Sunday, June 21, 2009

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Social Media Payment Platform oneTXT Scores $2 Million And Former iVillage Exec As COO Top
OneTXT, a social media payment platform, has raised $2 million in Series A funding from Metamorphic Ventures with KPG Ventures, New York Angels Fund, and individual angel investors participating. Former iVillage CTO and COO Richard Caccappolo has joined oneTXT as president and COO. OneTXT provides a payments processing alternative for social networks, online games to accept payments, create loyalty programs, and send marketing messages. Similar to PayPal, oneTXT takes a stored-value approach. Each account, which is filed under the user’s cellphone number, has funds sourced from a checking account, a credit card or Western Union. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Oyster Hotel Reviews Provides Detailed Reviews By Travel Writers Top
There are two different types of hotel reviews: user reviews and professional reviews from travel journalists. When choosing a hotel, it can be helpful to evaluate both. TripAdvisor has long been the leader of the pack when it comes to providing a database of user reviews for every hotel out there. Oyster Hotel Reviews aims to provide consumers with qualified professional reviews of hotels around the world, hoping to compete with the likes of Frommers, Fodors, Conde Nast Traveler and others. Oyster’s reviews take on a longer, more magazine-like form, and are all written by a staff of full-time journalists who travel to each hotel reviewed. There’s no doubt that Oyster’s actual reviews are comprehensive. Reviews include a snapshot summary that lists detailed pros and cons of each hotel, and extensive descriptions on the scene, service, location, features, activities, food and drinks for hotels. Because the review is able to be so lengthy, the details given about the hotel are ones that you wouldn’t normally find on other review sites, such as the thread count of the sheets on the beds or which celebs have stayed there. Each review also includes photos from when the reporter stayed in the hotel (not the fancy photos pulled from the hotel’s website), a map with nearby hotels, and user comments/reviews. Currently, Oyster, which launches in beta tomorrow, only provides reviews for hotels in Aruba, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Miami and plans to add New York City and Las Vegas in the near future. These lack of options are no doubt limiting and even in the current coverage areas, not every hotel is listed. For example, in Jamaica, there are only 40 hotels listed for the entire country. TripAdvisor lists over 300 hotels, in addition to lists of vacation rentals and B&Bs. To date, Oyster has raised $6.4 million in Series A funding from Bain Capital, Accelerator Ventures and angel investors in March 2008 and plans to raise a Series B round in the near future. The co-founder of Oyster Hotel Reviews, Elie Seidman, says Oyster will make money off of traditional CPM based ads from relevant partners (Jamaica’s tourism board, airlines etc.). Seidman says the site will also generated revenue from leads to bookings sites like Orbitz, Hotels.com and Expedia. On Oyster, you can click to check availability of a hotel for a given date and will be given the choice to check Expedia, Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Orbitz. Each time a user books through one of these engines from a lead created by Oysters, the site gets a cut. The online travel industry has a whole is incredibly crowded—and there are many services out there that provide reviews of hotels including TripAdvisor, Fodors, Frommers and TripKick. I think the comprehensive, journalistic, unbiased style of Oyster’s reviews are certainly useful, but the startup will need to scale its number of reviews and coverage areas to be a serious competitor. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Facebook Admits Click Fraud Problem, Says Fix Coming Today Top
An update to our post yesterday talking about a weeks-long issue with click fraud on Facebook : A spokesperson for the company admits there’s a problem and says a fix is coming today. Advertisers will also be credited for any fraudulent clicks. In a comment to the post, Brandon McCormick says: This is Brandon on the Facebook communications team. I wanted to chime in to make sure that our voice was part of this discussion and to clarify how we are addressing this issue. We take click quality very seriously and have a series of measures in place to detect it. We have large volumes of data to analyze click patterns and can identify suspicious activity quickly. Over the past few days, we have seen an increase in suspicious clicks. We have identified a solution which we have already begun to implement and expect will be completely rolled out by the end of today. In addition, we are identifying impacted accounts and will ensure that advertisers are credited appropriately. Advertisers on WickedFire , where the original comments about click fraud are posted, are sure to be pleased. Although they may be wondering why it took attention from a blog to get Facebook to deal with the issue, which has been ongoing since at least May. As an aside, Izea, the controversial (at best) pay per post advertising company, used this story as an opportunity to reach out to advertisers. CEO Ted Murphy left a comment on WickedFire saying “This is my first time here, I found out about this forum through the TechCrunch post. I wanted to offer up an opportunity for anyone of you to try SocialSpark CPC and put our click validation to the test. We will provide a $100 credit to any new advertiser. Drop a line to ashley@izea.com if you would like to take a spin on us.” That didn’t go over so well with members. One person suggested Murphy review the forum’s rules (linking to a pornographic image) and another said “you are unwelcome here.” Sounds like a normal day at the office for Izea. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Apple Stuck Apologizing For AT&T Yet Again With A $30 iTunes Credit Top
We’ve received a few tips of people saying they’ve gotten an email from Apple offering them a $30 iTunes Store credit due to the problems activating the new iPhone 3G S. Apple claims it is still working with AT&T to resolve the issue that has caused some new iPhones to still not be activated 2 days after the launch of the device. And it warns that it may be another 48 hours before it’s resolved. For those affected, check your inbox Monday for the $30 credit. To me, this is yet another indication of why Apple needs to move away from its AT&T exclusivity. While this year’s activation fiasco isn’t nearly as bad as last year’s nightmare , it’s still pretty bad considering that most of the iPhone 3G S orders were done via pre-order this time around. So AT&T knew what it was getting into ahead of time — and still couldn’t handle it. Then of course there’s the hilarious fact that MMS is not ready to go in the United States despite being launched on the device in 20+ other countries. And the same is true for tethering. Both are expected sometime later this summer. Oh, and the iPhone 3G S can handle faster