The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- What “On-demand” Media Really Means And Why Your Cable Company Should Be Scared
- 3 Nifty iPhone Apps For News Consumption On The Go
- Beware The Reverse Brain Drain To India And China
- A Troll Squats On WWWBING.com — Literally
- Shepard Fairey Responds To The AP: Yes, I Lied. But It Was Still Fair Use.
- AP Claims Shepard Fairey Admits To Lying And Trying To Destroy Evidence; His Counsel Quits
- MySpace Close To Spinning Off Photobucket
- DanceJam Finds A Buyer
- Where The Monetizable Clicks Are: Digg’s New Ads
- Exit Stage Right: Accel, Benchmark, NEA, And Foundation Saw The Most Exits In Q3
- 2009 State Of The Blogosphere: The Full BlogWorld Presentation
| What “On-demand” Media Really Means And Why Your Cable Company Should Be Scared Posted: 17 Oct 2009 09:01 AM PDT I've been angling to get rid of my TiVo and cable for some time now and I believe I've finally figured out a solution that works best for me. It involves a lots scripting, Sabnzbd, and HandbrakeCLI and I'll tell you what I ultimately did next week once it's stable but it seems to be working as well as can be expected for these sorts of hacks. I posit that the TV industry is about to face the same threat dealt the music and movie industries but they still have a chance to make things better for themselves when the world changes around them. First, let's rehash the old arguments. What I'm doing is downloading TV shows and sending them to a media player near my TV. I'm doing this because there exist two separate infrastructures that interface imperceptibly at one key point - the official cable and online distribution networks and the shady underworld of pirate distributors. Right now that interface is a trickle, but it will soon be, pardon the pun, a torrent. The first infrastructure is the studio system. While I'm talking specifically about TV here, we can also extrapolate to talk about movies and music. This infrastructure is based on the advertising or distribution model in that they make all their money placing advertisements around their content or by placing their content onto physical media. But what is important to note is that the TV industry is in a completely different business from the music and movie industry. They're not "selling" a product. They're selling the space around a product. They they commission artists to make that product better in hopes of raising the price of the space around that product. They sell DVDs, sure, but that's a sideline.   |
| 3 Nifty iPhone Apps For News Consumption On The Go Posted: 17 Oct 2009 07:53 AM PDT
Being obsessed with consuming as much news – mostly technology related, of course – as humanly possible in the all too short span of any given day comes with the territory of working for TechCrunch, but I’ve always been a fan of obtaining as much information as fast as I could. You could say my ever-growing habit of trying to consume as much news in my waking hours as I can is more of a natural cause for my employment in the fast-paced tech blogging scene than it is a result. It also means I feel very disconnected when I’m not near a computer or mobile phone I can use to tap the Internet for the never-ending stream of news that gets pumped onto the wires. (Reading Wisdom 2.0 didn’t help – I barely found time to turn the pages) I used to have a HTC phone (OS: Windows Mobile 6) for when I was on the go, which offered such a miserable browsing experience compared to the iPhone 3GS I own now that I’m genuinely thankful every single day for the fact that technology evolves so fast and the average consumer has so much choice these days. Before I digress too much: there are a number of iPhone apps that I use to (try and) stay on top of the news flow, like a mobile RSS reader and apps from major publishers like the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Bloomberg etc. But then there are a couple of iPhone applications built by independent programmers that provide even more news consumption bliss, and there are three that I wanted to highlight today. The first comes from BNO News, the tiny but incredibly efficient media organization behind the popular @BreakingNews Twitter account that gets followed by some 1,320,000 people right now. The company’s ‘breaking news’ iPhone application (iTunes link) with customized push notifications is a must-have for anyone who likes to learn about news near-instantly. PaidContent’s Rafat Ali recently gushed about BNO News and its fantastic iPhone app, saying some of the majors should step up and buy them outright. I tend to disagree: as long as they’re eating the majors’ lunch on breaking news independently, which shouldn’t they keep to their own and see what happens next? The cost: $1.99 for the installation and a $0.99 subscription fee per month.
