Tuesday, September 22, 2009

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Twitter Begins Emphasizing SMS Again Top
For a long time, it looked like Twitter and SMS were destined for a slow and painful breakup. While the functionality was originally a user favorite, as Twitter exploded in size, it looked like it would become too expensive to maintain. Twitter shut down SMS in several countries (in fact, all of them besides the U.S. and India). But even since Kevin Thau , Twitter’s head of mobile products and partnerships, came on board in January, SMS has seen a resurgence. And today it looks like Twitter is ready to emphasize the service again. Now, on the profile for any Twitter user you follow, you will notice a little mobile phone icon surrounded by a circle. If the circle is clear, SMS updates for that user is off. If there is a green background, SMS updates are on. You can also hover over the icon to see if they are on or off. Clicking on the icon will turn them on or off. On your Following page, you will also see this same icon under the “Settings” column that you can toggle on and off. Both of these tweaks provide a much more obvious way of handing SMS alerts. And it makes them much easier to switch on and off. Previously, there was no way to control this on individual profiles and you had to drill down into your followers to toggle them on and off. Maintaining and expanding SMS support is important for Twitter is other parts of the world, where it remains a simple and effective way to communicate with the service. SMS remains a colossal rip-off for what it is, but in some areas, people who want to use Twitter may not really have many other options, as not all countries have affordable iPhones with data plans. The next step will be for Twitter to turn on SMS track functionality, which will allow you to get pinged every time a certain keyword is mentioned on Twitter. But hey, one step at a time. Note : If you aren’t seeing SMS updates working, make sure you check your Settings -> Devices area. Here, you should see your mobile phone number and in the Device Updates drop down, this should be set to “On” if you want to see updates. This is the place that you can also set Twitter to only send you text messages when you get direct messages. Also, be careful. When I turned on Twitter notifications for the first time in a while, I was bombarded by text message tweets from hundreds of users I didn’t even realize I had turn the feature on for (not only is this annoying, but again, it’s a rip-off depending on your messaging plan). The functionality still needs some UX tweaks — where’s the “set all to off” button? — otherwise it’s simply easier to keep them all off rather than going through each one to make sure they’re off. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
DEMO: Tinker Gets Some New Toys For Its Real-Time Content Platform Top
Tinker , the product from Glam Media that aggregates real-time conversations on services like Twitter and FriendFeed, and allows publishers to embed them in widgets, has launched a new 1.0 release to the public. The company announced the new version at this week’s DEMO Fall conference. Tinker actually launched back in March, offering both a consumer facing site that serves as a central hub for monitoring events in real-time as well as a number of widgets for publishers looking to leverage this real-time content. Today’s release introduces a number of new features, including a new section that focuses on News. The feature draws on the real-time updates that Tinker typically monitors, as well as news feeds from online publications and wire services. Also getting a boost are Tinker’s media apps, which let bloggers, news sites, and other publishers manage the tweets they’d like to display on their pages. For example, we could include a Tinker app on TechCrunch that would only show tweets from TechCrunch staff, or could display the latest tech trends to surface on Twitter. Tinker has also recently launched a new advertising product called ‘Tinker Stream Ads’, which let major brands create a filtered stream of real-time content relevant to their products, which can then be displayed on publisher sites. In September alone these new ads saw over 50 million impressions. Finally, Tinker now offers a real-time search engine that lets you search through the news, tweets, media, and other content that’s tracked by the site. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Let's Be Trends: Brizzly Launches A Twitter Trending Topic API Top
One nice feature of the Twitter web app Brizzly is that it has an explanation for why each trending topic on Twitter is popular at any given moment. And because these explanations are user-editable, they’re always up to date. Now Brizzly wants to share that data with the launch of “ Let’s Be Trends ,” its trending topic API. The idea is to have other Twitter third-party developers use this data in their apps. Let’s Be Trends features both “current trends” and “get trend” actions that will allow apps to call the most recent popular topics on Twitter as well as the explanation for any one trend upon search, respectively. “Brizzly users are coming up with awesome explanations,” co-founder Jason Shellen tells us. He wouldn’t share any exact stats for how often users update these trending topic explanations, but says they do so “quickly.” Quite vague, but based on my own usage of the site, it certainly seems true. While landing third party apps for this data would be great, the big fish to catch, obviously, would be Twitter. Currently, it uses the third-party service “ What The Trend? ” to display information about trending topics. Right now, it only shows that information on the main Twitter homepage when you’re logged out, but it has been rolling out showing the data across the site. When that happens, the provider of that data should be in very good shape. Brizzly, which is a product under Shellen’s Thing Labs , has been steadily rolling out improvements as it nears a public launch. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Tweetboard Launches Twitter Client And URL Shortener Top
