Gregarius » TechCrunch » December 2008

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December 31, 2008
20:12
A Look At Some Of The Best iPhone Apps Of 2008
» TechCrunch

This guest post was written by Bryan Barletta, lead reviewer at AppVee, a site that offers iPhone app reviews and news. Barletta has picked out some of the App Store’s best applications, and we’ve embedded video reviews for some of them (click the corresponding review link to view a video if it isn’t already embedded). Also be sure to check out our picks of the hottest iPhone apps from back in July when the App Store first launched.

The iPhone and iPod Touch have taken the world by storm. In just a little over six months time we’ve witnessed the doors of the iTunes App Store opening to the 10,000 app marker being crossed. In between that time we’ve see the $999 I’m Rich make several people poor, fart joke apps earning over $25K in one day, and Apple still looking the other way when users mention copy and paste. And with the number of total apps reaching over 13,500 less than a month since the 10,000 mark was passed, that growth is showing no signs of stopping. But some of these stand out much more than others do, so we’ve tried to hone in on the cream of the crop.

Top 10 Apps

Tweetie
An easy to use and full featured Twitter app that is speedy. The app has quite a bit of competition (other popular apps include Twitterfon and Twitterific).
Link: AppVee’s Tweetie Review

Pandora
Browse through the music genome and find new artists that fit your taste. These are automatically recommended by the site’s algorithm, so it acts like a personalized radio that works surprisingly well.
Link: AppVee’s Pandora Review

Simplify Media
Connect to multiple computers and stream their music directly to your iPhone.
Link: AppVee’s Simplify Media Review

RJDJ Album
Let your iPhone and the world around you create unique and original music. The app uses external inputs (like sound) to create a dynamic soundtrack).
Link: AppVee’s RjDj Review

Beejive IM
A multi-client instant messaging app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Link: AppVee’s Beejive Review

Camerabag
Emulate 5 different camera and film setting directly from your iPhone. This helps spice up the photos you’re taking with the phone (the default application doesn’t offer much in the way of effects.
Link: AppVee’s Camerabag Review

Facebook
An updated version of the Facebook app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, this allows you to chat with friends, post on walls, and use nearly every feature available on the social network’s main website.
Link: AppVee’s Facebook Review

Friendbook
A full featured replacement for the iPhone and iPod Touch contacts app.
Link: AppVee’s Friendbook Review

Vlingo
Voice control nearly every aspect of your iPhone and more - it’s like a more powerful version of the highly hyped (and still-impressive) Google Mobile App.
Link: AppVee’s Vlingo Review

Evernote
Keep track of everything you could possibly want to remember (like notes or photos) whether you’re on the go or at home.
Link: Appvee’s Evernote Review

Top 10 Games

Rolando
An epic platform adventure game for the iPhone and iPod Touch, this is easily one of the most innovate games to hit the platform.
Link: AppVee’s Rolando Review

Fieldrunners
A Tower defense game with SNES-like graphics. The classic gameply is highly addictive.
Link: AppVee’s Fieldrunners Review

Jellycar
A unique puzzle game that asks you to guide your “jelly car” to an endzone. As with most of the other games on this list, this is highly addictive.
Link: AppVee’s Jellycar Review

Scramboni
A multiplayer online word game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Multiplayer games on the iPhone are still rarer than they should be, and being able to play online definitely adds an extra dimension to the gameplay.
Link: AppVee’s Scramboni Review

Dr. Awesome
Save your friends and family from deadly micro viruses in this iPhone and iPod Touch game.
Link: AppVee’s Dr. Awesome Review

Up There
Guide your balloon through various obstacles as you attempt to get the highest score
Link: AppVee’s Up There Review

Flick Fishing
Forget your fishing rod - this uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to allow you to mimic a realistic fishing motion to cast a line. Also check out many of SGN’s games, which feature similar motion detection.
Link: AppVee’s Flick Fishing Review

Hero of Sparta
Control King Argos as you battle the Gods and their minions in this action adventure game.
Link: AppVee’s Hero of Sparta Review

Brothers in Arms
Play through 14 levels on foot or vehicle in this WWII action game.
Link: AppVee’s Brothers in Arms Review

Aurora Feint II
The popular iPhone and iPod Touch puzzle RPG game goes multiplayer.
Link: AppVee’s Aurora Feint II Review

While it’s easy to simply break down the top apps and games that we’ve enjoyed in 2008, it becomes a lot more difficult to find just five apps that took a chance and brought more innovation to the iPhone and iPod Touch. Below are the five apps we feel helped define the future of apps on these devices.

Top 5 Innovations

Ocarina

Link: AppVee’s Ocarina Review

RJDJ Album

Link: AppVee’s RjDj Review

iFun

Link: AppVee’s iFun Review

LogMeIn

Link: AppVee’s LogMeIn Review

Slydial

Link: AppVee’s SlyDial Review

The future of the iPhone and iPod Touch is wide open, to some degree. Depending on what restrictions Apple decides to lift. Developers are already chomping at the bit to release a video recording option as well as the ability for apps to run in the background. While those factors sit solely on the shoulders of Apple as they have been proven possible by the jailbroken community, there are quite a few things that we as consumers should expect out of the apps we’ll see in 2009.

With titles like Rhythm Spirit, a rhythm fighting game based on Japanese folklore, and Myst, a remake of the classic adventure game, making their way over to the iPhone and iPod Touch sometime in 2009 we’ve got some idea of what to look forward to. The real question is: What will be our Ocarina? Our Rolando? What apps are going to challenge the capabilities of this phone and create such a large hype that we find ourselves begging for just one more screenshot or bit of information? We’ll have to wait and see what the App Store has in store for us in 2009 as we count down the remaining hours.

2008 was all about experimenting. A fantastic device emerged, developers went crazy, and we’ve been flooded. Its now time to settle down, dig in and create some revolutionary applications. 2009 is going to be all about quality and depth. We’re going to see richer games that rival the DS and PSP, applications that truly make this device a portable computer, and multi-user apps that really start connecting people. Mobile social gaming is going to be huge and we can’t wait to see what developers have in store for us in the New Year.

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18:41
Interview: Pytey of the iPhone Dev Team
» TechCrunch

Have you ever jailbroken an iPhone? Ever used a software solution to “unlock” the iPhone’s SIM slot, freeing it from the shackles of its original carrier? Chances are, the iPhone Dev Team had something to do with it. This group, made up of some of the iPhone development scene’s finest minds, spends countless hours tearing apart the iPhone to make it do all of the things Apple won’t allow - and then figures out a way to make it work for everyone. It’s tough, unpaid, and often thankless - but they keep cracking away.

Later tonight, the iPhone Dev Team is expected to release “yellowsn0w“, a long-awaited software-based SIM unlock for the iPhone 3G. Though they don’t often do interviews, we were able to gab with one of the members, Pytey, just hours before their big release for a chat about who they are, how they operate, and a whole lot more.
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18:40
Audiolizer Puts Your iTunes Library In The Cloud, But Lala Does It Better
» TechCrunch

Audiolizer is a new music streaming service that lets you put your iTunes library in the cloud. After uploading your iTunes Library database file, the site will automatically compile a list of links to every song, allowing you to access your favorite music when you’re away from your home computer. Users can also manually search for individual songs.

As with a number of streaming audio sites, Audiolizer makes use of the YouTube API to serve its music (this ostensibly makes them less of a target for lawsuits, as they aren’t hosting any music). The system seems to work fairly well, through the presentation is strange - the “music video” shown alongside the player is only thumbnailed sized for some reason. You can still access the full sized video by clicking on the thumbnail, but it’s a bit odd.

Audiolizer would have been a great site if it came out at the beginning of this year - I love being able to have my iTunes library in the cloud. But SonicSwap does almost the same thing with a nicer interface. And then there’s LaLa which effectively makes both services obsolete: instead of using YouTube as a source of audio content (which can sometimes lead to incorrect results), Lala has forged deals with all the major record labels, so the majority of your music in streamed at a reasonably high quality bitrate with few false matches (check out our previous coverage for more on the cool service).

Fortunately, it sounds like Audiolizer is more of a side project than a full-fledged startup - the founders say that they developed the site in a week (they’re currently University students in Computer Engineering and Business Management in Canada).

Also, as an amusing sidenote, a TechCrunch user named Clayton came up with the domain name Audiolizer.com in a comment back in October. Looks like someone took his suggestion.

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16:03
CrunchBoard: Work as a community manager, managing editor, or freelance developer (from anywhere)
» TechCrunch
Want to work as the community manager of a fully-funded company that hasn’t launched yet? Or an “Information Repository Specialist“? Maybe work as a managing editor at CBS Interactive?

(Here at TechCrunch, we’re still looking for a Rails Developer.)

Some other jobs currently on CrunchBoard:
- Ruby Web Ninja
  BorderStylo - Hollywood, CA
- Product Manager for FunSpace
  Slide - San Francisco, CA
- Lead Warehouse Engineer
  TripAdvisor - Newton, MA
- Freelance Web App & Social Media Developer (PHP or RoR, JS/AJAX)
  Vested Ventures, Inc - Work from anywhere (they’re in Buffalo, NY)
International readers can check out our British and French job boards as well. (In response to Lucio–who commented on last week’s post–Sorry, no Australian job board… yet.)
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15:48
Scribd Had A Blowout Year, And So Did the Web Document
» TechCrunch

The biggest surprise fro me in the social media rankings that I posted earlier today was the appearance of document sharing service Scribd in the top 20. According to the comScore numbers, it has more unique visitors worldwide than imeem and almost as many as Bebo, with 23.5 million visitors in November, 2008. (In the U.S., it had about 4 million visitors). This is a serious accomplishment for a startup that launched less than two years ago with $300,000 in seed capital.

Scribd, which raised a $9 million B round earlier this month, grew 218 percent from November, 2007. Scribd is heads and shoulders above other document-sharing services such as Docstoc (1.6 million uniques) and Issuu (1 million) in terms of attracting users. (All three are excellent services, by the way, and Docstoc is much closer to Scribd in the U.S.). Scribd users upload 50,000 documents every day.

What this tells me more than anything is that the concept of document sharing on the Web has legs and there is a real demand for it. (Unless Scribd’s numbers are artificially inflated—Quantcast shows an unusually steep drop-off in December, but that could just be a problem with Quantcasts’s data). Desktop-bound document formats like PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint slides, and spreadsheets are increasingly irrelevant if they cannot be viewed and shared online directly in a browser. Scribd’s paper is an embeddable Flash viewer for nearly all document types. (I’ve embedded a document with sample job interview questions below).

It looks like we are not the only ones who like to embed documents on the Web.

Update: CEO Trip Adler explains the Quantcast discrepancy:

The drop-off on Quantcast was caused by the fact that we removed the Quantcast pixel from Scribd for a little while because it was slowing down page loads. However, I’m not sure why these numbers are still on the low side. According to our Google Analytics, we did 39.9 million unique in November, and if you include views of iPaper on other websites, it was way over 50 million uniques.

50 Most Common Interview Questions and Answers Publish at Scribd or explore others: Do-it-yourself Tutorial truth knowledge
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14:56
iPhone Dev Team Posts Cryptic Message - What Are They Up To?
» TechCrunch

On the eve of the iPhone 3G software unlock, the following text just went up on the iPhone Dev Team blog:

01110110 01110100 01100001 01100010 01100101 01110010 00100000 00110110 00110001 00110000 00110110 00110000 00110001 00110111 00110100 00100000

Now, any self-respecting geek should immediately recognize this as binary. If we take that block of binary and convert each 8-number chunk into it’s respective ASCII representation, we get one step closer to the final answer.
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13:47
Top Social Media Sites of 2008 (Facebook Still Rising)
» TechCrunch
What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. Wordpress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques.

ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well.

Below are the top 20 sites on comScore’s social networking list. It is really more of a social media site list, which is what I’m renaming it for this post. It is not definitive, but it gives a good lay of the land. (Here is a similar ranking from 2007). Note on this list the stubborn persistence of Yahoo’s Geocities at No. 6, the rise of Yahoo’s Flickr at No. 7, Six Apart at No. 10, and the presences of Chinese sites like Baidu Space and 56.com. The real surprise, though, is document-sharing site Scribd at No. 16, with nearly 24 million worldwide uniques.

Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore)
1. Blogger (222 million)
2. Facebook (200 million)
3. MySpace (126 million)
4. Wordpress (114 million)
5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
7. Flickr (64 million)
8. hi5 (58 million)
9. Orkut (46 million)
10. Six Apart (46 million)
11. Baidu Space (40 million)
12. Friendster (31 million)
13. 56.com (29 million)
14. Webs.com (24 million)
15. Bebo (24 million)
16. Scribd (23 million)
17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)
18. Tagged (22 million)
19. imeem (22 million)
20. Netlog (21 million)
Here’s a screenshot of the actual data (as you can see, I rounded above):

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13:34
The Zune Screen Of Death (Updated)
» TechCrunch

We are aware that customers with the Zune 30GB are experiencing issues with their Zune device. We are actively working now to isolate the issue and develop a solution to address it. We will keep customers informed on next steps via the support page on zune.net (zune.net/support).” - Zune spokesperson

The “issues” 30 GB Zune owners are experiencing is a mass failing, all overnight, that is yet to be resolved. From Gizmodo: “Apparently, around 2:00 AM today, the Zune models either reset, or were already off. Upon when turning on, the thing loads up and… freezes with a full loading bar (as pictured above). I thought my brother was the only one with it, but then it happened to my Zune. Then I checked out the forums and it seems everyone with a 30GB HDD model has had this happen to them.”

Just a couple of months ago I wrote that the Zune was something of an anti-iPod, attractive to people who think Apple fandom has gone a little overboard.

But a massive, synchronized operating system failure on a Microsoft product is a fact-is-stranger-than-fiction story that’s too good to pass up on a slow news day. And it also lets people dust off blue screen of death jokes, which will forever send chills down the spine of Windows users. (The image to the right is not an actual Zune failure, though. It locked up in a less dramatic fashion with a frozen status bar).

When Apple products fail, as they often do, they tend to be less dramatic affairs that don’t affect all users at once.

This probably won’t hurt the Zune over the long run unless bricking becomes a habit. But some owners are saying they’re now done with the device: “Listening to music is about the last thing I do with my Zune. I always have to reinstall, download new firmware, or wait for the slow software to catch up. Now this? I want to throw it away and never look back.”

Perhaps he’ll feel better in a day or two.

Update
The Zune dev team has posted a notice on its blog that says all issues should be automatically resolved in 24 hours (as suspected, the problem is related to a calendar bug).

Early this morning we were alerted by our customers that there was a widespread issue affecting our 2006 model Zune 30GB devices (a large number of which are still actively being used). The technical team jumped on the problem immediately and isolated the issue: a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year.

The issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to January 1, 2009. We expect the internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset tomorrow (noon, GMT). By tomorrow you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on. If you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, you may need to sync your device with your PC to refresh the rights to the subscription content you have downloaded to your device.

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12:47
Apple’s Washington D.C. Store Facing Opposition: Satanic Plot? Also, New Mac Minis
» TechCrunch

Apple is facing opposition to putting up one of its gigantic glass-everywhere stores in one of Washington D.C.’s historic neighborhoods, the complaint being that it’d be too big and too modern to fit in with all the other quaint, cute buildings in the area (see our artist’s rendition above).

I propose, however, that the complaint is a cover-up for a much more massive and sinister conspiracy involving Apple, Satan, and the White House.

In related news, there might be a new Mac Mini next week.
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12:40
UK Government To Outsource Big Brother Internet Monitoring. I’m moving to China.
» TechCrunch

It will cost $17.5 billion, be run by private companies and track every move we make on the internet, every call, text message and every transaction. Yes, this is the UK government proposal to manage and run a communications database that will make Chinese attempts to control and monitor its citizens look like “light touch” regulation. The only difference with one-party states like China (apart from the summary trial and execution) is that the government claims that it will not look at the content on our every electronic interaction, but merely at the points of entry. The “pings”, if you like. But of course, by building up such a database, this will create enough “content” to create a pattern of recognition about our movements.
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12:01
Wikinvest Stock Charts Find Their Way Onto USAToday.com and Forbes.com
» TechCrunch

Stock charts and data are the lifeblood of all investing sites, even in these slumping times. Most major media sites have investing sections powered by stock data that they license for a pretty penny. San Francisco startup Wikinvest is making inroads as a stock data provider for media Websites. Its embeddable, annotatable charts now grace the stock pages of USAToday. Beginning next week, they will also power the stock charts on Forbes.com, replacing its current stock data provider, INVESTools. (On USAToday, the Wikinvest charts are supplementing the main charts).

Each stock page on USAToday also includes community analysis and links to related concepts from Wikinvest as well. Wikinvest charts can be annotated with news stories and embedded elsewhere. For instance here is a chart from USAToday’s Google stock page:

View the full GOOG chart at Wikinvest
Wikinvest gets only about 450,000 visitors a month worldwide (November, 2008 comScore numbers), but is growing rapidly. Distribution deals like these (and broader adoption of its Wikinvest Wire by financial blogs) could help Wikinvest grow beyond its current niche.

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10:14
Oy Vey! Israeli VCs Exceptionally Gloomy on 2009
» TechCrunch
Deloitte recently released the results of its VC Indicator Survey (PDF), conducted among Israeli VCs this past month. The complied results are so pessimistic they paint a warm and fuzzy aura around Sequoia’s Doom & Gloom presentation.

Participated by approximately 80 Israeli venture capitalists, the survey predicts 2009 will be an extremely painful year for the Israeli startup industry in most every respect.

Here are some of the highlights:
- 92% of those surveyed predict at least 3000 people will be laid off.
- 92% also believe that companies who do not lay off employees will slash salaries.
- 74% predict that at least 10% of venture backed startups will be shutdown.
- 95% foresee harsh times in the fund raising department.
- 54% expect a slowdown in seed investments.
- 87% expect a decrease in company valuations.
- 26% are confident that commitments by limited partners will not be withdrawn, while 51% believe they might.
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9:19
Yogurt Store Employee Confirms Jobs “Not dead yet”
» TechCrunch

Robert "I like yogurt" Scoble interviewed Steve Jobs' yogurt purveyor, asking him if the wizened CEO had been in lately. The answer? Yes. So Steve is well enough to eat yogurt. Smack 32 cents onto Apple's stock price. This frenzied speculation about Jobs is quite sad indeed. As we all know, Jobs is the driving force behind Apple's innovation but, last time I checked, Apple has 32,000 employees all dedicated to making the products we love. Just because he might not show up this year is no cause for alarm. Heck, based on this +5 Turkleneck of CEO Charisma Correlation Effect, you'd expect Windows 7 to suck with the figurehead Bill Gates out of the picture. Apparently it doesn't because even I'm interested in Windows 7.
6:59
Google’s Top Ten Products (More Or Less)
» TechCrunch

Can you name Google’s top ten products? If you look at how Quantcast ranks Google’s subdomains, you can get a sense of which Google products are the most popular, since they each have their own subdomain. Google’s main search engine tops the list with an estimated 136.6 million unique visitors in the U.S. Then comes Google Maps (36 million), Image Search (31.7 million), and Gmail (10.5 million). Google Docs, Sites, and Knol are still too small to make the top-ten, but are all showing decent growth.

YouTube, Blogger, and Orkut are not included below because they are on their own domains, but YouTube would be second with 70 million unique U.S. visitors, and Blogger would be in the top 5 with 23.5 million. Orkut is not popular in the U.S., so it would not be a factor in this particular list. And I took out sorry.google.com, the domain Google uses to try to catch bots and spyware. It would have ranked No. 8.

Another notable trend that Quantcast measures is the rise of Google Book Search, which it claims surpassed Google News in visitors back in September. Perhaps the enhanced newspaper archive search features it introduced back then helped. Book Search visitors are now at 8.4 million vs. 7.4 million for Google News, according to Quantcast. Other measurement services such as comScore and Compete show Google News to still be bigger than Google Book Search. ComScore for instance shows Google News at 15.6 million unique U.S. visitors in November, compared to 7.8 million for Book Search. But both also show significant growth in Book Search visitors since the summer.

The Quantcast numbers are not completely reliable because Google’s sites have not been “Quantified” (the process Quantcast uses to collect its most accurate data). But they are roughly accurate. Below the Quantcast rankings, I’ve put the comparable rankings from comScore for U.S. visitors. Some of the rankings are different, but nine out of same products make it on each list. (The only difference is that comScore counts Google Product Search, while Quantcast counts Google Groups).

Quantcast

1. Google Search
2. Google Maps
3. Google Image Search
4. Gmail
5. Google Book Search
6. Google News
7. Google Video Search
8. Picasa
9. Google Earth
10. Google Groups

ComScore

1. Google Search
2. Google Image Search
3. Google Maps
4. Gmail
5. Google News Search
6. Google Video Search
7. Google Product Search
8. Google Book Search
9. Picasa
10. Google Earth

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5:19
Angelsoft Gets An Upgrade, Opens Network To Venture Capitalists
» TechCrunch

Angelsoft, a New York based company that develops a platform for connecting early-stage investors and entrepreneurs and managing investment deal flow, has released a significant update to its software and is finally opening up its network to VCs next to angel investors.

When the company released version 3.0 last September, the upgrade was centered more about making it easier for early-stage investors to sift through entrepreneur applications, search and rate them, etc.

The new version is called Angelsoft 3.4 and comes with 317 updates (release notes), most of them bug fixes, but also introduces a number of features including a nifty ‘Tripit’ style one that enables users to e-mail in deals to a default e-mail address. The company says that most key features have been added to make it easier for VCs to manage deal flow, but that there was also a lot of improvements for angel investors.

Angelsoft was started in the fall of 2004 by David S. Rose, Chairman of the New York Angels, and Ryan Janssen. The company claims to currently cater to 442 angel groups and VCs, 14,852 investors, with 3,100 startup applications coming in a month. Angelsoft’s public stats show that 1,32% of the applicants ultimately get funded, but also that the activity on the network is definitely picking up.

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4:33
Update Twitter, Doogie Howser M.D. Style
» TechCrunch

I knew someone would eventually nail the perfect service for updating Twitter. That day has come, with the launch of Twoogie, where you can send and view tweets in true Doogie Howser, M.D. style on an IBM PS/2 screen.

Just add your username behind the URL to view your Twitter stream the old school way (e.g. TechCrunch). Note that for some reason - could be intentional - it doesn’t always work straight away. To update, you’ll need to log in with your Twitter credentials, so that’s entirely up to you.

Twoogie comes straight from Syndeomedia Labs, based in the Philippines and Australia.

You can tell us how cool it is or how we write too much about Twitter related stuff in 3, 2, 1 …

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3:36
YouTube Looks Back At A Year In Video; Hulu Brings in 2009 Live From New York
» TechCrunch

YouTube is posting their year end review of the top videos, measured by ratings, favorites and number of comments.

Last year they posted just 10 videos. This year, 24. They’ll be posting one per hour all day today and then summarize them at midnight when everyone will presumably find them much funnier because they’ve been drinking for hours (hopefully not alone watching the Big Apple fall live on Hulu).

Make your guesses on which videos will be included. I’ve started things off with the one above, which I imagine is very likely to be included.

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2:31
The Mob Wars War Is Over
» TechCrunch

The ongoing litigation between Mob Wars creator David Maestri and SGN is over. On December 16 the two sides reached a settlement. The Mob Wars game goes to Maestri, but SGN will have rights to create similar style games itself. SGN also received an undisclosed financial settlement.

The history of this powerful little app is dramatic. It was first created by Maestri while still employed at SGN’s former iteration, FreeWebs, under the pseudonym Jason Gilbert. That alone is evidence that the game actually belonged to his employer. Maestri left SGN in February 2008, and SGN sued Maestri for control over the game. For more background, see here.

Mob Wars, which is a game that lets players act as criminals and rise through the mob ranks by committing crimes, fighting other players, etc., brings in a lot of money. Players use real currency to buy weapons and other virtual goods on the site. Some estimates suggest revenue may have peaked at $1 million/month, and there are nearly 2.5 million active users of the application on Facebook today.

It has also spawned a number of copycats, including Zynga’s Mafia Wars, with 2.7 million active users.

Given that the settlement allows SGN to create its own knockoffs without fear of future litigation, suggestion is that Maestri will pursue Zynga and others for intellectual property infringement.

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December 30, 2008
22:53
Holiday E-Commerce Sales Fall Flat
» TechCrunch

Online holiday sales deflated 3 percent this year. ComScore estimates that holiday sales in the U.S. totaled $25.5 billion between November 1 and December 23, the last day orders could be delivered in time for Christmas. The comparable total in 2007 was $26.3 billion.

Sales were struggling to keep up with last year’s totals all holiday season. In the end, they fell short. (Hitwise comes to the same conclusion).

A simple look at U.S. traffic to retail sites in December through Christmas Eve (see table below) shows that eBay had the most unique visitors (85.4 million), followed by Amazon (76.2 million), and Wal-Mart (51.5 million). Even though eBay attracted the most people, its traffic was down 4 percent from last year. Amazon saw 7 percent more visitors, which might have contributed to its claiming to have a great Christmas.

But the retail sites that saw the biggest increases in visitors was Apple (up 19 percent) and Hewlett-Packard (up 28 percent). Dell, in contrast, saw a 17 percent decline in visitors.

(Photo by Randy Son of Robert)

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18:11
Large Form iPod Touch To Launch in Fall ‘09
» TechCrunch

We’ve got this from three independent sources close to Apple: expect a large screen iPod touch device to be released in the Fall of ‘09, with a 7 or 9 inch screen. Prototypes have been seen and handled by one of our sources, and Apple is talking to OEMs in Asia now about mass production.

Apple has been experimenting internally with large form tablet devices for years, one source says, but there was concern that users wouldn’t like the device. The difference now is the iTunes app store, which has thousands of games and other applications that are perfect for a touch screen device with an accelerometer. Apple says more than 300 million applications have been downloaded since the App Store launched in July 2008. Combine the App Store, iTunes and a browser and you have one heck of a device.

We don’t have any information on pricing. The current iPod touch, with a 3.5 inch screen, starts at $229. The 32 GB model is $399. We expect the price on the larger iPod touch to be significantly higher.

Apple rumors, particularly Apple tablet rumors, tend to come and go. I’m not saying Apple is definitely launching a large form iPod Touch. But sources I trust are saying they are currently planning to, and one source has actually held the device.

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17:53
Squatters Are Screwed; Nobody Cares If Your Domain Has That Hot New Suffix
» TechCrunch

Quick, name three significant web sites that have domain extensions that end in .me or .tv. Having trouble? Sure, there are a few of them out there (kyte.tv and Buddy.tv come to mind, but I can’t think of any major .me’s). For all of the hype surrounding these extensions at launch, they’ve largely failed to deliver.

Earlier today Chris Dannen at FastCompany wrote a post titled “How 2009 Will Spur The Rebirth Of Cyber Squatting“. In it, Dannen writes about the beginning of a new age of domain squatting, as ICANN (the organization that handles domain name registrations) begins accepting applications for new domain name suffixes. He posits that with the emergence of new extensions like “.nyc” or “.law” these squatters will be given a new lease on life, with a nearly endless number of possible domains to plunder. Legitimate companies, likewise, will have to register as many domains as they can in the hopes of fending off sites like “Microsoft.sux”.

Fortunately, Dannen is wrong. Some overzealous companies may still go to the trouble of snatching up as many domains as they can, but it will be for naught.

If ICANN does wind up releasing dozens or hundreds of new domain name extensions, extensions in general will become increasingly meaningless. Many people are already confused enough by the differences between common extensions like “.net” and “.com”. And they’ve generally rejected the overhyped extensions that are already out there, like “.tv”. Adding countless others to the mix will only make them more confused, to the point that they no longer care.

Instead, they’ll just turn to search engines. Many people are already using Google to search for whole domain names, and I can’t think of the last time I’ve directly entered a URL from an ad I heard on TV or the radio (I usually just type the company name into Google). Search engines generally do a better job at identifying the most authoritative sites in a space, and as they get smarter by paying more attention to user location and semantics, the bias for search engines over URLs will only become stronger.

To some extent we need this - the internet has essentially run out of good domain names. Most startups and small companies can’t afford to play the squatting game, leading them to create brand names that are as forgettable as they are meaningless. As we make the jump from the URL to the search engine, they’ll be able to name themselves whatever they’d like, even if they use an obscure extension.

This won’t kill off cyber squatting entirely - .com’s will continue to command exorbitant prices, and a handful of domain extensions may eventually emerge as popular alternatives to .com and .net. But the idea that the web will soon become “incomprehensibly more vast and expensive” is simply misguided. It might get a little bigger, but it won’t be anything Google can’t handle.

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17:46
Hitwise: High-Income Shoppers Slashed Spending Most Over The Holidays
» TechCrunch

Hitwise has just released a brief report examining the spending habits for web users over the holiday season. Using traffic data from its Retail 500 index, the site found that traffic in 2008 was lower than it was last year, but was (perhaps surprisingly) higher than it was back in 2006.

The study also found that the biggest drop off in traffic was among shoppers that fell under the ‘high-income’ demographic, which is classified as households earning more than $150,000 per year. Traffic from these upper-class buyers dropped 12.33% comparing December 2007 to December 2008, versus a drop of around 1% for those making less than $30,000 a year and an increase in traffic from everyone else. The report doesn’t make any guesses as to why this happened (perhaps the more wealthy users were losing more money in the stock market?), but it’s an interesting trend nonetheless.

Finally, the report says that the trends toward lowered traffic reversed in the days immediately following Christmas as shoppers looked for deals. This was especially pronounced at “luxury retailers”, who may have been forced to slash prices more viciously in light of the economic climate.
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17:45
Techmeme Highlights Top 10 Stories Of The Year
» TechCrunch

Techmeme, a popular partially-automated tech news site, has released a list of its top 10 stories from 2008. Megan McCarthy, the site’s recently appointed human editor, has published the list on the Techmeme blog. McCarthy writes that headlines were determined using Techmeme’s internal data, which allows it to generate what is at least a somewhat-objective list of the year’s most widely read (and written about) stories.

The year’s top story was Microsoft’s proposed takeover of Yahoo (in classic Techmeme fashion, McCarthy includes two ’sub-headlines’ under this one, one from the Wall Street Journal, another from Google).

Other top stories include the launch of Google’s Chrome, the rumored buyout of Digg (originally reported here), and the launch of the iPhone 3g

The list is also reflective of the unique nature of Techmeme and its audience. Some of the hottest topics, like Apple’s decision to drop its controversial iPhone NDA, probably won’t make any top 10 lists on traditional tech news sites, as the issue wasn’t particularly relevant to most consumers.

Perhaps the biggest misfit on the list is the launch of Google’s spoken-word iPhone app, coming in at #5. I absolutely believe that this ranked highly in Techmeme’s internal metrics (it seemed like everyone wrote about it repeatedly, especially after its three-day delay), but voice search hasn’t exactly turned out to be Earth-shattering.

For the whole story, which includes explanations for why each one was so popular, be sure to check out the blog post.

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17:23
iSkoot Moves Beyond Mobile Skype With Notifier
» TechCrunch

iSkoot is moving beyond Skype for mobile phones with the release of a more general mobile application called Notifier on AT&T’s Media Mall. Notifier lets users read RSS feeds and interact with Facebook, email (Gmail and AOL mail) and IM (AIM and Google Talk).

This isn’t an iPhone/Android application, it’s made for users who don’t have those kinds of fancy phones. It currently works with a variety of LG, Sony, Samsung and Motorola handsets, and it costs $2.99/month.

Why this is interesting: this is the productization of the technology they acquired with Social.IM, one of the first chat applications for Facebook. It also makes iSkoot less reliant on the whims of Skype - today their primary product is a technology and application that lets people use Skype from mobile phones.

Diversifying their business is probably one of the arguments they made in justifying their recent $19 million funding. Perhaps they can spend some of that money and invest in a new logo.

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15:03
MD5 Collision Creates Rogue Certificate Authority (Translation: Bad News for the Internet)
» TechCrunch

At the 25th Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) today, researchers will reveal how they utilized a collision attack against the MD5 algorithm to create a rogue certificate authority. This is pretty big news, so read on. When you make a secured connection to a website via HTTPS, a public key certificate is sent from the server to your computer. This certificate contains a digital signature which your computer uses to verify the identify of the site to which you're connecting. Certificates are "signed" by a Certificate Authority (CA), which acts as a kind of middle-man: you trust the CA, so you can trust the certificates signed by the CA. Anyone can create a certificate authority, though, so most browsers have a list of known reputable and trustworthy CAs. When your computer gets a certificate from a server, your browser checks the CA that issued it to determine whether the CA is trustworthy. If the CA is trustworthy, your browser assumes that the certificate being presented is trustworthy.
13:27
Organize Your Company With WizeHive (Beta Invites)
» TechCrunch

Yammer definitely started something. The enterprise Twitter service has more competition today from Wizehive, a Web-based group messaging and task management service for businesses. WizeHive just launched in beta. We have 500 invites (just enter “TC2009″ when you sign up).

WizeHive is a bootstrap startup funded with $100,000 from the founders Mike Carson and Michael Levinson. Levinson is also the founder of DreamIt Ventures, a YCombinator-like startup incubator in Philadelphia. DreamIt itself did not invest, but Levinson created WizeHive out of the frustrations of managing all the different DreamIt projects and applicants. Says Levinson:

I needed something to organize all my thoughts and activities for DreamIt. Stuff was flying all over the place. I looked at Basecamp and Central Desktop, I didn’t think they were intuitive enough, the way the interfaces were designed, for my partners (who are business partners, not techies).

Although it is similar in many respects to Yammer, Present.ly (our review), Basecamp, Central Desktop, and even in some ways to Producteev (our review), WizeHive is a worthy competitor and adds a few twists of its own.

Like Yammer and the rest, WizeHive lets you set up workgroups and displays messages to everyone in a Twitter-like stream. But conversations are threaded. You can click to see an entire thread (the most recent message also appears at the top of the stream). WizeHive also works great on the iPhone and other mobile browsers (Blackberry and Android optimizations are coming soon), and you can get it as a desktop Adobe Air client or receive alerts in your email. (If you CC notes@wizehive and put the workspace in brackets in the subject line of an email, WizeHive will ingest and categorize the contents of the email, including attachments). Soon, you will be able to get WizeHive updates in your Twitter feed as well.

WizeHive also adds task-management features like Basecamp, Huddle, and Producteev. You can create a task, set a due date, and assign it to yourself or to someone else. Each task can be marked as “open,” “completed,” or “in progress.” You can also upload files, and everyone can view them in-browser. Images and files can be attached to specific messages.

The most distinctive feature of WizeHive, though, is that it allows you to create a small database for each workspace, complete with customizable data fields. This is great for managing contacts or organizing events. WizeHive plans to add additional apps for which it will charge subscription fees. The first two due out in January will be a simple Opprtunity Tracking app for CRM purposes and one for TimeSheets. WizeHive already has an API and hopes others developers will build their own add-ons.

WizeHive is free for up to three people and up to 50MB of storage, and then fees start at $8 a month for a small group, with additional fees for extra storage. Add-on apps built on top of the API will cost less than $10 a month, and is where Levinson thinks he can make the most money.

WizeHive Overview from mike on Vimeo.

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12:39
SlideSix: A Guerrilla Presentation Sharing System
» TechCrunch

At last night’s meet-up I met a guy named Todd Sharp who created SlideSix.com, a presentation sharing system that supports PowerPoint/PowerPoint 2007, PDF, OpenOffice, and MOV files. It supports uploading and embedding of slides in any web page. It’s not much to look at right now, but I works correctly and it’s a testament to what one man with a dream can accomplish in this dirty, harsh world.

Todd built the service from the ground up and it works using a Flash-based interface with plenty of additional features including on-the-fly video and audio recording. The system also allows for the creation of a “branded” presentation experience where all of your presentations are presented as a cohesive whole. Yeah, I didn’t get that part either.

What’s really important is that Todd is basically creating this in a vacuum in Medina, Ohio and it just goes to show you that good programmers and ideas aren’t just coming from the confines of some programmer cage in the Valley. Good on ya, Todd.

Note: Please think before you troll. Todd is the very definition of a start-up: an enthusiastic business-owner who made something from scratch.
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12:06
AT&T’s YellowPages Paid $3.85 Million In Cash For YP.com
» TechCrunch

AT&T’s YellowPages subsidiary purchased the two-letter domain name YP.com (now redirects to yellowpages.com) last month from the company LiveDeal (formerly YP Corp.).

A SEC filing has now revealed that YellowPages acquired the domain name for a cool $3,850,000 in cash payment. That’s a lot of money for an admittedly valuable domain name, especially during this economic downturn. It probably didn’t hurt that YP.com was actually operational and generating revenue for LiveDeal, but we should also note that this amount is roughly half of the publicly listed company’s current market cap.

For the sake of comparison: AT&T (or rather BellSouth and SBC at the time) acquired YellowPages.com for something approaching $100 million dollars a couple of years ago. Its market capitalization, of course, exceeds $165 billion.

Hat tip to George Kirikos for the tip.

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11:09
F*MyLife Offers A Glimpse Of Others’ Screwed-Up Lives
» TechCrunch

If you enjoyed visiting DMFail, which surfaced Twitter messages intended as private messages on a public website but ultimately failed, you’re bound to get a kick out of this: F*** My Life is a service in beta where registered users are given a public platform to complain about just how screwed up their lives are and why.

In true Web 2.0 style, other users can comment on the short revelations and indicate that they in fact agree about the fact his / her life is f*cked up, and/or if the submitters actually deserve it. Thanks to those groundbreaking features, you can filter down stories based on the number of people who agree or think it’s well deserved, and you can also get a top-down list of the most discussed or most favorited life stories.

It all makes for very awkward reading (it reminds me of that creepy, now defunct Confession account on Twitter), although I’m sure there are people that will actually enjoy this.

Update: there’s also What A Fail, an iteration of the popular French Vie De Merde, and F*MyLife seems to be heavily ‘inspired’ by it.

There are currently only 100 stories on the website, but if you have anything to complain about in your life, eat your heart out (in max. 300 characters). Do remember to assign the correct category, so F*MyLife can keep making these graphs as an insight into what makes people miserable the most.

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9:47
Netflix, Adobe, Google Rated Best Places To Work. AT&T, eBay, RadioShack Among the Worst.
» TechCrunch

Where are the best and worst places to work? Glassdoor, the site that surveys employees about workplace conditions in great detail, has issued lists of the best and worst 50 companies as rated by employees out of the 11,000 in its database (see below).

There aren’t any startups on these lists because Glassdoor does better with larger companies with more employees. Topping the list of best companies is General Mills, but tech companies make a decent showing as well, with Netflix, Adobe, Google, SAP, and NetApp making the top 10. Apple is No. 19. Amazon and Microsoft didn’t make the list. Neither did Yahoo, but it escaped the worst 50 list as well. The same cannot be said for eBay, IAC, and AT&T

Here are the top 20, with tech companies in bold:

1. General Mills
2. Bain & Company
3. Netflix
4. Adobe
5. Northwestern Mutual
6. Whole Foods
7. Google
8. SAP
9. Continental Airlines
10. NetApp
11. Intuit
12. McKinsey & Company
13. FactSet
14. Boston Consulting
15. Procter & Gamble
16. Caterpillar
17. Genentech
18. CareerBuilder
19. Apple
20. Juniper Networks

The five worst places to work, according Glassdoor, are:

1. DHL Express (USA)
2. United Airlines
3. Reynolds and Reynolds
4. Farmers Group
5. Gibson Guitar

Other notable companies that made the bottom 50 include:

6. RadioShack
14. Qimonda
15. NCR
27. EDS
29. AT&T Mobility
31. OfficeMax
33. Level 3 Communications
34. Motorola
37. Blockbuster
38. Alcatel-Lucent
43. IAC
44. Cadence Design
46. Circuit City
47. eBay
49. AT&T

The full lists are below, with teh best places to work listed first:

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7:46
UGC Picture Agency Is The Logical Conclusion From Death In Gaza
» TechCrunch

Demotix, a new startup coming out of London, is taking a pretty raw approach to reinventing the newswire and with the wave of news coming out of the Israel/Palestinian conflict right now it is coming into its own. If you ever wanted to know what life and death was like on the ground in the middle of a war this is it, direct from ground zero. The idea is simple: anyone can shoot video or photos at a news event like a protest and upload the content to the site. The site only takes photos right now but text and video are due soon. Everyone who uses Demotix will keep the copyright and the right to remove the images from the website. The non-exclusive images will be sold for anywhere from between $150- $3,000, and videos will be sold by $500-$1,000/minute. Demotix shares 50 percent of the revenue from each sale with the person who contributed the content. Demotix has six-full time staff members and six full-time interns. The site has launched in Beta but in the next fortnight launches a full version, along with an Arabic version.

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5:35
TipsBase, A Place To Share Tips And Tricks About Anything
» TechCrunch

TipsBase is a new social network centered around sharing tips and tricks about a wide variety of topics, counting on user-generated content to populate the community site with interesting tidbits on why and how to do (or not do) certain things. The team behind the website likened it to a ‘YouTube for tips’, but that’s quite the overstatement.

TipsBase says it’s different from the crowded space of How To websites and other social networks where tips are shared via message boards and the likes, by providing a centralized platform where registered users can share short, practical advice about any topic ranging from business, computers and video games to fashion, pets, gambling and health. There’s also a social layer on top of it, where you can do classical social networking stuff like befriend people, subscribe to their tips, comment on articles, send direct messages, rate content, etc. This is similar to what Tipstrs is all about.

The team is convinced that users will benefit from the fact that TipsBase covers so many categories, but I tend to think niche communities or websites dedicated to tips and tricks about a limited set of topics work better. There are better resources for finding tips and tricks about video games, for instance, and I’m not even going to consider looking for tips on health or personal finance on a general website like TipsBase.

They’re also going to have a hell of a time moderating incoming tips (see second screenshot for example). Having your community flag spam and adult material is one thing, but I think the quality of the tips is what would make users come back for more, and there’s no way to assure that when all it takes for people to start sharing tips is providing their e-mail address and picking a password.

CrunchBase Information TipsBase Information provided by CrunchBase
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3:42
Content Sites Bracing For 50% Revenue Slowdown
» TechCrunch

The U.S. economy has likely been in recession for a year, and tech companies have been bracing for a big slowdown in growth. But the fact is that revenues for most Internet-based companies haven’t dropped yet. Amazon, in fact, was able to issue its annual “best year ever” press release the day after Christmas.

That’s all about to change, at least for content sites, starting this week. Display advertising revenue is going to fall of a cliff in January according to a number of content sites I’ve spoken with who rely on advertising for revenue. “Sales through December were mostly strong as advertisers used up their marketing budgets,” said one sales exec. But, he added, “there are few buyers for this next fiscal quarter, and those few that are buying are looking for steep discounts.”

Just how bad will it be? I’ve heard estimates of 30%-80% revenue drops over the next three months from companies that serve a variety of content (games sites, tech news, celebrity news, political news, etc.). The median pessimism point is around 50%. The people I’ve spoken with work at large public companies and small one-person blog shops. Absolutely no one I spoke with said they expect an up quarter.

Some of the companies that survive the next few months will be leaner and stronger when this ends. That’s the upside. But everyone is cutting the fat, and your boss just may think you’re expendable.

Anyhow, on a more upbeat note, guess the movie the image is from, first comment to get it right gets a TechCrunch tshirt.

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December 29, 2008
23:37
Columbus TC/CG Meet-up: The Aftermath
» TechCrunch

So we had about 45-50 people at the event tonight and I was amazed at the energy and excitement here in my hometown, good old Columbus. I met the guy who sold me a car (seriously: I guess his Dad owns the dealership and he's a huge gadget geek) this weekend along with the guy who invented the PowerSquid. There are a few start-ups and products I'm going to highlight this week and I'm pleased to say that these folks are amazingly excited and enthusiastic, even in a down economy. Click through for a full gallery.
23:06
RjDj Continues To Be The Most Trippy App On The iPhone (And I Love It)
» TechCrunch

Back in October I wrote about a new iPhone app called RjDJ, which I described as “An Awesome, Trippy Soundtrack For Your Life“. The application includes a set of entrancing songs that go on forever, using the iPhone’s internal microphone to ‘listen’ to the noises and voices heard in your proximity to dynamically create music. It’s a bizarre and totally unique experience that you should try if you haven’t already (you can grab the full version here or a one-song trial here).

Tonight the RjDj team has released a followup to its original app called RjDj Shake. The application has a similar purpose, using external input to dynamically generate music. But instead of using sound, Shake relies on the iPhone (or iPod Touch’s) accelerometer to adjust the audio any time the phone senses movement.

Each song (or “scene”, as the app calls them) responds to movement in a different way - some scenes are designed for passive movement, playing tiny bells whenever you take a step, while others are meant to be used when you’re jumping, dancing, or waving your iPhone around. You can also record your songs for future listening, though it doesn’t look like there’s an easy way to export them.

In my brief testing I found Shake to be less trippy and captivating than the original application (likely because it doesn’t feature weird echoing voices), but it’s still fun to play around with. I’m hoping that eventually RjDj will incorporate the technology from both Shake and the original into a single application so we can get the ultimate in bizarre musical iPhone tripping.

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19:26
Second Authority-Based Twitter Search Engine Launches: Twithority
» TechCrunch

As bloggers continue to debate the finer points of nothing, yet another entrepreneur has gone out and just built a filtered search engine for Twitter. A couple of days ago Twitority launched (although it appears to be down now). Today, it’s Twithority, by the same guys at Tsavo that created Daymix.

Twithority is notably faster in returning results, and it looks farther back (1,000 results v. 50). It ranks results by rank (highest ranking users first) and time (most recent first) by the top 10,000 Twitter users.

Some people will continue to hate the debate over Twitter authority, but ultimately the market will decide if there’s demand for this kind of product.

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19:24
Borange: A Social Activity Timeline For Your iPhone With Free Group Texting
» TechCrunch

Borange, a new app that just went live on Apple’s App Store, is looking to turn your iPhone into a casual social planner. The application effectively adds a basic calendar function to the iPhone’s address book, allowing users to view a timeline that details when their friends will be free to hang out that day. You can download the 99-cent application here.

Borange is very well designed, and feels like a natural extension to the address book. To get started, you scroll through your list of contacts, checking off the ones you’d like to send your availability information to (you can also send out mass notifications to groups or your entire contact list). Contacts that are Borange members will see your available times listed as part of a comprehensive timeline that also includes schedules from their other Borange-using friends.

Those contacts that aren’t using Borange will get their updates via SMS or Email, which include links to a map of your current location as well as your contact information. Borange is less impressive when you don’t have many friends using the iPhone app because the nifty timeline view becomes mostly useless, but it’s still an effective way to handle group messaging (and all outgoing SMS messages are free, as they are routed through Borange’s servers).

There are a number of other apps available on the iPhone that are also geared towards helping users pair up with friends, but most of them just use GPS to tell you when you’ve got a friend close by and leave the logistics up to you. Borange has less of an emphasis on geolocation and is instead focused on streamlining the invitation process, which could make it a worthy addition to your iPhone. And even if you can’t get your friends to start using the iPhone app, it still makes for a great free mass text-messaging service.

For more on Borange, check out their demo site.

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16:57
DMFail Fails, Twitter To Fix Private Messages Snafu
» TechCrunch

Say goodbye to the fun of reading private Twitter messages sent improperly and gathered on DMFail. Sometime today, Twitter says in an email, they’ll change the way private messages are sent so that you can use either [D + username + message] OR [DM + username + message].

It’s a subtle feature change, but one that will avoid embarrassment for people who’ve accidentally made their private messages public.

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16:52
It’s Not How Many Followers You Have That Counts, It’s How Many Times You Get Retweeted
» TechCrunch

Over the weekend a lot of tech bloggers got into a tizzy over a suggestion that Twitter search should rank Tweets by authority, with Tweets from people who have the most followers coming up first. Some bloggers quickly objected that this was somehow undemocratic or would give spammers more of an incentive to trick people into following them, and thus would be easy to game. One developer went ahead and created exactly that search experience with Twitority anyway. (Update: Make that two, check out Twithority also). While others didn’t understand what the big deal was in the first place because their relatives in Scranton have never heard of Twitter (sigh).

One thing that is clear is that there needs to be a better way to filter Twitter (which is a finalist for a Crunchies Award this year) as it grows into a broader public communications and publishing system. I like to think of Twitter as public IM. But with possibly more than one billion Tweets out there, how do you know which ones to pay attention to? What is the best way to measure the authority of a Tweet (and, thus, where it should rank as a Twitter search result)?

A better proxy for authority than the absolute number of followers someone has on Twitter may be how many times their messages get retweeted. Retweeting occurs when someone takes an original message on Twitter (a Tweet), sticks an “RT” in front of it, and spreads it further to their followers. It’s another way to separate some signal out of the cacophony of Twitter.

These numbers are, of course, related because the more followers someone has, the more likely that one of their messages will be retweeted. But they are not exactly the same. For instance, here are the top 100 people on Twitter ranked by number of followers and here is another list ranked by the number of retweets. Guy Kawasaki is No. 1 on the Retweet list (his messages have been retweeted 335 times in the past week), and is No. 9 on the followers list (with 40,496 followers). Not surprisingly, he thinks looking at retweets is the way to go (so he tells me).

The nice thing about retweets is that it offers a potential way to sort though not just people on Twitter, but their individual Tweets. An important Tweet that gets replicated around the world from someone with 5 followers or less (which is a third of all Twitterers), should have more authority than a Tweet from Kawasaki or Robert Scoble or even Barack Obama that has no impact.

You could go even deeper than just the number of retweets a person has. An even better proxy might be the number of retweets per follower. Someone with a high ratio might be worth listening to more than someone with simply a lot of followers.

Looking at the propagation of retweets is also helpful. Dan Zarella, the man behind the retweet list, recently crunched some numbers and found that most retweets die after the second retweet. That is they get picked up by one follower and that’s it. Only 7.57 percent get retweeted again. But the retweeting rate then grows after that. He refers to it as the “depth” (See chart below). Messages that have ben retweeted three times have an 11.47 percent chance of being retweeted again. By the time a message has been retweeted five times, it has a 48.44 percent chance of being retweeted. I would love see all Tweets that have been retweeted three or more times, especially whenever I do a Twitter search.

The problem with retweets I suspect is that not many people use them or even know what they are. What’s with all the abbreviated commands on Twitter, anyway? How hard would it be for Twitter to add a retweet button or link, at least as an option? (In fact, they should take the most popular commands and turn them into buttons—usage would skyrocket).

Then, just as Webpages and Websites have different link authority, individual Tweets and Twitterers could gain retweet authority. A Website that gains link authority over time has an advantage over others, just as someone like Kawasaki has an advantage over other Twitterers by dint of how often his messages have been retweeted in the past.

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15:49
BlackBerry Storm, Or Possibly Just The Winter, Causes Major AT&T Outage
» TechCrunch

Someone at InformationWeek could probably use a vacation right about now.

Earlier today the site ran a post titled “BlackBerry Storm Causes Major AT&T Outages“, in which it described the network issues the telecom giant has been having over the last day. The title refers to BlackBerry’s recently-launched (and widely panned) touchscreen handset that is supposed to take the iPhone head-on. It might even make sense - perhaps enough people bought the phone over the holiday that a traffic spike took the network down.

Unfortunately the story is about a weather-related power failure that took the network offline, and appears to have nothing to do with the BlackBerry Storm, which isn’t even available on the AT&T network (it’s a Verizon exclusive).

From the article:

“The wireless carrier said a weather-related power failure in Bloomfield, Mich., was the cause of the problem. The disruptions varied for subscribers, as some experienced dropped calls, while other had no access to voice or data services. Other users experienced slower mobile data service, or no access to AT&T’s 3G data network.”

InformationWeek corrected the goof quickly, but not before it was snagged by Google News and a few other syndication portals on the web. You can also see the original version in the site’s cache.

Obviously someone over there has written the phrase “BlackBerry Storm” a few too many times.

Thanks to Colby Lavin for the tip.

