The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- CrunchGear’s Geek Weekend: Philadelphia
- Bing Leapfrogs Yahoo Search … Again
- Lazyfeed Wakes Up — And We Have Invites
- Launching The TechCrunch Europe Top 100 Index
- Scribd Streamlines Embedded Docs With iPaper 2
- Flickr Follow-Up Project Has A Name, Tiny Speck. And They’re Hiring.
- Redfin Turns Profitable, Real Estate Industry Shudders
- Bebo’s Michael Birch launches $49m startup fund for Europe
- The TechCrunch Europas: The Winners and Finalists
- Power.com Countersues Facebook Over Data Portability
- Review: Nokia N97 - So Close, Yet So Very, Very Far.
- Bing To Google: Try Updating Your Index Once In A While
- The Naked Truth 2009 Slides: Show Me The Money
- Microsoft’s Silverlight 3 Launches Early
- While Sacks Plays Poker, Yammer Burns
- New URL Shortener Is Kind Of Cool, Kind Of Defeats The Point
- Gnip Launches Push API To Create Real-Time Stream Of Business Data
- TokBox Fires 50% Of Engineering Team, All Founders Gone
- Multi-Platform Media Sync Software DoubleTwist Gains “Hundreds Of Thousands Downloads”, Is Now Available in Japan
- Someone At Apple Has A Sense Of Humor
- Location Now Built-In To Google Maps — In Chrome And Firefox
- It’s Official (Kind Of): People Prefer the Kindle
- Speeding Up RSS
- Google Finally Adds Creative Commons To Image Search
- Office 2010 Promo Video Promises Action, Excitement, Explosions
| CrunchGear’s Geek Weekend: Philadelphia Posted: 10 Jul 2009 08:33 AM PDT  In this new series we'll be offering you a list of cool things to do in cities across America and around the globe. This Geek Weekend we present Philadelphia, the city of geek love, where you can check out ENIAC, a Star Trek exhibit, and buy a geeky faucet. For questions about Philly, Tweet VisitPhilly. Want your city featured? Drop us a line at tips @ crunchgear.com.
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| Bing Leapfrogs Yahoo Search … Again Posted: 10 Jul 2009 07:24 AM PDT
According to the new data, Bing took 12.9% of the US market like comScore had earlier measured. With the strong jump, Bing comes out ahead of Yahoo Search (10.15%), while Mountain View remains the undisputed king of the mountain with a US market share of 75%. StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen comments on the leapfrogging of Yahoo Search by Bing, saying: “The jump in Bing's share may reflect a positive review of the search engine compared to Google which appeared online in the New York Times on the 8th and in the print version on the 9th July.” I’m not really sure if that is in fact the reason and if this isn’t just the service’s regular growth path. After all, Microsoft has shown a remarkable drive to keep the momentum for its decision engine going, recently adding Twitter messages to search results and bringing the search platform to its Hotmail service. Surely one newspaper article can’t be the only reason for its steady rise in share? In any event, while Google shouldn’t be particularly worried about losing its dominance on the search market yet, the other players in the field better be watching Bing’s progress very closely. Microsoft is doing it right, and users are noticing, too. Update: as a commenter points out, judging by the graph Yahoo Search is holding quite steady while Google seems to mirror Bing’s market share evolution. Check it out: Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Lazyfeed Wakes Up — And We Have Invites Posted: 10 Jul 2009 07:23 AM PDT
Lazyfeed is an interest feed for blog items. It indexes about 100,000 of the most popular blogs and organizes posts by topic. The hottest topics, as determined by related tags, pop up to the top. On the home page it shows you the hottest topics of the moment, which offers an easy entry point into the service. You can also do searches for particular tags, and the most recent posts with those tags start streaming into the reader. You can save tags as favorites in the side bar. and return to them. The service might include Twitter hashtags in the future, but right now it is focused on showing the most recent blog posts about a particular topic. The service has promise, but needs to be developed further. For instance, I would like to see a unified stream of all my interest, just like I can see a unified stream of all the blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader. Currently, you have to click on each tag/interest to generate a feed of headlines. I’d like to all my interests in one column. There also needs to be a way to add and remove particular sources and to filter the results so that they become much more personalized. But all in all, it is a good start and a refreshing approach. The company will be demoing its service later today at the CrunchUp, which will be live streamed here. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Launching The TechCrunch Europe Top 100 Index Posted: 10 Jul 2009 03:12 AM PDT
