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- Ozzie FUSEs Social Media Teams In Microsoft Reorg
- INQ To Build Spotify Branded Phone
- Upon Hitting Profitability, Dailymotion Raises $22 Million More
- Google Flu Trends Goes Global, Proving That We’re A Nation Of Snifflers
- Polar Rose Now Supports Photo Tagging On The Biggest Of Them All: Facebook
- CNN, Dalai Lama And The Obamas Jump On Anti-Handshake Bandwagon
- Ozzie On Getting Users To Do The Realtime Wave
- Dear Friends: Please Stop Falling For Phishing Attacks
- Federal Appeals Court Dismisses Patent Claims Against Skype, eBay
- Help Us Re-fresh Our European Tech Top 100 Index
- Snapixel Lets You Share, Sell Photos
- Cable Boxes And Their Fisher Price Remotes Are Junk. Demand Better.
- Google Forces Web Standards Issue Using Sexy Buttons
- Faculte Streamlines Web-Based Video Presentations For Businesses
- Satirical iPhone Apps? Not Cool. Upskirt iPhone Apps? Cool.
- Everything You Wanted To Know About Startup Building But Were Afraid To Ask
- Engine Yard Raises $19 Million In Series C For Ruby-On-Rails Hosting
- On Book Settlement, Google Is Still Trying To Hold The Line
- Bing! So That’s What A Swizzle Stick Is.
- Apple’s Mighty Mouse Never Lived Up To Its Name. And Now It Can’t.
- Yes, Rock Band is coming to iPhone. Here’s proof.
- WWWTWITTER.com: Best Website Ever
- Quick Hit’s Football Coaching Sim Is Nearly Ready For Kick-Off (Invites)
- Schmidt: “We Have Not Yet Found The Evil Room.”
- Should Twitter Buy Oneforty?
| Ozzie FUSEs Social Media Teams In Microsoft Reorg Posted: 08 Oct 2009 08:57 AM PDT  For months now we've been wondering when Microsoft was going to start making moves in the social media space. Rumors of talks with Twitter have been swirling at all levels of the company, but now a subtle re-org may shed light on what Microsoft might do internally to shore up its presence in the RealTime Wave. Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has announced the formation of Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs, a new group led by general manager Lili Cheng. FUSE Labs is being seeded with a range of related talent and software by combining much of Lili's Creative Systems Group with Rich Media Labs and Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA. In the past, she's been able to move social technologies from the labs into product. In an internal memo, Ozzie talks about the growing vortex of social media and realtime:   |
| INQ To Build Spotify Branded Phone Posted: 08 Oct 2009 08:15 AM PDT
A source with knowledge of the deal tells us that London, UK based INQ is developing the Spotify-branded phone. The company already creates phones with tight integrations to social networking services like Facebook, Skype and Windows Live Messenger. INQ is backed by Li Ka-Shing, who recently invested in Spotify. We’re still gathering details on this, such as date of availability and price. The phone is in the design stage right now, and there are plans, we’re told, to roll it out to all markets via partnerships with various carriers. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Upon Hitting Profitability, Dailymotion Raises $22 Million More Posted: 08 Oct 2009 08:14 AM PDT  Video sharing site DailyMotion has raised another €15 million ($22.1 million) in financing, reveals an interview with CEO Cédric Tournay with French business website Capital.fr (translated version). PaidContent followed up with a report in English earlier this morning, and we've confirmed the news with Fred Destin of Atlas Venture, an early backer of the company. Tournay, who joined as CEO just a couple of months ago, tells Capital.fr that the venture recently turned profitable, but that additional investment was required to fund its steep growth. He expects a 50% increase in turnover in 2009 and 2010, and says DailyMotion currently serves 1 billion video views per month. |
| Google Flu Trends Goes Global, Proving That We’re A Nation Of Snifflers Posted: 08 Oct 2009 07:52 AM PDT
As we all gear up for flu season (have you gotten your shots yet?), Google is doing its part by expanding Google Flu Trends to 22 countries, from four. Google Flu Trends tracks flu-related search terms as an early predictor of flu outbreaks. In the U.S., Google’s data has a 92 percent correlation with actual U.S. government data, which can lag by two weeks or more. Now if you look at the global map on Google Flu Trends, you’ll see that the U.S. is already in the red zone indicating high flu activity, compared to Europe, Russia, Mexico, and Australia. This tells me that either we are a nation of snifflers here in the U.S., or a nation of hypochondriacs who rush to our computers every time we sneeze to see if our neighborhoods are infected. (What if it’s Swine Flu!? Don’t panic). Wondering why the U.S. is showing more flu-like symptoms (at least among searchers), I asked Google for clarification. Is it just because Google has better data for the U.S.? A spokesperson responded: “We are indeed seeing unseasonably high estimates of flu activity for the U.S. That’s not because of more US data – it means that compared to the U.S. historical baseline, flu levels are “high.” If you look at previous seasons you’ll notice that the peak typically occurs in the winter months around February. We are already approaching those levels. It’s a nice reminder to observe the good practices that will help keep you healthy.” You might also want to avoid shaking people’s hands, except for in Australia. They’ll look at you funny if you don’t shake, and it’s relatively safe there now with “minimal” levels of flu activity as the Southern hemisphere enters its spring months. Below is a video explaining how Google comes up with its flu trends.
