Tuesday, June 23, 2009

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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The Government Comes Through For Tesla With A $465 Million Loan For Its Electric Sedan

Posted: 23 Jun 2009 08:12 AM PDT

tesla

In an announcement today at Ford’s research center in Dearborn, Michigan, the U.S. Secretary of Energy will be giving details about the first loans to come out of the government’s $25 billion program to help auto manufacturers. Ford got a $5.9 billion loan, but Tesla Motors, Silicon Valley’s electric car manufacturer, is receiving $465 million from the program. The money will go towards completing the development of its Modern S sedan and its electric power trains, which are being licensed by other car makers such as Mercedes. Last month, Mercedes’ parent company Daimler also invested $50 million for a 10 percent stake in Tesla. That brought the total debt and equity invested in the company to more than $200 million. Now, with the government loan, that brings the total capital raised to $700 million.

If the government is going to be giving out loans to help car makers produce more fuel-efficient vehicles, it is good to see some of that money trickle down to helping electric cars get off the drawing table and into driveways. Tesla plans to use $365 million of the loan to accelerate the production of its Model S sedan, and the remaining $100 million for its electric power train manufacturing plant in California, for which its is in the final stages of negotiating a lease.

At the tail-end of a long blog post yesterday responding to allegations in a lawsuit by Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, Tesla CEO Elon Musk reveals that the company is on track to hit profitability next month as it ramps up production of its all-electric Roadster sports car. He also writes that the company has received more than 1,000 pre-orders for the Model S sedan, up from 500 in the first week. At about $50,000 after a tax credit, the Model S will be about half the price of the Roadster. In the post, he explains how the Roadster made possible the sedan:

Tesla is sometimes criticized for the fact that our first car is relatively expensive, implying we thought there was a shortage of sports cars for rich people! Obviously, the transition to electric cars can only occur if they are affordable. However, a low volume and fairly costly product like the Roadster is the only realistic initial option for a small startup trying to create breakthrough technology. New technology in any field takes a few versions to optimize before reaching the mass market and in this case it is competing with 150 years and trillions of dollars spent on gasoline cars.

I want to be clear, though, that we are trying to get there as soon as possible. My main reason for putting so much time and money into helping create Tesla is to speed up the transition to electric cars. This was not a case of rank ordering likely return on investment and concluding that the auto industry was the easiest way to make money! While I'm confident that Tesla will turn out to have a good return for investors, building a car company has to be one of the hardest ways to make a buck.

That $465 million loan should help.

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One Flight Closer to My Electric Plane Fantasy Coming True

Posted: 23 Jun 2009 06:13 AM PDT

skyspark1I missed a lot of things while I was in Africa. There was an obsession with Facebook vanity URLs that still doesn’t quite make sense to me, the launch of a new iPhone that I still won’t buy because it doesn’t have a keyboard (cue the Apple fanboy trolls) and–most exciting to me but most under reported– a milestone in electric aviation. I fantasize about electric, supersonic planes the way others fantasize about Hollywood celebrities or, I guess, new iPhones. It’s the result of spending as much as 30-hours per trip on dirty, fuel-spewing, noisy planes with broken entertainment systems and bathroom doors that don’t always lock. (Did I mention I fly coach?)

Earlier this month, in Turin, Italy, Italian astronaut Maurizo Cheli set a world record for speed for a 100% electric plane at 155 mph. That’s still slow compared to commercial jets, but remember when electric cars only went a few feet and looked like go-karts? It’s progress, right? The promise is a bit more exciting than the actual video, but here it is anyway. We now return you to regularly scheduled Twitter, Facebook and iPhone news.

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Web-Based Productivity Suite Zoho Now Integrated With Microsoft SharePoint

Posted: 23 Jun 2009 04:30 AM PDT

Zoho Suite, a web-based software suite comprised of document, project and invoicing management tools, has launched an add-on that allows Zoho Office to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint.

Zoho users can now create new documents and save them to SharePoint in MS Office formats, view existing documents within SharePoint using Zoho apps, and edit existing documents with Zoho Apps and save them back to SharePoint. The new add-on also provides collaborative editing functionality in Zoho with the integration with SharePoint. Zoho says the add-on costs $2/user/month on an yearly subscription or $3/user/month for monthly subscription.

Zoho says that the seamless integration between Zoho and SharePoint will help businesses who want the best of both worlds: the ability to collaborate on documents on the web while still keeping data behind the firewall. If you have SharePoint installed in your intranet behind your corporate firewall, your documents in Zoho are saved back to your SharePoint server behind your corporate firewall leaving no data on Zoho Servers.

As we've written in the past, Zoho is an innovative document management tool, and includes easy access thanks to support for mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing across different app features. Zoho knows that it is going to have to fight an uphill battle to keep users from flocking to the web-based applications offered by companies with a vast reach (Google, Adobe, etc.) which is why these sort of integrations are helpful to the software’s success as an application suite.

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iPhone 3.0 Unlock Is Go - Don’t Try It On Your 3G S, Though

Posted: 23 Jun 2009 04:13 AM PDT

The dev team has released their latest carrier unlock, ultrasn0w, It requires a quick using redsn0w and then the installation of ultrasn0w through Cydia. If you've already jailbroken your iPhone 3G simply add repo666.ultrasn0w.com to your repositories list and download ultrasn0w. What does this do? It carrier unlocks the iPhone 3G. Sadly, it doesn't yet work on the 3G S. It is also safe to update to the latest 3.0 version.


Ooma Gets $14 Million, Survival Looks Like A Real Possibility

Posted: 23 Jun 2009 03:54 AM PDT

VoIP startup Ooma has raised another $14 million in venture capital, we’ve heard from multiple sources, increasing the total amount of capital the company has raised to $56 million. This most recent round of financing was led by existing investor Worldview Technology Partners and was a restructuring that wiped out earlier investors who chose not to participate in this round.

The company was really on the ropes and down to its last few dollars, says one source. But sales, particularly at Best Buy, are brisk and the company should reach profitability with this new round of financing, he added.

Ooma first launched two years ago as a new type of consumer VoIP product. But a complicated business model (expensive hardware, free service) made it confusing for consumers to compare to competitive offerings from Vonage and others.

But customer reviews were very positive, and the company brought in seasoned sales executive Rich Buchanan, previously at Sling Media. Best Buy started selling the devices and have been very successful in moving them off the shelves.

