Thursday, June 11, 2009

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bChamp: The iPhone App That Beatboxes For You

Posted: 11 Jun 2009 08:48 AM PDT

At the TechFellow event on Friday, we had the opportunity to demo a musical mobile app that lets you beatbox on your iPhone. Developed by Dutch startup Monodomo, bChamp is $0.99 at the app store. The video gives you a clearer idea of how the app works.

bChamp will translate sounds you make into the iPhone’s microphone into beatboxing sounds. bChamp will recognizes three beatbox sounds: Snare (say "k" as in "cabbage"), Kickdrum (say "b" as in "bogus"), Hi-Hat (say "t" sound with your teeth closed). When you make those sounds into the microphone, they will be translated into dfferent drum-like sounds. You can also adjust the pitch of your beats by using the app’s interface to change the pitch. bChamp’s app includes some visual graffiti effects.

For $0.99, the app is a simple way for those of us who are challenged in the beatboxing department to pretend that we have some skills. Our demo was particularly effective because the founders of Mondomo hooked the device up to an external speaker. Using headphones or the iPhone’s speaker may not be as much fun when it comes to bChamp’s sound. Other iPhone apps that let you simulate beatboxing sounds include Milky App’s Beatbox Live and BtBx.

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Lycos To Relaunch Search Services In Europe, For Whatever Reason

Posted: 11 Jun 2009 08:27 AM PDT

Remember Lycos? Well, believe it or not, they’re not dead yet. In fact, the search engine / web portal has just announced that it has regained the rights to use its the trademarked brand names “Lycos” and “Hotbot” within the European territory. In case that confuses you: Lycos Europe had an exclusive license to use those terms within Europe under an agreement dating back to 1997 when the company was formed as part of a joint venture and started up European operations independently from Lycos.

In a statement Jungwook Lim, CEO of Lycos (which today is actually a subsidiary to Korean Internet giant Daum Communications), said: “Lycos continues to have a loyal user base and we expect this consolidation to help revitalize and strengthen our search businesses within Europe.” That made me scratch my head a bit, because I’ve been living and working in Europe for a long time and I don’t know a living soul that’s still ‘loyal’ to anything remotely Lycos.

Chuckle along with this additional statement from Edward Noel, General Manager of Search and Business Development for Lycos, too:

“Over the next several weeks Lycos will be re-launching the provision of search services within the European territory. Locally targeted content verticals will gradually be rolled out and we will be taking steps to enhance our users’ search experience.”

If I read that correctly, it seems Lycos is not giving up on Europe just yet.
Too bad European users have long given up on them.

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iSamurai: FIGHT With Your iPhones

Posted: 11 Jun 2009 08:24 AM PDT

iSamurai is a crazy two-player app from Toy Kite that recreates real Samurai sword fighting without the flesh wounds or ritual disembowelment. The app uses the iPhone's built-in motion sensor and accelerometer to tell where the iPhone is in space and make noises that suggest that you are fighting with swords. It connects to another player's iPhone with peer-to-peer networking and looks pretty goofy. Clearly the concept of fighting with invisible swords takes a bit of skill and imagination but it's a fascinating use of all of the iPhone's motion features. It's available now for 99 cents.


Apple’s Awesome App Wall Gets Photosynthed

Posted: 11 Jun 2009 08:05 AM PDT

The web has been abuzz lately over Apple’s awesome Matrix-style app wall at WWDC, which displays 20,000 of the platform’s most popular applications in a dense, moving grid. It’s certainly a sight to behold, but while it’s been covered pretty extensively across the web, some iPhone app developers who missed WWDC are still left asking, “I wonder if I’m on there”. Here’s your chance to check.

Developers Andres Douglas and Greg Pascale (who was behind the iSynth application) have taken a whopping 273 photos of the App Wall and used them to build a virtual recreation using Microsoft Photosynth. Photosynth was one of the cooler things to come out of Microsoft Live Labs, allowing users to stich together hundreds (or more) of photos to build virtual worlds out of static photographs.

The Synth works pretty well — you can zoom in and get an up close view of much of the wall so you should be able to check if your app is on there, and zipping through the different zoom levels is fun. But it isn’t quite perfect, as all of the photos were taken using an iPhone’s relatively low resolution camera, and there are some chunks missing.

To remedy this issue, Douglas and Pascale are asking for high-res photos from other developers who attended the conference, which they’ll use to create a much higher quality version of the synth, hopefully with every single application visible on it. If you’ve got photos of the wall, head over to this Drop.io account and upload your images. Don’t worry if you’ve only taken a shot of a portion of the wall, as Photosynth can stitch pieces from other photos together.

You can find embeds the of the synth on the iSynth website here, or a larger version at the Silverlight Photosynth viewer here.

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Toodledo Is In Troubledo

Posted: 11 Jun 2009 07:04 AM PDT

Toodledo, a basic but nifty free online to-do list management tool, is having a very bad day. According to a message posted on its website, a storm hit the city where their datacenter is located, prompting the engineers to switch to power generators.

This caused Toodledo to wind up with a corrupted database, which it is currently frantically trying to restore.

So, here’s the story. A big storm went through the city where our datacenter is located. The datacenter decided to proactively switch to generators. During the switch, something got screwed up, and the power went off for a few minutes. As (bad) luck would have it, this caused our database to get corrupted. We are currently working to bring it back online and restored from the live backup. The crack team at Rackspace is on the job. Thanks Rackspace! Unfortunately, the database is so large, that it will take some time to transfer and verify all the data. Hopefuly not more than a few hours. We know that this is very bad, and we apologize for any inconvience that this will cause. Please check the forums when we are back online for a full report.

Update: Its obviously taking longer than we expected and we are really sorry for that.

Update #2: I know that our downtime is totally unacceptable. I am literally sick to my stomach about this whole thing. We have successfully restored all of the data up until June 10, 4am CST and we are working very hard to restore the remaining 12 hours of updates that happened before the servers crashed. Obviously, this has been a major event. We had multiple simultaneous errors happen that have made recovery slower than anticipated. Because our database is so large (many many many gigabytes), it just takes a long time to transfer and import the data. I know that many of you are upset, and all I can say is that I am deeply sorry. We are already starting to rethink our backup strategy so that recovery doesn’t take so long in the future.

