The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- New Facebook iPhone App “Pretty Much Done”
- Source: Apple And Google Agreed Not To Poach Workers
- Hey, What Happened To Scribd? Traffic Down Over 48% Since June
- Outlook Not So Good: Predictify Heads To The Deadpool
- Spotify, Napster and The Quest For Premium Music Dollars
- Translation Party: Tapping Into Google Translate’s Untold Creative Genius
- Geopolitical Attacks On Twitter Intensified Almost Tenfold Last Night
- Pic: The Microsoft Mall Invasion Begins
- Apple Tablet Prophesied, Sales Foretold By Eager Analysts
- Assetize Launches Twitter Account Parking
- Confirmed: Spotify Now Valued At €170 million
- When Amazon Bought Zappos, Clothes.com Also Came In The Box
- Video: Where Were You When Twitter Went Down?
- Tesla Says It Is Now Profitable, Ships 109 Roadsters In July
- Geek Weekend: Ann Arbor, Michigan
| New Facebook iPhone App “Pretty Much Done” Posted: 07 Aug 2009 09:42 PM PDT
“The app is pretty much done - we’re just working on translating it into a bunch of languages,” Facebook developer Joe Hewitt wrote tonight on Twitter. That means that shortly, we’ll have access to the much-improved app which is scheduled to have features such as a News Feed that is more like the one on Facebook’s site, the ability to “like” items and a new customizable home screen. More importantly, it will also have video support for the iPhone 3GS, something which Hewitt threw-in at the last second, unexpectedly. And perhaps best of all, the app will have the ability to manage events, finally. But don’t get too worked up just yet. We asked Hewitt if “pretty much done” meant next week perhaps. His response: “Can’t be sure - translating could take a while. I’ve been avoiding predicting an actual release date“. And of course even when the app is done, Facebook still has to submit it for approval in the App Store, and as we all know, that can be a crapshoot. We could see it next week, we could see it 6 months from now. Though, Apple does seem to do a pretty good job pushing important apps like this one through quickly. Funny how that works, isn’t it? Facebook is also finally working on an Android app. That should drop any day now.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Source: Apple And Google Agreed Not To Poach Workers Posted: 07 Aug 2009 07:34 PM PDT
This news follows a report by The Washington Post in early June that the Justice Department was looking into this very issue. That report cited sources close to the investigation stating that the government was looking for possible antitrust violations among several tech companies, including Google and Apple, with regard to their hiring policies. But that report didn’t say whether or not it was actually taking place. According to our sources, it is. Or at least, it was. Another interesting element to this is that the main component of this understood agreement between the two companies was Schmidt’s position with each, one source tells us. Now that Schmidt has stepped down from Apple’s board of directors, that agreement may be off, they went on to say. It’s hard to know that for sure until actual hiring starts taking place, but one source says that both Google and Apple have been ramping up their staffing departments recently, presumably to make a bunch of hires. To be clear, this unwritten agreement was that Google would not go after Apple employees, and vice versa. However, employees of both companies were free to apply to the other company on their own, we’re told. That’s a small, but important difference as the practice of going after other company’s talent, also known as “poaching”, is considered to be an important component of healthy competition in the market. That’s why the Justice Department is looking into it.
This news comes amid much controversy between the two companies. The stated reason for Schmidt stepping down was the growing overlap the two companies have on the product side. But the FTC was (and still is) also looking into the overlap between Google and Apple on its board of directors. And more recently the FCC launched an inquiry into the relationship between Google and Apple (and AT&T) on Apple’s App Store. That followed Apple’s rejection of Google’s Google Voice app. And it goes even deeper. A few months ago, there was a report (written by me, for another publication) that the reason Google didn’t put multi-touch support into its Android mobile operating system was because Apple asked it not to. More recently, Google admitted that it scrapped plans for a Latitude native iPhone app in favor of a web app because, yes, Apple asked it to. We’ve reached out to both Google and Apple for comment on this latest matter, but have yet to hear back from either. We will update if we do. Update: We’ve just received an email from a source that would seem to very directly confirm the agreement between Apple and Google in print. We’ve removed the names, a few details that could identify our source, and exact date, but the email was sent in the summer of last year.