Tweetboard, a recently-launched product that lets you create a Twitter-powered forum on any site, is adding additional functionality by releasing a Twitter client, new API, and a URL shortener, called PO.ST. As we’ve written in the past, the advantage to Tweetboard is is the ability to view discussions as a thread, similar to what you'd find on FriendFeed or Facebook. Tweetboard threads all replies, and all nested replies (replies to replies) on Twitter. With Tweetboard’s functioning web-based Twitter client (which will be released at the end of the month), you’ll be able to access the threaded conversations around a particular Tweet. Plus, you’ll be able to Tweet and access your stream from within the Twitter client. Aside from its fairly original name, Tweetboard’s new URL shortener is designed to compliment it’s client and site widget, letting people shorten URLs from the client and product. Tweetboard is also releasing an an API to allow developers to integrate Tweetboard and is launching a private label service that will let users create a branded “Tweetboard” widget for their sites. While Tweetboard, which is a product of startup 140Ware, is currently in private alpha, the startup has generously given us 20,000 invites to TechCrunch readers, which you can access here. Tweetboard may be a little late in the game to launch a Twitter client and URL shortener, which are both areas that are over-saturated with offerings. But packaging conversations into a forum and thread from the client is innovative and could be appealing to users. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
DEMO: Can A Hooking Up And Looking Up App Redeem Intelius? Top
There’s really no excuse for going on a date in this day and age without knowing anything about the person — even if they’re a complete stranger. With so much information available about people online whether through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, or the like, it’s relatively easy to find out way more information than you probably want to know. And now there’s an app for that. DateCheck by Intelius (more on them below), which launched today at the DEMO conference in San Diego is an iPhone app that allows you to look up a whole range of information about the person you’re on a date with. All you really need is one piece of data as a starting point. It can be something as simple as a name, an email address, or a phone number. From there, you can look up a whole range of information. The best feature is the “Sleaze Detector”. Basically, this takes the information you collected and does a background check on the person to see if they have a criminal record. This works by current or previous registered addresses that the person has. You can also check out a person’s net worth, their living situation (are they living with their parents), as well as get the usual range of information from Facebook, Twitter, etc. Unfortunately, though Intelius didn’t really mention it on stage, obtaining all of this information costs money, as TechFlash notes . For example, a criminal check is $19.95. Pulling social network info? $9.95. So while the app itself may be free, the service is anything but. All of this is more than slightly creepy, but with tag lines like “hook up before you look up” it was an easy crowd favorite at DEMO. Unfortunately, Intelius, and its co-founder Naveen Jain , have a bit of a sketchy history, including allegations of fraud . Jain, who left InfoSpace to start Intelius, was said to be buried in lawsuits back in March , and the company was looking like it could be in trouble. Have things turned around for Intelius? Will a hooking up app save them? In a world where a sex offender finder app was a hit , it seems like this certainly could be. But the extra costs will likely kill it. Hopefully, Intelius is up front about these costs unlike it has been in the past. I also hope people don’t try to go to do a Google search for “ datecheck ” — the first result is an “Escort Directory of Female MILF Escorts.” CrunchBase Information Intelius Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
The Top Ten Twitter Apps On The iPhone Among Early Adopters Top
What are the top Twitter apps on the iPhone? It’s hard to say because the iTunes store doesn’t have a Twitter category (Twitter apps are lumped in under “Social Networking). But AppsFire , the iPhone app sharing service, might have an answer—at least for the early adopter crowd who tend to use AppsFire (i.e. people like you, dear reader). AppsFire looks at apps actually downloaded and kept on people’s iPhones. Based on a sample of 1,500 AppsFire members, the top ten Twitter apps on the iPhone are: TweetDeck Tweetie Twitterific TwitterFon IM+ Twitelator Pro Twitterrific Premium iTwitter ShoZu Boxcar Notice that 7 of the top ten Twitter apps are paid apps. The only free apps are TweetDeck (No. 1), Titterific (No. 3), and TwitterFon (No. 4). AppsFire also collected some data on what percentage of users download Twitter apps compared to Facebook apps (see slideshow below). While it found a total of 32 different Facebook apps on user’s iPhones, compared to a whopping 102 Twitter apps, more users had a Facebook App on their device. The No. 1 Facebook app, of course, is the official Facebook app for the iPhone, whereas Twitter does not have any official iPhone app. A full 70 percent of users in the AppsFire sample had the Facebook iPhone app, while only 63 percent had a Twitter app. So much for diversity. The one thing AppsFire does not know, however, is which apps are actually used more often. You can help answer that by answering the poll below: Appsfire: Facebook vs Twitter, who wins on the iPhone View more presentations from Ouriel Ohayon . CrunchBase Information Twitter Facebook iPhone 3G AppsFire Information provided by CrunchBase 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 : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Picasa Adds Facial Recognition And Geo-Tagging To Its Desktop App Top
