The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- The Most Engaged Brands On The Web
- YouTube Experimenting With 3D Web Videos
- Media Loves Twitter This Much: $48 Million A Month (At Least)
- Apple Approves iPhone App That “Promotes School Shootings”
- Candy.com Sets Up Shop After $3 Million Domain Name Sale
- Tim Armstrong Prepares AOL For a Fragmenting Web
- Digg’s Kevin Rose Not Pleased With DiggBar Change
- DiggBar Commits Career Suicide, Starts Redirecting To Digg Homepage
- Why Zynga Is Worried about Playfish
| The Most Engaged Brands On The Web Posted: 20 Jul 2009 06:18 AM PDT What big brands do the best job with social media? A new study by analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint ranks the top 100 brands by social media engagement. You can find the report embedded below or on ENGAGEMENTdb, which was presumably created with Wetpaint’s site-creation software. The study scores the engagement level of each of the top 100 brands across more than ten social media channels, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and discussion forums. Starbucks scored the highest, with 127 points. The top ten brands are: 1. Starbucks (127) The report categorizes brands into one of four types, depending on how many social media channels they participate in. The most engaged are “mavens,” while the least engaged are “wallflowers” (McDonalds and BP are examples). The study claims a correlation between social media engagement and revenue growth. The “mavens” saw revenues grow an average of 18 percent over the past 12 months, while the Wallflowers saw revenues drop 6 percent. I really doubt that their level of social media engagement had anything to do with their revenue growth, it is just that the strongest brands are the most engaged.
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| YouTube Experimenting With 3D Web Videos Posted: 20 Jul 2009 06:17 AM PDT
The news site’s Barry Schwartz discovered a recent thread on the YouTube help forum and found out an employee named Pete is experimenting with the 3D viewing feature on his 20% free fiddling time:
An example video can be found here. (Image from SE Roundtable) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Media Loves Twitter This Much: $48 Million A Month (At Least) Posted: 20 Jul 2009 04:39 AM PDT
AdvertisingAge got more details from the company about its research, which pegs the total free media coverage given to Twitter the past month to be worth $48 million. As AdAge points out, that’s about half of what Microsoft plans to spend marketing Bing. Online, Twitter received 2.73 billion impressions, undoubtedly some of them thanks to TechCrunch. Television contributed to 57% of the PR value, newspapers 37% and magazines 5%, according to VMS. As the monitoring company’s CEO Peter Wengryn explains, the total coverage may be much higher than what the firm could possibly monitor, since it doesn’t take into account mentions in smaller newspapers in the United States and media coverage in the rest of the world. Either way, it’s a LOT of coverage, acknowledges Gary Getto, VP-integrated media intelligence at VMS:
How long will Twitter continue to be the social media darling in the media? Long enough to eventually reach 1 billion users and become the “pulse of the planet”? And more importantly, when will it start turning the mountains of attention, traffic and users it is getting into cold, hard cash? (Image via MaximumPC) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Apple Approves iPhone App That “Promotes School Shootings” Posted: 20 Jul 2009 04:02 AM PDT
Take this Zombie School application from the aptly named iPhone app developer Retarded Arts. It lets you turn your classmates or teachers into zombies, after which you can use a machine gun, bow or grenades to kill them. It’s a pretty tasteless game, but I can see how the team at Apple responsible for screening new apps for submission in the App Store could have missed the sensitivity surrounding the topic of the game to ultimately approve it. But what threw me off, and what should make them reconsider rejecting the application into the store if you ask me, is the fact that the developer has been astroturfing the iPhoneWorld forums and touting the game saying that it just like “promoting school shooting!” Check out this forum post from user ‘privateson’, who pretends that he became aware of the game after his friends downloaded it, writing that he’s ’shocked’ about his ‘insane’ game that lets you “bomb the Cheerleader into several pieces!!!” Only, this is the user’s second post on the forum, the first one being this promotional post in which he discloses to be working for Retarded Arts. Whether you think this app has its place in the App Store or not, I think it’s sick for the developer to promote the game the way he does in the forums. What’s your opinion? Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Candy.com Sets Up Shop After $3 Million Domain Name Sale Posted: 20 Jul 2009 02:38 AM PDT
