The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- DocVerse Turns Microsoft Office Into Google Docs With Collaboration Plug-In
- MP3tunes Founder Fights Court Decision That Could Help Music Labels Bankrupt Him
- Wiccan Employee Files Sexual And Religious Discrimination Lawsuit Against Google
- Turkish Government Slams Google With $47 Million Fine For Alleged Tax Evasion
- Exclusive: Soluto Raises $6.2M From Bessemer To Make Your PC Run Better
- TwitterPeek Is A Peek That Inexplicably Tweets
- USC: We’ve Helped 15 Promising Startups Raise Over $115 Million In Capital
- Shed No Tears For N-Gage Games, They’re Not Long For This World
- Animoto Gets Groovy For The Holidays
- Chorus Delivers Customized App Recommendations To Your iPhone
- SugarSync Sweetens File Syncing For Small Businesses
- GSI Commerce Rebrands Digital Agency As TrueAction
- (Updated) Downtime At Rackspace Cloud
- Opera Mobile 10 Beta For Nokia And Other Symbian/S60 Smartphones Released
- RockYou Joins The No Scams Parade. But What’s Facebook Up To?
- Break Media Partners With Southern Comfort To Launch Social Sportz Net
- Wildfire Launches A Legitimate, Easy To Use Sweepstakes Platform For Twitter
- Sorenson’s Squeeze 6: A Connected Media Encoding And Distribution Platform
- Google’s New Music Search Will Be Getting A Boost From Your Favorite Bands
- Dumb Pipes — Why Skype Treads Carefully With Open Source
- Twitter Reveals More Lists Power With A Widget
- Yahoo Gets A Mobile Search Deal In Germany. Google Shrugs.
- Cisco Shells Out $44.5 Million For Set-Top Box Unit Of Chinese Cable Company DVN
- 5 iPhone Accessories We’re Still Waiting For
- Yahoo Open Sources Traffic Server
| DocVerse Turns Microsoft Office Into Google Docs With Collaboration Plug-In Posted: 03 Nov 2009 08:45 AM PST  Collaboration on editing documents and spreadsheets is becoming a key feature in productivity suites with the emergence of Google Docs, Zoho, Etherpad and others. Even Microsoft is adding collaboration features to Excel in its new version of Office. While Microsoft is adding this limited functionality to its new version of office, DocVerse offers a plug-in for Word, PowerPoint and Excel that lets you collaborate with other users when editing a document. Once downloaded, the DocVerse plug-in will appear on the right-hand sidebar of any Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel file. You can invite other users to collaborate with you, and once all partied have downloaded the plug-in, you can share documents with each other. Whether users are working on a document online or offline, DocVerse will track, manages and sync all changes to merge them into one updated version of the document. You can communicate with other users via an IM feature within the plug-in as well. And DocVerse also allows for documents to be viewed on web. So you can transfer your document to the web, where DocVerse will render a high fidelity version of within it’s platform. You can also add comments from the web, which are synced automatically, enabling collaboration between people with and those without Microsoft Office software installed on their computers. Each DocVerse-edited document will feature an activity stream which is viewable via Microsoft Office, any Web browser, or an RSS stream. DocVerse is priced based upon users and number of documents. For example, the plug-in is $49 per month for 500 documents and up to ten users. Although DocVerse will face competition from Microsoft itself when Office is released with more collaboration features, the plug-in is extremely useful for past versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Founded in 2007 by Microsoft veterans Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui, DocVerse has raised $1.3 million in seed funding from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal Capital, Naval Ravikant and others. The startup also recently made an enterprise play by integrating its plug-in with popular social collaboration platform Jive. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.           |
| MP3tunes Founder Fights Court Decision That Could Help Music Labels Bankrupt Him Posted: 03 Nov 2009 08:42 AM PST
