The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Glubble Scores $1 Million, Simplifies Photo Sharing With Your Family
- New Yahoo Homepage Spotted In The Wild
- Opera: Mobile Search On The Rise, Google Still King Of The Hill
- There May Be 50,000 Apps For The iPhone, But Only A Select Few Become Popular
- Movable Type Experts Team Up On Melody, An Open Source Publishing Platform
- Mochi Media Launching Payments Platform For Flash Games. Early Results Are Stunning
- AudioMicro Partners With SlideRocket, Revamps Music Licensing Platform
- BookFresh Is OpenTable For Everything Else
- Google Dips Its Toe Into Travel Space With City Tours
- Looking for a Freelance Project Bonanza? Look No Further than DoNanza!
- Yep, iPorn Is Here For The iPhone
- Did Shaq Just Find Out He Was Traded On Twitter?
- Wikinvest Hopes Redesign Will Attract The Yahoo Finance Crowd
- Like TweetDeck? Like TechCrunch? Then You’ll Love This.
- PubMatic Launches Dynamic Ad Price Prediction Tool
- Miss Out On Your Facebook Vanity URL? Here’s Your Consolation Prize.
- Get A Free Copy Of Sarah Lacy’s Startup Book
- Adultery Rampant Among South Carolina Governors. This Must Be Craigslist’s Fault
- Video: Apple’s Awesomely Improved iPhone Remote App
- Evan Williams, Ron Conway, Caterina Fake and True Ventures Invest In Web Typography Startup Small Batch
- The Onion Finally Weighs In On The Iranian Situation “Ruining” Twitter
- Fever, A Self-Hosted Feed Reader, Heats Up Your RSS Subscriptions
- Break.com’s New Twitter Show: “As Long As Celebrities Continue To Be Stupid, I’ll Mock Them”
- Nielsen Debunks Myths On Teens And Media - They Still Watch TV!
- A Million App Downloads For Palm. A Million iPhone 3GSs For Apple.
| Glubble Scores $1 Million, Simplifies Photo Sharing With Your Family Posted: 25 Jun 2009 08:45 AM PDT  Glubble, social network for families, is launching several new features to improve photo sharing within its social network for families. Formerly a Firefox plug-in that let parents control what websites kids could visit online, Glubble evolved into a social network that resembles a FriendFeed but for families. Glubble has also raised $1 million in Series B funding from European investors, bringing the site’s total funding to $4 million. Glubble lets families set up a private family home page where they can leave messages on the message wall, create online photo albums and organize their familyʼs schedule using the family events feature to post appointment, birthdays, holidays and reminders. Glubble has always let users post photos to their families’ site, but the network has launched a useful tool called the “Family Timeline,” which provides visual navigation of family photos, events and messages through a timeline. Glubble has also created a new Toolbar interface (a Firefox plug-in) which provides families real- time message and events updates from the Family Page.  Currently, Glubble has 300,000 “family pages,” on it’s site and is still small. Glubble plans to make money from a freemium model, which will let families pay $39.95 for more storage space for photos. Glubble’s interface and photo sharing features are easy to use but there are a plethora of social networks for families and it may be tough to differentiate itself in such a crowded space. Competitors include Cozi, Geni, and MyFamily.com. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| New Yahoo Homepage Spotted In The Wild Posted: 25 Jun 2009 07:33 AM PDT
TechCrunch reader Bradley Scott Shoemaker checks in with us to tell us this new Yahoo homepage turned up when visiting the portal using Google’s Chrome browser. All his other installed browsers still showed the classic Yahoo website, which lead him to believe they’re gradually bucket testing the new redesign for now (update: some users reported seeing it for over a month already). We think so too: the screenshot shows that this design is very close to the redesign we reported on back in September 2008 (embedded below again). They only tested that one for a select few users in a limited amount of countries too, but it was the last we’d actually heard of it. Update 2: The Business Insider posted a screenshot of a new redesign back in May too, but there are some differences, particularly on the color and navigation level. For the record: comScore pegs Yahoo’s total traffic at over 550 million unique visitors worldwide (May 2009), of which 150 million located in the U.S. alone. So, who else has spotted this revamped Yahoo website? Let us know in comments. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Opera: Mobile Search On The Rise, Google Still King Of The Hill Posted: 25 Jun 2009 06:49 AM PDT