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| Polar Rose Now Supports Photo Tagging On The Biggest Of Them All: Facebook Posted: 08 Oct 2009 07:28 AM PDT
Now the Swedish company is taking it up a notch with the release of a Facebook application that should make it easier for people to discover in which other photos on Facebook, Flickr or 23hq.com they (or any of their friends) appear, whether they’re properly tagged or not. I installed the application, and after importing all the photos from my account – which took quite a while – Polar Rose let me tag persons in photos that hadn’t been labeled yet. It let me view and edit tags for photos from people I’ve added to my account, as well as those uploaded by persons I’m connected to and are also on Polar Rose (e.g. Mike Butcher, see screenshot below). When you tag people, Facebook automatically posts about this to the named person's wall (something that can’t be controlled from the outside), so take that into account before you start mass-tagging. And in case you’re wondering, the application only fetches photos with privacy set as "friends only", "friends of friends" and "everyone". In the future, Polar Rose aims to support more social graphs, like the ones from your Twitter account and Google Contacts. Face.com is another facial recognition startup, although they’re currently limited to Facebook only, while Polar Rose works across Facebook, Flickr and 23hq. Polar Rose also says it differentiates from Face.com because it isn’t exclusively focused on the tagging part but also about the ‘viewing and sharing experience’. In case you haven’t heard, Facebook is huge in photo sharing. According to its latest statistics, it hosts about 20 billion photos, of which 5 billion were added in the last 6 months alone. The social network’s public stats claim 2 billion photos are uploaded to the site each month at present time.
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| CNN, Dalai Lama And The Obamas Jump On Anti-Handshake Bandwagon Posted: 08 Oct 2009 07:19 AM PDT
Now, CNN jumps in with an article, saying “The H1N1 swine flu virus is putting our most familiar gesture of greeting — handshakes — at risk.” They note that “on June 3, 2008, then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama tenderly fist bumped with his wife Michelle,” and “on September 22, 2009, the Dalai Lama was welcomed to Memphis, Tennessee, not with a handshake but with a fist bump from interim Memphis Mayor Myron Lowery.” It’s the beginning of the end of the handshake, people. When the Dalai frickin Lama himself, the twelfth (thirteenth?) son of the Lama, joins your cause, you’re sure to get bumper stickers on all the tree hugger’s cars. Free Tibet. And end the handshake. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Ozzie On Getting Users To Do The Realtime Wave Posted: 08 Oct 2009 06:50 AM PDT  In June, I spent several days on the Microsoft campus talking with Microsoft executives about the impact of realtime and the emerging era of cloud computing. My conversation with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie began with a discussion of the recently unveiled Google Wave, now being rolled out for testing by some 100,000 users. Ozzie followed up on his Churchill Club chat, where he described Google as taking on such a hard problem that it might limit adoption: RAY OZZIE: Whenever you innovate like that, you don't know what you don't know in a lot of dimensions. And like I said, I applaud innovation. I really like that in terms of experimentation. But when you do that, I just know from the Groove experience most recently, from the Notes experience before that, when you create something that people don't know what it is, when they can't describe it exactly, and you have to teach them, it's hard. |
| Dear Friends: Please Stop Falling For Phishing Attacks Posted: 08 Oct 2009 05:32 AM PDT  Come on, people. You're probably aware of the big Hotmail scandal going on right now, what with some 30,000 account names and passwords having been leaked over the past few days. And now Gmail and Yahoo! e-mail accounts appear to have been compromised. The thing is, these leaks aren't the result of a software glitch or anything, but the result of successful phishing attacks. I have one question: what the heck is wrong with you people? |
| Federal Appeals Court Dismisses Patent Claims Against Skype, eBay Posted: 08 Oct 2009 04:44 AM PDT
Acacia Research’s subisidiaries are in the business (PDF) of acquiring, developing, licensing and enforcing patents, according to its website. One of those subsidiaries, Peer Communications, filed the patent case in August 2006 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The court ruled in favor of Skype and eBay swiftly, but the case then went on to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has now affirmed the lower court’s decision. The two patents are somewhat related, to be fair. They deal with “a uniform user interface for network access that can enable a network agent to access multiple discrete network services,” according to court filing documents. The technology contributes to a system that allows groups of loosely interconnected agents to communicate contemporaneously without intermediaries such as a servers and to exchange data. A quick Web search reveals that the actual patent holder is most likely Miami-based Sociocybernetics, which has held such a patent in the U.S. since November 2005. It’s a small victory for Skype/eBay, who is neck deep in far more serious litigation than this patent case. More on that later. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Help Us Re-fresh Our European Tech Top 100 Index Posted: 08 Oct 2009 04:40 AM PDT
And now we need your help. We’re going to re-fresh the Index, taking some companies out, putting some in and generally improving it. We’d like your feedback on who should stay and who should go. Take a look at the index as it stands and leave your feedback in the comments. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Snapixel Lets You Share, Sell Photos Posted: 08 Oct 2009 03:42 AM PDT
Yes, it’s yet another photo sharing service. And yes, it’s yet another stock photography marketplace. But both of the services rolled into one website results in a pretty decent combined offering, especially considering the fact that the whole thing was built by a completely bootstrapped venture based out of San Francisco. Update: the company gave us some free coupons for TC readers! (see below where we discuss account types) So what gives? On the photo sharing side, users get a bunch of features and storage for free. There’s no maximum file size (although the only format you can upload is JPEG for now), and you can store up to 5GB of photos without paying a dime. You get multiple upload options, geo-tagging and mapping features, easy organization and management tools and multiple ways to share images with your friends on other social networks in just a few clicks.