Fast forward to about two weeks ago, when a new ruling gave EMI again a way to go after Robertson’s personal assets in court. That poor decision was made after a key witness – a former director at MP3tunes who was fired – was reportedly paid by EMI to get her to change her deposition after the judge had already thrown it out. For more information about this unexpected turn of events, head over to this excellent article on TechDirt. The fact that the record labels were going after Robertson personally was as despicable two years ago as it is now, and Robertson has now understandably appealed the court decision that would allow the roughly two dozen labels to personally sue him for MP3tunes’ alleged copyright infringement (which is also BS since the service only allows people to store their own digital music online and lets them access it from any Web-enabled device). Robertson filed a motion for reconsideration or alternately certification for interlocutory appeal on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Meanwhile, he continues to ask readers of his blog to spread the word about EMI’s lies to the world. I’d consider doing just that if I were you. (Image credit: MichaelRobertson.com) Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| Wiccan Employee Files Sexual And Religious Discrimination Lawsuit Against Google Posted: 03 Nov 2009 07:31 AM PST Lawsuits can be the source of all sorts of surprising and off the wall stories and this one, filed by a Google Atlanta-based former data center employee takes the cake. In the lawsuit, which was filed on Oct. 29 in a federal court in Atlanta, the former employee, James Bara, alleges both sexual and religious discrimination from his superior. While it doesn’t sound juicy, the stories that Bara tells are. Bara was initially a contractor for Google’s Atlanta office, working as an assistant in the Data Center. After six months, he was hired by Google as a full-time employee. According to the complaint, all was rosy for the next two years until a female transgender employee joined the group Bara worked for. Bara’s boss, a woman named Pam Sohn, allegedly made inappropriate comments about this woman, and ridiculed her sexual preference. Bara complained about the comments to Sohn, who Bara says turned on him and began to treat him, and the other men in the office unfairly. Bara, who is a member of the Wiccan religion, also said that Sohn made inappropriate comments directed towards him about witches and his religion that made him feel uncomfortable. For example, Sohn would sing The Wizard of Oz’s “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead.” Bara’s employment was eventually terminated by Google after long standing issues with Sohn. There’s more in the lawsuit, but you get the picture. It’s totally bizarre, and also very sad if these allegations are true. Bara is seeking punitive damages as well as compensation for attorney fees. wiccan – Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| Turkish Government Slams Google With $47 Million Fine For Alleged Tax Evasion Posted: 03 Nov 2009 06:12 AM PST  Following an investigation that lasted over a year, Turkish authorities are fining Internet giant Google a total of 71 million Turkish Lira (approx. €32 million or USD $47 million) for supposedly dodging the national tax system. Local media reports (links in Turkish) teach us that the Turkish government claims it is entitled to additional taxes because of the fact Google operates its online advertising in the country and even boasts offices and a registered subsidiary there while bills and payments originate from Ireland. That latter part rings true, since the search juggernaut's European headquarters are located in Ireland's capital and most of its support and financial services are centralized there. But Turkish authorities say Google is required to pay national taxes for revenue generated through its registered company based in Turkey, and asserts that an extensive audit shows that the American company owes the government nearly $50 million in unpaid taxes.   |
| Exclusive: Soluto Raises $6.2M From Bessemer To Make Your PC Run Better Posted: 03 Nov 2009 06:01 AM PST
The company, which is aggressively keeping its operations hidden from the public eye for now, is only willing to describe itself as being in the ‘anti-PC frustration software’ business. Our man in Israel, Roi Carthy, says the company is one of the hottest in Israel at present day, so let’s take a closer look at what they’re building over there. Soluto’s stated objective is to resolve common end-users’ PC frustrations (e.g. sluggishness, application/OS freezes and long boots). Granted, there are literally hundreds of software applications that claim to deal with these issues, including registry cleaners and a plethora of ‘PC performance boosting’ applications but Soluto claims they all miss the point. The startup doesn’t see the crux of the problem in buggy software but in the way applications behave when running alongside each other and the manner in which they interact with the hardware. In