The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- U.S. Internet Ad Revenues Decline 5.3% In First Half 2009
- Nonoba’s “Ning For Gaming Sites” To Power Indian Gaming Platform Zapak
- ChaCha Branches Out, Launches Digital Coupon Service In Indiana
- Smartphones Get Bigger Ads From Google
- Jinni Hits Public Beta With Video Discovery Engine
- Causata Launches Customer Interaction Platform With $4.5M From Accel Partners
- Yammer 2.0 For The iPhone Finally Pushes Past The App Store Watchmen
- Googled: Schmidt Wants To Build A “$100 Billion Media Company”
- On The Internet, Nobody Knows You’re Not In The USA
- The Speed Of Share
- Yahoo Buys Full Page Front Page Ad In Times Of India
- The Evolution Of Technology In Schools
- Twitter Should Decentralize (And Make Money) Via Twitter Server
- Playing Around With Ball-it’s Ridiculously Cool Wireless Gaming Device (Video)
| U.S. Internet Ad Revenues Decline 5.3% In First Half 2009 Posted: 05 Oct 2009 09:06 AM PDT
Search continues to take nearly half of all Internet advertising, with 47% of the total ($5.1 billion). Display ads, classified listings, lead generation and email took 34%, 10%, 7% and 1%, respectively. Search took just 44% of total advertising revenue in the first half of 2008. Digital video jumped from 3% to 4% of the total in the first half of 2009, to $477 million total. 2008 was the peek year so far for Internet advertising in the U.S., with $23.4 billion in total revenues. That’s up from just $6 billion in 2002. Retail advertisers represented the largest category of spending, at 20%. Telecom (16%), Leisure Travel (6%), Financial Services (12%), Automotive (11%), Computing (10%), Consumer Packaged Goods/Food Products (6%), Entertainment (4%) and Media (4%) made up most of the rest. The full report is embedded below and is available here (pdf).
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| Nonoba’s “Ning For Gaming Sites” To Power Indian Gaming Platform Zapak Posted: 05 Oct 2009 09:00 AM PDT  Earlier this year, we wrote about Nonoba’s GameRise, a "Ning for Flash games" that lets anyone create a gaming website. India’ largest casual gaming platform, Zapak, is now using GameRise as a white-label solution to power the portals for its multi-player games. Zapak’s single player games will rest on an additional GameRise-powered site. Reliance-owned Zapak, which has more than 6 million registered users, contains more than 5,000 games on its platform. GameRise is essentially a CMS that makes developing and maintaining customized Flash-based gaming sites featuring game catalogs and social services like chat rooms and forums. Part of Nonoba’s monetization plan was to sell GameRise’s API as a white label service. Since its launch in March of 2009, GameRise has signed-up over 100 customers for its white-label offering including Kongregate, Minijuegos.com and MTV’s Addicting Games. The idea of creating a “Ning-like” gaming portal is innovative but the examples of the sites using GameRise’s white-label service on Zapak is pretty basic and could use a sleeker interface. That being said, Nonoba has been able to move gaming properties from two big-name media properties—MTV and Reliance— so the startup is off to a good start. Mochi Media is doing something similar in the gaming space, but focuses more on monetization, distribution and analytics for Flash games. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| ChaCha Branches Out, Launches Digital Coupon Service In Indiana Posted: 05 Oct 2009 08:46 AM PDT
ChaCha CEO Scott Jones tells the local business newspaper that ChaChaCoupons is a ‘logical extension’ of its core service, which allows users to call or text questions on mobile phones and receive answers from human guides quickly and free of charge. He adds that the service currently attracts about 9 million unique users per month through mobiles and its website, but forgets to mention that the model doesn’t appear to work out all that well for the startup. ChaCha has cut guides’ payments quite a few times since its inception and was forced to lay off a significant part of its staff earlier this year. Anyway: ChaChaCoupons aims to make it easy for people to search for local companies and offers by business type, area of the city, alphabetical listing, newest deals, and more. Like most online coupon services, visitors can print coupons at their desktop or send them to their mobile phones to be redeemed at their favorite businesses. They can also send a coupon via text messaging to a ChaCha in-store coupon printer. At launch, hundreds of local offers are on the site with special coupons and discounts in some 13 categories ranging from beauty to restaurants. Conceivably, ChaCha will be expanding the service to more regions and cities across the United States in the future. The new ChaCha service has also been integrated with the company’s text VIP lists where users sign up to get cellphone offers and news from their favorite businesses. Users