The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Demdex Comes Out Of Stealth, Offers Advertisers Their Own Behavioral Data Bank
- Here Comes The iPhone 3G S
- Lacy, Birch, Krim And Glaenzer To Attend TechCrunch Europe Awards
- Mozilla Shows Microsoft Where $10,000 Is Buried
- TinyPetition Aims To Become The Default Petition Engine For Twitter
- Animoto Is Already Cash-Flow Positive, Raises Another Round To Go To 11
- Yahoo Is Now Resorting To Selling Killer Domain Names On The Cheap
- Exhibition Over: Yahoo Gallery Closing
- Tinker Becomes A More Powerful Twitter Trends Discovery Engine
- Stealth Startup 5to1 Raises $4.5 Million With All Star Founding Team
- What’s Ghetto? Pushing Digital Album Sales On Twitter (Video)
- I Love Rewards Raises Another $1.6 Million For Employee Rewards Program
- Amazon Associates To Pull Out Of North Carolina Due To “Unconstitutional Tax Collection Scheme”
- Twitterfeed Gets An Overhaul, Adds Analytics
- Bing Is Still Drawing Crowds, Search Share Jumps To 12 Percent
- i-Aroma: NTT Communications’ Fragrance Communication System Sends Smells Over The Web
- Aviary Launches Falcon, A Browser Based Image Editor
- Have A “Cheap” iPhone 3G Plan? Don’t Expect A “Cheap” iPhone 3G S Upgrade.
- Really Love Firefox? Skin Your iPhone, Laptop or Even Your Car with Firefox Artwork
- Yahoo Rolls Out A “Real-Time” Toolbar
- iPhone OS 3.0 Just Launched. Here Are 20 Things To Do With It.
- Ask Waves Its Arms To Tell Everyone It Also Does Q&A Search
- The iPod Comet and Third-Parties Or Why Apple “Scares” Pre Owners With iTunes Threats
| Demdex Comes Out Of Stealth, Offers Advertisers Their Own Behavioral Data Bank Posted: 18 Jun 2009 07:36 AM PDT Advertisers and websites all too often rely on other companies for data about their own potential customers. A new advertising analytics startup called Demdex came out of stealth mode today to give companies a way to store and make sense of all the behavioral data which they collect or which is collected on their behalf. They put all of this user profile data into a “behavioral data bank” and then score each user across more than 40 behavioral and demographic variables to come up with a “traitweight.” This number is supposed to be able to help websites segment their audiences better and advertisers target their messages more exactly. Demdex was founded in 2008, and its investors include First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Posted: 18 Jun 2009 03:53 AM PDT AT&T has just released official word about the upcoming wave of iPhone 3G S device deliveries to its retail locations and directly to customers who have pre-ordered the widely anticipated phone. TechCrunch is here to make it easier for you to skim the information by breaking the press release down to the core items (no thank you required): When, how, where - the device will be sold in 2,200 AT&T retail locations and 211 U.S. Apple retail stores - you can expect these locations to open at 7 AM local time (pre-ordered only) Pricing (with two-year contract commitment) (ad verbatim) - $199 (16GB) and $299 (32GB) for all new AT&T customers and existing AT&T customers who have fulfilled their previous agreement. In addition, AT&T yesterday extended this pricing to iPhone 3G customers who will be eligible for a full upgrade in July, August, or September 2009. Data plans - monthly plans for consumers start at $69.99 per month for voice and data, and families who share minutes get special rates (starting at $129.99 a month for two iPhone lines with bundled voice and ‘unlimited’ data) MMS and tethering Coming ‘later this Summer’ and ‘in the future’, respectively. How many can you buy? - New customer: one iPhone 3G S per person So, are you getting one? Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Lacy, Birch, Krim And Glaenzer To Attend TechCrunch Europe Awards Posted: 18 Jun 2009 03:50 AM PDT
On the evening itself we will be joined by some of the great and good from the European startups scene, and some from the US. Check out who is coming already, and we’ll also be joined by a number of VIPs including Michael Birch (co-founder of Bebo), The main way is to make sure your company is able to be selected for nomination is to put it in CrunchBase, with all fields filled in, as well as key staff, like CEO etc. Don’t forget your logo and your picture! There are more details here. We will be releasing the list of nominees to vote on shortly. We’re also looking for sponsors for the award categories, details here. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Mozilla Shows Microsoft Where $10,000 Is Buried Posted: 18 Jun 2009 02:23 AM PDT Yesterday, we poked fun at Microsoft’s tacky $10,000 online treasure hunt to get people to use IE8, at the domain TenGrandIsBuriedHere.com. We were hardly the only ones. Today, a developer at Mozilla, makers of IE rival Firefox, weighed in with his own way of mocking Microsoft: TenGrandIsBuriedThere.com. The site is simply a Google Map zoomed out to a certain point. If you zoom in enough, you’ll find a surprise. The developer took exception to Microsoft calling Firefox “old” on its site. That is a bit odd since IE is much older than Firefox. [thanks Alan] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| TinyPetition Aims To Become The Default Petition Engine For Twitter Posted: 18 Jun 2009 02:03 AM PDT