Looking at global trends, Opera Mini’s nearly 25.4 million users (as measured in May 2009, up 8.4% from the month before and up 36% compared to May 2008) have viewed over 9.6 billion pages. Since April, page-views have gone up 11.0% and increased an amazing 227% since May 2008. Opera says Mini users generated nearly 160 million MB of data for operators worldwide in May 2009, and claims that that would be 1.5 PB worth of data if the company didn’t compress this data up to 90%. As for mobile search, a number of interesting trends are notable. Apart from dominance of local players in some parts of the world (e.g. Biadu in China and Yandex in Russia), Google mostly leads the pack in mobile search across the globe. Opera Mini users in India and Nigeria are the biggest users of search portals. In India, 16.3% of page-views are from search portals, and users viewed an average of 63.7 search-portal pages per month. In Nigeria, 26.6% of page-views are from search portals, and users viewed an average of 49.6 search portal pages per month. Taking a closer look at Southeast Asia, the company mentions the following key trends: the top 9 countries using Opera Mini in the region (Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Brunei, Singapore, Cambodia and Laos) see continued growth. From May 2008 to May 2009, overall page-views in those countries increased 459%, while the number of unique users went up 119% during the same period. In this region, Google is the undisputed number one mobile search engine, followed by Yahoo. Also noteworthy: Facebook is on its way to challenge the leader in mobile social networking in Southeast Asia (that would be Friendster). Full report and press release can be found here. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| There May Be 50,000 Apps For The iPhone, But Only A Select Few Become Popular Posted: 25 Jun 2009 05:32 AM PDT
Out of 2,309 tracked applications (representing 15.1 million unique iPhone and iPod Touch users), no less than 54% are actively used by south of 1,000 persons. That’s a very long tail there, and not an economically interesting one at that. Only about 20% of the tracked apps have more than 10,000 active users, and only 5% (or 116 apps) boasts more than 100,000 active users. For the record, an active user is considered to be someone who used the app at least once in May. Two caveats: the AdMob network evidently doesn’t cover all applications available for the platform in its entirety, and the large majority of those it tracks are free of charge. That means two things: there’s no indication that these findings can correctly be extrapolated to the entire iPhone app universe, and it’s likely the curve is less steep with paid applications (usually, you’d be more actively engaged with an app you paid for than a free app you downloaded just for testing). The report also correctly points out the App Store ranking system feeds the success of top applications, particularly when they are featured on the Apple website in combination with getting rave reviews. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Movable Type Experts Team Up On Melody, An Open Source Publishing Platform Posted: 25 Jun 2009 05:09 AM PDT
The platform is dubbed Melody and will be managed by a non-profit named The Open Melody Software Group, which has Anil Dash (Six Apart’s outspoken VP and Chief Evangelist) on its board. From what we can gather reading about the project on the website, its founders are passionate about Movable Type but see more value in forking it, community-style, “to see it flourish as a platform”. According to the FAQ section, the team is working together with Six Apart to some degree - which isn’t surprising considering Dash’ presence on the board - and strives for as much compatibility with Movable Type’s core APIs as possible. However, you can also read that the team is inspired by successful open source initiatives such as WordPress (a Six Apart rival), Apache, Linux and Firefox.
As for the product, it’s not ready yet, even for beta testing. The first release (Melody 1.0) is scheduled for ‘Fall 2009′, but if you’re a developer and you can’t hold your horses than you should check out the latest development snapshot from Melody’s source code repository on Github. Behind Melody: Tim Appnel, Jesse Gardner, Dan Wolfgang, Mark Stosberg, Jay Allen, Su, Arvind Satyanarayn and Byrne Reese. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Mochi Media Launching Payments Platform For Flash Games. Early Results Are Stunning Posted: 25 Jun 2009 02:43 AM PDT
These games are embedded on publisher sites and are very often “borrowed” by other sites who just lift the Flash files. So it’s important that the game files generate revenue directly. Ads served by the publisher around the game aren’t reliable. Mochi Media puts the ads directly into the games, so even if they are ripped off, the ads still show and create revenue. The problem is these ads don’t make a whole lot of money - the industry average is around $0.50 per 1,000 game plays. To fuel revenue growth to developers (and therefore Mochi Media), the company has launched a payments platform called MochiCoins with a handful of game developers. MochiCoins lets developers charge for game upgrades - users can pay for coins via credit card, PayPal or SuperRewards, and the coins that then be used to purchase upgrades in games. The early results, we’ve heard from someone close to a game developer on the platform, are stunning. SAS: Zombie Assault 2 is killing it. The game has normal Mochi Ads, but users can also purchase better weapons and other stuff to kill zombies faster and better. It’s addictive. I spent over an hour “testing” the game earlier this evening and spent $5 in upgrades in an astonishingly short period of time. Try it - you can log in via Facebook Connect and be spending money like a drunken venture capitalist in no time.