its research, Soluto claims to have uncovered the number one cause for slow PCs: the fact that legitimate software is hogging resources with no apparent reason. For example, software that loads at boot and performs indexing could also perform its chore when the machine is idle. Seeing as it does not, the user has to wait—needlessly—for the process to complete, and voilà, frustration. Soluto believes it can tackle the nature of the issues that result in PC frustrations by employing a crowd-sourced approach to ‘map the PC genome’, which is the term the company uses to denominate the collection of data that can be determined about application behavior, processing requirements, hardware and performance. Obviously, the specifics of this modus operandi are hazy at best, so we’ll have to wait for the company to launch something in public beta to see how it stacks up. Along with the round of financing, Soluto is also announcing that Naftali Bennett has been appointed CEO of the fledgling company. Bennett, a well-known entrepreneur in Israel, is the former founder and CEO of Cyota, an anti-fraud company which was acquired by RSA Security in 2005 for $145 million. Bennett joins Soluto’s original co-founders Ishay Green and Tomer Dvir on the management team. Soluto remains in stealth / closed alpha, but intrigued PC users can sign up for the company’s upcoming public beta product right here. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| TwitterPeek Is A Peek That Inexplicably Tweets Posted: 03 Nov 2009 05:15 AM PST  Remember the Twitter Peek thingie Peter Ha spotted last week? Yeah, it's official now and is actually a neat little device if you Twitter a whole lot and don't carry a smartphone. Wait, what?   |
| USC: We’ve Helped 15 Promising Startups Raise Over $115 Million In Capital Posted: 03 Nov 2009 03:46 AM PST
For your background: the University of Southern California, to be more precise its Stevens Institute for Innovation, helps USC spin-offs manage intellectual property, regularly incubates and showcases new high-tech ventures and connects promising young teams to appropriate investors for follow-up financing and commercialization. Los Angeles-based USC tells us 15 startups have raised a healthy $115 million in funding in total since the beginning of the 2008 calendar year, tapping ‘creative’ financing sources beyond venture capital such as private and overseas investors as well as government grants. Based on those funding numbers, USC asserts the spin-offs are averaging close to $7 million in funding each, not including those that haven't yet secured a significant investment and also excluding funding numbers for startups that couldn't be verified through multiple sources. You can find some of the startups on the USC Stevens Institute website, but most familiar to you will be Box.net, Orgoo (now dead) and Flixya.com. Another promising one is BigStage, which lets you create photo-realistic 3D-animated avatars that can be used in virtual worlds, video games, etc. The startup was recently ranked 18th in Forbes Magazine’s list of America's Most Promising Companies and has raised over $10 million in financing over two rounds. Needless to say, I think it’s a great to see universities doing their part in furthering technological innovation and giving promising young companies a leg up, and I think it’s equally great to see them reach out and disclose numbers. Id be interested to seeing how they stack up to other education and research organization’s results. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Shed No Tears For N-Gage Games, They’re Not Long For This World Posted: 03 Nov 2009 03:45 AM PST
The service was launched in 2003 as an attempt to tap into a growing games market. Anyone remember the clumsy N-Gage phone? Didn’t think so. Although maybe its hideousness and general usability difficulties probably stuck on your mind. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Animoto Gets Groovy For The Holidays Posted: 03 Nov 2009 01:34 AM PST It’s no surprise that Animoto’s new video product is a hit. Upload a few short videos and images, add a song, click a button and bam, you’ve got a very high quality souvenir of your recent holiday or other event. Here’s one I put together for Foo Camp in August. More examples are here. So far it’s a one-size-fits-all product. And since it’s such a good one no one is complaining. But there have been requests for holiday themed platforms, says CEO Brad Jefferson. And so on December 1 they’ll release themed templates for various holidays. The new product will be called Animoto Originals, and the video above is an example.
