The latest from TechCrunch
- Boxcar Opens Up Its iPhone Push Notifications. And Soon, You Can Monetize Them
- Sorry, Members Only – Keynoir's New Take On Group Buying
- Aha! Google Buzz Is A Black Hole — Its Traffic Must Be Inferred
- Hello, iPad. Hello, Cloud 2.
- Google Buzz Getting Smoked In The Sharing Race By A Dead Man
| Boxcar Opens Up Its iPhone Push Notifications. And Soon, You Can Monetize Them | Top |
| Push Notifications on the iPhone are great, but they can be impossible to manage . That’s why Boxcar , a Push Notification management app, is brilliant , and has long been one of my favorite apps. Unfortunately, as great as it is, like Apple itself, it is also a closed system. But now, it’s opening up. What I mean by closed system is that Boxcar only serves up notifications for a select few services, such as Twitter and Facebook. But with its new Provider feature ( and API ), anyone can tap into the Boxcar platform to enable Push Notifications through the service. This step has been in the works for a few months creator Jonathan George tells us. But it comes just weeks after a competitor, Notifo, started offering the same thing . However, unlike Notifo, Boxcar subscriptions and settings are easily managed from within the iPhone app itself, rather than having to visit a site to manage things. And there’s another potentially huge benefit. Beginning in Q2 2010, Boxcar is going to open up these provider notifications to be monetized. What this means is that third-parties can charge customers for the ability to get Push Notifications and Boxcar will share the revenue from the in-app purchase as a 50/50 split. It’s worth noting that this would work only for one-time purchases, and not for subscriptions. Still, this is potentially a nice way for third-parties to make some money without having to worry about building an maintaining their own Push Notification system. Unlike Notifo, Boxcar plans to review all services that want to use the providers feature to maintain some order. And, as Boxcar notes: There are two kinds of notifications – broadcast notifications, and individual notifications. Individual notifications are best used for action items, such as when a users comment is replied to. Broadcast notifications send the same message to every Boxcar user that has subscribed to your provider. While the service currently only works for the iPhone, the plan is to launch an Android app within the next 90 days. After that, Windows Mobile support should come along. But even without those other platforms, Boxcar is doing just fine. So far, the service has pushed over 100,000,000 Push Notifications to date. You can find Boxcar in the App Store here . It’s a free download. CrunchBase Information Boxcar iPhone Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Sorry, Members Only – Keynoir's New Take On Group Buying | Top |
| A new take on the group-buying bandwagon launches today, but this one will attempt to address the information overload about offers, known as "voucher fatigue", while incentivising local businesses. Keynoir is described as a "private buying club meets Woot", in reference to the tech site which made its name by having just one offer on one decent product a day. The startup even includes aspects of the old Letsbuyit.com. But this is not a trivial play. Keynoir has already secured £1.3m of investment from PROFounders Capital, investor Jan Riem and Index Ventures (including Dominique Vidal). Serial entrepreneurs Paul Birch and Andrej Henkler participated. Vidal and Sean Seton-Rogers from PROfounders will be joining the board. The founders are Philip Wilkinson (founder of the UK's first price comparison engine which later became Kelkoo), Glen Drury (ex-MD Kelkoo Europe and VP Yahoo), and Jan Riem (technology deal maker). It launches in London this week , and plans to exand across the rest of the UK and Europe by the end of the year. | |
| Aha! Google Buzz Is A Black Hole — Its Traffic Must Be Inferred | Top |
| My bad — maybe. Earlier today, I reported that Google Buzz, Google’s new social sharing service, was sending less traffic than FriendFeed , a service which has been a ghost town in recent months. It turns out there’s probably a good explanation for this. You see, in January, Google started defaulting all Gmail traffic to the HTTPS (secure) version of its domain. Previously, it was defaulting to the regular HTTP (unsecure) domain. As a result of this change, all traffic referrers are scrubbed before being picked up by services like Google Analytics. I didn’t realize the change would cause such a scrubbing, but it makes sense. Google’s Matt Cutts pointed it out earlier (in Buzz, appropriately), and looking at our logs, it does, in fact, appear that in January (when the change was made) traffic from the mail.google.com domain plummeted. This was before Buzz ever existed. This is interesting because it means that Google Buzz is essentially a social