can choose to instantly join an advertiser’s VIP List by either text or online at ChaChaCoupons.com, giving local businesses a way of retaining their loyal customer base. In all fairness, I actually agree that this could be a worthy extension for the regular ChaCha service that the company could turn into dollars, which it is hard-pressed for. That said, ChaCha basically raised approximately $62 million for a mobile answer service, and I can’t shake off the feeling that this new addition is actually the company desperately trying to do new things because its primary focus turned out to be, well, worthless. Time will tell if all this branching out can help the company’s investors get something out of the startup in the long run. On a sidenote, I had a good laugh when I looked up the most recent question from a mobile phone that was featured on the ChaCha website. It was: “where do squirrels poop?” and I’ll let you check out the guide’s answer and more in the comment section on your own, for shits and giggles (pun intended). Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Smartphones Get Bigger Ads From Google Posted: 05 Oct 2009 07:11 AM PDT
The problem was that up until now, publishers were only eligible to serve smaller text and image ads on their website content so far, and these were apparently far from effective enough on high-end mobile phones. Today, the Mountain View search and advertising giant is announcing the freshly added possibility for publishers to run bigger ads. Click the image above for a larger size, but basically Google now offers the possibility to select “iPhone and other high-end devices only” rather than “all phones”‘. The new JavaScript snippet that publishers need to implement to start taking advantage of the optimized ad units are aimed to reduce latency on high-end mobile phones, according to a blog post on the Inside AdSense blog. The snippet will allow publishers to select additional ad unit sizes from common AdSense formats. Over the weekend, Google also quietly introduced advertising units and user-generated content blurbs on iPhone maps. Earlier, the company had launched new AdWords options for the iPhone and the G1, a new beta product called AdSense for Mobile Applications and a revamped local search service for mobile phones. If anyone still has any doubts about how serious Google takes the potential of advertising revenue from smartphone users, consider a different train of thought. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Jinni Hits Public Beta With Video Discovery Engine Posted: 05 Oct 2009 07:09 AM PDT
Most of us choose movies based on rather amorphous criteria like mood or an association with another movie we like. But categorisations like genre are usually too wide. On Jinni you can search for movies and TV shows based on mood terms like “witty”, “stylized” or “disturbing” or plot elements like “unlikely couple” or “ambition”. Links are provided to sites like Amazon, Netflix and iTunes (and for European users LOVEFilm) where you can buy or rent the content. Jinni’s most obvious rival is Netflix, but the founders of Jinni see the two services as complementary with Netflix’s main focus being content delivery while Jinni does discovery. There are many other recommendation engines (e.g. Tastekid, Clerkdogs, Criticker) with the the closest probably Nanocrowd, but Jinni’s interface and functionality could give them a run for their money. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Causata Launches Customer Interaction Platform With $4.5M From Accel Partners Posted: 05 Oct 2009 05:55 AM PDT
The Series A round actually closed back in April this year, but the name of the investor has only now been made public through a regulatory filing, reports peHUB. Judging by messages posted this morning on the company’s Twitter account, the software startup has only now gone public with its website and offering. Causata markets a multichannel customer interaction platform that intends to enable companies to optimize customer experience and business results simultaneously, at any touch point, in real-time. Causata's software essentially structures enterprise data around customers' interests, rather than solely on enterprise-centric events and transactions. The company focuses strongly on two verticals – retail and financial services – but also caters to other industries like telecom, media and Internet businesses. Causata was founded in the beginning of this year by Paul Philips, an entrepreneur who sold his previous business Touch Clarity to Omniture in 2007 for a reported $48.5 million. Gareth O'Loughlin, former General Manager of Skype, is VP of Products. In a blog post, Philips shares more information about why he started Causata:
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| Yammer 2.0 For The iPhone Finally Pushes Past The App Store Watchmen Posted: 05 Oct 2009 01:40 AM PDT
