Tuesday, July 21, 2009

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Spotify Adds Two Million More Tracks As It Preps For US Launch

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 07:02 AM PDT

Spotify, the music streaming service, has announced a deal with IODA, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance. IODA brokers agreements for independent labels and artists and helps them out with marketing and distribution. Thus, the Spotify/IODA deal brings 2 million new indie tracks - meaning you’ll now be able to stream The Prodigy and Bob Marley, among others.

IODA’s international partners, including Bonnier Amigo Music Group, are on board too. The move is clearly ahead of a planned US launch. Upcoming Android and iPhone apps are also being readied.

It’ll be interesting to see how all this plays out: although Spotify plans to launch in the US before the end of the year, there’s the small matter of Microsoft’s upcoming music streaming service to factor in.

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iPhone Push Problem Broadcasts Your AIMs to Random Recipients, Could Affect Jailbroken/Unlocked Phones

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 06:08 AM PDT

Till Schadde, founder of development house Equinux, has discovered an exploit - a broadcast error, really - that sends your AIM messages to random recipients without your knowledge or consent. The problem seems to happen in unlocked/jailbroken iPhones and results in a alert appearing on a recipients home screen bearing your message. Till tested the service by sending an AIM from the OS X desktop using iChat to his iPhone. He then received a reply back from a random recipient. It is clear that this is a Push problem in the message addressing - each iPhone is assigned its own identifier and receives messages from a central server operated by Apple - although this may change.


Playdom Extends #1 MySpace Game ‘Mobsters’ To The iPhone

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 05:58 AM PDT

It’s been just under one year since social-gaming startup Playdom launched Mobsters, which has grown to become the #1 game on MySpace with 13.5 million total installs. Now, the company is taking the incredibly popular game mobile with its first iPhone App, dubbed Mobsters: Big Apple (iTunes Link). And while it may not be the first such mafia-related game on the iPhone, it still has a few tricks up its sleeve that could turn it into a major hit.

Now, Playdom isn’t close to being the first mover here — we covered iMob back in January, and we’ve seen competing social gaming companies like Zynga and SGN launch similar games based on the Mafias, Vampires, and a number of other themes. But Playdom has one advantage that the others don’t: it has directly hooked Mobsters Big Apple into its counterpart Mobsters game on MySpace, which means millions of players will be able to begin playing with the account that they’ve spent the last year building up on the social network. SGN and Zynga both offer Facebook and MySpace games with similar themes to their iPhone games, but for whatever reason they haven’t linked them together, which means gamers have to begin anew if they start playing on the iPhone.

Aside from a large existing user base, Playdom also has the benefit of being able to use much of the same content from its well-established MySpace game on the iPhone, which means the new mobile app has access to 65 missions and plenty of items. And because both games use the same backend, the company can continuously add new content to both games. The iPhone app can’t currently connect to Playdom’s Facebook game, but the company says support is coming.

As with other games in this genre, gameplay largely revolves around completing missions and becoming more powerful by acquiring better weapons (there’s also a time constraint that forces you to keep coming back for more). It may not sound particularly appealing until you’ve tried it out for yourself, but once you do it’s easy to quickly become totally addicted. Playdom has done a good job enhancing the experience with audio clips (you’ll hear things like “Magnifico..” when you complete a mission), and assorted art assets.

Now we’ll just have to wait and see if Zynga and SGN strike back with their own web-connected updates, or if there’s a reason why they made the decision to hold off on adding that functionality.

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Gaming Software Company Arkadium Acquires Advergame.com

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 05:25 AM PDT

Arkadium, an NYC-based company that markets gaming software for brands, ad agencies, casino operators and online game websites, has bought Advergame.com for an undisclosed sum and has revamped its gaming portal GreatDayGames with a number of additional features to boot.

According to the company, customized advergames offer a fresh approach to exposing consumers to a brand and “keep them coming back for more”. Kenny Rosenblatt, CEO of Arkadium says: "The majority of display ads shown to gamers today are irrelevant to the player and worthless to the publisher. Casual gamers spend thousands of hours playing online and are highly receptive to relevant advertisements.”

