Sunday, June 14, 2009

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iPhone OS On A Touchscreen Monitor, Multi-Touch and All Top
Now this is the hack of the weekend or the hoax of the weekend. Some intrepid hackers have run what appears to be iPhone OS 2.x on a "multi-touch" monitor with accelerometer support. I've found a few examples of monitors that could potentially pull this off but I haven't been able to pin down a model number. However, because iPhone OS is basically a Linux Kernel it should be bootable on Intel hardware - at least in an emulator - and all of this is feasible. We'll do a little digging but as it stands it's an impressive hack.
 
Does America Need to Make Things? Top
KIGALI, RWANDA– As I've mentioned before I like my entrepreneurs risk-taking and a little crazy. Earlier this week on TechTicker, we ran an interview with a guy who fits that bill: Shai Agassi. In some ways, Agassi is even more ambitious than Elon Musk —you know, the guy who builds rockets and $100,000 electric sports cars. Agassi wants to re-engineer the entire auto and oil infrastructure with electric cars, charging stations, battery replacement stations (staring robots who actually change the battery for you) and sophisticated software to keep it all running—one country at a time. His company is called Better Place, and while some have accused Agassi of being an egomaniac, I give him huge props for walking away from one of the most powerful jobs in the tech world to start a new company that was this hard to pull off. I last interviewed Agassi several years ago on stage when he was at SAP, and I was covering the oh-so-sexy enterprise software beat for BusinessWeek. If memory serves, we were good-naturedly sparring about whether Oracle's acquisition strategy would work. (I'd argue I was right .) But I have to say, I like this Shai better. He made his name as an intense and gifted entrepreneur who wasn't afraid to take risk and sometimes people like that are wasted inside big organizations, even if they have the top job. Agassi seemed inspired and unleashed compared to his SAP days. There's more about Better Place itself and Agassi's plan here . But at the end of the third segment (embedded below), Agassi said something that's been sticking in my head ever since: America has to start making things or the economy won't work. He argues you don't have a country with just a service economy to support it. I'm starting to fear that he's right, especially spending time last month in China and this week in central Africa, both places where manufacturing and consumer goods industries are being built fresh and in incredibly innovative ways. It's a bit like what you kept hearing after the dot com bust: When things turn south it's good to have hard assets to fall back on. Trust me, as I sit on a terrace in a landlocked African nation that has to import almost everything to great expense, America doesn't want to get in the pure-consumer, non-producer game. And while some argue the intellectual work—ala thinking up the idea or doing the hard core engineering—is higher margin, it's absurd and arrogant to think we've got a lock on the people who can do that kind of thinking. This is clearly the biggest concern in the rust belt where thousands of manufacturing job are at risk. But if Agassi is right, Silicon Valley is in trouble too, because we hardly make anything anymore. Look at the semiconductor business: Most start-ups for the last ten years have been so-called "fabless" chip companies. And how many gadgets are made here? The great age of networking and telecom rollouts are over—instead monopolies are upping revenues by "metering" our broadband not rolling out a newer, faster infrastructure. Even outsourcing low-level software development to Balkan states contributes to this. It's a win-win for now, but long-term emerging markets benefit more than we do. Tech got in this situation for two reasons: technology advanced quickly enough we could outsource all the assembly and VCs liked it that way because it's cheap. But there's more than enough cash flowing around this Valley to fund a few risky, expensive manufacturing plays. Here's what I'd like to see America start making again. Leave your ideas in the comments. 1. Better consumer devices. For decades VCs have shied away from consumer devices given the manufacturing and consumer marketing costs. Sure there are loads of duds out there to support that point. But whether they’re entirely made in the US or not, haven't the iPhone, the Flip, the Kindle, the Jawbone and others proven a good device that does something well still has a future coming out of the Valley? Increasingly, people will pay up for brilliant device execution even if it only does one thing well, even if it's not necessarily a new category. 2. Cars . Yep, we're doing it already but it largely hasn't been funded by the Valley. Musk invested $70 million of his own money and Agassi's cash mostly came from Israelis. Props to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for funding Tesla competitor Fisker. But now that these pioneers have proven there's a viable market here, the US establishment whether it's the Valley top brass, DC lawmakers or Detroit need to get behind it in action, not words. Although President Barack Obama has been careful to say the government won't dictate strategy for the car companies we now own, Agassi thinks America should take the opportunity to push on electric manufacturing hard. After all, we do own them. Why not get something out of it? (More on that in the video below too.) 3. Medicine. What ever happened to the biotech boom? The promise from decoding the genome? The rhetoric that the Valley was going to give birth to dozens of Genentechs? I'll tell you what: VCs got into the habit of selling promising pre-clinical research to big pharma early and often. There's no more company building in biotech, and that's a shame. I get that drug discovery is hard and expensive, but we need the innovation, real science and jobs if you ask me. There's also the side benefit of screwing with the big pharma oligopolies. And saving lives is generally a good thing for the country. 4. Electric planes that go really fast. Ok, it sounds even crazier than rockets or electric cars, but every time I board a creaky old Boeing jet for a 10-hour-plus international flight, I can't stop thinking about Musk's idea for an electric plane that's supersonic and lands vertically. I don't even know if that's feasible, but I'm ready to retire my much-beloved noise-reduction headset if it is. If anyone would like to build a teleportation device I'll sign up for a beta tester on that one too. I don't care if there's a risk that my organs will arrive on the outside of my body, I'm so over 20-to-30 hour flights on planes older than I am. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Google Voice's Secret Weapon: Number Portability Top
