The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- TwitterSense. It’s Coming.
- Google UK On Fire (Literally)
- You Can’t Kill The Mindex. iMindi Is Back.
- iPhone Users Share Download Behavior With Android Users, But Buy More Apps
- Bambuser Releases Android App For Cellphone Video Streaming
- Linksify Gets A $500,000 Injection, Aims To Improve Contact Management
- Yoono Grows Up, Launches A Desktop App
- ShowClix Secures Series A Funding For Event Ticketing Service
- Apple Finally Signs Deal With China Unicom, Brings The iPhone To China In October
- Echo Won’t Kill Comments — They Died A Long Time Ago
- Boxcar 2.0 Is A Must-Have For the iPhone. It’s The Best Push Notification App Yet.
- Slacker Premium Not Quite A Scam, But Close
- Google Toolbar Fail; Doesn’t Work On Chrome
- Nokia Eyes Emerging Markets With Obopay-Powered Payment Platform
- New Apple Tablet Interface Pics? Probably Not, But Who Knows.
- Google To Open The AdSense Gates To Other Ad Networks — That They Approve Of
- Facebook Wants To Own Idea Of Crowdsourced Translations
- Facebook Reiterates That You Can Reject Friends Without Looking Like A Jerk
- Sony And Google Try To Take On The Kindle With Open Books
- NetVibes Gets Into Website Design
- Palm Wants To Embrace Google Voice, But It’s Not Clear Google Wants To Embrace Palm
- Balihoo Raises $7 Million To Help National Brands Market Themselves At The Local Level
- Yahoo Gets With The Program, Finally Lets You Play Videos In Search Results
- CrunchBoard: Yelp, MTV Networks, and More!
- TechCrunch50: Don Dodge, Paul Graham, Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Schroepfer join Panel of Experts
| Posted: 27 Aug 2009 07:37 AM PDT At this very moment, at this very villa in the Israeli city of Hertzeliya Pituach, the final preparations are being made for what can be best described as ‘TwitterSense’—a way to automatically filter your Twitter stream so that the most relevant Tweets come out on top. The location in question is the home of my6sense, which currently offers a powerful way to filter news feeds. It is applying its filtering technology to Twitter and by the looks of it you’ll soon be able to follow as many Twitter users as you want and still never miss out on the most important tweets. It took insistent prodding on my part to get my6sense to spill some of the beans and give me a sneak peak. The good news is that TwitterSense (my term, not theirs) is real and it works. The bad news is that it’ll take a couple of more months to be deployed. And yes, it could greatly improve the way we consume Twitter streams. The advent of a TwitterSense offering could not be timelier as the onslaught of noise on Twitter has increased dramatically and its manageability has become a real pain point. Even Robert “The Stream Prince” Scoble has had to take dramatic measures, namely, slashing the number of users he follows on Twitter and befriends on Facebook. I, on the other hand, keep the number of people I follow on Twitter in the neighborhood of 150. This number works well for me, but I keep wondering whether I’m missing out on users who could provide insights relevant to my personal and professional interests. That is exactly where TwitterSense would come into play. First, a quick recap on my6sense: The company has been building out what it calls ‘digital intuition,’ a content ranking technology that to date has been applied to RSS feeds to separate the signal from the noise. My6sense's technology translates user actions such as Web navigation within and across various streams of content, and actions taken with various pieces of information in different contexts, into semantically-sensible implicit user feedback. The real beauty is that it requires zero intervention other than using the app itself. Here’s how I described my experience with the alpha release:
A couple of weeks ago my6sense announced its new native iPhone app (iTunes link), which along with a few new features, presented a major user experience improvement over the original iPhone web app version. So far there is nothing seemingly compelling beyond our previous in-depth look into the company’s technology. But looks can be deceiving. Underneath the surface lies what could transform the way my6sense users consume Twitter. TwitterSense in an extension of my6sense’s ranking technology and in this respect treats a user’s Twitter stream like an ordinary content source, much like an RSS feed. To begin with, my6sense has to differentiate between simple status updates/personal tweets and tweets which link to content. The differentiation is a must because its ranking algorithms require further optimization to be able to correctly float important simple/status tweets. In the short-term they have no plans to solve this particular challenge. Instead, the company is focusing on ranking tweets with links—and we all get quite a few of those. From my6sense’s perspective, your friends provide the first level of filtering. It then provides the second level by taking it upon itself to re-rank these Tweets so a users’ focus is directed to the information that is most important to them. If you tend to click on links from specific friends on Twitter, those will get a boost in the rankings. But my6sense also looks at the underlying pages behind the links and figures out what topics those pages are about using its semantic engine. If those topics match your interests, as determined by your past reading and clicking behavior on the app, then those links rise to the top as well. So the obvious question to ask is, why then if it rests upon my6sense’s existing technology isn’t it deployed already? First, there are challenges in ranking the content behind the link. A typical web page includes not only the post/article itself, but additional data and content as well. my6sense wants to make sure it ranks the intended content and this isn’t always trivial. Second, there are scalability challenges. On average, a Twitter stream encompasses a greater mass of content than an average RSS feed. This means that my6sense has to go out and parse every piece of content behind every link in a user’s steam so it can analyze it based on the user’s ranking model. This requires extra processing power in order to avoid significant delays in ranking. My6sense did close a round of funding recently, but it can’t just throw