The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- How To Make Facebook, FedEx, And Amazon More Fun
- The Final Tally: More Than 1100 Cities Apply For Google’s Fiber Network
- CrunchGear’s Weekend Giveaway: An HTC HD2 from T-Mobile
- Why America Needs To Start Educating Its Workforce Again
- Google VP Bradley Horowitz Talks Buzz’s Future, Gmail Innovation, And More (Video)
- The Connection Between Fake Steve Jobs And Walt Mosspuppet
- A Recap Of The Daniel Ek SXSW Spotify Keynote — In Rap Form
- Thank You TechCrunch Sponsors!
- Jobs And Schmidt: We’ve Seen This Movie Before, I’m Just Not Sure Which One It Is
- Factual Turns On Tools To Visualize Its Big Data
- What Happens When Apple Passes Microsoft In Value? Yes, When.
- Facebook Foreshadows New Features With Privacy Policy Tweaks
- Facebook’s Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For
- Google Receives More Than 600 Community Requests For Broadband Network
- CTIA 2010 Wrap-up: Android, Android, Android
- Why The Hell Was Panasonic Gobel Trending on Twitter? Blame Indonesia
- Some iPhone Video Apps Won’t Be Approved Unless They Can Adapt To AT&T’s Lousy Network
- Image Space Media Upgrades In-Image Ad Network With Analytics Dashboard
| How To Make Facebook, FedEx, And Amazon More Fun Posted: 27 Mar 2010 08:30 AM PDT
What if everything we did was a little more fun? Ever since Foursquare burst onto the scene with its clever badges and simplified "mayoral" achievements, people have been going gaga for game mechanics (and Gaga videos, circumstantially). Its competitors and allies, from Gowalla and Yelp to Miso, Hot Potato and my own startup, beamME, have been evangelizing the value of points, badges, levels, challenges, leaderboards and achievements as an easy and powerful way to get consumers to engage with a product or service. This use of game mechanics outside of games—also known as Funware—is taking the social web and mobile apps world by storm. Almost every aspiring startup—and many established brands, including Chase, NBC and the US Army—are turning to Funware to deliver results that traditional/social marketing simply cannot deliver. As I explain in my new book, Game-Based Marketing, game mechanics can make any service or community more fun; and when given a choice between two similar activities, consumers will always choose the one that's more enjoyable. Wouldn't you? Within the next 10 years, almost every consumer interaction will have game mechanics built into it. You'll earn points for filing your taxes early, virtual badges for doing public service, and there will even be game shows on TV offering purely virtual rewards. Yes, I'm officially predicting "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grade Farmville Player?" (Coming Fall 2015 on NBC) But the use of game mechanics isn't limited to things that already seem somewhat enjoyable. I always get asked the same question about how to apply game mechanics to specific, challenging product categories—and even how to make great products better. So in the spirit of fun, here's my wishlist for the top three web/mobile apps I'd like to see "gameified", and the three major game mechanics they should use: Leaderboards, Points and Status. Facebook. Yes, it's the world's most popular social network, and perhaps the most trafficked website in the U.S., but it still could be a lot more fun.
A socialized leaderboard would allow you to more easily gauge the popularity of your social graph and give you an incentive to make/add more connections to the service. Maybe the score could be weighted to reward adding friends ho are more active on the site, or who in turn have more connections than others. A well-designed board would also let you see your relative and absolute ranking, along with a simple invitation to do just a little better ("add two more friends to beat Sam's score"). It could even be designed to reward you for having more friends you actually interact with by scoring your behavior. Generating that kind of behavior would be a huge win-win. Having more friends generally equates to greater personal satisfaction with Facebook and in real life, while Facebook has frequently called the number of connections the most important driver of user growth and engagement. All this is possible through the simple power of the leaderboard and would further cement Facebook's intrinsic potential for fun. Fedex. With the rise of e-commerce and simplified logistics, merchants and consumers are ever more acquainted with how to ship packages across the country and the world. After all, simplifying shipping (with things like the Free Super Saver at Amazon) has been credited as one of the most important drivers of e-commerce growth. But why can't the experience of shipping (or receiving packages) be made more fun and social?
