Saturday, August 15, 2009

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Coincidence? Three Interesting Things About 345 Spear Street, San Francisco

Posted: 15 Aug 2009 01:58 AM PDT

  1. It’s the location of Google’s San Francisco office (floors 2-4)
  2. It’s the location of the Secret Service’s San Francisco field office (floors 5-6)
  3. And someone who works there has a license plate that says “Drunk”

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to theorize how these three facts form the backbone of a massive worldwide conspiracy. Feel free to add additional “facts,” such as “That building was also constructed on top of an ancient Native American burial ground” or “I heard that’s where the Secret Service keeps all the counterfeit cash they confiscate, and the floors are really thin.” Just make sure to bake in the drunk license plate, too.

I took that picture of the license plate, by the way, in the parking garage of that building. And a different picture of it ended up on the FailBlog last month. So if you can work that into your conspiracy theory, you get bonus points.

Best story gets a free TechCrunch Tshirt, any size, delivered anywhere in the world. In fact, any entertaining story that has significant creative effort put into it gets a Tshirt. So go for it.

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Phil Schiller Is A Man On A Mission: To Save The App Store

Posted: 15 Aug 2009 01:01 AM PDT

ref_phil_schiller2As Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing, you’d have to imagine that Phil Schiller is a pretty busy guy. He’s also been moonlighting as Apple’s keynote speaker during Steve Jobs’ medical leave of absence. But now it’s really starting to look as if Schiller has taken on another task: App Store savior.

We’ve already talked at length about the two instances in the past week or so of Schiller personally reaching out to bloggers to set the record straight about a few of the App Store issues. But he has actually taken it a step farther. He’s also been reaching out to individual app makers to talk to them about their apps and offer his assistance in getting them approved, we’ve learned tonight.

And one such app, Rising Card, is now available in the App Store thanks to Schiller.

Rising Card is a magic application developed by Theory11. The reason it was initially rejected after a long period of hearing nothing from Apple was that they felt the app would be confusing to customers. Of course, that was the point of the app as it’s a magic trick meant to confuse people. The developers wrote Apple to explain that to them, but heard nothing back. They figured all hope was lost as this was hardly a high profile application, and Apple clearly didn’t seem to care too much about it.

Then the Apple blog TUAW covered the rejection a few days ago, and all of a sudden, Apple started reaching out to the developers. And of course, not just anyone at Apple, but Schiller and also Phil Shoemaker, Apple’s Director of Application Technology. Based on this and Schiller’s previous responses, it would seem that not only is Apple reading the blogs that cover App Store issues, but it really is trying to resolve them. And in this case it did. Shoemaker called yesterday to let the developers know that the app was now in the store.

Obviously, the developers are very pleased with situation. Jonathan Bayme, the CEO of Theory11 wrote this to us this evening:

Schiller was unbelievably responsive throughout the whole ordeal. Our first communication from him was late at night on the 11th - with another email sent to us an hour later. He was extremely nice and although not promising anything, he said he would have their team look into the situation ASAP.

To be frank, Chris and I [the creators] were both amazed that this had reached the heights it had at all - given the fact that it is just a fun magic trick. We had spent months creating, polishing, and finishing this thing - and up until then we thought all hope was lost. It’s been quite the rollercoaster.

This morning, we received another email from Schiller advising us that Phil Shoemaker (Director of Application Technology) would be in touch with us soon to discuss our app, and as promised I received a phone call about three hours later from Phil. Shoemaker said that his team was looking into the issue as we spoke, and he was hopeful to see resolution of this by the end of the day.

True to his word - it was in fact approved late this afternoon. In sincerity the whole process was quite the ordeal, but I must say that I respect the hell out of the fact that we received the personal attention that we did. They were responsive, attentive, and truly listened to what we were saying. While one could argue that it took us over a month to get to that point, I would judge this situation based on the lengths they went to to fix the problem - they were incredible.

So there you go, another happy customer. This new Schiller strategy seems to be working wonders for the App Store.

But I still find it a little crazy that it’s Schiller who is personally doing this. On one hand it’s great, but it’s also odd. Perhaps that speaks to this being more serious of a situation then just some apps being rejected. After all, the FCC is looking into Apple’s role in the App Store and how it handles app approvals/rejections. This follows Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice app and the removal of all apps that use Google Voice. Google and AT&T are also the subjects of that investigation.

