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| Posted: 07 May 2009 08:56 AM PDT
Yesterday, Amazon launched its larger-format Kindle DX with a built-in PDF reader and partnership deals with textbook and newspaper companies. Today, Wall Street analysts are weighing in on what kind of impact the DX might have on Amazon’s numbers. Barclay Capital’s Doug Anmuth estimates that the DX alone could add $800 million in revenues and $100 million in gross profits in 2012. Total Kindle revenues in that year for both the smaller Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX will be be $3.7 billion, he estimates, with gross profits of $840 million. In three years time, he thinks the Kindle will represent more than 10 percent of both Amazon’s sales and gross profits (for perspective, last year Amazon reported $19 billion in sales and $4.3 billion in gross profits). Meanwhile, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney for now is sticking with his 2010 projection of $1.2 billion in Kindle sales, which would account for over 4 percent of the total—that is next year. Mahaney isn’t going out further than that yet, but he may soon “up that estimate a bit,” he wrote in a note this morning. Why? One reason is because Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos threw out a tantalizing detail yesterday about the Kindle’s growing traction: For the books available on the Kindle, unit sales are tracking at 35 percent the level of the same titles in print, up from 13 percent in February. Mahaney estimates that the Kindle already accounts for “about 10% of total North American book units,” or or 4 million books sold during the first quarter out of a total of 38 million books, he tells me. Those 4 million Kindle books equated to an estimated $34 million in revenues during the quarter (which doesn’t include sales of the Kindle device itself) and added 2 to 3 percent to Amazon’s growth in media revenues for North America. Mahaney also thinks that the 35 percent sales figure suggests that Kindle owners are buying two books per month on the Kindle. Obviously, these are hardcore book readers, and that level of sales won’t stay so high as the Kindle is used by more and more people beyond the early adopters (who in this case are tech-savvy bookworms). But the Kindle DX hints at a broader strategy. It is purpose built for the educational market—students who don’t want to lug around heavy textbooks and can buy cheaper versions on the Kindle. (What would be really interesting would be a textbook subscription that gives students access to all of their books each semester, with an upgrade option to buy chapters or entire books if they want to keep them beyond that time period. But I digress). Surely, the Kindle DX is not the last Kindle in the pipeline. Amazon will keep rolling out upgrades and offshoots designed to appeal to different readers. For instance, the DX isn’t perfect for magazines and newspapers. You really want a color screen for anything with photos and illustrations. But electronic ink technology is moving in that direction, and then there is the prospect of a larger iPod Touch that would be perfect as both a Web tablet and an electronic reader. Already, Amazon has a Kindle app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Despite the small size, I prefer it to the still-clunky Kindle just because I carry my iPhone with me all the time. I’d much rather read a book on an IPod Tablet than on a Kindle DX. And you know what? Amazon doesn’t care because it is not in this to sell Kindles. It is in this to sell digital books, which have much higher margins than either paper books or the Kindle devices. Amazon could (and should) just as easily make a Kindle app for Android (especially with Android Netbooks coming out), Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile. So how big can the Kindle get? It’s not about the device, it’s about the software. The only limit to how big it can get is the speed with which people can become comfortable reading books on screens. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| I Love Rewards Raises $5.9 Million For Employee Rewards Program Posted: 07 May 2009 08:50 AM PDT
I Love Rewards, which operates employee rewards and sales incentive recognition programs for companies, has secured a $6.9 million in Series B funding led by GrandBanks Capital with prior investors JLA Ventures and Laurence Capital participating. The company raised $4 million in Series A funding in 2008 from JLA Ventures and Laurence Capital. The company says the funding will be used to expand its sales and marketing efforts. I Love Rewards operates employee rewards and recognition, sales incentive and service award programs for corporations, including Microsoft, Marriott, ConAgra and Bell. Rewards are distributed as 'points' that are then used by employees to choose brand name reward merchandise (i.e. Apple), experiences (i.e. travel and special events), gift cards and virtual awards (i.e. music downloads). Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| CrunchGear Reviews the Electronic Cigarette Posted: 07 May 2009 08:03 AM PDT  The SuperSmoker is an atomizer that sends the taste and nicotine of a four cigarettes into your gullet without flame, smoke, or even any of the nasty chemicals usually found in cigs. As a non-smoker, this thing was a bust but if you're a jonesing flier, this thing is amazing. Each filter tip contains about four cigarettes worth of puffs and each box contains 24 tips. To use it you charge it up from a wall socket, attach a little filter-shaped atomizer packet, and suck. The tip lights up and you get your taste of sweet release. In all honesty I wasn't much impressed - "All the nasty taste of a cigarette without the cancer!" - but, again, this isn't for me.
