The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- TechCrunch/CrunchGear Meetup Taipei: 6 Taiwanese Startups Demo Their Services
- Obama, Does It Take Winning A Nobel To Get An Email From You? What #Obamashould Do.
- A Chink In Android’s Armor
- Letting Data Die A Natural Death
- WITN?: Yahoo didn’t sentence 200,000 Iranians to death, and other misadventures in online journalism
- Internet Archaeology: In Which The Internet’s Sordid Past Is Preserved And Curated
- T-Mobile Sidekick Disaster: Danger’s Servers Crashed, And They Don’t Have A Backup
- Either The British Royal Family Is Reading TechCrunch, Or They Should Be
- This Is What Happens When Your Mother-In-Law Uses Internet Explorer 6
- Fast Cars and Mullet Wigs: How I Won The Maverick Business Adventure
- Area Man Murders Palm Pre At Local Bar
| TechCrunch/CrunchGear Meetup Taipei: 6 Taiwanese Startups Demo Their Services Posted: 11 Oct 2009 06:20 AM PDT
As in many parts of Asia, the 800-pound gorilla in the web arena is Yahoo: The company established Yahoo Taiwan as early as 2000 after a buy-out and acquired Wretch, a wildly popular platform for blogging and sharing media, in 2007. Today, these two sites are the biggest in the country, with Facebook following as the No. 3 (Facebook now has 3.9 million users in Taiwan).
A total of six Taiwan-based startups were given the chance to pitch their services (all are available in English) to the audience. Here's a rundown on all of these companies. Startup 1: If a friend sees a user-tagged Gucci bag in an album photo, for example, the Swagly widget will show details of the bag and where the friend can buy it (Swagly works with a slew of American retailers by integrating with Commission Junction and LinkShare). In the case of a click or sell-through, Swagly shares the revenue with the publisher and the user who tagged the product. Startup 2: You can then drag and drop any kind of file into the DragNTalk pane and go through your slides just like you do in Powerpoint, for example. The application lets you take snapshots of materials that are available in unsupported formats to be able to share these, too. Listeners can view the presentation you give in their browser windows. DragNTalk is currently available as a trial edition, with a USB-powered wallet-size wireless router supporting the application in the works (people connecting through the Wi-Fi network spawned by the router will then be able to see the presentations automatically). Startup 3: The six applications Ragic currently offers are free to use for a limited time and are as easy to use as Excel. The company earns money by charging customers on a monthly basis (just like Salesforce in the form of a Platform as a Service model) and selling OEM licenses to web design companies. Startup 4: Startup 5: Startup 6: Each blog is displayed as an icon in a customizable grid-view. Click on the icon to view the blog in a full browser window where you’ll find a YusReader bar at the top. You can choose the blog you want to read via a drop-down menu and quickly browse through the articles from that blog by scrolling up and down with your mouse. Event sponsor: IPEVO’s current product line includes the best-selling So20 Wifi phone for Skype and the Kaleido R7, a digital frame that features a unique pivoting display design and comes bundled with EyeStage software to wirelessly stream Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and other Internet contents from a PC or Mac to the frame. Available in late October, the Point 2 View USB Camera (pictured below) is a 2.0 Megapixel, PC & Mac compatible webcam that sits on a versatile swing-arm stand. Many thanks to all attendees, demo companies, co-organizer Chili Consulting and sponsor IPEVO. xie xie! You can find many more pictures of the event here (courtesy of Chili Consulting). Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Obama, Does It Take Winning A Nobel To Get An Email From You? What #Obamashould Do. Posted: 11 Oct 2009 05:13 AM PDT
Editor’s note: Below is an open letter to our President from guest author Edo Segal, a concerned web geek who cares about the future of our democracy. It is followed by a proposal and a new website for anyone who thinks they know what #obamashould do (cynics please skip post). Mr President, On the night of your acceptance speech, just before you walked on stage, "you" sent out an email saying "i will be in touch soon"—but you disappeared and all we were left with was the strange feeling you get when your older brother ditches you for his cooler friends. Does it take you winning a Nobel prize to get another direct letter from you? Where's the attention? The yes-we-can attitude, making us feel we can be good again? It seems that since you made it to the Oval Office you have been too busy at work, and our relationship has really suffered. I recall that as the election results where announced, there was an epiphany that hit the pundits and us web folks at the same time. "He's going to govern this way" we all thought. What we meant was that you will continue the evolution of direct democracy beyond using the Internet for fundraising, heralding a new age of direct access to the citizenry. A new age of democracy where the President has your email and can talk to you directly. An age without intermediaries and pollsters—just us and that cool guy who's running the country. Regardless of our political views, almost everyone in this country was in awe of how you came to be in office and changed how elections are won forever. But for the readers of