Friday, February 25, 2011

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Vocus Buys Facebook Apps Maker North Social For $7M In Cash + $18M Earnout Top
Vocus , the publicly-listed provider of cloud-based marketing and PR software, has moved to acquire Facebook apps maker North Social , which enables businesses to create, manage and promote their business on the popular social network. Vocus bought substantially all of the assets of North Social. Under the terms of the agreement, Vocus paid $7 million in cash and could pay up to an additional $18 million over the next 24 months based on the achievement of certain milestones. North Social offers 19 Facebook apps delivered in a single self-service subscription, allowing businesses of all sizes to create engaging fan pages and fan experiences. The software basically allows users to set up custom Facebook pages in order to launch social media campaigns, integrate photos and videos, incorporate feeds from sites like Twitter and Yelp, offer sweepstakes, sign up volunteers and more. North Social says its software is used by over 1,300 organizations of all sizes and types, including major brands like Coca-Cola, Sony and Hard Rock Café. Under the terms of the deal, North Social's operations and staff will remain in Oakland, California. Earlier this month, Vocus acquired Engine140 , a social media recommendation engine that makes it easy for businesses to build their brand on Twitter and other social networks. The move in fact marks the fifth acquisition Vocus has made in the last 12 months or so. Increasingly, Vocus thus rivals Dachis Group , which has been snapping up Facebook apps makers and other social media companies left and right recently. Vocus meanwhile registered a significant loss of $821 million in the fourth quarter. Revenue rose to $26 million, compared with $22 million a year prior. CrunchBase Information North Social Vocus Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Scality Raises $7 Million For Enterprise Cloud Storage System Top
Fresh off the heels of Box.net raising $48 million , cloud storage startup Scality is set to announce next week that they’ve raised $7 million in Series B funding. The round was led by IdInvest Partners (formerly AGF Private Equity), with previous backers CAPE, Galileo and Scality CEO Jerome Lecat chipping in. Scality provides ‘storage-as-a-service’ solutions for enterprises around the globe. The company says it will use part of the proceeds to complement its San Francisco headquarters with an East Coast sales and services office in New York. Furthermore, Scality will step up development of its object-based storage platform, adding full multi-tenancy for service providers who want to offer virtual private clouds (VPCs). Scality's total investment to date is $13 million . The company claims its valuation doubled after the Series A round of funding secured in May 2010, thanks to the successful delivery of a complete email platform to cable operator Telenet for over 2 million users (coincidentally, I’m one of those). CrunchBase Information Scality Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Future Simple Raises $1.1 Million To Further Simplify The Life Of SMBs Top
For the past two years I’ve been holding onto the belief that Israeli entrepreneurs should devote particular focus on the opportunities available to products and services that cater to Small & Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs). Slowly but surely, more and more companies have indeed started targeting this space, the most notable being Kampyle , SohoOS , and Clarizen . Today, Chicago-based but Israeli-founded Future Simple is announcing a $1.1M round led OCA Ventures with participation by the I2A Fund , as well as angel investors. Founded in 2009 by Uzi Shmilovici, Future Simple has already launched two SMB products: PipeJump , a small business CRM, and QuoteBase , a project/job quote generator that is claiming thousands of users. The investment will be used to bolster the management team, market the current products, as well as develop additional ones. As an interesting side-note that proves yet again that startup entrepreneurship is (a wonderful) disease, Shmilovici was co-founder at Netcraft, an Israeli design firm that was acquired by a local portal last year. His co-founder at Netcraft, Joey Simhon, is today co-founder and CTO at Do@ , a stealth startup which Robert Scoble noted on Quora : “[the] first company since Siri that makes me think that search still can be greatly improved on mobile will launch a compelling new mobile search product.” CrunchBase Information Future Simple Information provided by CrunchBase
 
The Post-Optical Disc Era Gets Off To A Rocky Start With The OS X Lion Beta Top
If there was any doubt in peoples’ minds that Apple intends to kill off the optical disc , it was put to rest today. This morning’s unveiling of the OS X Lion Developer Preview came with the news that it would only be available one way: through the Mac App Store . And while Apple wouldn’t say if they intended to release the final version of Lion to consumers this summer in the same way, it’s pretty clear that they’re going to do just that. But this important push into the post-optical disc era hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for all so far. Since the beta was first put up for download this morning, angry developers have flooded Apple’s forums. Why? Because many can’t install the software. But it’s not a bug in the OS itself that’s preventing them from doing it, it’s a bug in the distribution method — the Mac App Store. In the past, when Apple has distributed test software to developers, they’ve done so through a website devoted to that. Once a developer entered their credentials, they could get access to a download link to get the software. But with the new method in place for OS X Lion, Apple had developers log in and get a special redemption code that they were told to use in the Mac App Store to get OS X Lion. For some, that worked just fine. But once a large rush of developers started hitting the Mac App Store, deployment slowed to a crawl. And at points, things were at a total stand-still, several developers tell us. Given the interest, that’s somewhat understandable, except for the fact that if the connection to the Mac App Store was interrupted, paused, or cancelled after the download had started, it then became impossible to download OS X Lion at all. This is apparently a bug in the deployment system. It seems that Apple is limiting downloads of the beta software installer to one machine. You can install the software on multiple machines, but you have to copy the installer from one machine to another manually. You cannot re-download it as you can with other software distributed through the Mac App Store. And once the one-time download starts, Apple apparently assume it’s going to finish and they cut you off from being able to resume or restart a download. Hence the swarm of angry developers unable to get access to Lion today. Clearly, this more strict distribution model is in place to prevent piracy and to ensure that regular users don’t move over to Lion before it’s ready to really show its stripes. But the situation today has been bad enough to lead many developers to question why Apple just didn’t stick with the old method for developer distribution. And it’s lead others to question the distribution method itself for such a high-scale roll-out. Presumably, by going this route today, Apple wanted to further test the CD-killing system they’ve spent time and money building. Up until now, it has run pretty smoothly since its launch in January. And Apple undoubtedly needed to test the ability to dish out huge software downloads via this method — things like the final build of OS X Lion. It’s definitely better that they get the bugs out now, rather than when consumers flood the store to get Lion this summer. I suspect we may end up seeing a hybrid launch this summer, with Apple using both DVDs in their retail stores/website and the Mac App Store to sell Lion. And perhaps Apple may even give those who decide to go the Mac App Store route, a discount. The one tricky thing about pure software distribution are system restores. Apple got around using an optical disc for this with the new MacBook Airs by using a USB stick. Perhaps they’ll include details on how to make your own such stick/disc if you download OS X from the Mac App Store. With talk of MobileMe and other retail boxes vanishing from Apple Store shelves, this software distribution method is clearly the future for the entire platform. But it’s a future that’s still a work in progress. CrunchBase Information Apple Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Google's Wizard Of Oz Search Algorithm And The Threat Of Facebook Search Top