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12:56
What Was The Best Of The Web in 2008? A Voter’s Guide For The Crunchies.
» TechCrunch

Last night we released the finalist names for the Crunchies Awards. Vote here for who you think should win. We’ve set up a site that is pretty self-explanatory, with all of the names of each finalist for every category, along with links to their Websites and Crunchbase profiles where you can learn more about each one before voting. The Crunchies represents the best the Web had to offer in 2008, and you get to help choose who will win. Below is a voter’s guide for two of the major categories to get you started.

Best Overall
Amazon Web Services
Facebook
Android
hulu
Twitter

Best Overall is the big prize. Amazon Web Services makes it as a finalist this year because of the sheer number of startups that are built on top of its cloud computing infrastructure. Facebook won last year, but makes a return as a nominee due to popular demand. Facebook continued to gain massive mainstream adoption in 2008 (with 140 million members now) and launched some major initiatives to extend its social computing platform beyond its site, most notably Facebook Connect (which by itself is a finalist for Best Technology Innovation, going up against Google Friend Connect). But does Facebook deserve to win again?

This was also the year that Google launched its Android phone, bringing the unadulterated Web to mobile devices beyond the iPhone (which won Best Gadget last year for its 2G version). Hulu emerged as a rarity in the Web video world, a popular site with a serious revenue model. And Twitter broke out as the service everyone can’t stop talking (or Tweeting) about. As with any new communication technology, people keep finding novel ways to use Twitter’s public instant-messaging service.

Best New Startup of 2008
Dropbox
FriendFeed
GoodGuide
Tapulous
Topspin Media
Yammer

This category recognizes the best startup to launch publicly in 2008. Dropbox makes it dead-simple to transfer files between computers. It creates a Dropbox folder on your computer that you just drag files into, and then they become available to anyone else with access to that folder. FriendFeed sparked the whole lifestreaming movement this year, and kept adding improvements that makes it easier to filter the Web through the actions of everyone in your various social networks. GoodGuide has created an impressive product database (and iPhone app) that tells you at a glance how green or safe that baby cream or toy is that you just put in your shopping cart.

Tapulous created some of the most popular iPhone apps with Tap Tap Revenge, Tap Tap Dance, and Twinkle (a Twitter client, of course), despite some internal turmoil. Topspin Media, founded by former Yahoo Music chief Ian Rogers, is trying to help bring the music industry into the 21st Century by embracing the Internet as a marketing vehicle instead of a necessary evil. And Yammer is an enterprise version of Twitter which won the top prize at this year’s TechCrunch50.

Here are the finalists for some of the other categories. To see a complete list, go to the Crunchies site and vote for who you think should win. Voting ends January 5.

Best Technology Innovation
Facebook Connect
Google Friend Connect
Google Chrome
Windows Live Mesh
Swype
Yahoo BOSS

Best New Gadget
Android G1
Asus 1000 Netbook Computer
Flip MinoHD video camera
iPhone 3G
SlingCatcher

Best App
Get Satisfaction
Google Reader
Minted
meebo
MySpace Music
Yelp

Best Mobile App
Google Mobile (for iPhone)
Imeem Mobile (for Android)
Pandora Radio (for iPhone)
rolando (for iPhone)
ShopSavvy (for Android)
Ocarina (for iPhone)

Most Likely To Make the World a Better Place
Akoha
Better Place
CO2Stats
GoodGuide
Kiva

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11:54
More “Private” API Calls Rise Apple’s Ire
» TechCrunch

John Gruber tackles private APIs again on Daring Fireball, noting that even some homegrown solutions to mimic iPhone private API calls has been banned inexplicably by Apple. The API in question is Cover Flow. Most internal Apple applications have access to the coverflow system but when a coder decided to mimic the system, his product was banned for using a private API. In fact, Apple has been timebombing some of the APIs, allowing folks to use them and then pulling the plug on them down the line.
11:52
Meet Mar.Com, The Techmeme For Marketing And Communication That Isn’t
» TechCrunch

I just stumbled upon the freshly launched Mar.Com, dubbed a ‘Techmeme for Marketing and Communication’ by co-creator Giovanni Gallucci on Twitter. It’s essentially an aggregation and filtering service for news related to advertising, digital marketing, search engine optimization, etc. where users can also submit events and jobs related to those topics.

First of all, I have to hand it to founders Gallucci, William Hurley and Mike Erwin: the (domain) name is awesome². That said, I fail to see the connection with Techmeme, as it has nothing to do with automatically aggregating news from a number of sources and having the best / most linked / most discussed article come out on top. Users can submit, discuss and rank stories related to all things marketing, so it’s more like a Digg for marketing and communication than anything else. In fact, I suspect they’re using Pligg CMS or a similar product to run the website although I’m not entirely certain.

Update: Gallucci got back to my e-mail and explained why Mar.Com is still ‘kinda’ like Techmeme:

While we are not totally automated we are taking hints from techmeme. A couple of the accounts on mar.com are “owned” by bots. They cull through RSS feeds for us and collect possible stories based upon our own internal algorithm. We then make a decision to promote the stories either to the site based upon the category the bot as recommended to us, promote the story to the site after changing the category or do nothing.

I’m sure there are numerous websites which have similar objectives as Mar.Com (although I can’t think of any besides Sphinn), and I’m also sure they’re going to have a tough time forming a strong enough community that actively engages with the content to make Mar.Com a must-visit. That said, it might be worth checking out from time to time to see if you’re not missing out on any stories.

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10:41
Apple App Store Gets Big Boost From iPod Touch Sales
» TechCrunch

Looks like the iPod Touch had a good Christmas, as App Store downloads on December 25th increased three-fold or more for most titles.

The boost in sales "appears to be from a large influx of iPod Touch users," according to MacRumors.com, who noted that it would have been much easier to give an iPod Touch as a Christmas gift versus an iPhone, which would have to be activated and whatnot.
9:48
Can Music Production Be Crowdsourced? Minimum Noise Thinks So.
» TechCrunch

Copenhagen, Denmark-based startup Minimum Noise wants to take a crack at crowdsourcing music production, by connecting musicians around the world in an open marketplace where like-minded artists can get together to create music tracks.

Basically, users can submit a project, describe what they’re looking for and what they’re prepared to pay for it. This can be anything from vocals to a bassline or the main instrumental riff, but the bottom line is that someone from the Minimum Noise community is supposed to run with the project and add a layer to whatever exists already. Typically, this would be something the project creator(s) or any of his musically gifted friends or family members are unable to accomplish without looking online for help. Project creators can accept submissions from other community members, pay him / her if they’re happy with the results and obtain the necessary material and rights of usage.

This is rather similar to the way WeMix (co-founded by artist Ludacris and backing by angel funding), Bojam and Indomite function, but I’m not sure if it’ll work.

There’s definitely merit in the idea of musicians collaborating on the net, but I doubt music as such can be crowdsourced at all. Isn’t creating music supposed to be a personal experience (or a group experience if there’s more than one person involved of course)? And even if it’s not, what exactly would drive musicians to look online for peers to complement or perfect their work? I could be dead wrong here, but I don’t see it happening, or at least not in the volumes required to build a business on top of it.

What do you think?

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9:00
Reminder: Columbus, Ohio Meet-up, 6pm Today
» TechCrunch

A quick reminder: CG/TC readers will be meeting at the at the Surly Girl Saloon [Map] in the Short North on Monday at 6pm. It's between holidays, it'll be nice and cosy, and we can talk of many things, including but not limited to, cabbages and kings. Please email john@crunchgear.com with the subject line "COLUMBUS" if you plan on stopping by. If you already emailed, I've got your RSVP. You can follow me on Twitter for updates as the evening progresses.
6:42
Want To Be A Reality TV Star? RealityWanted Could Be Your Missing Link.
» TechCrunch

Why people even want to go on reality TV shows is beyond my understanding, but it could be just me. Heck, there’s even a social network centered around reality TV programs and its protagonists, so it is probably just me. RealityWanted is such an online community, and its focus lies in one important aspect of the whole thing: the casting.

RealityWanted claims to have accumulated 100,000 members since its launch, and it’s dedicated to connect the aspiring reality TV stars (God knows the world needs them too) among them to producers of reality TV programs. Members can register for a free account, create a profile and post pictures to promote themselves to casting professionals. There’s news and video interviews on the site as well, but the casting element seems to be the essential reason of being for the website. It kinda works like an online job board (e.g. Crunchboard): casting directors can post ‘vacancies’, and RealityWanted members can apply for them online.

Yes, it’s niche, but reality TV is also an enormous industry and I’m pretty sure RealityWanted fills a need. Somewhere. Honestly.

The site was founded by Mark Yawitz, who apparently appeared on some reality television programs himself in the past, and Jason Oropallo. Yawitz started building RealityWanted as an information hub way back in 2000, but it was officially launched as a social network in 2004.

What are you still waiting for? I hear they’re still casting for married women with an addiction or obsession (just about any will do).

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2:54
DMFail: Another Reason To Just Not Send Private Messages On Twitter
» TechCrunch

If you are the kind of person who can’t help but look when you drive by an accident scene, DMFail is for you. The site, which has been all the rage on Twitter for the last few days, shows direct (private) messages that were sent improperly on Twitter and are therefore public.

If you want to send another Twitter user a message that only she or he sees, you type [D + username + message]. But a lot of people accidentally type DM (for Direct Message) instead of D, and when that happens you pay the price of having your message pop into your Twitter stream for everyone to see.

DMFail grabs all those messages and reprints them on its site for everyone to see, which can be quite a horrible experience for the people involved. Thus the accident scene analogy.

It would be fairly trivial for Twitter to change things so that DM also sends a private message, but so far they haven’t. On average, a couple of messages per hour over all of Twitter end up hitting DMFail.

Direct messages on Twitter don’t seem to be all that secure in general. They’re available to third parties through the API, for example, and there has been at least one case where confusion led to making some direct messages public.

Anyhow, from now on I’m just going to start all my Twitter messages with DM. I suggest you do the same.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
December 28, 2008
23:46
Go Vote For The 2008 Crunchies Finalists
» TechCrunch

The finalists for the 2008 Crunchies awards, brought to you by VentureBeat, GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider and TechCrunch went up for vote earlier this evening. Vote here for your favorite startups, products and entrepreneurs.

Nearly 180,000 total nominations were made across the various categories.

Voting will continue until end of day on January 5, and the winners will be announced at the award ceremony and party on Friday, January 9 at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. We released another 200 tickets for the event this evening as well, get them at Amiando. This ticket also gets you into the after party.

This year’s Crunchies would not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors. Thanks to ceremony and after-party co-hosts: Microsoft, MySpace and Founders Fund; award benefactors: Charles River Ventures and Mayfield; streaming partner, Ustream; after-party game-room partner, Garage Games; ticketing partner, Amiando; photo host, PicApps; hosting partner, Media Temple; wine partner, Cannonball wines; and event patron, Institutional Venture Partners. Please contact heather@techcrunch.com or jlogo@earthlink.net if you’re interested to learn more about creative (and very reasonably priced) sponsorship opportunities.
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18:45
UK Government Has Heard There’s Bad Stuff On The InterTubes
» TechCrunch

In the US tech scene you have weekend “bitchmemes”. In the UK, there is a kind of equivalent known as “government minister opens mouth and inserts foot”. This weekend it was the turn of Andy Burnham, the secretary of state for the Department of Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS), and as such supposed to take an interest in the Internet. Unfortunately his weekend interview with a newspaper betrayed the simple fact that he knows nothing at all about how the Internet works. Nothing.

Burnham gave an interview to the Daily Telegraph newspaper saying that the UK government is considering “the need for “child safe” websites – registered with cinema-style age warnings – to curb access to offensive or damaging online material.” There would also be “child-safe” internet services run by ISPs and the “option” of introducing age ratings for websites. “This is an area that is really now coming into full focus,” he said. He said some content, such as clips of beheadings, was unacceptable and new standards of decency were needed. He also plans to negotiate with the US on drawing up international rules for English language websites.

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16:29
Will It Blend iPhone App Promises Fun, Fantasy
» TechCrunch

Need 20 "Will it Blend?" episodes? Have $1.99? Then the great god Odin is smiling upon you today for Tom Dickson of Blendtec has an app for you.
14:24
The Tubes Are Clogged
» TechCrunch

If you’ve been having trouble accessing some of the web’s most popular sites this morning, you aren’t alone - reports have been pouring in that major sites like Amazon, CNN, and ESPN have been having sporadic outages in some areas across the United States. The problem seems to be stemming from an issue with Level 3 Communications, which operates one of the largest internet backbones in the world.

According to InternetPulse, the provider has been showing severe latency times, and a number of other sites have confirmed that Level3 is the source of the issue.

Some of the affected sites are beginning to write blog posts explaining their outages to users (here are posts from SliceHost and Posterous). It looks like some of the issues are being resolved, but some sites are still having problems.

We should also note that AT&T customers have been reporting widespread outages in some regions. We’re trying to find out if the two outages are related.

Update, 11:45 AM PST: Level3 technical support technician Eunice Morales says that all of the issues have been resolved, and that the problems originated from Washington, DC, Chicago, Spain, and Germany. She also says that the problems with AT&T could possibly be related to the Level3 issues.

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13:08
The Future Of Social Search (Or Why Google Should Buy Facebook)
» TechCrunch

If you could search your friends’ thoughts, interests, and activities, would that be a better search experience? In many cases, it would be. Searching for restaurants, books, or movies, would turn up recommendations from people you actually know. If you are researching a trip to Florence, Italy, you might discover ten friends who have been there already, and could ask for advice on what to do. These scenarios have been the dream of social search for a few years, with both startups and search engines taking a stab at it. But so far it’s been a failed dream.

Yahoo’s experiment with social search, Yahoo ~~360~~ MyWeb, never took off. ~~is being shut down~~. It was a rudimentary social search in that relevant bookmarks from friends showed up as search results. And search has never been Facebook’s strong suit. It handed search over to Microsoft, but the search experience on the site is poor. It is difficult to search much deeper than your friends’ names. You need to go to an advanced profile search page to filter through their interests, activities, or other profile categories, for instance. And forget about searching your news feed.

Yet social search done right could become very valuable for Facebook. And it would be even more valuable for Google. (They already know how to make money from search). It is also an opportunity for Microsoft Live Search, but they are not really inspiring much confidence so far. So let’s set aside for a moment the unlikelihood of any Google-Facebook deal or partnership (given Microsoft’s investment in Facebook), and let’s imagine how the two could help each other.

Even if Facebook/Microsoft figures out social search, it is more useful on Google, which is where most of us do our searching. To get a glimpse at what this might look like, you can try Sidestripe, which is both an add-on widget for Google search and a Facebook app. Sidestripe is like Glue for search (Glue is a browser add-on that shows you whether anyone in your social networks has expressed interest in the book, movie, restaurant, product, or other things mentioned on whatever page you happen to be browsing). Similarly, sidestripe indexes all your friends on Facebook and parts of their profiles (where they work, their interests, etc). When you do a search on Google, a box with Sidestripe results appears after the third natural result, giving you a sense of whether any of your friends might be experts on the topic. For instance, when I do a search for “Google” it turns up Facebook friends who work at Google or are somehow affiliated with Google, and looks like this:

A search for “biking” turns up friends who are interested in biking. You can also add your own knowledge to any search result, and it will appear as a subsequent result (although it does not let you add links, which I consider a major bug). Or if you still can’t find what you are looking for from either Google or Sidestripe, you can ask all of your friends a question from inside the Sidestripe box on Google about the topic you are trying to learn about and that question shows up in all of your friends’ feeds. Any answers then become indexed and searchable.

Sidestripe is barely out of alpha and still frustrating to use because more often than not the Sidestripe box remains empty. When there are results, they are interesting. It is hit or miss. As more people use Sidestripe, this should improve. But I think a big part of the problem is that it does not fully index my social graph, and certainly does not return results from my News feed.

Yet making Facebook’s News feed searchable (on Google) would go a long way towards realizing the dream of social search. The Facebook feed already aggregates what my friends are doing not just on Facebook but all across the Web (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc.). It’s like Friendfeed in this respect, but with many more users.

The trick to making all of this seemingly random data useful in search is to come up with a social algorithm that can rank it all accordingly. For instance, when I search for Florence, Italy, friends who have lived in Florence, Italy should show up, but so should friends who have recently taken pictures there or Tweeted about Florence, and maybe in that order. This kind of ranking is a hard problem to solve, and it is what Google is good at.

Imagine instead of Sidestripe, the option to add Facebook Connect to Google search, which would then turn on social search in results (these should only appear when there actually are social results to show). They could keep the Q&A capability in there as well. It would add an entirely new dimension to search.

Of course, Google has its own Friend Connect program, and wants to monetize it with Friendsense. But just as search is not Facebook’s strong suit, social networking isn’t Google’s. All my contacts are on Facebook. They are the ones I want to search. And everything I’ve described above is a big opportunity for Microsoft, if they can pull it off.

But the best results, IMHO, would come form a combination of Facebook and Google.

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12:48
Ask And Ye Shall Receive: Twitority Launches Authority-Based Twitter Search
» TechCrunch

Yesterday Loic Le Meur wrote a blog post asking for an authority-based Twitter search that would allow users to restrict their searches to Twitter users with a large number of followers. A number of bloggers were upset over this seemingly innocuous feature request, citing the difference between authority and popularity and how easy it is to game popularity counts on Twitter. But it looks like at least a few people thought it was a worthwhile cause: twelve hours later, Loic writes that a small team of developers led by Jon Wheatley has launched new service called Twitority that does exactly what Loic asked for.

Below is the letter Wheatley wrote to Loic:

“Since I read your post this morning about authority based twitter searches I’ve been frantically trying to come up with a solution with some friends. 12 hours and numerous cups of coffee later I think we’ve cracked it.
You can now perform authority based twitter searches at http://twitority.com

This wasn’t an easy task. There are some very real limitations on the twitter API so we had to hack around it a little bit to find a way to do this. This obviously isn’t an ideal solution but hopefully it will suffice until twitter implements the feature themselves.”

The service seems to be pretty bareboned at the moment, but it’s still impressive for the amount of time it took. Users can choose to search for users with “any authority”, “a little authority”, or “a lot of authority” (no word on how many followers correspond to the latter two), and each result indicates how many followers the user has. At this point it seems like the threshold for the “high authority” settings are too high - I’m often left with no results for queries for popular keywords like “iPhone” and “Twitter”. But now that the technology is built, it will likely be fairly simple for the site to implement more customized settings.

So is Twitority going to mark the end of the golden age of Twitter? Hardly.

Even Loic, who initiated yesterday’s fiasco, has admitted that “authority” might not be the best word for a popularity-based search (he blames his French). But it doesn’t really matter what it’s called. Being able to filter users by follow count is useful, and is certainly be a worthwhile feature. But it won’t spell the end of a “democratic Twitter” because, as Google showed over a decade ago, popularity isn’t the best indicator of relevance. For that, you need an algorithm that can filter out spammy results (don’t be surprised if Twitter is already working on one in-house).

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10:55
Actual Conversations On Twitter Not Possible Until Twitter Lets Us
» TechCrunch

One of the big complaints about Twitter is that conversations are hard to follow. Users can write a response to a Twitter message (or anything else), but the easy way to do this is to add an @[username] tag to the Twitter, which refers back to the original Twitter user. But by then that original user has often moved on to other subjects, and it becomes impossible to follow the conversation.

This morning a new service launched called Tweetree that tries to solve this problem by threading conversations. It works, sort of, but there are occasional errors as the service tries to match up which messages refer to what, and it rarely tracks deeper than one comment. Hardly a conversation.

This was all tried before with a service called Quotably, which actually worked much better than Tweetree. Quotably is now sadly in the Deadpool. Quotably was a good way to track conversations on Twitter, but it too had its problems keeping up.

The fact is that Twitter purposefully doesn’t want users to be able to track conversations. The content begins and ends with a discreet Twitter message, up to 140 characters long. Competitor Friendfeed does a nice job of tracking conversations by letting users reply to actual messages, not just users. Twitter, for whatever reason (possibly to keep things simple), just doesn’t want that. And until they do, nothing is going to change.

Tweetree has other features, like embedding videos and pictures that people link to into the stream. But without proper conversation tracking it won’t gather more than a handful of users, and will soon be forgotten.

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December 27, 2008
23:37
Bloggers Lose The Plot Over Twitter Search
» TechCrunch

Wow. Loic Le Meur asks for a simple feature on Twitter search - the ability to filter results by the number of followers that a user has to make sense of thousands of messages - and the blogosphere calls for his head.

For the record, I agree with Loic. Being able to filter search results, if you choose, by the number of followers a user has makes sense. Without it, you have no way of knowing which voices are louder and making a bigger impact. It’s a way to make sense of a query when thousands or tens of thousands of results are returned.

Of course, I’m pretty sure I can live without this feature, too. I’m failing to get too worked up over it. But the outpouring of emotion from bloggers is surprising me, and I thought I’d seen just about everything when it comes to blogging.

Robert Scoble: “Here’s why it’s a stupid idea: everyone is gaming the number of followers. And, even if everyone weren’t, popularity on Twitter isn’t a good way to measure whether a Tweet is any good or not.” [Ok, but it is a good way of determining how loud that message was]

Dave Winer: “I think it’s a bad idea.”

Sarah Lacy: “No one could be this nakedly egotistical and self-serving.” [this one was my personal favorite. Sarah is clearly worked up over this idea.]

Steven Hodson: “some-one like me with next to no followers wouldn’t even rate showing up in search results even if I started to topic being searched for” [no, only if someone turned that filter on in the search]

Sam Harrelson: “I think this is a terrible idea.”

MG Siegler: “this absolutely would ruin one of the most compelling things about Twitter: That it’s completely democratic.”

Etc.

All this vitriol and angst over a simple feature request - a button to filter search results by number of followers on Twitter search. If people don’t like it, they can not go into advanced search and hit the button. No one is being disenfranchised, the wonderful faux democracy of Twitter won’t be imperiled. And for those of you who just hate the idea, maybe you can have an option to only show messages in search results that are from users with few or no followers.

Get it together people.

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17:45
Companies hiring on CrunchBoard: Digg, Dictionary.com, CBS, Hulu, and TechCrunch
» TechCrunch
Despite layoff season, companies around the US continue to hire–including New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Indiana. (Here at TechCrunch, we need a Rails Developer to add some fancy new features to CrunchBase.)

Some of the jobs currently on CrunchBoard:
- Senior Marketing Manager
  Digg - San Francisco, CA
- Art Director
  DCI Group - Washington DC
- Senior Product Manager
  Dictionary.com - Oakland, CA
- Senior Developer
  Synacor - Buffalo, NY
- Wanted, Dead or Alive! Superstar Rails Developer
  Cerego Japan - Tokyo, JP
International readers can check out our British and French job boards as well.
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12:35
Fucked Company/Adbrite Founder Philip Kaplan To Launch Kaplan Index
» TechCrunch

People are urging Philip Kaplan to restart his FuckedCompany site that gathered so much attention earlier this decade. Clone sites are popping up to fill the void during this down market, and people sort of see the world of dead and dying startups as Kaplan’s territory.

He strongly considered re-starting the site and even had a former Valleywag writer lined up to do the hard work. But on second thought, he said, that era is dead for him. He’s going to focus on the positive instead.

Thus the beginning of his newest service, Kaplan Index, which he tells me will launch in the next few weeks. The site is quiet on what exactly the service will do, but does say “Get recognized for your skills in 2009,” which tells me it’s got something to do with finding people a job.

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11:42
Saturday Morning Quiz: Name That Web 2.0 Logo
» TechCrunch

Besides the funny names and bad spellings, one hallmark of Web startups over the past few years has been the creative use of logos. Often you know a startup by its logo more than by its name, especially if it is for a Web app whose site you don’t actually visit that often. Instead, the logo appears as a favicon in your browser address window, or as an icon on another site.

How well do you know your Web 2.0 logos? Take this quiz to find out. There are 33 logos. See how many you can name. Most of them are easy, but there are a few tricky ones thrown in.

Check out the other quizzes at Quizable while you’re at it, like “Name That Villain” or “Football Haircuts.”

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10:24
It Was a Netbook Holiday at Amazon
» TechCrunch

All the boys at CG love them some netbooks - I'm content with my mini-model AKA the iPhone - but apparently the rest of the world is snapping them up as well. Om notes that 17 of the 25 top-selling notebooks on Amazon were sub-$500 netbooks, something I'm sure the laptop manufacturers love.
10:18
Cuil Fail: Traffic Nearly Hits Rock Bottom
» TechCrunch

Remember the ill-fated Google-killer Cuil? Named ‘Cuill’ and very much in stealth mode for the first part of the year, they finally emerged end of July 2008 with a ‘massive’ search engine that would rival the most popular search engines of our time with an enormous index, an innovative interface and some nifty features.

Rival, it never did. The launch of the search engine was nothing but a classic PR trainwreck, with much hype and little to show for. Cuil failed to deliver good enough results to drive anyone to change their search behavior, and quickly became the subject of backlash and criticism because of their poor performance and indexing methods that actually took websites down in the process. Last time we reported about Cuil, was when their VP of Products (and AltaVista founder) Louis Monier quietly resigned from the startup.

With the end of the year approaching, I took a peek at how they’re doing traffic-wise out of sheer curiosity. After all, with no less than $33 million in funding and a founding management team consisting of ex-Google search experts, something had to give, right?

Well, no. Cuil isn’t performing well any way you look at it, and I can only imagine how nervous the startup’s management team and investors must be by now. Based on the numbers and graphs we gather from Google Trends, Alexa, Compete and Quantcast, you could even say search engine traffic is nearing rock bottom. Apart from that, a Cuil search for ‘TechCrunch’ still displays a Gmail logo rather than our own.

CrunchBase Information Cuil Information provided by CrunchBase
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7:01
BookSprouts, A Social Network For Book Worms And Clubs
» TechCrunch

Reading books is usually a solitary experience, but it triggers social activity as well, as the ongoing success of real-life book clubs shows. BookSprouts is a fairly new online community dedicated to book readers who love discussing books over a nice cup of virtual coffee. The social network is designed to make it easy to start an online book club, discuss books with other individuals, organize meetings and write up reviews.

First of all: the website looks and feels great. Signing up was quick and easy, and the lay-out of the website as well as the copy all make it very clear what to do after you’ve registered. There’s a powerful search behind the community layer so it’s very easy to add books you’ve read, or books you haven’t read yet but would like to. Creating and joining a book club on BookSprouts is done in a heartbeat, and you can look for book clubs by book (surprise!), subject, author, or geographic location. Based on the search results, the social network currently counts about 275 virtual book clubs, but some of them are invite-only.

BookSprouts faces the same hurdle most online community websites do when they launch: the inevitable ‘chicken and egg’ problem. I added a couple of books I read to my virtual bookshelf, but none were being discussed in any book clubs, nor were there any reviews. That means there’s not much social about this particular network for me so far. I could start my own book club of course and recruit members from the site or my own friends, and start writing reviews like crazy, but we all know only a small percentage of users actually gets around to being an active creator on these types of services, so only time will tell if BookSprouts can turn enough visitors into online book club ‘leaders’.

I also don’t see the business model behind BookSprouts. You have to dig very hard to find ads on the site and users don’t get charged for anything. What I see are affiliate links for buying books you’ve added to your profile on Amazon or AbeBooks (which recently became part of the Amazon family), but that seems rather pointless as I’m likely to already own books I’m declaring myself a fan of.

BookSprouts will find itself competing with Shelfari (recently acquired by Amazon) and the AbeBooks-backed LibraryThing, both of which are social networks centered around books.

(Found via MoMB)

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2:25
Should Twitter Add Authority-based Search?
» TechCrunch

Loic Le Meur is asking Twitter to add an authority filter to their search (he also goes on a rant about Sprint, but ignore that). He wants to sort through Twitter messages based on how many followers the person writing has, so he’ll know the relative importance of what’s being said.

The way he argues isn’t pretty (“We’re not equal on Twitter, as we’re not equal on blogs and on the web”) but what he says has merit. The number of followers a Twitter user has is effectively a volume button - the more followers, the higher the volume of what’s being said. This is exactly what Technorati does with blog search (and where I grabbed the green bit in the image to show what it might look like).

He uses the Le Web conference as an example. 7,000 or so tweets were written that mentioned the event, and he doesn’t want to sort through all of them. Give him a filter to look at just the ones by users with at least 1,000 followers, he says, and he’ll be happy.

I’m with him on this. Most of the time I just want to read everything people are writing about a topic to more or less take the temperature of the masses on whatever I’m researching. But sometimes it would be nice to hear what just the top users are saying on a particular topic, too, since so many more people hear their message.

Given that Twitter, God love em, are more focused on stability these days than new feature releases, I wouldn’t expect this any time soon. But perhaps an industrious third party can take a crack at it. Don’t forget that Twitter search is actually a product created by a startup called Summize. Twitter bought them in July.

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December 26, 2008
23:09
Snackfeed: A Newsfeed For The Web’s Hottest Video Clips
» TechCrunch

Snackfeed, a video recommendation site that tries to aggregate the web’s hottest videos, has made impressive progress since its launch last fall. We were first introduced to the site at the DreamIt Ventures (a startup incubator similar to Y Combinator and TechStars) first funding day, and it held its private launch three weeks later. Since then the site has seen impressive growth, with a reported 150,000 unique visitors in November. Snackfeed is currently in private “b’alpha” but TechCrunch readers can grab one of 1000 invites by visiting this site and entering the code “snacktastic”.

The site presents videos in a basic feed that is populated with videos shared by your friends, your favorite shows (which you can sign up for during the registration process), and clips that are currently trending in blog posts, Twitter feeds, and other places across the web. Users can also follow eachother using a Twitter-like follow system.

Snackfeed’s Jason Laan says that while the company initially concentrated on an extensive recommendation engine that segmented viewers into personalized channels, it found that most people were primarily interested in watching the web’s most popular clips. The site now serves these first, and then tries to fill in “the gaps” with recommendations based on the user’s favorite blogs, recently watched Hulu and YouTube clips, and favorite topics. The site’s homepage also offers a listing of the web’s current most popular videos to non-members, and acts as a sort of Hype Machine for video. Laan says that the site’s rapid growth can be largely attributed to an aggressive marketing campaign on Twitter and other social sites.

There are a few other players in this space, including ffwd (covered here), which is focused on created a powerful recommendation algorithm that allows users to “channel surf” across the web.

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18:32
The Vultures Are Circling Project Playlist
» TechCrunch

Music streaming service Project Playlist has 40 million users if you believe their home page, or around 10 million if you go by Comscore unique monthly visitors. Either way, it’s a lot. They’ve got a hot new CEO, raised a big round of financing, and finally signed a deal with a big label.

But they’re also in a very vulnerable position right now. Litigation with the other three labels continues, and they’ve been banned from both MySpace and Facebook after those labels threatened to sue them, too. Embedding music playlists on social networks is the key to Project Playlist’s continued growth, and that door has been closed.

And Project Playlist’s competitors have certainly noticed.

Legitimate music startups like LaLa and Imeem, who have deals with the major labels and also let users embed playlists onto the major social networks, are working on tools, we’ve heard, that will let Playlist users port their music lists over to the new services and embed them onto Facebook and MySpace. LaLa confirmed to me that they are working on such a tool.

If I were these services I’d try to cut an advertising deal with Facebook and MySpace that targets just those users that used to have Project Playlist playlists embedded on their profiles. I imagine they’d get a very nice conversion rate.

Users are fickle, don’t expect them to just wait things out as Project Playlist scrambles to get their label litigation settled and deals finalized. If those users see an easy way to get their favorite songs back on their profile, they’ll take it. And they may never go back to Project Playlist.

Update: Mixaloo says they’ve already released a tool that does this, see comments below.

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16:14
Telonu: Another Place To Write About How Much You Hate Your Job
» TechCrunch

Telonu (Tell-on-you, get it?) is a new website that invites you to “Rave, Rant, and Rate” about your school and business in the hopes of helping inform prospective applicants as well as providing co-workers a place to gossip anonymously. The startup is by no means the first to offer users a place to detail the inner workings of their current occupation (in fact, many companies have entire sites dedicated to describing how badly they suck, and we wrote about a similar site called JobVent last year). But unlike some of these alternatives, Telonu has a fairly attractive and professional interface that could help attract comments beyond the typical “my boss is a moron” drivel that prevent other sites from becoming valuable resources.

The site’s layout is reminiscent of Yelp, offering a summary of each company at the top of its profile followed by a listing of brief reviews from workers on the inside. When users sign up they are asked for their full names, but are guaranteed that these will never actually appear on the site (I’d be wary about entering it regardless, as it seems this information could be easily handed over to litigious companies by court order). Whenever users write a post about their company or co-worker, they can choose between displaying their names as ‘Anonymous’ or their site nickname, presumably so that they can make the really nasty messages totally untraceable.

Of course, with total anonymity comes questionable accuracy. Members of rival companies can easily litter profiles with poor reviews, so readers need to be wary of overly negative remarks (each review can be rated and commented on, so the obvious plants will hopefully sink to the bottom). Beyond standard reviews, the site also offers a section for ‘watercooler’ chit-chat as well as stock advice, which seems like an open invitation to offer insider trading tips given the ‘insidery’ nature of the site. But given the fact that there’s no way to actually verify if a tipster works at a company, even legitimate tips will probably get lost in the shuffle.

Beyond its interface there really isn’t much seperating Telonu from dozens of other competitors, including GlassDoor and the aforementioned JobVent. That said, none of these has really risen to become a well-known leader (as Yelp has with restaurant and entertainment reviews), so Telonu may still have a shot.

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13:42
Help Key: How To Get Out of Helping People With Their New Christmas Presents
» TechCrunch

Your brother just got a new digital camera. Your mom got a GPS device. Your grandfather got a Falcon Northwest gaming rig with six cores and a graphics card that requires its own physical plant. You're stuffed, sleepy, and just want to watch TV. How do you distract these hordes long enough to get in another turkey sandwich and viewing of A Christmas Story? Follow these easy steps:
11:57
Tweebay Offers A Rudimentary eBay For Twitter
» TechCrunch

Call it micro-classifieds. Paul Rawlings, a developer in the UK, launched Tweebay on Christmas Day, a classifieds listings service for Twitter. You use your Twitter account to buy and sell stuff (perfect for those unwanted holiday gifts). Instead of entering your Twitter password, you simply follow Tweebay on Twitter, and you confirm your bids via direct message (Twitter’s private messaging channel). This method should be used more often to authenticate Twitter accounts, as it does not require people to give out their passwords.

The advantage of selling things on Twitter is that you can alert everyone following you on the service that you have something to sell. Whether or not people will be more willing to buy something from a Twitter friend than from an eBay stranger remains to be seen. But the idea of social classifieds is gaining steam. And there are already ways to sell stuff on Twitter (see iList).

Right now, there is no way to actually pay for items via Tweebay (options are on the way). It simply connects buyers and sellers, and they have to figure out payments (which is less than ideal). Perhaps Rawlings should look at integrating Twitpay, Tipjoy, or Paypal directly. Tweebay took a day to develop using Twitter’s APIs, and is just a side project of Rawlings’ company ScreenReach. If it picks up users, Rawlings says he will develop it further. (He might have to change the name, though—eBay might consider it a violation of its trademark).

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10:45
At Least Amazon Had A Good Christmas
» TechCrunch

One reason Amazon has survived as an enduring Internet brand is that during downturns it takes market share, and this holiday season looks like it will be no different. Amazon announced its 14th record holiday season, with 72.9 items ordered every second, up from 62.5 last year. What really counts is its revenues and profits, which Amazon does not get into, but the holiday stats do provide some sense of how much shopping occurred on it site.

The day that orders peaked was on December 15th, when 6.3 million items were placed into Amazon’s checkout carts. That number was up 17 percent from the peak order day in 2007 (December 10). With five fewer shopping days this season, orders shipped peaked at 5.6 million on a single day, up 44 percent from last year. Some of the best-selling items this year included Eyeclops night vision stealth goggles, the Nintendo Wii, Razor scooters, Samsung 52-inch LCD HDTVs, The Dark Knight DVD, and the Twilight Saga books by Stephanie Meyer. Amazon says it was able to ship 99 percent of all holiday items in time for Christmas.

How does this year compare to seasons past? Barclays analyst Doug Anmuth provides the following comparisons:

Peak items ordered on a single day

2008: 6.3M
2007: 5.4M
2006: 4.0M
2005: 3.6M
2004: 3.6M

Items ordered per second

2008: 72.9
2007: 62.5
2006: 46.3
2005: 41
2004: 32

Peak items shipped on a single day

2008: 5.6M
2007: 3.9M
2006: 3.4M
2005: 2.7M
2004: 2M+

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9:52
Voicetag Brings Voicemail To Facebook
» TechCrunch
For those of you who don’t think voicemail is counterproductive, there is a new app on Facebook called Voicetag that lets you send voicemail messages to individuals or groups. This is not the first such app on Facebook (see Voicemail or TringMe), but it works with regular phones and incorporates SMS messages.

The app is very simple. You select a Facebook contact you want to leave a voice message for (or you can set up group aliases), and add an optional text message. Then, instead of using a computer microphone, you enter the number where you are at and Voicetag calls you. After leaving your message, the recipient gets a notification via Facebook and can play the Voicetag from his or her browser. You can also leave messages to groups from your cell phone by texting Voicetag. It will then call back your cell phone and you can leave a message. The service is free for now.

Voicetag was built by a startup called Ringful to showcase its voice app APIs. (It hopes to compete with BT’s Ribbit and Gizmo). Voicetag’s future feature list includes:
- The ability to not only record but also deliver voice messages to phones, in addition to the online voice Inbox we have today.
- The ability for the message recipient to interact with the message via touch tone when they hear the message on the phone (imagine that you can send out a voice poll on “where do we want to eat tonight? punch 1 for XYZ; punch 2 for ABC”, and get the votes back in text message!)
- The ability to start ad hoc group / conference calls among facebook friends.
- The ability to call your Facebook friend on the phone no matter where she is in the world, and no matter how many times she has changed her phone number since you last talked.
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7:25
Why Googlers Call Friend Connect “FriendSense”
» TechCrunch

It’s always fun to hear what Google employees call various projects when they think no one is listening. In 2007 they called the upstart Hulu joint venture Clown Co. as a private joke about the messy start to that unlikely company (I was right there mocking Hulu with them, but later gave them their due when they failed to fail).

Now we’ve confirmed that inside the Googleplex their new social product, Friend Connect, is often referred to as “Friendsense.” Why? Because like Adsense, Google plans to use Friend Connect as a shoehorn to insert advertising onto third party websites.

Friend Connect was first confirmed in May 2008. Earlier this month it opened to all comers.

The product (see the video below) lets websites add social features to their website. Add a few lines of code and you can let users sign in through a variety of social networks. Websites can also add various widgets and applications through Google’s Open Social project.

Soon websites that use Friend Connect will have a new option - add Adsense-like advertising within the Friend Connect and Open Social widgets that they’ve added to their websites. Publishers will get a percentage of the revenue generated from the advertising.

And that’s the big monetization scheme behind Open Social and Friend Connect for Google. And that’s why they call it Friendsense internally. And occasionally let it slip to outsiders.

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3:21
Charles River Ventures Trolling For Startups On Facebook
» TechCrunch

Forget using Facebook to hook up with random girls or guys. Venture fund Charles River Ventures is using it to find a hot startup or two. Eagle-eyed reader Rishi Mandal saw the ad to the left today, which says “Running a hot startup? Learn more about Charles River Ventures and how we can help you. We are actively investing in great entrepreneurs and big ideas.”

Usually VCs get way more business plans in their inbox than they can even read. But CRV, which is a traditional venture fund (meaning they tend to make larger investments than most very young startups need), also has a “Quick Start” program where they invest smaller amounts in very early startups. Some of those investments have done well, which explains why they’re trolling Facebook for more. I expect their competition will be there shortly as well.

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December 25, 2008
23:43
Sushi On Your iPhone
» TechCrunch

Great news for people who a) own an iPhone or iPod Touch and b) never know what kind of topping to get when eating Sushi: Tokyo-based Shogakukan, known outside Japan for its extensive offerings of manga (Ichi The Killer, Ranma 1/2, Crying Freeman etc). is releasing a virtual sushi guide for these devices.
12:36
How They Make Toys At Google
» TechCrunch

You know those engineer elves at Google like to do things their own way. That build-it-better ethic also applies to Christmas toys. If you click on the Christmas Doodle on Google’s main search page, you will see the five images below, which shows what I can only assume is one of Google’s older engineers in his workshop with his son. He is putting together a contraption with wooden gears and tubes that create toys (and explosions too!). Those must be Internet tubes.

(Yahoo and Live Search are also celebrating today).

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12:08
Pew Survey Confirms What We All Know: Net Beats Newspapers As A Source For News
» TechCrunch

News Flash: More people get their news from the Net than from newspapers. While this will hardly count as news to most of our readers, the Pew Research Center seems surprised by the shift. In a survey of 1,489 adults in the U.S. conducted in early December, 40 percent said they get most of their national and international news from the Internet, compared to 35 percent from newspapers. The percentage of newspaper readers has been pretty steady since 2005. What’s changed is the number of people admitting they get their news from the Internet as well, up from 24 percent the last time the Pew Center asked this question in September, 2007.

TV still beats both as a news source, with 70 percent, but give it a couple more years and the Internet should overtake that as well. Among younger adults, those under 30, the Internet already ties TV as a news source at 59 percent for both. (Last year, TV beat the Internet among this age group, 68 percent to 34 percent, to give you a sense of how fast things can switch).

Have people’s reading habits really changed so much in just a year, or are Pew surveys a lagging indicator of reality?

And if the numbers are accurate, is this just another nail in the coffin of newspapers? Not exactly. What isn’t clear from the survey is how much of that Internet news comes from Websites run by newspapers.

The New York Times alone, for instance, operates the 16th most popular set of properties on the Web, although that does not seem to be helping much in the online advertising department. Even if newspapers grab a large share of the Internet news pie, that pie is just not as filling as a pie filled with more lucrative print ads. But as long as newspapers keep producing journalism worth reading (and adjust their business models accordingly), people will keep going to them for a portion of their news. It is just that they will read their news in their browsers instead of on paper.

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0:39
The Meaning Of Friendship
» TechCrunch

I can only imagine the angst that Jessica Vascellero at the Wall Street Journal inserted into countless minds this evening with her article about the difficulties people are having defining what is and isn’t a “friend” for online social networking purposes.

Most Americans who aren’t teenagers or a little older are just getting used to the idea of social networks in general. But the complicated and evolving rules about what constitutes friendship online is adding even more stress.

One young woman had to face someone she defriended on Facebook in a chance encounter on an elevator, and re-added the person to rid herself of the guilt. A middle aged jeweler frets over the implied meaning a competitor unfriending him. Meanwhile, the web-savvy David Dalka, saying he doesn’t need to know “you’ve changed to a new brand of peanut butter,” has unceremoniously dropped people from his friend list at LinkedIn.

So What Is An Online Friend, Anyway?

The social networks themselves, and those of us who spend a lot of time there, are still trying to work out the details on what it means to be a friend with someone online. With friendship comes benefits - you get a stream of information about the person, but it also has costs (you have to wade through a stream of information about the person, and they get access to your intimate details).

Facebook in particular has struggled with this. For a time they really just wanted users to be online friends with people they already know in the offline world. That messaging has subtly changed more recently, though, to a less rigorous position.

It’s clear that the more friends you have on any given service, the more noise you have to wade through to find the golden signal. In the real world when you don’t want to be friends with someone, you just find ways not to spend time with them. But online, you click that friend button because it seems so easy, and it’s considered insulting if you don’t. And then you pay.

Social networks are taking two approaches to dealing with this. MySpace and Facebook (and those like them) have added different buckets to throw friends into. You can share more or less information with different groups of friends. So if you aren’t really friends with someone but don’t want to insult their friend request, you can throw them into the unwashed masses bucket (or whatever you want to call it).

The other approach is the one taken by sites like Twitter and Friendfeed. Anyone can follow anyone and watch what they’re up to, but you are under no pressure to reciprocate. The problem with this approach is that there is still a lot of social pressure to follow people back. I suggested a “fake follow” back in August so that you can just pretend to follow those people. Friendfeed now has a feature which allows just that.

But bucketing friends just seems like a bolted on way to fix the problem. And managing the changing relationships you have with of hundreds or thousands of people across multiple sites is a real time sink. In the future, the services should be able to do a much better job of just figuring out, through your gestures, who you are really close to and who you aren’t. It may also define a relationship with someone I don’t know at all based on whether or not we have friends in common. So even if there is no interaction at all, Facebook and MySpace (or whoever) can theoretically have an idea of how much personal information to share between us.

Ultimately, though, our culture is adapting just as quickly as the networks are. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has said users are becoming more and more comfortable sharing online. Sometimes (ok, often) Facebook is pushing the envelope when it comes to deciding on my behalf what is shareable and what isn’t. They’re placing aggressive bets on where this is all evolving. And sometimes they lose the bets (but not always).

But where they are correct is that there is no bright line of right and wrong when it comes to defining online friendship. The algorithms and the humans will meet somewhere in the middle.

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December 24, 2008
23:28
A Silicon Valley Christmas Tale
» TechCrunch

Editor’s note: The poem and illustrations below were submitted by an engineer in Silicon Valley who works for a big company and wishes to remain anonymous. The views expressed are not (necessarily) those of TechCrunch. The awesome illustrations are by Doug Shannon

Every geek
Down in Geek-ville
Liked searching a lot …
But Bill Gates,
Who lived just north of Geek-ville,
Did NOT!

Bill Gates hated searching and search advertising!
Now, please don’t ask why. It’s not that surprising.
It could be his brain had slowed up with age.
It could be, perhaps, that he loathed Brin and Page.
But I think that the most likely reason of all,
Was his wallet was feeling 2 sizes too small.

But,
Whatever the reason,
His wallet or brain,
By Jan of ’08 he was feeling the pain.
Looking down on the web with a Gatesian stare,
At the billions of people just becoming aware,
That web search NOT windows was the new way to think.
That it’s really more fun to surf popular links!

For,
Tomorrow, he knew …
That some Google shareholder
Would make many more billions
Than him or Steve Ballmer.
They’d start BIGGER foundations
To improve world health
And they might even give away
MORE of their wealth!

And THEN
They’d do something
He liked least of all.
Every googling fool, the tall and the small,
Would sit at their laptops like Sergey and Larry
They’d open their browsers and type in a query!
They’d search! And they’d search!
AND they’d SEARCH! SEARCH! SEARCH! SEARCH!

“They’ll be clicking those ads”, he snarled with a sneer.
“I smell a monopoly! It’s practically here.”
The he growled, with his fingers nervously drumming,
“I must somehow stop that monopoly from coming!”

Then he got an idea!
An awful idea!
Bill Gates
Got a wonderful, awful idea!

“I know just what to do!” Gates said with a laugh.
Then he called his pal Ballmer, to plan an attack.
And he chuckled, and clucked, “What a great business trick”.
I’ll buy up Yahoo and I’ll buy them up quick.
All I need is a deal
To get their web stuff
31 dollars per share seems enough!

So Ballmer sent Yahoo his generous offer,
But was told by Yang to return to the coffer.
Did that stop Bill Gates …?
No! He simply said,
“If I can’t buy Yahoo, I’ll sink them instead!”
So while Yahoo’s board was asleep at the wheel,
He asked Steve Ballmer to walk from the deal.
“Now, that is a lesson in playing hardball!”
Said Gates, as he watched Yahoo’s stock in free fall.

Well, it looked like Yahoo was certainly done.
It seemed like Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer had won.
But, let’s not forget, that in Silicon Valley,
You’re one hack away from printing more money.
So Yang and his gang started coding from scratch.
They made up a product that no one could match!
“Part open, part social,” Yang said with a grin.
“We’ll rewire Yahoo from outside to in.
And open up search, the home page, and then
We’ll double our profit by 2010.”

And Gates, in ‘08, who’d lost half of his dough.
Stood puzzling and puzzling: “How can it be so?
Is there any way Yahoo can help MS Windows to sell.
Or keep Office sales from going to hell.”
And he puzzled for hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then Bill Gates thought of something he hadn’t before.
“Maybe Yahoo,” he thought, “is more than just search.”
“Maybe Yahoo … perhaps … HAS significant worth!”

And what happened then …?
Well … in Geek-ville they say
That Bill Gate’s small wallet
Magically grew 3 sizes that day!
And the minute his wallet didn’t feel quite so bare,
He made a cash offer of 30 per share.
Then he opened HIS browser and did something new.

And he
… HE HIMSELF …!
Tried a search on Yahoo!

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20:45
Two free tickets to Lotusphere–is IBM’s Lotus Notes Out of Touch With Web 2.0 World?
» TechCrunch

Next month is the annual Lotusphere conference. IBM is giving two free tickets to TC readers--leave a comment saying why you'd like to go to Lotusphere, and we'll pick the winners by Monday morning. (Note: Passes cover conference registration only, not travel/hotel.) Few pieces of software are as polarizing as Lotus Notes. When my last job forced me to use Notes, I found the interface clunky, the graphics Win 95'esqe, and the workflow architecture non-intuitive. Granted, I was using Version 6.5 (Notes is now on Release 8), but even so I found it frustratingly unproductive. And I'm clearly not alone. Which leaves me wondering--has IBM's Lotus Notes lost touch with the user-centric web 2.0 world? To answer these questions, I interviewed Kevin Cavanaugh, IBM's VP in charge of the Notes/Domino group. Also joining us was Ed Brill, IBM's Director of Messaging and Collaboration.
17:31
DailyLit Emails Your Favorite Books In Bite-Sized Chunks
» TechCrunch

Before this week I’d never really heard much about DailyLit, a site that Emails you books in short, easily-consumable chunks. But after a few days of receiving The Count of Monte Cristo in my Email inbox every morning, I think I may be hooked - these serialized novels couldn’t be more perfect for a 10 minute coffee break or waiting at the bus stop.

To use the site, you choose a novel from DailyLit’s catalog of over 1300 novels, many of which are free. Each book is broken up into dozens (or hundreds, depending on the length) of installments, each of which is supposed to take around 5 minutes to read. You can tell the site exactly what time you’d like to receive each update, which can be sent either via Email or in an RSS feed, and how many chunks you’d like to receive at a time. And if you just can’t wait to see what happens next, you can also immediately download the next section of a book using a link at the bottom of every Email.

DailyLit has also recently launched public reading groups, which broadcast links to the current segment over Twitter. Because the books are being sent over Email, they can be read from nearly any mobile device with a dataplan. My only gripe with the service is that there seem to be few current bestsellers, which means you’ll need to look elsewhere for more recent novels.

Of course, with the growing popularity of Ebook readers like the Kindle and books on the iPhone App Store, DailyLit may seem pointless - why chop a book up when you can download the entire thing at once? But there’s something about receiving stories in these bite sized chunks that make them much more appealing - reading a 400 page novel on my iPhone’s 3.5 inch screen has always seemed like a daunting (and painful) endeavor, but when it’s only for a few minutes at a time, it couldn’t be any more convenient.

Thanks to Christian Bogeberg for the tip.

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15:38
SGN Launching Live Versions Of iPhone Apps. Challenge Others To Bowl Against You.
» TechCrunch

Social Gaming Network is launching new versions of its Wii-like iPhone sports games that let users play against others who’ve installed the apps.

In August I was disappointed that so few iPhone applications leveraged the network effect to spread virally. I used the chess apps as an example - there were lots of them, but none at the time that let you play against other people.

The chess problem has since been solved. But I am still amazed at how few applications let iPhone users interact with each other (other than the nascent mobile social networks, which continue to gain users quickly).

But SGN, which launched a bunch of sports-themed games that turn the iPhone into a Wii-like controller (and are experimenting with the iPhone as a PC game controller, too), is starting to experiment with multi-user games where players can compete against others who have the application installed.

First up is iBasketball (iTunes link). The app launched in November, but an update this morning lets players compete with others. So far it isn’t that great - you shoot free throws for a period of time while someone else does the same, but you don’t see them. At the end the scores are compared. (In the next update, SGN says you’ll be able to watch your foe take his/her shots real time, too).

But they have something much grander planned for the next version of iBowl, which originally launched in October. The new iBowl Live will let you play against three other players, and watch their swings (or whatever its called when you roll a bowling ball).

