Thursday, July 16, 2009

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Nearest Subway App Overlays Subway Directions On the Real World

Posted: 16 Jul 2009 07:59 AM PDT

If you're anything like me whenever you pop up from the subway or metro you're always lost. No matter where I am I can simply stick my head up like a grotesque and hairless badger and find myself in a brave new world, completely unsure of next steps. Luckily, if you live in New York you can use the AcrossAir Nearest Subway App for the iPhone 3GS. This app overlays nearest subway stops on the live image in front of you. That's right: this is a HUD for straphangers and it works amazingly. You can hold the iPhone flat to see arrows pointing you to various subway stops or hold it up to see signs and distances for nearby stations. Click through for a video.


Palm Opens the Mojo SDK For All, New Pre Apps Forthcoming

Posted: 16 Jul 2009 07:54 AM PDT

Prepare yourself for the onslaught of tip calculators and flashlights, friends, because the Mojo SDK for Pre's WebOS is out and ready to rock. You can download it right here and start coding immediately, if not sooner. Our major beef thus far has been the Pre's fairly sparse app store and this promises to open things up considerably. Devs should also hit the Palm Developer Network to sign up to start selling their wares online. Devs with current Palm logins should get in just fine to begin the development process. The SDK uses VirtualBox on OS X/Linux/Windows and requires a Java install. Interestingly, a simple XHTML file is basically the only thing you need to write to create a Hello World application.


Dopplr Launches iPhone App, But Where’s The Add Trip Button?

Posted: 16 Jul 2009 07:24 AM PDT

Dopplr has launched an iPhone app they are billing as a “social atlas”. Curiously, and possibly wisely, you don't even need an account at Dopplr to use the app, meaning it will get exposed to a lot more potential users. However, a let down from the get-go is that you can’t add upcoming trips from within the app right now, which is kinda the point with Dopplr, as it’s users will attest - although the feature is planned, they say. Till then if you want to add trips on mobile people can use the site, twitter, SMS or email in the usual manner, of course.

The app appears first on the iPhone, but apps for Nokia, Blackberry and Google Android platforms are also in the pipeline. The app is available from the iTunes store here. There is plenty of content inside the app pulled from Dopplr’s own content as well as your social network. The question mark with Dopplr is how it will continue to fair against Tripit, which is tearing along at a fast pace and recently launched premium flight monitoring and alerts.

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Canadian Privacy Commissioner Says Facebook Is Full Of Holes

Posted: 16 Jul 2009 06:52 AM PDT

In order to comply with Canadian privacy law, Facebook must take greater responsibility for the personal information in its care. That’s not what we said, it’s what Canada Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart says in a statement following an investigation into the social network's privacy policies and practices.

That investigation was reportedly prompted by a complaint from the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (ahem), and identified “several areas where Facebook needs to better address privacy issues and bring its practices in line with Canadian privacy law”.

(Update: Facebook statement below)

You may want to read our post on “The Looming Facebook Privacy Fiasco” for more context. We also recently reported on independent European advisory body on data protection and privacy to the EC Article 29 Working Party’s arguments that social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace need more government regulation in Europe.

The organization and Commissioner’s main concern is that Facebook provides confusing or incomplete information about its privacy practices, like not giving users to opportunity to complete wipe out their accounts instead of merely deactivating them. Stoddart also criticizes Facebook’s policy of indefinitely keeping the personal information of people who have done just that. Another issue that gets raised in the report is the sharing of users' personal information with third-party developers creating Facebook apps, for which the report claims Facebook lacks adequate safeguards to restrict them from accessing private profile information.

Recommendations to Facebook included the adoption of a retention policy whereby personal information in deactivated accounts is deleted after a reasonable length of time, although it doesn’t specify what period would be within reason exactly. According to Canada's private-sector privacy law, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), organizations must retain personal information only for as long as is necessary to meet appropriate purposes.

The report also recommends a number of other changes, including technological measures to ensure that developers can only access the user information actually required to run a specific application, and also to prevent the disclosure of personal information of any of the user's friends who are not themselves signing up for an application.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner will review the actions Facebook takes to comply with the recommendations in a month, and hints that Stoddard is empowered to go to Federal Court to seek to have her recommendations enforced.

One tidbit of information in the statement: Facebook apparently boasts about 12 million Canadian users.

The full report can be found here.

Update: Facebook’s response:

Facebook is pleased that the Canadian Federal Privacy Commissioner has dismissed the most of the inaccurate claims brought by CIPPIC, and that we were able to collaboratively resolve other issues raised in the complaint.

