The latest from TechCrunch
- South Park Scares You Into Reading Apple's Terms And Conditions
- eBay's PayPal Buys Mobile Payments Startup Fig Card
- Buzz Off, Google Buzz
- With A New Suite Of Games, Arkadium Lets Gamers Play Right On Their Facebook Walls
| South Park Scares You Into Reading Apple's Terms And Conditions | Top |
| HUMANCENTiPAD Tags: SOUTH PARK Kyle Broflovski , Eric Cartman , more... You know the drill … You open iTunes and there’s a popup that asks you to download a new version. You download the newest version and there’s another popup asking you to agree to Apple’s Terms of Service . But it’s over 55-pages long! You scroll to the bottom and hastily click “Agree,” because what’s the worst that can happen right? Right? Well in South Park’s out-of-control genius premiere last night (which you’ve probably already seen but I’ll repost clips of for the two of you who haven’t) creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone took iPhone Location-gate to the next level in a plot line that was a mashup of a Stevenote and the horror film “The Human Centipede.” In the episode, Kyle, who apparently is one of the only people in South Park who didn’t read the iTunes TOS, inadvertently agrees to become the middle part of a Human CentiPad or a “part human, part centipede, part web browser and part emailing device.” Hilarity ensues. Classic line: “I should have never updated iTunes.” HUMANCENTiPAD Tags: SOUTH PARK Kyle Broflovski , Eric Cartman , more... HUMANCENTiPAD Tags: SOUTH PARK Kyle Broflovski , Eric Cartman , more... CrunchBase Information Apple iTunes Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| eBay's PayPal Buys Mobile Payments Startup Fig Card | Top |
| In its second acquisition in two weeks, eBay’s PayPal unit has bought mobile payments startup FigCard. Terms of the acquisition, which was announced on the PayPal blog, were not disclosed. Boston-based Fig Card allows merchants to accept mobile payments in stores by using a simple USB device that plugs into the cash register or point-of-sale terminal. All the consumer needs is the Fig app on his or her smart phone. The connection with PayPal is that when consumers setup their payment information, they could add PayPal as a payments option. You can see the video below for a demo of Fig Card’s technology This is also as much of a talent acquisition as it is a technology buy. The founders, Max Metral and Hasty Granbery (who will both join the PayPal Mobile team) are both seasoned technology execs. Prior to founding Fig, Metral was co-founder and CTO of Firefly, which was sold to Microsoft. He also went on to architect sign-on system Microsoft Passport. Metral and Granbery met at PeoplePC, which was sold to Earthlink. And so and so forth. Clearly mobile and online to offline is a big part of eBay’s strategy both for its marketplace and PayPal business. The company just bought location and advertising company Where, which will be housed within PayPal. In fact, PayPal will be integrated into Where's mobile app as a payments mechanism for its local deals. It should be interesting to see how (and if) PayPal integrates Fig Card into its products. We know that the payments service is looking to connect with local merchants and bringing them a PayPal-focused point of sale system could help them compete with emerging technologies like NFC, Square and others. CrunchBase Information eBay Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Buzz Off, Google Buzz | Top |
| Two days ago, we removed the Google Buzz button from the top and bottom of each post on TechCrunch. No one noticed. Not a single person said a word about it. It wasn’t until earlier today when I tweeted about it that we got some feedback on the change (most of it being: “oh, I didn’t even notice”). As I tweeted, that in and of itself says a lot. The issue of Buzz being a viable sharing platform used to be somewhat of a hot-button issue. When I wrote a post last March noting that traffic coming our way from Buzz appeared to be less than that of a dead man, FriendFeed, many folks got up in arms. It turns out, my data was flawed — but it wasn’t necessarily wrong. You see, since Buzz runs within Gmail, which defaults to HTTPS, it scrubs the referrer data before sending the traffic our way. So, conveniently, the only way to measure Buzz traffic was to infer it. Like a black hole. But I’m now pretty convinced that Buzz is actually much more like a black hole in another way: we were sending links there, but nothing was coming back our way — meaning traffic. When we had the Buzz button live on TechCrunch, I was sending every one of my posts to my over 2,200 followers on Buzz. Mike was doing the same for TechCrunch posts to his over 1,500 followers by way of the tweets he auto-imported into Buzz. Most importantly, the TechCrunch Buzz account was sending a link to each story to the over 9,000 people that follow it. And yet, all but a very tiny amount of traffic is accounted for from the other major referring sites. Further, there were never any weird spikes in traffic sent by some unrecorded source. When a post is popular on services