The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Twitter Taps Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart And Other Celebs For Promotional Video
- After 5 Years Of Facilitating Sharing On The Web, AddToAny Turns A Profit
- Social Commerce Platform 8thBridge Raises $10 Million
- Engineering vs. Liberal Arts: Who’s Right—Bill or Steve?
- Security Software Maker AVG Announces $235 Million Financing Deal
- Complete Integration Of Google Voice And 50 Million Sprint Customers, Plus 4G Nexus S
- OwnZones Media Raises $500,000 – Is No Stranger To Hyperbole
- New uTest Lets Professional Testers Kick Your Startup’s Tyres
- A Critical Analysis Of The Literal Web Crowd: The Tools You Need To Survive In A Humorous World
- STELLAService Raises $2M, Tests Online Customer Services So You Don’t Have To
- Bu.tt Gets Kicked Off The Internet
- CrunchGear Interview: “Gadget-Talk” With Cody Votolato From The Band TELEKINESIS
- PapayaMobile Relaunches FarmVille-Like Game For iOS
- Rebecca Black Means The (Internet) Fame Game Has Changed
- Fast Break: As Of Last Week, Many At Sprint Thought They Were Merging With T-Mobile
- Push notification
- Adult Websites Will Soon Get Their Own .XXX Brothels, But Not All Are Excited
- In The Race For More Spectrum, AT&T Is Acquiring T-Mobile For $39 Billion
- Beetailer Helps Online Retailers Set Up Shop On Facebook
- Big Data Needs To Think Bigger
| Twitter Taps Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart And Other Celebs For Promotional Video Posted: 21 Mar 2011 08:57 AM PDT
Located at discover.twitter.com, the video features Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Richard Branson, Piers Morgan, Serena Williams, Rachel Zoe, Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart and others explaining how they use Twitter. Snoop even says that he follows Martha Stewart, “…Martha Stewart, because she keeps it stuttered and buttered, baked and flaked, and she love to wake and bake with the big Snoop Dogg.” The site, which is clearly a promotional campaign, also allows you to follow the 16 Twitter users featured in its video and access suggested users lists based upon interests. Five years later, Twitter is still hitting record usage, and clearly has evolved into the go-to communications platform for news, celebrities, music, politics, and more. And the company is reportedly now valued at just under $4 billion.         
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| After 5 Years Of Facilitating Sharing On The Web, AddToAny Turns A Profit Posted: 21 Mar 2011 08:11 AM PDT Like Twitter, AddToAny turns five years old this week. It doesn’t garner even a fraction of the attention that venture-backed competitors like Clearspring (AddThis), Gigya and ShareThis do, but it has definitely put its stake in the social sharing widget ground. Note: the above-cited rivals have raised roughly $90 million combined, while AddToAny has never taken outside financing since it was founded back in 2006. Still, the AddToAny button is one of the most distributed widgets on the web, and according to the company the most distributed widget from a bootstrapped startup. AddToAny is now even a lucrative business, and has gotten to that point without spending a dime on marketing. How is the service monetized? AddToAny sells (anonymous) aggregate sharing data, which is used by clients to increase the relevancy of their ads. Income has been admittedly small, but revenue projections for 2012 range in the seven figures. Being one of the first to offer a social sharing and bookmarking widget for website publishers has helped AddToAny a lot to get where they are now, but there’s more to it than that. Founder Pat Diven II says he has never felt the need to raise outside funding, although he reckons it might be fairly easy to secure financing if he wanted to. That said, he basically regards AddToAny as one of his side projects and wants to keep things simple and stable first and foremost. That strategy has worked wonders for the service given its steady growth rate. Diven II says that there have been many serious and casual buy-out offers over the years, but that the focus remains squarely on the user and publisher experience rather than ‘exiting’. Today, AddToAny handles over a billion widget loads and millions of shares every month, and boasts a total reach of over 100 million visitors. And what has Diven II concluded based on that wealth of data? That over 60 percent of all sharing activity is not to Facebook, Twitter, or email, meaning that (what the entrepreneur calls) “me-too, niche, long-tail, and non-U.S. sharing destinations” still matter.        
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| Social Commerce Platform 8thBridge Raises $10 Million Posted: 21 Mar 2011 07:59 AM PDT
8thBridge, which was formerly known as Alvenda, allows retailers to set up shop on Facebook and engage consumers via social features on the network. 8thBridge’s capabilities includes a quick checkout feature inside Facebook's News Feed, Fan Pages, and inside banner ads on publisher websites. 8thBridge also allows retailers to deliver highly personalized offers based on consumer interests, social promotions and rewards to repeat purchasers. Currently, 8thBridge is helping power Facebook retail experiences for a number of high-profile brands including 1-800-Flowers.com, Lands' End, Brooks Brothers, Delta Air Lines, Hallmark, HauteLook and Avon.        
