The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Armstrong Hints AOL Will Renew Search Deal With Google: “Distribution Is Almost As Important To Us As Money”
- Tim Armstrong’s First Earnings Call: “Fragmentation Is Our Friend”
- IBM Acquires Data Management Software Company Initiate Systems
- SlideShare Offers Branded Channels To Businesses
- Salesforce Simplifies The Creation Of Business Applications With Visual Process Manager
- The New TechCrunch Europe Top 100 Index. Are You In It?
- Spotify Takes A Leaf Out Of Last.fm’s Playbook
- AOL Revenues Dropped 17% Year-Over-Year In Q4 2009
- Tesla Motors’ Next VP of Manufacturing Is A Toyota (Veteran)
- Acacia Awarded $12.4 Million In Patent Infringement Case Against Yahoo
- Nokia: Ovi Maps With Free Navigation Averages A Download Per Second, 1.4M Total
- Gowalla Prepares To Roll Out On BlackBerry
- Stephen Colbert: Blippy Is More Exciting Than Going Through Old Receipts
- What Is This Mysterious Facebook Music App?
- Fwix Launches Mobile City Apps To Provide You Local News On The Go
- Everybody Forgets The Readers When They Bash News Aggregators
- 3Crowd Comes Out Of Stealth, Reveals Its Plan To Disrupt The CDN Market
- Live From Facebook’s HipHop Technology Tasting
- Hidden Backdoors On Torrent Sites Led To The Latest Twitter Attack
- Video: Android’s New Pinch-To-Zoom Multi-Touch In Action
- Where Did Internet Explorer’s Browser Share Go?
- Did Google Just Multi-Punch Apple In The Face?
- News Corp Earnings Are In: Digital Media Contribution Decreases By $32 Million YOY
- The Nexus One Just Got Multi-Touch
- MyHeritage Buys Germany’s OSN, Now 540 Million Profiles Strong
| Posted: 03 Feb 2010 07:08 AM PST During today’s AOL earnings call, which just finished, CEO Tim Armstrong dropped the strongest hint yet that Google is the front-runner in negotiations for who will power search across AOL properties. Google is AOL’s current partner, as it has been for nearly a decade, but the partnership is up for renewal. Needless to say, snatching the search partnership away would be a coup for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Bing wants the search deal, which would help it increase its total volume of searches by a couple percentage points since AOL on its own has the fifth largest search share in the U.S. But during the call, Armstrong emphasized that “distribution is almost as important to us as money, we will look for distribution as much as money in the deal.” AOL is a content company and it gets a lot of its traffic from Google. The sheer volume of referral traffic Google sends to AOL sites is something Bing cannot yet compete against, and to the extent that Google can find ways to send more traffic to AOL as part of its search deal, that makes it a more attractive partner than Bing. Microsoft can throw all the money it wants at AOL on the search side, it probably won’t make a difference. Here is Armstrong’s relevant reply to an analyst’s question on the topic from my notes:
So he is not ruling out Bing entirely, but if you read between the lines it is clear that he values Google almost as much as a distribution partner as he does as a search partner. Add in the fact that he still seems to be on good terms with his former boss Eric Schmidt, and it is clear that he is leaning heavily towards sticking with Google. Oh, by the way, this also means that he’s fine with Google being a huge news aggregator, because those links are extremely valuable and he understands that better than the CEOs of most other media companies. Google’s unique position as a source of traffic to Websites is one of its great strengths in any negotiation involving another Web company. I’ve heard this before from other Web CEOs who let Google get away with a better deal than they would otherwise because they fear reprisals in the form of lower search traffic. Google, of course, needs to keep up appearances that it delivers the best search results no matter what, but there are other ways Google can help juice a site’s traffic. Update: As I was writing this post, Tim Armstrong called me. He emphasized that “Overall, we do feel distribution is important, we also like revenue. We will balance those things.” It all “comes down to what the actual distribution deal is.” In other words, he is still negotiating. But he did shed some light on how a distribution deal could work. “You can’t really affect the index in partnership deals,” he explains, but there are lots of other things AOL and Google coudl do. On AOL’s end, it could change the way pages are set up and how much advertising is on each page to make them appear in results better. On Google’s end, there are opportunities to get more traffic “through Oneboxes and other types of integration like on the News property.” (The Onebox is Google’s unified results at the top of organic search which pulls from different sources). Another possibility is to include search advertising inventory into the deal. So Armstrong is definitely thinking creatively about how to get the most out of his next search deal.