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| Double Happiness: Microsoft Integrates Photosynth With Virtual Earth Posted: 07 May 2009 07:40 AM PDT
In the video it’s releasing on YouTube for the occasion (embedded below), Microsoft claims ‘hundreds of thousands’ of users have already used Photosynth - which was released to the public back in August 2008 - and uploaded more than 12 million photos in 350,000 synths. Now it’s taking the next step by using Silverlight technology in order to make it possible for user to port their Photosynths to Virtual Earth, running on Macs and PCs alike (unless you refuse to run Silverlight on any of those, of course). It touts this as a must for tourism agencies (for obvious reasons) but also businesses who want to add a cool visual layer of their stores, outlets and offices. The example it is featuring on the Virtual Earth product site is for a real estate listing, and the result of the synth is stunning as ever. In addition to the integration, Microsoft announced that the latest release of Photosynth introduces commercial licensing, privacy controls, and one-click highlighting for viewers to easily explore synths. It’s also worth noting that this integration announcement comes several months after Microsoft started including hyperlinks to hosted photosynths on its Live Maps web application. I can really see how many tourism agencies and businesses from around the world can benefit from showing off whatever they can show off on a digital version of our planet, but I also see the challenges ahead for Microsoft. After all, the company is going to have to convince not only those organizations but also potential visitors to install and use both Virtual Earth and Silverlight on their computers, and getting the word out that something like Photosynth even exists. So far, these are all examples of services that haven’t exactly seen stellar success and are seem to be far away from even edging mainstream popularity. Either way, I think the combination is powerful and enticing. What do you think? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Historical Perspective: At Least This Time Around We Don’t Have Incubators For Incubators Posted: 07 May 2009 02:42 AM PDT
I’m not just talking about three massively funded pet food delivery services. Nor am I talking about blowing a billion dollars on home grocery delivery. No, I’m talking about possibly the most absurd idea to come out of the bubble years: Incubators for incubators. Startup incubators are businesses that help startups get on their feet. They supply office space, human labor for things like legal and human resource expenses that are easily outsourced, and other services. In return they get equity in the startup. The incubator model, which has been infinitely tweaked, can work. Some great startups came out of well known incubators like idealab, such as GoTo.com, which later changed its name to Overture and was bought by Yahoo for $1.63 billion. But for the most part incubators have been the punch line in bad jokes about the bubble, and deservedly so. But they were hot in the late nineties, particularly off the back of perceived idealab success. So when, in 1999, a slew of startups decided to not just be incubators but rather incubators of incubators, it sort of made sense. At least, it made sense to Red Herring writer Sarah Lai Stirland, who wrote a masterful article on the flowering niche. The article is long gone but was preserved at Vault.com and I’ve copied it below for historical hilarity (I have no idea what the copyright status of this is, but if someone has a fit we’ll gladly take it down - but I won’t delete it from my hard drive, no way). The article profiles not one but a whopping four “incubators of incubators,” or companies that would incubate companies that would incubate startups: Incubatorincubator.com, KnowledgeCube, InQbiz, and The Atlantic. The article begins with “Jonathan Abrams has a cunning plan: capitalize on the incubator craze by starting an incubator of incubators.” (yeah, that Jonathan Abrams). Everything that follows is absolutely hilarious. An early quote from Abrams: “It used to be that after you sold your company to Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) or Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) for $200 million, you might start another company. But now that has become passe, and anyone with a glimmer of pseudo-success is starting an incubator.” When told about the other three incubators of incubators, Abrams said “Wow, I had no idea I had competition.” Before you stomp on Abrams: he says it was all a joke and he was amazed Red Herring took it so seriously. He says in an email yesterday explaining the article “i was working on my first startup HotLinks, a social bookmarking company circa 1999, and was talking to an editor at Red Herring about HotLinks and he kept going on about incubators (which were a hot topic at the time) and I spontaneously made a joke that I was gonna start an incubator for incubators. This is typical nerd/programmer recursive/meta humor, like when I did FriendFeedFeed.com. anyways, some writer from Red Herring calls me about it and wants to write a serious article about it, so we went along with it as a joke, not really 100% believing they were gonna take it seriously. at least I think thats about what happened, this was a while back… the whole thing was pretty silly” I believe Abrams, since his quotes are so off the wall. But the rest of the article is apparently serious. I’d highlight the best parts but, really, the whole thing is the best part. Just read it all. Here it is: Who will incubate the incubators? Jonathan Abrams has a cunning plan: capitalize on the incubator craze by starting an incubator of incubators. For-profit incubators are a form of training-wheels venture funding that are supposed to help novice entrepreneurs along before they receive larger sums from traditional venture capitalists. Idealab founder Bill Gross is seen as the pioneer of commercial Internet incubators, but investors tend to view them as nascent CMGI (Nasdaq: CMGI)s, the publicly traded venture capital fund that had its share value increase 19,541 percent since starting its venture activities in 1995. “It used to be that after you sold your company to Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) or Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) for $200 million, you might start another company. But now that has become pass?, and anyone with a glimmer of pseudo-success is starting an incubator,” notes Mr. Abrams. Part of the attraction comes from the business model: incubators routinely take 50 percent equity stakes in new ventures, and they also establish the value of the services that they provide their companies, according to research done by Ben Cary, a second-year student at Harvard Business School, for the Cambridge Incubator. On top of that, incubators can boost their valuations when and if they go public, since they can claim that all their companies work together to provide each other services and assets, increasing the value of the companies and by extension that of the holding company. Without a trace of irony, the 30-year-old Mr. Abrams proposes to leapfrog that process himself by helping would-be business hatcheries beat their competitors. Mr. Abrams, who launched an Internet search portal called Hotlinks last September and who is funded by @Ventures, a subsidiary of CMGI, says that his incubator of incubators will help to speed up the whole process. He already has gone so far as to reserve the domain name Incubatorincubator.com, although he hasn’t figured out a schedule for implementing this idea yet. “Incubatorincubator.com will be taking perhaps 5 to 10 percent of the equity of the incubators. This will in turn mean we indirectly get a stake in the companies those incubators incubate, since the incubators will take stakes in those companies, and we will have a stake in the incubators. This will provide us with a very large portfolio!” Mr. Abrams says. THE RACE IS ON “Wow, I had no idea I had competition,” says Mr. Abrams. He does, and his competitors are going global. A small group of financiers, working independently, are starting to incubate incubators around the globe by providing their own resources and packaging these resources with local and global technology partnerships. In effect, they’re spreading the commercial model of incubation by teaming up with and training local management teams to establish their own incubators, which eventually will become nodes of global incubator networks. While bigger companies such as Softbank, CMGI, and Hong Kong’s Pacific Century Cyberworks are also busy setting up global venture networks, the deals being set up by incubators are typically smaller, ranging from $50 million to $500 million. GOING GLOCAL “We’re really training these people to run local incubators,” explains Matt Bruck, KnowledgeCube’s vice president of corporate development. “So we incubate both technology companies and local incubators. We believe we have created the prototype for incubation.” KnowledgeCube directly incubates technology startups in New York, Boston, and Seattle, but also is building satellite “Cubes” around the globe. The local incubators will be set up like traditional venture capital funds in which KnowledgeCube is both an investor and a partner, says Mr. Bruck. As he describes it, KnowledgeCube incubates the local incubators in the traditional sense of incubation by providing them with the