appears that a worm has hit Twitter-the tweet will say “Best Video” with a link to “http://juste.ru.” If you see this in a tweet, do not click on the link. It’s unclear exactly how the worm is spreading. But from the look of Tweets about the virus, if you click on the link, you account could be compromised and spammed. According to reports on Twitter, users who clicked the juste.ru video link had their account compromised and passwords stolen. Further details about the virus are limited but Twitter’s official spam account was updated this morning stating that Twitter is aware of the issue and making steps to resolve the virus. The Tweet also warned users to not click the Best Video link. This isn’t the first worm to hit Twitter. In early April, Twitter’s service was infected with a worm that appeared to have originated from the owners of the website StalkDaily. This week, Twitter was hit with a “Twittercut” worm, which also compromised users’ accounts if they clicked on a link. UPDATE: Twitter has posted the following update to its status page stating that the site is aware of the virus: No matter how good that "best video" looks, don't go to any juste.ru domains. We're aware of the situation and are working on it. UPDATE 2: Twitter has also noted that they’ve temporarily suspended some legit accounts to clean up the spam. Again, this is just temporary for the real accounts that were spreading the worm. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
The Top VC Blogs (According To Google Reader) Top
Venture capitalists can be valuable sources of information about the tech community. Not only do they have quality insider information but they also have a knack for figuring out how to evaluate startups. So it makes sense that their blogs can be compelling reads. Larry Chang, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, has compiled a list of the 100 top VC blogs, according to the number of Google Reader subscribers for each one. Chang admits that the rankings don’t necessarily equate to the best quality of content and that there is fine content coming from VC blogs with less subscribers. But the list is a good starting point. Chang says he will be highlighting the best VC blog posts from this list on his blog every two weeks and will update the directory to add new VC blogs quarterly. Here are the top 20 on the list, with their Google Reader subscriber numbers (you can see all 100 on Chang’s blog): 1. Guy Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures, How To Change The World (17,555) 2. Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures, A VC (11,821) 3. David Hornik, August Capital, VentureBlog (7,060) 4. Brad Feld, Foundry Group, Feld Thoughts (6,434) 5. Marc Andreessen, TBD, Blog.pmarca.com (5,099) 6. Josh Kopelman, First Round Capital, Redeye VC (3,310) 7. Ed Sim, Dawntreader Ventures, Beyond VC (3,239) 8. Jeremy Liew, Lightspeed Ventures Partners, LSVP (2,973) 9. Bill Gurley, Benchmark Capital, Above The Crowd (2,257) 10. Jeff Nolan, SAP Ventures, Venture Chronicles (1,528) 11. David Cowan, Bessemer Venture Partners, Who Has Time For This? (1,261) 12. Christopher Allen, Alacrity Ventures, Life With Alacrity (1,194) 13. Seth Levine, Foundry Group, VC Adventure (1,154) 14. Rick Segal, JLA Ventures, The Post Money Value (795) – Canada 15. Jeff Bussgang, Flybridge Capital Partners, Seeing Both Sides (727) 16. Mike Hirshland, Polaris Venture Partners, VC Mike's Blog (726) 17. Tim Oren, Pacifica Fund, Due Diligence (661) 18. Jeff Clavier, SoftTech VC, Software Only (656) 19. Mendelson/Feld, Foundry Group, Ask The VC (587) 20. Matt McCall, DFJ Portage Venture Partners, VC Confidential (432) (Image courtesy PhotoxXpress ). Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Smub Lets You Do All Your Social Bookmarking On The Go Top
When you’re on the road, passing time reading up on things online from your mobile phone, it can be quite a pain in the ass to bookmark articles for later or share them with others. Smub aims to change all that by debuting a web-based tool that you can access from anywhere and lets you easily bookmark and share stuff from your mobile browser without necessarily having to register for the service. Smub is incredibly simple to use. All you need to do when you’re browsing an article on your computer or mobile device is add “smub.it/” in front of the URL and it will take you to a page where you can bookmark the link to your Smub profile if you have one, or alternatively your favorite social bookmarking service or one of the more popular social networking services without the need for a separate account. Currently, Smub boasts e-mail support as well as direct push to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Mixx, Reddit and HelloTXT. Smub is a very basic service, but a useful one that’s been pretty well executed. Once you’ve saved a bookmark to your Smub profile, you can set a relatively short URL which redirects to it (e.g. smub.it/robinwauters/netflix.ceo - yay, another toolbar-in-a-frame ) and you can also add keyword tags and comments to the article in one swoop. You can manage your bookmarks from your account too, and share them on the services cited above later if you choose to. To get started, you can import the bookmarks from whichever browser you’re using, and you can easily pull in your friends’ contact details from Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Windows Live Hotmail to make it easier and faster for you to share ‘Smubs’ with them. I like Smub already, and I suspect that while the team clearly wants to make sure the service is mobile-friendly (it works particularly well with the iPhone) some people will be interested in simply using it on their computers. For those, the Smub guys added a Firefox extension and toolbar which can come in quite handy if you’re using multiple social bookmarking services. Now go smub something and tell us what you think. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Make Your Mark: RightSignature Lets You Sign Documents Online (Or On Your iPhone) Top