Google Voice , formerly GrandCentral , is a seriously heavyweight product. When it relaunched in March, just a couple of months ago, we gave Google Voice a glowing review . Once you’ve jumped in head first to the product it will straighten out your phone life forever. You’ll never have to worry about figuring out which phone numbers to give to different people. Give them one number - your Google Voice number - and then use rules to determine where your calls go based on who’s calling and what you are doing. There are significant switching costs, though. You have to tell everyone your new phone number and get them to start using that, instead. New business cards have to be printed, which is another cost. For most people, that’s just too much heavy lifting to fully embrace the service. And there’s the additional problem of your outbound calls and outbound text messages showing the phone number of the device you are calling from instead of your Google Voice number. Your friends need to store that number or they won’t know who’s calling. And once it’s stored, they’ll use it, bypassing all the great voicemail and call routing features of Google Voice. But Google has a plan to deal with all of these issues, we’ve heard. And it starts with Number Portability. Today you are issued a new phone number when you sign up for Google Voice. But we’ve confirmed that a very small number of people have ported their existing numbers to Google (Google uses Level3 to handle phone numbers). In the U.S. it’s possible to port any phone number to another service provider - even a mobile number to a voip provider like Level3. Google is only testing the service for now, but we’ve heard from a source inside Google that they plan to roll out number portability as a general feature later this year. Once that happens, users will be able to move the phone number they’ve had forever to Google, and avoid the switching costs. That means you can switch your mobile number to Google and then just use whatever device you happen to have in your hand to receive calls. That’s an extremely powerful feature for Google Voice. Outbound calls from those devices will still show whatever phone number is assigned to it, though. But Google has that covered, too. We’ve learned that they are preparing to launch apps for the major smartphone platforms that will automatically route outbound calls through Google Voice. That means whoever you call will see your Google Voice number as the caller. I’m banging on every door I can find to get Google to let me port my mobile number over to them as soon as possible. I’ll have to pay a $175 fee to AT&T to switch away, but it’s worth it. As long as Google is around I won’t have to be shackled to any of the ridiculous U.S. mobile carriers. I can just use whatever device I’m testing at any given time as my main phone. And I won’t have to ask people to call me at my home VoIP line when I’m here just because my iPhone doesn’t work at all at my house. Instead I can just switch my inbound calls to Vonage. Callers won’t know the difference. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
For TechCrunch, Twitter = Traffic (A Statistical Breakdown) Top
Some people use Twitter to organize street protests in Tehran. Some people use it to share their daily thoughts and observation. But it is increasingly becoming clear that one of the most common ways people use Twitter is as a social information filter and link distributor. Over the past few months, TechCrunch has experienced the power of this micro-media firsthand as the percentage of traffic we get from Twitter has grown to the point that it is now our second largest source of outside traffic after Google. In the past 30 days, Twitter accounted for 9.7 percent of all traffic to Techcrunch.com, up from 1.8 percent six months ago. This is out of millions of visits. Looking at our Google Analytics numbers, here is the breakdown of visits to TechCrunch by source over the past 30 days: Top Sources of Traffic To TechCrunch 1. Google: 32.7% 2. Direct: 22.7% 3. Twitter: 9.7% 4. Digg: 7.4% 5. Techmeme: 2.4% 6. Other: 25.1% Twitter has been rising up that chart, just recently surpassing Digg. TechCrunch is certainly not typical of most Websites, but this data certainly shows the potential of Twitter to generate traffic. A large portion of that traffic comes from the TechCrunch account on Twitter , which has nearly 715,000 followers (it is one of the accounts suggested to new users). For many people, Twitter is replacing their RSS readers. One of the ways we use that account is to Tweet out links to our stories, which then spread virally as followers retweet those links. Retweets are becoming a new type of link currency . We are big believers in retweets (in fact, there is now a retweet button at the bottom of every post). About a month ago we started using Awe.sm, which lets us send out our own custom short links (http://tcrn.ch) and track how much traffic we get from them. About 73 percent of our Twitter traffic comes from people clicking on an http://tcrn.ch short link. Another 23 percent comes directly from Twitter.com via other short links such as bit.ly’s. We can also approximate how much Twitter traffic comes from desktop and mobile clients. At least 44 percent of Twitter traffic comes from clients, and that counts people clicking directly on http://tcrn.ch links from those clients. So the true number is easily more than half. For us, and I’d argue increasingly for other large Websites as well, Twitter is not just about micro-media. The most powerful Tweets are those which point elsewhere. Or to put it another way, the shortened link may just be the most powerful type of micro-media there is. Those retweeted links are turning Twitter into a social broadcast media that rivals any other on the Web. (Photo credit: Flickr/ Brett Weinstein ) Top 5 TechCrunch Traffic Sources CrunchBase Information Twitter TechCrunch Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Colnect Is A No-Frills Collectibles Marketplace And Wiki. Someone Wake Up David Cowan! Top