Any Xbox user knows how quickly games get stale. Going online and playing against others on Xbox Live is what keeps people playing the same titles for months or years. I think many iPhone apps, especially games, will follow a similar path. SGN seems to be taking the lead in innovating in this space.

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11:38
Fotonauts Opens Up A Little More; Skip The 5,000-Long Waitlist
» TechCrunch

Paris, France based Fotonauts, which launched at TechCrunch50, had a strong showing at the Le Web conference earlier this month.

The company aims to be a sort of Wikipedia for photographs, letting users create and edit albums of events, things and places. Information from Google maps and Wikipedia is automatically added to the albums.

The attention to detail and design is what makes Fotonauts so awesome. Check out the customization options for the album embedded above, for example, here (try dragging the margins to make the embed larger or smaller). No wonder that the founding team is ex-Apple.

Fotonauts is still in private beta, with 5,000 people or so on the waiting list. But during Le Web anyone could sign up, and were encouraged to upload their photos from the event to the many albums that popped up.

The company also announced the hiring of a CEO - Gilles Samoun - at Le Web, and released a Windows version of its desktop software (previously it was Mac only).

If you’re dying to get in to the Fotonauts beta right now, send an email to techcrunch@fotonauts.com. The first 500 will get set up right away. Otherwise, sign up here and wait in line.

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11:03
Informal Central Ohio CG/TC Meet-up on December 29 in Columbus, Ohio
» TechCrunch

I'm proposing we have a get-together at the Surly Girl Saloon [Map] in the Short North on Monday at 6pm. It's between holidays, it'll be nice and cozy, and we can talk of many things, including but not limited to, cabbages and kings. Please email john@crunchgear.com with the subject line "COLUMBUS" if you plan on stopping by.
10:58
Canary In The Coalmine: NYT Sees First Decline In Online Ad Revenues
» TechCrunch

In what may be an early indicator of broader Web advertising trends, the New York Times announced today that it saw total Internet advertising revenues decline 3.8 percent in November. This compares to a total decrease of 21.2 percent for all advertising at media company, most of which is print advertising. The New York Times releases financial data on a monthly basis, and this was the first time it has reported an actual decrease in Internet advertising revenues. (Internet advertising revenues for the year through November are still up 11.6 percent).

The NYT’s digital properties, which include NYTimes.com, Boston.com, and About.com, attracted 47 million unique visitors in November and collectively would have been the 16th largest site on the Web, according to comScore. In the third quarter, online advertising ground to a halt at the largest Web companies.

But most analysts are still arguing about the extent of the slowdown, not whether online advertising revenues will actually go down like other types of advertising. Barclays analyst Doug Anmuth, for instance, recently revised his 2009 Internet advertising revenue growth numbers down from 17 percent to 6 percent. But that might still be too optimistic.

That said, we still need more data points before any conclusions can be made about the fourth quarter or next year. The New York Times is not a perfect indicator of the overall advertising market. Most of its declines came from weakness in online classifieds, especially job and real-estate listings. On the positive side, its news sites actually saw an increase in display advertising in November. So there is some hope for other display advertisers.

Looking at November comScore stats for the NYTimes.com site alone, unique U.S. visitors were flat at 13 million was and pageviews were down 15 percent to 147 million (see charts below). Like many media sites, it is suffering from post-Election blues.

(Photo by matticgn).

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7:37
All I’m Saying Is, MobileAge May Want To Make A New iPhone Icon
» TechCrunch

I know what it’s supposed to be, but I also know what it looks like, and all I’m saying is that MobileAge may want to think about creating a different icon for their $9.99 iPhone app (which you can download here). Thanks Mike for sending this in (and also Gizmodo).
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6:04
TwitTangle Lets You Rate, Tag And Categorize Your Twitter Friends
» TechCrunch

Another day, another Twitter related application launches. This time around it’s TwitTangle, a service that pulls information about your followers from the Twitter API and enables you to put a layer on top by rating and tagging them, and also lets you categorize them in groups. Looks like something Scoble could use.

Like most Twitter apps, TwitTangle requires you to enter your credentials in order to use the service, so that’s up to you. If you do, you’ll find that the look and feel closely resembles that of the Twitter web version, with some added functionality but without the ability to see replies or direct messages. You can filter tweets by period or by tag. Of course, you need to tag all your friends first, so that’s quite a drag if you follow lots of people. Once you’ve taken the time to rate your friends (from ‘Just friends’ to ‘I love them’), you can view a custom timeline that takes your ratings into consideration and shows the updates of your best rated friends first.

Most useful is the Groups feature, which users have long been waiting for Twitter to implement themselves (for the record, they do offer this functionality for the Japanese version), but it’s not nearly enough to justify using TwitTangle daily, particularly because the basic features that make Twitter a good two-way communication channel are not in there. Also, there are no RSS feeds, nor a search function.

Definitely needs some tweaking.

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2:37
RareShare: A Community For People With Rare Medical Problems
» TechCrunch

Rareshare, a community site for people with rare medical conditions, has shared some of it most recent growth data with us and the results are impressive. Since launching over the summer, the site has grown each month by between 35%-50%, and now has over 700 communities associated with different disorders. Given the nature of the site, the numbers are bittersweet, but it’s nice to know that so many people are finding others they can connect with.

Vistitors to the site are invited to contribute information and their personal experiences regarding each condition, and are also able to make contact with other users that are facing the same issues. Most communities offer a description of the condition, along with links to relevant websites that contain more specific information, and there’s a forum where the users can collectively give each other advice.

Rareshare says that it has been collaborating with the National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Organization for Rare Disorders, which are helping it gain traction in an incredibly crowded space (most other medical sites are focused on more common afflictions). It’s usually good to see healthy competition, but this is one case where consolidation would benefit the users - hopefully RareShare (or something like it) can establish itself as the de facto web portal for rare diseases.

That said, we should also note that communities focused on some rare diseases have already formed either at standalone sites or on larger health networks, so any readers looking to find a community focused on a particular disease would do well to do some searching beyond RareShare.

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December 23, 2008
22:24
When Walking Hurts: Best Buy Offers Curb-side Pick-up
» TechCrunch

If you like buying stuff from Best Buy but you can’t stand actually entering the stores, you might soon be able to just sit in your car and wait for them to bring your in-store pickup purchases out to you as though it were a lukewarm bag of Chili’s Chicken Crispers.
21:29
Adult FriendFinder Files To Go Public
» TechCrunch

Florida-based FriendFinder Networks (formerly Penthouse Media Group), a group of sites that includes Penthouse and Adult FriendFinder, has filed a registration statement with the SEC to go public.

Little known Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital is representing them in the deal. The company hopes to raise $460 million in the IPO.

The registration statement is still preliminary, but it gives deep insights on the financial condition of the company. Revenues for the first three quarters of 2008 were $244 million. The company claims 946,598 subscribers to its adult services.

The primary use of the proceeds from the IPO, the company says, is to pay off the nearly half billion dollars in debt on its books.

Penthouse acquired Adult FriendFinder in December 2007 for approximately $400 million.

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20:58
Telecom Giant Vodafone Gets Into Location Based Social Networking With Pocket Life
» TechCrunch

Pocket Life, a geo-aware social network backed by mobile network giant Vodafone, has launched to the public. The service allows users to update their friends on their current locations automatically, and also allows them to syndicate status updates and their recent activities to popular social networks like Facebook and MySpace. You can also use GPS to create a route (say, for mountain biking or hiking) and share that with friends over the network.

At launch Pocket Life is compatible with over 30 phones, including a number of Blackberries, Nokias, and Samsungs, with the iPhone listed as “Coming Soon” (you can see the full compatibility list here). If you have a compatible phone, you can download the software by visiting http://mob.pocketlife.com from your phone’s browser. You can also use the site from your computer at PocketLife.com, though this doesn’t feature automatic location updates. To get a feel for more of the site’s features, check out the walkthrough video.

Pocket Life has many similarities with other geo-aware social networks like Whrrl, Limbo, and Loopt, which recently signed a deal to become available on every mobile carrier in the US. Pocket Life is getting a late start, but with giants like Facebook and MySpace largely sitting on the sidelines in the race to take social networks mobile, it still has a fighting chance, especially given its backers.

Vodafone is the largest telecommunications network company in the world, with huge mobile market shares in many countries (it also owns minority stakes in some large mobile companies, with a 45% stake in Verizon). If its phones started to carry Pocket Life as a default application, it could easily overwhelm its competitors in many regions.

Disclosure: Pocket Life competitor Loopt is in the middle of a patent litigation suit that we’ve been dragged into, and they’ve also created a TechCrunch-branded Loopt iPhone app.

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20:44
Facebook Folds In Face Of Massive Litigation, Bans Project Playlist
» TechCrunch

Just in is a statement from Facebook that they will ban the fast growing (but non-label-sanctioned) music service Project Playlist. Last Friday MySpace banned Project Playlist and removed all traces of the service from its site.

But Facebook remained silent even as music label insiders called them “irresponsible” and suggested litigation against them was on the way.

This is a big blow for Playlist, which just yesterday announced that they had their first label deal, with Sony BMG. The other three big music labels, however, remain hostile to the service.

The entire application has been removed (it used to be here), and the embedded playlists have been removed from user’s profiles. An image of what the application used to look like is below. Over 660,000 Facebook users are affected.

Facebook’s statement:

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) initially contacted Facebook last summer requesting the removal of the Project Playlist application for copyright violation, and recently reopened those communications. We have forwarded the RIAA’s letters to Project Playlist so it can work directly with that organization and music labels on a resolution. In the meantime, the application must be removed to comply with the Facebook Platform Terms of Service. Our hope and expectation is that the parties can resolve their disagreements in a manner that satisfies the developer and copyright holder, that continues to offer a great experience to music fans, and that doesn’t discourage other developers from using Platform to share their creativity and test new ideas.

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19:52
CrunchGear Contest: Free TeleNav Service for your BlackBerry Storm
» TechCrunch

CrunchGear has been around for a few years now and we know that a lot of you have been following us since the beginning so we wanted to reward those folks. Think of it as our version of Best Buy’s Reward Zone program. Otherwise known as the CrunchGear Loyalty Rewards Program. TeleNav has always been supportive of us and so we’ve teamed up to give away a years worth of free service for your Verizon Wireless BlackBerry Storm. So how do you win?

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18:24
Zumbox Delivers Paperless Mail (In Beta)
» TechCrunch

Would you trust your postal mail with a company called Zumbox?

I ask, because startup Zumbox enters public beta today with a fairly interesting (but not entirely new) alternative to traditional snail mail. Here’s how it works: instead of sending bills, statements, advertisements, postcards and the likes to a street address, a business can now send those to a digitized street address, without the need for actual paper or stamps.

Let me try again: Zumbox basically created a digital mailbox for every street address in the US it could find (150 million), which can be used to receive mail that was sent to a physical location instead of an e-mail address. This approach is based on the fact that while not everyone has an e-mail address, everyone supposedly has a unique street address, and that businesses tend to have street addresses for their customers more often than they have e-mail addresses.

With Zumbox, these businesses as well as individuals can send documents and custom mailings to one’s physical street address, and by entering their address on Zumbox.com, recipients can consult what was sent. That’s an entirely different approach than Earth Class Mail, which scans all the postal mail it receives on a custom address created by a user, and then posts it to the customer’s digital account. Sending and receiving with Zumbox is free to consumers, and businesses are charged 2 cents postage per address.

I have a couple of observations. First of all, going back to my initial question: why would anyone trust their personal mail, which often includes sensitive information, with a young company they’ve never heard of? The company goes to greath lengths to explain the service is secure, and how they’re compliant with the security standards of the financial, healthcare, and banking industries, but that remains a significant hurdle.

I was also wondering if Zumbox doesn’t make it easier for companies to electronically spam people, but the startup gave me a number of reasons why this isn’t the case: it’s a closed system where Zumbox controls the entire flow of mail, the identities of senders and receivers are verified in advance, users get some control over the mail they receive, and finally the 2 cents charge should provide a barrier to senders with malicious intentions.

Another question that I had was how Zumbox notifies a user the first time he receives his mail to a digital account instead of his physical mailbox. Apparently, the startup has 3 ways of doing this: by getting consumers to sign up via e-mail, an iGoogle widget, or a desktop application (the latter two coming this January). Developers of third-party application are invited to use the company’s API to work on other ways too.

Not a flaw, but still noteworthy: the solution won’t help you a bit if you don’t have an internet connection. The number of people without internet access may be decreasing, but it’s nowhere close to zero just yet.

I’m still not sure whether I think this idea will stick or not, but for what it’s worth, Zumbox realizes it will take several years for postal mail to transition into a digital system. The company has raised $3 million in Series A funding in Q1 2008 from a number of private angel investors to finance the public beta release, but there’s no doubt they’ll need way more capital to provide a runway to success.

CrunchBase Information Zumbox Information provided by CrunchBase
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18:14
Searches For “Kindle” Picked Up During The Holidays
» TechCrunch

We already know that the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book, is sold out for Christmas, but people are still looking for them. Searches on Google for the term “Kindle” picked up in October to nearly triple the level during the summer. It’s settled down a bit, but search volume is still at about double the previous rate.

Not finding any available Kindles, searches for “Sony Reader” are picking up as well, although the clear preference is still the elusive Kindle by nearly two to one. If you really want one, just do yourself a favor and wait for the next version to come out early next year.

Despite the surge in demand and sold-out inventory, I’d be surprised if Amazon has sold more than one million Kindles to date. Maybe 500,000. That would not be a stretch, given that 240,000 had been manufactured through August. It’s a complete guess, though (the 500,000).

How many Kindles do you think Amazon has sold since it launched a year ago?

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17:46
2tweet: Broadcast Instant Media Galleries To Twitter Via Email
» TechCrunch

Following in the footsteps of services like Twitpic and Twitblogs, internet startup 2pad has launched 2tweet, a new service that allows you to Email any number of photos and videos to a designated Email address (twitter@2pad.com) to immediately generate a web gallery that is Tweeted to all of your followers. 2tweet will use the first 113 characters of the Email’s subject line to lead off the tweet, and will then append a link to your web gallery.

To begin using the service, you’ll need to confirm your account with 2tweet and enter your login credentials so that it can broadcast tweets on your behalf. After that, Emails sent the twitter@2pad.com will be automatically posted without any other actions needed. 2tweet is very similar to Posterous, a Y Combinator startup that just closed a $725,000 funding round.

2pad, the company that makes 2tweet, allows users to mine their Email boxes for pictures and videos and automatically generate web galleries with them (if you enter your login credentials, it can also monitor your incoming and outgoing messages for new media and automatically add it to the gallery).

The service is similar to Xoopit, a Firefox plugin that can scan your Gmail or Yahoo inbox for media (the service also offers its own standalone site). But 2pad has the advantage with compatibility, as it supports all IMAP Email providers, including Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.

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16:08
Tweet A Last-Minute Gift To Charity
» TechCrunch

It’s micro-messaging meets micro-funding. Marketing consultant Laura Fitton is trying to raise money $2 at a time through Twitter. She is using Tipjoy, which allows people to turn Tweets into payments (via PayPal). Help her raise $25,000 for Charity:Water by Christmas. Tipjoy investor John Borthwick has agreed to match up to $10,000 in donations.

For less than the price of a double latte, you can give clean drinking water to children in villages across the world. All you need to do is enter your Twitter ID in the widget at this link, and then fund a TipJoy account. You can give $5 to the Salvation Army or the Google Lunar X-Prize through TipJoy instead.

And you thought Tweets were worthless.

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15:11
The April Fools Joke That Keeps On Giving
» TechCrunch

The Sacramento Bee mentions our ongoing litigation with Facebook and our next Attorney General, Chris Kelly (which was actually settled later that April Fools Day).

One thing I’m going to do in the future is go back and clearly mark April Fools jokes. I can easily understand how a non-tech reporter could be clicking through links, see that, and add it at the end of a story and create this kind of confusion.

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14:34
Knewton Takes Adaptive Learning To The Next Level
» TechCrunch

Textbooks are so yesterday. Yet student backpacks are still weighed down by them. Replacing those textbooks with software has been one of the great white whales of computing going back at least to Alan Kay’s original Dynabook concept 40 years ago (which he is still working on). Today, there are a slew of startups tackling the problem of e-learning (Brightstorm, iKnow, Grockit, PrepMe), and some progress is being made.

The low-hanging fruit seems to be test preparation and video tutorials, but the bigger prize over time will be augmenting or replacing printed textbooks and increasingly penetrating the global education market. One small startup with the ambition to take that prize is Knewton.

Based in New York City, Knewton raised $2.5 million last May from Accel Partners, First Round Capital, Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway, and other angels. The company was very much under the radar until it showed up as a finalist for the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge last month (see video below). The company is built entirely on Amazon’s cloud computing services (EC2 for computation, S3 for storing video tutorials, and Mechanical Turk for fine-tuning its test questions). ~~And currently it is leading in the voting for the Startup Challenge, with 51 percent of all votes cast. (That kind of online voting can be easily gamed, of course).~~ Actually, the Startup Challenge already has its winner: Yieldex. Knewton did win the popular vote, though.

The founder and CEO, Jose Ferreira, used to be an executive at Kaplan, the test prep giant. Knewton’s two chief test designers, Len Swanson and Robert McKinley, wrote the scoring algorithms for the adaptive learning tests used by, respectively, the Educational Testing Service (which administers the SAT, GRE, and AP tests) and ACT.

Adaptive learning tests are taken on computers. The questions get progressively harder or easier depending on each student’s answers. Thus, they adapt to each student’s knowledge and abilities. Knewton is taking the adaptive learning concept and applying it first to online test preparation services. It is not cheap. Right now it offers a year-long subscription to prepare for the GMAT test that costs $1,390. The company guarantees a minimum 50-point jump in a student’s test score or their money back.

The service combines live video chat with an instructor in a whiteboard environment, along with learn-at-your-own-pace sample questions and tutorials. Knewton finds the best teachers it can get and pays them $500 to $800 an hour. In addition to the virtual classroom, Knewton keeps track of each student’s progress in mastering the thousand or so concepts that can be covered in each test. A “concept queue” keeps the students abreast of what concepts they have mastered and which ones they are weak on. They can click on each concept tag to dig deeper. (See screenshots below).

A big “Knewton’s Law” button automatically presents the next concepts and tutorials each student is ready for at that particular moment, based on what they’ve covered and how they’ve done so far. The content is delivered in whatever format (text, video, animation) and difficulty level that student learns best from for that particular concept.

A color-coded progress bar tells them how they are doing in different categories such as math or verbal. Knewton also shows students what their score would be on the test if they took it that day, based on the questions they’ve actually answered. Students also receive alerts for upcoming classes, homework deadlines, office hours, and the like.

Knewton plans to expand beyond the GMAT to other standardized tests, but the really big opportunity is to apply its learning engine directly to online textbooks. Ferreira explains the concept:

We tag content down to the atomic level. A student who accesses a digital textbook, for instance, any given day they come in, instead of the same syllabus every day, they get a new syllabus based on the concepts they know and the ones they don’t know. If they learn best via video, they get that. If they learn best with text they get that.

Several textbook publishers big and small are talking to Knewton about pursuing partnerships, says Ferreira. Baking adaptive learning techniques right into the textbooks could one day make the online versions of textbooks much better learning tools than the offline versions. Not everubody learns the same way, and the one-size-fits-all approach that the textbook industry takes today needs to be changed.

But can textbooks, tweaked with the right software, ever become good teachers in their own right? The prospects of such a future raises more than just pedagogical questions. The Teacher’s Union might have a fit if software like Knewton’s ever threatens their jobs, but education is so broken in this country that anything that make students smarter should be embraced with open arms. Unless, of course, textbooks are going to cost $1,000 online instead of $100 in print.

(For more of our coverage of e-learning startups, read our profiles of TC50 finalist Grockit and Japan’s iKnow).

CrunchBase Information Knewton PrepMe iKnow! Brightstorm Grockit Information provided by CrunchBase
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12:02
CrunchGear Contest: 3 Western Digital WD TV HD Media Players Up For Grabs
» TechCrunch

Western Digital’s WD TV is one of our favorite gadgets of 2008 because of its ability to playback just about every video format known to man and we want you to experience the joys its brought us this holiday season. WD felt the same way and has donated three for us to give away to our readers. It may be two days before Christmas (if you’re into that sort of thing), but this is one gadget you’ll be happy to get any day of the year. Hop on over to see how you can win one.

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12:01
The Year In Questions
» TechCrunch
Google has its Zeitgeist based on the most popular searches of the year, as does Yahoo, but Q&A site WikiAnswers (part is Answers.com) just has a list of questions. Below are some of the representative questions its users asked throughout the year:
- January, 2008: When was the last time snow fell in Baghdad?
- February, 2008: Why did the Hollywood writers go on strike?
- March, 2008: Why did Bear Stearns fail?
- April, 2008: Which races has Danica Patrick won?
- May, 2008: How successful was Sex and the City?
- June, 2008: How long did Tim Russert have coronary artery disease before he died?
- July, 2008: Have Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie released photos of their twins?
- August, 2008: How many gold medals did Michael Phelps win in the 2008 Olympics?
- September, 2008: What town was Sarah Palin the mayor of?
- October, 2008: What led to the need for the 2008 Federal Bailout?
- November, 2008: What are all the political positions that Barack Obama has held?
- December, 2008: What is Rod Blagojevich being indicted for?
Sometimes the questions people ask says a lot more about them than the answers.

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4:19
Animoto On The iPhone: Trust Me, You Want It
» TechCrunch

Yeah, I gush about Animoto (and so do others). And I’ll keep on gushing because they are an example of a startup that just focuses like a laser on doing one thing well. In their case, it’s creating slideshows for users from their photos.

They just launched their iPhone application. Select 8-16 photos from your photo library, pick some music to play in the background, and it creates a slideshow for you on the fly. Watch it on your iPhone or email it to friends. I created one in just a few second with some photos I took today. It’s embedded below.

You don’t go through the hassle of creating a new account when you use Animoto on the iPhone. That’s great for new users, but existing Animoto users need a way to tie the two accounts together. They’re working on that, says CEO Brad Jefferson.

Why this is so great - you no longer have to wait until you get home and to your computer to create slide shows of the amazing pictures you take at a wedding, sports event, or whatever. Make it on the fly and then email it out to friends while you’re still there. I love it.

Get the application here (iTunes link). More information is here.

Now go create some content. Put a link to your shows in the comments below, I want to see them. Here’s mine:

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2:47
I’m Sorry Robert, But It’s Time For A Friendfeed Intervention
» TechCrunch

I’m a big champion of services like Twitter and the newer Friendfeed (can you believe Friendfeed is less than a year old?). But there’s a difference between liking a service and having an addiction. Robert Scoble crossed that line, and I believe he’s asking for help.

I spoke to Robert for a few minutes at the Le Web conference a couple of weeks ago. I said “You sure do like Twitter and Friendfeed.” His response - “Yeah, but I wonder if that was such a smart investment of my time.”

This isn’t the first time Robert has questioned whether he’s wasting his time on those services. On November 18 he wrote (on Friendfeed) “I invested a lot of time this year in FriendFeed and Twitter instead of my blog. Was that the right decision?”

I asked Robert how much time he actually spends on those services. He monitors them all day, he said, hitting refresh over and over on both (he doesn’t use desktop clients to manage the services, and he says he doesn’t like real-time streaming feature on Friendfeed). In addition to watching all day, he says he spends at least seven hours a day, seven days a week, actually reading and responding directly on those services.

That’s 2,555 hours over the last year.

Which is more than a full time job (2,000 hours/year).

It is more than 106 full 24 hour days interacting with those services in aggregate.

It is an addiction.

What is the cost of this addiction? Well, I’ll put his family life aside, that’s his business. But his blog has clearly suffered. He now posts only a few times a week, sometimes sporadically writing multiple posts in a day but often skipping 3-4 days in between. A year ago, Robert wrote multiple posts, every day. I used to read his blog daily, now I visit once a week.

“Some people tell me my thought leadership has declined as I’ve blogged less.”

What has he gained? On Twitter Robert has nearly 45,000 followers and has written over 16,000 messages. On Friendfeed Robert has nearly 23,000 subscribers.

So lots of people follow Robert on those services, but they aren’t visiting his site and the content he writes is on someone else’s server. Plus all that content is just really forgettable, compared to a good thought piece that people refer back to over time. There is no direct way to monetize any of that content, which is something that a full time blogger with a family really needs to think about.

Meanwhile, all this attention from Robert has certainly helped the valuations of Friendfeed and Twitter. How much of that value does Robert receive? Zilch.

So Robert has spent 2,555 hours spent reading tens out thousands of mostly inane Twitter and Friendfeed messages, and has written a few thousand messages of his own. Meanwhile, we as a community lost the regularly entertaining and thoughtful posts of a great writer.

Like I said, it’s time for an intervention. I want Scobleizer back.

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December 22, 2008
23:41
Bambuser Gets A Facelift, Rejoins The Mobile Video Streaming War
» TechCrunch

We haven’t covered live video streaming startup Bambuser until now, but the Swedish startup is rapidly shaping up to becoming a formidable contender to the likes of Qik, Flixwagon, and Kyte in the race to turn mobile phones into portable TV studios. Bambuser has just released an updated version of its site, which features a new embeddable player and more intuitive interface.

The site strongly resembles Qik, which we’ve covered extensively. Users can stream videos directly from their mobile phones to their profiles on Bambuser and can also syndicate their video elsewhere on the web using embeddable video players. Videos can be streamed over either Wi-Fi or 3G, and the software supports a range of phones running on Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms (you can see a full list here).

The site’s biggest differentiator is its ability to automatically pinpoint where users are streaming from using GPS, which it then presents in a Google Map alongside its videos. It’s not a major feature, and is one that Qik and its competitors could likely implement without much trouble (Update: Qik actually does have it). In the end, it will be the service with the best quality and ubiquity that will win out (so far Qik has the advantage in terms of compatibility - it already supports BlackBerry, which Bambuser doesn’t).

There may also be another entry into this space soon: we’ve received leaked footage of a mobile version of Ustream, a live video streaming site that until now has not supported mobile devices.

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20:54
The State Of The Twittersphere (HubSpot Edition)
» TechCrunch

How many followers do most people really have on Twitter? The average number of both followers and other members people on Twitter are following is about 70, according to the State of the Twittersphere, a new report by Web marketing startup HubSpot. (Full report embedded below). But that average is skewed by elite Twitterers who have hundreds or thousands of followers. The vast majority of people on Twitter use it to keep in touch with a much smaller circle of friends and peers. For those with 50 or fewer followers (three quarters of all users), the average number of followers is 15.6 and the average number of people they are following is 18.4.

HubSpot’s State of the Twittersphere report is inspired by Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, which tries to quantify trends across all the blogs it tracks. HubSpot gets its data from Twitter Grader, a site it operates that generates a grade for Twitter users based on factors such as how many followers they have, the reach of the people who are following them, and how often they post updates.

Twitter Grader is basically a vanity search site for Twitter, but it has managed to compile data on over 500,000 Twitter accounts, which is probably around 10 percent of the total. It is not clear how representative these users are, but it is a large sample and they certainly are not all power users. (Three percent had 0 followers, 9 percent didn’t follow anyone else, and 22 percent had five or fewer followers). Until Twitter releases its own State of the Twittersphere report, this is as good as the data gets.

Some other key stats from the report:

—70% of Twitter users joined in 2008
—20% of Twitter users have joined in the past 60 days
—The average user has been on Twitter 275 days

So it is pretty much all newbies, and mainstream adoption is just getting started.

—The most popular days of the week to Tweet are Wednesday and Thursday
—An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts are registered each day.
—Only 5 percent of all Twitter users have more than 250 followers.
—Only 0.8 percent have more than 1,000
—22 percent have five or fewer followers
—Another 24 percent (the largest group) have between 11 and 25 followers

Similarly, most people don’t follow more than 25 other people. In fact, 30 percent follow the Tweets of five or fewer other members. Again, 11 to 25 seems to be a sweet spot, with 21 percent users following that many others. Here’s is the breakdown:

State of the Twittersphere - Get more Information Technology

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19:51
Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly To Run For California Attorney General
» TechCrunch

Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly will be announcing his candidacy for the office of Attorney General of California, we’ve heard from multiple sources. He’ll be running in the 2010 election as a Democrat, and will be leaving Facebook (or taking a leave of absence) in June 2009 to focus on his campaign.

Three others have already declared their candidacy, including San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, Torrence assemblyman Ted Liu and Pittsburg assemblyman Gerald Canciamilla.

This puts Facebook in an awkward position, as Kelly has led the team that represents the company in their ongoing negotiations with Attorneys General around the U.S. They’ll need to hire a replacement for Kelly, fast.

As Facebook grows it continues to draw fire from the government and various privacy advocates, and things are going to get worse over time, not better. Concerns range from too much private information getting into the hands of third parties to Facebook becoming a platform for the spread of computer viruses. Reports of terrorist and hate groups using the site to draw recruits have recently popped up. And Facebook, like many online services, wages a relentless war against spammers.

It will be interesting to see if voters think of Kelly as a man in the trenches who understands privacy and security issues, or the guy who’s defended Facebook’s various slip ups over the years as the company has experimented with new privacy-pushing products like Beacon.

Kelly is a former attorney who worked at Baker & Mckenzie and Wilson Sonsini. He also served as an education advisor in the Clinton Administration. He wouldn’t comment on this article (nor would he comment on the “latte incident“).

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19:24
Scrapplet: Powerful Social Web Canvases That Are As Easy As Drag-And-Drop
» TechCrunch

There are a few sites out there that let you aggregate your entire online presence into a single place, but for the most part they offer little control over the way your information is actually presented. Today sees the launch of Scrapplet, a powerful new website/platform based entirely on JavaScript that allows users to design pages combining all of this information to their liking using a WYSIWYG interface. The site also offers a dizzying array of options - so many, in fact, that the site could be used by experienced developers to create pages that go far beyond showing off your interests and favorite photos.

CEO Steve Repetti stresses that Scrapplet isn’t another social network - rather, it’s a place for you to compile all of your information from sites across the web and present it however you’d like. The site gives users a blank canvas, allowing them to import information from sites including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, RSS feeds, and a number of other sources. You can also embellish your profile with music, embedded videos, and images.

Once you’ve imported all of your content, you can drag and drop each item wherever you’d like in your canvas. Each item also has a properties menu that allows you to customize how it should behave (for example, you can determine if it should have a border or if it should “stick” to another item on your canvas, or if should move independently when it’s dragged). More advanced options include a Timer, Rollover, and OnClick actions that allow you to execute commands accordingly.

To novice computer users, Scrapplet’s wide array of available options can be daunting at first. Immediately after registering, I was presented with a page full of default widgets, asking me to add a profile picture, configure my guestbook, list a few of my favorite things, and so on - there was so much there that I simply didn’t know where to start. Fortunately the site offers a listing of Scrapplets created by other users, which gives an idea of what’s available. Repetti says that while there is a learning curve, once you’ve got the basics down it becomes much more intuitive (as proof as its wide accessibility, he directed me to this canvas, which was created by a user named Rockin’ Grandma). Still, it would be nice if the site offered a better tutorial, or allowed users to go into ‘Easy’ mode by eliminating advanced options entirely.

Besides appealing to more casual users, Scrapplet also has the potential to become very popular for businesses and experienced developers. Because users are free to append their canvases with extra code, developers can enhance their Scrapplet pages, leveraging the platform to quickly build powerful web apps. For an example, check out this sample Gallery Scrapplet, which showcases some of the site’s layering and lighting effects in a virtual art gallery.

Repetti is a member of the board of the DataPortability project, so it comes as little surprise that Scrapplet canvases can be exported to a number of widespread formats, and it’s also easy to share to other social online services. The site also readily supports logins through OpenID, as well as other sites like Facebook. Scrapplet is going to be free for most users, who will probably be fine with only a few canvas pages. Users with more than 7 canvas pages or who want to present their canvases on a custom domain will need to become paid members, with memberships beginning at around $2.95 per month.

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19:16
ScrollMotion Partners With Major Publishers To Turn Popular Books Into iPhone Apps
» TechCrunch

Tired of lugging around paperbacks, but don’t feel like dropping the extra change for a standalone e-book reader when you already own an iPhone? ScrollMotion has announced that they’ve partnered with Random House, Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin, Penguin Group USA and Hachette to begin selling e-books repackaged as iPhone applications, or “books-as-apps”.

Serving as the core of all of these app-books is ScrollMotion’s Iceberg Reader, which they promise provides a “natural book-like reading experience”, with pagination, cover art, adjustable text size, and margin notes.
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16:49
Textecution Hopes To Put An End To Texting While Driving
» TechCrunch

Texting while driving is incredibly dangerous - perhaps moreso than driving under the influence according to some studies - yet it is a widespread habit that is socially acceptable, especially among younger crowds. Some states are finally beginning to outlaw the act, but as with the recent legislation mandating Bluetooth headsets, this will be difficult to enforce.

The solution may wind up coming not from the lawmakers, but from the phones themselves. Technology firm eLYK Innovation has created a $10 application called Textecution for Google’s Android mobile platform that will sit in the background and use the phone’s GPS system to detect whenever the phone is moving faster than 10 MPH, at which time the app will deactivate the phone’s SMS capabilities. Once the phone comes to a standstill (say, at a stop light) the driver will be allowed to text again within a few seconds.

The application has been designed primarily for adults looking to keep their teens (who are apparently most prone to the behavior) in check. When parents install Textecution on their child’s Android phone, they are asked for an ‘admin phone number’, which will be contacted if the child ever needs to temporarily deactivate the app (like if they’re on a train or in the passenger seat). To grant the exception, the parent simply sends an SMS message saying “Allow”.

Unfortunately while Textecution has admirable goals (namely, keeping everyone safer), it has some serious flaws. For one, children can easily remove the application without needing any administrator approval (though the developers are considering implementing tighter restrictions). The exception system is also far from perfect - any teenager who frequently rides trains or as a passenger in a car will be constantly assailing their parents with exception requests and will probably be more likely to simply disable to application than constantly check in for approval.

There are a few other methods being employed to address this issue. Key2SafeDriving makes a key fob that disables phone activity, which is another big-brotherish approach that most teens will just find a way to circumvent. In the long run, the solution will likely be something that offers the convenience of SMS without the constant need to read from a tiny screen - one contender is Yap, which allows drivers to translate their voice into SMS text messages without taking their eyes off the road.

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16:35
Add Stock Quotes To Every Post With Upcoming Wikinvest Plugin
» TechCrunch

Financial bloggers are going to like this one. Wikinvest is getting ready to release a Livequotes plugin that automatically adds a stock quote every time a publicly traded company is mentioned in a post. It auto-detects company names and adds the ticker symbol, price, and the percent change in parentheses after the name, with links to the Wikinvest page for that stock. It also can add links for financial terms and definitions such as “PEG ratio” or “price to book.”

The plugin works on Wordpress and Blogger right now, and will launch officially in a couple weeks. But Wikinvest will give 10 TechCrunch readers early access. State in comments why your site or blog is deserving and how your would use the plugin, or email Wikinvest founder Parker Conrad (parker [at] wikinvest).

The plugin works automatically, potentially cutting out a few steps for financial bloggers who often include links to stock quotes in their posts. For ambiguous company names, there’s a backup to the auto-detect feature: simply put the desired stock quote in double brackets like [[AAPL]]. It will look like this:

But instead of just spamming your blog with a bunch of links back to Wikinvest (because, let’s be honest here, that’s what this is really all about), it adds a box inside the editing pane of Wordpress or Blogger that previews the links it will add. Any links a blogger doesn’t want can be unchecked before the post goes live.

Wikinvest will soon add support for other financial quotes beyond stocks, such as for currencies, commodities, and interest rates.

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15:08
Got a Drupal Site? Get 100GB Of Video Hosting And Streaming Free From Kaltura (First 50 Only)
» TechCrunch

We’ve got more holiday treats for you here at TechCrunch. If you run a site on Drupal, the open-source content management software, and want to add collaborative video editing to your site, try Kaltura’s new video module for Drupal. The first 50 readers to download the module from this link will get 100GB of free video hosting and streaming (everyone else gets 10 GB).

Kaltura, which won the People’s Choice award at TechCrunch 40 two years ago, offers a video player with remixing capabilities built in. So site visitors can not only watch videos but edit them and add their own twist. Wikipedia is trying it out.

Here is a Beet.Tv interview with Kaltura CEO Ron Yekutiel at this year’s TC50 conference:

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14:29
Our Gift To You: Win A Zero G Flight And A Chance To Go To Space
» TechCrunch

Wanna bop around the inside of a padded airplane while experiencing zero gravity in 30-second intervals while the plane repeatedly does parabolic dives? Sure you do. Best of all, Symantec is paying for it and running a contest to select two lucky TechCrunch or CrunchGear readers to go on a Zero G flight on February 21, 2009. The winners will also be entered into another contest for a future flight in a suborbital vehicle that will actually go into space.

If you want to see what a Zero G flight is like, check out these videos of CrunchGear’s Peter Ha floating around on a flight earlier this year.

Come on, you know it’s what you want for Christmas. (Sorry, the contest is only open to U.S. residents 18 and older. We don’t make the rules).

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13:53
Elevation Partners Pours $100 Million More Into Palm. How’s That Nova Running?
» TechCrunch

Can Palm's upcoming operating system, Nova, revive the fortunes of the flagging company? Palm's biggest investor, Elevation Partners, is putting $100 million into that Nova, after already spending $325 million for 25 percent of the company last year. Maybe all Palm needs is a really good tune-up, but it is going to be tough to go up against all the newly-polished goodness coming from the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. When Elevation first invested, it brought in former Apple hardware chief Jon Rubinstein to head up the company. The fruits of his labors may now be just about ready to be unveiled. But will it be enough?
13:37
Ping.fm Secures Angel Funding From Joi Ito And Reid Hoffman
» TechCrunch

Ping.fm is a very simple, useful service that enables you to send a message to 30+ social networks at once, using either standard e-mail, your mobile phone or popular IM services. Its simplicity apparently attracted two high-profile angel investors, according to a company blog post. The new backers are Reid Hoffman (who just became CEO of LinkedIn again) and Joi Ito.

We first took note of Ping.fm in late March this year, when the service was still in private beta, and we warned it could well become merely ‘a feature of a feature’. Nonetheless, the site seems to be holding its own and has attracted enough users to start having problems scaling the service.

Ping.fm apparently had its share of problems and slow response times the past few weeks, and the new capital should help them obtain more stability. From the post:

This is mainly because of not having the resources to maintain the volume of users and overall traffic we are seeing. This investment will allow us to scale our hardware to improve the reliability of our service as well as continue to increase the awesome that is Ping.fm instead of babysitting smoking servers all day.

It’s unclear how much both men have invested in the pinging service. It’s also unclear if there will ever be mainstream adoption of Ping.fm, as it seems a bit reserved to power socnet users / early adopters.

(Source: ReadWriteWeb)

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12:38
Mobile Social Network GREE Lands a Big IPO, In Japan
» TechCrunch

The tech IPO is not completely dead. Last Wednesday, Japan’s third largest social network GREE, launched in 2004 by the company of the same name, listed its IPO shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market for start-ups. GREE caused a sensation in this year’s lackluster Japanese IPO market with shares rising a whopping 52% from $37 to $56 on the first trading day.

The company now has a market capitalization of over $1.3 billion, which is even more than that of Mixi, Japan’s biggest social network that’s also listed (at around $970 million).

The successful debut instantly made GREE the No. 4 player among Japan’s listed web companies, only trailing Yahoo Japan (market cap: $24.3 billion, $7 billion more than Yahoo America), online shopping site Rakuten ($8 billion) and Mobage-town provider DeNA ($1.42 billion).

GREE began operations on the fixed Internet before Japanese users started to move over in droves to competitor Mixi, which currently boasts 15 million members. Today, the fixed Internet site is virtually abandoned, but GREE Mobile has 7 million registered users. And 99% of its 8 billion monthly page views are generated through cell phones.

GREE is essentially a mix of social networking and a gaming platform. The Nippon-only service adopted the business model that made Mobage-town big, a social service that’s also 99% mobile-based and has 12 million members: Users are represented through avatars and can buy virtual items on the site, i.e. food used in GREE’s virtual pet games, clothes for avatars or special fishing rods needed for fishing games. Playing the games is free of charge.

In 2006, GREE received around $4 million in funding from KDDI, Japan’s No. 2 telecommunications company, triggering a complete realignment in corporate strategy. The site started to focus solely on the mobile web (it’s the default social network for KDDI’s 25 million cell phone subscribers).

It seems the stock market sees a lot of room for growth in GREE’s business model even though the company doesn’t own valuable IP; the site’s big idea is easy to copy and Japan’s mobile market is saturated and bound to shrink considerably in the future for a variety of reasons (declining birth rate in Japan, government ban on handset subsidies). The combination of ads and fee-based sales is working out in today’s weak online ad market: From all of GREE’s sales, 70% comes from virtual items and 30% from ads. That’s a high ratio of virtual sales for a mobile site. In contrast, Mixi is heavily dependent on advertisements (the site generates less than 10% of its revenues through premium accounts and has no avatar system).

For fiscal 2008 (that ended in June), GREE reported revenues of $33 million while profits exceeded $11 million. But profits ballooned to $15.6 million between July and September during this year alone (revenues jumped to $22 million in the same quarter).

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11:19
Nokia Debuts Worldwide Mail on Ovi Beta Service
» TechCrunch

Earlier this morning, Nokia released a public beta version of its Mail on Ovi service, which enables users to sign up for a free e-mail account directly from their Series 40 handsets. The new service is available worldwide and available in a dozen languages, after a test period of one month during which users in India, Malaysia and the Philippines were able to try out the service.

Mail on Ovi gives users all the features and functionalities of a PC-based e-mail account, and functions on some 35 different Series 40 handsets. Nokia claims to have shipped over 110 million of such devices globally as of October 2008, so this is definitely a major announcement, particularly for countries where mobile devices are the main digital communication hubs instead of computers. These so-called ‘emerging markets’ represent a big growth opportunity for mobile device manufacturers and service providers, so it’s no wonder Nokia is so focused on creating new services to go with lowered-price devices. (Its more advanced phones are in the Series 60 line).

Nokia Mail on Ovi is available in 12 languages during the beta period including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Hindi, Bengali, Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia. Users with a Nokia Series 40 device can head over to this website to check it out.

Over the weekend, Nokia also announced that it started combining sign-ins for its overall services site Ovi.com and for its media sharing service Share on Ovi. Nokia said earlier this month it aims to make annual revenue of at least 2 billion euros ($2.79 billion) from Internet services in 2011, focusing on navigation, music, games, messaging and media.

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10:22
AlertThingy Gets An Upgrade, Kills FriendFeed Support (But Not Really)
» TechCrunch

We’ve covered AIR application AlertThingy quite a bit in the past, being one of the most elegant tools available to keep on top of all your social networking accounts from your desktop. Most recently, we announced AlertThingy v2 was going to add support for Digg, Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce and Tumblr besides Twitter, Flickr and lifestreaming service FriendFeed. The release was delayed a bit, and things turned out to be a bit differently than advertised.

Support for Pownce is now no longer necessary, of course, but all the other announced integrations have been included for this upgrade, with the addition of the TinyURL service. But surprisingly enough, the makers of AlertThingy (design & development house Howard / Baines) have decided to no longer support FriendFeed in this edition, which is a peculiar move to make as AlertThingy actually launched as a FriendFeed desktop application to begin with.

The reason is simple enough: AlertThingy wants to be the social desktop application of choice but this actually interferes with the reason for being of FriendFeed, that pulls together all your social networking data inside your browser. AlertThingy fans needn’t worry, though, as there’s now a special FriendFeed-only version of the application alongside the upgraded ‘normal’ version.

AlertThingy v2 also got a fresh UI and adds support for RSS, which makes it double as a desktop-based feed reader. On a technical level, the team moved from using AIR with AJAX, HTML and CSS to a 100% Flex-based application.

I’m already looking forward to the next upgrade, which is supposed to include support for Yammer, the ‘Twitter for companies’ that won this year’s TechCrunch50 and has become an essential tool for our editorial team.

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8:49
JS-Kit Introduces Picture Comments, Embraces OpenID 2.0
» TechCrunch

Cross-platform feedback widgets maker JS-Kit just added a feature that enables users to enhance comments with pictures, on any of the 600,000+ websites using its custom commenting system. I’ve always been curious to know why major blogging platforms don’t simply add such a functionality to their commenting systems, while there are already companies like Seesmic, Viddler and Blipback focussing on taking a step further by adding video commenting features to websites.

There are custom picture commenting plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type available, but we should note JS-Kit is not only meant for blogs, as it can be installed on any Javascript-enabled website. According to the blog post announcing the new features, JS-Kit users can now attach multiple images to each of their comments on sites running its commenting systems. Images will be auto-thumbnailed and can be clicked on for full-size viewing.

The new features comes right after the announcement that Facebook Connect had been made available to any of the 600,000 blogs and sites that are using the JS-Kit commenting widget, and after the system enabled commenters to add YouTube videos to their feedback.

In other news, JS-Kit has also been upgraded to support OpenID 2.0, not really a surprise as DataPortability co-founder and evangelist Chris Saad works for the company.

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6:26
Dead Simple Posterous Gets A Round Of Funding And Launches Group Blogs
» TechCrunch

Posterous, which launched in June, is one of those sites that I tested and it stuck - I continue to post pictures to it regularly.

What I like about it - you don’t have to create an account to use it. Just start emailing text and files (images, video, whatever) to post@posterous.com and you’ve got a site where it all goes. And they’ve steadily added features. You can, for example, repost all the stuff you email in to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr or wherever.

Today the company is announcing a new product, group blogs. You can add your friends or family’s email addresses to any Posterous site you control, and they can then email stuff in too. It’s useful for families, sports teams, etc. to share photos and video. Once you’ve added those emails, all they have to do to post is send whatever they want to publish to post@sitename.posterous.com. No registration required. An example is here, and see the image below.

Posterous is a Y Combinator startup. They also just raised a second angel round of financing - $725,000 from XG Ventures and a whole bevy of high profile individuals.

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5:20
Some Good News For Project Playlist - A Deal With Sony BMG
» TechCrunch

It looks like embattled music service Project Playlist has someone other than Facebook in their corner. This morning, after remaining silent all weekend over the MySpace ban, they are announcing a much-needed agreement with Sony BMG to give users direct (and legal) access to that library.

Sony was never part of the litigation by the big labels that was filed on April 28, 2008, choosing instead to pursue negotiations. Warner Music, EMI and Universal, the three other big music labels, remain hostile to Project Playlist. And until all the labels have given the company a green light (and the litigation is settled), it’s unlikely MySpace will un-ban them.

One down, three to go.

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2:53
The Richter Scales Are Back. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
» TechCrunch

Anyone remember the laugh-out-loud Richter Scales song from last year called Here Comes Another Bubble? It’s embedded below in case you’ve forgotten, as well as the version they performed at the Crunchies.

Well, they’re back with their most recent song, a slight variation on Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas. “Desperate times call for desperate Christmas carols. Here’s our contribution. Enjoy the video, and then go enjoy another egg nog. And another. And another.”

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Drink your cares away
Times are bad and stock declines are here to stay…

You can catch the Richter Scales live at this year’s Crunchies on January 9 in San Francisco. They’ll be performing an all new song at the event (and hopefully this one, too).

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1:01
A Sad Day At Fox Interactive - No More Free Lunches
» TechCrunch

Don’t expect big layoffs at MySpace parent company Fox Interactive Media any time soon. In an email to all staff on Friday, Fox Interactive chief Peter Levinsohn says that 2009 will be an “even rockier economic climate” and takes steps to reduce costs. Chief among the changes - the end of the free lunch program for all employees (the French would riot over such an outrage).

Levinsohn also says he has avoided a hiring freeze. But if you are a contractor or temporary employee, watch your back and steal those office supplies now. Shortly after returning from the holidays you may find yourself being walked out of the building.

The memo also details the successes of FIM companies over the year (MySpace, IGN, Rotten Tomatoes, Photobucket, Fox Sports, etc.).

The full memo is below:

With the end of the calendar year approaching, I want to take a moment to thank everyone for making 2008 a year full of milestones and accomplishments for all of FIM’s businesses. In spite of a challenging economic environment, the last twelve months have produced some great results, none of which would have been possible without your dedication and hard work.

Unfortunately, 2009 is shaping up to be an even rockier economic climate, and while I am convinced we hold an incredibly unique position in the marketplace and have great potential for success going forward, we will be making some hard and necessary decisions about how we run our business in this environment. I’ll outline a few of those decisions below, but first I want to share some of the past year’s accomplishments:

· MySpace launched MySpace Music — a groundbreaking joint venture with major and independent music labels — and the MySpace Open Platform, which included the launches of the MySpace Developer Platform, MySpaceID, and Post-To MySpace.

· MySpace also continued its aggressive international expansion strategy — launching in seven new countries — and is now fully localized in 30 territories.

· FIM Audience Network was formed and launched self-serve ads on MySpace, a program which now has more than 15,000 participating advertisers.

· IGN launched a groundbreaking video initiative that includes more than a dozen of the Web’s most cutting-edge content creators.

· FOXSports.com produced more video content than any other sports site — including live content for the World Series, the Super Bowl and the BCS Championship Game. Scout.com continued its full product and management integration into FOXSports.com, enabling the two sites to deliver an even better experience to college and high school sports fans.

· Photobucket built out a world-class advertising team and released over 10 major new products, including group albums, themes and its API to the developer community.

· The new Digital Publishing Group launched its Web Content Management and Digital Asset Platform for FOX Television Stations and a number of third-party television station groups.

· Rotten Tomatoes completely redesigned its site and this week announced a deal with Current TV to co-produce “The Rotten Tomatoes Show”.

· GameSpy powered the online functionality for a number of the year’s top videogames, including Grand Theft Auto IV; Direct2Drive began selling games from EA for the first time ever, and featured some of the hottest titles of year from publishers like Ubisoft, Bethesda and Rockstar.

· AskMen continues to be the Web’s leading men’s lifestyle site and attracted more than 13 million unique users in October – an all-time high – while bringing on board a number of first-time FIM advertisers such as Porsche, Gucci and Calvin Klein.

· FIM Mobile distributed free, ad-supported mobile Web versions of every FIM site and is now a leader in ad-supported mobile Web, with a cumulative audience of 15M unique users per month.

While we’ve had some incredible success this past year, it’s impossible for us to ignore the larger economic environment and the challenges that are facing businesses all over the world. As a result, we are taking proactive steps to align our businesses practices with the economic realities that we will face in 2009. Some of these steps will be painful in the short term, but they are necessary to put our company in the best possible position to succeed now, and more importantly to emerge even stronger once the markets recover.

FIM’s success is the product of our incredibly talented people, and the retention of that talent is always our number one priority. We have approached this process with this priority at the forefront of our thinking.

We have taken several initial steps. First, have we have reprioritized our hiring needs for the remainder of the fiscal year. By doing so, we avoided instituting a hiring freeze and will continue to invest in our most promising opportunities. We have also taken a detailed look at our use of contract and temporary workers, and will be scaling back our use of those services in favor of internal resources wherever possible. Second, we will be closely monitoring, and cutting back on travel and expense budgets for the remainder of the fiscal year — please discuss any travel plans with your manager. And finally, we have made the decision to discontinue all meal subsidy programs currently being offered at FIM locations, effective January 1, 2009. Right now, it is imperative that we all work together to create savings and to maximize value – and these are all vital steps to this end.

Despite the challenging economic environment in which we will be operating, I am incredibly confident in our position within the marketplace. We have made a conscious effort over the last several years to build our business from the ground up in a manner that delivers maximum value at minimal cost not only to FIM, but to our advertisers and business partners. As a result, we are now in a great position to respond to the needs of the market at a time when our services are not only valuable to our partners, they are critical.

Thank you for your continued hard work and I look forward to seeing you all in 2009 as we work together to execute our plans and engage the challenges that lie ahead.