expertise, funding, and connections to get them up and running quickly. Other partners in the local venture fund/incubator will be local conglomerates who have the connections and expertise within those specific markets, Mr. Bruck says. Mr. Bruck says that deals are in place for Cubes in Hong Kong and S?o Paolo, Brazil. The effort is so new that the company won’t disclose how much it aims to spend or who will be involved, since terms still are being negotiated and the intended executives have yet to give notice at their current jobs. But Mr. Bruck says that managers of the regional offices will have local business connections and American business experience (one is an investment banker, the other an entrepreneur, and both are currently living in New York). KnowledgeCube’s management has good pedigrees. President and CEO Max P. Michaels was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (Nasdaq: MWD) and a McKinsey consultant, while senior vice president of technology and operations Dave Tottle was most recently an executive at Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU). Mr. Tottle, Mr. Michaels, and Mr. Bruck are all MIT alumni and have snagged Ed Roberts, an MIT Sloan School of Management professor and former partner and cofounder of Boston-based venture capital firm Zero Stage Capital, as the chairman of the advisory board. NO GARDEN-VARIETY INCUBATOR “What’s happening is if anybody provides any portion of the range of services needed, they’ll call themselves an incubator,” he says in disgust. For his part, Mr. Lind sees himself in the business of exporting and importing intellectual capital from various countries around the world to places where it’s applicable. For example, companies within the InQbiz network will have most of their IT support outsourced to India, where such support is cheaper than elsewhere in the world, while some of the business plans for the startups may be modeled after U.S. Internet startups. Like other incubators, his ultimate aim is to create a network between the various startups in order to share their knowledge, users, technology, and expertise. InQbiz invests money in startups around the world and hooks international professional services and technology companies such as Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) up to local entrepreneurs. Like KnowledgeCube, it also will establish local incubators through strategic partnerships with local companies. Mr. Lind, an entrepreneur who in 1997 founded Strategic Partners, an emerging markets corporate finance firm specializing in telecommunications and finance, has so far established InQbiz incubators in Bombay, India, and Cape Town, South Africa. He was in Hong Kong to interview candidates to help him to set up an incubator there. He also has plans to set up an incubator in Singapore and to partner with local firms in Japan and Korea. The local InQbiz incubators typically take a 50 percent interest in the incubated companies. Companies that are being incubated in InQbiz India include StrategicNewspapers.com, a sort of Verticalnet (Nasdaq: VERT) of India; eEngineering, a portal for outsourced engineering workforce solutions; Findstone, a business-to-business site for trading industrial stone; and SoulKurry.com, a portal for Indian women. Mr. Lind expects most of these startups to complete IPOs on their countries’ main stock exchanges, rather than on Nasdaq. He anticipates InQbiz completing an IPO sometime within the next year to fund the growth of its network. OVER THERE The Atlantic, which just started a holding company called eMIT Capital (short for emerging markets technology), plans on taking a 50 percent stake in local incubators that it partners with. The markets that it’s eyeing include Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, South Africa, and China. Since the managers were still fund-raising at the time, they declined to provide any more details about their plans. But Scott Gordon, CEO of eMIT Capital and former president and CEO of ING Emerging Markets Investors, does say that with such low consumer penetration rates in emerging markets, the best opportunities are in the so-called business-to-business arena. Again, the company’s pitch to local entrepreneurs is its ability to provide seed capital, in addition to a global network of business connections. All the activity surprises one person who’s prominent in the incubator business. “Is there such an animal out there?” asks Alberto Saavedra, who sits on the board of advisors for a number of incubators, including Venture Catalyst in Santa Monica, California; Software Greenhouse in Barcelona, Spain; and Talentum in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Incubating runs in the family: his wife is a taxonomies manager at Business.com, a company being incubated by the Jake Winebaum/Sky Dayton incubator eCompanies. While making pizza at his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Saavedra says he’s been cooking up ideas for two such incubators of his own: one perhaps for IBM (NYSE: IBM) and another for the government of Uruguay. He claims individuals working for those entities have told him that they have large sums of money to invest. “The point is to train management teams to start incubators, since there aren’t enough of them,” he says. “That’s my thought process — I haven’t thought that much about it.” Meanwhile, he says that he’s also coined another new term for the incubator lexicon: the one-man incubator. “For some reason, a lot of people who want to do startups come to me for advice, so I provide it in exchange for shares,” he says. “This is a bit of fun, so I’m doing it. Next week I might not care about other companies though, and I might start my own.” Hmmm, self-incubation. Wonder what the market will think of that? TROUBLE AHEAD? InQbiz’s Mr. Lind says that his confidence stems from his belief that incubation as a business model is a fundamentally new way of doing business, though a volatile market might mean slower expansion and less acquisition currency for the Internet companies. “The emerging markets are tough after [Tuesday]; it’s like the tail wagging the dog,” he says, referring to Tuesday’s bizarre market volatility, which saw the Nasdaq Composite Index drop 575 points, or 13.6 percent, at one point, only to rally back to finish the day down less than 75 points. Back in Mountain View, California, Mr. Abrams shrugs off the Nasdaq’s wild wobbles. “It’s a just a blip,” he says. Time, and the market, will tell. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Attention Kmart Shoppers: Your Social Elements Are On Aisle 3 Posted: 07 May 2009 02:40 AM PDT
MySears and MyKmart were built to foster a community around the long tradition of shopping at those retailers. The idea being that this community would not only be interested in buying things, but would be interested in rating items, having discussions about items and giving feedback to the company itself. Perhaps if you got users to interact and form this community, eventually they’ll keep coming back to Sears or Kmart to do their shopping, was the thought. And after over a year of testing, it seems to be working pretty well. Yes, MySears and MyKmart have actually be around in one form or another as a testing ground for a while, Rob Harles, SHC’s VP of community, tells me. It started out as an experiment to see where it would lead. And even with the sites officially launching, it remains an experiment, he says. But it’s one the company is getting much more comfortable with. The sites have been built in conjunction with Viewpoints, a consumer review social networking site. And as Harles tells it, SHC seems to have a pretty good grasp of what could conceivably work and what won’t. It doesn’t, for example, want to build another giant social network like Facebook or MySpace. Instead, it aims to stay within its reach, engage customers, and eventually, hopefully, create a sense of the small town shopkeeper who knows all of his customers, as Harles put it. That may be a bit of wishful thinking on the part of a company that owns Kmart, one of the world’s largest retailers, but at least it’s thinking small rather than thinking too big.
Something else Harles said that made a lot of sense to me is that SHC also doesn’t want to restrict users into having to create yet another profile on yet another social site. He hopes to use various other site’s APIs to help his customers fit MySears and MyKmart into their online social lives that already exist. He wouldn’t go into specifics about what exactly he was thinking about with this, but one could imagine sites like this using something like Facebook Connect to tie Facebook profiles to MySears and MyKmart accounts. Harles conceded that when the project first launched, the sites were limited to the demographics you normally associate with Sears and Kmart — which is to say, older house moms. But over the past several months, various other groups of users have come to try out the sites and find out information about products. But he notes that a network like this may be good for the parents of the Facebook and MySpace generations to step into the social graph. Sure, a lot of the elements on these sites are the old tried and true standards of just about every other social networking site, but it’s good to see old stalwarts of retail attempting to transition into the new age. An age where online customer feedback and input is important. And they’re apparently willing to keep on shifting along with the ever-changing web.
