The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Layar’s Augmented Reality Browser: Literally More Than Meets The Eye
- Facebook Click Fraud Enraging Advertisers
- Images From The #iranelection
- It Really Should Have Been Called The iPhone 3G V - For Video
- AOL’s PoliticsDaily Quickly Surpasses Rival Politico, MediaGlow Sites Continue To Grow
| Layar’s Augmented Reality Browser: Literally More Than Meets The Eye Posted: 21 Jun 2009 03:57 AM PDT
Layar is a so-called ‘augmented reality browser’, an application that turns you mobile phone’s camera viewer - only on Android-powered phones for the time being - into a full-fledged information portal and local business search engine. It essentially puts an information overlay on top of your camera view, bringing digital data of various sorts into play whenever you’re looking at or for something in the real world. Imagine being on the look-out for a great new place in a street nearby your current apartment or house and seeing all the real estate listings, with some details and pricing included right from your mobile device as you’re walking down the street. Imagine watching status updates your friends pushed to social networks roll in with location information attached to them (e.g. ‘Tweets Nearby’). Imagine finding information on ATMs, public transport etc. in a city you’re visiting just by starting up the camera on your mobile phone. And thanks to an integration with Google Local Search, how about being able to look up contact information and reviews for businesses (e.g. restaurants, bars, etc.) in your direct neighborhood with one-click dialing capability? These are all things that are or will be possible with Layar, and there are so many use cases I could think of in under a minute that you’d really have to make an effort to miss the enormous potential of this application. Layar is typically one of those cutting-edge things that aggressively shoves you nose-first into the enormous potential of the next-generation smartphones and platforms, giving you an idea of what you can expect from inventive developers and service providers thankfully making use of their ever-increasing capabilities in the near future. I can only hope for Layar that they’re not entering the game too early. Check out this Engadget video for more hands-on coverage. And in case you were wondering, you can expect a Layar application for the iPhone 3G S this Autumn (and not Springtime, duh). Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Facebook Click Fraud Enraging Advertisers Posted: 21 Jun 2009 02:03 AM PDT
A big part of that revenue comes from cost-per-click advertising from small self serve advertisers. And right now those advertisers aren’t very happy. They’ve been complaining about click fraud of up to 100% for weeks, and the situation doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Scores of complaints can be found at WickedFire, where advertisers are complaining of massive click fraud and an indifferent Facebook. A few of the recent posts (excuse the language):
These aren’t the standard click fraud complaints that advertisers have leveled against search engines for years. In those cases, bots are racking up the fake clicks, which obviously never convert to any sort of purchase or other action. But at least the advertisers see the clicks. In this case advertisers are saying that Facebook is recording and charging for clicks that don’t exist at all, even from bots. Their tracking software (many use Prosper202, but others are using raw Apache logs) shows one set of numbers, which is 20% - 100% lower than what Facebook is recording. According to the WickedFire posts Facebook isn’t officially acknowledging the problem or giving any refunds so far. But they are asking some advertisers to send in logs to show the discrepancy. So far, advertisers who go to the trouble to do this aren’t getting the response they wanted: “I was asked to send in my logs so I spent over an hour compiling logs over the time period in question, and they replied with their fucking scripted bullshit. I was sooo fucking pissed, since I took the time to do that and they churn out a 2 second response.” We have an email in to Facebook for comment. Image is from a 2006 BusinessWeek report on click fraud. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Posted: 20 Jun 2009 09:16 PM PDT As the world watches the violence and post-election protests escalate in Iran, startling images from the streets of Tehran are disseminating through various social media. Many of them are tagged #iranelection, a hashtag which started on Twitter but is spreading to Flickr and elsewhere. Since it is difficult to find photos in the sea of Tweets using the same #iranelection tag I’ve been using Twicsy, an image search engine for photos posted to Twitter which we wrote about yesterday. If you search “iranelection” or “tehran iran”, dozens of images from the protests will pop up. Fair warning: these images are raw and unfiltered, and some of them are quite gruesome, showing people getting shot and lying in pools of blood. The most tragic one shows what is described as a woman protester bleeding to death after being shot today. This same incident was caught on someone’s video or cell phone video camera and uploaded to YouTube. (I hesitate to link to this because it is so hard to watch, but you can find it by searching for “An innocent girl was shot by Iran riot police” on YouTube). There’s been plenty of debate about how big a role Twitter is playing in events in Iran. At the very least, it is being used as a channel to distribute information and images to the rest of the world. It is not always clear where these images come from or who took them. Some of the images are credited to professional news agencies such as the AP, Getty, Reuters, and Arabic news organizations and are being spread around by bloggers both inside and outside Iran. Others look like they were taken in haste or on a cell phone. (For other images from Iran taken by citizen photojournalists, check out Demotix/iranelection). Below are a few images circulating on Twitter. The first one was uploaded on June 14, 2009 and has no attribution (if anyone knows the photographer, please tell me in comments). Update: The photo is by Olivier Laban-Mattei/Agence France Press/Getty Images: This one was also uploaded on June 14, and is also uncredited: This one was taken by Farhad Rajabali of news.gooya.com: So was this one (Farhad Rajabali/news.gooya.com): Beyond Twitter, you can find a slide show of Iran protest images on the New York Times. And on Flickr, Faramarz Hashemi has collected the set of #iranelection photos embedded below (some of them overlap with the ones on Twitter).
