The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Delicious Rolls Out A Few More Appetizing Features
- TechCrunch Europe’s Mobile Meetup, Barcelona 17 Feb, MWC
- Citysearch Unleashes CityGrid, A Massive Local Advertising And Content Network
- The iPad Runs Flash?
- Review: Crush the Castle for iPhone/iPod Touch
- Whitehouse.gov Streamed The State Of The Union Live To 1.3 Million People
- Tagged.com Wins $201,975 In Default Judgment Against Spammer
- Apisphere Raises $4.6 Million For Geolocation Apps
- Video Ringtone Company Vringo Files For $64.3 Million IPO
- Netbiscuits Signs Tasty Deal With UMG For Artist-Branded Mobile Websites
- 3 Million Amazon Kindles Sold, Apparently
- Guest Post: Get Real, Geeks – The iPad Is The Apple For Mom
- The Subplots Of the iPad Blockbuster
- Spotify’s Promises of Profits and a US Launch? Still MIA
- PhoneTag Voice-To-Text Is Only 86 Percent Accurate, But That’s Better Than Google Voice
- 5 Things The iPhone Could Learn From The iPad
- VeriFone’s Square Competitor Hits The App Store. Hands On With The Hardware.
- Benioff On The iPad: “The Most Important Feature Is Its 10-Hour Battery”
- MyYearbook Rolls Out Its Crowdsourced Redesign
- More Bad News For Intelius: Cofounder Charged With Lying About Sex With Stripper
- Video: Obama’s State Of The iPad Address
- Microsoft Reports Strong Quarter, Driven By Windows 7 Demand
- Holy wow! AT&T Admits NYC/San Fran 3G Service Sucked in 2009
- Amazon Fourth Quarter Sales Up 42 Percent, Bezos Says “Millions Of People Own Kindles”
- Two Years After Launch, Howcast Is Streaming 25 Million How-To Videos A Month
| Delicious Rolls Out A Few More Appetizing Features Posted: 29 Jan 2010 08:43 AM PST Social bookmarking service Delicious is kicking the year off with a few enhancements to its service and interface. Delicious, which has made Michael’s favorite products list for the past three years, allows you to store, access and share your bookmarks and links from around the web. The service has updated its bookmark display options in a more compact interface, combining all of the options to th right of the Tagbar. Tag Options has been reshuffled and moved it to the sidebar where the tags are actually listed, which makes sense. Within the bookmark display menu, you can now filter your bookmarks by Only Private or Only Public. You can also indicate whether you want to show the history of who you’ve sent bookmarks to, giving you the ability to hide who you’ve shared your bookmarks with. And you can open your bookmarks in a new browser tab instead of within the same window. Delicious has added a new browsing feature that helps save you from the annoyance of bouncing back and forth from Delicious when viewing more than one bookmark in a row. Via the “Browse these Bookmarks” tab, Delicious will open up a small frame at the top of the page, which will allow you to see a visual snapshot of your bookmarks as you browse through the list. Acquired by Yahoo in 2005, Delicious was one of the pioneers of social bookmarking. The site recently became a little more Twitter-centric, with more emphasis on the realtime web. Unfortunately, Delicious’ founder, Joshua Schachter (who left Yahoo last year, to go work for Google), wasn’t such a big fan of the Twitterification of the service. Schacter also revealedhis regrets about selling the startup to Yahoo.
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| TechCrunch Europe’s Mobile Meetup, Barcelona 17 Feb, MWC Posted: 29 Jan 2010 08:40 AM PST
And TechCrunch Europe will be returning to Barcelona on Feb 17 for yet another interactive and live-video-streamed session. We’ll be featuring some of the most innovative and interesting mobile startups and investors in Europe. You can get your tickets to the event here.
