The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Rich Mobile Browser Startup Skyfire Snags Travelocity Exec For Top Spot
- Layar Wants More Layers, Opens Augmented Reality Platform To Developers
- Google Chrome: Redefining The Operating System
- eBuddy Finally Gives Birth To iPhone App (And It Has Push Notification)
- AudioBoo Adds Spinvox To Magically Turn Interviews Into Text
- Google Drops A Nuclear Bomb On Microsoft. And It’s Made of Chrome.
- Twittorati Will Show You How Awesomely Fascinating Bloggers’ Lives Are (Or Not)
- Upload Videos From Your iPhone To Facebook Right Now With VideoUp
- Small Newspapers May Be Able To Prolong Death Longer Than Large Counterparts
- So Much For That Idea. Facebook Has Killed Off Its Great Apps Initiative
- Sequoia, Greylock Take Stake In OpenDNS
- Tweet Those Screencasts With Screenjelly
- Swing And A Miss. La Russa Drops Silly Twitter Lawsuit
- The World Was Watching: Michael Jackson’s Memorial, By The Numbers
- Technorati To Unveil Twittorati Tomorrow
- Grassroots Enterprise’s “Actions” Lets You Send Messages To Elected Officials From Facebook
- iPhone Dev Team Releases 3GS Jailbreak
- Amazon Killing Mobile Apps That Use Its Data
- Another Beta Down: Doorbell’s Sales CRM Is Now Commercially Available
- My Secret Circle: A Secure Social Network for Tween Girls, Me
- Pandora (And Other Internet Radio) Has Officially Been Saved
- Someone Needs To Stop Tripping Over The Power Cord At Rackspace
- Kazaa Still Kicking, To Bring HD Video To The Pre?
- Google Apps Standard Edition Findable Again
- Feedburner Founder/CEO Dick Costolo To Leave Google
| Rich Mobile Browser Startup Skyfire Snags Travelocity Exec For Top Spot Posted: 08 Jul 2009 06:30 AM PDT Skyfire, the makers of the "game-changing" Skyfire mobile browser, has tapped Jeffrey Glueck to join the company as CEO. Formerly Chief Marketing Officer at Travelocity, Glueck helped grow sales for the travel site from $3.5 billion to $10.6 billion globally and introduced the Travelocity Guarantee and the “Roaming Gnome” advertising campaigns. Prior to Travelocity, Glueck co-founded last minute deal start-up Site59.com, which was sold to Travelocity in 2002. Former Skyfire CEO Nitin Bhandari will become chief product officer with the goal for expanding Skyfire as a platform for media and entertainment companies to build video apps. Skyfire is free and the only browser of the bunch to support Flash, Silverlight, and a number of other technologies generally reserved for desktop browsers. Skyfire, which has over one million users, supports devices from Nokia, Samsung, LG, HTC, Palm, and Motorola, and is testing a BlackBerry version. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Layar Wants More Layers, Opens Augmented Reality Platform To Developers Posted: 08 Jul 2009 06:21 AM PDT
Layar is far from the only player in the mobile AR browser market, which is shaping up to be an interesting field as devices and the operating systems they run see technological advances at an ever-increasing speed. Our friends over at Venturebeat recently published a great piece about AR browsers and listed Layar alongside similar tools like Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera and Mobilizy’s WikiTude. But ultimately, it will always come down to supporting as many platforms as soon as possible without neglecting the content part of the equation. Without a decent amount of usable layers, none of these AR browsers are going to see mainstream adoption any time soon, and Layar is the first to attempt luring third-party developers into creating layers on top of their system by means of an extensive API. In my opinion, it’s a logical step to take, and I’m curious to see if there will be enough developer interest. To be continued. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Google Chrome: Redefining The Operating System Posted: 08 Jul 2009 01:24 AM PDT
Last year I wrote a post about the just launched Chrome browser titled Meet Chrome, Google's Windows Killer. From that article:
One representative response to my quote above, from The Register: “In no way can this statement be construed to make sense, and I’m not just being a pedantic asshole here. Fortunately, El Reg readers are with it enough to know that you need a proper OS before you can have a browser.” Purists complained that a browser isn’t actually an operating system, and brought up mundane issues about hardware drivers, memory and processor management, and other red herrings. Sure, they were right - the Chrome browser isn’t an operating system. It is, you could say, sans the bag of drivers needed to meet the definition. Still, the writing was on the wall - Google quite clearly saw Chrome as an operating system that competes with Windows. Fast forward to today. The Chrome browser now has 30 million active users, says Google, and tracking services say it has 6% or so market share. Not bad for a browser that’s less than a year old. And now, WOW. Google just bolted a big ol’ bag of drivers (also known as the Linux kernel) to Chrome and are calling it the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s going to be hard for people to continue to deny its operating systemness now. The new OS will focus entirely on the web: “The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform.” What that means is this. The browser is the platform. The browser is the UI. Now, finally, even the tech purists can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Windows is hardware management plus an application platform, and we call that an OS. Chrome OS is hardware management plus an application platform (the browser), and we call that an OS, too. Don’t worry about those desktop apps you think you need. Office? Meh. You’ve got Zoho