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| You Put Your Aardvark In My Twitter (Bonus: Interview With Founders) Posted: 07 Jul 2009 08:45 AM PDT Yesterday we sat down with two of Aardvark’s founders, Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, to get an update on the company and learn about today’s integration of Aardvark into Twitter. Aardvark is a question an answer service with a twist. Instead of services like Yahoo Answers where the anonymous masses try to answer your questions (resulting in mostly spam), Aardvark sends questions to your social graph via email, SMS, instant messaging, etc. Your friends answer your questions (restaurant suggestions, things to do in Paris, whatever). Most questions are answered within 5 minutes. Last week the service opened up for Facebook users. Today they integrate with Twitter. For now, the integration only includes asking questions - if you add @vark to the end, Aardvark picks it up and adds it to your account. In future versions, they may try to integrate responses from Twitter directly into Aardvark as well. I spoke with Max and Damon at length about the Twitter integration as well as the service in general now that it has been tested by beta users for the last few months. The video and transcript (provided by SimulScribe, it’s not perfect but they are fast) are below: Transcript: INTERVIEWER: Max Ventilla. I pronounced your last name correct. You're the CEO and co-founder of Aardvark. We also have Damon Horowitz, you're the CTO and co-founder. And you're showing us the new Twitter integration. VOICE 1: That’s right. INTERVIEWER: OK. VOICE 1: And so, we are excited to basically allow people to interact with Aardvark over Twitter, the same way that they would over IM or e-mail or any other channels that they’re currently using to interact with their network. This is my Twitter and let’s imagine that… INTERVIEWER: You only have 677 followers. VOICE 1: I know. I haven't been at it too long. So… INTERVIWER: Will it be OK? You need to do a little more Twitter spamming. VOICE 1: Right. Would be to say, what’s going on in SF this weekend? INTERVIEWER: And normally, you’d be typing this into your Instant Messenger or directly on the Aardvark site where you normally use Aardvark. VOICE 1: That’s right. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. VOICE 1: Let’s say, something outdoors. It’s like - and… INTERVIEWER: Are you using a hashtag or - OK. Yeah. VOICE 1: You can. So, you could put in sort of like, concerts, or if you don’t, Aardvark will sort of pick out from that question about what’s going on… INTERVIEWER: Really, just because they know you’re a user? VOICE 1: That’s right. So, essentially, what’s happened now is - let’s imagine that I sent this in to Aardvark… INTERVIEWER: You actually are just sending this through Twitter? VOICE 1: This is a regular Twitter. This is like what I might do know and ask like, oh my Twitter followers, what’s happening? What you can do now is you can either send a direct message to vark. INTERVIEWER: So, Aardvark isn't aware of it yet. VOICE 1: That’s right. Nobody can send direct message to vark. Or what you can do is, you can take your normal Twitter message and just put somewhere in the message Aardvark. INTERVIEWER: OK. VOICE 1: And then, essentially, that clues in Aardvark the same way if you send that message to anyone else that it should be paying attention to it. INTERVIEWER: OK. VOICE 1: And it’ll pick it out of My Twitter Stream and it’ll do what it normally does. INTERVIEWER: It’ll pick up the original Twitter? Do people start responding to the original Twitter that had no Aardvark at it? Aardvark will see it? VOICE 1: It would not. So, we want people to be intentional about wanting Aardvark to answer their message. There are some instances where you don’t particularly want that to go out to your network. But, the idea is that if you wanted to sort of in addition to have Aardvark answering the question, then you’ll put an add message, you know, with that Aardvark syntax and if you wanted just to go to Aardvark and for it to answer the same ways it would if you sent it over IM or e-mail, then you send the direct message. And in either case, as the answers come back, they’ll get direct message to me. So, I'll show to you - so, earlier today, I asked, you know, what’s going on in New York on a certain weekend when I'm going to be there. Sort of other questions that I asked to ask about Twitter. You go to this… INTERVIEWER: These are all questions you ask. VOICE 1: Over Twitter. INTERVIEWER: And if somebody responds, Aardvark picks that up. VOICE 1: That’s right. So, here's an example. I said, you know, at Twitter, do try to copy several features (unintelligible), I see your terms, you know, in tags. Twitter, here you see answers coming from different people. Many of these are sort of people that I have friends in common with. Here’s another one and then you have the ability on the transfer page to go and you can thank the person or send a follow-up message to them or to tell Aardvark whether or not the answer that they came back with was particularly helpful to you. INTERVIEWER: So, any reply is pooled in? VOICE 1: The replies that come through the Aardvark system are all pooled together on a transcript page… INTERVIEWER: So many people have to have the Aardvark in their replies as well? VOICE 1: No, so these are actually people that had answered over IM or e-mail or - so the nice thing is we’re using it the same as we would with any other communication channel. When a question comes in, you can interact with someone no matter what IM network they're on or if they're on more advice or anything else. So… INTERVIEWER: But if somebody responds on Twitter, you’re not picking that up at all. VOICE 1: That’s right. So, presently, we’re not pulling in the normal app replies you get from your actual followers. You’re already going to be getting those in whatever you know, Twitter appliance you’re using. And in the same way that, you know, if you didn’t ask a question through Aardvark as of yet, you know, we’re only pooling together the answers that you got through the system. INTERVIEWER: OK. VOICE 1: And then, similarly, you get the same benefit that when you sign up for Aardvark and you sync with Twitter, it’s using that same social graph that you’ve aggregated from either your web e-mail client like, you know, Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or MSN mail or Facebook. INTERVIEWER: How do you sync with Twitter when you setup for Aardvark? VOICE 1: So, right now, you’ll go to a profile page and there’s just a Twitter tab, that’s right there. And you’ll basically put in your username and password through the Twitter site. So, we don’t actually - we get, you know, authorization from Twitter to be synced with your account and then you’ll be able to basically see, you know, on this page how exactly this is going to (unintelligible) what you can do with it. INTERVIEWER: OK. And what are you importing from Twitter - the people you follow, the people who follow you, mutual follows? VOICE 1: So, that’s one of the things that we’ll integrate with in terms of - so, that’s the actual answer coming back. I just have it synced so that it gets directly to… INTERVIEWER: Oh that’s your phone. VOICE 1: …to my phone as well. But right now, we’re not using the Twitter social graph as something for routing but certainly, you know, if it seems like people want that and it seems like, those mutual follow connections or the transfer to the friendly model that we have, then we’ll look at it. INTERVIEWER: So, that’s it. That’s a future feature. VOICE 1: That’s right. INTERVIEWER: Right now, it’s just…wow, let’s see what’s going on with the phone. VOICE 2: Let's see if you got this and yeah, you got these direct messages here. INTERVIEWER: Let’s see. VOICE 2: For sure. INTERVIEWER: So, this is the question you just asked on Twitter. VOICE 2: That’s the question I just asked on Twitter and Aardvark direct messages response to let them know that Aardvark got the question and then tried to find the answers. INTERVIEWER: And so, no answers yet. That’s just the… VOICE 2: That’s the first one. VOICE 1: Although they’re actually are there's, I got 3 answers in the first four minutes. VOICE 2: Let’s see what we got up here. I’ll show this one. So, here we go. Here’s an example of an answer. So, it’s coming in as Eric being a friend of a friend is pointing to a URL where he can go on to the website and kind of have a longer interactive, kind of conversation with Eric about what’s going on. INTERVIEWER: Who’s Eric, one of the people who answered the question? VOICE 2: Yeah, so that’ll be somebody… VOICE 1: In the massive extended social network on Aardvark, so, basically, a friend of a friend of a friend or somebody with a common affiliation. Next time we ask from Google, somebody else (unintelligible). VOICE 2: And here you see, you know, I got after 3 minutes an answer coming back from Jason Young(ph) plus a number of mutual friends. There’s a pretty great concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley on Saturday with Death Cab, Andrew Burton, Robert Ryett(ph) outdoors and (unintelligible) in Berkeley Station. It's actually a concert that I’m going to this weekend. So, when we get a recommendation and you can again sort of rate the answer. You have a link there with the person’s Facebook profile so you can actually go there and see a little more… INTERVIEWER: We’re in regular Aardvark functionality now. VOICE 2: That’s right. INTERVIEWER: How’s the Facebook integration going that you did last week? Have you seen a lot of signups to Facebook? VOICE 1: Yeah. Working really (unintelligible) about the Facebook site is we wanted to - since we got past the beta period, (unintelligible) really have its service going to open up more. But we’re also aware that they’re just… INTERVIEWER: You needed a social graph attached to it… VOICE 2: We need some kind of social graph attached because it’s about your network that's really differentiated from just you know, public service… INTERVIEW: Yeah. VOICE 2: So, we turned it on but want to make people, the kind of a chicken-egg problem that some people might have in terms of getting their social graph on but we just let people sign up and it turns out that, for the average user joining, they have an average of six friends of friends already on Aardvark. So, that even when you come in right away, when you connect to Facebook, and other people have their Facebook profiles, there's already some… INTERVIEWER: Yes. VOICE 2: There’s already some… INTERVIEWER: Is that (unintelligible) generally goes, its friends of friends or do you do go deeper if there is a direct match on a keyword? VOICE 2: Yeah, we’ll go deeper than that if we - especially if we moved past the people that are close to you, the friends