It took a whole year, but Google is finally adding the facial recognition features you can find in Picasa Web albums to its desktop app. With today’s release of Picasa 3.5 , when you add a name tag, it scans your entire photo library and applies that name to every match. If it’s not sure it’s the same face, it gives you the option to apply the tag. To help you tag people, Picasa auto-completes names from your Google contacts when you start typing a name. And you can also geo-tag a photo by marking a photo on Google Maps. Once faces are tagged, you can create a face collage of the same person, time-lapse movies, or sync the tags with your Picasa Web albums. You can now upload directly from your camera to Picasa Web albums if you like. Also, with this release the Mac version is no longer in beta. Facial recognition is now a standard feature for photo apps, both desktop and online. iPhoto has it , Faceboopk Photos has it ( through Face.com ), and now both Picasa’s online and desktop versions have it. Here’s a video with a demo of the new features: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
WTF Is This Article Doing On Facebook? Top
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” – Edmund Burke “Technology will never deliver us from evil. Only decent people can.” – Rabbi Abraham Cooper What an odd blog post on Facebook today by Rabbi Abraham Cooper. The social network has failed to take a leadership position against Holocaust denial groups. And just when the buzz dies down, they post an article that ends with “We all must do our part to ensure that social media lands on the side of the good.” So, ok, great. Let’s start by removing the Holocaust denial groups that put Facebook’s logo above some of the most ridiculously vile stuff I’ve ever read. eBay and others don’t allow Holocaust denial because it’s a back door to Jewish hatred. As a private company, Facebook could easily take the position that their site is no place for that kind of nonsense. Show me a Holocaust denier who doesn’t hate Jews and we can start a conversation I guess. But the fact is, they don’t exist. Do your part, Facebook. Follow the Rabbi’s advice. Shut that evilness down. Sure, it’s funny when Facebook employees mock the situation by creating groups like “Michael Arrington Does Not Exist.” But I think Facebook can do more to be a part of a solution to the problem, rather than part of the cause. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
YouTube Comes To A 5-Star Realization: Its Ratings Are Useless Top
The graph above is hilarious. It represents the way in which people rate videos on YouTube. As you can see, there are some 1-stars and a huge amount of 5-stars, and then basically no 2, 3, or 4 stars. As such, YouTube has a blog post today admitting that maybe its star system isn’t the best way to vote on videos. Of course, anyone who has used YouTube for an extended period of time will already know this. And really, the same seems to be true of basically all 1 to 5 star crowd rating systems. It’s easy to know if a video (or anything) is good or bad, but how on Earth do you determine if it’s 2 star, 3 star, or 4 star-worthy? Everyone likely has their own opinions about what would constitute those ratings, and naturally, they’re all completely subjective. Apple’s App Store faces a similar problem. And it also shares another issue that YouTube faces, most people are probably only going to vote if they absolutely love or hate an app (or a video). Hence, the 1 and 5 star usage. YouTube asks in its post, “ Would a thumbs up/thumbs down be more effective, or does favoriting do the trick of declaring your love for a video? ” Yes, the two vote option (thumbs up/thumbs down) or the one vote option (favoriting) are both better methods because they’re more defined. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Reminder: Celebrate Rajeev Motwani's Life On September 25 Top
This is a reminder to those of you would like to celebrate the life of Rajeev Motwani , who passed away on June 5, 2009, to RSVP as soon as possible for the September 25 memorial and concert. The deadline was actually yesterday, and the family and organizers need to have as accurate an attendance count as possible. More details on the event are here . RSVP details are here . Thousands are expected to attend. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Google Has A Solution For Internet Explorer: Turn It Into Chrome Top
People hate IE6 ; they’ve made that abundantly clear on the web. Unfortunately, plenty of people are still stuck using it for reasons such as their work not letting them upgrade. So Google is doing something about it. Chrome Frame is a new browser plug-in developed by Google to give you a Chrome browsing experience inside of Internet Explorer. Let me restate that slightly to make it more clear: Chrome Frame turns IE into Chrome. Yes, it’s both hilarious and awesome (or hilariously awesome, if you will) that Google seems to dislike IE so much that it has spent its own time improving it. Google claims its goals are noble. Talking to Group Product Manager Mike Smith and Software Engineer Alex Russell, they tell us that they simply want to make a more seamless web experience for both web users and developers. That said, they are only targeting one browser, IE, right now. And that seems fair. IE, which is of course made by Google nemesis Microsoft, is both the largest web browser and the one with a poor history when it comes to web standards. Things have gotten better since IE6, but that’s really not saying much. And