Animoto is profitable and has over 1 million registered users. 10% of those users have purchased a product, either a subscription or one time video purchase. Short videos remain free. They’ve also started signing partners to make photo and video sharing easier. Last month they announced deals with SmugMug and Life.com. What I’d really like to see is some sort of partnership with Someecards. But perhaps that’s too much to hope for. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Chorus Delivers Customized App Recommendations To Your iPhone Posted: 03 Nov 2009 01:20 AM PST With close to 100,000 iPhone applications now available on the App Store, finding the ones the ones that you will actually enjoy and use can be difficult. There are other apps and sites that offer a resource for you to find and share popular apps, and even present customized recommendations, such as AppsFire, 16 Apps or Sidebar, which we recently wrote about here. But what about tapping into your social graph to help find the apps that are popular amongst your friends? Enter Chorus— a free iPhone app that helps you discover apps with the people you trust most – your friends. Chorus, which is developed by envIO Networks, is sort of like a mobile social network based around the apps that your friends have downloaded. The app features real-time feeds from your designated friends (those who have also downloaded Chorus and whom you have friended) displaying the apps they are downloading, and what they are saying about them in the app. Chorus uses a proprietary Social Genome technology to match your favorite apps against those your friends use, building a personalized and relevant list of recommended apps. Chorus will also ask your a series of questions to determine the types of apps your like. And you can share your favorite apps through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and also invite them to test out Chorus. Chorus also aggregates opinions of tech experts via its AppMavens service and features AppMavens' reviews and ratings from trusted app reviewers from leading review sites. The app also offers a desktop application that will sync to your iTunes account and and iPhone to update your Chorus app with all of your apps. The app seems useful to tap into your friend’s recommendations but I am also a fan of Sidebar’s app as well (which has not been released yet). After learning about both apps, I find myself wishing that they could be combined into one app that offers both friend and personalized recommendations, content Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| SugarSync Sweetens File Syncing For Small Businesses Posted: 03 Nov 2009 01:19 AM PST  Sharpcast’s SugarSync, an application that synchronizes data across desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones, and even televisions, is rolling out a service designed specifically for businesses. As people split up their digital lives across devices and the Web, allows you to back-up any kind of digital file, including videos, spreadsheets, photos and documents, in the cloud and access it from virtually anywhere via a variety of devices. You can read our past reviews of SugarSync here and here. SugarSync for Business, which is specifically designed for small businesses, lets enterprise users sync data across computers and smartphones syncing capabilities, share folders and collaborate with employees within its platform. The version allows administrators to create account for many users, where employees share the storage amount, but each employee has a separate user account (the employee's data is not shared with other employees). Admins can set storage limits for each user and also receives alerts when user is near limit. And it’s easy to delete a user account without losing the data that’s in the account. Of course, one of the draws for the business is that ability scale large data storage easily and quickly through a simple interface. Because it is cloud based, SugarSync can provide this to businesses for affordable prices. The base plan starts at $29.99/month for 100 GB and 3 users. Additional users can be added for $9.99/month and more storage can be added in 100 GB increments for $29.99/month. The services also offers free phone-based customer support. Similar to its consumer product, SugarSync for Business supports computer and smartphone operating systems, including Windows, Mac, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android. SugarSync has already tested in small businesses and is especially popular with graphic designers, law firms, real estate offices and other service-oriented companies with data-intensive environments. SugarSync for Business also features some of the innovative functionality of its consumer product, including the ability to share files with anyone in their Gmail, Hotmail, AOL or Yahoo Mail contact lists. Users will also be able to directly upload photos stored in SugarSync to Facebook, with functionality for additional social networks to be rolled out in the near future. SugarSync faces competition from Windows Live Mesh from Microsoft, which won a Crunchie for best technology innovation earlier this year. Startups Dropbox, Box.net and Mozy also provide popular storage services in the cloud. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| GSI Commerce Rebrands Digital Agency As TrueAction Posted: 03 Nov 2009 01:18 AM PST GSI Commerce, a company that powers e-commerce platforms for major brands, recently made headline with the acquisition of Retail Convergence, which operates RueLaLa.com, a private sale site and SmartBargains.com, an off-price e-commerce marketplace, in a deal valued as high as $350 million. GSI is now rebranding its digital marketing agency that caters to fashion and retail brands, formerly known as gsi interactive, to TrueAction. TrueAction's new brand identity is focused on helping retail brands turn the transaction experience into a revenue builder for e-commerce platforms. TrueAction is launching Usability Lab, a marketing tool that utilizes a live focus group where real consumers can provide detailed feedback on aspects including digital marketing, design, and functionality. The agency is also focusing on creating technologies for brands to help deepen relationships with consumers. This includes mobile apps, store locators, catalog services, and customer service integration. GSI also acquired outside marketing firms Silverlign Group and Pepperjam this year. Clients include NFL, NHL, MLB and Toys ‘R Us Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| (Updated) Downtime At Rackspace Cloud Posted: 02 Nov 2009 11:52 PM PST
I got the first alert as I was stepping towards the door to leave (it is always like that), and when I got back to my seat found that half the web seemed to be talking about it. The main Techcrunch site was still serving pages to most, due to our super-aggressive-mega-cache, but it seemed that the entire Dallas NOC was being rebooted. From the status blog:
From slicehost (who actually mention power outage):
And from Scoble, on Twitter: (the list he pointed to is actually a good one to follow if you are a Rackspace customer). This will likely lead to many cursing the cloud, when in essence there is nothing about this problem that seems unique to being a ‘cloud problem’. What is more concerning is that the NOC seems to have run out of power (almost unimaginable) and then took so long to come back online. So – how did you all spend the downtime? It seems most admins and devs from Rackspace hosted companies were just hanging out on Hacker News and IRC bitching about RS As soon as we know what happen etc. or any more, we will be posting updates here Update From Rackspace: from their site:
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Opera Mobile 10 Beta For Nokia And Other Symbian/S60 Smartphones Released Posted: 02 Nov 2009 10:45 PM PST
The company’s latest ‘State of the Mobile Web’ report, which was based on usage data from their other mobile browser product, the popular Opera Mini, suggests that mobile web usage is still increasing at a rapid pace. With that in mind, Opera has given its free Opera Mobile browser a decent makeover and added several new features that many a Nokia owner – and despite popular belief, there are still a heck of a lot of phones from the beleaguered Finnish handset manufacturer out there – will definitely enjoy. The new Opera Mobile 10 beta features a fresh look that was first introduced with the recent release of Opera Mini 5 beta. The new design also comes with a set of new features like the Speed Dial, bookmarking and tabbed browsing elements Opera desktop browser users have long grown accustomed to as well as a handy password manager. Opera Mobile 10 beta can be downloaded here and is optimized for both touchscreen and keypad-style navigation on Nokia devices and select Sony Ericsson and Samsung smartphones running Symbian/S60. Opera Software claims the latest build of the smartphone browser product is notably faster than the previous beta release (9.7) and is even twice as speedy when downloading or zooming in on pages. Apart from the performance upgrade, Opera Mobile 10 also sports full integration of Opera Turbo, the company’s server-side compression technology that makes loading Web pages from mobile devices faster and cheaper. Since I do not have any Nokia devices lying around anymore, I haven’t been able to actually test the performance of Opera Mobile 10 hands-on, but if my experience with the company’s desktop browser and Opera Mini are anything to go by, the company doesn’t ever appear to compromise on speed. As for the design, you can judge for yourself based on the screenshots below – or your own experience of course. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| RockYou Joins The No Scams Parade. But What’s Facebook Up To? Posted: 02 Nov 2009 09:55 PM PST
