Thursday, March 31, 2011

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Google's Music Search Engine Quietly Vanishes From The Web Top
At the end of October 2009, my colleague Jason Kincaid traveled all the way to Hollywood , Los Angeles, for the official unveiling of Google’s new music search initiative by the Internet giant and its partners , Lala, Rhapsody, imeem and MySpace Music / iLike. He interviewed just about everyone involved about the news, and Mike Arrington followed up with a post basically calling out Facebook and Ticketmaster for not acquiring iLike instead of MySpace. In a blog post , Google said that, going forward, a simple Google web search would enable users to “search and more easily discover millions of songs”. Queries for songs, artists or albums would return search results including links to an audio preview of those songs provided by its music search partners, at least in the United States – for starters. People were invited to learn more about the exciting new feature on a special landing page . Fast forward to today: the landing page linked above now redirects to a list of regular Google search features, Apple has acquired and killed Lala , MySpace acquired both imeem and iLike and already killed the former (and is pretty much on life support itself, too). (On a sidenote, isn’t it sad that neither lala.com or imeem.com lead anywhere anymore?) In addition, one of the key people behind Google Music Search, Director of Product Management R.J. Pittman , defected to Apple about a year ago. From what I can gather, searches for popular artists, songs and albums no longer yield search results that come with audio previews even in the United States, as evidenced by a series of spot tests done by some TechCrunchers stateside. Here’s how it used to work : A tipster pointed out the disappearance of the old Google Music Search landing page to us, which doesn’t necessarily mean it vanished recently, but I’ve searched everywhere for mentions of Google officially or unofficially retiring the service and have been unable to find any reports about it. I wonder if simply nobody noticed it was gone, or that my search skills or simply not what they used to be. The last update I can find it when SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan spoke with Google spokesperson Jason Freidenfelds about the future of the service and was told that it was firmly tied in with Google's search group, and that people would continue to develop it even after Apple shut down Lala. That conversation dates back to April 2010, so obviously things have changed somewhere along the way. One more reason I think things have changed rather recently is because Google linked to its own blog post announcing Music Search back in December 2010 . Now, as I’m sure you’re well aware, Google has bigger plans when it comes to digital music than mere search, so perhaps the Google.com/music link to the former Music Search product landing page was quietly removed to make way for another, more appropriate landing page? Or did someone just quietly pull the plug hoping no one would notice? I’ve asked Google for comment and will update when I hear back. Meanwhile, according to Cnet’s Greg Sandoval, Google has begun testing internally its much-anticipated music locker and subscription service , which will simply be named Google Music . Google had hoped that the service would launch to the public in 2010, but it has failed to sign licensing agreements with copyright holders fast enough to launch a digital music download store and cloud-based locker service for that to happen. Google may, however, unveil Google Music at its I/O conference in May. As for its loudly-trumpeted-upon-launch music search engine: rest in peace, I guess. CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Disrupt Winner Qwiki Raises, Like, $1 Million From Groupon Co-Founders Top
TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki is on a roll. The visual search startup raised $8 million earlier this year from a number of well-knowninvestors including early Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. And today, the startup is announcing that it has received $1 million in new funding from Lightbank, the investment fund of Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky. This brings the company’s total amount raised to $10.5 million. What makes Qwiki so compelling is its ability to generate media on the fly that combines text, audio, and animated photos. It presents information in a highly visual way, assembling photos and spoken text from Wikipedia and other sources to create visual guides to millions of topics. Brad Keywell, Co-Founder of Lightbank, said in a release: Doug and the Qwiki team are solving a real problem with a technically innovative and scalable solution that applies to multiple verticals. We are looking forward to working with them as they accelerate the expansion of their business. After launching in private alpha last October, Qwiki opened up to the public in January of this year. New features include the ability to post, tweet, email or embed Qwikis, the opportunity to contribute content such as YouTube videos and pictures to Qwikis as well as give feedback on sound quality, and a text-based "Contents" section that includes all the information in a given Qwiki. In its next version, Qwiki plans on expanding to thousands of other content sources, building an iPad app and eventually releasing a custom publishing platform which will allow publishers to transform their own content into a Qwiki. Startups interested in applying to launch at TechCrunch Disrupt can apply here. The deadline is April 3. CrunchBase Information Qwiki Information provided by CrunchBase
 