standards aren’t the only issue, performance is as well. Chrome Frame injects the latest versions of Chrome’s Webkit and JavaScript engines into IE. These are the versions used in the dev channel builds of Chrome, so they’re actually newer than the ones found in the latest regular release of the browser. So how does this work? Basically, it’s just a plug-in that creates a new frame inside of IE that is the Chrome browser. The plug-in itself is lightweight (around 500K or so, I’m told), but then it must download around 10 MB of Chrome-related data to work correctly on a machine. The look will be so seamless that a user shouldn’t realize they’re not simply browsing with their regular old version of IE, albeit a much faster and more compliant one, I’m told. While it is obviously more system-intensive to run two browsers rather than one, I’m told that the overall difference is pretty small since Chrome is designed to give resources back to your machine when you’re not using them with the browser. In terms of promotion of Chrome Frame, Google says that while it won’t be explicitly advertising it, it will use subtle methods to alert users to its existence. For example, if you browse to a Google app in Internet Explorer that may render better in Chrome, Google might have a message on the page telling you about the plug-in. The hope is that other developers will use similar messages on their pages. Many already do something like this to tell users to upgrade their browser, but again, this is just a plug-in, rather than requiring you to install a whole new browser. It’s pretty ingenious. Smith and Russel wanted to make it clear that this plug-in, which is still technically in the testing phase, is just as much for developers as for web surfers. They know all too well the pain of having to design sites specifically for IE’s “quirks” and hope a tool like this can make the web a smoother and easier to develop for environment. To target the Chrome plug-in for IE, developers simply have to insert a meta tag in their HTML code. If Chrome Frame isn’t found, the page will render just as it normally would in IE. Chrome Frame will work with IE6, IE7, and IE8 on any Windows-based machine. I cannot wait to see Microsoft’s reaction to this. This isn’t quite the nuclear bomb that the Chrome OS revelation was, it’s more like a smart bomb. You can find Google Chrome Frame here . And learn more in the video below. CrunchBase Information Google Chrome Windows Internet Explorer Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
DEMO: RadioWeave Lets You Build A Custom Social Radio Station Top
RadioWeave , a startup that’s launching today at DEMO fall, is looking to bring radio into the 21st century. The company has built a platform for customizing an online streaming radio station that extends beyond just podcasts, music, and news. In some senses RadioWeave reminds me of Stitcher , which lets you build your own custom radio stations out of your favorite content sources. But RadioWave includes a number of features that Stitcher doesn’t, like the ability to follow a Twitter account and have its tweets read aloud to you (albeit by a very robotic-sounding voice). You can also import feeds of your local weather and traffic. The site’s playlist creation features seem convoluted, but its initial setup flow (which is reminiscent of Twitter’s suggested users lists) will get you up and running within a few minutes. There are some social elements that let you share your audio content with other users. You can also share your playlist of ‘tags’ with others, so they can tune in to a RadioWeave station that’s similar to yours. Along with RadioWave’s web interface, the service also offers an iPhone application that you can download here . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
UK Libel Law Is Out Of Control. We Know From Experience. Top
The UK is coming under increasing fire for its out-of-control libel laws. And the consequences of the laws are clear – journalists/bloggers are shying away from writing anything controversial when it involves someone who lives in the UK. Or, increasingly, someone who may be willing to litigate in the UK despite not living there. Most recently the NY Times wrote about the issue , describing how science journalists, worried about being sued, are afraid of calling out bogus medical procedures: The problem the libel laws create is not so much that critical stories can't be written, but that they won't be. As the conversations I had this summer show, for many journalists and their employers the potential for a libel case is a powerful deterrent to criticism: the pieces aren't worth the hassle. Singh has commented that "if I successfully defend my article, I will have had to have put my career on hold for probably two years, and it will cost me perhaps £25,000 [about $41,500] because I am unlikely to recover all my costs. And if I lose my case, then it will cost me roughly £500,000 [$800,000]. Fighting and winning is bad enough; fighting and losing is catastrophic." Most writers won't take the risk. And who can blame them? We have first hand experience fighting UK libel laws. Until now we’ve kept the fight on the back burner on our CrunchNotes blog. But recent developments are so absurd I’m moving the discussion here. We were sued in the UK earlier this year by Sam Sethi, a man who started a company called Blognation. The post that was the subject of the lawsuit, and which gives a lot of background on his antics, is here . In a nutshell, he’s a very, very bad guy. So bad in fact that he has been banned from being an owner or executive in any UK company until 2015 (he has ignored that court order, and the UK doesn’t seem inclined to enforce it). And most of his previous employees have gone on record talking about how he committed fraud and other crimes (see “our second response” here , as well as here and here ). So we chronicled