The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Belgian Tax Watchdogs Tracking Facebook, Netlog Updates
- Stealth Mobile Startup MOBshop Has Serious Backers, Big (Secret) Plans
- Ignore That Scary MSNbot, It’s Just The Friendly BingBot - Unless It Attacks!
- Hulu’s Content Owners Are Missing A Major Opportunity This Summer
- UK Entrepreneurs: Get Your Funding While You Still Can
- Amazon, Why Don’t You Come In Our Houses And Burn Our Books Too?
- An App To Show You Mastercard “Priceless” Deals: Priceless.
- Google Says Mobile Web Apps Will Win In The Long Haul
- How Google Made Its Q2 Numbers: Squeezing Expenses
- If Execution Is What Matters, Where Does That Leave Ideas?
- A Quick Look At the New HTC Hero Running Android Cupcake
- Did Your Mom Tell You Not To Talk To Strangers? Don’t Show Her FlyChat.
| Belgian Tax Watchdogs Tracking Facebook, Netlog Updates Posted: 18 Jul 2009 07:15 AM PDT
Accountants are quick to point out the watchdogs can’t actually use any of the public status updates, photos and videos from users as proof in case of a dispute, but apparently your lifestyle as you depict it online can prompt an investigation when it doesn’t seem to add up to what your official income is. The local version of the IRS, the BBI, has already admitted that it actively tracks activity from citizens online to sniff out tax avoiders. To quote director Karel Anthonissen: “It’s technically possible, it’s legal, and it’s happening.” Just in case they read blogs too: I’m getting paid to write this article and I will make sure to report the income, mr. Anthonissen! Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to jump in my Maserati and drive to our second house on the coast. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Stealth Mobile Startup MOBshop Has Serious Backers, Big (Secret) Plans Posted: 17 Jul 2009 04:09 PM PDT
The company has raised $2.5 million in an initial round of financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and entrepreneur/angel investor Reid Hoffman. Hoffman also joined the board of directors of the company, and Kleiner actually added two board members: Matt Murphy and Aileen Lee. It’s rare for a fund to spend two partners’ time on a single investment. And Hoffman has said he rarely invests in startups any longer, let alone taking the time to sit on the board. Clearly, they think there is something under the hood at the secretive MOBshop. But just what that something is, we don’t know. Roeding, a German-born entrepreneur and former EVP of CBS Mobile, most recently did a stint as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner. He will only say that the company will hit the intersection of mobile and physical worlds. That doesn’t really narrow things down much, but Roeding says that it’s still way too early to start talking about the product. They don’t even have a website up yet. Hoffman described the project to me as ” extraordinarily interesting” but wouldn’t go into any further detail at all. He’s not generally one to gush, so I assume he’s genuinely impressed. Roeding has also put together a strong core team. His co-founder is Jeff Sellinger took over CBS Mobile after Roeding left to join Kleiner. He has also pulled senior people from Loopt (Evan Tana) and Six Apart (Aaron Emigh) to complete the team One thing the company is being very vocal about is hiring. “Right now we're looking for a small group of the Valley's best and brightest developers for the iPhone, other smartphones, and backend systems,” Roeding says. Email resumes to makecontact@mobshop.net. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Ignore That Scary MSNbot, It’s Just The Friendly BingBot - Unless It Attacks! Posted: 17 Jul 2009 03:50 PM PDT
While Microsoft has updated the bot’s version number (from 1.1), it isn’t changing the name, it notes. But what’s interesting is the part of the post from Microsoft that reads:
Problems? What sort of problems? Is the BingBot going to become self-aware, Skynet-style? Microsoft gives no details. I’m scared. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Hulu’s Content Owners Are Missing A Major Opportunity This Summer Posted: 17 Jul 2009 03:45 PM PDT
Earlier this week I had something of an epiphany. Hulu, with its mountains of movies and prime-time TV shows, is the perfect answer to the summer doldrums. I’m finally free to catch up on those shows that my friends have been talking about for years, or at least watch the first few episodes of a show to see if it’s worth buying on iTunes or DVD. Eureka! Unfortunately, when I went to catch up on a few shows the other night, I fell prey to a problem that’s nagged the site since it launched: content owners frequently impose bizarre restrictions on which content you’re allowed to watch on Hulu. The number of episodes available for each show vary wildly, and serial dramas will sometimes only offer a smattering of episodes scattered across a season, which makes it impossible to follow the story line. Hulu does its best to explain the situation to users with messages like “We are able to run five trailing episodes of this series”, but these bulletins don’t do much to ameliorate the frustration and apparent lack of logic. In short, it leads to a bad user experience on an otherwise highly-polished site. A quick spin through the site reveals how bad the problem is. Rescue Me, which I’d heard was quite good, has a measly three episodes available, all taken from the end of the fifth season. Given that I know absolutely nothing about the show other than that Dennis Leary plays a firefighter, I figured this probably wasn’t the best way to get hooked. Fox’s popular serial drama 24 is currently offering a whopping five episodes, but these are taken from the middle of the first season (for those that haven’t seen 24, trying to pick up the story mid-season is an exercise in frustration). Battlestar Galactica is similarly limited. The list goes on. In case it wasn’t obvious, Hulu has very little control over what it’s allowed to show users — it’s forced to bow to the whims of its content partners. And while it’s easy to point the finger at the studios and accuse them of simply being withholding, the reality is likely a bit more complicated. Distribution of this content is impacted by ‘windowing’ — the time periods when the rights to a show or movie belong to different mediums like Cable, syndication, or DVDs. So in some cases, studios really may have their hands tied. That said, it’s hard to imagine that some of these media companies couldn’t do a better job with their licensing deals, and I suspect some of them really are withholding content because they’re afraid of undercutting their DVD and iTunes sales. In those cases, they’re shooting themselves in the foot. If I can’t begin watching a show from the start, the odds of me watching it at all plummet. Sure, I could probably buy the first season on iTunes, but I’m not likely to pay for TV unless I’m quite certain I’m going to like it. Studios should be doing everything they can to introduce Hulu users to new shows during these summer months, perhaps going as far as enabling access to a show’s entire first season. Yes, I might wind up skipping buying the first season on DVD, but I’m also far more likely to go out and buy seasons 2-3 so I can continue watching from the comfort of my couch. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| UK Entrepreneurs: Get Your Funding While You Still Can Posted: 17 Jul 2009 03:11 PM PDT
Out of 39 firms that were active investors in British start-ups over the last five years, only thirteen venture firms have £5 million or more left in their coffers to invest, according to NESTA, the UK agency that advocates for start-ups and also sponsored the recent Traveling Geeks blogger tour. That's right: All but thirteen firms in the United Kingdom are either completely tapped out or have committed the rest of their funds for follow-on investments in existing portfolio companies. In total, NESTA estimates there's about £400 million left that's uncommitted among the thirteen, with only half of that available for brand-new series A deals. To put that into perspective, there's roughly the same amount of money in the fund Marc Andreessen just closed than there is for new companies in the entire United Kingdom right now. This is coinciding with a precipitous drop in UK firms closing on new funds thanks to the global credit crunch. In 2008, only seven firms closed new funds, and NESTA expects fundraising to be even weaker in 2009. As most people know, I'm a pretty big advocate of the idea that many of the next great high-growth companies will be founded outside of the U.S., but these stats starkly demonstrate a undeniable advantage of being Valley-based. Even when fundraising slows and VCs save bigger reserves than usual for current investments, there are still billions sloshing around to fund new deals. Sure, it's hard during times like these even in the Valley, but raising venture capital should be hard. As with most research reports on the venture business, it's the trend line that's important to note here. It's probable that NESTA isn't counting a firm here or there. But it can't be too far off. Indeed, the stat explains a lot of the anecdotal evidence that hit me in the face as soon as I arrived in London two weeks ago. Many of the entrepreneurs who'd pitched me on my last visit to London in November have already shuttered their companies and were unsure of what to do next. I have exactly one friend in Silicon Valley who has been forced to that point. Even the good UK early stage names are struggling to close deals. It took AlertMe—a hot energy home monitoring company that won The TechCrunch Europa for best clean tech company last week—a whopping nine months to raise money almost landing the company in bankruptcy. (Index Ventures and others finally snapped up the deal a few months ago.) "I don't want to go through that again," the very polite and British CEO Pilgrim Beart demurred. It's that kind of bleak desperation that lead the infamous Paul Carr to pronounce the UK Internet scene