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| It Really Should Have Been Called The iPhone 3G V - For Video Posted: 20 Jun 2009 02:09 PM PDT
So, I’ve now had a full day with the latest iPhone, the 3G S. So far, so good. This isn’t meant to be a full review — that will come later. But I wanted to give an initial reaction based on the last 24 hours, because as someone who has more than extensively used both the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G, a lot of users may be interested to know what immediately strikes me as different in this version. The obvious answer would be its speed. There’s no denying it, it is fast. But that speed is severely hampered by AT&T’s often bad service and the fact that while this phone is capable of transferring data about roughly twice the speed of the iPhone 3G, AT&T’s network isn’t yet capable of doing the same, rendering that advantage moot. So instead of iPhone 3G S, I really would have called this thing the iPhone 3G V — for video. Because that feature, quite simply, is awesome. Yes, plenty of other devices have done video in the past, but the combination of the overall package of the iPhone with this video recording capability is a game-changer in my opinion. And as we wrote last night, this could spell big trouble for the Flip. Others are saying the same thing. The way that the 3G S handles video is more than good enough for the average consumer. And I think we’re going to see that play out over the next several months. Not only does the 3G S shoot video in fairly nice (VGA) quality (with the possibility of doing HD quality someday), it is dead simple to upload to YouTube — it is literally the click of one button. Almost immediately after unboxing the 3G S I shot a quick 30 second video (embedded below), and within minutes it was online being viewed on YouTube — and that was transferring it to YouTube via 3G. (Over WiFi, it’s obviously even faster.) No, that’s not as real-time as live video streaming that a service like Qik would like to offer (but is currently being restricted from doing so), but again, it’s fast enough for most consumers, and it’s much better quality to boot. And one thing that sets it apart from competitor smartphones with similar functionality, like the Google Ion (aka the G2 or HTC Magic), is that the 3G S has dead-simple video editing capabilities right on the device. You simply drag your finger across the video timeline along the top of a video to trim it down to just the part you want before you upload it. And playback of these videos on the device itself looks great. But really, it’s the whole package of the iPhone as an extremely consumer-friendly device mixed with this video functionality that is killer. Just think about all those popular Twitter applications on the iPhone. When those add video sharing functionality, these iPhone videos are going to be everywhere, just as iPhone-shot pictures are. And it’s already happening. The increasingly popular yfrog was the first such service to support video from the 3G S, as it already is offering it through Twittelator. And the video attachments are already coming in from the new device. You can expect a surge of other Twitter apps to follow, as TweetDeck, Tweetie and Twitterrific are all ready to launch video support with yfrog, we hear. And you can bet that other services like TwitVid, the other TwitVid, 12seconds and possibly even TwitPic are sure to follow. But the fact that you can record a video and upload it with one click to YouTube is huge. And with YouTube’s new social features, those videos can auto-tweet out when you upload them, as I learned yesterday. I asked YouTube for its thoughts on the new iPhone. “It’s a truly amazing world - and great for YouTube - if everyone has an IP connected video camera in their pocket 24/7. Examples such as the protest videos in Iran display the incredible impact of getting video online and shared with the world. The 3G S is only going to increase the velocity of realtime creation and sharing via YouTube,” Hunter Walk, the Director of Product Management at YouTube, tells us. I can already see it — there will be so many simple ways to get video from your iPhone 3G S to the web, that we’re about to enter the next phase of mobile social sharing: Full-on video. And I think that’s fantastic, I just hope all these services are ready as obviously video is an entirely different game than pictures are. Yfrog claims to be ready, as does YouTube. “We’re already seeing thousands of uploads from new iPhones, but we’re built for scale and receive more than 20 hours of video every minute, so overall quite confident that iPhone users will have a great experience sharing via YouTube,” Walk says. Really, the only thing I see inhibiting this video revolution on the iPhone 3G S is, not surprisingly, AT&T. How the service is going to handle all these relatively big video files flying over its network