The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Seesmic Desktop Adds Twitter Lists, Hits 3 Million Downloads
- Orkut Gets Streamlined In An Attempt To Fend Off Facebook And Twitter
- Last week on TechCrunch: Arrington’s fight, MG’s puns and Lacy’s Chinese Takeaways…
- Amazon Closes Zappos Deal, Ends Up Paying $1.2 Billion
- TechnoBuffalo Launches Tech Blog Social Network (With Videos!)
- Collaboration Platform PBWorks Gets A Real-Time Makeover
- Microsoft And OpenX Team Up Against Google In Web Ad Partnership
- Google Equals Apple In Value. And Vice Versa!
- Scamville: Zynga Says 1/3 Of Revenue Comes From Lead Gen And Other Offers
- How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession
- OWLE Hacks The iPhone to Make A Serious, Zooming Video Camera
- In The Fight Between Facebook And Twitter, Which One’s The Mac And Which One’s The PC?
- NSA Datacenters To Store Yottabytes Of Surveillance Data
- Marvel Comics Partners With Panelfly To Bring Mobile Comics To The iPhone
- CrunchGear Week in Review: Monster Mash Edition
- Think the Term “Supply Chain” Is Unsexy? Meet the Kinky King of Beijing
- YouTube Down For Maintenance. Right.
- Let’s Kill “Viral”: It’s Time For a New Word
- Avoiding the Cargo Cult And Getting The Trans-Atlantic Startup Model Right
- Four Years After Founding, Kiva Hits $100 Million In Microloans
| Seesmic Desktop Adds Twitter Lists, Hits 3 Million Downloads Posted: 02 Nov 2009 08:57 AM PST  Now that Twitter has officially unveiled its Lists feature to all users, the frenzy has started. But while Lists are available via Twitter’s site, the feature has been slower to come to Twitter clients. Today, Seesmic is announcing the availability of Lists on its desktop client, Seesmic Desktop. The new, downloadable version of Seesmic Desktop will display your Twitter lists in the left sidebar from any Twitter account you have (Seesmic lets you use one client for multiple accounts). The new feature also lets you add any Twitter user to any user list from any of your account. Right now, list functionality is limited. You cannot see lists that list you, only lists that you follow. And you cannot create lists from the client; this must be done within Twitter’s site. But, Seesmic’s founder and CEO Loic Le Meur told me that both the ability to create lists and see lists that follow you will soon come to Seesmic Desktop in the next few weeks. The list feature will also come to Seesmic Web shortly, says Le Meur. He also said that lists took so long to incorporate into the clients because the updated, comprehensive API wasn’t available until a few days ago. Le Meur and his team have scrambled to launch a new version of the desktop client over the weekend and will unveil it to Seesmic members today, and to the general public within the next few days. Other third party sites have also tapped into the Lists API, Listorious, a Lists directory. List descriptions, which will be coming in the next week or so according to Twitter’s Vitor Lourenco confirms, would also be a valuable addition to clients like Seesmic. TweetDeck, one of Seesmic’s main competitors, is also adding list functionality very soon, according to TweetDeck’s founder and CEO Iain Dodsworth. While the nature of TweetDeck’s lists feature is still a secret, he told me that “integration will be extensive and offer complete flexibility to TD users with particular emphasis on curation, consumption and portability of lists and existing TD groups.” Seesmic Desktop, which integrated with both Facebook and Twitter, has also hit 3 million downloads, with the last 500,000 downloads taking place within the past month and a half. The client was recently upgraded to add Facebook fan pages, yFrog integration, a "reply to all" button for messages and a favorites timeline. Earlier this summer, Seesmic recently launched its browser-based Twitter client at TechCrunch's Real-Time Stream CrunchUp. Seesmic Web will also be integrated with Facebook within the next month as developers are currently tweaking the application's functionality on different browsers. Disclosure: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic. I am not. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors           |
| Orkut Gets Streamlined In An Attempt To Fend Off Facebook And Twitter Posted: 02 Nov 2009 08:40 AM PST Forgive us for not noticing sooner, but last week Google’s social network Orkut announced that it is rolling out a complete redesign. The new site is faster and, like every other social network these days, puts the activity stream front and center. Orkut has actually reduced the number of pages so that the most popular actions can all be done from the home stream. For instance, there is now in-line commenting for status updates, photos, and videos. And the various notifications (”friend requests, testimonials, community requests or birthday announcements”) have all been consolidated onto the homepage as well. Orkut also now has video chat, in addition to regular text IM. Access to other Google properties such as Gmail, maps, and search are now integrated at the top of the homepage. Profile pages are more customizable, and photo uploads are faster. The changes come at a time when Orkut is seeing major encroachments by Facebook in its strongest markets of India and Brazil (despite its efforts to make it hard for Orkut users to switch). Google’s social network definitely needs a refresh. In September, it attracted 51 million unique visitors across the world, down from 54.5 million in July, according to comScore. Facebook is about six times larger than Orkut worldwide, and even Twitter recently surpassed it with 58.4 million global visitors just to Twitter.com. Can the stream save Orkut, or is it too late? Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Last week on TechCrunch: Arrington’s fight, MG’s puns and Lacy’s Chinese Takeaways… Posted: 02 Nov 2009 07:15 AM PST
Under a growing list of bylines, more than 200 posts are published on TechCrunch.com each week – with countless more on the various spin-off Crunch sites. Even allowing for MG Siegler’s eight personalities, and the fact he hasn’t slept since the day Twitter launched, that’s still an enormous amount of content for one blog to produce. Consuming every single word that appears on TechCrunch is a fool’s errand, and yet we know some of you try to do exactly that. We know this because, even when you find a post that doesn’t interest you, you still take the time to let us know rather than simply moving on to something else. “Too long; didn’t read” you say, helpfully. Knowing how keen you are not to miss anything good, but worried that our ever-increasing output is going to turn you crazy, I took Arrington aside after our weekly game of beer pong to suggest a solution. Why don’t I compile a weekly ‘Best Of TechCrunch’, rounding up the most important, informative and entertaining content from the preceding seven days? “Ok,” said Mike, “let’s try it.” And so here we go – your handy guide to the best of the past seven days of TechCrunch, starting with our…
And finally…
As do I, Mike, as do I. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Amazon Closes Zappos Deal, Ends Up Paying $1.2 Billion Posted: 02 Nov 2009 06:47 AM PST
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh writes in a public letter:
As expected, the Zappos management team will remain intact and the company will continue to operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary with headquarters in Las Vegas, NV. I’ve embedded a chart showing Amazon’s stock price evolution since the announcement of the acquisition was first made at the end of July up until now. The significant jump noticeable on the right is from when the company announced solid third-quarter earnings. It made an estimated $272 million difference for Zappos this weekend. And how was your Halloween?