Techcrunch, the people who grease the wheels of our progress online, it feels like after the hangovers were over and you moved on to set up your transitional government, from that day, what was a highly effective and motivating direct relationship with your supporters, an emotional relationship that was predicated on a real connection evaporated. And what we were left with was the most effective spam bot in the world (Gmail doesn’t block it) . This is wrong in so many ways, let me count just a few: 1. Stop asking me for money: Why are you still asking me for money? I think I am not alone in being confused with the notion that you are still asking me for money after you were elected President (I know why you need it intellectually but not emotionally). I mean at this point, I feel like you should be paying me back with change and not billing me every week. I pay a big bill every April that should just about cover it. Using the "Network" purely as a means to raise money without the additional layers of engagement and relationship is offensive. We are the network. By just using email as a system to raise money you loose the soul of the connection you established with millions of people. 2. Your singular focus is distracting: While there has been much discussion about the administrations' notion of taking on multiple fronts at the same time, the online channel recently has been fully saturated with a singular purpose of supporting the very important policy goal of universal healthcare. But in doing so, you have played into the hands of your opponents. The grind on Capital Hill and the levels of complexity that are involved in making this happen, and the time it takes are not a recipe for engagement—they are a recipe for disaster. You are losing your audience and failing us on a major promise of direct democracy. When I explained my support for you at the very early stages of your campaign to bewildered people who didn’t see how it could be possible for you to win the Presidency, I articulated that regardless of the specific nuance of your policies, the fact you have the power to motivate people in this way is priceless. You demonstrated that you can build on top of the best practices of prior online campaigns (Dean). Delegation to really smart people culminated in the most effective campaign financing system in the history of democracy. But if you don’t keep watering the soil from which your support stems, that direct relationship, you will not be able to make the historic policy changes you seek. Your base is eroding as you focus all of your communication channels on a VERY heavy piece of legislation. Don’t spam us, engage us. 3. The promise: From the perspective of the history of media, the level of engagement you can generate through the Internet has typically been reserved for occasions of war and violence, for times of strife and conflict. Like the days of WWII when people huddled around their radios to hear the comforting voice of their leaders. Imagine applying the same level of engagement that won't just fuel death destruction and line the pockets of the military industrial complex, but rather will power true change, growth and improve the quality of life for all people. This is within your grasp if you follow through and use the medium appropriately. Mr. President, beyond the content of your ideas, now is the time to extend the way you govern as we all heard you promise. Make us care again. Online engagement is the key to fostering the support you need to accomplish your policy goals. Engagement is the key to maintaining your base as you mount these vast campaigns. Getting the government to set up a network of Web 1.0 sites is a start, but we need much more. If you continue to spam us and recycle old speeches off a teleprompter into email (like you did with the Nobel eMail) you will lose your base, but if you step up to the challenge and continue to take risks and push the envelope in structural ways that only you can, your greatest legacy could be more than enacting historic legislation or winning a premature prize. It could be the very way our democratic process works and how we view government. Margaret Mead: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. That is my letter to Obama, but it is not enough. The notion that we will evolve the very essence of democracy beyond the already achieved goal of changing campaign financing and moving power away from private interests is profound. I truly believe it may end up being the greatest piece of innovation we are collectively offering the world in the coming decades. But to make additional progress, you and I need to step up. If each of us contribute a bit of creative energy we can accelerate this evolution by a generation In the past, the main skills that effected political outcomes in the communications realm were polling, copy writing, speech writing, and directing and producing for radio and television. But today and in the future, the most potent creative skill-set is that of creating online connections. Yes, I’m talking about you. Our professional careers depend on our ability to create platforms that engage millions of people and constantly grow that level engagement. The readership of this blog constitutes the highest concentration of such competency on the planet. We spend our lives creating platforms that aim to engage millions of people. We get it, it’s tough for government to take risks and thus political innovation moves at a glacial pace. Maybe we can give the pols a hand, help speed things up a bit.
