The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Who Needs Spy Satellites? Google Earth Pinpoints Where Missile Targeted Taliban
- Get angry: AT&T Changes Contract to Prevent Class Action Lawsuits
- Despite All The Angst Around Its Demise, Tr.im Will Hardly Be Missed
- Who’s bad? Claim Says Michael Jackson “Bought” Twitter Followers
- Buildabrand Offers Full Blown Branding For Price Of A Domain
- Bloglines On Life Support. This Story Needs An Ending
- Digg Is On A Roll
- Microsoft Unloads Razorfish To The French For $530 Million
- Source: Dell Mobile Phone Launching In China Within Days
- tr.im Throws In the Towel
- Hey, Where’s Twitter For Families?
- The Case Against Apple Is Just As Much A Case For Apple
- How I Learned To Quit The iPhone And Love Google Voice
- If Jason Calacanis Is Against Apple, Who Can Be For It?
| Who Needs Spy Satellites? Google Earth Pinpoints Where Missile Targeted Taliban Posted: 10 Aug 2009 08:28 AM PDT  The leader of Pakistan’s Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, may or may not be dead after a CIA missile hits his father-in-law’s home in the remote “Zangarha area” of the country. But now we can see exactly where that missile hit, and we don’t even need access to a spy satellite. Thanks to Google Earth, we get the image above. Stefan Geens pinpointed the location on his blog Ogle Earth using location information gathered from news accounts. He also figured out where the supposed burial ground was. A decade ago, only a handful of people would have had access to such satellite imagery. Today, anyone can download it for free. CIA and military satellites are still higher resolution, but it makes you wonder how fast the geo-information gap between governments and citizens is closing. We’ve also seen recently how the Untied States Holocaust Memorial Museum is using Google Earth to graphically document the ongoing genocide in Darfur. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to hide from Google Earth, which makes us all Big Brother in a sense. That’s a good thing (better us than a single government or corporation). Unfortunately, Google Earth is only retrospective. You can’t see what is happening across the globe right now. Maybe one dayit will be closer to real time. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| Get angry: AT&T Changes Contract to Prevent Class Action Lawsuits Posted: 10 Aug 2009 07:53 AM PDT  When was the last time you read your AT&T contract? If you answered "never," then may I suggest you take two minutes to look this over. That's right, unbeknownst to you, you just lost the ability to enter into a class action lawsuit against the mobile phone carrier. High five!
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| Despite All The Angst Around Its Demise, Tr.im Will Hardly Be Missed Posted: 10 Aug 2009 06:53 AM PDT For all the angst around the demise of Tr.im, the fact is that there are way too many URL shortening services in the world and inevitably more will fall by the wayside. There simply is no need for more than a dozen services to make long URLs shorter (and that doesn’t even count services such as Su.pr or the Diggbar which incorporate a URL shortener as a feature). Already, the market is consolidating around bit.ly, largely thanks to it being the official URL shortener adopted by Twitter (which switched from competitor TinyURL back in May). Currently, bit.ly makes up 79.6 percent of the short URLs on Twitter, according to stats kept by Tweetmeme. It is followed by TinyURL (with 13.75 percent), is.gd (2.47 percent), ow.ly (2.26 percent), and FriendFeed’s ff.im (1.92 percent). On Friday, before it shut down, Tr.im was no. 4 on the list, even with ow.ly. So when I say that Tr.im is not going to be missed I do not mean that it was not loved by some users. It was even moderately popular. But as you can see from the market shares above, it is hard to compete against bit.ly since it is Twitter’s default URL shortener. Twitter should just buy it already and put all the other ones out of their misery. Until it does that, it is in Twitter’s interest to keep a few alternatives in the wings. If it ever chose to switch to another default service, that one would grow to 70 to 80 percent of all short links within a few months as well. In other words, if bit.ly ever slips on the innovation front, it can easily be replaced. But bit.ly is more than a URL shortening service. All of those links hold valuable data. Collecting that data plays into its grander plans to show users deep analytics and the most popular links being shared at any given time. Tr.im didn’t have any such plans. It was an afterthought of Nambu, whose main focus is to make a killer stream reader. If making URLs short (and mining the resulting data) is not your main business, it is hard to compete against startups who do nothing else. Many developers and others