data speeds then the iPhone 3G (up to 7.2 Mbps now), but that doesn’t matter because AT&T’s network can’t do the same yet — and may not be able to in most places for a couple of years. AT&T tried to do the right thing by offering some existing iPhone customers full subsidies for the new iPhone, but that was only those paying a large amount of money each month. It really should have offered it to all existing customers , just to rope them in for another 2 years of service because I’m betting that when its exclusive deal is up next year , Apple is going to ask to starting seeing other carriers . Anyone who saw the WWDC keynote ( now available online ), clearly heard the jeers and boos from the crowd whenever one of the Apple execs had to say that AT&T wasn’t yet ready to launch one of the new iPhone features. You can be sure Apple heard those too — and that it wasn’t happy to have to say such things during a keynote in which the majority of those in the audience were AT&T iPhone customers. Find the email below: Dear Apple Customer, Thank you for your recent Apple Store order. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience caused by the delay in your iPhone activation. We are still resolving the issue that was encountered while activating your iPhone with AT&T. Unfortunately, due to system issues and continued high activation volumes, this could take us up to an additional 48 hours to complete. On Monday, you’ll receive an email from Apple with an iTunes Store credit in the amount of $30. We hope you will enjoy this gift and accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience this delay has caused. Thank you for choosing Apple. Sincerely, Apple Online Store Team Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
CNN Loves Twitter, But Doesn't Seem To Always Know How To Use It Top
If you’ve tuned your TV to CNN at all over the past week, you’ve probably witnessed a sweeping love affair. I’m not even kidding when I say that I think CNN’s anchors have used the word “Twitter” more than they have uttered “CNN” during that time. And while some people hate that, I think it’s great, because the service is providing a very, very valuable service for spreading information about what is going on in Iran right now. But none of that matters if CNN cannot use its Twitter account correctly to disseminate that news. Look at the CNN Breaking News Twitter account right now. 8 of its last 10 tweets contain a broken link. This is a Twitter account with nearly 2 million followers, that CNN is promoting like no other on its shows, and it’s 404-ing millions of people. Why this matters is of course because so many people are using this account as their main means of getting news about Iran. When CNN tweets out things like “Daughter of former president Rafsanjani arrested #iranelection,” and then has a link that doesn’t work, a lot of people are obviously very upset. If you’re going to insist on basing most of your coverage around Twitter CNN, please figure out how to use it. Update : It looks like CNN has figured it out after an hour with broken links. Whoever runs their account started using TweetDeck instead of the web, and so now all of the links are using the Bit.ly URL shortening service. But that’s interesting too. Why does CNN, which has a natural URL that is already very short, not just make its own short URLs? That way it could also guarantee they will work if a service like Bit.ly goes down. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Colabolo Takes Another Stab At Team Task Management Top
Colabolo is an Adobe Air app that soft-launched a few days ago and wants to simplify the way tasks in a team are assigned, managed and resolved. Available in English and Japanese , the app (currently in beta) is offered by Tokyo-based ImaHima . By combining the ease of use of email with the structure of project management solutions, Colabolo intends to help handling tasks that require team work such as sales leads, approval requests, document reviews, support requests, etc. After installing the client ( system requirements ), Colabolo starts with an almost spartan interface that indeed looks like that of an email client. User can create a new task (called “issue”) in just a few seconds: Click on the “New Issue” button, name and describe the task, classify it by type, assign who is responsible and you’re done. All tasks can then be tracked (and filtered) at a glance in an inbox-like grid at the top of the screen. This is also where all updates made by team members are automatically sent to. But Colabolo isn’t only for the project leader. All issues can be scheduled, commented on and discussed in real-time by added team members. Files can be shared with drag-and drop. And Colabolo can also be integrated into existing email accounts, essentially turning it into a help desk system when dealing with external customers. An example: If an email from a customer arrives to your company’s support email address, it will not only be automatically converted into a new Colabolo-compatible support issue but also forwarded to the support team leader. The issue can then be assigned to another colleague whose comment on the issue can be used as an email reply back to the customer from within Colabolo. If the person in charge regards the task to be resolved, all team members involved get a notification in their Colabolo in-box and can move on to the next task. ImaHima CEO Neeraj Jhanji says this built-in inbox (with push notifications) helps reducing the number of conventional emails significantly. Asked what other factors are distinguishing Colabolo from similar solutions already existing on the market Jhanji says Colabolo is easy to use even for non-technical staff (which is true), efficient (because users don’t have to wait to be online) and fast (because Colabolo behaves like a desktop application while syncing changes with all team members in the background). Colabolo is free at the moment, with future pricing likely to stand at around $9.99 per month and user (in contrast to many competing products, there is no limit on projects, tasks or attached files). An iPhone app is also in development. I liked Colabolo enough to at the very least recommend downloading and trying the app out, which is true especially for start-ups looking for a simple task management tool for their team. Colabolo faces a lot of competition in the online project management field (37Signals' Basecamp , Action Method , Daptiv , LiquidPlanner , Huddle , Producteev , Clarizen , just to name a few). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Layar's Augmented Reality Browser: Literally More Than Meets The Eye Top
