Saturday, May 9, 2009

Y! Alert: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from TechCrunch

Layoffs Hit MySpace Top
MySpace has let go of as many as 45 employees in the last week, we’ve confirmed. Sources close to the company say that the exact figure may be smaller, but that MySpace has definitely laid off a significant number of people. MySpace has refused to comment on the matter, so it isn’t clear if this was the result of a canceled project, general layoffs, or performance-based cuts. A source says that early signs indicate that the open positions will not be filled by other employees. The news comes only a few weeks after MySpace suddenly dropped founding CEO Chris DeWolfe and brought on a new executive team led by Owen Van Natta . It’s unclear if the cuts are directly related to decisions made by the new team or if they were already set in motion prior to DeWolfe’s departure. In any case, we’ll probably hear about more restructuring as Van Natta and team slash the projects they don’t want to continue pursuing. Last July MySpace was rumored to have laid off as much as 5% of its workforce, though the company later said that the cuts were performance based and amounted to “less than 5%” of the company. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Rampant Piracy Will Be The Kindle DX's Savior Top
Earlier this week, we got our first glimpse of the Kindle DX, Amazon’s upcoming E-book reader that has taken the original Kindle’s nearly prohibitive $359 price tag and bumped it up to an even more exorbitant $489 for good measure. Granted, the DX has one major improvement: a bigger screen that makes it suitable for textbooks, professional journal articles, and even newspapers. I’ve spent the last few days mulling over the future prospects of the new device, and up until a few hours ago my forecast was looking pretty grim. But then a lightbulb went off over my head: pirates are going to save the Kindle DX. But before I get to that, let’s address why the Kindle DX is poised to fail. The Newspaper Strategy Three major newspapers have banded together for an experimental trial run on the Kindle DX, offering cheaper long-term subscriptions to customers in return for the fact that their distribution costs will be next to nothing. The newspaper angle might be attractive for a few people, but I’m not convinced that it’s actually going to sell many Kindle DX’s - at least, not without the newspapers subsidizing the device’s cost as part of a subscription plan. Over $500 after taxes, plus paying for the newspaper subscriptions themselves, for convenient access to content that is already available for free online? I just don’t see it happening. Kindle DX As A Textbook Reader The other big marketing angle for Amazon is that the Kindle DX is the ultimate textbook reader. This sounds great in principle: students won’t have to lug around massive tomes between classes, and their books may even be slightly cheaper to boot! Unfortunately, for anyone who has ever actually used a Kindle, it’s pretty clear that this isn’t going to be as amazing as it sounds. Sifting through an E-book looking for a certain passage or image when you don’t know its exact page number (some call it ‘random access’) is a strange and unnatural experience. The Kindle sort of makes up for this by offering text search, but this is only helpful if there’s a proper name or unusual vocab term that you can remember in the passage. But the Kindle’s real weakness is its highlighting and annotation functionality. In a real book, you can mark up your textbook and make notes to yourself in the margins. The Kindle lets you highlight and take notes, but the interface is painful to use with any kind of frequency - E-ink doesn’t lend itself well to quick navigation, nor does the Kindle’s joystick/button interface. From a student’s perspective, the Kindle is badly in need of a touchscreen. And while some students may initially grab the Kindle DX as soon as it comes out for the ‘cool’ factor, practicality (and cost) will rule it out for most of them. Unless.. Pirates To The Rescue College textbooks are really expensive. As in, $300+ per quarter (a small fortune for someone with little to no income) for a set of books that you may only occasionally look at and will have no use for three months down the line. If you’re thrifty you can sell those books back to your school and get doubly screwed when they fork over a laughably small return. Selling them online through services like Chegg usually yields better results, but for whatever reason most students still don’t use them. So why don’t these students, renowned pirates as they are, simply copy the books? Well, textbook piracy already exists. If you know where to look online, you can find many novels and textbooks scanned in their entirety as PDFs. But until now, pirated textbooks were more trouble than they were worth. Reading them on a computer screen is a pain for obvious reasons. The alternative, printing out hundreds of pages at a time, results in an unwieldly mess that also stands out like a sore thumb whenever you pull it out in class. The Kindle DX changes that. Just find the book you want in PDF form, upload it to your Kindle over USB, and you’ve got a perfectly readable and convenient textbook. Sure, students will have to deal with the usability issues I raised above, like slow highlighting. But these books, frustrating as they might be, will be 100% free . That’s $300 per quarter in extra beer money. Most obstacles and morals fade quickly in the face of that much alcohol. Now, this is an issue we’ve brought up before when the original Kindle came out, and it hasn’t really been a problem. But most of the books people have been buying up until now are available for a mere $9.99 from Amazon. For most people, the motivation simply isn’t there to figure out how to pirate a book. But when you’re faced with a price tag of around $70 per textbook there’s a far greater incentive to find a workaround. It’s easier to find pirated files on campus too - students will be surrounded by classmates using the exact same textbooks so there’s a better chance someone will have a pirated digital version. And there’s always the resident friendly geek down the hall ready to help with any tech support issues. So the Kindle DX may wind up selling well to Amazon’s chagrin. Amazon is really in the business of selling ‘the blades’ - it cares more about selling books than it does about selling devices (this is why Amazon offers an E-book reader for the iPhone too). Then again, it might just work out for the company after all. Students may take the time to pirate expensive textbooks, shortchanging their publishers. But a New York Times Bestseller? Why, I’d save myself the trouble and just buy it for $9.99 off Amazon. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Animoto Gives Procrastinators A Last-Minute Mother's Day Gift Top
