The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Redux Is Like FriendFeed Redux, But The TV Feature Is Killer
- 3jam Launches Virtual Numbers, Takes Google Voice Head-On
- Panels Network: Overlays That Aim To Inform, Rather Than Annoy
- iPhone Devs: Lite/Free Mobile Apps Really Pay Off
- Nimbuzz Releases App For Android, And Research Into Our IM Habits
- Another iPhone App Tries To Kill The Business Card
- ipadio To Release Smart New iPhone App For Audio Broadcasting
- Wikia Seems To Have Found An Audience For Wikianswers
- What If: The New New York Times
- AOL Newsroom Now Has (Wow) 1,500 Writers
- M&A Activity Heats Up In July To $9.6 Billion
- New Twitter Cross-Posts To Facebook Have Users Bewildered. (Update: Facebook Bug To Blame)
- JamLegend’s ‘Guitar Hero For The Web’ Now Lets You Upload And Play Any Song You’d Like
- Is the iPhone Causing Apple to Lose the Plot?
- Roger McNamee: Judgment Day
- Yahoo Shareholders Transfer $2.9 Billion To Microsoft Shareholders
- AT&T: Don’t Blame Us For The iPhone’s Google Voice Ban
- Yahoo Got Binged
- The Hangover: AOL Gives Time Warner’s Quarterly Results A Headache, Again
- Wall Street’s Reaction To The Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal: Not Good
- Inside AP’s New News DRM System
| Redux Is Like FriendFeed Redux, But The TV Feature Is Killer Posted: 30 Jul 2009 08:55 AM PDT
Officially, Redux says it’s a “personalized entertainment guide to the web.” But really, that’s what most social sites are these days. We need new features to distinguish them. And solid usability. And that’s what Redux offers in this video area. The main problem I have with online video is that there’s way too much of it. I visit YouTube, but I have no idea what to watch. If I try to browse random videos, most of it is crap, and really, it’s just a waste of my time to do that. Most of the videos I consume, friends send me, and that’s exactly the idea behind Redux’s video area. But because it’s an actual video player, the sharing and watching of videos is seamless. You go to the area and you are served up videos that your friends have liked (or, given “props” to, in their words). If you like the video too, you can mark it as such, and it will send it to your other friends. You can also comment on the video, right from the player. I’m sitting here trying to write this post, but I find myself lost in video watching now, it’s quite addictive. Sure, FriendFeed and other services allow you to share videos and watch them from within the service, but the way Redux does it is much nicer, and makes it easier to lose yourself in the content. The idea behind all of this is a larger one. “In 2-3 years when we turn on our TV we’ll have the same content discovery problem,” Redux co-founder David McIntosh tells us. The site has been around for about 5 months now in private testing. So far, there are over 5,000 users, but now it’s time to expand. As such Redux is making 500 invites available to TechCrunch readers. Simply follow this link to sign up. So what’s the business model behind all of this? Well, it’s two-fold. First, there will eventually be video advertisements place din the video section. The other idea is based around micropayments. Say you like the show Mad Men, and only want to see content related to it, you could pay a small fee and get access to just that content. There is also the possibility of using micropayments to give users “super prop” privileges. Right now the video clips only include YouTube, but we’re told additional services will be added in the future.
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| 3jam Launches Virtual Numbers, Takes Google Voice Head-On Posted: 30 Jul 2009 08:13 AM PDT
3jam offers many of the same core features offered by Google Voice, including the ability to have one phone number ring multiple phones, as well as an online interface for managing voicemail and text messages, though there are some more advanced features that it lacks (more on that later). But it does have a few features that Google Voice doesn’t, like the ability to receive calls on Skype, AOL, and Yahoo Messenger (why waste minutes when you’re sitting in front your your computer anyway?)
3jam also has some impressive SMS functionality, which makes sense given the company’s history with SMS. One of these is a group SMS chat, that lets you designate a new phone number as a ‘group number’ and then pick out which of your contacts is in your group. Every time someone within the group sends a message to that number, it will be sent to everyone else in the group as well. Outsiders can attempt to send messages to the special number, but it won’t have any effect. 3jam is also trying to tackle one of the biggest problems facing Google Voice: number portability, which allows you to transfer your current phone number to the new service. We’ve heard that Google is trying to work out the details to get his feature out the door some time this year, but it poses many logistical problems. For one, users could potentially cancel their carrier contracts on accident, leading to hefty fees. And the wait to get a number transfered from the carrier to the service can take weeks. But that isn’t stopping 3jam. The company is letting users transfer their numbers despite these hurdles, though users will be warned that the process may take as long as 45 days. So 3jam has some things going for it, but it still lags behind Google Voice in some key areas. 3jam lacks many of Google Voice’s more advanced features, like call filtering options — Google Voice lets you set up lists of users and filter calls accordingly (for example I could send certain people straight to voicemail after 6PM but let my family call me at any time), while 3jam doesn’t offer any similar features. And 3jam costs money, with plans starting at around $5 a month (Google Voice is free for most features). Of course, the market for this kind of service is huge, so 3jam may have a chance even with Google Voice in the same space, but it still has many obstacles ahead. The concept is still quite novel to most people, and some may resist putting their telephony service in the hands of a startup. And 3Jam is going to have to face the same problems Google has when it tries to bring its service to smartphone handsets, though carriers may be less intimated by a startup than they are of Google. Despite these challenges, 3jam is off to a fairly good start. The company is offereing a white label product that has been licensed by Peek, a company that makes small mobile communication devices. Now for the bigger challenge: getting normal people to understand and sign up for the service. For more, check out the site’s presentation here.
