The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- PS: I Love You. Get Your Free Email at Hotmail
- App of the Day Makes It Easier To Find iPhone Apps
- Verizon Droid Is The Real Deal
- This Used To Be My Playground
- Verizon Launches Direct Attack Against The iPhone With Ads For The Motorola Droid
- NSFW: Why Seth MacFarlane’s Microsoft Guy is the end of television, and the world
- IMDb Turns 19. Yes, 19. Older Than The Web Browser.
- Life in the Slow Lane: Zipcar’s Sputtering iPhone App Release
- Interview: Talking To The Rentals’ Matt Sharp About His Music And Photography
| PS: I Love You. Get Your Free Email at Hotmail Posted: 18 Oct 2009 09:00 AM PDT
Many of the most successful Web 2.0 companies, including MySpace, YouTube, eBay, Flickr and rising stars like Twitter are prime examples of a "viral loop"—to use it, you have to spread it. The result: Never before has there been the potential to create wealth this fast, on this scale, and starting with so little. In Viral Loop, Penenberg tells the fascinating story of the entrepreneurs who first harnessed the unprecedented potential of viral loops to create the successful online businesses—some worth billions of dollars—that we have all grown to rely on. The trick is that they created something people really want, so much so that their customers happily spread the word about their product for them. PS: I Love You. Get Your Free Email at Hotmail After the two sides worked out terms governing the initial $300,000 seed investment, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith walked out of the Draper Fisher Jurvetson offices with a $50,000 bridge check and quit their day jobs. Working from home, Smith, after bringing onboard another engineer, got down to building a prototype. They also needed to come up with a name, which fell to Smith, who stayed up late with his wife to brainstorm. Sitting with a blank sheet of paper they listed possibilities that contained “mail” in some form. Out of two-dozen there was Cool Mail, Run Mail, this mail, that mail, but no “A-ha!” moment. Finally his wife suggested, “Hotmail.” Smith wrote it down. He wasn’t sure about the “hot” part, but given everything else this seemed the best candidate. Then he noticed it contained the letters “HTML,” the acronym for “HyperText Markup Language,” the lingua franca of web pages. Smith canvassed Bhatia the next day while riding in an elevator to their attorney’s office. As usual, his friend initially gave it a cool reception but they were running out of time so he went along with it. On March 27, 1996 Smith registered the Hotmail domain. At the same time he finished a prototype within two weeks, sharing it with a small circle of friends who provided valuable feedback, mostly relating to layout, how e-mail should be viewed and the index page arranged, the look and feel of the interface, how the columns should appear on the screen. Smith demonstrated it at the next meeting with Draper and Jurvetson, who were duly impressed. Draper asked, “How are you going to get the word out there?" "We’ll put it up on billboards," Bhatia said. He also mentioned radio advertising. "God,” Draper replied, ” that’s expensive marketing and we’re giving this away?” He thought for a moment. “Can’t you just give it out to all those guys on the web?” That would be spamming, Smith replied. I guess spamming is bad, Draper thought. He hadn’t heard the term before. Then he flashed back to Harvard Business School, where he had received his MBA—a case study his professor had covered in class: women holding parties for their friends then selling to each other. A certain percentage of the women at each party became salespeople by referring more business. Tupperware, that was it. He also recalled MCI’s “Friends & Family Plan,” which harnessed the power of social interactions to spread the product. He wondered if they could do something like that with webmail. “Jack,” Draper asked, “could you put a message at the bottom of everybody’s screen.” “Oh come on, we don’t want to do that!” Bhatia blurted out. “But can you technically do it?” Draper asked. “Of course we can technically do it,” Smith said. “Oh, great,” Draper said. “And it can persist, right? You can put it on one message and if he sends an email to somebody else you can put it on that one, too, right?” “Yeah, yeah," Smith said, not convinced. “So put ‘PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail’ at the bottom.” Bhatia and Smith communicated through pained expressions. “Oh, no,” they seemed to be saying. Draper had seen that look before. Of all the investors in the world, why did we end up with this idiot? Frankly, he didn’t care what they thought. This just felt right. “Wait a second guys, don’t you get it?” Draper asked. A tag line at the bottom of each message would act as free advertising. “I can send you an e-mail and you can send it to all your friends and they get it and they can sign up and send it to their friends and pretty soon it takes off.” Smith said, “I don’t think…” Bhatia interrupted. “Let’s move on to other