What's The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology. Top
"It's fucked up when your mind's playin' tricks on ya" —The Geto Boys By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I've spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it, and I have never read anything on the topic. It's like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don't talk about the psychological meltdown. At risk of violating the sacred rule, I will attempt to describe the condition and prescribe some techniques that helped me. In the end, this is the most personal and important battle that any CEO will face. If I'm Doing a Good Job, Why Do I Feel So Bad? Generally, someone doesn't become CEOs unless she has a high sense of purpose and cares deeply about the work she does. In addition, a CEO must be accomplished enough or smart enough that people will want to work for her. Nobody sets out to be a bad CEO, run a dysfunctional organization, or create a massive bureaucracy that grinds her company to a screeching halt. Yet no CEO ever has a smooth path to a great company. Along the way, many things go wrong and all of them could have and should have been avoided. Things go wrong, because building a multi-faceted human organization to compete and win in a dynamic, highly competitive market turns out to be really hard. If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100. This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging for a straight A student. It is particularly challenging, because nobody tells you that the mean is 22. If you manage a team of 10 people, it's quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that you'd be associated with that kind of incompetence. Seeing people fritter away money, waste each other's time, and do sloppy work can make you feel bad. If you are the CEO, it may well make you sick. And to rub salt into the wound and make matters worse, it's your fault. Nobody to Blame "You can't blame Jazz Musicians or David Stern with his NBA fashion issues" —Nas When people in my company would complain about something or other being broken such as the expense reporting process, I would joke that it was all my fault. The joke was funny, because it wasn't really a joke. Every problem in the company was indeed my fault. As the founding CEO, every hire and every decision that the company ever made happened under my direction. Unlike a hired gun that comes in and blames all of the problems on the prior regime, there was literally nobody for me to blame. If someone was promoted for all the wrong reasons, that was my fault. If we missed the quarterly earnings target, that was my fault. If a great engineer quit, that was my fault. If the sales team made unreasonable demands on the product organization, then that was my fault. If the product had too many bugs, that was my fault. It kind of sucked to be me. Being responsible for everything and getting a 22 on the test starts to weigh on your consciousness. Too Much Broken Stuff Given this stress, CEOs often make the one of the following two mistakes: 1. They take things too personally 2. They do not take things personally enough In the first scenario, the CEO takes every issue incredibly seriously and personally and urgently moves to fix it. Given the volume of the issues, this motion usually results in one of two scenarios. If the CEO is outwardly focused, she ends up terrorizing the team to the point where nobody wants to work at the company any more. If the CEO is inwardly focused, she ends up feeling so sick from all of the problems that she can barely make it to work in the morning. In the second scenario, in order to dampen the pain of the rolling disaster that is the company, the CEO takes a Pollyannaish attitude: it's not so bad. In this view, none of the problems are actually that bad and they needn't be dealt with urgently. By rationalizing away the issues, the CEO feels better about herself. The problem is that she doesn't actually fix any of the problems and the employees eventually become quite frustrated that the Chief Executive keeps ignoring the most basic problems and conflicts. Ultimately, the company turns to crap. Ideally, the CEO will be urgent yet not insane. She will move aggressively and decisively without feeling emotionally culpable. If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself. It's a Lonely Job "And this loneliness won't leave me alone" —Otis Redding In your darkest moments as CEO, discussing fundamental questions about the viability of your company with your employees can have obvious negative consequences. On the other hand, talking