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Oklahoma City Tea Party Protestor Arrested for Threatening Bloodbath On TwitterTea Posted: 26 Apr 2009 12:53 AM PDT An Oklahoma City man named Daniel Knight Hayden, 52, posted threats against the government on Twitter under the name CitizenQuasar including the suggestion that he would kill police if they approached his home. The FBI has arrested him around April 15 in response to the threats, including a final tweet describing himself as "locked and loaded" and ready to "see what happens." Oh, and he has a MySpace page, too. Wired paints the picture of a zealot who might not have all of his screws tight. "START THE KILLING NOW! I am willing to be the FIRST DEATH!," read a tweet at 8:01 PM that day. "After I am killed on the Capitol Steps, like a REAL man, the rest of you will REMEMBER ME!!!," he added five minutes later. Then: "Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the[m] on the State Capitol steps."

World of Warcraft Comes to iPhone Posted: 26 Apr 2009 12:22 AM PDT Well, we had a good run. The Renaissance, going to the Moon, inventing the Snuggie... but all that's done now. World of Warcraft is no longer restricted to home and laptop use. Its grip on humanity will be total. Penny Arcade was remarkably prescient in this case; I wonder who Satan (who is the devil) is working for right now? Could be Apple, could be Blizzard, or maybe he's just freelancing. Now there will be no reason to log off for the poor souls whose evenings are already consumed in questing and raiding.

Google Earth Helps Solve A Plane Crash Mystery Posted: 25 Apr 2009 10:04 PM PDT The idea behind Google Earth has always been a powerful one: It allows users to explore places that they either can’t or won’t go. But with its vast amount of maps and topographical data, it also is a very powerful tool for combing the Earth — and that can be very useful when you’re searching for something. Which is exactly how it helped a grieving family find a plane that crashed, and took the lives of loved ones, that had been missing for over two years. Despite countless time spent searching all the areas in Arizona that authorities and the family thought the plane might have gone down, there had been no luck all this time in finding the plane. Then, something rather incredible happened. A person who had also been involved in the attempts to find millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, found a picture of a forest fire that had been taken the same day as the crash and in what was thought to be a similar area. He alerted the family, which had set up a website to aid in the search. Remarkably, they were able to find the exact area in the picture using the different viewing angles and topographical data of Google Earth. The family and some volunteers then set out to the area they had pinpointed in the program, using its coordinates. Sure enough, they found the wreckage. While it’s not exactly a happy ending for the families of the two people lost in the crash, Marcy Randolph and William Westover, it does provide closure, Randolph’s family says. And now the family is hoping to help others do similar types of search and rescue using Google Earth. The family has set up a system called MARSI, which stands for Mapped Archive of Rescue & Search Information. On the website they set up for it, they detail exactly how they were able to use Google Earth’s data to find the missing plane. It’s very interesting stuff. And MAST (The Missing Aircraft Search Team), a team which contributed to the Fossett search, apparently wants to use MARSI for future searches, Liz Johannesen, Marcy Randolph’s cousin, tells us. These types of stories remind us that while projects like Google Earth may not be the most important to a company’s bottom line, they can provide something much more valuable to a lot of people. Last week, we heard about the woman who got her stolen purse back thanks to Google Latitude. And this week we have this much more important story involving Google Earth. It is nice to see that the technology we sometimes take for granted in a quickly evolving space, actually can help people in a meaningful way. Below, find some images detailing the search area from Google Maps. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

EQ Network Converts Videos To Mobile-Friendly Formats While Inserting Ads Posted: 25 Apr 2009 09:11 PM PDT The web is filled with video content, but there are different formats that don’t always play nicely with all players. The most obvious example of this is the hugely popular Flash format, which does not work on the hugely popular iPhone. EQ Network has an answer for that and other format issues, and wants to offers content owners a way to serve up ads in those video post-conversion. The company’s Media Delivery Bar can be embedded on a page below any video player. This gives viewers an easy-to-understand option for converting and sending a video to a specific type of device they may want to watch the video on — like an iPhone. You simply enter an email address or cellphone number that you want to send the video to, fill out some quick demographic information, and within a few minutes, the video will arrive in a format tailored to your needs. The demographic information part is key. That’s how EQ Network hopes to serve up ads to you that are embedded within those videos. Because