The latest from TechCrunch
- Multiply 4.0: Social Network Photo Sharing Done Right
- Mark Zuckerberg And Yuri Milner Talk About Facebook's New Investment (Video)
- Topsy Search Launches: ReTweets Are The New Currency Of The Web
- Warning: Twittercut Worm Plays On Your Desire For More Followers
- Need A Witty "App For That" Phrase? There's An App For That.
- Contenture Launches. Micropayment-Based Freemium Models For All. (If People Use It.)
- OurParents Launches Free Customized Service To Find Senior Care Providers
- Feel The DailyBurn: Gyminee Gets A New Name, Raises $525K
- Political Pundit Tucker Carlson To Launch Competitor To Huffington Post
- It May Not Be Making A TV Show, But Twitter Sure Has A Lot Of Reruns
- The Awesome Potential Of Retweet
- Microsoft's Bing Logo Leaked By Way Of Favicon?
- Now You Can Avoid Euro Disney In Google Earth, Just Like You Did In Real Earth
- Taking Yahoo Meme For A Spin: It's A Mediocre Tumblr Clone
- Live Blogging The Facebook Conference Call
- Facebook Takes That $200 Million Investment From The Russians At A $10 Billion Valuation.
- When 1.3 Billion People Are Too Many
- Kindle Notes And Highlights Now Accessible On the Web
- OpenX Keeps On Growing, Raises $10 Million More
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- Nokia's Ovi Store Opens For Business: 10 Must-Downloads To Kick Off
- Twitter May Not "Transform Television," But Its Jump Is Interesting
- Smashwords Launches Flexible Ebook Affiliate Program
- RT: @Microsyntax Sets Out To Make Sense Of #twittergrammar
- 300 Things I'd Like To See From Twitter Before A TV Show
| Multiply 4.0: Social Network Photo Sharing Done Right | Top |
| Multiply , a social network with a heavy focus on sharing media with friends and family, is getting a major upgrade at 10 AM tomorrow, introducing an overhauled (and much improved) interface, extensive photo editing functionality, a fully integrated photo finishing platform. Multiply doesn’t get nearly as much attention as bigger players like Facebook and MySpace, but it has built up a solid base of users, some of whom are giving the company a steady source of income through its premium accounts. Where other social networks like Facebook have embraced a mentality of helping users widely share their thoughts and photos, Multiply has held onto the belief that sometimes users only want to share their personal media with a handful of their good friends and family. With the latest release, Multiply is looking to embrace the “digital mom”. Recognizing that many of the site’s members are adults looking to share their media with loved ones, the site has adopted an interface that is best described as a media inbox. When you first log in, the site presents you with a stream of content similar to Facebook’s news feed (in fact, Multiply had feeds long before Facebook did). Your friends’ newest events, messages, and photo albums appear in the main column, with thumbnails next to each. Navigation through the new interface largely revolves around a new sidebar at the left hand side of the screen, which strongly resembles something you might see in an Email client. The panel includes links to your most important friends and family, allowing you to make sure you catch all of their latest updates. Likewise, there are filters for the site’s groups, and you can create powerful custom filters - a feature that will appeal to power users. Aside from this feed of new items, the other main area to get an overhaul in Multiply 4.0 is the Media Locker, where you can upload and manage all of your photos, videos, and blog posts. This is where the new site really shines - Multiply 4.0’s photo manager strongly resembles native photo software like iPhoto, allowing you to drag and drop photos into whatever albums you’d like. You can use a slider to adjust how large the thumbnails appear during navigation, and the top bar includes handy links that let you quickly share albums via Email or through Multiply itself. It’s also much easier to export photos to the site’s printing storefront , which allows you to have your images printed into physical photo books, cups, and other products. The Media Locker also includes a number of basic photo editing features, like red-eye reduction, color adjustment, and image cropping. Multiply isn’t the first social network to offer these features (MySpace launched similar tools earlier this year), but unlike the MySpace editor Multiply’s doesn’t need a Flash embed. To get your photos onto Multiply, the site offers a range of plugins for your computer’s photo software, as well as an AIR application that can monitor your folders for any new images as they are imported from your camera. My one major gripe with the new site is the inconsistent appearance of the sidebar. While it appears and changes contextually when you’re in the Inbox or Media Locker sections, any time you visit a page or album on a friend’s profile, the sidebar vanishes. You can still get back to the other pages using the links at the top of the screen, but it’s strange for a UI element that seems persistent to disappear occasionally (imagine if Facebook’s menubar at the bottom of its pages only showed up some of the time). Aside from that, Multiply’s new site seems solid, offering a social network that can really do your media justice. Facebook may be the web’s leading photo sharing service, and it’s great for sharing day to day photos with friends. But for those shots that really matter you can’t beat full resolution, which Facebook doesn’t offer. Multiply allows users to upload full resolution photos, with the option of paying $20/year for an unlimited amount of storage to to have them all backed up (not to mention its more extensive photo editing features). Multiply isn’t going to overtake Facebook or MySpace any time soon, but it’s doing a great job bridging the gap between photo sharing services like Flickr and the larger social networks. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Mark Zuckerberg And Yuri Milner Talk About Facebook's New Investment (Video) | Top |
| I had a chance to sit down this afternoon with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner , the Founder and CEO of new investor Digital Sky Technologies . Digital Sky Technologies is the new owner of just less than 2% of Facebook, paying a whopping $200 million for the privilege. But it’s still a bargain compared to what Microsoft and others paid - this current round values Facebook at a third less than the $15 billion valuation they accepted in October 2007. We live blogged the press call on the announcement earlier today. The full transcript of the video is below. One thing that isn’t clear is why Facebook took the money. Late last year Zuckerberg said he’d be willing to raise more, but only at the $15 billion valuation . Now they’ve raised money at $10 billion, even though they still say they’re approaching profitability and don’t really need it. We discuss that in the interview, but the answer still eludes us. Milner is a colorful character. He was the first Russian to get an American MBA - he graduation from Wharton Business School in 1992. Instead of taking a U.S. investment banking job he returned to Russia “to take advantage of the developing free markets,” he said, adding “My idea is to be in the most useful place in the proper time.” Milner’s DST has made investments in Mail.ru, the “Yahoo of Russia,” and Vkontakte.ru , the largest Russian social network with 34 million users. Vktontakte, by the way, looks a lot like Facebook. It hasn’t been all roses and champagne for Milner. He was an executive at Bank Menatep , the company that had an indirect controlling interest in Yukos Oil Company and was involved in the $4.8 billion diversion of International Monetary Fund funds. That entity was accused of having ties to organized crime, and some of Milner’s colleagues are still in prison (there have never been any accusations against Milner at all). His time at Bank Menatap is not mentioned on his DST bio . One thing Milner doesn’t seem bothered by is the lack of a board seat at Facebook, a sticking point for the company . Transcript: Michael Arrington: I'm here with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Founder of Facebook and new investor Yuri Millner from Digital Sky technologies. Hey guys. First of all congratulations to both of you, you've got some more money Mark, and Yuri, you've got a piece of facebook. How much do you own? Yuri Milner: 1.96% MA: 1.96% Plus there will be more when you buy common stock in a couple of months YM: Yes, depends, you know, we'll see how much. MA: Why did you invest in Facebook? YM: Because it's a great business MA: You're comfortable with the $10B valuation? YM: Absolutely. And, you know, I can repeat the reasons why. Basically, I think they have a very unique perspective on social network monetization, that other investors don't necessarily see. You see how social networks have been monetized in our part of the world, and we're just doing our math and coming up with numbers that we feel very comfortable with going forward. We don't really value this business on (fee?) basis 2009 but rather on a longer term, based again on our experience, and we're very confident that, you know, those numbers can be achieved. MA: And what revenue numbers are you looking at for 2009 YM: Well we…you know, it's a question for Mark. We've done our due diligence but I'm not sure I can disclose that. MA: Is it $550M Mark, is that what you're telling investors? Mark Zuckerberg: You know, I mean like anyone who's doing diligence on the company gets to see the forecast, and we've said three things, (I'm so confused about whether to look into the camera…) MA: Camera's best MZ: We've said three things publicly about our finances for this year. And one is that we've been cash flow positive for 5 quarters. Another is that revenue is growing 70% year over year at least and that you know, we're really happy with just given the economic climate. And the third is that we expect that on our forecast we'll be cash flow positive in 2010, along the cash level that we had before doing this investment. So, that really made it so that when we were thinking about doing this we had a lot of optionality as to pick the partner that would be best for us and find the terms that would make the most sense for us and a lot of the investments in the portfolio that Yuri and DST have were really