The latest from TechCrunch
- "Apple Is Evil! Boycott The iPad! – Sent From My iPad"
- Blekko Bans Content Farms Like Demand Media's eHow From Its Search Results
- Deals Juggernaut Next Jump Hires a CFO, Looks To Add 100 Engineers In San Francisco
- Egypt Shuts Down Noor, Its Last ISP
| "Apple Is Evil! Boycott The iPad! – Sent From My iPad" | Top |
| Here we go again. It has been a few weeks since we had a story about how Apple is evil, or how the relatively closed system the fuels the iPad and iPhone will be the downfall of society. We were due. And tonight we got such a story. Maybe. Or maybe not at all. It doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that Apple is closed! Closed, I tell you! The empire is going to collapse any moment now. Tonight, The New York Times is reporting that Apple is “further tightening its control of the App Store”. How? Apparently, they rejected a Sony e-book reader app. Here’s the key blurb: The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store. While no one actually cares about the Sony eReader app, everyone is quick to jump on the Kindle angle here. This means the Kindle app on the iPad is dead, right? As my colleague Jason Kincaid wrote earlier , “ An alternative title, should the report prove accurate, could be, Apple Underscores The Downsides Of Its Closed Platform. Really, things look like they are going to get nasty. “ Here’s the thing: apps like this have actually never been allowed to sell their content within their apps. Instead, Amazon’s Kindle app dumps you out onto the web where you have to buy it. So there’s absolutely no difference there. Now, if Apple were to block the Kindle app from recognizing content bought outside of iTunes (through Amazon) that would be a change of policy. And yes, that would be very annoying. But it’s simply not clear if that’s the case yet. Again, here’s how NYT puts it, “ Apple rejected Sony's iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books bought from the Sony Reader Store .” Did Apple reject it because Sony was trying to let users buy e-books through their app (again, an old policy)? Or because it simply allowed them to access those e-books bought outside the app? Hard to say. Later, NYT specifically notes that this change in policy “could” affect Amazon’s Kindle app. But they only say it “may” change, and cite a Sony president on the matter — no one from Apple, no one from Amazon. Regardless, here are a few bigger picture items that everyone seems to be overlooking. If Apple really wants their iBookstore to succeed, playing hardball is inevitable. Right now, you can’t buy books within the Kindle app. The reason for this is probably twofold. First, since the purchases wouldn’t go through iTunes, Apple wouldn’t make its 30 percent in-app purchase cut. And second, Amazon still has a much better selection of e-books than Apple does. So allowing users to easily buy Amazon books through the Kindle app would be cutting their own product off at the knees. That’s not evil. That’s business. Apple could conceivable try to force Amazon (and others like Sony) to use iTunes for e-book in-app purchases — similar to how Facebook is now starting to force app developers to use their credit system. And who knows, maybe this even plays into their upcoming iTunes revamp that will allow for new models like content subscriptions. But would Amazon really play along and pay Apple 30 percent off of every sale? Probably not. Actually, that’s too weak. No way in hell, is more like it. Sony’s statement sounds as if that they were looking forward to taking advantage of the success of the iPad to bolster their own struggling e-book products. But it’s not like they can sell their books on the Kindle either. Instead, the Kindle exists so Amazon can move their own products. And no one is calling Amazon “evil” because of it. But the larger point goes back to what I poked fun at in the beginning of this post. There seems to be this desire to paint Apple’s relatively closed system as “evil” in some way. But the reality, of course, is that it’s not evil. If anything, it has just proven to be good business. In fact, one of the most successful business models ever. Once again we’re simply seeing that the case against Apple is just as much a case for Apple . The larger public simply doesn’t care about this whole open versus closed debate. And it doesn’t really seem like developers actually making the apps do either. But the press certainly seems to for some reason. We get so damn angry about things like this — when we read them on our iPads. Apple sold nearly 15 million iPads in just 8 months last year. Does anyone really believe the product is going to crash and burn this year? I can hear the masses, “You know, I was going to buy an iPad, if only they had accepted that Sony eReader app. Damn…” [photo: flickr/ atmasphere ] CrunchBase Information Apple iPad Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Blekko Bans Content Farms Like Demand Media's eHow From Its Search Results | Top |
