The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- EU, U.S. Justice Department Approve Cisco’s $3.4 Billion Acquisition of Tandberg
- Hulu Versus TV Everywhere: What Happens After The Comcast-NBC Merger Is Complete?
- Opera Mini Sees 50.5 Million Mobile Users In February, Up 145 Percent
- Apple Confirms: iPad On Sale In “Most” Best Buy Stores On April 3, From 9 AM
- Avnet To Acquire Bell Microproducts In Deal Valued At $594 Million
- Screenwriting Software Company Scripped Merges With Zhura, Raises Funding
- Dashboard App For iPad: Sneak Preview Video
- Quora Has The Magic: Benchmark Invests at $86 Million Valuation
- No Flash On The iPad? No Problem. Brightcove Turns Videos Into HTML5.
- NSFW: The Madness of King Rupert – I Admit, I Was Wrong About Murdoch’s Mental State
- Reeder 2.0: Finally, An Awesome iPhone Feed Reader Arrives
| EU, U.S. Justice Department Approve Cisco’s $3.4 Billion Acquisition of Tandberg Posted: 29 Mar 2010 09:01 AM PDT
Cisco and the Norway and New York-based Tandberg both developed competing tele-video conferencing technologies. The release says that the European Commission took into account Cisco’s ambitions to incorporate Tandberg’s technologies to further interoperability between its multi-screen video conferencing products and competitive products. As a condition of the approval of the deal, Cisco is required to appoint an independent monitor, who must be approved by the Commission, to oversee the implementation of these commitments. Once the Commission approves the independent monitor, the deall can close. Cisco recently bought up Rohati Systems, and acquired the set-top box business of one of China’s largest cable companies, DVN, for $44.5 million. This deal was peanuts compared to Cisco’s other 2009 acquisitions including the acquisition of ScanSafe for $183 million. And last fall, Cisco announced a $2.9 billion acquisition of mobile networking infrastructure provider Starent Networks. Photo credit/Flickr/TedPercival      
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| Hulu Versus TV Everywhere: What Happens After The Comcast-NBC Merger Is Complete? Posted: 29 Mar 2010 08:46 AM PDT The pending $30 billion merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal is going to complicate things for Hulu, the second most popular online video site after YouTube. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC, News Corp/Fox, and (since last year) Disney/ABC. It was created by the TV networks as a counterweight to YouTube, a safe place where they could run their full-length TV shows online with their own ads. Comcast, however, is championing TV Everywhere, which is an entirely different model for professionally-produced Web video. TV Everywhere is going to put TV channels online behind a paywall where only existing cable subscribers can watch them. Once Comcast owns a part of Hulu, there will be more pressure to put parts of Hulu behind a paywall as well. One knowledgeable industry source speculates that “Comcast will push Hulu very hard to become an authenticated destination for TV Everywhere.” If that happens, Hulu could end up offering less free content and more premium shows. In this scenario, there will be a two-tiered system. Some shows will be available for free, but a larger selection will be available only to paying cable subscribers. TV Everywhere will work on a federated model. Comcast might have its own TV Everywhere portal, giving its subscribers access to many of the channels they get on their TVs. But individual networks can also set up their own online video sites available only to “authenticated” subscribers. HBO Go is an example of one such federated site. Hulu could set up become another authenticated site, offering the TV Everywhere fare only behind the paywall. Ever since the Comcast-NBC merger was announced, questions have swirled about what will happen to Hulu and free TV on the Web. While NBC says it “has no plans to remove the kind of shows currently offered over the Internet on an ad-supported basis,” both NBC and Comcast refuse to guarantee that current or future TV shows will be available for free online. Media companies in general seem to be backing away from Hulu. For instance, Viacom recently pulled two of the most popular shows from Hulu, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show. Now the prospect of a two-tiered Hulu may confuse things even more for consumers. Photo credit: Flickr/Richard Durdl      