money at the problem and solve it via brute force (i.e. just buy more machines). I asked Barak Hachamov, the company’s founder and president, whether they’ll be offering TwitterSense integration for Twitter clients. His answer was that they do have such plans but it’s far too early to talk about them now. My6sense plans to make TwitterSense publicly available in a couple of months or so. In the meantime, if you want to experience what it will behave like I suggest downloading my6sense’s native iPhone app to see how it works on RSS feeds. You won’t have to spend very long waiting to see the ranking magic since some backend improvements were made that get users to achieve the ‘A-ha moment’ I mentioned above much quicker, even within one or two brief sessions. There’s also a new digital intuition meter that provides users with feedback regarding the status of their preference model and indicates how strong their digital intuition is at that point in time. We’ll be keeping a close tab on the upcoming release of this so called TwitterSense and reexamine it when it’s made publicly available in a couple of months.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco           | ||||||||
| Posted: 27 Aug 2009 07:01 AM PDT We’re not inclined to refute reports from a professional journalist on Twitter, so when Daily Telegraph reporter Jon Swaine says Google’s UK headquarters in London are currently on fire, we believe it’s true. Especially since the man has managed to provide some evidence by uploading a picture to photo-sharing service TwitPic. Here’s a clear picture of fire on the roof of some building, supposedly housing Google UK’s offices on Buckingham Palace Road. Let’s hope no one gets hurt. Update: The Telegraph writes the building was evacuated, thankfully no one got hurt and we’re told that the fire (now out) was the result of a tree catching flames during a rooftop terrace BBQ above one of the three floors Google occupies in the building. (Via @Scobleizer) Update 2: now that the fire is out and everyone is safe, enjoy this spoof: Update 3: and this one Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| You Can’t Kill The Mindex. iMindi Is Back. Posted: 27 Aug 2009 06:37 AM PDT It got skewered at last year’s TechCrunch50. Then when it finally launched in private beta, it “accidentally deleted” all of its initial user accounts. But iMindi is back and it wants you to help it build the Mindex. iMindi wants to be a Twitter on steroids. Actually, it is the exact opposite of Twitter. It is more for people who want to have lengthy discussions and explore topics deeply. Instead of a 140-character limit, it has a 20,000-character limit. You can have threaded discussions about different topics, follow people, and topic categories (”think tanks”). You dump in your thoughts or excerpts from articles, then iMindi does a semantic analysis of the concepts and connect those “thoughts” with other similar ones (this is what they mean by the Mindex). In the private beta, iMindi had some mind map visualizations, but it has abandoned those in the interest of simplicity. Now all iMindi needs is for people to fill its database so that it can start linking people’s thoughts. I kind of think that going for long-form, blog-like discussions is going to be harder for people to get into than short bursts of micro-information. But it might appeal to people who want something deeper than Twitter. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| iPhone Users Share Download Behavior With Android Users, But Buy More Apps Posted: 27 Aug 2009 06:13 AM PDT
Here are the takeaways from the July report, with some commentary of my own: - App discovery is mostly done by perusing through the rankings on the App Store and Android Market >> not much of a surprise since it’s a centralized platform for something - Over 90% of users who browse the application storefronts do so from their mobile devices rather than their computer >> makes sense, because that’s where they end up too, but the percentage is very high regardless - Android and iPhone users download 9-10 new apps per month, while iPod touch users download 18 on average. Furthermore, 22% of iPod Touch owning survey respondents download more than 20 free apps a month >> I’d expect downloading behavior to be similar for both platforms, but I have no clue why iPod Touch users would be inclined to download double the amount of apps than mobile phone users. (update: commenters suggest the younger demographic of iPod Touch owners likely install more games, boosting the average) - Over half of Android and iPhone users spend more than 30 minutes per day using apps - 19% of Android users download at least 1 paid app per month, compared to 50% of iPhone users and 40% of iPod Touch users >> this is the key finding in the report, although it would also be helpful to correlate these statistics with app pricing and actual revenue - Users who regularly purchase paid apps spend an average of $9 on about 5 paid apps per month - Dividing the average amount paid per month by the average number of paid apps downloaded yields an average app purchase price of about $1.80 >> this seems rather high If you’d extrapolate the findings on app spending, which is not without risk considering the relatively small number of users surveyed, and combine them with estimated numbers of users of the devices / platforms, you could conclude that the App Store paid market is currently nearly $200 million per month (or approximately $2.4 billion a year) in size compared to $5 million per month (or $60 million on a yearly basis) for the Android Market. Both strike me as overstated, particularly the estimated paid market size for Apple’s App Store, so I’d wager we need a bit more deep-delving analysis before reaching such conclusions. You can download the full report here (PDF). Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Bambuser Releases Android App For Cellphone Video Streaming Posted: 27 Aug 2009 04:50 AM PDT
Bambuser’s main claim is that it has the lowest latency out of all the mobile video streaming services. In order to keep the video stream as close to real-time as possible, the Bambuser app drops a few frames here and there, while at the same time storing locally on the handset any dropped frames or audio that can't get through during the live broadcast. What data doesn’t make it through during the live stream is then sent immediately afterwards when the handset doesn’t have the pressure of having to live stream and display video at the same time. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Linksify Gets A $500,000 Injection, Aims To Improve Contact Management Posted: 27 Aug 2009 04:11 AM PDT