Over the last 15 years or so, most of us have adapted to the new forms of communication that pervade the web, ditching letters (and in many cases, phone calls) in favor of rapid fire IMs and Email. But there’s still at least one formality embedded in most of us that’s been hard to overcome: the personal signature. The simple act of signing a document, silly as it may seem in an era of fingerprints, photographs, and passwords, is something that has been engrained in us. And while signing a digital document with an “Okay” button or check box may be legally binding, they’re so basic that it makes the gesture feel insincere. Cue the digital signature - handwritten signatures input using either your mouse or a tablet, which are then embedded alongside the document in question. These have around for quite a while, with companies in this space including DocuSign and EchoSign . Now RightSignature , a new startup that launched to the public last month, is looking to make things even easier. CEO Daryl Bernstein says that the existing digital signature companies don’t focus enough on the user experience, making it difficult to actually read the document you’re meant to sign. So RightSignature has built a proprietary PDF viewer that shows a large portion of the document alongside a box for your John Hancock. Bernstein also says that competitors tend to focus on large companies, so RightSignature is trying to make its service more accessible to smaller businesses (you can send a document out for signing in around sixty seconds). You can get a feel for the document signing process on this page . The service supports Google Docs, as well as native formats like PDF and .DOCX. Other extras include the option of requiring a photo taken by your computer’s camera alongside a signature and a free iPhone app that lets you sign documents on the go. The service offers a variety of distribution options, allowing users to send documents to a bulk list of users, and can also be used for petitions. Users can send five documents per month for free, or can choose from a number of plans starting at $11 a month per user to get unlimited document sending. TechCrunch readers can get two months of the premium service for free by signing up through this link . The service seems to work well, but RightSignature has a long road ahead - its competition is already quite well established, and some businesses may be hesitant to rely on a new service for their important document signatures. That said, the simplified UI may be enough to entice small businesses who had previously been scared off by the daunting nature of some of these other services. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
It's Heeerrre: 'Pay With Facebook' Is In The Wild Top
Earlier today, we wrote about Facebook updating its terms to get ready for the roll-out of its payment system. Well guess what, it’s already here. The application GroupCard is currently testing the new payment system live for all accounts that have it installed. I included some screenshots below. It’s very straightforward: There’s a big “Pay With Facebook” button, similar to the “Facebook Connect” buttons you see throughout the web. Next to that, there are the other options to pay with Visa, Mastercard, etc. Clicking on the “Pay With Facebook” button pops open an overlay which asks you to confirm payment via your Facebook Credits. My $2.99 card cost me 30 Facebook Credits. Expect to see this roll out to other applications soon. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Google's Public Policy Chief To Be Deputy CTO for Obama Administration Top
Google’s head of public policy, Andrew McLaughlin, will join the Obama administration as deputy chief technology officer, according to a report by the New York Times. McLaughlin will assist former Virginia Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra, who President Obama appointed as CTO in April. McLaughlin has been leading Google’s public policy efforts for quite some time now. According to this blog post, he was the first member of Google’s policy team in 2005. Before his time at Google, McLaughlin launched the nonprofit group Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, where he serves as vice president, chief policy officer, and chief financial officer. Previously, McLaughlin was a senior fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet. Most recently, McLaughlin was working on the Obama/Biden presidential transition team in Washington. McLaughlin isn’t the only Googler to join the Obama administration. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was speculated to be CTO, was recently named to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Former Google product manager Kate Stanton joined the White House as its director of citizen participation earlier this year. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Spy Vs. Spy: The Spymaster Backlash Begins And Twitter Needs To Fix It Top