The granddaddy of all venture capital funds, Bessemer Venture Partners , keeps a tally of the mega-successes it passed on in a list known as the Anti-Portfolio . In it, renowned VC David Cowan is attributed for passing up on eBay: “Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You’ve GOT to be kidding,” thought Cowan. “No-brainer pass.” Good news David, lightening may in fact strike twice for you because here's your chance to invest in Colnect , a community site for collectors of coins, banknotes, stamps, phone cards and bottle caps. And no, I'm NOT kidding at all. Colnect (Collect+Connect) is a collector's community site that assists its users to organize, share, trade and sell their collectables. There are no fancy algorithms, the UI is modest—old school some may argue—and it's literally a one-man show having been founded, coded and operated by 29-year-old Amir Wald. He's still the only employee(!) The core of Colnect is a community driven wiki where Contributors add content (collectibles), Editors make changes to existing items, and Coordinators supervise content contributions and provide permissions to Editors. Wald also employed crowd-sourcing to translate the site to 35 languages. Colnect's catalogs currently encompass 158K phone cards, 68K stamps, 15K coins, 15K banknotes and 5k bottle caps. Users have marked 11M items so far: 6.6M collectibles in wish lists, 4M in collections, and another 800K in swap lists. Wald tells me that in the last month alone over 650,000 items were marked in the system. He plans on continuously adding categories, with upcoming candidates being PEZ dispensers, Kinder Surprise toys, baseball cards, and waif for it—barf bags. Different strokes for different folks I guess. Part of Colnect's charm is that it really doesn't try to impress you, it just aims to provide basic but critical utilities for collectors of mass-produced collectibles. Collectors can easily manage their inventory with personal collection, swap list and wish list management tools. There's also auto-matching between collectors' inventory and wish/swap lists (huge time saver I'm told). Then of course there are the run of the mill social features such as personal profiles, ratings, friends and private messages. These are all on top of the actual catalogs which are continuously updated and therefore a godsend to collectors. All trades on Colnect are currently free of charge for now. There is however a premium membership option starting at just over $6 per month with the purchase of a one year subscription. Benefits include Custom Personal Lists , Premium Member Highlighting which helps member profiles and their items stand out, and the removal of ads across the site (AdSense and eBay ads are plastered everywhere). So there you have it Mr. Cowan, your second opportunity to invest in stamps, coins and barf bags. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
The App Store Needs A Genius Feature, ASAP Top
You may not realize it yet, but the App Store is broken. I spent this week at Apple’s WWDC conference in San Francisco talking to quite a few iPhone app developers. One thing that struck me was just how many of them shared the exact same concern with the App Store: App discovery. By now, you’ve likely heard some of the success stories from the App Store (Apple does what it can to promote these at just about every event it holds pertaining to the iPhone now). But for each of those, there are also a ton of developers who work hard on apps only to watch them fall by the wayside . Apple’s greatest strength with the store — the fact that there are now 50,000 + apps — is also turning into its weakness with many developers. And if it doesn’t adapt the store to its huge growth, those developers might start looking at other platforms. The problem is that while early on, it was pretty easy for small-time developers to make an app and get it noticed in the store, now with 50,000 apps, we’re getting to the point where you need to do something else to promote your apps. That’s good news for big time development studios like EA, which can throw marketing money at the problem. But for some smaller developers — some of which are just one person — that’s simply not an option. But there is one potential solution, and it’s one Apple already has built-in to iTunes: Genius recommendations. Apple rolled out its “Genius” feature for recommending music on iTunes last year. Based on my experience with it, I believe it really is genius — it scans your music library and uploads the information to iTunes’ servers where it compares it to other users’ libraries (anonymously) and sends back recommended playlists based on the other songs you have on your computer. And, perhaps more importantly, it also recommends songs on iTunes that you will probably like based on songs in your library. Apple also more recently rolled out the same feature for movies purchase recommendations on iTunes. And it’s the iTunes Store recommendations that are key, because it could easily do the same thing with the App Store. At its most simple level, it could probably work like this: Say there’s an app that you downloaded and really like, Apple should be able to recommend other apps of a similar genre you might like based on what others’ downloading habits are. But Apple could probably go much deeper than that and see which apps you use (or at least launch) the most, and use that as a basis for these recommendations as well. And it could also use the star rating system it already has in place as another point of recommendation — though it should probably make it easier to rate apps from within iTunes if it does that. While such a system may not be perfect, it would be much better than the current system of app discovery through iTunes, which really isn’t too fair to little developers. Apple features some apps within iTunes, but those are usually skewed towards ones made by the bigger App Store players. For example, look at the apps featured along the top of the App Store right now: The Sims 3 (an EA game), ESPN Scorecenter, A Home & Garden app, a Lonely Planet app and a Square Enix game. Now, to be fair, those are all popular things in their own regards, so the largest collection of people would probably be interested in them and so it makes sense for Apple to highlight them. But in doing so, it’s perpetuating a type of “rich get richer” system that threatens to take over the App Store. And if you are a smaller app, it’s not like being featured on this main iTunes App Store page matters all that much anyway. I spoke with one developer of a top application this week who told me that when his app was featured on this main page, they only say a single-digit percentage point bump in terms of downloads. Much bigger, he says, was when it was featured on the iPhone version of the App Store. But let’s look at the featured ones there. It’s largely more of the same: ESPN Scorecenter, a THQ game for the new Disney movie Up, the Sims 3 again, an AT&T app, etc. Apple does do a much better job diversifying this list, wrapping in some smaller apps as well, but there are still only so many apps they can fit in this area — especially since it’s on a much smaller screen. Again, a Genius feature on the iPhone or iPod touch would go a long way in helping to uncover new, under-the-radar apps. The Top Paid and Free app lists are great when it comes to helping with