Layar is one mobile application that has definitely managed to get quite some tongues rolling and keyboards rattling this past week, including at the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference in Spain where I just got back from (video demo below). Layar is a so-called ‘augmented reality browser’, an application that turns you mobile phone’s camera viewer - only on Android-powered phones for the time being - into a full-fledged information portal and local business search engine. It essentially puts an information overlay on top of your camera view, bringing digital data of various sorts into play whenever you’re looking at or for something in the real world. Imagine being on the look-out for a great new place in a street nearby your current apartment or house and seeing all the real estate listings, with some details and pricing included right from your mobile device as you’re walking down the street. Imagine watching status updates your friends pushed to social networks roll in with location information attached to them (e.g. ‘Tweets Nearby’). Imagine finding information on ATMs, public transport etc. in a city you’re visiting just by starting up the camera on your mobile phone. And thanks to an integration with Google Local Search, how about being able to look up contact information and reviews for businesses (e.g. restaurants, bars, etc.) in your direct neighborhood with one-click dialing capability? These are all things that are or will be possible with Layar, and there are so many use cases I could think of in under a minute that you’d really have to make an effort to miss the enormous potential of this application. Layar is typically one of those cutting-edge things that aggressively shoves you nose-first into the enormous potential of the next-generation smartphones and platforms, giving you an idea of what you can expect from inventive developers and service providers thankfully making use of their ever-increasing capabilities in the near future. I can only hope for Layar that they’re not entering the game too early. Check out this Engadget video for more hands-on coverage. And in case you were wondering, you can expect a Layar application for the iPhone 3G S this Autumn (and not Springtime, duh). Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Facebook Click Fraud Enraging Advertisers (Updated) Top
Facebook has a big revenue target this year - $550 million, according to investors who were pitched in the last round of funding. That’s nearly twice 2008 revenues of $280 million. A big part of that revenue comes from cost-per-click advertising from small self serve advertisers. And right now those advertisers aren’t very happy. They’ve been complaining about click fraud of up to 100% for weeks, and the situation doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Scores of complaints can be found at WickedFire , where advertisers are complaining of massive click fraud and an indifferent Facebook. A few of the recent posts (excuse the language): Tracking 202 is telling me 11 clicks….Facebook is telling me 145. That’s way off the 15-20%, is there a different margin for tracking 202 than there is prosper 202 or did I suffer from one of those click bots? Sucks how high the numbers are today. Its clear the problem is getting worse daily. I’ve moved most of my shit off facebook for the time being and magically my shit is all positive again. Crazy how that works. There are lots of places to buy traffic, some that will even actually give you the traffic you are paying for. Facebook is never going to admit to whats going on. I can almost guarantee you that. Facebook is still reporting 20% more clicks than I actually get. This is bullshit. If I were at least getting bot traffic or something that would be one thing, but right now Facebook is simply stealing 20% of clicks that I paid for, which adds up to thousands of dollars. Someone should threaten legal action, this is straight up fraud on Facebook’s part. FB click fraud update: ratio is now EXACTLY 10:1. 10 clicks reported on FB, 1 click on prosper. No, this wasnt on a small scale either. Were talking 1000’s of clicks. Have fun facebook. Im checking out till you can fix this shit. I’m targeting small, specific demos, Facebook reports exactly twice as many clicks as hit my LP. Facebook is stealing our money, fuck this shit. This is experienced by not just those that use 202. When in doubt, look at your raw apache logs - which I did. The result: 15% - 20% clicks never make it to my LP. Clearly a case of click-fraud going on. Tested on 3 different servers at 3 different DCs (not a network issue). These aren’t the standard click fraud complaints that advertisers have leveled against search engines for years. In those cases , bots are racking up the fake clicks, which obviously never convert to any sort of purchase or other action. But at least the advertisers see the clicks. In this case advertisers are saying that Facebook is recording and charging for clicks that don’t exist at all, even from bots. Their tracking software (many use Prosper202 , but others are using raw Apache logs) shows one set of numbers, which is 20% - 100% lower than what Facebook is recording. According to the WickedFire posts Facebook isn’t officially acknowledging the problem or giving any refunds so far. But they are asking some advertisers to send in logs to show the discrepancy. So far, advertisers who go to the trouble to do this aren’t getting the response they wanted: “I was asked to send in my logs so I spent over an hour compiling logs over the time period in question, and they replied with their fucking scripted bullshit. I was sooo fucking pissed, since I took the time to do that and they churn out a 2 second response.” We have an email in to Facebook for comment. Image is from a 2006 BusinessWeek report on click fraud . Update: From the comments below ( update here ) - This is Brandon on the Facebook communications team. I wanted to chime in to make sure that our voice was part of this discussion and to clarify how we are addressing this issue. We take click quality very seriously and have a series of measures in place to detect it. We have large volumes of data to analyze click patterns and can identify suspicious activity quickly. Over the past few days, we have seen an increase in suspicious clicks. We have identified a solution which we have already begun to implement and expect will be completely rolled out by the end of today. In addition, we are identifying impacted accounts and will ensure that advertisers are credited appropriately. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Images From The #iranelection Top
