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| That Whining Sound You Hear Is The Death Wheeze Of Newspapers Posted: 07 Apr 2009 08:47 AM PDT
The newspaper industry is making a lot of noise these days about the Web “stealing” its content and destroying its business. Invariably, the newsmen point their ink-stained fingers at blogs, which are nothing more than “parasites”, or at Google, which is supposedly aiding and abetting in the wholesale theft of the newspaper’s precious words. Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journal and other fine (and not-so-fine) publications, recently warned that the industry should no longer allow Google “to steal our copyrights.” And yesterday, the A.P. declared all out war against the Internet. Now, there certainly is wholesale theft going on. It happens to newspapers, it happens to TechCrunch, and it happens to all big publishers on the Web. But don’t be confused. That is not what is going on here. For the most part, it is not the millions of legitimate bloggers who are doing the stealing, and it is not Google either. What is going on here is that the newspaper industry contracted by $7.5 billion last year in the U.S. alone, and it is looking for someone to blame rather than adapt to the new realities of information consumption. The worst part about their whining is that it is completely hypocritical. While newspaper chiefs are complaining in public about Google, their editorial departments are sprouting blogs and their technology departments are using every SEO trick in the book to make sure their articles show up in Google searches and Google News. As Danny Sullivan points out in beautiful rant, if they really wanted to, any newspaper could stop its content from showing up on Google with one simple line of code:
The newspapers are targeting Google, just like everyone else, because it has the deepest pockets and directs large currents of information and attention on the Web. But, as Sullivan points out, you don’t hear the newspaper industry complaining about Yahoo, even though Yahoo News is much bigger than Google News. Perhaps that is because Yahoo is an advertising partner with 793 newspapers in the U.S. and points its traffic firehose directly at the newspaper’s websites. The newspapers want the traffic. They just can’t stand it when readers can skim the headlines and a few lines of text on Google or a news aggregator and decide to click elsewhere. Google is the newsstand, as is Digg, TechMeme, Reddit, and any other news filters. If the newspapers and their Websites were the only source of “quality” information, Sullivan suggests they go create their own online newsstand, a Hulu for news. Maybe they could just link to each other. Then we’d see just how good the newspapers are at creating original reporting and how much readers actually care. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| I Want To Install Your NIN iPhone App Like An Animal Posted: 07 Apr 2009 08:18 AM PDT  Hey, pig: Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails knows how to make an iPhone app. Their latest app, which should appear this week, is basically a music, video and image browser with a number if connectors to NIN.com, the band's website. In short, it turns a band's website into a portable social network and offers all of NIN's music for streaming on the go for free. The app also finds NIN friends nearby and then allows you to chat with other NIN fans and share images and profile information with them online. Video after the jump. |
| Knewton Bags $6 Million Series B Round For Adaptive Learning Platform Posted: 07 Apr 2009 06:03 AM PDT
The company says it will use the extra capital to better serve both the enterprise market (where it says demand for its adaptive learning engine is growing) and end consumers with its online test preparation services. When Erick reviewed the service late last year, he wrote:
Read the full review here (it digs pretty deep). Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| GM And Segway Announce Two-Wheeled Urban Transport Vehicle Posted: 07 Apr 2009 05:32 AM PDT  General Motors and Segway have teamed up on Project PUMA (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility), a two-wheeled city vehicle capable of reaching speeds up to 35 miles per hour, and going 35 miles on a single charge at a cost of 35 cents per charge. |
| Facebook Commits To Making Social Networking More Accessible For Visually Challenged Users Posted: 07 Apr 2009 04:11 AM PDT
This makes sense from Facebook’s perspective too, of course. There are a lot of visually impaired people on the planet, and they want to connect to their friends, relatives and peers just as much as you and me. According to stats provided by the AFB, there are over 20 million Americans who have reported experiencing significant vision loss. Augusto writes:
Facebook has been working with the organization for 2 years, and so far this had led to a number of improvements which are listed here. In the blog post, Augusto writes that they’re also working together with Facebook to implement some design changes that will make the site more usable for people with visual impairments. I have a feeling they won’t be starting Facebook Groups and Polls against these changes. I quickly looked for pages on MySpace and Bebo where they indicate that they’re committed to making the user experience for visually impaired members better, but didn’t immediately find anything. Google, on the other hand, tackles usability issues extensively, and is for example experimenting with a custom search engine for blind or visually challenged users. We’re not here to lecture anyone, but if you’re building websites and Web applications, you might want to keep into consideration that there are millions of people who could potentially be using them, provided you make it possible for them to do so. AFB Consulting can help you with that. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Boxee Continues To Innovate With API And New Alpha Version For Mac, Apple TV Posted: 07 Apr 2009 01:36 AM PDT
Heck, they’re even prepared to act as middleman for connecting freelance web developers with companies looking to leverage their API. Hard not to love that type of company. Boxee is today also introducing a new test version of the Boxee alpha version for Mac and Apple TV (get it here for Intel Mac OS X 10.4+), adding two applications that were built using the brand new API. The new Boxee alpha comes with a lot of music goodness as it includes both Pandora, the popular music streaming service, and RadioTime, which enables their users to access over 100,000 traditional radio stations from across the globe. This comes right off the heels of the introduction of a (basic) iPhone application. The new version of the software for Mac and Apple TV features support for Hulu too, but in the work-around way, i.e. using a custom browser built on top of Mozilla technology (sort of like a stripped down Firefox). As you know, Hulu is doing everything it can to keep its content from being streamed on Boxee, while Boxee is doing much of the same to do the exact opposite. Boxee says it’s now working on updated versions for Ubuntu and Windows. As a PC user, I can hardly wait. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Enterprise Communications Software Socialcast Secures $1.4 million in Series A Funding Posted: 06 Apr 2009 09:47 PM PDT
Socialcast, a social communication SaaS provider for enterprises, has secured $1.4 million in Series A funding from True Ventures and angel investors. True Ventures led the round with $1 million and angel investors contributed $400,000. Socialcast was a finalist for the 2009 Crunchies Award for “Best Bootstrapped Startup.” Om Malik, the founder of tech blogging network GigaOm and venture partner at True Ventures, will be joining Socialcast’s board of directors. On Malik joined True Ventures last September. Socialcast is Malik’s first investment at True Ventures and his first board appointment as a partner at the VC firm. Founded by Tim Young, Socialcast is a communication tool businesses can use to incorporate social networking with messaging to share knowledge across enterprises. Socialcast’s software (for $1 per user per month) combines social bookmarking features, Twitter-like microblogging and FriendFeed-like streaming into one platform. And the software integrates with other social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and Del.icio.us. Socialcast can also import activity from your iPhone, Gmail account and YouTube. And all of this activity is private, making Socialcast an ideal program for real-time, internal communication within businesses. Yammer, a winner at last year’s TechCrunch 50, is a similar Twitter-like microblogging and communication platform for businesses that has gained popularity. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Adgregate Markets Scores Distribution Deal With Google’s DoubleClick Posted: 06 Apr 2009 06:40 PM PDT
Adgregate Markets, a TechCrunch 50 startup, has signed a distribution deal with Google’s DoubleClick. Adgregate's ShopAds allow consumers to browse, interact, and ultimately purchase directly within an ad unit. Normal display ads take users away from a publisher's site and brings them to a third-party store but Adgregate lets users buy products featured in ads without moving away from the page. Adgregate, which presented its technology at TechCrunch 50 last fall, received positive reviews from our panelists, who included entrepreneur Marc Andreessen; MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe; Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, angel investor Yossi Vardi; and former Yahoo executive VP Ash Patel. The panelists unanimously agreed that Adgregate was a great idea that will make money and address a need in the display ad market. It was only a matter of time before Adgregate’s technology attracted big-name interest. ShopAds, which is a widget, can replace any size banner ad and will now be available to all of DoubleClick's advertisers. If a user views the ad widget and wants to buy the product it's advertising, they need only to click the description button under the ad and click "add to cart" to buy it. From there, the user can pay directly in the widget by inputting credit card information in a secure buying process. Adgregate will share revenue with both DoubleClick and the retailer whose goods are being sold in the ShopAd widget. But the publisher of the ad only gets a share of revenue if the retailer has accepted them as an affiliate publisher. If that is the case, then the publisher will also get a separate commission fee from the advertiser. This isn’t a bad deal for