I feel genuinely sorry for Jake Olefsky, the sole independent developer behind the Toodledo service. If this is any comfort to him: an Amazon datacenter got hit by a lightning strike this morning, causing its EC2 service to suffer a fairly major outage.

Or how cloudy weather can have a devastating effect on cloud-based services.

(Thanks for the tip Gavin)

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Skype Co-founders Invest In European Pet Community Network

Posted: 11 Jun 2009 05:42 AM PDT

Estonia-based United Dogs and Cats, which operates two pet-specific community websites dubbed UnitedDogs.com and UnitedCats.com, has raised €480,000 in VC funding. The money comes from individual investor Raivo Hein, the state-owned Estonian Development Fund and Ambient Sound Investments, the investment group led by co-founders of Skype that had previously seeded the startup with €170,000 of funding back in April 2008.

UDC first launched the two pet communities internationally about two years ago, and the nicely designed social networking services have quickly gained traction with cat and dog owners throughout Europe, in large part thanks to its localized nature with support for 16 languages. CEO Ragnar Sass says the total number of registered users has recently surpassed 200,000 and claims that the site is market leader in its respective segment for a number of European countries like Italy, France, Spain, Lithuania and Estonia.

United Dogs and Cats makes money by selling advertisement placements to companies interested in reaching pet owners with related products, and by offering its members a number of paid features like the ability to upload more photos of their pets, access to more hand-crafted virtual gifts and a range of pet profile designs. Paying users also receive bonus points (like a virtual currency) every month, which they can use to send virtual gifts to other pets, etc.

I asked co-founder Martin Tajur if UDC was inspired by the popular Dogster / Catster network sites based in the U.S., and he claimed they did not even know about the San Francisco company (which by the way, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is an investor in) when they launched the websites in Estonia.

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Online Advertising In Europe: 2008 Was Tough, 2009 Will Be Worse

Posted: 11 Jun 2009 02:55 AM PDT

The Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe is currently holding its annual Interact Congress, an event that brings together the main protagonists of the European digital industry here in Brussels. For the occasion, IAB Europe in conjunction with PriceWaterhouseCoopers today released the findings of its annual advertising expenditure survey for the year ending December 2008. The gist: growth in digital advertising significantly slowed down last year, especially in more mature markets, and the outlook for this year is grim.

In 2008 the total European online advertising market, or at least the 19 markets analyzed by IAB Europe and PwC, was worth €12.9 billion (approx. $18 billion) with a like-for-like growth rate compared to 2007 of 20%. For comparison, online advertising grew 10.6% in the United States in 2008 (outpacing TV) and was worth €16.6 billion ($23.4 billion). However, the 20% growth figure paints a better-looking picture than the harsh reality, which is that it is far below previously stated expectations, of course caused by the crumbling of the global economy and the huge strain it has put on digital advertising spending worldwide.

If you look at the top 10 markets in Europe, year-on-year growth rates were under 20% more often than not. Considering the fact that these markets account for about 93% of the total value of the market, the following chart doesn’t accurately reflect the slowed growth because it over-accentuates the massive growth in Slovenia, Poland and Austria.

Broken down by formats, search remains the leading format in Europe with the strongest year-on-year growth rate (26%), accounting for 43% of online ad expenditure in the countries measured and a value of €5.6 billion. After search come classifieds, with growth rates of 17.4% bringing it to 26% share of total ad spend and a market value of €3.8 billion.

Alain Heureux, President and CEO of IAB Europe, acknowledges that while the overall picture in Europe is one of growth, what is clear from these figures is that 2008 was a tough year for online advertising. And if you thought that trend was going to reverse this year, Eva Berg-Winters, Senior Manager at PwC, is here to put you back with your feet on the ground:

“2009 is set to be a difficult year for online advertising. Decline is likely in a number of mature markets and, where there is still growth, we expect it to be much lower than previously.”

In the U.S., IAB as recently as last week reported that online advertising declined 5% in the first quarter of 2009 to $5.5 billion, compared to the first quarter of 2008. Industry revenues were down an even steeper 9.8 percent sequentially from the fourth quarter's $6.1 billion.

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Betaworks Email To Investors: Read It Here

Posted: 11 Jun 2009 01:29 AM PDT

Famous angel investor Ron Conway’s investment focus on real time startups earned him the moniker “Real Time Ron” by his close friends. But he’s certainly not the only venture capitalist out there focusing on this space.

New York based betaworks, an incubator/VC, is also right in the thick of things. They invested early in Summize and gained a sizable chunk of Twitter stock when that company was acquired in 2008 to become Twitter Search.

betaworks’ list of investments is a who’s who of the real time world. Twitter, StockTwits, TweetDeck, Twitterfeed, Tumblr and bit.ly are examples. And they also own a piece of what may be my favorite content site on the Internet - someecards.

Anyway, things seem to be rocking at betaworks based on the email to investors from CEO John Borthwick and COO Andrew Weissmanthat was sent out a couple of weeks ago and forwarded to us. bit.ly, for example, now has a 50% share of the URL shortener market and 130 million weekly clicks on links.

The full email is below.