Mother’s Day is just around the corner and those of you who are on top of your game have probably already sent a card and arranged to give your mom a thoughtful gift of flowers, candy, or a gift certificate to a spa. For those of you out there who have done none of the above, Animoto, a startup that automatically generates high quality slideshow/music videos from a set of photos, offers you the ability to make a heartfelt video greeting that would warm any mother’s heart. The site features a Mother’s Day card that allows you to submit a handful of photos to automatically create a sentimental video-slideshow set to your mom’s favorite music. It’s an easy, quick and and innovative way to show your Mom how much you love and value her on Mother’s Day. Animoto, which launched in 2007, also helped users make creative slideshow greetings cards on Valentine’s Day and and over the holiday season. Animoto offers a nifty service and does a nice job of spicing up photo albums, with little effort needed on the users' part. Competitors include RockYou and Slide. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Sobees Latest Horse To Enter The Twitter / Facebook Desktop Client Race Top
For a while now, we’ve been tracking a number of companies who are hard at work trying to build the ultimate social networking desktop app. We’ve talked about TweetDeck , Twhirl / Seesmic Desktop , AlertThingy , and there are many more especially if you also include the ones that focus only on Twitter ( Tweetie , Nambu , Twitterific , etc.). Another horse in this race that barely gets a mention is Sobees , probably in big part because of the fact it’s only available for Windows users (with the latest .NET framework, moreover), although it doesn’t really deserve to be below the radar this much at all. We covered the company’s social network aggregator when it entered public beta, and wrote that they were aiming to attract a mainstream audience for their software, which enables users to manage a fairly wide variety of web apps and social networking services from their desktops. It’s a nifty companion that plugs into Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, YouTube and many more web services, but I’ve always felt it was far too overloaded with features for me to use it on a daily basis. So I was interested when the company set out to build a stand-alone client for Twitter, Facebook and Twitter Search. And just as they were working on that, Facebook launched its Open Stream API so they made thankful use of it quite rapidly and converted the API to .NET and integrated the stream into the new client. The software is now in alpha and publicly available under the name bDule , and it’s definitely worth checking out even if you only use one of the two services it supports. Soon, we’ll do a feature-by-feature comparison for all the existing social desktop applications, but for now let me just say Sobees is very much worthy of being included whenever someone talks about Facebook / Twitter clients. As mostly all of the apps mentioned on top bDule is a bit of a memory drain, and at times renders a bit slow, but the UI is really well thought-out (love the different templates you can switch to in just one mouse-click) and it does what it’s supposed to do really well. Too bad it’s Windows / .NET only, because I’m sure there’s an audience out there that’s looking for just this type of app. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Hackers Temporarily Seize Control Of Google Morocco Domain Name Top
Google.co.ma , the domain name for Google Morocco’s search portal, was taken hostage by hackers earlier today reportedly for several hours before the problem got fixed (it’s working fine again now). We got a bunch of tips about it, and the situation lasted long enough for lots of people to take screenshots of the website the domain name briefly pointed to due to the hack. You can find loads of screenshots here and here , but the main domain name pointed to the website shown on top of this post. There’s a bit of confusion about how the hack was performed exactly, but it appears as if the hackers found a way into NIC.ma , which controls the DNS for the country, and targeted the Google domain name especially. The domain was pointed to a different server, and the web page above was shown when people tried to access the search engine. Google apparently at one point automatically relayed visitors from Morocco to Google.com instead of Google.co.ma, but it took a while to get the latter functioning correctly again. PAKbugs.com leads to a forum where Pakistan hackers hang out, and the names on top of the web page above are all members of the message board. They’re being proud of it here . This website (in French) claims that this isn’t the first such incident this year, as apparently the websites for Google Algeria and Google Puerto Rico were taken hostage by hackers last month too. (Via ArabCrunch ) Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Hand Shaking Is So Medieval. Let's End It. Top
Every once in a while we go on a little rant here about something that bugs us. In the past we’ve done hit jobs on email , voicemail and business cards at various times. But there’s one thing that bugs me more than all of those things put together - the ubiquitous hand shake. I’m not just talking about the sweaty palms handshake, which sends shudders down my back. I even take issue with the firm and dry handshakes that we engage in every day. I’d like to see the ritual ended. Hand shaking goes back a long, long way. Wikipedia says it was practiced as far back as the 2nd century BC. The story I’ve always heard is that shaking someone’s hand shows that you hold no weapon. Since most people are right handed and would hold a knife in that hand, we shake right hands. Whatever the reason for hand shaking, it isn’t needed. Like the Qwerty keyboard (which is designed to slow us down so that the typewriter doesn’t jam), it’s a relic of an older time that’s not only no longer needed but actually causes inefficiency. I can live with the keyboard. But I’d rather not have to catch another flu or cold from a hand shake. The fact is that hand shakes spread germs. You shake someone’s hand and then touch your nose or mouth and you can get sick. I don’t like getting sick. But to turn down a hand shake is such an insult that there’s little choice. The hand is out there, in front of me waiting, so like everyone else I grasp it. Whenever I do shake a hand I’m completely aware of it, can’t stop thinking about it, until I can wash my hands. Sometimes in a meeting I’ll shake hands all around, then excuse myself to the bathroom to wash my hands, then return. It draws attention, though, and people have pointed it out to me as odd. My response is that it’s nothing personal but I don’t want to get sick. If I get sick I have to take time off and it hurts my business. And there’s a good chance I’ll get other TechCrunchers sick, too, which is doubly bad. Anyone who pays attention knows that most people don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom, which should be a criminal offense. Probably ten times a week I don’t shake hands with the excuse that I’m “coming down with something,” even though I’m not. So let’s start a new trend - not shaking hands. You can do a fist touch instead. or a solid, respectful head nod. I’ll even start bowing if I have to. Fox has a couple of other options , but I absolutely refuse to engage in an elbow bump. Other than that I don’t really care. But just like I don’t swap spit with everyone who walks into a room, I’d prefer not to swap germs via the ancient but disgusting habit of shaking hands, either. Deal? Thanks to Laura Boychenko for researching hand shakes for me. It’s a fascinatingly heathen practice. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Notify.me Brings Instant RSS Updates To Yet Another Browser Toolbar Top
