The Latest from TechCrunch

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• Bing Travel Arrives
• Phishing Scam Targets YouTube Partners
• The Europas - The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009
• TechCrunch Europe Wants You!
• Ron Conway To Focus On “Real Time Data” Startups: 40-50 New Investments In Next 18 Months
• Exclusive: Sarah Lacy’s New Chapter On Twitter From Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good Paperback Version
• Offerwire Scores $3.5 Million For Home Service Deals Site
• Bing Versus Wolfram Alpha: A Tale Of Two Search Engine Launches
• Told You: Digg Applying The User Voting Model To Advertising
• Vinod Khosla, Risk Junkie
• CrunchPad: The Launch Prototype
• The API’s Plan To Save Newspapers: Let’s Put Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again
• Chris Hughes Likes Twitter, Hates MySpace Ads And Wishes He Would Have Dropped Out Of School
• Hulu Still Going Strong, But Growth Is Dropping Off Sharply
• Google Squared Goes Live, Puts Web Search Into A Spreadsheet
• Twitter Tracker: Conan Pokes Fun, Hilarity Ensues
• Sequoia Puts $4.1 Million Into GameGround
• Tweetree Puts Actual Shared Content In Your Twitter Stream
• Google Goes After Celebrities With iGoogle Showcase

Bing Travel Arrives Posted: 04 Jun 2009 07:47 AM PDT Microsoft this morning announced that it is rolling out Bing Travel, one of the verticals it’s focusing much of its attention on when it comes to the recently unveiled “decision engine” the company set out to conquer market share from Google and Yahoo Search. Bing Travel, as we mentioned when we posted the first screenshots based on the Kumo preview, combines a lot of the airfare and hotel reservation tools from Microsoft’s 2008 acquisition of Farecast with news and other editorial content from MSN Travel (in fact, travel.msn.com already redirects to the new search engine). Bing Travel is one of the initiatives that Microsoft is launching to differentiate Bing from traditional search engines which mostly provide information and links instead of tools that help visitors make more informed decision quicker. Customers will be able to take advantage of tools and features like Price Predictor (designed to forecast how airfare prices are going to evolve), Rate Indicator (set up to highlight the best hotel deals), but also Travel Deals, Comparison Flight & Hotel Search, and Fare Alerts. According to Redmond, 45 percent of people use a search engine to select a flight or hotel. Out of those, a survey by Bing Travel pointed out that 52 percent of potential travelers search three or more sites before booking their airfare, and 42 percent of travelers spend between one and four weeks weighing their travel options (17 percent even spend more than one month). Microsoft wants to reduce that time by centralizing comprehensive results based on searches for travel information in one place. We’ll take Bing Travel for spin and post a detailed post about our findings soon, but for now do tell us what your first impression of Bing’s Travel section is in comments. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Phishing Scam Targets YouTube Partners Posted: 04 Jun 2009 02:12 AM PDT Some YouTube partners are being hit with e-mails seemingly coming from Google / YouTube teams attempting to trick them into replying with their login credentials and other personal information. One partner contacted us with screenshots of the phishing messages, the first received at the end of May and the second on June 3rd, coming from and delivered to different accounts. While the first e-mail was quite amateuristic of nature and came filled with stuff that should raise quite some warning flags (typos, clumsy phrasing, Youtube instead of YouTube, etc.), the second appeared more genuine and had a body text edited rather professionally (see screenshot below). In both cases, the YouTube partner was told that there was some kind of problem with his or her account, either with videos that purportedly contained copyrighted material, hate speech/bullying, or other issues that violate the service’s ToS. The first e-mail urged partners to respond with their username, password, e-mail address and D.O.B, while the second asked only for the password. It’s unclear whether this phishing scam was aimed at our tipster specifically or if this is a more widespread problem (any YouTube partners wanna chip in?), but in any case YouTube has been alerted by the user and myself, although we have yet to receive a response. YouTube partners, be aware and spread the word! Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The Europas - The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 Posted: 04 Jun 2009 02:11 AM PDT Well people, it’s time. It’s time we celebrated the tech scene in Europe with an awards event which we can really call our own. So TechCrunch Europe will, on July 9, hold the first Europe-wide awards ceremony for technology innovation in London. “The Europas” - The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 - will honor the best tech companies and startups across the web and mobile scene from across the continent of Europe. The first tranche of tickets are now on sale. These awards will recognize and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the past year (Summer 08 - Summer 09), with the tech community invited to have a say in which finalists should be win. Leading lights of the the tech community will be invited to give away the awards to the winners, so you’ll have the opportunity to meet your tech heroes and heroines. The initial filtering will be done by referencing our database on European companies on CrunchBase (so make sure you are in it), then by public vote online, with the final Award winners to be determined based both on the popular votes received through website voting and by The Europas Judging Committee. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

