Thursday, May 28, 2009

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Video: Plastic Logic Prototype E-Reader Top
Plastic Logic is showing off a prototype of its thin-film electronic reader at the D7 conference. The main difference between what Plastic Logic is trying to build and the Kindle is that its screen technology is much thinner, lighter and can be incorporated into more flexible form- factors. I shot the video above showing a demo of what it can do. We certainly need thinner, sleeker e-reader devices. But unless Amazon adopts the technology for future Kindles or opens up the Kindle Store t other e-readers, any Plastic Logic device will have limited appeal. The company is pitching it as ideal for viewing business documents, something you can easily do with the Kindle as well. It converts everything to a PDF and lets you jump around to different pages or even different documents (represented by different tabs). The Plastic Logic prototype uses E-Ink technology, like the Kindle, it i just not on glass. So it suffers from the same slow load times for each new page. It also does not display Web pages (something the Kindle does in rudimentary form). Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Ads For New Microsoft Bing Search Engine…On Google Top
Maybe it works, but seeing ads on Google for Microsoft’s new Bing search engine just doesn’t seem to send quite the right message. Plus, the ads link to a nearly blank landing page , since Bing hasn’t launched yet. Microsoft is rumored to be spending up to $100 million to advertise the Bing launch. I wonder how much of that Google will end up getting… There are also ads pointing to a Ning site called BingHub . I can’t imagine why whoever created it is spending cold hard cash to promote that, either. Thanks for the tip , Gur. Update: Bing ads on Yahoo, too: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
SourceForge Acquires Open Source Data Community Ohloh Top
SourceForge, a tech news and e-commerce network has acquired Ohloh, a social network for developers and directory of open source projects, for an undisclosed amount. SourceForge owns and operates a number of tech media websites, including SourceForge.net, a centralized location for software developers to manage open source software development; Slashdot, a tech news site; ThinkGeek, a marketplace for tech goods. Founded in 2004, Ohloh crawls 3,500 open source forges and gathers statistics and data on more than 300,000 open source projects and 300,000 open source developers. It’s not clear of Ohloh will be absorbed into SourceForge.net. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Sergey Brin: Google Wave Will Set A New Benchmark For Interactivity Top
Google unveiled its new communication tool, Wave, this morning with a bang at Google I/O. The blogosphere is a buzz with talk of the new product, which blends email, instant messaging, collaboration and real time functionality into one platform. And Wave will open up its API soon to developers and will eventually be an open source product, letting the developer community take an active part in shaping the platform. We spoke to Wave’s creators yesterday, brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon. One question that’s is on everyone’s minds is whether Gmail and Google Apps become obsolete with the emergence of such powerful platform? TechCrunch IT Editor Steve Gillmor caught up with Google co-founder Sergey Brin (who he also talked to about Chrome yesterday) after a Q&A session with Wave’s creators, and asked him about the future of Google Apps and more. Brin says that Google has been using Wave internally for a couple of months and remained mum about how and when Gmail and Google Apps will be integrated. Brin points out, however; that developers of Chrome have been collaborating with Wave developers to make the platform extra speedy on the browser. Wave has also been working with the Google Web Toolkit, says Brin. It’s apparent from the video that Brin is enthusiastic about Wave and its potential. Brin, who only works on a handful of Google’s products, handpicked Wave as a compelling project on which to focus his efforts. Brin also says in the video that he didn’t know that Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, launched today but he did say that he has played around with Wolfram Alpha and is interested in exploring that search engine a little bit more (fun fact: Brin spent a summer interning for Stephen Wolfram). Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Take A 3D Tour Of Your Favorite Baseball Stadium With Google Earth Top
This has been quite a week for Google, especially with the announcement of Google Wave at the Google I/O Conference . Not to be ignored, Google Earth has been quietly rolling out some nifty features, including business listings. Today, Google Earth has added 3D tours of buildings, bridges, baseball stadiums and more. The tours are self-running views into buildings, bridges, museums, skyscrapers, stadiums and castles from around the world, most of which were built Google SketchUp users who model buildings for Google Earth. To play a tour, you need to activate the “3d Buildings” layer in Google Earth. Then you can click the “Start tour here” link in the “Places” panel in Google Earth (make sure you have download the latest version of Google Earth). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Palm Pre To Come With Twitter Search And iTunes Sync Top
The Palm Pre will be Twitter friendly. In a demo of the Palm Pre at the D7 conference a few minutes ago, Twitter search was showcased as one of its universal search options (along with Google and other search engines). Other features shown in the demo included the ability to sync the Pre to iTunes , download music over the air from the Amazon MP3 store, run multiple apps at the same time, and integrate third-party apps with other apps on the device such as the calendar. For instance, if you buy a movie ticket through a Fandango app, it can make an entry on your calendar. In an interview on-stage, Palm’s largest investor Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners noted that Palm represented 45 percent of the capital invested by Elevation so far. McNamee compared Elevation to the early days of Kleiner Perkins, where the partners are fully engaged in the businesses they invest in and they invest in very few companies (Elevation has six portfolio companies and five partners). Palm is its biggest bet by far. “This will be the thing that defines us,” says McNamee. He is confident that there is room in the transition from feature phones to Web-enabled smartphones to carve out a decent business for Palm. First, he’s got to make sure the Pre does not flop . Asked whether Apple would mind that Palm built iTunes sync into the Pre, McNamee shot back: “They are practically a monopolist. Consumers want their content.” The Pre can only sync non-DRMed content from iTunes. And there are other ways to get that content, but this is the first non-Apple device that syncs directly with iTunes without the use of third-party software. ” They can’t tell people what to do with music that they own,” says McNamee. “We are confirming their dominant market share. They are not stupid.” Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Facebook Names First Class Of fbFund REV, Its New Incubator Top