Happy Holidays,
Peter Levinsohn

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December 21, 2008
23:27
First Real iPhone 3G Unlock Caught on Video, Coming New Year’s Eve
» TechCrunch

Put on your woot hats and prepare your fun cannons because the iPhone 3G is getting its official unlock on New Year's Eve. Isn't it a little cynical to launch a cellphone unlock on New Year's Eve? Listen: the folks who will buy an iPhone, break the contract, and soft unlock the thing probably won't be hanging out in the Rainbow Room come midnight. They'll be snug in their beds, tapping warily at their MacBook trackpads, counting down the seconds for the first true soft unlock of the iPhone 3G (sadly, I'll probably join them). And they say technology isn't destroying human interaction.
17:33
Will This Economy Finally Push the Toyota Way Into Software Development?
» TechCrunch

On Friday, I interviewed Ryan Martens, CTO & founder of Rally Software, about agile development. (Rally offers Agile lifecycle managment products and is a key player in the online Agile development community.) Agile has its roots in the Toyota way and lean manufacturing. But only now is it starting to hit mainstream knowledge management process–like software development. Wikipedia calls it “Agile Software Development.” Certainly, moving to Agile isn’t pain free–there is risk involved–but companies that take the risk consistently report strong results, including those listed on the banner above. (Expect it to be flavor of the week if you apply it like the flavor of the week.)
17:03
MySpace v. Facebook Advertising Showdown. Which Platform Is Better?
» TechCrunch
The guest post below is written by Ryan Hupfer at HubPages. A couple of weeks ago HubPages ads were blocked from MySpace’s new self serve ad platform, MyAds, as being competitive to MySpace. That problem was fixed, but we asked Ryan, who advertises on both MySpace and Facebook, to write a guest post comparing the two platforms.

His results are below. In a nutshell, he finds Facebook a much better experience. When it comes to the results, though, things are mixed. Ryan’s test showed a lower cost per click on MySpace than Facebook ($.27 v. $.44). But the Facebook clicks were more productive: a new user cost just $5.11 on Facebook, v. $8.03 on MySpace.

The results, though, can’t be taken too seriously, for a number of reasons. First, Ryan spent $3,119 on Facebook ads and only $225 on MySpace (he says MySpace ads are much harder to administer, so he spent less). But that difference alone makes the results unreliable. Second, Facebook has text ads, MySpace has display ads, so the results are not apples-to-apples.

That gets me to the biggest reason the test isn’t scientific - both MySpace and Facebook knew about it. Ryan interviewed both extensively for the post. Since both knew this was coming, they both had incentives to help his ads get better performance.

But the post is valuable in that it shows what a real world advertiser thinks of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the platforms. Based on this, we may commission a true third party test of each of them, without notice to either company. Those results will be more relevant.

Update: A statement from MySpace on the post below:

We welcome the constructive feedback we’re getting on MyAds from our more than 15,000 advertisers—we’ve only been live publicly for a handful of weeks and we continue to make updates to the system. Unfortunately a lot of the information in the post above is outdated and we wanted to clarify a few important details on the new product.

Last week, we debuted a new functionality—“On-going Campaign and Daily Spending Limit,” which allows an advertiser to easily set up a continuous campaign with a daily stop-limit budget. Since its launch last week our daily budgeting has been adopted by 90% of advertisers. We also recently launched “Bulk Pausing and Restarting” which enables advertisers to better manage campaigns in bulk and filter by campaign status. We think these new improvements should address the major points above.

MySpace does an exceptional job of empowering MyAds customers to receive an analysis of campaign performance, however, in the break-out spreadsheet above, it says “No Daily Reporting,” which is factually incorrect. Not only does MyAds have daily reporting in the product, the reporting is updated on an hourly basis and has been core a functionality of the product since launch.

Ultimately, we wish the author would have spent more money with us to match what he spent on Facebook to ensure the comparison was reasonably balanced, but in spite of that we managed to deliver a 50% higher CTR at two-thirds the cost-per-click– making MyAds a better value for the money.

We hope this additional information is helpful to TechCrunch readers and are in contact with the guest author to update him on some of the absent MyAds product details.

Ryan’s Post:

After I had some issues with MySpace MyAds a while back, I’ve decided to dig in and come up with a much more detailed and apples-to-apples comparison of MySpace’s newly launched self-service ad platform to that of the slightly older, yet just as wet behind the ears Facebook Ads. As HubPages Communicator of Awesomeness! I have not only extensively used both of these latest attempts at the do-it-yourself advertising craze as a part of my overall marketing plan, but I have also had the chance to pick the brains of each of their management teams.

One of the first things that I found out was even though MySpace and Facebook have both created services that are similar in the fact that they’re finally able to capitalize on the data that millions of people are pumping into them daily, their implementation, strategy and vision couldn’t be any more different.

MySpace MyAds - Keeping It Creative And Looking To Monetize Now

While meeting with Adam Bain, the president of Fox Interactive Media’s audience network and the guy that Fox challenged to make some monetary magic with MySpace after they acquired the ad optimization and hypertargeting ad experts Strategic Data Corporation in 2007, it was clear that he has a plan to implement MyAds in a way that won’t affect the creativity and entertainment that MySpace has embraced since its launch in 2003. This is the main reason for him and his team deciding to go with a banner-based system as opposed to the more text-based systems that are currently used with Facebook Ads and other cost-per-click ad platforms such as Google AdSense.

Adam was also quick to let me know that the MyAds platform is now utilizing the same hypertargeting technology that they have been successfully using with larger big brand ad campaigns, such as the major mobile phone carriers (which he claims MySpace is the number one online lead generator for each of them). His overall vision for MyAds is to quickly focus on monetizing MySpace by utilizing this new hypertargeting which now gives users the ability to target a professional and creative campaign to practically anyone on MySpace based upon their interests and location. Also, he stressed that as the adoption of MyAds continues to grow he feels that that eventually the ads that most people are used to seeing on MySpace (punch the monkey) will go from being annoying to becoming something much more relevant and entertaining.

It’s probably also worth mentioning that the MyAds platform itself was built from the ground up internally by MySpace and that many of their core members came over from the team that helped Yahoo integrate their acquisition of Overture’s search advertising system. MyAds is seen as a huge revenue opportunity for MySpace and according to Adam the 40,000+ ads that have been submitted are already having an impact on their bottom line.

Facebook Ads - Monetization Taking A Backseat To Overall Growth Strategy

Facebook’s director of monetization, Tim Kendall, seemed to have a much different take on their now one year old self-service ad platform, which is an evolution from the Facebook Flyers that I once used a few years back when I was a graduate assistant at a college in Indianapolis, IN. According to Tim and despite the over half a billion dollars of funding that they’re currently burning through, Facebook’s main priority isn’t monetizing - it’s continuing to keep the now fastest growing social network of 140+ million worldwide users on pace to become something even bigger.

Growth, Tim says, is the only way to eventually get to a point to where they can start bringing in a positive cash flow and can begin turning their now venture capital devouring machine into something that can show signs of actually making some real money. Until they get to this point of growth that they’re happy with, Tim says that the proper resources required to really break out the Facebook Ads system into the mainstream won’t be available and they will continue to grow at the modest pace that they’re currently seeing.

The excitement about and around the Facebook Ads team wasn’t close to being on the same level of what I experienced when meeting the MyAds team, but I suppose that could be due to other growth-based initiatives, such as Facebook Connect, getting all of the attention. Also, as we discussed the overall vision of Facebook Ads there was much less focus on the potential effects to the overall user experience when it came to the ads being implemented into the Facebook as compared to my discussion with the MyAds team. This is probably because of the more spontaneous and community-focused nature of MySpace vs. the more connection-focused Facebook that is used more like a communications tool.

Using MyAds In Two Words: Clumsy Yet Creative

The newly launched MyAds is a huge step in the right direction for MySpace’s attempt to empower potential advertisers of all sizes to be able to tap into their network of promotion-friendly users by utilizing their new lineup of self-service tools. As a marketer with a mid-sized and somewhat limited budget, the idea of what MyAds can offer is very appealing - as long as it’s easy-to-use and somewhat self-managing.

You see, the self-service model that is meant to take advantage of the longtail of advertisers (50,000 advertisers spending $25 as opposed to 25 advertisers spending $50,000) is somewhat of a double-edged sword due to the fact that the smaller and mid-sized advertisers that are meant to use the system are a much different beast than the larger and more experienced advertisers that are more used to dealing with advertising platforms, terminology and management. This means that dealing with smaller advertisers (like me) also comes with dealing with advertisers that have less time, are managing many different things at once, and are most-likely less educated on advertising methods and seem to need more tools that allow them to make sense of their campaigns easily and quickly.

This brings me to my own experience with the MyAds platform, which up until this point has been a little bit of a struggle. This isn’t surprising considering that it’s only been openly available for less than 3 months and is still in public Beta. I’m not one to get frustrated easily with something new and I understand that they are consistently making improvements every day, but as it stands now there are some issues with the MyAds platform that have made it really hard for someone like me to work with as efficiently as I’d like. Some of these issues are as follows:
- Extremely slow and non-intuitive Flash-based management system that can be a real time-killer: It takes me a lot of time and a lot of screens to manage the campaigns that I have created. I want to get in, make some changes and get out fairly quickly and this system just doesn’t allow me to do that at this point.
- No multi-ad campaign creation: Unfortunately every ad that I enter into the system has its own campaign, budget, timeline and reporting. This makes it impossible to create specific sets of ads that can be managed from the group level such as Christmas ads, female-targeted ads or groups of locally focused ads. Managing each ad on its own is very inefficient, unpractical and isn’t worth the time that it takes to manage them.
- No ongoing campaigns and no daily spending limits: When a campaign is created there is a specific budget amount and schedule set for the ad and once either that budget or schedule runs out the campaign is officially complete and stopped until it is restarted manually. This results in excessive management of the campaigns or the inability to manage them at all, especially for the ones with smaller budget amounts. One odd quirk that I specifically ran into was that when my $25 budget ran out for an ad I couldn’t figure out how to get it restarted. This was because even though I extended the schedule for another month, I had to go in and add another $25 by hand to the $25 that was already listed for my budget, meaning that I had to change the original $25 to $50 to get it up and running again. Then the additional $25 ran out (which happened a day later) and I now need to go in and change the budget to $75 to get it restarted one more time. As you can see this can begin to get very annoying. This past week the MyAds team informed me that they are rolling out both daily spending limits and ongoing schedules, which will clear this issue up and will make MyAds much more manageable.
- Being creative could also mean more work: The banner-based system that MyAds utilizes allows for a higher level of creativity for those who use it, but this also means that it takes more work to get these campaigns created and running. Google, Facebook and others have developed more text-based systems for this very reason. But, the user-generated ads that I was shown by the MyAds team were super creative and looked as professional as many banner ads that I have seen on other sites, which shows that users are already capitalizing on the flexibility of the platform. MySpace has never been one to take the more boring route and they’re hoping that these types of banners will make the ads more effective and relevant to their users as time goes on.
Each of these issues can probably be easily fixed and like I said, the MyAds system is only a few months old and they have a very capable team working on improving this system every single day. I fully expect MyAds to only get better over time, I just hope for their sake that they don’t lose a lot of advertisers in the meantime.

Using Facebook Ads In Two Words: Speedy And Statistical

Everyone knows that Facebook hasn’t exactly been free of any issues when it comes to trying to monetize their network, but ever since I have used them Facebook Ads have consistently improved their extremely easy-to-use tools and have quickly realized the benefit of empowering their advertisers with as much statistical and analytical data as possible. The speed and ease of use that comes along with using Facebook Ads makes creating campaigns and managing their budgets, schedules and messaging extremely straight forward while their reporting options also make it easy to get a quick and easy overview of what your different campaigns are up to.

In fact, there aren’t a whole lot of things to complain about from a marketing perspective when it comes to Facebook Ads, but the one thing that I do worry about is how much noise their users will take before the ads begin to get in the way of what they’re actually there for - communicating with their friends. Here are a few things that I feel Facebook has done right:
- They have developed a great keyword-based ad targeting system: Facebook has over 20,000 unique keywords (and a pool of over 1 billion) that you can use when targeting your ads. These keywords come from profiles, Facebook pages, groups and authorized Facebook applications and are entered with a free form predictive keyword system. MySpace, on the other hand, uses a less-organic method to targeting interests via a hierarchy tree-based system.
- They have created a very flexible and friendly campaign management and reporting system: There are options to group ads into a campaign, to set a daily spending limit and the ability to make the campaign run on an ongoing basis. Of course, all of this is well complemented with a quick and comprehensive reporting system that Facebook calls Insights. Insights goes well beyond just clicks and impressions by enabling you to dig deeper into your campaigns by providing user-specific demographic data for the people who are actually end up clicking on your ads.
- The use of adding Social Actions can really boost your clicks: By adding Social Actions to your Facebook Ads you allow the ads to potentially run with an image of one of the Facebook user’s friends if they’re a fan of your Facebook Page that is connected to the campaign. Adding Social Actions has been known to double the amount of clicks that an ad receives.
So, does Facebook have the perfect system? No. But as far as I’ve seen they’ve made some huge leaps in the right direction when it comes to advertising on social networks and I can only imagine what they’ll come up with once they actually give it the attention and resources that they think it eventually deserves.

Stats, Conversions And The Bottom Line: How Do They Perform?

The bottom line when using these self-service advertising platforms is whether or not they make my life easier as a marketer and whether or not they give me a good return on my investment of time, money and attention. I ran some numbers on how each of these campaigns has performed for me, but like most advertisers will be quick to tell you, results can and probably will vary from campaign to campaign. With that being said, here are some things that you should be aware of before I lay out my numbers for you:
- These stats are from the campaigns that I ran in November of 2008
- Each week I spend some time each Thursday to update, manage and adjust these types of marketing campaigns and depending on ease of use, I can get more done on some platforms than others. MySpace tended to take me more time to manage, so it usually didn’t get the same level of management that Facebook Ads did.
- These stats include analytics that I have pulled from both Facebook Ads and MyAds and the amount of data they allow you to view and download varies. While MyAds only offers a Flash-based reporting interface with some basic analytics, Facebook Ads allowed me to download more data than I could ever ask for in an easy-to-use Excel format.
- I was more than willing to budget the same amount of spending on both of the platforms, but due to some of their campaign restrictions, I honestly had a hard time spending as much money with MyAds.
- As far as HubPages interests go, there are two metrics that we are most interested in when it comes to determining a good ROI - newly registered members and more importantly the Hubs that they end up publishing. Depending on these two metrics we can determine whether or not various marketing campaigns are giving us the return that we need to deem them successful.
The Future For These Self-Service Ad Platforms

Although MySpace and Facebook are two very different businesses, they both have realized that they need to accomplish similar things in order to give their self-service systems the success that they’re looking for. Two big goals that they both mentioned were increasing their marketing and promotional reach to the millions of potential advertisers across the nation and once they reach them somehow educating these advertisers to the point that they feel comfortable using these self-service systems.

Facebook has already started setting up deals with partners as a way to get the word out, such as their partnership with the Visa Business Network that leverages Visa’s name to attract new businesses to advertise and a deal with GoDaddy and Intuit that gives their new business users free credits to try out the Facebook Ads system. MySpace is also working on setting up some of these partnerships and I’m sure that they will be figuring out ways to inform their music, comedy and other entertainment-based users about the MyAds service as they begin to implement their marketing and promotional strategy.

With both MySpace and Facebook looking to self-service advertising as a way to significantly bump revenues, the race is officially on to see who can get traction in the market first. Facebook has the polished tools and the growing audience, but I have a feeling that MySpace has just given us a taste of what their creative team can come up with and despite the issues that I’ve had with MyAds, they seem to be constantly improving their system that has already seen some early success. All I know is that I’m looking forward to seeing how these competing platforms end up performing through the rest of 2008 and into 2009.

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3:09
Fear Kills Businesses, Dead
» TechCrunch

It’s official. We’re in a recession. Recessions naturally inject fear and panic, which is only heightened by every discussion of market losses, layoffs, bailouts, and somber predictions. We’re only human after all; of course everything affects us personally and emotionally.

Fear is not a catalyst for productivity however.

With valuable advice pouring in from concerned and sympathetic entrepreneurs and proven leaders, businesses are indeed responding quickly to make decisions that equate to a secure and prosperous future—hopefully.

This constructive advice has helped businesses focus and weigh difficult decisions sooner than they might have without it.

However, over time, productive guidance has mutated into a glut of negative forecasts and grim predictions that pillage precious and vital airtime from contributing to the resolution of our financial predicament. Simply said, fear, and the dissemination of distress, slowly erodes hope, vision, and ambition, ultimately killing businesses instead of guiding them.

Fear inspires desperate actions. Hope (combined with clarity and inventiveness galvanizes action and engenders opportunities.

Opportunity vs. Emotion

These are emotionally charged times which only fuel emotionally-driven decisions. Unfortunately, the advice shared from many experts now and in the past is subjected to both literal and open interpretation, and thus guiding or misguiding the next steps of established businesses and emerging startups.

Don’t worry about getting ahead, instead, just survive…Cutting deeper and quicker is the formula to survive. - Sequoia Capital

There’s a distinct difference between mere survival and succeeding in real world business. Many companies may unwittingly lock themselves in an isolated panic room instead of taking strategic steps to evolve and grow the business opportunity that exists today.

General advice is just that, general. One prevailing set of strategies and recommendations doesn’t apply to all.

In a conversation with veteran CEO and financier Steve Larsen, currently co-founder of Krugle, he advises:

Of course, don’t be stupid. Have enough cash to run your business, but I think the doom and gloom crowd are getting too much airtime. Look for opportunities. Difficult times are when they’ll most likely occur. When we’re at ‘steady state’ and things are normal, good opportunities are much harder to find with GREAT opportunities nearly impossible. It is during periods of tumult and transition when you can spot things that lead to the greatest returns—if you are alert. So be alert.

In every recession, abundant opportunities are inherently rife. To simply believe that this is a generic time to step off of the playing field to warm benches or take a seat in the spectator bleachers in the hopes of emerging once again to readily have a shot at winning the game is illogical. Businesses, and customers, do not stop making decisions—they’re just more discerning during volatile economic climates. But make no mistake, if you choose to stop vying for customer attention, the world will move ahead without you.

This is your time to vault in front of your competition, to earn rapid and sweeping visibility, for a fraction of the time and money that was required to excel during the “good days.”

Your rivals are retreating right now, so what are you going to do about it?

Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu advised in The Art of War:

When weak, feign strength…Attack him [your enemy] where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.

Whoever inspires you, remember, tomorrow’s leaders are born, tested, and proven, today. This is your moment.

Development vs. Revenue Generation

As a startup, you are now, officially, on your own. You can’t count on your VCs saving you or some magical offer from Yahoo or Google showing up to bail you out. — Jason Calacanis

If your company is guided by a board of advisors or group of investors that are not actively in tune with the real world opportunities and hurdles of your business, then their advice and direction may be questionable. Either they’re investing in the development of a product/service or they’re investing in the development of a commercial business or acquisition opportunity.

Depending on goals and milestones, there’s a stark difference in not only how the company is run, but also how its leaders assess and implement critical cost-cutting measures or where additional investment may be required. And, if users or customers are involved, the process of cost cutting isn’t necessarily a sweeping solution.

If resources are dedicated to research and development, assess the state of progress coupled with the runway of current cash and expectations. The key question is, “how can you get from here to there with less than what you’ve already been spending or planned on spending this year?”

For those companies who rely on customers to market products and either hit profitability or simply attain proof of concept through adoption, customers are not expendable. Cutting or freezing any program that connects your solution to your customers is dangerous and requires careful consideration. This IS the time when businesses must invest in the transcendence from survival to market leadership. This recession is temporary, but business is constant.

Do Not eliminate marketing or sales efforts. Okay, I’m biased here, but cutting marketing and sales has a direct and reverberating impact on future income, so don’t be surprised if next quarter’s numbers are down. Without support, sales will continue to trend downward.

Be wise as you evaluate your sales and marketing efforts. With the right team, you may want to consider maintaining or increasing financial support in order to excel while your competition retreats.

Do create an innovative and cost efficient formula for running a concentrated, sustained, and proactive outbound marketing program that effectively creates a bridge between your core customer’s needs and your product.

While companies are cutting costs to extend their runways, consumers and businesses are reducing spending in parallel. However, it’s important to remember that customers are not freezing spending altogether. They are and will continue to research, invest and procure the solutions, services, and products that will help them succeed, offer entertainment, or streamline aspects of their day-to-day workflow. And, they’ll also continue to make impulse decisions just for the hell of it.

Building Your Business in a Recession

Obviously, capital preservation and cost cutting do not equate to sustenance or growth. The driving factors are poles apart when striving to merely stay alive vs. building a business.

If you’re sheltering cash to focus on development, then cut the services and expenses that will not impede your ability to cross the threshold to market success. If you’re conserving funds to prolong life, then realize that the only fountain of youth is cash itself. Focusing energies on generating revenue, increasing visibility, and enhancing customer loyalty are the most effective strategies for underwriting longevity, and hopefully growth, especially during an economic downturn.

The real question you have to ask yourself is, “How will my customers find me today and tomorrow?”

I’m not sure if this is a newsflash or not, but customers do not typically go out of their way to “discover” your products and companies. They have choices and it’s the job of any marketing and sales-centric business to reach their customers where they go for information—otherwise, they’re out of the decision making process by default. Marketing and sales are the conduits for connecting prospects to your business.

In a down economy, tomorrow’s leaders are born today. It takes vision, focus, and a hyper-connected sense of what customers are seeking, why, and where.

The reality is that there are hard costs tied to customer acquisition and retention. The key is to observe and listen to your customers to ascertain the most active and direct channels to reach and engage them.

Here are several, targeted and affordable suggestions:

1. SEO – Customers actively use search engines to find relevant solutions. Keyword and organic search optimization is an inexpensive and effective means for gaining strategic presence.

2. Blog Relations – It’s not just about news and pitching the A-List, creating a consistent and visible brand requires the inclusion of the authoritative, peer-to-peer blogs that your customers and influencers read for information, help and perspective. Oh, and be wise about using embargoes.

3. Media/Analysts – Reporters and analysts cover your space and by simply writing about your company or product, they can position you as an option among your customers; especially when they’re researching options to validate decisions.

4. Direct Sales – Some of the most successful companies right now are concentrating on direct outreach to the decision makers instead of hoping to influence them from the sidelines.

5. CRM – Building a customer-focused business saves money and increases revenue. Focusing on customers and empowering them improves business processes, product development, and also offsets marketing expenses as “involved and participatory” customers transform from a cost-center into an active surrogate sales force.

6. Participate – Social networks are much more than mere time killers. Participating across the social communities where you’re customers and prospects are active and vocal provides a looking glass into their thoughts, requests, opinions, dislikes, and recommendations. It also provides you with priceless opportunities to combat negative perceptions while also positioning your company as a resource.

7. Thought Leadership – One of the best ways to demonstrate thought leadership is to actively share your thoughts where they count. Contributing articles and posts to industry publications, forums, and blogs increases visibility and unobtrusively contributes to your sales strategy by helping customers find you.

8. Blog and Blog Comments – It may seem trite or perhaps even worthless, but I can guarantee that finding the time to host and contribute to a blog that demonstrates the expertise of you and your team is priceless. People are looking for information and direction, not just from your blog but others as well. Go where they are and offer counsel, contribute to the dialogue and establish trust and authority in the process. Why wouldn’t you position yourself as a resource for your customers or prospects? Too busy you say? Empower your staff. Contract outside experts to contribute to creating a one-stop-shop for insight and direction—just be transparent about their involvement. It costs less than you think to build a community around your product, or at least what it stands for.

9. Network in the real world – Participation isn’t solely relegated to online networks. Opportunities to meet and cultivate relationships in the real world are abundant. Meetups, industry events, groups, unofficial lobbycons associated with your favorite events are continuous and more valuable with your involvement.

10. Involve Your Community – Save money and time by involving your customers in the development process of your new and iterative products as well as your go to market strategy. Alpha customers are often ready to assist with the validation of your business model and also the honest feedback associated with your product benefits and features.

11. Websites are not Just Web Pages – Your Website must make an emotional connection with visitors, while also conveying stories and value propositions that specifically capture the attention of your customers – otherwise, all of your hard work and investment of time and money in sales and marketing campaigns will generate traffic, but lead to a dramatically reduced conversation ratios.

12. Innovate – Always learn and improve everything in order to stay relevant.

Buy When No One Is Buying

If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it, is the surest path to obsolescence. Equally, swinging the axe without accuracy and grace will also send you packing. Constraint forces and inspires creativity. Operate not from fear, but from vision, determination, and ingenuity.

In a down market, generally speaking, this is the time to strategically cut dispensable expenses, but also invest in growth. It may appear as common practice, however, current actions demonstrate counter intuitiveness. You sell when people are buying, not when people are selling. You buy when no one is buying, not when everyone is frantically bidding the price up. These are indeed the times to invest in the success of your business and your personal brand.

Remember, the economy is a yo-yo on an escalator. It might go up and down, and down some more, but eventually, it’s always going up (once we fix it, this time).

Any company that intentionally pulls itself from the radar screens of potential and existing customers will find itself on a direct path to the Deadpool.

It is during these most difficult times when character is truly tested and defined.

To paraphrase Al Pacino from Any Given Sunday, the inches we need to be successful right now are everywhere, and it’s up to us, and only us, to fight for them. And when we add up those inches, it will make the difference between winning and losing. Find and keep the people who will fight for those inches with you. That’s a team. Either you win as a team or you all lose as individuals. But fear will not help you win at all.

(Photos by Stuant63 and Sam UL).
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December 20, 2008
17:50
Techfluff.tv - The UK tech scene delivered with a wink
» TechCrunch

After a couple of episodes, it’s becoming clear that Techfluff.TV is in many respects the UK’s answer to Pop17 and RocketBoom. Every week TechFluff delves into the world of web-celebrities and tech startups, particularly the London scene right now, but increasingly across Europe (if the Le Web video is anything to go by). What’s fun about TechFluff is that it doesn’t take the industry too seriously (hence “fluff”, referring to the lighter side of things - honest). And host Hermoine Way has the hutspa to go up to any Web player and ask them anything - including asking Michael Arrington where he’d like a Gaping Void cartoon drawn. The show comes out every week and is definitely worth catching. The second episode features an interview with TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher (me) and the latest one features our esteemed editor at Le Web. Let’s hope it goes daily some time. And while we’re on the lighter side, check out Paul Carr, increasingly the UK’s tech satirist.
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17:48
The Ning Exodus Begins: Adult Networks, It’s Time To GTFO
» TechCrunch

The eviction of Ning’s adult sites is in full swing. The actual shut down of the sites doesn’t happen until January 5 (extended from January 1), but the sites that are affected have now received an email with instructions on how to get their content off Ning.

Ning CEO Gina Bianchini says only about 1% of the 675,000 networks are being asked to leave for having adult content. She also points out that Ning attracts 2,500 - 3,000 new networks daily.

The reason Ning is shutting down adult sites despite the fact that cofounder Marc Andreessen thinks Ning should “let people fundamentally do what they want?”

Google.

Ning uses Google for advertising, and Google doesn’t like adult content. That puts Ning on a bit of a slippery slope when it comes to defining what is and isn’t adult content. But presumably they’ve now drawn that line, and those 1% of networks that are on the wrong side of it have been notified. So pack your content, and get out.

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9:37
MOG Music Network Pushes Back Affiliate Payments, Are They In Trouble?
» TechCrunch

When music blog network and discovery platform MOG launched an advertising network last August, CEO David Hyman described it as a “Federated Media for music sites” (note: we partner with FM for TechCrunch). Dubbed MOG Music Network, it allows independent music bloggers to syndicate content to Mog.com and customize ads that appear on their websites, enabling them to generate revenues greater than what they’d get from ad networks like Google AdSense.

Now, a tipster that’s part of the program, tells us that MMN is seriously behind on payments and that they’re raising the payment terms significantly. This is the e-mail he/she received from MOG:

Greetings MMN affiliates,

MMN is now 275 strong. We’re really thrilled with the fantastic response we’re receiving from advertisers. Examples of advertisers MMN has featured in the last 60 days include SanDisk, Electronic Arts, and Sony Pictures. Our sales pipeline for 2009 is massive as a result of the enthusiastic reception to MMN among the biggest brand marketers in the world. They recognize MMN as more valuable, and with a cooler audience, than MySpace, Facebook, Imeem, and others. These marketers get that the tastemakers and influencers live on your sites.

Some of the proof is already in the pudding. MMN has averaged over $5.50 CPM in the last 60 days with 50%+ sell through rates, outpacing many other ad networks.

While demand for advertising on MMN continues to be strong, we are seeing a distinct slowdown in advertiser-issued payments. Regrettably, MOG doesn’t have the luxury of paying out affiliates before advertiser payments are collected. This means that we have to push back our payment terms to 120 days, starting with October 2008 earnings onward.

I ask that you be patient with us as we work to collect your earnings. We’re dealing with cream of the crop advertisers who, I assure you, will pay out.

Thanks for your understanding,

Andrei Marinescu
Director, Business Development | MOG

It reads like a classical corporate message announcing bad news. Start off with the good: tout your member numbers and the ‘massive sales pipeline’, say how special the network really is, boast about your impressive CPM rates, say how much better than competitors you are. Then go on with the bad news, get it over with swiftly and then get to the reassurance part, and never forget to thank the recipient for their understanding in advance.

According to the company’s FAQ, which has yet to be updated, payments were issued within 60 days of the last day of the month in which revenue was earned up until now.

It’s always possible that there is effectively nothing extraordinary going on and that the problems will be solved and affiliates paid out in full, but we wouldn’t be surprised that there’s more to the story here, and that MOG is feeling the sting of the recession like so many other ad networks and publishers are.

MOG is venture-backed: after raising $3.2 million in angel funding, they raised Series A funding to the tune of $2.8 million in April 2008 from Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and The Angels’ Forum. Their total funding is thus $6 million. The company also has legendary music producer and co-head of Columbia Records Rick Rubin on its board.
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5:19
Digg’s Sorry Revenue Stream, And Rumors Of An Experimental Ad Product
» TechCrunch

So Business Week gets their hands on Digg’s financials and reports that the company had 2007 revenues of $4.8 million and losses of $2.8 million. The first three quarters of 2008 Digg had revenues of $6.4 million and losses of $4 million. That implies total 2008 revenue of $8.5 million, with $5.3 million in losses.

First of all, ouch. People close to Digg once suggested to me that the Microsoft search deal, which was announced in July 2007, would bring in well over $100 million in revenue to Digg over the three year agreement (something we’ve never reported). That suggestion seems to be completely false. The deal is bringing in less than $10 million/year.

Second, Digg shouldn’t be losing money. They have over 70 employees, the company recently confirmed, and plan to grow to 150 by the end of next year. That’s an awful lot of people for a company that outsources sales and content creation, and has little to do besides focus on keeping the servers humming.

Granted, Digg has a number of people on staff that moderate content and focus on the community. But even so, experts I polled this evening who’ve run large scale Internet sites tell me Digg should be able to keep the lights on with no more than 15 engineers, and as few as five or six. Comscore says Digg has 16 million worldwide unique monthly visitors and 58 million page views. Those numbers are likely significantly lower than reality, but still. Digg could turn itself profitable, even at these low revenues, by simply firing much of its staff. Instead they choose to lose $5 million or more this year.

Digg’s Product Plans

A Digg employee recently told me that “most” (I took it to mean more than half) of the 70 employees were development and operations engineers, so they are clearly up to something besides keeping the lights on.

One experiment Digg is working on, says one source close to the company, is a self service advertising product that will be somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist. The product would insert advertisements into the Digg news stream (presumably clearly marked). Where those ads end up, and how much an advertiser pays per click, would be based on user feedback.

So users would have the ability to vote on advertisements in the same way they vote on stories. The better ads, as determined by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click.

Digg won’t comment on these rumors. And from what we heard, at best the product is still an internal experiment.

But clearly some significant portion of those 70 engineers must be working on new products, and if I were Digg I’d be thinking a lot about revenue. Given how successful the company has been at leveraging their users to sort through the news to determine what’s hot, perhaps they’ll be able to do the same with advertising.

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December 19, 2008
21:15
Facebook Stares Down Labels Over Project Playlist Takedown Demand
» TechCrunch

Earlier this afternoon MySpace scrubbed all traces of Project Playlist music widgets from the site, and users are unable to embed any further playlists. The scrub was the result of infringement notices from the major labels, all of which are in litigation with Project Playlist.

The labels, sources say, sent the same takedown notices to Facebook, which has 660,000 users with playlists from Project Playlist. But Facebook has refused to comply with those demands, our sources say.

Facebook for their part are refusing to comment, as is Project Playlist. But our music industry sources are calling Facebook’s refusal to comply “irresponsible” and saying that a lawsuit is inevitable if Facebook doesn’t remove the application and widgets.

It’s not clear Facebook is fully aware of what they’re stepping into (although the experience of Mark Zuckerberg’s friend Sean Parker, who is the founding President of Facebook and the cofounder of Napster, with labels should give them some indication). The labels aren’t screwing around, and their fury with Project Playlist, who they say have been stalling on a music licensing deal for months, is unchecked.

Expect users to give Facebook a big thumbs up for staring down the labels. My question is, how far is Facebook willing to go to protect Project Playlist? The potential litigation exposure is massive.

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21:10
YouTube Unveils Unique View Counts. Now You Can Tell If Your Mom Is Your Only Fan
» TechCrunch

YouTube has just released a new feature for its analytics platform that allows content owners to see how many unique visitors are watching their videos. While YouTube videos have long displayed their view counts to the public, until this point it hasn’t been possible to tell if the hits were coming from a wide audience or just a few devout fans who repeatedly watched the same clips.

To access the feature, visit the YouTube Insights page for the video in question and click ‘Show Unique Users’ under the ‘Views’ tab. A yellow line depicting unique views will appear alongside the standard green line showing absolute views, allowing you to easily gauge how many repeat hits you have. While most users will probably see fairly mundane trends, the most popular viral videos have statistics that are much more dramatic (I’d love to see the stats for this classic.)

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20:14
MobileCrunch Interviews Tracy DeMiroz, VP of Marketing at Skyfire
» TechCrunch

I spent a few minutes earlier this week chatting with Tracy DeMiroz, the VP of Marketing for Skyfire. Skyfire is a free mobile browser for Windows Mobile and Symbian, and the only browser of the bunch to support Flash, Silverlight, and a number of other technologies generally reserved for desktop browsers.

With Skyfire now open to the world and quickly approaching a 1.0 release, I figured it was time to sit down and ask them a few questions. While Tracy has to skirt around some of my inquiries, she was able to drop some hints about Skyfire’s budding business model, the future of Skyfire on other platforms, and when we might be able to expect version 1.0.
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19:38
MySpace Puts The Hammer Down On Project Playlist
» TechCrunch

MySpace is getting back into the business of blocking third party widgets, it seems - today they’ve banned embedded music widgets from the fast growing Project Playlist. But unlike previous 2006 and 2007 blocks of iMeem, Photobucket and many others, this time MySpace is doing it under threat of litigation from the major labels.

We first got word from MySpace users that their Playlist widgets are simply vanishing from their MySpace profiles earlier today. When we contacted MySpace they confirmed the ban, noting that they have received infringement notices from “major music companies”:

MySpace is an open platform that welcomes all developers to build rich and legitimate applications for its global community. We take copyright issues very seriously and our goal is to help developers build a substantial business by creating an environment that respects rights holders and protects their content.

MySpace has received notices of infringement about Project Playlist at different times from several of the major music companies currently suing Project Playlist. Per our policy of taking very seriously the requests of rights holders to block access to third party sites that are believed to be infringing, we have evaluated the requests of the major music companies and determined that it is in our best interest not to allow Project Playlist widgets on MySpace, and effective immediately, we will no longer be allowing these widgets within the MySpace platform. Any third party widgets (including any music widgets) are welcome on MySpace so long as they do not include infringing content—we encourage our users to utilize the many legitimate applications found on MySpace and across the Web.

Those major music companies are likely Warner Music, Universal Music Group and EMI, which have been in litigation with Project Playlist since April 2008. This is both a ban and a scrub, meaning users can’t add new widgets and all old widgets are being removed from the site.

Apparently this isn’t the first time the two companies have come to blows. MySpace also blocked Project Playlist earlier this year in March, but the company was able to evade the block with some success.

An industry source also confirms that Facebook has been served with the same notice of infringement. As of now, Playlist is still live on that site.

Project Playlist recently hired former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta as CEO and raised an undisclosed round of financing.

Update: More on how Facebook is handling the infringement notices.

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18:22
Smule Shares Its Awesome Audio Technology To Bring Cigarettes To Your iPhone
» TechCrunch

Smule, the company behind innovative applications like the Sonic Lighter and Ocarina, is easily one of my favorite developers on the App Store. The company has developed a suite of advanced technologies revolving around audio information, which allows it to share music on a global scale and (in the case of an app launching today) to use audio to relay information between two nearby cell phones.

Today Nico Becherer, the developer behind the hit application Face Melter, has released the first third party application to use Smule’s core technology. The application, called Electric Smoke, allows users to play with a virtual cigarette. It may not sound particularly exciting, but the technology behind it is impressive - if you’ve got another iPhone handy with Sonic Lighter installed, you can use it to light your virtual cigarette.

Using Smule’s ‘Sonic Modem’ technology, the two phones actually relay information using sound (they literally beep at each other), which means the apps will work even if there isn’t an internet connection available. Smule has lent its IP networking technology to Electric Smoke free of charge in return for promoting its Smule Sonic Lighter app.

While the technology behind it is very cool, the application itself isn’t particularly fun. After launching Electric Smoke, you’re presented with a very nicely rendered unlit cigarette.
Once you’ve got your cigarette ablaze, you can inhale and blow on the iPhone’s microphone as you watch virtual smoke fill the screen (you can manipulate the smoke by running your fingers across it). The game keeps track of how long it takes for you to burn through each cigarette, making for a mildly amusing game that will leave you both lightheaded and winded.

Because Electric Smoke is at least jokingly meant as a substitute for smoking actual cigarettes, the app offers a long listing of random trivia detailing how much money you’re saving and the time you’ve added to your lifespan (other notable factoids include how much you’ve helped the ozone layer). It also offers a smoking-related statistic every time you launch the app, likely as a way to show that it isn’t meant to promote smoking - it’s meant to raise awareness (or help you quit).

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17:00
Elevator Pitch Friday: MakeFive
» TechCrunch

This week’s Elevator Pitch comes from MakeFive, a Vancouver, B-based startup that revolves around making top-five lists. The concept is simple: you make a list of anything you want—the worst typefaces of all time, the best tech sites, or things to do after the economy collapses—and vote up the items you think should make it to the top five.

The site is well-designed and fun. I am not sure how many times I would go back. It would depend on how good the lists become and who makes them. Of course, there is already a MakeFive Facebook app. But I liked this pitch from founder Eric Karjaluoto. It made me want to go check out the site, which is what an Elevator Pitch is supposed to do.

If you have a startup, submit your Elevator Pitch and we might cover it here on TechCrunch.

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16:56
The People Have Spoken: CrunchGear Reader’s Poll Results and Best of 2008
» TechCrunch

Welcome to CrunchGear's Gala Best of 2008 Awards featuring the Best Gear, Gadgets, and Software of 2008. Best of all, we tallied your responses and collated them in the People's Choice awards. Now that I'm wearing my tux, let's get right to the awards.
16:03
Is the T-Mobile G2 Coming Next Month?
» TechCrunch

If this one turns out true, it looks like T-Mobile’s followup to the Android-powered G1 might be on the shelves as early as next month. Note the emphasis on “might” there - while there’s nothing red flagging it as false, we’re taking this one with the finest grain of salt we have to spare.

Be it that the specs pan out, the G2 should be a pretty substantial step up from the G1. Not only would the camera get bumped up to 5 megapixels (from 3.2) with flash, but it’d be sporting a secondary (and presumably front facing) VGA camera as well.
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15:29
Pandora Hits 20 Million Registered Users (Via Twitter)
» TechCrunch

Just in via Twitter: Pandora has registered its 20 millionth user. The three-year old music streaming service is trying to hold its own despite tough economics and recent layoffs.

Its music-recommendation engine pumps out personalized radio stations over the Web, and its iPhone app remains one the top free apps on iTunes (currently No. 21).

How many of those 20 million registered users are active? Most of its listeners are in the U.S. According to comScore, Pandora had 5 million unique U.S. visitors in November, more than CBS-owned Last.fm (2.8 million) and close to Imeem (5.5 million). (MySpace Music, in contrast, had 17. 8 million). Here is a Google Trends chart showing a similar relationship.

Update: According to the company, 40 percent of its registered users, or 8 million, have been active in the past 90 days.

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14:19
Issuu Really Wants to Kill The Document Download
» TechCrunch

One thing that I find increasingly anachronistic on the Web is the stubborn persistence of the PDF download. I really don’t need to download more junk onto my computer, especially if it is only something I am going to look at once or twice. Every document should just be viewable (and searchable) on the Web. That is why I am a big fan of services like Issuu, Docstoc, and Scribd that let you embed PDFs and other documents on any Webpage.

Today, Issuu (which raised $5 million in October) is introducing something it calls Smart Look, which turns all the document-download links on your site into browser-viewable documents. It works for PDFs, slideshows, or regular text documents. You just insert some code onto your site, and it does the rest. Instead of an embedded viewer, it launches a new overlay window where you can see the document in all of its glory, search it, page through it, and even print it (if you still do that kind of thing).

Once you insert the code, it turns on this feature for all document downloads on your site, instead of requiring you to create an different embedded viewer for each document.

You can check it out some on this sample site or watch the video below:

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13:55
Meebo Passes IMs Between MySpace And Facebook
» TechCrunch

MySpace and Facebook may be frenemies forever, but now they have a new mutual friend that will pass notes between them. Meebo, the Web-based IM service, now supports IM accounts from both social networks. That means you can enter your Facebook and MySpace account IDs into Meebo and the chat with friends from both social networks in one IM box. The integration will work on Meebo.com itself, as well its Community IM partner sites.

While the partnership with MySpace is official, Meebo basically reverse-engineered Facebook’s IM. So if Facebook decides to change its IM protocols, the Meebo integration could break until its engineers apply a band aid. The MySpace integration, in contrast, is built on top of official APIs and incorporates all the security features of MySpace IM.

Meebo also supports AIM, Gtalk, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, and ICQ accounts. It claims 40 million members, who send 5 billion messages a month. ComScore reports 7.4 million monthly visitors worldwide to Meebo.com, and shows some flattening of growth. Tapping into Facebook and MySpace should help Meebo keep its growth going.

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11:34
The Recording Industry Decides To Stop Suing Its Customers
» TechCrunch

After suing tens of thousands of customers to no avail, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has decided to change tactics. Instead of dragging music downloaders and file-sharers into court, it has somehow convinced ISPs to take on the role of digital policeman (and jury and judge). The WSJ reports:

The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003. Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.

The RIAA will now work with ISPs behind the scenes in what is being described as a three-strikes policy. It will provide the ISPs with information (IP addresses, presumably) identifying accounts suspected of sharing music illegally. The ISPs wil then ask the owners of those accounts to stop. After the third request, the suspected infringer might lose his or her Internet connection.

This approach is certainly better than threatening jail time, but it raises a whole host of new issues. For one thing, what happens when someone is wrongly accused? At least before they had recourse to a court of law. ISPs are not equipped to set up quasi-legal proceedings or hear appeals. It will be much easier for them to simply send out notices and turn off service, and that is what will happen.

As for the recording industry’s bigger underlying problem (the death of the CD business) ,turning the ISPs into a music police does nothing to address it. Let’s just hope they don’t bring back the idea of making everyone pay a music tax through their ISPs.

And while the RIAA may not sue as many consumers in the future, startups trying to forge new paths for music distribution still need to fear its lawyers.

(Image via Marxchivist).
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10:47
Simply the Best: My Top Gadgets of 2008
» TechCrunch

It's easy to forget that we at CrunchGear are taking part in a mild, nebbish, and highly organized form of hedonism. We become inured to the lures of technology, and like rheumy-eyed Caligulas we survey the mass of writhing, oiled bodies and yearn for something new, something to break the hard bolus of cynicism and distrust we have growing inside us like a dark, terrible pearl. To offset this, I've picked a few great pieces of kit that I've enjoyed this year including one pink and cuddly one that has essentially taken over my life.
10:44
Two New Web-based Calling Services Promise - But Don’t Quite Deliver - Free Calls to the US
» TechCrunch

A couple days ago we received a press release for a new service named CallingAmerica, which permits you to make free VoIP calls to U.S. phone numbers using only your web browser. Offered free of charge, users are required to look at advertisements for about 10 seconds before calls are connected (AdBlock Plus worked just fine to suppress the ads, by the way). We've tested the service and you can use it to make calls from foreign countries to the U.S., although the founders, the world famous Goober Networks, don't want to publicize the feature.
9:35
Gaming Site InstantAction On A Roll
» TechCrunch

From time to time, companies we’ve covered in the past check in with us to give us an update on their progress, and we’re always happy to receive those notices even if we don’t always publish something about it here. Yet sometimes, it’s definitely worth it.

For instance, InstantAction, a gaming site from IAC-owned GarageGames, has managed to cross the 1 million members mark only 9 months after we covered their launch.

InstantAction lets you play 3D games inside your browser using neither Flash or Silverlight, but instead via a proprietary Windows and Mac compatible plugin that works with games programmed in pretty much any language. The 3D graphics are awesome and the games are rather addictive.

The company also very recently announced it was making all the games free of charge for users, instead of clinging to the subscription model, a move that could explain the notable traffic surge Compete and Quantcast are reporting. Anyone who registers with the site can now get access to the games Fallen Empire Legions, Marble Blast Online, Rokkit Ball, and Think Tanks for free. Those who had previously purchased an ActionPass subscription will gain advanced access to the beta for three upcoming titles: flight-combat Ace of Aces, Lore and arcade racer Blur. They’ll also get a refund on their purchases through June 1, 2009.

So what’s your favorite gaming site, and more importantly, why?

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7:24
KillerStartups Launches Dataopedia, A One-Stop Shop For Information About Websites
» TechCrunch

KillerStartups, or rather its overarching company Startups.com Networks, has been in the news lately. First, they picked up Startups.com in a killer deal, next thing you know they’re launching their own web applications (Twingr). Now, they’re introducing the strangely named but quite useful Dataopedia, which is meant to serve as an information resource for websites.

It’s actually very useful, even if the idea isn’t exactly new (Quarkbase, for example, is very similar if not exactly alike). Just as you would use our own Crunchbase for information about companies, Dataopedia gives you a run-down of all the data it can find about a website you provide an URL for (including Crunchbase data, in fact). The web service aggregates data from dozens of sources in combination with a number of public APIs.

It’s valuable to have all this information in one place, and it’s plenty: expect data about traffic (arguably from the poorest source available, Alexa, although there are embedded graphs from Compete and Quantcast too), screenshots, names of people involved, WHOIS information, Google PageRank, multimedia links and embeds, jobs, office locations, and so on.

The web service comes with a nice set of features that make it easy for you to fetch data the way you choose. Send a website URL to a custom e-mail address and you’ll receive a reply in HTML format with all the information about that website. Browsing on a smartphone? Dataopedia has mobile versions that can be consulted with most devices. Firefox user? Get the bookmarklet, add a custom searchbox or install the add-on (coming soon). And my personal favorite: send a Twitter message to @dataopedia with a URL and you’ll get a tweet back with a link to the appropriate Dataopedia entry.

Dataopedia, you’ve got yourself a fan.

CrunchBase Information KillerStartups Information provided by CrunchBase
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4:03
European Business Social Network XING Acquires socialmedian
» TechCrunch

Hamburg, Germany based XING, a global professional social network that’s strong in Europe, has acquired New York based socialmedian for an undisclosed amount. Socialmedian’s founding CEO Jason Goldberg is relocating to Germany and will be joining XING as Vice President Applications Platform, and the entire socialmedian team will be integrated into the company.

We’re updating this post as the news is breaking.

Socialmedian is basically a personalized news filter that integrates well with social networking platforms. It aggregates news articles from around the web, blogosphere and social services like Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Google Reader, FriendFeed, etc. which are then filtered by topic. Users can pre-define which keywords and topics they’d like to receive news on, and they can also submit articles to the site with the help of a bookmarklet. Stories can be viewed either in chronological order or according to popularity on the network. The startup was operating on a mere $560,000 in seed funding from individual investors and The Washington Post Company.

About 3 weeks ago, we reported on XING CEO Lars Hinrich, who founded the company in 2003 and led it to an IPO three years later at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, stepping down. He still got to announce the news, though:

Why do we think that socialmedian is a perfect fit for XING? Here´s why: In business success depends on access to the right information at the right time. Both the speed of information and the sheer volume of data have increased rapidly due to the rise of the internet. Traditional media companies, social media such as blogs, tweets, videos and other user-generated websites now provide daily news, leading to a veritable flood of information. The consequence: Time-strapped professionals are forced to parse through numerous news sources for relevant information and sort, organize, and share stories on their own.

With this acquisition, XING shows that it’s not about to give LinkedIn and Facebook, both of which are expanding rapidly across the globe, an easy path to dominating social networking for professionals. The Applications Platform division Goldberg will be heading, is an entirely new business unit and will likely take a page from the application strategy that both LinkedIn and Facebook exhibit. It will basically enable application developers and content providers to connect to the XING platform.

Publicly listed XING currently boasts nearly 7 million members (up from 4.8 million in 2007), about 510,000 of which are paying about $90 per year for a premium account to get full networking functionality. XING has been cash-flow positive 3 months after the start and boasted seven record-breaking quarters after the IPO, achieving more revenues and earnings in each quarter. Revenues from January to September this year amounted to $32 million, 28% more than in 2007 as a whole.

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4:03
European Business Social Network XING Acquires socialmedian (Update: For $7.5 Million)
» TechCrunch

Hamburg, Germany based XING, a global professional social network that’s strong in Europe, has acquired New York based socialmedian for ~~an undisclosed amount~~ approximately $7.5 million in total, a mix of $4 million in cash up front and an earn-out valued at between $700,000 to $3.5 million (€0.5 million-€2.5 million) payable over three years. Socialmedian’s founding CEO Jason Goldberg is relocating to Germany and will be joining XING as Vice President Applications Platform, and the entire socialmedian team will be integrated into the company.

Socialmedian is basically a personalized news filter that integrates well with social networking platforms. It aggregates news articles from around the web, blogosphere and social services like Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Google Reader, FriendFeed, etc. which are then filtered by topic. Users can pre-define which keywords and topics they’d like to receive news on, and they can also submit articles to the site with the help of a bookmarklet. Stories can be viewed either in chronological order or according to popularity on the network. The startup was operating on a mere $560,000 in seed funding from individual investors and The Washington Post Company, so this is definitely a successful exit for them.

About 3 weeks ago, we reported on XING CEO Lars Hinrich, who founded the company in 2003 and led it to an IPO three years later at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, stepping down. He still got to announce the news, though:

Why do we think that socialmedian is a perfect fit for XING? Here´s why: In business success depends on access to the right information at the right time. Both the speed of information and the sheer volume of data have increased rapidly due to the rise of the internet. Traditional media companies, social media such as blogs, tweets, videos and other user-generated websites now provide daily news, leading to a veritable flood of information. The consequence: Time-strapped professionals are forced to parse through numerous news sources for relevant information and sort, organize, and share stories on their own.

In the short term, this is mostly about adding business news functionality into the network, and hiring experience and knowledge. But with this acquisition, XING also shows that it’s not about to give LinkedIn and Facebook, both of which are expanding rapidly across the globe, an easy path to dominating social networking for professionals. The Applications Platform division that former Jobster CEO Goldberg will be heading is an entirely new business unit and will likely take a page from the application strategy that both LinkedIn and Facebook exhibit. It will basically enable application developers and content providers to connect to the XING platform. Goldberg’s first job will be launching OpenSocial on XING (due this Spring), after which he’ll concentrate on making strategic partnerships with service providers that can bring added value to XING’s member base on a professional level.

Publicly listed XING currently boasts nearly 7 million members (up from 4.8 million in 2007), about 510,000 of which are paying about $90 per year for a premium account to get full networking functionality. XING has been cash-flow positive 3 months after the start and boasted seven record-breaking quarters after the IPO, achieving more revenues and earnings in each quarter. Revenues from January to September this year amounted to $32 million, 28% more than in 2007 as a whole.

