The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Coming To AOL: Warren Buffet And Martha Stewart Cartoons
- Go Sightseeing Without Leaving Yahoo Image Search
- Microsoft Bows to Apple Pressure, Changes the Laptop Hunter Ads
- Nokia Buys Social Addressbook Startup Cellity For The Team
- Twitter Cracks Down On Spam Accounts, People Lose Followers
- Modern Technology Brings More Productivity, Longer Working Hours
- Dotopen Opens For Business - It’s Like FriendFeed For Companies
- SearchMe Searching For A Buyer
- ChaCha Never Lets Me Down, Even When They Let Me Down. They Raise $4 Million More
- Twitter Unveils A Live-Updating Search Widget
- Google Voice Gives Out Free Business Cards, Makes Switching Numbers Slightly Less Irritating
- Twitter Launches “Twitter 101″, Step One Of The Business Plan
- Biz Stone Talks Twitter At Fortune Brainstorm
- Y Combinator’s Mixpanel Takes Stat Tracking Beyond Google Analytics
- Project Fair Bid Raises $4.5 Million For Stealth Auction Platform
- Why Is Google Latitude A Web App And Not A Native App? Because Apple Said So.
- iPhone Security Is “Broken” - Business Users Take Note
- Google Latitude Comes To The iPhone. No, It Doesn’t Run In The Background.
- Amazon’s Bezos Apologizes For The “Stupid” And “Thoughtless” Kindle Incident
- Amazon: Kindle Growth Is “Very Strong”, But That’s All We’re Saying
- Microsoft’s Money Pit. Every Dollar Of Online Revenue Is Wiped Out By A Dollar Of Loss
- Review: T-Mobile myTouch 3G With Google Android
- Google’s Ronny Conway Joins Andreessen Horowitz
- The Online Payment Wars Continue: PayPal Officially Announces Flexible API
- TicketFlow: You Know, For Tickets
| Coming To AOL: Warren Buffet And Martha Stewart Cartoons Posted: 24 Jul 2009 08:51 AM PDT
Yes, Tim Armstrong does have a secret plan to save AOL, and it involves cartoons starring Warren Buffet and Martha Stewart. At an employee meeting today to rally the troops with his new strategy, Warren Buffet and Martha Stewart were on hand to talk about their new Web cartoons. AOL founder Steve Case is also there Tweeting about it (he took this picture of Buffet and Stewart on stage). Buffet’s cartoon will be called “The Secret Millionaire’s Club” and it will be geared towards teaching kids about business (fun!). “Martha Stewart KIds” will feature a 10-year-old Martha Stewart. Both will be produced by A Squared Entertainment, along with cartoons starring supermodel Giselle Bundchen (”Gigi & The Green Team”) and the late astronomer Carl Sagan (”Kosmos”). Each show will have 26 episodes, which will run three to five minutes each. Does this mean AOL is going to start producing more of its own Web video content? That would fall into its new mission: “To inform, entertain, and connect the world.” I hear that there are some ex-Yahoo employees in LA who have some ideas on how to create Web video. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Go Sightseeing Without Leaving Yahoo Image Search Posted: 24 Jul 2009 07:54 AM PDT
Even though Google gets more than three times the amount of traffic, Yahoo Search continues to add some pretty innovative features that its main competitor doesn’t have. In the past year and a half, Yahoo introduced Search Assist, thumbnail images and preview panes for Image Search. Yahoo even had the ability to search for Creative Commons licensed images before Google. Now, Yahoo Image Search is rolling out a travel image refiner in its search, which is definitely worth a look. When you type in a city in image search, Yahoo will suggest related points of interest to your search, giving you more contextual information about your destination. For example, if you type in an image search for San Francisco, you will see a box to the left side of the page that will include image results for various points of interest and popular destinations within San Francisco, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz or Fisherman’s Wharf. If you click on one of the points of interest, you will see an overlay of the images so you can take a virtual tour of the Golden Gate Bridge without having to leave the search results for San Francisco. Yahoo says that by providing these suggestions, tapping into what the company calls a “Web of Objects,” you will be able to take a virtual tour of a city without having to input many different sites or places. Basically, Yahoo Image does all the work for you. This is no doubt a useful feature, especially considering that researching travel spots is now conducted primarily online by consumers. Having this sort of feature only enhances the travel planning process on the web. Yahoo says the Image Search Refiner is currently available for location-specific searches, but is planning to expand this functionality to other types of image searches in the future. Of course, while Yahoo is adding these nifty features to its search capabilities, it’s facing challenges from Microsoft, with Bing nibbling at Yahoo’s search share. But a little competition never hurts, and perhaps even livens up the fight between the two underdogs.