downloads, I hear as well. Of course, you have to actually move a lot of apps to get on those lists to begin with. So it’s another of the “rich get richer” situations. Some smaller developers have started to think outside the box to promote their apps. A bunch of them have started banding together , forming their own networks of sorts, for promotion. This method allows them to not only promote each other’s apps over the web, but within the apps themselves. That way if one of them takes off, the likelihood that another one of the apps in this group will be seen, is much greater. Another outlet that app makers use to try and get traction is the press. Every day, we’re pitched dozens of apps, even though we don’t really cover that many apps here at TechCrunch. If we happen to , that seems to be a decent way for an app to get some downloads, but that fame is often fleeting. A developer’s best chance in this regard is to hope that their app gets enough coverage from multiple outlets over an extended period of time. That should help it both spread by word of mouth and hopefully make it onto one of the top apps lists. But again, this is very hard to do. And these alliances and means of promotion pale in comparison to having Apple actively promoting your app. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that if you can get our app on one of the iPhone’s television commercials, your downloads will absolutely go through the roof. And if Apple puts your app on the demo units in its store, that helps sales in a big way as well. But Apple can only do that for so many apps. There needs to be a better way, that scales to a huge store — which the App Store has become. All this matters because there is plenty of money behind all of this. The App Store is already a big business for many developers, and increasingly for Apple itself . And when Apple launches the in-app payment system in the iPhone 3.0 software due next week, I think the store could even jump to the next level in terms of people making money off of it. But to keep the overall momentum the store has going, Apple needs to make sure its ecosystem is enticing for the small developers to work in. And that’s getting to be a problem with so many apps now in the store, and with so many big name development houses now making apps. I think a Genius app recommendation feature would go a long way to help this. CrunchBase Information iPhone App Store Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Things A Startup Founder Will Never Say Top
Chris Yeh from PBWorks responds to Things A Venture Capitalist Will Never Say slide show with a few funny-because-they-are-true slides of his own: Things A Startup Founder Will Never Say My favorite: “We reached out to you because your portfolio shows you are about as selective as Paris Hilton.” Good one! Second favorite: “Our marketing plan is to pray for TechCrunch coverage.” Founder Non-Admissions View more OpenOffice presentations from Chris Yeh . Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Interview With NPR On Process Journalism Top
Yesterday I did an interview with NPR’s On The Media about the idea of Process Journalism . Process Journalism is the posting of a story before it’s fully baked, something the New York Times officially despises, but they do it too . From my original post: We don't believe that readers need to be presented with a sausage all the time. Sometimes it's both entertaining and informative to see that sausage being made, too. The key is to be transparent at all times. If we post something we think is rough, we say so. If we think it's absolutely true, we signal that, too, while protecting our sources. … But anyway, media outlets like the NYTimes think that having to update a story is a sign of weakness. I believe the opposite, that it's a sign of transparency and a promise to our readers to continue to give them the best information we have. Corrections and updates are made constantly to big news posts. Some people ask why we don't just wait until we have the whole story before posting. That's where the cheap/expensive quote above comes in. The fact is that we sometimes can't get to the end story without going through this process. CEOs don't always take our calls when we're asking about speculative rumors. But when a story is up and posted, it's amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to give us additional information. It's that iterative process, which Jarvis nails completely, that I was trying to guide Damon to. He can like it or hate it, but it works. And readers love it. The only people who don't like it are competitors who like to point out that a story was partially wrong, and that they got it right later. But the fact is that they didn't even know there was a story to begin with. Our original post kicked off the process, and they, like us, started digging for the absolute truth. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Hands Down, The Best Facebook Vanity URL Top
As you no doubt heard last night, the whole Facebook vanity URL grab thing was big. Within seven minutes of the service being available last night, 345,000 users grabbed one. Within 15 minutes, over a half million had, Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu told Bloomberg . But who got the best one. The best one I’ve seen by far, was grabbed by Christine Shipley of San Francisco. Rather than go for facebook.com/christine.shipley or even facebook.com/shipley, she went with facebook.com/default.aspx . Yes, her name could easily be confused as the default landing page for Facebook. (Though, savvy users will know that the site is actually built in PHP, and not ASP, which the .aspx extension suggests). Not surprisingly, people are already trying to sell their Facebook vanity URLs as well. The service Assetize , which we wrote about yesterday , already has 4 accounts for sale . The accounts listed are: cotman, pokerbook, sexybook and shekhar. The listing amount for each is “best offer” — none have any bids. But according to the service, one name has already sold, though it has to be bogus. Assetize just started partially blocking out names sold so you can’t see which ones were purchased, but I loaded the page earlier and saw that it was facebook.com/alex. Apparently, it sold for 99,999,999.99 — so unless it went to Alex Rodriguez, I say this buying and selling system is already broken. What else is odd about this is that alex is a 4-letter URL, which is against Facebook’s rules. So unless it was a Facebook employee who got the URL and was selling it, the whole thing seems to be a sham. Not everyone was happy with the results of the landgrab. Michael was one of the unlucky ones who didn’t get the name he wanted , even though he originally broke the story . Knowledge, it seems, isn’t always power. [thanks Loic ] CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
