The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Oooh Dramatic! Twitter Get’s DDOSed
- Snapily Offers Customized Notebooks With 3D LASER COVERS
- OLX And hi5 Join Forces For International Expansion Plans
- Facebook Ain’t Cool With the Kids No More
- Serious Twitter Outage Ongoing, Denial Of Service Attack (Updated)
- YouTube Founder Chad Hurley Invests In U.S. Formula 1 Racing Team
- London, Not SF, Is The Capital Of Twitter, Says Co-Founder @ev
- What’s The Google Brand Worth These Days? $100 Billion. Probably Less.
- YC-Funded Directed Edge Sees A Post-Search Web Where Recommendations Rule
- ShoeMoney Reaches Settlement With Google Employee Over AdWords Violations
- Savings.com Makes Coupons More Social; Jason Calacanis Joins Board
- Bing Has Succeeded… In Finding The Worst Jingle Ever
- Headed To College? Design Your Dorm Lets You Build Your Pad In 3D
- Q2 Takeaways: Search Revenue Down, Display Down, But Google And Amazon Gained Share
- Google Reader Speeds Up Sharing With PubSubHubbub
- Facebook’s Open Stream API Grows Stronger
- As Snow Leopard Lurks, OS X Leopard Gets One More Update
- Spotify and the Great Leaps of Faith
- Radiohead Dips Into Online Distribution Again - This Time With A Price (For Charity)
- Oh No, They Didn’t? Tumblr Launches a “TumbleUpon” Toolbar.
- Latest Google Chrome Beta Is “30 Percent Faster,” Supports HTML5, And Is Prettier Too
- Pipejump Boils Down Salesforce Into A Mega-Simple Sales App
| Oooh Dramatic! Twitter Get’s DDOSed Posted: 06 Aug 2009 08:06 AM PDT
Update to the big ongoing Twitter outage that has brought the service down since at least 6:00 am California time today: It’s a DDOS attack. That’s way more exciting than run of the mill outages that have plagued the site since forever. Stay tuned. Update: As of 8:16 Twitter is partially live again. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Snapily Offers Customized Notebooks With 3D LASER COVERS Posted: 06 Aug 2009 08:04 AM PDT  I know what you're thinking, old man: "These kids today with their space rockets and their Yoo Hoo and their customizable notebooks! When I was their age I had a Trapper Keeper with cars on it (the Transformers ones were always sold out) and I didn't have a service that allowed me, for the relatively outrageous sum of $15.99 for a 100 sheet 8x11-inch notebook and $10 for a 5.5x8.5-inch model, to customize my notebooks with lenticular photographs of my friends." Well suck it, Grandpa, because this is 2009. Snapily is one of those companies that lets you print stuff. They're a dime-a-dozen right now but look at what you can print, people! Lenticular freaking notebooks for kids. You can upload an image or a illustration and have your custom notebook sent to your house.
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| OLX And hi5 Join Forces For International Expansion Plans Posted: 06 Aug 2009 07:50 AM PDT
Even with a reasonable amount of overlap accounted for, these are significant numbers, albeit in countries where potential advertising income is generally much lower than it is in the U.S. and Europe. OLX (a competitor to Craigslist in the United States) and hi5 (a competitor to the likes of Facebook and MySpace on a global level) claim the fresh partnership serves to consolidate both companies’ hold on the Latin American market, while making way for accelerated growth in the rest of the world. As part of the agreement, hi5 will implement OLX features that include the ability to display ads on a user's profile page and to see friends' ads, as well as a feature to tell friends about their own ads via newsfeeds. OLX will also allow users to include videos and pictures in classified listings, comment, post/view listings in over 39 languages and 90 countries, and access the site from mobile devices. The latter two features are clearly meant to appeal to a large international user base. Oodle, another major player in the online classifieds space, has been scoring similar deals recently with social networking services and portals like Facebook, MySpace and AOL. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Facebook Ain’t Cool With the Kids No More Posted: 06 Aug 2009 07:43 AM PDT  Sorry, but social networks simply aren't cool anymore among the 15-to-24-year-old crowd. I'm 23, and have all but quit Facebook (I stopped tweeting a few months ago), but that's more of a function of me being an anti-social cad than anything else. Why? It seems the older crowd—people 25 and older—has given social networks the unmistakable stench of being not cool. Why would an 18-year-old kid want to mimic the lifestyle of a 30-year-old? Now, while I'm thrilled to read this news, there are a few caveats. It's not like 15-to-24-year-olds are not using the Internet anymore. (No, they're using YouTube to listen to music, and using Rapidshare to download TV shows.) And a lot of those older users (25+) are responsible for the growth of Twitter of late.
