The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Why Schmidt Had To Go
- Google CEO Eric Schmidt Resigns From Apple Board. Surprised?
- 4Chan Users Attempt To Incite Mass Fear, Succeed Only In Creating Really Tidy Block List
- Google Preparing To Launch A Large Themes Gallery For Chrome
- Google Launches A Major Offensive Against Microsoft With “Going Google”
- Polaris Ventures Makes A Hire To Bolster Its Dog Patch Labs
- Family In India Or The Philippines? Cheaply Boost Their Mobile Accounts With Aryty
- Dr. TweetLove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the @Ev Bomb
- Barron’s Makes Waves With Vague Tapplet Rumors
- Taser Shockwave Will Take Out a Herd of Charging Rhinos
| Posted: 03 Aug 2009 07:55 AM PDT
What happens when the enemy of your enemy is no longer your friend? You cast him out, as Steve Jobs seems to have done to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who today resigned his seat from Apple’s board. An alliance which began with a mutual distrust of Microsoft is now under strain because of a mutual distrust of each other. Google is not so much the enemy of Microsoft as it is the enemy of the old model of device-centric computing which both Microsoft and Apple represent. The announcement comes on the heels of an FCC investigation into Apple’s iPhone App Store that was announced on Friday evening. The subject of that investigation is nominally the rejection of a Google app, Google Voice, from the App Store, but it is really an investigation into the closed and arbitrary nature of how apps get approved for the iPhone. In other words, Google brought down the disapproving scrutiny of the FCC onto Apple on Friday night, and on Monday morning Schmidt resigned. It is difficult not to make a connection between these two events. The FCC investigation, of course, is never mentioned in the press release (that would only invite more pesky questions from the FCC). Instead, what Steve Jobs does say in the press release is that Google’s entry into mobile operating systems with Android and desktop operating systems with Chrome OS is increasingly becoming a “conflict of interest” for Schmidt. As a result, Schmidt had to go. It also says that both executives “mutually decided” it was time for Schmidt to resign. (I can only imagine how that conversation went. Jobs: “You are going to have to resign.” Schmidt: “Okay, but can I say it was my idea?”) Regardless of how the resignation came about (maybe it was the other way around with Schmidt telling Jobs that the two companies were increasingly coming at odds with each other), what made the two men come to grips with reality all of a sudden? If nothing else, last Friday’s letters from the FCC was a wake-up call to Apple that Google stands on the opposite side of the fence when it comes to the evolution of the mobile Web. Google wants the mobile Web to be as open as the Internet. It’s entire mobile strategy is predicated on open access for all apps, devices, and services because that creates a larger, more vibrant, and more searchable mobile Web. Apple is not about being open. It never has been. Every app on the iPhone (all 50,000 of them) must be approved individually, for instance. This difference in approach wasn’t a problem until Google started to have mobile aspirations of its own. Asked to choose between furthering Apple’s mobile agenda or Google’s, Schmidt must choose Google’s. It is his fiduciary duty. That conflict is only going to grow. And that is perhaps why Jobs says his “effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished.” Schmidt had to go. Not just because of the dust-up with the FCC and the Google Voice app. But because Google has a different set of agendas which already are putting strains on the relationship. Google wants to diminish the importance of any single computing device in favor of Web apps which sit in the cloud and are accessible from all devices—mobile phones, Macbooks, Dell laptops, or whatever. As much as is physically possible, it wants to replace the operating system with the Web. Ultimately, that is a bigger threat to Apple than Microsoft ever was. (Image via Photoxpress). Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Google CEO Eric Schmidt Resigns From Apple Board. Surprised? Posted: 03 Aug 2009 05:53 AM PDT
The resignation comes a few days after the FCC sent letters to Google, Apple and AT&T inquiring why Apple denied the Google Voice application from its iPhone App Store. Here’s Apple’s statement on the matter:
Update: Google has provided us with the following statement from Schmidt:
Hardly surprising, and it’s good to see both come clean on the situation: you can argue all you like, but Google’s foray into the mobile and computer operating systems, the two products mentioned in the statement (not to mention Chrome in the browser space), must have been quite the thorn in Apple’s and Jobs’ side. And I’m quite certain that the whole Google Voice App / FCC debacle only made the process a bit speedier. Many people have always found it strange that Schmidt was on Apple’s board, but back in August 2006 when he took the seat Google had virtually nothing even remotely competing with Apple’s core products and services. It’s only in the last 20 months or so that possible conflicts of interests really became an issue, and we can’t forgot that Schmidt was consequently asked to leave board meetings when critical things were shared about Cupertino’s plans for the iPhone and the App Store. (Image via Technologizer) Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| 4Chan Users Attempt To Incite Mass Fear, Succeed Only In Creating Really Tidy Block List Posted: 02 Aug 2009 11:40 PM PDT