OfferPal Sues Former Customer Kickflip For Starting Competitive Service Top
Offerpal Media , an advertising platform concentrated on helping developers monetize social networks by offering virtual currency in exchange for participating in ‘offers’ like online surveys, has filed suit against Kickflip, the company behind the Gambit payment engine. As first reported in GigaOm , the suit alleges that Kickflip temporarily used Offerpal’s services for the purpose of stealing knowledge of how the service worked, which it then used to start a competitor. From the suit: [Kickflip] misrepresented its intentions in forming a relationship with Offerpal, and then used the information and trade secrets learned in the course of the relationship to develop and improve Defendant's own competing service. Kickflip responds that the suit has “absolutely no merit”. The company originally started off as a game developer in 2007 (you can see a list of their old games here ). The company says that during that time it has tried to use OfferPal and SuperRewards (an OfferPal competitor) to monetize their games but that both were unable to meet their needs, so they built their own service. The company’s ‘about’ page offers a similar background: In 2007, we formed kickflip inc. to build online games, eventually reaching over 7 million users. We had the same problem you have…making money. So we built all the tools we needed to help users pay for our games. Our users loved it. We loved it. So we thought we’d allow a few friends to use it. Surprisingly, the developers and their users liked it too. Since then we’ve been focused on providing the easiest payment solution for online games and communities. Kickflip has issued the following statement regarding the suit: We were game makers long before we built Gambit. As game makers, we used the services of both OfferPal and SuperRewards. We noticed these services couldn’t keep up with our needs, so we decided to build our own, which turned into Gambit. Since then we have been building partnerships with game developers. We have a lot of respect for the business OfferPal has developed, and it is unfortunate that they feel it necessary to sue a former customer and game developer. We are confident that this lawsuit has absolutely no merit, and we plan to fully defend ourselves. If you have further questions, feel free to contact our lawyer: Eric Benisek Vasquez, Benisek & Lindgren LLP 925-627-4250 Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Facebook Nabs The Man Who Engineered Google AdSense For Many Years Top
Facebook has just hired Greg Badros , a Google Senior Director of Engineering, we’ve learned. Badros joined Google in early 2003 and has worked his way up the chain since then. At Facebook, his official title will be Director of Engineering. At Google, Badros was in charge of the AdSense engineering team from its formative years in 2004, through when it exploded in popularity with billions of dollars in revenues. He has also led the Google Calendar, Google Reader and Gmail teams. Since March 2009, he has led the Application Platform group. But it’s the AdSense experience that is particularly interesting here, as Facebook is attempting to better monetize its service. Badros will report to Mike Schroepfer , who Facebook hired from Mozilla in July of last year. Schroepfer is the VP of engineering. Before Google, Badros worked at Go2Net which was later acquired by InfoSpace. He served as the Chief Technical Architect at both companies. His Google profile doesn’t reveal much about him, other than the schools he attended, and his blog — which he infrequently posts on. Update : Here's Facebook’s official statement statement: "Greg Badros has joined Facebook as a director of engineering, reporting to Mike Schroepfer. Greg is one of the most accomplished engineering talents at Google, and it's wonderful that he has decided to bring these talents to Facebook and take on numerous responsibilities across the engineering organization." CrunchBase Information Greg Badros Information provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Facebook Vanity Landrush Tonight At 9 pm PST: Here's What You Need To Do Top
We were the first to tell you about the Facebook vanity URL landrush , and we’re going to guide you across the finish line. And don’t worry, I declined to participate in the journalist program that would have given me my name in advance. I’ll be right there with you, battling for the name I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life. Ok, that was a little dramatic. But it is a final decision - after you pick one, you can’t change or transfer it. At 9 pm PST you’ll be able to log in and claim your new name. Go to facebook.com/username and log into Facebook. You’ll see a tool like the one below to pick a permanent Facebook URL: Usernames much be in basic text, at least 5 characters long, and include only alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), or a period or full stop (”.”). When you get your name, the next step is to leave a comment below with your new URL (yep, we want to see it) and then become a Fan of the TechCrunch Facebook page . Ok, to be honest, that last step is optional and probably has very little impact on you getting the vanity URL you really want. But it won’t hurt, either. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Twitpocalypse Not Now: Crisis Averted. Mostly. Top
So, as just about everyone on Twitter was talking about today, the possibility of a Twitpocalypse was upon us . The site tracking the possible failure of certain third-party Twitter apps not built to handle the signed integer limit, believed the crisis would happen tomorrow early in the morning (in the U.S.) — but Twitter pre-empted the problem by triggering it today instead, so all hands would be on deck to attack the problem. And it worked. “As planned, we averted the twitpocalypse with a deploy this afternoon,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone tells us. Excellent news. But there is one small temporary casualty of the problem, Twitter Search has been paused for about an hour, I’m told. But it should be caught up and back to normal soon, says Stone. So, everyone can calm down, for now. Just like the Y2K bug that much of the world freaked out about a decade ago, the Twitpocalypse came and went with nary a problem. Update : As a few commenters have noted, and I’ve just confirmed, the popular Twitter app, Twitterrific, is completely broken right now due to API errors — at least the iPhone version. Some reports have said TweetDeck is facing similar problems. . CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
TechCrunch's Most Frequently Used iPhone Apps Top