all the time now is a huge question mark. We already saw that it couldn’t handle a few thousand geeks with iPhones being in the same place at the same time during SXSW this year — just imagine the first event where there are thousands of geeks with thousands of iPhone 3G Ss, uploading video. AT&T says that it is continuing to upgrade and improve its network. But the company couldn’t even get MMS ready to go in the U.S. for the iPhone 3G S launch, so I’m skeptical. The time for excuses is over for AT&T. If it wants to prove it deserves that iPhone exclusivity, it needs to be ready for what’s about to occur. The mobile video revolution is upon us. And that’s why this device should have been called the iPhone 3G V. Below find a couple more tests, one in widescreen (horizontal) mode, one in vertical mode — featuring me as I am in most social situations, on the iPhone. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| AOL’s PoliticsDaily Quickly Surpasses Rival Politico, MediaGlow Sites Continue To Grow Posted: 20 Jun 2009 02:00 PM PDT  AOL’s new political news and blog site, PoliticsDaily.com has surpassed rival Politico.com in unique visits in May, after being launched only a month and a half ago. According to May’s comScore results, PoliticsDaily.com received 2.4 million unique visitors compared to 1.1 million unique visitors on Politico.com in May. PoliticsDaily, a “news magazine” site which primarily focuses on in-depth political commentary as opposed to breaking news, provides only original content, from long-form analysis to blog posts on issues in the U.S. political landscape. You can read our original review of PoliticsDaily here. This is a big deal for AOL and representative of the company’s ambitions to become a dominant player in the online content space. PoliticsDaily is the brainchild of Martin Moe, senior vice president at AOL and is built under Bill Wilson's new MediaGlow division, which is building new content brands distinct from AOL itself. MediaGlow, which recently launched topic directory Love.com, runs AOL News, Engadget and TMZ.com, among other properties. AOL may be on to something. MediaGlow reports that sites as a whole, rose 5% year over year, with unique visitors climbing hitting 76.3 million, according to May’s comScore data. AOL’s Technology Network – which includes Engadget, , Switched, DownloadSquad, and others, saw the most growth out of all the MediaGlow networks, seeing 35 percent growth in year over year. As TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington wrote earlier this month, the MediaGlow team is looking to pick up the remnants of the dying print magazine business and digitize this content. With the print business in shambles, a lot of high quality talent is suddenly willing to take a job in online, even at a much lower salary. And AOL has some cash from the dialup business. High quality talent may be what is helping PoliticsDaily stay competitive in a crowded field. Wilson credits editor and former New York Times Washington Correspondent, Melinda Henneberger’s leadership and “dream team” as the primary reason for the site’s rapid growth. PoliticsDaily launched with a venerable list of experienced political reporters from both new and old media, including Walter Shapiro, former columnist for USA Today and former Washington bureau chief for Salon; Jill Lawrence, former national political correspondent for USA Today and columnist for the Associated Press; Carl Cannon, former Washington bureau chief for Reader's Digest and White House correspondent for the National Journal and the Baltimore Sun; and others. Of course there are still other political news-driven sites that are getting more unique visits than PoliticsDaily— The Huffington Post saw 5.3 million unique visits in May, over twice the amount of traffic than PoliticsDaily. But HuffPo’s a content aggregator and PoliticsDaily is focused more on long-form original content. And it seems that PoliticsDaily is still growing and may be a model for where magazines should head in the future. In the grand scheme of things, AOL’s strategy towards monetizing niche content online seems to be working out. And since they've already got the publishing platform with MediaGlow, new brands can be inserted or built at little marginal operating cost. If the brand tanks, which is likely to happen at some point, then AOL isn’t losing too much. It will be interesting to see what digital content brands AOL unveil next. Wilson says that MediaGlow will be launching several sites in the near future, but declined to give specifics. Perhaps they’ll reinvent some of the dying magazine brands at former parent company Time Inc.? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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Facebook has a big revenue target this year - $550 million, according to investors who were 
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