business.” Draper agreed to table the discussion for now, but had no intention of letting it go. He vowed he would keep pounding until they listened. They launched HoTMaiL on Independence Day 1996. Not only did they like the symbolism—they viewed webmail as a populist tool because any user could log in from anywhere in the world—Smith had long promised the service would be ready by then. After turning on the registration function and hitting the switch in the early afternoon, Smith accompanied his tiny technical staff to Chili’s Grill & Bar in San Jose to celebrate. To keep track of signups he brought along a laptop with an attached radio modem receiver on the back, the antennae sticking up like a divining rod. Over quesadillas Smith counted 100 registrations in the first hour. After lunch they went to the movies, and by the time the summer blockbuster “Independence Day” began to roll he tallied 200 signups. Upon exiting the cinema, Smith logged in again to find that fifty more joined HoTMaiL. They were finding the site via word of mouth and word of mouse. People were talking about it, and letting their friends and family in on the deal via email, using the Hotmail message as a proof of concept: Eighty-percent of those who signed up said that they learned about it from a friend. Growth was robust but not staggering for the week. At the next meeting at DFJ Tim Draper once again pushed the two young entrepreneurs to insert a tagline into each message. Bhatia and Smith were adamant about not adulterating email. It just wasn’t done. They would feel like they were polluting emails with advertising, and what about privacy issues? If someone is adding a tagline what else were they doing? A user would wonder what else they had access to and they were also fairly certain it was unethical. But Draper wouldn’t let it go. The benefits, he contended, far outweighed the risks. If they were predicating their entire business on the size of their user base, they should be doing everything in their power to increase it as fast as possible. “P.S. I love you. Get your free email at HoTMaiL.” The more he said it, the more he liked it. The next day Bhatia phoned Draper with the news that they agreed to do it, but without the “P.S. I Love You” part. The impact was almost instantaneous. Within hours Hotmail’s growth took on the shape of a classic hockey stick curve. They started averaging 3,000 users a day, compounded daily. By Labor Day they registered 750,000 users and within six months they were up to 1 million. Five weeks after that they hit the 2 million user mark, adding more than 20,000 signups a day, with Smith desperately trying to keep the servers up and running. At times, the site became sluggish and suffered major outages. But through it all Smith, using little more than virtual spit and glue, kept Hotmail—they had dropped the awkward capitalization by this point—afloat. The tagline with the clickable URL that Draper insisted that Bhatia and Smith insert into every outbound message served as a promotional pitch for the company. Simply by using the product every customer became an involuntary salesperson. This implied endorsement from a friend or peer made it more powerful—and more far-reaching—than traditional advertising. The receiver of a Hotmail messages could see a.) his friend is a user, b.) it works, and c.) it’s free. Successful consumer branding is often based on user affiliation. (The cool kids wear low cut jeans, so I will, too.) This plays to our tribal instinct. It also resulted in clusters of users. Bhatia sent a message to a friend in India and within 3 weeks Hotmail registered 100,000 users there. It also became the largest email provider in Sweden without spending a nickel on advertising there. In contrast, Juno blew through $20 million in marketing and advertising yet Hotmail gained three times as many users in half the time. As Jurvetson related in what would become a famous white paper, the Hotmail adoption pattern was similar to that of a virus “with spatial and network locality.” A person’s email address book is a type of virtual social network that is not encumbered by geography. A certain percentage of contacts will be friends, family and colleagues who reside relatively near by; others may be scattered throughout the world. A Hotmail message sent across the country might result in a new cluster of users. Jurvetson noted a “mathematical elegance” to Hotmail’s “smooth exponential growth curves” in the company’s early days: cumulative users = (1+fan out) cycles. “We would notice the first user from a university town or from India, and then the number of subscribers from that region would rapidly proliferate,” he wrote. “From an epidemiological perspective, it was if Zeus sneezed over the planet.” Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| App of the Day Makes It Easier To Find iPhone Apps Posted: 18 Oct 2009 07:33 AM PDT