If they wanted to kick it up a notch, they could even incorporate tracking stream data from competitive carriers (look at how much slower UPS is!) and let consumers use the power of human intelligence to do warehouse-to-destination routing calculus, a super complex math problem that could be easily made into a fun game. Suddenly, shipping isn't just a commodity – it's enjoyable – and it's entirely possible with points. Amazon.com book reviews. Paul Carr recently wrote an impassioned essay about the failure of Amazon's book reviews to adjust for consumer vigilantism. While the comments were interesting and the suggestions lucid, making Amazon's (or Yelp's, or TripAdvisor's) product and service reviews more accurate and relevant can be better accomplished through the thoughtful application of Funware, rather than one-off rulemaking. In fact, Amazon's review scheme was one of the first highly successful reputation systems, using basic badge mechanics and "flagging" to encourage and reward thorough reviews. Despite its early lead however, the review system on the site has stagnated in the last few years, with irrelevant badges becoming the norm ("Top 500 Reviewer") and no true connection to a social graph. By taking a page from Farmville and other Facebook games, Amazon could reignite the fun of writing reviews on the site and go a long way toward eliminating the chaff that clogs up the works. The key is to associate the reviews with the social graph in a way that both friends and prospective buyers can see. I'd start by creating a virtual bookshelf for every book purchased – whether on Kindle or in the real world – allowing people to connect that to Facebook and curate the contents. Now take a page out of Blippy and Farmville and post this every time a purchase is made: Gabe just purchased Game-Based Marketing on Amazon.com, check out his bookshelf. This will drive friends to visit Gabe's virtual bookshelf giving Amazon a fun way to socialize book (or other product) buying, but also ensuring that the original buyers' friends are reading their reviews (which rarely happens today). Then, issue visual, socialized badges for buying, reading, reviewing and evangelism behaviors so that users' status is directly connected to the books they have on their virtual shelves and what they say about them. Since we also know that badges are highly effective at creating positive status loops and desirable behaviors, Amazon could easily issue badges for a wide range of reading activities. Whether its Science Fiction book discovery or reading 20% of the available bestsellers on Barack Obama, given the scope of literature, there are a virtually unlimited number of badges that could be earned! Now, allow random buyers to browse Gabe's virtual bookshelf (or virtual living-room, kitchen, garden) directly from the product's page on Amazon. This will facilitate better reviewer/buyer understanding (my biggest personal complaint about reviews is that I can't judge the reviewers taste against my own) and keep reviewers more honest because their real social graph is connected to the books they choose to keep/curate. In short, Amazon could make book discovery, purchase and review a lot more fun by using socially publicized selections and badges to their advantage. Whether it's Facebook, Fedex, Amazon or your own startup, Funware and game mechanics can have a profound impact on how customers interact with each other and with your products. Incorporating points, badges, levels, challenges, leaderboards and achievements is a straightforward way to drive consumer engagement, even when the underlying activity isn't intrinsically enjoyable. It's a lesson we've learned time and time again—if a game mechanic is good enough, users won't care if the theme is banal (Farmville) or the activity repetitive (Foursquare); all they care about are the virtual rewards for a virtual job well done. In our fun future, we'll earn these virtual, social rewards for everything we do—from shipping packages to taking out our trash, from getting good grades to buying books. If the rapid success of early Funware apps are any indication, perhaps a more playful world is closer than we think.      
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| The Final Tally: More Than 1100 Cities Apply For Google’s Fiber Network Posted: 27 Mar 2010 07:44 AM PDT
Yesterday, Google product manager posted a blog post stating that 600 communities applied to be a guinea pig for the search giants experimental fiber network. And 190,000 individuals wrote letters of support for their communities to be chosen. But the post was written with 5 hours until the deadline, so it was expected that more cities would apply to be chosen by the end of the day on Friday. Yesterday night, Kelly updated the post with the final tally: 1100 communities submitted applications, and 194,000 individuals posted letters of support for their communities. Google also posted a map showing the locations of the applications and letters of support. Each small dot represents a government response, and each large dot represents locations where more than 1,000 residents submitted a nomination. It appears that applications centralized around both coasts, with a few of the central areas of the U.S. noticeably lacking in participation. We wrote about the great lengths many cities and towns were taking to catch the attention of Google, in the hope that the search giant would choose their community for its fiber network. The broadband network would be completely free for the chosen city (only the consumers using the services will be charged) and the 1Gb/sec fiber would be roughly 100 times faster than what most Americans get today for Internet speeds. Google’s plan is to reach anywhere from 50,000 to 500,000 people with this experiment. In terms of the application process, Google asked that interested municipalities fill out a Request for Information (RFI) to help determine the best community for the experiment. Google estimated that each form/request from cities would take around 4 hours to complete. Individuals and citizens can also submit letters of support for cities. The next step, says Google, is to review all of the city applications and individual letters of support, perform site visits, consult with third-party organizations as well has communicate with local officials in cities of interest. A final city/town is expected to be announced by the end of the year. Google’s broadband plan is designed to compliment the U.S. government’s ten year broadband plan, which among other goals, wants to subsidize broadband connections in rural areas, and bring 1-gigabit connections to every community in the U.S. But there are a number of flaws with the government’s strategy, namely that the plans aren’t ambitious enough. For example, under the new plan, some 85% of homes covered would have no choice when it comes to a provider, possibly locking users into higher prices because of a lack of competition. So at then end of the day, Google represents a small beacon of hope in that it could provide a concrete example for other communities or broadband providers to follow. And while Google’s initial plan involves a fiber network at a very, very small scale, if all goes well, Google could end up expanding the project nationally.      
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| CrunchGear’s Weekend Giveaway: An HTC HD2 from T-Mobile Posted: 27 Mar 2010 05:16 AM PDT  Wakey wakey, eggs and a culturally accepted meat or vegetable product that can be diminutized to rhyme with "wakey!" Have we got a surprise for you. This weekend we're giving away an HTC HD2 GSM phone for T-Mobile. If you recall, the HD2 is a glorious Windows Mobile 6.5 phone with lots of great things built-in including a huge, beautiful screen, Wi-Fi, and it even comes with two Transformers movies right on the handset. Seriously good stuff. I haven't been a fan of Windows Mobile since 2000 and even I like it. How do you win?