find Twitter’s favoritism maddening, but that is how standards are created (right or wrong). As for Tr.im users who are afraid they will lose their data or that all of their short links will be broken, bit.ly has offered to create a short-link redirecting archive at 301works. Nambu should take them up on the offer (but it won’t right now because it wants to sell tr.im and that data is valuable). What happens to those links is really what we should be worried about. Broken links mess up the Web. All URL shortening services should make a directory of all of their short links available where anyone (especially search engines) can look up the underlying long link where each one redirects. Maybe this is 301works or some other non-profit repository, but having all of these non-standard short links proliferate will just create more problems down the road when other URL shorteners inevitably fail. And fail they will, which is another reason for publishers to use their own custom URL shortener (we use Awe.sm) and always control their data. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Who’s bad? Claim Says Michael Jackson “Bought” Twitter Followers Posted: 10 Aug 2009 05:56 AM PDT
"I can’t admit that we dealt with Michael Jackson directly, though we were in touch with someone in his family recently who tasked us with conducting a Twitter campaign on an account relating to him," said uSocial.net CEO Leon Hill. "It was exciting to say the very least to conduct work with such a big name." This doesn’t mean anything, besides the fact that whoever was looking after Michael Jackson’s Twitter account was an idiot. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  
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| Buildabrand Offers Full Blown Branding For Price Of A Domain Posted: 10 Aug 2009 04:41 AM PDT
Answer a few questions about your business and buildabrand will provide a selection of brand identities: logos, fonts and so on. You can then apply that branding (after customizing it, if you choose) to downloadable graphics, stationery, website templates and even - eventually - merchandise like pens and, er, beach towels. You just pay for the items you order or download. The service requires no creative skills from users. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Bloglines On Life Support. This Story Needs An Ending Posted: 10 Aug 2009 01:53 AM PDT
The once-great feed reader, bought by IAC in February 2005 for around $10 million, has been on life support for a couple of years now. A two year old beta site with new features remains in beta and has never been launched on the main domain name. A band aid was put on the problems the service had a year ago, but not a single new feature of note has launched since then. Repeated attempts to sell the service for next to nothing went nowhere. And recently, we’ve heard, IAC strongly considered simply shutting it down. The team ultimately decided not to, but they are clearly looking for a long term home for the project. Competitor Newsgator recently threw in the towel and suggested users port their feeds over to Google Reader. Something interesting needs to happen at Bloglines at a product level, or they will, inevitably, be deadpooled. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Posted: 09 Aug 2009 11:43 PM PDT Digg’s been busy lately adding new features—some loved, some not—but they seem to be having a positive effect on overall. In June, comScore estimates the site brought in 8.8 million unique visitors in the U.S alone, up 31 percent over the preceding three months. What accounts for the change all of a sudden? Well, by Digg’s own admission, once it introduced the Diggbar it saw an initial lift in visitors just as a result of people passing around short links. And it’s been getting even more aggressive on that front lately, having to reverse itself at times. But it’s not just the Diggbar. The site launched a decent search feature in April (which always helps generate more traffic) and Facebook Connect in May. Its recently-introduced Digg Dialoggs with people like Al Gore, Trent Reznor, and Marissa Mayer have also been popular. Users can suggest and vote on questions of be asked during a video interview conducted by Digg founder Kevin Rose. What do you think is the biggest source of new visitors to Digg? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Microsoft Unloads Razorfish To The French For $530 Million Posted: 09 Aug 2009 10:03 PM PDT More than two years after buying advertising network aQuantive for $6 billion, Microsoft finally unloaded the digital advertising agency that came with that deal. It sold Razorfish to French advertising conglomerate Publicis Groupe for $530 million in a combination stock-and-cash transaction. The price was 1.4 times Razorfish’s 2008 sales of $380 million. Microsoft has been shopping Razorfish around all summer. It was reportedly hoping to get $600 to $700 million, but the advertising recession didn’t help. Microsoft settled for a slight discount to that. But at least now Microsoft is out of the people-heavy ad agency business (Razorfish has 2,000 employees), and can concentrate more on its automated search and display ad platforms. Razorfish remains one of Microsoft’s preferred ad agencies (it came up with the Bing ads). And as part of the deal, Publicis agreed to purchase both search and display ads from Microsoft on behalf of its clients. Maybe that is where Microsoft will make up the difference between the $530 million and its original asking price. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Source: Dell Mobile Phone Launching In China Within Days Posted: 09 Aug 2009 08:57 PM PDT
Our sources on new hardware coming out of Asia tend to be spot on (we broke the news of the second and third generation Amazon Kindles, the launch of the Palm Pre and the existence of the second Palm WebOS phone and generally have good information on sales figures for iPhones, Kindles and other devices). But in this case the information we’ve received is extremely thin. There have been reports of Dell launching a phone in the Chinese market in recent months, with rumors of the carrier partner being China Mobile in one case and China Unicom in another. There is also wide speculation on the operating system, but we’re guessing it’s Android. Dell has also been working with Google on an Android-powered tablet computer in recent months. But in April Reuters had a report that Dell may be creating a proprietary operating system with China-based software maker Red Office. What we’ve heard on the hardware: iPhone-like, touchscreen, no physical keyboard. that’s it for now. Keep an eye on the Dell China site. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| Posted: 09 Aug 2009 05:47 PM PDT
Nambu Networks will now focus its attention on Nambu for Mac OS and iPhone.
Nambu Network’s doesn’t specifically say how many URL’s have been shortened, but looking at Twitter, tr.im was quite popular. The URL’s already shortened with tr.im will not be affected, but all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. tr.im has been added to the Deadpool. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  
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| Hey, Where’s Twitter For Families? Posted: 09 Aug 2009 04:30 PM PDT
Earlier this week I was talking to TechCrunch alum (and rockstar dev) Henry Work, who told me he was thinking of setting up a Yammer account with the sole purpose of keeping in touch with his immediate family. It’s a fantastic idea — Yammer allows for secure, private communication, offers an iPhone app, SMS support, and a web client, and is free for basic functionality. Even better: the company has just comfirmed that it’s planning to offer Push notifications for its iPhone app in the near future, which would help cut back on SMS costs. It’s not hard to think of countless ways that a family-oriented Yammer group could come in handy, especially for families with children who are still in school. Need someone to pick up the kids from baseball practice? Send out a message and see if a spouse or older sibling can help, without having to wade through a game of phone tag. Quickly send out reminders that you’re heading to Grandma’s house in the morning to make sure nobody sleeps in. And, of course, you can hold nightly polls to figure out what’s for dinner. But there’s one hitch. Yammer only accepts users with company Email addresses — you can’t just fill in your Gmail account and get started. Anyone looking to use Yammer in this fashion would have to register their own domain name and create a new Email account for each family member. In other words, it’s not something that the vast majority of the population is going to be doing any time soon. I’m sure there are a handful of under-appreciated startups that have had this very idea, but a quick Google search for “Twitter for families” doesn’t reveal any obvious choices. In fact, most of the relevant links are articles talking about people who actually do use Twitter itself to talk to their families. I suppose that would work if you kept all of your tweets private and didn’t want to let anyone other than your family members follow you, but that doesn’t seem practical. So here’s what we need: a Yammer-like service that allows for easy signups (rather than use domains to restrict registrations, it could simply require approval from the family’s account admin). Monetization could involve premium features (calendar reminders?) or perhaps a low monthly fee. Given that it already has the technology, Yammer could obviously build something like this fairly quickly — they could even use it to further extend the Geni brand (Yammer was a Geni spin-off). And if they don’t do it, someone else should. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| The Case Against Apple Is Just As Much A Case For Apple Posted: 09 Aug 2009 02:22 PM PDT