Billed as the ‘last address book you’ll ever need’, the service - which looks and feels remarkably like it was built in the late nineties - promises to give its users complete control over how their information is shared all while respecting their privacy needs. It does so by giving registered members the option to divide people you know into three groups (acquaintances, personal contacts and work contacts) and assign different sets of permissions to them. Once you’ve connected with someone on Linksify, you supposedly never have to update your address book with their contact information again, because it will automatically be modified when the user changes any details. This of course is nothing new and something most people have come to expect from any contact management tool, but Fisher apparently liked this and other features so much that he quit business social network LinkedIn for it. In the free version of Linksify, you can have your contacts from either your Google / Gmail, Microsoft Outlook or Yahoo account synced to your Linksify profile. If you want to sync multiple address books or have the app sync to your iPhone, Windows Mobile device or BlackBerry, you’ll need to cough up $49.95 a year for a premium subscription. Also worth noting: Linksify incorporates a system called ‘Passkeys’, for which they’ve filed provisional patents. Here’s how they pitch it:
Tony Wu, who started Linksify, was the former CFO of Bharosa, which was co-founded and led by Jon Fisher. Bharosa, an online identity theft and fraud detecetion company, was acquired in July 2007 by Oracle, where Fisher stayed on as VP until shifting his attention to angel investments. He also has a pretty strong opinion on monetization of Web 2.0 services:
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Yoono Grows Up, Launches A Desktop App Posted: 27 Aug 2009 04:01 AM PDT Yoono, a nifty IE and Firefox plug-in that serves as both a social network aggregator and media hub, is launching a desktop version of their browser sidebar. Yoono basically aggregates and centralizes your online profiles, including IM tools like Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk and AIM as well as a wide variety of social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Friendfeed and more. The startup also recently launched the ability to share pages and video/images in addition to real-time search capabilities powered by OneRiot. The new desktop app, which is available for both Windows and Mac, has the same experience as the browser add-on except in a standalone product. The app is powered by Mozilla’s cross-platform xulrunner technology (the same technology Firefox is built upon), which is refreshing considering all of the Adobe AIR apps out there. Yoono says the decision to use xulrunner was made in light of its history as a Firefox add-on and the ease of porting. Yoono has also released a new version of its Firefox plugin (which will be used in the desktop version), which integrates Twitter search and notifications when new results are available. The latest version also includes the ability to share web content simultaneously with MySpace. You could previously share to content with Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed. Additionally, Yoono has added stream filters to help manage your stream. This tool lets you hide individual users in your stream, across services such as Facebook or Twitter or both. You can also hide updates from a particular Facebook app. For example, you could hide Mafia Wars updates from any of your friends (very welcome!). Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| ShowClix Secures Series A Funding For Event Ticketing Service Posted: 27 Aug 2009 02:41 AM PDT
The amount invested was undisclosed, but as several blogs noted an SEC filing at the time the announcement was first made revealed that the company at the time had brought in $570,000 of an $850,000 round. Co-founder Joshua Dziabiak now says the round ultimately totaled ‘between $750k and $1.5M’. They had earlier raised about $400,000 in seed funding from Innovations Works. The company says it will use the funds to expand its staff, for sales and marketing efforts, and to extend customer support. ShowClix provides web-based solutions to event organizers, promoters and venue managers across the U.S., providing performing arts centers, nightclubs, live music venues, non-profit organizations etc. with a way to sell event tickets online, over the telephone or in-person through a point-of-sale/box office system. The startup thus taps into a multi-million dollar market but faces stiff competition from TicketMaster and others. (Disclosure: I’m a minor investor in Oxynade, which is also into ticketing services yet aimed at European event organizers) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Apple Finally Signs Deal With China Unicom, Brings The iPhone To China In October Posted: 27 Aug 2009 01:59 AM PDT  Major Chinese news portal 163.com is reporting [Google machine translation] that Apple has finally signed a deal with China Unicom to bring the iPhone 3G to mainland China in October. This is huge news for Apple, which is now to enter a market with around 700 million mobile phone users, the biggest in the world (US: around 270 million). Following months of negotiations between Apple and China Unicom, "industry insiders" are reportedly expecting an official announcement to be made by the country's second biggest mobile telecommunications company tomorrow in Hong Kong.TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Echo Won’t Kill Comments — They Died A Long Time Ago Posted: 27 Aug 2009 01:39 AM PDT