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| Tim Armstrong’s First Earnings Call: “Fragmentation Is Our Friend” Posted: 03 Feb 2010 05:54 AM PST AOL announced its first quarterly earnings today as a newly public company. Fourth quarter revenues dropped 8% to $471.6 million, and turned a profit of $1.4 million (see the slides below). Notes from CEO Tim Armstrong’s first conference call are below. He laid out AOL’s strategy, warned that sales would probably be dampened this quarter as a result of reducing a third of its workforce and noted that “AOL is not a quarterly project.” He emphasized Aol’s content strategy, with the build out of AOL’s new content management system Seed and acquisition of StudioNow on the video front. Armstrong went into some detail about AOL’s nichebuster strategy, noting that “fragmentation is our friend.” He also said that AOl will pursue new paid subscription services in the future. The sales team is now given incentives to sell more premium ads on site than across AOL’s ad network. AOL plans on closing money-losing international operations, which will result in a $125 million hit to revenues, but Europe alone lost $50 million so its income statement will look healthier after the exit. Display advertising is forecast to remain flat, but the mix will shift from network to premium ads on AOL’s owned properties. Here are my live notes: Tim Armstrong: We have an aggressive strategy, starts and ends with execution, We have gone through major cost reduction, reducing one third of workforce Most important thing, we put the heartbeat and will to win back into AOL Strategy we are going after Some major items on the checklist
It is difficult to remove a third of workforce without some impact, may see some dampening on ad sales, AOl is not a quarterly project. Q&A Q: What are new lines of business AOL is launching? Armstrong One is ion conetnet, Seed is largest cross company prject in a few years, formulation of a product we hope to bring to market over the course of 2010. StudioNow acquisition on video side is similar ro Seed. You will see us bring projects that help us scalle teh conetent on teh Web and loosk different than the contenet you see on eth Web today. We continue to work with advertisers and ad agencies. new ads platform will have some new features oin it. In tehlocal area, we continue to launch Patch. The Q for us is how much we scale it in 2010. The most important new things will be the new ad system, how we launch and grow that in 2010, and the content system, how we produce and aprtner for great content to a tract users to AOL properties Q: Why does niche at scale stratgey make sense now. Seems like it depends on doing well in search. Armstrong, niche at scale is actually quality at scale. What uou consider niche, we don’t. Some people may look at Engadget as niche, but that blog won blog of the decade and also was the official blog covering CES. We had a partner in Sprint that saw that as attractive. It is a scale advertisers find very attractive. A content strategy that people relate to. We are able to bundle those audiences together and create scale for advertisers. Seed and StudioNow wil help us fuel more properties like an Engadget. Second Q, are these properties created for search? Search si an important part of it but if you look at referral traffic, it is other things, Twitter, Facebook, other things, our own properties in recirculation, we look at the mix. Our strategy around distribution is not reliant on search. It is a part of it. Internally we say fragmentation is our friend Q: Audience numbers, paid services? Armstrong: You might see bumps in total uniques, but company is getting healthier underneath as we shift our content strategy. Will shut some properties, open new ones. Will audience grow overall? I am not sure, but focussed on growing audiences in specific category? People look at paid services as dialu-p access, there are other paid services, where people bring their own access. It is an interesting asset as paid services are becoming more viable. We look at services and subscriptions as areas we will be testing this year. There were a number of deals before that were unprofitable for us. The company was hooked on pageviews. We are now focussing on net revenue. Q: Technology toolkit A: first and foremost we have to be clear about which platforms we are betting on. Second is what are clear and differentiated parts of those products. Who is building those products. the product team was disbanded at AOL a couple years ago. We are bringing in product people and engineers. We have had very good success bringing people into the company. Third thing is to open up the platform to external developers. AOL is not necessarily the most open platform. In the process of looking at the infrastructure and relationship with outside on acquisition,$37M StudioNow, I have said this before, we are out of the Hail Mary business. I think StudioNow is great example of what we would hope to do in the future in M&A. They have great group of people,strong leadership and strong engineers. On search deal, we have had a great partnership with Google, we continue to be close to them. What we are expecting to get out of search deal is longer-term partnership where we are both aligned. We have along partnership with Google. Marketplace is more competitive. First and foremost if you are looking for us to squeeze more dollars or pennies out every quarter, you are going to be disappointed. Looking for a deal that helps our strategy, a reasonable deal for us and the partner. We are a content focussed company, distribution is almost as important to us as money, we will look for distribution as much as money in the deal. Q: divestitures, what are non-core? CFO: likely we will trade some assets away if we can get a good deal and they are non-strategic. Q: How will brand advertising on the Web grow? Also international shutdowns, more color? I had an experience last ten, 15 years doing advertising every single day, advertising that was accountable, clickable, fortunately for my last company we got the whole industry thinking that way. If you are a consumer walking down the aisle and there is a generic and branded detergent, our job is to put that brand around quality content to make that consumer believe it os worth it to pay more for that branded detergent. Q: you have very attractive margins in access and search, display is less, what is overall profit margin you are looking at and what is the key driver of margins in display? How do you drive margins in the display side? CFO: the good and bad news in display is there is a lot of operating leverage, we’ve seen the downside as we’ve gone through the ad recession. As we come out of that we should be able to drive incremental OEBITDA conversion. We do see benefits on the pricing side, saw it in the 4th quarter. We have a compelling product to sell to advertisers, added more than 150 new advertisers in the fourth quarter Armstrong: What it comes down to is user engagement, our ability to do high-quality content. Armstrong: I would highlight from 2009, we are very happy with how we did, when you layer on a global cost restructuring and a spin-off from Time Warner. We care more about execution than you do. We have a clear strategy we want to deliver on. We are not focussed on quarter over quarter results, but how does AOL become a very valuable property on the Internet. I would like to thank the employees of AOL, everyone worked exceptionally hard, pulling double duty. Request-AOL Q4 2009 Earnings Presentation
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| IBM Acquires Data Management Software Company Initiate Systems Posted: 03 Feb 2010 05:51 AM PST
It appears that the acquisition is aimed at boosting IBM’s healthcare offerings. According to IBM, Initiate’s software us currently in use at more than 2,400 healthcare sites, over 40 health information exchanges and multiple government health systems around the world including CVS/Caremark, Blue Cross Blue Shield, United Healthcare Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Initiate speeds the adoption and exchange of electronic medical records by allowing medical professionals to access to complete medical histories of patients quickly and easily. The software also caters to government organizations to help share data across multiple agencies. Initiate will be IBM’s 30th acquisition in the information management and analytics segment and Big Blue’s 90th acquisition since 2003. Last year, IBM acquired six companies, including Guardium, RedPill Solutions, SPSS, Ounce Labs, Exeros and Outblaze. While IBM is kicking of 2010’s shopping spree with Initiate, it should be interesting to see the other buyout Big Blue has up its sleeve.