Spymaster , the Twitter-based game that we covered last night , is spreading like crazy today. It’s been a trending topic on Twitter throughout the day, even ahead of the hype around Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Because of this popularity though, some Twitter users are getting inundated with tweets from the service in their streams. It’s not really spam, because it’s their friends doing it, but to some, it’s very annoying. Former Digg lead architect, Joe Stump , is particularly pissed off. “I've started both unfollowing and reporting users of this game to @spam . This isn't because I hate my friends, it's because I have no other recourse to stop this application's abusive behavior,” he writes in a blog post today . While Stump isn’t entirely accurate that the only way to gain points is by tweeting out your actions in the game, the spirit of what he’s saying is correct because you are encouraged to tweet out your actions in the game to earn more points. He notes that this is similar to what happened with Facebook Platform early on, as games like Zombies took over people’s streams. This is something that VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon notes as well, joking that maybe they should rename the game “SpamMaster.” But the real issue here, which both Stump and Eldon bring up, is that this is the perfect example of why Twitter needs filters of some sort. We’ve been railing on this for a while, and I’m actually quite glad this game has come along to bring the issue to the forefront. The problem isn’t that the game is spam, it’s that Twitter is not at all set up to handle games like this, even though it is positioning itself to be a robust platform. You need to be able to do things like block certain hashtags or keywords, and to be able to group together certain friends. Currently, various third party sites /services handle thing on top of Twitter, but it’s not enough if Twitter is really going to be a new form of communication. Because if Twitter gets overrun by these types of viral games, people will simply stop visiting Twitter, and it will destroy the platform’s backbone. Not that these are trivial things for Twitter to implement given its crazy rate of growth right now. But it will be needed if that growth is to continue in the future. At the very least, Twitter should allow you to block which apps you get updates from — though I think it still considers Spymaster updates to be coming from the “web.” For his part, Spymaster co-founder Eston Bond says, “Backlash has been pretty minimal. Some people find Spymaster noisy but I’m amazed at how many people defend their tweeted spymaster actions to others (search can give you some examples .) For now, everyone’s having fun and I want to make sure that we can keep the game compelling in the long term. I have lots of content ideas that I’ll be hopefully implementing soon.” Again, I don’t consider this Spymaster’s problem — but there is a problem, it’s Twitter’s. You’ll see this as more of these style games come along. It’s a matter of when , not if. CrunchBase Information Spymaster Twitter Joe Stump Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Video: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings On The Economics Of Movie Streaming Top
A couple years ago, Netflix began supplementing its DVD mail rental business with movie streams over the Web. for a few thousand select titles. Today, millions of Netflix customers stream their movies instead of waiting for them to come in the mail (or, more often, do both). ComScore Video Metrix estimates Netflix’s online viewership a bit lower at 645,000 unique viewers in March. They watched 6.9 million video streams and the average time spent watching per viewer is an amazing 128 minutes for the month, which is right up there with YouTube in terms of time spent (having full-length feature films helps keep people around longer). You pay Netflix a subscription, and you can watch your monthly allotment of movies any way you want. Netflix doesn’t care where you watch your movies, whether it is on your TV, xBox 360 , Windows Media Center , or other devices. Streams still make up a small portion of the overall movies watched by Netflix customers, but it is growing as the company expands its streaming catalog, broadband improves, and computers become more like TVs (and vice versa). I ran into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings at the AllThingsD conference this week, and asked him in the video above how his streaming service is going and how its economics compare to that of mailing out DVDs. As you can imagine, it costs much less to stream a movie over the Internet than it does to mail it as a DVD. But Netflix ends up paying twice anyway because it already owns the movies on DVD. It has to pay the studios an additional streaming fee. The studios like that. “If the studios have their way, we’ll pay them two or three times,” quips Hastings. But he is resigned to paying wtice for movies he’s already bought. The way he looks at it, Netflix is paying the studios instead of the Post Office. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Facebook Revs Up For Payment Platform With Updated Terms Top
Facebook developers are dying for a unified payment platform, and all signs are pointing to one coming soon. In the latest news, the site has just released a draft of its proposed new Payments Terms, which will dictate how transactions will be conducted going forward. While the updated terms are in line with Facebook’s recent trend towards using simplified language in its legal documents, the company’s blog post also notes that the new terms will “give us the flexibility to try new features”. This isn’t particularly surprising - there have recently been reports of Facebook planning to begin testing payments some time soon, after months of delays. Facebook is using the same community commenting process it used during its site-wide Terms of Service fiasco before it officially rolls out the new terms, giving users three days to voice their thoughts on the site’s Governance site . You can read through the proposed list of rules here (there’s also a FAQ ). Most of them are pretty straightforward - Facebook basically says that it licenses all of your virtual goods and credits to you (you don’t own them), and it can do whatever it wants as far as changing the price of credits. It’s also not responsible for anything you buy (aside from ensuring that your Facebook Gifts are delivered), and there are no refunds (though the company says that it may intervene in disputes betwen users concerning payments, but that it is under no obligation to do so). Some of the language refers to transactions between users and third parties, which is indicative of the upcoming payment system. There are a few interesting tidbits worth looking through. My favorite is this one, which seems to indicate that Facebook can randomly disperse virtual gifts to friends if you fail to use your credits in three years (which could have some potentially hilarious consequences, depending on who receives those virtual bikinis and cans of Coors Light): 3.6 If you leave a balance of credits unused for three years, we may redeem those credits by sending virtual gifts to your Facebook friends or donating the credits to a nonprofit organization of our choice (and charging standard redemption fees for those transactions). Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
If Your Phone Requires A Headset Adapter, Your Phone Sucks Top
Listen up, 2.5mm-to-3.5mm headset adapters. You too, crappy shape changers required by an absurd chunk of the worthwhile phones out there: We’re through. Game over. Just like voicemail and hand shakes , we’re officially declaring war on any middleman component required to pump audio from a cell phone, along with the phones that require them. There was a time when this sort of thing was acceptable. It was only a few years ago. Most phones were hitting the shelves with but a few hundred megabytes of storage space, while standalone audio players touted capacities that all but the most dedicated downloaders had a hard time filling. Then came microSD and its high capacity variant, allowing users to pack up to 16 gigs of data (soon to be 32 gigabytes and, with the eventual evolution of SDXC, up to 2 terabytes) onto a card roughly the size of your thumbnail. Then came the iPhone which, whether the decriers like it or not, made much of the general populace give a damn about what their cell phones could do. With 3G networks up across the country and 4G networks beginning to roll out, audio streaming and on-the-go music downloads are becoming commonplace. Phone manufacturers can no longer afford to implement media playback as an afterthought - but if they insist on requiring headset adapters, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Read the rest of this post >> Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Foursquare To Serve Up APIs, More Mobile Apps, Free Beer Top
It’s been over 2 months since Foursquare launched at SXSW and something strange is happening: My friends are still using it — a lot. Sure, for the service to have real success, it will have to spread well beyond pockets of tech hipsters, but even this success is something we haven’t seen with the majority of location-based social networks so far. But Foursquare’s strategy is smart in that it’s just as much of a game, in which you collect badges and gain mayorships of your favorite local places, as anything else. And now it’s gearing up for a further expansion with an API. Initially, team hopes this API will be used to build more mobile clients, co-founder Dennis Crowley tells us. Right now, there is only a native app for the iPhone, but he says that there are already a few people working on a native Android app as well. And they envision someone building a BlackBerry app shortly as well. I know that will be music the ears of a lot of my friends who are forced to visit Foursquare’s website from their mobile browsers, which is a less than ideal experience right now. Crowley also says that someone has already used the APIs to build a desktop client on Adobe AIR. As for the iPhone app, version 1.2 has just been submitted for approval to the App Store. As we know, that’s always a crapshoot , but assuming it gets approved in relatively short order, there will be a lot more cities the service will be available in . The team also recently rolled out a way to submit your own badges . But the recent news that most interests me has to be how some cities have establishments that are acknowledging mayorships. You can a mayorship in Foursquare basically by being the person who checks in there most often (on different days). One bar in LA, Good Hurt, is giving away a free beer to the “mayor” every time they come in! Another place in Denver is giving away free lunches to the mayor, and some bar in Brooklyn has a blackboard which they write the mayor’s name on, Crowley tells us. He says that the team is thinking about ways to work with more establishments to offer these sorts of deals. It’s really a pretty ingenious idea for both the service and the establishment, as it drives usage of both. It’s sort of like what some brands are using Twitter for, but the location aspect is particularly interesting and could be much more targeted. And yes, that could even eventually blossom into business model. But basically, I just want some San Francisco bars to acknowledge my mayorships and give me a free beer. That’s my business model. [photo: flickr/ a4gpa ] CrunchBase Information Foursquare Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
The Walking Dead: Yahoo 360 Officially Closes, Again Top
