Friday, September 18, 2009

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Review: Zune HD Top
But what did he see in the clear stream below? His own image; no longer a dark, gray bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan. —The Ugly Duckling It's been a long, brown trip for the Zune: from its early days (mocked and abject) to its awkward years (deemed a dead end and money pit) it's been embattled and criticized, and rightly so. After all, here was an unpopular company with a frankly ridiculous brand it had pulled out of thin air, attempting to compete with the guys who defined the market. We've always been champions of the devices, despite their quirks, and of the service, despite its growing pains — and Microsoft occasionally made it pretty hard for us to stand by our favorite little misfit media player. Well, for once they just made it really easy. Let's not beat around the bush, now: this thing is going head-on with the iPod touch, one of the most versatile and well-liked devices on the planet. There are other PMPs, sure, but the caliber of these two devices is well beyond the best offerings from Creative, Samsung, or Sony. To make it easy on the Apple fans who are impatient to comment on this story, let me just state it right now for the record: the Zune HD is not an iPod-killer, but it is the only player out there that can go up against it and not be annihilated in the process. It's good enough that everyone owes it to themselves to give it a look — unless you're afraid of just how good it might be. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
WeddingWire's iPhone App Lets You Plan Your Wedding On The Go Top
Planning a wedding can be an incredibly stressful process (I know from experience-I just got married a few weeks ago). WeddingWire, an online wedding planning platform and vendor directory, is launching an new version of its app to let brides (and grooms) plan their weddings with the help of their iPhone. The previous version of WeddingWire’s app just let you see lists of vendors in your area. The new app is a lightweight version of WeddingWire’s site that will sync with your account on the planning platform’s site. Once you log-in to the app with your WeddingWire account, you can keep track of to-do items in your planning list, access your customized budget tool, and find local wedding vendors and reviews. The review feature is key, sort of serving like a Yelp for weddings vendors. You can see reviews of a vendor then create a to-do item in your planning checklist to follow up with that vendor at a later date. Surprisingly, there aren’t as many wedding planning apps in the app store as I though there would be. Other wedding planning apps include Bride Guide, and iWedding but both are paid apps. WeddingWire’s app is free. The Knot, which is one of the more popular wedding planning sites on the web, has an iPhone app that simply lets you get advice for their experts but doesn’t recreate the planning experience from the site on your device. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
The Plot Thickens: Skype Founders And Joost Sue Former Chairman And CEO Mike Volpi Top
The Skype-eBay plot thickens. Joost and Joltid, both companies owned by Skype’s founders, have filed a lawsuit against former Joost chairman and CEO, Mike Volpi. The suit also names Index Ventures, the VC firm where Volpi is a partner. In a nutshell, the legal documents say that Volpi obtained confidential information in his role as CEO of Joost about how to circumvent Joltid’s IP. We’ve embedded the legal document that appears to have been filed this morning, below. Earlier this week, Joltid, the Swedish firm owned by founders of Skype sued eBay and recent Skype buyer Silver Lake Partners and its partners in the buyout, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board; accusing them of copyright violations. The twist: Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom also founded Joost and Volpi, Joost’s former chairman and CEO who left the imploding company in June to become a partner at Index Ventures, has been rumored to be a contender for Skype’s CEO position. While Friis and Zennstrom named Volpi as a defendant in the earlier suit against eBay, it appears that the new suit against Volpi alleges leaking of trade secrets from Joost, breach of contract and “civil conspiracy.” So what does this all mean? It’s a little complicated and slightly twisted. Yesterday, TechCrunch’s Robin Wauter’s reported that Skype is actively shopping around for companies that provide web-based communication services such as browser-based calling and video chats to add this functionality to the product. What the complaint basically implies is that at Joost, Volpi had access and knowledge of information regarding the ability for the peer-to-peer technology to go to the web. In his role at Joost, Volpi knew how it could be possible to make the switch to a web-based communication service within the source code. This source code is intellectual property owned by Joltid. The reason the bid from the consortium of bidders was so high, was because they all has knowledge (from Volpi and participant Index Ventures) that its possible for Skype to go web-based. The complaint goes on to say that Google and Microsoft were considering buying Skype and were both aware of the ability for Skype to possibly add web-based functionality but didn’t want to touch it because of the complicated IP situation, since Joltid owns the code. All of that said, the complaint doesn’t have any affidavits or direct evidence that Volpi used this info in the bid to buy Skype. eBay sold Skype in a deal valuing the peer-to-peer telephony service at $2.75 billion a few weeks ago, with the new investors owning approximately 65% of Skype, with eBay continuing to own 35%. Several months ago, Skype’s founders made their intentions public by announcing they wanted to buy Skype back from