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- Ustream Finally Launches A Recording iPhone App. No Live Video, But A Lot Of Options.
- Apple Censors iPhone Dictionary App
- Here Come The Twitter Patent Lawsuits. TechRadium Files The First One.
- Eight New Startups Pop Out Of The LaunchBox
- Online Ad Marketplace TRAFFIQ Scores $10 Million in Series B Funding
- Mobile Ad Network mKhoj Rebrands As InMobi, Eyes Expansion In Europe
- Google Acquires Video Compression Technology Company On2 For $106 Million
- Listia Is An Awesome Way To Give And Get Free Stuff
- Closed Deal: WideOrbit Acquires Google Radio Assets
- Other Companies Should Have To Read This Internal Netflix Presentation
- EC: 1/3 Of Europeans Have Never Used The Web
- Chrome’s New Feature: Click The UI Designer To Close The Window
- In The Pre-Chrome OS World, Google Optimizes Gmail For Netbooks
- WorldMate + Push = Must Have iPhone App for Road Warriors (Free Copies)
- SkyGrid Now Appearing On StockTwits For A Real-Time Financial Frenzy
- USA CTO Aneesh Chopra: We Need To Extend Technological Innovation Beyond Our Personal Lives
- Google Chrome Official Themes: Collect All 29, But Some Make Your Eyes Bleed
- Google Maps Fills Out With More Landmarks and Points Of Interest
- Report: Firefox 3.5 Jumps To 4.5% Market Share In A Month, IE Hemorrhaging Slows
- SocialGreat Starts Tracking Trendy Places For All Foursquare Cities
- Is 2010 the Year Of the Tablet? Nah.
- Flickr Turns Up The Awesome On Image Search
- The (Bill) Clinton Touch: Current TV Reporters Free After He Visits North Korea
- Spinvox Raises $25 Million More, But A Live Demo Still Leaves Questions
- MySpace Subtly Debuts A Posthumous Heath Ledger Work
| Ustream Finally Launches A Recording iPhone App. No Live Video, But A Lot Of Options. Posted: 05 Aug 2009 08:54 AM PDT
The new Ustream Recorder is a free application available in Apple’s App Store that allows you to send video from your iPhone to the web. Unfortunately, despite long-standing talk that it might be able to send live video from your iPhone to the web, that is not the case. Instead, Ustream appears to be attempting to use some spin by calling it a “live-to-recorded video recorder” — um, okay, isn’t all video at some point technically recorded live? Yes, it is. Mentioning “live” was not necessary here because this app does not stream video live. Not that it’s Ustream’s fault, it’s Apple that doesn’t currently allow apps that do that in the App Store. So instead, this app records video and then uploads it to the web. The problem is that there are already a number of other apps out there that do this, like Kyte and 12cast. But Ustream wants to challenge them on the iPhone by offering more options. The app gives you the option to share you videos to Ustream, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or Ustream on Facebook. This makes the app much more flexible than its competitors when it comes to deciding where you want to send your video. Ustream also promises high-quality video from the app, which isn’t a surprise given the quality that Kyte’s app outputs. Also interesting is that the app allows edit and manage videos that are already up on Ustream, even if they weren’t recorded with the iPhone. You simply pull download them to edit them. But the reason why Ustream isn’t too bummed about its app not offering live-streaming is that they envisioned it used in another way, with another new service they’re launching.
Again, that is pre-recorded video being sent in from the iPhone, but such a use-case actually sounds pretty cool. And for publishers it’s fairly flexible. You can accept videos from anyone that submits them if they use a hashtag that you set (to be able to identify the right videos). You can then choose to accept certain videos into your feed on a case-by-case basis. Or you can approve certain users ahead of time so that their videos will definitely show up in your stream. The functionality works on Ustream and on embeds. It’s disappointing that the app doesn’t offer live video streaming, but again, that’s not Ustream’s fault (Qik can only do it by bypassing the App Store with an Ad-Hoc install method). But a nice set up upload options and this new Media Stream capability should make Ustream’s app a good option in an increasingly crowded iPhone 3GS video app field. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Apple Censors iPhone Dictionary App Posted: 05 Aug 2009 08:54 AM PDT  In another fascinating move by the App Store acceptance team (Motto: Lunch is tasty! Is that a butterfly? We like cake.) the Ninjawords pocket dictionary, a $2 app, has been given an 17+ rating after being censored by Apple. This ensures that tittering schoolboys won't scroll through the app and discover bad words like "tits," "micturition," and "enough with this wanton disregard for your customer's intelligence, Apple. Do you only hire barely literate, rule-cleaving sub-morons with no judgement skills to police your damned App Store?" Warning: Some saucy language after the jump.
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| Here Come The Twitter Patent Lawsuits. TechRadium Files The First One. Posted: 05 Aug 2009 08:23 AM PDT
Twitter is being sued again, and this time it isn’t some angry baseball manager who doesn’t like people impersonating him on the service. This time it is a little more serious. Twitter is being sued for patent infringement by TechRadium, a Texas-based technology company which makes mass notification systems for public safety organizations, the military, and utilities. TechRadium claims that it thought up the whole concept of mass notifications, and points to three issued patents: Nos. 7,130,389, 7,496,183, and 7,519,165. According to the lawsuit, which was filed yesterday on August 4, 2009 in Houston, Texas (full document embedded at bottom of post):
Twitter works across text messaging and e-mail, but not voicemail (yet). The very concept of unifying different message communication systems is what is in dispute here. Whatever the merits of the lawsuit, you can’t say Twitter didn’t see this one coming. Way back in a February, 2009 strategy meeting (see Twitter Papers), the company discussed potential legal threats.