Google search is powered by algorithms. Computers slice and dice data looking for signals that a web page is more or less interesting than other web pages for a given query. PageRank is a big part of this, where Google looks at inbound links to a site as well as the text relevant to that link. But Google also uses lots of other signals to determine the relevance of a web page. They have to, because PageRank on its own is infinitely gameable. If no one ever tried to game search results PageRank would work just fine. Inbound links are simply votes for various web pages. If you take the authority of the site linking into account, it makes for really good search results. That’s why Google was so great in 1999, when there was less incentive to game search results, and less expertise by the people doing it. But today all that’s changed. There’s a feeling that Google’s algorithm is falling further and further behind the very motivated people and companies out there fighting that algorithm. It’s an arms race, and Google is losing that arms race. Today we saw yet another algorithm change by Google, designed to fight some of the more annoying internet polluters - content farms and scrapers . The arms race continues. No Humans Involved! What fascinated me most today was Google’s insistence that they are not directly using the block data they crowdsource from their Chrome extension in determining search relevance. It's worth noting that this update does not rely on the feedback we've received from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which we launched last week. But then they talk about how the algorithm is coming up with very similar decisions anyway: However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits. The more I think about this, the more strange it seems to me. There’s a good explanation for not relying on that data – if they publicly said they did there would then be a huge incentive for SEOists to start to manipulate that block data, too. Forget linkfarms, just hire thousands of people on Mechanical turk to download the extension and block competitor’s sites. Another angle on the arms race. But I don’t think that’s why. Like the Wizard of Oz, Google hides behind their mighty and mysterious search algorithm. If good search was as easy as analyzing simple clicks of a mouse on a web page, all the magic could vaporize. And if you could somehow remove as much spam as possible from that data, and even slice it demographically, geographically and even personally for a given user, then things might really get sticky. Particularly if Google didn’t have access to any of that data. And Facebook did. One of the most interesting experiments going on in search right now is Blekko’s Facebook Like powered search engine . Search results and search relevance is determined by what your friends have “liked” on Facebook, a very deep store of data indeed. Facebook has more than half a billion users, and half of those log on every day. These people spend 700 billion minutes on the site and share 30 billion pieces of content. Links are being shared and people are clicking “like” to vote for that content. And it turns out that it all adds up to a pretty useful search engine experiment on Blekko. Imagine what Google could do with all that data and you start to understand why social is so darned important for them right now. Not to kill Facebook, but to try to neutralize the threat that the next great leap in search engine evolution doesn’t happen completely without them. A lot of the searches that Google is really bad at – commerce and travel, for example – can get really good really fast if you can look at deep data from friends about those very things. I don’t need pages and pages of results. Just a nice hotel in Paris that a friend vouches for. Or a movie I’ll enjoy. Or the right set of pots and pans. All that data is right there on Facebook. It may take Facebook a few years to really start to get interested in search. But there is so much advertising revenue in that business that they can’t ignore it forever. And that must scare Google more than just about anything else . CrunchBase Information Google Search Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Wordchuck's Shelly Roche On The Challenges Of Being "RV Profitable" [TCTV] Top
Offhand internationalization doesn’t seem like it should be a problem for websites, or at least it should be a problem that should be easy to solve. Well not so much,  at least according to  Wordchuck founder Shelly Roche. We brought Roche into the newly redesigned TCTV studio to talk about her efforts at automating translation (in over 20 languages!) for the Ruby on Rails community, what its like to not win a TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon as well as her future plans for the internationalization of web content, a project which evolved out of her own attempts to make localization less painful for her own personal development efforts. Workchuck received 100K of angel funding shortly after TechCrunch Disrupt, and Shelly’s been working on wearing multiple hats ever since, building a startup by herself  out of her 17-year-old 23′ Class C RV. Watch the video above to catch up with Shelly and get a taste of her “RV Profitable” adventure. You can also catch Shelly back in the day here , or in the Wordchuck walk through, below. CrunchBase Information Wordchuck Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Oops, Facebook Advertiser Gets A Mysterious Bill For $8.8 Million Top
Social ads on Facebook are supposed to be cheap. In fact, they are one of the cheapest ads on the Web in terms of cost per thousand impressions. So imagine Facebook advertiser Joshua Niamehr’s surprise when he logged into his Facebook ad campaign and saw the following notice: There is an outstanding balance of $8,804,978.14 USD on your account. Your ads will not be displayed until your account is settled. Please enter a valid funding source. When you submit that information, we will charge your funding source for $8,804,978.14 USD. Needless to say, he did not click “Make Payment.” Niamehr’s credit card had expired, which is why his account was delinquent. But his actual outstanding balance was $58.07, not $8,804,978.14. (He was placing ads to market his site LaundryLocal ). Facebook did eventually correct itself and showed the correct amount, to Niamehr’s relief. So was that $8,804,978.14 just a glitch. Niamehr thinks the number was too specific for it to be random. His theory: “I think this may be the outstanding balance across all or many of their accounts.” That’s just a theory. But if that’s true, it’s not an inconsequential amount. Maybe Facebook should get into social debt collection. It could offer Facebook Credits to friends of delinquent advertisers who shame them into paying their bills. CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Google Targets Content Farms With Major Search Algorithm Tweaks Top
Google made a substantial revision to its search algorithm today, the company says . And while no one in particular is being called out, it’s clear that the big losers are content farms and related spammy-content producers who have been having an absolute field day on Google over the last couple of years. 11.8% of search queries have been “noticeably” updated, says Google – meaning there have been changes in the top 2-3 results. Google is also making it clear that they have not used user data from a recent Chrome extension they released which lets users block specific sites in Google results that annoy them. Google is saying they’ve compared the data they’ve collected from that extension to the sites most impacted in the new search rollout. 84% of the most blocked sites via the Chrome extension were impacted, they say. What are those sites? Google isn’t saying. But the changes are designed to weed out low-value content, they say, such as content copied from other websites or non-useful content. That means sites like Demand Media, Associated Content and Mahalo are likely on the list. In a couple of months traffic data to those sites will likely confirm that they were impacted. In a post a couple of weeks ago I heavily criticized Google for lack of quality search results, particularly in certain categories like travel and commerce. It’s unclear if these changes will fix all that, but I’m keeping an open mind. And either way, the time when content farms dominated Google search results may be finally coming to an end. Cheers to that. CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Shervin Pishevar: "Twitter and Facebook are shields against future genocides" [TCTV] Top
With regime change in Tunisia and Egypt, and Libya’s uprising continuing apace, a growing number of commentators are hailing the influence of Facebook and Twitter in helping world-be-revolutionaries coordinate their actions. Earlier this week, SGN founder and angel investor, Shervin Pishevar tweeted that “Twitter and Facebook are shields against future genocides. Like new antibodies in the body of humanity” – which is pretty damn profound. So profound, in fact, that I brought him into the TechCrunch TV studio to explain himself. As an on-the-record skeptic of the role of social media in causing revolutions, I wanted to know how the “social media revolution” differs from previous communications revolutions. We also discussed how the Rwandan genocide might have been covered differently today, how the Internet can avoid being shut down by dictators and Pishevar’s involvement with Openmesh – a project that aims to use technology to keep communications channels open. Video below.