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| Microsoft Bows to Apple Pressure, Changes the Laptop Hunter Ads Posted: 24 Jul 2009 07:52 AM PDT  "As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between. But a little whining from Apple isn't going to stop Microsoft from running the ads." Looks like Devin was right, as he often is. Microsoft has updated the "Laptop Hunter" ad that had annoyed Apple, and now it's much more benign. Click through to see the video. You'll notice that the lines have changed somewhat. In the original version, the lines were, "This Mac is $2,000, and that's before adding anything... Why would you pay twice the price?" Now the line is, ""It seems like you're paying a lot more for the brand." The brand isn't mentioned by name, of course.
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| Nokia Buys Social Addressbook Startup Cellity For The Team Posted: 24 Jul 2009 07:13 AM PDT
German mobile startup Cellity is getting acquired by Nokia. The sale price was not disclosed, but it is not likely to be more than $10 million to $20 million. The deal was all cash. About a year ago, Vodafone bought Cellity’s competitor Zyb for 31.5 million Euros. Nokia didn’t actually buy the whole company, only “certain assets” and the team, which is usually code for a fire sale. The company began talking to Nokia six months ago, and in the end there was actually a little bit of a bidding war with Netherlands mobile carrier KPN and an international web portal. Cellity had a Series A round of funding in 2007, led by Mangrove Capital Partners. Cellity’s service is a social addressbook for mobile phones which which syncs your contact list on your phone with your contacts on the Web, including Outlook, Twitter, AOL, Hotmail, Yahoomail, Gmail, Plaxo and LinkedIn. Nokia won’t be continuing Cellity’s Addressbook 2.0 service, but it stands to reason the team will build similar functionality from scratch for future Nokia phones. Or perhaps they will work on new projects. The team will become part of Nokia’s Services division in Berlin, which also houses other startup acquisitions Plazes and bit-side. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Twitter Cracks Down On Spam Accounts, People Lose Followers Posted: 24 Jul 2009 06:30 AM PDT
If you notice this morning that your follower count on Twitter dropped dramatically, don’t be alarmed. It is just Twitter cracking down on spam accounts and bots that automatically follow people. So chances are those weren’t real people anyway. The drop is a big topic on Twiitter (search for “spam”). This isn’t the first time Twitter has purged spam accounts. What is alarming, however, is that some people affected are complaining that not only did their follower count drop, but that all of their followers and people they followed were wiped out. Oops. That is the same effectively as starting from scratch. Spam accounts on Twitter are becoming a big problem, inflating follower counts and setting the stage for unwanted commercial come-ons and scams. (And you thought spam on Gmail was bad). As Twitter inches towards becoming a place to do business, it needs to sweep the spammers out of its system. Inevitably, some innocent bystanders will suffer collateral damage. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Modern Technology Brings More Productivity, Longer Working Hours Posted: 24 Jul 2009 06:28 AM PDT
Furthermore, mobile communications have resulted in us working longer hours, too. That means modern technology is likely to be thanked for the wonderful state of the global eco … never mind. Anyway, the shocking findings come from staffing firm Kelly Services' "Global Workforce Index" (via eMarketer), which shows that no less than 78% of workers in the US and Canada - across all generations - believed that gadgets such as laptop computers and mobile phones have effectively increased their productivity. Over half of the respondents even said they felt ‘much more’ productive, and only 2% said it made them worse workers (I’d love to meet them someday).