The Backstory While my story with computers doesn’t go back quite as far as Calacanis’, our stories are pretty similar. He said that 6 years ago he made the switch to Apple products after a 20-year affair with Microsoft. I made the same switch 5 years ago after a roughly 15-year affair with Microsoft. Regular readers may have heard this already, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but in the 1990s I loved Microsoft products and hated Apple stuff. I grew up on DOS, installed Windows For Workgroups because I thought it was cooler than regular Windows 3.1, bought Windows Bob, made my dad take me to the midnight launch of Windows 95, bought Windows 98 the day it came out, actually bought and used Windows ME, and bought Windows XP the day it came out. I could fill that timeline in with many other pro-Microsoft details, but let’s just say I was hooked. It’s not like I loved Microsoft because I didn’t know anything else. Our high school was Mac-only. I hated it. The systems were slow, I hated their UI and I just found them generally frustrating to work with. And I used them everyday for years. Throughout all of high school and college I only bought PCs even after many viruses and a few complete system failures. So what changed? For me, two things. First, the iPod. Second, OS X. After I finished college in 2004, I bought my first iPod. Prior to that I had been using several other MP3 players (one of which I got for free when I bought Windows XP). But I needed a new device with a lot of storage for my long drive out to California. Obviously, I had heard great things about the iPod, and despite its high price tag, I decided to get one. The fact that it was so much better than every other MP3 player I had used to that point said nothing specifically about Apple’s other products, but it did plant the thought in my head that if Apple was able to make such a nice experience for its portable music players, maybe its computer experience had also evolved from the poor one I remembered from high school. Still, I was a broke just-out-of-college kid, and Macs were yes, expensive. So my curiosity remained a curiosity for the time-being. But a few months later, I was living in LA and working in Hollywood. Everyone there was using Macs, and as such, I had to use one at my job. Less than a week into using one on a regular basis, I realized something: I liked OS X a lot. Since it was released after my time in high school, and I still generally avoided Macs in college, I hadn’t really ever used the OS before. But in Hollywood, I was forced to, and I really liked it. If the iPod had planted the Apple seed in my head, using OS X watered it. The conclusion soon blossomed: Apple now made great products. Within a couple of months I had bought my own Mac (the cheapest white MacBook I could find) to serve as a back up to my PC. A couple months after that I basically stopped using my PC. A couple months after that I shipped the PC home as a present for my dad. I have never bought another PC since. During that time, I have bought 5 Macs. The Product
It’s a simple point, one that is certainly subjective, but I really believed it, and that’s why I switched. And it’s why I remain an Apple-user despite some of the headaches, which I’ll get to. If you make a great product, you can get away with a lot — which again, Apple has. But it is my belief that it will continue to, because at the end of the day all that really matters is the product. That’s despite Calacanis’ belief that there’s a brewing backlash against Apple. Sure, there is a small one among tech journalists and some in the mobile developer community. And I do believe it is warranted. But the fact remains that Apple’s business is stronger than it has ever been, and that’s because more people are Apple users — whether that be Mac computers, iPods or iPhones. The easiest way to continue on at this point will be to look at and address each of Calacanis’ 5 points. 1. Destroying MP3 player innovation through anti-competitive practices Calacanis argues that Apple should open iTunes to any MP3 players on the market. He says that if that occurred, other MP3 players not necessarily made by Apple would flourish. I think he has it backwards. I actually think iTunes is not a great piece of software, and that Apple could do a much better job with it (iTunes 9 might help out with that). And I believe Apple may actually know that, as I have heard whispers that they’ve been trying to completely revamp it for some time now, with no luck so far. The key ingredient in the iTunes/iPod universe is the full ecosystem aspect of it. iTunes isn’t great for the straightforward managing of music, but it is brilliant for buying music