and Google Apps. You won’t miss office. Chrome plus Gears plus Google Wave plus HTML 5 and web platforms like Flash and Silverlight all combine into a single wonderful computing device. The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way. Chrome will do just that. And it will be free, unlike Windows. Forget the netbooks, which Google is targeting initally. We’ll see PCs of all types being sold by the major manufacturers as soon as Google gets this out of beta next year. Microsoft has a very serious competitive threat to the core of their revenues. Every Chrome computer bought won’t have Windows and won’t have Office. That must send chills down the spine of the guys up in Redmond. But hey, at least they can now point to Google when the antitrust guys come knocking. Someone other than them are bundling the operating system and browser into one neat package. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| eBuddy Finally Gives Birth To iPhone App (And It Has Push Notification) Posted: 08 Jul 2009 01:21 AM PDT
The application for the iPhone and iPod Touch the company is announcing today has quietly gone live in the App Store last week (iTunes link), but hasn’t been promoted in any way since until today. It brings a very strong competitor to the likes of Nimbuzz and fring, both of which have had native iPhone applications for a while now. Where eBuddy differentiates is in its support for Apple’s Push Notification Service, which allows a third-party server to ping the service in order to push out notifications to your device over a persistent IP connection.
At a later stage, the company expects to prolong this push notification window but strives to maintain a balance between a longer time and not putting too much strain on the device’s battery life. I’m told that eBuddy already saw about 2 million people using its product from the iPhone or iPod Touch before the app actually hit the App Store, thanks to the web-based eBuddy Lite Messenger tool, but the free native application that was just released will likely convert most of those users to it in a short period of time. In fact, many seem to have already done so despite the lack of a marketing push: according to stats provided by app store analytics startup Distimo, the eBuddy for iPhone application is currently already ranked #1 in 21 countries, within the top 5 in 31 countries, and within the top 10 in 37 countries in the free social networking application category. Of course, a massive user base doesn’t equal massive revenue streams, especially not when you’re giving away a product for free. I asked eBuddy how it expects to make money from its mobile applications (they’re already doing quite well on the web version, I’m told), and CEO Jan-Joost Rueb said he wants to see an aggregate mobile app user base of 10 million uniques before they roll out monetization efforts like advertising and paid premium apps. Rueb expects to hit that milestone by the end of this year based on its current growth path, so basically if the company can attract 4 million more mobile app users on top of its current 6 million ones, they’ll start deriving revenues from them in Q4 2009. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| AudioBoo Adds Spinvox To Magically Turn Interviews Into Text Posted: 08 Jul 2009 01:20 AM PDT  There are lots of ways to get audio online from an iPhone today. You can use Evernote, you can send audio notes via Field Recording to Soundcloud, then there's Tweetmic, Facemic (sends recordings to Facebook) Twitsay and Twitterfone. The list goes on. But one that's getting a lot of traction for its ease of use and for the fact it has its own social network is AudioBoo out of the UK. And today it takes a step further with integration with the Spinvox API, the voice-to-text company which has been taken on by a number of global mobile networks.
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| Google Drops A Nuclear Bomb On Microsoft. And It’s Made of Chrome. Posted: 07 Jul 2009 10:12 PM PDT
In the second half of 2010, Google plans to launch the Google Chrome OS, an operating system designed from the ground up to run the Chrome web browser on netbooks. “It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be,” Google writes tonight on its blog. But let’s be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft. It even says as much in the first paragraph of its post, “However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.” Yeah, who do you think they mean by that? And it’s a genius play. So many people are buying netbooks right now, but are running WIndows XP on them. Windows XP is 8 years old. It was built to run on Pentium IIIs and Pentium 4s. Google Chrome OS is built to run on both x86 architecture chips and ARM chips, like the ones increasingly found in netbooks. It is also working with multiple OEMs to get the new OS up and running next year. Obviously, this Chrome OS will be lightweight and fast just like the browser itself. But also just like the browser, it will be open-sourced. Think Microsoft will be open-sourcing Windows anytime soon? As Google writes, “We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision.” They might as well set up enlistment booths on college campuses for their war against Microsoft. Google says the software architecture will basically be the current Chrome browser running inside “a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.” So in other words, it basically is the web as an OS. And applications developers will develop for it just as they would on the web. This is similar to the approach Palm has taken with its new webOS for the Palm Pre, but Google notes that any app developed for Google Chrome OS will work in any standards-compliant browser on any OS.
