The Latest from TechCrunch

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• Minority Report Via A Facebook Event Page - For A Barbeque
• Judge Dismisses SEC Insider Trading Case Against Mark Cuban
• Geek Weekend: Columbus, Ohio
• Top iPhone App Developer Was Losing Out On $2000 A Day Because Of Sloppy Coding
• Socialseek Lets You Track The Social Goodness Of Brands Online
• Microsoft Popfly Gets Squashed
• Elance Hit By Security Breach
• Yammer Completely Reworks Its Desktop Client. I Can Feel My Productivity Increasing Already.
• Awesome: The Game Crafter Lets You Build And Sell Your Own Custom Board Games
• The Creepy 23andMe Zeppelin Is Still Circling My House. Go Away, Zeppelin.
• Google Wants You To Know A Google Docs Redesign Is Coming (I Wonder Why)
• You Only Live Twice: Spymaster Coming To Facebook Too
• Hulu’s Alien Plot Is Now Up For An… Emmy Award?
• Bit.ly Starts Warning About Malicious Links
• Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet”
• Foursquare Shows The Business Potential Of Location-Based Services
• Google Health Now Lets You Upload Scanned Medical Documents
• Viadeo Secures $5m More Funding, But How Does It Achieve Breakout?
• No, Oprah Doesn’t Really Want You to Watch That Pirated Copy Of Harry Potter

Minority Report Via A Facebook Event Page - For A Barbeque Posted: 17 Jul 2009 08:45 AM PDT Although we now have multi-touch interfaces via the handy iPhone, it appears the rest of the world promised by the Minority Report movie and its "Precrime" concepts has arrived sooner than we thought. Brit Andrew Poole organised a simple barbeque to celebrate his 30th birthday party. He expected a total of 17 guests, so he bought a lot of burgers, rented a marquee and put some batteries into the portable MP3 player, as anyone with an impending significant birthday and an unused BBQ stove would. But his first mistake was to create an events page on Facebook. His second was to send out invitations to join the BBQ in a Devon field owned by a friend...

Judge Dismisses SEC Insider Trading Case Against Mark Cuban Posted: 17 Jul 2009 08:11 AM PDT An update to our earlier story about the insider trading charges the SEC brought onto dotcom billionaire Mark Cuban, the notorious entrepreneur famous for investing in NAKEDpizza and also for founding a number of Internet startups (e.g. Broadcast.com, bought by Yahoo! for $4.6 billion) and owning the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. Apparently, a federal judge has dismissed the case. According to a MarketWatch report, the AP says U.S. District Judge Sidney Fitzwater granted Cuban’s motion and gave the SEC 30 days to file an amended complaint. The SEC had filed suit against Cuban in November 2008, alleging he sold shares of Internet company Mamma.com based on non-public info, sparing himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses (an estimated $750,000 to be exact). Cuban publicly fought the case through blog posts and Twitter messages, and that strategy seems to have paid off. Or maybe his lawyers just did a good job defending him. We’ll know soon enough, I reckon. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Geek Weekend: Columbus, Ohio Posted: 17 Jul 2009 07:26 AM PDT Geek Weekend is a continuing travel series about geeky things to do in cities around the world. Want your city featured? Write us at tips@crunchgear.com. It's a common opinion -- even amongst its residents -- that Columbus, Ohio is "Cow Town, USA" with nothing to do. As a life-long resident, I disagree emphatically with that notion. Columbus is the 15th largest city in the United States, and the greater Columbus area has just under two million residents. Columbus is within a half-days drive of over half the U.S. population, making it easy to reach for many people, as well as making it a good layover for a long drive to another destination. Tourism related sales were $7.2 billion USD in 2007, and according to a Longwood's International Study the central Ohio region had 55.6 million trips in 2007: 44.3 million day trips, and 11.3 million overnight trips (so the answer is "Yes, people do visit Ohio!"). The Ohio State University, which has anchored Columbus for more than 130 years with a rich history, has more than 50,000 students, which brings a wide variety of activities to town, including arts and cultural events, and concerts at the Newport Music Hall and the Schottenstein Stadium. If you can't find something to do in Columbus, the shortcoming is your own, and not the city's! Be that as it may, I'd like to share a short list of my own favorite features around Columbus.