Yahoo 360, which was supposed to close early last year, is finally officially shutting its doors on July 13, according to a blog post written on the site today. The social network/blogging service that nobody really used (except in Vietnam ) steadily lost its steam, especially in the U.S. According to ComScore, Yahoo 360 had 13.9 million worldwide unique visitors in April. But only 982,000 of those unique visitors were from the U.S. This is down from 1.8 million unique U.S. visitors a year ago (see chart below). Yahoo 360 was built to create a social network around a blogging platform, and simply couldn’t compete with other social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and other more popular blogging platforms like Wordpress and Movable Type. Similar to the company’s original announcement in 2007, Yahoo is promising to help move blog posts and friends lists over to a more general Yahoo profile. What took it so long to pull the plug? Yahoo says it took almost two years to shut down the service because the company was trying to find “a sustainable and adequate solution” for retaining user’s personal data from the site. The blog post also mentions that they have a solution for users but neglects to mention what exactly that is. Yahoo also shut down its other venture into social networking, Mash, last summer. Perhaps Yahoo is going to focus its efforts on its Twitter-clone microblogging platform Yahoo Meme, which has been rolling out invites recently but isn’t getting resoundingly positive reviews. Maybe Yahoo should just give up on creating a social network and buy one instead (Twitter!). Or maybe it should just make a deal with Microsoft for boatloads of money. UPDATE: Yahoo responded to us via Twitter (!) with this : “the solution we have for users is a new blogging tool, found in user’s profiles.” Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Goog-411 Now Tells You Intersections Top
If you don’t use GOOG-411 when you are away from your computer and need directory assistance, you should. It is free and will give you the address or phone number of any local business. Today, GOOG-411 added an obvious feature it should have had all along: it now tells you the street intersections where a business is located. Since it knows the location information and can presumably cross-reference that with Google Maps, giving out the intersection is not too hard. To get the intersection, just ask for “details” after you get the phone number. The thing about GOOG-411 is that it is all automated using Google’s speech recognition technology. While you are waiting for it to find the phone number and address, it plays a recording of a human voice pretending to be a computer calculating the answer (”bidabudabidabudabidabudabid”). It’s a nice touch. Almost makes you forget you are talking to a computer. Almost. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
VisualDNA beta: Tailored Ecommerce Based On The Pictures You Choose Top
Imagini has launched the private beta version of its VisualDNA Shops widget to help monetise blogs and websites through a unique take on affiliate sales. The widget adds personalised product recommendations to any site, and immediately starts generating detailed demographic, psychographic and behavioural analytics of its visitors. It does this using the company’s VisualDNA concept; working out people’s personality types based on the pictures they choose. Imagini draws the data from its consumer facing personality test site, Youniverse , which has profiled more than 15 million people since 2006. VisualDNA Shop presents visitors with a few visual questions, and delivers real-time product recommendations from Amazon.com based on their responses. Imagini secured $13.5m in funding in February this year, a chunk of which no doubt went on getting actor Stephen Fry to explain the VisualDNA concept in the video after the jump. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Mochi Media Network Attracts Nearly 100 Million Online Gamers A Month (comScore) Top
Mochi Media , a well-financed San Francisco startup that operates a decentralized network of Flash-based online games and gaming websites and offers developers a way to distribute, monetize and get statistical information about their games, sure has done a good job growing its network to a significant size since it debuted its public beta product back in October 2007. Sometime next week, the company is going to announce that in its first month of inclusion in comScore’s measurement system, it has taken the lead over one-stop shop gaming destinations in traffic by a margin. Combined with the company’s claim that the so-called ‘extended network’ is growing its delivered impressions by 5 to 10% month-over-month, Mochi Media should be attracting over 100 million visitors on a monthly basis right about now. Looking at worldwide traffic, comScore pegs the Mochi Media network to have received a little over 91 million unique visitors last April, or roughly 8.2 per cent of the total traffic measured in the ‘Online Gaming’ category for that month. These are impressive numbers: the second ranked online gaming destination is Spil Games , and the total amount of traffic that network receives on a global scale per month is close to that of Mochi Media Action, a subset of Mochi’s network made up of only one genre (adventure games). Familiar brands you’d expect to rank higher, such as Yahoo! Games, MSN Games, EA Online and Nickelodeon, all obtain less than half Mochi Media’s reach worldwide. It’s worth noting, however, that most of this traffic is coming from countries outside the U.S.: from those 91+ million visitors per month worldwide, only about 16 million visitors or roughly 17% originates from the Unites States. The company tells me a lot of visitors come from other English speaking nations like Canada and the U.K. but also from China and a good number of European countries. I also got some numbers regarding its current network size: Mochi Media currently includes more than 14,000 games played across 30,000 websites, which the company claims translates to 1 billion game