Wednesday, August 4, 2010

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Judge Strikes Down CA's Prop 8, Leaked Ruling Sends Scribd Traffic Skyrocketing Top
Minutes ago, San Francisco federal judge Vaughn Walker struck down the infamous Proposition 8, a measure that banned same-sex marriage in California. Twitter and Facebook are abuzz with the news (as you’d expect), but one other site is also seeing an immense amount of traffic from it: document sharing hub Scribd . The final ruling was leaked to Scribd and received over 50,000 hits “in a matter of minutes” according to Scribd Senior Director of Communications Michelle Laird — it’s up to over 125,000 reads as of this writing. CEO Trip Adler says, “a typical viral document gets 100,000 reads in 24 hours, this document has over 100,000 reads in about 24 minutes.” Of course, the case is not yet settled: Prop 8 may be facing a long, time-consuming road to the Supreme Court over the next couple years. But for champions of equal rights, this is big news — expect to see that Scribd read count continue to trend skyward over the next few days. Update: There are some issues with docs loading, which Scribd says are being caused by an outage at Amazon’s Web Services. Image by laverrue View this document on Scribd
 
Forget The Facebook Movie — The YouTube Movie Is The Hot Ticket Top
The consensus among people I talk to about the upcoming movie about Facebook, The Social Network , seems to be that it looks like it actually might be good. That said, most simply can’t believe that it actually will be because it’s about, well, Facebook. So is it just the trailer that is making it look decent? A few people on YouTube decided to try and find out by making their own trailer for a movie — about YouTube. The Video Website looks very promising. The plot looks eerily similar to The Social Network – but it includes laughing babies and pandas. What more can you ask for? It also contains lines of tense dialogue such as: “I’m talking about taking the entire humiliating experience of home videos and putting it online.” “We don’t have enough videos of adorable laughing babies.” “Then find more! This is my shot” “The keyboard cat wants more money.” Watch it below. CrunchBase Information YouTube Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Zynga Buys Tokyo-Based Startup Unoh Top
Japan’s biggest business daily, The Nikkei, has just reported on its website that social gaming giant Zynga has acquired Tokyo-based startup Unoh for “several billion Yen” (one billion Yen currently translates to $11.6 million). Neither Zynga nor Unoh have officially confirmed the news yet ( Robin Chan , Zynga’s GM of Asia Business Operations, tweeted about a “done deal” just 24 hours ago). The move follows the $150 million Zynga raised from Japanese technology powerhouse SoftBank to build a joint venture to "develop and distribute social games across Japan." Now we know where some of that money has landed. Zynga is said to have acquired 100% of Unoh, with The Nikkei saying that the Americans will transform their new Tokyo office into its strategic base for the Asian social games market as a whole. Unoh will localize Zynga’s game to better fit the taste of Asian customers and will also create titles for the local and international markets on its own. The Japanese startup, which develops games for both cell phones and PCs, has so far been largely active in its home market only. Unoh’s current hit title is called Machitsuku (“Build a City” in Japanese), a free game with a virtual item-based business model. Machitsuku passed the three million user mark on Mixi , Japan’s largest social network (20 million members), just last week. The Unoh deal marks Zynga’s second major acquisition in Asia. Zynga bought Beijing-based XPD Media (which was actually Chan’s company) in May this year for an undisclosed sum. Chan spent a lot of time in Japan recently to build up a Tokyo office for Zynga, but even though I kept grilling him, he remained tight-lipped about his company’s Japan strategy. Rumors about possible acquisitions by Zynga in Japan (where I live) started making the rounds in the local startup scene in June (not to brag, but I actually foresaw the Unoh acquisition back then). We’ve contacted both Robin Chan and Unoh CEO Shintaro Yamada for official confirmation and further information on the deal. CrunchBase Information Zynga Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Wave Goodbye To Google Wave Top
Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly, but Google is saying today that they are going to stop any further development of Google Wave. Wave, a real time messaging platform, was unveiled in May 2009 to an enthusiastic crowd of developers at the Google I/O event in San Francisco. It would “set a new benchmark for interactivity,” said Sergey Brin . The product is part email, part Twitter and part instant messaging. Users can drag files from the desktop to a discussion. Wave even showed character-by-character live typing. It fully launched this last May. And while the service has many , or at least some, passionate users (including TechCrunchers), it “has not seen the user adoption we would have liked, ” says Google. The service will remain live, says Google, although they say they it may eventually come down. Google has also open sourced parts of the code and say they will create tools to let users “liberate” their data: “The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave's innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users easily "liberate" their content from Wave.” What happens to the Wave team, mostly located in Australia? Google won’t say, other than that they will be given new projects. Our guess is many, or all, of them will soon be working for Vic Gundotra and his new WWF ( war with Facebook ). CrunchBase Information Google Wave Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Microsoft And Salesforce Agree To Agree On Patents (For A Fee) Top
It’s no secret that Microsoft and Salesforce just plain don’t like each other (remember when Microsoft communications head Frank Shaw basically said that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is obsessed with them?). In fact, the two companies have spent the last year suing one another over patents. But today they’re announcing that they’ve settled the suit. But Microsoft couldn’t help but get one final jab in. At first, the press release sent out today by Microsoft announcing the settlement seems even-steven. The patent agreement will allow Salesforce to receive coverage under Microsoft patents, and Microsoft to receive coverage under Salesforce’s patents. Nice. Everyone is happy. But then comes a paragraph indicating that Salesforce is actually paying Microsoft for the patent coverage “based on the strength of Microsoft’s leading patent portfolio.” Here’s the key humorous blurb: Although the contents of the agreement have not been disclosed, Microsoft indicated that it is being compensated by Salesforce.com based on the strength of Microsoft's leading patent portfolio in the areas of operating systems, cloud services and customer relationship management software. So the contents of the agreement haven’t been disclosed — and yet they’ve directed their PR wing to vaguely disclose the fact that Salesforce has to pay. In other words, leaking out that Microsoft is the winner here. Microsoft also made sure to highlight this key point in the email to us about the agreement. I suspect the hostilities between the two sides may not be over just yet. CrunchBase Information Microsoft Salesforce Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games Top
We've just learned that Google has agreed to buy Slide for $182 million, in a deal to be announced Friday. And sources also tell us that this is not the last move Google is going to be making to cobble together a serious social gaming and apps strategy to counter Facebook. As we previously reported, Google invested in Zynga to form the cornerstone of Google Games, which Eric Schmidt somewhat confirmed will launch later this year. No word on whether Slide founder Max Levchin will be joining Google or what his continuing role will be. $182 million is a nice exit no doubt, but it's a come down from Slide's $500 million valuation in 2008. And Levchin has said many times that success to him was Slide becoming bigger than PayPal. Looks like it hasn’t. But it's still possible that Levchin—who was the first investor in Slide too—is making a comparable or bigger amount personally from this sale. CrunchBase Information Slide Information provided by CrunchBase
 