So why release this new OS instead of using Android? After all, it has already been successfully ported to netbooks. Google admits that there is some overlap there. But a key difference they don’t mention is the ability to run on the x86 architecture. Android cannot do that (though there are ports), Chrome OS can and will. But more, Google wants to emphasize that Chrome OS is all about the web, whereas Android is about a lot of different things. Including apps that are not standard browser-based web apps. But Chrome OS will be all about the web apps. And no doubt HTML 5 is going to be a huge part of all of this. A lot of people are still wary about running web apps for when their computer isn’t connected to the web. But HTML 5 has the potential to change that, as you’ll be able to work in the browser even when not connected, and upload when you are again. We’re starting to see more clearly why Google’s Vic Gundotra was pushing HTML 5 so hard at Google I/O this year. Sure, part of it was about things like Google Wave, but Google Wave is just one of many new-style apps in this new Chrome OS universe. But there is a wild card in all of this still for Microsoft: Windows 7. While Windows XP is 8 years old, and Windows Vista is just generally considered to be a bad OS for netbooks, Windows 7 could offer a good netbook experience. And Microsoft had better hope so, or its claim that 96% of netbooks run Windows is going to be very different in a year. Google plans to release the open source code for Chrome OS later this year ahead of the launch next year. Don’t be surprised if this code drops around the same time as Windows 7. Can’t wait to hear what Microsoft will have to say about all of this. Good thing they have a huge conference next week. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Twittorati Will Show You How Awesomely Fascinating Bloggers’ Lives Are (Or Not) Posted: 07 Jul 2009 07:53 PM PDT As we reported earlier today, media search engine Technorati has succumbed to the Twitter infatuation and is launching Twittorati, a site that shows what Technorati’s top 100 bloggers are tweeting about. Our earlier story indicates that the site is launching tomorrow but perhaps our post sped things up. We had a chance to demo the site with Technorati’s CEO Richard Jalichandra. The site pulls in the Tweets published by bloggers from Technorati’s list of Top 100 Blogs, which is determined by Technorati’s Authority Ranking (its equivalent to Google Page Rank). Authority Ranking is calculated via algorithm of inbound links from other blog posts, and weights those based on timing, relevancy and the inbound link's site source Authority Ranking. The blogs that are ranked vary by subject, with The Huffington Post taking the top spot, TechCrunch as no. 2 and Engadget in the no. 3. Twittorati pulls Tweets into a real-time stream (though not fully real-time; like Twitter, you still need to refresh the page to get real-time results) where you can organize Tweets by Authority Ranking or by latest Tweet. Because the Tweets are aggregated from blogs that cover a variety of subject relating to politics, technology, entertainment and more, the subjects of the Tweets are varied and somewhat random. But you can narrow your stream by filtering Tweets by Technorati Tags (life, news, music, politics, etc.) and the top trending Twitter hashtags. For example, some of the top Twitter hashtags that bloggers were Tweeting included #michaelphelps and #MJ. The origins of the Tweets include a blog’s Tweets and bloggers’ personal Tweets from their own accounts. Technorati says it has collected Twitter handles for most of the authors of the top 100 sites.  The site also shows the most popular links that bloggers link to as well as the most popular photos that are linked to. Both link and photo searches can be filtered by most recent links and images. And each day Twittorati pulls in a list of Tweets of featured bloggers that are profiled on the site. The site itself can be useful when trying to peer into the professional and personal lives of bloggers. I think something that’s missing a breakdown of Tweets from blogs by topic. So for example, if you only wanted to see Tweets from bloggers at technology blogs, there’s no easy way to filter Tweets and blogs by subject. Jalichandra says Twittorati plans to add this functionality in the near future. The site is similar in theory to Federated Media’s ExecTweets, which is focused more on aggregating Tweets from execs in various industries vs. the blogger-focus on Twtterati. WeFollow is also similar, but isn’t limited to just blogs. Missing from the Twittorati are bloggers whose blogs may not make Technorati’s top 100 list, but whose Tweets are relevant and entertaining. Jalichandra says that the site will expand to include other prolific bloggers down the line. Twittorati is being produced in partnership with Sawhorse Media, publisher of fellow Twitter aggregatorsMuckrack.com and VentureMaven. Luxury car manufacturer Infinity is sponsoring Twittorati. Technorati Media has been through a roller coaster of highs and lows over the past year. Last June, the company launched Technorati Media, a blog advertising network. Prior to launching the ad network, Technorati raised $7.3 million in a fourth round of financing through Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital and FG Incubation. And last fall, Technorati acquired AdEngage to join the company's newly formed blog advertising network. And most recently, Technorati launched a new directory of 'tag' pages, offering brief overviews of a variety of tech-related topics and redesigned BlogCritics, a blog network the company acquired. Unfortunately, Technorati hasn't been immune to layoffs during the current economic climate. In April, the company let go 10 percent of its staff, or 4 employees, and also suffered through an earlier round of layoffs last September and implemented pay cuts for remaining staff. Despite these setbacks, Jalichandra remains optimistic about the future of Technorati and the potential of Twitterati to be a popular destination to peek into the Twittersphere of the blogosphere.  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Upload Videos From Your iPhone To Facebook Right Now With VideoUp Posted: 07 Jul 2009 07:15 PM PDT