the activities of a convicted fraudster, who has been accused of new crimes by employees. And our reward was a lawsuit that our attorneys told us not to fight, because a “win” would mean months or years in court and legal costs that could exceed £500,000. Instead, we declined to participate in the circus, and a default judgement was awarded against us. So what’s next? Well, my attorneys have advised me to stay away from the UK for a few years, which is difficult because I spent part of my childhood there, and worked in London earlier this decade. So all those friends have to visit me now. But luckily UK libel judgements are generally not enforceable in the U.S., so our core business is safe from this lunatic. And by the way, Sethi, in one of his manic fits, has reached out to apologize to me. He sent the first email below to Paul Carr, who has covered this story and its absurdity in the past, and it appears as if he is genuinely remorseful. But his actual apology email to me, also below, lacks any of that remorse. And of course there's no mention of dismissing the lawsuit. We weren’t going to publish either email until we saw Sethi’s promised public apology, but six weeks later it still hasn’t appeared, and now the UK banning order has come to light despite Sethi denying its existence. Yet more lies . If the UK wants to continue to suppress free speech by facilitating more nonsense like this, they certainly have the right and ability to do so. But maybe it’s time for them to take a new look at those libel laws. A personal dispute between two tech bloggers is one thing. But stopping the public from knowing about useless and possibly dangerous medical practices is another. The Theoretical Apology: Hi Paul I want to quickly thank you for your open letter, not that I enjoyed it but It really made me step back and think what am doing? When multiple friends tell you that you have crossed so many moral lines in writing those emails, it finally made me realise what a dick I have been for the past few years blaming other people actions for the downfall and failure of blognation when the ultimate blame lies with me. Thus I would like to initially write Mike a private email [xxxxxxx@gmail.com] personally apologising for my appalling behaviour and then I plan to write an open letter of apology on my blog. So could you please confirm that the email addr above is Mike’s and please accept my apologies for my act(s) of stupidity that drove our friendship to the point of breaking. I hope you can start to forgive me and I know it may take many years before you could once again call me a friend but this is my first step in reconciliation. Thanks in advance The Non-Apology: Hello Mike Well I’ve procrastinated long enough about sending you this email but given the number of private emails that I’ve had published on Techcrunch, I guess it’s not surprising I’m mindful to be cautious. That said I’m ever hopeful that this email will remain confidential between us. Therefore after careful consideration and advise from friends I would like to offer you my personal apology for my churlish behaviour in the past eighteen months and especially in regard to blognation and hope that we can now bring an end to this war of words. It struck me as I wrote this email that it was about two years ago that we meet in London to discuss starting TCUK. It was obvious that London’s Startups needed a voice and I am pleased Mike B is doing such a good job in pushing out that voice across Europe. I was going to write a war and peace email covering all the things that happened in the past two years both good and bad but frankly it’s water under the bridge and nothing I can say or do will change the past now. The damage has already been done. However one thing I will always regret was trying to hide the funding delay from the editors simply because you might have published the fact. Sadly I was unaware xxxxx was still giving you leaked information, I just knew confidential docs were being leaked somehow. At the end of the day, it matters not what xxxxx did or what you might have done, I was wrong to do so and no one else was responsible for my decisions. In this age of trust and transparency I should have simply told the editors of the delay and dealt with the fallout openly and honestly. Regarding the termsheet I have to admit I was deeply upset that you chose to publish it even after we spoke but as Paul Carr said recently that was just business and a chance to bury a potential competitor. Even after that I was still blindly considering trying to keep blognation going against all the odds with a new funding offer but realised that I had lost the trust of the editors and the various troll comments on TC hurt especially from people I knew. As you know to your own cost the mob can be vicious when it decides to turn on you but when people you consider friends do so it hurts even more so. But it was the death of Marc that finally made me realise this had to stop. I was accused of his death, theft from you and forgery and much more. None of which were true but people believed it. With hindsight I wish I had never started blognation. So I would like to reiterate I am sorry for the hurt and blame I levelled at you. In addition I have already apologised privately to the vast majority of the editors (not all) for my actions. So what happens next I have no idea. My reputation is in pieces and in the eyes of many I am no longer considered a trusted agent (ala chris brogan). So for now I am taking timeout to spend more time with my family and friends and review thinds once again. So all it leaves me to say for now is good luck Mike with Techcrunch. Sam 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 : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Yahoo Will Spend More Than $100 Million To Try To Connect With You Top