The company also announced a new handset product called the Telo at CES earlier this year. It is not yet available for purchase.

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MySpace To Terminate 2/3 Of International Staff

Posted: 23 Jun 2009 03:08 AM PDT

MySpace is planning to lay off 300 of its 450 non-U.S. employees, it announced this morning, confirming our earlier report. Just one person in three gets to keep his or her job. The company has now announced that over 700 of it’s 1,800 total employees have been or will be laid off - 30% of U.S. staff last week, and 66% of non-U.S. staff today.

The company will not confirm whether Managing Director Travis Katz is still with the company (we reported earlier this evening that he has left the company). Update: sources at MySpace are saying that Katz will remain with MySpace and that “his role hasn’t changed.” The company will still not respond to an on-the-record request for comment about Katz.

TechCrunch Europe has the press release and email from MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta to what’s left of staff.

The company also says that it will close “at least 4 of its offices outside the United States,” adding “Upon completion of the proposed plan, London, Berlin, and Sydney would become the primary regional hubs for MySpace's international operations. Under the proposed plan, MySpace would place all existing offices in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, and Spain under review for possible restructure. MySpace China, a locally owned, operated, and managed company, and MySpace's joint venture in Japan would not be affected by the proposed plan.”

The email to employees notes absurdly that the “restructuring steps we have taken have laid the groundwork for an exciting new chapter of innovation for MySpace” (with nearly half of MySpace staff now laid off, the few that are left are thinking about everything except innovation). He also says “I look forward to working with you all and speaking with you in the coming days.” I’m sure he’ll get something less than a warm reception.

From: Owen Van Natta
To: FIM MySpace All
Subject: IMPORTANT: PROPOSED INTERNATIONAL RESTRUCTURE
Importance: High

Everyone,

Last week we made a number of changes to MySpace's domestic structure in order to create a leaner, more nimble organization. Today, we are announcing the next step in our overall restructuring effort - a proposal to streamline our operations abroad.

Unlike our recent domestic restructuring announcement, what we are announcing today is a formal proposal we intend to implement, rather than an executed plan. As required by laws in countries where we operate, we will not implement the plan until we have consulted with potentially affected employees. As a result, even though the plan we are proposing today would apply to all international divisions of the company, a finalized international restructuring will be put into action over a period of days.

Similar to our domestic restructuring, our international plan is designed to rein in growth in staff and expenses that we cannot sustain. Our proposal would reduce MySpace's international staff from 450 employees to approximately 150 employees and close at least 4 of our offices outside the United States.

Upon completion of the proposed plan, London, Berlin, and Sydney would become the primary regional hubs for MySpace's international operations. Under the proposed plan, MySpace would place all existing offices in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, and Spain under review for possible restructure. MySpace China, a locally owned, operated, and managed company, and MySpace's joint venture in Japan would not be affected by the proposed plan.

We are focusing on London, Berlin, and Sydney for two very simple reasons: (1) these are markets where we have a lot of MySpace users as well as the resources to allow us to compete effectively and (2) these are major international commerce centers where a robust MySpace presence can help our company develop new and innovative business partnerships.

As with the domestic changes we made last week, these proposed international reductions and eliminations will be extremely challenging – professionally and personally. These are difficult decisions and they are essential to our financial well-being and the re-establishment of our overall growth strategy.

Our goal to tap into as many international markets as possible drove us to create too many offices around the globe, and with them came inefficiencies. Under the new plan, we will refocus our efforts on regional business partnerships and integration in a smaller number of territories, while retaining a robust international presence. We remain steadfast in our commitment to reaching a global audience.

The last two weeks have been tough for everyone. The employees who leave us played an important role in the successes of MySpace in these international markets, and I thank them for their hard and dedicated work. The restructuring steps we have taken have laid the groundwork for an exciting new chapter of innovation for MySpace. I look forward to working with you all and speaking with you in the coming days.

Thank you,

Owen

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Ever Wondered What The Most Common Names On Facebook Are? Here’s A List

Posted: 23 Jun 2009 02:50 AM PDT

With well over 200 million registered users, Facebook is undeniably a giant on the web, and one that is sitting on an enormous amount of raw data about individuals and demographically selected groups at that. While private profiles are not even always as private as we’d like to assume - something we’ve learned yesterday and multiple times in the past as well - there’s a lot of data that you can extract from what’s openly available to the public.

For example: what are the most common names used on the social network?

Well that’s exactly what social search solutions provider Rapleaf wanted to find out, so they crawled no less than 100 million public Facebook profiles for unique names and compiled three lists: most common first names, last names and combinations of both.

There are little surprises to be found in the lists. Over 1 million of scanned profiles has ‘John’ as first name, making it the most popular on Facebook, although chances are ‘Michael’ should come out on top if ‘Mike’ as a nickname wouldn’t be counted as unique. Out of the ten most common first names, only number 10 is female (Maria), although ‘Chris’ could account for men or women alike. The top 10:

First Name Count
1. John 1,037,972
2. David 966,439
3. Michael 798,212
4. Chris 647,966
5. Mike 535,065
6. Mark 526,198
7. Paul 511,504
8. Daniel 504,203
9. James 494,945
10. Maria 484,693

The last names list is more representative of Facebook's global reach than the list above, and is led by another American household name: Smith. Surnames like ‘Lee’ are popular worldwide, and the numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10 are all outspoken Hispanic names that are very common throughout the whole of Latin-America and Spain. Top ten:

Last Name Count
1. Smith 1,049,158
2. Jones 520,943
3. Johnson 440,978
4. Lee 392,709
5. Brown 375,444
6. Williams 372,486
7. Rodriguez 328,984
8. Garcia 311,477
9. Gonzalez 277,987
10. Lopez 269,896

The list of top 10 full names commonly used on Facebook is believed to be comprised of both real and fake accounts, considering the fact both ‘John Smith’ and ‘Jane Smith’ made it on there. Again, little surprises in the top 10:

Full Name Count
1. John Smith 75,980
2. Joe Smith 14,648
3. Bob Smith 13,846
4. Mike Smith 11,199
5. Juan Carlos 10,254
6. Jane Smith 10,023
7. Mike Jones 10,014
8. David Smith 9,322
9. Sarah Smith 8,534
10. James Smith 8,397

Rapleaf offers the top 100 lists as CSV download, but we’ve made it easier for you to consult them by creating separate pages with the full lists:

Top 100 Most Common First Names On Facebook
Top 100 Most Common Last Names On Facebook
Top 100 Most Common Full Names On Facebook

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Conduit Launches Marketplace For Toolbar Content

Posted: 23 Jun 2009 02:30 AM PDT

Conduit, a service that enables web publishers to easily create their own toolbars for Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox, is opening up its platform to allow for distribution opportunities.

