The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- German Mobile Social Network aka-aki Gets Another Capital Infusion
- Google To Partner With iLike And LaLa For New Music Service
- How The iPhone Is Blowing Everyone Else Away (In Charts)
- HealthGuru Raises $3.2 Million For Online Health Video Platform
- Tracked.com Launches Massive Structured Database Of People And Companies
- Yammer Experiencing Extended Outage
- New Google Music Service Launch Imminent
- Sun To Lay Off 3,000 More Employees Amid Acquisition Delays
- HelpHive Tries To Monetize Home Service Directory
- Mobile Social Network Wars: Loopt Acquires GraffitiGEO
- rrripple: A Touchscreen-Friendly Hub For Storing And Securely Sharing Your Media
- CrunchGear Reviews the Apple MacBook, Cupertino’s Entry-Level Netbook
- RIM is Building A WebKit Browser For BlackBerry, And They Need Help
- Stealth Startup Palaran Raises $1 Million From True Ventures
- The Verizon Droid Might Be Landing Sooner Than We Thought
- REvolution Computing Raises $9 Million
- Web 2.0 Summit: Evan Williams Wants To Kill The Suggested User List
- Mark Pincus: Web 3 Is The App Economy
- Chart: How the Nook Stacks Up In the Ereader Race
- Comcast: Twitter Has Changed The Culture Of Our Company
- Mary Meeker: Economy Is Recovering, Mobile Is Exploding, And The iPhone Is Awesome.
- Exclusive: Yahoo’s VP Applications Scott Dietzen Calls It Quits
- Yahoo Struggles To Reignite Q3 Revenue Growth, But Triples Profits With Cost Cuts
- Almost Live From Barnes & Nobles Nook Event
- Video: The Rejected Windows Marketplace Apps (Humor)
| German Mobile Social Network aka-aki Gets Another Capital Infusion Posted: 21 Oct 2009 09:03 AM PDT  Berlin-based aka-aki, which offers a location-based social network for mobiles, has raised additional funding. The amount of this second round of financing was not disclosed, although the company did say it was 'several millions of euros'. Investors were Creathor Venture and Innovacom. Aka-aki has been running its mobile social networking service for about two years now and says its community is growing much faster than anticipated. Aka-aki's Roman Hänsler tells me the user base is currently 350,000 users strong and located around the world. The company started generating revenue only last August, mainly through advertising.           |
| Google To Partner With iLike And LaLa For New Music Service Posted: 21 Oct 2009 07:51 AM PDT Google will partner with iLike and LaLa for their new music service, we’ve learned. And the announcement date is Wednesday, October 28, 2009. Press, including us, received an invitation this morning (see ticket image above) inviting them to a Hollywood event next week hosted by music services LaLa and iLike. The invitation, titled “Discover Music!” says announcements will be followed by performances, and that LaLa, iLike “& Others” are hosting. The “& Others” includes Google, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and the new service will be unveiled. All four major music services are backing the service. iLike was recently acquired by MySpace, so the new service may involve them as well. From information we’ve gathered from sources, the new service will be integrated into Google search. Users will be able to stream songs directly from Google via partners iLike and LaLa. Additional information around the music query will be provided to users as well (presumably any relevant results from YouTube as well as information already available in Google’s existing music search – example). One source said that Google will organize music searches in a way very similar to the way they do public company stock searches today. Users will also be offered the opportunity to purchase songs for download, we’ve confirmed. Both iLike and LaLa provided limited streaming services today. LaLa lets users stream a song once, then a user either has to pay or only get a 30 second clip. iLike has some full streaming, some 30 second clips. MySpace Music has full streaming rights from all four major labels. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| How The iPhone Is Blowing Everyone Else Away (In Charts) Posted: 21 Oct 2009 07:29 AM PDT Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit, Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker did her annual data dump slide presentation, this year focusing on the growth prospects of the mobile Web. As usual, there were 3 or 4 slides that really captured the trends she was talking about, particularly the ones around iPhone adoption and how that phone in particular is catapulting mobile Web usage into the mainstream. You can see her full slide show below (all 68 of them), but let me pull out the three iPhone slides that helps put its growth into perspective. The first one above shows the growth of data traffic on AT&T’s mobile network. It is 50 times higher than it was just three years ago. I added two arrows to show when the first iPhone launched in June, 2007 and the iPhone 3G in July 2008. AT&T saw massive pops in data usage following those two launches as consumers discovered the unadulterated mobile Web for the first time. And it is not just the iPhone. With the ubiquity of WiFi, the iPod Touch offers pretty much the same experience without AT&T’s monthly fees. Taken together, the adoption of the iPhone and iPod Touch is outstripping the early adoption the desktop Internet, as represented by AOL and Netscape in Meeker’s chart below. It is also outstripping the early growth of NTT Docomo’s imode, which was the most successful example of the first generation of mobile Web adoption in Japan. The chart overlays the first 20 quarters of user growth for each product. Only eight quarters after launch, the iPhone and iPod Touch has more than twice as many users (57 million) as imode (25 million), five times as many as Netscape (11 million), and eight times as many as AOL (7 million) at a comparable points in their histories. The iPhone/iTouch combo is also the fastest-growing consumer electronics product of all time. Its adoption ramp is even steeper than videogame consoles including the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, and Sony PSP. The original iPod and Blackberry aren’t even in the same league. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| HealthGuru Raises $3.2 Million For Online Health Video Platform Posted: 21 Oct 2009 07:02 AM PDT
