Tuesday, September 22, 2009

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Can We Please Have Jerry Back? Top
Last November we all knew Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang would be stepping down after a disastrous tenure as CEO. He spurned Microsoft without realizing the consequences, and he had no ability to describe an alternate path for the company. We weren’t alone in calling for his dismissal , and the hope was that Yahoo would find the right leader to restore their former glory. They didn’t. In the few months between Jerry’s resignation and the beginning of the Carol Bartz era at Yahoo, there was much speculation in Silicon Valley about who might lead the once great company. People I spoke with thought Yahoo would go one of two ways. The first would be to try to find the great product visionary to lead the company forward. Their Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (Mark Zuckerberg may someday be on that list). With the right product vision Yahoo could push boldly into new territory and renew its bid to create a lasting brand and company. The second way to go would be to hire someone to sell the company, whole or in parts, and maximize shareholder value in the short run. It’s pretty clear Yahoo went with door number 2 and chose someone who could negotiate a deal over the next great product visionary of our time. You can’t really blame them – true visionaries are by definition rare. And it’s unlikely they’d want to go to swim upstream at Yahoo during the hard rebuilding years. So in came Bartz, and the deals started happening. We’ve mostly kept quiet. Any new CEO deserves a honeymoon phase, and Bartz barked at journalists to keep their opinions to themselves on her first day at Yahoo: “It's been too crazy. People outside Yahoo deciding what Yahoo should do, shouldn't do. That's got to stop.” But the honeymoon ended when Yahoo signed away its most important asset for next to nothing. Yahoo went from being in the enviable position of no. 2 in search to just another portal, albeit a big one. And despite what Bartz said, she held out hard for a big up front cash payment. Microsoft never gave in, and Yahoo caved. Now they’ll watch their search market share dwindle, just as AOL’s did after surrendering search to Google earlier this decade. And since all the people have left or are leaving, there is no way for Yahoo to ever recover what they once had. What in the world will happen to them in the government rejects the search deal? They’d be in very serious financial trouble almost immediately. I almost wonder if Microsoft secretly hopes for exactly that to happen. Bartz played an excellent game of checkers. It’s just that her opponent was playing chess. And the history books will not be kind. So what’s next for Yahoo? There’s talk of social stuff, but no one believes it. Products are being sold and shut down left and right. Yahoo may stumble along for years without a forced sale. But there are no real product gurus left there to do anything spectacular and risky. What’s Yahoo’s equivalent of the iPhone? They don’t have the stomach to try it, whatever it is. Bartz says not to worry, that middle America still loves them : “When you get outside New York and Silicon Valley, everyone loves Yahoo.” You know who else used to say that as they began their long, slow decline? MySpace. But what they miss is that the new generation of Internet users is all about Facebook and Google, no matter where they live. Without a bold and risky plan to reshape the company, there is no way to get back those users. Do I really want Yahoo to bring Jerry Yang back? No, not really. He loves the company but he certainly wasn’t the leader Yahoo needed. His tenure as CEO was a sad affair . But he did have passion for the product, something Bartz lacks. And frankly, he seemed willing to turn down every offer from Microsoft. After declining the initial takeover offer, maybe that was the best strategy. Giving away search hardly seems strategic. I miss Yahoo. They used to be warriors, with a bite to back up their bark. You can throw F-bombs all day long, but if you don’t have the product muscle to back up the bluster, eventually it just gets old. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
"Fidelity Potential Index" Pits MP3 Against Vinyl; Science Or Pseudoscience? Top
There really isn't much debate to be had regarding sound quality: a poorly-encoded MP3 sounds the worst, and an audiophile system playing something on the medium for which it was mastered sounds the best. However, there is a whole continuum between those poles, and some people (audiophiles particularly) can't resist using arbitrary numbers and unintelligible descriptors to differentiate those different levels of quality. In this case, John Meyer of Newform Research (opting for arbitrary numbers) has computed the effective bitrates of all the major audio formats, from wax cylinder to MP3. You can see the results in the chart pictured. His methods are scientific in a way, but also questionable. The effective bitrate of a record can sort of be calculated, since it does indeed rely on a sampling rate and frequency range among other things, but that's not really the end of the story. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Magnify.net Expands Mobile Strategy With iPhone App Top
Social video hosting and sharing site Magnify.net is launching an iPhone app to let users submit videos to a Magnify video channel from their 3GS. iPhone users can shoot, upload, store, and share their personal videos on any Magnify-hosted channel. The app, which is free, is currently available on the App Store. Last year, Magnify added social networking features to its video channels, which can integrate video from across the web (YouTube, AOL). Magnify is using these features to create white-label video platforms and communities for various businesses, including Zappos, New York Magazine Mediaite, and The Weather Channel . In fact, Magnify has seen significant growth in this side of the business. Magnify currently has more than 62,000 customers using its video platform. While iPhone 3GS users can submit videos from other sources to their Magnify channels, Magnify Mobile lets users design and layout their individual channels to fit their personal tastes. According to Magnify, the app will be developed for other smartphones, including the Blackberry and Android. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Plaintiffs In Google Books Settlement Try To Delay Hearing Top