The App Store is crowded with tens of thousands of applications, many which do the exact same thing. Just do a quick search on the App Store for Twitter, and you’ll find over 170 applications related to Twitter. But how do you figure out which Twitter application is best? That’s where App of the Day comes in. App of the Day highlights a different application every day for iPhone or iPod Touch users looking to discover high quality applications in the App Store. Founded by Jordan Satok, App of the Day features community-nominated applications that get featured on the home page each day. Users are then able to comment on the application, and provide feedback for potential buyers. You only get one nomination per day, reinforcing the goal of the site to only feature quality applications. Whichever application gets the most nominations, then becomes the App of the Day. App of the Day also works directly with Gravatar, so users don’t have to upload their own picture — their avatar is just affiliated with their email address, which they use to sign up with on App of the Day. You can find my user profile here. The concept is quite simple, and is something the Apple community has been looking for. App of the Day provides quality applications that users want to use. Satok built the site in less then 10 days and it is hosted on the Rackspace Cloud. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Verizon Droid Is The Real Deal Posted: 18 Oct 2009 01:07 AM PDT
MobileCrunch has been tracking the phone, which has also been called the Tao or Sholes, for some time. Just about anyone who has come in contact with the phone can’t stop talking about it. And from what we hear, they have good reason. The phone is a three-way effort between Motorola, Verizon and Google. It looks a lot like the iPhone, and may even be as thin or thinner than the iPhone 3GS. It also has two key advantages over the iPhone – a slide out physical keyboard, and use of the Verizon network. Unlike previous Android phones, the Droid is rumored to be powered by the TI OMAP3430, the same core that the iPhone and Palm Pre use, and which significantly outperforms Qualcomm 528MHz ARM11 based Android phones that exist today (Engadget has a great overview article on mobile CPUs). Droid will also be running v.2.0 of Android, with a significantly upgraded user interface. The Droid poses a different and more significant challenge to the iPhone than any other phone to date. The Palm Pre could have been that challenger, but it lacked the Verizon network, and users were unimpressed with the hardware. According to people who’ve handled the device, the Droid is the most sophisticated mobile device to hit the market to date from a hardware standpoint. When you combine that with the Verizon network, you’ve got something that is most definitely a challenger to the Jesus phone. And the scary thing for Apple is, it may only be a few months before something even better than the Droid comes out. With the flood of Android devices that are hitting the market, a few are bound to be hits. No wonder Google CEO Eric Schmidt is so bullish on Android right now. Things are about to get very, very interesting. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Posted: 17 Oct 2009 07:55 PM PDT
One of the most compelling things about FriendFeed has always been just how easy it was to have a conversation on the site. Someone posted an item, and within seconds, many had robust conversation threads updating in the speed of realtime beneath them. This also lead to the occasional trollish activity, but overall it was great. But since the acquisition, those conversation threads have largely slowed to a crawl, or worse, don’t exist at all on many items. Previously, FriendFeed had committed to keeping the site running indefinitely despite their new jobs at Facebook. And it has remained running, but the site’s innovation, always its key attribute, has been completely halted. And perhaps as a vote of no confidence, previously rabid users are now largely staying away. And that’s really too bad. One of the key things I used FriendFeed for was to get information. There was a great system in place that would allow interesting things to bubble up based on people commenting on and the liking of items. Not all of it was great (baby pictures, while cute, get in the way of information), but overall the system worked. It was crowd-sourcing at its finest. But that obviously doesn’t work too well when the crowd has vanished. Sure, there are some items on the site that still garner a good amount of conversation and likes, but as a whole, my experience post-sale has been severely tainted. So why not just move on to Facebook, you may wonder? Because while there are similarities between what Facebook does and what FriendFeed does, FriendFeed is still much better at it. Hopefully soon we’ll begin seeing the effects of the FriendFeed team at Facebook, but so far that hasn’t happened. It’s still too slow to share, automatically imported items take forever to show up, the filtering system needs work (I want to be able to hide just a certain type of item from one friend, like I can on FriendFeed, rather than hiding everything), as does the relevance of the main stream.