Hence them betting on advergaming as a concept to find widespread adoption among marketers worldwide and creating some brand awareness by purchasing the relevant domain name / business Advergame.com.

Arkadium says it currently boasts an online network of more than 250 Flash-based games that attracts over five million monthly unique users and is running a profitable operation, servicing big name clients Warners Bros., CBS, NBC, General Electric, Reader’s Digest, Mattel and Hasbro. The company also claims it serves more than 120 million page views each month within its game Arenas, with users spending an average of 20 minutes each session.

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FanDuel Turns Premium Fantasy Sports Social — And It’s Legal

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 03:55 AM PDT

The people that brought you HubDub, the prediction site that effectively turns news content into a game, have had a new idea. FanDuel is a premium, paid-for game focused on fantasy sports. Running in private beta for the last month, the game opens up today concentrating on baseball and NFL to begin with. Although the competitive space for daily fantasy sports is fairly new, there's clearly an opportunity there - some 20m people play fantasy games, making it a $2bn industry. Currently big players such as Yahoo, CBS and ESPN dominate the market. But if you play Mafia Wars and other social games on Facebook, going back to playing traditional fantasy sports on CBS feels like going back to when dinosaurs walked the earth. Plus fantasy sports require a lot of time commitment as you have to play for the whole season. FanDuel addresses this problem by letting users play and win in a day. The game is integrated with Twitter and Facebook, and books revenues from taking a 10% commission on each of the match-ups. But hold on just a second - how is this all legal?


Condé Nast Sheds Men.Style.com, Hires Consultants For More Cost-Cutting

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 03:54 AM PDT

Nearly three months after shedding glossy business magazine Portfolio, publisher Condé Nast has hired external consultants from McKinsey to assist in some serious cost-cutting continuation, Yahoo-style.

First online property to go after the word of the hire got out: Men.Style.com, the media company’s web-only brand for - you guessed it - men.

In a memo that got republished all over the web yesterday, Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend told his staff that it is time to "rethink" the entire business, warning that the company must "realign to be a successful business in an emerging economy that is now predicted to be painfully slow in recovering."

In this environment, it’s indeed not the best choice to keep three men’s fashion titles on the web, as Condé Nast Digital president Sarah Chubb admitted to Advertising Age:

“It didn’t really make sense to do so because lifestyle content from GQ was already the main traffic driver for Men.Style.com. Further, the view among Conde Nast execs is that a unified print-web brand will be an easier sell to brand advertisers.”

After the launch of both sites, Men.Style.com - launched back in 2005 - traffic will refer to GQ.com and the original staffers will move along with it.

According to Condé Nast’s internal numbers, Men.Style.com saw 1.7 million unique visitors last month, up nearly 50% from the same month last year. The umbrella website, Style.com, had 2 million monthly UVs. ComScore paints a different picture, putting Men.Style.com at 386,000 unique visitors and Style.com at 656,000 in June.

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Best Buy Goes All Twitter Crazy With @Twelpforce

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 02:30 AM PDT

This is an interesting one: consumer electronics retailer Best Buy is encouraging hundreds of employees to handle online customer service and company promotions via Twitter, even airing commercials not mentioning their own website but merely the URL of the profile they created on the micro-sharing service (two spots embedded below). The new service, dubbed Twelpforce, was debuted over the weekend but so far hasn’t garnered a lot of online buzz, let alone followers on Twitter (currently at around 1350). I’m sure that will change soon enough.

Tweet the Twelpforce, they’re here to twelp

Leaving aside the brutal misuse of the ‘tw’ in Twitter for their own use of names and verbs, the concept is pretty well thought-out. Best Buy employees can use their company and Twitter ID to register for the service here, after which tweets from the lot of them will be displayed in a single stream on the same page.

Once registered, tweeting Best Buy employees from across all operations can send messages from the @Twelpforce account, and if they add the hash-tag #twelpforce, their messages will automatically show up under the twelpforce handle with a credit to their proper Twitter account. This is similar to how we handle the auto-posting of TechCrunch posts on our Twitter account.