Other key findings: more than seven in 10 workers from all countries considered the ability to work outside of the office a ‘positive’ development, and 87% felt an office telecommuting policy would be attractive to them as employees. In addition, 30% in North America, 33% in Europe and 41% in the Asia-Pacific region agreed that they were working longer hours because of mobile communications. Never one to accept study findings without checking and then double-checking the facts, we’ll conduct a little research of our own:
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| Dotopen Opens For Business - It’s Like FriendFeed For Companies Posted: 24 Jul 2009 03:30 AM PDT
We’ve heard that a million times before, but I got an early peak of the platform when I was in Spain for the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference last month and there is one thing that I think differentiates dotopen from the likes of LinkedIn, XING, etc.: it’s not so much focused on connecting people in companies than it is to provide an up-to-date, stream of information on the company itself and start from there. When I got the demo, I immediately thought of it like some sort of ‘FriendFeed for companies’, and the startup’s founders Rudy De Waele and Carles Ferreiro said there are effectively some comparisons to be made in that regard. The idea is for companies to set up a public profile on the service and dynamically and manually populate it with streams of information, creating a virtual ecosystem of businesses that decision makers could use to find new partners and clients. I registered a startup I’m involved with myself, Oxynade, to see what kind of data can be added to the public profile (which you can find here). Apart from basic company information, you can add streams and social networking profiles for key management, indicate what you’re looking for as a company (e.g. ‘new partnerships with media publishers’) and insert a stream of feeds from blogs, Twitter accounts, etc. You can also detail your financials and which companies you’ve partnered, affiliated and/or competing with. You could deem dotopen to be a potential competitor for our own CrunchBase, but the difference is that dotopen focuses more on wrapping an open community feel to the service targeted at company management only, while CrunchBase is a free wiki-based database accessible to everyone. It’s an interesting concept, but time will tell if it will be able to attract enough companies to register a profile and effectively use the platform to expand their business. As usual, there’s the chicken or egg problem: dotopen can only be really useful when there are lots of companies sharing data, so the goal would be to try and get as much traction from day one (that would be today) and make the experience good enough for them to share and recommend the service to others. What’s your take?
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| SearchMe Searching For A Buyer Posted: 24 Jul 2009 12:42 AM PDT
The search engine first launched in March 2008, and has raised around $44 million in venture capital. Sequoia Capital has backed them from the start, beginning with a $400,000 seed round in 2005. SearchMe has an innovative visual approach to search that lets users scroll through screen snapshots quickly. It is particularly appealing on the iPhone, and has been one of my favorite apps since launching late last year. It’s something that is just perfect for a mobile device with a large touchscreen. Here’s SearchMe on the iPhone: Sadly traffic to SearchMe’s main site never really took off. It grew fairly respectably to 1.8 million monthly unique visitors in March (comscore worldwide), but much of that traffic was generated from paid traffic (which was freely admitted by the company). When the marketing ended, traffic dipped to about 600,000 unique visitors in May. For more traffic data see Quantcast, which is directly measuring their traffic. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| ChaCha Never Lets Me Down, Even When They Let Me Down. They Raise $4 Million More Posted: 23 Jul 2009 09:38 PM PDT
So when I saw an email from the company’s PR person this evening, I had high hopes to be entertained. They didn’t let me down. “ChaCha Funding” read the subject line. One thing this company hasn’t failed at is raising large amounts of cash - maybe as much as $58 million. In the email they ask me if we’d like exclusive funding news, so long as we only talk to them. I said sure but went ahead and looked up the funding filing on the SEC website anyway (they raised $4 million). But the best part was their almost immediate response letting me know that they no longer wanted to talk. This entire exchange, from offer to acceptance to revocation of the offer, took 27 minutes. So there you have it. ChaCha has raised another $4 million from some investor or investors. Whoever it is, we may never know.
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| Twitter Unveils A Live-Updating Search Widget Posted: 23 Jul 2009 08:07 PM PDT
The widget, found here, allows you to enter any search query, along with a title and a caption. The widget will then be built next to the input fields so you can see what it looks like. You can also edit its color and dimensions. If you like it, you simply grab the code and put it on a webpage. From there, it will continuously update in real-time with new results from the query you set. You can even do more advanced searches using parameters like “OR”. In their example widget, Twitter uses the following search string “San Francisco OR @sf OR #sf” to make a live-updating San Francisco Twitter Search widget. And you can also loop old results if you’re doing a search for something that will have a low volume of tweets, so the widget doesn’t appear so static. There are no shortage of third-parties that do widgets like these, but an official Twitter one will no doubt be useful to many people for events or personal use. It’s not quite the useful “track” functionality that Twitter used to have (which would ping you when a keyword you were searching for was said), but it’s getting closer. We made one of these real-time widgets for TechCrunch, but the code you get doesn’t appear to work too nicely with WordPress posts, so the picture will have to do for now. This new feature follows Twitter rolling out its “Twitter 101″ guide for businesses to use the service earlier tonight. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Google Voice Gives Out Free Business Cards, Makes Switching Numbers Slightly Less Irritating Posted: 23 Jul 2009 07:01 PM PDT