I hope it hired that “great patent attorney” because this could just be the beginning.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Eight New Startups Pop Out Of The LaunchBox Posted: 05 Aug 2009 07:06 AM PDT
Washington DC based LaunchBox Digital, an early stage investment firm and incubator founded in 2007 by John McKinley, Sean Green, and Julius Genachowski (now the new head of the FCC and divested from LaunchBox), just wrapped up its second annual 12-week program. Modeled after Y Combinator, LaunchBox invests seed capital of around $20,000-$25,000 into teams, and provides them with 12 weeks of education, mentorship and access to a small army of advisers. Drawn from a pool of over 275 applicants, eight teams were selected to make up the class of 2009. (For the class of 2008, read last year’s post). Below is a brief description of each with notes written by LaunchBox founder John McKinley, as well screencasts of their products and links to their websites.
SEC Watch deals with a big problem facing individuals interested in research and investing—a mountain of invaluable data exists in SEC filings, but those filings are really difficult to deal with as an information source.
Why does this all matter? Well, if you had looked at AIG's filings, for instance, you could have found information about their sub-prime mortgage exposure almost a year before things blew up. It was just buried in a footnote. SEC Watch brings state of the art search technology, combined with user annotation and sharing capabilities to the problem, and has crafted a compelling product that both retail and professional investors and analysts can use. It is easy to track companies and keywords (e.g., "subprime","litigation", etc.), and get automated results in near real-time when filings are posted that match your criteria. You can then dive down to the relevant sections, and annotate a given filing for your own personal use, your team's use, or to share with the public. Bandsintown
Bandsintown addresses a big shift in the whole economics of the music business. Nowadays, 70% of a band's income comes not from music sales, but from touring. That's up from 20% only four years ago. Ticket sales have never been more important, but the marketplace for tickets has become incredibly fragmented. There are 70+ separate ticket marketplaces on the web. That makes for a bad experience for a fan, but also a bad experience for music sites trying to encourage ticket sales for all the different artists they feature. Bandsintown has dealt with this problem by building interfaces to 62 different ticket marketplaces, and then exposing all ticketing information as a simple to use API that music sites can integrate. They have increased their traffic to over 500K monthly unique visitors in the five months since they launched their API, and have a global partner base (including Spotify, the Hype Machine, and PureVolume among others). Bandsintown automatically plugs into music players such as iTunes, last.fm, Pandora and other sites to learn your artist preferences, and then lets you track your favorite artists (and related ones) and receive alerts when events of interest are coming to your area. They are also preparing to release a new iPhone app (it's awaiting approval from Apple) that lets you see local concerts based on your musical tastes and geo-location— think of it as Urban Spoon for live music. There is lots of other good stuff too, like live event twitter integration to allow you to easily track both yours and others' concert experiences. If you love live music, you'll love Bandsintown. Social Collective Social Collective addresses the huge market of conferences and corporate meetings. There are an incredible 1.2 million conferences and corporate meeting in the US each year. It is a huge industry—close to $11 billion is spent worldwide. The problem is that in these tough economic times, revenue for event producers is down, and the demands from attendees and sponsors is up, as they want more for their dollar. Social Collective is a browser-based service targeted at event marketing and the enhancement of the event experience for both attendees and sponsors. They powered SXSW this year, as well as the Oracle Open World and other big events. They bring innovation to a pretty under-served industry by allowing things like crowd-sourced agenda design, social graph importing for attendees to reach out to friends and associates attending the same event, marketing tools for pre and post event awareness building by conference organizers, and tools for vendor communications and networking with attendees. The service has been great in helping both long-standing events re-invigorate themselves, as well as first-time events get their word out to the marketplace. They have both web and mobile experiences covered, and do some really nice things like allowing you to build your own tailored agenda for an event, and then import it into your online calendar. (FYI, this custom-agenda function was very popular at SXSW, with over 60% penetration). TapMetrics TapMetrics is a tool designed by a team of iPhone application developers that brings together sales data, user feedback, software metrics, and other information into a consolidated dashboard to allow developers to manage a portfolio of applications quickly and easily. The whole experience starts with a dashboard that lets you view important information about how your application portfolio is performing, and then lets you drill into each application to investigate any issue that is highlighted. The nice part of the TapMetrics solution is that while it does a great job on the business metrics of running an iPhone application, it does just as good of a job serving the needs of the engineer. Everything from detailed environmental data (which iPhone/Touch hardware is being used, which OS level, which release level of the application), to detailed crash reporting, to application messaging/event logs, and session tracking are supported within the integrated TapMetrics experience. That integration of both business and technical data (including session-level tracking) in a single dashboard is something no one else does today. They also have a free iPhone app called TapMini that you can use to track sales data for your applications. If you are trying to get more out of your iPhone application portfolio (both in terms of improving the consumer experience and making more revenue), this can be an essential tool.