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I like that the ‘Tips & Expectations’ part targeted at interested Best Buy employees is made public (right here). An excerpt:

The promise we’re making starting in July is that you’ll know all that we know as fast as we know it. That’s an enormous promise. That means that customers will be able to ask us about the decisions they’re trying to make, the products they’re using, and look for the customer support that only we can give. And with Twitter, we can do that fast, with lots of opinions so they can make a decision after weighing all the input. It also lets others learn from it as they see our conversations unfold.

When you start, remember that the tone is important Above all, the tone of the conversation has to be authentic and honest. Be conversational. Be yourself. Show respect. Expect respect. The goal is to help. If you don't know the answer tell them you'll find out. Then find out and let them know.

Practical tips include identifying oneself as a Best Buy employee, not asking for personal customer information (even in direct messages), don’t be pushy in trying to convince someone to buy consumer electronics from Best Buy, apologize for any delays and misunderstandings, etc.

Having launched last Sunday, Twelpforce has reportedly been in test with more than 700 registered employees, with more of them signing up daily.

Fantastic or spamtastic?

Personally, I think this is a phenomenal way to engage with Twitter users and social media in general. I’m sure that a lot of people will find it intrusive if a Best Buy employee suddenly starts talking to them after they tweeted out something random like “I could use a new flat-screen TV for my condo”, but looking at the advice provided by the company I think they actually ‘get it’ and are not looking to be overly pushy in selling you stuff.

If the response is friendly, personal and not clearly coming from someone interested only in trying to make a sale rather than being proactive about giving knowledgeable advice, I wouldn’t mind to be contacted by Best Buy employees on Twitter at all. Judging by the public stream of tweets, I’d say that this is exactly what they are doing, so kudos to them and Best Buy for thinking differently about online customer service.

More of this, please.

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Google Wave Begins To Swell With Developers; Wider Release This September

Posted: 21 Jul 2009 12:01 AM PDT

Google Wave, the search giant’s incredibly ambitious new Email/IM hybrid that was announced in May, is quickly picking up steam. As of last week the service was open to around 6,000 developers (most of whom had attended conferences like I/O), and Google is planning to send out an additional 20,000 invites over the next month. It looks like a big batch of them just went out, as we’ve received a number of tips about new invitations, and Twitter is currently abuzz with excited developers thrilled to finally get in on the action.

One other piece of news that will be very interesting to non-developers eagerly waiting to try out the service: Google is planning to release Wave to 100,000 users beginning on September 30th, using the service’s main wave.google.com hub rather than the developer site (we can likely expect a Gmail-like limited invitation system). By this time we can likely expect there to be a rich variety of Wave widgets — the site already boasts plenty of them, including a RickRoll widget and more practical things like a weather forecast — but you can’t try them out without a Developer Sandbox account.

Thanks to Noah Hendrix for the tip.

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Venture Capital Dollars Stabilize in Second Quarter at Mid-1990s Levels

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 08:58 PM PDT

Venture capital dollars going to startups in the U.S. stabilized in the second quarter at $3.7 billion, according to the latest MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. The venture money invested in the quarter is still only about half of what it was a year ago (when it was $7.2 billion in the second quarter of 2008), but is 15 percent above the low point in the first quarter of 2009 (when it was $3.5 billion). All in all, VC investments are trending at mid-1990s levels, which isn’t such a bad thing.

The average deal size came up a little bit to $6 million, from $5.3 million last quarter. Seed and early stage investing picked up after venture capitalists fled to the perceived safety of later-stage investments in recent previous quarters.

The rebound, if you want to call it that, hasn’t hit the Internet sector yet. Internet deals brought in only $524 million in the quarter, down from $593 million the quarter before and $1.7 billion a year ago. Clean tech isn’t doing so hot either, with only $274 million invested during the second quarter compared to $911 million a year ago. Most of the action came from biotech and medical devices, which saw bigger jumps in funding during the quarter to $88 million and $628 million, respectively.

Remember, this is only one source of data (most of it from Thomson Reuters).  We actually measured nearly twice the dollar amount of venture deals during the quarter on CrunchBase, which we’ll share more fully soon.

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Digg User Voted Ads In The Wild. Mmmmm, IHOP

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 08:55 PM PDT

A TechCrunch reader submits the screenshot above showing a user voted Digg advertisement for IHOP. As far as we know, this is the first time this has been seen in the wild.