The company’s content library contains more than 1,000 videos covering 75+ health conditions, which currently attracts about two million visitors per month according to the company. HealthGuru claims makes that makes them the largest health video destination site with the biggest reach in its category on third-party distribution networks such as YouTube and MySpace TV. HealthGuru is building a network of verticals based on its database of health information, chopped up into categories like pregnancy, college and sex health. The company said that it will be using the extra capital primarily for the expansion of its channels for traffic acquisition and to ramp up its money-making capabilities, which are centered mostly around advertising. In conjunction with the funding, HealthGuru announced the appointment of Skip Besthoff, General Partner at Castile Ventures, to its Board of Directors. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Tracked.com Launches Massive Structured Database Of People And Companies Posted: 21 Oct 2009 05:59 AM PDT It isn’t often that a startup can raise nearly $12 million dollars and work in stealth for a year and a half without anyone noticing. But that’s exactly what Tracked has done – and today they’re launching a massive structured database for tracking people and businesses. Imagine LinkedIn meets Yahoo Finance, on lots of steroids. Tracked was founded in April 2008 by Michael Yavonditte, formerly the CEO of AOL-acquired Quigo. The service launches publicly today (right now, actually). “This is a new kind of business service,” Yavonditte said in an interview yesterday. He has “begged, borrowed and stolen” (I don’t think he meant that stolen part literally) data from other structured data sources and has mashed it together into a highly usable format. You can, for example, view public company financial statements, compensation data and insider trading for public company executives, or just overviews (and news items) for countless business people and other notable individuals. You can also create watchlists of people, companies or industries, and the service will create a customized feed of news relevant to the items on your watchlist. If there is something in the business world you want to keep an eye one, Tracked will likely do that for you. Once you start clicking you’ll find you can spend hours viewing pages and data, and setting up watch lists of interesting people and companies. It’s also fascinating to see related people, and click through various relationships. We only had a few minutes to chat with Yavonditte and test the service prior to launch. We’ll be posting a much more in depth look of the service shortly. Tracked has raised $11.5 million from Union Square Ventures and a number of angel investors. Screenshots:
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Yammer Experiencing Extended Outage Posted: 21 Oct 2009 02:47 AM PDT
A look at the whois records for the domains shows that there are only two name servers assigned, and they are DNS is very fault tolerant, since it is possible to setup secondary servers that know where to find the answer to a query, and query responses are heavily cached all the way down to the local machine performing the lookup. There are a number of commercial services available that offer distributed DNS hosting along with advanced features, such as EasyDNS, who we use at Techcrunch (Disclosure: we use them). We use and love Yammer at Techcrunch, and the product won the 2008 Techcrunch50 conference. We have become very accustomed to using Yammer as a replacement for a lot of internal email and Skype group chat, so we are almost lost at the moment without it. We can definitely sympathize with other Yammer users flooding Twitter with questions and complaints (Yammer has been very responsive to queries over Twitter, although has not confirmed a firm ETA on the service being back up). Yammer is an enterprise service, being used my a number of corporations for internal communication. When Twitter goes down, we can moan about it and make do with not knowing what our friends are having for lunch. But when Yammer is down it has an effect on those businesses using it as a communication tool. There are a number of emerging services taking aim at the corporate short-messaging market, least not Google with Wave and TC50 demopit winner Socialwok. For all of these services, factors such as availability and reliability are far more critical than with consumer oriented sites, and with the enterprise market these factors often take precedence over features or nice design. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| New Google Music Service Launch Imminent Posted: 21 Oct 2009 01:28 AM PDT
We’re still gathering details, but our understanding is the service will be very different to the Google China music download service that they launched in 2008. That service, which is only available in China, allows users to search for music and download it for free. This new service will be available for at least U.S. users, our sources confirm, although it isn’t clear if it’s a download or streaming service, or both. Google already has a decent (if little used) music search engine that can be accessed by simply typing “music:” before a query (example). But songs are not available for streaming or download from those searches. We’ll update as we get more details. Update: More details on the service, which is in partnership with LaLa and iLike, here. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Sun To Lay Off 3,000 More Employees Amid Acquisition Delays Posted: 21 Oct 2009 12:12 AM PDT