Unblab is trying to attack the email overload problem by answering the question "What emails should I be reading"? They are approaching this by building a cloud-based service that uses common and user-specific rules to identify and prioritize important email messages. Think of it as attacking the email overload problem from the opposite end of the spectrum as the anti-spam vendors, but using similar technologies. The latest productivity studies have white-collar workers now spending 4 hours a day in email-related activities, and the volume of legitimate inbox messages increasing 10% per year. The challenge is how to approach better management of that legitimate traffic. Unblab has two products it is deploying initially to help refine its algorithms and demonstrate the value of its ranking system, which it calls “Importance ranking.”. One product is a Gmail add-on called GTriage, and the other is a mobile app called iTriage. The goal is to get early-stage learnings on the differences of what's "important" when you are on a mobile device with limited real estate as compared to when you are using a pc-based webmail experience. The API for the service will be opened up to developers to define their own user experiences (and to allow additional training events/algorithmic enhancements). KeepFu
KeepFu is a simple note-taking and organization tool to help manage consumer-defined "projects" like trip planning, event planning, and important purchases. The team has built a good Evernote-like note taking tool called Ubernote, and while they got some decent initial traction, they realized there were some key unmet needs that the whole web note-taking space was failing to serve. Feedback from their own user based shaped this next-generation offering. This new product, KeepFu, is addressing the organization of information, not just the collection of it. KeepFu collects data through one-click and passive data collection while a user reads an email, visits a website, IMs with a friend, or send a Tweet. It then supports a quick drag and drop experience to organize these information snippets into community-created project templates (predefined file folders specific to an activity, like planning a trip). These projects are then easily published or shared. The goal is to allow information capture without forcing a user to change context and leave the experience they are engaged in, and then support automated and manual classification and organization of the information when it is appropriate, a bit like the weekly photo tagging activity of Facebook users. Simple collection, organization, and sharing is what KeepFu is all about. Keen Guides Keen Guides started from the personal experience of its founder, a hearing-impaired woman who was visiting a very popular museum in Washington, DC and wanted to have her own tour experience. They handed her a dog-eared pile of paper, and sent her on her way. Trying to come up with a better experience, she went home and made a sign language version of the commentary as video clips she then viewed the next day on her iPod as she toured the Gallery. It was a transformative experience for her, and that's when Keen Guides was born. The goals of the company are simple: Leverage new platforms (especially the iPhone) to replace outdated audio wands as content delivery tools. Create self-paced custom tours, based on prior visitor feedback, what time you have available, and your unique interests. Encourage social interaction and sharing of comments, photos, etc., by tour participants. Support access by all, including hearing and vision impaired visitors, as well as non-English speakers. They are using the iPhone as their initial tour delivery platform, and will support tour content creation (and monetization) by both themselves as well as third parties like DC By Foot. Initial deployments include museums, city walking tours, and college campuses (for orientation tours.).
Legal River is focused on providing a marketplace for matching small businesses with legal professionals. Looking at search queries, you see a lot of businesses searching for uniquely skilled legal professional in areas like patent law, contract disputes, and other specialties. While there are numerous directory sites for lawyers, they don't encourage the concept of competing for a given business's project, and do little to give prior client feedback and other useful data that would help a business owner to make an informed decision. Legal River has created a marketplace where a business can anonymously post a given project and get competitive bids from multiple subject-matter experts. The system allows easy side-by-side comparison of credentials, prices, and prior client feedback on similar projects. The net result is a better, more transparent process that serves both the business owner as well as the legal professional, who gets access to high-quality local leads. Legal River has signed distribution deals with a number of sites to both get their service offering in front of small business owners, as well as qualified local lawyers.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Online Ad Marketplace TRAFFIQ Scores $10 Million in Series B Funding Posted: 05 Aug 2009 07:01 AM PDT
The New York-based company, which operates a management platform designed to connect buyers and sellers of online media, had previously raised $7 million from the latter investor and says the extra capital will be primarily used to enhance its TRAFFIQ platform and accelerate the company's sales and marketing efforts. TRAFFIQ positions itself as different from ad networks or exchanges, in the sense that they offer an end-to-end platform that is capable of consolidating planning, RFP distribution, order execution, optimization and billing. Its solution is targeted primarily to larger ad agencies like Havas Digital, IMRE and AdStrategies and publishers like WhitePages.com, Scripps Network and ContextWeb. The service also boasts the inclusiong of reporting and free ad serving tools, as well as integration with common third-party ad-serving technologies like Atlas and DoubleClick’s DART. The company claims “millions of dollars of campaign demand and billions of impressions” are currently available on its TRAFFIQ platform, although it didn’t go into specifics. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Mobile Ad Network mKhoj Rebrands As InMobi, Eyes Expansion In Europe Posted: 05 Aug 2009 06:18 AM PDT
Based on our understanding of their eCPMs and monthly ad impressions (which range up to 2 billion per month and growing), it looks like they are currently grossing over $1m in mobile ad revenues per month. That’s not too shabby, and if you consider that the eCPM rates they informed us about are based on averages from their operations on the Asian and African mobile markets, it’s conceivable that they’re looking at multiplying that revenue soon. That is, if they manage to get traction in Europe, where eCPMs are generally much higher. If they book some early success, the company says it will be on track to become cash-flow positive later this year. The company’s mobile advertising service - which is targeted more to the mobile web than applications - is currently available in over 23 countries and cites advertisers like Reebok, Yamaha, Cricket Nirvana and MakeMyTrip.