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| Engineering vs. Liberal Arts: Who’s Right—Bill or Steve? Posted: 21 Mar 2011 05:40 AM PDT
That was several years ago. I realized how much my views have changed when the The New York Times asked me to write a piece for its "Room for Debate" forum this week. The paper wanted me to comment on the divergence of opinion between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. In a speech before the National Governors Association on Feb 28, Gates had argued that we need to spend our limited education budget on disciplines that produce the most jobs. He implied that we should reduce our investment in the liberal arts because liberal-arts degrees don't correlate well with job creation. Three days later, at the unveiling of the iPad 2, Steve Jobs said: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing, and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices”. Because I am a professor at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, and given all the positive things I say about U.S. engineering education, The Times assumed that I would side with Bill Gates; that I would write a piece that endorsed his views. But, even though I believe that engineering is one of the most important professions, I have learned that the liberal arts are equally important. It takes artists, musicians, and psychologists working side by side with engineers to build products as elegant as the iPad. And anyone—with education in any field—can achieve success in Silicon Valley. Here is what I wrote for The Times.
But I need to acknowledge the difficult reality: that employment prospects are dim for liberal-arts majors. Graduates from top engineering schools such as Duke are always in high demand. But PhDs in English from even the most prestigious universities, such as UC-Berkeley, can't get jobs. The data I presented above were on the background of tech-company founders—those who made the transition into entrepreneurship. Most don't. And, as you can note from Bill Gates' speech, there is a bias against liberal arts and humanities. Angelika Blendstrup is an author and a lecturer who holds a PhD in Bilingual Bicultural Education from Stanford. She says that her liberal-arts background is "great for writing papers or PhDs, but it would be better to have studied engineering and have a choice of jobs". Charles River Venture Partner emeritus, Ted Dintersmith, on the other hand, received a PhD in Engineering from Stanford. But he also studied liberal arts. Ted says “It doesn’t have to be either/or—I double-majored in Physics and English, and never regretted combining two such different disciplines”. So there is no black and white here. We need musicians, artists, and psychologists, as much as we need bio-medical engineers, computer programmers, and scientists. My advice to my students—and to my own children—is to study what interests them the most; to excel in fields in which they have the most passion and ability; to change the world in their own way and on their own terms. Once they master their domain, they can find the path to entrepreneurship. They can then come up with creative ways of solving the problems that they have encountered, and apply their ideas to other fields where their knowledge adds value. Maybe they can team up with the hard-core engineers who develop the clunky, inelegant, over-engineered products that Bill is famous for; maybe work with Steve to create the next iPhone or iPad. You can read more views and witness the lively debate on the New York Times web site. Editor's note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.        
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| Security Software Maker AVG Announces $235 Million Financing Deal Posted: 21 Mar 2011 05:11 AM PDT Consumer security software company AVG Technologies this morning announced it has entered into a new credit agreement with a syndicate arranged by J.P Morgan and Morgan Stanley. The company has secured a five-year term lean for $235 million in its first-ever capital markets transaction. AVG says the financing deal provides the company with “the resources to realize strategic growth opportunities”. The company will also pay a dividend to its shareholders. AVG CEO J.R. Smith commented on the financing thusly:
AVG was originally founded back in 1991. The company says it currently protects more than 110 million consumers and small businesses in 170 countries from viruses, spam, cyber-scams and hackers on the Internet.        
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| Complete Integration Of Google Voice And 50 Million Sprint Customers, Plus 4G Nexus S Posted: 21 Mar 2011 04:59 AM PDT
Here’s how it works. If you are currently a Sprint customer, you can opt in to make that Sprint phone number your Google Voice phone number. This isn’t number porting, Sprint retains control of your number. They simply tell Google when you make or receive calls, and forward that call to other phones if you’ve chosen those options. Google also takes over the voicemail for the phone, and long distance calls are completed by Google at Google’s very low international rates. In other words, if you have a Sprint phone you can choose to make that a Google Voice phone as well. And get all the benefits of Google Voice, like having it ring to any phone you control, initiating and receiving calls from Gmail, hilarious voicemail transcriptions, etc. And the partnership is two way as well. If you already have a Google Voice phone number, you can have your Sprint mobile phone make outbound calls using that number as well. Previously you had to use a Google Voice app, or initiate phone calls through a mobile web browser, to make that happen. This kind of integration is far more useful to users, and far less painful to set up, than number porting, which Google launched earlier this year. And if that’s not enough, Google is also announcing today the availability of its first 4G and CDMA version of the Nexus S Android phone, available with Sprint. This Is Meaningful This is a meaningful partnership. Not just for Sprint users, who can now have the benefits of Google Voice and use their phone number anywhere they want. The carriers have rarely done much that makes sense for their users. The fact that Sprint is willing to give up control of the phone number for those who want to use Google Voice shows that there is actual competition breaking out in the U.S. mobile world, and a willingness to try bold new things to differentiate products. I’ve had my issues with Sprint in the past, but this is a brilliant move by them.         
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| OwnZones Media Raises $500,000 – Is No Stranger To Hyperbole Posted: 21 Mar 2011 04:49 AM PDT OwnZones Media Network this morning announced that they’ve landed an initial round of funding to the tune of $500,000. Described as a ‘pay-for-content ecosystem’, OwnZones raised the capital to step up development of its digital paid content delivery and subscription platform. Here’s the boilerplate description found at the bottom of the company’s press release, which sets the bar rather high – even for, well, a company’s boilerplate description:
I’m still not 100% sure how they plan to do that, exactly, but the company says it will soon be launching the first of four trials with a “go-live” release in January, 2012, so we’ll have to wait and see. From what I can gather, the business model is almost entirely based on the notion that consumers will be more than happy to pay for personalized, targeted ‘quality’ content on the web, and that people will be increasingly inclined to ignore and avoid much of the low-value drivel that can be found online. Which, I’m sorry to say, may just be a good deal of wishful thinking on OwnZones’ behalf. Publishers, of course, tend to be eager to subscribe to that vision. Indeed, OwnZones says it is currently in ‘final stage negotiations’ with a range of print and video content publishers to enhance its current content offerings.        
