The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Bing Gains Some Search Share (From Yahoo)
- Nimbuzz Releases Mac Desktop Client, iPhone App Updates
- F-Secure Buys Online Storage Startup Steek For $38.8 Million
- Alterian Acquires Techrigy, The “Google Alerts On Steroids”
- Final Tweet: The Twitter Reality TV Show Pitch
- Our Reaction To Your Reactions To the Twitter Confidential Documents Post
- In Our Inbox: Hundreds Of Confidential Twitter Documents
- Story Of The Government Having Twitter Data Access Is “Bullshit,” Says Co-Founder
- Google Voice Apps For Android And Blackberry Are Here
- Xobni Decides To Start Making Money, Launches Premium Upgrades For Your Smarter Inbox
- The Steve Ballmer Rule Of Three
- Twitter’s @Ev Confirms Hacker Targeted Personal Accounts; Attack Was “Highly Distressing.”
- World Of Warcraft Still Suspended In China Indefinitely
- Justin.tv Redesigns To Make Broadcasting Easier And Chat More Obvious
- My God, Scoble, Did You Think We Wouldn’t See These?
- LendingTree Wants To Be Your Financial Advisor And Your Mortgage Marketplace
- Federated Media Teams With Bing For BingTweets. It’s Exactly What It Sounds Like.
- Cheat Sheet For GOOG’s Second Quarter Earnings Later This Week
- 3,700 Tweets And 480,000 Characters Later, There Will Be An Original Novel On Twitter
- Caveat Emptor: iBidcondo Auctions Off Real Estate At Massive Discounts, But There’s A Catch
- SightMax Brings Live Customer Service Chat To The iPhone
- Bored With FriendFeed? Shut The Duck Up. (By Shooting It)
- Socialtext Microblogging Appliance Is Twitter In A Box
- How We Know Chrome OS Will Be A Hit: Steve Ballmer Doesn’t Think So
- Google Calendar Adds Labs and Opens Up An API
| Bing Gains Some Search Share (From Yahoo) Posted: 15 Jul 2009 08:57 AM PDT All the fuss about Microsoft finally posing a credible challenge to Google with Bing, its new search engine, misses the real primary target of Microsoft’s search efforts: Yahoo. Microsoft knows it can’t unseat Google anytime soon, but it does have a fighting chance of taking down Yahoo to soften it for an acquisition or simply take over the No. 2 spot in search. Even that day is still a long ways away, with Yahoo commanding about twice as much search market share in the U.S. as Bing. But data from Bing’s first full month after launch suggests that its initial share gains are coming out of Yahoo’s hide, not Google’s. ComScore released its June qSearch market share figures to Wall Street analysts last night (click on the table above from Barclays to enlarge), and they show Bing making a modest 0.4 percent gain in search query volume to 8.4 percent, compared to May, 2009. (Compete reported a 0.3 percent jump in search market share for Bing from May to June.) Whlle that gain was modest, and less than what some of Bing’s own self-reported traffic numbers would have suggested, it pretty much all came out of Yahoo’s hide. According to comScore, Yahoo’s search market share declined 0.5 percent to 19.6 percent from May, 2009. Google’s market share stayed steady at 65 percent. Shortly after Bing’s launch, comScore reported strong initial interest in the new search engine, but how much of that will translate into actual search market share remains to be seen. Bing’s 8.4 percent market share just brings Microsoft’s share slightly above where it was in March, and it is still below the 9.2 percent share it commanded a year ago. Bing still has along way to go. But as it gains traction, it isn’t Google that should be worried. It is Yahoo. U.S. Core Search Share, June 2009 (Source: comScore qSearch)
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| Nimbuzz Releases Mac Desktop Client, iPhone App Updates Posted: 15 Jul 2009 08:20 AM PDT
