The latest from TechCrunch
- Which Cellphone Did The Yemeni Terrorists Use?
- The Future of Local Commerce = Facebook + Foursquare + Yelp + Groupon
- Is Gulf Seafood Safe To Eat? Feds' New Test Says Yes, Not Convincingly
| Which Cellphone Did The Yemeni Terrorists Use? | Top |
| If you look closely at this shot of the bombs allegedly sent from Yemen to Chicago you’ll notice what looks like a small camera up in the corner. Slide down the side and you see the volume buttons and I suspect the silver area is where the battery holder once stuck to the circuit board. It’s clear that this was a phone – probably of modern vintage – so which phone is it? Read more… | |
| The Future of Local Commerce = Facebook + Foursquare + Yelp + Groupon | Top |
| Editor’s note : The following guest post is by David Marcus, founder and CEO of Zong, a mobile payment provider for Facebook Credits, AT&T and hundreds of leading destination websites and mobile applications There’s been much hype, crazy valuations, and overall market excitement about businesses that promise to unleash the power of the social graph, location, recommendations and group buying. Facebook’s latest valuation according to SecondMarket is now about $30 billion , Foursquare raised $20 million at a post-money valuation of $115 million while still at a pre-revenue stage, Yelp, short of selling for $550 million to Google, raised over $25 million at an undisclosed but very high valuation, and finally Groupon raised $135 million at a whopping $1.35 billion valuation. So besides their huge success with the investment community, and their users, what do these companies have in common, and what does all this have to do with disrupting Local Commerce? In an August TechCrunch guest post , Alex Rampell, describes how Online2Offline commerce is a potential trillion dollar opportunity. The gist of it is that we spend most of our disposable income offline, in local stores, restaurants, and shopping malls. But companies like Groupon, Gilt, and other group buying and private sale startups are changing the money flow. People buy online, and redeem offline. But this is just the beginning of a perfect storm brewing that will change the way we discover, shop, and pay for things. Let’s focus on the main function each of these different startups provide to understand how bringing them together will ultimately disrupt multiple trillion dollar industries: Facebook: provides the Social Graph, which is fast becoming a utility. Through its open platform, and APIs, we share more about our lives and our interactions online and on mobile every day. Foursquare and Gowalla: provide location services and check-ins, along with game mechanics that motivate users to unlock badges, earn mayorships, and get discounts at local stores in the process. Yelp: provides crowdsourced reviews of local businesses. Now also provides check-ins, and offers. Groupon: provides discounted offers against a promise to increase sales and bring in brand new customers to local businesses. The interesting thing here is that there’s a lot of overlap between the features offered by these companies. Recently, Facebook launched Places, a mobile geo-location service that mimics Foursquare local check-ins. Yelp also added check-ins , and recently rolled out Yelp Deals , a Groupon clone. Considering that Local Commerce will be mostly mobile, one of these companies still must bring all of these features together, along with one-click payments (IMHO), to truly tap into the potential of all these disruptive technologies. In my mind, the ultimate product combines all these features in a mobile app. A user would launche the app, see what special deals are in her area (location + group buying), whom of her friends already bought the coupon/item (social graph), local reviews from friends (social graph + reviews), and then she could then buy the desired coupon in one click on her handset. She could walk into the local business with a discount code, barcode, or maybe at some point in the future, an enabled RFID tag, and redeem what she just bought. All of these companies, with the exception of Yelp, are at an early stage of their product development in this space. Facebook Places is lacking the gaming mechanics of Foursquare, the reviews of Yelp, and the local deals of Groupon. Foursquare is missing scale in its discounted offers. Yelp is missing the reach of the social graph, and the embedded payments. Groupon is lacking core social graph features that would give it better relevance through social shopping. So which one of these companies will succeed in unleashing the power of Local Commerce by combining the right set of features with the appropriate on-the-ground salesforce? My bet is on Facebook to be first. They have a large advertising sales organization that could reach out to local businesses, already are supposedly testing offers on Places, they have de-facto more distribution and social graph access than any of the other companies, and finally they are building a true payments platform. Groupon and Yelp also have a decent shot at it, but it will be tough to compete with Facebook’s distribution capabilities and ubiquity. In order to remain relevant, they will have to innovate and come up with original features. Foursquare’s future is probably going to be more challenging with more players entering their space, but it it could end up being bought (once again for founder Dennis Crowley) by Google, which is preparing to aggressively go after the local commerce opportunity. CrunchBase Information Facebook Foursquare Groupon Yelp Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Is Gulf Seafood Safe To Eat? Feds' New Test Says Yes, Not Convincingly | Top |