| Blekko , the perky little search engine startup that lets you customize your search results, is taking the fight against web spam to a new level. It already allows searchers to mark results as spam and keeps a spam clock that counts how many spam pages are on the web (743 million and counting). Now it is about to block content farms like Demand Media’s eHow and Answerbag entirely. The top 20 sites its users have marked as a source of web spam will now be blocked (see full list below). Concerns are rising that spam is increasingly taking over search results. So much so that Google recently vowed to become more vigilant and downgrade content farms specifically in search rankings. Now Blekko is going to do one better and ban the worst offenders entirely. Here is the list of banned sites: ehow.com experts-exchange.com naymz.com activehotels.com robtex.com encyclopedia.com fixya.com chacha.com 123people.com download3k.com petitionspot.com thefreedictionary.com networkedblogs.com buzzillions.com shopwiki.com wowxos.com answerbag.com allexperts.com freewebs.com copygator.com Your move, Google. CrunchBase Information Blekko Demand Media Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Deals Juggernaut Next Jump Hires a CFO, Looks To Add 100 Engineers In San Francisco | Top |
| Groupon gets all the attention, but another deal juggernaut that should be on your radar is New York City-based Next Jump . The company runs group discount shopping programs for 90,000 corporations and organizations, and powers MasterCard’s loyalty rewards program. Investment bankers are sniffing around. Merchants offer deep discounts through Next Jump as a way to acquire new customers (read my initial profile for more info). Last November, Next Jump started to let people buy things with loyalty points as well. Its 60 million active shoppers are now spending 100 million loyalty points every month (each loyalty point is worth a penny, so that comes to $1 million a month). Before November, they were only burning through about 1 million loyalty points per month. CEO Charlie Kim believes that combining deep discounts with loyalty points is the best way to keep consumers coming back for more. Next Jump is on a hiring spree. It just hired its first chief financial officer, ex-Googler Angus Kelsall, who used to run Google’s international businesses in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Another new addition to the executive team is Andrew Beranbom (he once ran Yahoo Shopping), who will take on the roles of chief social officer and VP of products. It acquired Y Combinator startup Flightcaster for its talent and plans to hire about 100 more engineers in San Francisco, mostly mobile. They will work under Sandeep Gupta, Next Jump’s chief mobile engineer it nabbed from Yahoo last summer. Mobile shopping apps are going to be a huge area of concentration for the company this year. Next Jump CEO Charlie Kim derides most mobile shopping apps as either being meer extensions of websites (eBay and Groupon) or “built for the wrong audience—men not women.” He is looking to change that equation. CrunchBase Information Next Jump Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Egypt Shuts Down Noor, Its Last ISP | Top |
| We’re hearing reports on Twitter that the coverage of Noor Group’s DSL service, Egypt’s last standing ISP which powers the Egyptian Stock Exchange as well as sites of major brands like Coca Cola and Exxon Mobile, is being shut down, meaning the nation will lose nearly all the remaining high-speed links to the outside world. According to Jacob Applebaum the shut down is occurring in stages and certain sites are still online, “noor.net shut all except NTG, the National Technology Group providing IT processing to the aviation, banking and financial sectors.” The ISP’s website itself is offline. @ioerror Jacob Appelbaum It looks like our last terrestrial hope has been shut down; my connections to systems on Noor are all down. #egypt #jan25 about 11 hours ago via web Retweet Reply Effective Measure CEO Scott Julian confirms that the traffic from Noor has trickled to a halt and the last two ISPs are offline, “Effective Measure was recording active traffic from Noor coming in the hour of 11pm last night up until midnight Egypt time but from 12am onwards, we have no active sessions from Noor IP addresses and no data has appeared in the logs.” Julian also points out these connectivity blackouts happened around same time as the last batch and posits that this is a well organized effort. Dial-up is presumably still working as Google and Twitter have just launched a speak-to-tweet service at http://twitter.com/speak2tweet . Update: Internet Monitoring service Rensys is confirming the Noor shut down. Applebaum has tweeted out this graph of the current set of IPv6 addresses online in Egypt. Noor is not one of them. | |
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