it knows your sex and age range, these are highly tailored ads that in theory will lead to better returns. But the ads themselves are kind of annoying. Rather than being overlay ads at the bottom of a video, they stop the entire video and make you watch them, similar to what you have to sit through on Hulu videos. Of course, for most of the content that this Media Delivery Bar will be used for, it probably won’t be hit Hollywood content like Hulu has, that people seem to be okay with sitting through some ads to see for free. But to smaller content providers, EQ Network’s solution could be an intriguing one. “Virtually all companies that we met with confirmed our model and can't wait to use the bar to instantly deploy their videos without having to ad additional infrastructure or up-front costs,” Equilibrium (the company behind EQ Networks) CEO Sean Barger tells me. That sounds suspiciously optimistic, but testing the solution out, it does work well. I took a web video that wouldn’t play on my iPhone, hit the iPhone button on the Media Delivery Bar, and it formatted it so that it will play on my device. But the big boys in the field, like YouTube, will continue to go with their own solutions. For example, YouTube reformats all of its Flash videos to the h.264 format to play on the iPhone (and Apple TV). If any one device gets big enough and won’t support Flash for whatever reason, you can be sure they’d do the work reformating the videos to play there as well. Likewise, Hulu would likely choose its own solutions if and when it decides to make its site compatible with devices like the iPhone. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Steve Jobs On The Value Of Stock Options Posted: 25 Apr 2009 06:53 PM PDT On March 18, 2008, Steve Jobs was deposed by the SEC during its investigation of Apple’s stock option backdating scandal. The deposition was never made public until Forbes published it on Friday, after obtaining it through a Freedom of Information Act request. (Full deposition embedded below) Jobs explains his reasoning for why he asked the board for mega grants of options for both himself and his top executives, but claims ignorance of the mechanics of how that was done after the board approved the grants themselves. (It was the falsifying of board minutes for a meeting that never occurred, not the backdating per se, that got Apple’s former general counsel Nancy Heinen into hot water with the SEC—this deposition was for a case against her). There aren’t too many revelations on the legal front in the document. But the document provides the first detailed account of the incident from Steve Jobs himself in his own words. What comes through in the deposition is how Jobs sees himself and his’ fierce loyalty to those who work for him. For instance, after selling NeXt to Apple in 1997, his initial reason for acting as a consultant was to get “some of the NeXt people into some jobs where they could help Apple.” He himself was reluctant at first to take on the CEO role at Apple because he didn’t want the people at his other company, Pixar, to “think I was abandoning them.” Then when it came time to reward his “ultra key” executives with one million options each, two of them were from NeXT. While he was taking care of his top lieutenants by trying ti “surprise and delight them with what a career at Apple could be”, he was “hurt” that Apple’s board didn’t do the same for him. So he had to have a little talk with them about swapping his 20 million then-underwater options for 7.5 million new ones, which they did. I’ve excerpted some of the juicier bits from the deposition below. Some names were redacted in the original, but I’ve reinserted them in brackets where it is obvious who Jobs is talking about I’ve also bolded some parts for emphasis. (In the transcript, “A” is Jobs). 1. On coming back to Apple and becoming CEO in 1997: Q: And I guess, just to go back in time then, I want to just try to understand a little bit the transition from having the title consultant to becoming CEO. Could you just describe that transition for me? A: Well, when Apple bought NeXT, Apple was pretty messed up. It was pretty easy to see. And I was trying to help in my arm’s length role. I was trying to help Apple by getting some of the NeXT people into some jobs where they could help Apple, and that’s pretty much all I was doing. . . . Q: Okay, Did the board in fact fire [Gil Amelio] the following week? A: Yes. Q: And did you take on the role then as CEO? Jobs: Well, no, I did not. I was very concerned that Pixar was a newly public company with shareholders, employees, and I felt that - - to my knowledge there had never been a CEO of two public companies before. So I felt if I took the job, the Pixar shareholders and employees would think I was abandoning them. Q. Mm-hmm Jobs. And I decided I just - - that I couldn’t do that. So I took the title of interim CEO and agreed to come back for 90 days to help recruit a full-time CEO. Q. How did that recruitment effort go? A. I failed. Q. And when you say you failed, is it that you didn’t find anyone that you thought would be suitable to take on the role? A. Yes. Apple was not in good shape and everybody knew it and the kind of candidates that we were being offered up by the headhunters were not very talented. Q. Okay. In other words, not the sort of people who could turn Apple around? A. Yes. Q. Okay. So after that 90 days, what happened next? A. Well, it just kind of slid into the fact that I stayed. I kept the interim CEO title for quite some time, a number of years. 