Twitter is getting a ton of spam tonight for the hashtag #sept2nd along with vague sounding warnings about something bad happening on that date. There’s also a YouTube video and a Digg story that is just starting to get clicks. What is it? Some 4Chan users are trying to stir up some good old fashioned fear. A message urges readers to “Write “9/02/09″ on flyers, stickers, currency, walls, etc. and put them EVERYWHERE….Tweet with the hashtag #sept2nd. Get it into the trending topics….Help get the youtube video into the popular section (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT6N_PZuY-Q)…Spam Google with “9.02.09″” This is much more likely to create a big annoyance for everyone rather than the intended effect of “its gonna be hilarious seeing everyone freak out.” Traditionally 4Chan has been much better at just raining on parades than than creating any serious mayhem. But there’s an upside, too. All those people twittering out that hashtag make up an excellent and tidy block list. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Google Preparing To Launch A Large Themes Gallery For Chrome Posted: 02 Aug 2009 10:38 PM PDT
The site, which will reside here, is not live yet. But on the default new tab/new window page, the one with the thumbnails of your most visited sites, if you click on the “X” to remove some of them, a themes page shows up as a thumbnail (see included screenshot). When you click on the thumbnail, it takes you to the not-live-yet page. But the thumbnail clearly shows this page will have a bunch of themes for Chrome. My superior counting skills tell me there are 24 themes shown in that thumbnail alone. This little trick to get the themes directory thumbnail to show up works in the latest developer builds of Chrome for both Windows and Mac (I haven’t tried it on Linux). Speaking of Chrome for Mac, it continues to come along nicely, with limited support for Flash just being added recently. We’re told it’s working in the Linux build as well. Alongside themes, improved support for extensions is included in this new Chrome build. Themes have been available on Chrome for a while, but they used to require you to download files and know which folder to drop them in. It was also hard to revert to the original one. This latest build allows for push-button skinning and an easy way to revert. You can find two of the Chrome themes on this page (theme.crx is “Camo,” theme2.crx is “Snowflake”). Click on them and then click “download” on the next page from within the new build of Chrome to install them.
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| Google Launches A Major Offensive Against Microsoft With “Going Google” Posted: 02 Aug 2009 08:59 PM PDT
The campaign, called “Going Google,” has a very clear target: Microsoft Office. A series of advertisements [disclosure: including on this blog] will begin touting how and why some 3,000 organizations are signing up to use Google apps each day. But the crown jewels of this campaign will be billboards on four major U.S. highways that will give a new message about Google apps everyday for a month. The billboards will be placed on the 101 in San Francisco, the West Side Hwy in New York, the Ike in Chicago, and Mass Pike in Boston. Google says that the vinyl being used to create these new messages each day will be recycled or reused into either computer bags or shopping bags. Google says that so far over 1.75 million businesses, schools and organizations have signed up to use the various combinations of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and the other Google apps. But that is of course a drop in the bucket compared to the number of companies that use Microsoft Office and its other enterprise solutions. Now, Google is clearly trying to be proactive in telling people why its solution is better before Office goes online in a big way with the 2010 version. Google is also attempting to use the viral message platform of choice these days to spread the “Going Google” message: Twitter. At the bottom of its blog post on the matter, Google urges people that use its apps to “Tweet your story” and provides a link to auto-populate a tweet with the #gonegoogle hashtag. You can also follow the GoogleAtWork Twitter account to follow the Gone Google stories. It has also set up a site to “Spead the word” about Going Google. This is similar to what Mozilla has long been doing to promote Firefox — and it’s worked to the tune of over a billion downloads. The site has a range of options for letting your company or organization know that you want it to “Go Google,” including things like fliers and pre-populated emails to send out. And Google is also promising to give away “goodies” each week in August to users who have Gone Google and fill out a Google Doc describing their experience. Will any of this work? Who knows. But I know that I can’t wait to see how Microsoft responds in this back-and-forth war. “Stay With Office” blimps, perhaps?