Sun says that it will be eliminating the jobs over the course of the next year in locations worldwide, and that the cuts have already begun. There are reports that there may be even more cuts once the acquisition is complete. We’ve updated the Layoff Tracker with the news. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| HelpHive Tries To Monetize Home Service Directory Posted: 20 Oct 2009 11:59 PM PDT  Seattle-based startup HelpHive lets consumers find rated and reviewed home service professionals, such as plumbers, landscapers, handymen and more. Exclusive to the greater Seattle area, HelpHive integrates with social networks, like Facebook, to help homeowners to find reviews from friends, colleagues and neighbors. Today, the site is launching a monetization strategy called “Referral Pro” Plans which charges businesses in exchange for promotion and advertising. Businesses pay $99 per year to receive increased promotion on HelpHive.com with increased promotion in search for keywords related to the service businesses provide, on the home page, on their specific service page (e.g. for an Electrician, on the Electricians page etc.) and on unclaimed business pages in their service category (i.e. a business in the paid plan would appear on pages of other unclaimed businesses that provide the same service). Businesses who are participating in this program are also required to pay 5 percent of any total transactions for booked jobs to HelpHive (if the job was through HelpHive’s platform). HelpHive of course doesn’t charge the businesses who don’t participate in the program, but the startup’s CEO Karim Meghji claims that the promotion is a pretty big incentive for businesses to pay out. I’m not so sure about that, but HelpHive does have over 7600 vendors listed on the site from the Puget Sound area. While the site is currently limited to Seattle, Meghji says that they plan to unroll HelpHive to other metropolitan areas in the near future. The startup faces competition from Angie’s List, Merchant Circle, and Service Magic. There’s also TechCrunch 50 winner RedBeacon, which not only lets you find providers, but also enables pricing and booking of services. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Mobile Social Network Wars: Loopt Acquires GraffitiGEO Posted: 20 Oct 2009 08:57 PM PDT
GraffitiGEO, which launched just a couple of months ago, combines mobile social networking with reviews and games. It’s somewhat similar to the surging foursquare, which has stolen some of the oxygen from the first generation mobile social networks like Loopt. GraffitiGEO is also preparing to launch an augmented reality application that we previewed in August and that we suspect will launch shortly. Both GraffitiGEO apps fill holes in Loopt’s product lineup, so the acquisition makes a lot of sense. Here’s the video of the application that we included in that post: Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| rrripple: A Touchscreen-Friendly Hub For Storing And Securely Sharing Your Media Posted: 20 Oct 2009 08:45 PM PDT
The site has a slick and fairly unique design: everything is organized on a timeline, with an album for each day represented as a vertical column running up the screen. Each column is filled with thumbnails representing the photos taken on that day, which makes it easy to tell at a glance which album you want to jump to. Once you’ve chosen an album, you can hone in on the type of media you’d like to look at from that day, be it photos, videos, notes, links, or files. You can also use a slider at the bottom of the screen to control the zoom level, much as you would in iPhoto or a similar photo app. To add something to an album, you hit the ‘Post’ button in the upper right hand corner of the screen, which brings up a straightforward menu for uploading content. As with sites like Multiply, one of rrripple’s key focuses is on allowing users to choose exactly which users they want to share their content with. Sharing is done using panels that pop out of the far right and left hand sides of the screen. At the left side is a tab for your friends — hit it, and a list of your friends will slide out. You can share your photos and other media with individual friends, or you bundle your friends into various groups, which allow you to share your content with multiple people at once. Once you’ve sorted your groups out, you can share some photos with them by dragging and dropping them from your main timeline onto the group’s icon. The UI works pretty well using a mouse and keyboard, but it’s also perfectly suited for use on a touchscreen display, as it lets you essentially ‘flick’ through your photo history instead of just scrolling through it. rrripple has also kept the number of dense menus to a minimum — most actions can be done using large buttons that would be at home on a touchscreen. None of these design decisions were an accident — the rrripple team says that they’ve designed the site with touchscreens in mind. At this point rrripple is still rough around the edges — you can tell that the UI has potential, but there are times where it doesn’t behave the way you’d expect. There are also a few features that seem to be missing, like the ability to view PDF documents from directly within the site (you can upload and share them, but to view them you have to download them to your desktop). Everything is also built using Flash, which is going to be a problem for accessing the site on portable devices, as many of them don’t support Flash (at least, not yet). All of that said, rrripple is showing promise. The company has an iPhone application that should be coming out any day now, and has support for more platforms in the pipeline (hopefully they’re also considering converting the interface to something other than Flash). And finally, the startup is well aware of the biggest gripe most people will have: it realizes that the domain is a little ridiculous, and is open to changing the company name. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| CrunchGear Reviews the Apple MacBook, Cupertino’s Entry-Level Netbook Posted: 20 Oct 2009 07:34 PM PDT  For weeks - months even - analysts have been telling Apple to make a netbook for the masses, a $299 junker designed for those who surf the web on the couch, their Cheeto-stained hands scrabbling for the TiVo remote while they incessantly refresh Reddit and hope against hope that their Craigslist Missed Connection emails them back. The Air, they said, was too expensive, designed for the frou-frou quiche-eaters of Silicon (V)alley while the MacBook Pros were too overpowered for the likes of Flyover Sally and her sad-eyed brood of younglings. They needed to sell something to the masses, something solid, American, and corn-fed. Well, now Sally, the quiche-eaters, and the Cheeto dude - and the rest of us - have the new MacBook. It offers a bit less power and peformance than the Pro line, a little more of the styling of the Air line, and sells right at $999, a magic marketing number that is neither North of $1000 (before taxes) and South of corporate financial suicide.   |
| RIM is Building A WebKit Browser For BlackBerry, And They Need Help Posted: 20 Oct 2009 07:23 PM PDT  RIM is good at plenty of stuff: As any sore-thumbed business-type could tell you, they've got the whole email thing down. They can pump out software updates for a bunch of handsets at an outright impressive pace. With the BlackBerry Storm2, they've shown people that they can build the touchscreen device everyone thought they were building the first time around. Even with all these talents, one thing still drags them down, tarnishing an otherwise exceptional brand: their browser. After RIM snatched up the development company behind a WebKit-based browser back in August, it was pretty easy to deduce where things were going: there would be a new browser, and it'd be fueled by WebKit. For everyone out there not comfortable with deduction, however, we've now got good ol' fashion undeniable proof.   |
| Stealth Startup Palaran Raises $1 Million From True Ventures Posted: 20 Oct 2009 07:23 PM PDT Palaran, a stealth-mode advertising startup based in Palo Alto, has raised $1 million Series A from True Ventures, we’ve learned. True Venture’s Jon Callaghan has taken a board seat along with Om Malik as a board observer. Palaran's undisclosed round of angel funding came from Esther Dyson, Delicious founder Joshua Schachter and Vish Makhijani, among others. Palaran was founded in July and has been in stealth mode until now, but we’ve learned that the startup has something to do with web based advertising. Amit Kumar, CEO, is a former Yahoo! alum; he helped create SearchMonkey, the company's third-party developer platform. He left last year to serve as VP of Product Management at semantic ads and content engine Dapper. The rest of the team — Joseph Primiani, George Paul and Alan Ngai — are all Yahoo or Google alumni. Palaran has raised a total of $1.8 million including their angel around. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| The Verizon Droid Might Be Landing Sooner Than We Thought Posted: 20 Oct 2009 05:35 PM PDT
But we do have some hints: DroidDoes.com features a mysterious countdown timer that consists of a bunch of nonsensical symbols swirling by. Through some trickery (namely changing your computer clock or looking at the site’s config.xml file), it’s pretty easy to see what it’s counting down to. When the site launched on Saturday the countdown was going to October 30, 12:00 AM CST. Sometime today, that changed: the clock is now counting down to October 28, at 12:00 AM CST. Or 48 hours earlier than it used to be. Of course, it’s possible that October 28 is the day Verizon is going to actually announce the phone, with the actual release coming a bit later (remember, the “Droid Does” ad ends by saying it comes out in November). Or maybe we’ll be holding this thing two days earlier than we thought. Update: We’ve heard from a tipster who claims to have knowledge of the launch that Droid will be released either November 6 or 7. We’ve been hearing similar rumors before so this is certainly plausible. Thanks to Christopher Daggett for working this out. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| REvolution Computing Raises $9 Million Posted: 20 Oct 2009 05:28 PM PDT REvolution Computing, the “RedHat” for the open source "R" statistical computing language, has received $9 million in Series B funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and Intel Capital. The company also announced that founder and former chairman of SPSS, Norman Nie, has been named CEO. Founded in 2007, REvolution Computing sells products, including REvolution R and REvolution R Enterprise, that allow statisticians, scientists and others to create predictive models and and make sense of large sets of mission-critical data easily and quickly. The “R” statistical language has been growing growing in popularity as support increases in the open-source and academic communities. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Web 2.0 Summit: Evan Williams Wants To Kill The Suggested User List Posted: 20 Oct 2009 04:46 PM PDT
