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- Seesmic Web One-Ups Brizzly With Lists AND Geolocation Support (Kind Of)
- Andreessen On Skype: “This Is One Of The Most Important Companies On the Internet.”
- Confirmed: Skype Founders Settle With eBay And Others, Get 14% Stake In Skype, Not 10%
- Fever Pitch: It’s Droid Day, Enjoy The Moment.
- Bettween Makes Tracking And Sharing Twitter Conversations A Breeze
- Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: “I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues”
- ScamVille: New Offerpal CEO Admits Mistakes, Makes Bold Promises
- Brizzly Marries Groups And Twitter Lists
- ZooLoo Gets A Facelift With Revamped Homepage, Navigation, And Widgets
- Smartphone Showdown: iPhone 3GS vs. Motorola Droid Round 2
- Ning Reaches 37 Million Users, Launches Developer Appathon
- Ok, Now I Totally Get Aardvark
- US Cyworld Will No Longer Be Able To Service
- Facebook To Increase Enforcement Of Anti-Scam Rules
- New Twitter Retweets Take A Little Peek Around
- Twitter Starts Curating Trending Topic Tweets
- On-The-Go Mobile Coupons: Almost As Cool As Minority Report. Not Quite As Creepy.
- Yes, This Is How I Want To Search TV Shows [Video]
- The Realtime Agenda For The Realtime CrunchUp
- Browse Before You Buy? Adroll’s RoundTrip Is Targeting You.
- Gopher: Content > Presentation
- Online Real Estate Broker Redfin Adds More Recent Sales Data And Links To Blogs
- Are You A Blowhard? Zyxio Wants Your Help With Product Ideas
- Google Open Sources Set Of Closure Tools It Uses To Build Its Own Apps
- Google Has Music Search. Yahoo Responds By Searching YouTube For Music Videos.
| Seesmic Web One-Ups Brizzly With Lists AND Geolocation Support (Kind Of) Posted: 06 Nov 2009 08:35 AM PST Earlier this week, Seesmic rolled out support for the new Twitter Lists for its Desktop client. Today, that same functionality comes to its web-based client. And with it comes a bonus: Geolocation support. Now, to be clear, most users still won’t be able to use this geolocation support just yet, as Twitter has yet to enable it for most users. But if you do happen to have it, Seesmic supports it. As you can see in the screenshot, it looks pretty nice. If you see a little location marker on a tweet, you can hover over it to bring up a Google Map overlay showing where that tweet was sent from. Last week, we previewed Tweetie 2.1, which will include geolocation support as well. Seesmic’s method looks like it may be a bit easier since it only requires a hover state to get to a detailed map of where the tweet was sent from, whereas Tweetie 2.1 requires two clicks (to the tweet and then on the tiny map to get a more detailed version). Meanwhile, List support looks solid in Seesmic Web as well. As you can see in the other screenshot below, when you hover over a Twitter username, you have an option to add them to one of your Lists. Another web-based Twitter client, Brizzly, rolled out it support for Lists last night. The plan is to have all Brizzly “Groups” (a feature that worked like Lists) synced with Twitter Lists by tomorrow. Presumably, Seesmic will have its lists synced with Twitter Lists tomorrow as well. It’s not yet clear when Twitter will do a wide roll-out of its geolocation support, but with several third-party services looking ready to go, it seems likely that it will be realatively soon. Following Lists full launch last week, Twitter has also begun testing its new Retweet funtionality to a small set of users. Along with Lists and geolocation, Seesmic Web has a new Trending Topics area it is rolling out today as well. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.           |
| Andreessen On Skype: “This Is One Of The Most Important Companies On the Internet.” Posted: 06 Nov 2009 07:03 AM PST Earlier this morning, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis settled their lawsuits with eBay and a syndicate of investors in return for a 14 percent stake in the company they founded. The lawsuits were complicating the spin-off of Skype from eBay because the Skype founders still controlled the service’s underlying peer-to-peer technology. In an interview with me this morning, Marc Andreessen, one of the investors through his new fund Andreessen Horowitz, told me, “The deal was never held up. The money was in escrow and was going to close” even if the lawsuits weren’t settled. The transaction is on track to close later this quarter. The other investors are Silver Lake Partners and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Index Ventures and Mike Volpi are out of the deal. Josh Silverman will continue to be CEO. Andreessen is glad that the lawsuits are settled and that the “Joltid IP is now owned by Skype,” but was prepared to litigate if it didn’t work out. He explains: “This was a completely known situation going into it. It was one of the reasons the deal was available, because of the situation. We assumed it would be a good idea to bring the founders on board and resolve all the issues, we are very pro-founder. There was some drama along the way, but we came out with everybody in the same boat rowing in the same direction.” In addition to legal avenues, Skype also had the option to try to switch to a different technology, such as SIP-based Internet telephony. “Had this not happened,” says Andreessen, “there were various technological paths that could have been followed. Now that it is settled, it is not necessary to make any changes. The technology is scaling very well.” Skype is on a $740 million revenue run-rate and boasts 521 million users worldwide. “Skype is gigantic and yet still a relatively small percentage of international call volume,” notes Andreesen. “This is, and ought to be, one of the most important companies on the Internet.” Now that the deal drama is over, we’ll get to find out. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Confirmed: Skype Founders Settle With eBay And Others, Get 14% Stake In Skype, Not 10% Posted: 06 Nov 2009 06:01 AM PST
