The latest from TechCrunch
- Quick Look: Kempler & Strauss W Phone Watch
- The Venture Hacks StartupList Helps Fledgling Startups Pitch Top Angel Investors
- Mark Cuban May Hate News Aggregators, But He Also Wants To Invest In Them
- Armstrong Hints AOL Will Renew Search Deal With Google: "Distribution Is Almost As Important To Us As Money"
- Stephen Colbert: Blippy Is More Exciting Than Going Through Old Receipts
- Everybody Forgets The Readers When They Bash News Aggregators
- Hidden Backdoors On Torrent Sites Led To The Latest Twitter Attack
| Quick Look: Kempler & Strauss W Phone Watch | Top |
| Do you dream of jet boots and ninjas from space? Sure, we all do. Well, the future just arrived in my mailbox, friends, and it's the Kempler & Strauss W Phone Watch , an unlocked GSM phone inside a watch. Is it amazing, you ask? Does it come with a jet pack, you ask? The answers are "Yes" and "No." The phone is about as big as a Garmin GPS watch and has a touchscreen and small camera. I'm going to wear this thing for a few days and report back on how it feels to wear the entire world on your wrist but this far it seems to work fine. The screen is amazingly hard to type on without a little stylus, but it's fun to try. Interestingly, you can even make and take calls without a headset. How much does it cost? $199, friends, and it's available for pre-order now . While it will never replace the standard phone, it's nice to be able to tell people to talk to the hand. Or talk to the wrist. Or whatever. Click through for a video Quick Look. Look for a review next week. | |
| The Venture Hacks StartupList Helps Fledgling Startups Pitch Top Angel Investors | Top |
| If you’re a startup looking for some early angel investments, you probably have a list of people you’d love to work with mapped out in your mind. Unfortunately, there’s also a good chance that you have absolutely no idea how to get their attention and pitch them. Today Venture Hacks is launching a new project that may help with that. Dubbed StartupList , Venture Hacks will start sending a weekly Email digest featuring three startup pitches that will get Emailed to some of Silicon Valley’s most respected angel investors. Venture Hacks founder Babak Nivi likens it to a DailyCandy for startups. The project is a followup to the Venture Hacks AngelList , which launched yesterday. AngelList is a basic directory of over 80 established angel investors, including their all-important contact info (or, at least, the best people to get a reference through), what the investor looks for in a startup, and other key information. These members of the AngelList will all be receiving the weekly StartupList, which obviously makes it a huge boon to any startups that land a spot on the list. Nivi says that the system is already working — after an initial release on Twitter they’ve had nine angel investors ask for intros to the startups, including David Cohen (Techstars), Mike Hirshland (Polaris), and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. To get on the list, you’ll have to apply through this site . Your pitch will be judged by the two members of the Venture Hacks team (Nivi and Naval), who will be looking for traction, ’social proof’, and a solid team (though you don’t necessarily have to be excelling in all three areas). Your elevator pitch will have to be kept to around 150 words, and you need to have a minimum viable product (as defined by the Venture Hacks guys). CrunchBase Information Venture Hacks Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Mark Cuban May Hate News Aggregators, But He Also Wants To Invest In Them | Top |
| I’m still scratching my head at Mark Cuban’s comments about news aggregators being freeloading vampires that should be blocked by news sites. As Danny Sullivan points out , Cuban is an investor in Mahalo, which is an aggregator extraordinaire. And in 2008 at the TechCrunch50 conference, Cuban said he’d like to be an investor in news aggregator TechMeme . He says: “Gabe from TechMeme, I’ve been running after him for two years to try to let me do something with him because I think its a brilliant idea and I think I can add value…I try to stick to things that are strategic to me that I think are fun that I think are game changing.” Cuban was mostly railing on Google News in his talk, but TechMeme has a similar model of linking to stories with a short excerpt. You can watch the entire interview here . I’ve emailed Mark to get see if he wants to talk more about this, because I continue to be more than confused. | |
| Armstrong Hints AOL Will Renew Search Deal With Google: "Distribution Is Almost As Important To Us As Money" | Top |