to your board and outside advisors can be fruitless. The knowledge gap between you and them is so vast that you cannot actually bring them fully up to speed in a manner that's useful in making the decision. You are all alone. At Loudcloud, when the dot com bubble burst and subsequently sent most of our customers into bankruptcy, it crippled our business and devastated our balance sheet. Or rather, that was one interpretation. Another interpretation, and necessarily the official story for the company, was that we still had plenty of money in the bank and were signing up traditional enterprise customers at an impressive rate. Which interpretation was closer to the truth? In the absence of someone to talk to, that's a question that I asked myself about 3,000 times. As an aside, asking oneself anything 3,000 times turns out to be a bad idea. In this case, I had two specific difficult questions: 1. What if the official interpretation was wrong?  What if I was misleading everyone from investors to employees? In that case, I should be removed from my position immediately. 2. What if the official interpretation was right? What if I was grinding my brain into sawdust for no reason at all? What if I was taking the company off track by questioning my own direction? In that case, I should be removed from my position immediately. As is usually the case, there was no way to know which interpretation was right until much later. It turned out that neither was actually right. The new customers didn't save us, but we figured out another way to survive and ultimately succeed. The key to getting to the right outcome was to keep from getting married to either the positive or the dark narrative. My friend Jason Rosenthal took over as CEO of Ning about a year ago. As soon as he became CEO, he faced a cash crisis and had to choose amongst three difficult choices: 1. Radically reduce the size of the company or 2. Sell the company or 3. Raise money in a highly dilutive way. Think about those choices: 1. Lay off a large set of talented employees whom he worked very hard to recruit and, as a result, likely severely damage the morale of the remaining people. 2. Sell out all of the employees who he had been working side-by-side with for the past several years (Jason was promoted into the position), by selling the company without giving them a chance to perform or fulfill their mission. 3. Drastically reduce the ownership position of the employees and make their hard work economically meaningless. Choices like these separate the women from the girls. Tip to aspiring entrepreneurs: If you don't like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don't become CEO. Jason sought advice from some of the best minds in the industry, but ultimately he was completely alone in the final decision. Nobody had the answer and whatever the answer, Jason was the one who had to live with the consequences. So far his decision to reduce staff by letting go of primarily the most recent hires has paid off. Revenue at Ning is soaring and they will soon be profitable. If it had gone worse (or ultimately goes bad), it will be all Jason's fault and it will be up to Jason to find a new answer. Whenever I see Jason, I like to say: "Welcome to the show." Techniques to Calm Your Nerves The problem with psychology is that everybody's is slightly different. With that as a caveat, over the years I developed a few techniques for dealing with myself. Hopefully, you find them useful too. Make some friends —Although it's nearly impossible to get high quality advice on the tough decisions that you make, it is extremely useful from a psychological perspective to talk to people who have been through similarly challenging decisions. My friend Bill Campbell was a huge help to me as CEO, but interestingly it wasn't his great success running Intuit that I found most useful; it was his disastrous experience running Go. Through that experience and his most traumatic days at Intuit (like laying off 1/3 of the company), Bill learned a tremendous amount about how to think about excruciatingly difficult decisions from a psychological perspective. Get it out of your head and onto paper —When I had to explain to Bill and the rest of my board that, as a public company, I thought that it would be best if we sold all of our customers and all of our revenue and changed business, it was messing with my mind. In order to finalize that decision, I wrote down a detailed explanation of my logic. The process of writing that document separated me from my own psychology and enabled me to make the decision swiftly. Focus on the road not the wall— When they train racecar drivers, one of the first lessons is when you are going around a curve at 200 MPH, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. If you focus on the wall, you will drive right into it. If you focus on the road, you will follow the road. Running a company is like that. There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely capsize your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid. Don't be a punk Ben Horowitz is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz . To read more from his blog, go here .