 
Hashable Brings It To SXSW, And The Android Top
Today in SXSW jockeying … Introduction service Hashable , which has the pretty ambitious goal of ridding the world of business cards, is announcing its Android offering and a slew of features just in time for the Interactive party event to end all Interactive party events, SXSW . In case the message wasn’t loud and clear, its also got a fancy SXSW set up on its site, so I guess its hoping to win the app Super Bowl or some other stupid sports analogy pertaining to being the app with the most SXSW usage. Aside from it now being available for nerds Android users (I kid! I kid!), the Hashable product team has taken a long hard look at what extra features would be useful to the drunken professionals at the conference and has bulked up its core functions of facilitating introductions through Facebook and Twitter, allowing you to search for them by tag and plotting your progress on the Hashcred leaderboard. Both the iPhone and the Android app now allow you to check into Foursquare though Hashable, and “Check-in w/Someone” has replaced the “Post a Connection” option on the app interface. Tapping on the location icon in the options view will bring up a list of venue options, and the checkin will be recorded on both apps provided you link the account in your Hashable profile. Hashable has also simplified its contact exchange function, known as “Just Met,” making it easier to connect with non-Hashable users by entering in their email addresses and Twitter names. The app can then send a “business card” with your contact info over email or Twitter, allowing you to add an optional message or share the connection internally within the app. The app also adds the person to your address book. “We think this will be the primary usecase for SXSW” says Hashable UX designer Oz Lubling about the cloud-based contact trading. “Hopefully everyone who uses our iPhone and Android app can return from south by with an address book of all the people they meet and where they met them.” Hashable, which builds your network by bringing in existing Hashable users from your address book and Twitter, is also taking a stab at its own version of a social graph with the new “Inner Circle” function, which brings up a stream of #intro and other activity of people you have invited into your circle, so you can see who they’re meeting and where. You can also now post connections when you’re offline, a major plus during the smartphone saturated conference. Interested users sign up for the Android beta here. The app should be available in the Android marketplace over the weekend. CrunchBase Information Hashable Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Disposables Debate: Can Recycling, Materials Innovation Make Plastic Bag Bans Obsolete? Top
Single-use plastic grocery bags, and the various fees, taxes and bans proposed to curb pollution from their disposal, are causing controversy again this week. A newly surfaced study, still under peer review, suggests that disposable bags aren’t as bad for the environment as re-usable cotton bags. The study —  The Life Cycle Assessment of Supermarket Carrier Bags by Dr. Chris Edwards and Jonna Meyhoff Fry — was done for a government environmental agency in the UK. As reported by Martin Hickman for The Independent its authors found: “[By] assessing pollution caused by extraction of raw materials, production, transportation and disposal…an HDPE plastic bag would have a baseline global warming potential of 1.57 kg Co2 equivalent, falling to 1.4 kg Co2e if re-used once, the same as a paper bag used four times (1.38 kg Co2e). A cotton bag would have to be re-used 171 times to emit a similar level, 1.57 kg Co2e.” These results make it seem like a shopper would have to use a cotton bag 171 times or more before displacing the equivalent environmental impact of one plastic bag. Contextualizing studies that make disposables look downright green, however, environmental researcher Susan Freinkel — whose book PLASTIC: A Toxic Love Story will be out in April — told TechCrunch (via email): “If energy is a top concern, then plastic bags do come out with a nicely ‘green’ profile. But that’s not the only measure of a bag’s environmental impact. Plastic has one big downside: it persists in the environment…Unlike paper or cotton, it doesn’t biodegrade. It only breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces. Persistence is a big deal if you’re concerned about pollution and the health of wildlife. Plastic bags can clog storm drains, which was why Mumbai, among other places decided to ban them. [They] are one of the top categories of beach debris collected in international beach clean-ups every year, according to the Ocean Conservancy’s annual beach clean-up reports. Wildlife often mistakes plastic bags for food and can choke on [or get entangled in] them— from camels in Dubai to sea turtles in the Pacific.” While startups like EcoLogic LLC are trying to get plastic manufacturers to make their materials less persistent, using high-tech additives and processes, several industry players want to increase plastic bag recycling programs. Unfortunately, though plenty of municipalities and retailers collect plastic bags and polyethylene film for recycling in the U.S. today, it’s still not available everywhere, according to website of the American Chemistry Council (a strong opponent to regulating plastic bags). Hilex Poly — a corporation that both makes and recycles massive amounts of plastic bags — created a legislation tracker via GoogleMaps to protest bag bans and promote recycling instead. Waste reduction has proven significant in cities and countries where bags have been banned and taxed: Ireland saw a 90 percent reduction in disposable plastic bag use post-regulation the BBC reported ; and San Francisco lowered plastic bag waste citywide by about 20 percent according to the SF Environment Department . [Ed's note: If you know of any recycling initiatives that produced similar results, we'd like to hear about them. Send research to tips@techcrunch.com noting "green tech" in the subject line. ] Sustainable packaging and bioplastic companies have joined both sides of the debate. Metabolix , a company that spun out of MIT in the 1990s and now makes renewable crop-derived plastics, along with the Biodegradable Products Institute and many others opposed legislation that would have banned free, disposable plastic bags at large retail outlets in California, for example. Meanwhile, Cereplast sees regulation as a market opportunity. In January this year, the bioplastic company issued a press statement noting: “Stores in Italy alone use approximately 20-24 billion plastic bags a year, which accounts for one-fifth of all European use. This is the equivalent of a potential $1 billion bioplastics market in Italy as manufacturers now have to replace traditional plastic with environmentally-friendly materials.” Will reusables always trump throw aways when it comes to environmental concerns? Or could clean tech and sustainable packaging innovators give us a net zero, single-use bag? It’s not a material issue, says Freinkel, behavior and context matters too. She wrote: “Comparing the environmental impacts of different type of bags diverts away from the real issue here, namely that the problem isn’t so much the material a bag is made from as the way in which the bag is used. Single-use bags made of any material are a waste of valuable resources. Both paper and plastic single-use bags involve using finite and precious resources that took decades, in the case of trees, and hundreds of millions of years in the case of oil or natural gas to make, to produce something we use for the 15 minutes it takes to get from the grocery store to our front door. Reusable bags are a step away from that throwaway mindset. As long as it can be used over and over, a reusable bag of any type is the best, most sustainable choice.” Images: Infographic, via 2009 International Coastal Cleanup, Ocean Conservancy Plastic bag in branches, via Katerha CrunchBase Information Metabolix Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Apple Has Significant Head Start With Thunderbolt, But Not Exclusive Top