Conduit’s SaaS tool lets companies create and distribute their content and products on a custom community toolbar. Conduit, which we have covered previously here and here, has amassed a network of more than 200,000 web publishers who distribute their toolbars to more than 60 million users.

Conduit is now letting publishers add other publishers’ content to each others toolbars via a marketplace. And consumers can also get additional content for their Conduit toolbars from the marketplace or the website of anyone who is a Conduit user. The toolbar can be a useful marketing tool for companies because it helps market brands by showing logos to users every time they surf the net. And now multiple brands can tap into this potential.The offerings include major brands such as Fox News, Lufthansa, Major League Baseball, Greenpeace and more (disclosure: TechCrunch also uses Conduit).

To date, Conduit has raised close to $10 million in funding and is currently cash-flow positive.

Of course, nowadays everyone has a toolbar and space in the browser is competitive landscape. MySpace, Yahoo, Digg and many others are all either upgrading their toolbars or creating toolbars for their brands. But with its white label offering that can now distribute brands more widely, Conduit may have found the opportunity to help companies cross-promote.

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iPhone In-App Purchases Already Leading To The Dreaded Two Words: Bait And Switch

Posted: 23 Jun 2009 02:25 AM PDT

bait-and-switchSince it launched a year ago, Apple’s App Store has had a series of successes (50,000 apps, a billion downloads, transforming the market), but also some failures. While plenty of people talk about the abundance of junk apps in the store, I have never seen that as a problem since no one is forcing anyone to download them — and believe it or not, some people actually do, for whatever reason, love fart apps. But one real problem has been Apple’s uneven policy when it comes to the acceptance and rejection of apps into the store.

It looks like we should be seeing some improvements on that front shortly, as the new iPhone 3.0 software has parental controls built-in which will restrict kids under a certain age from using certain apps. While that won’t solve some silly rejections, it should ease the burden on app screeners having to look closely at apps that are clearly intended for a mature audience.

So, I’m hopeful on that front. But there’s a new potentially troublesome front opening up as well: Bait and switch apps. Yes, the old practice of luring customers with a shiny price, only to reveal the real cost after (in this case, the download), could find its way to the App Store, thanks to in-app purchases.

Let me be clear: I think in-app purchases are potentially the most exciting thing about the new iPhone 3.0 SDK for developers. I believe it will mean a boatload of money for a great many of them as well as Apple, which takes its 30% cut. But where there is money to be made, there is money to be taken. And we’re likely to see a rise in apps that seem priced way too good to be true — because they are, until you download them.

Now, this won’t be a huge problem because no app can force you to make an in-app purchase. But it could potentially clutter up the store with these falsely cheap apps. And depending on how misleading Apple allows some apps to be with the in-app purchases, we could see a bunch of people buying stuff they didn’t really want to be buying.

One of the first potentially troubling apps in this regard for the iPhone 3.0 software launched last week, Gokivo [iTunes Link]. The app sells for $0.99, but that doesn’t give you access to the biggest selling point of the app: Turn-by-turn navigation. That will set you back another $9.99 a month. Now, to be fair, Gokivo does give you plenty of other features for your $0.99, but as you can see on the App Store review board, most people believed they were getting the turn-by-turn functionality with that money as well.

picture-311Part of that was Gokivo’s somewhat tricky wording when the app first launched. That wording has been cleaned up now, but it’s still not good enough. Basically now you have a series of asterisks on the app page sidebar denoting the most important part of the app: That it’s $9.99 a month to use the turn-by-turn features.

Apple should create an obvious way to see that these type of apps feature in-app purchase components as a key part of them. Hell, there should be a prominent label any app that uses any in-app purchases, so consumers know what they’re potentially getting into. This should definitely be on the App Store page for these apps, but it should also probably pop-up when you go to download the app itself. Developer-made text asterisks are not going to cut it.

But it’s probably unfair to pick on Gokivo, because it is just the first of many turn-by-turn GPS apps that are likely to hit the App Store. And all will likely have the same type of pricing structure. It make sense, most GPS apps/units do charge a monthly fee, so why shouldn’t the iPhone versions? That’s why I think this is just all about the way Apple highlights these apps.

But that’s a reasonable example. Just wait until the first $0.99 games come out that feature basically no content for that price, and force you to buy additional content to gain any experience. Gaming is the obvious one, but really, it could be any app that does this. And I think those are coming.

Maybe Apple expects its app screeners to look to make sure all apps have an appropriate level on content for the $0.99 price point. But that’s a foolish dream given what we’ve seen so far from these screeners.

And what else is a bit annoying to a number of developers I’ve talked to, is that Apple is forcing you to charge at least $0.99 to have in-app purchases as an option. As I understand it, this is because Apple wants to maintain a section of the App Store that is totally free. But by doing that, it’s sort of creating situations like the Gokivo app, where it appears like they’re charging only $0.99 upfront to be deceptively cheap — that’s probably not the case, but it looks like it. And that’s a problem. Because it could make a lot of apps look like classic bait and switch ones. And why do that, when real bait and switch ones are coming too?

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Socialtext Goes Freemium With Socialtext Free 50

Posted: 23 Jun 2009 12:59 AM PDT

14Socialtext offers a compelling package of Enterprise 2.0 services, but it has a problem. While it can talk all it wants about how great its products are, the real selling point is getting customers to use them for themselves. While free-trials work somewhat, the time constraints are limiting. So that’s why Socialtext is moving into the freemium market with its new SocialText Free 50 offering.

Basically, Socialtext Free 50 allows companies to sign-up and get many of Socialtext’s services for free, for up to 50 users. That includes the service’s social networking, wiki, site building and messaging tools. The only constraints are that you’re limited to one wiki workspace (paid accounts offer unlimited), and there is no support beyond the basic online variety. “We think we picked the right line of what can we give away,” Socialtext co-founder Ross Mayfield tells us.