As part of our continued leadership in developing privacy tools that advance user control over their information, Facebook will soon be introducing a number of new additional privacy features to its service that we believe will keep the site at the forefront of user privacy and address any remaining concerns the Commission may have. In the meantime, we will also continue our efforts to work with the Canadian Federal Privacy Commissioner to address the outstanding areas highlighted in the report and will continue our efforts to raise awareness of the privacy controls on Facebook.

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Clikthrough Raises $1 Million For Extremely Interactive Music Videos

Posted: 16 Jul 2009 06:50 AM PDT

Interactive video and analytics startup Clikthrough has secured $1 million in Series A funding from music execs and investors Max Martin, Savan Kotecha, Nicky Byrne, and Wayne Wilkins. Clikthrough’s technology lets you “clik” on anything you see: products, people, places, and more. Once you click on a “hotspot” you will see information about the product to the right of the main video screen. Clikthrough lets you see how to purchase to an item; user comments, how to save it to a wish list, as well as live chat, rating and sharing features.

Clikthrough’s videos are mainly music videos where everything you see in a video is available to consumers at the click of a mouse for further browsing, sharing, or purchase. The startup struck deals with Sony Music, Universal Music and Slip N Slide Records to license content. Clikthrough, which recently added a customized iPhone site for mobile access, also offers an analytics tools, which tracks behavior and metrics with the videos.

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Former Googler Sanjeev Agrawal To Lead Just-Funded Mobile Search Startup Aloqa

Posted: 16 Jul 2009 05:07 AM PDT

Today’s a big day for Aloqa, a fledgling mobile search and information services company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The startup will be announcing at Venturebeat’s MobileBeat 2009 conference that they have just raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from multiple angel investors and VC firm Wellington Partners.

Aloqa will seize the opportunity to present its context-aware mobile application for Android - currently in beta and available on Android Market for a limited time - on stage and boast about its newly appointed CEO: Sanjeev Agrawal, former Global Head of Google Product Marketing and subsequently VP Products at TellMe Networks (acquired by Microsoft) will take the helm.

Aloqa is one of many startups betting big on location-aware search and information provision services for mobile phones. The app proactively notifies users about interesting places, services, events, and (Facebook) friends in their immediate neighborhood. All users need to do is look at their phone and the service will display live information about interesting things in their vicinity. Aloqa refreshes itself automatically when users change locations, which comes in handy when you’re mobile.

Aloqa also provides an API for easy development of location-based services, especially for proactive and community oriented applications. Examples: detecting the proximity of two mobile targets (such as Facebook friends) automatically, sorting a buddy list by current distance and automatically updating the list as well as clique observation (”show me when 3 out of 5 of my myspace girlfriends are nearby”).

According to Aloqa, the application will be made fully available on “most major mobile platforms” through the fall of 2009, and will work on both GPS- and non-GPS enabled handsets and on any carrier network.

Looks like a great platform, but they’re entering a very crowded space.

You can see a demo video from the startup’s homepage.

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ALOQA
Information provided by CrunchBase

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PlaySpan Launches Virtual Goods Marketplace On Facebook And MySpace

Posted: 16 Jul 2009 05:00 AM PDT

Micro-payments across the gaming world is gaining serious traction, especially on social networks. PlaySpan, which powers micro-payments across over 1,000 video games and virtual worlds, is launching marketplace storefronts for Facebook and MySpace (which will be rolled out soon). The marketplace will which let users purchase online game items, virtual goods, and game currencies for online games and applications directly from their social networks.

What makes the marketplace interesting is that you can buy, trade, and sell goods within the marketplaces on Facebook and MySpace and then use the items in online game environments. And making a transaction on the marketplace becomes a whole lot more social, as your friends may be able to see it on your NewsFeed. PlaySpan, which recently acquired micro-transaction app developer Spare Change, has processed more than $50 million worth of micro-transactions through its PayByCash and Ultimate Game Card products. PlaySpan also raised $16.8 million in a series B funding last Fall from Easton Capital Group, Menlo Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, and STIC. The startup was founded by a 12-year-old, Arjun Mehta, but it is actually run by his father, CEO and co-founder Karl Mehta.

The recent acquisition of Spare Change now makes sense. While PlaySpan’s focus so far has been within games and virtual worlds, it made a recent deal to power micropayments on hi5. Spare Change, on the other hand, powered micropayments across 700 social networking apps on Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo, and at the time of its acquisition was on its way to processing $30 million worth of transactions this year.