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| Panels Network: Overlays That Aim To Inform, Rather Than Annoy Posted: 30 Jul 2009 08:00 AM PDT
A key feature of these overlays is that they’re not just about links, they also pop-up over ads. So, for example, when you hover over a 125×125 ad on TechCrunch (see an example on this demo page), you can find out information about the advertiser. Think of them as kind of like an excerpt from Wikipedia about the company. And it’s not just standard information about the company. These panels also house screenshots of the company’s website, a map of where they are located, any recent news about the company, job listings, financial news, reviews, and also the ability to shop (if applicable). And the panels remember what section you last clicked on, so the information you find most relevant will always be front and center. The idea is to make the ads more useful, by giving more information about the companies. As a result of this, they’re seeing a 50% to 500% increase in click-throughs, Panels Network CEO Craig Barnes tells us. So how does Panels make money off of any of this? Well, the idea at first is advertising. Around 20% of Panels are taken up by contextual ads. But eventually, the company has more elaborate plans, including possibly working with companies to tailor their own panels, and control the way they are shown on other sites. The service, opening in beta today, will be free, at least initially. But the company is being selective for who they will let in at first, with only a few hundred users being allowed to sign up. Installing the panels on your site is as easy as placing a line of code on the page. Down the line, Panels Network also hopes to make an iPhone app with the same information you see in the panels. The idea there is to get users used to the idea of the information found in the panels. The Portland, Oregon-based company has raised $2.5 million from Barnes as well as several angel investors, so far.
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| iPhone Devs: Lite/Free Mobile Apps Really Pay Off Posted: 30 Jul 2009 07:14 AM PDT  The creator of iCombat wrote an analysis of his experience making and giving away a free "lite" version of his app alongside his paid, full version. The result? It makes economic sense to create a lite version early on and update it often to goose the users into downloading - and paying attention to - your app. His global conversion rate was 9% which meant that a considerable cohort of lite users bought the full version. He discovered a number of best practices for iPhone devs and allowed us to post them here. His most important takeaway? He should have made a lite app much earlier in the game. The conversion rate once the lite app was made available was quite impressive and meant a lot of lost revenue.
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| Nimbuzz Releases App For Android, And Research Into Our IM Habits Posted: 30 Jul 2009 06:05 AM PDT
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| Another iPhone App Tries To Kill The Business Card Posted: 30 Jul 2009 05:56 AM PDT
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| ipadio To Release Smart New iPhone App For Audio Broadcasting Posted: 30 Jul 2009 04:46 AM PDT
However, a new entrant, ipadio, is potentially about to steal AudioBoo’s thunder with a new iPhone app which covers all the bases: live streaming audio into a web page; high quality uploads from the iPhone; live phone-in service; upcoming Android app - plus, crucially, a business model. Released to the public at the end of April the existing iPadio iPhone app is simple enough. However, not unlike BlogTalkRadio, it was based around making a phone call to get your audio online. But the new version of the existing ipadio iPhone app [iTunes link], poised for approval in the App store, brings a ton more functionality to the platform. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Wikia Seems To Have Found An Audience For Wikianswers Posted: 30 Jul 2009 04:44 AM PDT
We already have dozens of those, including popular sites like WikiAnswers.com (not affiliated with the Wikia service but with a terribly confusing name resemblance), Yahoo Answers, Mahalo Answers, Linkedin Answers (anyone else spotting a naming pattern?) and a plethora of similar services. Wikia thought there was room for one more regardless and was going to try and make a difference by focusing on an open, freely licensed community where copyright remains with the user who submits the content at all times. And unlike Wikia Search, the startup’s disappointing attempt at creating a crowd-sourced search engine experience that was shut down by the company a couple of months ago, Wikianswers seems to have gotten a bit of traction with that strategy. Wikia CEO Gil Penchina tells us Wikianswers recently hit some significant milestones: the site apparently now boasts 200,000 questions of which 50,000 are answered, and it’s generating a healthy 1 million page views per month. Granted, this is still a far cry from the traffic some of its more established competitors are seeing - comScore pegs WikiAnswers.com at 79 million monthly page views in the U.S. alone and Yahoo! Answers at 4x that, for example - but Wikia of course only launched its Q&A service about half a year ago. Much too early to tell if Wikianswers will prove to be a winner for the company, but the current milestones suggest its future may at the very least be a lot brighter than the ill-fated Wikia Search service ever was.
