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- Why The FCC Wants To Smash Open The iPhone
- 10 Words I Would Love To See Banned From Press Releases
- Don’t Look Now, But Flash Is (Kind Of) Working On Chrome For Mac
- FCC Takes On Apple And AT&T Over Google Voice Rejection
- District Court Judge Orders Facebook To Reveal Source Code In Patent Dispute
- Google Adds More Options To Image Search
- Coming This September: Twitpocalypse Now Redux!
- Video: Erick Talks Microsoft/Yahoo On Charlie Rose
- Google Maps Don’t Lie. Sweden And Canada Among Worst Greenhouse Gas Emitters.
- Testing The Reverberations Of ECHO Commenting On TechCrunch
- Geek Weekend: Minneapolis-Saint Paul, MN
- The Online Ad Recession Continues. Is This What A Reset Looks Like?
- While We Wait For 12seconds’ Robust iPhone App, We Get A Dead Simple One
| Why The FCC Wants To Smash Open The iPhone Posted: 01 Aug 2009 07:27 AM PDT
Right about now, Apple probably wishes it had never rejected Google Voice and related apps from the iPhone. Or maybe it was AT&T who rejected the apps. Nobody really knows. But the FCC launched an investigation last night to find out, sending letters to all three companies (Apple, AT&T, and Google) asking them to explain exactly what happened. On its face, it might seem odd to some people that the FCC is investigating the rejection of a single iPhone app. After all, iPhone apps are rejected every day. But the Google Voice rejection caused an unusual amount of uproar, and there is nothing like a high-profile case to make an example out of in pursuit of pushing a bigger policy agenda. The FCC investigation is not just about the arbitrary rejection of a single app. It is the FCC’s way of putting a stake in the ground for making the wireless networks controlled by cell phone carriers as open as the Internet. Today there are two different sets of rules for applications and devices on the Internet. On the wired Internet, we can connect any type of PC or other computing device and use any applications we want on those devices. On the wireless Internet controlled by cellular carriers like AT&T, we can only use the phones they allow on their networks and can only use the applications they approve. This was fine when the wireless networks were used mostly just for voice calls. But now that they are increasingly becoming our mobile connections to the Internet and mobile phones are becoming full-fledged mobile computers, an argument has been growing that the same rules of open access that rule the wired Internet should apply to the wireless Internet. Whlle Apple and AT&T are cannot be too happy about the FCC investigation, Google must secretly be pleased as punch. It was only two years ago, prior to the 700MHz wireless spectrum auctions, that it was pleading with the FCC to adopt principles guaranteeing open access for applications, devices, services, and other networks. Now two years later, in a different context and under a different administration, the FCC is pushing for the same principles. In its letters requesting more information from all three companies, the FCC cites “pending FCC proceedings regarding wireless open access (RM-11361) and handset exclusivity (RM-11497). That first proceeding on open access dates back to 2007 when Skype requested that cell phone carriers open up their networks to all applications (see Skype’s petition here). Like Google Voice, Skype helps consumers bypass the carriers. The carriers don’t like that because that’s their erodes their core business and turns them into dumb pipes. But dumb pipes are what we need. They are good for consumers and good for competition because they allow any application and any device, within reason, to flower on the wireless Internet. So if you look at the questions the FCC is asking, it wants to know why the Google Voice app was rejected and whether AT&T (the carrier) had anything to do with that rejection:
The FCC also wants Apple to explain the arbitrariness of its app approval process:
Good questions. Hopefully, the FCC will share Apple’s answers with the rest of the us. It is all a bit absurd, though. Why does it take a formal request from a government agency to get Apple (and AT&T) to explain what the rules are to get on the wireless Internet? More importantly, why are these companies allowed to be the gatekeepers to the wireless Internet? The iPhone needs to be smashed open, and the FCC is swinging the hammer. (Flickr photo credit:Stephen Heywood). Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| 10 Words I Would Love To See Banned From Press Releases Posted: 01 Aug 2009 06:39 AM PDT