If you feel like you’ve seen this type of design before, it’s probably because you have. The screenshots below show that the whole look and feel of the Snapixel website was heavily inspired by Flickr, but frankly I see it as as a good thing because it works. Like Flickr, there’s a community aspect to the site, and the service lets you easily organize uploaded images into groups and sets, with the added ability of assigning the appropriate Creative Commons license to them. You can add tags, edit descriptions and titles, assign geo-information to photos and interact with other members. But what Flickr lacks, Snapixel offers: a marketplace where users can go to buy and sell photos. Sure, Yahoo-owned Flickr once had serious plans for such an embedded service – it made, and still makes a lot of sense – and has a partnership with Getty Images in place that allows the latter company to market select images that Flickr users upload online. Snapixel offers several account types: Free, Pro and Seller. The Pro account (currently $9.95/year) has all the features of the free offering but removes any advertising and comes with unlimited storage and bandwidth. When you sign up as a Seller, you get a Pro account with the extra ability to participate in the Snapixel Marketplace. (The startup is giving away free one-year Pro subscriptions to the first 200 TC readers to sign up here – you can also simply enter the coupon code “TechCrunch” on the registration form) When you apply and get activated as a Seller after screening, you can earn 60% from every photo sale – an extraordinarily high commission compared to competitors – and you get a couple of extra features such as watermarking, IPTC keyword support, flexible licensing options and unlimited storage. All in all, Snapixel offers a great user experience combined with a service that’s packed with features, and again it’s impressive to see both of the core services of the platform so well aligned with each other in just one interface. The startup’s biggest challenge is going to be marketing; spreading the word to enough photographers who’d be interested in signing up to make the service viable.
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| Cable Boxes And Their Fisher Price Remotes Are Junk. Demand Better. Posted: 08 Oct 2009 02:59 AM PDT
Fast forward to now: I recently moved, and luckily enough my apartment isn’t held captive under Comcast’s dominion. So I decided to try cable once again, just to see if it was as bad as I remembered it. My new service is substantially cheaper, so that’s nice, but all in all, the song remains the same. It’s absolute crap from an end user perspective. And yet we put up with it. The Box Almost all of us likely have a cable box. Turn it on. Just look at that user interface. Yes, it’s probably more or less the same one you’ve been looking at for the past 10 years, if not longer. It probably has some blue in there, probably some green, maybe a little red if they’re rebellious. The icons look like crap and the text is often hard to read. I would make a joke about our phones having nicer UIs, except that our phones now have UIs that must be a thousand times nicer. Maybe a million.
I don’t think I’m going to get much disagreement in saying that Motorola, which makes many of these boxes that cable companies use, should have been fired a long, long time ago for these miserable things. But of course, the cable companies don’t care. Most of them have strangleholds (shhh don’t say “monopoly”) over their communities, and know that consumers have very little choice, and so the cable companies go for these cheapest option boxes. The Remote As bad as the cable boxes are, their remotes may be worse. Most TVs nowadays are slick pieces of hardware, and their accompanying remotes are also pretty slick. I’d love to use one someday, unfortunately they’re all pretty useless because the cable company forces their cable box on you and then makes you use their awful remotes. I’ve seen a lot of cable boxes in my time, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a remote for one of them that doesn’t look like it was developed by Fisher Price. Those huge, ugly, rubbery buttons. The cable company branding. The absurd number of extra buttons. These things are nightmares. And while there are some nice universal remote solutions, let’s be honest, most people are never going to get those. Others will say, “Get a TiVo.” It does have a great remote, but again, why would people get yet another box for the living room when the DVR through the cable company is cheaper (though much, much worse)? So they are stuck using the Fisher Price variety. Like I am. Look mom, I can use TV too!
The Offerings I’m not going to go into the various aspects of why cable companies overall content offering are bad. That could be a number of posts all by itself. I will say that it’s an absolutely joke that we still have no a-la-carte options. That is to say, no way to pick just the channels you want to get without being forced to have literally hundreds now that you could care less about. The Catalysts If the cable companies had their way, none of this would ever change. Just look at Comcast. We’re in the midst of a horrible recession and yet Comcast’s profits increased by an amazing 53% last quarter. Why? Well a small sliver may be attributed to the fact that in tough times people turn to entertainment to get away, but the real story is that Comcast jacked up prices. Again, because they could. But I’m going hold out hope that services like Verizon FIOS and others can continue spreading, and put pressure on these cable companies to actually work towards improving their offerings, rather than improving their bottom-lines.