Index Ventures, a historical investor in Skype, is not going to be part of that buying party after all, and its partner Mike Volpi is definitely out of the picture (no surprises there). Marc Andreessen, partner of Andreessen Horowitz, tells us: “Everything is settled—all lawsuits, all IP. The Joltid IP is now owned by Skype. The company is free and clear to execute to its full potential.” The original Skype founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, are now back in the game. The Scandinavian businessmen are getting 14 percent of Skype back for rights to the Global Index P2P technology their company Joltid controls (which is key to the Skype software) – and not 10% like previously reported by other media. In addition, Friis and Zennström gain representation on the board of the new entity. The two men are also putting in a ’significant amount of capital’ of their own in exchange for the stake in the new company, presumably through their Atomico Ventures fund. Marc Andreessen, General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz, tells us: “Everything is settled—all lawsuits, all IP. The Joltid IP is now owned by Skype. The company is free and clear to execute to its full potential.” Update: Andreessen shares more of his thoughts on the deal, saying Skype is one of the most important companies on the Internet. GigaOM first reported that a settlement might have been in the works earlier this month, a report that was later echoed by the NY Times. Thus ends the legal kerfuffle surrounding eBay’s sale of Skype to the investor consortium (news we broke last August), which it acquired back in September 2005 for $2.6 billion (written down to $1.2 billion in 2007). Friis and Zennström had accused eBay of breaking a licensing deal and sued the investor group last September, claiming damages were growing by $75 million a day. The newly structured buyout group is now on track to buy approximately 56% of Skype, with eBay continuing to own 30% and the original founders 14%, in a deal valuing Skype at $2.75 billion. EBay is expected to receive approximately $1.9 billion in cash upon the completion of the sale and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million. The deal is still expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2009. Withdrawing party Index Ventures released the following statement:
Meanwhile, the two ruthless European entrepreneurs who founded Skype walk away with a renewed stake, seats on the company’s board and the smile of victory on their faces. (Top image via E24) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Fever Pitch: It’s Droid Day, Enjoy The Moment. Posted: 06 Nov 2009 03:54 AM PST
Launch day of a new cool gadget is the closest thing to being a kid again on Christmas day (or whatever your winter solstice holiday of choice). You’ve anticipated the day. You’ve called in sick to work. And you are standing out in the freezing cold at 7 in the morning, hoping your place in line assures you a device before the carefully-planned sell out occurs. You’ve worked yourself into…a Fever Pitch. I’ve always been let down with the real world gadget after that high of anticipation. But that’s ok. It’s part of the cycle of tech. Today is Droid day. In just a few hours Verizon stores will open and the first customers will get their hands on their very own Droid. And I promise you, if you are one of the people waiting in line, you will have a much lower than average amount of letdown. That’s because, in my humble opinion, the Droid is the coolest mobile phone to exist to date. It is as close as we’ve come to the Platonic ideal of a smartphone. Its very existence ensures that the next iPhone will be even better than it otherwise would have been. Competition is good.
This post is about love of technology. I’ve had one of the devices, a free loaner that I wasn’t ashamed to beg for, for a week now. I’ve assigned it to my Google Voice account and have used it and only it since it arrived. I have placed it in the car doc and have used Google Navigator to get around, shunning my expensive but suddenly dated in-car navigation system. I talk to my Droid. And it talks back to me, guiding me to my destination. I have installed a dozen apps on my Droid, and all run smoothly in the background. Skype, Yammer, Twitdroid and Google Voice all let me know when something is happening that I need to be aware of. There is no lag when I open these apps. Even when most of them are running at once.