It’s not that I dislike the PR industry in general, although I often wonder how so many of these firms continue to be in business when the large majority of them have been doing it exactly the same way for the past few decades, instead of evolving. When media distribution and usage was less fragmented than it is now, I guess it made sense for PR firms or consultants to write press releases using a given ‘best practice’ and pushing it out to a list of contacts in the publishing industry, hoping for as much coverage as possible. Regular TechCrunch readers know how we think about the PR industry - and some of its proponents - in today’s world, and in particular our stance towards embargoes. I'd like to tackle a different problem in this post, one that reporters from around the world, whatever field they cover, will no doubt recognize. The issue I have with press releases, and the reason I think they are a thing of the distant past in their current form, is that they basically all look alike. Sure, the companies that are talked about can be different, and the type of news coming from them can be different, but the copy, form and style are often so much alike that for large parts of the announcements you could just as easily swap the names of the companies and keep the rest of the words. Oftentimes, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. My biggest gripe with press releases is that for basically as long as they’ve been around, they’ve contained the same damn words, rendering them completely meaningless in most cases and contexts. I wonder what the world would be like if these words were henceforth permanently banned from all press releases: 1 ) LEADING / LEADER You know the kind: “Initech, the leading blah in blah blah blah, has partnered with Initrode, leader in blah blah blahblah blah blah blah.” Every single time a press release carries either one of these words in the first sentence, I cringe. Why? Because if everyone is leading, no one is. Period. PR people, next time you start writing a news announcement, ask yourself if you really should be using the words ‘leading’ or ‘leader’ just because it’s easy and everyone is doing it. 2 ) BEST / MOST / FASTEST / LARGEST / BIGGEST / etc. Emphasizing the strengths of the company you’re pitching is obviously a good thing. But does anyone realize how meaningless these terms become when they are followed up by something so blatantly untrue or tied to a small niche that it’s just painful to read? I’m specifically thinking about press releases that commence with something like “Initech, the largest manufacturer of red staplers engraved with our company logo, has just won the Buzo Award for the most uncreative use of the word ‘largest’ in the history of mankind.” Handle these words with care. 3 ) INNOVATIVE / INNOVATION The mother of all voidness. How many truly innovative products are launched on a yearly basis, regardless of the sector? How many times have you seen something get the ‘innovation’ label without merit? Unless you or your clients find a cure for all cancers, simply stop using it, starting today. Now that would be innovative. 4 ) REVOLUTIONARY Much like the above, terrible word to be using in press releases. What exactly about your product is going to make people leave their houses to demonstrate, oppose their government, riot, etc.? Oh, sorry, you mean the company you’re pitching is not going to change the world but it is going to completely change the way an industry thinks about your business? Safe bet: it’s not going to. Likely you’re just doing the old ‘wishful thinking’ routine, and everyone knows you are. 5 ) AWARD-WINNING Trust me, telling anyone willing to listen that you’ve been recognized with this or that award won’t be providing you with any goodwill right off the bat. There are exceptions to this rule, but very few (they include the Nobel Prize, a Pulitzer, a Crunchie or a Europa Award). Basically it’s like going around a party informing everyone that you’ve had sex with a human being last week: I’m sure it matters to you a great deal - and hopefully to the other person as well - but the rest of us likely don’t give a hoot. We also think it’s kind of sad that you are looking for someone to confirm or recognize your accomplishments that way. A tip: unless you’re announcing that you’ve actually won an award (which by the way is only very rarely newsworthy), leave it out. 6 ) DISRUPTIVE / DISRUPTION Newsflash: a product or service is only very, very, very rarely disruptive. If there is a truly ground-breaking one, it’s also never disruptive out of the gate, for it can take years or even decades to turn an entire industry upside down. The fact that you’d use the word in a press release speaks volumes about your ability to tell your head from your ass: anything truly disruptive doesn’t happen overnight, and you can’t capture ‘disruption’ in a news announcement pushed out at a given time and date. Besides, if something is genuinely disruptive I’m sure it will require little push from PR people or firms to get the word out there. 7 ) CUTTING / BLEEDING EDGE In the same boat as the words ‘innovative’, ‘revolutionary’ and ‘disruptive’: so often misused in the past that it now looks like you’re practicing your skills to write quality satire when you use it to tout a company or product in a press release. 