Top iPhone App Developer Was Losing Out On $2000 A Day Because Of Sloppy Coding Posted: 17 Jul 2009 05:41 AM PDT Great story from iPhone ad network provider AdWhirl. Apparently the developer of one of the most popular applications for the platform ever wasn’t generating any ad revenue from it for several days, missing out on up to $2000 a day according to the company’s co-founder Sam Yam. Here’s the gist of what happened: Inner Four, the developer behind the insanely popular (and inane) iPhone / iPod Touch application Mirror Free (iTunes link) - a gratis tool that turns your device’s screen into a mirror - was using a sample key instead of the key provided by AdWhirl that was supposed to power real display advertising units in the app interface. The ad network enabler found out that the developer was missing out on revenue from the app, which has consistently been topping the charts across the entire App Store, when someone from the team downloaded it to their iPhone and noticed test ad units were being run that were attached to the sample AdWhirl application key. As the company was still able to see what kind of traffic the application was getting, the developer was losing out on an estimated $2000 a day, although that number is evidently hard to verify. Update: here’s the evidence from AdWhirl. Yam explains: AdWhirl allows you to set percentages for the ad networks you run. On our sample app, we had only a quarter of the inventory dedicated to AdMob, with the remaining 3/4 (maybe even more, b/c of our rollover feature, but I won’t get into all the nitty gritty) of the inventory used to demo how our custom ads work (custom ads don’t pay the developer any money when run, but allow them to cross-promote their other apps or promote a website, for example). Thus 3/4 of the ads weren’t generating money, and the quarter of ads that were generating money exceeded $500/day (and growing even more quickly on the most recent day) - doing the 4X multiplier on revenue generated gets to the $2000/day figure (you’ll notice the early days didn’t generate any revenue - this app rose to #1 VERY quickly). AdWhirl contacted the unknowing developer and dynamically pushed out new keys on the platform from their side, claiming that otherwise the developer would have been forced to submit an updated application to the App Store that could take days or even weeks to get cleared. Most iPhone app developers will never see their app(s) top the charts, let alone be able to effectively monetize them. That’s why it’s so baffling to see the developer of such a top ranked application - out of 65,000 free and paid apps in total - stumble over such a minor coding tweak. In software, it’s impossible to over-test anything. CrunchBase Information iPhone App Store AdWhirl Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Socialseek Lets You Track The Social Goodness Of Brands Online Posted: 17 Jul 2009 05:38 AM PDT Socialseek has released a desktop application that lets you search for a topic, item, brand or company across news sites, blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and events. You can also track mentions of a particular search query by city and receive charts that show trends on popularity of a topic across websites, or Twitter. The ability to crawl social media sites and websites for a brand can be valuable, but what I find useful about Socialseek is the ability to track an item over image sites like Flickr and even event sites. And it’s also interesting to be able to limit chatter over the web about a particular topic to a geographical region or city. Socialseek could be popular in the enterprise space, especially as Twitter has become an essential marketing tool for brands and companies. The app runs on Adobe Air, which I find to have some strange UI quirks and bugs and ends up using good amount of resources on computers. Competitors to Socialseek include Viralheat and Peoplebrowsr, which both help marketers track the buzz around a certain individual or brand on social media sites and web sites. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Microsoft Popfly Gets Squashed Posted: 17 Jul 2009 03:07 AM PDT Microsoft has announced that in late August it will be discontinuing availability and support for its once popular mashup creation application Popfly. In a blog post, team leader John Montgomery confirms the internal deadpooling, although he doesn’t call it the way we do. He writes that on August 24, 2009 the Popfly service will be discontinued and all sites, references, and resources will be taken down. Montgomery points developers to Microsoft’s Web Platform and Xbox development program as all projects that were created using Popfly will effectively be discontinued completely. TechCrunch got an early look at the Silverlight-powered application when it debuted in private beta mode over 2 years ago. At the time, mash-up and widget creation tools were all the rage, with Yahoo introducing its Pipes web app just a few months prior. Google got in the game with its Mashup Editor a bit later, but that service never left private beta and the company ultimately announced it would be axing the product last January. Two days ago, the team even reminded developers that it would soon be shutting down. ProgrammableWeb in its coverage of the discontinuation of Microsoft Popfly points back to a February 2008 article in the NY Times, in which the newspaper talks about Montgomery and Popfly in a positive light, with the product manager being lauded as “an example of how it just might be possible for someone to teach dinosaurs to dance”. Last fall, his team introduced an intriguing software Web service called Popfly that is intended to make it possible for nonprogrammers to plug together Web components and data sources quickly to create useful new Web services. For example, news feeds could be added to digital images, or data lists to maps. Introduced at the Web 2.0 conference last year by Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, Popfly was picked by PC World magazine as one of the most innovative computing and consumer electronics products of 2007. It has garnered more than 100,000 users — the company says the exact number is confidential — and now has a library of more than 50,000 "mashups": new components or Web pages that have been created in a visual snap-together fashion, like