As the world watches the violence and post-election protests escalate in Iran, startling images from the streets of Tehran are disseminating through various social media. Many of them are tagged #iranelection, a hashtag which started on Twitter but is spreading to Flickr and elsewhere. Since it is difficult to find photos in the sea of Tweets using the same #iranelection tag I’ve been using Twicsy, an image search engine for photos posted to Twitter which we wrote about yesterday . If you search “iranelection” or “tehran iran” , dozens of images from the protests will pop up. Fair warning: these images are raw and unfiltered, and some of them are quite gruesome, showing people getting shot and lying in pools of blood . The most tragic one shows what is described as a woman protester bleeding to death after being shot today. This same incident was caught on someone’s video or cell phone video camera and uploaded to YouTube. (I hesitate to link to this because it is so hard to watch, but you can find it by searching for “An innocent girl was shot by Iran riot police” on YouTube). Update : The woman is being called “Neda” and her image is becoming a symbol of Iran’s brutality against its own people. Her name is already a trending topic on Twitter. There are now at least two separate videos of her death on YouTube. Since they are spreading around on their own accord and other news organizations are linking to them, I will add them here. Again, these are highly graphic and disturbing, so consider that before you click (video uploaded June 20 , video uploaded June 21 ). There’s been plenty of debate about how big a role Twitter is playing in events in Iran. At the very least, it is being used as a channel to distribute information and images to the rest of the world. It is not always clear where these images come from or who took them. Some of the images are credited to professional news agencies such as the AP, Getty, Reuters, and Arabic news organizations and are being spread around by bloggers both inside and outside Iran. Others look like they were taken in haste or on a cell phone. (For other images from Iran taken by citizen photojournalists, check out Demotix/iranelection ). Below are a few images circulating on Twitter. The first one was uploaded on June 14, 2009 and has no attribution (if anyone knows the photographer, please tell me in comments). Update : The photo is by Olivier Laban-Mattei/Agence France Press/Getty Images: This one was also uploaded on June 14 , and is also uncredited. Update , this one is also Olivier Laban-Mattei from AFP: This one was taken by Farhad Rajabali of news.gooya.com : So was this one (Farhad Rajabali/ news.gooya.com ): Beyond Twitter, you can find a slide show of Iran protest images on the New York Times. And on Flickr, Faramarz Hashemi has collected the set of #iranelection photos embedded below (some of them overlap with the ones on Twitter). Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
It Really Should Have Been Called The iPhone 3G V - For Video Top
Disclosure: I have not bought an iPhone 3G S — I’m still unsure if I will . Apple gave me a review unit to play with for 60 days. So, I’ve now had a full day with the latest iPhone, the 3G S. So far, so good. This isn’t meant to be a full review — that will come later. But I wanted to give an initial reaction based on the last 24 hours, because as someone who has more than extensively used both the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G, a lot of users may be interested to know what immediately strikes me as different in this version. The obvious answer would be its speed . There’s no denying it, it is fast. But that speed is severely hampered by AT&T’s often bad service and the fact that while this phone is capable of transferring data about roughly twice the speed of the iPhone 3G, AT&T’s network isn’t yet capable of doing the same, rendering that advantage moot. So instead of iPhone 3G S, I really would have called this thing the iPhone 3G V — for video. Because that feature, quite simply, is awesome. Yes, plenty of other devices have done video in the past, but the combination of the overall package of the iPhone with this video recording capability is a game-changer in my opinion. And as we wrote last night, this could spell big trouble for the Flip . Others are saying the same thing . The way that the 3G S handles video is more than good enough for the average consumer. And I think we’re going to see that play out over the next several months. Not only does the 3G S shoot video in fairly nice (VGA) quality (with the possibility of doing HD quality someday), it is dead simple to upload to YouTube — it is literally the click of one button. Almost immediately after unboxing the 3G S I shot a quick 30 second video (embedded below), and within minutes it was online being viewed on YouTube — and that was transferring it to YouTube via 3G. (Over WiFi, it’s obviously even faster.) No, that’s not as real-time as live video streaming that a service like Qik would like to offer (but is currently being restricted from doing so ), but again, it’s fast enough for most consumers, and it’s much better quality to boot. And one thing that sets it apart from competitor smartphones with similar functionality, like the Google Ion (aka the G2 or HTC Magic), is that the 3G S has dead-simple video editing capabilities right on the device. You simply drag your finger across the video timeline along the top of a video to trim it down to just the part you want before you upload it. And playback of these videos on the device itself looks great. But really, it’s the whole package of the iPhone as an extremely consumer-friendly device mixed with this video functionality that is killer. Just think about all those popular Twitter applications on the iPhone. When those add video sharing functionality, these iPhone videos are going to be everywhere, just as iPhone-shot pictures are. And it’s already happening. The increasingly popular yfrog was the first such service to support video from the 3G S, as it already is offering it through Twittelator . And the video attachments are already coming in from the new device. You can expect a surge of other Twitter apps to follow, as TweetDeck, Tweetie and Twitterrific are all ready to launch video support with yfrog, we hear. And you can bet that other services like TwitVid , the other TwitVid , 12seconds and possibly even TwitPic are sure to follow. But the fact that you can record a video and upload it with one click to YouTube is huge. And with YouTube’s new social features , those videos can auto-tweet out when you upload them, as I learned yesterday . I asked YouTube for its thoughts on the new iPhone. “It’s a truly amazing world - and great for YouTube - if everyone has an IP connected video camera in their pocket 24/7. Examples such as the protest videos in Iran display the incredible impact of getting video online and shared with the world. The 3G S is only going to increase the velocity of realtime creation and sharing via YouTube,” Hunter Walk, the Director of Product Management at YouTube, tells us. I can already see it — there will be so many simple ways to get video from your iPhone 3G S to the web, that we’re about to enter the next phase of mobile social sharing: Full-on video. And I think that’s fantastic, I just hope all these services are ready as obviously video is an entirely different game than pictures are. Yfrog claims to be ready, as does YouTube. “We’re already seeing thousands of uploads from new iPhones, but we’re built for scale and receive more than 20 hours of video every minute , so overall quite confident that iPhone users will have a great experience sharing via YouTube,” Walk says. Really, the only thing I see inhibiting this video revolution on the iPhone 3G S is, not surprisingly, AT&T. How the service is going to handle all these relatively big video files flying over its network all the time now is a huge question mark. We already saw that it couldn’t handle a few thousand geeks with iPhones being in the same place at the same time during SXSW this year — just imagine the first event where there are thousands of geeks with thousands of iPhone 3G Ss, uploading video. AT&T says that it is continuing to upgrade and improve its network. But the company couldn’t even get MMS ready to go in the U.S. for the iPhone 3G S launch, so I’m skeptical. The time for excuses is over for AT&T. If it wants to prove it deserves that iPhone exclusivity, it needs to be ready for what’s about to occur. The mobile video revolution is upon us. And that’s why this device should have been called the iPhone 3G V. Below find a couple more tests, one in widescreen (horizontal) mode, one in vertical mode — featuring me as I am in most social situations, on the iPhone. CrunchBase Information iPhone 3G S YouTube yfrog Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