eBay. Shortly after this announcement, eBay announced that Skype was to be spun off as a separate company and then IPO. From a press release issued by Joost/Joltid this morning: The lawsuit alleges breach of fiduciary duty against Volpi, aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary duty against Index, interference with prospective business advantage, misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of contract against Index, breach of confidence, and civil conspiracy. The suit seeks an injunction requiring the defendants to return to the plaintiffs all documents and files containing confidential information that the lawsuit alleges was misappropriated from Joost, and enjoining the defendants from making any use of the alleged misappropriated trade secrets, among other things. Update: More TechCrunch commentary on this story here . Joost – Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
TC50 Demopit Company TweetFunnel Launches Enterprise-Friendly Twitter Publishing Platform Top
As more and more businesses dip their toes in the Twitter stream, there’s a need for enterprise-focused Twitter applications that cater to businesses’ needs from the microblogging platform. TechCrunch50 demopit company TweetFunnel is business-friendly publishing platform for Twitter. The web-based application is both a Twitter client and a platform for businesses to manage all their Twitter accounts. TweetFunnel lets you aggregate and use multiple Twitter accounts, and also makes it easy for several employees to post to one Twitter account. Users can also schedule, monitor and assign posting of Tweets within the platform. And TweetFunnel offers Bit.ly link analytics within its platform. TweetFunnel breaks down users into three different categories—administrators, publishers and contributors. The administrator has permissions to add users to the account and to review and publish tweets. Publishers also have the ability to review and publish tweets and contributors can add tweets to the review queue, but cannot publish tweets. The platform is appealing and has a number of compelling features for businesses, including the ability to time and assign Tweets. Of course, TweetFunnel will face competition from the growing number of clients and services that provide variations of enterprise-friendly Twitter clients, including PeopleBrowsr, ViralHeat, and Socialseek. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Seesmic Desktop Continues To Grow, Adds Facebook Fan Pages, Yfrog Integration And More Top
Seesmic, the startup behind the Twitter and Facebook desktop and web clients, is launching a new version of Seesmic Desktop that adds Facebook fan pages, yFrog integration, a “reply to all” button for messages and a favorites timeline. Developed by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, Seesmic recently launched its browser-based Twitter client at TechCrunch's Real-Time Stream CrunchUp in July. You can download the new version of Seesmic Desktop here. Seesmic Desktop, which launched in April and has reached 2.5 million downloads, is an Adobe Air-powered client that has pulls in status updates from Facebook and Tweets from Twitter in a real-time feed. Today, Seesmic Desktop is furthering its integration with Facebook by allowing users to access and manage Facebook Pages. Users can view and post to activity feeds from any Facebook page they are fans of and can also manage their own fan pages. Each Facebook Page will show up as a column, where you can post messages, and respond to comments and express likes, just as you would in a Facebook feed. If you're an administrator of fan pages, you can post messages as the administrator. I think the compelling part of this feature is Seesmic’s play in the enterprise space. It’s no secret that businesses are actively using both Twitter and Facebook as marketing tools and there have been a plethora of enterprise-friendly clients that help companies and brands manage social networking initiatives. Seesmic’s existing multi-Twitter user functionality and now the Facebook Fan Pages integration is definitely establishing the desktop client as a viable business application (as well as a useful consumer app). Seesmic is launching a reply-all feature that lets users reply to all of the usernames listed in a message. This is useful when re-tweeting a message because the Reply-all function will simply Retweet the exact text of a message. Additionally, you can now add a “favorites” column to your interface that lets you mark and aggregate your favorite Tweets and messages. Le Meur also says that TwitPic -rival Yfrog has been growing fast and when Seesmic was looking to partner with a Twitter picture posting service, Yfrog was the most attractive default picture posting service. Yfrog will now be implemented on all Seesmic products, including the browser version. Speaking of Seesmic Products, I spoke to Le Meur about his much hyped iPhone app, which is scheduled to launch in October. Le Meur was tight lipped about details on the iPhone app’s features, but he did say that the experience on the desktop, browser and mobile versions of Seesmic will be the same. That means that the app will probably be integrated with both Facebook and Twitter. He did mention that the browser version of Seesmic will be integrated with Facebook within the next month as developers are currently tweaking the application’s functionality on different browsers. I’m a big fan of Seesmic’s web-based client, particularly because of its Gmail-like interface and the avoidance of using a desktop app built off of Adobe Air, which is buggy. Seesmic faces competition from PeopleBrowser and rival Tweetdeck, which recently added MySpace functionality and a number of other features. Disclosure: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic. I am not. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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