8 ) NEXT-GENERATION Overused. If you have an updated version of your product to announce, why not just say so? I simply cannot understand what people are trying to tell me when they say their new release is ‘next-gen’. Is it too advanced or complex for me to use and will only young children have the ability to understand what you’re doing when they grow up? Did your previous product version stink so bad that you needed to skip an entire generation of iterations to finally get it right? 9 ) STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP Partnering with other companies can be good - and newsworthy too, though not often - but it doesn’t help you get more attention or goodwill when you announce a strategic partnership, agreement or relationship. We’re assuming it fits in both your strategy and the one of the company or companies you team up with, otherwise you wouldn’t be forming an alliance, right? It’s not like your agreement suddenly gets a whole other dimension because it’s labeled ’strategic’, honestly. 10 ) SYNERGY Simply defined, synergy means that the whole in combination is greater than the sum of the individual parts working on their own. Used properly, the word can describe the magnified effects of two drugs taken together, is used in relation to drug abuse, parasites that enforce each other’s destructive effects and chemicals that are more toxic together than they are apart. When applied to corporations, it means a financial benefit that a company aims to realize when it merges with or acquires another corporation. As history teaches us, there’s rarely any synergy involved when companies melt together or one takes over the other. PR people, you’d be doing yourself a serious favor banning this one from all future press releases. Bonus words: enterprise-grade, world-class, turnkey, premier, unparalleled and unrivaled. Can you think of any others that should be given the kibosh? Update: awesome! The Gobbledygook Manifesto (PDF) by David Meerman Scott. Also, if you have links to press releases that are ridden with the terms I’ve grown so resentful of, do let me know in comments. I’ll help you get started with this one about Akamai and Delve Networks ’s recent forming of a strategic partnership:
See what led me to this post? Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Don’t Look Now, But Flash Is (Kind Of) Working On Chrome For Mac Posted: 01 Aug 2009 02:46 AM PDT So, we’ve been tracking the progress of Google Chrome on the Mac for a while. The daily builds of Chromium seem to be getting better and better, and close to being ready for prime time. One major thing missing however has been the lack of Adobe Flash support in the browser. Well, don’t look now, but it’s finally working — kind of. Okay, to be honest, you can’t pause or stop Flash videos on sites like YouTube, but the important part is that when you click on a YouTube link, the videos actually play. That is great. I’m very, very close to using Chrome for the Mac on a daily basis already, and this may have just put me over the edge of at least using it as a secondary browser. It’s clear that we’re getting very close to a release of Chrome for the Mac that is stable enough for regular web surfers to use. If the team has implemented Flash support, I have to believe that they are close to where they want to be in terms of a general release schedule. Of course, they have already released developer versions of the browser for the Mac, but they encouraged people not to use them. I think soon that mentality may change, and we may see a public beta.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| FCC Takes On Apple And AT&T Over Google Voice Rejection Posted: 31 Jul 2009 04:35 PM PDT
The newswire report notes that this is part of the FCC’s ongoing investigation into wireless handsets and their exclusive deals with carriers. Of course, this all comes years after Google CEO Eric Schmidt sent a letter to the FCC, urging it to adopt open standards that would gives users the freedom to use whichever applications they’d like on their wireless devices, on whichever network they preferred. At the time the suggestions seemed perhaps a bit idealistic, but now it’s becoming clear just how badly they’re needed. It has been just over one year since Apple released the App Store, and already we’re beginning to see just what can happen when major companies collude to restrict user choice without fear of recourse. As I’ve written before, Google Voice offers a service that innovates in the telephony space in a way that hasn’t been seen for years. But rather than try to improve and offer a better service, Apple and AT&T are doing what they can do to protect their sacred cash cow. But it looks like the government isn’t going to stand for that any longer. With this move, the FCC is showing that it’s not going to let Apple carry its famed culture of secrecy into the telecom space. FCC Letter to Apple
FCC Letter to Google
FCC Letter to AT&T
Photo credit: Billogs. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| District Court Judge Orders Facebook To Reveal Source Code In Patent Dispute Posted: 31 Jul 2009 04:06 PM PDT