Notify.me , a service that delivers instant notifications on your favorite topics the way you would like to receive them (i.e. by SMS, e-mail, IM, desktop app or on the web), is adding a new feature next week that should make its die-hard users primarily very happy. The rest of the world will probably care much less. It’s not that Notify.me at its core isn’t useful, albeit not very unique. For a lot of people, instant updates for anything that has an RSS feed (not only blogs or news sites, but also classifieds listings, for example) with the ability to filter incoming by keyword makes sense, particularly if they need a lot of control over how the updates get delivered based on what the source is. Yet I can’t help thinking that the latest feature the startup is releasing, a browser toolbar, has ‘overkill’ written all over. What the toolbar does is bring Notify.me’s core functionalities to a persistent toolbar whenever you’re browsing the web. Users can set delivery methods and filter rules directly from the toolbar, and the company has also integrated Ping.fm (which it recently partnered with ) and AddThis directly to the toolbar so you can easily share and bookmark websites you’re visiting on a wide variety of social networking services. Personally, I wouldn’t use this service as I would find it incredibly annoying to constantly have a toolbar on my screen that’s not only persistent but also pings me with new notifications every so often. There’s an abundance of new toolbars launching nowadays, and somehow I don’t think that’s what the next web is all about (quite the contrary, actually). I would love to get your thoughts on this as well. Similar services include Yotify and Notifixious . Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
TwitDoc: Proving That Every File Format Will Eventually Be Shareable Over Twitter Top
Twitter is quickly turning into the media sharing platform of choice for many people, despite the fact that it, uh, doesn’t have any actual media sharing functionality. But a variety of services are popping up to fill the need, including countless Twitter-specific sites for sharing images , music , and video . Today TwitDoc is launching what appears to be the first service for sharing documents over Twitter, bringing support for PDFs, Microsoft Office Documents, and a bunch of other file formats. The site has integrated with popular document sharing hub Scribd to make the process as painless as possible - it only takes around 20 seconds to send a document, and you don’t have to sign up to get started. To use the service, you enter your Twitter user name and password, choose the document or photo you’d like to send out, and add any text you’d like to include alongside the document’s link. Hit upload and you’re done. It’s a handy tool, but I doubt it will reach the same level of popularity as TwitPic and its ilk - most people simply don’t have as many documents that they’d like to share with all of their Twitter followers. Still, it will definitely be helpful for sharing reports you find interesting, or scanned images that wouldn’t be readable if they were shrunk and compressed (which some image services do). Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Nuts: Twitter Inventor About To Launch His Next Project, Code-named Squirrel Top
Almost immediately following Twitter coming back from a planned downtime this afternoon, co-founder and current Chairman Jack Dorsey sent out a tweet letting his followers know that he was, “ Getting ready to embark on something new and entirely different. Excited! ” Dorsey is getting ready to launch his next startup, he’s confirmed to us. As the guy who actually invented Twitter, this is notable. Though Dorsey declined to comment on what his new startup is right now, we hear from a source knowledgeable about the new company that it’s code-named Squirrel. Here’s what else we know so far: It’s a service that allows anyone with an iPhone to become a merchant. Just like the wireless credit card swipers you see at certain shops and restaurants, you can carry around your iPhone and take payments. Apparently, the idea is that this will allow any individual to take credit card payments on a mobile device, kind of like what PayPal does for the web. Squirrel is both a physical device add-on to the iPhone as well as an iPhone app. Ingeniously, the device derives enough power from the physical swiping of the credit card to then read the card, so it requires no external power from the iPhone or anywhere else. The physical device apparently looks something like an acorn, thus the code name Squirrel. But Dorsey is not leaving Twitter. He told me just now, “ I’ll never leave Twitter, it’s my life’s work and baby and I’ll always be a major part of the endeavor, strategically and operationally.  But, I do have some other ideas I’m pursuing and yes, we’re going to launch soon. ” Twitter was Dorsey’s idea when he was an engineer at the company Odeo, a podcasting company which current Twitter CEO Evan Williams ran at the time. Odeo ran Twitter as a side project for a while, before realizing that it had more potential than Odeo itself did. Twitter became the company, and Dorsey became the CEO. But there was always some question as to whether or not that role was a good fit for Dorsey, and so a few months ago, Williams and he swapped roles , with Dorsey taking the role of Chairman. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Update: Seeqpod Fire Sale To Microsoft Not A Done Deal. Top
Earlier today, I wrote a post wondering whether music-search engine Seeqpod had finally sold itself to Microsoft because of a suggestive link on its homepage linking to Microsoft Search. Some other bloggers noticed also. Since then, I’ve been able to confirm that no acquisition has closed and that talks continue. Seeqpod is indeed speaking with Microsoft, but not about an outright acquisition. Rather, it is trying to negotiate a piecemeal sale of its technology assets and find new jobs for its core technology team. And while Microsoft seems to be interested in the largest chunk of Seeqpod’s assets, the company is speaking with other large search companies in hopes of finding a home for the other pieces. These assets include its targeted crawling system for finding playable media on the Web, its search index of 14 million playable search results and 500 million associated text pages, its recommendation and discovery system, five related patents, and the teams associated with each of these technologies. The fact that Seeqpod is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy makes this sort of fire sale easier to pull off. As far as the pending lawsuit with the music industry which forced it to seek protection under bankruptcy in the first place, there is no plan to settle at this point in time and “become an ATM machine” for the dying music industry, says my source. So why would Microsoft want to touch Seeqpod, even with a ten-foot pole? It’s underlying search technology can be applied to many other areas besides music search. Seeqpod actually got its start at Lawrence Livermore Lab and genomic search (matching genomic sequences to diseases, symptoms, and even foods), so there are health search applications. But more broadly Seeqpod’s technology is around “playable search.” It can bring back playable media results (audio and video, primarily) for practically any search term. That is the kind of technology and team that could help Microsoft’s general search engine. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Twitter And FriendFeed Battle For Downtime. Scoble's Head Explodes. Top