 
The GoPano: A Panoramic Lens System For The iPhone Top
There are quite a few panoramic apps for the iPhone but they all require a steady hand, lots of patience and, most important, you can only take still photos. The GoPano aims to solve that by adding a panoramic mirror to the iPhone’s video camera, thereby allowing you to take panoramic video in real time. The GoPano simply snaps onto your iPhone and the included app does the rest. As you record, you can turn the panorama by swiping the screen to shoot what you want as it happens. Read more…
 
TidalTV Raises $30M For Online Video Ad Optimization Technology Top
Baltimore-based video ad technology company TidalTV has raised more than $30 million in financing led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from Comcast Interactive Capital and Valhalla Partners. This brings TidalTV’s total funding to $61 million. Launched in 2007, TidalTV develops a video ad optimization product for advertisers that helps deliver ads to a target demographic. For example, advertisers can use TidalTV to serve campaigns to specific age/gender segments or to select audiences that have shown an affinity towards a particular brand. This technology is currently being deployed for online video, mobile video and television. The new funding will be used to expand TidalTV's technology into global markets in the coming year and to deploy its ad targeting technology into new multi-screen applications for advertisers, media agencies and publishers. CrunchBase Information TidalTV Information provided by CrunchBase
 
HeyWire Debuts App To Allow Users To Send Texts And Tweets Via SMS From Facebook Top
HeyWire , a service developed by MediaFriends that offers a free SMS service is debuting its Facebook App that will allow Facebook users to send both texts and Tweets via SMS (from a real phone number) from within Facebook. Via the new HeyWire Facebook App , Facebook users can text worldwide without any per messaging fees and Tweet via SMS from within Facebook. Here’s how it works. Similar to other free texting apps, HeyWire users are given a real phone number to send and receive unlimited texts with friends and family worldwide. Users can send messages via the HeyWire Facebook App or the HeyWire apps for iOS and Android devices. Texting conversations actually follow users from the HeyWire Facebook App to their smartphone apps, which is useful. Of course, this comes with a price. HeyWire is charging users 20 Facebook Credits (around $2.00) per month, for a U.S. phone number with unlimited texting from within Facebook to any mobile phone in the USA, Canada and Mexico, and to most mobile phones in China, the Caribbean and Central and South America. Honestly, if I’m on Facebook, I’m probably just going to message my friends as opposed to using a text message, so I’m dubious as to the large-scale value of the new app. And if I do use Facebook’s messaging system, I can continue those messages on an iPhone or Android phone via Facebook’s app or the mobile web. HeyWire recently partnered with Twitter to launch a worldwide service, called HeyTweet, that allows users to send free tweets via mobile SMS. CrunchBase Information MediaFriends - HeyWire Information provided by CrunchBase
 
GeeknRolla – Gowalla To Hire UK Team, Duedil Wins Startup Competition Top
This year’s European startup conference GeeknRolla has become a platform for news, as startups launched and speakers broke news direct from the stage. Duedil , the business reputation startup, secured first prize in the startup competition, and an on-the-day announcement from DFJ Esprit that it would award the winner a £50,000 no strings investment in the form of a convertible note. This would convert into its next funding round at the price of the next round. That kind of announcement is more common in Silicon Valley, so to have the deal announced literally within a couple of hours of Duedil’s pitch on stage was real news for a European event. Let’s hope we see more of that kind of fast action in the rest of the year. They also won a crack at a year’s worth of Windows Azure hosting, £5,000 in free legal advice form Orrick and free premium job advertisements for a year on CoderStack (normally £120 per ad per month). Not a bad result for a 3 minute pitch.
