The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Electro-Harmonix and Social Media: You’re Doing It Right
- From Terrible To Terrifying: Newspaper Ad Sales Plummet $2.6 Billion In Q1 2009
- The Big Cheese: Powerful Version Of Google Search Appliance Can Grow Exponentially
- Video Tour Of Star Trek: The Exhibition at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute
- Twitter And Bing Shutdown In China As Tiananmen Date Looms
- According To Twitter, You’re All Using Their Website To Tweet Your Hearts Out
- Nokia N97 Coming To 75 Countries This Month (Assembly Video)
- Search Smackdown: Bing Vs. Google
- CrunchGear Does E3: Day One
- Want Your Service Integrated With TweetDeck? It’ll Cost You A Cool $50,000
- Quirky Is A Social Network For Product Development
- Your Father’s Day Gift Idea: ShirtsMyWay.com
- Tungle.me Makes Scheduling And Calendar Sharing More Social
- Why China Isn’t “The Next Silicon Valley”
- Google Local Lures Small Businesses With Their Own Web Dashboard
- The Future Of Twitter Visualized
- Sugar Inc. Raises $16 million, To Expand Into TV, Movies, Online Video
- Almost.at: Real Time Events, As Tweeted By The People Who Are Actually There
- Now You Also Can Call Bing 411.
- Blown Cover: A Couple Ways To Stop Those Spymaster Invite DMs
- WatchDox Lets You Track And Control Document Sharing (Beta Invites)
- Netbook OS Jolicloud Prepares For Launch: Exclusive Screenshots To Whet Your Appetite
- The Next Big Feature Of Xbox Live: Twitter!
- MySpace Experimenting With Interactive Ads Powered By SocialMedia.com
- Google Upgrades Custom Search Box On Blogger
| Electro-Harmonix and Social Media: You’re Doing It Right Posted: 02 Jun 2009 08:38 AM PDT  I just took a tour of the Electro-Harmonix factory in Queens, New York and came away with an interesting bit of information. Their lead web guy, Scott Matthews, has created a number of systems to connect musicians and EHX products in ways that I've never seen on other conventional music supply sites. EHX is famous. They've been making pedals and effects since 1968 and the sounds their pedals produce have been heard in countless recordings in the last few decades. But how is the average Joe supposed to share his experiences with the pedals? Or, more importantly, how does the professional or amateur guitarist supposed to know how to use the pedals and which pedals to buy?
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| From Terrible To Terrifying: Newspaper Ad Sales Plummet $2.6 Billion In Q1 2009 Posted: 02 Jun 2009 08:06 AM PDT Nothing like a telling graphic to illustrate what most have been expecting, albeit probably not in this order of magnitude. Veteran media exec Alan Mutter discovered some horrid statistics about the state of ad sales for American newspapers on trade organization NAA’s website, and published his view on the Q1 2009 numbers on his blog. They don’t look pretty. The stats show that total newspaper ad sales dropped by an unprecedented 28.28% in the first quarter of 2009, a deep plunge that represents a loss of more than $2.6 billion in ad revenue compared year-over-year. Compared to 3 years ago - 2006 was a pretty good year for American newspapers - we’re looking at a drop of more than $4.5 billion in ad sales in just three years if you only take into account the first quarter. The sharp decline is caused by the lousy state of both digital and dead tree ad sales: the stats posted on the Newspaper Association of America website show that print sales fell by 29.7% in the first three months of this year (to $5.9 billion), while online sales dropped a record 13.4% (to $696.3 million). Classified advertising is clearly still taking major hits. Compared to the first quarter of last year, revenue from all types of classified ads fell 42,32% to less than $1.5 billion. Considering the fact that total classifieds ad sales topped $4 billion back in 2001 and were still at almost $3.4 billion in the first quarter of 2007, that has got to hurt. The biggest losers in classifieds: Recruitment (-67.39%), Real Estate (-45.55%) and Automotive (-43.42%). Annual ad sales for American newspapers came in at a grand total of nearly $49.5 billion in 2005 and dropped to about $37.8 billion in 2008. If the decline rate keeps accelerating the way these first quarter results suggest, we could be looking at somewhere in between $26 billion and $30 billion in total ad sales revenue for this year. And yet somehow, I fear newspapers haven’t even seen the bottom of the barrel yet. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. 