The second is an iPhone app that was launched not too long ago: a mobile extension of Newsy.com (iTunes link). Newsy caters perfectly to people like me, who are keen on getting news fed to them in snack-size bits of multimedia that cover the essence of what’s going on. Newsy monitors, analyzes, curates and presents the world's news coverage through short video segments available both on the web and mobile devices. It’s great for quick news consumption on the go, but also helpful in understanding it by delivering stories as covered by media outlets from around the world. The cost: zip.
Last but not least: Zensify’s awesome ZenNews app (iTunes link). Its lifestreaming iPhone app was already worth installing, but ZenNews – billed as “a new breed of intelligent news analysis programs” – takes the cake as far as I’m concerned. The app allows you to discover story trends from the world's leading news sources – bar TechCrunch – in real-time. It provides you with a visual way of sifting through the news of the day by displaying tag clouds made up of essential keywords that you can tap in order to drill down to what you’re interested in reading. You can switch to a different news source by simply swiping to the next tag cloud, which also allows you to compare news item coverage from different sources. And if the tag clouds don’t do it for you, you can switch to a list-based, chronological overview of the news as well. In addition, you can filter certain news categories out of what gets displayed on your screen. Finally, you can favorite news stories from any source and pass articles on to your Twitter friends and by e-mail in just one tap. The cost: nada
Any other neutral developers who’ve come up with innovative concepts around mobile news consumption (on any platform) that I should know about? The comment section is there for you. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Beware The Reverse Brain Drain To India And China Posted: 17 Oct 2009 06:30 AM PDT
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa. I spent Columbus Day in Sunnyvale, fittingly, meeting with a roomful of new arrivals. Well, relatively new. They were Indians living in Silicon Valley. The event was organized by the Think India Foundation, a think-tank that seeks to solve problems which Indians face. When introducing the topic of skilled immigration, the discussion moderator, Sand Hill Group founder M.R. Rangaswami asked the obvious question. How many planned to return to India? I was shocked to see more than three-quarters of the audience raise their hands. Even Rangaswami was taken back. He lived in a different Silicon Valley, from a time when Indians flocked to the U.S. and rapidly populated the programming (and later executive) ranks of the top software companies in California. But the generational difference between older Indians who have made it in the Valley and the younger group in the room was striking. The present reality is this. Large numbers of the Valley's top young guns (and some older bulls, as well) are seeing opportunities in other countries and are returning home. It isn't just the Indians. Ask any VC who does business in China, and they'll tell you about the tens of thousands who have already returned to cities like Shanghai and Beijing. The VC's are following the talent. And this is bringing a new vitality to R&D in China and India. Why would such talented people voluntarily leave Silicon Valley, a place that remains the hottest hotbed of technology innovation on Earth? Or to leave other promising locales such as New York City, Boston and the Research Triangle area of North Carolina? My team of researchers at Duke, Harvard and Berkeley polled 1203 returnees to India and China during the second half of 2008 to find answers to exactly this question. What we found should concern even the most boisterous Silicon Valley boosters. We learned that these workers returned in their prime: the average age of the Indian returnees was 30 and the Chinese was 33. They were really well educated: 51% of the Chinese held masters degrees and 41% had PhDs. Among Indians, 66% held a masters and 12% had PhDs. These degrees were mostly in management, technology, and science. Clearly these returnees are in the U.S. population’s educational top tier—precisely the kind of people who can make the greatest contribution to an economy’s innovation and growth. And it isn’t just new immigrants who are returning home, we learned. Some 27% of the Indians and 34% of the Chinese had permanent resident status or were U.S. citizens. That’s right—it’s not just about green cards. What propelled them to return home? Some 84% of the Chinese and 69% of the Indians cited professional opportunities. And while they make less money in absolute terms at home, most said their salaries brought a “better quality of life” than what they had in the U.S. (There was also some reverse culture shock—complaints about congestion in India, say, and pollution in China.) When it came to social factors, 67% of the Chinese and 80% of the Indians cited better “family values” at home. Ability to care for aging parents was also cited, and this may be a hidden visa factor: it’s much harder to bring parents and other family members over to the U.S. than in the past. For the vast majority of returnees, a longing for family and friends was also a crucial element. A return ticket home also put their career on steroids. About 10% of the Indians polled had held senior management jobs in the U.S. That number rose to 44% after they returned home. Among the Chinese, the number rose from 9% in the U.S. to 36% in China. When we asked what was better about the U.S. than home, 54% of Indian