service that you can’t track the effectiveness of for your own site. Of course, given that so much of Twitter is run through its API, measuring Twitter traffic by the twitter.com domain is also flawed. Still, looking over the overall numbers, it would seem that aside from a rise in referrals from the usual suspects (Twitter.com, Facebook.com, etc), we haven’t seen a huge bump from some unknown anomaly out there — which, you’d assume, would be Buzz. So I’m still not convinced that it’s actually sending a lot of traffic our way. But, admittedly, it’s hard to know for sure, because like a black hole, its existence must be inferred. CrunchBase Information Google Buzz Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Hello, iPad. Hello, Cloud 2. | Top |
| Editor’s note : What does the iPad have to do with cloud computing? Glad you asked. In this guest post Marc Benioff , chairman and CEO of salesforce.com , explains how liberating the iPad will really be. The first piece of software I ever wrote was on the TRS-80 Model 1. It was called “How To Juggle", and it had 4K of memory. It was my version of "Hello World", what every programmer first writes on a new piece of hardware. CLOAD Magazine purchased it for $75, they distributed it to their subscribers on a cassette (there weren't disks for the TRS-80 yet). It was 1979. I was 15 years old, and I was a software entrepreneur. I still am. Just five years later, I was an intern at Apple writing some of the first native assembly language on the Mac and working in a building called Bandley 4 with a pirate flag on the roof. Guy Kawasaki hired me to help developers write software on the Mac without using its predecessor, the Lisa (something that had been required when the Mac launched). My first example of how to write for the MDS 68000 development system manifested itself in a video game called “Raid on Armonk.” It was an allusion to IBM's headquarters. They were the anti-Mac and we clicked and destroyed them. (Turns out they eventually clicked on themselves.) I’m sentimental this week, and thinking about the past, because I have seen the future. The future is not a Mac, or even a PC. Its father created a lot of the computers I've loved: Apple IIe, Mac, and iPhone. There have been others I have loved, even some PCs and yes, my Blackberry, but none of that matters anymore. Looking ahead, I am energized, a door is opening, and we are all going to walk through it. We'll soon enter a new world of computing accelerated once again by the industry’s creator Steve Jobs, and amplified by someone conceived after the PC, Mark Zuckerberg. The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it's called the iPad. It's not about typing or clicking; it's about touching. It's not about text, or even animation, it's about video. It's not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it's about the cloud. It's not about pulling information; it's about push. It's not about repurposing old software, it's about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle). Finally, the industry is fun again. Last week I gave presentations to more than 60 CIOs in various meetings throughout America’s heartland. My message to them: We are moving from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2, and the iPad is the accelerator. Many of them haven’t even made it to Cloud 1—some are still on mainframes. They are working on MVS/CICS, or Lotus Notes, and they have never heard of Cocoa, or even that there is now HTML 5. This is unacceptable. The next generation is here. The iPad that shows us what now is really possible—and that we all need to go faster. Unfortunately, some CIOs would rather retire than go faster. Cloud 1 ————————————-> Cloud 2 Type/Click———————————->Touch Yahoo/Amazon—————————–>Facebook Tabs——————————————>Feeds Chat——————————————>Video Pull——————————————->Push Create—————————————->Consume Location Unknown————————->Location Known Desktop/notebook————————->Smart phone/Tablet Windows/Mac——————————>Cocoa/HTML 5 What’s most exciting is that this fundamental transformation—cloud + social + iPad—will inspire a new generation of wildly innovative new apps that will change entire industries. Take health. We have all been waiting for the health application that will revolutionize how we share and communicate with our doctors, and help us make better health care decisions. The apps we have seen as first generation EHR/PHR just have not cut it, and now with ObamaCare there is no killer app to accelerate through the new EHR reimbursement program. The shift ignited by the iPad will allow the proliferation of these new missing apps, and automate the industries and professionals left behind by the last generation of technology. Now, no industry will be left behind. It was on TechCrunch in late February that I first suggested that the enterprise software industry has to move forward and posted an article, “The Facebook Imperative.” In 1999, I