TechCrunch Europe Wants You! Posted: 04 Jun 2009 02:10 AM PDT In September 2007 we launched TechCrunch UK & Ireland. But within three months we realised the tech story that needed to be written was across Europe. So we went on tour to find contacts and companies. This year we’ve re-launched as TechCrunch Europe and begun running events across the continent to bring the European tech scene together, along with our first ever day-long conference. Today we’re opening up TechCrunch Europe to new contributors from across Europe so that we can really tell the European tech story the way it is. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Ron Conway To Focus On “Real Time Data” Startups: 40-50 New Investments In Next 18 Months Posted: 03 Jun 2009 11:25 PM PDT Heavy hitting angel investor Ron Conway, who’s been called the “Godfather of Silicon Valley” by Gary Rivlin, is now focusing most of his investment attention on “real-time data,” according to an email he sent out to friends and contacts earlier this week. Conway was one of the earliest investors in Google, and has invested in more than 500 startups, he’s said in the past. Conway has also distanced himself somewhat from Baseline Ventures, a fund run by Steve Anderson. Since 2006 Baseline has taken the lead in managing Conway’s deal flow. Now, Conway says, he’s reverting back to doing all of his investments directly. Conway is also accelerating his investing, he says in the email, and has a goal to invest in 40-50 companies in the next 18 months. His focus will be companies exploiting “real-time data,” which he calls “the next billion dollar market opportunity.” Conway is already an investor in Twitter and Facebook, two companies solidly in the real-time space. He’s recently invested in other very young startups like Scoopler and Twitvid. Both are Y Combinator startups. He’s also an advisor to Topsy, a new real-time search engine that launched recently. David Lee and Brian Pokorny from Baseline now work with Conway directly. Anderson is re-staffing Baseline and will continue to invest $10 million -$12 million per year in young startups. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Exclusive: Sarah Lacy’s New Chapter On Twitter From Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good Paperback Version Posted: 03 Jun 2009 10:55 PM PDT Last year (nowTechCrunch editor) Sarah Lacy’s book, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good came out in hardcover. Here’s an interview we did with Lacy about the book in May 2008. The paperback version of the book was just released (buy it here). The book includes a new chapter titled “The Fail Whale” that’s all about Twitter. The chapter begins with a discussion of the infamous Fail Whale, the image that Twitter put up when the service was down. CEO Evan Williams told Sarah “I hate that fucking whale”: Twitter’s unreliability had stretched nearly a year by that summer, getting worse by the month. The site could be down for hours a day, for days at a time. Twitter users were getting impatient. People had started to rely on the system as a sort of personal news feed, a way of connecting with friends, and a tool for tracking events. When it went down, people flew into a rage. It only made them angrier that Twitter’s staff wasn’t saying much of anything about why the outages were occurring or when they would end. The Twitter team wasn’t trying to be obtuse; they just didn’t know what to say. They were just as stumped. The Fail Whale was cute at first. In fact, undeniably so. But when you saw him every time you tried to message a friend or Tweet a new blog post, his oblivious grinning expression became maddening. As furious as users were, they stopped short of tearing Twitter down or abandoning the site altogether. There was something about Twitter that Silicon Valley rooted for; a remarkable sense of goodwill for a company that was continually letting its users down for months. Friendster certainly hadn’t been cut that kind of slack. Even the whale itself developed fans. The problem went on long enough that a weird Stockholm Syndrome developed. A Fail Whale fan club emerged. One guy got a Fail Whale tattoo. The woman who’d designed the art started to produce T-shirts and mugs. She sent a box of Fail Whale T-shirts to Twitter’s offices late in the summer, but the joke was wearing thin on a staff battling the problem day and night. Sure, some staffers found it funny. After a point you just have to laugh, right? But ask CEO Jack Dorsey about wearing a Fail Whale shirt and you’ll get this answer: “l won’t wear any shirt with a whale on it, ever. It has put me off the whole species.” Twitter’s cofounder Evan Williams agrees: “I hate that fucking whale.” The chapter also goes into a lot of detail on the beginning of Twitter. Creator Jack Dorsey tells Sarah that the original idea goes back to when he was just fifteen years old: That’s because Twitter didn’t really start in 2006. It started in Jack’s head back when he was fifteen years old. He was iust a geeky kid living in St. Louis in the 1990s who had an unnatural obsession with the dispatch industry. Particularly the armies of couriers who physically took something, put it in their messenger bags, and dropped the packages off somewhere else. He thought about it the way other fifteen-year-olds think about half-naked girls or Star Wars—with sheer awe that never seemed to end. And when he thought of dispatchers, he would picture a huge map of New York city with blinking lights of couriers all acting like a flock of birds navigating the city individually, but also as one. A symphony of bikers fanning out