Lego blocks. Web 2.0 Conference organizer Tim O’Reilly also gets quoted in the article, and he apparently expressed skepticism early on: "Popfly shows me that Microsoft still thinks this is all about software, rather than about accumulating data via network effects, which to me is the core of Web 2.0," said Tim O'Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O'Reilly Media, a print and online publisher. "They are using Popfly to push Silverlight, rather than really trying to get into the mashup game." Seattle-based tech blog TechFlash got a bit more information out of Microsoft regarding Popfly’s sudden death. In an e-mail to editor Todd Bishop, Redmond says Popfly was simply no longer part of its refocused strategy, which was outlined in light of the dismal economic situation. (Thanks to everyone who sent this in as a tip) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Elance Hit By Security Breach Posted: 16 Jul 2009 09:32 PM PDT We’ve just gotten word that development-outsourcing site Elance has suffered a security breach, compromising some user information that included names, addresses, phone numbers, and location (no financial information was taken). Multiple users have received the following letter: It has recently come to our attention that certain Elance user information was accessed without authorization, including potentially yours. The data accessed was contact information — specifically name, email address, telephone number, city location and Elance login information. This incident did not involve any credit card, bank account, social security or tax ID numbers. We have remedied the cause of the breach, and are working with appropriate authorities. In the meantime, please take extra precautions in protecting your Elance account. For example, do not provide your login information on any site that is not http://www.elance.com, and NEVER give out passwords by email, over the telephone or on websites that are not the Elance site. We sincerely regret any inconvenience or disruption this may cause. For more details and ongoing information about this, please visit this page in our Trust & Safety center: http://www.elance.com/p/trust/account_security.html Michael Culver Vice President Elance Elance’s security alert site reveals that the data was taken by hackers who discovered a security hole on the site: The hackers discovered a security hole on an unprotected page that enabled them to access a data table that contained contact information including name, email address, telephone number, city location, and username, and that contained protected versions of user passwords, in an unreadable format called a one-way hash. Their attack did not access personal financial information such as credit card, bank account, social security or tax ID numbers. In a bizarre twist Elance’s security site says that some of the stolen user data is now appearing on OutsourcingRoom.com, a competing service. Elance writes that it is working to have the data removed. This is only the latest in a recent string of security breaches on major web services. It’s obviously nearly impossible to guard against every kind of online threat, but if we’re going to become comfortable having our entire computing experience in the cloud, things need to change. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Yammer Completely Reworks Its Desktop Client. I Can Feel My Productivity Increasing Already. Posted: 16 Jul 2009 08:47 PM PDT It’s been less than a year since Yammer made its debut at TechCrunch50 (and took the top prize), but the Twitter-for-businesses has already become absolutely essential to keeping TechCrunch going on all cylinders. And we’re not the only ones — Yammer is used by over 40,000 companies, and given the uproar caused when the service went down briefly last week, it’s clear that we’re not the only ones who rely on it heavily. But while Yammer as a service is great, its popular desktop client (from which most messages are sent) has left something to be desired: It’s been a fairly basic AIR app that lacks some of Yammer’s core functionality, like search and filtering through replies, and also looked a little clunky. But tonight, that changes. Yammer is releasing a new client that offers a slew of much-needed improvements, and looks much nicer to boot. The new client retain’s Yammer’s key features, updating with new posts from your colleagues as they come in. But it’s much sleeker, sporting an interface that reminds me of Tweetie, the slick Twitter client for Mac. The app now features integrated search, the ability to jump between Yammer accounts on the fly, improved notifications, spell-check, and support for viewing different threads in multiple windows. In short, if you use Yammer, you’re going to want to grab this ASAP. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Awesome: The Game Crafter Lets You Build And Sell Your Own Custom Board Games Posted: 16 Jul 2009 07:48 PM PDT Now this is a great idea. The Game Crafter is a new company that lets you build your own, fully customized, table-top games. Board games, card games — you name it, there’s a good chance these guys can put it together for you, with fully customized art assets and text. Building a game is fairly straightforward — you upload the art assets you’d like to have printed on your game board and cards, pick out which accessories should be included in the box (dice, pawns, etc.) and write out the game’s documentation laying down the rules. Of course, that’s all a bit easier said than done if you don’t have a bunch of art assets sitting around. Still, once you have your images and text in hand, actually putting the game together is painless. Unsurprisingly there are still some limitations (you can’t currently design custom pawns), but the company is planning to add more customization options shortly. As you put your game together, the site will give you an idea of how much it will cost to build based on how many cards, pieces, and boards it requires. From there, you can either order it at cost for yourself or set a sale price and sell it on the site’s integrated store. The store is pretty empty at this point with only a handful of games available, but it’s a start. The best part of this for novice game builders is that there’s no up-front cost to get started —  the site handles all distribution and printing