Facebook has just announced the 20 final winners of the latest round of fbFund, the joint entity created by Accel Partners and Founders Fund in conjunction with the social network to help foster quality applications on Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. This round’s winners will be invited to join a special Facebook startup incubator in downtown Palo Alto this summer. We’d previously learned about the program’s 50 finalists, each of whom was given $1,000 in advertising credit. But this is the real prize that the applicants have been shooting for. The incubator program is being called fbFund REV, and will operate in a similar fashion (at least in some senses) to programs like Y Combinator and TechStars . Twenty companies, which include two nonprofits, will take part in a program headed by Founders Fund’s Dave McClure , and will have the chance to work with Facebook engineers and a range of Silicon Valley veterans . Facebook intends to keep us posted on the startups’ progress throughout the session, and will be holding a demo day at the end of the summer to help expose the companies to investors and press. McClure is drawing inspiration from his experience teaching a Facebook course at Stanford, where he helped guide 25 teams of developers. He says that while the program has more participants than other incubators have had over the last few years, this can actually help the startups, as they feed off each others’ knowledge and experience. McClure adds that the program will be somewhat more structured than YC and other incubators and that it will emphasize getting the companies to release and iterate their products quickly, rather than spending a long time on the development cycle. As for the funding being given to each startup, McClure says that the average amount of investment is $25,000, with over $500,000 being distributed in total (the non-profits are excluded from receiving funding, but are invited to the program for free). Investments are being made as a convertible note, with a discount for future priced rounds. fbFund is taking roughly a 1-5% stake in each company (around 2% for most of them), which is in line with what other incubators have been doing. Here is the full list of winners, along with some brief introductions provided by Facebook: Frintro : Find friends of friends to date…or play matchmaker! If you’re single, you can search your friends’ friends and ask for intros. If you’re taken, you can set friends up. Friends of friends are the best people to date. It’s social dating via friendly intros. Funji : Funji is an avatar-based social networking app for the iPhone and iPod touch, satisfying users’ desire to express themselves and communicate with others in a fun, creative way. The team has more than five years of experience in the mobile market in both South Korea and the US. Gameyola : Gameyola is a distribution and monetization platform for casual Flash games. Flash games currently monetize poorly, but Gameyola solves this problem by providing Flash developers tools to sell virtual goods and to acquire users through social channels. Life360 (private beta): From keeping track of your kids to protecting your identity and getting back your lost stuff, Life360 is the place you go to keep your family safe, secure, and prepared for daily life. MyChurch.org : Churches create their own social networks on MyChurch.org. They extend their community between Sundays with tools to connect and engage their members. Over 30,000 church congregations are represented on MyChurch.org. Navify: Navify is a visual encyclopedia that combines Wikipedia articles with images, videos, and comments. It is the only general encyclopedia that allows you to listen to music videos, watch movie trailers, and browse news and celebrity photo galleries. Nutshell Mail : Simplify the way you manage Facebook and other social networks. NutshellMail consolidates activity from all your accounts into a single email digest delivered on your schedule. Don’t let email alerts clutter your inbox. Get informed, not interrupted. Get the Nut! Networked Blogs : Bring your blog to Facebook, and Facebook to your blog. Pull your Feed to your profile and business pages, add widgets to promote your network, and read the news from blogs you follow on the largest community of bloggers and blog lovers on Facebook. Paradise Paintball 3D : Paradise Paintball is the first game developed on Cmune’s next-generation social gaming platform. It is the first casual, 3D multiplayer FPS game on Facebook, Apple Dashboard, and Mac and PC. Play with up to eight friends and buy virtual items to enhance the gameplay. Photos I Like : Photos I Like is a digital media sharing and discovery site emphasizing lightweight social content, self-expression, and communities. RentMineOnline : Combines the success of resident referral programs with the power of social networks. Residents refer their community to friends through social networks like Facebook, and email to earn rewards and live with friends. RunMyErrand: RUNmyERRAND is a social networking inspired web and mobile marketplace that provides people and businesses an easy and trusted way to get everyday tasks done in their own hyperlocal community. RunThere : RunThere is a social-networking service for runners and cyclists. Users can map and measure their favorite routes (no GPS required), keep a running/biking log, and find athletes and routes nearby Sortuv: Sortuv lets you start with something you like, and discover more. Instead of searching for a “great restaurant” just say what you mean: “Find me a place sortuv like Spago in Seattle”. Check them out on the Web , on the iPhone , and on Facebook . TravelBrain / GeckoGo : Travel Brain by GeckoGo helps you track (and show off!) your travels, share experiences with others, and discover new places to visit. Learn from the knowledge of over 600,000 travelers, and get expert guide info from their Bradt Travel Guides partnership. Weardrobe (private beta): Weardrobe is a fashion-focused community for discovering different ways to wear clothing. Weardrobe provides a platform for people to share reviews of their own clothing, post photos of their looks, catalog their closet and search for style inspiration. Workstir : Workstir is a community that connects users with trustworthy local service providers. Anyone can post a job and choose a provider with confidence by browsing their past reviews. For businesses, Workstir provides a wealth of jobs in their area of expertise. Worldly Developments (private beta): Worldly Developments is building online services that will help you connect with the people, places and events in your local community. Its first product makes it a snap to plan, promote, and communicate around group activities. Non-profits* Samasource : Sama is Sanskrit for “equal” – Samasource finds and trains reliable QA professionals to test Facebook apps with a user-friendly interface that lives on Facebook Platform. With Samasource, developers lower costs, reduce poverty, and improve their applications. Vittana: Vittana enables you to lend directly to students in the developing world, $25 at a time. Their mission is to bring student loans to the developing world through the power of person-to-person microlending. Congratulations to TechCrunch alum Mark Hendrickson , whose company Worldly Developments will be part of the program! Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Playdom Grows Up: Switches To Studio Model, Lands Top Talent Top