From: Borthwick John
Sent: Sunday, May 31, 2009 11:23 AM
To: Schilling Mathias; Thomas Blondet; Smith Richard; Jean-Charles Charki; Herbert Allen III; Vigil Hank; Tarek Abdel-Meguid (Terry) Meguid; Ellman Stuart; Jaffe Bruce; Lisa Belzberg; Gillian Munson; Pittman Bob; Dominic Becotte; Joshua Stylman; Peter Hershberg; Stan Pantowich; Ron Conway; David Singer; Cappuccio Paul; Jean Marie Messier; Heiferman Scott; Howard Lindzon; Peretsman Nancy; Brad Reifler; Peter Borish; Brian Gottlieb; Strauss Zelnick; Taavet Hinrikus; Eric Martineau-Fortin; Ted Barnett; Robin Transport; Jon Brod; Russell Andrew; Ken Lerer; Gordon Crovitz; Goldstein Seth; Hilary Bergman; Shen David; Armstrong Tim
Cc: Andrew Weissman
Subject: betaworks / quarterly investor update / June

betaworking
Once again a busy quarter at betaworks — and a good one to boot. We now have 22 companies in the network. They are listed here http://bit.ly/beta-network. We are still in the early days of building betaworks into a new type of media company - one characterized by a loosely coupled network of companies. A network that is connected by shared data services matched with a bottoms up structure. Chris Anderson wrote last week that “the .. new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small … distributed-information networks would do the same outside the walls of a single company. The Web would be globalization taken to the extreme. Projects would be open to the best of breed anywhere, creating virtual flash firms of suppliers and workers that would come together for one product and then re-form for another. “Small pieces, loosely joined” was the mantra.” Its only eighteen months but this is betaworks. We did a revision to our web site and included a interactive presentation on what is betaworks and how we believe what we are building is in essence a new kind of media company. You can find it at http://betaworks.com On to the update. Over the past quarter we spun out our first project, took a majority stake in one company, made two new investments and made solid progress on our other internal product.

bit.ly
Eight weeks ago we spun bit.ly out of betaworks into bit.ly Inc, and raised a seed investment round led by OATV (O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures), Social Leverage, Ron Conway, TAG, Chris Sacca, Mitch Kapor and the Founders Fund.

bit.ly has been on a tear since we launched it last summer — let me sketch out what it is, why its useful and offer some data points on progress. bit.ly is on its surface a link or URL shortener, helping people take long and unwieldy links and make them short and easy to share via email, Twitter, Facebook etc. But once you shorten a link with bit.ly the fun begins. You can put a simple “+” on the end of any bit.ly link and see, real time, the pace at which that link is getting shared and clicked on as it moves around these social distribution networks. The pace of growth at bit.ly has been astounding to say the least. Its been a real lesson to us here at betaworks — when you hit a vein things can grow extremely fast. I have had the fortune to work with fast growth products before, bit.ly growth has been like walking up a wall. Some data points. We launched bit.ly late last summer. The growth curve below illustrates the trend. Nine weeks ago when we closed the funding of bit.ly approx. 18m bit.ly links we getting clicked on every week, about 3-4 m per week day (the chart below shows daily clicks through the first week of April). In a little over 6 months we managed to earn a 30% share in the URL shortening market via organic, viral growth.

By the first of May we were doing approx. 50m decodes a week. Last week 130m bit.ly links were clicked on. Three weeks ago we rolled out bit.ly as default within Twitter. Twitter has added 20-30% on top of the viral growth - a great partnership that holds a ton of potential. Closing in upon bit.ly’s nine month anniversary it has over 50% market share. The betaworks / bit.ly team has done a phenomenal job scaling the systems and making sure that not once has a bit.ly link been unavailable. And the real time metrics distinguishes bit.ly from all of its competition. Scaling real time metrics is a huge challenge — one of those things that you only hear about when you slip up. Please if you come by the office mention this to the team of ex AOL engineers who run bit.ly — they are doing a great job. Business model wise we are starting to figure out where the money is. My sense is that there should be some very interesting monetization opportunities we can un-pack.

Three new things …
Partnered with TAG, betaworks took a majority stake in Twitterfeed a content router for publishers to Twitter. Twitterfeed has 150k publishers pushing out a quarter of a million updates daily. It’s a very interesting business — for some background see http://bit.ly/U2QM3. And we did seed investments in two new companies — Uservoice and GDGT — two wonderful companies, both of whom fit right into the betaworks thesis.

Other updates …
- Tweetdeck is doing very very well. The most recent version, out for less than a month, has received approx. a million downloads. Over the past quarter Tweetdeck has continued to pull ahead of its competition. Tweetdeck is the preferred way to access the Twitter stream for over 14% of all users and they send more messages from Tweetdeck than from Twitter.com or any other service.
- Tipjoy opened up an API to power payments for social applications. User and payment growth have both been strong. This is the first social payments API we’ve seen, excited to see how it grows. Stocktwits is doing very well — premium (paid version) is getting rolled out and they closed a series A in the past quarter.
- IILWY — who we told you last time had hired a CEO — rebranded itself to OMG POP. The service is doing great, they closed its B round led by Bessemer.
- Some e Cards is rocking. Last October (@betaday) the announced break-even– they have been cash flow positive ever since then, sold out till the fall. They have approx. 600k followers on Twitter and as I outlined in an essay I wrote 2 weeks ago they, and other betaworks, are leading a transformation in distribution (see: http://bit.ly/UWNtS).
- Lastly, we launched Chartbeat in the spring — we now have 500 paying customers, modest but solid start. Phew — I said it was a busy quarter.

Press roundup
Business Week included in its round up of the Twitter ecosystem five betaworks companies:
Tweetdeck http://bit.ly/4sLvnH
Stocktwits http://bit.ly/Oyukm
Tipjoy http://bit.ly/1911Z1
bit.ly http://bit.ly/10q3FP
Twitterfeed http://bit.ly/U2QM3

GigaOm mused about how we could “upstage Digg” at http://bit.ly/3IfpUO (laying out an interesting roadmap for bitlynow). Jenna Wortham from the New York Times http://bit.ly/4fol1L, Chartbeat press: Better Homes ‘n Garden! http://bit.ly/11YCEz “chartbeat is metrics porn” http://bit.ly/f48j5 “I recently stumbled upon Chartbeat and I'm already addicted.” http://bit.ly/6empP

And someone @ the LA Times is loving our work product!

Thats it for the quarter, onward and best regards to you all

best regards

JB, AW and our small crew

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Hurt, Trent Reznor Half-Quits Twitter

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 11:57 PM PDT

picture-43He’s had enough.

Trent Reznor, better known as the man behind the band Nine Inch Nails, is apparently fed up with Twitter. In a long, free-flowing rant post tonight in the NIN forums, Reznor let his haters have it. What starts out as a diatribe against the record labels (which Reznor has been one of the main proponents against in recent years), quickly turns directly to Twitter, which Reznor seems to blame for allowing him to give too much insight into his personal life — something which some trolls are using against him. And so he’s taking a break from the social media scene, and has turned his Twitter account into a “one-way” stream of NIN-only material, according to his new bio.