But more to the point, Facebook is an entirely different beast than FriendFeed. Facebook is still first and foremost a social network for people you know and want to connect with, FriendFeed was much more about information sharing and conversation. And that’s what I miss. There are plenty of others ways to get information on the web, but FriendFeed was like a playground for information. It was fast and fun. And the team’s rapid pace of innovation pushed others, like yes, Facebook. Moving over to Facebook obviously didn’t make the FriendFeed team any less brilliant, but I worry about their ability to rapidly innovate in a much larger company, one that has to worry about its legacy of over 300 million users. This week, one former FriendFeeder already left Facebook. He reasoning was that he didn’t want to telecommute anymore (he lives in Seattle), but he didn’t seem to mind doing it while he was still working on FriendFeed. Read into that what you will. The bigger picture is that we see this happen all too often. A larger service buys a smaller one and proceeds to run the smaller one into the ground. Not on purpose, but because they have bigger goals for their own products. Google is particularly good at it. Jaiku, Dodgeball, you could even put Feedburner in there. Now we’re seeing Facebook do it too. The users are just along for the ride, helpless when this happens. They take our playground, and put glass on the ground. We can still play, but it’s not as fun. And eventually, everyone leaves with bloody feet — and doesn’t want to come back. We should consider ourselves lucky that Twitter hasn’t agreed to be purchased yet, it could have very well suffered the same fate. Look, I’m happy the FriendFeed team was able to get an exit that they clearly felt good about. And I realize that some services, no matter how innovative or how passionate their user base is, sometimes fade away. It’s just sad to see it go. It used to be my playground. [photo: flickr/Alejandro Hernandez] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Verizon Launches Direct Attack Against The iPhone With Ads For The Motorola Droid Posted: 17 Oct 2009 06:21 PM PDT Verizon isn’t pulling any punches: it calls out basically every major weakness on the iPhone, from its inability to run background applications to the App Store’s walled garden. The site kicks off with a stream of things that the iPhone can’t do, mimicking the black text-on-white background commonly seen in Apple ads but replacing it with statements like iDon’t run simultaneous apps. After a handful of these, the site kicks you to a page with the heading “DroidDoes”, with a banner rotating through a number of the Droid’s features that include Android 2.0, background tasks, and video recording support. Some of the differences mentioned, like the Droid’s inclusion of a physical keyboard, are really a matter of personal preference. Others, aren’t. For one, Droid can claim to run on “The Network”, which runs circles around AT&T.  The phone hasn’t been officially announced yet, and the release date is vague (the rumor is that it will launch at midnight on October 31). But we’ve heard from some people who have had the chance to briefly test it out, and they were very impressed (one response was that it was “totally awesome”). I’m not going to be foolish enough to call this an iPhone killer for the simple fact that the iPhone’s developer community is still miles ahead of Android’s regardless of how good Droid turns out to be. But don’t be surprised if you start hearing about people who quit the iPhone in favor of the Droid. After all, even if the phone doesn’t turn out to be quite as polished as the iPhone, it will be running on a network that will actually let them connect their calls consistently. One final thing to note: given how direct an attack Verizon is making on the iPhone, it sure doesn’t sound like the iPhone will be making the leap to Verizon any time soon. Commenter Christopher Daggett has tried to work out the exact timing of the countdown, revealing the (possible) launch date to be 10/30/09 at 1:00AM EST.
Video via BGR’s Twitter feed. 