Basically, Blake is looking to address the apparent need for a tool that allows the many opinionated people that inhabit Twitterland to voice their concerns about anything that gets their hearts pumping: a digital petition engine that can quickly spread online thanks to the viral nature of Twitter and the concept of retweeting in particular. We’ve already seen Twitition pop up, most recently for aggregating opinions from Twitter users on the iPhone 3G S upgrade prices AT&T is going to charge. So far, that service has racked up 41800 signatures for 730 topics. TinyPetition, in contrast, has only soft-launched its website so far and stands at about 5800 signatures for only 5 petitions. Still, Blake thinks he can eventually overtake Twitition, which prompts the question how he intends to do so. Well for one, Blake has access to an existing user base of millions he could potentially draw from, as he also happens to be the guy behind this website called PetitionSpot, one of the most popular online petition services in the world. It’s a good start: PetitionSpot boasts about 4 million registered users (although Blake says it’s more like 2 million who have actively shared petitions since the site’s inception) and these are all people who have already expressed their interest in signing digital petitions, obviously. We’ll see how far this gets TinyPetition further down the line. I’ve set up a test petition (unsurprisingly, about our quest to have Facebook management reconsider their policy on Holocaust denial groups), which you can find at tinypetition.com/facebookholocaust. Here’s my tweet about it, which I’ve shared from the TinyPetition website (something seems to have gone wrong with it). Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Animoto Is Already Cash-Flow Positive, Raises Another Round To Go To 11 Posted: 17 Jun 2009 08:56 PM PDT
So it has raised by far its biggest round of funding to date, a $4.4 million Series B led by Madrona Venture Group. With an already proven business model, Jefferson says the company just wants to accelerate everything it’s doing, and push harder. That means a more diverse roadmap and more importantly, a much broader distribution strategy with more partnerships. One of those partnerships with with iStockphoto, whose founder, Bruce Livingstone, participated in this round. For those not familiar with Animoto, the startup basically allows you to take your images and your music and mash them together to create cool videos. What makes the videos cool is the company’s technology that renders the pictures so they’re in-step with the music you’ve chosen, adding nice transition effects. We’ve gushed over it previously here, here and here. One relatively new area of focus for the company is the mobile realm. Back in December, it launched an iPhone app that allows you to create videos from your pictures and music on the device. The app already has 300,000 users. And Animoto has had version 2 of the app ready for months, but Apple has yet to approve it. Jefferson isn’t sure what the actual hold-up is since the first version submitted had very little different besides some upgrades from the first version. And later, Apple apparently didn’t like that it was pushing users to its site to sign up for pro accounts, something which should be rectified shortly with the iPhone 3.0’s in-app purchase system, according to Jefferson. The plan is to have an app that charge the same $3 (or less) that it does on the site to make premium videos (using full-length songs). And another reason the company is going to need that money is because it’s expanding beyond using photos for its videos and into also using actual videos. Jefferson wouldn’t say too much about it, but check out the Webby’s video below for a preview of how that will work. At this year’s Webby’s it won both the Judges Choice and People's Voice awards for Best Services & Applications. “We really believe we’re at the tip of the iceberg for cinematic artificial intelligence technology,” Jefferson says. “We want to allow users to create high production video that tells a story. That has the feel of a short form documentary. Right now that’s mostly teed off of music, but in the future it will be done off of meta data in the photos as well,” he says. Animoto has raised $5 million in funding total so far, including money from Amazon back in May that was rolled into this round. Prior to that a group of personal investors provided $600K. Additional investors in this round beyond Madrona, Livingston and Amazon include Jeff Clavier's SoftTech VC. Matt McIlwain, the Managing Director of Madrona Venture Group is joining Animoto’s board of directors. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Yahoo Is Now Resorting To Selling Killer Domain Names On The Cheap Posted: 17 Jun 2009 07:39 PM PDT
