The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- EchoSign Reaches One Million Users For E-Signatures
- Google Releases A Nuke. Apple Won’t Win This Fight.
- Review: Zune HD
- New Lawsuit Brings Clarity To Skype’s IP Problem (Prognosis: Screwed)
- WeddingWire’s iPhone App Lets You Plan Your Wedding On The Go
- Sneak Peek At T2, Twine’s Semantic Search Engine
- Closing In On Launch, Twitter Tweaks Its Retweet API And Shares A Picture
- The Perfect App To Start Your Weekend Off With A Drink – Or Several Drinks. Fast.
- TC50 DemoPit Startup Fresh Sliced News Launches News And Blog Aggregator
- While We Wait For Chrome For Mac, Mozilla’s Camino Gets An Update
- Google Reveals Full FCC Response, Directly Contradicts Apple On Google Voice Rejection
- Mixcloud Launches Cloudcasts Monday – But You Can Try It Now
| EchoSign Reaches One Million Users For E-Signatures Posted: 18 Sep 2009 10:11 PM PDT EchoSign, the web-based electronic signatures and signature automation service, has surpassed one million users. The startup, which launched back in 2006, has also helped sign and close more than $200,000,000 worth of contracts in one month. EchoSign's electronic signature service lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. The startup has a freemium model, where the you can use a basic service for free but pay anywhere from $14.95 to $300 per month for a subscription service that includes extra features such as PDF encryption and password protections. EchoSign’s CEO and co-founder Jason Lemkin says that the electronic signature movement experienced momentum as more businesses adopted SaaS and cloud computing applications. For example, EchoSign has gained significant popularity on Salesforce’s App Exchange. EchoSign is also integrated with web-based productivity suite Zoho. To date, EchoSign has raised $8.5 million in funding. The startup faces competition from DocuSign and VeriSign.
EchoSign: The Way the Web Signs from FromEchoSign on Vimeo. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco           |
| Google Releases A Nuke. Apple Won’t Win This Fight. Posted: 18 Sep 2009 05:19 PM PDT
There’s no longer any question – either Google or Apple is flat out lying to the FCC: Apple: “Contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it.” Google: “Apple representatives informed Google that the Google Voice application was rejected because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone” Our position is that Apple is the one full of it, which we stated way before this new information from Google. And it isn’t just he said/she said – Apple’s story doesn’t add up. But Apple is standing firm, and even today told press that they haven’t rejected the Google Voice application, despite what Google says. This doesn’t end here. As we’ve speculated, Apple will capitulate and accept the application with a few minor tweaks to save face. Because if they don’t we’ve heard Google has yet another nuke waiting on the sidelines – a screen shot of the actual rejection notice via the iPhone developers admin with the formal rejection. At that point, Apple will no longer be able to rely on nuances and misdirection. The FCC and everyone else will know that they lied in a government investigation. We’re offering a free TechCrunch tshirt to any Google employee that forwards that screenshot to us. No questions asked. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Posted: 18 Sep 2009 04:01 PM PDT  But what did he see in the clear stream below? His own image; no longer a dark, gray bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan. —The Ugly DucklingIt's been a long, brown trip for the Zune: from its early days (mocked and abject) to its awkward years (deemed a dead end and money pit) it's been embattled and criticized, and rightly so. After all, here was an unpopular company with a frankly ridiculous brand it had pulled out of thin air, attempting to compete with the guys who defined the market. We've always been champions of the devices, despite their quirks, and of the service, despite its growing pains — and Microsoft occasionally made it pretty hard for us to stand by our favorite little misfit media player. Well, for once they just made it really easy. Let's not beat around the bush, now: this thing is going head-on with the iPod touch, one of the most versatile and well-liked devices on the planet. There are other PMPs, sure, but the caliber of these two devices is well beyond the best offerings from Creative, Samsung, or Sony. To make it easy on the Apple fans who are impatient to comment on this story, let me just state it right now for the record: the Zune HD is not an iPod-killer, but it is the only player out there that can go up against it and not be annihilated in the process. It's good enough that everyone owes it to themselves to give it a look — unless you're afraid of just how good it might be. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| New Lawsuit Brings Clarity To Skype’s IP Problem (Prognosis: Screwed) Posted: 18 Sep 2009 03:24 PM PDT