When the government gets involved — the government that is already looking into Apple for its board of director issues (with Google), anti-competitive issues (with iTunes/iPod), and hiring practice issues (again, with Google) — you are naturally going to take things a little more seriously than you were before. The fact of the matter is that Apple had, and still has, a lot of problems with the App Store. They waited too long to fix them, and the situation started to get out of control. So it looks like Apple may have had to bring out the big guns to restore order.

Now, Schiller and Shoemaker cannot possibly personally look into every app, or even just every app rejection, but they appear to be focusing on the ones that are getting attention. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was some kind of stop-gap move until the improvements to the App Store approval process that Schiller has been alluding to are ready to go. We know they’ve already broken up the iPhone PR team into two divisions now (hardware and App Store), a next step could well be a complete revamping of the app approval process and team.

When MobileMe was having troubles following its launch last year, Steve Jobs stepped in to right the ship, and it worked. It looks like Schiller may be doing the same now with the App Store. Let’s hope that works too.

Oh, and the Rising Card application that led to all of this? It’s pretty good, very smartly designed. Is there any reason Apple should have rejected it? No, and so it’s good to see it in the App Store where it belongs. Find it here for $2.99.

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Gmail Nudges Past AOL Email In The U.S. To Take No. 3 Spot.

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 09:28 PM PDT

Good thing Gmail is out of beta. It is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore estimates. (Gmail is the orange line in the chart below). That puts Gmail within sight of the No. 2 player, Windows Live Hotmail, which has 47 million unique visitors. After that there is a wide gulf separating Yahoo Mail and its 106 million monthly unique visitors.

The last time checked on Gmail’s progress was at the beginning of the year, when it seemed like it would still take at least two years for it to catch up to its nearest rivals. But so far this year, Gmail’s unique visitors grew 25 percent, while AOL’s declined 22 percent. Thus, the two crossed paths in July. (Hotmail grew only 8 percent during the same period, while Yahoo Mail increased unique visitors by a healthy 16 percent).

If Google wants Gmail to pass Hotmail quickly and gain the No. 2 spot, my suggestion is to keep pumping in new enhancements through Gmail Labs and to speed up the pace at which mail storage increases. Not that I am a typical user, but I am already at 97 percent of my allotted 7,358 megabytes. One of the primary lures of Gmail has always been its seemingly endless and ever-expanding storage limits. Please don’t make me pay for more storage.

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CubeTree Adds Group Chat To Its Branches

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 08:57 PM PDT

picture-55CubeTree, the collaboration suite built on an enterprise social networking platform, has launched a new group chat feature today that should allow its customers to communicate more efficiently with chat room functionality.

CEO and Co-Founder Carlin Wiegner says that there are also more APIs coming to CubeTree, including some that are related to the new live chat feature. CubeTree also has applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Blackberry, Adobe AIR and Jabber support. Group chats can be enabled so numerous users can communicate with each other at once. After chats are completed, they are archived for later viewing, which you can also search through by keyword.

Just earlier this week, Socialcast launched its own brand new set of developer API’s to help Socialcast users better communicate with each other.

CubeTree was founded in 2008 and is backed by Mitch Kapor and Trinity Ventures.

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Tapulous’s Cash Cow Tap Tap Revenge 3 Is Almost Here

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 06:18 PM PDT

It’s been a long time coming, but it’s almost here: Tapulous is putting the finishing touches on Tap Tap Revenge 3, the next installment of its wildly sucessful iPhone music game. The game, which is best described as a “Guitar Hero for the iPhone”, will feature in-game song purchases, which were finally enabled with the release of the iPhone 3.0 software update in June. If there’s a game ripe to make a killing with these in-game downloads, it’s TTR. Tapulous expects to have the game submitted by the end of August, with general release soon thereafter depending on the App Store’s approval process.

So why does this matter? Tap Tap Revenge and its various spinoffs has been some of the iPhone’s most popular games since the App Store launched last year (in fact, a very similar game was very popular on jailbroken phones before the official store even launched). Gameplay consists of tapping your fingers to a song as colorful bubbles fall down the screen, and newer versions also make use of the phone’s accelerometer so you can shake it to the beat. As with games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, TTR tends to appeal to a very broad audience.