The multicolored cards are definitely going to catch the eye of anyone you hand them to, and they also do a great job at highlighting the most important thing on the card: your new number. And while you may not be too keen to have everyone start calling you rather than using Email (which is going to be one of the side effects), you can always take advantage of Google Voice’s automatic voicemail transcription. Of course, there’s a good chance that none of this will be necessary once Google Voice introduces number portability, which would let you keep your current number and transfer it to the service. We’ve previously confirmed that a very small number of people have already been able to port their numbers over, and that Google hopes to roll it out later this year, though the logistical hurdles involved are huge. This isn’t the first time Google has given away free business cards in honor of a new product launch. In May the search giant gave away free sets of cards to commemorate the launch of the inclusion of Google Profiles in search results (the cards instruct people to simply ‘Google’ your name). They’re definitely great keepsakes, but I’ve got to be honest — every person I’ve handed one to has given me a really strange look. Thanks to Jeff Martens for the tip. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Twitter Launches “Twitter 101″, Step One Of The Business Plan Posted: 23 Jul 2009 06:03 PM PDT
While Stone only gave a brief overview of what it would entail, as the name implies, it sounds like it will basically be a beginners guide for using the service effectively. Something like this is crucial if Twitter is going to convince businesses to sign up en masse. When most people, let alone businesses, look at Twitter for the first time, they still have no idea what they are supposed to do with it. So this guide will be a set of use cases, techniques and best practices, among other tips, to help users get acclimated to the service. “The level of engagement is less than the level of awareness about it, and we want to change that,” Stone said. Twitter wants to teach people to use the service via these docs. And also get people hooked on trends and searches of their brands, Stone noted. It’s through businesses using Twitter that the service plans to make money. While there are no plans to ever charge regular people to use it, businesses that are either selling items or providing support to customers through Twitter, are likely to be charged down the road. But Twitter needs to make sure the service is as business-friendly as possible first. Hence, a “Twitter 101″ service. Again, look for Twitter 101, which we imagine will be some kind of site linked to from the main Twitter site, either later today or tomorrow. Update: And here it is. As expected, it’s a site that contains documentation for how businesses can best use Twitter (you can also get the documents in PDF form). Here’s what Stone says on the blog:
The site contains six sections. They are: “What is Twitter”, “Getting started”, “Learn the lingo”, “Best practices”, “Case studies” and “Other resources”. One thing we noticed is that the site contains links to a new subdomain: business.twitter.com (it looks like a lot of these links have been changed back to twitter.com, but business.twitter.com is there, and it works). It works on and off, but if you put in a brand name, like “bestbuy,” it will redirect to that company’s Twitter page. This would seem to indicate that Twitter may be thinking about hosting its business accounts on this business subdomain. Or perhaps that is how they will allow businesses to access their special accounts (when those eventually launch). It does not appear to work for personal accounts. Another thing that immediately jumps out about Twitter 101 are the case studies. They come from the likes of Dell, JetBlue, Teusner Wines, Current, Tasti D Lite, CoffeeGroundz, Etsy, NAKEDPizza, America Apparel and Pepsi. They are pretty well done, and show that even early on in Twitter’s lifespan, without much support, companies are having no trouble figuring out how to use the service for business purposes. Here’s Twitter’s own definition of “tweet”:
Here’s how Twitter explains its own name:
Here’s what Twitter says it can do for businesses:
Below, find some screenshots of the sections.
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| Biz Stone Talks Twitter At Fortune Brainstorm Posted: 23 Jul 2009 05:33 PM PDT
My real time notes follow. I can say with certainty that the Twitter hacking incident will be brought up as part of this conversation. My Notes: An audience poll shows 65% of attendees use Twitter, but 77% say they prefer Facebook to Twitter. First question from Lashinsky: “Will Twitter make money?” Biz says “yes!” - company has 55 employees now. - size of the service: Biz says they are 1% into the journey of Twitter, and they have a lot of growing to do. “The level of awareness is way bigger than the level of engagement.” - How they will get more user engagement: start by showing users Twitter search and show results on your product, etc. Then they ask how they can get involved. “We have to position our product better,” says Biz. Search and trends are ways to get immediate engagement from users. - Why isn’t Twitter making money? Biz: Lots of people like Twitter and want it to succeed. They want Twitter to make money so that the company sticks around. Biz says that Twitter is being used by people and companies around the world, and if the network is robust and reliable, there are lots of ways to make money. But they need to optimize for value before they optimize for profit, he says. - Twitter’s business plan will begin this year, he says (which correlates to the notes we published last week). First step - launching today or tomorrow Twitter 101, a set of use cases, techniques, best practices, etc to help new users and companies use Twitter effectively. Will post today or tomorrow, Biz says. Biz is excited about Best Buy’s use of Twitter to engage with customers and provide better customer experience. - on the hacked documents: Biz says they are thought documents more than anything else, gives people an idea of the scope and level of what they are thinking of, nothing more. “We’re thinking big,” he says. - Biz says the easy business model is value added services, like verified accounts, that they can charge for. Advertising is less interesting, he says. - On whether he will sue TechCrunch: We’re still investigating, he says. - Biz says they are preparing to launch lots of new features, really looking at a golden age for Twitter. New features that are coming - add more value to users, watch how users are using Twitter, bring new features that make sense. - Discovery on Twitter - how will they do a better job of this. Biz says they need to assign weight to users or specific Tweets to do a better job of surfacing Tweets. - On doing good in the world v. making money: “We want to have a real positive impact on the world, and the only way to do that is to make tons and tons of money.” Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Y Combinator’s Mixpanel Takes Stat Tracking Beyond Google Analytics Posted: 23 Jul 2009 05:23 PM PDT