Intel’s new Thunderbolt interface, which made its debut this morning in an upgrade to Apple’s MacBook Pro line , may be effectively an Apple exclusive for quite some time, according to Intel. At their press release, held shortly after Apple’s update when live, Intel noted that the developer kit for the interface would be provided to other computer manufacturers this spring, and that they didn’t expect OEMs to ship with Thunderbolt until 2012. It’s not exactly an exclusive, but it’s close. That’s a pretty big coup for Apple — assuming Thunderbolt catches on faster than USB 3.0, and has no problems and plenty of applications. It’s actually a lot to assume, and although Apple is definitely a winner here, there are also some risks involved. Continue reading on CrunchGear…
 
What Losing TechCrunch Disrupt Meant to CloudFlare: OMFG Top
Editor’s Note : The following guest post is by Matthew Prince , CEO of a CloudFlare , which came in as a close runner-up at the last TechCrunch Disrupt . We asked him to give us an update on the startup since Disrupt. It’s hard to imagine a web performance and security service “going viral,” especially one Mike Arrington described during the Disrupt awards ceremony as “Muffler Repair for the Internet,” but a glance through our  Twitter feed gives credence to one of Silicon Valley’s axioms: if you make a great service that solves a real problem, users will come. And come they have! While I have to confess our engineering team was initially bummed about losing to a demo of a website that could read Wikipedia articles aloud , I’m happy to report that they’ve channeled any frustration into building an incredible service that improves the lives of millions of web users every day. A quick snapshot of the four months since our Disrupt launch : Tens of thousands of websites have signed up with CloudFlare to be faster and more secure We grew from a trickle of traffic to powering more than  1.2 billion monthly page views in January Nearly 3% of the Internet’s users (approximately  50 million unique monthly visitors ) passed through our network last month By making sites faster (a 40% performance boost on average) we’ve helped Internet surfers collectively  save nearly 1,000 years worth of time And we’ve  stopped nearly 600 million attacks launched against our users’ websites We’ve done no additional PR, marketing, or outreach since Disrupt and yet every day hundreds of new websites  sign up for CloudFlare . From the Disrupt stage, we reached an incredible number of users worldwide. Today, the websites on the system span the globe from San Francisco (where CloudFlareis headquartered), to Accra (where we power the Official Government Portal of the Nation of Ghana), to Islamabad (where we power the Pakistani version of the IRS). We power sites for actors ( Michael Rooker ), popular bands ( Counting Crows &  Jack Johnson ), and ecommerce shops like the one belonging to  Lisa Freede . Lisa is a jewelry designer who was featured on  The Today Show earlier this week. We’re proud that CloudFlare kept her site online and taking orders in spite of the staggering traffic generated by her appearance on the show. Beyond introducing CloudFlare to the world, TechCrunch Disrupt was the event that really brought our team together. We actually launched the service live on stage in front of thousands of Silicon Valley’s thought leaders. That’s pressure. Nothing motivates better than a little fear, and knowing we would soar or crash in front of a live, influential audience had us all cranking for the months leading up to Disrupt. Even as I was back stage, the CloudFlare engineering team was in the audience with a list the final 27 bugs that needed to be fixed. I watched our IM channel as our team banged through the problems. When Michelle and I stepped on stage, they were down to 8. By the time we stepped off, they squashed the last few, flipped the switch, and we were live across five data centers on three continents. No one on our team will ever forget the experience. If you’re a startup thinking of launching at Disrupt, that’s the only way to do it. You may not win the trophy, but you’ll receive something else far more important. Our team is growing fast, we have a new office in downtown San Francisco, and we all still come to work each day excited to solve real, meaningful, hard problems. While we may just be doing “Muffler Repair for the Internet,” it turns out the Internet’s muffler is broken and needs fixing. And, as you’ll see from the video below, we’re having a great time while getting that done. CrunchBase Information CloudFlare Matthew Prince Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Singing The Blues: MySpace Music Loses Nearly Half Its Audience, And Its President Top
Remember MySpace Music ? It was supposed to put online music streaming on the the right track . But with all the layoffs , shrinking audience and turmoil at parent MySpace, MySpace Music is singing the blues. According to comScore, only 17 million people in the U.S. visited MySpace Music in January, 2011, which is down 46 percent from the previous year. Pandora is now bigger on the Web, with an estimated 20.3 million monthly U.S. visitors. Today, MySpace Music president Courtney Holt is stepping down. He joined two years ago from MTV. But with MySpace itself on the wane and Rupert Murdoch looking to unload it , MySpace Music can no longer hold its own. Below is the internal MySpace email Mike Jones sent to employees announcing Holt’s departure. No replacement was named, instead Jones will be adding MySpace Music to his responsibilities. From: Mike Jones Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 10:44 AM To: Myspace All Subject: Organizational Update Myspacers, I wanted to let everyone know that Courtney Holt's role in the company will soon be changing. Over the next several weeks, he will be moving from being the President of Myspace Music to becoming a key advisor to both Myspace and Newscorp. Courtney will provide guidance on the strategic direction of Myspace Music and lend his incredible depth of experience, industry expertise and creativity to Myspace and Myspace Music. Additionally, Courtney will continue to serve on the board of Myspace Music. Sam Wick will now oversee all of marketing for Myspace and operationally I will be taking over as the interim president of Myspace Music. Please let me know if you have any questions about these changes. CrunchBase Information Courtney Holt MySpace Music Information provided by CrunchBase
 
WITN: Is It Racist To Say That Chinese Manufacturing Leads To Low Quality Goods — And Fraud? [TCTV] Top