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| Citysearch Unleashes CityGrid, A Massive Local Advertising And Content Network Posted: 29 Jan 2010 07:53 AM PST The momentum around local online advertising is growing, especially with the expansion of the Web to mobile devices and flowering of Geo-mobile apps which need a way to make money. Today, Citysearch is throwing its hat into the local advertising ring with teh launch of CityGrid, a set of APIs which makes all of Citysearch’s local listings content and advertising available to other Websites and mobile apps. The APIs include more than 15 million local business listings, 3 million user reviews, and access to 500,000 local advertisers looking to reach people near their places of business. I sat down with Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti at IAC headquarters in Manhattan to get an overview of CityGrid (watch the video interview above). Citysearch itself is a 12-year-old site which Herratti has been updating, but it is not really growing much anymore and it is feeling considerable competitive pressure from Yelp and, even more so, from Google Local. To counter that pressure, Citysearch already distributes its local listings content to about 100 sites and mobile apps with a collective reach of 100 million people (about a quarter of that is Citysearch.com). “I thought what if I took all the tools that we put together to build Citysearch and put it on a platter, an API and web services layer,” says Herratti. Specifically, he is referring to all the descriptions of local businesses, the reviews, photos, videos, hours of operation, offers, menus, metered phone numbers, merchant messages, and more. “What if I open that up to publishers big and small?” he asks. “I let them take it and enhance their experience, and get more pageviews.” You can see elements from Citysearch listings already scattered throughout the Web. A New York City bar like The Ainsworth, for instance, will have a CitySearch page, but the same summary description and reviews will show up in a Bing search, on Local.com (with a Citysearch photo), Urbanspoon, Yellowpages.com, MerchantCircle, and so on. Other existing partners include Mapquest and mobile apps like Loopt and Buzzd. Tons of Websites and mobile apps would love to have access to this database of content to build out their own sites and apps, and now they can via CityGrid. But much of this content is also advertising. Citysearch operates on a pay-per-action model. Local merchants can sign up to get sponsored spots in search and elsewhere, and they pay for things like every time someone clicks on their menu, a video, their own merchant description, or makes a phone call for a reservation. They are paying for leads, and the same actions trigger payments on partner sites as well. But in that case, Citysearch is splitting the ad revenue with the publisher. Many of the ads come from other local advertising sites as well, such as Superpages, Yodel, Spafinder, and limos.com. In that case each advertising dollar is split three ways. But ever since Citysearch opened up to those 100 partners, it went from 150,000 paid listings on its own site to 500,000 across its network. “My goal is to get to one million,” says Herratti. Now that it is an open API, he might just reach that goal. Developer who sign up for the API can create local directories on a self-serve basis and will start getting paid once they meet a minimum threshold of ad impressions or actions. While Yelp’s rise is certainly something to worry about, CitySearch’s biggest competitor is actually Google, which is driving a lot of local search to its own Local Pages and has been making a big push lately to sign up local merchants. Herratti positions CityGrid as a way fro local advertisers to reach consumers everywhere else. There is search marketing on Google and then there is the rest of the Web and mobile apps. Ironically, if you look up the Ainsworth on Google Local, the pictures and some of the reviews are also from Citysearch, but Google isn’t a paying partner (the content is made available through an older deal). It makes money off the search ads on the side.
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| Posted: 29 Jan 2010 07:29 AM PST  Listen: cry me a river about Flash and multi-tasking. If Apple wants to keep multi-tasking for their own apps in an effort to prevent folks from making their OS run like Windows Mobile on a good day, be my guest. Push servers work great for always-connected applications. As for Flash, I think it's all political. Anyway, rant over. Those little minxes at 9to5mac found Flash running in Safari on the iPad. If you watch the video after the jump, you notice that when they browse the NYT you can see the Dining section pop up. The Dining section is usually represented by video in a Flash box.
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| Review: Crush the Castle for iPhone/iPod Touch Posted: 29 Jan 2010 07:27 AM PST  Every so often you find a game so addicting that you can't stop playing it. I'm that way with two games on the iPhone: Fieldrunners and Civ Revolution. Close runners up are iShoot (there are only so many times you can launch nukes) and now Crush the Castle. Designed by Armor Games, CtC was originally a Flash game ported to the iPhone. To play you load up a trebuchet with weapons (rocks, firebombs, whatever else) by tapping once. You tap again launch and then tap to release at some point in the arc. The items swing out into space and land at some point on a castle that is essentially made of beams. The beams react in a naturalistic way meaning they move as if they were real beams and you then crush little people underneath them. Rinse. Repeat.
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| Whitehouse.gov Streamed The State Of The Union Live To 1.3 Million People Posted: 29 Jan 2010 06:47 AM PST
The White House had a live stream of the speech that was embeddable on blogs or websites. Nearly 1.3 million people tuned into the WhiteHouse.gov’s live video feed of the speech, which is a ten-fold increase in traffic over the most popular live-streamed event. Unfortunately, the White House doesn’t have any concrete statistics on the number of unique streams of the speech from the new iPhone App, but says that nearly a terabyte of data was served to iPhones with the application during the event. After the speech, over 50,000 people engaged in a live chat on Facebook. It was just the latest in our Open for Questions series where you can ask questions directly to the officials who work here at the White House. And the President will be holding a live video event next week on CitizenTube to answer questions that people submitted following this week’s address. So far, over 40,000 people have submitted 472,000 votes and 9,926 questions. On the TV side of things, the President’s speech drew 48 million viewers. Of course, the live stream of the President’s inauguration drew a much greater audience, with 3.8 million viewers on the Ustream live feed. MSNBC reported over 18 million streams and CNN delivered over 25 million streams for the inauguration.