We all know about Twitter’s downtime today. It was a scheduled maintenance service that was supposed to last for about an hour. Sure enough, after about an hour, Twitter came back — but only partially. Over the past hour since it’s been back, it’s been up and down, but mostly down. And now there’s another problem, FriendFeed is down too. FriendFeed, aka, the first alternative to talk about Twitter when Twitter is down, has completely lost contact with its data center, co-founder Bret Taylor tells me (hey, Twitter once lost a database , so this is nothing new). They’re investigating the problem right now. But where are we supposed to turn? Facebook? LinkedIn? Orkut? Scoble must being going crazy right now. It was probably only a matter of time before Twitter, which has a long history of downtime, was down on the same day as another site that houses people’s social graphs. When one of these sites goes down, people can usually deal with it. But two? I think I hear people screaming outside of my window. If Gmail goes down right now, I’m packing up some bottled water and heading for the hills. (With my iPhone just in case they all come back up in time.) Update : FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit lets everyone know (appropriately on Twitter ), “ The entire svcolo datacenter lost power. They expect to have it restored in 10min, but it will take at bit to bring up all systems. ” Update 2 : The downtime has now surpassed an hour. Here’s what Buchheit tells me, “ Our entire datacenter lost power, and unfortunately it’s taking them a while to restore it. ” He also noted that FriendFeed isn’t the only one affected, check out more of the carnage via this Twitter search . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Show Your Mom You Care On Facebook On Mother's Day — Then Unfriend Her Top
In celebration of Mother’s Day, Facebook now lets you list and connect to your family members in the “Basic Information” part of your profile. Starting later today and through this weekend, you will see a new “Family Members” section within the Information tab on your profile. You can enter your parents, children, sisters and brothers and can list family members even if they aren’t Facebook users. If you include their birthdays, Facebook will show their ages too. This is a good idea in theory and I think many users would have no problem listing and connecting siblings on their profiles. But I feel that a lot of people may not use this feature because they don’t want to list their parents on their profiles. I can see parents wanting to list their children but I’m not so sure that the feeling would be mutual, especially amongst younger users who may not want their parents to be connected to their lives via Facebook. Facebook also said it is considering an extended family section for the future. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Joking Or Not, Official Or Not, Facebook Needs To Grow Up Top
It’s sort of funny when Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg takes her frustration out on a club bouncer by saying (it has now been removed) it would be “a huge bummer if their facebook pages “accidentally” went down.” But it’s also terrible messaging for the fast growing company. Randi is founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, an executive of the company and also their unofficial spokesperson. Her statements carry weight, can be intimidating and considered an abuse of power. It’s also a recurring theme with Zuckerberg, who was in the news a couple of weeks ago for facilitating a minor but annoying violation of the Facebook terms of service to help out a friend. I’m not trying to paint this picture as something that it isn’t. Randi was clearly joking around and venting frustration. But it illustrates an underlying way of thinking that needs to be nipped in the bud. Facebook has long referred to user data as “our data,” ignoring the fact that in reality it’s the users’ data, not theirs to do with as they please . Likewise, Facebook is a community of people. This community will accept a benign dictatorship. Even a police state, perhaps, if the benefits are clear. But too many vendettas and shows of favoritism and that community could turn. I don’t believe that Randi would actually take action at Facebook to get back at this bouncer. But the message this sends is terrible, and it shows that she may not fully understand the weight of her words. It’s time for Facebook’s executive team to step things up a notch and realize that as fun as Facebook is, this isn’t a game. We’ve reached out to both Randi and Facebook for comment. Update: Facebook’s official statement is “This comment was clearly intended as a light-hearted joke. It goes without saying that there is no intended consequence beyond voicing a personal opinion." The twitter message has been removed. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Tech Jobs Still Scarce But Layoffs May Be Slowing Down Top
April proved to be a dismal month for technology sector jobs and overall employment, but there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. Granted, this morning brought sobering news of the U.S. unemployment rate hitting its highest mark since 1983: 8.9%. In the past month, 700,000 jobs were lost in the U.S., bringing the total number of U.S. jobs lost since December, 2007 to 5.7 million in April, 2009. However, while the economy continued to suffer from recessionary conditions over the past month, the pace of layoffs, at least in the tech sector may be decelerating. According to the TechCrunch Layoff Tracker , tech layoffs reached 330,000 in April, due to layoffs announced by Yahoo (675), Sony Ericsson (2,000), Toshiba (3,900), and Nokia (450) over the past month. Media companies were also hit with layoffs this month with NPR, The Tribune Company, and Conde Nast Digital all forced to implement job cuts. However, according to the numbers, job losses may be slowing down. It only took three weeks for tech layoffs to go from 200,000 to 300,000 in February and five weeks for layoffs to hit the 200,000 mark before that in January. Yet it has taken 11 weeks for layoffs to rise by 30,000, with the layoff tracker hitting 330,515 layoffs today. We are not completely out of the water yet. Last month, we reported the effects of the recession as measured by tech jobs site Dice.com, and it appears that available tech job listings have dropped even further