Nimbuzz has released a new version of its iPhone application (iTunes link), which has already proven to be quite a hit on the platform: the app has consistently done well on App Store ranking charts in a wide variety of countries worldwide. In the startup’s home turf The Netherlands as well as in France, Nimbuzz claims 1 out of 5 iPhone or iPod Touch owners have installed and use the tool on a regular basis. The new version of the app brings file-sharing in the cloud capabilities, VoIP calling on a range of IM networks (both over Wi-Fi and 3G) and push notification with home screen alerts of both incoming calls or chats through Nimbuzz or third-party networks like Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk. Finally, the iPhone app now boasts location-awareness, which allows Nimbuzz contacts to share and retrieve their physical locations on a Google map. The Mac desktop client is nothing spectacular but it doesn’t hurt to have another decent, good-looking IM and social network aggregator application for Apple computers. The unified app supports connections via Facebook, AIM, MySpace, Google Talk (Orkut), Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger (MSN), ICQ and more. Nimbuzz says its product for Mac is the only IM product to provide high-quality VoIP calling direct from the desktop among IM buddies on Nimbuzz and the more popular IM networks. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| F-Secure Buys Online Storage Startup Steek For $38.8 Million Posted: 15 Jul 2009 06:54 AM PDT  Finnish computer security provider F-Secure has acquired venture-backed French startup Steek for €27.5M (approx. $38.75 million) in cash with the possibility of a further performance-based payment of up to €2.5M ($3.5 million) next year. Steek was backed by Innovacom, which financed the startup's $4 million Series A round mid-2006 and later joined AGF Private Equity in a $8 million Series B round. Steek offers integrated online multimedia data storage, file sharing, and automated backup solutions to individuals and SMEs. More interesting for F-Secure however is that fact that the startup boasts a strong white label operator partner network that includes major corporations like SFR (France), Virgin Media (UK), Singtel (Singapore) and Terra (Spain).
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| Alterian Acquires Techrigy, The “Google Alerts On Steroids” Posted: 15 Jul 2009 05:19 AM PDT
The latter is a Pitssford, NY-based startup that markets an enterprise-grade SMM and analysis solution called SM2, targeted at PR and marketing pros who want to keep tabs on what is being said online about the companies and brands they represent. The terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed. Last February, we covered Techrigy for the first time when the company announced it had tracked over 1 billion online conversations with its software. Back then, we used the metaphor “Google Alerts on Steroids” to describe the service. SM2 enables you to track conversations, reviews and positive/negative sentiment for your brands, clients (and your competitors) in social media: blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networks, etc. virtually in real-time. Instead of merely returning keyword search results like most generic search engines can, SM2 also provides you with a complete set of analysis tools such as charting with comparisons, demographics, geo-location, sentiment and drill-down reports. Check the announcement blog post for a little bit of history about Techrigy, which was founded in 2006:
There you go: from basement to acquisition in 3 years. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Final Tweet: The Twitter Reality TV Show Pitch Posted: 15 Jul 2009 02:04 AM PDT
The pitch: four teams of “young entrepreneurs” battle with non-profit organizations to win a cash prize of $100,000. They’ll travel across the U.S. and live off “limited cash.” “In this choose your own adventure type journey the players rely partially on the influence and knowledge of their twitter followers and supporters, the strength of their teamwork, and their ambition to advance them from spot to spot….. and bringing them one step closer to that final tweet…Teams will unite, squabble and laugh, looking forward to what Twitter Headquarters has up their sleeves. Twitter followers at home will live and play their journey as the teams document themselves by tweeting updates.” The full pitch is below.