Founder Suhail Doshi says that most significantly large companies, like Slide for example, have entire teams dedicated to tracking user behavior. If you throw a virtual sheep at your friend using one of Slide’s apps, you can be sure that every element of that action — including who the sheep’s receipient was, the time you threw the sheep, and even what prompted you to throw the sheep in the first place — is being tracked. Unfortunately, most fledgling companies simply don’t have the resources to put together this kind of analytics tracking. Mixpanel solves this problem by giving developers a library of stat tracking functions that they can quickly integrate with their code, saving them the development costs that would have been required to build their own analytics tools. Doshi says this can take as little as ten minutes to integrate, requiring only a line of code wherever there’s something you want to track. After implementing these functions in their code, companies can track stats from the Mixpanel control panel, which updates in real time. Beyond tracking stats like the number of times a certain song is played or a given feature is used, Mixpanel can also do funnel analysis, which allows startups to measure when in a signup flow users begin to drop off (this allows them to figure out the pain points and lower barriers to entry as much as possible). Mixpanel’s pricing is based on usage, which it measures by looking at the number of ‘points’ of data the service tracks. The company is already in use by a number of other startups (many of them fellow YC alumni) including Posterous and HeyZap. Analytics and stat tracking is extremely important to the growth of any company, especially one that’s trying to gain users for the first time. Mixpanel is definitely honing in on a large market — its ultimate success will be decided by how useful the data it collects really is, and in how many datapoints it can track that free services can’t.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Project Fair Bid Raises $4.5 Million For Stealth Auction Platform Posted: 23 Jul 2009 04:40 PM PDT
Project Fair Bid, a stealth startup that is creating a Swoopo-like Auction platform, has raised $4.5 million in funding, according to a SEC filing. The funding was raised from the Mayfield Fund, First Round Capital, and Foundation Capital, with Raj Kapoor, Charles Moldow and Josh Kopelman joining the board of directors. Details on Project Fair Bid are limited but we hear the startup hopes to reinvent and legitimize the Swoopo business model by using a different auction methodology to improve consumer engagement and retention. Swoopo’s business model has been criticized for its alternative bidding system. Swoopo uses a unique pricing model that lets you to purchase virtual "bids" for 75 cents, which can then be used to bid on goods ranging from video games to high-end televisions. Whenever you bid on an item, its price increases by fifteen cents and an extra 20 seconds are tacked on to the duration of the auction. Oftentimes items wind up selling substantially below their market value, but this lower price comes with some risk: if you bid on an item, you don't get that 75 cent bid back when the auction concludes. Even if the item winds up selling below its normal market price, Swoopo can make money from these bids (the site does sometimes lose money on an auction, but relies on the proceeds of other auctions to cover them). But Swoopo may be on to something—since launching in late 2008, the site has grown to almost 2 million members in Canada, Germany, the U.S., Austria, and Switzerland and closed a $10 million funding round led by August Capital. Photo credit/Flickr/walkinboston. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Why Is Google Latitude A Web App And Not A Native App? Because Apple Said So. Posted: 23 Jul 2009 03:59 PM PDT
Here’s their actual wording:
Hmm. We all know that Apple and Google are pretty buddy-buddy, after all, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple board (though it’s not clear for how long). But something about this sounds a bit odd. Apple dictating product decisions to Google, and Google listening. There has been talk of this in the past as well. And perhaps now we know why it took Google so long to get the service on what is the most popular smartphone out there right now. This is also a bit odd because if Apple is so worried about a confusion between Latitude and Maps, why not just build Latitude into Maps? Maybe that’s coming down the road? Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| iPhone Security Is “Broken” - Business Users Take Note Posted: 23 Jul 2009 03:45 PM PDT  An Apple expert and hacker has shown that the iPhone, in all its various forms and moltings, is child's play to compromise. This comes despite assurances from Apple regarding the 3GS's encryption feature. Bad news for businesspeople of the 21st century, who have glommed onto the iPhone and its service halo like no other device. The wonder-phone has certainly changed the way smartphones and other devices are made, but this isn't the first time Apple's security measures have been described as being seriously lacking. It seems that with a little creative coding, or access to an insecure computer, the iPhone can be cracked wide open. The encryption doesn't really even enter into the equation, since you can just have the phone read off the information you want. There hasn't been much of a reason to hack iPhones yet — you might get a few Facebook passwords, or some contact info, but now that the phone is gaining traction in the business world, there may actually be something worth stealing on them. And it's not very hard to do. I like this quote: "I don't think any of us have ever seen encryption implemented so poorly before."