The ads were first announced last month as a new type of advertising platform. The more users who digg on the ad, the less the advertiser has to pay. The more it is buried, the more the advertiser has to pay, eventually pricing it out of the system.

Here’s the interesting thing. Digg says they are internally testing Digg Ads and confirm that IHOP is one of the ads Digg employees see. But no one outside of Digg’s offices are supposed to see them yet. They give no explanation as to why this person sees the ad, but do confirm it is an accurate screenshot.

They’ve been working on this product for a long time - we first reported rumors of it in late 2008.

Anyone else see these? Send a screenshot to tips@techcrunch. Thanks, Mohamoud, for sending this.

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Adobe Unveils New Open Source Initiatives Targeted Towards Media Companies

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 08:50 PM PDT

Adobe has rolled out two new open source initiatives aimed specifically towards developers for media companies and publishers. Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework lets developers build more robust, feature-rich media players optimized specifically for the Adobe Flash Platform. The second initiative, the Text Layout Framework (TLF), will help developers create sophisticated typography capabilities to Web applications.

OSMF basically lets developers easily build media players for the Adobe Flash Platform. Adobe says the structure of OSMF lets developers leverage plug-ins for advertising, reporting metrics and content delivery along with standard video player features such as playback controls, video navigation, buffering and Dynamic Streaming. The OSMF source code and software components are available under the Mozilla Public License. Adobe is also partnering with content delivery service Akamai to create a cohesive standard to support Adobe media players that support Flash.

TLF lets developers layout text on web applications with support for complex languages, bidirectional text, multi-columns and other advanced typographical features and controls. TLF is an ActionScript library built on top of the text engine in Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5 software. Similar to OSMF, TLF is available as open source under the Mozilla Public License.

Adobe’s product manager for Flash, Tom Barclay, says that these new initiatives are mainly targeted towards media companies who want to leverage typography technologies and rich media players off of the Flash and Adobe AIR platforms. The New York Times TimesReader 2.0 and The Boston Globe's GlobeReader are both powered by TLF, and leverage the typography features of the open source code. Barclay says that Adobe saw an opportunity to open code to Flash applications that could prove to make interactive rich media applications. In the past, Adobe has also opened up the Flex Platform and launched the Open Screen Project.

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SlideRocket Raises $5 Million For Online Presentation Platform

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 08:15 PM PDT

SlideRocket, a startup that helps create online presentations, has raised $5 million in Series B funding led by Azure Capital Partners with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners participating. This new round of funding brings SlideRocket’s total funding to $7 million. The company also announced that Chuck Dietrich, former General Manager and Vice President at Salesforce.com, has joined the company as CEO.

SlideRocket is an online presentation application that produces media rich slideshows that rival PowerPoint presentations. SlideRocket says it will use the funding to grow the company by adding more hires and help continue innovation of the product.

SlideRocket took the beta label off last fall and added collaboration tools to let users share slides and other assets between presentations and turn on a conference mode similar to WebEx, allowing users on different computers to view the same presentation simultaneously.

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What’s Up Next For Yahoo? Better Search, Customizable Content (How Fluffy Do You Want Your News?)

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 07:21 PM PDT

Yahoo showed off a couple of new upcoming features during my briefing today on the new home page to launch tomorrow.

The first is a tool, called Customizable Content for now, to dial how “fun” or “serious” you like your news. Want hard core serious stuff? Pull the slider to the right. Fluffy fun stuff to the left. Leave it in the middle for a mix. User testing for this product begins in August, says Yahoo:

Yahoo will also begin integrating the new home page experience into Yahoo search. Users will be able to filter searches by type (via third parties like eHow) by clicking on apps in the left sidebar. Users can also change search type (video, etc.) via links on the left sidebar. Compare a current search for “How To Kayak” to this:

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Inspired By Japanese Food, Bit.ly Gets A Slight Redesign

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 07:12 PM PDT

1347318433_047e545bf1Yahoo isn’t the only site that is undergoing a homepage change. The URL-shortening service Bit.ly did a slight reworking of its main site today as well. And not surprisingly, it’s very Twitter-focused.