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| What If: The New New York Times Posted: 30 Jul 2009 01:34 AM PDT
I keep wondering what would happen if the top 10% of the writers at the NYTimes just…walked out. I know it’s crazy, but let’s just explore this a bit for the heck of it. Today the company is worth just a little over $1 billion. As recently as five years ago it was worth nearly 5x that much. You have to go back to the early 1980s to see a lower stock price. I certainly don’t think the NYTimes is going to be shutting down any time soon. The company still pulls in nearly $3 billion a year in revenue, down just 10% or so from 2005. But massive overhead, and more than 9,300 employees, make profitability an increasingly difficult goal for The Gray Lady. Her age is showing. Journalism Isn’t Dead. Just The Old Business Part Of It. A couple of weeks ago I met the Politico guys just before they taped their Charlie Rose segment. I watched them live from the green room at the show, and read Michael Wolff’s excellent Vanity Fair article on the young company. Their news room is 100 strong and they have more people in the White House Bureau than any other brand. They have roughly the same traffic as we do - 7 million monthly visitors - but they’ve been around just half the time. How did they do it? The site was founded by well known political journalists who bailed to start their own company. They took their personal brands and credentials with them, and the readers followed. Today they are profitable - largely because they launched a three-day-a-week print version of the site. Amazing. Print isn’t dead (yet). Just the overhead is. And earlier today I got a glimpse at what AOL is up to - they are hiring all the journalists being fired and laid off by the newspapers and magazines. And they now have a news room 1,500 journalists and editors strong. Amazingly, failing old media is throwing away their most valuable assets. And AOL is eagerly picking those assets up for a song. Before anyone knows it, AOL may be the most powerful news outlet in the world. Journalists still matter. A lot. Especially the good ones. What if… So that got me thinking about the NYTimes. $3 billion in revenue. 16 million monthly unique visitors and 124 million page views (Comscore worldwide, May 2009). 9,000+ employees. 1,200 news staff, and just 400 or so writers, critics, correspondents and columnists. I’m still waiting to hear how many editors the paper has on top of those 400, but it’s probably a total full time news staff of no more than 450 people. I don’t really read the NYTImes beyond the technology section. But I’m guessing that the top performers in the news room, say the best 5%-10% of the writers and editors, produce 50% or more of the real value of the newspaper. The hungriest reporters. The best writers. The most competitive and aggressive editors. What if that group, the most valuable assets that the NYTimes controls, simply walked out of the building and started their own company? What would that look like? The New New York Times The New New York Times, or NNYT, would have a writing staff of say 50 people. These are among the best journalists in the world, and lets say they wanted to pay themselves $200,000/year, a top salary for a reporter of that stature. That’s just $10 million a year in payroll expenses. Call it $12 million with benefits. Plus, they all have stock options in the new comapny If TechCrunch is any indication, the amount of support staff (developers, office staff, sales people, admin) needed to run the company is at most 20%, or another ten people, particularly if they outsource a lot of that. Put everyone in the cheapest office possible, and you’re looking at additional payroll, benefits and office expenses of another $3-4 million per year. Now lets just add another 50% on top of that for other expenses and a safety net, and round it up to $25 million per year in total expenses. That’s $25 million/year to have a well paid staff of the best journalists on the planet. How long before they outstrip those 16 million monthly visitors and 124 million page views? 5 years? Less? How many private equity funds would kill to put $100 million behind the NNYT to make sure the company had plenty of money until it reached profitability? My guess is plenty. And Marc Andreeseen, who has already backed two blogs, may be the first in line to invest. And I know a couple of hedge funds that would be right there, too. I know this because they’ve pitched me on a vision not much different than this one. Of course, none of this is going to happen. Those 50 top journalists aren’t going to be able to self select and organize themselves even if they had the inclination to do something like this. But the interesting thing is that I think something like this would work, really work, if anyone tried it. And the guys at Politico and AOL seem to be doing just that. Lean journalism, for the win. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| AOL Newsroom Now Has (Wow) 1,500 Writers Posted: 29 Jul 2009 10:59 PM PDT
AOL now has 1,500 people writing content across its scores of content sub-brands, we’ve confirmed. Around 1,000 of those people are working full time for AOL, the rest are freelancing. That’s more than double the number that they had creating content a year ago, and by this time next year, we’ve heard, the plan is to have 2-3x as many people as they do now. Where is AOL hiring these journalists? From the failing print world. We’ve obtained a list of hundreds of these individuals, including former journalists at BusinessWeek, New York Times, USA Today, ESPN, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Consumer Reports, Condé Nast and scores of regional and national newspapers and magazines. A few of them are listed at the end of this report. From our earlier post describing the media strategy:
A few of the journalists now working at AOL: Alex Salkever - formerly Businessweek’s Technology Editor, now at AOL Daily Finance Jay Mariotti is a national columnist and commentator for FanHouse.com. He also is a daily panelist on ESPN’s sports-debate show, “Around The Horn", seen Monday-Friday at 5 p.m. ET. Mariotti spent 17 years as a lead sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and has covered every major sporting event — national and worldwide – numerous times. Mariotti is a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America and is a Hall of Famer voter. He resides in Chicago. Kevin B. Blackistone is a national columnist and commentator for FanHouse.com. He also is a regular panelist on ESPN’s daily sports-debate show, “Around The Horn”. Blackistone currently serves as the Shirley Povich Chair in Sports Journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. He is the author of the book: "A Gift for Ron: Friendship and Sacrifice On and Off the Gridiron" detailing Everson Walls donating a life-saving kidney to former Cowboys teammate Ron Springs. A former award-winning sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News, he currently resides in Silver Spring, Md. Greg Couch is a national columnist for FanHouse. Previously, he was at the Chicago Sun-Times as a sports columnist, takeout writer and beat. He also was a sports columnist at the Akron Beacon-Journal and a sports writer at the Wichita Eagle. He received the 2007 and 2008 Lisagor Award as Best Sports Columnist in Chicago and surrounding areas, was featured twice in the Best American Sports Writing and is an APSE award winner. He resides in Chicago. David Whitley is a national columnist and commentator for FanHouse. Previously, Whitley had been an award-winning columnist at the Orlando Sentinel for 10 years. Beth Pinsker Gladstone (Editor Walletpop) worked formerly for Inside.com, the Dallas Morning News, Entertainment Weekly, The Independent Film & Video magazine and iVillage.com and her freelance career has encompassed everything from a column at WSJ.com to a stint on staff at Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Todd Pruzan (Senior Programming Manager) has been an editor and writer at Condé Nast Portfolio, Details, Blender, Advertising Age, and numerous other places. He has written for publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times and is the author of the 2005 book The Clumsiest People in Europe. Andrea Chalupa (Associate Producer) most recently wrote and produced videos for Portfolio.com, covering the Sundance Film Festival, the 2008 Presidential Conventions, among others Mitch Lipka (consumer ally) Investigative journalist for consumer issues, formerly of the Consumer Reports, the Philadelphia Inquirer and other places Julie Tilsner (lead blogger) More than 20 years as reporter, writer and editor for regional and national publications, including Business Week Magazine and the L.A. Times. Author of four humor books on parenting. Currently a freelance writer for women’s magazines such as Parenting, American Baby, Redbook and others. Melinda Henneberger: She spent 10 years as a reporter for the New York Times, in the paper's Washington and Rome bureaus, and found covering the Vatican a lot like covering Congress, the former having practically invented politics. She is the author of If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear (2007, Simon & Schuster) based on interviews with women in 20 states after the 2004 presidential election. At New York Newsday, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting on a subway crash at which she was the first reporter on the scene – at the Union Square station underneath her apartment building. Carl Cannon: Carl was the DC bureau chief for Reader’s Digest and for a decade before that, covered the White House for National Journal. Before coming to Washington during the Reagan presidency, he worked for six newspapers over a 20-year span. He has covered every presidential campaign and major political convention since 1984, was honored for his White House coverage by winning the prestigious Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting of the Presidency and in 2006 received the other top honor on the White House beat, the Aldo Beckman award for "excellence in presidential news coverage." He is also a past president of the White House Correspondents' Association. In 2007, Carl was a fellow-in-residence at the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He authored or co-authored four books. Jill Lawrence: Jill is a former national political correspondent for USA Today. She has also written about politics for The Associated Press, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Constitution and other publications. She has covered every presidential campaign since 1988. Columbia Journalism Review named her one of the top 10 campaign reporters in the country in 2004. She was included in Washingtonian Magazine’s 2005 list of the 50 best and most influential journalists in Washington . Walter Shapiro: Walter has covered the last eight presidential campaigns as a columnist and political reporter. Along the way, he has worked for two newspapers (USA Today and the Washington Post), two news weeklies (Time and Newsweek), two monthlies (Esquire and the Washington Monthly) and two online magazines (Salon and Slate). He served as a White House speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and a special assistant and speechwriter for Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall. And in 1972, he ran for Congress from Michigan, finishing second in a six-way primary. Lynn Sweet: Sweet is a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN and FOX News and other broadcast outlets. In July 2008, Sweet traveled with Obama's presidential campaign to Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and England. In 2006 Sweet reported on Obama's Africa trip, including Obama’s visit to his father’s native Kenya. In 2002 Sweet reported from the Middle East as violence between Israelis and Palestinians was deepening. In 1995 she broke the story on perks offered by the Clinton White House to major donors. In 1990, she was among the first journalists in the nation to analyze political ads for accuracy. Sweet was named a fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government in Spring, 2004. Nikhil Hutheesing recently joined DailyFinance as Investing Editor. Formerly, he was at Forbes for 17 years and wrote a top investing newsletter about wireless stocks. Jonathan Berr is a former reporter with Bloomberg News whose work has appeared in The New York Times, BusinessWeek and The Philadelphia Inquirer. In 2000, he won the Gerald Loeb Award, one of the most prestigious prizes in business journalism. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| M&A Activity Heats Up In July To $9.6 Billion Posted: 29 Jul 2009 09:11 PM PDT
Whether it’s a sign of economic recovery or just investment bankers getting ready to take off the month of August, there’s been a lot acquisition activity lately. In the last week alone, IBM purchased SPSS for $1.2 billion, Amazon bought Zappos for $928 million, Sprint paid $483 million for Virgin Mobile, AdKnowledge paid $50 million for Super Rewards, and Yahoo picked up Xoopit for $20 million. So far in July, the value of the acquisitions we track on CrunchBase totals $9.6 billion, which is nearly three times more M&A activity than the $2.6 billion we tracked in June. M&A exits already started to perk up in the second quarter , according to our latest CrunchBase report. But the increased deal flow on July suggests that corporate buyers are opening up their purse strings even more while acquisition prices are still relatively cheap. But the bargains might not last. Already, the median acquisition price leaped up to $260 million in July, from $22 million in June. Most of that jump was due to some very big transactions such as the ones listed above, as well as Agilent’s $1.5 billion purchase of Varian and Bristol-Myers’ $2.1 billion acquisition of Medarex. Still, you know what they say about rising tides . . .