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| Google Acquires Video Compression Technology Company On2 For $106 Million Posted: 05 Aug 2009 05:12 AM PDT
Some of its codec designs are known as VP3, VP4, VP5, TrueMotion VP6, TrueMotion VP7 and VP8. Its customers include Adobe, Skype, Nokia, Infineon, Sun Microsystems, Mediatek, Sony, Brightcove, and Move Networks. On2, formerly known as The Duck Corporation, is headquartered in Clifton Park, NY. Under the terms of the agreement, each outstanding share of On2 common stock will be converted into $0.60 worth of Google class A common stock in a stock-for-stock transaction. The transaction is valued at approximately $106.5 million. According to the release, $0.60 per share represents a premium of approximately 57% over the closing price of On2’s common stock on the last trading day immediately prior to the announcement of the transaction, and a premium of approximately 62% over the average closing price of On2’s common stock for the six month period immediately prior to the announcement of the transaction. Important to note is that On2 once had a market cap in excess of $1 billion at its peak, after going public on the American Stock Exchange in 1999 following a merger with Applied Capital Funding (which was already listed at the time). Before its entry on the public market, The Duck Corporation had raised $6.5M in venture capital funding from Edelson Technology Partners and Citigroup Ventures. Back in 2001, On2 made waves by releasing their VP3 compression technology to the open-source community, including their patents on the technology. The technology lives on in the form of (Ogg) Theora. You can find more information about this here. The agreement is subject to On2 stockholder approval, regulatory clearances and other closing conditions. Google is reluctant to dive into specific regarding the product plans until after the deal closes, although it’s conceivably related to its immensely popular video service YouTube. In a blog post, the company says:
If would be great if Google decides to open-source On2’s VP7 and VP8 video codecs and free them up as the worldwide video codec standards, thus becoming alternatives to the proprietary and licenced H264 codecs. On2 has always claimed VP7 is better quality than H264 at the same bitrate. Also noteworthy: Google could use the VP8 codec for YouTube in HTML5 mode, basically forcing its many users to upgrade to HTML5-compliant browsers instead of using Flash formats. Smart move by Google, and possibly great news for innovation in web-based video viewing. Expect updates if and when we learn more. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Listia Is An Awesome Way To Give And Get Free Stuff Posted: 05 Aug 2009 04:53 AM PDT
We tend to give away a lot of the random stuff people send us at TechCrunch. Some of it is trivial - stickers, tshirts, etc. But sometimes it’s decent electronic stuff - we get a lot of iPod touches with demo apps to review, for example, and usually the company doesn’t want them back so we give them away to people. Earlier this week I gave away a wireless Google-branded mouse on Twitter, and pondered setting up a Twitter account just to give away all the test stuff cluttering our office. Often people list free things on Craigslist or donate it to Goodwill, charities or churches. But Craigslist isn’t a perfect solution, since you will get a mass of emails and need to deal with everyone. And often the winner doesn’t show up. And most charities and churches aren’t really interested in getting actual stuff that they then need to sell for cash. They’d rather just get the cash. Listia makes it all a lot better. Users don’t bid cash for items, rather they bid points that they get for free for signing up, listing items and referring friends. That means the winner is the person who wanted the item the most and was willing to bid the most points. The lister doesn’t have to deal with a lot of emails, and the no-show risk is minimized. And if a user really wants an item but doesn’t have enough points, they can buy more. That’s where the business model comes in, and the value to charities. Points can be purchased at a rate of $5 for 50 points. And if a lister decides to donate the proceeds to charity, the charity gets 60% of any paid for points used by the winner.
The service is fully working now but a lot of features are still baking. The selection of charities is very limited (more being added soon, the company says). And soon Listia will let you add other charities, give accumulated points to charity, etc. It’s a no brainer for charities to encourage their supporters to use something like this to donate actual items, and Listia says they are busy creating features to accommodate that. The company was founded by Gee Chuang and James Fong Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Closed Deal: WideOrbit Acquires Google Radio Assets Posted: 05 Aug 2009 04:17 AM PDT
As expected, WideOrbit is taking over several assets of Google’s radio business, namely Google Radio Automation, Maestro and SS32 automation products. The company, which is backed by at least $34.5 million in venture capital, commented on the closing of the deal saying that it was looking to expand its product portfolio and taking over Google Radio’s assets was a key step in that process. In the released statement, the company added that 3,600 customers were currently using Google Radio Automation. WideOrbit, founded in 1999, claims to help manage over $12 billion in online advertising from about 1300 cable networks, TV and radio stations, as well as managing advertising for movie theaters, mobile devices, and digital display networks. It boasts clients such as NBC, Telemundo, Hearst Television, and Gannett, among others. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Other Companies Should Have To Read This Internal Netflix Presentation Posted: 05 Aug 2009 02:47 AM PDT
The presentation, which you can see for yourself below, is as interesting as any 128-page document can be. If you read it over, about half-way through, you’ll probably start wishing you worked for Netflix. This was meant to be an internal document for employees to read, but it’s also one hell of a recruitment pitch. Early on, a lot of it deals with workplace efficiency, and not being afraid to let someone go if they’re not doing their job. The idea is that if someone just wants to do mediocre works, that’s fine, they’ll get a nice severance package. It extends this into an emphasis on effectiveness over effort — the company doesn’t want to necessarily reward people who stay late versus those who don’t, but get the same amount of work done. It then turns to some internal policies including management best practices. And then to retention practices — making sure the company pays the top people a high enough salary that they’ll never want to leave. There’s a big emphasis within the company on salary, rather than stock options and bonuses. The thought is that you should give the employees as much money as possible up front and let them decide what to do with it. This is all pretty interesting stuff for a fairly large, publicly-traded company. The emphasis is obviously not to act like other big companies do. Given Netflix’s recent successes, it would seem that the strategy is working. And yes, there is stuff in there about the vacation policy. Culture View more presentations from reed2001. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| EC: 1/3 Of Europeans Have Never Used The Web Posted: 05 Aug 2009 02:33 AM PDT  Close to half of Europeans use the internet every day but one third have never used the web, according to a new report (PDF) published by the European Commission. The study, which took a deep dive into the digital landscape in Europe over the last five years, demonstrated that new technologies are spreading fast across the continent but deep divisions remain and that particularly the elder and unemployed remain largely unaware of the existence of websites such as TechCrunch and FAILblog.org. The commission's study showed that 56 percent of Europeans had become regular Internet users by 2008, a jump of one third since 2004. Forty three percent of EU citizens currently use the web every day, while 75 percent use it regularly ("at least once a week") compared to only 43 percent in 2005. Half of all households and more than 80 percent of businesses had a broadband connection last year and with 114 million subscribers the EU is in fact the largest world market for fixed broadband access.