In an email to RockYou’s publishers, they say that they will begin complying with Facebook’s rules on offer scams (and like you, we’re not sure why they haven’t been complying all along, but lax enforcement is likely the cause). Two interesting nuggets from the email though. First, RockYou says that from now on you’ll only see “clean, safe surveys from top tier brands advertisers.” All of the surveys we’ve seen are mobile subscription scams, so I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a clean, safe survey. Second, the email says “the Facebook compliance team will be keeping a very close eye on offer walls starting tonight.” We’d heard that Facebook is coming down hard on app developers around scams right now, but Facebook won’t comment about it other than to say that they have always been monitoring application offers and enforcing the rules. From what we’ve seen, that enforcement didn’t bring much in the way of results, but perhaps they’re more serious about the situation now. The full email: Subject: RockYou Offers: Facebook Offer Wall Compliance Update Hi RockYou Publishers, You may have heard the recent controversy around the types of offers that are being run by most offer wall providers (Offerpal, SuperRewards, etc.). If you haven’t heard, take a look at this post on TechCrunch: The Facebook compliance team will be keeping a very close eye on offer walls starting tonight. Since the RockYou Ad Network is the largest display network on the Facebook platform, we have a long history of working directly with the Facebook compliance team to ensure that we always maintain the highest standards of compliance and ad quality. We will apply the same level of quality assurance to our RockYou Offers platform. Some thing to keep in mind that set us apart from the other offer wall providers: We believe we will continue to outperform the competition based on our diverse advertiser base, and we will do so while always maintaining full compliance with Facebook policy. Our technology provider for RockYou Offers, PeanutLabs, has also posted an interesting research study they ran over the weekend that clearly outlines how users feel about the scammy offers that have been so prevalent on offer walls: We believe the new Facebook policy enforcement is in the best interest of Facebook users and the entire platform ecosystem, and we look forward to working with you as a safe and effective monetization partner. If you have not yet switched over to RockYou Offers, all you have to do is: If you have any questions or issues with integration, please contact Chris or Aaron: Chris Akhavan Aaron Choi Thank you, Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Break Media Partners With Southern Comfort To Launch Social Sportz Net Posted: 02 Nov 2009 09:00 PM PST Break Media, a social video site for guys, is launching a new branded content project, called the "Social Sportz Net,” created in partnership with liquor brand Southern Comfort. The videos will consist of an original series of webisodes designed around the “uniqueness and versatility” of the popular spirit. The "Social Sportz Net" channel will cover information that most fratastic guys want: how to throw a perfect party. For example, a webisode will feature everything guys need to know to host a killer house party, including the right music, required dress, games and entertainment, and drinks ideas. The webisodes showcase two roommates, Ted and Neil, as they go head-to-head to prepare, host, and entertain in a party-hosting showdown. Each installment features a different themed party, covered with sports news-style recaps and analysis that highlights the Southern Comfort brand. Break.com recently launched a campaign to upload more UGC to its video platform. Break Media (which includes several other “entertainment communities for men,”) had 26 million unique visitors worldwide in March according to Comscore. The media network also recently launched a new Twitter-focused show, called Tweet Boxx. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Wildfire Launches A Legitimate, Easy To Use Sweepstakes Platform For Twitter Posted: 02 Nov 2009 07:33 PM PST
Wildfire hasn’t been around very long, but it’s already accomplished quite a bit: it won last year’s fbFund, and has built up a very impressive roster of clients, including Pepsi, Sony, CNN, Universal, AT&T, VIctoria’s Secret and even Facebook itself, which has used the service for multiple campaigns. But until now, it hasn’t been available for Twitter. From the user perspective, a Wildfire sweepstakes that’s being run on Twitter is very straightforward: clicking a contest link will take you to a basic sweepstakes form, which includes a pre-populated Tweet that will alert your followers that you’ve just signed up for the contest. Tweet that out, and you’re presented with another quick form where you fill out your name and contact information, so you can be reached if you win. The contest format is built to encourage virality — for every one of your followers that signs up for the sweepstakes via the link you tweeted out, you’re given an extra entry in the contest. This gives users with a