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| Opera Mini Sees 50.5 Million Mobile Users In February, Up 145 Percent Posted: 29 Mar 2010 07:53 AM PDT
Opera says that the 50 million plus users viewed more than 22 billion pages in February, which actually represents a 6% decrease from January (Opera claims this is because February only has 28 days compared to January's 31.) Since February 2009, page views have increased by 200%. In February, Opera Mini users generated over 330 million MB of data, with consumption down by 1.9%. Since February 2009, data traffic is up over 164%. The top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage in February remained the same with users mainly centralized in Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, Nigeria, the United States, Vietnam and the United Kingdom. Opera claims that people browsing with Opera Mini (in the top 10 countries according to unique users) spent approximately $103.8 million in data costs, which if tallied for 12 months, represents a potential of $1.25 billion per year. Opera calculates this based on usage and the average cost of browsing in each country. Opera calculates this number based upon using $1 per megabyte as a global average. While $1.25 billion seems like a big reach for Opera, you can imagine what the users of more popular browsers like mobile Safari or Android are spending. Per users, Opera Mini users spent approximately $4 on average in the month of February, which comes out to $48 per year. The heaviest spending occurs in the United States ($146.40 user/year) and the United Kingdom ($102/user/year), whereas the least spending occurs in India ($8.76/user/year) and South Africa ($11.52/user/year), which is mostly due to data costs in these countries, as opposed to the amount of data transferred.
Specifically in North America, February 2009 to February 2010, page views in the top 11 countries of North America and the Caribbean increased by 153%, unique users increased by 109% and data transferred increased by 84%. In terms of specific sites used in the U.S. among mobile Web users, Google is at the top of the rankings, with Facebook coming in second and Yahoo in third. In the United States and Canada, BlackBerry handsets occupy the number 1 spot. Of course, BlackBerry takes the top spot because iPhone and Android users both have powerful browsers, nullifying the need to use Opera Mini. However, Opera just submitted an application for an Opera Mini app for the iPhone, which it claims is up to 6 times faster than the native browser thanks to its compression and server-side rendering technology. We’ll see if the app is approved.      
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| Apple Confirms: iPad On Sale In “Most” Best Buy Stores On April 3, From 9 AM Posted: 29 Mar 2010 06:00 AM PDT So we know that Apple’s iPad has started shipping, and this morning the company also confirmed that the device will be on sale in all 221 of its retail stores across the United States as well as “most Best Buy stores” this Saturday, beginning at 9 AM. Apple also said its retail stores will offer a free Personal Setup service to every customer, helping them customize their new iPad by setting up their email, loading their favorite apps from the App Store, and more. Furthermore, all US Apple retail stores will host special iPad workshops to help customers learn more about the product. iPad will be available in Wi-Fi models on April 3 in the States for a retail price of $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, and $699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available in late April at $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. Engadget over the weekend obtained and published pictures of an internal memo from Best Buy which essentially confirmed that the iPad would be available at selected stores at launch day. According to later reports by TUAW, each store will be limited to 15 iPads in stock, and WiFi-only iPads will be evenly distributed among the three price points. Also according to TUAW and other reports, only Best Buy stores with badged Apple Solutions Consultants (ASC) and “Apple Shops” will be carrying the iPad devices, which equates to roughly 675 stores total. Have you pre-ordered yours? Where do you plan to wait in line, if at all?      