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| Zendesk Secures Funding For SaaS Help Desk System, Heads To The U.S. Posted: 07 May 2009 02:30 AM PDT
The company declined to comment how much financing it secured from the VC firm exactly, but in a telephone conversation did say it was a fairly small round. Zendesk previously raised $500,000 in seed funding from PageFlakes co-founders Christoph Janz. Zendesk is a web-based, SaaS-delivered help desk / support ticketing solution that gives companies, big or small, a simple way to manage incoming support requests from end customers. The aptly-named startup is delivering its hosted help desk system, which can be set up in just a matter of minutes, to a wide range of customers, including some familiar names like Rackspace, Condé Nast, MAXroam, Twitter, MSNBC and Scribd. Zendesk comes with a free version, but it is fairly limited since you can only provide support for up to 50 end-users, plus you don’t get to brand the interface. There are six packages that you can subscribe to on a monthly basis (all come with a 30-day free trial), ranging from $19 for 1 support agent to $475 for 25 agents. Needless to say, these prices are way below what most traditional help desk system vendors dare charge for their products and services. I very much like the fact that the startup is so laser-focused on what they do and do well, instead of overloading the product with unnecessary features or over-extending it to broader use (i.e. project management, to-do listings, etc.). That would put them up against some stiff competition and it seems to be carving out a nice niche for itself by focusing on end-user help desk management as it is, so that just wouldn’t make a lot of sense. Zendesk was also smart enough to have come right out the gate with an extensive API third-party developers and/or customers can use to plug the tool into other applications. Bet we’ll here more from this company in the future.
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| @Google - @Twitter To Start Indexing Links For Search Posted: 07 May 2009 12:18 AM PDT
Speaking on a panel today, Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s new VP of Operations, had some very interesting things to say, Webware’s Rafe Needleman who moderated it, reports. The most interesting thing is that Twitter Search will soon begin crawling the links that people tweet out and indexing them. This immediately takes Twitter Search, which is still a very basic service, to the next level. This means that no longer will it just be a stream of textual tweets, but it will include millions of web pages as well — web pages that are more or less already curated by the individuals who tweet them out. Sure, there will be some spam, maybe even a lot of it, but this user curation should help real good content from around the web bubble up. Apparently, Twitter Search will index the content of these pages as well. Yes, this is what Google does. So it should be no surprise when I say that Jayaram was the former VP of Search Quality for Google. Of course there is no way Twitter Search will index as many pages as Google, but that’s not the point. Twitter Search isn’t meant to replace Google, that’d be dumb. At this point, no one is going to beat Google at its own game (you hear that Microsoft?). Twitter Search is meant to be a different kind of powerful search engine in its own right. A smaller, potentially curated, real-time search engine. Twitter’s biggest trump card here is the real-time factor. It’s not entirely real-time right now, and there are often delays, but it’s faster than Google — mainly thanks to the nature of tweets (fast to send) versus the nature of webpages (slow to build). And so it’s not yet clear how indexing these linked pages would impact that aspect of Twitter Search. You’d have to assume it would slow it down, but really there’s not much point in assuming anything because it’s not yet really clear how Twitter would use this webpage data in search results. One thing that is more clear is that Twitter is also looking at ways to better tailor search results. As I mentioned, right now the results are a very basic collection of tweets with key terms. Jayaram says that the company wants to add some sort of reputation filtering to offer better results. Now before everyone gets in a tizzy about the word “reputation” just like when Loic Le Meur brought up the idea of filtering Twitter Search by “authority,” Jayaram says Twitter’s engineers are still determining the best way to calculate this reputation. That seems to indicate that it wouldn’t be something silly like just being based on the number of followers you have. Things should get very interesting in this space over the next several months. Unless, of course, Google buys Twitter first. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| YouTube River Diverted Into The Google Social Ocean As Well Posted: 06 May 2009 11:30 PM PDT
To be clear, you could previously link the two together, but starting today, if you sign up for a new YouTube account, you automatically get a Google account to go with it. And more importantly, buried at the end of the post on the YouTube blog, Google notes that, “some of the new features we roll out down the road may require a Google Account. In these cases, we’ll be there to help you link your YouTube Account to a Google Account if you want to check the features out.” Without saying what it means by that specifically, I think it’s pretty clear that Google has big plans for its hugely popular online video site in its overall social scheme. Not only does that probably mean little things like being able to feature YouTube videos on your Google Profile (just like you can with pictures now), but also placing videos in the upcoming “Updates” news stream area. That’s seems likely to be the name of the area that will be Google’s version of the News Feed — where all of your social data and the data of your contacts is collected in one place. This area, which has yet to be unveiled, is very important if Google is to find cohesion in its social plans which have so far been scattered. For the big two social networks, Facebook and MySpace, pictures have been a huge part of each of their networks. Videos are now increasingly becoming a big part as well as recording and encoding technologies improve — and broadband speeds get better. And there’s no bigger site for video than YouTube, which in the U.S. far outpaces its next closest competitor, Fox Interactive Media, which runs, yes, MySpace. So Google is set on the video end for its social network that is coming together. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| A Few More Tickets To Star Trek Tomorrow. Plus, Free Popcorn And Drink! Posted: 06 May 2009 07:44 PM PDT
We’ve got a few more tickets to the Star Trek screening tomorrow night at 7 p.m. in Redwood City (see here and here for more details). We are letting people in at 6 p.m., so get there early. We're paying for the price of the ticket, and charging a $2 fee to minimize no shows. After the show we'll meet at the nearby Red Lantern for a drink or three. Get your tickets here. And we now have three sponsors for the event. Microsoft Live Search, which helps more than 200 million people a month find stuff on the web, is buying everyone a soft drink at the movie theater (remind me to disclose this when we write about the new search launch). Trapster, a location based mobile application that alerts users in real time when they approach speed traps (iphone app here), is buying everyone popcorn (woohoo). And Eventbrite is helping with the cost of the tickets. Thanks very much, Star Trek sponsors.