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| NSFW: Why Seth MacFarlane’s Microsoft Guy is the end of television, and the world Posted: 17 Oct 2009 05:53 PM PDT
On November 8th at 8:30pm, viewers of Fox in the US will watch in horror as the network gives over thirty whole minutes of airtime to a Windows 7-sponsored episode of Family Guy. Just take a moment to let the horror of that fact settle in your brain. Multi-millionaire Seth MacFarlane – who, by the way, uses a Mac – has decided to sell the soul of his flagship show to Redmond. For money. Of course, producing art to order is always a tricky call. Back in the 16th century Michelangelo was quoted as saying “One cannot live under pressure from patrons, let alone paint,” and yet even he was forced – from time to time – to succumb to the pressures of paying the rent. In his painting ‘The Conversion of Saul’, the face of Saul (who would have been around 30 when he took the road to Damascus) is replaced with the far more elderly face of Pope Paul III. Why? Because Pope Paul III was the pontiff who commissioned and financed the work. It was a tacky move, sure, but changing the facial features of one character (whose true appearance is conjecture anyway) is still a light year away from letting your sponsor dictate your entire storyline. We’re fortunate that Michelangelo didn’t share MacFarlane’s principles. If he did, then visitors to the Pauline Chapel today could gaze in awe at a masterpiece entitled “Saul’s Conversion To Realising How Freaking Awesome Paul III Is” – a masterpiece which would almost certainly feature a cutaway joke about the 16th century equivalent of the old man in Family Guy who chases young boys. Or ‘Michelangelo’ as he was known in those days. What’s worse is that MacFarlane is not just an artist but also a comedian – and the whole point of comedy is to make your subject look ridiculous. It is simply not possible to write funny jokes about Windows 7 while simultaneously making Microsoft happy. It’s like watching a clown getting a handjob from a banker; it just stops being funny the moment the money guy gets involved in the act. Watch this MacFarlane-voiced preview clip from Microsoft and you’ll see what I mean – in it we see Brian rehashing a horribly meta Family Guy joke (presumably because hardcore fans are the only ones who will still be watching) while Stewie puts “Windows 7 through its paces”. After listing the many splendid features of the sponsor’s product we discover what Stewie is actually doing with Windows. He’s using Twitter… to tweet the words “I’m using Twitter!”. Awesome! No, not awesome. That other thing. Awful. Seriously, Seth, stick a fork in yourself, you’re done. If that’s really the best joke you could find about Microsoft – a joke that would work perfectly well with Stewie using a Mac or any cellphone – then the whole show is doomed. It’s not like there aren’t a billion jokes about Microsoft that would be funny. Photoshopping out Cleveland from the episode and replacing him with a white Polish Guy, for example. That would be funny. The episode crashing halfway through and refusing to restart. That would be funny. Telling Microsoft to go screw themselves and instead writing an episode about them trying to brand TV shows. That would be freaking hilarious. But to be fair to MacFarlane, there are two ways to assess his culpability in this abortion of a judgment call. On one hand you might call him a sell out – a whore whose relentless pursuit of even greater wealth, despite already having a contract with Fox worth $100 million a year, has lead him to throw his credibility – along with Peter, Lois, Brian, Stewie, Chris, Meg et al – under the bus. Alternatively, one might be more charitable. One might call him an idiot – a man who didn’t realise that accepting $100 million of Fox’s money would oblige him to watch impotently as his credibility, Peter, Lois, Brian, Stewie, Chris, Meg et al were thrown under that same bus. Either way, they’re under the bus, and it’s his fault. Youa culpa, Seth. But while Seth MacFarlane is obviously the most guilty party here, you also have to ask yourself what on earth Microsoft’s marketing geniuses are thinking. I mean, when you’re watching that clown getting a handjob from a banker, the only person you feel less warmly towards than the clown is the banker. Precisely how gullible does Microsoft think its target audience is? So gullible that we’ll sit through thirty minutes of unfunny Windows-plugging bullshit and still be left believing that Windows 7 is a brand (urk!) we want to align (urk!) ourselves with? That’s the kind of dumb thinking that MacFarlane would gleefully would parody in a cutaway, like the one in which he blamed Jim Henson for wrong sounding Muppets: “it’s like that time Microsoft sponsored Family Guy and hoped no one would notice the difference”. But, hell, there’s no sense in getting too worked up about half an hour of Family Guy murder. Every show has its shark-jumping moment, and with millions of dollars in the bank and American Dad getting consistently edgier and funnier, MacFarlane probably isn’t too worked up either. “Meh, let it die; I’ll bury it under this enormous pile of money in my basement, next to whoever wrote the scripts for The Cleveland Show.” Really the thing we should all be worried about is that Microsoft Guy could be the start of a trend, not of product placement in television – that ship has sailed – but of entire shows being rebranded at the whim of technology companies. This month the BBC reported that spending on online advertising in the UK has finally taken over from television advertising for the first time. The UK is the first major market where it’s happened, but other European countries are close behind and it’s only a matter of time before it happens in the US. As technology companies see their coffers swell and poor old television is forced to scramble for every available pound, euro or dollar we could be heading for a point where the only way television can survive is if every single show is re-written to promote a huge tech brand. You think I’m paranoid. Of course you do. And yet I’ll take almost no pleasure in telling you I told you so when America finds itself subjected to shows like…