According to the website, Candy.com even ships internationally but I think they just left out the word ‘not’ by accident (seriously). The new owner of the candy.com domain name is G&J Holdings, a Weymouth, Massachusetts-based Internet candy retailer that has been in business since 2005. The $3 million question for them: how quickly, if at all, will they make up for the price it paid for the admittedly attractive .com domain name? (Hat tip to DNxpert) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Tim Armstrong Prepares AOL For a Fragmenting Web Posted: 19 Jul 2009 09:01 PM PDT The days of the Web portal are long gone. Everyone knows this, especially the people who run the largest destination sites on the Web. AOL’s newest CEO, Tim Armstrong, acknowledges this fact. “We think the Web will fragment in the future,” he tells me. “I think you have to be agnostic about where your content goes. If they want to get it on Twitter, you should let them get it on Twitter. If they want to get it on your destination site, then let them do that.” Last week marked the first 100 days since Armstrong left Google to take over as CEO of AOL
When he talks about the first two, he talks about “scaled content” and “scaled advertising,” yet he is very much pursuing a niche content strategy married to a highly targeted, brand advertising approach. AOL is already going down this path with its collection of MediaGlow sites (which include, Engadget, TMZ, and Love.com). We’ve called this the “Toyota strategy” because it consists of creating standalone online media properties which appeal to niche audiences much like magazines used to do in the world of print media. Which is not to say that Armstrong is chucking the AOL brand out the window. He is just being selective about where he uses it. “My guess is that there are places where the AOL brand will be very helpful,” he says: “A good housekeeping seal of approval. In other places, you don't want it because it means something different.” On the advertising front, he thinks AOL jumped into the ad network game at the wrong time right as the economic downturn hit. AOL was left with too much generic ad inventory and not enough inventory appealing to brand advertisers. (Hence, the niche content/magazine-like approach). Another market he is bullish on is localized content and mapping. AOL owns Mapquest, which needs to be reinvigorated. It also just bought local news site Patch and local events listings site Going. (Armstrong was a shareholder in Patch, but didn’t accept any profits from the transaction beyond his initial investment). Local content remains a huge opportunity on the Web. I asked Armstrong how he feels about the center of attention on the Web moving away from destination sites to personalized streams of data such as what you find on Twitter and Facebook. “Real-time messaging feeds have a wide spectrum of usage,” he replied. “In some places speed is more important than depth. In others, depth is more important than speed.” He is pretty much agnostic about where people find AOL content, as long as they return to AOL to read it (and maybe click on an ad or two while they are there). At the same time, AOL is trying to leverage AIM to get into the lifestreaming game. Communications (email, IM, SMS) is one of AOL’s core areas Armstrong wants to strengthen. And to the extent that he can combine personal communications with public streams, he can play there as well. Content, advertising, and communications are the areas where he feels AOL can play to its strengths. When I asked about search and search advertising, he responded, “Search has taken up a lot of oxygen in that space and rightly so, it has performed well for advertisers and funded a lot of other things.” But he thinks display brand advertising is poised for a comeback once we come out of the economic downturn. “There are a bunch of large players kicking the search ball,” he adds. “We probably don't consider ourselves in that quadrant.” Finally, Armstrong set up AOL Ventures as a place to invest in early-stage startups, as well as to park businesses which need fixing or outside investment, Bebo being a case in point. It’s been shunted to AOL Ventures. Armstrong is clearly distancing himself from the $850 million Bebo debacle. He describes one of the imperatives for AOL Ventures as “to keep things on track that have not been on track.” On the M&A front, he says AOL will continue to make “smaller acquisitions” to pick up key technology, engineering talent, unique content, or more advertising scale. “Will we do acquisitions the size of Bebo? My plan is No.” Armstrong is getting AOL ready to be spun off from Time Warner in an IPO. As part of that transaction, the original thinking was that AOL’s legacy dial-up business wouldn’t be a part of that, but Armstrong has changed his mind. It is not only the roughly $1 billion in annual subscription revenues AOL still generates from the dial-up business that convinced him to keep it. That is quickly declining. But just as important is the traffic and distribution which comes from those locked-in customers. “If you were going to try to recreate the access traffic it would be very expensive to recreate,” notes Armstrong. (ComScore estimates that about 19 million of AOL’s 106 million unique U.S. visitors a month still come from AOL’s client app). When you are trying to build an advertising business, every eyeball counts. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Digg’s Kevin Rose Not Pleased With DiggBar Change Posted: 19 Jul 2009 06:36 PM PDT