The new design is called “Bento Box,” according to a post on the Bit.ly blog. This is named after the containers that Japanese food is often served in. The reason is that Bit.ly is now more obviously broken up into sections, for the different core functionalities: Shortening links, custom URLs, posting to Twitter and shortening other links.

On the homepage, there remains a big URL input box for shortening, and below that, a list of the links you’ve already shortened (if you’re signed in). But when you enter a URL to shorten now (or do so via the handy bookmarklet), you get a nicer-looking set of options for what you can do with your new Bit.ly URL. This includes easy access to copy that URL as-is, get stats, but also a way to more obviously change the URL to a custom one. So, for example, if you want your URL to be http://bit.ly/thisismylink, you can do that (assuming it’s not taken). You could do this previously, but it was a bit buried in the UI.

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Also much nicer is the ability to easily post to different Twitter accounts. Many people have multiple Twitter accounts for multiple purposes now, and before you had to sign out of one and sign in with the other if you wanted to tweet from each with Bit.ly. Now, there’s a drop-down menu which allows you to add another account seamlessly.

Bit.ly has seen an explosion in usage since Twitter decided to make it the default URL shortener for the service. Many third-party Twitter apps use it as the default as well. The service is getting ready to roll out what sounds to be an ambitious project called Bit.ly Now, which sounds like it will take on Digg in finding out what’s popular on the web right now.

It has also been shoring up its core business by adding features such as checking for malicious URLs.

[photo: flickr/miheco]

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New Yahoo Home Page Tomorrow. Here’s What It Looks Like

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 06:57 PM PDT

Remember that new Yahoo home page we previewed waaaay back in September 2008? Tomorrow it will go live for many U.S. users, and it will eventually roll out to everyone who uses Yahoo around the world. France, India and the UK are next up after the U.S.

The final version looks a little more like one of the test pages we caught in the wild in March, without the dark background coloring on the left sidebar. But it has evolved further from that bucket test page, too.

The main difference from the current Yahoo home page is that users can now customize the page with widgets/apps from third parties. Some apps have been pre-created by Yahoo and others. And others can be added as well, Yahoo will make the app based on the URL you supply (they don’t say it needs RSS, although I’m not sure how they create it on the fly without it).

The key change, besides personalized content, is the removal of the tons of links to scores of Yahoo services. Most people only use a handful of those services, says Yahoo, so it’s better to let users decide which ones are present and take up screen real estate.

Yahoo also says they will be letting users sync up the customizations between their mobile and desktop versions of Yahoo starting soon.

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People Are Using Google Reader “Likes,” But Some Hate It. And It’s Flawed.

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 06:11 PM PDT

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As we expected, the new “like” functionality in Google Reader seems like it’s seeing some good usage. Certainly, given that “likes” are fully public, we’re seeing much more social activity on feed items than previously with Google Reader’s “share” or “share with note” functionality. And that’s good. In a world of Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook, where social sharing is very easy, Google Reader needs to become more social, more alive, if it’s to continue growing.

But quite a few people don’t like the functionality — at all. A search of “Google Reader Likes” on Twitter returns results that are nearly evenly mixed between people curious about the feature, and those that wish it would go away. Says one user on Twitter, “Hating the new “like” feature in Google Reader. I don’t want to see Likes from the Unwashed Masses. Anyone know if I can disable or filter?” That seems inline with what many are saying. They don’t care who liked a story, and want a way to turn the feature off. And one user has already created a script to do so.

Personally, what I think what the feature needs is more options. There definitely should be one to turn it off, but there should also be something that lets you sort items in any feed by the number of likes it has. While some people hate the idea of only reading what someone else likes, for popular feeds, it’s actually a somewhat useful filter in determining the most interesting articles. (But again, only in feeds that are popular enough to have many likes to begin with.)

The ease of “liking” an item is good. And I like that it’s not right next to the “star” at the top of an item so users have to at least pretend they looked at an article to “like” it. From what I’m seeing, since Google Reader implemented this feature and the search for users functionality, the number of requests for people to follow my public Google Reader shared items feed has gone through the roof. Again, that’s a good thing to keep the service moving in the direction of social.