We’re left wondering if the acquisition was settled over Twitter. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, read this.

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3:48
Scribd Raises $9 Million So You Can Continue To View PDFs Online
» TechCrunch

Y Combinator startup Scribd has raised its second big round of financing - $9 million from Charles River Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group. That comes on top of a $3.7 million Series A round in the middle of 2007, plus some scattered angel investments.

Scribd is a site where users upload PDFs and office documents for online viewing and embedding. It has spawned a copycat, Docstoc, which has raised its own round of financing. Issuu is another similar service that recently announced a Series B round in funding of $5 million. We should also note that Google recently added a feature in Gmail that lets you view PDF files inside your browser.

You’d think these services wouldn’t be used much, but in fact they do well with search engines, and sites like ours love to embed uploaded documents. Compete shows Scribd at 4 million monthly U.S. visitors. Scribd reports 50,000 documents uploaded daily.

Scribd also hired George Consagra, the former COO of Bebo, as President. Legendary venture capitalist Bill Tai of Charles River Ventures will also join the board of Scribd.

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3:27
Yahoo Makes Super Strategic Investment In Indian 411 Service
» TechCrunch

Today Yahoo announced the purchase of 30% of the shares of an Indian telephone information service called Network Management
Company. The size of the investment wasn’t disclosed, although Yahoo will take a board seat.

I’m sure Yahoo has great reasons for the investment, but this seems like a bit of a side show. Their core U.S. business is deteriorating. Whatever energy they put into this deal seems like it would have been better spent pondering what they will do about it.
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2:48
There Are No Dancing Elves. But Skype’s Got A Video Greeting Card App For The Holidays.
» TechCrunch

Once you’ve dressed up as an elf and danced like crazy with your coworkers it’s hard to get too worked up over a simple video greeting card. But if you are one of the few people left who still send actual dead tree holiday cards (tsk), give this new Skype holiday card thingy a twirl. Email videos out to your friends, embed the festive spirit in your blog like I’ve done below, or just link to it. And if you’re a Facebooker, you can do it all there. Happy Holidays.

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2:16
ComScore: YouTube Now 25 Percent Of All Google Searches
» TechCrunch

Video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S., according to the latest search engine numbers from comScore. Its monthly qSearch report, which was released on Thursday night, breaks out the number of searches conducted on YouTube. If it were a standalone site, YouTube would be the second largest search engine after Google. More searches are done through YouTube than through Yahoo, which has been the case for the past few months.

Christa Quarles, an analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners, writes in a report:

YouTube continues to be a standout contributor for Google generating 2.73bn searches in the U.S., up 8.5% from 2.52bn last month and up 114% from 1.28bn in November 2007. YouTube currently represents 25.4% of U.S. Google site searches compared with 17.4% in November 2007 and is larger than all of Yahoo based on total U.S. queries in November.

The comScore numbers show healthy growth in core search activity as well (stripping out video search, map search, etc), especially for Google. Plain-vanilla search for Google grew 32.3 percent annually, compared to a 29.6 percent growth rate in October. Perhaps all of that holiday bargain hunting is helping.

Google’s core search market share (which does not include YouTube) edged up 0.4 percent from October to 63.5 percent (and up 5.9 percent year-over-year).

Yahoo’s market share of core search queries was 20.4 percent (down 0.1 percent from October, and down 2 percent year-over-year) and Microsoft’s was 8.3 percent (down 0.2 percent month-over-month, and down 1.5 percent year-over-year). See the tables below.

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0:28
Giftd: The Portable Virtual Gift Store
» TechCrunch

Virtual gifts have been fairly popular on social networks like Facebook, which offers a library of hundreds of gifts, most of which sell for a dollar (a few of them are free). But these gifts are generally all tied to the network they were purchased on, which means you can’t display the same giftbox in a different social network or on your blog. Viximo, a startup that offers websites a turn-key solution for virtual goods and gifts, has released a consumer facing site called Giftd that allows users to create virtual giftboxes that can be embedded nearly anywhere on the web.

The site offers a store filled with digital gifts, many of which feature full animation, sound effects, and some degree of user-interaction (for example, clicking on the six pack of beer will let you ‘gulp’ down drinks). Gifts are purchased with Giftd credits, which run around $3 for 15 credits, with most gifts costing between 2-5 credits.

Gifts are displayed in embeddable Flash widgets, which can be placed in most blogs, homepages (like iGoogle and Netvibes), and social networks including MySpace and Multiply. The big exception: Facebook, because it doesn’t allow for embedded Flash.

So will Giftd catch on? The concept of a transportable virtual giftbox isn’t a new one - other startups have developed similar offerings. The real differentiation is in the content, which is where Giftd may excel - its gifts have high production values, which can be attributed to Viximo’s growing community of artists. But even with the high-quality icons, Giftd will still have a hard time competing with the native gift stores that are increasingly common on social networks (Hi5 just launched one, and MySpace has one in the works).

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0:25
Is Branded Content Really That Big? t5m Thinks So
» TechCrunch

When Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher launched his Blahgirls project at Techcrunch 50 this year, one of the first things investor Ron Conway said on the judging panel was that the idea would tap into the emerging billion dollar market for branded content. Media plays like Blahgirls aren’t normally so well received in the tech community, but now UK startup t5m has today re-launched in order to tap into the same market. But it will do so by setting up a global network of bureaus to produce and syndicating short-form interactive 3-5 minute HD video, built around brands and distributed via its own custom-built video player; and a version of Wordpress built with developer Automattic. An example is the interview with actress Kate Bosworth, after the jump.
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0:20
WorldTV Bids To Aggregate All Web Video And Put It On Your TV
» TechCrunch

In the wake of YouTube fully embracing HD video, online video aggregator WorldTV hopes to take advantage by turning all embedded video into a linear, TV-like experience. Unlike US-based Magnify, which focuses on the PC, WorldTV’s end-game is to funnel all this web video towards the next generation of Browser-enabled, WiFI-capable TV sets. To that end the Ireland-based startup has added a new EPG feature and now hit 100,000 user-generated channels.
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December 18, 2008
22:32
On The Go? Watch Your Net Worth Plummet Anywhere With Mint For iPhone
» TechCrunch

Mint, a fast growing financial site that won the top award at the 2007 TechCrunch40 conference, is a great way to track your personal finances. It’s been described as an online Quicken, but it’s a lot more than that, too, since user data can be aggregated and shared in interesting ways. It’s not listed in the App store directory yet, but you can grab it here.

But how can you watch every penny during those few moments each day you aren’t sitting in front of your computer watching the stock markets tank? That’s where Mint for the iPhone comes in, which just launched. Check balances on your checking, savings, credit card and loan accounts. Track expenses and budgets. Watch the dismal performance of your 401(k), brokerage and IRA accounts, etc.

All of which may be a little much. But Mint will be very helpful in some situations, like alerting you asap if a large transaction is made on your credit card, or the ex husband just cleaned out your bank account.

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22:18
Synthasite Buys ClickPass. I See Zero Synergies.
» TechCrunch

Easy site building service Synthasite, which we first covered way back in 2006, has acquired Y Combinator startup Clickpass, which launched earlier this year.

There are no details on the purchase price or terms of the deal. Synthasite has raised $5 million in capital, Clickpass just raised the Y Combinator seed round.

The press release talks about theoretical synergies between the companies, specifically that Clickpass’ OpenID sign in solution can be integrated into sites created with Synthasite, but that could just as easily be done by partnership. Perhaps it’s a mercy acquisition in a down market where I imagine Clickpass would have trouble raising funds.

Either way, we’re fans of both services, but this acquisition just seems to create a smeary mess.

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22:18
Synthasite Buys ClickPass. I See Few Synergies.
» TechCrunch

Easy site building service Synthasite, which we first covered way back in 2006, has acquired Y Combinator startup Clickpass, which launched earlier this year.

There are no details on the purchase price or terms of the deal, other than that Clickpass CEO Peter Nixey will be joining the SynthaSite team (Clickpass had one other employee who will not be making the jump). Synthasite has raised $5 million in capital, Clickpass just raised the Y Combinator seed round.

Clickpass helps make OpenID more accessible to users by allowing them to use their accounts on services like Gmail, Yahoo, and MSN to log in to other sites. This is essentially what OpenID was built for in the first place, but it has taken many months for major companies to actually implement the standard (though they have been making strides lately). Randy Almond, SynthaSite’s VP of Marketing, says that the Clickpass technology will be used to make it easier for users to import content from other services into their SynthaSite pages.

This may help streamline SynthaSite’s website building process, but it could have just as easily been done though a partnership. There’s also the issue of Clickpass’s longterm utility - as more companies do wind up embracing OpenID as fully as they’ve promised, much of Clickpass’s usefulness with disappear. Perhaps it’s a mercy acquisition in a down market where I imagine Clickpass would have trouble raising funds.

Either way, we’re fans of both services, it just seems like SynthaSite acquired Clickpass for its talent rather than its lofty goals of bringing OpenID to the masses.

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21:40
Burger King Launches A Perfume That Smells Like Meat. Crispin Porter Must Be Behind this.
» TechCrunch

Burger King launched a new brand of perfume today called Flame by BK. “The Whopper sandwich is America’s favorite burger. Flame by BK captures the essence of that love and gives it to you. Behold the scent of seduction, with a hint of flame-broiled meat.”

My guess is that the controversial advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky is behind the new perfume, which apparently is actually for sale for $3.99 (but sold out). I’ve emailed Crispin Porter for a comment.

The firm is famous for creating the Subservient Chicken for Burger King. But they were also behind the ridiculous Microsoft advertisements featuring Jerry Seinfeld and some exceptionally bad Ask.com commercials.

Microsoft is now selling retro tshirts, so it looks like they’ll try just about anything.. Maybe Crispin can get a twofer on this idea and talk them into selling Eau de Windows Vista as well.

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19:42
Glam Slashes Exec Compensation By Up To 60%, Everyone Else by 3%-15%
» TechCrunch

Advertising/blog network Glam Media held a company wide meeting today where employees were told about the company’s 2009 operating plan. Q4 was surprisingly strong, the company told employees, with only the auto and finance advertising sectors down significantly.

But the company is making changes anyway, they say, mostly to control expenses. The executive team will take a “25-60% reduction in pay” with an offsetting bonus based on performance should the economy not go as far south as people expect. CEO Samir Arora will be on the high end of the cut percentage. For staff salaries are being cut 3% - 15%, with the same offsetting commission plan.

I have a couple of observations. First, companies are beginning to realize that emails to staff are the best way to spread news. They tend to leak (as this one did), so there is rarely meaty stuff there. But it’s also rare for a company to slash salaries because employees are so adverse to it. It’ll be interesting to see if Glam can keep its top people. In this economy, though, I doubt many will be leaving their jobs.

The full email is below:

Dear Employees,

Despite the very turbulent environment we are fortunate that 2008 has been a good year for Glam Media and our publisher network. This was the year of forging ahead by focusing on our core business while still being conservative and cautious. It was a time for leadership and resolve, and Glam has emerged as a much stronger company because of it.

Market Update

1. The founding vision of Glam Media was to help brand advertisers embrace the Web. As time spent on TV and print significantly declined in 2008, the Internet and Glam benefited.

2. Glam helped build the premium display ad market for women’s ad categories—most of the brands in our categories had very low spending on Internet, unlike now-hard hit categories in categories like Auto and Finance, where the Internet spend was already high and cutbacks are high.

3. Pioneering the Vertical Content Network with a dedicated and strong Publisher Network is built on the way the Web works—distributed media and fragmentation with users increasingly going to individual sites. De-portalization and the internal challenges Yahoo and iVillage continue to face are creating growth opportunities for Glam to provide a better solution to their brand advertisers.

4. Of the three types of advertisers—High Brand with Low Direct; Brand and Direct; and Direct—Glam focuses on Premium and Luxury brands that typically spend over 70% on brand ads in traditional media and much lower on direct response. In a down turn, these advertisers don’t go to direct or “cheaper” media, they just spent carefully (Vogue’s advertisers don’t go to US Weekly or Direct Mail—and they are coming online to Glam)

5. Glam chose to have very limited Ad Networks fill in its inventory using GlamX Exchange, a sector hit very hard in the downturn. This conservative strategy has helped build a stronger direct sales business—we could have had more revenue, but then we would have been looking at lower or even negative growth.

Business Update

1. While the reports of downturn/recession for the last 3 quarters feel right to us, the reports of widespread panic and meltdown online seem thus far fear-driven or isolated to specific ad categories like Auto and Finance. We were expecting very bad news in Q4 and were ready to take decisive action, but have been positively surprised at the strength of the web, women and men’s lifestyle ad categories and the continued shift of spending to the web. We expect the business to be overall much tighter, with advertisers more careful and seeking in the short term more return/data-driven, but the fundamentals of the web, online advertising, and display ads are all strong.

Despite the slower economy, Q4 was the strongest quarter we have had—we will end the year in a triple digit ad revenue growth rate year over year, and also very strong sequentially. We believe Glam is one of the few digital companies with this level of growth in revenue today. The reason is the focus on making our customers-—the agencies and brands successful online, being the number one for women, the scale of reach, premium inventory, targeting technology, custom solutions and our strong publisher network.

2. Glam’s strategy of staying focused in the first three years on Women & Style was essential to get to scale and our tipping point, but our strategy in diversification in 2008 was essential driver of our growth. Glam expanded by creating New Vertical Networks for Women in Style, Living, Health & Wellness, Entertainment, Luxury and Family, and also launched Brash.com Men’s network in Lifestyle, Entertainment, Tech & Auto. Glam’s ad sales team has brought in business from over 500 new advertisers and additional business from 300 existing clients in 2008.

3. Glam expanded internationally, acquiring Monetize to launch Glam UK, Codex Media and a JV with Burda in Glam Germany, and launched Glam Japan.

4. Glam continued to focus on making our clients-Brand Advertisers succeed online through the data-driven Glam Evolution Ad Targeting and deep custom advertorials which helped increase the number of advertisers from to over 900 top brands in 2008. Glam and Brash now have one of the largest lists of Premium brands on the web.

5. Glam raised a Series D in early 2008, and did not go out and spend it on large acquisitions or operating overhead. We’ve tried to run a very lean company prior to the downturn, and we continue to believe that being frugal in spending is the best way to run a business we all own.

6. With 54 Million unique visitors to Glam and our network, Glam will end the year as Number 10 on the MediaMetrix Top 100 web properties, on the AdWeek Top 10 Digital Hot List and Number 7 in Online Media after Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Fox/MySpace and Ask.com. Glam is Number 1 in reach in the women category, with over two times the reach of iVillage in the US, and just became number 1 in UK, Australia, and Germany. Globally, Glam now has a reach of 98 Million uniques per month and Brash.com Vertical is already over 15 Million uniques in 2 months of launch. In a downturn, advertisers reduce experimental budgets to smaller sites, and favor fewer, larger companies with proven history in providing reach and value.

7. The focus has been to create New Ad Products and Solutions that provide better returns to advertisers in a down economy. In display ads, Glam is providing contextual, audience, above-the-fold placement, primetime, and now full behavioral targeting with detailed reports. Glam now has full suite of ad solutions that can be built using the Glam Apps Platform—custom advertorials, full page takeovers, influential outreach, video, and applications and widgets for brand engagement.

2009 Plan

With the core fundamentals of the business in place, we are now in the process of finalizing our operating plan for 2009. The lack of visibility is making planning very challenging this year. Given the uncertainties we are taking a different strategy for managing through the downturn and to avoid broad-based layoffs that we think would undermine our potential for success.

With this in mind, we are proposing the following changes:

1. Starting at the Top: The executive team will take a effective 25-60% reduction in pay and an increased commission based on performance. Our CEO and the top sales execs will take a 40-50% reduction. The team will have accelerators to significantly beat the plan—helping instill similar incentives, spirit and dedication in early stage startup founders. We recognize this will be very hard for some, but is consistent with Glam’s core values, and creates a strong incentive for the leaders to deliver results.

2. US Employee Incentive Plan: a small part of the compensation will be converted to a variable commission based model—starting at 3% for employees, to 10% for the more senior staff and up to 15% for the functional management team.

This variable compensation model allows us to reduce operating expenses in the case of a worse than anticipated downturn, saving critical jobs and at the same time if the results better than expected, rewards the current employees more.

3. Functional Plan and Changes: The Glam functional team will continue to build the final business plan, and there may be operating changes in functions, roles and employment—but only as a part of our annual planning process. We will continue to do performance and growth level changes every six months to ensure we have the right people in the right job at the right time.

4. Hiring: Glam is carefully adding some strategic resources—we are looking for several top level product managers in Silicon Valley, international team members in our new subsidiaries, and will continue to conservatively hire in ad sales in line with our growth.

5. Tight expense management, using technology innovation and leadership: Glam will focus on managing our growth rate in a slow economy with very tight controls in expenses, building more technology, thinking outside the box, showing care, and leading in the market.

We trust you will all appreciate this innovative approach to protecting the company and our valuable team in these challenging times. We will continue to monitor the business closely on a month-by-month basis and make further changes as required. We believe we have the very best team at Glam, and these changes will help us bring the Glam Family closer together and will make us stronger. Our values make our destiny. We care. We take our responsibility to our shareholders, investors, employees, publishers, developers, media partners, agencies and brands very seriously, yet recognize the social and local responsibility to manage and lead effectively.

Thank for all for your hard work in 2008- and here’s to a cautious, yet strong 2009!

Glam Executive Team and Founders

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19:11
Loopt Snags AT&T, Now Available On Every U.S. Carrier
» TechCrunch

Mobile social network Loopt goes live on three AT&T phones today, which was the last major carrier holdout. Loopt is now available in the U.S. on Sprint, Verizon, Metro PCS, T-Mobile and Boost. The service is free for a year and then a $4/month fee kicks in.

You can get Loopt for free on the iPhone (and there is a TechCrunch version), the Blackberry and Android as well.

We’re big believers that mobile is the future of social networking. Loopt and a handful of other brave startups are pushing the envelope on mobile social networks while the big guys, Facebook and MySpace, sit on the sidelines.

A big reason they’re hesitant - privacy concerns. Both companies have had their run ins with the press and state attorneys general. Mobile social network is all about location, and finding people around you. That’s not where Facebook and MySpace want to go right now.

That leaves room for Loopt and others to grab market share. These services allow users to update their location and share it with others. People who are on the network can contact you, if you choose, just because of where you are even if they don’t know you.

One feature that hasn’t hit the iPhone yet is auto-updating of location. But it appears to be on AT&T’s general rollout on other phones. I’d expect to see it released soon on the iPhone as well. That means that, theoretically, your friends can find out where you are (if the feature is turned on) on demand. yes, there are big privacy issues there, but it’s also the future.

Disclosure: Loopt is in the middle of a patent litigation suit, and the plaintiff in that case dragged us into the middle of the fight.

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18:05
Google SearchWiki Now Has Sound. Sigh.
» TechCrunch

Thank goodness Google’s working on the really important stuff, like adding sound effects to SearchWiki, instead of releasing the promised off button to that dreaded service.

Although, I have to admit it’s pretty cool. To add the sound effect, turn this Google experiment on and delete a search result in Google search (you have to have SearchWiki turned on). It makes a Desktop Tower Defense like sound, recorded by co-founder Sergey Brin himself. Check it out in the video below.

Of course I’m now deleting search results like crazy to make the sound, which has wrecked my search results. I guess today’s a writeoff for SearchWiki data collection procedure.

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17:48
YouTube Finally Embraces HD, Launches Huge Video Player And Topical Portals
» TechCrunch

YouTube has just launched a new portion of its site dedicated to HD content, allowing users to easily browse through what is now the largest archive of high definition content on the web. The move has been a long time coming - in the last few weeks the site has been gradually building up to a large scale HD launch with the introduction of a 16:9 video player and the ability to watch HD on selected videos, but until this point it has been difficult to separate the HD content from videos encoded at YouTube’s normal resolution.

In conjunction with launching the new HD section, YouTube has also started displaying HD movies in a large video player that takes up nearly the entire browser window without going into the sometimes-annoying full screen mode. To see a demo of the new player in action, check out the Where The Hell Is Matt Video.

YouTube has also released a set of topical portals related to News, Music, and Movies. Each portal uses a different set of data to surface the most popular YouTube videos of the moment: News culls recent news videos from Google News, while Music monitors popular playlists, rising songs, and artists. Perhaps most notable is the Movies portal, which features movies from both the site’s studio partners (like MGM) as well as indie films.

Along with the full launch of HD and the larger player, the new Movies section marks YouTube’s biggest step towards taking on sites like Hulu. While users have been able to search for movies in the past, YouTube’s new portal offers a more comprehensive listing with a sexier interface and spots for ‘featured’ films. Don’t be surprised if they a launch a similar portal dedicated to Television shows in the near future (in October the site rolled out full-length shows provided by CBS).

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17:29
BackType Launches Google Alerts For Blog Comments
» TechCrunch

BackType, a Y Combinator startup that launched in August, is a sort of “Twitter for comments” that aggregates comments from millions of blogs into a single, searchable, parsable stream.

Today they launched a new feature called Alerts that will let users track keywords included in comments on tracked blogs - a sort of Google Alerts for blog comments.

This will be useful to anyone who likes to track what’s being said about them, their companies or their brands online. Google Alerts only show keywords that are in the main text of articles or stories, and sometimes only catches keywords when they are included in titles of stories. BackType gives users another level of information.

For now alerts can be tracked on the site’s dashboard or via email delivered daily, weekly or whenever a new one pops up.

This should give those of you anxiously awaiting the return of Twitter Track, which does the same thing for Twitter messages, something to play with in the meantime.

They also launched a new feature today called Subscriptions, which allow users to track comments on any blog post. Many blogs already have a built in feature that emails readers when a new comment is left on a post to let them keep up with the discussion. BackType now allows people to duplicate the feature for blogs that don’t have it.

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17:00
Study: Newspaper Websites Are Still Figuring Out This Whole Conversation Thing
» TechCrunch

Newspapers are still lurching their way around the Web, a new study finds, but at least they are making some progress. The Bivings Group released a study today that quantifies the Website features of the top 100 newspapers in the U.S. Among the findings: Nearly every newspaper site has reporter-written blogs and some form of video; features that elicit content from readers are on the rise; podcasts and mandatory registrations are down; social networking features are pretty much non-existent.

You can pretty much see all of the findings in two graphs, which I’ve marked up. (Click on the images for a larger view). In the one above, which shows the penetration of all the online features on newspaper sites, 93 percent have reporter blogs and 100 percent offer articles in RSS feeds. Yet only one percent put ads in those RSS feeds. That seems like an opportunity, even though most RSS ads are complete garbage and readers hate them.

In terms of reader-submitted material, newspapers are more comfortable accepting images than words. More newspaper sites accept photos from readers (58 percent) than videos (18 percent) or articles (15 percent). Comments are less controversial, with 75 percent allowing reader comments on articles. One thing I found curious is that 57 percent of newspaper sites offer their editions in PDF form. Why? A PDF of a page, maybe, but nobody prints out the whole edition.

The graph below shows the biggest changes between this year and last. Newspaper sites that incorporate user-generated content is on the rise (58 percent in 2008, versus 24 percent in 2007), as are comments on articles (75 percent in 2008, versus 33 percent in 2007) and bookmarking (92 percent, versus 44 percent).

Sites that require registration are down from 29 percent to 11 percent, which means that most newspapers have finally figured out that putting up any barriers, even a temporary one, between readers and articles simply drives readers to other sites.

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15:13
Facebook Is Gaining Ground On Google In Time Spent On The Internet
» TechCrunch

Facebook long ago passed MySpace in global visitors and time spent on the site, but now it appears to be gaining ground on Google.

A couple days ago, Facebook released some new statistics on user growth and engagement on the site. It now has more than 140 million active users, 70 percent of whom are outside the U.S. The number of active users added each month seems to be accelerating, only half are in college, and the fastest-growing demographic is 25 years and older.

There are now 52,000 apps on Facebook, created by 660,000 developers. That’s a serious platform. Some of the user engagement stats were also particularly interesting:

User Engagement

* Average user has 100 friends on the site
* 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
* More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day

Applications

* More than 700 million photos uploaded to the site each month
* More than 4 million videos uploaded each month
* More than 15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month

How does this level of engagement compare to other large sites? These are global numbers so let’s start there, with minutes spent on the site, which is the way comScore measures engagement. According to the most recent global data from comScore, which is for October, people spent 33.9 billion minutes on Facebook (up 19 percent from September), compared to 41.6 billion minutes on Google (up 3.6 percent) and 18.5 billion on MySpace (down 2.5 percent). Yahoo is still heads and shoulders above everybody else with 120 billion minutes. And in terms of actual visitors, Google still has nearly four times as many monthly visitors worldwide as Facebook.

In the U.S., the gap between Facebook and Google in terms of time spent is much closer. ComScore has November data for the U.S., and it estimates people spent 8 billion minutes on Facebook during that month, versus 8.5 billion minutes for Google. MySpace was about double with 16.4 billion (it also had more visitors than Facebook in the U.S., with 75.5 million vs. 50.5 million).

Some might argue that it makes no sense to measure engagement for Google, since it’s stated goal has always been to send people away from its site as fast as possible. But that’s only for search, and even there Google wants to send you away only to draw you back. With its apps and other sites (Gmail, Google Docs, Youtube, Orkut, Google Docs), engagement is most definitely the name of the game, so it is a fair comparison.

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15:09
NeXT Computer Unboxing, Twenty Years Later
» TechCrunch

Peter Urban at Smibs managed to find a rare NeXT Computer on eBay, and paid $400 to obtain the machine which was originally sold for $6,500. He unboxes it in the video below.

NeXT is the company Steve Jobs founded after he was booted from Apple in 1985. They originally made these extremely high end, high priced computers, but eventually moved to an all-software model.

It’s a historical device. Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT Computer in 1991 to create the first web browser and web server, and John Carmack used a NeXTcube to build Wolfenstein 3D and the original Doom.

NeXt was eventually acquired by Apple in 1996 for $429 million. That brought Jobs back to Apple, and because of that I get to have an iPhone. Cool stuff.

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14:34
Spanish Photog Polices Weddings for Copyright Infringement
» TechCrunch

Imagine you're at your wedding doing the ol' “smash cake into your wife or husband's face” move. It's a great day, all things considered. The sky is the bluest it's ever been and birds are fluttering around in a non-threatening manner. (That's what weddings are like, right? I've never been to one.) A man dressed like Spy vs. Spy is tiptoeing around the premises, capturing video of your Wonderful Day. Hmm, who invited him? A few weeks go by. Then, one day, a letter arrives in the mail. Apparently you owe a copyright agency tens of thousands of dollars for the unauthorized use of the song “Wonderful Tonight.” Image Flickr'd
14:21
Google Exec Brian O’Shaughnessy Leaves To Run Skype PR
» TechCrunch

This is a loss for Google. Brian O’Shaughnessy, one of the good guys of PR, is leaving Google to run communications for eBay-owned Skype. His last day at Google will be this week.

O’Shaughnessy oversaw communications for all of Google’s user-focused products, including YouTube, Search (Google Chrome), Apps (OpenSocial), Geo (Google Earth), and Mobile (Android).

This is the second high profile PR loss for Google this year. In May Elliot Schrage, Google’s vice president of global communications and public affairs, left the company to join Facebook.

O’Shaughnessy will be moving to Luxembourg for his new position at Skype. Lucky him.

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12:33
Amiando Releases Ticketing API
» TechCrunch

Event ticketing service Amiando (we are using them for the Crunchies) wants to spread its ticketing service throughout the Web. It has a new Community Ticketing feature that lets websites and social networks embed the ticketing functionality into their sites instead of linking off to Amiando. Here is the API.

Amiando is offering to waive $200 from its fee for the first 50 TechCrunch readers to sign up for the API (mention “techcrunch).

One of Amiando’s features is its ViralTickets, which allows anyone in the community around a particular site to grab a widget and sell tickets on their site or blog. As an incentive, they get to keep a portion of the ticketing fee. So if a niche social network implements the API, its users could sell tickets directly from their pages. The social network or any site owner would be able to set a fee that it would keep (about 60 percent of which would go to Amiando, not including some expenses), and the rest would go to the organizer of the event. For a $100 ticket, if the fee is 10%, the event organizer keeps $90, and the rest gets split between the social network/community site, Amiando, and any viral marketing fans of the event.

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12:30
New Android Roadmap Details Video Recording, Stereo Bluetooth, More On The Way
» TechCrunch

Oh, Android - How do I love thee? Let me count the ways; I love that you’ve essentially eliminated the need to hypothesize what might be coming in future firmware updates as, due to your open source nature, it’s put out there for all to see. I love that.. well, there are other reasons, but none relevant to this post. No offense, Android.

In the recently published roadmap for the work-in-progress “Cupcake” Android development branch, a laundry list of bugs fixes and coming features is on display.
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11:01
Mashup Culture Under Attack: Mixwit Goes The Way Of Muxtape
» TechCrunch

The digital mixtape is dying on the Web. The RIAA is killing it just like it tries to kill anything that smacks of consumer-driven innovation. Digital mixtapes are nothing more than shared playlists. Sites that make it easy to create and share music in this fashion are shutting down left and right. Muxtape bowed to legal pressure from the RIAA earlier this year, and now Mixwit is shutting down as well. The service will cease to exist before the end of the year.

In a blog post announcing the imminent closure, Mixwit does not specifically mention any legal action by the RIAA, but it is not hard to put two and two together:

We’ve put a year of work into Mixwit so this choice wasn’t taken lightly. I won’t go into the details of our situation but state simply that we boldly marched into in a position best described as “between a rock and a hard place.” We’re very grateful to be have been part of the mixtape revival of ‘08 and are satisfied to be able to to bow out while things are still good.

. . . We’ll return early next year with a new company and new toys. Until then, enjoy the holidays and please take good care of yourselves, your families, and your friends =)

It is with sadness that we place Mixwit into the deadpool. Mixwit is contemplating donating its source code to the OpenTape project, as Muxtape did before it.

As we noted in our original review, Mixwit drew its songs from the MP3 search engine Seeqpod, which is what made it a good experience but probably also what got it into hot water.

Other mixtape services (Mixaloo, Mixtube, Favtape, and 8track) live on. But for how long? It depends on where they are getting their music from and whether it is licensed or not.

The lesson here for music startups is that it doesn’t matter what consumers want to do with music. In the eyes of the music industry, sharing music is (still) a crime.

Update: I asked Mixwit founder Michael Christoff if the RIAA ever actually sued his company or threatened to sue. It did not, but the fear of a lawsuit is what drove him to pull the plug. Here is his response

we’re glad to have contributed what we did to the 2008 mixtape revival, and we’re completely stoked about our forthcoming company. that said, we’ve received a lot of questions today so we liked to say a few brief things about why we decided to shut mixwit down.

first and foremost, we’d like to say that we’ve had good and not-so-good communications with the record labels over the past year, but we were never sued. i’m sure i don’t have to explain that our mixtapes are perceived to be in a legally ambiguous state (at least as far as the labels are concerned). we’ve explored all options, including becoming fully-licensed, and we decided that the time commitment and economics just don’t make sense, particularly with the economy the way it is. the decision was clear: we needed to shutdown the mixtapes. we thought about continuing with mixwit as a company, but we could never get assurance that the future of mixwit would not be hurt by the perceived liabilities of its past so we decided it was time to to shut things down.

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10:58
12seconds.tv Rolls Into Public Beta, Launches iPhone Application
» TechCrunch

When we wrote about 12seconds.tv back in July of this year, we called it the “real video Twitter“. Rather than droning on for 19 hours on what they had for lunch, users of 12seconds.tv have - you guessed it - 12 seconds to get their point across on video.

Later this morning, 12seconds will be making the transition from invite-only alpha to public beta, opening their registration to all. They are also debuting a brand new iPhone application, which mixes things up a bit to allow users to create new 12seconds posts without violating Apple’s policies against recording video.
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10:18
TechCrunch Passes 10,000 Posts
» TechCrunch

Yesterday, we passed a big milestone for us at TechCrunch, our 10,000th post since the blog launched in June, 2005. This morning when I logged onto Wordpress (the blogging software we use to put out TechCrunch), I saw this message: “You have 10,010 posts.” It made me smile.

Even though there are a handful of us blogging every day on TechCrunch, we are all still trying to keep up with Michael. He has 3,802 posts to his name (I have 1,455, but I only started in September, 2007). I don’t know how fast it will take to get to the next 10,000. It’s not a race. But as long as you keep reading, we’ll keep writing. Thanks for helping us get this far.

So what was that 10,000th post? Fittingly, it was one from Michael, yesterday’s Death to the Embargo, that is already an instant classic.

I swear we didn’t plan it that way.
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5:41
GoDaddy Moves To Close Shady Standard Tactics Subsidiary
» TechCrunch

Earlier this month, we reported on The Go Daddy Group doing everything it could to keep the public from knowing about its subsidiary Standard Tactics, which it used for domain warehousing. Although the practice wasn’t necessarily against the Terms & Conditions of ICANN, they sure went through a lot of trouble to make sure Standard Tactics couldn’t easily be identified as a GoDaddy company.

Andrew over at DomainNameWire was the first to take the story public, and we followed suit quickly, concluding our article with the words: “It’s really no wonder GoDaddy is trying to cover its tracks and hide these practices, but thanks to Andrew the word is now out.”

Yesterday evening, Andrew got on the company show GoDaddyRadio together with CEO Bob Parsons. In the middle of their conversation, Parsons informs the listeners that the company is effectively shutting down Standard Tactics. All of the names the subsidiary owned are being added to GoDaddy’s auction service The Domain Name AfterMarket with a $10 starting bid. Parsons then goes on to claim that it was founded for ‘research on monetization practices’ in the first place and denied that it had anything to do with domain warehousing.

I don’t buy that for a second, but it’s good to see the company decided to listen to its critics, was open to a discussion, and didn’t hesitate too long to make the right decision. There’s no question that the bad publicity surrounding the company about the shady subsidiary effectively spurred the decision to close Standard Tactics.

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3:44
Meet Lois Whitman, The Poster Child For Everything Wrong With PR
» TechCrunch

Meet Lois Whitman-Hess, from the New York based PR firm HWH. Lois is one of the most obnoxious PR people you’ll ever meet, and the poster child for everything that is wrong with the industry. Consider this part two of my ongoing discussion of the industry.

Lois takes pleasure in making people miserable, and her specialty is spamming. She first crossed our radar at CrunchGear, which reported on her exchange with PhoneScoop.

The PhoneScoop guys registered for CES, not realizing that their contact information would be blasted out to any PR firm that wanted it. When they received a very off-topic pitch email from Lois (about Samsung TVs), they sent it back with the message “Please remove me from your list. My publication does not cover these types of products. I did NOT sign up to receive info in this category, nor anything close. By CES guidelines, I should not have received this, making it dangerously close to spam. That reflects poorly on your company. Thank you.”

Bad idea. They received two messages back from Lois:

CES publishes a list of press. You are one of a few thousand. Everyone has access to that list for all kinds of reasons. It is publicly published. As a PR agency we use that list so we can solicit press for booth appts. I hope you can appreciate that. If you don’t, let me introduce you to the “delete” button. Or in the future do not sign up as a press person for CES. Furthermore, do not make any threats to my company. I don’t need you to tell me what is right or what is wrong. I have been in the CE business for 42 years.

and

I have seen nasty people like you melt away faster than a snowball going up hill in the rain. I am waiting for an apology. Maybe we can meet at CES for a hug or a slug. P.S. I just visited your web site. I would hardly call your blog a publication, However, you do have very interesting content and we have lots of client you would like to know more about to help you in your endeavors. Call me.

That’s enough right there for Hall of Shame induction. But a quick perusal of Lois’ blog indicates her willingness to spam and spam and spam until she gets what she wants:

In September the Bad Pitch Blog (a new favorite) also called out Lois for spamming, yet it continues. What I don’t understand is why her clients continue to bankroll this activity. You are supposed to hire these people because they have relationships with the media, not because they know how to effectively spam and are verbally abusive.

Yes, I am going to keep outing these people and their absurd behavior.

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3:00
Google Holiday Easter Eggs Double As Handy Revenue Boosters
» TechCrunch

Check out these fun Easter Eggs that appear on the side of Google search results for terms like Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa Gifts, Christmas Sweaters, Hanukkah Sweaters, etc.

Sure draws the eyes to those ads. I wonder what those images do for the click rates. But I’m sure it’s all just good holiday cheer. More here and here.
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December 17, 2008
23:44
Joost Just Gives Up On P2P Altogether
» TechCrunch

Joost’s two year old online video service was a pretty darned smart idea when it first launched.

Instead of streaming video through the Joost website, users would download a Mozilla-based client and watch it there instead. The user experience could be more tightly controlled. And more importantly, the Joost client had built in person-to-person file sharing. That meant Joost had lower bandwidth bills. It also meant that Joost didn’t need to worry about overloading servers while showing live events - users would just grab the stream from others automatically.

But Joost bet wrong, as the whole world, led by YouTube and then Hulu, got comfortable with Flash as the delivery method for video. Showing video on Flash meant users could deep link to specific videos, and also embed stuff they liked on their own sites. With the benefit of hindsight it all seems sort of obvious.

Joost adapted, though, giving users the option of an all-Flash site in September. Some international users would still be required to use the software to reduce bandwidth costs, and the company was hoping U.S. users would eventually install it, too.

Today they announced they’re discontinuing the software application altogether, but they aren’t saying why. It’s clear that Joost’s strategy has been fluid over the last few months as they try to figure out a way to compete with the much more successful Hulu. It’s honestly not clear that they really can. Joost doesn’t offer anything particularly unique or compelling to users over competing sites with proprietary content (Hulu with Fox and NBC, TV.com with CBS).

Joost raised a big $45 million round of financing way back in 2006. It’s not clear how much of that is left. If they want to succeed they’re going to have to do something pretty radical.

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22:05
SnapTell: One Of The Coolest iPhone Apps Gets Even Better
» TechCrunch

SnapTell, the awesome iPhone app that lets you take a photo of nearly any CD, DVD, book, or video game to get instant product reviews, has just released an upgrade that introduces a number of useful new features.

Most significant is the addition of local and online price comparisons through TheFind, which allows you to get a quick look at what the item you’ve photographed is going for at local retail stores as well as on online sites like Amazon. It seems to work fairly well, though I wish it had a more comprehensive price listing (a query for one of the Harry Potter books found only one online price, though it did find the book at a number of local stores). You can download the app on iTunes here.

The upgraded app also includes a number of UI changes (the ‘take photo’ button is now centered, as opposed to hidden up in the corner of the screen), and seems generally snappier.

Since launching a month ago, SnapTell has seen over 200,000 downloads and has been as high as #16 on the free apps list (which is frankly lower than it probably should be). And while a large portion of users are probably just trying out the app for the novelty of image recognition, SnapTell says that around 35% of its installs see repeated use, and that it has a 15% click-through rate to online stores.

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20:08
Watercooler Brings Content From Every Major Television Network To Its 16MM TV Fans
» TechCrunch

The race is on between sites like Hulu and Joost to bring video content to the web, but as this content becomes more ubiquitous it will be the sites that go beyond basic video streaming that will ultimately be able to differentiate themselves. Watercooler, a development house behind several hundred community-based social network applications, is one company that is positioning itself well for this upcoming face-off. The startup has built up a community of 16 million registered users spanning its TV-centric applications on MySpace, Facebook, and other popular social networks, and has now signed deals with Hulu and Joost that make it one of the first sites on the web to offer content from every major TV network.

Watercooler launched its apps over 18 months ago (long before getting rights to any video content), offering an array of applications that allowed TV fans to interact in an environment focused on their favorite shows. Each application offers discussions, games, and other social content relevant to a specific show (for example, you can find the Addicted To Heroes app here on Facebook). But recently, Watercooler has made strides to take these social communities to the next level.

In October the site signed on Hulu to provide video for its applications, and last week the site launched its own video portal, TVloop. Today, Watercooler has added Joost to its list of partners, which means it now has full length content from Viacom, CBS, Fox, NBC, ABC, and the CW - a feat that CEO Kevin Chou says is the first on the web.

Watercooler isn’t offering every piece of content from these networks - instead, it only presents shows that have corresponding Watercooler applications (though the hundreds of apps available encompass most popular shows). And Chou says that the company isn’t setting out to take on the likes of Fancast or Hulu, but is instead looking to offer a complete package merging both a social community and the video content itself. Other sites may be able to match its video library, but building a thriving social community of 16 million (a third of whom are active on a monthly basis) is not something that will be easily reproduced - Chou says that competitors like Mesmo and TV.com still have only a small fraction of those numbers.

Another video portal looking to differentiate itself is Sling.com, which features integration with Sling’s popular video-streaming devices (you can see our initial review of the site here).

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18:54
Foodista Tries To Prove That More Cooks In the Kitchen Will Produce A Better Recipe
» TechCrunch

How many cooks does it take to produce the perfect recipe? I’d say one, a really good one. Barnaby Dorfman thinks that 1,000 cooks can come up with a better recipe than any single chef, and earlier today he launched Foodista around that premise. It is a Wikipedia for food. Each recipe can be collaboratively edited and improved. Scrumptious photos for each dish are pulled in from Flickr, and descriptions are pulled in from Wikipedia itself. You can add or remove ingredients, see the edit history, or add a comment to each page.

The site is well-designed and was put together by Dorfman and two other co-founders on their own dime. It will have to overcome some pretty stuff competition from both established sites like AllRecipes and the Food Network, as well as new cooking sites like Cookstr (read our review) and Open Source Food.

But Dorfman thinks he can do better than all of those sites by collecting better data and organizing it in a smarter way. Foodista borrows not only from Wikipedia, but also from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), part of which Dorfman used to run when he was at Amazon a few years ago. Every recipe, ingredient, cooking technique, and kitchen utensil links to every other mention of the same thing throughout the site. Dorfman says:

We are taking a structured-data approach to cooking.

Getting the data model right makes it easier to find related recipes along any given dimension. It also will open the door to lots of cool features down the road, like figuring out the nutritional value of each recipe. The entire site, by the way, is built entirely on Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, and SimpleDB).

The biggest issue facing Foodista is whether a collaborative approach to cooking can ever work. The entire premise of the site is that 1,000 contributors can somehow come up with the perfect recipe. But as any foodie can tell you, many times there is no standard recipe for a dish. There are always variations, which is what makes cooking interesting. Your mother cooks chicken soup differently than mine.

As Dorfman was telling me about his site the other day, I looked up the recipe for cassoulet. One of the ingredients was curry. This is a French dish. Curry might make it taste better (although, I doubt it), but it doesn’t belong in the one standard recipe that Foodista presents. Dorfman simply took it out. I’m not sure who won that argument. Me, for pointing out a flaw in a recipe, or Dorfman, for showing how recipes could become better over time.

The problem is they could also become worse over time, or simply devolve to a bland consensus. Why not allow variations? Dorfman is not opposed to that, but what he wants to avoid is to have “50 cassoulet recipes, and they are all the same.” Fair enough, but let’s at least start with the best recipes.

A few spot checks don’t give me a lot of confidence that all of the recipes are quite yet up to snuff. For instance, take the entry for cioppino, a seafood stew usually made with white wine. The recipe lists both red and white wine, which is just wrong on so many levels. It’s like cooking with a rosé.

My other issue with the site is that it pulls random photos of the dish in question from Flickr, which do not show the recipe you are trying to prepare. This was the case with the cassoulet entry. It showed a picture with a big duck leg confit, which is a key ingredient. But that ingredient wasn’t listed in the recipe (I added it). The reason cookbooks come with big pictures is because food is visual and, for the cook, it helps to visualize what you are trying to create. That means the pictures and the recipes have to match.

These are minor quibbles. I’m sure the wiki cooking hordes will prove me wrong in the end.

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18:09
Cloudlet Plugin Brings Tag-Based Search To Google; Yahoo
» TechCrunch

Simple and useful, exactly the way I like ‘em: Cloudlet effectively brings tag-based search to Google and Yahoo in the form of an add-on for the Firefox browser (except for the latest 3.1 beta). That’s about all it does, and it does it well.

You really have to try it before you judge it, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a winner even if experimental and still in beta. It basically inserts a context-aware tag cloud into the traditional search interface to help you navigate through your search queries swiftly and intelligently. You can filter by keyword tags, but also by websites and even domain name extensions, and turning it off is as easy as clicking your mouse. The add-on even works on Google News both for source and location tag clouds, and enables you to filter down by author in Google BlogSearch.

You can watch a demo video here, but I kindly recommend you to turn off sound, unless you’re into Eastern European classical music.

It looks a whole lot like Tweetag, which does the same for searching Twitter, and also reminds me of Quintura, an alternative search engine platform that is centered around tag clouds for navigation.

I’ve been switching back and forth between Chrome and Firefox ever since Google came out with its own browser (it’s all about the speed, baby), but these extensions are exactly what’s stopping me from going with Chrome altogether.

Cloudlet was developed by the International Software & Productivity Engineering Institute (INTSPEI), a research organization with offices in New York and Kiev (Ukraine).

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17:58
Management Shakeup At LinkedIn: Reid Hoffman Takes Back CEO Role, Jeff Weiner As Interim President
» TechCrunch

Big changes at fast growing professional social network LinkedIn this afternoon. Founder Reid Hoffman has retaken the CEO role, which he relinquished to former Intuit exec Dan Nye in early 2007. Nye is leaving LinkedIn in January, although the company says he will stay on as an advisor.

Former Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner is joining the company full time as interim President. Weiner is currently an Executive-in-Residence for venture capital firms firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, and he will maintain a loose relationship with the firms, he says. Weiner left his position at Yahoo in the early summer.

Last week the company grabbed a Google executive, Deep Nishar, to take over Hoffman’s current role as head of the products group at LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has raised $103 million in venture capital to date and has 11.2 million monthly worldwide visitors according to Comscore (October 2008).

What’s not clear is why all this is happening. LinkedIn says their revenues continue to grow dramatically - up 900% over the last two years (although they won’t say what their actual revenue is). When Hoffman stepped down as CEO in 2007 he said the company needed a different leader to grow it further. Now, he says Nye has done that job and it’s time for him to take back the reins.

The addition of Weiner is also quirky, and may explain the changes. Weiner was likely expecting a CEO role as his next job. He’s now second to Hoffman. Perhaps the company is using the interim period to see how he can handle himself leading the company. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Weiner take the CEO job at LinkedIn sometime in 2009, or else leave the company.

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15:57
“Screw You Yahoo” Says Former Consultant
» TechCrunch

Michelle Chappel, who created the video above, writes in to give us her view of the fall of Yahoo from an insiders perspective:

I have a news tip about a topic you’ve covered: the Yahoo layoffs.

I’ve been a consultant/contractor at Yahoo three different times. It’s one of my favorite companies to work for–including AltaVista, Google, TiVo, and eBay–because the people are so nice there! Here is some background information on what it was like to be at Yahoo right before the fall, as well as a recount of my experience on “Layoff Day.”

The fact that Yahoo would be having another round of layoffs was first announced at a company-wide meeting an hour before Yahoo threw a huge Oktoberfest party in which beer, bratwurst and German chocolate cake were served to everyone on campus. A week later we received sparkling wine and cupcakes to celebrate a recent Developer Network (YDN) success. Many people were curious as to why so much money was being spent on these parties, not to mention the upcoming Christmas party, because Yahoo was in such dire straights.

The layoffs were preceded by a massive re-org. Suddenly we were having lots of meetings with people we’d never worked with before. The rumor going ’round was that if you were a manager with fewer than 5 reports, you’d either be demoted, or fired. One woman who lost all her reports packed up her desk weeks in advance of layoffs because she couldn’t take the pressure anymore. She’d always seemed so sure of herself before. A couple of others told me they secretly wished they’d be let go because they were sick of all the changes at Yahoo this past year. One girlfriend admitted she was very angry about it all, and that Jerry Yang had screwed up. But most people at Yahoo stayed quiet… and tried to be good… and extra dutiful… to save their jobs.

Towards the end, some of us were asked to submit reports again and again, and we all knew it was so that the powers-that-be could determine who would stay and who would go. Some people just stopped working altogether because there was nothing to do. We were pretty sure folks were going to lose their jobs on December 10th because all the classrooms had been booked on that day. But at meetings right before Thanksgiving, the date “December 10th” wasn’t even placed on timelines on whiteboards. It was as if nothing was going to happen, even though we all knew layoffs were inevitable. The VP of my division sent LinkedIn invites to all his reports in late November, so we figured that meant he was going to be asked to leave. But we weren’t sure because he was such a stellar boss. It made no sense. It was a crazy time.

On the day Yahoo was having layoffs I recorded a music video called “S**** You Yahoo”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gn4soId0EM&fmt=22

It broke my heart to watch friends and co-workers worry about whether they’d lose their jobs. I wanted them to know they’re not alone, encourage them to have hope, and maybe even make them laugh a little. The video even proposes an out-of-the-box solution to our trying economic times. I used your layoff tracker and Yahoo piece (12/10/08) for the statistics in it. (Best to watch it in HD so you can read the signs.)

I hope this background information is interesting to you, and that you enjoy the music video. This song is not just about Yahoo, it’s about all companies having layoffs right now. It would be terrific if you’d consider doing a story on this to help raise people’s spirits during this economic downturn.

Happy Holidays!
Michelle

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14:37
Death To The Embargo
» TechCrunch

PR firms are out of control. Today we are taking a radical step towards fighting the chaos. From this point on we will break every embargo we agree to.

Background:

Tech companies are desperate for press and hammering their PR firms for coverage on blogs and major media sites. That in turn means that PR firms hammer us to get us to write about their clients. Gone are the days of polite pitches and actual relationship building. Today, PR firms email a story to us as many as 20 times, and call every TechCrunch writer on their cell phones repeatedly. If we say we won’t write a story (which is most of the time), things often turn nasty (check out Lois Whitman at HWH PR/New Media for a fine example).

For the most part we’ve dealt with the problem quietly over the last couple of years, other than the occasional lashing out on Twitter. Others, like Wired Magazine’s Editor In Chief Chris Anderson, have been more public with their frustration.

But now a new problem has emerged that we won’t ignore.

A portion of the stories we write are “embargoed” news items. They aren’t stories that we’ve dug up ourselves. Instead, PR firms have pre-briefed us on the news and have asked us to write, if we choose to, no earlier than a set time.

A lot of this news is good stuff that our readers want to know about. And we have the benefit of taking some time during the pre-briefing to think about the story, do research, and write it properly. When embargoes go right, we get to write a thoughtful story which benefits the company and our readers.

But there’s a problem. All this stress on the PR firms put on them by desperate clients means they send out the embargoed news to literally everyone who writes tech news stories. Any blog or major media site, no matter how small or new, gets the email. It didn’t used to be this way, but it’s becoming more and more of a problem. As the economy turns south, PR firms are under increasing pressure to perform and justify their monthly retainers which range from $10,000 to $30,000 or more. In short, they have to spam the tech world to get coverage, or lose their jobs.

One annoying thing for us is when an embargo is broken. That means that a news site goes early with the news despite the fact that they’ve promised not to. The benefits are clear - sites like Google News and TechMeme prioritize them first as having broken the story. Traffic and links flow in to whoever breaks an embargo first.

That means it’s a race to the bottom by new sites, who are increasingly stressed themselves with a competitive marketplace and decreasing advertising sales.

A year ago embargo breaks were rare, once-a-month things. Today, nearly every embargo is broken, sometimes by a few minutes, sometimes by half a day or more.

We can’t continue to operate under these rules.

Our New Policy

The reason this is becoming a larger problem is because there is no downside to breaking embargoes. The PR firm gets upset but they don’t stop working with the offending publication or writer. You get a slap on the wrist, and you break another embargo later that day.

There are a few (very few) exceptions. One is Waggener Edstrom, who handles PR for Microsoft. Their embargoes don’t break because they’d unleash hell on the offender. Another is Google. The few times they’ve had problems they’ve chosen the nuclear option and banned the offender for as much as a year. As you can imagine, Google and Microsoft embargoed news doesn’t break early.