Earlier this week, CrunchGear’s John Biggs sparked controversy (within TechCrunch ranks at least) with a post entitled “ Alibaba And The Curse Of Chinese Manufacturing “. In the post Biggs wrote (amongst other things) that… “Many decry the sad state of American manufacturing but these [Chinese] companies still sell billions in janky garbage that washes up here in huge containers and is sold throughout our 50 great states and, more important, the rest of the developed and developing world.” Gosh. He added… “I was not surprised to hear that the CEO and those Alibaba employees were taking cash from criminal gangs to receive "gold ratings" on their products. This only makes sense. In an unfettered market, the unfettered will push their way to the top.” So that’s how John Biggs feels about Chinese manufacturing companies, particularly those who sell on Alibaba. As Biggs was keen to point out, he has visited China, so this isn’t just a protectionist rant from a xenophobic American. But here’s the thing: Sarah too has traveled to China. Quite a few times. In fact she just wrote a book (partly) about the country’s growing technology manufacturing industry. And on TechCrunch’s internal Yammer discussion platform she called Biggs out – even going so far as to accuse him of veering towards racism. Biggs responded that, if she disagreed so strongly, Sarah was welcome to write a rebuttal. Instead we decided to head to the TCTV studio. In this week’s Why Is This News, we discuss whether Biggs had a point or whether… well… watch the video and see. … Update: John Biggs has responded in the comments… “I wasn’t given the option of being on TCTV this time so I’ll rebut here. My line of thinking is this: Chinese manufacturers are forced BY OUR OWN DESIRE for a deal to make things as cheaply as possible. I don’t blame them. In a very many cases, a Chinese-made product can be well-made, environmentally friendly, and ISO-compliant. This is an absolute fact. HOWEVER, sites like Alibaba allow people with very little interest in those aspects of quality to find providers who are equally lax. The result is junk that gives China a bad name. THIS is my point, not that all Chinese manufacturing sucks. Sarah believes I’m playing into stereotypes but she and I both know using stereotypes are not how I argue. I find it delightful that the same people who call for blood when it comes to Foxconn’s practices will rail against me for slighting Alibaba, a site that connects sellers of junk with buyers of junk. A real manufacturer goes to China, makes relationships, and builds a product and I’ve met a few of those people. He or she doesn’t find a cheap tablet/laptop/whatever, rebadge it, and sell it as the latest thing. There is more to selling an object than swiping a credit card. Sarah focuses on business and people. She found it offensive that I called out a CEO. Fine. I’m sure he’s a charming guy with a house and kids. So am I. Howeever, I focus on technology, on physical things that clutter our homes and planet. I’ve seen to much garbage in various countries and places to defend the peddlers of this trash. Crap is made everywhere, to be sure, but surprisingly it is TOO EXPENSIVE TO MAKE CRAP OUTSIDE OF CHINA, which hinders the trade. Maybe Alibaba’s original mission was to make it easier for the next Ron Popeil to make is pocket fisherman. It isn’t anymore.”
 
Glam Media To Launch Third Content Vertical, Health And Wellness Channel Bliss.com Top
Glam Media , one of the largest publishing and advertising networks on the Web, is revealing its third branded content channel today: health-focused Bliss. Bliss, which will be a content hub of health and wellness sites, joins male-focused vertical Brash and womens entertainment, style and fashion channel Glam.com . Glam’s networks currently have a total reach of 90 million people a month in the U.S and 200 million monthly visitors globally. Glam says that traditional health and wellness sites (i.e. WebMD) have more narrowly focused on more medical and condition-related topics and are missing the opportunity to reach a wider audience with the prevention and wellness angle. Bliss’ content will include information about diet and nutrition, empowerment, alternative healing, green living, exercise, fitness, parenting, pregnancy and more. Bliss will also pursue a more social angle to health and wellness and will aim to connect and engage women in a community around these issues. While Bliss.com’s content will sway towards women, it won’t exclusively focus on women’s issues and content (as is the case with Glam.com) and will feature select male-oriented information. The Bliss Community by Glam will launched to the public later this spring and Glam’s CEO Samir Arora tells us that the company plans to roll out other verticals in 2011. Glam’s move into health and wellness content isn’t surprising. Back in 2008, Glam was reportedly in talks to merge with AOL founder Steve Case’s health portal Revolution Health. And the demand for health and wellness online content is on the rise. According to a Pew Internet & American Life survey from 2010, eight in every ten internet users have looked online for health information, and the number of Americans who get exercise and fitness information online has grown by 88% since 2002. Not only is there the tremendous opportunity to reach a greater audience but Glam will also appeal to a new set of advertisers in these segments. 2010 was a busy year for Glam, which launched a brand-targeted ad serving platform, Glam Adapt , and branched out from its singular focus on women’s sites to include men’s sports sites as well. The company also made a number of key hires and is pushing a social strategy. And if the IPO reports are true, Glam will have a big 2011 as well. Industry sources tell us that investment banks have been actively courting Glam for a potential public offering. And the tech IPO market is heating up, with Skype, LinkedIn, Pandora and even possibly Facebook, gearing up public offerings in the next year. CrunchBase Information Glam Media Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Instagram Unveils Realtime API With Foodspotting, Fancy, Momento, Flipboard, About.me And Others Top
It really is kind of amazing that Instagram has shot past two million users in just a few months with only an iPhone app. No Android app, no website, no real third-party support. But starting today, that changes as they’re finally ready to unveil their API. And they already have some pretty nice implementations right off the bat to show what it can do. Co-founder Kevin Systrom says that it would have been easy enough for them to implement a simple API early on, but they didn’t want to do that (that’s why you may have heard about one developer getting unofficial access shut off ). Instead, Instagram decided they wanted to make an API that was both massively scalable and provided a realtime feed of everything going on across the service. Today, they’re unveiling this realtime API for four different elements of Instagram: user photos, tags, locations, and geographies. Here’s how Instagram describes each: 1) Users of the developer’s application: every time a user of an Instagram-linked application posts a photo, the developer’s application will receive a notification. 