Playdom, a popular social gaming developer on MySpace, is moving to a studio model, similar to the model of competitor Zynga. Playdom has largely flown under our radar until now, but they’ve built up some very popular social networking apps on MySpace, and are also moving to Facebook as well. Adopting the studio model means that Playdom will have multiple independent teams working on different games. To head up the two studios, Playdom has brought in substantial talent from successful gaming companies. Former Director of Game Design at Zynga, Dave Rohrl, will oversee a studio focused on new intellectual property and former Studio Director at Pogoa/Electronic Arts, Sean Clark will head a studio focused on role-playing games or RPGs. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company first made a name for itself on MySpace, creating the most popular game on the social network, Mobsters. The startup has 9 of the top 25 games on MySpace. Playdom also made waves on Facebook’s gaming community, creating the popular game Poker Palace. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Fortune Columnist Stanley Bing Reminds Microsoft That He Was Here First Top
Whether you like the name Microsoft picked for its shiny new search engine or not, Bing has got tongues rolling and keyboards rambling . One of the funniest takes on this we’ve seen today comes from Fortune columnist and author Stanley Bing, who is ‘moderately outraged’ over the new name but is not considering legal action at this point. Sure, Bing’s doing his best to get some free publicity out of the carefully planned preview of the new search engine, but his sense of humor is spot on, so enjoy the read. Here’s an excerpt: BING VS. BING LONG-TIME FORTUNE COLUMNIST AND BEST-SELLING AUTHOR STANLEY BING CONDEMNS "BRAND INTRUSION" BY NEW MICROSOFT SEARCH ENGINE, ALSO TO BE NAMED "BING" OFFERS SERVICES TO NEW ENTITY FOR "ANY REASONABLE OFFER" NEW YORK, MAY 28, 2009 – Stanley Bing, FORTUNE Magazine columnist and best-selling author, today expressed "moderate outrage" at the branding of the new search engine to be offered by Microsoft, also to be called Bing. At the same time, Bing the Author took the unusual step of offering an initial olive branch to Bing the Search Engine, proposing that the two powerful brands merge into one for which Mr. Bing could be the logo, corporate symbol and spokesman, to the extent that it fits in with his other duties. Read the whole thing here , and make sure you don’t miss the end: Mr. Bing began his column in FORTUNE in 1995. Prior to that, he was at Esquire Magazine for 11 years, where he built a considerable following. He is also the author of numerous books and is the host of a popular Web destination on CNNMoney.com and writes regularly for Huffingtonpost.com. He has been cultivating the Bing brand since 1983. Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975. It has been establishing the Bing brand for about seventeen minutes. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Arianna Huffington: Subscriptions Are For Porn Top
At D7 today, Kara Swisher sat down with Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington and Washington Post’s Digital Chief Katharine Weymouth to discuss a topic that has been beaten to death: old vs. new media. Much of the interview was spent massaging each other’s egos, with each praising the other for the quality of their respective publication’s journalism. But Huffington spiced things up when Swisher broached the issue of monetization. Huffington denied that HuffPo would ever consider subscriptions, saying “We absolutely never imagine subscriptions. Unless you're selling porn, and especially "very weird porn", you shouldn't sell subscriptions.” Swisher cited a Penn Schoen & Berland survey that found that 5% of people would pay for blogs and 92% of people don’t pay for online content today. Subscriptions for news are a controversial subject to say the least. Rupert Murdoch said recently that News Corp. would start charging for access to many of its newspaper’s websites, citing the success of News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal’s subscription model. News Corp. owns and operates over 110 newspapers worldwide. Today, GigaOm announced GigaOm Pro, a subscription service for research and analysis created by analysts. Content includes briefings, notes, long views written by editorial team, quarterly wrap-ups, weekly updates on news, and curated links. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Hulu Labs Now Live: Recommendations, Time-Based Browsing, And More Top
Earlier this morning we stumbled across Hulu Desktop , an impressive new application from the popular video portal that lets you use your remote to control your Hulu experience. As it turns out, Desktop is only one of a set of new features Hulu is launching today as part of Hulu Labs , which is now live. First, there’s Time-Based Browsing, which is the feature I’m going to be using most (aside from Hulu desktop). This allows you to see all new Hulu videos sorted by the day they appeared. Before now you could always sort individual shows in order, but if you missed a night of prime time it was up to you to figure out which shows you’d missed. Now you can just jump to that date under Time-Based Browsing and Hulu will do all the work for you. Labs also includes a new Recommendation feature that presents users with videos they might like based on their past actions (videos viewed and rated) on the site. Next to each recommendation, the site includes a note explaining why it thought you might like a certain show. It seems to work fairly well, though I don’t really understand how Fever Pitch was recommended because I’d previously watched Family Guy. Finally, the Video Panel Designer will allow site owners to make a custom Hulu embed featuring multiple videos at once (they display a handful of video thumbnails side by side). Using the Designer you can specify exactly which shows you’d like to have appear in the panel, and you can also customize the color scheme, size, and layout. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Live With The Google Wave Creators Top
We’re here in the press room at Google I/O for the follow-up press event to the Google Wave unveiling today during the keynote. The initial audience response to Google Wave was huge; there was a standing ovation the likes of which I haven’t seen at a tech event, including the Apple events in recent years. We spoke with the creators of the service, brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon yesterday, but it should be interesting to see and hear from them following the initial reception. Find our live notes below and the live Qik stream below that. The creators are here along with Vic Gundotra , Google’s VP of Engineering. Live Notes (paraphrased): Vic : Google wants to move the web forward. Greater of the usage leads to more Google Search ultimately. Google Wave is exciting for open source and it’s running in the browser. This could be a turning point on the web. —–Q& A—- Q : This does Gmail and Google Docs one better. Will Wave be the evolution of both or a replacement? Vic : This is an early developer release of our Wave, but we’ll see this over several products/services/sites. Q : Limitations of the mobile site of Wave? Lars : This is just the developer preview again, mobile isn’t finished yet. But because we built it in the web browser, it can be on many of the smart phones that use the rich mobile web browsers. If we did native code, we’d have to write it multiple times, but with the web we write it once. The web by far is the best choice for us. Eventually access to the camera and other advanced features will be available through the browser. Q : This seems like this will replace email –but can it really replace all we love about email? Lars : We think of email as an incredibly successful protocol. Google Wave is our suggestion for how this could work better. You can certainly store your own copy by way of the APIs