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| Our Reaction To Your Reactions To the Twitter Confidential Documents Post Posted: 15 Jul 2009 01:09 AM PDT
Let’s put aside the highly sensitive documents that we aren’t going to publish, but which will likely end up on the Internet anyway. We’re not going to post that information whether we have the legal right to or not. No discussion is needed. But we are going to publish some of the other information that is relevant to Twitter’s business, particularly product notes and financial projections. Many users say this is “stolen” information and therefore shouldn’t be published. We disagree. We publish confidential information almost every day on TechCrunch. This is stuff that is also “stolen,” usually leaked by an employee or someone else close to the company, and the company is very much opposed to its publication. In the past we’ve received comments that this is unethical. And it certainly was unethical, or at least illegal or tortious, for the person who gave us the information and violated confidentiality and/or nondisclosure agreements. But on our end, it’s simply news. If you disagree with that, ok. But then you also have to disagree with the entire history of the news industry. “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising,” is something Lord Northcliffe, a newspaper magnate, supposedly said. I agree wholeheartedly. That doesn’t mean we are entitled to do anything we like in order to get to that information. But if it lands in our inbox, we consider it fair game. And if we have reason to believe it will be widely published regardless of what we do, the decision isn’t a hard one. We throw out the information that is sensitive or could hurt an individual, and publish what we think is newsworthy. In the end, this is no different than, as an example, this 2006 post where we posted confidential Yahoo documents showing their valuation of Facebook in a proposed acquisition. Nor is it any different than the WSJ publishing this internal Yahoo memo, which was also “stolen” in 2006. And I believe it is significantly less of an ethical issue than Gawker’s posting of Sarah Palin’s private emails. It’s not our fault that Google has a ridiculously easy way to get access to accounts via their password recovery question. It’s not our fault that Twitter stored all of these documents and sensitive information in the cloud and had easy-to-guess passwords and recovery questions. We’ve been sitting in the office for eight hours now debating what the right thing to do is in this situation. We’ve spoken with our lawyers. We’ve spoken with Twitter. And we’ve heard what our readers have to say. All of that factors in to our decision on what to post or not to post. We are always in the delicate position of balancing what’s right for the community with publishing insider news that helped build this site into what it is today. We don’t sit around and republish press releases, we break big stories. I feel bad for Twitter and I wish this had never happened. But it did happen and the documents are out there and they are going to be published somewhere on the Internet. Hopefully the embarrassing and sensitive stuff about individual employees will never see the light of day. And hopefully this situation will encourage Google and Google users to consider more robust data security policies in the future. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| In Our Inbox: Hundreds Of Confidential Twitter Documents Posted: 14 Jul 2009 11:08 PM PDT
We’ve spent most of the evening reading these documents. The vast majority of them are somewhat embarrassing to various individuals, but not otherwise interesting. An example - there are a number of documents showing the names of people who interviewed at Twitter for various senior level positions so publishing their names would obviously be distressing for them. Most of these people remain in their current jobs. Some documents show floorplans and security passcodes to get into the Twitter offices. We’re not going to post any of those documents. But we are going to release some of the documents showing financial projections, product plans and notes from executive strategy meetings. We’re also going to post the original pitch document for the Twitter TV show that hit the news in May, mostly because it’s awesome. There is clearly an ethical line here that we don’t want to cross, and the vast majority of these documents aren’t going to be published, at least by us. But a few of the documents have so much news value that we think it’s appropriate to publish them. More posts coming soon. Update: Our Reaction To Your Reactions To the Twitter Confidential Documents Post Update 2: Final Tweet: The Twitter Reality TV Show Pitch Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Story Of The Government Having Twitter Data Access Is “Bullshit,” Says Co-Founder Posted: 14 Jul 2009 09:14 PM PDT
“Your characterization of this as bullshit is perfect. You could also go with laughable, libelous, and absolutely untrue,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote to us in an email this evening. I had asked if the news was “BS” and if Stone cared to comment about it on the record. Obviously, he did. And obviously, he’s pissed off. And he should be if there’s no truth to this whatsoever. Valleywag has since updated the post with a quote from Twitter denying the allegations. Here’s the core of what Valleywag wrote:
It is worth noting that Twitter did apparently talk to the U.S. government during the Iranian protests because the service was scheduled to have downtime that would have stopped the flow of communications. While Twitter did not deny talking with the government at that time, it was quick to note that it plays no role in its decision-making for the company. As Twitter is a fast growing communication platform being used around the world, obviously, that’s important. [photo: Thewolfweb] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Google Voice Apps For Android And Blackberry Are Here Posted: 14 Jul 2009 09:00 PM PDT
Google Voice users get a phone number that should be the only number you give out to people. You route calls to mobile, home and other phones based on who’s calling and when. But there’s always been a nagging problem with the service - when you call out from your phones, people don’t see your Google Voice number on caller ID. They just see whatever phone number you are calling from. That means your friends have to store another phone number for you, or they don’t know who’s calling. Google had the same issue with text messaging, but fixed that problem earlier this year by playing middle-man to those messages. Now they are doing something similar with voice calls via mobile apps. The applications make outbound calls to Google Voice, and those calls are then routed to the recipient, who sees the Google Voice number as the caller. Two apps are being released tomorrow morning, for Blackberry and Android phones. The Android app is the most complete and takes over the native dialer, address book and call log. Users won’t be bothered with accidentally dialing numbers through the device phone number. The Blackberry app is less integrated, accessing only the native address book, and uses its own dialer. Users can’t simply go into the call log and return missed calls. They need to go back to the address book and select Google Voice to make the call. Still, it solves a big problem. The apps also allow users to access the core features of Google Voice. Listen to/read voicemails and text messages (all voicemails are automatically transcribed as well), access call history, send SMS messages and place international calls at low rates. Google Voice cofounder Craig Walker gave me a demo this afternoon of both apps, and told me that an iPhone version is in the works, too. The apps can be downloaded at m.google.com/voice starting tomorrow (Wednesday). Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Xobni Decides To Start Making Money, Launches Premium Upgrades For Your Smarter Inbox Posted: 14 Jul 2009 08:59 PM PDT
Xobni Plus has a heavy emphasis on improving search, which is one of the key components the service has always been based around. Users will now be able to craft more advanced search queries, using either a GUI-based ‘query builder’ or Xobni’s own markup language, which lets you manually specify attributes like “attachment=yes” or “from=Jason” (Gmail offers similar search features, and they are very handy once you’ve gotten a hang of them). Other improvements include Xobni’s autosuggest feature, which can use linked Facebook and LinkedIn accounts to pair Email address with full names, as well as the ability to search within your Xobni ‘feeds’ in the sidebar. Xobni may be calling this a ‘Plus’ version, but pretty much anyone who uses the service with any frequency is probably going to want to upgrade (I’d be surprised if the company puts much effort into adding new features to the free version after this). Xobni is expecting fairly broad uptake by its users, so it’s pricing the upgrade at a modest one-time fee of $29.95. However, the company also has more task-specific “Pro” features in the works that will likely appeal to different segments of their userbase, and it sounds like these will be more expensive (a mobile-only premium product is also in the works, with plans to release it later this summer). Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| The Steve Ballmer Rule Of Three Posted: 14 Jul 2009 06:28 PM PDT
But there may be a method to the madness. We’ve all seen “Developers, developers, developers” by now. That was Ballmer at his finest, repeating a single word 14 times in a row before he ran out of breath. Yes, 14 times. But this new Ballmer in the post-Gates era of Microsoft has scaled back a bit. Now he seems to only emphasize things in sets of threes. Ashlee Vance cracked the new code in an aside in his Bits Blog post today. Just read some of the key blurbs from his speech today:
Ballmer’s “Rule of Three” is the new Steve Jobs “Boom!” Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Twitter’s @Ev Confirms Hacker Targeted Personal Accounts; Attack Was “Highly Distressing.” Posted: 14 Jul 2009 04:41 PM PDT Back in May, Twitter was hacked by someone who got into the accounts of several Twitter employees and then gained access to high-profile accounts such as those of Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher. The breach was the work of someone going by the name Hacker Croll, who posted the compromised screen shots on a French message board. Now more screenshots attributed to the same hacker have popped up on another French site (rough translation here). According to the post, Hacker Croll was able to compromise the Twitter accounts of founder Evan Williams, his wife, and several employees. Using password recovery techniques, Hacker Croll claims he gained access to various Paypal, Amazon, Apple , AT&T, MobileMe and Gmail accounts. I emailed Evan Williams asking about the breach. He confirms:
Above and below are purported screenshots of Williams’ accounts on Twitter, Gmail, and GoDaddy. He claims he was able to access Twitter’s domain name account on GoDaddy and could have redirected the traffic to another IP address (I’m sure that would have worked for about three minutes). The Gmail access, if true, would have been more troubling. Once the hacker got into @ev’s Gmail account, password recovery for other accounts was easy. He claims to have gained access to some internal documents, including projections for reaching 25 million users in 2009, 100 million in 2010, 350 million in 2010, and an outlandish goal to eventually become the first Internet service to reach one billion users. So maybe some corporate information was compromised. Here is a list of some of the other things he claims to have found out, along with screenshots below, the last being a plan for Twitter’s new office space, including a sleeping room, a playing room, greenhouse, a meditation room, bicycle room, gym,washer/dryer, wifi, lockers, wine cellar, and an aquarium. Twitter moved into its new digs in July (the accounts were compromised in May, which is when all of this information dates from):
Who knows if any of this is true (there are no actual screenshots of the corporate documents), but it is enough to make any executive wary of living too much in public. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| World Of Warcraft Still Suspended In China Indefinitely Posted: 14 Jul 2009 04:36 PM PDT Blizzard’s World Of Warcraft appears to be down indefinitely in China, which is one of WoW’s largest user bases. Blizzard recently changed the company that was operating WoW for them in China from The9 to NetEase. WoW was supposed to be up and running by the end of June. Apparently the transition hasn’t gone so well because WoW isn’t up in China and it appears that there is no update as to when the game will be available. One report suggests that the Chinese government is looking into the partnership between NetEase and Blizzard as possible illegal joint venture and has suspended WoW until the investigation is over. Blizzard and The9 launched WoW in China in 2005 and saw a massive response to the role-playing game. In less than one month, the game surpassed 1.5 million paying players thanks to China’s growing gaming community. It’s not clear what the holdup is or if it is permanent. Perhaps somebody at NetEase didn’t pass a big enough brown paper bag to an official at the right department. Photo credit/Flickr/Juanpol. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Justin.tv Redesigns To Make Broadcasting Easier And Chat More Obvious Posted: 14 Jul 2009 03:59 PM PDT
The new site has an overall cleaner and simplified look. And simplification is the key to another big change: The addition of big front page broadcaster. When you first load up the site you will see front and center a large video player with the phrase “Live broadcasting in one click.” If you click on the big red button below it, you’ll load up your camera options screen, where you pick a camera to record from. From there you can log-in or create an account to start broadcasting. Previously, you had to log-in or set up an account first and could then start recording on a different page. This new way makes it much more obvious how to get recording right away.
As I said, Justin.tv remains the top live streaming site, but its competitors have all been making moves recently to try and spur usage. One big move was Mogulus recently rebranding to Livestream. Traffic to all of these sites across the board seems to be slipping. But when Ustream launched a redesign a year ago, it helped kick start growth. Justin.tv just launched its Camtweet, live video on Twitter service, last week at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp. This new simplified Justin.tv main experience, seems like an extension of the idea of simplicity, which I like. Justin.tv also launched a DVR feature last month. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| My God, Scoble, Did You Think We Wouldn’t See These? Posted: 14 Jul 2009 03:08 PM PDT What happens in London when a group of American blogger types heads over to geek out? They get drunk, put on wigs and get friendly with the locals, apparently. Former Guardian columnist Paul Carr (@paulcarr) sends us links to a disturbing group of photographs, likely taken about five minutes apart. What was Scoble, the poster boy for RackSpace’s new Building 43 project, thinking? We’re not sure who the other guy is, other than a rumor that he works at Amazon UK. Any information on what else happened that evening would be appreciated. Photos borrowed from Jamie Klingler. Sounds like I missed a hell of a party.