And apparently, he won’t change it until “Twitter improves blocking.” The reason for this is people Reznor calls the “Metal Sludge contingency.” Here’s Reznor graphic description of these people:

Metal Sludge is the home of the absolutely worst people I’ve ever come across. It’s populated mainly by unattractive plump females who publicly fantasize about having sex with guys in bands. Kind of like a role-playing game where people NOBODY will fuck make up stories about their incredible sexual encounters with people they WISH they could fuck. It would be kind of funny in a sad and pathetic way except the fun doesn’t stop there - hate and good old-fashioned outright blatant racism are also encouraged to spice things up and remind you how truly ugly these scourges are. TRULY ugly on the inside (the outside is obvious).

But buried in this stuff, Rezor has some good points. First of all, Twitter is quickly getting overrun by spammers. That’s probably not a shock to those of us who follow and use Twitter a lot, but it’s getting to the point where celebrities are now starting to notice it, and it’s turning them off from the service. As he puts it, “So when you see the new accounts that pop up daily on Twitter spewing [garbage], usually from picture-less creatively named profiles, spewing hate at Mariqueen and I, take a moment to visualize the sad couple people behind them.”

Also, he’s thinking about the idea of these networks using real-life verifications to encourage better conversations:

I had thought a while ago about attempting to start a mainstream public forum that required real verification of it’s participants for purposes of context. The idea was to have a place where you can actually discuss whatever and have some idea of who you’re conversing with. For example, if we were discussing drumming techniques and you can see that someone participating in the discussion is a drum instructor vs. a 13 year old kid Googling answers, you’d have the proper context in which to have a potentially valid discussion. If we were discussing EDLC’s heart condition and a real cardiologist speaks up, I’d value his opinion over, say FredFuckFaceWhateverHisLastFuckingNameIs’s “opinion”. Know what I mean? Anyway, we’re in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience.

That’s obviously another shot at Twitter, but it really speaks to most networks. Facebook is by far the best as it at least tries to make sure real people are using it. This topic is something I have thought about recently, as well.

Reznor kind of gives away what seems to be at the heart of his issues towards the beginning of his rant:

Back to Twitter. I approached that as a place to be less formal and more off-the-cuff, honest and “human”. I was not expecting to broadcast details of my love life there, but it happened because I’m in love and it’s all I think about and that’s that. If this has bummed you out or destroyed what you’ve projected on me, fair enough - it’s probably time for you to leave. You are right, I’m not the same person I was in 1994 (and I’m happy about that). Are you?

Apparently, some people are disappointed with Reznor no longer portraying himself as the crazed counter-culture icon he was in the early-to-mid 1990s. He’s in love now, and it’s changed him. And thanks to Twitter, millions of people have been privvy to that. Other celebrities should consider that a warning. With Twitter, there is no PR person filtering the message about you. That’s both powerful, but also potentially harmful.

Reznor’s post is actually quite insightful, when you’re able to parse it. Especially when compared to Kanye West’s rant about Twitter last month. And his rants have proven useful in the past, especially against Apple’s ridiculous app approval process for the iPhone. Perhaps now, Twitter will step up its game in the fight against spam and trolls.

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Facebook Vanity URLs: Journalists Don’t Have To Wait In Line

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 08:17 PM PDT

Friday night is the Facebook vanity URL landrush (first reported on May 31, announced yesterday officially). At 9:01 pm PST on Friday, just log into Facebook and grab the name you want before someone else does.

While the masses (that’s you) will be fighting for that perfect name on Friday night, some lucky few people won’t need to bother waiting in line. Facebook employees have already grabbed theirs (taking Facebook.com/Mike, which is what I wanted). And apparently “key journalists” won’t have to wait in line, either.

In an email today, Facebook told me “We wanted to let you know that we decided to reserve usernames for the key journalists and outlets we work with. Look out for an email from someone on the communications team with more details.” Other writers here at TechCrunch got the same email.

I feel sort of bad about posting this, since Facebook is actually doing us a favor. But I also think it’s kind of BS that Facebook is giving some people, employees included, first shot at the names. My guilt only extends so far, though. You suckers wait in line. I’m grabbing my name in advance.

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Video: iPhone Push Notification In Action With AIM

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 07:36 PM PDT

picture-35Earlier today, Apple sent out an email (embedded below) to developers who are testing the latest iPhone 3.0 software, asking them to help do one final stress test the new Push Notification service. The app picked for this test was AOL’s AIM instant messaging application, which makes sense given that IM apps are likely to be the apps that end up using Push Notification the most.

Push Notification, for those who haven’t been following news about it for the past year, is the system Apple developed to alleviate the fact that it won’t allow third party apps to run in the background of the iPhone. Apple claims there are security concerns, battery life concerns and performance concerns that prevent background apps from being feasible at this time on the iPhone (though the company is considering ways to do background apps in the future). Instead, it has asked developers to use its servers to push out certain tasks (like IMs) that come to your phone even when that application isn’t running.

Apple first talked about Push Notification a year ago at WWDC, and said it should be available around September of 2008. When that deadline came and went, Apple was largely silent, only remarking briefly that the system wasn’t yet ready and it wanted to make sure it was perfect before rolling it out. A smart move considering the rough start its MobileMe service go off to. So we waited and waited, until finally Apple announced that it would be a part of the iPhone 3.0 software, due out June 17.

Watch the video below to see Push Notification in action with AIM. One quick note: The video makes it look like there may be a delay between an IM sent and received, but I’m told it’s basically instantaneous — under a second.

push

[thanks Kyle]

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Behold! The Living Sasquatch

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 05:39 PM PDT

Remember those holograms we saw during the presidential election? It was just like the hologram of Princess Leia that R2D2 shows to old Ben Kenobi, except suckier. I bet you wished, like I did, that you could make your own cool holograms, but with Sasquatch, right? Your dreams have been answered, thanks to LivingSasquatch.com! This is a pretty cool little application. Simply print out the foot, and place it in sight of your webcam. Then use the simple storyboard tools to line up a sequence of actions, emotions, or attacks, and watch Sasquatch act them out right in front of you! Here's a little video I made that took all of two minutes to prepare. With a little more time, and a modest amount of creativity, you can whip up any number of clever Sasquatch videos! I can't wait to see someone reenact their favorite scenes from Harry and the Hendersons! Be sure to check out the gallery for more glorious Sasquatch videos.