I make calls from my home via the robust Verizon network, something I had to forgo in my AT&T/iPhone days. My voicemails are transcribed automatically by Google Voice and delivered via email, along with my text messages. Not one call has been dropped in a week’s use. I view web pages in the gorgeous 3.7″ WVGA (480 x 854 pixels); 16:9 widescreen. And the scrolling speed on web pages is faster than even my desktop computer. Droid is the Alpha phone. And I will love it and only it. Until something better comes along. Happy Droid Day. Let me know what you think of yours. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Bettween Makes Tracking And Sharing Twitter Conversations A Breeze Posted: 06 Nov 2009 03:17 AM PST
But Twitter has never been an ideal two-way conversation tool. It’s hard to keep track of back-and-forth communication between users, particularly when you’re not actually part of the discussion but still interested to know what’s being Like most Twitter-related web apps, the tool is simple and crisp. You enter the usernames of two Twitter users and you get an overview of what they’ve conversed about on a single page, with an indication of when the tweets were published and who replied to whom. And because it comes with a dedicated URL à la bettween.com/arrington/craignewmark, you can easily share conversations between two users with others as well. I’m left wondering if it would be possible (and/or desirable) to tweak the tool so it could track conversations between more than two users. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: “I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues” Posted: 06 Nov 2009 12:02 AM PST
But what he didn’t say in that blog post is that Zynga has been scamming users from the beginning quite intentionally as part of their revenue model. Rather, he pointed much of the blame at middlemen offer companies: “We need to be more aggressive and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring them to filter and police offers prior to posting on their networks.” Last spring, though, he gave a much clearer explanation to an audience at a Startup@Berkeley mixer, admitting that scamming users was part of Zynga’s business model from the start. And it was all caught on video. I think everyone sort of knew that this was exactly Zynga’s gameplan. But to hear it said so directly is just shocking. The full 30ish minute video is here. We’ve taken the relevant section of the video, roughly starting at around the 10:40 mark, and embed it below. From the video:
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| ScamVille: New Offerpal CEO Admits Mistakes, Makes Bold Promises Posted: 05 Nov 2009 10:52 PM PST
Garrick, who has been the CEO of Offerpal for less than 48 hours, is already taking a polar opposite approach to his predecessor. He left a lengthy comment, reprinted below, on a post earlier today about Facebook’s policy and enforcement changes around application offers. The full comment is below. But he doesn’t beat around the bush. Garrick admits that Offerpal made mistakes – “I have quickly concluded that regrettably, Offerpal has been guilty of distributing offers of questionable integrity from some of our many advertisers.” And he says that recent communications with partners stating that Offerpal was in compliance with Facebook rules were innacurate – “…we've also made some erroneous communications to partners and developers about the state of our compliance. In particular, we recently sent a letter to our Facebook developers which assured them that we were completely in compliance with Facebook standards, when in fact we were not.” Garrick also makes a series of promises in the comment, including “any offers we distribute meet stringent standards of integrity and quality, as specified by our partners, credible industry experts, and good old common sense” and “we will do everything we can within reason to lead the industry and set the example in these efforts.” Garrick is very much taking the Mark Pincus approach to dealing with this situation. He’s admitting mistakes and he’s promising his company will do better. Compare his words to Shukla’s a week ago. It’s night and day. Offerpal Today:I am the new CEO of Offerpal (as of yesterday) and although I've only got 48 hours under my belt, and have entered this industry in the midst of a recent firestorm of controversy, I thought it was time to share some of my thoughts and plans. Direct marketing, in particular lead-gen, has always been full of questionable, misleading, and outright fraudulent marketers and offers. We all get these daily via snail mail, email, phone, and late-night TV. Unfortunately, this is the nature of the Direct Marketing beast. Although a distribution channel which carries or distributes such offers does not actually create the offers, I do believe that a channel that wishes to be perceived as credible and of high integrity does indeed have a responsibility to make sure that the offers it distributes are not deceptive or "scammy". Over the last year, the use of offer-based payment systems such as Offerpal has skyrocketed, and it's pretty clear today that the industry has not kept up with its explosive growth in terms of properly policing the offers that are being distributed. I am not going to comment on events leading up to this situation, nor on other players in the industry, but I have quickly concluded that regrettably, Offerpal has been guilty of distributing offers of questionable integrity from some of our many advertisers. The policies we've had up until now have not been thorough enough to prevent such offers from airing, nor has our organization had the proper focus and accountability to ensure quality assurance over the offers we distribute. As a result, we've had a number of offers which were recently taken down by either ourselves or our partners. Although we believe that the majority of our offers were valid and not misleading in any way, we have acted conservatively by taking down the majority of our offers and we are now in the process of letting them back into the system after inspection. However, we've also made some erroneous communications to partners and developers about the state of our compliance. In particular, we recently sent a letter to our Facebook developers which assured them that we were completely in compliance with Facebook standards, when in fact we were not. This was not a deliberate tactic of any kind, it was a mistake that reflected our ineffective checks and controls. But nevertheless, it was an inaccurate claim and for that we take full responsibility, and I apologize to Facebook and to their user community. The good news in all this is that it has brought to light some very important issues for our collective industry which need to be addressed immediately. For our part, we will be doing the following: 1. It will be a fundamental part of the Offerpal culture that any offers we distribute meet stringent standards of integrity and quality, as specified by our partners, credible industry experts, and good old common sense. 