So, you’re pretty much free to open those up to 50 accounts and let the users roam around as they wish. And if you determine you need more accounts, or just more options, there’s obviously an easy path to upgrade. The paid service starts at $6-a-month per user for a hosted plan, or larger companies can opt to pay $1,000 per month, plus $1 or $5 per user based on if they want hosted or on-site capabilities. The full pricing breakdown is here.

18

Alongside the Socialtext Free 50 launch, the company is also opening up the beta of its new SocialCalc spreadsheet service. SocialCalc’s development was lead by Dan Bricklin, the co-createor of VisiCalc — the first spreadsheet program that was ever made for PCs. It’s been private beta testing for a little while now, but is ready for public testing, Mayfield says. The general release is expected at the end of Q3.

As you might imagine, SocialCalc is a social spreadsheet service. But Mayfield feels it bests competitors such as Google Spreadsheets and EditGrid, because they’re doing more than just reverse engineering the dominant spreadsheet client, Excel. SocialCalc was built to make group editing simple, and to eliminate potential conflict issues when multiple people are editing a document. It offers a way to “work with structured data in an unstructured way,” as Mayfield puts it. And, unlike Google Spreadsheets, SocialCalc can be deployed behind a firewall.

Perhaps more importantly, SocialCalc ties into all of Socialtext’s other offerings (though, unfortunately won’t be included in the Socialtext Free 50 offering as of right now).

We’ve been seeing a resurgence of the freemium model in recent months. It seems to be working pretty well for some consumer-facing products like Pandora, which had a nice offering a couple months ago. It will be interesting to see how it works in the enterprise sphere. CubeTree, another social enterprise offering, launched with the model last month as well.

24

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MySpace International Head Travis Katz Is Out (Updated)

Posted: 23 Jun 2009 12:03 AM PDT

Update: MySpace sources now say Katz may still be at the company, although 2/3 of international staff will be terminated.

More bad news at MySpace. As we await what are likely to be significant cuts in MySpace’s international headcount, MySpace International managing director Travis Katz is out, we’ve heard from a source in the UK. MediaWeek is also reporting this.

Katz joined MySpace in early 2006 as Vice President International, taking a SVP and Managing Director title in October 2006. He is responsible for all non-US operations for MySpace, IGN and other Fox Interactive Media properties. He grew staff from 2 to more than 400 in a span of 2 years.

How many of those 400 international employees will shortly be following? We’ll likely know soon. International employees were spared from the 30% layoffs last week due to legal requirements for notice in some countries, particularly in Europe. But the clock is still ticking on those employees.

I almost interviewed Katz at Davos earlier this year, but he was not available at the time of the interview. Former CEO Chris DeWolfe went solo.

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Clear In The DeadPool. So Much For Zipping Through Airport Security

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 10:47 PM PDT

So much for zipping through airport security for people willing to pay $199 per year and have their fingerprints and iris images scanned to be pre-approved.

Clear, the largest company to leverage the Registered Traveler program in the U.S., has “ceased operation” as of 11 pm PST today and their parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc., is in the deadpool. They were “unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.” Users were notified this evening by email.

The service was popular - it was used 250,000 times at Washington, DC airports alone. Overall, the company said, over 2.5 million people were processed using Clear. It operated security lanes at 20 U.S. airports: Albany, Atlanta, Boston’s Logan, Cincinnati, Denver, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, LaGuardia, Little Rock, New York JFK, Newark, Oakland, Orlando, Reno, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, San Jose, Washington, D.C.’s Reagan and Dulles, and Westchester.

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Let’s Talk Antitrust (on June 30)

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 10:07 PM PDT

Next week I’ll be interviewing antitrust expert Gary Reback on his new book Free the Market!: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive (buy it here). This is a HBSTech event being held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

This is the guy that represented Netscape in its epic legal battle with Microsoft in the nineties, and he was instrumental in convincing the U.S. government and a number of state attorneys general to sue Microsoft for antitrust violations.

In general he’s a proponent of ripping monopolies apart to keep competition strong. I’m generally less eager to kill off the companies that have won. It will definitely be a lively debate, and Google will be brought up more than once.

If you’d like to attend the event is free but has limited seating - register here. We should have archived video available after the event as well.

By the way, the book is an excellent read. It chronicles the big companies in silicon valley and reads more like a recent historical novel than a legal text. He can write.

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iCrack: The iPhone Is An Accident Magnet

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 09:19 PM PDT

If you’ve ever thought that your iPhone had the frictional coefficient of a Slip n’ Slide, you’re not alone. A new report from SquareTrade details the accident-prone nature of Apple’s line of smartphones, reporting that over 20% of iPhones have been damaged in the last 22 months. Cracked screens abound.

From a manufacturing standpoint, the iPhone wins higher marks than its competition by a significant margin. The report says that over the last 22 months, only 9.9% of iPhones have malfunctioned, versus 15.3% of BlackBerry and 19.9% of Treo phones. Apple is getting even better, too: these manufacturing defects were averaged across both the iPhone 2G and 3G, and the report indicates that the latter is significantly more reliable.



But when it comes to surviving drops, the iPhone doesn’t fare so well. The report says that more than 20% of iPhone owners accidentialy damaged their phones during the 22 months since SquareTrade began tracking the data. The most common cause of death was a drop or fall, which accounted for 66% of the failed phones. Another 25% of them were due to water damage (e.g. dropping your phone into the toilet or pool).



The report doesn’t detail exactly why the phone is so prone to accidents, but it isn’t hard to make a few educated guesses. The phone is a sleek, somewhat slippery device, nearly half of which is made up by a glass screen. There are also very few physical buttons to offer a solid grip. And the iPhone’s screen, which is relatively huge compared to the Treo and most BlackBerrys, is obviously going to be more prone to shattering than its smaller counterparts. Wrapping up the iPhone in a case can help matters, but I always feel sort of guilty doing it.

The report also highlights the insult-to-injury pricing offered by AT&T for a replacement phone. Depending on how long you have until you’re eligible for an upgrade, you can find yourself paying hundreds of dollars more than you paid for the phone in the first place (though this is typically the case for other phones as well).

Finally, it’s worth nothing that SquareTrade is in the business of selling warranties for these phones. This makes them a great source of data, but the company’s conclusions aren’t going to be entirely without bias, either. SquareTrade’s iPhone warranty starts at around $77 for two years, which includes accident coverage (AppleCare does not). You can find full details here.

