Tuesday, September 22, 2009

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"Fidelity Potential Index" Pits MP3 Against Vinyl; Science Or Psuedoscience? 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
 
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
 
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
 
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
 
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 : 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 : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. 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 : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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