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Polaris Ventures Makes A Hire To Bolster Its Dog Patch Labs Posted: 02 Aug 2009 06:22 PM PDT
Ryan Spoon, formerly the Vice President of Marketing & Business Development at Widgetbox, is joining Polaris as a senior associate, with Dog Patch Labs being one of his key areas of focus. Like other senior associates, Spoon will also be helping to generally assess investment opportunities and work with portfolio companies, but he will be working out of the Dog Patch Labs at Pier 38 in San Francisco. Polaris general partner Mike Hirshland describes the space, which they share with the startup Social Media, as sort of a “frat house for geeks.” It offers space for promising young entrepreneurs to work out of, giving them desks, bandwidth, lunch and coffee. And it offers all of this for free, with no commitment to Polaris required. The idea is that many of these startups aren’t quite at the investment-ready yet, but they can use the labs to work towards that. Hirshland expects Spoon, who is also the founder of the sports social network InGameNow and the high school althete college recruiting service beRecruited, to be a great resource for the entrepreneurs that hang out at the Dog Patch Labs. And he certainly has the right experience for the labs, Spoon is also the founder of sfEntrepreneurs, and SF-based collective for young entreprenuers. He also worked at eBay for nearly 5 years as the manager of the Internet marketing efforts. Here’s Spoon’s own post on the move.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Family In India Or The Philippines? Cheaply Boost Their Mobile Accounts With Aryty Posted: 02 Aug 2009 04:58 PM PDT
Aryty CEO Nils Johnson says that it is quite common for families in America who have loved ones in the Philippines or India to send money on a fairly regular basis as a reminder that they’re thinking of them. But standard wire transfers, especially for small amounts of money, tend to be highly inefficient because of the way fees are structured — you might pay in excess of $10 in fees for a wire transfer of only $20. In contrast, Aryty has no fees. Families can send money directly into the cellular accounts of their loved ones without losing anything in the process, which makes it more appealing for these ‘thinking of you’ transfers. To initiate a transfer, you simply enter your credit card information, and the credit is instantly added to the cellular account of your loved one abroad (they also receive a SMS message alerting them to the addition). Generally speaking, Aryty users will send relatively small amounts of credit on a regular basis — say, once a month or every two weeks. The reason for the fairly small amounts is that most carriers in India and the Philippines don’t allow for ‘roll-over’ credit, which means any excess amount left at the end of the month will expire. Fortunately, Aryty also offers a scheduling feature that lets you send money as often as you’d like without having to remember. Aryty has forged deals with major carriers in the Phillipines, and is now expanding into India, where it expects to have support for around 98% of the market by the end of the year. And while Aryty doesn’t charge any fees, it can still make money — carriers sell the company minutes at a discount, which it can then resell at the standard rate. Carriers like Aryty because it lowers user churn (users don’t want to switch carriers after they’ve established accounts that their family members are depositing money into).  Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Dr. TweetLove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the @Ev Bomb Posted: 02 Aug 2009 02:50 PM PDT
It’s 11 p.m. on a Sunday night when I notice that Twitter founder @ev has just tweeted about FB140, our company Twables’ days-old service that helps you find your Facebook friends on Twitter. Since our launch, I’ve felt like a surfer, waiting for a wave of users to start using our service. A few smaller waves have trickled through in our first days since launch, but Ev’s post represents something totally different. I mean, here’s someone who has more than a million followers and receives personal messages from Lance Armstrong. I was beyond excitement until I realized a tweet from @ev has the force of nuclear explosion. And a nuclear explosion makes a very, very big wave. I quickly IM’d my only developer to warn him. Then I ran a Twitter search on Ev’s tweet and saw that it was getting retweeted. A lot. Between midnight and 6 a.m. alone, 170 people had retweeted him. “Frak,” I thought, “we might not scale.” For the next six hours, my developer began spinning up machines on Amazon, reworking our code and rolling it out overnight as we tried to ride the wave without having it crash down upon us. By then, we were doing more traffic in an hour than we had all week. Fortunately, he’s a killer Java programmer, and we’ve stayed afloat so far. By 6 