of friends of friends and so forth to find something that's an exact hit. INTERVIEWER: Do you ask people when they ask a question, at some point, do you say, hey, we’re sort of satisfied with this, you know, the next day or in an hour or two. VOICE 1: Well. So, one thing you saw there is we do get feedback on the answer pages. INTERVIEWER: Right. VOICE 1: So, people are able to, you know, rate for them, how good of a match Aardvark made. In addition, we do exert a constant user research. So, one of the things that has really driven us from the beginning is how are people using the product, technically make the product better and initially that meant, you know, Aardvark is like the sixth idea in the space and it was only after months and months of prototyping things that we sort of integrated those early learnings into something that we actually want to do long term. And then since, you know, we ran for about 6 months with Aardvark, essentially being simulated, there are human beings on the back end doing all the routing… INTERVIEW: Yeah, we talked about this last year. VOICE 1: …doing all the conversation there, just sort of see what did people want to do with this kind of service and now whenever we sort of propose a new feature and try something out, it's extensively user-tested, there’s actually a community page on the web site that - it's pretty cool. It's using Uservoice. We built a forum where people can essentially say the things that they would like to see from Aardvark. And different people can vote on it, comment on it and you can see sort of everything on the first couple of pages is actually stuff that we’re planning and building already and the feedback from people is very, very high in terms of when they ask a question, are they getting quality answer quickly from someone in their network, delivered sort of over the communication channel that they naturally are using throughout the base. They don’t have to go back to some third party website and sort of see what came back. Anecdotally, it’s about, you know, a third and a third and a third. Third is like fantastic experiences, third quality experiences and then a third where, you know… INTERVIEWER: What (unintelligible). VOICE 1: The answer came back slower or there were some - you know, the number of answers and it’s just a constant iteration and improvement on bringing up all of those numbers and there’s a lot of… INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Are you really focused on new features being driven by the community? VOICE 2: Yeah, we are. I mean, we can - that was (unintelligible) is for real. I mean, I came from an ad background and there, the way it usually works is you have your algorithm and you push out there and you internalize (unintelligible), users like the algorithm and they don’t. But here, we built the algorithm around, the exact experience that users wanted. So, we were doing all sorts of iteration and that continues today with - every week we have in person interviews with both users and product. New user, we kind of walk him through a sign and post to see what they think. People haven’t seen in yet. We get a flood of mails straight to our feedback address and then also, we have the community forum. Every week, we gather together and aggregate on the thoughts we have and we have something internally in the company that we call weekly learnings where the whole company sits there and we go through - all right here’s what we learn this week from our users. We have our vision for how are we going to, you know, whatever, take over the roof. And here’s what our users told us and that’s what feeds into our like actual prioritization (unintelligible). INTERVIEWER: How many questions have now been asked on Aardvark? VOICE 2: A lot. VOICE 1: (Unintelligible) total users, total questions asked like… VOICE 2: Yeah. VOICE 1: Draws some interest there or how many per week now. INTERVIEWER: You're not going to answer any of those? VOICE 2: Yeah. We're keeping the specific numbers under (unintelligible) for a little while. What we are doing though is focusing on kind of, you know, here's what you can expect when you join. So, right now the majority of questions are answered in every five minutes which is the huge thing for us. There are roughly quarter million topics represented in terms of what people who joined to that and you know, willing to answer questions to that. You know, we show little teasers to ask for status message sometimes because our community is really interested on how the product is doing. Sometimes we’re putting our Aardvark status message hey, you (unintelligible) messages were sent into Aardvark yesterday. INTERVIEWER: OK, so what are some of those since you’ve (unintelligible)? VOICE 2: Yesterday, there's 27,000 or something. I mean, that's… INTERVIEWER: 27,000 what? VOICE 1: Of interaction that people are having for the system. INTERVIEWER: And that’s growing. VOICE 1: Certainly, yes. INTERVIEWER: You guys are a fairly secretive company. (Unintelligible) teeth to get you to admit your funding last year. VOICE 1: Yeah. INTERVIEWER: Remember that? VOICE 1: I mean, I think that our… INTERVIEWER: Are you running down or running away from me? VOICE 1: Our idea is that this takes a long time… INTERVIEWER: Yeah. VOICE 1: It takes a long time to figure out what you should be building. It takes a long time… INTERVIEWER: Oh, no. That might be perfect for your business… VOICE 1: No. And I’m just saying… INTERVIEWER: Which is not good for mine. VOICE 1: Well, I’m just saying that whenever you sort of go out and you put numbers, you say hey, you know, start benchmarking me today, like see how much I improve tomorrow and the next day and the next day. And in fact, a lot of our focus, you know, was on quality and growth… INTERVIEWER: Perfecting the user experiences, yeah. VOICE 1: Over a year - I mean, the thing that really kept us back from doing open sign ups was not the fact that the (unintelligible) wasn’t there. It was much more that we wanted people to come in and actually stay and have - you know, even if one-tenth of the people stay, for most startups, they say that’s great. That’s what I want to be doing. You know, forget about the rest. For us, we really want, you know, to hook you that first experience… INTERVIEWER: Yeah. VOICE 1: That you have (unintelligible) and answer. We view it incredibly negatively if, you know, if 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent of the users die out. That’s something that causes us to go back and really reflect on why they’re leaving and what we can do different. INTERVIEWER: Would your iPhone (unintelligible)? VOICE 1: So, we’ve had a test for a long time. VOICE 2: And finished for months. VOICE 1: It got finished for a while. VOICE 2: Apple just won’t let it… VOICE 1: No, no, no. It’s not Apple. Apple has been incredibly helpful. It’s just again, we want to have a lot of user testing. We want to figure out, you know, what does it take for… INTERVIEWER: So, you really - they don't want it to be like that. VOICE 1: No. We wanted to be live when we see… VOICE 2: When it’s absolutely perfect… VOICE 1: Hundreds of cases, not perfect. But when we feel like in order to learn more… INTERVIEWER: Yeah. VOICE 1: We need orders amounting to more usage. So, we went for a long time with sort of thousands of users and we were learning a tremendous amount. It was only like after six months, 12 months of that that we said you know what, we’ve sort of saturated the learning we can do at this scale, like we need to be in order (unintelligible), towards the magnitude more and then we’ll start learning new things. Similarly, we’re at the stage of the iPhone app where, you know, with the number of testers that we have now, we’re learning as much as we can possibly deal with at any given week to fix. Maybe we should get to get it out, we’ll say OK now, it’s ready to - for a wider audience. INTERVIEWER: I’d love to talk to you both for a second about this sort of product iteration by scientific method and the idea of, you know, testing something, pulling it back, asking your readers what they want, looking and trying things out and it’s always been a Google way to do that, obviously. And some people have argued, me among them, Robert Scoble, and others that sometimes you can end up with a Volvo that way instead of a Porsche or the other funny one is a camel as a horse designed by the committee. And that sometimes if - the real challenge to users and like Facebook has (unintelligible) done, outraged their users, and three weeks later, the same outraged users could not live without whatever feature they were complaining about three weeks ago. What are your feelings on that in general and specifically to Aardvark? Do you feel like, you know, it’s important to continue this inner process? Do you occasionally try to challenge your users? What are the plans there? VOICE 2: It’s a great question. And it’s something that - it’s really important because much that goes internally (unintelligible) react strongly against the tradition of economy like oh, you’re either one of these vision companies who are doing crazy stuff or you’re doing (unintelligible) customers. That’s really not - we don’t see that respect (unintelligible). And we’re a vision company. We think like - we think there’s tons of information on the web and it’s a fraction of what’s on people’s heads and we’re enabling this full new thing. It’s a paradigm, so there’s a lot. It’s driving us forward in terms of why, if this is worth I’m trying to do. But that means, OK, in terms of the actual surface, in terms of what people are interacting with, your users know better than you do about what their experiences are like in the wild. So, we really do them both at once. Now, in terms of how you innovate in that type of context, one of the things that happened is we do a lot of early - like AV testing and also kind of highjack testing where there’s something innovative and what we want to do, not just throw in front of everybody. Well, first, go through like a paper stage where we send and we check internally with the team, the people we bring in, you know, users we solicit, hey do you who want to come in and have an interview with us. We talk to them there. We also contact users who have given us feedback in related areas to see if what we’re proposing is going to work with them. And then we’ll actually go and we’ll have a test run this (unintelligible) with individual conversations, kind of work through how features would go and what have we responded this way as opposed to that way. It’s only one who’ve done a fair amount of the stuff and validated that the crazy idea that we have is worthwhile. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. VOICE 2: And then we push it out and we have a quick followup even after we put something live, a quick followup with users where we interview users with different - in different segments of our audience and say what happened when you used this? So, that’s not something that’s gone away for us. We want to continue to say there’s this vision where we’d subject the search to be about, what would it be like if you could tap everybody in your extended network, you know, 40,000 people at the same time, you know, better if users tell us if we step over those (unintelligible). VOICE 1: And you have to be careful about becoming radically different things because lots of people are asking you to do that. So, you know, the two big things for us have always been point systems and sharing content like making all other content explicitly public and… INTERVIEWER: You haven’t done that yet? VOICE 1: We haven’t done that. INTERVIEWER: That’s something (unintelligible). VOICE 1: Well, it’s something that people are constantly coming to us saying like hey, do this and then it would really be great. And it’s - for us, you know, fairly different from the brand. We’ve always positioned Aardvark to be more like a communication channel where, you know, I’ll ask you something over e-mail. I’m asking you over e-mail, you know, it’ll be a little bit weird if A, my question and your answer showed up publicly on the web. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. VOICE 1: And B, if Gmail sent me back, you know, similar conversations that other people have had in Gmail. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. VOICE 1: That said, there’s certainly a place for it, there’s a way that you can selectively share the content, there’s a way that you can give people sort of personalized… INTERVIEWER: Maybe de-personalized it a little bit, too. VOICE 1: Potentially. INTERVIEWER: Yeah. VOICE 1: I mean, there is certainly a subset of the content, which is less personal or there certainly might be a scale. It’s just, you know, we haven’t found the really clear way to keep doing what we want to do well and yet, address sort of that comment that the users have come to us. What we keep in the back of our mind… INTERVIEWER: Make it public, searchable, index. VOICE 1: That’s right. INTERVIEWER: Yes. So, when do that happen? VOICE 1: We just don’t know yet. INTERVIEWER: Because you haven’t quite figured how to do it? VOICE 2: Well actually, we want to quite end up that way. I mean, we try to figure out what’s - if our users suggest a feature to us, say what’s the urge behind that? Sometimes the urge is - well, other sites do it this way. And that’s not sufficient for us to do it. Sometimes there’s an urge like, well I want to learn the terminology(ph) of the communities. INTERVIEWER: Sort of, you want Aardvark to start answering questions directly based on the database. It's all this artificial intelligence stuff that you're so good at. VOICE 1: Now, it's exact. Now, we want humans to answer the questions. VOICE 2: We want Aardvark to be better at routing them. So, their database… INTERVIEWER: Just better at routing them. VOICE 2: In the database we used to figure out who's best in answering and seeing over time what happens. INTERVIEWER: But let's say that I asked for a really good restaurant recommendation in San Francisco. And it turns out that a month before, one of my best friends asked the same thing on Aardvark and got stellar answers that he marked just like they're perfect, perfect, perfect. Well, you turn back and say, hey, this is Aardvark, we think that actually you might like these restaurants. I mean, you must be thinking about that as an AI guy, right? VOICE 2: Well, there are two ways to look at it. I'm an recovering AI guy. What that means is, I no longer think that my machine is intelligent as any human in terms of understanding what the other human really wants. When I ask a question, I want you to understand me. It's the same reason when you go to a store and there's something that really helps you and listens to what you need. So, in this situation that you suggest, Aardvark will do two things. One, it will go to your friend and say, hey, you know, we think you can answer Michael's question about restaurants. You see, just received these answers, and we'll go to these answers. There is a different channel where on the (unintelligible) angle we're saying, hey, here's an opportunity to… INTERVIEWER: Bypass actual results… VOICE 2: …to bypass (unintelligible) answers we have clearly labeled, when we think that's useful for our users. But, right now, our users are getting a really good experience without any recycled comment. INTERVIEWER: But this is not – I'm sorry, I just finished what you – all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica, the sort of stuff someone likes, have you guys seen that, the new Battlestar, yeah? But, I mean if you think about it, you could just be having all these users sort of training the big Aardvark mind right now towards eventually being able to answer things intelligently. VOICE 2: It's one way of looking at it. INTERVIEWER: You just refused. You don't think that's the future. VOICE 2: I don't think that's the future. In some ways, they're trying to figure out our mind to learn how to tap them better. The same way that the web isn't, you know, the same as human intelligence, it has a different sort of knowledge. And right now, we think of the web, it's a great browser of factual information and getting static content. But, it is also really good for indexing the real world and so, with Aardvark as it's using all of these stuff that people publish and saying, can you in the world could you have it… INTERVIEWER: So, when do you use the data other than just learning how to route stuff better? When do you actually use the questions and the answers and make it available somehow to generate lots of pages and then add units(ph)? You are going to do that some day, right? VOICE 2: You know, it's not our near-term focus in that we really see the value proposition that we're providing as a life connection in the moment through whatever communication channel you're already using with someone from your network. And, you can't automate certain things, right, or a lot of the pleasure goes away. If I go out on the street and I find a flyer for a restaurant, it's exactly the same content as if I stopped someone and I said, hey, you know, I'm pretty hungry, what's a good place to get a sandwich around here? But it feels very different when a human being sort of looks me in the face and tells me, this is where I'd go, and I feel like, OK, that's an actual result. INTERVIEWER: Or looks at you on Twitter. VOICE 2: Or I mean interacts with you absolutely interacting with another person. And part of it is the latency dimension. So, it was very important for us to get, you know, average answer rate down to five minutes, below 5 minutes, you want to… INTERVIEWER: Is that what it is now, it's below five minutes on average? VOICE 1: Most questions are getting the answer in under five minutes. INTERVIEW: Even last week, I'm sure you had a huge fight with Facebook and people trying it because they've been able to…. VOICE 1: Well, the nice thing here is that questions are broadcast. So, I just got four answers to that question I asked in, I don't know like… INTERVIEWER: Yeah, you have the interns back in the office doing it, right? VOICE 1: …minutes. Well, we've never answered the questions ourselves. Even though, we were sort of, even when we were actively, you know, posting every question. It wasn't to answer them, it was to figure out, you know, what the individual in the community will be able to provide an answer. Here, you're seeing… INTERVIEWER: So, a legitimate answer? VOICE 1: Yes, three minutes, four minutes, four minutes, five minutes, you know. And the nice thing here is there were only about a half dozen people paying for this. INTERVIEWER: And you have four answers. VOICE 1: Yeah, and I mean, I'm asking a question which I'm, you know, very sure the system will be able to route reasonably well and part of that is for learning, you know, the fact that longer questions are better, right. If you give a second sentence to your question, it will almost always get you more answers, better answers, faster answers. It's because it's easier for a human to answer which by the way is almost exactly the opposite as any sort of static content database, where the more filters you put on what you want, the less actual content you get back. INTERVIEWER: But it makes sense that if you have a little more context to give, it should give you a (unintelligible). What's a good restaurant in San Francisco is different than – VOICE 1: Exactly. INTERVIWER: I'm taking my parents off for their anniversary, what's you know, they love sushi and Italian. Where should I go? VOICE 1: Exactly. INTERVIEWER: It's much easier. VOICE 1: Think about how much easier and more satisfying it is for someone on the other end. And that sort of what we generally say is like you know, use the golden rule - ask the question in same way that you would want to receive a question with all the detail and all of the context and you know whatever else you could think of. And you absolutely see it in people's responses based on the quality of what they come back with. And again, and that's what you lose when you're saying, you know what, the end goal of all of this is just to get a huge amount of generic like reviews and then just find different ways to sort of slice and dice stuff and return it to people. And again, it's not to say that that is not fantastically useful. Not only is it usually useful and it's a hugely useful thing in compliment to this. As soon as I get back a restaurant recommendation, I love going Yelp and seeing what everyone says about it - INTERVIEWER: Taking the next step, you know. VOICE 1: And seeing you know, what their store hours are and everything else. INTERVIEWER: Which is why Yelp should be paying you to get their stuff on there. VOICE 1: Or we should be paying Yelp to make our answers, you know, that much better. In any event - INTERVIEWER: I'd start the discussions which they should be paying you and go from there. But… VOICE 2: So, I guess one of the kind of like cute, I just have a new paradigm to kind of like focus on what we're working on, what wouldn't work. It's to really think about the answering experience because that's what made us certain we wanted to build Aardvark. When we were trying the different prototypes that were similar, we found answers were extremely responsive when we send in a little IM saying, hey you there, you know – a friend of Max Ventilla has a question about, you know (unintelligible) everything. People loved to be called upon in the moment, when somebody has a need right then that they can help us. INTERVIEWER: So the people who answer quickly, I assume you intend to go back to them. VOICE 2: Yeah