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| Avnet To Acquire Bell Microproducts In Deal Valued At $594 Million Posted: 29 Mar 2010 05:09 AM PDT Avnet, a publicly listed global distributor of electronic parts, enterprise computing, storage and others products, has agreed to acquire Bell Microproducts in an all-cash merger for $7 per share. That’s roughly a 30% premium based on Bell’s share price at Friday’s market close. This equates to an equity value of about $252 million and a transaction value of approximately $594 million, assuming net debt for Bell of $342 million at face value as of December 31, 2009. The acquisition has been approved by the Boards of Directors of both companies and is subject to the approval of Bell’s shareholders as well as customary regulatory approvals. The transaction is expected to close in 60 to 120 days. Bell Microproducts distributes storage and computing technology products. The company was founded in 1988 and employs over 1,900 employees in 55 offices around the world. In calendar year 2009, Bell registered sales of approximately $3 billion – it currently expects to generate first quarter 2010 sales of $795 million to $815 million. Avnet has been around for way longer: originally founded by Charles Avnet in 1921, it was incorporated in 1955 and went public 4 years later. The company boasts offices in over 300 locations across the globe, and employs roughly 12,000 people. Avnet’s share price ticked off at 28.37 in recent trading and boasts a $4.3 billion market cap – Bell shares are up 28% in pre-market trading.      
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| Screenwriting Software Company Scripped Merges With Zhura, Raises Funding Posted: 29 Mar 2010 04:50 AM PDT Scripped.com, a San Francisco-based developer of online screenwriting software, has merged with competitor Zhura. Financial terms of the merger were not disclosed, although Scripped said the deal size is in the “seven-figure range”. In addition to merging with Zhura, Scripped also announced that it has raised $250,000 in new funding from private angel investors. Co-founder Sunil Rajaraman remains CEO of the merged company, while Break Media CEO Keith Richman and co-founder and former President of BitTorrent Ashwin Navin have been added to its Board of Advisors. Zhura.com was founded in 2007 and is based in Boston. Like Scripped, the company provides screenwriters with tools that enable them to work on their writings online, whether individually or in collaboration with other writers, friends or even the Web community as a whole. Amusingly, the Zhura website still boasts a list of application features in comparison with other players in this space … including Scripped. Scripped, founded in 2008, used to be based in Los Angeles, but has recently moved to San Francisco to become part of technology incubator i/o ventures (more about them here). The company says that its community of registered screenwriters is now 60,000 strong, effectively doubling its user base thanks to the merger with Zhura, with a new one signing up every 20 minutes. How long until one of them gets his or her work published and widely distributed? That would really put Scripped on the map.      
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| Dashboard App For iPad: Sneak Preview Video Posted: 29 Mar 2010 02:30 AM PDT The iPad is coming alright – shipping notices have started popping up this morning, although I’d wager you won’t see the first ones effectively arrive until the 3rd of April. At launch day, expect at least 100 apps straight out the gate, and likely double that. We got a heads up from Carnegie Mellon student Rich Hong this morning: he built a widget dashboard app for the iPad, and it’s definitely worth checking out the sneak preview video. Have you seen other previews of iPad apps that are worth checking out?
     
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| Quora Has The Magic: Benchmark Invests at $86 Million Valuation Posted: 28 Mar 2010 10:23 PM PDT
Both Quora and Benchmark have confirmed the funding, but they won’t comment on the size of the round or the valuation. Our source for the story says it was an $11 million round that valued the company at $86 million. Additional investors may join the round as well. Elevation Partners was also rumored to have bid aggressively on the deal. Quora first launched in private beta on January 4, 2010, just a few months ago. To get in you have to convince a current user to use one of their ten invitations on you. It’s one of the hottest private beta tickets in town. And for a question and answer site that’s saying something. But there’s a magic to Quora that has captured Silicon Valley’s imagination. Something about the quality of the people and the content. Real discussions break out on Quora all the time. The signal to noise ratio is extremely high. I sat down with Cofounders Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, and