The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- The Top VC Blogs (According To Google Reader)
- Smub Lets You Do All Your Social Bookmarking On The Go
- Make Your Mark: RightSignature Lets You Sign Documents Online (Or On Your iPhone)
- It’s Heeerrre: ‘Pay With Facebook’ Is In The Wild
- Google’s Public Policy Chief To Be Deputy CTO for Obama Administration
- Spy Vs. Spy: The Spymaster Backlash Begins And Twitter Needs To Fix It
- Video: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings On The Economics Of Movie Streaming
- Facebook Revs Up For Payment Platform With Updated Terms
- If Your Phone Requires A Headset Adapter, Your Phone Sucks
- Foursquare To Serve Up APIs, More Mobile Apps, Free Beer
- The Walking Dead: Yahoo 360 Officially Closes, Again
- Goog-411 Now Tells You Intersections
| The Top VC Blogs (According To Google Reader) Posted: 30 May 2009 08:08 AM PDT Venture capitalists can be valuable sources of information about the tech community. Not only do they have quality insider information but they also have a knack for figuring out how to evaluate startups. So it makes sense that their blogs can be compelling reads. Larry Chang, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, has compiled a list of the 100 top VC blogs, according to the number of Google Reader subscribers for each one. Chang admits that the rankings don’t necessarily equate to the best quality of content and that there is fine content coming from VC blogs with less subscribers. But the list is a good starting point. Chang says he will be highlighting the best VC blog posts from this list on his blog every two weeks and will update the directory to add new VC blogs quarterly. Here are the top 20 on the list, with their Google Reader subscriber numbers (you can see all 100 on Chang’s blog): 1. Guy Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures, How To Change The World (17,555) (Image courtesy PhotoxXpress). Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 
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| Smub Lets You Do All Your Social Bookmarking On The Go Posted: 30 May 2009 04:00 AM PDT
Smub is incredibly simple to use. All you need to do when you’re browsing an article on your computer or mobile device is add “smub.it/” in front of the URL and it will take you to a page where you can bookmark the link to your Smub profile if you have one, or alternatively your favorite social bookmarking service or one of the more popular social networking services without the need for a separate account. Currently, Smub boasts e-mail support as well as direct push to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Mixx, Reddit and HelloTXT. Smub is a very basic service, but a useful one that’s been pretty well executed. Once you’ve saved a bookmark to your Smub profile, you can set a relatively short URL which redirects to it (e.g. smub.it/robinwauters/netflix.ceo - yay, another toolbar-in-a-frame) and you can also add keyword tags and comments to the article in one swoop. You can manage your bookmarks from your account too, and share them on the services cited above later if you choose to. To get started, you can import the bookmarks from whichever browser you’re using, and you can easily pull in your friends’ contact details from Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Windows Live Hotmail to make it easier and faster for you to share ‘Smubs’ with them. I like Smub already, and I suspect that while the team clearly wants to make sure the service is mobile-friendly (it works particularly well with the iPhone) some people will be interested in simply using it on their computers. For those, the Smub guys added a Firefox extension and toolbar which can come in quite handy if you’re using multiple social bookmarking services. Now go smub something and tell us what you think.