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| Kim Kardashian Joins FriendFeed, Befriends 35,000 Users, Gets No Love Back Posted: 06 May 2009 07:34 PM PDT
Now, she did this thanks to FriendFeed’s new one-click Twitter login functionality. This allows you to sign up for FriendFeed using your Twitter name and transfer your information over via OAuth to FriendFeed, as well as automatically friend anyone you are following on Twitter. It’s a smart move by FriendFeed, as it ports your social graph over from a more popular service. But this simplicity and close tie into Twitter raises a couple concerns. First, Twitter, a service with which FriendFeed is often compared, hit its watershed moment recently during the Ashton Kutcher/CNN race to a million followers. Now that it’s mainstream and celebrities are starting to see the benefits of using these types of services to promote themselves, are they already staking out other less mature services to become the “Ashton” of those services and bring them to the mainstream? Second, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit isn’t even sure if the Kardashian account really was created by her (or her people). It’s possible that squatters are going to start staking out on popular names in the hope that the service will grow in popularity and gain some of these real celebrities. Or worse, that people are going to start signing up for the service pretending to be celebrities on there. Either way, it’s just going to lead to a bunch of noise. And some users are already getting upset about it. But there’s hope: Of the 35,000 people that Kardashian friended, only around 350 people subscribed to her. FriendFeed users, a much smaller base than Twitter, seem to be more savvy. When they see that Kardashian is only porting in her Twitter updates to FriendFeed, they’re probably not going to start following her back, as she adds nothing to the service, which prides itself in conversations about entries. Everyone is already on the hunt for the “next Twitter.” Kim Kardashian (or someone pretending to be her), apparently thinks it’s going to be FriendFeed. And FriendFeed users don’t seem to care. Can one of these services go mainstream without celebrities? Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| No Mob Wars Here: WonderHill Nabs $7 Million To Build Wholesome Casual Games Posted: 06 May 2009 07:02 PM PDT
It’s quickly becoming clear that social gaming is a goldmine. Zynga is reportedly making as much as nine figures in revenues, and as users become more accustomed to microtransactions, these figures are poised to grow even more. But it’s also an incredibly difficult space to break into - for every successful game, there are countless others that go unnoticed, even if they have very similar gameplay. So when I say that a new startup called WonderHill has a good chance at making a name for itself in social gaming, it’s not something I’m taking lightly. While some companies like Zynga have dominated the youth demographic with games like Mafia and Poker, WonderHill is looking to target an entirely different audience, honing in on the 30+ demographic with games with a broader appeal. The company has just closed a $7 million Series A funding round led by Charles River Ventures and Shasta Ventures, and currently has two games live on Facebook and MySpace. The company’s greatest asset is its team. CEO James Currier founded Tickle, one of the earliest pioneers in viral marketing, in the late 90’s (it later sold to Monster.com for over $100 million) and is on the board of directors at Linden Labs (the makers of SecondLife). CTO Stan Chudnovsky was also a long-time Tickle employee, becoming that company’s CEO following Currier’s departure. And Chief Creative Officer Nick Rush has held executive positions at Pogo, Electronic Arts Online, and iWin, where he created a number of very popular games. He was also involved with You Don’t Know Jack (one of my all-time favorite games) and the Flying Toasters screensaver. As for the games themselves, Currier says that WonderHill is looking to take the “Pixar approach”, building family-friendly games with high production values that could be played by anyone, without having to dumb them down too much for children. They’re fun and casual, but non-violent. At launch the available apps include Dog World, a virtual pet app with around 1.25 million active users across Facebook and MySpace, and Green Spot, a gardening game with 1.5 million active users. The company plans to build out more casual games in the near future, beginning with some of basics (word games, card games, etc) and eventually ramping up to entirely new gameplay. For starters these games will all be played through social networks like MySpace and Facebook, but the company has plans to expand to the iPhone as well. Revenue will be generated through micro-transactions - the company isn’t going to be relying heavily on advertising. WonderHill isn’t by any means a sure bet. There are already quite a few social games made ‘for everyone’, even if they aren’t all flying under a single banner. But it’s hard to argue with the experience these guys are bringing to the table, and the older demographic they’re targeting is among the fastest growing on social networks - and they’re probably going to be looking for something other than Vampires to pass the time.
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| News Flash: Paying for Coverage Is Still “Taboo” Posted: 06 May 2009 03:53 PM PDT
“…while compensating bloggers was considered taboo a few years ago, there has been a paradigm shift in thinking over the last year…” Really? Yeah, I guess that whole Google resetting the page rank of PayPerPost bloggers was all the way back in November 2007. I must have slipped into a coma and missed the “paradigm shift” since. Each time I’ve gotten this email, I have written back something like, “I’m sorry, I still consider paying for coverage incredibly controversial and, for a reporter, unethical. Can you explain to me what has changed about this issue?” No response. Month or so passes, then I get the same email. I honestly don’t know if the emails are being sent to me for press consideration or as a nudge that I should sign up, because it’s just obliquely titled “suggestion” in the subject line. So, let me address this publicly, to save the time of future Izea employees cutting and pasting the email and sending it to me again: There is no time during my life on planet earth or beyond that I will *ever* consider accepting payment for coverage. There is no circumstance or situation where I will respect a journalist who does, especially if the details of that conflict aren’t clearly disclosed. P.E.R.I.O.D. The release backs up this assertion that it’s no longer taboo by touting Forrester Research as endorsing “compensated conversation” as a great addition to your PR and marketing strategy. The great test case? Kmart. Wow. I wouldn’t consider trading in my credibility for, say, a lifetime shopping spree at Bloomingdale’s, but it’s definitely not worth talking up the latest blue-light-specials. What’s more, I wonder how they’re measuring that “success” as I haven’t been hearing any great Kmart buzz of late… I’ve always had massive respect for former Forrester analyst Charlene Li and current analyst Jeremiah Owyang and was shocked that the firm would endorse this. So I sent a note to Owyang who quickly sought to put it in context and with good reason. According to Sean Corcoran, who authored the research note, Forrester said that this could work and could be OK, but with strict parameters including full disclosure of the items or services being received for free, and encouraging the bloggers to be negative if they had a negative experience. At no time, did Forrester suggest that it was no longer controversial and said that journalist-bloggers should never be considered in the “compensated conversation” mix. “We write for marketers and, like it or not, this isn’t going away,” Corcoran said. “Companies were thoroughly confused, and we want to show them how to do it the right way.” Ok, fair enough. Reviewers are frequently sent free items with the understanding that they’ll write whatever they think. They also