The latest from TechCrunch
- Firefox On The iPhone? No (Though It Is Being Worked On). Another Mozilla Browser? Maybe.
- Search Etsy Listings By Color With Glancely
- How Much Did It Cost AOL To Send Us Those CDs In The 90s? "A Lot!," Says Steve Case
| Firefox On The iPhone? No (Though It Is Being Worked On). Another Mozilla Browser? Maybe. | Top |
| Continuing today’s theme of scouring Quora for interesting nuggets of information, a Q&A about Mozilla’s Firefox Mobile browser is of some interest. In response to the question: Will Firefox Mobile ever be released for iOS devices ?, Mobile Firefox developer, Matt Brubeck, this morning gave his answer. First, he gave the obvious and fairly well-known official answer, “ We have no plans to release the full Firefox browser for Apple iOS devices ,” Brubeck wrote . Why? Because the current iOS SDK agreement forbids apps like Firefox from including their own compilers and interpreters, Brubeck explains. But he continues on to note that there are a couple of ways to work within Apple’s system, notably what Skyfire is doing (using Apple’s own build-in WebKit libraries) or what Opera Mini is doing (using a proxy server to execute their JavaScript). “Mozilla could create a browser that did one of those things, but it wouldn’t be related to Firefox in any way ,” Brubeck explains. Mozilla does currently have a Firefox iPhone app, Home, but it does not include a browser for the reasons listed above. Instead, it lets you sync bookmarks and open tabs between your iPhone and the home computer. But Mozilla is also in charge of other browsers, notably Camino , which has long been a Safari and Firefox alternative on Mac machines. Might Mozilla consider releasing it as an iPhone app? If they did, it would have to be altered from its current state as it’s not WebKit-based (it, like Firefox, is Gecko-based). Or could Mozilla come up with an entirely new WebKit-friendly browser for the iPhone? It’s certainly possible, though it would still have to use the specific WebKit framework that Apple has built-in to iOS. Or, there’s always the jailbreak route. As Brubeck notes, some people have been doing work to port Firefox to iOS. Interestingly enough, his wording seems to imply that it actually might be Mozilla employees working on this. But as he continues, “ unless Apple removes these restrictions, Mozilla will not spend time and money on this project. ” So if they are working on it, they’re doing so off-reservation. “ The development would likely violate the SDK agreement, and it would not be distributable to non-jailbreak iOS users ,” Brubeck conclues. CrunchBase Information Mozilla Firefox iPhone Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Search Etsy Listings By Color With Glancely | Top |
| Let’s say you want to find that perfect quirky little black dress for New Year’s Eve? Like a mashup of Etsy , Flickr color search and Google Instant, Glancely lets you search Etsy visually, sorting instant results by color and by price so you can scan through multiple green knit caps or purple socks or whatever handmade items your heart desires. Hold your mouse over an item to get a closer look and click on an item to go straight to its Etsy profile. The most interesting thing about Glancely is that creator Davin Bentti plans to expand beyond Etsy, his ultimate goal being thousands of retailers and millions of products and searching. He is currently adding more upscale retailers like MacMall, Kidorable, GelaSkins, Scarpasa and Diamond.com and has BestBuy, FinishLine, Linea Pelle and PrincetonWatches in the queue, considering “pretty much anyone who has images big enough to use.” While TheFind and Milo also offer visual shopping search, the results are sometimes underwhelming from a visual standpoint. Says Bentti, “The concept of visual search results isn’t really being exploited the way I think it potentially could be and the technology is either there now, or will be soon.” Glancely is currently looking for seed funding. Aside from further expansion and product scaling, Bentti plans on eventually having a Glancely mobile app, visual input for search and potentially localized results. CrunchBase Information Glancely Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| How Much Did It Cost AOL To Send Us Those CDs In The 90s? "A Lot!," Says Steve Case | Top |
| Like most little kids, I used to love getting things in the mail. And in the 1990s, I was lucky enough to get something new every single day. Sadly, 99.9 percent of those were install discs from AOL. If you lived in the United States in the 1990s, you remember these. They started as 3.5-inch floppies and transitioned into CDs. And I’m not exaggerating. I got one just about every single day. You’ve got mail, indeed. If nothing else, it was ingenious marketing for AOL. While people eventually started bitching about getting spammed by the discs, most of those people probably also installed them at least once and checked out the service. So how much did that cost AOL? “ A lot ,” says CEO at the time, Steve Case . Case himself took to Quora recently to answer the question: How much did it cost AOL to distribute all those CDs back in the 1990′s ? Case says that he doesn’t remember the total amount spent on the discs specifically, but says that in the early 1990s, AOL’s goal was to spend 10 percent of lifetime revenue to get a new subscriber. He says that since the average subscriber life was around 25 months, revenue was about $350 off of each of these users. So he guesses they probably spent about $35 per user on things such as these discs. “ As we were able to lower the cost of disks/trial/etc we were able to ramp up marketing. (Plus, we knew Microsoft was coming and it was never going to be easier or cheaper to get market share.) When we went public in 1992 we had less than 200,000 subscribers; a decade later the number was in the 25 million range ,” Case recalls. In other words, the discs worked. Case also notes that the subscriber growth helped grow AOL from a market cap of $70 million at the time of their IPO to $150 billion when the marger with Time Warner occurred. I repeat, the discs worked. Well, at least until that merger turned into a nightmare and had to be dissolved. A move which paved the way for the new-look AOL to purchase TechCrunch this year . Another user on Quora looked over some numbers from the 90s and gave a more specific number for how much AOL spent on those discs: $300 million. Update : Jan Brandt, AOL’s former Chief Marketing Officer has now weighed in as well: Over $300 million :-) At one point, 50% of the CD’s produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it. We were logging in new subscribers at the rate of one every six seconds As a side note, it’s great to see people like Case — who is usually pretty candid — answering questions directly on Quora. Humorously, it was SGN founder Shervin Pishevar who actually asked the AOL question in the first place. How do we know? Because he emailed us about it, overjoyed that Case himself responded. He also sent us the following love note for Quora completely unsolicited: I think it’s very significant that people of influence are starting to flock to Quora as the authoritative place to communicate with the world in long form. Billionaire entrepreneurs like Steve Case (AOL) and Reid Hastings (Netflix) have already left important answers on Quora. Twitter is the leading place for short form broadcasting and short form blogging. Influential people are busy and don’t have the time to manage blogging on a continual basis and manage that community. Quora is quickly becoming the defacto community for such people to broadcast longer forms communications with the world and have it spread fast. We love Quora too. It leads to information like this . CrunchBase Information AOL Steve Case Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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