Saturday, March 31, 2012

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Is Technology A Zero-Sum Game? Top
pacmanIn last week's Get Rich or Die Trying article, I mentioned that "tech is a zero-sum, winner takes all game".  A reader objected, arguing: "I think that may be an inappropriate use of the term 'zero-sum' - one company's increase in profits (or revenue) does not mean a competitor must see declining profits (or revenue)". History suggests that Jack Welch's philosophy that "a company should be #1 or #2 in a particular industry or else leave it completely" is even more applicable to the tech industry, where the top player can build a sustainable and ever-growing business but everyone else is practically better off getting out.
 
Why Google Might Be Going to $0 Top
googleKen Lang could perform miracles. In 1990 we would head off to a bar near where we were going to graduate school for computer science, and we would bring a Go board. Then we would drink and play Go for five hours. At the end of the five hours, after a grueling battle over the board, I remember this one time when magically Ken would show up with two girls who were actually willing to sit down and hang out with two guys who had a GO BOARD in front of them. How did Ken do that? Fast forward: 1991, CMU asks me to leave graduate school, citing lack of maturity. The professor who threw me out still occasionally calls me up asking me when I'm going to be mature enough.
 
Here Are The Women of Y Combinator And They Are Awesome Top
Olga-VidishevaI would normally rather have a root canal instead of write about the issue of women in technology. I just find most essays on this really tedious and obvious. (Sorry Alexia.) But I do want to point one thing out. When I went to my first Y Combinator Demo Day three years ago, there was one woman. At this week's Demo Day, there were six companies with one or all female founders among the 66 startups in the class. I'm going to keep this post simple. No complaining. Less navel gazing. Just more role models. So here are the women of Y Combinator and they are awesome:
 
Hallmark Greets Digital, Acquires SpiritClips To Let You Send Photo/Video E-Cards Top
Hallmark SpiritClipsPhotos and video can be even more personal than a handwritten card. That's why Hallmark has just acquired SpiritClips, an online video production and streaming service that also makes personalized digital e-cards. It looks like Hallmark customers will soon be able to create and send e-cards by uploading their own photos or choosing from video content created by SpiritClips. Hallmark already has its own line of animated video e-cards, but they're not very personalized. As more of our intimate connections happen online, the SpiritClips acquisition will let Hallmark stay relevant rather than living off its dead-tree printing business.
 
"Girls Around Me" Creeper App Just Might Get People To Pay Attention To Privacy Settings Top
girlsaroundme1Cult of Mac has a great write-up of an app for iOS called Girls Around Me, which essentially displays check-ins and public profiles of girls around you. With a little shift in context it could easily be confused for a hot new startup (discoverability meets speed dating!), but no, it really is just a way for guys to creep on nearby girls who have failed to lock down their info. It's sad, but maybe something like this is what people need to shock them into understanding just how much information they put online.
 
Groupon's Profit In 2011 Was Actually $22.6 Million Less Than They Previously Said Top
groupon_logoDaily deals site Groupon today issued a pretty significant revision of the financial results it previously reported for the fourth quarter and the full year of 2011. According to the company, it actually made $14.3 million less in revenue during the fourth quarter of 2011 than it previously reported -- $492.2 million, compared to the previously stated $506.5 million. It also spent more in operating expenses than it previously said it did -- resulting in its Q4 operating income and net income being $30 million and $22.6 million less, respectively, than the company initially said it was.
 
Evinar – A Google Hangouts For Facebook That Broadcasts Anything (Except The Audience) Top
Evinar ScreenshotWith Evinar, you can't bring audience members onto a live streaming stage with you, but you can broadcast anything else. Evinar is a new Facebook Page app launching today via TechCrunch that lets you stream to a live audience nearly nearly any type of content, including YouTube, Ustream, Hulu, Facebook photos, Flickr, SlideShare, tweets, or uploaded text and images. Evinar definitely lacks interactivity. You can't collaborate or video chat with the first 10 viewers like on Hangouts, or pipe in the webcam streams of any audience member like promising startup OnTheAir. Plus you can't stream your own webcam directly. Still, web celebs and thought leaders could use Evinar to connect with their fans in more ways than a standard video stream.
 
Ultra Disappointment? Nah, Ultrabooks Are Just Getting Started Top
ultrabooksThis year was supposed to be the year of the Ultrabook. It was supposed to be the year where svelte notebooks became standard. It was supposed to be the year that Intel's latest ultra-mobile platform gave Windows PC makers something to celebrate. But that's not happening. At least not yet. And that shouldn't come as a surprise.
 
Twitter Takes Tweetdeck Offline After Apparent Bug Opens Up Access To "Hundreds" Of Accounts [Back Now] Top
tweetdeck_avatar_2_reasonably_smallTwitter has taken its Tweetdeck app offline after an apparent bug has possibly given some Tweetdeck users access to others' accounts. A Tweetdeck user in Sydney, Australia, Geoff Evanson, says he discovered today he was somehow able to access hundreds of other accounts through Tweetdeck. Twitter quickly responded to the situation by shutting off access to Tweetdeck entirely, claiming the need to "look into an issue."
 
Gillmor Gang Live 03.30.12 (TCTV) Top
Gillmor Gang test patternGillmor Gang - Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Rob La Gesse, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.
 
Inside Best Buy: An Anonymous Store Manager Speaks About Recent Changes Top
bestbuyFrom the outside, we early adopters see Best Buy as a dinosaur in a dying world. The company recently announced the closing of 50 stores in the U.S. and 400 layoffs, mostly in corporate. It would be easy to say "Good riddance" and ignore the slow decline of bricks and mortar, but I wanted to speak to someone inside the company. I got a hold of a manager who wished to remain anonymous and was considered a solid and dedicated employee. I asked him what it's like inside his store right now. "Basically what's going on is that we got to work and heard about the 50 store closings and we started wondering about job security. Immediately my reaction was 'Oh, crap, what am I going to do?'" he said.
 