and 43% of Chinese said that total financial compensation for their previous U.S. positions was better than at home. Health-care benefits were also considered somewhat better in the United States by 51 percent of Chinese respondents, versus 21 percent who thought it was better in their home country. (Indian respondents were split more evenly on this). These were a self-selected group, people who had already left. But what about the future, the immigrants presently studying at U.S. institutions of higher learning? We surveyed 1,224 foreign students from dozens of nations who are currently studying at U.S. universities or who graduated in 2008. The majority told us that they didn't think that the U.S. was the best place for their professional careers and they planned to return home. Only 6 percent of Indian, 10 percent of Chinese, and 15 percent of European students planned to settle in the U.S. Many students wanted to stay for a few years after graduation if given a choice—58% of Indians, 54% of Chinese, and 40% of Europeans. But they see the future being brighter back home. Only 7% of Chinese students, 9% of European students, and 25% of Indian students believe that the best days of the U.S. economy lie ahead. Conversely, 74% of Chinese students and 86% of Indian students believe that the best days for their home country's economy lie ahead. National Science Foundation studies have shown that the "5 year stay rates" for Chinese and Indians science and engineering PhD's have historically been around 92 % and 85% respectively (NSF tracks these 5 years at a time, and the vast majority stay permanently). So something has clearly changed. For Silicon Valley, and for the U.S., this is the wrong kind of change. To some degree, these responses reflected the moribund U.S. economy and the rough job prospects facing students. With U.S. unemployment at 10%, who cares if we lose the next generation of geeks? There won’t be jobs for them for years, anyway, until the U.S. job market recovers. And sure, I know the xenophobes are going to cheer my findings. They believe that foreign workers take American jobs away. But a growing body of evidence indicates that skilled foreign immigrants create jobs for Americans and boost our national competitiveness. More than 52% of Silicon Valley's startups during the recent tech boom were started by foreign-born entrepreneurs. Foreign-national researchers have contributed to more than 25% of our global patents, developed some of our break-through technologies, and they helped make Silicon Valley the world's leading tech center. Foreign-born workers comprise almost a quarter of all the U.S. science and engineering workforce and 47% of science and engineering workers who have PhDs. It is very possible that some of the smart Indians who sat in the room with me holding their hand up on Columbus Day will start the next Google or Apple. Many of them will build companies which employ thousands. But the jobs will be in Hyderbad or Pune, not Silicon Valley. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| A Troll Squats On WWWBING.com — Literally Posted: 16 Oct 2009 08:58 PM PDT
At the time, the domain simply pointed to a page with a bunch of links. But since our story, the author decided to do something a bit more fun with it. As you can see now, wwwbing.com is a lovely page featuring a squatting troll. As a bonus, the troll is picking its nose and snot appears to be dripping out. The site is titled, “Welcome to Walter Will Wawrinka Bing Fansite,” and it’s supposedly about an upcoming children’s book, due in 2010, that the author hopes “can be as successful as Harry Potter.” So that might sound at least somewhat legitimate, right? But the funniest part is that Patrick McAuliffe, the owner of the domain also writes, “Feel free to do a search for Walter Will Wawrinka Bing in the following search engines,” and then goes on to list every single search engine besides Bing. Yes, even Lycos, AltaVista, and Excite. Naturally, Google is first. What else is funny is that a query for “Walter Will Wawrinka Bing” provides absolutely no results at all on any of the search engines (though it may after this post!). This despite McAuliffe writing, “I know I have many fans around the world.” In case you haven’t gotten the joke yet, let me spell it out: Walter Will Wawrika Bing. I asked McAuliffe if Microsoft had reached out to him about acquiring the domain. Instead, it was McAuliffe who reached out to Microsoft with a proposal to sell the domain, and here is the response he got back:
Gotta love that Microsoft bureaucracy. But maybe they don’t mind that a site a ton of people are probably mistyping, redirects to a picture of a squatting troll picking its nose that suggest you search on Google. Who knows. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Shepard Fairey Responds To The AP: Yes, I Lied. But It Was Still Fair Use. Posted: 16 Oct 2009 07:32 PM PDT
Tonight’s admission focuses on the photo that Fairey originally claimed to use during his creation of the ‘Hope’ poster — he claimed to use an image other than the one the AP claims to own, and then lied and deleted evidence when he realized he was wrong. Both were taken at the same press event. The one Fairey originally said he used showed Obama next to George Clooney, the one he really used was a close-up. The AP has succeeded in character assassination (perhaps rightfully so given Fairey’s actions), but Fairey may still have a case arguing that his image is protected under fair use. Regardless of which photo he used, by painting the image and turning it into a national icon he may have transformed it enough to render the AP’s claims invalid.