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| Serious Twitter Outage Ongoing, Denial Of Service Attack (Updated) Posted: 06 Aug 2009 06:40 AM PDT
Since most of you spend your entire work day screwing around on Twitter (luckily I actually get paid to do this), you may be left wondering what to do now. No worries, we have a list. Meanwhile, I can’t Tweet (TM) that it’s raining here in Palo Alto, or go on a 140 character rage over PG&E shutting off my electricity for no reason at all yesterday, forcing me to come into the office at 4 am this morning. Twitter declared their scaling problems over in early 2007, well before the serious problems even started. And as much as the Great Twitter Outages of 2007 and 2008 frustrated early adopters (there were so many outages that we just started reporting uptime instead), these outages are much more serious. 45 million people worldwide now rely on Twitter as a communication platform. If they want to be the “Pulse of the Planet,” it’s time to scale. Of course, even the largest sites still have occasional outages. Yahoo suffered 15 minutes of systemwide downtime yesterday, we’re still trying to get their comment on why that happened. Update: LiveJournal is also down. Who else? Update 2: Some commenters are saying Facebook is down too, although it’s up for me and others. Update 3: Work productivity surges around the world. My electricity is still off. Update 4: Here’s something else to do - watch this (response to this). My electricity is still off. Update 5: Facebook is still up, but it is definitely having a lot of issues. Update 6: LiveJournal is back up around 7:45 am Calif time. Still no electricity at my house, those jerks. Update 7: It’s a denial of service attack. Twitter’s status update says: “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.” Further updates on this post will be here. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| YouTube Founder Chad Hurley Invests In U.S. Formula 1 Racing Team Posted: 06 Aug 2009 04:52 AM PDT
I also ran into YouTube founder Chad Hurley at the Fuze offices, who was meeting with the Best Buy team along with the execs from the new U.S. Formula 1 Racing team USGPE (previously US F1). Hurley is “the big investor” in USGPE said Best Buy Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge, and it looks like Best Buy is also looking for ways to get involved in the project. There are also rumors that YouTube will sponsor the car. USPGE, which was founded by Ken Anderson and Peter Windsor, has 20 employees, is slated to make its Grand Prix debut in 2010. The car is being produced in Charlotte, North Carolina and may be finished by October 2009. Image Credit: PSFK.com Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| London, Not SF, Is The Capital Of Twitter, Says Co-Founder @ev Posted: 06 Aug 2009 02:52 AM PDT
Prior to a pre-recorded interview with Ev Williams, CEO and co-founder of Twitter, they ran a report in which the editor of Wired UK said he didn’t know what the business model of Twitter was. He obviously hasn’t been reading TechCrunch. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| What’s The Google Brand Worth These Days? $100 Billion. Probably Less. Posted: 06 Aug 2009 02:17 AM PDT
Topping the list were Internet giant Google, whose brand was valued at a whopping $100 billion, and rival Microsoft which came in second with a $76.2 billion valuation. The report showed Google’s brand value was up from $86 billion last year (an increase of 16% in value), while Microsoft’s rose only 8% in value over the past year. Note that this is the value of the brand and not the company, and we mustn’t forget Google tends to put its name in all its products so would conceivably get more exposure as Microsoft, which markets far more brands than just one (Windows, Bing, etc.). Then again, Microsoft has been around a heck of a lot longer than Google, as has Coca-Cola which came in third with a brand valuation of $67.6 