In early testing, says our source, users are buying stuff and lots of it. The average revenue has increased dramatically to $6.50 per thousand game plays. Users are paying for upgrades and subscriptions on the iPhone, Facebook and other platforms already and proving that good apps and games can generate a lot of easy money. But what Mochi is doing is completely decentralized. The game I embedded on that page, without the developers permission, is making money for that developer and for Mochi Media. In other words, go ahead and steal these games. They’d love nothing more. Mochi Media has raised $14 million over two venture capital financing rounds. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| AudioMicro Partners With SlideRocket, Revamps Music Licensing Platform Posted: 25 Jun 2009 02:22 AM PDT
In addition, the startup is announcing a partnership with online presentation software maker SlideRocket, which basically means its library of stock music and royalty-free sound effects will now be included in the SlideRocket marketplace. The revamp of the site consists of both a cleaner design and more functionality. One of those new features is the addition of promotion codes you can pass to friends, and of course we requested some for you. The first 100 TechCrunch readers to sign up for AudioMicro using the promotion code "TECHCRUNCH2" get access to 2 free audio downloads credits (an $8.99 value). As for the new site: the search process, which was below par before, has been completely redesigned and looks and feels much better now. You can now also take audio files with you on the web, meaning that there’s now an embed code that you can use to embed tracks on your blog, social network account, etc. (example below). AudioMicro also introduced some type of ‘lightbox’ feature that lets you create favorite lists and buy the audio material on there at a later time.
Finally, there’s an API available now that allows approved partners to create applications using the AudioMicro library. The SlideRocket partnership is a first result of the new API: utilizing it, SlideRocket users can now license tracks from the AudioMicro archive and incorporate them directly into their SlideRocket presentations. Last month, AudioMicro announced the availability of its second iPhone app, AudioMicro Lite (iTunes link). The app includes over 50 royalty -ree sound effects as well as a "Sneak Attack" feature, which sets the iPhone to play a specified sound effect when the device is moved by an unsuspecting person (lots of fun). For 99 cents, users can upgrade to the full AudioMicro app, which includes over 500 professional sound effects. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| BookFresh Is OpenTable For Everything Else Posted: 24 Jun 2009 11:57 PM PDT
Who might need such a service? A lot more services and individuals than you may realize. While most services have some sort of scheduling system, many aren’t optimized, and can’t adapt on the fly to openings/changes. Massage therapists, dentists, doctors are all perfect examples of who could use such a system, founder Ryan Donahue tells us. He notes that health and beauty has been a particularly hot area. He knows that because the service has actually been around for a little while, but it was formerly know as HourTown. But BookFresh is a much better name for the service because, “appointments are much like produce items in a grocery store, it’s a perishable thing,” Donahue says. And a name change isn’t all that in-store for users. BookFresh wants to be the main platform for all online appointment booking on the web. As such, they’ve created APIs to let developers of sites take advantage of their tools. But you don’t have to be a developer to implement the service, anyone can do it with a simple line of code added to their site. This is important because a lot of people BookFresh is targeting are one-person or small operations, that probably don’t have a web development team. Donahue likens the idea of BookFresh as an appointment platform to PayPal as a payment platform. (And he should know, he used to work at PayPal — incidentally with Jeffrey Jordan, the CEO of OpenTable.) He notes that just like a lot of sites out there don’t want to go through the hassle of building their own payment system, they also don’t want to have to make an online booking system. Sure, it’s not as complex, but it’s still a hassle — and might as well be impossible for little shops/services. And BookFresh offers some nice things with its platform. One is the ability for businesses that use it to get calls when a customer is requesting an appointment time. From your phone, you can opt to accept or decline the request. That’s perfect for someone like a plumber, who may be always on the go and not able to get to a computer to confirm appointments. And the offers easy integration with Google Calendar and iCal to place appointments in your own personal calendars automatically when you accept them. Alongside the name change, BookFresh is announcing a partnership with Webs.com, one of the largest sites for building free websites out there. A lot of small business owners are already using it, and now they’ll have one click access to install BookFresh if they choose to. In terms of monetization, the service is free for the end user, but businesses/individuals who wish to use it will pay a month fee that starts at $19.95. If larger sites choose to sign-on, there are other deals such as revenue sharing that can take place. In terms of competition, there is Appointment-plus, but their service forces you back to their servers to handle everything. BookFresh’s platform allows users to stay on the page they are already on to set everything up, Donahue says. One service that BookFresh won’t be competing with is OpenTable. They have no interest in getting into the restaurant space, Donahue says. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Google Dips Its Toe Into Travel Space With City Tours Posted: 24 Jun 2009 11:52 PM PDT