It seems like these days everyone is getting into micropayments, and the number of players are scaling quickly. With continued expansion on social networks, startup PlaySpan can become a serious player in a space where bigger players like PayPal, Facebook and MySpace are all considering making a move. The competition may be stiff but as micropayments start to integrate with consumers’ social graphs, but there seems to be the potential for more than enough opportunity for both startups like PlaySpan and Zuora, and the more established players.

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Chrome For Mac Starting To Look Polished

Posted: 16 Jul 2009 03:52 AM PDT

picture-115No, it’s not ready yet. But it does at least look like the Mac release of Chrome is getting ready for prime time.

Now, let me be clear: I am not testing out that rather bogus “Developer Release” of Chrome that Google announced to placate users last month, I’m testing out the daily builds of Chromium, which you can find for the Mac here. How different are they? Well, in look in and feel, a lot.

Just look at the difference in the start pages. The Developer Release of Chrome for Mac has a ho-hum old-style history overview page. The new builds of Chromium feature the new, sexy layout. This includes thumbnails of pages that you can move around and pin down. And because the build also includes favicons (which the Developer Release only does in certain places), it also includes the ability to switch to “list view.”

But more importantly, it has the new “Recent activities” and “Tips and Suggestions” windows below the thumbnail section on the launch page. This Tips and Suggestions page is particularly interesting because it does offer up sites that I am finding to be generally interesting based on my browsing.

The “History” area of Chromium (where you see your browsing history) is also looking great thanks to the favicons. And search is working in that section.

When you launch an “Incognito” window, the resulting window looks right as it has a dark blue trim with a spy man logo, indicating that the browsing session is private.

Overall, the browser feels very snappy and most sites seem to load and render just fine. Dragging tabs around works perfectly, as done “ripping” one off into its own window. The one major thing still missing is the lack of a Flash plug-in, which prevents sites like YouTube from working.

So again, if you want to use Chrome for the Mac, forget about that Developer Release and get one of the new builds of Chromium. It’s not perfect yet, but it looks like it’s getting pretty close.

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Cooliris Business Model Surfaces: More Advertising We Actually Like

Posted: 16 Jul 2009 01:57 AM PDT

We don’t talk about Cooliris nearly often enough. The Palo Alto-based company has done a fantastic job in pushing the limits of interactive photo and video browsing with its 3D Wall, a plug-in for Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox that enables users to enjoy viewing their photos on Flickr or Facebook and their YouTube videos in a rich setting that drips of coolness. If you haven’t tried it and you’re using one of the supported browsers, give it a shot or check out the Flash-driven Cooliris Embed Wall below.

Today, the VC-backed startup is introducing what was always in the cards for them if they were ever going to make money off its innovative product: a Publisher Network that integrates non-intrusive interactive advertising units into embeddable 3D walls.

You can already see the new advertising solution in action thanks to a partnership Cooliris has sealed with marketing agency OMD and one of its historical big clients, Infiniti. Basically, Cooliris will be integrating custom blocks for the Infiniti G Convertible ad campaign into streaming photo walls throughout its freshly launched publisher network, more specifically on popular websites like Yahoo! News, Golf.com, the New York Magazine and Style.com. See it in full effect at this section of the New York Magazine website or just have a look at the screenshot below to get an idea of where the company is going with this.

Personally, I’m a big fan of Cooliris and the way they are going about trying to generate revenue from its product. In the past, we’ve talked about other innovative advertising strategies we actually appreciate, and I think this is what should be drawing the attention of The Online Publishers Association. Maybe that way they will finally realize that just making display ads units bigger isn’t going to solve any of their members’ problems without annoying the heck out of their respective website visitors.

Cooliris on Yahoo! News Photos

Embedded 3D Wall (doesn’t work so well in Firefox for some reason)

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MySpace CEO: “Our users don’t know if we’re a social portal, a music site, or an entertainment hub”

Posted: 16 Jul 2009 12:26 AM PDT

One thing that’s great about MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta - his emails to employees always have at least one good sound bite. In June the zinger was his reference to laid off employees as “bloat.” This time, he’s saying it like it is, again: “Our users don't know if we're a social portal, a music site, or an entertainment hub.”

Neither do we. MySpace always described itself as a social network until they weren’t the biggest social network any more. At various times since then they’ve called themselves a “premier lifestyle portal,” an “online community that lets you meet your friends’ friends” or just the largest “social portal” in the world that doesn’t begin with “F” and end in “book.”

Anyway, I assume Van Natta will have an answer to what exactly MySpace is at some point in the near future. He also says “In the last week, we've made some small but meaningful site changes that will lay the groundwork to provide more clarity on our brand and business” (all we’ve seen is a logo change, but there are likely other small changes).

Meanwhile, here’s his email to the troops, confirming our stories that Travis Katz is leaving and Mike Macadaan is joining, among other personnel changes.

