Saturday, January 7, 2012

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When You Have To Buy Their Love, You've Lost Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-07 at 3.57.59 PMOver at WindowsITPro, Paul Thurott outlines some details of Microsoft/Nokia's (purported) marketing plans for Windows Phone in 2012. Amongst them: a $10 to $15 commission for retail sales people who sell Windows Phone handsets over Android or iOS. In turn, John Gruber asks: "If this strategy was on the table, why didn't Microsoft start this a year ago?"

Here's why: because it's an admission of failure.
 
The Road To CES: A Peek Inside Our Gadget Bags Top
headerWhen you're a small team going to cover the biggest electronics show in the world, every person has to act as a Swiss Army knife, able to fill any role at any time. This generally produces an incredibly heavy bag, packed with spare cameras, lenses, batteries, cords, and of course a laptop. Luckily for us, our live-camera approach to covering the show takes a bit of that burden off of our sagging shoulders now, but old habits die hard and it's good to be prepared just in case. Aren't you curious what's filling your favorite bloggers' bags to bursting? We've rounded up the items we'll be taking to CES, arrayed them, and described them for your benefit. Take a look.
 
Just A Friendly Reminder: If You Sold Your Apple Stock In October, You Were, In Fact, An Idiot Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-07 at 3.18.16 PMOn October 19 of last year I wrote a post entitled: If You Sold Your Apple Stock Today, You're An Idiot. Because their Q4 numbers missed Wall Street expectations, Apple's stock dropped over 5 percent on that day, to close below $400-a-share after hitting an all-time high just days before. My argument was that it was the Wall Street expectations that were horribly flawed, not Apple's actual performance. And the stock would recover quickly as a result leading up to their Q1 earnings, which even Apple was predicting would be a blow out. Reading the comments on that post — which I love to do — you'd think I was saying something insane. When the stock fell to $363 right after Thanksgiving, a few remembered the post and once again pointed out the irrational insanity of this fanboy.  But then a funny thing happened yesterday. Apple's stock closed at a new all-time high.
 
How To Create An Early-Stage Pitch Deck For Investors Top
ryan_dogpatch_reasonably_smallThis is a guest post by Ryan Spoon (@ryanspoon), a principal at Polaris Ventures. Read more about Ryan on his blog at ryanspoon.com. When raising capital, a combination of your company's product, vision, team and execution are what ultimately attract investment. And while the pitch deck is ultimately less important than vision and product, it exists to convey both elements and consequently get investors hungry for more. Like other investors, I come across 100's of pitches each month - some in person, others in email; some as PowerPoints, and others as full-fledged business plans. Your goal is to craft a deck that is both:
 
(Founder Stories) ZocDoc's Massoumi: A Bad Flight & Terrible Customer Service Created ZocDoc Top
Founder Stories Zoc1.movIn 2007 Cyrus Massoumi ruptured his eardrum on a flight to New York and turned his distasteful experience of trying to track down a physician into ZocDoc - a service that enables customers to quickly book appointments with doctors and dentists online. In a relatively short time, his streamlined offering has attracted considerable interest from both consumers and investors. Supported by doctors who pay a fee to be listed on the site, ZocDoc is now available in more than a dozen United States markets, claims 200+ employees and has tallied $95 million in funding. In this episode of Founder Stories, ZocDoc's CEO and co-founder Cyrus Massoumi tells host, Chris Dixon how ZocDoc came together.
 
First Pictures Of OLPC's XO-3 Tablet Break Cover Top
olpc3_11Last night we heard that the One Laptop Per Child program would be showing off its long-awaited XO-3 tablet at CES. We'll be getting a hands-on then, but they were kind enough to send out a couple pictures of the device this morning, and they seem worth sharing.
 