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| AP Claims Shepard Fairey Admits To Lying And Trying To Destroy Evidence; His Counsel Quits Posted: 16 Oct 2009 06:54 PM PDT
According to the statement, Fairey has also admitted to using a close-up of Presdient Obama that was taken by the AP as the model for his image, not a different photo that he claimed to use that also included George Clooney, which he later cropped. The statement also says that Fairey’s legal counsel “now admitted that Fairey tried to destroy documents that would have revealed which image he actually used” and that “he created fake documents as part of his effort to conceal which photo was the source image, including hard copy printouts of an altered version of the Clooney Photo and fake stencil patterns of the Hope and Progress posters.” Finally, the AP notes that Shepard Fairey’s lawyers are withdrawing from the case. It’s worth pointing out that tonight’s release was issued by the AP, Fairey’s rival in this case — we'll reach out to Fairey and be keeping an eye out for his response. Even if the claims are true, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that Fairey’s case is dead in the water, as he still has the fair use defense. He may not have taken George Clooney out of the photo, but he may well have transformed it when he painted the photograph and turned it into an icon. We’ll see what the court decides. Also worth noting: who actually owns the photo to begin with is still being disputed. The photographer, Mannie Garcia, has asserted that he owns the image because he was serving as a temporary fill-in when it was taken, without signing a contract with the AP. For more details, see our post here. The AP has confirmed that ownership of the image is still disputed, claiming that it owns the copyright and that Garcia was indeed a salaried employee. Update: Fairey has given us his own statement that confirms what the AP has said, though the case will continue as Fairey cites Fair Use as his defense. Here’s the full AP release:
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| MySpace Close To Spinning Off Photobucket Posted: 16 Oct 2009 05:00 PM PDT
Photobucket has grown steadily since the acquisition, and currently brings in 54 million worldwide users each month (Comscore). But MySpace never integrated with Photobucket, keeping their own separate photo and video platforms. It’s been little more than a side show ever since the acquisition, and the founders have left to do other projects. With News Corp. scrambling to fix up its digital division, it’s no wonder Photobucket has been on the chopping block. Best of all, the deal will bring in new cash to News Corp. It’s not clear that the final terms have been worked out. But our source tells us that News Corp. will sell a majority stake in Photobucket, retaining some equity. If Ontela is the buyer, the merged company will take a new round of financing, with most of the cash going to News Corp., and part of it going into the new company. Presumably this deal won’t look much different from eBay’s spinoff of StumbleUpon earlier this year, except on a larger scale. News Corp. gets a cash injection and retains a portion of Photobucket. And the service, combined with Ontela or another buyer, gets a new start. Ontela didn’t return a request for comment. MySpace isn’t answering their phones or email. Everyone is being very quiet about the deal in general, in fact. We’ll update as we learn more. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Posted: 16 Oct 2009 11:49 AM PDT
We don’t know the purchase price or other terms of the deal. Both companies are privately funded. Earlier this year Purevideo Networks also acquired Sportnet, a site that controls a number of popular topical video sites. DanceJam launched in November 2007 and has raised $4.5 million in venture capital. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Where The Monetizable Clicks Are: Digg’s New Ads Posted: 16 Oct 2009 11:38 AM PDT