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| The Big Cheese: Powerful Version Of Google Search Appliance Can Grow Exponentially Posted: 02 Jun 2009 07:00 AM PDT On average, most businesses currently double the number of digital documents they have every twelve to eighteen months. The impact of this rapid addition of content, argues Google, is that the search functionality of an organization’s databases and Websites need to be scalable in a dynamic environment. Google maintains that scalability is a crucial need of enterprises today, which is why the new version of Google’s Search Appliance (GSA) for enterprise search customers has added a powerful, dynamic scalability feature, allowing businesses to now index billions of documents, in addition to indexing Web pages. To extend search into the enterprise, Google offers businesses its GSA product, a yellow box (that resembles a slice of Swiss cheese), which is based on a standard Dell server and is powered by Xeon 5500 Series processors from Intel. The GSA can index any enterprise data generated by Oracle databases, SAP systems, Documentum, SharePoint, Salesforce.com, HR systems, intranets, wikis, and more, and presents it to employees in a familiar Google-like interface. The sixth generation GSA will be able to index 30 million documents, compared to 10 million in the last generation. In the sixth generation of the GSA, Google is now adding functionality to let businesses stack GSAs on top of each other, so businesses can search billions of documents across integrated GSAs. The fifth generation GSAs were not able to be interconnected. The new version of the GSA also allows businesses to separate data by sector of an organization (engineering, marketing, finance) but still be able to provide unified search results of all data contained within each appliance. Each department can also monitor and regulate which documents should be integrated into enterprise-wide search and which should be kept within the department’s search. In the new version of the GSA, Google has upgraded the customization of the appliance, adding several new features to help businesses tailor the GSA to their search needs. First, Google now allows administrators to specify whether the GSA will implement late binding, which is real time authorization of whether a user has access to a document, or early binding, where the GSA holds a cache of existing policy information about who can access which documents. Second, if a business has multiple GSAs operating search, administrators can give more importance in search results to a particular appliance (engineering documents vs. marketing documents). Developers can also add an extra ranking framework to stack search results. Google is also revving up search results in the GSA, adding social search features such as suggested search and user-added results, that aggregate knowledge across the organization for more precise search results. Additionally, users can now enable cross-language search, where the GSA will translate their search results in real-time into whichever language they choose. Google now counts 25,000 enterprise search customers, up from last year’s 20,000 customers. Over half of customers use Google’s search appliance and the rest use its hosted site search and other enterprise products. Last year, Google added results based on personalization and Google Alerts functionality to the GSA. This year’s emphasis on scale and customization reinforces Google’s potentially strong enterprise strategy for both content inside the firewall and in the cloud. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Video Tour Of Star Trek: The Exhibition at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute Posted: 02 Jun 2009 06:30 AM PDT  Jeff Victor of STARFLEET, the International Star Trek Fan Association, recently showed me around the 12,500-foot Star Trek exhibit at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute. We laughed, we cried, we played a little Dabo. Good times indeed. Star Trek at the Franklin Institute [FI.edu] STARFLEET International Star Trek Fan Association [SFI.org]
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| Twitter And Bing Shutdown In China As Tiananmen Date Looms Posted: 02 Jun 2009 04:31 AM PDT
Since many of the sites don’t actually have Chinese versions, it’s hard to know how many people will be affected by this, but for those brave and resourceful business people, entrepreneurs and social commentators with strong links to the world outside China, it’s a crushing blow. Having traveled to China last year I have a number of contacts there now who have all now confirmed the shutdown. The move is almost certainly related to the date. The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened on June 4, and the lead-up to any date like this is usually a time when the Firewall is tightened. The API to Twitter, used by clients like TweetDeck, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop, has also been affected. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| According To Twitter, You’re All Using Their Website To Tweet Your Hearts Out Posted: 02 Jun 2009 04:00 AM PDT
Here’s the kicker: after some digging, I found that the company has learned about this issue a couple of days ago but decided not to fix it in order not to disturb the engineers during the weekend:
Guess they’re having a long weekend. Meanwhile, I’m wondering how this will affect the ranking of ‘most popular Twitter clients’ and the likes. (Hat tip to Chris Cosentino) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Nokia N97 Coming To 75 Countries This Month (Assembly Video) Posted: 02 Jun 2009 03:11 AM PDT  Yes, the rumors are true: Nokia will start shipping its N97 device (they call it a mobile computer) to no less than 75 countries this month, after starting to accept pre-orders earlier last month. In the second half of 2009, Nokia plans to start rolling out a bunch of new features and functions, but right off the bat it will be the first device to come pre-installed with the recently launched Ovi Store. We hope the experience is better than the actual launch. Nokia hasn't detailed exactly which countries will start seeing N97 shipments roll in, but it's safe to say they will most likely include most of the European markets, as well as North America.
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| Search Smackdown: Bing Vs. Google Posted: 02 Jun 2009 01:53 AM PDT