2) Tags: An application can track a given tag and receive updates every time a new photo is posted with a given tag. 3) Locations: Every time a new photo is geo-tagged with a specific location, the developer will receive a notification. 4) Geographies: Sometimes individual locations are too specific. For these cases, we suggest subscribing to Geographies. Geographies consist of a latitude and longitude and a radius. This allows developers to subscribe to a given area like Austin or a specific city block of Manhattan. Once a developer signs up for the API , they can choose which of these to implement. And Instagram has set up a demo site to give an example of what subscribing to certain geographies and getting updates in realtime looks like. But you can actually see the API in action elsewhere on the web and in apps already. Today, fashion photo sharing service Fancy , food picture sharing service Foodspotting , and cloud storage service Dropbox all have implementations up and running. A service like Foodspotting taking advantage of Instagram’s API makes a lot of sense. Anyone who uses Instagram will know how many people take pictures of food. And now once they link up to their Foodspotting account, if they simply Instagram a food photo with “#food” or “#foodspotting”, Foodspotting will find it and add it to your feed of food. The Dropbox integration is interesting because it matches a feature that rival PicPlz has, but was built by an independent developer simply using both the Instagram and Dropbox APIs. Also launching today is Instagram integration with Momento , the awesome iPhone digital diary app we covered a while back. And coming shortly will be Flipboard and About.me integration as well, Systrom says. But those are all existing service using the API. A new service, Instagre.at , has also popped up as a great web viewer for Instagram that was built from scratch. Systrom says that some 2,000 developers have already signed up for access to the API. That should explode starting now. I give it maybe a day until we see the first third-party Android app. One caveat: for now, the API is read-only. CrunchBase Information Instagram Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Mark Cuban-backed 140Fire Lets You Create Real-time Overlay Ads For Your Video Content Top
Launching today is 140Fire.com , a Y Combinator-backed platform that allows advertisers, publishers, and media buyers to create interactive ad content and polls to overlay on streaming or pre-recorded video. What does this mean? As you can see in the image above, 140Fire’s real-time editor allows BMW (in this case) to create and serve questions based on what’s happening in the video. Here, in the depths of March Madness, Brian Zoubek has just stepped to the line to shoot a few free throws, so the ad asks viewers “how many free throws will he make?” Like most video ads, the ads will appear as a small bar on the bottom of the screen, but unlike those of its ilk, they allow viewers to remain in the content, answering polls while continuing to watch the video. According to Founder Jason Wilk, this allows brands to collect data on what viewers are thinking in real-time and monetize those high-interest points in video content. 140Fire can then serve up post-roll ads based on viewers’ responses to the polls. As another example, say you’re watching Mad Men, a show that features its fair share of office drinking (and thus a perfect platform for alcohol-related advertising). Because 140Fire’s advertising is content specific, they might feature an ad from GreyGoose that polls users on their different personality traits in order to come up with the type of GreyGoose cocktail they would most enjoy. You could then check out which of your friends like GreyGoose and were matched with the same drink. 140Fire enables this by using Facebook Instant Personalization , making it one of the first sites of its kind to integrate with Facebook’s new feature. As Instant Personalization takes public data (what you’ve set to “Everyone”) from your account to “personalize” its partner sites (140Fire joins Pandora, Bing, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, among others), some have expressed concerns over how this will affect individual user privacy. I, for one, don’t find it particularly threatening, but Facebook could certainly do a better job of explaining how exactly third party sites will use your personal information. 140Fire was founded by serial entrepreneurs Jason Wilk and Paras Chitakar. Since its founding in January 2010, the startup has added Scott Shumaker and Ryan Evans to their roster, the core team behind Flektor . Flektor was acquired by Fox Interactive in 2007 for $20+ million after building a suite of user-friendly content generation tools, including a full-featured online video editor. According to Wilk, Flektor’s technology applies directly to the backend of 140Fire, as it allows for the scaling of simultaneous results and automatic ad creation. The company is entering a space already occupied by big video advertisers like Tremor , ScanScout , and Kit . But by providing an editor that allows you to easily create interactive ads and publish straight through your ad server or network, 140Fire hopes to separate itself from its competitors. Recruiting heavyweight investors into the fold helps the cause, too. Today, 140Fire announced that feisty serial entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban will be its lead investor. Robert and Jonathan Kraft , the father and son owners of the New England Patriots and Kraft macaroni fame, and Skip Paul , former SVP of Atari, were also added as investors. Technology is bringing us closer and closer to a highly personalized, real-time advertising experience. Some may find this a bit creepy, maybe a bit intrusive, but I say bring it on. Though 140Fire’s technology may not be quite as applicable to static video like Hulu, it may very well make live events (like Dancing With the Stars) a more interactive (and interesting) experience. CrunchBase Information 140Fire Information provided by CrunchBase
 
PayPal On Cutting Off Courage To Resist: "This Has Nothing To Do With WikiLeaks" Top
photo © 2007 Anh Thai | more info (via: Wylio ) Last time we checked in with PayPal, it, along with MasterCard, Visa and others had blocked its services with regards to donations to WikiLeaks foundation. Today it is being reported that PayPal has taken further action against another WikiLeaks-related fund, in freezing the account of the Courage To Resist foundation which, in conjunction with the Bradley Manning Support Network, gives donations to the Bradley Manning legal defense fund. The imprisoned Manning is allegedly the source of the US Embassy cables leaked by WikiLeaks. In a phone call earlier today, PayPal representative Anuj Nayar told me that this action is not WikiLeaks related and that PayPal has only temporarily restricted the fund, “This has nothing to do with WikiLeaks.” Courage To Resist and PayPal are still in talks, and according to Nayar the former is infringing against PayPal’s policy on 501 (3) (c) non-profits, which hold that a non-profit needs to have a bank account associated with their PayPal account. “For the vast majority of none profits this is not an issue,” says Najar. Nayar also takes up CTR’s claim that PayPal would not un-restrict the account unless CTR authorized PayPal to withdraw funds from the checking account by default, “We can’t do that without the authorization of an account holder, so a) We can’t do it b) We don’t do it c) Even if we did the bank would resist the charge.” So why make this a WikiLeaks issue? “That’s a question for them,” he says. The company’s official statement, below: “Today’s temporary limitation of the Courage to Resist organization’s PayPal account is due to PayPal regulations requiring non profits to associate a bank account to their PayPal account. It is nothing to do with Wikileaks. Back in December 2010, we permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We've notified the account holder of this action. This is not the case with Courage to Resist” Update: PayPal has posted a longer statement on their company blog. CrunchBase Information PayPal WikiLeaks Information provided by CrunchBase
 