The big addition here is Push Notifications. This is really a key feature since you now can see whenever someone in your network says something without having to open the app. And there are Push settings to allow you to see all messages, replies to you, direct messages, “liked” items, bookmarked items, events, and editorial items — and combinations of any of those. You can also set whether or a not a sound plays when the notification comes in (it seems to say “Yam”), and set “quiet” times; times when you don’t want to get any notifications (such as at night). Here’s a little refresher of the other new features:
The app remains free. If you use Yammer and have an iPhone, this is clearly a must have. You can find it here. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Googled: Schmidt Wants To Build A “$100 Billion Media Company” Posted: 05 Oct 2009 12:54 AM PDT If Google were a sitcom, it would open every week with co-founder Sergey Brin arriving late to a meeting “out of breath in a T-shirt, gym shorts, and on Rollerblades.” This familiar depiction of Brin finds its way into practically every major profile ever written about the company, and so too does it dutifully roll into Ken Auletta’s newest book, Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It. The first scene is a 2003 meeting with Mel Karmazin (then CEO of Viacom) at the Google campus with a sweaty Brin, Google’s other co-founder Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt. At the end of a his visit, Karmazin tells them he is appalled that Google is “fucking with the magic” of the media business by actually telling advertisers which ads work and which ones don’t. Auletta is a writer for the New Yorker steeped in the media industry, and while he spent a lot of time with Brin, Page, and Schmidt, his best stories like this one come from the titans of media he’s been covering and schmoozing with for decades. As such the focus of the book is on Google’s rise as a media company at a time when every other media company is feeling threatened by the Internet, and Google specifically. Googled is not published yet, but I managed to get my hands on a copy of the uncorrected proofs. One of the most startling assertions Auletta makes right up front and repeats throughout is this:
Later on, you find out that Schmidt qualified this statement with a list of very large businesses Google would have to enter successfully to some day get to that $100 billion figure. These include mobile, TV, enterprise, and existing bets like YouTube will have to pay off financially as well. All of this was part of a hypothetical “planning process where we said, is it mathematically possible for Google to become a hundred-billion-dollar corporation.” But no matter, $100 billion sounds impressive. Auletta does a masterful job turning Google’s story into one that is about his favorite subject, the media firmament, and how Google secretly plans to shake it. Auletta, however, is forced to hinge his narrative on quotes like that one from 2007 because Schmidt isn’t saying things like that anymore. Google is currently so vilified by the fearful media industry—from newspapers and book publishers to TV networks and movie studios—that Schmidt is bending over backwards these days to sound more conciliatory. By media, Auletta means advertising, not content. Google is more than happy to leave the content production to others. The following passage is typical of how Auletta spins the Google story into the most epic media battle of our times:
The scope of their ambition makes even other Internet entrepreneurs, like Marc Andreesen, suspicious of their motives. Andreessen provides one of the choicest quotes in the book:
Did Andy Kaufman ever wear Rollerblades? The excerpts above give a flavor for the book and its slant, which alternately characterizes Google as both a growing media giant and a media killer at the same time. Auletta culls great fly-on-the-wall anecdotes from his sources, both at Google and at the media companies it may one day displace. But that is only one facet of Google’s incredible story. As such, Googled reflects the author’s lifelong preoccupation with the media industry as much as it reflects a complete picture of Google. But that’s why people read Ken Auletta books, to get that point of view, and for his exhaustive research and the riveting detail he brings to his subjects. And if it makes readers see Google in a new light, then it can be forgiven its overriding preoccupation. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| On The Internet, Nobody Knows You’re Not In The USA Posted: 05 Oct 2009 12:25 AM PDT A large number of web services are geographically restricted, such as Hulu, Pandora and Spotify. The reasons are usually to do with content licensing restrictions, or because US visitors (or visitors from other advanced economies) are of a higher value from a monetization perspective. A web application can only guess at the location of a visitor based on an IP address and other information, such as browser language and regional settings. IP addresses are mapped to countries (and in some instances, further to states and cities) using large commercial datasets such as GeoIP from Maxmind, which is a ‘best guess’ database based on data it has collected (how, I would rather not know). The system is accurate enough to enable services to block on a country level, but often fail at a more local level. But the nature of the web means that geographically restricting web services is next to impossible, because those who are technically adept have known how to find and use proxy servers (both open and private) and VPN services to masquerade as being from another country. The demand for such services has become so popular that more apps are being released that make this process almost as easy as installing any other application – one-click VPN/Proxy install and then pick a country you want to be surfing from (default USA). Even better, there are now VPN solutions available for free – some of which are outright free, others which are ad supported. If you find yourself outside of the USA and wanting to watch Hulu, outside of the UK and wanting to checkout the BBC, or wanting to rig a web poll, here are some tips: Proxy ServersEasy to find, easy to setup. Some sites have become smart enough now to check if the IP address you are coming in from is an open proxy server and will attempt to deny it – but this is most often the easiest solution. The key is to find an open proxy server that everybody else, or even worse, Eastern European crime syndicates, are also not using. The best source if you are a blogger is to check your spam comments. Most of those IP addresses will not only be open proxy servers (you just have to work out the port – or if you host your own blog, start logging the port), but will be virgin proxy servers. Otherwise there are a ton of lists available online, often updated each minute, as well as services where you can test your proxy. FoxyProxy is a Firefox plugin that allows you to easily switch between proxy servers (many Chinese web users are very familiar with having to juggle proxy servers and use such plugins, or browsers that have similar features built-in) VPN ServersSimilar to a proxy, except that a VPN is an encrypted link to a server that will route all of your network traffic (your computer, in effect, becomes part of the network). FreeVPN – thefreevpn.com – A completely free VPN client and service for Windows machines. No ads, and a fast service. Not sure what the business model is, which is why I wouldn’t trust it with any personal or private information and restrict it to just movie watching or poll rigging. Best free VPN service and super easy to install (see review here) Feeedur - www.freedur.com – A commercial VPN/anonymizing service that works well. HotSpotShield – hotspotshield.com – Another free VPN service, but forces you to click on an ad. Working with Hulu again. UltraVPN – www.ultravpn.fr – cross platform (OS X support). Both free and anonymous. The Web Is FlatUsing a proxy or a VPN to bypass geographic restrictions or to preserve anonymity online has been known and used by more advanced users for years. More modern services and tools are making it easier for the average internet user to take advantage of the same techniques. There are entire business models that depend on geographic targeting, so there is a constant cat-and-mouse game between providers of these services and those seeking to bypass the set restrictions. Those who are seeking to access content are winning though, and they will continue to win, as the very nature of the Internet and web make it near impossible to detect where somebody actually is if they refuse to let you know. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Posted: 04 Oct 2009 11:46 PM PDT
Now, Facebook isn’t in any immediate danger because of this, it can coast on its sheer size (300 million users). But eventually, if those users find their way to Twitter, I would bet that they’ll start sharing more there, because it’s just so much easier. And while ease and speed may be what the user cares about, traffic is what publishers care about. And despite being much larger, Facebook also loses that battle to Twitter. A Tale Of Two Buttons The reason I bring this up is because this weekend, TechCrunch installed a new Facebook Share button on every article, next to the Tweetmeme Retweet button. When we first installed it, we set the Facebook button up with the default settings that included a share count, and the ability to pop open a new window to complete the share. These default settings are awful. The first time I clicked on the Facebook button to test it out, I could not believe how long it took to populate the information to share. I did some tests, comparing it to the retweet button. Assuming you’re logged in to both Facebook and Twitter already, the Tweetmeme retweet button takes about 2 seconds to send your shared