billion. Just for reference, I took a look at both tech companies’ current stock listings to see how they relate to the brand value pegged by Millward Brown’s ranking. Google today has a market cap of $142.82 billion, while Microsoft’s amounts to $212.16 billion, or an approximate 1.5 ratio in Redmond’s favor. Does Google’s brand really account for 70 percent of its total market value, or has its brand taken a hit since the initial report? After all, Google is now Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the antitrust division of the U.S. Justice Department, competitors, and others. Other valuable top brands in technology, according to Millward Brown’s ranking, included IBM ($66.6 B), Apple ($66.1 B), Vodafone ($53.7 B), Nokia ($35.1 B), Blackberry ($27.4 B), HP ($26.7 B), SAP ($23.6 B), Intel ($22.8 B) and Oracle ($21.4 B). Just outside the top 25, we found Amazon at the number 26 spot, but the company can pride itself in having the most ‘brand momentum’ - a measurement predicting short-term growth prospects - this year. For the full lists and report, click here (again, it’s a PDF file). The report also broke down brand valuations in categories, so allow me to publish the top 3 for those categories you’re likely most interested in: GAMING CONSOLES 1 Nintendo DS - $9.65 billion MOBILE OPERATORS 1 China Mobile - $61.28 billion BEER 1 Bud Light - $6.65 billion CARS 1 Toyota - $29.9 billion (Image via Renato Mitra’s blog) Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| YC-Funded Directed Edge Sees A Post-Search Web Where Recommendations Rule Posted: 06 Aug 2009 02:11 AM PDT
That quote, by Greg Linden, the man behind Amazon’s recommendation system, is the dogma of Directed Edge, a new Y Combinator-backed startup in the recommendation space. Amazon, of course does product comparisons, but there’s no reason recommendations shouldn’t be a part of news consumption, music consumption, social networking, basically everything we do on the web. And while there are no shortage of companies out there that focus on some of these different fields specifically, Directed Edge has developed a system that can be plugged into all kinds of different sites. And for sites that implement its system, it does the recommendations in real-time. “We can take data sets with millions and millions of data points and figure out what’s related to a given item in a few milliseconds. Most recommendations engines pre-compute stuff rather than generating the recommendations in real-time like we do,” Directed Edge co-founder Scott Wheeler tells us. Wheeler claims they can do this because of the graph database they created in-house after they realized the off-the-shelf options just weren’t good enough for what they wanted to do. And much like Linden’s quote, Directed Edge truly believes that we’re about to see a shift on the web away from search and towards recommendations. And real-time is crucial to that. While we’re starting to see that trend take off in the social space right now, Wheeler believes it will spread to the rest of the web shortly. “Fundamentally we believe that shift is coming, and we want to be a big part of it,” Wheeler says. Despite the recommendation system being fairly complex, they claim that a person running a site can get Directed Edge’s service up and running in just 15 minutes. And obviously, to be useful such a system would have to work with the data you already have, and that’s exactly what Directed Edge does thanks to its binding system that recognizes a wide range of web languages. It may be hard to imagine a web where search isn’t the utterly dominant way we interact with everything, but it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that something like recommendations could become a big part of it. We’re seeing large sites like Digg also putting a lot of focus on recommendations. And then obviously there’s the Netflix Challenge, which just ended. That’s the web Directed Edge wants to see.