through iTunes and having it sync automatically with your iPod (and now your iPhone). Even if Apple opened iTunes up for use with other MP3 players, I have a hard time believing the market would flow towards other players. Having used quite a few of the MP3 players that are available in the U.S., I think it’s pretty clear that the iPod (all its different flavors) is still the best of breed. There may be better ones in Asian countries, but some of the features that Calacanis talks about like TV-tuners would not fly here. (This is something I’ll hit on again later when we get into the iPhone.) But the key here is that with iTunes open to other MP3 players, Apple would have less control over the user experience, something which is very important to them. Adding non-Apple devices which Apple would have little or no control over from a hardware perspective would be a headache for them and in turn, for some users. It might be worth it if they made significant money from music sales on iTunes, but they don’t. Sure, some people do not want or like that level of control, and there is somewhat of an argument that it is in some ways anti-competitive, but the majority of users of iPods benefit from the ease of use that a contained ecosystem provides. And the bigger picture is that this really doesn’t matter that much anyway, because the iPod and all other MP3 players as we know them are currently in the process of a slow death. And as devices connected to the web take over, eventually much of the media consumption and management on these devices will occur on the device itself. 2. Monopolistic practices in telecommunications
I absolutely agree that Apple and AT&T’s exclusive partnership is a problem. It’s a big problem. And I think for both consumers and Apple it needs to end when the deal is up next year. But I believe that Apple realizes that too, and will open the device to other networks (or at least announce the intention to do so) at some point next year. It simply makes no sense not to. Not only is AT&T performing poorly under the strain of so many iPhones, but for Apple to keep expanding its user base, it simply needs to be on other carriers in the U.S. At the same time, it’s all-too-easy to forget that the iPhone has absolutely changed the mobile landscape in the U.S. for the better. We complain about not being able to browse the web on AT&T’s crappy network, but think back not even 5 years ago when the idea of browsing the mobile web at all, was absurd. I remember being very excited to get the Motorola RAZR when it finally came to Verizon. I still have that phone; it’s laughable compared to just about every phone on the market right now. And a lot of that is thanks to the iPhone. I’m not saying there would not have been innovation without it, but I am saying that Apple’s product made its competitors get their heads out of their asses, and we’re starting to see the fruits of that with nice devices from Palm, RIM and some of the newer Android phones. Ones that don’t have to use the shitty carrier-built operating systems. Yes, it sucks that the iPhone is tied to AT&T right now. But my CDMA RAZR was tied to Verizon, and I was stuck using their hideous operating system which offered me next to nothing. My point is just that in some ways, many of us have been spoiled this past 2+ years with the iPhone. It’s easy to forget what it was like before it existed. Which is to say, awful. And just to hop back to the Asian marketplace, which I mentioned earlier, it is true that they have had some amazing phones with amazing capabilities for a while. But the point is that here in America, the carriers had us completely under siege with horrible phones and even worse plans until very recently. When Apple cut its deal with AT&T for the iPhone, the same deal we all now bitch about (maybe none more than me), it changed the landscape — for the better. I’m not going to get into Calacanis’ two SIM card idea, which sounds nice, but would be a complicated nightmare that hardly anyone would pay for. 3. Draconian App Store policies that are, frankly, insulting I agree with a lot of this, and have expressed why numerous times in the past. It is ridiculous that we can rent movies on our iPhones that have nudity and graphic violence, but can’t have apps that offer the same. Actually no, it’s not just ridiculous, it’s hypocritical. I understand why that was the case before there were parental controls, but now they’re in place and Apple is still banning applications that it has no business banning left and right when it offers movies with the same stuff. Yes, it’s Apple’s store and they can do what they want. And if they don’t want hardcore porn apps, that’s fine — they also don’t sell hardcore porn movies. They do sell plenty of rated-R movies though, yet restrict many apps that would obtain a similar (or possibly even lighter) rating.