Getting started is incredibly easy — just type in where you’re visiting (say, San Francisco or London), and Google will present a suggested itinerary spanning a three day trip, with around a dozen attractions per day depending on the city. From there you can change the number of days you’ll be staying (Google will show more attractions the longer you stay), and you can also manually adjust the list of places you’d like to visit. You can add a new attraction by entering its name in a text field, and Google will try to find it in its database. All attractions include a star rating, along with its hours operation and location. For the most part adding attractions works pretty well (which is going to be key given that you can’t expect Google to predict everything you’ll want to see). It managed to find the London Eye perfectly, and it even figured out that Platform 9¾ was located at the King’s Cross Rail Station. That said, it isn’t perfect: a search for Hyde Park directed me to a nearby hostel, which I suppose would have gotten me there but probably isn’t the ideal result. Perhaps the coolest part of the new product is the way it uses Google Maps to figure out which locations are closest to each other. Rather than simply present a list of places Google thinks you might want to check out, the site will logically order them according to where they’re located, minimizing the travel time between each. Given its status as a Labs product this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but there are still a few kinks in City Tours. For one, I am apparently unable to remove events from my suggested itinerary (I’ve tried in both Firefox and Safari with the same issue). Likewise, sometimes when I click on the name of a location nothing happens. And it badly needs support for Google Transit, which can automatically route you across town using public transportiation — my London tour included a 99 minute walk that would have only been a couple minutes away had I ridden on the Tube. In the mean time, there are plenty of other travel sites that offer similar (and in many cases, more robust) functionality than Google’s City Tours, including TC50 finalist GoPlanit, Offbeat Guides, and Zicasso. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Looking for a Freelance Project Bonanza? Look No Further than DoNanza! Posted: 24 Jun 2009 11:21 PM PDT
DoNanza currently aggregates its freelance and crowd-source projects from 300 websites, with another 300 sites to be added in the coming months. Amazingly (or maybe not, really), 99% of the projects are indexed via scraping, with only a handful added manually. There are a couple of main features I really like about DoNanza. First, its filtering tools are very clear and effective—nothing innovative, but often common-sense discovery tools are misguidedly cut from a public launch for some reason. On DoNanza, searches can be fine-tuned wit sliders on several levels, from Budget/Reward (Fixed/Hourly/Revenue-Share), to Project Type (Contest/Bidding/Other), to Time Left and Date Posted. The second useful feature is that each project’s details are displayed in an easy to skim form (see screenshot below). Again, not rocket science, but it makes the sometimes cumbersome chore of going through a myriad of search results a breeze. DoNanza is also jumping on the ever-growing Twitter bandwagon by tweeting out new project notifications. Handles include: @dnzSEOfor SEO, @dnzWriting for Writing, @dnzPHP for PHP, @dnzDataEntry for Data Entry and more. Demonstrating that it believes in freelancers, the DoNanza team outsourced much of its site development, including the UI, search engine, crawlers, as well as the indexing and data evaluation mechanisms. The company has yet to start making money but is planning on introducing sponsored links and projects in a couple of months. In the meantime, it’s pretty much a traffic and retention game. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Yep, iPorn Is Here For The iPhone Posted: 24 Jun 2009 10:38 PM PDT
"We uploaded nude topless pics today. This is the first app to have nudity," Hottest Girls' developer Allen Leung tells Macenstein. Quite an accomplishment. While some will undoubtedly see this as a bad thing, I think this is actually a good thing. First of all, allowing mature content like this should free up the App Store screeners to be able to focused on finding apps that are actually malicious or out of line, rather than being prude-police. Second, as we all know, porn is a big industry and as long as the kiddies can’t see it, there’s nothing wrong with adults being allowed to get it on their iPhones. It should make developers a lot of money. And it should make Apple, with its 30% cut, a lot of money. Still, I’d be surprised if we see hardcore pornography in the App Store anytime soon, but who knows. Lastly, this is the App Store opening up a bit more once again. It did a bit last year when it started letting in cartoon violence NC-17 games, and this is the next step. A more open store, is a better store. Yes, even if it means a flood of crappy soft porn apps. Options are good, download what you want. Though I still believe there needs to be a better sorting and highlighting mechanism from Apple for apps. It’s possible that this is another case of Apple letting an app slip through that shouldn’t have, but given that the developer is playing up the nudity on the app page, I doubt it. And it looks like Apple has a new rating sub-heading: Rated 17+ for “Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity.” Hottest Girls is $1.99 in the App Store. Find it here. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Did Shaq Just Find Out He Was Traded On Twitter? Posted: 24 Jun 2009 10:03 PM PDT