- searching for ‘Google’ Google will show news results about themselves first, and a link to their homepage later, which makes sense since people are probably already on there. The rest of the results consists of Google products and local versions of the search service. Noteworthy difference is the presence of a button that lets you drop down a widget displaying information about Google’s stock without the need to leave the page. Bing, on the other hand, provides a list of possible extended search queries on the left sidebar, and a list of useful direct links to Google services below the first result. It also lists ’similar’ searches on the right sidebar (not visible in this screenshot) with alternative services - Bing being the first one they recommend. It also displays a box that you can use to jump to Google search, and it keeps track of your search history right on the page, unless you turn that feature off. - searching for ‘TechCrunch’ Google only shows internal network links on the first SERP with the exception of our Twitter account, Netvibes profile and Wikipedia entry, while Bing mostly shows links to third-party services (Wikipedia, OnSugar, Flux, Blip.tv, AboutUs.org, Facebook, GitHub, Mahalo, etc.). From the viewpoint of TC the company, the latter situation is not ideal, and to top it off running the query on Bing apparently means potential visitors will see the names of competing blogs in the left sidebar. On the upside, you can open the Wikipedia article on TechCrunch on the same page, which makes for a seamless user experience if information about us was what you were looking for. - searching for ‘Linux’ Using Google, you get much better results for this query, period. Google lists at least five very relevant links (Kernel.org, Debian.org, RedHat.com, LinuxJournal.com and LI.org) that you will not find in the first 15 search results on Bing. No nifty sidebars, nor any amount of spot-on similar results will help Microsoft here. - searching for ‘Office Space quotes’ Here, Bing takes the top prize, although with this particular query the results are much more similar, which can be attributed to the fact that it is more detailed (three words instead of one like the other examples). Why do I say that? Because Bing is the only one of both that correctly lists the movie Office Space’s Wikipedia entry in the first few results, while Google doesn’t even list until the fifth page of results (both rank Wikiquote quite high). Also, this is where the extended search options in the left sidebar at Bing really shine: ‘Office Space sound clips’, ‘Office Space WAV files’, ‘Office Space Clips’, etc. - that’s the stuff you’d likely be looking for. It is far too early and this is far too unscientific a research method to jump to any conclusions - we’d need a Jump to Conclusions mat for that - but using Savage’s tool gives you a nice clean overview of what most people who’ve tried both engines today: Google and Bing at the very least feel very different, and while you can argue about the quality of one engine versus the other back and forth as much as you want, it’s painfully clear both need improvement. Of course, if there continues to be no clear winner on the quality front, then Google has already won the battle before it starts, expensive ad campaigns be damned. That said, please allow me to reiterate a point Michael made yesterday as well as in the past, that I most definitely agree with: Microsoft is damn right not to give up the search game yet like some are suggesting they should. Please stop calling for a monopoly in search, let these companies compete and fight hard for every user, and I’m sure we’ll see more innovation in this space soon enough. (Via @PatPhelan) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Posted: 01 Jun 2009 10:13 PM PDT
Today’s events included Microsoft’s Xbox event this morning, then heavyweight EA’s press conference in the early afternoon, then Ubisoft in the later afternoon (they win the guest presenter contest, with both Pele and James Cameron). They dropped some interesting stuff, though I’d be lying if I told you they didn’t introduce a game where you do fantasy make-up. Ubi had the most interesting non-game talks: they’re working with Hollywood in a pretty ridiculous fashion and are going to be using their in-game engines and assets to help in creating actual films. If three events in a day sounds like a light schedule, well, it is for a team of like 10 guys, but there’s just two of us right now and we’ve got to liveblog, shoot stills and video, transcode, watermark, upload, and post like five things for each event — all while trying to stay alive in downtown Los Angeles — a full-time job in itself. Here are a few highlights from the day: Project Natal camera-based gameplay (looks ridiculous) We’re going to have lots of hands-ons tomorrow, so watch the tag or check back late tomorrow for another omnibus post. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Want Your Service Integrated With TweetDeck? It’ll Cost You A Cool $50,000 Posted: 01 Jun 2009 09:42 PM PDT
We’ve been hearing from multiple sources that TweetDeck has been toying with charging a fee for services to appear in the popular Twitter client for some time now, so we turned to the company’s founder, Iain Dodsworth, for answers. He says that no services have paid up until this point, but that by the time the next version comes out, that will change. Unsurprisingly, Dodsworth wasn’t willing to go into the details of the arrangements, but we’ve been hearing it will cost services around $50,000 to appear in TweetDeck. We’ve also heard that there might be an extra fee to become a default service, but this information is less concrete. It also sounds like only some services will be asked to pay to appear in TweetDeck, while others will be included for free, which makes sense. The application would have a hard time omitting a service like TwitPic without raising quite a few eyebrows. But for those link shorteners that are a dime a dozen, particularly the ones that are just getting started, a fee would be much less surprising. Now, let me be clear: I don’t think there’s anything particularly sinister about this. It’s a natural progression of the Twitter ecosystem. Developers have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise they’re going to be presenting users with an increasingly overwhelming and redundant list of options. So they can either subjectively pick out their favorite services (or perhaps the most popular ones), or they can charge for their spots. In theory they could also allow users to manually specify their own shortener and image sharing services (in the same way you can specify the default search in your web browser), but the number of people who would actually do this would be negligible. That said, I do have concerns. My biggest issue is that TweetDeck, or any other clients that adopt a similar model, could show favoritism to services that are clearly inferior simply because they have larger pocketbooks. At this point many of these third party services (particularly the URL shorteners) are very similar, so I don’t particularly care if my link goes out through one or the other. But if TweetDeck starts defaulting to a service that isn’t very good, or refuses to integrate an up-and-coming new service that users are clamoring for, then we’re going to have issues. As for other clients, TweetDeck’s competition has largely avoided the practice of charging for integration. Seesmic Desktop doesn’t do it - in fact, it rotates the default services for each install to maintain neutrality. And Tweetie, the very popular iPhone and native Mac client, doesn’t charge either (though it does generate revenue through premium versions and integrated advertising). But now that the dam is breaking, I suspect we’ll hear about more applications, particularly the free ones, adopting similar pay-to-play models with their integrated third party services. That TweetDeck is among the first clients to do this isn’t very surprising - it’s the most popular Twitter client, and the company has also raised funding, which means it has to appease investors with some actual revenue. The company has also recently experimented with a branded Blink 182 version of TweetDeck, and Dodsworth says that more revenue streams are on the way. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Quirky Is A Social Network For Product Development Posted: 01 Jun 2009 08:52 PM PDT Have you ever thought of a quirky but innovative product that might be useful to the masses but didn’t follow through with the idea? Sometimes these flashes of genius get lost in the shuffle. Startup quirky is hoping to be the platform for product ideas that are born on napkin doodles and in other unorthodox ways. The site then tries to use crowdsourcing to develop the product, by engaging participants in collaborating on every aspect of product creation - from ideation, design, naming, manufacturing, marketing, to sales. It’s like a social network for product development. Founded by serial entrepreneur Ben Kaufman (he created mophie and kluster), quirky lets users submit their product idea for $99. Users can also vote, rate, and influence other people’s product ideas. Every week users can post ideas on quirky to be rated by the quirky community. After a seven day evaluation period, the quirky community chooses one product from the pool of submitted ideas to move forward through the process. quirky’s community engages and contributes to every part of the product’s development, weighing in on everything from naming to logo selection to packaging. The product is pre-sold at the quirky online store. Once the product hits a pre-sales threshold, credit cards are charged, and the product graduates to production and delivery. $0.30 of every dollar generated from the sale of a quirky product goes back to the creators, and the people who voted, commented, and rated the project idea along the way, giving the community an incentive participate and engage in each product’s development. The creators are given $0.12 of that $0.30. With the launch of the site, quirky has also revealed its first product, created by friends and family of quirky employees. The Sling Back is a universal wire retractor that holds up three feet of any type of wire ( headphone cords, small power cables, USB cords, firewire cables, or printer cords) up to 1/8″ in diameter. On the development page of the Sling Back, quirky lists the creator (in this case, Ben Kaufman) and the top “influencers,” the people who contributed to the development of the retractor. The site says that so far, two other products are currently being developed. Each product lists the stage of development they are in and how much time is left before a decision will be made. For example, “The Ouch Pouch,” a designable sling that has pictures and decorations needs a logo. quirky seems like an innovative idea although, I do think that the creators of the product which ends up being developed may get the short end of the stick when it comes to sales, especially given that they are putting up $99 per idea. But, on the flip side, these ideas, which may be otherwise discarded or forgotten, are given the chance of being created. The site is similar to one of Kaufman’s previous ventures, NameThis, and other sites IdeaBlob and Innocentive. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Your Father’s Day Gift Idea: ShirtsMyWay.com Posted: 01 Jun 2009 05:45 PM PDT
My last day in Shanghai I met with Peter Crawfurd and Michael Yang the baby-faced founders of ShirtsMyWay.com. (Pictured here.) ShirtsMyWay allows you to customize a men's dress shirt with trillions of possible combinations of details, from the material on the collar to the stitching around the buttonholes. Shanghai-based tailors whip it up, and it's mailed out to you for $65-$95, including international-shipping. Right now, the site is running a buy-two-get-one-free Father’s Day special, but TechCrunch readers are getting an additional 10% off their entire orders placed before June 7. Because they aren’t normally set up for this kind of promotion (ahem, I was a little pushy about it all), you have to email your name and the promo code “TechCrunch 10%” to support@shirtsmyway.com within an hour of placing the order to get the discount. So here’s the bad news for some of you: Right now, the site only makes shirts for men, although the guys awkwardly measured me on a hutong in Shanghai to make me the first-ever women's shirt. (I still haven't gotten it, so no word on the results.) For other ladies out there, I figure this is at least a good idea for a cheap and very personalized Father's Day gift. Crawfurd and Yang haven't raised any outside capital to date, and this wasn't the easiest business to start-up. It took Crawfurd more than a year to find the right tailors and fabrics. Meanwhile, Yang tried twice to outsource the building of the site itself and both times was disappointed, so finally he rebuilt it all himself. In February 2009, they finally launched. Apparently, it’s going well. In April, they sold about 300 shirts, and with just a handful of employees they break even on way less than that. (They wouldn’t let me say how much less, but it’s substantially less.) Every once in a while, it's nice to see a business model that doesn't need huge volumes to work, isn’t it? Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Tungle.me Makes Scheduling And Calendar Sharing More Social Posted: 01 Jun 2009 05:32 PM PDT Syncing calendars and scheduling meetings over email can be an arduous and annoying task. I’ve often wished that I could just send my calendar to contacts instead of going back and forth over email, so we could find a mutual time that works best for various schedules more quickly. Tungle, a scheduling and calendar sharing tool we wrote about during its launch last year, has made scheduling a meeting a whole lot more social and simple through its Tungle.Me technology. Tungle offers users Tungle Accelerate, a free web-based application that lets you share calendars across companies and platforms, schedule meetings with individuals or groups inside or outside their company and propose multiple meeting times in invitations. The service currently syncs with Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage for Mac, and soon Lotus Notes. Tungle’s latest technology, Tungle.Me, a “click to meet” application that is integrated with Tungle Accelerate, makes inbound scheduling more social. Once you create a Tungle account, you can also create a Tungle.me URL (you can include this link in an email or message and anyone can click on it) which you can send to contacts. At that site, contacts will input their name and email to verify their identity, then choose an available time to meet with you. Your calendar (which is synced via Tungle) will appear so that contacts can choose an open time. The spots where you have meetings are blocked off. Once a contact requests a meeting, you are sent an email with potential times for meetings. You can accept the meeting time (your calendar will be updated upon approval), send the contact another meeting time or you can deny the meeting all together. If you add meetings into your calendar that are synced with Tungle, your Tungle.me link is updated in real-time. And contacts who request a meeting don’t have to be Tungle users to use the Tungle.me interface.  