But there is one very key flaw to the idea of Google Reader “likes” — if you read news as it comes in, you’re likely to read it before anyone is even able to “like” it. To take that idea further, the longer you wait to read your feeds, the more useful the “likes” are as a social feature. That rewards reading stories late, which is pretty much the opposite of the real-time sharing that Twitter and the like offer.

And unlike FriendFeed, where someone “liking” an item often brings it to the top of the stream, once you read an item in Google Reader, the likelihood that you’re ever going to read that item again is small. The whole concept seems to work against itself, presently. Now, this could change when Google Reader “likes” have their own API, and third-parties can do interesting things with them. But for now it seems to be encouraging RSS reading — already a slow medium through feed readers — to be done even slower.

Hopefully, Google’s ultimate goal here is to create some sort of “Best of” feeds area which you can visit at any time and see what hot items are across Google Reader. It really should have been doing this from the beginning with the “shared” functionality, but it never implemented it. Instead, Digg has owned this area, and now others like Bit.ly are about to enter that game in a big way.

And so Google’s social strategy remains flawed. There are an increasing number of pieces there, but no one can yet put them in place.

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Card.ly Lets You Create Cool Online Business Cards In A Matter Of Minutes

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 04:20 PM PDT

card.lyHave a personal domain name but not sure whether you should have it redirect to your blog, Facebook profile, LinkedIn or Twitter account? Lacking the time or skills to set up a web presence of your own where you can point to all of them at will? Card.ly is here to save the day.

Inspired by the look of the personal web page of interface designer Tim Van Damme, the team over at Harkness Labs set out to build a service where people can easily add their online profiles, pick a theme and create a good-looking online mini business card of their own in just a couple of minutes. Having lots of experience with quickly setting up and launching light-weight Web services (check out the CrunchBase profile for the company’s founder Daniel Blake for a list of other projects), it didn’t take them too long to come up with a good enough concept.

After a month or so of coding, Card.ly is now live. I love it (here’s mine), and I’m going to send the link to a bunch of my friends. It’s a bit more limited in scope than Chi.mp (our coverage) and a different approach from Unhub (our coverage), but I doubt there’s an easier way to create custom social hubs that look so damn good than Card.ly.

Once you add personal details and your various online profiles (nearly 50 are currently supported, from LinkedIn to Yelp and our own CrunchBase), you can pick a custom theme out of nearly 30 proposed designs - most of which are free, others are only available with premium accounts - and automatically have your online business card published. It’s hCard compliant and people can download a vCard from your personal Card.ly profile by clicking the recognizable icon under the title.

You can also embed widgets for your profile, which I have done at the top of this post. Finally, some themes support a ‘Stream’ tab, which basically doubles as a lifestreaming web application by pulling together all the activity from the profiles you added to your Card.ly account.

Card.ly is free when you’re content with a limited choice of skins and RSS feeds, as well as couple of other restrictions, but there’s a premium version that will set you back $24.99 a year. The paid account comes with more themes to choose from, unlimited RSS streams, and more goodies like advertisement-free cards. Not as cheap as I’d like it to be, but I paid for it just for the fact that I can link to my Google Analytics account and get advanced statistics on my personal card.

Your opinion?

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Sing About Bing For A Chance To Win $500. You Know You Want To.

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 02:56 PM PDT



Microsoft is doing a lot of things right with Bing, the new search engine it debuted in late May. For one, the engine works quite well, including a number of subtle features like video previews that Google doesn’t have (yes, some of the improvements were introduced in Live Search, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t cool). Perhaps more important, the company is doing a good job with its marketing efforts, shedding its corporate monolith culture in favor of something that’s decidedly more.. Googleish.

Today Microsoft is launching a fun little contest for Bing that invites you to sing a a jingle about Bing (no more than 5 minutes long) and upload it on Bing’s YouTube Account (another good move here Microsoft — no need to make people upload through a proprietary site). You have up until July 31 to submit videos, and voting will commence today and continue through August 5. Be sure to watch the video above of some Bing interns introducing the concept (I’m currently harassing the TechCrunch interns to make one of our own).