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| Why America Needs To Start Educating Its Workforce Again Posted: 27 Mar 2010 03:40 AM PDT
That was until the '70s. IBM still provides good training, but try getting a job there today: unless you have just the right skills, you won't even score an interview. New recruits don't receive the year or so of training that was common; they get a few days of orientation, after which they're expected to be productive. It's the same at Microsoft, Google, Apple, and almost every tech company. Unless you have the alphabet soup of technologies on your resume, you'll get nothing more than an auto-response to your job application. If you do get hired, it's up to you to stay current or get booted out with the first dip in sales. American corporations consider their workforce to be disposable — like ball-point pens and cigarette lighters. Gone are the days when a company would train a factory worker to become a computer programmer or offer lifelong employment. It's all about quarterly revenue and profits now. Large corporations do offer some employee training programs, but managers often discourage their workers from participating in them. Why invest in workers when there is no clear payback? After all, training requires time off, and costs the department money. And bosses fear that once their subordinates gain new skills, they will be more likely to jump ship — to a better-paying competitor. That's the common belief.
Industry pundits often tout India's engineering-graduation rates as India's advantage. As far back as 2002, "experts" claimed that India graduates 350,000 engineers every year. The reality is that India has a weak education system and produces far fewer engineers than is commonly believed. In 2002, it graduated 102,000 engineers. By 2006, this number had increased to 222,000 (and will be double that again, by 2011). India does have some excellent engineering schools, but at best, only half of the output of India's engineering colleges are employable upon graduation. Yet in 2007, India's five largest IT services companies added 120,000 engineering jobs. IBM and Accenture added 14,000 engineers each in India in the same year. That's only seven of the hundreds of companies that hired engineers that year. Where did these engineers come from, and how is it that India's R&D industry is booming? My team made several trips to India during 2007 and 2008 and met the executives of dozens of leading companies to solve this puzzle. We also interviewed workers in R&D labs and reviewed the types of work they were doing. We were astonished at what we learned. I'll explain. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Japanese achieved major advances in manufacturing management, which led to their rise as an economic power. The Japanese economic miracle and the country's new manufacturing skills and methods surprised western firms; but the Japanese had done this by studying, adopting, and eventually perfecting the best practices of the West itself. My research team (at Harvard and Duke) found that India is achieving similar feats in workforce development by learning from the best practices of the western companies that have outsourced their computer systems and call centers there. It has adopted these practices and perfected them. Faced with severe talent shortages; escalating salaries; and a lagging education system, Indian industry had to adapt and has built innovative and comprehensive approaches to workforce training and management. Their initial focus was on training new recruits and filling entry-level skill gaps. Now, they are investing in constantly improving the skills and management abilities of their workers and in providing incentives for them to stay and to grow with the company. We published a report titled "How the Disciple Became the Guru", which details the workforce-development practices of 24 leading companies in India (note: there are many bodyshops in India that don’t invest in their people, we looked at the biggest companies). I suggest you download and read this, but I'll present some highlights here of what the best Indian companies are doing right. Recruitment: When you're looking for a job, what's the first thing you do? Create a good résumé. What does a good résumé tell about a person? Simply the ability to write a good résumé. The résumé doesn't reflect skill, potential, or aptitude. Indian companies figured this out long ago. So they started putting applicants through batteries of psychometric tests and rigorous interviews. They hire for general ability and aptitude, rather than specialized domain and technical skills. Indian companies also learned to cast a wider net when looking for people with potential. Instead of hiring only from elite engineering colleges, technology companies such as Infosys, HCL, and TCS recruit from second- and third-tier colleges all across the country, and also in arts and science schools. India's largest call-center operator, Genpact, has set up branded storefronts in 19 cities, where applicants can learn about the company and apply for a job; no resume required. New-employee training: Companies in India assume that new recruits will have to be trained practically from scratch. So most large companies have built dedicated learning centers, and some employ hundreds of training staff. The Infosys Global Education Centre at Mysore can train 13,500 people at a time. New recruits attend a 16-week boot camp that strengthens their technical, communications, and management skills. For its arts and science recruits, TCS provides an additional three months of training. That's right: fresh recruits get four to seven months of training before starting work. Continuing training: Employees are typically required to participate in a wide range of education programs, including not only technical and domain training but also a wide range of soft skills and management skills encompassing training in quality processes; communication; and cultural, foreign-language and personal-effectiveness skills. It is common for companies to mandate one to four weeks of yearly training for employees. That is more than the vacation time that many