usually have to send the item back. I’d argue there’s a world of difference between that and cash payment that’s disclosed on another page of the blog. Interestingly, Owyang tipped TechCrunch to the company in the first post we ever wrote on them saying he had “grave concerns” but that founder Ted Murphy was not “the devil.” More interesting, the post he wrote about it at the time, is no longer available on his site. He says he never pulls any post, and that it’s an old blog and a Web hosting problem. (I believe him.) He also notes that he wrote that in the early PayPerPost days when it was an undeniably shadier service with no disclosure rules. As is clear from Forrester’s careful clarification, the problem with the thinking here– well, one of them– is that it lumps “bloggers” into one category. In reality, blogging is a tool that lots of professionals use, not really one profession. There are bloggers– like the ones at TechCrunch– who are independent journalists and then there are bloggers like Owyang who write about the industry and have smart things to say, but also get paid by clients. Then there are corporate bloggers or in-house employees who write about their companies’ news. It’s basically a more conversational press release and there’s nothing wrong with it, because you go to it realizing the company is going to put itself in the best light. In each case these are professionals using a conversational tool to get across a given message. As long as we get what they do for a living, there’s no harm or foul. I appreciate the insight of an analyst, and more openness from reading blog posts written by companies like Google or Twitter. Then, there’s the Izea concept: Sure it’s been tweaked to include vague disclosures, but as seen by how they positioned Forrester in this release, there’s just an underlying shadiness to the venture. Just go away. Or at least stop emailing me. (For Michael’s endless rants on the subject, go here.) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Mahalo Answers Is Hijacking Twitter Questions From IMshopping Posted: 06 May 2009 03:17 PM PDT
Last week we wrote about a startup called IMshopping, which lets you ask questions to human shopping guides about products to buy. One of the ways you can do this is directly through Twitter by asking a question to @imshopping. I tried this earlier today by asking for Mother’s Day gift suggestions. Imagine my surprise when I started getting back answers not only from @imshopping, but also from @answers, lots of them. The @answers account belongs to Mahalo Answers, the Q&A site that is run by Jason Calacanis. Could it possibly be that Mahalo Answers is hijacking questions directed at IMshopping. Yes, it is. My question is now posted on Mahalo Answers, where anyone there can answer, and every time they do I get another message on Twitter. I never posted this question on Mahalo Answers nor asked them to. Mahalo Answers is stealing my question, isn’t it? Calacanis (who is our partner in organizing the TechCrunch 50 conference), confirms, “We pull in about 100-200 questions a day from twitter… Usually anything with ‘does anyone know…’” And only “less than 1%” of Mahalo’s total traffic comes from Twitter. I asked that also. Finally, Calacanis points out: “It’s all public, so folks love it (ie free research).” I am not sure about the loving it part. If I ask a question on Twitter, usually I am looking for an answer from people who are following me. I don’t know if there is such a thing as answer spam—I mean, I did put the question on Twitter—but this comes pretty close. In the two hours since I posted my questions (I also asked for gift suggestions for my wife since we have children), I’ve gotten three answers on Twitter from IMshopping and 11 from Mahalo answers. Both link to a page where the question is posted, along with all the answers. IMshopping doesn’t send you a new tweet every time there is anew answer, which is a far less spammy way to do it. Actually, I don’t really care that Mahalo is hijacking these questions if I end up getting better answers as a result. And there is an evil genius component involved which is admirable in its sheer audaciousness. Who steals somebody else’s questions? So how do Mahalo’s answers stack up to IMshopping? To be honest, I found both sets of answers equally unsatisfying. The guides on IMshopping suggested a “personalized oversized metal family tree sculpture,” an engraved wooden keepsake box, personalized throw, and chocolates. The folks from Mahalo Answers came up with a digital picture frame, a gift certificate (thanks), tea, and time with her grandchildren. I am still looking for a good, original answer—something that is not too tacky would be nice. If you have one, please leave it in comments.
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| Despite Recession, ExactTarget Raises A Whopping $70 Million For Marketing Software Posted: 06 May 2009 03:10 PM PDT
Marketing email software provider ExactTarget has secured $70 million in funding led by Battery Ventures, with Scale Venture Partners and Montagu Newhall participating. The company says it will use the money to expand its international presence. The company says that the $70 million is a similar level of funding it sought to raise in its December 2007 application for an initial public offering. ExactTarget will delay its IPO plane and has withdrawn its application with the SEC to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol EXTG. ExactTarget’s software provides enterprises with email marketing platform that powers everything from email coupon offers and automated fraud alerts to e-statements and SMS text messages. ExactTarget's software provides email marketing tools for a widespread group of big-name clients, including CareerBuilder.com, Expedia.com, the Gannett Co., and The Home DepotThe software is also integrated on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Twitter Just Made Its Email Notifications Much More Useful Posted: 06 May 2009 02:35 PM PDT Twitter has just rolled out a small, but somewhat meaningful update to the way it sends email notifications. This includes both direct message notifications and new follower notifications. Both now carry the Twitter logo and turquoise background in each update, rather than just plain text. But more importantly, the new notifications contain a lot more information about the person sending you the message or following you. For example, previously when someone followed you, you received a message like:
The only thing that was a hyperlink in all of that was the actual profile URL. Now, when a new person subscribes to you, you see what is in the image below.
As you can see, this now gives you how many followers they have, how many people they are following, and how many tweets they’ve sent. You can also see their profile picture. Previously, you would had to click through to a person’s profile on Twitter to see all of that. This certainly will save me a lot of time in checking out the people who follow me. And it actually should help me follow more people that I want to, as it’s not such a hassle to screen through new users now. Direct messages aren’t that much different substance-wise, but they do also contain the Twitter logo now, as well as the Twitter user’s icon (pictured, below).
Update: As commenter Jeff notes below, these notifications would be even more useful if Twitter had added the “Bio” data that users include in their profiles. [Thanks Adam] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| MeatCards: Print Your Business Cards On Beef Jerky With A Frickin’ Laser Beam Posted: 06 May 2009 02:23 PM PDT  I’ve made no secret about my disdain for business cards. In an age where we can swap photographs and movies in a matter of seconds wirelessly, why are we still fumbling with clumsy pieces of paper that are both easy to lose and environmentally unfriendly? Today, it looks like I might be eating my words (or, as the case may be, yours). Enter MeatCards. Two weeks ago a number of blogs caught wind of this bizarre and potentially amazing creation, bringing meat and lasers together to create the most protein-rich business cards ever. Some thought it was a hoax. But it’s very real.