So I bet you’re wondering why we created this list? Well Europe, despite being a bigger market than the U.S., is spread across multiple countries, jurisdictions and languages. However, many companies themselves trade both across this complex matrix and internationally. So in order to throw some light onto the situation we wanted to do more that just cover the market in a traditional media manner (as we already do). We wanted to use a data-led approach to create a list which could start to throw up both the themes and the diversity of this rich marketplace. We hope the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 will help throw some light on the European companies that are generating strong, genuine progress. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Scribd Streamlines Embedded Docs With iPaper 2 Posted: 10 Jul 2009 03:00 AM PDT
The old version was an improvement on Flash Paper, with a much smaller footprint and speedier browsing, but it still left quite a bit to be desired. For one, it was still clearly very Flash and not a native browser element. And the navigation bar at the top of the viewer was unnecessarily cluttered, making the widget seem bulky. Contrast that with Google’s document reader, which uses HTML and image files, and it just didn’t feel like a natural extension of the browser. The new viewer (screenshot below) is a big improvement. It’s still in Flash, which may be enough to turn some people off, but it manages to look like it’s native. Scribd says that iPaper 2 does this by hooking into the browser’s native widgets (the company believes it’s among the first Flash apps to do so). It may sound like a small addition, but it definitely makes a difference. The new viewer also has improved searching functionality, adding the ability to see where a search result lies in context with the text around it. Most of the other additions are more minor: the viewer simplifies the process to share a doc through Twitter or Facebook, and the view modes are a bit easier to use. But really, the big difference here is aesthetic, and it’s safe to say the streamlined design is a big improvement. iPaper 2 is currently live on Scribd’s main site, with plans to roll out support to embedded documents in about a month. While Scribd is the leader in this space, it has plenty of competitors that offer their own document viewers, which include DocStoc, Issuu, and Edocr, not to mention Google’s own embeddable doc viewers. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Flickr Follow-Up Project Has A Name, Tiny Speck. And They’re Hiring. Posted: 10 Jul 2009 02:11 AM PDT
Butterfield sent out a tweet tonight announcing that the new company was hiring. The link he sent goes to a page on a site for the Tiny Speck project. Along the top of the jobs page it reads “We’re a new company, founded by four core members of the original team behind Flickr.” It’s no secret that another of those four core team members is former Flickr head of engineering, Cal Henderson, who left Yahoo in April of this year. So what is Tiny Speck all about? That is still not entirely clear. The word on the street has been that it’s some kind of new social gaming endeavor, but all they’ll say on the site is “We are working on something huge and fun and we need help.” And the main page doesn’t offer much help either. On it you’ll find the words, “O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!” For the non-English majors, that’s a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which is also the passage that inspired the title of Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World. Below that, you’ll find the logo, and below that you’ll find the link stating that Tiny Speck is hiring. And below that it reads, “Other than that, we have nothing in particular to say for ourselves right now.” Mysterious. So, is there anything to be drawn from this position they’re hiring for? A bit, yes. The position is Creative Production Team Lead. The description says this person will be supporting staff and contractors including “illustrators, along with the occasional writer, animator or sound designer.” So clearly this is a creative project — it almost sounds like their making an animated movie. As awesome as that would be, with people like Henderson on board, you can bet there’s impressive engineering going on to turn this all into a game of some sort (if that is in fact what this is all about). Something else that is interesting is that this is being run out of Vancouver, according to the job posting. That is also where Flickr got its start. And guess how Flickr started? As a photo tool for a project called Game Neverending, a massively multiplayer online game. It eventually became clear that the photo sharing aspect was the idea that would take off for Ludicorp, Butterfield and Fake’s company. So Game Neverending was tabled, and Flickr was born. Yahoo then bought Ludicorp and the rights to Flickr in March of 2005. Looks like we may be seeing Butterfield returning to his roots. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Redfin Turns Profitable, Real Estate Industry Shudders Posted: 10 Jul 2009 02:09 AM PDT