message over to Twitter.com, which you then send by hitting “Update.” So let’s say the total time is about 3 seconds to share. With the Facebook button, it took quite a few seconds to load this new small window. And then it took another few to post the shared information to my wall. Also, the Facebook functionality attempts to pre-populate a picture from the post you are sharing. That’s a good idea in theory, but it’s almost always the wrong picture, so that’s another few seconds to cycle through those to find one (or get rid of it). So we’re looking at a total share time of 10 to 15 seconds. While 10 to 15 seconds may not seem like a lot of time, compared to Twitter’s 2 to 3 seconds, it’s an eternity. And people who use both services will realizes this (whether it is consciously or not), and I believe it will push them towards using Twitter more as their main sharing outlet. And the gap is actually much larger if you’re logged out of both services to start. With Twitter, it takes a couple seconds max to sign in. With Facebook, it can take anywhere from several seconds, up to 30 seconds in my experience. All of this wasted time adds up, and it really disuades me from using Facebook to share things. Another inexcusable time suck on Facebook’s end is caused by the pulling of the share count. Tweetmeme seems to do this on its button without much problem (though their count is sometimes off). With Facebook, it is another barrier to sharing because it slows the whole process down. Seeing this, our dev team made some changes to the button almost immediately. They removed the count number to reduce load time, and also got rid of the pop up window functionality. Instead, now when you hit the button, it will populate the information in a regular new browser window or tab. The result, is much, much faster (though still not Twitter fast). A Need To Connect
Those same developers have not been doing that for Facebook because Facebook until very recently would not supply them with the type of developer support they needed for these third-party sites outside of Facebook proper. And now even with some (but not full) support, developers are not creating the same type of app ecosystem around (again, not inside) Facebook, that they have for Twitter. This limits the sharing pipeline for Facebook. Facebook also has its Import functionality that users can use to auto post things like stories from Digg, Flickr photos they post, YouTube videos they favorite, and even blog posts they write. But this feature is horribly slow, and laughably unreliable. It was basically trying to offer much of what FriendFeed does, but it is worse in every way possible. Hopefully now that Facebook has bought FriendFeed, that will change. Sharing Is Caring Facebook recently added the “Everyone” button functionality and revamped its bookmarklet. To me, both of those signal Facebook’s desire to be the central place for sharing content on the web. Unfortunately, neither of these did anything to improve the speed of sharing. There’s something else that is often overlooked, but very key to this sharing of information: Facebook has no simple way to reshare items. To be fair, Twitter doesn’t really either, but its users dreamed up the retweet idea, and soon it will be fully baked into the product, with the launch of the Retweet API. Users have chosen not to use Facebook status messages in the same way, and there is no method to reshare News Feed items. FriendFeed has a very obvious “Share” button on each item which allows you to repost an item, or share it elsewhere. But maybe even worse, Facebook also has no method like FriendFeed of having interesting items that users “like” bubble back up to the top of the stream. Sure, they have a “Highlights” area, but that’s really pretty weak. It’s all about the stream, and currently, once an items falls off of the first page of the News Feed, the likelihood that you will ever see it again, is slim. Again, maybe the FriendFeed acquisition will help remedy these things. Or maybe Facebook will once again take a play from Twitter’s playbook (as it did with the @ syntax) and create some sort of reshare functionality. Traffic Doesn’t Lie Obviously, users are going to want a sharing process to be as quick as possible, but while publishers care about that too, their bottom line is different: Traffic. You might think that Facebook would have the obvious advantage here since it’s much larger than Twitter, but you’d be wrong. As we shared back in June, Twitter is in our top five referrers. Facebook? Not even on the list. Actually, they are on the list, but farther down it. While Twitter is #3 or #4 (depending on the month), Facebook is more like #6, #7, or even as low as #10. And the gap between the two is pretty wide. That’s fairly remarkable for a site that is much, much smaller (Twitter) to be already easily beating its bigger rival (Facebook). Maybe the new Facebook button will change that, but if I had to bet on it, I would say that it won’t. And I believe that speaks to the fact that it’s much easier to share on Twitter than it is on Facebook. And while it may not be a huge problem right now for them, it’s something I’d be taking very seriously. Speed and ease in sharing are only going to become more important in an increasingly social web. [photo: flickr/mikewoods, flickr/jurvetson] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Yahoo Buys Full Page Front Page Ad In Times Of India Posted: 04 Oct 2009 11:10 PM PDT