CrunchBoard Jobs: TechCrunch Is Hiring Top
Would you like to be a Product Lead for TechCrunch? How about a Sales Marketing Manager? Maybe an Executive Assistant? We have positions open and we are currently looking for qualified applicants. If you would like to work for TechCrunch, please find current job listings below: Product and Engineering: Rails Developer – San Francisco, CA TechCrunch Product Lead – San Francisco, CA CrunchBase Manager – San Francisco, CA Sales & Operations: Ad Operations Manager – San Francisco, CA Sales Marketing Manager – San Francisco, CA Conferences & Events: Conference Program Chair – San Francisco, CA Executive Support: Executive Assistant – San Francisco, CA There are also many other job listings available for other companies. Some other jobs currently available on CrunchBoard include: Senior PHP Engineer – Onswipe – New York City, NY Product Manager, Advertising – Polyvore, Inc. – Mountain View, CA Android Developer – Eveo – San Francisco, CA
 
What Do You Want To Know About The Xoom? Ask Me Tomorrow Live Top
I have the Motorola Xoom here in my hot little hands and I put it through its paces over the past few days and I’d love to demonstrate and explore the device with your questions in mind. What I’m planning is a 12pm Eastern/9am Pacific LIVE STREAM for one hour TOMORROW Friday, February 25, answering the questions you have about the device and going through some of the screens. You’ll also be able to ask me questions via chat and Twitter. Read more…
 
Social Fundraising Site Fundly Raises $2 Million of its Own Top
Today, social fundraising platform Fundly announced that it had closed a $2 million seed funding round led by a group of Silicon Valley investors. Using AngelList , a marketplace that makes it easy for startups to connect with angels, Fundly assembled a laundry list of reputable investors, including Mitch Kapor and Stephen DeBerry of Kapor Capital, Trevor Kienzle of Correlation Ventures, George Zachary of Charles River Ventures, and Jeff Fluhr of AngelHub. Fundly, formerly known as BlueSwarm, adds to the $800,000 it raised back in July from a group of individual investors, including Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen. You can read our coverage of the initiation of the first round (and watch TC’s interview with CEO Dave Boyce) here . Founded in Boston in 2009, Fundly is a SaaS platform that aims to give your political campaign, your university’s alumni office, or your non-profit that extra boost by making your fundraising social. It does this by leveraging your social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn — as well as peer-to-peer interaction — to encourage your donors to become social advocates. As part of this effort, Fundly offers a Facebook app that can be shared among your supporters, for example, allowing donors to compete with their friends to raise money for your cause, work to earn rewards, invite their friends, tell friends about support for cause, and give and receive virtual goods — all without leaving the comfortable confines of Facebook. According to CEO Dave Boyce, when a friend asks another friend to help raise money for a particular cause, the added trust inherent in that social dimension results in a 10-times higher response rate and 52% higher donation than a cold call or email. Traditionally, fundraising has been the domain of professionals, who target and reach out to high net worth individuals to meet their goals. The 2008 presidential election, in contrast, provided ample evidence of the huge fundraising opportunities that exist beyond the social elite, even if those donations happen to come in smaller numbers. During her run for governor last year, for example, Meg Whitman raised more than $20 million from thousands of Californians using Fundly’s platform. What’s more, the service was used in more than 50 percent of senatorial races during the past political season and has already been used to raise more than $200 million from hundreds of thousands of individual donors, according to Boyce. Causes.com , founded by Sean Parker and Joe Green , is a well-established competitor with big-name recognition behind it, but Boyce said that the two sites differ in their target audience. Causes seems to be aimed more at individuals seeking to make a difference (their site says they’ve already attracted 140 million of these individuals) and create awareness around particular issues, whereas Fundly’s customer is the non-profit itself. You can think of Causes.com as Web 2.0 applied to advocacy, while Fundly is a SaaS platform — a product that offers its clients the tools they need to collect data and view detailed reports about their donors. Since its launch, Fundly has moved beyond political campaigns and is now offering its service to all non-profits. Educational institutions have been among the most recent converts, including Boston College, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Communities In Schools, and the Silicon Valley Education Foundation. Perhaps the biggest selling point for the social fundraising platform is that it doesn’t require you to install any software — nor does it require any costs upfront, you simply pay as you earn money. So, if you’re looking for an easy way to process payments and record pledges online in real-time, or send automated payment reminder and confirmation emails in a socially optimized setting, Fundly may just be what you need to launch your campaign for Town Crier. More about Fundly in the video below: CrunchBase Information Fundly Dave Boyce Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Android Market's Web Store Gets Bookish Top
Earlier this month Google launched the web version of Android Market, which lets you purchase applications from your web browser and have them beamed directly to your phone or tablet (it’s very slick). Now, Google has some good news for you bibliophiles out there: The Xoom’s Android Market application includes Google Books, and now the web version does too. You can find it right here . Buying a book on Android Market works just the same as buying an app — you click on the price (or the ‘free’ label), choose a method of payment, and your new book will show up the next time you fire up the Books application on your Android device. As far as I can tell you’ve actually been able to do the same thing from books.google.com , but this has the potential to expose the book store to the millions of people using Android, who otherwise may not have been aware it. CrunchBase Information Android Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Can America Function More Like a Fiscally Responsible Company? It's up to Us, the Shareholders Top