But until now it’s been handicapped by one major obstacle: there was no way for users to pay to download new songs. On console games like Rock Band, in-game purchases have proven very lucrative with gamers regularly plopping down around $2 per song. But the iPhone didn’t allow for this kind of transaction until recently, so Tapulous was forced to sell satellite games like TTR Weezer and TTR Coldplay, which did well but never saw nearly the usage of the main TTR app. Now they’ll be able to license songs from directly inside the flagship app, which means the number of paid downloads will likely skyrocket. It will also likely be easier to get premium artists on the platform, as they will be able to sell a song or two at a time rather than entire albums.

As a teaser, Tapulous has sent us the following frustratingly small screenshot:



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iLike Just Launched Its Own Music Download Store

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 03:32 PM PDT

Popular music recommendation service iLike launched a music download service this afternoon, offering users MP3 downloads for $0.89 to $1.29 per song. Previously the service only offered users the ability to sample 30 second clips of songs, or restricted full streaming via a partnership with Rhapsody (now phased out).

iLike says the first song purchased today was Get Away, Jordan by Ernie Haase & Signature Sound. Music is available from all four major labels and “hundreds of indie labels, enabled via MediaNet.”

Rumors of the music store were first reported by CNET’s Greg Sandoval last month. Until now iLike has offered downloads from Amazon and iTunes. Those options remain.

The service is rolling out now on iLike (I was able to purchase a song), and should be available to all U.S. users by end of day, says iLike. iLike applications on iGoogle, Facebook, Bebo and other platforms will also be available “soon” says the company for U.S. users.

In an email exchange, iLike CEO Ali Partovisaid:

We’re enabling the millions of music fans who discover and share music on iLike to purchase songs in-page directly from iLike. Our solution provides a smooth, immediate in-page purchase experience. You can sign up, enter your credit card, and download the music you just bought — all without ever leaving the web page you were on when you discovered the song.

We're making it easier and more immediate for music fans to buy MP3s as an online on-Web activity. iTunes already provides a great music buying experience inside a media player, and we'll continue offering our users the option to jump off iLike to purchase from iTunes. At the same time, we're filling a void by providing a faster way to make impulse music purchases on the web. Our social features and integration into all the major social networks will create a unique music discovery and purchasing experience for music fans across the Web.

The iLike in-page download solution was achieved via direct deals with major labels and a relationship with MediaNet to support the back end fulfillment and provide indie label catalogs. PayPal is providing billing support.

Going forward we’ll continue to enhance our download service, which is currently in Beta, as well as making it available on other leading third party websites where iLike is embedded. Our goal over time is to offer music fans the ability to impulse buy in-page from wherever they are.

In other recent news about iLike, the company is rumored to be raising new capital in an unusual transaction designed to push out Ticketmaster, an investor since 2006.

Images from the purchase flow are below:




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man TweetShell: A Browser-Based Terminal For Twitter

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 03:24 PM PDT

If you’ve ever spent much time working from the command line, there’s a good chance you’re going to love TweetShell, a new Twitter client that replicates the terminal environment in the browser. No, it isn’t very user-friendly — if you’ve never heard of commands like ls or man you’re going to be totally lost here, but if you can hold your own in a Bash shell you’re going to be right at home. (Note: while the site is called TweetShell, the URL is Tweetsh.com.

To get started, it’s probably a good idea to run the man command to get a list of the site’s main features. TweetShell just launched a few hours ago so it’s buggy and is missing some common Twitter functionality, but it has most of the basics: you can login using either OAuth or the ‘old’ less secure way, you can tweet from your account using the wall command, and you can browse through tweets from other users using the directory commands like cd and ls. There are also a number of more advanced commands, though frankly I haven’t been able to figure out how some of them work (feel free to leave tips in the comments).

Of course, there are already a number of Twitter clients that actually run from the terminal, but this runs from the browser, which means it’s more accessible for casual use and you can access it from any computer.

Thanks to Habib Haddad for the tip.

Update: Here’s another nifty Twitter web console that’s worth checking out if you like TweetShell.

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Yahoo Pretends To Tell You What Kind Of Twitter User You Are

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 02:47 PM PDT

picture-145When Robert Scoble, lover of all things web, says something is lame, you know it must be really lame. And that’s what he’s saying about a new Yahoo site, Know Your Mojo! — and he’s right.