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| New Twitter Cross-Posts To Facebook Have Users Bewildered. (Update: Facebook Bug To Blame) Posted: 29 Jul 2009 07:31 PM PDT Twitter is now seeing dozens of tweets a minute from users reporting that their Twitter updates are being posted as automatic updates to their Facebook profile, apparently without their consent. The change seems to have happened very recently, and reactions are ranging from surprise to anger. At this point it isn’t clear exactly what’s going on — it seems like some users may have installed the official Twitter application at some point and not had it post updates until now. But others are reporting that they’ve never installed a Twitter-related app, which makes the situation all the more confusing. We’re reaching out to Twitter and Facebook to find out what the cause is. My hunch is that these users have previously installed the official Twitter app on Facebook, which has had problems in the past, and used it to occasionally check their Twitter profiles without realizing that it was also meant to auto-post their tweets to Facebook (a bug may have prevented these posts from ever actually appearing). It looks like this may have something to do with Facebook ignoring an application’s privacy settings. Under Facebook’s application privacy page, I’ve unchecked the box that gives Twitter the ability to post updates to “Publish recent activity (one line stories) to my wall”. However, the updates are still showing up. We’re seeing similar reports from users with the FriendFeed app installed. Update 2: Facebook has given us the following statement:
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| JamLegend’s ‘Guitar Hero For The Web’ Now Lets You Upload And Play Any Song You’d Like Posted: 29 Jul 2009 07:07 PM PDT
For those that haven’t been exposed to JamLegend before, the site shares a lot of common ground with Guitar Hero. Gamers load up a song and a flurry of colored dots begin to flow down the screen, with each one corresponding to a differet key on your keyboard. The experience is less atmospheric than the games you’ll find on the consoles, largely because it lacks flashy graphics and plastic guitars, but if you’re a Guitar Hero addict looking to get your fix at the office, it’s certainly good enough. Until now JamLegend has fallen prey to the same problem as Guitar Hero and other console games: if a song wasn’t in the catalog, you couldn’t play it. Now, you can upload any song you’d like, and using digital signal processing, beat detection, and other automatic analysis, JamLegend takes the song and converts it into a playable track within a few minutes. Of course, generating a playable track is is one thing — but are they any good?
After trying out a few tracks, I found the technology to work well, though it isn’t perfect. On a standard, professionally-made track, you typically play along to guitar notes and not the accompanying drum beats or vocals. The auto-generated tracks tend to catch the most prominent sound at any point in the track, which means that sometimes you’ll find yourself playing elements of each instrument, along with the vocals. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a bit different from what you may be used to. Because this is a fairly unique feature in the genre, JamLegend is hoping to use it to start monetizing the site. Users can upload up to five of their own tracks at once, and each week they can swap out one of these for a new one (in other words, there’s a waiting period before you can add new songs). If you’d like to have more songs available at once, the site offers an entry-level premium package for $5 a month, which allows for up to 100 tracks at once, or a $20/month package for 500 songs. All in all this a solid addition, though I’m curious if the record industry will have a problem with it. The only way to add a song to your library is to upload your own copy (the site makes it easy to buy songs you don’t already own, which is another source of revenue), but we’ve seen the labels get upset over less. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Is the iPhone Causing Apple to Lose the Plot? Posted: 29 Jul 2009 06:40 PM PDT  Is Apple losing the plot? I ask this because, having just read this bollocks (Apple wants to make jailbreaking illegal because it supposedly threatens our nation's cellphone tower infrastructure, and thereby threatens our national security), I've read nothing but well-reasoned, anti-Apple invective. Come, let's explore the phenomenon. But first: what's going on? The Electronic Frontier Foundation wants to make iPhone jailbreaking 100 percent legal. It's your phone, so why can't you install whatever the hell you want on it? No one tells you what software you can and cannot install on your PC, right? Exactly. Now, Apple doesn't want jailbreaking to given any sort of legal blessing, because, well, Apple is Apple, and AT&T, its incompetent partner in crime, doesn't know if it's coming or going. Want to use Google Voice mobile? Oh, I bet you do, but The Man doesn't want you to.