Rather than just rely on comments and the ill will of the trolls, I took a little initiative and with the help of the good people at iGeneration who volunteered their time to build Obamashould.org, a site for the community to contribute ideas to the President. Please spend a few minutes there and voice your opinions in a constructive way. Or just tweet your ideas with the hashtag #obamashould. The site will track retweets, and the ideas gathering more support will float to the top automatically. Its like an http://www.ideastorm.com/ meets tweetmeme.com and uservoice for our President. BTW, Mr. President, if you want the source code, it’s yours. If you are a developer and want to contribute to the project please join us. We will take the best ideas that surface to the top from there and get them built by the community. We may even launch some of them here on Techcrunch in a few months. Let me throw out some #obamashould’s to start the ball rolling. Click the YES re-tweet button if you support it! Idea 1: What you did to get us, you need to do to keep us. Keep a weekly Youtube post that gets emailed to the base. It feels like you are becoming hostage to the status quo of what presidential. For both the Y Generation and many of us older folks, the notion of what constitutes presidential behavior is changing rapidly with your actions serving as the main catalyst. communications is when in fact you are the one that is supposed to re-invent it. It’s not a presidential address in the conventional sense of the word. Give us genuine direct talk over words tested with pollsters any day. A direct candid discussion about a given topic once a week that is not read off a teleprompter is priceless for the continual sense of a direct relationship. Just flick open your laptop in the oval office or in your study at night and talk to us. Have a small panel of trusted advisers review it, and if no serious red flags are raised post it and email it to us. The value of genuine conversation from a man with your insight will way overshadow the shortcomings offered in the prose. You will probably say things you will regret, but the damage done will be dwarfed by having a continued sense of renewed personal relationships with your citizens. If you do this, they will be there when you need them. Retweet to vote up or Comment Here Idea 2: Engage the people via email and ask them for their opinions, not just their money. Have a weekly poll question that is linked to social media (twitter, facebook), creating a viral engagement engine. In addition to the immediate policy objectives, you need to understand that such engagement is not only a means to an end, but an end in itself. Retweet to vote up or Comment Here Idea 3: Give $500 of your money to charitywater.com (Video) and send out an invite from their system to everyone on your mailing list to do the same. Tweet it, put it on facebook. Show people how they can use the web to effect positive change in the world and do good again. Why not? That single email will effect millions of lives around the globe. Giving changes people, help them give and start that chain reaction of good will. Use your power to promote things that have to do with generosity of spirit, not just hard core policy. This is a way to lead through example and not just talk in the abstract about the need for volunteerism. Your effect on the world cannot be reduced to a series of policy wins and losses. Different from prior Presidents making public their charity contributions, doing this via a digital medium is like clicking a button that activates a viral system and magnifies your contribution a million-fold over the web. Retweet to vote up or Comment Here What do you think #obamashould do? Go to www.obamashould.org and please contribute ideas now. If you want to join a vibrant open source community of people that are passionate about helping evolve democracy online, we need your help. Join us here. Guest author Edo Segal (@edosegal) has launched and sold several companies. In 2000 he founded eNow, a search engine for the Real-time Internet in an age that predated RSS as a popular medium. As such he has had a decade to think about its implications. He ultimately sold the company (renamed Relegence) to AOL in 2006 and today runs an Incubator/Investment vehicle called Futurity Ventures. He recently launched a new search engine for wisdom. Photo credit: Flickr/White House. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Posted: 11 Oct 2009 01:21 AM PDT
75 million phones running the Android operating system will be sold in 2012, says research firm Gartner, which if right, would eventually make it the second most popular mobile OS after Symbian. This makes sense, because the operating system is free (unlike Windows Mobile), and it gives mobile carriers and handset manufacturers who aren’t Apple and RIM (the closed off guys) the ability to create a smartphone that someone may actually want to use. I’ve switched to Android now based largely on deep integration with Google Voice. And that is despite the fact that Android is still just an infant. Version 1.5, which most people are using, has an imperfect user interface and is somewhat laggy on today’s hardware. But hold on. There’s just one problem. Android, an open source operating system, must avoid the fate of J2ME, an open source mobile applications platform. Open source is great, until everyone splinters off into their own world. That’s what happened to J2ME, and a number of frustrated Android developers are now saying that there is a risk Android will follow the same path. New Android devices are being announced and shipped in bunches. HTC, Samsung, Dell, Verizon and others have phones on the way. Each has different hardware, and different software, than the others. We’ve spoken with a number of high profile Android application developers. All of them, without exception, have told me they are extremely frustrated with Android right now. For the iPhone, they build once and maintain the code base. On Android, they