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| Chrome’s New Feature: Click The UI Designer To Close The Window Posted: 05 Aug 2009 01:54 AM PDT This is just kind of odd. Look at the picture below. See the picture of some guy in place of the “X” button? Yeah, that’s this guy. Apparently, one of Google’s Chrome UI designers, Glen Murphy, has inserted his face into the latest nightly build of Chrome. Specifically, this is the Linux build, which is meant for developers and testers (we haven’t been able to see it on the Mac or Windows versions). Our tipster was pretty surprised when he downloaded the nightly build and saw a person’s face staring back at him, so he asked around on the Chromium irc channel, and found out it was Murphy (who you can see in a picture here from SXSW three years ago). Apparently, the next update will remove Murphy’s face. Oh those Googlers, always messing around.
[thanks Jimmy] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| In The Pre-Chrome OS World, Google Optimizes Gmail For Netbooks Posted: 05 Aug 2009 01:27 AM PDT
Tonight, Google has just released a small new feature in Gmail Labs so that users can optimize their email service for viewing on netbooks. It’s a small, but noteworthy setting as netbooks have become popular, yet most still run sites just as full-sized laptops would. Gmail’s engineers apparently had a problem with that, so they launched the new “Remove Labels from Subjects” feature. Basically, this does exactly what it says, removes the labels that are normally in front of subject lines in Gmail. The idea is that this will save a lot of screen real estate, especially on netbooks. While a lot has been said recently about the growing differences between Apple and Google, this attitude towards the netbook is as good of an example as any. While Apple has said time and time again that it isn’t interested in the netbook space (at least as it’s currently comprised), Google is clearly thinking about it a lot. Google also notes that using its Chrome browser in full screen mode is a good solution for netbooks. That is, of course, until Chrome OS is released. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| WorldMate + Push = Must Have iPhone App for Road Warriors (Free Copies) Posted: 04 Aug 2009 11:48 PM PDT
If you do much traveling this is one iPhone app you may actually be delighted to pay that $20. Also, there’s also a free version (iTunes link), although that version does not have push, the compelling feature of the app. If you’re quick though, you can grab one of the 40 free copies of the Gold version WorldMate is giving away to TechCrunch readers. Simply email techcrunch@worldmate.com and they’ll contact you if you’ve won. WorldMate begins winning you over in the itinerary building stage. It offers a couple of ways to automatically build it for you. One way is to enter the info directly on WorldMate.com. The second is by email—manually, or using an Outlook toolbar. WorldMate is able to parse confirmation emails from over a hundred travel agencies, airlines, hotel chains, and car rental agencies. Once it has automatically pieced together all of your trip details and stored key data such as confirmation numbers, phone numbers and seat numbers, the itinerary is synced over-the-air to the iPhone app. This is the point where the app’s killer-feature begins to shine. Having integrated with various data sources such as GDS, airline systems (including low-cost airlines that are not on GDS), the FAA and airports, WorldMate is able to monitor flight statuses for over 350 airlines worldwide. This allows them to send out immediate push notifications when flights are delayed, canceled, diverted, and even when there’s a gate change.