in different corners of the city, crossing paths seamlessly, each on their own route, then coming back to the same place at the close of business. All controlled by one conductor; one master plan. “I wanted to write software to do it,” Jack says, “I just had to.” On Dorsey’s firing: The question of replacing Jack first came up for the board duriing the summer of 2008, while Twitter was raising another round of money. Taking the money meant that the company likely wasn’t selling, and the board asked whether Jack had the chops to take the company to the next level. Nothing was decided then, but it kept coming back up for two reasons: Things weren’t getting better between Evan and Jack and, increasingly, Evan was discovering that he did actually want to be the CEO of Twitter. Both Jack and Evan complained to the board, and the board decreed that one way or another, it couldn’t go on. So Fred Wilson asked Evan, “Do you want this? Do you want to be CEO?” … Twitter’s investor Fred Wilson and Spark’s Bijan Sabet were in town for a board meeting and the three of them decided the investors should deliver the news, not Evan. It would be easier for Jack that way. And really, the news wasn’t all bad. Jack would be awarded the second largest individual stake of Twitter stock and would be named chairman of the board. It was generous by any standards. Later that night, Jack went out with a few now-former coworkers. “Come on! This is a celebration,” one of them said. Jack smiled, but he couldn’t feel very celebratory on the inside. The next day it was announced with the ubiquitous face-saving line, “Jack Dorsey has decided to step down.” On Twitter’s business model: Indeed, that’s how Evan is thinking about Twitter’s business model too. The plan is to let corporate Twitter users use the service the way they want to - and charge them for it. There’s been a lot of debate over whether Twitter would have some sort of partial subscription business model or an ad-based one. Evan says neither. He’s planning something more creative that’s every bit an extension of the product as any free feature. “There are lame ways we could make money now. We have enough of a user base and enough traffic,” he says. “But it needs to be part of the system.” Evan uses the word “system” a lot. He thinks of Twitter as a living, breathing organism - not unlike a flock of birds - that he needs to keep moving together, now that he’s taken over the lead position in the formation. Revenue is as much a part of that “system” as company culture, features, the user interface, and the behavior that happens on the site. “The revenue piece is pure product design,” he says, getting excited. “What are people trying to do and how much are we going to help them do it? Is this something only companies want? Then how much can we charge? And where’s the credit card field?” These are just small excerpts from the chapter. If you haven’t read the book, you should. Buy the paperback version here. Kindle version is here. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Offerwire Scores $3.5 Million For Home Service Deals Site Posted: 03 Jun 2009 08:33 PM PDT Startup Bridgevine has raised $3.5 million in Series C funding from Safeguard Scientifics and Constellation Ventures to launch Offerwire, a consumer focused site that aggregates home services deals. This round brings Bridgevine’s total funding raised to $16.6 million. Bridgevine previously provided an online e-commerce engine for consumers and small businesses to find and compare deals specifically on connection and entertainment services, such as high speed internet, voice and cable TV offerings. Bridgevine’s new consumer site, Offerwire, is an aggregation site of deals and offers not only for connection and cable services, but also for music, dvd rental, magazines, credit cards, security and more. It’s like Kayak for home and entertainment services. Users can comparison shop for deals, bundle services together, and as an added bonus, receive cash back for certain deals. Offerwire has a host of big-name vendors on board including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Verizon, Netflix, and LifeLock. The cashback incentive makes the site particularly appealing. For example, Offerwire says that if you get cable through Time Warner, you could get as much as $100 cash back. Bridgevine’s CEO, Vinny Olmstead, says that the site offers a deal where if you bundle cable, phone and internet services together (the “triple play”), you could receive as much as $300 back from Comcast. Of course, with every referral, Bridgevine takes a cut, which ranges depending on the service bought. Competitors to Offerwire include Digital Landing and WhiteFence. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Bing Versus Wolfram Alpha: A Tale Of Two Search Engine Launches Posted: 03 Jun 2009 05:40 PM PDT In the past month, we’ve seen some new search engine launches. Two in particular were able to generate a hype cycle of early positive reviews and excitement: Bing and Wolfram Alpha. One was launched by Microsoft, and the other by a startup. It is inherently not a fair comparison because Microsoft has so much more money to spend on marketing ($80 to $100 million is earmarked for Bing)> But most of the buzz so far has been generated by the respective launches with all of the blog and news coverage that entails. So even though it is not fair, let’s compare the two, because it is instructive. There is little data on actual traffic or search volume for either site at this point. Instead, I looked at another proxy of interest: Google searches for both sites as measured by Google Trends. As you can see by the chart above, searches for “Wolfram Alpha” began to build up the weekend that it soft launched on May 15, peaking the following Monday, and then trailing off after that. It had a strong showing, and then interest waned. Interest in Bing, on the other hand, started out just as strong with its unveiling last week. Then when it actually launched, interest shot up even higher. The positive experience many people had with their first search certainly helped. Now, the question is: Can Bing keep up the momentum, or will interest in the latest search experiment fade away as fast as it did for Wolfram Alpha? That is where Microsoft’s big check book and that advertising campaign come in. You are going to be hearing a lot more about Bing overt the next few months: on TV, on the Web, and, yes, even on Google. Microsoft cannot afford to let Bing disappear from view. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Told You: Digg Applying The User Voting Model To Advertising Posted: 03 Jun 2009 04:52 PM PDT Late last year we wrote about an experimental advertising product that Digg was developing: 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. Compare that to the blog post from Digg a few minutes ago announcing a new advertising product: Today, we're announcing our plans to roll out a new advertising platform — Digg Ads. Digg Ads will give you more control over which advertisements are displayed on Digg. The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system. The platform will launch as a pilot in a few months, and it will be an ongoing work in progress as we learn more from the Digg community and adjust the system. We're still in very early stages of working with advertisers and building the system, but we wanted you to be the first to hear about our plans. Digg Ads will appear alongside stories in the river. The sponsored content will look and feel similar to regular Digg content, but will be clearly marked as sponsored. It may link to stories, video trailers, independent product reviews – many of the same types of content you see on Digg every day. The goal here is to give advertisers a way to present content related to their brands and get immediate input on whether it's relevant to the Digg audience, or not. New Digg ads will appear directly in the news stream and will be clearly marked as sponsored. The more people click on the ads, the lower the price the advertiser will pay. Ads that are buried too often will be priced “out of the system.” Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Vinod Khosla, Risk Junkie Posted: 03 Jun 2009 04:18 PM PDT I haven't been much of a cleantech bull in the past, at least when it comes to venture capital investing. I think it's a huge market, and there's clearly a pressing social need. I just don't quite think the science, government cooperation and economics are there yet for it to be a great opportunity for classic venture investing. Sure there's low-hanging fruit, and the outliers like Elon Musk who had the cojones to invest $70 million of his own money into building an electric car company. But a huge boom producing several multi-billion winners? Not yet, IMHO. But Vinod Khosla greatly disagrees with me, and, frankly, you should listen to him, because he's a lot smarter. That came across last week during a rare-sit down with Khosla, the famed venture investor and Sun Microsystems co-founder. It was for my Yahoo show, TechTicker, and I'd lobbied—nay, harassed—Khosla and his poor assistant for about eight months to get the meeting. I'd initially intended to talk a lot about investing in India, since I'm going there in November, and it's a cause close to Khosla's heart. But we spent most the time talking about cleantech. Khosla Ventures arguably has the largest cleantech portfolio in the business. I counted more than 30 companies from the Web site alone. And, in many cases these are ambitious, science-heavy, swing-for-the-fences type plays. He is one of the only VCs I know who likes to do "science projects" – usually that's a derogatory term in the industry, even for biotech VCs. Here's a link to our segment where Khosla explains why he believes ethanol—not hybrids and plug ins—are the answer to getting us off oil for good and here's a link to the broader segment we did where he rebuts all my arguments about why cleantech won't be the next big driver of Valley returns. He says that "clearly" ten Googles will be created from this opportunity, because it's not really about solar, wind or biofuels, it's about totally re-architecting the infrastructure of society. Sounds ambitious, huh? I’m still not sure about cleantech as the next big Valley wave, but that ambition was what I liked about Khosla. Because I just don't hear enough ambitious investment ideas these days in the Valley. Facebook apps, Twitter apps and iPhone apps are all great for consumers and for developers who want nice thriving businesses. And certainly, they’re great for Facebook, Twitter and Apple. But with the possible exceptions of Slide, Zynga and one or two others, they're not the next companies that are going to drive the economy of Silicon Valley, mint millionaires, generate fees to support all those attorneys and accountants, and of course generate enough returns so that institutions want to keep investing in this asset class. The fact that Facebook is considered risky scares me a little for the future of the Valley. This is a company that's not necessarily doing something new; social networks have been around a while. It's a company that mostly always been run at break-even. It's a company that's generating upwards of $500 million in revenue a year without really "figuring out" its business model. It's a company that has no problem still raising money at nosebleed valuations. And most importantly, it's still growing in almost every user metric that matters. That is not a particularly risky