plays a month worldwide. A company representative declined to share any details about its revenue - the company provides technology for game developers to integrate advertising units powered and distributed by Mochi Media - but did say sales of pre-roll video advertising units are going particularly well, with CPM rates “in the low to mid-teens” for the U.S. and the UK. Mochi Media is backed by $14 million in venture capital from Accel Partners and Shasta Ventures. Its most recent financing round was a $10 million Series B round from both investors back in June 2008. Meanwhile, the startup has convinced both a former MySpace ( Carol Werner ) as a Yahoo exec ( Eric Boyd ) to join its ranks and spurred small startups like the recently seed-funded HeyZap to do similar things. Keep your eyes on this one, folks. CrunchBase Information Mochi Media Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
So Much For Twitter's Trending Topics To Indicate Breaking News Top
Twitter ’s near real-time search capabilities and the ability for them and third parties to mine the collective data from user messages for indicators of what’s buzzing online is the intrinsic core value of the company now that it has grown to the size it is at the moment. We already know Twitter can be quite the source for breaking news , but critics have in the past correctly pointed out that one should be aware of the fact that the mob isn’t always right, and unverified claims on the micro-sharing service - often from a single user or even a single message - can quickly lead to false or incomplete stories circulating rapidly and viciously until the dust settles and the truth surfaces. And even then, it’s often too late as most people will have probably moved on unless it was a topic they have a continued interest in. Case in point: the Prop8 debacle . Up until recently, Twitter’s trending topics - which are prominently displayed on their Search homepage and now also in the sidebar when you’re using the Twitter website - were an awesome way to get a feel of what was buzzing on the Web, in a way that virtually no other web service was able to do. And even if you couldn’t quite make sense of why a certain word, term or hashtag was trending, wiki-based services like WhatTheTrend were able to lay it out for you (most of the time, anyway). It was simply a great way to stay on top of news that was breaking online. Which brings me to my rant. Today, when you look at Twitter’s trending topics, you’ll notice that the large majority of trends are memes started by a single user or a group of users, with the main goal offering entertainment rather than spreading information. That’s all fine and dandy - no harm in having fun - and I realize well that Twitter’s trending topics are not necessarily required to be giving you and me an overview of stuff that really matters, but I can’t help but think it’s a pity that that list is starting to turn into the top 10 of chain letters people used to circulate through e-mail messages in the late nineties. Fine with me if people want to share what they consider to be lies that boys tell, or which 3 words should follow after sex, or what their moms used to tell them when they were little, but as I said before I think it’s a shame considering how powerful that trending feature and how valuable that list could be instead. Maybe Twitter needs to add a feature that allows for people to customize that list by enabling them to remove topics out of their attention stream at the very least. We’ll make sure to add it to our list of 300 things we think Twitter should do before a TV show. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Digg Nabs Federated Media's Chief Revenue Officer, Chas Edwards Top
High profile advertising network Federated Media’s Chief Revenue Officer Chas Edwards has resigned, we’ve confirmed, and will shortly be taking a job at Digg with the same title. Thomas Shin , who Digg stole from Yahoo earlier this year, will report to Edwards. Mike Maser , currently Digg’s Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer, will change his title to Chief Strategy Officer. He controls Digg’s marketing, business development, corporate development and community management groups. This is a big blow for Federated Media. Founder and CEO John Battelle recently announced that he’ll be looking for a replacement to run the company, although he’ll remain active with the business. And Edwards, I know from personal experience, is the kind of guy who can sell ice to eskimos and get a sincere “thanks” as he takes their money. Federated Media raised a big round of financing last year that valued the company at $200 million. Oak Investment Partners , which led the round, must be wondering what exactly they invested in. Many of Federated Media’s partners have left the network. Digg left in 2007 , followed by GigaOm last year. TechCrunch parted ways with Federated Media earlier this month. Edwards will have responsibility for all revenue streams at Digg, which include some revenue from Microsoft (although that deal is largely over) as well as direct sales . The company is making a push towards profitability, they’ve said in past months. That will likely require about twice the reported $8.5 million in revenue that Digg generated in 2008. Edwards will certainly help them get there. Update: The Digg blog post . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Spymaster: The Twitter Game That Will Assassinate Your Time Top