new investor Matt Cohler, to talk with them about what makes Quora so special. My notes from the interview are below. When will Quora launch publicly? There's not going to be a big sudden open. We're going to gradually open things up over time. One thing we're really focused on is just getting high quality content on the site, and there's a tension between suddenly letting in everyone when we don't have policies and procedures to manage them. We de want to get a lot of users, we just want to be ready for them. Ready for them from a scaling standpoint or a community standpoint? Community management product and policy standpoint. What were some of the early product ideas that you had that you threw away? How did the process go from "we're going to start a company" to what it is today? We knew we wanted to do a question and answer system. We didn't know exactly how the details were going to work. Over the first six months starting a year ago, we were still doing a lot of the details and figuring out how the product was going to work. From that point on, it was just executing on building the product. With all the Q&A sites already out there it seems like this was a saturated market. Why go in this direction? We didn't actually say that this is a market that we want to be part of, and we weren't actually focused on the other Q&A sites. The way we think about this is there's actually a lot of information that's still in people's heads that's not on the internet. And when you think about it you would say that probably 90% of the information that people have is still in their heads, not on the internet. So we're trying to get that information out of people's heads, so it's not on sources that are hard to access on the internet, and get it into a really useful format to make a valuable database. What makes Quora so special? Why are people raving about it? When you come to a question page on Quora and it's blank there are a bunch of people waiting for the answer. An expert will look at it and say "there's an audience here and I know exactly what they want to hear. And I actually know about this stuff, or know enough to research and produce a really interesting piece of content, and it's going to go to the perfectly targeted audience who opted in to hearing about this." When we worked on building the infrastructure for the product we also worked on building a website that works in realtime, so you can be up to date and it feels really alive. People say they feel smarter after they use Quora. Quora is an insiders' forum for Silicon Valley right now. At some point, how does this not become Yahoo answers, which is just a little bit of everything but not really deep on anything? Part of it is making it so you see the stuff that you care about but you don't see the other stuff. I think a lot of services lately have done a better and better job of that. Users follow topics and people that they’re interested in and that information is highlighted for them. Why did you decide to get outside funding? I imagine that you could have continued to fund this for the foreseeable future on your own. We think this is a really challenging problem. When you think of all of the abstract knowledge that is in people's heads and getting it into a useful format and getting it on the internet. We think it's going to take a lot of work and it's going to require a lot of really smart people, and this funding is going to let us do that. And this gets Benchmark involved. And it gets Matt involved. We're hiring engineers and designers, that's another reason why we raised this money. To grow quickly and hire a lot of smart people, because we're going to need them. As the service grows how will you avoid “pulling a Twitter” and having massive downtime? I'm pretty confident we can deal with the scaling challenges. Community management is a big thing and the information here is so rich. These are the things that smart people need to work on and figure out. Matt, why is this an interesting investment for you? Because the people are extraordinary. That and they're going after a really big, interesting problem (getting the 90% of information that's in people's heads onto the web in a way that's usable). It's still in closed beta, but there's already some evidence that that's happening. The real goal of Quora is to accumulate this valuable knowledge. It's kind of like Wikipedia. This is the long tail of information. On Wikipedia people fight over what the text is going to say and it gets boring. Here you have none of that. You have conversations. I do think there's a distinction between answers and discussion. The userbase seems to do a pretty good job of distinguishing between answers and questions and comments. One thing we talk about with the product is continually improving, and having the pages on the site be a good resource. If there's a ton of different anecdotal answers, then someone comes along and summarizes all of that.      