AOL's PoliticsDaily Quickly Surpasses Rival Politico, MediaGlow Sites Continue To Grow Top
AOL’s new political news and blog site, PoliticsDaily.com has surpassed rival Politico.com in unique visits in May, after being launched only a month and a half ago. According to May’s comScore results, PoliticsDaily.com received 2.4 million unique visitors compared to 1.1 million unique visitors on Politico.com in May. PoliticsDaily, a “news magazine” site which primarily focuses on in-depth political commentary as opposed to breaking news, provides only original content, from long-form analysis to blog posts on issues in the U.S. political landscape. You can read our original review of PoliticsDaily here. This is a big deal for AOL and representative of the company’s ambitions to become a dominant player in the online content space. PoliticsDaily is the brainchild of Martin Moe, senior vice president at AOL and is built under Bill Wilson' s new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. MediaGlow, which recently launched topic directory Love.com, runs AOL News, Engadget and TMZ.com, among other properties. AOL may be on to something. MediaGlow reports that sites as a whole, rose 5% year over year, with unique visitors climbing hitting 76.3 million, according to May’s comScore data. AOL’s Technology Network – which includes Engadget, , Switched, DownloadSquad, and others, saw the most growth out of all the MediaGlow networks, seeing 35 percent growth in year over year. As TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington wrote earlier this month, the MediaGlow team is looking to pick up the remnants of the dying print magazine business and digitize this content. With the print business in shambles, a lot of high quality talent is suddenly willing to take a job in online, even at a much lower salary. And AOL has some cash from the dialup business. High quality talent may be what is helping PoliticsDaily stay competitive in a crowded field. Wilson credits editor and former New York Times Washington Correspondent, Melinda Henneberger’s leadership and “dream team” as the primary reason for the site’s rapid growth. PoliticsDaily launched with a venerable list of experienced political reporters from both new and old media, including Walter Shapiro, former columnist for USA Today and former Washington bureau chief for Salon; Jill Lawrence, former national political correspondent for USA Today and columnist for the Associated Press; Carl Cannon, former Washington bureau chief for Reader's Digest and White House correspondent for the National Journal and the Baltimore Sun; and others. Of course there are still other political news-driven sites that are getting more unique visits than PoliticsDaily— The Huffington Post saw 5.3 million unique visits in May, over twice the amount of traffic than PoliticsDaily. But HuffPo’s a content aggregator and PoliticsDaily is focused more on long-form original content. And it seems that PoliticsDaily is still growing and may be a model for where magazines should head in the future. In the grand scheme of things, AOL’s strategy towards monetizing niche content online seems to be working out. And since they've already got the publishing platform with MediaGlow, new brands can be inserted or built at little marginal operating cost. If the brand tanks, which is likely to happen at some point, then AOL isn’t losing too much. It will be interesting to see what digital content brands AOL unveil next. Wilson says that MediaGlow will be launching several sites in the near future, but declined to give specifics. Perhaps they’ll reinvent some of the dying magazine brands at former parent company Time Inc.? Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Flip Has Little Chance In An iPhone World Top
As successful as Pure Digital has been with their Flip line of video cameras - selling $150 million worth of them last year - they face a new type of threat that they can’t defeat. The video capable iPhone , and video mobile phones in general, will make them irrelevant in the next couple of years. Flip cameras have really grown on me. A year ago I didn’t see any point in it, since most point and shoot cameras did everything the Flip could do at the same or better price point, and they took good pictures, too. The Flip was very simple to use, but the software wasn’t so great and it didn’t play well with Macs. I didn’t see the point in carrying the extra device. But at the end of last year Flip released the Mino HD and everything changed . The device was a lot smaller than most point and shoot cameras, and took way better video (1280 x 720 high definition video v. 640 x 480 on most point and shoot cameras). They also fixed the software to work well with Macs. And the joy of taking a device out of the box - no cords or wires at all - was real. Their $590 million exit to Cisco was well deserved. I now love my Flip camera, and not just because the company sent me a check for $1.3 million . Along the way Pure Digital fought ridicule from the big video camera companies, who said nobody would want the device. Then, once Pure Digital proved the market, all those competitors jumped in with their own offerings. There are now many devices with similar tech specs as the Flip, but Pure Digital has managed to stay ahead of them all by innovating faster. Flip Can’t Beat The iPhone That’s just not something they’re going to be able to do v. the iPhone and other similar devices to come. The new iPhone takes very good video (640 x 480). That isn’t as good as the Flip (not yet anyway, word is that it actually can shoot HD video but is being slightly crippled), but it’s still able to shoot perfectly good videos on the go ( example ), which is exactly what the Flip is for. And the iPhone has something that the Flip will never realistically have, cellular and wifi connectivity that lets you upload your videos immediately. No need to sync back with your base computer to edit the video and upload it. You can do basic editing right on the iPhone, and publish it to YouTube immediately. As an added bonus, that video can be geo-stamped via the phone’s GPS capability. That makes it significantly more useful as a video device than the Flip, and worth the reduction in quality. You already have to make some quality tradeoffs with the Flip anyway, so if you are going to have a second video device after your iPhone, it may as well be a slightly bigger video camera that you keep in your bag. I just don’t see people grabbing that Flip when they run out the