The newspaper’s circulation as of 2008 was 3.14 million, making it the largest selling English-language daily newspaper (here’s the whole list). Yahoo already has a large presence in India, reaching 26 million of the 35 million online Indians (according to Comscore, August 2009). What does the ad mean? Who cares. It’s big and yellow. Yahoo has said it hopes to follow up on the ads by personalizing the Yahoo experience for each user. Thanks to Anand Srinivasan for the tip. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| The Evolution Of Technology In Schools Posted: 04 Oct 2009 10:34 PM PDT Schools try to keep up with the current technology trends, especially in Silicon Valley, the home of technology innovation. You would think that schools in Silicon Valley would be the most up to date on technology—with the latest computers, projectors, drawing boards—but coming from a first hand perspective, as a student at a local school, it’s the complete opposite. I go to a high school where there are no technology classes that even teach students the basics of web development, or video production, or anything of that matter. Our school just upgraded our computer labs to brand new computers, Windows XP machines, that of course, block Facebook, YouTube, and all those other good “time wasting” sites. Just this year, all the teachers’ computers got connected to projectors so that teachers can show presentations, documents, etc. Also this year, our school finally got WiFi, but it is password protected and not open to students. The restrictions on the use of school computers and the internet, are in my opinion, extreme. Each night all student accessible computers are wiped completely, and restored with all the basic programs – Mozilla Firefox, IE6, Microsoft Office 2003. I understand the need for schools to protect local machines from viruses and spyware, but I feel like school policy is too extreme when it comes to blocking YouTube, Facebook, and other sites. These sites can be “time wasting” sites, but there are occasions when the sites are useful. I was the Technology Editor for my school newspaper last year, where we needed to get pictures and information from fellow students. We used Facebook chat and messages to communicate with other students to get information, to co-ordinate and to find things such as video from events. In a neighboring high school, they have a full video production studio for daily video announcements – yet at most other schools, such as my own, we are stuck with old PA systems for announcements and old technology along with a restricted web experience. This is not what the rest of the world would imagine for a school in Silicon Valley. A friend’s school in Los Angeles has a full Mac computer lab for video and graphic work. My school — one Mac, and it’s not even allowed to be used by students. Given that in most of the developed world most schools, especially public schools, lag with technology – but it seems that even when there is a will and a budget to implement new technology the policies are still outdated. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| Twitter Should Decentralize (And Make Money) Via Twitter Server Posted: 04 Oct 2009 01:22 PM PDT
The big problem with Twitter is assymetric following without limitations on the number of connections, which means that a single account can theoretically have a number of followers limited only by the total number of Twitter users. This adds massive complexity to the system. Other services solve the problem by forcing both sides to agree to friendship, a one-to-one relationship. Others, like Facebook, limit the connections to 5,000 as well. But Twitter has no limits on complexity. And since they are a centralized, bottlenecked system, it is both hard to scale and easy to attack. The short messaging format is popular, and it is now part of the web. It should thus be designed and implemented as a decentralized service like most other core web services (email, DNS, blogging etc.). The Internet was built to withstand a nuclear attack, and it is a platform that can’t be owned, attempting to completely centralize a new core service has never worked. As Twitter grows, it needs to be architected more like the Internet. New Twitter COO Dick Costolo says that he believes Twitter can scale in a centralized way, meaning the status quo will continue. But he acknowledges that it is a theoretical debate at this point, and