SnapStream Charts Trending Topics On The Tube

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 05:15 PM PDT

Snapstream, the company that makes a device that lets enterprises record thousands of hours of TV (from both satellite and digital cable sources) and search inside the recordings for keywords, has launched a trending topics site for TV. The site lets you see the hot words (those that are ascending in mentions) and cold words (those that are descending in mentions) on national television. And you can also enter couple of keywords (up to 5) into TV Trends and you'll get a graph showing you the relative frequency of mentions of those words on mostly-news national programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, MSNBC and CNN.

Snapstream crawls closed-captioning text for programs that they record. They filter out local programming, sitcoms, and sports and then cleans-up, analyzes and indexes data for the trends site. When you graph a keyword, the site will give you a view of excerpts of stories at selected points along the curve and you can also filter the results by network. For example, you can chart trends of the mention of “Twitter” on CNN alone. TV Trends graphs can be embedded into a site or blog. Here’s a comparison between mentions of Twitter and Facebook over the past six months. You can see the spike in mentions in April, around the time of the Ashton Kutcher/CNN showdown.

I compared SnapStream’s trends to Google Trends and Twitter’s Trending Topics. SnapStream’s mentions differ because it tallies the most common mentioned words, not topics. So today, SnapStream’s top keywords mentioned include several references to the Holocaust Museum Shootings, including “the gunman,” “museum,” and “Holocaust.” Twitter and Google both listed the Holocaust Shootings as one trending topic. And of course, the content that is popular differs between the two mediums. For example, one of twitter’s Trending Topic’s is “#geekpickuplines.” And Google lists “Contessa Brewer,” the MSNBC host who recently had an on-air meltdown that was spread via YouTube. On the other hand, SnapStream lists “North Korea” and “Chrysler” as hot topics.

SnapStream’s site isn’t updated in real-time (it is updated every 3-4 hours), which puts its topics at a disadvantage to Twitter and Google’s topics, that are close to real-time. But Twitter’s Trending Topics has its disadvantages too and thus far, there isn’t much on the web that measures trending topics on national TV.

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Looking Forward To Streaming Live Video From Your iPhone 3G S? Not So Fast.

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 04:40 PM PDT

picture-19There’s a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley: A lot of people are using their iPhones to stream live video over the web. The reason this is kept secret is because technically, no one is supposed to have such an app on their iPhone. You see, Apple has not allowed any of these live-streaming apps into the App Store. One reason is because these apps use hacks to get the iPhone’s camera to record video. But another is undoubtedly because AT&T does not want live streaming video clogging up its network. But if Apple and AT&T think videos like this and this were shot on something like a Nokia N95, they’re dreaming.

Even the video-crippled iPhone 3G has proven to be a great tool for shooting streaming live video, and now with the launch of the iPhone 3G S — which actually supports video, the implications are huge. Companies like Qik and Ustream should be shouting from the rooftops, “Finally!,” right? So why is everyone so quiet when it comes to using the iPhone 3G S for streaming live video? Well, because it’s still far from a sure thing.

Speaking with representatives from Qik and Ustream — two of the leading live streaming video companies — both seem to be completely in the dark when it comes to any streaming live video from the phone functionality in the new device. Obviously, they’re both very interested in it (and that’s probably an understatement), but it sounds like Apple and AT&T aren’t too interested in talking to them about it, right now.

The iPhone video capture problem is now out of the way, as Apple announced it has opened its video APIs to third parties, but that doesn’t mean that live streaming video output will be okay, Qik co-founder Bhaskar Roy tells us. He says that his team is currently digging through the new APIs in the iPhone 3.0 software, but it’s hard to know anything for sure until they get their hands on the actual iPhone 3G S hardware, which will be available next week.

11And while it would be easy to blame the life or death of such functionality solely on AT&T, the whipping boy when it comes to all problems iPhone-related lately, it could well be Apple’s APIs that are limiting such functionality. “I haven’t heard specifically about AT&T’s concerns,” Ustream founder John Ham tells us.

Still, there’s good reason to think AT&T is plenty happy not to see any live streaming video apps anytime soon on the iPhone. It has been widely reported that AT&T is prohibiting iPhone apps like the Sling Player from streaming video over its 3G networks due to bandwidth concerns. This is true even though AT&T allows the same app to work over its 3G network on other phones. It’s crap. And we could be looking at getting handed the same plate of crap when it comes to sending live streaming video from the new iPhones.

And it seems pretty unfair to these video startups trying to provide their service to customers. “Currently, viewing YouTube videos on the iPhone presents a load that is likely larger than the aggregate amount of bandwidth used by many individual broadcasts [on Ustream] at any given moment,” Ham notes. That’s interesting because YouTube, which is owned by Google, obviously has had an official app on the iPhone since day one, and AT&T doesn’t seem to ever complain about that.

Why any of this matters is because live streaming video from your phone is proving to be an invaluable tool for certain circumstances. Despite its popularity, most people still don’t carry around Flip cameras at all times, and even if they did, those don’t stream live to the web. But having such a tool that is always on you, on your phone, with such capabilities is huge. How else could we get great videos cornering Google co-founder Sergey Brin at a conference or the Google Goats?

AT&T has been working to overhaul its 3G network, upgrading to High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) which can run at 7.2 Mbps — which the new iPhone will work with. Of course, that won’t start happening until “later this year,” so our best hope for live video support over 3G may be then. If we don’t have such a capability at least by then, that’s just pretty pathetic — no matter whose fault it is.

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The More Followers You Have, The More You Tweet. Or Is It The Other Way Around?