The iPhone and the subsequent smartphones that followed have forced change to improve the state of the industry from an end-user perspective. Before it, the carriers ruled with an iron fist. Now, companies like Apple and Google are starting to have a say. I hope the same thing is possible in the cable industry. It will be harder to initiate this change because various providers do have many areas on lockdown. In wireless, most consumers had a choice of which provider to go with. In cable, most don’t have that choice. Sure, some opt for satellite, but again, that’s not an option for a lot of people. The Compromise But forget the service, let’s even just improve the cable boxes. It’s no secret that the Apple TV hasn’t exactly been a big success for Apple. Maybe it’s time for them to stray from the go-it-alone approach and instead talk with cable providers about making boxes for them. Do I believe that will actually ever happen? No, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility as it is a similar idea to what they’ve done with the iPhone in wireless. Apple could use its box to get a foot into the cable business. The box could have a DVR, full access to a cable company’s content, but also access to iTunes. Would the cable companies ever go for that and give up their pay-per-view business? Probably not, but maybe a smaller one would be willing to take a gamble on it. An maybe that in turn would force others to at the very least improve their rubbish hardware.
And why on Earth do cable boxes have to be so big? There is technology now to use CableCARD (even though no one suspiciously seems to be using them), and yet we need these gigantic boxes? Myself and others have ranted about this topic before, with elaborate plans to bring about change, but nothing ever seems to change. That’s why I think now a very simple goal is important — Cable companies: Get decent cable boxes with non-Fischer Price remotes, or get out of my living room, again. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Google Forces Web Standards Issue Using Sexy Buttons Posted: 07 Oct 2009 10:30 PM PDT
Google made a very minor but significant change to their search homepage earlier this week. While everybody else was distracted by the barcode logo, a few Chrome and Safari users may have noticed that the search buttons now have a certain zing to them, a new and pretty look, with slightly rounded corners, a border around them and a cool looking gradient. Now, before you think or say, “baa baa techcrunch why is this a story Google change their button baa baa iphone twitter” (or something like that), what is important here is not what they did, it is how they did it. To achieve sexy buttons, Google has implemented CSS features that are currently not part of any standard and are only supported by Webkit based browsers (ie. Chrome and Safari). To experience sexy buttons on Google, you will need the Google browser (or that other one). The two specific features that are being used to enable sexy buttons are Browser developers are resorting to going their own way with implementing new features because the standardization process is nothing short of a clusterfuck. In 1996, back in the wild west days of the web, the CSS1 recommendation was published – but the two major browser maker at the time were at each others throats and didn’t pay much attention to it. It only took another two years to get the next version, CSS2, to recommendation status. It was this version, and more importantly, support from the browser makers, that spurred the widespread adoption of CSS and the separation of markup from style on the websites. The first drafts for CSS3 was published in 2001 – and today, a full 8 years later, it is still a work in progress as nobody seems to be able to agree to anything again. This has spurred the various browser developers to press ahead with their own plans, some of which, such as gradients and rounded corners, can be found in browsers today. These browser-specific bleeding-edge features have always been there, for example, XMLHttpRequest, the core component to Ajax, started a a proprietary extension to IE 5.0. Some of these features live on, some die, and some become part of the standard (or more correctly, a standard). By implementing currently non-standard features on their homepage, Google are sending out a strong message on what they believe the new standard features should be, and not coincidently, it is the features that their own browser implements and supports. This is not the first time Google has sent a wrecking-ball into the standards process. Google Gears was launched long before Chrome as a way to implement proposed HTML5 standards, such as offline caching, into browsers (see my NextGenWeb series from last year). It was born out of frustration for the slow and beurocratic standardization process – something that Google couldn’t afford to wait for as their web applications could not advance further without a non-aligned platform to build them on. A large part of the anti-trust case against Microsoft was that with combined desktop, browser and server market dominance the company could abuse that position to make the web a Microsoft web by implementing Microsoft-only features. Google are using their dominance to force an issue that has been stalled for far too long – but the difference is that they are using their force for potentially a greater good (I hope). The theoretical Microsoft web would have been “this website only supports Internet Explorer”, whereas with Google so far we have “this website is a lot better, and has sexy buttons, if you use Chrome (which btw is open source)”. Update: I originally referred to
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| Faculte Streamlines Web-Based Video Presentations For Businesses Posted: 07 Oct 2009 10:12 PM PDT