built once for v.1.5, but are getting far less installs than the iPhone. And now they’re faced with a landslide of new handsets, some running v.1.6 and some courageous souls even running android v.2.0. All those manufacturers/carriers are racing to release their phones by the 2009 holiday season, and want to ensure the hot applications will work on their phones. And here’s the problem – in almost every case, we hear, there are bugs and more serious problems with the apps. There are whispers of backwards and forwards compatibility issues as well, making the problem even worse. More than one developer has told us that this isn’t just a matter of debugging their existing application to ensure that it works on the various handsets. They say they’re going to have to build and maintain separate code for various Android devices. Some devices seem to have left out key libraries that are forcing significant recoding efforts, for example. With others, it’s more of a mystery. Imagine if Windows developers had to build different versions of their applications for different PC manufacturers. Or even different versions for various models by a single manufacturer. That’s what some Android developers are saying they are facing now. Some manufacturers/carriers are opting out of the Android marketplace altogether, and only allowing custom applications on the phone. These devices can still use the Android robot logo, which is creative commons, but they aren’t able to use the Android text logo, which requires that they pass a compatibility test suite. Developers are frustrated. And consumers will be confused when their “Android” phone won’t let them download their favorite third party applications. When Steve Ballmer said open operating systems are hard, he wasn’t kidding. And Google, which is currently building two separate operating systems (Android and Chrome OS) doesn’t have 30 years of experience in getting it right. But Wait…Keeping the Cart Behind The Horse First of all, the compatibility between versions issue may be overblown. The reported problems have been limited to an Android developer contest, where developers were building on v.1.5 and being reviewed on v.1.6. We haven’t heard of any major app developers complaining of backwards or forward compatibility problems. Also, I’ve now upgraded my phone from 1.5 to 1.6, and every application continues to work fine. The bigger issue of a general splintering of Android cross-partner may also be overblown. As I said above, the carriers are rushing to get devices to market by end of year, and they are pushing developers to ensure that their apps work. In most cases the test devices developers get aren’t running final software, and so the final devices at launch may not have these problems. The real test will come in a month or so when sales of multiple devices running v.1.6 of Android ramp up. If apps are running bug-free cross-device without tons of developer frustration, Android may be looking good. But if developers are forced to create and maintain multiple versions of their apps for various devices, Android may be in trouble. The whole idea of Android is to let app developers build once and let users install on any Android device. Right now, it’s not a certainty that will happen. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Letting Data Die A Natural Death Posted: 10 Oct 2009 09:20 PM PDT
The big story today is about Microsoft subsidiary Danger losing all T-Mobile Sidekick customer data from their servers. Danger is the company noted for the T-Mobile Sidekick, the revolution in cloud mobile, and most memorably, almost everybody living in 90210 having to get new phone numbers because of Paris Hilton. Valued T-Mobile Sidekick customers received a notice today from the company updating them on the “data disruption” problem. The good news is that data is no longer being disrupted. The bad news is that there is no data left to be disrupted. This latest large-scale publicized data loss will surely lead to managers everywhere forwarding a link to the story to their IT departments asking “what are we doing so that this doesn’t happen to us.” It will lead to the issue of data loss and backups being written about ad naseum by technology pundits. Research companies will rub their hands together as they prepare new 80 page whitepapers with titles such as “How Companies Who Pay Us Money Can Prevent Your Data Being Lost” (complete with FDA “may cause drowsiness” warning label on the cover). Consultants will flock to their customers, pat them on the head, and reassure them that everything is ok because their project specification powerpoint shows that they included two of everything (and charged for it). Backups are a hard sell. Most of us don’t want to think about things going wrong (or put more colloquially, shit hitting the fan). Spending your Saturday afternoon staring at a progress meter that seems to be moving backwards is the polar opposite of fun. If there was a brainwave study of people in the process of backing up data, it would probably show no activity at all (but they could use the results to help calibrate the machines). Furthering the point of no interest, Google trends shows that while the volume of news stories about backups and data loss is increasing over time, volume from people searching about it is proportionately decreasing. We are only shaken out of this slumber briefly when there is an incident such as the one at Danger this week. Like the death of a celebrity from a drug overdose, publicized data loss incidents remind us that we should probably do something about taking better care of our data. But we usually don’t, because we quickly remind ourselves that backups are boring as hell, and that it’s shark week on Discovery. Our previously well thought out backup and recovery plans are expunged as we scan the perimeter of the clinic for the shortest fence to jump over and bolt back to freedom. Those who are organized and backup their data usually discover the later, larger, part of the