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| Make Your Mark: RightSignature Lets You Sign Documents Online (Or On Your iPhone) Posted: 29 May 2009 07:42 PM PDT
Cue the digital signature - handwritten signatures input using either your mouse or a tablet, which are then embedded alongside the document in question. These have around for quite a while, with companies in this space including DocuSign and EchoSign. Now RightSignature, a new startup that launched to the public last month, is looking to make things even easier. CEO Daryl Bernstein says that the existing digital signature companies don’t focus enough on the user experience, making it difficult to actually read the document you’re meant to sign. So RightSignature has built a proprietary PDF viewer that shows a large portion of the document alongside a box for your John Hancock. Bernstein also says that competitors tend to focus on large companies, so RightSignature is trying to make its service more accessible to smaller businesses (you can send a document out for signing in around sixty seconds). You can get a feel for the document signing process on this page. The service supports Google Docs, as well as native formats like PDF and .DOCX. Other extras include the option of requiring a photo taken by your computer’s camera alongside a signature and a free iPhone app that lets you sign documents on the go. The service offers a variety of distribution options, allowing users to send documents to a bulk list of users, and can also be used for petitions. Users can send five documents per month for free, or can choose from a number of plans starting at $11 a month per user to get unlimited document sending. TechCrunch readers can get two months of the premium service for free by signing up through this link. The service seems to work well, but RightSignature has a long road ahead - its competition is already quite well established, and some businesses may be hesitant to rely on a new service for their important document signatures. That said, the simplified UI may be enough to entice small businesses who had previously been scared off by the daunting nature of some of these other services. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| It’s Heeerrre: ‘Pay With Facebook’ Is In The Wild Posted: 29 May 2009 04:18 PM PDT Earlier today, we wrote about Facebook updating its terms to get ready for the roll-out of its payment system. Well guess what, it’s already here. The application GroupCard is currently testing the new payment system live for all accounts that have it installed. I included some screenshots below. It’s very straightforward: There’s a big “Pay With Facebook” button, similar to the “Facebook Connect” buttons you see throughout the web. Next to that, there are the other options to pay with Visa, Mastercard, etc. Clicking on the “Pay With Facebook” button pops open an overlay which asks you to confirm payment via your Facebook Credits. My $2.99 card cost me 30 Facebook Credits. Expect to see this roll out to other applications soon. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Google’s Public Policy Chief To Be Deputy CTO for Obama Administration Posted: 29 May 2009 03:28 PM PDT Google’s head of public policy, Andrew McLaughlin, will join the Obama administration as deputy chief technology officer, according to a report by the New York Times. McLaughlin will assist former Virginia Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra, who President Obama appointed as CTO in April. McLaughlin has been leading Google’s public policy efforts for quite some time now. According to this blog post, he was the first member of Google’s policy team in 2005. Before his time at Google, McLaughlin launched the nonprofit group Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, where he serves as vice president, chief policy officer, and chief financial officer. Previously, McLaughlin was a senior fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet. Most recently, McLaughlin was working on the Obama/Biden presidential transition team in Washington. McLaughlin isn’t the only Googler to join the Obama administration. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was speculated to be CTO, was recently named to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Former Google product manager Kate Stanton joined the White House as its director of citizen participation earlier this year. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Spy Vs. Spy: The Spymaster Backlash Begins And Twitter Needs To Fix It Posted: 29 May 2009 02:33 PM PDT
“I've started both unfollowing and reporting users of this game to @spam. This isn't because I hate my friends, it's because I have no other recourse to stop this application's abusive behavior,” he writes in a blog post today. While Stump isn’t entirely accurate that the only way to gain points is by tweeting out your actions in the game, the spirit of what he’s saying is correct because you are encouraged to tweet out your actions in the game to earn more points. He notes that this is similar to what happened with Facebook Platform early on, as games like Zombies took over people’s streams. This is something that VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon notes as well, joking that maybe they should rename the game “SpamMaster.” But the real issue here, which both Stump and Eldon bring up, is that this is the perfect example of why Twitter needs filters of some sort. We’ve been railing on this for a while, and I’m actually quite glad this game has come along to bring the issue to the forefront. The problem isn’t that the game is spam, it’s that Twitter is not at all set up to handle games like this, even though it is positioning itself to be a robust platform. You need to be able to do things like block certain hashtags