Since I wasn’t able to see the ads before, I wondered if the actual Digg content portion of the ad would link back to the sponsor or to the actual story. Not only does it link back to the story’s permalink page, but it routes it through a DoubleClick referral. So yes, Digg is keeping track of all of these clicks (though I’m told that right now the ads are on a CPM basis), while users are being sent to content that quite likely do actually want to go to. Win-win. As you can see in the first such ad, for the new Warner Brothers film Where The Wild Things Are, the movie studio picked three previously popular stories on Digg about the movie. Each already had several hundred diggs before the studio wrapped it in the ad unit. One of Digg’s weaknesses is that once a story is off the main homepage, the likelihood that anyone is ever going to see it again goes way, way down. But this is a way for Digg to surface older content, while giving them a huge incentive to do so: Advertiser money. Naturally, the ad unit also features a big graphic for the film as well. Clicking on this area goes to the movie’s website, just as you’d expect from a normal online ad. While Google has made billions off of its contextual text link ads, overall advertising on the Internet remains a tough nut for many sites to crack. The simple fact is that some of the Google search result sponsored links aside, many users probably don’t really want to click on advertisements, and only do either by accident, or when they’re tricked (into thinking it’s content, or a game, or that they can win something free, or whatever). That Digg has figured out a way to get paid for what its users already click on, is very interesting. To be clear, these ads are not the same as the sponsored Digg Ads that appear in the stream of stories. Those feature content that sponsors place for users to vote on. These new ads feature content that has already been submitted to the site by other users, not the sponsor. The next question is, what happens if Digg strikes some deals to place these types of ads on other sites? Would users click on them, recognizing the Digg branding and realizing that they might actually like to see that content? Would advertisers still pay for that on a massive scale? That could be a billion dollar question. Update: We were just told that for right now these ads are on a CPM basis, while the other Digg ads are CPC. Still, with Digg (by way of DoubleClick) keeping track of these clicks, they could very easily flip the switch and do CPC, assuming the advertisers played along with it, of course. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Exit Stage Right: Accel, Benchmark, NEA, And Foundation Saw The Most Exits In Q3 Posted: 16 Oct 2009 11:21 AM PDT  For more TechCrunch Analysis, check out the Q3 09 Trends Report here. Which venture capitalists had the most exist last quarter? A peek at Crunchbase data shows that Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, Foundation Capital and New Enterprise Asosciates all recorded at least three exits by acquisition in Q3 2009. The four firms were all also among the ten most active investors in CrunchBase in the quarter. Benchmark and Accel were led by partners who had career weeks, Peter Fenton and Jim Breyer. NEA might have posted the best returns, with two huge deals. Foundation, meanwhile, exited two investments that began in the seed/angel rounds. |
| 2009 State Of The Blogosphere: The Full BlogWorld Presentation Posted: 16 Oct 2009 10:18 AM PDT
We’ll have a video of his full video presentation shortly. In the meantime, we’re embedding the power point presentation below. Key points Jalichandra brought up – What’s the no. 1 success metric for a professional blogger? What do successful bloggers have in common? The data was taken from a survey of 2,900 bloggers, conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland. 72% of bloggers are hobbyists, says Jalichandra, and blog for fun. They don’t make any income from blogging, and only half hope to someday. They blog simply to express themselves. Of professional bloggers, only 10% blog 40 or more hours per week. 2/3 of professional bloggers are male, and 60% are between 18 – 44 years old. 75% have college degrees, and 40% have graduate degrees. Half have household incomes of $75,000 or more. 17% of them say blogging is their primary source of income. A whopping 74% of bloggers use Twitter, v. 14% of the general population. Their no. 1 use of Twitter is to promote their blogs. Lots more detail in the full presentation, below. You can see the audience reaction on Twitter here.
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My name is Robin Wauters, and I’m a news junkie.
Last week, 
We reached out to Shepard Fairey about the AP’s release this evening 
The AP has just released a statement declaring that Shepard Fairey, the artist being 
News Corp., via MySpace, 
Last week, we wrote about 
Technorati CEO 
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