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| Posted: 29 Jul 2009 05:39 PM PDT
Yes, that would be today. So how did McNamee’s claim turn out? Well, let’s put it this way: If there was a foot-in-the-mouth award given every year, no one else would need to apply this year. Hell, it might take the prize for the whole decade. It’s a quote of Ballmer-level proportions. Before I dive into any kind of analysis, I can say right off the bat that McNamee’s statement is false. Why? Because I bought the original iPhone on June 29, 2007. I am still using an iPhone today. Something else to think about: Estimates are that Apple sold somewhere between 250,000 to 500,000 iPhones in its first weekend on sale in 2007. The last estimates given for Pre sales was that it sold around 300,000 by the end of June. It’s entirely possible that there haven’t even been as many Pres sold so far as there were iPhones sold during its first weekend. That doesn’t just make McNamee’s claim look bad — it makes it impossible. I do not have a Palm Pre, but I have used one quite a few times now. It’s a great phone. The hardware isn’t exactly my cup of tea (I don’t like the keyboard), but there is no denying that the webOS software is very solid. Of course, it’s subjective, but I would say the Pre is the second-best smartphone on the market today. But that’s not what McNamee said. He said, “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later." The claim was laughable at the time, but it’s even more laughable now. He was, of course, implying that once people who bought the original iPhone saw the Pre, all of them would switch since their initial 2-year contracts would be up. The reality has been much different. Not only is it likely that many of the people who originally bought the iPhone are still using one, but many of them have upgraded once or twice to newer models. And of course, there are millions more iPhone customers that have been added since then. Including millions since the launch of the iPhone 3GS, which was launched after the Pre.
Contrast that with the iPhone 3GS that sold over a million units in just three days after its launch, and has remained red hot. It’s so hot that Apple has had a hard time keeping it in stock. The Pre, on the other hand, is widely available, according to recent inventory checks. And while it’s not entirely fair to compare the two platforms by their app stores, the huge difference cannot be overlooked either. The iPhone launched its App Store a year ago, which was a year after the launch of the first iPhone. So there was already an installed user-base, which is one of the reasons why iPhone app downloads completely destroy Pre app downloads. But at the same time, the iPhone App Store launched with 500 apps, the Pre’s App Catalog has an anemic 32 apps, nearly two months after its launch. The number is so laughably low that when two new apps were launched yesterday, it made headlines — for the fact that two new apps finally launched. This is of course because Palm only just opened its SDK to the public, the lack of which really hurt its potential. With it out now, the Pre’s app ecosystem should grow much more quickly, but it will likely still be a few months before we really start to notice that. But McNamee knew all of that when he made that statement, and yet, he still said it. Now, it’s one thing to tout your own product, but calling out a rival with a comment so asinine, was a poor choice, to say the least. And to Palm’s credit, they knew it too, which is why they sent the SEC a filing with 10 clarifications and corrections about what McNamee said in one interview. Here’s the correction that relates to this:
Oh, okay, why don’t we all just make outrageous claims then send the SEC a note to withdraw them? But that’s why we’re here, to hold people’s feet to the fire when they say idiotic things, even if they petition the SEC to withdraw them. The fact of the matter is that the iPhone remains the hottest smartphone and may be the hottest platform overall on the planet, right now. Apple has sold around 25 million iPhones. Palm has sold something probably south of a half million Pres — it’s a number that Sprint wouldn’t even say during its earnings call. And whatever the number was, it was not enough to stop the service from bleeding customers last quarter. The Pre, while a nice phone, has a number of things working against it, including Sprint’s smaller network (though I find it to be much better quality-wise than AT&T’s awful network), and the lack of a robust app ecosystem right now. But both of those should change shortly. I already spoke to the app problem, but Verizon has also announced that the Pre will be on its network sometime in early 2010. That will be big, I imagine.
Palm has no shortage of ex-Apple employees now working for it, including newly appointed CEO Jon Rubenstein, who used to head Apple’s iPod and Mac divisions. And now they’re caught up with this cat-and-mouse game with Apple to make iTunes syncing work for the Pre. The Pre is also the first mobile device since the iPhone to use multi-touch, something which brought out some interesting statements from Apple about protecting their intellectual property. There have been no lawsuits on that front, but we can probably safely assume that Apple looked into it, and probably isn’t too happy that it apparently cannot push for legal action. Then there was the ad that Sprint made for the Pre, with an eaten apple (which also spoke to the first wave of expiring iPhone contracts). And then there was Apple trash-talking the Pre’s small app store size during its WWDC keynote. “And somebody else. I can't quite read it. It's small,” is what Apple’s Phil Schiller said. (The chart he’s referring to is above.) But Apple can talk for now, it has earned that privilege by running laps around its rivals with its smartphone and App Store. Palm, has not. And they look bad today thanks to McNamee. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Yahoo Shareholders Transfer $2.9 Billion To Microsoft Shareholders Posted: 29 Jul 2009 03:25 PM PDT
So net/net about $30 million in new value was created today by the market, All of that plus everything Yahoo lost went to Microsoft. Yahoo got Binged, to the tune of $2.9 Billion. Oops. Our complete coverage of the deal is here. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| AT&T: Don’t Blame Us For The iPhone’s Google Voice Ban Posted: 29 Jul 2009 03:20 PM PDT
Last time we reached out to AT&T to comment on the story, the company gave TechCrunch writer MG Siegler a very blunt and brief statement:
But today, the company has begun sending out more detailed messages to some of the frustrated customers who have been voicing their complaints. The message below was written by Glenn Lurie, AT&T’s President of Emerging Devices and Resale.