Widget developer JS-Kit recently proclaimed the “death of comments”. How so? By way of its innovative comment management system Echo, that’s how. This would-be executioner pulls together disparate comments across the Web about a particular article and places them amid the conventional comments below the article. If it takes off, popular sites like TechCrunch could end up with hundreds if not thousands of additional comments. And therein lies the problem. How many of us can be bothered to read through more than the first few dozen or so comments on an article? Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Boxcar 2.0 Is A Must-Have For the iPhone. It’s The Best Push Notification App Yet. Posted: 27 Aug 2009 01:21 AM PDT
For those unfamiliar with Boxcar, you’ve been missing out. I’ve been using the original version since it launched as my go-to push notification app for Twitter updates, and it has worked beautifully. But with 2.0, it get even better. Like, an insane amount better. Previously, Boxcar allowed you to get Twitter @replies and direct messages pushed for your iPhone. Version 2.0 expands that to include all of the tweets for people you follow, if you want them. And it supports multiple Twitter accounts now. And it also allows you to push any new trending topic on Twitter right to your phone. Best of all, it allows you to push results from any Twitter search query directly to your phone. Yes, track is back, and it’s better than ever. But that’s just what it can do with Twitter. Boxcar 2.0 also works with Facebook Connect to allow you to get push notifications for all new Facebook alerts. One of my two complaints about the Facebook 3.0 app is that it doesn’t include push alerts (that should be coming in the next version). Boxcar solves that problem right there. But wait, there’s more. The Twitter and Facebook elements alone would make this app a must-have, but the addition of email notifications may shove Boxcar into the realm of best apps on the iPhone. Now, before everyone gets all excited and points out the problems that services like Gpush have had getting push notification for email right on the iPhone, Boxcar does it differently. It requires a tiny bit of work on your end, but once you do it, it works very well.
When I asked Boxcar developer Jonathan George how he could be sure that Boxcar wouldn’t suffer from the same problems as Gpush, he told me, “Maintaining tens of thousands of IMAP connections 24/7 is a huge issue, whereas I’m sitting back and *waiting* for the action to happen.” George went on to explain that he had been previously working on an email push notification app that used the IMAP approach as well, and realized this forwarding mechanism was a much better solution. On top of all of the features of Boxcar 2.0, it also adds the ability to select from a range of different sounds for the push notifications. And yes, you can set different sounds for different notifications, something which will greatly help me recognize if I should pull my phone out to check on one or not. You can set the application or web site (if any) that each of these notifications should open by default. Or you can choose to view them in the Boxcar notification inbox, which keeps track of your most recent ones that have come in through the app. And you can also set for each of the notifications to be private, meaning that rather than display something like a full tweet, Boxcar will just pop up a notification alerting you that you have a new message. Now, a few words of caution. First, the application has been submitted to the App Store for approval, but has not been looked at yet. George expects it to be accepted (never a given) and thinks it should be available sometime between September 3 and September 7.
Third, if you use Boxcar to receive your entire Twitter timeline you are likely to get a lot of push notifications. Now, these don’t cost anything, but they will get annoying depending on how many people you follow. Boxcar alleviates this a bit by displaying the most recent tweets with a message at the bottom like “+2 more” indicating there are two other messages like that one that came in at the same time. The final word of caution is about the price. Boxcar is a paid app, at $2.99. And these new features come at a price as well. George is using the new in-app purchases to charge $0.99 for each service you wish to add (the base $2.99 app comes with one service for free). So, for example, if you choose Twitter as your free service and want to add Facebook notifications, that will cost you $0.99 more (a one-time fee). But even at a few dollars, this app is easily worth the price. I would probably pay as much as $10 for such an app if it is able to scale, which George assures me it will. And with the $2.99 base cost, you can switch the notifications you wish to use as your included one at any point. Boxcar 2.0 is simply an amazing application, and a must-have if you are addicted to Twttier, Facebook or simply receiving emails. If you’re addicted to all three like I am, this may be your new favorite app. And for a few dollars, to get all of these notifications, it’s well worth the price of admission. While you wait for the new version, check out the old version of the app here in the App Store. I suspect this app will be very popular, and hopefully it will push (yes, I went there) Apple into making a better push notification management system for the iPhone. We need to be able to see multiple messages on the locked screen, and keep track of what came in recently from various apps upon unlock. Plus, there should be a universal “quiet hours” option. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Slacker Premium Not Quite A Scam, But Close Posted: 26 Aug 2009 10:13 PM PDT An enraged reader, Josh Vickers, writes in today to complain about Slacker’s premium online radio service. Like Pandora, Slacker streams music to users for free. And like Pandora, Slacker limits the number of times you can skip songs each hour, and has advertising. Both services allow users to remove those limitations if they pay a yearly fee. Slacker charges $48/year. Pandora charges $36/year for their Pandora One service. The frustration from users isn’t that Slacker charges more. It’s how they market the premium product. Pandora straight up says they’ll charge you $36 to upgrade. No misleading marketing statements. You pay $36 and you get Pandora One for a year. But Slacker tricks you. They give you a seven day free trial and say it’s $3.99 a month after that. But you get billed for the whole year - $48 - after that seven day period is over. And if you don’t want want to pay for that year, you have to cancel during the seven day period.