The site claims to tell you what kind of “social mojo” you possess by analyzing your tweets. It’s a very simple site, below the big “What’s Your Social Mojo?” question it asks you to put in your Twitter username. You then hit the submission button and it takes you through an animation of a series of pipes. You’re spit on on the other end with what kind of Twitter user you are. The only problem? It’s different just about every time you put in your user name.

Of the 16 different mojo possibilities, I’ve gotten 3 different ones on 4 attempts. Scoble notes similar results. So I don’t know what kind of analyzing it’s doing, but it doesn’t appear to work too well. Of course, that doesn’t really matter because what this is really about is advertising Yahoo’s new homepage. It makes that pretty clear on the results page that tells you to feed your “mojo” by checking out Yahoo’s site and adding content to it.

While all of that has actually nothing to do with Twitter, Yahoo clearly made a Twitter analyzer to take advantage of the viral nature of the service, hoping the masses would tweet out their results and get more people to visit the site, and then Yahoo’s homepage. Sadly, it will probably work, even if the analyzer itself doesn’t.

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Google Points At WebFinger. Your Gmail Address Could Soon Be Your ID.

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 01:47 PM PDT

picture-1111There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that Google is apparently getting serious about supporting it. So what is it?

It’s an extension of something called the “finger protocol” that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses. As the web expanded, the finger protocol faded out, but the idea of needing a unified way to identify yourself has not. That’s why you keep hearing about OpenID and the like all the time.

But those standards, while open, have failed to latch on in a meaningful way with the public at large. One of the holdups is that you have to set up a website or service you use to be your OpenID. It’s relatively easy to do, and you may already have one ready to go, but just not realize it. But it’s still kind of tricky to explain to a regular web user — wait, you login with your website?

But something everyone on the web knows is their email address. And they’re conditioned by services like Google and Facebook to use it as their identifier. The problem with it has been that it’s just a string of text, nothing more. You cannot attach information to it to let others know a bit more about you — something vital for true identification. Then idea behind WebFinger is that you should be able to attach any information you choose to your email address.

The excitement today is that a group of Googlers have apparently finally not only gotten Google’s support to pursue the project, but that they have started working the technical details. As Googler Brad Fitpatrick writes today:

In other words, we’ve eliminated both technical & political hurdles. We can now work on this spec, implement, push, try, rinse, repeat…. until we’re all reasonable happy.

Googler Brett Slatkin (incidentally, Fitzpatrick’s partner in making PubSubHubbub) explains to us that while it hasn’t been turned on yet, and that there’s still a lot of work to do on the spec, the idea is to go into testing mode soon. Fitzpatrick notes that there will be a small experiment going on internally with some Googlers’ Gmail accounts.

Without knowing much about the technical details behind it, the core idea behind WebFinger immediately strikes me as a good one. It’s taking something everyone knows on the web (your email address) and making it immensely more valuable as a way to identify yourself and information about you. Exactly what kind of information? Here are some of the ideas from the WebFinger Google Code page:

  • public profile data
  • pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
  • a public key
  • other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
  • a URL to an avatar
  • profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
  • whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it’s NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
  • or even a public declaration that the email address doesn’t have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.

This is definitely something to watch for in the coming months.

[photo: flickr/chris owens]

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comScore: The Michael Jackson Effect Shakes Up June’s Online Video Rankings

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 12:51 PM PDT

Analytics firm comScore has just released its latest statistics for video streaming sites in the United States for the month of June, and at first glance the results are quite surprising: the top video sites have seen a major shakeup, with many of the top sites abruptly falling in the rankings.

The cause, of course, is the Michael Jackson effect — media organizations around the world dedicated huge amounts of coverage to the pop star’s tragic death on June 25, and many people turned to the web to learn more. Other breaking news that month, including the Iranian election controversy, also likely contributed to the growth seen by news properties.

Hulu, which has ranked as the third most popular video site in the United States for the past few months, has dropped down to seventh. Likewise, Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace, has dropped from second to fifth.

So who took their place? Video search engine Blinkx jumped from sixth place in May with 300,641 views to fourth overall with over 623,000 (Note:all figures in 000’s). Microsoft also saw a big jump, rising from fifth place in May with 310,560 overall streams, to third place in June, with 695,661 streams (much of this gain was likely due to increased traffic to MSN and MSNBC). Turner, the parent company of CNN, also saw its video views nearly double.