AT&T’s stance is no longer that it can’t talk about the App Store — it’s that it doesn’t manage the App Store, and that any concerns about this case should be directed at Apple. Of course, the note leaves plenty of wiggle room for AT&T. The company may not be necessarily “managing” the approval process, but it could easily be the whispering in the ears of the people who do. And to say that AT&T isn’t involved at all seems highly unlikely as well — why would Apple cripple apps like Sling were it not over bandwidth concerns voiced by AT&T? Still, there must be some reason why AT&T is beginning to change its tune. AT&T would be foolish to paint a bulls-eye on Apple as it tries to extend its incredibly valuable exclusive iPhone contract, but it’s doing what it can to deflect a few of the blows coming from its frustrated customers. We followed up on the letter above by getting in touch with AT&T, at which point an AT&T spokesman said that the company stood by what Lurie had written and that we should contact Apple for any further information. Apple spokesman Steve Dowling refused to comment on the matter. Our brief conversation, which consisted largely of “we haven’t made any comment on that” responses, included this gem:
So where does the blame truly lie? It’s unlikely we’ll ever get a straight answer. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has cited a reliable source in saying that it was “AT&T that objected to Google Voice apps for the iPhone. It's that simple.” And I myself suspect that the blame lies largely with AT&T. But others, like Om Malik, believe that Apple should be bearing the brunt of the blame. But in the end, users don’t really care who is to blame, provided the issue gets resolved quickly. If that doesn’t happen, developers will continue to lose faith in the App Store’s walled garden approach. Apple will lose its glossy luster, and some will seek lusher platforms where they’re sure they can actually release the applications they’ve spent months building. The iPhone may be dominating this space now, but we’re really only about two years into this new era of smart phones — it’s a bit early for Apple to be embittering developers with such regularity. Thanks to Jason Walke for the tip. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Posted: 29 Jul 2009 01:48 PM PDT
Today, Yahoo died as a search engine. If the deal with Microsoft is approved, what will replace it will be Bing, the search engine that Microsoft launched only two months ago. Within a few months time, Microsoft will go from owning 8 percent of the U.S. search market to 28 percent (comScore). That is still less than half of Google’s 65 percent, but it could give Microsoft a fighting chance in the search wars against Google. While the agreement was a long time coming, Bing was the cherry on top, so to speak. Earlier today, I spoke with the two executives who oversaw the negotiations for both sides, Yahoo EVP Hillary Schneider and Microsoft SVP Yusuf Mehdi. I asked how big an impact Bing’s sudden success had on bringing the deal to a close. “Seeing Bing as a live experience was a nice assurance,” says Schneider, “but did not change our rationale or timing. This was a conversation that went on over several months. Bing was introduced after we had material momentum in how we wanted to approach this partnership.” Yet Bing was able to gain market share in its very first month, and it took it from Yahoo, not Google. And Bing is just going to get better. Yahoo faced the very real prospect of market share erosion from below as well as from above. Now in one fell swoop, Microsoft will control all of Yahoo’s search volume. In a conference call today, Steve Ballmer explained how important market share is in search:
Microsoft will measure the success of this deal in two ways: increased market share with advertisers and increased market share with consumers. When I asked Mehdi what success would look like a couple years out, he defines it in terms of “shares of queries and spends.” Even before mentioning gaining share with consumers, he says: “Success is a smooth transition for advertisers as they shift more share of wallet from traditional media and competitors to get the better ROI.” Microsoft will also become the new home for Yahoo’s search technologies. That is a good thing because even before this deal was announced, the spirit of technology innovation at Yahoo which produced projects such as Yahoo Boss and Search Monkey seems to have fizzled. These efforts will now be passed on to Microsoft. The fortunate news is that Mehdi says he wants to keep those projects alive. “For Search Monkey and Boss, we will integrate that technology and determine how to take that forward. There is a lot of goodness there.” At least Microsoft knows a good developer platform when it sees one. So the deal is good for Microsoft. It puts them in the game, and they didn’t even have to pay $1 billion upfront. But is it good for Yahoo? Instead of that upfront payment, Yahoo is getting 88 percent of search advertising revenues on Yahoo-owned sites every year for the next five years (at which point the so-called TAC rate will be renegotiated for the last five years of the deal). “This is a materially higher TAC than any of the previous arrangements,” says Schneider. But it’s also not much higher than what big affiliates like AOL are believed to be getting from Google today. And Yahoo needs to keep paying its sales force, but can only keep 88 percent of the revenues they generate. (Although there are some revenue-per-search guarantees baked into the deal to protect Yahoo on the downside). Investors aren’t thrilled with the deal, and it is not just because they tend to value cash over potential. This is a ten-year arrangement between two lumbering giants that is filled with execution risk. It is a very complicated deal. Yahoo’s sales team has enough trouble communicating with its own engineers. Now they have to learn how to talk to Microsoft’s. Jason Calacanis argues that Yahoo just committed suicide, while Bill Gurley thinks the opposite, that Yahoo had to get out of Google’s way to survive. The two companies will work hard to pull this off. Their futures depend on it. And the deal is structured in a way that makes sure both sides make more money the more searches and advertising dollars Bing generates. Getting to that ideal state, though, won’t be easy. In the meantime, as they work through all of the implementation issues, Google could strengthen its position and take even more share. No matter what happens, Yahoo just took itself out of the search game. It got Binged. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| The Hangover: AOL Gives Time Warner’s Quarterly Results A Headache, Again Posted: 29 Jul 2009 11:30 AM PDT