publishers. Advertisers have an incentive to pay a higher commission to publishers so they put their ads in a more prominent spot on their page, but the money is being split an awful lot of ways. Competitors to Adgregate include Nooked and Lemonade, which both also allow publishers to embed an e-commerce widget on their sites, but lead users to the retailer’s site for purchases. Adrgregate’s technology is useful to publishers because users can purchase an item in the ShopAd widget without having to ever leave their site. Display ad network DoubleClick was bought by Google in 2007 for a $3.1 billion, outbidding Microsoft and pushing through eventual approval of the deal in both the U.S. and Europe. Here’s an example of one of Adgregate’s embeddable ShopAd widgets: Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| The Good Old Days Are Back: Twitter Succumbs To A Day Of Glitches Posted: 06 Apr 2009 06:15 PM PDT
After a day of missing avatars, lost Tweets, and vanishing DMs, Twitter is down for the count (at least for the next 30 minutes or so). The site has posted its ‘unscheduled maintenance’ image, featuring some frozen yogurt and a caterpillar in lieu of the infamous Fail Whale (which now seems to be reserved for temporary glitches). And the status blog now says that the site will be down for an hour or so (which began at 5:45 PM PST). Twitter was notorious early last year for its rare bouts of uptime, though the service has performed admirably since last summer despite incredible growth. Now that the service is down this evening, it gives users the perfect opportunity to try out the new FriendFeed beta. Update 6:28 PM PST: And they’re back after less than 45 minutes of downtime. Not too shabby. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| FriendFeed Is In Danger Of Becoming The Coolest App No One Uses Posted: 06 Apr 2009 05:46 PM PDT
But there’s trouble on the horizon, and FriendFeed is in danger of becoming the coolest application that no one uses. Growth at Twitter, FriendFeed’s primary competitor, continues unchecked. According to Comscore the site is growing at approximately 33% a month and attracted just under 10 million unique worldwide visitors in February. It had just 1.2 million in February 2008. More importantly, every time I turn on the news, it seems the talking heads are pushing their Twitter account as their online identity. That kind of mainstream attention is driving users by the boatload. Meanwhile, competitor FriendFeed, despite a continuous stream of innovative new features, is languishing. It has just 637,000 monthly uniques according to Comscore, or about 6.4% of Twitter’s flow. FriendFeed has less users today than it did last October, according to Comscore. Cofounder Paul Buchheit says that isn’t accurate (and I believe him), but it’s clear that the service hasn’t grown much in the last few months. Twitter is adding more users every week than FriendFeed has in total. Twitter is turning into a growth monster, and the trajectory and continued media hype suggest that will continue well into broad mainstream adoption. This is despite the fact that Twitter rarely launches new features (or perhaps because of that) and had to buy its search feature. Meanwhile, all those innovative features that FriendFeed launches are routinely copied by Facebook and others, minimizing their positive impact. And the fact is that FriendFeed may just be too complicated for the average user to quickly understand. Twitter is fairly simple: spout off on whatever you like in 140 characters or less, and if you’re interesting enough people will begin to subscribe to you. FriendFeed, by contrast, is a much more complex system with numerous bells and whistles. The power users love it. Novices can be overwhelmed. Buchheit says that there’s no reason multiple players can’t compete in the microblogging/activity stream space and find success. He points to email as an example (and as the creator of Gmail, he knows what he’s talking about). But I’m not so sure that this space will go the same way as email. Twitter’s lead may be insurmountable by anyone other than Facebook at this point. At the end of the day, this wonderful company may tire of swimming upstream and go for an easy exit. I’m sure that a number of larger companies would love to snap up FriendFeed to get the technology, team and userbase. I mean, it’s not like Google is just going to sit there and watch this all play out without them. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| The Growing Complexity Of Facebook Is Confusing Your Mom Posted: 06 Apr 2009 05:17 PM PDT