Back to that enraged user. After seeing a $48 charge from Slacker on his credit card when he expected $3.99, emailed Slacker for an explanation, and then tried to cancel. He was denied (messages in chronological order): Slacker: We hope you have been enjoying the benefits of Slacker Radio Plus. Your subscription has reached its renewal date. Your credit card was charged $47.88 on 08/26/2009 and your Slacker Radio Plus service will continue uninterrupted. Your auto-renewal date is: 08/18/2010. To adjust your account settings at any time, simply log into your Slacker account and enter the Account Management section. Thank you for listening, Slacker Customer: i was under the understanding I was going to be billed monthly at 3.99 per month. Please advise. Slacker: Slacker subscription are billed annually. We don’t currently offer a monthly billing plan. Customer: Please cancel my subscription - thats misleading - should consider revising your message. Slacker: Once the subscription has past the 7-day trial, you can go through our web site as described below to cancel your subscription so that, once your current subscription has expired, you will not be renewed for another subscription. However, the subscription has to be canceled within the 7-day trial per the contract you agreed to when you signed up for the free trial in order to avoid being billed. So if you sign up for the free seven day Slacker trial, don’t be surprised when you’re billed for a whole year and can’t cancel. Pandora, by contrast, does give partial refunds. I contacted the company today and they said “It’s a year agreement, but we of course do refunds when people call to request them.” The difference in how these companies market to customers and then treat them later is night and day. No wonder Pandora is so much more popular - tricking a few people to pay you $48 is fine, but clear messaging and proper customer service will win in the end: Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Google Toolbar Fail; Doesn’t Work On Chrome Posted: 26 Aug 2009 08:15 PM PDT It’s as though Google doesn’t want you to use its new Chrome browser. If you try to install the Google Toolbar on Chrome, it practically suggests that you switch browsers. Chrome users are greeted with this message:
Of course, Chrome is like a giant Google Toolbar that takes up the whole screen, so you don’t really need it. (The Toolbar offers Google search, bookmarks, search suggestions, Web history, and shortcuts to Google apps). But still that’s not the message Google wants to be sending to curious Chrome users. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Nokia Eyes Emerging Markets With Obopay-Powered Payment Platform Posted: 26 Aug 2009 08:02 PM PDT
As we wrote when news broke of Obopay’s $70 million funding round (of which Nokia was a major participant in), one of the biggest markets for this technology is in regions like India, where many people have phones with pre-paid SIM cards but don’t have bank accounts. And judging by Nokia’s press release, which emphasizes that there are “4 billion mobile phone users and only 1.6 billion bank accounts”, the company seems to agree. From the release:
Nokia will hardly be the only player in these emerging markets — other competitors include mChek and Paymate. We’ve also seen some alternative payment models like Aryty, which allows users in the US to remotely charge up the mobile accounts of family and friends in India and the Philippines. Stateside, the technology will also likely see some success, though it will be competing with a variety of other payment methods, and US users haven’t been nearly as quick at adopting mobile payments as customers in other regions have been. Nokia’s release notes that while the technology will be based on Obopay, it will be making a number of improvements and will allow the payment service to interoperate with competing services. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| New Apple Tablet Interface Pics? Probably Not, But Who Knows. Posted: 26 Aug 2009 06:05 PM PDT We just received an anonymous tip containing some supposed pictures of the interface for Apple’s forthcoming tablet computer. Are they real? Who knows. There are some peculiarities, like the keyboard jumping all over the place on the screen. And the menu system looks a little un-Apple for what is clearly a movie trailer section. Also, why is the play/pause area so transparent? I think I prefer this video still. But again, who knows. Says our tipster, “this is very early stuff, and it is all about what Steve wants”. (At least, if these are indeed fake, the creators had the good humor to have a couple of the screenshots focus on the upcoming movie All About Steve). More importantly, is this what you want? Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Google To Open The AdSense Gates To Other Ad Networks — That They Approve Of Posted: 26 Aug 2009 05:44 PM PDT
Right now, if you run AdSense on your site, you are seeing ads come in from advertisers who bid on certain keywords using Google’s AdWords product. But with the new more open system, if there is a better offer from one of these Google-certified third-party networks, Google says it will run those ads instead. You’ll be able to partially control these third party ad networks from within AdSense. For example, if you don’t like a certain network, you can block it. Or you can black all third-party ad networks entirely — obviously, Google would be just fine with that. Here’s another interesting bit: Google says that the third-party ad networks that have tools to show more relevant ads based on the content on your site, won’t necessarily be allowed to do that through this program. Only the ones that adhere to Google’s privacy standards will get the contextual advertising privilege. Basically, this kind of sounds like those Progressive Insurance commercials where they promise to show you the best quote for your insurance even if it isn’t their’s. The idea is that you’ll appreciate their honesty, but also that they feel good enough about their product and prices that you’ll stay with them. Of course the big difference is that with Google’s system you will still be remaining in their ecosystem, whereas with the Progressive system, you would have gotten to leave the Progressive site to sign up for a competitor’s insurance. Well played, Google, well played. Here’s the full email they’re sending out:
[photo: New Line Cinemas] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Facebook Wants To Own Idea Of Crowdsourced Translations Posted: 26 Aug 2009 05:30 PM PDT