Of course, Facebook is going to fight tooth and nail against this, and is sure to appeal the ruling. Facebook has given us the following statement regarding the case:
This isn’t the only legal battle Facebook is facing. It’s currently being sued by Power.com over issues related to data portability, as well as by multiple advertisers alleging click fraud. You can view Leader Tech’s request to have Facebook reveal its code below: Thanks to Aditi Tuteja for the tip. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Google Adds More Options To Image Search Posted: 31 Jul 2009 03:50 PM PDT
Image search is an area of intense competition between Google, Yahoo, and now Bing. Today, Google Images added some search options to make it easier to filter a search by color, type (face, photo, clip art, line drawing), and file size. Most of these filters were available before in advanced search, but now they are available in the left-hand column. (A similar option column was introduced to the main search page in May, 2009). You can choose more than one option to automatically narrow down your search. Another option Google could add is sorting by images with a Creative Commons license. It already does this in its advanced search options, but it is hidden there. Yahoo and Bing have similar filtering options, Although Google’s color filter is the most advanced. It allows you to sort by 12 different colors, wheras Bing and Yahoo only let you sort by color or black-and-white images. Bing, however, does a better job with related searches, something Google is experimenting with in a slightly different way by actually trying to find And Yahoo has its own set of novel features in image search which Google doesn’t. You can compare the three with a search for “fruit” on Google Images, Yahoo Images, and Bing Images. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Coming This September: Twitpocalypse Now Redux! Posted: 31 Jul 2009 03:26 PM PDT
Okay, it didn’t end up being that bad. But it still was a pain in the ass for many third-party developers, especially the iPhone Twitter app developers, who had to wait in the App Store line like everyone else for their fixes to go through. And now it’s set to happen all over again! A tweet today from the TwitterAPI account warned that the second Twitpocalypse was closer than people thought. Okay, most people probably didn’t realize that it could occur again, but it can, and it will, and it’s fast approaching. The current estimate by the API team is that it will occur sometime in the next 60 days, probably at the end of September. They warn that it could happen sooner though. So what does it mean, and why is it happening? Well, for those that don’t remember, the first Twitpocalypse occurred when the unique identifier for tweets hit 2,147,483,647 — the 32-bit signed integer limit. That number caused some third-party apps to start counting tweet identifiers as negative, screwing them up. This new Twitpocalpyse is similar, only it’s for the 32-bit unsigned integer value of 4,294,967,295. In case you didn’t already realize it, the fact that this chasm between the two numbers was crossed so quickly once again shows that Twitter is growing very quickly. Though it’s not a 1 to 1 tweet-to-unique ID ratio, that the number will have doubled (an increase of over 2 billion) in just a few months is huge. So what can you do to prepare yourself? Well the Twitter API team recommends developing your apps to use 64-bit integers, thus increasingly the number of tweets your app can recognize before it hits these integer walls. Also, lock up the women and children.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Video: Erick Talks Microsoft/Yahoo On Charlie Rose Posted: 31 Jul 2009 02:30 PM PDT TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld appeared on Charlie Rose last night to discuss the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal alongside Steven Levy of Wired and Nick Wingfield of The Wall Street Journal. The group talked about the initial deal Microsoft offered Yahoo last year to buy Yahoo outright, the complicated nature of this new deal, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo walking away from the search fight rather than engaging, how this was the worst of the deals that Microsoft had offered so far, the Bartz/Ballmer reaction, what this means for Microsoft versus Google now, and the possible antitrust implications of all of this. Watch the part of the show that featured the discussion below. And here’s the transcript: CHARLIE ROSE: Microsoft and Yahoo! announced yesterday a partnership in the search and advertising business. Under the deal, Yahoo!