start-up. Guess what? Twitter isn't either. If you can't look at the growth and usage patterns on Twitter and come up with several ideas to monetize it, you're not very creative. Google built a great monetization engine because it knew intent—in other words, what you were searching for. Twitter knows way more about what's going on at your head at any given moment, and that's ripe for advertising and premium research/customer service products for companies. Is it a slam-dunk? Of course not. The crew still needs to execute, and the Twitter natives are getting restless to see some new features. But it's all execution risk at this point, I’d argue. Compare that to a company that's making liquid biofuels out of bark or switchgrass. Khosla spoke right to this fact in the third segment of our interview, which I've embedded below. I started out by asking him if he'd turned his back on IT, which is after all where he made his fame and fortune. He gave a few examples of investments he'd snapped up in seemingly "over-invested areas." One strong one was Aliph, the company who makes the Jawbone. It did $500k in 2006 to $140 million in 2008, and it's still growing amid the downturn. (He says this at the 2:15 mark below.) At minute 3:55, he talks about the venture capital business, and its troubling new aversion to risk. As he puts it the business is more about “capital” these days and less about “venture.” "There are too many people trying to avoid risk; too many people trying to deploy capital as opposed to invest in risk and invest in breakthroughs," he said. You tell ‘em, Khosla. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

CrunchPad: The Launch Prototype Posted: 03 Jun 2009 02:52 PM PDT We’ve been working hard behind the scenes on the CrunchPad since our last update in April, and have just about nailed down the final design for the device. We’re showing the conceptual drawings here today. In another few weeks we’ll have the first working prototypes in our office. This launch prototype is another significant step forward from the last prototype. The screen is now flush with the case and we’ve decreased the overall thickness to about 18 mm. The case will be aluminum, which is more expensive than plastic but is sturdier and lets us shave a little more off the overall thickness of the device. I believe the device now actually looks better than the original concept design we published last summer. Compare the images below to the first prototype and you can see how far we’ve come. If you’re interested, here’s Prototype B. Pictures of Prototype C, which is the device we’re actually demo’ing to people now, are here. A lot has happened behind the scenes, too. Our partner Fusion Garage continues to drive the software forward, and we are in deep discussions with key partners to bring the device to market. If you’d like to see the previous CrunchPad in action, we have a previously-private video available on YouTube that shows our vision for the user interface and the last version of the software stack. This is a Linux based operating system and a Webkit based browser. The device boots directly into the browser. The next time we talk about the CrunchPad publicly will be at a special press and user event in July in Silicon Valley. If you’d like to be emailed when new news comes out, send an email to crunchpad@techcrunch.com and we’ll put you on the list. Here is the near-final industrial design for the CrunchPad: Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The API’s Plan To Save Newspapers: Let’s Put Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again Posted: 03 Jun 2009 02:38 PM PDT At last week’s hush, hush meeting of newspaper execs on how to monetize content and save a dying industry, the American Press Institute presented a white paper that offers a step by step plan of how newspapers should move forward with paid content. Nieman Journalism Lab posted a downloadable copy of the report, which has some interesting recommendations. Poynter also provided a comprehensive review of the report. We’ve embedded the document below. The report suggests several models to implement paid content, including micropayments, subscriptions and hybrid models. Google is compared to an atom bomb that “blew up the content business into millions of atomized pieces,” leaving news organizations with the mess of putting things back together. Comparing newspapers to “Humpty Dumpty”, the paper paints a “poor-me” tale of how news orgs are scrambling to put all the pieces back together to “restore their integrity.” And of course, news enterprises are also forced to suffer a second related atom bomb: hyper-linking. The report says: “The culture of hyper-linking and hyper-syndication that fuels the interactive Web has become an atom bomb for the old news business model.” So the remedy for putting the pieces back together according to the API: charge for content, stick it to Google, and renegotiate subscription models with Amazon for the Kindle (which it implies is unfairly making more money from content than newspapers). Apparently, nobody at the API has actually read Humpty Dumpty, otherwise they would know that you can never put the pieces back together again. The API recommends a five pronged business plan, divided by “doctrines,” to charge users for content: True Value Doctrine: Newspapers should create value by beginning to charge for it. Fair Value Doctrine: In order to maintain the value of content, newspapers should aggressively enforce copyrights and right to profit from published content. Fair Share Doctrine: News orgs should start to negotiate with the technology industry for higher prices for content that is aggregated, redistributed, broken up, and linked to. Digital Deliverance Doctrine: Newspapers should invest