You can find the full SquareTrade report here.
Photo taken by PSD.

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Alice.com Is Your Housekeeper And Personal Shopper Rolled Into One

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 08:00 PM PDT

Ever run out of toilet paper or trashbags at an inopportune moment and think to yourself, I wish I had someone to remind me when I need to buy household basics? Tonight at 9 pm, Alice.com will show you a better way to buy household essentials online that will not only remind you when you need more toilet paper but will save you time, and most importantly, money.

The basic idea behind Alice.com, which raised $4.3 million in funding last fall, is that the site is an open platform for consumer packaged goods manufacturers, like Procter & Gamble, to sell directly to consumers instead of going through retail channels like Target or Wal-Mart. On the consumer side, Alice.com lets users create a profile of their household (how many people, kids etc.) and then the site will keep track of items and reminds users with emails when they are running low and need to reorder. Each shipment is bundled together in a single 'Alice' box, delivered directly to the consumer's door, with no shipping costs attached.

Although young, the site, which has over 6,000 products, has a great deal of variety when it comes to different types of products. There are 86 choices under bathroom paper, which includes kleenex, toilet paper, cotton balls and more. And there are 804 offerings for hair products. You can choose to shop for goods by type of room (kitchen, bathroom, bedroom), brand, green/natural products, or by the best deals. You can also filter results by lifestyle choice (green, bargain hunter, premium), by brand, or by those that have coupons. Alice also crawls the web for coupon codes (often discounts offered by the manufacturers themselves) and will automatically apply discounts to products on the site.

I did a comparison of a bottle of Tide liquid laundry detergent on Alice.com and Drugstore.com. On Alice.com, the price was $7.71 with discounts, nearly $6 cheaper than the price on Drugstore.com, which was $13.99. The other nifty tool that Alice provides is a built in comparison shopping feature for each item, that will look up comparable prices on competitors including Drugstore.com, Safeway, Walgreens, CVS and Amazon Fresh.

Of course, you pay your state’s tax on the item and you have to buy at least six items at a time, which can be annoying if you run out of certain items at different rates. But Alice saves your information so when you return to the site, it will calculate what you need and suggest items for you. You will also be able to choose free samples to add to your shipments from manufacturers. You can also review products on the site but you have to have purchased an item in order to submit a review. And you can publish your list to the site, if you want others to see what you’ve bought (which might not be that interesting considering all lists will be composed of household items). And to keep up with budget conscious users, Alice.com will chart your spending history over your orders.

On the manufacturer side, Alice.com makes no retail margin allowing each manufacturer to control product assortment and pricing in its own direct sale to the end consumer. Alice collects the goods from the manufacturers in a warehouse and manages all of the e-commerce and shipping. So how does the site make money? Advertising. Alice.com collects money from manufacturers which post ads on the site and also offers alternative ways to advertise via free samples and coupons. It should be interesting to see if advertising alone is a viable business model for Alice.

Alice.com could have the recipe for success for a startup-a solid idea, competitive pricing and experience. Co-founders and serial entrepreneur can get Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire managed to sell three companies in the past +10 years, most recently flipping social shopping service Jellyfish to Microsoft (which it later used to create Live Search Cashback).

Wiegand and McGuire both said that manufacturers are excited at the idea of selling directly to the consumer via Alice.com. Wiegand cited one reason that I found interesting: the emergence of retail stores providing their own labels for household goods. For example, Target has created their own brands of dishwasher soap, which competes directly with Dawn, Palmolive and others and is often priced at lower pricepoints. Wiegand says that manufacturers find this frustrating, especially when retailers advertise their cheaper brands next to the manufacturers more expensive brand.

Competitors of course range from online retailers like Drugstore.com to Target, Walmart, Lowe’s, and even grocery stores. But with Alice’s prices and convenience, the startup has the potential to make significant strides in in the space.

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New Business Model In Hand, Tagga Raises $400,000

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 07:29 PM PDT

Last August we wrote about Tagga, a new SMS service that made it easy for individuals to set up free interactive SMS campaigns. Since then the company has shifted gears, changing its business model to help larger marketing agencies (the sort with actual budgets) set up their campaigns. Now the company has closed a $400,000 funding round led by a number of independent investors out of the US, Canada, and the UK.

Tagga’s core service remains largely the same: pick out a shortcode (we’ll use ‘TECH’ for this example), and then invite people to send ‘TECH’ to 82442, Tagga’s special phone number. You decide what these vistors receive after opting in, with messages that can include things like an invitation to check out your website or an interactive poll.

Tagga’s intial business model was to append ads to the end of its outgoing messages. CEO Amielle Lake says that the company swapped models in November after finding that advertisers weren’t yet biting at the chance to appear at the end of the texts. What the company did notice, however, was that some of North America’s 30,000 advertising agencies needed a good way to manage SMS campaigns and had no idea how to do it.

Thus, the new Tagga Agency Platform was born. The company now helps marketing agencies create SMS-based campaigns, allowing them to schedule when they’d like their messages sent out, create voting campaigns, and build mobile websites. The service also takes care of any issues involved with carrier fees and device problems. Lake says that 12 advertising firms have signed up for the service, and that some US government representatives are building SMS campaigns as well.

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Pageonce Brilliantly Combines All Your Online Accounts Into One App

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 06:46 PM PDT

Step aside, Mint. Pageonce just launched a major update to its iPhone application, and it blows you out of the water. Pageonce's v3 update is absolutely fantastic, and Mint's app pales in comparison. Pageonce's premium app, A Personal Assistant Premium, allows you to connect all of your online accounts to one login (and one application). What do we mean by all accounts? We mean damn near everything: from Facebook and Twitter to American Express to AT&T Wireless, Pageonce allows you to connect with pretty much every account that you have online. And it actually works.


Now We’re Talking: AIM With Push Support Hits The App Store

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 05:10 PM PDT

17There’s been a lot of talk the past few days since the launch of the iPhone 3.0 software about the lack of Push Notification apps in the App Store. Well, today brings a big one: AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).

Instant messaging apps are perhaps the perfect use for Push Notification, which allows you to use such services without requiring that they be open at all time. In our test of the pre-release beta version of the AIM app with Push, the messages were sent almost instantaneously. In testing it out right now, it looks to be just as fast.