costs, taking a 50% cut of the profits from each sale. A 50% cut sounds like a lot, but the company defends the price-point by explaining out how much you’d get if you managed to get your game in stores — according to the site, you’d typically have to give the game’s distributor 30% of the the proceeds, with the retailer taking another 40%, leaving you with only 30% of the sale price. You also retain all rights to the game, so you’re free to take it off and sell it elsewhere should a better opportunity come along. It sounds great, but there are still a few caveats. The site’s production page notes that while cards are full color and printed on hefty card stock, they’re printed with wax instead of ink, which is less exact. Likewise, card printing isn’t exactly perfect, and there’s a chance some parts of the card’s far edges will be cut off. Still, it sounds easy to compensate for these issues, and the technology is only going to get better. We think this is such a cool idea that we’ve currently got an intern hard at work at creating a TechCrunch board game. It’s still early in the planning stages (feel free to leave ideas in the comments), and we’ll let you know once it’s ready. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The Creepy 23andMe Zeppelin Is Still Circling My House. Go Away, Zeppelin. Posted: 16 Jul 2009 07:34 PM PDT Update to last weekend’s breaking news about the creepy 23andMe zeppelin that’s been floating around my house. It was back again today. For all I know it’s been circling my house all week. What do you want, 23andMe zeppelin? I already bought a DNA kit. Go away. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Google Wants You To Know A Google Docs Redesign Is Coming (I Wonder Why) Posted: 16 Jul 2009 06:11 PM PDT On the Google Docs blog today, the company took the time to make a non-announcement. Basically, there’s a bunch of words that bury the real story: That Google Docs will soon be launching a “brand new shiny interface.” Hmmm. I wonder why. Obviously, earlier this week Microsoft laid out its plans for Office 2010, which includes a web-based component meant to take on Google Docs. But once again, there is nothing to actually see right now from Google, instead this is a pre-announcement to let users know that they may be seeing wonky elements over the next few weeks as they tweak things on the fly. Not surprisingly, the sharing of documents will be a key element to this redesign. Despite it being perhaps the key element of Google Docs, sharing items with others is simply not that intuitive right now. Here’s what Google has in mind for the future: One thing you’ll probably notice in the next few days is that the “Shared with…” list in the left hand pane will go away. But don’t worry, you can still use Search to do the same thing. Just click on “Search Options” and type the user’s name into the “Shared with:” box. If this is a search you’ll do over and over again, you can click “Save this search” so it will be easily accessible in “Saved Searches”. Another thing you’ll see is the new Sharing Menu. We feel this is a big improvement over the old one; we’ve moved all the sharing functionality into this one dialog, so now you can completely manage sharing without having to leave the Docs list. Other than that, Google is adding a bunch of new search operators (which only the hardcore users will care about). And it concludes the post with “They [the new features] will be followed shortly by the new interface and a number of pretty exciting features we have in the pipe.” Google. Such a tease. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

You Only Live Twice: Spymaster Coming To Facebook Too Posted: 16 Jul 2009 05:37 PM PDT By now, many of you have heard about Spymaster, the viral game that uses your Twitter social graph to play and get more users into the game. Well guess what? It’s coming to that network with even more users, Facebook. The integration should be launched at some point today, co-founder Chris Abad tells us. But the key is that this will not be playable on Facebook’s site like many of the gaming apps built for that platform are, instead this will use Facebook Connect to pipe updates into the social network, just as it works with sending updates to Twitter. And users on Twitter and Facebook will be able to play at the same time against one another. Players on the different networks will be distinguished by the different icons. And you can link up accounts on both Twitter and Facebook at the same time. Spymaster caused quite a bit of controversy shortly after its launch as some followers of players on Twitter felt they were being spammed by the game. Since then, Spymaster and others have taken a few steps to make it easier to blunt some of the more viral-like elements of the game. But really, we felt the game just showed the need for Twitter to add at least some basic forms of filters on its core offering. And despite this blunting, Spymaster says it is already monetizing its product. “We started monetizing about a week ago. So far we’re seeing very high numbers in terms of revenue per user, as well as conversion rates. I can’t share specific numbers with you just yet, but Super Rewards (our partner for our virtual goods store) says we’re knocking it out of the park against comparables,” Abad tells us. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Hulu’s Alien Plot Is Now Up For An… Emmy Award? Posted: 16 Jul 2009 05:10 PM PDT It’s not often that we hear about consumer web startups getting their own TV spots, much less during the Super Bowl — that’s the sort of craziness that was reserved for the heady 90’s, back before the (first) bubble burst. But that’s exactly what Hulu did this year when it ran a spot during Super Bowl XLIII, introducing the masses to the online video site’s plot for world domination (headed by Alec Baldwin, of course). The ad was certainly effective — Hulu saw a massive traffic jump and released a series of followup ads featuring celebrities including Seth MacFarlane and Dennis Leary. Apparently the general public wasn’t alone in liking the ad. Hulu has just been nominated for an Emmy Award in the category “Outstanding Commercial” — a feat that few other consumer websites have ever accomplished (I believe the only other startup to get a nod was Snap.com in 1999, when that site was home to a search engine).