We expect perfection from companies in Silicon Valley. The general consensus is that Yahoo is one of the worst run tech companies in the world, never mind it’s still profitable, cash-rich, and one of the largest media assets in the world. We get outraged and hit the BUBBLE! panic button when valuations of startups like Facebook, Zynga and Twitter get in the double digit billions, never mind their growth rates, user engagement and (in the case of Zynga an Facebook) actual revenues. So how can we be so apathetic when we see true abysmal fiscal neglect, especially when it’s that of a pseudo-company in which we all essentially own shares? That pseudo-company is the United States government and in a thorough report issued today, Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker has taken all emotions, politics, spin and manipulation out of the issues, to present a steely-eyed view of just how hosed our financial situation is. Spoiler alert: It’s not pretty. America is gripped by a new red menace and this time, it’s not the commies– it’s a sea of red ink. If politicians reported to voters the way management reports to shareholders, no one would finish out their terms. If you’re a tax-paying American, you should read the report (embedded below) to see how your money is being spent. If you’re not an American, you should read it too. Far too often blogs like ours trumpet the advantages of living and starting a business in this country, of which there are many. But here’s a sober view of the downside of our wishfully innate belief that we deserve to have it all: We are in a deep financial hole, and there’s not an easy, pain-free or politically palatable way out. But let’s leave politics aside, as Meeker and her team do, and look at some of the financials. America’s revenue has been flat for ten years. 40% of that income comes from individual tax payers. This surprised me: If you exclude Medicare and Medicaid and one-time charges, America’s profit & loss statement isn’t bad. We have had a 4% median net margin over the last 15 years. But Medicare and Medicaid are huge exclusions, and Meeker’s report points the finger at them as the biggest culprit for why our financial situation is so untenable. Thanks largely to these unfunded entitlement programs, our cash flow is negative $1.3 trillion, or about $11,000 per household. This isn’t a George W. Bush or Barack Obama issue. Cash flow has been negative for each of the past nine years. There are a few reasons the situations with Medicare and Medicaid are so bad. First, unlike social security and unemployment, there is no direct funding mechanism to support these programs. Second, the cost is 10x higher than was projected when Medicare and Medicaid were enacted. Why were the estimates so far off? It’s a combination of the aging population, people living longer while the retirement age has barely budged, higher-dollar expectations of care as medical advances have been achieved, and an expansion of who can receive these programs. And there’s a bad market force at play: Private sector costs increase to help offset lower-cost public programs, which only pushes more people out of privately-funded programs and into public ones. More than 35% of the US population receives entitlement dollars or is on government payroll, up from 20% in 1966. The report examines the cultural impact of this, asking, “Given the high correlation of rising entitlement income with declining savings, do Americans feel less compelled to save if they depend on the government for their future savings? It is interesting to note that in China the household savings rate is ~36%, per our estimates based on CEIC data, in part due to a higher degree of self-reliance – and far fewer established pension plans. In the USA, the personal savings rate (defined as savings as percent of disposable income) was 6% in 2010 and only 3% from 2000 to 2008.” Indeed, if it weren’t for Medicare and Medicaid, the numbers show there’d be plenty of room to spend more on defense, education, law enforcement, transportation, infrastructure and energy and still break-even. Meeker notes that our global competitors– particularly countries like China and India– are investing more heavily in those areas. There’s much more on the financials in Meeker’s report, and some recommendations of how to boost revenue long term through R&D spending and immigration reform. But the interesting thing is why she wrote it: Because for all the hand-wringing over the cost of health care and the state of our deficit, she had a hard time finding the simplest data for what America’s financial situation was. Last year at her annual Web 2.0 Summit address, she included a slide showing America’s flat revenue, before she got into her presentation on mobile computing, and was stunned at how many people came up to her afterward to express their shock that our revenues weren’t growing. It convinced her to spend some time taking a deep look at America’s financials, and pull out all the politics and emotion to just look at the facts– something we almost never get in a world where our top news sources are Glen Beck, MSNBC and the Daily Show. As a result there’s something for every party or talking head to love and hate in the report– the true sign of balance. Meeker started the project while still at Morgan Stanley, and said in a call this morning she’s going back to her day job tomorrow. There’s no USA, Inc. Part 2 coming out, and no Al Gore-like “Inconvenient Truth” tour planned. It was a one-time project, born of her own curiosity and belief that Americans should know where their money is going. But do people want to know the truth? And if they do know the truth, will they push politicians to act on it? As the report points out 80% of Americans indicate balancing the budget should be a top priority, but only 12% support cutting spending on Medicare and Social Security– two of the biggest reasons our financial situation is so untenable. You can’t wish this problem away. The answer to whether American will ever be run more like a company lies with whether America’s “shareholders” will ever start to demand it. View this document on Scribd CrunchBase Information Mary Meeker Information provided by CrunchBase
 
What Is Thunderbolt And Will It Change Your Life? Top
Though you’re probably hearing about it for the first time now, Intel's been working on a new interconnection technology for the last few years. “Light Peak”, as it was called up until it was rebranded “Thunderbolt” today, promises a new world of screaming-fast data transfers. The claims are spectacular: 10 gigabit per second transfers (both upload and download!), dual protocol support, and power over the cable. Light Peak… excuse me, Thunderbolt, is truly the interconnect of the future. The technology launched today on Apple's latest MacBook Pros, but Apple is just one of a bunch of companies with plans to support Intel's technology. Thunderbolt devices will slowly trickle out of major industry players over the coming year. It's going to be an uphill battle for the standard — the USB horde won't go without a fight. If you're going to throw your support behind just one camp in this silly battle (first person to get a Thunderbolt tattoo wins!), you may want to give Thunderbolt a long look. It's good. Read More
 

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