attractive for us in terms of the insight and understanding that they have in this space, so you were just talking about this a bit, but it's really interesting how all of the different Russian social networks, and he has stakes in all of them, monetize in different ways, but all very effectively. Right so, we're not looking at that and saying we want to do any of those specific models right now, but it is a very directional, it is an interesting directional indicator of how far we can expect things to scale and I think when coming up with valuation analysis, that's why it was so simple for you to do, and that's kind of how we were thinking. MA: Would you have paid a higher valuation? What was your top price? MZ: So that's the question that you never ask after it's done. I don't want to know the answer to that. MA: But I'd love to know the answer . MA: Yuri, are you a FB user? YM: Yes MA: When did you create your account? YM: It was not an extremely active account but it will be more active now MA: You're going to be clicking those ads. And, do you have many friends? YM: I've been using more local networks in Russia MA: You're going to stop doing that as much. YM: I will just use more. MA: You're going to social network a lot more. YM: Yes, I'm just a big fan of social networks MA: How popular is FB in Russia, just on the streets talking to people. Is FB THE thing? YM: You know among people who kind of travel a lot and have exposure to the United States and some other countries, they do have accounts, but you know, Russia is not exactly the place with multiple language skills so local networks kind of have an edge. But I mean, going forward, it's not inconceivable that people would be members of two social networks. I mean, that's what we see in Russia, I mean, between our properties I think about 30% of people have multiple accounts. And they're not really migrating, which is interesting. MA: How do you feel about that? People on two different social networks? Does that work for you? MZ: It's interesting and it's evolving pretty quickly but (sorry gotta look at the camera now) . MA: Just do whatever's comfortable. MZ: A lot of times people ask us about, this comes up a lot when we're talking about our platform strategy, right because, people ask us how we see the system evolving to become more open and the way that I think about is that in the early days of an industry, take for example Apple with the PC, it really makes sense to have one company doing the whole thing to kind of birth the concept and bring it out to the market, but over time if it's a really important industry, then what will happen is people will specialize and people will do different aspects of it. Just like what happened with the pc and you get companies that focused on chips, companies that focused on other parts of hardware, companies that focused on software applications, operating systems, etc. I think we're going to see more and more of that with social networking as well. So what started off as one monolithic thing will end up becoming a more decentralized model, and that's a lot of what we're trying to do with FB connect. Now, I think a big implication of that is that people will use different services. MA: FB connect, is that the intel, the Microsoft, or the Dell in your analogy? MZ: That's taking analogies too far. MA: So we'll stick with the Apple analogy to start MZ: There are any number of examples of the start of industries starting off centralized and becoming more decentralized and I think that one of the natural implications of that is that people will use multiple services and that the services will interoperate, and I think that's kind of the world that we're moving towards. MA: Yeah, and FB will be the plumbing. MZ: Hopefully we'll provide a lot of utility in being people's, in helping people share their identity and communicating with friends and the people around them. MA: So kind of a combined Microsoft, Intel. (MZ laughs) I don't expect an answer. I do have one question that's sort have been on the top of my mind. We met late last year November, December and we talked about funding at that time, and you had said, look, we're open to investing more, the $15 B valuation, we're not really actively looking, we're talking to some people, I don't want to misquote you but basically what you said was: open to raising more at that valuation. Now clearly things have changes, and there's no reason things wouldn't change, but can you just talk me through the difference between now and then because you talk about If anything, your financial situation has gotten significantly stronger. You almost didn't need to raise this money based on what you're saying. MZ: We did this to increase our option value for the future. We have no plans to use this money immediately and we may never use it. We may use it to make an acquisition or to open up data centers, if some strategic option makes itself avail and now we might be able to do it whereas otherwise we wouldn't have been able to , that's the option value that we gain through this investment. Just to clarify where we were before, what I was trying to kind of explain was our approach to the follow-ons after Microsoft. Right so there was the Microsoft investment of the $15 B valuation and then there were a series of other investments that we did afterwards at the same terms. And that was basically an analogous approach to us where we weren't going out saying ok we need this money, we want to find money on whatever terms it comes on we'll get it. We kind of said, if people want to invest at these terms that we think are good terms, and we're really comfortable with the people, then we'll go ahead do that. And that's really similar to where we are now. And obviously the market is at a lower position so the terms aren't exactly the same but fundamentally, this wasn't a financing where we said we need to go out and raise the money to make our operating plan work, it was more one where people started approaching us and these conversations have been going on for a while, right. I don't remember the last time that we talked about this but basically we've been talking to folks for a while. Recently it kind of got to the stage where we realized we have good caliber of people that we're talking to the terms are in a good range, let's actually go do this thing and we kind of finalized that we wanted to work with Yuri and DST and then we nailed it all down. MA: How close did you get with General Atlantic and Silverlake? MZ: We talked to a number of firms earlier in the process, as I was just saying, and just because things are going really well and growing quickly. I think a number of different firms… MA: Things are definitely growing. How many, 30m users a month you're adding, is that right? It's about 30. MZ: It's growing quickly. MA: Comscore's over 300 million now. It's the whole internet, there's no one left. MZ: Our internal numbers are lower than Comscore's because Comscore is tracking all the unique visitors but we're focusing on active users. But it's growing really quickly. so a bunch of folks just approached us to do different things and as time went on we kind of zeroed in on where we wanted to be and that's when we really started talking seriously about what the final terms would be, and that's where we are now. MA: How many acquisitions will you make this year, if you just had to guess. I mean, you're clearly going to get more active in that. MZ: So unless I'm missing something, we've made one acquisition and it was this talent acquisition which in my mind was one of the coolest things that we've done. We got two exceptionally bright guys. Blake Ross, who is now one of the key folks on the product side at FB and Joe Hewitt, who has single handedly built out much of our mobile stuff including the iphone app by himself and just really cool. Our track record I guess you could say is we're one for one. Might make us want to explore more of that. Honestly, to me, being cash flow positive is also really important. So I'm not looking to take this money and go do a bunch of things with it immediately. We will continue looking at talent acquisition just as we had over the last period of time and if any make a lot of sense, then we'll surely go ahead and do it , and this money might make it more possible for that to happen, but the plan isn't to use it for that. MA: Yuri, more investments to come in the US? YM: Well I have Stage 2 coming. So let's complete this one and then have a look. MA: Ok great, thanks very much for your time guys. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Topsy Search Launches: ReTweets Are The New Currency Of The Web | Top |
| New search engine Topsy , which has been in stealth development for three years, launches, well, now . Before Google, search engines like AltaVista determined relevance based on how well a web page matched the query. Then came Google, which views the web as a network of documents. Today, all search engines analyze linking behavior around the web. When a web page is linked to a lot, it’s given more influence than other pages competing for attention around the same topics/keywords. Jeff Jarvis summed it all up nicely in 2005 “In this new world, links are currency. Links grant authority. Links build branding. Links equal value.” There’s lots more to it, but the notion that links create value is what drives Internet search. Well, it’s no longer 2005. Back then blogs were giving Google fits because of how fast and irregularly they updated. Google had to make decisions on how often to index pages. Indexing is expensive, so there’s a tradeoff. Ping servers and blog search engines rose briefly to fill the niche, but Google indexes most popular blogs so often that those blog search engines are no longer much better. Now, though, we have so much real time content being created that Google and the other engines can’t keep up. Most of this content is on Twitter, but FriendFeed, Facebook, Digg and lots of other services are adding to it, too. The result - more and more people are doing searches on Twitter Search in addition to Google. For me, someone who’s obsessed with news and stuff that’s happening right now, Twitter search is about 25% of my total Internet searches. The ratio keeps going up over time. That’s where Topsy comes in. It’s not strictly speaking a real time search engine like Scoopler , which we wrote about earlier