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| LendingTree Wants To Be Your Financial Advisor And Your Mortgage Marketplace Posted: 14 Jul 2009 03:05 PM PDT The online mortgage industry is chock full of online platforms that match buyers and lenders. Although lending has slowed and credit is tight, sites like LendingTree, Bankrate, SmartHippo and other sites still provide a valuable marketplace for finding mortgages for those who still qualify. LendingTree, which was spun off from parent company IAC in 2007, is overhauling its site to offer more than just mortgages; the site is also trying to be a personal finance guide for consumers, sort of along the lines of what Mint.com does, but targeted towards real estate. The new site is adding a bunch of new tools to help potential buyers improve and monitor their financial health. The site’s MoneyRight feature helps you create a budget, offers tips on how to reduce expenses, calculates your financial health and categorizes your spending. MyCredit will monitor your credit reports and alert you when your score changes. Ask the Tree is a personal finance question and answer tool where you can get any money questions answered by a professional. Though Ask the Tree isn’t really the most reassuring name for a personal finance information source. The site is also adding several mortgage and loan-focused tools such as a Refinance Payment Calculator, which will determine if you should refinance your current home or consider buying a new one; and a Lender Scorecard, which give you detailed rankings of LendingTree lenders with customer reviews. It’s not surprising that LendingTree is making a move towards becoming more than just a mortgage marketplace. Now more than ever, consumers are looking to improve their financial health and educate themselves on the best practices. But I’m not sure if consumers will know to look to LendingTree for advice and resources on financial health considering its brand as a mortgage marketplace. It may be tough to become the new Mint.com.  Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Federated Media Teams With Bing For BingTweets. It’s Exactly What It Sounds Like. Posted: 14 Jul 2009 02:46 PM PDT
The top of the site features a listing of popular terms, grouped into a general ‘popular now’ category, and then divided by People Places, and Products. You’re also free to search for whatever term you’d like using the box in the upper right hand corner of the screen. The resulting site could prove useful, but it’s a little cluttered, with a scrolling list of constantly updated Tweets on the left side and your standard Bing search results on the right. This would be fine, were it not for the large ‘trending topics’ section and ’sharing’ sections in the header which should probably be tucked along the side. My biggest gripe, though, is that the Bing search results are in a frame — I’d much rather just have the whole page dedicated to the results, even if I had to sacrifice the nice blue border. This isn’t Bing’s first attempt to fuse its results with Tweets — the site began rolling out integrated results from Twitter earlier this month, but it is only using results from especially prolific and popular Tweeters, which diminishes the feature’s value. Microsoft has previously worked with Federated Media on the launch of ExecTweets, a Twitter aggregator that displays tweets from top business executives. One side note: Microsoft actually released BingTweets around an hour ago, but it went down almost immediately afterward, and performance is still very spotty. BingTweets will still certainly be a hit in the Twittersphere, but there’s no better way to kill your virality. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Cheat Sheet For GOOG’s Second Quarter Earnings Later This Week Posted: 14 Jul 2009 01:55 PM PDT Google is scheduled to announce second quarter earnings on Thursday afternoon, and Citi analyst Mark Mahaney just sent out the handy cheat sheet above showing consensus estimates, as well as his own. The Street is looking for $4.05 billion in net revenues, Mahaney is predicting $3.97 billion. Anything above $4.05 billion would be viewed as positive, and anything below Mahaney’s estimate would be viewed as negative. Similarly, the Street consensus on non-GAAP EPS (earnings per share) is $5.05, while Mahaney thinks it will be 20 cents lower ($4.85). Anything between the two extremes would be viewed as neutral, according to his cheat sheet. Mahaney is somewhat bearish compared to the consensus view, perhaps because of the continued economic difficulties and the deep funk the advertising industry is in. He expects revenues to increase only 2 percent on an annual basis, and to decline 3 percent on a quarterly basis. (Last quarter was the first time Google ever reported a sequential drop in revenues). His EPS estimate is only 5 percent higher than Google’s second quarter earnings a year ago, and 6 percent less than last quarter’s. The cheat sheet also goes into how to evaluate Google’s key financial metrics, such as paid click revenue growth and average cost per click. Anything less than 13 percent paid click growth should be viewed as negative, anything above 16 percent as positive, and anything in between as neutral. He is modeling 13 percent growth. However, he expects the average cost per click to decline by more than 13 percent to $0.42. Google can make its numbers if need be by tamping down discretionary capital expenditures, so keep an eye on that number as well. Anything above $500 million in CapEx wlil be seen as wasteful, anything below $300 million as frugal. Will Google blow these estimates out of the water, or will it just keep treading? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| 3,700 Tweets And 480,000 Characters Later, There Will Be An Original Novel On Twitter Posted: 14 Jul 2009 01:19 PM PDT