While there are obviously plenty of options out there for creating presentations, including PowerPoint and Apple’s Keynote, Faculte is looking to offer a solution that’s cloud-based so that presentations (called ‘broadcasts’ by the site) can be easily edited collaboratively. In this sense the app has more in common with online services like SlideRocket and 280slides, with video presentations as its main focus rather than slides. Faculte broadcasts can include video content, narration, static images, powerpoint slides, and annotation. And unlike most video applications that force you to re-render your content whenever you make a change, Faculte lets you edit things on the fly (all of your edits will also apply to copies of the presentation that have been embedded elsewhere on the web). The service also has a heavy focus on helping businesses manage where their content is distributed — after creating a Faculte presentation, you can secure it with a password and track when it’s watched, and you can charge for access if you’re looking to monetize your content. The broadcast creation process is pretty straightforward: building the presentation involves dragging and dropping your content — be it video, slides, or images — into the presentation timeline. You can take video from your computer’s webcam or upload your own, and can customize the look and feel of your presentation using templates. Nothing in the broadcast presentation process seems particularly unique, but that means it should be easier for most people to pick up and start using (you can see some of the broadcast creation features in action here). The company offers its service for free for basic accounts, with premium accounts beginning at $50/month. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Satirical iPhone Apps? Not Cool. Upskirt iPhone Apps? Cool. Posted: 07 Oct 2009 09:37 PM PDT
The only problem? This app is in the App Store. As in it is right now, live. In the U.S. too! What the hell, Apple? Let me just get this straight: A hilarious satirical app made by the Someecards guys cannot get approved because it contains cards that, for example, mock Hitler. But an upskirt app is just fine? That is so ridiculous. Now, to be clear, this Puff! app contains no nudity, but I think we all know what this type of app is implying, and who this type of app specifically appeals to (hint: some may be found in this app). This app is rated 17+ for “frequent/intense sexual content or nudity.” The Someecards app was also submitted with the same rating, but just for satire (so basically, language), and it was rejected. Apple is either extremely hypocritical, asleep at the wheel again (remember Baby Shaker?), or both. Look, I’m all for all kinds of apps getting into the App Store, including porn apps as long as they’re correctly rated. What I’m not for is Apple’s totally uneven rules for what apps get in and what don’t. And today has brought two perfect examples of that. I still think it’s time to tear down the App Store wall. I just wonder how long it will take Apple to realize that they have to because the approval situation is untenable and ridiculous. Maybe when they hit a million apps in the App Store? 2 million? Until then we’ll just have to deal with this BS, I guess. [thanks Sean] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Everything You Wanted To Know About Startup Building But Were Afraid To Ask Posted: 07 Oct 2009 09:03 PM PDT
Let’s say you have an idea for a startup. How do you begin the process of finding cofounders and employees, creating a corporation, handing investors, growing the company, etc.? There are lots of details about building a startyp that are usually a mystery to the newly initiated founder. Usually you have to learn this stuff on the job, making mistakes along the way. But not anymore. Last night I saw a 45 minute presentation by Mint CEO Aaron Patzer at a startup competition event called Juice Pitcher on the Microsoft campus. The event, which is put on by TheFunded and Vator.tv, put a handful of new startups on stage to show their stuff and compete for a top prize. Between pitches, Patzer took the stage and told the story of Mint, in detail. His company just sold for $170 million to Intuit. Patzer takes the audience (and now you) from the beginning of Mint, and gives some incredibly useful device. He talks about the early days of Mint, where he lived on $30,000/yr and hired engineers at just a little more salary by offering them significant equity. He also says that, as a rule of thumb, every engineer in a pre-revenue startup adds $500,000 in valuation. Every business guy lowers the valuation by $250,000, he half jokingly quipped. In its earliest days, Mint was burning $150,000/year, he says, for 2 founders and 1 engineer/contractor.
Patzer also spoke about financial modeling, keeping costs low throughout the life cycle of the company, and Mint’s revenue model. He also gives suggested goals and milestones for each successive funding round. One interesting fact – today Mint, which is free, generates $30/year/user from various offers and value added services. There are lots of additional details, including, for example, various hidden costs in financings (mostly legal). If you are a startup founder, you’ll want to bookmark this and refer back to it. It’s absolute gold. YouTube butchered the video. Up now on Vimeo. Apologies Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Engine Yard Raises $19 Million In Series C For Ruby-On-Rails Hosting Posted: 07 Oct 2009 08:59 PM PDT
Developers love Engine Yard, the Red Hat for Ruby on Rails. And so do investors, who just plowed another $19 million into the startup, which hosts Ruby-on-Rails deployments. New investors include DAG Ventures, Bay Partners, and Presidio Ventures. Existing investors Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Amazon also participated. The company had previously raised $15 million in July, 2008 from Amazon and NEA, and $3.5 million from Benchmark the previous January. Ruby on Rails is a programming framework for Web apps that is fast and easy to deploy. Engine Yard offers a hosted environment for Rails apps that is stable and up to date. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| On Book Settlement, Google Is Still Trying To Hold The Line Posted: 07 Oct 2009 08:15 PM PDT