Facebook filed the patent application with the US Patent & Trademark Office in December 2008, but it only recently made its way online. The application is currently going through the office’s examination process, and you can be sure that plenty of sites are hoping it doesn’t go through. Here’s the patent’s abstract:
In layman’s terms, Facebook’s Translation app presents users with words that need to be translated, and they submit their entries. The system then invites other users to vote using Reddit-style up/down arrows to vote on which translations are best. This helps generate translations that are not just technically accurate, but also helps eliminate awkward or overly formal wording. It’s a technique that has worked so well that other social networks have rolled out their own implementations. Hi5 launched a crowd-sourced translation model in spring 2008 (the site had already been professionally translated into 23 languages at that point), and even launched a crowdsourcing translation tool for OpenSocial developers last fall. But the reception of free crowdsourced translation hasn’t always been positive — LinkedIn recently conducted a survey to gauge what kind of incentive its users wanted to help it translate the professional networking site. The results? Most users would have been happy with some kind of free recognition, either through a leaderboard or on their profile, which is what Facebook does, but 45% expected to receive “upgraded accounts” for their efforts.  Of course, Facebook was hardly the first site to use the web to crowdsource localization. Meebo has used a user-edited Translation Wiki to generate the site’s translations since early 2006, though the site’s voting mechanisms are less robust. Now it’s up to the patent office to decide if the techniques employed by these other sites will represent prior art that would nullify Facebook’s patent. And you can be sure that’s what many people are hoping for — it would be highly frustrating for social networks down the line if they can’t leverage their own communities the way Facebook has.  Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Facebook Reiterates That You Can Reject Friends Without Looking Like A Jerk Posted: 26 Aug 2009 03:45 PM PDT
And I think Facebook realizes that, which is why we’re getting a post today on its blog basically explaining that it’s okay not to accept all requests. Specifically, the post notes that if you click the button to ignore a friend request, the person who requested you will not be notified about it. Likewise, if you accept someone as a friend, but then later un-friend them, they will not be notified (though they will no longer be able to see your information, nor will you be able to see their’s). And if you don’t want to accept them, but don’t want them to be able to attempt to friend you again, Facebook recommends simply leaving their request pending in your queue. It’s interesting that Facebook felt the need to go over this again. That seems to speak to confusion over the symmetric nature of its social graph in a world of Twitter and other social services in which the “follower” is more common than the “friend.” Of course, there are benefits to this type of network, the key one being privacy. But the problem is that as Facebook continues to grow and evolve, we’re getting more and more requests from random people that we don’t actually know. But many of us are using Facebook to spread information just as we do with Twitter (status updates, sharing links, etc), and there is some desire to allow these random people to be able to see some of what you are doing on Facebook. This is why Facebook created the “Everyone Button” and Fan Pages, but both of those seem to complicate the social graph, rather than simplify it. The solution that I employ is to accept all Facebook friend requests but limit the people I do not actually know to a very basic profile using Facebook’s filters. I then hide many of these people from my main News Feed. The problem is that they still show up when I do things like search for something. It’s a less than ideal solution. Plus, many users of Facebook probably still aren’t using filters (or at least not using them well).
Of course, we’re also hearing that they’re very close to launching their location functionality (just like Twitter recently did), which will once again highlight the importance of privacy. Almost all location-based services are currently symmetric, because while it’s one thing for random people to read your words or see what links you’re sharing, it’s another for them to know where you are. Because of that, on services like Loopt and Foursquare I stick pretty firmly to only accepting users that I actually know. As they approach 300 million users, Facebook continually has the tough situation of having to deal with these issues while figuring out how to educate all their current users if they intend to make a change. Of course, having 300 million users is a problem a lot of social networks would like to have. Update: Former TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson also shared some great thoughts about Facebook’s social graph on his personal blog recently. Here’s one particularly interesting paragraph:
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Sony And Google Try To Take On The Kindle With Open Books Posted: 26 Aug 2009 02:49 PM PDT When you are coming from behind, embracing openness is always a good strategy. That is exactly what Sony is doing with its electronic book reader, which is up against the Amazon Kindle. The key to the Kindle’s success is that it is paired with the largest book store in the world, where most people likely to buy an electronic book already have accounts. Sony is trying to fight this advantage by being more open and thereby attracting other large players into its sphere of influence. Its biggest ally in this fight is Google, whose M.O. is to attack closed industries with open technologies. Today, Google is making available more than one million public domain books in the open ePub format, which also happens to be the linchpin of Sony’s open strategy. Yesterday, at the unveiling of Sony’s latest electronic book reader at the New York Public Library, the head of its ebook division, Steve Haber, emphasized: “”You want a ubiquitous experience: open, open open.” He repeated the mantra in the way that Steve Ballmer says, “Developers, developers, developers,” except he said it a little softer since he was in a library. As I’ve mentioned, the key to its open strategy is Sony’s