in April. Dice.com is reporting a 47% year-over-year drop in available technology jobs for April, increasing slightly from a 45% year-over-year drop in March. April’s drop, as reported by Thomas Weisel Partners, is the highest annual drop Dice has seen so far this year, with February's listings down 40.4% and January's jobs down 39.3% (all year-over-year). Once again, Dice said that of the ten reported metropolitan areas, Silicon Valley was hit worst, with available tech jobs in the Valley down 54.2% year over year. Chicago (down 54.2%) and Boston (down 52.6%) also posted large declines. Our own smaller jobs site, CrunchBoard, has also seen a sharp decline in available tech jobs in the past month. A little over year ago 100 - 120 job listings were added to CrunchBoard each month. The number of new listings gradually declined with the onset of the recession and then fell significantly in November 2008, dropping from 68 to 37 listings from the month before. The listings rose slightly over the next few months, with February's listings hovering around 60. In April, the listings dropped to a low of 35 job postings. But the Conference Board’s Online Help-wanted Index may show signs of hope in the economy, reporting that monthly job demand dropped 131,000 in April, down 28% year over year, compared to the 31% year over year decline in March. And Challenger, Gray & Christmas released a report yesterday that planned layoff announcements eased in April to 133,000, from 150,000 in March. Strangely enough, it looks like the fishing, farming and hunting industry has been able to weather the storm better than any other area. According to analyst Christa Quarles from Thomas Weisel, the agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting industry was the only industry that showed an increase in job vacancies in April. Maybe we are in the wrong industry. We’ve consistently believed in the resilience of the tech industry, especially given the industry’s past experience with economic downturns. Hopefully, the ease in layoffs is a sign that the tech industry is slowly but surely rebounding in the wake of the economic crisis. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Twitter Is Down: 15 Alternative Things To Do Top
Twitter just went down. Don’t worry, it was planned . It should only be offline for about an hour today but there’s another downtime planned for Monday as well. I’m sitting here not quite sure what do with myself, as I’m sure many of you are. So I’ll go ahead a prepare a list of alternative activities for today and Monday, in order of importance/likelihood: Talk about Twitter being down on FriendFeed Talk about Twitter being down on Facebook Talk about Twitter being down over IM Leave a comment on a blog post about Twitter being down (preferably this one) Talk about Twitter being down via text message Talk about Twitter being down over email Tip TechCrunch that Twitter is down Write your own blog post about Twitter being down (for an example, see this blog post) Talk about Twitter being down on Pownce Plurk Talk about Twitter being down on Identi.ca Talk about Twitter being down internally on Yammer Think about Twitter being down Call an actual friend to talk about Twitter being down Invite an actual friend over to talk about Twitter being down Go outside And here are some other alternatives inspired by commenters: Compose a tweet using Birdhouse to send out when Twitter comes back [thanks Josiah] Bitch about the Twitter coverage on TechCrunch [thanks Austinite] Question the timing of the planned maintenance [thanks Carl] Accuse TechCrunch of being paid to promote Twitter [thanks what? (and Scoble and Winer)] Find a homeing pigeon [thanks courtney benson] Talk at a conference about Twitter being down [thanks Scoble] Talk to Walt Mossberg and Jimmy Wales about Twitter being down [again, Scoble, who loses a point on the leaderboard for name-dropping] Resort to hyperbole [thanks Shanky Baba] Compare TC to a pubescent boy and Twitter to Scarlett Johanson [thanks Beer Universe] “ losers” [thanks Max] Fix typos [thanks Erick] Update IM status [thanks Drew] Visit this site [thanks Orli] Update : And Twitter is back. But save the list for Monday! Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
So Long Federated Media, And Thanks For All The Fish Top
Federated Media has been our advertising partner since December 2005. The first checks they sent us allowed TechCrunch to become something more than a guy sitting in a spare bedroom talking about startups to a small audience. Revenue from Federated Media let me hire our first few writers and helped accelerate our growth to the point where we are today. We’ve had our very vocal dustups with Federated Media over the years, but the fact is that we owe FM a lot, and I’m somewhat sad to announce today that our relationship with them is coming to an end (see Federated’s announcement here ). We’ll no longer be working with them on ad sales. We’ve long sold many of our ads directly, and as of now we’ll be taking control of 100% of TechCrunch network ad inventory. In some ways this is a rite of passage for our still-young blog network. TechCrunch is starting to grow up. We now have six full-time writers on TechCrunch, and our total writing staff across our network is 20 bloggers strong. The TechCrunch Network now reaches more than 5.5 million unique visitors per month and 15 million page views (TechCrunch proper is more than 3 million uniques and 10 million page views / month.) In short, we're finally getting big enough to matter directly to advertisers and agencies. I'm personally excited about our new direction. Heather Harde , our CEO, has deep experience in sales and has acquired advertising technology companies in her previous job at News Corp. She’s got a lot of ideas on where online advertising is going. And as our CrunchCam shows, she can get an ad unit on just about anything . One of the things we're going to pilot with our expanded go-to-market sales strategy is a self-serve platform hosted by isocket . As the largest independent media property covering technology, TechCrunch is in the fortunate position to have a lot of advertising prospects reach out to us with interest in running on our network. Offering a self-serve platform will enable us to sell smaller units of TechCrunch inventory to be more timely and affordable to marketers and start-ups. For example, we used to sell month-long sponsorships exclusively, and now have weekly, and in some cases, daily buyout opportunities. Inventory on all TechCrunch properties is available, including CrunchGear , MobileCrunch , TechCrunchIT , CrunchBase , TechCrunchEurope , TechCrunchFrance and TechCrunchJapan . The isocket service is brand new. One of the things that makes working at TechCrunch so much fun is discovering new start-ups and getting to test them out first. TechCrunch is the first pilot client for isocket, a new, yet-to-be-funded startup by John Ramey and Zak Hassanein . The isocket self-serve ad platform sits on top of OpenAds, our ad-serving partner, and will help us offer more transparent and flexible pricing options to advertisers. We're launching with a modest set of variables, all time-based buyout