Monday, August 2, 2010

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OMG/JK Episode 5: Everything Is Dead. Kill. Kill. Kill. Top
Above, find the fifth installment of the show fellow writer Jason Kincaid and I do for TechCrunch TV, OMG/JK . This week, we discuss/argue Facebook Questions, the new Kindle, the Magic Trackpad, and Android’s Wallpaper of Doom. The overall theme this week seems to be the death of everything. The Kindle is dead, the mouse is dead, Quora may be dead, and Android is dead. Okay, I’m exaggerating — for at least two of those things. Jason calls me “The Undertaker” and I demand free bumpers for Wallpapergate. Good times. Here are some relevant links to what we discuss: Facebook Q&A Service 'Questions' Begins Rolling Out, Could Be Massive Amazon Reveals New Kindle: $139 For Wi-Fi Version, $189 For 3G Bezos On iPad: "You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets." Voilà! Apple's Magic Trackpad Appears. Multi-Touch On Any Mac For $69 Apple's Magic Trackpad Signals The End Of The Mouse Era The Mouse Is Dead. I Just Killed It. Now Can We Move On? Researchers: Android Wallpaper App Shows "No Evidence Of Malicious Behavior"
 
Exclusive: Titan Gaming Takes Xfire Off Viacom's Hands Top
Xfire , the social network for gamers that was acquired by Viacom for $102 million back in 2006, has a new owner. The buyer is Titan Gaming , a small company that raised a mere $1 million in angel funding to date, so we’re making an educated guess here and going to assume that it was sold for a song compared to the price Viacom paid a couple of years ago. In a message posted on the Xfire website very recently (via Kotaku ), it looks like most of the development team is not sticking around: August 2, 2010–Xfire has been purchased by another company. Most of the team that has brought you Xfire for the last 6 years is leaving, including me. We’ve enjoyed our time and I personally am sad that I was only able to do 127 releases. Good bye and game on! The message comes from someone named ‘Chris’ – most probably Chris Kirmse , Xfire founder and VP of Engineering. Krimse was once Senior Engineer of Yahoo Games – said to have built the Yahoo FIFA system – before creating Xfire back in 2003. Xfire is a free service that enables gamers to interact with each other coupled with a tool that automatically keeps track of when and where gamers are playing PC games online. It works regardless of game type, server browser, or gaming service. The service thus eliminates the need to run multiple programs like IRC, instant messengers, or in-game friends lists to keep track of when and where a gamer’s friends are playing. It combines instant messaging, a server browser, peer-to-peer file downloads, in-game messaging, screenshot and video capture and an active gaming community. The service has attracted some 16 million users to date. We’ve just confirmed with Titan Gaming CEO John Maffei that they have acquired Xfire – the deal was signed just a couple of hours ago – but have not been able to pin down the exact purchase price. Here’s a brief statement from Titan: Titan Gaming has purchased Xfire. The terms of the purchase are undisclosed. Titan will be taking on the Xfire name. The Xfire services will continue uninterrupted for its users. Xfire redefined how gamers communicate, Titan intends to build upon this tradition and utilize the Xfire platform to help gaming companies better engage and monetize their games. Maffei adds that Titan Gaming has retained several key members of the development staff, which sounds far more positive than the statement on Xfire’s website – which reads that most of the team is leaving the company – suggests. Titan Gaming last May announced that it had raised $1 million in funding from a slew of prominent angel investors. You can find the full list of investors on the startup’s CrunchBase profile, but it includes people like Clearstone Venture Partners principals William Quigley and Jim Armstrong , PriceGrabber co-founder Kamran Pourzanjani and MP3.com founder Michael Robertson . CrunchBase Information Xfire Titan Gaming Information provided by CrunchBase
 
New Site Renders Social Media Experts Obsolete Top
PR agencies and social media experts across the web, prepare to meet your match. This week sees the launch of WhatTheFuckIsMySocialMediaStrategy.com , a website that can tell startups to “identify relevant and compelling hooks”, “humanise the brand by driving the audience conversations”, and combine a bevy of many other pleonastic words to forge taglines that are utterly and completely devoid of meaning. Free of charge. The site works by jumbling a few verbs (facilitate, foster, leverage) and nouns (‘word of mouth’, buzz, ‘branded utilities’) into a sentence that sounds impressive but means absolutely nothing. It’s hilarious, but it’s also eerily accurate. Thousands of pitches have left me scarred to the point that this site actually makes my stomach churn. In all seriousness, if you took a few of these phrases, added a quote or two, and threw in one sentence of actual news, you’d have a pretty convincing press release. The site is inspired by the similarly titled WhatTheFuckShouldIMakeForDinner . And, all kidding aside, we still love you PR firms.
 