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| Google Latitude Comes To The iPhone. No, It Doesn’t Run In The Background. Posted: 23 Jul 2009 03:25 PM PDT
Latitude, like all other third-party iPhone apps, cannot run in the background on the device. While you might think this would be extremely obvious, there is a big difference between Latitude and many of the other apps built for the iPhone: Latitude is entirely browser-based. Yes, there is no native Latitude app, and there was some thought that since the mobile version of Safari on the iPhone can technically run in the background, that maybe it would allow apps like Latitude to also do the same. Sadly, that is not the case.
And so we very well could see Latitude stagnate in the same pool the other location-based iPhone services are in, because they cannot do location in the background. That’s too bad, because there’s a lot of potential here.
You can find it on your iPhone simply by directing your browser here: http://google.com/latitude. As with all other web apps, you can create an icon on your main iPhone screen, simply hitting the bookmarks button (the “+” sign in your browser). Despite Latitude and Gmail remaining web-only apps for the iPhone, Google says it remains committed to making native apps for the device where it sees fit as well. It also notes that it was Apple who thought it would be best to have Latitude as a web app for the device. Interesting.
That begs the question: Why not just have Latitude as an option built-in to the Maps application? I’m betting that eventually we may see that. And, if I really want to go out on a limb, I’m wondering if Apple wouldn’t allow Latitude running on Maps to eventually run in the background. We know it is definitely thinking about how to solve the background issue. Despite being browser-based, Latitude on the iPhone does appear to run really smoothly. And it has a nice overlaid menu system to do things like search or show traffic on your map. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Amazon’s Bezos Apologizes For The “Stupid” And “Thoughtless” Kindle Incident Posted: 23 Jul 2009 02:55 PM PDT
Amazon quickly admitted that the move was a mistake to the press with a bland statement, but that wasn’t enough. So today, right before the company announced its earnings, CEO Jeff Bezos personally apologized for the incident as follows:
While the company had its reasons (apparently, the versions it deleted were unauthorized versions) and did give refunds, it didn’t change the fact that it was invading devices and taking back content which those people had (at least to their knowledge) legally bought. And it knows that was wrong, which is good. Companies make mistakes, and we’ll chalk this up to a big, dumb one by Amazon, because they’ve now said as much. But what also troubles me is that while Amazon apologizes for incidents like this, it says nothing about other sketchy moves. Like how it is forcing mobile applications to be taken down because they access their APIs in a way that they don’t like (even though it’s fine to use the same calls on desktop versions of the apps). And the whole idea of companies being able to remotely wipe content that you’ve bought is still troubling (Apple can do it to on your iPhone, but hasn’t used that power yet). But welcome to the 21st century. Not only is Big Brother watching, he’s got a backdoor passcode into your devices — and a kill switch. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Amazon: Kindle Growth Is “Very Strong”, But That’s All We’re Saying Posted: 23 Jul 2009 02:48 PM PDT
Szkutak had little interest in getting into questions about the Kindle, other than to repeat that growth was “very strong” multiple times. When one analyst asked what kind of trends Amazon is seeing with regard to the Kindle cannibalizing book sales, Szkutak danced around the question, stating, “We’re not doing any updates in terms of the units, in terms of specific numbers. We’re seeing very good growth. It’s exceeding our expectations.” One analyst also asked about Amazon’s recent decision to lower the price of the Kindle to $299, attempting to explore if the move was a result of cheaper production costs or if Amazon did it to increase market penetration. Szkutak vaguely