The latest from TechCrunch
- Live At The Barnes & Noble Nook Event
- Solar Millennium Gets The Greenlight To Build The World's Largest Solar Project In California
- Twitter Hits 300 Employees As The Search For A New Office Continues
- Why Use UberCab When Calling A Cab Is Cheaper?
- The Top 5 PC Alternatives To The MacBook Air
- Get Ready For Blekko: Public Launch On November 1
- Mertado Now Lets Developers Bake A Retail Store Into Social Games
- Google's Proposed ITA Deal Has The Online Travel Industry Crying, "No Fair!"
- PayPal Apps Launches With Merchants In Mind
- PayPal Unveils Micropayments For Digital Goods, Facebook Signs Up
| Live At The Barnes & Noble Nook Event | Top |
| We’re live and set up at the Barnes & Noble Nook event in New York. I’ll be updating this page in lieu of using our standard liveblogging software, mostly because it will be only one device this time – probably an LCD color Nook . Keep this page refreshed. | |
| Solar Millennium Gets The Greenlight To Build The World's Largest Solar Project In California | Top |
| The US solar market took another step forward this week with the federal government’s approval of Solar Millennium’s plan to build a massive thermal power station in Blythe, California. Located between Phoenix and Los Angeles in the arid Palo Verde Valley, this thinly populated city will soon be home to the world’s largest solar project. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management delivered the final greenlight, wrapping up a (relatively swift) year-long approval process. Technically, it is the government’s first approval of a parabolic trough power plant, which uses curved mirrors to direct the sun’s heat towards a pipe that contains a heat transfer fluid. The heat from this fluid helps create steam which ultimately powers a turbine Solar Millennium , a German firm, plans to build four plants on the expansive property with a total capacity of 1,000 megawatts— which is roughly on par with the country’s current total solar capacity. With 1,000 MW at completion, the station would be able to power more than 300,000 homes. The hope, the company says, is to start supplying the grid with electricity by 2013. In terms of regional economic impact, Solar Millennium predicts that the project will hire 1,000 people during the construction phase and 220 permanent workers (once its operational). In the meantime, there’s quite a bit of construction to be done which will require significant financing. In a press release, the company said it has secured enough cash for the first wave of construction, which could begin as early as this year, but acknowledged that it is heavily dependent on government incentives and pending loans. Speaking of the federal government’s approval, Solar Millennium’s CFO, Oliver Blamberger says, “This paves the way for the start of construction of the first two 242-MW plants before the end of the year…This is also good news for our advanced talks with the US Department of Energy on the loan guarantees for which we have applied. A successful conclusion of this process would secure more than two thirds of the financing volume of the first two planned power plants through the American Federal Financing Bank.” As we mentioned in a post on Monday, the US solar market is ramping up significantly, with capacity expected to grow roughly 30x over the next 10 years to 44G. But the capital intensive industry will need to continue to raise heaps of private capital (and benefit from generous government policies) to get there. CrunchBase Information Solar Millennium AG Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Twitter Hits 300 Employees As The Search For A New Office Continues | Top |
| This past June, we noted that Twitter had zoomed past 200 employees — basically doubling in just six months. The rapid hiring pace continues at the startup, though not quite as quickly. The company has just hired their 300th employee a tweet confirms today. And with that growth comes the need to expand. As we noted back in September, Twitter confirmed that at some point relatively soon they’d likely have to look at new office options. That search is getting close to coming up with a new place, we’ve heard. And they’re very likely to stay in the SoMa district of San Francisco. For their part, Twitter will only say they have “ no updates on this right now “. Digg layoffs aside, hiring seems to be booming in the tech space. Zynga is also about to open a new massive SoMA-based office that should accomodate up to 2,000 employees. As a side note, it’s sort of interesting that the tweet today highlights that Twitter “just” hit 300 employees when co-founder Evan Williams’ post back on October 4 pointed out the same number. We’ll assume “full-time” might be the key there. Perhaps the other number counted contractors/part-timers. We’ve reached out to Twitter to clarify. Update : Says Twitter: We had 300 full-time + contractors + interns at that time. Now we have 300 full-time employees. There you go. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Why Use UberCab When Calling A Cab Is Cheaper? | Top |