`s websites will be powered by Microsoft new search engine, Bing. Yahoo! will get 88 percent of the ad revenue from searches on its sites for the first five years. With the partnership, the two hope to take on Google, which currently commands about 65 percent share of the U.S. market. The agreement follows Microsoft`s failed takeover bid for Yahoo! and shows the continuing importance it is placing on search. Joining me now from Redmond, Washington, is Nick Wingfield of the “Wall Street Journal.” Here in New York with me, Steven Levy of “Wired” magazine and Erick Schonfeld, co-editor of TechCrunch blog. I am pleased to have all of them here. Nick, tell me how this deal happened, first. NICK WINGFIELD: It started last year with the CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, making an unsolicited bid for close to $48 billion to acquire Yahoo!. Never happened, Yahoo! resisted the offer. It fell apart. Fast forward to about January. Yahoo! has a new CEO, Carol Bartz, and Microsoft and Yahoo! start talking about a more limited deal, not a full-blown acquisition, in which Microsoft basically take over the search operations, handle the search operations on Yahoo! in exchange for some value. And the deal went through all sorts of fits and starts, and finally arrived at the deal you described a moment ago. All of this being designed to improve Microsoft`s fairly poor position in search right now, which is a highly lucrative market, the online advertising market that accompanies search, and one that Microsoft really has not had much success in on its own. CHARLIE ROSE: Is this a good deal for just Microsoft or good deal for Microsoft and Yahoo!? NICK WINGFIELD: Well, the shareholders of both companies seem to think it`s a better deal for Microsoft than it is for Yahoo! The stock of Microsoft went up a bit yesterday and up a bit today. Yahoo! is down. One of the problems Yahoo! has is that they had sort of almost set expectation that they were going to get a big check, a multi-billion dollar check from Microsoft in exchange for a deal of this sort. And that didn`t end up happening. Instead, what Yahoo! is getting is very high percentage of the ad revenue from advertising sold on searches that Microsoft delivers. So, both parties argue that it`s better for Yahoo! to get this, because they`re getting more — a bigger chunk of the share of ad revenue on an ongoing basis, but there is no big upfront check, and that seems to disappoint people. CHARLIE ROSE: So, what`s the judgment of people who are looking at it in terms of whether Yahoo! would have been better to take the original deal that Ballmer offered or take the deal they have now? NICK WINGFIELD: Well, I don`t think there`s any question that Yahoo! shareholders would be better off if they had accepted the original $48 billion deal. I don`t know what Yahoo!`s latest market capitalization is, but they`re down a lot. So, I don`t think Microsoft, though, regrets not acquiring all of Yahoo! I think they`re fairly happy with the position that they`re in. They also have managed to improve their own home-grown search engine, which is now called Bing, and have started to inch up a little bit in market share. So I think Microsoft probably comes out a little bit ahead here, but still, both parties argue that Yahoo! is going to thrive as well because they no longer have to invest in search, so they can be a lot more profitable. CHARLIE ROSE: Is this going to work? STEVEN LEVY: It has a lot of hurdles. I think the upfront money really isn`t the key to Yahoo! The key is, Yahoo! is disbanding their search team, their engineering, and disbanding the team which built their advertising engine to sell ads on search. Now, these happen to be some of the most important aspects of engineering at a company there. And really, if Yahoo! wants to be a top Internet company, it has to have the engineering chops to keep doing that. So, it`s going to miss out on that. And it will save money by not hiring — having those people to pay, but those are the people you want in your company. Also, this deal is a little complicated. Yahoo! actually is going to sell some of these ads to the premium customers. A lot of customers, those in the long tail, they just go on the website and buy the ads just straight there like you buy something from Amazon. But a big customer needs someone to work with them and tell them what words to buy. It`s very complicated in how much to bid, because these things are all done by bids. And Yahoo! is doing that part, and Microsoft has the technology, which means those people who work for Yahoo! are really going to have to go back and forth to Redmond and talk to a lot of people to be familiar with how that works there. So there`s a little complication in how they`re going to be able to do that, which is going to make it a little more difficult for Microsoft`s big task, which is to take on Google and build up its ad share to something beyond even what it has combined with Yahoo! CHARLIE ROSE: Did Bing make a difference here at all, the fact that Bing has gotten — the Microsoft search engine has gotten good reviews? ERICK SCHONFELD: I think Bing made a big difference, because Yahoo! was in a tough position. It was seeing market share eroding from the top, from Google, and now the prospect of market share erosion from the bottom, from Bing. Bing has only been out for two months, but it`s made a little bit of a gain