Look at Shaq’s last few tweets. Several minutes ago he tweeted out “I didn’t hear dat yet” in response to this tweet, “is it true u a CLEVELAND CAVALIER.” A few minutes later someone sent Shaq the following tweet, “U CLEVELAND BOUND…shaq found out he was traded thru twitter! lmao….hahahaaaaaa” Shaq’s response? “I kno right.” He went silent after that. Hopefully his agent called him to tell him the news. Then I fully expect a rush of good rush of tweets name-dropping LeBron James. The trade was rumored to be going down during the regular season, so I’m happy for the big guy that it got done. As well as for my hometown Cleveland Cavs. Shaq is one of the most popular Twitter users with nearly 1.4 million followers. This looks to be yet another example of Twitter being used to break news. Albeit much, much less substantial than what is going on in Iran. [thanks Jon] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Wikinvest Hopes Redesign Will Attract The Yahoo Finance Crowd Posted: 24 Jun 2009 10:01 PM PDT Finance sites like Yahoo Finance and Google Finance haven’t changed much in the past ten years. The fonts are different. Maybe there’s some more real-time quotes and fancier, interactive charts. But at their core they all follow pretty much the same formula: dump as much data on the individual investor as they can and let them figure it out. Wikinvest, which started out as a crowd-sourced investing site, is trying to change all of that with a complete redesign that is being turned on tonight for members who log in. Over the past two years, Wikinvest has become a great resource for researching stocks but some of its most interesting data was hidden away. It is not a daily habit like other finance sites, attracting only about 500,000 unique visitors a month. The redesign aims to change that by putting all of Wikinvest’s industry- and company-specific data front and center. Each stock page has a chart, key metrics, a news feed, wiki analysis, and opinions from bulls and bears. But there is a new data central tab which presents financial data in new ways. For each metric, whether it is revenues, operating margins, or debt-to-equity ratios, Wikinvest tells you whether the number you are looking at is high, low, or average compared to the industry. It also computes trends for you such as revenue growth and net income growth. Hovering over an one of these numbers produces a mini chart graphing the trend over time. Beyond that, though, Wikinvest shows industry metrics which can give investors insights into the health of the company. For instance, the industry metrics it shows for Google include ad revenue growth, paid clicks increase, and market share of searches. All of these also have their own little charts, each of which are embeddable. Here are the charts for ad revenue growth and licensing growth: You can also create charts which compare Google to Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay across a variety of metric. Here is one comparing advertising revenues: The whole point is to make the data intelligible. If you don’t know what the Price to Sales ratio means, you can click on it and get a definition In addition to making all the data come more alive, Wikinvest also now has a news feed for each stock. But instead of showing articles tagged with the ticker symbol, which is now overused by every finance news site from Forbes.com to the Motley Fool, it matches words in articles to its own database of 100,000 keywords associated with different companies. Its news feed shows headlines and snippets of text from 200 trusted sources, ranging from Bloomberg and the New York Times to wonkish finance and economic blogs. This casts a wider net and brings back different types of headlines than you might find on Yahoo Finance, although it may be too wide a net. I am not sure why a Forbes story about the hospital where Steve Jobs got his liver transplant comes up on the Yahoo stock page. Is that enough to make it the new Yahoo Finance? No, but at least it’s something different. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Like TweetDeck? Like TechCrunch? Then You’ll Love This. Posted: 24 Jun 2009 07:03 PM PDT
TechCrunch TweetDeck users will get all the features of the normal version of TweetDeck (Twitter, Facebook, 12seconds, etc, integration), with the added bonus of the TechCrunch Column, as an option. This column features tweets from TechCrunch’s writing staff. It’s seriously riveting stuff. Why just last night, our own Robin Wauters tweeted out, “Cleaning up disks, creating backups etc. Necessary evil.” Seriously though, we do occasionally share interesting stuff. And if news is breaking, there’s a good chance you’ll get it from one of us first. And you’ll be getting a version of TweetDeck with the handsome TechCrunch logo all over it. What’s not to love? Get it now. TweetDeck is available for Mac, Windows and Linux, it just requires Adobe AIR. The company, which secured angel funding in January, has been working on getting more services integrated into its client. Last week, it launched an iPhone app that has been gaining popularity quickly. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| PubMatic Launches Dynamic Ad Price Prediction Tool Posted: 24 Jun 2009 07:00 PM PDT With ad pricing from ad networks changing constantly, publishers not only have to keep a pulse on revenue from impressions, but also on which ad network is delivering the best value. In fact, publishers can benefit greatly from diversification in this dynamic environment. PubMatic, an online ad optimization service and TechCrunch 40 company, is launching a new product, Ad Price Prediction, that matches the optimal ad network with every ad impression with real-time functionality. Ad Price Prediction’s algorithm has been developed using data collected by PubMatic’s ad optimization service over the past three years. The company processes more than 100,000 data transactions per second through ads served for 6,000 publishing customers, and has applied this data to its technology to enable real-time processing. PubMatic offers a meta ad server that sits between online publishers and online ad networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network and Value Click. Their service helps publishers manage and maximize their advertising inventory by communicating with multiple ad networks to help them find the optimal ad layout and the highest paying ad network. They also provide users with a central dashboard to track all their ad networks and ad configurations. Ad Price Prediction’s algorithm compares the price difference between behavioral targeting and contextual targeting on a single ad impression and then serves the publisher the higher paying ad. PubMatic says that its premier customers, publishers with more than $5 million in annual online revenue, were able to lift ad revenue by as much as 70% using Ad Price Prediction. Competitors to PubMatic include YieldBuild and the Rubicon Project. AdWhirl also does dynamic ad optimization, but only for iPhone developers. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Miss Out On Your Facebook Vanity URL? Here’s Your Consolation Prize. Posted: 24 Jun 2009 06:24 PM PDT  When Facebook’s Vanity URL landrush kicked off nearly two weeks ago, over 500,000 people registered their new names in a matter of 15 minutes. Over the following weekend, nearly 6 million users staked their claims. The most desirable names, like ‘Jason’ or ‘Mike’, were snapped up in a matter of seconds (if they weren’t already registered by a Facebook employee before the landrush even began). Needless to say, a lot of people were left in the dust, forced to settle for something other than the vanity URL they’d been dreaming of for weeks. Well, if you’re a member of the unlucky masses, here’s your chance to get the name you’ve always wanted. Sort of. Developer Alex Gonzalez of Branch Interactive has put together an application that will allow you to to generate a Facebook application in your name, giving you the URL apps.facebook.com/NAME. So instead of Facebook.com/jasonkincaid, I would be apps.Facebook.com/jasonkincaid. Sure, it has the four extra letters designating it as a Facebook application, but it’s hardly an eyesore. Gonzalez’s application, which is called Personal URL, builds a basic secondary profile that can link to your online presences, including your main Facebook profile. At this point the options are very sparse, but if the application becomes popular Gonzalez plans to introduce more features. Installing the application forces you to jump through a few hoops (the process is similar to the custom Quiz apps that keep popping up all over Facebook). First, you’ll have to install the Facebook Developer App and create a new application. Then you’ll have to copy and paste your API Key and Secret Key into the Personal URL app. This is all spelled out pretty clearly in the directions, but it’s not exactly user friendly. So should you do it? The URL may be easy on the eyes, but it could also easily confuse anyone who tried to recall it from memory since normal vanity names don’t have the preceding ‘apps’ in front of their Facebook URL. There’s also a good chance Facebook is going to kill off the application entirely, and it may not be SEO friendly. Still, at least it’s a decent consolation prize for those that missed out on the great vanity landrush of ‘09. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Get A Free Copy Of Sarah Lacy’s Startup Book Posted: 24 Jun 2009 04:39 PM PDT
You can buy the book here. But since most of you are way too cheap to actually pay for a book, we’re going to give away 15 signed copies for free (postage included!). Here’s what you have to do - retweet this story using the retweet button at the bottom of this post (or just click here) by midnight California time tonight. We’ll choose 15 at random and contact you for delivery details. Good luck, and enjoy the book. To be eligible to win, you must retweet the post by midnight California time tonight. We’ll send these anywhere mail is delivered, you don’t have to be in the United States. Residents of South Carolina are not eligible to win. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Adultery Rampant Among South Carolina Governors. This Must Be Craigslist’s Fault Posted: 24 Jun 2009 04:09 PM PDT
All I’m wondering is, where’s South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster when we need him? Adultery is serious business. This is clearly, somehow, all Craigslist’s fault. For example, how do we know that Sanford didn’t meet his mistress in the adultery section of Craigslist? And also, can we please kick South Carolina out of the Union now? Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Video: Apple’s Awesomely Improved iPhone Remote App Posted: 24 Jun 2009 03:42 PM PDT
Watch the videos below to see it in action, but to say this is improved is beyond an understatement. Rather than clicking those little buttons dozens of times, you can now just slide around the iPhone screen to move around. And it’s much easier to get to the iPhone’s keyboard to do things like searches — a funtionality which is basically unusable with the white remote. Find the updated Remote app in the App Store here, it’s a free download and will work with iTunes on your computer as well.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Posted: 24 Jun 2009 02:32 PM PDT Stealth startup Small Batch has raised an undisclosed round of equity funding from True Ventures with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake, WordPress/Automattic Founder Matt Mullenweg, renown investor Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, Josh Felser and Dave Samuel participating. Small Batch is launching Typekit, a service that lets designers build sites with web-native typography. Small Batch was co-founded by Jeffrey Veen, who was one of the founding partners of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map, the well-received web analytics tool that was acquired by Google. After the acquisition, Veen worked at Google and started Small Batch in January of 2009. Veen was also the recipient of TechFellow award a few weeks ago. Details about Typekit are still limited but Veen says that the company wanted to “build a nimble, safe tool that makes it easier for web designers to do amazing design online.” Typekit plans to launch a preview of the service in the coming weeks with a library of high quality fonts and design typography tools. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. 