Sure, Skype doesn’t own its core P2P technology, and founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom were trying to rip that IP out of the service. But that’s all old news from months ago. Surely those new investors wouldn’t have committed to paying $1.9 billion for 65% of a company that didn’t control its IP? At the time of the deal, people close to the transaction told me that the new investors had a much better relationship with Niklas and Janus than eBay, and the situation would soon be worked out. Our best guess was the two would be given a piece of Skype, and possibly a board seat, and the litigation would be dropped. But that isn’t the case, it seems. This new intellectual property lawsuit against former Joost CEO Mike Volpi and venture capital firm Index Ventures really has nothing to do with Joost at all. It’s all about control and ownership of Skype, and it’s a signal that the dispute is nowhere near over. What’s most interesting about the lawsuit is a single disclosure early in the lawsuit complaint. Not only does Skype not own the core P2P technology underlying the service, but they don’t even have access to the source code (emphasis added):
And this bit of information singlehandedly explains possibly the entire history of Skype over the last few years. Want to know why they never opened up to developers in a meaninful way? It’s because they couldn’t. They can’t even tweak their own core source code to allow it. Skype has never disclosed this, but it must be a source of monumental frustration for them. That frustration boiled over in an interview I did with Skype last week, where they made it very clear that they want to, and plan to, open up widely to developers. But until this litigation is cleared up, and Skype has access to the actual source code that runs its service, that isn’t going to happen. This new litigation could tank the acquisition. Or it could change it materially. Or it could result in a big compromise where Niklas and Janus take a big role in the new Skype. But whatever happens, it has very little to do with Mike Volpi and Index Ventures. The real story here is that Skype is restrained from innovating because they don’t own their own IP. In fact, they can’t even see the core IP. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| WeddingWire’s iPhone App Lets You Plan Your Wedding On The Go Posted: 18 Sep 2009 03:15 PM PDT Planning a wedding can be an incredibly stressful process (I know from experience-I just got married a few weeks ago). WeddingWire, an online wedding planning platform and vendor directory, is launching an new version of its app to let brides (and grooms) plan their weddings with the help of their iPhone. The previous version of WeddingWire’s app just let you see lists of vendors in your area. The new app is a lightweight version of WeddingWire’s site that will sync with your account on the planning platform’s site. Once you log-in to the app with your WeddingWire account, you can keep track of to-do items in your planning list, access your customized budget tool, and find local wedding vendors and reviews. The review feature is key, sort of serving like a Yelp for weddings vendors. You can see reviews of a vendor then create a to-do item in your planning checklist to follow up with that vendor at a later date. Surprisingly, there aren’t as many wedding planning apps in the app store as I though there would be. Other wedding planning apps include Bride Guide, and iWedding but both are paid apps. WeddingWire’s app is free. The Knot, which is one of the more popular wedding planning sites on the web, has an iPhone app that simply lets you get advice for their experts but doesn’t recreate the planning experience from the site on your device. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Sneak Peek At T2, Twine’s Semantic Search Engine Posted: 18 Sep 2009 02:13 PM PDT Extracting meaning from the Web is huge project that is very difficult to do at large scale. Keyword search only skims the surface of meaning locked in Web pages. Various semantic search technologies try to go deeper by adding structured data to web pages so that the Web can be treated more like a database. But adding semantic metadata to the Web is laborious and time-consuming. Just look at Twine. It’s approach so far has been to add semantic data only to the Web pages members save to the service. While it appeared like Twine was finally getting some traction earlier this year, it’s fallen by the wayside. Traffic is way down (see chart below), partly because it is no longer buying traffic with ads and partly because of changes to the way Google indexes the site. Bottom line is that is that beyond a hardcore following of about 250,000, Twine does not have broad appeal. But CEO Nova Spivack and his team at Twine have been busy working on something else entirely, to the point that the current Twine service is pretty much on autopilot. In the video above, Spivack gives a sneak peak at what his team has been working on. Codenamed T2, it is complete departure from the navel-gazing approach of Twine 1.0. It is a big step towards creating a semantic search engine that might eventually scale across the Web—exactly the