When you first fire up this new version of AIM, it asks you if you’d like to receive Push notifications. You can change this at any time in the settings. And you can also choose if you’d like the notifications to be brief (only say that you have a new IM), feature the sender’s name only, be normal size, or full size.

You can also set how you’d like Push messages to show up on your phone for each app in the device’s settings. You can have it pop up a message, play a sound, badge your icon or do any combination of those.

And Push works with both the free [iTunes link] and paid version [iTunes link] of the app. The $2.99 paid version removes all advertising.

Push is great for services like IM, but it doesn’t resolve the lack of iPhone background support for all apps. With Push you still can’t listen to Pandora while doing something else on the web, for example. I still believe it’s only a matter of time before we see some sort of third-party background task support as well.

Update: While users are reporting that they aren’t receiving notifications to update their apps yet, if you use the links above, it is the latest version with Push.

23 hai

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Don’t Have Enough Widgets In Your Life? Netvibes Adds Recommendations.

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 05:04 PM PDT

netvibes-recommendations

For those of you who need more information widgets in your life, Netvibes is adding widget recommendations to its homepage service. It just started rolling this feature out today, and all Netvibes users should see it within the next two or three days. It looks at all of the information widgets on all the pages and tabs in your account, compares that to other members with overlapping taste, and suggests content they have that you don’t.

When users click on the “add content” button on the top left, a “Recommended” option will appear below the widget search box. Clicking on that will generate 12 new widget recommendations across nine categories of interest: news, sports, business, technology, entertainment, shopping, lifestyle, games, and travel. Netvibes is calling this new widget recommendation and distribution feature Talk To Me.

When I tried it, most of the recommendations were for news, since the way I use Netvibes is to scan dozens of blogs and news feeds on a single page. The recommendations, at least for me, were a bit too predictable: WSJ blogs, the Financial Times, The LA Times, CBS News. (Click above for a larger image). These are all things I could have found myself. But the recommendations are suppose dto get better over time, learning from what you add and what you reject.

Netvibes is in the widget business, so it needs to encourage more consumption of widgets. It will also be showing targeted sponsored widgets in the same window, marked accordingly, and it gets paid every time someone installs those widgets on a cost-per-install basis.

I personally have moved on from widgets to more linear streams of data as my information consumption habit of choice, but a lot of people still like widgets (see, iGoogle). Most widgets are really just a different way to package streams of data such as news or Twitter feeds. On Netvibes, you arrange them in boxes on your page, and can organize multiple pages in tabs, and even go beyond that. But at a certain point you stop adding new widgets just like you stop adding new feeds to your RSS reader because you don’t know what else to add or it simply becomes overwhelming. A good recommendation system could help you discover new widgets, but what is equally important is a way to clean up the widgets you added long ago but never bother to look at. Recommending what to get rid of is just as important as recommending what to add. But that is not part of the system yet.

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Exclusive: OTOY Goes Mobile, Turns Your Cell Phone Into A Powerful Gaming Rig

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 04:42 PM PDT

Last week we posted a pair of videos showing off OTOY, the upcoming server-side rendering service that can stream complex 3D games to your computer through any web browser. It’s a very impressive technology, requiring no plugins or lengthy installs — just open your browser and you can instantly jump into a game of Crysis or GTA4, streamed in HD quality.

Today we’ve gotten our hands on a clip proving that when OTOY says its technology will work on nearly any browser-enabled device, it means it. As the video below shows, OTOY is going to bring modern games like Crysis and GTA 4 to your mobile phone.



The phone in the video is a Samsung Omnia, which was released to the public last summer (in other words, you don’t need a cutting edge phone for the technology to work). The game is running through the phone’s built-in browser, with no installs required, and is being controlled via a Xbox gamepad connected wirelessly. OTOY Chief Strategy Officer Mark Tseng says that the company is working on a variety of control schemes, allowing users to control games using a phone’s accelerometer, onscreen gamepad, or external peripherals like the Xbox controller.

OTOY will work over Wi-Fi or a 3G connection (the company has it working speeds as low as 1.5 Megabits per second), though Tseng says Wi-Fi works best. He also notes that the technology will work on the iPhone, going on to emphasize that it should work on nearly any device — we can likely expect it to work on the Palm Pre, Android, and most other smartphones as well. At this point the company isn’t willing to divulge how pricing will work, though Tseng says more details will be coming soon.

This is very powerful stuff. Imagine being able to whip out your cell phone and join a quick raid in World of Warcraft, or play through a mission in Grand Theft Auto. I see this as being particularly appealing for MMO’s, which tend to attract especially devout players who would love to be able to access their accounts away from home.

Of course, mobile phones are becoming powerful enough to render 3D graphics on their own — the iPhone offers a slew of games with complex graphics, and the iPhone 3GS is able to support even more detailed games. But these graphics won’t rival modern console or PC games for many years, and you’re going to always have to continuously upgrade your hardware if you want to stay current. Once you have a phone that supports OTOY you shouldn’t have to worry about upgrading your hardware, as all game processing is being done remotely.

But streaming games on mobile phones come with its own set of issues. Unlike your home PC, where you can normally count on a stable connection, many of us play games on our phones while we’re in transit, when you can hardly rely on your cell phone’s reception to hold up. But even if they have to stay stationary or jump on a Wi-Fi connection, this is a service that I’m sure many gamers will be salivating over.

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Bush Advisor: Twitter Founders Should Get Nobel Peace Prize

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 04:06 PM PDT

nobelOh my God, the haters of Twitter are going to love this.

Speaking to Fox News, Mark Pfeifle, a former Deputy National Security Advisor to George W. Bush, offered up this appraisal of the Iran situation:

“If there’s anybody that should possibly get a Nobel Peace Prize in the next time around, it should be the founders of Twitter who delayed the tuning up of their system in order for an amazing amount of tweets to be sent out in the last week or so.”

Let me just repeat the key phrase there: “If there’s anybody that should possibly get a Nobel Peace Prize in the next time around, it should be the founders of Twitter”

Now watch this clip over and over.

Just so we don’t get accused of entirely taking this out of context, below we’ll paste the full transcript (and full video) of what he said in the interview. But again, he did say “If there’s anybody that should possibly get a Nobel Peace Prize in the next time around, it should be the founders of Twitter”.

Twitter, for its part, says it is not a covert government agency, even though it did postpone maintenance to make sure it was up during the peak hours of Iranian protests.