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| No Flash On The iPad? No Problem. Brightcove Turns Videos Into HTML5. Posted: 28 Mar 2010 08:57 PM PDT The lack of Flash on the iPad is a sore point for many and often listed as one of its greatest potential weaknesses. Not allowing Flash on the iPhone is bad enough, but on the larger iPad with full-screen browsing, its absence will be much more noticeable. Or will it? Already the Web is adapting. Videos powered by Brightcove, for instance, will stream in an HTML5 video player when it detects an iPad. On the iPhone browser, the video thumbnail will open up the Quicktime player. It will also work on Android phones. Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire is agnostic about the Flash Vs. HTML5 debate. “HTML5 is great,” he says. “It is an open standard, and firmly entrenched in the Apple device platform. Flash can't reach those platforms for political and business reasons.” But HTML5 simply cannot do everything Flash can, especially when it comes to supporting advertising, audience measurement, customized players, and social sharing. So he decided to bring HTML5 video to parity with Flash for anyone who uses Brightcove. (Note that this is for videos playing in the browser. Brightcove already supports video playback in iPhone apps). It will take until the end of the year to reach full parity with Flash, but that is his goal. At first, Brightcove videos will play back in a very basic HTML5 player when they detect an iPad. But over the next nine months or so, Brightcove will add the same audience measurement and advertising features available in its regular Flash player. Brightcove will still display the video in Flash when the viewing device supports it, but for the iPad, iPhone, and even Android phones, videos will play in HTML5 and most viewers probably won’t notice the difference. Already today you can see who these videos work on the iPhone. For example, Brightcove turned on the capability for Techcrunch videos such as this one when viewed in an iPhone browser. When the iPad comes out, you will be able to watch our videos on there as well, along with videos on the sites of the New York Times and Time magazine, who also use Brightcove. Making HTML5 playback available is just something all video platforms will eventually do. Ooyala is set to offer it for the iPad as well, and YouTube is moving in that direction as well.      
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| NSFW: The Madness of King Rupert – I Admit, I Was Wrong About Murdoch’s Mental State Posted: 28 Mar 2010 05:49 PM PDT
I mean, granted, I don’t particularly like being wrong – and I especially don’t like being wrong in the full glare of the public spotlight. But on the vanishingly small number of occasions when – due to some inexplicable glitch in the universe – I happen to be wrong, never let it be said that I don’t admit it. A case in point… I just stumbled across an excellent post by biographer TJ Stiles, calling me out over my claim that hardback books are a ‘cash cow’ for the publishing industry.”Let’s set the record straight,” said Mr Stiles, “publishers (and authors) make much more money from hardcovers, it’s true. That is one reason why they have always delayed the release of cheaper paperbacks. But to refer to anything in publishing as a ‘cash cow’ is to suggest a level of profitability that simply does not exist in this narrow-margin industry. ‘Life line’ would be a better cliché. Did publishers cut that life line when the paperback was invented? No. Why should they now for the e-book?” …and you know what? He’s right. The phrase ‘cash cow’ was misleading – it has echoes of fat cat publishers making billions in profits when, in most cases nothing could be further from the truth. ‘Life line’ is a far better phrase. I was wrong and – see! – I have no problem admitting it. Of course, that’s hardly the admission of the decade: in cases like that, admitting I was wrong doesn’t involve eating a whole lot of humble pie. A more accurate test would be if I were to make a stratospheric misjudgment about a major issue – a misjudgment that turned out to be so embarrassing that I’d rather bury my head in a box on ants than admit to my error. What would I do then? On Friday I was given the opportunity to find out. A few months ago, in this very column, I wrote about Rupert Murdoch and how he would never remove his newspapers’ content from Google’s index because he was too obsessed with eyeballs…
My point was pretty unambiguous: unless Rupert Murdoch has lost his mind, his obsession with eyeballs meant he would never pull the plug on freely available online content. Rupert Murdoch hasn’t lost his mind, ergo his content would stay free. And then on Friday came this… Times and Sunday Times websites to charge from June And you know what, I’m not afraid to say it. I was wrong. Rupert Murdoch has lost his mind. Please understand I don’t make that statement lightly. When it comes to Murdoch, I’ve always been of the Michael Wolff school – doubting the man’s Internet credentials (allegedly he still hasn’t ever used Google) but at the same time respecting his business sense and his willingness to defer to trusted advisors when it comes to his company’s digital strategy. But with this latest decision it’s clear that he has not so much lost his marbles as collected them together into a lead bag and thrown them into the sea. Moving its content behind a pay-wall