this month. Topsy is just a search engine. That has a fundamentally new way of finding good results: Twitter users. The 30 million or so Twitter users are an army of little content-finding machines. Topsy says those users are sending tens of thousands of unique links per day to interesting things around the Internet. Some of those users have more influence than others. And some links are sent by lots of Twitter users, others just sent once. Those links, combined with the information in the Twitter message itself, is what Topsy uses as the basis of its search engine. And the results are…amazing. New stuff in particular percolates up very quickly. A search for Facebook, for example, shows lots of news about the funding that was announced earlier today. And the links are sorted by those that Twitter users are sending around the most, weighted in favor of links sent by more influential Twitter users. You can sort results over all time (going back to September 2008), last month, week, day or hour. For all time, top results for Facebook are the Facebook site and developer site, among others. But in the last hour and day, it’s all about the funding news. Results show popular links but also the most influential users tweeting about that topic. Click on that user and you’ll see all their tweets about the topic. Here’s the results for TechCrunch and Facebook, for example. User influence is a hot topic , of course. Topsy isn’t looking at the number of followers. Rather, Influence is gained when others retweet links you’ve sent out. And when you retweet others, you lose a little Influence. So the more people retweet you, the more Influence you gain. So, yes, retweets are the new currency on the web. Told you . Topsy was founded in 2006 and has raised nearly $15 million to date in venture and debt funding. More information on the funding and founders is on the CrunchBase page for Topsy . Here’s a video where the Topsy founders give an introduction to the service and how it works: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Warning: Twittercut Worm Plays On Your Desire For More Followers | Top |
| Everyone wants more Twitter followers. It’s kind of the name of the game. But if you see some tweets in your stream that proclaim: “OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from http://twittercut.com” — don’t be fooled, it’s a scam. The link takes you to a site that requests your Twitter login and pass. It then sends out this tweet to all your followers — a typical worm. The reason to watch out for this is not only for the tweets of your friends and the retweets, but the links seem to have originated from the account twittercut — which was suspended. But then the links started up again from the account tweetcut (which has also been suspended). In other words, it looks like the perpetrators are just jumping from account to account to keep this thing going. As a Twitter Search shows, the worm is spreading quickly . Do not give it your Twitter credentials. If you do click through to the site, you’ll notice that they didn’t even attempt to create fake pages for the bogus site navigation. There is no “About” page, etc. Here’s the message on the page: TwitterCut.com is the best place for you to grow your twitter network and gain a ton of followers. We recommend giving it a shot, it’s free and will help you get the followers you need. This system is brand new, so the quicker you get involved the better it will be, fill out the form below and get started right away… The quicker you get involved! The play on getting more Twitter followers is a smart one — something that wouldn’t necessarily work for a Facebook’s worms of a similar nature. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of these. Again, do not give this site your Twitter info. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Need A Witty "App For That" Phrase? There's An App For That. | Top |
| I’m a big fan of coming up with ridiculous “App For That” headlines . You know, the kind that mock Apple’s iPhone App Store commercials that basically proclaim there’s an app for everything you could ever possibly want to do. So it brings me great pleasure today to report that the next time I need one of those headlines: There’s an app for that. App For That , is a website that gives you a series of user submitted “App For That” jokes, which you can vote on, tweet out, email, etc. The service looks like the iPhone’s text app, with submissions written in chat bubbles. Below that is a submission form for your own jokes. Oddly enough, this is a web app, and not an actual iPhone app. (Come on guys, get on that — the joke cannot come full circle until you have one.) But here are a few of my favorites: “If you just murdered your friend and need to find the nearest city dump, there's an app for that.” “Your momma’s so fat, there’s an app for that.” “If you want to write an app that makes fun of apps, there's an app for that.” “If you want to get your drunk roommate out of bed, there's an app for that.” “If your reading this, there's an app for that.” [thanks Nick] Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Contenture Launches. Micropayment-Based Freemium Models For All. (If People Use It.) | Top |
| A few weeks ago, we wrote about the impending launch of Contenture , a monetization network for sites built around micropayments. The idea is that while traditional online advertising models work for some sites, others are better suited for custom-tailored approaches — and that’s what Contenture can offer. Today, it has launched its service is giving TechCrunch readers a special deal. If a website owner signs up with the promotional code “techcrunch,” they will receive double affiliate commissions for a full year. A pretty good deal considering that because the way the network works, it’s in your interest to have more site owners sign up. That’s because the larger the network is, the more likely it will be that users sign up for Contenture accounts. And the more that do, the more you’re likely to get paid. Contenture users pay a minimum of $5.99 a month, but can offer to pay more if they choose. Site publishers keep 80% of the money coming in to Contenture, while it keeps the other 20%, which is a pretty solid deal compared to other monetization networks. The core of the service is similar to the idea behind TipJoy . That is, users paying a small amount of money to a site owner. But Contenture goes further, allowing sites to switch to a full-on “freemium” model, giving them the option to toggle certain features on and off depending on if a user has paid. But because it is based around a monthly-fee, we could be looking at a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Users may not want to sign up for the service because of the limited number of sites available — while sites not want to sign up because of the limited number of users. But Contenture has made it very simple for a site to install and use their service — it’s just a small snippet of JavaScript that can turn on or off features based on if a user visiting the site has a Contenture account. This type of model is no doubt a gamble, but it’s an intriguing one. As I wrote about a few days ago , I have no problem paying a certain number of sites that I visit often and love. But those were all web services, and not necessarily content-oriented sites. The large web services are likely to want to run their own freemium models — like what Pandora is doing . Contenture would be perfect for content-oriented sites, but a lot of users have hang ups about paying for content on the web. That’s not to say that won’t even change in some form, but today that’s a tough sell. Micropayments could be a key to unlocking such a model, but a monthly fee is a barrier to entry. Disclosure : Contenture sponsored our CrunchCam for a few hours a couple weeks ago. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| OurParents Launches Free Customized Service To Find Senior Care Providers | Top |
| Former AOL Digital Chief and founder of startup incubator Launchbox Digital John McKinley’s mother fell ill recently and McKinley turned to the web to find answers on how and where to seek care for his elderly parent. McKinley found a distressing lack of resources that helped adults find the right care providers for elderly parents. He found that many of the existing services were targeted towards the care providers instead of the consumer, with services often focused completely on making sales commissions off of connecting seniors with care facilities. And McKinley found that none of the existing services offered a user-friendly web interface to find customized care. McKinley vowed to create a portal aimed towards the consumer and today, is officially launching OurParents, a free elder care matching service, focused on assisting adult children with aging parents find the right care solution that meets the parents’ and family’s health care needs. OurParents’s transparency is derived from the site not making money from any matches that take place via the site. OurParents aims to provide an unbiased service that helps families sort through the decision of whether in-home care, a senior community, assisted living facility, nursing home care, or hospice care is best for their elderly parents. And the site does a lot of the fact-finding work for you. OurParents offers descriptions, services, photos, quality ratings, price info, etc. for over 65,000 care providers and allows consumers to filter search results by location, cost, quality, distance and special requirements. Among the site’s features that are particularly useful to consumers when assessing a senior care facility are free detailed reports about each facility, which includes access to the Medicare ratings, detailed audit findings, community data, and information about nearby hospitals and clinics. Users can also access provider information such as real life stories about a provider, news stories, bankruptcy filings and nursing home abuse allegations. OurParents includes a tool called the Care Options Advisor, that lets a person describe the circumstances about a senior citizen (health, age, priorities, etc.) in an entry form and be guided to the type of care options that make the most sense to consider. Once users pick a provider that they are interested in, OurParents will contact the care provider for the user. OurParents currently doesn’t advertise on the site but plans to make money from paid services the site plans to offer users in the future, including insurance and health related products. Enurgi, which was acquired by health care provider Univita earlier this year, provides a similar service, but Enurgi is targeted toward connecting the elderly with home caregivers, a small segment of the elderly care population. And Energi took a cut of transactions that took place via its site. Because it’s completely free, OurParents is sure to be a popular destination for adults looking to find unbiased and detailed information on care for elderly loved ones. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Feel The DailyBurn: Gyminee Gets A New Name, Raises $525K | Top |
