Monday, October 26, 2009

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What's Black And White And Red All Over? Top Newspaper Circulation Numbers. Top
The Audit Bureau of Circulations has released the numbers for the top 25 daily newspapers in the U.S. based on their weekday circulation numbers. Not surprisingly, the numbers are bad — okay, awful. Exactly one of the top newspapers has shown growth when compared to where they were 6 months ago. That paper is The Wall Street Journal, which is now the number one paper in the country thanks to USA Today’s staggering loss of nearly 20% of its readership the past 6 months. And it’s not like WSJ is growing like gangbusters, it grew 0.61% in the last six months. Also a good list is the top 10 gainers in circulation , only because it looks like they could barely find 10 papers in the entire country with positive gains. Almost all of the ones on this list are smaller papers, with Women’s Wear Daily coming in as the number two gainer over the timeframe. Below, find a chart of top 10 circulated paper’s “growth” over the past 6 months. Below that find the raw data for the Top 25 papers. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL — 2,024,269 — 0.61% USA TODAY — 1,900,116 — (-17.15%) THE NEW YORK TIMES — 927,851 — (-7.28%) LOS ANGELES TIMES — 657,467 — (-11.05%) THE WASHINGTON POST — 582,844 — (-6.40%) DAILY NEWS (NEW YORK) — 544,167 — (-13.98%) NEW YORK POST — 508,042 — (-18.77%) CHICAGO TRIBUNE — 465,892 — (-9.72%) HOUSTON CHRONICLE — 384,419 — (-14.24%) THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER — 361,480 — N/A NEWSDAY — 357,124 — (-5.40%) THE DENVER POST — 340,949 — N/A THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC — 316,874 — (-12.30%) STAR TRIBUNE, MINNEAPOLIS — 304,543 — (-5.53%) CHICAGO SUN-TIMES — 275,641 — (-11.98%) The PLAIN DEALER, CLEVELAND — 271,180 — (-11.24%) DETROIT FREE PRESS (e) — 269,729 — (-9.56%) THE BOSTON GLOBE — 264,105 — (-18.48%) THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS — 263,810 — (-22.16%) THE SEATTLE TIMES — 263,588 — N/A SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE — 251,782 — (-25.82%) THE OREGONIAN — 249,163 — (-12.06%) THE STAR-LEDGER, NEWARK — 246,006 — (-22.22%) SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE — 242,705 — (-10.05%) ST. PETERSBURG (FLA.) TIMES — 240,147 — (-10.70%) Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Orkut Slows Hemorrhaging To Facebook By Making Friend Export Tool Nearly Useless Top
Orkut continues to undermine Google's Data Liberation Front , whose singular goal is to “make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products”. Earlier this month the Orkut friend exporter, which makes it easy to export your friends’ contact information to a standard CSV file, was mysteriously broken due to a bug. The timing of the bug was more than a little suspect — Orkut has been hemorrhaging users lately in India and Brazil as people flock to Facebook, which takes advantage of Orkut’s friend export tool to help users make the switch. Now Julio Vasconcellos over at Armchairfounder has noticed how Orkut managed to fix their bug while still making it harder for members to switch to Facebook: the tool works, but it no longer includes your friends’ Email addresses. In other words, now when you export your list of friends from Orkut, all you’ll get is a list of their names, location, birthday, gender, and links to the Orkut profiles. Which means it’s basically useless. Facebook can’t use the data to invite your friends, and you can’t use the data to actually contact and share with your friends, which is the whole point of a social graph. We reached out to Google about the issue, and a Google spokesperson gave us this statement: “Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks — when a user friends someone they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click. In order to protect user privacy, we now exclude email addresses from the CSV export file. Of course users can still export their friend lists in the CSV file. In addition, Google Contacts syncs with Orkut, so users can export their Orkut friends’ email addresses from Google Contacts. We support web standards such as OAuth and are working on ways to help users share their data more securely between social networks. We believe strongly that users own their data, and we’re committed to finding ways to make it easier for users to export data.” Google is right in that this isn’t a standard feature on most social networks, but most social networks aren’t busy touting things like the Data Liberation Front and reaping all the positive press associated with it. And if this is really a privacy issue, it doesn’t make sense that Google would let you export Email data through Google Contacts but not Orkut itself. Spammers looking to figure out how to harvest Email addresses will doubtless figure out the process. Of course, Orkut users looking to make the jump to Facebook probably won’t. Vasconcellos also points out that Orkut’s tool is unncessarily hard to use, and he’s absolutely right. When I went to test out the friend exporter, I was fairly certain that it simply wasn’t working at all. That’s because every time you click on the ‘Export Contacts’ button the site kicks you back out to your homepage, and only shows the “take your contacts with you” section below the fold. It took me way too long to figure this out (I even tested the feature out in two different browsers). And I doubt most people will put in that much effort. It’s understandable why Orkut would want to handicap the feature and make it hard to use, but Google can’t have it both ways: it’s either open, or it isn’t. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
The New Grooveshark: Faster, Prettier And Still Phenomenal Top
