The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Silicon Valley Grieves Rajeev Motwani’s Passing
- CubeGuard: Please Step Away From The Barrier
- 2009 TechFellow Awards: The Winners
- VirtualDatingAssistants.com Lets You Outsource Your Online Dating Life
- Live Stream Of This Evening’s TechFellow Awards
- Rajeev Motwani, Early Google Advisor And Silicon Valley Luminary, Has Passed Away
- Apple Gets Pwned, SF Store Is Now Advertising DVD Jon’s doubleTwist
- Join Us: TechFellow Awards Live on Ustream Tonight
- MySpace Ditches New Playa Vista Offices
- If Facebook Is Worth $10 Billion, Twitter is Worth $1.7 Billion
- Elevator Pitch Friday: VocabSushi Teaches Vocabulary Using Real-World Examples
- News Flash: Google Squared Is A Work In Progress
- Candy.com Sells For A Sweet $3 Million
- Pixelpipe Amps Up Android App With Video Uploads
- IAB Reports 5 Percent Decline in U.S. Online Ad Revenues For First Quarter 2009
- Robot Pickup Lines On Twitter Will Turn You Out
| Silicon Valley Grieves Rajeev Motwani’s Passing Posted: 06 Jun 2009 02:31 AM PDT The news of Professor Rajeev Motwani’s untimely death on Friday afternoon spread quickly throughout the couple of hundred attendees of tonight’s TechFellow event in San Francisco. The mood of the event turned from cheerful cocktail sipping banter to stunned silence. Most everyone who was there is his friend. And most everyone there had a story to tell about how Motwani had helped them at one time or another, asking nothing in return. I have a couple of those stories myself. Ron Conway, a long time friend of Motwani, was visibly shaken. We asked Ron to make a few remarks to honor Motwani before the event started. His talk was not scripted or prepared. He was in a state of shock before, during and after his talk. And it clearly came directly from the heart. He talked about a man who loved entrepreneurs and who would meet with anyone to at least give them advice. Motwani influenced hundreds of entrepreneurs and students, Conway said, and never refused a meeting. We’ve included the video of Conway’s tribute to Motwani above. Google founder Sergey Brin, who describes Motwani as his “friend and teacher,” also wrote a tribute on his blog:
Goodbye, Rajeev. You will be missed. What a sad, sad day. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| CubeGuard: Please Step Away From The Barrier Posted: 06 Jun 2009 01:30 AM PDT  It's a Saturday morning. You're making Silver Dollar Hots for the family. The doorbell rings. It's the mailman. He's brought a CubeGuard. That's right: on the traditional day before or the actual day of rest, the mailman is here to bring you something to remind you of work. But what a gadget it is! It's basically one of those crowd control tapes with a spring loaded reel to wind it back up after use. However, this tape has a calming scene - a mountain range or a happy face - with a message ("Do not disturb" or, in my case, "John is blogging. Do not disturb." That's right: it's crowd control tape for your cubicle. Read on for more info and a giveaway.
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| 2009 TechFellow Awards: The Winners Posted: 05 Jun 2009 10:53 PM PDT  We’d like to congratulate the twenty-two inaugural winners of tonight’s TechFellow awards, each of whom has made outstanding contributions in one of four different categories: Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management, and Disruptive Innovation. Below is a listing of the winners, broken down by category. Disruptive Innovation This category is meant to highlight the visionaries, the starry-eyed fools who believe when no one else will. They are undaunted when told NO by stern parents, when told it WON'T WORK by a thousand dismissive VCs, when failure after failure would dash the hopes of lesser mortals. These are the men and women whose incredible ideas burst forth like Athena from their foreheads, and they know what it means to make Fire, the Wheel, and the Printing Press. Engineering Leadership Engineering Leadership candidates are people who have demonstrated technical excellence, built amazing technology infrastructure and products, or led teams that together built complex and elegant solutions that changed our lives. They are the uber geeks who calculate 10-digit squares in their heads, and write a thousand bug-free lines of code on the fly without skipping a beat. Product Design and Marketing Product Design and Marketing candidates are people who have designed insanely great products, who have made technology beautiful, who have created the marketing campaign that blows you away and make you want to go out and buy ten of them for your whole family. These are the storytellers, the artists, the people who make our dreams come alive. General Management General Management candidates are people who have built the teams and organizations that create and deliver great technology and products to the world. They are company builders who provide foundations and processes for all the rest of the geeks and dreamers to make their dreams reality. They are the folks who wake up at 6am and open the doors, make the donuts, play reveille, and lead the charge to take the hill. They make it *happen*. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| VirtualDatingAssistants.com Lets You Outsource Your Online Dating Life Posted: 05 Jun 2009 10:30 PM PDT Although TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington recently posted an April Fool’s joke about hiring a matchmaker to find him a wife, matchmaking services are becoming an alternate (and pricier) way to find a mate (think Millionaire Matchmaker). For those guys who are looking to meet a lady but don’t have the time to devote to the due diligence, outsourcing the job is the obvious option. Trolling Match.com, eHarmony and other dating sites can be a time-consuming and frustrating task. Even setting up an appealing profile on these sites can be daunting. To help these dudes out, VirtualDatingAssistants.com has launched a service to allow busy male professionals to fully outsource their online dating experience. At a price of $480 per month, the company's virtual dating assistants will use "advanced internet dating techniques and strategies to create online dating profiles, interact with women and set up dates with them.” The company says it will work approximately 40 hours per month for each customer and guarantees them a minimum of 2 dates per month (or their money back). Co-founders Mark Anderson and Scott Valdez are overseeing a cherry-picked team of virtual assistants that are referred to as "007" Dating Assistants due to the "suave and sophisticated nature of their undercover interactions." Yes, they are actually called “007″ Dating Assistants. Anderson attests to the power of virtual assistants representing you on online dating sites because that’s how he found his wife. As a pharmaceutical sales exec, Anderson had his assistant manage his online dating accounts and schedule 79 dates with attractive women within a period of a year. One of these women happens to now be his wife. Virtual assistants will help clients fill out their profiles and then search dating sites like Match.com and eHarmony to find women that fit each client’s tastes and preferences. Once the client informs the assistant of necessary information for a profile, the assistant will take over the process of finding, messaging, and setting up dates with women. According to the site, the “007″ assistant will begin “contacting and interacting with the candidates. Once an interesting candidate is qualified as a strong candidate, your 007 Dating Assistant works to stimulate interest, build comfort, and flip her attraction switches.” The client doesn’t have to participate in the process until a “pre-date evaluation” meeting before the actual date. The service makes me a little uneasy. I get that people are busy but the idea that I’d be trading emails with a virtual assistant posing as the potential date seems disingenuous and gives me the creeps. Not to mention that $480 a month is a hefty price to pay for someone to just handle dating websites for you. There’s no doubt that online dating is a huge market, and there have been similar startups that have emerged to feed off this pool, such as ProfileHelper.com, which assists people in creating the perfect profile for online dating. But I think Virtualdatingassistants.com takes it a step to far. It almost seems like misrepresentation. What ever happened to romance? (Photo credit/Flickr/Nick Slide) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Live Stream Of This Evening’s TechFellow Awards Posted: 05 Jun 2009 09:41 PM PDT Tonight many of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest have come together for the TechFellow Awards, a new startup investment program that we have created in partnership with Founders Fund. We’ll be annoucing the winners shortly, and are live streaming the event below, compliments of Ustream. Here are more details about the program: At least twelve fellows will be granted $25,000 each tonight to invest in an early stage startup of their choice. Founders Fund will invest an additional $25,000 alongside those investments and request an additional right to invest another $250,000 when the company raises its next round of financing. In all, Founders Fund expects to devote around $3.6 million to the program. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Rajeev Motwani, Early Google Advisor And Silicon Valley Luminary, Has Passed Away Posted: 05 Jun 2009 08:26 PM PDT
Rajeev was an ardent supporter of Silicon Valley startups, investing and mentoring many of them while continuing his research at Stanford University. With investments in companies that included PayPal and Google, he saw an overwhelming amount of success. And through it all he continued to give back to the community though his mentorship, investments, and his time at Stanford, where he continued to teach as recently as last semester. We owe Rajeev a debt of gratitude here at TechCrunch, as he was kind enough to speak at a number of our events and was genuinely supportive of our efforts. Om Malik has shared his thoughts on his old friend, writing that there wasn’t a startup that Rajeev didn’t love on his quest for the unknown. Our deepest sympathies go out to Rajeev’s family. He will be sorely missed. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Apple Gets Pwned, SF Store Is Now Advertising DVD Jon’s doubleTwist Posted: 05 Jun 2009 04:55 PM PDT