Bit.ly Starts Warning About Malicious Links Posted: 16 Jul 2009 03:55 PM PDT Since it became the default URL shortener for Twitter, Bit.ly has been growing like crazy. And as we learned from Spider-Man, with great power, comes great responsibility. Bit.ly has started warning users of potentially malicious sites, based on information it has about URLs being shortened. For example, if you click on this link, you’ll see the message that reads, “Warning - this site has been flagged and may contain unsolicited content. The content of this web page appears to contain spam, or links to unsolicited or undesired sites.” It then gives the following suggestions: Close your browser window Notify the sender of the URL Or you can also continue on to the link, at your own risk, if you click another URL on the page. And this do-gooding likely plays into Bit.ly’s greater plans to become a more Digg-like destination for content. Bit.ly is apparently pulling this malicious site info from StopBadware.org and antiphishing.org, just as many other services do. [thanks Adam via tunese] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet” Posted: 16 Jul 2009 12:50 PM PDT On Tuesday evening more than 300 confidential Twitter documents and screenshots landed in our inbox. We said we were going to post a handful of them only, and we’ve spent much of the last 36 hours talking directly to Twitter about the right way to go about doing that. We’ll have more to say on that process in a couple of days. The documents include employment agreements, calendars of the founders, new employee interview schedules, phone logs and bills, alarm settings, a financial forecast, a pitch for a Twitter TV show, confidentiality agreements with companies such as AOL, Dell, Ericsson, and Nokia, a list of employee dietary restrictions, credit card numbers, Paypal and Gmail screen shots, and much more. These are the last two documents we are going to share: a subset of the detailed notes from a set of executive meetings that took place between February 12 and June 9, 2009. Much of the information in these notes is either personal in nature (new hires, etc.) or too sensitive to share. What’s interesting of the rest we are posting here with our commentary. These notes include never-before revealed discussions between Twitter and Google, Microsoft, and others, as well as details of product planning, company goals, employee retention, and new proposed terms of service and APIs. Even acquisition targets such as CoTweet and Twitpic are discussed (and sometimes dismissed). It’s important to note that we have been given the green light by Twitter to post this information - They aren’t happy about it, but they are able to live with it, they say (more on why they did that in our later post). One other caveat - as we’ve said before, these documents are rough meeting notes, not polished documents meant for broad consumption. There are lots of typos and outdated information. But on the plus side, the rawness of it shows the dedication and deep commitment of this team to making Twitter into a world-class company. Finally, there are some details about partner discussions, particularly around Google and Microsoft, that we are just not going to publish. Twitter has been in negotiations with both companies around a broad set of transactions for months. But we aren’t going to go into great detail about exactly what has been discussed, or Twitter’s strategies toward those negotiations. So while it looks like there is a lot of detail around those discussions below, the most sensitive stuff has been removed. Let’s start with a key strategy meeting which took place on February 25, 2009. One of the audacious goals laid out in the notes of the strategy meeting is for Twitter to become the first Web service to reach one billion users. The notes are laid out in bullet points with each one reading like a Tweet: “If we had a billion users, that will be the pulse of the planet.” In the meeting itself, Stone tries to put his finger on what Twitter is by calling it more of a “nervous system” than an alert system. A lot has happened since February. Twitter’s site has gone from an estimated 4 million visitors in the U.S to 20 million, and nearly double that worldwide. However, the notes provide a rare view into the strategic thinking of the company just before it entered its current phase of hypergrowth. Dealing With Google: Much of the discussion at Twitter meetings throughout the past six months revolved around dealing with Google and Facebook. In a March 13, 2009 management meeting, for example, during a discussion of a search deal with Google, the fear is expressed that “Google would kick our ass at finding the good tweet.” But almost immediately afterwards, someone asks, “Can we do to google what google has done to others?” In a May 7 management meeting, Twitter’s search syndication strategy with Google is discussed, as is the desire of “every tech company” to gain access to “Hosebird,” an API Twitter is working on to deliver its full stream of Tweets to search partners and others. The attitude towards Google is cautious: “Playing with fire here where we know that Google is building the competitive product.” But by June 9, things seem to have progressed with Google. After an earlier two hour meeting with Google executives, the Twitter leadership had decided that an “agreement for some period of time makes sense - with our parameters.” But at the same time, they resolved to that Twitter’s own “search results page needs to be great - better than the landing pages on Google.”Company Goals and New TOS/APIs: In that same June 9 meeting, Twitter execs talked about their end of year goals, including a “next gen search results page” and a (much-needed) reputation system which internally is being called “Tweet rank.” The company is also hard at work defining a new Terms of Service agreement which will launch in conjunction with new APIs. These will determine what kind of commercial messages Twitter will have rights to monetize via ads. Twitter wants to “take a far reaching license to the content, with two exceptions (endorsement, content profit), and no opt-out.” Twitter