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| New uTest Lets Professional Testers Kick Your Startup’s Tyres Posted: 21 Mar 2011 03:52 AM PDT
uTest Express offers different plans and the ability to create a simple test case which testers will follow. Once the project scope is outlined, uTest then handpicks members of its tester community who best match the testing requirements and have the right mobile devices and operating systems. The customer's mobile app is tested by these paid professionals on real devices in a real life setting.        
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| A Critical Analysis Of The Literal Web Crowd: The Tools You Need To Survive In A Humorous World Posted: 21 Mar 2011 03:16 AM PDT
If you come across a statement or a conversation that seems odd at first, like really dumb things are being talked about like they’re brilliant ideas, your first reaction will be to write something like “I can’t believe you would actually think that,…” with the “…” usually containing a derogatory term like douche, douchebag, asshole, etc. Now if you do that and check back on your comment later you may see subsequent commenters saying something like “woosh.” Often that commenter is me. The message is that whatever you were commenting on went way over your head, wooshing your hair back as it did so, leaving you with no idea what’s going on. Sarcasm, irony and other lovely verbal gymnastical tools and trick are what make our language beautiful. You are not stating what you think directly. But you are stating it directly because most people understand you. What you mean is just usually the opposite of what you’ve said. Or perhaps it has an even more nuanced meaning. It’s important that more people come to understand, and even appreciate, these situations when they come up. It is hard for some people. Like the people who tend to believe April Fools stories, they are the kind of people I’m talking about. They aren’t inherently bad people, they just need to work on their humor muscle and develop it. Once they do, they’ll enjoy a much fuller and complete online life. Check out this paragraph from Wikipedia on understanding sarcasm:
Basically if you have brain damage you may be out of the race entirely, and no one’s going to be calling you a jerk for that. Also, people who are too smart, in certain ways, go more of the Rain Man route. They have trouble picking up social cues and can’t distinguish between jokes and serious statements. That leaves the rest of us, which is most of us. Most of what’s left are speaking English as a second language and have trouble understanding irony and sarcasm until they’ve lived here a long while. Native speakers from outside of the U.S., like Brits, Irish and Canadians, tend to identify irony at world record breaking speeds. These guys invented the language behind the language. We just picked it up and made it ours. In fact, in London, among certain crowds with very expensive accents, it is nearly impossible to understand exactly what someone means. Who they are, who you are, their relationship to you and other factors must be analyzed real time as a sort of filter that spits out what’s really going on. Amazingly, compliments are never quite that once you’ve rooted to the second or third-order interpretation of the language that rich Brits speak. But back to us. We see this all the time in comments, where someone just doesn’t get what’s going on but butts in anyway with an outraged statement of some sort. NASA Loves Cocaine, Has No Humor Take Paul Carr’s recent article on his new email footer: “Fuck the environment. Print this email immediately. And then burn it.” A commenter (who works at NASA) chimed in saying “This is a joke, right?” Oh, the nuances there. Paul is joking, but not in the way you think. Like me, he is really annoyed by people telling him that he’s an earth hater if he prints the email. He’s annoyed by the smugness of the people sending those emails. And so he wrote. I pondered my response to NASA, as it was clearly a “whoosh” moment. But really, nothing could be better than simply asking her if she was high right now, and linking to this. It was apropos of nothing. But a round of chuckles went around the office (we all take breaks to watch the comments on Paul Carr’s posts because they are world class entertaining). Kevin Rose Lassos In A Wandering Literal Webber But back to the Literal Web. It struck again over the weekend. On Friday I noted Kevin Rose’s resignation from Digg and his intention to close a small round of funding for his new startup. What was that new startup going to do? We all asked. ryan000 (a former Digg developer) tweeted : “@kevinrose 3 words: “B2B e-commerce solutions” [Aside] – many of you will clearly understand that ryan000 was joking. Because the big B2B ecommerce plays rose like giants in the 90s bubble only to come crashing down when actual usage didn’t exist, in a sort of fraudulent way. See Ariba and Commerce One for examples of what ryan000 is suggesting Kevin does next. It’s obvious to most of us that he was kidding around. And then Kevin tweeted back “@ryan000 shhhhhhh keep that quiet! ;).” And the Literal Web mob took over. That last message from Kevin is literally saying ryan000 is correct and in the know, but he has to keep it quiet. Seriously, this is important stuff, ryan000. But that isn’t what it was really saying. Listen close, you Literal Webbers. Kevin is responding sarcastically, saying the opposite of what he means, because it’s kind of funny to think of him taking on a multi-billion dollar market in a space he has no idea what’s going on and where massive companies blew billions of dollars and failed. That just wouldn’t be playing to Kevin’s strengths. His strengths include sitting in front of a camera drinking beer, and partying with movie celebrities. He also has a good eye for product, we hear. Consumer facing social media stuff, that is. So, no revival of Commerce One for Kevin. But a reader writes in with a scoop that the tweets confirm that Rose is doing a B2B e-commerce solution.”