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| SlideShare Offers Branded Channels To Businesses Posted: 03 Feb 2010 05:50 AM PST
SlideShare’s branded channels can be fully customized, with pricing ranging depending on the businesses’ preferred layout. Sinha declined to share the pricing range for the channels. As SlideShare continues to attract business users, the startup has been rolling out premium services to not offer compelling features to users but to also monetize the platform. LeadShare is a self-service tool that businesses can use to capturing leads from documents and presentations and AdShare allows users promote their content via ads on SlideShare's platform. Competitor Scribd also offers branded readers. In the past year or so, SlideShare has unveiled a mobile-friendly site, launched a free Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 plug-in that allows for one-click publication of your presentations to the cloud, and support for embedding YouTube videos in SlideShare-hosted presentations. The company is based out of San Francisco and raised over $3 million in capital to date, from VC firm Venrock and a number of prominent angel investors like Dave McClure, Mark Cuban, Saul Klein, Jonathan Abrams, Hal Varian and others.
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| Salesforce Simplifies The Creation Of Business Applications With Visual Process Manager Posted: 03 Feb 2010 05:28 AM PST 2009 was a banner year for Salesforce.com. The enterprise cloud computing company made significant enhancements to its product lineup, reported overall strong earnings, and even launched their own take on realtime enterprise social networking and collaboration, Chatter. Today, Salesforce is launching one of its first product enhancements for 2010: the Force.com Visual Process Manager. Force.com, company’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications, will now allows companies to design and deploy business processes inside their apps without having to build the applications on other software. Customers can visually design any complex business process with a design tool and instantly run it in the cloud without writing a single line of code. The technology powering the Visual Process Manager is based on technology acquired from Informavores, call scripting startup Salesforce bought last year. The Manager has several different components. The Process Designer essentially helps businesses sketch out applications with established set forms, questions, and choices, and logic components, like task assignments, decision trees, and approval processes. These components can be dragged and dropped into a visual process design diagram/ The Process Wizard Builder enables companies to design a “wizard” to help walk end-users, step-by-step, through their business process. The Process Simulator lets customers test out and review processes before they are deployed. And lastly, the real-time process engine will run all of a company’s sophisticated processes and provides realtime scalability. For example, if an insurance company wanted to create a step by step business application for sales representatives to follow in order to create a price quote for insurance packages, the administrator could visually map out every question and step the sales reps need to take and then simple create an application that would automate these processes. Prior to the inclusion of the Visual Process Manager, companies would have to build applications off of separate platforms, including on-premise software, hardware and infrastructure, to automate processes. The bonus to the Visual process Manager is that it integrates seamlessly into all of Salesforce’s applications. The Process Manager will be available to Enterprise and Unlimited Edition Force.com subscribers for $50 per user per month. The company recently rolled out Force.com Sites, which lets companies build and run their applications for internal use as well as for public use on Salesforce.com cloud computing platform. And Salesforce also opened up an additional distribution channel off of Force.com: the Value-Added Reseller (VAR) program While the opening up of the Visual Process Manager pales in comparison to the scale of launching Salesforce Chatter, both products represent Salesforce’s rapid pace of innovation. It should be interesting to see what 2010 brings for Salesforce; the company just raised $500 million, which we all expect will be uses towards a few acquisitions.
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| The New TechCrunch Europe Top 100 Index. Are You In It? Posted: 03 Feb 2010 04:22 AM PST
As you can see, there are companies that are staying in the Index, some arriving and some, alas, leaving. The companies that have made great progress in the last few months are ones that have being doing important things like generating revenue. It’s quite clear from the refreshed Index that European startups know how to make money (in particular through e-commerce, private shopping, lead-generation and games). The Silicon Valley business model of scale and user acquisition, while still a hugely important arrow in the European startups quiver, is still just part of the equation, especially in a wide European market so divided by language and regulation. Although I’d like to see more European startups thinking globally from the start, and going for growth, no-one is saying one shouldn’t have at least half an eye trained on where the business model is going to come from.
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| Spotify Takes A Leaf Out Of Last.fm’s Playbook Posted: 03 Feb 2010 04:21 AM PST
Let’s just say it’s no Last.fm, appearing to make very little use of users’ listening data to help other users discover new music. That’s about to change, to some degree at least, as the European music streaming service rolls out an improved artist discovery feature.
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| AOL Revenues Dropped 17% Year-Over-Year In Q4 2009 Posted: 03 Feb 2010 04:18 AM PST
The company reported a profit of $1.4 million, or a penny a share, compared with a loss of $1.96 billion, or $18.52 a share, a year earlier (when Time Warner wrote down the Internet giant). What caught our eye is that revenues are down 17% YOY, dropping from $974 million in Q4 2008 to roughly $810 million in the fourth quarter of last year. Zooming in on advertising revenue, Q4 revenues on that level dropped 8%, from $512.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2008 to $471.6 million in Q4 2009. Nevertheless, results beat Wall Street expectations, particularly because they were notably low across the board. AOL says Q4 revenue declines reflect continued attrition in the subscriber base, leading to declines in subscription and search & contextual revenue (which dropped 19%). AOL Properties’ global display advertising revenue dropped 3% YOY, but the company points out domestic display advertising revenue actually grew 1%. We’ll see if that trend continues. AOL had $147 million of cash-on-hand as of December 31, 2009. AOL Chairman & CEO Tim Armstrong in a statement said the company is entering 2010 with a “clearly defined strategy” and “incredibly focused on day-to-day execution." Needless to say, 2010 will be a turn-around year for Armstrong & co, and probably not the end of it. The company is losing long-time executives almost daily now, but it has a clear, much-discussed focus on turning AOL into a highly effective, profitable low-cost, high-volume content machine. Time will tell if this niche content strategy ends up having a positive effect on ad display revenues in the coming years.