The rest of the hotel hotel booking features available in both the free and premium versions are pretty useful as well. There are three ways to search for a hotel: Itinerary Location, for example, ‘Find hotel near my meeting with TechCrunch HQ’, Current Location, which utilizes the iPhones embedded GPS, and finally Standard Search, by specifying city, times, etc. Hotels are ranked according to the user’s preferences which are saved for future re-use. These include budget, brand, and amenities, which are all rated by importance to the user. There are also some basic features that round off WorldMate as the Swiss army knife of apps for the business traveler. These include a self-updating exchange rate calculator for over a hundred currencies, worldwide weather info, home and travel destination clocks and a tip calculator.   Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| SkyGrid Now Appearing On StockTwits For A Real-Time Financial Frenzy Posted: 04 Aug 2009 08:59 PM PDT
It’s a match made in real-time heaven. StockTwits, a popular site that lets you track real-time discussions about stock information on Twitter, is now featuring a live feed of real-time news provided compliments of SkyGrid, the powerful real-time financial news aggregator. SkyGrid will now embed a widget on StockTwits pages, showing a stream of incoming news for whatever company you’re currently looking at (you can also see a broader stream of news if you haven’t visited an individual company page). In effect, the site will now let you monitor both the news and the conversation around it in real-time, making the site even more useful for investors. And if you’re only on the lookout for good news (or bad news), you can filter by that too: SkyGrid uses semantic text analysis to determine if each incoming article is deemed positive, negative, or neutral about a given company. At this point the SkyGrid widget is only available on StockTwits. However, I’d be very surprised if we don’t start seeing it pop up on more publisher sites soon, though it may be some time before anyone is able to grab the widget. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| USA CTO Aneesh Chopra: We Need To Extend Technological Innovation Beyond Our Personal Lives Posted: 04 Aug 2009 07:45 PM PDT
Chopra kicked off the evening by stating that this is the first of many visits to Silicon Valley, where he hopes to continue an onging dialogue throughout his tenure as CTO. He then began exploring some of the ways that technology is having a major impact on our personal lives, briefly describing some of the ways he and his wife have used the Internet to help seek advice in raising their child. But while we’re doing a great job leveraging technology in our personal lives, he says this hasn’t translated to “global competitiveness” and public policy. In a recent report put out by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, it was found that the US, while doing well with regard to innovation in terms of an absolute measurement, was seeing very little growth compared to other countries. Likewise, our growth in E-Government has been stagnant, as have our improvements in higher education and improving the next generation of our workforce. Even in areas that we’ve done well in, we’ve largely failed to continue improving, setting the stage for the Unitied States to fall behind in the future.  To deal with these problems, and others, Chopra says that his job is to balance long term policy making with near term changes. Chopra says that part of the problem we’re dealing with involves figuring out the ‘verbs’ — we know what tools could possibly help (the ‘nouns’), but we need to decide what we’re going to actually do with those tools. He recalled a story from his time serving in Virginia, when the school board was looking to update its old physics text books. Going through normal procedures, updating the text books would take as much as four years. Instead, Virginia assembled a team of scientists throughout the state and the US to write chapters for the book for free. Scientists and professors accepted to task, and managed to write and have a book up for approval within a year. Some of the tasks we have to undertake will be years in the making, but Chopra pointed out a few ways that we’re already making headway. On June 30, the government launched the Federal IT Dashboard — an extension to the government spending site that had been previously launched. The site allows citizens to see how their tax dollars are performing relative to IT investments. Since launching, the site has seen 30 million hits. Likewise, Chopra talked about a new product being undertaken to help modernize the Citizenship and Immigration Service, which is not known for being particularly customer friendly. The service will soon be launching a new online site that will allow for online checking of application status, as well as alerts via SMS, Email, and the website. Chopra says it’s “not the easiest thing to bring innovation to Federal government” (a statement that brought more than a few chuckles). But he and his team are working to find open government platforms for blogs, wikis, and peer collaboration tools that could be easily deployed to multiple agencies throughout the government. Q&A: Q: Talking about cyber security, we thought it would boost innovation. But given recent resignation of Melissa Hathaway.. Here’s a video of the event recorded by Robert Scoble: Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Google Chrome Official Themes: Collect All 29, But Some Make Your Eyes Bleed Posted: 04 Aug 2009 05:18 PM PDT
As we first reported the existence of a few days ago, Google’s Theme Gallery for Chrome has gone live. On the page, you can find 29 official themes that range from subtle (greyscale) to hideously ugly (legal pad). Installing them couldn’t be simpler. Just pick the one you like and click on the “Apply theme” button. The theme will download and in the download manager at the bottom of the Chrome browser window, simply select “open.” After you have the new theme installed, you’ll see an option to return to the default theme. If you close that, you can revert in the Preferences area, under “Personal Stuff.” These themes work on the latest developer builds of both the Windows and Mac versions of Chrome (I haven’t tried out Linux, but I imagine they will work there as well). It’s nice to have the option to personalize and skin your browser, but most of these themes are way too distracting. And some, like the “Baseball” theme, make seeing tabs almost impossible. They also remind me of my beautiful work of art (pictured below) in creating a new custom theme for Gmail. Can’t wait for Chrome to give us access to make our own themes! Update: Since some people seem confused, let me reiterate, “the latest developer builds” seem to be required for these themes to work correctly. This is not something Google is touting yet, the gallery site just went live with no fanfare, so use at your own risk.