KEVIN ROSE’S NEW START UP SECRET TWEET So, yeah, he’s part of the literal web club, he thought he made a real find and he diligently sent it over to us. I love him for that. But love can be hard, and I want to make sure he grows from this experience. In the future he may get the humor and just tweet a smiley face back at Kevin. That shows he’s in the know, and gets the decade old startup disaster reference. LOL! Oh, Canada! I’ll leave you with one last personal example. Last year I disparaged an entire nation in a post about how we will never have a TechCrunch Canada, and that frankly I’d prefer if Canadians didn’t even visit our main site out of politeness (they just aren’t wanted here). A storm of rage erupted in the comments and on Twitter. A couple of days later, while the Literal Web mob was still running around with their shirts off breaking shit, I tweeted to calm people down.
But they didn’t realize I’d tricked them. New rage erupted asking how dare I threaten to kick them off the internet, or mocking me for being unable to carry out my literal threat. I backed off of that one to go on with the rest of my life. But a week later I was in it again, this time suggesting the Canadian Mounties were out to get me, possibly trying to usurp my journalistic freedom by throwing me in some frozen, dark Canadian prison. That’s when mainstream Canadian media (they are so cute) got involved. They pointed out that a lot of the eegits were actually Americans telling me I was being insensitive. As for Canadians, they either thought it was funny or just couldn’t be bothered to read it. In the end this is what you need to take away. Read a little slower. Try to see the subtle changes in tone (hard in print I know, but not impossible) to understand that there is a second or third layer of communication going on. If you only see the first layer, and respond like a doofus, people are going to ignore you. You’ll have much more fun on the Internet if people aren’t ignoring you. So either develop a sense of humor, or revert to snark (humor for the unwashed masses) like so many others do, or become brilliant and create content above all this nonsense. Any of those are fine. Just, please, don’t be the guy leaving comments with others saying “woosh!” right after. You do not want to be that guy.        
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| STELLAService Raises $2M, Tests Online Customer Services So You Don’t Have To Posted: 21 Mar 2011 03:00 AM PDT Exclusive - STELLAService, a startup that measures, rates and highlights the quality of customer care of online businesses, has raised $2 million in early stage funding. STELLAService was founded in 2009 with the dual goal of helping online shoppers make more informed purchasing decisions, while also helping online retailers grow their businesses through customer service data and marketing services. The company boasts many known e-retailers in its customer portfolio, including ecommerce companies like Diapers.com, Zappos.com (both owned by Amazon these days) and 1-800-Flowers.com. STELLAService pays for all products it purchases and relies on its staff of trained customer experience analysts to thoroughly test the (thousands of) companies it evaluates. STELLAService says it will use the additional capital to step up development of its customer service evaluation system. The company will also work to make its website more comprehensive for online shoppers with new tools and features. The round was led by Battery Ventures and DFJ Gotham Ventures, with RRE Ventures, Consigliere Brand Capital, Doug Lebda, Mark Wachen and other angels participating.        
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| Bu.tt Gets Kicked Off The Internet Posted: 21 Mar 2011 02:25 AM PDT Weep, my fellow internauts. Bu.tt, the amusingly named URL shortener that launched to ‘kick it’ a mere five months ago, is no more. In a brief message posted on the service’s homepage, the venture capital backed startup behind the URL shortener (just kidding) poetically explains the reason for the abrupt ending of this beautiful, heartwarming story:
To which one can only respond with a question: seriously dudes, there were dedicated users besides those spammers? Hat tip goes to one of those hardcore users, Brazilian entrepreneur Marco Vanossi.        
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| CrunchGear Interview: “Gadget-Talk” With Cody Votolato From The Band TELEKINESIS Posted: 20 Mar 2011 07:10 PM PDT
A super nice guy, Cody lent some insight into passing the time in a tour bus playing Angry Birds and staying connected to contacts, family and friends. Video below.        
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| PapayaMobile Relaunches FarmVille-Like Game For iOS Posted: 20 Mar 2011 07:00 PM PDT
Papaya Farm allows players to manage a virtual farm by plowing land and planting and harvesting virtual crops, trees and bushes (sound familiar?) A player begins with an empty farm and a fixed starting amount of “Papayas,” the virtual currency used in the game. Papayas can also be used in PapayaMobile's other social games, including PapayaFish. As we mentioned, the game was developed using PapayaMobile's Game Engine SDK. Until now the game was only available via an Android app and the web, and has actually seen decent success considering the competition in the mobile social gaming space. Papaya Farm has more than 2.5 million monthly average users, around 20 percent of which are on iOS devices. Hopefully that number will increase with the launch of a native app.        