also talked about making its API license “more throttled than ToS.” Diddy, Marissa, and Microsoft: Another thing that comes through from the notes is just how much everyone has been courting Twitter. The agenda topics for a Twitter management meeting on April 16, 2009 reads like a who’s who of Hollywood and Silicon Valley: Diddy, Oprah, Marissa Mayer, Microsoft, 4Chan. They discuss giving “advisor shares” to entertainer Diddy, a big Tweeter, but also see him as a distraction. “Diddy values his contribution higher than we do,” read the meeting minutes. In an earlier meeting on April 2, other potential advisors discussed included Shaq and Al Gore (presumably both would receive advisor shares as well). If Diddy was a distraction, Google product chief Marissa Mayer was a “huge distraction” who kept asking for stats on Twitter’s growth. Twitter management decided to give her “a constrained version of growth.” Finally, Microsoft wanted to talk about a deep infrastructure deal (”we don’t want to talk about this right now”) and a “secret project with the x-box.” Despite the interest and attention, all the Twitter management really seemed to want was to be left alone, even by its own board members. In a May 7 meeting, they talk about how to put off informational meetings in a nice way: “How do we communicate to the Board (and investors) to back off.” Exchanging Favors With Investment Bankers: On May 26, the Twitter management team discussed choosing investment bankers with the idea that they would engage them “for a year and a half - exchange favors, then use them for the transaction.” It is not clear what “the transaction” is, but it can only be an IPO or an acquisition. Managing the Message: The minutes of that May 26th meeting also shed some light on how Twitter manages the media. Word had gotten out that a Twitter TV show was in the works, and Twitter decided it needed to “kill the story that “twitter is coming out with a TV show.” The message: there are “many users of Twitter - none are officially blessed.” Identity Crisis: Let’s return to that key strategy meeting on February 25 (from here on out I’ll try to go chronologically). It is clear from the notes that the company was still struggling to define itself: Some stabs at defining the company’s mission included “Twitter is for discovering and sharing what is happening right now,” and “Twitter makes you smarter, faster, more efficient and more powerful.” Below are excerpts taken from throughout the document. Acquisition Angst: The meeting took place after acquisition talks with Facebook fell apart last fall, and before similar talks with Google also went nowhere this spring. A lot of the meeting dealt with Twitter’s acquisition angst and trying to decide “What do we want to be when we grow up?” The company has an “IPO Bias,” yet realizes it will “always have to be open to Exits.” The “only type of acquisition we are interested in are ones where we stay in charge.” Perhaps that is what killed the Facebook deal. Twitter management felt that the “Facebook sell always seemed wrong,” that it was “the wrong destiny for Twitter.” The Facebook Threat: The Facebook threat keeps coming back up. In one portion of the meeting devoted to discussing “How could Facebook kill us?” they list threats such as Facebook adopting real-time search, changing the opt-in options to make status messages public, emphasizing its SMS features, and generally copying Twitter’s functionality and user-interface (all of which have started to happen). Defensive Strategy: The company also considered how best to defend against Facebook. “Make sure people are happy” is at the top of the list, followed by “cult” and “get more and better developers.” Doing a better job and getting “twitter everywhere” seems to be its best defense. Real-Time Search: Twitter is clearly concerned about positioning itself against its two main rivals and potential acquirers. In contrast to finding out “what is happening right now” on Twitter, “Google is old news.” Yet during the meeting, the company is clearly preoccupied with search: “Twitter the product is a vehicle for twitter search;” “People don’t use twitter for search; and “Twitter should tell me stuff without me searching for that.” Financials: The company talks about its financial model, which boils down to generating “$1 per user per year” and going from 25 million users at the end of 2009 to one billion in 2013, with a user being defined as a “unique individual having a conscious twitter experience in a given week.” Revenue Model: The strategy meeting also covered future revenue models, starting with verified commercial accounts, which is described as the “fastest way to make money without putting a whole organization behind it.” Another benefit to targeting corporate and celebrity users: “Charging more to fewer users is a good model.” But it is the next business models down the list which start to become interesting. These include Search/Content Ads (with heavy users of the search API being required to run ads), Sponsored Tweets, “Adsense Widgets” (presumably Twitter ads which can run on other sites like Google’s AdSense, and in other apps) and payments. Getting To One Billion Users: The key to most of these business models is to keep attracting more users, and the company has some creative thoughts on how to acquire them. These include: “Free phones preloaded with twitter,” “TV twitter,” “Kindle,” “Radio,” “Dell, build it into,” videogame consoles, Website widgets, IM networks, and PCs. They also realize the “cost would kill us if we had a billion users tomorrow.” RSS Is The Enemy: The other expense they are worried about is supporting all of the RSS feeds that are migrating to Twitter. The people who run Twitter definitely don’t like RSS, and who can blame them? The big concerns expressed at the meeting were, “What if all feeds went through twitter: would be expensive,” and “feeds are not unique content.” (They are also too slow, but that is another issue). March 12, 2009 Meeting (Getting Back to Google): Moving forward to a regular management meeting on March 12, the subject of Google comes up again. Google’s blog search team was scraping