The Latest from TechCrunch

YouTube Launches Reporters’ Center, Wants To School Citizen Journalists In Better News Reporting
Google’s Africa Strategy: Search And Trade Via SMS
In Soviet Union, You Get Palm Pre
Startups Smell Userplane Blood
Bring Twitter Talk To Your Site With Tweetboard
Pirate Bay Fires Its Copyright-busting Cannon At YouTube
Kid Swaps iPod For Sony Walkman, Gets A Culture Shock
NYTimes and Wikipedia Save Reporter’s Life By NOT Reporting On His Capture
Digitalsmiths Launches VideoSense 2.0 Platform With Frame-By-Frame Video Search
Need More Michael Jackson? Love “Billie Jean”? This Site Is Awesome.
The $99 iPhone Is James Bond. The Other $99 Phones Are Joe Schmoe.
FriendFeed, Syphilis And The Perfection Of Online Mobs
The Akiduki Pulse Box Posts Your Heart Beat Rate To Twitter, Lets Followers Know You’re Alive

YouTube Launches Reporters’ Center, Wants To School Citizen Journalists In Better News Reporting

Posted: 29 Jun 2009 08:56 AM PDT

Over the weekend, YouTube launched a new channel dubbed Reporters’ Center, which it hopes will prove to be a good way to educate existing and aspiring citizen journalists on how to report news in ‘the digital age’. The new resource will feature a host of top journalists and media experts sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting.

So far, there are 34 videos uploaded to the channel, featuring people like Facebook Marketing Director Randi Zuckerberg providing 8 tips on how to maximize distribution of your YouTube video on the social network her brother famously co-created, and folks like CBS News’ Katie Couric and legendary Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward explaining how to conduct a good interview and how to be an investigative reporter, respectively.

The idea is sound and some of the content is rather good, and I’m sure it will provide a helpful resource for citizen reporters across the globe. Of course, it serves YouTube’s interests as well when more and more people take up the habit of filming whatever happens in their neighborhood and upload the videos to the wildly popular sharing site afterwards.

If you have any tips to share, you can also upload your own videos to the channel.

(Hat tip to NewTeeVee)

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Google’s Africa Strategy: Search And Trade Via SMS

Posted: 29 Jun 2009 08:06 AM PDT

Not only does Google want to organize all the world’s information, it also wants to make all that information available to everyone in the world. For the majority of the world’s population, that means making it available on a cell phone, and not a fancy iPhone or Android with a Web browser either. I’m talking about $10 cell phones with not much more than voice and SMS capabilities. If Google can reach people, especially in developing nations, with SMS, it can reach everyone with a cell phone.

In Africa, it is launching a suite of SMS services today, including SMS search, Q&A-style tips, and an SMS-based marketplace. The first country to get these services is Uganda.

The search service works like Google SMS in North America. You text a search term, and it responds via SMS with the result. Searches can be narrowed by using specific keywords such as “local time,” “weather,” “news,” “maps,” “translation,” or “currency conversion.” For more complicated searches, the related SMS tips service offers answers in an automated Q&A format.

But the most interesting application is Google Trader, which allows people to post items for sale and jobs via SMS. Other people can search for them by texting the service with the word “BUY” preceding the search term. Google Trader connects the buyer and seller together (each listing contains the seller’s cell phone number).

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In Soviet Union, You Get Palm Pre

Posted: 29 Jun 2009 07:42 AM PDT

If you were reading a major paper this weekend, you'd notice a striking ad. There's the Palm Pre resting against an apple core with the words:

The Palm Pre does things the iPhone can't. Run multiple applications at the same time with real-time updates and even save $1200 over two years. It's the perfect time to join the Now Network, America's most trusted 3G network, bringing you the first and only 4G network from a national carrier.

The real call to action was to iPhone users with lapsed contracts - presumably iPhone users who bought the original iPhone two years ago and never upgraded to the 3G - a cohort that I suspect consists of perhaps five Palm engineers and maybe our tech-savvy grandparents. It's a small number, friends. A small number.