problem – restoring from a backup: Where did I put the backup? It’s an old copy. That file I was just working on isn’t there. It was never actually backing up. No software I use can read this stupid fucking format, etc. For most of us, by backing up, we are only setting ourselves up for a bigger failure down the road. If you read almost any technology website or newspaper, you could be forgiven for thinking that “The Cloud” solves everything. When “The Cloud” is proposed as a solution to any problem most nod in agreement, not wanting to appear out of the loop by asking what the hell it even means. It certainly isn’t a solution to backups – as Sidekick users found out today, and ironically, as 7,500 users of online backup provider Carbonite found out after the company lost their backups (Carbonite can take some comfort in that they now rank very well for ‘data loss’ in search engines because of the incident. What do they say about bad publicity?). In the Danger case, it appears from initial speculation that the data was lost because they attempted to upgrade a storage array without backing it up first. Here is a case of smart and rational people who do this for a living at one of the best companies in the world, and they didn’t even bother making a backup – so what hope do we have? Relying on the cloud as a backup didn’t work, because somebody forgot to backup the backup. Roman poet Juvenal foreshadowed this very problem when he wrote “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (at least I think he did, hard to tell because there was no word for “backup” back then). Storage technology does a reasonable job of keeping data intact, considering that it is only a spilt Red Bull away from not functioning at all. The methods used to store data are vulnerable to simple things such as a magnet, and we live on one of those (hint: The Earth). We have become far too reliant on something that is inherently unreliable. Every systems administrator has at some point in their life experienced the sickening feeling of realizing that they have lost data – and do not have a backup. It is so common that Eminem even wrote a song about it (Lose Yourself, about a sysadmin who when realizing he didn’t have a backup decides it is time for another career (replace ‘music’ with ‘
The solution may be to do nothing, certainly not to panic. The biggest problem is that we hoard data. We produce more data and information than we ever have, and we are all vain enough to believe that the data we create is so fantastic that it should live on for eternity. Losing the contact list on your phone shouldn’t be a problem – you should know who your friends are anyway. If you are losing sleep because you can’t find an old email you wrote, you likely have deeper issues to address. Technology has spoiled us to the point where we feel nostalgic when we lose data that didn’t really matter in the first place. If it did matter, a primal instinct would have driven us to do more to preserve, rather than rely on a sleep deprived sysadmin on the other side of the country. If you didn’t care enough to take care of it yourself, then you didn’t really need it. It is our misguided expectation of technology that causes us to panic when we lose data. The only people who have a larger incentive to preserve your data are those who are using it to target an advertisement at you, or sell you something. Not only is a lot of this data not important, but do we really want to keep it? I certainly would not want a full account of everything I did in my youth sitting on a server somewhere. I am also certain that we do not want the record of our as a society time being documented and discovered by future civilizations based on Twitter messages. Data experiences its own form of natural selection. What is important will survive, the remainder will thankfully fade away. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| WITN?: Yahoo didn’t sentence 200,000 Iranians to death, and other misadventures in online journalism Posted: 10 Oct 2009 06:57 PM PDT
This is the same Larry Dignan who is Editor in Chief of ZDNet, which is the same ZDNet that yesterday published a blog post accusing Yahoo of passing the names and email addresses of thousands – sorry, hundreds of thousands - of bloggers to the Iranian authorities during the country’s recent election. Poor old Larry. One can only imagine the warmth with which he was greeted when he arrived at Yahoo’s event. “Hey Larry!” his hosts may perhaps have said “go fuck yourself.” And their suggestion wouldn’t be entirely unfair, given that the story – written by ‘lawyer and technology writer’ Richard Koman, was a steaming pile of horseshit. How much horseshit? Let’s break it down, just for giggles. Koman’s unnamed source for the story was a guy who had translated an Iranian blog post written in Farsi. The post – which, let’s say it again, was written in Farsi, which Koman doesn’t speak – was published on the blog of an avowedly anti-government Iranian student group. In the original post, which Koman quoted without a secondary source or an independent translation, it was claimed that Yahoo’s Malaysian subsidiary had passed on the information after access to their Iranian site was blocked by Tehran. Yahoo doesn’t have an Iranian site, nor does it have a base of operations in Malaysia. Neither Koman nor anyone else at ZDNet bothered to put the allegations to Yahoo before publishing a story which Koman admitted he hadn’t got entirely “buttoned down”. I emailed Larry to find out what on earth went wrong. Is there even a jot of editorial oversight on ZDNet’s blogs? I asked him. Didn’t the fact that the sole source for the story was someone who had translated an avowedly biased blog written in Farsi by students in opposition to the Iranian government give him or any other ZDNet editor pause? In response, Larry was candid in the way that only a man who has spent the day at a hack day organised by people he’d accused of sentencing two hundred thousand Iranians to death can be….