OpenTable Serves Up A 273 Percent Jump In Profits, And Launches Spotlight Deals Top
One publicly traded Web business that seems to be humming (unlike AOL ) is OpenTable . The company announced second quarter earnings last night. Revenues were up 37 percent to $22.5 million, and net profits rose a whopping 273 percent to $2.6 million, or $0.11 per share. Non-GAAP earnings per share were $0.15, handily beating the $0.12 consensus. OpenTable is installed in 14,128 restaurants and seated 15.6 million diners last quarter, up 27 percent and 52 percent, respectively. Of those seated diners, 97 percent were in North America, but international operations are growing quickly from a base of 500,000 international diners last quarter. Those diners have now written more than 7 million restaurant reviews. As a point of comparison, Yelp has a total of 12 million reviews across all local businesses, and CEO Jeremy Stoppleman considers the those reviews to be Yelp’s single most important competitive advantage. Many of OpenTable’s reviews are simply ratings, so it is not completely apples-to-apples. On the other hand, OpenTable deletes reviews after six months to keep them fresh, and you can only leave a review if you’ve booked a table at that restaurant through OpenTable. To make those diners even more loyal, OpenTable is getting into group buying and flash sales by launching a weekly deal program called Spotlight , which will offer deep discounts on meals at OpenTable restaurants. For $25, consumers will be able to get $50 worth of food at a promoted restaurant. (Yelp is also testing out similar deals ). Executed properly, these discount deals could have a significant impact on OpenTable. Using discounts to entice new customers to try a restaurant can be very effective, as Groupon is already showing. (At our Social Currency CrunchUp last week, the owner of Stone Korean Kitchen in San Francisco explained how selling 2,600 Groupon discounts at a loss helped drive repeat traffic and introduced his restaurant to new customers). If diners have a good experience, that will increase their loyalty to those restaurants and to OpenTable, potentially driving more reservations in the future. Anything that results in more reservations and increased customer loyalty will keep OpenTable growing. But what is the deal with having to print out the deal certificate? Why can’t diners just show the coupon on their mobile phones? CrunchBase Information OpenTable Yelp Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Former Crunchies Finalist StatSheet Recieves 1.3 Million In Series A Top
One-man-startup StatSheet just received 1.3 million in a first round of funding from a group of investors that includes Valhalla, IDEA Fund Partners and assorted angels, most notably Adam Smith of Xobni. Founded by former Cisco engineer Robert Allen, the StatSheet Network platform is run on StatSheet.com and provides fans and bloggers with statistical analysis, charts, and sport stat embeds. At some point their roster boasted Twitter accounts for each NBA, NFL, and college team . StatSheet was also a 2008 Crunchies finalist in the Best Bootstrapped Startup category (won by GitHub that year). Allen will use the new funds to hire a developer team in order to expand the variety and automate the creation of new sports content; His intention is that StatSheet become, “a new type of sports media company that is focused on technology and automation instead of paying people to research and report news like is the norm with traditional sports media.” StatSheet’s future plans include rolling out an extensive network of team-specific sites update in realtime with game previews, player news and recap analysis. They are currently tracking over 250 million sports stats and hope to extend their reach to all major sports soon. CrunchBase Information StatSheet Valhalla Partners Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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