The ad invites passersby to try “The Cure for iPhone Envy”, which they can use to access their “iTunes Library on any device. In Seconds”. It’s clearly a message that Apple doesn’t want anything to do with. We’re hearing that Apple employees are currently scratching their heads as to how this appeared. So how did this wind up only a few feet from the store’s entrance, and directly beneath a giant Apple logo? Apparently the window technically belongs to BART, the Bay Area’s commuter transit system. doubleTwist got in touch with an ad agency that BART deals with and leased the window, giving them the chance to plaster their ad just below the Apple logo in its full glory. This is apparently the first time the window has been used for this purpose (before it just sat bare). And because everything was done legally, Apple’s going to have a hard time getting rid of it. While DVD Jon has a long history of reverse engineering digital media security, doubleTwist is a perfectly legitimate software application that makes it easy to manage media files for a variety of hardware devices. It’s sort of like iTunes, except it works for nearly any device — not just your iPod and iPhone (you can find an extensive overview here, and the app now supports both Windows and Mac). Given that one of the iPod’s biggest advantages over competitors is the seamless experience it offers to users, Apple probably isn’t a big fan. Thanks to Chester Ng for the tip. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Join Us: TechFellow Awards Live on Ustream Tonight Posted: 05 Jun 2009 04:54 PM PDT
The TechFellow Awards is a a new startup investment program that we created in partnership with Founders Fund. At least twelve fellows will be granted $25,000 each tonight to invest in an early stage startup of their choice. Founders Fund will invest an additional $25,000 alongside those investments and request an additional right to invest another $250,000 when the company raises its next round of financing. In all, Founders Fund expects to devote around $3.6 million to the program. An amazing group of people have helped us select winners of the TechFellow Awards and will be attending the ceremony tonight at the beautiful and newly-renovated California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park:
Don’t worry if you can’t watch the video stream live. We’ll upload the full video after the ceremony and add information about each of the winners. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| MySpace Ditches New Playa Vista Offices Posted: 05 Jun 2009 04:38 PM PDT
Fast forward through that next fiscal year and just about everything in Levinsohn’s email worked out exactly differently. Peter’s gone. FIM is dissolved. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe was terminated. And MySpace is facing dramatic traffic declines and the prospect of a world without Google welfare payments. Time to cut costs. And people cuts alone won’t do the trick. Levinsohn said “Given our tremendous track record, it's only fitting that we should enter into the single biggest real-estate transaction in Los Angeles in the last 25 years.” Now new digital chief Jonathan Miller, who has probably noted that with all the layoffs MySpace doesn’t really need all that hip new square footage, is saying they’re backing out of that transaction. In an email to all MySpace employees, Miller said:
It’s funny how MySpace PR fell all over themselves to get the word out on the new office space last year, but not a word on pulling out now. We hear the San Francisco office is next to go. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| If Facebook Is Worth $10 Billion, Twitter is Worth $1.7 Billion Posted: 05 Jun 2009 04:19 PM PDT Last week, Facebook took a $200 million investment that valued the company at $10 billion. So if Facebook is worth $10 billion, how much is Twitter worth? After all, Twitter turned down $500 million from Facebook late last year, and founder Evan Williams might not even sell it for $1 billion. But how about for $1.7 billion? That is the valuation we come up with when we run Twitter’s numbers through our new social network valuation model. The model takes into account the size of each social network’s audience in different countries and the average online spending per capita in those countries. Using Facebook’s $10 billion valuation as a baseline, Twitter would be the fourth most valuable social network after MySpace ($6.5 billion) and Bebo ($1.8 billion). Of course, that $10 billion valuation was for preferred shares, so $1.7 billion might be a valuation a strategic investor or acquirer would be willing to place on Twitter. If you use the $4 billion to $6 billion range Facebook’s common stock is being valued at in private sales, then Twitter’s valuation would come down to $671 million to $1 billion. And if you use Bebo’s 2008 valuation of $850 million as a benchmark instead, Twitter would be worth $781 million. So there is your range: roughly $700 million to $1.7 billion. And remember, Twitter may still have scaling issues, but it doesn’t have all the costs that Facebook has in terms of storage and other capital expenditures. For one thing,Twitter isn’t keeping everyone’s photos on its servers—that is what TwitPic and Yfrog are for. On the flip side, there is also the question of revenues, which remains an open question for Twitter (and for Facebook, for that matter). Is Twitter going to make money from real-time search, corporate accounts, or maybe even figuring out a way to sell followers? Given how engaged a large portion of Twitter’s users are already and how it is becoming a hot testbed for opt-in marketing, it is not inconceivable that Twitter’s users will be worth more to advertisers than Facebook’s. But before we can find out, Twitter needs to pick a business model. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Elevator Pitch Friday: VocabSushi Teaches Vocabulary Using Real-World Examples Posted: 05 Jun 2009 03:40 PM PDT We’ve taken a break from reviewing elevator pitches for awhile but we’re back with a good one: VocabSushi. The pitch is concise yet detailed and manages to pack in a good amount of content into a one-minute pitch. The founder, Jeff Novich (an SAT tutor), even managed to squeeze in the price points for the services. VocabSushi is an online verbal test prep service that helps you prepare for standardized tests like the SAT, ACT, and GRE by teaching you vocab words with real-world, contextual examples found in the daily news. The site crawls the daily news from around the U.S. to find examples of vocab words to show users context of how a word is used while also seeing the definition of the word. VocabSushi has compiled lists of vocab words commonly tested on each standardized test and contains recorded MP3 pronunciations, definitions and sample sentences for every VocabSushi word.  The site’s tests simulate traditional verbal standardized tests, offering you sample definition multiple choice and sentence completion questions. VocabSushi’s tests are intuitive and tracks your progress overall and for every word. When you learn words, they’re automatically replaced with newer, more challenging ones. You can also download word quiz podcasts and print PDF version of tests. Pricing is $10 for month, $25 for 3 months, and $50 for a year’s subscription to the service. Kaplan, Princeton Review and others offer online tutoring for the verbal sections of standardized tests but don’t have the intuitive testing and comprehensive audio pronunciation and real-world context features of VocabSushi. Prepme’s standardized test help system also keeps track of what questions you get right and wrong, remembering what questions you miss and challenging you accordingly. Prepme’s plans are pricier, but the startup offers comprehensive tutoring for all subject matters of standardized tests. Learn10 is another interactive vocabulary learning site. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| News Flash: Google Squared Is A Work In Progress Posted: 05 Jun 2009 03:11 PM PDT
Which is why I’m already getting annoyed by the stories pointing out how funny it is that Google Squared has declared the current Russian president dead or that President Obama passed away in 1982. Oh, Prince William kicked the bucket, too. And Google Squared apparently hates conservatives. It’s probably only a matter of time before the mainstream press picks up on a potentially offensive result and multiple organizations scream with feigned outrage. For those who haven’t been keeping up with it, Squared is a fairly major departure for Google that could eventually change the way we look up data on the web. If you run a query for “dogs“, rather than present a list of pages relevant to canines as the ‘normal’ Google would, Squared attempts to generate a spreadsheet of dog breeds, complete with their average height, weight, and country of origin. As with Wolfram Alpha, another structured data search engine, it’s very cool when it works — it just doesn’t work all that often. Anyone who has used Squared for more than two minutes knows that it messes up quite a bit. I think you’d be hard pressed to search more than a few queries in a row that didn’t result in clearly incorrect facts or glaring omissions. Many of the service’s initial reviews pointed this out, and for good reason. We’ve all seen the goofs. But at this point honing in on a poor result just feels mean spirited and lazy. The alternative is for Google to restrict access to Squared until it does work consistently, which could be years, if ever. What Google is doing here is pretty gutsy, and the fact that they’re letting us play with it when it’s still half-baked makes it even more so. So let’s take Squared for what it is, and (hopefully) help it grow into something powerful rather than harp on its self-admitted flaws. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Candy.com Sells For A Sweet $3 Million Posted: 05 Jun 2009 02:31 PM PDT