 
Exclusive: IAC Hatches Hatch Labs, A Technology Sandbox To Incubate Mobile Startups Top
IAC has made a business out of developing or acquiring mobile applications based on its popular properties. In fact, IAC’s mobile apps, which include apps for Match.com, CityGrid, UrbanSpoon, and Dictionary.com, have seen over 40 million downloads as of end of the year 2010. Today, we’ve learned exclusively that IAC is furthering its mobile strategy by launching Hatch Labs, a technology sandbox devoted to incubating mobile startups and innovations. Hatch Labs is the brainchild of Dinesh Moorjani , who was formerly the SVP of IAC Mobile. At IAC, Moorjani started the mobile group in 2007 and helped lead all product strategy for mobile. During his time, Moorjani helped doubled mobile revenue annually for IAC. He tells us that for the past five years IAC has been acquiring mobile technologies and apps, but this can be an expensive endeavor. Moorjani and the company wanted to help incubate more innovation within IAC, particularly in the mobile sector and thus Hatch Labs was born. The incubator, which is located in IAC’s New York office, is financially a joint venture between Xtreme Labs and IAC (financial terms have not been disclosed). Hatch Labs is bringing in talent to prototype and develop new applications, tools and platforms that tackle emerging problems in mobility. Moorjani, who serves as CEO of Hatch Labs, manages multiple teams of handpicked engineers and entrepreneurs, who work on developing mobile applications. Moorjani says that three ideas/products are being incubated a any given time, and expects five businesses to be spawned from Hatch by the end of 2011. The most promising ventures, which will ranged from consumer facing to B2B apps, will seek additional capital from IAC and outside investors, to further grow the businesses, and could even be fully acquired by IAC. In terms of equity and initial seed funding, Moorjani declined to give us specifics but says it is competitive and similar to the equity arrangements with other startup incubators, such as TechStars and Y Combinator. Of course, recruiting talent is key to the success of Hatch Labs and its businesses and Moorjani is using equity incentives to attract talent that not only has experience in the mobile industry, but also has developed and sold busineeses previously. For example, Hatch’s first general manager to run one of its initial businesses is BumpTop’s former COO, Nina Sodhi. BumpTop was acquired by Google last year. Details on Hatch’s first product Blu Trumpet, which is expected to launch in Q2 this year, are limited but Moorjani says that it is a monetization and distribution platform in mobile, that aims to help publishers make money off apps and provides a distribution portal for advertisers. Another business being developed within Hatch involves group texting, but Moorjani declined to reveal any further details. Housing an incubator within a large company has its advantages and drawbacks. First, the incubator will need to be free of any corporate regulations, mentalities and rules for innovations to flow freely. While this sounds simple, it can be tough. Of course, IAC has tons of cash to put into these ideas, which is an added bonus. It should be interesting to see the quality of products that hatch from Hatch Labs.
 
Skype Challenger Releases Viber 2.0: Free Text Messages And More Top
Exclusive - Viber Media , the Israeli startup behind the Viber service, which lets iPhone users make free calls to each other , has released version 2.0 of its app in the App Store. The company’s still gearing up for the launch of their Android application , but in the meantime the update to the iPhone app brings a couple of goodies, in particular the ability to text message other Viber users free of charge. Sure, there isn’t exactly a shortage of free messaging apps for the iPhone these days, but it’s always nice to have a free app that supports both voice calls and text messages. Viber 2.0 comes with a new tab dedicated to ‘Messages’, where users can see all of their messages and from which they can send new ones to their contacts. Viber sends push notifications to users when they receive a text, so it’s potentially a replacement for SMS. In addition, the ‘Contacts’ interface has been redesigned to let users filter their contacts and easily see which ones are already on on Viber, or just their favorites if they prefer. Viber’s calling mechanism has also been improved. When users place a call, the app will first enter a ‘Calling’ state. Once the other party’s Viber app has been contacted and it begins ringing, Viber will enter a ‘Ringing’ state, letting the user know that there’s a connection. Viber has already been downloaded by over 10 million users to date. CrunchBase Information Viber Media Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Live With Jack Top
I’m at Columbia Business School tonight to talk with Jack Dorsey, a founder of both Twitter and Square. As I wrote earlier today: It's really more of an interview, with questions from the students and the audience at large. If you have a question for Dorsey, leave one in comments below or Tweet them at me during the event @erickschonfeld. I'll be asking Dorsey about his new role at Twitter, where the product needs to go from here, how he will balance that with his role at Square, and how he thinks about designing social products in general. The theme of the lecture is "Social Disruption." Both Twitter and Square are disruptive startups in the media/communications and payments industries, respectively. We'll get into how each company disrupts the current order of things and creates new value in the process. Square lets anyone accept credit cards, lowering the barriers to creating a business. Twitter lowers the barrier to communication, opening up a whole new way to consume information. I want to know what lessons he's learned from both experiences, and how the early rough days of Twitter helped him launch Square with so far hardly a hiccup. I also want to know what he thinks about larger players like Intuit rushing in after Square. Send in your questions, and we’ll try to get to some of them (no promises, and they have to be good). CrunchBase Information Jack Dorsey Twitter Square Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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