The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Mixx Traffic Took A Dive In June
- By A Nose: Netflix Prize Leaders One-Upped With One Day Remaining
- Facebook Makes Baby Steps Towards Its Twitter-Like ‘Follow’ Feature
- The Song of the PowerSquid: The Inside Story of the Life of an Invention, Part 3
- Silicon Valley, It’s Time to Clean Up
- Video: AT&T iPhone Hell
- The iPhone’s Latest Hit App: A Sex Offender Locator
- NSFW: Bringing Nothing To TechCrunch, And A Brand New Reality To The Unter-Trolls
- FreeYourID Gives Up On Trying To Monetize OpenID
| Mixx Traffic Took A Dive In June Posted: 26 Jul 2009 08:28 AM PDT
News aggregator site and Digg-competitor Mixx had a rough June. Traffic to the site took a 68 percent nosedive in the U.S. from May to June, according to comScore (see chart). Compete shows a similar trend. Wondering if Mixx had maybe been paying for traffic and had now stopped, I asked CEO Chris McGill if this was the case. Absolutely not. He replied: “We have never paid for traffic… Not once. How could we? … We have operated for two years on almost no money.” Hard to argue with that. Mixx has only raised $3.5 million to Digg’s $40 million, and is “nine guys sitting in a boiler room.” So what happened? McGill admits, “We had some performance problems in the month of June.” A database problem and a DNS change ended up temporarily blocking Google. Traffic was only down 30 percent, says McGill, and has almost fully recovered in June. He sent me a screen grab from Google Analytics (below) showing that in the first half of July, unique visitors tripled to 1.5 million compared to the first half of June. For the full month of June, he sent me a Google Analytics page showing 1.8 million total visitors. (comScore’s estimate for U.S.-only unique visitors in June was 337,000, but it typically under-reports traffic for small sites). If Mixx’s drop was just a technical issue (and I have no reason to doubt McGill’s explanation, he was very upfront with me), then comScore and Compete should pick up the site’s rebound in their July numbers. I hope that’s the case because Digg needs competition. For instance, in April, Mixx started experimenting with showing ads based on user voting, a great idea which Digg then started taking seriously in June. And just yesterday, it launched TweetMixx to tap into hot links appearing on Twitter.
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| By A Nose: Netflix Prize Leaders One-Upped With One Day Remaining Posted: 25 Jul 2009 11:40 PM PDT
According to its homepage, the Ensemble is made up of three teams who chose to join forces: “Grand Prize Team”, “Opera Solutions”, and “Vandelay United”. The Ensemble has just posted the following blog post to its official site:
The competition will end tomorrow morning, so teams still have a little bit of time left to make their last-second submissions, but things are looking good for The Ensemble. This has to be absolutely brutal for team BellKor. Thanks to TechCrunch intern Dan Romero for the tip. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Facebook Makes Baby Steps Towards Its Twitter-Like ‘Follow’ Feature Posted: 25 Jul 2009 07:48 PM PDT
Not exactly. As it turns out, this feature was first announced in late June, nestled in Facebook’s blog post about the beta rollout of its Publisher upgrade, which lets you choose who you’d like a given update to be visible to. Now, any time you add a Facebook friend who has set their status updates to ‘Everyone’, you’ll start receiving those updates in your News Feed, even if they never accept your friend request. In a sense this is akin to what the ‘follow’ feature will be one day, but it’s not a particularly good substitute. For one, there isn’t an easy way to tell if someone has their status updates set to ‘everyone’, so you’re going to be taking a shot in the dark every time you add one of these people as friends. And you’ll also wind up spamming inboxes with friend requests in the process. Still, the feature, and especially our readers’ reaction to it, show just how confusing Facebook can become when it’s a mix of both one and two-way connections. The current setup is decidedly strange. Since March, you’ve been able to set certain portions of your profile and status updates to everyone, which make them visible to anyone who arrived at your profile via Facebook search or clicked on your name after seeing it on someone else’s wall. But there still isn’t an option that allows users to ‘follow’ someone and receive their status updates in their News Feed without making the leap into becoming Facebook friends. That feature is still reserved for Pages, which allow for one-way connections. Users are free to make their own Facebook Pages, though these don’t let you have a separate group of friends that have access to more personal data, like your photos. But the distinction between Profiles and Pages is supposed to be fading, so maybe they’ll have that feature soon. It’s all very confusing. Hopefully this will all clear up once Facebook deploys its much-anticipated new privacy features, which will bring with them more control and hopefully a more intuitive experience. However, that update will also feature a heavier emphasis on sharing with everyone — something that I think may wind up leading to even more problems. Thanks to Jesse Waites for the tip. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| The Song of the PowerSquid: The Inside Story of the Life of an Invention, Part 3 Posted: 25 Jul 2009 05:51 PM PDT  Hello, my name is Christopher Hawker. I am a professional inventor, specializing in innovative consumer products. My company is called Trident Design, LLC. I have developed many products in numerous industries and have over 20 products on the market. My most famous invention is the PowerSquid, a cephalopod-inspired power strip with outlets situated at the end of short cords, thereby eliminating the problem of losing outlets to bulky transformer plugs. John Biggs, editor-in-chief of this blog, has asked me to write the story of the birth of the PowerSquid and its development and journey to market. This is the Song of the PowerSquid. Part 3: The License Hunt Armed with our handmade prototypes and fancy brochures, we set about searching for a partner. We felt it would be easy. We thought we would call up the companies, tell them about our revolutionary products, and they would line up to see them. Then they would immediately recognize the beauty of the products and fight over the right to be the exclusive distributor. As you might guess, we were wrong.
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| Silicon Valley, It’s Time to Clean Up Posted: 25 Jul 2009 05:33 PM PDT
Things have changed a bit. Today, the hair is purposely disheveled and coders not only get out in the fresh air– they go climbing. Some even drink green tea instead of coffee. (Cough, cough, Kevin Rose.) And, increasingly, I’m seeing start-up kitchens with — gasp– no junk food. Some have even called full-on bans against soda and Red Bull. In short, we’ve gone all California on ourselves. It’s not nearly as macho as coding all night on jerky and Jolt, but clearly in an employer’s best interest to swap out carb-crashing junk food for more sustainable fare. Enter Blueprint Cleanse– a company that’s opening San Francisco operations in the next few months and, IMHO, is going to absolutely clean up, literally and figuratively. And in August, California residents can try it for $20 cheaper per day. We’re already huge fans at TechCrunch: I’ve done it, Leena has done it, Heather is doing it next week and even Arrington has put down his Chipotle burrito for a few days to cleanse. Yes, the same Michael Arrington. Blueprint is a great example of the Web’s ability to radically transform a weirdo hobby into a growth market. It’s basically an ecommerce company for juice cleansing, making the off-putting, hippie trend seem accessible and, well, normal. The Web site walks you through which plan to pick and all the normal questions like “So I really don’t eat for three days?” (Answer: Yes.) You order, and FedEx delivers you six bottles of freshly pressed juice for every day you’re cleansing. They’re labeled, the packaging is nice, and they even send little coolers so you can take them around with you. The founders, Erica Huss and Zoe Sakoutis have obsessed about every detail of the experience, starting with the most important thing, the juice itself. In New York, it’s even become the juice cleanse for foodies, being written up in Food & Wine and guzzled by the likes of Mario Batali. Yep, the juices are that good. And from what I hear, Huss and Sakoutis are turning down would-be investors left and right. The problem? It’s horribly expensive. $85 per day if you’re outside New York, thanks to shipping costs. That’s more than $10 per bottle and way too steep for most of us. For New York residents, it’s $65 a day– still pricey, but somehow that $20 difference makes it a lot more accessible. Huss and Sakoutis get that, which is why they’ve decided to prime the California market with the August shipping discount. (When they actually open in SF, we’ll celebrate by forcing them to give TechCrunch readers a special discount.) I know what you’re thinking, because I used to think the same thing. I am a meat-loving Southern girl. Add in being a writer, and that means I drink more than I should too. I am the last person who ever thought she’d be doing a juice cleanse. I tried Blueprint out of pure desperation. A bout with pneumonia last year meant anytime I traveled or pulled an all-nighter I got sick. That’s obviously untenable given I’m writing a book about emerging markets and on a 10-plus hour flight every month. After just one three-day cleanse I felt healthier than I had in two years. Four months later, I haven’t so much as had the sniffles. But here’s the real test: I’ve convinced our newest irascible columnist Paul Carr to try it next week. Yes, Mr. hookers-on-one-arm, bottle-of-rum-in-the-other will be waking up Friday morning and starting his day with this:
Disclosure: The company is sending out free samples of the product to press in California, including us, this week. I and others at TechCrunch have paid full price for this product in the past. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Posted: 25 Jul 2009 05:28 PM PDT Our post last week on AT&T’s failures inspired a lot of people to voice their displeasure (to put it kindly) with the service over its poor network performance, particularly with the iPhone. It also inspired one professional video editor, Pat Lee, to make the following truly awesome AT&T/Apple ad parody. Lee tells us that he hopes the video inspires people “to contact Apple to let them know about their issues with AT&T’s atrocious service.” The end goal is to put pressure on Apple not to renew its exclusive deal with AT&T here in the U.S. And the video comes at a good time. Comic-Con is currently taking place in San Diego and not surprisingly, there are widespread reports of major AT&T failures at the show. While it’s undoubtedly due to a huge concentration of comic lovers with iPhones, once again, AT&T should have seen this coming. Instead, just as with SXSW, they’re forced to scramble to try and fix things on the fly rather than preemptively attacking a problem. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| The iPhone’s Latest Hit App: A Sex Offender Locator Posted: 25 Jul 2009 04:56 PM PDT
While all 50 states require that sexual offenders register themselves, and allow anyone to access the information online, most people never look at it. That’s why it’s surprising that this app is a top seller — especially considering that it’s not free (it’s $0.99). Certainly, it’s good to be aware of these people living around you — especially if they have committed acts against children, and you have children — but it’s interesting that it’s the iPhone that is making such information “popular.” The app allows you to see a list of offenders based on your current location (using the iPhone’s location services), any contact’s address, or it allows you to manually enter an address. The app then scours the database and lists the sexual offenders based on their proximity to the location you gave. You can click on any of these names to get a picture of the person, their information like date of birth, height, weight, and a picture. And you can also see the specific sexual crime they were charged with. But, as you might imagine, such an app is not without controversy. First of all, there’s a disclaimer when you first load it up warning that all of the information may not be accurate. The reason it gives are that the sexual offender lists are continuously updating, so some parts may be out of date or incomplete. An even bigger problem is that the app may not be legal in all states. As someone who reviewed the app notes, “This app is not legal, at least under CA law. Selling the personal information of people (even ex-criminals) for profit is forbidden.” It is rather odd that this app costs money when the information is available freely on the web. As a top 10 app, the developer is likely making thousands of dollars a day off of this app. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| NSFW: Bringing Nothing To TechCrunch, And A Brand New Reality To The Unter-Trolls Posted: 25 Jul 2009 12:34 PM PDT
I don’t know about you, but I give this ridiculously misguided experiment three weeks. Three weeks until - at best - Arrington comes to his senses and realises that there’s a reason why I’ve been fired from every job I’ve had, most recently as a columnist for the Guardian. Three weeks until - at worst - I say something so insanely actionable about a deep-pocketed venture capitalist that TechCrunch finds itself sued out of existence. But in the meantime, here I am, and it’s traditional in the opening episode of a new column for the writer to introduce himself and to generally sketch out his plans for the column. So here we go… Hello TechCrunch readers, my name is Paul Carr and I’ll be your Saturday columnist for the next three weeks. Shortly after I was booted from the Guardian, Arrington called me and asked what it would take to bring me and my weekly column to TechCrunch. I immediately gave him a list of four things… - Hookers The Editorial independence thing was particularly important to me. TechCrunch is a publication that never shies away from a good story, which sometimes means it makes embarrassing or amusing mistakes. I called out these mistakes with glee when I was at the Guardian, and I see no reason why I should stop now. Or to put it another way, the next time Erick asks the question “Did Last.fm just hand over listening data to the RIAA?” I need to be able to say “no, you idiot” without fear of reprisals. (Hello