Yes, Stewart is publishing his entire 480,000 character book at 130 characters at a time (to leave room for hashtags and links) on Twitter. To be clear, the book, called The French Revolution (being released today, appropriately on Bastille Day), is already written. But Stewart and his agent couldn’t get any publishers to bite, so they decided to go the non-traditional route, to say the least. Here’s how this works: Every so often, Stewart is tweeting out sentences (or incomplete sentences) from the book. No, he’s not doing this by hand, he got a programmer to help him automate the process. The result is slowly spilling out the entire narrative of the book to his Twitter feed. If you think this would be impossible to follow in a regular stream of tweets, you’re right. That’s why Stewart has a website chronicling the whole story thus far (or, of course, you can simply click on his Twitter page to read it — though backwards). Stewart expects that will will take about 3,700 tweets to get the full story out there. Others have taken this approach to put pieces of writing on Twitter, and plenty have even crowd-sourced the writing of works on the service. But Stewart believes his is the first full-length literary novel to be released first on Twitter. To commemorate the launch, you can also find his book for free on Scribd, or find it on Amazon’s Kindle for $1.99. The obvious question is: Is the book any good? It’s too hard to tell at this point. We’re only about 80 updates into the 3,700. Regardless, this seems like a good idea for a guy who couldn’t get a book deal. Who knows, maybe he’ll even land a book deal now to write about his experience in publishing a book on Twitter. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Caveat Emptor: iBidcondo Auctions Off Real Estate At Massive Discounts, But There’s A Catch Posted: 14 Jul 2009 01:15 PM PDT
The auction strategy is one that reminds me of Swoopo, a controversial auction site we recently covered that allows users to buy inexpensive ‘tokens’ that they use to make bids (even if you don’t win the item, you’re still out the cost of those tokens). With iBidcondo, the site requires potential bidders to pay for a $100 ’seat’ to have the right to bid on the real estate auction. The auction itself has no reserve and often sells for much lower than its normal price, and over half of the final auction price goes towards the charity of your choice. If you don’t win, you’re still out the $100 seat fee. It almost sounds too good to be true, but a look at the details reveals how iBidCondo manages to pull it off. The site recoups the costs of the real estate through the seat prices — if it’s looking to sell a property worth $280,000, it will sell a maximum of 2,800 seats which will pay for the entire price of the property before the auction even starts (developers can choose if they’d like to wait until the maximum is reached or if they’re comfortable starting with fewer purchased seats). The developer who owns the property takes this money, as well as half of the final auction price (the other half goes to charity), with iBidcondo taking a 5% cut. It’s definitely going to confuse some people, and it isn’t hard to forecast some problems. The auction is time-limited (sometimes as short as 7 minutes), and price increments are limited by which stage you’re in: first you can only increase your bid by $10, then $100, then $1000. In effect, the only time period that actually matters is the last minute or so, when every bid coming in is going to be $1000 and anyone seriously interested in buying the property is going to be clicking furiously. There’s no limit to how many times you can bid, so if you wind up in a horse race with a few dozen people the price can easily increase very quickly, perhaps far beyond those magical low price points the site is currently advertising. An iBidcondo spokesman says that the company can typically guess how high these bids will go and sets the time limits accordingly, but I’m wondering how effective that will be. After all, it would only take a 30-person horserace with each one bidding 30 times in the last minute to add $900,000 to the final auction price. That said, there’s at least a chance that you’ll walk away from an iBidcondo auction with a new condo in tow for 15% of its list price, which may well be enough to entice people to try their luck. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, use the code iBidTC, which will get you $25 off the $100 fee. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| SightMax Brings Live Customer Service Chat To The iPhone Posted: 14 Jul 2009 01:05 PM PDT  On the road? Want to check your website's traffic? Better yet, answer live chat requests from your online customers? Now you can. SmartMax, a company that provides online live chat and monitoring support for businesses, recently introduced an app for the iPhone that will allow you to do just that: iMaximo SightMax Live Chat. We tested the app this week, and were extremely impressed with its capabilities. It plugs into SmartMax's existing server product, the SightMax Installable Live Chat and Monitoring product. SightMax (the server software) provides online businesses with the ability to monitor the traffic of their website, and to embed a Live Chat box within the site. Users click on the chat box to speak with a live customer service representative.