and we favor people who respond and have been answering. And so, it's that moment, it's the same moment, you know somebody introduced you, probably your friend who needs a hand like, oh I know all about that, I can just help you. So, all of our decisions are kind of driven by that experience and you say there, what would preserve that experience? If I say well, it's a different thing if I'm posting a static review on a site. It's much more like I'm helping somebody live in the moment. INTERVIEWER: Have you ever thought of paying people? Like giving them say those Facebook credits or something? Sort of something they can actually use. VOICE 2: In a sense but we… INTERVIEWER: You don't wanted to get… VOICE 2: In any systematical graph, it's the really the human experience that we want to drive it. For instance, we don't a point system or a reputation systems, you are the best answer. Instead, what those are really useful for is for the flood of user generated content to try to distinguish it, it has some authority for some and not others. But we found, there's another dimension for dealing with content which is if you're just having a one on one conversation with somebody in the moment, you know, you tell them the truth, you're honest with them. And that's a type of intimacy that you know comes along with that. So, that's how we approach the issue instead of saying, hey, for that (unintelligible) they can spend 10 hours a day on an answer site, rack up your points, that's a very different audience. And when I ask some question, I don't want an answer that's solely for that kind of audience like we get for some things. But usually I want somebody in my network who's not spending their days kind of, just focusing on web content but they're going about their affairs. We catch them at a convenient moment and they answer, if they want to. VOICE 1: And the final dimension too is that the referrals really compliment the routing that are worked out. So, I'd probably answer as many questions as I refer to other people that got answered. And this is a channel in which referring questions feels very natural. You know, if you sent me a direct email, you know, asking me, you know whatever you're going back to Hawaii for lobbying like what are places that are worth checking out if you stay for a few extra days. You know what? I've been to Hawaii twice but my buddy lived for six years, you know, on the big island. I'm going to email it to him. And here because it's coming directly to you because you know that you've been selected, it' a small number of individuals, it's not like put on the web page for anyone to see. We actually do find that people refer to the question on to someone else. So it just points to the fact that there are very different motivations here going on than you know, I want to get paid for it, I want to get points for it, or like this is actually going to be my full time activity. What we like about Aardvark is that it doesn't have to be like something that you know you're going back to this website on a regular basis and it's like one of the major things you do. It just fits pretty seamlessly in your day-to-day interactions over IM or email or Twitter in this case. VOICE 2: Yeah, on that side, a big theme(ph) to us is although there's a lot of, you know, we talked about this. There's a lot of complexity in the technology for how we are going to figure out the routing, you know, these situations from the point of view, you know, the user is supposed to be just that simple like, you type a question just like you're sending it to a friend. Instead, it goes to Aardvark and he finds the right person to answer. So, that simplicity is really important to us and we want to kind of keep that. Oh, it's interactive but like, you are in contact to it. It's closer to a telephone than it is to a website. INTERVIEWER: What is your most popular interface? VOICE 2: IM (unintelligible). INTERVIEWER: IM before. What's second, e-mail? VOICE 2: Yeah, I think e-mail comes in second now. INTERVIEWER: All right. Great, so anything else we're talking about right now on video? Any big announcements? VOICE 1: Well, there's a lot stuff coming down the pipe. INTERVIEWER: Like what? VOICE 1: We're actively developing. INTERVIEWER: It's probably off record. (Soundbite of laughter) VOICE 1: It's going to be off record. Well, this is off record. You know, the icon thing it's going to be a big thing which we're not talking about. You know people know it's in my hair but, you know, we're not going to give any timeframe for that kind of thing now. INTERVIEWER: So, when do you think that will launch? VOICE 1: Exactly right. (Soundbite of laughter) INTERVIEWER: Is there a problem with, you know, just push notification for background apps and that kind of stuff or is it literally just - VOICE 2: Push notification, I thought we're going to, I mean, it (unintelligible) fine. It always will. VOICE 1: That was certainly you one of the things we were excited about you know coming out this year to be able to use that functionality. I mean, it's totally fundamental to what we're trying to do. And the other thing that's exciting is just you now how much that platform has taken off And the fact that it is totally natural for people to install an app they'll be going to be using on a regular basis. It's not like the (unintelligible) thing that a few techies with the iPhone are doing. INTERVIEWER: Are you guys - do you wear these t-shirts with that the tiny Aardvark logo? Do you wear this everyday like the whole office or just when you go out for meetings? VOICE 2: You know, except again we're clearly off the record and we're definitely you know. My sister, excuse me, she's an animal psychologist and she designed this logo. So, that's why I wear this all the time. It's a little aardvark. INTERVIEWER: Is an animal psychologist – VOICE 2: …particularly qualified to design Aardvark logos? I think so. INTERVIEWER: Is there something on the bank? VOICE 2: Of the t-shirt? INTERVIEWER: Yeah. VOICE 2: No. VOICE 1: Actually nothing. It's very, very small. (unintelligible) INTERVIEWER: Yeah, there some things going on with that. Okay. (unintelligible) VOICE 2: But, I do wear it everyday. INTERVIEWER: Really? He has multiple shirts. VOICE 1: I have like a shelf full of these shirts so that we do wear it everyday. INTERVIEWER: Really. VOICE 1 & 2: Yeah. VOICE 1: Yeah. You'd be hard pressed to find me not wearing this t-shirt. On the weekend, I don't wear it. But during the week, I wear it. INTERVIEWER: I was following your chin there at the end. I was getting criticized for my camera work which is nonexistent. All right. So, there's absolutely no major announcements. I mean, we're doing Twitter but here at the end of the video nothing like super juicy like – oh by the way, Google just acquired us or we just raised another round of funding at a $500 million valuation or – VOICE 2: But, that would be newsworthy. INTERVIEWER: Just a slow and steady building of business listening to you (unintelligible). VOICE 2: There are some exciting integrations coming out with a bunch of different services because we sent on top of all these services but, that stuff has - INTERVIEWER: We have Facebook now. We've got Twitter. VOICE 2: I think by process of elimination, you'll be going to be able to like them. Yes, we'll go and sit on top of all the social networks and the remaining IM networks. INTERVIEWER: OK. And the iPhone would it be - are we thinking this year, I mean are you allowed to say when? You may not even know exactly but definitely thinking. VOICE 2: Absoultely. INTERVIEWER: OK. Thanks very much, guys. VOICE 1: Thanks, Michael. VOICE 2: Thanks, Michael. VOICE 2: It's great having your thoughts on these ideas, you know, and push back under different areas. It will be interesting. INTERVIEWER: And TechCrunch by far your favorite blog? VOICE 2: That's exactly what I meant to say. INTERVIEWER: Yeah, you have been to TechCrunch, right? (Soundbite of laughter) Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Google Finally Peels The Beta Label Off Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and GTalk Posted: 07 Jul 2009 07:52 AM PDT The beta days are over at Google, at least for some of its most popular applications. As we predicted two months ago, Google is finally taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and GTalk today. And it is about time. For instance, Gmail, which launched five years ago and is by far Google’s most popular non-search app, is already older than many startups. Gmail is now one of the leading email services and can no longer hide under the cover of a beta label. Over the past year in the U.S. alone, according to comScore, Gmail has grown 48 percent to 36 million unique visitors, quickly gaining on AOL Mail (40 million uniques, down down 6 percent) and Windows Live Hotmail (46 million uniques, down 1 percent) to grab the No. 2 spot after still-safe Yahoo Mail (98 million uniques, up 13 percent). Worldwide, Gmail had 146 million visitors in May, about half of Yahoo Mail’s and Hotmail’s numbers, and about three times bigger than AOL Mail. Google Docs (launched in 2006), Calendar (launched in 2007), and Gtalk (2005) are not quite as popular, but all three are also fully-baked products. The reason, though, that Google is making this change is purely marketing because it sells these Google Apps bundled together to businesses for $50/user/year. Matt Glotzbach, director of product management at Google Enterprise, tells me removing the beta label was really for business customers. “Consumers don't really care,” he says, “for some of our business customers it is certainly an issue.” Google Apps are now used by nearly 2 million businesses and they account for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues for Google. It is ramping up to be quite a nice little side business, and sales have been brisk as CIOs look for any way to cut costs. For enterprise customers, Google is also adding two new features today: the ability to delegate access to your email account to another person such as an administrative assistant, and enhanced retention features for compliance purposes. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| GSM Palm Pre Hitting O2 and Movistar In Europe Posted: 07 Jul 2009 07:45 AM PDT  We're all quite excited here to find out that O2 and Movistar will get the Palm Pre in GSM form, opening the phone up to unlocking, hacking, and all sorts of molestation. UK, Ireland and Germany will get the phone on O2 and Spain will get it from Movistar. When, you ask? Christmas. That's right: by the time Palm pinches off the GSM Pre Apple will have probably released iPod Touches with cameras and the HTC Hero, an Android phone that I wouldn't kick out of bed for eating crackers, will be dancing on the Sprint Pre's grave. It's like Palm wants to fail.