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| Tesla Motors’ Next VP of Manufacturing Is A Toyota (Veteran) Posted: 03 Feb 2010 04:02 AM PST
Passin has 23 years of international automotive experience under his belt, most recently serving as general manager of production engineering for Toyota in North America. Previously, Passin was vice president of manufacturing at Toyota’s plant in Cambridge, Ontario, which produces over 200,000 automobiles per year. Passin regards his jump as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’. In a statement, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Passin’s recruitment fits in the company’s plans to significantly ramp up its production capacity (at present, it has produced some 1,000 cars), particularly with respect to the planned Model S sedan. Musk added that his new VP will also help recruit new employees for Tesla’s California manufacturing team. (Via press release)
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| Acacia Awarded $12.4 Million In Patent Infringement Case Against Yahoo Posted: 03 Feb 2010 03:34 AM PST
On May 15th, 2009, a federal court jury decided that Yahoo’s messenger program with IMVironments – which revolves around interactive backgrounds that users can add to IM conversations – infringes US Patent Number 6,205,432, filed by a trio of inventors and published back in 2001. The patent was described as follows:
According to today’s statement, Acacia subsidiary Creative Internet Advertising Corporation received a $12.4 million final judgment stemming from its May 2009 trial verdict (PDF) and corresponding $6.6 million damages award in its patent lawsuit. In addition, the District Court's judgment awarded a post-verdict ongoing royalty rate of 23% for all of Yahoo's IMVironments sales. To learn more about Acacia Research Corporation and its business, I suggest you read up on the company by heading to the BusinessWeek profile. To give you an idea: Acacia essentially buys patents from inventors and then seeks fees from companies that it says infringe on those patents. It’s in the business of suing companies rather than producing products or services; the company is said to have filed at least 337 patent-related lawsuits since its inception in 1992.
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| Nokia: Ovi Maps With Free Navigation Averages A Download Per Second, 1.4M Total Posted: 03 Feb 2010 02:15 AM PST
Nokia says the new version of Ovi Maps that includes free walk and drive navigation has been downloaded over 1.4 million times since its introduction on 21 January 2010. Nokia says the 1 million mark was reached after just one week following the launch, and the company’s Executive VP Anssi Vanjoki adds that they’re currently seeing ‘a download a second, 24 hours a day’. As of 31 January 2010 the top five countries downloading the new version of Ovi Maps were: China (!), Italy, UK, Germany and Spain. The top five most popular Nokia devices installing the download were: Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia N97 mini, Nokia N97, Nokia 5230 and Nokia E72. From next month, all new Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones will include the new version of Ovi Maps, pre-loaded with local country map data, with walk and drive navigation and access to Lonely Planet and Michelin travel guides at no extra charge. Nokia clearly wants a piece of the fast-growing market of location-aware applications, and is looking for third-party developers to fill the gaps when it comes to content, new services and additional features. Also, as my esteemed colleague Greg Kumparak so eloquently put it when Ovi Maps with free turn-by-turn navigation was launched:
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| Gowalla Prepares To Roll Out On BlackBerry Posted: 03 Feb 2010 12:35 AM PST The check-in arms race continues to heat up. Foursquare has been working fast to secure its place on not only the iPhone, but also Android, Palm Pre, BlackBerry, and most recently, Windows Mobile. But rival Gowalla is working hard to get onto the other platforms as well. Recently, they launched a version that works on Android phones through the web browser — and a similar method is bringing it to BlackBerry phones as well. While it’s not quite live yet, it will be “very soon,” founder Josh Williams tweeted today. He also noted that he’s currently using it, and it seems to work well. When it’s live, BlackBerry users will just have to direct their browser to m.gowalla.com. The mobile web version that Android uses takes advantage of the HTML5 elements of WebKit built into Android’s browser, which includes the ability to access location information in certain smartphones. The BlackBerry implementation isn’t quite as seamless, and requires a newer model of the device, we’re told. For it to work, users have to turn on their location in the browser settings, apparently. Gowalla has said that they’re working on a native application for all the major mobile platforms, but in the short term, this mobile web version makes sense. Perhaps third party developers can use their soon-to-be-released API to speed the process along.
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| Stephen Colbert: Blippy Is More Exciting Than Going Through Old Receipts Posted: 03 Feb 2010 12:09 AM PST
Tonight, the controversial social credit card data aggregator was featured on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. As you might imagine, host Stephen Colbert ripped into the service’s ability to show everyday purchases at places such as Wendy’s. Humor aside, this appearance is a huge win for Blippy, which recently raised its first round of funding, and is now signing deals with retailers. Will Colbert Nation embrace Blippy? Sadly, YouTube is apparently smart enough to know that the Colbert Report is something they shouldn’t allow you to embed, so I’ll have to link to it — here. Update: And YouTube has now completely removed the video. Wow, they’re good.