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| ShoeMoney Reaches Settlement With Google Employee Over AdWords Violations Posted: 05 Aug 2009 10:45 PM PDT
It’s been a long road to get here. Schoemaker originally filed suit against Farrell last April, when Farrell used Schoemaker’s trademarked term “Shoemoney” in his ad copy — a breach of Google’s terms of service. The case was interesting not just because of Schoemaker’s notoriety, but because Farrell is an employee working out of Google’s New York office. Given his position, it was feasible that Farrell had used his access at Google to somehow bypass the system’s trademark filters (among other things), though Google denied this and attributed the fault to human error. Farrell subsequently filed an affadavit stating he didn’t know that the term was trademarked and blamed a failure of Google’s text filters. In June, Farrell then went on to counter-sue Schoemaker for defamation. Farrell dropped half of the counter-suit a month ago, and soon thereafter approached Schoemaker about a settlement. Yesterday, Schoemaker posted the following to his blog:
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| Savings.com Makes Coupons More Social; Jason Calacanis Joins Board Posted: 05 Aug 2009 09:04 PM PDT
Coupon site Savings.com just got a redesign and a new board member: Mahalo CEO (and TechCrunch50 co-host) Jason Calacanis. “They’ve broken $10 million in revenue after just a couple of years,” says Calacanis, “and are crushing it in the deals space. Obviously this is a great place to be in a recession.” The redesign is aimed at making the site more social for those virtual coupon clippers (hey, don’t laugh, we should all be trying to save more money these days) who want to just live to tell everyone they know about the great deals they found. The site offers coupons from about 2,000 merchants, including the Gap, Restoration Hardware, and even the San Diego Zoo. The site is basically a coupon search engine, organized by brands, stores, and shopping categories. The new design is much more social—as far as a coupon site can be social. Each deal can be voted up, commenetd on, or shared (via Twitter, Facebook, Digg, reddit, delicious, or email). And members can submit their own deals. Hardcore members and get reputation points based on how many coupons they vote on, how many they add, and whether or not the ones they add become popular.
There are tons of coupon sites out there, such as RetailMeNot and CouponChief. CEO Loren Bendele says he is trying to stand out from the crowd by creating a good user experience so that peopel stick around and want to come back instead of just keeping up bad deals or expired coupons which draw SEO traffic but little else. Bendele expects to pull in more than $10 million in revenues this year and drive more than $200 million in sales for participating merchants. That is not a bad little business. (The company has raised $6 million in ventiure capital, most recently in October, 2008 from US Venture Partners.
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| Bing Has Succeeded… In Finding The Worst Jingle Ever Posted: 05 Aug 2009 07:46 PM PDT
Sure, the song will get stuck in your head, but so does the sound of seals barking, or cows dying, if you listen to them for long enough. But as bad as the jingle is, the video is much, much worse. It’s some guy in pajama pants doing really bad interpretive dance nonsense with awful effects and a Bing backdrop. The entire time I’m watching this, I’m thinking: So this is what hell looks/sounds like. I cannot believe the guy won $500 for this. And I also cannot believe our interns didn’t enter. Bing, as a product, is pretty solid. This jingle, is not. Hopefully whoever voted on it was just messing around with Microsoft. “Enjoy” it below. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Headed To College? Design Your Dorm Lets You Build Your Pad In 3D Posted: 05 Aug 2009 05:49 PM PDT
A new startup called DesignYourDorm might just hold the answer. The site has built 3D virtual models of common dorm room layouts, allowing new students to figure out what they’ll have room for long before they ever set foot in their dorms. To help figure out the exact room configuration, DesignYourDorm currently has a few hundred 3D models of various common dorm room items, including electronics like TV sets, furniture like beds and desks, and storage containers that you can freely drag and drop into the room. There’s also a selection of bedding, posters, and plenty of things that you might find at Bed Bath & Beyond. And because most people wind up rooming with someone, the site has a collaboration feature that lets two roommates edit their room at the same time. Of course, virtual decorating is one thing, but that still leaves students with the task of actually going out and buying each item they place. But DesignYourDorm has that figured out too: each of the items you can place in your room is a real product taken from Amazon.com, and the site builds a virtual shopping cart as you go. When you’re done, you can have everything shipped to your university so it’s there the day you arrive. DesignYourDorm generates revenue through Amazon’s affiliate program, but it eventually hopes to work with big-box stores instead.