Yahoo unveiled a new branding campaign at a press conference in New York City, centered around personalization and connecting directly with consumers. The Web company’s new tagline is, “It’s Y!ou” (with the awkward Yahoo exclamation point in there). Yahoo wants to make the Web personal and it is emphasizing the various ways it does that through the Yahoo home page, search, and individual properties. The company will be spending “more than $100 million” on this new branding campaign, CEO Carol Bartz reveals. Yahoo is so big that the only way it can speak directly to individuals is to make the message more about them than about Yahoo. Other slogans in the new campaign include “The Internet is under new management: Yours” and “The Internet has a new personality: Yours.” Just sticking the word “you” in an ad doesn’t make it any less generic, but Yahoo hopes to follow up on this promise by personalizing the Yahoo experience for each user. This extends to search, which rolled out a number of new features more broadly which were previously being tested (including SearchAssist, and enhanced results from SearchMonkey). “The focus of the company is to really engage and personalize Yahoo for the users,” says Bartz. “Yahoo is a really unique company. It is the only brand that can make the promise of uniting my world and your world. We do deliver information about the world and we do deliver information relevant to you.” Always folksy, Bartz compares the Internet to “scrambled eggs” which Yahoo can help unscramble for consumers. She also talked a bit about Yahoo’s positioning and getting rid of businesses not core to this consumer focus. Asked whether she is trying to sell Zimbra and other non-consumer businesses, she wouldn’t comment specifically, but did say generally, “We have to make sure we are ready to put our signature at the bottom of every page that has Yahoo on it.” In terms of what she is seeing in the advertising market, Bartz wouldn’t go so far as to predict a recovery in ad spending, but reiterated that spending seems to be “bumping along the bottom.” She also clarified that recent reports about her selling stock are wrong: “I have not sold one share of Yahoo stock.” There was a sale related to a restricted stock grant, but Yahoo sells them to pay off the taxes as a matter of course. Finally, when asked if the press was hard on Yahoo and obsessed with seeing change, Bartz agreed wholeheartedly. She told the room of New York journalists and bloggers: “When you get outside New York and Silicon Valley, everyone loves Yahoo. I just want to transplant all of you guys out of your cynicism. What is wrong with you guys?. Go be cynical about frickin' Google. You got me pissed off.” Carol, don’t ever change. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Push Gmail Finally Comes To The iPhone, No Thanks To Apple Top
Push Gmail support for the iPhone is finally here . And you have Microsoft to thank. No, Push support has not finally been added to Apple’s Mail app for the iPhone, that would be too easy and make too much sense. Instead, it appears that Google is once again working around Apple to provide customers with some functionality, this time by way of its Google Sync product. Basically, to get it to work, you have to set up a Microsoft Exchange account on the iPhone using your Google account credentials. Read more about the process here . Previously, this option was available for some of the other Google apps like Calendar and Contacts, but now Gmail is supported, which is important, because it means that you will be instantly notified when a new message comes in. This is a big deal to a lot of iPhone/Gmail users because with the iPhone’s built-in Gmail functionality, you can only manually pull messages from the servers. This means you have to wait longer to get your email depending on the time interval you set to check for new messages. Even though Apple offered Push support out of the box for Yahoo Mail, Gmail through the Mail app is still pull-only, for some unknown reason. Gmail push works fine on Android phones and the Palm Pre . There have been several third-party apps that have come along to attempt to provide push support for your Gmail email. Gpush had one hell of a time getting accepted before it finally was, another, Boxcar 2.0, is still waiting . The interesting side story to all of this is that Google is once again doing its own thing to bring a service to the iPhone. Apple would not allow a native Latitude application, so Google built a web app that would work with Safari on the iPhone. And, of course, we’re all still waiting to see what Google cooks up to get Google Voice funtionality on the iPhone, which Apple also won’t allow currently. Google Sync works for all Google Apps accounts, and people with personal Gmail and Google Calendar accounts can also use it. Alongside push Gmail support for the iPhone and iPod touch, Google also launched it for Windows Mobile phones today. Update : As several have noted, there is a downside to this method. The iPhone only supports one Exchange account, so if you happen to use one for something like work, you can’t also use it for your personal Google account. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
DEMO: Micello Is "Google Maps Inside A Building" Top