That’s great news for everyone except the real estate industry. The Seattle-based startup represents buyers and sellers in home real estate transactions for far less than the entrenched industry rates that take 5%-6% of the sale price of a home and split it between buy and sell brokers. On the buy side they reimburse 50% of the fee they receive back to the buyer. On the sell side they charge a $5,000 - $7,000 flat fee. The normal broker fees on a million dollar house are up to $60,000, so the savings are obvious. The company was profiled favorably by 60 Minutes in 2007, but real estate agents and brokers have known about the company for far longer. Even as far back as 2006, Kelman told me, they’ve had to deal with “threats, stalkings and other disturbing behavior towards their employees and some customers from, apparently, angry real estate professionals.” Now that Redfin has shown that their model works profitably those threats will likely become worse. Disruption is never fun for those being disrupted. The DOJ is hitting the real estate industry from one side, and Redfin is hitting them from the other. The result? A better deal for the rest of us. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Bebo’s Michael Birch launches $49m startup fund for Europe Posted: 10 Jul 2009 01:40 AM PDT
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| The TechCrunch Europas: The Winners and Finalists Posted: 10 Jul 2009 01:39 AM PDT
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Power.com Countersues Facebook Over Data Portability Posted: 09 Jul 2009 10:52 PM PDT
It’s been over six months since we last heard about these two duking it out, so here’s a quick refresher: Power.com launched last August, offering users the ability to import their latest updates and user information from Facebook, MySpace, and a number of other social networks. It did so by tapping into the social networks’ APIs when available, but also by scraping user data when they couldn’t access it through other means — a big no-no for most social networks, as we saw with the Scoble/Plaxo fiasco. It didn’t take long for Facebook to file suit against Power.com for scraping user data and storing user credentials (another violation of Facebook’s ToS). A week later we heard that the two parties might be close to a settlement, but apparently that didn’t work out — the suit is still pending. Power.com CEO Steve Vachani likens the current situation with Facebook to one the cell phone carriers saw before they allowed for number portability. In the case of the cell phones, users were effectively locked into a certain carrier because they had spent so much time building up contacts and giving them their phone numbers, and it would be too much effort to switch to a new one. It’s an analogy that has been drawn since the data portability movement began, and while it may make sense, there’s no guarantee the courts will view phone numbers and a user’s social network data in the same light. That said, Power.com is making some good points. The idea that users aren’t allowed to input their username and passwords into other services is particularly hypocritical, as that’s exactly what Facebook invites you to do to import contacts from services like Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Facebook can point to its efforts with Facebook Connect, which lets you log in with your Facebook username at third party sites and import some select data from your profile, as evidence of its openness. But this isn’t true data portability, it’s just a new walled garden — third parties are generally only allowed to cache your data, which means that you’re still tethered to Facebook. Of course, while we may not like the current situation, there may well not be anything illegal about it — that’s up to the courts to decide. We’ve all agreed to the Facebook Terms of Service, and there’s no question that Power.com breaks them. We’ll be following the upcoming case closely.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Review: Nokia N97 - So Close, Yet So Very, Very Far. Posted: 09 Jul 2009 09:47 PM PDT  Oh, Nokia N97. I wanted to touch you from the first time I Iaid eyes on you. You seemed like everything I wanted in a handset. You'd be the phone that surmounted the shortcomings of every smartphone before it. You were to be the mobile masterpiece. At least, I thought you were. I've had the Nokia N97 for roughly 3 weeks now. Usually, we push out our reviews after just a week or so with the device - but I just couldn't bring myself to sit down and review this one. Why? Because I thought I was missing something. There just had to be something I was overlooking - some setting, some application, just something that would earn this handset its pre-allotted spot in my pocket. I wasn't missing anything.