But the system comes with a few snags. While the site does a good job with its generic floor plans, they only get you so far — you still won’t know how large each cabinet and desk will be, the height of the beds, placement of any windows, and so on. Fortunately, the startup is hoping to team up with universities across the country to get detailed floor plans for every single room at a given school. It’s currently running a pilot test with the University of Pennsylvania, where it has taken measurements for all room layouts in one of the school’s housing buildings. As part of the partnership, Penn will be promoting the site to incoming students as they get their room assignments, and will in turn get a small cut of the revenue generated by any sales. Interesting sidenote: the startup has a mirrored domain at CollegeRoomCreator.com for its university partnerships, because schools apparently don’t like referring to their housing facilities as “dorms”. Seriously. All in all, the site seems to have a solid idea and a large market. That said, it still needs to work on its execution. The site’s UI is clunky at times, and sometimes the 3D objects don’t behave as you’d expect (I’m allowed to place a small storage container on top of a bed but not beneath it, even though it explicitly says that it’s meant to fit underneath beds). Likewise, many of the site’s products don’t yet have 3D models, which means you can buy them but can’t place them into the room at all. Co-founder Taylor Robinson says that the company is working on fixing all of these issues (it recently hired a new developer), and that we can expect improvements soon. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Q2 Takeaways: Search Revenue Down, Display Down, But Google And Amazon Gained Share Posted: 05 Aug 2009 03:23 PM PDT
Most of the public Internet companies have reported their second quarter earnings by now. In a research note sent out to clients today, J.P. Morgan provides a few takeaways from the quarter. We already know that the recession continues in overall online advertising (see our chart at right), but even normally-strong search revenue was down. And display advertising shows “no signs of recovery.” Travel, finance, and entertainment remain especially weak advertising sectors. But even in a down market there can be winners. Both Google and Amazon gained share in search and e-commerce revenues, respectively. Google now commands 72.3 percent of all search revenues, according to J.P. Morgan. Online travel sites are also benefiting from the weak economy, with hotels giving them more inventory. Here are some key takeaways from the note:
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| Google Reader Speeds Up Sharing With PubSubHubbub Posted: 05 Aug 2009 02:31 PM PDT
The Reader team notes today that it has begun the adoption of PubSubHubbub, starting with the publishing of Shared Items. As you can see in the demo video below, with PubSubHubbub support, when you share an item in Google Reader, it instantaneously shows up on services like FriendFeed (which pull in Reader Shared Items). While this is just for Shared Items right now, you can imagine that Google Reader will add further support as well in time. It really needs to in order to keep up with the speed at which information is traveling around the web on sites like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. And while this is a side project by some Google employees (PubSubHubbub) working on a Google application (Google Reader) and shown off on a service started by a bunch of ex-Googlers (FriendFeed), the main idea behind PubSubHubbub goes far beyond that. They want the fully open protocol to be used by all services/sites that work with feed items to make them more real-time. As one of the creators, Brad Fitzpatrick said during our event, “Nothing in the protocol hardcodes Google as the center of the world, I hate that sort of crap too.” See the FriendFeed demo as well as the CrunchUp demo below. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Facebook’s Open Stream API Grows Stronger Posted: 05 Aug 2009 02:25 PM PDT
One feature that will be familiar to Twitter and FriendFeed users is a new ‘via’ attribution, pointing out to your friends how you submitted your latest update. This can add to the virality of applications like Seesmic and web services like Yelp — if you start seeing that many of your friends are using a certain app, you’re probably more likely to check it out for yourself. Before now Facebook had shown the icon of whatever application or site was posting to your profile, but it didn’t actually name it.  Another major addition to the API is enhanced functionality for Facebook Pages. Page administrators will now be able to post updates to their Page from third party applications that support the Open Stream API. Before now there were some loopholes that allowed developers to integrate support for Pages, but the API didn’t officially support it. Now, these features are fully baked in. Finally there’s a new JavaScript version of Facebook’s stream.publish function. Many sites have already been using Facebook’s ‘Share’ feature for some time, which allows you to post a given webpage to your Facebook feed (it’s also extremely easy to integrate). But using Share, developers haven’t been able to specify what those posted stories should actually display — Facebook just scrapes the page for its title and a brief description. Using stream.publish, developers can customize these shared items as they’d like, including messages like “Jason just wrote this comment on TechCrunch” or “Michael just purchased tickets to Hawaii on Orbitz”. Stream.publish has been around since the API launched in April, but now that it’s available as a JavaScript function it will be very easy for developers to implement. For more, check out the Facebook blog. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| As Snow Leopard Lurks, OS X Leopard Gets One More Update Posted: 05 Aug 2009 01:23 PM PDT