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| The Onion Finally Weighs In On The Iranian Situation “Ruining” Twitter Posted: 24 Jun 2009 02:22 PM PDT
The post is short, sweet and to the point. But the best parts are the fake quotes by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey:
In all seriousness, Twitter has been proving to be an amazing tool during this crisis, but I’ll admit that the headlines here and elsewhere often do read like Onion headlines unintentionally. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Fever, A Self-Hosted Feed Reader, Heats Up Your RSS Subscriptions Posted: 24 Jun 2009 01:59 PM PDT Fever is a hot new RSS reader that aims to cure “second inbox syndrome, unread item guilt, and unbold elbow.” In other words, the common plights of the modern RSS power user. Besides offering a full-featured feed reader, the application attempts to create a personalized Techmeme by scanning a user’s feed list for popular (or hot) links. Fever then groups these links into stories and assigns each a “temperature.” This allows a user to quickly keep a pulse on what’s going on in his or her “slice of the web.” The other refreshing feature of the app is its move away from email inbox-style unread counts. As a long-time Google Reader user, I always dreaded the experience of returning from an offline vacation only to find several thousand unread items in my reader. With Fever, the emphasis is on dividing subscriptions into two camps: must-reads (called Kindling) and everything else (Sparks). By moving the “hit-or-miss” feeds into the Sparks bin, Fever ensures that a user gets only the most relevant content. I’ve been using the product for a little less than a week and it has yet to disappoint. I now feel like I’m always aware of the trending stories in my area of Internet interest. Furthermore, I’ve been able to subscribe to a number of high-volume feeds that I would have never added to my Google Reader. And since I added them as Sparks, they now help Fever’s algorithm better find the most interesting stories from my Kindling. Fever is the newest product from designer/developer Shaun Inman: He is also the creator of Mint, a web site analytics suite (not to be confused with Mint, the financial site); Shortwave, a command line bookmarklet; and Horror Vacui, an 8-bit iPhone game. Although Fever has fully replaced Google Reader as my everyday feed reader, there are two drawbacks to the app: its cost and its requirements. Fever costs $30 (there is no demo or trial available). It also requires self-hosting and self-installation. Ultimately, this will prevent widespread adoption. A possible solution to increase mass appeal would be if a hosting company, e.g. Media Temple or Rackspace, were to offer a hosted version of Fever for a few dollars a month. Even better would be an ad-supported free version. But in the end, Inman seems to be fine with a more targeted market:
Check out the demo video here. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Break.com’s New Twitter Show: “As Long As Celebrities Continue To Be Stupid, I’ll Mock Them” Posted: 24 Jun 2009 01:43 PM PDT
Now Break.com, a video site heavily geared towards a male audience, is looking to get in on the action. The site has signed on comedian Mike Polk (formerly of HBOLabs) to host a show called Tweet Boxx, which is specifically focused on making fun of the Twitterverse. You can catch the first episode here. Polk kicks off the inaugural show saying that each week he’ll “be sharing with you my favorite celebrity Twitter tweets of the week” following that up a moment later with, “what am I saying here, these are words?” Welcome to my life, Mr. Polk. The show’s definitely worth watching if you’re a heavy Twitter user, and you’ll also probably love it if you’re still in the “Twitter is stupid” camp. The novelty of making fun of tweets will probably wear off at some point, but I think we still have a ways to go before we get there. Polk closes the show by saying, “as long as celebrities continue to be stupid, I’ll continue to mock them from the safety and comfort of my living room.” He’s got his work cut out for him. If you like Tweet Boxx, also be sure to check out Tweeting Too Hard, a site that shames those Tweeters that really deserve it. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Nielsen Debunks Myths On Teens And Media - They Still Watch TV! Posted: 24 Jun 2009 01:30 PM PDT