or keywords, and to be able to group together certain friends. Currently, various third party sites/services handle thing on top of Twitter, but it’s not enough if Twitter is really going to be a new form of communication. Because if Twitter gets overrun by these types of viral games, people will simply stop visiting Twitter, and it will destroy the platform’s backbone. Not that these are trivial things for Twitter to implement given its crazy rate of growth right now. But it will be needed if that growth is to continue in the future. At the very least, Twitter should allow you to block which apps you get updates from — though I think it still considers Spymaster updates to be coming from the “web.” For his part, Spymaster co-founder Eston Bond says, “Backlash has been pretty minimal. Some people find Spymaster noisy but I’m amazed at how many people defend their tweeted spymaster actions to others (search can give you some examples.) For now, everyone’s having fun and I want to make sure that we can keep the game compelling in the long term. I have lots of content ideas that I’ll be hopefully implementing soon.” Again, I don’t consider this Spymaster’s problem — but there is a problem, it’s Twitter’s. You’ll see this as more of these style games come along. It’s a matter of when, not if. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Video: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings On The Economics Of Movie Streaming Posted: 29 May 2009 01:41 PM PDT A couple years ago, Netflix began supplementing its DVD mail rental business with movie streams over the Web. for a few thousand select titles. Today, millions of Netflix customers stream their movies instead of waiting for them to come in the mail (or, more often, do both). ComScore Video Metrix estimates Netflix’s online viewership a bit lower at 645,000 unique viewers in March. They watched 6.9 million video streams and the average time spent watching per viewer is an amazing 128 minutes for the month, which is right up there with YouTube in terms of time spent (having full-length feature films helps keep people around longer). You pay Netflix a subscription, and you can watch your monthly allotment of movies any way you want. Netflix doesn’t care where you watch your movies, whether it is on your TV, xBox 360, Windows Media Center, or other devices. Streams still make up a small portion of the overall movies watched by Netflix customers, but it is growing as the company expands its streaming catalog, broadband improves, and computers become more like TVs (and vice versa). I ran into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings at the AllThingsD conference this week, and asked him in the video above how his streaming service is going and how its economics compare to that of mailing out DVDs. As you can imagine, it costs much less to stream a movie over the Internet than it does to mail it as a DVD. But Netflix ends up paying twice anyway because it already owns the movies on DVD. It has to pay the studios an additional streaming fee. The studios like that. “If the studios have their way, we’ll pay them two or three times,” quips Hastings. But he is resigned to paying wtice for movies he’s already bought. The way he looks at it, Netflix is paying the studios instead of the Post Office. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Facebook Revs Up For Payment Platform With Updated Terms Posted: 29 May 2009 01:23 PM PDT
Facebook is using the same community commenting process it used during its site-wide Terms of Service fiasco before it officially rolls out the new terms, giving users three days to voice their thoughts on the site’s Governance site. You can read through the proposed list of rules here (there’s also a FAQ). Most of them are pretty straightforward - Facebook basically says that it licenses all of your virtual goods and credits to you (you don’t own them), and it can do whatever it wants as far as changing the price of credits. It’s also not responsible for anything you buy (aside from ensuring that your Facebook Gifts are delivered), and there are no refunds (though the company says that it may intervene in disputes betwen users concerning payments, but that it is under no obligation to do so). Some of the language refers to transactions between users and third parties, which is indicative of the upcoming payment system. There are a few interesting tidbits worth looking through. My favorite is this one, which seems to indicate that Facebook can randomly disperse virtual gifts to friends if you fail to use your credits in three years (which could have some potentially hilarious consequences, depending on who receives those virtual bikinis and cans of Coors Light):
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| If Your Phone Requires A Headset Adapter, Your Phone Sucks Posted: 29 May 2009 01:14 PM PDT
There was a time when this sort of thing was acceptable. It was only a few years ago. Most phones were hitting the shelves with but a few hundred megabytes of storage space, while standalone audio players touted capacities that all but the most dedicated downloaders had a hard time filling. Then came microSD and its high capacity variant, allowing users to pack up to 16 gigs of data (soon to be 32 gigabytes and, with the eventual evolution of SDXC, up to 2 terabytes) onto a card roughly the size of your thumbnail. Then came the iPhone which, whether the decriers like it or not, made much of the general populace give a damn about what their cell phones could do. With 3G networks up across the country and 4G networks beginning to roll out, audio streaming and on-the-go music downloads are becoming commonplace. Phone manufacturers can no longer afford to implement media playback as an afterthought - but if they insist on requiring headset adapters, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Foursquare To Serve Up APIs, More Mobile Apps, Free Beer Posted: 29 May 2009 12:57 PM PDT