Erick. Love you, man). Likewise when the wifi inevitably fails at TechCrunch 50 - which it will, because it’s a technology conference - I need to be able to write a slap-down at least as damning as the one I wrote about LeWeb without being taken out and shot (Hello Loic. Love you, man). To Michael’s credit, he didn’t hesitate in agreeing to the editorial independence (”but if you suck, I’ll fire you”) and to two of my other three demands. And so with a hooker on my arm, and a pint of good rum in my hand, I’m ready to get started. But before I kick off my regular posting schedule, there’s one more thing we need to talk about… We need to talk about You. I’ve been a TechCrunch reader since long before I joined the masthead - and through the comments appended to each post I feel like I’ve got the measure of you, my fellow readers. The vast majority of you - it’s only fair to say - seem like great people. You post witty, erudite, knowledgeable comments and are always ready to add a new dimension - or lash on a few additional facts - to a story. It’s a genuine honour to be able to write for you and I look forward to your responses, for good or ill. But then there’s the rest of you. The small but all-too-vocal minority of you who are - and I mean this sincerely - total freaks. Howling at the moon lunatics. Mentally unbalanced, socially subnormal trolls. Except, if Scandinavian mythology has taught us anything (and it hasn’t), it’s that trolls are strong, frightening and cunning creatures. You people are unworthy of the word troll. In fact there is no creature - real or fictional - that I could liken you to, without it being an insult to that poor beast. You people are unter-trolls. I don’t want to get into a fight with you, for the same reason as Cyrus S. Ching once said you should never fight with a pig: you both get dirty and the pig enjoys it. And so, because you clearly need hard discipline in what you laughably call your lives, I’m simply going to set out some ground rules, not just for commenting on my columns but for every comment you ever make on Techcrunch in future. Listen carefully, unter-trolls, because I won’t tell you again… Rule One: The next time one of you asks the rhetorical question “why is this news?” I swear to God I will come round to your basement, gather up all of your Wil Wheaton action figures and melt them down into a giant plastic phallus. If you’ve ever seen the Miriam Karlin scene in A Clockwork Orange, you know what happens next. Save us both a trip and next time you find yourself asking “why is this news?”, instead ask yourself “why do I still live with my parents?”. It’s news because people better than you said so. Rule Two: See rule one again, but add the questions “really MG, another post about Twitter?”, “why should I care about this?” and “is this TechCrunch or Valleywag?”. That last one is particularly mental. If you’re genuinely incapable of telling the two sites apart then I’ll gladly help you by replacing next week’s column with a list of copied and pasted tweets, illustrated with a picture of Julia Allison posing in Pete Cashmore’s vest. Rule Three: Anonymous comments. If I had my way there would be no absolutely no anonymous comments, not just on TechCrunch but the whole of Internet. They are the last refuge of a child molester. In fact, I would rather encourage my only child to trick-or-treat his way down the sex offenders register than to spend one moment in the company of someone who would leave an anonymous comment on a blog. Man up or fuck off. Rule Four: Personal attacks. You’ll notice that I’m attacking you generically here, rather than naming and shaming any single one of you. That’s because I realise that this is just a technology news site and that nothing posted here is important enough to warrant an individual being insulted or threatened. Likewise, calling Arrington names or making cheap innuendo about Lacy became boring before it even started, not just because either of them, or every other TechCrunch contributor past and present, could write and report you little punks under the table. Realise that, feel ashamed and move on. And don’t even get me started on actual physical threats: that’s flashing blue lights, handcuffs and padded cell stuff. Rule Five: Sometimes I write long. I really don’t care if the Internet is supposed to be limited to 140 badly punctuated characters of nothingness or one-note blog posts designed to leave a tsetse fly with ADD wanting more. For every comment I see complaining about the length of this column, I will add an extra 100 words to the following week’s installment. Believe me when I say this is a battle that I will win. Rule Six: I have written a book. It’s called Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions Of A New Media Whore. Don’t worry, there’s no need for you to remember that title as I will be reminding you in every single post I write. I mention it here because I guarantee