Startups Smell Userplane Blood

Posted: 29 Jun 2009 07:26 AM PDT

There has been no shortage of talk about the apparent demise of Userplane, the text, voice and video chat software provider that was acquired by AOL in August 2006 for around $40 million (the exact price was never disclosed).

Venturebeat ran a story on the property last May, citing sources and Userplane clients as saying the service had been “neglected if not abandoned by AOL”. Yet this morning, I exchanged some e-mails with Darin Ohlandt, General Manager of Userplane, and he responded to the rumors saying they are definitely not shutting down and will continue to offer the existing chat and IM services to third-party sites.

However, some writing on the wall suggests he may not be painting a complete picture of what is going on.

A recent thread on OnlinePersonalsWatch (which covers the online dating industry, where demand for Userplane and other similar services has always been high) suggested that the site would be deadpooled by its owner soon. A developer commented on the thread claiming he had tried to contact Userplane for weeks through e-mails, voice calls and social networks and received no response, and ultimately went to their offices only to find all doors were locked with no one in sight (Ohlandt suspects the latter may have had something to do with the move to a new office in Santa Monica). And in that very same thread, former senior developer at Userplane Nick Schneble touted his new startup TopicFox, an alternative to the service (although it seems to be offline now).

Meanwhile the Userplane website still lists Michael Jones as the company’s CEO. That’s remarkable, because Jones left the AOL executive team to pursue a new startup called Tsavo back in August 2008, and has since signed up as the new COO at MySpace.

A month ago, Time Warner announced that its Board of Directors has authorized management to proceed with plans for the separation of AOL from the company. This would likely result in a massive restructuring of AOL, and could have a major impact on non-proven acquisitions made in the past. Other reasons why Userplane is on deadpool alert: AOL is placing much focus on lifestreaming and chat service SocialThing, which recently spread across 75 of its properties, and then of course there’s those other instant messaging services in their portfolio (AIM and ICQ).

There are more signs. When Ted Cahall was named new president of the product group at AOL back in January 2009, his memo - which we published in full here on TechCrunch - states that Userplane would be moved into the People Networks business unit under former Bebo President Joanna Shields. But at the end of last month, Shields resigned from her position as Executive VP for People Networks and to our knowledge has not been replaced to date.

It’s not surprising that many startups with competing solutions are taking advantage of the rumors about Userplane’s impending shut-down. Toksta is the most outspoken one, having set up a special page for Userplane clients who are looking to switch to an alternative provider. Other competitors in the field who are likely paying a lot of attention to what is going to happen to Userplane include Meebo with its Community IM product and ekkoTV.

To be continued, no doubt.

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Bring Twitter Talk To Your Site With Tweetboard

Posted: 29 Jun 2009 06:35 AM PDT

As Twitter becomes the default conversation spot on the Web, we’re going to start to see tools which combine site-specific conversations with Twitter. One example is Tweetboard, which creates a Twitter-powered forum for any site. Once a site adds the Tweetboard code to their site, a site-wide tab appears which allows visitors to have forum discussions by simply logging into Twitter (via OAuth). All the conversations are threaded, and comments appear on Twitter as well, potentially drawing in a larger audience into the specific conversation.

One of the difficulties of following a conversation on Twitter itself is that replies to particular threads aren’t threaded together. On Tweetboard, all the discussions are threaded and nested together, similar to what you’d find on FriendFeed or Facebook. Site publishers can choose to set up a Tweetboard using their personal Twitter accounts or create a new one specific to each Tweetboard.

Packaging conversations and presenting them in a forum place extends any particular site’s forum content to the Twitterverse. The next step is to turn Tweetboard into a commenting system for blog posts and the like. Right now it works only as a site-wide tab, but developer Juan Carlos Muriente says he is working on another version which will be page-specific and could be used as a commenting system.

Tweetboard is the first project to come out of Muriente’s startup 140ware, and is currently in open alpha.

