The latest from TechCrunch
- Conan Roasts iPad 2: You'll Buy It No Matter What We Say [Video]
- Ford Focus Is #WINNING
- Bing, NYT And Everybody Else Wants A Piece Of Groupon's Success
- Ditto: The Social App For What You Should Be Doing
- WordPress.com Suffers Largest DDoS Attack In Its History
| Conan Roasts iPad 2: You'll Buy It No Matter What We Say [Video] | Top |
| With every new Apple product launch, there’s now an expectation that we’re going to get a video made by Apple to help explain the product. You know the ones. They feature Apple executives (though, oddly, never CEO Steve Jobs) set against a white background telling us how great and revolutionary the product is. They’re brilliant and effective. But they definitely also take themselves way too seriously. And that’s why they’re the perfect target for parody. We’ve seen dozens of people/groups mock these on the web . And now the professionals are getting involved. During his TBS show tonight, Conan O’Brien decided to take his shot. Like Jobs, O’Brien isn’t in the actual video. Instead he sets it up and lets his minions do the work. “ I personally think that the people at Apple are starting to get a little bit cocky, ” O’Brien says to set up his take on the iPad 2 ( here’s Apple’s real video ). Enjoy below. I personally enjoy the Vice President of “Dream-Telligence”. CrunchBase Information iPad 2 Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Ford Focus Is #WINNING | Top |
| You know who else is #WINNING in this whole Charlie Sheen on Twitter thing? The Twitter ad sales team. At upwards of $100K a pop, the revenue that Promoted Tweets bring in is no a joke. And it looks like big name brands like Ford Focus, Arbys and Audi and AMC Theatres have all forked over some cash to capitalise on the attention being lobbed onto to Sheen at the moment, buying into what is likely a Promoted Tweet keyword auction on the hashtag of his infamous catchphrase, “Winning.” The reason these tweets cost so much is that Promoted Tweet engagement on hashtag search is high, 5% of users who see the tweets react to them either by re-tweeting, clicking on a link or replying. And impressively, 80% of brands that buy one ad end up buying another. Right now only one of the #WINNING Promoted Tweet products is directly related to Sheen, and it’s for a cheesy Shepard Fairey-style WINNING movie poster , proliferating the meme. Branding in this day and age is so strange and somewhat shady, as one man’s media meltdown can become another man’s venue for pimping their bacon cheeseburger. @McDonalds McDonald's Despite all the rumors there r no plans 2 bring #mclobster or mcsushi 2 the US menu. We r working on a new menu item called McWinning. about 17 hours ago via CoTweet Retweet Reply As Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic points out , “In purchasing the #Winning hashtag, [brands] get all of the benefits of celebrity endorsement (eyeballs, psychological association) without the risk that when the guy finishes losing his mind, they look bad.” Note: While I was writing this post, it looks like the Ford Tweet got “Un-Promoted.” Did someone over at Ford have a change of heart ? | |
| Bing, NYT And Everybody Else Wants A Piece Of Groupon's Success | Top |
| photo © 2007 Ed Schipul | more info (via: Wylio ) Does anyone know where I can find some daily deals? Everywhere. Taking a cue from the New York Times and everyone else in the world Bing has launched a daily deals service today, Bing Deals. Now visitors to m.bing.com will find a deals tab that will allow you to search and drill down for localized daily deals around you via mobile. Eventually Bing wants to integrate deals into its homepage as well, as now you have to actually search for the name of a business to find the Bing Deals on the web. Groupon, with reportedly $2 billion in revenue and a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google last year, is everyone’s great white hope at the moment. Success at this scale is eye-opening and when a new way of getting cash into a companie’s bank account happens, everyone takes notice. What’s the last time we saw this kind of “Omg that’s a lot of revenue” industry earthquake? Google. (Google, hilariously enough, is now planning its own deals service, Google Offers .) The problem here is that humans just don’t have the energy or space to track so many deals. When we first heard the news about Bing, Mike Arrington commented, “Someone needs to create an app that just aggregates all the daily deals in your city for you.” Somebody does , it’s called TheDealmap, and they just partnered with Bing on this launch. Groupon had a great model: exercise editorial oversight and charge the deal maker for the distribution. I’m not sure the revenue from chain of affiliate partnerships in these kind “me too” plays will be enough to justify maintaining the product. Owning the deals space takes effort, not afterthought — Twitter shut down down its @Earlybird service after two months of tweeting out uninspiring deals. And while setting up an ancillary deals service might work for hyper-targeted audiences, your newspaper/search engine/social network/used car wiki is not Groupon. And it will never be Groupon. @semilshah Semil Shah @ alexia old days, we'd pay for content & get free ads. Nowadays, tables have turned. about 13 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone Retweet Reply @zec Zec RT @ kluoma : @ alexia Groupon is an ad format. about 13 hours ago via web Retweet Reply | |
| Ditto: The Social App For What You Should Be Doing | Top |