Americans get. And these workers get rewarded for improving their skills: career advancement and salary increases are usually tied to the completion of training. Companies don't just offer online courses. They have programs of mentorship by senior executives; peer learning and knowledge sharing; and job-rotation programs. Take the example of Cadence India. Its CEO, Jaswinder Ahuja, instituted a "leaders as teachers" program under which every manager is required to spend one to two weeks teaching internal classes. Not even the CEO is exempted from this rule. Training is considered so important that the most senior executives do their part. Trainers are often the most skilled and successful employees rather than those who couldn't cut it in customer engagements. Managerial development: Managers are typically groomed through fast-track programs that provide management training and mentorship to highly performing employees. Preference is usually given to internal staff to fill management openings. (Yes, many companies have a policy that insiders get first dibs at management jobs). The formal training curricula include project-management, team-building, people-management, communication, coaching, and other managerial skills. On-the-job learning is provided through a variety of structured developmental experiences: job rotations, early managerial responsibilities, cross-functional projects and experiences, and intrapreneurship initiatives. There was a time when Indian companies were so desperate to hire western-trained and -educated managers that these people would command premium salaries. Today, companies find that they can hire better talent locally. Gone are the big salaries. Returnees to India with too much management experience from abroad can have a hard time even finding a job in India. Performance management and appraisal: Companies use ERP-like systems to manage the human-development process. Employees usually get reviewed at the end of every project. They are prescribed training if found to have weakness. (Yes, the performance review is used to guide development, rather than to protect the company from lawsuits in case they need to fire you). Mechanisms such as 360-degree reviews (wherein you review your bosses and peers) and balanced-scorecard reviews are widely used. Managers are evaluated on a variety of non-financial measures, including employee satisfaction, attrition rates, and mentoring. Where is the proof that these policies work? The myth is that Indian IT companies have high turnover that is and getting worse. As the graph below shows, at a time when the Indian IT industry's growth rates averaged a dizzying 40%, attrition rates at top Indian companies fell, or stayed in the low-teen percentages. Compare this with Silicon Valley, where a typical recruit works for a new employer for three to five years at best — which translates to a 20–33% attrition rate. (Indian IT company rates dropped even further in 2009 — not reflected in the chart). Most interestingly: Indian companies learned that with better education, employees became more productive so they could afford to pay higher salaries without hurting corporate profit margins. Additionally, the Indian R&D industry has been moving into the higher realms of innovation. In the aerospace industry, Indian companies are designing the interiors of luxury jets, in-flight entertainment systems, collision-control / navigation-control systems, fuel-inverting controls, and other key components of jetliners for American and European corporations. In pharmaceuticals, Indian scientists are discovering drugs and performing clinical research for nearly all of the largest multinational drug companies. In the automotive industry, Indian engineers are helping to design bodies, dashboards, and power trains for Detroit vehicle manufacturers — and creating their own innovations, such at the Tata Nano car. In telecommunications and computer networking, Indians are developing next-generation infrastructure for tomorrow's intelligent cities. There are over a hundred thousand people in India doing this type of advanced R&D. The Indian experience highlights what can be achieved by investing in upgrading the skills of the workforce. If workforce training can take the output of an education system as weak as India's and turn its graduates into world-class engineers and scientists, imagine what could be done with a worker base that has received amongst the best education in the world, as is the case in the United States. U.S. companies have long played the guru, developing and disseminating many widely adopted management and workforce practices. The time has come for the guru to learn from one of its disciples: India.      
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| Google VP Bradley Horowitz Talks Buzz’s Future, Gmail Innovation, And More (Video) Posted: 26 Mar 2010 07:47 PM PDT
During his talk, Horowitz spoke at length about Google’s new Apps Marketplace, which allows businesses using Google Apps to easily sign up for a variety of third party services like TripIt and Aviary, directly linking them to their Google accounts. He then sat down for a fireside chat with Dave McClure, who asked him about a variety of issues pertaining to Buzz, Gmail, and other topics. Here are some of my notes from the fireside chat:
Here’s the Horowitz’s full talk and the fireside chat, broken into two parts: Part 2 Here’s a one on one interview McClure and Horowitz conducted before the talk:       
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| The Connection Between Fake Steve Jobs And Walt Mosspuppet Posted: 26 Mar 2010 07:32 PM PDT
The fact that Lyons promotes many of the Mosspuppet videos on Fake Steve certainly suggests a strong connection. The truth, at least according to Dan Lyons (I think I was talking to Dan, but it may have been Fake Steve. I’m never sure with him): Not true. Lyons says he helped Hogg with some of the early scripts and has advised him to shorten the videos, but other than that he’s just a fan. “Would you lie to me, Dan?” “Never, Mike. Never.” He added “If I was writing the scripts to Mosspuppet, they’d be a lot funnier.” So there you have it.      