Amazon already has Snow Leopard available for pre-order, with a ship date expected sometime in September, though it warns that date is not set in stone: “Official release date has not been announced by Apple, though they have indicated this product will be released sometime in September.” The new OS seems to be getting more buzz for its price (29.99) than its features. The emphasis with Snow Leopard is optimizing Leopard, to make OS X run smoother and faster. Remarkably, it will also have a smaller footprint than its predecessor, saving over 6 GB of hard disk space (though that does likely have a lot to do with the fact that it will only run on Intel processors). Snow Leopard will of course also be coming out around the same time as Windows 7, Microsoft’s attempt to make its users forget Vista. Windows 7 will be out October 22. So what’s new in 10.5.8? Nothing too exciting on the face of it, here’s a list of highlights:
Update: The following two charts comparing the Windows 7 upgrade path to the OS X Snow Leopard upgrade path are pretty hilarious [via Marco.org and (ds)]:
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| Spotify and the Great Leaps of Faith Posted: 05 Aug 2009 01:08 PM PDT
Each time the company won, you heard two reactions from the crowd: fan boys screaming with joy and other companies' founders groaning. "Too big for their boots," was a phrase heard muttered a lot. But player hating is just part of life as a hot start-up right? Of course - but Spotify is living in a particular dual reality. It's caught between the rapture of music lovers who say it's the site they always dreamed could exist and the cruel reality of the online music business. And that meant there was a lot more drama than immediately meets the eye behind that reported $50 million funding and $250 million valuation. As one investor who ultimately passed on the deal told us, "This was one of those where you hold your nose and just pay up. Before you've done anything the majority of the economics are right out the door to the labels. You need huge scale to pay for all that, and then you're still in bed with a bunch of numb nuts." Someone in the comments of TechCrunch’s previous Spotify story said it was Europe's YouTube. We don't know if they meant that in a good way or a bad way—but we agree on both. The problem with the comparison? YouTube found Google; a deep-pocketed public company that was also trying to build a video offering online and was willing to pay top dollar for YouTube's streams, and their associated business model challenges. Several VCs we talked to used the words "leap of faith" over-and-over again in describing the decision to invest in Spotify or not. In reality an investor has to take multiple leaps of faith to do this deal, especially at a $250 million valuation. Looking at those leaps explains why so many VCs who were awed by the product ultimately passed - and yet why a few ballsy investors saw the elusive upside worth the role of the dice. According to people close to the company, the deals being negotiated with labels are similar to past subscription deals. There's a minimum in royalties that has to be paid, and once that's cleared there's a more reasonable revenue share. But that minimum bar is so high, that's where most subscription services have died. "The labels are entertaining how to work with them in a way everyone can make money, but they're still clearly taking a pound of flesh," said one person with knowledge of the negotiations. Leap of Faith #2: Audio Advertising Will Shift from Radio to Online. So far, the money Spotify is getting from audio ads is likely to be “chump change - less than you could earn from those crappy ads at the bottom of instant messenger clients,” according to one industry expert we talked to. For the service to still have a free element, a larger-than-just-Spotify industry shift is going to have to occur where audio ads move from terrestrial radio to the Web in material amounts. We're knee-deep in that shift in print, and only beginning to see it in online video. Will it happen in audio? Probably, but not next year. Leap of Faith #3: Millions Will Pay for Subscriptions. That means the real opportunity for Spotify to build a business is the subscription model - something no online music company has succeeded at to date. Right now the company claims it has “just under 100,000 users” paying $10 a month. Other sources confirm that it's growing