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| Tagged.com Wins $201,975 In Default Judgment Against Spammer Posted: 29 Jan 2010 06:31 AM PST
In a ruling issued earlier this week, a U.S. District Court Judge in the northern district of California found Vogeler guilty of sending messages to 6,079 Tagged users and assessed damages of $25 per violation for a total of $151,975. Court also ordered Vogeler to pay Tagged $50,000 in attorneys’ fees and to cease sending commercial emails through Tagged.com. More information is expected to be shared on the Tagged blog soon. Tagged, which has raised close to $14 million in venture capital to date, claims over 80 million registered users worldwide. Ironically, the social networking company has itself been the subject of numerous customer complaints for sending deceptive bulk mail since its inception in 2004, and is regarded as a phishing and spamming site by some consumer anti-fraud advocates. In November 2009, Tagged settled a court case with Texas and the New York Attorney General over its practices, coughing up $750,000 in penalties. As part of the settlement, Tagged has adopted privacy reforms and altered its invitation processes. Tagged co-founder and CEO Greg Tseng was previously co-founder and CEO of Internet startup incubator Jumpstart Technologies, which in March 2006 was fined $900,000 for alleged violations of the CAN-SPAM Act, then the largest ever penalty for illegal spam. The irony is strong with this one.
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| Apisphere Raises $4.6 Million For Geolocation Apps Posted: 29 Jan 2010 06:03 AM PST Apisphere, a startup that delivers location-aware technologies to mobile applications, has raised $4.6 million in funding according to an SEC filing. Apisphere creates mobile applications that use location-aware technologies to provide customized information to users. For example, the startup created Apisphere for Outlook, a location aware plug-in for Microsoft's Outlook that lets users to send and receive automatic messages on their mobile devices or GPS-enabled laptops based on their Outlook calendar and location. So when a meeting is scheduled in Outlook, the plug-in will provide relevant location-based information around the event including mapping, real-time traffic updates and geo-triggered voice and text messages for reminders on the go. Apisphere has also created a plug-in for Salesforce’s CRM that allows users to receive contextually relevant information to send sales reps the most relevant, location-based information for the sales leads. So a sales rep could get client-specific information on the go when meeting a particular client.
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| Video Ringtone Company Vringo Files For $64.3 Million IPO Posted: 29 Jan 2010 05:24 AM PST
The company plans to trade on NASDAQ, with Maxim Group serving as lead underwriter. Vringo shareholders include Warburg Pincus, who invested $12 million for a 31.9% ownership stake in 2007, and undisclosed private investors. Vringo operates an online video ring tone sharing community, providing a hosted and client-server-based solution, which allows users to find, choose, create, and share video ringtones. The company provides mobile phone video sharing, and video ringtones and video download solutions. Its content includes licensed material from televisions, movies, and music videos, as well as user generated clips. Vringo says its application, which is available for Android in beta, is compatible with more than 300 handsets. According to the filing, Vringo’s product will soon no longer be offered for free to consumers. The company says it will move to a paid service model together with mobile carriers and other partners around the world. The initial revenue model for the service offered through the carriers will generally be a subscription-based model where users pay a monthly fee for access to the service and additional fees for premium content. The company lacks any revenue to speak of—it only booked $36,000 in first nine months of 2009 and $0 in 2008. The company has only a history of losses, reporting an operating loss of $3.5 million and a net loss of $4 million the first nine months of 2009. The company says it expects to generate more net losses and negative cash flow ‘for the foreseeable future’. Future income will depend greatly on Vringo’s capability of signing up more carriers, handset makers and mobile services providers, historically deals that take a lot of time and resources to get sealed and implemented. Vringo was founded in January 2006 and is based in New York. We’ve tracked about $17.3 million worth of investments in the company in CrunchBase. Vringo’s chief executive is Jonathan Medved, one of Israel's leading serial entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Medved founded Israel Seed Partners in 1995 in his garage and co-managed the fund until January 2006. Israel Seed has $262M under management in four funds and has been an investor in some 60 Israeli companies. Exits include: Shopping.com (acquired by Ebay), Compugen (Nasdaq: CGEN), Answers.com (Nasdaq: ANSW) and Business Layers (acquired by CA). You can watch a MarketWatch interview with Medved here. (Via Wall Street Journal)
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| Netbiscuits Signs Tasty Deal With UMG For Artist-Branded Mobile Websites Posted: 29 Jan 2010 04:13 AM PST
Netbiscuits serves the mobile Internet programs for brands like Yahoo, MTV, and eBay, and well known digital agencies such as Razorfish, Isobar, and ad networks like Google-owned AdMob. To give you an idea of its size: globally, Netbiscuits claims to deliver more than 1.5 billion mobile page impressions on a monthly basis. This morning, the decade-old company announced that it has partnered with Universal Music Group to help the music company expand its line-up of direct-to-consumer mobile content and services, after a successful test run centered around a mobile website for Bon Jovi in November 2009. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Netbiscuits will essentially be aiding UMG in setting up and operating artist-branded mobile websites, which will give fans the ability to interact with other fans and to make purchases directly from their handsets. Based on the mobile websites, Netbiscuits also enables UMG to set up hybrid apps for several major platforms, including the iPhone, Android, and Windows Mobile devices. UMG also plans to utilize the text messaging service that comes integrated within the Netbiscuits platform, providing music fans with SMS alerts whenever their favorite artists are in town.