Kudos, Larry. And kudos for publishing a such a prompt and detailed retraction. But yes, you should have been more on top of it. Here’s why… Earlier this year TechCrunch published a story titled ‘Did Last.fm just hand over listener data to the RIAA?‘ (Spoiler alert: no). In the story, we – by which I mean, not me – quoted an apparently rock solid (and English speaking) source who claimed that Last had been tricked by parent-company CBS into passing on a whole bunch of listener information to the recording industry. An outcry promptly ensued, especially after TechCrunch’s source disappeared without trace and both Last.fm and CBS issued categorical denials. A source at CBS was quoted by Ars Technica describing our – which is to say not my – story as “irresponsible journalism” while Last’s Richard Jones went even further in a blog post headed ‘Techcrunch are full of shit.’ Despite doing our best to verify the story, including roping in additional sources, we – which is to say, not me – were left with some egg on our faces. At the time, I was still writing for the Guardian where I wrote a couple of brilliantly insightful columns about the incident, including one in which I lectured TechCrunch – and by extension all bloggers – on how writing on a blog doesn’t excuse you from the rules of journalism 101. Specifically I offered some lessons that professional blogs might want to carry over from old media. Stop allowing bloggers to post their own stories without passing them first through an editor. Don’t publish a story accusing a company of malpractice without first giving them a chance to deny it. That kind of thing. And yet, eight months on, ZDNet still operates a policy – as does TechCrunch (mostly), as did the Telegraph when I wrote for them – where ‘trusted’ bloggers can post stories without so much as a gramme of editorial oversight, and without anyone ensuring that the subject of the story has been contacted for comment. Enough. Trusting the common sense of your writers is all well and good – but when it comes to breaking news, where journalistic adrenaline is at its highest and everyone is paranoid about being scooped by a competitor, that common sense can too easily become the first casualty. Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news. And then within half a minute – bloggers being what they are – the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact. Fact that can affect share prices or ruin lives. This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill’s remark: that “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on” is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history. I was going to reply with all of this to Larry, to tell him about our – which is to say not my – run in with CBS and to sympathise with him over how easy it is for this kind of thing to happen. He’d had a bad day after all, and he didn’t need anyone making it worse. But then I clicked ‘reply’, saw Larry’s email address and experienced one of those wonderful moments of serendipity that make columnists weep with joy. Because seeing Larry’s email address reminded me which company owns ZDNet. That company…? CBS. Did CBS just accuse Yahoo of handing over user data to the Iranians? Oh yes they fucking did. Thank you baby Jesus. I thought for a moment whether it was mean to gloat. Whether it was unfair to write a post reminding CBS of their “irresponsible journalism” remark. Wouldn’t that just be mean? Shouldn’t I at least give Larry a chance to respond to the irony? Perhaps I should check with my editor before posting – yunno, make sure I’ve got everything buttoned down. And then I remembered. I’m a blogger. And that’s just not how we do things. Click. Post. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Internet Archaeology: In Which The Internet’s Sordid Past Is Preserved And Curated Posted: 10 Oct 2009 03:35 PM PDT  It wasn't long ago that we heard about the imminent demise of one of the net's most infamous and venerable sites: Geocities. At the time, we could see the pendulum hanging from the rafters, but earlier this week it was set a-swinging and the site will die quietly and gallantly on October 26th. Of course, while the sites will no longer be accessible at Geocities itself, they will be preserved in our hearts — and on the Internet Archive, of course. But merely being not deleted is hardly an honor fit for one the original pillars of the internet. Although we (and you) created a modest tribute, it deserves more, being one of the primary crucibles (or petri dishes, depending on your point of view) for internet culture. Enter Internet Archaeology, a site established in order to "explore, recover, archive and showcase the graphic artifacts found within earlier Internet Culture." Artifacts is the perfect word, isn't it? And as eye-searing as many of them are, there is a kind of transcendent quality in them to the sympathetic eye, and the site is dedicated to preserving that. |
| T-Mobile Sidekick Disaster: Danger’s Servers Crashed, And They Don’t Have A Backup Posted: 10 Oct 2009 02:43 PM PDT
T-Mobile Sidekick users have been suffering from a major outage all week, and that issue apparently hasn’t been resolved either. This goes beyond FAIL, face-palm, or any of the other internet memes we’ve come to associate with incompetence. The fact that T-Mobile and/or Microsoft Danger don’t have a redundant backup is simply inexcusable, especially given the fact that the Sidekick is totally reliant on the cloud because it doesn’t store its data locally. Microsoft acquired Danger for $500 million in February 2008. Update:: There is some speculation that this was not actually caused by a server meltdown, but by Danger’s failure to make a backup before a Storage Area Network upgrade that was botched. The full letter to customers is below.