We’ve never broken an embargo at TechCrunch. Not once. Today that ends. From now our new policy is to break every embargo. We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo by one minute or three days. We’ll choose at random.

Some firms will stop talking to us (yeah! less email), but we’ll find other ways to get the news. Others, who haven’t read this post because they don’t read TechCrunch, will be unpleasantly surprised. Maybe if we cause enough pain then PR firms will start to take action against those publications who break the rules.

There will be exceptions. We will honor embargoes from trusted companies and PR firms who give us the news exclusively, so we know there won’t be any mistakes. There are also a handful - maybe three - people who we trust enough to continue to work with them on general embargoes (if you are a PR person and wondering if you’re on that list, you’re not). But for the vast majority of news we get in our inboxes, we’re just going to fire it off to our readers ad hoc whenever we please.

This policy stays in effect until I update this post, which won’t be any time soon.

I’ll also be publishing a blacklist on TechCrunch listing every firm, company, publication and individual writer involved whenever an embargo is broken. Of course, given our new policy, I’ll be putting us at the top of that list.

Update: Good discussion on this at Mahalo.

Update 2: The rant continues.

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13:08
AllFacebook Is Giving Adonomics A Run For Its Money
» TechCrunch

When it comes to stats for Facebook apps, there aren’t that many places to go. You can click around Facebook itself, but it almost seems like they are trying to hide the stats and make it hard to compare different apps. Adonomics was the first to offer rankings and even made-up valuations for each app. They were followed by Developer Analytics, which covers apps across all social networks and gives monetization estimates (but charges for its best data). And now the AllFacebook blog is getting into the game with a pretty decent set of free stats for Facebook apps.

Today, AllFacebook just launched a demographic widget that lets you create comparison charts for any age or gender on Facebook by country. The chart above, for instance, shows male versus female Facebook members in the U.S age 35 to 44 (the ladies outnumber the men in that age group by nearly two-to-one).

But the more interesting stats are for the apps themselves. You can sort by developer name, monthly active users, or daily growth rate. For some reason, Adonomics still ranks apps and developers by daily active users, even though Facebook switched to monthly stats a long time ago. For that reason, the ranking of top developers at AllFacebook and Adonomics is slightly different (see below).

I prefer AllFacebook’s approach. The data is all free and it is easier to switch and sort so that you see exactly what you want. Tracking growth rates is really helpful. I’d like to see more charting features like the one it introduced today for demographics. And that blue highlighting has got to go.

What is your favorite source of stats for Facebook apps? Where is the OpenSocial app tracker? There’s got to be something better than this.

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12:45
Another One Bites The Dust: Yahoo Shutters Kickstart
» TechCrunch

Yahoo is definitely on a cutting spree: after shutting down both Y!Live and Jumpcut, as well as selling off Kelkoo, it’s now time for Yahoo Kickstart to pay a visit to the deadpool.

Kickstart was launched by the company’s Advanced Products Group in April this year and aimed to connect students and alumni at specific colleges and universities and also help them connect on a professional level.

When it debuted, many wondered if there was room for Kickstart, given the fact that Facebook and LinkedIn pretty much had that ground covered already and the service didn’t really bring anything new to the table. It was really job board disguised as a social network (the site now suggests visitors go to Yahoo’s Hotjobs).

The shutdown doesn’t come as much of a surprise, as the service had been dealing with downtime and a ton of error messages for several weeks now, but we guess the image below makes it official.

(Thank you Dan for the tip)

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12:41
First Round Capital Literally Makes All Their Startups Dance
» TechCrunch

Just in - the most ridiculous (and, yes, awesome) holiday card ever. First Round Capital, quoting James Brown, says “Any problem in the world can be solved by dancing” and then promptly shows video clips of each and every one of their portfolio companies…dancing. The whole thing is inspired by WhereTheHellIsMatt, they say. It’s not pretty. But I sure am smiling.

The YieldX guys, at 1:48, look like they are about to be hit by a car. Because they are dancing in the middle of the street in San Mateo.

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11:48
Sports Fans, Keep Up With Your Teams On StatTweets.
» TechCrunch

A big part of being a sports fan is keeping score. And now there is a great way to keep up with scores and stats for every basketball and football team in the U.S. (NBA, NFL, and college teams). It’s called StatTweets, and it just launched today. You can follow any team you like from @KnicksStats to @UNCStats, and you’ll get spreads, final points, standings, ranks, and more. Here is the full list of teams.

There are other sports-related Twitter services, such as SportsTwit, but those tend to be updates from other fans. StatTweets lets you zero in on the teams you care about.

The data for StatTweets comes from StatSheet. So when you click on StatTWeet from the Knicks, it takes you to the Knicks page on StatSheet. Both were developed by Robbie Allen ad are part of his newly announced StatSheet Network, which also includes StatFix (an embeddable stat of the day widget for any college basketball team).

Hardcore sports fans are going to want to check out StatSheet. For a one-man startup with no funding, this is really impressive. The site is all about sports stats. They are front and center in a big, readable font. You can slice and dice them anyway you want. There are stats on how each player impacts his team, and even on referees.

But my favorite part is the charts. Here’s an animated one called Rankings in Motion that shows how the college basketball standings changed over the season. Best of all, you can build your own with any of the data on the site and then embed it as a widget on your blog or fan site.

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9:29
TV on the iPhone: Not a Hot Brooklyn Band
» TechCrunch

Return to cookie mountain indeed, because a new program called Television for iPhone is now available and offers "50 shows from 30 channels" on demand. It's not live TV - that would be hard - but it's basically rehashed content CNN, CBS, and Comedy Central. Sadly, most of it isn't the good stuff (Comedy Central - Standup Highlights, NBC - Nightly News, Meet the Press - WOOOO HOOO!) but some video is better than no video, right?
7:50
Confirmed: Kleiner Perkins Gets Into Textbook Rentals As Chegg Raises $25 Million
» TechCrunch

Confirming in part our initial report last month, Chegg has announced that it has closed a Series C funding round led by famed venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to the tune of $25 million. The round also saw participation from Foundation Capital along with existing investors Gabriel Venture Partners and Primera Capital, who likely helped boost the round beyond the $15 million figure we were hearing about in November.

Chegg is a textbook rental startup that lets college students rent books for a fraction of the price they’d normally pay at their campus bookstores. After identifying the books they need on the website, Chegg sends students their textbooks within eight business days. Once they’re done with the books at the end of the term, students simply toss them in a pre-paid box and ship them back to Chegg. The service is available nationwide at 4,000 universities, and has reportedly saved some students as much as $650 per quarter in textbook fees.

It’s a great service and one that will likely spread like wildfire once more students realize how much money they can save. Textbooks have been notoriously overpriced on college campuses for years, and even the textbook buyback programs found at most student unions are blatant ripoffs, often paying as little as little as 15% or 20% of a book’s original price. With rates that put these programs to shame, Chegg seems like a sure winner. That is, until textbooks finally go digital and students can just throw them on their Kindles.

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7:30
Taptu Closes $9.86m Series B Funding Round
» TechCrunch

UK-based mobile “social search” engine startup Taptu has secured $9.86m in Series B funding from existing investors 3i and Paris-based VC Sofinnova. The company has also brought in a new COO to work on monetizing the search engine. Taptu competes to some extent with Jumptap which has $73m in funding, as well as Google and Yahoo on mobile search. However it takes a social approach to search - allowing users to share search results with friends via email, text messaging and Twitter, plus it has an API for 3rd party sites, one of which is Moblr.
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7:26
Yahoo Putting Jumpcut In The Deadpool?
» TechCrunch

Online video editing service Jumpcut, which was acquired by Yahoo! in September 2006, appears to be in the process of shutting down.

From their website:

We’re sorry to announce that we are no longer accepting uploads to Jumpcut.

We will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future so you‘ll still be able to play, remix and share your existing movies – you just won’t be able to upload anything new.

If you’re looking for a place to upload and share your video, we recommend that you head over to Flickr: http://flickr.com/explore/video

We’re not sure how long this notice has been on the Jumpcut website, but it seems to be quite recent. In the beginning of November, Yahoo! closed live streaming service Y!Live.

Since they’re pointing people to Flickr for their videos, and say in their FAQ that they made this decision in order to ‘focus resources on other Yahoo! sites’, we’re putting Jumpcut into the deadpool even though the site will remain accessible for the time being. What seems painful for the users who have uploaded videos to the service in the past, is that Jumpcut is not able for them to download their edited videos.

Hat tip to Flickr exec Shamir Ramjan.

CrunchBase Information Jumpcut Information provided by CrunchBase

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6:43
FutureTap Taps TapTapTap’s “Where To” iPhone Application
» TechCrunch

iPhone application developer tap tap tap recently announced the sale of its ‘Where To’ application, which allows you to use your device to find points of interest based on your location, but didn’t specify who the buyer was. We now know that the acquiring party is a brand new iPhone app development house called FutureTap, who put the app back on sale and plans to release other stuff in the near future.

So how much was ‘Where To’ worth according to FutureTap’s founder Ortwin Gentz? Apparently, not all that much. In a statement, the ex-CTO of equinux shared the price tag: $70,000. FutureTap has placed version 1.5 of the app back in the App store if you’re interested, but also plans to release new localizations and a couple of new features soon. For a direct link to the purchase page, click here.

The app is on sale for $2.99 USD. Last August, tap tap tap shared sales figures with TechCrunch, which showed that they netted just over $50,000 in revenue in their first month on the App Store, and that was after Apple took their cut. In October, tap tap tap claimed Where To had gross sales of around $200,000 for the three months that it’d been available on the App Store.

So why was it sold for only $70,000?

The reason is simple: tap tap tap founders Sophia Teutschler and John Casasanta - who you might remember for his infamous blog post titled ‘Fuck The VCs’ - split up the company mid-October because of arguments over its future direction, and Where To was just too hard to split or assign, leaving only two options: let it fade into oblivion, or organize a fire sale. The second option prevailed.

Are we happy with the outcome? Yes.

While I still would’ve preferred to keep control of the app, Sophia and I are now free of each other. I’ve managed to rebuild tap tap tap and I couldn’t be happier with the new team of extremely talented developers I’ve assembled. In addition, Sophia found herself with a new job in the deal as she’ll be continuing to develop new features into Where To.

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3:30
MySpace Quietly Begins Encouraging Users To Use Their Real Names
» TechCrunch

A constant criticism of MySpace is that real names are hidden when you view someone’s profile or interact with them on the site. They’re now making subtle product changes that encourage users to show their real name on the site.

Anonymity is great when you don’t want your actual identity to get in the way of whatever fantasy life you are living online. But it’s also one of the reasons Facebook, which identifies users by their real names, is gaining so quickly on MySpace. On Facebook, you generally know who you are talking to. On MySpace, it’s anyone’s guess.

All this anonymity suited MySpace just fine for the first few years of growth. But 2009 is going to be all about social network identity and spreading it out around the web. MySpace, Facebook and Google all want users to log in to third party sites using their account credentials from those sites, and having those accounts be associated with real names to do it is a competitive advantage.

Facebook has a big head start on that already with Facebook Connect, which is now available to any third party site that wants to use it. Google also has its product out the door, and is integrating with sites like Twitter.

MySpace is working to get MySpaceID (formerly Data Availability) out to partners.

MySpace also added a feature in account settings that ask users if they want to display their real name on their profile along with whatever display name they’ve chosen (so MySpace COO Amit Kapur’s MySpace page now shows his real name, it didn’t before).

When adding a new friend, MySpace users are also prompted to reveal their real name (see first image above).

All this serves to legitimize MySpace’s chaotic namespace with actual names of actual people. If they’re successful in getting a large percentage of users to reveal their names they’ll mitigate Facebook’s advantage in this area. I’d expect more of this over time, not less.

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3:30
Jaxtr’s FreeConnect: Free Mobile Calling Worldwide That Seems Too Good To Be True
» TechCrunch

VoIP startup Jaxtr has just launched a new service called FreeConnect that gives members the ability to talk to each other on their mobile phones, free of charge, for as long as they’d like. The service seems too good to be true - unless Jaxtr begins serving ads with each call, FreeConnect has no apparent way of making money. But Jaxtr’s interim CEO Bahman Koohestani says that the company is using the service to expose itself to new members, who may be enticed by the more convenient and feature rich premium services offered by Jaxtr.

The biggest deterrent to using FreeConnect is the number of hoops that users will have to jump through to get started. For starters, both members have to be members of Jaxtr. To initiate the call, you first need to enter the number you’re looking to reach into Jaxtr, which will then spit out a local number for you to call using your cell phone. After calling that number, Jaxtr will send a SMS message to the person you’re calling with a number that’s local for them. Once they dial that number, you enter a free mobile call that can go as long as you’d like. The process is tedious, but after creating the initial connection you can use the same local numbers to reach each other in the future.

Users can skip this ordeal entirely by placing calls using Jaxtr’s (very cheap) paid service, which is probably what the company is hoping will eventually happen. Koohestani says that FreeConnect is not just a trial promotion, but I can’t see the company keeping it going for long unless it can increase membership and convert a significant fraction of new members into paying customers.

The last few months have been rough on Jaxtr. Only a few months after closing an $11 million funding round, the company was forced to lay off 13 employees, and then saw its CEO Konstantin Guericke resign (VP Engineering Bahman Koohestani is acting as an interim CEO).

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0:57
LaLa, The Black Sheep Of Music Startups, Just May Have The Right Formula
» TechCrunch

LaLa doesn’t get nearly as much attention as the other streaming music services, probably because they actually charge users to listen to music. Sites like MySpace Music, Imeem and Last.fm all stream music for free these days. But LaLa only lets you listen to a song once. After that, you have to “buy” it for ten cents to listen to it as many times as you like, and add it to playlists.

Seems like a non-starter, right? But wait, there are a few reasons why LaLa has a real chance at success. First, they have an absolutely exceptional user experience, which was completely relaunched in October (and we loved it). Unlike all of the other services, LaLa gets you to the music you want to hear as quickly as possible, whether it’s through search, browsing or suggestions from friends. Creating and embedding playlists is dead simple, too (see below). The other services mentioned above take more steps to find music. Last.fm is the worst interface, it’s very hard for new users to figure it out. And both Imeem and MySpace Music have their issues too - too many clicks to get to music, and MySpace doesn’t allow embedding.

In Step - Girl Talk
Second, LaLa is completely advertising free. It lets you play any song once without paying. After that you have to pay $0.10 to add it to your collection and stream it whenever you want. But you get 50 songs free when you sign up, so users can get a feel for the service before paying anything. If you choose to download a MP3 of the song for $.89 (which is already cheaper than the other services), you get that $.10 streaming fee back.

Frankly, the exceptional user experience probably isn’t enough to compete with the free services. But LaLa also has its Music Mover client for Mac and Windows machines. Download it and it identifies all of the MP3s and paid iTunes songs on your hard drive and adds them to your collection on LaLa. You don’t have to pay the $0.10 to listen to those songs stream. What this means - you can listen to all that stolen music you’ve been gathering since Napster days on any computer with an Internet connection. You don’t have to worry about copying the songs from one hard drive to another to access them.

That sort of makes LaLa perfect. You can listen to all the music you already have, and then get new music recommendations from your friends. Listen to it once and then add it to your collection for $0.10.

They also have an iPhone app coming that lets you listen to all your music streaming on that device. No longer will you be limited to the small hard drive on your iPhone or iPod and forced to make tough decisions on which music to upload.

LaLa also has plenty of money to let the whole music scene shake out. While competitors lose money on every stream, LaLa has a business model that they say doesn’t burn cash. And they still have $20 million of unspent venture capital in the bank.

The company tapped former Yahoo Chief Product Officer Geoff Ralston as their CEO in late 2007, and his product experience shows. The company has the best streaming music product on the Internet today, and a business model that doesn’t burn cash.

Competing with giants like MySpace and possibly Facebook isn’t trivial. And those competitors will eventually catch up. But they have to serve a certain amount of advertising to make their models work, a handicap that LaLa neatly avoids. Don’t count them out any time soon.

It’s the joy of using products like LaLa that keeps me excited about startups.

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December 16, 2008
22:51
Thank You Seesmic, For Sucking Less
» TechCrunch

Even though I’m an investor, one thing that has always bugged me about Seesmic is the all black background (its depressing), and the excessive use of Flash on the site (there’s nothing except Flash, try loading it on an iPhone). Having a few Flash elements on a site when necessary is fine. But using it just to use it is so…ugh.

You can check out the new all white site which ditches the Flash here. They’ve also added some additional bells and whistles to improve usability, like a big red button on the top left to start a new conversation.

User reactions are here. Let us know in the comments what you think as well (you can leave a video comment via Seesmic if you choose too).

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22:17
Mahalo Answers User Gets $100 Payday For Giving PR Tips To Strippers
» TechCrunch

Mahalo Answers, the just-launched Q&A service that is part Yahoo Answers, part Google Answers has just proven that people will actually pay for valuable information. At least, they will when strippers are involved.

This morning a representative for the The Stripper Method - a video series that invites viewers to watch “two former strippers, now housewives, business owners and mothers, as they teach secret stripper techniques for use at home with your significant others” - asked how they could book the video’s stars on a nationally broadcast TV show or radio show.

Mahalo member budgallant answered the call, offering a detailed guide to contacting local radio hosts, reaching Public Access Television, and, if all else failed, staging a protest (you can see the full answer here).

In return for his answer, the question’s originator (a user by the name of vegasundressed) has just awarded budgallant with $100 in Mahalo Dollars (the site’s virtual currency). Budgallant will now be able to exchange those Mahalo Dollars for real cash, less a 25% cut taken by Mahalo.

(Disclosure: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is our partner in the TechCrunch50 conference).

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21:18
Taxi Magic: Hail A Cab From Your iPhone At The Push Of A Button
» TechCrunch

Taxi applications on the App Store are a dime a dozen, but for the most part they’re just glorified phone directories that don’t really make it any easier to call a cab. Taxi Magic, a new app that recently went live on the App Store, is doing what the others can’t: on-demand cab service from your iPhone at the push of a button. The application connects directly into Taxi routing systems, allowing users to book cabs without ever needing to speak to an operator.

The service is available in over 25 cities across the US, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington DC (oddly enough New York seems to be excluded for now). Ordering a cab is fairly simple: after launching Taxi Magic, your iPhone will use GPS or triangulation to determine your general location, and will present a list of nearby cab services (some listings are only phone numbers, while others fully support Taxi Magic’s ordering system).

Update: Apparently NYC is excluded because no booking systems for the cabs are available.

After choosing a supported cab company, the application will ask for your exact street address and will then take you to a status screen that will alert you once your ride is dispatched (wait times can vary depending on the time of day and location). The status screen also allows you to view how far away the cab is and the driver’s name.

I’m looking forward to using Taxi Magic next time I need to hail a cab, but I still have a few gripes with the program. For one, the interface could use a facelift - the funky blue background makes it look like an amateurish effort. It would also be nice if the application could send SMS alerts to inform me when my cab was on its way, and some kind of wait time indicator would also be handy. Finally, the app should integrate some of the features found in other Taxi apps on the App Store, like toll estimates based on the distance you’re traveling.

Taxi Magic was made by RideCharge, a startup geared towards frequent cab users who can book their taxis on the web and pay for them using their mobile phone. The site also makes it easy for businesses travelers to produce expense reports for their cab rides.

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19:24
Hey CBS, Hulu Much?
» TechCrunch

CBS just pushed a completely new look and feel for it’s TV.com site. Think they have Hulu on their mind? you be the judge.

The overall look of the home page is very similar to Hulu, although the actual show pages remain different. Frankly, I think they should have gone all the way and copied Hulu completely.

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18:56
Looks Like Ustream.tv Is Headed For The iPhone, As Well
» TechCrunch

When we broke the news last week that Ustream.tv is working on a mobile streaming application, the only device we could verify support for was the Nokia N95. A few days later, we’ve received photographic proof that they’re cracking away at a client for at least one other popular handset: the iPhone.

Continuing a tradition long established in the world of pre-announcement photography, the shot we received is all kinds of blurry. That said, it came from the same source as last week’s video, so we’re confident that what we’re looking at is the real deal.
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18:23
Apple Leaves MacWorld: It’s About Time
» TechCrunch

Apple has just announced that this January’s MacWorld event will be the company’s last, and that Steve Jobs won’t be giving the event’s much-anticipated keynote (Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will be taking his place). Stocks are sure to tumble on the news as rumors of Jobs’s health are rekindled, but in reality this move has probably been a long time coming.

MacWorld’s timing as a January event has always been questionable - many consumers have long since learned not to purchase Apple products in the weeks leading up to the event, which likely resulted in lost sales during the holiday shopping season. When Apple has had something major to announce it has managed to totally overshadow the competing Consumer Electronics Show (as they did with the iPhone), but Apple just can’t produce such blockbuster products at regular intervals.

As John Gruber pointed out back in 2002:

“That means every January, and every July, Jobs delivers a keynote, and at each of these keynotes, the Mac community expects to hear about Great New Things. This is doubly troublesome for Apple. For one thing, people have learned not to buy new Macs during the month before each Expo, because there’s a decent chance that something brand new is going to be announced at the upcoming keynote. Obviously, that’s not good for sales.

Worse, however, is that the schedule for keynotes is set in stone: January and July. The schedule for new products, however, is unpredictable. It would be much better for Apple if they could simply announce new products — especially major new product lines — when they’re ready to sell them.”

The move to pull Jobs from the keynote may simply be a way to lower expectations. Apple probably isn’t keen on releasing a big new product in the current economy (assuming it has something ready in the first place), and it would look silly to have Steve Jobs to present a keynote whose highlights were limited to an iTunes Plus update and maybe a Mac Mini (I don’t buy the netbook theory).

So keep your cool. Apple is still on track and Jobs is probably doing just fine. At least I hope he is.

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18:14
Soon, All Your Blog Comments Will Belong To Facebook (Or Google)
» TechCrunch

There are way too many comment login systems out there. Each blogging platform (Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger) has its own login system, then there are the cross-platform commenting systems like Disqus and JS-KIT. But many of these will soon give way to Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect.

I am talking about just the ID people use to login, not the commenting systems themselves. We adopted Facebook Connect as a login option for anyone who wants to leave a comment on TechCrunch, and it already accounts for more than 20 percent of our comments. FB Connect is also now available to any of the 500,000 blogs and sites that use the JS-Kit commenting widget, and Disqus is planning on implementing Facebook Connect before the end of the year.

Other blogs are adopting Google’s Friend Connect (which lets people login with various email credentials, or even Twitter). JS-Kit is also working on adding Friend Connect, as well as MySpace ID as login options.

All of this choice is great, except that already there are six different login options in The JS-Kit widget (Guest, Existing JS-Kit, New JS-Kit, Haloscan, OpenID, FB Connect). Pretty soon we’ll need the equivalent of a “Share This” button, perhaps a “Universal ID” button, that will then open up to all the options. But I think that’s too much. Engineers may feel it is egalitarian, but consumers run away when they are presented with more than 3 or 4 options.

That is why I think Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect will win in the end (Sorry, MySpace). People may have IDs for the various blogging platforms or commenting systems, but most don’t identify with them. It is a necessary inconvenience. They identify with Facebook or their email because that is where they manage their personal and professional lives.

In addition to replicating the comments on your Facebook News feed, the JS-Kit implementation also supports embedding Facebook photos and YouTube videos directly into the comments. It makes commenting much more personal when you know your friends will see it in Facebook. It also has the potential to reduce the amount of comment trolling and general incivility that has taken over many blog comments (we hope).

Update: No sooner did I post this than I learned that not only is Disqus working on a Facebook Connect plugin, but so is Six Apart (for Movable Type), Wordpress, and MediaWiki. Here is an entire Facebook Connect plugin directory. Grou.ps is also adding FB Connect.

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17:21
Foodzie Raises $1 Million For Its Specialty Food Marketplace
» TechCrunch

Foodzie, an online marketplace for high-end artisan food vendors, has raised a seed round of $1 million from noted investor Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, First Round Capital, and a number of angel investors. The company, which we were introduced to over the summer as part of the TechStars class of 2008, recently launched to the public with a marketplace of 25 vendors ranging from Vermont and California cheese makers to specialty BBQ sauces from Smokin’ Joe Jones.

Foodzie helps provide a centralized hub for these small food vendors, giving them more exposure than they’d get from their standalone sites and making it easy for food aficionados (or ‘foodies’) to find the products they’re looking for. Foodzie generates revenue by taking a commission on each transaction (around 20%), but vendors still make as much as double what they’d get if their products were sold in traditional specialty food sites. Foodzie can charge a lower commission because it doesn’t warehouse the items it sells - instead it handles all of the transactions (a boon for less tech-savy vendors) and leaves distribution up to the individual stores.

Given the economic downturn, it seems like high-end food would be among the first “cuts” made by consumers in an effort to cut back on spending. However, Foodzie CEO Rob LaFave says that the recession doesn’t seem to be having a major impact on the marketplace. He explains that many of the products on Foodzie are actually cheaper than those in supermarkets, and that many customers come to Foodzie looking for foods they can’t find elsewhere that fulfill special dietary needs (like vegan or gluten-free products).

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15:10
Answerpedia: The Yahoo Product That Never Launched
» TechCrunch

Yahoo Answers is three years old this week, and it is the fifth most popular property within Yahoo after the homepage, search, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Shopping. (See the table below). According to Quantcast, it attracts 24 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S. ComScore puts the number a bit higher at 33 million monthly U.S. visitors, and 154 million worldwide. It’s a pageview machine, with 1.1 billion a month worldwide.

But Yahoo has not done anything with the Yahoo Answers other than try to sell it. It still gets tons of traffic and you can get an answer to almost any question pretty much immediately, but its growth has stagnated since last April.

Yet Yahoo killed a promising project that could have made Yahoo Answers even better. It was called Answerpedia. The idea was to take the very best answers from Yahoo Answers (the top 5 or 10 percent) and institutionalize them as authoritative topic pages on their own wiki that could be edited and refined. Hence, Answerpedia (which was only ever used as the project’s codename).

In contrast to Wikipedia, Answerpedia was supposed to be a Wiki of experiential knowledge instead of historical fact. It was the place where people would go to find out things like , “What is the best way to get a reservation at a popular restaurant?” or “How do you go about planning for a kitchen remodel?”

Like many promising projects, Yahoo never let it get past the alpha stage. Maybe the next CEO will revive Answerpedia and other internal projects that never saw the light of day. (The halls of Yahoo are littered with them).

A lot of the answers on Yahoo Answers are worthless, but a small percentage are consistently brilliant. This is especially true in categories where many people have specific knowledge such as home repair, literature, finance, pets, cooking, and parenting. Yet these are also areas where search tends to fail or results are inundated with spam. Authoritative pages on these topics would get great search-engine juice and create the basis for a compelling new destination site within Yahoo as well.

If Yahoo doesn’t do this, someone else will. Already, startups are picking up the slack and experimenting with new ways to improve the core idea of a Q&A site. For instance, Mahalo Answers launched yesterday, adding virtual currency and embedding the best answers in its wiki topic pages. Wiki Answers also takes a collaborative approach to coming up with the best answer.

And what about Answerpedia? Well, for one thing, Yahoo does not own the URL. If you type in [answerpedia.com], it redirects you to Facebook, of all places (Update: The site now directs to a simple landing page). That might not be an issue, though, as all of Yahoo’s product use a Yahoo URL (like answerpedia.yahoo.com).

And here’s another curiosity. When I asked a question on Yahoo Answers about what it was and why it never launched, “Yahoo Products” came up a suggested category for the question. As for why it never launched, I am still waiting for an answer to that one.

Update: And we have an answer from someone who says he is one of the founding engineers of Yahoo Answers:

Answerspedia would have been more peanut butter =)

Maybe, but there is a difference between spreading yourself too thin and just sitting on the ball.

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14:56
Twitter Hiring Product Manager To Bring In The Revenue
» TechCrunch

Twitter’s business model (or rather lack of one) is a topic of endless debate. Like many successful startups that came before it the company has been successful in getting users and usage when it doesn’t charge a cent. But ramping up revenue is a different matter. And Twitter is now in the process of doing just that.

Most startups in this position simply sell themselves before it becomes too much of a problem and let their new parent deal with it (see YouTube). A nice side benefit of having no revenue is that the MBAs can’t use your actual financials to determine your valuation.

Twitter is likely to do the same, but these uncertain financial times mean Twitter can’t count on a definite exit anytime soon (although I’d bet money Google buys them within six months).

When I interviewed CEO Evan Williams last July he gave a few hints about what Twitter might eventually do to monetize:

MA: What is your revenue model? Do you know yet? Have you thought about it?

EW: We’ve though about it. We had to do some thinking about that to raise a bunch of money, but it’s not actively in development right now. The broad strokes on the matter are obviously Twitter is being used for a lot of commercial purposes right now, in addition to social purposes. We think that works pretty well. We think there’s a lot of companies that we’ve talked to that seem to be getting a lot of value out of it. If that continues, if that becomes a rich world for users and the companies, we think we can extract some revenue from that.

MA: It might be difficult to define commercial activity versus not, right?

EW: It might in some cases, but in a lot of cases it will be really clear. I mean Woot.com is selling stuff. So maybe we just say, this is commercial usage and you need to pay for that and maybe there’s some features you get on top of that, that wouldn’t be as meaningful to personal users. There’s other cases, like yours, is that commercial or personal?

But now’s obviously the time. Twitter recently posted a Product Manager job description at Jobscore.

The primary responsibility: “Define products and feature sets of commercial-oriented Twitter applications.” The description goes on: “As Twitter’s first product manager focused on revenue generation, you will play a defining role in the formulation of Twitter’s business. Your job will be to lead the definition and execution of the products and features that will lead to monetization of the Twitter platform.”

Got an idea as to how Twitter can turn on the cash spigot? Send in your resume.

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14:24
Stax Networks Launches: Google App Engine For Java
» TechCrunch

Seattle-based Stax Networks launches this morning into private beta. Stax is offering a platform as a service product for Java applications - basically, the easiest way to think about it is Google App Engine for Java applications (or Heroku for Ruby on Rails applications)., Java is still extremely popular for business applications (Indeed has 64,000 Java job openings currently as well).

Stax is built on top of Amazon EC2 and allows developers to create, text and deploy Java applications without having to build out their own physical infrastructure.

For now Stax isn’t charging users at all. Eventually they’ll move to a model that charges for resources uses, similar to EC2 and other infrastructure platforms. If you want to try it out, create an account using the “techcrunch” invite code.

The company was founded by Spike Washburn, Cold Fusion creator J.J. Allaire and Baseline Ventures partner Steve Anderson. They raised a round of financing from Baseline Ventures in late 2007 - the size isn’t being disclosed but is “under $1 million.”

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13:20
Pandora Now Available for Windows Mobile
» TechCrunch

More than two years ago, Pandora began working on a Windows Mobile client for their personalized music streaming service. Right as that project was entering alpha, they penned distribution deals with AT&T and Sprint, who both had one requirement: it needed to work on their standard, run-of-the-mill feature phones. With their relatively small development team, Pandora shifted their efforts to the development of a J2ME application. Soon after that was ready, the iPhone SDK became available, which meant Windows Mobile development was pushed aside again.

At long last, the project has come to fruition. Pandora has now released a Windows Mobile client.
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11:51
Gizmo Finally Introduces A Browser-Based Phone And Ringing Links
» TechCrunch

Skype competitor Gizmo is rolling out a Flash version of its SIP phone client. GizmoCall works entirely in the browser, much like other Flash-based phones from Ribbit (which was acquired by BT), TringMe, and others. In fact, Gizmo’s in-browser phone comes about a year too late. (But it still beat Skype).

Like Skype, you pay really low rates for calls to regular phones, while PC calls are free. GizmoCall supports video calls as well. And one nice feature is that it can turn any phone number into a link, like this test number.

Gizmo has opened up its APIs for developers to add calling features to their apps compare to the APIs from Ribbit or Ringful). GizmoCall phones are also embeddable:

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10:13
Image Metrics Scores $6.5 Million In Funding, Makes Digital Characters Look Really Real
» TechCrunch

Image Metrics has raised a Series B round of funding to the tune of $6.5 million, led by Saffron Hill Ventures. The extra capital will be used to advance R&D on the company’s impressive facial animation solutions, which are primarily of interest for the film and gaming industry.

You might remember Image Metrics from ‘The Emily Project‘, which went viral over the Summer and made quite a few jaws drop (video below). The company provides its technology for known players like Digital Domain, Sony Computer Entertainment and Rockstar Games, which it partnered with for making Grand Theft Auto IV look more realistic than previous versions of the best-selling game.

Its mission is, in essence, to create believable facial performances that emotionally connect
audiences to digital characters in movies, games and other forms of entertainment.

Developed over the past seven years by a team of Ph.D. physicists and experts in automated computer vision(ing?), Image Metrics has offices in Santa Monica, California and Manchester, UK, and employs about 30 people. We’re still trying to find out how much funding they’ve raised in total so far.
Update: apparently $4.2 million was raised in July 2002, which would bring the total to about $10.7 million now.

Emily Project
envoyé par Gameblog

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9:26
Omniture Brings Real-Time Analytics To iPhone Applications
» TechCrunch

Omniture is extending its SiteCatalyst measurement tool to native iPhone applications, enabling developers and marketers to gain insight on how users are interacting with their iPhone apps, based on real-time information. This should allow them not only to improve the user experience based on analytics, but also make adjustement necessary to generate more revenue by enhancing ad clicks, purchasing and increasing page views.

The new offer, which is basically an extension of its existing SiteCatalyst solution, is called App Measurement for iPhone and will be generally available as from January 2009. To our knowledge this is the first analytics program specifically designed for native iPhone applications, but it’s safe to say other providers will soon follow suit with similar offerings.

Update: that’s why we love commenters. Venture-backed Pinch Media also offers an analytics suite for iPhone developers.

Update 2: similar service providers include Medialets, Mobilytics, AppLoop and Mobclix.

In related news, Tel Aviv-based Kenshoo is taking its Search Engine Marketing campaign management solution mobile, enabling users to consult campaign statistics and reports from their iPhone browser. More information about their solution is available here, and a video demo can be viewed here.

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6:08
Aravo Raises $7 Million Series D Following World’s Largest Single SAAS Deployment
» TechCrunch

Despite the economic downturn, companies that solve real problems are still successfully raising money. Aravo, a SAAS supplier information management tool, announced today that they closed $7 million in Series D funding. Currently, Aravo claims their GE installation is the largest single SAAS deployment. "We are now managing over 500,000 suppliers and their data in Aravo, and have just gone live in six languages," said Gary Reiner, CIO of GE.
5:56
Clear2Pay Raises Another €6 Million For Payment Transaction Technology
» TechCrunch

Clear2Pay, a provider of technology that powers advanced payment solutions used primarily by financial institutions, has raised a total of €6 million by its current investors AGF, IRIS Capital, Big Bang Ventures, GIMV, Trust Capital and management.

Clear2Pay delivers globally applicable solutions for e-payments, facilitating banks and financial organizations in their provision of payments services while reducing transaction processing costs. Clear2Pay’s payment solutions offer these organizations a branded way for their customers to pay online, including trade-supporting B2B environments, e-commerce applications and remittance services. The company also offers a ‘Open Payment Framework (OPF)’, which is essentially a library of component building blocks from which payments solutions can be derived.

The company has raised nearly €30 million in funding to date, so it seems like the company is simply battening down the hatches for the next years, considering the fact that the majority of its customer base of financial institutions is currently in a very deep crisis.

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4:46
Twingly Debuts BlogRank, Guess Who Leads The Top 100
» TechCrunch

Twingly, the social blog search engine that prides itself in being completely spam-free, has launched BlogRank as a way to identify the 100 most important blogs in 12 different languages based on a proprietary ranking system. It’s very similar to what Technorati has been trying to achieve with their Authority ranking, i.e. creating a Google PageRank for blogs.

The biggest difference is that Twingly breaks down the most popular blogs by language, which they claim is worth much more for local blogs than competing with others at an international level. I tend to agree with that. It’s rather similar to what Wikio is doing (disclosure: TechCrunch France writer Ouriel Ohayon is on Wikio’s board).

To demonstrate the technology, Twingly is debuting its Top 100 today, taking another page from Technorati in that regard. We may be a little biased, but we like Twingly’s Top 100 better because we came out on top across all languages tracked (we also lead the English-language blog ranking). In all seriousness, the top 100 lists from Technorati and Twingly look very alike, although The Huffington Post (which is the most popular blog according to Technorati) isn’t even listed at Twingly’s. The startup says this has to do with the fact that they’re more focused on Europe right now, and that they’ve simply never bothered to ping the service anyway.

You can find out who leads the top 100 per tracked language (12 so far) in Twingly’s blog post announcing the new feature.

Sweden-based Twingly, not to be confused with Twing, doesn’t share much about the underlying technology and only says its ranking system focuses on ‘inlinks and likes among other things’. They also stress that it shows the blogosphere according to their data, and that it’s not necessarily 100% accurate. It’s a nice feature, but late in the game, and you’ve got to ask yourself how obsolete both Twingly’s and Technorati’s ranking would be if Google were actually the next to introduce the next ‘Google PageRank for blogs’.

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2:05
Gaia Online Cuts 13% Of Staff Despite Claims Of Record Earnings
» TechCrunch

Gaia Online, a social network/virtual world hybrid that includes one of the web’s most popular forums, has laid off 36 employees, or around ~~20%~~ 13% of its staff. Of those laid off, 16 were full time and 20 were contractors. From what we’ve heard the layoffs were unexpected by most affected employees - the site raised $11 million in July, and has been hiring employees as recently as a month ago.
Update: Gaia has written a blog post on the layoffs stating that the headcount represents 13%, not 20%, though this may discount contracted workers.

Even more odd: an article printed today in the San Jose Mercury News quotes Gaia CEO Craig Sherman stating that the company is looking forward to a record month.

“So far, the deepening recession has not slowed sales of virtual goods, which executives attribute to people spending more time at home. Gaia Online, a youth world with 7 million monthly visitors, sells more than $1 million a month of virtual goods and expects a record month in December, said its chief executive, Craig Sherman”

Sherman’s statement seems to be misleading - we’ve heard that revenues last month were lower than expected after a product launch didn’t go as well as hoped, and today’s layoffs seem to contradict the idea that sales of virtual goods have not been affected by the recession.

That said, it is possible that virtual goods sales have held steady as other streams of revenue like advertising have fallen off, or the cuts were made to preempt a forecasted (but as of yet unseen) slowdown. In any case, the article couldn’t have come at a worse time for those laid off.

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0:56
Palm Gets In On The App Store Game, Launches Palm Software Store
» TechCrunch

With Apple and Google’s on-device application stores already peddling the wares and RIM’s BlackBerry Application Center just around the corner, Palm’s making an effort to not get left behind. This evening, Palm launched an official on-device application store for both Windows Mobile and Palm OS powered handsets.

With “App Store”, “Market”, and “Application Center” all spoken for, Palm’s going with “Software Store”. With that, the store name tap is just about all dried up.

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0:01
SEC Gives Social Investing Site kaChing Green Light To Take On Mutual Funds
» TechCrunch

Every social investing site wants to turn the insights of its trading members into financial products that people can actually link to their brokerage accounts. Finding the few brilliant stock pickers in the crowd and then letting everyone else follow their portfolios while taking a cut of the management fees is the business model. KaChing, which is the most popular investing application on Facebook (previously called FSX), just took a major step in that direction by becoming a registered investment adviser with the SEC. Sometime in the second half of next year, it will allow its members to link their brokerage accounts to the portfolios of the elite managers on the site and automatically follow their trades.

The company has raised an angel round from some heavy hitters in Silicon Valley, including Marc Andreessen, OpenTable CEO Jeff Jordan, Benchmark Capital partner Andy Rachleff, and Kleiner Perkins partner Kevin Compton. Bruce Dunlevie of Benchmark, Doug Mackenzie of Kleiner, and former Opsware CEO Ben Horowitz are also investors. (All the VCs invested individually). The size of the round was not disclosed.

Competing social investing sites such as Cake Financial (which launched at TechCrunch 40), Covestor, and PersonalRIA (which launched at TechCrunch 50) all have the same plan. All of these sites want to disrupt the current mutual fund industry by broadening the spectrum of potential money managers. PersonalRIA sticks with professional investment advisers, whereas Cake, Covestor, and kaChing each provide a platform for talented individual investors to attract a following.

In some respects, kaChing is the most extreme example of pure social investing. Cake and Covestor both track real trades in real portfolios, whereas anyone can create a fantasy portfolio on kaChing. There are absolutely no barriers to entry. CEO Dan Carroll argues this is a good thing because you could be a brilliant investor but not have the money to actually trade. KaChing levels the playing field.

The counter-argument is that following people who are investing real money is less risky because at least they have something at stake. It’s not just play money. The recent returns of most professional money managers, however, doesn’t necessarily bear that out.

Carroll says that risk is taken away by forcing everybody to be open about their investment strategies and showing their entire holdings and each trade as it happens. In other words, the data doesn’t lie. Carroll says:

A lot of the problem is there is no transparency. We are offering complete transparency.

Well, not complete transparency. He won’t say how much he raised from his angel investors, after all. But he does demand transparency from the investors who use his site. I guess that is what he meant. Carroll himself, by the way, has a pretty impressive stock-picking record. His portfolio is up 25 percent in the past six months, during a time when the S&P dropped 36 percent.

Some other members on the site have done even better. Richard Jones has an eye-popping 372 percent six-month return, while Nick Kwok has a 97.8 percent six-month return.

Who are these people? I have no idea. Richard Jones appears to be from the UK and uses a dog picture as his avatar. On the Internet everyone’s a dog, but would you invest your money with someone who actually presents himself as a dog? Carroll thinks it doesn’t matter. You can see his holdings and you can see his risk-adjusted returns. And the site gives you tools to evaluate whether or not Jones is good or just lucky.

Carroll has some ex-Google engineers (who doesn’t these days?) cranking out algorithms like the SuperCruncher, which comes up with a skill score for each investor by comparing the source of their returns with their stated investment strategy. If your strategy is to invest in large cap value stocks, but all of your returns are in small cap growth stocks, you might just be lucky. As it turns out Richard Jones’ skill score is 0%. Maybe he lets his dog pick his stocks.

Nick Kwok, in contrast, has a skill score of 100%. So at least he is accomplishing what he has set out to do, which is to make money by investing in financials and large caps. But his research score is low. (Each investor is encouraged to write out the reasons for each trade, and the research score is determined by how many other members indicting that they agree, disagree or think it is worthless).

Of the 350,000 portfolios on kaChing, 20,000 (1,500 of which are diversified portfolios) have actually generated positive returns over the past seven months, which is no mean feat. The idea that a tiny percentage of kaChing’s members can beat the market is really appealing, and I hope that Carroll is right. But we need more data. How many of those 20,000 can stay in positive territory, or even just beat the market?

It is quite possible the leaders will keep switching out, making it very difficult to invest in a winner over the long run. The iron law of investing is that, over time, everyone’s performance returns to the mean, or worse. Why should a bunch of investors on Facebook prove any different?

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0:00
SlideShare Sends PowerPoint To The Cloud With New Plugin
» TechCrunch

SlideShare, a startup that we’ve likened to a YouTube equivalent for PowerPoint presentations, has released a new plugin for Microsoft Office 2007 that allows users to edit and publish presentations directly to their SlideShare accounts. You can download the free plugin here.

Beyond publishing new PowerPoint documents to the web, the SlideShare plugin can import SlideShare files from the cloud (both your own and those that are shared by others), which can then be modified on your native PowerPoint client. The plugin features an integrated search so you can browse through files from your SlideShare contacts and groups, as well as support for Twitter and FriendFeed so you can broadcast a new presentation without leaving Office, adding a social component to PowerPoint that extends beyond typical group collaboration.

SlideShare’s plugin offers a peek into where cloud-based document editing is probably ultimately headed for most consumers. While most online-only services like Google Docs are free (Office isn’t), the vast majority of computer users have been using the Microsoft suite for years, and aren’t keen on learning a new interface loaded with new quirks. Even with the offline capability afforded by Google Gears, Docs still feels foreign. Expect plugins with functionality similar to SlideShare to emerge for all of Microsoft Office (Microsoft already offers its own similar service) as consumers desperately look for familiarity as they make their first steps into the cloud.

Other players in this space include Scribd, DocStoc, and SlideRocket (a cloud-based PowerPoint alternative).

Slideshare Ribbon Powerpoint

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December 15, 2008
22:23
MusicBox: Visualize Your Music In Ways You Never Thought Of
» TechCrunch

I've been looking for something like this my whole life — and of course now that I've found it, I can't have it. MusicBox is the Masters thesis project of MIT Media Lab student Anita. I've never been impressed with things like Coverflow and Genius because they seem so shallow; there's so much metadata in and around our music libraries that something more robust should certainly be possible, I always thought. And look, someone like-minded but far more capable than myself has created a powerful, intuitive, and attractive tool for visualizing, sorting, and playing your music.
22:00
Yamli’s Powerful Arabic Search Engine Continues To Innovate
» TechCrunch

Yamli, the Arabic transliteration search engine that allows users to easily search for Arabic phrases using their Latin keyboards, has launched a revamped version of its site that introduces a number of enhancements, including a way to automatically search for phonetically similar words that are spelled differently - a significant feature that could further bolster Yamli’s position in this still-fledgling space.

Because there is no ‘correct’ way to convert Arabic to Latin text, most words have multiple possible spellings (a fact readily visible on most major news networks). In the past Yamli has tried to automatically pick the best possible spelling, but these searches often missed out on possible relevant matches that used alternate spellings.

Yamli co-founder Habib Haddad says that search engines like Google can already correct for this for popular queries (especially names) using databases of alternative spellings, but that these are generally determined by human linguists and don’t work on less common or more generic words. Haddad says that using the millions of search queries that have been conducted on Yamli since its launch, the site can automatically determine synonymous words without any human intervention.

The new version of Yamli also introduces image search powered through Microsoft’s Live Search API, video search from YouTube, and Wikipedia search (the main text search is still powered by Google). Yamli has also added a two-column view that presents English and Arabic matches simultaneously (the two languages are separated because they are read in opposite directions).

There are a few other players in this space, including Onkosh and Google’s own competing service.

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20:40
Bush Shoe-Dodging Video Already Watched More Than 5 Million Times On YouTube.
» TechCrunch

The video above of a man throwing his shoes at President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad on Saturday is sure to live on in infamy for many reasons: the sheer brazenness of the act, the incredible lack of adequate security surrounding the President of the United States (a journalist had to take the shoe tosser down), and the sad commentary on the President’s standing in the world during his waning days in office. It is already infamous on the Web, having gone viral through YouTube.

The YouTube video has been seen more than 5.5 million times across at least 640 ~~sites~~ different clips where it has been embedded, according to Visible Measures. The chart at left shows teh number of views between 7 AM and 5 PM on Monday.

In less than 12 hours the video went from 2 million to 5.5 million views, and may be on track to beat the Obama victory speech video in terms of viral reach in a 48-hour period. Is that how Bush will be remembered?

Update 12/16/08: On Tuesday, as of 3:30 PM ET, the number of views jumped to 10.7 million across 900 ~~sites~~ video clips, and it has racked up 83,000 comments. This is hotter than “Jizz in My Pants.”

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19:50
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em. Movable Type’s Motion is Microblogging In a Box
» TechCrunch

Six Apart, the company behind blogging platform Movable Type, has just announced a new social application called Motion that integrates social network-like activity streams, microblogging support, and dead simple login functionality for visitors that allows them to quickly leave comments and even tie in their own activity feeds to your site. The new application will be free for all users of Moveable Type Pro, the site’s premium service, once it leaves beta in 2009. For now, you can sign up for a free demo of the Beta version here.

Motion is build around open standards, allowing users to create their own microblogs that pull in events (in a manner similar to FriendFeed) from over 150 other sites supported by Six Apart’s Action Streams, which launched earlier this year. The service also offers full support for OpenID, allowing users to login with their Google accounts, Facebook Connect, AOL screen names, and Yahoo IDs.

Six Apart says that Motion isn’t just a set of social features - rather, it’s a flexible suite that you can customize to suit your needs. Among the possible applications:

* Create a private, custom action aggregator to track sentiment and glean intelligence from conversations around the web through action streams.
* Provide a private microblog community for simple internal employee or team collaboration.
* Publish a public microblog to nurture and grow your community while increasing your page views.
* Create a public social network to connect to your community across the web instead of competing against other social networks.

At this point there aren’t any sites that have actually implemented Motion so its hard to get a feel for how well it works, but Six Apart says that they’ll have a demo live some time this evening (we’ll update the post once they do). You can read more about Motion on the application’s product page here.

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19:29
Get Yer Crunchies Tickets Right This Second
» TechCrunch

Tickets for the one and only Crunchies, which honors the best products, startups and founders from around the tech world, are now on sale at Amiando.

The event is being held on Friday, January 9 at the beautiful Herbst Theater in San Francisco. And we’re also holding an extravagant (read: free drinks and cool music from MySpace) after party across the street at City Hall’s Rotunda from 9 - midnight. MySpace is bringing a celebrity DJ, and we will also feature a gaming room with a variety of online and offline games (if you are interested in demo’ing, contact jlogo at earthlink.net or heather at techcrunch.com).

Among other surprises at the event, you’ll see the famous Richter Scales make a return performance. We’ve commissioned them to write a special song just for the Crunchies.

You can also buy tickets through our awesome blog co-hosts GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider and VentureBeat.

Thank you to the following companies who have stepped up to help sponsor the 2008 Crunchies Awards: Amiando, Charles River Ventures, Mayfield, Microsoft, MySpace, Media Temple and UStream. If you would like to add your name to that list and be part of something special, contact jlogo at earthlink.net or heather attechcrunch.com. There are many creative ways to show your support and help us recognize innovation and entrepreneurship in tech.

Look for final nominations later this week.

See you all soon!

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18:09
Twilight And PostSecret Top MySpace Lists For 2008. (Taylor Swift and Mobsters Do Okay Too).
» TechCrunch

Following in the tradition of Google’s Zeitgeist and Yahoo’s list of top searches, MySpace has put together its “Top 8’s of 2008″, detailing some of the most popular artists, songs, searches, performers, and blogs on the social network in the last year.

The biggest winner overall seems to be Twilight - the vampire flick that took the world by storm earlier this winter ranked highest in terms of overall searches on MySpace as well as for the movie trailer category. Other popular search terms are unsurprisingly entertainment oriented (and stand in contrast to popular searches on Google and Yahoo, many of which were focused on the election and the Olympics).

The report also indicates which songs have fared best on MySpace’s massively popular music streaming service, which has streamed billions of songs in few months since it launched. Oddly enough, only two of the most searched-for artists on MySpace Music were in the top 8 for songs streamed, which means that some of these artists aren’t converting their popularity into listeners as well as they could be.

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17:24
Twitter Humiliates MySpace
» TechCrunch

Google Friend Connect launched with Twitter this morning, a big win for Google in the fight for control over user logins on third party sites. Recent speculation was that Twitter would be partnering with Facebook to integrate Connect first.

Twitter quickly corrected stories, telling reporters that they’ll soon integrate with Facebook Connect, too. Twitter CEO Evan Williams even Tweeted about it, saying “For the record: Twitter did not “choose Google, not Facebook.” We’re working with both. We have more to do on the FB side before launch.”

But, er, hey Twitter, what about MySpace? You know, the company that you agreed to launch with back in May? Here, this screen shot may jog your memory.

But Twitter is dead silent on their MySpace relationship. No mention of it in Evan’s twitter message. No response to my email asking for their current position on MySpace. Just silence.

MySpace isn’t much help either. All they’ll say is “Twitter has been a valuable strategic partner in defining the MySpaceID program. We continue to work collaboratively with Twitter and will share more news on MySpaceID implementation specifics when we have it.”

Which is sort of like saying nothing at all.

Update: Twitter’s Evan Williams responds “Yes, [we are integrating with MySpace]. The onus is on us currently to apply the engineering resources.” He actually said “Yes, all of the above. The onus is on us currently to apply the engineering resources.” But I take that to mean he’s integrating with MySpace given my question.