This kind of contest isn’t particularly novel — it just isn’t something you’d typically associate with Microsoft. Last month Google launched a contest inviting users to make a video about Google’s Chrome icon, which most people still don’t recognize. It’s no wonder why they’re keen to increase Chrome’s brand awareness: it’s going to be a full-fledged operating system soon.

You can find full details on the Bing contest here.

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Barnes and Noble launches eBookstore, Partners with Plastic Logic

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 02:40 PM PDT

Well look at that, Barnes & Noble is getting into the e-book game. Right now, there's no stand-alone reader to go along with the company's just-launched e-book store, but it's not big deal; odds are you already have the reader. (A reader, created by Plastic Logic, is scheduled to go on sale early next year.) The store, which has "700,000 titles" on its servers, goes live alongside an iPhone (and iPod touch) and Mac/PC reader software. That is, as you fire up, I don't know, iPhoto or Notepad, you could be reading The Beckham Experiment. The store doesn't look any different than the rest of BN.com, which I guess is what you want here. There's an "eBooks" tab up top, and you're greeted by all sorts of people having a good time reading books on iPhone and laptops.


Universal Studios to Launch Blu-ray Features on the iPhone

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 02:30 PM PDT

Universal Studios announced today that they would be releasing the first iPhone app to control Blu-ray features in upcoming Blu-ray releases starting with the two-disc Special Edition release of Fast & Furious on July 28. iPhone and iPod Touch owners will be able to control certain features over their local Wi-Fi network and in the instance of Fast & Furious, they'll be able to control and navigate the Virtual Car Garage. Said feature will entail control of "360-degree views of the movie's supercharged street-racers and instantly punch up exclusive technical specs for the film's high-tech cars." Universal has not stated whether or not this will be the only feature enabled on the iPhone app.


MySpace Gets Some Love From The Former Kings Of Grunge

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 02:17 PM PDT

l_76a38c042e884e4b812b9e652f0e1a0fAlright, I’ll admit upfront that I’m a little biased here. Pearl Jam was my favorite band growing up and retains a place in my heart. I like them so much, that they got me to visit the new social networking whipping boy, MySpace, today. Why? Because the band’s new single, “The Fixer” premiered exclusively on MySpace Music.

Now, I know Pearl Jam was one of the most popular bands on the planet during its heyday in the grunge-stricken 90s, but these days, they’re no match for the likes of Daughtry, and whatever else American Idol throws at us. So that’s why it’s fairly surprising to see that Pearl Jam’s new single has just about 100,000 plays in just a couple hours.

Pearl Jam, long a fighter against the establishment (see: the band’s testimony before Congress against Ticketmaster), went with MySpace Music to debut the single rather than iTunes or Amazon (where you’d have to pay to buy it) or other streaming sites like Imeem. Not sure why, but hey, it’s free and I’m back on MySpace listening to it.

If MySpace wants to slow its descent in the traffic race with Facebook, it seems like exclusive single releases like this are a solid way to go. Just tweet them out and watch the traffic roll in. Not sure that they’re making much money off it, but it’s pageviews and people on the site, clicking around.

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Launch Wars: Twitcam Beats CamTweet To Live Video Tweets

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 02:04 PM PDT

Ten days ago at our Real Time Stream CrunchUp, Justin.tv demonstrated a new beta product they are working on called CamTweet. It lets you launch a live video broadcast using your computer Webcam, Tweet it out to your followers on Twitter with a link to help gather an audience, and then keep the viral Tweets going by letting the audience sign into a chat box with their Twitter accounts so that each comment gets Tweeted out to their followers with a link back to the video.

It is a really simple, but powerful idea. So simple, in fact, that one of Justin.TV’s competitors, Livestream CEO Max Haot (who was watching the demo from New York via UStream, another live Web video competitor) decided to create the exact same product using Livestream’s new, yet-to-be released APIs.

What he came up with is Twitcam, which is live now. You sign in with your Twitter account (not yet through OAuth, though, which is subpar), hit broadcast, and you are off to the races. Comments are all routed through Twitter as well. You might be able to catch Max doing a test livestream here.