Over the past few days, perhaps you’ve seen a few tweets pop up in your stream from people you follow that end with the “spymaster” hashtag. If not, it’s likely you will soon. Spymaster is a new social game based around Twitter in which you do spy-like things such as buy things on the black market, assassinations and put money in Swiss bank accounts. For doing all of these various tasks, you get in-game fake money, and/or points to level-up to become a better spymaster. But if you try to do too much, too often, it will wear on your body and you will lose energy points. Plus, if you fail in assassination or other tasks, you can get injured and lose money. But the genius of this game is its tie-in to Twitter. You sign-up for the game with your Twitter name using OAuth, and your fellow spies are other Twitter users. So when you attempt to assassinate one of them, it will tweet that out to all of your followers including both of your names — and to the followers of the person you tried to assassinate, if they turn the setting on. These Twitter notifications are the real key to the game. There are a bunch of activities within Spymaster that you can set up to automatically tweet out when you do them. These include securing a new safe house, buying something on the black market, and even failing in an attempt to assassinate someone, among other things. The more of these you elect to tweet out, the more money you will earn for doing stuff. But it’s a delicate balance, because if you tweet out too much of your activities, you run the very real risk of annoying your other Twitter followers. Co-founder Eston Bond is clearly aware of this, saying that with just a very small group of users, some are already finding the tweet updates “a bit noisy.” But it’s easy to toggle them on and off on the game’s site. And after playing around with a few different settings, I find that “Assassinating a user,” “Securing a new Safe House,” and “Spymaster level increase,” are some pretty good ones to send out as they don’t bombard your users since you don’t do each of those all that often (well maybe assassination, but that’s just a fun tweet). If you turned on every task you did or every black market purchase you make though, your tweet stream can get ugly — fast. But it’s really quite ingenious. Because the game relies on these tweets, each of which is hashtagged and sent with a URL for the game, word about the game is spreading like crazy with just a select few beta users. The game is being opened up more tomorrow for public testing tomorrow, Bond tells me. And when it is opened up, it should spread even more quickly because a large component is “Converting Spies,” which is taking your Twitter followers (regular “spies”) and sending them direct messages to join your spy network , converting them to “spymasters.” The bigger your spy network, the better your spymaster will be in the game at things like assassinations. Definitely part of the draw of Spymaster is the whole spy thing — it’s hilarious. Spies who do sign up to become spymasters opt-in to one of the various spy agencies — either the CIA, the British SIS or the Russian FSB. Which group you sign up for helps determine your spy network as well. And depending on which network you’re in, you can wire money to spymasters in other networks, but you will have different (fake) currencies. But the money is all converted with the real-time exchange rates, Bond tells me. Brilliant. Spymaster is a side project of iList , a classified listing site for your friends . Aside from Bond, it was created by Chris Abad (iList’s CEO), and Albert Choi and Ben Myles. I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of spymaster hashtags tomorrow on Twitter — hopefully users figure out how to limit their noise. But if they don’t, feel free to assassinate them. That aspect is another brilliant part of the game — just when I think I’m done playing, I get a message that someone tried to kill me, so naturally I hop back on and try to kill them. It’s beautiful, really. Or, as my fellow spymaster Drew Olanoff puts it, “Just when I try to leave. They pull me back in. ” That’s the theme of just about every spy movie ever made. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
What Just Happened? Thursday Was Supposed To Be Bing Day. Top
Everyone knew today was the day that Microsoft was going to launch their new search engine. Everyone’s been talking about it for months, and the press and marketing efforts were carefully tailored to maximize the impact. Thursday, May 28, 2009 was supposed to be Microsoft Bing Day. A little after 8 am this morning Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer himself took the stage at the exclusive All Things Digital conference near San Diego, California and announced to a few hundred elite executives that Microsoft would soon be releasing its new search engine , and that it would be called Bing . One problem right off the bat: the Bing.com site wasn’t live. And since press didn’t know the name until Ballmer said it, it took a while for the news to spread. Another problem: A team of Google engineers based in Sydney was simultaneously announcing a stealth project 4+ years in the making called Wave . And it wasn’t being announced to a select few top business executives. Instead, the team that created it was showing it to 4,000 developers at the Google IO conference in San Francisco, California. You know that scene in the Lord Of The Rings movie where the huge eye of Sauron on top of that mountain swings its view from the alliance troops massed at the Black Gate of Mordor over to the real action, Frodo with the Ring at the Cracks of Doom? That’s basically what happened today. The eyes of the world, and the press , swung from San Diego to San Francisco as they realized what was happening. And what was happening was this: Google stole Microsoft’s thunder with one of the most ambitious and exciting products the tech world has seen in a long while. At the end of the Google Wave presentation, 4,000 developers stood up and cheered like nothing