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| 3 Million Amazon Kindles Sold, Apparently Posted: 29 Jan 2010 12:23 AM PST
We’ve checked with our sources, who have been amazingly accurate on the number of Kindle’s sold over the last couple of years. The total number of all types of Kindles out there in users hands hit 3 million sometime in December, says a source close to Amazon. And that was before the new model with worldwide data hit. And before Amazon started offering free Kindles to select long-time customers. The Kindle now has real competition from the Barnes & Noble Nook and, more so, from the Apple iPad. But so far at least Amazon has had amazing success with their device. Which is even more extraordinary since the only place you can buy the Kindle is Amazon.
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| Guest Post: Get Real, Geeks – The iPad Is The Apple For Mom Posted: 29 Jan 2010 12:20 AM PST
To much of the geek-sphere, the iPad is somewhat of a disappointment. It's underwhelming. I think part of the reason for this is, as usual, that the first round of people interpreting the meaning and purpose of the iPad are all geeks – developers, designers, and assorted Macheads who already own one or two macs at least, and an iphone. But the vast majority of the world is still using Windows PCs. And for them, an iPad may be exactly what they've been waiting for. Let me elaborate on this…
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| The Subplots Of the iPad Blockbuster Posted: 28 Jan 2010 11:54 PM PST
The A4 While only a few people really picked up on it, in my mind, the biggest news yesterday was not about the iPad itself, but rather about what powers it. Apple has created a new processor, the A4, a customized ARM A9 processor. Never mind that it appears to match the specs of the Snapdragon (the chip inside the Nexus One), the key point is that Apple is now in control of their processors. Is there really any doubt that these Apple-designed chips will end up in the next iterations of the iPhone from here on out? One of the things that makes Apple well, Apple, is the tight integration they weave between their hardware and software. That’s because, for the most part, they’re absolutely in charge of both unlike many other companies that do either one or the other. But for chips, Apple has still had to rely on outside parties to provide those. And in most cases, they’re the same chips that everyone else is using — Intel (in the Macs) or Samsung-built ARM chips (in the iPhone). There’s a reason Steve Jobs and Apple VP of Hardware Engineering, Bob Mansfield, were touting these new chips and their built-in GPU and power management systems yesterday during the keynote. With the A4, Apple really is in charge of the whole system. And when you consider a key quote from Jobs yesterday, “Apple is a mobile devices company,” it’s not hard to imagine that Apple hopes to create its own chips for all of its products one day — including the Macs. The 2008 acquisition of P.A. Semi has allowed them to do this. And just two years later, they’re clearly taking advantage of it. This was the big revelation yesterday. iPhone OS While it was somewhat surprising that the iPad runs on the iPhone OS rather than a separate (but similar) derivative, even more surprising may be that Apple announced the launch of the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK specifically for developers to get to work on making apps for the iPad. On one hand, it now makes complete sense why we haven’t seen an iPhone OS update in over three months — Apple was holding it back for the iPad launch. But on the other, why is iPhone OS 3.2 iPad-only right now? Wouldn’t you think a major product like the iPad would be worthy of an update to iPhone OS 4.0? Well, I have heard from a couple of sources that iPhone OS 4.0 is definitely coming along and soon. Usually, Apple shows off major iPhone SDK iterations in March so developers have some time to get used to the changes before the new OS rolls out alongside new iPhone hardware in the June or July timeframe. That would seem to be the case again. Since Apple wants to ship the first iPads in 60 days (the Wi-Fi version), iPhone OS 4.0 was likely out of the question. But I’d bet it will still be unveiled sometime in the next few months. And it seems likely that it will ship this summer for both the a new iPhone and the iPad. And with it, we could also see something that a lot of people were disappointed was missing from the iPad launch: the ability to run multiple applications at once. Since last summer, when I heard that Apple was definitely thinking about the problem, all I’ve heard is vague references to it being a priority to figure out. Now, with this new A4 processor (which again, I’d be shocked if we don’t see in the next iPhone), computing power clearly isn’t an issue. More importantly, power consumption shouldn’t be as big of an issue anymore either. Apple claims you’ll be able to get 10 hours of use from the iPad (on Wi-Fi) — and that’s with a huge screen sucking up much of the power. Just imagine what they think they can squeeze out of an iPhone with this chip (though yes, a much smaller battery).