Facebook has a thing for moms. The last two times I’ve attended a Facebook event - both the unveiling of its redesign and its announcement of Connect on the iPhone - Facebook employees emphasized how excited they were about the fact that their mothers had recently joined the social network. The milestone is a symbolic one, indicating that Facebook is expanding beyond historically internet-savvy generations to include an older user-base, namely folks who use their computers primarily for basic tasks like Email and photography but have largely stayed out of the social-media craze. Yes, there are plenty of older tech-savvy computer users, but this is hardly the norm. Facebook is clearly trying to bridge this gap, and it’s making significant progress. But it still has a long way to go. Thing is, I really don’t think Facebook is that user-friendly for people who are trying out social networks for the first time. In fact, with its plethora of granular privacy settings and the somewhat foreign concept of ‘Networks’, Facebook can be downright baffling for new users. I’ve been using the site for years and I still have trouble configuring privacy settings for various photo albums and Friend Lists. The settings are all there, somewhere, they’re just confusing. Homepage redesigns and somewhat frivolous new features aren’t really helping the matter. Facebook’s default privacy settings aren’t exactly geared towards novices, either. Creating a new photo album lists the default sharing option as “Everyone”. It’s trivial to change, but how many people simply click ‘next’ and share their photos with the world without really meaning to? And new accounts are set by default to share their information with everyone else on their network, which works out to quite a few people if you happen to join a regional network (which Facebook suggests during the signup process). What Facebook really needs is a ’safe mode’. Something that caters to the the kind of person who may occasionally lend a few thousand dollars to a Nigerian princess, or who sends out chain-letters that originated in 2002 to dozens of friends at time. Many of these people are quite intelligent. They just haven’t grown up with the constant threat of scams and phishers. And they’ve been told so many times not to adjust a program’s settings (for fear of doing something wrong), that they’re afraid to explore the site and figure out the privacy settings for themselves. A ‘Safe Mode’ could take any number of forms, from a profile with stricter default privacy settings to a Clippy-like virtual helper (hopefully with fewer annoying tendencies than Microsoft Office’s old sidekick). Just something that makes the site a little easier to use for those people who aren’t really sure what they’re doing. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Behind The A.P.’s Plan To Become The Web’s News Cop Posted: 06 Apr 2009 04:31 PM PDT
With its news syndication business under direct attack by the growing abundance of other news sources on the Internet, the Associated Press announced today that it will begin to police the Web and “develop a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used.” The A.P., it appears, wants to become the RIAA of the flailing newspaper industry—ferreting out information pirates and threatening lawsuits if they don’t turn over some of their Google gold. The A.P. has a broad view of what constitutes its content. It is not just entire articles copied wholesale by spam blogs. The A.P. has problems with the unauthorized use of its headlines, even when they include links. Many of its policies ignore the concept of fair use. And even when it has cause to go after copyright violators, it sometimes relies on antiquated and tortuous legal theories. The A.P. is so backwards in its thinking that we’ve banned links to all of its stories on TechCrunch. Now it wants to go after unauthorized use if its news articles across the Web. Forget for a moment that its notion of what constitutes unauthorized use may not hold up in a court of law. The A.P. is going directly after the search engines and news aggregators which often point traffic away from A.P. sources directly at the supposed infringers. So how exactly does the A.P. plan on policing the Internet? Here I must rely on informed speculation, but I think I have a pretty good idea. The A.P. already monitors the Web for any partial or whole re-use of its articles and photos through a partnership with Attributor, a startup that has indexed the Web and can find any content for which it has a digital fingerprint. After identifying the worst offenders through Attributor, the A.P. could simply present that list to Google or any other site pointing to those offending sites and demand action. This action could be anything from redirecting links to A.P.-sanctioned sites to demanding a portion of the offending sites’ AdSense or other advertising revenues if they happen to be a customer. Would Google comply with such requests? If doing so gets the A.P. and Rupert Murdoch off its back, and it believes there is a good chance that copyright infringement is taking place, it very well might. The real troubling aspect here is that this determination would not be made by a court, but rather placed into the hands of Google and the A.P. The A.P, for one, has already proven that it cannot be trusted to distinguish between fair use and infringement on its own behalf. And Google’s policy when it comes to claims of copyright infringement is to take down the offending content and ask questions later. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Is Web 2.0 Abandoning the UGC Ship? Posted: 06 Apr 2009 03:54 PM PDT