The mobile app world is new and still evolving. A number of Apple’s App Store rejections are ridiculous. Hell, I cover a lot of them and say as much. But I think it’s wrong to think that Apple is doing this with malicious intent. Based on a number of conversations I’ve had with people to varying degrees in the know about Apple’s App Store, I would argue that they simply were not ready for what it has become. I’ve heard that when it launched, there were just a handful of people who would check every single app that was submitted. Undoubtedly, the team has expanded quite a bit since then, but it still very much seems like they have no comprehensive strategy when it comes to app approvals and rejections. Many seem arbitrary, and at the whim of the reviewers, because I believe they are. When Apple VP Phil Schiller wrote to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber last week about one app rejection, his last line was the most telling:
Of that, I would change “if we err” to “when we err”, but it seems pretty clear that Schiller and Apple know there have been real problems with the system, and they’re attempting to correct them. I don’t think they’re doing a good enough job of that, but I have no doubt that is hard to change things on the fly with a entity that is exploding in popularity as quickly as the App Store is. It’s not an excuse for some of Apple’s poor decisions, but it is unfortunately, the reality. Calacanis’ solution is to give users the option to install unapproved apps as an option. That would just be a slightly easier way of jailbreaking your phone, something which is already extremely easy to do. The reason why Apple won’t do this is the same reason why it won’t open iTunes to other MP3 players. When it controls the ecosystem, it can ensure the customer experience. Something which, again, is very important to Apple. That may not be what some people want to hear, but the fact is that it works well for the majority of users who have no idea about the app approval process. 4. Being a horrible hypocrite by banning other browsers on the iPhone
With the iPhone, mobile web browsing has exploded. Would it be nice for Apple to let you use other browsers on your phone? Sure, but really, how much different is each mobile browser compared to another one? Some are faster at JavaScript, I guess, but all lack the bells and whistles that their desktop counterparts offer. I wonder if what Calacanis is really getting at is that he wants a browser that can run Flash? I think we all want that, but Apple has decided that for whatever reason it is not going to do that. Maybe it’s waiting for the HTML 5 video capabilities to make Flash less necessary (which still seems a long ways off)? Maybe it really believes the performance is simply not up to par? Who knows. But even with another browser on the iPhone, Apple would still have to allow for plug-ins to be installed, which probably wouldn’t happen. As the mobile web and devices continue to mature, there undoubtedly will be a lot to be said for having other browsers on the phone. I just don’t see that as such a big issue right now. 5. Blocking the Google Voice Application on the iPhone I completely agree that this is ridiculous. And the fact that Google is now implementing a work-around by making Google Voice a web app for the iPhone, shows that banning the native app is also pointless. But I believe this rejection had more to do with AT&T — and certainly more than they’re letting on. When Calacanis says, “Or, just simply stop being jerks and let the free market decide how to use the data services they've BOUGHT AND PAID FOR.” I would again point to that being AT&T’s issue much more than Apple’s. We’ve seen that with the SlingPlayer app, which can only work over WiFi but not on AT&T’s 3G network because they’re concerned about the bandwidth it would use. We’re all paying near or over $100 a month to use the iPhone on AT&T’s network. If they cannot handle the iPhone any longer — which I’ve made the argument that I don’t think they can — then both Apple and AT&T should agree to remove the exclusivity agreement. Conclusion While Calacanis certainly has some valid points, I would argue that some of his points simply reinforce what makes Apple, Apple. By controlling the ecosystem surrounding their products, Apple ensures a great user experience for the majority of users. And that’s really the key point: The majority of users. We can bitch as much as we want about Apple’s shortcomings, but by and large the public couldn’t care less about any of it, nor do they even know about any of this stuff. Does my sister care that Apple rejected Google Voice? No, she’s never heard of Google Voice. As far as she knows, all is well in the Apple universe because she turns on her iPhone and boots up her Mac and they work, giving her an experience that she finds superior to competitors’ products. The fact remains that as long as the company continues pumping out high-quality products that offer this great user experience, people will buy them. Calacanis believes that cheap and stable products from Microsoft and Google will undercut Apple, but that seems to be the same thing that people have been saying for years about Apple’s products. Macs are too expensive, iPods are too expensive, the iPhone is too expensive — people are still buying them. And they’re doing so at or near record levels, which is stunning in this economy.