in technology and digital platforms that could “provide content-based e-commerce, data sharing and other revenue-generating solutions” at “premium prices.” Consumer Centric Doctrine: Newspaper need to refocus their content from advertisers to readers/consumers. The section of the paper that addresses Google is part sad, part funny and part delusional. Google, the “atom bomb,” is also a “frenemy” to newspapers, citing Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, and VP of products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, as the top frenemies at Google. The paper concedes that Google provides 25 to 35 percent of the traffic to news web sites but says that Google is taking a disproportionate share of profits from content creators. Reading between the lines, the paper suggests that Google’s profits are being stolen from newspaper’s profits. In order to seek compensation from Google, the API suggests that news organizations should put legal, political, business and technological pressure on Google, and other “powerful players” in the digital space including MSFT, Yahoo, AOL, and Facebook. That’s right.  Part of the plan is for newspapers, which are technologically challenged, to put “technological pressure” on the technology giants.  That plan is even less likely to succeed than the Humpty Dumpty one. It’s understandable that newspaper organizations are trying to figure out the best way to move forward in the industry, and I think that this report does outline their options for monetization (if that is the remedy) fairly well. Although, many don’t necessarily agree with this. But the passive aggressive finger pointing at Amazon, Google and others seems to be a bit off. As author Michael Connelly wisely says in an interview, “Google doesn’t kill newspapers. People kill newspapers.” apireportmay09 - (Photo credit: Flickr/Atarkus) CrunchBase Information Google Amazon Information provided by CrunchBase (Photo credit: Flickr/Pink Rocker) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Chris Hughes Likes Twitter, Hates MySpace Ads And Wishes He Would Have Dropped Out Of School Posted: 03 Jun 2009 01:54 PM PDT Today at the Startup 2009 conference in New York City, Business Insider’s Henry Blodget interviewed Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes on stage. Hughes recently moved to the city and has been going around to various colleges on the east coast talking to students who have good ideas, but don’t necessarily know how to start companies, as he put it. On the topics of Facebook, the Obama campaign (he was a major player in the online side of it) and even Twitter, he had some interesting things to say. On Facebook, Blodget of course had to bring up the allegations that the idea was stolen when Hughes was still in college with co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz. “Not true,” says Hughes. While both Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to move west to focus on Facebook full-time, Hughes stayed in school. But it’s a decision that Hughes admits he kind of regrets. He wishes that he could have been working on it full-time from the beginning. The back story has been told many times before, but from Hughes perspective, Facebook was started as a way for friends to share what they thought was cool on the web in a trusted environment. And to get updates on what other people were doing. It’s hard to know if that’s a bit of revisionist history (at least the way he’s phrasing it), as those two things happen to be exactly what Facebook is so focused on right now. Sharing things from around the web is finally starting to come into focus with Facebook Connect taking off. And getting updates on what others are up to is the major part of the redesigned homepage which, yes, looks a lot like Twitter — that other service dedicated to status updates. Speaking of Twitter, during the Q&A portion, someone asked for Hughes’ thoughts on the service. Hughes had apparently only just started using it when he was being interviewed for his Fast Company cover story a couple months ago, and the magazine noted that he had done so, “albeit reluctantly.” But now, Hughes seems quite sold on the service. “I think Twitter is great,” he said before going on about how he doesn’t believe that there can only be one service that everyone uses to share things — something which I absolutely agree with. Instead, he sees Twitter as just one of many new ways to communicate on the web, and believes there will be room for “dozens of applications like this.” Blodget then got Hughes to talk a bit about his experience with the Obama campaign. Hughes broke it down into simple terms, noting that all the campaign really did was use existing technology to make campaigns more efficient. The key parts of that were ways to help the campaign raise money easier, and also to connect with voters to form an emotional relationship. He talked about how right after one of former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s speeches in which she belittled what the Obama campaign was doing with its online efforts, the entire team got fired up and starting sending out a mass of emails to supporters. Hughes and the team realized that Palin was an extremely divisive person, and used people’s dislike of her as a way to raise money instantly online. Obviously, it worked to the tune of millions upon millions of dollars. Blodget wondered if that type of campaign victory was a one-time thing, asking if the Republicans had found their “Chris Hughes.” Hughes wasn’t sure if they had, but guessed that in the next round of major elections, the Republicans will probably have a similar game plan. “We weren’t doing brilliant new things,” Hughes said continuing on that they just knew what would work