Earlier today, as Google co-founder Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt were holding forth before a dozen or so reporters in their New York City offices, a judge downtown was postponing a hearing on the Google Book settlement until November 9 to give Google and the Author’s Guild more time to change parts of the settlement. Because of opposition from the Department of Justice and others, the settlement is being amended. But if you think that Google is about to cave in any major way, think again. Schmidt offered the following synopsis of the situation during the press conference: “We thought we were doing something appropriate. We were sued by a bunch of publishers, and now it has come before a judge. We don't want to change it unless we need to.” (The “it” being the settlement). Brin had already brought up the settlement at the very beginning of the meeting. It was obviously on his mind. He mentioned that the hearing was going on as he spoke. “Generally, that is something I am very proud of,” he said, “to make the world's books accessible.” Google has scanned million of books to make them searchable, and was subsequently sued by the Author’s Guild for violating copyrights. They settled. Now, the objections to the settlement center mainly around one part dealing with so-called “orphan works” (out-of-print books still under copyright, but whose owners are unknown). The settlement gives Google blanket protection against any future copyright lawsuits regarding any of these books. Google’s competitors think that is unfair. “It doesn't seem right that you should kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told a conference audience n June. The Justice Department also doesn’t like it and signaled it would oppose the settlement. Which leaves us where we are today, with Google and the Author’s Guild renegotiating minor changes to try to satisfy the judge who needs to approve the settlement. Schmidt argued today that while the settlement is not perfect, it is worth trying to save: “The goal is to get all the books available and make sure the authors are compensated. The settlement was not a total solution, it was the best we could do.” He also made the case that it will be good for consumers. “The scenario that is in front of us is probably the best outcome for someone who is looking for information that is not otherwise available,” he said. Brin was equally defiant. His attitude seemed to be that Google has gone to great lengths to digitize millions of books, and if competitors don’t like that they should scan their own books. “The companies that are making objections about out of print books,” he said, “are doing nothing for out-of-print books, like Microsoft and Amazon. I guess they scanned 15 books.” They’ve actually scanned a little more than that, but the bigger point is that they don’t have any economic incentive to scan them. Nobody wants to buy these books (hence, they are out of print). But they are valuable in the aggregate to a search engine. Schmidt noted that if they did not like the settlement, they should “make an alternative proposal that solves the problem.” I asked how hard would it be to extend the terms of the settlement to other book digitizers so that everyone would benefit equally. “It would be legally impossible,” Brin stated. “You are looking at this as an either/or. [Our settlement] does not preclude other settlements, and will make legislation more likely. The companies complaining now, if they were engaged in the digitization process we were doing, digitizing 10 million books, there would be nothing stopping them from achieving the same thing.” Does that sound like someone who is about to give in? Photo credit: Flickr/Rob Milsom Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Bing! So That’s What A Swizzle Stick Is. Posted: 07 Oct 2009 04:49 PM PDT
There’s no denying it is hands down the best porn search engine on the planet (although ChaCha is pretty good too). But Bing also had a snafu with Google ads that showed the search engine for “pornography” queries. Google took the blame for that one (see updates to that post), and at least it only showed up for people actually querying the adult term. Now, a new controversy has popped up around a Microsoft ad unit that scrapes a page for content and then shows relevant Bing queries. The ads normally work fine. But last week Bing started showing an ad unit that contained sexually explicit terms, including at least one that I had never heard of before (the swizzle stick). Best of all, the ads were displayed on a WonderHowTo web page showing only Home & Garden content. You can see the queries that were self-generated by Bing for the ad unit in the image. This isn’t just R-rated run of the mill porn stuff. This is stuff that’s still illegal in some states. Particularly that top query. Microsoft is saying this is a bug, and they’ve taken down all of these ad units on all sites until they understand what happened. The unit is supposed to scrape only the page being viewed. In this case, WonderHowTo has sexually explicit content on other areas of the site, which may be triggering the ad content. Said Microsoft’s Senior Director Online Audience Business Group Adam Sohn, who wasn’t too happy with the ad: “We are very cognizant of what we want the Bing brand to stand for, and this is not it.” My response – “well, at least it’s educational.”
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| Apple’s Mighty Mouse Never Lived Up To Its Name. And Now It Can’t. Posted: 07 Oct 2009 03:31 PM PDT
Man & Machine, a company which makes computer peripherals, says it has been granted the trademark on “Mighty Mouse” from the United States Patent and Trademark Office as of yesterday. Sure enough, it’s there on the USPTO site. For over 5 years, the company says that it has used the name for its line of mice that are “rugged, hygienic, waterproof.” The company has a press release for the trademark decision; clearly, they are jazzed about the win. And they should be. Though they never mention Apple by name, they do say that “Others have used the name Mighty Mouse for their computer mice and have sought registration of that trademark, but now the United States government has spoken." Perhaps the U.S. government wasn’t a fan of Apple’s poorly executed mouse either. And now it looks like unless they want a trademark fight, or to pay Man & Machine a lot of money, the new mouse will get a new name. iMouse? Apple Mouse? Touch Mouse? Let the guessing begin. It’s worth noting that “Mighty Mouse” was also the name of a cartoon series, and yes, parts of it are also trademarked, and Apple was using the name with CBS’ permission. But since the cartoon is not a computer peripheral, CBS didn’t have a claim to the name in that realm, apparently (though they tried). [Thanks Clifton] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Yes, Rock Band is coming to iPhone. Here’s proof. Posted: 07 Oct 2009 03:21 PM PDT  A few weeks back, we got a press release from EA's PR company. It was tucked within an attachment titled "Rock Band Verizon iPhone Fact Sheet_V3.docx". As if seeing "iPhone" behind "Verizon" wasn't strange enough, the rest of the press release made absolutely no reference to an iPhone release. The folks we talked to denied that an iPhone port existed, and we chalked it up as a really, really strange typo. Looks like it was more of a Freudian slip. |