2. On the origins of the 4.8 million-share mega grant to Apple’s top executives: A. Apple was in a precarious situation in that we’d, you know, had the internet bubble busting, and I thought that Apple’s executive team and the stability of Apple’s executive team was one of its core strengths. And I was very concerned because Michael Dell, one of our chief competitors, had flown Fred Anderson, our CFO, down to Austin, I guess, him and his wife, I think, to try to recruit him. And I was also concerned that [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] two very strong technical leaders, were also very vulnerable. So I was very concerned that Apple could really suffer some big losses on its executive team with the business environment we were in and the competitors coming after our people. . . . Well, I talked with the board almost every meeting about, you know, key personnel, because I think that’s the key asset Apple has, is its talent . . . Q. All right. And who did you consider to be these ultra key people? A. [Timothy Cook] who at the time I think was our Executive Vice President of Operations, maybe sales and operations, actually. Fred Anderson, our CFO. [Jon Rubinstein] head of hardware. [Avi Tevanian] head of software. Who am I forgetting? I think those were the four key ones. Two of those ultra key people, Rubinstein and Tevanian, came from NeXT. Jobs helped them get hired by Apple after the sale of NeXT in the first place, and then rewarded them down the line with options on one million shares apiece. Today, Rubinstein is competing against Apple in his role as the executive chairman of Palm, which is backed by Silver Lake Elevation Partners, where Anderson is a partner. That’s gratitude for you. 3. On the question of whether Apple was trying to pick a grant date for the options to maximize the return to the executives, Jobs tries to dismiss how important a role that played in the process. Q. And sort of in this framework of options being, in part, a retention tool, is the idea to try to get a lower price so that there is the potential to maximize one’s profits on the options? A. You know, this has come up before. I have to tell you, for these options to be worth anything, the stock has to go up so much compared to a dollar or two at the beginning . . . And so if these guys were going to realize the kind of money they could make elsewhere by staying at Apple, you know, they were going to have to make tens of millions of dollars. These guys are really senior guys. Several of them, you know, could be CEOs of a few big companies and a few medium-size companies. So for them to realize that kind of a gain here, it’s a lot more than a small variation in a strike price. Nevertheless, with one million shares each, every $1 increase translated into a $1 million gain and a million dollars is still a million dollars. But Jobs wasn’t just rewarding his lieutenants, he was trying to keep them. The “mega grants” were designed to be one big grant instead of smaller grants every year. 4. Jobs explains the reasoning behind his compensation strategy: One of the things that I felt was that rather than giving them shares once a year, as is common in some companies, I would rather give them four years’ worth of stock upfront. . . . the key thing is if the stock goes up, which we always hope it does, then the golden handcuffs are dramatically increased, which is what I was hoping would happen. And on the subject of his own grant of 7.1 million options at the time, Jobs says that he negotiated so hard for it because he felt he wasn’t getting the recognition he deserved: Q. Could you just tell me a little bit about the process of how this all came to be? A. Well, it was a tough situation, you know. It wasn’t so much about the money, because a very small percentage of my net worth is from Apple. Q. Okay. A. But everybody likes to be recognized by their peers, and the closest that I’ve got, or any CEO has, is their Board of Directors. And as we’ve seen in the discussions of the past hour, I spent a lot of time trying to take care of people at Apple and to, you know, surprise and delight them with what a career at Apple could be - - could mean to them and their families. And I felt that the board wasn’t really doing the same with me. Q. Right. A. So I was hurt, I suppose would be the most accurate word, and, you know, the board had given me some options, but they were all underwater. They weren’t underwater necessarily because of our performance, but, you know, the bubble had burst in the dot-coms, and here I had been working, you know, I don’t know, four years, five years of my life and not seeing my family very much and stuff, and I just felt like there is nobody looking out for me here, you know. Q. Right. Okay. A. So I wanted them to do something and so we talked about it. Steve Jobs Deposition Publish at Scribd or explore others: Taxes & Accounting Business & Law backdating stock options Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Former AOL Exec Mike Jones May Become No. 2 At MySpace Posted: 25 Apr 2009 05:34 PM PDT One thing MySpace has is a lot of holes in the executive ranks. Founding CEO Chris DeWolfe has been hurriedly replaced by Owen Van Natta (our