responded, saying that the Kindle was currently getting better economies but not really answering the question: “We certainly are getting better economies, and given the growth in Kindle devices..we think that’s an appropriate price for customers, we think it’s helpful given the growth that we’re seeing.” Another analyst asked about Amazon’s plans to finally bring the Kindle to an international audience (it has only been available in the US until now). Szkutak didn’t rule out the idea, but didn’t commit either, stating, “Kindle International is certainly an opportunity. Our customers have certainly expressed an interest. We’ve had a practice of not talking about what we might do, but certainly it’s an opportunity.” I’ll be very surprised if we don’t see more news in this area soon, as this is a huge untapped market. Amazon’s lack of transparency is especially frustrating because the Kindle may well be something of a canary in a coal mine for the entire Ebook industry. No other E-book device has gotten as much exposure, and frankly the Kindle is likely the best device out there. Without statistics about how well Amazon’s Ebooks are selling, or even knowing if the Kindle is going to be available to the (very large) international audience, publishers and authors being left in the dark. We’ve done our best to shed some light on the matter: according to our historically reliable sources, as of April, the Kindle 2 had sold 300,000 units at a pace twice that of the original device. We should note that while Amazon’s acquisition of Zappos was briefly brought up during the call, few questions were focused on it. Also interesting: only a few hours before the call, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos apologized for its bizarre decision to remotely delete copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from the Kindle. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Microsoft’s Money Pit. Every Dollar Of Online Revenue Is Wiped Out By A Dollar Of Loss Posted: 23 Jul 2009 02:35 PM PDT  Microsoft just announced quarterly earnings and they are not pretty. Total revenues are down 17 percent to $13 billion, and net income is down 29 percent to $3 billion. Every business got hit hard, but the worst-performing business by far was the online business. It had the biggest operating loss of $732 million, which was $1 million more than its revenues of $731 million. That means that every dollar of online revenue was wiped out by a dollar of operating loss. And those operating losses really stack up. For its fiscal year (which ended in June), the online business showed an operating loss of $2.2 billion, nearly twice as much as the year before. Despite the much-ballyhooed launch of Bing, search revenue was flat in the quarter was flat. You’ve got to wonder how much of the ballooning operating loss is going into Bing, and whether those investments will ever pan out. The client business (Windows), isn’t doing so hot either. Revenues in the quarter were down 29 percent to $3.1 billion, and it made $1 billion less in operating profit. The Entertainment business (Xbox) saw quarterly revenues decline 25 percent, but managed to reduce operating loses to only $130 million. 1.2 million Xboxes were sold in the quarter, and each Xbox owner has now bought an average of 8.6 games. At least servers and Tools under Bob Muglia seems to be holding up. Its revenues of $3.5 billion were only down by $200 million and its operating profit of $1.3 billion was essentially flat. (Click on segment breakdown below to enlarge).
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| Review: T-Mobile myTouch 3G With Google Android Posted: 23 Jul 2009 01:56 PM PDT  It's been twenty long months since the announcement of Android and nine months since its handset debut, but it's finally picking up steam. On August 5th, the HTC-made T-Mobile myTouch 3G will become the second Android handset to make its way to the shelves of a US carrier. In the time its taken for T-Mobile to cross the t's and dot the i's, we've already had a chance to review HTC's next handset: the bigger, badder, and (arguably) better Hero. Alas, the Hero isn't yet confirmed for any US carrier, so we'll take what we can get. Was the myTouch 3G worth the wait? Read on for our review.