online. The talk then turned back to Facebook, where Blodget wondered if Hughes felt the company was doing the right things in order to become a profitable company. Not surprisingly, Hughes is very optimistic about Facebook’s business potential, noting that the company is just in the process of trying a bunch of interesting ideas and seeing what works. He reiterated Zuckerberg’s claims that by the end of the year, Facebook plans to be cash-flow positive. One audience member asked why Facebook wasn’t doing the type of big advertising site branding that its rival MySpace was doing. “There’s a reason we don’t do that. Ads shouldn’t be in people’s way,” Hughes noted before saying that the best type of advertising is non-intrusive and interesting. Clearly, he doesn’t think too highly of MySpace’s Fanta ads. Hughes is positive that bigger and better online advertising possibilities will exist over the course of the next few years. And he obviously thinks Facebook will be able to take advantage of that in a very meaningful way, given that it has over 200 million users — and is still growing at a nice rate. Hughes became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at General Catalyst Partners back in March. CrunchBase Information Chris Hughes Facebook Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Hulu Still Going Strong, But Growth Is Dropping Off Sharply Posted: 03 Jun 2009 01:11 PM PDT There’s no question that Hulu has firmly established itself as one of the dominant video sites on the web. But its incredible growth seems to be dropping off, and quickly. Between January and February of this year, the site saw a 42% increase in unique U.S. visitors and 33% increase in streams. Between Feburary and March, it moved up to become the third most popular video site in the US, with a 14% growth in uniques and a 20% growth in overall streams. The latest comScore data for Hulu, which covers the month of April, reports a much more modest 4.4% growth in overall streams, from 380 million streams in March to around 397 million in April. And its unique visitors actually went down month over month, from around 41.5 million in March to 40.1 million over the same time span. Much of the site’s growth between January and February can probably be attributed to its prime time Super Bowl commercial, which introduced the site for the first time to millions of viewers. Since then the site has kept up a star-studded marketing campaign to keep awareness up. I suspect that most of the site’s new users earlier this year were the low hanging fruit — people who would love to watch their TV and movie content on their computer screen, but didn’t know that Hulu even existed. Now the site is going to have to convince the die-hard TV fans to switch up their viewing habits if it wants to keep the same momentum going. Hulu Desktop, one of the first products to come out of Hulu labs, may help with this. But it’s going to be hard to break people out of old habits. Update: As commenter Shahar Nechmad points out below, some of the drop off may have had to do with the timing of the broadcast of new content (though most prime-time shows were still on the air through April, so I doubt that can be blamed in this case). With that in mind, it won’t be surprising if we see Hulu growth continue to slow over the summer, when most hot shows aren’t on the air. That said, Hulu’s still the number three video site in the US, which isn’t half bad. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Google Squared Goes Live, Puts Web Search Into A Spreadsheet Posted: 03 Jun 2009 12:49 PM PDT Google is taking a step towards taking all the messy, unstructured information on the Web and putting it into neat little, labeled boxes. Literally, that is what Google Squared does. First announced at last month’s Searchology event, Google Squared is now live. You can try it out. Google Squared is an experimental search engine that is in its own “labs.” It gives you topical search results broken down by categories, something that Bing does in a different way with guided results in the left explore pane. Google Squared is more comparable to Wolfram Alpha in that it is A) really early stage, and B) goes and finds out every facet of a subject based on a single keyword search. But unlike Wolfram Alpha, it does not “compute” answers based on data that it has ingested into its own databases. Its database is the Web. Does Google Squared crush Wolfram Alpha today? No. But as I originally suggested when it was announced, adding structure to the Web will eventually win out over a self-contained database. Even if it seems primitive today, its approach scales better than Wolfram’s. Type in something like “planets” and the results come up as grid with the planet names, images, a short description, the equatorial surface, and the mean density. It only manages to identify seven planets, and those include Pluto and Ceres. (Where’s Uranus?) This is still very experimental. But you can add more rows and columns. When you click on the the “add” box under the planet names, for instance,, it will suggest the missing ones. Or you can add yor own category, and then it will fill in the other boxes in that row. You can also add a column. It suggests categories such as “Date of Discovery” and “Escape velocity” (which is important to know if you are planning to visit and want to ever return). But how would you get to one of these planets? Well, you would need a spaceship, of course Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Twitter Tracker: Conan Pokes Fun, Hilarity Ensues Posted: 03 Jun 2009 12:45 PM PDT Bro's a no no for CoCo? In case you missed the Twitter Tracker bit on Conan last night, here it is again in all its glory. It's a must-watch no matter what you think of Twitter.