door. And one last killer feature of the iPhone - live streaming video from services like Ustream and Qik are already a reality - most TechCrunch authors have been using it for months on the old iPhone. At some point soon Apple will allow those apps to launch, and iPhone users will be able to stream video in real time from their phones to the Internet. The Flip still costs less than the iPhone, and the transition will be gradual. But most everyone carries a phone anyway. And within a couple of years video will be as ubiquitous on those phones as photos are today. Flip won’t have a chance . Or do they? Flip As A Brand v. Flip As A Device Last year I wrote about a possible way for Amazon to fork it’s Kindle business to really dominate the e-book market: build signature devices and actually pay ODMs to use the software in a unique reverse-licensing model: Imagine if Amazon launched a licensing program that gave hardware manufacturers the ability to build Kindle clones, along with an incentive to sell them at near-zero margins. Amazon would give those manufacturers access to the core Kindle hardware specs (there's no real magic there anyway) and the right to call it a Kindle device so long as they also put the core Kindle software on the device. That software links the device to Amazon's store, meaning downloads revenue flows through Amazon. Flip could do something similar - leverage its brand to convince handset manufacturers to Flip-certify their devices. Garmin, facing stiff competition for its GPS devices from mobile phones, is doing exactly this : “the nuvifone is Garmin’s entry into the cellular phone market and considered key to the company’s future. Cell phone carriers have increasingly been chipping away at Garmin’s market, adding navigational features to their phones.” There’s no reason why Cisco shouldn’t work with handset makers to make them “Flip certified” - high quality video hardware plus the awesome Flip software installed right on the phone. Another way for Flip to go is to launch a series of higher quality video cameras to compete higher up the food chain. Both strategies have big holes, and neither may work. But one thing is certain - In another year there will likely be multiple mobile devices that record video as well as the Flip, and have the benefit of GPS geo-stamping and mobile uploading. Flip will hit a huge brick wall. If the brand wants to live, it needs to adapt. CrunchBase Information Pure Digital Technologies Flip Ultra Apple iPhone 3G S Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Not Only Was Steve Jobs Sick, He Had A Liver Transplant. Top
There really isn’t much to say here beyond what are being reported as the facts. Apparently, Apple CEO Steve Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago, the Wall Street Journal reports tonight . When you read that, it’s pretty shocking — but not that surprising. After Apple initially tried to pass off Jobs’ gaunt physique as a minor ailment, Jobs himself came out in January and announced that the undisclosed illness he was suffering from would require him to take a leave of absence from the company. He has been on that leave ever since. But the good news in the WSJ report is that Jobs is in fact feeling well enough now to return to work as scheduled at the end of this month — which is just days away. But here’s an interesting nugget from the story: When he does return, Mr. Jobs may be encouraged by his physicians to initially “work part-time for a month or two,” a person familiar with the thinking at Apple said. That may lead Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, to take “a more encompassing role,” this person said. The person added that Mr. Cook may be appointed to Apple’s board in the not-too-distant future. That seems to suggest that the transition is well underway for Cook to eventually lead Apple. That shouldn’t be a surprise , Cook has done a masterful job in Jobs’ absence, pretty much doubling the value of the company’s stock during that time. Jobs has long been thought to be perhaps more important to his company than any single figure is to their’s. But his time away has seemingly proven otherwise. Of course, there was already likely a multi-year pipeline for products when Jobs left. The business angle is the important one here. Some have alleged that Jobs and Apple have held news of Jobs’ health too closely for a publicly traded company. But Apple’s board of directors, which includes Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Vice President Al Gore, apparently were getting updates on the situation. Here’s what the WSJ had to say on that: At least some Apple directors were aware of the CEO’s surgery. As part of an agreement with Mr. Jobs in place before he went on leave, some board members have been briefed weekly on the CEO’s condition by his physician. We’d be remiss if we didn’t note that the timing of this story appears favorable for Apple. This news breaks late on a Friday, after Apple has just held a successful launch of a very high profile new product, the iPhone 3G S, that sent the stock soaring today. Obviously, the market won’t be open again until Monday. In 2004, it was disclosed that Jobs had suffered from pancreatic cancer, which was cured. But, a side effect of that cancer is likely the thing that lead to this liver transplant, many doctors familiar with such things have stated. While little is known about the actual operation, the belief is that it was done in Tennessee, because first and foremost, the waiting list of a liver there is much lower than the rest of the country. From the WSJ: The specifics of Mr. Jobs’s surgery couldn’t be established, but according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which manages the transplant network in the U.S., there are no residency requirements for transplants. Having the procedure done in Tennessee makes sense because its list of patients waiting for transplants is shorter than in many other states. According to data provided by UNOS, in 2006, the median number of days from joining the liver waiting list to transplant was 306 nationally. In Tennessee, it was 48 days. It’s good to hear that Jobs has apparently recovered well from the very serious procedure, and we look forward to him returning to work, when he’s ready. Update : It’s worth noting that others brought up the possibility of Jobs being in Tennessee for something health-related months ago. Here’s one , here’s another , and the first comment here is very interesting : Posted by: Anon April 15, 2009 5:17 PM I live in the Memphis area. There was a rumor swirling around yesterday connected to someone high profile in a local hospital saying that Steve Jobs at their hospital undergoing a liver transplant. CrunchBase Information Apple Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Widgetizing The Web: Widgetbox Hits 500 Million Impressions A Month Top