Scheming Intentions Top
hell-roadFrom Vannevar Bush to PageRank, the World Wide Web was built on hypertext, the notion that any morsel of information can link to any other. But that was always only a dream, and a rapidly-dissipating one of late. Nowadays even Web links are likely to terminate at warnings, paywalls or registration screens. Anil Dash rages that "Facebook is gaslighting the Web" with its treatment of content outside Facebook. Jon Mitchell and Jamie Zawinski complain that Google Plus will "mess up the Internet" for its treatment of content outside Google+ff (and Zawinski adds "they just ripped off this model from Tumblr.") Google's Tim Bray, in turn, is irate about single-page JavaScript sites breaking the web. Meanwhile, six months ago, according to Flurry, time spent using mobile apps surpassed web consumption. You can link out of apps easily enough -- clicking on a phone number to open a dialer, or a hyperlink to open a Web page -- but it's very difficult to reliably link in to an app.
 
WindRiver Brings Overlapping App Windows To Android Top
windriver2Android users may soon be able to work with multiple app windows if an Intel-owned company called Wind River has anything to say about it. The company has recently announced they have worked up a way to implement overlapping application windows in Android, and the results look pretty slick.
 
Gillmor Gang 01.07.12 (TCTV) Top
Gillmore Gang test patternThe Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — kicked off the New Year in CES style. That's CES as in Apple-Free, last Microsoft keynote, All TV all the time, Super Cab Lines Vegas stays in Vegas. Both @dannysullivan and @scobleizer spent a great deal of time handicapping the race for control of what used to be called the TV set. These days I'm not so sure, as Apple's AirPlay could just as easily come in a controller-sized package (read iPhone) as a 100-inch box. The real battle is over how to find something decent to watch, and the big question is whether Google will figure out how to get network shows onto its service or if Amazon will embrace and extend Apple TV.
 
My Failed Attempt At Making An Appeal For The Wikimedia Foundation Top
brainwouldntdieI wanted to write an appeal for the Wikimedia foundation. I'm going to be completely honest: the only reason I wanted to write it was for completely self-promotional and ego purposes. On almost every Google search, Wikipedia is the #1 or #2 result. It's almost like Google is just a middleman to Wikipedia. So I wanted you to search on "head transplants" and then click on the Wikipedia page and see my face on the left hand side with something like, "Click here to donate $5 to my favorite cause".
 
Engineering Serendipity Top
serendipity_001When John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale reach for the same pair of black gloves in the movie Serendipity, they meet and fall in love. The goal of social discovery applications is to engineer this kind of serendipity. By leveraging demographic and interest data, and by providing good reasons to interact with strangers, this emerging category seeks to make meeting people feel fun and natural. And it's not just about dating. Most people I know I met through serendipitous encounters. Whether it's the friend I bumped into at the college bookstore as a confused freshman or the boyfriend I met at the coffee shop, most human relationships start the same way – in a serendipitous moment.
 
Daily Crunch: Hex Enduction Hour Top
1515Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: Review: AAXA P4 Pico Projector AIAIAI's New Headphones Continue Trend Of Understated Design What Witchery Is This? A Cardboard Camping Pot? Not Bad, LG Marketing, Not Bad A Very TechCrunch CES: How To Follow Our CES Coverage Nobody Wins At CES
 
4SquareAnd7YearsAgo Becomes Timehop, Takes You A Year Back In Time Through Online Content Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-06 at 7.49.40 PM4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, a service built at a Foursquare Hackathon that emailed you your Foursquare checkins from exactly a year ago, has branched out beyond Foursquare. Now the service, newly re-monikered Timehop, includes your Facebook status updates, photos you updated, photos you were tagged in, as well as Twitter and Instagram posts from 365 days past. The tech industry is starting to see a resurgence of products that play into social media nostalgia; Facebook Timeline, Memento and Memolane for example. "Everybody is starting to realize that there's value in the past," Timehop co-founder Jonathan Wegener tells me. He hopes that the startup will one day be the "ultimate" way people experience their content history online, despite the tight constraint of only showing anniversary content -- which Wegener likens to Timehop's 140 characters.
 