Is There Money To Made In The DIY Sentry Gun Open Source Scene? Yes. Top
Sentry_Eugene_01It's hard to forget that scene in the Graduate when the young, confused Benjamin is approached by a family friend who tells him the future in two words: sentry guns. Now you, too, can enter this lucrative world with Project Sentry, an open source tracking sentry gun system that uses a webcam to scan the scene and take down your prey.
 
Amazon's Appstore Generates More Revenue Per Daily User Than Google Play Top
Revenue Comparison - iOS vs Amzn vs Android-resized-600According to new data released today by mobile analytics firm Flurry, Amazon's Appstore for Android is generating more revenue per daily user than the Google Android Market, which was recently rebranded as the Google Play store. That shouldn't be surprising, given that Amazon vets apps for quality, runs promotions to entice users to return daily, and perhaps most importantly, is able to leverage its established user base of Amazon account holders who already have credit card information on file - perfect for one-click checkouts.
 
Keen On… Chad Mureta: How Apps Can Change Your Life [TCTV] Top
MuretaBack in 2009, Chad Mureta was an 18-hour a day real estate salesman living from one paycheck to the next. Driving home after a basketball game one evening, he hit a deer, flipped his truck over four times, mangled his arm and almost killed himself. Then, recovering in his hospital bed, Mureta - who knew nothing about technology or the Internet - was introduced to the app economy by a friend who gave him a newspaper article about how apps can generate significant revenue. When he got out of the hospital, Mureta borrowed $1,800 from his stepfather, built an app called Fingerprint Security Pro which eventually generated $800,000 in revenue. Mureta is now an app entrepreneur and, in good Tim Ferris style, travels around the world as a member of what he calls "the new rich".
 
Second Prize Is A Set Of Steak Knives: MarGenius Is A Social Network For Networkers Top
Screen Shot 2012-03-30 at 1.32.35 PMSo you're in town to follow up on some weak leads and your boss says you've got to stay put for a few more days because there's an old lady out near Patton Road who is looking to buy and you call back and say you got to get back to HQ for some paperwork and your boss says "Make the most of it." The only thing that counts in this world, friend, is getting them to sign on the line which is dotted. Am I right? So you need some new leads, or at least some new people in your Rolodex. That's where marGenius comes in. You import your Google or Microsoft address book and calendar (don't worry, nobody else can see it) and it figures out if there are people you need to see and talk to near you, right in town there. Doesn't matter if the lady near Patton Road's crumb cake is from the store. You got four more new leads out of marGenius and you can give them a call or even schedule a meeting right from the app and ring a ding ding you're up on the big board again, at least for a while.
 
PayPal Teams Up With Gas Station Chain On A Payment App And Fuel Discounts Top
cumbyThere's no shortage of apps that help people find cheap gas these days, but apps that let you pay for it? And ones that give you a discount for doing it? Sign me up. Regional gas station/convenience store chain Cumberland Farms has done just that with their new SmartPay app, which in addition to letting users pay without leaving their seats, offers them a $.05 cent/gallon discount. Here's how it all goes down: once a driver signs in with a PayPal account, they can pull into a supported Cumberland Farms location and fire up the iOS/Android app or the mobile website. From there, the app uses the device's GPS to hone in on the gas station they're parked at, users punch in their pump number and voila -- their gas charges are sent to PayPal, and users get an email receipt.
 
Netflix Sharpens Focus On DVDs With DVD.com, But Don't Cry Qwikster. (It's Staying) Top
netflix-logoNetflix has been making a few moves to separate its DVD business more from its streaming operation, and today brings news of the latest move in that direction: the company has bought the domain name DVD.com, the company has confirmed to us. The news raises questions of Netflix possibly getting ready to pull a Qwikster on us after all and separate its streaming and DVD businesses -- something others have suggested it might do -- but TechCrunch understands that there are no plans to spin off its DVD business into a separate company, à la the Qwikster strategy of last year that so qwikly spiraled into a PR disaster for the company, and was then abandoned.
 
Engineering Serendipity Top
flickr-ktoine-surpriseI don't know if Highlight, Glancee, Banjo, or any one of those other startups you're now officially sick to death of hearing about are going to make it, but I know that for the first time in a long time, we're starting to move in the right direction in terms of mobile innovation. And no, I don't mean we need more people-stalking apps, I mean we need more passive use of our mobile phones. Less life lived looking down means more life actually lived. The trend that strikes me here as being important is not necessarily "ambient location" or even "people finders" - that's just all we're capable of today. The real end game is engineering serendipity.
 
DoubleTwist's New Alarm Clock For Android Wakes You With Your DoubleTwist Tunes Top
productshotDoubleTwist, the maker of the popular suite of applications for syncing music and media between devices, has just surprised its users with the release of a new application today. And this time, the app branches out from the company's prior focus on media management - it's an alarm clock app for Android phones. But on closer inspection, DoubleTwist Alarm actually does makes sense as an extension of the DoubleTwist brand, as the app is designed to wake you with music. In fact, it even connects with the company's mobile Player app, allowing you to configure songs or entire playlists as the music you wake to.
 
(Founder Stories) Kayak's Paul English Discusses Big Wins & Important Strategic Alliances [TCTV] Top
Kayak Video 1 Out -tc_upload.mp4Having recently posted its 2011 revenue numbers, Kayak.com's co-founder, Paul English stopped by TCTV to tape an episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon. In part I of this conversation, English describes serendipitously meeting co-founder Steve Hafner (who previously co-founded Orbitz), speaks to the importance of striking the right business partnerships and offers insights into how Kayak tests its products.
 

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