by the day, week or month. In the coming weeks, we'll add the ability to purchase CPM-based advertising. We'll also be launching new targeting channels. For example, marketers who want to reach a mobile audience, can focus a package that includes MobileCrunch, as well as the relevant pages of CrunchGear and TechCrunch and on matching company profiles on CrunchBase. One of the practices that we will discontinue, at least for the short time, is running ad inventory from multiple third-party networks. Since we haven't been selling all our own inventory, we need time to get a clean read of the demand for premium advertising on our network. Google AdSense will provide backfill for remnant impressions for the immediate future. We'd like to acknowledge Federated Media for the contributing role they've played to help TechCrunch get to where it is today. Notwithstanding our differences of opinion about the role of conversational marketing, we part friends. Unlike others, we're not leaving to move to competitive selling networks, we're just leaving to chart our own course. John, Neil and Chas have contributed to the TechCrunch business in important ways over the last three years. Federated's commitment to represent aspiring authors is still an important role in the publishing ecosystem. As part of our kick-off, we're offering a 20% discount on all advertising purchased directly online through isocket during the month of May (discounted inventory based on availability through 12/31/09.) Our traditional rates resume June 1, so please use this opportunity to test us out and save. Of course, we welcome advertisers to contact us directly to purchase advertising on either a sponsorship or CPM basis. Please email heather [at] techcrunch [dot] com or visit techcrunch.com/advertise . Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
DocuSign Raises $5 Million For E-Signature Software Top
DocuSign, an e-signature service, closed $5 million in Series D funding from Frazier Technology Ventures, Ignition Partners, Sigma Partners, and West River Capital LLC. The funding follows a Series C investment of $12.4 million in 2007 from the same investors. DocuSign, which was founded in 2003, allows companies to get legally binding signatures quickly over the internet instead of over the fax or mail. DocuSign certifies digital signatures over the web, acting as a intermediary who holds the documents and verifies the identity of the signature. The digital signature business was really opened up during the turn of the century with that passing of the UETA and ESIGN acts, which clarified the legal grounds for electronic signatures nationwide. To date, more than 25 million signature events have been executed using DocuSign. Competitors include EchoSign, and VeriSign. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Ex-Googlers Try To Create A Better Travel Guide With Nextstop Top
Are you looking for the best beer bars in the world, good places to make out in San Francisco, or where to go on the Big Island in Hawaii? A travel recommendation site called nextstop mixes social recommendations with search and adds a reputation system and elements of gameplay to come up with a new social online travel guide. The site has been in beta for a few months, although it hasn’t gotten much attention yet. It was started by a couple of ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, who helped launch Google Calendar (Sjogreen) and Google Groups, and Picassa (Graham). A third co-founder, Charles Lin, was a Stanford classmate of Graham’s. The site grew out of their frustration with finding interesting things to do in unfamiliar places. “It is difficult to discover something new when you don't know what to look for,” says Sjogreen. Everything on nextstop is geared towards getting people to recommend their favorite places and organize those recommendations into guides. There are various ways to explore the site, including a search box, by city , a guide view , or a map view (see screen shots below). The recommendations can be collected together into guides (like this one for an architecture tour ), which can be explicitly “liked” by members. The guides can be sorted by most recent, most liked, or most viewed. You can save any place or guide in a wishlist for later viewing. But it is the social aspects which give the site an extra edge. Each recommendation acts as a vote (for any given place, you can see how many people recommend it) and you can also vote individual recommendations up and down. Every member gets a reputation score . You get 2 points every time somebody else votes up one of your recommendations, and 15 points when they “like” one of your guides. To fight spam, your reputation score goes down every time somebody votes down one of your recommendations or flags one of your entries. Entries can also be edited wiki-style. Still, it would be fairly easy to game the system with a few friends. The members with the most points get recognized on a leaderboard . And you can follow any other member, which lets you see all of their entries and actions on the site in an activity stream (which you can export to other services as an RSS feed). In addition to the reputation points, members can also earn “badges” for accomplishing certain goals, such as being the first to recommend a place, for getting 100 views on a guide, or 10 likes. Any recommendation can be shared via email, Facebook or Twitter (but sharing is not automatic, it has to be explicitly selected for each recommendation). Individual guides can also be shared as embeddable badges or widgets. The site makes very simple to create a recommendation. These are not meant to be in-depth reviews, rather curated suggestions of things to do. It uses a combination of search APis from Google (for local search, geo-location, image search, and maps) and Yahoo Boss (also for image search) to help you find and auto-complete many of the items that go into each recommendation. Once you create an account or sign in using Facebook Connect, you can type in the name of practically any bar, restaurant, tourist attraction, or business after clicking “add a recommendation.” It will suggest places it recognizes along with their addresses, and if one of them is what you are trying to recommend, you click on it and nextstop will place it on a Google map and find pictures. You pick an image, add a short Twitter-length recommendation no more than 160 characters, and categorize it as a place to eat/drink, stay/sleep, or do/explore along with an approximate price range (free, inexpensive, mid-range, high-end). Then the recommendation is created and other people can find it on the site. I did this for a restaurant in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, Bar Tabac , and it found it immediately, along with a great picture. There is plenty of competition for online travel guides and social recommendations, starting with TripAdvisor and Yelp down to a bevy of startups including Dopplr , Offbeat Guides and TripSay . But nextstep manages to do things a little bit different. It is not trying to be comprehensive, it is just trying to provide travelers a highly selective and vetted list of things to do and places to visit. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Google Makes A Great TV Commercial For Chrome, Assuming You Already Know What It Is Top