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Pirate Bay Fires Its Copyright-busting Cannon At YouTube

Posted: 29 Jun 2009 04:14 AM PDT

Supposedly, the The Pirate Bay guys were found guilty in their recent trial in Sweden, and, supposedly, they got sentenced to a year in prison and had to pay $4.5 million in damages. But back in the parallel universe which happens to be the real world, they've appealed the verdict and could probably keep doing so for the next few years. So in the meantime they need to keep busy, and what better way to do this than start a new user driven video portal to take on YouTube, called, predictably, Video Bay, allowing users to post and share video clips without having to worry about copyright violations. Seems reasonable. It's not like they need to attract any more legal interest or anything.

Kid Swaps iPod For Sony Walkman, Gets A Culture Shock

Posted: 29 Jun 2009 04:10 AM PDT

The pictures of the Sony Walkman in this BBC Magazine article made me feel strangely nostalgic - the actual text of the article made me laugh out loud. The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to trade his iPod for a Walkman for a week, and he recounts his experiences with the device, which was launched 30 years ago this week.

Campbell, apart from being amazed at the blandly colored portable music player, correctly points out that the Walkman is much bigger, heavier and generally more clunky than the digital media players he’s accustomed to seeing within his social circle.

On the upside, he writes, the ‘monstrous box’ comes with a ‘handy belt clip screwed on to the back’.

Update: ha, Campbell is one of our interns at CrunchGear!

The funniest part of the story:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn’t is “shuffle”, where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.

Campbell goes on to speak wise words (”portable music is better than no music”) and lists the pros and cons of the portable cassette player compared to its latter-day successor. Go read it here.

Anyone else felt a bit nostalgic about the good old cassette tape after reading?

(Picture from BBC)

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NYTimes and Wikipedia Save Reporter’s Life By NOT Reporting On His Capture

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 09:51 PM PDT

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This post was written by Gagan Biyani.

Earlier last week, New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from a Taliban prison. He had been a Taliban hostage for the last seven months, but the general public had absolutely no clue. In a joint effort by The New York Times and Wikipedia, the story was kept quiet until his daring escape.

In November 2008, Rohde was captured and held hostage by the Taliban, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal. But until he managed to escape, most of the general public had absolutely no clue. To prevent Rohde's value in the eyes of his captors from rising, the New York Times kept more than 35 major news organizations from reporting on the story. They believed that the publicity from reporting his capture would inflate the value of Rohde's life, increasing the difficulty of negotiating for Rohde's release. Keeping 35 news organizations quiet was actually not the hard part - but staving off Wikipedia users from publishing the news? That was a bit trickier.

Through an elaborate and ongoing battle between Wikipedia editors and an anonymous contributor from Florida, the New York Times and the Wikipedia Foundation managed to keep the story quiet. For seven months, Wikipedia editors were in a constant back-and-forth with this user to delete news of Rohde's capture off of the site. They were unable to contact the user directly, as s/he was anonymously posting on Wikipedia, and thus could not explain to the user why they were trying to keep the news quiet. Infuriated, the user threw insults at the editors who were deleting his addition, and blindly continued their futile fight.

All of this ended when Rohde and Ludin managed to climb over a wall and escape the Taliban's clenches. In an interesting twist, the driver chose to join the Taliban and thus stayed behind, according to Rohde. This is a truly inspiring story, and the efforts of the Wikipedia editors and the New York Times are beyond laudable. In a recent tweet, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that preventing the news from breaking may have saved his life. Regardless of the merits of this comment, it made Rohde's escape more likely, and was a downright impressive feat of coordination by all parties involved.

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Digitalsmiths Launches VideoSense 2.0 Platform With Frame-By-Frame Video Search

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 08:56 PM PDT

Digitalsmiths, the video distribution and analysis platform that powers TheWB.com, TMZ, and a number of other popular sites, is rolling out a new product suite today dubbed VideoSense 2.0. The new suite includes a number of features that will make it more appealing to content owners looking to distribute video across the web, but the most interesting new feature for consumers will be the platform’s revamped video search, which can best be described as a “Google for video”.