Update: Here’s a tweet Pfeifle sent out recently as well (emphasis mine):

RT JBergsman,M. Pfeifle on FNC: Nobel Peace Prize for Twitter founders for #iranelection? Why not. @ev & @biz > deserving than Arafat.Carter

picture-69

Full transcript:

Bream: Let’s talk about the Administration’s so far. Has it been on point? What do we need to see next from the White House?

Pfeifle: They are walking a tightrope. That’s what they are doing. They do not want the U.S. or West to become the talking point for the Iranian regime, saying they are trying to do a coup by their public statements. What the reaction has been in the prayers yesterday by their supreme leader, he used it anyway and said the West is trying to do this. So, sometimes it doesn’t work. And you try and stay quiet and you try to stay mum or you say too much. The real winners in this and the people that have gotten the message out, even though the U.S. with some exceptions has been fairly quiet is Twitter, has been Facebook, Flickr, YouTube. It’s been all of those. If there’s anybody that should possibly get a Nobel Peace Prize in the next time around, it should be the founders of Twitter who delayed the tuning up of their system in order for an amazing amount of tweets to be sent out in the last week or so.

Bream: It’s been such a valuable source of information because, in the past the government there probably had a lot more control over the information disseminated inside the country and outside as well. So now that we have this additional information coming in, does it put the Administration in a different place as far as, you know, crediting some of this information - maybe not being able to credit all of it because it’s coming from unreliable sources?

Pfeifle: It’s difficult because it’s moving so quickly. We saw just on the 17th, 221,000 tweets sent about Iran, 3,000 videos were uploaded onto YouTube. It’s been really remarkable, you know, how the emerging media the social networking has taken over and has given a voice to a lot of people who have been silent.

Bream: And let’s talk about this escalating today as well, because the government had been cracking saying no more protests in Tehran. Mousavi will be responsible for whatever happens if these people are hurt or injured. They turned out anyway, thousands of them we know so far. Now he’s also amped things up so far by talking about being ready for martyrdom and also calling for a national strike if he is arrested. You know, this seems to be on a trajectory. What happens next there?

Pfeifle: It’s really hard to tell. If the country is shutdown by a strike or portions of it, it’s going to put the Iranian regime in a very difficult situation. Already they have massive problems with gas rationings for fairly wealthy country. Where they’ve been putting money into funding Hamas and Hezbollah and putting so much money into their nuclear program instead of into their people. All of this is quailing up. It’s hitting a point right now where the regime is going to have to make some drastic changes one way or the other. They’ve already said that they are going to count 10 percent of the vote. They are already making some concessions and the people’s voices are being heard.

Bream: Alright, so we know about the official response we’ve already talked about that so let’s talk about back channels. Obviously there’s a lot going on probably that we don’t know about. What kind of efforts can the Administration make off the radar in this situation?

Pfeifle: well, it’s difficult to get to the actual Iranian regime. They are very isolated. There’s some ways through the Swiss, there’s some ways through Ambassadorial channels that you can makes some entries to the Iranians but for the most part they’re not going to listen to the West, they are not going to listen to the U.S. They are going to listen to them more between press releases and public statements as President Obama has done, as the Secretary of State and others have done periodically last week.

Bream: Mark Pfeifle, we thank you so much for your insight on this and for sharing your Saturday with us as well.

Pfeifle: Thank you Shannon.

[thanks James]

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk Sets The Record Straight About Pending Lawsuit

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 02:35 PM PDT

We reported a few weeks ago that Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard filed a lawsuit against Tesla and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, citing allegations of slander, libel and breach of contract. Tesla issued a short statement when the lawsuit was filed, calling the lawsuit a "fictionalized account of Tesla's early years." Now Musk has taken to Tesla’s blog to give his own version of the messy situation. Unrelated to the lawsuit, Musk says that Tesla will be profitable by next month, thanks to lower material costs, and increased Roadster Sport sales.

Musk responds to several of Eberhard’s allegations that he lied about his background and fictionalized pieces of his resume to embellish the truth:

The facts are that when I requested through AC Propulsion to meet Eberhard, he had no technology of his own, he did not have a prototype car and he owned no intellectual property relating to electric cars. All he had was a business plan to commercialize the AC Propulsion Tzero electric sports car concept. Three years later, when Eberhard was asked to leave Tesla, most of the work that he had been paid to do had to be redone.

Particularly, Musk addresses Eberhard’s complaints that the PayPal founder misrepresented his education. Musk maintains that he did his undergraduate studies in physics and business at UPenn/Wharton (we confirmed this with Wharton—Musk was an undergraduate alum and holds degrees from both Wharton and the College of Arts & Sciences) and despite dropping out of grad school at Stanford, maintained affiliations with the university by working with the Stanford Engineering Advisory Council.

Musk also addresses Eberhard’s claims that he had no hand in the making of the Roadster and that Musk’s management was detrimental to the business. Musk writes that while Eberhard was leading the operational teams, Musk himself focused on the body design, technical specifications and building the Tesla brand. Musk also says he spent significant time “on the details of the product and particularly the body styling — you will see elements of two of my favorite cars (Porsche and McLaren F1) in the Roadster body — but left most day to day management of the company up to Eberhard.”

The tale from Musk is quite different than Eberhard’s allegations that Musk and Tesla pushed him out of the company for no reason. According to Musk’s post, Eberhard grossly miscalculated costs of production of the Roadsters and purposely withheld this information from Musk and investors:

The real reason that Roadster development cost so much more than can be accounted for by typical entrepreneurial hubris is that we essentially had to spend the development money twice. After Eberhard was asked to step down from the CEO role two years ago, almost every major system on the car, including the body, HVAC, motor, power electronics, transmission and battery pack, had to be redesigned, retooled or switched to a new supplier.

The post is a fascinating read in its own right, diving deep into some of the early missteps at Tesla and how they were overcome. For instance, the company’s decision to move production of the battery packs from Asia to the United States was counter-intuitive, but crucial to its survival. Writes Musk:

Avoiding the cost of shipping a half ton pack from Asia also meant significant savings on shipping costs. This is a much bigger deal for a heavy and bulky product than a small consumer electronics device, where outsourcing to Asia makes a lot more sense. Very importantly, our supply chain went from a tectonically slow six months and having to pay for tens of millions of dollars of inventory in transit to a matter of a few weeks.