and with the extensions. The model for ownership — it’s a shared object, so how do you delete the object? Even though it’s a shared object, no one can take it away from you without your consent. There will eventually be reversion to sync up with the cloud or you own servers. We’re not planning on having spam in wave (laughs). Early on in email, spam wasn’t really taken into account, so we benefit from that learning experience. We’re planning on a feature so that you can’t add me to your Wave without being on a white list. Q : Is this something that forces identity on people? Will there be anonymous usage? Lars : I don’t think Wave will answer that question way or another. With our APIs people can make the choice of how they use it. If a person embeds a Wave in their own website, it’s up to the website who can interact with that Wave. You can use anonymous comments, or a number of different identities. Q : You haven’t talked about advertising. Ideas for that? Lars : We haven’t talked about it because we haven’t thought about it — yet. That’s a benefit of working at Google, we have time to think about how to make money from this. It’s the same way we worked with Google Maps, the ads eventually came. Q : No immediate need for this replace email — so how can this be all in one? Lars : Integration with Twitter is an example of what you can easily build with the APIs. You can do that for email too if it’s open on their end. Imagine if someone has an email extension that will turn all your emails into a Wave — and replies come back via email. It’s not simple, but it could work. Q : How do you integrate with Gmail or other Google services? Lars : Again, it’s very early for us. When you sign up for Google Wave, it’s your Google account, you’ll have your Google Contacts, etc. Q : Is this Google’s attempt to organize the world’s communication? Who is or will be your competitor? Lars : Acme Wave (the fake demo they used) is the competitor (laughs). Look, I don’t know. It’s not something we really thought about — it was all about making communication and collaboration better. There’s a lot of overlap with web services that makes it hard to figure out which service to use at which time. Stephanie : It’s important to know that we’re going to let people build their own Wave services. It’s not about us controlling this. Here’s Sergey Brin, Google co-founder. Q : Lots of ways to market this. How do you do it? Vic : Really haven’t thought about that too much. Q : Top 3 priorities for developers, that you’re doing core work in? Lars : Doing our absolute best to make the developers happy. We’re looking for the 3,000 early adopter developers who are adventurous. Sergey : And you’ll be working on scalability right? Lars : Yes. Stephanie : And we’re excited to learn from users. Q : Who would this be the most useful for? Vic : The way a lot of social sites work today is that you get sent a link via email when someone updates something. With Wave it can all be done in the system. That’s just one example. Any social company can use it too. Q : How interoperable will it be — how open source? Lars : The developers can choose completely. We’re using the most liberal license to open source our code. Q : To Sergey - Lars came to you with this idea in 2007, why go with it? Sergey : It did sound kind of crazy - we’re just going to reinvent communication (laughs). It was not a very compelling proposal, but Lars and Jens had reinvented what mapping was like on the web. So if it was someone else this might be different, but they have the body of work to give them the benefit of the doubt. It was also an interesting experiment, it was one of the most independent groups that we’ve had at Google. Q : Google has reinvented how I do school work — where could this go for education? Lars : It could be a great tool for researchers, and students too. Vic : We very much care about your (student) demographic. Q : Why do this now? You’re trying to replace email, why will it work? Is this a SharePoint competitor? Vic : SharePoint is easy — this has far greater breadth. And it’s open and has a federation model. The previous day we talked about the five capabilities of HTML 5, so that’s why now. The main browsers are starting to support it. Sergey : Google Maps was on the edge of browser capability when we launched. Today, Wave is that edge. You’ll see a form of interaction with this you wouldn’t have before. Q : A lot made of real-time search and a lot of talk about Twitter — does Google put these real-time capabilities in perspective. Real time search? Lars : The liveness in Wave came about because we became obsessed with how fast you could see a message on someone else’s screen. With IM you’ve been waiting for someone typing, so we removed that (others have before). When it’s not live, you lose your attention on a conversation, but when you see it live, you’re engaged. From that a whole new set of use-cases came up. The live search aspect is fun. Q : Were there platforms that influenced you on this? After Maps and Wave, what’s next? Lars : Before we joined Google we (him and Jens) had the discussion about what would be next. Basically we realized email was like snail mail on the web, computers were evolving. We needed something faster. And IM and email shouldn’t really be two separate tools. We took inspiration from everything that we could see in communication and collaboration. Stephanie : We want to work on this for a while. Q : What did you show Sergey to sell him on it? Sergey : Nothing (laughs). It really wasn’t much besides the pitch. Demos came after we were already well brought in. We can’t have everyone at Google do these crazy ideas, but with a handful of past successes, that sold me. Lars : My vision is to have the one communication tool. I want all the use cases to be covered. We made up ideas of what Wave could be used for — negotiating contracts, writing articles. Lots of things. Stephanie : Each person you show it to seems to pick out other things they would use it for. Going back to email now, I miss the liveness. Q : How important of a roll is mobile going to play? And will Google ever release an official app for any mobile platform? Lars : Mobile is hugely important. If you’re out walking and and take a picture to put in a Wave, that’s perfect for mobile. We have no plans to make native apps for any mobile platform. The rate of progress on mobile is astounding — we hope soon access to the camera will appear. Maybe we’ll make a lightweight app just to get access to those if they don’t come quickly. Vic : You might have missed the Android and the iPhone working in the demo, but it worked great using the same code. It’s an economic issues as well. Think of those teams who have to write native code for all these platforms, but this is just one browser-based version. Q : Will this work right now on mobile? Vic : We’re not sure it’s ready yet, but we’ll let you know. We’re working on it. Some of it is just the layout. Q : Are you going to rely on grassroots adoption? Or will you work with the other big players to get them to adopt? Lars : This is just the first step today, but my colleagues are reaching out to friends to gauge interest. Q : Looking at the notification speed — is it too distracting? Stephanie : We’re still trying to figure out how best to handle the speed at which we can communicate. For example, the real liveness of real-time search could be distracting. We’re thinking about it. Q : Can you elaborate on the offline capabilities? Lars : Offline is very important, we don’t have support yet, but the protocols are designed for that. If you lose an Internet connection, you should be able to keep working. Full offline support will come later, but it’s coming. That wraps it up. CrunchBase Information Google Wave Lars Rasmussen Jens Rasmussen Stephanie Hannon Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Hulu Desktop Lets You Rot Your Brain From The Comfort Of Your Couch Top