(Via @Zappos) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| TechnoBuffalo Launches Tech Blog Social Network (With Videos!) Posted: 02 Nov 2009 06:47 AM PST
TechnoBuffalo is built on a customized version of WordPress Multi-User. TechnoBuffalo gives users the option to create their own blog with a custom URL (TechnoBuffalo.com/username) complete with full WordPress content management. Users can add writers, and customize the layout of their tech blogs. Users then have the option to manage their own advertising, or have TechnoBuffalo supply advertising on the site. To encourage users to create sub blogs, TechnoBuffalo offers a full library of training videos that teach them how to effectively run a tech blog. Videos include tutorials on how to find items to review, how to act confident in front of a camera, and more. If videos and content is good, TechnoBuffalo will feature the content on the home page. TechnoBuffalo is monetized through advertising. It was started earlier this year by two journalists; Jon Rettinger and Brandon Miniman. Both Rettinger and Miniman have a strong YouTube presence, and have a high number of subscribers to their channels. Besides offering the blogging network, TechnoBuffalo also adds a social network on top called BuffaloNet. BuffaloNet allows users to talk, make friends, groups, and send messages within the tech space. And unlike other social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace which ask for private information when registering, TechnoBuffalo does not require much of that. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Collaboration Platform PBWorks Gets A Real-Time Makeover Posted: 02 Nov 2009 05:52 AM PST Startup PBWorks, which was formally known as PBwiki, specializes in helping businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions collaborate via wikis. The startup has steadily added innovative, real-time features to its platform, most recently integrating Twitter-like microblogging. Today, PBworks is entering the stream by adding real-time functionality and voice collaboration within the application. PBWorks is adding four new features to its suite: Instant Messaging The startup is adding IM functionality to the application, which looks and operates just like Gchat. The platform allows PBWorks users in their organization to send them instant messages from within the product. Users can also request for co-workers to look at the workspace page they’re working on using the “send a link” function built into the IM system.  Live Notifications Similar to notifications in a Facebook stream, PBWorks is adding Live Notifications alerts, which lets users know the different activity within their organization in real-time. Users can select which notifications they want to receive, based on their preferences (known as “starring” or “following” particular pages), and the system will stream relevant notifications to whatever page a user is viewing. The notifications provide a link to whatever the employee is working on.  Live Editing PBWorks is now upgrading its collaboration features by adding a the ability for users to share a PBworks editing session. So whenever a user is editing a workspace page, other users viewing that page see the edits appear in real-time as well as participate in edits.  Voice Collaboration Conference calls are a daily part of any business’s day-to-day operations and PBWorks is now allowing this to take place within its application. Users can initiate an instant conference call by dialing several participants at the same time. Each conference call is recorded and stored for later review, which is an extremely useful feature. Voice Collaboration can even be triggered via PBWorks using an iPhone.  PBworks, which had an overhaul of its user interface and features last year, offers businesses with a project management application and a customized wiki workspace, with mobile support, document management, access controls and more. The incorporation of real-time functionality as a natural extension of PBWorks makes the platform a whole lot more attractive, as more and more enterprise-focused startups are adding real-time features to applications. So if a user is editing a page and realizes that he or she needs the input of other team members, the user can request fellow employees to join the appropriate page using IM Collaboration, start a Live Editing session, and use Voice Collaboration to initiate an instant conference call. Currently, PBworks manages 50,000 wiki groups with over 3 million users and has accumulated a loyal client base. The company serves teams at over a third of the Fortune 500, and was home to three presidential campaigns, the United Nations, The Financial Times and Harvard University. Like Salesforce, PBworks is a paid subscription service, with no advertising. The company has raised nearly $2.5 million in funding, with its most recent funding round of $2.1 million announced in 2007. Competitors include Microsoft Sharepoint, Jive, and Socialtext. And of course, we can draw comparisons to Google Wave, Google’s much-hyped new collaboration platform. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Microsoft And OpenX Team Up Against Google In Web Ad Partnership Posted: 02 Nov 2009 05:45 AM PST
Under the agreement, Pasadena-based OpenX becomes a preferred partner to publishers for enterprise ad serving solutions and has agreed to promote Microsoft’s Content Ads monetization products and eventual future products to its own roster of web publisher customers. OpenX said that publishers usings its recently launched OpenX Market and Ad Server products will be able to use MS’s Content Ads, and that the Redmond software giant will refer potential customers to OpenX. Financial details of the advertising tech partnership, which has been in trial since August 2008, were not disclosed. Microsoft’s director of advertising business development Peter MacDonald did tell Reuters there will be the opportunity for both companies to make money in the deal. OpenX, interestingly based on open-source ad-serving tech, claims it works with more than 150,000 independent sites that collectively serve more than 300 billion ad impressions a month. The company – formerly known as Openads – is led by former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller (Chairman) and ex-Yahoo exec Tim Cadogan (CEO). The company’s backed by over $30 million in funding, most recently having raised $10 million from a host of venture capital firms. OpenX competes with companies like Google (which owns DoubleClick) and, notably, Microsoft because of its own aQuantive product. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| Google Equals Apple In Value. And Vice Versa! Posted: 02 Nov 2009 02:41 AM PST People often compare market capitalization (current share price times the number of shares outstanding) for public companies as an indicator of success / failure, and one surpassing the other as a sign that one is overtaking the other, regardless of whether they’re actually full-fledged competitors or not. Google and Apple, for example, have been making headlines when stock transactions move their respective market cap to top the other company’s (see this Bloomberg article from August 2008 or this one from GigaOM from two weeks ago). So here’s a fun fact to start off the week with: the market cap for both Google and Apple are currently tied at about $170 billion after Friday’s market close. Google closed at a share price of 536.12, while Apple’s closed at 188.5 but with nearly three times as many shares outstanding. To the investment community, the tie in market cap means the companies are exactly the same size today (the measurement is an important indicator of the value and size of a company and thus a determining factor in stock valuation). Both companies beat analysts’ estimates when they announced their latest earnings earlier this month (relive our coverage of Google’s Q3 earnings announcements and Apple’s Q4 results). It will be interesting to see how both stocks keep performing as we continue to slowly but surely crawl out of the recession. And just for the sake of comparison: Microsoft’s market cap is currently approximately $246 billion, while IBM’s is $158 billion and Yahoo’s closed last week at $22 billion. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Scamville: Zynga Says 1/3 Of Revenue Comes From Lead Gen And Other Offers Posted: 02 Nov 2009 01:05 AM PST
Zynga revenue guesses range all over the place, but are likely $250 million a year or more. That means $80+ million/year is being brought in from legitimate offers like Netflix subscriptions, as well as the really smelly stuff like recurring mobile phone and learning CD subscriptions that trick users into paying big dollars for little or no return value. What percentage of offer revenue is scammy? We believe it varies over time, and is heading in the wrong direction. Legitimate advertisers like Netflix and Blockbuster, hit with countless laundered subscriptions from repeat subscripers, are said to be dramatically lowering bounty fees paid on signup. Far less scrupulous advertisers like Video Professor and Tatto take their place. HotOrNot cofounder James Hong said it best in a comment to our post yesterday outlining the scams: “In a nutshell, the offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users. Sure we had netflix ads show up, and clearly those do convert to some degree, but i'm pretty sure most of the money ended up getting our users hooked into auto-recurring SMS subscriptions for horoscopes and stuff.” Offerpal and others, who provide these offers to game developers, try to downplay the percentage of revenue that comes from scams. Clearly they are obfuscating the truth, to put it kindly. Facebook and MySpace must takes steps to address this. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession Posted: 01 Nov 2009 08:07 PM PST
Did you know how Mark Zuckerberg supported Facebook in the early days, before he got venture funding? Casino ads. And how about those advertisers who were making over $100,000 a day selling Acai Berry and other weight loss products – they are friends of mine, pioneers of new advertising channels. You see those ads saying “Inbox (5). Nick, someone in San Francisco has a crush on you!" (with your name, profile picture, and city in the ad). I generated millions of dollars from these offers on Facebook – I am not proud of it, but it was very lucrative. I will walk you through how these online scams work on Facebook and other social networks – the mechanics of how the money is made, some of the people involved, and who is actually clicking on ads. If you're reading this article, there is a good chance that you are not the type of person actually clicking on these spam ads, but are you curious as to who actually is? In June 2007, Facebook opened up their application developer platform so that anyone could build games on top of the social network. By having access to user data, game developers could instantly make engaging, viral games. Rate who is hottest among your friends, share quizzes, race cars, grow vegetables, and so forth – all with a click of a button. Users in one click gave the game permission to access their profile data and they didn't think twice about it. Facebook hadn't consider what was possible when the game developer passed on user name, profile picture, and personal details on to an advertiser – and the kind of deceptive ads that were possible. These ads looked like they were from Facebook- the blue button, white background, same font. And, of course, they had your profile picture, your name – plus that of your friends, in the ad. If you're a 15 year old girl, would you know what's being served by Facebook, the game developer, or the ad network? These same offers have been running for years on MySpace, using tactics such as fake Windows system messages and pop-ups. But the perfect storm being able to dynamically insert user data into an ad, disguising the ad to seem like part of the application, lack of enforcement by the social networks, and billing the parents' cell phone – well, it's no secret what happens next. By early 2008, the platform was generating 400 million impressions a day, as people poked, bit, slapped, kissed, and drop-kicked each other to the glee of a college-age crowd of game developers. These developers weren't professional corporations – they are college kids who build a game for fun over the weekend and now discovered they could make over $10,000 a day in ad revenue. Yes, we wrote some big checks. The numbers today are much higher. Given the choice of making money versus being ethical, these kids chose money in nearly every instance. Believe me, I tried to do honest optimization—running legitimate flower ads on Valentines Day, Walmart ads on Cyber Monday, auto insurance offers on car racing games, and so forth. For months, I went through over 150 offers across a dozen networks, systematically testing offers, ad copy, targeting, creative templates, and so forth. I couldn't get a single one to work. And in a previous life I worked on Yahoo!'s internal analytics team—our job was to optimize traffic. I finally came to this realization: People on Facebook won't pay for anything. They don't have credit cards, they don't want credit cards, and they are not interested in shopping. But you can trick them into doing one of three things:
Publishers (game developers) chose whoever makes them the most money. And that led to things like: Showing personal data on landing pages: This got a couple ad networks banned—they took the user name and images and put them on landing pages, which increased conversion. This is the equivalent of steroids in Major League Baseball. Cloaking: This is when you show a different page based on IP address. We and most other ad networks would geo-block northern California—showing different ads to Facebook employees than to other users around the world. One of the largest Facebook advertisers (I'm not going to out you, but you know who you are) employs this technique to this day, using a white-listed account. Our supposition is that it makes too much money for Facebook to stop him. Believe me, we have brought this to Facebook’s attention on several occasions. Here's what this fellow does—he submits tame ads for approval, and once approved, redirects the url to the spammy page. To be fair, players like Google AdWords have had years more experience in this game to close such loopholes. Sharks who smelled blood: I was contacted by every major ad network to either run their offer and/or help them optimize their ad platform. One CEO (not saying his name, but they're on Comscore's list of the top 25 ad networks) threatened physical violence if we didn't cooperate with him. I got wined and dined like you wouldn't believe. That's how much money was at stake—whether on the game inventory or the self-serve ad platform. Weak enforcement: Paul Jeffries, who enforced (or didn't enforce, depending on your view) the platform rules, wanted to allow a laissez-faire economy, stepping in only when the violations were so egregious that his call center was getting flooded with complaints. He called me into a meeting and told me that my ads were costing him more in customer service than any revenue I was possibly generating. That pre-supposed that he knew what we were generating – in the high 5 figures a day. And most of that was profit, since we paid out only a fraction of what we earned. Remember that we had to beat only what Google AdSense generated. There was no way that Facebook—and definitely not the Federal Trade Commission—could keep up with the "innovation" happening. Witness the virtual currency scam, where users complete the offers mentioned above to earn points in a game. It doesn't take a genius to know that the quality of such leads is garbage—these users are filling out forms just to get the points. They sign up for Netflix, a platinum credit card, get an auto insurance quote, whatever. The industry term for this type of traffic is called "incentivized". The underlying advertiser is paying for these leads much like they would if they were coming from paid search. They may be told they're getting incent traffic—or maybe not. Or maybe the ad network, the middleman between the advertiser (company paying for traffic) and publisher (source of traffic) is mixing PPC, email, and incent (also called social) traffic to hit certain quality thresholds. Either way, the advertiser is usually blind—they can't see the referral data (which is understandably masked) and they probably can't figure out what's going on anyway. The three major ad networks that deal in incentivized (or virtual currency) are OfferPal, SuperRewards, and Q Interactive. OfferPal is run by Anu Shukla—she and I have sat down before, where she flatly claimed that most of her offer inventory was unique (it was actually brokered from MemoLink, a company down the street from us in Denver). Ms. Shukla also touted her optimization technology, but couldn't discuss it because of the proprietary nature—I'm sure you understand. You can watch her video with Arrington to judge for yourself. SuperRewards is run by Jason Bailey (aka ChickenHole), who was able to quickly morph himself from Millnic Media to this new company. This fellow would call me up and yell at the top of his lungs, as I wouldn't refund his money for setting up multiple accounts to game our network. I did refund his money, only once he agreed to a ban on our network. Q Interactive is the quietest, but largest player of the group. Formerly coolsavings.com, it's run by Matt Wise, and is, in my opinion, the most reputable of the bunch. They have Fortune 500 clients and a more massive bankroll and sophisticated technology platform. You won't find information on their virtual currency platform, as they work with large publishers only. The offers across all of these networks are similar. There is a lot of money to be made if you're a game developer on the MySpace or Facebook platforms, so choose your ad networks wisely. Ad Networks are not going away soon, as the big brands aren’t there yet and someone must fill that vacuum. In case I have thoroughly disillusioned you of all social advertising, let me prognosticate about a slightly brighter future: When any new platform opens up, the spammers are there first: Traffic is cheap and their untargeted offers are profitable. But as legitimate advertisers come on, they bid the price of traffic up and squeeze out the spammers. The most powerful bit of social advertising, unlike traditional PPC, is the ability to target by interest and by location. And local represents 74% of Facebook's ad revenues in 2009. That's a deceptive stat, as it likely includes dating, which is technically "local” – but the point still stands. Facebook will either clean things up or become a MySpace: Users loved the "trust" and "clean look" of Facebook. I believe Facebook will put controls in place on their fledgling platform, as told to me by the executive in charge of their online marketing. I honestly believe from my meetings at Facebook, that they've all drunk the Zucker-koolaid and are putting the user experience ahead of earnings. That's why, if you're a UK resident, you're not seeing those sexy Russian dating ads from a couple months ago—but man, were those profitable. But you may continue to see these girls: Deceptive ads will be gradually replaced by trusted ads: The underlying premise of all the advertising techniques we've discussed so far is that trickery is profitable. Fool them into thinking the new friend request is from Facebook, lie to them that the miracle skin crème is actually free, tell them they'll earn points if they just click this button – which then puts their email address on a list that's resold to the top spammers in the world. Incidentally, if you hate someone, sign them up for one of those free offers – it will burn their email to a crisp. Just kidding – don't do that. The local and big brand advertisers are slow to react, but will eventually shift their ad dollars to Facebook, as they figure out how to advertise effectively. Facebook is the "other Internet" and represents 25% of all pageviews in the US. What's possible right now: Imagine getting an ad on your birthday, saying "Happy Birthday, Nick! Mention FBCAKE and get a free slice of cake today at Jim's Coffee Shop" (yes, you can target people on their birthdays). What if you're a B2B company and want to hit small businesses? You can target by job title and company. That's not possible in traditional PPC, where a search for "massage" can be a consumer with stiff muscles, a student looking for a massage school, or a practitioner looking to buy massage supplies. What if you're Maggianos and want to target folks who like Olive Garden? You can hit precisely those fans—and even narrow down to where they live, how old they are, and if they are married. Then send them to the nearest location to book their wedding anniversary party. Are you a Denver liposuction doctor and want to target middle-aged females in upperclass neighborhoods who watch "Desperate Housewives" and like to eat chocolate? What if Farmville could be sponsored by Albertsons and offer real fruits and vegetables on sale? Wouldn't that be more powerful than clipping coupons from the daily newspaper? It's going to take a few years, but these legitimate advertisers will push out the scammers and Facebook will put more rules in place. Enforcement will tighten, but spammers are clever with shifting their entities, enough to make us all "dizzy". We said that when these platforms first launched, earnings were in the 10 to 15 cent range. Then spammers raised the bar and could afford to pay $6 per thousand impressions (or about 20 cents a click) for the same inventory. But when the legitimate guys come with the hyper-targeted local ads, they can afford to pay $10 or even $50 per thousand impressions for that inventory. The spammers will be forced out of this particular game and onto whatever is next. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| OWLE Hacks The iPhone to Make A Serious, Zooming Video Camera Posted: 01 Nov 2009 08:00 PM PST The OWLE team is back at it again, and they never fail to impress. Just a week ago, they announced the availability of the OWLE Bubo, their first product, which turns the iPhone into formidable video camera. Now, Harold Smith and Graham Mcbain have gone a step further. They’ve figured out how to access the 30 pin connector, the connector on the bottom of your iPhone that you use to charge it with, for more then just charging. What Harold and Graham have come up with today, could make video on the iPhone near broadcast-quality. The idea of the OWLE Bubo is to take your camcorder accessories and let you use them with your iPhone to optimize the iPhone’s video experience. OWLE today posted a video to its YouTube channel (embedded above), explaining what they have achieved. They show a hack of the iPhone that allows it to use audio and video equipment that professionals use for movies. The latest prototype that OWLE has developed, which is different than what they start shipping tomorrow, allows you to use lenses with depth of field and telephoto effects, XLR microphones (both wired and wireless microphones), stereo microphones and more. Basically, it allows you to plug in any professional audio equipment that filmmakers use, on your iPhone. The mics are plugged in through the 30 pin, and the telephoto lens was cobbled together. To develop this working prototype, Harold and Graham took apart numerous other products that had the chips they needed to create what they feel is missing from current products. To be clear, none of these workarounds have been authorized or otherwise approved by Apple, but to see the quality and the possibilities with the iPhone 3GS really makes you think — what if Apple did approve this? Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| In The Fight Between Facebook And Twitter, Which One’s The Mac And Which One’s The PC? Posted: 01 Nov 2009 06:53 PM PST Facebook is much more than a social network. Twitter is much more than an information network or serendipity engine. Each represent a dashboard for your attention, a foundation for conversations and collaboration, and a matrix for your social graph and contextual relationships. In other words, Facebook and Twitter essentially represent the entrée to the future of the social Web as each strive to host, what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and others, refer to as our personal social operating system (OS). What Windows is to PCs and OS X is to Macs, Facebook and Twitter are to our social architecture and enterprise. Certainly there’s a David and Goliath element here depending on which company you immediately view as Microsoft or Apple. However, Mac and Windows are simply operating systems, not networks per se, and that’s where the metaphor of an OS breaks down. Either way, there is the perception that there is a competition between Facebook and Twitter for your attention and your network. Why? At the very least, Twitter and Facebook combine the elements of productivity and interactivity, combining a social OS, a global network, and a platform for open development. The fabric of our online activity stems from a sophisticated social framework that facilitates the exchange of information and sustains professional, conversational, and contextual connections. Facebook and Twitter, like Windows and Mac, allow us to interact cross platform, while hosting dedicated applications that support our engagement, productivity, and communication. As much attention as we pay to this mythical clash between Facebook and Twitter, the truth is that it’s not unprecedented to maintain identities in more than one ecosystem. For example, I use both Mac and Windows-based systems, I use both Facebook and Twitter. Yet according to new data from Hitwise, it appears that the epic battle between the two perceived leaders in Social Media is one-sided—or perhaps better stated, dominated. As of October 2009, Facebook accounts for 6 percent of all U.S. Internet visits while Twitter represents only 0.14 percent. In fact, visits to Twitter.com peaked at .20 percent between June and July 2009 and has slowly lost attention in the interim, a point TechCrunch has noted as well. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco recently, co-founder Evan Williams acknowledged the slowdown in traffic to Twitter.com in the U.S., for now, but he also stated that they are in the process of finalizing new features that will reverse the downward trend. Williams also reminded us Twitter continues to recognize growth in both mobile and abroad. And, for those who take solace in the hope that traffic is migrating from Twitter.com to mobile clients, there is some truth to the theory. However, new visitors count for everything and Twitter needs to do a better job capturing new users and holding their interests after they register. The company needs to look further than its resident celebrities to attract and sustain traffic. For the time being, regardless of numbers, Facebook and Twitter serve a purpose, and thus, remain the Mac and PC in the lives of many. And, until the day that I am forced or compelled to pledge allegiance to one or the other, I will continue to cultivate relationships across multiple landscapes and suggest that you do the same. But which one’s the Mac and which one’s the PC? Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| NSA Datacenters To Store Yottabytes Of Surveillance Data Posted: 01 Nov 2009 06:30 PM PST  There's an interesting article in the current New York Review of books (predictably, a book review) detailing the history of the National Security Agency, that shadowy power-behind-the-power to which we surrender much of our privacy. That in itself is interesting, but I found the introduction a bit shocking: the NSA is constructing a datacenter in the Utah desert that they project will be storing yottabytes of surveillance data. And what is a yottabyte? I'm glad you asked. There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet? The more salient question is, of course, what are they storing that, by some estimates, is going take up thousands of times more space than all the world's known computers combined? Don't think they're going to say; they didn't grow to their current level of shadowy omniscience by disclosing things like that to the public.   |