He also demoed full YouTube integration on the device — including YouTube in HD. Google and Apple are definitely growing apart as they continue to compete, but with the iPad, at least for now, they seem cool. There Will Be Apps While the focus of the iPad event in terms of apps seemed to be on iPhone apps that would work on the iPad, it’s important to remember that developers are going to start developing apps specifically for the iPad. A few showed off their apps ported to the iPad for the event, but developers will also be able to create apps just for the iPad. This will be more important than a lot of people realize right now. Jobs’ Off-The-Glass Pass One other thing that struck me as odd during the keynote yesterday was the point where Jobs pointed out the price analysts had predicted for the iPad. Normally, Apple doesn’t do things like this. In basketball, from time to time when players decide they want to showboat, they throw the ball against the backboard to pass it to themselves so they can score. Jobs’ move yesterday, in my eyes, was largely the same thing. As I laid out a few weeks ago, it seems pretty likely that it was Apple that leaked much of the information to The Wall Street Journal about the tablet device prior to its launch — including the bogus $1,000 price from “analysts.” Later, a former Apple employee corroborated this. Why would they do this? It’s simple. As I said at the time, if they plant the idea in peoples’ minds that a product will be $1,000, then release it for significantly cheaper, it’s a huge win for Apple. So when Jobs announced the entry-level iPad would be $499 yesterday, it was an absolute home run. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a masterstroke of manipulating the media, but it’s still a showboating move.
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| Spotify’s Promises of Profits and a US Launch? Still MIA Posted: 28 Jan 2010 11:03 PM PST
StrategyEye reports that less than 4% of users of Spotify—the gorgeous online music app with a troubled business model—are paying subscribers. StrategyEye quotes Universal Music International digital VP Rob Wells who says the company needs 10% to 12% of its users to subscribe to be a sustainable business. It's only at the 10%-12% threshold that Spotify is able to ink revenue share deals with labels, until then, it has to pay for music by the stream, driving its costs up substantially. StrategyEye further cites Wells saying Spotify has those numbers in Sweden, Norway, Finland and France, but not larger markets like the UK and Spain. And the only thing more far-fetched than Spotify's claims last summer that it would be profitable by the end of the 2009 and "definitely" be in the U.S. by early 2010 is the idea that paid-subscriber rates would be higher in the U.S. than the rest of the world. Americans don't like to pay for things online. As we wrote in our August article about Spotify, even the giants of the Web struggle with this. Netflix only has 10 million subscriptions and Match.com has less than 1 million. Hell, US Web audiences don't even like free services that make money through intrusive advertising. (Yes, that's an invitation to complain about our new interstitial advertising format in the comments.) Unlike consumer Web properties like Twitter and Facebook that can build first and monetize later, online music is a graveyard full of companies sucked dry by the labels and left for dead. Pandora is one of the few to make it and that took $56 million in venture funding, a huge user base, years of employees not taking salaries and a user revolt so extreme it broke fax machines on Capitol Hill. As a result, Spotify is going back to its invite-only model to throttle back widespread free usage in money losing markets like the UK. Meanwhile, labels are pushing for the product to be subscription only in the US. According to Mike, Google was at one point so hungry for Spotify on Android that it was willing to subsidize those per-user fees. That deal has apparently gone cold for now, which isn't a shock to European VCs I've spoken with who've dealt with the startup in the past. Spotify is known for naming outrageously high valuations and not budging until it gets what it wants. That's an odd tact for a company in such a brutal market to take. While it makes sense that Google would be drooling over the application, why not sit back, let Spotify's funding dry up and then just buy it on the cheap? At the very least, Spotify will have to raise more money to launch in the US without a Google-like deal, and many local venture capitalists I've talked to echo what European investors who passed on the deal told us last August: There are just too many leaps of faith for this company at such a nosebleed valuation. Of course, the Valley being the land of too much venture capital, if worst comes to worst someone will fund it at some price—it just may not be the deal Spotify wants. Look, I love the service, I love that the founders believe in it enough to invest their own money and I love that the company is ballsy enough to think it can succeed where hundreds of music startups have failed. But the only way Spotify can have a shot in this near-impossible market is with truly stellar execution, and the experiences I've had with the management team have been marked by misleading "off the record" statements and unchecked arrogance. (As always, I'd love to talk with CEO Daniel Ek more about the company. Alas, so far he's responded to requests for interviews by telling me he "doesn't like (my) tone." He has offered to meet up sometime when we're on the same continent, which I genuinely hope happens.) I usually root for startups with great products not to sell early, but this may be one case where a stunning and much-beloved app would do better in someone else's hands. With any luck, a bidding war could still make good on that $250 million valuation.