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| Rebecca Black Means The (Internet) Fame Game Has Changed Posted: 20 Mar 2011 06:30 PM PDT 
The video for Rebecca Black’s “Friday” now has more YouTube views than Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” at around 26 million versus 22 million for Gaga. For those of you that haven’t been playing along with the meme, Rebecca Black is a 13-year-old aspiring singer whose parents paid $2,000 to have a “professional” music video made by a YouTube popstar factory called, appropriately enough, ARK Factory. The video then went viral after gaining traction for all the wrong reasons on music blogs, tech blogs (yeah we’ll cover anything these days), Reddit and 4Chan, turning its star into both a meme and into fodder for mainstream media outlets like ABC. So why all the media attention? In part because Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black are two sides of the same Internet fame coin: Black is like the anti-Justin Bieber, her “Friday” video has all the trappings of pop star gloss, with none of the talent. Bieber on the other hand, had the talent, and enthralled fans with that despite the rawness of his homemade YouTube music videos (nice Simpsons poster Justin), which he posted before putting out a more polished album and becoming the online and mainstream fame tornado that he is today. Bieber and Black, like the Artic Monkeys and Lilly Allen before them, are a sign of the power of alternative distribution channels in our time. But Black is a tipping point, as her video was engineered to go viral (And it did! If not exactly in the way she intended …). To give you a micro-example of how much becoming a YouTube celebrity is now considered a viable, respectable way of gaining traction in the music industry, even for those beyond their teen years; Earlier today I had lunch with a musician friend who was lamenting the trouble her band was having booking shows in San Francisco. When I asked her how she planned on getting the word out she said, “Get a publicist, or have a video go viral.” Then she mentioned something about Twitter followers. “Basically the content doesn’t matter at all. Only the fact that other people are sharing it,” Gawker’s Adrian Chen, who has followed the Rebecca Black story and is pretty much an expert on how people become Internet-famous, explained to me over Skype. “I don’t know if it’s a tipping point. But more like the most extreme example of something that’s already happening in music and entertainment stuff.” Indeed the focus of Rebecca Black’s ABC/Good Morning America interview was the extreme negativity of the comments (“I hope you get an eating disorder so you’ll look pretty. I hope you go cut and die”). In an age of readily available tools for discussion, the value of our pop-stars is now in the extent to which we can use them as topics for social media blathering (Rebecca Black is trending on Twitter, of course) whether or not that blathering is positive. The most fascinating part of the Black story is that she’s actually famous now, which was exactly the reason her parents gave $2,000 to ARK Music Factory in the first place. From Black herself on her unlikely fame, “I think that’s an accomplishment you know, even a person who doesn’t like it, it’s going to be stuck in their head. So that’s the point of it, it’s a catchy song.” Exactly. Get used to this kind of stuff. As society advances technologically, culture becomes a parody of itself, and we enjoy the parody, intentional or not, more than anything sincere. But what becomes of the Antoine Dobsons and the Rebecca Blacks, our Internet culture folk heroes? Says Chen, “From an industry standpoint. I think if you’re an Internet phenomenon you get put in this meme box, which means you can only do certain meme things, like put out merchandise related to your meme, or appear on talk shows joking about your meme. The mainstream industry kind of picks them up gingerly, with slight disgust, and throws them into stuff until they’re sick of them.” The pop culture ringer hasn’t got sick of Bieber quite yet, and we’ll just have to wait for Black to put out her next song to gage her expiration date. Best case scenario: It’s a duet, with Bieber himself.
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| Fast Break: As Of Last Week, Many At Sprint Thought They Were Merging With T-Mobile Posted: 20 Mar 2011 02:51 PM PDT
And it’s an especially poignant question for Sprint because as of last week, many at that company believed they would be merging with T-Mobile, we’ve heard. Specifically, we’re hearing from a source with direct knowledge of such a deal that Sprint believed they were in the driver’s seat to land T-Mobile. It’s not clear if anything had been formalized or if discussions were still ongoing, but a “desperate” Sprint was said to be putting it all out there to get a deal done. This news echoes a report from three weeks ago by Bloomberg that stated Sprint and Deutsche Telekom were discussing such a deal. And a few second-hand accounts state that those at T-Mobile USA were also thinking that Sprint was the likely acquirer. T-Mobile USA CEO Philipp Humm’s email to employees about the AT&T deal this afternoon may point to that. “I know this news is unexpected and may be somewhat unsettling, but I am confident that our strong culture and T-Mobile USA Values will help guide us through this process,” he wrote. That wording suggests that the deal with AT&T went down very quickly. And again, it may also speak to a change from the Sprint endgame that many had assumed. Of course, from a technology perspective, the T-Mobile/AT&T deal would seem to make more sense. Both run a GSM-based network, whereas Sprint has a CDMA network, like Verizon. That said, as both T-Mobile and AT&T have made clear, the main impetus behind this deal is the 4G LTE networks going forward — GSM and CDMA go out the window when those hit. And while AT&T is already saying they don’t believe government regulators will hold up the T-Mobile deal (what else are they going to say?), they acknowledge that it should take a year for it to complete. The T-Mobile acquisition would give AT&T a combined customer base of about 130 million — surging it into the number one position in the U.S., far ahead of Verizon’s slightly more than 100 million customers. And that means both AT&T and Verizon will now have more than double the number three carrier, Sprint. A Sprint/T-Mobile merger would have given them around 85 million customers. That would have put them only 10 million or so behind AT&T. Obviously, regulators would have looked more favorably at that maneuver, since it would mean a more level playing field. But it was not to be. It’s not known why exactly at this point, but Bloomberg’s original report stated that the price may have been the hold up. They cited an analyst saying that a $25 billion offer may be too high a price for suitors. And yet, AT&T’s offer was some $14 billion more — and includes an 8 percent stake in AT&T, and a Board seat. Perhaps that’s how and why AT&T swooped in so fast for the win. Money talks. [image: flickr/JMRosenfeld]        
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| Posted: 20 Mar 2011 12:11 PM PDT