in share, .4 percent. Is that going to last over time? Who knows. But Yahoo! didn`t want to find out. Right? And the big problem here is that Yahoo! really — they kind of walked away from the most interesting fight on the Internet right now, which is search. And they handed it over to Microsoft for less than any of the previous deals that were on the table. The four real deals that were on the table going back to the $45 or $48 billion offer in February of 2008, the revised search deal that Microsoft offered, which included $8 billion to buy 16 percent of Yahoo! and $1 billion payment for the search part of the business. The Google deal that got squashed, that guaranteed $800 million in revenues. This deal was the worst of all the deals. And as Steve mentions, the deal introduces a lot of complexity, right? So now you`re going to have Yahoo! sales people selling Microsoft`s search product. So Yahoo! sales people already have enough problem talking to Yahoo! engineers. Now they have to talk to Microsoft engineers. And what if something goes wrong? Who are they going to yell at? Are the Microsoft engineers going to like that, being yelled at by Yahoo! sales people? CHARLIE ROSE: Nick, you`re in Redmond. What does this do for Steve Ballmer? NICK WINGFIELD: Well, it gives him a real fighting chance in a market that he said is strategic to the company. They have about 8.4 percent market share on their own with Bing. With Yahoo!`s market share, they could go to 30 percent of shares — 30 percent of searches in the U.S., and that`s significant. Now the question is, does it decline from there? Can they increase it? If they do that, you know, how much money do they make off of it? Because of course, Microsoft is losing money in its Internet search business right now. But they just want to gain the share. They argue once they gain the share, they get eyeballs. Search is a scale business, that they will start to improve the quality of the search, because they can do all sorts of things, make ads more relevant. And if they do that, they think they can have a flywheel effect and start really eating into Google`s share. The other thing that this lets them do is, Google is not only strong in search with 65 percent plus share, but Google is also moving into these other areas that are quite threatening to Microsoft. They`re using their profits in search to get into operating systems, into online applications that are free, that threaten these cash-cow businesses like Office and Word and Excel. And they just recently announced that they`re going to be doing an operating system for laptops. They already have one for mobile phones. And I think Microsoft wants to gain share in search in part to help alleviate that threat. CHARLIE ROSE: And what about the leadership of Yahoo!? Carol Bartz? STEVEN LEVY: Well, she felt she had to do something. But I think in this case, by targeting the search team and taking it away, some people wonder whether that`s going to really take the glue, which keeps her portal together there. The search that Yahoo! did had, you know, about three times the size of what Microsoft search, mainly because so many people come to Yahoo! and they search there. So it really was an opportunity for Yahoo! to grow out there and do more. She says this is going to enable them to concentrate on the other things that they do. But having a very strong search team and engineering that comes with that search, and with the really complicated engineering you have to do to be able to sell ads on searches, that`s very complex. And you know, for reasons we can get into, it really helps if your share grows. Not having that, those engineers aren`t going to be able to filter through the rest of the company to help you do these other things there. If you look at the team now, gee, what are they going to do? It`s going to take well over a year for this to come to fruition with this deal there. So if I`m working as an engineer for Yahoo! now, what`s my future? CHARLIE ROSE: That`s — and losing talent is the big issue so much, because they`re creating the new software and building on the old. STEVEN LEVY: And who is one of the most talented people at Microsoft, the one they all talk about there, is Qi Lu, the guy who came from Yahoo!, and went to Microsoft. He`s now the big technology leader, the bright guy who is leading Microsoft search. CHARLIE ROSE: All right. What about AOL? What`s going to happen to AOL? ERICK SCHONFELD: So, I think AOL is a great example here, because you`ve got Tim Armstrong, who came from Google, who is now the new CEO of AOL, and he took what was really a hobbled company, and is taking it in a new direction, away from the sweet spot that Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft already dominate in. He`s hiring hundreds of journalists, which as you know from your Politico piece, that you know, they are very, very valuable assets. And is kind of creating — that`s just one part of his business — is creating this sort of new newsstand online. And is doing a lot