What’s really odd though (aside from an Internet giant actually selling a domain rather than buying one), is the price at which it sold. Contests.com is a killer domain name. People like my mother love nothing more than going online and searching for contests to enter to win stuff. But what’s crazy is that Yahoo sold it for only $380,000. Let’s put that in some perspective. In February, Toys.com sold for $5.1 million in auction. Sure, that’s a better domain, but not over 10 times better. And a few weeks ago, Candy.com sold for $3 million. How Yahoo failed to secure even a million for the name is beyond me. Just poor luck in the auction? This guy, who apparently left right before the auction started last night is flabbergasted as well. I just really would like to know why Yahoo would even sell it in the first place? I know times are tough at Yahoo but is $380K really going to help much in the long run? No. Hell, it’d probably be better to keep the domain and just put a load of ads on it, perhaps even Google ads. Or, I don’t know, run some Yahoo contests on it. People on the web love that stuff, I hear. [photo: flickr/.larry page] [thanks Sahar] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Exhibition Over: Yahoo Gallery Closing Posted: 17 Jun 2009 06:42 PM PDT
Yahoo Gallery was a project that never left beta testing. It was intended to showcase cool applications that were built using Yahoo’s various services and APIs. And while it was a decent idea as a way to show off cool things like Flickr apps, it never really took off. Here’s Yahoo’s explanation message about the shuttering:
The sentence, “The decision to close the gallery is part of this larger strategy and will allow us to focus on helping our customers develop engaging applications using Yahoo! technologies” doesn’t seem to make much sense. Isn’t that exactly what Gallery was supposed to highlight? But whatever — Deadpool, it is. Gallery’s closing follows the much bigger decision to shutter Geocities earlier this year. And Yahoo officially shuttered Yahoo 360 last month, and Jumpcut shut down two days ago. [photo: flickr/marshall astor] [thanks Akash] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Tinker Becomes A More Powerful Twitter Trends Discovery Engine Posted: 17 Jun 2009 05:58 PM PDT Tinker, the recently launched microblogging topic tracker from Glam Media, will be rolling out several new features to upgrade its service. Tinker, which we covered in depth during its launch here, allows users to quickly browse through different real-time Twitter and Facebook searches relevant to various current events, trends and breaking news. Each event, trend or news item is associated with one or more terms, which Tinker then searches for across all Tweets and then presents the relevant ones in a single stream. Tinker is launching a people section that allows users the ability to search and discover people on Twitter. Users can find people by name, but also by location and profession. This feature ends up being a comprehensive directory of Twitter users, listed by profession, category or interest, that helps find, follow and filter people that are micro-blogging. Tinker also lets you see the most popular and influential of the Twitterati, by categorizing the people that create events and breaking news by topics such as Information Technology, Media and Real Estate. Within each category, Tinker offers sub categories of popular Twitter users. So under politics, you can search for Twitter user who blog about conservative, liberal and Republican politics.  Tinker has added a featured page, which provides users with lists of hot topics and trends to follow on Twitter, including streams on events, news, celebrities, and topics. Similar is the look and feel of the iTunes homepage, Tinker’s featured page let you browse through categories of the top trends on Twitter. And Tinker now allows a large range of topics to be tracked semantically, creating a powerful search capability across Twitter. On of Tinker’s most innovative features is the ability to go viral with widgets. After creating an event, users can share the event's feed using an embeddable widget, which they can place on their webpage or blog. These widgets allow users to both view the feed of an event and to submit their own messages, which can then be sent to Twitter and eventually sites like Facebook and FriendFeed. Samir Arora, Glam Media’s CEO and founder, says that the widgets are being used by brands and companies for advertising purposes. For example, the movie “Away We Go” has created a branded widget and event page, with a video and Twitter stream that can be embedded on any site (see below). Tinker says that the site is now running over 50 million widgets and applications a month on distributed sites and networks. Widgets are getting a slight upgrade, and now let users make widgets in different sizes and colors. As we said in our earlier review of Tinker, the site is the perfect answer to Fred Wilson’s call for a Twitter events firehose—a place where users could input a handful of keywords collectively referred to as an 'event,' which could be used to monitor current news as it happens in near real-time. Of course, there are trending topics on Twitter (which can be misleading) as well as a plethora of Twitter apps out there that try to tell us what exactly the buzz is on Twitter. But Tinker does this and more by doing most of the work for users-by categorizing topics and events, dividing Twitter users by the topics they Tweet about, and letting anyone embed real-time streams into their own sites. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Stealth Startup 5to1 Raises $4.5 Million With All Star Founding Team Posted: 17 Jun 2009 04:25 PM PDT