It appears that the plaintiffs in the Google Books settlement fiasco are going back to the drawing board by asking to postpone a hearing that was scheduled for October 7. Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice made its intentions clear that Google needed to rewrite the settlement that the company made with the Author's Guild to make orphan books available on the web. The hearing was to take place to hear from the plaintiffs, which include the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and others, as to what needs to be changed in the settlement. Last October, Google signed a $125 million settlement with the Author's Guild to pay authors for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web through its Google Book Search project. More than 7 million books have been scanned by Google so far, a large portion of them out of print. The settlement, though the site is up and running, is still up in the air, because of the antitrust investigation by the Department of Justice. And the settlement has draw its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Thank You TechCrunch Sponsors! Top
A BIG thank you to all of our sponsors. You keep us in business and allow us to grow: TechCrunch now has over 6.7M unique users per month, generating over 22M page views across our global sites! Plus another 3M RSS subscribers. And no matter how hard Twitter tries to keep us down, we’ve still managed to amass a million followers on that awesome service. Spectorsoft: providing employee monitoring, surveillance and investigation software for the enterprise. CubeTree: On-demand enterprise collaboration suite. Conduit: Create a toolbar for your users. Share your content with the world. Powering the TechCrunch Toolbar . Citrix Netscaler: Comprehensive application acceleration, load balancer, and web security. INetU: Tier 1 enterprise managed hosting services. Microsoft Windows Mobile: Enter the Race to Market Challenge. Networks In Motion – Gokivo: The first turn-by-turn navigation app for the iPhone. Sorenson Media: The global leader in video encoding and compression technology for nearly a decade and a half. Crucial Technologies: The memory experts carrying over 250,000 upgrades for more than 40,000 systems. Rackspace: Enterprise-level managed and dedicated hosting services, serving 14,000+ customers in eight data centers worldwide. Go-Grid: Deploy and Scale Windows or Linux Cloud Servers Instantly and Build Your Cloud Computing Infrastructure in Minutes. Contendo: TechCrunch’s content delivery network. Google Enterprise Apps: Reliable, secure online applications wherever you work WebEx: An easy way to share ideas with anyone, anywhere. Stratascale: Hosting solutions that offer customers the efficiencies of cloud computing on hosted physical servers. Reminder: TechCrunch now sells its own advertising. View our media kit information and buy direct via isocket or for custom programs contact vaughn [at] techcrunch dot com. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
TechCrunch50: Visualizing Real-Time Social Structures Top
This is a guest post by Kovas Boguta , the founder and CTO of new startup Infoharmoni . Kovas has analyzed twitter buzz around various startups and products that launched at TechCrunch50 last week. It gives a fascinating glimpse at how news blossoms, peaks and then fades. People are social animals, and love to both move in packs. But they also like to purposefully individuate. One game-changing aspect of the real-time movement is being able to see this as never before. With real-time, and with algorithmic visualization, our “telescope” is strong enough to see the laws of social physics at work: existing social groups incubate new topics of interest, and existing interests incubate new social groups; both move in response to each other. Twitter bills itself as the pulse of the planet, but it’s more like the pulse of creative networks. Take a look at these surprisingly visceral data movies, freshly computed from the TechCrunch50 Twitter stream, and showing an evolving network of companies competing for attention and publicity during the course of Tuesday: To explain, companies (colored balls) are competing for the attention of people (smaller white balls), all just repelling each other and floating in 3D space. At the time a person tweets about a company, a line is drawn between the two and pulls them together, until a while (set to 30 minutes) has passed, and the connection fades away. The movie reminds of some amateur Youtube journalism – a chaotically evolving social situation, like a natural disaster. The camera jerks around everywhere, trying to sample some disruptive sequence of events. But if you look at the details, you can get a feel for the dynamics of the room — who burst onto the stag and when, and who was riding in on someone else’s coattails. For example, around the :36-second mark, AnyClip bursts onto the scene, lighting things up in green and wildly bouncing around from the energy of grabbing both the existing audience and a bunch of new people. And you can see how Crowd Fusion and Hark feed off of it, but do not take it over completely. At times the audience hand-off is very civilized and orderly, such as in the morning session, when ClientShow, Metricily, and Affective Interfaces are all basically sharing the same set of influencers' attention. The next session, starting off with Cocodot, draws a very different audience which develops off-scene and then gets sucked in once there is more audience overlap. From a PR point of view, the best possible case is something like what happened when Threadsy, Lissn, and Radiusly hit the stage after the 46 second mark: its the “colliding galaxies” model of social formation, where you drew an audience on your own, and then the preexisting audience found you compelling enough to move over as well. These are exactly the kinds of details and context a company presenting at next year’s TechCrunch50 would want to know, something that simple aggregators and bean-counting analytics are unable to provide. Movies are great at setting context, but static images that emphasize time evolution can be incredibly useful for comparing events. And actually, this turns out to be the more useful way to look at the events of the first day of