kind of swing for the fences type of idea we like to see at TechCrunch. When T2 launches, hopefully by the end of the year, it will be a demonstration of what semantic search could be. T2 will have a semantic index of the top 50 to 100 sites across major categories such as food, health, sports, music, finance, television, politics, tech and movies. In those categories, T2 should provide really good guided search. If you search for “baseball” you will get a list of baseball players, along with categories on the side to refine the list such as by position or team name. When you type in “thai food,” you can select the Recipes tab and then filter by food site, rating, main ingredient, and so on. Or you can select the restaurant tab and drill down by city, hours of operation, etc. You’ll find this type of guided search on Bing, with the categories changing based on the initial search term. But Twine does things differently. What Twine has done, basically, is speed up the rate at which it can look at a raw Web page and create semantic metadata for it. Bing sometimes does this via natural language processing, through the technology it bought with Powerset. That takes a lot of computation. It also employs other methods. Twine’s approach is more to create a set of semantic tags for each page. There are already standards for doing this, such as RDF and OWL, but most Webmasters don’t bother adding such tags to their sites. If they happen to be there, Twine can read them, but it can also make a good guess as to what is on the page and assign its own tags to the page. In order to try to make it easier for Web developers to tag their sites, Twine is also working on developer tools such as an Ontologies Editor. This lets anyone with domain expertise define the different concepts and tags which would characterize a page about a particular topic, such as a recipe or a baseball player or a car. For example, a recipe might be contain concepts such as ingredients, difficulty level, an author, and a a date. There are literally millions of potential properties that can be matched to different concepts. The collection of all of these together for a specific topic is an ontology. There can literally be hundreds of thousands of ontologies for every conceivable topic. If Twine knows what ontology to apply to a given Web page, it can do a better job applying semantic tags to it and extracting data. Twine wants to create an open directory of these things, which will be like a SourceForge for ontologies where anyone can contribute and make them better. You can watch this video for more details. All of this might seem a bit abstract, but if we could ever get to the point where the most important pages on the Web have semantic tags, it will be a lot easier for computers to know what they are about. And to the extent that data is locked in those pages, the Semantic Web will turn that data into something that can be computed. As these tags get applied to more and more information, they could eventually help filter stream data as well that everyone is increasingly drowning in. Whether or not Twine will be the company to deliver any or all of this is a long shot, but it is definitely something worth swinging for. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Closing In On Launch, Twitter Tweaks Its Retweet API And Shares A Picture Posted: 18 Sep 2009 02:11 PM PDT
First, the launch of the new API is “close at hand.” In fact, Molina notes that users may already be seeing the new style retweet/status messages from users who are currently testing out the feature. Second, and more importantly, Twitter is making a pretty significant change to the API prior to launch. Previously, Twitter was requiring third party developers to check whether a tweet has already come in or not in any users’ stream to see if they should collapse it under the new retweet structure. Now, Twitter has built its own mechanism to check for those duplicate tweets into the API. This will ensure that only the first tweet is shown and the retweets go under it automatically. Interestingly enough, Molina notes that this will only gather up to 100 retweets. With our TechCrunch account, we often see many more than that, so it will be interesting to see how it handles that. As I read it, it may just cut off the retweets beyond 100, and simply not show them, which seems fine. Oddly though, in the image below, you’ll notice a “100+” note on Sarah Silverman’s tweet. Perhaps it notes that many, but will not show them. Molina apologized to developers if they had already been doing work using the old method with the Retweet API. You can find the API documentation here. And Twitter has also shared a picture of how the functionality may look on Twitter.com. Obviously, things have changed since the initial announcement. Note the icons now under tweets, as well as the Retweet tab system. It’s important to note that this view is not the main Twitter stream, as you can see on the right hand side, this stuff resides in a new “Retweets” column. Molina notes that this is just one potential mock-up for how it will look on Twitter.com. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| The Perfect App To Start Your Weekend Off With A Drink – Or Several Drinks. Fast. Posted: 18 Sep 2009 01:09 PM PDT