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| A Recap Of The Daniel Ek SXSW Spotify Keynote — In Rap Form Posted: 26 Mar 2010 06:25 PM PDT Whenever there’s a big event, like SXSW, we usually have people there to live-blog the important keynotes and/or write recaps of it afterwards. I’m not gonna lie, sometimes those are boring. You know what’s better? Rap songs that recap keynotes. Hip-hop artist SaulPaul has released a video on YouTube which recaps the keynote Spotify CEO Daniel Ek gave at SXSW this year (here’s our more traditional write-ups of it). It’s awesome. I want all my conference recaps this way. Me and Jason Kincaid are going to have to learn how to freestyle for sure — or get SaulPaul to do these for us. Hands down, the best line:
     
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| Thank You TechCrunch Sponsors! Posted: 26 Mar 2010 05:20 PM PDT
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| Jobs And Schmidt: We’ve Seen This Movie Before, I’m Just Not Sure Which One It Is Posted: 26 Mar 2010 04:00 PM PDT Earlier today, two men were spotted having coffee in Palo Alto, CA. Except these weren’t just any two men. They were the CEOs of perhaps the two most important and powerful companies in Silicon Valley right now, Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Big deal, you might think. After all, Schmidt used to be on Apple’s board. But ever since he stepped down (and actually before he did), the growing animosity between the two formerly close companies has been apparent. So what does their coffee date mean? Well, obviously, only Jobs and Schmidt know for sure. Gizmodo, which scored the pictures, also has accounts that they were discussing technology. It’s a better sign than if they were screaming at one another, I suppose. But, as with anything Apple, you should never discount the possibility that this entire thing was staged so that someone would see them and snap a picture that would produce a thousand blog posts. Few companies (if any) handle their image better than Apple. So the fact that these images exist immediately raised the notion in my head that Apple wants them to exist. Remember, these pictures come after weeks of Apple getting dragged through the mud as a big bully for moves such as suing HTC over mobile patents, a move which everyone realizes is actually a suit over Google’s Android operating system infringing on those patents. And then, of course, there’s what Steve Jobs supposedly said about Google at an Apple Town Hall meeting. So anyway, regardless of the circumstances behind the meeting, the meeting itself is interesting given the current state of affairs between Apple and Google. And when I see these pictures, I can’t help but think I’ve seen this scene before — in several movies. I’m just not sure which one today’s meeting more closely resembles. (Warning: A few movie spoilers ahead.) Movie 1: Heat Michael Mann’s 1995 movie Heat, is one of my favorite movies. In it, there’s a scene in which Al Pacino’s cop character, Vincent Hanna, pulls over Robert De Niro’s criminal character, Neil McCauley, and says, “What do you say I buy you a cup of coffee?” McCauley agrees, and the two enemies lay aside their differences for a few minutes to share some coffee at a local diner. The resulting talk is brilliant. It’s just two guys sharing their hardships brought about by their professions. They even note that in another life, they could probably be friends, but in this life, the next time they meet, they’ll probably have to kill one another. Movie 2: 500 Days Of Summer This movie springs to mind because I’ve used it before to talk about the break up of Apple and Google. In the film, after the breakup occurs, Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel) meet up in a park after having not seen each other for some time. It’s awkward as Summer is now married, and Tom is still alone. There’s clearly no hope for them to get back together, but the meeting ultimately ends up being a good one because they can both move on. Movie 3: The Princess Bride This reference was brought up almost immediately in the Gizmodo comments and by Digital Daily. In the movie, Westley (Cary Elwes) sits down to share a drink with Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) — but one of their drinks is poisoned. In the ensuing battle of wits, Vizzini believes he has tricked Westley (known to him only as the “Man In Black”) into drinking the poison, but little does he know that both cups were actually poisoned — and Westley is immune. It is Westley who gets the last laugh. Movie 4: Scarface Pacino again. In this movie, his character, Tony Montana, goes to meet with Alex Sosa, a Bolivian drug lord — and Tony’s main enemy. Sosa ends up helping Tony by revealing that one of his colleagues, Omar, is an informant. Omar is killed and Tony strikes a huge deal for 2,000 kilos of cocaine. Movie 5: Batman Begins In this film, a young Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) recklessly goes to meet with his enemy, crime boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). Falcone points a gun at Wayne and threatens to kill him. Years later, Wayne, as Batman, gets him back. Movie 6: Lost Okay, not a movie, but Lost might as well be one. The current plot of the final season revolves heavily around Jacob vs. The Man In Black (yes, just like The Princess Bride). At the end of last season, the two sit side-by-side on the beach and the Man In Black says to Jacob, “do you have any idea how badly I want to kill you?” Jacob replies, “Yes.” But neither kills the other, they just sit there, and reflect. Movie 7: The Seventh Seal In this movie, Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) routinely meets up with Death (Bengt Ekerot) to play a game of chess. If Block can defeat his rival in the game, he won’t die. Death gets his man, in the end. So that’s seven examples of would-be rivals taking a break from their fighting to meet up for some face time. There must be dozens others. Interestingly, in none of these situations do both sides end up making amends permanently. And actually, I’m having a hard time coming up with any example of a film where two sides patch things up over coffee. Not that movies are real-life, of course — but art does imitate life. That doesn’t speak well for Apple and Google.      
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| Factual Turns On Tools To Visualize Its Big Data Posted: 26 Mar 2010 02:05 PM PDT Big Data is great for geeks, but most normal people don’t get a kick out of looking at huge tables of data (Excel junkies excluded). Factual, which is an open database wiki, just added some tools to help visualize the data entered on the site. Every table now has a “visualizations” tab which lets anyone who publishes a set of data an easy way to turn that data into graphs, maps, and images. For instance, here is a map view of a restaurant database. Here is one for hiking trails which shows a difficulty dial, the length of the route, today’s weather, and which seasons the trail is open. Each visualization can be embedded as code onto a Website and is directly editable. For every entry there is an “edit this” button which lets anyone correct mistakes or add more information. In other words, people don’t have to go to Factual’s website to add restaurants or hiking rails to each database. They can edit the information directly on Websites where the visualizations are embedded. To encourage developers and designers to create more visualization templates, Factual is running a $500 contest for the best new visualizations to show off its databases of iPhone apps or cancer doctors in the U.S. Factual was founded by Applied Semantics co-founder Gil Elbaz and raised $1 million in seed funding earlier this year from Andreessen Horowitz, Idealab, and a group of super angels.      