whatever criticism you feel the need to level about me - my unprofessionalism, my uncontrollable drinking, my inability to hold on to a job or any other relationship for more than five minutes - I’ve said far worse about myself in the book. As such I’m immune to your lame retorts. To paraphrase Batfink, my wings of self-confessed loserdom are like a shield of I don’t give a shit. Ok, that’s enough rules for now. I’m sure I’ll think of others as we go along - you freaks never fail to surprise me - but I think you get the gist. Just remember that you bitches are my bitches from hereon out, and we’ll get along just fine. As for the rest of you - the sane, rational, intelligent un-anonymous majority of the TechCrunch community - I’m really sorry you all had to witness that undignified scene. It sounds twee, but I really do see this column as a weird dysfunctional partnership between me and you - my Kermit to your Statler, my Gonzo to your Waldorf. Like you, I adore TechCrunch, in the way I would adore a smart, funny, flawed, bipolar and sometimes-just-plain-wrong lover. I really couldn’t be prouder to be joining the team of professionals who inhabit the terrifyingly-quiet TechCrunch offices (little known fact: there is actually sound on CrunchCam, it’s just that no-one has ever said anything) and I’m really looking forward to being your eyes and ears, responding to your comments and helping to grow the vibrant community that makes TechCrunch such a unique beast. So, as TS Eliot almost said; let us go then, you and I, when the Valley is spread out against the sky. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, we’ll call out the bad guys and celebrate the good, we’ll travel the world and get kicked out of Le Web, uninvited to TED, sued by delusional entrepreneurs and write miles of gushing prose about Last.fm just to piss off Arrington and Schonfeld. Really, it’s going to be a blast. For three weeks at least. [Photo credit: Geoffrey Ellis] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| FreeYourID Gives Up On Trying To Monetize OpenID Posted: 25 Jul 2009 09:05 AM PDT
In an e-mail to its user base and with a short notice on its main website, FreeYourID has announced that it will be shutting down its service after nearly two years and a half in business. After August 15, the web service will be discontinued without a hint of explanation about the reason for the folding, although we suspect it may have something to do with VeriSign taking over the service’s main backer late last year. When FreeYourID launched in February 2007, we dubbed it a personalized OpenID, because it allowed users to register a unique .name domain name (e.g. first.last.name) which in turn could be used as a custom, personal OpenID identifier, website URL and e-mail host. The service was the result of a partnership between OpenID company JanRain and Global Name Registry, the domain name registry for the .name extension. Alas for them, it never got any significant traction. Until August 15, 2009, users will be able to access and use their FreeYourID accounts to make changes to their .name domain names, extend the registration period with a payment or retrieve the authorization code needed to be able to transfer the domain name to another provider. If the domain name isn’t transferred to another party, dotname will transfer all remaining .name domain names to Key-Systems automatically. The latter will let users who are still interested in the service change the e-mail and URL forwarding settings for their domain names and continue using OpenID. FreeYourID, however, hits the deadpool. E-mail in full (hat tip to @pascalvanhecke):
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Last month 
In the last few days we’ve gotten multiple tips about a seemingly new phenomenon on Facebook: people are receiving status updates from people they’ve attempted to add as friends, but who have not yet accepted their friend request. In effect, they’re seeing these users’ status updates without being able to see their profiles — something that hasn’t previously happened on Facebook, at least not until very recently. So has Facebook finally turned on the Twitter-like ‘follow’ feature it 
When I first moved to Silicon Valley there was no such thing as “geek chic.” A trip through Frye’s Electronics told you everything you needed to know about engineer culture: It was a one-stop-shop for circuits and motherboards, huge bags of candy, cases of Jolt, and porn.
I’m betting if you cut Paul’s arm, a mix of nitrates and rum would come pouring out. If he can handle it, I think even those old school Frye’s electronics geeks can too. If nothing else, it should make for an entertaining week two of his Saturday column.
Looking over the top 10 paid iPhone apps list today, the list appeared pretty typical: A bunch of games, a camera app, etc. Then I noticed one called Offender Locator [
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