A “Power Hour” is a game in which you must drink one shot of beer every minute for an hour (there are variations). Yes, that’s 60 shots of beer. Yes, that will get you very, very drunk. But again, this app never once mentions drinking in its description, and instead implies that it may just be fun to listen to music for a minute at a time. I love it. Then I dove into the App Store and looked at some other “Power Hour” apps — there are a ton of them. And hilariously, none seem to mention drinking at all. One, Hour of Power, has a description that even reads as follows:
Exercising? Jogging? Ha! We all know what these apps are for, even if they found a rather brilliant loophole in Apple’s App approval system: Simply create a drinking game app, don’t mention the drinking part, and you’ll get a nice 4+ rating, rather than a much more restrictive one (or possibly even rejection). But we’re going to focus on Power Music Hour because at least they were honest in their email to us about the app:
The app itself is great as a Power Hour app. It takes the music that on your iPhone or iPod touch and cycles through it in 60-second intervals (you can also make it longer or shorter). There is then an audible “ding” when that minute is up, and the song changes. Back in the day, we used to have to use a stop watch to do Power Hours, this is much, much better! Find Power Music Hour in the App Store here. It is $0.99. Please drink responsibly. Or, please listen to music for a minute at a time responsibly. While jogging. Or whatever. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| TC50 DemoPit Startup Fresh Sliced News Launches News And Blog Aggregator Posted: 18 Sep 2009 01:05 PM PDT  While RSS may be slowly dying, startups are still building interesting products around the stale technology. Launched at TechCrunch 50’s DemoPit, Fresh Sliced News is a free Adobe Air powered-desktop application that lets you to build a personalized newspaper from your favorite news sources on the web. Once you’ve downloaded the app, you can create personalized sections on the app such as “Technology,” “Food,” “Fashion.” Within each section Fresh Sliced News lets you pull in the RSS feeds of 140 news sites and blogs. You can also add other RSS feeds manually if you have the feed’s URL. Content is automatically added to the app and items are given more visual prominence corresponding to their importance, which is determined two criteria— the level of engagement a news story is receiving on the internet (gauged by PostRank’s technology) and the interests a user has demonstrated in the subject matter of the news on the application. So if I tend to read more news about wine in my “food” section, the articles about wine will be more prominent within the app. When you hover over an article, a pop-up window appears with a snapshot of the content. When you click on a post, you are taken, via a separate window, to the article’s site, where you can read the post and browse the site. I especially like how you don’t have to leave the app to read the content on a news site. The app itself is visually appealing and easy to read. It doesn’t appear cluttered, which can be a problem for sites and apps that are aggregating news stories and large amounts of content. Of course, Fresh Sliced News faces its biggest competition from Google Reader and the plethora of other RSS feed aggregators on the web so it might be tough for the startup to gain serious traction. But if you can get past the strange quirks and bugs of Adobe Air, Fresh Sliced News is worth a look.  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| While We Wait For Chrome For Mac, Mozilla’s Camino Gets An Update Posted: 18 Sep 2009 12:28 PM PDT
Camino is a browser built by Mozilla specifically for the Mac. Unlike the much more popular Firefox, Camino is extremely lean and fast. It’s so fast that it’s been my browser of choice for the past several years. And the new version, Camino 2.0 beta 4, released today, offers some nice improvements. Among them:
The key feature for many users will be the last one. Mozilla has finally updated Camino to blend in a little bit better with OS X. While the changes in the look and feel definitely aren’t huge, they are subtle and nice. But here’s the real interesting thing about Camino, its project lead, Mike Pinkerton, also happens to be the guy leading the development of the Mac version of Chrome for Google. It seems likely that most of his time is now spent on Chrome (and his Twitter updates indicate as much), but he has always maintained that work would continue on Camino for Mozilla. Of course, it has been almost a year since Camino 2 first went into beta testing (last December) and it’s still not done yet. Meanwhile, in that time, there have been three official releases of Chrome (though, again, none for the Mac). Still, it’s nice to get even little updates to Camino. It remains a great browser. On the Chrome end, Google has publicly stated that it will be available before the end of the year. Judging from the Chromium builds, it seems very close. No word on when Camino 2 will be finalized, but that too, seems pretty stable. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Google Reveals Full FCC Response, Directly Contradicts Apple On Google Voice Rejection Posted: 18 Sep 2009 11:10 AM PDT