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| Bing To Google: Try Updating Your Index Once In A While Posted: 09 Jul 2009 05:38 PM PDT Last Friday, a fire at Fisher Plaza in Seattle knocked out a number of popular websites, including Microsoft Bing’s recently launched Travel portal. The site was back up by Saturday afternoon, but not before Google caught the site’s placeholder “Bing Temporarily Unavailable” page and added it to its index (you can see the cached page here). Now, five days later, “Bing Temporarily Unavailable” is the second search result offered when you search Google for “Bing”. It doesn’t take much to picture Google CEO Eric Schmidt cackling with glee over this. This would be amusing enough on its own — It’s been days since Bing was last unavailable, and while I’m sure Google’s automated bots caught the page while it was actually down, it’s strange that it is taking this long for it to recognize the updated page. Bing may currently see traffic that pales in comparison to Google’s, but it’s no slouch either, and many much smaller sites are indexed by Google on an hourly basis. But it gets even better: Bing’s Twitter account just sent a message directed towards Google’s, asking if they could take a look at their index and captions. This might seem like a trivial goof on Google’s part, but it could actually have a fairly significant impact. Given how many people rely on using their browser’s integrated search box (which is often set to Google) rather than their address bar, I suspect there are quite a few queries for “bing” on Google every day.  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| The Naked Truth 2009 Slides: Show Me The Money Posted: 09 Jul 2009 05:33 PM PDT
For those who want to follow along live, you can find the video of the event here. First up, restaurant recommendation service UrbanSpoon, which was recently bought by IAC. Some highlights of their slide:
Next up, online imaging editing service, Picnik (which has a partnership with Yahoo to edit Flickr pictures).
Video slideshow maker Animoto (which recently raised a new round of funding):
And finally, online real estate company, Redfin: Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Microsoft’s Silverlight 3 Launches Early Posted: 09 Jul 2009 05:25 PM PDT Microsoft's competitor to Adobe Flash, Silverlight, has officially rolled out the new version, Silverlight 3, today. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering media experiences and interactive applications for the Web. The first version was launched in 2007 and the second version was launched in September of 2008. In April, Microsoft reported 300 million downloads of Silverlight between September 2007 and April 2009, with an estimated 300,000 developers and engineers working off the Silverlight platform. SIiverlight 3 launched a day earlier today on Microsoft’s servers, surprising the blogosphere. The new version has improved streaming capabilities, called Smooth Streaming. Here’s what Microsoft said about the new streaming function:
Microsoft is also extending Silverlight’s technologies beyond the browser by allowing developers to design and create apps that can run on the desktop. Microsoft will be announcing further details about Silverlight at its official launch of Silverlight 3 and Expression Studio 3 tomorrow morning. We’ll have all the details. And Microsoft will also be demoing some of the real-time capabilities of Silverlight 3 at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp tomorrow. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| While Sacks Plays Poker, Yammer Burns Posted: 09 Jul 2009 04:00 PM PDT
The service has been down for a few hours now, with no signs of coming back up. Twitter is abuzz with the failure. So while Sacks is busy playing Poker (okay, he’s actually working today, but still), leaving comments on our blog posts, and Twittering, his startup (which we love and use everyday, by the way) is suffering. Hope you win that gold bracelet, David! Update: It’s definitely a hardware and not a software issue, we’re told. They’re still looking into the issue. Update 2: After several hours, it looks like Yammer is finally coming back online. Our icons still aren’t working, but messages are going through. Update 3: Here’s Sacks on today’s issues:
Here’s a video of Sacks and Jason Calacanis talking poker and their bet: Watch Internet CEOs Play Poker at the 2009 WSOP on RawVegas.tv Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| New URL Shortener Is Kind Of Cool, Kind Of Defeats The Point Posted: 09 Jul 2009 03:28 PM PDT
The idea is that with the messages in the URL, you won’t need to have a separate comment in your tweet or Facebook message. The problem with that is that people the people who like to retweet comments with comments of their own will have much less space to do so. Here’s an example of what the shortened URL with a message will look like: http://l.pr/a43v/hey,_it’s_mah_blog and here’s a slightly more ridiculous one: http://l.pr/a43w/hey,_look_it’s_my_Twitter_profile._go_take_a_look._if_you_dare. But, you can use it as a regular shortening service too. Below each message-encoded URL is an actual short URL you can use too. For example, the latter one above can also be: http://l.pr/a43w. Yes, much shorter, and nice thanks to the three letter domain. Like most other URL shortening services. LinksPreadR also has a bookmarklet for easier use. Update: And I just realized something, for URLs with really long messages, Twitter will re-shorten it, using bit.ly. Yeah, that totally defeats the point. For shorter messages it still works though. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Gnip Launches Push API To Create Real-Time Stream Of Business Data Posted: 09 Jul 2009 02:12 PM PDT The Web is speeding up and Gnip wants to help push it along. Today, the API aggregation platform is releasing its own Push API which lets any site patch together its own version of Friendfeed or Twitter-like data stream. Gnip will be speaking at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp tomorrow on the Real-Time Business panel. Gnip lets data-consuming services like Plaxo that take data from other services (like Twitter, Facebook Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, etc.) collect data from requested users pushed to them. Data consumers using Gnip's platform can get public data streams for over 30 social media networks and sites, including Twitter, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, Six Apart and others without ever visiting those sites or accessing their individual APIs. The new push service lets companies filter and white-label the stream so the technology is fully integrated into the business’ infrastructure. Companies list out the most common data requests that are made on their APIs and websites and Gnip will collect the relevant data and deliver it in real-time to any approved third-party. For example, a travel website like Expedia or Kayak may use Gnip’s service to track and deliver real-time information on how customers are interacting with airline deals to the vendors that are listing flights on their site, like American Airlines or Delta. The real-time capabilities would let a travel site analyze real-time data and syndicate changes in fare sales immediately. Gnip is also launching a early-stage startup partner program that will let startups access to all of Gnip’s service features and data services. The program is aimed towards software development startups that have been in business for less than 3 years and generating less than $200,000 in revenue. Of course, Gnip requires that partners pay a fee of $1000 but says the services that they will receive are valued at $10,000 per month. Dipity, Toobla and Klout are all pilot partners of the new program. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| TokBox Fires 50% Of Engineering Team, All Founders Gone Posted: 09 Jul 2009 01:59 PM PDT
TokBox offers a great product that allows for multi-user video chat from the browser, but it hasn’t really managed to take off, much to the chagrin of the company’s investors who include Sequoia and Bain Capital (TokBox has raised $14 million to date). That’s a lot of money for a video and chat startup, especially when there are a number of similar sites that have begun offering some of the same functionality. So the company is beginning to make some major changes. TokBox recently got a new CEO — the third in the company’s brief history. Founder Serge Faguet was replaced by Nick Triantos last July, who in turn was replaced in May by former Mark Logic exec Ian Small. TokBox VP Marketing Micky O’Brien says that this week’s firings were part of Small’s plans to restructure the company, and that as of this morning the vacant positions are being shown on the company’s Jobs page. She also says that TokBox’s last remaining co-founder, CTO Ron Hose, left the company on his own accord around four weeks ago. Disclosure: TokBox is a sponsor for tomorrow’s Real-Time CrunchUp. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Posted: 09 Jul 2009 01:16 PM PDT
Users can share music files, photos or videos across (almost) any device via drag and drop and share the files with others. DoubleTwist’s main selling point: It supports hundreds of devices, from cell phones or mobile gaming devices to portable music players. For example, the software can sync all music files you bought on iTunes with your Blackberry, Nokia phone, Kindle or Sony PSP without you having to worry about file format compatibility. Media files can then be uploaded to sites like Flickr, Facebook or YouTube from within doubleTwist. Watch this video to see how the app works: It’s safe to say Apple isn’t probably a big fan of the software. But doubleTwist co-founders Monique Frantzos and Jon Lech Johansen (better known as DVD Jon) silently enhanced the app in the last few weeks and told me today they have more plans for the future. doubleTwist added support for video downloads from YouTube and now works with Android phones and the Palm Pre, too. Drag and drop any YouTube video you want to watch on the go on your Android G1, for example, into the doubleTwist window and copy it onto your device in seconds. iPhone 3.0 compatibility, bundling deals with several cell phone makers and a more sophisticated podcast engine are to be expected in the near future, too. Entry into gadget-crazy Japanese market
doubleTwist’s entry into Japan makes sense, as the country is one of the world’s biggest markets for music and movies (for example, Japanese users downloaded music worth $10.2 billion to cell phones in 2007). Nearly 170 Japan-only cell phones from local carriers NTT Docomo, KDDI au and SoftBank are supported from the start. DoubleTwist has set up a Wiki page for each one of them, an exclusive pilot service for the Japanese market that might be expanded to all doubleTwist-compatible devices in the future. The company has so far raised $7.5 million in series A and B from several major venture capital companies in the US, Europe and Asia, including Index Ventures (investors in Skype) and Hong Kong-based Horizons Ventures. |
| Someone At Apple Has A Sense Of Humor Posted: 09 Jul 2009 12:28 PM PDT  No one likes limitations. Though Apple has been opening up more and more of their API with each software update, a good chunk of it is still off limits to anyone outside of their own team of developers. Be it because they're unstable, unproven, or just outright blacklisted, a number of methods exist that no one but Apple is supposed to use. Of course, people try to use them anyway. Some (like Google) succeed. Others don't. The practice of playing with verboten methods is heavily frowned upon - but if a newly discovered private method is any indication, Apple's at least got a sense of humor about it.