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| Match.com Acquires People Media For $80M In Cash Posted: 07 Jul 2009 07:14 AM PDT
The deal includes the purchase of about 27 targeted dating sites with a combined 255,000 paying subscribers, including BlackPeopleMeet.com, BBPeopleMeet.com, LDSPlanet.com, SingleParentMeet.com and SeniorPeopleMeet.com. People Media, founded in 2002, had $11.6 million of EBITDA in 2008 and quotes Jupiter Research as saying the combined revenues of the targeted dating service business are expected to reach $1.2 billion worldwide this year. Still according to the announcement, People Media, besides exclusively powering multiple AOL Personals communities, reaches nearly 4 million internet users each month. Match.com attracted about 5.8 million unique monthly users in May 09 according to comScore and reported $9.9 million in operating income before amortization last year. Sounds like a good match. And it’s not like Match.com’s parent company IAC/Interactive is lacking the cash for an acquisition of this size: after buying back 3 million shares for an average $15.15 apiece in the first quarter of the year, it ended the quarter with a whopping $2 billion in cash and securities with just $98.5 million in long-term debt. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Mozilla Aims To Centralize All Open Web Tools In One Directory Posted: 07 Jul 2009 06:27 AM PDT
The first thing you’ll notice when you visit the website is the unorthodox - and relatively confusing - design, as you can tell from the screenshot above. Explains Ben Galbraith on behalf of the Developer Tools team on the Mozilla Labs blog:
Luckily, there’s a search box at the bottom that allows you to browser for applications based on its name and category (Design, Code, Debug, Test, Deploy and Docs) which seems to do a decent job at weeding out the right applications from the directory. Note that you need the most recent browser versions (Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 2, or Opera 9) to explore the site, but I take it our readers will probably have at least one of those installed already anyway. According to Mozilla, this is just the first step, and for now it’s inviting developers to submit tools for inclusion in the database themselves. The Mozilla team will review incoming entries and put them up asap. On the roadmap: social features and fresh display options. (Hat tip to MoMB) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| China Blocks Access To Twitter, Facebook After Riots Posted: 07 Jul 2009 05:41 AM PDT
Web2Asia’s George Godula writes:
A quick test on WebsitePulse confirms the blocking of Twitter and YouTube (which have been restricted for a while) and now Facebook too, at least in some parts of the country. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Hear That? It’s The Sound Of Your New Hearing Aid, The iPhone Posted: 07 Jul 2009 05:03 AM PDT
We’ve still got a ways to go before we start seeing glucose monitors and blood pressure pumps pop up with iPhone support, but some health and disability-related apps are already beginning to emerge. One of the first is a new application called soundAMP (iTunes Link), a hearing aid application that was just released on the App Store, and is available for $9.99. The application is pretty straightforward: it takes everything that reaches the phone’s microphone, and makes it louder. You can manually adjust just how powerful you’d like the sound amplification to be, and can also choose from several different equalizer settings to specify which frequencies you’d like boosted most. There are also a number of handy features for repeating something if you missed it the first time: a button at the top of the app will replay the last five seconds of everything you’ve heard, and there’s also a button that lets you listen through a 30 second buffer of recent audio. As far as the microphone goes, you can choose to either use the built-in mic on the handset, or an external mic, like the one that’s built into the standard iPhone headphones. In my testing I found that using the phone’s mic worked better than the headphone mic, largely because you can direct it towards whatever you’d like to listen to. So how well does it actually work? Truth be told, I’ve had little experience with ‘real’ hearing aids, so I’m not entirely sure how well this stacks up as far as volume and microphone quality go. And frankly, if you’ve got significant and long-term hearing problems, you would be much better off with a device dedicated to the purpose instead of having to carry an iPhone with you at all times. But for more casual use — be it in a lecture hall with a quiet speaker, or a wedding when when you want to make sure you hear every word that’s being spoken — this could definitely prove useful. In my testing all sounds became significantly louder, though never to the point that they were painfully loud. That said, it isn’t perfect — I noticed that ambient noise like fans can become irritating at higher levels, which seems like something the app could filter out. Finally, even if you’re not hard of hearing, soundAMP is worth checking out. It’s surprisingly fun to give yourself superhuman hearing while you’re just walking down the street. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Finally, A Decent Website To Browse Android Apps: AndroLib Posted: 07 Jul 2009 03:32 AM PDT
In other words: it sucks. As a reporter lacking an Android-powered phone but with a great interest in the platform, it sucks even more. Sometimes I need to know which applications in a certain category are available for Android, what people are saying about them, what version a certain app is at, and so on. Until now, I used Cyrket for that, a third-party directory that provides me with most of the functionality I need for doing a bit of research about Android apps. But the website is slow, regularly returns errors and doesn’t provide a decent filter between paid and free apps, so the experience was usually below par. But now, thanks to @conoro, I found another website with Android apps listings that should suit my needs for now: AndroLib. A tad more pleasing to the eyes than Cyrket (albeit not that much), AndroLib is available in 7 of the most spoken languages in the world, has proper search and RSS, clear application overview pages and supports feedback from the user and developer community. Finally! Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Push Gmail Comes To The iPhone — Through An App (If It’s Accepted) Posted: 07 Jul 2009 02:59 AM PDT
Let me be clear, I’m still not certain that this app will even be approved for the App Store. But if it is, it’s pretty awesome. It’s called GPush; it’s a very simple app that uses the new Push Notifications in the iPhone 3.0 software to ping your iPhone every time a new message comes in. Yes, not only is it push Gmail, it gives you Gmail with notifications. While you might think that could be annoying, it actually works quite well. And the app couldn’t be simpler. You fire it up, enter your Gmail username and password, and if you choose, you never have to open the actual app ever again. The app doesn’t even have anything besides the log-in screen. It technically works by using IMAP IDLE functionality which Gmail supports (but doesn’t on the iPhone for whatever reason). This is the same way that push Gmail works on devices like the Palm Pre and Android phones. And while IMAP IDLE is generally thought to be not as good as actual push, GPush works pretty well. In my tests, new emails would show up about 10-30 seconds after I sent them. Not “instantaneous,” but not bad either. Especially when you compare it to having to open the email app and have it manually check if any email is there. Or setting the iPhone to check it every 15 or 30 minutes. And both of those methods require the use of iPhone battery life. GPush does not because it’s doing all the work in the background, on Tiverias‘ (the company behind the app) servers. You will still have to open the iPhone’s email app to read the email beyond the subject, but with GPush you will know when there is actually email there to read. As I noted, for all this to work, you have to enter your Gmail username and password into the app. The developers promise that it uses SSL encryption to protect your password and send it to Google securely. So, the big question is: Will Apple approve this app? “Apple should technically speaking approve the application, nothing went into the code that violated either Apple’s or Google’s Terms of Service,” we’re told. Ahh, but it’s Apple, they’ve done quite a few things that don’t make sense when it comes to approving/rejecting apps. And they have a history of being picky when it comes to apps that revolve around email. So, we’ll see. If and when it is accepted into the store, it will cost $0.99. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Palm Pre To Hit Europe By Christmas With Telefónica Posted: 07 Jul 2009 02:24 AM PDT  There were a few leaks and rumors about this last week, but now it's been officially confirmed that the Palm Pre will launch exclusively with mobile network Telefónica, initially in four major European markets. Spain, United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany will get the device first on the O2 and Movistar networks, just before the winter holidays. Pricing has not been announced. This is something of a coup since, at least in the UK, Telefónica-owned O2 already has the iPhone deal, thus making it the sole arbiter of two of the hottest phones right now. OK, the Pre maybe isn't as hot as it was pre-launch, but it remains to be seen how European mobile obsessives will react to the handset.