Your Tungle.me link can also be embedded as a widget in an email or on a site as well as added as a Facebook widget on your profile. The widgets display a real-time glance of a users’ availability and a quick link to their personal Tungle.me URL.  The widget is a great idea, but I’m not so sure I’d want to give Facebook users and all of my friends the ability schedule a meeting with me. There is also the potential for random people, who you don’t know, to spam your email with meeting requests. Of course, you can always deny these meetings but it’s still annoying to sort though random emails in the first place. But the service itself is a innovative idea and could save users, especially those who have frequent daily and weekly meetings but don’t have a personal assistant or secretary, a lot of time when it comes to scheduling those meetings. And the ability for your Tungle calendar to be synced with Outlook, Google Calendar and other popular scheduling applications makes the service compelling. Tungle’s main competitors are TimeBridge, which also lets you publish your calendar to selected users, and Jiffle. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Why China Isn’t “The Next Silicon Valley” Posted: 01 Jun 2009 04:45 PM PDT
If you think about it, Silicon Valley doesn't really move as fast as people say it does. Sure, the rest of the U.S. business world may feel out-lapped by the pattern of companies going from nothing to billions in a few years, but those start-ups are mostly the outliers. For every wunderkind smirking on the cover of a magazine, there are far more entrepreneurs who slogged away for thirty years before ever getting their Nasdaq moments. And there are even more who slogged away for longer and didn't. And even the breakout Googles and Facebooks of the Valley had the clear benefit of building their companies on top of decades of infrastructure build-out. I mean "infrastructure" in the sense of technology infrastructure—the chips, routers, open source stack, etc.— but I also mean it in the sense of Valley infrastructure that makes it possible to come up with an idea at breakfast and have a company by noon. It's taken decades of continual boom-and-bust cycles to create the complex fabric of venture capitalists, angel investors, lawyers, term sheets, accounting methods and best practices that a newby entrepreneur waltzing in the Valley today has the luxury of taking for granted. What makes China so staggering is that everything that happened to corporate America over decades—think the television and media studios build out of the 1950s, the greed of the 1980s, the dot com bubble, the build out of physical and IT infrastructure, current Web 2.0 and CleanTech innovation—is all happening to China at once. Imagine: At the same time eCommerce is getting sea legs, TV Home Shopping is also getting hot. Online ads are growing not because people are TiVoing through commercials—both TV and online ads are growth markets at the same time. Ditto for entertainment and piracy: While Hollywood sees the Internet as a threat to its cozy legacy business, China's entertainment industry is just now building amid a world where piracy is already rampant. No one assumes anyone will buy a CD, so they just look for other ways to make money. The wonder of China right now isn't just the size of the market. It's the rate at which dozens of “old” and “new” economies are all maturing amid one another, and the hyper-network effects that such economic progress is having throughout the country. As for China’s start-up ecosystem , it’s working to build its own Valley-like infrastructure, but it doesn’t have the luxury of growing it steadily over several decades. Experts say there's at least $20 billion in venture capital sloshing around the country right now. It’s probably double that if you count angels and unofficial or very local funds, says Rocky Lee of DLA Piper, a law firm that represents much of that venture money in China. That's why calling China merely “the next Silicon Valley” misses the singularity of what's happening there. The Valley has never been like this, and I don't say that to knock the Valley. In many ways, our steady development has been healthier. But it’s also a lot less electric. In the next ten years or so way more money will be lost amid the China chaos, but I’m betting way more money will be made too. It reminds me of the distinction between start-ups who develop products in "parallel" and those who develop them in "serial." In the former, you raise a bunch of money, hire an army of coders and develop your whole vision at once. In the latter, you build one product, prove that one works and can make money, then raise more money to develop a second. Typically in a time of economic plenty and investor froth everyone pushes for parallel. When the funding and revenues get tight, the serial approach comes into vogue. Parallel is always more exciting; serial is always more rational. Silicon Valley tends to develop start-ups in “serial waves,” if you will. There are always outliers and waves can coincide in timing like CleanTech and Web 2.0 did, but investors and entrepreneurs tend to jump on dominant high-growth bandwagons and ride them until a few billion companies come out of them and many more fail. Then they wait for the next wagon. China, as a country, is developing in parallel. The wagons are running constantly and going in nearly every direction. It’s a time of chaos that can burn people out, but it’s also one so unique in the history of modern economics that many ambitious people can't ignore it. That's why most transplants from the West who survive their first two years in China tend to stay for more than ten. Given all this, China is a lot more inwardly focused than other places like Israel and Europe where start-ups have to be global from day one to have a big enough addressable market. When it comes to the Web and mobile, the biggest surprises will likely come from local, non-English speaking entrepreneurs, maybe even those outside the largest cities. They probably don’t read TechCrunch and may not even know where Silicon Valley is on a map. But that won’t matter, because their local market will necessarily develop very differently than ours. And while China gets a rap for ripping off U.S. Web start-ups now, I think we're going to start seeing U.S. start-ups copying a lot of elements of Chinese entrepreneurs' business plans, whether it’s unlocking the value in virtual goods, experimenting with alternative online payment methods or developing more social forms of e-commerce, where like-minded friends shop together. You always find the best ideas within atmospheres of constraints. It's why some of the best companies are started during recessions. It's why Israel was such a surprising hot-bed for Nasdaq IPOs in the late 1990s. And it's why Chinese Web companies have come up with other ways of making money than just slapping ads on a site, because they had to. I’ll be going back to China in October, and I’m learning Mandarin in the meantime. Because odds are the next great grinning Web coverboy may not speak English. (And for the commenters who keep complaining that India isn’t getting enough TechCrunch love, calm down! I’ll be there most of November.) Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Google Local Lures Small Businesses With Their Own Web Dashboard Posted: 01 Jun 2009 04:15 PM PDT Google wants more small businesses to claim their listing profiles on Google Local (which is basically listings that pop up in Google Maps and local search results). To entice them, starting tomorrow it will give local businesses in the real world with physical addresses a free dashboard akin to what Websites get for free with Google Analytics (see screenshot above). Except that it will show stats such as how many times their business comes up as a search result, how often people click through, as well as how many times people generate driving directions to their business son Google Maps and where those people come from. In return, all they need to do is claim and verify their listings at the Google Local Businesss Center. It takes about as much time as setting up a new email account, maybe a little more. Google gets clean data (and, thus, better results), businesses get free analytics and an opportunity to train Google’s search engine. Right now only a few hundred thousand businesses in the U.S. have been claimed out of approximately 20 million. The other benefit to Google is that the more that small businesses can measure the impact of search, the more likely they will be to buy search ads. The dashboard shows the top search queries that result in a business’ listing showing up. The next obvious step is to start buying those keywords or optimize a business’ site to make sure they are on the page. There is no integration yet with Google AdWords (like there is on Google Analytics), but you can see that one coming from a mile away. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| The Future Of Twitter Visualized Posted: 01 Jun 2009 04:00 PM PDT During his keynote at the TWTRCON conference yesterday in San Francisco, Steve Rubel showed off a mind map he made entitled “The Future of Twitter.” The map, which I’ve embedded below with his permission, is an interesting way to look at the state of the service. It starts out branching into two different directions: “Twitter and the Ecosystem,” and “Twitter as an OS.” One side shows what could happen to Twitter in the future from possible threats (of services that can kill it), to companies that could acquire it, to those that it could acquire. The other side shows Twitter as a social OS versus its role as a marketing OS. From there it goes into its role as a platform, and the rise of the apps based around it. The map is a good look into what is becoming an increasingly complex web of relationships involving Twitter on the Internet. As the service continues to gain popularity, this web will only continue to expand unless one of the threats destroys it or if a larger company acquires it. Rubel has more in his post on the matter. Brian Solis‘ and Jess3’s Twitterverse diagram also offers a good visual look into the state of Twitter. Click on the image for a larger view [photo: flickr/steverubel] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Sugar Inc. Raises $16 million, To Expand Into TV, Movies, Online Video Posted: 01 Jun 2009 03:30 PM PDT
They are using at least some of the proceeds, they say, to buy out NBC, which invested $10 million in the company in June 2007. The NBC investment came with an advertising sales deal that the companies dissolved last year. The company has now raised a total of $31 million in capital. Sugar is also announcing the acquisition of Los Angeles-based Shopflick, a video powered fashion marketplace founded by Patrick Yee in 2007. It raised $7 million last year and brought on board David Grant as CEO. Grant, who is the former President of Fox TV Studios, will become president of a newly formed Sugar division called Sugar Digital Entertainment, which will “expand the Sugar brand into online video, television, film, videogames and other content formats.” CEO Brian Sugar says the company is seeing nearly 100 million monthly page views per month. He won’t disclose revenue, but says that the company is now profitable. A year ago we’d heard they were doing around $15 million in annual revenue. They have 97 employees. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Almost.at: Real Time Events, As Tweeted By The People Who Are Actually There Posted: 01 Jun 2009 03:30 PM PDT
Built on the Cappuccino web framework, the first thing that you’ll notice is that Almost.at is sporting a very polished interface that strongly resembles a native application. The app consists of four main columns. On the far left side you’ll see a handful of different popular topics, which include breaking news stories and events. Clicking on one of these (we’ll use E3 as an example) will fill the three right columns with real-time feeds of recent content: one column for recent tweets that include the #E3 hashtag, another for rich media from Flickr, Twitpic and YouTube, and a third with relevant links that have been sent out in recent tweets. Every 10 seconds or so, the service will pull in the latest content, so you shouldn’t ever have to manually refresh. You can also use a timeline at the bottom of the page to browse through the history of an event (for example, I could ‘watch’ this weekend’s Maker Faire as it happened, even after the fact). One small caveat though: make sure to scroll to the bottom of a column rather than the top, as Almost.at displays these new items below older ones. Aside from its snazzy interface and real time updating, Almost.at’s appeal lies in its ability to help users differentiate between people who are at an event, and people who are just talking about it. The system behind this is pretty simple: every tweet has a ‘+’ sign next to it, and if you see a tweet from someone that seems to be actually attending event, you can click it to add them to a special ‘Followees’ list. From then on, their tweets will be displayed with a yellow background in everyone’s feed, and you can optionally choose to watch a feed with tweets that only come from Followees. At this point it’s working very well - I love being able to watch the actual E3 news as it comes in from press at the scene, rather than have to wade through the waves of fanboy spam. Of course, this system comes with one major problem: any user can add anyone to the Followees list, which means spammers could easily add themselves. At this point there isn’t any kind of communitiy moderation system, though Cann says that one is definitely on the way (for now he’ll have to regulate spam himself). Cann is also hand picking the events that users have to choose from (the servers can only handle a few at a time), though it sounds like he may look for a way to do this automatically in the future. If you find yourself really enjoying Almost.at, you can download it as its own standalone application. Cann says this is really just a browser window dedicated to the site, but it should allow you to keep it running for hours on end. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Now You Also Can Call Bing 411. Posted: 01 Jun 2009 02:09 PM PDT Lost in all the excitement around today’s public preview launch of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, was the subsequent launch of Bing 411. This is a direct swipe at another Google product, GOOG-411. Both are free and both use speech-to-text technology and voice recognition to completely automate directory assistance calls. GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) has been going for a while, and is surprisingly intuitive. It keeps adding features like nearby intersections. Bing 411 (1-800-246-4411) gives you local business listings, as well as local traffic, weather, and movie listings. The voice is a little more obviously computer-generated than Google’s, but it also can get you a phone number, address, or directions. It also tells you how many stars the business has in average reviews. What’s more, the second time you call, it remembers your last request and you can ask for “saved searches.” It is a voice-activated Bing for local business searches. I tried it out, and it was able to find the Trader Joe’s near my Brooklyn apartment. But it had trouble with a french restaurant, Bar Tabac, (which Goog-411 also couldn’t understand or find). If it doesn’t understand your search, it takes you to a decision tree, asking you what type of service you are looking for. I find this highly unsatisfying in voice-activated user interfaces. My suggestion for either service: if they don’t’ understand your request right off the bat, just bail and call 1800-FREE-411 or another 411 service. It will be much faster, even if you have to pay 50 cents. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Blown Cover: A Couple Ways To Stop Those Spymaster Invite DMs Posted: 01 Jun 2009 01:55 PM PDT
First, Topify, the power Twitter emailing service, saw the Twitter crowd’s negative reaction to the DMs and decided to add a feature to prevent it. If you’re using Topify, and get a direct message you don’t want from Spymaster, simply forward it to StopSpymaster@topify.com, and Topify will create a filter to stop these message from inundating your inbox. This is a smart move by Topify, as it not only is a nice feature for current users, but it gives other non-users a reason to potentially use the service. That should be even more true going forward, as I’m sure Spymaster is just the tip of a very large iceberg when it come to viral spreading Twitter games.
As I noted above, the key thing to realize here is that Spymaster is just the first of many viral games coming to Twitter — you can’t imagine how many I’ve already been pitched. Ultimately, Twitter is going to need to step up with better filters on their end to stop these type of things from people who don’t want them. Otherwise, you’re going to have people being forced to unfollow people they may not otherwise want to unfollow. And that simply doesn’t make for a very good social service. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| WatchDox Lets You Track And Control Document Sharing (Beta Invites) Posted: 01 Jun 2009 01:05 PM PDT Sharing confidential documents within a business or between businesses can be risky—you never know who might leak a document or if your document is being shared with other employees. To solve this problem, startup Confidela has launched the beta of WatchDox, a SaaS product that allows a sender to control, restrict and track viewing, printing and forwarding of documents. We have 100 free beta invites here. The service’s basic functionality is similar to document sharing services like Scribd and DocStoc but with ramped up privacy settings and tracking systems. DocStoc and Scribd also offer the ability to set documents as private, but WatchDox is giving users a few more tools that allow users to control and track documents. Watchdox lets you upload any type of document, including PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, Excel files and Word documents. The service gives you a dashboard where you can control who the document is sent to, limit a recipient’s ability to view, forward or print the document and encrypt content of a document. Users can set expiration dates for each document and place watermarks on the document to show versions or the document’s recipient. Watchdox will also track recipient’s activities and location, including when a document is opened and the user’s geographic IP address. You can also send documents directly from Microsoft Outlook by via a WatchDox Outlook plug-in.  WatchDox, which is initially partnering with file collaboration and storage service Box.net to make the service available to all Box.net users, is currently in beta and adding features regularly. The startup will offer a free version of the service and will soon launch a premium version, which is $14.99 per month. Negonation also lets you upload and manage private contracts online, but is targeted towards the legal community. WatchDox seems like a useful service for documents that are confidential and private but you do lose the sharing and social elements of Scribd and DocStoc, which let users share documents with anyone and form groups around certain subjects.  Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Netbook OS Jolicloud Prepares For Launch: Exclusive Screenshots To Whet Your Appetite Posted: 01 Jun 2009 12:00 PM PDT
First, the skinny about the project. Krim has always been bullish on the (open) Web in general and open source technology in particular, and when netbooks started to make their way into the low-cost computer market right about the time that cloud computing was clearly maturing, he thought it was a shame that the user experience on the small-screen computers was often below par. In an effort to change that, he sought to develop a custom-built OS using open source technology and betting big on open standards, that would basically make using netbooks sexy in the same way that Apple showed the world how a mobile phone should function when it introduced the iPhone. Michael made the same analogy when he first caught wind of Jolicloud back in December 2008. Jolicloud is based on Ubuntu and Debian but is optimized significantly for use with netbooks that are permanently connected to the Internet, whether it’s over WiFi or 3G. It enables users to install a bunch of web applications that run as if they were installed natively, including Gmail, Skype, Boxee, Twitter, Facebook, DropBox, Meebo, and many more. This is made possible thanks to a close collaboration with