will be the death of the Times; one of the world’s most respected newspapers and a British national treasure. Even with a relatively modest subscription cost of £1 ($1.60) a day or £2 for the whole week, it has been shown time and time again that the hassle factor of making even a small payment to access a website will result in a hemorrhaging of readers. Unlike the Financial Times (no relation), only a small fraction of the Times’ online readership do so for business reasons – with most incorporating it into their general news diet. If it’s no longer free they’ll simply get their news elsewhere. And then there’s the drop in Google juice: News International is yet to announce its search indexing policy for the new site but it’s safe to say that the pay-wall will mean the vast majority of the paper’s news archive vanishing from search engines. Times Online currently attracts 20 million unique readers a month, most of whom will disappear overnight once the pay-wall is erected. No matter which angle you look at Murdoch’s decision, it’s almost impossible to see it as anything other than a sign of madness. But of course that hasn’t stopped some from trying to spot some hint of method in it… James Harding, editor of The Times, tried to put a brave face on his boss’ decision – much like a mid-ranking officer might try to justify to his men why Douglas Haig has ordered them to go over the top during the Battle of the Somme. According to the BBC, Harding “agreed that NI’s pay-wall strategy was a risk… but [argued that] it’s less of a risk than just throwing away our journalism and giving it away for free.” Nice try James, but that doesn’t really wash. For a start, complaining that making newspaper content available for free online is somehow devaluing it is just plain stupid. For years newspapers have been giving their paper editions away for free – on airlines and in other high-traffic locations – on the basis that these “bulks” will increase circulation figures and will in turn drive more advertising. Once you factor in printing, distribution and returns, the cover price of a newspaper – and let’s remember that Murdoch is the king of slashing prices to drive competitors out of business – barely covers the medium on which it’s delivered. Advertising has always been the real revenue driver in print, to the point where Murdoch was quite happy to give his “away for free” with the launch of a free London daily back in 2005 (it went out of business last year due to fierce competition from another free paper from rivals Associated Newspapers). The truth is that – as Jeff Jarvis writes in the Guardian – Murdoch simply hasn’t been able to figure out how to make online advertising work. And it’s that inability that has driven him to his current madness. There’s a second problem with Harding’s argument: journalists and columnists actually are quite keen on having their product given away free. No matter whether we’re covering Iraq or fashion trends, we writers tend to be egotists at heart, which is one of the reasons we’re prepared to accept the reasonably shitty salaries offered by news organisations rather than going in to, say, PR. Our reward isn’t so much money as the knowledge that our work will be appreciated by a large audience. With print circulation plummeting (the Times has gone from nearly 700,000 daily readers to 500,000 in the past five years), journalists want to write for publications with large online audiences to ensure that their reporting is seen by the masses. When Sirius hired Howard Stern they had to pay him a hugely inflated salary to reflect the fact that he’d be seeing a large and immediate drop in his listener numbers. Similarly, by hiding its journalism behind a pay-wall, News International will have to pay vastly inflated salaries to attract the best an brightest to its pages. And in an era where newspapers can barely afford to keep the talent they have, that’s just another nail in the coffin. Really the only possible reasoning – outside of madness – that’s left for Murdoch’s behaviour is that he’s cleverer than all of us. Perhaps if we just watch quietly we’ll soon see the true genius behind his plan. After all, that’s what happened back in the 1980s and 90s when he launched Sky Television – a British-based satellite TV channel. Back then no one in the UK paid for television (we’d been brought up on free to air TV with little or no demand for cable) and there were no signs that they were ready to start – and yet in less than a decade Sky had become one of the country’s biggest broadcasters. The success of Sky was down to the content – Murdoch bought the rights to broadcast premium football (sorry, soccer) games, forcing millions of households to sign up to Sky if they wanted to follow their favourite teams. Perhaps that’s his plan with the Times as well – make the content of his new online editions so unbelievably compelling that subscribers will be forced to sign up in their droves? Nope, that doesn’t wash either. With Sky, Murdoch was operating in a single market (the UK) with a product (pay per view TV) that had already been proven overseas. With Times Online, Murdoch is competing on a global stage and, unless the Times is about to switch its editorial page over to porn, there’s no example of anyone getting the paid news content model right for a consumer audience so far. Especially not someone who is so afraid of the Internet that they haven’t even used Google.      