2. We will individually inspect and approve every single individual offer before it is allowed to go into distribution on our system. 3. We will customize our offer profiles to meet the needs and standards of each partner and will not attempt to have a "one size fits all" approach. 4. We will do everything we can within reason to lead the industry and set the example in these efforts. Over the coming weeks you will hear much more from us on this issue, but more importantly you will see action and results. I will remain personally involved in this initiative and consider it one of my highest priorities in assuming my new role here. Offerpal a week ago:Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Brizzly Marries Groups And Twitter Lists Posted: 05 Nov 2009 10:01 PM PST When it was first unveiled at our Realtime Crunchup in July, easily one of the best features of the web-based Twitter client Brizzly was Groups. Basically, it allowed you to sort your Twitter followers into subsections, to make specific groups of users easier to follow. Of course, with Twitter’s new Lists functionality, you can basically do the same thing. So Brizzly is screwed right? Nope. First of all, Brizzly has decided to make Groups play nicely with Lists — very nicely. Starting tonight, Brizzly is importing all of the Lists that its users have made on Twitter and it will begin showing them within Brizzly. But that’s not all: It’s also going the other way. Any Group that you made in Brizzly will be converted to a Twitter List. To be clear: A private Twitter List. So no, no one will be able to see that you put them in the “Loser” Group on Brizzly. And of course, Brizzly does much more beyond Groups. Notably, it recently added Facebook support. That alone is worth the price of admission right there. But Brizzly also offers Direct Messaging capabilities that are superior to twitter.com. And it allows you to upload photos to its servers. And it displays pictures and video inline, in your tweet stream. So Brizzly should be just fine even with Twitter’s Lists now rolled out to everyone. Brizzly expects the Groups to Lists transition to be complete by tomorrow night, co-founder Jason Shellen tells us. Here are the other main features he laid out in an email:
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| ZooLoo Gets A Facelift With Revamped Homepage, Navigation, And Widgets Posted: 05 Nov 2009 09:45 PM PST Back in July we took a look at ZooLoo, a service that looks to help users build their own websites (complete with vanity URLs) where they can manage their entire social network experience from one place — when it launched we described as an iGoogle meets Facebook, in that it’s a single hub that lets you interact with your Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace accounts. Since then the site has seen some significant improvements, including an overhauled UI that makes the site both nicer on the eyes and easier to use. The biggest changes to the service is its revamped, streamlined navigation system. The old icons, which you can see in this screenshot have been replaced by a series of dropdown menus that are cleaner and easier to use. Another big addition is a home page, which aggregates your feeds from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and brings them together in a single feed. At the top of the feed is a box where you can enter a status message, which then you can then syndicate to each of the services you’ve connected to ZooLoo. The service has also updated its website creator, which allows you to tweak your page as you’d like. The new version includes added support for CSS and HTML tweaking. Other additions since the July launch include support for Facebook Connect, and widgets that you can add to your ZooLoo dashboard (including PayPal, Google Voice, and LinkedIn). Looking forward, the service has an iPhone app in the works that it expects to release in the next few weeks. The company describes it as “ZooLoo Home Page Plus” for the iPhone — basically a feed of your social network activity (which you can use to update across multiple services), as well as links to your photos, friends, and messages.
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| Smartphone Showdown: iPhone 3GS vs. Motorola Droid Round 2 Posted: 05 Nov 2009 08:49 PM PST
My inbox is in pain. Almost immediately after I hit the publish button on last week’s iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid Smartphone Showdown, a torrential blast of comments and questions has been barraging just about every communication inlet I’ve got. Phone calls. Twitter DMs. Lots, and lots, and lots of emails. Across the board, it all seems to indicate one thing: people want more. We hear you. There are a number of worthwhile topics I simply didn’t get a chance to touch on, and a few observations I’ve made since that are worth mentioning. For those, may we present: Round 2. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Ning Reaches 37 Million Users, Launches Developer Appathon Posted: 05 Nov 2009 08:35 PM PST Tonight at a Ning’s developer event in Palo Alto, newly appointed COO Jason Rosenthal announced that Ning has reached 37 million registered users, as well as 1.6 million Ning networks created. The company also says that it grows another million users every couple weeks. Out of the 1.6 million Ning networks, 20% of the active networks are running at least one Ning application — reaching more then 9 million people. According to Ning, on average, each network installs more then two Ning applications. Since the Ning application directory launched, there have been over 100 applications created and submitted. Ning has also brought partners TokBox and Box.net on stage as well, to talk about how they have used the developer platform to integrate their products into Ning. Chief Product Officer Diego Doval also talked about some of the future plans of Ning, including analytics for Ning apps, as well as launching a payment service so that developers can sell their applications to users. Ning has also launched the Ning Appathon contest, to encourage developers to build on the newly launched Ning Developer platform. The best original application will win $5,000. Prizes for second and third place can be found on the Appathon site. Juding the Appathon competition are Marc Andreessen, Chris Anderson and Robert Scoble. The competiton ends on November 12, at 10pm PST. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Ok, Now I Totally Get Aardvark Posted: 05 Nov 2009 07:38 PM PST This is, apparently, not a fake exchange. A young journalist comes to Aardvark user Ryan Asava for help. Things go downhill from there. If you never quite understood the service, you’ll get it now. Our previous coverage of the company is here. Thanks Marshall. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| US Cyworld Will No Longer Be Able To Service Posted: 05 Nov 2009 06:30 PM PST