Sequoia Puts $4.1 Million Into GameGround Posted: 03 Jun 2009 12:40 PM PDT Israeli gaming company GameGround has closed a $4.1 million funding round from Sequoia Capital. The company had previously raised a $2 million seed round from a number of angel investors and founders. For now, we don’t really know much about GameGround other than the team behind it. It was founded in 2007 by Shaul Olmert (formerly of MTV), Guy Margolin (formerly of 888.com, and Itzik Ben-Bassat. Ben-Bassat, who currently serves as Chairman, comes from highly regarded game development studio Blizzard, where he was VP of international and global business development and worked on integration with Internet services. While he wouldn’t get into specifics, he says that Gameground is looking to expand how far the Internet ties into computer games. For now, the company isn’t actually making any games — it’s making a special agent for Mac and PC that can work with existing games to expand their online functionality, even after they’re released. At this point exactly what can be done with the agent is unclear, but I suspect it will allow gamers to distribute high scores and milestones to their social networks, and perhaps use your social graph to connect you with your friends in-game. Apparently these features will be integrated with the games in an “automatic way”, presumably with little, if any, work needed on the developer’s side. Here’s how the company describes itself on the site: For you, gaming is more than a mild diversion. It's a way of life. And soon, life is going to get a whole lot more exciting. Introducing GameGround, an all-new personalized gaming center built around advanced technologies that aggregate all your web-wide gaming activities into a single online destination. At the heart of GameGround is a powerful yet simple-to-use Personalized Command Center that gives you total control over every facet of your gaming experience. From this console, you'll have the ability to tap into comprehensive, never-before-existing data for any game you play, no matter where on the web you play it, no matter who you play against. This is an unprecedented innovation that simply cannot be found anywhere else in the world of gaming! Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Tweetree Puts Actual Shared Content In Your Twitter Stream Posted: 03 Jun 2009 11:14 AM PDT One large component of the “RSS Is Dead” idea is that services like Twitter offer a faster and more curated way to share content. But the problem is that to do this on Twitter, it involves sharing a link to the content and not the content itself. Tweetree solves this — using RSS. When you log in to Tweetree with your Twitter credentials, you’ll see your normal Twitter stream, but whenever anyone shares a link, Tweetree goes out and grabs the content on that page via its RSS feed and places it right in your stream. Long articles are placed in a frame that can be scrolled through. This is a seamless way to read a ton of content without having to leave your Twitter stream. Of course, there’s still a couple problems with this. The biggest one is that a number of popular content sites use partial feeds. That basically means that Tweetree will pull in the opening snippet of the story, but you’ll still have to click through to the actual story to see it. Another potential issue is that many sites use Google’s Feedburner product for their RSS feeds. That service has a history of poor performance when it comes to RSS feeds, so it’s possible that when you share a link through Twitter, it won’t yet be on the RSS feed for that site, so Tweetree won’t be able to pull it in. Tweetree also updates in real-time, using the Twitter Search method of letting you know when new tweets are available and asks you to click a button to refresh your stream. Another nice feature is that Tweetree actually pulls the background that you set up for Twitter, so it looks similar to how your stream looks on twitter.com. And you can send tweets from it, see your replies,direct messages and even search tweets. We previously covered Tweetree back in December when it launched a way to thread Twitter conversations, to make them easier to follow. That worked to some effect, but this is a much more compelling idea. Now if we could just remove the RSS middle man from the equation, it’d be a great idea. Learn more about it in the video below. Tweetree: web twitter client from Ryan Twomey on Vimeo. CrunchBase Information Tweetree Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Google Goes After Celebrities With iGoogle Showcase Posted: 03 Jun 2009 09:40 AM PDT Twitter’s not the only social platform to have a celebrity fetish. Google is bringing out its inner obsession with celeb users by launching iGoogle Showcase, which allows you to see and share the homepages of your favorite celebs. The current site showcases iGoogle homepages from celebs such as Rachael Ray, Al Gore, and Katie Couric. The showcase also highlights web celebs like Kevin Rose, Arianna Huffington, and Seth Godin. The iGoogle Showcase lets you copy your favorite celeb’s iGoogle page to your own, or browse through the collection and choose different gadgets and themes to include from varying pages. Some celebs have created customized gadgets that you can embed. For example, Ryan Seacrest’s gadget lets you keep up with all the latest entertainment news. Donald Trump’s gadget offers advice to entrepreneurs, Martha Stewart shares recipes and tips, and Anderson Cooper delivers headline news and extras from his CNN show AC360. iGoogle also recently added video game themes, more social gadgets and may be releasing a new, more social version. Martha Stewart’s iGoogle page is featured above. Here’s Ashton Kutcher’s iGoogle homepage: And here’s Donald Trump’s home page: Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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