Google really wants you to use Chrome. So much so, in fact, that they’ve decided to broadcast commercials for the browser on TV - an extreme rarity for the online giant, which typically relies on web-based advertising and integration with other products to increase exposure. The spot was created by Google’s Japan team a few months ago as a way to “demonstrate how clean and simple” Chrome is. And beginning this weekend, Google will be using its TV Ads program to run the clip on TV. Now, I’m not a marketing person, and given Google’s vast resources I’m sure they’ve thought this through, but to me the commercial doesn’t do an especially good job at explaining what Chrome even is. I mean, for the vast majority of TechCrunch readers it’s a given that Chrome is a browser, but for the massive audience needed to turn Chrome into a contender against the likes of Internet Explorer? Not so much. It might pique the viewer’s curiosity, but I suspect many people will see the commercial and just go, “huh?”, especially given how rare commercials for web browsers are. If this ad doesn’t turn out to be a hit, Google has quite a few online-only commercials up its sleeve for Chrome, but it apparently isn’t planning to run them on TV any time soon. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Twitterrific Comes Roaring Back Into The iPhone Twitter App Wars Top
During the past several months, a war has been brewing between Twitter apps for the iPhone. But it’s been largely two-sided. You were either in the Twitterfon camp or the Tweetie camp. And if you were using any other app, it was only because you didn’t know any better. But with the release of Twitterrific 2.0 [ iTunes link ] for the iPhone, a new player has entered the fray. Twitterrific was one of the original iPhone Twitter apps. And for a while it was the most popular one. But when newer apps like the Twinkle, Tweetsville and then Twitterfon and Tweetie came along, they just blew it out of the water with either features, speed, or both. And so I was very skeptical when trying out this latest version, thinking there was no way it could replace the two newest gold standards. But after using it for a day, I have to say, I’ve for the most part been won over. The new Twitterrific is great. It adds all the key features that it lacked before: Multiple account support, search and trends, while doing so with a completely redesigned user interface. Previously, I didn’t like how big and clunky tweets looked in Twitterific, but the new version allows you to easily change the size of your tweet stream depending on how many tweets you want to see on one screen. It also allows you to change the theme from dark to medium to light. The new Twitterrific also adds an amazing amount of features, while being able to keep the core functionality of the app simple. This is largely thanks to the filter icon which tucks away @ replies, direct messages and the like. Also in that area, you’ll find what I think is one of the key advantages the app has over its rivals: The ability to bookmark tweets to look at later (which is separate from favoriting tweets). You also take and save notes on various users.   There are also a ton of options that can be set in the settings menu, such as which photo service to upload pictures to. And the ability to add Instapaper bookmarking support, just like Tweetie offers. You can also set the app to be better suited for left-handed people, set what tapping on an avatar does (as well as set what double and triple tapping does), and a whole host of other things. But the most important element to me for any of these Twitter apps, is speed. Previously, Twitterrific seemed downright slow when compared to some of its newer rivals. But the new version is much faster — but it’s still not quite as fast as Tweetie. But it has some nice options to make this less of an issue, including the ability to set auto-refresh intervals for your tweet stream. Unfortunately, I have gotten a number of API timeouts when trying to refresh my stream too often, but that’s likely at least as much of Twitter’s own fault. After initially taking the Twitterfon side, for the past few months I’ve been a Tweetie convert. It is simply a hard app to beat in terms of features, ease of use and design. The main downside is that it is a paid app (while Twitterfon is free). Because of this, Tweetie started as more of a Twitter power user tool. But by word of mouth it has spread quickly and grown into a huge app. So big that the developer even made a desktop version for the Mac . But this new version of Twitterific (which also has a desktop app too), is a worthy challenger to the throne. Smartly, it’s creators, The Iconfactory , offer it in either free or paid versions (the premium $3.99 one takes away the in-stream ads). If you want a Twitter client for the iPhone with the most features, Twitterrific is probably for you. For me, it remains to be seen which one I’ll continue to use on a daily basis. Twitterrific’s slightly slower speed may ultimately be the deal-breaker. But if I start bookmarking a lot of tweets, or using some of the other features, I may continue using Twitterrific — even instead of Tweetie. Check out a quick run through of the app in the video below: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Tweets From Space: NASA Turns To Twitter And YouTube To Reconnect With The Public Top
“I find it frightening that the first alien contact we might make could be a tweet.” Truer words have never been spoken by a YouTube commenter. NASA astronaut Mark Polansky , who will be commanding the next mission to the International Space Station, has just posted a video to NASA’s official YouTube channel inviting YouTubers and Twitter fans to take part in his next mission, submitting video questions via YouTube and following mission updates over Twitter. To ask a question, Polansky says to create a video of around thirty seconds and post it to YouTube, then send it to his Twitter account using an @reply. He’ll respond to the questions on NASA TV , which is broadcast nation-wide. Polansky won’t actually be the first person to Tweet from space - that title will likely belong to Mike Massimino , who plans to Tweet from Space Shuttle Atlantis, which embarks on mission STS-125 in less than three days. NASA has recently been making a big push in using modern consumer technology, the web, and social sites to reach a broader audience. Yesterday it launched a collection of very impressive Photosynth galleries of the ISS and Mars Rover. And they have more exciting releases in the works. This is something that is long overdue - the public may not be as enamored of space missions as it was a few decades ago, but the feats these astronauts are undertaking are no less impressive. And frankly I’d much rather follow the updates of true heroes than yet another celebrity on Twitter. Still, I can’t help but wonder if alien races will stumble across the tweets and conclude that our brains are only capable of interpreting 140 characters at a time. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