VideoUp is a application created by Raizlabs. While they are in no way affiliated with Facebook, the social network was nice enough to help them fix a couple bugs to get it ready for the App Store, founder Greg Raiz tells us. That’s good news because it means Facebook apparently isn’t being tyrannical and demanding that its official app is the only one that will be able to do video uploads to the network. VideoUp is very simple. You login to your Facebook account via Facebook Connect, choose which video you wish to upload (you can pick one in your library or shoot a new one), enter a description, and you’re done. What’s really pretty amazing about the app is just how fast it uploads the videos. The 16-second test video I shot below was uploaded and playable on Facebook in under a minute. That easily beats the YouTube upload times from the iPhone 3GS, and the quality seems much better. VideoUp recommends that you hold your iPhone horizontally, so it appears correctly on Facebook. However, if you do it vertically, it’s easy to rotate the video there as well. Obviously, this will only work with the new iPhone 3GS, which has video capabilities. You can find VideoUp for Facebook in the App Store here. It is $0.99. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Small Newspapers May Be Able To Prolong Death Longer Than Large Counterparts Posted: 07 Jul 2009 07:05 PM PDT More bad news for large newspapers. According to the latest stats from the Inland Press Association, larger newspapers with higher circulations are suffering more than their smaller siblings. Newspaper veteran Alan Mutter reports that the bigger the newspapers are, the more their profits decreased over the past five years. Since 2004, operating profits on average fell just over 100% at newspapers with circulation higher than 80,000. That’s right. Taken all together, their losses wiped out their profits. The Inland Press surveyed 120 papers across the country. Newspapers with circulations of less than 15,000 fared better, with ad revenues actually eking out a 4.3% increase over the same period. But operating profits still fell by nearly 65%. This drop isn’t nearly as staggering as the plummet of profits for newspapers with an 80,000-plus circulation, but it’s not a cause for celebration either. Newspapers with 50,000-80,000 in circulation saw profits fall 83%, with newspapers with circulations of 25,000 to 50,000 seeing a 90 percent drop in profit. Another sign of hope: small papers still have a hold on classifieds. Average classified sales for small papers have actually gone up, at a time when they have been declining for most papers. Inland cites an example of a daily newspaper with a circulation of less than 15,000, which posted a 210.4% increase in classified revenue from 2004 to 2008. But it didn’t do much good. The paper’s profits were down by almost 30%. All in all, newspapers on average reported a 13.5% drop in ad sales between 2004 and 2008, which confirms yet once again the dismal state of the industry. Curiously, the study says that the largest newspapers reported an average profit margin of 12% in 2008, which is remarkably high for publishers whose profits have virtually disappeared. Mutter points out that a 12% profit margin is more than double Wal-Mart’s margins in 2008. Apparently, Inland Press says the reason profit margins could still average 12% is because data was collected from a variety of publications, some of which had healthy margins and some of which has terrible losses. We’re not sure which, if any, large newspapers had healthy margins. Also, the data that was volunteered by publishers was released on condition of anonymity. Seems like a bit of a paradox in these times. Perhaps their are just averaging the profit margins across newspapers on a percentage basis, while taking absolute profits and losses into account when calculating the overall declines. Large percentage gains at small newspapers would then have an over-sized weighting. No matter how rosy a picture the newspaper association tries to paint, the fact remains that there are still serious (perhaps mortal) declines at all newspapers. And while death may be slower for the little guys, it’s still imminent. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| So Much For That Idea. Facebook Has Killed Off Its Great Apps Initiative Posted: 07 Jul 2009 06:05 PM PDT
The second step was a program dubbed “Great Apps”, which was meant to reward the very best applications on Facebook Platform, enticing developers with promises of “greater visibility on Facebook, earlier access to new features, and more feedback from Facebook”. It was going to highlight the true cream of the crop, launching with iLike and Causes as inaugural members with plans to add a dozen or so more applications within the next year. Now, we’ve learned, that isn’t going to happen, as Facebook has killed off the program. Or, rather, it’s combined Great Apps with Verified Apps — the two are now one and the same. The few applications that were members have been notified of their demotion to plain Verified Apps, and nearly all literature relating to the program has been removed from Facebook. So what happened? Facebook decided to simply give the benefits it was going to reserve for Great Apps and give them to the Verified Apps instead. Verified Apps are currently being more prominently displayed than their unverified brethren, and Facebook has recently been testing out some new features, like its payment platform, with a handful of them. Here’s Facebook’s full explanation:
This all makes sense, but it’s hard to argue that being grouped into a field of hundreds of good apps is comparable to ranking among a dozen or so truly excellent applications. With 15 or so Great Apps, every top app could have been shown on a single screen, perhaps as the first thing users saw when they clicked over to the “Browse Applications” section. Facebook gives Verified Apps better positioning in the App Directory, but this promotion is diluted to some extent by the many other applications that are given the same treatment. That said, we’ve heard that Verified Applications have been reaping the benefits of better placement and less restrictive invitation limits and seeing boosts in traffic. Still, I’m sure many of the truly great apps would have appreciated the chance to really stand above the rest. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Sequoia, Greylock Take Stake In OpenDNS Posted: 07 Jul 2009 05:40 PM PDT
The deal size and valuation isn’t being disclosed. David Strohm from Greylock and Michael Goguen from Sequoia join previous investor Halsey Minor and CEO Nand Mulchandani on the board of directors. Founding CEO David Ulevitch stepped down in late 2008 to take the CTO role. OpenDNS, which launched in 2006, is a DNS service provider for consumers and organizations. It has two main benefits. First, users can avoid DNS outages that occasionally plague ISPs because OpenDNS routes around the legacy infrastructure that occasionally gets hit by DDOS attacks and other problems. Last year, for example, a Time Warner outage left many Los Angeles customers without Internet access, but OpenDNS users weren’t affected. The service also allows users to block certain kinds of sites, like porn and phishing sites. Users have to do some basic configuration of their computer to get it going, and once it's running they rarely see it again. A year ago we reported that the company was resolving 7 billion DNS queries per day and revenue from search pages from unresolved URLs brought in as much as $20,000 per day. Today they are resolving up to 15 billion daily DNS queries. The company has 24 employees and previously raised just $2.5 million from Minor Ventures. They have been profitable for more than 18 months, they say. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Tweet Those Screencasts With Screenjelly Posted: 07 Jul 2009 03:38 PM PDT On Twitter there are easy ways to share links, photos, and videos (via bit.ly, Twitpic, YFrog, Flickr, and YouTube), and now there is an easy way to record and share screencasts. The service is called Screenjelly, and it just launched today. It comes from the the team that created ScreenToaster, which was bought by enterprise video provider Veodia last month. Screenjelly is a browser-based screen sharing app. After allowing a Java applet to run on your computer, you press record and have 3 minutes to show anything on your computer screen, using your built-in microphone to do a voiceover. Once you are done, you can Tweet out a link to your video. Unlike other Web-based screen sharing apps like Webex or Adobe Acrobat, Screenjelly is asynchronous and designed for quick, fast sharing sessions. Even ScreenToaster has a lot more bells and whistles. I did a Screenjelly video going through some of the open tabs on my browser and a desktop app. It works pretty much as advertised, although I would suggest closing any apps you don’t intend to demo. I kept getting a lag between the audio and the video until I closed down some of my desktop apps. (Hat tip to Loic Le Meur) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Swing And A Miss. La Russa Drops Silly Twitter Lawsuit Posted: 07 Jul 2009 03:31 PM PDT
No money changed hands in the dropping of the suit. Here’s the goods from the court document:
Here’s why this lawsuit was rather silly. First of all, La Russa was suing Twitter rather than suing the impersonator. Even after Twitter did what it could to stop whoever it was — delete the account. But even better was that La Russa tried to claim just a few days later that Twitter had settled the case and was giving money to his charity in return. One problem: That never happened. La Russa might actually be lucky that Twitter didn’t come back and sue him for saying that — such a statement could literally open the floodgates for more lawsuits like this if it was implied that Twitter was in the wrong. But hey, at least all of this helped bring about verified accounts on Twitter. Lest we get another Kanye rant. [photo: Reuters] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| The World Was Watching: Michael Jackson’s Memorial, By The Numbers Posted: 07 Jul 2009 02:40 PM PDT
It’s still a little too early to determine just how widely watched the ceremony was, especially since traffic was distributed across many sites, but we’re already beginning to see some staggering preliminary numbers. In the time window from 12AM to 4PM EST, Web analytics company Omniture reports that CNN saw:
CDN server logs also indicate that CNN saw a peak of 781,000 concurrent live streams at its peak. We’ve also gotten some numbers from Ustream:
Update: Facebook has sent us their finalized stats, taken from all partner sites that integrated its stream of real-time updates. In total, the social network reports that 1 million users posted approximately 800,000 status:
E! Online:
ABC:
MTV:
Very impressive numbers to be sure, but they don’t surpass those of President Obama’s inauguration, which was the last web event to draw this much attention from the social web. During the inauguration, the CNN/Facebook live stream drew 13.9 million live streams between 6 AM and 11:45 AM ET, with millions more during the course of the day, and a peak of 1.3 million concurrent streams. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Technorati To Unveil Twittorati Tomorrow Posted: 07 Jul 2009 02:32 PM PDT
The site, which we haven’t seen yet, will show what top bloggers are tweeting about, and compare topics to blogosphere trends. The site will also, according to a press release we’ve seen, allow visitors to filter tweets by topic, see the most tweeted blog posts, and compare leading blogosphere and Twitter trends. It sounds like it may be somewhat similar to Federated Media’s Exec Tweets. Technorati Top 100 bloggers will be featured at launch, and it will expand to include more authors over time. The site was produced in partnership with Sawhorse Media, publisher of Muckrack.com and VentureMaven. Infinity is sponsoring Twittorati. More details when we actually see the site. Update: Here it is. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Grassroots Enterprise’s “Actions” Lets You Send Messages To Elected Officials From Facebook Posted: 07 Jul 2009 02:31 PM PDT Writing letters to elected officials and government organizations is a time-old part of political activism. More recently, citizens had the option of using email vs. snail mail to send out correspondence. Now, citizens will have the opportunity to send letters and messages to elected officials directly from Facebook. Bi-partisan Political and digital strategy firm Grassroots Enterprise has launched an technology, called “Actions,” that organizations can use on Facebook to allow supporters and visitors to send messages and letters to elected officials or other targets directly from Facebook. The Actions tab on an organization’s Facebook page will let visitors immediately send letters to Federal or state officials and will automatically match them to federal and state legislative officials, based on the addresses they enter. One of the other important functions of Actions is its ability to capture names and emails in an external database for later emails and fundraising. Grassroots Enterprise says the beauty of the Actions offering is the ability to for users to interact with the technology without having to download a separate application. And the "Actions" page is customizable for individual pages, enabling organizations to feature their own actions for their specific causes. One of the first Action tabs Grassroots launched was for the "Confirm Sotomayor" effort on Facebook. The organization reports that in the first two days, the Facebook page had over 2,000 action takers. Grassroots says that they are going to be unrolling Actions pages for a variety of Faceboook pages, including the Sierra Club’s page, and a "pro-hockey" effort in Canada that’s trying to create another professional team.  Actions is similar in theory to Causes, a popular Facebook application that lets users support and donate to non-profits, causes and individuals. But for now, Actions is focused on helping movements with correspondence to spur action and harvest emails. Investors of Grassroots Enterprise include Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| iPhone Dev Team Releases 3GS Jailbreak Posted: 07 Jul 2009 12:47 PM PDT The iPhone Dev Team has released their much anticipated iPhone 3GS jailbreak and unlock set. Last week we reported on George Hotz, the teenage hacker, who released a Windows only version of the jailbreak which could then be used to run the ultrasn0w unlock. Then he released a Mac version over the weekend. Now the Dev Team has fixed their own version, redsn0w, to work with the iPhone 3GS under Windows and OS X. The iPhone Dev Team jailbreak isn’t much different then Hotz’s version — besides the point that the iPhone Dev Team released it. The Dev Team is a group of hackers dedicated to unlocking the iPhone and exposing all of its wonderful mysteries. They write:
The 3GS jailbreak uses the same procedure as the iPhone 3G unlock process but was not deemed ready for release by the Dev Team until today. The Dev Team in a blog post also mentions that if you have the correct personalized (signed) dfu/img3 files, then you’ll always be able to jailbreak, even if you install Apple’s firmware update. This means you’ll be safe to upgrade over the next few software iterations but if you intend to unlock your iPhone 3GS permanently you must watch the Dev Team site for discussion on the baseband upgrades that Apple might release in the future. If you upgrade the baseband you could fry your iPhone or lock out future unlocks. Below is a video demonstrating the Dev Team jailbreak process. iPhone 3GS Unlock Demonstration from planetbeing on Vimeo. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Amazon Killing Mobile Apps That Use Its Data Posted: 07 Jul 2009 12:35 PM PDT
A recent change to Amazon’s Product Advertising API means that apps like Delicious Library are being restricted from using it, according to Alan Quatermain. And what’s really perplexing is that this change apparently only matters on mobile devices, meaning bye bye to an iPhone app that took its developers 8 months to build. Here’s the official wording that killed the app:
Developer Wil Shipley tried to reach out to Amazon to see about getting permission, but Amazon apparently said no exceptions were being made. Not only that, “they [Amazon] told me to remove it today, or they’d shut me down,” Shipley tweeted out. And this data is crucial to Delicious Library, because it’s how it pulls its product information. So it won’t be back unless Amazon changes that rule, which it doesn’t appear to be ready to do anytime soon. It would seem that Amazon only wants you to be able to access its product data through its own mobile site and apps. But that’s a problem because, as Quatermain points out, the Amazon iPhone app isn’t even available in places like the UK. Yeah. This is fairly ridiculous. Update: As Rod points out in the comments, this seems to be related to similar action Amazon was taking nearly 2 years ago against mobile web startups. But here’s why this remains utterly ridiculous — if not more so — just read what Amazon told us at the time:
Amazon tried to make it sound like they were just in the process of figuring everything out and then would come up with a way to “best serve customers who want to use mobile devices to shop on Amazon.com” Uh yeah, it’s been almost 2 years. And again, Shipley did ask for permission, and was flat-out denied. [thanks Nik] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Another Beta Down: Doorbell’s Sales CRM Is Now Commercially Available Posted: 07 Jul 2009 11:55 AM PDT
The service has changed pretty significantly since we first covered it last June. The most obvious change is a complete UI redesign, which ditches the drab colors in favor of something much sleeker and more intuitive. Founder Peter Urban says that the site has a strong emphasis on using AJAX to decrease load times and increase efficiency, and has adopted more of a webtop control panel. The site has also added a new feature that allows you to ‘attach’ Emails to certain contacts by including a special Doorbell address in your mail client’s BCC field, and will be adding more social features, like the ability to monitor your contacts’ Twitter conversations, in the near future. Anyone has been able to sign up for Doorbell for the last few months, but Urban says that it was still undergoing tweaking and was still in public beta. Now, the service is ready to make its full professional debut and drop the Beta tag (incidentally Google Apps did the same thing this morning — not bad company to be with). With the Beta tag gone, Smibs will also begin charging for the product, though it will offer it for free to teams of up to two users and 250 contacts. Paid plans start at $19 per month. Doorbell isn’t the only Smibs product in the works: the company plans to have another application out this August, and we’ll also begin seeing third party applications appear on the Smibs platform in the next few months. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| My Secret Circle: A Secure Social Network for Tween Girls, Me Posted: 07 Jul 2009 11:39 AM PDT  So this seems like a good enough idea. It's called MySecretCircle and it's basically it's a closed social network for girls. You and your buds buy a USB key that acts as your login. It autoruns under Windows and OS X and brings up a photo and journal sharing system that only allows certain people access to your daughter's personal info. In theory and in practice this is great. It ensures your tween doesn't connect with creeps like me. Kids can only connect with friends that have their private key - no one else exists in the site except for Sabrina Circle, the Tom of this candy-pink MySpace.
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| Pandora (And Other Internet Radio) Has Officially Been Saved Posted: 07 Jul 2009 11:31 AM PDT
For those not familiar with what was going on, basically the streaming rates for Internet radio were in danger of being raised to levels that would have made it very hard for companies like Pandora to stay afloat. But a resolution has been reached between webcasters, artists, and record labels, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad tells us. “Pandora is finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates,” Conrad says. The key part of the resolution involves SoundExchange agreeing to a 40-50% reduction in the per-song-per-listener rates. In exchange, Pandora is giving up a 25% share of its U.S. revenue. [Update below, if that 25% figure is higher thank the per-song-per-listener number.] This agreement runs through 2015. But Pandora also had to give up a little more. Because the rates agreed upon are still quite a bit higher than other forms of radio, the service is going to have to put limits in place for users of its free version. Apparently, this will only affect 10% of the user base, as it’s basically just anyone who uses Pandora over 40 hours per month. If a user hits that wall, it will only cost them $0.99 to go unlimited for the remainder of the month. Seems fair. Users of Pandora One, the pay version of the service, will continue to have unlimited listening. I asked Conrad if this 25% kickback or new per-stream rate will effect Pandora’s stated goal to be profitable by next year. “It’s a great outcome. Expensive, but I think we can still be profitable next year. These are workable rates,” he says. Update: Just to clarify one thing, the new deal will see Pandora pay either 25% of its U.S. revenue or the new per-song-per-listener rate, whichever is higher. That’s an important distinction because it likely means Pandora will actually be paying more than the 25% figure. [Thanks to MediaMemo's Peter Kafka for pointing that out.] Find the rest of the details in the email below.