like Facebook, Twitter, Hacker News, Google News, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc, we often see big spikes. There was never once a sign of that happening with Buzz — inferred or otherwise. And so that led to us removing the Buzz button yesterday. And again, no one said a word. So it will remain gone. We are planning for now to replace it with the new Facebook Send button (though a minor technical issue is holding up that deployment). That also says a lot. We will have two Facebook buttons (the Like button being the other) on the site and zero Google ones. I suspect when Google rolls out their +1 button , we’ll try that out. But that’s not really the same thing. Our data shows that the Facebook and Twitter buttons are being used a lot. And even the Digg button is every once in a while these days. But Buzz? More or less nada. And looking over my Buzz feed (which I haven’t done in months), it looks as if 99 percent of the content are tweets that are being auto-imported. And there’s basically no interaction on any of the items. A black hole. Remember when Buzz was supposed to get its own standalone site? What ever happened to that? It does exist in Google Profiles now, but I’m sure it gets even less usage there than within Gmail. Remember when Google launched a Buzz API that no one uses? That was just about a year ago. We’ve been hearing rumblings for months that Google was considering scrapping Buzz altogether at some point in the future. That still may be in the cards now that social is a priority under new CEO Larry Page. As more of their social products begin to roll out, Buzz may in fact be Wave’d . The upcoming Google I/O conference will be telling. If we don’t hear anything about Buzz, I suspect Google may soon be telling it to — forgive me — buzz off. Like we just did. CrunchBase Information Google Buzz Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| With A New Suite Of Games, Arkadium Lets Gamers Play Right On Their Facebook Walls | Top |
| Arkadium , the casual and social game developer, is announcing today the release of the Arkadium Stadium , a suite of 12 Flash-based games that users can post and play right from their Facebook walls. Now you don’t have to deal with the hassle of playing the game in-app. I joke, but this functionality is very cool, as it allows you to quickly publish the game app to your profile, or your friends’ profiles and play right there. No fuss, no muss. Arkadium Co-founder and President Jessica Rovello told me that few gaming companies have yet explored this method of “wall play”, so through the Arkadium Stadium, the company hopes to begin setting the groundwork for people to be able to enjoy and share games like they would videos, photos, and links. Arkadium has been making casual games for the last 10 years, but has only moved into creating games for Facebook in the last year. With the growth in popularity of Facebook games (back in September Zuckerberg said that 200 million people are playing games on Facebook), the company’s transition made sense, Rovello said. And, while most Facebook games are currently played in-app, this functionality might signal a growing trend in social gaming, especially on Facebook. It’s a logical next-step, and will only make sharing and playing that much easier. The Arkadium games suite, which includes puzzles like Sudoku, a Tetris-like dice game, 52-card pickup, and other simple (and addicting), casual games. In fact, in writing this post, I was distracted at least once by the ability to post a game to my Facebook profile, play the game embedded-as-is in my wall, then pause and stalk a few ex-girlfriends. I have a feeling this functionality is only going to increase the potential of virality, which is of course exactly what Arkadium is hoping. Of course, if you’re not a fan or are a little sensitive to multimedia Wall posts, this is a great way to be bombarded by game-spam at any turn on Facebook. Though I think people are starting to let down their guard a little bit in terms of how willing they are to have content shared on their walls. And, hey, if it gets annoying, you can just remove the post, or play the game in-app. Whether or not it’s needed, this adds another layer to “Social”, considering I can now pop over to friends’ profiles to see if anyone else has taken the bait and is enjoying a little Sudoku during work hours. And if they’ve posted a game I happen to enjoy, but am a little hesitant to add the game to my own wall (I’m careful like that), then I can just roll a few dice right on their Facebook wall. Then leave them a message on their wall reminding them how much better I am at the game. At any rate, it’s kind of a neat feature, and I’ll be interested to see whether or not its embraced by fellow Facebook gamers. (And how well Flash holds up across browsers — in Chrome, it works like a charm.) I have a feeling it will be, if Zynga isn’t already planning to roll out similar functionality for their lineup. Check it out. CrunchBase Information Arkadium Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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