The company isn’t saying what they’re up to yet. But Heckman has a history of successful startups - he founded Rivals.com (acquired by Yahoo in 2007 for $100 million), and Scout.com (acquired by News Corp./Fox Interactive in 2005 for around $50 million). Other founders/execs/investors include Dale Strang, Mark Stieglitz, Michael Barrett and Woody Benson. A summary of funding from the recent filing shows the company closed $2.2 million in April 2009 and $2.3 million in June 2009, bringing the total to $4.5 million. Fuse, Prism, and several angles are listed as investors. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| What’s Ghetto? Pushing Digital Album Sales On Twitter (Video) Posted: 17 Jun 2009 02:59 PM PDT If Twitter is good for one thing, it is for promoting whatever it is you have to sell. Some of the best self-promoters out there are rappers, and they’ve taken to Twitter just like every other type of celebrity. Just as Twitter can drive traffic to Websites, it can also drive music sales on iTunes. On a panel at the 140 Characters Conference yesterday, Xavier Jernigan (@xjernigan, the director of digital marketing at Universal Motown Republic, described how Twitter help put one of his new artists, Asher Roth (@asherroth), on the map. Roth released his first album, Asleep In the Bread Aisle, on iTunes on April 20, a Monday. The night before he Tweeted out to his followers (he currently has 69,566) that the album would be on iTunes. And then he Tweeted out a short link which opened up to the album page in iTunes. The key to engaging fans, as is well known by now, is for the celebrities themselves to really send out Tweets and show fans a more personal side. Then when they Tweet that a new album is out, it doesn’t seem like marketing. It seems like inside information. One rapper on the panel was Jim Jones (@jimjones), who has more than 500,000 followers. He’s also seen iTunes sales spikes after Tweeting out to his followers. In between releases, he entertains them with dirty knock-knock jokes and observations on “What’s Ghetto?” For instance, “drinking out of mayonnaise jars” or getting the last bits of ketchup out of the bottle by putting water in it and shaking it, that’s ghetto. So is using Twitter to move albums on Twitter. I caught up with Jernigan and Jones in the hallway after their panel and got them on video:
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| I Love Rewards Raises Another $1.6 Million For Employee Rewards Program Posted: 17 Jun 2009 02:57 PM PDT I Love Rewards, the Canadian operator of employee rewards and sales incentive recognition programs for companies, has secured a $1.6 million ($1.8 million in Canadian dollars) in an extended Series B round from Ontario Venture Capital Fund. These funds add to I Love Reward’s previous Series B funding round in May led by GrandBanks Capital with prior investors JLA Ventures and Laurence Capital participating, bringing the company’s total Series B funding to $7.7 million ($8.7 million in Canadian dollars). The company raised $4 million in Series A funding in 2008 from JLA Ventures and Laurence Capital. The company says this round of funding will be used to expand its sales and marketing efforts. I Love Rewards operates employee rewards and recognition, sales incentive and service award programs for corporations, including Microsoft, Marriott, ConAgra and Bell. Rewards are distributed as 'points' that are then used by employees to choose brand name reward merchandise (i.e. Apple), experiences (i.e. travel and special events), gift cards and virtual awards (i.e. music downloads). Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Amazon Associates To Pull Out Of North Carolina Due To “Unconstitutional Tax Collection Scheme” Posted: 17 Jun 2009 01:15 PM PDT
Here’s the full email:
So what exactly is this “unconstiutional tax collection scheme”? Here’s what the site news-record has to say:
With its “scheme” and “unconstitutional” wording, Amazon is clearly not happy about this. It also notes that other states have thought about similar measures but rejected them. But hey, that’s a pretty huge budget gap, makes me worried for what California might do. And what’s with the Carolinas and getting into dustups with web companies? [thanks Mark] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Twitterfeed Gets An Overhaul, Adds Analytics Posted: 17 Jun 2009 01:13 PM PDT If your Twitter feed is beginning to replace your RSS feed, you can probably thank Mario Menti. Back in March, 2007, he created the initial prototype of Twitterfeed in London as part of a BBC developer program. Twitterfeed is a simple publishing tool which turns any RSS feed into a Twitter stream. Each feed item becomes a new Tweet consisting of the headline and a shortened link to the story or blog post. Today, 170,000 publishers are using Twitterfeed to convert 300,000 feeds into Twitter streams. By one count, Twitterfeed is the third largest Twitter client, being used by 6.5 percent of all Twitter accounts and at one point was generating 9.2 percent of all Tweets.But it is not really a Twitter client, as investor John Borthwick of betaworks pointed out to me last night while we were riding in one of those bicycle rickshaws across Manhattan (I do not recommend this mode of transportation, we were in a hurry and there were no regular cabs available). Nobody uses Twitterfeed to consume their Twitter stream, so it is not really a client like TweetDeck or Seesmic Deesktop. However, a lot of people use it to populate their own Twitter account with messages. So many people, in fact, were pushing their feeds through the service that Menti’s one-man shop was having trouble scaling the service. About a month ago, he sold a majority stake to betaworks and The Accelerator Group (TAG), and today it is relaunching with a completely rebuilt back-end, which should improve reliability. Working with betaworks (which includes a stable of interconnected real-time startups including TweetDeck, bit.ly, and Chartbeat), the new Twitterfeed now also includes a basic analytics dashboard which brings in bit.ly data so publishers can see how much traffic is coming to their site from Twitter. They can also compare that side-by-side with traditional Feedburner stats to see where most of their redares are coming from and which source is growing faster. Twitterfeed is also adding more sign-in options. In addition to OpenID, it now accepts usernames and passwords from Google, AOL or Yahoo accounts. But one big drawback the service still needs to address is the lag time between a post hitting a feed and the corresponding Tweet hitting Twitter. It can still take a half an hour between those two events. When you are talking real-time, that is 30 minutes too long. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Bing Is Still Drawing Crowds, Search Share Jumps To 12 Percent Posted: 17 Jun 2009 01:01 PM PDT Microsoft’s new search engine Bing had a strong showing in its second week, according to the latest comScore stats. You can see our analysis of Bing’s success in its first week here. Microsoft sites' average daily penetration among U.S. searchers reached 16.7 percent during the work week of June 8-12, up 3 percentage points from the May 25-29 period (which was prior to Bing's introduction) and up over 1 percentage point from its first week. Microsoft's share of search result pages in the U.S. increased to 12.1 percent during the period of June 8-12, which is also 3 percentage points above the pre-introduction work week of May 25-29, and up 1 percentage point from the week of June 2-6, 2009.  If you take a look at the number of Google search for Bing over the past 30 days on Google Trends, searches peaked but then leveled off to a steady pace. And though Bing is still growing, according to comScore’s analytics, the growth is steady from its first week to its second week. Bing may have come just in time for Microsoft. In May, before Bing’s debut, Microsoft’s search share was down nearly 1 percentage point to 5.0% from 5.9% a year ago, according to comScore’s search data. Google’s U.S. search share, in contrast, increased nearly 2.7 percentage points year-over-year to 60.1%, while Yahoo’s share was 13.9%, down nearly 1.6 percentage points from a year ago. Whether or not Microsoft can sustain the initial curiosity around Bing and keep its market share gains over the long term remains to be seen. But Microsoft is pouring $80-100 million in advertising for Bing and is certainly seeing considerable growth, even to the point where it may have leapfrogged Yahoo for one day. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| i-Aroma: NTT Communications’ Fragrance Communication System Sends Smells Over The Web Posted: 17 Jun 2009 12:14 PM PDT  Releasing odors in movie theaters to enhance the viewing experience is an idea that's been around for decades now. Now NTT Communications, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Japan's telecommunications behemoth NTT, takes the idea to another level: The company today announced the development of a "fragrance communication" system that makes it possible to send smells over the web. NTT Communications is currently recruiting monitors for their so-called i-Aroma service, which will go through a test run from mid-July to the end of August. i-Aroma is based on a USB device (15cm tall) that contains six base oils, which are mixed and vaporized depending on the online commands the diffuser receives. As a result, a number of different fragrances will waft from the machine.