The premise of the show was that would-be writers and directors would submit their work via the Web and the guys would pick the most talented person and produce his or her movie. It was an entertaining show, but the movies always flopped. In the later seasons, I remember a scene where a frustrated Matt Damon says something like, "Are we saying we were wrong and all the talent is already in Hollywood?" Welcome to the catch-22 of User Generated Content. And guess what? It hasn't changed with time. We all know there are talented people who never get their lucky breaks, so democratization works in theory. But there's a problem: It doesn't make money. Users don't want to pay subscription fees for something aspiring writers, singers, and actors are uploading for free, and advertisers don't want to be next to dodgy and unpredictable inventory, no matter how gaudy the page views or streams. In the LivePlanet-era, costs and excesses ran fledgling UGC companies into the ground. But this time around, with more people online, greater access to bandwidth, a more established online advertising ecosystem, and far lower burn rates, there was reason to believe the monetization nut could be cracked. After all, there was a time when no one thought you could make money off of search. Tim Koogle reportedly used to brag at Yahoo analyst meetings that search traffic was going down, because how could you possibly make money off people leaving your site? Then, the financial world blew up the economy for us. And the most rosy-eyed optimists have come to realize that even though Web companies didn't cause the meltdown this time, they’re still getting hit. Companies need revenues and in a duck-and-cover economy, it seems UGC isn't going to get them there. Across the Web 2.0 world, we're seeing a quiet-but-knee-jerk shift away from UGC in favor of professional content. I wrote about this idea back in February when Slide—a company that's long championed the marketability of individual expression—did a deal with Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst Media. But in the last few weeks, there's been a better example: YouTube. Last week, news leaked that YouTube was close to locking Disney up in an exclusive deal for long-form content, and now, we hear of a potential deal with Sony Pictures. One of two things has happened: Either YouTube has spent years trying to work on deals with Hollywood,and they all happen to be closing at the same time; or the biggest champion of the user generated content revolution is changing its game plan. Of course, YouTube won’t say it’s turning its back on user generated content, the same way Max Levchin said calling UGC a loss-leader was "too harsh" a few months ago. (Never mind, he had just described it as a great way to bring in users but not a great way to make money….you know, the definition of a loss leader.) That's because smart entrepreneurs realize user generated content still matters, it just doesn't directly translate to revenues. UGC is the core of why so many people are on these sites and without the eyeballs, the tech platforms don’t have as much negotiating leverage with Hollywood. Without Hollywood, it seems, they may not get revenues anytime soon. It’s an interesting catch-22 for entrepreneurs and executives. Web 2.0 companies need to shift their emphasis away from UGC, without seeming like they are. In other words, they can’t abandon the soft, fuzzy ROI of UGC, as much as the immediate need to make money is pressing down on them. Otherwise, they risk driving users away and opening the door for the next wave of Web upstarts—the same way Web 1.0 did when its leaders stopped chasing eyeballs in favor of premium services and subscriptions. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Private Shopping Clubs Combine Discounts With Luxury (We Have One Kings Lane Coupons) Posted: 06 Apr 2009 03:40 PM PDT
Thanks to a surge of consumers looking for deals in the recessionary economy, private online sample sales, which offer highly discounted merchandise from luxury retailers looking to unload excess inventory, is becoming a fast-growing business. BuyVIP, a European private online shopping club with more than 3.5 million members, just secured $14.9 million in Series A funding from Kennet Partners, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, 3i Group and Molins Capital. BuyVIP’s American counterparts, Ideeli and Gilt Groupe have also been able to latch on to this expanding market where big-name designers like Calvin Klein, Zac Posen and Givenchy sell last season’s clothes, jewelry and handbags to shoppers at significant markdowns. Now, private shopping club One Kings Lane is trying to be the online sample sale for affordable designer home wares and furnishings. The first 100 TechCrunch readers who sign up here will get a $25 credit towards any purchase. Like Ideeli and Gilt Groupe, One Kings Lane is an exclusive invitation-only shopping destination, featuring high-end designer home goods at prices that are discounted by as much as 70% (everything on the site is at least 40-50% off retail price). One Kings Lane offers its sample sales during a 72-hour window, alerting members of sales via daily emails. The online site buys the excess merchandise directly from the designers, and then marks items up to make a profit. One Kings Lane cuts costs by outsourcing its e-commerce operations to e-business provider Auspient Inc. One Kings Lane co-founders Alison Gelb Pincus and Susan Feldman say that invitation-only online “shopping clubs” are incredibly attractive to high-end designers because the exclusivity of the clubs doesn’t diminish the image of the luxury brands. Sites like Overstock.com or retailers like TJMaxx also offer discounted, excess merchandise but don’t have the luxury connotation attached to their