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 03:49 PM PDT

sysomos-twitter-follower-tweet

Oh, the burdens of popularity. We already know that most people on Twitter are sheep with few followers and who don’t Tweet much. But what about the rams? If you want to lead a flock on Twitter, you need to be heard. People with 100 followers send out an average of 2.4 Tweets per day, while those with 1,800 followers Tweet an average of 10.2 a day, according to a new study by Sysomos, a social media analytics company based in Toronto. The inflection point seems to be between 800 followers (2.8 Tweets a day) and 1,000 followers (6.4 Tweets a day).

The more followers you have, the more you Tweet. Perhaps once people attract a large enough audience they feel obligated to keep them entertained. More likely, the more you Tweet the more followers you get, provided you actually have something interesting to say. As it turns out, not everybody uses Twitter as a broadcast mechanism. Many people simply tune in passively and skim their feeds. Sysomos looked at 11.5 million Twitter accounts and concluded that the top 10 percent of Twitter users produce 86 percent of the Tweets (which closely matches a Harvard Business School study that estimates the top 10 percent of Twitter users do 90 percent of the Tweeting). It is even more concentrated than that. The Sysomos data indicates that the top 5 percent of people on Twitter account for 75 percent of all Tweets.

More broadly, 50 percent of people on Twitter send out updates less than once a week. But 36 percent of the accounts Sysomos tracks send out Tweets every single day. So about a third of people on Twitter are fairly active, dedicated users. While half are more passive desk potatoes, Tweeting less than once a week.

sysomos-twitter-inactivity

These numbers are actually higher than the activity suggested by other recent reports. For instance, TweetGrade found that 29 percent of Twitter accounts in its sample have zero followers (same link as above). Sysomos, on the other hand, found a much lower percentage of accounts with zero followers: only 7 percent. And it counts 21 percent of users who have never posted a Tweet (Ironically, 65.5 percent of people who identify themselves as social media marketers have never posted an update). These discrepancies may be due to the way Sysomos gathered data on those 11.5 million accounts. It indexed Twitter starting with a core set of accounts and then spreading out to all of their followers and followees. Dead accounts or spam accounts with 0 followers and 0 Tweets would be less likely to be picked up this way. All of the data is as of mid-May.

The study also broke down the market share of Twitter clients, both desktop and mobile. More than half of all users (55 percent) use a Twitter app. The most popular way to use Twitter is through the Website (45 percent), followed by TweetDeck (19 percent). Twitterfon and Tweetie are the two most popular mobile apps and the No. 3 and No. 5 most popular ways to use Twitter overall, with 4.5 percent and 3.7 percent market share, respectively. Twitterfeed, which people use to submit RSS feeds to Twitter and which was purchased today by Betaworks, was the No. 4 client with 3.8 percent share. (Here are more up-to-date cient usage stats from TwitStat).

sysmos-publishing-tools

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Massive Layoffs Coming To MySpace - 25% Or More May Be Cut

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 03:44 PM PDT

MySpace is about to have a major wave of layoffs, according to multiple sources close to the company. One source describes the number of people affected as “massive”, while another source says that the layoffs will likely affect between 300 and 500 employees. It’s unclear if these numbers apply to MySpace alone or its parent company Fox Interactive Media, but MySpace makes up around 1600 of the 2900 employees in FIM, so it’s likely that the social network will be hit hard.

Last summer MySpace let go of 5% of its staff, and as many as 45 employees were laid off last month. These cuts go far deeper. We’ve heard that the company’s legal team is hammering out the paperwork that will need to be submitted to the state of California under the WARN act, which requires large companies to give advance notice of any major layoffs. We’ve contacted the California Employment Development Department, which has yet to receive the filing, but we hear they should be getting it any day now.

Contacted for comment, a Fox Interactive Media spokesperson issued the following statement:

"Like any company with new leadership, Fox Interactive Media is reviewing every aspect of our operations, performance and structure. It's no secret that we are looking for ways to improve our products, increase the value of our digital assets, and enhance the overall financial strength of the company."

Since former AOL chief Jonathan Miller took over as News Corp’s CEO Digital Media and the MySpace executive team shakeup in April, MySpace and FIM have undergone extensive measures to cut costs, including these personnel hits. FIM also just backed out of its plans to take over its new Playa Vista offices.

Why the cuts? MySpace traffic is plummeting, and revenue is going to take a huge hit when the Google deal terminates in mid 2010. MySpace already has an uphill battle on its hands as it vies to compete with Facebook, and it’s no longer going to have that very lucrative revenue stream to lean on.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Pandora’s iPhone App Gets Concert Listings — Through An Ad

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 03:29 PM PDT

picture-28Pandora had the top downloaded iPhone app for all of last year, and it continues to be a big success for the company, even helping them make some money. Now there’s another avenue to potentially do that with personalized concert listings within the app thanks to a partnership with SonicLiving.

The feature, which is already live on the web, shows you concerts you might like based on music you have rated, bookmarked or stations you’ve created on Pandora in the past. It shows you these concerts based on your location. But there’s a catch. It’s not actually a part of the Pandora app itself, but rather is an advertisement, sponsored by Amstel Light, you can click on to be taken to the personalized listing of concerts. From there you can buy tickets to shows.

This seems like a smart play for both Pandora and SonicLiving as this type of ad should lead to a solid number of click-throughs. The concert recommendation space has been heating up recently, with Livekick going live and Songkick launching a large update to its service. But using Pandora’s music recommendation data, which millions of people already use on a regular basis, through its API, seems like it could be a better way to recommend shows.

Of course, I’m not really sure how this is going to work for Pandora One users, who pay a yearly fee not to see ads — including those on the iPhone.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Jon Rubinstein, Formerly of Apple, Ascends the CEO Throne At Palm

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 03:17 PM PDT

It's the changing of the guard. In an continuation of Palm's reinvention of itself, pioneering ex-Apple exec and Pre torch-bearer Jon Rubinstein will be sitting in the CEO chair at Palm come Friday. Ed Cooligan, the current CEO, will be moving behind the curtain to work with Elevation Partners, a major investor in Palm. Whether they bet the job on the success of the Pre or had it arranged months ago, it's probably a good step for Palm to take: the smaller and more agile Palm with its new OS and design will likely function better under the guy who was instrumental in that change.


gdgt Draws 4.7 Million Views During WWDC Keynote. Not Bad For A Site That Hasn’t Launched.

