The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Security Threat: WordPress Under Attack
- Google, Twitter, Aliens, And Internet Memes: The Truth Is Out There.
- Facebook Pushes Widgets To Share Your Stream, Photos, And More
- 23andMe Founder Linda Avey Leaves To Start Alzheimer’s Research Foundation
- Confirmed: Foursquare Gets $1.35 Million To Play With From Union Square And O’Reilly AlphaTech
- AT&T Has A Human Working For It. And His Name Is Seth.
- The Hurt Keeps Coming: Dish And EchoStar Ordered To Pay TiVo Another $200 Million
- HealthHiway Raises $4 Million For Web-Based Hospital Software
- CrunchBoard: Threadless, SlideShare, and More!
- MG Explains Why ISPs Want To Lower The Definition Of Broadband
- New TechCrunch50 Logo, And Our Apologies To Apple
- Watch Out Baidu, China Clamps Down On Music Piracy
- People Of Walmart, Some Of You Should Look In The Mirror Before You Walk Out The Door
- Background Location Finds A Loop(t)hole On The iPhone
- eBay Acquisition Map Shows Where It Got On The Wrong Track
- The Onion Keeps On Embarrassing Newspapers
- Gov 2.0: It’s All About The Platform
- Big Amazon Will Give You Back Your Copies of 1984, Annotations Won’t Be Sent Into the Chute
- Former MySpace Exec Allen Hurff Working On A Startup Incubator
- Google Loses China President Kai-Fu Lee, Has Trouble Translating The Reason
- Elephant Attacks Tech Legend Tom Siebel (And Gets Away With It)
- New Gmail Themes Include One That They Won’t Call “Nintendo,” But I Will
- Snow Leopard, Marble, And Calamine Lotion
- RubyOnRails XSS Vulnerability Claims Twitter, Basecamp And My Confidence
- Former Digg Architect Gets The Superhero Treatment, Wants To Take You To The Internets
| Security Threat: WordPress Under Attack Posted: 05 Sep 2009 04:01 AM PDT
Writes Lorelle on her WordPress-centric blog:
To prevent this attack, if you have not done so already, update your WordPress install immediately to the latest version. Change all your passwords to a strong password (cough), including WordPress blog access for all users, database, FTP, control panels, etc. These are all highly recommended procedures. Automattic, WordPress’ parent company, hasn’t commented on this issue, but we’ll keep everyone updated. In the meantime, we urge you to update your WordPress blog immediately. (Image via Developer Tutorials) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco           |
| Google, Twitter, Aliens, And Internet Memes: The Truth Is Out There. Posted: 05 Sep 2009 02:45 AM PDT
So what does it mean? It’s fairly straight-forward, actually, assuming you know your Internet memes. The code itself is a simple pattern, A=1, B=2, C=3 and so forth. Plugging it in, this translates to: “All your o are belong to us”. That is in reference to the meme from the early 2000s, “All your base are belong to us,” a humorous saying that was popularized from a poor translation of a Japanese video game (video below). So where does the “o” come in? Attached to Google’s tweet is a TwitPic of its logo doodle today, which is an alien spaceship beaming up the second “o” in “Google.” It’s not really clear why that is Google’s logo today; the logo just links to the Google result for “unexplained phenomenon,” which returns results mainly talking about Google’s odd logo today, and general alien conspiracies. Maybe someone at Google is just bored and wanted to play a game, or maybe they just saw District 9. The truth is out there. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Facebook Pushes Widgets To Share Your Stream, Photos, And More Posted: 04 Sep 2009 07:08 PM PDT For a social site that is into sharing, it sure has taken Facebook a long enough time to embrace widgets. Sure, they launched a Fan Box widget back in July for companies and celebs with a Facebook Page, and a few other widgets before that. But how many peopel actually used them? Now, Facebook has a new widget center that brings them all together. There are five widgets in all: a profile badge, a photo badge to share your Facebook photos elsewhere on the web, a Stream Box to share your stream, the aforementioned Fan Box, and a related Facebook Page badge. Like other widgets, you can embed these on your blog or elsewhere. The live stream widget, of course, is my favorite. You can see what it looks like at right. There is an everyone tab and a Friends tab. The Friends tab is hwat I actually see in my stream when I log into Facebook. Now I can embed that stream anywhere and expose my view of my friends’ ramblings to a wider audience. In addition to reading the stream, you can comment and add likes to items from within the widget. At least that is what it lets you do in the preview. I had trouble embedding the widgets in this post, which is why I resorted to screenshots except for the TechCrunch Page badge below (but that could just be an issue with the way we have WordPress set up on our site): TechCrunch And this is what the TechCrunch Fan Box looks like: Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| 23andMe Founder Linda Avey Leaves To Start Alzheimer’s Research Foundation Posted: 04 Sep 2009 02:42 PM PDT
Avey notes that the foundation will be starting with the connection between Alzheimer’s and ApoE4, which helps in the breakdown of peptide plaques associated with the disease. The decision seems to be driven in part by personal reasons, as Avey’s father-in-law suffered from Alzheimer’s. Avey sent the following Email to the 23andMe team:
Anne Wojcicki, who founded the company with Avey and is also noted for being Sergey Brin’s wife, sent out the following letter.