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| Aviary Launches Falcon, A Browser Based Image Editor Posted: 17 Jun 2009 12:07 PM PDT Aviary, the small New York-based startup with the ambitions of recreating Adobe Photoshop’s most popular design tools in the browser, has launched a simple, free tool, called Falcon, that lets you quickly grab and edit images within the browser. Falcon, since it is web-based and works in any browser, can be used on a Mac or PC. Skitch, another similar fast, simple editing tool, is a desktop app that only works on Macs. Both Skitch and Falcon offer a simple subset of tools which was previously only available in Photoshop. As we’ve said in the past, these simple tools are especially useful to bloggers and others who spend a lot of time manipulating and editing images on the fly. The beauty of Aviary is in its Firefox plugin, called Talon, which let’s you grab a screen shot or portion of a screen at any time and automatically imports the image into Aviary’s browser-based editing platform. When you click on the icon on your browser when you are on a page you want to capture, you are given the choice of capturing a portion of the screen, the entire viewed screen, or the entire page (below the fold). The option of capturing the entire page is a useful; and a feature that Skitch currently doesn’t allow. Once you capture the image, Falcon gives you the option of editing the image on Aviary.com, saving the image to your desktop, copying it to your clipboard or hosting the image at Aviary.com.  Aviary’s in-browser editing platform is similar to Skitch’s desktop app and adds much of the same functionality. You can add arrows and text to an image, as well as crop, rotate, and resize your image. Falcon also has a built-in color picker tool to extract web color values from images and screenshots. For more design power, you can port your image into 4 different powerful Aviary tools, including color editor, advanced image editor, effects editor and vector editor.  Once you are finished with editing your image, you can save the image as a PNG or JPG either on your desktop or host it on Aviary. Aviary Pro members can gain additional storage options like privacy and watermark control for $24.99 per year. Like with Skitch, images that are uploaded to your Aviary account can be commented by other users, and there are a number of options to embed that image in other websites or link to an image from other sites, like Twitter or Facebook. Aviary has also released the API for Falcon, so that any website can integrate the tool. The drawback of Falcon is that if you don’t use Firefox, the tool isn’t as simple as with the plug-in. You have to import a image into Aviary’s browser editing platform or or you can paste link into the platform to get the entire page imported in, which you can then edit. Since we first covered the company, Aviary had kept most of its tools in private beta. Only four have become publicly available: Phoenix, an image editor along the lines of Photoshop; Peacock, a so-called "visual laboratory" for pixel-based images; Toucan, a color palette tool; and Raven, a vector-based image editor that mimics (and therefore competes with) Adobe Illustrator. Adobe also released a simple, browser-based photo editing tool at Photoshop.com, but it is designed more as an application to edit photos as opposed to grabbing and editing items and screenshots from websites . Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Have A “Cheap” iPhone 3G Plan? Don’t Expect A “Cheap” iPhone 3G S Upgrade. Posted: 17 Jun 2009 11:41 AM PDT
“We're now pleased to offer our iPhone 3G customers who are upgrade eligible in July, August or September 2009 our best upgrade pricing, beginning Thursday, June 18,” AT&T writes. But don’t be fooled, that’s far from everyone. If you read a few lines above you’ll see “For example, iPhone customers who spend more than $99 a month per line with us generally are eligible for an upgrade between 12 and 18 months into their contract.” As an iPhone 3G AT&T customer, I decided to check my eligibility using “check eligibility” tool on Apple’s website. The date I’m eligible for the upgrade according to that site is December 12, 2009 — well outside the July, August or September rule. I bought the iPhone 3G on day one, so why am I not eligible? Because I’m not paying enough — by 33 cents, apparently. My monthly bill is $98.67.