dead….just before his own column in the Guardian became its own victim of the economy a few days later. (See Mr. Butcher’s TechCrunchEurope rebuttal here.) Indeed "the scene" may be dead, but there's an upside here. The companies that are still around have a much greater emphasis than Valley companies on making money. The Traveling Geek contingent went to Accel's London office to meet with a handful of start-ups, and each one emphasized revenue and profits in their five-minute elevator pitches. One that caught me by surprise was Michael Smith's Moshi Monsters, a social network/ virtual game for kids. Cute idea, but sounds like it should be road kill in this environment, right? Nope. Its revenues are growing 35% month-over-month, it has 85% gross margins, and just five months after launching the site is cash flow positive. Nicely done, gents. (BTW, Smith isn't all business. His house was the setting of those famous Scoble pictures…) Indeed, there's always something healthy about startups having to work within constraints. There will be fewer of them, but it's possible that the companies that make it in this environment could well make up one of the most promising crops of UK companies we've ever seen. After all, Skype was laughed out of VCs' offices when it started in the wake of the dot com bust. In the coming days, I'll be writing several more posts about the London companies that impressed me the most. Stay tuned. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Amazon, Why Don’t You Come In Our Houses And Burn Our Books Too? Posted: 17 Jul 2009 02:09 PM PDT
Why? Well, apparently the publisher changed their minds about having digital versions of the books available for the Kindle, reports David Pogue. Okay, that’s up to them — from this point forward. But those who already paid for the books, own them. In a word, this is bullshit. Seriously, why doesn’t Amazon just come into our houses and burn the print copies as well while they’re at it? This remote deletion issue is an increasingly interesting one. Last year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed that the company has a remote “kill switch” to remove apps from your device if it thinks that is necessary. To the best of my knowledge, they have yet to use such functionality, and would only do so if there was a malicious app out there that was actually causing harm to iPhones. They have not even used it to kill some poor taste apps that were quickly removed from the App Store, like Baby Shaker. That sounds reasonable. What Amazon is doing, is not. Yes, they credit your account with the money you paid for the book, but I don’t want the money. I want the book, which I legally bought. And this follows its poor choice in making certain app makers remove their apps from the App Store that call their APIs in ways they don’t like — that is to say, on mobile devices. Laughable. Pogue and our own CrunchGear have it right in pointing out the parallels between a move like this and Orwell’s own novels that are being removed. “And of course the fact that this happened to 1984, of all books, makes this even more surreal,” write Gizmodo. Big Brother is in your Kindle. Watching. Update: As commenter Edward Virtually notes, this action is likely within Amazon’s legal rights. I think that’s pretty obvious or there is no way they would have done it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not complete and utter bullshit too. Everyone who hears about this and has a Kindle will now think twice about buying a book on there. Legal BS aside, this is Amazon shooting themselves in the foot here. Big time. Update 2: Amazon has admitted how stupid this was, and says it won’t do so in the future. But InformationWeek is reporting that the FTC may be interested in looking at Amazon’s shady actions. [photo: flickr/pccorreia] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| An App To Show You Mastercard “Priceless” Deals: Priceless. Posted: 17 Jul 2009 12:49 PM PDT
If you’ve ever watched TV, you’ve undoubtedly seen at least a dozen of the Mastercard “Priceless” ads. You know the ones, “So and so consumer items: $5. Such and such memorable moment paid for with your Mastercard: Priceless.” Yeah, now there’s an app for those. Well not exactly. It’s not like this app is limited to the priceless moments mentioned in the commercials, that would be kind of pointless. Instead this is a social app that allows consumers to point out their best deals at their favorite local spots for all to see. The app uses the iPhone location services to figure out where you are. It then shows you on a map and shows all the deals others have placed around you. That may sound bland and obvious, but the app is actually done in a really nice way. You can choose either a bird’s eye view of the deals around you on the map, or get a more street-view like look (though, sadly, it doesn’t use the iPhone 3GS’ new compass to move the map when you move). If you tap on any of the color-coded bubbles, you zoom into that specific deal and can tap to get more info about it.