It was a lengthy discussion covering a lot of interesting topics. If you’re interested in Twitter, you’ll probably want to read the full Q&A below (and we’ll post a video if we get it). For an overview, Battelle at first focused on revenue. Williams notes that while Twitter is definitely thinking seriously about revenue, 97% of its efforts are still on the product and technology (which he thinks will be key for revenue eventually). That said, they are thinking about ways to charge brands that use Twitter (which everyone has known for a long time), but that they’re also still open to some advertising ideas too. In terms of Twitter’s recent growth slowing down, Williams acknowledged that traffic to twitter.com in the U.S. is slowing down for now, but said that they think they have new features coming out that will change that. He also noted that while that growth may be slowing, they are still seeing big growth in both mobile and abroad. Williams said that he doesn’t regret the decision not the sell Twitter at all. He acknowledged that they’d been meeting with Facebook since he took over as CEO almost exactly a year ago. But ultimately, he believes they can do great things with Twitter, and he doesn’t think being a part of a bigger company will help that (this drew applause from the audience). Williams also doesn’t think that Facebook has to die for Twitter to survive, and vice versa. He sees the two as doing different things, even though there are some similarities. Interestingly, Williams also wasn’t sure that Twitter and Facebook weren’t talking about a way to link up their data. He said he’s not involved in those dicussions, but seemed to indicate that they may be taking place. When Battelle asked about Google Wave, Williams said he thought Wave was “awesome.” He also noted that if he weren’t doing Twitter, he thinks he would be doing something similar — working on the problem that is email. The most interesting bit came at the end when conference founder Tim O’Reilly asked a question from the audience. O’Reilly asked if it was time to retire the Suggested User List (SUL) with the new Lists feature coming? Williams made it very clear that he absolutely agrees that it’s time. When Lists comes out and are working properly, they plan to kill the SUL, Williams says. Below find the full Q&A (paraphrased): JB: What’s your revenue model going to be? EW: We’re thinking about it, you can’t raise as much money as we have without thinking about it. We’re spending 97% of our efforts still in improving the product and technology. It would be a mistake to take our eye of the product and focus on the revenue right now. That answer it? JB: No. (Laughs). So what’s the revenue model. JB: With search, what if your revenue model was little links all over the site and to the third party guys? EW: I like where you’re going, we’ve never thought of that. Hasn’t worked for anyone else (laughs). JB: Mobile (SMS) is a revenue source, and there are a lot of brands that want to work with you. Brand marketers? Is that something to consider? EW: Yes. Not first though. I can tell you that we’re optimistic about revenue. There is some advertising that makes sense for Twitter. Twitter isn’t a social network, it’s an information network. It tells the world what you care about. Brands use it to drive sales, driving foot traffic, or move old inventory. Eventually we’ll be able to extract value for ourselves. JB: What about some business services? Share the data you have about users? EW: Yeah, I find that interesting. There are some users trying to do different things. In broad strokes, there are business and personal users. Business users may want those things. We can charge money for that, and it will get them using Twitter more. Data will be a big part, but not the only part. And that will be a platform too. Comcast doesn’t use Twitter.com, they use a third party app, so we have to work with them with this too. JB: Twitter’s growth has been extraordinary, but the past few months it has trailed off. I know it’s only a slice of the data we can see, but comment on that? Is Twitter dead? EW: We are seeing slowing growth in some areas, and accelerating growth in others. The big two areas for growth are mobile and internationally. Through our API and third party clients is a very high percentage of the traffic. But U.S. Twitter.com traffic has slowed for now. But we’re launching stuff that we think will pick that back up. JB: People are confused when they come to the site right? The suggested users aren’t always the best. How do you address the ‘what do you do question?” EW: It is a problem, but it’s an upfront problem. We haven’t spent much time on helping people find the killer app of Twitter for them – we’re focusing on that now. I’m very excited for the Lists feature for that reason. It drives discovery for both new and old users. Lists also filters for people following too many people. JB: Let’s move on to Facebook. Why’d you turn them down? And maybe Google too? Have you ever woken in the middle of the night saying ‘I should have taken the check from Facebook?’ EW: No. JB: What made you think with this one is the one you’re going all the way with (having already sold other companies). EW: It’s both Twitter and where I am as an entrepreneur. I took the CEO job almost a year ago, that’s about when I realized it was getting really big. That’s also when I first talked to our friends in Palo Alto (Facebook). I didn’t see a reason to sell. “Business is a context for doing interesting things.” The number of cool things we can do with Twitter blows my mind. Going to a bigger company doesn’t make that better. (Applause) JB: But now Facebook is becoming more like Twitter. What do you think of that? EW: I don’t know how Facebook’s feature prioritization works. I think they probably came about it the same way as us. They came up with the News Feed, we did something similar, then they changed again. For their size, it’s impressive how they can change. “I’m pretty sure the world is big enough for Facebook and Twitter.” Facebook is for something different, it’s about your close friends. JB: What do you think about Google Wave? EW: I think Google Wave is awesome. I think what they’re trying to accomplish is awesome. I might be working on something like that (reinventing email) if I wasn’t working on Twitter. I don’t know what it will be – that’s similar to how Twitter started. I like that there is a way to tweet from Wave. JB: MySpace and AOL sync with Twitter, why not Facebook? EW: I don’t know, that’s on their side. It’s possible that we’ve been talking about that, but not me personally. Syncing isn’t always the best user experience though. It’s different uses, that’s why all these services will survive in most cases. JB: Is there a business model for the third parties? Can that ecosystem support them long term? EW: We need to get better about that with our third party developers. We can do better, we do it a bit. We are working on terms of service for the API for this. They need more than ‘don’t worry, you can invest in us.’ Developers are crutial to where we’re going. JB: I haven’t seen the Fail Whale often lately, but there is still grumbling about stability. Twitter is large now, but not huge. Are you concerned about scaling. EW: I’m not as concerned as I used to be, but I’m not satisfied with where we are. In the last year, a lot of the core problems got fixed. There are a few pieces that we still have to fix. Reliability is something we’re still working on after scaling – we’ll be working on that for a while. Question From Audience: What about users who get suspended for no good reason? EW: That’s unfortunate. We’ve had overactive spam killing scripts in the past that have accidentally removed people, which we’ve apologized for. There’s a lack of information still though, we need to be better about that. Q: What countries or regions are really popping right? EW: Top 5 active users are U.S., UK, Brazil, Japan, and Indonesia. Not sure which is the fastest. Brazil is moving fast. New launches in India and Japan in mobile should help growth too. JB: What about the celebrities? What about Hollywood no-Twitter clauses? EW: I’m not too worried about it. I was talking to the guy who owns the Patriots – he loves it and the fans love it, but he doesn’t want his players giving info to other teams. Same thing with celebrities, they don’t want deals to be killed. Q: Why have a DM daily limit? EW: I didn’t know that is a problem people are having. I can look into it. Q: As a journalist, it blows me away how Twitter is changing the way we get information. Are there any tools you think you could give us? EW: I’m glad for that usage. We’re putting a ton of effort into search and discovery. We’ve just scratched the surface on it. We need to be more intelligent about mining this data. JB: Search deals with Google and Microsoft? EW: What deals? (awkward) Seriously though, we think third-parties can come up with great tools for people in the media. Q (from Tim O’Reilly): For a long time there was only one list, the SUL. Is it time to retire it? EW: Yes, it’s time to retire the SUL. It was a quick fix to a problem. We want to kill it when lists come out. Q: Will these features kill third-parties? EW: We don’t think so, we think this will help them. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Mark Pincus: Web 3 Is The App Economy Posted: 20 Oct 2009 04:29 PM PDT
Pincus started out praising Facebook for opening the platform in 2007, which had led to the rise of companies like his. And they’ve come a long way. Zynga’s first game in July 2007 was a social poker game on Facebook, and just yesterday the company hit 50 million daily active users across its properties. Pincus believes that Web 3.0 is the App Economy. That is to say, it will be a web in which people use various apps to share things. And there will be money behind this thanks to direct payments, and social goods. Of its 50 million daily users,, 20 million are using Farmville, Zynga’s most popular game about yes, farming. Pincus announced on stage that they had made $830,000 in just two weeks selling a certain kind potato seed (a virtual good), and that they donated half of that to school children in Haiti. That money will feed 500 of them for a year, he says. There have been various reports around the web in recent months that Zynga is already making nine figures in revenues thanks largely to these social goods. Below find some live notes (paraphrased)
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Chart: How the Nook Stacks Up In the Ereader Race Posted: 20 Oct 2009 04:20 PM PDT  The Nook, Barnes & Noble's new ereader, has upped the ante. With a small, 3.5-inch LCD screen in the lower quadrant, the Nook adds touch capabilities that the Kindle definitely does not have. So who will win the ereader race? While no one in particular has to "win" the race, it's abundantly clear that Amazon has a head start. B&N was late with their readers, starting with a Kindle-like IREX and ending up with an odd duck that uses e-ink for text display but also adds a bit of UI richness with the color LCD. The specs promise an interesting experience and it's especially nice to hear that the device will last for 10 days with wireless off, a bit longer than any of the Kindle family.   |
| Comcast: Twitter Has Changed The Culture Of Our Company Posted: 20 Oct 2009 04:02 PM PDT