“Google has an agreement with Apple that we will not cold call their staff.” That would seem to once again confirm that Google was not allowed to poach Apple staff, but implies that they could have talked if it was the Apple employee who initially reached out (which wasn’t the case here). [photo: flickr/mackz] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Hey, What Happened To Scribd? Traffic Down Over 48% Since June Posted: 07 Aug 2009 05:53 PM PDT  We reached out to Scribd CEO Trip Adler, who says that the site is currently toning down its SEO efforts and further reducing pirated content. He also writes that there’s a dip associated with the summer season:
It sounds like Scribd has some major changes coming, and it’s understandable that the site might want to prepare for those in advance. Still, it isn’t often that you hear about a site voluntarily killing nearly 50% of its traffic — perhaps Scribd didn’t expect its changes to have such a major effect (it’s sort of hard to believe that they aren’t concerned about the dip). That said, Scribd is still ranked as the 130th most visited site on the web by Quantcast, which is hardly anything to scoff at. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Outlook Not So Good: Predictify Heads To The Deadpool Posted: 07 Aug 2009 05:04 PM PDT
Last year, the site seemed like it was starting to pick up steam: by summer 2008, it had forged partnerships with The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and it subsequently got CBS News as well. News sites liked Predictify because it could potentially increase reader engagement. Along with its media partnerships, Predictify also offered “Premium Questions”, which allowed businesses and market researchers to pose questions to the Predictify user base for a fee. The most accurate users would receive a portion of the money generated by the Premium Questions, and marketers were entitled to all of the resulting data (including demographics). The site has posted the following:
Predictify has been added to the Deadpool. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Spotify, Napster and The Quest For Premium Music Dollars Posted: 07 Aug 2009 04:03 PM PDT
A new music service called Spotify has attracted millions of users in a short time with the enticing lure of listening to any common song on your computer free. Meanwhile, the digital music grandpa Napster has quietly launched a $5 service that offers unlimited streaming plus free MP3 files. A closer examination reveals that Spotify has raised tens of millions of dollars, given equity to the record labels, is under constant attack by hackers, uses clever P2P technology, is accruing enormous per song royalty obligations and has the seemingly impossible task of figuring out how to generate enough money from a free ad model to satisfy the music companies. Here’s my admittedly biased look at both companies: Spotify: Spotify is a music service to browse and play songs from a library of 3.5 million songs. Users can create custom playlists, culling out their favorite songs and the service generally gets high marks for an intuitive user interface and peppy performance. It is a free ad supported service in which users get banner ads and audio ads. There’s also a $13/month premium level which gives you an advertising free experience. The service is available in U.K., Sweden, Norway, Finland, France and Spain and the premium service is available in other EU territories. U.S. access is not available although company representatives are saying it is coming. Technology: Unlike other web based services like imeem and Last.fm, Spotify requires a downloadable client available for Mac or Win computers. When songs are requested they are delivered from either the Spotify central servers or other users computers using P2P (peer to peer). This means Spotify will use your bandwidth even when you’re not listening music to service their other customers. They have filed a patent for this technology. Music is delivered using the Ogg Vorbis q5 codec at around 160Kbps which sounds nice and is also speedy to load. Spotify was founded in 2006 by serial entrepreneurs Daniel Ek (previous CTO at Stardoll, founder of Advertigo and Evertigo among others) and Martin Lorentzon (one of two co-founders of Tradedoubler, the largest European online affiliate advertising company). Spotify is based in Luxembourg to avoid taxes although most of its employees are in Sweden, the UK and Romania. Finances: While Spotify has been tight lipped about financing amounts and sources details have leaked out and they reveal that Spotify has raised millions from its wealthy founders and tens of millions from venture capitalists. Similar to imeem, Myspace Music and Lala, the major labels own part of Spotify.