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 02:51 PM PDT

gdgt, the new consumer electronics site founded by Peter Rojas and Ryan Block that was first announced in September, hasn’t even launched yet. But it’s already managing to to draw millions of viewers for its coverage of major events, like Apple’s WWDC keynote on Monday, which saw 4.7 million views in less than two hours.

Of course, gdgt’s coverage was no match for that of our own CrunchGear’s, but for the site to already be attracting such a sizable audience is an impressive feat. The small team managed to handle the huge traffic spike using Rackspace’s Cloud services.

The impressive traffic stats aren’t much of a surprise: Rojas and Block have built up large followings during their time running Engadget and Gizmodo, two of the most popular gadget blogs. Up until now gdgt has primarily consisted of weekly podcasts from Rojas and Block, and we still don’t know what form the final site will take. It sounds like we’ll find out soon though — tucked away at the end of the WWDC live blog is a note that gdgt will finally be launching in the next few weeks.

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Yahoo Releases Internal Hadoop Source Code

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 01:27 PM PDT

Yahoo! is releasing their tested source code used to help power its sites and products, called Hadoop. Hadoop is free Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure and fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Yahoo made the announcement at the second annual Hadoop Summit today in Santa Clara, California, which was co-sponsored by other cloud computing vendors Amazon Web Services, Cloudera, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. Yahoo! has been the primary developer and investor to Apache's Hadoop. In 2006, Hadoop founder Doug Cutting joined Yahoo to lead the project of developing the open-source software. Hadoop now provides the framework for many Yahoo properties including Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, and several content and ad services. Hadoop runs on more than 25,000 servers and analyzes billions of Web pages.


GeeksOnAPlane Meet Tokyo 2.0, Learn About The Relation Between The Web & Language

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 01:25 PM PDT

t2p0_logo_largeThe GeeksOnAPlane Asia tour kicked off on Monday in Tokyo, with the group of mostly US-based geeks leaving today for Beijing. Former TechCrunch employee Mark Hendrickson already shared his views on the Japanese tech scene from an American perspective, giving me room to summarize (almost) all presentations the GoaP group witnessed in Tokyo (I myself am a Japan-based writer for the TechCrunch network).

This means there is a lot of substantial stuff to cover, which is why I will do a two-part posting on the GoaP Tokyo leg (the second piece follows tomorrow). First on the list is Tokyo 2.0, a monthly web industry event that combines networking with a number of presentations and lightning talks (and regularly attracts an audience of about 200 people).

This time, a total of four presentations tried to shed light on the question of how language and the web can be interconnected and how this helps in the evolution of the web. Here is a quick summary of all the presentations held during Tokyo 2.0 this Monday.

Presentation 1: The application of NLP to ‘goo’ services (by Junji Tomita)

goo_logoBackground and summary:
Ranked at No. 10 in Alexa Japan, Goo is one of the biggest search engines and portal sites in Japan. Presenter Tomita introduced two NLP (natural language processing)-based tools developed by the company, ‘Blog Sentiment Analysis’ and ‘Blog Report Card’. The first tool is available to automatically understand emotions textually expressed within blog postings. It retrieves text from blogs, parses it (”This PC comes with a cool display.” as opposed to “This cool PC comes with a display.”) and then visualizes the processed data on a results page.

The report card tool grades your blog after you type in its URL based on four different factors, i.e. influence or diligence. Neat idea, but this appeared to be more of a gimmick to me.

Full video of the presentation (English and Japanese, 17:18 min):


Presentation 2: Ubiquity - Command the Web with Language by Michael Yoshitaka

mozilla_labs_ubiquityBackground and summary:
The GeeksOnAPlane (and myself) particularly enjoyed the great presentation delivered by Michael Yoshitaka on Ubiquity, a project launched by Mozilla Labs last year. Yoshitaka said Ubiquity, a Firefox add-on that unites textual commands acting as mashups for web services, helps users accomplish more online by combining the web with language.

The big idea is to use natural language for the commands, to make using Ubiquity as easy as possible. Let’s say you write an email in which you invite someone for dinner in the “Cyber Cafe” in San Francisco and want to include a map. Normally you would have to open a new tab, find a map somewhere and copy the link into the email text.

However, users can open Ubiquity right within the email tab, simply enter “map san francisco” in the text box and insert the Google map that pops up into the email text with a single keystroke (or select the name of the cafe and city and let the tool map it). Type the words “yelp cyber cafe san francisco” and Ubiquity offers you a JPEG that can be included right into the email text and shows the Yelp rating for that cafe. The whole process just takes seconds as you don’t have to access sites like Google Maps or Yelp anymore. It all happens within the browser tab that you currently work in.

Mozilla Labs itself labels Ubiquity an experiment and is currently working on localizing the tool. More on that and other Ubiquity-related stuff in Yoshitaka’s video or over on SlideShare.

Full video of the presentation (English and Japanese, made by Yoshitaka himself, 9:10 min):

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

Presentation 3: An online synthetic speech system, Voice Delivery System by Shinjyou Sunao

vds_logoBackground and summary:
Another presentation tickling the fancy of the GoaP group centered on VDS (Voice Delivery System), an API for synthetic speech generation developed by Tokyo-based Knowledge Creation [JP]. Targeted mainly at elderly and disabled web users, VDS lets owners of any site on the Internet add a “reading out” button. Press it and VDS makes sure the text content on the page will be read out loud for you. A total of 30 languages is currently supported.

Great stuff and the best thing is users are not required to download any software. Knowledge Creation offers a free version (for pages containing up to 5,000 characters) and several “pro” versions.

Full video of the presentation (English and Japanese, 13:20 min):

Presentation 4: Social Media and Translation - Bridging the Two Solitudes by Chris Salzberg

global_voices_logoBackground and summary:
Tokyo-based American Chris Salzberg, a writer and translator who used to work for international blog network Global Voices Online, spoke about the implications of multilingualism on the web. Salzberg argues that social media on one side and human languages on the other are nothing but materializations of different kinds of solitude.