TC50. The plots below show each company of Day 1, and plot the number of tweets per minute during the course of the day associated with each company. In the first one, we just make one dot for each tweet, and in the second one, we bin up the number of tweets per minute, and show a kind of “volume” plot of the conversation share each company is getting. In one glance, we can see how Bing took the stage and had lasting power, while Google took the stage with more initial buzz, but then quickly faded. Clicker and iTwin were able to break though the conversation, while whoever had to follow Penn&Teller was either at a big disadvantage or didn’t do enough to energize the crowd. Interestingly, unlike Day 2, the end of Day 1 was mostly a muddle of conversation about a bunch of companies. In a way, the Google announcement seem to let the air of the balloon a bit, with no one being able to generate much excitement afterwards. The two days of TechCrunch50 provided a wealth of data on the bubbling subculture of technology startups, but the principles at work are far, far greater than self-interested promotion. Consider a Google News headline, and think about how many thousands of TC50’s underlie the movement of that incredibly large-scale structure. Or how events decades or even centuries in the past still echo in the social fabric, like background radiation of the universe, or like decayed supernovas reforming into a solar system. Why do we care about discovering social structures? The endgame here involves turning that information into transformative actions, and erecting new structures. From the micro-optimizations of the immediate moment, to the long-term constraints and opportunities of society, we can observe TC50 from vibrant new perspectives. Expect to see a lot of startups combining both ends of the social info to social action pipeline at next year’s TC50. By then it will surely have a monosyllable buzzword, but for now, lets call it “socially integrated analytics.” Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
GeeksOnAPlane Gets Political in DC Top
It would seem that tech startup culture – which extols the virtues of agility, cost-efficiency and risk-taking – should make strange bedfellow with the staid, inefficient, and downright corporate practice of federal governance that’s conducted from within the Beltway everyday. Many in the Valley also presume that their startup ecosystem would be best off if left alone by all three branches of government, lest they impinge on its ability to innovate and create vibrant new businesses. However, at a GovTech meeting attended by GeeksOnAPlane in Washington, DC on Friday, administration and state department officials insisted that a sea change of sorts is occurring within the federal government, one in which our public officials have begun embracing both Web 2.0 technology and the management methodologies that have made it possible. The message from officials was that the Obama administration in particular is dedicated to leveraging new information technology for increased transparency and responsiveness, with the goals of enabling citizens to learn more about their government and make their voices better heard. Andrew McLaughlin, the administration’s deputy CTO, talked about turning the government into a platform that enabled “services at the edge”, with Data.gov and Apps.gov as first draft efforts towards this end. Interest was also expressed in how the administration might adopt startup techniques to drive innovation in how it governs, with Eric Ries explaining how the lean startup method can applied by government and Director of Citizen Participation Katie Stanton declaring that government is at its own “pivot point”. More generally, we heard about how the federal government possesses an interest in stimulating entrepreneurship – both domestically and abroad – for the purpose of creating jobs and furthering international peace efforts. Dave McClure spoke in support of a so-called Startup Visa that, while currently on the drawing board, would make it much easier for venture-backed entrepreneurs to relocate to the US and hire Americans at their new companies (an idea first proposed as a “Founder Visa” by Paul Graham this past April). Such legislative change would theoretically have immediate effects on the Valley’s ability to attract and retain talent from abroad. Esther Lee of the US Department of Commerce also noted that Obama made the support of entrepreneurship in Muslim countries an important part of his Cairo speech, reinforcing the notion that pro-small-business governance can produce both economic and national security. Startups would also do well to think of how government involvement in their businesses might actually benefit them. For one, the federal government (and more local governments around the country) can serve as customers that present opportunities to scale and generate evergreen revenues. Evan Cooke of Twilio , a San Francisco-based startup that provides easy-to-use telephony APIs for developers , learned firsthand about the government’s interest in licensing new technology. He was enthusiastically thrust a business card by an administration official even before he left the stage after giving a demo on how quickly the government could set up a flu hotline with his software. Tempering all of this optimism were remarks made by panelists at a Startup2Startup lunch at The Washington Post headquarters following the GovTech meeting. Errol Arkilic, program manager for the National Science Foundation, took care to remind us that the federal government is an animal with very different parts, some of which move quickly and adapt, and some of which move at snail’s pace and resist innovation. While the NSF dispenses grants within months, other departments are slowed by vested interests and imposing backlogs of records managed under legacy systems. And whereas Silicon Valley operates under a sense of urgency, DC often succumbs to inertia, especially since the government mainly responds to public entreaties instead of initiating change on its own. It’s because of these inherent traits that it has yet to be proven whether this new administration – or any other – can truly absorb cutting-edge technology and its entrepreneurial culture. Photos courtesy of Jen Consalvo Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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