at a fast clip. While impressive, the onerous costs from the labels mean that revenue - $12m a year, before that “crappy” audio ad money - is not nearly enough. For this business to work Spotify needs millions of paying subscribers. The fact is, Spotify is not only trying to break the online music subscription curse, they're trying to do something few have done on the Web. To date people have shown themselves unwilling to pay for content and premium services en masse. Even the mighty Netflix only has 10 million subscribers; Match.com has less than 1 million. And again, thanks to the pressures from the labels, Spotify doesn't have years to get there. Leap of Faith #4: Apple Won't Kick Spotify Off the iPhone; Other Mobile Carriers Will Champion it as an iTunes Alternative. Apple isn't open. It's territorial. And with good reason—it owns the dominant mobile Web and music platforms. Why on earth would it allow Spotify’s offline music player app to compete on its own hardware with iTunes? That leaves other mobile devices to champion Spotify as an iTunes/iPhone alternative. That strikes us as highly likely. What's more: People are more willing to pay $10 a month for a music app that's not tethered to their computers. This would seem to be the company's best bet to solve its business model woes and get enough future investment to hit scale. Leap of Faith #5: US Launch Goes Well. Spotify is saying it will launch in the US by early 2010. That doesn't seem feasible, given their business model challenges and the fact that this round was only 50 million. Investors who looked at the deal confirmed they'd need a much larger war chest to make that happen. Also, there is some confusion over whether the round is even closed at all - with some close to the company saying it’s still open but the company itself saying it has been closed for two weeks. Much seems to depend on just how much demand there is to invest in Spotify, which is hard to read. The company claims that it got nine term sheets and a 20% premium on what we understand was a requested €150 million valuation. The latter appears to be true, but we know that the bulk of the major European VCs—including names like Balderton and Index that don't normally balk at price if a company is good enough—turned down Spotify or offered a term sheet at a substantially lower valuation, due to all these leaps of faith. And, we contacted six of the top US consumer Internet partners who said they weren't even pitched. This leaves us wondering from where these nine competitive term sheets came. In addition, the deal took a reported five months to close– unusual for a “hot” company. There are certainly billions in cash in the world of private equity for promising companies, even in this economy. But it's unclear how much more there is for Spotify while all these questions remain. Leap of Faith #6: If All the Above Fails, Someone Buys the Company for $100 Million. In other words, what are the odds the incoming investors lose money? We think chances are good they'll at least make their money back. After all no one disputes the beauty of the product or how many people love it. That's clearly worth something even in a worst-case, fire-sale acquisition. Any investor worth their salt would have insisted on a liquidation preference given the risks and the high valuation attached to the deal. It bears noting that while Spotify has been wildly promoting themselves in off-the-record conversations with the press (including us) they have been less than forthcoming with information publicly. In several weeks of reporting this story in the Valley and in London, we talked to more than a dozen people including investors who looked at the deal, people close to the company and other people in the online music industry. We've found a host of troubling contradictions that we tried to comb through for this story, with little help from Spotify. We sent two emails to the company detailing the discrepancies we were hearing on both sides of the pond and got little back but a note saying the founders "wouldn't comment on financial matters" and "didn't like (our) tone." This after their representatives had been providing us, off the record, with hype about subscription numbers and claims about term sheets and increased valuations. Given the mass of uncertainties in the business and how many users love the service, it'd be nice to see the company be a bit more forthcoming about its future. [Photo credit: Dirk Lindner for TechCrunch Europe] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Radiohead Dips Into Online Distribution Again - This Time With A Price (For Charity) Posted: 05 Aug 2009 12:24 PM PDT