From: Owen Van Natta
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2009
To: FIM MySpace All
Subject: Organizational Update

Hi everyone,

As we continue to evolve our organization there are some changes I'd like to update everyone on.

After nearly two years of managing MySpace's product organization, SVP of Product Tom Andrus has decided to explore other opportunities. During his tenure at MySpace, Tom brought a level of professionalism to the product organization and established a true discipline of product management. He helped create a dynamic, top notch team of product talent responsible for managing one of the biggest platforms on the planet. I personally appreciate all the support that Tom has given the new management team and look forward to welcoming new talent to compliment the tremendous group we currently have in place. We expect to see incredible things from Tom and wish him the best in his future plans.

After more than three years running MySpace's international business, MD and SVP of International Travis Katz has decided to leave the company to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities. Travis joined News Corp in 2004 and was one of the principal authors of the company’s digital strategy, which led to the creation of Fox Interactive Media and the acquisitions of MySpace and IGN among other sites. In February, 2006, Travis joined MySpace to lead the company’s international expansion, and under his leadership, MySpace grew its international user base from 12 million to more than 60 million active users. Travis leaves as a friend to MySpace and to the executive team - we wish him and his family the best of luck in future endeavors. Travis will remain with the company through the end of August to help with the transition.

International will continue to be a major priority for MySpace going forward and I'm proud to announce that Rebekah Horne – formerly our GM of Europe and Australia – will be taking over as MD and SVP of International. During her tenure at MySpace, Rebekah has done an incredible job inspiring and leading teams across Europe and the rest of the world. Rebekah spent last week in LA working with us on strategic planning and this week I plan to join her in London to meet with our leadership team in Europe. Please join me in congratulating Rebekah on her new role.

As I've said before, simplifying and unifying our site is fundamental to our success going forward. MySpace should feel like one platform - not 15 sites loosely stitched together. We consider our diverse content offering a strength but t oo many logos and disorganized verticals makes the site difficult to navigate and creates confusion about our brand identity. Our users don't know if we're a social portal, a music site, or an entertainment hub. In the last week, we've made some small but meaningful site changes that will lay the groundwork to provide more clarity on our brand and business. Unifying MySpace is critical to how we define ourselves to the world. We're beginning to start this process and I'd like to introduce two major hires to the product organization.

Please join me in welcoming Katie Geminder, our new SVP of User Experience and Design. Katie began her career designing user experiences at Amazon, where she led large cross-functional and customer experience initiatives including the Amazon.com Kitchen Store, Target.com, and the Amazon Services e-Commerce platform. Since then she has worked for top online and technology companies including Apple and Facebook. For Katie, great user experience and design lives at the convergence of product, engineering, and design. A great user experience is dependent on two things, a clear and concise vision augmented by user feedback and the collaboration of business, product, technology, and engineering teams.

Improving our product interface is a major component of creating an exceptional user experience. With that, I'd like to welcome Mike Macadaan as our new VP of Product. Prior to joining MySpace, Mike served as Vice President of User Experience at the start-up publishing network Tsavo Media. Mike is a fixture in the start-up scene as the founder of Twiistup, an industry standard startup showcase. At AOL, Mike led the team responsible for creating Magnet, the company's groundbreaking first effort at personalization and behavioral targeting, which gave AOL an in-depth look at the needs of their users. At MySpace Mike's job is to push, inspire, and lead the product organization. He'll be responsible for developing next gen experiences that will reset the growth for MySpace.

Finally, we've spent the last few weeks designing a framework that provides tremendous clarity to the way in which our product and technology teams will be working together moving forward. Next week, Jason and Mike are going to walk employees through the new team structure of our technology and product group. I appreciate the input from everyone across the company that has helped develop this architecture.

Thanks,
Owen

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Swish And Flick: Magic Wars Turns Your iPhone Into A Virtual Wand

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 09:23 PM PDT

With the latest Harry Potter film already setting box office records, there’s no doubt we’re about to see a big surge in the public’s interest in witchcraft and wizardry. Unfortunately, Harry Potter fans will find a limited selection of wizard-centric apps the App Store: there’s currently only one official app available, and it’s mostly a promotional vehicle for the movie rather than an engrossing game. Fortunately, there are a handful of other wizard apps on the marketplace, and one of them — a free game called Magic Wars(iTunes Link) — may be exactly what you’re looking for.

The game was put together by pocketfungames, a Y Combinator startup that specializes in iPhone games. The company originally planned to focus on dating-based applications, but has since shifted gears, looking to take advantage of the fact that many iPhone games still fail to leverage the phone’s Network Effect and integrate social features. In some senses this is a return to the company’s roots, as it was was previously a developer of social games on Facebook.