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| What Is This Mysterious Facebook Music App? Posted: 02 Feb 2010 11:51 PM PST Facebook Music may not exist, but you may have it installed anyway. Right now if you log into the site and go to Facebook’s “Edit Applications” screen, you’ll probably encounter a new application at the top of the list: Music. And it’s pretty clear that this isn’t just some third party app; the application links to Facebook.com/music, which is the same format used by other official Facebook applications, including photos (Facebook.com/photos) and events (Facebook.com/events). But the application doesn’t work at all — clicking it just brings you to your Facebook News Feed. Update: Facebook has now removed the application. We’re still waiting on a full explanation. We reached out to Facebook about the mysterious application. They’ve directed us to a Facebook Music Player app that appears on some Facebook Pages, and say that there may be a bug that’s showing some Pages apps on the editapps.php page (they’re looking into the issue). They also say that the Facebook.com/music site may be related to a now-defunct site that was launched at SXSW a few years ago (it wasn’t a streaming music service). That may well be the case, but the Pages music player application has a different Application ID than this new one does — it doesn’t look like they’re the same thing. Still, Facebook’s spokesperson was pretty clear that there was no new Facebook Music app, stating, “We have no plans to launch a music service on Facebook.” Facebook long considered launching a free music service, and previously engaged in talks with multiple different streaming services to power the site. Obviously those didn’t pan out, and in light of Facebook’s promotion of third party apps and pages, they may have decided to ditch the idea entirely. It’s worth pointing out that one of Facebook’s most popular music applications is iLike, which was recently acquired by MySpace. Facebook and MySpace may not be butting heads as much any more (MySpace has shifted its focus to the ’socialization of content’ rather than networking with friends) but given their history it’s an interesting arrangement. Thanks to Will Hankinson for the tip.
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| Fwix Launches Mobile City Apps To Provide You Local News On The Go Posted: 02 Feb 2010 10:11 PM PST
Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>
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| Everybody Forgets The Readers When They Bash News Aggregators Posted: 02 Feb 2010 08:01 PM PST
Those days are over. The problem is that most of the people running legacy news sites today are way older than I am, and still can’t get their arms around the fact that the world has fundamentally and irreversibly changed. Today I get my non tech news via scores of sources. I’m led there via social sites like Twitter and Facebook, and from aggregators like Google News and Memeorandum. Most of my tech news comes, of course, via my phone and email inbox. It’s ok that the legacy guys don’t understand that, because when they erect paywalls it just stokes TechCrunch, which isn’t behind a paywall. Live and let live, I say. Far be it from me to talk them off the ledge. Paywalls kill social links and aggregators unless they are specially designed to allow them via a set number of free views. But even then there’s enough friction that most people won’t bother. But when Mark Cuban starts saying aggregators are bad, that’s something new. He’s one of the guys that gets it. He’s not supposed to be on the losing team:
Telling the world that you don’t want them to do you the favor of visiting your site is just ridiculous. Let me repeat that. When someone visits your site they are doing you a favor. Not the other way around. And when an aggregator puts up a link to your site, they are doing you a favor by sending you traffic. Not the other way around. As I’ve written before, “We throw a party when someone "steals" our content and links back to us. High fives all around the office. At least there's some small nod in our direction.” The real problem out there today for news sites are the guys that just take stories and rewrite them on the cheap without any links or attribution at all. When you erect a paywall, you’re just encouraging this behavior. It’s less anyone will notice. What About The Users?But forget all that navel gazing for a minute while I jump back up to my first paragraph. Aggregators are popular because they help users find the news they’re interested in. They serve a very real purpose and add value to the system. Without aggregators and social links users would be forced to choose which news sites they want to pay for, and trust that they’ll get everything they need from those sites. I don’t want to jump back to 1993. I want to live in the present where each piece of news lives and dies by its own merit as it spreads virally around the Internet. That means I spend less time finding better content. Mark Cuban knows all this, and he agrees. Which is why I don’t understand his lash out against aggregators. If news sites block aggregators, as Cuban urges, they lose and the users lose. No one wins. Except the sites that remain free. And those sites are here to stay.
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| 3Crowd Comes Out Of Stealth, Reveals Its Plan To Disrupt The CDN Market Posted: 02 Feb 2010 07:55 PM PST
3Crowd’s first product is setting out to help users manage their content across multiple CDNs at the same time, using rule sets to determine which CDNs should be tapped depending on variables like the user’s location and which content they’re accessing. The product also looks to make it easy to actually deploy your content to these CDNs — you have to create the account with the CDN, but 3Crowd can then walk you through a wizard to get things going. Lyon says that this changes the process from one that would typically require a programmer to one that’s managed through a clickable wizard. So what’s the benefit from being able to easily spread your content across multiple CDNs? For one, you aren’t dealing with a single point of failure. But the rules-based platform also gives you more flexibility as to how you’d like to distribute your content. If you found a CDN based in the United States that was cheaper than the alternatives, you could use that while still maintaining your content on a premium CDN serving users abroad. You could also set up the system to have a secondary CDN kick in if your traffic hit a certain threshold. The system also makes it easy to jump between CDNs — find a better deal on one, and you can jump to it with fewer headaches than you would have had otherwise. As the co-founder of the CDN BitGravity, Lyon obviously has experience in this area. He says that one of the issues with content delivery networks is that they can become prohibitively expensive for successful sites. He explains that as your site grows, CDNs may be able to help you quickly serve your content to all of your new fans, but there’s a good chance your income isn’t scaling as quickly as your CDN costs are. 3Crowd ultimately hopes to make it much cheaper to achieve massive distribution. There are still plenty of unknowns, though. 3Crowd is still in private beta and will remain so for the next few weeks, and Lyon didn’t want to get into the service’s pricing (he says it will be “very affordable”). Lyon also promises that there’s much more to 3Crowd’s vision, though he wouldn’t get into the details yet. My hunch is that the company will eventually look to make switching between CDNs a near real-time affair — imagine being able to dynamically swap between CDNs based on which one is cheapest at a given moment (this would be especially powerful if you could target CDNs during traffic drop-offs, when bandwidth might be cheaper, though that assumes the CDNs will cooperate).