But look at the wording from AT&T again. If those paying more than $99 a month are eligible for upgrades after between 12 and 18 months, I would assume those paying $100 are towards the 18 month part of that window, while those much paying much more are closer to the 12 month line. So this is just a guess, but if my $98.67 isn’t eligible until December under the old rules, I would imagine you’ll have to have a monthly bill in something like the $120 or above range to hit the September window needed to trigger the fully subsidized iPhone 3G S price. The new upgrade prices will go into effect tomorrow on AT&T’s eligibility tool, so we’ll know for sure then. But when that happens I fully suspect I’ll see my iPhone 3G S offer to be the same $399 or $499 as it is today. And if you’re on the lowest iPhone 3G plan, you can expect the same. I completely understand why I wasn’t originally eligible for the subsidy (that’s how it works, AT&T subsidized my phone last year over the course of a two year deal), but I don’t like this new arbitrary pricing cut-off at customers with $99 a month contracts or higher. All AT&T iPhone plans are expensive — to the point where AT&T is trying to find a way to bring them down a bit. I thought that it would be in AT&T’s best interest to offer all iPhone 3G early adopters a fully subsidized iPhone 3G S simply because it would lock us in for another 2 years of expensive monthly service. That’s something AT&T shouldn’t pass up given the rumors swirling about the company losing its iPhone exclusivity after next year. But now, for many users still not eligible for the iPhone 3G S full subsidy, who likely won’t upgrade, they’ll be free to do as they wish next year. Including leave AT&T. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Really Love Firefox? Skin Your iPhone, Laptop or Even Your Car with Firefox Artwork Posted: 17 Jun 2009 10:45 AM PDT
From time to time Infectious works with corporate partners to create custom stickers. Here’s an example of an iPhone with a Wordpress theme, for example. We’re also talking to them about designing custom stickers for the CrunchPad. The Mozilla project brings art from five Infectious artists that you can buy now. iPhone skins cost $15, laptops skins are $30 and car decals are $35. 25% of the proceeds go to the artist and the Mozilla Foundation. In a couple of weeks Infectious will also open up the project and let any artist submit work. One or more winners will be selected by user voting and input from Mozilla and Infectious, and users will then be able to buy those skins, too. More info on the Mozilla blog. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Yahoo Rolls Out A “Real-Time” Toolbar Posted: 17 Jun 2009 10:15 AM PDT Yahoo released a new browser toolbar today for IE and Firefox which lets you add icons for your favorite Yahoo apps and Websites. When you click on the icons, you get a drop-down preview of your favorite sites, mail, stock quotes, or news feeds without having to go to those sites directly. It is only real-time in that you can check for the latest updates without going to those sites. From the Yahoo blog.
The toolbar is completely customizable, so you add from a large Websites or apps you want to keep handy. But if it really wants to be real-time, Yahoo needs to make it easier for you to preview your personal activity stream across sites. Other add-ons such as Friendbar try the streaming ticker approach, which I find too distracting. But perhaps a drop-down stream preview or built-in notifications when new items appear in your stream (whether that is Twitter, Facebook, or something else) would be preferable. Yahoo also made search faster from the toolbar, incorporating some search assist technology from its Inquisitor acquisition. It suggests refined queries as you begin typing and sites that you’ve clicked on in the past. (The Inquisitor app for the iPhone is also worth checking out). Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| iPhone OS 3.0 Just Launched. Here Are 20 Things To Do With It. Posted: 17 Jun 2009 10:10 AM PDT Here it is, folks. At long last, version 3.0 of the iPhone OS has launched here in the US, bringing with it just about every feature the phone should have had from the start - and a whole lot more. If you hadn’t already coaxed an iPhone developer into letting you piggyback on their account or (gasp!) actually shelled out for a developers membership, the past 3 months have probably been pretty grueling. You read the blogs, and kept up on every new feature to be uncovered. Maybe you even made a list of all the things you wanted to check out first. No? Well, here you go. Read the rest of this entry >> Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Ask Waves Its Arms To Tell Everyone It Also Does Q&A Search Posted: 17 Jun 2009 09:41 AM PDT One of the most active sub-genres of search right now in terms of startup and new product activity is question and answer sites. Some searches are subjective and best answered by another