I’ve always considered the Grooveshark web app’s UI to be quite amazing, so I was wary when I was granted preview access to the service’s new look, which the startup is presenting publicly for the first time today (at 12 AM EST). Fortunately, they somehow managed to make it even more awesome than it already was, and the makeover was more than a new lick of paint as it also included a number of performance tweaks to make it run smoother. In case you’re not familiar with Grooveshark: it’s a great web-based music search, play and management tool that’s been around since April last year . You can use the app to instantly look for, share and listen to music, and there’s the quintessential social component that allows you to interact with people from its community and discover new music from others' choices. With the new look, Grooveshark’s design is now more desktop client-like (think Spotify , Deezer or Imeem ), which in my opinion is a good thing. The overall design and the new navigation bar on the side make for a much smoother user experience, and you can switch themes to make the app fit your mood or resize the menus to fit your screen. But the back-end tweaks that have increased the speed of the application are what’s making me seriously considering switching to Grooveshark for most of my online music needs. Playback between tunes is now seamless, with no more lag in between tracks when you’ve added multiple ones to a playlist. Switching between menu items and tabs is as fast as I consider possible inside a browser. In short: great new design combined with an excellent user experience. Grooveshark is still struggling to get all major music industry players involved for the ‘legalization’ of its vast content library, which is in large part put together by avid users uploading music files straight from their hard drives. So far, the only one it has signed up is EMI and that was after the company sued Grooveshark over copyright infringement. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
OWLE Launches Bubo; Ultimate iPhone Video Rig Top
With the iPhone 3GS, the possibilities are endless. In July 2009, Harold Smith and Graham Mcbain took the iPhone 3GS, and made the first prototype of the OWLE Bubo, which we covered on CrunchGear. Now, just four months later, the OWLE Bubo is ready to ship to the public. OWLE, which stands for Optical Widgets for Life Enhancement, is aiming to making mobile video much easier, by taking the parts you use on your camcorder, and enabling you to use them on the iPhone. The Bubo comes standard with a hotshoe mount on top for LED lights, four tripod mounts and standard 37mm lens threading so that you can put your own lenses on it, in addition to the lens that the Bubo comes with. It’s been quite a journey since the first prototype of the Bubo — Harold and Graham traveled to Yahoo!’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. for iPhoneDevCamp 3, where they won the iFund “Most Promising Startup” award. The Bubo is going on sale for pre-orders starting tomorrow for $99.95, but TechCrunch readers can pre-order starting today! Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Social Games: How The Big Three Make Millions Top
CrunchBase Profile Zynga Playfish Playdom Location: San Francisco, CA London, UK Mountain View, CA Money Raised: $39M $21 Million $0 Revenue: Estimated $200M Estimated $75M Estimated $60M Rumors: Strong 2010 IPO candidate Possible acquisition talks with EA Raising Venture Capital Key Apps: Facebook: Farmville-61M Mafia Wars-25.8M Yoville-19.8M Texas Hold Em' Poker-18.3M Facebook: Pet Society- 20.5M Restaurant City-17.3M Country Story- 8M 135 million total installs for all games Myspace: Mobsters -14M Bumper Stickers-11.7M Own Your Friends-10.1M; Facebook: Sorority Life-7.1M Mobsters 2-3.5M Poker Palace- 1.5M So much for the first generation of big Facebook/MySpace social application startups. Slide and RockYou both got huge valuations in venture rounds. But a new generation of application developers has taken center stage and are racking up big revenues and their own eye popping valuations: Zynga , Playfish and Playdom . All three own popular social games on Facebook and MySpace. Zynga’s Farmville has 61 million monthly users. Playfish’s Pet Society has 21 million monthly users on Facebook. And Playdom has 16+ million monthly users of Mobsters on MySpace and Facebook Combined. All three companies are getting a ton of press and investor attention. Zynga wants to go public next year. Playfish probably already got bought by EA for $400 million or more. And Playdom probably raised an unannounced big chunk of venture capital over the summer. These three companies may be generating as much as $300 million annually on sales of virtual goods. Need a shotgun to do that next job on Mobsters? No problem. Pay with a credit card, paypal, or your mobile phone and it’s all yours. And people are obviously very willing to buy these virtual goods. Nothing new there . The goal of all of these games is to get to a higher level, and generally have more fun growing things or killing things faster than your friends. Get addicted to the free version, then start spending to move things along more quickly. Once people are committed, it’s easy to get them to pay. You can read all about it on Business Week. Except Business Week didn’t mention the dark side of the business at all. All three companies are willing to give game currency in exchange for offers. Sign up for Netflix. Buy a ringtone subscription. Or energy drinks. Sign up for a credit card. Get car insurance. Take an IQ survey that requires a $9.99/month mobile subscription to see the results. We even found one for arthritis medication. Here’s how it all looks . One executive we spoke with says that 70% of total revenue from these applications may come in from lead generation, not direct payments. Netflix alone will pay $30-$40 for a free trial (requires credit card). Three companies control most of these lead generation offers: TrialPay (appears to have the most legitimate offers), Offerpal and SuperRewards. There’s nothing wrong with basing a business off of lead generation, although some of the offers are pretty sketchy (long term credit card or mobile subscriptions for little or no value). And the FTC does tend to take a swipe at them periodically. But the bigger problem is that advertisers may not be getting much for their payouts. As the higher quality advertisers bail, pressure to add the scam artists increases. The cycle of all of these games is pretty standard. Get new users playing for free, give them incentives to message all their friends to signup, hit them hard for cash or lead generation for revenue, and move them up the levels. Rinse. Repeat. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 

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