a.m., exhausted, I reflected on three things I’ve learned since stumbling into development on the Twitter platform just two months ago. 1. Business hours are dead. 24/7 is the new 9 to 5. Real-time messaging means that anyone can start talking about your product at any time and that talk can snowball before you know it. I happened to see Ev’s post nine minutes after he sent it, but what if I hadn’t checked Twitter at all? Our site would have been down and a golden opportunity missed. As much as I love all the new technology (Amazon Web Services, Twitter APIs, Google Apps) that makes it possible for a two-person company to operate, it’s tough, if not impossible, for two people to be on call at all times. Perhaps this means that business guys like me are going to have to start wearing ops pagers (what? business people actually earning their paycheck?). How can you sleep for fear that someone will say something to tens of thousands of people that you really need to respond to. Is our only solution to never go to sleep? 2. The Borg has finally arrived. On Friday afternoon, I popped my head into Dave McClure’s office to shoot the breeze and mentioned a thought that Twitter was a bigger threat to MySpace than to Facebook. Before the words were out of my mouth, he had tweeted it, Dave-style. Instantly, people started to respond with their thoughts, and I realized that Dave was crowdsourcing our discussion before he’d even formed his own opinion. Will we all use the real-time world to have conversations? While Dave has the unfair advantage of a lot of followers, most of you are just at the beginning of your Twitter experience. I predict that you’ll join the Borg soon enough. The reality is that many of you are accustomed to asking those around you for advice. The difference is that now you’ll be able to accomplish your information-gathering process in minutes instead of weeks. Our company gets advice from users within hours of our initial launch and we are able to release changes for those users on the same day. If the dialogue with customers is now real-time, then the process of incorporating feedback needs to be real-time, too. Sorry big companies, life is about to suck for you! 3. The Patriot Act can’t hold a candle to Citizen Paparazzi. An hour before Ev’s post, I was talking to two friends about Twitter. They mentioned that a friend of theirs had tweeted about their two-year-old son a few times, which they characterized as an “unusual” experience. Celebrities will finally have their revenge as two out of every three of your neighbors starts tweeting about everything you’re doing. The Supreme Court will have to revisit the definition of “reasonable expectation of privacy” when a father’s kid tweets that daddy is reading Playboy in the bathroom. (That happened to a buddy of mine. Not to me. A buddy of mine.) This may not seem like a new phenomenon, what with YouTube videos and the like already starting this trend. However, the pace at which things spread is now so close to real-time that it almost erases the line between past and present. Real-time communication invites the world to experience your life with you, as it happens. I don’t know if the world after Twitter will be better or worse. (For me, I think it will be better.) But when your tidal wave approaches, will you be ready to ride it? Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Barron’s Makes Waves With Vague Tapplet Rumors Posted: 02 Aug 2009 12:46 PM PDT  Looks like the mythical Apple Tablet (or "Tapplet") has been handled in prototype form. I can believe that this guy is telling the truth because he's old-school journalism, working for Barron's. Not that Barron's is some infallible and extra-dignified news source, but it's an establishment and they have to be extremely careful about respecting confidentiality. And since this article is so incredibly vague, I can only assume that Apple did actually show the guy something, but also told him exactly what he could and could not write.
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| Taser Shockwave Will Take Out a Herd of Charging Rhinos Posted: 02 Aug 2009 12:42 PM PDT  Taser, taser, burning bright in a show of force tonight When I posted that triple Taser the other day (apparently it's for taking down your female coworkers, watch the video), I speculated that the criminals would come back with greater numbers, creating an arms race between muggers and the mugged. But if there was one of these on every corner, all you'd have to do is get behind it and hit the trigger, and everything you can see gets Tasered. Boom, no more muggers!
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Lots of people will be arguing today that this was inevitable, but the news comes faster than expected. Google CEO 
Microsoft and Google have seen their rivalry kicked up a notch in recent weeks. First, 
Dog Patch Labs is the name of 
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