Widgets were all the rage last year. And the trend seems to be growing. Widgetbox, a widget creation and distribution platform, is reporting 500 million impressions worldwide in the past month, according to Quantcast. Widgetbox says that the vast majority of activity exists across hundreds of thousands of publishers who embed the widgets in blogs each month and through partners who integrate Widgetbox’s widget galleries. That being said, Widgetbox is still behind other widget makers in the space, including competitor RockYou, which had 9.5 billion impressions in the past month, according to Quantcast. Clearspring also seems to have more of a reach than Widgetbox, but we don’t have the comparable Quantcast numbers. Clearspring’s widgets had 520 million unique visitors in April of 2009, according to comScore. We also received these comScore numbers of uniques for April 2009 for most of the widget producing platforms: Widgetbox, provides tools for both novice and advanced developers to create a variety of widgets, from simple embeddable RSS feed readers (called "blidgets") to full social network applications for Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and others. Although Facebook represents only 1% of the widget maker’s traffic, Widgetbox says that they are specifically targeting Facebook as a growing priority, recently launching Facebook Connect integration for users and widgets (which can be published in the Facebook feed). Perhaps this is because of Facebook’s steady growth in the U.S. and its popularity abroad. Last fall, Widgetbox launched a blog network. To be part of the network, a blog owner needs to embed one of the 29 channel-specific widgets created by Widgetbox. Each widget displays the same leaderboard content as the Widgetbox homepage, which allows users to browse through a network's top blogs without having to frequently return to the Widgetbox site. The majority of Widgetbox’s impressions come from blogging platforms Blogger and Wordpress, with a fair amount of traffic also coming from Bebo and MySpace. While Widgetbox is seeing success as a startup, it is competing in a crowded space of other more popular widget makers, including Rockyou, Clearspring, and Slide. Get the The TechCrunch Network Widget widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox ! Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Charles River Ventures Hires That FuckedCompany Guy Top
Remember Philip Kaplan, better known as “Pud,” the guy who created FuckedCompany at the tail-end of the first Internet bubble? Yeah, him. He just joined Charles River Ventures this week as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. The EIR position is usually where venture firms park executives they want to work with but who don’t yet have a company. EIRs get to see a lot of deal flow, work with the portfolio companies, and usually end up starting their own companies which the venture firm can invest in. For those of you too young to remember, FuckedCompany was the original deadpool site. Mike once wrote an April Fool’s joke announcing that TechCrunch had acquired the site, which some people still ask us about seriously. But it was always just one of many projects for Kaplan. Kaplan went on to found AdBrite , which is now one of the top 25 ad networks . Kaplan is still chairman of AdBrite, but he’s been tinkering with his own projects for most of this year, including several fun Twitter apps like flirt140 ( Twitter dating ), fast140 (a typing challenge game), Tweetname ( domain name registry via Twitter), AlumTweet (Classmates.com for Twitter), and HitMeLater (a snooze button for email). He says he has about 16 sites or apps that are currently live. So what’s the big idea he will be pursuing for Charles River Ventures? He’s still figuring it out, but he thinks it will have something to do with the intersection of business, social networking, and finance. Whatever it is, you can be sure it will be interesting. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Google Maps Finally Gives Me The Feature I've Wanted From Day 1: What's Here? Top
I don’t know about you, but when I look at an online map and see outlines of buildings, I get a little frustrated. I want to be able to click somewhere, and find out exactly what’s there. And with a new feature in Google Maps , you can do just that. If you right-click somewhere on the map, it will bring up a menu with a bunch of options. The new last option allows you to select “What’s here?” And if Google knows — which it does for a lot of places — it will pop up information about what is actually at the location you’re pointing at. If it knows the name of say, a store that is there, it will give that to you. Otherwise, it will give you the address of where you are pointing. And if you’re zoomed out, it works too. The example Google gives is that if you’re looking at a zoomed out view of the Galapagos Islands, using this feature can get you the name of each individual island. Same with Hawaii, as you can see below. Sure, in some cases you could find out what was at certain points on a map previously by switching to satellite view, or better yet, Street View. But this is much easier. And this technique, which is called “reverse geocoding,” has been a part of the Maps API for a little while now, according to Google. So you can use it on your maps as well. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
CrunchBoard: TPS Reports Annoying The Job Out Of You? Top
If you’re annoyed by TPS reports right now, consider yourself lucky. This week saw the staff reduction of MySpace by 30%, to bring the total number down around 1000 employees. Things dont look good abroad as well. But the situation might be turning a corner. Last week the U.S. Labor Department issued their Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report. While it showed an increase of 608,000 in jobless claims last week, the number of continuing claims dropped to under 6.7 million. Here is our layoff tracker , which is updated regularly. If your on the hunt for a new job, CrunchBoard may be the place to find a new opportunity. Check out a snapshot of the jobs available below: Sr. Java Engineer Cramer Production Business Trust - Norwood, MA Senior Brand Strategist Red Lever Inc- Santa Monica, CA Sr. Front End Developer eHarmony - Pasadena, CA Member of Technical Staff- Systems Kosmix - Mountain View, CA Ad Product Manager Cirius Technologies,Inc. - Sunnyvale, CA For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard. Don’t forget we’re looking for a few good hackers here at TechCrunch. Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
I Have A Crush On ManBabies.com Top
I post this because it’s Friday, because it’s freaking hilarious, and because it could be a killer last-minute Father’s Day gift . Go visit ManBabies.com right now. I cannot stop laughing. Babies are cute, and men are usually normal looking — but when you swap their heads, the results are truly terrifying. ManBabies does just that, both by creating its own images and accepting user submissions for photos that are then voted on by the community. And you can easily share all these pictures via the normal means: Twitter, Facebook, email and you can even embed them. And they’ll even take your photographs and do the swap for you, if you’re willing to pay them — $15 per Manbaby photo. If you’re interested in submitting your picture, just like Fight Club, the first rule is the most important one: 1. The picture MUST have both a man and a baby. Man + baby = ManBaby. Get it? Below find a few of my favorites: [thanks Adam ] Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Twicsy Is A Killer And Kind Of Creepy Way To Search Pictures Shared On Twitter Top