The game is a fairly basic online RPG that lets you boost your stats through brief training games as well as duels with other wizards. You interact with other players through social features like messaging and guilds, and can choose to battle wizards worldwide or only those who live nearby. It also features a number of elements obviously inspired by the Harry Potter series, including placement into a certain class of wizards (i.e. a ‘house’) depending on your personality traits.

By far my favorite part of the app is the way it handles battles. Whenever you go to cast a certain spell, the application presents you with a motion you need to make with the phone (standing in for your wand), and the incantation you have to speak aloud. Movements can include things like jerking your hand swiftly above your head and waving it in a semicircle, which makes you look ridiculous but also makes the game feel a bit more ‘authentic’. After casting your spell, the game rates you on your performance which determines how much damage is inflicted on your opponent. In my testing I had trouble ever reaching a spell’s maximum potential, though I can’t tell if this is because the app’s sensitivity is off or if I’m just not very good at it.

But while the gameplay is surprisingly fun, the app could really use some work — some parts of it look fairly polished, while others simply look like generic buttons (the developers should strongly consider getting some more professional art assets in the game given the demographic it’s targeting). Still, it’s a good start.

Lewis says that the application launched three weeks ago and is now pulling 2,000 downloads a day. The game offers a free version, but it’s also going to offer “booster packs” for its virtual currency, which allows players to increase the number of spells they can perform. The company also has a number of other games in the works, though Lewis declined to reveal any details (I suspect the new games will have a bigger focus on the iPhone’s GPS capabilities).

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Personforce Launches Mobile Jobs Platform To Develop Job Search Applications

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 09:07 PM PDT

Dice.com has recently released data that indicate that tech jobs are still largely unavailable. Dice reported that its available technology jobs totaled 48,993 in June, which is down 43.7% year over year. And unemployment numbers have hit record highs. As there are fewer jobs available, there is increased pressure on the unemployed or those looking for jobs to be able to access listings at any time, from any device.

Personforce, a startup that powers jobs and classified sites for VentureBeat, Business Insider, paidContent, the Harvard Crimson, the Stanford Daily and TechCrunch’s CrunchBoard, is launching a mobile jobs platform that lets any job board or career site to turn its website into an iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry app.

Personforce has already launched an iPhone app, called “High Paying Jobs,” with Next Mobile Web. The app lists jobs from Dice.com, CareerBuilder. Monster and more. Basically, Personforce can takes any career website and turns it into a mobile application. Personforce’s CEO Rohin Dar says that companies may find this particularly appealing, as they can create mobile apps for their internal job databases. CareerBuilder already has a free iPhone app, and Beyond also has one as well, which searches job sites and aggregates listings.

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Apple To Microsoft: Quit It Already With The Laptop Hunters, Okay?

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 07:30 PM PDT

Well, it's a big day for Microsoft! Their first official retail stores are dated and partially located, Gates mentions that Project Natal is coming to Windows, and now it appears that Apple has cried uncle with the Laptop Hunters ads. Actually, it probably depends on who you ask. Microsoft will say that its shopping farces were effective, not just on consumers but on the competition as well. Apple might say that their prices have become more competitive after a recent price drop on certain models, so the ads aren't accurate any more — if they say anything at all. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between. But a little whining from Apple isn't going to stop Microsoft from running the ads. After all, Apple didn't stop running its "Twice as fast, half the price" ads after they admitted its claims weren't "statements of fact." Why should Microsoft stop running a consumer dog-and-pony show that has them coming out on top?


NetVibes Adds Drag And Follow Search Widgets For Twitter, Facebook And MySpace

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 07:10 PM PDT

NetVibes, the startup that lets you assemble all your favorite widgets, feeds, social networks, email, videos and blogs onto a customizable homepage, is rolling out helpful “drag and follow” widgets for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter tomorrow.

NetVibes has offered Facebook, MySpace and Twitter widgets for some time now. Once you insert the respective widgets onto your NetVibes homepage, now you will be able to click on any friend, screen name or hashtag in the widget, then drag it outside and drop it on your page to create a new custom widget. The new widget will follow a person or topic. For example, you can take the stream of a news source or friend from Twitter and create a separate widget that tracks only their stream.

It’s certainly useful to navigate many different streams or threads at once. Especially if you are an active MySpace, Facebook or Twitter user, you can aggregate all the feeds onto one page as well as break out the feeds and searches that are most compelling to you, much like you can with many desktop Twitter clients..