And while Calacanis may have spent $20,000 on Apple products over the years, everyone that is not Calacanis has spent billions upon billions more. Until those billions stop rolling in, Apple will generally stay on the same path. Despite some of the rhetoric, Apple is not a totalitarian state, it is very much a democracy. It’s just that in this democracy, people vote with their wallets. None of that is to say that Apple shouldn’t fix any of its aforementioned problems. With regards to AT&T and its App Store policies, it certainly needs to. But it’s humorously short-sighted to think that they won’t. But Calacanis goes farther, “Making great products does not absolve you from technology's cardinal rule: Don't be evil.” That would seem to suggest that he believes Apple is making some of these mistakes with malicious intent. Instead, I would argue that the mistakes stem from the pursuit of making great products. They control the ecosystem because people left to their own devices would make the products less great. That’s something that will be hard for a lot of people to hear, let alone understand. But I do believe it’s at the core of what Calacanis thinks makes Apple “evil.” And that’s why much of this isn’t a case against Apple, it’s a case for Apple. Many of the problems Calacanis talks about simply aren’t seen as problems by Apple, and more importantly, by the public at large. Until that changes, there is no real risk to Apple. In fact, I would argue that the only real risk to Apple goes back to the simple point: Great products. If Apple stops making products that are great, it will start to decline. If someone else comes along with a better product, Apple will decline. It’s that simple. 5 years ago, it was my belief that Apple offered a better product that got me to ditch my PC. And I’ll switch again from Apple if something better comes along. This isn’t some elaborate conspiracy in which Steve Jobs is tricking millions of people into buying his stuff against their will. They’re buying his stuff because it’s good. End of story. [photos: flickr/kyz, william.hook, declanTM, renatomitra, chris radcliff, the pug father] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.  
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| How I Learned To Quit The iPhone And Love Google Voice Posted: 09 Aug 2009 12:58 PM PDT
Porting my phone number to Google Voice was a three day process, which I was pre-warned about. The mobile carriers in the U.S. have made the porting process between them fairly easy, and it occurs over a couple of hours. But they are in no hurry to help customers move their phone numbers to Google Voice, and so it took a few extra days. Also, I’m one of the first people to port their phone number to Google Voice, and there are always a few hiccups when you’re a guinea pig. A week ago I was an unhappy AT&T iPhone customer. I couldn’t get cell phone reception here at my house and so I was always missing important calls. Today I’m a happy Google Voice customer. My old mobile number, which all of my contacts already have, now rings simultaneously on my home Vonage phone and the TMobile myTouch 3G Android phone that I’ve started using (and, by the way, TMobile works just fine here at home, too). If I want to start using a new phone, I can make a switch in the settings at Google Voice and calls will ring through to that instead. no carrier will ever have a stranglehold on me again.