| Last week San Francisco car matching startup UberCab was served a cease and desist order by the city of San Francisco because it did not have taxi licenses or taxi insurance and went beyond the normal scope of a limo service by picking people up right away. As UberCab (which has now changed its name to Uber) serves primarily tech industry elite, there is much Internet debate over whether this is another case of “Innovation vs. Establishment” or a startup just straight up breaking the law. Perhaps someone in the San Francisco Metro Transit Authority or the Taxi Dispatch service should pay a visit to Quora, where the “Why would anyone use UberCab when you can just call 415-333-3333 and quickly get a cab for a much lower price? ” thread has reached epic proportions (with one Quora user reporting that a SF cab driver actually stole money from him). Perhaps the most amazing answer comes from Micheal Wolfe , the CEO of JoinWire , who hilariously breaks down the typical SF taxi user experience. Here is how it works: You call the number. You get a busy signal, or no one answers. You call again, nothing. You get a second phone, you dial Yellow on one and Desoto on the second and hit redial over and over again with both of your thumbs until one answers. Your wife grabs two more phones and does double redial. Finally it picks up. You wait on hold for 7 minutes. A dispatcher answers. He barks, “10 minutes!” then hang up on you (it is always 10 minutes). You wait 23 minutes with your grandma in the rain. You call back and repeat the redial/hold routine. You tell the dispatcher, your guy didn’t show. He says, “10 minutes!” and hangs up on you. 23 more minutes later you give up and go wander around the neighborhood hoping a cab randomly drives by. You are 53 minutes late for your event raising money for children with sarcoma. Your friends ask if you really do care about the children. 38 minutes later a taxi driver arrives and knocks on your front door. The babysitter answer and says you are not there. The cabbie screams at her and makes the kids cry. (And if a taxi does show, you get a guy driving like mad with the windows rolled down, cell phone in one hand, and radio blaring). “You wait 23 minutes with your grandma in the rain” is pretty much spot on here. Like in the case of Airbnb , UberCab in the fortunate/unfortunate position of being a catalyst for industry change. There’s something not quite right about regulations that allow for a dispatched cab to pick up another fare instead of completing its original transaction yet make it impossible for a service that has obvious consumer demand and puts idle drivers to work to continue its business. UberCab, which has $1.25 million in funding from First Round Capital, is still in operation, risking a $5,000 fee every time a cab gets sent out and threat of 90 days in jail per each day it’s still running. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for that Taxi Magic cab I called last Tuesday. Thanks: Matt Van Horn CrunchBase Information UberCab Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| The Top 5 PC Alternatives To The MacBook Air | Top |
| Apple raised the bar on ultra-portable computers with the latest MacBook Air . There’s no questioning that. Steve Jobs & Co. took the already-thin MacBook Air and shrunk down both its physical size and price tag. Win win, right? Well, yeah, but the MacBook Air isn’t for everyone. Good thing the PC world has been doing the ultra-portable thing just as long as Apple and offers some quality alternatives. Sure, there really isn’t one model that soundly beats the new MacBook Air in every category, but the same can be said about the Air versus the five computers listed after the jump. | |
| Get Ready For Blekko: Public Launch On November 1 | Top |
| Blekko , the shiny new search engine that we first started covering way back in 2008 when they had a hand puppet as their mascot , is preparing to launch. Next Monday, November 1, they’ll turn the lights on and let anyone in. If you’re really raring to get in at the first possible moment, the site will technically go live at 9 pm California time on Sunday evening. We’ve been testing it since July, along with 8,000 other people in the private beta (our beta review is here ). Unlike the massive failure that was known as Cuil , the Blekko team isn’t out hyping the site as a Google-killer. Rather, Blekko is being positioned as a place for people to create and share their own search engines based on trusted websites, and to get deep insights into SEO via a very transparent ranking system. Will you like it? During the beta period, the company says, about 11.5% of users stuck around and started using Blekko at least weekly. That’s a very high percentage of repeat usage for a new search engine. The targeted search engine feature is extremely useful, as you’ll see when the site launches. We’ll have a full launch review up on Sunday evening. The company has raised $20 million from a variety of investors, including Marc Andreessen and Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC. CrunchBase Information Blekko Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Mertado Now Lets Developers Bake A Retail Store Into Social Games | Top |