Most TechCrunch writers are iPhone users. And while we're still debating whether when what time we will be upgrading to the iPhone 3G S next Friday, we are excited for the iPhone OS 3.0 next Wednesday. We’ve had a few requests to publish the apps we use on our iPhones - and we’re going to share that information with you now. The following list is by no means all of the apps we have on our iPhones. There are plenty of apps we only use a couple times a month (e.g. Shazam ), but when we need them, they’re great. We’ve also linked to any TechCrunch/CrunchGear/MobileCrunch reviews of the apps. Let us know which apps you use in the comments below. App Users Review Yammer 7   Qik 6 CG Skype 6 CG Tweetie 6   Facebook 5 MC foursquare 4   Flight Control 4 TC Pandora 4 TC Recorder 2   Loopt 2 TC Strategery 2   Twitterific 2 TC Fieldrunners 2 CG Remote 2   Deep Green 2   Instapaper 2 TC Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Holocaust Museum Death Won't Change Facebook's Mind On Hate - But Advertisers May Be Able To Top
Earlier this week a Holocaust denier shot and killed a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. Facebook didn’t change its policy on allowing Holocaus denial groups , even though one group quickly put up a cartoon mocking the event. If attacks on Jews by Holocaust deniers won’t be enough to sway Facebook that this is all hate speech, perhaps angry advertisers will do the trick. Brian Cuban has been tracking advertisers who have insisted their ads don’t show up anywhere near Holocaust denial pages on Facebook, and at least one who doesn’t want ads to be placed on profiles of people who are members of such groups. Vodafone, Tesco, American Airlines and Domino’s Pizza have pulled advertising, says Cuban. Domino’s Pizza’s Social Media Specialist Phil Lozen wrote to Cuban saying that “initially, Facebook was pushing back on their ability to block ads” from some of the pages. But as of today even pages showing search results for hate groups won’t have Dominoes ads. He also says that Dominoes would not have purchased ads at all if they knew of the possibility of their ads appearing near Holocaust denial pages. What we really need are a set of large advertisers to boycott Facebook entirely until these groups are banned. There’s a reason why eBay and other private companies won’t let this kind of hate speech on their sites. It’s bad for business. And as soon as Facebook realizes that, they’ll change their policy. Then look for lots of talk from Facebook employees about how proud they are that their company did the right thing - [insert current policy here]. And for those of you who will argue that the best way to handle hate is to shine a light on it, debate these people openly, and generally assume that reason will prevail: you’re wrong. Read this USA Today opinion piece that is talking about the steady rise of hate groups in the U.S. - “the Internet gives formerly isolated racists, whether individuals or small groups, a means to stoke one another’s smoldering anger. With the ready availability of weapons, even a single person can do enormous harm.” Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Dotcom Hangover: Amazon Pays $51 Million To End Long-Standing Battle With Toys "R" Us Top
Back at the height of the dotcom bubble, Amazon was signing lucrative deals with traditional retailers to be their online store. One of the biggest such deals was with Toys “R” Us. It was announced with much fanfare in 2000 and was supposed to last a decade. Toys “R” US would handle the toy buying and inventory management, Amazon would handle the Website. It made sense until, oh, about 2004, when Toys “R” us filed a lawsuit for breach of contract. While Amazon was perfectly happy to be the exclusive online presence for Toys “R” Us, it didn’t feel that it had agreed to make Toys “R” Us the exclusive of provider of toys on Amazon. A New Jersey court ruled in favor of Toys “R” Us back in 2006 . But only yesterday did Amazon finally settle with Toys “R” Us, agreeing to pay $51 million. In an SEC filing Amazon states: On June 11, 2009, Amazon.com entered into a settlement agreement in its lawsuit with Toys "R" Us, Inc., and its affiliates, with terms that include, among other things, (i) a one-time payment from Amazon.com of $51 million in the third quarter 2009, substantially all of which was unanticipated and will be charged to "Other operating expense" in the second quarter, (ii) dismissal of all claims and counterclaims, and (iii) mutual releases. Nine years after the initial agreement, that particular dotcom hangover is finally over. It lasted almost as long as the original deal was supposed to be. The lesson here: don’t hand a key part of your business to someone else, especially if it is where your growth is going to be coming from. That is the same as handing control over your destiny to someone else. (Photo credit: Flickr/ Daniel Chan ). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Why Europe Won't Go Browserless This Fall Top
The web is currently ablaze with headlines that IE8 will not be included in the European release of Windows this fall. In fact, no browser at all is going to be included with the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system. No, Hell has not frozen over — the news is the result of Microsoft’s longstanding (and very costly) antitrust issues with the European Commission. And it has everyone, from the regulators to consumers to IE competitors, very upset. Fortunately, it seems like this is much ado about nothing. The way some people are portraying it, it’s as if millions of computer users are suddenly going to be left Internet-less, isolated on their home PCs without any hope of ever reaching the web beyond. But an important statistic that some major news outlets are failing to highlight (though most others are pointing out ) is that the vast majority of people won’t notice the change at all. That’s because PC makers — your Dells, HPs, etc. — will be able to install IE8 before their computers ever reach the consumer. And you can be sure that for nearly all of computers they sell, they’re going to do just that. But what about that 5% of users that are buying the the OS in a retail store? For one, consider the fact that many of the people taking the initiative to actually go out and buy Windows 7 are perfectly capable of finding a way to install Firefox or IE on their computers. But what about everyone else? Microsoft has made it clear that it’s going to offer IE on an “ easy-to-install basis “, which includes distribution via “via CD, FTP, and retail channels”. In other words, every single computer store you walk into is going to have giant displays inviting you to grab your Internet Explorer pack. At checkout, your friendly clerk is going to remind you to make