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| Location Now Built-In To Google Maps — In Chrome And Firefox Posted: 09 Jul 2009 11:42 AM PDT
If you are using either Google Chrome 2.0+ or Mozilla FireFox 3.5+, you’ll now notice a little dot in the upper left-hand corner of Maps, just above the Street View guy. If you click that dot, Google Maps will show you your location on the map. It does this using the W3C Geolocation API standard, according to Google. So how well does it work? Pretty well. It got my location slightly wrong, but only by about a block. That’s not as good as it is on mobile devices, but remember, many of those have GPS, which is more accurate. Google Maps location is pulling from WiFi access points or, if none of those are around, your IP address. This is an important step for Google. If it wants services like Google Latitude to take off, there needs to be ubiquitous location information no matter if you’re on your phone or your laptop. Location is also potentially huge for Google if it can use it to start serving up localized ads based on your current location. It of course already does this somewhat, but being able to exactly pinpoint you will work better. Of course, there are privacy implications with that. And Google devotes a whole paragraph to that in its announcement:
If you don’t have these latest versions of Chrome or Firefox (the two browsers currently supporting the Geolocation standard), you can still get your location if you install Gears. Google says support for more browser is coming soon, and notes that if you’re using a browser that doesn’t currently support it, you won’t see the location dot. Update: Lots of commenters are pointing out that Maps is placing them at completely wrong locations — sometimes in wrong countries. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| It’s Official (Kind Of): People Prefer the Kindle Posted: 09 Jul 2009 11:25 AM PDT  The Catalyst Group, who ran a fairly unscientific study of Google v. Bing preferences, have run another fairly unscientific study of Kindle v. Sony Reader user preferences. The results? The Kindle won on all fronts, beating Sony's aged ereader handily. The Group asked 12 interviewees, six men and six women, what they thought of both devices. They were asked about physical controls, the general "feel," UI, resolution, and shopping experience. Eight respondents preferred the Kindle overall, three preferred the Sony, and one apparently fell asleep and pretended to like both when he or she woke up because there was one tie.