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| Think About it. Do You Really Want An HD Camera In Your Phone? Posted: 07 Jul 2009 02:20 AM PDT  There's some buzz right now about the iPhone 3GS and other phones being capable of 720p recording, or perhaps even 1080p if they use the newest sensors. Wow! The future is here! 720p video built right into your phone! But here's the thing: would you rather have HD video recording implemented very badly, as it must be with the limitations of mobile phones, or would you rather not have it at all and have capacity for more battery life or RAM? Because there's no way that video is going to be watchable, except as a low-bandwidth stream, and if that's your idea of 720p... come on now. Look, I'm excited about the prospect too, but consider that today's compact camcorders like the Webbie, Zx1, and MinoHD produce only passable video, and it's the only thing they do. The lens, sensor, and encoder (in these low-end camcorders as they will be in the iPhone) are all going to be absolutely bargain bin. Everything that compromises them is going to be worse on a mobile phone. And no iPhone-specific lens set is going to change that.
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| ZooLoo Is A Social Network That Basically Never Wants You To Leave Posted: 07 Jul 2009 01:25 AM PDT
When you set up your ZooLoo account, you are given a dashboard which contains customizable widgets just like iGoogle. But you’ll see along both the top and bottom of the site elements that lead you to the more social aspects. Along the bottom, is your Facebook-style chat bar and options area. At the top of the main page you’ll find the tools to control your site and manage your media (pictures and videos). And the key two words in there are “your site.” ZooLoo clearly wants to give you everything you want, so you never have to leave your ZooLoo. You want to watch YouTube videos? You can browse and watch them from in ZooLoo. Hulu videos? Same thing. Maybe you want to go read some news on popular tech blogs like this one? Again there’s a series of widgets you can install so you can do all of that without leaving. Obviously, it’s a good idea in theory as users spending more time on the site means more ads that can be shown to them. And ZooLoo has plenty of those — big ones at the bottom and sides of the site. It’s the same line of thinking that Facebook has, in that it wants to be your central hub for everything on the web. The problem with that for ZooLoo is that Facebook has about a 200 million user head start on their social graph. For a service like this, that is all that really matters. That’s not to say that ZooLoo can’t woo some of those users with some nice features, but it’s hard to teach 200 million users new tricks. And while it’s not a “there can be only one”-type situation, if ZooLoo is trying to do the same thing that Facebook is, which one do you think will win? And obviously it’s not just Facebook in this game as well, they’re just the big guys right now. But Google is still trying to get more social too, and continues to take iGoogle in that direction. Again, the choice between Google or ZooLoo as your main hub, doesn’t seem like too tough of one right now. But ZooLoo is smart to play off of the vanity URL thing. Its slogan, “Your name. Your domain. Your life.” doesn’t seem to be an accident. As we saw from the users flocking to Facebook on a Friday night to secure their own vanity names, users clearly want domains that are easy to remember. And ZooLoo offers that up with the slightly different XXXXX.zooloo.com naming structure. But its real hidden weapon may be letting users pick any domain to use with the service, not just a zooloo.com one. That’s an option if you sign up for the paid version of the service, ZooLoo Plus. For $29.99, you get to select a .com, .net or .info domain (.me names are available too for slightly more money). The freemium model hasn’t exactly taken off in the traditional social networking market. But ZooLoo gives you some things that are a bit more like an online office service, such as calendaring. There’s no shortage of options on ZooLoo, but you have to wonder if it can possibly meet such lofty goals with going up against Facebook and Google. Of course, they used to say that about Facebook going up against MySpace. And MySpace against Friendster, before that. ZooLoo should be live at some point later today. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| What The Hell Happened To The Free Version Of Google Apps? Posted: 07 Jul 2009 01:01 AM PDT
Earlier this year we reported that the usage caps were being squeezed by Google over time for Google Apps, from 200 users down to just 50. When the service first launched in August 2006 it was free and described as "a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes." A paid version first appeared in 2007. Dave Girouard, Google's President of Enterprise, commented on our post that talked about the decreasing number of users allowed for the free version, saying that the cap reductions were needed to keep resellers happy, adding “There's no reason to believe that the cap will continue to "move down" - we have no plans whatsoever to do that.” I guess not. They didn’t move the cap down, they just killed the Standard product entirely. No mention of this change was made at a Google Apps press event held last month. You can actually still see the free version at this page. But it doesn’t appear to be linked to from any Google page at this point. We’re emailing Google for comment. Update: It turns out Google didn’t kill the free Standard edition yet, they just made it really hard to find. You can still sign up for it here (quick, before they move it again!). A Google spokesperson says, “In experimenting with a number of different landing page layouts, the link to Standard Edition was inadvertently dropped from one of the variations. We are in the process of restoring it and you should see it soon. We have no intention of eliminating Google Apps Standard Edition, and are sorry for the confusion.” The old version of Google Apps had a comparison chart of the Standard and Premier versions that looked like this: Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| No Second Life, Twinity Wins $6m For Real Worlds Posted: 07 Jul 2009 01:00 AM PDT  Virtual worlds can be pretty dull when nothing you see there is recognizable as anything remotely real-world, which is perhaps why Twinity has such confident investors. The virtual world which re-creates the world's cities for real-looking avatars to wander around, has closed another round of financing from existing investors to the tune of 4.5m Euros ($6.26 million). Twinity's owner Metaversum, which has taken a totally different tack to the likes of Second Life, won the backing from existing investors. In Twinity, members use real profiles and realistic-looking avatars. A virtual Berlin has won plaudits from users, while more cities are planned.
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| OWLE: A Mount That Turns Your iPhone 3GS Into A Mobile Video Workhorse Posted: 06 Jul 2009 08:04 PM PDT  We've made no secret of our admiration of the iPhone 3GS's video capabilities — Apple has managed to integrate a video camera that's both easy to use and surprisingly high quality into an already-stellar device. But for all its merits, the iPhone 3GS suffers from being, well, a phone. No matter how good the phone's video quality is, it's still prone to shakiness as its director moves around. And while the microphone may be high quality, its position at the bottom of the phone definitely isn't ideal recording whatever you're pointing the camera lens at. Fortunately, an answer is on the way for all you mobile videographers. A new startup called OWLE (Optical Widgets For Life Enhancement), is currently working on a mount that should resolve most of these issues. The mount, which you can see in the images and videos below, gives you a much more stable way to hold the phone, making it much less prone to bumps and shakes. The mount also improves your recording quality by including a 37mm camcorder lense and a front facing microphone, which plugs into the phone's headphone/mic jack. There's also planned support for external lighting and power. All in a package that could slip easily into a backpack or laptop case. In short, this is exactly what you need if you frequently use the iPhone for video.