“It has changed the culture of our company,” Roberts said. Comcast has for a while now been using Twitter to scan for complaints and engage with customers. The idea was not his, but rather rose organically when someone in the company realized that a lot of public complaints were being sent over Twitter. Roberts went on to note that “Famous Frank,” also known as Frank Eliason (Comcastcares on Twitter), now has 11 people working under him simply to respond to information about Comcast being broadcast on Twitter. Roberts says that it’s an entirely different kind of dialogue coming in then the usual phone complaints, and he seems very pleased about the work the team has done with the customers on Twitter. He also noted that it’s not just Twitter the company is using now to engage with customers. They also use Facebook and some of the other networks. As a very unhappy Comcast customer, I’ve had a number of interactions with Comcast’s Twitter team. There’s no doubt, they are very responsive, and are trying to be helpful. The real problem Comcast has is that their product and all other forms of service are simply not up to par, to put it nicely (I often put it much less nicely on Twitter). Still, Comcast is a great example of a large company using Twitter in a meaningful way. And don’t think for a second that Twitter doesn’t know that. Expect them to unleash their monetization idea about charging these companies sometime soon. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Mary Meeker: Economy Is Recovering, Mobile Is Exploding, And The iPhone Is Awesome. Posted: 20 Oct 2009 03:45 PM PDT
Overall, she notes that Morgan Stanley sees many good signs that the economy is recovering. She notes that stock markets usually are a leading indicator of recovery, and certainly we’ve been seeing that recovery in the tech sector (see: Apple). That’s good news because the tech industry is now the most highest capitalized market, it’s no longer the financial industry. Meeker thinks we’re in a new computing cycle with the mobile web. Meeker believes Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch are leading the way here, big time. She thinks the mobile web will be 10 times as big as the more traditional desktop Internet, and that it will grow much faster. She also notes that the technologies around it are exploding: Wi-Fi, GPS, 3G, Bluetooth, etc. And all of this is exploding in a recession, she notes. Other key points:
Find the full slides below: Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Exclusive: Yahoo’s VP Applications Scott Dietzen Calls It Quits Posted: 20 Oct 2009 03:24 PM PDT
Scott Dietzen joined Yahoo with the acquisition of open source email startup Zimbra, where he was President and CTO. Dietzen went on to replace Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo’s former SVP of Communications & Communities, when he left the company in June 2008. Before Zimbra, the TechFellow Award winner was CTO of BEA Systems (now an Oracle company) where he was the principal architect of the technology strategy for the WebLogic product family. So what’s next for him? Well for one thing he will be joining the Board of Directors of rPath, a venture-backed startup that develops solutions companies can use to automate application deployment and maintenance across physical, virtual and cloud environments. The company has posted a Q&A with Dietzen on its website which confirms the rumors of him having left Yahoo. In the interview, Dietzen says he’s not thinking about what’s next yet, and that he considers himself to be on an open-ended sabbatical for now. He says he wants to ‘disconnect’ for a while to regain some work/life balance and spend more time with his family until he moves on to other things, which will most likely be a startup rather than a large corporation. Another loss for Yahoo at the senior executive level, and a major one it is. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Yahoo Struggles To Reignite Q3 Revenue Growth, But Triples Profits With Cost Cuts Posted: 20 Oct 2009 02:18 PM PDT YQ3_Q309EarningsPresentationFINAL – Yahoo announced third quarter earnings today, showing net income more than tripling to $186 million, or $0.13 a share, nearly double analysts estimates of $0.07 a share. This was definitely a financial achievement for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, but it was done almost entirely through cost cutting. Total operating expenses of $775 million was pared down by $169 million from a year ago. In comparison, net income rose $130 million from a year ago. What investors really want to see is revenues go up again. Unfortunately, Yahoo’s total revenue was down 12 percent from last year to $1.6 billion. And revenues minus traffic acquisition costs (the money Yahoo shares with advertising partners) declined 14 percent to $1.1 billion. On the bright side, revenue were flat with the second quarter by both measures. On the conference call, Yahoo is characterizing revenues as “stabilizing.” Yahoo’s advertising business was down on all counts. Search revenues declined 19 percent annually to $354 million. Display revenues were down 8 percent to $399 million from last year(but at least that was $6 million more than last quarter). And affiliate revenues were down 6 percent to $526 million Below are my notes from the conference call Q&A: Q; display, RPS [revenue per search]? Tim Morse, CFO: $15M impact from ad quality, overall display grew, guaranteed side grew relatively strongly, things are starting to loosen up, ad dollars are starting to flow a little bit better. In terms of results in search, tough to compare to Google, I've got to focus on Yahoo and what we . this quarter only down 1%. That feels to us like stabilization. RPS only being down slightly. Year over year queries grew double digit Q: Impact of changed relationship with eBay Time Morse, CFO: Extremely small. Q: seeing TAC rates go up, do you have to guarantee more to keep that business intact? Tim Morse, CFO: our focus is definitely on owned and operated. There is make whole provision for affiliates who leave to MSFT, there is no make whole provision if they go to another competitor. We do have to pay more. MSFT monetizes better. No question. Q: Q on display, year over year trends, what needs to happen for it to get back on its feet Morse: I think we are in a good position. We saw better yields this quarter. Economy starting to