I reached out to the guys behind MeatCards, and as luck would have it they were preparing for their first run of prototype cards (styled after the design from American Psycho, of course). So I sent in my information, and they printed out the prototype seen above. In the interest of preserving a shred of privacy, I’m blurred out a few digits from my phone number, Email, and our mailing address. But most of the text, like my name and the TechCrunch information in the upper right hand corner, hasn’t been touched. Obviously the laser etching isn’t quite perfect, but it mostly gets the job done. More samples below. I haven’t receieved my MeatCards yet, and thus have been unable to taste the goods for myself. But I have been assured that they should in theory be edible, albeit with a strange laser-burnt aftertaste. That said, the guys behind MeatCards seem to be interested in finding a way to mark the cards with “Do Not Eat” to make it clear that they don’t want you to eat them - it just opens them up to too many possible legal problems and regulations. But they can’t stop you from doing it. So when can you order one for yourself? The product is still in the testing stages, but according to its homepage they should be going on sale some time soon. Make sure to check out this awesome Flickr set to see how it’s done. And for a more conventional business card, check out the cards Google is currently giving away.  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Arianna Huffington Says Online Journalists May Have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Posted: 06 May 2009 02:09 PM PDT
Arianna Huffington testified today before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet in a hearing on the “Future of Journalism.” The Senate was contemplating the future of news, particularly newspapers, and will consider what (if any) action Congress needs to take to save the industry. Those who testified include Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google; lberto Ibargüen, CEO of the John S. And James L. Knight Foundation; David Simon, writer and producer of The Wire, and former Baltimore Sun employee; Steve Coll, former managing editor of The Washington Post; and James Moroney, publisher and CEO of The Dallas Morning News. You can see the transcripts of their testimonies here. Huffington says in her testimony that traditional media has been afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder, saying “they are far too quick to drop a story-even a good one, in their eagerness to move on to the Next Big Thing.” Online journalists, she says, have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder because “they chomp down on a story and stay with it, refusing to move off it until they've gotten down to the marrow.” She goes on to say that the two afflictions should be merged to produce optimal journalism. Huffington maintains, as she has said before, that the future of journalism is based on a the link economy, search engines, online advertising, citizen journalism and foundation-supported investigative funds. She warns that if media doesn’t adopt these features, then they will have a tough time surviving. David Simon, the creator of the popular HBO series “The Wire,” took a pot shot at bloggers, saying that they aren’t “in the trenches” like newspaper journalists so often are. He said he has never seen a blogger in a courthouse or bar with policemen (building relationships with sources), which is something that career newspaper journalists do and bloggers don’t. Whether he’d know a blogger if he saw one in a crowded courtroom is not something he addressed. James Moroney, of the Dallas Morning News, suggests that Congress should create tax breaks for newspaper companies, relax antitrust laws so that newspapers can experiment with joint content distributions, and establish laws or regulations to prevent unpaid content distribution over the internet. These are really bad ideas. Marissa Mayer defended Google and Google News (which was referred to as a parasite by Forbes CEO and Chairman, Jim Spanfeller) valiantly, saying that “Google News and Google search provide a valuable free service to online newspapers specifically by sending interested readers to their sites at a rate of more than 1 billion clicks per month. Newspapers use that Web traffic to increase their readership and generate additional revenue…” Google has been taking a beating lately from news organizations ranging from the A.P. to Forbes claiming that it is somehow “stealing” their ad revenues. Can Congress save journalism? Does it even have to? Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| T-Mobile G1 Owners To Get Android v1.5 “Cupcake” Next Week Posted: 06 May 2009 02:03 PM PDT
After a somewhat steady stream of T-Mobile USA customers reported that the Android “Cupcake” update had hit their G1s last week, all went silent. Not everyone had gotten their update, and it seemed as if the rollout had suddenly stopped. Whether this first batch of updates was a mistake, we’re not sure - but now we at least know when it’s coming for everyone. Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >> Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Against All Odds: Imeem Raises More Cash And Has A Bold New Music Plan Posted: 06 May 2009 12:42 PM PDT
The point is, they aren’t going to be closing down any time soon, say sources close to the company. And for a free music streaming company, that’s really saying something. Weeks ago they were on the ropes, near the end of cash and with crushing venture debt obligations threatening to shut them down entirely. No one was interested in buying them or putting in more cash with big music label royalty commitments already past due. Then we heard whispers that they may have a plan to build a profitable business. And apparently they’ve convinced at least their current investors to back that plan with more capital. CNET’s Greg Sandoval reported earlier today that the company may have raised new funding (he used the “dodged a bullet” idiom, by the way). We’ve confirmed that the company has raised a new round of financing from existing investors. There’s no word if Sequoia has put new money in, and we’ve been told the amount raised is small, likely in the single digit millions. But it allows iMeem to make payroll and keep the servers running. More importantly, the company has forged new deals with the music labels, we’ve heard, that help it break away from the crushing pay-per-stream model that’s impossible to cover with advertising. Imeem has renegotiated its label deals to allow it to focus more on a revenue per user goal than a pay per stream. Revenues from downloads and ringtones will offset streaming rates, which moves the relationship much closer to a revenue share than a pure licensing deal. It may just give iMeem the room it needs to get to sustainability. The company is also planning on terminating its download deals with Amazon and iTunes, we’ve heard. Downloads will be sold directly by iMeem itself through Snocap, which it acquired last year. Those download sales are very low margin, but it takes money previously being sent to Amazon or Apple and gives it directly to the labels to offset streaming costs. At least that’s what we’re hearing. Imeem as usual won’t comment. But there’s a chance this company may still be around for the foreseeable future. And they may have redefined how streaming deals are done across the industry. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Control Freaks: Hulu Now Blocks Anonymous Proxies Too Posted: 06 May 2009 12:35 PM PDT
Outside of this country, if you’ve wanted to access Hulu, you’ve either been out of luck, or had to use a proxy server workaround. For several months, there were quite a few options that would work to trick Hulu into thinking you were trying to access it from within the U.S. even when you were not. But Hulu got smarter and started doing geo-checks at the streaming level. But still, a few virtual private network (VPN) creators like Hotspot Shield would get the job done by making your IP anonymous. Not anymore. Hulu has once again tweaked its detection methods and is now blocking anonymous proxies. If you try to access it with something like Hotspot Shield, you will get the message:
Ouch. Hulu has been making a habit of cracking down on unwanted access to its service. There is still a back and forth going on between it and the online media center startup Boxee. Boxee allowed users to access Hulu content from within its service, which the content providers behind Hulu saw as a problem because the content wasn’t be run directly through Hulu.com. Even though advertisements were still being shown during these streams, Hulu blocked Boxee, igniting a firestorm among Boxee fans. Boxee struck back by using Hulu’s RSS feeds to get some of the content back, but then Hulu blocked that too. So Boxee made a new web browser based on Mozilla, to make Hulu think it was running on something like Firefox. The message is pretty clear: People want access to Hulu, but Hulu’s isn’t interested in letting others work around its limits. While it’s annoying for users outside of the U.S. not to have access to the great content, considering that many of the proxy servers also blocked advertisements, you can on some level see where Hulu is coming from on that. Of course, those users are now probably just going to use a service like BitTorrent to find and download the content for free anyway. And if you happen to be using one of these VPNs for, you know, actual security reasons — no Hulu for you!