OLPC XO-3 Tablet To Be Shown At CES Top
xo3After years in the making, the One Laptop Per Child program's XO-3 tablet will be shown in more or less final form next week at CES, according to the project's founder, Nicholas Negroponte. The latest image of the tablet is shown here, though it is from some time back and may no longer be representative. The price of the tablet will in fact be under $100, he said, though various options will put it over that. It has an 8-inch screen — traditional LCD, though it may be upgraded to a Pixel Qi display for power savings and e-paper-like capability. If they stuck to their original specifications, it will also be waterproof, durable, and about a quarter of an inch thick. The version they're showing will run Android, though what version was not specified.
 
When "Find My iPhone" Becomes An Adventure Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-06 at 5.07.44 PMTechCrunch reader Nikos Kakavoulis sent us the following amazing story earlier this week ... The Daily Secret founder used Find My iPhone to catch an naive iPhone "thief" -- turning on the Play Sound feature in Starbucks in order to locate his lost phone inside the person who had found (and kept) his phone's pockets.
 
Review: AAXA P4 Pico Projector Top
IMG_3251Short version: A powerful little device, significantly brighter than others of its size, with decent battery life and a good picture. Too bad it's so damn loud, and not the most user-friendly thing of all time either.
 
Spotify Has Gotten Big In The US Via Facebook, But Serious Free Users Will Have To Start Paying Soon Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-06 at 3.18.00 PMEveryone who has been using streaming music service Spotify for free in the US from when it launched last July is now going to have to start paying, as Business Insider notes today. The reason is the company's policy of limiting free usage to ten hours and/or five plays per track every month, after the first six months of free usage. Full access will now cost you $9.99 per month, with partial access (no mobile, no offline, etc. but also no ads and no streaming limits) at $4.99.
 
Facebook Says Privacy Advocates Should Applaud Timeline, EPIC FTC Probe Unnecessary Top
EPIC Vs FacebookTechCrunch has received a response from Facebook to the Electronic Privacy Information Center's letter urging the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate Timeline for possible privacy violations. Facebook says it has not violated user privacy or its November settlement with the FTC. That's because Timeline simply makes historic content more accessible, not visible to anyone who couldn't already see it. Also, Timeline provides Activity Log for managing the visibility of this content. I agree. Facebook may be bending the rules of privacy, but it hasn't broken them. In response to EPIC's call for an FTC investigation, as reported by Identity Matters, Facebook's Director of Public Policy Andrew Noyes tells TechCrunch:
 
With Version 2.0, Onesheet Becomes The About.me For The Entertainment Industry Top
screen-shot-2011-08-16-at-3-26-17-amBack in July of last year, ArtistData Founder and serial entrepreneur Brenden Mulligan brought his newest project, Onesheet, into beta. At the time, Alexia described Onesheet as the "About.me for bands", which is an apt description considering Mulligan's professed goal for his startup was to create a simple way for bands to build a real presence on the Web without having to religiously maintain that presence. That means that bands can use Onesheet to create aggregated, customizable profiles, verifying their identities through Facebook or Twitter to connect with third party services like Soundcloud, Bandcamp and ReverbNation. (And social media services like Posterous, Tumblr and YouTube.)
 
SV Angel And Founder Collective Give Hackruiter $200K For Its Hacker School Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-06 at 1.28.41 PMYCombinator-backed hacker recruiter platform Hackruiter has raised a modest seed round from investors SV Angel and Founder Collective. The company raised $200K but could have raised much more, because it is already profitable co-founder David Albert tells me. Hackruiter is already profitable because startups like Tumblr, Weebly, Loopt, Artsy and Bit.ly currently pay Hackruiter $20K per programmer referral on averafe (Amazing, right?). And Hackruiter finds people to refer through its Hacker School, which is now entering its third batch. Unlike beginner code-learning programs like Codecademy, the in-person Hacker School is exclusively focused on making already good coders better.
 

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