| Marvel Comics Partners With Panelfly To Bring Mobile Comics To The iPhone Posted: 01 Nov 2009 05:55 PM PST If you are a comics fan, you are going to like this (unless you’re a print purist). Panelfly is partnering with Marvel Comics, one of the largest comic book companies in the world, to bring all your comic book fantasies to the iPhone. Marvel’s line up of comics is quite amazing — the original Spider-Man series, X-Men, X23, Age Apocalypse, and Iron Man. These titles are now being offered in the Panelfly iPhone application, going back to the very first issues. [iTunes Link] If comics are to survive the digital age, they need to become available in electronic form. And that’s exactly what this partnership does. Until now, reading the original Spider-Man or Captain America on your iPhone wasn’t possible. For instance, Stephen Lynch, CTO of Panelfy, says that it’s almost impossible to get your hands on the original versions of some of these comics, but now with this partnership, you can read the very first issue of Spider-Man, X-Men, and Ironman on your iPhone. The application is free, but each issue costs $0.99 to download into Panelfly’s reader. Now, if only Apple hurried up with that Tablet, you could actually read them in full screen. In August, Disney acquired Marvel for $4 billion. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| CrunchGear Week in Review: Monster Mash Edition Posted: 01 Nov 2009 12:52 PM PST  Here are some stories you might have missed this week on CrunchGear. All about the Motorola Droid Helmet radar: coming to a supersoldier near you Spooky Tesla Radio in a jar   |
| Think the Term “Supply Chain” Is Unsexy? Meet the Kinky King of Beijing Posted: 01 Nov 2009 11:16 AM PST
For Chicago-native Brian Sloan, it was about the time he was being questioned by police for trafficking and dismembering human skulls. Sloan seems normal. Even boring. I met him with some other Beijing entrepreneurs last week over hot pot and he refused to eat anything out of the spicy side of the pot. He has a slight build, non-descript features, and mousey brown hair. He even has a law degree from Penn State. But his life took a more interesting turn in 2004 or so when he started to scour antique shows and auctions for things he could sell for more money on eBay. What motivated him? "Making money," he says. Not so much for the cash itself, but the chase, the deal and the challenge. Buying something undervalued—even weird— and figuring out who would highly value it. Long story short: He starting to realize China was a treasure trove of things to buy low and sell high—among them, human skulls that he imported in a box marked "TOYS" and then boiled, cleaned, broken apart and screwed back together and detailed for medical students. A good skull would cost about $100 each and he could sell it for as high as $800. (What makes "a good skull"? Turns out it's the number of teeth.) It all went well until the day an eccentric Chicago puppeteer named JoJo Baby came by the house to buy some mannequins and saw some skulls boiling on the stove. He naturally assumed Sloan was a serial killer and called the cops. This YouTube video (also embedded below) pretty much says the rest. It bears noting, Sloan was never actually arrested or charged, although he still complains that he never got his “inventory” back from the mustachioed, gum-smacking Chicago brass who spent days trying to work him over Law-and-Order-style while TV satellite trucks camped out in front of his apartment. Sloan moved to China soon after. It was considerably closer access to the things he was selling and, let's just say after the skull incident, filled with more open-minded people. "In China, people respect what I do as a business," he says. Which would be a boon in his next career move… making latex fetish-wear. (Link very NSFW.) And that's where the Chinese supply chain magic came in. He was able to tailor nearly any outfit in any size and ship it at a healthy mark-up. Some outfits go as high as $800. But even that pales next to his new business. How should I put this and still be a lady? The product is called "AutoBlow" and it has nothing to do with cars. Here's the site. Warning: It's very, very Not Safe For Work. (Yes, I'm spelling the letters out this time, just in case.) Like a lot of entrepreneurs in China, Sloan is cagey about what I can and can't say about how the operation works. That's not because it's illicit—it's because it's so incredibly lean, flexible and outsourced that he doesn't benefit if competitors realize exactly what he's pulled off business-wise. But suffice to say with a small army of employees peppered around the globe, Sloan—aka the "Kinky King of Beijing"—is looking at an incredibly profitable business that's already generating more than $1 million in revenue and growing quickly. He's exploited what each region does best: Romanians are his programmers and SEO, Indians and Brazilians do his Web design, and China does the manufacturing and fulfillment. He hired his whole staff without leaving his living room. His next act? Finding new products and following the same playbook. My point here isn't to write a salacious post about skulls and sex toys—as much as I enjoy watching Michael Arrington squirm. My point is that for all the talk about how much harder it is for a Westerner to do business in China, in a lot of industries there are far fewer barriers to entry than anywhere else I've seen in the world. And – huge 1.3 billion person domestic market aside—that's what is making China such a Mecca for scrappy, pioneering entrepreneurs right now. You may find Sloan's ventures distasteful, indeed he says his mother still changes the subject when friends ask what her son does for a living. But change the nature of what he's selling and Sloan thinks just like any good entrepreneur pushing the boundaries in any pioneering market. We like to think that outsourcing manufacturing to China or call centers to India revolutionized American business. But America hasn't seen anything like the truly flattened, profitable, deconstructed and then ingeniously reconstructed businesses I've seen in China in the last few weeks. People who say China is all about outsourcing the supply chain and not innovation have it backwards—the deconstructed supply chain is precisely what's opened China up to a world of innovation. Imagine the way the Web democratized media and content and now apply the same ability to break a staid practice into Lego-like pieces to any physical hard goods industry whether its sex toys or iPods or pharmaceuticals. We've only seen the first few innings of what this means for global business and smart entrepreneurs in China – whether expats or locals—have the advantage.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| YouTube Down For Maintenance. Right. Posted: 01 Nov 2009 11:10 AM PST “YouTube is down for maintenance and will be back shortly,” says the site. The site first went down at around 9:30 California time. Or possibly earlier, we’re sorting through the Twitter barrage – “is down” is a trending topic right now. Most companies plan maintenance for short periods in the middle of the night, so our guess is this is maintenance of the unplanned sort. 2+ hours and counting isn’t a trivial amount of downtime. We’ve asked Google for a statement on when it might be back up, and what caused the outage. Update: Erictric says this may be part of a YouTube store rollout. I’m dubious. Update 2: A YouTube spokesperson says: “We are aware that some users are having difficulty accessing videos on YouTube. We are working hard to fix the issue and will have the site back to normal as soon as possible.” Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Let’s Kill “Viral”: It’s Time For a New Word Posted: 01 Nov 2009 11:00 AM PST