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| Facebook Connect Now Live On Digg Posted: 06 May 2009 11:37 AM PDT
Digg CEO Jay Adelson has suggested that Facebook Connect is the future of Digg, and that Facebook’s massive userbase will both spur Digg usage and provide a collaborative filter on stories. With Facebook Connect users will be able to cross-post, share Digg activities on Facebook and auto-follow Facebook friends. Every time you perform an action on Digg (leave a comment, submit a story, etc.) it will ask if you’d like to share with your Facebook friends. At this point you’ll have to approve sharing every time, but soon you’ll be able to set Digg to share all your activity on the site. What’s taken Digg so long? Facebook’s 200 million users go with Digg like peanut butter and chocolate. CBS had an early implementation of Facebook Connect back in September, nearly 8 months ago. See our recent video interview with Digg’s Kevin Rose. Digg: Facebook Connect Demo from Digg Meetups on Vimeo.
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| Guess Who Owns Kindledx.com? Amazon. Guess Who Forgot To Set It Up? Amazon. Posted: 06 May 2009 11:28 AM PDT On January 23, Amazon secured the domain kindledx.com, anticipating the launch of its new product today, the Kindle DX. Given all the hoopla surrounding today’s event, you’d think Amazon would have thought to point the domain to the Kindle DX pre-order page — or at the very least, to the Kindle page, or even any page whatsoever. Instead, it’s a dead link. Amazon, which also owns kindle.com, points that domain to the page where you can buy the Kindle. I’m sure Amazon will eventually get around to doing it with its new product, but it may have been wise to do it on a day when the hype and demand are at their peak. Update: Someone out there is listening. Amazon just set up the site to redirect to its Kindle store page.
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| Ning Apps Bring A New Dimension Of Flexibility And Power To The Social Network Platform Posted: 06 May 2009 11:17 AM PDT
Ning’s social network-building platform is getting a huge boost today, with the private beta launch of Ning Apps, a new suite of applications and features that Network Creators will be able to deploy across their networks with only a few clicks. The news has been a long time coming - network administrators have long been asking for features that could enhance their networks. But because of the nature of Ning, which houses hundreds of thousands of unique social networks, Network Creators were often requesting totally different things. Now they’ll be able to make everyone (or nearly everyone) happy. At launch, Ning Apps is offering 90 new features to Network creators, built by 52 different developers that encompass a wide variety of web services. Network creators will now be able to integrate live video chat through TokBox, condunct contests with Wildfire, and create Wikis. Even better: network admins will be able to easily integrate monetization options, selling merchandise through Cartfly and tickets through Amiando and other ticketing apps.
Ning is likely going to be a very enticing platform for developers, too. Unlike social networks like MySpace, when a Ning network creator chooses to deploy an application, they have the option of deploying it to all of their users at once. And with some networks reaching more than 500,000 members, that translates into a huge jump in users. The applications are based on the OpenSocial standard, with some modifications to make them suitable for network-wide deployments. Still, even these changes are pretty minor - Ning says that developers have been porting their applications from other social networks in just two to three days. Access to applications is beginning to roll out to a small number of Network Creators tomorrow, and will be available to everyone by the end of the month. At launch, all of the applications will be free to install (though some of the apps that involve money, like Cartfly, will take a revshare at the time of transaction), but Ning may well decide to deploy premium applications in the future. Before now Network Creators have had access to some added functionality through third party applications. But Ning didn’t support these, and some of them were eventually removed from the site entirely. CEO Gina Bianchini says that Network Creators installing applications through Ning Apps can have ‘absolute confidence’ that the applications will work as advertised. Aside from the launch of Ning Apps, things seem to be going quite well for Ning. The site recently saw the creation of its 1 millionth network (of which 200,000 are active), and is seeing 85,000 to 100,000 new users per day across all of its networks. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Next09 Video Interview: What Would Jeff Jarvis Do? Posted: 06 May 2009 10:57 AM PDT
Jarvis, for those of you who don’t know the man, is a published author, well-known blogger at Buzzmachine (Dell Hell, anyone?) and an associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York's new Graduate School of Journalism. We talked about his new book and why it is titled the way it is, if he’s really the Google fanboy people make him out to be, and what he thinks about the whole Google vs. the newspaper industry situation. He says the latter is being suicidal by not understanding what he refers to as the ‘link economy’, and I don’t think he’s far off there. (see our earlier posts about this here and here) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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When it comes to the web, one name that doesn’t exactly jump out at you is Sears Holdings Corporation (SHC). Certainly, you might think that during a economic downtime, the parent company of Sears and Kmart has more pressing things to worry about than social networking. But it is thinking about them. And tomorrow, it’s launching a couple sites to prove it.
Twitter Search
It’s pretty obvious that Google is getting ready to fully cast its social net over its web properties. It’s been doing things like 
I’ll be honest. I have no idea what Kim Kardashian does. I wouldn’t even know who she is if it weren’t for jokes on Pardon The Interruption (an ESPN sports show) about some sex tape a few years back. But apparently, she 
Here’s a tip: If your business is so polarizing that you have to change your name the mere passage of time doesn’t suddenly make it all mom-and-apple-pie. In the last few months I have gotten the same pitch from PayPerPost (now called Izea) all sent from different names. My favorite part is this:
Insert your favorite cliche or idiom here: 
There are few web services hotter than 
Digg has done a lot of talking about integrating 
So I finally managed to sit down with | You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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