of interesting things. And so why didn`t Carol Bartz do that? Why didn`t she double down? You can make the argument that you know, ultimately she had to do something, because she doesn`t have Microsoft`s Windows money and she doesn`t have Google`s search money. So ultimately search is an expensive game and maybe she has to get out of that business, ultimately. But Microsoft needs her search volume. Why not double down, invest in search, and get a better deal down the line? Or merge with AOL when they become public? CHARLIE ROSE: Speaking of one final issue, anti-trust, Nick. Is Google worried about anti-trust ramifications of its market share? Will this deal be subject to anti-trust implications, questions? NICK WINGFIELD: Well, Google is I think worried, yes, about their future in anti-trust. In this particular case of Microsoft and Yahoo!, they argue that together they have 30 percent of the market, compared to Google`s 65 percent. And so they think they are going to have a pretty strong case with the anti-trust regulators. They are definitely going to face some tough scrutiny. They`re prepared, I think, to really fight with Google, but it`s unclear what Google is going to do. There was some talk today at this Microsoft meeting I was at of Google employing sort of third-party advocacy groups to fight the deal. But Google really is the big gorilla here. So it`s a little challenging for them to make an argument that this is going to be anti-competitive. Google has… (CROSSTALK) STEVEN LEVY: There`s a really delicious irony here, because last year, when there was the threat of Microsoft buying Yahoo!, Google wanted to make a deal with Yahoo! for the search. It was not on the scale of this, and Microsoft complained about it, and said to the Justice Department, successfully argued that, hey, we can`t do this, because Yahoo! would end its search team. There would be less competition in there. Guess what? CHARLIE ROSE: They`ll take over their search team. Yes. Is there a feeling with the search — Bing getting good marks and now this deal, that Microsoft is back and that Microsoft can deliver a lot more than people, or may be much stronger than people assumed it was, say six months ago, when the effort to buy Yahoo! came to nothing? NICK WINGFIELD: Well, there definitely is a feeling that they are on an upswing in terms of the quality of their products. Windows 7 is coming out, which they hope will erase the sort of disdain of Windows Vista, which was a very troubled operating system for them with some technical problems. Bing is doing well. They have done some innovative stuff in games. But they`ve also got some real challenges. For example, some people think that they have placed too much emphasis on search and neglected mobile phones. They have a pretty poor offering there. And Apple`s got the iPhone and others are doing very well in that category. So they`ve got some big challenges in other areas as well. ERICK SCHONFELD: Microsoft no doubt is better off today in search than it was before. But we shouldn`t overestimate what their advantage is. Even if they have 30 percent of the search market share, they don`t have 30 percent of the revenues, because they`re giving 88 percent of that back to Yahoo! CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly. Nick Wingfield, “Wall Street Journal” here. Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch and Steve Levy from “Wired,” thank you all. END Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Google Maps Don’t Lie. Sweden And Canada Among Worst Greenhouse Gas Emitters. Posted: 31 Jul 2009 01:43 PM PDT
Which countries are the worst greenhouse gas emitters? Now you can see for yourself on this handy Google Map created by a department of the UN and Google. The map shows changes in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2006. Green is good (a decrease in emissions) and purple is bad (an increase). So who are the worst offenders? Topping the list is Sweden! The country has managed to increase its emissions by 110 percent over that time period. So much for Nordic purity. Following Sweden is Turkey (with a 103 percent increase) and Canada (with a 55 percent increase). Yes, Canada. What is it with these northern countries? You’d think the U.S. would top the list, but it is actually only the tenth worst country with a 14 percent increase in emissions (still well within purple territory). It is kind of embarrassing that Russia is greener than we are. But at least we are better than Canada (and Sweden). Or are we? The map itself lets you drill down into the data to find out. You can sort by industry, type of emission (CO2, CH4, N2O, etc), or year, and if click on a country it gives you a detailed breakdown of emissions by economic sector and other variables. For instance, over the 1990 to 2006 time span, Russia has actually seen a 29 percent decrease in emissions, but if you look at just 2006, Russia starts getting pretty purple, and rises to the No. 3 worst emitter. And the USA rises to No. 1. Hey, we’re No. 1!