Since launching in late 2007, Hulu has done one one thing very well: it lets you watch your favorite TV shows and movies from your computer, free of charge. But aside from improving the user experience with assorted niceties like smart thumbnails, improved navigation, and social features , the site hasn’t really done anything extreme to expand its functionality. That changes today. One of my only long standing gripes with Hulu was that it could never really replace the TV watching experience simply because you had to sit in front of your computer to control it. Boxee was the perfect solution to this, as it allowed you to control Hulu via remote through a very snazzy media center interface. But Hulu has repeatedly killed that functionality, largely at the behest of its major network investors. Now Hulu is releasing its own desktop application , allowing you to browse through the site’s content using your computer’s remote control (both the Windows Media Center remote and the Apple Remote are compatible). Both applications are native too, so you won’t have to deal with any quirkiness from Adobe AIR. Hulu has posted an intro video for the Desktop application, which you can watch below. The app itself doesn’t seem to be live yet (oddly enough, the URL for the application that’s shown in the video is located on the company’s QA server, which requires a password). But we can probably expect an update later today Update : It’s now live, download it here . Of course, most people aren’t going to ditch cable in favor of Hulu, simply because they don’t have their computers hooked up to their TVs. They’ll just use it to make their Hulu experience at their computer even better. But for those of us who have been toying with Boxee and similar solutions to replace our cable boxes entirely, this is a very welcome addition. Update : Looking back on the Boxee fiasco , the news is a bit strange. I (and a number of others) believed that content owners were against giving users this ‘lean-back’ experience entirely, but now Hulu has done just that. Given the change of heart, Boxee is reaching out to Hulu once more to give things another shot. It won’t be surprising if they get turned down though - Hulu may well want to keep all of its content contained in its own application. Hulu is also planning to launch a new Labs section today, though details on this are still scarce. The new Labs site has just gone live as well. Thanks to eagle-eyed TechCrunch alum Nick Gonzalez for the tip. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Exclusive: Video Interview With The Google Wave Founders Top
Everyone’s still digesting the Google Wave news from this morning. The demo video that we’re seeing at Google IO isn’t yet up, so for now you’ll have to digest the our overview and screen shots. But the product is important - not only does it do fantastic new things in a browser care of HTML 5, but it also proposes a new communication paradigm. The founding team behind wave like to say that this is what email would be if it were invented today. Yesterday we had a chance to sit down with that founding team - brothers Lars Rasmussen and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon - to talk about the initial idea behind Wave, and Google’s philosophy in rolling it out. VP Engineering Vic Gundotra also makes a cameo appearance at the end. Yens and Lars are brothers, originally from Denmark, who founded mapping startup Where2 in 2003. The company was acquired by Google in 2004 and is now Google Maps. Stephanie is a Google Product Manager who was previously on the Google Maps team. The core idea for Wave, says Lars, was first thought of by Jens as a way to fix email ( yes yes yes ). Email is asynchronous conversation. Instant messaging, by contrast, is synchronous. Wave is both. Yahoo has tried to tackle this problem by bringing instant messaging directly into the web mail interface . Google also integrates Google Chat directly into Gmail. But in both cases the products are simply bolted together. Google Wave is something new. The team also talks about making both the underlying protocols as well as the source code for the application open source. They seem to define success as the point when lots of third parties are building their own Wave systems, fully interoperable with Google Wave. Unlike Twitter, Google Wave is an open system right from the start. If it’s successful there is no need to host data on Google servers. And third parties are free to fork the direction of Wave for their own use. This is very, very innovative stuff. We’ll be hearing a lot more about this over time. The full transcript of the interview is below. Transcript: Michael Arrington (TechCrunch): This is Mike Arrington. I'm here with the Google Wave founding team. We've got Lars Rasmussen, Stephanie Hannon, and Jens Rasmussen. You guys are brothers? Lars: Yes. MA: At this point now, everyone has seen the Google Wave demo. Developers here at the Google I/O conference now have access to it, so they can start playing with it. What I want to do here in this video, is talk to you guys about the core vision, when you first came up with the idea, why, what you wanted to build, and do you think you've done that, where do you see it going? SH: We just wanted to say we hope everyone liked the demo. MA: I think it's safe to say that people were pretty stunned by the demo, in a good way. LR: I get to answer the question because it was his (points to Jens) idea. I don't have to be as modest as he would have to be. JR: It works better that way. LR: So actually it's been a while since we (by we I mean Jens) had the idea. It was back in 2004, and we were just about to join Google. That had bought a little startup that we had. We had a mapping prototype that turned into Google Maps. And Jens and I started discussing what we might do after Maps. And Jens had the idea that we should work on this thing that became Google Wave. He argued that email, even though it is the most popular way to communicate still, was invented quite a while ago, in fact before the Internet (if we look it up on Wikipedia). And he argued that was designed essentially to mimic snail mail, and what we should do instead is look at how computers work today and networks work today, and they have obviously improved dramatically in four decades, and see what the best way to communicate would be. He proposed this thing called "hosted conversations" (this is what we call waves now). He listed them in a big series of benefits over existing systems. The thing that caught me was with these hosted conversations, you could do both email type conversations and instant messaging type conversations, in the same tool. You can see this in the very early parts of the demo. MA: Synchronous and asynchronous communication in one stream. LR: Exactly. Synchronous and asynchronous in the same conversation. And you can switch back and forth, depending who is online at any one time. That's what sold me. We didn't talk about the project for another couple years. We had a great time building Google Maps with some of the best engineers in the world. And then in the beginning of 2007, we picked it back up. We started prototyping with the a team of four or five engineers in Sydney, Australia. And little by little, we came up with