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| Bored With FriendFeed? Shut The Duck Up. (By Shooting It) Posted: 14 Jul 2009 12:45 PM PDT
Yes, ducks float by you in the background (and over FriendFeed elements) and you shoot at them with your mouse cursor. Each time you click over a duck, you will hear a shotgun sound, and you will hear the duck squeak — its death sound. Of course, you can’t miss, because that likely involves clicking on a link on FriendFeed (which would ruin the functionality of the site). The theme is actually based on a game called “Duck My Life” (get it? of course you do). It’s a bit of JavaScript that allows you to turn any page into this interactive duck hunting game. It’d be slightly cooler if this were based on the classic Nintendo version of Duck Hunt — complete with the snickering dog. It would also be cooler if you had a zap gun to use on your screen. But this will do to kill some time. And, as Apple’s App Store has already taught us, there are copyright issues with that. “Duck Hunt” brings the total number of themes on FriendFeed to 8. Hopefully we’ll see some more like this, and maybe even ones that let you keep score compared to other FriendFeed users. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Socialtext Microblogging Appliance Is Twitter In A Box Posted: 14 Jul 2009 12:34 PM PDT  As if the world needed more microblogging services we present the Socialtext Microbloggin Appliance, a rack server that basically builds out social networking and microblogging applications instantly inside an Intranet. Instead of relying on outside services like Yammer, Facebook, and AdultFriendFinder, your employees can tweet or whatever you want to call it all from the comfort of your offices and you have complete control of the drivel they spew. The device costs $1 per user per month along with a
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| How We Know Chrome OS Will Be A Hit: Steve Ballmer Doesn’t Think So Posted: 14 Jul 2009 11:34 AM PDT
Okay, I’m being a bit facetious, but still it’s worth noting this, for reasons I’ll get into below. First, here’s what Ballmer had to say about Chrome OS according to TechFlash:
On the face of it, that doesn’t sound like a bad point. And it’s one that plenty of others are saying. But it’s interesting that Ballmer is saying it because it’s not like Microsoft doesn’t also have a mobile OS (Windows Mobile) and a computer OS (Windows). And while yes, you can get Android to run on netbooks, I think Google realized that for most purposes, it was less than ideal. But back to Ballmer. What makes these comments really interesting is his history of making disparaging comments about something, only to have it go on to massive success. The most obvious example of this is the iPhone “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance,” Ballmer once said (along with what he said in the video below). The iPhone has of course reshaped the mobile industry. Its combination of excellent hardware, software and the killer App Store, has forced competitors to follow its model. Yes, even Microsoft. It’s also making Apple billions of dollars in revenue, and has expanded the OS X user base by millions. So what else? Well, we were reminded just yesterday of his comments about Google back in 2004. “Google's not a real company. It's a house of cards," he reportedly yelled at former Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Mark Lucovsky on his way out the door to Google. Five years later, Google is doing just fine, and Microsoft is still chasing them in search and advertising online. We’ll put aside what Ballmer also allegedly said about Google CEO Eric Schmidt (who is also an Apple board member) at the time. Again, Ballmer would seem to have a bit of a point about Google’s strategy with Chrome OS, but he of course is brushing aside the fact that Google undoubtedly thought of this and you can be sure has a plan. It’s similar to how he did have somewhat of a point with the iPhone originally (that it was too expensive at $500), but Apple also had a long term plan to make it cheaper, which Ballmer naturally didn’t mention as a possibility. Update: As a bonus, here’s what Ballmer had to say about social networking in October of 2007:
Less than a month later, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook — at a valuation of $15 billion. Why so high? Because it was battling Google for a stake in the “faddish” company. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Google Calendar Adds Labs and Opens Up An API Posted: 14 Jul 2009 11:19 AM PDT Google Calendar now has its own Labs. Long one of the most popular features of Gmail, at least among the early adopter crowd, Labs is the tab in Settings where users can find and turn on experimental new features. Google Calendar Labs is launching with six features:
If you don’t yet see the Labs setting, it should be rolling out gradually across all Google Calendar users. In conjunction with the rollout of Google Calendar Labs, Google is also opening up new APIs for developers to change the Google Calendar interface. Google Calendar can act as a gadget container complete with hooks into OpenSocial apps and OAuth authentication, or apps can be written as new sidebar features. The new Labs features were written using the gadget API. Maybe someone will write a Google Calendar app like Facebook events which makes it easy to organize and add events to your calendar directly from Gmail, or better yet, Facebook. What new features would you like to see come out of Google Calendar Labs?
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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In a move that will appeal to many of its Apple-loving users, 
Ok, we’re going to 
Wow, that’s quite a reaction to our post earlier this evening saying that we will publish some of the 
Here’s a dilemma: The guy (”Hacker Croll”) who claims to have accessed hundreds of 
Earlier today, 
Google Voice, previously called 
We 
There’s a lot of live video streaming competition out there right now, but 
Another change is the addition of a Meebo IM chat bar to each page on the site. Previously, chat only existed in channel chat rooms, but now the Meebo bar will allow you to continually chat no matter where you are on the site. Justin.tv says it’s the first live video site to use the Meebo bar, and has already seen 10% of its chat messages coming through as IMs, rather than in the chat areas on channels. That’s about 600,000 IMs out of 6 millon messages a day, we’re told. Expect that number to go up now that it’s sitewide.
Who says 140 characters isn’t enough to say 
No matter what you think of 
There are a lot of questions out there about Google’s 
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