sure you grab one. If you find yourself walking out of the store without an IE CD, it’s almost certainly because you made the decision not to. In the incredible event that you do install the OS and can’t figure out where your browser went, there will likely be a hotline at Microsoft dedicated to answering this exact question. No, it’s not going to be especially user-friendly (at least compared to having the application pre-installed). But this is hardly going to be a crisis. Now, it’s easy to decry Microsoft for this move, but it’s also pretty easy to understand why they’re doing it. The company is eager to launch Windows 7 on time, and it isn’t too keen to hand over another 1.7 billion euros in fines. It also doesn’t want to resort to the so-called “ ballot screen which would present a list of alternative browsers during the OS’s first boot, which is one of the solutions being proposed. Microsoft may work out (or be forced to use) an alternative solution, but in the mean time this should help the company avoid any further fines. It’s also a way for Microsoft to effectively tell the European Commission to piss off. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Gliider Makes Makes Trip Planning A Breeze Top
At Launch Silicon Valley this past week, I saw a demo of Gliider, a Firefox plug-in and tool that allows you to drag and drop travel information you collect from around the web. The video explains the concept behind Gliider, which is still in private beta, fairly well. While the travel 2.0 space is nearly saturated with a plethora of competitive products, Gliider’s tool is incredibly useful and its focus is narrow (Gliider only wants to help users with planning), which could make it standout in the crowd. After you download the plug-in, you can pop-out the Gliider trip planner box from your browser when you need it. Within the planner box, you can create a trip, specify where you are traveling to (Gliider’s search box offers auto suggestions), and when you plan to go. Gliider will automatically create folders for each type of information, including flights, hotels, shopping, transport and food. You can also create customized folders. When you come across useful travel info, like hotel, restaurant, or flight listings, you can highlight the text and images and simply drag and drop the info into the box. Once the item is in the organizer, you can make insert comments to each item. It replaces bookmarking for travel and automatically organizes links, sites, and listings for you. Once you’ve finished the planning process of a trip, Gliider will email you all your details in a PDF file. The startup will also be rolling out a iPhone app that will let you view your planned trips. Gliider’s proprietary technology will read where and when you will be traveling and provide customized hotel deals for you. And Gliider will also track hotel deals, letting you know when a price goes up or down. The tool doesn’t yet do the same for flights, which would also be a useful item to track. Gliider will soon have a “ask around” feature, which via Facebook Connect, will let you solicit advice on a trip or listing from your Facebook friends. Gliider mainly makes money from affiliate fees—when they suggest deals (they have a partnership with Expedia) and a user clicks to the deal and books, Gliider will get a cut from the purchase. The startup’s CEO and co-founder Jordan Stopler, declined to say how much they receive in these deals but also added that the startup will be offering deals on flights as well in the future. Gliider will also be adding functionality for IE8 soon. The most obvious and serious competitor to Gliider in this space is TripIt, a popular travel site (and one that Mike can’t live without ) that lets you generate an itinerary by simply forwarding the service your email confirmations from hotels and airlines. NileGuide also is similar in function. But the beauty of Gliider is that it’s solely focused on planning a trip and not on creating a step by step itinerary for travelers. And the fact that Gliider is a plug-in makes it easy to access and integrate with the browser experience. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Twitter Moves Up The Twitpocalypse. All Hell May Break Loose Today. Top
Twitter users, the Twitpocalypse is upon us. Twitpocalypse is the name given to a bug that’s about to be exposed. Apparently, it’s similar to the Y2K bug in its nature, and stems from the fact that every tweet sent out has a unique numeric identifier. This identifier is about to hit 2,147,483,647. This number is the signed integer limit and apparently when some third-party Twitter clients start hitting it, the identifiers will start turning negative, and those apps are likely to crash as a result. This crash was supposed to happen sometime tomorrow, according to the countdown, but it looks like Twitter has just moved up the Twitpocalypse time to 21:00 GMT, which is 2 PM Pacific/5PM Eastern time today. Yes, in a couple hours. They’re forcing the failure now so that all hands are on deck working on the issue, rather than having it go down in the middle of the night. This Google Group thread run by some developers working at Twitter explains more. Engineer Matt Sanford originally explained: The overflow of the 32-bit signed integer value for status ids (a.k.a “The Twitpocalypse” [1]) is fast approaching. The current estimate is around tomorrow at around 11am GMT, or 3:00am Pacific time in the case of Twitter. There is some discussion internally about  accelerating things so we’ll be in the office and able to cope. Nobody is their freshest at 3:00am, not to mention it would be nice to not have apps broken throughout the weekend if one-person developer teams don’t notice. No decision has been made yet but I wanted to get something out to you all so you know what’s going on in the event we decide to do this. But now is saying: The responses to @twitterapi and all discussions internally show a preference to not waiting until the middle of the night. The current plan is to force this issue at 21:00 GMT (2:00pm Pacific/5:00pm Eastern for those in the US). This will let us make sure we have all staff available in the unlikely event something goes wrong on our end. We’ll also be available when people who don’t follow the twitter-dev-talk list start reporting errors. While we did warn developers about the Twitpocalypse I’m sorry we didn’t think about setting a drop-dead date and scheduling this previously. We’ll keep trying to improve on warnings like this. Good night, and good luck. So yeah, be prepared for some Twitter apps to fail in about 2 hours. Hopefully Twitter will be able to resolve this quickly. Update : It’s possibly a coincidence, but Twitter has just welcomed two new members to its API team today. Is Twitter manning up for the battle? Update 2 : It’s now past 2 PM and no reports of massive failures yet. Perhaps this really is just like Y2K. Update 3 : Here’s an update from Twitter developer Doug Williams: Just an update, there is a lot of coordination that it takes to pull something like this off. We need the operations team to watch the servers and application. The services team to work closely with the ops folks to ensure that any problems on our end are properly tracked and fixed. And Matt is running around coordinating the entire effort. That said, the deadline may slip a bit as we work to ensure that we’ve covered our bases, and that the engineering team is ready to react to unforeseen problems. Doing what we can to keep the tweets flowing. Update 4 : The crisis looks mostly averted. More here . CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