Initially, team hopes this API will be used to build more mobile clients, co-founder Dennis Crowley tells us. Right now, there is only a native app for the iPhone, but he says that there are already a few people working on a native Android app as well. And they envision someone building a BlackBerry app shortly as well. I know that will be music the ears of a lot of my friends who are forced to visit Foursquare’s website from their mobile browsers, which is a less than ideal experience right now. Crowley also says that someone has already used the APIs to build a desktop client on Adobe AIR. As for the iPhone app, version 1.2 has just been submitted for approval to the App Store. As we know, that’s always a crapshoot, but assuming it gets approved in relatively short order, there will be a lot more cities the service will be available in. The team also recently rolled out a way to submit your own badges. But the recent news that most interests me has to be how some cities have establishments that are acknowledging mayorships. You can a mayorship in Foursquare basically by being the person who checks in there most often (on different days). One bar in LA, Good Hurt, is giving away a free beer to the “mayor” every time they come in! Another place in Denver is giving away free lunches to the mayor, and some bar in Brooklyn has a blackboard which they write the mayor’s name on, Crowley tells us. He says that the team is thinking about ways to work with more establishments to offer these sorts of deals. It’s really a pretty ingenious idea for both the service and the establishment, as it drives usage of both. It’s sort of like what some brands are using Twitter for, but the location aspect is particularly interesting and could be much more targeted. And yes, that could even eventually blossom into business model. But basically, I just want some San Francisco bars to acknowledge my mayorships and give me a free beer. That’s my business model. [photo: flickr/a4gpa] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| The Walking Dead: Yahoo 360 Officially Closes, Again Posted: 29 May 2009 11:50 AM PDT Yahoo 360, which was supposed to close early last year, is finally officially shutting its doors on July 13, according to a blog post written on the site today. The social network/blogging service that nobody really used (except in Vietnam) steadily lost its steam, especially in the U.S. According to ComScore, Yahoo 360 had 13.9 million worldwide unique visitors in April. But only 982,000 of those unique visitors were from the U.S. This is down from 1.8 million unique U.S. visitors a year ago (see chart below). Yahoo 360 was built to create a social network around a blogging platform, and simply couldn’t compete with other social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and other more popular blogging platforms like Wordpress and Movable Type. Similar to the company’s original announcement in 2007, Yahoo is promising to help move blog posts and friends lists over to a more general Yahoo profile. What took it so long to pull the plug? Yahoo says it took almost two years to shut down the service because the company was trying to find “a sustainable and adequate solution” for retaining user’s personal data from the site. The blog post also mentions that they have a solution for users but neglects to mention what exactly that is. Yahoo also shut down its other venture into social networking, Mash, last summer. Perhaps Yahoo is going to focus its efforts on its Twitter-clone microblogging platform Yahoo Meme, which has been rolling out invites recently but isn’t getting resoundingly positive reviews. Maybe Yahoo should just give up on creating a social network and buy one instead (Twitter!). Or maybe it should just make a deal with Microsoft for boatloads of money. UPDATE: Yahoo responded to us via Twitter (!) with this: “the solution we have for users is a new blogging tool, found in user’s profiles.”  Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Goog-411 Now Tells You Intersections Posted: 29 May 2009 11:28 AM PDT If you don’t use GOOG-411 when you are away from your computer and need directory assistance, you should. It is free and will give you the address or phone number of any local business. Today, GOOG-411 added an obvious feature it should have had all along: it now tells you the street intersections where a business is located. Since it knows the location information and can presumably cross-reference that with Google Maps, giving out the intersection is not too hard. To get the intersection, just ask for “details” after you get the phone number. The thing about GOOG-411 is that it is all automated using Google’s speech recognition technology. While you are waiting for it to find the phone number and address, it plays a recording of a human voice pretending to be a computer calculating the answer (”bidabudabidabudabidabudabid”). It’s a nice touch. Almost makes you forget you are talking to a computer. Almost. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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When you’re on the road, passing time reading up on things online from your mobile phone, it can be quite a pain in the ass to bookmark articles for later or share them with others. 
Facebook developers are dying for a unified payment platform, and all signs are pointing to one coming soon. In the latest news, the site has just 
Listen up, 2.5mm-to-3.5mm headset adapters. You too, crappy shape changers required by an absurd chunk of the worthwhile phones out there: We’re through. Game over. Just like 
It’s been over 2 months since 
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