Twitter’s site and getting only “60-70% of updates.” They wanted Twitter to hurry up with its Hosebird API so that they could start indexing every Tweet. The plan was to “include microblog content on blogsearch.google.com (which gets less than twitter search).” Already, Twitter made up “90% of the content” on Google Blog Search. As the minutes put it: “We are this product.” There was also talk of including microblog results on the main search page, which would be “the biggest change to google search in years.” In that same March 12th meeting, Twitter also wrestled with a proposed search advertising partnership with Microsoft. The team was “not ready” and considered this yet another “Distraction.” Worries were expressed that it would strain Twitter’s engineering resources and that any partnership with Microsoft would raise branding issues: “There is going to be a perception that we are dating.” The board was also worried about Twitter “getting into bed with Microsoft.” By the end of the discussion, someone asks, “Why did we start talking to Microsoft in the first place”? Twitpic, Photobucket, Tweetie: At the same time that Twitter was putting off Microsoft and Google, it was cultivating smaller startups. During that same March 12th meeting, one agenda item was “Twitpic- To buy or not to buy (1).” They decided not to, and the next week in a meeting on March 19, they decided to “bless” a competing Photobucket app called Twitgoo. Twitter also decided “we like Tweetie,” the popular mobile Twitter client in a meeting on March 26th. Another Acquisition target: CoTweet. More recently, in a June 2 meeting where CoTweet and the need to support commercial accounts came up, the need to partner, buy, or hire came up, as it had in the past. And CoTweet seems to be identified as “another acquisition target.” Mogees, R.I.P: You can also see what happens to startups that don’t get Twitter’s blessing. Twitter CEO Evan Williams was “not blown away” by micro-payment startup Mogees in a May 7 meeting because “Paypal and Amazon can do this.” Mogees doesn’t seem to be in service anymore. April 30, 2009, Employee Retention (”Happiness Committee”): Twitter’s management meetings also dealt a lot with how to keep employees engaged. The minutes for an April 30 management meeting talk about recruiting from Facebook and note: “People don’t leave jobs they leave managers,” they “leave situations that are making them sad.” To prevent that from happening at Twitter someone proposed forming a “happiness committee.” That should work. Nothing Is Free Forever: In that same April 30 meeting, the team talked about licensing Tweets to partners: “We can give people stuff for free but not forever.” There was also a fascinating discussion about how users should be able to opt out of having their Tweets syndicated by other media properties such as TV shows. One idea put forward was that your Tweets can only be syndicated by other people or entities who already have a relationship with you. Search as Discovery: Another interesting discussion on April 30 had to do with search as discovery and the work of a visiting Stanford professor. The notion of charging per follower is contemplated. Retweeting (A “Disturbance In the Force): Finally, everyone’s favorite subject, retweeting, was brought up in that June 2 meeting. It looks like Twitter is going to adopt it as a formal feature, but Evan Williams is concerned that retweets are “broken” because it becomes “hard to read who authored, people edit what was actually said.” Well, yeah. There’s only 140 characters, you know. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Foursquare Shows The Business Potential Of Location-Based Services Posted: 16 Jul 2009 11:47 AM PDT There’s a reason Google is working at a rapid pace to bring location services to the forefront of many of its products (Maps, Search, Latitude, etc) — new potential business models. Sure, location also happens to be useful to many consumers, and that’s undoubtedly why Google loves it even more. Like AdSense, it’s a mixing of what’s potentially useful for a consumer, with a way to make money. So what exactly are they going to do with it? Well, location-targeted ads are already out there, but will get much more refined. But there’s also potential for new ways to use location as a business model. And the startup Foursquare is already showing the early stages of what could be some very interesting things. A couple months back, we wrote about localities in New York and Los Angeles using Foursquare “mayorships” (which you get when you check into a venue the most times compared to others in the city) as a way to give out special deals, like free beer. That idea continues to expand. As Amit Gupta noted yesterday, a bar/performance space is doing something similar in San Francisco. But they’re also expanding on the idea. Not only does the mayor of the venue (The Marsh) get free drinks, but everyone who checks into the venue on Foursquare and shows proof (on your iPhone or other mobile device) gets $2 off a ticket to any performance that night. While Foursquare didn’t officially sanction this, it loves ideas like this. And it should be obvious why: It entices people not only to go to those venues, but to use Foursquare when they do. The service loves the idea so much, that it’s building support for these types of deals, or “Mayor Bonuses” as they it calls them, into the next version of the iPhone app. It’s still being worked on, but in version 1.4 of the iPhone app, “ideally, when people checkin into places that have some kind of special / offer / etc, we’ll show a banner at the bottom which you tap to slide over and see the promo info. If the promo requires some certain level of “local” (e.g.  you’re currently the mayor / you’ve been here 10x / etc) then you’ll see a special screen that you can show to bartender / waitress etc that makes it easier to identify that you’re entitled to the freebee,” co-founder Dennis Crowley tells us. It may look something like the image on the right, though that’s just something they threw together quickly, Crowley says. Amongst the people who use it in San Francisco on a regular basis, I know that will go over very well, and should cause a rush to certain establishments on certain nights. The next step would be Foursquare striking some kind of deals with these places (since it would be driving paying customers to them), and voila, you have a nice little revenue model. There’s got to be some kind of reason the service recently came on VC Fred Wilson’s radar, right? (The service currently has no funding beyond the money put in by its founders.) Update: Charlie O’Donnell made some great points about why Yelp and retailers should be using the service as well, the other day. As he notes from a recommendation and advertising perspective: I definitely started getting sucked into the game, too.  