names. Pincus adds that retailers are still able to take advantage of the potential buying power of shoppers across the Internet but not at the expense of tarnishing the brand. One Kings Lane appears to be growing at a rapid pace in its first week of business. Already the site has tens of thousands of members. Pincus and Feldman say that because of the recessionary economy, consumers are trolling the internet for deals and they hope to make their site an easy way to find high-end home goods at discount prices. The sales are pretty good. Popular high-end Archipelago candles were discounted by over 50%, for instance, while they are being sold for full price on Nordstrom.com. Competitor Bluefly.com, which is an open site that also sells marked down luxury goods, has a wide variety of deals on home goods and will likely be a formidable opponent to One Kings Lane. Bluefly also has high-end, designer merchandise, including flatware from Vera Wang and Hermes, and shoppers aren’t restricted to a 72-hour window to buy goods. At the moment, One Kings Lane has a handful of designers featured and will definitely need to grow its roster of brands to create a loyal user base. BuyVIP currently features over 400 different brands. And part of BuyVIP’s new capital will be used to expand to new geographies, and a US expansion could grow the site’s 3.5 million user base even further.  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Earn Some D’oh: MySpace Wants You To Make Your Own Simpsons Couch Gag Posted: 06 Apr 2009 03:28 PM PDT
Nearly anyone who has watched TV in the last twenty years is familiar with The Simpson’s intro, which always features a different brief segment at the end as the family rushes to sit together on their couch. Even after 436 episodes it’s a gag that still hasn’t gotten old. Today The Simpsons is teaming with MySpace to launch a contest that invites users to create their own Simpsons couch gags. Contestants are invited to include the official theme song (which is available for download on the site). The contest runs until May 18, with the winners receiving a trip to LA to attend the premiere party for the show’s 21st season, along with a home entertainment system and some other Simpsons memorabilia. MySpace likes to do a lot of these media-heavy contests, which strongly appeal to its core demographic. Other competitions include its Married On MySpace wedding contest, where users vie to win a cheesy online wedding. The Simpsons Couch Gag - How To Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Are URL Shorteners A Necessary Evil, Or Just Evil? Posted: 06 Apr 2009 01:50 PM PDT
One of the most viral activities on the Web is sharing links. It is fast and easy, and a good way to communicate ideas. What started out as something people did via e-mail and bookmark-sharing services like Delicious, is now moving to Facebook, Twitter, and other social broadcasting services. It is just so much more efficient to share a link once with all your friends and followers than to send it to each one individually. Twitter is especially suited to sharing quick links, but its 140-character limit has perhaps done more than anything else to propel forward the use of URL shorteners. These take long URLs and turn them into shorter ones that usually redirect people back to the original. So for instance, http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/06/revolution-money-raises-another-42-million-for-alternative-payment-service-nobody-is-using/ becomes http://tinyurl.com/coflho or http://bit.ly/q3Sl9 or http://digg.com/u1LRR. There are more than a dozen such services, including TinyURL, bit.ly, Snurl, tr.im, is.gd, and the new Diggbar. The better ones offer tracking stats. One of them, bit.ly, just raised $2 million. Nobody really likes them, but they are a necessary evil. How else are you going to share links on Twitter without having the URL take up half the message? It may be more complicated than that, however. Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious, thinks they are downright evil. Schachter writes, “The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system.” In other words, they slow down the Web. He gives several other reasons why they are bad as well. They add a whole new slew of middlemen to the equation, and these links become dependent on the continued existence of these startups or even the whimsical changes in their terms of service. URL shorteners make links opaque, which spammers love. They also add an unnecessary extra step to what should be a fairly simple message. Some, like Digg’s new Diggbar, also steal link juice from the original destination by wrapping the Website in a frame rather than redirecting to it. That just messes with the whole link structure of the Web. If I am linking to your story using a shortened Digg URL, Digg gets the credit, not your Website. Most URL shorteners don’t do this, but If Digg is successful with its new feature, they may follow suit. If that becomes an accepted practice on the Web, it would create all sorts of complications for the search engines in terms of duplication and making sure the underlying link gets the proper ranking. There is a simple solution to all of this. Services like Twitter could simply do a better job of incorporating links into their design by allowing users to hyperlink existing words in their messages, without wasting space by displaying the actual URL. This is how FriendFeed handles the issue. Or it could carve out a separate place for links outside the message (perhaps through a “link” button at the bottom of each Tweet). The only reason to keep the URL within the message itself is for SMS messages, and for those perhaps Twitter would be better off creating its own URL shortening service that can become the standard, or buy one of the existing ones. If it ever does go the acquisition route, bit.ly might be a leading candidate. It was created by Betaworks, the main investor behind the startup Twitter purchased last year (Summize) when it realized it needed its own real-time search engine. So are URL shorteners necessary or just evil? Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| CVS Signs On With Google Health To Offer Comprehensive Pharmacy History Posted: 06 Apr 2009 11:50 AM PDT
The slow but steady march towards a unified online healthcare management system continues. Google has announced that it has forged a new partnership with CVS, one of the nation’s largest pharmacy chains, allowing CVS customers to import their full prescription history into Google Health. CVS joins other major pharmacies including Longs Drugs and Walgreens in offering the same functionality, which combined now allow over 100 million Americans to import their medical histories into Google Health, which launched last May. It may not sound terribly exciting at first, but the ability to quickly look up a patient’s past and current medications is actually very important in an age when it seems that nearly everyone is on at least one prescription medication. While national pharmacies can typically look up what medications you’ve filled from other branches of their store, they can’t search through the systems of other chains, so they’re forced to rely on the patient to self-report their medical history. Unfortunately most people have pretty poor memories when it comes to remembering their current and past medications, especially when they’re taking generic drugs, which can lead to some very dangerous drug combinations (the Google blog post notes that as many as 1.5 million Americans a year are harmed by dangerous medication interactions). By aggregating prescription histories in a single place (which users can then share with their doctors and loved ones), Google Health can help cut down on these harmful drug interactions. Of course, a central hub for your prescription history is only really useful if you can import all of your prescriptions, not just most of them. And Google Health is still missing out on a few major players, including national store chains like Wal-Mart and Target. Google won’t comment on who they’re currently in talks with, but I suspect they’re trying to get as many of these chains on board as possible. Google Health doesn’t seem to get as much attention as many of Google’s other properties, but my guess is that it will be among the company’s most important assets a few years down the line. The American healthcare system makes accessing past records, prescriptions, test results, and other important data a huge hassle, not to mention the ridiculously confusing (and uncentralized) hubs offered by health insurers and pharmacies. There are privacy issues abound with a centralized system (the fact that Google insists on labeling its health product as a Beta is definitely unsettling, as are the company’s past security issues), but the potential benefits may well outweigh the risks. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Google Helps Rock The Vote In India Posted: 06 Apr 2009 11:41 AM PDT
Google has launched the Google India Elections Center to help engage India’s 700 million eligible voters in the country’s 15th general election, set to take place over the course of the next month. Google launched similar web based election centers in the U.S. and Australia in the past, but Google India’s election center has some new features which make it worth a look. Available in English and Hindi, Google’s Indian election center lets Indian citizens confirm their voter registration status (which is a new feature that wasn’t fully implemented in the U.S. or Australian versions), find their polling location, view their constituency on a map and access election news. Voters can also get in-depth data about the area where they vote, including changes in literacy, poverty, and employment rates in the constituency since the last election. Voters can learn about the background of their Member of Parliament and this year’s candidates, and are able to see politician’s voting records, and attendance. The site will also feature updates on election schedules, online polls, discussion forums, opinions and photos. Google has partnered with the Hindustan Times, and a number of NGOs, including, the Association for Democratic Reforms, Indicus Analytics, the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, the Liberty Institute, and PRS Legislative Services. Yahoo developed a similar site for Indian citizens last week, but Yahoo’s site doesn’t seem to be as comprehensive as Google India’s election site.  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| When Startups monetize! Babbel starts first paid services Posted: 06 Apr 2009 07:58 AM PDT
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