Update 2: Biz Stone made it even clearer on the Twitter blog that the company is working on its MySpace integration as well. In a post titled “Let’s All Be Friends,” he explains:

Twitter plans to integrate with the open initiatives offered by our friends at MySpace, Facebook, and Google. We officially announced our intent to work with MySpace back in May because we believe strongly in offering the exchange of public information between our complimentary services.

Yesterday, Google included Twitter in their Friend Connect program which means folks can stay connected with their Twitter network on web sites that have activated the service. This particular integration did not require effort on our part so it was a quick win for folks who use Twitter and want to connect on participating web sites.

Integrating with MySpace as well as Facebook Connect will require some development effort on our part. Now that we have 13 software engineers working at Twitter and our reliability continues to improve we’re getting closer to integrating with your favorite social networks.

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17:16
Tales From The Deadpool: Wallop Comes Back As Coveroo
» TechCrunch

For some startups, there is life after the deadpool. Take Wallop, a social-network-turned-social-app company that dove under in September, only to now arise again as Coveroo. Wallop still had some money from the $13 million it raised in 2005 and 2006, but its business wasn’t working. It’s original idea was to sell virtual “self expression” items through its own social network. It ended up creating animated greeting card and party invite apps for Facebook. Rest in peace.

CEO Karl Jacob isn’t giving up, though. He is just moving in a different direction, away from virtual goods and towards customizing real consumer devices. Using mostly its stock, Wallop acquired Etchstar, a custom engraver that specializes in laptops, iPods, and cell phones. And now it is relaunching as Coveroo, which is making it even easier to personalize your digital devices. All you do is order a back cover to your existing cell phone, pick a design, and they send it to you.

If you want to pimp your cell phone cover this Christmas, check out the designs at Coveroo. Starting at about $20, you can order a cell phone cover for your Blackberry, Motorola, Samsung, or LG engraved with one of 250 different designs. These range from tattoo-like patterns and silhouettes to comic characters and brand logos. (Sorry iPhone owners: No cover, no Coveroo).

At least Coveroo now has a clear business model, and a pretty cool product. Coveroo is taking submissions from artists and also does corporate logos. The five best ideas for new designs or new product extensions in comments will get a Coveroo with a TechCrunch logo.

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15:57
Yahoo Mail’s New App Platform: A Boon for Xoopit and Other Productivity Add-Ons
» TechCrunch

Xoopit, the email-enhancement service that helps you locate files, images and videos in your inbox, is getting a potentially big shot in the arm with the launch of Yahoo Mail’s application platform today.

Previously, Xoopit was only available to Gmail users who were proactive enough to install a Firefox plugin. But with the opening up of Yahoo Mail, Xoopit will now have more immediate access that webmail service’s 275 million monthly global users. And the company won’t have to hijack Yahoo Mail to do it, as it has essentially done with Gmail - Xoopit will be presented nicely in a Yahoo application gallery for easy installation.

This may be the opportunity for Xoopit to transform itself from a neat plugin into a widely-used tool that many people learn they can’t live their digital lives without. And we can expect many other productivity tools to follow suit, since Yahoo Mail’s application platform is focused more on serious tasks than finding better ways to poke your friends, which is often the case on social networks like Facebook. WordPress is another example of a productivity tool that hopes that to spur more usage by grabbing users’ attention during their daily (or hourly) email routine.

Xoopit is still exploring paths to profitability but says that Yahoo is exceedingly open to discussing ways that developers can monetize its platform. Details aren’t available yet on how Yahoo plans to do this exactly, but Yahoo may allow developers to display advertisements within Yahoo Mail and even offer to split revenue on their own advertisements somewhere down the road.

Google has yet to open Gmail to developers, although its Gmail Labs platform suggests that it will get there in time. AOL has also begun to open up.

On the flip side, startups like Zenbe and Postbox should be getting worried right about now.

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15:56
The Extraordinary Happenings At BitTorrent
» TechCrunch

“I have never seen anything like this” said a corporate law partner at a large silicon valley law firm. He was referring to the undoing of a $17 million venture round at BitTorrent and subsequent recapitalization that we reported yesterday.

In one board action, $10 million was removed from the company’s bank account and the valuation slashed from $177 million to just $35 million.

Recapitalizations, where existing stockholders are crammed down to near zero equity in anticipation of a new round of financing at a lower valuation, are common. Particularly in down markets. Old investors are forced to put in new capital to maintain their ownership. New stock options are awarded to current employees. Anyone who’s left the company, even founders, are left with nothing. Even though they’ve often paid hard cash to exercise stock options.

Recaps are the only way to make bloated startups that have run out of cash healthy again. But they only happen when a company is desperate for cash and has no other options. The reason is clear - the board of directors has a fiduciary duty to protect stockholders. Recapitalizations are not good for existing stockholders, and can only be approved when the company has no other choice.

But what happened at BitTorrent wasn’t a standard recapitalization. Nothing about the BitTorrent reorganization was standard, in fact. The company, which laid off more than 2/3 of staff (65 to 19 employees), had over $20 million in the bank before this transaction, says a source close to the company. They weren’t generating much revenue from toolbar and device installations - just $5 million or so annually - but at least the company had plenty of runway left.

In other words, the fiduciary duty of the board of directors to the stockholders of BitTorrent was almost certainly disregarded.

The letter to stockholders said that “DAG claimed that the Series C financing should be substantially renegotiated.” But our sources say that Accel was the firm to insist on the change, forced the decision on everyone else, and let DAG take the fall. Why did DAG allow that to happen? The firm’s whole investment thesis is to follow top tier firms like Accel and Sequoia, investing in later rounds at higher valuations. They have to keep these top firms happy. As a result, they are effectively a whipping boy when someone has to be held publicly responsible for unpopular actions.

But the real question about the recap is why the board of directors let it happen. The board has a strict fiduciary duty to protect stockholders. That didn’t happen here, since all existing stockholders were effectively wiped out by the recap.

So why did the board vote for this extraordinary transaction? Two of the board members, Ping Li (Accel) and David Chao (DCM), are investors in the company and stood to gain financially from the rescission and recap. CEO Erik Klinker is an Accel man, having previously worked at Accel-funded Internap. That leaves founder Bram Cohen, founder Ashwin Navin and outside director Brad Templeton.

Navin voted against the transaction. Templeton voted for it, but refused to comment when I asked him why he felt this was in the best interest of the company and it’s stockholders. Cohen also voted for the transaction, and as the majority holder of common stock he was a necessary vote. Without him, the transaction would not have happened.

So why did Cohen agree to vote for the transaction? Speculation abounds, but one aspect of the transaction is suspicious. The term sheet calls for $750,000 to be spent buying back shares from common stock holders. That mostly means Cohen, who is reportedly getting the lion’s share of the 30% of the company put aside for current employees. Cohen, who has recently had highly publicized financial troubles, may have simply been bought off.

There’s no other reason for the stock buyback. If the company is in a dire enough financial situation to warrant an unprecedented rescission of a $17 million financing, then money that’s left sure as hell shouldn’t be spent in payouts to founders.

BitTorrent and Accel will not respond to requests for comment. Everyone is keeping quiet. For now.

CrunchBase Information BitTorrent Information provided by CrunchBase
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15:33
What Holiday TV Show Will You Turn Off? Win a TV-B-Gone
» TechCrunch

I'm not suggesting we turn off old Rudolph here, but which holiday TV show or movie would you turn off at your next holiday get-together? The Charlie Brown special? That very special Christmas episode of Scrubs? Fox News? Answer and win a TV-B-Gone just in time for CES.
13:59
Yahoo Announces Next Steps in Open Strategy
» TechCrunch

Yahoo has invited the press to an event in San Francisco today where it will announce the next steps in its open strategy (details found here).

As GigaOm speculated over the weekend, we should be hearing details about the deployment of applications on Yahoo Mail. We’ll post the details here as they become available, starting within the next few minutes.

WordPress CEO Toni Schneider is here, along with someone from Xoopit, which suggests that both companies will have integrations to announce.

The event has begun. We’re told that today’s announcements will be primarily about how the open strategy adds value for the end consumer, with a focus on several product launches (from both Yahoo and its developer partners). Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo, Yahoo Toolbar and Yahoo’s media properties will all benefit from “openness” enhancements today.

Yahoo Mail will get a new open, social inbox. My Yahoo will receive an upgrade. And the media properties to become more open include Yahoo Music.
Yahoo Mail
Yahoo Mail has 275 million montly global users worldwide according to ComScore. It pulls together email, instant messaging, and SMS.

The new, smarter inbox will help users prioritize the email messages that matter the most to them. It will also help users perform tasks without pulling them out of Yahoo Mail (such as viewing photos and invitations from non-Yahoo services). The two key buzzwords Yahoo is using are “social” and “open” to describe their overall strategy with Mail.

Yahoo is showing us a demo. There are applications in the sidebar for Flixster, Flickr, Photos by Xoopit, Family Journal, and WordPress. The “Welcome” dashboard shows messages, invitations, and “updates” from the people that matter to users most. The dashboard also displays “invitations to connect” (evidently, once connected with someone, their actions will begin showing up on your dashboard because they will have deemed important to you).

When you view your inbox, you can choose to view messages from just your “connections”, letting you filter out all of the email that ostensibly means less to you. Contacts (which includes everyone in your address book) are different than connections, which are suggested by Yahoo’s algorithm and explicitly identified by users. Invitations to connect are either generated by Yahoo’s algorithm or sent manually by your contacts.

Connections appear to be like “friendships” on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, but Yahoo is insisting that the relationships will be used in a variety of ways not found on traditional social networks (such as this mail filtering).

Six applications for Yahoo Mail are launching today. Four are from third-party developers (Flixster, Xoopit, Flickr, and WordPress) and two are from Yahoo (Yahoo Greetings and Family Journal). We’re going to get a demo of three of these applications.

If you click on the Flickr application, you’ll see all of your Flickr photos, which can then be easily dropped into a new email message.

The Xoopit applications will “mine” all of your photos in Yahoo Mail (back from when the service began) and surface them in an easily browsable interface. The photos include not only the photos that have been attached explicitly to your archived email messages; Xoopit also follows links to galleries hosted elsewhere and brings them in as well. These photos, as with Flickr, can be shared easily by entering an email address and message. Xoopit was the Yahoo Open Hack winner.

With the WordPress application, you can easily convert an email message into a blog post. Just drag the message onto the WordPress icon and it will convert the email subject line and body into a blog post title and content.

Yahoo says that its efforts in opening up Mail have been influenced by Zimbra’s philosophy but is not necessarily based on Zimbra code.

Certain social features (welcome tab enhancements related to Connections and Updates) launch in the United States and Australia today. US users are required to have a new profile.

The open applications will begin limited beta testing in the United States today at beta.mail.yahoo.com (Note: that address will only work for users who have been explicitly asked to participate in the testing).

Yahoo plans to fully integrate all of these social and open features in the first half of 2009.
Yahoo Homepage
Yahoo is now discussing changes to so-called “front doors” to its services, such as the homepage, toolbar and My Yahoo. These front doors are being made personalizable to become “more relevant” to users.

The bottom third of the homepage has been “lopped off” because Yahoo wants to focus on the few tasks that users commonly perform on a daily basis. The left sidebar aggregates things like email, stocks, weather, and eBay listings. In the future, this area might show updates from places like Twitter and Facebook, viewable inline. The sidebar is the “centerpiece” of what is being done on Yahoo.

Yahoo Toolbar
Yahoo’s new toolbar displays which Yahoo applications you use wherever you go on the web. The applications are listed in a dropdown menu called “My Apps”. A “My Notifications” area displays the activity of all your friends on Yahoo. And a “Mail Boxes” tab shows your mail from any service you use (Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etc).

The search box now has Inquisitor-like suggestions and allows you to do specified searches, like all “Barack Obama” searches on Flickr. Code from Inquisitor (which Yahoo acquired in May) is being used here.

The new toolbar will be available in beta within the week.
My Yahoo
Today, application integration and a new theme API will be released for My Yahoo. You will also be able to view your friends’ activity across Yahoo’s property.

The new applications will be listed under “Add Content” in a section called Open Apps (there appear to be eleven of these apps available right now). One such application is “Addicted to House” from app developer Watercooler that shows a quote of the day and trivia of the day. You can also view a full-length episode of House from within the application.

The theme API lets you and your friends create new themes and then send them to each other.

Yahoo TV and Yahoo Music
You can now see updates from your friends on Yahoo TV. If someone you know comments or rates a movie, you’ll see it in a panel on the Yahoo TV homepage. It’s like a news feed for a particular subject.

The same thing is happening to Yahoo Music, letting you see the music-related activity of your friends. Other services will get the same social feature later down the road.

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13:58
Beta Launch Invites: Kwyno Brings The Web Into Your IM And (Soon) SMS Inboxes
» TechCrunch

For people who live inside their instant messenger clients and SMS text messages on their mobile phones, Kwyno wants to help bridge those worlds with the Web. Kwyno is a simple service developed by Raphael Caixeta out of Boca Raton, Florida that launches in private beta today. We have 200 invites here.

Kwyno is very raw at the edges, and needs a lot more feedback before it becomes anywhere near useful, but it points in an interesting direction. You enter commands like “check techcrunch” or “check twitter,” and it returns the latest feed headlines or Twitter stream (after you’ve given the service your Twitter credentials). You can add your own RSS feed here if Kwyno doesn’t support it, but Caixeta is also adding them as fast as he can. (This is a side project for him).

The service can seem a bit pointless at Kwyno itself. After all, it is just bringing in data from other Websites that you could just as easily visit yourself or add to your RSS feed or lifestreaming service. But all the commands also work in IM and, soon, SMS. Kwyno currently supports AIM and Yahoo IM. You add Kwyno as an IM buddy and can bring back headlines and tiny URLs from your favorite feeds and your Twitter account. Its a quick way to check what’s going on without leaving IM. This will be even better via SMS.

Besides checking for updates across the Web, Kwyno also supports a dozen other commands, including the ability to search Google, Digg, YouTube, images, and local listings. You can also send Twitter messages from inside Kwyono, use it as a calculator, look up the weather, or add a task to a Wipee to-do list. The possibilities are pretty much endless. Caixeta can keep adding commands as he dreams them up.

But there is a limit to how many commands most normal humans can remember. Kwyono would be better off concentrating on a few key commands and expanding their applicability. The “check” command is the most important one, for instance, and Kwyno would be much more useful if it supported a much larger list of feeds from the get-go. (Some of the sites it supports now include
CNN, ESPN, TechCrunch, LifeHacker, Gizmodo, Joystiq, and DownloadSquad). Also, when headlines are returned in IM, it would be nice if there was a “more” command to get the next batch.

If you have more suggestions for how Caixeta can improve this service, leave them in comments.

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13:41
CrunchGear’s Best of 2008: Vote Now
» TechCrunch

This Friday, we the editors of CrunchGear will be hosting our Gala Online Awards Ceremony complete with dancing bears, punch, and whirling mirror balls. Until then, we invite you, the reading public, to select your favorite - and least favorite - gear of 2008 in our 2008 People's Choice Awards. Click through to make your end-of-year picks.
12:02
What The Twitter/Google Announcement Means
» TechCrunch

Google’s got a new partner at Friend Connect, their service to let users log in to third party websites with their user credentials from social networks.

Last week at Le Web conference MySpace was doing all the heavy lifting to promote Google Friend Connect. But it turns out Twitter is the first third party service after Plaxo to actually integrate with Google’s new service.

What The New Announcement Means

For users, it just means you can use your Twitter credentials to sign into third party sites like Billboard For The People, and pull in your Twitter friends and some profile information.

But for Twitter, it’s a real change in policy and an illustration of just how much they’ve grown in the last year. Back in May Twitter was seen as a relying party in the Google/MySpace/Facebook war, and they hastily chose MySpace as their partner of choice (Data Availability is now called MySpaceID). In their launch announcement for Data Availability MySpace showed a Twitter log in screen where users were using their MySpace account to access Twitter.

That partnership was never integrated, and MySpace won’t say when or if it will be. But today Twitter is using Google’s infrastructure to push their their own agenda. Twitter is effectively saying they don’t need Facebook’s or MySpace’s help with user registrations. Instead, they can compete head to head with both of them in the race to “own” user identities.

Twitter is coming of age, and this announcement is just one more piece of evidence that they have arrived.

Update: Google emails “Users can sign-in or join a friend connected website using their Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID credentials. The Twitter integration occurs after a user has already signed in, at which point he can (as you mentioned) choose to link his Twitter profile to his Friend Connect profile, see which of the people he follows have joined the same site, and “tweet” back to his followers by clicking “invite” and then clicking “share.”"

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8:00
OpenX Shows Impressive Growth, Ramps Up Revenue Streams
» TechCrunch

OpenX (which used to be called Openads), provider of an open-source ad serving solution for web publishers - we use it at TechCrunch -, is growing like weed under the leadership of former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller, who is the company’s chairman, and ex-Yahoo executive Tim Cadogan who is CEO. According to the company, they’re serving well over 300 billion ad impressions through its software as of this month, while its Hosted product line has achieved a more than 1 billion monthly ad impression run rate.

In August 2008, OpenX announced the launch of version 2.6, an update to its downloadable ad server and introduced a couple of features which spurred usage of the system, including a new API, dashboard and a speedier ad tagging system.

The ad serving solution is getting attention from around the world: its products are used in more than 100 countries and are translated into twenty-five languages by community contributors. The company says its community now counts over 35,000 total publishers that power more than 150,000 websites across the Internet.

OpenX makes money by provide professional services to its publishers, something it started offering only two months ago. In addition, it sells premium support packages and enterprise-level Hosted accounts. A fourth revenue stream currently being tested is OpenX Market, a monetization platform that will essentially be something of an online market place where advertisers and publishers can partner up with each other.

OpenX raised around $20.5 million in funding from Accel Partners, Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. It was originally based in London, but has now moved its main offices to California.

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8:00
Stickam API Lets You Build Your Own Live Video Site
» TechCrunch

Stickam, a live video streaming service that competes with the likes of Justin.tv and Ustream.tv, is releasing a new API that effectively allows anyone to build their own streaming video startup with a minimal amount of effort. The service is normally pay-as-you-go, but the first 100 users to sign up will be able to try it out for free.

StickamAPI allows developers to leverage Stickam’s infrastructure - which handles handles everything from actually hosting videos to bandwidth and streaming - to integrate video streaming into their own sites. While most video services have allowed users to create their own ‘channels’ (typically videos associated with a group or theme) and embed their videos wherever they’d like, the Stickam API allows for much deeper integration of live video streaming.

CEO Steven Fruchter says that live video can be incredibly engaging - Stickam’s site is reporting an average 18 minute staytime for new users to the site, and 70 minutes for those that are logged in. He expects that the new API will appeal to businesses and social networking sites looking to increase their engagement without having to pay and wait to develop their own live video platforms.

It’s a smart move from Stickam, which is likely trying to find a way to differentiate itself from Justin.tv, which continues to lead in this space. Many sites with established communities (like forums or niche social networks) would probably love to offer a tightly integrated video service. That said, live video is very expensive (YouTube has apparently canned its own plans because of bandwidth costs), so the success of StickamAPI will likely come down to its rates and how effectively the live video streams can be monetized.

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7:49
Palm to Show New “Nova” OS at CES 2009
» TechCrunch

Peter Burrows at BizWeek has some hot news about Palm's new OS, Nova. The company hopes to fit their new system in the gap between the BlackBerry and the iPhone (good luck - Microsoft has been trying to do that all year) and they are looking to grab 2% of the middle-range market shere, the range that Google/Android is also gunning for.
"If they can't show me a large, active audience, I'm not going to be interested," says Jeff Holden, CEO of Web 2.0 company Pelago, maker of a social networking tool for the iPhone. "At this point in the game, you're toast unless you have something completely unbelievable."
7:29
Google Starts Blending Web And Shopping Search Results Again
» TechCrunch

Looks like Google is rolling out more tests with integrating results from its Shopping / Product Search engine (former Froogle) in traditional web search queries, right before the start of the holiday period. This isn’t necessarily new (see this WebMasterWorld forum entry from November 2007), but it does appear to be more widespread now. Our tipster says he’s had 5 of his friends test queries like ‘bed sheets’, and they all saw the changes, although sometimes after about a dozen times of hitting ‘Refresh’.

I’m not able to reproduce this, but it might have something to do with the fact that I’m not based in the US. If the images I embedded below are in fact real, this shows Google is getting very serious about creating a nice direct gateway for Google Checkout partners.

(Thanks to Mike Cohen for the tip and the screenshots)

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6:55
YouTube Wants To Bring You To The World Economic Forum In Davos
» TechCrunch
Last year YouTube scored big at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. They had the best space at the conference, with world leaders and celebrities wandering through on the way to the press area (I, on the other hand, flailed).

Attendees and everyone else were asked to create a video and answer the question “What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?” Here’s Bono giving his answer. Henry Kissinger and Shimon Peres were among the others to do so.

This year they’re back with a new format called The Davos Debates. And the best part of it is, whoever creates the best video gets a free all expense paid trip, including a press pass, to the event. This is no small prize. Davos is arguably the most exclusive and interesting conference in the world, and you will have the chance to interact directly, one-on-one, with world leaders.

YouTube users are asked to answer one of four questions:
- Are you confident that global growth will be restored in 2009?
- Will the environment lose out to the economy in 2009?
- Will the Obama administration improve the state of the world in 2009?
- Should company executives have a code of ethics similar to doctors and lawyers?
The winner will be chosen by a panel of experts based on the following criteria: overall originality and creativity, offering tangible solutions and popularity of the video based on views and ratings (so you’ll want to get everyone you can to watch your video).

We will of course be playing favorites with our readers, so if you create a video leave a link in the comments below. We’ll embed the best ones in a post in the coming weeks.

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3:40
Q: What Do You Get When You Add Karate Belts To a Q&A Service? Mahalo Answers.
» TechCrunch

Mahalo is now answering your questions. The human-curated search engine/ condensed wiki guide is adding a Q&A service called Mahalo Answers to its mix. It is a combination of Yahoo Answers and the long-defunct Google Answers, with some cute avatars and virtual currency thrown in. (Disclosure: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is our partner in the TechCrunch50 conference).

Like Yahoo Answers, anyone can ask or answer any question. But Mahalo Answers throws in a twist. If someone really wants to encourage the best answers, they can offer a tip in “Mahalo Dollars,” which can be funded through PayPal and are convertible into real dollars once a member has earned at least 40 of them. For those of you who remember Google Answers, it paired questioners with vetted researchers who found answers for a fee. This is slightly different in that questions are not assigned to a specific researcher. As many people can answer it as they want and all compete for the tip. Furthermore, the tip can be rescinded by the questioner if he or she is not satisfied with any of the answers.

To keep people honest, there is a reputation system. If a tip is withheld, you have to explain why. Reneg on too many tips, and nobody will want to answer any of your questions.

There is also a point system. Calacanis says he was inspired by many of the gaming startups at TechCrunch50, and how they were designed to keep players engaged by getting them to constantly level up. On Mahalo Answers, you get points for asking questions, answering them, providing the “best” answers, as well as adding links and gaining friends. (And guess who is the member with the most points accumulated during the closed beta? Calacanis).

As you get more points, you progress through different belt levels (white, yellow, green, etc.). It’s like a game. The higher belt you have, the more of an “expert” you are. One of the features of the site is that people can ask members direct questions. The more points you have, the more you can charge for your answers. Mahalo takes a 25 percent cut when Mahalo Dollars are converted back into regular currency Calacanis says:

If you can make knowledge into a game and help people make living, it is very powerful.

He considers Mahalo Answers to be the third plank of his company’s strategy, with human-powered search and abbreviated wiki guides being the first two. When someone answers a question, they are encouraged to add links, photos, and videos as part of their answer. Mahalo harvests all of those links, and the best answers become part of its topic guides. “The question and answer service becomes a way to make our guide better,” says Calacanis. That is, if enough people use it.

Mahalo is essentially paying for traffic here, or rather getting its users to pay for traffic. The prospect of making tips from other users will be the main draw for many visitors. The question is: Will that be enough to jumpstart more organic growth by improving upon the Q&A format and seeding the site with some really good answers? Or does Yahoo Answers with its 154 million monthly unique visitors worldwide (comScore) have too much momentum to ever be challenged?

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December 14, 2008
16:17
BitTorrent Recapitalizes: $17 M Financing Undone, Valuation Plummets
» TechCrunch

File sharing service BitTorrent has undone its $17 million financing from earlier this year, we’ve learned from an investor in the company, and that money (or what’s left of it) has been returned to investors DCM, Accel Partners and DAG Ventures.

The company, admitting that the their business was “not gaining sufficient traction,” has closed a new $7 million round of financing from those same investors at a “substantially reduced” valuation of $28 million.

Down valuation rounds are common in tough economic times. But rescinding entire rounds of financing and returning capital to investors isn’t - it’s a sign of significant distress at a startup.

From a letter to shareholders:

In late May and June of this past summer we closed a $17 million Series C financing.
The lead investor in this financing was DAG Ventures. Given the changes in our Company’s business model and projections that occurred in close proximity to the Series C financing, DAG claimed that the Series C financing should be substantially renegotiated. After evaluating DAG’s claim, engaging in significant negotiations with DAG, unsuccessfully trying to raise funds from other sources, and taking into account the overall economy, the Company decided to work with DAG to significantly modify the terms of the Series C financing.

The executive team has also been cut dramatically. Most of the executives listed on this page no longer appear to work for the company (BitTorrent previously announced that Eric Klinker was promoted from CTO to CEO after the resignation of Doug Walker) :

As a result of the foregoing, the Company now employs 19 people, and our executive
officer team consists of the undersigned, Eric Klinker, as CEO, Mitch Edwards as CFO, Bram Cohen as Chief Scientist, Simon Morris as VP of Product Marketing and Ilan Shamir as VP of Engineering.

The founding team has also been diluted to the point that they own a very small percentage of the company. Common stock and stock options account for only 11.4% of the company after the new financing, and much of that is owned by the venture capitalists. Current executives, though, are clearly being topped up. 30% of the newly capitalized company is set aside for new stock options.

The full letter is below, as well as the term sheet for the new financing and the current capitalization table. We’ve emailed BitTorrent with a request for comment.

Letter To Stockholders:

CONFIDENTIAL

Dear BitTorrent Shareholder:

I am writing to inform you of a number of significant developments related to the
Company, including the renegotiation of the terms of the Company’s Series C financing, and to
request your approval of, and to offer you the opportunity to participate in, the revised financing.

Business Update

Last spring the Company was focusing its business efforts on content delivery services
(DNA), embedded software (SDK) and our direct to consumer portal (the Store). Over the
course of the summer it became clear that some of the Company’s businesses were not gaining
sufficient traction, and that the Company would significantly miss its projections. In response,
the Company substantially restructured various product offerings, closed the Store, laid off a
significant number of employees, and made significant changes to our management team.

As a result of the foregoing, the Company now employs 19 people, and our executive
officer team consists of the undersigned, Eric Klinker, as CEO, Mitch Edwards as CFO, Bram
Cohen as Chief Scientist, Simon Morris as VP of Product Marketing and Ilan Shamir as VP of
Engineering.

Series C Financing

In late May and June of this past summer we closed a $17 million Series C financing.
The lead investor in this financing was DAG Ventures. Given the changes in our Company’s
business model and projections that occurred in close proximity to the Series C financing, DAG
claimed that the Series C financing should be substantially renegotiated. After evaluating
DAG’s claim, engaging in significant negotiations with DAG, unsuccessfully trying to raise
funds from other sources, and taking into account the overall economy, the Company decided to
work with DAG to significantly modify the terms of the Series C financing. The modifications
included reducing the amount of the financing from $17 million to $7 million, substantially
reducing the pre-money valuation of the Company to $28 million, and reducing the amount of
the outstanding pre-financing liquidation preference from $38 million to $13 million.

Series C-1/Series C-2 Financing

The terms of the revised financing call for the rescission of the Series C financing and the
sale of $7 million of a new Series C-1 Preferred Stock at a price of $0.32178 per share. The
terms also require the conversion of all of the Company’s pre-financing outstanding Preferred
Stock into Common Stock, and providing shareholders whose Preferred Stock is converted into
Common Stock the opportunity to exchange approximately one-third of such Common Stock
(approximately 2.1 million shares based on a $7 million financing) for a new Series C-2
Preferred Stock at a ratio of approximately 15 shares of new Series C-2 Preferred Stock for each
share of Common Stock being exchanged, if such shareholders participate in the new Series C-1
financing. The new Series C-2 Preferred Stock has a liquidation preference of $0.4196 per share,
resulting in an aggregate liquidation preference of the Series C-2 Preferred Stock of $13 million
(assuming a $7 million financing). The purpose of this Series C-2 Preferred Stock exchange is to
incent current Preferred shareholders to participate in the Series C-1 financing, and to obtain
their agreement to the reduction of their liquidation preference, by providing for them to receive
a higher percentage of the Company than they would otherwise have. We expect that the $7
million raised in this financing will fund the Company’s operations for a minimum of 12 months.

Please note that the financing documents also provide that the Company may use up to
$750,000 of the financing proceeds to repurchase shares of Common Stock from current
Common Stock holders. The Company has not yet decided whether to pursue such possibility.

In connection with the financing John Cadeddu of DAG will be joining the Company’s
Board, and Ashwin Navin has resigned. All directors other than Mr. Navin voted in favor of and
support the financing.

Enclosed is a Summary of Terms describing the Series C-1/C-2 financing in more detail,
together with a pre-financing and post-financing capitalization table.

The Company has already received the commitment of DAG to purchase $2 million in
the Series C-1 financing, and for Accel and DCM, the Company’s other major investors, to
invest an aggregate of $5 million in the financing. The other smaller investor in the Series C
financing, Quilvest, has elected not to participate in this financing. The Company may raise up
to approximately $7.8 million in total if additional shareholders purchase their pro rata portion.

Shareholder Participation

Given the nature of this financing, the Company is providing all shareholders the
opportunity to participate in the financing, to the extent that they can consistent with applicable
securities laws. If you would like to participate in the financing, or would like additional
information on the financing or the Company’s business, please contact the undersigned at (415)
568-[redacted] or [redacted]@bittorrent.com; or Mitch Edwards at (415) 568-[redacted] or
[redacted]@bittorrent.com.

If you are interested in participating in the financing you must notify the Company in writing by January 5, 2009.

Financing Approval

Enclosed is a Shareholder Consent approving this financing, and various related matters
(including a substantial increase in the Company’s stock option plan to allow the Company to
provide appropriate incentive to its new management team). If the proposed transactions and
Consent are acceptable, please sign the Consent and return it to our Company’s law firm,
Fenwick & West, attention Diana Woods at (650) 938-5200 (fax) or dwoods@fenwick.com (by
pdf). Please provide your consent as soon as possible, as we would like to close the initial
closing of this financing in the very near future. We will be holding a second closing in the
future for any shareholders who wish to participate in the financing as described above.

The need for this revised financing is disappointing. That said, the management team
believes that the Company’s prospects are bright with a greatly reduced operational expense
profile, a focus on attaining profitability and a commitment to building value for our
shareholders.

Sincerely,

Eric Klinker
President and CEO

Term Sheet:

DOCS-1990105-v4-Summary_of_Terms_Series_C-1_BitTorrent - Free Legal Forms

Capitalization Table:

bitprepostcap - Free Legal Forms

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10:53
The Notorious Sam Sethi Launches His Latest Venture, Twitblogs.
» TechCrunch

Former TechCrunch UK writer Sam Sethi’s newest venture: Twitblogs. The service is targeted towards Twitter users who want to write more than 140 characters, or want to embed images into their posts, etc.

In other words, it’s a feature-poor but usability-rich blogging service similar to Tumblr and others. Users actually don’t even create accounts. Instead they log in with their Twitter credentials. And any posts created on the site are automatically posted to Twitter as well to get extra exposure. So heavy Twitter users can use Twitter for the quick messages and Twitblogs for the longer stuff, and everything flows into Twitter automatically.

Generally I like services like this, which are created on the cheap and put out there for users to try out. Some survive to funding, most fade away. But in this case the service has serious founder baggage to deal with as well.

Sethi’s previous startup, Blognation, folded a year ago and left writers and employees unpaid for months of work. We’ve had our own unpleasant issues with Sethi as well, all documented here. Some of his former writers have accused him of fraud and other crimes.

None of this matters that much for users. Except that they must type their Twitter credentials directly into Twitblog to test the service. That’s iffy at the best of times. But when a service is run by someone who’s shown questionable ethical behavior in the past, it’s a non-starter. The service also lacks terms of use and a privacy policy, so users won’t know how their private information may be used, sold or exploited.

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9:20
So How Much Time Do You Waste On Twitter?
» TechCrunch

Making the rounds quickly on Twitter this weekend is Tweetwasters, a site that gives you an idea of how much time you’re really ‘wasting’ posting messages and status updates to the popular micro-sharing service. Users are calculating away and tweeting about it, ironically spending even more time on Twitter (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

There’s even a WordPress plugin that lets you show off your Twitter usage stats to your blog visitors, and if you try hard you might just make the Tweetwasters Hall Of Fame.

Tweetwasters estimates that a user spends about 30 seconds on creating a Tweet on average, which I think is a bit long. They multiply that by the number of Twitter messages you have produced and they provide you with the approximate number of seconds, minutes, hours or days of your life you have spent on Twitter. Of course, I assume most people spend more time reading tweets than writing them, so it’s probably way more than Tweetwasters will ever be able to tell you.

The service was obviously built for fun (by Sugarrae and ITCN), but there’s an application called Wakoopa that actually tracks your software usage continuously and provides you with a good overview of what you use the most (both for desktop and web applications) and tells you what other software you might find useful.

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0:40
SwissCom Tries To Deflect Criticism Of Le Web Internet Failure
» TechCrunch

I’m going to put aside my differences with the Le Web conference and organizer Loic Le Meur for a moment to address another issue at the event: the complete lack of Internet connectivity, both days.

A good conference has at least three separate connections. One is for the audience and has both wifi coverage and as many ethernet cables as can be managed logistically. A separate ethernet connection should be reserved for the stage to ensure that demos go smoothly. And a final connection should be reserved for the press room so that bloggers and journalists can file reports even if the main audience connection goes down (as an aside, the press room should also have a simulcast of the stage so that press can work from there and cover the event real time). A fourth connection should be dedicated to livestreaming the event (Ustream was doing that at Le Web).

Le Web, which paid €100,000 to Swisscom to ensure lightning fast Internet, had no Internet connectivity. Nothing for the audience, nothing for the stage, nothing in the press room. Ustream had 50% connectivity, and lost some great footage.

Day 1 was a complete writeoff and I left mid day to work from my hotel. On day two there was some connectivity reported by a few people, but I wasn’t able to get access to the Internet until after the event was over.

Le Meur apologized to attendees. Beyond that, there was really nothing he could do. He contracted with Swisscom to take care of Internet access, and Swisscom failed to provide that service. Once the event started, all he could really do was beg them to get it right. They never did.

We had the same problems at TechCrunch50 (day one Internet was a write off, although we had a stage connection). We’ve settled with our provider and agreed not to trash them publicly, so I won’t name the service. But we will never do business with them again.

I was planning on letting this go and not writing about it. But today Swisscom, instead of simply apologizing, denied the problem (translated version here):

Swisscom spokesman Sepp Huber media that the high demands of users and the organizer could not be met. Swisscom is currently analyzing the causes. Huber, however like to stress that contrary to the connectivity different reports about 80% of the two day event was ensured and on the second day of the conference almost worked smoothly.

This is, to put it bluntly, a lie. A complete and total fabrication. And there are 1,700 people who attended the event that can verify this (here’s one!). There was no connectivity during the event, I was not able to blog a word from the conference hall or the press room. There was not 80% coverage. Things most definitely did not “almost work smoothly.” Things didn’t work at all.

In addition to managing the media side of things with outright fictions like the one above, Swisscom will be negotiating with Le Web on the fee. Part of it was undoubtedly paid up front. Whatever Le Web still owes them will be negotiated down.

But forget the €100,000. Swisscom’s actions damaged Le Web considerably. Sponsors and presenters were also damaged because they couldn’t show their content on stage, and press couldn’t cover the news. I wouldn’t be surprised if some sponsors refused to pay their agreed fees.

In a perfect world Swisscom would be writing a check to Le Web for 10x the fee they tried to charge, just to make them whole. But I’m guessing the company included a standard limitation of liability clause in their contract with Le Web. That isn’t bulletproof. Grossly negligent behavior, which is exactly what happened, would likely nullify the limitation. But that would require hiring lawyers and going to court, which is a nightmare and won’t happen.

This is something we think about a lot at TechCrunch, because so many conferences have bad connectivity, and we need to make it perfect at TechCrunch50 next year. There’s a real business here if a large company can get it right and is willing to put a guarantee in place to conference organizers. They can charge almost anything - I’m sure Loic would have paid €200,000 if that’s what it took to get proper Internet for attendees. If they can build a reputation for reliability, and are willing to back up that reputation with a liquidated damages clause for failure in the range of, say, 5x the fee they charge, then I imagine every conference that could would hire them.

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December 13, 2008
22:47
Microsoft Dips Its Toe Into The iPhone With Seadragon Mobile
» TechCrunch

Microsoft apparently isn’t going to ignore the iPhone completely. They released a Seadragon application for the iPhone today that lets users “infinitely zoom” on high quality images with near zero transition times. The embed below shows Seadragon in action, and the experience on the iPhone is very similar.

We’ve covered Seadragon applications like TouchWall and pptPlex previously, and in March Microsoft built it into Silverlight.

You can browse a few photosets included in the application or add your own content from Photosynth or any RSS feed.

Get the application at this iTunes link. More on the excellent 148apps.

Seadragon.embed("383px", "300px", "http://seadragon.com/content/images/milwaukee.dzi", 15497, 5378, 255, 0, "jpg");

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19:43
uvLayer Updates Its Enhanced Media Sharing Webtop
» TechCrunch

uvLayer, a startup that has built an intuitive webtop for sharing YouTube videos and other media, has launched the latest version of its site which introduces a host of new features, including support for more IM networks and Flickr search. uvLayer has slipped under our radar until now, but their product is impressive, allowing users to search for and organize media much as they would on their computer’s desktop.

These ‘desktops in the cloud’ (called canvases by the service) can be made public, allowing users to browse through the media you’ve collected in an organized manner. These canvases are useful for purposes beyond pure entertainment - for example, teachers can organize videos into appropriate lessons folders for their students.

uvLayer also includes support for sharing individual videos over IM. The site has integrated with major chat networks including AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and Gtalk, making it a simple process of checking off user names when you’d like to share a movie clip or photo with some of your friends.

The company first launched in January with an application based on Adobe’s AIR platform, but soon moved on to develop a version that could be run directly in the browser with Flash. The AIR app is still available, but doesn’t add much beyond allowing users to watch movies outside of their browsers (there’s also some integration with Facebook, but this functionality will likely be coming to the Flash version soon).

In the future the company hopes to adapt its technology to touch screens and to a wider array of devices. But for now, it still has some work to do - while the interface is great, the selection of content sources is very small (sites beyond YouTube and Flickr will be integrated in future releases). It would also be nice if the site supported user-uploaded content (everything on your webtop currently has to be hosted elsewhere).

There are a few other sites working on similar webtop interfaces, including Wixi, a TechCrunch40 company covered here.

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15:25
Le Web’s Response To TechCrunch: Censorship
» TechCrunch

As a response to my on-stage comments and this post about entrepreneurial culture in Europe, Le Web organizer Loic Le Meur is asking readers if I should be “invited back at Le Web next year.”

As of the writing of this post, nearly 2/3 of respondents say no, I should not be invited to return.

If that’s how the European startup community wants to deal with criticism, C’est la vie. We sent five writers to Le Web this year to cover the startups presenting there and other tech news. Perhaps next year we’ll send none.

But I do think this is a dangerous precedent. If journalists, bloggers and speakers know that they may be punished for what they say on stage, you can’t expect a genuine dialog to occur. There is a chilling effect to merely ask if someone should be punished for expressing opinions that some find objectionable. Will the Guardian also be ejected next year for calling the event boring and reporting that there was no Internet connectivity or heat?

I expected more from the European community.

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3:35
Joie De Vivre: The Europeans Are Out To Lunch
» TechCrunch

I write this from a hotel room at Newark airport in New Jersey. I’m half way home from a wonderful week in Paris at the Le Web conference where I mingled with 1,700 or so attendees. My mood: jetlagged, sated and cranky.

My week was spent in luxury. I was treated to a business class flight to Paris, a stay at one of the nicest hotels in the city, and at least three of the best meals I’ve had since the last Le Web conference in 2007. I’m still a little dazed after a five hour, fourteen course dinner last night at Restaurant Guy Savoy, my first foray into a Michelin three star restaurant, for example. A fleet of Peugeots sallied us across town. Europe is more formal than Silicon Valley, so I wore a suit each day to the conference. In all, an atypical week for me in every way (jeans, tshirt, Jet Blue and Motel 6 is how I roll on most of my trips).

Life is good in Paris.

The conference agenda was packed with excellent content. There were a few well documented logistical hiccups (there was effectively no Internet connectivity either day, and the venue was cold). But apart from that Le Web was a success.

As an American I found that I was treated more warmly than any time I’ve visited Europe in the last few years. Obama is on deck, and the Euros like him. America is cool again.

But Europe’s persistent background pessimism was out in full force, even at an event full of entrepreneurs. Americans dominated the stage and spoke mostly about the tremendous opportunities that arise in down markets. Engineers are much easier to hire. The press have fewer startups and stories to divide their attention. The pond certainly gets smaller, but there are far fewer people fishing, too. For most startups, this is a time to blossom.

The last session at Le Web was a live Gillmor Gang It will be posted soon but you can watch it below, care of Ustream. At about the 14 minute mark a discussion of Europe v. Silicon Valley erupts.

Conference organizer Loic Le Meur (a French entrepreneur who moved to Silicon Valley for his most recent startup Seesmic) says that Silicon Valley moves too fast, and that Europeans enjoy a good two hour lunch just to experience the joy of life.

My response, at about 17:40: the joy of life is great, but all these two hour lunches over a bottle or two of great wine and general unwillingness to do whatever it takes to compete and win is the reason why all the big public Internet companies are U.S. based. And those European startups that do manage to break through cultural and tax hurdles and find success are quickly gobbled up by those U.S. companies. Skype (acquired by eBay) and MySQL (acquired by Sun) are recent examples.

The crowd jeered but the stark reality of it all is unavoidable. And the fact that the panelists on stage, all either American or living in America, suggested that you can somehow succeed with a startup while maintaining a healthy work-life balance is unfortunate. Too many people choose to be entrepreneurs as a lifestyle, without realizing that it takes everything you have and more to win. And if you aren’t in it to win, why not just take that nice job down the street that gives you five weeks of vacation.

Two hour lunches are great. But when you have investors to answer to and employees (and their families) to provide for, something has to give. Perhaps that’s why many of Europe’s hardest charging and most successful entrepreneurs tend to move to Silicon Valley, where they are surrounded by like minded people.

The panelists would have better served the audience by urging them to help shift European culture to be more supportive of their entrepreneurs. These people need a fighting chance to survive, and just telling them what they want to hear isn’t helpful. Joie de vivre is fine once you’ve sold that startup and have a summer house in the south of France. In the meantime, get to work. Le Web needs more Europeans on stage next year, and it just may be you up there telling the world how you overcame European culture and grew a successful company.

Update: An offended Le Meur asks his readers if I should not be invited back after I expressed these opinions on stage and in this post. My response is here.

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December 12, 2008
23:03
iFart And Pull My Finger Battle To Stink Up The App Store. Please Keep These Under Control, Apple.
» TechCrunch

Earlier today we learned that Apple had decided to allow a new genre of apps into the app store with the release of Pull My Finger, a humorous but simple application that emits predictably nasty sounds whenever users pull on a virtual finger. The application was intitally rejected by Apple, sparking debate over the seemingly arbitrary standards it was using in its approval process. Today’s policy shift sets the stage for imitators looking to build on the irreverent success of Pull My Finger, and we’ve already got our next contender in the battle for flatulence supremacy. It’s called iFart, and while it’s an improvement over Pull My Finger, I seriously hope this isn’t the start of a new trend.

First, the apps themselves: while Pull My Finger has the basics down, it doesn’t do much beyond playing embarrassing noises when prompted to. iFart builds on this by adding a ’stealth’ feature, allowing users to set off their ticking timebombs after a set amount of time. They can also enable a “security” feature that plays one of the noises whenever the phone is moved.

Don’t get me wrong - both applications are funny, and I’ll probably use them to play a prank or two over the holidays. But I fear that developers will now flood the App Store with similar juvenile apps looking to make a quick buck, and we’ll see iFarts and Pull My Fingers overwhelm the Top App lists and overtake the genuinely useful apps like Shazam.

Left alone, the market might let most of these immature apps fade into obscurity within a few weeks (note that not a single ‘lighter’ app is present on the Top Apps list anymore, despite the fact that there are at least 15 of them available). Then again, iBeer is still ranked #5 after over five months. The general population has a seemingly insatiable appetite for dumb shit (remember what happened when Facebook Platform first launched?), and it would be a shame if the some of the App Store’s prized Top Spots were sacrificed for an endless rotation of dumb.

Apple made the right move by letting these onto the store - censorship is a slippery slope, and there’s a place for immature and adult content. But, as with the recently released NC-17 tags, Apple should consider making a tag for ‘Silly Apps’. Give them their own place on the store (perhaps even a Top 5 on the front page), or continue to tweak the store’s layout, but don’t let them overwhelm the apps that add real value to the iPhone.
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22:38
Android Market Comments Are the Best
» TechCrunch

One of the great things about Android Market is that you can see what everyone has to say about the applications they've downloaded. Very useful in figuring out if you should really download that app called "Alien Blood Bath" or just avoid it all together. The system, however, is slightly flawed. It appears that no one is really moderating these comments, and they usually end up turning into heated debates on the most futile of topics. So, rather than let these little gems go to waste, we've run into the middle of the battle, and emerged somewhat unscathed with loads of half-baked comments for everyone to enjoy.
19:48
MIT students build mobile applications in 13 weeks
» TechCrunch

MIT professor Hal Abelson started today’s final presentation for the school’s “Building Mobile Applications” class by saying, “A course like this couldn’t have existed ten years ago… maybe not even a year ago. Courses like this right now are unique, but in two years they’ll be completely ordinary.” What’s extraordinary is that on top of a full college course-load at one of the most challenging schools in the country, these groups of students built fully working mobile applications for Windows Mobile, Android, and Symbian devices while mentors from the likes of Google, Nokia, Bank of America, and Microsoft oversaw their progress.
18:52
Interview with Qik Co-Founder Bhaskar Roy: Competition, iPhone, and Android
» TechCrunch

This morning I had the opportunity to have a chat with Bhaskar Roy, Co-Founder and VP of Product Management of Qik, a popular live video casting application available on most major mobile platforms. It’s not the first time we’ve interviewed him but, with competition at an all time high, I figured it was time to check back in.

The interview was conducted over IM and later formatted to fit within the traditional Q&A structure.
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17:44
Tech Layoffs Surge Past 100,000
» TechCrunch

After a lull around Thanksgiving, December has seen some of the biggest layoffs in the tech industry yet since the economy entered its tailspin in the fall. Our Layoff Tracker is now past 100,000 lost jobs (109,629, as of this writing) across nearly 300 different technology and media companies both large and small. To put this in perspective, Citigroup alone announced 52,000 layoffs in November, and across the U.S. economy, just counting September and October, there were nearly 500,000 unemployment claims as a result of mass layoffs (data isn’t in yet for November or December).

December, though, has seen no let-up in the number of tech jobs being eliminated. Sony announced 8,000 layoffs on Tuesday, AT&T topped that with 12,000 the week before, and Alacatel-Lucent added another 1,000 today. Yahoo’s previously announced layoffs of 1,500 employees took effect this week, and Cnet saw the brunt of the estimated 275 layoffs across CBS interactive (although other units, such as Last.fm, were not spared).

Pink slips were also passed out at Divx (21), Silicon Graphics (160), and Sandisk (300). But the single worst day so far was December 4th, when 18,816 tech jobs disappeared. Most of those (12,000) came from AT&T, but on that day layoffs hit Real Networks (130), IBM Japan (2,500), Viacom (850), NBC (500), and Careerbuilder (300)

If you know of any layoffs at a tech company, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article. (For those more interested in who is hiring, check out our job board).

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17:22
Why We Need to Go Digital This Holiday
» TechCrunch

What I'm about to say will anger a lot of CE manufacturers, but this has been the laziest year in consumer electronics to date and I'm recommending that rather than spending money on the boring stuff that has come out in 2008 we all spend our money on digital media - games, music, audiobooks, ebooks, and the like. And I don't mean digital Blu-Ray and game disks, either. I mean all bits, all season.
17:20
Elevator Pitch Friday: Duck Duck GO, The Hybrid Search Engine
» TechCrunch

It’s Elevator Pitch Friday, which means another startup has created a video that’s worth showing you. This week’s presentation comes from Duck Duck Go, a start-up that wants to make it easier for you to find what it is that you are looking for on the Internet.

Duck Duck Go combines a search engine’s algorithmic search technology with Wikipedia’s user generated content. They argue that the combination of these two technologies makes it quicker and easier for people to find what they want on the Internet.

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17:12
JumpStart’s Virtual World Teaches Kids While They’re Busy Having Fun
» TechCrunch

When it comes to educational software, the trick is to make kids think they’re just playing a traditional escapist game, while they’re really being surreptitiously fed facts and logic problems that put their brains to work. But while many games have done this for years, the technique hasn’t really made the jump to online virtual worlds - most of the kid-friendly virtual worlds are more focused on socializing and having fun than learning. Now JumpStart, a best-selling educational software developer, is looking to fill this niche with its new JumpStart Virtual World, which launched this week in public beta.

The game has high production values, with rich 3D graphics, customizable avatars, and a large world to explore. The game is browser-based, and works on both Mac and Windows with a small browser plugin. The current release offers 5 themed zones, each of which is filled with games designed to entertain and teach at the same time (examples include a Story game, which requires the child to play a memory matching game as they attempt to find all of the parts of their story book). Each game also tracks the child’s progress, and allows parents to receive periodic updates via Email detailing how their kids are doing.

The JumpStart virtual world is broken into three main segments, each targeted towards a different age range. At launch the only one available is Story Land (for ages 3-5), but Adventure Land (6-8’s) and Futureland (8-10’s) will be opening up in March or April 2009. The game is free to try out and lets kids play in one of the world’s themed zones, but to access the majority of the content families will need to pay a $7.99 monthly subscription fee (the fee is per family, not per child, and also includes access to JumpStart’s library of retail games).

But while JumpStart’s world is loaded with content, at this point it doesn’t take full advantage of its online connectivity. To keep kids as safe as possible the game doesn’t allow for much socialization between avatars (an understandable restriction, especially with the 3-5 year-old set). But at launch there’s only one multiplayer game, though JumpStart exec Thomas Swalla says more are on the way. If JumpStart is going to be charging monthly dues, it needs to do more to separate itself from a standard off-line game. That said, in my testing the game was surprisingly fun (even though I am admittedly well outside the target audience), and could easily be a hit with kids.

Also check out Handipoints, a virtual world that tries to get kids to do their chores.

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15:46
Zentact Wants to Turn You Into A Super-Connector (Invites)
» TechCrunch

There is something about great sales people or deal makers that is entirely social. They are connectors, as Malcolm Gladwell calls them—people who know the interests, skills, and needs of everyone in their social or business circle and connects them together. If you are really good at this, like Sidney Weinberg (a legend who helped build Goldman Sachs), you are a super-connector.

Zentact has the modest goal to help you become a super-connector. It has a long way to go before it can do that. But it is starting with the kernel of something that is intriguing. At its core, Zentact is a browser add-on (for Firefox only right now) that helps you read the Web with the interests of your social network in mind. If you want to try it out, we have 500 invites for the private beta (but once you are in, you can invite as many people as you want by sending them a message through Zentact).