Getting badges and seeing where my friends were was fun.  The other night, I realized that I was about to go to a place that Mike Galpert had been to about an hour or so before me, so I called him to ask what he had.  Indeed, the spinach gnocci at Supper was excellent. That’s when I realized how valuable Foursquare really is from a business perspective.  Mike made a recommendation to me, but Foursquare was the service that actually knew that I went, because I checked in.  Being able to connect web advertising, recommendations, and social media buzz to an actual person walking into your store has long been the holy grail of the advertising world.  We spent lots of money and effort online to drum up our brand, but does it actually drive food traffic?  Foursquare knows. Plenty of others (including Google) are working on similar ideas surrounding location-based coupons, but the Foursquare idea has different potential because it’s a more proactive use of location-based services. On one level, Foursquare is more of a game, and some people use it to obtain a high score and get badges (for checking in certain places). That’s different from being in a place like a grocery store because you’re shopping as you normally would, and seeing a coupon pop up. And the badge aspect contains more possibility for the service. I’ve had a number of conversations with people in the advertising space who think that sponsored badges which center around events (like SXSW, where the Foursquare iPhone app officially launched) has real potential. Know of any other establishments offering deals to Foursquare users? Foursquare is requesting you let them know (more here). And also let me know, so I can go to them and get free drinks. [photo: flickr/amit gupta] [Thanks Dan] CrunchBase Information Foursquare Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Google Health Now Lets You Upload Scanned Medical Documents Posted: 16 Jul 2009 09:54 AM PDT Whether it be bills, insurance forms, medical records or prescriptions, patients are often inundated with vast quantities of paper. Google Health is now trying to help you organize all of this paperwork in its platform. Google Health, which finally launched last May after months of rumors, has ambitions to become a centralized and secure place to store medical records online. The new feature lets patients upload scanned paper documents into your Google Health account. Google particularly suggests that you upload an “advance directive,” which determines your end-of-life wishes so that your family and doctor can honor them if you get sick and are unable to communicate. Google Health is actually working with a advance directive provider, Caring Connections, to provide a free, downloadable form customized for all 50 states. In order to complete the form, you need to download it, print it out, complete it, scan it, and upload it back to Google Health. Google Health also recently launched a feature that gives users the ability to share their medical history with designated family or close friends. The whole concept of hosting medical records online raises security concerns for many but Google says it is taking lengthy measures to ensure the security of the data, associating invite links to specific Email addresses and allowing users to track who has viewed their records. All shared records are also read-only. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Viadeo Secures $5m More Funding, But How Does It Achieve Breakout? Posted: 16 Jul 2009 09:45 AM PDT Viadeo, aLinkedIn and Xing competitor, has secured $5m of funding from French investment houses AGF, Ventech and other investors (including the wealthy Mulliez family) to accelerate growth and prep for potential acquisitions. The business social network is best known in France, but it’s planning to expand its existing foothold in emerging markets like China, India and Mexico. The latest investment takes the total money it has raised since 2006 to $23m. AGF and Ventech were previous investors. Although this market is seeing a lot of “down round” investments right now (a down round is where investors purchase stock from a company at a lower valuation than previously) I am assured by Viadeo that this is not the case here. The question is whether or not this new momentum can deliver traction and a breakout position. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

No, Oprah Doesn’t Really Want You to Watch That Pirated Copy Of Harry Potter Posted: 16 Jul 2009 09:20 AM PDT If you're following celebrities like Oprah, Michael Arrington, and Justin Timberlake you might find that folks are retweeting some odd stuff purportedly originally posted by the aforementioned celebrities. For example, I was watching Greg Grunberg AKA Matt Parkman from Heroes (and the co-founder of Yowza) and noticed he was being re-tweeted with a vengeance. The tweet was simply 'RT @greggrunberg guys watch"Transformers 2" Movie Free online here [snip] Wal-Mart' and it was sent out, in this case, by CarriCarrie012. A few clicks and we discover that young Carri is not "Goofy, intelligent, and determined!!!" as she claims in her bio but is actually a spambot. The bot essentially takes a celebrity's @ name and pretends to Tweet that they are supporting the viewing of pirated versions of major motion pictures for free, something someone like Grunberg would never condone (although I wouldn't put it past Oprah).

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