“Harry Patch (In Memory Of)” is available today on the band’s website. But there’s a difference between it and In Rainbows — it has a set price. £1.00 (or roughly $1.70) gets you the single in high-quality MP3 format. But don’t mistake this for Radiohead completely abandoning some of its online experimentation ideas, this single has a price primarily because its proceeds are going to the Royal British Legion. You see, Harry Patch was the name the last remaining UK World War I veteran before he passed away recently at the age of 111. As Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has more about Patch on the band’s blog. While I’m certainly all for paying a small amount of money to get a song and help a cause, it would have been slightly more convenient if the ban had chosen one of the more popular methods to distribute the song online, meaning iTunes or Amazon. Entering all your credit card and billing information just to get one $1.70 song is kind of a pain. But of course, had they distributed through iTunes or Amazon, it may have meant less money going to the cause. You can find the song and a preview of it here. [photo: flickr/alterna2] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Oh No, They Didn’t? Tumblr Launches a “TumbleUpon” Toolbar. Posted: 05 Aug 2009 12:23 PM PDT
What is it with all the toolbar copycat craziness lately. First, there was Digg going after StumbleUpon with the Diggbar. Then StumbleUpon, which already had a toolbar, introduced a new toolbar/URL shortening service called Su.pr. Now, micro-blogging service Tumblr is getting in on the act with its own toolbar which it is calling TumbleUpon. Could they try to be more blatant in ripping off StumbleUpon? The toolbar has a random Stumble-like shuffle button which randomly takes you through different Tumblogs in a similar way that StumbleUpon’s toolbars do. On the right there is a heart button if you want to “like” a page, a reblog button and a button that takes you to your own Tumblr dashboard. StumbleUpon’s Su.pr toolbar, in comparison, also has a random shuffle button for discovering pages Websites other people have Stumbled, and a “like” button. But Su.pr is a URL shortener with powerful analytics on the backend, while TumbleUpon is not. It is just a discovery tool which surfaces other Tumblogs of people who have overlapping “likes.” So is this a joke? Yes, and no. Tumblr founder David Karp tells us:
In a blog post today, Karp also shares some growth stats. He claims that in July, 2009, Tumblr had 50 million visitors, 255 million impressions, 650,000 new posts per day, and 5,000 new users per day. Tumblr is definitely growing, but comScore estimates a much smaller number of users: only 3.9 million uniques worldwide in June, 2009 and 68 million pageviews. That is a 3X increase in unique visitors over a year ago and a 12X increase in pageviews, but a far cry from the numbers Karp is putting out. I asked Karp what could explain this disparity. He pointed out that 15 percent of Tumblr’s blogs are on custom domains, and that the 50 million number is for visitors per Google Analytics. The same person can be a visitor more than once. Google counts 20 million unique visitors, and Quantcast counts 13 million worldwide. The site is verified by Quantcast, so I’d go with that number. Any way you count it, though, the service is showing strong growth. But really, TumbleUpon?
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| Latest Google Chrome Beta Is “30 Percent Faster,” Supports HTML5, And Is Prettier Too Posted: 05 Aug 2009 09:56 AM PDT
Google just released a new beta version of its Chrome browser for Windows PCs. The company claims that it is 30 percent faster than the current stable version of the browser (based on V8 and SunSpider benchmarks). What may be more significant, though, is that this is the first version of Chrome that adds some support for HTML5, including video-tagging capabilities. The latest Firefox 3.5 beta also adopts HTML5, which allows for all sorts of cool things inside Web video like links and other interactive elements. It lets you treat video more like a Webpage. Along with Google’s acquisition of On2 today for its video codec, it looks like Google is getting behind open video in a big way. (Read this post from last year for more on the evolution of HTML). The new Google Chrome beta is also prettier. Those themes we’ve been telling you about are now fully incorporated. And the new beta also improves the New Tab and Omnibox features. When you create a new tab, Chrome shows you thumbnails of the sites you visits the most often (just like in Safari). These act as automatic bookmarks. Now, you can rearrange the thumbnails in any order you like by dragging and dropping them, or you can pin one down so that it doesn’t move even if you don’t visist it as much as other sites. The Omnibox is Chrome’s all-in-one address and search bar. As you type words in, it gives you drop-down suggestions, which now have icons distinguishing between search results, bookmarks, and Websites. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Pipejump Boils Down Salesforce Into A Mega-Simple Sales App Posted: 05 Aug 2009 09:50 AM PDT
It’s deceptively simple to use but actually pretty powerful in its simplicity. Co-founded and developed by Applicake from Krakow (Poland) the venture is bootstrapped but, I understand, has already turned down some investment offers. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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Ok, so I don’t normally write about online sales applications but one such app comes out of stealth today which made me sit up and take notice. | 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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