Here is what is supposed to happen once you have Zentact all set up. Reading an article about black labs? A box pops up to remind you that your co-editor loves black labs and lets you email him the article with a note right from that page. Run across a blog post that mentions a contact’s company? Same thing happens. You can forward that article or link and make yourself look thoughtful in the same way that setting up automatic birthday reminders in your calendar or Amazon makes you look like you went the extra effort to remember someone’s birthday.

“This is basically a karma points system,” says investor and adviser Eric Marcoullier, the CEO of Gnip. Marcoullier and Zentact co-founders John Sampson and Jared Brandt are all MyBloglog refugees. They founded Zentact with a few hundred thousand dollars. (Howard Lindzon is their biggest angel investor).

Before you can start using Zentact, first it needs to ingest all of your contacts from Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail. Then—and this is its weak point—you have to tag each contact with their interests, company affiliations, and whatnot. That right there almost makes it a non-starter for me. Some people, I realize, will do this obsessive tagging (sales people, recruiters, biz dev types), but not most people. I have 2,318 contacts in Gmail. There is no way I am going to go through and tag those. It would be much better if Zentact could simply get all of this information from one of my existing social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, which already know all of my contacts’ interests and affiliations.

The software, however, does have a saving grace. Whenever you email someone in Gmail, a Zentact box opens up right in the email below the address field where you can add tags and other data in a piecemeal fashion. That makes the process a lot less daunting, and lets you focus on the people you actually are in contact with the most frequently.

Once that is set up, then the Zentact box is supposed to pop up whenever it reads a tag contextually on a page and tell you which contacts you might want to email the link with a thoughtful note. It acts a a surrogate super-connector brain in that way. Explains Marcoullier:

The vast majority of people get information, they process it for internal use, and then move on. Why not build a plugin that reads what you are reading and alerts you to the fact that it might be relevant to someone in your network?

That could be helpful or annoying depending on how often it pops up. You can moderate that based on the tags you use. The actual mechanics of Zentact are still a little bit buggy in my experience (although that could just be my dying computer or the fact that I imported way too many contacts). But this is a rough beta and there is a lot of promise here.

Once you’ve tagged a bunch of contacts, then you can click on each tag at Zentact’s Website and see all the contacts who share a certain interest. This could be great for organizing soccer games or biking trips or a startup, or that matter. It all depends on how good is your personal tag database. How well do you know your contacts and what they are good at?

Zentact will soon add the ability to actually connect like-minded contacts to each other, which is really what super-connectors do. When it does that and can automatically tag your contacts for you, then I’ll really be excited about it. But what I really want is for my existing social networks to do this for me.

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12:28
5 Days of Cleaning Out My Office-Mas: Day 3
» TechCrunch

We have two special gifts for all you today. The Blu-Ray packs have been sent out but if you added me in Twitter you'll have discovered a super secret Blu-Ray pack that I won't mention here. Luckily, we have two great prizes today so get cracking.
12:25
Skimlinks Thinks It Has Solved That Annoying Affiliates Schemes Issue
» TechCrunch

As is often the case, a startup comes up with one idea and then quickly realises there is a better model. UK startup Skimbit started out with a decision-making tool with affiliate links, but has now realised the method used to aggregate those affiliates could be offered to other publishers. Similar schemes leave little room for editorial control, but it’s new Skimlinks off-shoot aggregates 11 affiliate networks and puts publishers - blogs, forums, web apps - in full control, in return for a revenue share.
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12:11
AdSense For Domains Now Available For All US Publishers
» TechCrunch

Any US publisher with a domain name he or she isn’t using (yet) can now squeeze a couple of extra dollars out of it by using Google AdSense For Domains, another way for the search giant to make more money from online real estate and give some of it back to people with parked domains. The company is opening up to ‘English-language AdSense publishers located in North America’ in phases, but says it will soon expand to other regions and languages as well.

If I remember correctly, Google AdSense for Domains has been around for many years under the name ‘Domain Park’, but the program was previously reserved exclusively for owners of domain names wielding in a lot of traffic (1M+ monthly pageviews), up until yesterday. GAFD received a lot of criticism for returning advertisers poor quality traffic in the past, and yesterday’s launch won’t exactly reduce that criticism. You don’t have to be a genius to know this will attract more domain squatters to expand their questionable business. Here’s a step by step guide for advertisers who want to block domain parked sites on Google AdWords.

If anything, this shows Google is scrambling for every penny it can get its hands on these days even if it means lowering their quality standards, but I have to add that I can’t exactly blame them for it either.

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9:52
CrunchGear Reviews the Sonos Bundle 150
» TechCrunch

We've reviewed a lot of home audio solutions, and they all offer different benefits and drawbacks. The big trend is "music everywhere", whether through powerline networking or wirelessly. Most of these products require a specific music source to feed into the system. Sonos brings something rather more complete to the goal of "music everywhere". Read on for the complete review of the Sonos solution.
9:00
Race And The Web: Going After Niche Markets Or Practicing Digital Segregation?
» TechCrunch

This is a guest post by Angela Benton, Founder & Publisher of Black Web 2.0, a site that covers the internet industry from an African-American perspective. It was co-written by Black Web 2.0 General Manager Markus Robinson.

The release of Blackbird, an African American focused web browser sparked quite a bit of controversy this past week. The TechCrunch post about it elicited reactions from both sides of the aisle (it has 275 comments and counting). Some argued for the value of niche audiences while others debated that the idea of a Black browser is in and of itself separatism, racist even. But catering to niche audiences online is nothing new. In fact, browsers that focus on a specific market segment isn’t all that new either. For example there’s Gloss, a women focused fashion and beauty browser created using Flock, the social media browser. But what makes the launch of Blackbird both a controversial and sensitive topic, is that it is focused towards an ethnic segment versus a special interest group. Race is still an extremely touchy subject in America, and the Internet and web are not immune to this sensitivity regardless of how open it is. But aren’t most businesses, especially web businesses, started in this “Web 2.0″ era defined by catering to a particular niche?

Really, if race-based niche sites are racist, then this inflated “Web 2.0 bubble” has played a major role in the segregation of the web overall. Many of the sites we all follow right here on TechCrunch, like Digg, Techmeme, and Mixx, were built and launched to service a niche, therefore fragmenting the web making it so we all think it’s “more personal” and “more authentic.” Remember when Global Grind was once the more authentic counterpart to Pageflakes for the hip-hop culture? Or how about the collaborative advice site for parenting Minti that was described by Mike Arrington as a “walled garden” even though he “…like(s) to see niche content sites spring up that use Web 2.0 ideas - these services will help the masses start to use and understand things like tagging, ajax, etc.”

While niche sites like the newly launched CodeBlack.com which is described as the “Black Amazon.com” will always have the debate of whether it is really needed; CodeBlack’s CEO Quincy Newell thinks otherwise:

“In general there should be something for everyone, we are living in a society where it’s okay to have something for everyone. Everyone is welcomed. The intent is to serve the need and/or perspective, not to exclude. We aren’t entering the market to be the ‘Black Amazon’ we entered to give back in the form of opportunities created for our community.”

Newell believes his service provides opportunity by giving film makers and authors without major distribution deals the ability to distribute their content to an audience who may be interested in it. A portion of the proceeds from purchases from the site also go to the United Negro College Fund Scholarship.

In the case of CodeBlack, it is less of an Amazon and more of a Netflix (or even Hulu) which, from a business perspective, is a good niche to be in. Last time I checked “Watch Instantly” in Netflix there were (count’em) 34 African-American Comedy movies available to watch instantly. A quick search on Hulu for the comedian Sommore brought back about 12 TV Clips, but how many Movie Clips? Zero. So perhaps the real argument is being positioned as the Black “Insert Mainstream website.” I am no different. My own site is often referred to as the Black “TechCrunch” by others and even by my team and I. No jab here, TC, but we aren’t. We are actually quite different. However it is a quick and easy way to help someone associate a concept they may not fully understand off the top with something that is much more familiar to them.

The point: how can we ALL move past the thought of a niche application or site being separatist? Today most of us can see past race, and I say most because racism does still exist. Brown vs The Board of Education integrated schools so we could all learn equally, together. We are a better society today because of this. What Brown vs the Board of Education did for society and integrating school systems, services like Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and Open Social will do for this very fragmented web we weave now. There is no doubt that services such as these will integrate the web regardless of race, niche, special interest, or application preference.

Facebook doesn’t discriminate against non-college students. Yahoo’s Shine isn’t sexist. Christian Café doesn’t discriminate against Muslims. Gay.com doesn’t discriminate against heterosexuals and Black websites and applications aren’t racist. It’s less about race and more about people wanting to share with people more like them whether that means common interests, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality or skin color, etc. And by the way: everyone is doing it. Its the new Black.

CrunchBase Information Blackbird (Browser) Information provided by CrunchBase
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3:45
Holiday Gift Card Management Startup Leverage Goes Belly Up
» TechCrunch

The idea behind Leverage was simple and had some potential: it offered an advanced management system for gift cards, hugely popular worldwide especially this time of year, so you could register all of them and keep track of how much you have left or stored on each one. You were also able to buy gift cards, or swap them with others. The service also let you manage all of your loyalty reward programs, such as frequent-flyer or frequent-stay plans.

Leverage, which was founded in May 2005 and had raised $2 million in angel funding, planned to generate revenue by reselling gift cards (see our launch coverage for more). It turns out the business model wasn’t solid enough to keep the company afloat during tough times. It appears the entire staff has been laid off (right before the holidays, which is supposed to be a key period for this type of company) last week.

From the blog post by former web developer Colleen Robledo:

With VC funding freezing up and retail revenues down, the company can’t afford to keep any of us on payroll. The owners are hoping this is just a temporary lay-off, that they will get funded again after the holidays, and be able to hire us all back.

We’re putting Leverage in the deadpool, because that last part was just wishful thinking.

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3:45
Holiday Gift Card Management Startup Leverage Has Very Little Left
» TechCrunch

The idea behind Leverage was simple and had some potential: it offered an advanced management system for gift cards, hugely popular worldwide especially this time of year, so you could register all of them and keep track of how much you have left or stored on each one. You were also able to buy gift cards, or swap them with others. The service also let you manage all of your loyalty reward programs, such as frequent-flyer or frequent-stay plans.

Leverage, which was founded in May 2005 and had raised $2 million in angel funding, planned to generate revenue by reselling gift cards (see our launch coverage for more). It turns out the business model wasn’t solid enough to keep the company afloat during tough times. It appears the entire staff has been laid off (right before the holidays, which is supposed to be a key period for this type of company) last week.

From the blog post by former web developer Colleen Robledo:

With VC funding freezing up and retail revenues down, the company can’t afford to keep any of us on payroll. The owners are hoping this is just a temporary lay-off, that they will get funded again after the holidays, and be able to hire us all back.

We’re putting Leverage in the deadpool, because that last part was just wishful thinking.

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3:35
IT Factory’s Bagger Super Sorry For The Massive Fraud
» TechCrunch

The beginning of what promises to be a fascinating story (and possibly a Hollywood movie) around the rise and fall of Denmark’s IT Factory is starting to emerge. In late November celebrated CEO Stein Bagger went missing in Dubai - it later turned out he abandoned his wife and child and fled to New York as his company fell apart.

He then borrowed a friend’s car and credit card and took embarked on quite a road trip to California, where he promptly turned himself in to local police.

Danish media tracked him down for an interview (translated version is here). Among the first questions they asked: Why did you perpetuate a four year fraud that involved $170 million or so in fraudulent revenues (90% of IT Factory’s revenues may have been nothing but lies)?

I have been threatened on my own and my family’s life, and I have been threatened with firearms between 25 and 30 times. He would not say who threatened him, but told that they would have money from him.

Everyone’s always sorry after they get caught.

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2:19
How Many Bodies Exactly Is CBS Interactive Trying To Hide? Try “275-ish.”
» TechCrunch

The pink slips were passed out on Thursday throughout the various business duchies that make up CBS Interactive—CNET, CBS.com, CBSNews,com, CBSSports.com, BNET, GameSpot, TV.com, last.fm, and CHOW. While CBS confirmed to me and other reporters that layoffs did happen across the board, it refused to talk about how many total people are losing their jobs. That left us scrambling about gathering piecemeal information. There were about 20 layoffs at Last.fm; 8 editors, we hear, at CBSNews.com are out of a job; another set of “redundancies” were eliminated at CBSSports.com.

But how big exactly were the layoffs, especially at Cnet, where most of the employees reside? CBS, which is at heart a news organization, doesn’t want the public to know how many layoffs just occurred at CBS Interactive. As of this writing, Cnet didn’t even report the fact that there were layoffs on Thursday. Neither did CBSNews.com. And it’s not because they didn’t get the memo (from CBS Interactive CEO Quincy Smith, reprinted below).

One rumor going around, which I heard as well, was that there were 20 percent cuts in all business units (which was in line with the cuts at Last.fm). But that percentage turns out to be a bit high. According to a source inside Cnet, the buzz is that the total number of employees asked to leave today was “275-ish.” A CBS spokesperson wouldn’t confirm that number. So take it as a rough estimate.

Don’t expect a press release or even a footnote in CBS Corporation’s SEC filings either. CBS as a whole employed nearly 24,000 people at the end of 2007 (the last figure I can find), so 275 is barley one percent. That is not material, and thus the company is not required to report it. But for CBS Interactive, it is material—about 10 percent or higher.

Here’s how I get at that figure. The vast majority of employees are at Cnet, which if you look at the last 10K it filed with the SEC, lists 2,700 employees at the end of 2007. There was at least one round of layoffs at Cnet in March, 2008, which reduced headcount by 120. And a CBS Interactive spokesperson told me today that before Cnet was acquired in July, 2008, it had 2,000 to 2,500 employees. But that was more a guesstimate than a hard number. Figure some more attrition, then give or take a few hundred employees at the other CBS properties, and that puts the total employee count back somewhere between 2,300 and 2,700. Sticking with the 275 layoffs, that represents between 10 and 12 percent.

We’ve updated our Layoff Tracker with this estimate.

Below is the memo Quincy Smith sent on Thursday afternoon to all CBS Interactive employees, delivering the layoff news in the vaguest terms as part of a progress report. Basically, everywhere he is combining business units (in sports, games, music, lifestyle, entertainment, news, marketing, and biz dev), people are losing jobs.

From: Quincy and Neil
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:33:25 -0800
Subject: CBS Interactive Update

Team,

As we come to the end of 2008, we have a lot to be proud of. CBS Interactive is the best online content network for information and entertainment. Our properties are expanding, advertisers are capitalizing on our properties and their scale, and we are positioned well to continue to grow. As we prepare for 2009 and beyond, we’d like to update you on this progress, announce some organizational changes and comment on the broader market environment and how it impacts CBS Interactive.

Progress

CBS Interactive is the 8th largest Internet network in the world. Our combined traffic is up nearly 30% since we closed the merger this summer. CNET, CBSSports.com, BNET, GameSpot, TV.com, CBS.com, last.fm, and CHOW have each had record traffic within the past three months. Our commitment to our users is paying off.

Advertisers have noticed. We have recently signed and announced deals across several of our properties with Microsoft, AT&T, Intel, Bertolli, EA, and GM. In these challenging economic times, marketers are consolidating their efforts with their best partners. Our properties, our audiences, our ideas and our insights will continue to differentiate us in the marketplace.

Finally, we have contributed to and benefited from the TV and Radio divisions of CBS. We’ve done nearly 1500 purpose-driven promotions to our properties on Broadcast TV, Radio and local TV Stations; CHOW and GameSpot content is running on the CBS Outernet; and CNET ran a major consumer campaign in markets like New York and San Francisco through CBS Outdoor. CBS Interactive is also a key partner to CBS Television Network for major broadcast events. In just the last week, we featured complementary content for events including The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the Grammy Nominations and the SEC Championship.

Moving forward, we have a lot to look forward to. Events like CES, The Grammys, and March Madness on Demand are all just around the corner. Each represent huge cross-platform opportunities where CBS Interactive will again help complete the experience with coverage on air, online, and on mobile for our audiences.

Organizational Promotions and Changes

As we enter 2009, we are making some changes to our organizational structure to capitalize on audience and advertiser overlaps. We are also making some changes to key functions so that we can realize the benefits of our position in the marketplace. These changes mark another significant milestone in our integration, as we fine-tune our organization to best take advantage of the power of our entire network.

Sports, Games and Music

We are combining our Sports, Games and Music properties into a single group led by Steve Snyder. Steve has tremendous product and leadership experience and an enthusiasm for each of these categories. In addition, Tom Jones will be moving over from CNET to head-up the sales efforts for this group. Within the group, our talented senior leaders including Jason Kint, Rich Calacci, Jaci Hays, Kevin Menard, Felix Miller, Doug Schmidt and others will report to Steve and to Tom.

Entertainment & Lifestyle

We are also moving our Lifestyle properties, CHOW and UrbanBaby, to the Entertainment group (TV.com, CBS.com, The CBS Audience Network and TheInsider.com) to capitalize on the similarities in audience and advertisers. This group will continue to be led by Anthony Soohoo with sales led by Ken Lagana. We’re excited to see the innovation that will come from this group in 2009.

Technology & News

Under the continued leadership of Joe Gillespie, our Technology & News division will bring CBSNews.com and CNET News.com into a single CBS Interactive News Group. Each site will maintain its own brand identity, while benefiting from shared resources in design, product and engineering to deliver deeper and more comprehensive coverage of major stories and events. Led by Mark Larkin, with Dan Farber as Editor-in-Chief, CBS News.com and CNET News.com will also have the opportunity to share content and collaborate on stories for the benefit of their unique audiences.

CBS Interactive Marketing

We are bringing together our key marketing functions into a new group called CBS Interactive Marketing led by Mickey Wilson. The group brings together expertise from across the organization so that we can capitalize on our biggest opportunities, and elevate the company to be a strategic marketing partner whose products, consumer insights, and ad innovations are critical to our clients’ long-term success. They will establish the company as the standard for premium content online, and define and evolve brand strategies to capture the biggest opportunities for audience and revenue growth through market planning, insights and execution.

CBS Interactive Business Development

We are also bringing together all of our business development activities. This group will be led by Mike Marquez. Mike and his team will be responsible for the development of all new partnerships, investments, and acquisitions. They will be charged with taking advantage of knowledge sharing across the whole company to ensure that we are the strategic partner of choice for the industry.

Market Conditions

As you know the general economic environment continues to be a challenge. We have always been very aggressive about managing our costs, and that requirement is even more critical now than it has ever been. We believe this new, more efficient organizational structure will produce better results for CBS Interactive, and also result in lower operating costs. It is always very difficult to make these kinds of reductions, but they come after a thorough review of how we are organized and how we operate, and what best serves our many users, advertisers and employees.

CBS Interactive is a special place because of you, and we thank each of you for what you have done, are doing, and will do to exceed the expectations of the tens of millions of people who come to our properties every day.

Today, we sit in a great position. People seek out our brands because we provide them with the information and entertainment they want and need, and marketers seek us out because of the powerful audiences we attract. We are positioned to grow in 2009 and beyond.

Best,
-q, NA

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December 11, 2008
20:27
Sweet: PartyBeans Makes It Easy To Send Customized Candy Gifts
» TechCrunch

PartyBeans, a new startup launching today to the public, has created a WYSIWYG interface for candies that makes it easy to order personalized tins of Jelly Bellys, mints, and gum. The first 500 TechCrunch readers to check out the site can get 15% off their orders with the promo code “TECHCRUNCH”.

The site allows users to add their own logos or photos to the tops of their candy containers, along with a few lines of text. Each candy also has a few customization options - you can choose if you’d like your Jelly Bellys to come as a standard random sampling, or in a flavor or two of your choosing. The site plans to introduce more candies and options in the near future.

There are countless other custom confection sites out there (you can see a sampling of them here), but many of them have minimum order sizes and cater primarily to large events like weddings. PartyBeans is trying to appeal to more casual purchasers, who can buy as little as one item at a time (you can get a custom Jelly Belly tin for as little as $5, including shipping). In my testing the site seemed to work quite well - it took me only a few minutes to create my own jar of green and white TechCrunch Jelly Bellys, and I’ll probably be ordering a few more tins for the holidays.

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18:29
Ustream.tv Working On Mobile Streaming App To Take On Qik, Kyte, FlixWagon
» TechCrunch

With Qik, Kyte, and FlixWagon all battling for their share of the live mobile broadcasting market, is there room for another contender? Ustream.tv seems to think so. We’ve just received word (and even better, video) of a Ustream.tv mobile client already in the works.

While details are still somewhat sparse, we’re hearing that Ustream.tv’s got at least one trick up their sleeve to make their offering stand out: drastically shorter delays in getting your live content onto viewer’s screens.

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18:18
DivX Cuts 21 People From Payroll
» TechCrunch

More layoffs today at DivX, the publicly traded video codec supplier that recently sued Yahoo over canceling a contract that makes up as much as 20 percent of its revenue. According to a tip that came into our Layoff Tracker, 21 people were let go. I just confirmed that until-now unannounced number with DivX investor relations. It represents just under 10 percent of the workforce in San Diego, where DivX is based (although there were some cuts globally as well).

Its stock is trading under $5, about a third of where it was a year ago.

This follows the resignation of its CTO Markus Moenig earlier this month. And some readers may remember the drama surrounding DivX’s shutdown of its video site Stage6 back in February.

Keep those layoff tips coming.

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17:44
Chrome Shines A Little Brighter, Drops The Beta Tag With New Release
» TechCrunch

Google’s Chrome browser is officially ready for prime time. As we reported earlier this week, Google has dropped the Browser’s Beta label after a mere 14 weeks (many Google products, like Gmail, have been billed as Betas for years). The browser now claims over 10 million active users worldwide.

Since launching, Chrome has implemented a number of major bug fixes (audio and video are less glitchy), increased performance on the browser’s V8 JavaScript engine, added a bookmark manager, and introduced UI changes to make privacy settings more accessible. The company’s blog post also says that an extension platform (similar to Firefox’s add-ons) is on the way. Mac and Linux versions are still nowhere to be seen.

During our talk at LeWeb with Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience, we learned that the (relatively) quick turnaround is due to the fact that Chrome is a client software application. Many OEMs won’t touch software that is still in Beta, so Google had an incentive to conduct a thorough but finite testing Beta program. Conversely, cloud-based apps like Gmail can retain their Beta status indefinitely so long as Google feels that there are still major features that should be added.

So how has Google Chrome fared? It was clear from the get-go that this thing was fast, touting new features and enhanced stability that made it a great new entry into the browser market. Within a few days after launch the browser made up 6.23% of our traffic - a few weeks later it was up to 8.12%. Some analysts guessed that it might even be able to overtake Firefox within the next two years.

But since then that number has fallen to around 6% of our total traffic - nearly three times more than Opera, but well below Safari (9.87%), Internet Explorer (28.37%), and Firefox (52.05%). For a browser that is only a few months old this is still an impressive feat, but for Chrome to take on Internet Explorer (which is Google’s ultimate goal), Chrome’s market share needs to be showing consistent growth. TechCrunch traffic is by no means representative of the web as a whole (a recent report pegs Chrome’s overall US market share at .62% vs 81.36% for IE), but a large number of early adopters read this site and may be indicative of future trends.

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15:03
We’re Giving Away $50 Gift Cards All Week at MobileCrunch
» TechCrunch

When Virgin Mobile acquired Helio earlier this year, they also acquired a nice big pile of $50 AmEx gift cards intended for use in Helio promotions. The downside? They expire at the end of 2008. In an effort to make sure the cards don’t go to waste and to make December just a wee bit brighter for a handful of MobileCrunch readers, they sent a pack of cards our way. We’ll be giving them out through a series of contests for the next few days, with at least one giveaway each day.

The first and second contests are already underway, but you’ve still got time to get your entries in. And the other contests? You’ll just have to keep an eye on MobileCrunch.
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13:55
Like An OpenID For Your Carbon Footprint - AMEE Secures Series A
» TechCrunch

AMEE, a London based startup with an API which has the grand aim of measuring the world’s energy consumption - and therefore Carbon Footprint - has secured an undisclosed Series A financing from O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, Union Square Ventures and UK-based Angel The Accelerator Group. AMEE’s idea is pretty simple. Act as a neutral, open source aggregation platform for energy consumption data and thus sit at the centre of a paradigm shift in the way the world thinks about energy.

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13:31
Layoffs At Last.FM Confirmed. Where Else Are Heads Rolling At CBS?
» TechCrunch

Today, CBS Interactive is laying off people across several of its properties, I’ve confirmed with the company. CBS is not saying which divisions or how many people are affected. It is positioning the layoffs as part of the integration process it began six months ago when it bought CNET for $1.8 billion. But it is not just the CNET businesses that are being cut.

I’ve also confirmed that earlier today employees at social music site Last.FM were let go. CBS bought Last.fm in 2007 for $280 million. One source puts the number of layoffs at as many as 40 people, mostly from LAst.FM’s London HQ, which has a total staff of 95. A spokesperson for CBS Interactive says that number is inaccurate on the high side, but won’t provide the correct number. In any case, it is likely a small fraction of the overall number of employees being laid off across CBS Interactive. Update: CBS says the number of Last.fm layoffs is less than 20, which would put it at about 20 percent.

Last.fm never really became a big money maker from what I can gather, and all of those engineers and other staff members are not cheap. Even after a redesign last July, growth has been flat. According to comScore, Last.fm had 9.2 million global unique visitors in October, a 6 percent increase from July. Imeem is still much more popular, with 22.1 million global visitors. And in the U.S., even Pandora has a bigger audience (4.97 million uniques in November, versus 2.75 million, see chart below).

If you know which other CBS Interactive divisions are going through layoffs today or the total number of layoffs, leave us a tip and we will add it to our Layoff Tracker. Update 2: There were also layoffs at CBS Sports where, a tipster who is a former employee tells us, “the entire accounting department” was lost, as well as jobs in Database Applications and Data Warehouse .

The Last.fm staff learned about the layoffs a little more than an hour ago. Below is a screenshot from one of their friends, showing their reaction on Facebook. That first status message is in Swedish and says, “better start planning for the future.” Update 3: Matt Hillman says that his status message below was not related to the layoffs.

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13:09
Facebook Testing Even Simpler Sign Up; Closing The Gap With MySpace In The U.S.
» TechCrunch

Just a couple of months ago Facebook redesigned its home page and changed its tagline to simplify new user signups.

Now they’re testing an even simpler interface - instead of getting things started by asking for your name, email, password, sex and birthday, all you have to manage is your actual name. If conversions go up, expect this to be rolled out to everyone.

Facebook is also quickly closing the gap in U.S. usage v. MySpace. Facebook became the largest worldwide social network last April, when they overtook MySpace.

MySpace continues to dominate in the U.S., with 75 million monthly visitors (Comscore). A year ago Facebook had just 35 million monthly U.S. visitors, compared to MySpace’s 69 million, meaning MySpace was about twice the size of Facebook in the U.S. Two months ago Facebook had risen to just 40 million users, and MySpace had grown to 75 million, so the ratio was still hovering around 50% (53% to be exact).

But in the last two months Facebook has added nearly 10 million monthly U.S. users, surging to 50 million U.S. visitors in November. MySpace has stayed steady, but the Facebook is now 2/3 the size of MySpace in the U.S.

If Facebook’s growth rate v. MySpace in the U.S. continues, they’ll overtake them sometime next year.

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12:08
5 Days of Cleaning Out My Office-Mas Contest: Day 2
» TechCrunch

Day 1 of our contest is over and FlyGirl (a real pilot, apparently), yachris, and Harishio won the headsets. Good on 'em. But that doesn't mean you should cry and or whine that the fix is in. In fact, it isn't in. The fix is decidedly out. Read on to find out how to win one of four Blu-Ray packs.
11:59
Twitter And HuffPo Take A Post-Election Breather
» TechCrunch

After showing hockey-stick growth leading up to the U.S. Presidential Elections, Twitter took a breather in November. According to comScore, unique U.S. visitors to Twitter.com grew less than one percent sequentially from October to 1.466 million. U.S. pageviews declined more precipitously to 19.7 million, from 37.2 million in October (a 47 percent decline).

These numbers suggest that about the same number of people are still visiting Twitter, but without all the election Tweets, they are only finding half as much to keep them interested. Remember, this is just a proxy for Twitter activity, as it only estimates visits to the site, and does not take into account all of the other clients and sites where people consume their Twitter feeds.

If Twitter is taking a breather, the HuffingtonPost is winded. The political uber-blog saw a 20 percent decline in unique U.S. visitors from October to November. U.S unique visitors went from 5 million to 4 million, according to comScore. And U.S. pageviews are down 33 percent to 43 million. (Yeah, we saw this coming). Meanwhile, CNN.com was able to build on its election momentum and broader news coverage to grow its U.S. audience 11.4 percent month-over-month to 27.4 million (although pageviews are down 14 percent).

Good thing HuffingtonPost raised $25 million before the numbers turned south. Now it has to readjust to the post-election environment and broaden its coverage as well.

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10:46
Fast-Fingered Domain Squatters Flip Bush Library URL For $35K
» TechCrunch

Doh. Domain squatters snatched away the domain name GeorgeWBushLibrary.com and made an easy $34,990 profit on promptly selling it to back to Yuma Solutions, the web development company that let it expire. Yuma has been a contractor for the Bush family for quite some time, and the domain name they accidentally let expire belonged to the George W. Bush Library Foundation. It originally bought the domain in 2007 from another squatter for $3,000.

It looks like Yuma is going to have to eat the cost of not renewing the domain.

The Dallas Morning News reports:

Mark Langdale, president of the George W. Bush Library Foundation, said Tuesday that he didn’t know about the Web site being lost and recovered. But, he said, he would know if the library had been stuck with a surprise $35,000 expenditure.

The name of the squatter who so adeptly flipped the URL is, appropriately enough, Illuminati Karate (which is another Web design firm in Raleigh, North Carolina).
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10:18
Cut and Paste Between iPhone Safari and Mail with Pastebud
» TechCrunch

Ladies and Germs, we have news. Copy and Paste might finally come to your iPhone. This clever method bypasses the App Store by utilizing two Javascript bookmarks and web services that don't require any software installation. The service, dubbed Pastebud, is launching tomorrow and according to the video above, seems to work well. Perfect? Nope, but a hella big step forward. Click through for a video.
9:52
Tumblr Pulls In $4.5 Million In Funding, Puts Out Premium Services
» TechCrunch

Tumblr, one of the companies that significantly lowered the bar for starting a blog, has just raised $4.5 million in a Series B round led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, the same investors that put in $750,000 in the first round. CEO David Karp says the investment will give the startup a runway of at least two and a half years, and is introducing paid features at the same time.

Furthermore, former Time Warner technology SVP (and current CEO of Betaworks) John Borthwick is joining the board, while former CNET director John Maloney will act as the New York-based company’s President.

Tumblr serves zero ads on its pages, and generated an equal amount of dollars so far. Now, Tumblr will have premium services to make up for that, although it’s unclear what the services will be exactly. Karp did mention they were gonna be ’sexy’, so we’re moderately curious now.

In a release, Tumblr is claimed to have over 15 million monthly unique visitors, but those numbers sound a bit inflated if you ask us. ComScore measures 1.5 million global unique visitors in October, a 300 percent increase from a year ago (see chart). Nonetheless, it had great momentum from the moment it launched in 2007, and there’s still a lot of potential users out there. If they will continue to come, and if they will be able to make the company profitable, remains to be seen.

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7:50
Use CrashTheInauguration To Find A Place To Stay In D.C. And See Obama Become President
» TechCrunch

The government is issuing around 240,000 tickets to President Elect Obama’s inauguration on January 20. But many more people than that want to be there, and there are plenty of parties and other activities for them to attend. The big problem, though, is finding a place to stay.

Hotels were sold out long ago, and without a place to stay it’s basically impossible to be there. That’s where CrashTheInaguration comes in. The site is powered by AirBed & Breakfast, which we covered in August.

The service lets people rent out rooms or their entire home to travelers. Unlike services like CouchSurfing, they can also charge for the service, so it effectively lets anyone who wants to launch their own hotel in their home. AirBed & Breakfast charges a fee that averages around 10%; the rest goes to the person renting the room.

Cofounder Brian Chesky says that over 2,000 rooms have been listed for rent since the service launched. Later today CNN will be doing a segment on the CrashTheInauguration service, and I expect the number of listings to jump up sharply.

If you really want to attend the inauguration and you don’t have a hotel room booked, this may be just what you’re looking for. And if you live in or near DC and don’t mind a stranger in your home, you can make a few extra bucks come January.

Get a $20 discount as a renter on CrashTheInauguration for being a TechCrunch reader. Just type TechCrunch at checkout.

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7:08
Quite Simply The Best Commercial Ever Made
» TechCrunch

Only the Danish could get away with something like this (but how great would it be to see Amazon do commercials like this). Danish ecommerce site Fleggaard recently made the commercial below. I don’t know if it was shown on Danish television (I’m trying to find out), but I wouldn’t be surprised.

It most definitely contains nudity and is NSFW. I think it would be just as good without the exposed breasts, though. If you don’t watch it, the highlight is that dozens of topless Danish women link hands during a skydive to advertise a Siemens washing machine for 4,999.00 DKK, or about $900. It doesn’t seem like such a great price, but I’ll buy one anyway if they deliver to California.

Link:

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7:00
TuneUp Brings Its iTunes Cleanup Wizard To The Mac
» TechCrunch

TuneUp, an iTunes plugin that helps correct wrong or missing song meta data and album art (and also offers a number of complementary features) has released a Mac-compatible version to the public.

We originally covered TuneUp last May (click here to see our full overview of the features), and since then not much has changed in terms of the plugin’s functionality. The application sits as a sidebar alongside iTunes, allowing users to simply drag and drop songs from their playlists into appropriate boxes to have their meta tags ‘cleaned up’ or cover art downloaded automatically. The sidebar also includes a panel called ‘Now Playing’ that features YouTube videos along with album and song recommendations related the song currently playing. Finally, there’s a tab for ‘Concerts’ which offers a listing of upcoming concerts in your area.

The free download includes 500 free song corrections (which fixes meta data and album art), as well as 50 free album art corrections (which just fixes album art and ignores meta data). After that, the service costs $12 for an annual subscription or $20 for a lifetime membership. Data lookup generally works well, and uses information licensed from Gracenote.

When we covered the Windows application earlier this year my biggest concern was that few people would be willing to pay for what for many will be a one-time fix - TuneUp does offer some value after fixing your library with its ‘Now Playing’ and ‘Concerts’ tabs, but most people are just concerned with cleaning up their libraries, which only needs to be done once. TuneUp’s Andrew Kippen says that while this was a major concern for the company, the conversion rate from free to paid users has actually been five times higher than expected (though he wouldn’t give any specific numbers).

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3:01
YouTube Opens Enhanced Abuse And Safety Center
» TechCrunch

YouTube has just launched a new Abuse And Safety Center meant to help make the site as safe as possible for families (YouTube is only meant for ages 13+, but kids still flock to the site in droves). While the site has previously offered safety guidelines, they used to be bundled in the same section as product help and had far less information. The new section offers tips from organizations including the Anti-Defamation League, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the National Crime Prevention Council.

After entering the Abuse and Safety Center, users are presented with a list of common issues, including Privacy Concerns, Cyberbullying, and Hateful Content. After selecting one of these items, the site displays a list of tips and guidelines from the aforementioned expert agencies, as well as a video guides in some cases. Most of the topics are directly related to YouTube, but they are also relevant to the web as a whole.

The new Center also offers a Help and Safety tool that makes it easier to manage irritating or malicious comments and also gives users more control over who can contact them through private messages. Users can now search for all comments left by a given user across their entire channel, allowing them to see if any commentors are making a habit of repeatedly harassing them on their videos. From there, it’s a simple process to delete multiple comments at once or ban that user entirely from the channel.

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1:54
Screw The Downturn. Accel Raises A Cool Billion In New Funds
» TechCrunch

Twenty five year old venture capital firm Accel Partners is announcing two new funds today that add more than $1 billion to their war chest: Accel Growth Fund at $480 million and Accel London III at $525 million.

The Growth Fund will focus on later stage investments information technology, internet, digital media, mobile, networking, software, and services. The London fund will continue to invest in early and late stage European and Israeli startups.

Accel has over $6 billion under management. The firm’s current and past portfolio includes Baidu, Brightcove, Comscore, Etsy, Facebook, Walmart.com, Zimbra and dozens of other startups. Accel has offices in Palo Alto, London and Bangalore as well as in China via a IDG-Accel Partnership.

If you want some of that new money, start here.

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0:57
Marissa Mayer At Le Web: The (Almost) Complete Interview
» TechCrunch

The video above shows twenty two minutes of my and Loic Le Meur’s half hour interview with Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer at the Le Web conference in Paris on Wednesday afternoon. A spotty Internet connection led to some problems with the Ustream stream, but they were able to save most of the footage.

Mayer announced that their Chrome browser would shortly be leaving beta and that Google Search Wiki would soon have a toggle button to allow people to turn it off. She also gave some very simple employee hiring advice.

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December 10, 2008
20:47
Gmail Enables SMS Messaging From Chat
» TechCrunch

Only a few days after the launch of its new task manager, Gmail has introduced a new feature allowing users to send free SMS messages through its integrated Chat. To activate the feature, visit the Gmail Labs page and scroll down until you see the appropriate listing (you may also want to activate a few of the other nifty features while you’re at it).

To send a message, just type a phone number into the search box at the top of the chat window on the left side of the Gmail interface, and hit ‘Send SMS’. Numbers can be associated with contact names so you don’t have to keep manually entering them. Recipients of these messages can respond by simply hitting ‘reply’ on their cell phones to send their own SMS message (Gmail ties a unique phone number with each of your contacts).

According to the Gmail blog post, the site is currently testing out the service with US phones only for now (messages can be sent from abroad, they just need to be directed at a US phone).

Gmail first toyed around with the feature in October, but wound up pulling it from Labs for a few weeks because of a number of glitches. This time, it seems like it’s here to stay.

This isn’t by any means the first chat service to offer free SMS messaging - major chat networks like AIM have been doing this for years. But it’s a handy feature, especially for the many people who use Gmail all day long.

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20:01
The Shorty Awards Honor Twitter’s Elite Tweets
» TechCrunch

After my first few weeks on Twitter I quickly came to realize that most people are not nearly as interesting as they think they are - my Twitter feed was constantly inundated with tweets describing such mundane topics as my friends’ favorite day of the week and what they had for breakfast. But within this apparent pool of mediocrity I found a few gems - Twitter users who managed to entertain me on a regular basis, and have kept me addicted to my Twhirl client for months on end. Now the time has come to bestow these great Tweeters with the honors they truly deserve.

The Shorty Awards, currently the top trending topic on search.twitter.com, is setting out to reward Twitter’s best and brightest with their own awards show. The contest is meant to identify the best Twitter users in over twenty predefined categories ranging from Business to Food, as well as any number of user-submitted custom categories (the site will weed out the ones that don’t get enough participation).

Beginning today, users can nominate their favorite users by sending a Twitter message with the following format (you can also use a form on the event’s homepage):

* To nominate someone for a Shorty Award, use form on this site, or send a tweet similar to this: @shortyawards I nominate @someone in category #news because… (but write something of your own).
* The text of the tweet is completely up to you. As long as it contains @shortyawards @someone #category you can be as creative with the rest as you like.
* You actually have to write something. Just submitting the default tweet doesn’t count.

After the initial round of voting, which will last until midnight December 31, the five Tweeters with the most nominations in each category will take part in a final round between January 5th and 14th. An awards ceremony will be held in New York in late January, where the winners of the “most important categories” (the site doesn’t say what qualifies as important) will be able to deliver acceptance speeches in person or via video in 140 characters or less. You can find the complete rules here. The site is a production of Sawhourse Media, which also is behind Musebin and News Groper.

Also check out The Twitties, a Twitter awards show that has already concluded. And while you’re at it, be sure to place your final nominations for the Crunchies - voting ends at midnight PST tonight.
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19:33
Citysearch Vs. Yelp On The iPhone: Can You Tell Them Apart?
» TechCrunch

Citysearch now has an iPhone app. It looks a lot like Yelp’s iPhone app, which came out two months ago looks and is currently the third most popular travel app (after Urbanspoon and Google Earth). Both tap into the iPhone’s GPS to let you find nearby restaurants, bars, clubs, hotels, and stores. Both let you rate and review the places you visit.

Both even share the exact same navigation buttons on the bottom: Nearby, Search, and Bookmarks. Only the first button on Citysearch is different. It shows Featured editorial content from Citysearch editors for the city you are in. Yelp opted for a Recent button instead, which Citysearch places on its Bookmarks page.

The two apps are really similar in look and feel (see screenshots above), but under the hood they are different because they are pulling from different databases. Citysearch is taking advantage of its recent overhaul, which reclassified every piece of data by neighborhood. That helps when you search for a place to eat nearby. You still can’t search by neighborhood (only zipcode and city), but that is coming soon. Also coming soon will be the ability to upload photos and other multimedia along with your reviews.

What is powerful about both of these apps is giving people the ability to rate or review a restaurant or a store right as they are eating or having whatever experience they want to share. Ultimately, the one you prefer will boil down to the one whose reviews you trust the most. (Correction: The Yelp app actually only lets you upload photos, not reviews. So advantage, Citysearch on that one).

But next time you have an amazing meal or have a nasty run-in with a waiter, just whip out your iPhone and tell the world.

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18:47
Last Call For Those Crunchies Nominations
» TechCrunch

The Crunchies awards are right around the corner. Who will be named the Best Startup of 2008? The Best CEO? The Best app? The Best mobile? The Most Likely to Make the World a Better Place? You have until midnight PT tonight to enter your nominations. There are 15 different startup and product categories. Who is worthy of consideration?

After nominations close tonight, we will sift through them all (well, okay, our computers will—165,000 have been submitted so far) and select five finalists in each category for the final round of voting, which will begin on December 15. So get those nominations in now if you haven’t already.

The Crunchies award ceremony will be held on Jan. 9, 2009, 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater across the street from City Hall in San Francisco. The reception will follow and tickets will be released in December. Here are photos from last year, when we introduced the noble-yet-noticeable Crunchies gorilla statuette. This year, they will be even more apropos as we celebrate the survival of the fittest.

We are lucky once again to be partnering with some of the leading tech blogs on the Web: GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider, and VentureBeat. They will be co-hosting the event with us. On the video front, 1938 Media will be on hand to document the evening. Together, and with your help, we hope to bring the Web community together and recognize the best to has to offer.

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17:03
Microsoft Live Labs Tackles Web Clips With Thumbtack, Still Needs Polish
» TechCrunch

Microsoft’s Live Labs has just released Thumbtack, a web clipping service that allows users to compile links, media, and text snippets into online storage bins for future reference. Users can also share their Thumbtack collections with their peers, allowing them to collaborate by adding new clips and notations.

To add a photo or snippet of text to their Thumbtack canvas, users can either highlight the text and paste it in manually, or use a browser bookmarklet (the service works fine on IE7 and Firefox, and isn’t OS dependent). Each of these clippings can be sorted into folders called ‘Collections’, which can be published to the web via RSS, embedded in blogs, opened to friends for collaboration, or kept private for safe keeping.

Thumbtack also allows users to customize their experience by offering a set of ‘gadgets’. At launch available gadgets include an Address gadget that can identify addresses in clips and find them on a map, a Properties gadget that allows users to assign a price value to a specified item, and a Layout gadget that allows users to change the organization of their Thumbtack workspace. In the future the team plans to offer gadgets that can suck data from Office applications, and may eventually release a sandbox environment allowing developers to create their own gadgets.

There are a number of sites that offer some very similar functionality, including Google Notebook, Evernote (covered here), SimplyBox, and Snipd. There’s also Twine, a web clipping service that can automatically categorize items using semantic sorting technology. The Labs Team has tried to explain what differentiates Thumbtack in its FAQ:

While there are several applications that overlap with functionality in Thumbtack, they all serve specific constituencies related to list making or note taking. Thumbtack focuses on being a repository and crossroads for user collected content from across the web. It emphasizes the activities that follow the act of gathering – archival, research, sharing and publishing. Thumbtack stands apart in its ability to introspect on incoming data in order to automatically classify it and extract structure from it using machine learning…

Thumbtack may be able to eventually separate itself from these competitors, especially if it does open the platform to outside developers. But for now it still has a ways to go - in my testing I found it to be pretty buggy (one of my collections seems to endlessly copy and paste the same TechCrunch logo whenever I open it). And the interface isn’t as sleek or intuitive as some of the other services I’ve tried. Still, as a Live Labs project it’s inherently a work in progress, and given some of the other projects that we’ve seen from them (like the very cool Photosynth), Thumbtack is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Video: Thumbtack Introduction

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14:57
Hi5 Hopes To Make Real Coin With Virtual Gifts
» TechCrunch

Social networks need to find a way to make money fast. Online advertising never really worked well on social networks in the first place, and with online advertising feeling the same pressure as everything else in the economy, new sources of revenue must be found. Internationally-oriented social network hi5 is turning to virtual gifts, which can be bought with virtual coins that members buy with real money. Members can buy virtual gifts for about a dollar each and send them through hi5 to their friends (both real and virtual).

True to its international reach, hi5 is taking a multi-culti approach to virtual gifts. They include a Mexican Rosca cake, a dreidel, and a steamed pork bun. Don’t ask me what culture values rocks or finds cats in cups to be tasty (see below). Each virtual gift costs 80 coins, or about $1.

Hi5 is claiming to be the “first major social network to launch its own virtual currency.” But Facebook has been selling virtual gifts for a long time, even though CEO Mark Zuckerberg won’t talk about how much they are bringing in. Each virtual gift on Facebook also costs $1, and you buy them with 100 gift credits. Facebook’s gift credits are no different than hi5 coins, other than they are not as shiny. They perform the exact same function.

In the future, however, hi5 members will be able to buy other “premium goods and services” with their coins.

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13:52
CrunchGear’s 5 Days of Cleaning Out My Office-Mas Contest
» TechCrunch

See that pile of junk? There's more where that came from. I want to give it to you. Why? Because I like you. How can you win it? I'm going to invent some devious contests over the next five days and give away something new and cool to the winner(s) each day.
13:46
This Week on the CrunchBoard
» TechCrunch
Make sure to look at the latest job listing on CrunchBoard. While doing that take a look at our new Crunchboard Service and Sales Directories. They are a great way to connect with the start-up community. Here’s some of jobs posted in the past week:
- Freelance Web Apps & Social Media Developer
  Vested Ventures - Remote
- CFO
  MocoSpace - Boston, MA
- Sr. Software Server Engineer
  Tableau Software - San Mateo, CA
- Head of Content and User Support
  Yelp - San Francisco, CA
- Web Marketing Director
  Knewton - New York, NY
- Senior Marketing Manager
  Digg.com - San Francisco, CA
- Senior Product Manager
  Dictionary.com - Oakland, CA
TechCrunch is also still looking for a Ruby Developer to work on CrunchBase, as well as a fulltime writer to work on TechCrunchIT at our office in Atherton, CA.

International readers are encouraged to visit the British and French job boards as well.
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13:45
Grouper Co-Founder’s New Gig: LiveKick, A Concert Ticket Search Engine (Invites)
» TechCrunch

What happens when you sell the company you co-founded for an estimated $65 million and have a cushy VP gig at Sony? You set out and build your third startup of course. That’s exactly what Aviv Eyal did along with Yarden Tadmor, the former VP of Business Development at Quigo.

Their new company LiveKick can be best described as the Kayak of music concert ticketing. The service helps users discover live concerts in their geographic vicinity and purchase the cheapest available tickets. 500 invites for the private beta are available exclusively to TechCrunch readers here.

Setting-up LiveKick is a two step process, the first being indicating your location (US only), the second being adding your favorite artists. There are three ways to do this: Manually (artist-by-artist), linking to one of the five supported online music services (Rhapsody, Last.fm, Pandora, MySpace Music, iLike), or uploading an iTunes Music Library File.

This is where LiveKick’s under the hood technologies start kicking-in, beginning with its live concerts search engine that continuously queries ticketing sites such as Ticketmaster, LiveNation, StubHub, Tickets.com and eBay, as well as user-generated content sites such as MySpace Music. The Livekick search engine performs daily updates of ticket pricing info for the 69,000+ concerts that it tracks in the US.

A proprietary recommendation engine suggests what upcoming local concerts users would enjoy attending by crossing stylistic relationship data, such as performing artists and bands, with geo and venue data. The engine monitors for relevant events and sends an email alert as soon as new matching concerts are announced, allowing users to act quickly and buy tickets while they’re cheap or before they run out.

A point the company reiterated is that it has no intentions of being another music related social network (see Twones, which launched Yesterday). Instead it will focus on integrating with users’ existing social destinations and utilities.

There are a number of direct competitors such as Songkick, ShowClix and HearWhere—even last.fm and iLike have concerts recommendation features. LiveKick doesn’t mind though because it isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, it’s just trying to make it slightly better. This is very much in line with Kayak.com which disrupted an already rich online travel ticketing industry.

The big question is whether it’s the best time to launch such a business. One argument would be that leisure spending is going to be tight in the foreseeable future so LiveKick’s timing is off. However, one could also argue that if users are going to spend the money, they might as well make the most out of it, which is where LiveKick’s offering theoretically hits the mark.

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12:54
Android Market May Be Getting Ringtones, Wallpapers, and Google Checkout
» TechCrunch

Can’t live without Fergie ringtones on your Android handset, but can’t take the time to throw together your own? You may be in luck. While rummaging around through the files tucked away within the Android Market package, the guys over at Phandroid noticed a couple of unused icons lingering.

If these icons are any indication of functionality thus far unseen, we might be seeing ringtones, wallpapers, and Google Checkout support make their way into the Android Market before too long.

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12:23
Just Got Fired From Yahoo? Have A Taco.
» TechCrunch

Today, 1,500 people at Yahoo are losing their jobs, as layoffs across the tech landscape approaches 100,000. But for startups lucky enough to have cash to hire, 1,500 soon-to-be-unemployed Yahoos is a recruiting opportunity.

Video chat startup TokBox (which raised $10 million in August) will be parking a taco truck outside of Yahoo headquarters today, handing out free tacos and job applications. TokBox only has five jobs to fill, so maybe they can make room in the truck for other hiring startups.

Unless, of course, they are run off by Yahoo security first. My guess, though, is that there aren’t many security guys left. They should keep an eye out for the Sheriff of Yahoo, but that is pretty much it. He looks like this:

(Taco photo by Pheezy, Yang photo by me).

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11:34
To Really Understand The (Google) Zeitgeist, You Need To Dive Into The Details
» TechCrunch

Google released its 2008 Zeitgeist list of the most popular search terms for the year. Unlike Yahoo’s 2008 list of top search terms, Google looks at the fastest-rising searches of the year. That makes for a slightly more interesting list. (Yahoo’s list was basically a repeat of its 2007 list). Below are the two lists, and you can compare to Google’s list for 2007, which was dominated by technology searches (”iphone,” “facebook,” “youtube”).

Google’s Fastest Rising Search Terms for 2008 (Global)

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

Yahoo’s Top Search Terms For 2008
1. Britney Spears
2. WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment)
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. American Idol

Here is the U.S. list for Google, which does have more overlap with last year’s.

Google.com - Fastest Rising (U.S.)

1. obama
2. facebook
3. att
4. iphone
5. youtube
6. fox news
7. palin
8. beijing 2008
9. david cook
10. surf the channel

The top-level Zeitgeist lists are not too surprising (they never are). The most interesting trends reveal themselves only when you dive deeper. For instance, in terms of search popularity, we find that “facebook” beat out “myspace,” the “martini” beat out the “mojito,” and “ice cream” beat out “chili.”

Certain terms peak and then drop off, but they can tell us more about the national mindset than terms that remain consistently strong. For instance, searches for “hybrid car” and “solar panel” skyrocketed during the summer when gas prices reached bank account-draining levels, but dropped just as quickly as gas prices came down.

Similarly, the term “layaway” found a resurgence in popularity that coincided with the economic crisis.

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Company	Facebook	MySpace	YouTube
Unique video viewers	7 million	51 million	344 million
Videos Streamed	21 million	411 million	5.3 billion
Total Minutes Watched	32 million	449 million	12.3 billion
Avg. videos/viewer	3	8	53

Gregarius » TechCrunch » December 2008

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