I’m here at DEMO Fall, where dozens of startups are presenting to a conference room full of attendees and press. One interesting company that presented today is Micello , a startup that’s looking to offer interactive maps at a more detailed level than what you’ll find on sites like Google Maps or MapQuest. The idea behind Micello is simple: Google Maps is great for helping route cars places, but when it comes to navigating a large area with many points of interest by foot, it can fall short. So Micello offers a much more detailed perspective, outlining the stores that are in your vicinity. It works as you’d expect, with a look that’s similar to the maps you find inside of shopping malls. Even better: the site allows you to search for whatever product or service you’re looking for, with results appearing directly on the map. For example, if you were looking to find a certain kind of item at a mall — say, some shoes — Micello would present a map of the various stores in the mall with the shoe stores highlighted in red. The service will allow anyone to create maps, and estimates that it takes around four hours of work to make a map for a large mall. The company isn’t limited itself to shopping centers either, with plans to offer support for college campuses, airports, convention centers, and theme parks. At launch Micello will offer 100 maps from around the Bay Area, with more coming every day. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 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
 
12mail = 12seconds + Twitter + Facebook + iPhone Top
At our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp in July, 12seconds previewed a new iPhone application to send video messages to your Twitter and Facebook followers. Today, the app, called 12mail Video Messenger, is finally live in the App Store. To refresh your memory, basically, the app allows you to send short videos to your friends in the same way that you might send them text messages. Once you download the app, you simply input your Twitter or Facebook (or both) credentials and you have access to your contact lists from those services. From there, if you want to send a message to someone you’re connected with on Twitter, simply enter in their name, record the video (or use a pre-recorded one) and it will send them a direct message with a link to the video. If you send a message to Facebook friends, it will post the video on their Wall. You can also mix and match contacts to send the videos to from within the app. And you can send the videos out publicly to all your Twitter followers. If your contacts also have the 12mail app, they can see the message right from within it on the iPhone. And it will send a Push Notification when new messages come in. 12mail is a big part of 12seconds’ new strategy to use existing social graphs (Twitter, Facebook) for its video platform, rather than trying to build out its own. That makes sense as obviously those are much, much larger than 12seconds. Interestingly, the app will also work with non-3GS iPhone (meaning ones without video recording capabilities) but it becomes a dumbed-down version of the app. Users of 12seconds’ first iPhone app will remember that it involved still pictures and audio; this dumbed-down version is basically the same. You can find the free app in the App Store here . Also kind of humorous is Apple’s list of warnings for the app: “Frequent/Intense Sexual Content Or Nudity,” “Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence,” etc. Apple clearly loves the possibilities of video messaging! Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
LiveJournal Users Can Now Make Money With Google AdSense, If They Pay Up First Top
It’s notoriously hard for bloggers with a limited audience to monetize the traffic generated by the content they self-publish, and LiveJournal users are no exception. Now LiveJournal has added a program dubbed ‘Your Journal – Your Money’ which should help users monetize their blogs or journals using Google AdSense . Important caveat: only users with paid accounts are eligible for the program. Here’s the deal: users who cough up between $5 for 2 months or $25 for 12 months of using LiveJournal, can add Google AdSense banners to their blog and keep 100% of the earnings (after Google takes their cut). They will be required to sign up for a Google AdSense account or associate an existing account to start earning revenue from displaying Google ads. Users who enter the program can control where ads appear and whether they're text, images, or both. What I fail to see how this deal benefits LiveJournal in any way, since they won’t be seeing a penny based on the current agreement. Perhaps it’s just a way for them to maintain its user base, considering the fact most popular blogging platforms already offer multiple ways for users to monetize their traffic. LiveJournal has a rich history when it comes to weblog publishing. First started more than 10 years ago (on April 15, 1999) by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities, its parent company Danga Interactive was acquired by Six Apart in January 2005. Less than two years later, Six Apart announced it was selling LiveJournal to SUP, a Russian media company that had been licensing the LiveJournal brand and software for use in Russia. Fitzpatrick moved on to join … Google , which may be part of the reason behind the LiveJournal/Google advertising deal. LiveJournal says it signed up over 22 million new users since its U.S. launch and has a worldwide monthly reach of 25 million users with approximately 7 million in Russia and 8 million in the U.S. Kind of funny to notice Fitzpatrick hasn’t yet entered the program to start monetizing his own LiveJournal blog . Or maybe he just doesn’t have a paid account? Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Ad.ly Brings Sponsored Tweets From Celebrities Top