Security: Since Spotify has 3.5 million songs it is an obvious target for hackers. There’s a battle pitting Spotify programmers against net hackers trying to decipher how the technology works. Code within the Windows version attempts to block debuggers so the Mac version is a more easy target. Several software programs have been released which download tracks from Spotify such as spotifysave and despotify. Spotify has is available in a limited number of countries, but its been well documented that the only check is on the initial signup page and its trivial to bypass. Users can easily bypass this by going to http://www.defilter.co.uk/ and entering the signup URL: https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/ A UK mailing code like W1T 3EF is required but users simply look those up athttp://www.postcodesearch.org.uk/ Economics: The Spotify CEO boasted they have spent just £5,000 ($10,000) in total marketing the Spotify service in the UK and attracted 1 million users doing 10 million streams making it the cheapest and most effective service launch since Google. Missing from the calculation is the royalty obligation. Like all webcasters, Spotify must pay a per song fee for every song they play. These range from 1 cent per play (for interactive playback) to 0.2 cents (radio experience). While the rates seem modest they add up quickly. 10 million streams per day translates to $100,000 per day, $30mm/month and $360 million annually in royalties - just for the UK operation. Royalty rates are similar in other countries and its Spotify claims 1mm users from Sweden as well. Advertising from audio and banner ads cannot generate even a sizable fraction of these royalty obligation. Spotify is a on quest to get paid monthly subscribers and has launched a $13/month service. They join a crowded field of competitors including Napster who recently relaunched their subscription service moving from $12.95 down to $5/month. The Napster service includes unlimited streaming like Spotify but also 5 free MP3s to add to your permanent collection each month. Napster: Literally weeks before the economic meltdown Napster was sold to electronics retailing giant Best Buy. Best Buy’s plan is to cost effectively market the Napster service to their large customer base. To achieve this, Napster had to move away from their limited Microsoft orphaned DRM service to a MP3 service. This would allow the service to work with all devices sold by the big box retailer. Recently, they announced a $5/month service where you can stream any song - much like Spotify - but you also get 5 free MP3s per month to add to your personal collection. Since most newer MP3s are $1.29 this is a cost savings in itself and the unlimited free streaming is a bonus. Users paying for an annual service can immediately download 60 tracks plus a bonus 10 making the cost of tracks 85 cents. Like AmazonMP3 and itunes, Napster has a rich uncle to lean on to not only promote their service, but add other business segments to rationalize a low or no-margin digital music business. Apple sells ipods, Amazon sells other stuff while you’re shopping for MP3s and Best Buy can send you home with electronic gear they profit from selling. Using this financial flexibility Napster is able to offer an industry leading price point for a full streaming and MP3 service. This renders other services seem overly expensive and uncompetitive.
Future Users have largely rejected paying a monthly fee for music subscriptions. The masses have ignored subscription services like Napster and Rhapsody which offer similar catalogs, some music portability and limited device support. Cheaper radio services like early paid Pandora have also been failures (although a desperate Pandora is bringing it back to try again). There’s little reason to believe that customers are willing to pay $13/month to stream music mostly to their PC. (Even Pandora estimates only 3% will pay a monthly fee.) This leaves Spotify with strictly an advertising-based business. Ad rates cannot generate revenues sufficient to pay even the mandated royalty rates much less all the costs of running a high tech business. Publicly Spotify is promising a US launch and mobile clients (iphone andAndroid) however this completely ignores the incongruity of the underlying economics. Current royalty rates are too expensive by 10-100x for an advertising business to work. This is why Youtube dropped music videos in the UK. Getting more users will not improve the upside-down economics. Napster’s new service has lowered the bar dramatically to a modest $5/month for unlimited streaming and personal MP3 collecting. It’s not clear that Napster can generate a profit from this service, but as a tiny division of Best Buy it’s not clear they are required to. What is clear is the $5 price point means financial pressure on standalone digital music companies. The music selling and radio business is increasingly being commoditized. Profits are being squeezed to the point of unsustainability. This spells pending doom for imeem, Pandora, Myspace Music, Slacker and the newest entrant Spotify unless there is an industry-upheaving royalty rate change. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Translation Party: Tapping Into Google Translate’s Untold Creative Genius Posted: 07 Aug 2009 03:16 PM PDT