Four months before my latest book hit store shelves, my publisher wanted to change the title. Viral Loop might be catchy, and reflect what the book is about—and isn’t that what a title is supposed to do?—but Hyperion worried that some readers would be put off by the word “viral.” Would they shrink away for fear it was about “swine flu”? The book looks at entrepreneurs who built multimillion- and in some case billion-dollar businesses from scratch by incorporating virality into their products and businesses. Many iconic companies of our time, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, eBay, PayPal, Flickr and rising stars like Twitter are prime examples of a "viral loop"—to use the product, you have a strong incentive to spread it. At some point, as the number of users doubles, then triples, the company achieves what’s known as a “viral loop,” when the product spreads even if the company does nothing to promote it. The trick is that they all created something people really want, so much so that their customers happily spread the word about their product for them. The result: Never before has there been the potential to create wealth this fast, on this scale, and starting with so little. Fears of swine flu as a reason to change a book’s title may sound inane to TechCrunch’s audience, but from Hyperion’s perspective you are anything but representative of a mass audience (sorry). Every publisher wants to maximize its chances of sparking a bestseller. The challenge is to create a title that would not only appeal to those in the know but also induce a regular human being (read: non-geek) browsing the stacks in Barnes & Noble to pick up a copy, sample text and carry it to the checkout aisle. (Insider’s tip: That’s why editors place such great emphasis on the first 50 pages of a book.) Hyperion suggested we call the book “Share,” because that’s what Web-based viral dissemination is, when you get down to it: Users sharing links, memes, observations and ideas with one another. Since I would be following Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson’s Free in its publishing lineup—and his first book, The Long Tail, was a bestseller—Hyperion believed a title like Share would be more likely to succeed. I refused since I had invested tens of thousands of dollars into a social marketing campaign with Viral Loop as its centerpiece. More to the point, I believed Viral Loop perfectly encapsulates what the book is about. (I didn’t invent the term; I first heard it from Marc Andreessen, who I interviewed for a Fast Company cover story.) Now that Viral Loop is out, and I’m in full book pimping mode, doing radio and TV interviews with interviewers who don’t have a clue what social media is, I wonder if Hyperion might have been right. On ABC News Now, the anchor referred to Digg as “Dij”—apparently he’d never heard of it. A septuagenarian radio host cracked a string of borscht belt jokes about diseases and the flu after introducing my book. (Him: What’s that word that means you’re doing a lot of things at the same time? Me: Multitask? Him: Multicask?) While I want to talk about viral coefficients, viral business plans and success stories, and the entrepreneurs who founded these businesses, mainstream interviewers want to know how to sign up for Twitter. Clearly there are the social media “haves” and the social media “have nots.” How do you reach the latter without alienating the former? The problem, I think, is the word “viral,” which comes from biology and was retrofitted to cover the phenomenon of word-of-mouth—or on the Web, so-called “word-of-mouse”—dissemination of ideas. I propose we kill it and replace it with something better. (Where’s Don Draper when you need him?) If I had my druthers I’d also change the word “blog,” which sounds like the noise someone makes after scarfing down a plate of nachos after tipping back a few too many tequila shots. But one thing at a time. With that in mind I’ve created a Change the Term Viral contest. If you have a better term for “viral” a.) post your suggestion to the comments thread of this post, and b.) email it to viralloopbook@gmail.com. The winner will get props for his or her genius in the forward of the next edition of the book and win $250. The runner up gets $100. Third prize is $50. Each participant must post to the comments thread because that way the community can weigh in. The reason for the email is so I can contact the winners and arrange payment. Winners will be announced on viralloop.com next week. Learn more about Viral Loop on Amazon. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Avoiding the Cargo Cult And Getting The Trans-Atlantic Startup Model Right Posted: 01 Nov 2009 09:30 AM PST
When I met Michael Arrington back in April, I told him he was crazy to dismiss the possibility of a first-class technology startup coming out of Europe. I was born and raised in the Czech Republic, I’ve spent the last 15 years working towards building a global hi-tech company. So naturally I took it a bit personally. But I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit since then. The story usually goes that Europeans just don’t have the drive and commitment to spend enough hours necessary to get a fledgling company to an escape velocity and grow it from there. Our love of the two-hour lunch and Augusts in Provence is the evidence most often cited to prove this theory. But I believe that there are some very driven people in Europe who are willing to put enough time into it. My problem with the European startup ecosystem is somewhere else. I actually believe that it bears some signs of a Cargo Cult. Here is the definition from Wikipedia:
The best known examples of Cargo Cults come from some Pacific islands during World War II. The American airfields and their personnel brought relative prosperity and modernity to the island people, but once the war was over the Americans took their planes and equipment and left. The local people wanted to bring the prosperity back but they did not understand the substance of why the Americans came there. They only saw the form. And so the locals crafted wooden headphones, lit fires to light up runways and tried to attract back the planes with canned food and other useful goods by emulating airfield traffic. Something similar happens in the startup community in Europe these days. People start companies, write business plans, meet with investors, talk about term sheets and exits. But in reality most Europeans don’t actually understand the substance of the system—the business plans are wooden headphones and term sheets are fabricated control towers. Repeating the form of US-based startups without a real understanding of how much the deep and complex ecosystem of Silicon Valley contributes to the success of VC-funded US startups won’t bring prosperity to companies coming from Europe. In order to overcome the limitations of not being in the Valley and to avoid the the cargo cult mentality, I had to adjust the typical model. I’m on my third attempt to get the trans-Atlantic startup model right. I started my first “global” startup in Prague in the summer of 1997. I was so impressed by Marc Andreessen and Netscape that I wanted to build something similar. And so I started NetBeans and sent the business plan to Esther Dyson. Esther introduced me to her friends in Silicon Valley. And that’s when I first realized that I had no idea how the system works. And so NetBeans was marketed in the US, we raised money here but the engineering team was always based in Prague. We were ultimately able to build the company on a shoestring. Eighteen months later we got a call from Sun Microsystems and we agreed to sell our baby. I did not know until the last day if my transaction was going to happen. I had spent all my money (and more) on lawyers and advisors and there was no break-up fee in the term sheet. Startups are absolutely not for the faint of heart. I thought Systinet would be very similar, but it turned out quite different. We started working on the code in Prague in 2000. By the time I got here after the Summer of 2001, the situation did not look so rosy. Fortunately we managed to get the attention of the VC community; by Christmas time we received a $21M term sheet from Warburg Pincus. In November 2005 we signed a term sheet with Mercury Interactive for $105M. What we did not know is that during the due diligence, Mercury would be investigated by the SEC for stock option backdating and the company was delisted from Nasdaq. Not a pleasant experience for a small startup going through a very disruptive (and expensive) process of being acquired. Mercury was eventuaally acquired by HP. I am now working on my third startup: Good Data. I am a huge fan of the Customer Development Model by Steve Blank, but it assumes that the company can continue spending money on engineering and market/product fit tests until the target market is actually validated. And as much as I like the startup ecosystem here it seems to me that the people cost of software development forces startups to launch half-baked products. Very few companies can make the “Four Steps to the Epiphany” work financially – this is one reason having engineering located in a cheaper country from day one is a major plus. Good Data is still early but we managed to raise money from Marc Andreessen (among others)—the same person who inspired me to start NetBeans. Since Good Data was born in the cloud, we own no hardware (except notebooks), we have no PR agency, we do no outbound marketing, there are no software downloads, but we’re able to release a new version of our service to our customers twice a month. Startups are cheaper to operate these days, and technology helps us be much more agile than ten years ago—agile throughout our business. And being here in the Valley lets us be part of new trends—we can move even faster. My advice is always the same to European entrepreneurs: emulating and competing with Silicon Valley startups in Europe looks easy but the substance is quite a bit more complicated. You just cannot compete with Silicon Valley completely from the outside. Europeans—and all entrepreneurs—should consider that bootstrapping and focus on local markets is usually a better way to obtain the material wealth of the advanced culture rather than through magical thinking, religious rituals and practices. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Four Years After Founding, Kiva Hits $100 Million In Microloans Posted: 01 Nov 2009 08:32 AM PST Proving that microloans can help to change the world one little bit at a time, Kiva.org hit a major milestone today. Since it’s founding four years ago, it has now made possible $100 million in microloans between individual lenders and entrepreneurs all around the world. The company has brought together 573,000 lenders (people like you and me putting in $25 or more towards a specific project), and 239,000 entrepreneurs. Most of the entrepreneurs who benefit are in developing countries, but Kiva opened up its service to needy U.S. entrepreneurs last summer (which caused some controversy, but was the right decision). It also has APIs for other developers to build on its data set. Kiva creates a personal connection between lenders and recipients. Each entrepreneur has a profile page with a picture and description of what they plan to do with the loan. Then every month you get an update on how much of the loan has been repaid. For instance, I joined other Kiva donors to give this furniture maker in Afghanistan a $1,075 loan a year ago. So far, he’s paid back 61% of the loan without ever missing a payment. You can also create lending teams on Kiva. So far the 40 people on the TechCrunch team (join here) have loaned out $5,225 spread across 183 loans. Once a loan is repaid, you can plow it back into another loan. I think of it as charitable giving, although it is not technically a charity. But the best form of charity is to help people help themselves . . . teach a man to fish and all that. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
Frankly, since I started writing my weekly column for TechCrunch a few months back, I’ve been growing increasingly worried about the sanity of our readers. And not just for the reasons you might think.
User generated content has been the rage for quite some time now, but there have been few sites that nail the process of getting users to create quality content on the web. Launching today is 
A big part of the debate about the 
Method #3, getting their phone number, has been the most lucrative thing on Facebook, even more than the fake weight loss offers, for the last 2 years. As an ad network, we were at the mercy of what the game developers want—more money. Here's what 
I've met a lot of expats in my time in China. Some decided to move during an Asian studies class in college. Others decided to move when they saw Mandarin-speaking colleagues getting a promotion over them at work. Still others may have promised a Chinese parent on his or her deathbed to return to the homeland.
This guest post is by Adam L. Penenberg, author of 
This guest post was written by 
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