He argues that community translation is the main key to bridge the gap between these disconnected parts, but couldn’t finish his presentation in time (which is why I embedded his slides below).

Globalvoices Salzberg 20090608

The video (Salzberg’s presentation in English and Japanese had to end after 11:30 min) can be found here.

Lightning Talks:
The lightning talks were held by four Japan-based web start-ups:
Popin’s popIn Rainbow (an add-on for all major browsers that lets you search, compare prices, look up information on Wikipedia etc./video), Keireki (a Japanese-only community for “grown-ups”/slides), Eigobama (a site teaching English to Japanese by using speeches of Barack Obama/slides) and MyGengo (a human translation service currently covering four languages/video with MyGengo’s presentation starting at 5:30 min).

That was a lot of stuff to digest for the gaijin guests on their first night in Japan, but all the Tokyo 2.0 materials are put together nicely here for everyone to check out (I could only scratch the surface within the scope of this article). The GeeksOnAPlane had an even longer day during yesterday’s “Startonomics Tokyo” event, which I will try and summarize tomorrow in a separate post.

Tokyo 2.0 organizer Andrew Shuttleworth already announced another event for next month (topic: cloud computing). So please make sure you attend this (non-profit) event if you happen to be in Tokyo on July 13 and want to get in touch with the Japanese tech scene (if not, check out Tokyo 2.0’s Ustream page when it’s time).

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Now That It’s The One Millionth Word, “Web 2.0″ Can Be Retired To The Dictionary

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 11:22 AM PDT

What do you do if you are an obscure language group in Austin, Texas looking for attention? You declare “Web 2.0″ the one millionth word in the English language. So says the Global Language Monitor, which looks at usage of words on the Web and adds them to its online dictionaries. “Web 2.0″ has been in common usage for a long time, even though Merriam-Webster does not yet recognize it. But interest in the term peaked long ago, and everyone is pretty much ready to move on now. Even John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly, who popularized the term with their Web 2.0 conferences, realize the term is stale. They are looking to extend their brand by calling their next conference “Web Squared.” I guess Web 3.0 was taken.

Kudos to the Language Monitor for picking the one word guaranteed to get them coverage. I just don’t think that “Hai Joi” (Word No. 999,999) or “Noob” (No. 999,998) would have elicited the same response. However, their definition is not so great:

Web 2.0 – The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you.

Someone should tell the folks at Language Monitor that Web 2.0 is already here and has been in our browsers for the past few years. Even though it is an quasi-official word now, everybody still has trouble defining it. Here is O’Reilly’s original dissertation on the subject. And his so-called “compact definition”:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

Here’s my definition: It’s the modern Web. Period. Can we move on now?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Google Gives The G1’s Physical Keyboard A Glass Of Ice Water In Hell

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 11:16 AM PDT

picture-18The T-Mobile G1’s physical keyboard sucks. The keys are oddly spaced, they’re too depressed and the device’s Leno chin makes for an overall awkward typing experience. The Google Ion (sometimes called the “G2″ or the HTC Magic) offers a much nicer experience with its virtual keyboard, and is overall a much nicer device. I’m not sure why anyone would buy a G1, but to those that did, Google threw them a rather nice bone today: Keyboard shortcuts in Gmail.

If you have an Android phone with a physical keyboard (so, as of right now, the G1), you can now use the same keyboard shortcuts you’re accustomed to in Gmail on your computer web browser. So, for example, if I’m reading a message in mobile Gmail that I want to archive, I can simply hit the “e” button on my G1 keyboard. The same will not work for devices with a virtual keyboard, presumably because it only pops up when you’re in “writing” mode, and when you’re reading email, you wouldn’t be in writing mode.

Google rolled out this new feature as a part of some overall improvements to the mobile Gmail experience. The other big improvement is that auto-completion for all phones, including the iPhone, should now be faster. Google sped this up by using previously fetched auto-complete matches. It’s a small, but nice improvement.

Back to the physical keyboard for a second, it’s nice that Google has found a way to make the G1’s not completely worthless when everyone gets the Android 1.5 “Cupcake” update which includes the virtual keyboard. But having a large portion of your device serve as basically a shortcut button area is not something most people will care about.

I know that most Blackberry’s have nice physical keyboards, and people are obsessed with them, but I finally got around to trying out the Palm Pre’s keyboard — it’s laughable how bad it is. Perhaps if I had index fingers for thumbs it would be okay, but the keys are way too small and crammed together. And the fact that it always feels like I’m popping bubble wrap when I type doesn’t help either. Virtual keyboards for the win.

[photo: flickr/Andrew Mason]

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Get Ready To Barf. AOL And Sears Want To Push “Good News” Down Your Throat

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 10:01 AM PDT

Are you tired of all the depressing headlines every day about bombings, layoffs, and financial collapse? Sears sure is. Its “Life. Well Spent.” ad campaign just doesn’t work next to downbeat stories. What if there was a news site that only ran good news? Well, that wouldn’t really be a news site, but Sears decided to create one anyway in partnership with AOL News. It is called Good News Now, or GNN.

There you will find feel-good stories such as “Senior Couple Ties the Knot,” “Lucky Boy Discovers Seven-Leaf Clover,” and “Tourist Survives Dangerous Train Ride.” Topics you can explore further include “Heroes, Winners,” “Upbeat News,” and “More Good News.” You can barf now.

Of course, the whole site is plastered with ads from Sears. GNN is like a cross between a bad advertorial and a splog. It is what happens when you let advertisers select the news. If you need a reason to save journalism, this is it.

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What Is This iPhone 3G S/AT&T Upgrade Pricing Brouhaha Really About?

Posted: 10 Jun 2009 09:20 AM PDT

There has been plenty of ink spilled over the 3G S upgrade ("Now faster with oleoresistant skin!") and it's abundantly clear what folks are trying to do here. Early adopters have always chafed at having to pay outrageous fees for upgrades inside of a contract period. Be it the latest RAZR a few years ago or the latest iPhone today, the same obsessives who are ranting about iPhone upgrade pricing were trying this same trick years ago - but now they have some leverage.


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