The Konami Code Strikes Again: Facebook Adds Some Flare Top
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start. There are few codes more sacred to old school gamers than the Konami code - a cheat code that originated on the original NES and has since made its way into many other games. More recently, some popular websites have been getting in on the action, with mischievous easter eggs from sites including Digg and Google Reader . Today, Facebook is joining the club. Entering the code will enable what I’m going to call ‘ lens-flare ‘ mode, adding the over-used Photoshop effect to a Facebook page whenever you click your mouse. Just enter the above code using your keyboard’s arrow keys (substitute ‘Enter’ for Start), and click anywhere on the page. It is totally useless, but looks sort of nifty and is guaranteed to impress your friends. For at least ten seconds. Last summer, Google Reader implemented the code, which introduced a Ninja to the site’s interface. And entering it on some game-related sites, like GiantBomb and GameSpot , will take you to a page about Contra (the game that popularized the code, because it was nearly impossible to play without it). But of all these, the one that takes cake was ESPN , which began showing dazzling unicorns and rainbows when you entered the code. Seriously. It has since been taken down, but you can watch a video of it here . For more Konami code Easter Eggs, check out our post on CrunchGear . Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Did SeeqPod Find A Savior In Redmond? Top
We’ve covered SeeqPod quite a bit here on TechCrunch. The San Francisco startup has been hard at work to develop a way to intelligently index media files on the Web to make them searchable online, and introduced an API which many other startups and projects made use of to power their own music, video and audio search engines. But despite the fact that its technology has always been pretty unique, the startup has had a rocky road up until now. SeeqPod has always tried to avoid getting sued by pointing to the DMCA, and arguing that it merely indexes media from across the Internet (much of it not copyright-cleared) but does not effectively host any files and thus should be protected from litigation. Regardless, music labels in particular were not pleased with how SeeqPod and many of the web services using its technology as an underlying foundation were discovering and streaming songs on the net. The record labels sued, Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy , and then put itself up for sale. Did anyone bite? Right now the site is down, with a message saying it is “cocooned for metamorphosis…” The word “metamorphosis” links to Microsoft Search , which could mean that it is in talks with Microsoft to sell the company, its technology assets or the link could just reflect wishful thinking on Seeqpod’s part. Microsoft would most likely be interested in Seeqpod’s underlying technology and could deploy it in a much different manner than Seeqpod. It would also be in a better position to settle the lawsuits with the music industry quickly. CrunchBase Information Seeqpod Microsoft Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Captain's Log: Google Calendar Now Knows That It's Stardate [-28]01210.00 Top
It’s no surprise that Google has its fair share of Trekkies, and they’re as excited about the new Star Trek film as anyone. So excited, in fact, that the Google Calendar team has put together a new ‘Stardate’ calendar that will tell you exactly today’s date in the Star Trek universe. There are a few ways to go about adding this to your Google Calendar. The easy (and lame) way is to add “[ stardate: ] ” as a friend’s calendar. You can also just look at it on the Google Calendar homepage. But for those of you with a more adventurous streak, try figuring out the secret to unlocking it the cool way. Here’s a hint: add an event that contains the name of your favorite new movie. And it isn’t ‘Wolverine’. You can learn about how Google calculated these Stardates here . Of course, Stardates are known to have been more than a little inconsistent over the years, so you may want to keep those Communicators handy in case there’s a mixup with friends. Also, thanks to all those who came out to our TechCrunch Star Trek screening last night! Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Is the Growth Of The Web Slowing Down Or Just Taking A Breather? Top
There are now 231.5 million Websites according to Netcraft . But last year the number of new sites added to the Web slowed down to 29.9 million, from 48.7 million in 2007. Royal Pingdom went through Netcraft’s server surveys to come up with the chart above, which shows the increase or decrease in the number of Websites for every year going back to 1996. The growth of the Web so far can be broken down into two five-year cycles, where every year the growth rate gets bigger until there is an economic downturn, when the growth rate takes a breather. In 2001 and 2002 the growth slowed and even went into negative territory, and again in 2008 there was another slowdown in the number of sites added to the Web. It stands to reason that the number of new sites will ebb and flow with the global economy, but it is not clear that there is any direct correlation. For instance, so far in 2009 we’ve added a whopping 46 million sites, many of them Chinese blogs. The total for the year will almost surely be much greater than the 2007 increase, and is already larger than all the sites added in 2008. Does that mean the global economy is already on a rebound or simply that countries like China and Russia are embracing the Web in a big way? These numbers also raise the question of how many sites does the world need—500 million, one billion, ten billion? Maybe the upper limit is the number of people who are on the Web, which is estimated between 1 billion worldwide (comScore) and 1.6 billion right now. Maybe it is more. How many Websites do you have? Here are the top countries by Internet population according to comScore.  All the growth is coming from China, Russia, Brazil, and India. (Growth is compared from July, 2008 to March, 2009 for an apples-to-apples comparison because comScore changed its methodology slightly in July, 2008). Internet population Jul-2008 Mar-2009 % Chg World-Wide 949,583 1,092,598 15% China 161,015 192,000 19% United States 162,619 163,825 1% Japan 56,786 63,152 11% Germany 35,212 39,183 11% United Kingdom 35,223 36,781 4% France 31,842 35,747 12% India 29,817 33,340 12% Russian Federation 26,355 30,710 17% Brazil 25,288 29,081 15% South Korea 26,251 27,901 6% Canada 21,587 22,023 2% Italy 19,689 21,174 8% Spain 16,562 18,456 11% Turkey N/A 17,390 N/A Mexico 12,037 12,914 7% Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 

CREATE MORE ALERTS:

Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted

Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope

Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more

News - Only the news you want, delivered!

Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more

Weather - Get today's weather conditions




You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)