Desktop clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic, for instance, let you create breakout columns to filter feeds by user and search from Twitter. So if you regularly use a Twitter client, NetVibes’ page may be redundant. But the nice thing about the widgets are that they are small, and you can aggregate other info, like the weather, news feeds, RSS feeds and more onto one centralized page. NetVibes says that they will start using the drag and drop technology for search within other widgets in the near future. Competitors to NetVibes include Pageflakes and iGoogle. Last week at the TechCrunch’s Real Time Stream CrunchUp, Netvibes also previewed a new live feed reader and instant update architecture to make RSS real-time, which will be officially launched in the near future.

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The Truth at Last(.fm)

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 07:02 PM PDT

lastfmmaI've been in London for two weeks pretending to be part of the Traveling Geeks contingent of bloggers. But really I've been doing some deep investigative work on this whole Last.fm scandal.

I showed up at their offices and guess what I found? A pile of servers sitting in a corner waiting to be delivered to the RIAA. Sure, they said they were just old servers… likely story.
lastfmservers
I also discovered that Last.fm is getting into a new business: Michael Arrington Target Practice Kits ™. I got a demo in the office (see video below). Ev, can I put you down for a case?

michael fires me from sarah lacy on Vimeo.

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Jajah Lands Deals To Give Love A Voice On Match.com, eHarmony

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 06:41 PM PDT

VoIP startup Jajah has just scored major deals with eHarmony and Match.com, two of the web’s most popular dating sites, to provide online daters with semi-anonymous voice chat. The new features are part of Jajah’s ‘Platform for Dating’, which is also currently being tested on a number of other dating sites (though Jajah won’t name them, yet).

The new feature offers a good middle ground between the text interactions you typically go through on dating sites and actually meeting your potential match face to face. The integrated Jajah widget will allow you to talk with a prospective match though an online voice call, without having to divulge any of your real contact information should things turn messy.

Voice chat is a premium feature on both eHarmony and Match.com, going for around $5/month. Jajah declined to share any details regarding the revenue split between the dating sites and the VoIP service, but it sounds like the company is going to be generating quite a bit of money from the deal, especially given the negligible costs associated with actually connecting the calls.

This isn’t the first time dating services have implemented voice chat — Match.com previously offered its own service that was powered by the now-defunct Jangl, but it’s been out of action for the last nine months. This is the first time eHarmony is implementing a similar service.

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Google Brings Location To The Mobile Web On The iPhone

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 05:34 PM PDT

img_0207Google’s updates surrounding location are now coming fast and furious. Just a few days ago it added location to Google Maps for the Chrome and Firefox browsers. Today, it brings location to the mobile web on the iPhone.

If you have the new iPhone 3.0 software and go to Google’s homepage in Safari, you’ll notice a new message below the search box that reads, “New! Try My Location to find restaurants, shops and bars near you!” If you click on the My Location link, the iPhone will pop open a dialogue asking if it’s okay for Safari to use the device’s location services to locate you. If you opt-in, you’ll see a new blue dot below the search box with your location next to it. Do a search, and it will return local results.

The fact that mobile Safari can access location is a huge feature. It’s what’s going to allow Google Latitude, Google’s location-based social network, to work on the device without a native app, as we described a few months ago. Something else that is potentially interesting about this is that Safari, like some of the other native iPhone apps, can apparently run in the background. Now, I’m not sure if it can still access location services while it’s running in the background, but that could be very interesting for something like Latitude.

And accessing functionality like location in the browser seems to tie in well with Google’s ultimate goal of having the web be the platform of choice.

For many people, such a feature will bring up privacy concerns. Here’s what Google has to say about that:

As always, your privacy is one of our top concerns. Google won't use your location in search unless you explicitly opt in. And you can always disable the feature from Preferences at the bottom of the homepage.

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Chris Anderson’s Free Is Now Available For Free On The Kindle

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 05:18 PM PDT

41ujse4ntsl_sl500_aa246_pikin2bottomright-1534_aa280_sh20_ou01_I put this out on Twitter earlier, and there seemed to be a lot of interest, so I figured I’d publish it here as well. If you have a Kindle, head on over to Amazon to pick up Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, for free. While the regular print edition will set you back $26.99, for whatever reason, the entire book is available for free right now in Kindle form.

Naturally, you have to have a Kindle to get it (it’s delivered over the Amazon Whispernet network to your device), but you can also grab it and read it on your iPhone or iPod touch if you have the Kindle app. Sure, there may have been a few plagiarism issues with the book recently (maybe that’s why we’re seeing it for free in digital form, with corrections), but it’s hard to argue with the price.

Again, find it here.