Via Engadget Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Either The British Royal Family Is Reading TechCrunch, Or They Should Be Posted: 10 Oct 2009 02:01 PM PDT
The reason for the interview was that it’s the 50th anniversary of the Prince Philip Designers Prize, an award given by Britain’s Design Council to celebrate elegant design. When asked if the state of design was deteriorating in some ways, the duke agrees and immediately starts his rant against television design (about 6:50 in to the video below). Some of the best bits of the interview aren’t in the video, but are highlighted in the BBC article about it. At one point, the duke says, “To work out how to operate a TV set you practically have to make love to the thing.” And speaking specifically about remote controls, he says, “And why can’t you have a handset that people who are not 10 years old can actually read?” My thoughts exactly in noting that remote controls these days are Fisher Price-like. Overall, it’s an interesting discussion about the move away from exceptional design and towards more functional and in some cases, convoluted design, especially in technology. What I want to know is, if the the 88-year-old Duke of Edinburgh understands that modern television controls are awful, why don’t the cable companies who are now largely in control of the interaction between you and the television? The answer is that they do, but they just don’t care. And by most accounts the situation is much worse in the U.S. than in Britain because here the FCC has seemingly decided that they’re fine with a lack of competition in the marketplace. [thanks Steven] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| This Is What Happens When Your Mother-In-Law Uses Internet Explorer 6 Posted: 10 Oct 2009 01:17 PM PDT  I removed IE from the desktop, taskbar, Start Menu, and even hid the icon in Windows Explorer. I then installed Firefox and Chrome and renamed them both "Internet." But yet somehow my mother-in-law still found a way to use Internet Explorer and wonders why her computer runs like poo. Oh, and she wants to keep all of the toolbars. She uses them. |
| Fast Cars and Mullet Wigs: How I Won The Maverick Business Adventure Posted: 10 Oct 2009 10:29 AM PDT
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Paul Sloan, a journalist who’s worked for Business 2.0, Fortune, NPR, and CNN. His writing can now be found on Playing The Angles. I didn't really want to strip to my underwear on a street in broad daylight and sing Bob Seger's Old Time Rock and Roll a lá Tom Cruise in Risky Business. But when I agreed to come on this trip for a very unusual entrepreneur’s adventure, I told myself that I'd play along. And this, apparently, was part of the drill. At least, that’s the way this gang of Internet entrepreneurs like to have fun. I had agreed to attend a four-day themed conference as a way of gaining insight into the minds of an often-misunderstood group of multi-millionaire moneymakers, most of whom are Web marketers. There was the dude who sucks cash from Internet merchants by plying the affiliate trade. There was the personal trainer who teaches other muscle bums how to market themselves (annual revenue, a steroidal $3.7 million and swelling) And there was the twenty-something wunderkind from Austin, Texas, who’s minting his own fortune selling how-to info; whether its down-market like hot-dog vending or importing toothpaste from China, he’ll tell you how to make your dreams come true.
If this is starting to sound like a late-night infomercial, what can I say? Wait, there’s more!! The truth is, hanging day and night with a bunch of guys who are among the best in the world at Internet marketing can have that affect on you. Suddenly, everything looks like a sure-fire business opportunity. So back to this 1980s-themed road rally, treasure hunt, business conference they were throwing for themselves. Of course this club has a consultant-sounding name: Maverick Business Adventures. To get in, you have to be doing $1 million-plus in revenue a year and pass a reference review to make sure you’re a good fit. Then you pony up $7,500 to become a member. It’s extra for each of these trips—$12,500 for the one I was on. To a lot of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, these guys are not really entrepreneurs. They get lumped in with the myriad get-rich-hucksters who prowl the Web. But I think they get this rap because they’re just super-good at what they do. They’re successful and that breeds envy—especially because they’re often one-man shops and so don’t have to share their riches with tranches of angels and other VC hangers on. In fact, these hard-nosed businessmen feel equally judgmental of the VC-backed masses in their corporate parks and glass-walled conference rooms. Why, they argue, would anyone accept VC funding and give away a portion of his business when he can start minting cash for little investment? “Guys that take funding, buy nice cars and throw company parties,” remarked one Maverick. “We call that ‘playing business.’” One thing is for sure: Mavericks like to party in a way I have not seen in the Valley. (Sorry Arrington. I know I dubbed you a party animal in that Business 2.0 cover story a few years back, a characterization for which I took some heat, but these guys got you beat). They also have an uncanny ability to act like complete jackasses with utter disregard to the fact that they’re acting like complete jackasses. I sort of like that.  