The site is incredibly simple: you enter any English phrase you can think of, and it uses Google’s automated translator to convert it into Japanese. And then it translates it back into English. And back into Japanese. At each step along the way, the words you began with gradually take shape to form something entirely different and (hopefully) awesome. The retranslations continue until you reach what the site calls ‘equilibrium’, when the English and Japanese words translate back and forth into exactly the same thing. Fortunately, it usually takes at least a few steps for your words to reach equilibrium, and the resulting sentences are often hilarious. There really isn’t much else to do on the site, but it’s definitely a great way to kill some time. Movie quotes and song lyrics seems to work best. You can also check out a list of some of the results other people are generating by clicking the “crash other parties” at the bottom of the page. Enjoy it. And October 5 power, to please. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Geopolitical Attacks On Twitter Intensified Almost Tenfold Last Night Posted: 07 Aug 2009 01:24 PM PDT
Says Stone:
This is in line with various reports around the web suggesting that a group of Russian hackers are targeting Georgian users, and possibly just one user. Similar attacks also targeted Facebook, LiveJournal, Blogger and YouTube. While certainly this would fall into the realm of cyber terrorism, what’s crazy is how this is echoing elements of actual terrorism as well. We’ve gotten multiple tips from parties either claiming or denying responsibility for the attacks, much like terrorist factions claim or deny responsibility when a bomb goes off somewhere. Sadly, given the success the responsible parties have seen in taking down these sites, it seems likely that it will only embolden others to carry out more attacks of this nature in the future. Twitter notes that it is doing all it can to prevent that and to resolve this situation, but as Stone writes, “Denial of Service attacks are a known quantity on the web and they are not going away any time soon.” Twitter has been posting updates on its status blog to let users and third party developers know what is going on. On top of taking out Twitter’s main service, these attacks forced it to shut down many of its API services, which obviously crippled many of the services built on top of Twitter’s platform. Twitter is still working on restoring those. The API team is encouraging developers to post questions on their mailing list found here. One recent update in that list is pretty telling for how serious these attacks are:
The key point there is obviously that the attacks intensified almost tenfold from what they were seeing yesterday. That’s not good. [photo: flickr/lucianvenutian] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Pic: The Microsoft Mall Invasion Begins Posted: 07 Aug 2009 01:11 PM PDT The Microsoft PR team tweeted out the first image to Twitpic of the Microsoft Retail Store opening in Scottsdale and Mission Viejo. The stores are slated to open sometime in the fall, with more locations opening after. In July, Microsoft’s master plan for the retail stores were leaked in a presentation. Image below.
Thanks for the tip, @Loic Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Apple Tablet Prophesied, Sales Foretold By Eager Analysts Posted: 07 Aug 2009 12:20 PM PDT  Everybody's making noise about the upcoming Apple tablet, and who can blame them? It'll certainly be an interesting device, but the thing is that nobody really knows what it's going to be. Flat, to be sure, and tablet-shaped in all likelihood, but beyond that it's pretty much anybody's guess. Analyst-at-large Gene Munster has made a list of predictions anyway, since his job is to turn ignorance into money. So what does he think you can expect? Sales, for one thing. Via a house-of-cards sort of logic peculiar to analysts like himself, he determines the features, then the price, then the sales, then the revenue. Here are his nested prognostications, as summarized by Fortune's Brainstorm Tech.