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| Posted: 09 Jul 2009 11:12 AM PDT I’m sorry, but RSS feeds are way too slow. I know this first-hand. As part of my job here at TechCrunch, I monitor a lot of RSS feeds for breaking news. We also produce our own feed and I can see how quickly it propagates to various feed readers and feed-powered news aggregation services. The lag time between posting a story and seeing it pop up in the RSS feed is usually a few minutes, and then it can take another 10 to 15 minutes or so for it to appear in something like Google Reader. And the TechCrunch feed is probably checked more frequently for updates than most other feeds. In our business, every second counts and RSS just isn’t cutting it. While there is an argument to be made that RSS is dying, being replaced by more instantaneous forms of content delivery such as Twitter and other real time streams, many people aren’t quite yet ready to give up on it. Instead, they want to save it by speeding it up. Tomorrow, at our Real Time Stream CrunchUp, we will see three demos of projects that do just that in slightly different ways. Google engineers Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin will show a demo of a new push protocol called pubsubhubub, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini will demo his similar RSS Instant Update Hub, and WordPress engineer Andy Skelton will show off a Jabber client which uses the XMPP protocol to push blog headlines into an IM-like environment faster than RSS. The pubsubhubub and Netvibes technologies create RSS hubs, which push out feeds as soon as they are available. This approach is in contrast to the polling method which is the foundation of RSS. The polling method sucks because it requires the server acting on behalf of the RSS subscriber to constantly ping the server where the RSS feed is published to ask if there is anything new yet. Depending on how often this happens, you end up with a lag. As communications become more real-time, this lag is becoming more noticeable. The way pubsubhubub fixes this is by putting an RSS Hub in the middle which more efficiently pushes out the feeds to the servers subscribing to them. It is an open protocol and can be applied to any existing RSS or Atom feed, as well as other real time streams. If you think about the Twitter firehose that everyone wants access to, this approach lets anyone create their own firehose for different types of data streams. It is more of a federated approach. You can think of these RSS Hubs as a content delivery network of sorts for RSS feeds, similar in concept to what Akamai does for video streams. Netvibes is creating its own proprietary version of this for its own service, which it is developing independently. It is called the RSS Instant Update Hub. All of those widgets on your Netvibes page today take forever to load because they each have to fetch the underlying feeds of data. The Instant Update Hub will cache and push these feeds automatically so that the widgets load faster and they update continuously without requiring a refresh. Any data stream that is supported by a Netvibes widget today, which goes well beyond RSS, will be pushed through the Instant Update Hub. It will also form the basis for a new stream reader which Netvibes will introduce later this year as an alternative to its current widget grid and magazine-style layouts (see screenshot below). The WordPress Jabber client uses a different push technology, XMPP, to speed up RSS. The effect is that headlines pop up like instant messages. Jabber is mostly used for IM clients such as Gtalk, but Wordpress is using it as a feed reader and micro-blog publisher. The great thing about it is that it is two-way. In the demo, Skelton will show how the Jabber client can be used as an interface to to post directly to your blog. Feed reading and blog posting can all be done from the same place in a more real-time fashion. The Jabber client can also be used as a blog commenting system and embedded as a widget directly into a Web page, turning comments into more of a chat room. What we are seeing is the world’s of publishing and IM colliding. The faster we can close the loop between publish and response, the more we are going to see real-time data streams take on the look and feel of public IM systems. Twitter is asynchronous, but it often feels immediate with back and forth conversations sometimes happening almost fast as a private IM chats. That is just a taste of things to come, as all publishing platforms get up to speed. (Photo credit: Flickr/joiseyshowwa) Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Google Finally Adds Creative Commons To Image Search Posted: 09 Jul 2009 10:36 AM PDT As a blogger, I search Flickr and other photo sites for Creative Commons commercial licensed content on a daily basis. I like Google’s image search feature but the ability to search Creative Commons and other licensed content was a missing. Today, Google is launching the ability to create and advanced search for images that you can use for free and that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons. Searches will also include images and art that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain. For me, the new feature is already listed under the advanced image search page. Under the “Usage rights” section, you can select the type of license you’d like to search for, such as those marked for reuse or even for commercial reuse with modification. Google says they will slowly be rolling out this to everyone throughout the day. Unfortunately, Google warns that its up to you to verify that the licensing information is accurate and says that they can’t guarantee that the content that is found under a search is in the public domain,or available under the license. The nice thing about the search capability is that it allows you to do a licensed image search for Flickr, and a variety of other sites and sources, as opposed to searching for content only on Flickr. Yahoo has had the capability to filter image searches by licensed content for some time, but Yahoo’s licensed content search appears to pull images mostly from Flickr, where Google provides a diverse selection of sources of licensed images. I wonder when Bing will jump on the licensed content bandwagon?  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Office 2010 Promo Video Promises Action, Excitement, Explosions Posted: 09 Jul 2009 09:32 AM PDT  Office Team Lead: We need something really cool to make people excited about Office 2010. Some Office Programmer Guy: Can we call Google to hint at ChromeOS to take the heat off of us when we launch on Monday? OTL: Already done. We need a video. SOPG: What should it include? A little run-through of the program? Sort of a screencast that folks can watch and understand and then maybe get excited about Office 2010? Maybe we can put some Feist in there? Make it really minimalistic? OTL: No. We need an action movie.
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