Single best feature of Google Voice: Call blocking. Someone spams my SMS or calls me too much, I click a button and they can never call or SMS me again. So what’s the downside? I had to pay the AT&T termination fee of $175. But that’s it. And this myTouch phone (which TMobile has supplied to me for free for a test period) is an excellent piece of hardware. I believe it is superior to the iPhone 3GS - it loads the camera app and video app faster, and web pages load in about 2/3 the time it takes on the iPhone/AT&T (likely more AT&T’s fault than the iPhone). The Android apps are far more interesting because they have the ability to integrate with any native function (so, for example, Google Voice, banned on the iPhone, has taken over the myTouch native dialer). And I can run persistent apps in the background like Google Talk, which lets me keep a chat window open to contacts all the time. Google Voice really is nearly perfect. The only thing that would be better is if they became a MVNO and offered mobile services directly as well. And tethering would be a nice feature. But for now I’m extremely happy with my mobile situation. And I plan to never do business directly with a carrier again. Want to port your mobile number to Google Voice and do what I’ve done? You can’t just yet, but porting will be released later this year publicly. Prepare yourselves, and don’t sign any new long term contracts with your carrier. Life will soon be good for you, too. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0  
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| If Jason Calacanis Is Against Apple, Who Can Be For It? Posted: 09 Aug 2009 09:53 AM PDT  It is the end. Jason "The Animal" Calacanis is thinking about maybe quitting using Apple products, reporting that the company has gone all corporate and mainstream and that Steve has lost his hippie, dippy LSD edge. Look at this language, people: Years and years after Microsoft's antitrust headlines, Apple is now the anti-competitive monster that Jobs rallied us against in the infamous 1984 commercial. Steve Jobs is the oppressive man on the jumbotron and the Olympian carrying the hammer is the open-source movement For folks in the tech industry, this is not a new discussion. Another radical visionary, Steve Gillmor, has been hosting this discussion since Apple's draconian iTunes updates led smart people to *downgrade* their software. Think about that mind bomb for a second: people downgrading their software to maintain their freedoms–is this a William Gibson novel? Steve Jobs is on the cusp of devolving from the visionary radical we all love to a sad, old hypocrite and control freak–a sellout of epic proportions.This is not the thought process of a well man. Perhaps Jason spent too much time next to his Tesla roadster or maybe the stress of running Mahalo has finally gotten to him but someone needs to send Jason an iPod Shuffle STAT. Intra-cardial insertion of the Shuffle, much like the needle in Pulp Fiction, has been known to snap anti-Apple zealots out of their madness.
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According to controversial “paid follower” service uSocial.net, Michael Jackson (or, more likely, his people) attempted to buy 25,000 followers for 
Every now and again, you come across a service that promises to disrupt and change the entrepreneurial landscape. 
If you were a 
A source with knowledge of the situation tells us that Dell is launching (or at least announcing) a mobile phone in China in the next day or two. We are trying to verify the information and gather more details on the hardware and operating system now.
Since I joined TechCrunch I’ve seen more Twitter clones and derivatives then I’d care to remember, most of which haven’t really gone anywhere. But there are a few gems that have managed to tackle markets that Twitter has, for whatever reason, ignored. One of these is 
I’ve had a half dozen or so longer posts about Apple brewing in my head the past couple of weeks. There is no shortage of controversy surrounding the company right now thanks largely to the 
Okay, that is a lot of set up to get to an opening point, and one that is actually the most important point. I made the switch from the PC world to the Mac world because of one thing: I believed that Apple started making better products than the other guys.
“Apple's iPhone is a revolutionary product that has devolved almost all of the progress made in cracking–wait for it–AT&T's monopoly in the '70s and '80s,” Calacanis writes. On one hand that is a very interesting statement, in so much as it relates to AT&T specifically. On the other, it’s pretty ridiculous.
That being said, I think Calacanis’ point about how ridiculous it would be if Microsoft approved every app for Windows is a bad one. It’s not like Apple restricts applications for OS X on its Macs; doing that would cause an uproar just like it would on Windows. But the mobile space is different because it’s so new when it comes to apps. Microsoft is going to restrict apps that can be on Windows Phones. They won’t be as strict as Apple, but they will still have restrictions, just as Android does.
Again, this to me is just as much about the mobile landscape being a completely different one than the desktop landscape, even though they are merging. When the iPhone launched, the idea of a mobile browser was basically a joke. Sure, Opera may have been decent on Windows Mobile devices, but let’s be honest, hardly anyone was browsing the web on their phones.
He seems to be suggesting that the premium market will disappear. But again, if it hasn’t in this economic environment, I don’t see it happening. Cheap, stable and open sound great, and they are great, for some people. But others are fine with paying more for what they consider a superior experience, and they will continue to do so.
At the end of July I declared my intention to 
Not only are calls being sent to both of my phones simultaneously now, but all my voicemails are now aggregated at Google Voice and immediately transcribed and emailed and SMS’d to me (complete | 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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