Cyworld, the massive Korean based virtual world, is shutting down its U.S. site, which draws all of 112,000 monthly visitors according to Comscore. And while the shutdown is sort of sad, the message they sent to users more than makes up for it. The translation is bad. Not Matrix DVD cover in Korean bad, but bad. Yes, I know Americans and others butcher other languages in reverse all the time. But that doesn’t mean I can’t laugh a little at this, too. CyWorld first launched in the U.S. in 2006, and we estimate that they are the twelfth most valuable social network in the world overall. Email is below. Thanks for the tip, David. Subject: Cyworld shuts down US cyworld service Due to Cyworld shuts down US service, US Cyworld will no longer be able to service. Refunds and data backup service is in progress, using the acorn will no longer be able to purchase for miniroom items, skins, etc. @ Schedule for closing US Cyworld service * Shop service will be unavailable since Nov 03, 2009 Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| Facebook To Increase Enforcement Of Anti-Scam Rules Posted: 05 Nov 2009 05:38 PM PST
Facebook says that deceptive ads are a widespread problem on the Web (which is true), and they say they’ve been fighting these scams for some time (which is also true, albeit a little slowly sometimes). They point to their updated policies on third party ads on the Facebook platform from July – which are aggresively pro-user but have rarely been enforced. They also note that they have disabled two ad networks since then, and are disabling two more now. In my talks with Facebook earlier this week they took the position that they’ve been aggresively protecting users, and they’re taking the same tone in this blog post. They say that with so many ads and so many apps its impossible to monitor the entire platform effectively. My answer was that it took me about 10 seconds to find really scammy ads on FarmVille, the most popular social game on Facebook with 63+ million monthly users. If they just start with the big guys, a lot of the problem will go away. In our original post we showed a financial connection between these ads and Facebook. Apps take the money from the ads and then aggressively buy ads on Facebook, effectively giving them a cut. So slow enforcement against even the top apps when they are so blatantly violating the rules is both unacceptable and suspicious. Facebook says they are building out teams and technologies to address the problem. We’ve witnessed a remarkable effort this week by industry players to clean up the ecosystem, even while Facebook has been silent on the issue. MySpace, Zynga and RockYou all took steps to eliminate scams. Which is remarkable when you think about it. Anyone who doesn’t engage in scammy behavior right now is at a monetization disadvantage. There are real similarities between this issue and steroid use in baseball. As long as the MLB didn’t really enforce steroid use among players, it was a competitive necessity to take the drugs, and so many more players took them than otherwise would. What we saw this week was the equivalent of the MLB staying silent while a group of the most popular players admitted to steroid use and promised to stop using it from now on. If Facebook is serious about stopping app offer scams, it will all be a lot easier in the future for developers to abstain. Hopefully, this is the start of a much cleaner Facebook. But if they continue with their arguments that Facebook is no dirtier than the rest of the Internet, and resist outside pressure to clean up their community, we could quickly be back where we were just a week ago. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| New Twitter Retweets Take A Little Peek Around Posted: 05 Nov 2009 05:36 PM PST Twitter has just activated the retweet button a a small number of accounts, according to a blog post. The new retweet functionality was originally announced back in August. Below, you’ll find a picture of what it was slated to look like when it was previewed back in September. (We haven’t actually seen this latest implementation yet, but feel free to send us screen shots if you are one of the lucky ones who has the retweet button activated.) As we’ve written in the past, Twitter has been tweaking this new functionality for a while, making a pretty significant change to the API prior to launch. Previously, Twitter was requiring third party developers to check whether a tweet has already come in or not in any users' stream to see if they should collapse it under the new retweet structure. Now, Twitter has built its own mechanism to check for those duplicate tweets into the API. This will ensure that only the first tweet is shown and the retweets go under it automatically. We’ve already previewed how the new retweets will look in one third-party app, the as-yet-unreleased Tweetie 2.1. This implementation looks pretty nice, and is not as cluttered as the one previewed by Twitter itself. Previously, it was also stated that the retweet function will only gather up to 100 retweets, which is limiting. Here’s the text from Twitter’s post today:
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| Twitter Starts Curating Trending Topic Tweets Posted: 05 Nov 2009 04:44 PM PST