Musk also includes some emails to back up his counter-claims against Eberhard but says that while the post is meant to clear up several misconceptions, there is more to come in a formal response to the lawsuit which will be filed soon. I’ve included a couple of the juicier snippets from the emails below but you can see more of the emails in Musk’s blog post.

As we wrote in our earlier report, a lot of Eberhard’s claims seem like sour grapes. It’s unclear how much he’s seeking in damages.

FYI-Michael Marks was the interim CEO of Tesla who was brought in to the company in 2007. Darryl Siry, was the head of Sales, Marketing & Service at Tesla during this time period

From: Michael Marks
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007 10:38 PM
To: Elon Musk
Subject: boardI've thought about it, and completely agree with the idea that Martin
shouldn't stay on the board, just fyiEmail presaging the host of issues that had to be fixed:
—–Original Message—–
From: Elon Musk
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 08:56 AM Pacific Standard Time
To: Jim Marver; Ira Ehrenpreis; Antonio J. Gracias; kimbal
Subject: Fw: meeting

This is not good. Sounds like there are more issues that the board was not informed about. I will send out a note as soon as I talk with Marks and will ask him to email an assessment to the board as soon as he can.

Martin seems to be focused on his public image and position within Tesla, rather than solving these critical problems. If you should speak with Martin, please urge him to spend all his energy on making sure that the Roadster works and arrives on time. He doesn't seem to understand that the best way to maximize his reputation and position within the company is to help get this right.

From: Darryl Siry
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2008 6:28 PM
To: Elon Musk; Ze'ev Drori
Subject: Martin EberhardElon & Ze'ev

Some recent developments in the past few days have given me cause for serious concern regarding the amplification of Martin's public statements about the company. I have come to the conclusion that Martin and his wife are hell bent on damaging the company by doing everything that they can to cast the company in a negative light and accuse the company of deceptive and unethical practices.

My counsel to you in the past has always leaned to the side of appeasement, thinking that by doing what we can to defuse the situation would minimize the negative publicity potential. Recent events have led me to a conclusion that Martin and his wife will continue to take every opportunity to damage the company through their statements in the press and on public internet forums. The fact that we are on the verge of delivering his car and he is increasing his attacks causes me to wonder whether we will ever be free from these unceasing attacks on the company.

In conclusion – I believe the board should take under serious consideration the severing of all ties with Martin Eberhard including the refunding of his reservation payment and cancelling of his order. If this course of action were to be pursued by the board, I would recommend that the company issue a public statement announcing our intention and outlining the rationale that led us to this conclusion. While this action may be considered severe and would no doubt create a stir, I feel this route may be better than subjecting the company to an unceasing negative publicity campaign that is fueled by his continued ties to the company as an early customer. Carolyn Eberhard's comments in an email to me implying that they would seek to derail our attempts at going public is especially concerning.

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What’s In A Name, Indeed. Apple Now Calling It The “iPhone 3GS”, No Space

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 01:32 PM PDT

iphone3gs
When the iPhone 3G S was announced at this year’s WWDC conference, I first wrote it as the “iPhone 3GS” and was corrected by a colleague that according to Apple, there was a space between the “G” and the “S.” That seemed to be the case on Apple’s entire website. But today, with its million units sold announcement, I noticed that Apple has apparently moved to calling the device the iPhone 3GS — with no space. And I’m hardly the only one who noticed the change.

So which is it, Apple?

Obviously, this isn’t a huge deal, but considering how many people are writing stories, posts, tweeting, etc, about the device right now, you’d think Apple would like to have one correct name out there. But it seems that it’s not even sure. While the press release this morning has “iPhone 3GS,” the website still has “iPhone 3G S.”

As I’ve said from when the name was first rumored, I think the iPhone 3G S (or 3GS, for that matter) is kind of a silly name. Already, I’ve heard some people who are unclear if “3GS” just means multiple iPhone 3Gs. And then there’s the whole issue of writing iPhone 3GSs, plural. Plus, having played around with the device all weekend, I’m still not sure they shouldn’t have called it the iPhone 3G V — for Video.

I’ve contacted Apple for some clarification.

Update: According to a tweet from The Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro, Apple has made the change to “iPhone 3GS,” citing Apple’s Greg Joswiak. Someone should probably let their website know.

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Interview: Jared Brown, IPhone Developer About Having His App Rejected

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 01:30 PM PDT

Every day the Internet pays lip service to the "apps" "yanked" by Apple. But what happens when something Apple does in the SDK shuts down an entire type of app, namely the camera apps that added interesting new functionality to the phone? Jared Brown write Quick Shot, an app that added a number of cool features to the iPhone camera.
Apple has decided to strictly enforce their SDK guidelines with the release of 3.0, leaving potentially millions of iPhone users with applications that will not be compatible with iPhone OS 3.0. Maybe you are already aware of this, but I had not seen anything written on Techcrunch and thought it was compelling enough to bring to your attention. Our company, Code Monkeys at Work, produces an application, Quick Shot. It's a camera application, not unlike Night Camera. It has been live in the App Store since mid-Feb. When the 3.0 beta came out we updated it to be compatible and submitted it. Each time we submit an update to Quick Shot we cross our fingers, since we always get a different reviewer who takes issue with features/graphics/text that were already approved in earlier versions. Although this time when it got rejected it caught us by complete surprise.

A Social Force Departs Google

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 01:08 PM PDT

Kevin Marks, a social force within Google and one of the main drivers behind its recent social efforts (including OpenSocial, its Social Graph API, and Microformats) is leaving the company. He announced his departure today on his blog. Marks was an evangelist to other engineers outside Google, his official title was Developer Advocate. For many Web developers outside Google, he has been the public face of its social efforts in recent years.

Contacted by phone, Marks says he is working on a bunch of things “related to the social Web” and “activity streams,” but declined to get into specifics. Asked why he is leaving Google, he responds that his work is pretty much completed: “Over the last two years, we have built out the infrastructure for the social Web. Now it is time to build things on that infrastructure.”

He also is ready to work in a smaller company. Noting that he has worked at both large and small companies over the years, he says, “I am due for a small company phase.”

That is a nice way to put it. OpenSocial has been gaining steam, but still seems to be lagging Facebook as the platform of choice for social applications and Websites. That is not to say that the game is over or that OpenSocial cannot prevail over time (precisely by being more open). The action, anyway, is moving to real time activity streams and Marks now seems to be pointed in that direction.

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