Granted, there already is a Google video search, but this goes well beyond that, allowing users to search for any actor, scene, or piece of dialog they’d like across shows in the Digitalsmiths library. Digitalsmiths has spent years building the technology to perform speech recognition and visually match actors’ faces and environmental elements (it can tell if a scene is taking at a beach or on a mountainside), and it’s quite impressive.

Before now the search has been available on a limited scale, but users would have to first fine tune their queries using a number of drop-down menus, specifying which show they’d like to search through and choosing from a number of other options (these helped speed searches up by limiting the content the engine would have to look through). Now Digitalsmiths has refined the technology to the point that it can offer a Google-like search bar, with the engine able to automatically detect if a search term refers to a character or actor name, a location, or perhaps the name of a show. If, for example, I typed in “Seth Cohen Bagel The OC”, the engine would serve up video clips of the character Seth Cohen talking about bagels in the show, The OC.

Unfortunately, while its search functionality is much improved, it’s being held up to some extent by the content owners. In theory Digitalsmiths could put together an engine that searched through all of its content at once, which really would make it akin to an extremely powerful Google for video. But the content owners have not agreed to enable that functionality, so for now all searches will be be constrained to partner sites and widgets (e.g. you’ll have to head to TheWB.com if you want to search through its shows). Hopefully the content owners will have a change of heart, as this kind of universal search could prove immensely useful.

The new product suite includes a handful of products that will appeal to content owners, including a new Asset Manager, which handles things like video ingestion, storage, and processing, and Publisher, which allows content owners to schedule when their content will be posted.

Other players in this space include Auditude and Viewdle.

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Need More Michael Jackson? Love “Billie Jean”? This Site Is Awesome.

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 02:28 PM PDT

picture-129

The web is still inundated with Michael Jackson news, but just in case you haven’t had your fill, I highly recommend the site Billie Tweets. The concept is simple: Take Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and pull in tweets that sync words to the music.

The site was made by 9Astronauts, the development house that also made the Blame Drew’s Cancer site a few weeks back. Another solid creation by them.

Considering that Jackson’s music is utterly dominating all of the online sales charts right now, this site is also a smart play to pull in some affiliate fees for sales from Amazon. You’ll notice the links at the bottom of the site.

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The $99 iPhone Is James Bond. The Other $99 Phones Are Joe Schmoe.

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 12:25 PM PDT

aapicture-26 While it’s not being talked about too much, the $99 iPhone 3G is a very interesting play by Apple. It takes what was previously a just out-of-reach device for many, and puts it at a magical price-point. Sure, it still won’t sell everyone, like the people who only care about getting the phone that their carrier is offering for free, or those looking for the cheapest possible monthly plans. But just look at the iPhone compared to the other $99 phones out there.

That’s what we did. And originally we set out to compare the various specs. But looking them over, it’s really a joke. And you can basically see all you need to see simply by looking at the devices being offering by the major carriers in the U.S. at this price point.

Of course, there are legitimate iPhone competitors out there, namely the Palm Pre and the soon-to-be-released T-Mobile myTouch 3G. But the Pre sells for $199 (or $299 before rebate) and the myTouch will also cost you $199. That’s iPhone 3GS territory now. This $99 range is a whole different ball game.

When I looked at the $99 phones, I started to think of a high school reunion. Some show up as successful business people, some as boring cookie-cutter suburbanites, some as fat, overweight slobs. And that’s fine. But then there’s that one person who shows up and makes everyone else look worse. Everyone there has something in common (in this case, the high school), but you wouldn’t know it just by looking at this one James Bond-type in the full tuxedo while everyone else is wearing rags. In my opinion, that’s kind of like the $99 iPhone 3G compared to the other $99 phones out there.

Let’s take a look.

AT&T’s $99 Offerings:

James Bond.

The successful business guy. Kind of pudgy, pretty boring.

The less successful but skinnier business guy. A pencilneck.

The guy who thinks he’s James Bond, but bought his tux at the thrift store — and it’s blue.

The guy wearing his clothes from when you were still in high school.

That odd foreign exchange student that no one still wants to talk to even though he’s popular in Europe.