loosen up a bit, and brand spending coming back. Q: Gross margins were flat year over year. Do you feel gross margins in net revenue basis can be flat on sustainable basis. Morse: There is something changing in Yahoo, getting your hands dirty, reducing costs any way you can, that is rewarded at Yahoo now. Q: Any changes that you’ve made in terms of enabling more rich media ads, how are sell-through rates. Morse: nothing out of the ordinary to improve quality of the home page. We relaunched it. Q: looking at guidance, doesn’t look like you are looking for improvement on any line. Is it a lack of visibility or conservatism? Morse: You’ve got $15M impact going to $25M impact on revenue initiatives, s a little bit of a revenue drag. But we anticipate a good strength in display business because of seasonality. Search also does well in Q4. Perhaps a drag in fantasy sports, since we reduced fees to improve the experience. Q: pageviews? Morse: We grew pageviews 5% year over year. Mail was a little more than that, homepage was double digits, upper teens. Sports doing well. tough comps with some verticals, closed some properties. last Q 7% up YoY, this Q 5% up. Added 200 people to headcount. Q: Performance of premium end of the market Vs. non-premium end? Yahoo’s exposure to each? Morse: We talk about them as guaranteed placements and non guaranteed. Guaranteed was stronger than non-guaranteed for the second straight quarter. Q: What % of users are on the new homepage? What is difference in terms of user experience? What will you talk about next week on Analyst Day? Morse: We won’t be giving 2010 guidance. Home page we are up in pageviews, still opt-in. rolled out in 8 countries total. A lot of operational metrics we are still sorting through. Q: Can uyou give us color on mobile monetization? Are you factoring affiliate losses into Q4 guidance? Morse: On Mobile, you’ve hot on a focus for our future. Have some new iPhone apps, Flickr. On 19 devices. As that becomes more established, monetization will improve. In terms of affiliate losses for 4Q, no I am not factoring that in. I am assuming rather neutral. Q: How much of cost savings from MSFT deal will be headcount related? Morse: $650M of GAAP improvement in GAAP expenses, $425M of cash costs, the majority of which are headcount related. Q: looks like search query growth accelerated, but monetization didn’t. Why? Morse: Look at this sequentially, queries were up a little bit, RPS was down just a little. Search was down 1% QoQ, but comparing to a tougher 3Q last year. Q: Branding campaign. What was the thinking? Were you losing audience to competitors? What response have you seen, attracted users? Morse: It is very, very early. Some very encouraging input and early stats. We definitely expect this to translate into more users over time. It really is about revitalizing the company. Refreshing how people think bout Yahoo externally and internally. And returning to a normal level of brand spending. Just getting back to where we ought to be. Using this not just as an external catalyst but an internal catalyst too, identifying who were are and where we want to go. Will be an ongoing part of our cost structure. Q: We are hearing that Right Media is being de-emphasized. Morse: That is incorrect. Q: Updates to outsourcing non-core businesses like dating or Hotjobs? Morse: We are not going to comment on acquisitions or divestitures that are in process. Look at Xoopit, we want great technology , great people behind that technology, getting into new markets. That is what our acquisition and divestiture group is constantly doing. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Almost Live From Barnes & Nobles Nook Event Posted: 20 Oct 2009 02:16 PM PDT  Not that every media outlet on Planet Earth doesn't already have all of the details, but Team CrunchGear (Jimin and I... we're right up there with The Mega Powers) is here at Barnes and Noble's big reveal here in New York. Technically, we're at Pier 60 right along the Hudson River. Not that you care. Seeing as though we're not live, I thought I'd offer my take on what's going on. Jimin is on pics, so full props to him for bringing a camera. First impressions... well, they're playing what I can best describe as Chicago house music. And there's all sorts of blue mood lighting. It's a very festive atmosphere, and with good reason: e-books are the future, so they say, and if Barnes and Noble screws this up, and cedes any more ground to Amazon and its Kindle, well, yikes. Early indications, however, are that the Nook won't stink on ice. Silly name, but what are you gonna do?   |
| Video: The Rejected Windows Marketplace Apps (Humor) Posted: 20 Oct 2009 01:20 PM PDT Today, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Dev team released a humorous video giving a sneak peek inside the Microsoft Apps Lab. Here, you get a behind-the-scenes look at a few of the apps Microsoft dreamed up for its new Windows Marketplace, but were forced to reject for various reasons ranging from stupidity to lawsuits to physical pain. The video is fairly amusing, but mostly because it seems like the undertone here is Microsoft prodding Apple’s App Store for both its draconian app approval process and the number of ridiculous apps in the store. This follows Verizon’s newest ad which takes on the iPhone head-on, while teasing about its new Droid device. The video also features an virtual handshake app called the “Germaphobe” which, Mike would love!
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Google will soon launch a music service, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and the company has spent the last several weeks securing content for the launch of the service from the major music labels. One source has referred to the new service as Google Audio.
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