If you want to add you own deal, you simply click the “+” button, and enter the relevant details. It will tag the place at whatever your current location is. So will anyone actually use this app? Who knows. But if Mastercard starts promoting it on their annoyingly effective commercials, I could certainly see a bunch of tourists picking up this app to find some deals in whatever city they happen to be in. The best part of this “priceless” app is that it really is price-less, as in, free. Find it here. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Google Says Mobile Web Apps Will Win In The Long Haul Posted: 17 Jul 2009 12:43 PM PDT  Native Apps, or Web Apps? It's the great debate of the mobile world right now, essentially fueling the platform wars from behind the scenes. Palm took the Web App route with the Pre and webOS, though with the SDK just now available to all its a bit too early to gauge that decision. The iPhone began its life with Web Apps, only to later open up native support and become the apotheosis of how app development and distribution can be done. Even Google, who will try to jam just about anything into the cloud, is putting a lot of weight behind running things locally on their Android platform. Still, Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra says Web Apps are the way.
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| How Google Made Its Q2 Numbers: Squeezing Expenses Posted: 17 Jul 2009 10:33 AM PDT Google made its earnings numbers yesterday, actually coming in above expectations. Total revenues were $5.5 billion, 3 percent above the same period last year and flat with the first quarter (when sequential revenues actually declined). Net revenues, which are the revenues which actually go to Google after they pay off AdSense and AdWords partner sites via traffic acquisition costs (TAC), came in at $4.07 billion. That was slightly above the Street consensus of $4.05 billion (see Citi’s cheat sheet below). Non-GAAP earnings came in at a respectable $5.36 earnings per share, well above the $5.05 Street consensus. Investors should be ecstatic, right? Yet the stock is down $15 right now from yesterday’s close, to about $428. Some of that is selling on the news that advertising revenues have “stabilized.” But if you take a deeper look at the numbers, it looks like Google’s earnings strength has more to do with cost-cutting than with revenue growth. Google ended the quarter with 378 fewer employees than in March, 2009 (total headcount was 19,786). Some of those might have included the 200 sales jobs it announced it would cut at the tail end of the first quarter. Google was able to reduce its sales and marketing costs by 3 percent and of its general and administrative costs by 23 percent from last year. The latter translated into $110 million in savings. All of this cost containment certainly helped operating income rise 19 percent (to $1.9 billion), when net revenues were flat. Google also put a major squeeze on capital expenditures, which came in at $139 million (80 percent lower than a year ago). That helped free cash flow increase 37.5 percent to $1.5 billion from a year ago, but that was still down $517 million from the first quarter. And when you back out the CapEx numbers the actual net cash coming from operations declined 9 percent to $1.6 billion.
Other key metrics: Paid clicks were up 15 percent year-over-year, but down 2 percent from the first quarter. Cost per click ($0.42 on average) was down 13 percent from a year ago but up 3 percent from the first quarter. YouTube close to profitability: On the conference call, Google reported that monetized views on YouTube had tripled and that profitability for the service is in sight.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| If Execution Is What Matters, Where Does That Leave Ideas? Posted: 17 Jul 2009 10:23 AM PDT
In my view, it’s not that ideas are worthless per se, it’s that they’re never more than a starting point, a launchpad. I’ve been thinking about this all day after I read this blog post by Marjolein Hoekstra (who I consider to be a friend) about the original idea for Tweetmeme, a service that aggregates the most discussed and retweeted stories on Twitter (we use their retweet button at the bottom of blog posts, and you should use it). I won’t dive deep into the details of the story because I’m trying to make a larger point, but here’s the gist: Hoekstra feels she doesn’t get enough credit publicly about the original idea for Tweetmeme, and calls out the company’s founder Nick Halstead for acknowledging her role and suggest perhaps they should even consider writing her a check. According to her, Halstead has been open about her role in Tweetmeme’s early days but has stopped doing that ever since they’ve raised about $650,000 in seed financing for taking the service to the next level. Halstead’s side of the story boils down to the fact that she was very involved in the (not so great) first version of the product, but they let it languish for 8 months and finally refocused and turned it into a great service without her help. I tend to lean towards Halstead’s view on all this, despite my respect for Marjolein and knowing how knowledgeable she is about the Web and Twitter in particular. The way I see it, Tweetmeme is what it is in part of what Hoekstra talked about with Halstead et al. in the early days, through direct messages on Twitter and conversations on Skype. But it was a fairly obvious idea in the first