Before the change, a shortened URL would point to the underlying URL (example). If the person clicking was a logged in Digg user they got the Digg toolbar on top with stats and the ability to Digg the story. If they were not a logged in Digg user the short URL simply redirected to the original URL, which is how most other URL shorteners work. Now it’s different. Logged in users still see the DiggBar. But non-Digg users get redirected right to the Digg page about that story. In the example above, they’d be directed here. The reason for this? Digg clearly wants more unique visitors. Before they only “kept” people who were already using Digg and logged in. People who didn’t use Digg never hit the site. With this change all those non-Digg users are now hitting Digg.com and racking up the user stats. I actually think this is extremely shortsighted of DIgg. Competitor Bit.ly (and they may be Digg’s biggest direct competitor soon) has a clean experience that is predictable and creates user trust. With Digg, you can’t be sure where people will end up once they click the URL. And the constantly changing policies only add to the uncertainty. As we wrote previously, people are not happy. And Kevin Rose, fresh off a two week vacation, says he had no idea the change was happening. In a Twitter message an hour ago, he said “just now reading the digg short url discussion, I was not aware this changed and will check in on it tomorrow (was on vacation for 2 weeks).” Translation: He’s not happy (otherwise he wouldn’t disagree with a new policy publicly). Look for a reversal on this policy sometime soon. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| DiggBar Commits Career Suicide, Starts Redirecting To Digg Homepage Posted: 19 Jul 2009 04:02 PM PDT
The change is a subtle one, but it will have major implications. Typically when you use a link-shortening service, anyone who clicks on your shortened link will be sent directly to the original article that you’ve linked to, without any landing page or barrier in between. This is how nearly every single link shortener works, from Bit.ly to Awe.sm, and up until now DiggBar worked basically the same way, though it inserted a frame at the top of the page. But sometime in the last few days DiggBar has changed this core functionality: clicking on a DiggBar shortlink will send anyone who isn’t already logged in to Digg to Digg.com’s list of comments about an article rather than the article itself. So, if I linked to TechCrunch.com using the DiggBar, users would first have to go to Digg’s page about TechCrunch.com before they could actually make it over here. In short, this is totally ridiculous. It’s not hard to guess why Digg would want to make the change — every single non-member to click the link is being sent to Digg.com, which means the site is going to get new users and a big traffic boost. But it totally kills the user experience. As someone sharing a link, I would never want to force them to jump to a landing page before they could see what I was trying to share. It just leads to too much confusion, not to mention the fact that it’s incredibly irritating. And I’m not the only one to feel this way — famous Digg user MrBabyMan is reportedly bashing the change, as are other top Diggers. Digg may have just boosted the amount of traffic it gets from DiggBar, but it may have killed DiggBar itself in the process. This isn’t the first problem users have had with the DiggBar service. Soon after its launch, there was an uproar over the way it handled its redirects (it used a 200 code rather than a 301), though it soon reached a compromise. Since then the uproar has died down, though most website owners aren’t too happy about the fact that a site linked to using DiggBar effectively hides the original source URL (yes, you can still see it, but not in the address bar where it normally is). This underlines one of the biggest problems with URL shorteners: you’re basically adding another layer of indirection on the web — something that Delicious founder Joshua Schachter says contributes to making the services downright evil. There’s still a chance that this was a bug or mistakenly enabled, though our tipster says that Digg has confirmed that it is working as intended. We’ve contacted Digg directly, but they have yet to respond. Update: The backlash has already begun. Tweetie developer Loren Brichter just tweeted that he would be pulling Digg support from the popular Mac and iPhone client if it doesn’t change things back soon. Update 2: Digg founder Kevin Rose has tweeted that he didn’t know that the change was going live, as he has been on vacation for the last two weeks. Don’t be surprised if we see this switch back very soon. Thanks to JD Rucker for the tip. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Why Zynga Is Worried about Playfish Posted: 19 Jul 2009 10:57 AM PDT