In a post on its blog, Twitter notes that the “noisiness of the conversation” has led Trends to be less interesting. So beginning today they’re going to be experimenting with ways to surface more relevant tweets in this area. While they don’t come out and say it, the implication here seems pretty clear: They’ll be in some way curating the topics and the tweets. It’s not clear if this will be algorithmic or manual yet. Actually, Twitter has kind of been doing this with topics for a while. When a spammy topic gets into Trends, Twitter quite often will remove it. But this sentence, “Specifically, we’re working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful,” seems to suggest that it will be curating tweets within trending topics as well. And that it may even in some way rank tweets to show more relevant ones for the topic at hand. Twitter notes that users may not notice the improvements at first, but soon they will. Their wording is also interesting in that they note that this is about “unearthing more value in search.” Again, that would seem to suggest that Twitter is thinking about the bigger picture of how to rank tweets based on relevancy (not just in Trending Topics). That could be by user authority, which has been a sticky issue in the past. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| On-The-Go Mobile Coupons: Almost As Cool As Minority Report. Not Quite As Creepy. Posted: 05 Nov 2009 04:28 PM PST
As you can see in the video below, the idea behind AT&T’s system is that you can walk around a city with a phone in your pocket and get alerted when a nearby retailer has a deal for you. Users of Foursquare and soon Loopt will recognize this concept, but AT&T’s idea is a bit different. By using AT&T’s network as the bridge to be constantly updating your location (assuming, of course, you opt-in to such a feature), these retailers are able to push these coupons to your phone via SMS. Currently, something like Foursquare requires that you “check-in” to a place to see that there is a deal there or nearby. Naturally, this could get very annoying to a consumer if they don’t like the place offering the deal, but customization is the key to this. A user could, for example, say they like Mexican food, and those types of coupons would pop-up when they were in the vicinity. Obviously, a system like this could be very lucrative for retailers and restaurants who want to entice the impulse buy or just increased foot traffic in stores. It could also be lucrative for AT&T if they were to strike deal with these retailers to serve these up — or even just charge SMS fees. This is just a proof of concept at this point, but you can probably bet something like this is coming soon. And the next logical step after that is the Minority Report system. “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now!” [image: Dreamworks & 20th Century Fox] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Yes, This Is How I Want To Search TV Shows [Video] Posted: 05 Nov 2009 03:56 PM PST
Today in San Francisco, AT&T held a Tech Showcase to show off some of the new innovations they are working on in their labs. One such thing I got a demo of was a way to use your iPhone to search television content simply by using your voice. While you may think something like this is less than ideal, it’s fast and very accurate. Watch below as the demonstration goes from simple to more complex. And, of course, a regular touch-based remote is included as well to select things. By the way, none of this is actually happening on the iPhone or on your actual TV. Instead, your iPhone is connected to AT&T’s service where it does the voice filtering on its end — and it’s still this fast. This project isn’t quite ready for consumer use, but as you can tell, they’re not far off either. I would replace my cable box with something that has this in a second. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| The Realtime Agenda For The Realtime CrunchUp Posted: 05 Nov 2009 01:08 PM PST Over the past few weeks, it’s definitely been crunchtime as we’ve been putting together the panels and demos for our Realtime CrunchUp on November 20 in San Francisco. After much back and forth, and with the help of our Realtime Board, we finally have an agenda we are very excited to present (see below). Get your tickets here. Speakers will include Twitter COO Dick Costolo, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, angel investor Ron Conway, FriendFeed co-founders (and now-Facebook VPs) Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. The CrunchUp will take place at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco and will kick off with a big roundtable discussion and one-on-one interviews, followed by startup demos and panel discussions drilling down into geo streams, media streams, marketing, and venture capital. If there is anything that is capturing the attention and excitement of the technology community right now, it is realtime streams. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and startups galore are all active in the realtime Web and will be at the event. Nearly 40 startups applied to fill ten demo slots for new realtime product launches. But as more of us immerse ourselves in our Twitter and Facebook streams, and Foursquare check-ins, the need to filter out the noise is becoming acute. That will be a big theme, and we’ll hear about different approaches to do that ranging from better user interfaces to better realtime search. We are also seeing the emergence of new types of streams, particularly geo streams that tell everyone where you are at any given moment, and media streams that inject photos, videos, and other content beyond text into the the realtime conversation. The CrunchUp will explore both the technological side of the phenomenon and the business side. These streams represent a new communications layer across the Web, as well as a platform for building products and startups. Come join us to find out where the stream is going next. If you feel like your company can add to the few holes left in the agenda, please contact us at realtime [at] techcrunch [dot] com. Bloggers and journalists can request a press pass by contacting Daniel Brusilovsky. The CrunchUp also provides an amazing sponsorship platform for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Heather Harde or Jeanne Logozo to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities. AGENDA 9:00-9:30 AM From RSS To Realtime: A Conversation With Twitter COO Dick Costolo 9:30 to 11:00 AM Roundtable: Filtering The Stream. Getting Rid of the Noise. 11:00-11:15 AM BREAK 11:15-11:45 AM The Social Enterprise: A Conversation With Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff 11:45-12:30 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow's Killer Apps (Demos) Hot Potato (event streams, launch) 12:30-2:00 PM Lunch 2:00-2:45 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow's Killer Apps (Demos) PlyMedia (new product launch) 2:45-3:30 PM Media Streams: Are These The Ultimate Marketing Vehicles? 3:30 to 3:45 Break 3:45- 4:30 Geo Streams: We Know Where You Are, Right Now 4:30-5:00 Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus 5:00-5:45 PM Where The Realtime Rubber Meets The Road: When Does The Serious Money Come In? A panel of realtime investors and founders will wrap up the day and point to where the industry needs to go next. 6:00 to 7:30 PM Realtime Party Tickets are on sale now. You can still get them for $395. Prices go up to $495 the week before the event. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Browse Before You Buy? Adroll’s RoundTrip Is Targeting You. Posted: 05 Nov 2009 12:47 PM PST