the developers behind Mozilla’s Prism project and the open standards that live on the Web. While the Jolicloud team is pondering about some day developing a native Webkit client for the OS, it currently runs Firefox with Google Gears installed by default and supports both Adobe Flash and AIR, which means you can do virtually everything on Jolicloud that you can currently do with your current computer’s browser. Interestingly, you can assign your Jolicloud profile (including all the applications you use) to multiple computers, which also means you can easily power up a brand new netbook, install the OS and use it exactly the same way you’re using it on any other netbook. There’s also a bit of a social layer baked into the system that lets you keep track of your installation history and displays updates in the style of Facebook’s News Feed. The system also feeds you updates on which software your friends are using (you can follow freinds who install it), so you can check if you’re using the most recent / optimized version for any tool based on their behavior. I think it would also make sense for Jolicloud to incorporate features from social network Wakoopa in there, so you could get recommendations based on what you use most, for example. Below is a presentation with a collection of screenshots that reveal a lot about the functionality and design of the upcoming netbook OS (it works best if you view the slides in full-screen mode) as well as a video from netbooknews.com featuring a review of a slightly older version of Jolicloud. Personally, I’m excited about the project’s potential and can’t wait to test the alpha version—dubbed Robby because of Krim’s fascination with Robby The Robot—on my Acer Aspire One later this month. At the same time, I have my reservations about the potential for Jolicloud to gain the necessary traction to make waves in the market, or the ability for the fledgling company to compete with other Linux-based operating systems, particularly Android which is rumored to be coming to netbooks in a big way in the future. But Krim is trying to invent the future here, and for that alone Jolicloud is worth keeping an eye on. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| The Next Big Feature Of Xbox Live: Twitter! Posted: 01 Jun 2009 11:52 AM PDT Microsoft has just announced that some new features are coming the Xbox 360 at E3. Facebook and Last.fm integration into the Xbox Live dashboard are two of them. The game Metal Gear Solid is another. But the one they seem to be touting the most right now? Twitter! Yes, it seems the software giant, who has made some nice moves in the gaming space, has just as big of an obsession with Twitter as everyone else. You will apparently be able to see tweets and post new tweets from the console starting soon. While, to me, this doesn’t rank up there with last year’s announcement of Netflix streaming coming to Xbox Live, it’s a pretty nice group of features to add to make the Xbox 360 more social. But the show just began, I’m sure Microsoft has some other tricks up its sleeve. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| MySpace Experimenting With Interactive Ads Powered By SocialMedia.com Posted: 01 Jun 2009 11:25 AM PDT
The ads are a variation on SocialMedia.com’s powerful Friend to Friend social ads, which the company first rolled out in March. The idea behind them is simple: if I visited a page on MySpace Music, an ad could ask me if I preferred Rock or Rap, with a pair of checkboxes where I could indicate my favorite genre. Then when my friends visited MySpace, they could see an ad that said “Jason likes Rock and Roll! Which do you like?” This level of customization may seem a little strange at first to users, but the ads tend to be far more engaging than typical banner ads. I won’t be surprised if ads that pair user interaction and the social graph become the norm over the next few years. This news is obviously a very major win for SocialMedia.com - not only is the company running campaigns from major brands, but MySpace itself is working in tandem with the company to sell the ads. It’s also good to see MySpace working with third parties to maximize revenue opportunities, especially as its user growth begins to stall.  Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Google Upgrades Custom Search Box On Blogger Posted: 01 Jun 2009 11:21 AM PDT Google’s blog publishing platform, Blogger, is bringing its Custom Search Box gadget out of its beta version, also known as Blogger in Draft. The search gadget a blog’s readers search posts, web pages linked from the blog, other blogs on the blog roll, as well as pages on the shared links list. Google initially launched the gadget on its Blogger in Draft platform, which offers users a version of Blogger where Google tests out features and new interfaces. Google says it has upgraded the search gadget to provide simpler defaults as well as the ability for the box to integrate with the aesthetics and color of your blog. The Search Box gadget uses AJAX Search APIs to power the feature and also automatically updates the custom linked search engine when you update your blog, blog lists, or link lists. Custom search can be a useful tool for blogs because it allows readers to not only search a blog’s content but also any pages or favored sites that are linked to, giving readers a related, but still-focused, search experience. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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It’s widely known that China runs a pretty tight ship - to put it mildly - on what its citizens get to see online, especially that content which is served from outside of China. YouTube has been blocked for some time and although Wikipedia was blocked for a while, it’s gradually become more available. However today Chinese authorities have brought the the Great Wall of China on a number of services including Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail, Blogger and a number of other sites. The picture is patchy across the country between ISPs and geography, but my sources - who all agreed to be named in this post - say the ban is blanket ban is closing.
Few users seem to have noticed this, but apparently 
That was fast. Irish programmer and SEO specialist 
One of Twitter’s greatest assets has always been its developer community. But with the countless 
You guys didn't think I'd go to China and forget to bring you back something, did you? Sillies.
Since I got home from China last week, I’ve found myself in a lot of conversations where phrases like “the next Silicon Valley,” or “just like Silicon Valley used to be,” keep coming up. But while China is swimming in capital and littered with start-ups, I’m going to argue it’s not the next Silicon Valley. In fact, it’s something far different than I’ve ever seen before.
Blog and media network 
As we’ve relentlessly documented, the Twitter-based game 
But if you don’t want to use Topify, Spymaster itself has come up with a way to opt-out of these invitation DMs. Simply 
At this morning’s 
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