| Gyminee , a fitness-oriented social network that was part of the TechStars class of 2008, has closed a $525,000 seed funding round led by FF Angel LLC, with a number of angels including Garrett Camp ( StumbleUpon ) and Tim Ferriss also participating. Alongside the funding news, Gyminee is also announcing a total rebranding - the company will henceforth be called DailyBurn (which is significantly easier to spell), and the site has seen a complete redesign. Gyminee first launched in late 2007, coming out of beta in January 2008 (the company had launched before it joined the TechStars program). Since then it has grown to 125,000 members, and while the site has to deal with some users dropping off as they get lazy and stop exercising, it reports that active users have managed to shed an average of 6.2 pounds of fat, or gain 5.75 pounds of muscle, depending on their goal. The overall purpose of the site is to help you lose weight and gain muscle by tracking every aspect of the food you consume and your workouts, all presented in a very attractive interface. The site offers a database of thousands of foods, allowing you to quickly figure out how many calories you’ve eaten throughout the day. You can input stats from your daily exercise regime (number of miles run, bench-press weight, etc.), so you can track your progress over time on slick graphs. The site’s social features allow users to share exercise plans and try to motivate each other. DailyBurn generates revenue by offering a set of premium features , which include a meal planner, more nutrition stats, and exercise plans created by fitness professionals, as opposed to other users. CEO Andy Smith says that the premium plan has been seeing a high conversion rate, which helped make the company appealing to investors. The company will soon be releasing a native iPhone application that will allow you to update your workout profile on the go, and will also be opening up its API to third parties. Other fitness startups include Fitbit , ZodBod , and watchMEmelt . DailyBurn from Andrew on Vimeo . Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Political Pundit Tucker Carlson To Launch Competitor To Huffington Post | Top |
| Conservative political pundit Tucker Carlson is planning to launch a political news competitor to the Huffington Post, reports The Hill today. The site will be called TheDailyCaller.com and will be focused on reporting news about the Obama Administration but will add “facts to the conversation.” Implying that the Huffington Post’s coverage is biased, Carlson said that The DailyCaller will be dedicated to “telling the truth and be accurate.” The site’s reporters will share in the profits of the news site based on how much traffic reporters get for their stories. According to Carlson the site’s motto is “every seven minutes,” and will be speedier than its competitors, including HuffPo and The Drudge Report. Carlson, an MSNBC campaign correspondent who is famous for his conservative spin and love for bowties, denies that the site will be a forum to discuss the future of the Republican party. Regardless of the spin, political news sites are aplenty and Carlson’s site will face stiff competition from HuffPo, the Politico and AOL’s new politics site, Politics Daily. Fellow MSNBC reporter Carlos Watson recently launched The Stimulist, which is focused on reporting long-form news for the Obama generation. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| It May Not Be Making A TV Show, But Twitter Sure Has A Lot Of Reruns | Top |
| For a service that is all about concise messaging, it’s humorous how the manner in which Twitter writes its blog posts is anything but. For the second time in as many days, we have yet another post today about the supposed Twitter TV show. This one is a clarification of the clarification from yesterday. It’s similar to how Twitter needed no less than 4 blog posts on one topic a few weeks ago to explain something (the changing of the @replies ). Here’s what the latest says: Twitter is not making a TV show. Instead, some “Hollywood folks” are, but Twitter has “little to do with their efforts but we wish them success,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone clarifies. Of course, this is exactly what he said yesterday, as I outlined , but he said it in a very indirect way. So now we get a second post. The problem is that a massive number of Twitter users are still tweeting out that Twitter is basically developing its own show. The power of the retweet is keeping this story going. And now even CNN is covering super-celeb-user Ashton Kutcher threatening to boycott if they go through with it. So let’s be clear once again: What Twitter is doing : Lending its support and probably branding to at least one television show produced by Reveille and Brillstein. Others are in the works as well. What Twitter is not doing : Making its own show, starring anyone from Twitter, or really distracting it from anything else it’s working on. Why this matters : First and foremost, this is a business deal. And Twitter will make money from this — though it doesn’t state that. Long term though, Twitter thinks its platform can be leveraged beyond web applications, and can be the backbone of entertainment experiences, among other things. Basically, Twitter is thinking of itself as a new communication medium (which has been noted several times in the past) and a TV show totally built around Twitter is an interesting step in proving/disproving that with the mainstream public. That is all. At least until the inevitable post tomorrow further clarifying the situation. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| The Awesome Potential Of Retweet | Top |
| Editor’s note: This is a guest post by David Sacks, the Founder and CEO of Yammer and Geni. Previously he was the COO of PayPal and produced the Academy Award-nominated movie "Thank You For Smoking." Sacks says he’s incorporating the retweet feature into Yammer, his “Twitter for the enterprise” product that launched at TechCrunch50 last year. Sacks’ Twitter username is @DavidSacks While there are many new features that Twitter could launch, the most powerful are likely to be based on behaviors that users have invented themselves. That's exactly what happened with @replies. Users started addressing each other by their @usernames. Twitter noticed and officially supported the feature. As a result, Twitter is on its way to becoming the discussion board for the web. There is one other user convention with that kind of potential: Retweet. A retweet occurs when a user reposts an interesting tweet. As with @replies, users established the notation organically: you type 'RT' followed by the @username of the original author and then the message. The problem is friction. You have to copy & paste the message and then the author's username. Frequently you have to edit the original message because the extra meta-data pushes it over 140 characters. Because of the accumulation of meta-data, retweets are even harder to retweet. This means that interesting messages don't spread more than a generation or two. Retweet support built into clients like Tweetdeck is only a partial solution. It eliminates the need to copy & paste messages but not to edit the original. Twitter should officially support this feature by adding a 'RT' option to messages. Clicking this button would repost the original message in your followers' feeds. The reposted message would appear just as you saw it (except for a tagline showing who retweeted it), and could itself be retweeted. (See my 'Before' and 'After' screenshot.) The ability to retweet retweets is critical because it means that messages could spread throughout the twittersphere frictionlessly. I believe this would make Twitter the leading way that memes spread in our culture. Twitter could accelerate this phenomenon by surfacing analytics about the most retweeted messages, allowing users to see the ideas (and links) that are spreading fastest throughout the world or in their local networks. One other suggestion: A follow button appearing under the original author's avatar in a retweet would make it easy to follow that person. Thus retweet would ensure widespread distribution not just of interesting content but also of interesting people. This would help level the "celebrity" bias on Twitter, allowing regular people to quickly build a following by posting interesting messages. In the absence of such a feature, many people conclude that it's too hard to get discovered if you're not a celebrity. Like search and @replies, retweet plays to Twitter's core strengths — discoverability and easy sharing. In the war between sharing platforms, it's hard to see how Facebook could copy this feature, because its privacy settings would prevent the frictionless spread of content. If Twitter becomes the dominant platform for discovering and sharing information when privacy is not important (including most status updates and all links), Facebook might suddenly look like a small subset of the sharing universe, reserved primarily for private news and media sharing. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| Microsoft's Bing Logo Leaked By Way Of Favicon? | Top |