human being. The success of Yahoo Answers proved this and spurred a raft of competitors to try their own hand at making Q&A better. These include Answerbag, Wiki Answers, Mahalo Answers, Aardvark, and Hunch. Now Ask, arguably the original Q&A search engine (in that it encouraged searches to be asked as a question, not that the answers came from other humans), is waving its arms to remind people that you can ask questions and find answers there as well. In fact, it is doing a little more than that. Today, it launched a Q&A tab on its site which taps into a new database of 300 million pairs of questions and answers, which it has crawled and indexed from around the Web. In other words, it is crawling the other Q&A sites to look for the best answers to a particular question. It is also applying some semantic and clustering filters to group similar questions together and to try to surface the most relevant results. It is more of a search engine for Q&A sites than a Q&A site itself. You can’t answer any of the questions, just search for what other people have answered on other sites. At first glance, I find it a bit unsatisfying. I asked it, What is the best Q&A site? Yahoo Answers seemed to be the consensus, but no other choices even surfaced. I tried, What is the newest Q&A site? and it turns up only a single result from someone on Yahoo Answers asking how to go about creating a new Q&A site. Does Ask even search Mahalo Answers? If it did, it would have found this question (”What other question and answer services have you used, tried or have found interesting besides Mahalo Answers?”) that includes a long list of more than 25 Q&A sites, many of which I had never even heard of (including Afraid To Ask, Ask An Owner, Blurtit, and Quenchmark). It is not just that the answers on the handful of queries I tried weren’t so great, it is that taking a purely algorithmic approach to Q&A is the wrong answer. Obviously there are way too many Q&A sits out there and Ask is trying to find the best existing answers from everything that is out there across different Q&A sites. But offering Q&A search without letting people ask new questions or improve the results by offering their own answers kind of misses the whole point of Q&A. It is people helping out people to find the best answers to their questions. At least the Q&A startups are trying to move the ball forward by building a community and incentives around Q&A (Mahalo Answers), machine-learning and game-play (Hunch), or let you tap into your direct social circle for more trustworthy answers (Aardvark). These sites get smarter the more people who use them and some of them offer personalized answers as well. The right answer to any question often depends on who is asking. Ask thinks there is one or two right answers for everyone. (Image above courtesy PhotoXpress). Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| The iPod Comet and Third-Parties Or Why Apple “Scares” Pre Owners With iTunes Threats Posted: 17 Jun 2009 09:21 AM PDT  The iPod Comet orbits the Earth in a bi-annual rotation, bringing new devices and attendant accessories into our view every Spring and Fall. The constellation is followed by a set of third-party developers and manufacturers who bolster the cloud as it swings into view and then disappear as the excitement wears off, relegating the devices to CostCos and Sam's Clubs until the next rotation. But this season the orbit brought an anomaly: the Palm Pre, a device that is ostensibly compatible with the cloud, namely iTunes, but is definitely not of Apple's world. The Pre, as you'll remember, masquerades as an iTunes-compatible device, a feature that Apple promises will soon be remedied through software updates. To this Palm replied: "Palm's media sync works with the current version of iTunes," Palm spokesperson Lynn Fox told me. "If Apple chooses to disable media sync in a future version of iTunes, it will be a direct blow to their users who will be deprived of a seamless synchronization experience. However, people will have options. They can stay with the iTunes version that works to sync their music on their Pre, they can transfer the music via USB, and there are other third-party applications we could consider."
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Dan Blake from 
In a world where most startups choose gaining users over making money, 
No sooner do we finish writing up 
One thing Yahoo has been very good at over the past year is closing down services. Today brings news of another one shutting down: 
We’ve received numerous reports of 
So, after a tidal wave of criticism from the iPhone early adopters, AT&T is 
As someone with the 450 anytime minute plan (the lowest), I would venture to guess that I’m in the same boat as most of you out there with iPhone 3Gs. I opted to get 1500 text messages tacked on to my plan for $15 a month mostly because I hate AT&T’s (and all other carrier’s) 
Mozilla has teamed with 
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