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| What Happens When Apple Passes Microsoft In Value? Yes, When. Posted: 26 Mar 2010 12:49 PM PDT
Apple looks poised to get within $50 billion of Microsoft market cap any day now. Currently, Apple’s market cap is $208.76 billion, while Microsoft’s is $261.01 billion. And while $50 billion may seem like a huge chasm, consider that since December 31, 2009, just a few months ago, Apple has added about $20 billion to its market cap, while Microsoft has lost about $10 billion. Again, the gap is closing, quickly. Things are even more insane when you look at the data from a decade ago. Back then, Microsoft’s market cap was nearly $590 billion. It was the most valuable company in the world — by far (#2, GE, was over $100 billion behind). Apple, meanwhile, had a market cap of just $16 billion at the time. It was the 339th most valuable company in the world, two spots behind Volkswagen. Those were, of course, different times. Aside from that 2000 spike, Microsoft’s stock and value has remained largely stagnant. For example, it 1999, its market cap was $271 billion — $10 billion more than it is today. Apple, meanwhile, didn’t make the list that year. But with a stock price around $10 at that time, it was likely worth around $5 billion. But that’s the point. Aside from a dip during the stock market collapse at the end of 2008, Apple stock has been skyrocketing. In the past 10 years, it’s up over 500%. In that same time frame, Microsoft’s stock is down nearly 50% (again from those early 2000 numbers). Apple has soared past HP, Oracle, IBM, and most recently, Google, to move into the top five most valuable companies in the U.S. And again, that’s at a stock price of $230. And that’s before the iPad has even launched. Certainly, you could argue that if the device isn’t a complete blow-out hit, the stock will take a hit (and probably a fairly big one). But if it is a hit (and early pre-sales numbers suggest it may well be), the stock has just as good of a chance to soar further. In fact, several financial analysts are already upping the sales price target into the stratosphere. Credit Suisse, for example, set it to $300 today. Now, I’m generally wary of anything coming from analysts, but let’s just say Apple did hit $300-a-share. Remember, their performance the past few quarters has been stellar, and there is no reason to think that will stop, even without considering the iPad. So at $300-a-share, assuming the number of shares remains fairly constant, Apple would be worth $270 billion. Yes, ahead of Microsoft (assuming their market cap remains the same over that time). If that happens (and again, I venture to say it will happen), Apple fanboys will go through the roof. Never mind that last quarter, Microsoft still made more revenue than Apple ($19 billion versus $15 billion) and posted almost exactly double the profit ($6.6 billion versus $3.3 billion — though, thanks in large part to early Windows 7 sales). The perception is that Apple has been hitting home runs the past several years, while Microsoft has been largely stagnant with some big strikeouts (Vista). To mix in another sports analogy, Apple, it seems, simply picked the right time to back the right horse: mobile. As executives have been saying recently, Apple now considers itself a mobile devices company, because most of their money comes from there (they include laptops in that category). Microsoft, meanwhile, is just about the furthest thing from a mobile devices company. The only device they make themselves is the Zune, and their mobile software Windows Mobile, well, really dropped the ball the past decade. They’re now trying to capture some of that Apple mobile magic with Windows Phone 7 Series, and projects like the Pink phone and the Courier. Here’s the real problem for Microsoft though. If Apple does in fact pass Microsoft in market cap, I can see CEO Steve Ballmer losing it, and that could steal his focus away from what should still be considered his real enemy: Google. It is Google, after all, that is directly attacking the core Microsoft brands, Office and Windows, where the company makes practically all of its money. Google Apps and Chrome OS are meant to do two things: Kill Office and kill Windows. Sure, Apple’s OS X competes with Windows, but Apple is clearly never going to license out its OS (after a disastrous attempt to do so in the 1990s when Steve Jobs was away), so its market share can only ever be as big as people buying expensive Apple machines. Apple simply cares more about profits and controlling the high end of the market, then going directly after Windows. And actually, if both were smart and could bury the hatchet, Microsoft and Apple might be wise to team up. Google is now clearly an enemy for both of them. (Which is a bit odd, considering that it used to be Apple and Google teaming up in a major way to take on the shared rival, Microsoft.) If Microsoft really wants to compete in search, for example, their best move may be to strike a deal with Apple to become the default on the iPhone (and iPad). But I’m worried such rational thinking will go out the window if Apple passes Microsoft in market cap. And internal bickering at Microsoft will stop them from gaining focus. Or, rather, when Apple passes Microsoft in market cap. The trajectory of the two stocks in recent years: And here’s a chart for a little overall perspective on stock prices: Silicon Alley Insider also recently made a nice chart of the market cap battle between the two: [image: 20th Century Fox]      
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| Facebook Foreshadows New Features With Privacy Policy Tweaks Posted: 26 Mar 2010 12:34 PM PDT Facebook introduced some changes to its privacy policy today in advance of new features which will be rolling out soon, perhaps during its f8 developer conference next month. Some of the changes foreshadow new features dealing with location, taking advantage of the expanded “Everyone” settings, syncing contacts on your mobile phone with your Facebook contacts, and sharing your personal data with select Facebook Connect partners. The most significant change seems like it could allow third-party sites to automatically sign you into Facebook Connect just based on your browser cookies. Another change sets up new location features. Facebook previously added some location language to its privacy policy back in October, but it’s now tweaked it again. It looks like not only will it be possible to associate a specific location with status updates, photo uploads, and other posts, but Facebook will also make it possible to add a geo-component Facebook pages, such as one for a store or a restaurant. So a link to a fan page for a store could also carry with it where it is located. The other changes make it clearer what it means when you share your status updates and posts with “everyone” and who can find that information. It also makes a distinction between your ability to control who can access information on your personal page versus stuff you share on public pages. There is also a change which talks about syncing your Facebook contacts with those on your mobile phone, another indication of how serious Facebook is about its mobile efforts.      