After all, it competes game-to-game, with similar mob-style and poker games, and was said to be doing the same revenues as Zynga with much higher profitability. (As my column pointed out, Zynga's revenues are more like double Playdom's—and since I've heard the discrepancy is even greater.) As you'd expect Zynga's CEO Mark Pincus pooh-poohed Playdom as any sort of threat. But tellingly, he said the company he was worried about was UK-based Playfish. So, while I was across the pond, I decided to see what the fuss was about and sat down with Playfish's founder and CEO Kristian Segerstrale. I came away convinced this was one of the hottest companies to watch in the UK. Here are five reasons why. 1. Not "The UK Zynga." Playfish is very much running its own race in this market, and this may be a case where distance from the Valley is actually healthy. It doesn't try to compete on specific games with Playdom, SGN, and Zynga. For instance, it doesn't have a mob game, the most popular genre right now, and it doesn't have a poker game, Zynga's top earner. "That's such short term thinking," Segerstrale said. "Something is wrong if your route to success is copying competitors' games." 2. Platform Development Doesn't Have to Mean Half-Ass Development. Playfish is not about building a game in a week or so and throwing it up on Facebook. Playfish spends six months to a year designing a game, and they've only produced seven of them. While everyone else talks up how quickly and cheaply you can build a game on social networks, Playfish still employs the same artistic discipline of a console game with a Wii-like look and feel. The plus with platforms like Facebook and the iPhone isn't speed to market for Playfish, it's easier distribution and greater social engagement. 3. Traction. The painstaking design process appears to be a hit. Every one of Playfish's games has been a top ten hit on Facebook. Across all platforms, those seven games have yielded 100 million installs and 30 million monthly uniques, says Segerstrale. Playfish pays "practically nothing" for customer acquisition and makes money through virtual goods, ads and premium versions of games. Playfish is profitable and hasn't spent a dime of its recent $17 million funding round. That's gotta be some top line given Playfish has 200 employees across several offices. In fact, TechCrunch Europe's Mike Butcher speculated that Playfish could be the $1 million-dollar-a-month Facebook app maker, back in September 2008. It certainly puts the company in an enviable position given the paucity of venture funds in the UK. 4. Proximity to the Valley Insiders via Investors. While Playfish enjoys distance from the one-ups-man-ship or developer poaching of SGN, Playdom and Zynga, it's connected into the Valley where it counts. One of its main investors is Accel—also one of the main backers of Facebook. Yes, that matters. (See Sequoia Capital-backed Google's purchase of Sequoia Capital-backed YouTube.) 5. Segerstrale Knows Games. This is the fuzziest one, but also probably the most important. As a CEO, Segerstrale comes to this industry from a different point of view than Pincus. Pincus has said he was never really much of a gamer—Segerstrale on the other hand has loved games since he was three years old playing Pong with his older brother. He always got a visceral rush from playing, especially with other people. So he's spent much of his career working towards two goals: Decoding what makes a game "fun" and deconstructing the concept of a "gamer" so games are just something everyone plays. His first attempt was at mobile, thinking that with phones in every pocket, everyone would essentially have a game console. Indeed, the company he cofounded, Glu Mobile, went on to a successful IPO. But gaming was still a niche activity on phones. There were too many barriers set up by the telcos and it wasn't as easy for people to find and download games. Facebook turned out to be a much greater platform for this kind of democratization of gaming because users could market games to one another. Segerstrale's macro theory is that we're in the first shift of a move from physical games and goods to digital ones, and from games as a product to games as a service. It's a theory that seems right-on to me. For one thing, we already saw it with the transition from enterprise software to software as a service. For another, sales of console games are down 20% year-over-year according to NPD, while comScore says social gaming is up 20% year-over-year. It's nice to see a CEO who can articulate not only a product vision, but a clear industry vision. All the positives above aside, I'm still not convinced that Segerstrale will succeed in his mission to democratize games. I still mainly use Facebook as a way to connect with friends, not to build virtual restaurants and I don't necessarily see that changing. In fact, Facebook has so de-emphasized apps in its new all-feed iteration, I spent nearly an hour trying to find a listing of games, before someone finally told me it was on the throw-away bottom bar of the profile page. And by emphasizing the social stickiness of a game, there's a chicken-and-egg risk that the games are boring for people who don't have enough friends already playing. But these are execution risks and every promising startup has them. When it comes to business model, financing, vision and product, Playfish is certainly a formidable competitor to Zynga. With hundreds of millions in real dollars already swarming around social gaming, this will be fun space to watch. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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