| Within the next few days, Microsoft is expected to unveil its latest attempt at trying to be a player in the world of web search. After it has failed to get live.com any traction against Google, it will apparently launch a new engine called “Bing” — the project formerly known by its working title “Kumo.” This should be unveiled at the D conference which starts today in Carlsbad, CA — but it looks like Microsoft may be giving us a peak at the logo a tad early. While it appears that Microsoft may have already taken it down, I visited bing.com in my browser about 10 minutes ago and sure enough saw the favicon you see above. It’s a lowercase “b” with a yellow/orange dot in the middle. It would appear that this will be at least a part of the Bing logo. The light blue and yellow/orange color combination matches that of Kumo. I find that combination to be quite ugly — sort of like the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball uniforms ( below ) from the 1990s — but hey, that’s just personal taste. All that really matters is now the search engine actually performs. This favicon, which again, may only be a part of the logo, also looks a lot like the logo for Blinkx , the video search engine. That features a red lowercase “b” with an eye in the middle. See them side-by-side below. Microsoft is spending some $80 to $100 million on a marketing campaign for Bing, according to Ad Age . That’s huge by any standard, but especially when you consider that Google only spent $25 million on all of its marketing last year. I don’t know what Microsoft plans to spend all that money on, but I get the sneaking suspicion that Bing Crosby will be involved in some way or another. [thanks DD] Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Now You Can Avoid Euro Disney In Google Earth, Just Like You Did In Real Earth | Top |
| In 1992, Disney decided to build upon the huge success of its Disneyland and Disney World theme parks by opening Euro Disney in a suburb of Paris. The company had previously licensed its name for a resort abroad just outside Tokyo, but the European version was a more ambitious project being handled by the company. It started out as a nightmare. Simply put, people didn’t go to it. And now you can avoid going to it from the comfort of your own home thanks to the magic of Google Earth. Just as it did last year with Disney World , Google Earth now has Disneyland Paris (as it was rebranded to in 1995 following its thud of an opening) rendered in 3D. Disney has provided the program with some 85,000 photos — a huge 450GB worth — to make the renderings as realistic as possible. All the rides are there, the castle and even over 500 landscape elements. Following its rebranding, and the opening of some new rides, Disneyland Paris was able to somewhat turn things around, but it remains far in debt. Having a virtual representation of your theme park in Google Earth isn’t going to help that. Is it going to convince more people to go visit the park? Unlikely. But it’s a cute distraction for me for about 15 minutes. And it shows how good some of these 3D renderings are getting. The Disneyland Paris layer can be found in the “Gallery” folder of Google Earth 5.0. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Taking Yahoo Meme For A Spin: It's A Mediocre Tumblr Clone | Top |
| We recently broke the story about Yahoo launching a service in Portuguese dubbed Meme that on the surface seemed to be tilting towards a Twitter-like service. But now that we’ve received an invite code from a user in Brazil Portugal, we know it’s nothing like Twitter at all. It’s all about micro-sharing, sure, but that’s just about where the comparison ends. Yahoo Meme is much more like micro-blogging service Tumblr than anything else, and it’s a mediocre clone at that. Here’s how it works: you create an account with your preferred username (Yahoo profile required), and you basically start off with an empty blog that you can fill with text, images, videos, music or a mixture of those media. All you can add to your blog - apart from the content - is a title, a 100-character description and an avatar. You can visit my account here . There are no other settings for customizing your Meme blog, at least for now, and so far there is no way for people to create a comment thread underneath the content you post nor for you to share your posts other than a dedicated URL that points back to the update. You can search other people’s public accounts and follow them - which is essentially the same as subscribing to a blog’s RSS feed - and once you do this the updates from these users will also appear in your own stream. It’s similar to Tumblr in the sense that there’s a ‘Repost’ button (see second screenshot) that works exactly the same way as the ‘Reblog’ feature that’s baked into Tumblr. That said, Tumblr gives you way more customization options, lets you update your blog in a variety of ways, offers basic analytics and comes with an API. Yahoo Meme has none of that for now. It’s unclear whether Yahoo is merely bucket testing this new service in one language only (although it is one that is spoken by more than 200 million people) and planning a more extensive roll-out in the long run, or if this is as far as it goes. We’re also not sure if there are more features on the way, or if it will continue to be as rudimentary as its current incarnation. Either way, it needs a lot of work before it can appeal to a wider audience than some early testers. (Thanks to Carlos Duarte for the tip) Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Live Blogging The Facebook Conference Call | Top |
| This morning Facebook announced that it had accepted a $200 million investment at a $10 billion valuation from Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies. Over the last few weeks there have been reports of the company turning down investments at lower valuations, and debate over if the investors would get a coveted Facebook board seat (DST did not). Facebook is holding a teleconference to talk about the new investment. Below are our notes. Mark Zuckerberg: Despite a pretty tough economic environment, our revenue is up and growth continues. Removing barriers to communication across the web. Advertising products performing strongly. Now have tens of thousands of advertisers. On track to create a nice self sustaining business. Lots of firms have approached us. DST approached us with an investment background demonstrating advanced background in the power of social networks. Getting this money gives us a cash cushion. Not going to talk about how it’s going to be used, but nice to have the flexibility. Yuri Milner (DST Chief Executive): Giving some background on DST. Largest internet investor in Russian and European markets. One of largest groups involved in exclusively internet companies. Organized as a holding company, not a fund. Since 2005, have raised and invested over $1 billion. Investment in Facebook underscores belief that social networks change the way people communicate. We’re convinced Facebook has potential to be one of the most valuable internet companies globally. Q: How does this affect Facebook’s approach with regard to an IPO. Zuckerberg: We want to take money that will help us realize the long term vision of the company. For lots of startups the IPO is the end goal. That’s not the case for us, it’s a milestone along the way. It’s not something we see happening on the immediate horizon. Q: About Facebook valuation with common stock. Zuckerberg: Nothing to report there at this time, we’ve structured a few different transactions. Over the next few months (over the summer) we’ll have more to announce. Question about the Microsoft valuation Zuckerberg: It’s important to note that the Microsoft deal was part of a larger partnership with the company. That was a strategic partnership with a lot of different components. That was a year and a half ago when the market was at its peak. This is only taking the form of an investment right now with DST, we’re hoping it can work into other things over time. Q: How are you going to monetize international audience? Zuckerberg: I want to let Yuri speak about this, because of his experience with other social networks. Milner: Advertising and micropayments generated by users themselves. (seems to imply that Facebook will be doing payments soon, which has been long rumored) Zuckerberg: The different models are advertising, a number of things we’ve experimented with. The bottom line with the other social networks abroad is that they’re doing well, each with a different model. Q: Idea about projected advertising revenues going forward? What do you see your role as? Zuckerberg: As a private company we don’t share revenue numbers. I can tell you what we’ve shared so far. A couple of months ago everyone outside the company was underestimating our performance. We expect our rev growth to be greater than 70% year over year. We know that with our current rate of growth we’ll be cash flow positive some time in 2010. This relationship is purely cash buffer. Milner: *joke about joining management of Facebook* Says that he has his own business to run. Q: Can you talk about why Facebook is not interested in larger brand ads? Zuckerberg; We’re actually very interested in it. We’ve got a dedicated team, building out international offices. Sandberg: We’re working with the largest brands around the world. Our ads are specially designed for the Facebook environment, so they look and behave differently. Q: Quick question about the preference shares you’re issuing to DST. How similar are these to the ones Microsoft got in 2007? Zuckerberg; We’re not going to discuss the preference structure of the stock. I’m going to duck that one. Q: I was wondering if the $10 billion valuation includes any debt, and if the company carries any debt at all. Zuckerberg: This is an equity investment. There is some information that has been public about debt from equipment, but this is equity. Q: To be clear on this valuation. The $10 billion doesn’t refer to common stock. So how should we think of the valuation of Facebook itself. Zuckerberg: That’s really up to you. As a private company there’s not really a market for the shares. One of the reasons we haven’t been as focused on that. The common stock valuation would be different from this. Q: How many other suitors did you have? Did you line them up and pick from the highest bidder? Zuckerberg: There were multiple discussions, we were comfortable with DST, felt like I really learned a lot from my conversations with Yuri. Q: Is this the largest foreign investment in Facebook? Zuckerberg: There has been other information that has been available, but the size of those things haven’t been public. Q: There was buzz about Facebook working on a video chat feature, does this investment give you a little breathing room to focus on that kind of feature. Zuckerberg: We’re testing that currently. Don’t think the investment has much bearing on that. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Facebook Takes That $200 Million Investment From The Russians At A $10 Billion Valuation. | Top |