The reactor crisis in Japan may have its roots in a cascading series of events, but the most intractable parts stem from decisions, or lack of them, about what to do with the spent fuel rods. Not a technology problem but a failure of leadership, a buck-stops-not-here that if we’re not incredibly lucky will have an impact on generations to come. We won’t soon forget the images of tsunami, smoke, and explosions, but the video of helicopters and fire trucks trying to save us from a catastrophic meltdown will last even longer. They look like tinker toys arrayed against the terror of the real adult world. The way the media consumes these crises adds to the feeling of helplessness. Armchair experts line up with snap analysis in hopes of locking down the three or four slots needed to keep the cable networks happy. In the age of social, credentials are less important than fitting easily into the ping pong nature of point counterpoint orchestrated by weekend anchors barely out of the Weather Channel. It’s the Battle of the Colonels, with retired military commentators second guessing the Joint Chiefs of Staff as Quadafi jousts with kings and presidents. We keep switching back and forth between the networks as they recycle the lack of news across a day’s worth of timezones. For all the hype about realtime, the newspapers shine through with the context and investment in years of sources and back-room deal-making that ultimately drive the way forward. It’s ironic that the New York Times, so reviled in the techsphere for its paywall, is providing the very value it needs to sell whatever morphing model is in the cards. Mad Men shows us history may repeat itself, but on television it goes into an endless loop, battering our emotions into a dull numbness that calls out for soothing. Here the social services are beginning to surface. Facebook provides day-to-day glue from family and friends, Twitter the drumbeat of alerts, a realtime pointer into the cable streams aggregated by a follower network of cloud reporters. And then there’s FaceTime, which with the iPad 2 is now turning the iPhone 4 and iPod Touches into a deeper more emotional network. As television brings a world of danger and uncertainty, FaceTime brings connection. I’ve spent the weekend battening down the hatches for this new, more turbulent phase. Hours of time on the phone and net comparing prices and contracts, early upgrades or terminations, automatic porting from one carrier to another. My daughter had her iPhone stolen right out of her backpack on a bus field trip, triggering a reassessment in light of the competition opened up by Verizon’s entry into the iPhone/iPad market. It may seem over the top, but maintaining a FaceTime connection with my children seems ever more important. When technology and media intersect with the emotional underpinnings of our lives, the result is the kind of tsunami we’re experiencing with the iPad. It may seem petty to many to cheerlead a company and a technology so geared toward the pursuit of the next shiny object, the next Tweet, or whatever. But learning the language of this next generation of empowerment certainly is on our minds for reasons other than immediate gratification. The messages of social media and mobility are not lost on the people of the world, as they try and forge freedoms they can see beaming around the world over the lingua Franca of WiFi. The tools of this new trade are AirPlay, Personal Hotspot, direct messages, @mentions, automated number porting, GarageBand, iMovie, push notification. These tools give us the context of history, the connection of family, the aspiration of mobility, of seeing the change and fighting for it. It’s not about technology, it’s with it. The revolution is in our understanding that we are the experts and the agents of change we’re looking for.         
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| Adult Websites Will Soon Get Their Own .XXX Brothels, But Not All Are Excited Posted: 20 Mar 2011 12:00 PM PDT This is a guest post from Andrew Allemann, author of Domain Name Wire, a blog covering the business and policy of domain names. He has been active in the domain name industry as a buyer, seller, and consultant for over ten years. A new .xxx top level domain name is coming soon, and a lot of people aren’t happy about it. On Friday, the Board of Directors of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved entering into a contract with ICM Registry to operate a .xxx top level domain name (TLD). The first domain names bearing the new TLD are expected to hit the web later this year and will sell around $75-$100 each. Getting .xxx on the web hasn’t been an easy task for ICM Registry. It originally applied for the domain in 2004 and it was essentially approved by ICANN’s board. But then conservative groups such as Family Research Council and Focus on the Family started lobbying governments to halt the new web extension. ICANN ended up canning the idea, leading to an independent review against the non-profit coordinator of internet naming systems. This opened .xxx back up to discussion in February 2010. Ironically, a group of adult web site owners that are part of adult entertainment trade group Free Speech Coalition joined conservatives in opposition to the new domain. They worried that governments would try to restrict adult web sites to .xxx and then censor the domain. They also are upset about paying to defensively register their “brand names” in .xxx. Free Speech Coalition organized a protest with placards reading “No to .XXX” outside the ICANN meeting in San Francisco this past week. They only mustered up a couple dozen people and a homeless guy who had been bumming cigarettes off meeting attendees all week. While conservatives and some adult web site owners fear .xxx, this sort of domain name backlash will only escalate in the coming year. In June, ICANN is expected to approve guidelines that will allow just about anyone to get their own new top level domain name if they can afford the six-figure price tag that comes with it. This could result in literally thousands of new top level domains within a few years, from .Shop to .London to .Google. Some of these will be controversial. .Gay and .sex will certainly be opposed by conservative groups. Governments want to protect all matter of geographic terms. And trademark owners worry about cybersquatting and the cost of registering their trademarks across more TLDs. It’s governments, with instructions from their intellectual property lobbyists, that have pushed back the most on new TLDs. While ICANN has to listen to advice from its Governmental Advisory Committee, it doesn’t have to follow it. In fact, it disagreed with its advice on .xxx. But steamrolling governments might present long-term challenges to ICANN and the future of the domain name system. The U.S. government still controls key aspects of the internet and an important contract it can hold over the head of ICANN. Later this year, the crucial contract to run Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) comes up for renewal. More worrying would be if some governments get fed up and create an alternative to the existing domain name system. In the meantime, you might want to go pre-reserve your own .xxx domain name. According to the ticker on ICM Registry’s website, over 280,000 domain names have already been pre-reserved.        