commitment to adopt the ePub format, which is an open format for electronic books. As a result of embracing that format, Sony announced yesterday that libraries, starting with the New York Public Library, would be able to “loan” out digital editions of books in their collection for 21 days to people with Sony Readers. Furthermore, book chains could start selling their own digital books without going through Sony’s digital bookstore as long as the books are in the ePub format. With an open digital book format like ePub, anyone can sell or distribute electronic books. It doesn’t have to be Sony, which after all is more interested in selling Readers than in selling the books. Amazon’s strategy is the opposite. It wants to sell as many electronic books as possible in case people transition away from paper books. The Amazon Kindle does not support ePub. The Kindle is tied to Amazon’s book store. Its sole purpose is to drive sales of ebooks on Amazon. If you could buy an ebook at Barnes and Noble and read it on the Kindle, that would not make Jeff Bezos happy. As long as Amazon remains the market leader in electronic books, it can stick to its closed format much like Apple did with the iPod and its DRM-wrapped AAC music format for many years. Eventually, though, open won and Apple removed the DRM from songs in iTunes as well. The same will happen with the Kindle and Amazon, but not until Amazon feels that it has a safe enough lead so that Sony, Google, and all the booksellers in the world combined won’t ever be able to catch up. Meanwhile, Amazon has joined another open crusade—this one against Google. It is a member of the Openbookalliance, which is a group of publishers, Microsoft, and others who oppose Google’s book settlement. It’s funny how companies choose to be open only when it suits them. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| NetVibes Gets Into Website Design Posted: 26 Aug 2009 02:46 PM PDT  NetVibes, the startup that lets you assemble all your favorite widgets, feeds, social networks, email, videos and blogs onto a customizable homepage, is rolling out a new feature today that lets users create personalized widget-based web pages. NetVibes’s tool, called Theme Publishing, is a visual design editor that lets users personalize and edit every part of their page’s’ theme, from images to background. The layout of the editing tool is fairly simple. Users “click and pick” on the page:, meaning they click which part they want to edit and pick options from a color palette and design option menus. NetVibes offers a directory of themes or you can create your own theme. You can also publish your theme to the gallery for other NetVibes members to use. Every change is shown live in a preview pane, making it easy to see how a particular design will look. Plus, users can add widgets, feeds, social networks and more to their pages. The bonus: it’s all free. While the new feature is sure to attract users, it is also likely to attract the attention of brands. NetVibes says that ad agencies, including Ogilvy and Razorfish, are already using NetVibes’ theme design tool to create interactive, uber-personalized microsites for clients that are branded and contain customized widgets for social networks and feeds. NetVibes is also offering a new XML-based Theme API, which will enable web designers to create animated themes on their pages. The startup recently launched "drag and follow" widgets for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, making it easy to create custom widgets around followers or feeds. Although NetVibes was a pioneer in personalized widget homepages, it has since been overshadowed by iGoogle. At TechCrunch's Real Time Stream CrunchUp in July, Netvibes previewed a new live feed reader and instant update architecture to make RSS real-time, which will be officially launched in the near future. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Palm Wants To Embrace Google Voice, But It’s Not Clear Google Wants To Embrace Palm Posted: 26 Aug 2009 01:49 PM PDT
Google Voice gives users a lot of freedom with their phone - they can ring several mobile and landline phones at once through one number, manage text messages, auto-transcribe voicemails and also block/manage callers depending on who they are and when they are calling. Want to switch phones or carriers? If you use Google voice, you don’t have to port your phone number or tell everyone what your new phone number is. Which is exactly why Apple fears it. What really makes Google Voice useful is when it integrates deeply with native apps like the dialer and contacts. That way all outbound calls use the Google Voice phone number (and caller ID) instead of the phone number associated with the phone. When it works perfectly, as it does with Android phones, the underlying device phone number is more like an IP address for a website - it’s there but no one uses it. Your Google Voice phone number is more like the domain name, which everyone remembers and associates with you. We’re hearing that Palm wants that deep integration to lure iPhone users to the Pre, and our source said it would roll out an official app some time in the next month or so. But from what we hear from sources close to Google, no one there is actually working on a Google Voice app for the Pre. They have apps for Android and Blackberry (and iPhone in purgatory), but that’s it. Officially Google is saying “Google is interested in bringing the mobile experience of its products to many platforms, including Palm, as we have for the Palm Pre with Google Search, Google Maps, and YouTube built in, as well as easy sync to Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts. We look forward to providing a mobile experience for more Google products to Palm Pre users.” But our understanding from other sources is that Google only intends to roll out a browser based version of the service for Pre, which lacks the deep integration with native apps like the dialer and contacts. The user experience isn’t nearly as good. There are already third party Google Voice apps for the Pre, such as this one, but again, those apps can’t integrate deeply with the phone. That’s because Google Voice has no API right now, so Google has to build deep integration apps directly. So what we’re left with is this - Palm really wants Google Voice for the Pre, but it isn’t at all clear that they’re going to get it any time soon. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Balihoo Raises $7 Million To Help National Brands Market Themselves At The Local Level Posted: 26 Aug 2009 01:32 PM PDT