This Is Getting Ridiculous: Startups Already Trying To "Assetize" Facebook Vanity URLs Top
Facebook vanity URLs may not be here just yet, but that isn’t preventing startups from readying offerings that aim to complement them (or you could say piggy-back on them). Assetize , for one, is readying its account username marketplace for the highly-anticipated-in-some-circles unique addresses. Coinciding with the impending introduction of unique Facebook URLs for the masses ( at 12:01 AM Eastern Time tonight ), Assetize will enable users to buy and sell them much like you can with regular website addresses on so-called domain name after-markets. The startup already provides the same service for a variety of other accounts, such as Twitter, Gmail and Ning, and will now be adding Facebook to its roster. As Facebook noted in its blog post announcing the upcoming availability of the unique addresses, it’s not possible to change or transfer vanity URLs. This doesn’t pose a problem, says Assetize, because you’re still able to buy and sell ‘access’ to the account, i.e. your login credentials. In related news, SocialToo is jumping on the Facebook vanity URL bandwagon too, by offering its users a way to get a bunch of analytics on their Facebook profiles, like which browsers visitors to the account are using, where they’re located, and where they’re clicking from (if available). All a user would need to do is register for the service, click on the link to get a special code from Facebook, provide the code along with a SocialToo username and password (the username will be what their vanity URLs will be based on), and click submit. Next time they log in, they’ll see a new “SocialStats” tab with statistics for their URL. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
YouTube and Yahoo Logos Offer One Last Reminder About The TV Broadcast Transition Top
If you’re reading this, chances are you haven’t been using an over-the-air antenna to get analog television service for quite some time. I’m not even sure I’ve seen the “rabbit ears” since the 80s. But just in case you are one of the rumored 6 million Americans who aren’t ready for the switch from analog to digital, Yahoo and YouTube are doing their part to remind you. Both sites feature analog-to-digital logos to mark the transition that happens today. While YouTube’s is purely cosmetic, Yahoo was nice enough to link its to a site that gives users more details about the switch. But again, I’m not sure that at this point if you’ve missed the notice after notice that the transition was happening, that’s you’re surfing Yahoo either — or own a computer, or even watch TV. The U.S. government started a $1.2 billion campaign in 2007 to let people know about the switch. But somehow all that time and money still wasn’t enough as Congress had to delay the transition in February (when it was supposed to occur) and give the program more money. Now that the transition is finally happening, the companies that bid on that spectrum last year can finally start actually using it. The auction of those airwaves by the FCC raised nearly $20 billion , with Verizon taking a large chunk of the coveted C-block. You probably remember hearing about the auction on a lot of tech sites because Google threw down the gauntlet early on and promised to pledge at least $4.6 billion towards a part of the spectrum. It didn’t end up winning any part, but by raising the stakes, Google no doubt helped ensure that the minimum bid was met — because the thought of Google winning a huge chunk of wireless airspace that it could use for a number of things, including mobile communication, likely scared the hell out of the giant telcos. And Google also pushed hard to make sure that no matter who won the bidding, that the spectrum was “open,” meaning any company’s products and services could be used on it. Products and services like the ones Google provides. While Google of course owns YouTube, it’s own logo doesn’t reflect the transition today. Perhaps it realizes that the vast majority of its users probably haven’t been in danger of being effected by it since the 80s. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Shutterfly Finally Adds Video Sharing Top
Shutterfly, an online photo sharing and printing site, is adding video capability to its photo sharing sites. Shutterfly is using video hosting site Motionbox to power its video sharing service. So when you upload a video to your Shutterfly Share site, it will also be stored in your Motionbox account. If you upload to Motionbox directly, you will be given the option to post your video to your Shutterfly Share site. Users can also share videos to social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Blogger can upgrade for unlimited video storage and HD-quality playback. The free account is a little limiting for storage—you can only upload ten video clips. For $30 per year, you can have a premium subscription which allows higher file size limits, unlimited video downloads and HD-quality playback. I’m assuming that Shutterfly will monetize the addition of videos by offering customized DVDs of clips. Currently, the company offers users a variety or printing services where users can not only print their photos, but also create cards, mugs, invitations, apparel and more with photos emblazoned on each item. But I’m not sure how else Shutterfly can make money off of the video component. Shutterfly, which IPO’d in 2006, is playing catch up to other more popular photo sharing sites, like Flickr and Photobucket, which both host video as well as photos. Even Facebook is becoming the go-to destination to share photos and videos. But Shutterfly, a vestige of the dot-com boom and bust, has managed to survive, despite being in an ultra competitive space that’s chock full of similar offerings and products. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 

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