Maverick Mike Hill ready to roll (Photo © Den Bradshaw) In the case of the road rally I was on, that was part of the point. Each day we paired off into teams and were given a set of missions and riddles to tackle en route to our next destination. Day 1 launched from the Ritz Carlton in Marina del Rey. We had a breakfast discussion with John Paul DeJoria, the billionaire founder of Paul Mitchell Hair Care, and then we pulled names from a pile to pick our rides for the day. The lineup included a Ferrari 430 Coupe, a Lamborghini Gallardo Convertible, an Aston Martin Vantage Convertible, and a 69 Cadillac Deville Convertible. Sweet vehicles all around. I wasn’t a paying member, so I got whichever car had a back seat. In the Caddy I hopped. Among the missions my team conquered was that Risky Business dance (I treated it like skinny dipping in a 50-degree body of water: close your eyes, don’t think, get it over with), convincing a couple of bikini-clad women on a beach to run slow motion, Baywatch style, and serenading a stranger with an ’80s love ballad. (Thank you teammate Chip for handling that one) We would have won that day, but, alas, the ‘69 Caddy gave up. Somewhere about an Maverick is the brainchild of Yanik Silver, a who in all the press about him is simply referred to as an Internet entrepreneur and self-made millionaire. A short and stocky 36-year-old, Silver’s demeanor is so laid back it seems hard to believe he works, which, come to think of it, probably helps his pitch when he’s selling courses on how to achieve easy Internet riches. He began selling medical equipment for his dad's company in Baltimore at age 14. He did that through college and beyond. To boost his sales, he taught himself to write snappy copy and began taking out direct-response ads. In 1998 he sold a $900 course to teach cosmetic surgeons how to market themselves—before he had even written the course. Then one night in 1999—near the end of Web 1.0 bubble—Silver awoke at 3 a.m. with an idea for writing templates for sales letters and selling them on the Internet. He launched "Instant Sales Letters," and within a few months he was pulling in $10,000 a month from this single product. People were impressed. So he cranked out a how-to product called "Instant Internet Riches." Suddenly, at Internet speed, an industry guru was born.
Silver started Maverick Business Adventures almost two years ago for people like himself: People who want to do crazy stuff, party, bond, swap ideas, meet big-shot entrepreneurs, help each others’ business ventures and spread the word to young people that they don't have to grow up and work for the man. (At our stop in San Francisco, the Mavericks ran a business-idea workshop with high school kids and Silver awarded the winning team an Ed McMahon-sized check for $500 to get started; he didn’t ask for equity). By Maverick standards, my trip was mellow. Silver has taken groups of Mavericks—they prefer the Sarah Palin pronunciation, Meeavreek—scuba diving at Iceland’s Silfra Ravine, on zero gravity flights, and off-road racing with Jesse James, the West Coast Choppers dude. In April they spent three days on Richard Branson’s Necker Island, brainstorming and partying with the ultimate entrepreneurial adventure-seeker. My group did get to ride in a Zeppelin out of Moffett Federal Airfield in Sunnyvale, CA, and there were jokes about dropping crap onto Larry and Sergey's Boeing 767, which was parked below.  Photo © Den Bradshaw The final day’s missions included some doozies, such as inciting a group on a form of public transportation to join in a sing-along of a 1980s song (Thank you shameless tourists on the bus for attempting “Roxanne” with us, and thank you judges for not checking that it was released in 1978). And although my partner and I missed a 100-pointer when the cop I asked to outline my body with chalk on the sidewalk refused because he was dealing with an unruly troublemaker, we nailed all the big missions. The upshot: With a total of 4,450 points, I won the whole event, beating all 17 competitors except Silver, who topped my score by 25 points but who, like the family members of radio station employees, wasn’t eligible to win. Oh, crap, now I’m one of them, only without the bank account. Photo credit: Den Bradshaw Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Area Man Murders Palm Pre At Local Bar Posted: 10 Oct 2009 10:02 AM PDT
On the upside, it stays on for about a minute before giving up the ghost. Compare that to the possibly real video directly below it of an iPhone 3GS that was dropped in a pool and kept recording video. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
In one of those wonderful ironies of scheduling that make columnists weep with joy, Larry Dignan spent yesterday at a Yahoo! hack day in New York.
Wow. T-Mobile and Danger, the Microsoft-owned subsidiary that makes the Sidekick, has just announced that they’ve likely lost all user data that was being stored on Microsoft’s servers due to a server failure. That means that any contacts, photos, calendars, or to-do lists that haven’t been locally backed up are gone. Apparently if you don’t turn off your Sidekick and make sure its battery doesn’t run out you can salvage what’s currently stored on the device, otherwise you’re out of luck: Microsoft/Danger is describing the likelihood of recovering the data from their servers as “extremely low”.
A couple days ago we wrote 
hour south of Big Sur, the exhaust we’d been inhaling all morning turned into more of a burning smell, smoke began billowing and….she was dead. (Note to organizers: Give the embedded journalist a car you think will make the drive.)
Yanik Silver with John Paul DeJoria, founder of Paul Mitchell
If you’re Palm you’re hoping that Pre owners love their phones so much that they cherish and protect them for always. So when a guy who owns a Palm Pre | 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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