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| Reeder 2.0: Finally, An Awesome iPhone Feed Reader Arrives Posted: 28 Mar 2010 04:27 PM PDT
An app called Reeder, by Silvio Rizzi, has always been a nice-looking app that syncs with Google Reader. Unfortunately, it has also been clunky, and slow, and lacking some features such as state-saving. But the latest version, 2.0, which just went live in the App Store last night, corrects all the issues I had with it. It’s wonderful. I have absolutely no doubt this will be one of my most-used apps now. In fact, I’m so sure of it, that I’ve already placed it on my the first page of apps on my iPhone screen. So what makes it so good? Well, first of all, it’s simple. Rather than trying to cram is all of the clutter items that Google Reader itself now crams into its own site, Reeder focuses on three key areas: Unread items, Starred items, and All items. These are the three key areas across the bottom of the app. The only other icon down there (on the main screen) is a reload button to load in new feed items. Assuming you group your feeds into folders in Google Reader, navigation is Reeder focuses on that. So, for example, when I click into my “tech” folder, I see all the unread feed items that have appeared since the last time I opened Google Reader. I can sort these by individual feeds or by time in which the items came in. Obviously, clicking on an individual story loads that item (including any images). And in the story-view mode you have a new set of options along the bottom that let you mark an item as unread, star it, or a button to load a range of great Reeder features. For example, on this overlay menu, you can make a Google Reader note about an item, you can share it with your Reader friends, you can save it to Instapaper, you can send it to Twitter, you can open it in Safari, you can mail it to someone, etc. There are a half dozen other features which you can customize in the app. But maybe my favorite feature of Reeder is the Tweetie-like ability to swipe an individual feed item to do something. In Tweetie, when you swipe a tweet, a bunch of options are shown under that tweet. In Reeder, it’s a bit different. Swiping right toggles an item between read and unread status. Swiping left toggles between starred and unstarred status. It’s brilliant. (And yes, there is also a button to mark all as read.) As you’d expect, Reeder gives you the ability to sync feed items locally so that you can read them when you don’t have an Internet connection, such as on a plane. Previously, as I mentioned, syncing was slow. With version 2.0, syncing speed screams. And, there is also an option to only cache images if you’re connected to WiFi, to keep things moving alone. If you haven’t been using the iPhone for a long time, news of a great feed reader may sound lackluster to you. After all, it’s been almost two years since the launch of the App Store now, it may be hard to believe that no one has nailed a simple feed reader app yet. But that has been the case. A few are okay, like NetNewsWire and Byline, but none have been great on the level that Tweetie is great as an iPhone Twitter client. In fact, I’d say the best feed reader on the iPhone up until now has been the mobile web version of Google Reader itself. But that too is only good, not great. With Reeder 2.0, I think we finally have a great iPhone feed reader. Its combination of speed, simplicity, and beauty make it a must-have app in my opinion. Now the only hard part will be waiting for a native iPad version to come out that supports things like dual-pane views to more easily go through feed items on the larger screen. But now I’m just being greedy. I’m just happy to finally have a solid feed reader on the iPhone. You can find Reeder 2.0 in the App Store here. It’s $2.99.
     
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The European Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice have just 
Browser maker 
One of about a half dozen tabs that I always have open in my web browser on my desktop or laptop is Google Reader. Even though other sources such as Twitter and Facebook are now better at uncovering news more quickly, Reader remains a great catch-all backup plan for the content I read online. But I’m increasingly finding myself browsing for news on my iPhone. And sadly, all the Google Reader applications that have launched over the past few years have, in my opinion, sucked. And I’m 
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