As Twitter continues to mull over how to make money, startups are looking to capitalize on the advertising potential of the microblogging platform. Media network Glam Media is going to be launching a Twitter ad network. And today, Ad.ly, an Los Angeles-based startup, is launching a Twitter-based advertising network to connect high-end brand advertisers with celebrity and high-profile Twitter users. The idea behind the startup is simple: advertisers can pick which celeb they want to Tweet about their product and once the celeb approves the Tweet, he or she will be paid handsomely by the advertisers. Basically, Ad.ly is the middleman between advertisers and the Twitterati. In fact, founder and CEO Sean Rad says that he wants Ad.ly to be the Federated Media for Twitter. Ad.ly’s platform is self-serve for both the Twitterati and the advertisers. So for example, an advertiser for Dell could choose which celeb or power-user to pitch their ad too and then submit a bid to a particular user. The celeb (or publisher) then approves or denies the request. Once the publisher approves the Tweet, the message is sent out via their account by Ad.ly. Each campaign requires the celeb to send out four Tweets over the course of a week. Here’s a sample Tweet that a celeb would send out. It’s important to note that each Tweet identifies Ad.ly and links to an online interactive campaign for a brand: So how do advertisers know how well their campaign is doing on Twitter? Ad.ly features a customized dashboard that tracks click-through rates, retweets, and even the geographic location of users who retweet an ad. The startup is also in the process of launching a “machine learning client” product that would identify the makeup of a celeb’s user base and then match advertisers based on the target audience of a brand’s ad pitch. For example, the new technology will determine the breakdown of a celeb’s follower base by gender. Each publisher sets the price of a Tweet campaign but Ad.ly will give the publisher a pricing suggestion based on variety of metrics. Ad.ly’s proprietary algorithm evaluates follower counts, authority, quality of Tweets and will help determine the Twitter’s value. And when I say that celebs get paid “handsomely,” I mean it. If a celeb has above a million followers, each Tweet gets in the five figures, with multiple Tweets about a product netting the celeb a six-figure reward (yes, for four Tweets!). Ad.ly takes a cut of what the celeb makes, but Rad wouldn’t reveal what the percentage is. This is an interesting idea and a potentially lucrative money maker if these numbers are correct but there are a few concerns I have. First, will a celeb’s Twitter “authority” be negatively impacted by the appearance of ads within his or her stream? The second issue I have is the whole idea that a celeb will be monetizing off of other people clicking in their Tweets. I’m not sure how followers will react to this, considering many of these celebs are raking in the money as it is. But Rad says that the ads won’t distort the quality of a celeb’s stream because the Tweets are spread out and sent every two days, and the ad campaigns that are promoted via Ad.ly’s platform are for high-end brands such as Dell, Maserati, and Hilton. He adds that ad-sponsored Tweets are clearly marked by Ad.ly so people can ignore those Tweets if they’d like. As for the monetization issue, Rad says that celebs can opt to donate any proceeds they receive from the campaign to a charity of their choice. For the launch, Rad has accumulated an impressive list of high-profile celebs who are willing to participate in the network. Celebs include Kim Kardashian, Brooke Burke, Nicole Richie, Brody Jenner, Dr. Drew and Samantha Ronson. Ad.ly has recently raised a Series A round of funding from GRP Partners but Rad declined to reveal the amount of funding. Ad.ly faces competition from fellow Twitter ad networks Magpie and Twittad. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Think Augmented Reality Is Cool? Layar Adds 3D Element To AR Browsing Top
Layar , one of the first companies to start popularizing the concept of augmented reality browsing using modern day's mobile phone cameras, is today announcing the addition of 3D capabilities to its AR browser platform for Android and will be demoing the experience starting tomorrow at the Picnic Conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. With 3D, third-party developers can now tag real-life objects with three-dimensional text, place 3D objects on top of real-world space and create multi-sensory experiences. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
TechCrunch50 Winner RedBeacon Gets Some TV Love Top
RedBeacon , the new “OpenTable for local services” that launched at TechCrunch50 last week and took home the top prize from the event, gets a little attention from mainstream media. See founders Aaron Lee, Ethan Anderson and Yaron Binur on Fox Business, the clips are below: Watch the latest business video at FOXBusiness.com Watch the latest business video at FOXBusiness.com Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
PBworks Adds Microblogging And Email Upload Features To Wikis Top
PBworks (formally known as PBwiki), a startup that specializes in helping businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions collaborate via wikis, today announced its Social Collaboration Update for PBworks Project Edition and Legal Edition, which integrates social media-style user profiles and microblogging to help teams work together more easily. The new user profiles in PBworks allow organizations to specify which fields to include (e.g. office location, department, relevant skills and experience, etc., converting a company’s PBworks Network into a searchable personnel roster. Now, user profiles automatically include a list of the users contributions such as edits and file uploads, as well as tasks each user is working on. PBworks is also going more social with the release of real-time, Twitter-style microblogging to facilitate unstructured collaboration such as brainstorming and discussions. Along with real-time updates, PBworks has added email upload support, so authorized users can add wiki pages and upload files simply by sending an email to that wiki. The “Social Collaboration Update” as PBworks is calling it, is available today for all Project Edition and Legal Edition customers. PBworks is based in San Mateo, Calif., and has raised $2.45 million in venture funding to date. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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