place, and there were already others competing for the title “Techmeme for Twitter stories” when it first came out. I’ve been in similar situations myself, having discussed business ideas with people online or offline and seeing them start a company, add a certain feature or rethink their strategy after these conversations (not that I’m saying I’m always right, quite the contrary). Sometimes I get credited, sometimes I don’t. But usually it’s not something I care much about, because I realize ideas are essentially a dime a dozen and there’s little chance that these people wouldn’t have made these moves without my help. Furthermore, most of the time it pleases me to see something happen because of something I told someone, whether it gets publicly credited or not. I understand Hoekstra’s sentiment, but in general, I also think if your role is that significant from the get-go you should become a partner or somehow try to get compensated for your work early on. Complaining about not getting enough credit this late in the game comes off as envy rather than a call for sympathy, even if I know in Hoekstra’s case it’s most certainly the latter. To her credit, she blogs she just wants to get stuff settled between them and then move on. Question is: what should one expect for helping shape an idea that turned into a business after many meetings, a lot of trial and error and some risk taking which did not involve her? Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| A Quick Look At the New HTC Hero Running Android Cupcake Posted: 17 Jul 2009 09:44 AM PDT  The HTC Hero just landed at my humble office/abode and I'm pleased to report that it is, in fact, all that and a packet of crisps. The phone is slim and sexy with a great UI - one of the best I've seen on a smartphone since the phone that starts with 'i' and ends with Phone - and it's quite snappy, a huge improvement over my experience with the G1.
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| Did Your Mom Tell You Not To Talk To Strangers? Don’t Show Her FlyChat. Posted: 17 Jul 2009 09:28 AM PDT
Here’s the basic idea behind FlyChat: Social networks often limit you to interacting with people that you already know, either from the online world or the real world. But FlyChat wants to connect you with people that you don’t already know, based on location and interests. Okay, it’s not quite that creepy. It’s a little more innocent than that. Basically, you write a note and attach it to a fly. You then select a region you want that fly to travel to. A person in that area can see your note and your profile which includes your picture and a few things about you, and can decide if they want to respond or not. Each of these flychats also has a category which you put it into to let potential readers know what it will be about. The more FlyChats you send out, the more you can receive in return. The company considers these messages to be like “high-tech messages in a bottle.” So why on Earth would you want to use a service like this? Well as I said, while most social networks focus on establishing your existing connections, FlyChat wants to help you make new ones. Some people are into that. Second, imagine you’re planning a trip somewhere that you don’t know anyone. With FlyChat, you can potentially make some contacts before you go. Though, obviously, that could potentially be a bit dangerous. It reminds me a bit of the app PhotoSwap, which some friends of mine have long been addicted to. With that, you send photos from your iPhone to other random users throughout the world. You then get sent a random photo back. FlyChat is a bit like that but with text. But there’s also a game element to it, where you earn points and medal based on how many connections you make. FlyChat was developed by Project1010, it is available in the App Store for $1.99 today [iTunes Link]. Learn more about it in the video below.
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Not entirely unexpected, but still weird to see it confirmed and acknowledged: the federal tax administration in Belgium, my home country, is 
I’m not sure exactly what MOBshop (the company name is 
Microsoft has 
It’s no secret that summer is the season of terrible television, when networks flock to broadcast cheap reality TV and game shows that actually will turn your brain into a slippery pile of goo. Granted, there are a few gems out there (particularly on the cable networks), but for the most part TV fans are out of luck during the dog days of summer. At least, that’s the way things used to be. 
You think you have it bad, Mr.-Silicon-Valley-entrepreneur-trolling-Sand-Hilll-Road-for-cash? Try life on the other side of the pond.
So 
When I first heard that Mastercard was releasing an iPhone app called “Priceless Picks,” I thought for sure it would be a lame gimmick. But I must admit, it’s actually a kind of cool gimmick.
You can also flag the deal is “improper” or send it to a friend, all without leaving the app. It also tells you when (if ever) the deal expires.
There’s a cliché statement about entrepreneurship that says 
I sat down thinking I was going to write about how FlyChat, a new iPhone app, is kind of creepy. Then I realized it’s actually a lot like Twitter in some regards. And that’s not to say that Twitter isn’t creepy in some ways. But it’s an accepted form of creepy. FlyChat, however, isn’t just yet.| You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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