| More than 9,000 square miles of U.S. federal Gulf waters are closed to commercial and recreational fishing today thanks to the BP oil spill. However, government offices today claimed that seafood from the Gulf is basically safe to consume, based on the results from their latest battery of tests. You gonna eat that? Companies responsible for the environmental disaster spilled about 5 million [ Correction: in the original post, I wrote "gallons" and have corrected the typo ] barrels of oil, accidentally. They poured about 2 million gallons of oil dispersants into the Gulf waters on purpose, though. The dispersants were supposed to break up the wildlife-choking slicks into droplets that could be more easily digested by oil-eating bacteria. Or at least, they’d make the water look more like water and less like tar while the cameras were flying overhead. At the time of the spill, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) sent scientists to the Gulf to help with the oil spill cleanup. Even that federal office knew nothing about the dispersants’ likely impact on sea life or humans. USGS director Maria McNutt admitted to her office’s ignorance at last week’s 2010 PopTech conference . By May, the St. Petersburg Times reported, there were still no federal standards for how much dispersant could be present in seafood consumed by humans, a detail the paper confirmed with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) . Here’s what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) claimed in their joint press statement today regarding the safety of seafood in the Gulf, though: Building upon the extensive testing and protocols already in use by federal, state and local officials for the fishing waters of the Gulf, NOAA and FDA have developed and are using a chemical test to detect dispersants used in the Deepwater Horizon-BP oil spill in fish, oysters, crab and shrimp…. Experts trained in a rigorous sensory analysis process have been testing Gulf seafood for the presence of contaminants, and every seafood sample from reopened waters has passed sensory testing for contamination with oil and dispersant. Nonetheless, to ensure consumers have total confidence in the [emphasis added] safety of seafood being harvested from the Gulf, NOAA and FDA have added [a] second test for dispersant when considering reopening Gulf waters to fishing. Using this new, second test, in the Gulf scientists have tested 1,735 tissue samples including more than half of those collected to reopen Gulf of Mexico federal waters. Only a few showed trace amounts of dispersants residue (13 of the 1,735) and they were well below the safety threshold of 100 parts per million for finfish and 500 parts per million for shrimp, crabs and oysters. As such, they do not pose a threat to human health. The press statement follows an investigative report by English Al Jazeera about the dispersants’ impact on people and our environment that concluded: The Gulf has suffered the largest accidental marine oil spill in history. Compounding the problem, BP has admitted to using at least 1.9 million gallons of widely banned toxic dispersants… Dispersed, weathered oil continues to flow ashore daily… [Human] health impacts include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitization, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, genetic mutations, cardiac arrhythmia, and cardiovascular damage… One researcher studying the impact of dispersants in the Gulf, told Al Jazeera about dolphins— and people— hemorrhaging from too much dispersant exposure. Gulf residents showed off pieces of their boats that had been eaten away by dispersant-contaminated waters over just a short time. How could the new FDA-NOAA tests declare the seafood from the Gulf oil spill waters safe to eat in light of Al Jazeera’s (and so many others’) reports? [UPDATE: Readers requested clarification on "others' reports."] News organizations from MotherJones to the Washington Post and New York Times have run stories that examine the issue of dispersants’ toxicity in a similar light. According to the press statement, the government labs tested for traces of dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate, a.k.a. DOSS, a component of the dispersants used in the Gulf that’s approved by the FDA for use in various household products and over-the-counter medication at low levels. They didn’t test for the other stuff that’s included in Corexit 9500 the primary dispersant used by BP and still sprayed over the Gulf these days. [Update: further detail on ingredients in disperants.] The labs also didn’t test the toxicity of oil-and-dispersant combined. Corexit 9500 includes ingredients like propanols that are used in household cleaners (which one presumably shouldn’t eat) but it is less toxic than some other Corexit dispersants, which include the ingredient 2-butoxyethanol. These other Corexit dispersants were likely used in the immediate response to the oil spill. BP and Nalco— the company that makes Corexit— for some reason, haven’t revealed the exact ingredients of what they used, how much of it, and when in the Gulf waters. Nalco sticks to the message that it has only been “making” Corexit 9500 for Gulf responders since the start of the spill. Image via: U.S. Coast Guard 8th District, External Affairs CrunchBase Information British Petroleum Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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