| Facebook is taking that rumored $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment group. DST will take a 1.96 percent stake in the company, giving Facebook a $10 billion valuation. Facebook ultimately did not have to give up a board seat to DST in return for the cash. But DST is getting preferred shares for it’s $200 million. When Microsoft bought preferred shares , it valued Facebook at $15 billion. Since then the market has come way down and various valuations for Facebook have been thrown out between $4 billion to $6 billion. And recently, Facebook turned down an investment valuing the company at $8 billion, with the stipulation that the investor get a board seat. During a conference call today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg he confirmed that other investors had approached Facebook, saying: “It was really at our option to find someone we wanted to work with on our terms.” No doubt, part of the appeal of taking the Russian money was to set the company’s new valuation at something easier to stomach than what the common stock was going for in private sales. But this investment may affect the valuation of the common stock as well. Additionally, DST has the option to buy another $100 million worth of common stock from existing employees and investors. Although, during the conference call, the suggestion was made ( update : confirmed) that these are being treated as two different transactions with different valuations. Facebook announced a program last year to let employees sell some stock to private investors, but that program was put on hold. Facebook hopes to give some of its employees liquidity with this separate deal with DST, which it views as a long=term investor. Despite recent public statements from COO Sheryl Sandberg saying that Facebook does not need the money , it can certainly use the cash to fund its growing operations, including bandwidth, storage, and engineering costs. During a conference call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that the investment will give Facebook “a good cash cushion” and give the company more flexibility “for strategic options” (which is code fro acquisitions), although he also says the company has “no plans currently.” It is not clear that $200 million is enough to buy the company it really wants to buy ( Twitter! ). Zuckerberg adds: “This investment is purely buffer for us. It is not something we needed to get to cash flow positive.” He expects Facebook to be cash flow positive in 2010, and says the company has been EBITDA positive for five consecutive quarters, going on six. And what about an IPO? “It is not something we are thinking about right now, not something we are rushing towards,” claims Zuckerberg. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| When 1.3 Billion People Are Too Many | Top |
| There's one big Web 2.0 question we'll never know the answer to: Could YouTube have survived on its own? There are a handful of industry-changing Web 2.0 names including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But unlike those other Web 2.0 behemoths who have the luxury of waiting out revenue challenges as their user base surges and the economy recovers, YouTube’s runaway success meant extremely high bandwidth costs and legal worries early on. It's one of the only companies in that list that should have sold early while the momentum was high. Evidence: Nearly three years after the acquisition, the mighty Google still hasn't figured out exactly how to monetize all those eyeballs either. Industry estimates say YouTube spends half a billion or more a year in bandwidth costs. That's not to say it was a bad acquisition, particularly considering Google's stock currency was tantamount to monopoly money back then. But you have to wonder, if YouTube were alive today, how much more would it have been forced to raise and at what terms? You can get an inkling by looking at the fortunes of a handful of Chinese equivalents: YouKu, Tudou, and 56.com. The three tell a lot about the Web in China. YouKu is based in Beijing, Tudou is based in Shanghai and 56.com is based in Guangzhou – and each is representative of the strengths of the region, according to several dozen interviews I did in China over the last two weeks. Situated at the nexus of Chinese startup culture and government influence, YouKu is widely credited as being the best at playing the startup game. Drawing off the Shanghai’s strength as a media hub, Tudou prizes self-expression as you can see by its Facebook-esque employee-graffiti-ed walls (right). And like a lot of emerging Chinese tech powerhouses to come out of the Guangdong province, some say 56.com has the best sheer technology of the bunch. YouKu and Tudou both claim to be the largest, while 56.com suffered from a several week government closure last June . The three are also emblematic of the flood of US money trying to get a piece of China: Among others, General Catalyst and Granite Global Ventures invested in Tudou, Sutter Hill Ventures invested in YouKu and Sequoia Capital, Disney and Adobe backed 56.com. The three are also examples of the Chinese habit of taking something popular in the US and doing the China version. The temptation is to think ideas that worked in the U.S. plus the world’s largest Internet market equals closest thing you can get to a sure thing. But the so-called "China Factor" has been a mixed blessing for these sites. 56.com's closure is emblematic of the challenges these companies face sitting at the crossroads of a closed China and a (more) open China, as user generated video blurs the lines of media and information and video is a powerful way of telling a story. But that's not the only unique "China Factor" challenge. The sheer size of the world's largest Internet audience is sucking these companies’ coffers dry, as they work to do what YouTube couldn't in the less developed Chinese online advertising market. The companies are literally growing too fast for their own good. As a result the number of players in the market have shrunk from 200 pure-play video sites in 2007 to about ten in 2008 and only a handful today. Those numbers are according to Gary Wang, CEO of Tudou. (Pictured above.) It was the first to launch back in 2005 and in the first six months of business the site did half the video traffic in China. That terrified Wang and his co-founder Marc van der Chijs. Today, the site has to proactively throttle back the size of its pipeline, knowing full well it’s giving a lot of users a bad experience. But Wang doesn't have much of a choice. He's raised a whopping $85 million and doesn't want to tap the markets again until his revenues are break even, and while growing, they're not close now. It's a catch-22: More traffic could bring in more ad revenues, but the bandwidth costs would also be too crippling to prove out the model. "We could be five to ten times bigger if we wanted to," he says. "It's purely a financial decision." All the Chinese sites have some advantages over YouTube. Chinese Web surfers tolerate a lot of ads and bling online and, with more limited media options, they tend to watch clips for longer. That means they won't necessarily balk at pre-rolls. Tudou has five-second pre-rolls, and YouKu has 15-second pre-rolls. And while a lot of haters like to call the sites nothing more than havens for pirated content, that's not exactly verboten in China the way it is in the U.S., so there’s not the same legal threat for now. The battle may be going on half-way around the world, but it has all the makings of a Valley-LA grudge match. Most of the people I met in Shanghai argued why Tudou was stronger, while those in Beijing argued YouKu had the edge. A few even said that 56.com's tech advantage and content partners like Disney could make it a compelling dark horse. But all three should probably worry less about each other and more about someone winning. Because that's the big fear of most people who live in China and love the sites: That the fire hose of traffic kills them before online ads catch up. And then it's back to those pirated DVD shops for everyone. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Kindle Notes And Highlights Now Accessible On the Web | Top |
| About a half hour ago, Amazon opened up a new feature on the Kindle: the ability to read your notes and highlights on the Web. Readers have always been able to make notes and highlight text on the Kindle itself. Now those annotations appear on your account at http://kindle.amazon.com . Once you sign in, you can see all your notes. While this opens up all sorts of possibilities, Amazon is taking a very conservative approach. You can’t share your notes with others. You can’t even edit them in your browser. All you can do is read them. That makes the feature little more than a Web archive of your notes and highlighted text snippets. It is a convenient feature, but why not enable sharing? Why can’t I share an excerpt with my friends on Facebook or Twitter (with the beginning of a quote and a short link)? Amazon needs to connect the Kindle to the rest of the Web. Hopefully, this is the first step in that direction. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| OpenX Keeps On Growing, Raises $10 Million More | Top |