| Mertado , a social shopping site that launched in April, wants to give social game developers a new way to make money: by incorporating a virtual storefront into their games. Today the startup is launching a new widget that developers on Facebook can integrate directly into their apps, and it’s also offering support for embedding the storefront on publisher sites across the web. Mertado is a bit like a Groupon for retail goods — every day it presents you with a handful of items available at a discount price, with deals on things like digital picture frames, tote bags, and those As-Seen-On-TV gadgets that you’d never think of buying on your own but are actually pretty useful. The service has been available via a Facebook application and a Facebook Connect-enabled website (the company says its users are split around half and half between the two) and now it’s looking to increase distribution with the new widget. Once a developer has integrated the widget, Mertado entices gamers to go shopping using a tried and true technique: by offering them ‘free’ virtual credits whenever they purchase something through Mertado. Mertado features support for Facebook Credits (it says it’s the first retailer on Facebook with Credits support), and it can also work with alternative virtual currencies. When a user activates the Mertado storefront, they’ll see a widget overlaid on top of the game they’re playing. The whole shopping process, from selecting an item to checking out with a credit card, is done from this widget, so the user never gets kicked off to another page (which is good news for developers, who want them to stay engaged with their game). To help get the gamer interested, there’s a very QVCish video describing the product Mertado is currently selling — in fact, the company actually hired someone with QVC experience to do the audio for these, which is a nice touch. The embedded shopping widget will also work on publisher sites. Mertado isn’t the first to offer something like this (PayPal launched a shopping widget in 2007, and there have been a handful of similar startups). But Mertado says that it’s fairly unique because it isn’t simply promoting goods that are sold through another party — it manages the entire process, including fulfilling orders. So will this be effective? I think the answer will largely revolve around how good the products Mertado promotes are, and how well it can target them. Offers of free credits may be enough to get users interested enough to activate the Mertado widget, and it could also push them over the edge if they’re considering buying the latest gadget Mertado is hawking. But if the consumer doesn’t have much interest in the product to begin with, I don’t think promises of Facebook Credits will be enough to get them to make a purchase. Here’s a video walkthrough of how the widget works: CrunchBase Information Six Times Seven Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Google's Proposed ITA Deal Has The Online Travel Industry Crying, "No Fair!" | Top |
| Google’s proposed $700 million acquisition of flight data powerhouse ITA Software is running into some serious resistance from the online travel industry. A group of online travel companies including Expedia, Kayak, Travelocity, and TripAdvisor are lobbying the Justice Department to block the deal on antitrust grounds through an organization called FairSearch . Some of these companies were also behind competing bids for ITA Software which failed. Microsoft separately opposes the deal as well. ITA provides flight data, schedules, fares, and availability to many of these travel sites, airline sites and Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The FairSearch coalition argues that allowing “Google could use ITA to try to marginalize competitors in ways that raise prices for consumers and limit innovation.” They fear that Google will use its search dominance to steer traffic away from their own sites and favor flight search on Google itself. These fears are not completely unfounded. A lot is at stake here. Online travel is a huge business. It accounts for an estimated $80 billion in ecommerce sales, or 38 percent of all ecommerce last year (the biggest segment by far). It also contributed an estimated 6 percent of online advertising (and an estimated 8 to 10 percent of Google’s revenues). About two thirds of all travel plans start on a search engine, and FairSearch claims that more than 30 percent of all travel searches already start on Google. Getting this deal through the Justice Department will be a big test for Google. For its part, Google responds that it will honor all of ITA’s existing contracts, won’t sell airline tickets, and it plans to keep sending traffic to travel and airline sites. The reason Google wants ITA is because flight search is broken and needs fixing. But in order to fix flight search, Google will very likely try to keep people on Google longer before sending them off to a travel site. Just like the ITA-powered travel section of Bing today is a fully-functioning travel search engine until the last click to purchase, Google will likely move in a similar direction. The travel sites understandably don’t like the prospect of Google gaining even more control over their business. As I’ve written before, the ITA deal represents a huge shift in strategy for Google towards more vertical search and a possble move from cost-per-click (CPC) to cost-per-action (CPA) advertising. What if Google starts charging travel sites a CPA bounty based on each ticket purchased instead of just for every click it sends? Google would make more money under such a scenario, and the travel sites would make less—but only if Google has good enough data to know which flights to show which travel seekers. That is why Google needs to own ITA and all of its data. Does that raise antitrust concerns? Maybe. But it’s all hypothetical harm at this point. Only one thing is certain If Google gets this deal past the DOJ, you can expect a few more going after other online industry verticals, which in turn will change the Google search experience depending on the type of search you do. CrunchBase Information Google ITA Software Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| PayPal Apps Launches With Merchants In Mind | Top |