This is your future, Seth. Wokka wokka – who wants to hear a funny ass joke? Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| IMDb Turns 19. Yes, 19. Older Than The Web Browser. Posted: 17 Oct 2009 03:12 PM PDT
Founder Col Needham explains the history a bit in a birthday message today. IMDb was born on October 17, 1990 as a series of Unix shell scripts to let users search the USENET group, rec.arts.movies. It wasn’t called IMDb yet (that came four years later), but it was the beginning of being able to search for movie information on the Internet. Once the web as we now know it sprung up around the IMDb, the site became hugely popular — it’s probably the first website that I remember being addicted to when I was young. The site became so popular that its founders realized they would have to start charging visitors if they wanted to keep it up (remember, this was the mid 1990s, Internet advertising was much, much smaller than it is today). But in 1998, Amazon came along to buy the site, enabling it to stay free for users. Though they would later add IMDb Pro, a subscription-based section with more data on movies. They’ve also added new functionality to the site over the years. This includes the ability to play video content (which is ho-hum), and the addition of the excellent movie box office tracking site, Box Office Mojo. IMDb says it now gets 57 million people coming to its site each month. I still can’t believe that it’s nearly as old as I am. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Life in the Slow Lane: Zipcar’s Sputtering iPhone App Release Posted: 17 Oct 2009 01:01 PM PDT
The story begins with a giant coup: Zipcar won an invite to show off its App at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco this past June, the one at which Apple rolled out its 3GS phones. It's the kind of exposure that could turn an App into the mobile equivalent of a summer blockbuster—and that, presumably, was exactly what Zipcar execs had in mind. So on June 8th, Zipcar CTO Luke Schneider and principal engineer Jonathan Wolfe took center stage before a packed house and gave a slick demo of the car-sharing company's futuristic App, which, as Schneider proudly announced, "We're very excited to introduce…." Wolfe played the role of Zipcar customer, Schneider narrated, and the audience—which of course extended to the Web—watched on a giant screen. Schneider described how Jonathan, a carless San Francisco resident, needed a Zipcar to pick up friends for dinner. Jonathan taps the Zipcar icon, and a map emerges on his phone. It locates Jonathan via GPS, and then shows him nearby Zipcar lots, complete with bright green pins to indicate available cars. Jonathan taps a location, selects a Mini Cooper and reserves his wheels for the evening. This was cool stuff, but the duo wowed the audience even more when Schneider described how Jonathan nears the parking lot, taps on a virtual key fob and—voila!—the car horn honks. Next, Jonathan reaches the car, taps on his fob once more, and the Mini unlocks, as if by magic. The crowd applauded enthusiastically. It was a sweet victory for Zipcar. The press picked up on the futuristic idea of smart phones controlling your car. Bloggers got excited. And the company said its App would be available this summer. In the following weeks—nah, make that months—Zipcar scored all kinds of adoring press, culminating with a September 14 cover story in Fortune (the actual release date is a couple of weeks earlier) in which the magazine hailed Zipcar as, The Best New Idea in Business. The article naturally opens with newest and coolest thing: That iPhone trick. The writer describes Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith entering the parking lot at his office in Cambridge, Mass., and using his iPhone to make his Mini Cooper honk and then unlock itself. The story goes on to explain how this revolutionary company is growing like mad, about to turn a profit and on track to go public in 2010, which likely explains why Zipcar has been courting the media so hard. This was killer press for any company, well worth the visit Griffith paid to Fortune headquarters in June to make his pitch to the editors. As for the iPhone App, however, Fortune didn't bother to mention one little thing. It still wasn't available. More than a month after that story came out, on September 29th, Zipcar at last announced the "immediate availability" of its Zipcar App at the iTunes App Store—a full 114 days since Schneider introduced it back at the Apple conference, which, in the age of Twitter, seems roughly equivalent to a decade. Okay, then. Great! The App must be killer, what with all that extra time. So let's go to the user reviews, where the leading category is….