That’s three AOL mentions in three sentences. Clearly, Time Warner is happy to let everyone know that it will only have a couple more quarters of dealing with that division’s nosedive. How bad was AOL this quarter? Revenues dropped 24%, to $804 million, versus the year-ago period. The service saw a 21% decrease in advertising revenues, attributable to both display and search ads on its own sites, as well as on third-party sites using its platform. And the loss of dial-up subscribers continues to hurt the company. It lost over a half million in this past quarter, and some 2.3 million from the year-ago period. Revenues from subscriptions declined 27% from the year-ago period. In preparation for the AOL spin-off, Google recently sold back its 5% stake in the company, at a $700 million discount from its initial $1 billion investment. However, thanks to the search deal over these past several years, it looks as if Google was much closer to break-even on the deal. And while AOL’s numbers were awful, Time Warner’s print and film divisions hardly fared better. The print division headed up by Time, saw a 26% decrease in ad revenue from the year-ago period, and an 18% decrease in subscription revenue. Meanwhile, the film division was hurt by the slide in DVD sales. While movies like The Hangover exceeded expectations at the box office, those profits were wiped out by DVD numbers being down across the board. Highlighting The Hangover in the results is interesting. One could say Time Warner’s experience with AOL these past several years after the $164 billion mega (or perhaps “drunken”) merger in 2001 (remember, it was AOL that actually bought Time Warner at the time), has been similar to The Hangover. Based on the repurchasing price Time Warner paid for Google’s AOL stock, AOL is now worth less than $6 billion.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Wall Street’s Reaction To The Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal: Not Good Posted: 29 Jul 2009 09:07 AM PDT
Carol Bartz and Steve Ballmer are all smiles this morning with the signing of their long-awaited search deal, but the agreement isn’t going over so well on Wall Street. Shares of Yahoo took a plunge this morning on the announcement and are currently trading at $15.31, down 11 percent from yesterday’s close. Microsoft shares are flat. Investors who were hoping for a large upfront payment and “boatloads of money” were disappointed by the terms of the deal, which includes no upfront payment. But that is short-sighted of investors because the actual deal ends up giving Yahoo a much bigger share of search revenues (88 percent) than the previous deal that was on the table last year. It is actually a much better deal for Yahoo long-term if it works, and aligns its incentives closer to Microsoft’s. If Yahoo were instead to realize more of the value of the deal upfront, it wouldn’t have as much reason to make the deal a success over time. This is a10-year deal. Making sure both sides are working towards the same goals for the next decade is pretty crucial, and a large upfront payment would have diminished that incentive because it would have come with a lower revenue-share for Yahoo on the backend. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said as much on the conference call this morning when asked what the differnce was between this deal and the one offered last year.
(The TAC (traffic acquisitions cost) rate is the percentage of search ad revenues Yahoo gets from the deal). Whether or not Bartz had a choice in the matter, taking the higher TAC rate over a “boatload of cash” will be better for Yahoo in the long run. Eventually, Yahoo’s investors will figure that out. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Inside AP’s New News DRM System Posted: 29 Jul 2009 09:05 AM PDT  There has been some talk about the Associated Press' new system, called hNews for some reason, for protecting its precious copywritten materials from bloggers, pirates, and pederasts. The system will include a DRM system that will make sure you can't cut and paste data from a browser to a blog post, thereby ensuring that no one can steal the AP's valuable, value-added content. As I recall similar systems were implemented by websites back in the days of AOL. They didn't work because you could just view the source code or, interestingly enough, take a screen shot. The system works by putting something into a digital container and then sending to Google or whatever. This same system, as you recall, has prevented the rise of piracy in the music and movie arenas and must be applied to the written word before the Internet fails and we all resort to getting our news from "prophets" who will line major thoroughfares opining on things they believe happened, whether or not they are true. In short, we'll be stuck with cable news pundits.
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At first glance, 
We’ve all seen the ads and screenshots that pop-up when you hover over keywords on blogs. For the most part, they’re annoying. But what if those pop-ups had actual useful information in them? That’s the idea behind 
Dutch startup 
Getting sound out of an iPhone and online quickly has been pretty easy for a while, and there are a number of startups playing in the space. 
When 
Like everyone else I’ve watched the print media world fall apart over the last few years. The poster child for that industry is the New York Times, of course, and their many missteps in recent memory have been well chronicled. In early 2008 
In June we wrote about 
"You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone," 
Speaking of the Pre’s launch, it took place after McNamee’s claim, and it sold pretty well out of the gate. But Apple announced the iPhone 3GS a few days later, and as expected, it dampened much of the Pre hype. Sales of the Pre remained decent, but 
But will it be iPhone-killing big? No, of course not. There is plenty of room for many smartphones on the market, you’d have to imagine that even McNamee knows that. I think his iPhone-envy just got the best of him with such a statement. And that was interesting because it added more fuel to the fire of the Apple/Palm rivalry, which was already an interesting one.
Anyone wondering who got the 
The 
Time Warner released it
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