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| In The Race For More Spectrum, AT&T Is Acquiring T-Mobile For $39 Billion Posted: 20 Mar 2011 11:34 AM PDT
Here’s the release with the details of the deal. AT&T will pay roughly $39 billion to Deutsche Telekom for T-Mobile USA. Deutsche Telekom will also get a roughly 8 percent ownership stake in AT&T as a result of the deal. And a Deutsche Telekom executive will join AT&T’s Board. With the deal, AT&T will get access to T-Mobile’s roughly 35 million customers. If the two fully merge, this will push AT&T far past Verizon in terms of subscriber numbers. Currently, Verizon has about 100 million subscribers in the U.S., while AT&T has about 95 million. This deal will also leave Sprint as the lone large outsider, with about 50 million subscribers. The agreement has already been approved by both Boards, but obviously will have to pass government scrutiny. Here are AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson’s key quotes from the release:
And:
And here’s Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann:
Stephenson’s wording, and other wording in the release referencing President Obama seems to be a clear message that AT&T thinks this deal should get government approval. Here’s the key blurb in that regard:
The “rural communities” and “small towns” wording is a big part of both the net neutrality and spectrum debate. AT&T wants to make it clear that they’re doing this for the little guys. It’s a smart play, but whether or not it will work is another matter. Certainly, Verizon will have some things to say about this deal. It also looks like T-Mobile customers may end up getting access to the iPhone after all… This commercial is certainly much more interesting now. More: Fast Break: As Of Last Week, Many At Sprint Thought They Were Merging With T-Mobile         
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| Beetailer Helps Online Retailers Set Up Shop On Facebook Posted: 20 Mar 2011 10:30 AM PDT
Today, Y Combinator-backed Beetailer is launching its software application that allows online retailers to import their web store onto Facebook. Not only does Beetailer import products onto a designated Facebook page, but the startup also allows retailers to promote their store and access detailed analytics about how well the social storefront is performing. Beetailer’s software connects with existing e-commerce platform, such as Magento and Shopify, and will import and sync online catalogs including, prices, images, sizes, colors and even whether products are in stock. The online storefront will populate on the retailer’s Facebook page and will essentially allow Facebook users to browse and add products to a shopping cart within the social network. When a user clicks to checkout and actually purchase the products, Beetailer will lead the user to the e-retailer’s website so the shopper will checkout via the retailer’s preferred payment process. But in addition to accessing the social network’s vast userbase, retailers can also leverage Facebook’s social graph to engage consumers. Beetailer allows retailers to launch time-limited, Facebook-specific promotions, including prizes and discounts for fans who like, comment, and bring other friends to the store. Additionally, Beetailer provides retailers with analytics to measure the results of each Currently, Beetailer, which was co-founded by Spanish engineers Laura Valverde, Miguel A. Martinez and Juan Gallego, has helped 900 online retailers (here’s an example) set up shop on Facebook for more than 434,000 products. There are a number of other players in the same space, including Payvment, which also helps retailers set up online storefront on Facebook. But as shopping on the social network ramps up there is a need for a variety of offerings to help retailers leverage the power of Facebook.        