Finally there’s Viacom, the media conglomerate that includes Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, and BET. Viacom vaulted from seventh place in May with 281,368 views to second place in June, with a whopping 773,554. Again, much of this can likely be attributed to the Michael Jackson news that was featured prominently on MTV, but Nickelodeon also saw strong traffic, which may be related to the summer season when kids generally watch more TV.


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Glide Engage Is A Stream Reader With A Web OS Attached

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 12:35 PM PDT

If you need proof that the stream makes complex services more accessible, take a look at Glide Engage. Launched last week, Glide Engage is a stream front-end for the Glide, a Web OS which offers a suite of integrated Web Apps including docs, spreadsheets, photo and music uploading and sharing, calendar, email, Website creation and collaboration tools. Glide can be overwhelming. There is a lot there. But it has attracted its own loyal following of about one million registered users.

With Glide Engage, the various features of the Glide OS become available on an as-needed basis and gives a better entry point for the service. At first glance, Glide Engage is a micro-messaging service on steroids. You can follow (”engage” with) other people in Glide, add comments to your stream, share links and files, create discussion groups and bring different media and people into online meeting spaces. In the left-hand column you can also set up news alerts and see the latest articles being shared on Glide about those topics.

What makes Glide particularly interesting is that it is also a Twitter client. You can import your Twitter stream and read it within Engage like you can with other Web-based Twitter apps. You can Tweet out messages, but also add links to photos, documents, playable music files and videos which bring people back into Glide. Imagine if Seesmic or Tweetdeck hosted their own photos, videos, and other shared files, and had a Web productivity and communication suite as well.

The Twitter functionality is very limited at this point. You can reply to a message or retweet it, and find some information about the person whose Twitter message you are looking at. And when you send a Tweet, you get redirected to Twitter. All of this is a work in progress and will improve over time. To the extent that Glide Engage can extend its OS capabilities to Twitter, the more interesting it will become. Soon, you should be able to create Twitter groups and send out links to Glide’s collaboration spaces, which let multiple people look at photos, videos, documents, and videos in an online meeting environment.

Glide also allows you to assign rights to each file you share, so a document or photo can be shared in view-only mode or you can give others editing privileges. These privileges can be changed on a message-by-message basis. The overall user interface could still use some simplification and isn’t as zippy as other stream reader apps (and I am not sure why the logo looks like a flaming IE logo crashing into the water), but Glide Engage also has some novel features worth exploring.

Glide is built on a sophisticated syncing engine, which means that it can share all of these files on mobile phones as well. It will release an Android app for Glide Engage next week on August 18, followed by BlackBerry, and Windows. The company will do an iPhone app at some point, but since this syncing capability competes with Apple’s MobileMe, it wants to establish Glide Engage on other mobile platforms first.

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The Movie Studios Have A Great Idea To Ramp Up Piracy. And Blockbuster Wants To Help.

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 11:07 AM PDT

3391612981_74a744b44aMovie piracy is a problem, but it’s not as huge of a problem as music piracy was this past decade. While certainly the size of the movie files and the need for fast broadband connections to get them in a reasonable amount of time plays into it somewhat, also helping is the fact that there are some fairly decent ways to get movies quickly, for a pretty fair price these days. And now Hollywood is apparently trying to change that.

The studios are starting to rally around a horrible new idea: Keeping new releases out of Redbox and more importantly, Netflix for 30 days. Let me repeat that: They think Netflix shouldn’t be able to ship many new movies to you until 30 days after they’re released on DVD.

Now, this doesn’t appear to be set in stone yet for Netflix, as the studios are said to be currently negotiating this with the company, but it is what the studios want. And the strategy is going forward with Redbox, which recently filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox over the same issue. And now, with Universal and Warner Brothers getting on board, another lawsuit seems likely.

And in a move that couldn’t be less surprising, Blockbuster is on the wrong side of this. Despite the company having a strategy to do a massive roll-out of kiosks like the ones Redbox has, it is all in favor of the 30-day window, based on comments CEO Jim Keyes made during its Q2 earnings call.

Why? Well the company once again completely bombed in those earnings, posting a net loss of $36.9 million, while overall sales fell 22 percent in the quarter. It is getting fleeced by the likes of Redbox and Netflix and needs to gain some sort of competitive advantage in movie rentals. A 30-day rental window for its stores would certainly offer that.