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| Live From Facebook’s HipHop Technology Tasting Posted: 02 Feb 2010 07:41 PM PST
Facebook Senior Open Programs Manager David Recordon kicked off the event by walking the audience through some of the challenges Facebook faces, particularly with the dynamic pages it has to generate. He spoke about some of the benefits of various programming languages, and also the CPU costs of each. As it scaled, Facebook encountered problems with PHP, including high CPU and memory costs and difficulty developers faced to build extensions. But Facebook has a slew of talented PHP developers, and it didn’t make sense to rewrite the site. The solution Facebook came up with is HipHop for PHP, which started as a hackathon project from a single developer named Haiping Zhao (though he had some team members as the project progressed). The technology transforms PHP into C++, using g++ to compile it. Facebook has found that the technology uses 50% less CPU with equal traffic on its web tier, and 30% less CPU usage with doubled traffic on its API tier. Facebook started deploying HipHop six months ago (initially it was only on internal servers). It’s now been ramped up to 90% of Facebook’s production servers. Zhao took the stage to give a highly technical walkthrough of the benefits of the technology (watch the video below for the details).  Facebook Open Source Developer Advocate Scott MacVicar presented a roadmap for the future of the open source project. Among Facebook’s goals: Video chat rooms at Ustream
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| Hidden Backdoors On Torrent Sites Led To The Latest Twitter Attack Posted: 02 Feb 2010 04:20 PM PST
On their Twitter Status blog (interesting that it’s not the main Twitter blog), Del Harvey, Twitter’s Director of “Trust and Safety” has a post detailing the attack. Apparently, Twitter figured out that some torrent sites have been being created for a number of years by some individual who then sells them to others looking to get into the business. The problem is that this person seems to have included a backdoor into these sites so that they could access them later when the site became popular. And because people often use the same login and password across the web, a bunch of Twitter accounts were then comprimised with this data. To make matters worse, it seems that there were also other exploits on these sites that allowed other hackers to gain access to data. Harvey doesn’t name any of the torrent sites involved (and says they likely won’t even be able to figure out all of them), but notes that if you’re a torrent site user, you should probably change your Twitter password immediately. Harvey titles his post, “reason 4,132 for changing your password” — but really it should be, “reason 4,132 for not using the same login/password on all sites.” Here’s the main nugget:
[photo: flickr/Daquella manera]
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| Video: Android’s New Pinch-To-Zoom Multi-Touch In Action Posted: 02 Feb 2010 02:58 PM PST As we noted earlier, Google announced an update today to its Android OS for Nexus One phones that would enable the pinch-to-zoom multi-touch feature for the first time in a few Google apps: Maps, Gallery, and the Web Browser. We’ve just received the update, which is technically firmware 2.1-update1, and have taken a video of the new functionality in action. While some third-party apps have taken advantage of mutli-touch for some time on Android, Google has resisted the feature for its own apps — likely due to an agreement with Apple. But now, all bets appear to be off. Google notes that most users shouldn’t receive the update until the end of the week as they gradually roll it out, so we were apparently lucky. Watch it in action below, and note how it compares to the iPhone’s multi-touch.
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| Where Did Internet Explorer’s Browser Share Go? Posted: 02 Feb 2010 02:31 PM PST Yesterday, browser market share figures came out from Net Applications, and the big news is how Chrome is moving up the ranks at the expense of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and even Firefox, compared to December. But you have to look further back to get a sense of what is really happening. The various flavors of Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7, and IE8) together have 62.1 percent market share, down from 68.5 percent last March. That is a 6.4 percent drop in about a year. During the same period Chrome went from 1.6 percent share to 5.2 percent. Firefox and Safari each gained about a percentage point each over the same period to 24.4 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively. (Although Firefox is a tiny bit down since November, when it peaked at 24.7 percent). If you add up the gains from those three—Chrome, Firefox, and Safari—that is where most of IE’s share went. But even that doesn’t tell the whole story because if you look at share of individual versions of the different browsers, you can see another dynamic in play. Namely, a big part of the share shift can also be explained by the uneven rate at which people abandon older browsers like IE6 for newer ones like IE8 or Chrome. Let’s look at the share shifts just among IE6, IE7, and IE8. The pitchforks are out for IE6, people hate it and Websites (especially those run by Google) think the sooner it dies, the better. Even Microsoft wants people to move away from IE6. IE6’s individual market share has dropped by about 11 points since March, 2009, from 31.4 percent to 20 percent. Meanwhile, IE8 took almost twice as much share as IE6 lost, it’s up almost 21 points from almost nothing to 22.4 percent share. So why did IE show an overall drop? You can blame poor old IE7, which lost exactly as much as IE8 gained, going from 35.2 percent to 14.5 percent share. But taken alone, IE8 actually gained more than any other browser during the period (up 20.6 percent), followed by Firefox 3.5 (up 17.1 percent). Chrome’s 5.2 percent share gain was spread across its Windows and Mac versions. So IE8 is making stronger gains than you might think from simply looking at the overall IE share numbers. In fact, in January, it finally surpassed IE6 in market share and is now the largest single browser. As IE6 and IE7 continue to dwindle, IE8 needs to capture as much of those legacy users as it can. With almost 35 percent share left between them, IE8 will no doubt continue to see rapid individual share growth simply by getting people using older versions of IE to upgrade. It helps that IE8 comes pre-installed with the Windows 7 operating system also. But those users are also prime targets for Chrome and Firefox (which is still going through its own transition from 3.0 to 3.5). Chrome, in particular, has the most to gain here. It only needs another 5 percent to double its market share, whereas IE8 can win over another 20 percent and still see IE’s overall share go down. It remains an open question where the overall shares will settle when all of this shakes out over the next year or so.