what became Google Wave. [Points to Jens] All based on his original ideas. MA: [to Jens] Do you agree? JR: Yes. [laughter] MA: So you really started coding hard in 2007 with four or five people. How big is the team now? LR: It's about 50 now. MA: 50 engineers? LR: 50 engineers. Pretty much all of them are in Sydney. SH: We are in Sydney too. Everyone can come visit. MA: One of the cool things about this is you aren't just launching a new web service — obviously the service itself is pretty impressive based on the demo (can't wait to try it out myself) — but you are also open-sourcing this. Parts of it. In particular, right from the beginning, the protocols. And so, if you were inventing a new way of communicating here, and if you were inventing email for the first time and you kept it proprietary, it would obviously limit the usefulness of it. Can you talk a little bit about your goals with publishing the protocols and not trying to keep intellectual property rights attached to those? LR: I'll give it a shot. This has been our thinking from the beginning. We want to build, like you said, a new way of communicating. But we want to make sure it's open, just like email. We want to make sure that you can choose your own Wave provider and no matter which provider you get your account from, you can talk to anyone else that has a Wave account. And were publishing the protocol, or rather a draft of the protocol (I should say that this is very much a work in progress), and we intend later to open source the lion share of our code. The primary reason we want to open source our code is actually adoption of the protocol. It's not a simple thing to build a Wave system — we've spent two and a half years on the first one — and so we think adoption will go a lot faster if you can grab our code, look at it, and start out with that. And so we're envisioning this bright future of Wave, where it's a new accepted way we all communicate. There are lots of different Wave providers. Some of them will be cloud-based like ours, where you go and get an account from a Google or a competing company. But also, we envision that enterprises or techies will run their own Wave servers, in their own server closets. MA: So within the enterprise, behind the walls, for those reasons. LR: Exactly. It's a very important feature of the protocol that if a set of colleagues within an enterprise runs a Wave server, that will stay just between them — that data will never leave their network. And in fact, if remember in the demo, we have this feature called the private reply, where within a larger Wave with a large number of people, you can do a sub-thread with a sub-set of the people in that Wave. If you guys are colleagues in an enterprise running your own Wave server, you start a private reply within a larger Wave, that private reply will never leave your corporate network. SH: So we think exciting things will happen, the more people that have Wave. And we think more people will have Wave, if they have choice in providers and choice in where there servers sit. MA: Jens you guys have talked about how you guys have been using this internally for a couple months now, and you have a couple thousand Googlers using it. How sticky is it? How many people sticking with it after they try it out? You guys must be looking at those numbers. JR: They are very good. MA: Very, very good? SH: Yes, very good. JR: You can quote me on that. LR: I would moderate given how early days it is, it's quite good. And we have just started. We actually asked them, when we offered our colleagues accounts to help us test it, how pain tolerant they were — whether they were the types that swim with sharks and walk on fire, or people that like less adventurous things. I think about the 3000 or so users we have now are the people that offered to walk on fire. MA: Willing to try anything? LR: Exactly. MA: But may not be willing to make a commitment to anything? LR: Well, what we are looking for now is for people to test it, try it out. We want to measure how well it scales. We want to figure out what happens when lots of people use it. In the first several months, there were about 50 Wave users, and everything was all very controlled, calm, and quiet and all the Waves were super important to us. All of sudden there were 2000 users, all of them colleagues, all of them wanting to talk to us. And we learned — in a very exciting way — what it means to get lots of waves all of a sudden. And so we are learning lots from it. SH: A core part of the product is the “liveness.” And you can see what people are doing all the time. Waves become active and unread and pop-up in your search panel all the time, and you need to learn when that's useful for people and when it's not, and how to present information to them in a way that's useful and so they know what's important and what to deal with. Googlers are amazingly vocal, and we have learned so much in the last few months about how people are using it. It has helped change our feature set, improve our usability, and just decide what to do with our engineering resources. LR: Amazingly vocal, that's true. SH: Crazy vocal. MA: And you were saying earlier that you definitely think this is a Twitter-killer? [laughter] LR: I don't remember saying… MA: Oh, was that off record? SH: I don't think that was ever said… MA: Oh maybe that wasn't you guys, that might have been someone else. LR: I remember saying quite the opposite. So you saw the video that we did two months ago? One of the things that's missing is actually integration between Twitter and Wave. Another of the sample applications that we are trying to sell developers on building for real — where you can install as an extension into your Wave client that let's you get all of your tweets from all of your followers into a Wave, and if you reply to one of the tweets inside a Wave, the extension will tweet back into the Twittersphere. And we would estimate that would actually improve adoption of Twitter. SH: We like to compliment Twitter for being open and having APIs from the beginning. MA: You want to compliment them before you kill them. [laughter] Uh oh, the press people are not happy. Vic Gundotra: Michael, Michael, Michael… MA: Can we talk about Chrome? VG: We can talk about anything you like. MA: I think we are done. I really appreciate your time. Congratulations guys and thank you very much. The demo at Google I/O has just ended to huge standing ovation. If today is any indication, this is going to be big. CrunchBase Information Google Wave Lars Rasmussen Jens Rasmussen Stephanie Hannon Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Why Bing? Sift Would Have Been Better. Top
Microsoft just announced it’s new search engine Bing , and it is going to spend a reported $80 million to $100 million on an advertising campaign to familiarize consumers with the brand. But was it the best name it could have picked? Asked about the name onstage at the D7 conference, CEO Steve Ballmer admits: “I am not what you would call the creative side of life. Short matters. Being able to verb up can be helpful.” But he also says, “We wanted something that unambiguously says search.” Does it? To me, Bing says nothing. I think a better name from the ones Microsoft was supposedly considering would have been Sift. Other candidates were Kumo, which is project’s codename, or Hook. Which would you have gone with? What Would You Have Named Microsoft’s New Search Engine? ( web poll ) Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Bing! Microsoft Prepares For War With A Revamped Search Engine (Screenshots) Top