Of course, as the name synonymous with movie rentals for the past couple of decades, Blockbuster could have used its power to get ahead of some of these trends (by-mail rentals, cheap kiosks, online rentals/streaming), but didn’t. So now they will have to rely on the movie studios attempting to put stricter rules in place for gaining access to its movies right away. Rules, that would seem to be basically prodding users to obtain those movies illegally.

If the studios are allowing some places like Blockbuster stores to rent movies on day one, but limit Netflix from doing the same, how many of the millions of Netflix users are going to drive to a Blockbuster store to get that movie? Some certainly will, but a lot will also turn to the web and simply download the movie. And some who have never done that before will learn how to get around such a ridiculous restriction.

And Blockbuster’s comments on this are pitiful. Having failed so far with its movies-by-mail approach, online approach, and set-top box approach, Blockbuster is now turning to kiosks. It hopes to have some 2,500 of them by the end of the year and 7,000 of them by next year. Some of their ideas for them are pretty laughable (a good example is the digital transfer of movies to portable media players, but no iPod/iPhone support, meaning that basically no one would use them), but more importantly, Blockbuster is against the two things that made this solution work for Redbox: Availability and price.

Keyes comments during the earnings call indicate that he believe the $0.99 price that Redbox offers its movies for is far too low for a sustainable model. He probably doesn’t mean for Redbox’s end, because they seem to be doing just fine — which is to say, just about the opposite of Blockbuster — using that model. Instead, he seems to be saying that Hollywood can’t survive on such a model, which again, is probably not true, but it’s good that Keyes is the movie studios new PR agent.

Here’s the best part of what he said though:

A vending rental window would enhance the complementary relationship between Blockbuster stores and Blockbuster kiosks. On Fox, Universal, and now Warner titles, for example, we can be far more aggressive in filling the store shelves with product to assure 100% availability of hot new releases. After 30 to 45 days, we can then make use of that product in our vending channel at a substantially reduced cost of goods, since that product will be partially amortized. Our customers can then use Blockbuster stores for depth and breadth of selection and assurance of hot new releases being available on Friday night or Saturday night. The customer can use vending kiosks then for value and convenience.

So basically, he wants to use the studio’s ridiculous 30-day window to prop up his own stores, which are flailing badly. He sees a movie rental ecosystem in which you get new releases from Blockbuster stores, and then slightly older options from the kiosks. Of course, both of those methods of getting movies are already dead, Keyes just doesn’t realize it yet.

He’s investing in these kiosks because Blockbuster has failed elsewhere to make inroads against competitors. But eventually, everyone knows that all of this distribution is going to go online, and then Blockbuster will be left with thousands of kiosks that are useless, just like its store are becoming. At least those won’t be the black holes for money that the stores are, I guess.

Supporting Hollywood’s ridiculous and dangerous idea to place 30-day rental holds on Netflix and Redbox, might prop up his failing brick and mortar stores a bit, but the idea that it will save them long term is laughable.

And Hollywood shouldn’t be tricked into thinking this 30-day rental window is a good idea because they have Blockbuster’s support. Blockbuster doesn’t matter anymore. And they well pay for that mistake in piracy.

[photo: flickr/gwaar]

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CrunchBoard: TokBox, Ustream and More!

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 11:04 AM PDT

If you're on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We've added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks. Here's a quick sample:

For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard.

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No, I’m Not in Charge of Tony Hsieh’s (Entire) Investment Portfolio

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 09:38 AM PDT

aac20081013pg45_zapposfinal2_newIt’s a great story for us whenever an entrepreneur makes a crazy amount of money and we get to tell the world about it. For the entrepreneur? Not so much. Hitherto unknown relatives, entrepreneurs seeking angel investments, money managers and supposed baby-mamas all come out of the woodwork with dollar signs in their eyes.

Since I outed their take-home pay from the Amazon merger a few weeks ago, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and COO/CFO Alfred Lin have figured out a way to cope with this: Giving everyone my email address and telling them I’m in charge of their investments.