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| Did Google Just Multi-Punch Apple In The Face? Posted: 02 Feb 2010 01:32 PM PST
With the Android update announced for Nexus One phones today, Google has enabled multi-touch for its Browser, Gallery, and Maps applications. Specifically, they’ve enabled the popular pinch-to-zoom functionality that iPhone users are fond of. So why did Google wait all this time to implement this obvious feature when its devices have been capable of it since the G1? Well, a report last year (written by me for another publication), cited a source within Google who noted that Apple and Google had a gentleman’s agreement that Android wouldn’t encroach on what Apple believed to be its property, certain multi-touch gestures, like pinch-to-zoom. With Apple and Google now fighting, all bets are apparently off. Android chief Andy Rubin has said that there was no conspiracy about multi-touch, and suggested the Google apps haven’t implemented it simply because he didn’t like the functionality too much. But given that just about every Android user disagrees with him, that statement seems suspicious, at best. And why the change of heart now? And why does it happen to coincide with a time that Apple and Google are clearly at odds with one another? While the two used to be just about as close as two companies can be, sharing two board members, one of whom was Google CEO Eric Schmidt, things have turned sour as the two are increasingly competing in various fields. This led to Schmidt resigning from Apple’s board last year, and since then things have gotten more sour. While the whole Google Voice not being allowed onto the iPhone situation was one thing, Steve Jobs reportedly made recent remarks that Google’s Android team was out to destroy the iPhone (as well as other disparaging remarks about Google). And the battle continues on — those new Chrome OS tablet mock-ups are clearly envisioning multi-touch usage, just like Apple’s new iPad. Apple and Google also apparently used to have a gentleman’s agreement not to poach each others workers, we reported in August. But again, with the situation between the two deteriorating, that is apparently off now as well. And Google may have another reason to be okay with implementing multi-touch now: the Palm Pre. Since its launch last year, webOS (the OS that runs on the Pre and other new Palm devices) has allowed for native multi-touch, including pinch-to-zoom. While Apple has made some thinly veiled threatening comments about protecting their IP, they have so far not sought any legal action against Palm for this. Microsoft’s new Zune device uses similar multi-touch functionality too. Maybe Google now believes that Apple is not going pursue legal action against the use of this, despite their many multi-touch patents. [image: warner brothers pictures]
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| News Corp Earnings Are In: Digital Media Contribution Decreases By $32 Million YOY Posted: 02 Feb 2010 01:32 PM PST
Zooming in on the ‘Other’ segment, which houses News Corp’s Digital Media group, things are not looking too bright over there, in contrast to the rest of the business. The business unit, which manages MySpace, IGN Entertainment, as well as the Hulu joint venture with NBC Universal, took a bit of a hit (again). The company says earnings contributions from the Digital Media Group decreased by $32 million from a year ago, principally due to lower search and advertising revenue. Unfortunately, those numbers aren’t broken out in more detail. Other than that, News Corp actually performed remarkably well, solidly beating Wall Street’s expectations. News Corp reported net income of $254 million ($0.10 per share) for the last 3 months of 2009, compared to a net loss of $6.4 billion ($2.45 per share) in the second quarter a year ago. In the quarter, total revenue increased by 10% to $8.7 billion as a result of double-digit percentage growth at the majority of business segments (Filmed Entertainment, Television, Cable Network Programming, Newspapers and Information Services and Book Publishing) as compared to the same period a year ago, said News Corp. News Corp Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said he was pleased with the results:
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| The Nexus One Just Got Multi-Touch Posted: 02 Feb 2010 12:53 PM PST Google has just started to deploy an update to the Nexus One that brings a long-desired feature to Android: Multi0touch. In a blog post announcing the news, Google says that the new update will bring “Pinch-to-zoom functionality” to the Nexus One, which will allow users to pinch-to-zoom in the Android browser, Gallery, and Maps applications. So does this mean that Multi-touch will be coming to all Android phones? Not quite yet. A Google spokesperson says that multi-touch support is part of the Android 2.0 framework and that its integrated support on the Browser, gallery, and Maps applications will be part of the next Android update. However, it will be up to carriers and device manufactures to roll the updated software to these devices. The post also says that Nexus Ones will be receiving some other updated apps. The new version of Google Maps Navigation will include a ‘night mode’ that automatically changes the screen for optimized night time driving. And Google Goggles, which lets you search with pictures, will now be included in the default set of applications on the phone. Finally, 3G connectivity has been improved. You may have to wait a little longer to get your update though — while the over-the-air update will start going out today, Google’s post says some users may not get it until the end of the week. It’s worth pointing out that Android has actually supported Multitouch for some time — the functionality just hasn’t been implemented on most popular Android devices, like the Droid and Nexus One. Some software add-ons have been circling that enable multitouch in the Android browser, but this is the first time Google has baked the feature in.