Worth pointing out is Wojcicki’s statement that 23andMe needs to find “better ways to promote the value of knowing your DNA”. That may be tricky — while there are some traits that are well understood, this is a field that is still in its infancy and the relationships between our genes and most traits are murky. At some point personal genomics will play a key role in our health care system, but I’m not sure we’re there yet. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Confirmed: Foursquare Gets $1.35 Million To Play With From Union Square And O’Reilly AlphaTech Posted: 04 Sep 2009 01:58 PM PDT
As expected, Union Square Ventures is one of the investors, but also participating in the round is O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and some angel investors, that co-founder Dennis Crowley was not ready to reveal at this point. The round is in fact $1.35 million. For weeks, there has been plenty of talk about how Union Square’s Fred Wilson has taken a liking to the New York-based company. But it’s not Wilson who will be joining Foursquare’s board, instead that will be Union Square’s Albert Wenger. Foursquare has been a hot startup among some tech early adopters, especially in cities like San Francisco and New York. The service is primarily used through its iPhone application right now, but it just launched an Android version, as we first reported two days ago. A BlackBerry app will be available in the coming weeks as well, and a Windows Mobile app could be available as soon as next month. There is also a mobile web interface that users can use. Recently, Foursquare has started doing some things with its app to show the potential of using location for a business model. The company has started alerting users when there is a deal at a venue nearby. Right now, these deals are centered around “mayors” of places, meaning if a person has checked-in the most times at a location. Some venues are starting to offer deals like free beer to mayors, as it obviously benefits them to get people wantin to come back more to check-in. Foursquare is an interesting player in the location space in that it’s just as much of a game as anything else. Users compete for mayorships, and try to earn badges and get points for checking in more places. The idea of the “check-in” rather than a constantly updated background location, also differentiates it, and makes some people less uneasy about the location tracking aspect, since you have to explicitly check-in at a location. Foursquare was started by Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, after Crowley rather famously left Google not exactly pleased with the company after they bought his previous (similar) startup Dodgeball, and decided to do nothing with it. This past January, Google officially deadpooled it. Crowley maintains that he has a good relationship with Google now despite what happened. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| AT&T Has A Human Working For It. And His Name Is Seth. Posted: 04 Sep 2009 01:39 PM PDT
Apple 2.0’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt posted a video of Seth Bloom today, an AT&T rep that is also know as “Seth the blogger guy.” In this video, Bloom explains AT&T’s iPhone MMS service, which was finally announced the other day (set for September 25), as well as some of the issues that plague AT&T’s network due to his smartphone usage (read: iPhone usage). We’ve actually been working with Bloom for a number of months as AT&T issues have continued to mount. He’s quite helpful in answering the questions that he’s allowed to answer, which we appreciate. The problem Bloom has is that he can only answer questions, he can’t actually solve AT&T’s problems. And while the network is trying, it’s still not where it needs to be in many regards. But that’s why these videos are good, they humanize AT&T. Rather than having us cite an AT&T spokesperson talking about the issues they’re facing, it’s good to put a face to the problems. Again, this doesn’t solve them, but hearing them explained from AT&T is a smart play. Certainly smarter than saying nothing. Of course, as Elmer-DeWitt notes, Bloom has actually been doing these videos for a while, but when AT&T starting running into some reason problems over the summer, he went silent. Now he’s back that AT&T has some good news to offer (MMS). If anything, we could use these videos more when AT&T is having issues. Speaking of those issues, PC World has a rather ridiculous headline today, “Network Woes? Hate the iPhone, Not AT&T.” The main idea is that it’s the iPhone fault for AT&T’s service issues because it’s so popular and is overloading their network. That’s undoubtedly true, but it completely skirts around the fact that we’re all paying a large amount of money for a service that is completely unreliable. It would be much easier to cut AT&T a break in that regard if they were to say, offer up discounts to paying customers for poor service performance. It’s simply hard to feel bad for a company you’re paying in excess of $100 a month to, for a service they’re failing to provide. It’s certainly a fair point that the massive success of the iPhone likely would have overloaded any company, including Verizon. But if anything, that speaks to why we need to get rid of the exclusivity agreements. Watch Bloom below:
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| The Hurt Keeps Coming: Dish And EchoStar Ordered To Pay TiVo Another $200 Million Posted: 04 Sep 2009 01:18 PM PDT