I don’t know about you, but when I see a link to a picture shared on Twitter, I almost always click on it. Sharing images in real-time is a particularly interesting use of the service. And now there’s a more interesting way to view these time-sensitive pictures with Twicsy . The service, launched by the social search engine Searchles , features a main page that is filled with image thumbnails. All of them are images shared over Twitter on either TwitPic or yFrog (two of the most popular Twitter picture sites, currently). The default is to show images from the past hour, but you can set different time intervals to change what images are shown. Hovering over any of them shows a larger version of the image, along with some details about it, like its link and tags. If you click on any of these thumbnails, you’re taken to a page that shows the image, shows who has tweeted about it, and images that Twicsy believes are related. These related images are shown based on contextual tags and user analysis, we’re told. Interestingly, Twicsy doesn’t use Twitter’s search API to find these images. Instead, it indexes all tweets with image links and populates them from that. But perhaps the most useful feature of Twicsy is its own search functionality. For anything you query, Twicsy pulls up related images that have been shared on Twitter. You can sort these by time or by relevance. The results are pretty solid. As you might imagine, this service pulls up a lot of slightly personal pics, such as couples being all cutesy together. Since you don’t know any of them, it’s slightly creepy. But hey, if they don’t want those seen, they shouldn’t be sharing them over Twitter in the first place. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
YouTube Plays Nice With The Movie Industry, Puts Trailers In Their Own Channel Top
YouTube has launched a new directory for movie trailers. While YouTube has had movie trailers on its site from distributors in the past, Google’s video-sharing site has launched a new channel where official trailers are organized by “Latest,” “Popular,” “In Theatres,” and “Opening Soon.” Apple’s movie trailer platform has long been the most comprehensive and popular site in distributing online trailers . Hulu also provides a good amount of trailers on its site. Recently, YouTube launched a premium section with movies and TV shows from Crackle/Sony Pictures, CBS, MGM, Lionsgate, Starz, the BBC, Anime Network, Cinetic Rights Management, Current TV, Discovery, Documentary Channel, First Look Studios, IndieFlix, and National Geographic. A spokesman for YouTube told us there isn’t a a lot of content on the new trailers site because its new but this will be the main portal for content partners to upload movie trailers. He added, “Trailers have always been popular on the site, and we got a lot of feedback from users and partners and there should be a place on the site specifically for them.” YouTube also launched a few new search options today today, including the WonderWheel, a search feature Google added in May. to its main search engine. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Android Users Are Stickier Than iPhone Users Top
No, no - that headline wasn’t intended as commentary on the hygiene of Android users (though if a good chunk of the Android devotees I know are any indication, it very well could be. Zing!) Earlier this morning, mobile analytics group Flurry gave us an exclusive sneak peek at their Smart Phone Industry Pulse report for June. Flurry’s June report harvests data from 1,100 applications running across 4 platforms (iPhone OS, BlackBerry, JavaME, and Android) on over 40 million handsets, and sheds a bit of light on the usage habits (stickiness included) of smart phone users over the past few months. Read the rest of this post >> Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
In Its Rush To Offer A Persian Version, Did Facebook Violate Its Terms Of Service? Top
Yesterday evening, Facebook hurriedly launched a Persian (Farsi) version of the site for users in Iran. Following the past week’s events surrounding the Iranian elections and subsequent protests, Facebook felt that there was an immediate need to provide a Farsi version of the social network as an act of solidarity with the citizens of that country. But this recent move may be in violation of Facebook’s own terms of service. Clause 4.3 of Facebook’s terms of service states, “You will not use Facebook if you are located in a country embargoed by the U.S., or are on the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of Specially Designated Nationals.” A spokesman for the Bureau of Industry and Security, a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce, confirmed to us that there are currently five countries that the U.S. has imposed embargoes against: Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, and Sudan. This was also confirmed by the U.S. Department of State . Many of these embargoed countries seem to have Facebook users in their respective countries. We also heard anecdotally from someone who lives in Cuba that Facebook can be used in there as well, although the U.S. has historically implemented strict embargoes against Cuba. Facebook doesn’t specify what exactly it means by “embargoes” (trade embargo or arms embargo, or both) or how strictly this rule is followed. As Facebook’s popularity grows internationally, perhaps the social network should take another look at its terms of service. Other Web companies such as AOL, Microsoft, and Google are reportedly banning users in embargoed countries from using instant messaging and other software. Twitter’s and MySpace’s terms of service make no similar mention to restricting users from embargoed countries. But Facebook may have a way out. It can apply for a a special export license if it can argue that its service promotes “independent activity intended to strengthen civil society,” which is a rule that is used with Cuba, according to Department of Commerce guidelines. We’ve contacted Facebook for a comment. We will update as soon as we hear back. Here’s the excerpt from Facebook’s Terms of Service: UPDATE: Facebook has issued the following response: To be incompliance with US law, we need to prohibit commercial activities from embargoed countries. As events in Iran have demonstrated, we have allowed, and plan to continue to allow, users to set up accounts from those countries and communicate, as long as they are not engaging in commercial activities on the site. This section you are referring to was addressed in our response to user comments on the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. They are very common terms, though they are worded differently by different companies…Our terms have caused some confusion so we may also propose revising this section in the future to be more clear. Photo Credit: Flickr/ Misterarasmus Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 

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