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| Google Maps Fills Out With More Landmarks and Points Of Interest Posted: 04 Aug 2009 04:44 PM PDT
Slowly but surely, Google Maps is filling up with more and more places. If you do a search in a major city, you are likely to find landmarks, museums, famous stores and restaurants labeled right on the map even if you did not specifically search for them. If you pull up a map of midtown Manhattan, for example, you’ll see museums like MOMA and the American Folk Art Museum, as well as tourist attractions like the “Tree at Rockefeller Center.” But some of the famous buildings are also marked, like the Sony Building, the Trump Tower, and the CBS building. Churches and chocolate stores show up as well. High-end stores like Harry Winston and Takashimaya are also on the map, as are more common ones such as the Gap. Some well-known restaurants are also highlighted. La Cote Basque, an expensive French restaurant on 55th Street is on there, but so is Sapporo, a great Japanese noodle house on 49th. When you click on a labeled building or landmark, an information window pops open with the exact address, phone number, description, and link to a Wikipedia article if available. And as you zoom in more places become visible. At some point the map could become pretty crowded, Google hopefully is looking at search history and click behavior to surface the most important places. Each place on the map becomes a visual search result. I like the direction this is going. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Report: Firefox 3.5 Jumps To 4.5% Market Share In A Month, IE Hemorrhaging Slows Posted: 04 Aug 2009 03:53 PM PDT
Firefox 3.5, which didn’t officially launch until June 30th, now claims 4.54% of the browser market, though most of these new users were likely previously on Firefox 3.0, which dropped from 20.03% in June to 16.21% in July. Internet Explorer 6 and 7 continue to see their user-bases fade (which is a decidedly good thing, especially in the case of IE6), and it seems that many (though not all) of these are heading to IE8. IE6 dropped from 30.15% in May to 27.21% in July, while IE7 saw a drop from 31.16% to 23.09% in the same time frame. IE8 has grown from 5.95% in May to 12.46% in July. Adding all versions of Internet Explorer together, Microsoft’s market-share has remained fairly stable over the last few months — it dropped to 67.77% in April, then rose to 68.32% by June, and has since dipped back down to 67.68%. It’s certainly not going upwards, but it’s no longer hemorrhaging users the way it was last fall, when it dropped from 74.18% to 69.72% between September 2008 and January 2009 (other reports have shown major losses for IE more recently). Likewise, Firefox is also holding fairly stable, dropping from 23.84% in April down to 22.75% and hovering around there since (for July it was at 22.47%). Any downturn in Firefox’s growth can likely be chalked up to the growth being seen by Safari and Chrome, both of which still represent relatively small but steadily growing user bases. Safari has risen from 3.53% to 4.07% between April and July, while Google Chrome has risen from 1.79% to 2.59% in the same time frame. This report is also notable because it represents a change in the way NetMarketShare analyzes browser usage. Before now, Net Applications only reported its raw stats, without taking into account how disproportionally measured countries could skew results. Now the site has started to weight traffic data based on the number of Internet users in a given country (the impact of a user measured in China will be greater than one measured in the US, for example). Worth noting are some of the changes Net Applications has seen resulting from the weighting change. From the Net Applications site:
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| SocialGreat Starts Tracking Trendy Places For All Foursquare Cities Posted: 04 Aug 2009 03:24 PM PDT
The idea behind SocialGreat is very simple: To show the most popular places in cities during set periods of time. As the tagline says, “Where’s the crowd?” But here’s why it’s better than a regular rating system: You vote with your feet. As in, if you go to a place, and check-in there, it gets a point on the leader board. The service launched in New York City a couple weeks ago, and last week it added San Francisco. This allowed it to track the movements of nearly 3,000 people, which provided some interesting data about how groups migrate from place to place. But starting today, it’s now available in all the cities that Foursquare is available in. This will undoubtedly mean a lot more data points, and even more interesting information. SocialGreat uses Foursquare’s API to pull your information. When you visit the site, you click the “Join” button and you’re taken to a Foursquare page to allow your data to be sent via OAuth. Your data is then entered into the information pool.
SocialGreat’s main page keeps it simple: You can track the hot places based on hour, day, week, or all-time. A list shows you how many people have been to that place, as well as the recent trend of people going or not going there (expressed in positive or negative numbers, respectively). To the right of this list, all of the popular places are shown on a map. From there you can click on any of them to get their address. One downside is so many people check in at airports. That’s why in the image above you see “San Francisco” leading the pack (it’s really SFO, the airport). The same is true in New York. Still, that should be easy enough to filter out if the service chooses to. As I said, it’s a simple idea and application, but it’s potentially a very good idea to track trendy places based on a very real metric — people actually going to them. Of course, it will be more useful the more people who sign up and use Foursquare, and in turn allow SocialGreat to access their data. SocialGreat is the brainchild of Pepper Lillie’s Bill Piel and Googler Jon Steinberg (which is kind of interesting since Foursquare itself is the similar, follow-up service to Dodgeball, which Google bought in 2005, only to let it die). The duo also go the help of Drop.io CEO Sam Lessin. Update: As Piel notes in the comments, the full range of cities aren’t quite live on the front-end of the site yet (they will be tomorrow), but you can probably figure out the URL for the city you’re looking for pretty easily. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Is 2010 the Year Of the Tablet? Nah. Posted: 04 Aug 2009 02:51 PM PDT  There's a lot of talk of 2010 being the year of the tablet or, more correctly, the year of the Mobile Internet Device (MID). These devices were supposed to change the world a few years ago (remember Origami?) but never did and we basically bumped over MIDs and into netbooks, resulting in the race to the bottom we're now seeing. But now we learn that Dell might be making a MID and that Apple is planning a bigger Touch. These two rumors are fairly concrete - I'd give the Tapplet a 75% chance of happening and a Dell MID about 80% - but there's a big problem: people don't like MIDs.