was obsessed with the question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com? And in 2010, the question evolved: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” This week we will have the answer to that question in our hands with the iPad. It's a more productive, easier, and fun way to work and live. The iPad shows us the old world is no longer good enough. We'll need new software with a new UI. Our industry has gone through many shifts, but ultimately, the big ones have always been about software, not hardware. Now, we are seeing a simultaneous software and hardware revolution. The key apps we use in productivity, collaboration, communication, entertainment, education, and even health, will all be rewritten to take advantage of the new capabilities. This will result in a new generation that looks more like Facebook on the iPad than Yahoo on the PC. Our industry is changing. We all need to step up to meet this change head-on or we will leave an incredible opportunity behind. CrunchBase Information Marc Benioff iPad Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Google Buzz Getting Smoked In The Sharing Race By A Dead Man | Top |
| Update : See this post for a likely explanation on why Buzz appears to be sending almost no traffic referrals. It is, in essence, a black hole. In the 2000 elections, incumbent Republican Senator John Ashcroft was defeated by Governor Mel Carnahan in the race for one of Missouri’s U.S. Senate seats. The only problem? Carnahan was dead. I’m reminded of this while looking over the traffic logs for TechCrunch, because it appears that someone else is losing to a dead rival: Google Buzz. According to our data, in the past month, Google Buzz has been sending less traffic to TechCrunch than FriendFeed — the service which is essentially the same as Buzz, only better , and ever since the acquisition by Facebook has been a ghost town . But apparently, a ghost town still sends more traffic than the much buzzed-about Buzz. In the past month, FriendFeed is the #52 referrer of traffic to TechCrunch (in its heyday, it was occasionally in the top 20), Google Buzz, meanwhile, is at best #55. I say “at best” because it’s hard to know exactly how much traffic Buzz is sending because it’s built into Gmail. But still, I’ve drilled down into the subdomains to look for clues that it’s Buzz sending the traffic. Obviously, a solid chunk from the mail.google.com domain is coming from Buzz, and also some from google.com where Google Buzz profiles are hosted. Looking over a handful of popular stories on TechCrunch over the past month, Google Buzz is nowhere to be seen anywhere near the top referrers. This, along with conversations I’ve had with others about their referrals leads me to believe that Buzz is actually quite horrible at doing the job it set out to do: share information . What’s the point of sharing links on Buzz and having other people comment and like it if no one is actually reading any of the content itself? The TechCrunch account has some 7,700 followers (and when you added in individual author accounts that also share our posts, we have well over 10,000 followers) and yet we’re seeing hardly any traffic from the social service. And that’s after we even made our own Buzz button . All that being said, there is evidence that Buzz is helping to boost sharing on Google Reader, because it did help make Google Profiles more social. But still, Reader shares a miniscule when compared to rivals Twitter and Facebook. And again, Buzz was supposed to be the service that made sharing super-easy . And it’s shoved in the face of Gmail’s hundreds of millions of users, so these referral numbers are pretty pathetic. While it may be a ghost town, FriendFeed remains the example of what Buzz should be when it comes to sharing content. One reason it still destroys Buzz: Twitter. For much of its life, tweets accounted for most of the data coming into FriendFeed. Early on, with a built-in Twitter account link, tweets were also popular on Buzz. The problem is that Buzz inexplicably delays tweets for as many as 12 hours before bulk importing them all from the day — which is beyond annoying. For this reason, myself and others have unsubscribed from anyone on Buzz who imports tweets. Google has access to Twitter’s firehose, so I have no idea why they can’t import these tweets in realtime, as the small FriendFeed team was able to do. Undoubtedly, that would help with the sharing problem . But Google may not want to do that. After all, it’s not trying to build just another front-end for Twitter. It wants to be its own service — one of Facebook proportions. Unfortunately, that’s just not happening right now. And I’m seriously starting to doubt if it ever will. Those changes can’t come soon enough. [image: Miramax] CrunchBase Information Google Buzz FriendFeed Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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