| During today’s AOL earnings call , which just finished, CEO Tim Armstrong dropped the strongest hint yet that Google is the front-runner in negotiations for who will power search across AOL properties. Google is AOL’s current partner, as it has been for nearly a decade, but the partnership is up for renewal. Needless to say, snatching the search partnership away would be a coup for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Bing wants the search deal, which would help it increase its total volume of searches by a couple percentage points since AOL on its own has the fifth largest search share in the U.S. But during the call, Armstrong emphasized that “distribution is almost as important to us as money, we will look for distribution as much as money in the deal.” AOL is a content company and it gets a lot of its traffic from Google. The sheer volume of referral traffic Google sends to AOL sites is something Bing cannot yet compete against, and to the extent that Google can find ways to send more traffic to AOL as part of its search deal, that makes it a more attractive partner than Bing. Microsoft can throw all the money it wants at AOL on the search side, it probably won’t make a difference. Here is Armstrong’s relevant reply to an analyst’s question on the topic from my notes: On search deal, we have had a great partnership with Google, we continue to be close to them. What we are expecting to get out of search deal is longer-term partnership where we are both aligned. We have a long partnership with Google. Marketplace is more competitive. First and foremost if you are looking for us to squeeze more dollars or pennies out every quarter, you are going to be disappointed. Looking for a deal that helps our strategy, a reasonable deal for us and the partner. We are a content focussed company, distribution is almost as important to us as money, we will look for distribution as much as money in the deal. So he is not ruling out Bing entirely, but if you read between the lines it is clear that he values Google almost as much as a distribution partner as he does as a search partner. Add in the fact that he still seems to be on good terms with his former boss Eric Schmidt, and it is clear that he is leaning heavily towards sticking with Google. Oh, by the way, this also means that he’s fine with Google being a huge news aggregator, because those links are extremely valuable and he understands that better than the CEOs of most other media companies. Google’s unique position as a source of traffic to Websites is one of its great strengths in any negotiation involving another Web company. I’ve heard this before from other Web CEOs who let Google get away with a better deal than they would otherwise because they fear reprisals in the form of lower search traffic. Google, of course, needs to keep up appearances that it delivers the best search results no matter what, but there are other ways Google can help juice a site’s traffic. Update : As I was writing this post, Tim Armstrong called me. He emphasized that “Overall, we do feel distribution is important, we also like revenue. We will balance those things.” It all “comes down to what the actual distribution deal is.” In other words, he is still negotiating. But he did shed some light on how a distribution deal could work. “You can’t really affect the index in partnership deals,” he explains, but there are lots of other things AOL and Google could do. On AOL’s end, it could change the way pages are set up and how much advertising is on each page to make them appear in results better. On Google’s end, there are opportunities to get more traffic “through Oneboxes and other types of integration like on the News property.” (The Onebox is Google’s unified results at the top of organic search which pulls from different sources). Another possibility is to include search advertising inventory into the deal. So Armstrong is definitely thinking creatively about how to get the most out of his next search deal. CrunchBase Information AOL Google Bing Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Stephen Colbert: Blippy Is More Exciting Than Going Through Old Receipts | Top |
| Normally, it takes quite a bit of time before a startup gets any sort of mainstream spotlight. That’s not the case with Blippy . Tonight, the controversial social credit card data aggregator was featured on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report . As you might imagine, host Stephen Colbert ripped into the service’s ability to show everyday purchases at places such as Wendy’s. Humor aside, this appearance is a huge win for Blippy, which recently raised its first round of funding , and is now signing deals with retailers . Will Colbert Nation embrace Blippy? Sadly, YouTube is apparently smart enough to know that the Colbert Report is something they shouldn’t allow you to embed, so I’ll have to link to it — here . Update : And YouTube has now completely removed the video. Wow, they’re good. Update: The video’s now up on Colbert Nation. CrunchBase Information Blippy Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Everybody Forgets The Readers When They Bash News Aggregators | Top |