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| Flickr Turns Up The Awesome On Image Search Posted: 04 Aug 2009 02:40 PM PDT
Searching for photos on the Web takes way too much time. There are simply too many photos to sort through and not enough good ones. Image search is a major priority for all the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing), and they’ve all been tweaking their image search to make it better. But for the longest time, Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo, but separate from Yahoo Image Search) has been my default image search engine because that is where I can usually find the best photos. Flickr’s been coasting. Its image search hasn’t been updated in a while—until today. But once again it has turned up the awesome on image search. For the longest time, image search results on Flickr would be returned as a single column of fairly large images that you’d have to scroll down and tab through to get to more pages. You could filter the images by “recent,” “relevant,” or “interesting.” Now that scroll view is still available (it is called “detail”), but the default view shows small thumbnails scattered across the page. As you resize the browser window, you get more or fewer images automatically. You can also hover over an image for more information (such as number of views, comments, and faves, as well as tags, location, and date) without clicking through. (They should add licensing and copyright information as well). These new features help save time by giving you a better preview of each photo, similar to what Yahoo is doing with its main image search. You can also view by medium-sized thumbnails and, my favorite, in slideshow mode, which takes over your whole screen and shows each image huge on a black background with a thumbnail navigation ribbon along the bottom. The slideshow view is much more immersive and feels more like a desktop photo app. You can still sort by “recent” or “interesting” (”relevant” is no longer an option though). There is also a new drop-down menu that lets you search everyone’s photos, or only your photostream, that of your contacts, friends and family, or special collections such as Creative Commons images or Getty photos. Some of these options were only available in advanced search before. Again, this helps remove steps in the search process. All in all, I think Flickr just kept me from jumping ship.
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| The (Bill) Clinton Touch: Current TV Reporters Free After He Visits North Korea Posted: 04 Aug 2009 02:14 PM PDT  But today, their story has a happy ending. Former President Bill Clinton has managed to convince North Korean President Kim Jong Il to pardon both reporters, only hours after arriving in North Korea during a surprise visit to the country. According to Reuters, Clinton is the highest-level US representative to visit the country in nearly ten years. The families of the imprisoned women have issued the following statement on their official website:
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| Spinvox Raises $25 Million More, But A Live Demo Still Leaves Questions Posted: 04 Aug 2009 02:07 PM PDT
CIO Rob Wheatley took us through a technical explanation that, while honest about the existence of human agents in the process, didn't give away as many secrets as he made out, before leaping to what we all came for: the demo. The big technical question surrounding SpinVox - the one they refuse to answer (as they did again today) - is what proportion of the messages they process are seen by a human being. Whatever the answer their backers are clearly convinced: today they raised another $25 million (£15 million) from existing investors. So what happened in the demo, and what can we infer from it about those proportions? Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| MySpace Subtly Debuts A Posthumous Heath Ledger Work Posted: 04 Aug 2009 12:27 PM PDT
The video, which is animated, is meant be a statement against modern whaling practices in Ledger’s home country of Australia. Sadly, Ledger died before he could complete the video, so The Masses, a film and music company Ledger was a partner in, stepped in along with co-director Daniel Auber to finish it. Obviously, plastering the fact that Ledger directed a video that they have exclusively all over the page would have been an easy way for MySpace to get a ton of traffic. Instead, the main MySpace Music page and the video page itself makes no visible references to Ledger. That seems rather classy, and the video still has over 22,000 plays so far. “This is a pretty meaningful exclusive for us,” MySpace’s VP of Global Communication, Dani Dudeck, tells us. You can find the video here or below. When it’s on iTunes, proceeds from the video will go towards the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a non-profit focusing on marine wildlife conservation. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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For several months now, 
Called “Media Stream,” it’s a functionality that basically allows broadcasters to pull in other video clips to supplement their own streams. Imagine it this way: Say you’re watching the 
Online advertising marketplace 
Global mobile advertising network operator 
The startup is certainly performing pretty well in a very crowded market. 
If it sounds complicated, just see this 
Google Radio, the Internet search and advertising giant’s online radio ad buying service, has been sold to online ad and media management software firm 
Ever since Netflix’s awesome vacation policy was 
Google is clearly enamored with the netbook space. We already know that it’s serving as an entry point for 
When it comes to flight information, or to be more accurate, flight statuses, push notification can be a godsend. Case-in-point, 
Now it’s certainly of value to know that changes to your flight have occurred, but it’s even better to be able to react to them, and the WorldMate app lets you do just that. For example, say your flight has been canceled, the app will help you find alternate flights to the destination. It will also assist you to book a hotel room. Here’s something pretty cool: WorldMate uses heuristics to sort the results so if it’s after 10pm, they’ll recommend a hotel near the airport, otherwise they’ll recommend a hotel near a choice of city landmarks.
Tonight Aneesh Chopra, US Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director For Technology, spoke at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View during his first trip to Silicon Valley since he took office in an event that is being put on by the 
We’ve written about 
When I walked in to 
When Heath Ledger passed away in January 2008, he had no shortage of things he was working on. Just about everyone in the world, it seems, saw The Dark Knight, but he had smaller projects too. One of those was directing a music video for the band Modest Mouse, for their song “King Rat.” Today, that video | You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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