Today, Microsoft publicly unveiled its soon-to-launch search engine Bing . It will become available over the next few days, and be fully launched by June 3. On the surface, Bing has a distinct gloss. The home page features a rotation of stunning photography, for instance, which can be clicked on to produce related image search results. But the most significant changes are under the covers. “We have taken the algorithmic programming up an order of magnitude,” says Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi. Each search result page is customized according to what type of search you do (health, travel, shopping, news, sports). The algorithms determine not only the order of results on the page, but the layout of the page itself, concluding what sections appear. These sections can include anything from guided refinements and a list of related searches in the left-hand pane to images, videos, and local results. I’ve been playing around with a preview version of Bing for about a week. It is designed to be “more of a decision engine,” says Mehdi. Bing helps people make decisions through guided search and a focus on task completion. In a time when a new Website is created every 4.5 seconds, information overload is becoming a real problem. ” People are getting hundreds of thousands of links but not getting what they want,” says Mehdi. Bing tries to alleviate problem by offering up different experiences depending on the search. It also acts more like a destination site for certain searches. Travel and product searches bring in comparison pricing, reviews, images, and more. Hulu videos can be played within the video search results. Bing pulls in data from other Web services when it can so that you often don’t have to leave to get the information you want. The internal codename for Bing is Kumo (which is what you see in the screenshots), and the current release is called Kiev. Rather than a spare, blank screen, Bing’s homepage surrounds the search box with a single beautiful image, such as the one of the tribesmen above or a kinkajou. You can hover over parts of the image to get factoids about the image or click through to an image search result page to explore more. The left-hand pane offers the option to narrow your search on images, videos, shopping, news, maps, or travel. Each of these has a different look and feel. A travel search will turn up a page based on Microsoft’s Farecast technology asking you where you want to go, with flights, hotels, and destination information. A news search offers up headlines, photos, videos, and local news in a column on the right. A shopping search will bring up products and is tied into Microsoft’s Cashback program . Every search also generates a guide on the left to help you refine your search. A search for “kinkajou,” for example, lets you refine by images, facts, sale, breeders, care, diseases, and videos. A search for “Samsung LCD TVs” brings up an entirely different set of guided results: shopping, review, manual, repair, buy, stand, images, and videos. If you search for images of “butterflies,” it lets you sift to show just Monarch, Swallowtail, Viceroy, Owl, and other types of butterflies. All of this categorization and concept-matching is Microsoft’s early attempt to bring in some basic semantic search technologies into a mainstream search engine. Each guided option is dynamically generated, just like the different sections of the search results page. “Google, tried to preempt this,” says Mehdi, referring to Google’s new search refinement options it launched last week, which is also in the left pane. Those Google options, which include the ability to search across different time periods or for related keywords, are “completely static,” criticizes Mehdi. “There is nothing new about it. It is a very minor rev, not as sophisticated as what we are doing. For us ever query is special.” Bing also takes advantage of Microsoft’s acquisition of Powerset to provide better previews and snippets of text when you hover over a result. Also, whenever a search brings up a “reference” tab in the guided exploration pane, clicking on that will bring up an enhanced Wikipedia article with semantic tags. Onstage at the D7 conference, Steve Ballmer acknowledges: “There is no way to change the whole game in one step.” But search “deserves a good feature war.” And Bing will be rolling out new features as it goes forward. But is it enough to get people to switch? Bing is certainly not a game-changer, but it does cut out a lot of the back and forth that happens with so many searches today. If Bing can help people find what they are looking for faster, it will put pressure on Google to keep advancing the ball as well. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
D7 Buzz: Bartz And Ballmer Meeting This Morning Top
When Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz suggested yesterday at the D7 conference that she would consider doing a deal with Microsoft for “boatloads of money,” she might have been doing more than just answering a hypothetical question. It could have been an opening salvo. If the late-night buzz I heard at the conference is correct, Bartz is meeting this morning with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who is also at the conference and is due to be onstage today. The two started talking in April about renewing negotiations between Yahoo and Microsoft over a search and advertising deal. Last summer, Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy its search business after earlier talks to buy the entire company also fell apart. But that was before Bartz became Yahoo’s new CEO in January . By March, Ballmer was publicly begging Bartz to come back to the negotiating table. When Bartz was asked yesterday if the two were talking, she said, “Yeah, a little bit.” If Ballmer wants to get anywhere with her this morning, he had better bring more than just a boatload of money. Bartz also made it clear yesterday that the data produced by Yahoo’s search engine is crucial to Yahoo’s overall advertising business and to improve its consumer properties. But she also signaled that she is more open to a search deal than she was when she first took the job: We went from ‘we will never sell it’ to ‘if they have the right idea.’ There are two parties in all of this. The other party has all the money, we have the data. It is not like a big secret what happens when you do a deal. When it comes to winning in search, money is no object for Microsoft. Ballmer is expected to unveil a brand new version of Microsoft’s own search engine this morning, internally dubbed project Kumo (possibly to be branded Bing ). Microsoft is reportedly planning on spending $80 million to $100 million on just the marketing campaign for Kumo/Bing. It is the data-sharing discussion which might be the stickler. So don’t expect any announcements today. But at least the two sides are talking again. Update : Walt Mossberg asked Ballmer ontsage today, “Have you met with Yahoo recently?” Ballmer tried to dodge the question, replying: “I don’t have to answer it. I can talk about the new Zune HD.” Then he spoke in generalities about how there could be a search partnership if it makes sense. Mossberg pressed him again, and Ballmer took the easy way out, telling Mossberg, “You were at the meeting. I went into the green room to get ready. You saw it.” Bartz had left a note for Ballmer in the green room joking that “the makeup couldn't fix me if it tried," says Ballmer. Sounds like a love note to me. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Mark Cuban Finalizes Investment In NAKEDPizza, Orders A Slice Of Expansion Top