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| PhoneTag Voice-To-Text Is Only 86 Percent Accurate, But That’s Better Than Google Voice Posted: 28 Jan 2010 08:37 PM PST Computer voice-to-text technology has come a long way, and every time it gets better, new applications open up. It is still not 100 percent accurate. Hell, it’s not even 90 percent accurate. But it is accurate enough for automated voicemail transcription services to become increasingly available and good enough not to have to listen through 15 voicemails to get the gist of what they are about. Of course, voicemails are often translated incorrectly, sometimes to comic effect. In a study comparing the accuracy of four different voice-to-text technologies (Google Voice, Preview in Microsoft Exchange, Ditech’s PhoneTag, and Yap) the one which came out on top was PhoneTag, which is now part of Ditech Networks. PhoneTag showed an 86 percent accuracy rate in translating 500 spoken messages into text. Google Voice was only able to achieve an 82 percent accuracy in its voice-to-text translations. The study only evaluated purely automated voice-to-text systems. Here’s how all four fared: Automated Voice-to-Text Accuracy:
The study was commissioned by Ditech and carried out by William Meisel of TMA Associates. You can read his methodology in the document embedded below. Of course, a study commissioned by Google might show Google Voice coming out on top But what I find more interesting is that 86 percent accuracy is considered something to boast about. Ditech’s Chief Strategy Officer, Jamie Siminoff (who founded the company behind PhoneTag, Simulscribe) points out that each percentage point gain in accuracy is a big deal and that his goal is to get to 90 percent accuracy. To get beyond that, it si still necessary to use humans to clean up the automated translations. PhoneTag offers both fully-automated and human-assisted transcription. One service which uses PhoneTag is Ribbit Mobile, which I’ve been using with the human-assisted transcription option turned on. I also use Google Voice on another phone. I’ve certainly noticed that the human-assisted transcriptions are incredibly accurate. It can even make sense of my three-year-old son’s messages:
I turned off the human-assisted option and tested some purely automated transcriptions today, so I could compare it more fairly to Google Voice. Some messages were pretty much the same, for others the accuracy went way down, but I really couldn’t say that PhoneTag was noticeably better than Gogle Voice. But I do notice the difference when I have the human-assisted option turned on. So while 86 percent accuracy might be something to crow about, adding human translators to the mix is still by far the best way to go. Accuracy of Voicemail-To-text Services
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| 5 Things The iPhone Could Learn From The iPad Posted: 28 Jan 2010 05:50 PM PST
These iPhone owners are exactly who should be the most excited about the iPad – even if they don’t plan on buying one. Even before its release, the iPad has heralded a number of changes on the way for iPhone OS – and presumably, the iPhone itself. Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>
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| VeriFone’s Square Competitor Hits The App Store. Hands On With The Hardware. Posted: 28 Jan 2010 05:10 PM PST
Today, the other key part of the equation has just gone live in the App Store, the PAYware Mobile app. This free application, when paired with the hardware, allows you to use your iPhone to easily accept credit card payments, just as Square does. Still, as Dorsey noted in the original video we took with him (second video below), Square is being aimed at a broader market of people who may not have merchant accounts but still wish to be able to accept payments. Also, while VeriFone’s hardware is clearly better designed for use with the actual iPhone, Square’s method of using the headphone jack is so that it will be able to be used with other mobile devices eventually (Square is currently working on an Android app, for example). VeriFone promises support for other platforms as well, but this particular hardware unit will only work with an iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS. VeriFone also clearly believes its solution is the safer bet for merchants thanks to its secure payment gateway. Truth be told, running transactions on this device does feel a bit safer than Square’s, but there are also a range of confusing options. And setting the thing up is kind of a pain. You’re also paying for this extra security. VeriFone’s solution has a $49 activation fee, along with a monthly fee of $15 — on top of the 17 cents you’re paying on each transaction. Square gives its hardware and accounts away for free, but plans to take a small percentage of each transaction. This will be an interesting battle to watch. Watch a quick demo of VeriFone PAYware Mobile in the video below. You can order the hardware here. And you can find the app in the App Store here.
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| Benioff On The iPad: “The Most Important Feature Is Its 10-Hour Battery” Posted: 28 Jan 2010 03:58 PM PST Everyone has an opinion about the iPad, even at Davos. Michael is there this week at the World Economic Forum, grabbing video interviews with the people he is running into (like Michael Dell showing off a yet-to-launch Android device). In the video above, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff talks about the iPad (what else?). Other people might be wowed by the touchscreen or the 140,000 apps or the iBooks, but not Benioff. He’s impressed by the battery: “The most important feature is the 10-hour battery life. That he was able to get that kind of capability in such a robust device, I think we have a game-changer.” He also gives Michael a hard time for not getting into some CEO dinner. Watch the video.