The new ruling brings Dish and EchoStar’s total payments to TiVo to around $400 million in damages and other fees after a five year legal battle. In this latest round, Dish and EchoStar say they tried to work around TiVo’s patents, but a judge ruled that they had failed to do so. The $200 million figure is based on a $2.25 per month royalty for every Dish DVR user, extending from April 2008, when an appeals court reaffirmed TiVo’s patent, to July 1 2009. It could have been worse. TiVo was looking for nearly $1 billion — or all of Dish’s DVR profits — as it accused Dish and EchoStar of willingly infringing on its patent. The judge ruled that the infringement had been unwilling (in other words, the companies had tried to work around the patent but failed to do so), hence the smaller penalty. None of this bodes well for AT&T and Verizon, who are also being sued by Tivo for infringing on its “Time Warping" patent. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| HealthHiway Raises $4 Million For Web-Based Hospital Software Posted: 04 Sep 2009 01:05 PM PDT Indian software company HealthHiway has raised $4 million in an unattributed round of funding from Greylock Partners. Based in Bangalore, India, HealthHiway provides web-based software to help hospitals, clinics, insurance providers, pharmacies and diagnostic centers collaborate on billing, patient records, x-rays and claims. Launched in 2007, HealthHiway was started by the Apollo Hospital Group, one of the largest healthcare groups in India, and offers clients a number of software products. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| CrunchBoard: Threadless, SlideShare, and More! Posted: 04 Sep 2009 12:00 PM PDT
For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard. Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| MG Explains Why ISPs Want To Lower The Definition Of Broadband Posted: 04 Sep 2009 11:57 AM PDT What’s the deal with Comcast, Verizon, and other ISPs petitioning the FCC to lower the definition of broadband? It’s all about money—broadband stimulus money—MG Siegler explains on G4’s Attack of the Show. As the Obama administration looks to expand broadband access to rural and urban areas that are still under-served, the ISPs want to lower what constitutes broadband so that they can get some of the billions of dollars in stimulus money without shelling out as much to actually deliver the broadband access the stimulus package is designed to create. Those phone and cable companies are tricky. Watch the video above. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| New TechCrunch50 Logo, And Our Apologies To Apple Posted: 04 Sep 2009 11:37 AM PDT We’re happy to show off our new TechCrunch50 logo this morning. The old logo, which is below, was getting a little stale. The logo was created by DESIGN about TOWN, who worked with us over the last few weeks on a number of concepts.
Our apologies to Apple, who may think they now own the idea of a text bubble. If you want to discuss, you know where to find us. And we promise we were locked into this design before the news about the supposed trademark. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Watch Out Baidu, China Clamps Down On Music Piracy Posted: 04 Sep 2009 11:14 AM PDT Yesterday, China’s Ministry of Culture (MoC), warned that it would strengthen checks and policing of online music content. The MoC said that search engines, which have been a source of pirated music in China, can only provide search information for tracks from legitimate music companies. This move may pose as a serious problem for China’s most popular search engine Baidu, which has long faced legal issues surrounding its index of pirated music. According to the report, the MoC is requiring that companies providing online music streams or downloads gain approval as “Internet culture companies,” and only companies that have directly obtained broadcasting or licensing rights can apply for approval. Imported music that is already broadcast online in China but has not been approved must be submitted to the MoC before December 31, 2009. The impact this will have on Baidu is noted by Pali Research’s analyst Tian Hou, who estimates that as much as 80 percent of Baidu's traffic is from music search. Hou says that with respect to music search results, most of the links provided are posted by illegitimate music companies. If these links are cut off, says Hou, traffic to Baidu could decrease. According to comScore, Baidu had 145 million unique visitors in July of 2009 worldwide (with more than 95 percent of those coming from Asia), while its MP3 search engine attracted 47 million uniques, which is only 32 percent but still significant. For July, Baidu was ranking fifth amongst most visited search engines worldwide, behind Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com. The success of Baidu has been credited to its index of music which is available from its front page, something Google caught onto last year when it entered a joint venture with Top100.cn to offer free and legal music in China. Baidu’s potential troubles could be good news for Google China, which took the beta label off of its music search engine this March and signed major deals to license music from four major music labels (Warner, Universal, EMI and Sony). Google China, however, just lost its top executive, Kaifu Lee. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| People Of Walmart, Some Of You Should Look In The Mirror Before You Walk Out The Door Posted: 04 Sep 2009 10:06 AM PDT In most cities across America, Walmart has replaced Main Street as the place people go to do their shopping and mingle with each other. But what is it about Walmart that brings out the—how do I say this delicately?—fashion-challenged freaks. I am talking about people who cover themselves in cheetah-print garb or worse, Easter eggs and bunnies. They are a tiny sliver of the people who go Walmart, but they are fascinating in a human train wreck kind of way. You want to avert your eyes, but you can’t stop looking. A satirical site called People of Walmart now lets you stare to your heart’s content without actually stepping inside a Walmart store. People can submit photos of the strangest people they encounter in Walmart. As the site’s About section explains:
Below are a few choice pictures from the site. Sometimes the cars are even better (yes, that is a spoiler on that clunker). People of Walmart, don’t ever change. Except for the woman wearing the swastika sweatshirt. She should definitely change. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Background Location Finds A Loop(t)hole On The iPhone Posted: 04 Sep 2009 09:00 AM PDT
Beginning today, Loopt is rolling out a trial for background location on the iPhone. Yes, you read that right. If you’ve been following the iPhone at all over the past couple of years, you’re undoubtedly asking yourself how this is possible, since the device does not allow third party apps to run in the background. Has Apple changed its mind about background apps? Not yet. Instead, Loopt is partnering with other companies in the mobile industry for what it’s calling “Always-On Location Service.” Loopt co-founders Sam Altman and Alok Deshpande would not disclose the names of any of these partners, noting that the system set up to make this happen is very “complex” and involves a number of players. But at least one of them has to be AT&T, which is, of course, the network the iPhone runs on. Loopt, which seems to be particularly good at carrier relationships, has cut deals with AT&T in the past. What this means is that these guys have gotten around the iPhone’s limitation by keeping a pipeline open on AT&T’s side that is constantly sending your location data to Loopt. This doesn’t require any app to be running on your iPhone — not even Loopt — and the location data will be sent even when you’re on a call or surfing the web on your iPhone. Most importantly, because there is no app required to do this, it doesn’t drain your battery life, Altman tells us. So what does Apple think about all of this? Altman refused to comment on that, but given the cordial relationship Loopt has had with Apple (being featured both at WWDC last year and in an iPhone commercial), it seems likely that the two sides at least talked about this before Loopt pulled the trigger. That said, because no application is actually involved in this process, it looks like Loopt has essentially found a loophole around Apple on this one. Privacy will undoubtedly be a major concern with such a feature. But Altman notes that you have to go to a website to actually sign up for this, and you can turn it off or on at anytime on that site or via an SMS message. And he believes some of privacy concerns will fade as people get used to such services. “The future of location-based services is always-on,” he says.
They way this will work is that you will be able to receive alerts (emails or text messages) when people or places of interest are nearby to your current location. Loopt can also now build what it calls a “Life Graph” for you — basically, keep a log of where you’ve been. Again, this will be opt-in. Altman would not comment on if its competitors like Whrrl or Brightkite could also strike similar deals, but Deshpande confirms that no one else is offering this (at least not yet). And Loopt is getting ready to come out with a version 2.0 of its iPhone app that should take on other competitors like Foursquare. As it seems clear that AT&T is the key factor in making something like this happen, it’s nice to see them doing something innovative to actually help their iPhone customers get a feature that many of us have long wanted. Assuming it works well, it might even be enough to make us forget the whole months-late MMS thing. But this good news has a price. $3.99 a month, to be specific, which users can sign up for on this site. Initially, Loopt is going to limit the trial to 5,000 testers. Disclosure: Loopt offers a TechCrunch branded version of the service here. [photo: flickr/Rev Dan Catt] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| eBay Acquisition Map Shows Where It Got On The Wrong Track Posted: 04 Sep 2009 07:58 AM PDT Sometimes all you need is a map to see where a company is going, or where it got on the wrong track. Take a look at the eBay acquisitions above plotted as a subway map created by the folks at MeetTheBoss. Click on it for a larger, clearer map. (They also did the same thing for Amazon acquisitions). The map is color-coded, with different subway lines representing different categories of acquisitions. As long as eBay sticks to central lines close to its main business, its acquisitions have done pretty well. For instance, the yellow line is online auctions (iBazaar, Internet Auction Co., GMarket), orange is retail (Half.com, Shopping.com), and violet is e-commerce (PayPal, Bill Me Later, StubHub). It’s when eBay has veered off far away from its core business that it’s gotten into trouble. You can see that here by the darker orange VOIP line (Skype), the red Social line (StumbleUpon), and brown Auction House line (remember Butterfield & Butterfield?). Even the pink Classifieds line has been a mixed bag. eBay’s investment in Craigslist certainly didn’t help it much, and it is still struggling to make a splash in the U.S. Fortunately, eBay’s current management is getting back on the right track by selling Skype and getting rid of distractions such as StumbleUpon. (Hat tip to reader Ciaran Duffy). Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| The Onion Keeps On Embarrassing Newspapers Posted: 04 Sep 2009 06:14 AM PDT
Two Bangladeshi newspapers, The Daily Manab Zamin and New Nation, have been forced to apologize to the public today after having regurgitated a news article taken from The Onion website which claimed the Moon landings were faked. The fake news article in question said Neil Armstrong had told a news conference he had been “forced to reconsider every single detail of the monumental journey after watching a few persuasive YouTube videos and reading several blog posts” by a conspiracy theorist. From the BBC:
Solid gold, and this quote from the
Keep on doing what you’re doing, The Onion. We love you. (Via @minorissues) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Gov 2.0: It’s All About The Platform Posted: 04 Sep 2009 05:20 AM PDT Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Tim O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of computer book publisher O’Reilly Media and a conference organizer. O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 five years ago. Now he is arguing it is time for Gov 2.0, and has helped organize a summit next week to talk about what that might mean. Today, many people equate Web 2.0 with social media; three or four years ago, they equated it with AJAX applications and APIs. Many are now starting to think it’s all about cloud computing. In fact, it’s all of these and more. The way I have always defined Web 2.0, it’s been about what it means for the internet, rather than the personal computer, to be the dominant computing platform. What are the rules of business and competitive advantage when the network is the platform? So too with Government 2.0. A lot of people equate the term with government use of social media, either to solicit public participation or to get out its message in new ways. Some people think it means making government more transparent. Some people think it means adding AJAX to government websites, or replacing those websites with government APIs, or building new cloud platforms for shared government services. And yes, it means all those things. But as with Web 2.0, the real secret of success in Government 2.0 is thinking about government as a platform. If there’s one thing we learn from the technology industry, it’s that every big winner has been a platform company: someone whose success has enabled others, who’ve built on their work and multiplied its impact. Microsoft put “a PC on every desk and in every home,” the internet connected those PCs, Google enabled a generation of ad-supported startups, Apple turned the phone market upside down by letting developers loose to invent applications no phone company would ever have thought of. In each case, the platform provider raised the bar, and created opportunities for others to exploit. There are signs that government is starting to adopt this kind of platform thinking. Behind Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s data.gov site is the idea that government agencies shouldn’t just provide web sites, they should provide web services. These services, in effect, become the government’s SDK (software development kit). The government may build some applications using these APIs, but there’s an opportunity for private citizens and innovative companies to build new, unexpected applications. This is the phenomenon that Jonathan Zittrain refers to as “generativity“, the ability of open-ended platforms to create new possibilities not envisioned by their creators. And of course, much as happened with the rise of commercial web services, “hackers” have been battering at the gates for some time. Adrian Holovaty’s chicagocrime.org (now part of everyblock.com) was the second-ever Google Maps mashup, back in 2005. It showed the world just how much value could be created by putting government data on a map. Most of the winners of Washington D.C.’s Apps for Democracy contest are direct descendants of chicagocrime. Similarly, Openstreetmap started out using crowdsourcing to create free maps in the UK, where map data is expensive; their move to build better maps for Palestine led to contributions from the UN and European community. We’re starting to see formal efforts to develop an application ecosystem at the local, state, and federal level, via contests like Apps for Democracy, Apps for America, and other similar programs. Startups like SeeClickFix are pushing for standardized APIs to government services (like Open311). But there’s still a long way to go. My goal at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase and Gov 2.0 Summit next week in Washington DC is to encourage more of this kind of platform thinking. We’ve brought in leaders from some of the most important platform providers in the tech world—Vint Cerf, the creator of TCP/IP, Jack Dorsey of Twitter, and Craig Mundie of Microsoft, among others—to talk about what makes tech platforms tick. We’re bringing together people like GSA CIO Casey Coleman and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels to talk about what the government can learn from the private sector about building cloud computing infrastructure, and especially how to make interoperable clouds. We’re looking beyond the obvious, as in our on-stage conversation with Google chief economist Hal Varian, talking about the role that measurement and “real time economics” plays in the success of Web 2.0 platforms. We’ll try to apply these insights to some of the big initiatives facing the Federal government, including health care and education. And of course, we’ll be engaging with the architects of the government’s internet strategy, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra, White House new media head Macon Phillips, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, as well as leaders from the military and intelligence sector. In one of my prep calls with Craig Mundie, he pushed forcefully for the idea that killer apps drive platform adoption. It strikes me that the killer app may already be here; we just don’t give the government enough credit for it. I’m talking about the wonderful world of geolocation, with GPS devices in cars providing turn-by-turn directions, phone applications telling you when the next bus is about to arrive, and soon, augmented