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| Assetize Launches Twitter Account Parking Posted: 07 Aug 2009 12:00 PM PDT
Assetize currently has support for parked accounts at Blogger/Blogspot, Friendfeed, Gmail, Google Groups, Google Voice, Ning, Twitter, Wordpress, and Yahoo!. While there is nothing in Twitter’s terms of service that explicitly states you cannot squat on names, you can be sure it won’t like the idea of using these accounts as placeholders with ads. Also, Twitter’s TOS is full of talk about copyrights and how it can “reclaim” Twitter names if there is some kind of dispute over the name. So park at your own risk. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Confirmed: Spotify Now Valued At €170 million Posted: 07 Aug 2009 11:51 AM PDT
Wellington Partners invested in the company some time prior to July 10, taking a 3.8% stake for €6.5 million, confirms our source. That implies a valuation of €170 million, or about $242 million based on today’s exchange rates. The previously reported valuation was $250 million. So what’s new? The fact that the valuation has been locked down and the round partially closed. As of a few days ago Li Ka-Shing had supposedly not yet officially joined the round and wasn’t happy with the valuation, but was presumed to be willing to accept the independent Wellington valuation. When the round is complete, Spotify will have a post money valuation of around €200 million, says our source. That means the company has roughly doubled in valuation from a year ago, when investors bought stock at a €100 million post money valuation. And the service hasn’t yet left beta. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| When Amazon Bought Zappos, Clothes.com Also Came In The Box Posted: 07 Aug 2009 11:05 AM PDT
When Amazon paid $928 million for Zappos in July, it got a little something extra in the box: the Clothes.com domain. It turns out that Zappos bought the domain last year from Idealab for $4.9 million (Bill Gross strikes again). The detail is tucked away in Amazon’s SEC filing about its acquisition of Zappos:
The “we” in that sentence is Zappos (now Amazon). At $4.9 million, the Clothes.com sale would have been the second largest reported domain-name transaction in 2008 after Fund.com ($10 million), and the second biggest one so far this year after Toys.com ($5.1 million). The Clothes.com URL goes to a Zappos landing page with a clothing product smackdown. Zappos is primarily known as an online shoe retailer, but sells clothing as well. Such a large investment, however, suggests that Zappos may have had plans to branch out more aggressively into clothing, perhaps under the Clothes.com domain. (Thanks to reader George Kirikos for the tip).
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Video: Where Were You When Twitter Went Down? Posted: 07 Aug 2009 10:46 AM PDT Twitter was down for a little while yesterday (it’s still a little iffy), and it was the closest the United States of America has ever come to collapsing. P.S. I know the song is played out; that’s why I picked it! Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Tesla Says It Is Now Profitable, Ships 109 Roadsters In July Posted: 07 Aug 2009 10:06 AM PDT
Silicon Valley’s electric car company, Tesla Motors, says that it hit profitability in July. The private company reports that it made “approximately $1 million of earnings” on revenues of $20 million, and that it shipped 109 Roadsters, its $109,000 all-electric sports car. The revenues reflect GAAP accounting standards and are only for the month of July. Founder and CEO Elon Musk predicted in June that the company would soon hit profitability at the end of a lengthy blog post dealing primarily with a lawsuit brought on by Tesla’s ousted co-founder Martin Eberhard. In June, Tesla was also awarded a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy, which will help it manufacture its more reasonably priced Modern S sedan. The $20 million in revenues and $1 million in profits do not reflect any proceeds from that loan, the company tells us. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Geek Weekend: Ann Arbor, Michigan Posted: 07 Aug 2009 09:14 AM PDT  If you're craving city life or a university setting, Ann Arbor, Michigan is the place to be. Ann Arbor is the seventh largest city in the state of Michigan, with a population of 114,386, of which more than 30% are college or university students. Since its founding in 1824, Ann Arbor has flourished into a city of intellect and culture that has influenced the nation and the world. In the mood to relive your college days? Visit the University of Michigan campus; go to the Big House, experience a tailgate, or just wander through the Diag. But maybe you're in the mood for a night in the city. Try the array of restaurants and bars that make up downtown Ann Arbor, ranging from martini bars like the Black Pearl, jazz venues like the Firefly Club, to world renowned concert halls like Hill Auditorium. No matter what kind of mood you're in, Ann Arbor has a way of satisfying every craving. Check it out.
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As one of the most popular applications on Apple’s popular iPhone platform, a lot of users are eagerly awaiting the next version of the app. And that wait is almost over.
While Google CEO 
While plenty of tech companies have non-compete clauses that would seem to make poaching moot, both Apple and Google are headquartered in California, which is known for not recognizing non-compete portions of contracts.
This guest post on the struggles of online music services to reach profitability is written by 
As we 
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