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| What The Hashtag: Your Guide To Enigmatic Twitter Hashtags Posted: 06 Jul 2009 07:30 PM PDT There’s been a lot of chatter recently about the reliability of Twitter’s trending topics and how to make sense of hashtags. Hashtags are words preceded by a "#" which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. This weekend’s “Moonfruit” and “GorillaPenis” trending topics on Twitter were examples of trending topics that aren’t easily recognizable and aren’t current events. Personally, I find trending topics and hashtags to be confusing at times because there’s little context surround them on Twitter. And many of the Trending Topics aren’t necessarily breaking news and is often polluted by spam. What The Hashtag is a site launched to solve this exact problem. What The Hashtag provides detailed definitions and context of hashtags and trending topics on Twitter. But what makes the site even more interesting is that it provides hashtag use stats, top contributors to a particular hashtag, real-time hashtag stream monitoring, and charts. For example, the entry for the hashtag #moonfruit has a graph charting the frequency of the hashtag in Tweets sent out in a given time period, a detailed description of the context behind the Moonfruit, how many Tweets included Moonfruit (443,217) and a real-time stream of Tweets with the Moonfruit hashtag.  What The Hashtag reports that it has analyzed and tracked 2,775 hashtags since its launch in February 2009. So far the site has 800 registered users (registration needed for detailed info entry; simple definitions can be submitted without account). The site is adding the ability to Tweet from the site and opening up its API in the near future. What The Trend, which we reviewed here, is a fairly similar service that also makes sense of trending topics and hashtags on Twitter. The two services have many of the same features but a few differences. What The Trend pulls in news stories and photos about trending topics, but doesn’t include some of the analytics and graphing that What The Hasthag offers. It appears that What The Hashtag’s details goes more in-depth with the detailed descriptions and stats, but both sites are pretty useful when trying to make sense of Twitter’s enigmatic Trending Topics. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Mother Teresa, MLK, The Dalai Lama And Twitter. All But One Have A Nobel Peace Prize…So Far Posted: 06 Jul 2009 06:23 PM PDT
In an op-ed today in the Christian Science Monitor, Pfeifle lays out exactly why he thinks Twitter should get the prize. His argument is that without Twitter, the world would have had basically no insight into what was going on inside of Iran during the protests that broke out following the country’s controversial election. Specifically, he says that the story of Neda Agha-Soltan, the woman in Iran whose death was captured on video, wouldn’t have gotten out without the aid of Twitter. “Neda became the voice of a movement; Twitter became the megaphone,” is how Pfeifle puts it. He continues, “When traditional journalists were forced to leave the country, Twitter became a window for the world to view hope, heroism, and horror. It became the assignment desk, the reporter, and the producer. And, because of this, Twitter and its creators are worthy of being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize.” While the idea of Twitter getting the same prize that Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr. have all received may sound utterly absurd, when you think about it, it’s really not that bad of a point. It’s just kind of ridiculous to think of a web startup with that silly of a name getting the prize. But there is no denying the impact Twitter had in spreading information about that situation. Of course, if that spreading of information ends up mattering at all in the long run, is another story. And, as Ashu points out in the comments, it’s kind of ridiculous that Gandhi never got the award, but Twitter might. When he originally said it (video embedded below), Pfieifle indicated that Twitter should be considered for the prize because they postponed a planned maintenance to allow the communication surround the Iran situation to continue. Awarding a Nobel Peace Prize for the rescheduling of site maintenance remains absurd. But Pfeifle has a much better argument now. A Facebook page has also been created to try to get Twitter the prize. Perhaps next year someone can nominate Facebook for hosting the page that helped get Twitter the prize. [thanks James] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| HTML 5: Ogg Theora Vs H.264 In The Battle For A Web Video Standard Posted: 06 Jul 2009 06:15 PM PDT
The next iteration of HTML standards is poised to introduce a <video> standard, putting moving images in the same natively-viewed category as images and text. Flash video has become so ubiquitous that you hardly think about it, but we all get a reminder every few months or so when we have to upgrade or re-install the plug-in, and the continuing difficulties with .flv support offline show that Flash is far from the ideal delivery method for such a (now) basic resource. Unfortunate, it seems that the powers that be (heavyweights Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, &c.) can’t agree on what format the <video> tag will indicate. The battle is between the reigning champ, H.264, and the open-source alternative, Ogg Theora. Whatever, let the format geeks work it out, right? I’m afraid not: there’s more than image quality and codec efficiency on the table here. H.264 is a property of the MPEG standards organization, which places it somewhere east of proprietary but west of public. Whatever its status is (I don’t pretend to understand exactly), it’s not free, and although it’s well-maintained and extremely common, many think that implementing a patented technology for a fundamental standard is a bad idea when there is an alternative. And that alternative is Ogg Theora. While the Ogg formats (maintained by Xiph.org) haven’t taken off in popularity when compared to their MPEG cousins, they’re competitive and have the very attractive quality of being free and open source. Recent statements by Google’s __ suggesting that Theora is simply not efficient enough have been challenged, although it seems to me that there would certainly have to be some work done if Ogg were to roll out its format as a standard on this scale. Dailymotion has a corner of its site (you’ll need a compatible browser like FF 3.5) dedicated to using HTML5 and the <video> tag, but they admit that neither the audio nor image is up to snuff quite yet. It’s worth mentioning that The Video Bay is dual-wielding HTML5 and Theora as well, but to say its future is uncertain would be somewhat of an understatement. Not easy, is it? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The devil you know or the devil you don’t know… and you have to pay for the devil you know. Plus, of course, I’m simplifying everything to my own level — and I’m decidedly not a developer. Personally I’m rooting for an open format (I suppose x264 is out because it relies too much on H.264), and I’m sure a little elbow grease would shine Theora up but good. I’m also unsure as to the possibility of supporting multiple formats, as the <img> tag and others obviously do (I may be missing something here). Last, who’s to say that competition would be bad? You’ve got your open standard, free to all, and you’ve got your (perhaps slightly better) closed standard, easier to use and with better support. Fight! As long as it’s transparent to the user and it doesn’t stifle innovation, that sounds like the kind of rumble I can get behind. This isn’t really a new battle, nor is it likely to be resolved any time soon, but discussion is ongoing elsewhere on the internet (such as at Ars’ excellent examination of the legal issues, and of course Reddit) and we may as well bring on over to the Crunch (again). Any codec nerds or patent-mongers care to chime in? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Back To Basics: Ditch Delicious, Use Pinboard Posted: 06 Jul 2009 05:16 PM PDT I’ve been a long time Delicious user for bookmarks, going back to way before the acquisition of the company by Yahoo in late 2005 (one of our early scoops). But over the years I’ve used it less and less. It’s slow, sometimes offline. A couple of weeks ago it wouldn’t let me log in, saying my password was incorrect. I was sure it was right, but I requested a password reset anyway. The email never came. The service has languished, and has the feel of a product that’s on life support. There doesn’t seem to be a passionate group of developers loving and caring for the product and making it better over time. Or at least not worse. Traffic is stagnating or dropping, depending on which analytics service you look at. Founder Joshua Schachter left long ago in frustration, and is now at Google. All Delicious really needs to do is let me bookmark sites without a lot of distraction. It hasn’t been good at that for a long, long while. Something about a new service called Pinboard is really captivating to me. It’s not even a startup - it’s a side project by a developer, Maciej Ceglowski. Ceglowski is a former Yahoo Brickhouse engineer and has also designed and built an internal data warehouse for Twitter as an independent contractor. The service, which is in private beta, doesn’t have many bells and whistles. Which is exactly what I want. Bookmarklets let me set bookmarks via a popup or redirect, with fields for tags and description and a privacy toggle. You can also bookmark a page “to read” which populates a separate list. It’s not for permanent bookmarks, just a reminder to read something later. No graphics. no design. just easy, easy bookmarking and tagging. I love it. It reminds me of Delicious back in 2005, when I loved that site, too. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Posted: 06 Jul 2009 04:37 PM PDT The last batch of 150 tickets to attend our 4th annual summer outing on July 10 at August Capital are available now (now sold out), courtesy of Eventbrite. Once these go, the only way in is to attend our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp (which we highly recommend). Every summer we have a party at August Capital, and it somehow seems to get more popular every year (is that possible?). Last year we preceded the party with a roundtable on the Mobile Web Wars, and this year we are doing the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp. Think all day and party all night: that’s pretty much sums up our philosophy. Hope to see you at both events. August Capital TicketsFriday, July 10 Tickets are $20 to help manage the guest list and minimize no shows. Due to extremely limited availability, we regret that tickets are non-transferable and non-refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door. Grey Goose Vodka will be hosting a special martini bar for us (perfect compliment to our mini burgers.) Demo tables, photowalls, games and other sponsors are working to make our 4th annual outing better than ever. We have a few slots left, so please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde for sponsorship details. CrunchUpFriday, July 10 The CrunchUp final agenda is here. Gaping Void’s Hugh MacLeod designed his 4th commemorative lithograph in honor of our event, “dream big.” It’s certainly inspiring. We’ll live auction one special serigraph during the CrunchUp with proceeds to benefit Electronic Frontier Foundation. Press, please email Daniel Brusilovsky for press consideration to attend the CrunchUp and August Capital outing. Big Time Thank Yous to Our CrunchUp SponsorsProduct Sponsors: Glam Media Lab’s Tinker live conversation moderation, Tokbox live video chat, Ustream live video streaming, Bantam Live, Charles River Ventures, Microsoft BizSpark and mailspace cc:Betty. Demonstration Sponsors: Seesmic, OneRiot, PeopleBrowsr, Mashery, IDrive, Sun Start-Up Essentials, Meraki, SocialFeet, Tapulous, Loopt, Grey Goose Vodka, Future Works, Gaping Void, Stormhoek Wines, Friendster, LifeIO, and Groovy. Event Sponsors: Eventbrite for ticketing and MediaTemple for hosting, Topix, Orange, AIM/AOL, ReTargeter, Coveroo, Pandora. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities. Additional details here. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Write That Down: Yahoo Search Pad Is About To Launch To The Public Posted: 06 Jul 2009 03:52 PM PDT