reality applications telling you what’s nearby. It’s easy to forget that GPS, like the original internet, is a service kickstarted by the government. Here’s the key point: the Air Force originally launched GPS satellites for its own purposes, but in a crucial policy decision, agreed to release a less accurate signal for commercial use. The Air Force moved from providing an application to providing a platform, with the result being a wave of innovation in the private sector. Location is the key to the relevance of government to its citizenry, as well as to a host of non-governmental services. But there are already disputes about who owns the data. For example, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority issued a takedown order against the StationStops iPhone application. This is exactly the kind of bad policy that we hope to remedy by shedding light on best practices in government platform building. It’s important for the idea of “government as platform” to reach well beyond the world of IT. It was Scott Heiferman, the founder of meetup.com who hammered this point home to me. Meetup is a platform for people to do whatever they want with. A lot of them are using it for citizen engagement: cleaning up parks, beaches, and roads; identifying and fixing local problems. In some of my recent talks, I’ve used an image originally proposed by Donald Kettl in The Next Government of the United States. Too often, we think of government as a kind of vending machine. We put in our taxes, and get out services: roads, bridges, hospitals, fire brigades, police protection… And when the vending machine doesn’t give us what we want, we protest. Our idea of citizen engagement has somehow been reduced to shaking the vending machine. But what meetup teaches us is that engagement may mean lending our hands, not just our voices. In this regard, there’s a CNN story from last April that I like to tell: a road into a state park in Kauai was washed out, and the state government said it didn’t have the money to fix it. The park would be closed. Understanding the impact on the local economy, a group of businesses chipped in, organized a group of volunteers, and fixed the road themselves. I called this DIY on a civic scale. Scott Heiferman corrected me: “It’s DIO: Not ‘Do it Yourself’ but ‘Do it Ourselves.’” Imagine if the state government were to reimagine itself not as a vending machine but an organizing engine for civic action. Might DIO help us tackle other problems that bedevil us? Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform? We have an enormous opportunity right now to make a difference. There’s a receptivity to new ideas that we haven’t seen in a generation. Government at all levels has put out the call for help. It’s up to the tech community to respond, with our ideas, with our voices, with our creativity, and with our code. (Photo credit: Flickr/Center for American Progress) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Big Amazon Will Give You Back Your Copies of 1984, Annotations Won’t Be Sent Into the Chute Posted: 04 Sep 2009 04:52 AM PDT
Purchasers will receive a copy of the book for the Kindle or $30 in credit for Amazon products or a check. So either you can get one book or cash for two or more books. Giz has the full text of emails being sent to folks who bought the book:
Well that’s nice! Amazon made two mistakes here - they didn’t pay attention to copyright ownership and they didn’t pay attention to the implications of destroying copies of 1984. If this were My Life in France or a Clive Cussler novel, I doubt it would have created such a buzz. However, the irony and newsworthiness of the destruction essentially made this explode. Amazon will probably send flowers next time they have to delete a book like this - and I know they will - in order to head all the outrage off at the pass. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Former MySpace Exec Allen Hurff Working On A Startup Incubator Posted: 04 Sep 2009 04:46 AM PDT
So all we know at this point is that the incubator is or will be based in Southern California and that there’s no name for it yet. It might be called WebSquared actually, because as Trendslate correctly points out Hurff also reserved a Twitter account named @websquared. In case you don’t know, ‘Web Squared’ is a name that’s being kicked around as the (in my opinion just as ridiculous) successor to the late ‘Web 2.0′ term. Hurff spent four years working for MySpace, where he and former SVP Operations Jim Benedetto were largely reponsible for building up the company’s technology team (Benedetto left the company last March). Hurff also played an integral role in MySpace's adoption of OpenSocial, serving as Chairman of the foundation. We’re contacting Hurff for more information and will update when we hear back. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Google Loses China President Kai-Fu Lee, Has Trouble Translating The Reason Posted: 04 Sep 2009 02:56 AM PDT
Google said Kai-Fu Lee is leaving to work on his own venture, but not content with knowing so little about the man’s plans for the future, I turned to Google’s Translate service to learn more. The goal: translate Lee’s blog post and tweets in English for more clarity on the matter. The result: hilarity. Take this tweet for example. This is what Lee is saying, according to Google Translate:
Or this one:
To be fair, Chinese is not an easy language to learn, let alone translate, but you have to admit the Google Translate service’s desperate attempts to extract meaning out of the (now former) Google executive’s words are funny as hell. The translation of the man’s blog post is better (barely), and reveals that building Google in China hasn’t exactly been a breeze and that Lee now wants to pass on his knowledge and experience to Chinese youth. Or not. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Elephant Attacks Tech Legend Tom Siebel (And Gets Away With It) Posted: 04 Sep 2009 02:01 AM PDT