lot of followers a big incentive to tweet these contests, as they’ll have a good chance to boost their odds of winning. If you’d like to try out the experience for yourself, check out this sample contest. Wildfire also tries to streamline the process for the company running the campaign. The platform uses a wizard to set up the sweepstakes microsite, which companies can then customize with their rules, opt-in newsletters, and the appearance. Companies can also prompt entrants to their sweepstakes to start following their official Twitter accounts, which makes it easy for them to build up a larger audience. On the backend, Wildfire allows clients to control their campaigns across all supported platforms (Facebook, the web, and Twitter), and also offers detailed analytics for each. All in all this is a solid addition to Wildfire’s lineup — don’t be surprised if you start seeing major brands running campaigns on Twitter using the platform in the near future. And there will likely be plenty of smaller customers too, as Wildfire has been used by thousands of small businesses to run over 10,000 total campaigns. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| Sorenson’s Squeeze 6: A Connected Media Encoding And Distribution Platform Posted: 02 Nov 2009 05:20 PM PST  A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine came to me with a problem. The British distribution company handling his music video was shockingly backwards in its formatting, and was asking for a Real Media encode of the video. They didn't specify bitrate, resolution, where it would be shown, or anything like that. Quicktime was being a bother, and we needed to use my PC to do a few encodes at this or that specification. We ended up running it through in Vegas, and going to grab a coffee while it churned out the frames. Now, the point is not that you need a PC to encode heinous old formats, but rather that digital distribution is a weird, complex process that could use a bit of simplification. Sorenson's Squeeze 6 appears to go to some lengths to make this happen. It's far from the only encoding platform out there, but I think they're moving the right direction with this version, which not only integrates tightly with your Mac, but also with SMS, Twitter, and other popular services. After all, there's no guarantee that you're going to be working in the same office, or even the same country, as people who need to be informed every step of the way. (link fixed)   |
| Google’s New Music Search Will Be Getting A Boost From Your Favorite Bands Posted: 02 Nov 2009 05:04 PM PST
We’ve heard that artists will be offering songs that can only be found through Google search, some of which will be given away for free. Over 20 artists are involved. Beyond that details are still scant, but we hear that the new promotion will start running soon — perhaps later this week. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Dumb Pipes — Why Skype Treads Carefully With Open Source Posted: 02 Nov 2009 04:52 PM PST
It could also become part of multi-protocol messengers like Pidgin or eBuddy or Meebo. Or at least that was the hope for some hours today after a French user got the following answer from Skype customer support. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Twitter Reveals More Lists Power With A Widget Posted: 02 Nov 2009 04:32 PM PST
The List Widget is exactly what you’d expect: A widget that you can place on your blog that displays a list of your choosing. One nice thing is that this can be a list you made or one any user has made (that is public). If you simply type in a user’s name, it will show their lists in a drop down menu. You then give the list a title, a caption, customize its look and feel, and you’re good to go. But here’s why this widget is pretty cool: It basically is a way for you to create your own curated Twitter stream anywhere on the web. Obviously, you won’t be able to do things like tweet from it (though there is a reply button that comes up when you hover over a tweet — this directs you back to Twitter), but people are already making some great Twitter lists (like us and Scoble) and this is a great way to put them to work without having to go to Twitter itself. You can choose how many tweets to show, set the intervals, hide hashtags — there are a good number of options. Best of all, these widgets offer something that Twitter itself doesn’t: Realtime auto-updating. Basically, this widget is kind of like a better, more customizable version of Twitter.com. The List widget joins Twitter other widgets for profiles, search, and favorites. Find them all here. I’ve embedded our TechCrunch team list below.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Yahoo Gets A Mobile Search Deal In Germany. Google Shrugs. Posted: 02 Nov 2009 04:29 PM PST