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| Facebook’s Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For Posted: 26 Mar 2010 12:34 PM PDT
So what does that mean? We’ve heard that select Facebook partners will now be able to look for your existing Facebook cookie to identify you, even if you never opted into Facebook Connect on the site you’re visiting. Using that, the third party site will be able to display your friends and other key information. It’s possible that these sites will also be able to display any data you’ve shared with ‘everyone‘, which is of course now the default option on Facebook. Facebook’s draft privacy policy states that you’ll be able to opt-out of these sites, and you’ll also be able to opt-out of these ‘pre-approved’ experiences entirely. But by default, you’re all in. How convenient. Here’s the langauge from the draft privacy policy itself. Note that the ‘About Platform’ page does not yet include a list of approved partners:
Here’s how Facebook defines the term ‘General Information’:
     
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| Google Receives More Than 600 Community Requests For Broadband Network Posted: 26 Mar 2010 12:30 PM PDT
That’s an impressive number and the application process still isn’t over with four more hours to go until the deadline. Google asked that interested municipalities fill out a Request for Information (RFI) to help determine the best community for the experiment. Google estimated that each form/request from cities would take around 4 hours to complete. Individuals and citizens can also submit letters of support for cities; Google says that over 190,000 letters have been submitted over the past month. The next step, says Google, is to review all of the city applications and individual letters of support, perform site visits, consult with third-party organizations as well has communicate with local officials in cities of interest. A final city/town is expected to be announced by the end of the year. As we wrote yesterday, Google plan is designed to compliment the U.S. government’s ten year broadband plan, which among other goals, wants to subsidize broadband connections in rural areas, and bring 1-gigabit connections to every community in the U.S. But there are a number of flaws with the government’s strategy, namely that the plans aren’t ambitious enough. For example, under the new plan, some 85% of homes covered would have no choice when it comes to a provider, possibly locking users into higher prices because of a lack of competition. So at then end of the day, Google represents a small beacon of hope in that it could provide a concrete example for other communities or broadband providers to follow. And while Google’s initial plan involves a fiber network at a very, very small scale, if all goes well, Google could end up expanding the project nationally. Google will be posting the final application numbers tonight. We’ll update this post with the final tally. Photo by Mike Bergen (AidJoy.org for the City of Greenville)      
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| CTIA 2010 Wrap-up: Android, Android, Android Posted: 26 Mar 2010 11:59 AM PDT Bags have been packed, poker chips have been cashed, and planes have been boarded – and with that, the mobile-focused CTIA 2010 convention in Las Vegas has come to a close. Each time an event like this blows through town, tech heads do their best to distract themselves from their hangovers by writing monstrous posts on which platform or technology “won” the show. When it comes to CTIA 2010, the winner is clear cut and undisputed: Android. They could have called this year’s show “Android Week” and no one would have questioned it. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>      
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| Why The Hell Was Panasonic Gobel Trending on Twitter? Blame Indonesia Posted: 26 Mar 2010 11:35 AM PDT
Well if you’re a venture capitalist, an entrepreneur or a corporation you should care a lot. Because it illustrates the incredible power of the Indonesian internet consumer, or rather their consumer in general. Indonesia is undergoing a period of growth (it grew 4.5% last year during the global financial crisis) but has largely flown under the radar— despite housing more than 230 million people and being the fourth most populated country in the world. Of course, Indonesia is still struggling with high unemployment and poverty but like China and India it has a growing middle class that is spending more time on the internet, especially on social media sites like Twitter. To put this power in perspective: For a few hours this morning, Panasonic’s name was on the homepage of every Twitter user that logged on. Think this event is just some anomaly? Here’s more evidence of Indonesia’s presence on Twitter: Google Trends shows that Indonesia is Twitter’s fourth largest source of traffic, behind US, Japan, Brazil. Panasonic has been increasing its footprint in the region. This month, the company announced plans to relocate factories in Japan and Vietnam to Indonesia later this year. While its coup on Twitter was unexpected, I’m sure Panasonic executives are exploring (or will soon start aggressively exploring) new ways to reach the region’s consumer through social media. So far, they don’t quite get it. I manged to talk to a few Panasonic PR reps in the US and Malaysia this morning and even Panasonic seemed surprised by their reach and not fully aware of what the Panasonic Gobel show was. Their response was a mix of “wow” (“It’s doing what on Twitter?”…”Oh, I need to join Twitter.”) and “what?” (all three representatives I talked to were either completely unaware of the show or needed to dig around to get the basic information). Full disclosure: I am part Indonesian and I covered the region a few years ago as a freelance writer for the NY Times. You can color me biased, but I think the proof is in the tweet.      