G&J Holdings plans to use candy.com to sell — get this — candy. They would like to become the online destination for all your candy needs by offering expedited shipping and competitively price products, as well as a nice shopping experience. But really, how much does all of that matter when you have the awesome candy.com domain name? The press release claims there are over 800,000 searches for the word “candy” each month — hence, the $3 million price tag. The deal was actually all set to be done a couple months ago, but it took all this time to finalize it (read: for the lawyers to go over it). The site was purchased from the “Domain King,” who has all the details of how it went down. His real name is Rick Schwartz and he made a name for himself last year when he sold the ireport.com domain to CNN for $750,000. He also owned property.com which was sold for some ridiculous amount to foreclosure.com as the economy collapsed. [Thanks Mike] [photo: flickr/terren in virginia] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Pixelpipe Amps Up Android App With Video Uploads Posted: 05 Jun 2009 01:19 PM PDT Pixelpipe, the service that lets you syndicate text, audio, video and image files to 80 different social networks, blogs and sites, has launched an amped up version of their Android app. Following the release of the Android 1.5 “cupcake” that has video capture functionality, Pixelpipe’s app lets you upload video and audio directly from the device to over 45 social media destinations. The new app, which previously let you send photos as your status update or blog/micro-blog post, will link to media and send out a shortened link back to the user’s customizable pi.pe landing page. Similar to TwitPic, a pi.pe page is a customized Pixelpipe landing page where media can link back to. The Android app also lets you upload MP3s and audio recordings directly from the handset to music-focused social networks such as Imeem, as well as to Twitter, as a status update or an email. Since video files can be so large, the startup has rewritten its mobile upload service to accommodate large files being transferred from slower mobile connections. Pixelpipe’s app also enables background uploads, allowing users to just press the home key to put Pixelpipe in the background and still continue an upload. This contrasts to its iPhone app, which loses the connection to the application as soon as the application is closed. Pixelpipe’s app will be a boon to Android users out there, especially given the new video uploading capabilities. The true virtue of Pixelpipe’s service is the fact that it lets you publish all types of files to various social networks and sites from a centralized place versus TwitPic, which lets you publish photos to just to Twitter, or TwitVid, which lets you publish videos to Twitter. The latest Androids got some buzz last week at Google I/0, where the company handed out free G2 Androids to attendees as a thank you to the development community. While Android’s market share is still small, a full 18 to 20 different handsets are expected to be released this year from a variety of manufacturers. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| IAB Reports 5 Percent Decline in U.S. Online Ad Revenues For First Quarter 2009 Posted: 05 Jun 2009 10:54 AM PDT More evidence just came in that the recession has come to online advertising (in case you were still wondering). The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCooper today reported their numbers for online advertising revenues in the U.S., and they are not pretty. Internet advertising declined 5 percent in the first quarter of 2009 to $5.5 billion, compared to the first quarter of 2008. Industry revenues were down an even steeper 9.8 percent sequentially from the fourth quarter’s $6.1 billion. Last quarter’s falloff was first evident after Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL announced their earnings numbers. As I noted in a month ago, the online ad revenues of those four stalwarts declined by 2 percent annually in the first quarter (7 percent sequentially) to $7.9 billion. But that is a worldwide number. Today’s IAB estimate adds further evidence that the U.S. is following the global trend. Does one down quarter make a recession? The typical rule of thumb is two down quarters in a row, but that is for the economy as a whole, not for individual sectors. I guess we can wait to see what happens in the second quarter. The worst might very well be behind us. Or not. Either way, online advertising is hurting and seeing not just slowing growth, but actual dollar declines. Without a pickup in the general economy, online advertising will continue to sputter. Who thinks the second quarter will bring another decline? Who thinks it will show a rebound? Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Robot Pickup Lines On Twitter Will Turn You Out Posted: 05 Jun 2009 09:09 AM PDT
Thousands of messages are coming across the network tagged with #robotpickuplines. As you might expect, they are suave lines a robot might say to pickup another robot. Here are a few choice ones:
I have a feeling that the countdown to backlash against this meme is already on, so get your witty line out there before you’re ridiculed for it. I, for one, like this meme just because it beats the boring Follow Friday one, and reminds me of Conan O’Brien’s old Pimpbot 5000 routine. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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Tragic news today for the Silicon Valley community. 
Tonight’s the night that we’re announcing the 
Just yesterday, we 
Fridays on Twitter usually mean one thing: Being bombarded with “Follow Friday” messages. You know the ones, they contain usually no information other than a bunch of Twitter names followed by the #followfriday hashtag. But this Friday brings a new potential challenger: Robot Pickup Lines.| You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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