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| MyHeritage Buys Germany’s OSN, Now 540 Million Profiles Strong Posted: 02 Feb 2010 12:09 PM PST
The merger gives MyHeritage a lot of new features and a whopping combined 540 million profiles, 47 million active users and 13 million family trees. The companies have been quietly merging the sites together for the last few weeks, and all of OSN's information, profiles, family trees and pictures should be all live on MyHeritage, as of about thirty minutes ago. This was a big job because each profile has a lot of bits and pieces attached to it and there was only a 5% overlap in accounts. That may be a sign that MyHeritage wasn't doing so hot in Europe, proving this was a smart deal. MyHeritage has an algorithm that helps find family tree connections for users, so it should be interesting to see how this influx of European users expands existing users’ family trees in the coming weeks. "A huge amount of people in North America are going to discover unknown roots," MyHeritage founder Gilad Japhet says. I visited Japhet the last time I was in Israel and we chatted about the merger over the weekend. He wouldn't disclose whether the deal was stock or cash or how much he paid, but it was clear that he was eying OSN for some time. "It was founded by two very talented individuals, and I knew from their track record they were serial entrepreneurs," he says. "I thought from the start they wouldn't have the patience to run this for ten years, maybe they'd be willing to merge their vision with ours. Eventually that theory proved correct." Japhet is not playing around. It won't come as a surprise to anyone whose spent time in Israel if I tell you he's intense, competitive, and relentlessly determined. Post-deal, MyHeritage is far beyond most genealogy competitors with the exception of Ancestry.com, which started in 1983, has spent some $80 million acquiring census information and went public last year. But there's a key difference: MyHeritage is more about living family members, and Ancestry.com is more focused on, well, ancestors. So in practice the companies are far different. There's more interaction, communication, and photo and video sharing on MyHeritage because—bluntly put—more of the profile-owners are alive. Last Saturday when Japhet and I talked, 1 million photos had already been uploaded to the site that day. "There is a clear need for families to have a secure and private place online to share memories, stay in touch and preserve their history," says Saul Klein, partner at Index Ventures and a MyHeritage board member. "I think the further Facebook opens up to the real-time web and defaults to public, the greater this need will become." Indeed privacy is a big issue to Japhet, even if it means slower growth. Unlike competing sites, if you chose to be public on MyHeritage, only your information goes public, not the details of your siblings, nieces, nephews and other members of your family tree. This is less about beating other genealogy sites now and more about MyHeritage making up the third leg of the social networking stool, which is still largely up for grabs. Facebook has won on friends, LinkedIn has won on professional and MyHeritage is seeking to win on family. It took LinkedIn far longer to get to critical mass because professional relationships were less viral and sexy, and my guess is family relationships may take even longer. Indeed, MyHeritage started six years ago and is still largely unknown in the high-brow Valley circles. But eventually it's a huge opportunity, and Japhet is patient. His site has those same endorphin-rush elements of discovery and connection that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have. But here's kicker—it has to be international to work because the US, Israel, and much of the world are essentially young nations with huge immigrant melting pots communities. You can't trace distant cousins too far back, if you're only going to focus on the US. And you only get those moments of true "holy-shit!" joy when other trees start connecting to yours and you discover whole new branches. If you're just entering your known-relatives, it's not too exciting. Don't expect this to be MyHeritage's last acquisition. Japhet borderline stalks competitors. He can rattle off any stat from Ancestry.com's public filings and viewed Geni's 2007 launch as a huge wake up call for better UI and features. Japhet knew a lot about genealogy, but MyHeritage was a wonky, tech-heavy download before Geni's beautifully simple site launched—and got a whopping $100 million valuation. Later, when Japhet saw OSN's faster growth in Europe, he knew he had to have them. Japhet says OSN didn't have a deep understanding of genealogy, but they killed it on features, many of which MyHeritage will be keeping. Among other things OSN had an iPhone app, operated in 14 different languages, and offered poster printing of family trees in any size. "There's nothing like German engineering," Japhet says. [Update: Originally I wrote "40 languages" which is what I heard via our Skype connection.] Japhet's favorite feature is the coat of arms. If you don't have one, you can create your own, and it appears on all your pages—you can even order merchandise bearing your new coat of arms. The site will soon allow you to register it with the coat of arms authorities– a big hit with its European audience. When designing his own coat of arms, Japhet was a bit put off by the dragons and swords and instead asked an engineer to design some chess pieces. Yep, tech geeks are the same in every country. Is all of this making MyHeritage a target for someone like Ancestry.com? "I'd like to say we're too expensive for them," Japhet said. MyHeritage has raised $24 million to date and started to focus on revenues last year. It's profitable now, making money through ecommerce transactions and premium services. MyHeritage has been funded by some of the strongest investors in Europe including Index and Accel. That's ultimately the thing I find most exciting about Japhet and MyHeritage—he wants to build a billion dollar business, and he's not put off by how long that will take or by the rap that Israelis are great at enterprise, but bad at the consumer Internet. Japhet himself wasn't naturally great at it, but he's benefited mightily from his competitors who were and moved quickly to compensate—whether it's learning from them or buying them.
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Last summer, at the inaugural 
One perceived weakness of 
Right off the heels of filing for a 
Nice timing, 
I’m starting to suspect people like free stuff – a shocker, I know. 
Normally, it takes quite a bit of time before a startup gets any sort of mainstream spotlight. That’s not the case with 
I remember way back before the Internet when I got most of my daily news via the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN. If it wasn’t reported by either of those outlets, there was a good chance I wouldn’t hear that news at all.
I’m here at the Facebook Technology Tasting, where the social network is showcasing their newly open sourced PHP technology, 
Early this morning, Twitter began 
As great as Android phones are 
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