Search Pad is pretty similar to a host of other annotation apps that are already out there, with competitors that include Google Notebook. The biggest difference is that Search Pad tries to pre-populate your notes. For example, if you start running a number of queries related to a certain car model, Yahoo will detect that you’re going to ‘research mode”, and will then present a small bulletin asking if you’re like to launch Search Pad. If you click yes, the last few queries (in this case, the ones pertaining to the car) will already be in the text field. As far as text entry goes, Search Pad is pretty straightforward. You can add links and thumbmails to the page, as well as your own notes. One cool feature: if you copy and paste text from a page, Search Pad can figure out where you probably grabbed the text from, which makes it great as a bibliography tool (or just to remember where your notes were coming from). So why is this important? Because of the way Yahoo is promoting the product — automatically prompting users if they’d like to use it whenever it thinks it might come in handy — this is probably going to be seen and used by millions of people. And because there isn’t a plugin required, the barrier to entry will be much lower. That said, the lack of having a plugin available can be seen as a shortcoming. The way Search Pad works now, there’s no way to set up a hot key to pull up your notes — you’ll have to browse over to the Yahoo page that’s displaying Search Pad. This may work fine for casual note taking, but for those really intensive projects where you’ll be collecting copious amounts of data, it could grow frustrating. Yahoo won’t comment on its future plans for the product, but I’ll be very surprised if they don’t offer a browser plug-in or stand alone program in the next few months. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Posted: 06 Jul 2009 02:48 PM PDT AOL took another step towards fully embracing the lifestream today with the release of a slew of new AIM clients in beta and a new AIM Lifestream site, which brings together status updates from your AIM buddies with your activity streams from Facebook and Twitter. Earlier today, AOL quietly launched beta versions of AIM 7 for Windows, AIM for Mac 2.0, and a new AIM Windows Mobile client. (An upgrade to its iPhone app cannot be far behind). All three of the AIM betas include a new “Lifestream” tab, which allows you to read all of the updates from your friends on Facebook and Twitter, along with public status updates from your AIM buddies. You can also share videos and links via your YouTube and Delicious accounts. Expect more services to be added. The AIM clients also include the familiar “Buddies” tab, which lets you launch private IM conversations with your AIM buddies, and a “Me” tab shows your profile stats, updates, and notifications. What AOL is doing here is combining a FriendFeed-style approach of bringing together social updates from different services across the web with more private IM conversations. AIM status messages function as public utterances, and already on the AIM Lifestream site you can upload photos and comment on or indicate that you “like” a particular message from a buddy (expect these features to make its way into the clients soon as well). AOL is not so much trying to copy Twitter or FriendFeed as it is trying to bridge the private one-on-one message stream of AIM with the more public social conversation streams across the Web. Inserting the lifestream into AIM is part of a much larger strategy, which began with its acquisition of Socialthing nearly a year ago. Last February, it brought Socialthing-powered lifestreams into Bebo, and last April it began experimenting with bringing lifestreaming and chat to Websites via a chat toolbar. That effort soon spread to other AOL sites and recently was renamed AIM Connect. (Guess who it is trying to compete against with that product). The AIM beta clients provide further clues about where AOL is going, but are not yet fully-baked products. The Twitter and Facebook streams are only one-way, for instance. AIM can obviously support two-way communications (one of the big selling points of Socialthing), but AOL probably needs to negotiate that with Twitter and Facebook first. It could also use a URL shortener to make it easier to pass links. But AIM is huge, with around 50 million active users. I wonder how fast it would take for AIM to become one of the top Twitter clients. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Maybe The Palm Pre Isn’t Selling So Well, After All Posted: 06 Jul 2009 01:15 PM PDT
Since then, the Pre has largely fallen under Apple’s shadow. But there have been murmurs that Palm has still managed to sell far more devices than most analysts were expecting — a recent report from Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder suggests that Palm is still unable to meet demand, and that the company will ship one million phones to Sprint during the device’s first quarter in production. Today we’ve gotten a report that indicates that this may be pretty far from reality. The report, which comes from JNK wireless consultant iGR, was conducted on July 3, during which the firm’s analysts gathered reponses from fifty Sprint stores (more than 50 were contacted, but some refused to participate). The results? Palm isn’t having any trouble keeping pace with demand.
The report also notes that stores are reporting a dropoff in the number of Pres being sold, with 40% of stores willing to discuss their volume sales reporting fewer than 10 sales this week. 33% of stores reported sales of 10-20 units, with 16% reporting 20-30. That’s per week. I’d be surprised if most Apple stores are seeing similar sales in a matter of hours. Still, there are some bright points for Sprint and Palm. According to the report, a quarter of the stores contacted say that most Pres are being sold to new Sprint customers, which means the device is appealing enough to attract users away from their old carriers. Obviously, these polls shouldn’t be viewed in terms of absolute figures — we don’t know exactly how many phones Palm has sold, and neither do the aforementioned analysts. But it sounds like Palm still has its work cut out for it to drive interest beyond its initial launch hype. What Palm badly needs at this point is a robust App Store, which has become one of the iPhone’s biggest selling points. Unfortunately, that’s a long ways off — Palm still hasn’t broadly released the webOS SDK to developers, which means users only have a small pool of around 30 applications to choose from, and that isn’t going to change any time soon. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Marc Andreessen’s Burgeoning Blogging Empire: Invests In Talking Points Memo Posted: 06 Jul 2009 11:46 AM PDT
TPM founder Josh Marshall confirmed the pending investment today by phone. The round is small, between $500k and $1 million. Andreessen is leading the round and a number of other angel investors are participating as well. This comes just a little over a month after Andreessen invested in another blog network, Alley Insider. He clearly likes the format. Both the Alley Insider and Talking Points Memo investments are being done personally by Andreessen, not through the new venture fund. This is the first outside funding for TPM, which was founded by Marshall in 2000 after the presidential election recounts. In the past Marshall has funded TPM via advertising and three reader fundraising events, each of which raised “tens of thousands of dollars,” he says. The company is profitable and has 11 full time employees. The TPM network of blogs has 1.5 million unique monthly visitors and 15 million page views according to Google Analytics, says Marshall. The site has been highly praised, particularly for their 2007 coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys. That coverage got TPM a George Polk Award for excellent journalism. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Paypal Looks to Crush Amazon’s Fledgling Payment Service With A New, Secret API Posted: 06 Jul 2009 10:57 AM PDT It looks like PayPal is rolling out a more flexible payments API called Adaptive Payments. We’ve obtained a confidential document, which is embedded below, explaining the details of the new system. Basically the API is designed to give developers full access to PayPal's features, allowing them a lot more freedom in building applications which include the ability to accept and distribute payments. Very similar to Amazon’s Flexible Payments Service (FPS), the Adaptive Payments API handles payments between a sender of a payment and one or more receivers of the payment. Adaptive Payments allows almost the same functionality as FPS. The new API lets developers become a payment aggregator, which we are told is something against PayPal's current Terms of Service. Amazon’s FPS also lets developers aggregate payments. Moreover, Paypal’s Adaptive Payments has built in micropayments support, another feature of FPS. Some of the offerings of Adaptive Payments are sure to be attractive to developers. In what PayPal calls “Chained Payments,” developers can create applications that enable a sender to send a single payment to a primary receiver who may keep part of the payment and pay other, secondary receivers with the remainder of the funds. For example, an application might be an online travel agency that handles bookings for airfare, hotel reservations, and car rentals. The sender sees only the travel site as the primary receiver. But that site could allocate the payment for its commission and the actual cost of services provided by other merchants. PayPal would deduct the money from the sender's account and deposit it in both the primary travel site’s account and the secondary receivers' accounts. Adaptive Payments will also offer “Parallel Payments,” which would let a sender send a single payment to multiple receivers. An example of this type of application might be a shopping cart that lets a buyer pay for items from several merchants with one payment. The shopping cart would allocate the payment to the merchants who actually provided the items. PayPal would then deduct money from the sender's account and deposits it in the receivers' accounts. It’s unclear what PayPal’s pricing plan will be for Adaptive Payments and if it will be competitive with Amazon’s FPS pricing. Amazon has slowly been rolling out its competition to PayPal over the past few years, launching Amazon Payments and unveiling the beta of FPS. It isn’t easy for Amazon to replace PayPal, but it is going after developers to become the preferred payment mechanism on the Web. Perhaps PayPal is starting to feel the heat from FPS, which allows much more flexibility than PayPal’s Direct Payments API. Now, with its Adaptive Payments API in the works, PayPal is about to strike back. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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Online dating service and 
Following last weekend’s 
Ever tried finding applications for the 
You’d think on a phone that can do as many cool things as the iPhone, push email through one of the world’s most popular email services, Gmail, would be one of them. But for some reason, Google and Apple haven’t turned on the functionality for Gmail accounts on the iPhone. Sure, you can get push email through MobileMe, Yahoo Mail or Exchange, but basic Gmail users are basically out of luck. Until now, maybe.
Since you see it every time you open your web browser, a good start page is key. Google has a pretty good option with iGoogle, which is highly customizable. But as social networking continues to rise in popularity, an increasing number of people just have something like Facebook as their main page. 
The free version of 
Remember a few weeks ago when 
Tomorrow night Yahoo is planning to unleash Search Pad, a note-taking tool integrated with the search engine, to the masses. The company first 
My, how time flies in the tech world. It was only one month ago today that the Palm Pre 
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