we’ve seen outside of a Steve Jobs keynote. That picture above isn’t the crowd of gray haired execs cheering Bing. It’s a mass of engineers going wild over a new open source communications platform from Google. And yes, that guy on the right was literally waving his laptop in the air in excitement. The fact that everyone in attendance was still glowing from a free Android G2 phone that was handed out the day before didn’t hurt, either. So what happened? Well, the company that will do no evil will certainly engage in a little stealth black ops mission when its required. Google knew full well exactly when Bing was going to launch. And they carefully planned the Wave launch to occur just minutes afterwards. They knew the crowd was ready for something cool. Not only did they have that free phone, but the day before Google VP Engineering Vic Gundotra told the crowd that there would be a big announcement the next day. People were ready and willing to be wowed. And while Wave certainly deserves every bit of positive attention it got today, the fact that it’s an open source project didn’t hurt, either. San Francisco engineers love open source like east coast liberals love Obama. Microsoft never stood a chance. As far as the San Francisco developer crowd is concerned, Bing stands for “But It’s Not Google.” Photo credit: I have no idea. If you know, please tell me in the comments so I can ask forgiveness for using it without permission and give proper credit. Update: Chris Campbell took the photo , per the comments below. Thanks Chris! Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
The Bing Definition Microsoft Probably Doesn't Want You To Get In Your Fortune Cookie Top
Chinese, as a character-based language is obviously tricky to translate into English. But following today’s launch of Microsoft’s new oddly-named search engine, Bing , the world wants to know what it means. We have an answer. While you might associate “bing” with the Chinese flatbread, or a number of other things that Wired broke down . We were sent perhaps the ultimate translation in the form of a fortune cookie that just happened to pop up after someone’s dinner tonight. One translation for “bing” is apparently “disease.” Some more digging on the web indicates this as well. So while that is slightly less subtle than Microsoft’s former search property, live, spelling “evil” backwards, it’s another interesting name choice by Microsoft. I’d hope they didn’t plant the bing definition in that fortune cookie as part of its elaborate $100 million marketing campaign — though, come to think of it, that might not be a bad play. [Thanks Stephen ] CrunchBase Information Bing Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Google Wave: The Full Video From Google IO Top
Here’s the full video of the Google Wave demo from this morning at Google’s IO conference in San Francisco. Our full review of Google Wave is here . Exclusive interview with the founders is here , and our video and notes from the press conference is here . CrunchBase Information Google Wave Lars Rasmussen Jens Rasmussen Stephanie Hannon Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Video: Plastic Logic Prototype E-Reader Top
Plastic Logic is showing off a prototype of its thin-film electronic reader at the D7 conference. The main difference between what Plastic Logic is trying to build and the Kindle is that its screen technology is much thinner, lighter and can be incorporated into more flexible form- factors. I shot the video above showing a demo of what it can do. We certainly need thinner, sleeker e-reader devices. But unless Amazon adopts the technology for future Kindles or opens up the Kindle Store t other e-readers, any Plastic Logic device will have limited appeal. The company is pitching it as ideal for viewing business documents, something you can easily do with the Kindle as well. It converts everything to a PDF and lets you jump around to different pages or even different documents (represented by different tabs). The Plastic Logic prototype uses E-Ink technology, like the Kindle, it i just not on glass. So it suffers from the same slow load times for each new page. It also does not display Web pages (something the Kindle does in rudimentary form). Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Ads For New Microsoft Bing Search Engine…On Google Top
Maybe it works, but seeing ads on Google for Microsoft’s new Bing search engine just doesn’t seem to send quite the right message. Plus, the ads link to a nearly blank landing page , since Bing hasn’t launched yet. Microsoft is rumored to be spending up to $100 million to advertise the Bing launch. I wonder how much of that Google will end up getting… There are also ads pointing to a Ning site called BingHub . I can’t imagine why whoever created it is spending cold hard cash to promote that, either. Thanks for the tip , Gur. Update: Bing ads on Yahoo, too: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
SourceForge Acquires Open Source Data Community Ohloh Top
SourceForge, a tech news and e-commerce network has acquired Ohloh, a social network for developers and directory of open source projects, for an undisclosed amount. SourceForge owns and operates a number of tech media websites, including SourceForge.net, a centralized location for software developers to manage open source software development; Slashdot, a tech news site; ThinkGeek, a marketplace for tech goods. Founded in 2004, Ohloh crawls 3,500 open source forges and gathers statistics and data on more than 300,000 open source projects and 300,000 open source developers. It’s not clear of Ohloh will be absorbed into SourceForge.net. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 

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