Some crazy-looking dude.

A total square.

That guy who just got out of rehab.

T-Mobile’s $99 Offerings:

The girl was popular in high school but now is just kind of ugly, and oddly shaped.

Another business guy. Bland. Has his family on his “Fave 5″ though.

The short, fat guy with the shiny large head.

Verizon’s $99 Offerings:

Spunky, ditzy, short girl. No one took her seriously then, no one takes her seriously now.

The dude who’s really into guns.

The guy who’s trying too hard.

Again, nice suit — in 1999.

Wanna-be hipster.

The short sidekick of the wanna-be hipster.

Oh God. Don’t talk to this one.

Sprint’s $99 Offerings:

The ugly duckling.

The homeless guy. Hasn’t bathed in months.

Had a bunch of kids at 19. Now divorced and wears bold colors to stand out — which doesn’t work.

Business guy with a big chin and a square head.

The girl with the Coke-bottle thick glasses.

The former high school star quarterback. Still loves sports, but is between crappy jobs.

[Thanks Cameron]

CrunchBase Information

iPhone 3G

AT&T

Information provided by CrunchBase

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FriendFeed, Syphilis And The Perfection Of Online Mobs

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 10:15 AM PDT

People have always been inclined to join mobs - most people have at least one story to tell about a time that they got swept up in or had to face a crowd demanding justice for one thing or another (both of my experiences were in college). The Internet has proven to be a frighteningly efficient tool to create virtual mobs. But we note two trends that suggest a bleak future: the increase in non-anonymous mob participation and the evolution of online services towards ever more efficient and real time communication platforms that facilitate mob creation and growth like never before. Things are changing online way too fast for society and culture to adapt. Something will eventually break.

I’m going to pick on FriendFeed in this post because I believe it is the nearest thing to Shangri-La for mob justice enthusiasts. I explain why below. But first I want to compare FriendFeed to Syphilis, which may have been the “perfect” disease when it first hit Europe in the 15th century. Today Syphilis takes years to kill its victims and is easily treated with antibiotics. But back in the early 1500’s it led to certain death within months.

Consider the surprising evolution of syphilis. Today, our two immediate associations to syphilis are genital sores and a very slowly developing disease, leading to the death of many untreated victims only after many years. However, when syphilis was first definitely recorded in Europe in 1495, its pustules often covered the body from the head to the knees, cause flesh to fall off people’s faces, and led to the death within a few months. By 1546, syphilis had evolved into a the disease with the symptoms so well known to us today. Apparently just as myxomatosis. those syphilis spirochetes that evolved so as to keep their victims alive for longer were thereby able to transmit their spirochete offspring into more victims. (Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond)

What changed? Syphilis killed people too quickly. And dead people can’t spread a sexually transmitted disease nearly as well as non-dead people. So the disease evolved to keep its victims alive.

FriendFeed today is like Syphilis in 1495. It will be forced to evolve to something less dangerous or it’ll destroy itself.

This really shouldn’t be happening because FriendFeed isn’t an anonymous service. Just a couple of years ago experts were saying that the rise of online mobs could be traced to sites that promote mass anonymous content creation. From a 2006 Time Magazine article:

Along with all the sites that encourage individual expression, we are seeing a flood of schemes that celebrate collective action by huge numbers of bland, anonymous people. A lot of folks love this stuff. My worry is that we’re playing with fire…There’s the Wikipedia, which has absorbed a lot of the energy that used to go into individual, expressive websites, into one bland, master description of reality. Another example is the automatic mass-content collecting schemes like DIGG. Yet another, which deserves special attention, is the unfortunate design feature in most blog software that practically encourages spontaneous pseudonym creation. That has led to the global flood of anonymous mob-like commentary.

But FriendFeed users tend to be easily identifiable as real people. The site’s original purpose was to let users link their blogs, photos, social networking, Twitter and other content streams in one place. The whole idea is that you know exactly who it is that’s posting content there. And suddenly these people are getting comfortable talking hate under their real name. TechCrunch writer MG Siegler wrote about this trend earlier this month on his personal blog. For whatever reason, people are becoming comfortable writing seriously threatening stuff under their real name. That boldness means people are becoming even more comfortable with mob mentality, and more willing to take direct action.