| WWWTWITTER.com: Best Website Ever Posted: 07 Oct 2009 02:29 PM PDT
Go ahead, stop reading this right now and go visit it. You’ll be back in a second anyway. Why? Because yes, wwwtwitter.com is the greatest redirect of all: It redirects to TechCrunch. No, we don’t own it, nor do we have any idea who does. The registration is set to private, but the redirect is being done through GoDaddy. It was registered in November 2007, and won’t be up for renewal until 2014. So, whoever the wily person is out there who did this, good looking out. Here are some other incorrect www addresses:
Update: As my colleague Robin Wauters points out, it’s also humorous that people own variations of twitter.com with more “t’s” up to twitttttter.com. Try them all! And yes, a squatter own twiter.com as well. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Quick Hit’s Football Coaching Sim Is Nearly Ready For Kick-Off (Invites) Posted: 07 Oct 2009 12:45 PM PDT
To be clear, this isn’t a Madden-like video game where you’ll be furiously jamming on your keyboard as you try to get your players to do what you want (given the game’s graphics I suspect this may frustrate some Madden addicts). Instead, it’s a coaching sim: you pick a play from your playbook, your opponent picks theirs, and you watch the two teams duke it out on the field to see where your play calling got you. The game also shares many elements with fantasy football, featuring extensive stat tracking that effectively makes it a football RPG — your players gain experience points depending how they perform on the field, and you can boost their stats accordingly.  Quick Hit runs on Adobe AIR, but uses a browser interface for all the player management and stat tracking that goes on off the field. Getting started is fairly easy: you pick a team logo, name, and then from a few options that let you tweak your team’s gameplay style (for example, a run-heavy offense). Once you’ve finished this you’re thrown into the game’s lobby, where you can challenge other players to a match (you’ll have to download the AIR client the first time a match begins, but from then on it will launch automatically). The game’s graphics and UI are generally impressive, though I ran into a few slowdowns (I suspect these will be ironed out before the full release). To help keep matches balanced, Quick Hit rewards players for challenging gamers with a higher ranking than them, which discourages veterans from just picking on newbies all the time. Quick Hit has a few plans to generate revenue: first, it occasionally shows advertising during games (Best Buy is already running a campaign). Quick Hit is also considering allowing brands to place themselves in the game — for example, an item that provided an energy boost to your team could be sponsored by Gatorade, or a stat-boosting uniform could be provided by Under Armour. Finally, the game will offer premium goods that will allow players to further customize and improve their teams (for example, you might be able to purchase extra special plays to suit your playing style). All in all Quick Hit has built a polished product, but it has a few challenges to grapple with. For one, Electronic Arts has the exclusive rights to NFL licensing for official teams, stadiums, and players, which means other games have to use more generic logos and names. To help work around this obstacle, Quick Hit has signed on a number of high profile players and coaches, like Bill Cowher and Warren Moon, to help bring a more authentic feel to the game. It’s obviously not the ideal situation, but given that Quick Hit’s competitors have to deal with the same restrictions, it shouldn’t be a game breaker. To date QuickHit has raised $13 million, including a $8 million Series B round last January. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Schmidt: “We Have Not Yet Found The Evil Room.” Posted: 07 Oct 2009 12:11 PM PDT
Earlier today, Google’s Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt held an informal press conference of sorts (see my live notes), touching upon pretty much everything under the Google sun. One issue that kept on coming up was Google’s growing power in general. Google touches so many parts of the Web and our lives that concerns are rising that Google will use its power and all the knowledge it collects about us inappropriately. Every time the suggestion came up that Google’s power is too pervasive, Schmidt knocked it down: “If we went into a room and were exposed to evil light and came out and announced evil strategies, we would be destroyed. The trust would be destroyed.” He was, of course, speaking metaphorically (about the room, not the trust). “We have not yet found the evil room on our campus,” Schmidt assured everyone in the room (which was a bright and cheery conference room above Chelsea Market,not dimly lit or evil at all). Later on, he prefaced another discussion of the (hypothetical) evil room by saying, “There are many reasons why we will not be like Microsoft.” Maybe he thinks the evil room is on Microsoft’s campus. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land pressed Schmidt on the fact that “you seem to have data other people cannot get because you give away free tools.” Google knows not only what you are searching for, but if you use Google Analytics, it knows about the traffic to your site, and if you use Google Checkout it knows about what you are selling. Isn’t there a closed loop here, he asked, where Google gives away free products, and then collects all the data which makes its search engine smarter? Neither Schmidt nor Brin addressed the question of whether or not Google uses data from its non-search products to improve search in this manner, but Schmidt rejected the idea that customers are locked in. “There is no closed loop,” he said, “there are competitors and we make it possible for you to get out.” Brin elaborated on this notion, pointing out that the entire source code for its new Chrome operating system is open sourced. Schmidt picked up on that and argued that Google’s open nature will protect it from the evil room (which doesn’t exist anyway): “Today we have zero market share in Chrome OS because it is not shipping. Imagine a scenario where we got to 80% market share with a free product, which I think is unlikely. Let's say we go into the evil room and decide to start charging. A competitor would be able to take the code that we had and continue to offer our business model, while our new business model runs us into the ground. That is why open source provides a protection.” Google won’t be getting to 80% market share in desktop operating systems anytime soon. Even its Chrome browser seems to be barely making a dent, although Schmidt disputed that notion as well. When I asked him if Steve Ballmer was wrong to call the Chrome browser’s market share a “rounding error,” Schmidt snipped, “I don't respond to Steve Ballmer questions. Next question?” (Photo credit: Flickr/Typicalgenius) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Posted: 07 Oct 2009 12:11 PM PDT