No incriminating back-alley conversations. Google wasn’t trying to hide anything that could have hurt it in any way. It was just trying to give Apple a chance to take the high road. Instead, Apple apparently lied through its teeth to the FCC. The story so far: late last July, Apple abruptly pulled all third party Google Voice iPhone applications, which had been on the App Store for months without any problems. Apple stated that these were somehow “duplicating” the iPhone’s functionality, which was a no-no. At the time Google said it was still working on its own official application, but later that day we broke the news that Google had in fact submitted its app weeks earlier, only to have it shot down by Apple. The FCC soon launched an inquiry to investigate why the application had really been rejected. Three weeks later AT&T, Apple, and Google provided their responses to the FCC. AT&T, which had played the role of scapegoat in the debacle, proved to have little (if anything) to do with the decision. Google’s letter did its best to outline exactly what Google Voice does. And Apple spouted blatant lie after blatant lie in its inaccurate description of Google Voice, going as far as to imply that Google might be doing something nefarious with user data (though, of course, there are a number of Google apps that come pre-installed on the iPhone). And Apple triumphantly responded that it in fact had not actually rejected Google Voice (neener-neener), but that it was still “pondering” over what to make of the application. This last point is the most interesting, because Google’s response directly contradicts it. In fact, Google’s previously redacted response explicitly says multiple times that both Google Voice and Google Latitude were rejected, in no uncertain terms. And, of course, Apple’s other claims are laughable. There are countless apps on the App Store that “duplicate” the iPhone’s functionality in some form, and the notion that users might get confused about the apps is ridiculous too — after all, users have to manually install these apps. The real reason for the ban is likely that Apple doesn’t want its device to turn into a platform dominated by Google services. But one big question remains: why would Google redact the answer to Question 2 in the first place? Google’s response really only shows us that Apple stonewalled them the way they stonewalled everyone else (though Google did at least get some face time with Apple’s Phil Schiller). The real reason, I think, is that Google wanted to give Apple a chance to save face and let Google Voice into the App Store. Question 2 is the only place where Google explicitly says that its applications were rejected — the rest of them detail things like the way Google Voice works and whether or not Google has any more apps pending with Apple (it doesn’t). By redacting its response to Question 2, Google gave Apple the chance to make its ridiculous “pondering” claims, say it was all a misunderstanding, and let Google Voice into the app store a few days or weeks later. But it’s been a month since those letters were released, and neither Google Voice nor Google Latitude have made their way to the App Store. Google could have fought the Freedom of Information Act requests that sought the unedited letter, but there really isn’t much point any more. It’s time to remove any doubt as to who the bad guy is here: Apple.
Image by brankomaster. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Mixcloud Launches Cloudcasts Monday – But You Can Try It Now Posted: 18 Sep 2009 08:45 AM PDT
Online radio is very much a digital media orphan; languishing in a fragmented space while innovations in other aspects of streaming media have come thick and fast over the last few years. Mixcloud’s vision is to be the YouTube of radio with on-demand radio shows spanning music and talk and truing to make it make it more social, personalised and ‘democratic’. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
Well, something clearly broke down behind the scenes in the ongoing Apple/Google negotiations over Google Voice on the iPhone, because Google released one of two nukes it has been holding back. In a
When a group of investors pooled their resources a few weeks ago to put a bid in to 
In the Twitter API Announcement Google Group today, developer Marcel Molina 
I love the fact that Power Music Hour, a new app for the iPhone, never once mentions drinking in its App Store page description. But anyone who has been to college in the past decade will know exactly what this app is for: A drinking game.
While Mac users grow impatient for Google’s Chrome browser to come to the platform, there’s a small bit of good news today: A 
Google has 
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