Ready for some eye-openers? Here we go: With an ever-expanding media universe, social networks play an increasingly important roles in the lives of teens … as they do in pretty much everyone else’s, too. The 33 million or so teenagers (aged 12 to 17) in the U.S., against all odds, keep on consuming quite a lot of non-connected media, such as TV, radio and - get this - even dead-tree stuff like newspapers next to their online activities. According to Nielsen, teenagers are far from abandoning TV for so-called new media. In fact, television viewing rates among U.S. teens have actually gone up 6% in the last five years. Sure, they browse the Web a lot, but far less than you do. The average time spent browsing for an adult person in the United States comes down to about 29 hours and 15 minutes per month. While I reach that average almost on a daily basis, teens are said to browse the Web a lot less than that: 11 hours and 32 minutes per month on average. I honestly thought the average teen would spend that much time on the Web a week, at least. Here are some other kickers, straight from the report: - if you’re between 25 and 34 years old, you watch online videos about 35% more than teens do (and they don’t have to go to the office every weekday) - Teenagers enjoy video games, but they don’t necessarily carry a particular interest in ones that are violent of nature - Teens who recall advertising are 44% more likely to say they liked the ads than adults (ok now I’m scared) - 1 out of 4 teens reads newspapers daily - one last takeaway from the report is that teens evidently have their favorite TV shows, websites and genre preferences … only they’re almost exactly the same as their parents’. You can download the report over at NielsenWire, or simply consult the embedded file at the bottom of this post. Let us know which finding surprised you the most, if any. nielsen_howteensusemedia_june09 Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| A Million App Downloads For Palm. A Million iPhone 3GSs For Apple. Posted: 24 Jun 2009 01:28 PM PDT
We’re 5 days away from that milestone. Anyone want to take that bet still? It’s been 18 days since the launch of the Palm Pre, and the device has already passed an important milestone: 1 million app downloads, according to mobile analytics firm Medialets. That’s impressive for a store with only 30 or so applications. While Apple surpassed 10 million downloads in its first weekend following the App Store launch in 2007, it had over 500 applications at launch, and already had a few million devices (the original iPhone) with which people could download from. The big problem for Palm is that is set itself up to be compared to the iPhone with comments like the one above and its feature set. And now it has a huge mountain to climb to get anywhere near it. While the Pre may have seen a million app downloads after 18 days, Apple’s newest device, the iPhone 3GS, sold a million hardware units in just three days after its launch last week. Analysts estimate Pre sales to be about 150,000 so far. All told, there are well over 20 million iPhones now out there (probably closer to 25 million), and when you throw in iPod touches (which also access the App Store), there are over 40 million units. And Palm isn’t making things any easier on itself. During this critical time after launch where new apps are vital, there are only 30 because the webOS SDK still isn’t open to all developers. Palm recently gave an update saying that developers should by the “end of this summer”, but even when they get it, it will likely be another few months before a wide range of apps start coming out. That means it will be the Fall or Winter before there are a ton of apps for the Pre — and that’s assuming developers jump on board. Meanwhile, all indications are that Apple’s new iPhone 3.0 SDK is kicking app development into an even higher level on that platform. The App Store is currently backlogged with app approvals, and just about every developer I’ve talked to, has something in the pipeline very shortly. Oh yeah, and Apple just launched a version of the iPhone that is $99, which everyone seems to be forgetting. The sales numbers on that should be interesting. That’s not to say Palm cannot be successful with the Pre and more specifically, its webOS, it can. It’s a great device, and a great platform. And the mobile arena, and specifically smartphones, are exploding in popularity right now. There is certainly more than enough room for a number of devices and a range of platforms. But Palm still has some very serious question marks on the business side of things, and they’re basically betting the farm on the Pre. It has another webOS device that may or may not come in the next few months, but even if it does, if the apps aren’t there, it could be facing a less than stellar entrance. And that’s the kind of performance Palm needs right now, stellar. On the other hand, McNamee’s comment might technically be true. All those people who bought the original iPhone may not be using one a month from now — they might be using the iPhone 3GS, instead. Let’s revisit this on July 29, shall we? [photo: flickr/kowitz] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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