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| MyYearbook Rolls Out Its Crowdsourced Redesign Posted: 28 Jan 2010 03:40 PM PST
The most obvious change to the site is the logo, which has gone from cartoony to something a little more professional (though it still has a couple of smiley faces). The navigation bar has also been simplified. CEO Geoff Cook says that over time MyYearBook had integrated a bunch of gaming menu options into the main navigation area, without doing much to differentiate the core features that actually make the site a social network. Now, they’ve been moved to a different section of the header. This is actually only Phase I of a two-part change; soon MyYearBook will be modifying profile pages to more prominently feature Chatter streams. A Chatter stream looks visually similar to Facebook’s News Feed, but features a more heavy emphasis on meeting new people rather than only seeing content from your friends. The default Chatter feed displays recent content updates from other users in your vicinity (assuming you’ve told MyYearbook where you are), and there are tabs to see updates from just your friends.  Because MyYearBook is a social network, it obviously knows some key demographic information about each of its users. With that in hand, the site pulled together some interesting data analyzing exactly which members were in favor of the new design, and which ones weren’t. The conclusion? While the new design was favored over the new design by over 3 to 1 when averaged across all members polled, there was an obvious trend when age was taken into consideration: the older the user was, the more averse they were to the new design. That may not be especially surprising, but it’s interesting to see just how consistent the graph below is.
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| More Bad News For Intelius: Cofounder Charged With Lying About Sex With Stripper Posted: 28 Jan 2010 03:08 PM PST
The company has been trying to go public despite hundreds of scam complaints, and the atrocious legal record of CEO Naveen Jain. We covered many of the issues back in 2008. Last year the U.S. Senate began an investigation into the post transaction marketing offers that drive much of Intelius’ revenue. The new charges are somewhat ironic, since Intelius recently launched an iPhone dating application called datecheck. Arnold, now charged with lying to a grand jury about his sexual exploits, said of datecheck:
Indeed. Except, datecheck isn’t so useful if you want to date an Intelius cofounder. The company has removed the legal records of its own founders from the application.
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| Video: Obama’s State Of The iPad Address Posted: 28 Jan 2010 02:50 PM PST
Whirled Creative has made a mash-up of yesterday’s iPad announcement and President Obama’s first State of the Union Address from last night. Those who were concerned that the Apple announcement was getting more buzz than the President’s speech can now have the best of both worlds. Watch below as Obama talks about Apple’s revenues, compares the Zune to a root canal, talks about the “status quo” netbooks, and unveils the mythical iPad to a thunderous applause by the House and Senate. Obama also highlights TechCrunch as one of the “experts” of the system, which we appreciate.
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| Microsoft Reports Strong Quarter, Driven By Windows 7 Demand Posted: 28 Jan 2010 02:11 PM PST
Microsoft says that it sold over 60 million licenses of Windows 7 through the second quarter. Sales were driven by growth in the consumer PC market, which is up over 20% year over year. The Online services Division reported a 5% year over year decline. Online advertising revenue is down 2%. Microsoft notes that Bing’s marketshare has been up for 7 consecutive months, and that while there is growth in search revenue, display revenue has been hurt by declines in international rates.
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| Holy wow! AT&T Admits NYC/San Fran 3G Service Sucked in 2009 Posted: 28 Jan 2010 02:07 PM PST  A recent AT&T earnings call consisted of a lot of talk talk talk but one slide stands out: it essentially admits that 3G in San Francisco and New York sucked ween AKA were both far below their official performance objective. Although I can't figure out what the actual "Performance Objective" truly is based on this slide, those lines do seem to be going up. While anyone can make up a statistic, for AT&T to come out and say "we suck in those areas" is big news. Good on you, lads.
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| Amazon Fourth Quarter Sales Up 42 Percent, Bezos Says “Millions Of People Own Kindles” Posted: 28 Jan 2010 02:01 PM PST The holidays were good to Amazon, which just announced fourth quarter 2009 earnings. Sales were up 42 percent to $9.5 billion in the quarter, and net income shot up 71 percent to $384 million (or 85 cents a share, well above the analyst consensus of 72 cents). Free cash flow was up 113 percent to $2.9 billion. For the full year, sales were $24.5 billion, and net income was $902 million. Amazon highlighted the success of its Kindle in its earning release, which is not surprising given all the comparison to the iPad which Apple announced yesterday. The one quote from CEO Jeff Bezos in the release is about the Kindle: “Millions of people now own Kindles. And Kindle owners read, a lot. When we have both editions, we sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books. This is year-to-date and includes only paid books — free Kindle books would make the number even higher. It's been an exciting 27 months." Beyond being vague about how many “millions” of people own a Kindle (is it two million or 20 million?), Amazon also mentions that there are now 410,000 books available on the Kindle. The depth and breadth of that catalog is the Kindle’s greatest strength. Amazon also emphasized that its digital books can by synched between its own family of Kindles as well as PCs, “iPhone, iPod touch and soon, Blackberry, Mac and iPad.” The accounting recognition for the Kindle changed this quarter, with more of the total device price being recognized immediately instead of being deferred. During the conference call there was a mention of $500 million of deferred revenues from shipments from last year which will be apportioned in future quarters. Also asked whether its competitive position has now changed, Amazon emphasized that it will continue to focus on the strength of its existing relationship with publishers and on devices “purpose-built for reading. We believe readers deserve to have a dedicated device with great selection, at a great price.” But other than that would not discuss any competing devices (cough, iPad) or how they might impact the price of the Kindle. Amazon reconfirmed, however, that its Kindle app for the iPhone would be available on the iPad as well Earnings slides are below:
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| Two Years After Launch, Howcast Is Streaming 25 Million How-To Videos A Month Posted: 28 Jan 2010 01:17 PM PST Two years ago, former Googlers Jason Liebman, Daniel Blackman and Sanjay Raman launched Howcast, a site filled with originally-produced how-to videos on everything from “How to Ice Skate” to “How To Deal With a Mean Boss.” Today, Howcast is streaming 25 million videos a month across its network, which includes its own site, popular channels on YouTube and Hulu, and an iPhone app (iTunes link) which has been downloaded more than one million times. A year ago, the startup was streaming about 10 million videos a month. To put this in perspective, YouTube streams more than 12 billion videos a month and the next nine video properties on the Web all stream north of 200 million videos a month. But Howcast’s growth is still very respectable for a niche video site. The niche Howcast is going after, however is a very broad one. Informational videos can be applied to practically any topic, are always in demand, and are search-engine friendly. Its YouTube channel alone is in the top 100 channels, with close to 100 million cumulative views so far and 111,000 subscribers. Now that Howcast’s videos are gaining traction, CEO Jason Liebman is focusing more on monetization. ”We’re on track to be profitable by the end of the year,” he tells me, although he won’t go into specific numbers on either profits or revenues. He just hired his first head of sales to sell ads directly. Howcast makes money two ways. It places clickable overlay ads on its videos from ad networks such as Google and ScanScout. Selling ads directly should increase its CPMs. The other way Howcast makes money is from so-called “branded entertainment.” These are how-to videos for hire: advertorials, product demos, customer support videos, social branding. Companies such as AT&T, Kodak, JetBlue, Twitter, and Boxee pay Howcast a fee to create these videos and then pay on top of that for each view. Some examples of these sponsored videos include “How To Get Started With Boxee” (embedded below), “How To Use Twitter,” and “How To Use Your Cell Phone as A Wingman” (AT&T). These aren’t ads per se, they are more instructional videos on how to use a product or attempts at social branding. Not only does Howcast produce the videos, it also distributes them through its site, and various other channels. Branded entertainment pays well. Although it account for only about 10 percent of the videos Howcast produces each month, it currently makes up a majority of Howcast’s revenues (that could shift back towards more traditional ads as total views and direct ad sales ramp up). Howcast produces all of its own videos through a network of freelance filmmakers. It provides them with the scripts, voiceovers, and graphics to streamline production. Using this method, Howcat is able to crank out about 1,000 how-to videos a month. It typically pays filmmakers about $50 for a 2 or 3 minute video. Like Demand Media, it uses all sort of data—from search trends to video views to editorial calendars—to figure out what topics to assign. Although Demand Media does it at a much larger scale. AOL, with its recent $36.5 million purchase of StudioNow, is also ramping up its online video efforts. Howcast still has a ways to go before it proves its model, but two years after launch, with 35 employees, it’s starting to hum. Just looking at Howcast.com alone, comScore Videometrix estimates the site is doing 1 million video stream a month (see table below), compared to 1.7 million for HowStuffWorks and 422,000 for eHow (which is owned by Demand Media, but isn’t primarily a video site). These numbers are not comparable to the 25 million above, which come directly from Howcast. Leibman says traffic to the site is doubling every quarter.
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We’re hitting the 2010 GSM World Mobile Congress again. 
Social networking company 
An 
Chances are you’ve never heard of 
"Millions of people now own Kindles," 
This is a guest post by Daniel Tenner, CTO and co-founder of 
Obviously, yesterday was all about 
While Apple didn’t say much about Google during the event, Jobs did note that the Maps application on the iPad was equipped with the Google Maps backend. And despite the talk that Apple might be in discussions with Microsoft about making Bing the default search on the iPhone, Google remains the default on the iPad as well.
I'm going to keep this post short and sweet because no one likes a blogger who says "I told you so." But, Spotify fans: Paul Carr and I 
As is to be expected of any device that the masses get excited about prior to it actually existing, the iPad has torn the Internet in two. Some love it, seeing it as the first iteration of an eventually world-changing device; others just don’t see a point. “It’s just a big iPhone,” they say, “and I already have an iPhone!”
As we noted back in December, 
Remember those guys who made those nifty Google Wave movie mash-up videos? You know, the ones with 
Microsoft has just posted the results of its fiscal 2010 second-quarter, which ended December 31. The company reported $19.02 billion in revenue and diluted earnings of $0.74 per share, beating analyst 
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