The latest from TechCrunch
- Yelp's CEO On Google: We Were Suprised…I Don't Think It's A Permanent Situation
- Rival Smartphone Attenuation Videos Vanish From Apple's Website
- Photographic Evidence Of Stealth Startup Tello Raising $100k
- Half Of All Facebook Users Play Social Games — It's 40% Of Total Usage Time
| Yelp's CEO On Google: We Were Suprised…I Don't Think It's A Permanent Situation | Top |
| Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman deserves credit for trying to play nice with Google, even appearing onstage at the Social Currency CrunchUp with John Hanke , a Google VP of Product Management. As expected the tension was palpable, as Hanke and Stoppelman discussed Google Places and the goliath’s heavy reliance on Yelp’s content . As an increasingly robust aggregator of local reviews, Google Places is turning into a formidable opponent. Several years ago, Google paid Yelp for access to their huge database of reviews; however, eventually Yelp terminated the deal. All was well until Google started crawling Yelp’s pages for unlicensed content to populate Google Places. Adding insult to injury, Google often pushes Yelp’s data to the bottom of its review areas, favoring instead licensed partners like Zagat. Oh, what a tangled web of reviews we weave. Beyond the professional veneer, there’s no question that Stoppelman feels burned. The recent developments, he says, were unexpected: “Well I think we were surprised because we hadn’t participated in Place Pages over the years. Like we were in sort of the precursor to Place Pages back in something like 2006 and then we left because we weren’t really happy in the direction it was going and we thought OK we’ll just show up in organic results and everybody is still happy. And then yeah, we found our content was showing up there and it is ranked dead last right now. I don’t think that’s sort of a permanent situation from what we gather from talking to Google, they are sort of headed in a new direction that which hopefully will be more positive.” Yelp, of course, is not always the victim. The site has been criticized for ripping Foursquare’s techniques, with this year’s introduction of check-ins, leader boards, badges and the not-so-subtle “dukedom” honor. Now, Yelp is tiptoeing near Groupon’s turf, as it tests limited deals in cities like Sacramento. During our post-panel video interview, we got a chance to talk to Stoppelman about Google Places and Yelp’s budding rivalries with Foursquare and Groupon. See full video above— below are a couple key highlights: On Check-Ins -Android has been a particularly strong platform— the number of Yelp downloads grew 40% week over week for about a month. Now, its growing 15% week over week. On Limited Sales -Yelp will eventually roll out a product that will capitalize on its strength as a destination for time sensitive searches. “We have all this traffic, we have 35 million monthly visiting the site and so what could we do for people that are actually looking for a massage right now versus you know alerting them hey there’s this deal is available. So are there some interesting twists on just the Groupon model that we can apply because we’re Yelp.” CrunchBase Information Yelp Jeremy Stoppelman John Hanke Google Foursquare Groupon Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Rival Smartphone Attenuation Videos Vanish From Apple's Website | Top |
| Well this is interesting. One of the key points at Apple’s recent press conference to discuss the iPhone 4′s antenna , was that the problem (called “attenuation”) is not unique to the iPhone 4. To highlight this, Apple showed videos of the problem on smartphones by rival companies. Those videos were then posted to a special antenna page on Apple’s website . Those videos are now gone. As you can see on this page , the videos are nowhere to be found. Instead, the page now only shows the overview of the antenna design and test labs . A search of Apple’s website brings up a few of the landing pages where the videos used to be — here’s the Droid X one , for example — but now those just redirect to the antenna design page as well. Odd. Here’s what else is interesting: the original page with these videos still does reside on the Canadian version of Apple’s website . Here’s you’ll find the videos for the BlackBerry Bold 9700, the HTC Droid Eris, the Motorola Droid X, the Nokia N97 Mini, the Samsung Omnia II, the iPhone 3GS, and the iPhone 4. However, the Asian version of Apple’s site has the videos removed as well. The videos are still up on Apple’s official YouTube channel , but they are no longer featured, and are a little bit trickier to find. We’ve reached out to Apple for an official response as to why they removed them from the website. Obviously, they caused quite a bit of controversy – with some rivals, like RIM (makers of the BlackBerry), even responding . Has the threat of lawsuits from rivals forced Apple to take them down? Or did they take them down due to some of the negative backlash they were receiving? Or perhaps Apple is simply trying to move on from the situation — but again, the antenna design and test lab page is still there (though it doesn’t call out rivals specifically). At the top of this post, find what the /antenna site currently looks like in the U.S. Below, find what it used to look like — and still does for the Canadian version of the site. [thanks Noah ] CrunchBase Information Apple iPhone 4 Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Photographic Evidence Of Stealth Startup Tello Raising $100k | Top |
| Let’s call this a single source rumor. But the source is Paul Carr’s camera, so we feel pretty good about it. The picture was taken last night at the TechCrunch summer party at August Capital. Tello , says our source (the camera), has raised $100,000 from angel investor Dave McClure , who’s checks appear to have an imprint of the Twitter fail whale in the background. This is one of his first investments from his shiny new 500 Startups fund . What’s Tello? We don’t actually know. Founder and CEO Joe Beninato was previously the CEO of Presto. We had a lot of fun with that one . Cofounder and CTO John Cwikla has experience at GameLayers, Doostang, Xoom and other startups. The total size of this round is around $1 million, we hear. Does a picture say a thousand words? I dunno. Someone please count them. More details as they come in. CrunchBase Information Tello Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Half Of All Facebook Users Play Social Games — It's 40% Of Total Usage Time | Top |
| Perhaps you’ve heard: social games maker Playdom was acquired by Disney a few days ago for a deal potentially worth north of $750 million . Playdom CEO John Pleasants took the stage today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, to talk a bit about the deal and the future. Pleasants says that he’s not exactly sure what his title at Disney will be yet, but he thinks he’ll be the General Manager of Playdom. He’s also not sure if Tapulous (another gaming company just acquired by Disney ) will be under his department, but he doesn’t think so. And he made sure to clarify that the deal was for $563.2 million plus an earn-out of up to $200 million — so he’s not super super super rich, he’s just super super rich. But the most interesting thing Pleasants noted was that he recently heard (from his own source, apparently) that half of all users on Facebook now play social games. More impressively, 40% of total usage time on the service is spent on these games. That’s meaningful, of course, because “ a huge amount the Internet is on Facebook ,” Pleasants stated. When moderator Michael Arrington asked about changes Facebook has made recently to slow the viral spread of these types of games, Pleasants acknowledged they’ve all taken a hit. But he says they’re working with Facbeook on new ways to drive growth. But he made sure to say they had to do it without spamming. When talking about what’s next, Pleasants notes that they’ve released two new games in the past week alone. When Mike suggested that most of the games are just a combination of blindly pushing buttons, Pleasants noted that things were evolving, and that games were about to get more social. The biggest issue going forward though? “ The lack of credit cards with children ,” Pleasants half-joked. | |
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