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| Someone Needs To Stop Tripping Over The Power Cord At Rackspace Posted: 07 Jul 2009 11:23 AM PDT
For the second time in 8 days, a power outage interrupted service at one of its data centers. And again it was the Dallas center that was effected. This time however, Rackspace was able to get things up and running fairly quickly, and more importantly, communicated well through its blog and Twitter throughout the downtime. Still, it raises the question, why do power outages keep taking down a service that so many rely on? They have backups in place, so what’s going on? Last time, Rackspace blamed the failure on a series of events that began with a power failure, and eventually tripped up its backup system. It isn’t saying exactly what happened this time yet, but if it was the same issue, obviously that’s a problem. The issue here is reliability. A lot companies run their services through Rackspace. If it goes down, even for just an hour, that’s lost business. Last time around, Rackspace coughed up as much as $3.5 million in credits to those who were affected. It will undoubtedly have to cough up money this time around as well. The promise of reliability is presumably one of the reasons Google kept Gmail in beta for so long, finally removing it today after several years. Now, if something happens, there’s no leaning on that beta crutch anymore. To be clear, Rackspace has a pretty good history when it comes to reliabilty. Before last week’s downtime, it was November 2007 that a major outage last occurred. And that’s why it’s so troubling that we’ve seen two outages in just about a week. [photo: flickr/Gordon McDowell] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Kazaa Still Kicking, To Bring HD Video To The Pre? Posted: 07 Jul 2009 10:56 AM PDT  Seriously, we're just as surprised as you are. Not only is Kazaa somehow still in business, they're also trying anything they can to set themselves apart from all the other digital music retailers you'd rather use instead of them. Now the property of Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Kazaa is setting its sights on bringing HD movie downloads to the masses (well, the masses that use Kazaa), and the Pre is where they've decided to make their stand.
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| Google Apps Standard Edition Findable Again Posted: 07 Jul 2009 10:27 AM PDT
Google responded, saying "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." Translation: they are trying to get more users to pay by making the Standard version harder to find. In that they succeeded brilliantly, but were obviously a little overzealous in hiding it. Google just emailed to say that a link to the Standard version has been added back to the landing page. And they reiterate that they have no plans to kill the product, they’ll just make users play a version of Where’s Waldo to find it. (Ok, they didn’t really say that last part about Waldo). Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Feedburner Founder/CEO Dick Costolo To Leave Google Posted: 07 Jul 2009 09:58 AM PDT
Costolo and his team, based in Chicago, joined Google two years ago when Feedburner was acquired for $100 million. Like some other Feedburner employees he has moved on to other projects within Google. He currently reports to Neal Mohan, an exec in the Ads group, as the group product manager for social ads. Costolo has no plans for his next job/startup. But something tells me that in a few months we’ll be hearing about his next venture. He turned $8 million in venture capital into a $100 million payday. More than a few venture capitalists will be taking him to lunch at their first opportunity. Interesting side note: Costolo, who was a stand up comedian in a former life, is rumored to be the author of a Twitter account mocking a well known Silicon Valley angel investor, Chris Sacca. Zingers include “Headed to Africa for charity kite-surfing event. Kites made from t-shirts of child soldiers in Ivory Coast to draw attention to their plight” and “Going over my SXSW talk on “why I should have equity in your startup”. Getting inspired just proofreading it.” Sacca’s real Twitter account is here. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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It’s hard to type a blog post when one hand is being used to pat myself on the back.
You can see how that comes in handy for an instant messaging tool, since it basically acts as a replacement for text messages. When you exit the app, you’ll still be able to receive incoming messages from your contacts regardless of which IM client they choose to use (apart from Skype, but that’s another story), for 30 minutes initially. 
Wow. So you know all those whispers about a Google desktop operating system that never seem to go away? You thought they might with the launch of Android, Google’s mobile OS. But they persisted. And for good reason, because it’s real.
What Google is doing is not recreating a new kind of OS, they’re creating the best way to not need one at all.
Maybe you heard that 
Last summer Facebook 
It isn’t the sexiest startup in Silicon Valley, but San Francisco based 
Just to follow up 
In news that should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, Michael Jackson’s sobering memorial service this morning will go down as one of the most watched web events, ever. As we reported 
Well, this sucks. I had not yet gotten around to downloading the new Delicious Library iPhone app, which I heard was great. And now I can’t because the developer had to 
After two years of uncertainty, 
As much of the web 
Last night we reported that Google had 
It’s always hard to hold onto those pesky entrepreneurs after you acquire their company - the best ones always get restless and bail. Feedburner cofounder and CEO | You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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