While pulling in people from Twitter to watch your live video stream might help with the live video audience problem, but it doesn’t do anything to make the actual live video streams any better than before. There is still a quality/boredom problem when it comes to live video because live video is really hard. But there is nothing like a real audience to force people to pick up their game.

What this proves is that no Twitter-related idea can remain uncopied for long. Twitcam launched before CamTweet even went into private beta. (Justin.TV is getting ready to release private beta invites later today—stay tuned). There are simply no barriers to entry for any Twitter app. And first-mover advantages are fleeting (see TinyURL Vs. Bit.ly). Better hurry up there, Justin.TV.

Update: Justin.TV has just thrown the switch for CamTweet, which you can try out here. Compare and contrast.

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Augmented Reality Twitter App Looks Awesome. Hope Apple Thinks So Too.

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 01:45 PM PDT

picture-201So this a little bit old, but we’re just seeing it after Twitter’s chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury (who came over in the Summize acquisition last year) tweeted about it last week. Check out the video at the bottom of this post for TwittARound, a new augmented reality Twitter app for the iPhone 3GS. It looks pretty damn slick.

While there are no shortage of Twitter iPhone apps out there, this one is different because it uses a combination of the device’s camera and the iPhone 3GS’s compass feature. Basically, you fire up the app and it opens your device’s camera lens, allowing you to see whatever you’re pointing the device at. Overlaid on this live image are icons of Twitter users to show those in close proximity to you who are tweeting. And below the camera is a Twitter feed of those people’s updates.

But what’s really cool is that when you move the iPhone around, the compass recognizes you’re turning and loads new tweets based on the direction you’re pointed in. It also shows how far away those people are.

It is also, apparently, not a native iPhone app. Instead, TwittARound is built with WebKit, using the new version of Safari Mobile’s 3D CSS transforms, according to the developer on his blog i.document. Why not build a native app? Here’s what he has to say:

After writing some native iPhone apps this Webkit approach seems to be ideal for rapid development of applications independent of the iPhone UI.

That sounds like something Google might say.

But there’s a potential hiccup with this: Apple. Technically, using the open camera lens (basically, live video) as your background apparently only semi-conforms to the iPhone SDK. But there’s a petition from a bunch of developers making AR apps, for Apple to fully support this.

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Acquia Finds $8 Million For Development Of Publishing System Drupal

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 01:24 PM PDT

Acquia, a startup that commercially develops and distributes open source content management system Drupal, has raised a whopping $8 million in series B funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners with Sigma Partners participating. This bring Acquia’s total funding to $15 million.

Acquia, whose co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert created the Drupal platform in 2001, tells TechCrunch that the company will use the funding to help create and expand the market for Drupal in the enterprise world. Drupal hopes to expand its existing base of 200 subscription customers.

Acquia will also use the funding to develop new products and services. Over the past year, Acquia rolled out various products connected to its publishing platform, including Acquia Hosting, Acquia Gardens (think Wordpress.com for Drupal) and Acquia Training.

The Drupal platform is built on PHP and MySQL, with the purpose of giving those with minimal programming skills the ability to create interactive websites. Acquia, which aims to be the Red Hat of the Drupal community, was one of the first commercial entities to centralize open source development efforts.

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FriendFeed’s Latest API Spreads Real-Time Goodness

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 11:43 AM PDT

FriendFeed is launching version 2 of their API for beta testing today, adding a plethora of new features for developers to work with. We’ve written in the past that FriendFeed has long been in the driver’s seat for experimentation for social media and today’s announcement reinforces that thought.

With the new version of FriendFeed’s API, developers can replicate that real time stream feeling, direct message users from other apps/sites, and add file attachments. Developers can now add the never-ending stream of updates as a user interface feature, and the API supports “long polling” to be able to speed up how fast feeds show up in the stream.

The API also allows for OAuth support and simplifies an application’s response format. So a third-party application doesn’t really need to know the difference between a user and groups or how a “friend of friend” works in the interface. FriendFeed provides the HTML for representing entries so developers don’t have to construct it. Authenticated responses include a list of possible commands on every feed, entry, and comment so developers don’t have to recreate it.

FriendFeed recently made search results real-time and has a few more real-time goodies in store for the site, including, track for topics (it already has it for people and groups).

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