Let’s just check that again. What has happened is that Yahoo has entered into an exclusive, multi-year, partnership with O2 Germany to become the preferred partner for mobile search and services. Who was the previous partner? Google. So that’s not actually the same thing at all. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| Cisco Shells Out $44.5 Million For Set-Top Box Unit Of Chinese Cable Company DVN Posted: 02 Nov 2009 04:16 PM PST Cisco is at it again. The company is acquiring the set-top box business of one of China’s largest cable companies, DVN, for $44.5 million. This is peanuts compared to Cisco’s latest acquisitions including the recent acquisition of ScanSafe for $183 million. A few weeks ago, Cisco announced a $2.9 billion acquisition of mobile networking infrastructure provider Starent Networks, which followed the $3 billion acquisition of video video-conferencing company Tandberg in late September. Under the terms of the agreement, approximately $17.5 million will be paid up front, with an additional maximum amount of $27 million to be paid over four years based on sales performance. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2010. Cisco is looking to boost it’s cable business offerings with this acquisition. Cisco says the Chinese cable market is currently the largest in the world with 160 million subscribers and is predicted to grow to as many as 200 million over the next three to five years. DVN’s box unit will become part of Cisco’s International Cable Business Unit within the Service Provider Video Technology Group. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| 5 iPhone Accessories We’re Still Waiting For Posted: 02 Nov 2009 03:50 PM PST Way back in March, Apple announced that the latest and greatest build of the iPhone OS would open up a whole new world to third parties: richly featured accessories, complete with tie-in software. No longer would accessory makers be limited to headphones, cases, and FM transmitters with hardware controls – now they could make glucose meters, guitar amp controllers, and FM transmitters with onscreen controls! The possibilities were endless. 8 months later, what is there to show for it? There’s a $120 car cradle that boosts the GPS accuracy of the iPhone, some fancy running shoes, and.. er.. well, that’s about it. Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >> Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Yahoo Open Sources Traffic Server Posted: 02 Nov 2009 03:27 PM PST With 600 million unique visits per month, Yahoo sees a large amount of traffic to its sites. In order to maintain sites in the cloud, Yahoo uses Traffic Server, a piece of software initially acquired via Inktomi, to support this massive amount of traffic. Tomorrow, Yahoo will be debuting an open source version of Traffic Server. The code is available through the Incubator project at the Apache Software Foundation. Traffic Server enables the session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for an entire cloud computing stack. Yahoo says that with the open source version of Traffic Server, organizations can benefit from access to cached online content. In addition, Traffic Server enables faster responses to requests for stored Web objects, such as files, news articles or images. The company's global network of data centers allows Traffic Server to choose the closest servers to store and access cached content for increased speed. Traffic Server is capable of handling more than 30,000 requests per second per server and it currently serves more than 400 terabytes of data per day. Yahoo is also announcing an update to the Yahoo Distribution of Hadoop which is now deployed extensively in Yahoo data centers worldwide. These include new features and bug fixes that continue to improve robustness, security, performance, and operability of Hadoop for ongoing large scale deployments. Yahoo says that opening of code for Traffic Server and the distribution of Hadoop reinforces the technology company’s commitment to open source technologies. Yahoo has been the primary developer and investor to Apache’s Hadoop. In 2006, Hadoop founder Doug Cutting joined Yahoo to lead the project of developing the open-source software. Hadoop now provides the framework for many Yahoo properties including Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, and several content and ad services. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
Two years ago, a bunch of labels affiliated to music giant EMI Group 
Israeli startup 
The 
[Finland] Last week marked the end for 
Look for holiday and life event themed templates (Christmas, weddings, etc.). Short videos are free. Full length videos (the length of a song) are $3 each, or you can buy a 
A large number of customers of 
(first time I noticed that he shares initials with his employer).
It’s been about two months since 
Zynga 
Last week Google 
Skype’s Linux version will soon become open source software – and maybe run on every smartphone, TV set-top box or other gadget powered by the free operating system. 
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Yahoo is claiming it has “displaced” Google search in Germany. 
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