| I remember way back before the Internet when I got most of my daily news via the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN. If it wasn’t reported by either of those outlets, there was a good chance I wouldn’t hear that news at all. Those days are over. The problem is that most of the people running legacy news sites today are way older than I am, and still can’t get their arms around the fact that the world has fundamentally and irreversibly changed. Today I get my non tech news via scores of sources. I’m led there via social sites like Twitter and Facebook, and from aggregators like Google News and Memeorandum . Most of my tech news comes, of course, via my phone and email inbox. It’s ok that the legacy guys don’t understand that, because when they erect paywalls it just stokes TechCrunch, which isn’t behind a paywall. Live and let live, I say. Far be it from me to talk them off the ledge . Paywalls kill social links and aggregators unless they are specially designed to allow them via a set number of free views. But even then there’s enough friction that most people won’t bother. But when Mark Cuban starts saying aggregators are bad, that’s something new. He’s one of the guys that gets it. He’s not supposed to be on the losing team: Outspoken billionaire cum provocateur Mark Cuban charged Google and other content aggregators Tuesday of being freeloaders — or worse. “The word that comes to mind is vampires,” he said. “When you think about vampires, they just suck on your blood.” Telling the world that you don’t want them to do you the favor of visiting your site is just ridiculous. Let me repeat that. When someone visits your site they are doing you a favor. Not the other way around. And when an aggregator puts up a link to your site, they are doing you a favor by sending you traffic. Not the other way around. As I’ve written before , “We throw a party when someone "steals" our content and links back to us. High fives all around the office. At least there's some small nod in our direction.” The real problem out there today for news sites are the guys that just take stories and rewrite them on the cheap without any links or attribution at all. When you erect a paywall, you’re just encouraging this behavior. It’s less anyone will notice. What About The Users? But forget all that navel gazing for a minute while I jump back up to my first paragraph. Aggregators are popular because they help users find the news they’re interested in. They serve a very real purpose and add value to the system. Without aggregators and social links users would be forced to choose which news sites they want to pay for, and trust that they’ll get everything they need from those sites. I don’t want to jump back to 1993. I want to live in the present where each piece of news lives and dies by its own merit as it spreads virally around the Internet. That means I spend less time finding better content. Mark Cuban knows all this, and he agrees. Which is why I don’t understand his lash out against aggregators. If news sites block aggregators, as Cuban urges, they lose and the users lose. No one wins. Except the sites that remain free. And those sites are here to stay. More: Mark Cuban May Hate News Aggregators, But He Also Wants To Invest In Them | |
| Hidden Backdoors On Torrent Sites Led To The Latest Twitter Attack | Top |
| Early this morning, Twitter began alerting certain users to reset their passwords because of a possible phishing attack. They later elaborated on it a bit but it still wasn’t clear exactly what was going on. Now they’ve felt the need to fully go into exactly what went down — and it’s fairly interesting. On their Twitter Status blog (interesting that it’s not the main Twitter blog), Del Harvey, Twitter’s Director of “Trust and Safety” has a post detailing the attack. Apparently, Twitter figured out that some torrent sites have been being created for a number of years by some individual who then sells them to others looking to get into the business. The problem is that this person seems to have included a backdoor into these sites so that they could access them later when the site became popular. And because people often use the same login and password across the web, a bunch of Twitter accounts were then comprimised with this data. To make matters worse, it seems that there were also other exploits on these sites that allowed other hackers to gain access to data. Harvey doesn’t name any of the torrent sites involved (and says they likely won’t even be able to figure out all of them), but notes that if you’re a torrent site user, you should probably change your Twitter password immediately. Harvey titles her post, “reason 4,132 for changing your password” — but really it should be, “reason 4,132 for not using the same login/password on all sites.” Here’s the main nugget: The takeaway from this is that people are continuing to use the same email address and password (or a variant) on multiple sites. Through our discussions with affected users, we've discovered a high correlation between folks who have used third party forums and download sites and folks who were on our list of possibly affected accounts. [photo: flickr/ Daquella manera ] CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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