| We’ve talked about online ad server OpenX quite a bit in the past, and for good reason. The company, formerly known as Openads, is led by former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller (Chairman) and ex-Yahoo exec Tim Cadogan (CEO) and has in the past shown it’s serious about growing fast and making money in the process. More recently, we covered the launch of OpenX Market , an alternative online ad exchange platform operated by the Pasadena, CA-based company. Today, OpenX is announcing that it has raised a Series C venture capital round to the tune of $10 million, which brings the total of funding raised by the company to a healthy $30+ million . Worth noting is that the extra financing is coming from a new lead investor, which is increasingly rare in these troubled times: DAG Ventures led the round, with existing investors Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital and First Round Capital participating. Jonathan Miller, who recently was appointed as the new Chief Digital Officer of News Corp. also chipped in. OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan in a brief interview didn’t want to go into detail about the valuation of the company after this round, other than that he was pleased with it. He did say that there was still large part of the Series B round ($15.5 million, closed in December 2007) left on the company’s back accounts and that there was no real need for them to raise money, “which of course is always the best time to raise money”. Cadogan also told me the company is focused on making OpenX Market a success and to continuously add new publishers to its open ad technology platform Ad Server. To date, it has attracted over 38,000 publishers representing 150,000 websites for the latter, and Cadogan also informed me that Market has doubled since it launched a little over a month ago, with a current monthly run rate of over two billion impressions. More strong figures: OpenX claims that from December 2008 to April 2009, the monthly run rate of impressions for the OpenX Hosted product grew more than 500% to 7.5 billion impressions, with the number of sign-ups for the new product now exceeding 10,000 in six months since its debut on the market. (Disclosure: we use OpenX to power part of the ad serving here on the TechCrunch website) Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| Nokia Ovi Store Launch Is A Complete Disaster | Top |
| This was supposed to be a glorious day for mobile phone giant Nokia . The Finnish company got out-innovated by Apple a couple of years ago with the introduction and subsequent success of the iPhone and the iTunes App Store, and has been desperately trying to catch up with Cupertino’s disruptive initiatives ever since by launching a couple of new devices on one hand, and consolidating its software & services business on the other hand. Today sees the worldwide roll-out of Nokia’s Ovi Store , the company’s response to Apple’s App Store (and other centralized content stores for mobile phones and OS’es), and no doubt the company is watching the launch unfold on a global scale with watchful eyes. Here’s the thing: the launch is an utter disaster and I assume (hope) Nokia executives are outraged with the way things are going. Update: the Ovi team posted a response to the recurring problems, see below. Since I’ve seen the Nokia Ovi Store website come up a few hours ago, I’ve been trying to browse the selection of apps to select 10 that users should download to start off . I found that the store was down most of the time I was trying to snoop around, pages often didn’t load, and if they did they nearly always did extremely slowly. Despite the fact that I constantly needed to refresh and hope for pages to load, I figured that the service must be getting pounded from all the press it’s getting and was willing to forgive the slowness and regular downtime for the time being. But this has been going on for hours on end now, and there’s no sign of improvement. It gets worse. Out of the ten applications I recommended earlier today, three suddenly disappeared from the Ovi Store for no obvious reason. Searching for them yields no results, but they do pop up in the ‘related items’ section when you’re browsing alternative applications. Nokia offers no explanation why the content suddenly became unavailable, or if and when they will be back. Meanwhile, some apps are showing up twice (e.g. Qik ). The user experience sucks too. Navigating the online store is downright complicated, and the categories being assigned to certain applications and content are way off at times. Entering basic search queries (e.g. ‘games’) often leads to zero results or a freezing page. Publisher profiles sometimes have nothing but a poorly embedded logo, an extremely short description and no link to their own website (e.g. inTouch ). To add insult to injury, we hear people with an Ovi account are unable to use their credentials for logging on to the new service, but that they are being told that there’s already a profile with their username when they attempt to register for a new account. That means Nokia is basically blocking registered users from using its new service at this point. Update: All About Symbian lists more problems that need solving . I’ve contacted Nokia’s press services to give them a chance to respond and detail how heavy the load on their servers has been this morning, but the only conclusion I can make at this point is that the Ovi Store launch is a complete fail on Nokia’s part with a service being rushed out the door before it was ready for prime time. My advice to Nokia: tell us you’re open for business when you actually are. Update from the Ovi team: “Shortly after launching the Ovi Store at 2 am ET, we began experiencing extraordinarily high spikes of traffic that resulted in some performance issues for users accessing store.ovi.com and store.ovi.mobi. We immediately began to address this issue by adding servers, which resulted in intermittent performance improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused Ovi Store users and encourage you to continue giving us feedback as we develop the service further. The Ovi Store device client, however, has continued to perform very well and there were no reported issues from users logged on through that entry point.” Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Nokia's Ovi Store Opens For Business: 10 Must-Downloads To Kick Off | Top |
| Nokia’s very own centralized application marketplace, dubbed Ovi Store , today officially made its way to the public arena as we expected . It will have to stand up and fight against other notable mobile content stores such as Apple’s App Store, Windows Mobile Marketplace and BlackBerry’s Application Center. Nokia is rolling out the app and content store globally (with credit card support), but currently reserves operator billing for customers in Australia, Singapore, Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, Ireland and the UK. Additional countries and languages will be added throughout the year, with AT&T planning to make Ovi Store available to its customers in the U.S. later this year. Nokia claims more than 50 of its mobile devices are compatible with the service as of today, with more slated to roll out over time, and estimates that around 50 million people with Nokia devices will be able to license content and download applications from the Ovi Store right now. The news is now completely out there and people are testing the service like crazy, which means it can be a little slow or downright unresponsive at times. Update: actually, the launch is a complete fail . We’ve browsed the online store extensively and hand-picked 10 applications we think you should download and install first. Note that the available content you can download depends on which device you’re using, we’ve selected the option ‘any phone’ to increase the chances of these being available for you as well: * Qik (Photo & video, free) - Ovi Store listing : a powerful way to share live video from your mobile phone with friends everywhere you go. MobileCrunch knew it was going to be one of the featured apps in the store back in March. * FlyScreen (News & Info, free)- Ovi Store listing : an application that lets you add your favorite web services (in widget form) to your phone's sleep screen, enabling zero-click access to the content you use most. * Photobucket (Photo & video) - Ovi Store listing : lets you log in to your Photobucket account, upload photos from your phone to your album and search its public repository of photos. * Flight Info (News & Info, free) - Ovi Store listing : key in any airline code and flight number and track terminal, departing and arrival information. * Assassin’s Creed (Games) - Ovi Store listing : end the Third Crusade from your mobile phone. Update: seems to have disappeared from the store somehow. Alternative: Wolverine (€5). * Twittix (Social Networks, €1) - Ovi Store listing : Yup, it’s a mobile client for Twitter. * MobiSystems OfficeSuite 5 (Business, €20) - Ovi Store listing : OfficeSuite is a complete mobile office solution, allowing you to create, view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files away from your office. Support MS Office 2007 files. * RISK (Games, €5) - Ovi Store listing : Enjoy the classic board game playing against up to five cunning computer opponents, each with distinctive tactics and unique levels of aggression. * AP News (News & Info, free) - Ovi Store listing : Yes, we know, it’s AP, but this app does give you a good overview of breaking news and photo galleries to boot. * World Traveler (Utilities) - Ovi Store listing : allows travelers to plan and manage journey activities and provides instant access to relevant information and services. Update: seems to have disappeared from the store somehow. Alternative: WorldMate 2009 (free). Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Twitter May Not "Transform Television," But Its Jump Is Interesting | Top |