To be fair, Hsieh told me he was going to do this. He even told me they’d make an investment decision based on my favorite pitch. I just thought he was kidding. Then, two nights ago I had dinner with a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur who had “a hilarious” story to tell me. It seemed a friend at one of the more prominent Southern California investment firms was hounding him for an intro to Sarah Lacy. Clearly, this made no sense since writers don’t generate wealth. We’re lucky to pay rent and have some left over for booze. “No, I need to talk to her about managing this guy Alfred’s money,” the money manager insisted.

So let me be clear: I am not actually in charge of distributing that near-$400 million worth of Amazon stock, but if Hsieh is a man of his word, I will pass on the best single pitch I get in the next two weeks. Send to sarah(at)techcrunch(dot)com or leave in the comments.

Here’s the email he’s sending everyone:

As you can probably imagine, since the Amazon announcement, I am being
inundated with many requests for different opportunities, including
private wealth management services, investment opportunities, and
partnership opportunities.

To help sift through through the various opportunities, I’ve enlisted the
services of Sarah Lacy. As a journalist and author, her career has been
all about research and figuring out the story behind the story.

I’ve asked Sarah to help sift through many of the opportunities that I’m
being approached with between now and August 31. In September, I will ask
Sarah to present to me what she thinks the most interesting opportunities
are for me to consider.

I’ve cc’d Sarah so you should feel free to email her directly. However, I
encourage you to reach out to her in whatever medium you think would allow
you to best properly convey the value of your opportunity so that she can
give it a fair evaluation relative to all of the other opportunities.

This is the contact information that Sarah has made publicly available on
her web site:

http://sarahlacy.typepad.com/sarahlacy/contact.html

(For me personally, I’ve always found that talking to Sarah by phone or in
person to be more effective and enjoyable.)

Thanks for your understanding in participating in this process. I look

forward to hearing from Sarah her thoughts in September.

[Photo Credit: Tomas Muscionico]

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That Google Bomb Electromagnet Doodle Might Not Go Over So Well On Google Palestine. Wait, There’s a Google Palestine?

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 09:30 AM PDT

google-palestine-bomb

The doodle for today’s Google logo might give a new meaning to the term “Google bomb.” While it is not actually a drawing of a bomb—it is an electromagnet in celebration of the birth of its inventor Hans Christian Ørsted—a lot of people might mistake it for a bomb. It has a wire and a clock timer (Update that’s actually a compass) and that magnet kind of looks like a stick of dynamite.

For most of the world, it is just another quirky Google doodle. But for people in Palestine, it might just seem in poor taste. Especially since this is one of the first things they are seeing on the new Google Palestine domain. Yes, there is now a separate domain for Google Palestine, it just launched yesterday. Welcome, Palestine!

Yeah, Google might want to try for a different doodle there.

(Hat tip to Nuke Goldstein)

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Interview: Nicholas Francis, COO of Unity, A Leading iPhone Game Development Platform

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 09:13 AM PDT

If you're like me you've always wondered about making an iPhone game. What mad skillz do you need? What course in computer science will teach you how to vector a jet across the screen? Well, Nicholas Francis set out to solve that problem and came up with Unity, one of the most popular games development platforms for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. CrunchGear: Tell me about your company? Nicholas Francis: Unity Technologies is the company behind the Unity gaming middleware. We have 44 employees with our development HQ in Copenhagen, Denmark. Then we have a bunch of hardcore demoscene guys in Lithuania that have forgotten more about low-level optimizations than most developers will ever know, some developers in Brighton, UK and a few hotshots that work from their respective countries. Our corporate HQ is getting moved to San Francisco - there's so much more business going on over there, that we figured it made the most sense to have business be over there but keep development in Europe. We launched Unity 1.0 in 2005 and slowly grew it. We never had any VC backing or anything, so we've grown the company organically (by about 200% per year. these days we have over 9000 customers - pretty much spread through word-of-mouth. Basically, we're a tool by developers, for developers. Quite simple really, but our tech packs a real punch.


TechCrunch Heads to Brazil

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 09:12 AM PDT

brazilI've been taking a brief respite from my international travels, but the last weekend in August I am hitting the tarmac again. This time, it's a few weeks in Brazil. Right now, I'm planning on spending the time in Sao Paolo but am open to exploring the country further if anyone knows of great start-up activity elsewhere.

I'm working closely with Endeavor which has done amazing work in South and Latin America for more than a decade. But as always, I want to ferret out the best entrepreneurs and investors in the country so send me an email if you have any suggestions at sarah (at) techcrunch (dot) com.

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