Balihoo is a service that allows national brands to automate local marketing efforts — campaigns that have tradionally been run by franchises and affiliates. This setup can lead to a lack of consistency in branding between different regions, as well as excessive costs as regional franchises effectively have to remake the same advertisements. To help streamline these efforts, Balihoo offers an ad builder than can generate advertising for various types of media, and tools for ad fulfillment and planning, among other things. National brands can manage these efforts, granting access to their local affiliates to keep them in the loop. Balihoo says that these can help reduce overall marketing costs and improve brand recognition by increasing consistency. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| Yahoo Gets With The Program, Finally Lets You Play Videos In Search Results Posted: 26 Aug 2009 01:01 PM PDT There’s always been a tension in search between organizing information for users and getting out of the way so they can get to that information as quickly as possible. With text links, getting people to the correct page as fast as possible usually produces the best experience. But when it comes to video, which is a self-contained form of information, a better search experience is to be able to play the video right in results. Otherwise, in addition to clicking back and forth until you find the video you want, you are also adding the delay of playing the video. Video search sites like Blinkx and Google Video (yes, that is still around) figured this out ages ago. And Bing’s video search lets you play a video simply by hovering over the thumbnail, or you can click to enlarge for a more satisfying viewing experience. Now Yahoo is finally getting with the program. Today it added inline viewing to video search. For most videos, you can click play, and it opens up a large rectangle with a slightly larger player inside. It will also sometimes offer thumbnails of related videos inside that rectangle so that you can continue exploring and drilling down on a video-by-video basis. None of this going to change the fact that 90 percent of you will continue to search on YouTube when you are looking for a video on the Web. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| CrunchBoard: Yelp, MTV Networks, and More! Posted: 26 Aug 2009 01:00 PM PDT
For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard. Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||
| TechCrunch50: Don Dodge, Paul Graham, Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Schroepfer join Panel of Experts Posted: 26 Aug 2009 12:34 PM PDT
They’ll join the already announced expert lineup of Marc Andreessen, Roelof Botha, Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, Tony Hsieh, Marissa Mayer, Tim O'Reilly, Sean Parker, Kevin Rose, Robert Scoble, and Yossi Vardi. This will be Don’s third year judging. Paul, Jason, and Mike will be making their first appearances. And we’re not stopping here - additional judges will be announced next week. All the details for the conference are here. TechCrunch50 is an action-packed conference where fifty new startups launch over two days. The event will be held at the San Francisco Design Center, a huge and beautiful venue where we packed nearly 2,000 participants last year. Tickets for the event can be purchased here courtesy of Eventbrite. We've slashed our early-bird prices from 2008 to $1995 through August 31. (Prices escalate to $2,995.) If you’re interested in demoing your product, we have a few spots left in our DemoPit (e-mail us for details). Additionally, exhibitor passes are available for $8,000, which include entry to the conference for 4 people, a 5' exhibitor table, and other goodies. More on the TechCrunch50 blog.
Great partners make great conferences We’re really lucky to have the corporate support of some of the best names in the business. Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures and Perkins Coie all returned quickly to support us for the third year in a row. Google, Founders Fund, Microsoft and MySpace are back for their second year of partnership, and this year Bing stepped forward as a first-time partner. Additional partners will be named in the next few weeks. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
Pittsburgh-based ticketing startup 
This is a guest post by 
A few days ago, I wrote about the 
Basically, you have to tell your current email service to forward your mail to an address that Boxcar sets up for you. With Gmail, this works great, because it’s a simple thing to do right in the settings, and you can make sure that you keep a version of your email going to your Gmail inbox (important since Boxcar doesn’t store your email, just notifies you of it, with who it’s from and the subject). And the fact that it doesn’t store your email should put some peoples’ minds at ease. As should the fact that you never give the app your email address and password (which you 
Second, the developer build I’m using did crash a couple of times when attempting to modify a Twitter search result I put in. Other times it worked fine. I alerted George about this, and he is looking into it, and if it is really a problem he promises to fix it soon.
Compare the Slacker marketing pitch above to the straighforward way Pandora handles premium subscriptions in the image to the right.
Earlier today, Nokia 
In what looks to be an effort to be the one overall ad network that rules them all, Google sent out an email to AdSense publishers today letting them know that they would soon be opening up their accounts to allow for third-party ad networks to display ads as well. The catch is that it will only be open to third party ad networks that Google deems worthy of certification.
Facebook is the biggest social network in the world, so it may come as a surprise to some that up until early 2008, it didn’t offer any localized versions of the site at all. The company managed to jumpstart its international presence with an application fittingly called 
Last night, 
It will be interesting to see how Facebook deals with this issue going forward. Remember that they just 
Suddenly Apple’s competitors see a weakness in the iPhone, and it’s 
We’re pleased to announce Don Dodge (Microsoft's Emerging Business Team), Paul Graham (Cofounder of Y Combinator), Jason Hirschhorn (MySpace Chief Product Officer), and Mike Schroepfer (Facebook VP Engineering) will be joining our on-stage panel of experts at 
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