The idea of ad “retargeting” is not at all new. A ton of big brands and advertising platforms use it to try to lure users back to sites using the fact that they know they already visited once. The difference with Adroll’s new RoundTrip product is that they are making the practice accessible to any online advertiser to use. Previously, this type of campaign was reserved for those who were willing to spend a lot of money for this much more highly targeted ad type. With RoundTrip, Adroll is specifically aiming for small and medium sized brands. They’re doing this by not requiring a minimum spend threshold which customers have to pass in order to have access to retargeting ads. This makes sense as Adroll has always been about targeting the so-called “long-tail” brands with its method of rolling up these smaller brands to get to a size that will still attract some bigger advertisers. And this makes sense for a lot of these smaller brands as most of the time people probably aren’t coming to a site to do an impulse buy. Instead, they may simply be checking out a product to decide if they should buy it later. With retargeting, ads can remind users about this product they’ve checked out in the past and may be ready to buy now. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0   |
| Gopher: Content > Presentation Posted: 05 Nov 2009 12:11 PM PST  If you spend any amount of time using the Internet as we know it today, chances are you have suffered some inconvenience from the variety of interpretations of the various "standards" used to create the web. Every web browser renders web pages slightly differently; some Flash content isn't compatible with older versions of Flash (and some versions of Flash aren't supported on some operating systems at all!), etc. If you make your living creating web content, all of those problems may be amplified several times. Doesn't it make you long for a real standard, where content is king, and presentation of said content is the same, regardless of whether you're shopping for shoes or looking for an academic journal? The Gopher protocol, created in the early 1990s, had all that, and it ain't dead yet!   |
| Online Real Estate Broker Redfin Adds More Recent Sales Data And Links To Blogs Posted: 05 Nov 2009 11:40 AM PST  Online real estate broker Redfin is revamping its website to add recent data and photos of recent home sales as well as links to blog discussions of a listing. The Seattle-based startup, which is profitable, represents buyers and sellers in home real estate transactions for far less than the industry rates that take 5%-6% of the sale price of a home and split it between buy and sell brokers. On the buy side they reimburse 50% of the fee they receive back to the buyer. On the sell side they charge a $5,000 – $7,000 flat fee. The normal broker fees on a million dollar house are up to $60,000, so the savings for the consumer can be significant. With the addition of 9.6 million photos for 1.4 million recent property sales, the total amount of data and photos stored by Redfin has increased by 340%, empowering consumers with more information about the homes they are considering buying. With the upgrade, Redfin users can access sales information of properties within 15 minutes of the property's being taken off the market, including the photos used to sell the property, and information about the properties' amenities. Redfin mashes this info up with public records, giving the prospective home buyer greater insight into the history of a property. The new version of Redfin's site now also automatically links web pages about a property to blog posts about that property. For registered users, Redfin shows a link to the blog post with the post's title and a brief summary; for unregistered users, Redfin shows a link to the blog post but doesn't display the title or the summary. And Redfin launched a new version of its iPhone application that includes improved search filters on the year a house was built, lot size and days on market as well as the ability to exclude short sales and properties under contract from search results. The ability to publish recent sales data and to incorporate blog links into the site are the result of a settlement that took place last year between the National Association of Realtors and the Department of Justice, that allows online brokers to publish the same information to the web that a real estate agent can share with his client, which was a huge win for the online real estate industry. Redfin has been a disruptive technology to the real estate industry and has received backlash from the real estate professionals who are made unnecessary by Redfin’s model. The company’s CEO and founder Glenn Kelman told us recently, they’ve had to deal with “threats, stalkings and other disturbing behavior towards their employees and some customers from, apparently, angry real estate professionals.” And as Redfin adds additional information to its site, that real estate agents used to have a hold over, the platform is invading deeper into traditional brokers’ territory. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Are You A Blowhard? Zyxio Wants Your Help With Product Ideas Posted: 05 Nov 2009 10:46 AM PST Zyxio is a Las Vegas based startup that we’ve been tracking for a while now. They’ve developed proprietary technology called SensaWaft that lets people control computers via air flow. As in, you can control a mechanical device, or a mouse pointer on a screen, or whatever, by blowing. How hard you blow, as well as minute differences in direction, are converted to commands. The possible products from the technology are limitless. Combine this with voice recognition for less dangerous in-car computing. Or design applications to help the handicapped. You can get an idea for how the technology works in the video above.