The incident is vaguely reminiscent of TechCrunch editor Sarah Lacy’s recent baboon attack in Rwanda, although in Siebel’s case the consequences were a bit more severe than a psychological trauma. The 56-year-old tech mogul told Mercury News in an interview that he and his guide was attacked by a charging elephant in the Serengeti, breaking several ribs, goring him in the left leg and crushing the right. Fortunately, unlike Larry Ellison a couple of years ago when he set his sight on the man’s company, the elephant soon lost interest in Siebel and simply walked away from the scene. The billionaire (estimated worth: $US 1.9 billion as of 2008) had to wait three hours before the radioed medical assistance team showed up and gave him treatment, but is now recovering from his injuries in his Woodside home and expects to make a full recovery after reconstructive surgery and physical therapy. Siebel told the Mercury News Wednesday that he doesn’t know what became of the elephant that attacked him. He added that authorities in Tanzania searched for it, but as far as he knows it was never found. Not able to come up with a good joke using the phrasing ‘elephant in the room’, I’m just going to conclude by saying we’re all glad Siebel is ok, and we hope the same is true for the animal. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| New Gmail Themes Include One That They Won’t Call “Nintendo,” But I Will Posted: 04 Sep 2009 01:59 AM PDT
Truth be told, the Nintendo-like theme (called “High Score”, undoubtedly to prevent any trademark lawsuits), makes Gmail nearly impossible to read — at least at night, when the background is all black (below). But it’s awesome having a Mario-esque backdrop and Space Invader-like guys are your buddy chat indicators. There are three other new themes as well (the first Gmail has launched since themes launched in November). They are: “Orcas Island”, “Turf”, and “Random”. The first two are rather ho-hum compared to High Score. The random one is kind of cool if you like change, which, as I just explained, I do. This still isn’t quite as good as FriendFeed’s interactive Duck Hunt theme, but it’s close. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Snow Leopard, Marble, And Calamine Lotion Posted: 04 Sep 2009 01:35 AM PDT
On one hand, I like the idea that Apple has decided to stick with something that is working so well (OS X Leopard), and make it lighter, faster and all-around better. On the other, it’s fairly hard to tell that you’re actually using something that is any different from the previous version. Yes, there are many little, subtle changes all over, but aside from maybe Quicktime X, there is nothing that immediately strikes you as being different. I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t a little disappointing to me. New Spots? OS X Leopard (again, the previous version) has been great, but as I said, I like change. I had been hoping for Apple to present me with something a little different after a couple years of Leopard. Instead, within a day of installing Snow Leopard, I found myself moving my dock from the bottom of my screen to the left-hand side, just to make me feel as if something had changed. This, of course, is something anyone can do in Leopard as well, but I’ve always been a bottom dock kind of guy — now I’m a left dock kind of guy, simply out of the need to make Snow Leopard feel different. Obviously, Apple has known for a while that Snow Leopard really wouldn’t aesthetically be all that different from Leopard. While all the previous versions of OS X have had different big cat nicknames, 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is just a a different type of 10.5 (Leopard). And it’s been bracing both users and developers for the past year that Snow Leopard would not be a complete overhaul of the system, but rather a refinement of it. And nothing speaks more to that than the price: $29. Given the amount of time (and presumably, the amount of work) put into it, it would seem that Apple would have every right to charge full price for Snow Leopard — something along the lines of $129. But Apple undoubtedly realized that without any major new consumer-facing functionality or aesthetic changes, it would be foolish to try and charge that much. Plenty of users are noting that Snow Leopard doesn’t feel all that much different, but the rationale behind getting it always seems to come back to: “But it’s only $29.” Smart move, Apple. Microsoft
Windows 98 really wasn’t all that different from Windows 95 from an end-user perspective, it was more of a fine-tuning of the system. Snow Leopard would seem to be Apple’s Windows 98. And if that’s the case, Apple would undoubtedly be happy as plenty of users consider Windows 98 to be a high point for Windows (well, Windows 98 SE, anyway). But even Windows 98 came with a little cheat: Microsoft Plus. While not all versions had it, the add-on (which also was available for Windows 95, but different) added some themes and other front-end changes to Windows 98 to make it look different than the standard Windows 95 look-and-feel users may have been bored with. Marble And that’s why it’s surprising that Apple didn’t do something similar. At one point, it would seem that they intended to, by giving all OS X apps a new coat of paint, codenamed “Marble.” Basically, Marble was thought to be a darker version of the Brushed Metal look that OS X currently has. You can see what it may look like in certain Apple-made applications already in OS X, like Quicktime X, and parts of iPhoto and iTunes (the dark scroll bars). So if Apple has somewhat implemented what seems to be part of it, why not go all Marble in Snow Leopard and give the users something new to look at? I’m not sure. Maybe they thought it was too dark, or maybe they’re saving it for OS X 10.7. But it’s a bit odd that the UI of the operating system is so fragmented. Especially when a unification could have quieted some of the front-end complaints. Calamine Lotion