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Update: And the free experiment has apparently paid off as the book will enter the NYT Bestseller list this week at #12, Anderson tweeted out earlier.

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Update 2: Scribd has also had it available for free since last week. I’ll go ahead and embed the whole thing below for those of you without Kindles.

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson

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LinkedIn Drills Down Into People Search With New Beta

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 04:22 PM PDT

linkedin-guided-search

There is an IBM commercial that pokes fun of people who spend time on social networks in the workplace (see below). It shows a young, hip guy who brags about having “826 friends” and explains to an older boss-lady type that he “can find anyone.” So she says she needs a team of international finance experts who know merger arbitrage, speak Cantonese and can start on Monday. “I don’t have any friends like that,” admits the underling.

Well, if he was on LinkedIn, he might be able to impress his boss. The online business network earlier today quietly introduced a People Search beta. Once you opt in, a guided navigation panel appears on the right every time you search showing the breakdown of results across 11 different facets, including current company, relationship to you, location, industry, and whether or not they are looking for a job. By checking the appropriate boxes, you can narrow your search quickly and find who you are looking for.

A search for “mergers,” for example, brings up 108,345 results. But when I select people at least two connections away from me, who live in the Bay area, and are “potential employees” that narrows it down to 24 results. Since LinkedIn contains a lot of highly-structured data, it knows that “CEO” is a title and that “Cisco” is a company, so it can generate people results accordingly. Results in the guided navigation column are ranked and generated dynamically, according to how many results there are for any given field (a number in parentheses tells you how many results there are for each refinement). So it tells you where to look essentially

LinkedIn started improving search last Thanksgiving, and since then has seen searches double to more than 100 million queries a month. About a third of all visitors do a search, and it is increasingly becoming an important way to navigate the site. Better search means better engagement with the site, something LinkedIn could use. According to comScore, U.S. unique visitors declined from 8 million last March to 7.1 million in June. Maybe this will help.

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Another Security Tip For Twitter: Don’t Use “Password” As Your Server Password

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 02:38 PM PDT

With all the chatter about the current security issues surrounding Twitter, its workforce and the cloud-based Google apps they use, a new security issue has popped up that makes it trivially easy for anyone to access the Twitter servers directly. The problem? The password to the servers was, literally, “password.”

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, responding to our email, said “this bug allowed access to the search product interface only. No personally identifiable user information is accessible on that site.” Although no user accounts were compromised or accessible, the vulnerability speaks to a greater culture of lax security at the startup, and may be indicative of how earlier breaches possibly occurred.

With that in mind, we have some friendly advice for Twitter. For instance, it would be wise if in the future Twitter insiders do not use the password "password" for the back ends of its systems or one of its co-founder’s names (Jack) as a username.

Why do we think this advice could prove helpful? Well without taking this type of precaution, before you know it malicious hackers or just plain mean people who have it in for you could do some serious damage and/or embarrass you in front of all your friends and followers by invading your personal digital territory.

Again, for the record, this has absolutely nothing to do with the other security breach we’re publishing ongoing reports about and which Twitter has already publicly responded to. We notified Twitter about this breach as well, and waited until they took action to close it off before posting.

Screen shots below.



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Google Reader Takes Another Social Step With People Search And “Likes”

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 01:59 PM PDT

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As we’ve noted for some time, Google Reader’s social features leave a lot to be desired. The search giant is slowly moving in the right direction towards making shared items more accessible between friends, but it’s still rather clunky. Today, the functionality receives yet another upgrade, including one that may finally spur social usage — “liking” items.

Beginning today, you can search for people who are sharing items via Google Reader. Previously, people either had to be in your contact list or you had to share your ridiculous Shared Items URL. For example, mine is http://www.google.com/reader/shared/14881661495900338150. But now, someone can just go and search for “MG Siegler” and my name will pop up with an option to subscribe to my items with one click. In addition, there is also a way to add a link to your Google Reader Shared Items from your Google Profile page now.

file-1But at the same time that Google is opening up its social features a bit more on Google Reader, it is also allowing you to lock them down more as well. Another new feature is that you can protect your Shared Items to allow only those you want to be able to see to view them. This has long been an issue among users who wanted to share items, but didn’t want to share them with the whole world. For example, now if you just want to share items with coworkers (such as work-related feed items), you can do that. This is all based around your contact filters in Google Contacts.

But the biggest change to the sharing of items in Google Reader is that you can now “Like” items. Yes, this is the same functionality that FriendFeed has long had, and that Facebook implemented as well a few months ago. “Liking” an item is as easy as clicking one mouse button (or hitting the “L” key if you have keyboard shortcuts turned on). And since all “likes” are public, everyone who uses Google Reader can see them. I think this may be the first new feature that I’ve seen in a long time from the Reader team that may actually spur social usage of the product, as “liking” something is much easier than leaving a comment.