No need to introduce Mark Cuban to you, dear readers. The outspoken tech billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks has already made quite a name for himself as a savvy tech entrepreneur, angel investor and blogger. Cuban is today announcing that he has finalized an investment in New Orleans, Louisiana-based NAKEDpizza after 3 months of negotiations. NAKEDpizza is an all-natural pizza delivery shop that has famously done most of its marketing efforts on and centered around its Twitter profile and Facebook presence. Two months ago, the healthy pizza store even erected a Twitter billboard above its first - and for now - only store. The franchise’s got big plans for expansion, though. NAKEDpizza awarded Cuban with the Area Developer rights for the entire State of Texas, and while they haven’t disclosed how many stores the company plans to open in the state, NAKEDpizza co-founder Randy Crochet has indicated that “the market will support between 50 and 75 units.” The company is also actively seeking a group of Area Developers in the U.S. to open initial units as part of “founding cluster” of partners by year’s end. Apart from the interesting concept behind NAKEDpizza and its bold expansion plans, the way the company got Cuban to back them is interesting. It’s the first company to attract funding from the man after his self-proclaimed Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan , which he refers to as an open source funding environment (click the link for the full explanation). Here’s what convinced him to invest in NAKEDpizza: “Simply the Worlds Healthiest Pizza. Based in New Orleans, it tastes good. They work their asses off.” Curious to see if that will prove enough to make it a success nation-wide, but gotta admire the passion on both sides of the table here. Although I think NAKEDpizza’s logo was clearly inspired by the TechCrunch brand. We’re considering a lawsuit, although we might settle for a free pizza coupon. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Spotify Releases Taster Of Android App, With iPhone To Come Top
Spotify , the streaming music service which is gradually gathering a large fan-base in Europe, and is poised to launch in the US, has been plotting a mobile version for a while. It recently hired a head of mobile and the speculation was that it would come out with an iPhone app first after releasing a teaser video. But today it’s released video of an Android app it’s being demoing to people at Google I/O . The Android app is still very much a work in progress and subject to minor changes, but it gives a pretty good overview of their thinking. The demo highlights a number of features including playback, playlists, offline synch and music search. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet - the service has yet to launch in North America, although I’m about to send some lucky TechCrunch writers some preview codes we’ve gotten hold of - Spotify is a lightweight iTunes-like application for Windows and Mac that lets you search, browse and stream a deep collection of music. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
When In Doubt, Change Your Name: Meet Fuse Capital Top
Velocity Interactive Group, a venture fund managing around $1.4 billion in investments that was known as ComVentures until November 2007, has changed its name to Fuse Capital . Separately, the fund is announcing the formation of a new venture fund with Best Buy focusing on digital media investments. The size of the new fund is not being disclosed. Fuse Capital was rocked in March when partner Jonathan Miller left to head up News Corp.’s newly formed Digital Media group. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Tweetbucks Brings Affiliate Fees To Twitter Users. Is That A Good Thing? Top
Talk of how to monetize Twitter, both from its founders perspective and a third-party point of view, is dominating conversation on the web these days. Tweetbucks, a startup founded by entrepreneur Chris Sukornyk, is hoping to make money for users of Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed through leveraging affiliate fees and CPCs from ads. Here’s how it works. Tweetbucks has a database with thousands of online merchants that offer referral fees (or money you get from merchants when your advertisements of a product result in a purchase ), including Amazon, BestBuy, Barnes & Noble and Shoes.com. All you need to do is find a product on a retail site, enter it on Tweetbuck’s site, and the startup will automatically shorten (via Bit.ly) and convert it to an affiliate enabled link, referencing the site’s data base of online merchants that pay out affiliate fees. You can then add the link to in a Tweet, Facebook status update or FriendFeed message. Every time people click your link and your recommendation results in a purchase, the online merchant pays a commission to you. For example, referral fees for Amazon’s Associates program hover around 6%, BestBuy pays out 3-4%, and CompUSA pays around 6%. Tweetbucks will take 30% of the money you earn through each referral leaving you with 70%. So if you send out a link via a Tweet to a Kindle being sold on Amazon for $359.00 and someone purchases the Kindle from the link, you will receive $15.12 and Tweetbucks will take $6.46. On the other hand, if your affiliate fee comes from a book on Barnes & Noble (which also pays out 6%) that totals $16.76, you will receive $0.70 cents and Tweetbucks will get $0.30 cents. Tweetbucks also lets you earn money off of any non-retail site, by allowing you to enable a “custom ad-frame,” on a site you Tweet the link to. Tweetbucks displays an ad at the top of your destination page and you earn a variable rate (CPC) on every click. You can also customize this ad frame to include a hyperlinked logo of your choice. The compensation from this doesn’t seem to have as much potential as the affiliate fees; Sukornyk says returns are around $1 to $2 per thousand clicks. Tweetbucks give you a complimentary $5 in your account to start with and pays you via PayPal each month. You can also earn a 10% commission on all revenue earned by people you refer to Tweetbucks for 6 months after their approval date. It’s a little shady to be sending out links to friends and followers with out them knowing they you will be making a cut off of their sale. Sukornyk encourages Tweetbucks users to add the hashtag #tweetbucks at the end of any link so that people who click on your link will know whats in it for you. This has a few similarities to Microsoft’s controversial CashBack program, which gives users monetary incentives to click through and buy products from the ads they're shown. But Tweetbucks gives users the power to make money from others (and forbids the user to click and buy from the links themselves). There seems to be the whole double edged sword issue with Tweetbucks. The more affiliate links you send out, the more people will probably purchase from that link and the more money you will make. But the more links you send out, whether it be via Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed, the more you hover on that line of being a pseudo-spammer of links to retail sites. And you could come across as opportunistic if you send out a ton of links that make you money every day, regardless of whether you disclose or not. I guess it was inevitable that services would eventually leverage the power of links with Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook for monetary purposes. For some reason, it just doesn’t sit right with me. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 

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