he says that he hasn’t ruled out decentralizing Twitter. We believe decentralizing Twitter solves two problems – it will help the service scale infinitely. And it is potentially a very lucrative source of revenue. Email Is A Business – The Microsoft Exchange Model (Get Your Customers To Pay You And Do The Heavy Lifting, Too): Twitter should look at how email, and commercial email servers such as Microsoft Exchange Server, developed. The business generates $2 billion or more in revenue for Microsoft, and powers the majority of corporate office functions (email, calendar, etc.). Businesses pay a few hundred dollars for Exchange, plust $50 or so per year per user. Plus, the businesses handle all the infrastructure costs (servers, bandwidth, etc.). Twitter should sell Twitter Server just like Microsoft sells Exchange Server. They’d then run their own Twitter node on their own hardware. Twitter likely couldn’t get $50/user/year out of Twitter Server, but they could certainly get more than the zero they are charging now. And they’d move the burden of scaling Twitter to businesses that want a highly stable solution. And users could still go to Twitter.com to create accounts for free, too. They just wouldn’t have the benefit of controlling the data on their own servers, and having the peace of mind knowing that their uptime was conditioned only on their own infrastructure, something under their control. There would be some issues to work out, like the namespace and messaging between parties (If we had our own Twitter server, my user name would have to be something like @nik.techcrunch, or we could just use the existing global namespace – email). Twitter could build and sell a kick-ass Twitter server for corporations and those who wish to control their own messaging and their own brand. But the benefits would be huge. Possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And a partially decentralized service that would stay live even if Twitter.com went down. So there are the benefits – revenue, lower operational costs, higher uptime. And there’s one more benefit, too. A decentralized Twitter would suck the air out of the idea that Twitter needs a decentralized competitor. Twitter could own the micro-messaging protocols and core service for the long term. Twitter owns the protocol, the users, the format, the trademarks, the brand and the name – why does it also need to host the whole damn thing? Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| Playing Around With Ball-it’s Ridiculously Cool Wireless Gaming Device (Video) Posted: 04 Oct 2009 09:13 AM PDT  Yours truly was in Finland most of last week, visiting a bunch of technology startups at their offices, paying a visit to Nokia's research center and attending the great MindTrek conference (thanks again for organizing the tour, FinnFacts). One of the items in the packed schedule was a visit to the Demola facilities, essentially a type of incubator where students from the three universities in the city of Tampere and beyond can come work on projects in an 'open innovation environment'. One of the demos there that made a lasting impression on me - and the other bloggers who were invited to the tour - came from startup Ball-it. The fledgling company markets a golfball-sized device that is able to interact with your computer, TV or mobile phone thanks to physical wireless sensing technology that was popularized in large part by the Nintendo Wii gaming console. The technology has been under development for quite a while; tech blog Venturebeat profiled Ball-it about 10 months ago.   |
The IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers released U.S. Internet advertising stats today for the first half of 2009. The tally – $10.9 billion total, a 5.3% decline from the same period in 2008. 
Mobile answers service 
Finding a movie to watch on a rainy Friday night can be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. 
It seems like we’ve all been waiting forever for the new version of 
Facebook has a problem. One of its main goals now is to be the center for sharing everything on the web, but the key to that is to make the process as quick and easy as possible. And in that regard, its rival Twitter destroys it. That’s a problem.
Facebook does have a weapon that Twitter does not right now: Connect. A core idea behind Facebook Connect is that you can share things to Facebook (and back) without having to manually share them. That’s interesting, and eventually will be very powerful, but it’s still is nowhere near its potential. And the truth is that I’m not even sure Twitter needs a Connect of its own because third-party development community that keep pumping out sites and services that continue to feed the Twitter sharing machine.
India’s largest English-language newspaper, the Times of India, has an interesting print edition front page today – a huge yellow advertisement for Yahoo’s 
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