Google Earth Used To Fine People With Pools, Again Top
“Under the table” pools may be the catalyst of the next technology revolution in government. During last February’s economic collapse in Greece , the normally technophobic Greek government used Google Maps and Google Earth to find people who had craftily evaded taxes by failing to declare a pool. Now Google Earth-enabled law enforcement has come to the USA. The town of Riverhead in Long Island , taking a lesson from the Greeks, is also using Google Earth to track down about 250 “unpermitted” pools. And using the satellite imaging service has proved profitable, Riverhead officials have collected over $75,000 in fines from pool owners who never filled out the required paperwork. While Google Earth was originally intended to help people find their way around, Riverhead is one of the first incidences of what will inevitably be many more cases of the tool being used by local and national governments to catch people evading their duties as citizens, unless Google somehow intervenes. We’ve contacted Google for comment on this somewhat alarming unintended use. “Pool safety has always been my concern,” Riverhead’s chief building inspector Barnes said regarding the fines. Image: Tressugar CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Check-In On Foursquare Without Taking Your Phone Out Of Your Pocket Top
Heavy Foursquare users, you have a new app to get immediately. Future Checkin is an app that allows you to check-in to your favorite Foursquare venues automatically when you’re near them. You don’t have to do a thing besides simply have your phone on you and this app will check you in while running in the background with iOS 4. Developer Tim Sears says he was actually inspired to make this app by our posts about iOS 4 background location and check-in fatigue . Check-in fatigue in particular is a growing problem. A number of heavy users of Foursquare that I know (myself included) have been complaining in recent months that it’s getting a bit tedious to have to pull out your phone each time to check-in to a venue. Particularly venues that you frequent. Future Checkin absolutely solves that. Here’s how it works: you sign in to the app with your Foursquare account, and it shows you a list of Foursquare venues nearby. Or you can search for your favorite venues. From this list, you choose the ones to mark as “Favorites.” You can also scan your recent check-in history and select venues from here to add to your Favorites. This Favorites list is key — these are the venues you will be automatically checked-in to when you get close enough to them (within 300 meters). There is also an option to automatically check-in to venues you’ve been to recently (ones not explicitly marked as Favorites). In the “More” area of the app you can toggle this on and off. From here, you can also turn auto Favorites check-ins on and off. You can also turn off notifications (that send you a Push Notification when you’re automatically checked-in to a venue), and toggle the “Kill Switch” which basically turns off background location. All of this works thanks to the new ability for third-party apps to run in the background with iOS 4. Location is one of the features that can remain on when you leave an app (a slider in the settings allows you to determine if you’d like the GPS updates to be more frequent or save some battery life by making them less frequent). “ This app is really designed for people who are getting check-in fatigue, who often forget to check-in to places, or who don’t want to be rude by pulling out their phone in social settings. Who it is not designed for is people trying to cheat Foursquare, so Future Checkin will only check you in to a place once every four hours, and never the same place twice in a row ,” Sears says. As for the future of Future Checkin, Sears says that he plans to implement Gowalla integration too, as soon as their write API is ready to roll (hopefully this week). That could help solve the larger issue of check-in fatigue — checking-in across all these apps at various venues. Future Checkin’s solution would basically be check.in that runs in the background . Awesome. With the launch of iOS 4, Loopt was the first app with the ability to run location in the background . But that doesn’t auto check you in to venues, instead it just continually shows where you are to your friends on a map. In that regard, it’s more like Google Latitude. That may actually be a better solution for many users now, as it’s not yet clear if the world is ready for these auto check-ins. But power users of Foursquare certainly are. And this app speaks to how this stuff might work in the future. The only question may be: will Foursquare itself implement such an option soon? Future Checkin is $0.99 — a special 50% off price for launch week. Find it in the App Store here . CrunchBase Information Foursquare iPhone Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Shoutworthy Lets You Endorse A Friend In 140 Top
We've killed off reputation before , but it somehow refuses to die, with third party platforms like Unvarnished gaining traction in an entirely new sector of social, reputation currency. Quietly launching today out of DUMBO, Brooklyn ("the SOMA of New York City") comes Sawhorse Media 's Shoutworthy , a social client that attempts to steal some of LinkedIn 's thunder and cash in on the unmitigated human desire to share via Facebook and Twitter. Shoutworthy is partially angel funded and partially bootstrapped. Founder Gregory Galant's previous Twitter-related endeavors include The Shorty Awards ,  Listorious, Muckrack and Venture Maven . Galant wants to make it easier to give people recommendations socially, “You don't get LinkedIn recommendations unless you get your friends to write them. Because ours are posted on Facebook and Twitter, people are forced to keep it short." It's true, Shoutworthy's "shout outs" are easier to write than LinkedIn recommendations and the service makes it easy for you to distribute them over Facebook and Twitter, using the APIs to automatically tweet them out and auto-post them to the recipient's wall on Facebook. Unlike Unvarnished, each "shout out" is linked to your user profile, which means that everyone is held accountable for his or her reviews. When asked whether this accountability would put the kibosh on people who wanted to post negative reviews, Galant responded, "We're not encouraging people to [post negative reviews] … With Shoutworthy I get a testimonial page and see what my friends are recommending – If they're shouting out five people those are five people worth paying attention to." While this idea of a personal testimonial page hearkens back to Friendster , aggregators of business reputation testimonials like Yelp and Google Places are currently at war over today's SEO-obsessed landscape. I can’t see why personal reputation testimonials won’t one day be just as important; Everyone wants friends with high page rank. There is currently a LinkedIn connect function on your Shoutworthy profile, and Galant plans on doing a deeper LinkedIn integration in order to further solve the recommender motivation problem. While the platform's current utility is limited (Don't people already uselessly shout at each other all day via Facebook and Twitter?), by incorporating features that post user “shout outs” directly to LinkedIn or some other site frequented by employers, Shoutworthy might actually be something to shout about. CrunchBase Information Shoutworthy Sawhorse Media Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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