| Think about Foursquare right now. You can tell everyone what you’re currently doing, but there’s no good mechanism for planning something to do or for getting a recommendation for something to do. Sure, you could use “shouts” that way. But no one does. It’s an aspect of realtime that doesn’t really work. Enter Ditto , a new service in the space. Ditto is an iPhone app in the location space that goes beyond the check-in. Sure, that’s one aspect of it, but if Ditto works as intended, it’s hopefully only the end result. “ It is about sharing your intent to do something instead of what you’ve already done ,” is how founder Jyri Engestrom puts it. If you recognize Engestrom’s name, it’s because he was a co-founder of Jaiku, one of the early micro-messaging services that sold to Google in 2007. After two years there using parts of Jaiku to build Profiles, Buzz, and Latitude, Engestrom left Google seeking to “make meaning” once again. After dabbling in some angel investing, Ditto is Engestrom’s attempt to do just that. When you first load up Ditto, you’re asked to log in via Facebook Connect. With that social layer out of the way, you’ll see a main screen with three swipe-able pages of big icons along the top. Things like “At home”, “Eat out”, “Work”, and “See movie” all easily allow you to declare you intention to do something. Clicking on any of these drills down to a box where you can comment on your plans and also set a specific location for that plan. But that’s one of the keys. If you don’t know where you should eat for example, you just leave the location blank. It will then send a message to your Ditto friends that you want to eat, but aren’t sure where. When your friends see this, they can leave a comment recommending spots to eat. And if you like one of them, you can award them a trophy. Or if you want to do the same thing, there’s a “ditto” button — hence, the name. This works basically the same way for all of the various activities, not just eating. And you can be even more specific about your intentions by choosing other icons beyond the general food one. For example, there’s an “Asian” icon, a “Breakfast” icon, etc. And again, if you already are doing something, you can say that as well — much more of a traditional check-in. And you can even push those to Foursquare (and Twitter and Facebook). But it’s not just about location. “ The same basic use case applies equally to a broad range of social objects, including Netflix movies, books, music, etc. — all now consumable on the device! We’ll be adding new activities dynamically to the app over the next months ,” Engestrom says. ” Discovery is going social, social is going mobile, and nailing it is a huge, Google-sized opportunity that could replace traditional search on the phone. Ditto’s beauty is in that it naturally captures you at the moment when you make a decision, and combines algorithmic results with real time recs from your social graph ,” he continues. There are already whispers out there that Foursquare itself is about to push more heavily into the recommendation game soon. And obviously, you could use Twitter or Foursquare for these things. So why use Ditto? Engestrom believes they’ve nailed an important intersection of features that the others can’t match because they already have set users with expectations. “ It is simpler than Facebook, more fun that Twitter, and more useful than Foursquare ,” is his succinct way of putting it. And I have to agree. I’ve been using the app for about a week now, and it is a nice combination of checking-in, social interaction, and recommendations. And the latter will only improve with the app now open to all. Yet another app that could be perfect for SXSW. We previously covered the funding of Ditto parent Pingpin last year. You can find Ditto in the App Store here . CrunchBase Information Pingpin Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| WordPress.com Suffers Largest DDoS Attack In Its History | Top |
| You have no idea how hard it was to get this post up, as WordPress.com , our blog host, is currently under a denial of service attack. It’s been almost impossible to access the TechCrunch backend for the past 10 minutes (everything seems to be stable now) and users have been receiving a “Writes to the service have been disabled, we will be bringing everything back online ASAP” error message. From the VIP blog post: WordPress.com is currently being targeted by a extremely large Distributed Denial of Service attack which is affecting connectivity in some cases. The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second. We are working to mitigate the attack, but because of the extreme size, it is proving rather difficult. At this time, everything should be back to normal as the attack has subsided, but we are actively working with our upstream providers on measures to prevent such attacks from affecting connectivity going forward. We will be making our VIP sites a priority in this endeavor, and as always, you can contact us via xxxxx@wordpress.com for the latest update. We will also update this post with more information as it becomes available WordPress did not mention the origin of the attack (DDoS =! Anonymous) and I have contacted founder Matt Mullenweg for more information. WordPress.com currently serves 30 million publishers, including VIPs TED, CBS and TechCrunch, and is responsible for 10% of all websites in the world. WordPress.com itself sees about 300 million unique visits monthly. Update: Automattic and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg tells us that this is the largest attack WordPress.com has ever seen, and is likely to be politically motivated: “There’s an ongoing DDoS attack that was large enough to impact all three of our datacenters in Chicago, San Antonio, and Dallas — it’s currently been neutralized but it’s possible it could flare up again later, which we’re taking proactive steps to implement. This is the largest and most sustained attack we’ve seen in our 6 year history. We suspect it may have been politically motivated against one of our non-English blogs but we’re still investigating and have no definitive evidence yet.” You can check here for the latest status updates. Image via: blogohblog Update 2: Looks like everything’s back to normal. @wordpressdotcom WordPress.com Our systems are back to normal. We'll continue to monitor them and post updates here if needed. about 12 hours ago via CoTweet Retweet Reply | |
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