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| Google’s Ronny Conway Joins Andreessen Horowitz Posted: 23 Jul 2009 12:50 PM PDT
This is the first confirmed outside hire by Andreessen Horowitz, a $300 million venture fund founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The fund was first announced earlier this month. Conway will become an Associate at the new fund starting sometime in August. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| The Online Payment Wars Continue: PayPal Officially Announces Flexible API Posted: 23 Jul 2009 12:34 PM PDT
While Ebay’s Q2 earnings yesterday showed that its marketplace business was slow, the company’s revenue was boosted by continued growth in its online payments business, including PayPal and BillMeLater. Both businesses saw 11 % growth in revenue in the quarter, compared to a year ago, and saw a 20% increase in registered accounts from last year, with 75.4 million accounts. On the heels of this good news, today PayPal is officially announcing the launch of its flexible payments API, called Adaptive Payments (which we scooped a few weeks ago here). The new platform will officially open up to developers in November but will be accepting beta testers until then. Basically the new API is designed to give developers full access to PayPal's features, allowing them a lot more freedom in building applications which include the ability to accept and distribute payments. PayPal’s President Scott Thompson says that developers will basically be able to do anything they want off of the PayPal platform, emphasizing the “global connectivity” of PayPal (transactions can be conducted in 19 currencies). He says $2000 flows through PayPal’s system every second, 365 days a year. Thompson says that what differentiates this new innovation is the ability to maintain security, while still extending the API far from PayPal. Very similar to Amazon's Flexible Payments Service (FPS), the Adaptive Payments API handles payments between a sender of a payment and one or more receivers of the payment. Adaptive Payments allows almost the same functionality as FPS. The new API lets developers become a payment aggregator, which we are told is something against PayPal's current Terms of Service. Amazon's FPS also lets developers aggregate payments. Moreover, Paypal's Adaptive Payments has built in micropayments support, another feature of FPS. PayPal says that they think they can be a viable micropayments vehicle, but won’t reveal more information about what the support entails. Microsoft cloud computing platform Azure is also utilizing Adaptive Payments to let developers who are building applications using PayPal seamless integrate their applications with Azure’s platform. Microsoft is working with PayPal to help developers easily embed billing and payment functionality into applications built off Azure and will offer interoperability between Azure and Adaptive Payments. Some of the offerings of Adaptive Payments are sure to be attractive to developers. In what PayPal calls "Chained Payments," developers can create applications that enable a sender to send a single payment to a primary receiver who may keep part of the payment and pay other, secondary receivers with the remainder of the funds. For example, an application might be an online travel agency that handles bookings for airfare, hotel reservations, and car rentals. The sender sees only the travel site as the primary receiver. But that site could allocate the payment for its commission and the actual cost of services provided by other merchants. PayPal would deduct the money from the sender's account and deposit it in both the primary travel site's account and the secondary receivers' accounts. PayPal has decoupled the approval process from the transaction, giving sellers more flexibility of how and when sender approval process can take place. PayPal says that over the next year, they plan to unveil more APIs to encourage developer to build of the platform. Adaptive Payments will also offer "Parallel Payments," which would let a sender send a single payment to multiple receivers. An example of this type of application might be a shopping cart that lets a buyer pay for items from several merchants with one payment. The shopping cart would allocate the payment to the merchants who actually provided the items. PayPal would then deduct money from the sender's account and deposits it in the receivers' accounts. Michael Ivey, founder and CEO of TwitPay, a way to send money over Twitter, is using PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API. Off of TwitPay’s payments platform, you can pay multiple recipients in one PayPal transaction. LiveOps, an outsourcing marketplace and platform, is using the Adaptive Payments platform for several months. The platform uses PayPal to invoice; money is dynamically routed to workers from businesses. LiveWork says the advantage of using PayPal is that there is no credit card or financial information stored on LiveWork, with security being completely outsourced to PayPal. PayPal says that pricing for Adaptive Payments will be announced in November. It’s unclear if the plan will be competitive with Amazon's FPS pricing. The launch of the new API and services should surely heat up the competition between PayPal and Amazon (which bought Zappos yesterday). Amazon now has Amazon Payments and the beta of FPS, which allows more flexibility for developers than PayPal’s previous Direct Payments API offering. Now, PayPal has struck back with its own flexible API and is trying to engage the developer community to freely build applications off of its platform. PI, so it should be interesting to see where developers go. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| TicketFlow: You Know, For Tickets Posted: 23 Jul 2009 12:33 PM PDT
TicketFlow is the self-described Kayak of ticket sites. You type in an artist, team, play, or musical and it digs through the various websites to find tickets that match your requirements. Want to see a cheap Bob Dylan concert? Head down to Virginia. Want to watch Toxic Avenger: The Musical? Why?
The found, Justin Hartzman, worked with a buddy to aggregate all of the ticket sites into one simple-to-use interface. One other site, FanSnap, performs a similar function and also allows you to chose your seats at the venue. The system also includes a suggestion engine. You tell it what you want to do and in what city - concert, play, sporting event - and it will find events in your time frame and budget. It seemed to work fairly well in New York except for an unfortunate typo in the application dialog but, as we all know, nobody is perfick. See if you can spot it…
Generally this is an interesting and untapped market. The live music and event discovery world is still in its infancy and aside from the obvious sources - mostly weekly papers and some fan sites - you’re not going to hear that Willie and Bobby will be playing in your neck of the woods until it’s too late. The most important aspect here is obviously price comparisons, something that was once time-consuming. Sadly, this does not do a search into the infinite future, ensuring that my life will be forever free of the pan flute for months - if not years - to come. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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