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| Testing The Reverberations Of ECHO Commenting On TechCrunch Posted: 31 Jul 2009 01:02 PM PDT  "We're here today to announce the death of comments." That's what JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux said in his opening remarks at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp earlier this month. He went on to unveil ECHO, JS-Kit's new take on how conversations should be happening around content on the web. And today, we're going to try a limited test of this new system on the TechCrunch Network. To reiterate, this is just a test that will reside under only this post for the time-being, so let us know what you think. While at first glance, the comments you see below this post may look like a slight variation of any other commenting system, the reality is much different. Sure, a part of ECHO is made up by what we think of as traditional comments, that is, comments you fill out on a particular article and post to it. But the majority of the content in this commenting area will actually be populated from sources all around the web talking about this piece of content.
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| Geek Weekend: Minneapolis-Saint Paul, MN Posted: 31 Jul 2009 12:16 PM PDT  We've been getting requests from various citizens to feature their respective cities in our new Geek Weekend feature on CrunchGear, so when a request came in for the Twin Cities, John asked me to write it up and I thought,
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| The Online Ad Recession Continues. Is This What A Reset Looks Like? Posted: 31 Jul 2009 10:39 AM PDT
The recession in online advertising, which began in the first quarter of 2009, continued into the second. Every quarter we keep track of the combined advertising revenues of the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL), which together represent the lion’s share of all online advertising revenues and is a decent proxy for the market as a whole. In the second quarter of 2009, their combined global ad revenues were $7.864 billion, down 3.4 percent from a year ago.
In economics, a general rule of thumb is that two down quarters marks a recession. Last quarter saw the first annual decline in advertising revenues of 2.1 percent. And the annual decline this quarter got a little worse. However, on a sequential basis compared to last quarter, it is actually pretty much flat (but still down 0.18 percent). So we now have two down quarters on both an annual and sequential basis. Will this recession continue into the current quarter, or did we just witness a fundamental “reset”, as Steve Ballmer likes to call it. What that implies is that advertising revenues have been reset to a lower level from which they can once again grow. We’ll see what happens in the third quarter, but anecdotally I am hearing from advertising startups that the worst is behind us. This may be wishful thinking, of course. But barring any new economic catastrophe, the advertising levels of the past two quarters seems like the new floor. But how long will it take to get up off that floor? These numbers represent global advertising revenues, and include network revenues paid to affiliates through AdSense and Yahoo's ad network. Google's licensing revenues for Google Enterprise Apps have been stripped out. For the other companies, we include only the advertising portions of their online revenues as reported in their quarterly earnings statements. Below is a table with all the numbers: Online Advertising Revenues (in millions)
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| While We Wait For 12seconds’ Robust iPhone App, We Get A Dead Simple One Posted: 31 Jul 2009 09:58 AM PDT
Called 12cast, the app claims to be the “simplest way to get video on Twitter.” Here’s how it works, you open the app, enter a title for the video, then rotate it to the left to bring up the video camera. You then record footage, hit send, and you’re done. (If you’re not logged into Twitter, there will be a prompt that comes up to allow you to do that.) If the video you shot was over 12 seconds, it will only take the first 12 seconds. And because of the 12seconds limit, the uploading of the video occurs very quickly. And you can also use footage you’ve already shot and saved, by clicking the “library” link on the title page. Again, the 12 second rule will be in place. As with the larger 12seconds app they’re working on, 12cast is all about using the video service on top of the Twitter social graph. The goal here was to build an app with the lowest barrier way to put video onto Twitter. The plan for a future update is to include Facebook Connect as well. Obviously, this app will only work with the new iPhone 3GS, which has video capabilities. The app will be available for free in the App Store at some point later today. (Update: The app is now live, here.)
12cast introduction and overview from Sol Lipman on Vimeo. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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Ever since I’ve started blogging about technology a couple of years ago, I’ve been consistently growing an immense feeling of hate towards press releases, and it’s not getting any better. 
My, how the tables have turned. Earlier this week, we 
Facebook’s legal woes just won’t stop coming. Last November a company called 
The 
12seconds
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