It’s worth noting that while you can now more easily open up your Shared Items for anyone to see, only your contacts will be able to comment on them. For now, these new features are only in the English version of Google Reader, Google notes.

The question is, are these features enough to reverse, or at least slow, the trend we’re seeing of people consuming more and more of their content through places like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed? Probably not, but it’s a good attempt in the right direction, at least. More interesting to us is the possibility of speeding up RSS, which the new push protocol called pubsubhubub, which was shown off at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event, promises. This is something Google Reader badly needs if it’s to compete.

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The Price Of Success: Pay-To-Play Continues To Shape The Twitter Ecosystem

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 01:54 PM PDT

As Twitter continues to see skyrocketing growth, desktop and mobile phone clients are becoming a big business. Last month we broke the news that TweetDeck was asking some services for around $50,000 to appear in the client. Now we’ve gotten word that TwitterBerry, one of the most popular Twitter clients for BlackBerry phones, is running an auction for the coveted spot of “default media provider” for the app.

Orangatame (the company that makes TwitterBerry) is inviting select services to submit bids next week, at which point participants will be told the highest bid and will then be given a chance to submit one followup bid. Apparently Orangatame is looking to keep its options open in the future, as this bidding only grants the winner the default spot for three months.

Getting default position in a popular Twitter app can be enough to raise it from obscurity to popularity in a matter of months — one need only look at ImageShack-owned yFrog for proof, which leaped to popularity not long after becoming the default service for Tweetie, Twitterific, and a number of other apps (see graph below).

As I’ve written before, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with applications requiring payment for a service to get integrated, or to become the default. Given how many services that are out there that do exactly the same thing, developers need some way to choose, and it’s easy to see why they’d want to make some money in the process. However, it also opens the door to having an app littered by potentially inferior services with deep pockets. Developers will always claim to strive only to accept ‘cream of the crop’ services that are also willing to pay, but it might be hard to pass up a not-so-great service that’s willing to pay a significant premium.

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Twitter’s Financial Forecast Shows First Revenue In Q3, 1 billion users in 2013

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 12:39 PM PDT

Our negotiations with Twitter (or rather Twitter’s lawyers) over our intention to publish a small subset of the 310 hacked confidential documents continue. We published the first document, a pitch for a reality television show called Final Tweet, earlier this morning.

Far more interesting, though, is this internal Twitter financial forecast from February 2009. Twitter has told us that this was never an official document and it certainly is no longer accurate. But it gives an interesting glimpse into the company’s financial targets nonetheless. The projections go forward to 2013.

The most interesting data point - As of February, Twitter expected their first revenue to come in Q3 2009 (which is now). A modest $400,000 was expected, followed by a more robust $4 million in Q4. The document also shows Twitter’s projected user growth (25 million by the end of 2009), which it has absolutely blown through already. By the end of 2010, Twitter expected to be at a $140 million revenue run rate.

As of February the company had $45 million in the bank (they’d raised $55 million at that time). And they expected the cost of each Twitter user to the company to be just over $1/year.

We’re including just the projections through 2010, the data for the following three years is too pie-in-the-sky to be useful. But here are the numbers they were targeting for the end of 2013: 1 billion users, $1.54 billion in revenue, 5,200 employees and $1.1 billion in net earnings.

So what’s the product that they believe will bring in $400k in revenue this quarter? That’s something we’ll discuss in our next post.

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Gadget Club Contest: Win a Peek and Any $500 Gadget

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 12:29 PM PDT

Remember the Radio Shack Battery Club? Back in the old days you'd go into Radio Shack with a card and they'd give you free battery once a month. It was heaven. I used to go in and grab a 9-volt - the best battery to have, by a long shot. Well, Radio Shack and Peek just teamed up with us to offer you the Peek/Radio Shack Free Gadget Club. For the next three weeks we're giving away one Peek device - your choice - and another gadget (anything you want up to $500 in value) from Radio Shack. Sure as heck beats a D-cell, right?


Apple Kills Everyone’s Buzz At Once: AT&T Tethering Hack Is Dead, Palm Pre Blocked In iTunes

Posted: 15 Jul 2009 12:28 PM PDT

And yet another game of cat and mouse begins. Over the past 24 hours, Apple has released updates for both iTunes and the iPhone beta SDK. While both are seemingly minor on the feature front, each packs a bit of disappointment for those who had been using loopholes to their advantage.


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