Go to BeAMindBlower and register for more details. Submit your idea in as much or as little detail as you like. Others can register and vote. At the end of November the company will take the top ranked ideas and put them to a final round of voting, which ends on December 13. Five winners will be selected in each of five categories: PC/laptops/netbooks, games/multimedia/entertainment, assistive/multimodal/virtual reality, smartphones/in-vehicle/enterprise and digital music/graphic design. The winners will each be offered paid advisory board positions at Zyxio and asked to spend 10 hours per month for six months working on their projects. They’ll spend some of that time in Las Vegas (all expenses paid, except, I imagine, anything involving illegal substances or sexual activities). They’ll be paid $6,000 for their time, and have the chance to see their ideas become reality. And people have an incentive to vote on ideas, too. Anyone who votes is entered into a sweepstakes. Two Samsung Go netbooks and two Verizon Droid phones will be awarded. We’ll check back in on the contest over the coming weeks to see how things are going. And we’ll likely be interviewing some of the people with interesting ideas. I love stuff like this. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.   |
| Google Open Sources Set Of Closure Tools It Uses To Build Its Own Apps Posted: 05 Nov 2009 10:30 AM PST
The first tool is called the Closure Compiler, which helps developers optimize their JavaScript code by removing extra portions of comments and code. The Compiler also has a sister program called Inspector — a plugin for Firebug that allows developers to view their optimized code in the browser, with all of their original variable names and other data restored (typically optimized code strips variable names and formatting that makes it very difficult to read). Google is also releasing the Compiler as a web app and a RESTful API. Google’s second release is a Library that includes many common functions used for building JavaScript apps. Here’s how Google’s blog post describes it:
Finally, Google is releasing a new set of templates for Java and JavaScript:
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
| Google Has Music Search. Yahoo Responds By Searching YouTube For Music Videos. Posted: 05 Nov 2009 10:15 AM PST  Last week Google launched the Music Onebox — a special new music search product that lets users stream songs in their entirety for free. Today, Yahoo Video is answering by improving its music video search offering. When you search for a song or artists, Yahoo will extract music videos of the most popular songs and albums for that artists or band. It appears that most of the songs are pulled from YouTube, Last.fm and other music sites. So a search for U2 on Yahoo Video will show a list of the band’s albums, such as The Joshua Tree, and the music videos for popular songs, such as "Beautiful Day." When you click on an album, you’ll see the music videos for all of the songs on the album. If you click on an album or song, it will show videos for the album or song in an overlay page. Yahoo also recently made a similar upgrade to its image search, when it rolled out a travel image refiner. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   |
If you are a tech lover, there is nothing quite like the launch day of a much hyped new gadget. Expectations run high. And since those expectations are rarely satisfied once you have the special little device in hand, it’s a moment to savor. In the hours before you own it, that device is perfect in every way. It will make you happier, a better person. There are no bugs, there are only features. It is whatever you want it to be.
Yes, this is an unabashed love letter to the Droid. If you want the dispassionate reviews, 
And when I respond, I can choose between the quick virtual keyboard or the slider real keyboard. And I notice how slim the device is, about the same as the iPhone, even though it has a physical keyboard.
With 
Zynga CEO 
Yesterday Offerpal Media changed CEOs. Cofounder 
Ah, Engrish. There’s a whole world of funny translations out there to laugh at.
Twitter’s Trending Topics area is one of the easiest things to game on the web. Even when trends start out as real items, spammers often latch onto them with bogus tweets hoping to ride the wave and get some people seeing their spammy nonsense. Today, Twitter is acknowledging this.
In the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report (yes, I make some 
Last month, 
With most online services, the idea behind advertising is to get people to come to your site to make some sort of transaction. Most of the time, that doesn’t happen. In fact, even if they click on an ad to come to your site, 98% of the time, those users will leave without buying anything, according to the advertising startup 
The company is busy productizing the technology. But today they’re launching a contest to crowdsource new product ideas. If you have an amazing idea for the technology, you can get paid to help them build a product around it. And if you just want to vote on ideas from others, you can do that too.
Google has just announced that it is open-sourcing a set of tools its own developers use to build some of the company’s most well known products, including Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps.
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