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| Some iPhone Video Apps Won’t Be Approved Unless They Can Adapt To AT&T’s Lousy Network Posted: 26 Mar 2010 10:51 AM PDT Video streaming apps on the iPhone in the U.S. have always had to contend with the limitations of AT&T’s data network. For a long time, video streaming apps were not allowed in the App Store. And when they did finally get approved, at first they could only stream videos via WiFi. As AT&T slowly beefs up its data network, iPhone apps can now deliver streams over 3G. But network availability is still an issue, so much so that Apple is now requiring that video watching apps support multiple streaming bitrates before it will approve an app. At least that was the case for Justin.tv’s iPhone video app, which hit the App Store earlier this week. During the approval process, Justin.tv was asked to incorporate both high-quality (200 kbps) and low-quality (64 kbps) streams. The video switches to a low-quality when the 3G network is overloaded or only the slower EDGE network is available (which renders any video painful to watch no matter what the bitrate). “We were a bit confused by this request at the time, as none of the other live video applications in the App Store had that feature,” reports Justin.tv marketing VP Evan Solomon. “Apple was very adamant that we add it—they wouldn’t approve our app without it,” he adds. Apple is increasingly encouraging developers of video apps to include adaptive bitrates which vary based on the user’s connection. Currently Apple requires all long-form video (which includes live streams and anything over 10 minutes) to support low and high quality streams. But eventually Apple will likely start to enforce this policy for all videos and video apps, no matter what the length. Already at least one online video platform, Brightcove, dynamically adjusts the streaming rates when it detects a video request from an iPhone app. So it is becoming more of an industry practice. Now it looks like Apple is starting to reinforce that practice through the App Store approval process as well.      
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| Image Space Media Upgrades In-Image Ad Network With Analytics Dashboard Posted: 26 Mar 2010 10:50 AM PDT
Called the PubStop platform, the tool allows publishers to value which of their images are yielding higher earnings so they can place content in the places that earn the highest click-through-rates (CTRs). The dashboard features total ad impressions, total clicks, CTRs, eCPMs, number of images and more statistics that can help publishers manage their ads on the network. Image Space Media’s ads are text only for now but founder and COO Kevin Tung says that rich media ad formats will be implemented in the network soon. While Tung declined to reveal exact CTRs that Image Space’s ads are seeing, he says that CTRs are higher than average rates for normal display ads, which he says range from .2 % to .3%. He adds that CTRs depend on size and dimensions of the ad itself. The startup also just raised $2.9 million in funding from New Atlantic Ventures, Ridgeline Capital, and Michael Gordon and brought on a new CEO last year, Jesse Chenard, who Tung actually met at TechCrunch50 in 2008. Image Space Media faces competition from GumGum and others.
     
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Editor’s note: Should everything be a game? In this guest post, 
Let's take your "friend score", for example. Most of us know exactly how many friends we have, and are keeping a running tally of our friends who have an outrageous number of connections and those who barely socialize on the site at all. (Facebook says the average user has about 200 friends). In effect, we are keeping a running leaderboard in our minds of how our social graph ranks by popularity. But why not make the leaderboard public? Consider that Orkut exists almost entirely because of this incidental feature (the country-by-country leaderboard is what made nationalistic Brazilians sign up by the millions to "beat" the US).
What if Fedex allowed you to connect your social graph to your shipments, letting you see your en route packages on a game board relative to your friends? You would receive points and rankings for various shipping stats, such as total time in transit, miles traveled per day, and so on. You could "talk smack" to friends whose packages were sent via ground (or the USPS), and even choose to use points to speed up shipments already underway. You could even design it to reward "green" choices as a second level of interaction. In short, the game would have a built-in incentive to get users to choose faster shipment methods and to publicize their choice of carrier.
Ask any old-time IBMer, and you will hear stories of IBM's legendary workforce-development practices. When a manager identified a manufacturing worker with promise, the company would teach him how to dress, how to speak to clients, and how to service products. These technicians would then be trained to be computer programmers, sales reps, or product managers. IBM president Thomas Watson, Sr., considered education so important that, in 1932, he started a mini-university for employees, the 
Last night dozens of entrepreneurs and investors met up in Palo Alto for 
The rumor circulating around Silicon Valley yesterday: 
We would like to take a minute to thank all of our amazing sponsors. You guys rock!
Apple’s 
In anticipation of a slew of new features that will be launching at f8, today Facebook announced that it was once again making changes to its privacy policy (you can see our post outlining these changes 
Yesterday, we 
Your first question is probably what the hell is a “Gobel” and will it rival Foursquare? Not quite. It’s Panasonic’s subsidiary in Indonesia and it was also a top trending topic on 
TechCrunch50 demopit company 
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