The two key complaints: One, the App crashes the phone. And two, Zipsters, as they're known, still need their Zipcard access card, and they want the App to replace it entirely. So what gives? I emailed Zipcar spokeswoman Nancy Scott Lyon. "In just a few weeks," she wrote, "We've had nearly 140,000 downloads of our app. About 3% rated the app and less than 1% of those who downloaded the App have reviewed it–we've noticed that this is a trend that many other popular apps have experienced such as Starbucks, ESPN, Bump, Gap, and Whole Foods." In other words, the reviews offer too small a sampling to draw any conclusions but are enough of a concern that we've roped in others to show we're in good company. But does the App really cause the phone to crash? Well…
Oh, shit, sometimes it does cause iPhones to freeze. As for replacing the Zipcard access card, Lyon said the company's aware that some members want this, but that the first version was made this way so that people "don't get stranded because their phone battery goes dead, they lose their phone or can't get a network connection." Fair enough. Really, though, why did it take almost four months to get the damn thing out when you showed a working demo back in June? Lyon sent me an answer, but, in truth, she didn’t answer the question. I'm guessing it's a sore subject back at Zipcar HQ. Just for fun, let's look another car-controlling iPhone App that just hit the market, the Viper SmartStart, which came out October 13. The Viper App differs from Zipcar's because it's made for your car and as such requires installing hardware in your vehicle. But it has features Zipsters want: It can unlock the car on the first try (Zipcar requires you to first sign in with your Zipcard), and you can start the car, not just open it, from anywhere, which could come in handy on sub-zero days in big Zipcar markets like Boston. The Viper App was made by after10Studios, an App-building company in Santa Monica that's run by a 24-year-old named Mohamed Alkady. I asked Alkady how long it took his team to get the Viper App designed, built and in the App store. Answer: Three months. Now, I know this is just an App—it's not like Zipcar is knowingly putting people in exploding cars. But when you reach a certain size, you become fair game. So when you start posing on the cover of Fortune and talk about becoming a multibillion-dollar company, well, the honeymoon is over, even if you are great for the environment. Besides, Zipcar likes to point out that more than 25% of its 325,000 members have their lives on their iPhones–so this whole App thing seems like something they might want to be a little more careful with. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Interview: Talking To The Rentals’ Matt Sharp About His Music And Photography Posted: 17 Oct 2009 10:52 AM PDT  I spoke to Matt Sharp, founder and frontman of The Rentals, a few weeks back as a result of my weird fascination with film photography. (Incidentally, I have Louis CK, who you can now see on Parks and Recreation every week on NBC, to thank for my initial interest in film.) Current fans of the band know that it's been working on a yearlong project known as Songs About Time. Rather than going through the standard rigamarole of recording an album in a secluded studio, then touring to support it (not to mention dealing with the apparently crazy record labels), Sharp and Co. came up with a different idea: how about, instead of one big album, which is so start-stop, we sprinkle a few EPs throughout the year, and document our days together for our fans in the form of short movies and frequent photographs? Or, in Matt's own words: The project is one year in photography, film, and music that's all coming, in real time, on our Web site. There's not a better word for it than a multimedia project, but we have one element of the site that deals with photography, one part that deals with film, and one part that deals with music. At times they intersect and feed off each other, and have a cyclical, creative rhythm. |
The following is an excerpt from Adam L. Penenberg’s new book, 
Verizon and Motorola finally lifted the curtain on their new 
Maybe you’ve read 
That last item looks like it could be close as it would appear that Facebook Lite’s “View Top Stories” 
“I won’t be happy til the whole world hates me.” Not my words, for once, but those of Seth MacFarlane on stage last year at 
If you load up the 
Sometimes even a do-gooder company flubs something badly enough that it deserves to take some crap. So I give that honor to 
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