Real Time Content Can Easily Become Real Time Mobs

In the past for an online mob to get any real traction outside of anonymous chat rooms, lots of people had to write about their outrage on their blogs or other websites. That meant an issue had to be broadly interesting to a lot of people. There are lots of examples of these situations, particularly in Asia. One example: “In another well-known Chinese case, an angry husband who suspected his wife was having an affair with a college student she’d met in an online game asked for help tracking him down. The Associated Press reported that the student, who denied the accusation, was bombarded with harassing and threatening e-mails. This vigilante action might be prompted by understandable moral outrage, but some are concerned that the headline-grabbing witch-hunts have been vastly out of proportion with the original transgressions.”

In these examples outrage built over a number of days. Some actual facts were able to spread as well, which usually calmed the mob before real world threats could be carried out by vigilantes. But sites like FriendFeed allow the centralization of a conversation to occur, with real time updates appearing on screen without even the need for a refresh. Things can get out of control instantly.

I was on the receiving end of mob justice a few weeks ago when Leo Laporte exploded at me for asking rudely about a conflict of interest. People massed at FriendFeed and called for my head (a lot of the worst comments have now been deleted).

What the mob didn’t know is that it was largely a misunderstanding (I thought he was joking and egged him on, he was most definitely not joking). Leo and I quickly resolved the issue (and now it’s all just a joke). We both apologized and had a subsequent podcast and really talked things through. But most of the mob members had no idea that was happening. And in the meantime a number of death threats were posted in the comments on TechCrunch. Emails came in as well, including one from a non-anonymous account saying “Go TO FUCKING HELL YOU FUCKING TROLL, HOPE YOU FUCKING DIE”

These weren’t direct “I’m going to kill you” threats that I’ve gotten before. But they were serious enough that, like last year, I had to cancel a number of speaking engagements and generally worry about personal safety issues again.

This is the problem. The mobs get going, and even then most of them wouldn’t even consider physical violence as a real solution to the situation. But enough people are crazy enough that when they get fired up, they want to do something about it. And then, suddenly, I’m in a position of worrying about my personal safety because I asked someone to disclose a conflict of interest about a mobile phone. Seems crazy, right?

Some people say it’s not appropriate to pick on FriendFeed. Other services like Twitter, which are much bigger, have similar problems. But the conversations on Twitter aren’t centralized. It’s hard to see it when a mob forms unless it’s something massive like the almost-revolution in Iran. But on FriendFeed all the comments are aggregated on one page, and everyone participating sees it all. It’s much more likely to break out into a mob. And even niche topics, like mobile phones, can lead to death threats.

So what can we do to change this? In my opinion, nothing more than doctors could do to fight Syphilis before it changed itself. Things are going to get much worse before they get better. At some point an online mob, maybe one that begins at FriendFeed, is going to break out and seriously hurt someone. Perhaps it will be someone who’s being unfairly accused, like the student in China. And at that point society will demand change. Tools will emerge to temper mobs as they begin to form on mainstream sites. A lot of us, me included, will look back at today as a time of freedom on the Internet. But the system is breaking under it’s own weight. It is not sustainable.

Image Credit.

Update: A very relevant post that I missed before from blogger and former FriendFeed user Aaron Brazell.

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The Akiduki Pulse Box Posts Your Heart Beat Rate To Twitter, Lets Followers Know You’re Alive

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 08:51 AM PDT

It surely didn't escape anyone's attention Twitter is on track to becoming a mass phenomenon globally. The service is also growing nicely in Japan where it has been embraced by the geek community in particular (Japanese is the only alternative language Twitter is available in until today). And today a small group of those Japanese geeks, members of the so-called Koress Project, have announced the development of the Akiduki Pulse box, a device that automatically posts your heart rate to Twitter [JP]. Video and more info after the break.