thoughts on that are well known). Cofounder and President Tom Anderson is having “discussions” about “assuming a new role in the organization.” And last month three of the top (and most capable) execs (COO, SVP Product Strategy and VP Technology) left to start their own company. More MySpace execs will soon be leaving, voluntarily or not, as Van Natta fills the gaps and adds loyal lieutenants. The first announcement will likely be a replacement for the COO spot, who will be the no. 2 exec at MySpace. A number of current MySpace execs are hoping for the job, particularly Jeff Berman, president of sales and marketing. But our understanding is that the COO spot is definitely going to an outsider. The most likely candidate, we’ve heard from sources, is former AOL exec Mike Jones. Jones’ company, Userplane, was acquired by AOL in late 2006. And Jones worked closely with former AOL boss Jonathan Miller, who is now overseeing all of News Corp.’s digital assets, including MySpace. Jones is a well respected executive who has proven product experience (something sorely lacking at MySpace). If he joins, he’ll likely become a valuable asset to the company. He’s a smart pick if MySpace can get him, and frankly would have been a much better choice for the CEO spot than Van Natta. Like Van Natta, though, Jones already has a day job. He left AOL to start Tsavo in August 2008. Tsavo was in the news again this last February. News Corp. hasn’t responded to a request for comment, nor will they. More surprising, Jones, who is a personal friend, hasn’t taken any of my 15 calls today, or responded to voicemails or emails. That means he is either on an airplane, or he’s avoiding me like the plague. Until we get further confirmation, we’re categorizing this as a rumor. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Owen Van Natta’s Infamous Tenure At Project Playlist Posted: 25 Apr 2009 03:43 PM PDT One of the many unsavory aspects of the hiring of Owen Van Natta as the new CEO of MySpace: the rewriting of recent history around Van Natta’s involvement in Project Playlist. The communications group at News Corp. (MySpace’s parent company) is busy spinning Van Natta’s departure as a simple transition from one job to another, but that’s far from the truth. Nor does their story take into account the sad state of the company that he ran for just a few months before leaving for greener pastures. Here’s how News Corp spins this: This is a natural changing of the guard as a CEO of a small startup takes a bigger job. There was an orderly transition, and Project Playlist has a new CEO with great experience. Nothing to see here, please move along. Here’s the real story: Van Natta joined Project Playlist in November 2008, just about five months ago. He told investors and employees he was in for the long haul. And he hired an executive team under him that came with his promise that he’d lead the company to a win. Bob Pittman invested in the company, he told recruits, which is true. But he also let rumors that the company raised $20 million in new funding fly. In fact the company raised much less than that. And Van Natta also underplayed the problems with labels, suggesting that deals were imminent and the litigation was going to be settled. And now that Van Natta has abandoned the company, they’ve had to scramble to find someone to run the company. That’s why John Sykes, who was already a board member, was forced to step in. In fact, we’ve heard, Van Natta’s playing down of the music label litigation led directly to the downfall of the company. The labels complained to MySpace and Facebook and threatened to sue them as well if they didn’t ban Playlist from their social networks. Both companies backed down quickly, and Playlist lost their main channels of distribution. MySpace banned them on December 19, Facebook followed on December 23. If Van Natta had made fewer bold statements, sources close to the labels say, those threats against MySpace and Facebook may have never been made. Project Playlist traffic has plummeted since Van Natta took over the company. In October 2008, the month before he joined, 704,000 people visited the site from the U.S, according to Comscore. In March 2009 it had fallen to just 234,000. Page views also fell dramatically, from 9.6 million in October to just 6 million in March. Here are the traffic charts (unique visitors on top, page views below): If Van Natta hadn’t ruffled so many feathers at the labels with his promises that litigation was nearing settlement, it’s likely the pressure on MySpace and Facebook would never have materialized, say sources, and traffic would have continued to climb. At this point Van Natta likely wants everyone to simply forget about his infamous tenure at Project Playlist and focus on his more recent jobs at Facebook and Amazon. He doesn’t list the company on his LinkedIn profile at all (although he’s had five months to update it). Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Twitter’s Real Edge: It’s not Scary Posted: 25 Apr 2009 11:45 AM PDT When I was writing my last book, I used to go run at the gym for about an hour every morning to clear my head. The TVs were always set on ABC, so I’d zone out to either “Live with Regis & Kelly” or “The View”–two shows I’d never watched before. I was always struck by the constant fear mongering about the Internet, particularly on “The View.” It seemed every day there was a story about pedophiles patrolling MySpace, ex-wives putting retaliatory dirty-laundry-airing videos on YouTube and 20-somethings getting fired because of college keg party pictures on Facebook. The message to housewives was loud and clear: DO NOT LET YOUR KIDS USE THESE HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE SITES! Yesterday after a pretty brutal morning, I found myself sitting on the couch, flipping channels for a little background noise and settling on my old jogging buddy “The View.” Mainly because Lil’ Wayne was the guest and the combo of my favorite saucy rapper and ultra-right-winger Elizabeth Hasselbeck sounded TiVo-worthy. It was the first time I’ve watched the show in at least a year. Imagine my surprise that Joy was texting away on her Blackberry while on air, and a conversation about a study that showed good friends could help you live to 100 years old immediately brought up Twitter. “This is why I am on Twitter,” Joy said, “We’re all on it now except for Whoopi…We like to have all these friends. It’s like a community of people who are interested in you.” Nods all around. Turns out– as I learned from “The Soup” on Friday night–they’ve been talking about it all week, as has every other Oprah-wanna-be. Yes, even Tyra. (See video below.) Wait a minute, ladies. Wait. One. Minute. You’re telling me that you are blasting your every move out to a bunch of strangers’ mobile phones, and there’s no fear of stalkers, crazed fans or psychos? Not even from Elizabeth? I had to check to make sure I was really watching “The View.” It’s easy to dismiss this as yet more celebs jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. But that masks the really remarkable thing Twitter seems to have pulled off. It has seemingly side-stepped the whole fear-of-technology mania that usually plagues most social media sites as they start to tip mainstream. There was that little report about terrorists using it and that was pretty much it. Throughout 2007 I heard these same ladies make the argument that spending all this time on MySpace and Facebook was eroding kids’ abilities to make friends. Now just two years later, the same people are equating Twitter with real world friendships. What gives? Is it that everyone has finally gotten used to the idea of real world and digital friendships overlapping? I doubt it. Because you still hear fear mongering with a lot of the other sites. There’s just something about Twitter that’s less scary. And that may prove its biggest strength and differentiator. I think part of it is how simple the site is to use, the flexibility of using it via the web or mobile, and the relatively low barrier to that “a-ha!” moment. You know, the mini-endorphin rush you get from knowing what your friends are doing at any moment, or for a celebrity, hearing from fans in a more direct, more immediate way then you could before. But that’s only part of it. I think the key to Twitter’s mainstream celeb success has been the asynchronous, non-committal nature of the site. As Facebook and MySpace grew, we all experienced that social pressure akin to seeing someone on the street that you know, but don’t want to talk to and wondering how you can politely avoid them. Most people who indiscriminately add “friends” just because they asked don’t wind up really using Facebook to connect with actual friends, because they don’t want to over-share photos, contact information, or videos with “friends” who are essentially strangers. But on Twitter, the personal information is contained by the restraints of the site itself. It’s just short text updates, unless you chose to link to a picture or video. People feel like they know you, while you actually give up very little personal information. You get intimate connections with as many people as you want, but on your own terms. People can follow you, without you following them. You can still see what people you aren’t following are saying about you and respond, or not. And you can add someone for a bit, then unfollow them, frequently without them noticing while they still follow you. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn CEO and uber-Web 2.0 angel a few weeks ago. He pointed out that lifecasting never took off in a big way because it was originally conceived as video. Many people don’t want to show that much of their lives, and most friends just don’t have the time to watch. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s just that sometimes we’re not great editors. We tend to think we’re more interesting than we really are. But Twitter is noncommittal, bite-sized lifecasting in a manageable text form. It’s similar to how I refuse to check one long rambling voice mail, but I’m happy to scan hundreds of texts or emails. Hoffman compared it to the difference between watching a vacation movie of your friend sitting on a boat in the water for an hour, versus reading one 140-character Tweet that your friend was sitting on a boat enjoying the sun. Ironically, the asyncronicity of Twitter was hotly contested by a lot of early adopters who pressured the Twitter team heavily to change it to an auto-follow model. Evan Williams & crew always held out, convinced it was of key importance to how the site would grow and scale. Looks like they were right. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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