Don Draper has a great line in the first season of Mad Men, “The most important idea in advertising is 'new'. It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.” Apple created that itch by announcing a new OS, but I’m not sure that Snow Leopard is the calamine lotion that everyone was looking for. And Apple has taken a risk of sorts by releasing it this way. Especially on the verge of a major Windows overhaul with Windows 7 (which is to say, the version of Vista as it should be been made the first time). As blogger Jason Kottke puts it, “People want to feel, emotionally speaking, that their money is well-spent and impeccable branding, funny commercials, and the sense of belonging to a hip lifestyle that Apple tries to engender in its customers can only go so far.” It’s human nature (or at least consumer nature) to want something to seem new when you buy it; to make it seem like the money was spent on something tangible. You can completely re-do the inner workings of a piece of software, but at the end of the day, if it doesn’t look any different, to most consumers, it might as well not be. Snow Leopard looks like Leopard, therefore, to many, it might as well be Leopard. All that said, it is only $29. [photos: flickr/kessiye, flickr/thenandagain and AMC] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| RubyOnRails XSS Vulnerability Claims Twitter, Basecamp And My Confidence Posted: 04 Sep 2009 12:01 AM PDT  It was only three days ago that I wrote about the almost hopeless challenge of web security, specifically around new vectors with cross-site scripting attacks. Today came news that an XSS vulnerability had been found in the RubyOnRails development framework - and that applications built on the framework, such as Twitter and Basecamp, were vulnerable to XSS attacks. The vulnerability was discovered by Brian Masterbrook. He probed Twitter with some Unicode characters and found it vulnerable, tried the same thing on Basecamp and found it vulnerable, and then deduced that it must be a problem with RubyOnRails. He has an excellent and detailed write-up on his site about the process he went through. If you are running RubyOnRails anywhere, stop now and read his post as well as the security notice from the Rails developers and get your servers updated (the patch is in the notice, it will be in the release branch 'today or tomorrow').TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Former Digg Architect Gets The Superhero Treatment, Wants To Take You To The Internets Posted: 03 Sep 2009 11:45 PM PDT
There are eight categories of jokes; quotes, comics, sexy time, photos, geeky, jokes, stories and forum posts. Once you find a category that you like, you click to find numerous laughs that are aggregated from sites that people think are funny. If they think a site is funny, all you do is use the bookmarklet, and it gets added to the queue of sites. Sites are then added and moderated by Stump and a few others. It’s interesting to see how long it took for Stump’s latest iPhone app to get accepted to the App Store, considering his recent problems with Apple. There are numerous alternatives to an application that provides laughs, like iLaugh, iJoke, iLOL, iJoker and others. Also, if we ever do a company logo contest, I’m sure a flying Joe Stump in a cape would get good reviews. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
We’re hearing of numerous 
When Google officially joined Twitter back in February, its 
As we 
It’s pretty easy these days to think of AT&T as a giant corporation of demons sent to Earth to destroy iPhone users’ productivity. But apparently, it is a company just like any other, with humans working for it. How do we know? There is video evidence.
The battle between Dish and TiVo rages on. As reported by 
The goal of the logo is to convey a sense of community and discussion. Thus, the text chat bubble. Real time feedback from the audience and judges to launching startups is a crucial part of the culture of TechCrunch50.
A 
I agree, this seems like a huge win for Loopt (well, if users are okay with paying for the service, more on that below). I’ll be using it a lot more now because first of all, I don’t actually have to open the app to update — but more importantly, none of my contacts will either. So oddly, I probably will be opening the app itself more now too because of that. And eventually, you could see such background location functionality playing a roll in advertising on the iPhone.
Silicon Valley billionaire 
The Gmail blog has 
There are two types of people in the world: Those that hate change, and those that embrace it. I tend to fall into the latter category. And that’s why OS X Snow Leopard is an odd product for me.
My initial thought was that if Microsoft launched an OS update that looked and felt basically the same as the previous version, users would be up in arms much more than they are with Snow Leopard. But then I remembered that they’ve done this in the past also, it was called Windows 98.
None of this is to say that Snow Leopard isn’t good. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now (the developer builds and now the final version), and aside from some frustrating bugs with WiFi and MobileMe, I like all of the small changes that Apple made. But again, from a user’s perspective, they’re small changes. We may see some fruits of the under-the-hood labor (64-bit and OpenCL) in the months and years to come, but right now, that’s a hard sell.
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