We've heard an unconfirmed rumor that conversations are taking place between Twitter and Twitter-focused app marketplace oneforty. This is PURELY speculative and it's unclear if talks are about a possible acquisition or a partnership. But if Twitter is thinking about going on a shopping spree, why would it consider oneforty? OneForty recently launched its marketplace to fill a gap in the Twittosphere: an App Store for all things Twitter. The site lists over 1300 free and paid applications and services built on Twitter's API, where people can search for, rate and buy Twitter services. The site also features lists of the most popular apps on the marketplace, and lists the "best" app for nine types of Twitter services, such as apps for business, url shortners, image sharing, news, and travel. And the site hopes to be somewhat of a social network, with users having the ability to create profiles of their favorite Twitter apps and services. It makes sense for Twitter to acquire oneforty for a couple of reasons. First, Twitter just raised a boatload of money, so we all know that the microblogging network isn’t too strapped for cash. When the news broke of Twitter’s $100 million infusion, there was a ton of speculation about what the money would be used for and of course, acquisitions were at the top of the list. Twitter remained mum as to how the funds will be used but clearly, a portion of that ginormous amount of cash could be used towards acquiring Twitter-related applications like Bit.ly or oneforty. And Twitter may not want to reinvent the wheel when it comes to developing their own app store. oneforty’s site is compelling because it provides a service to Twitter users that isn’t out there yet. And oneforty’s social component of listing your favorite apps and sharing those apps with friends could be integrated into Twitter users’ profiles. And of course, a Twitter app store would also be a way to engage and help out the thousands of developers who are building applications and sites off of Twitter’s API. While Twitter currently lists some applications and also has a wiki-based directory of Twitter-related sites and apps, but the directory’s layout layout isn't easy to navigate and has a cluttered interface. Oneforty also has a defined business model, which could be a possible revenue stream for Twitter. The way oneforty makes money is fairly basic. If you want to download Tweetie’s iPhone app, oneforty provides an link directly to Apple’s App Store, allowing oneforty to collect an affiliate fee. Of course for the free downloads and sites, such as TwitPic or TweetDeck, oneforty will just direct you to their sites, where you can download or access the application. oneforty also lists Twitter-related books and paraphanalia, with affiliate links to Amazon.com. Laura Finton, oneforty’s founder, told me recently that oneforty would eventually become a full-fledged e-commerce platform, where developers can sell their apps on the site itself. We contacted Fitton to confirm our deny the rumors of talks with Twitter. She said that oneforty would “presumably that would be a great fit” with Twitter but gave us a “no comment” on whether talks were taking place with the microblogging network about an acquisition. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
Wow, if nothing else, new European music service 
Earlier this year, 
Our crusade against the 
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit last Tuesday affirmed a lower court’s decision to dismiss patent claims against 
Just before the Summer we launched the 
About a year ago, I had enough. I was so sick of putting up with Comcast’s ridiculous rates for terrible service that I decided to cancel everything but the Internet. Truth be told, I kept basic cable only because it was cheaper to keep it with my Internet package then to not keep it. But I never watched it. For all intents and purposes I was cable-free. Most importantly, that meant removing the cable box from my life as the filter between me and content on my television. I thought I would miss it. I did not. At all.
In fact, I can’t think of any digital device today that has a worse UI. And this is probably many peoples’ most-used device. And it’s not just that it looks awful, it’s slow. There are delays that simply shouldn’t be there when moving between channels or navigating the menus. We’re talking half-seconds to multiple seconds, but all of that time adds up and severely hampers the experience.
While Apple’s iPhone is not everyone’s cup of tea, there is no denying that it significantly changed the wireless landscape in this country. Just a couple of years ago I was using a RAZR phone, and that was considered fairly high tech for the U.S. Today, that would be considered laughable.
It’s a pipe dream, but it’s one that I’m going to keep on dreaming every time I turn on my TV. I look at my cable box’s UI versus the UI on my Apple TV or my Xbox 360 and I just shake my head. Two of them look like modern, sexy services, the other looks like it was designed in the 70s or 80s — probably because it was.
A buddy pinged me tonight with the video below. It’s of an iPhone app called Puff! that basically allows you to blow into the iPhone microphone or push your finger up the screen in order to get a Japanese girl’s skirt to blow up into the air, revealing her underwear. I’m watching this video, and thinking of my headline for this story. Here’s what I had: Well, Here’s An App You’ll Never See In The App Store.
Microsoft’s new 
It seems pretty clear at this point that Apple is 
With website URLs, one of the most common typos is to leave out the “.” between the “www” and the site domain. Huge sites where people generally type in the URL manually are usually pretty smart about it. For example, 
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