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| Big Data Needs To Think Bigger Posted: 20 Mar 2011 09:30 AM PDT Editor's note: Guest author Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. He is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semilshah Spend enough time in Silicon Valley, and of all the buzz words you'll hear neatly tucked in with "graph," "serendipity," and "personalization" is one often uttered though, on the whole, not yet fully understood: "Big Data." On the surface, everyone realizes the opportunity. Data is being generated at lightning speed, the cost of storing is tiny, and new technologies are available to help manage, organize, and secure the data. Earlier this month, LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman delivered a presentation on this topic at SxSW, and starting next week, GigaOM's annual big data conference "Structure'" kicks off in NYC. At the consumer level, while we are wowed by pretty visualizations, the real advancements in big data technologies cover (1) how data is structured and stored, (2) how it is organized and retrieved, and, most interesting to me, (3) how underlying mathematics can be written into algorithms to leverage the data and help discover entirely new things. I'll paraphrase from one data scientist, LinkedIn's Peter Skomoroch, who notes on Quora that cheap data storage allows users to leverage asymmetric information, larger data sets increase the likelihood that new insights can be found, and machine learning advancements can be used in entirely new, game-changing ways. This being Silicon Valley, the obvious targets in sight concern the massive bits of data generated online through social networks, e-commerce, mobile location, and advertising technology. There are no surprises here, and some of the best data scientists happen to reside within these social networks, such as Dmitry Ryaboy from Twitter, Jeff Hammerbacher from Cloudera (formerly of Facebook) Deepak Singh from Amazon, and Skomoroch and DJ Patil from LinkedIn. Not only is the amount of data generated within social networks staggering, but the pace at which its generated and its complexity are both accelerating. Beyond the data visualizations captured by social network maps, the opportunities that lie hidden within those relationships is phenomenal and will feed into social commerce, context-awareness, and location-based ads. These are the current "hot spots" for big data. There are many companies working on some angle within "big data," and some which have a long history. Earlier this week, Aster Data Systems was acquired by TeraData, and there are plenty of firms focused on some aspect of data. Dataguise focuses on "masking" sensitive data that is either regulated by law or corporate policy, protecting information from external and internal breaches. Lattice Engines uses algorithms to provide its clients with predictive analytics and learning. Cloudera develops and distributes Hadoop, which powers data processing for websites. And companies like Factual and InfoChimps provide platforms where anyone can share and manipulate data on any subject. (While there are many companies focused on big data, I'll highlight a few and ask the crowd to help input more into the system, here, and follow up on Quora.) One of the big data companies to break out into the mainstream tech press is located in downtown Palo Alto: Palantir Technologies. As TechCrunch's Leena Rao pointed out in June 2010, after the company raised Series D funding, big data companies, and especially Palantir, don't capture much social media attention. They are instead busy selling their flagship products, Palantir Government and Palantir Finance, to government and financial institutions worldwide. Big data investors know the writing is on the wall: Palantir's Chairman, Peter Thiel, has been on the record about big data and believes the company will not only cross the billion-dollar threshold, but shoot past it. Will it help securities regulators find the next crisis or Bernie Madoff? Will it help governments monitor potential terrorist activity and provide actionable information before it's too late? These are big problems that affect our society and for which we don't have the best solutions. We needed solutions yesterday, and when Palantir and other companies help us identify and head off these threats, they will be rewarded a billion times over. Now, let's take big data one step further. Whether we're all data scientists or not, we understand the scale of the opportunity. We know there's smart money to invest in data storage, masking, security, retrieval, analysis, and visualizations. But, what about leveraging data for true discovery? Can new techniques in mathematics and physics help computer scientists create a new breed of programs to analyze datasets that traditional approaches cannot? How could our world change if we better understood the underlying mathematics behind the data? If finding insights within data is like finding a needle in a haystack, will the right math-based approaches help us build better magnets to draw out those needles? The conventional wisdom to date has been to apply these new techniques to the online world, where data is generated and stored in robust and zero-cost ways, but there is much, much more to explore. While these are certainly big problems to tackle and will generate valuable insights for web properties to exploit, I'm most intrigued by the mathematicians and physicists who are innovating within their disciplines and applying them to tackle big problems around big data, particularly concerning the speed and shape of data. There are two aspects of data that capture my interest as a consumer. First, what are the speed and motion characteristics around the data generated, especially for networks that move in realtime, such as social networks and financial markets? Second, what is the shape of the data, and what can we learn from analyzing new dimensions within the data that perhaps weren't accessible even just a year ago? It's within those fast-moving data and subsequent nooks and crannies that our next big discoveries may be hidden, waiting for new equations to unearth them. There are many public datasets (such as data.gov) available to scientists, some of which are listed here and here. There's no shortage of opportunities to mine these resources, such as old public health studies, and to find new trends to inform the future. Perhaps just as interesting, if not more, is old data collected by large private companies and/or governments that are either too sensitive or competitive to release into the wild. Today, big pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are sitting on mountains of internal data related to trials they've run, energy firms have data related to mineral and resource deposits, and finance speculators use the most sophisticated programs to run hedge funds and the like, looking for the smallest holes to exploit and extract gains. Let's assume this data was released, or at least made available to the best mathematicians out there today—could they help us sift through life science data and harvest information that could itself lead to the formation of entirely new products and services? Could they help us find new deposits of minerals, oil, or gas buried deep in the ground or remote parts of the ocean bed? Could the data help us target geoengineering tactics high up in the clouds to combat global warming? Could the data be used in financial markets, not only to notify us of fraudulent behavior, but also to prevent market movers from profiting during bubbles while the masses get doused after the bubbles pop? And, could we analyze seismic activity to predict earthquake likelihoods and tsunami arrival times? The folks and institutions that currently sit on this data have reasonable, short-term incentives to protect it given how competitive their industries are. Yet in the long-term, we'll need to access these and other data, and hopefully allow entrepreneurs to probe them with all these new tools so, as Hammerbacher says, we can "use the past to impact the future." Yes, there is still much more value to extract from social commerce and interpersonal networks—but while these are worthwhile pursuits, the real game-changing innovation and advancement in big data will only come when we're able to apply the most cutting-edge mathematics and physical sciences to the biggest problems we collectively face. Image by Paul Butler.        
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When students asked what subjects they should major in to become a tech entrepreneur, I used to say engineering, mathematics, and science—because an education in these fields is the prerequisite for innovation, and because engineers make the best entrepreneurs.
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