| When news broke earlier that Twitter was working with some Hollywood types to develop a television series , the web nearly imploded on itself. Some assumed that the show would be about the people behind the scenes at Twitter, some thought they may have a chance to be on television because they use Twitter, some were outraged that Twitter would make a TV show rather than improving their own service, some thought it was Twitter openly endorsing the stalking of celebrities, most thought it was odd, to say the least. So Twitter co-founder Biz Stone weighed in to clarify a bit. It’s simple really: Twitter has signed an agreement with a production company to allow them to develop a show based around the service. Stone was vague when it comes to specifics, but it reads like Twitter will have little if anything to do with the show, and really will just lend its name and likeness (perhaps even in the title). It’s similar to what the company has done in the past with Current (for Hack the Debate) and CNN (for its various shows that heavily use the service). And it’s similar to other projects that are in the works with a few other networks. But it’s still quite interesting for a few reasons. First, from what Stone wrote, it sounds like Twitter hopes this will be the first of many shows built around the service. That’s interesting because it’s an extension of Twitter’s goal to be a powerful new platform. It already is one on the web, but that’s now expanding into different mediums, like television. And that’s notable because you don’t see many other startups — or even big web companies — make that jump. While the service has seen extreme growth in recent months, Twitter is still nowhere near the size of something like Facebook in terms of users (200+ million versus maybe 30 some million ). But services such as that, or even Google, aren’t dictating the content of shows the way Twitter is now doing. Sure, these other services pop up on television shows from time to time to make cameos — and yes, there is a movie about Facebook in the works — but Twitter is a springboard which shows are being built around . That’s a notable difference. Second, one would assume that Twitter stands to benefit financially from such television deals. While it won’t be Twitter’s ultimate business-model, if a network were to pick up any Twitter show, the revenue split with Twitter would undoubtedly be more substantial than say, a partnership with a third-party website built on top of Twitter. Third, this movement of Twitter into the entertainment sphere, does raise some interesting questions about Twitter versus TWiT (This Week In Tech), Leo Laporte’s popular video and podcasting network. This has been an issue in the past, but died down because ultimately TWiT and Twitter were in two different games. But if Twitter enters Laporte’s world, he may be moved to respond with his trademarks, as he noted yesterday . “ Twitter’s open approach might have the power to transform television—the dominant communications receiver worldwide ,” Stone said of the news. That reads a bit arrogant, or at the very least presumptuous, and while it would be easy to immediately dismiss such a comment, it does speak to Twitter’s potential power as a platform. Because the service hasn’t yet bloated itself with the bells and whistles that other services have, and has stayed mostly true to its quick, mobile usage roots, it could be the one startup that is able to break out of the web service stigma. Yes, plenty of services have “mainstream” usage now, but those are still considered web properties that regular people just happen to use. We may not like to admit it, but it’s still just not considered very cool to use any of these services rather than say, actually meeting up with a group of friends in person. But we’re moving to a world where not only will using these services move beyond seeming like something that geeks do, but where you don’t even think about the notion of a “web service” or being “offline.” An ascension of Twitter into entertainment could hasten that. I’m not saying that it will — hell, the Twitter show could absolutely suck — but I am saying that no one is developing television shows entirely around Facebook. It brings me back to perhaps my favorite scene from the television show Mad Men . While setting up his presentation for Kodak’s new Carousel slide projector, Don Draper says, “ Technology is a glittering lure. But there’s the rare occassion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product. ” For an increasing number of us, Twitter is starting to fall into that category. Whether the larger public can be engaged in the same way, remains to be seen. For now, it remains a glittering lure. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Smashwords Launches Flexible Ebook Affiliate Program | Top |
| Smashwords , an online Ebook store for independent authors and their publishers, is launching a new affiliate program that will allow external sites to generate revenue by linking to Ebooks that are being sold on the Smashwords store. Affiliate programs for bookstores are nothing new. Typically online publishers will link to a book and will get a cut of the proceeds if the store linked to makes a sale within a certain timeframe. But the emergence of Ebooks is changing the landscape. Amazon, which has built up its affiliate program for traditional books over the last decade, does not give affiliate publishers any portion of the purchase price if a visitor winds up buying an electronic book. Smashwords is looking to capitalize on this omission by offering web publishers an alternative. The Smashwords affiliate program is offering commissions of 11% of the net selling price (the sale price less any PayPal fees) for all of its online books (authors can optionally opt out if they’d like). And the store is giving authors and publishers the ability to control how much of a commission they’d like to offer above that 11% - so an author could bump it up to 50% or 80% if they were willing to exchange revenue for increased exposure. You can find the full details of the program here . Smashwords launched a year ago, and has grown to offer 1,300 Ebooks primarily from independent authors, though some small publishers are beginning to sign on as well. All of the content sold is DRM-free (you can read it on your computer, or devices like the Kindle) and authors receive 85% of the net proceeds of any Ebooks that they sell. Other players in this space include Fictionwise and Scribd , which just launched its online store, though neither of these offer an affiliate program. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| RT: @Microsyntax Sets Out To Make Sense Of #twittergrammar | Top |
| One of the side effects of Twitter’s 140-character limitation is that users are coming up with their own microsyntax and abbreviated Twitter grammar to make their Tweets more expressive. If your are merely retweeting someone else’s tweet, for example, you acknowledge that by placing a “RT” at the beginning of your micro-message. If you are replying publicly to another user or just referring to them, you indicate that with an “@username.” You can even add hashtags to a tweet so that it shows up in searches for specific topics (please use “#twittergrammar” if you are going to RT this post). New conventions pop up every day. To make sense of them, and develop new ones, Stowe Boyd is launching Microsyntax.org tomorrow. In a debut blog post , he insists that it is not a “standards body,” but that is effectively what it might become. And we need one, because Twitter isn’t setting any standards. You can follow @microsyntax to keep on top of the latest Twitter lingo. Microsyntax is not just about coming up with commonly used abbreviations. It is also the way that structure can be added to the mess that is Twitter today. Hashtags, for instance, lets you find all tweets about a particular subject or event. We probably need more microtags for different purposes. The problem with the microsyntax approach, however, is that it appeals mostly to the command-line crowd instead of to the average user. Nevertheless, if a microconvention becomes popular enough, then Twitter itself can adopt it, as it has with the @replies (although it has messed that up by mixing in retweets that simply mention your name and aren’t truly replies, but I digress). What’s your favorite microslang and what do we need to add to the microlexicon? Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| 300 Things I'd Like To See From Twitter Before A TV Show | Top |
| It’s not a bad joke, Twitter is apparently somehow involved in a new TV show . Among other things, this earns it our rarely used “WTF” in sign language image. Twitter has not yet responded to an email, but investor Fred Wilson seems to think it’s a good idea, saying “TV isn't TV anymore. It's just the largest screen in the house.” So we’ll wait for more details of the show to surface before we write the inevitable blog post trashing the idea ( update: details! ). In the meantime, Twitter, as a heavy user there are a nearly unlimited number of things I’d so much rather you guys spend your time on than going Hollywood. Here’s a few key ones, I’m guess lots more will show up in the comments and we’ll get to at least 300 or so things Twitter could better spend its time. Keep The Lights On. Twitter is still not a stable service . Fix Track. This is the “Google Alerts” feature of Twitter that made a brief appearance in 2007 but was stripped out in the uptime wars of 2008. It may have made sense to remove it at the time, but we’re long past due on this much needed feature. Fix Search. Twitter’s main value is as a search engine , and it’s pretty broken . There’s lots of work to do here. Stop Breaking Stuff. Twitter just doesn’t seem to feel comfortable in its own skin, making changes to suit the masses that are just confusing and need to be reversed. Fix Private Messages. Twitter’s direct messages (private messages) has occasional hiccups. Sometimes they are mis-delivered , as in they go to the wrong person. That just can’t happen. Maybe Launch Some Features. Twitter is so concerned with uptime that they rarely (never) launch new features. Sites like FriendFeed are embarrasing them with innovation, and others like Facebook are copying the core Twitter service. I get that uptime is important, but if you have time for meetings in Hollywood, you have time to add new features. Spend that time interviewing new engineers at the very least. You need more people badly. Ok, that’s six. Let me know what you’d like to see Twitter do before working on a television show in the comments, and we’ll add the smartest and most entertaining to the main post. Update: Some of the better suggestions from comments: Groups/Friend List — @zee and @blackrabbit Increased/No limit for API requests — Sam Houston and Jeff “A business model.” — @robinwauters Spam filtering — Sean Percival Integration with Steam — @carltonprest 30-second edit window — @Sheamus Analytics — @MiikoMentz iTunes Genius-like recommendations engine — Wesley Barrow Auto-linking of hashtags — @silvaldropout Threaded conversations — jcunwired Some of the suggestions were a bit more amusing: “surrendering to FF” — Johnny Schroepfer “Limit the amount of followers a cat can have to 499,999.” — @robinwauters “Gonorrhea - something I'd like to see before a Twitter TV show.” — Dante “A phone number where I can short the stock of the TV network that plans to air this show.” — swag “I'd like to see Twitter allow people to order cheesecakes by tweeting @twittercakes, before I would like them be involved with a TV show.” — @chacha102 CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
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