| Today, at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco, PayPal is releasing an embedded apps platform that will give PayPal developers a fully integrated set of small business, and buyer and seller tools that enhance PayPal’s payments platform. PayPal Apps allows developers to embed applications directly on the PayPal website and offer SaaS apps which enhance PayPal's services. It’s similar in theory to eBay’s apps for Sellers. The new platform, which is launching with a number of pilot partners today, will be released to the public next year. For example, shipping and order management startup Shipwire Anywhere has partnered with PayPal to gve developers a complete suite of shipping tools and multi-channel order management to manage their shipping without leaving PayPal. Other initial apps partners include Bill.com, CreditKarma, Expensify, Freshbooks, and Zuora are already building apps into PayPal.com. A marketplace will be launched next year. PayPal also announced a new product called PayPal Business payments, which allows businesses to receive any size payment for a flat 50 cent fee. Early partners using PayPal business payments include Bill.com, Expensify, Freshbooks, Harvest, Plastic Jungle, and Zoho. And PayPal launched its new micropayments product this morning, and announced Facebook as an initial partners. CrunchBase Information PayPal Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| PayPal Unveils Micropayments For Digital Goods, Facebook Signs Up | Top |
| At the company’s annual developer conference today, PayPal debuted its much awaited micropayments product. According to a release issued by the company, the new product is an “in-context, frictionless payment solution that lets consumers pay for digital goods and content in as little as two clicks, without ever having to leave a publisher's game, news, music, video or media site.” PayPal equates the product as the online equivalent of dropping a quarter into a game machine. Pricing is set at 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12, which PayPal says is lower than the fees typically charged by payment processors. For example, under standard PayPal pricing, a $1.00 transaction would incur a fee of $0.33. Osama Bedier, VP of platform, mobile and new ventures for PayPal says the product allows developers and merchants to get the revenue right away.With micropayment pricing, it would cost $0.10. While PayPal for digital goods will be available late fall this year, Facebook will soon integrate the new digital goods payment product. The company also announced a number of other partners including Autosport.com, FT.com, GigaOM, Justin.tv, Ooyala, Plimus, Tagged, Tyler Projects and Ustream. As we’ve written in the past, this product is huge for the payments industry because it can be used for an easier payments experience across a variety of industries, including gaming, online content and premium video. While the payments structure is slightly different than PayPal’s traditional take, this could bring in serious dough for PayPal considering the existing reach of the payments plaform. In 2009 alone, PayPal processed more than $2 billion in transactions for digital goods (out of $72 billion in total). In the first half of 2010, the company has processed more than $1.3 billion, and is in track to see $3 billion by the end of the year. In fact, over 50 percent of direct in-app transactions for virtual goods within social gaming environments are going through PayPal. The Facebook deal is pretty significant because there are a massive amount of micropayments that flow through the social network on a daily basis with Facebook Credits, gaming and more. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg made an appearance on stage at the event with eBay CEO John Donohoe, officially announcing the new partnership. Sandberg says that while PayPal has been one of the main ways to buy Facebook Credits, now developers can be paid by Facebook through PayPal. Facebook will integrate the digital goods payments product in the network soon. Bedier says that the new payments platform brings value beyond just gaming—he says that video, news, even TV could use the digital goods payments service. For example, Ooyala has started using the platform as a payments mechanism for premium content. The Financial Times says that it has 189,000 digital subscribers who pay for its online news content. The news publication is using PayPal for micropayments, subscription payments and more. PayPal also announced embedded payments, which allows developers to insert direct purchases on any site, including Facebook with only a few lines of code. So purchasers can just click the “Pay with PayPal” button and checkout without having to leave the page. The company demoed the product using a Payvment storefront on Facebook. One of the more interesting demonstrations was FourthWall Media’s demonstration of its TV “Buy Button” using PayPal. The button allows TV users to essentially buy products on TV using their PayPal account. CrunchBase Information PayPal Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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